Taking Root 1.1

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How does it go?  The first lesson, something even the uninitiated know.  For life to flourish on the most basic level, it requires four elements.  Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.

We were doing fine on that count.  The air around us was stale, but it was still oxygen.  Water ran around and below us, flowing over our bare feet, redirected from gutters to the building’s inside.

What had once been a barn had been made into a warehouse, then abandoned partway through a third set of changes.  A floor of old wooden slats reached only halfway down the length of the old building, what had once been a hayloft.  If we stood on the edge, we could look down at the floor below to see uneven floorboards on top of compacted dirt.  The original barn’s door was still there, mounted on rollers.  I leaned over to get a better look.  I could see a table, some scattered papers, books, and a blackboard.  The only light was that which came in through windows.  A scattered set placed on the upper floor, and more well above head height on the lower one.

Aside from the four of us, one other thing occupied the hayloft.  It was hard to make out in the dim light that filtered in through the window, like an eel in dark water, and if it weren’t for the fact that we’d seen it approach, we might not have noticed it at all.  Sleek, four-legged, and tall enough I couldn’t have reached its shoulder if I stood on my toes, it was wound around the pillar as a snake might be.  Unlike a snake, though, it had four long limbs, each with four long digits, tipped with claws.  Head flowed into neck, which flowed into shoulder and body without a without prominent ridge, bump, bone or muscle to interrupt the sequence.

It uncoiled, setting a claw on the floor, and the old floorboards didn’t elicit an audible creak.  Large as it was, it managed to distribute weight too evenly, and used its tail to suspend some of its weight.

It didn’t walk, but slinked, each foot falling in front of the last as it passed within three feet of us.  Its wide mouth parted, showing just a hint of narrow white teeth.

There was no cover, nothing to hide us from it.

I saw its nostrils flare.  It opened its mouth to taste the air with a flick of a thin tongue.

The way things looked, we were very close to doing the opposite of ‘flourishing’.

It was hard to put into words, but my thoughts connected with that thought, and it was funny.

I grinned, and flakes of wax fell from my face at the movement.  I watched the thing continue onward, toward the back of the hayloft, head turning as it sniffed the surroundings.  It unwound its long tail from the wooden pillar that held up the one end of the overhanging hayloft, and it moved with a slow carefulness.

I stared at its eye, and saw how it didn’t move as the head swept from one side to the next, the slit of the iris barely changing in response as the faint light from the window swept over its head.

“It’s blind,” I whispered.

The movements of the creature came to a halt.  It froze, nostrils wide.

Gordon, just to my left, put out a hand, covering my mouth.  He was tense, lines on his neck standing out.  Trying to put on a brave face, as our leader.  Gordon, strong, handsome, likeable, talented.  A veneer covered his face, as it did all of us, almost clear, cracked and white at the corners of his lips where he’d changed his expression, coming away in flakes at his hairline, where his hair was covered by the same substance.

The creature turned, and as it did its tail moved around until it touched the outside edge of the makeshift gutter that we were all standing in, fine emerald scales rasping against wood.

When Gordon whispered his response, I could barely hear him utter, “It’s not deaf.”

I nodded, and he pulled his hand away.

I had a glimpse of the girls.  Helen and Lillian.  As different as night and day.  Lillian was bent over, hood up and over her head, hiding her face, hands clutching the straps of her bag, white knuckled.  Terrified, and rightly so.  The coating on her face was flaking badly.

In contrast, Helen’s face didn’t betray a flicker of emotion.  Her golden hair, normally well cared for, cultivated into tight rolls, was damp and falling out of place.  Water ran down her face, splashing in through the side of the window where the makeshift gutter came in, and the droplets didn’t provoke one flinch or batted eyelash.  She could have been a statue, and she’d kept her face still enough that the wax that covered it hadn’t broken, which only helped the effect.

Still and silent, we watched as the creature moved to the far corner of the hayloft.

It snapped, and the four curved fangs were the only ones that were any wider than a pencil, visible for only an instant before the head disappeared into detritus piled in the corner.  A furred form struggled before the creature could raise its head.  No swallowing, per se.  Gravity did the work, as teeth parted and the prey fell down its long throat.

A second bite let it collect another, small and young enough it couldn’t even struggle.  Tiny morsels.

“Kitties,” Lillian whispered, horror overtaking fear in her expression.

Mama kitty shouldn’t have had her babies in the same building as the monster, I thought.  Wallace’s law at work.

Gordon nudged me.  He pointed.

The window.

I nodded.

The makeshift gutter was little more than a trough, with little care given for the leaks here and there, and it fed into wooden barrels at the edge of the upper floor, with more channels and troughs leading into sub-chambers and tanks below.  It had been running long enough for debris and grime to accumulate, a combination of silt and scum collecting at the very bottom to make it treacherous.  Our progress was slow, and I had to remind myself that anything faster threatened to make noise, or risked a fall.

As if to follow the thought, Lillian’s foot skidded on the bottom of the trough, and she tipped forward, straight into Helen’s arms.  The creature stopped its slow consumption of the cat’s litter.

We were frozen, waiting, while the creature sniffed the air.

It returned to its meal.

We made our way out, everyone but me flipping up their hoods to ward off the rain.  I let the droplets fall where they would, on hair that refused to be bound down beneath a thick layer of waterproofing wax.

There was no ledge outside the window, only the real gutter.  Bigger and more solid, if still treacherous with seasons of accumulated grime.  The roof loomed above us, more up than over, as barn roofs were wont to be.  Red leaves collected here and there.

“I stay,” Helen murmured.

There was no questioning it, no argument.  We couldn’t afford to make the noise, and it made a degree of sense.

“I’ll go first,” I volunteered, craning my head a bit to see the way down.  Being the sort of building it was, the barn-turned-warehouse-turned-something-else was tall, with a long way to the bottom.  The gutter pointed groundward at the corner, fixed to the brick exterior at regular points by lengths of metal.  It worked as a ladder, but not one that was fun to use.  The ‘rungs’ were too far apart, too close to the wall.

Someone grabbed my arm.  I thought it would be Gordon or Helen, as they had the personalities to be arm-grabbers.  It wasn’t.

“You go second,” Lillian whispered to me.  “I know you well enough to know that If you go before me you’ll look up my skirt.”

“Me?” I tried to sound innocent.

Gordon jabbed me.  His expression was no-nonsense, his green eyes a steely grey beneath his hood, absorbing the colors of the clouds above.  His mouth was a grim line.

“Okay,” I conceded.

“I’ll take your bag,” Gordon whispered.  Again, there was no argument.  Lillian handed over the backpack, loaded down with tools and supplies.

She accepted Gordon’s support in getting down to the downspout, and began her slow descent.

I fidgeted.  My eye traveled over our surroundings, buildings scattered like they’d been blown around by strong winds and planted where they lay.  Older structures had a charm to them, simplicity and a character that came with age and gentle wear and tear.  The oldest and the newest buildings had been shored up by strategic plant growth, branches weaving into and through damaged sections, growing to complement masonry, around bricks and supports.  The very newest growths had a characteristic red tint to the leaves.  The rest were dead, left to petrify.

The Academy loomed above it all, those same elements taken to an extreme.  It had been an old collection of buildings once.  A rush to grow and meet surging demand had led to a lot of the same haphazard growth.

It all had an odor.  There were smells that became second nature, and there were smells that were ingrained in the psyche as bad smells.  Ones that spoke of death, of long sickness, and of violence.  Rendered fat, decay, and blood.  Each were heavy on the air.

Ironic, that things so overgrown and reeking of decay were the parts of the city charged with progress.

You’d think the rain would wash away the smell.

I checked.  Lillian had moved down one rung.  I shifted my weight from one foot to the next, annoyed.

She wasn’t one of us.  She was new.  Allowances had to be made.

It wasn’t the first time I had told myself any of those things.  I’d heard it from Gordon.  It didn’t make it any less annoying.

I bent down, peering over the edge of the gutter to the road below.  I could see the windows, the boxes further down.

“Sy,” Gordon hissed the words, “What are you doing?”

Gripping the ledge, I swung myself over.

I let go, and enjoyed both the moment of utter terror and Lillian’s gasp of horror, before my fingers caught hold of the window frame below.

My right foot slipped on the damp windowsill, scraping peeling paint off and away before I brought it back up to the sill.  Water and paint flakes sprayed below.

When I looked up, Gordon’s head was poking over the edge, looking down at me.

He moved his head, and I could hear him speak, very patiently, to Lillian, “Keep going.  Don’t mind him.”

Peering in the window, I could see the interior, the lower floor.  The desk, the notes on the experiment.  Another table was heavy with lines of bottles, vials, jugs, and yet more papers, scattered.  Rain poured down on me, tracing its way down the back of my neck, beneath my shirt.  The waxed and waterproof cowl and short cloak had kept my shirt dry, and I shivered at the sensation.

I tested the window, and was utterly surprised to find it latched.  I drew a key from my pocket, trying to fit it into the gap, hoping to lift the latch, but it proved too thick.

The key went back in place.  I removed my hands from the windowsill one at a time, to dry them in my armpits and then reposition my grip.

Gripping the windowsill, I strained my body, reaching down and to the right.  The doorframe that bounded the large sliding door was just out of reach…

Holding the windowsill with my left hand, reaching with my right leg, I touched the frame with my big toe.  I found a grip, and I used it to better position myself.  Fingers dug into the space between bricks, where water had worn away mortar, and I heaved myself over, using my toes and only my toes to perch on the top of the doorway.

Were it any other door, I wouldn’t have fussed, but I was still just high enough off the ground to have cause to worry.  This had been a barn, and this door was the type that let wagons or draft horses inside.

I paused on top of the door, cleaning my hands of wet and grit.

“Watching you do that is making me nervous,” Lillian said, looking down at me.  She’d progressed two more ‘rungs’.  She was the shortest of us, next to me, it didn’t make it easier for her.

I flashed her a grin, and more of the waterproofing wax that I’d caked onto my face cracked.

I worked my way down to a crouch, still on top of the door, then slid down, draping my front against the door itself.  I let myself drop the rest of the way, landing bare-footed in mud.

I couldn’t get the smile off my face as I passed beneath the drain pipe, making a point of looking up at Lillian, who was making a point of her own in turn, glaring down at me, very clearly annoyed.

“You had an audience,” a soft voice stated.

I turned.

Amid empty crates and a door that had been taken off its hinges, jumbled together as trash and detritus, I could make out the fifth member of our contingent.  Jamie had a book in his lap, our collected boots and shoes neatly organized around him, and he had company.  A black-skinned boy with a hood and cloak far too large for him, tattered enough that it had probably been a hand-me-down for the last person to own it.  His eyes were wide.

“I thought you were keeping lookout,” I said.

“I was.”

“The whole point of being lookout is that you tell us if there’s trouble.”

“Is he trouble?”  Jamie asked.

“I’m no trouble,” the boy’s words flowed right off the back of Jamie’s, without a heartbeat of hesitation.  “The trouble is inside.”

“The snake thing,” I said.

“You saw it?” he asked.  His eyes went wider.  “Then you should know if you’re going to steal something, you shouldn’t steal from there.”

“We’re not stealing,” I said.  “We’re just looking.”

The boy didn’t respond.  He watched Lillian’s glacially slow descent.

I met Jamie’s eyes.  If it weren’t for Helen, who was a special case, I might have called Jamie the quiet one.  He wore eyeglasses, though there were all sorts of ways to fix or replace bad eyes, and his hair was long beneath his hood.  Not out of any style or affectation.  He simply never liked how it looked when it was short.  His face was narrow, his eyes large as he shifted his gaze to look from me to Lillian.  His hands held firm to a book that sat across his knees.

“Helen?” he asked.

“Stayed upstairs.”

A nod.

I wanted him to figure out how to deal with our bystander, given how he’d failed to warn us about the boy in the first place, but Jamie was silent.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mine?”

“I know his,” I said, striving to not sound as annoyed at the question as I felt.  I pointed at Jamie to make myself as clear as possible.

“Thomas.  My friends call me Thom.”

“Did you hear about the crying man of Butcher’s Row?”

“Sly,” Jamie said, suddenly paying attention to the issue.  The name was a warning.

But Thom gave an answer, “That stitched that went crazy.  Remembered things.”

“That’s the one.  Do you remember Mother Hen?”

Thom nodded.  “That nurse who- the babies.”

He looked rather uneasy now.

“That’s right,” I said, doing my best to sound calm, reassuring.  “The nurse.  Yes.  Both got caught, right?  Everything got tied up neatly?”

“Yeah,” Thom said.  He couldn’t meet my eyes, so he focused on Lillian instead.  “The authorities from the Academy got them.”

“Exactly, Thom,” I said, “But who told the authorities?”

His eyes moved.  To me, then Jamie, to Lillian, and then the barn-turned-warehouse.

I was nodding before the word came out of his mouth.  “You.”

“You’re clever,” I praised him.

“Why?”

I made the universal gesture for money, rubbing thumb against two fingers.

“Really?”

I nodded.

The gears were shifting in his head.  Processing, calculating.

“I’ve heard things,” he said.

“I bet.”

“Useful things.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“I can get money for it?  For telling people?”

“If you know who to tell, and how to sell it,” I said.

His expression changed, a frown.  Disappointment.

Tick, tick, turn turn.  The gears in his head were still moving.

He wasn’t dumb, even if he wasn’t much of an actor.  Then again, he was only ten or so.

I could guess what he was going to ask, and I knew I might lose him if I turned him down too many times.

My mind ticked over possibilities.  What I needed, what I had to do.

Before he could venture a question, I interrupted him.  “You want in?”

“In?” he asked.  Now he was wary.

I reached beneath my cloak, and I fished out a coinpurse.  Two fingers reached in, and came out fully extended, two dollars in coins pressed between the tips.

The wariness subsided.

“I’ll give you this on good faith.  Eight whole dollars if you follow through.  I need you to do something for me.”

He reached for and claimed the money without any hesitation.

“You said you had friends?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“On top of the grocer’s place. Corner of Oxbow and Halls.  Wait there.  Take turns keeping an eye out.  You’re looking for a black coach, led by two stitched horses, heading toward the Academy.  You’ll know they’re stitched because they’re wearing raincoats.  Won’t be more than two hours’ wait.”

“Uh huh?”

“There’s a rain barrel up there.  They’re going to have to stop to wait for the way to clear before they can carry on their way.  What you’re going to do is tip over the barrel.  Send water off the edge of the roof, onto the horses if you can.  Might want to prop some things up around the barrel, to make sure it happens.”

He frowned a bit.

“Ten dollars, all in all, for you and your friends, for one afternoon’s work.  Pretty good deal.  Don’t think you can do it?”

“I can do it,” Thom said.

“You sure?” I asked.

“I can do it,” he said, voice firm.

I studied him, head to toe, taking it all in.

Reaching beneath my cloak, I collected a note from a pocket.  I pressed it into his hands.

He looked down at the money, stunned.

“If you don’t follow through, you won’t get a deal like this again,” I said.  “Think hard before you try cheating me.  A big part of what we do is find people.”

Mute, he nodded.

“Go,” I said.

He went, running, feet splashing in puddles of water.

Lillian was about halfway down.

“You lied to him,” Jamie said.

“Would you rather I told the truth?” I asked.

“If you’re going to get him involved.”

I shook my head.

“Which leads me to ask… what are you up to?” Jamie asked.  “You weren’t just getting rid of him or making trouble.”

“I’m going inside,” I said, starting for the door.  “Tell the others if they’re wondering.”

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Jamie said.

But he didn’t move from his spot, and I was already gone.

I passed under Lillian a second time, peeking up her skirt a second time, more to needle her than out of any lingering curiosity.  The big door was, as it turned out, locked, and I wasn’t able to bypass the big padlock any more than I could bypass the latch of the window above.  But the door rolled on wheels, and the wheels fit in ruts, a long, shallow channel.

I headed to the end of the door opposite the lock, and I pushed the full weight of my body against it.  The lock rattled, heavy.

I tried a bit more pressure, pushing, and the door tilted, the bottom corner closest to me rising out of the channel.  Gripping the door, I lifted it up and away, wood scraping concrete as I created a triangular gap.

I slipped inside, my eyes immediately going to the hayloft, the upper floor.

Helen was there, sitting with one foot propped up, both hands in her lap to keep her skirt pressed down.  Her face was still expressionless.  Half of her attention was on me.  Half was on the creature.  There was a rain barrel beside her, rigged so it hung over the edge of the hayloft, collecting the water that ran in through the makeshift gutter, feeding a steady stream down into containers below.  Runoff from those containers fed into the corner of the building.  A drain from when the building had been a warehouse, keeping the goods dry.

I studied the papers on the desk.  Water from one of the windows above spat down.  Barely large enough to qualify as drops, but they dotted one paper, making ink bleed.  Sketches of the beast.  Notations on structure and anatomy.

One of the texts on a table beside the desk was hand-made.  Pages had holes in them, and a cord was laced through, tying them to the heavy leather cover.  With care, I paged through the thing.

One being, knit together from several.  The better traits of each, all drawn together.  References to Wollstone’s texts, to the ratios of life, and to the volumes of genetic code for Felidae and Eunectes Murinus.

A whole chapter on digestive enzymes.  Diagrams of the thing’s fangs, which I had glimpsed as it devoured the mother cat, with labels for the reservoirs of venom that wasn’t true venom.  It was enzymes, much like the ones bugs used to dissolve their meals before supping them.  Notes suggested that the feature helped with the digestion of any and all food.

Little doubt of what this thing had been engineered for.

My finger traced the labels of glass containers, bottles and vials.  Blood, bile, cerebral fluid…

Venom.  I’d expected it to be green, but it was clear, in a glass container with a murky exterior, about as tall and wide as a wine bottle, though more cylindrical.

There was a noise at the door, and I took a long step to the side, toward the shadows beside one of the big wooden containers for water.

Only Lillian, followed by Gordon, passing through the gap.  Gordon was the largest of us, and it was a particularly tight fit for him.

I continued paging through the text.

Diet.

My eye traveled down the list.  Meal times, meal sources, meal sizes.

Pig carcass.
Dog carcass.
Pig carcass.
Scavenged meal, unknown type.

Pig carcass.
Pig carcass.
Scavenged meal, dog.

It wasn’t fully grown, but it was close, and it grew fast.  Two meals a week.

I recalled that it had eaten the cat, and then looked back at the entries.

Forty pounds, sixty pounds, forty pounds, est. one hundred pounds…  I noted the numbers, and tried to find the pattern between those numbers and the meals.

I moved ahead a few pages until I reached the first partial page.  Room left for more entries.

Last meal, just over two days ago, goat carcass.  It was hungry already.  Quite possibly getting ready for one last growth spurt.  The more recent meals were larger.

Gordon was crouched, peering at labels on bottles.  He saw me looking, and tapped his nose, then pointed at the bottles

I nodded.

I tapped the book, getting his attention, and stepped away while he read the entries.

He didn’t have much of a chance to read.

There was a sound outside, violent, of things falling over.  Chaos.

I could picture Jamie’s hiding spot, the way the door had been propped up.  This was a warning.

Hide,” Gordon whispered.

You don’t have to tell me, I thought, but I held my tongue.

Very carefully, I closed the book.  I shifted the angle to return it to the position it had been in.  My eye swept over the room.

Water on the floor.  Did it matter?

No.  There was no time, besides.

I slipped into the shadowy crevice between the water tank and the wall.  Gordon and Lillian were already gone.  Helen, who had been above, watching everything, was now gone.  No doubt hiding behind the water barrel, a step away from where she had been.

Four seconds passed before I heard the lock rattle.

The door’s wheel slammed back down into the rut as it was pulled to one side, but there was no sign of concern or suspicion.

He closed the door behind him, and the sound of something being dragged joined the sound of hard shoe soles on the wooden floor, marking his progress across his makeshift laboratory.

“Damned beast,” he muttered.  “Where are you?”

He made seemingly deliberate noise as he cleared a table, then dropped his burden on top of it.

I heard a grunt, his, and the smell of blood filled the air.

The amount of light in the room shifted.  I judged it to be the beast’s bulk blocking the light from the windows above.

“There you are,” he said.

With swift strides, he crossed to the water tank I crouched beside.  He wasted no time in dipping his hands inside, splashing water as he swished his hands inside.  Some of the water that slopped around the top of the tank splashed down on top of me.

I was close enough to touch him.

There was a scuffle and a thud as the cat-snake creature touched ground, eager to get to its meal.  Its creator was already at the desk, picking select vials, dabbing a bit on his wrist, then rubbing his wrists together.

I thought of Gordon’s gesture.  Touching his nose.

Scents?

Pheromones.

It was how he controlled the beast he had made.

I could see him as he tidied papers, only periodically glancing over his shoulder.  He hummed.  But for some stubble on his chin, he looked like a gentleman, with a four-button vest under a butcher’s apron and an ankle-length raincoat.  His hair was sandy, parted to one side.

I could see the creature raise its head.  The meal was in its mouth, and it was angling its head to let it all slide down its gullet.

Its creator used a pair of tongs to collect a bloody sack.  I took it to be the sack the creature’s meal had been in.  Another pig, perhaps.

He disappeared from view.

A rustle.

Then the tongs clanged to the floor.  The beast changed the angle of its head.

“A child?” the man’s voice was touched with incredulity.

There was a commotion, a scrape of steel on concrete as a foot dragged on the tongs.

I remained where I was.

The struggle continued, intermittent, as he backed up, the desk of papers to one side, the table of bottles to the other.  He had a carving knife to Gordon’s throat.  Presumably the same one he’d used to cut open the creature’s meal and get its attention.

“Two of you.  Are there more?”

Gordon was silent.

“I’m asking you!” the man was angry, outraged.  “Are there more?  Girl!  How many?  Tell me or I cut him!”

“A few,” Lillian said.  “Four.”

“The noise outside.  That was one?”

“Five, if you count him,” she said, her voice small.

“Do not play games with me!” the man roared.  “Show yourselves!  Each of you!”

I exhaled slowly.

I stepped out of the gap by the water tank.

Helen was above, at the hayloft.  Standing by the edge.  Lillian was closer to the door.  She and Gordon had been hiding in or near a garbage bin.

The beast was relaxed, having just eaten its fill.

Children?” the man sounded incredulous.

He wasn’t wrong.  At thirteen, Lillian was the oldest of us.  Gordon was only twelve as of last month.

“Yeah,” Gordon said, his voice strained.  The man had his throat caught in the crook of one arm, exposing his lower throat.

“An infestation,” the man said.  “My experiment didn’t root you out?”

His eye traveled over each of us in turn.  I saw the faintest crease appear between his eyebrows.

He seemed to come to a realization.  “You’ve covered yourself in something.  So it can’t smell you.  This was premeditated.”

I met Lillian’s eyes.  I jerked my chin.  Pointed at her with my hand.

The easy, natural interactions and cooperation that followed from years of working together weren’t there with Lil.  She was new.  A recent addition to the group.

I almost thought she got the wrong idea, until she opened her mouth.

“Yes,” she said.  “We… heard about you.”

“Heard what?”

“That there was something loose in the slums.  It was eating pets.  It ate a man that was sleeping outside.”

“No,” the man said.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “There are witnesses.”

“The witnesses are wrong,” the man said.

“You let it go out to find its own food,” Gordon said, his voice still strangled.  “You couldn’t afford to keep it fed as it grew this large.  You let it feed on strays.  Which it did.  Except one of those strays was human.  It’s in the book.  Meal, unknown type.”

I edged around behind the man.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.  I’ve studied its leavings,” the man said, ignoring the label.  “Nothing human.”

“Nothing conclusively human, you mean,” Gordon said.  “But you aren’t able to identify all of what it ate.”

“You!”  The man raised his voice.  He sounded more emotional than before.  “Up there!  Girl!  Stay put.”

Helen froze where she was.

“You’re a killer,” Gordon said, more insistent.  “We were calling you the snake charmer.”

I edged closer to the table.

I didn’t make a sound, but the snake charmer sensed trouble before it arrived.  He wheeled on me, the knife dangerously close to Gordon’s throat.

I lunged in the same movement, seizing the big bottle.  The venom.  I held it high.

“You don’t care what happens to him?” the snake charmer asked.

“I care,” I said.  “That’s why, if you cut him, and if it looks like he isn’t going to be okay, I’m going to throw this at the both of you.”

The snake charmer’s eyes darted around.  He couldn’t watch all of us at once.

“Move!” he said.  “Go around.  I want you as a group.”

I didn’t budge.

“Move!”

No,” I said.

“It’s over, snake charmer,” Gordon said.

“That is not my name!”

“It’s a name they’ll give you,” Gordon said.  “They’ll make you a monster.  It’s what the Academy does.  Dehumanizes the dangerous ones.  You can’t get all of us, not with the way things are, here.  Some are bound to escape.  They’ll tell people, and those people will find you.  You know the resources the Academy has.”

“No,” the snake charmer said.

“You don’t know?” Gordon asked.

“This is not my fault,” the snake charmer said.  “The Academy… this rests on their shoulders, not mine.  You can’t enroll without showing your skill, and you can’t show your skill without experimenting, but oh, no, they don’t allow that, do they?”

“There are ways,” Lillian said.

“No!” the man barked, “No!  Not nearly enough.  The world is changing, and they’re deciding the course.  They’re putting us in this situation, where risks have to be taken.  Gambles have to be made, or history will continue to be made, names attached to great discoveries, and the rest of us?  If we’re lucky, we get left by the wayside.  If we’re not, we’re just fuel for what they’re setting in motion.”

“I’m a student there,” Lillian said.  “I just started, but… I’m enrolled.  First year of study.  Not them.  Just me.”

I could see the man’s expression twist.  Incomprehension.  Comprehension, which was almost worse.  Hatred for a thirteen year old girl.

Then rage, not a clean, pure kind, but one that only drove him further into a corner.

His hand tightened on the grip of the knife.

I figured out the destination he was arriving at before he did.

I arrived at my own, and I mustered up some courage.

Very deliberately, I grunted, heaving the bottle of acid at the snake charmer.

He heard the grunt, but so did Gordon.  With the snake charmer’s attention caught between Lillian and me, Gordon found a chance to protect his throat, keeping the knife from cutting.

The bottle flew lazily through the air.  Gordon ducked, head down, and the snake charmer released him.

The man caught the bottle in a bear hug.

He stared down at the container.

All the same emotions he’d felt for Lillian, now aimed at me, progressing much faster this time.  Incomprehension, comprehension, hatred, rage.

Directed at me.

I backed away, stumbling, falling.  I covered my face as he swung, using the waterproof cloth to try and shield my body.

He didn’t throw at me, but at the floor.  The chance of me catching it was small, but by throwing it at the floor, he could guarantee that the bottle would shatter into a spray I couldn’t possibly shield all of myself from.

The pain was sharp, at first, droplets touching skin, immediately breaking it down.  Then it burned.

The horrible coldness was worse, because it suggested dying nerves.  All down my arms, and one side of my face.

I screamed.

The creature turned its head, but didn’t move.

The man turned, wheeling on the others.  Gordon was ready, already closing in, taking advantage of the short moment it took the snake charmer to adjust his grip on the knife, so soon after heaving the bottle.

A tackle, shoulder into the man’s gut, taking advantage of smaller size and a good physique.  Gordon drove the man back.

Gordon was the hero, golden haired, noble, likeable.  Talented.

When he broke away, letting the snake charmer stumble back two steps, recovering balance, Gordon had the knife in hand.

The beast rose to its feet.  Sniffing.

I managed to stop screaming, going as still as possible.

It still edged closer to me.  Interested.

Still hungry,  I noted.

Helen acted.  Tipping over the barrel.

Drenching the snake charmer, washing away his charm, the pheromones.

“Brats!” the snake charmer spat the word.  “You little shits!  You think you have control of this situation?”

“Your experiment is trying to decide between you and Sylvester over there,” Gordon said.  “You smell, he’s bleeding.  Both are tempting.”

The snake charmer made an incoherent noise.

“Thing is, if you start bleeding…” Gordon said, trailing off.  “You’ll suddenly be a lot more tempting.”

“Try it,” the snake charmer said.

Gordon did.  He approached, and the snake charmer tried to grab him.

The man’s hands only grabbed clothes.  A hood and cloak meant to keep the rain off.  Gordon let him, and ducked low, the clothing bunching up around his neck and upper chest.

Gordon sliced the snake charmer’s stomach.  A shallow cut.

Another grab, wrestling Gordon, trying to overpower with strength, seizing one arm.

Gordon let the knife drop out of one hand, falling into the palm of another.

He cut the back of the man’s left knee.  When the man fell, screaming, Gordon cut the other knee.  He skipped back as the snake charmer fell.

The snake stirred, its attention no longer predominantly on me.

I could see the snake charmer realizing the same thing I had minutes ago.  He knew his experiment.  He knew how it hunted.  It scavenged, sniffing out prey.  Blind, it reacted to noise and smell.  Minimizing the noise one made was vital.

Given the situation, however, staying silent spelled the man’s doom.  Already, his creation was sniffing him out.  He smelled of blood.

“Pheromones,” he said, knowing how dangerous it was to speak, that every sound helped him lose the tug of war that let the creature decide between devouring him and devouring me.  “Let me- I’ll come with you.  You can take me in.  You win.”

Nobody moved or responded.

He used his arms to pull himself forward, progressing toward the table.  Each motion drew more attention from his beast.

Foot by foot, he closed on the table, and each sound was akin to a fisherman’s line, reeling in the beast.

He reached the table, struggling, and he raised himself up, using one hand to drag a leg forward, propping it under him.  Reaching across the table-

Gordon kicked the leg of the table, hard.  The table shifted a foot, and the snake charmer collapsed.

“No.  Please.”

The snake charmer looked at us.  At Gordon, then Helen, who loomed above, perched on the hayloft.  At me, as I glared at him, my face burned.  At Lillian, who was sitting in the corner, hands over her head.

Who was not one of us.

“Please,” he said.  “Not like this.”

Helen’s expression didn’t change.  Gordon shifted his position, placing himself between the snake charmer and the table, arms folded.  I remained where I was, limp and breathing hard.

I could see it dawn on the man.  Comprehension settling in as he realized what he was dealing with.

The snake seized the man’s feet, and began the very slow process of swallowing him.

The snake charmer’s screams became frantic.

“Lillian,” Gordon said, raising his voice to be heard over the screams.

“I don’t want to see.”

“Then shield your eyes.  But your job is to keep us in one piece.  Sly is hurt.  Focus, and make sure he doesn’t die.”

I felt the burning stop as Lillian tended to me.  By the time she was done, the screams had stopped.  The powder that dusted me made it hard to see, but that was fine.  I was lifted to my feet.

“I have to say, I’m very interested in what the fuck you were doing, faking that fall, setting yourself up to get hurt just now,” Gordon said.  “You’ll have to tell me later, when you can talk again.”

I managed a nod.

“Off we go,” he said.

I could hear the door open.

Helen spoke for the first time in a while.  Her voice was cute.  “The Academy sends its regards, Mr. Snake Charmer.”

.                                                                                                                                                      Next

================================================== 1.02 – Twig

Taking Root 1.2

Previous                                                                                                                      Next

Gordon had one arm, while Lillian was dividing her focus between supporting my other arm, keeping us moving and trying to examine me.  It made for some uncomfortable stumbling and fumbling around, including some grazing touches of the burns, but I didn’t want her to stop doing any of it.  I bit my tongue and inside cheek and endured it, blinking my eyes to try to generate the tears I needed to clear my vision.  I was mostly effective.

Jamie was waiting outside, his book under one arm, our shoes and boots in the other hand.  All the laces had been tied together, making for only one knot that he had to hold to carry them all.

The bundle dropped from his fingers and landed in a puddle.  I spotted my left shoe, on its side in the puddle.

“You’re hurt!” Jamie said.

“You just got my shoe wet,” I said.  I started to point, then winced as skin pulled where the enzymes had eaten away a spot on my arm.  I held back a cry of pain.  My arms had taken the brunt of it.  There wasn’t a spot on the back of my arms where I could have laid a hand flat without touching something the enzymes had devoured.  Some of the burns eclipsed my hands in size, and my arms weren’t large.  My skin looked like a sock that was as much holes as it was fabric, and the flesh beneath was angry, a scalded red, with blood seeping out from crevices.

More burns on a similar scale speckled my neck, one cheek, my side, my legs, and one foot.  My clothes had absorbed the worst of it, elsewhere, only droplets reaching through.

“I saw through the window, but I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Jamie said.  “I thought you all had everything in hand, but then Sy fell, and I wasn’t sure if I should go for help-”

“My shoe,” I commented, managing to point this time around.  Fixating on one thing made it easier to handle the pain.  The wounds themselves didn’t hurt, but the edges burned like fire.

“Sy didn’t fall.  He took a fall.  Wording,” Gordon said.

Jamie’s expression switched from confusion to an accusing glance.  Thinking that Gordon might be wrong didn’t even cross his mind.

“Why?” Jamie asked.  “You got yourself badly hurt, you twit.”

“Did I?” I tried to exaggerate the surprise in my voice, and all the pain-relief chemicals that my body was dosing me with made me sound even more exaggerated, my voice almost breaking.  I added some sarcasm for good measure, “Oh.  I hadn’t noticed.  Thank you.”

Lillian spoke up, “It’s nothing too dangerous.  I don’t like some of these spots on your side, but I don’t think you’re going to die from it.  Not soon.”

“Not soon.  That’s the best we can hope for,” I said.

Jamie looked closer at one of the wounds.  With Gordon still supporting me and both Jamie and Lillian fussing, there were a few more accidental touches of the burns.  One of the touches didn’t actually hurt so much, but I played it up, flinching and letting a gasp out, if only to get them to stop.

“Don’t let him distract you,” Gordon said.  “He’s trying to dodge the ‘why’ question.”

“I’m trying to hurry this along,” I said.  “Priorities.  Can I get medical attention?  Pretty please?”

“Still dodging the question,” Gordon observed.

“Let’s go,” I said.  “Wait.  Jamie needs to pick up my shoe, which is getting soaked through, then we can go.  Maybe since Jamie won’t stop touching me to make sure I’m okay, Jamie and Lillian can make sure I walk okay?”

Gordon looked me over, suspicious.  “You’ll tell us on the way, then?”

“Assuming there’s something to tell,” I said.  I felt the burning at my wrist get worse, and my little noise of pain wasn’t intentional.  I reached for my wrist, and Lillian slapped my hand away like I was a kid going for the cookie jar.  For her benefit, I said, “Hurts.”

Good,” she said, sounding like a cross between the bossy older sister and a schoolteacher.  “Maybe you won’t do that again.”

She wiped at my arm, clearing away blood where it had welled out from the center of the burn.  Where the blood had run through the edges of the scar, the trickle had left a faint pink line.  Spreading the enzyme around.

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Gordon,” I cut him off.

There was a pause.  I hesitated to call it tension.  He wanted me to come to my senses, I wanted to wait long enough for his concern for my well being to override his curiosity, which was bound to happen sooner or later.  Tension implied something being stretched to a limit, but we were both being patient.

I felt the burning sensation at my side getting worse.  From a six to a seven on the scale, and I was the one who caved, in the end.

“I promise I’ll tell you after,” I said.

He seemed to consider, rolling his head to one side, then the other.

“Fine.  Jamie, take over?” Gordon said.  “Seems to want you for some reason.”

“Jamie is shorter, I don’t have to stand on my tip toes while he’s holding me up,” I explained.

Gordon transferred his hold on me to Jamie, who had to transfer his hold on his book to the other arm.

“And he’s nicer,” I added.  Jamie rolled his eyes.

“Did you lock the windows?” Gordon asked, ignoring me.  The question was aimed at Helen, who had emerged from the door behind us.

I turned my head to see Helen’s nod.  She and Gordon worked to slide the door closed.  The movement of the wheel through the rut spat water at our legs.

“Let’s hope it stays put,” Gordon said.

“I thought we decided that it wouldn’t go anywhere after eating,” Lillian said.  “Carnivore eating habits.  Hunt or scavenge, eat, rest, rouse, repeat.”

“It was hungry enough to eat two meals.  Probably going through a final growth spurt,” I said.  “Let’s not rule anything out.”

“Okay,” Lillian said, right beside me, and I was genuinely surprised at the note of anxiety in her voice, how it had cut the word short.  “We can leave now.”

Very nearly but not a question.  A plea?

I suspected it was fear, but that suspicion sat askew in my head.  Lillian had experience with that stuff.  She’d had hands on experience with creatures and experiments at the Academy.  More restrained than that one had been, but the idea of the unrestrained experiment wasn’t enough to justify the thought.  It was probably well fed enough that it would ignore any meal that didn’t walk right into its open mouth.

Or lay there struggling as the snake charmer had.

There we are, I thought.  The snake charmer.  I could remember Lillian shielding her eyes.  The anxiety had more to do with the reminder of the man and the way he’d left this world.  If he had left it.  There was a chance he was still in there, alive and slowly dissolving.

Gordon had collected the bundle of shoes but hadn’t handed them out.  Which was fine.  My feet were muddy, and I had a burn on the top of my foot that would have made wearing the shoes hard.  The burn announced its presence every time I stepped in a puddle.

It wasn’t a particularly short walk back, and I was content to keep my mouth shut.  If I started talking, I might have started grunting or making noises in response to the pain.  If I started whimpering, then Gordon might have started reminding me that I’d done this to myself.

Instead, I focused on the future.  The snake charmer had been handled.  Were questions possible?  What about my injuries?

“We’re close to King,” Jamie said, interrupting my thoughts.  I realized Helen and Gordon were talking, with Gordon doing the lion’s share.  I’d tuned it out.

“Yeah,” I noted.

“Busy street means head down,” Jamie said, very patient.  He tugged on the front of my hood, so it could shroud my face in shadow.  “Hood down.  We don’t want your face to scare the locals any more than usual.”

I couldn’t help but smile wide at that.

The main street was framed on both sides by taller buildings, a great many of them being apartments.  People sat on steps beneath the overhang of their porches, smoking, and the occasional light glowed from within rooms above.

The plant growth that supported the structures reached overhead to meet and mesh.  An arch, to introduce us to the main street proper.  King Street.  It was a thick crowd, even in the late afternoon, the sun setting.  Men and women in raincoats, with umbrellas, walking on either side of the road.

Lillian and Jamie stopped supporting me quite so much.  I started to teeter over a bit, and Jamie caught me at roughly the same point I stuck a leg out to catch my balance myself.  I hadn’t realized how heavily I’d been leaning on the others, or how dizzy I felt.

Horses pulling coaches outnumbered cars at a nine to one ratio.  Of those horses drawing coaches, only one in five were truly alive.  The remainder were stitched, their hides patchwork, seams joined by thick black thread or by metal staples with burns where they touched flesh.  Were I able to see beneath the heavy raincoats, I would have seen the thick metal bolts that had been screwed into points down their spines.

Live horses were an affectation, really.  There was a convenience to them, as they didn’t suffer from the water in this city where it always rained, they could be taken out hunting, and they had personalities.  A horse could be a member of one’s family.  There was a lot to like.

But the stitched horses, voltaic horses if you asked someone who knew what they were talking about, they were cheap, they didn’t get tired, and rather than food, they could be kept going by connecting wires to the bolts on their backs and waiting.  When a stitched horse had done its work for the day, it could be placed in what amounted to a long closet.

There were no rules for the road, but everyone found their way.  Most people here knew most others.  A lack of courtesy today could be paid by a lack of cooperation from others tomorrow.  That wasn’t to say there weren’t idiots or disagreeable types who others paid no mind to, but it largely worked.

Like the branches and plant growth, it amounted to a planned chaos.  The exact shape and character of branches couldn’t be decided in advance, but the key elements were given attention, the problematic ones pruned.  The squat apartment buildings didn’t have room for even stitched horses, which meant every essential service had been put within walking distance.  Pubs, grocers, tailors, barbers and the like.

I raised my eyes.  Looking down the length of King, I could see it rise at a gradual incline, until it touched the perimeter of the Academy itself.  Radham Academy, to be specific.  All things flowed from it, all things flowed to it.  I imagined the same went for any Academy.  Stick one somewhere, and people would collect to it like flies to a carcass.  The advances and work that went hand in hand with an Academy would bleed out in a very similar way.  First to the city as a whole, then to surrounding regions.

Jamie grabbed the tip of my hood and tugged down, forcing me to look at the ground in front of me.  I’d been showing too much of my face.

We moved as a huddle, and with our heads down and hoods up, we weren’t much different from half of the streets’ occupants.  My burns didn’t earn me a second glance, because I scarcely warranted a first one.  I suspected that Gordon had chosen where he stood with the idea of shielding me from others’ sight, for added assurance.

I liked the thought.  It made me wonder if any other people in the crowd were in similar straits.

Ahead of us, a large shape loomed.  It looked like the offspring of a deer or rabbit might, if their offspring was squeezed out too early.  No larger than one of the cars on the street, it was pink, with stretched skin, the translucent eyelids appearing bruised with how they let some of the darkness of the black eyeballs beneath leak through.  Its head sat crooked, forcing it to see the way forward with only one of its two wide set eyes.  Its mouth hung open.

Most prominent, however, were the legs.  Not much thicker around than my leg, half again as long as the tallest man on the sidewalk was tall, the four legs ended in points, a single claw to each leg.  Saddlebags were strapped to saddlebags to form chains that draped the thing like a peculiar sort of jewelry.

As the coaches and cars on the road made way and cooperated, so did the people on the sidewalk.  This however, was motivated by discomfort and fear.  Men and women gave the thing almost the entire sidewalk to itself.

A woman led it on a fine chain, holding an umbrella overhead, though the creature’s mass already helped shelter her from the rain.  She was barely entering into her twilight years, but only the pale color of her once-blonde hair suggested as much.  Her face and body were young, and her clothes looked expensive, though they tended toward the simple.

I very nearly tipped over again, as Jamie let go of me and stepped forward to obscure the woman’s view of me.

Feeling as wobbly as I did was more than a little concerning, and a delay was the last thing I wanted.

“Hello Mrs. Thetford,” Helen greeted the woman, smiling.

“Helen,” Mrs. Thetford said, tugging on the chain to make her packbeast stop in its tracks.  Her expression changed from an easy smile to shock.  “Look at you!  You look like something the cat dragged in!”

How apt, I thought.

“It’s Sylvester’s fault,” Helen said.  “He pushed me and I got wet.”

Of course she invents a lie that makes me look bad.  I made a point of hanging my head, to better conceal my injuries.  I could see the crowd passing around and to either side of us.

“Sylvester, for shame,” Mrs. Thetford said, and she used my name as a rebuke, and the way she said ‘shame’ even made me feel a bit abashed over the deed I hadn’t committed.  “You really should be nicer to girls.”

“He really should,” Helen said, and her tone was perfect.  Just a little bit smug, chiding, but not so much of either that Mrs. Thetford would think less of her.

“And you,” Mrs. Thetford said, reaching under Helen’s hood to comb Helen’s hair back with long fingernails.  “You should give some thought to keeping better company.  I know you’re loyal to your so-called brothers and sisters, but you could do so well if you devoted some time to others.  Your caregivers have very nearly polished you into a diamond, and it would warm my heart to see you finish the transformation.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Helen said, smiling, pretending to be a little shy.  Not a lot, but enough to be humble.  “It means a lot that you think so well of me.”

“If you decide that you would like to become more of a lady, I would be more than happy to introduce you to some people who could teach you the finer points.  Music, dancing, etiquette.  The same goes for you, Gordon.  You’re evidence that Helen here isn’t a simple fluke.  It would take more doing, but I think we could turn you into a proper gentleman with some tutoring.”

“I might take you up on that offer, ma’am,” Gordon said.

“Do!  You should,” the older woman said.  She brushed Helen’s cheek with her fingers.  “You’re a dear.  I would have you for myself, if I hadn’t already had my fill of raising children.”

“For now, if it’s alright, I’ll have to content myself with getting home before it’s dark.  I’m looking forward to getting dry again,” Helen said, sticking me with a look.

“Of course!  Now I feel bad for keeping you.  You know where to find me if you would like those lessons.”

We hurried on.  Rather than take the long route around to the sides, we passed under and between the legs of the packbeast that was carrying Mrs. Thetford’s shopping.

By the time we’d flowed back into the crowd, almost invisible, Helen’s expression had gone flat again, her eyes cold.  The smile was gone.

She saw me looking.

“Are you upset?” she asked.

“Why would I be upset?”

“I blamed you.”

“I always get blamed.  I’m used to it.”

She seemed to take that at face value.

I might have pursued conversation, but it would have been purely for self gratification, and I was feeling less and less like talking.  My brain had apparently decided that the easiest way to handle what I was feeling was to declare that all of me hurt, and certain parts of me hurt enough that I was reconsidering my ‘one to ten’ scale of pain.  If I focused on any one part of me too much, it quickened.

All of that in mind, I was very glad to see the orphanage.

The building was perched in an odd spot, beside a creek and a stone bridge that was thick with grown-in vegetation. The land by the riverbed was stony, uneven, and threatened to be damp, discouraging building efforts, but the building itself had been here long before the Academy, serving as a home for shepherds when Radham had only been a few buildings set around a crossroads.

That it had withstood the test of time was either pure luck, or the person who had mortared the stones together had known what they were doing.

One floor tall, with a stone exterior, it lacked the reinforcing growths that marked so many nearby structures.  The only wood came from a tree in the backyard.  A short stone wall encircled the property, only three feet tall, and the height both served as a way of keeping the smallest children on the property and was paradoxically welcoming.  I couldn’t approach it without wanting to hop up onto it.

Toward the back of the property, I could see that Ralph Stein was in the process of walking the top of the wall.  The route went from the right side of the gate, over to the right of the house, alongside the riverbank, around the back of the house, under the tricky bit where the tree’s branches hung over, up the left side of the house, and then over to the left side of the gate.  All on the weather-rounded, uneven stones that made up the wall’s top, virtually always in the rain.

My focus wasn’t on that.

My focus was on the black coach parked to the left of the house, beneath the overhang in the roof.  The horses were wearing black raincoats, utterly still.  Their driver stood beside them, smoking.

My eye didn’t leave them as we made our way down the steps that had been set into the slope.  Each one of the stone stairs had seen enough traffic and years that they’d been reshaped, as if buckling faintly under thousands of footfalls.

Gordon pushed open the door.  Lillian and Jamie helped me through.

We stopped in our tracks at the sight of a man in the front hallway.

If it had a brain and a nervous system, the parts could be used for making a stitch, or voltaic creature.  The quality of that stitched was indicated by the placement of the stitches that gave them their name.  Poorer work or a stitched that had been ‘repaired’ often involved joins in visible or inconvenient places.  Across the face, or across the joints, where they interfered with function.  A good stitch had the joins and scars kept just out of sight, under the chin, or in places where clothes could cover the work.

The figure that stood guard by the door was the most human-like stitched I’d ever seen.  Tall, broad-shouldered, the parts had been selected for size and raw power.  But for stitches visible just past the cuffs of his jacket, I might not have known.  He wore a suit under a hooded raincoat and carried a pistol at his hip.

He was, in two short words, a problem.

I smelled tea, and I heard very little commotion.  If I hadn’t seen the coach outside, I could have put two and two together to figure out that we had a guest.

“That would be the children,” Mrs. Earles said.

The others properly put away hoods, cloaks, shoes and boots before toweling their feet to a reasonable state of clean and dry.  Lillian bent down and had me lift up my feet one by one to dry them.

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“It’s what I’m here for,” she murmured back.

One by one, we headed around the corner from the front hall, into the sitting room.  The room itself had homey touches, and was very much Mrs. Earles.  It was her perch in the evenings, the part she made her home.  The knick-knacks and decorative carvings, still, were placed well out of reach of errant hands, on the mantlepiece above the blazing fireplace and on various shelves and bookshelves.

My eyes scanned the shelves and bookshelves.  Searching.

Mrs. Earles didn’t give off the image of someone who ran an orphanage.  She’d struck me more as the assistant to that sort of someone.  Managing one child had a way of turning women into mothers, wearing away at certain things while exaggerating others.  Even with help, managing sixteen should have pushed her to an extreme in some respect.  Something in the vein of a tyrant or a defeated woman, a woman who turned to vice to escape stresses, or a saint.  But she wasn’t any of those things.

A part of me wanted to think of her as a mother, but she wasn’t.  She didn’t pretend to be.  She ran Lambsbridge, she kept us fed and sheltered, and she was quick to use the threat of a smack to keep us in line.  Even though I’d been a recipient more than once, I could appreciate that she didn’t hesitate in that respect.  I had to live with fifteen others, and if they were allowed to run rampant, I faced more grief than I did dealing with the occasional rap to the knuckles.

Mr. Hayle, by that same token, was almost but not quite my father.

He frowned as he saw me, immediately taking in details that more than a hundred people in the busier part of the city had failed to spot.

“I’ll make sure you don’t have eavesdroppers,” Mrs. Earles said, disappearing.

“Thank you,” Mr. Hayle said, without turning to look at her.

We stood in the entry to the sitting room, while he examined each of us, silent.

He was an older man.  Sixty or so, as far as anyone’s age could be pinned down with certainty.  He hadn’t prettied himself up or taken advantage of Radham Academy’s resources to remove wrinkles or revitalize his hair.  His hair was grey and waxed back away from his face, and his wrinkles cut so deep into his face that I could have imagined them as cross-hatching done with a scalpel.  He wore a doctor’s coat indoors, the fabric thick, dyed black so that it wouldn’t show any blood stains.  His gloves had been pulled off, and the ends were sticking out of one pocket.  A collection of files were already tucked under one arm.

“The other children are accounted for.  I’ll be in the kitchen, where I can intercept anyone coming your way,” Mrs. Earles said.

“Thank you,” he said.

She retreated, leaving us alone.

“I was planning on a longer meeting,” Mr. Hayle said.  “To look at Sylvester, he might not be able to stand for the duration.  Is he stable?”

“I’m stable,” I said, at the same time Lillian said, “He is.”

Mr. Hayle frowned.  “What happened to you?  No.  Hold off on that.  If you’re stable, let’s cover the essentials.  Tell me, how was it?”

Gordon answered.  “Our target’s second experiment is in one of the warehouses, off to the southeast of King.  Sleeping off a meal, we’re hoping.  It’s there, with all of the notes.  As for the target, he’s…”

“In his experiment,” I said, managing a smile.

Mr. Hayle didn’t smile back.  “I don’t understand.  Clarify?”

“Dead,” Gordon said.  “Swallowed.”

“Complications?”

We collectively uttered a chorus of ‘nos’ and shook our heads.  I glanced at the back of Jamie’s head, saw the faintest hesitation before he joined us in shaking his head.

“What happened to Sylvester?”

“The snake charm- ah, our target, he arrived, forcing us to hide.  He found me in my hiding spot, purely by chance, and took me hostage.  Sylvester distracted him, and was splashed with-”

“Enzymes,” I said.

“Splashed with enzymes, during the altercation that followed.”

“I did what I could,” Lillian said, “Neutralized the spread with counteragents our target had on hand.”

Mr. Hayle nodded.  “Good.  Lillian, I believe this marks your third assignment with the group?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you do another?”

I didn’t miss the hesitation on Lillian’s part.

I tried to view things through her eyes.  Seeing the man get swallowed.  The horror.

“I would, sir,” she decided.

“Good.  You’ll continue to have my support at the Academy, then.  If you don’t find all doors are open and all resources available to you, let me know.  Your tuition will continue to be waived.”

“Thank you sir.”

“That takes care of the, ah, what did you call him?  The snake charmer?  Now, unless there’s anything else, I should look after Sylvester there.”

There was a jumble of ‘no sir’s from the others.

He crossed the room, and the others were quick to get out of his way.  I used the opportunity to move to one side, further into the sitting room, and scanned the shelves.

There.

Mrs. Earles didn’t keep matches close to the fireplace, and she didn’t keep them where the smaller children could get them.

Even for me, it would require that I stand on my toes and reach high overhead.

The problems that came with being small.

Mr. Hayle was talking while he found and put on his boots.  “I do want to have a longer discussion.  I’ll need to rearrange my evening, which will take me at least an hour.  Add the time it takes to deliver Sylvester… hm, it would be late.  Too late?”

“The younger children will be in bed.  I could ask Mrs. Earles,” Gordon said.

“No.  I’ll be by in the morning.  I only considered tonight because I thought you’d want to know how Sylvester was.  I can send someone your way, if you’re willing to keep an eye out the window for them.  A quiet, short visit to pass on word.”

“Please, sir,” Gordon said, sounding far more solemn than I’d have expected.

“I’ll see to it.  Thank you for another job well done.  Sylvester?”

I was out of time.

With a wall between myself and Mr. Hayle, each of the others positioned to see, I reached up to the shelf, and felt my burns stretch, eliciting a tearing sensation, and a fresh renewal of pain.

I closed my fingers around the matchbook, then collapsed against the wall, panting.

“Problem?”

“Moved too fast,” I said.

Mr. Hayle gave me a sincere look of concern as he did up the buttons of his coat and took his umbrella from his stitched bodyguard.

“Let’s get you looked after,” he said.  He paused.  “No shoes?”

“Burn on my foot,” I said.

“Carry on, then.”

I discovered that stopping and then moving again was quite possibly the worst thing I could have done.  Every burn felt fresh.  The movement of my arm was the worst of it.  The stitched bodyguard helped me, even going so far as to lift me bodily to my seat.  All the same, by the time we reached the coach, I was sweating bullets from pain alone.

The coach’s interior was red, the windows stained to reduce the light that came in, and something that looked like a glowing orange minnow swam in a bowl overhead, casting light on the interior.

The driver steered the stitched horses around.  Before long, we were on King Street, heading for the Academy.

“It’s rare that I have a chance to talk with one of you,” Mr. Hayle said.  “Can I see your arm?”

I offered it.  He probed the edges of the injury.

“I suspect you’ll resist, out of loyalty to your… brothers and sisters?  Is that how you think of them?”

“Friends.  Gang,” I said.  I swallowed hard.  “Sometimes I think of them as siblings.  What am I resisting?”

“Giving me information.  Can you tell me if they’re doing alright?”

“Yes,” I said.  “They’re doing everything they’re supposed to do.”

“Is that so?  Something tells me you wouldn’t tell me if they weren’t.”

I smiled a little.  “What makes you think that?”

“I’ve watched you grow up these past few years.  I’d like to think I know you.”

I nodded.  I forbade myself from looking outside the window.

“Not up to talking?”

“Not sure what to say, sir.”

“Tell me about the snake charmer.”

“Yes sir.  Um-”

A crash shook the coach.

I could hear shouts.  Mr. Hayle’s coach came to an awkward stop, lurching, then jerking to the left before finally going still.

He twisted in his seat, and slid a panel to one side.  “John?”

There was a pause.  The driver replied, “Water.  Knocked me off my seat.  One of the voltaic horses got drenched.  It’s gone quiet.”

“Water?”  Mr. Hayle asked.  He frowned.  “I’ll be right out.”

I remained where I was, very much in pain after the sudden movements.

“Douglas,” Mr. Hayle said.  “Look after Sylvester.  Be ready to come outside at a moment’s notice.”

“I understand,” Douglas said, the words clumsy in a way that was hard to define.  Too precise, the local accent rounded off at the edges.  I suspected it would be worse if it was a more unfamiliar phrase.

The door of the coach closed.

One, two, three.

I forced myself to sit up.

I opened my eyes.

Naturally, going outside, Mr. Hayle hadn’t taken his paperwork.

When problem solving, the simplest answer shouldn’t be discounted.

I reached for the files.

The bodyguard reached out, blocking my hand with his.

“That is not yours,” he said.  The words were clumsier than his ‘I understand.’

If it was a human bodyguard, and not one that had died and been reanimated, rendered very simple and loyal in operation, I suspected I could have manipulated him or sent him out of the coach.

Stitched were easier in some ways, harder in others.

I pulled the matches out of my pocket.

I struck it.

He didn’t flinch.

I blinked.

Reduced to very primal, simple function, they were supposed to have reactions to fire.  Nine times out of ten, it was fear.  One time out of ten, it was violent and destructive rage.

The quality of this stitched was top notch.  Had Mr. Hayle or the person he bought the stitched from somehow solved the problem?

“Put that out,” the stitched told me.

I reached out, bringing the match closer to him.

He didn’t move.

“Put that out,” he said, more firmly.

I moved my hand, and he remained where he was.

No, the problem hadn’t been fixed.  But they’d found a step forward.

He was frozen.

I’d hoped to distract and disturb him enough that he’d forget his instructions and let me snatch up the files.  This, however, worked.  Still holding the match up, the whole of his attention focused on it, I grabbed the stack of folders.

I returned to my seat.

Before I could open the folders, the door opened.

Mr. Hayle studied me, his expression blank.

I froze, caught red handed.  Well, the red hand was the burn, but-

“And it all makes sense,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Sylvester,” he said, climbing up into the coach and taking his seat, “You know why I made you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Each of you.  My colleagues in other departments have made weapons, monsters, they’ve made viruses and more, with the understanding that there may very well be a need for these weapons.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“My focus, as you very well know, is on,” he reached over, and he tapped me on the forehead.  “The brain.”

“And I was dumb just now,” I said.  “Failed project?”

“No,” he said.  “No.  I made you.  Like I said, I know you.”

“If it helps, I’m starting to believe you, sir.”

“It would be stupid of me to make you for a purpose and not expect you to fulfill that purpose.  Mistakes here and there are to be expected, and your mistake here was expecting me to be dumb.  You’re still developing, and each of you are still being refined in your own ways.”

I nodded.

“Why didn’t you ask for the files?” he asked me.

“Because you might have said no, and you would have known I wanted them,” I said.  “And because I think people are more genuine when you catch them off balance.”

He nodded.

“Something to keep in mind,” he said.  “And I suppose I’m getting too predictable, if you were able to arrange this.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Take a look,” he said.

For a telling second, I thought the files would be empty, that he might have checkmated me.

But I paged through them, and I found them filled with pages of data, notes, design, and more.

Helen, project Galatea.

Jamie, project Caterpillar.

Gordon, project Griffon.

Sylvester, project Wyvern

I found the fourth file.  The one I’d wanted.

I glanced over the first page, then closed it, nodding.

“Why?” Mr. Hayle asked.  “All that for a glance?”

“Yes sir.”

“What, specifically?”

“Expiration dates, sir.”

Previous                                                                                                                      Next

 

================================================== 1.03 – Twig

Taking Root 1.3

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

The syringe was fancy, glass with silver leaf at the ends and at the plunger.  The glass had turned smoky where it had once been clear, and only the faintest trace of the original contents were still inside.  Thicker around than any three of my fingers put together.  It probably cost twenty dollars, if not more.  A good week’s wages.

Somewhat vindictively, I pulled out the plunger until I had the weight balanced, put my fingers on it, and sent it spinning wildly on the desk, periodically rustling scattered papers or sending them floating over the desk’s surface, riding a thin layer of air.  Traveling across the desk, it struck an identical syringe, eliciting a pair of high, sweet songs from the ringing glass.

It didn’t break.  Shame.

I stepped over to the window, my feet kicking up more papers as they might stir leaves in the fall.  I was at ‘the Hedge’, the colloquial term for the wall that encircled the Academy.  A great deal of the wall wasn’t large or tall at all, but it rose in places, and the corner of the Academy closest to Radham had a hospital built into it.  Through the hospital, students bought their turns at getting training and locals bought care.  The view was of the wall itself, the Academy on one side, Radham on the other.

About the only thing that was the same about the two places was that it was raining.  A light rain, but enough that just about everyone had their hoods up.  The boys and girls on the Academy side moved as though they were all in a hurry.  They were all tidy, hair well looked after, white uniforms clean.  Their bookbags had flaps over the top to keep the rain out, and the buckles that kept the flaps in place each had the university’s symbol on it, a full-face helmet in profile framed by red leaves and ribbons.

Almost but not quite a badge of office.

Outside, watched from a distance, people moved as though they were mired in tar.  They found their way eventually, but there was no clear direction, even in a city that had been built with a plan in mind.

I didn’t enjoy looking, but there wasn’t much else to be done.  I’d read the books, I’d read the various papers, and I’d slept.  Seven days I’d been cooped up here.

I felt a chill, and rubbed my hands over my bare arms.  My skin had been replaced where the enzyme solution had devoured it, and while the pigmentation was very slightly different if I looked for it, it remained sensitive, not yet used to heat and cold, to the rubbing where seams of clothing touched it, or to idle scratches.  I kept my shirt off, but that meant being colder, and though it was dawn and spring had sprung, it was gloomy outside.

I held the back of my hand up to the edges of the window, letting the sensitive skin feel the movements of the air.  Slowly, so as not to disturb the air with my own movements, I moved my hand along the point where the window glass met the frame.

I felt the point where the breeze came through as though ice had touched the new skin.  Pulling my hand away, I tore the end off one page of paper and popped the paper into my mouth before setting the syringe to spinning at full speed once again.

The syringe rattled as I got the motion wrong, and the rattle prompted the papers under the cot to rustle.  Not because I’d moved or because I was going anywhere.

Periodically, someone came to talk to me.  I was already figuring out their schedules.  Going by the time of day and the schedules I’d observed over the past week, they were past due to arrive.

Being past due meant they were up to something.  I was tense, chewing on the little bit of paper, listening past the patter of the rain on the window and the sound of the syringe spinning on the desktop.

I could hear the murmur of speech, too far away and muted to make out.

I recognized Mr. Hayle’s voice.

“-Or worse than before?” I could make out the tail end of the sentence.

“More or less the same, professor.  But as intractable as he gets, his behavior differs from month to month.  This time, he wanted to be alone.  Very much so.”

“I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that it followed so quickly off the back of another incident, or the pain he was experiencing.  Make a note.  If we’re bringing another student on board to oversee the Wyvern file, that would be a good way to bring them up to speed while doing something constructive.”

“Yes, professor.”

There was a pause, pronounced, then a knock on the door.

“Sylvester?”

I didn’t respond right away.  Reaching up to my mouth, I pulled the wad of paper out, then jammed it up against the gap in the window where it was leaking cold air.

“I’m here,” I said.

The door opened.  It only opened a few inches before it hit the toppled bookcase that barred the way.  The rest of the floor was carpeted in scattered papers, fallen books, and various folders.

I angled my head to one side, and saw Mr. Hayle do the same, peering through the gap.  He looked at me first, then the bookcase.

“How are you?” he asked.

“My head hurts,” I said.  It did.  It hurt in a very different way than my body had.  My body had been effectively burned by the enzymes, and burns hurt more than just about anything.  My brain, however, it felt like it had been poked, prodded, beaten and kicked into the dirt, then made to do a marathon after the fact.  The burn only hurt the parts that were burned.  This was the sort of pain that made everything hurt, and promised more pain every step of the way for the rest of the journey.

A hollow, empty, tired hurt.

“I can well imagine.  How in the world did you pull over the shelf?”

What he was asking was how a boy who weighed four point seven stone could pull over a floor-to-ceiling solid wood bookcase with half the books still on it.  Mr. Hayle might not have been able to knock it down in the prime of his youth.

“I pushed the upper corner,” I said.  “Then I dropped a book into the gap so it couldn’t go rock back to where it was.  Pushed again, dropped more books in.  Kept at it, and eventually it tipped.”

“You scared the wits out of some of my colleagues.  They thought a part of the roof had fallen in.”

“We thought something had escaped,” a woman’s voice in the hallway said.  “It was like someone had kicked an ants nest, people scurrying around to find out what had gone wrong.”

I couldn’t resist smiling a little at that.

Hayle smiled, though only half was visible through the gap in the door.  “Ah, there we go.  Your expression was so cold I thought we’d somehow lost you, Sylvester.  I don’t suppose you could think up a way to lift the shelf back into place?”

“Probably,” I said.  “I could get started soon.  It would take a while.”

“I was hoping to have you out of there sooner than later,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, without missing a beat.  I knew I sounded hostile, cold as he’d put it.  I didn’t care.

“Your… the Lambsbridge gang has asked for you.  I myself would appreciate your help.”

My eyebrows went up.

“I might see if Douglas here can-”

“Why?” I cut him off.

“Excuse me?”

“Why do they need my help?”

“That, Sylvester, is a question I’m more than happy to answer, but I don’t feel like detailing it all through a door.”

I frowned, reaching up to scratch my head, looking around.

Hopping up onto the back of the bookcase, I approached the door, examining the frame and the door itself.

“As I was saying,” he said.  “I could ask Douglas to try pushing on the door-”

I seized one of the syringes, paused to set the other one to spinning, just for the heck of it, and headed over to the cot.

“-he should be strong enough to move the bookshelf, don’t you think, Lacey?”

“I think so, professor,” the woman on the other side said.

“Now that I think about it, my concern is damaging the door.”

“It should be okay, I think.”

“Okay, Douglas, come here…”

When I glanced up, Mr. Hayle wasn’t looking through the gap.  It was probably awkward to keep in that position, right up against the door.

I put my bare shoulder under the bottom of the cot, using my whole body to lift it up.  The metal of the cot’s frame was cold against my back.  I set the syringe on the floor and slipped to one side to let the cot drop.  The leg came down to break the glass.

The noise made something under the bed move, flying out to the corner by the door and bookcase.

“Stop, Douglas.  Sylvester,” Mr. Hayle said.  “What was that?”

“Allow me one minute,” I said, absently, picking my way past the pieces of glass.

“I’m sure Douglas could get you out.  I’m not sure what you’re doing there, but if we could minimize the damage and the explanations I have to give my colleagues that are working here in the Hedge, I would appreciate it.”

“Damage is done,” I said.  If only to the syringe.  I shifted my position, lifted up the cot again, and repositioned the plunger-end of the syringe.  “I’ll be fifty seconds.”

I imagined him repressing a sigh.  All I heard, however, was a, “very well.”

A doctor using a syringe had to put their fingers into two metal loops just by the plunger.  My target was the loop.  I moved out of the way, and let the leg of the cot fall.

I twisted and worked the loop until the metal gave way, then raised the cot again.

Using my hands, I folded the broken bit of metal in two, for a long length of metal.  I collected a fallen medical text, and it was heavy enough I could barely hold it in one hand.

Placing the long bit of metal on the underside of the hinge, pointing up, I gave it a solid whack with the book.

The pin that held the hinge together popped up.

Another whack made it pop out.

The other hinge was high up enough that I had to stand on my toes to reach it, even with the bookcase under me.

I gave it the same treatment, and the pin came free.

“Okay,” I said, swiftly backing up, “Done.  Push.”

I very nearly stepped on the glass from the syringe, before arresting my movement.  My leg and bare foot stayed up, and I caught my balance, tipping over, twisting, and then throwing myself at the desk with the still-spinning syringe on it, just to have something to grab.

Around that same moment, someone pushed on the door.  Without the hinges, it simply tipped forward and fell onto the back of the bookcase.

Mr. Hayle was there, wearing his uniform, including the black lab coat with a hood, and I spotted the red headed woman in the white lab coat, who I knew only as Lacey.  Shapely, thirty or so, and wholly dedicated to her work.  Unfortunately.  I suspected the first-name-only was supposed to endear her to me, but it really didn’t.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Sy,” she said, her voice soft.  Trying too hard to be gentle.

Mr. Hayle picked his way past the door, stepping onto the back of the bookcase, apparently intent on surveying the damage.

“Sir,” Lacey said, suddenly sounding concerned rather than gentle.

He turned.

“There were two glass cases in the room.  They were inhabited.”

Mr. Hayle froze.

“The snake and spiders?” I asked.  “They’re around here somewhere.  Something was under the bed.  It’s pretty close to you.”

“They don’t concern you?” Mr. Hayle asked.

I shook my head, then wished I hadn’t.  It made the general kicked-into-the-dirt pain in my head come back.

“I won’t come any further then.  If you’d find a shirt and come out?”

I nodded.  I collected my shirt from the bed and pulled it on.

All things considered, he seemed remarkably at ease over the damage I’d done.  I wondered who the office belonged to.

“Walk with me,” he said.  “Douglas, please listen to Lacey as she instructs you about putting the shelf back in place and catching the smaller animals.  Lacey?  Bring him to my office in the tower when you’re done.”

“Yes sir,” Lacey said.

She reached for me while I passed, and I jerked my shoulder to strike her hand away rather than let it rest on me in anything resembling reassurance.

Mr. Hayle hadn’t missed it.

I buttoned up my shirt while we walked.  I was wrinkled, my hair greasy and sticking out at the ends.  I might have looked feral.

“You don’t like her.”

“No.”

“I could tell you she’s a lovely, vibrant young lady, but that’s not the question, is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.  Let it be what it is, then.  Tell me, honestly, do you feel up to working?”

“I’m rarely honest,” I said.

“Then give me a convincing lie.”

“Yes, sir.  If they need my help, I’ll give it.”

He frowned a little.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The night I dropped you off, I gave them a task.  It is perhaps the most important job that the Lambsbridge project has been given.  One only your particular group can do.”

He’d had my attention.  Now he had my curiosity.

He probably knew me better than I was willing to admit, if he was getting to me this quickly.

That, or my defenses were down, and I was giving him more clues than I’d intended.

“I positioned them at the Mothmont ladder school to investigate a problem, and they’ve run into a block.  No forward progress.”

“If I’d known I’d be going to school I don’t think I would have helped you move the door.”

“Then let me tell you why you opened the door.  Three weeks ago, a student at Mothmont killed his father, then himself.  The victim was a Crown State Senator.  Autopsies didn’t indicate any particular chemicals or abnormalities.  Nine days ago, we had another incident.”

“Another Mothmont student.”

“Yes,” he said.  He paused as we passed a pair of students in grey lab coats.  Graduates.  The red and silver of the Radham Academy crests they wore on their breasts were stark against the muted fabric.

“Hello, professor,” the girl of the pair greeted Mr. Hayle.

“Good morning, Heather, good morning, Daniel,” he replied.  We continued walking.  When they were out of earshot, he resumed his explanation.  “A house burned with four individuals inside.  Charred bodies of a lawyer, his wife, and his politician brother were autopsied, and trauma suggests they were cut with the intent of disabling, limiting their movements so they couldn’t escape the fire.  Ankles, knees.  The daughter of the lawyer was found in a separate room, a Mothmont student herself, but the cuts were different.  A day later, there was a third incident.  The day I appeared at Lambsbridge to talk to you.”

“Three makes a pattern.”

“The third incident saw the son murdering his father, grandfather, and mother, the father and grandfather were, again, prominent.  Military.  He set fire to the crime scene and sat in the midst of it to burn up.”

“Method?”

“Beg pardon?”

“What was the murder weapon?  Do they know?”

“The father and grandfather were killed with a sword that had hung over the mantlepiece, both were in their beds.  The mortician believes the mother fled and tried to fight back.  She had defensive wounds  and a weapon of her own in hand.  She lost the fight.”

She lost.  That was interesting unto itself.

“You’re sending us after killer children,” I observed.

“I would call them assassins rather than killers.  You understand the concern here?”

We’d reached the end of the hallway.  Mr. Hayle opened a closet and retrieved my cloak and shoes from within.  I started pulling my outdoor clothes on.  “It doesn’t look good.”

“No, Sylvester, it doesn’t.  Mothmont was made and supported by rich and powerful individuals with the premise that younger students would graduate from there and move on to the Academy.  If they couldn’t pass the entrance exam, they would continue their studies at Mothmont until they could.  Only the best in teachers, facilities, and students.”

“Except for the parent murdering part,” I noted.

We began our way down.  There were more students in the stairwell, four men clustered at one window, smoking, two women sitting on the stairs below.  Both scooted over as we came down.

One of the women smiled at me as I descended.  Twenty and beautiful and wearing a white lab coat that suggested she was still a student.  Almost an older Helen without the Helen-ness.  When I met her gaze, my expression flat, her smile dropped off her face.

Mr. Hayle spoke in a low voice, his head turned to make sure nobody above us was listening in as we continued down the spiral stairs.  “Being different tends to draw attention, whether it’s being inferior or being superior.  Mothmont, being superior, has clearly fallen under someone’s eye.  We would like this to stay out of the public’s eye.  The only reason it hasn’t, I believe, is that the third incident happened halfway across the country.  Given a fourth incident or time for rumors to spread…”

“…The cat would be out of the bag.  I get it.”

“This isn’t quite like any of the tasks I’ve given the Lambsbridge project, but it’s one I feel you’re suited for.  That said, it is sensitive, Sylvester.  Lives are on the line, the people who know and are paying attention matter, and the reactions if others found out could be disastrous.”

“I get it,” I said, again.  I knew I was more irritable.  I had the information I’d wanted, and now I was finding myself slipping back to the point I’d been: feeling the ache in my head and resenting everything for existing.

“Each major department was given a share of funds to go toward major projects.  Rather than devote my funds into one project, I devoted them to six very different projects.  The plan was for the six to form a whole.”

I nodded.

“It’s unfortunate that only four of you proved viable, but you’ve turned out well, you each show more and more promise as you develop, but you remain one member of a unit.  A gestalt.  Your group is feeling your absence, and they feel it strongly enough that they went out of their way to ask for you.”

“I’m touched,” I said.  I wasn’t lying about that, but my thoughts were more on the fact that I’d get to rub it in their faces.  They needed me.  I could be smug about it.

We reached the first floor.  He held the door for me, and we passed through, heading straight for an office.

The grey-coat doctor that had given me fresh skin greeted us, exchanging brief pleasantries with Mr. Hayle before getting down to brass tacks.  I shouldn’t spend too long in the sun until a few weeks had passed.  Never mind that the sun rarely showed its face around these parts.

My thoughts were already on the situation at Mothmont.  I was a week behind the others, and time was already proving to be of the essence.

It wasn’t Mr. Hayle that dropped me off, but his student Lacey.  One of three students assigned to me.  It made for a very quiet, uncomfortable ride to Mothmont.  I did my utmost to make it uncomfortable for her, glaring at her.

To her credit, she seemed to have difficulty meeting my eyes.

“Professor Hayle suggested I take you to get your hair cut,” Lacey said, summoning some courage and meeting my gaze.  “So you’re more presentable.”

“It isn’t long.”

“It’s long enough to get untidy very easily,” she said.  “It wouldn’t take long.”

“No,” I said.

“Sy-“

“No,” I said, again.  “Don’t suggest it again.  There’s a reason I want my hair like it is.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, raising her hands.  “I understand.  How about food?  You barely ate at all after you locked yourself in the office.”

“I ate plenty,” I said, meeting her eyes.  “You didn’t find all the spiders that had been in the glass case, did you?”

She was stricken with a paralyzing sort of alarm at the idea.

She seemed to shake it off, and she managed a titter of a laugh. “You’re messing with me.”

I looked out the window, and very casually remarked, “It’s sort of disgusting when a woman as old as you are tries to giggle and act like a little girl.”

I didn’t look at her to see her reaction.  That would have taken away from the effect.  My peripheral vision suggested she’d reacted as if I’d slapped her full-on in the face.

“Don’t talk to me like we’re friends,” I said, still not looking at her.  “I’m your job.”

“You seem to have civil conversations with professor Hayle, Sy- Sylvester.”  She’d switched to the long form of my name at the last second.

“Yeah,” I said.  I met her eyes.  “I respect him, if nothing else.”

Three students had hands-on roles with the Wyvern project.  With me.  I had no idea how many were peripherally involved.  Looking at Lacey, one of the three students, I couldn’t see any trace of a smile on her face.  The look in her eyes was a mixture of dislike and pity.

Pity.  And she wondered why I hated her as much as I did?

“I see,” Lacey said.  “Understood.  Can I ask-“

I tensed a little, leaning forward with my hands on my knees, and I heard the hitch of hesitation in her voice.  A momentary pause.

“-Why now?” she finished.  “I won’t say there haven’t been incidents in the past, but why are you suddenly taking issue with me today?”

“You can ask,” I said, and I left the statement hanging.

She turned her head, looking out the window I’d been staring out of a moment ago.  Apparently she wasn’t too surprised at the non-answer.

“Every day for the last week, you knocked on the door, you tried to talk to me, to reassure, to offer food, sheets or clothes.”

“And you wanted to be left alone?” she asked.

“I did, but that wasn’t it.  Give a man a gun, tell him to shoot his neighbor or he gets shot.  The first man we put in this situation does it without a care.  He pulls the trigger.  The second man cries and moans, he begs his neighbor for forgiveness, then he pulls the trigger.  The third man cries and moans, begs for forgiveness, and pulls the trigger, and the fourth man takes a bullet because he won’t bring himself to do that.”

“The second and third men are the same?”

“Oh.  Right.  The first and second man went home and went to sleep and rested easy,” I said.

She worked through it aloud, summing up, “First shoots without a word, sleeps easy.  Second man asks for forgiveness, shoots, sleeps easy.  Third man asks for forgiveness, shoots, but doesn’t sleep.  The fourth dies because he won’t shoot.  You’re going to tell me the first man is the best of the four?” Lacey asked me.

I gave her a disgusted look.  “No.”

“The third, then.  You’re implying I’m the second?  It’s a pretty massive, incorrect assumption on your part, Sylvester, if you think I sleep easy,” she said, and there was a touch of heat in her voice.  I’d upset her a little.

“No,” I said, calm.  “I didn’t say anything about someone being better or worse.  They can face the situation any way they want to.  They’ve got a gun to their head, it’s their choice.  You?  Maybe you’re like the second man, maybe you’re like the third, but you definitely don’t have a gun to your head.  If you’re being nice to me, it’s for your benefit, not mine.”

I leaned back, turning away from her, my attention returning to the window.

Human nature.  If I’d simply said it, one line, one sentence, she wouldn’t have listened.  But I’d gotten her thinking, pulled her in, and then forced her to face it.

The remainder of the coach ride to Mothmont was blissfully silent.

Mothmont turned out to be an interesting building.  Four stories with a steep, slanted shingle roof, it took up a third of a city block, it had no yard that I could make out.  The walls were eggshell pale, and the ivy that crawled across the brickwork was dark, almost leafless.  It wasn’t in an end of town I’d frequented, but even among nicer buildings with gargoyles that spat out water from the gutters and built-in stables for stitched horses, it stood out as something prominent.

A woman was waiting for me by the arching entrance that led into the building.

Lacey didn’t say a word as I left the coach, pulling my hood up to shield off the rain.

“Sylvester, I take it?” the woman asked.  She was buxom, the word was, businesslike in a pink jacket and short dress, brown hair curled at the sides, with a touch too much makeup.

“Yes ma’am.”

“You have manners.  Good.  I’m the headmistress.  Let’s have a look at you.”

I pulled down my hood.

Somehow she didn’t look particularly pleased.  I was a little scruffy.

“Come, inside,” she said, guiding me with a hand at my back.

She led me in past the front office, pointing me to the boy’s bathroom.

“Uniform on the chair by the sink.  Take a moment to wash your face before getting dressed.  I’ll bring you a comb so you can tidy your hair.”

I nodded, and I did as she asked.

The uniform turned out to be white.  White slacks and a button-up shirt with short sleeves and a straight, stiff-necked collar.  The white of it was likely a nod to the Academy.

I hated white.  I’d seen too much of it, and it didn’t suit.  My hair was black, and even with grease or glue or whatever else I put into it, the ends would curl up and it would find a way to break loose.

I made myself as presentable as possible, knowing it wouldn’t last.

I stepped out of the bathroom and presented myself to the headmistress.  She knelt before me and smoothed out some of the clothing, picking at one piece of lint.

“It suits you,” she lied.  “You look like a young gentleman.”

Two lies in two breaths, straight to my face.  I almost liked her.

“It’s lunch time.  You can introduce yourself to the others.  The afternoon classes are all dedicated to biology.  On Fridays, we visit the Academy.  Now, a boy named Jamie was staying at the orphanage.  Do you know him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll be in the same classes as him, and you’ll sleep in the same quarters.  You should find him sitting under the tree in the yard, I think.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“This is strictly temporary, you understand?” she asked.  “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“I understand, ma’am,” I said.

She straightened, looking down at me.  “Mrs. Earles believes you might be motivated to try harder, seeing what we have to offer.”

“I think I will, ma’am,” I said.

“Go on, then,” she said.

I went.  A woman stood by a gate, opening it to let me through.

The building formed a square, with the yard in the center, the precious pupils safe within.  A glass was erected with trees grown to support it at the corners, keeping those beneath dry.  The glass roof itself crawled with vines and small flowers.

Youths aged seven to fifteen were gathered within, many playing, or gathered in groups.  Blankets were laid out here and there for them to sit on, so they wouldn’t get their uniforms dirty.

Just as the students of the Academy had possessed a refined, polished air, these students looked proper.

It didn’t take me long to find the others.  Gordon was in the company of the boys, a larger group.  Helen was among the girls.  Jamie was under one of the trees at the perimeter, book and pen in his lap.  He’d seen me before I saw him, and was on his feet in a moment.

Lillian, I found off to one side, with an obese girl and a taller, skinny, buck-toothed man who looked to be about fifteen.  Gordon whistled, sharp, and got her attention.  She quickly said her goodbye to her two friends.

We collected.

Gordon took one look at me, and I saw genuine worry in his eyes.  “You had an appointment.”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “We’re supposed to be there for each other when it counts.”

“You didn’t know it was coming.  I didn’t either,” I said.  “At least I don’t have to worry about it for another thirty days.”

He looked unimpressed.

“You’re intolerable after an appointment,” Jamie said.

“I’ll try to be intolerable in a useful way,” I answered.  “Let’s get down to it.  I heard you got stuck.”

“Wait, before any of that, did you come alone?” Gordon asked.

I frowned.  “I got dropped off by Lacey.”

Damn,” he said.

“We’d hoped Hayle would come too,” Jamie said.  “I thought he’d be more concerned at our lack of progress.”

I looked between the two, confused.

Gordon frowned.  “Look, we’re more than stuck, Sy.  We’re in danger.”

“Danger?”

“They know who we are.  They’re onto us,” Helen said, and her voice was soft and entirely unconcerned.  That wasn’t to say there wasn’t cause for concern.  It was just Helen.

“Five attempts on our lives in the last seven days,” Jamie said.  “And the way we figure it, that means they’re either very, very clever…”

“Or rogue elements from the Academy,” I said.

Jamie nodded.

“Talk to us,” Gordon said.  “Let’s hear your ideas, fresh eyes, before we start giving you reason for bias.”

“Alright,” I said.  “Knowing what little I do, I don’t think the kids are killers.  I don’t think they’re assassins, either.  They’re tools.”

Gordon nodded.  The others were still.

“The killings are steadily improving in quality.  That suggests the kids are the weapons, and the killer is out there,” I said.  “and I think you know that already.”

“We do,” Gordon said.

“What you don’t know, and why I think you’re stuck, is that you’re too prone to patterns.  You have your own way of doing things, but it’s too rigid, when your enemies are hiding in the shadows.  You need to shake it up.”

“You have an idea how, I imagine.”

I smiled.

The pain in my head was going away by the second.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.04 – Twig

Taking Root 1.4

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Our conversation had to stop for a moment when a group of boys veered our way, kicking a ball between them.  They circled the tree that was holding up one corner of the glass roof, then headed off toward their makeshift goals.

“The lunch hour is going to end before too long,” Jamie said.  “We should hammer out details.”

“Sy’s idea, making sure we’re all on the same page…” Gordon said.  “Okay, that makes sense.  Sy?”

“Hold on.  I can change details based on where you guys are at.  Fill me in, quick.”

“Okay.  As far as everyone here knows, including the headmistress and the rest of the faculty, I’m the son of a butcher mogul, Helen is the daughter of a diplomat, and Jamie is the orphan son of a military captain who died and left him some money.  At Jamie’s suggestion, the story is that we were all staying at the orphanage as a matter of convenience before our enrollment at Mothmont.  Favors were called in, whatever.  It’s happened before, given the ties between Lambsbridge and Radham Academy, and it’s not going to surprise anyone.”

“I’ve been here before,” Lillian said.  “Before I was a student at the Academy.  Teachers know me, they like me.  We leaked the idea that I was suspended, and the rules of Mothmont mean I can come back here whenever, to get some classes in, use facilities or brush up.  I might have to explain to my parents, but I think it’s okay.  Nobody’s asked how I know you guys, but I don’t think it’s a problem.”

“I suggested the ‘ties to the orphanage’ thing because I recognized faces among the students, and those faces have probably seen us out and about as a group,” Jamie said.

“Overall, we have a cover,” Gordon elaborated, “Nothing so questionable that anyone’s going to raise questions.  But people have a way of taking things at face value, and this situation hasn’t really bucked the trend.”

“Except for the attempts on your life,” I said.

“Except for that.  But there aren’t any holes in what we’re saying that should have raised suspicions,” Gordon said.

I nodded.  “Mr. Hayle filled me in on most of that, but it’s good to have the details.  He said he was intentionally vague about who I was, so I could adapt as the situation required.  He did say that it was a special favor from the orphanage to work me in later than the rest of you.”

“Really,” Gordon said.  He smiled a little, “Why would the orphanage be so eager to get rid of you?”

“Because I’m intolerable,” I replied, smiling back.

“Going by the fact that we’ve been seen together, and we’re being seen together now, who are you, and how do we know you?” Gordon asked.

I shrugged, and I was reminded of just how uncomfortable the uniform was, and the spots where it was rubbing against the new skin.  “I’m an orphan.  We were about the same age, I offered to show you around town.”

“That won’t go over well,” Gordon said.

“I’m betting it won’t,” I said.  “Scrubby kid with messy hair from wrong side of the tracks.  I’ll stick out.”

“Which is your plan,” Gordon concluded.

“In part.  But before that… what have you done so far?  What angles have been covered?”

“Oh, you know me,” Gordon said.  “It’s only been a week and I’m almost the best student in my class, best at sports, and most can’t even bring themselves to hate me for it.  I’ve been mingling with the top dogs among the boys here.  Helen’s done the same for the girls.  Between the two of us, we’ve been able to get the word on who the victims were, as well as keep an eye out for who the potential victims might be.”

“Anything conclusive?”

“Less than I’d like.  We’ve asked for extra help to get up to speed with our classes, and that’s let us keep an ear to the ground when it comes to the faculty.  There’s a chance that the person turning children into murder weapons is one of the teachers.”

“Only a chance?”

“Every weekend, students go to the Academy.  Get a taste of it, keeps them invested in Mothmont.  Split up into groups based on interest and age.  Students who were extra good get special lessons with professors.”

“That’s… messy,” I said.  “Too many things to cover.  You didn’t visit me?”

“I was recovering from being poisoned,” Gordon said.  “Lillian was hovering, making sure nobody had reason to get too curious about me.  That left only Helen and Jamie, and they were busy following up on likelies.”

“Poison, huh?  I wasn’t expecting that.”

“That was the most successful attempt out of the three, two for me, one for Jamie.  One object fell from the roof, almost caving Helen’s head in, and Jamie very nearly got pushed in front of a fast moving coach while he was on his way to the Academy.  Helen saved him.”

I nodded slowly.  “No sightings?”

“They’re careful.  And they’re a they, we’re pretty sure.  Plural.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Starting to get a more complete mental picture.”

My eyes glanced over the collection of youths around us.  Would there be overt signs?  They couldn’t be too obvious, or the others would have noticed.

Without knowing more about how the murders were being done, I didn’t know what to look for.  We were surrounded, and letting our guard down could be dangerous.

Jamie, maybe thinking I was still hurt that they hadn’t come for me, commented, “I looked for you at the Tower, poked my head into Hayle’s department, to check the labs to see if you were around, and because I wanted to ask a quick question about Gordon and the poison.  I got word on where you were, but I didn’t have much time to look around.”

Hm.  I probably would have been where Jamie looked for me if I hadn’t barred myself in the office after my appointment.  Live and learn.

The Tower, Mr. Hayle’s department opposite end of the Academy campus from the Hedge where I’d been, was largely focused on research and development regarding the brain.  Widely viewed as a dead end, the department had defaulted to handling a lot of information storage, memory banks, and files.

If Jamie had been there… I spoke my thoughts aloud, “Jamie went to the Tower because… you guys were thinking about mind control?  Something to do with the brain?”

“We were thinking it could be some neurological manipulation,” Jamie said.  “Helen was looking into hormones and drugs at Claret Hall.”

Claret Hall being the center of campus, where students gathered and ate, where key administration facilities were available, and where some of the key elements of the campus and core classes were taught.  If all aspects of Radham flowed from the Academy, then all aspects of the Academy flowed from Claret Hall.

“And you didn’t find anything,” I said.  “If you had, you would have told me.”

“Nothing meaningful,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

Gordon’s head turned.  I followed his gaze.  Students were still playing, gathering in groups, but his focus wasn’t on the students.  “More teachers appearing around the doors.”

“Trouble?” I asked.

“In a way.  We’re out of time.  Lunch is over.  If you’re going to fill us in, now’s the time to do it.”

“We’re close enough to the door that people will see us,” I observed.  “Everyone but Helen, keep an eye on the crowd.  Don’t be obvious about it, but keep an eye out for hints.”

“What am I doing?”  Helen asked.

A shrill whistle drew the attention of the various students.  It sounded again.  A teacher was signaling for others to come indoors.  Hordes of students began moving toward the doors.  Some lingered, like we were, and some were quickly wrapping up their games.

“Fix my hair,” I instructed Helen, “Give me a kiss on the cheek or something, be tender about it.”

“I like you?” Helen asked.

“You’re a big sister to me, but actually acting like a normal big sister.  It can be misinterpreted.”

She hadn’t quite adopted her deadpan expression, but as I gave my order, her expression changed.  She smiled, and it was warm.

“Your hair is a mess,” she said, and her voice matched her expression.  She reached up and fussed with it, running her long fingernails against my scalp as she fixed it up a bit.  Probably better than I could have if I’d had a comb and more time.  She fixed the hair that went from the center of my hairline to my temple, brushing it up and more out of the way, and then let her hand linger, a quarter second too long.  “You should focus more on appearances.”

“I should,” I said.  “There’s time to learn.”

“I can always teach you the particulars,” she said.  “If you’re able to keep yourself in one piece long enough.  I’m glad to see you’ve been put back together.”

She gave me a rub on the arm where I’d been burned, then leaned close to kiss me on the forehead.

Again, her face remained closer to mine for just a heartbeat longer than it needed to.  With the proximity, I couldn’t help but think that I found her scarier than I’d found the snake charmer’s experiment.  I knew it was purely my imagination, but I imagined it was how I’d feel if I was dropped in a tiger’s enclosure at the zoo, the resident sitting the same distance from me.

Still, I smiled.  “I like me being in one piece too.”

I didn’t look, but I was very aware that of the large group that was filing into the door, a great many boys were paying a great deal of attention to the exchange.

“In we go,” I said.  “Keep an eye out.”

We joined the crowd.  Gordon took up the rear, guarding our backs.

I only realized at the last second that him watching our backs was a bad thing.  A hand reached out in my peripheral vision, and Gordon caught it.

“Woah there, Bruno,” a boy our age said, “Ease up.”

Gordon let go of the hand.  “Calling me names, now?”

“Just poking fun.  I’m a pal, Gordon.  Relax,” the boy said.  He pulled his hand free of Gordon’s grip.

The boy was dark haired, with dark brown eyes, but very much of the same type as Gordon.  Big, healthy in stature and build without showing a hint of being fat, handsome, and confident enough that he was probably one of the top dogs.  Between me and Gordon in size, a couple inches taller than me, an inch shorter than Gordon.  Twelve or so?

He smiled at me.  “Who’s slick here?”

“Sy.  Sylvester if you want to be polite,” Gordon said.  “Showed us around before we made our way to Mothmont.  Sylvester, this is Ed.  Ed is a good guy to know if you want to know people.  We’ve been hanging out.”

“Nice way to put it.  You mentioned you’d figured out where things were,” the boy said.  “Hi Helen, Lil, and Ja- James?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie.  Sorry.”

We were moving with the rest of the crowd, heading into the school proper.  I was very aware of those who were moving past me.  If they were as brazen as the others had insinuated, I wasn’t sure a knife wouldn’t find one of us while we were part of this press of bodies.

“Tell me about yourself, Sy,” Ed urged me.

“Nothing to tell,” I said.  “I’m nobody important.”

Reel him in…

Ed laughed, but it was a laugh for his own benefit, and probably for the others who were watching from a distance.  “You don’t get into Mothmont without being important somehow.”

“Got in on an ask,” I said.  “I’m from the orphanage.”

“Yeah?” he asked, and there was interest in his voice, with a hint of something else.  The question had more than basic curiosity backing it.  “How’s that work?”

“Someone liked me, I guess,” I said.  I shot Helen a smile.  She smiled back.

“That’s not really an answer, buddy,” he said, but there was a bit of a push to the statement.  Insistence.  Not just that, but really, ‘buddy’?  He was acting like he was an adult and I was the kid, but he only had a few inches on me.  It irritated, and I was feeling particularly irritable.

“Only answer I’m going to give,” I said.  “Don’t worry about it.”

I saw a flicker of annoyance on his face.  He blew a bit of air through his lips, “Pff.  I was just being friendly, there’s no need to brush me off.”

“I’m not brushing you off.  I’m hinting that you’re butting your nose in where it isn’t wanted.”

Ed laughed, again, and I could hear a distinct difference between the laugh now and the laugh just a few seconds ago.  Tighter at the edges.  More forced than natural.

We were in the hallway between various classrooms, and the crowd was thinning out, which made me feel a little less worried for my own skin.  The classrooms each had windows between the class and the hallway, and the window frames were grown, large pieces of broken glass collected with what looked like tree branches growing to hold them in place, glass effectively filling the gaps between each branch.  Past those windows and the classrooms, I could see the yard and the street beyond the school.

Things were so clean.  Bright, crisp, all polished and white-painted wood.  I didn’t like it when things were this done-up.  It felt dishonest.  Nicer people tried to make something look, the less I trusted it.

A place as nice as this, trying to be classy?  Murderous students felt like the least of its problems.

“Sy’s usually like this,” Gordon said, “Don’t worry about it, Ed.”

Ed was smiling, but it was a forced smile in the same way the laugh had been.  “I’m not worried, really.  I just have to wonder about the company you keep.”

“Wonder?  Why?” I asked.  Keeping him talking, talking on his feet.  I was more comfortable with a fast-moving conversation than most.

“You’ve been given a rosy opportunity like this, kid like you in a place like this, me offering a hand in friendship, and you snub me?  Not wise, limiting yourself like that.”

“Kid like me, huh?”  Force him to justify, put myself apparently off balance, trying to adjust, adapt…

“Kid like you.  Of less established breeding, no offense.”

He totally meant offense.  It killed me that he was giving me a golden line like that and I couldn’t give it what it deserved.  I had to go easy.

“No offense taken,” I said, smiling.  There was a teacher not too far away, watching the children in the hallway, making sure her students made their way to her class without dallying.  I gave my response, smiling at him. “It’s funny.”

He didn’t seem to comprehend.  Now I had the reins of the dialogue.  He was forced to ask.  “Funny?”

“Someone clearly inbred talking about my breeding.  It-”

He grabbed me by the front of my uniform and shoved me against the wall, hard.  Some students around us gasped, stopping in their tracks or forming a loose circle around us.

The teacher had noticed, and was heading our way.

“Woah there, Bruno,” I echoed him from earlier.

He pulled me away, then shoved me against the wall again.

Then there was laughter.

Helen.  She had one hand to her mouth, and in her attempts to stifle a giggle, she ‘accidentally’ snorted.

Ed stared at her.  There was something raw in the look.

Whatever else he was, he was still only twelve or so.  He could be good with words, handsome, smart, whatever else it took to be one of the top dogs of Mothmont, but he was new to liking girls, and he was very conscious of his other friends, who were hanging back, watching.

“Sorry,” she told him.  “Really, Edward, I’m sorry.  But you have to admit Sy’s line was funny.”

I love you, Helen, I thought.  She’d figured out my angle and here she was, supporting me perfectly.

The teacher was forging his way through the ring of students.  Ed had noticed, and he had to save face.  Had it not been for Helen, he might have socked me one in the stomach and left it be until later.  But he couldn’t very well hit me without going against her.

He was cornered.

“This isn’t over,” he said.  “We’re going to continue this later.”

“Are we?  Easy to say, but so many chicken out.”

He leaned close and whispered, “After classes, in the corner of the yard, where the two trees will give us some privacy,” he said, making a show of letting go of my uniform.

“I’ll believe it when I see you there,” I murmured my response.

The teacher broke through.  Ed pulled away, hands in the air.

“What’s this?” the teacher asked, stern, one hand on her hip.

“Nothing,” I said.  “All good.”

“All good,” Ed joined in.  “Just playing.”

She gave us a curious look.  “Get to your classes.  Mary, Eliza, I see you talking there, get to your desks, I’m starting the lesson soon.”

Her attention was already elsewhere, gathering up and ordering around kids she knew she had clout with.  The rest fell in step.

“I’m disappointed, Gordon,” Ed said.

“We can talk later?” Gordon asked.  “Don’t want bad blood between us.”

“Maybe, sure,” Ed said, but Gordon wasn’t his focus here, or even second in his focus.  The boy left, turning his back to Helen and me as he rejoined friends, hands in his pockets.

Lillian and Helen hurried to their next class, Helen shooting me a smile.

“When you set your mind to it, you’re remarkably good at getting people to hate you,” Gordon said.  “Poor sap.”

“Me or him?”

Him,” Gordon said, sounding offended at the question.  “You and Helen teaming up on him.  Why’d you go and do that to him?  You knew you’d get someone’s goat by having Helen be gentle to you, and you did, and then you twisted the damn knife.  If you wanted to verify that he wasn’t one of the people who were trying to kill us, you could have asked me.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

“What were you thinking, then?”

“They say when you go to prison, you should murder someone or join a gang.  Idea is that you want to figure out the pecking order and fit yourself into it somehow.”

“Uh huh,” Gordon said.  He glanced around, noting that the number of students in the hallway had thinned out pretty dramatically.  We were almost alone, and the students that were around were hurrying.  “This isn’t prison.”

“The hell it isn’t.  But that’s beside the point.”

“Then why bring it up?” He was quick to retort.

I sighed, “I’m establishing the pecking order.”

“Sy,” he said.  He put both hands on my shoulders, leaning close.  “I hate to say it…”

“You love to say it.”

“In all the years I’ve known you, watching you from the beginning, I have never ever known you to win a fight.  Or even put in a good showing.”

“I didn’t say I’d be at the top of the pecking order,” I protested.

Gordon stepped back, and he looked at Jamie.

“To be fair, he didn’t,” Jamie said.

“We just got him back, and we’re going to have to send him right back to the Academy for more medical care,” Gordon said.

“It won’t be that bad,” I protested, again.

“What are you shooting for, Sly?” Jamie asked.  “Gotta fill us in.”

“You guys stalled because you’re too safe.  Were you watching the crowd?”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  Jamie nodded.

“Anyone paying too much attention?  Trying not to look like they were looking?”

Gordon shook his head.

“A few faces caught my eye,” Jamie said.  “I can point them out later.”

“We shake things up, see what happens,” I said.  “What moves, what doesn’t, what doesn’t move like it should.  We pay attention to what comes next, and we might get clues.  I just happened to draw everyone’s attention, and whoever was paying attention to you lot is paying extra special attention to me now.  I’m betting they’re confused.”

“I suspect the only person who really gets how you think is you, Sy,” Gordon said.

“Helen gets me,” I said.

“Helen is-” Gordon started.  “Yeah.”

“I get it too.  But you should be ready.  You might be a target, Sy,” Jamie said.

“I know.  I expect it.  You guys have been worrying about knives in the back or poisonings up until now, it’s only fair I have my turn at it.  The way and timing of their response is going to be important, so keep your eyes open.”

Gordon and Jamie nodded.

We were getting dirty looks from teachers that were just starting their classes.

“Pass it on to the girls?” I asked.

“I will,” Gordon said.  “Watch yourselves.”

I nodded.

Jamie and I resumed our trek to our class.

“He’s not good at this,” Jamie said.  “This kind of task.”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing back at Gordon.

“His talents don’t really lend themselves to it.  Maybe one day, but not today.”

“This is more my domain,” I said.  “Helen’s.  Yours to a lesser degree.”

Jamie nodded.

“Speaking of your domain, what’s the scoop on the guy I just picked a fight with?”

“I don’t know.  He’s not in our classes.  Gordon’s kept an eye on him, I haven’t had a reason to.”

I frowned.

“You’re not worried, are you?”

“I figured if I had a few choice attacks I could fire his way, I could position myself better.  I don’t want to be at the very bottom of any pecking orders.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.  “I’ll find out.”

Jamie’s long hair was pulled back into a sailor’s ponytail, low and resting against the neck, which wasn’t how he normally wore it.  It was nearly invisible with his collar up.  I reached out and flicked it with my finger.

He jabbed me in response, which prompted me to bump his shoulder with my own, almost sending him into the nearest classroom door.  He did the same to me, to less effect.

The exchange continued for a few seconds, until he stopped all at once. “Stop, we’re at the class.  They’ll see.”

I immediately fell back into a regular walk, pulling my uniform top down.  Still in the hallway, we had to walk by the tree-branch window that ran along the length of the classroom to reach the door.  Jamie pushed his glasses up his nose and fixed his ponytail.

When he was all fixed up, I surreptitiously gave him a jab in the side of his stomach with one of my fingers.

“I’ll get you for that,” he murmured.  He opened the door.

“You’re late,” the teacher said.

“The headmistress said Jamie should show me around,” I said.

The woman pursed her lips.  “I see.  Take your seats, please.  You can sit by Jamie…”

“Sylvester.”

“Sylvester.  Thank you.  Get the notes from Jamie later.  For now, just sit and follow what you can.”  She walked over to her desk and made a note on what I assumed was an attendance list.

I was very aware of the subtle smiles or glances from various students.  Ones that had seen Ed pushing me up against the wall, knowing full well that I’d been stretching the truth.  My eye quickly traveled over the boys and girls that weren’t smiling.

I wouldn’t be able to remember the particulars, which ones looked like they were trying too hard not to look at me, or who weren’t.

Jamie would.

“Now, back to what I was saying.  Wollstone’s ratios are used in seventy percent of what you’ll be doing if you go on to attend the Academy.  The golden ratio, seen here, could be said to be the precursor to what would eventually be Wollstone’s nine ratios.  With a few quick measurements, we can quickly divine which of the nine ratios is used for a given organism’s physical structure or composition, and working backward, so long as we can keep to the ratio, we can trust that the organism has the fundamental supports for life.

For example, if you’ll turn to page seventy-five, we can see where the fundamental pattern of a cat is outlined.  Keeping to Wollstone’s ‘wise’ ratio, we can discern which parts of the pattern apply to specific parts of the cat.  Now, it gets more complicated when we decide to alter the pattern, or the how of it, but you should begin to have a glimmer of how a ratio can be used as a shortcut to understanding…”

My forehead hit the desk.  I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.

To his credit, Ed did know how to throw a punch.  He knew how to throw ten.

To my credit, I managed to stay on my feet until the tenth punch.  I didn’t manage to deliver anything substantial in the meantime, but I wasn’t curling up into a ball and crying uncle.

The group of students around us was smaller than I would have liked.  The Lambsbridge orphans, Ed and Gordon’s friends, and Helen’s group.  Girls for Ed to impress.  Maybe it would make up for my baiting him, if he got to look good in front of some girls.

Landing at the base of the tree, I took a second to catch my breath.  I raised a hand to make Ed stop.

“You done?” he asked.  “You’re not going to say anything about my family again?”

“I didn’t say anything until you-“

I saw him bringing a fist back, ready to hit me again.

I opened my mouth wide, wincing at the feeling at the corner of my jaw.  Tight.

In the process, I saw a movement in the corner of my eye.

There weren’t many windows that offered a good look at the scene.  Three trees had been planted at one corner of the yard, between the glass roof and the building, and they blocked the view from many of the nearby windows.  They also served to keep most of the rain off us.  Only the girls were wearing hoods and jackets, and I was getting dirty, but not muddy, which was better.

We hadn’t been obvious about our fight, and anyone who had a reason to watch was going to be part of this crowd.  But, still, three boys had paid enough attention to us to know the fight was happening, and had found one vantage point inside where they could peer past the gaps in the branches and watch what was happening.  One, thirteen or so, was standing in a way that let the curtain block the lower half of his face.  The other was far younger, nine or ten, and was leaning forward, hands folded on the windowsill, peering over the bottom of the window to look down at me.  The third was somewhere between the two in age, and hung far enough back to be hidden in the gloom of an unlit classroom.

The look in their eyes was clear enough.

As curious as we were about the murderous children, they were curious about us.  They couldn’t know me well enough to know how I operated.  Even Mr. Hayle didn’t, and he’d practically designed me.

Ed jabbed me in the middle with the toe of one shoe.  “Eh?”

“We’re good,” I said.  “Sorry about saying you’re inbred, Ed.”

He didn’t look appeased.

I glanced toward the classroom again.  The boys were gone.

“Come on,” Gordon said.  “Let’s get you looked after.”

I nodded.

“Saw them,” I murmured, as he helped me limp on.

“Where?”

“Inside.  Three boys.  I can give Jamie partial descriptions.”

“Three boys,” Gordon mused.  “That’s not good.”

“Poisonings are usually done by women,” Helen said, as she joined us.  “Meaning we’re dealing with four.”

“At least,” I agreed.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.05 – Twig

Taking Root 1.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

I watched as Jamie used a pen to sketch out a rough image.

“Head was narrower.  Taller than wide,” I commented.

“Most heads are.”

“That looks round.  Also, he didn’t look sinister, but he didn’t look interested either.  It was cold.”

“Like Helen sometimes looks?”

I considered.  “No.”

“You, then.  On a bad day, after an appointment?”

“I don’t know what I look like after an appointment.  They don’t usually let me have access to reflective surfaces, and I’m not usually gawking at myself, either.”

Jamie leaned back in his chair, and his head bumped my chest, where I was leaning over the back of the chair.

He remained where he was, looking up at me.  “You had a look in your eyes like all the joy had gone out of the world.”

“Depressed?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “Um…”

He turned a page in his notebook.

On the fresh page, he began to sketch.  He was using a fountain pen that flowed fairly freely, but his hand moved with some speed and dexterity.  It was interesting to see, because Jamie wasn’t a strong artist.  He made my eyes too small, the position slightly wrong, paused, then went back, expanding, making the top of the eye into my eyebrows, and drawing my eyes at a larger size.  It was a rough sketch, and it was a sketch that showed my face in heavy shadow, the lines noticeable, thick.

At first I took it for a caricature, exaggerating my features, but Jamie wasn’t good enough to do that.  The hair was drawn in messy, framing it all, and the lines marked my cheeks as being more gaunt, with thin cross-hatching for the shadows in the recesses, I realized that it wasn’t a recent picture, that my eyes were larger in proportion to the rest because it was a picture of me, years younger.

Near the beginning.

Drawing from memory, rather than talent.

I leaned forward, and it was as though I were looking into a mirror cast in paper.  My eyes were narrow, my lips thin and slightly parted, and all the features of my face and ears were fine to the point of being sharp.

Jamie was already putting down notes below and to the side of the image.  I glanced at the first.

Drawn for a discussion with Sly, during the Case of the Bad Seeds.

“Case of the bad seeds,” I commented idly.

“Placeholder,” he said.  He was already going on to write more.  Normally I wouldn’t have been able to resist reading over his shoulder, but I found I couldn’t keep my eyes off the image for long.  The eyes were just scratches of black ink, almost hidden in the shadows that had been etched around them, but they took up much of the focus.

“This was… that time I had to do two appointments, back to back?”  I asked.  Only time my cheeks would have been that hollow.

Jamie didn’t respond, but his pen moved, indicating a line he’d just jotted down.  He tapped his fountain pen against paper, leaving three blotchy dots in the margin.

From memory: Sly in the Tower, after he ran away.  Before he recovered from one month’s appointment, he had to do the next.

Reading the line, I suddenly felt excruciatingly uncomfortable, and the hour-old bruises from my encounter with Ed weren’t why.  Feeling so restless I couldn’t bear it, I turned away from Jamie, his chair, and his book, and I paced across our little dorm room.  Two beds each with a chest at the foot, one desk, and one bedside table between the beds with drawers for us to share.  Mothmont was fancy, but not so fancy that we each got a palace.  Real estate mattered, if nothing else.

“We didn’t think we’d get you back,” Jamie murmured.  “We suspected you were lost.

“That’s not it,” I said, forcing my voice to sound different from how I felt.  I worried I didn’t sell it very well.  “No.  It’s not like Helen is, and it’s not like that, okay?  That’s not the look they had.”

“Okay,” Jamie said, sounding very normal, placid, and very calm.

Though I didn’t like it, I was finding the conversation helped me to clarify my interpretation.  “They weren’t lost.  There was emotion there.  They were human, but they weren’t nice humans.”

“You’re not a nice human sometimes,” Jamie remarked.

I shot him a look.

“Only saying, Sly, only saying.”

“I looked at them, and I knew they were the sorts who’d stick their parents with something sharp and then light up the family home.  Or try to drop a piece of masonry on someone they didn’t like.”

“You’d-”

I narrowed my eyes, making the look darker and more intense.

He seemed to give up, pulling his hands away from the page, slumping back.  “Yeah, Sy.  Got it.  But if you can’t tell me how they looked all murderous, I’m not sure I can draw it.  I’m not sure I can draw them in the first place.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Don’t fret about it.”

“Think you’d recognize them if you saw them?”

“If I saw them?  No.  They were standing in shadow.  If I talked to them, maybe.”

“There are one thousand, two hundred students at Mothmont, give or take, ranging from year one to year twelve.  It’s going to take you an awful long time to talk to them all.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I was still on the far side of the room.  Three sets of my uniform had been provided, alongside a little cloak and hood for the rain and an umbrella, all stacked neatly on the chest at the end of the bed.  My bedside drawer had a new comb, bottle of toothwash, washcloth, and a new set of books.

Nothing that was mine.  I didn’t like it.  The office back at the hedge with the grille on the windows and the bookcase blocking the door had felt less like a cell than this.

There, I’d been free to be me.  Here, I was being made to conform, just like some of the fruit I’d seen grown at the Academy, placed inside molds that would shape their growth.  Fruit shaped like certain animals, or like human faces.

Were our murder-children in that same situation?

I frowned.  “I’m thinking…”

“Yeah?”  Jamie twisted in his seat, elbow over the back of the chair.

“Why here?” I asked.

“Resources are available, on multiple fronts.  You’ve got access to children, you’ve got access to tools and starter labs.  Maybe things go missing, maybe it gets put back at the end of the day?”

“Maybe,” I said.  “One way or another, something is going on with their heads.  Either they’re being made to do something they normally wouldn’t, or they’re not them, and something more nefarious is going on.”

“Nefarious?”

“There are parasites that induce suicidal behavior in the host as part of the life cycle.”

“Sure.  Transoplasma Felidae.  Feverish behavior and a compulsion to drown oneself.  Weaponized version was Transoplasma Necis, but that saw reams of people biting off their own tongues to choke on the tongue or aspirating the blood.  Well known enough.”

“I’ll take your word for it.  Maybe the students we’re talking about have a parasite in their heads, something that’s making them act funny.  Maybe we’re dealing with the parasites and not the children themselves.”

Jamie seemed to consider a moment.  “Raises questions.”

“You ask, I try to justify.”

“Why do they care about us?”

“They’re complex.  Pre-set instructions.”

Jamie shook his head.  “I don’t buy that someone capable of that would be here and not at the Academy, making a fortune.”

“Then they’re paranoid.  Like they’re rabid, they’re wary of everything.”

“Why us?”

I started to come up with an explanation, then dismissed it.  Felt weak, like too much of a reach.  “What if it made them suggestible?  Broke down the walls in their heads, left them open to receiving instruction?  Get access to the children, slip them something that leaves them open to being influenced.”

“We’d see it in their behavior,” Jamie said.

“What?  That they’d be willing to take orders?  Follow the rest of the sheep?  We’re in a school, Jamie,” I said.

“Point.”

“A highbrow school.  Look, I’m not sold on the parasite idea.  But we’ve got an awful lot of children here, ones that might be more vulnerable to whatever, or of an age where some symptoms might be easier to hide.  Maybe the fact that we’re all fitting into some cookie cutter archetype is an advantage for our puppeteer in the background.  If their little experiments feel disoriented?  Have lost memories?  If their behavior is a little outside the norm?  All our ‘bad seed’ has to do is imitate their peers.”

Jamie was nodding, already thinking the idea through, rounding it out, “If they act too far out of line, then the faculty steps in, gets them to shape up.  If that fails…”

“What happens when someone futzes up and doesn’t look like they’re going to straighten out?”

“Detention,” Jamie said.  “Or a talk with the headmistress.  You don’t think she’s the one doing it?”

I rolled my head to one side, then the other.  “I talked to the woman.  I didn’t get that sense out of her.”

“Why?”

I gave Jamie an annoyed look.

“It’s good to think about why,” Jamie said, his voice quiet but not meek.  “You have a good sense of things, but it’s important to identify the details that are feeding into that sense.  You see little details, and your brain picks them up and puts them into storage, while your conscious mind doesn’t register them.  Prey animals use that low-level awareness a lot, figuring out that a predator could be nearby, and we still have traces of that prey thinking.”

“I don’t see myself as a prey animal,” I said, smiling.

“The idea is sound, Sy.  We all use that sense to some extent, but you’re a little better than most.  You can train it, but training it starts with being aware.  Think about your surroundings, pay attention to the details, and-”

A knock sounded at the door.

“You two decent in there?” Gordon asked, voice muffled by the intervening door.

“Am I ever decent?” I asked.

The door opened.  But it wasn’t just Gordon, which surprised me.  He was accompanied by a boy, narrow in build, with thick eyebrows and wiry black hair cut a finger’s width from his head.  It didn’t look like one of the boys that would be in Gordon’s cadre.

“We ran into each other at the door,” Gordon said.

“I know him,” Jamie said.  “Book trade?”

“Yeah,” the boy said.  He held out two dime novels.  “Read them?”

Jamie glanced at the novels, “Yes.  But it’s fine.  I’ll trade.”

He opened a drawer in the desk, pulling out five more dime novels.  “Doll Man and the song of the moon?”

“Read it.”

“Doll man and the revenge of the swarm queen?”

“That’s out?”  The boy stuck out his hand.  Jamie dutifully handed over the book, no more than a hundred pages.

“I liked this one,” Jamie said, “But you might want to wait until there’s more material.”

“What’s that?” the boy asked.

“Huh?” Jamie asked.

I turned, and I started to cross the room, before I saw Gordon moving in the same direction.  He was faster, and he was closer.  I deferred to him.

Before Jamie was able to process just what had grabbed the boy’s attention, Gordon touched the cover of Jamie’s notebook and flipped it over.  It slapped closed and slid a bit across the desk.

Jamie put a hand out to stop it.

“That’s Jamie’s journal,” Gordon said.  “You don’t read someone’s journal, pal.”

“Oh,” the boy said.  He turned a little pink.  “Didn’t know, sorry Jamie.”

“It’s okay,” Jamie said.

“That picture was something.  Scary, if I can say so,” the boy said, turning to look at me.  “That was you?”

“You don’t comment on someone’s journal if you happen to get a look at it, either,” Gordon said, his voice firm.

The boy’s face turned even pinker.

“Mickey,” Jamie said, offering a bit of relief where I would have pressed the advantage. “Take a look.”

Jamie held the other three little novels so they fanned out.  A lady in white and a rat crawling out of the darkness, a man with a bird mask, and a handsome young man with a dog accompanying him through a forest.

“What’s that last one?” Mickey asked.

Jamie pulled it away before Mickey could grab it.  “When we stopped by the Academy last weekend, you see anyone go off in a very small group?”

“Very small?”

“More than three, less than ten.”

“Uh.  Some special students got instruction with professors, or got to sit in on classes.  Top of certain classes, or something.  But they were alone.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay, thanks anyway,” Jamie said.  He put the books down, then handed over the one Mickey had expressed interest in.  “Barber John and the dark forest monster.”

“Keen.”

Gordon stepped out of the way while the boy headed back to the hallway.  He closed the door behind him, and stood with his back to it.  “Asking questions like that can draw attention.”

“I’m very careful about who I ask,” Jamie said.

“Okay,” Gordon said.  He seemed to take that at face value.  He didn’t mention Jamie’s lapse about the book.

Gordon and I wouldn’t go after Jamie for that any more than any of the others would come after me for my behavior after an appointment.  We had our strengths, and we had our individual weak points.  If everything was working as it should, we covered the weak points and highlighted the strengths.

That meant accepting that sometimes Jamie had enough stuff in his head that he was a little slower to get things rolling when surprised.

If I’d been on the ball, I would have reminded Jamie, but my head hurt.

“It’s time for dinner,” Gordon said.  “Thought I’d check in.”

“Still alive,” I said.  “No surprise murders.”

Gordon’s expression didn’t twitch.  “What do you think?”

“We were thinking maybe the structure of the school is being used to shape or correct behavior where it might go off rails,” Jamie said.  I cleared my throat, and Jamie amended his statement to say, “Sy thought so.  It makes some sense.”

“Something to watch out for?” Gordon asked.

“Quirks in behavior, students pushing the limit and getting pushed back in line by the group,” I said.  “And it might be worth seeing who is in charge of correcting the students when they get too problematic.”

Gordon nodded.  “Our mad doctor or doctors act the role of the murderer, the children are the murder weapon, and that weapon needs to be kept controlled and concealed.  The school is a setting for it.  That still leaves questions.  Who, how, why.”

“Who is the murderer, how are they doing this with the students, and why are they doing it?  What’s the motive?” Jamie asked.

“How, also, are they giving orders?” Gordon asked.  “The students here got orders to kill us.  When?  What form did it take?”

“Food for thought,” I said.  I perked up.  “Speaking of food…”

“That was contrived,” Gordon said.

“Brain feels sluggish, and I haven’t had an actual meal in…” I counted on my fingers, then paused, stuck.  “When did we eat, before the snake charmer?”

Gordon blinked.  “At that point, I think the question is academic.  Have you had water?”

“I had some water, yeah,” I said.

He frowned.  “If you hadn’t, I’d wonder how you were still standing.  Let’s slap a feedbag on that face of yours, Sy.  And you wonder why you’re short.”

I grabbed the comb from the bedside table and hucked it at his head.  He caught it, which didn’t surprise me.

We collected ourselves, getting our things.  Jamie picked up his notebook, tucking it under one arm.  The pen was capped and slipped into a breast pocket.  Gordon was all set up, and all I needed was a bit of protection from any rain.

The school was arranged into a square, with the yard in the middle.  The front entrance sat at the southern wall with the front office, infirmary and other administrative rooms.  The west and east sides of the square had classrooms.  The more interesting area was the northern end, furthest from the entrance.  Here, we had the dorms, boys at the west corner, girls at the east.  The two sides of the dorms were separated by the teacher’s quarters and washrooms on the upper floors, and a spacious dining room on the lower floor.  I supposed the idea was that it made mingling harder.

The dorms were ordered by year, with the older students on the upper floors, and being right in the upper-middle of the range of ages, we were left to make our way down on our way to the dining room.

My eyes searched the crowd, looking for a familiar face or feature.  I’d told Jamie I wasn’t sure if I could place them, but that didn’t stop me from trying.  Kids milled around us.

“Ed was asking about you, before your little tussle under the tree,” Gordon commented.  Keeping the conversation to stuff we could talk about freely.

“Tussle?”

“I’m trying to phrase it so I don’t hurt your feelings, Sy,” Gordon said, sounding as condescending as he was able.  “Because if I was honest, I’d have to say you didn’t just embarrass yourself.  You embarrassed all of us.”

I jabbed him.  He took it without flinching.

“I’m guessing that, following your usual pattern, you’re going to get in trouble, ostensibly to see how the justice system of Mothmont operates?”  Gordon asked.

The question could be taken two ways.  Anyone hearing would think I was a troublemaker, which wasn’t wrong, but he was asking if I’d see which faces or individuals might be tied to the correction of errant students.  Or errant ‘bad seeds’, as the case went.

The maneuver had other uses.  If our opposition here was less graceful, they might well get themselves into trouble, just to follow me or keep an eye on me.  Simply paying attention to see who acted and reacted after I got myself into trouble could reveal a great deal.

But my answer to Gordon was a, “Not just yet.”

“No?”

“Still waiting to see what happens after my brawl with Ed.”

Jamie, trailing a bit behind us, snickered audibly.

Gordon openly scoffed.  “Brawl.  You got beat, Sy.  I was talking to some of the others, and Ed actually got worried when someone suggested that you might be a real scrapper, growing up in the orphanage.  I nearly split something, trying not to laugh.”

“Ha ha,” I said, without humor.

We reached the end of the dining room, and the girls were filtering in through the door on the far side.   It was nice, very spacious, all long tables of dark wood, benches, with the two sides separated by a buffet style table.

The kitchen was visible, a recessed area, with the chefs busy at work over various stoves.  Students aged twelve to sixteen were wearing aprons, carrying food out.  Racks of bread, bowls of salad and empty glasses were placed on the table, while larger pots of food were placed on the buffet table, beside stacks of plates.  Stew, soups, and portions of meat.

From the smell in the kitchen, they were already working on dessert.

I took it all in, studying it.  The system.

Gordon leaned close, murmuring, “Put yourself into their shoes.  How many ways can you see, to poison someone?”

“Pre-assigned seats?” I asked.

“No, but they’ll call us together by homeroom for a roll call soon,” Jamie said.

“Make sure all the students are present and accounted for,” Gordon elaborated.

Dust the glasses with something, poison the silverware, deliver the poison while serving water, refresh the bread bowl or salad, drop something in the food while we go from the buffet to our seats, or simply take advantage of the bumps and shoves that come with being in a crowd of hungry students to stick us with a needle.

“Seven off the top of my head.”

“Lillian and I counted out twelve ways they could’ve gotten me, looking back in retrospect,” Gordon murmured.  “Jamie and Helen added one each once they got back from the Academy.”

“Kind of takes the joy out of eating for the first time in a week,” I murmured.

“You shouldn’t eat too much on an empty stomach anyway,” Jamie said.

I made a face, but I didn’t take my eyes off the crowd.  I saw Helen and Lillian on the other side.  Helen had a bevvy of girls around her, and she was playing it up.  Lillian stood off to one side, talking to a teacher.

Oddly in her element, in a very not-the-way-she-acts-at-home way.

“Incidentally,” I said, still looking over the crowd for a glimpse of the boys I’d seen through the window.  I didn’t see any telltale signs, and I certainly didn’t see them together as a group.  “What do we do if I happen to spot a possible culprit?”

“Signal me and Helen.  We’ll go after him.”

I nodded.  “Easier if you’re together.”

“We’ll sit together as a group.”

“Okay,” I said.

Sure enough, we were called to specific tables by our homeroom teachers.  They read our names off of lists, and then gave the official go-ahead to get food.

I held back out of the way while everyone stampeded for the buffet table, or ran over to reunite with friends.  Nobody returned to the seats they’d been in for the nightly attendance, and the teachers didn’t enforce anything.  There were striations by year and groupings of cliques, but no divisions beyond that.

Helen approached with a group of her friends, while Gordon went to go talk to his clique.  The teenagers had all gathered around the buffet table and were screening out the kids, claiming first pick, but Gordon’s group looked set to take up the first gap that formed.

I appreciated that he going out of his way to stay in our line of sight, allowing us to watch his back.

“Sy, was it?” one of Helen’s older friends asked.  An attractive brunette with her hair in a short bob.  She’d hiked up her skirt just a fraction beneath her uniform top, so the bottom of the skirt was higher, revealing more of her very nice looking legs.

I realized I’d been caught looking, and met her eyes without a trace of shame or guilt, “You can call me whatever you want, so long as you give me your name first, and maybe the number of your dorm room.”

She smiled, amid some ‘oohs’ from other girls in the group, then gave me a pat on the head.  “That was a good try, and it might have worked, but you’re a little too young for me, and I like the idea of a man who can stand up for me.”

“You saw my duel with Ed,” I spoke my realization aloud.

“I did,” she said.  “I’d offer some comforting words, but the less that’s said, the better.”

“I could say I let him win,” I said.

“Did you?” another girl chimed in, interest piqued.  Blonde, like Helen, but more pixieish in many respects.  Helen could have been an actress or a model, but this girl made me imagine a ballerina, in build and how she was more expressive in general movement.

“No.  But I could say I did,” I said.

“Whatever convinced you to pick a fight with Ed Willard?” the brunette asked.

“Some people are born to be the hero of a story,” I said.  “I was born to be the villain.  I see the charming, good looking, obnoxiously noble type of guy and I feel compelled to start a battle I’m doomed to lose.”

“Does that include monologues while you’re winning and standing over the bloody hero?” another girl asked, a smile on her face, suggesting she was well versed in that sort of thing.  Not many girls read the books and dime novels meant for boys.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.  “You saw my poor showing earlier.  I haven’t gotten that far.”

I heard a few chuckles and smiles, and belatedly realized that I’d effectively and accidentally drawn the attention of Helen’s entire clique.  Heads at other tables and the buffet line were turning, looking at me as some of the more attractive girls in our grade were grouped around me.

“Okay, wait, I have to poke a hole in your story,” a girl closer to Helen’s and my age declared.  She was a brunette too, but wore her hair longer, with white ribbons that complemented her school uniform.  “You say you don’t get along with good guys, but you get along with Helen’s friend Gordon, don’t you?  If anyone’s noble, it’s him.”

“Oh, Gordon’s a villain at heart,” I said.  “I don’t know if he knows it yet, but there’s a scoundrel in there just screaming for an excuse.”

“How would you know that?” she asked.

“Because when I was showing these guys around, I saw them with all sorts of people, sometimes in the rougher parts of town.  I’ve seen Gordon here, all nice and ordinary, and I’ve seen him go toe to toe with people you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, and they walked away respecting him.”

A half dozen pairs of eyes turned Gordon’s way.  He caught sight of a crowd of girls giving him serious looks and looked about as bewildered as if I’d drawn a gun on him.

Miss Ribbons wasn’t looking though.  She was focused on me, her right eyebrow raised.  “I’m not sure I believe you.”

Pixie-blonde chimed in, turning from Gordon to Ribbons, and then to me.  She put her hands on her hips.  “Are you being a good friend and trying to get us interested in your fellow over there?”

“Maybe,” I said, smiling.

“It’s good if you’ve given up on making yourself look good, because that ship sailed hours ago,” Miss Ribbons commented.

“That’s cruel,” another girl said.  “I quite like Sy, here, and it’s noble of this little villain to play up his friend.”

With the words ‘I quite like Sy’, she put her arms around me, giving me a hug.  I very nearly ducked out of her grip, but a quick glance at each of her hands suggested that they were empty, with no weapon or needle in evidence.  Given the difference in stature, the girl being three years my senior, it pulled the side of my head right into her bosom.

A nearby teacher loudly cleared his throat, and my new friend pulled her arms away, raising her hands as if she were being held up.

“Believe it or not,” Helen said, still smiling, acting very much the young coquette, “Sy isn’t lying.  For once.  What he said about Gordon was true.”

That line spawned more conversation, but my focus was on Gordon.  He navigated his way through eager young students, holding four plates in two hands.  He looked a little wary of joining the group, with so many eyes on him.

“What’s going on?” he asked, once he was close enough to ask.

“Just talking,” Helen said.

“Healthy lad,” the girl who’d hugged me said, indicating Gordon’s plates.

“For my friends,” Gordon said.

Lingering paranoia made me study her expression for any hint of danger.  Had she powdered her shirtfront with a poison that could be inhaled?

Gordon handed us our individual plates, one for me, Helen, Lillian and Jamie, then asked, “Is anyone in dire need of a meal?  I was going to go back to serve myself, but I can get more plates.”

The short-haired brunette raised her hand, smiling way too much at Gordon.

“That’s one,” he said.

“I’m getting waved over,” Miss Ribbons said.  “I need to take over for a friend and start serving.  She’s been in the kitchen all day.”

“Good girl.  Talk to you later,” Helen said.

“Enjoy your meals,” Miss Ribbons said, before dashing off.

I watched her retreat, zig-zagging through the crowd on the way to the kitchen, hair and skirt bouncing before she reunited with the friend she’d mentioned.

She glanced back, looking at me.

“I do think Mary likes Sy,” Pixie-blonde said.

“Does Sy like Mary?” another girl asked.

“I’m going to sit,” Helen said.  “Come sit with us, Sy.  I don’t think these girls are going to let you go, like this.  They’ve got their claws in you, and I don’t think they’ll let you go.”

Claws?” a girl asked, archly.

Helen, doing her part to keep us together in a very natural seeming way.

It took time before everyone had a plate and food.  My focus was on the crowd, keeping only enough attention on the conversation to keep up with it.  Where were the dynamics?  What were the possible approaches for attack?

I was exceedingly aware of the state of my food.  On such an empty stomach, I couldn’t afford to get poisoned.  We already knew our enemies were aware of us, so I didn’t mind being a little guarded.  One girl commented on it, even, and I explained it away as a casualty of being from the orphanage.  That, in itself, spawned more discussion.

Jamie and Lillian seemed content to be in the background.  Jamie was taking it all in.  If something happened, he’d be able to tell us who was where.

Had I been familiar with the dynamic and the situation, I might have been more on point, aware of when it all started to go wrong.  It tied into what Jamie had said about the prey instinct.  Taking in the subconscious details, things that one’s mind and attention weren’t picking up on.

Changes in volume, shifts in tone.  The behavior of people at the fringes and in the background.

Little boys who were hunched over their plates.

It only clicked when I saw that dessert was being served, and that the cooks and serving girls were looking a little nonplussed.  I paid attention to what they were sensing with their own prey’s instinct.

That dessert was being placed on the table, and very few students seemed inclined to go get it.

Looking around, I saw expressions of pain.  People squirming.  Not a lot, but as I watched, I saw it was getting worse.

I dropped my knife and fork.

“Don’t eat,” I said.

Helen, Gordon, Lillian, and Jamie dropped their utensils.

They didn’t settle for poisoning us.

They poisoned everyone.

Why?

“Oh,” Erma, the pixie-haired blonde said.  “I thought I felt full, but now-”

She raised a hand to her mouth.

“Just nausea?” Lillian asked.  She got a nod.  “Feverish?  Does it hurt?”

Whatever she was feeling, I didn’t experience it.  My friends didn’t either.

Maybe a handful of people had escaped it, whatever it was.

My mind was going a mile a minute as I took it in, tried to figure out the approach.

What was the goal, the plan?

They’d hit everyone, but missed us.  Was it an accident, luck on our part, Gordon being safe?

“The teachers are affected too,” Gordon said.

“It doesn’t seem to be serious,” Lillian said.  “It’ll get explained away as a stomach thing.  Something improperly cooked, perhaps.”

As if to answer her statement, someone threw up.  It seemed to set off a chain reaction.  People were rising from their seats, hurrying out of the dining hall.

“The entire school is going to be shut down,” I said.  “Everyone in their beds for at least the next few hours, if not the next day.”

Everyone.  It’s not a frame, or they would have left the teachers alone, done more to set us up.  Again, I have to wonder… why?

My eye fell on Miss Ribbons.

I felt the uneasiness, watching her.  I saw the look in her eyes.  Just the same as the boys had been.

I jerked my head, and the others looked, following my gaze.  Miss Ribbons was already making a hasty exit, pulling off her apron.  If anyone asked, I bet she’d say she was going to the nurse.

“Nobody to look after us, or keep us out of trouble,” I commented.

Locking down the school.  They were largely free to roam, or to feign being sick until our backs were turned, but I suspected it wouldn’t be so easy or safe for us.

They’re making a play, and we’re still completely in the dark about what they are and what they’re doing.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.06 – Twig

Taking Root 1.6

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

With the people starting to vomit or rising from their seats to run for the nearest toilet, it was pretty clear that something was wrong.  Students were getting distressed, and students were getting scared.  The teachers weren’t in great shape either.

Our opposition was smart.  Whatever was going on, they were capable of making plans with multiple phases or steps.  Knowing we’d already served ourselves, they’d tainted the food, affecting most of the other students and teachers.  Probably.  It fit with Miss Ribbons’ actions and the general timeline.

Mary.  Helen’s friends had called her Mary.

Our seats at the table were arranged with intent.  It wasn’t anything we’d blatantly coordinated or organized, but we’d simply accepted it as an approach.  At the table furthest from the kitchen, Jamie, Lillian and I sat on the bench with the wall right behind us, Helen and a share of Gordon’s friends on either side.  Helen and Gordon themselves were opposite Jamie and I, their backs to the rest of the dining room.

The position meant that Jamie and I could observe the room, and getting to us was rather more difficult.  Gordon and Helen could look after themselves, for the most part, if someone happened to approach from behind.

I leaned over to Jamie, and I took advantage of the general noise, bustle, and distraction of the other students to murmur in his ear.  “The other students are too smart to reveal themselves in the midst of this.  Watch the teachers.”

“Sure,” he said.

I met Gordon and Helen’s eyes.  This was an awkward situation, because we couldn’t coordinate by speech without cluing the others in.  If we left, we ran the risk of being blindsided.  When our enemies were in the shadows and we were in plain sight, the chaos here worked very much against us.  While everyone else was distracted or incapacitated, they were free to attack us from any number of angles.  If we happened to die, well, even minor food poisoning could kill.

That in itself was dangerous, but I was willing to bet there were more layers to this attack.  A specific reason they’d done it this way.

“Helen,” Gordon said.  He put a hand on Helen’s shoulder.  “You okay?”

Helen shook her head.  She was already leaning over slightly, one hand to her collarbone.

She very briefly met my eye.

Good.  Play along.

“Do you need help?” Lillian asked.

“Just walk me to our room?” Helen asked.  There was a tension in her voice, as if she were suddenly trying very hard not to puke.

“Lillian isn’t that strong,” Gordon said.  “I’ll help.”

“Boys aren’t allowed on the girl’s side,” was the protest from Erma the pixie-blonde.  She looked visibly green around the gills.

“Special circumstances,” Gordon said.

“You’re really not allowed,” Erma protested, again.

“I really don’t care,” Gordon said, firm.

“We’ll come,” I said.

“Groups of-” Erma started, then bit the sentence short as she fought a wave of nausea.

“Erma,” I said.  “Let us be gentlemen, okay?  We’re mostly okay, I think.  We can walk you to your rooms.”

She didn’t look happy with that idea, but she wasn’t able to talk, either.

Gordon began to stand, helping Helen out of her seat.  He offered a hand to Erma.

“The teachers,” Jamie said, alerting us.

My head turned.  One of the teachers was standing.  He wore slightly old fashioned clothes.  His pants clung to his legs, disappearing into boots, while he wore a bright red jacket over a button-up shirt without a tie.  He had a strong build, with a prominent barrel chest, and the clothing had a way of making his legs look far too small while his upper body was made to look larger.  His hair was the same way, wavy hair across a head that was already very triangular, with a prominent upper brow and pointed chin.

The red jacket was unfortunate, not because it was a sad attempt at acting a member of the upper crust, but because his skin was now very flushed, matching the jacket.  He was sweating, in obvious discomfort.

He hadn’t escaped the effects of the poison.  The man seated to his right and the headmistress another seat down were both looking about as uncomfortable.

Had they eaten more, being larger in build?

“Everyone!” Red-jacket boomed out the word.  He had a faint but real British accent.

The noise level dropped.

“Something in the meal looks as though it might have been undercooked.  Head straight to your dorm rooms.  If you have to-” he paused.  “It is best if you use the wastebins in your room instead of trying to make your way to the toilets.  I expect there will be too much demand.  You will be looked after, but go now before you feel any worse.”

We’ll be looked after?

Jamie was staring intently, still in his seat.  He stirred when I reached across his field of vision for a pitcher of water, only a quarter of the way filled.  I emptied the contents into another pitcher, then slid it across the table to Gordon.

“What’s this?”

“If we can’t get to a wastebin,” I said, “Better the jug than the floor.  You hold onto it?”

Gordon took the glass pitcher by the handle, one arm supporting Helen.  It wasn’t much, but it served as a weapon.

“Go ahead,” I told Jamie.  While he and Lillian circled the table, I emptied another pitcher into the one at the center of the table, holding it in my hands.

Not that it mattered too much.  If it came down to me needing a weapon to defend myself, I doubted things could be salvaged.

Still made me feel better.

We headed for the girl’s dormitory with Helen and a few stragglers.  I was glad to be shorter than the norm, as I ducked my head down and let the crowd shield me from the eyes of the teachers.

I’d hoped that the act of taking care of Helen would let us break away, but there were too many people vacating the dining room.  Even those who were well were being driven out by the aroma of vomit.  It was humid in the room with the heat from the kitchen and the sheer number of students, and the humidity helped carry the offensive odor.  We couldn’t break away from the crowd, and I wasn’t sure that the dorm room would be much better.

Beside me, an older girl hunched over, making a guttural noise.  Everyone near her cleared out of the way.

I took advantage of the gap in the crowd to step closer.  I stuck the empty pitcher beneath her mouth, pulling my head back and away so I didn’t have to look as she emptied a portion of her stomach’s contents.

“Thank you,” she said, still bent over, smiling.

She reached to take the pitcher, and I pulled it away from her grasp.

“Reserved for friends,” I said.

She looked a little bewildered and lost.

“And here I thought you were a gentleman,” Erma mumbled.

“I’m a bastard, born and bred,” I said.  And there’s no way I’m handing a weapon over to a potential enemy.

With students moving slowly and some pushing or jostling, the way up the stairs looked like more of a jam than any day on King Street.  We were probably safe while we were a group, but if the crowd separated us, or if someone tried to slip us the wrong end of a knife while we were in the crush of bodies, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to respond accordingly.

I saw Gordon shooting Jamie a look, and I sensed that he was thinking along the same lines.

We were stuck.

“Where are the showers?” I asked.

“Showers?”

“Baths?  Where do we wash up?”

“Upstairs one floor,” Gordon said, “Above the dining room.”

He took the question as an instruction, and he and Helen dutifully forged their way into a gap in the crowd.  Jamie, Lillian and I hurried to follow, me holding my pitcher off to one side, to avoid the smell.

People were slow, some had stopped on the stairs, sitting or on all fours, and there was a smell that suggested they weren’t all simply throwing up.  It was a mess, a disaster, and a stain on Mothmont on many levels.

That part of it all was almost certainly a clue.

There were a lot of details to be picked out of this.  Motivation, approach, the nature of the enemy…

I idly moved the pitcher to one side, intending it to be a shield against anyone reaching for me or holding a weapon, but it ended up serving another purpose.  The sight of a glass container filled with vomit made two girls shy back.  It was an avenue for me to slip upstairs, skipping ahead three steps, ducking past two students, and stepping to safety, free of the sickly herd.

The others followed me as we headed into the girl’s showers.  Two showers were already running, and the room was filled with steam.  The floor was white tile, the stalls themselves were wood painted with an exceedingly glossy paint.  Each stall was recessed, with hooks and benches before the door and the shower beyond.

“They get individual stalls?” Jamie asked.  “Why do they get individual stalls?”

“Shh,” Gordon shushed him.

Erma had followed us, and staggered past us to the first available stall, where she promptly decorated the floor with her dinner.

I glanced around, then pointed.  While the others led the way, I stepped to nearby stalls and turned on the water.  The hiss of water filled the room.

By the time I caught up with the others in the furthest shower back, Helen was standing upright, her expression blank.  Gordon stood with a foot resting on one of the little benches at the entry to the stall, while Jamie and Lillian occupied the other short bench.

I stood at the entrance to the stall, where I could peek out and keep an eye on the door.  Clouds of steam drifted.

Helen reached past the others for my pitcher, and I let her have it.  Without flinching, she emptied some onto her sleeve.  She turned on the water, cold more than warm, and stepped under the stream.  The water ran over her, soaking her hair and uniform.  The makeup around her eyes ran.

I glanced away, my attention on the other stalls.  Pacing back a bit, I bent down, peering under stalls.  I saw some bare feet and wet socks.  It looked like Erma was sitting on the floor of the shower, letting water run over her.

“Were we followed?” Gordon asked, his voice low.

“Don’t know,” Jamie murmured.

“When things get this messy, it gets harder to keep track of things,” I said.  “Which might be what they’re counting on.”

“Trying to catch us out?” Gordon asked.

I nodded.  “Shaking things up, yeah.  What worries me is Mary.”

“I didn’t have any clue,” Helen said.

“It’s okay,” Lillian said, reassuring.  “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m well aware,” Helen said, turning her blank expression on Lillian.  Anyone else might have sounded irritated, but Helen didn’t sound anything.  “If I had an idea and ignored it, then it would be my fault.”

“I… okay,” Lillian said.

“Who is she?” I asked.  “This Mary?”

“Mary Elizabeth Cobourn,” Helen said.  “Her father isn’t influential.  Accountant to the rich and famous.  It’s why I didn’t pay particular attention to her.”

“Who is her mother?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Helen said.  “I just looked at the men, because of the prior pattern.  Would have asked, but it’s harder to ask about a girl’s mother.”

I nodded.  Most mothers were teachers, nurses, or homemakers.  Nothing so interesting that we could ask.  There were more women attending the Academy, but few from the last generation.

“Worth looking into,” Gordon said.  He ran his fingers through his golden hair, which was damp with the light spray that had touched it.  “Check the rest of her family, why she might be selected out of all the students here.”

I could sense how stressed the others were.  This maneuver had put us all in a reactionary position, and our options were limited until the other shoe dropped.  I volunteered some information, hoping to get them focused again.  Not necessarily improving morale, but I doubted that was a real issue.  We knew this sort of situation well enough.  “We know she had a role in this.  She might as well have told us to our faces that she was involved, the line about enjoying our meals, the look she gave us.   It means something, if she doesn’t care about us coming after her.”

Jamie nodded.  “The puppeteer is using these students as murder weapons.  As a killer, he has a pattern.  Murder-suicides.  One after another.  The suicides cover up evidence.  If Mary keeps to the pattern, she’s either going to come after us-”

“Or she’s going to go home,” Gordon said.  He paused.  “Oh.”

I followed his thoughts to the same conclusion.  “This is the endgame.”

“I’m sorry,” Lillian cut in.  “I’m not following.”

“They know we’re onto them,” Gordon said.  “Our puppeteer somehow figured out about us.  Maybe through a connection to the Academy, maybe by some other means.  He got scared, and now he’s wrapping up.  Get everyone sick, and in the midst of the chaos he can send his weapons after us, or students are sent home and finish their jobs.”

“Or both,” I said.  “If they’re careful about how they come after us, there’s nothing saying they can’t take a run at us and then disappear.”

“That’s possible,” Gordon agreed.  “Especially if they know who we are, they might not want to pick a fight.”

I heard a noise and glanced past the entrance to the stall to check the door.

Two more students.  One was crying.

I stepped further into the steam and shadow and eyed them until they disappeared into a stall.  No sign of hostility.

“Either way,” Gordon was saying, “our puppeteer may be wary enough to take a break for a few years, let interest in things die down, or pack up and head to another campus at another school.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “This approach here feels ugly.  Making students sick?  Vomit and shit everywhere.”

“Hurts Mothmont where it counts, and what hurts Mothmont hurts the Academy,” Gordon said.

“Personal,” Lillian said.

I nodded.  “Now you’re getting up to speed.”

She looked annoyed at that phrasing.

“We have a man-” Gordon said.

“-Or woman,” Jamie cut in.

Gordon continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “-Who considers these children to be expendable assets.  He alters them somehow, gives them a target, and has them die after the fact, tidying up the evidence.  He does this because he hates the school?  That’s an awful lot of hate.  Do we really think he’s a teacher?  That’s a lot of involvement and hours of the day to spend around something you hate that much.”

“Isn’t it possible?” Helen asked.

“No,” Gordon said, frowning a little.  “I really don’t think it is.  It feels too spiteful, twisting the knife for good measure when he could simply stab.”

Helen nodded.

“What if this isn’t about the school?” I asked.

“Go on.”

“It’s personal, but it’s a grudge against a person.”

“Against the headmistress?” Gordon asked.

I offered a languid shrug.  The moisture in the air was starting to collect on my skin and clothes.  I wiped my forehead and pushed my hair back and away from my forehead.  “Jamie?  Any thoughts on the faculty?”

“They were talking as a group before Mr. McCairn did his announcement,” Jamie said.  “The headmistress didn’t have a lot to say.”

“Did students serve the teachers food?”  I asked.

“Yes, right from the kitchen,” Jamie said.  He paused, glancing to the left, “Mary served the three at the end.”

“Making the headmistress look bad by keeping her ineffectual,” I said.  “More poison or whatever it was-”

“Emetics,” Lillian said.  “Maybe laxative.”

“Mary gave the headmistress more emetics than anyone else,” I amended my statement.  “The question is who would have a grudge against-”

I sensed a movement out of the corner of my eye.  My head turned, my hand and one finger going up for the benefit of the others.

“To your rooms, now,” a woman’s voice cut in.

I heard footsteps.  Both those belonging to the woman and the footsteps of the fleeing girls.

A sharp knock, a few stalls down.

“Out,” was the order.

Doing the rounds, clearing everyone away.

Gordon held up his hand, counting off on his fingers, his voice low.  “Who has a grudge against the headmistress?  Someone on campus, who can communicate with the students.  Who is Mary and why her?  Look at who her mother is.  What is the mechanism of control?  And don’t forget that they’re liable to come for us.  Be on guard, and don’t forget they might try to take you out with them.”

“And their families,” Lillian said.  “If they get away…”

“We’ll step in if it looks like there’s any danger of that happening,” Jamie assured her.

“We will,” I agreed.  “I’d bet money this ploy of theirs has another angle.  Watch out for the angle.”

There were nods.

Out,” the teacher gave the order, several stalls down.

“My friends,” Erma said.  “They were in here.”

Selling us out?

No, Erma didn’t know we were trying to avoid the spotlight.

“Do we need to worry about Erma?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Helen said.

“Not wanting us in the girl’s dorm was suspicious,” Gordon said, his voice a whisper.

I could hear the teacher’s approaching footsteps, hard soles on tile.

“Oh, that?” Lillian asked.  “Her room’s a sty.  She doesn’t know how to look after herself.”

Our entire group collectively relaxed.

There was a metal-on-metal squeak as another shower was turned off.

I turned to face the woman as she emerged from the steam.

“Boys in the girl’s showers?” she asked, her voice arching, as if she were about to launch into a tirade.

“It’s okay,” Lillian said.  “We-”

“Not another word.  This is most certainly not ‘okay’!” the woman said, building up steam.

Helen stumbled forward, lightly headbutting the woman in the solar plexus.  With wet hands, she clutched the woman by the shirtfront.

“Miss Williams,” Helen mewled the words, “I feel so bad.  Please.  I-”

Helen paused, apparently holding back her gorge.

Gordon stepped forward, hurrying to offer my pitcher of vomit to the woman.  The woman had to fight Helen’s clutches to get to the pitcher and offer it to the girl.

Helen managed to unload a mouthful of vomit and missed the pitcher entirely, dropping it on the floor between the woman’s feet.  She coughed, clutching at the woman’s shirt again.  “It hurts.”

I jumped in.  “We know her, and she had it worse than anyone, and we didn’t know what to do.  There were so many people on the stairs we weren’t sure we could get anywhere in time.”

“She had someone else’s mess on her sleeve,” Lillian said.  “I thought she could clean off, but I couldn’t support her myself, because Erma was there too, so we came here, and she went into the shower like that.”

“I wanted to get cool,” Helen said.  “I feel hot and sweaty and gross and…” her words dissolved into incoherent whines.

“I-” the woman started.

“Please, we don’t want to get in trouble,” Gordon said.  “We didn’t know any way to help her.”

“You don’t-”

“It hurts,” Helen said.  “My stomach is cramping.”

“Enough,” the woman said.  She managed to extricate herself from Helen.  “Enough of that.  You need to act like young adults.  I understand that this young lady is feeling unwell, but that’s no excuse for the rest of you.”

She glanced over us, and we collectively managed to look miserable and pitiful enough to get to her.

She gave me a curious look.  “What happened to you?”

“Scrap, ma’am,” I said.

The woman made a face.  “Boys, to your dorms, right now.  They’re doing headcounts shortly.  I’ll look after Helen here.”

We nodded and hurried to obey.

Once I was at the entrance to the showers, I glanced back.  I could make out Helen with her head resting against the woman’s chest, giving me a sidelong glance, a light smile on her face.

I resisted the urge to smile back.

Had things been different, I might have tried to get myself in trouble.  As nice as it would have been to see how punishment worked here and if it might be used to keep the bad seeds in line, I didn’t want to add more complications to a bad situation.

I was damp but not wet from the ambient moisture of the shower, and I ventured into a hallway that reeked of sick.  The students had been cleared out, but the air would have that bitter taste to it for weeks.

Jamie, Gordon and I all made our way down the hall.

“That was good,” Gordon said.  “Being able to talk, touch base.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But we’re on our back foot.  We know very little where it counts.  They’ve seized the initiative.  Until we turn things around, we’re going to be responding, not acting.  We don’t have time to waste, if they can just call it quits and go murder mom, dad, and themselves.”

“At which point the Academy can’t keep the situation under wraps,” Gordon said.  “What do you think, Sly?  Want to slip away, see what you can do while you’re staying out of sight?  See if you can turn things around or get the right words to the right ears?”

“If they’re doing headcounts, they’ll wonder where I’m at.  Depending on how things go, that wondering might reach our puppeteer.”

“That’s not a no,” Jamie commented.

I smiled.

“He has at least an idea of who we are,” Gordon said.  “Having you lurking could scare him.”

“Or she has an idea who we are,” Jamie said.  “We could scare her.”

Gordon rolled his eyes.

“I’m just saying.  Most teachers are female.”

“I’m only saying this doesn’t feel like a woman’s work,” Gordon said.  “Women care about kids on a deeper level.”

I thought of Lacey.

Jamie was shaking his head.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Jamie said.  “If I try to argue, you’ll win.  You’ll say something about the poisoner being a woman after all, and you’re faster on the draw than I am, so okay.  I forfeit the argument.  You’re right.”

Gordon frowned, clearly annoyed.

“Either way, I’m thinking we don’t want to scare him.  Or her,” I said, adding that last bit for Jamie’s benefit.  I saw a slight smile on Jamie’s face at that, and a slight deepening of Gordon’s frown of annoyance, which was even better.  “If we assume our puppeteer is operating under fear right now, tying everything up and attempting to remove us before we can uncover him, or packing up and running, then we don’t want to push him too far.”

Gordon nodded.

“How do we seize the initiative if you’re worried-” Jamie started.

I reached up, shushing him.

We’d approached a corner, and the man in the red jacket was further down the hallway.  He wasn’t moving, slumped against the wall.

“You think you need me?” Gordon asked.

As if in response, the man in the red jacket passed gas.  It was a long, high pitched sound.

He sighed in audible relief, patted his rear end with his hand, checking, then pulled himself away from the wall.

I took a second to admire the man’s courage before saying, “I don’t think so.”

Gordon nodded, but he didn’t move from the base of the stairwell while Jamie and I headed toward our room.

“Hello, Mr. McCairn,” Jamie greeted the man.

“Jamie.  And… I don’t recognize this one.”

“Sylvester,” I said.

“To your rooms, stat.  I’m doing a headcount as we speak.”

You’re standing there suffering, or you’re acting, but you’re most definitely not in the midst of doing anything else, I thought.

Still, I obeyed.

I closed the door, then immediately began studying our surroundings.  Jamie sat on his bed.

“You were saying?” he asked.

“We head back to our room, and you tell me about the faculty.”

Jamie nodded.  “Where do I start?”

“Headmistress.”

“Not a lot to say.  She was a teacher for five years before her superior came down with a pregnancy, she took over, and she did a good enough job that she kept the job while moving from place to place.  When Mothmont sprung up, they went looking for someone with a squeaky reputation and clean face to watch over it all.”

Squeaky reputation.  That didn’t mean it was a clean reputation, but it changed the tone of things.  Was it ambition at the heart of it?

I nodded.  I searched the room, looking over the desk, opening the drawers.

Nothing of particular interest.  Ink bottles, pens, a kit for sewing, in case we needed to mend our uniforms…

I removed the contents of the drawers, setting the items on top of the desk.  I considered them.

“McCairn?”  I asked Jamie, when I was done considering.

“Ex-military.  Does drills with the boys, looks over the boy’s dorm.”

“Physical education?”

Jamie nodded.

“It’s all an act,” I said.

“Is it?”

“Yes.  Dressing up, playing up the accent.  They picked him because he was local, not because he was upper crust.”

“Do you think he’s a consideration?  If he’s picking off the powerful, maybe he doesn’t like being the low man on the totem pole?”

“I’m more likely to think he’s beholden to this place than an outright enemy.  Besides, how does he control the children?  Who else?  Second person at the table, between McCairn and the headmistress.  Academy-trained?”

I turned my attention to the chests at the foot of our beds.  I opened the lid, and then tested the weight of the lid itself.

Solid wood, three feet by two feet, give or take.

“Not Academy trained, no.”

Returning to the desk, I claimed a pen, then set to unscrewing the hinges from the bottom portion of the chest.  “Who is he?”

“Mr. Percy.  He teaches the younger years.  Fundamentals of Academy science.”

“But he’s not Academy trained?”

“Teaches it from the books.”

I pulled the lid free of the chest itself, hinges dangling.  I set it aside.  “Help.”

Jamie was on his feet.  Not a question as to why.  He just obeyed.

Together, we moved the chest to the base of the door.  The entire thing must have weighed six or so stone.  A piece of furniture unto itself.

I upended the chest, so the side was facing up, and then dragged the lid over.  I climbed up onto the chest so my eyes were level with the top of the door, and the two of us managed to raise the chest’s lid up to the same level, resting the end of the lid near where my toes were.

“Get the chair?” I asked.  “And a book or something.”

He did.  Standing on the chair, he had a little less height than I did, but he was able to help me, lifting the lid higher.  When it got too high for Jamie to really help, he used the book for extra leverage, while I used my other hand to steady it.

In the process, we managed to get the entire thing up so it rested on the top of the doorframe, flush against the wall.

With one hand up to keep it from falling down on top of us, I took the book from Jamie and adjusted the bend of the hinge, until it bent at a right angle.

I opened the door a crack, peered through to make sure the hallway was empty, then gave the hinge a solid whack with the book.

The hinge punched into the wall.

Tentatively, I let go.

“You have the oddest sense for decorations,” Jamie said.

“I left the screws on the corner of the bed.”

“Ah, sure.”  Jamie went to fetch the screws.

“If he’s had access to the books, he could know something.  Percy.”

“He could,” Jamie agreed.  “But if he was this good, why wouldn’t he be employed by the Academy already?  He’d rather be headmaster?  It’s weak.”

I nodded.  Taking the first screw from Jamie, I used the pen to set it in place, just enough to be firmly in the wood, still sticking out.

“Strangest sense for decoration,” Jamie observed.

“Shut up, and give me a screw,” I said.

Jamie obliged.

It took only a minute to get the screws into place.  Set randomly, as my reach allowed.

“Sewing kit?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “And while I work with that, unlace your shoes.”

“You’re aware this is going to make a racket when it comes down?” Jamie asked.

“I’m aware,” I said.  “But Gordon was right.  It makes sense for me to be out and about… except I don’t like leaving you defenseless.”

“I’m better in a brawl than you are.”

I frowned.  “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s depressing, because you still suck at it,” I said.  “My worry is that they won’t give you a chance to scrap with them.  If the situation calls for it, this will at least give them pause.”

I put the first pin’s point against the wood, then pressed the cover of the book against it until it stuck out.  I started with the second pin.

“Laces done.”

“Both shoes?”

“Yeah,” he said.  He handed them to me.

“Lie down, get a wink or two,” I said.  “I’ll wait around until they’re done the headcount, then I’ll disappear.  You leave me a signal if it’s unsafe for me to return?”

Jamie nodded.

No plan went a hundred percent smoothly.

Sitting in the dark of the room, I could feel the lingering headache from my appointment.  The lights were off, the building was almost silent, but for the sounds of people continuing to be ill.  There was nothing to distract me from my own pain.

The shoelaces hung limp in my hand.  With my own shoelaces attached, they strung up to the board I’d fixed above the wall.  It bristled with collected screws, needles, broken pen tips, and a few choice pieces of glass.

The limited length of the shoelaces had meant I’d had to sit on the corner of Jamie’s bed or the chair, and even though sitting on the bed meant getting periodically kicked as Jamie tossed and turned under his covers, it was far more comfortable than the hard wooden chair.

I didn’t mind the company, even if the company was asleep.

My trap here wouldn’t kill, but killing wasn’t the aim.

Couldn’t interrogate the dead.

Every few minutes, I’d hear someone being sick or crying out, the rustle of running footsteps, or smell rank aromas from nearby rooms.

The trick was to connect the sounds.  I drew a mental picture, tying it all together, sequences of events.

It was when I heard a murmured conversation and the rustle of footsteps without any sound of distress to precede it that I tensed.

Young voices.

Moving the shoelaces to one hand, I slid back reaching as far as I could, and put my fingers over Jamie’s mouth.

He was awake in an instant.  I felt his hot breath between my fingers.

He nodded.

Floorboards creaked.  The doorknob rattled.

The light from the corridor outside was blinding as the door yawned open.

“Hey,” Ed said.  I could only barely make out his smile.  “You’re up.”

My eyes widened.

Three people.  Ed and his buds.  Boys who hadn’t sat at the table with me, Gordon, and the rest of us.

They’d collected their food around the same time Gordon had, as part of Gordon’s pack, even if they weren’t feeling too kindly toward my orphan brother.

I considered all the options, then sighed.

“Ed,” I said, “You don’t know the sort of mess you’re getting yourself stuck into.”

He approached me, and I felt a kind of resignation as I let the shoelace slip from my slack fingers.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

“Shut it,” Ed said.  “Stay put, don’t make a fuss.  Our business is with Sy.”

“Right,” Jamie said.  “Yeah.”

“What’s Gordon going to think?” I asked.  But it wasn’t really an ask.  More a statement, to Jamie.

“Gordon’s got his head up his ass,” Ed said.  “Now keep your voice down.  Don’t bother calling for help.  We’ve got someone keeping McCairn busy upstairs.”

I bet, I thought.

He grabbed me, and he hauled me up.  I didn’t try putting up a fight.  It would have been useless, and I hoped they’d get sloppy and give me a chance to surprise them.

With his buddies, he marched me forward, glancing this way, then that, before forcing me over toward the stairs.

We were half a flight down before I heard Jamie’s running footsteps above, going up to talk to Gordon.

I hoped to hell they’d be able to find me in time.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I said.

“I know well enough.  You’re an ass, Sylvester, and you made enemies.  Now it’s catching up with you.”

I decided to keep my mouth shut.

The descent continued until we reached the first floor, then continued down another flight.

Once we were at the bottom, I could feel the heat in the air.  The area was barely lit, the lighting buzzing audibly, flickering now and again, threatening to plunge us into darkness.

The boys opened a door.

There were no lightbulbs, but a very large furnace blazed, casting irregular orange flames throughout the room, while leaving much of the rest in darkness.

“Mary,” I guessed.

“Got it in one,” she said, from the gloom.

I nodded slowly.  “You’ve been paying a lot of attention to me.”

“I’ve been paying enough,” she said.

She leaned forward.  The light from the fire flickered over her face.

“What’d you tell them?” I asked.  I jerked my head to one side.

“The truth.  That you insulted me.  A bigger boy beating you up, you can use that.  Get pity from girls, from my friends.  But if a girl beat you up?  You’d never live it down.”

“The truth, huh?” I asked.

“Do you disagree with my version of events?”

I considered.

I sighed.  “No, I suppose not.”

Not if it meant that she’d clean up Ed and his cronies while dealing with me.

“Because I really wondered if you were that type of person.  If you were that much of a scoundrel.”

I shrugged.  “I’m not denying that I’m a scoundrel.  I do have to wonder what you are.”

“That, Sylvester, would be telling,” Mary said.

“Are you going to start fighting yet?” Ed asked.  “The little ass gets a whupping from me, and goes straight back to cozying up to your friends, disrespecting them, disrespecting you.  I want to hear a proper apology from his lips.”

“I’m not really the apology type,” I said.

“That!”  Ed said, “Right there.  I want you to make it so I never have to hear him say anything like that ever again.”

“Not until you’re gone,” Mary said.

“Huh?  I want to see.

“A girl has her modesty,” Mary said.

“That’s bull,” Ed said.  “We went out after curfew and brought him here.”

“I’ll make you a bet,” Mary said.  “If he turns up at school tomorrow, I’ll give you my company for an entire day.  We can go out on the town over the weekend.”

“She’s leaving school tomorrow,” I said.

“The trouble with being a little grease-stain, Sylvester, is that your words lose their power.  Anything you say comes out sounding like a lie.”

“You really have been paying attention,” I said.

“One day for each of us,” Ed said.

“One day for each of you, or he’s so embarrassed he never turns up again,” Mary said, her voice soft.  “Win-win.”

“Sure,” Ed said.

“Do me a favor, though?”

“Hm?”

“His friends are probably hunting for him.  There’s a stash of cards and dirty books in the kitchen, behind the shelves by the stove.  Duck over there, hang out for a while before going back to your room.”

“For real?” Ed asked.

“For real.  I’ve seen the cook boys goggling over it.”

I hung my head.

Ed’s group wasted no time.  I could hear the door shut behind me.

“You’re good,” I said.

I heard a click.

I recognized it as the sound of a gun lever.

“You’re very good,” I said, raising my arms.

“I saw your showing against Ed.  There’s no way you’re that bad in a scrap.  It’s a show.”

“It really isn’t,” I said.

“I’m going to assume you’re lying and stay comfortably at a safe distance,” she said.  “You’re going to tell me about your friends.  Share what you know.  In exchange, I’ll be merciful.”

“Merciful?”

“I’ll shoot you properly, once in the head, once in the chest.  Then I haul you over and push you into the furnace before taking my leave.”

“The alternative being?”

“I take your legs out from under you, then hold you up to slow cook you while you’re alive.”

My eyes were adjusting to the gloom.  I could see the look in her eyes.

She totally would.

I exhaled slowly.  “Okay.”

“Good boy.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.07 – Twig

Taking Root 1.7

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“Catch,” Mary said.

Something flew at me.  I couldn’t see it in the darkness, and it bounced off the door by my head.

I figured out where it had bounced off to and collected it.  I felt it rather than looking at it.  A key.

“Without turning around, lock the door.  If it opens or if you try anything funny, I shoot.”

I did as instructed.

“That was a little too fast,” she said.  “Stand with your back to the door.  Try the knob.”

I did.  I turned the knob to the side, tugged on the door, turned the knob all the way to the other side, and then tugged on it again.  The door rattled against the frame.

“I stand corrected,” she said.  “Toss me the key.”

I did.

Unlike me, she did manage to catch it, but she had the benefit of the light from the furnace.  She held it up to the light, examining it.

While she wasn’t looking directly at me, I glanced around the room.  There was a workbench with tools on the far end of the room, and she sat on the corner of it, legs dangling and not reaching the ground.  She wasn’t wearing her uniform, but a sweater, cloak and hood, and a skirt with stockings and boots.  The gun was in her lap, pointed at me, and other weapons sat within arm’s reach.  A hatchet, hammer, and the knife she probably planned to use if it came down to it.

By contrast, there was nothing of substance near me.  I was uncomfortably close to the furnace, but the door didn’t quite face me, so I got the heat without the benefit of the light that streaked across the room in lines.  The space around the furnace was kept clear, so fire wouldn’t catch.  A coal-operated monstrosity of a thing.  There was a pile of the fuel in the corner, a sliding door on the chute where the coal was deposited.

We’d voiced our suspicions aloud, that they would strike at us and then disappear to finish their missions.  I had a sense of what her escape route was.

I started to slide to the floor.

“What are you doing?” she asked.  “Stop.”

I stopped halfway, legs bent, back flat against the door.

“I was sitting down,” I said.

“I don’t trust anything you do.  Certainly not this,” she told me.  The way she phrased certainly was good.  Very proper, enunciated like a girl raised by the best teachers.

“You’ve made it clear that I’m going to die,” I said, holding my position.  “I didn’t expect it this soon, but I’ve always figured it was going to happen.  If there’s a chance I get to die sitting down, just after an interesting conversation, I consider it a pretty good end.”

She moved her head, and the light from the fire danced across her face with the motion.  “This isn’t a conversation.  It’s an interrogation.”

“Now I’m the one who stands corrected.”

I thought I saw her expression change.  A frown.

Had she caught me mirroring her?  Was she aware of what mirroring was?

“May I sit?” I asked.

“Feet apart, hands where I can see them,” she said.

I obeyed on both fronts, but I didn’t drop to the floor.  “But can I sit?”

“That was implied.  With your back to the door, please.”

“Implications are dangerous when you have a pistol pointed at you,” I said.  I slid the rest of the way down, keeping my hands up.  I rested my wrists on my knees, palms toward her, fingers spread.

I took a second, rolling my shoulders.

She didn’t say or do anything.  She remained in the shadows.

“I’m stiff,” I commented.  “I just spent three hours or so sitting on the end of a bed.  I had a trap rigged, was going to pull it down on top of anyone who came in through the door.  Except it turned out to be Ed.”

“He was in one piece,” Mary observed.

“For the same reason I didn’t tell him what you really were.  Doesn’t serve a point, only gets him killed.  If it works somehow, I’m still up shit creek.  Cat out of the bag.”

“You’re very calm, Sylvester,” Mary said.  A sudden change of subject.  “Why is that?”

“Like I said, I’m not too surprised I might die.  You know, about a week ago-”

“No stalling for time,” she told me.

“It’s relevant, I promise,” I said.  Several seconds passed without a word from her.  I started up again, “About a week ago, Professor Hayle from the Academy’s neurology department gave me a ride to the Academy.  Do you know why?”

“Keep going, Sylvester,” she said.  “Don’t ask me questions to try and squeeze details from me.”

“If you were really merciful, you’d tell me.  It’s a kind of torture, making me go to my grave without all of the answers.”

“I’m only offering mercy because it’s the only thing I’m willing to give you in exchange for information,” Mary told me.  “You were saying?”

I sighed.

“I was hurt.  I got myself hurt on purpose, contrived to be in Professor Hayle’s coach and get him out of the coach, so I could take a peek at his files.  On me, on Gordon, on Helen, Jamie, Lillian, and Evette.”

Nothing in her expression or body language changed.

Was she ignorant?  Did she not know that that wasn’t the real composition of the group?  They didn’t have particulars?  Or was she very good at hiding her tells?

I had to assume she was competent, and couldn’t push my luck without getting a bullet in the leg for my trouble.

“It was a lot of trouble, but there was a reason I went that far.  I needed to find out what they weren’t telling us.  I wanted to find out how long they expected us to last.”

“Last?”

“In terms of life expectancy.  Or project expectancy.  There’s more glory in breaking new ground than there is in refining someone else’s work, and the entire setup of the Academy is all about innovation more than doing good work.  We’re a casualty of that.”

“You and the others,” Mary said.

We, Mary,” I said.  I angled my head down until the angle of the light from the fire was enough to be especially bright in my eyes.  I couldn’t see Mary as well, but I knew that she’d see the reflection.  “You too.”

“We’re not talking about me,” she said.  “Go on.”

I moved my head back, shrugging.  “Most of us weren’t going to live to see twenty.  Barring outside intervention.”

My hands moved to indicate her, the outside intervention in question.

“My concern isn’t with your life expectancy.  I know exactly when you’re going to die.”

“I haven’t even told the others the numbers,” I said.  “Promised Gordon I would fill him in later, but the opportunity never came up.  How do you tell someone-”

“Sylvester,” Mary said, unamused.

“Okay.  Okay.  New projects.  You know how the departments portioned out cash for various measures?  We got funding as a special project.  Got it better than some.  Six individual cases, each managed with an entirely different approach.  If you want to know what you’re up against, that’s it.  I don’t like Professor Hayle, but he gave us money, and he tried for the gamble.  Longer-term approach than some of the other special projects, and with less than twenty years before most of us expire, that’s saying something.”

“Details.”

I shrugged.  “There are some big names on the other projects.  Do you know Doctor Ibott?  Of course you know Ibott.”

“Details about you, and your group.  Please don’t test me, Sylvester.”

“Hayle has been fighting to keep his department afloat, while others get regular injections of cash to keep innovating.  He gets a lot of criticism because in this age of innovation and immediate results, we’re taking too long to show anything demonstrable.  Their word, demonstrable.  If you pronounce it right, you could fit ‘monster’ in there.”

I smiled, while Mary didn’t look amused in the slightest.

“We’re meant to develop into something monstrous over time.  Most of us.  Each member of the group with a role, a defined identity, and a specific set of skills, crafted using entirely different means.  What you’re dealing with… we’re good, but we’re not there yet.”

“Defined identities,” Mary echoed me.  “You called yourself a villain, back in the dining room.”

“I’m the black sheep, or the black lamb, Mary.  Gordon is the multi-talented hero, Helen the actress, Jamie the bookworm and record keeper, Evette is the problem solver who steps out from the background to deliver answer and solution in one fell stroke, and Lillian is a student on the verge of becoming the teacher, eventually to become master, surpassing professors in her mastery of the Academy science.  Me?  I’m only the bastard.”

Were the sharp contrasts between light and shadow playing tricks on my eyes, or had Mary’s expression changed?

Sorry, Evette.  I hope it’s some consolation that you’re here with us in this sense, if nothing else.  A phantom enemy they have no details on.

“It was smart of you to come after me first.  Go for the weak link.  That’s a good instinct you have.”

“Something tells me you aren’t a weak link, Sylvester.”

I shrugged.  “We’re opposites, aren’t we?”

“Opposites?”

“I’m supposed to cover the gaps for the others.  You… you’re very specialized.  You were prepared for one task.  Anything else is peripheral.  I’m built to be part of a composite whole.  You… you’ve got the boys, but you don’t have them.  There’s no support.  You’re among kindred but you’re alone.”

My eyes were adjusting to the gloom.  I could see how she wasn’t moving.  Both hands held the pistol.

She didn’t move a hair.  Only the licks of fire from the furnace illuminated anything.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

This far into our dialogue, I had a sense of her.  Before, I might have had to guess.  Now I was suspicious that this was a willful lack of movement.  She was trying very hard not to give me anything.

I shrugged.  “I know more than you think.  You don’t trust your… should I call them fellow experiments?”

“I think you’re taking your own experiences and transplanting your experiences onto me.”

“Do you?  If you think I don’t trust the others with my life, you couldn’t be more wrong,” I said.  I clenched my hands, kneading the upper palms with my fingers to crack them, knowing full well that she was on the alert, that it would distract and force her to divide her focus between watching and listening.  “You, on the other hand, are paranoid.  Exceedingly careful.  Locking the door, taking the extra measures you are, keeping more than enough weapons in arm’s reach.  You made the boys a part of your plan, but you don’t trust them to have your back.”

“You keep saying that.  ‘The boys’.  I know you’re trying to make me let something slip.  Keep trying and-”

Bull,” I cut her off.  “You want to know how we operate?  This is part of it.  Every single thing you do, even this?  We can use it.  We can pick it apart and unravel it.  Every action you take, you tip your hand in one way or another.  There’s no other girl.  The boys were a group.  Ed said they were distracting whoever was walking the halls.  They, plural.”

“Ed’s friends, you mean?”

I shook my head.  “Ed and his closest buddies didn’t sit with us at dinner.  The rest like Gordon enough they wouldn’t pull something like that.  It was your fellow experiments.  The boys.  They operate as a group.  But while they shared the task of distracting the man, you have nobody else with you.  Dealing with unknown quantities, you could have had another girl there with you, standing in the shadow, ready to use the same escape route.”

I gestured toward the closed chute beside her.

“You showed yourself, acting the individual, taking point.  You showed off while doing it, that line about enjoying our meals.  That tells me you did it voluntarily, to stand out.  There’s no other girl in this narrative.  You stand alone, Mary Elizabeth Coburn, and you know it.”

She looked down at the gun.  “I feel like shooting you now.”

“That reminds me, just in case you feel like shooting me all of a sudden.  When you do it, can you do me a favor?  Shoot me in the heart?”

She looked up at me.

“I always thought my head would be what went first.  I’d kind of like to stick it to fate.”

“Not knowing what you are, I’m not sure I’m willing to risk it.  For all I know, you’re a human they grew in a jar.”

“I’m real.  Woman-born,” I said.  “An adjustment made after the fact, so my head works in a slightly different way.  A shot to the heart will kill me.  But maybe one to the heart, watch me die, then finish me off with one to the head?  As one experiment to another, it would be very much appreciated.”

“You’re a fatalistic little shit, aren’t you?  That’s really not an act, huh?”

“I said we were opposites, before.  Even our positions here make for a pretty good contrast.  You up high, armed to the teeth.  Me down below.  Roasting.  My weakness is my head.  Yours-”

“It strikes me,” she said, interrupting me, affecting an arch tone of surprise, “that I’m sitting here, and it truly feels like I’m the one being interrogated.  For the past minute or two we’ve barely talked about you in any meaningful capacity.”

That was the kind of epiphany that was punctuated by the pull of a trigger.

I’d hoped to lead into it more, but…

“If I were him, I would have told you that you were special,” I said.

She didn’t pull the trigger.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I said.  I even dropped my head down to look at the floor, so she didn’t have to worry about me studying her in the darkness.  “I’m just going to talk out loud.  You’re alone.  You’re smart enough and you have free reign enough that you have to know what happened to your predecessors.  Word gets around a school like this, and you’ve shown you can connect the dots.”

I continued, “That leaves a question.  How does he keep you in line?  How does he convince you that you’re safe, that you won’t go the same way the others did?  My line of thinking is that he tells you that out of all the tries, you worked.  This on top of whatever story he’s concocted, that he’s equipped you to kill your parents and that nobody will suspect you, the orphan.  You’ll get the inheritance and everything ends happily ever after.”

Still no bullet.

“You believed him.  You still do, because you have no other choice but to face the grim reality.  That your lifespan is measured in hours.  He tells you to do what you can to deal with us, as discreetly as possible, and then go deal with your parents.  The emetics would be his idea, but this thing with getting me in this room and having the furnace going, it’s all very well done, you put effort into it.  You’ll put effort into dealing with your parents…”

I paused.

You put the effort in because you think he’ll praise you.  You’ll be his triumph.  His girl.  You love him, as a parental figure or as anyone at the start of their journey to adulthood can be infatuated with an adult.

We’re opposites in that respect too.  You love your creator.

“…And you’ll end up exactly like the others, unable to move while the family home burns up around you,” I said, instead.  Attacking her relationship with the puppeteer would get me shot.  I raised my head to look at her.  I couldn’t quite make out her face in the gloom.  “How does he do it, Mary?”

“I thought I didn’t have to say anything,” she said.

Her words were empty of inflection, like Helen’s sometimes was.

I got it wrong?

“I’m trying to help you, you stupid little twit!” I said, clenching my hands again.  “He did something to make you sharper, to put ideas in your head, so that you’d walk the path he drew out in front of you.  I want to know so I can stop you from walking off the cliff that’s waiting at the end!”

“You seem to be forgetting something, Sylvester,” she said.  She hopped down from the edge of the workbench, and used a free hand to smooth out her dress and fix her cloak at the shoulder, the pistol never leaving me.  “Did you think that if you kept saying ‘oh, I’m going to die, I’m going to die, you’re going to kill me’ like it didn’t matter, getting me to let my guard down, that you could turn it around?  Start talking like I’m going to let you live and change my mind on that level?”

“No, actually, you’re quite wrong on that count,” I said.  “I really didn’t.  But it’s really kind of telling that you thought that.  Did you get that idea from him?  Is that how he thinks, and the sort of thing he pays attention to?”

She shook her head.

But it wasn’t a shake of negation.

Mary was losing her faith.  If there was anything I could do to keep her from stepping closer to me and pulling that trigger, it was giving her something to hold on to.

“You’re right that I’ve been interrogating you.  Thinking aloud and watching your reactions.  I can tell that you care about him, and you wanted to do this, right here, for him.  I can give you what you want.”

I can tell that you care about him.  If she was human at her core, finally having a confidant for feelings that had been under lock and key had to count for something.

“A bullet in your head?  A clean disposal?” she asked.  “A job well done?”

“I won’t tell you where Evette is.  But I can tell you who to watch out for.  You can tell him, and he’ll be pleased.  With you.”

She switched to a two-handed grip, aiming at my chest.

All show.

No way she’d shoot, now.

I decided to push my luck further.  “I have a condition.”

She let out a titter of a laugh.  Cultured through and through.

“Don’t go home.  Don’t go visit your parents.  If I’m right, then you’ll find that all the work the puppeteer has done has made it automatic.  You’ll see their faces and all at once you’ll be like a stitched, going through the motions with a very limited capacity, but all of the sharpness the puppeteer gave you.  Execute mom, execute dad, and then burn up yourself with all the rest of the evidence.  If I’m wrong, you lose nothing.  You can take the information I gave you, you can communicate the details to the puppeteer, get a rare compliment that means ever so much to you, and then go kill your parents another day.”

“Delaying gives you a window of opportunity to act against us.  If I communicate with him, that’s a chance for you to identify him.  I’m not that easily manipulated.”

“No you aren’t,” I agreed.  “But you’re wrong about my motivations.  Years ago, back at the beginning of my becoming Sylvester, I stole my file.  I found out about the expiration dates.  That it was so common a thing that it’s a pre-typed line in the documents that go with being an experiment.  I decided that I’d dedicate myself to helping the others.  If I can keep them alive longer, or support them, I’ll do that.  But I think my best bet is to prove that Professor Hayle’s secret project was a success.  Because then they’ll want to keep us alive, they’ll dedicate more to us.”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“You’re similar to the others.  To me, as much as I talk about us being opposites.  I want to keep you alive because you’re kindred.  Not kin, but a bird of the same feather.  Your success is our success, even if we’re on opposite sides.  Even the puppeteer’s success is, in a way.”

“I’m starting to regret letting you talk at all.”

“Because I hit the mark?” I asked, hopeful.

“Because that’s the biggest load of goatshit I’ve ever heard,” she said.

With the back of my head against the door, I could hear the sound of footsteps.  Heavier, running.

No! I thought, even as I kept my expression still.

Not now, I thought.  You damn idiot.  You’ll force her hand and get me shot.

The footsteps receded.  Going the wrong direction.  I resisted the urge to sigh in relief.

I was now forced to rush it.  I couldn’t keep stringing her along, offering her bait to keep her from pulling the trigger.

“Gordon is the one you should watch out for.  Investigating?  He’s still learning.  Acting, disguise, infiltration?  He’s okay at the third, in terms of sheer agility and ability to get places, but the rest are points he needs to shore up.  But when they figure out who the puppeteer is, and they just about have, it’s Gordon who will handle the man.  You can tell the puppeteer that.”

“Assuming I tell him anything.”

You have to, I thought.  Evette is too dangerous as an unknown.

“Assuming you tell him anything, yeah,” I agreed.

The footsteps resumed.  There was a murmur of voice.

Gordon was too fast, and the others were at the bottom of the stairs.

For gods sake, at least be quiet.

I heard a statement, quick and quieter than the ones prior.  Then silence.

They’d seen the light from the furnace under the door, or they’d heard something.

Now they were coming.

“Do what you have to,” I said.  “But know that whatever you do, the moment you go home to fulfill your last order, you’ll be a statistic to the puppeteer, and nothing more.  You’ll revert to the instructions he gave you, and in the midst of it, you’ll be completely and utterly alone.”

The expression in her face went cold.  Angry.  A killer’s eyes.  I believed her, that she didn’t have an iota of mercy in her when it really came down to it.  Her world had been reduced to her and her creator.

“In the meantime, Mary, keep in mind that there are others like you out there.  Including me, at least until you pull that trigger.”

The best way to lie was to believe the lie.  Not that I was lying, but the idea connected to the next.

The best way to surprise someone was to be surprised as well.

The door smashed into the room with a force that sent me from my seat at its base to the center of the room.

Gordon pushed aside the remnants of the door.  It looked as though he’d dislocated his shoulder, from the way he held his arm.

Mary, holding the gun, seemed momentarily caught between finishing me off while I lay two feet from her and dealing with the boy that was half-again her size and apparently capable of throwing himself through a door.

She decided in the same instant Gordon moved.  The pistol wheeled on him, and he threw himself between the wall and the furnace.  The bullet flashed where it hit the edge of the furnace.

She spent five shots in total, and then aimed at me.  I covered my face.

I heard the bullet, but didn’t feel it.

She reached to the table to seize the hatchet, and moved toward me.

Taking me hostage with a hatchet?  She was careful enough to sharpen it.

That would be ideal, but the others wouldn’t let her do it.  There were benefits to acting alone, I supposed.

Instead, I pointed at Gordon.

He was already emerging from behind the furnace.  She heaved the weapon at him, an expert motion, sending handle spinning over axehead.  He ducked back behind the furnace for cover, while the axe struck the wall right where his head had been.

She leaped over my legs on her way to the coal chute, throwing the door open.

Gordon moved to follow.

I heard a rasp.

“Nope!” I called out.  Non-sequitur, but it was what my brain produced in the moment.

Gordon paused.

Fire appeared within the chute.

Our golden boy kicked the chute door closed before the fire could touch the pile of coal at the chute’s base.

Leaving Mary to make her well-planned escape.

I let my head sink back to rest against the floor.  Above me, at the doorway, I could see the others standing on either side of the door, peering into the room.

“What did you get from her?” Helen asked.

“How are you doing, Sy?” I asked, injecting plenty of sarcasm into my voice, “How did you do it, Sy?  Are you okay?”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What did you get from her?” she asked, again.

I sighed.

Gordon offered me a hand in getting to my feet.

“I think she’s vat grown,” I said.  “When pressed, the first thing that popped into her head was a person grown in a bottle.  That’s where I’d lay my money.”

“Vat grown?” Gordon asked.  “Made from scratch?  No, that would be next to impossible, if they’re supposed to resemble the kids they ended up replacing.”

I nodded.  “Clones.  Possibly with implanted behaviors.  Probably something plugged in for imprinting to their creator and a reversal of the typical love for your parents.”

“We can work with that as a starting point,” Jamie said.

“We have a lot to work with,” I said, looking down at the mark the bullet had made in the floor when she’d fired at me.

Too far away to be anything but a deliberate miss.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.08 – Twig

Taking Root 1.8

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“You’re bleeding,” Lillian noted, touching my chin.

“Someone shoved a door into me,” I said, glancing back at Gordon.

“You’re welcome,” Gordon said.

“Thank you,” I said.  “I appreciate the rescue.  The sentiment, anyway.”

Now it was his turn to shoot me a look.  I was going to say something, but Lillian grabbed my chin, lifting it up.  She patted at it with a pad that smelled like something burnt.

“We almost missed you,” Jamie said.  “We went to the yard, then we were going to split up from there.  I didn’t think you’d be straight down from the dorm room.”

“I saw the smoke at the chimney,” Gordon said.  “I thought it was the kitchen, but Jamie knew the layout better than I did, and we found our way down here.”

“Good as my memory might be, I’m not in top form when I’ve just woken up.  We went to the wrong end of the hall.  There are multiple furnaces for different sections of the building.”

Slow to get things moving, I thought.

“I feel terrible I almost fucked up,” Jamie said.  “It would have been better to follow you first, then gone to get Gordon.”

“They would have seen you and adjusted the plan,” I said.  “This would have gone worse if it was the two of us instead of just me.”

“How’s that?” Gordon asked.

“She could have hurt Jamie to pressure me, or done it the other way around.  Being alone, I could build a rapport.”

“You could have gotten shot,” Jamie said.

“When push came to shove, she missed.  I think there was a reason she missed.”

“More than her being pressed for time?” Jamie asked.

I nodded.  “She’s been imprinted with set behaviors, but she’s still human, with hopes and fears.  Right now, she’s uncertain, very possibly more than she’s ever been in her whole life.  Her creator more or less had a monopoly on how she behaved.  Grow a child in a vat, imprint them with behaviors that fit the grand plan, stick them in school to surround them with people to mimic and model themselves after, step in now and again to reinforce, shape behavior and train.  I’m the first real challenge to her reality.  I’ve got her questioning things.”

“You make me question my reality,” Gordon said.

“Ha ha,” I said.  Lillian examined my hands, turning them face-up.  She had to squint to see, but she put the powder on the bases of my palms, where I’d scuffed them on the floor during my fall.

“What’s the next step?” Jamie asked.

“Sy’s call,” Gordon said.

“I gave her ideas and things to worry about.  I don’t think she’s going to check in with her compatriots here.  It would increase the chance of running into us a second time.”

“You don’t think she’s confident about their abilities?” Gordon asked.  “She threw that hatchet like a pro.”

“She’s confident in her abilities.  But that’s not where I hit her.  It’s called dissonance.  You believe one thing deeply enough that it’s central to your identity.  Then something, me, steps in to challenge that belief.  It’s a hell of a leap of faith to go from believing something and understanding how much of the world works, to saying ‘I don’t know’.  Some deny, and you can get stupid-as-hell behaviors from those who see something plain as day but deny it because it conflicts with something they believe.  Some get angry, some distract themselves until they can figure out how to deal with it… but very few will turn around and throw themselves headlong into more questions.  More dissonance.”

“If she’s not going to her old friends-” Jamie started.

“Which would force her to face the questions,” I cut in.

“Or coming after us-“

“Risks even more questions,” I added.

Jamie frowned at my interruptions.  “She’s going another place, another route.  Who is she?  How does she operate?  Will she try to escape her worries by fulfilling her mission?”

“I told her that if she tries, she might well lose herself to her imprinted behaviors.  I don’t think so.  She’ll want answers, I think we should track her and get some answers for ourselves.”

“She just covered her trail pretty well there,” Gordon said.  “Is it even possible?”

“It’s possible,” I said.  “We know where she’s going.  She’s going to pay a visit to her creator.”

“Which would be great if we knew who he was,” Jamie said.

“It would,” I said.  “It’s not going to be in the school.  If it was another kind of project, maybe it could be hidden, but if I’m right, and these are clones grown in tubes, then it’s too big a task.  Even ignoring that, she’s trained.  That takes time, and it takes space.  You need room to swing weapons around or practice your aim with a pistol.  A school with thirty members of faculty and over a thousand students isn’t going to give you that.”

“Off-campus, can’t be too far away,” Jamie said.  “How often would this training happen?”

“Training, instructions, shaping behavior,” Gordon said.  “I’d guess once a week?  Can’t say.”

“If they are vat-grown,” Helen said, “Then they’d need training on other fronts.  How to be human, basic niceties.  How to use silverware, how to talk… it might not take too long, but they need to be able to pass.”

“A house,” I said.  “That’s more what we’re looking for than where.”

“With a kitchen, clothes…” Helen said.

“Room to move around,” Gordon said.  “It’s not a small house with walls shared with anyone else.  Neighbors would get suspicious and complain about the noise just as much as anyone else.”

“And,” Jamie said, “There’s the question of how you make a child act well enough like their former self to pass muster with the child’s own parents.”

Gordon frowned.  “I really don’t want to run away with the wrong idea here.  If we go chasing after a wild goose, we might not get another opportunity to get them.  How sure are you, Sy?”

I leaned against the wall.  Lillian finished checking me over, and moved over to Gordon.  She began unbuttoning his shirt.

“How sure?  Um.  It fits.  The little detail thing that Jamie was oh-so-recently trying to get me to focus on.”

“He wasn’t there for that conversation,” Jamie said.

“Wasn’t he?”

“No,” Jamie said, very patiently.

Gordon grunted as Lillian pushed his shoulder back into the socket.  She had him go through a range of motions, extending his arm and moving it around.

“Well, Jamie was talking about the little things that we don’t necessarily pay attention to, that still register in the subconscious.  I made a point of calling Mary an experiment, part of my trying to build a rapport with her.  She never called me out on it or sounded uncomfortable with the idea.  I don’t think she’s ever had illusions about being anything else.  She paid a lot of attention when I talked about roles, identity, labels.  Part of that is going to this school, but part of it is that she’s acting out a role, and has been for a long time.  Whatever’s going on with her, it runs deep.”

“One student died and was autopsied,” Gordon said.  “The rest burned.  Wouldn’t a clone turn up on autopsies?”

“Moment I heard about the remainder being burned, I thought maybe they missed something in the first autopsy, and our puppeteer went out of his way to risk a second close call.  But I don’t know for sure whether it would show up.”

After a pause, we collectively turned to Lillian.

“It depends on a lot,” she said.

“That doesn’t tell us anything,” I said.

“Don’t be a butthole, Sy,” Jamie told me.

I rolled my eyes.

“If he tried to accelerate growth, which he must have, then there’s a good chance something would show up.  There are chemical ways to promote aging.  Hormones, substances, alter the seventh ratio.  But those substances turn up, and they have effects.  Any drug is like a puzzle piece.  We flood the body with puzzle pieces of a particular shape, and intend for those pieces to fit into a specific place and enact a specific function, but you can’t stop it from connecting to other sites, enacting other functions.  It’s how we get side effects.  We control it with how we deliver the medication and other factors, and some of the best graduates of the Academy have it down to an art, making it so one drug only affects one thing in one way, but that’s a delicate balancing act.  That’s without getting into the fact that a badly made clone might be more prone to wear, tear, and side effects.”

“Is our guy that good?” Jamie asked.  “Enough to have the aging drugs down to an art, hiding symptoms from an autopsy?”

“We don’t know,” Gordon said.  “But if what Sy said is true, I’d say he isn’t.  He has one area of focus and he’s giving his all in pursuing it.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “The second method is more complimentary, then.  Altering the fundamental pattern of the clones.  Humans mature at an exceptionally slow rate.  We saw people try this a decade ago in the Indian Empire.  Crown scientists tried to make a slave class that grew to maturity, with a specific level of intelligence.  Domesticated humans, strong, playful, good natured, attractive, and obedient.  If I’m not mistaken, they tried a lot of things, including imprinted behaviors.”

Like Mary?  I raised my eyebrows.  “How did it go?”

“How do you think it went, Sy?” Gordon asked.  “Do you see slaves everywhere?”

“That’s not saying it didn’t work,” I said.

“It’s pretty damn indicative,” Gordon said.

“Guys, guys,” Jamie cut in.  “Focus.  Please.  We need to figure out a direction to go, here.”

“It involves other problems,” Lillian said.  “Like the drugs and hormones, it’s an art unto itself.  It requires precision of a different sort, and a broad kind of knowledge.  There’s prior work to draw on, other projects that tried similar things, but there would be signs of the attempt that would crop up in an autopsy, unless the work was perfect.  Change one thing in the pattern, and it has ripple effects throughout the organism’s development and makeup.”

“I didn’t realize it was that difficult,” Helen said.

“Oh my god.  It really, really is,” Lillian said, eyes wide, the incredulity she wasn’t voicing clear in her expression.

“Again, if our puppeteer was that good, why the hell isn’t he already employed by the Academy and earning a small fortune for his talents?” Gordon asked.  A rhetorical question.

Many of us were nodding.

“Got any more suggestions, Lillian?” Jamie asked.  “Because this is good.  Very useful.  But I don’t think it’s screaming ‘this is our guy’.”

“For accelerating aging?  Those would be the best routes,” Lillian said.  “There are others, but I think I’d be wasting our time.”

“Then we’re stuck,” Gordon said.

“No.  Not exactly.  There’s a third possibility,” Lillian said.  “Maybe more, but I’m only thinking of three.  It kind of complicates things.”

“Go on,” Gordon said.

“Don’t,” Lillian said.  “Don’t accelerate the aging.  If you need them to age, you make them age by letting time pass.”

“Mary is twelve,” Gordon said.  “He’s had this plan in the works for twelve years?”

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “Except not exactly.”

I opened my mouth, and Jamie shot me a look.  I closed my mouth before he called me a butthole again for my poking fun at Lillian.

“I said it complicates things,” Lillian said.  “Because our ‘puppeteer’ could strike a balance.  Some natural aging.  Some hormones or changes to the pattern.  The more he relies on real time passing, the less he needs to accelerate the process.  Maybe this project has only been in the works for nine years, or six.”

“Meaning there could be clues,” Gordon said, “Ones that slipped through in the autopsy.”

Lillian nodded.

“More time to develop them,” Helen said.  “Either he inserts them while they’re young, where a half-socialized clone might go unnoticed amid rabid and rambunctious first graders, or he waits and he observes their real counterpart, and he trains the clones to mime the behaviors in his off-hours.”

“Yeah.  We were wondering why he picked Mary,” I said.  “Her parents don’t seem important.  But if this project has been in the works for a while…”

“Maybe we should be looking at who they were,” Gordon finished for me.  “Or who they were supposed to become.  Our puppeteer was taking stabs in the dark, this could be a stab that missed.”

“I can look into that end of things, given time,” Jamie said.

“We might not have a lot of time, but go for it,” I said.  “After you direct me to wherever student records are stored.”

“By the front entrance.  Below the front office.”

“Good,” I said.  “Great.  I’m going.  It’s better if I’m not here.  Assuming Mary hasn’t communicated anything to her fellow clones, they’ll assume I’m dead.  Play it up, act upset and distressed.  Stick together, try to keep them distracted and occupied.  Best case scenario, they’ll still think I’m dead and I can catch them off guard when I’m back.”

“If you do, don’t try to fight them,” Gordon said, his expression blank.

“They’re trained, I know,” I said.

“That, too,” Gordon said.

I frowned, but I was already heading toward the stairs, so I turned on the spot, switching to walking backward, if only to make my expression as clear as possible.

“Lillian,” I spoke up.

She looked at me, a crease between her eyebrows.  Annoyance, worry?

“That Academy know-how you just dropped on us?  That was good.  Smart stuff.”

If anything, the crease between her eyebrows deepened.  Her mouth moved, the start of a frown.

I didn’t see the rest of it.  I headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time, very nearly silent.  I ducked low and peered into the darkness to check the way was clear.  Only when I was on the move again did I spare Lillian’s expression another thought.  I’d given her a compliment, and she’d reacted like I’d slapped her in the face.

Dissonance, I realized.

The school’s prison-like elements turned out to make being stealthy remarkably difficult.  The rooms were large and every single one, bathrooms excepted, had a window, either facing out into the street or inward, at the yard.  I couldn’t very well turn on the lights without the room illuminating and risking that people half of the Academy’s rooms could see through their windows.

My movements through the front office, thus, were done with the benefit of and detriment of darkness.

The doors, I had to assume, were locked.  At the same time, people were far worse about attending to windows.

Water ran down over me and through my hair while I scaled the wooden branches and twigs that grew into and around the masonry.  It was far finer than the usual, not quite branches but not so thin as to be ivy, it was thorny, to discourage children in the yard from climbing on it, but it was still a place where I could find handholds, if I was careful to do it.

All the same, I was left bleeding in no less than five places; I couldn’t always see the thorns in the dark.

I reached the window and teased it open.  I slipped inside, then closed it behind me.

Glancing outside, I didn’t see any lights going on, suggesting that a faculty member might have seen the dark shape scaling the paler wall.

Jamie had told me that the records were kept beneath the front office, and my experience with the headmistress had suggested the office’s location.  Rather than go straight for the records, I found myself in the room between the front entrance and the principal’s office.  Typewriters sat on desks where the secretaries were stationed, benches lined one half of the room, and desks and cabinets of papers and supplies filled the other half.

The principal’s office, once I found it with its name plate on the door, proved to be unlocked.  I was glad I didn’t have to go out and back in again.

The interior of her office had a desk and chair, cabinets, some pictures meant to impress parents more than please herself or her students.  There were prominent faces I couldn’t name depicted on the wall.  Gradutes of Academies.  A ‘this could be your student in ten years’ thing.

But I knew that however good she was, few people remembered every detail about every single one of the people who worked under them.  If some of her staff slept in the building, some slept out, she still needed a means of contacting them.

I found a box of notecards, filled with teacher’s names and mailing addresses.  I took it with me.

Humans were complex creatures.  Add the rewriting of patterns, augmentations, grafts, revival, drugs, and everything else, and ‘human’ became an awfully unclear term.  Every new discovery meant the introduction of things that had never been done or discovered before, more things that muddied the waters.

Or bloodied them.

My ‘gang’ was muddy and bloody both, but they were fairly simple, with defined roles.  Here, in this, I was the odd one out.  If all five of the other projects were successes, I might never have been given the go-ahead.  It was sobering, to know that the foundation and excuse for my being rested on the backs of two corpses.

Two who were like me.

I’d been asked, once, how I could predict people as I did.  Jamie, I think, had raised the subject.  My answer had been simple.

Humans as a species were like a collection of bugs in a box.  Left alone, it was hard to predict how they’d move, or the patterns that would form.

Shake the box, and it generated chaos.  Maddened, they would seek to escape, butting their heads against barriers.  They would turn on their closest neighbors and strike out.  Even seek to kill.  In their frenzied movements, they were very predictable.

Jamie had been very quiet after that response of mine.

But it was true.  It worked on many levels.  Force people into darkness, then offer them a light, and they were a moth to a candle flame.

The darkness that surrounded Mothmont wasn’t my darkness.  It was meant to work against me.

But it was darkness I could use.  The headmistress was worried, and I very much doubted she was sleeping after so many of her students fell ill.  Many of them had rich and powerful parents.  She’d been driven into a corner.

Taking a blank piece of paper from the drawer of her desk, I placed it on the top, and I penned out a simple statement with a fountain pen.

The Academy would like for you to please order a quarantine.  Your students are to be fully examined in the wake of their illnesses, regardless of whether they fell ill.  Take care that it includes one and all, and that it is by members of the Academy. 

None of the blame in this lies with you.  Provided you speak of this letter to no-one, you have nothing to worry about.  All will be well.

Giving the moth her candle flame.

The only way this situation could go sour was if something happened to my group, or if more of the puppeteer’s Bad Seeds decided to make a break for their families.

The quarantine would keep that from happening and it would force our adversaries into a corner.  If there was something they were trying to hide from an autopsy, they might well be uncomfortable with a full physical examination.

The only danger was that she might not listen.

Let it never be said that I couldn’t have fun.

I opened the fountain pen and took a second to work it out.  There was a syringe by the ink bottle.

I hated needles.

But I didn’t hate them so much that it would stop me.

I took a minute to empty the pen with the syringe, and then took another minute to refill the syringe with blood from a thorn-puncture in my palm.

I penned out an illegible signature in blood.

Let her think about that.

I locked the door,then locked all but one of the windows.  Removing a shoe to wipe at the drips of water on the floor, retreating while I covered my tracks, I found my way to the remaining window and drew out a bit of thread from my sleeve and cut it with a letter opener, which I pocketed.  I carefully looped it around the latch-end, leaving more than enough slack – there was a good foot between my hand and the loop that sat around the latch’s arm.  Only tension keeping things from falling to mess and disaster.  Pointing up, the latch was unlocked.  A simple turn meant it fit into a waiting cradle, and resisted attempts to open the window.

I climbed out of the window, then eased the window shut.  Pulling on the thread with the knot, I worked the latch down, until it sat in the cradle.

I pulled on one end of the thread, and worked it out of the gap in the window.

There.

Let her wonder who at the Academy would be leaving her a message signed in blood, in a room with all means of entrance and egress properly locked and sealed.

Hopefully while she was wondering she wouldn’t be telling herself she couldn’t risk the quarantine.

I headed down one floor, sticking myself with a few more thorns on the way.  I was thoroughly soaked by the time I reached the set of windows on the ground floor.

The letter opener slid between windows to lift a latch.  I let myself into the records room.

The benefits of an organization being as hoity-toity as Mothmont were that they kept good records.  I had what I needed in two minutes.  Mary Cobourn.  I tucked it into my waistband behind my back, and pulled my shirt down to cover it.

I exited through a window opposite the one I’d entered, stepping out onto the street beyond Mothmont.

The rain poured down on me and the notecards.  I didn’t care.

She had them categorized.  Staff was a category.

Of that staff, two thirds were women.

I found myself fumbling through the cards that remained, wishing Jamie were around.

Jamie would know the names of streets better than I did, even in an unfamiliar end of town.

Still, we knew they were close.  If these students were paying regular visits, they had to be slipping away in the evenings, or when others were making their special visits to the Academy.

House, I thought.

I placed two cards back in the box when the addresses suggested apartments.

Another card, McCairn’s, proved to be too far away.  Poor bastard probably had to travel a ways every morning and night.

Unless he was staying at the Academy like he had tonight.  Either way, I felt confident in ruling him out.

Richards, Harper, Mason, Kelly, Caldwell, Percy, and Blankenship.

I moved at a quick pace through the rain, favoring the parts of the street where the lamp-light didn’t shine.  The only soul who saw me was a large man that was walking a near-empty cart of bodies through the streets, ringing a bell with a low tone.  Coin for bodies.  The area here was too nice for it to be lucrative, compared to areas closer to the orphanage where people couldn’t pay their way out of being sick.  I guessed he probably only did a walk-around once a month or once every few weeks.  Often only at night, because of the reactions the wagons drew in public.

If our puppeteer wasn’t entirely alone, there could well be a few adventurous sorts who might do the reverse transaction, lightening the wagon.

I considered for a second, then caught up with him.

It was so very human of him to be startled by my sudden, quiet appearance.  I thought for a second he might have messed himself, but the smell came from one of the bodies.

He seemed immune to the smell.  He wore a heavy rain-cloak that trailed down all the way to his calves, and was thin, with lanky hair suggesting he perhaps didn’t eat most nights.

Maybe he was doing his rounds here because others had edged him out of another territory.

“Has any one person delivered a number of children your way?” I asked.

“Children?”  He frowned.

“Boys and girls, about my age, or a little younger.”

“Dunno,” he said.

I badly wished I had some coins to spare.

“These street names,” I said.  I held up cards, pointing.  “Where are these?”

He gave me some quick directions.

“Any with big houses?”

He shrugged.  “Most.  Why?”

“Work with me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

He scoffed.

I remained still and silent, hoping that he might come around if I was serious enough.

He didn’t.  At the end of the day, I was only a child, half-drowned in the heavy rain.

“Out of my way if you don’t want to get run over,” he said.

I stepped closer, and I stuck the letter opener into his crotch.  Not hard enough to pierce anything, but enough to let him know there was a point to it.

I didn’t say or do anything.  I remained where I was, a blade held close to a part no man wanted to lose.

I waited, once more, not moving or making a noise, hoping he would come around this time.

My hand went up, holding the soaked cards with their running ink.  He caught my wrist, and for a second I thought he had me.

I pushed the point a little deeper, and his entire pelvis moved back.  I was careful to keep the blade in place.  I suspected the point might have hooked on a tag of skin, incentivizing him to stay right where he was.

There was a growl to his voice as he said, “Trellis is closest further down that way.  Then Yarrow, a little to the right, then in same direction, then Olds which is a hard right.  You’ll see the other two streets if you stick to Olds.  Biggest houses on Yarrow.”

I nodded, “Let go of me, now.”

He did.

I twisted away, withdrawing my letter opener, and splashed off into the rain.

Trellis was dark.  The buildings looked more like apartments than anything else.

Yarrow was where I found my prize.  Mr. Percy’s residence.

The lights weren’t on, but there was a candle flame on the second floor, and as ever, the branches were inviting in how they offered me places for my hands and feet.

I got as close as I could to the window where I’d spied the candle flame, where it rose from a steeply sloping roof, and I listened.

“…the boys!?” Mary’s voice rose at the end, a question.

There we go, I thought.

And she was using the words I’d given her, using my labels.

I sat back and listened.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.09 – Twig

Taking Root 1.9

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“Mary, I won’t talk to you while you’re being like this.”

“I’m scared!  I’ve never been scared!  And you’re not answering my questions, which-”

“Mary.”

“-isn’t making me feel any better!”

I shifted positions and settled back, now that I knew I was close enough to hear, the box of notecards in my lap, the contents thoroughly soaked.  The words were muffled by the intervening wall and window, but I could make them out and differentiate the speakers.  The man, who I was assuming was Percy, was speaking in a very careful, measured tone.

Mary was displaying more emotion in a given word than I’d seen from her during my entire discussion with her.

The rain streamed over me, and I pushed my hair straight back, away from my face, glad that it was so very wet that it didn’t just spring back into the most inconvenient position.  I was soaked through, and imagined that the spot at my back where the file was tucked into my waistband was so wet that the print from the pages was staining my skin.

It wouldn’t, but I still imagined it.

Where my skin was new on my arms and various points on my body, I could feel the cold of the rain like rough circles of ice.  The passage of a single droplet left an ache singing through my nerves for seconds after it was gone.

I shifted over, so the section of the room that jutted out to frame the window was tight against one of my arms and the slight overhang of shingles provided a bit of shelter.  It helped.

The puppeteer spoke, “Mary.  I told you to be ready for anything, that the Academy was almost guaranteed to respond.  You did very well to discover them as early and accurately as you did.  I’m proud of you for accomplishing that.”

“It wasn’t anything special.  A group of kids shows up all at once?  Just had to keep an eye on them.  The boys-”

“The boys,” he said, and he gave the word a different tone in the process.  He was apparently noting the phrasing.

“They did most of the work there, finding the group from the Academy.”

“I’m still proud of you, Mary,” he said.  There was a pause, uncomfortable and long.  I had to fight the urge to peek in the window.  The puppeteer resumed, his voice low and soothing, as if talking to an infant “Deep breath now.  In… and out.  There we go.  Tears wiped away, hair fixed up, and you’re not so flustered.  Do you feel a little better?”

“A little.”

“We knew they would send someone or something.  I warned you to be prepared for anything.”

“I thought it would be… one of those tools you hear the Academy talking about.  The Dog and Catcher, or the man with the hands.  Something like that.  I was expecting to have to deal with monsters, I didn’t…”

“You didn’t…?” the puppeteer asked, trailing off much as Mary had.

“I wasn’t prepared for them to be like that.”

My eyebrows were already up.

The Dog and Catcher were well known enough as they could be seen around town, but I was surprised that ‘the man with the hands’ had come up.  That would be the Hangman file from the Academy, and that file was pretty damn confidential.  Enough so that even I hadn’t known about it until I’d started to wonder what special project the Tackhouse had put together and went out of my way to get the file.

Had the little clones here been similarly busy during Mothmont’s excursions to the Academy?

“You’re very much alive, Mary, which you might well not be if it was another individual or group from the Academy.  I’m quite grateful for that fact.”

“I don’t know how to move forward, and I don’t like standing still when I’m not sure where I stand.  The boys-”

“Your brothers are your brothers, nothing else.  You were born from the same womb.  Have I spent half as much time in their company as I have in yours?”

“No,” Mary said.

“You look like you still have doubts,” he said.

“I’m okay,” Mary said.  “About the children from the Academy-”

“Don’t change the subject.  Do you have doubts, Mary?”

“Yes.”

“Try to voice them.  I’d like a chance to answer them.”

“I feel as though, if I had to guess, you might have told them that they were special, and you only spend time with me because I need the extra practice and training.”

“No, Mary.  No, no no,” he said.  I could hear the huff of a heavy sigh.  “I’m so caught off guard by the idea that I don’t even know what to say.”

“I knew it was unfair,” Mary said, and her voice was so quiet I could barely hear it.  “There isn’t a right answer, nothing you could say that would make me feel better.  So I wasn’t going to say anything.  It’s poison they put into my head, and I don’t want the poison to bleed out into this.  Us, our family, our home.”

“Tell me.  Share your worries when they come up.  I know that what we’re doing here is a lonely exercise.  I rely on you and your brothers to be my hands, while I continue to refine my work.  I hope you can rely on me in the same way.”

Her reply was so soft I couldn’t hear it.

“Good,” he said.  “That’s what I like to hear.”

“What do we do?”

“Your brothers are in the dark?”

“Yes.”

“We fix that, first.  I’m glad you came to me, but as special as you are to me, I do care about your brothers.”

“Yes.”

“We can’t do anything about this unknown member of the group.  From your description, I imagine she’s better suited against specific threats that are vulnerable to a chemical or counteragent.”

“I thought about that.  She can’t do anything without communication, either.  The members of the Academy children have to give her information to work with, if she’s going to do anything to find us.  If we wait and watch, they’ll eventually lead us to her.”

I wanted to laugh.  The irony.

“The boy, Gordon, he was a physical threat?”

“I don’t know if you could call him that.  He’s stronger than he looks.  He shoved his way through a locked door.  Sylvester, the one I talked to, he said Gordon was the one to watch out for.  Described him as being a jack of trades, or something like that.  Physical prowess.”

“The one to watch out for.  Do you believe him?”

“No.  Not completely.  But he said Gordon would come for you, if they identified you.”

“They will, and he will, I think,” the puppeteer said.

“I don’t want that.”

“Nor do I.  But I don’t see any way around it.  This is how the Academy operates, and just as we can’t cry over the rain, which we cannot change, we cannot cry about the Academy being what it is.”

“I like the rain,” Mary said, and her voice was a hair louder than it had been.

I was sitting beside the window, to the point where I was looking across it rather than into it, but the square of orange where the glass had caught the light from within changed as Mary’s head and upper body blocked some of it.

She was only two feet from me, and she didn’t even know it.

I shifted one hand to cover the spot on my arm where it was sensitive, the cold almost unbearable.  Unfortunately, the backs of my hands had suffered as much as anything, and the cold rain touched them just as sharply.

The light shifted again.  The puppeteer had drawn closer to the window as well.

“A moment ago you said you were afraid.  For the first time?”

“Yes.”

“Fear is rooted in the unknown.  I think that is why great minds tend to find such an unreasonable confidence in the process of plumbing it.  They face the unknown, they conquer it, and they diminish it until it no longer holds sway over them, and they continue to charge onward.”

“When you say great minds, do you include yourself?”

“I don’t.”

“I would,” Mary retorted, without hesitation.

“You’re biased.  Someone could say I’m clever, and I might agree with them, but I wouldn’t say I’m great.  We’re getting sidetracked.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t planning on sharing this with you.  It’s not because I was hiding anything, but because I didn’t see the need.  But if it helps you forge through the unknown, there’s a need.  I may not know who they are, but I know what they are.  Or is it the other way around?”

“The Academy children?”

“Yes.  More than a decade ago, I was involved with the Academy.”

“Involved?”

“The system and structure were different.  For a time, the amount of space outpaced the glut of students.  They opened the doors and let some in.”

“You?  Really?”

“I was one such individual.  Not a true student.  I didn’t pay a tuition, and I didn’t ever harbor delusions of being a graduate, a teacher or a professor.  They left us scraps, told us that when classes weren’t full we could fight between ourselves to take the additional spots.  We could use the libraries, and we had to put in a certain number of hours in service to the Academy.  Each and every one of us knew that if a paying student walked in the door, one of us would be leaving in that same heartbeat.  Those of us who endured it did so because we were hungry for it.”

“Why?”

“Why were we hungry, or why did we do it?” the puppeteer asked.

“Why did you do it?  How could you stand being second class citizens?”

Does that rub you the wrong way?  Do you think that if people knew what you were, that they would put you a rung lower than any ‘true’ human?  Think you derivative?  A curio?

“We were told that we were training to be assistants.  To know our way around the labs and the books and to know what needed stirring and how often, or to be effective sounding boards for the real great minds, when they were talking their way through a problem.  Every seat we were able to claim for ourselves was another dollar we were worth.”

“It’s weird, hearing you talk about the Academy like this.  You hate them.”

“I do.  That doesn’t mean I don’t value the knowledge or the education.  I got my position at Mothmont.  Everything they promised came true.”

“But?”

“But we’re getting off topic,” he said.

“That’s not what I was asking.”

“I’m giving you a different answer to a different question.  Listen, I managed to barter my way into a seat for a class, I think it was called ‘The Applied Mind’.  We were given projects.  Brainstorming, application.  Students had to work in groups, and I was paired with another non-student student.  He lost his position in the school, leaving me entirely on my own.  My project was amateurish, more concept than anything close to a proper execution.  But I got to sit through the entire class and I got glimpses of the work others did.  They kept it quiet, but they couldn’t completely silence twenty-five students out of a class of sixty.  The timing made too much sense, with the first appearance of certain special projects.”

“You’re talking about the Academy children?  They’re the work the other groups did?”

“Yes, I think so.  You’ve already told me some of it.  I moved on to another year of classes, and I heard through word of mouth that the project had fallen through, not enough viable results.  Died in the womb.  I saw how despondent some of the students were, and I believed it.  I heard the department was getting cut back a great deal, and I believed that too.  I still do.  I paid attention for two more months, and then my seat was taken.”

“They’re not just a special project, but a secret one?”

“One of several.  But, based on everything you’ve shared with me, those details I could process in the rare moments you stopped for breath, I remain suspicious these Academy children are a failed project.”

“Failed?”

“Only a suspicion.  The funding is spent, the department was cut back, but several of the projects lived, and it costs relatively little to keep an ongoing project operating.  Perhaps other failures were given a second chance because it was inexpensive.  It would explain the group being larger than it should.  Thus, we would have a failed project maintained as long as there is spare change to keep it going, made use of whenever an appropriate situation comes up.”

“He said something about being injured, and it was recent.  I don’t think we’re the first job they’ve done lately.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t a niche project,” he said.

“That’s true.”

“I was there for the conception, the brainstorming, and the discussions.  All I took away was that it wasn’t a roaring success, and a great many people were disappointed.  I don’t think I retained anything else that’s noteworthy… well, one thing, of course.”

“One thing?”

“You, Mary.  Your brothers.  You were my project.  The seed of the idea was born then.  It sat with me for a few years, until I had the means to make it happen.”

Mary was silent.

“You were a gamble.  You still are, but back then, I remember losing sleep.  I tried to put two projects forward, but I only had so much time to dedicate to the task.  I had to make a decision.  Would I follow the instructions to the letter with an inferior idea, or would I present you, knowing that you were novel as an approach, but doomed to be dismissed for not fitting to the rules?”

“He said- Sylvester said that the Academy prizes innovation.”

“Yes.  He’s right, and that idea is probably why I decided to do what I did.  I thought a great deal about what happened back then.  What I’d do differently, given a second chance.  Then I decided to see it through, and I did it on my own, which is something they can never forgive me for.”

“Because they want control,” she said.

“Yes.  As much as they prize innovation, they prize control more.  A mind that runs away with ideas is cherished there, so long as it remains there.  Within or with the Academy.  Here?  Past arm’s length?  Not something cherished, but despised.  That’s our enemy.”

“A little less of an unknown,” Mary said.

“Yes.  Now you know why they’re doing what they’re doing.  You have a sense of who they are.  A failed venture.  Does that take some of the fear away?”

“Yes.”

“Your hand,” he said.  There was a pause.  “Look at that, it’s as steady as a rock.  Arm yourself, conceal the weapons, but bring enough to arm your brothers.  I’m going to the school, and you’re coming with me.”

“You’re going to the school?” she asked, and she sounded anything but calm.  I heard sounds as she followed the instructions, all the same.

“Where do you think I should go?”

“Anywhere but the school.”

“You don’t think they’ll find me?  Or that they might have sent other resources after us?  I’m safest in your company, in the cover of the crowd, or where I can use my power as a member of the school faculty.  I’ll have all three of those things at the school for as long as I’m there, which won’t be for long.  You can’t communicate with your brothers for as long as the Academy children know your face.  Leave that much to me.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t.  You were always my most careful one.”

“You’re going ahead with this?”

“I don’t see any other way to do it.  Trust me, Mary.  I gave you a wealth of talents, but I’m not without my own.  This is something I can manage.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.  I’m not as afraid for me, but my fear for you is enough that I can barely think straight!”

“Mary-”

“Please.  You made me, you raised me, I’ve never refused to obey.  I’ve done everything you asked.  Let me have a say just once.”

“You would have me abandon your brothers?”

“You said they weren’t that viable.  They know what they have to do.  If they make it, they’ll fulfill their mission.  Let’s go.  Leave, take the notes, drain the tanks, burn the house to erase the evidence.  The Academy won’t catch up to us if we’re quick about it.”

“I won’t do that.”

“You said it was about me and you.  That I’d be by your side as the elder sister to all the viables.  Do this for me, prove it.  Prove that.”

“If I sacrificed your brothers to save my own skin, you would always suspect that I would do the same to you.”

“No.  I wouldn’t, I promise.  Please, don’t make what he said true.  Prove that you’re right.  Prove it!”

“Mary-”

“Prove it!”

There was a frantic edge to the words, now.

In stark contrast, the puppeteer’s voice was low and drawn out, voicing multiple syllables I couldn’t put together into a word.  A nonsense utterance with a cadence to it.

Mary had fallen silent.

An imprinted phrase?  Planned, crafted as something that wouldn’t be repeated in everyday conversation.

I heard noise, but from the heavy footsteps and creaks, I took it to be him and him alone.  Papers rustling, a thud, steps disappearing into another room, very possibly downstairs.

Almost a minute passed before his return.

“Take it,” he said.  “Drink.  Keep drinking… there.  You’re dehydrated and tired.  It’s been a long night.  Finish collecting the weapons and tools, we’re leaving as soon as I have my coat.”

“I-” Mary started.  “I don’t-”

Far more hesitant than she’d been a minute and a half ago.

What exactly had happened?

And was it something I could use?

I shifted my position, grabbing the rain-slick windowsill and leaning out and over, to glimpse the front face of the large house, locating the front door.

I slid as much as I crawled, dragging myself across the rooftop, beneath the window’s field of view, to get to the other side, and it was even more awkward a process with the box of notecards still occupying one of my hands.

My uniform was filthy, and it wasn’t just muck and dirt, but with the crawl over the shingles it was a muck and dirt that had been driven into the fabric.  I took care finding Percy’s notecard in the dark, then tucked it into a pants pocket.  The rest of the notecards I clamped between my teeth.

I waited, listening as the puppeteer resumed speaking.  “I need you to focus.  It’s been a long night, but my well being and your well being depend on your ability to watch our backs.  Remind me why you’re my best work.”

“Yes,” she said, and the word was warm with pride at the same time it was just a little faint.  Whatever he’d done to her, she was still reeling from it.

I made sure my position was secure, then snapped off the end of a shingle, where rain and weather had worn it down to the point where it was soft, hanging over the gutter.

I did the same for the next length of shingle, though it required a little more work.

Each piece was as thick as eight or so pieces of paper put together, two fingers’ width wide, and of varying lengths, all gritty like sandpaper.

Each piece of shingle went into the box.

I scooted along further, pausing now and again to listen, hearing nothing.  More shingles went into the box, but it wasn’t much larger than a brick, and I soon reached the point where the shingles were being wedged in rather than dropped in.

It was true I wasn’t good in a fight, but that didn’t mean I didn’t occasionally have my moments.

The trick was to avoid making it a proper fight, per se.

I rolled my shoulders, and found they were still stiff.  My arms were cold.

The door opened below me, and in my eagerness to react, I very nearly launched myself forward, over the gutter, and two stories down to the ground.

I hefted the weight of the box that had held the notecards.  It wasn’t so heavy.  Five, six pounds.  A little larger than a brick, and about as heavy.

While Mary was reeling from whatever the puppeteer had done to her, she might be slower to react.  I had to gauge my options, trust my ability, see them step away from the door after the puppeteer had locked it.

I got my first glimpse of the man.  Tall, hair slicked back from a widow’s peak, casually forming what looked like two horns, pointing at some area behind the back of his head.  Streaks of grey reached back from his temples.  His mustache-less facial hair swept forward much as his hair swept back, the point of the beard extending the chin of an already long face.  His jacket was long and clung to his body, adding to his apparent height and very lean build.  It was in the style of a lab coat without actually being a lab coat, very fashionable, and black.  It said as much about the man as anything else.

All put together, he was meticulous.  It was the first and last word that sprung to mind.

I’d heard his confidence as he talked about how he’d fend for himself at the school.  I knew how hard it might be to get to him, or to catch up to him once he tapped the available resources and made his escape to some other town.

Mary hadn’t quite believed him when he’d said he would be okay.

I did.

Which was why I brought the box back, and smashed the window with it.

I saw him stop, turning.  Mary turned too, but it was a slow reaction.

I’d seen Gordon in a good fight.  There were moments where I’d seen him throw a punch as his opponent turned their head, so it made the hit worse.  The opposite of rolling with the punches.  I’d fallen in love with the image and tried to emulate it in a fistfight and been kicked in the ribs several times over for my trouble.

In this case, it was pure accident, but he made it happen.  His head turned to look up at me, and the brick-ish box of shingles had already left my hand.  He brought his face straight into it.

I saw spatters of darkness that might have been blood, and I saw his ass hit the wet footpath leading between the door and the road.

I wanted to crow my victory to the night sky, to laugh at the success my ribs had suffered for just months ago, but that might have ruined the effect.

Better to stay a small, dark, dirty, drenched shape on the roof, and see if I could re-awaken little Mary’s fear all over again.  Fear of me, and fear for her puppeteer’s safety.

I saw her crouch, caught between keeping an eye on me and helping the puppeteer.

She had weapons, I knew.  She could throw a hatchet, and knives weren’t out of the question.

In a throwing contest, she was liable to win.

I had to turn up the pressure.  The moment this became a contest of skill or strength, she would win.

I reached into the broken window, disappointed that the lights were off, and felt inside until I found a wine bottle with only a few gulps left in it.  I hucked it at them.

Mary put herself between Percy and the bottle, hunching over so it smashed against her shoulder.  The top end disappeared into the grass at the boundary of the property.

The irony being that if she hadn’t put herself in the way, the course would have led to me missing entirely.

I found a book and threw that, but it opened in mid-air, drifting off course.  It landed a few feet to their left, my right.

“I’ll kill you,” she said, her voice carrying over the patter of the rain.

“Try it,” I said, blindly fumbling for the next thing I might be able to throw.  “Come after me.  We can play hide and seek, and the moment you lose track of me, it’ll be because I’m busy slitting his throat.”

I held up the letter opener.

She didn’t need to know that it wasn’t particularly sharp.  She just needed to know that I was armed.

But the gesture was a mistake, because it gave her a window to act, where she didn’t need to shield the puppeteer.  I didn’t even see her palm the knife, and her entire body moved with the throwing motion.

Not entirely surprised, I swung lazily to one side, holding on to the top of the window frame, moving over to the other side.

She was already readying to throw again.  Two knives at once?

I swung again, hoping to irritate her into making a mistake.  I badly underestimated how good she was.  The first knife hit the window frame a quarter-foot in front of my face.  A slightly faster swing, and it would have hit me.

The second knife… I didn’t feel or hear it land, and the lack of sensory awareness fed straight into that ‘prey instinct’ that Jamie and I had discussed.

A sense that something was wrong.

She’d pretended to throw two at once, but had held back the other.  Before I’d fully processed the fact that I’d almost swung right into the knife’s path, she was throwing it in a simple clean, crisp motion.  No choreographing, no putting her entire body into the throw.  The sort of thing I could very nearly miss if I wasn’t paying enough attention.

She’s aiming for-

The half formed thought was enough to make me let go of the window frame, falling and sliding until both of my feet landed in the gutter, the back of my head banging against the windowsill.

The knife buried itself into the spot where my hand had been.  While I’d been moving from side to side, my hand had been staying in place, keeping me from falling.

This time I was paying attention to what her hands were doing.  They traced the bottom of her uniform top and the fingers curled inward, holding what was presumably another throwing knife.

I grinned at her.  “I saw that.  Not quite subtle enough.”

“Don’t waste them,” the puppeteer said, raising one hand to the side of his face, then removing it, revealing a mess of blood on the fingers.  “He’s baiting you.”

“He’s a bastard,” she said.

“I never pretended to be anything but,” I said.  I reached up for a grip on the windowsill, and found a large piece of glass.  I whipped it at her.

She blocked it much as she had the bottle, flinching as it broke.  One of the eyes she’d closed remained closed after she lowered her arm.

“Go, we gain nothing by staying.  I can walk,” I heard the puppeteer say.  He rose, and Mary was quick to put her entire body under one of his arms, helping him to stand and put a few more steps worth of distance between us.

“What about the lab?” Mary said, looking up at me.

“It’s as good as gone,” the puppeteer said, mumbling some of the sounds.  The hit to his face seemed to have caught his cheekbone and nose, but that was somehow impacting his speech, too.  The skin was badly split, and it looked ragged enough that a shingle’s edge might have caught it.  An impact and a sawtooth edge.

I’d got him good, it seemed.

That wasn’t the sort of thing that made me want to shout my glee to the heavens.  The satisfaction was colder, quieter.

“You don’t have all your work,” Mary said.

“I have enough to start over.  If he wants to destroy it, he can destroy it.  Survival is paramount, and that includes yours, Mary.”

Hearing him, I almost believed it, and I would have if I hadn’t heard his special word and noted the aftermath.

I pulled another piece of glass free of the window itself, where it was only hanging on because of the paint.  I wasn’t strong enough to give it proper distance without putting so much into the throw that I’d lose all accuracy.  They were too far back, standing on the street now.  Mary and her hobbling puppeteer.

She was glaring at me through one eye, the other staying shut.

They turned, Mary watching me out of the corner of her eye, supporting the puppeteer as they retreated in the general direction of the school.

I counted the seconds between each over-the-shoulder glance she gave me.

One, two, three… glance.

One, two, three… glance.

One, two, three, fo- glance.

One two three, glance.

One, two, three, four, pausing for breath, a long stare back in my direction.

One, two, three, four, glance.

The moment she turned away, I moved.  To one side, to break line of sight, putting the corner of a building between us, then down the face of the building.  It was a reckless, haphazard descent, one where I fell more than I descended, stopping myself now and again with a grab at a window shutter or a bit of branch.

Providing the moths a flame to follow was one thing.  Creating a desire and filling it, destroying the prey at the conclusion.

It was another to leave your enemy only one path, and follow them along it.

I wasn’t strong.  I might never be.  Gordon could have brained the man with the shingle box.  Hell, even Helen could’ve.  Jamie could have done more damage, but probably would never have hit.  I’d hurt the puppeteer, at the very least.  Mankind had a long and involved history of being hunters, following a wounded beast for miles.

He’d already been intent on getting to Mothmont and gathering the boys, his three other killers.  Now it was the only place nearby that he had access to where he could tend to his injured face.

Nine in ten chance he would do that.  One in ten chance that the blow to his head would leave him relying on Mary.

It meant I didn’t need to follow, exactly.  That carried its own risks, when little Mary was so very good at throwing things at people.  Better to lag behind, to watch my flanks and move with appropriate care and caution.

If I happened to catch up with them, there was nothing I could do to capitalize on the situation.  If I stayed back, out of sight, then she had to wonder, and that wondering was a very useful tool.  It made every decision she made more difficult, with more variables to consider.  Every step of the way, she had to watch her back.

Approaching the school, I found my way to the same alcove where the coach had stopped to drop me off, and peered around the corner.

The puppeteer was alone, his keys rattling as he stood at the locked gate.

I immediately whirled around, looking, searching.

No Mary in sight.

You want to play that game, Mary?  I thought.

I’d really hoped that her bond to her creator would mean she stayed close to him, even as he got to the school.  But she was sticking to the plan.  I couldn’t go for the man without risking that Mary would step out and kill me, much as she’d promised back at Percy’s home.

I’d angered her enough that she was going to kill me very, very thoroughly, if she got the chance.

I could go straight for the puppeteer, but that was a gamble.  Was Mary close?  Hiding?  Would she intercept me?  She had a couple of inches on me in height, she had been trained, honed, and I wasn’t positive I could outrun her if it came down to it.

I didn’t like that gamble.

The man was still working to find the right key when the gate opened.

It was the headmistress.

“Mister Percy!” she exclaimed.  I looked through the window and thought it was a vagrant.  What happened!?”

“I was feeling better,” he said, mumbling.  He coughed and spat, “Thought I’d check how things were.  A thug on the street waylaid me.”

“Good mercy.  Get yourself inside.  We’ll get you patched up.”

I heard the gate shut and click.  That was my mark to go, double checking for a murderous Mary, then heading to the same window I’d used to exit the building, slipping inside.

My shoes had hard soles.  I slipped them off.  Comfort was secondary to moving quietly.

If I could get past Mary to reach Percy, I won.  If Mary could get to any of us, possibly excepting Gordon or very possibly Helen, it was over.  We’d never get the advantage over them with one of ours down and out.  If she could reach her group, they’d have an overwhelming advantage.  If I could reach mine… well, we’d be a group, and I could share what I knew.  In a situation as tenuous as this, their combined strength beat out ours.

Lopsided, as games went.  Her with her arsenal of knives and whatever else, me with my letter opener and the knowledge that she was scared, though she was only willing to show it to her maker.

Who, as he’d endeavored to communicate to her, wasn’t to be discounted as a player of our dark little game.

I smiled to myself as I darted off into the recesses of the building.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.10 – Twig

Taking Root 1.10

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

This was what I lived for.  Literally speaking.

I knew my enemy now.  I knew where she was weak, where she was strong.  I knew how dangerous she was, and through all of that I could make assumptions about the others in the school.  I might have preferred to know where she was and interact with her from a safe vantage point, but this was the next best thing.

I knew that the best way to handle this would be to get to the puppeteer, Mr. Percy, and deal with him before anything else.  He was hurt, my odds weren’t that bad.  Once he fell, the others would fall.  I knew that Mary knew the same thing, and would react accordingly.  She knew I knew, and I knew that.

Ad infinitum.

I liked these games, when the system broke down.  It was no longer about how good we were at predicting and planning.  We were both just good enough that we wouldn’t get ahead of the other by that alone.  It was about understanding the other, and I had the edge there.

The yard was dangerous.  Too wide a space with no cover.  Mary’s space.

That left me the school itself, hallways and classrooms for places I could navigate without exposing myself.  If I made it far enough, then I’d be in the back of the school, with the dorm rooms, showers, kitchen, and the boiler rooms in the basement.

The Lambsbridge gang would be back there, I was fairly certain.

I stopped where I was, beside a classroom door that was already open, something to keep me out of sight while not getting in my way.  The only light that filtered through was from outside, passing through windows on the outside that fit older styles, square and proper and framed, illuminating bits of the classroom, then touching the windows inside the hallways, where it was all broken glass secured in place with custom-grown branches.  The light that reached me was faint and mottled, like the light that might filter through a heavy forest canopy.

I couldn’t move forward until I knew how Mary would react.  Who was she?  How would the others read her, assuming I’d filled them in on the particulars?

She’s dangerous, she prefers to stay at arm’s length.  Throwing weapons, pistol, poison.  It’s not just a fear of you, it’s how she is, I imagined Gordon telling me.

Helen might say something like: The puppeteer raised her with care and a great deal of control.  A special trigger phrase to keep her compliant if she started to slip the leash.  He waited to use it, so it wouldn’t have been a common thing.  Remember everything we said about why he raised them at Mothmont.  Control and a firm hand.  Somewhere he could be close to them and steer them.

Except not in so many words.

Jamie was a hard one for me to guess.  I couldn’t slip myself into Jamie’s shoes and imagine what he’d say because Jamie would be the type to call up some obscure set of details.  He had a good memory, while mine was below average.  But Jamie would also have a sense of the building layout.  He could sketch out a quick map in that book of his, I could stare down at it, put all the pieces together, and start to imagine where Mary might have entered the building, where she might have positioned herself.

I tried to imagine the building as well as I knew it, but it wasn’t a complete map, and parts of it were nebulous, the scale not quite right.  I couldn’t draw a sharp picture, not a crisp image that stayed still in my mind’s eye.

Then there was Lillian.  Not an Academy project, except she was, in a way.  She’d grown up with the Academy in mind, had spent some time at Mothmont, and went on to be one of the Academy’s younger students.  Her family wasn’t so wealthy that she would thrive regardless of what happened.  She’d had to throw herself into her studies, into our activities, just to secure her future.  The Academy had its claws in her.

Lillian would share something about the science of the clones.  Maybe explain how the trigger phrase worked.

…Or, now that I thought about it, she might surprise us and say something very human.  Something like, she was so cold around you, but she let her guard down around him.  She even cried.

I imagined that as the moment I could pull the pieces together and get an idea of where Mary might be lurking.  I could formulate a plan and enact it.  But imagination was only imagination, and as much as it helped to put myself into others’ heads and look at things from set angles, I was missing pieces of it.  Jamie’s map, the extra tidbits that I could never come up with on my own.

But I still had an impression of where Mary was, even if I couldn’t pinpoint the exact location.  Given how much she cared about the puppeteer, how afraid she was of me, there had to be a comfort zone.  A certain range she might wander, where she could potentially keep an eye out for me while still watching him.

My head slowly turned.  End of the hallway.  Either one of the classrooms on either side, the last classrooms at that end of the hall.  Everything beyond that was offices.  More likely to be locked tight, too close to him, not close enough to observe me.

What else?

The yard?  I’d called it her territory.  She could look in the windows just as well as I could look out, and it gave her a lot of range of movement.

I started to imagine a Mary at each of those points.  A phantom image lurking in shadow, just out of sight.

The puppeteer was her weak point.  When he was strong, he could give her strength, centering her.  When he was weak or in danger, she cracked.  The brick I’d thrown at him had been aimed at her, in an abstract way.  That in mind, I was willing to bet that she was devoting more thought to how to protect him than how to catch me if I tried to break away and run.

Strings extended from him to the phantom Marys.  An abstraction of the fundamental hold he had on her.  They were strings that could snap, if given cause, but there was a resistance.  Tension.  Anything she did would always, always be prefaced by a concern for him.  A momentary worry.

That was the tool I had to use.

I could make out a heavy, low sound further down the hallway.  A large object being set down, a book being dropped.

What are you doing, Mary?  I wondered.

The phantom images were suddenly busy.  Enacting various scenes and scenarios.  Mary, anxious, making a mistake.  Mary intentionally making a sound to distract, then slipping closer toward me.  Mary setting a trap, a deadfall or a heavy object that held down a tripwire, impossible to see in the dark.

It was very possible that she didn’t just have weapons.  Poison, wire, any number of things could be stowed away in and around her uniform.  I liked traps, but they were hardly exclusive to me alone.

It was an approach that let her actively protect the puppeteer while keeping the right position respective to me and the man.

If that was what she was doing.

I was visualizing her at the end of the hallway, or in one of the adjacent classrooms.  I wasn’t thinking about the yard.

I raised myself up, head snapping over to look into the window of the classroom beside me, past desks and chairs to the window that looked out into the yard.

Between the rain and the branches, there was no way to tell if she was there, moving around to circle behind me, or if it was just weather and gloom playing tricks with my eyes.

Think twice, Sy, I told myself, going back to thinking about Mary being at any one of the positions in a quarter-circle around me.  Right classroom, hall, left classroom, yard.

This is why Gordon gets on my case, I thought.  Spend too much time thinking, miss my chances.

She was watching, apparently secure in the idea that she’d spot me or confirm my location if I made a break for it.  I needed to disrupt that security.

Need to make a noise someplace I’m not.

I looked, peering into the windows, searching the classrooms around me.

Books could be slid across the floor.  A small object could be thrown to break something, but both were crude, obvious.  I wasn’t strong enough to throw or slide either all that far, the sliding book would make too much noise and the broken glass would be too cliche.

My eye settled on a shape at the back of one room, barely visible as a silhouette against the vague light that made it in from outside, even against the paler background of the wall.

I darted across the hall, low enough to the ground that I had to put my hand down to touch the floor for balance and to keep my nose from smashing into the tile.

My heartbeat picked up as I made it into the classroom, moving amid desks and chairs.  There were windows, yes, but the only exit that didn’t threaten to cut me to shreds on the way through was the door I’d just passed through.  If Mary appeared in the doorway, I might well be done for.  Even if I did make it through a window, I wasn’t sure she couldn’t catch up to me.

The only defense was to do it fast and do it quiet.

I headed to the corner of the room furthest from the door.

Teacher’s desk.  Nothing of importance.

But beside the teacher’s desk, next to the window, there was a globe, resting on a stand, fixed in place at the poles so it could spin.  The colors were rich, even in the gloom.  A third of the globe was dominated by a rich crimson, each etching of place name topped by a crown.  The independent countries were marked out in their own colors, paler, less saturated, scattered and patchwork.

I took it down and pried it free of the stand with the letter opener, then made my way back to the door.

I was paranoid enough of emerging to find Mary standing just outside the door that I raised the globe a bit to shield myself from an impending stab or pistol shot.

But she wasn’t there.

I glanced down the length of the hallway, then set the globe rolling in the direction of a door that sat slightly ajar, leading to a more distant classroom.

I watched it roll, glancing back periodically to make sure she wasn’t sneaking up on me.

It touched the door.  The door moved, creaking slightly, clicking.

I ducked back to cover, hiding just inside a classroom, between the door and the shelf.

Closing my eyes, straining my ears, I counted to twenty.

When the time was up, I took a peek around the corner.

The globe had moved.

I moved in that same heartbeat, toward the globe, low enough to the ground that I couldn’t be glimpsed through the windows, glad for once that I hadn’t grown since I was nine.

As much as I was trying to find her and identify her location, she’d been doing much the same as I had.  I had little doubt she’d watched me break into the school from a window, tracked my general location, maybe even spotted me as I made my way through the school itself.

She had made a sound, but I’d been able to afford staying still.  Not a good thing, not entirely safe, if it was a precursor to her coming after me, but the ball was more in my court.

I’d made a sound, it forced her to react.  Staying where she was risked that I’d go after her ‘brothers’.  Or that I might loop around and find another angle to use in going after the puppeteer.  Or anything.

But seeing the globe, knowing it was a ruse, it forced a decision.  She had to figure out where I really was.  Was it a ruse, or was I leading her one way while slipping through to go after the puppeteer?

Given a fifty-fifty chance with no clue otherwise, the strings pulled her back to the puppeteer.

I passed the globe and the door it had touched, and felt a cool draft.  The excuse for the globe’s movement.  She’d slipped in through the window, had used it to make her exit, or both.

I rounded the corner to the west side of the school, moving as fast as I could toward the dormitories and the Lambsbridge gang.

Even just approaching the boy’s dormitory, I could smell the sickness.  Over a thousand students periodically venting fluids out of every orifice.  Looking through windows, across the corner of the yard, I could see that many lights were on in hallways, though not necessarily in the rooms themselves.  Staff doing patrols and making sure the students were alright.

I couldn’t quite see with the trees in the corner of the yard, but I saw motion.  Fast motion.

The other Lambsbridge members.  Running away or giving chase?

I only had a half-second to make the call, picking up speed, making noise as I ran.  A glimpse through two sets of rain-covered windows, past branches and leaves.

I saw Helen’s eyes, and I saw Gordon’s.

The focus, the killer instinct.

I picked up speed, running faster.  My feet were bare and wet, partially from water that had dripped off the rest of me, and the tile was slick.  I managed to keep my footing, but there were one or two points where I wondered if I was going to slip.  Approaching the bend, where my hallway met theirs at the corner of the dormitory, I could hear them.

As we intersected, I spotted the smallest of Mary’s ‘brothers’, eight or so years old, with two knives in hand.  Red haired, flushed in the face, but with a very cold look in his eyes.  Those same eyes widened as I sprinted his way.

Surprise.

Almost unconsciously, he switched his grip on one knife around, so the blade pointed down.

I dropped to the floor.  Still soaked with the rain, I slid on the tile.

He leaped, to avoid tripping on me, and I grabbed one foot.  It slipped from my grasp, but I’d put him off balance.  He flopped over, belly hitting the floor.

Spry little bastard.  He was already on his feet when Gordon caught up with him.  Without slowing, Gordon slapped one knife-hand to the side, caught the other wrist, and slammed the kid into a wall.

The kid went limp.  Gordon held his wrist, letting him dangle.

The kid’s eyes opened, and he jerked his other knife hand, pointed at Gordon’s middle.  Helen’s foot went out, pinning it against the wall.

“Damn,” the kid said.  I thought I might have seen a glimmer of fear in his eyes, but Gordon hauled him away from the wall, then cracked the kid’s head against it, hard.  He paused, watching, then did it again.

The knives fell from the boy’s hands.

“Lillian, got something to put him under, just in case?”

Lillian did.  She hurried forward, pulling her bag around in front of her to retrieve a syringe.  She squirted out almost half of it before jamming it into the boy’s stomach, depressing it.

“No interrogation?” I asked, as I picked myself up.

“This is the second we caught up to,” Jamie said.  “First was uncooperative enough that I don’t think Gordon is willing to entertain this one.”

As if to explain, Gordon turned and lifted up his shirt.  A bandage was already showing some blood.

Helen and Gordon let the tyke drop to the floor.  Gordon collected the knives, offered one to Helen, who shook her head, then stuck both into his belt.

“They’re better than I am,” Gordon said.

“At?” I asked.  “Fighting?”

He shrugged one shoulder.  “Wouldn’t say that.  Using a knife?  Throwing something?  Definitely better.  Fighting?  Eh.  Brawling?  Definitely not.”

“No real-world knowledge,” Jamie said, looking down at the boy.  He looked up at Gordon.  “No visiting seedy parts of town to trade money or drink for some lessons from the meanest guys around.”

“But they’re still really, really good,” Gordon said.  He looked at me.  “How’d it go?”

“Mr. Percy, our puppeteer, uses sounds to make them compliant if they get antsy,” I said.  “He’s here, with Mary.”

“Percy,” Jamie said.  He paused to consider, then nodded.  “Okay.”

“Attended the academy without being a student.  He knows of the Lambsbridge project, but doesn’t know the particulars.  Still no idea on greater motivation or plans.  He’s hurt, getting medical care.”

“Hurt?” Lillian asked.

“Brick smashed him in the face out of nowhere,” I said.  “Puzzling.

Gordon was on one knee, searching the little kid.  He collected four knives and a small sack with a weight inside, which he examined.

“Blackjack?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.  He tossed it to me.

I gave it a look-see, then pocketed it.  “Our headmistress got a letter in her office, recommending that she call the Academy, discreetly, to ask for a thorough search and examination of the student body, keep everything locked down.  I didn’t expect her to be up and about this early, but it works.  Puppeteer is here, kids are here.  The noose is in place.”

“They only need a push, then,” Helen murmured.

I matched her flat stare with a grin.  “I love you, big sister.”

Her expression unchanged, she reached over to rap the top of my head with her knuckles.

“Ow.”

Gordon tied the kid’s wrists and ankles, then hefted him, folded over one shoulder.  Gordon was big for his age, the kid was small, but Gordon made it look effortless, which was something else altogether.

“Which way?” Gordon asked.

“Mary was that way,” I said, pointing down the way I’d come.  “Puppeteer is in or near the front office.  The third boy is… up to you to figure out.”

He shook his head.  “Last we saw, he was near the kitchen, sent this one after us, we were busy staying out of the way while the little one used all his bullets trying to gun us down.”

“The others had guns?”

Have,” Jamie said.  “The oldest one has a gun, still.”

I nodded.

Gordon started walking, and the rest of us fell into an easy formation around him.

“Um, have to backtrack a bit, but I wasn’t keeping up with the discussion,” Jamie said.  “You said the quarantine was arranged.  They’re searching the entire student body?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Us included?”

“Ideal world, we won’t be here,” I said.  “Even if we are, we can adapt.  But I wanted to pressure them, and this does that.”

Jamie frowned.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’m not good at adapting,” Jamie said.  “Less than you three, anyway.”

“Sly is right, though.  The pressure we’re putting on them is a good thing,” Gordon said.  “That said, the ten year old very nearly killed me, this one was hard enough to keep from slipping away, let alone catch.  Helen wouldn’t put up a fight, and you, Jamie or Lil would die in two seconds flat if any of them got within arm’s length of you.”

We were making our way past the kitchen.  The smell of vomit was thicker here, not just because we were close to the place the poison had first taken hold, but because we were between both dormitories.

“I hate it when people call me Lil,” Lillian said.

I made a mental note of that, storing it for future use.

Gordon did the opposite and apologized, “Sorry, Lillian.  What are we thinking we do with the oldest clone, Mary, and the puppeteer?”

“Separate them, pick them off one by one,” Helen said.

“Mary is devoted to her creator,” I said.  “And the last one-”

“The teenager,” Jamie said.  “Oldest of the clones.  Physically the strongest, presumably the most trained.”

“You don’t have eyes on that one?” I asked.

“No,” Gordon said.  “We’ve glimpsed him, but he was leading this trio.  Keeping his distance.”

I chewed on my bottom lip for a second.  “Doesn’t work.  I don’t see it.  They’re going to band together.”

“I agree,” Gordon said.  “I’m betting he knows his fellows are down, or he will when we turn up.  He’ll stick with Mary, and both of them will stick with their puppeteer.”

“Brothers,” I murmured.

“Hm?”

“They’re Mary’s ‘brothers’, to Mary and the Puppeteer.  Mary is their sister.  It’s a little family unit.”

“I notice you called Helen a sister,” Jamie said.  “Interesting.”

“One isn’t related to the other,” I said.

“I seem to recall you going on at length about the intricacies of the human mind,” Gordon said.  “Everything impacts it on some level or something like that.”

“Okay,” I said, “Whatever.  Let’s joke around about Sy really wanting a family, deep down inside.  Mary’s situation has made me realize it’s what I really want.  It’s a yearning even.”

Hands settled on my shoulder.  Prey instinct, wham.  It took me a moment to realize it was because I saw Gordon, Jamie, Lil, and the smallest clone, but I didn’t see Helen.

Her arms wrapped around my shoulders from behind, and she hugged me tight, before leaning forward to give me a peck on the cheek.  Too perfunctory to be anything serious.

I didn’t move a muscle.

“I’ll be your big sister if that’s what you really want,” she said.

“Sarcasm,” I said, still not moving.  “I’m not sure what we are, but I don’t think ‘family’ is exactly it, and I’m really truly okay with that.”

She pulled away, giving me a rap on the head as she stepped over to Gordon’s side.  I caught a glimpse of a wry smile on her face as she gave me a sidelong glance.  For my benefit.  Her way of letting me know she’d been joking too.

Geez.

“We’re the Lambsbridge orphans,” Gordon said, as Helen leaned against the wall beside him, raising her hand to fix the placement of a strand of hair.  “That’s all we need to be.”

I nodded.  “Yeah.”

“But,” Jamie cut in, “part of being the Lambsbridge Orphans is doing our job.”

“Which brings us back to the ‘how’,” Gordon said.  “You guys think you can hold your own and keep one of them busy while I confront the other?  I’m not sure I can take the older one.”

I shrugged.  “Don’t have to ‘win’.  Assuming the headmistress reached out to the Academy, which I do assume, it’s all a matter of time.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Gordon asked.

“I’m never wrong,” I said.

The sudden burst of protest that came from every corner and every mouth overlapped to the point that I couldn’t pick out individual words.

“Point-” I started.  I was talked over.

I rolled my eyes.  I was pretty sure at least half of them were doing it to try to be funny.

“Point taken,” I managed.

They stopped.

“Get it all out of your system?” I asked.

“It’s late, our sleep was interrupted, we’ve been on edge all week,” Gordon said.  “Thanks for that.  The laugh helped.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

I studied them.  Most were in uniforms, though Jamie was wearing pyjamas with shoes, an odd combination.  He’d left our room too quickly to get dressed first.  I’d never changed into my pyjamas, myself.

Gordon was hurt, and it showed a little in how he held himself and his expression, and Helen was a little rumpled, though unharmed.  Lil, oddly enough, seemed more together and comfortable than I’d seen her in a long time.  Maybe ever.

She saw me looking and hugged her bag of medical stuff to her chest, glaring at me over the top of it.

“You’re home,” I said.

She didn’t move, but the glare became a more perplexed expression.

“This.  It’s where you belong.  Or the Academy is, and this is a close second.”

She didn’t reply immediately.  Her eyes moved, taking in the surroundings.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Sorry we’re not sticking around for longer,” Gordon said.

“I’m okay being anywhere I don’t have to worry about getting poisoned or stabbed,” Lil said.

“Just an hour or two more,” Gordon said.  “If Sy’s not wrong about the quarantine.”

“Trapping ourselves in here with skilled murderers,” Jamie said, “What could go wrong?”

“Corner the rats and hope they don’t bite too hard,” I said.

“Speaking of,” Gordon said.  His voice had dropped, which helped complete the thought.

We were further from the more lit dorms, now.  In less secure territory.  If we made it around to the front office, I would be very close to having completed a full circuit around the building.

The conversation was, I supposed, our way of touching base, leveling each other out, propping each other up.  Helen was being selective in what she said, letting me know she was glad to have me back in her peculiar way, but she didn’t need reassurance in the same way.

The attitudes of the individual members of the group changed as the surroundings did.

“We got the last two by moving around as a group,” Gordon murmured.  His voice was lowered so he wouldn’t give us away.  “They were trying to keep us away from any place we could arm ourselves or hole ourselves up.  Cornered the first one in the kitchen.  Second one was faking sick.  Jamie figured him.”

I nodded.

“They’re going to be ready for us to come as a group,” Gordon said.

I nodded again.

“We may not be able to keep them from running if they want to run, even if they don’t have a trap.”

I exaggerated my nods until I lost my balance, and bumped into him.  He elbowed me.

“This is serious.”

“Don’t get shot,” I said, echoing Jamie.  “Give me a chance to talk to them.  Mary is off-balance enough I think I can get to her on a level.  She’s pissed because I threw a brick at the man who brought her into this world.”

“That’s harder if they’re all together,” Gordon said.

“I don’t know how up to talking the puppeteer is,” I said.  “Again, brick to face.”

“You keep saying that like you’re proud,” Jamie said.

“It was a beautiful throw.”

“So you are proud,” Jamie said, voice quiet.

“Yeah,” I breathed the word.  “Gordon couldn’t have done better.”

“You’re the filthiest liar,” Gordon murmured, smirking.

“Can we stop talking?” Lil asked.

We obeyed.

The hallway turned, and we came face to face with a scattered group of youths.

Gordon drew a knife, but Helen’s hand reached out, stopping him from going any further.

They were ordinary kids.  Miserable kids in pyjamas who looked like they’d died and been brought back as stitched.  These would be the especially sick ones who needed help, ones who, if the metallic smell to the bodily fluids was any indication, had been so violently ill that blood was involved.

We were near the infirmary.

“Next door on the right,” Jamie murmured.

Gordon gave him a tight nod.

Gordon and Helen edged closer to the door, while I ducked low, to peek past their knees.

Mary, unarmed, standing in the middle of the brightly lit room, ribbons removed, hair in relative disarray.

Gordon was fastest to grasp that something was wrong.  He shoved Helen backward, and Jamie caught her.  I reacted too, backing away, not entirely sure why until Gordon turned the other way.

The room opposite.

A pistol went off, the bullet striking the doorframe where Gordon’s head had been.  It was almost too loud in the hallway where there was nothing to absorb the sound, the sound bouncing off the walls, an echo that played off the ringing in my ears.

The sick children around us screamed, panicking.  They leaped up from chairs and the floor of the hallway.

The screams continued as the children got in our way and obstructed our movements.  One tried to hide between me, clutching the back of my shirt, and made it hard for me to rise to a proper standing position.

It was a moment of stupidity that left me mostly in the front of everything as our third boy stepped out of the room he’d been hiding in, pistol in hand.  He wore a uniform, but he had a cloak and hood on over it, possibly to conceal himself better in the dark.

For all my talk about effective use and prediction of bugs’ movements when the box was shaken…

“Oy!” Gordon shouted.  “Got your kid brother here!”

I saw the hesitation.  The pistol’s barrel slid away from me as his focus turned to Gordon and the youngest clone.

I started to move, ready to kick up and try to knock it away or out of his hand, but the kid behind me still clung to me, and I immediately knew I wouldn’t make contact.

For an instant, I thought we hadn’t accounted for all the clones, but then he made a small sound of fear.  Human frailty, not maliciousness.

Gordon was heading for cover, still carrying his burden, turning his body and running almost sideways so the littlest clone was more between him and the gun-wielder.  The gun moved, wholly focused on Gordon.

One shot rang out, and the clone moved to reload.

Did Mary warn him that I’d said Gordon was most dangerous?

I made my escape, grabbing the kid who’d clutched me and dragging him behind, even though it slowed me down.

The third shot was aimed at me.  It hit the same boy I was trying to rescue, leaving me to stumble as my grip broke.

Helen grabbed me and pulled me around the corner.  We were right at the bend in the hallway where the hallway at the southern part of the school met the long hallway from the eastern part.

The commotion broke up.  The children who’d been sitting there waiting for their turns in the infirmary had mostly fled.  Two were apparently too sick to move while bullets were flying, and the third lay there with a bullet hole in him.  The one who’d clutched me.  Younger than I’d expected, going only by the strength of his grip.

I exhaled slowly.  Gordon was across the hall, in a classroom, ass on the ground, back to the wall, the littlest clone propped up beside him, still unconscious.  The others were behind me.

Unconscious and whatever else.  Being knocked out didn’t mean waking up okay after a set amount of time.  It could mean serious brain injuries.

“I have to ask, for context,” I started.

The pistol fired yet again.  I saw the puff where it had hit the corner.

It was a ball pistol.  One shot, firing balls of lead or whatever else.  It wasn’t efficient, in terms of the number of bullets it spat out, range, velocity, or whatever else.  Where a bullet from a high-end gun passed through your enemy, these guns were meant to fire a small metal sphere into the other guy’s body, where it could bounce around and tear up their insides.  A good killer would make the bullet count, and the damage done by these particular weapons meant that Academy trained doctors would have a far harder time patching them up.

“Context,” I started again.  “Does the Puppeteer read you bedtime stories at night?”

I heard Mary speak, and she sounded very tired.  “Don’t answer.  He’s trying to get to us, or trying to buy time.”

“Oh, Mary!  How are you doing?” I called out.  “They really like using you as bait, don’t they?”

“I volunteered,” Mary said.  “My plan.”

“Funny how that works,” I said.  “You’d think the puppeteer would work harder to convince you that you should stay alive, if you’re that special to him.”

“Puppeteer?” the older clone asked.

“Don’t listen to him,” Mary said.

You responded,” he pointed out.

“Mm,” Mary said.

I could imagine her expression.  Not very happy.

“I’m curious, Mary, why did you change your mind?  You sounded so insistent about not wanting the puppeteer to put himself in danger by coming here.  Then he said his magic words and, well, can you clarify?  It doesn’t make sense.”

“Magic words,” she said, her voice soft.

“You’re special, Mary, he was going to make something of you, right?  Big sister to all the new clones of the next generation.  Why would he do that, trying to control you?  Maybe if he came out, I could hear his explanation.”

“He’s-” the older clone started.  He stopped short.

I frowned, staring down at the ground, trying to picture why.

“We’re not going to put him in harm’s way,” Mary said.  “You’ll have to get through us to get to him.”

“Basically what I was going to say,” the older clone said.

“He puts you in harm’s way,” I said.  “What part of this is fair?”

“It’s none of your business,” Mary said.

“It’s exactly our business!  It’s what we do.  We do it to make money.  The definition of business.”

I couldn’t see either of them.  I was talking to thin air, which was worse than it had been trying to talk to Mary in the furnace room.

“You’re the cleanup crew for a corrupt and distorted organization.  Child soldiers and killers.”

“I think any argument you could make against our group would apply double for your puppeteer,” I said.

“Think so?  You don’t know us,” Mary said.

Something was off.

For someone recommending avoiding talking to me, she was doing an awful lot of it.

I raised a finger, pointing at the corner of the wall.  Very slowly, I moved my fingertip.  I glanced back at Jamie and Helen, then over to Gordon.

I got nods in response.  They got it.  Gordon leaned back, out of sight.

Mary was distracting us while the other clone approached down the length of the hall.

We didn’t have guns.  Much less guns intended to rip someone up inside.

“I know you, Mary,” I said.  “I get you.  We’re the same.

She faked a laugh.

I held the blackjack and letter opener, poised to throw the first and stab with the second.  The other clone had to be close.  He could well have his back to the same corner I was crouched beside.  Close enough to smell, if the smell of blood and puke hadn’t made the use of my nose impossible.

“Laughing, you don’t see it?  Tell me, did you have breakfast with him, Mary?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Often enough?  In the way you really wanted?”

A pause.

Glass shattered.

That was my cue.  I threw myself forward, out into the hallway.

Gordon was still mid-air, having leaped through one of the tree-branch and broken-glass windows that separated classrooms from the hall.  Glass and bits of wood danced around him, his knees pulled up to his chest to clear the wall beneath the window.

Not anything I’d expected, but it was something.

My shoulder hit the ground.  I’d planned to stab if he was close enough.  He wasn’t, so I threw the blackjack.  A little weight in a long, semi-rigid bag for smacking someone over the head.  It served as something to distract, to buy Gordon a fifth of a second as our teenaged assailant reacted.

Gordon collided with him.  In the midst of the collision I saw the two pistols the eldest clone was armed with, saw Gordon reach for just the one, twisting it around in the clone’s hand so the barrel pointed at the boy, the trigger finger slipping away from the trigger.

Our Gordon.  A hero on paper, skilled, strong, fit.  But if anyone took him for noble, they’d be wrong.  A noble person didn’t take advantage of inches of height difference to slam their forehead into someone’s mouth.

The older clone shoved Gordon away.  He raised his pistol in the same instant Gordon did.  One aimed at the other.

Slowly, I found my feet, rising beside Gordon.

The glass had cut him on the way through.  That didn’t happen in the books.

“You had two guns,” Gordon said.

“Was going to shoot both ways,” the clone replied.

“We’re not here for you,” Gordon said.  “We’re here for the puppeteer.”

“That’s not his name,” Mary said.

“It’s a good enough name,” I joined in.  “You can’t deny he has control over you.  He pulls your strings, he decides what you do.  Uses you as bait.”

“And they don’t use you?” Mary asked.  “You’re not tied to them, these other orphans?  Would you give them up to save your skin?  Oh, wait, you don’t care about your skin.  Expiration dates, huh?”

I saw Gordon’s gun waver a fraction.

“Yeah, you forgot to tell them, huh?”

“Was going to at the conclusion of this,” I said.

“You described yourself as a villain.  You’re a liar, a cheat, a thief, a grubby killer.”

“Yet,” Gordon chimed in, “I believe him.”

Mary didn’t have a quick response for that.

“When I was asking about breakfast, about the little things that count,” I said.  “I was really asking if you felt loved, if you truly loved your… father, or whatever you see him as, or if it’s just something ingrained in you.”

“I think that’s my cue?” a voice said.  Not a confident one.

A female voice.

The headmistress emerged behind Mary.

Her hands clutched a piece of paper.

My thoughts moved so fast that they were a jumble.

“La, re, tu, la, sun-”

I found my conclusion.

Left alone with the headmistress, the quarantine, our puppeteer had figured out what I’d done.

“They are not on your side!”  I called out.  “They are not with the Academy, Headmistress!”

He’d turned it around.

“-ro, ta.”

The eldest clone reacted, pulling the trigger.  Gordon’s reaction was a fraction of a second later, off-balance as he reeled from getting hit.  The clone was hit in the shoulder.

The look in his eyes went beyond cold, and had become something else entirely.  Dead, empty, hollowed out.

That was how he had them kill the parents.  A kill phrase, a letter they were to read at a set time or something sent to the home.

Gordon fell, and the clone barely staggered, heedless of pain and injury.

Helen wasn’t a fighter, and the rest of us didn’t stand a chance.

The puppeteer was a manipulative bastard, one that could well be on his way out, and he might well have beat us with one fell stroke.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.11 – Twig

Taking Root 1.11

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Letter opener, get close, stab, doing any damage at all can make the difference, get low, make better use of shorter stature-

The eldest boy stepped closer.  I ducked, drawing my arm back to stab, and he kicked me.  He caught and twisted my wrist while I was trying to catch my balance and before I grasped what he was doing, he’d grabbed the letter opener.

He pushed, and with the way my arm was twisted around, my head pointing forward rather than up, I was put in the position of having to let him destroy the arm or letting myself fall.

I toppled, landing next to Gordon.  He was hunched over, his hand to his chest.  I didn’t like the amount of blood I saw.

Mary was standing back, between me and the Headmistress, who was kneeling on the ground, trying to help the little boy who had been shot, her eyes wide, paper in one hand.  Mary’s expression was unreadable, but her body was tense enough I could visualize every muscle being tight, ready to spring.  The headmistress was the opposite, as if she would have fallen to pieces with a touch.

The others were still around the corner, half-crouching, caught between running and trying to do something.

Helen was the one who stepped up.

We’re better as a group.  Just need to put him off balance, give Helen the best opportunity possible.

I found my feet, half-walking, half-stumbling over to Gordon, where I grabbed one of the knives he’d stowed in his belt.  I paused, behind the clone, watching, waiting for the best chance.

He reached forward, to his belt.

Helen took a step, and I lunged in the same instant.

“Behind you!” Mary called out.

My instincts told me that Helen saw me, that she was capitalizing on the eldest clone’s distraction and my position.  Together, the pair of us might be able to accomplish something, whether he was drawing  a knife or loading his pistol.

But Helen stepped back, instead.

I found myself on a collision course with someone almost twice my size, who was better armed than I was, far better trained.  He followed Mary’s warning by turning and spotting me.

Situations like this were where I felt like the Academy had screwed me over.  The thoughts were in place, I knew what I had to do, and I could see everything play out.  Knife in hand, my enemy’s soft gut in plain view, almost in reach, nothing to stop the knife from punching deep.  Let the pain and the damage done slow him down.

But thoughts ran away, I started naturally thinking about cause and effect, follow-up, what to do to maximize the damage done and turn the situation around.  What if he made that one in a million movement to knock my knife aside with the letter opener or the barrel of the one-shot pistol?

While talking it wasn’t a problem, I could say one thing while thinking about the next step.  A fight moved too fast.  It slowed me down, made it feel like my hands and body were a step behind my thoughts.  Enough to make the difference in a fight against someone ordinary.

This guy wasn’t ordinary.  He swept his arm out, holding the pistol high –more thoughts about complications, predicting what he was doing, countering it– and letting his cloak fan out.  The fabric of the raincloak caught the knife.  His arm moved and helped the cloak naturally fold around the knife and my knife hand.  He bent his arm and used his elbow to force both hand and weapon to one side.

Before I could try to pull away, he was twisting, bringing his knee into my hand, driving it into the wall.

I grimaced in pain and followed through on backing up, aware that I’d lost my knife in the tangle of his cloak.

The letter opener clinked to the ground as he straightened his arm, fixing the flow of his cloak so his own limb wasn’t trapped in the folds.

Before I could catch my balance and pull my thoughts together, he was leaning forward, chasing me faster than I was retreating.  My knife was in one of his hands, freed from the cloak, filling the hand the letter opener had just been dropped from.  The pistol was in his other hand.

Good job, Sy.  Pick a fight, achieve nothing except arming the other guy with successively larger weapons.  Shall we go find a sword to give him?

He kicked me, hard, and sent me stumbling backward.  Keeping me off balance.

I was in the middle of thinking about how to regain it and turn things around when I stumbled over Gordon.  I hit the ground, the back of my head cracking hard against the floor.

One of the best minds the Academy can produce, still no better in a fight than a typical underweight, underdeveloped eleven year old.

I felt a little better knowing that Gordon was now between me and the clone, even if he was crawling on the floor, one hand held tight against a bullet wound, my feet on his back while I lay on the floor.

Then I felt guilty for feeling better.

I shot a quick glance at Mary and the headmistress, and saw that Mary was on the approach.

“Mary,” I said, backing away.

“Don’t even try,” she said.

“Do you want this?  Do you want to be-”

I was cut off by the slam of a door.  The eldest clone had kicked a door that Jamie was trying to use as a shield.  The door closed, and Jamie, Lil and Helen backed up.

“Do you want to be that?”

Her expression was still blank, unreadable.

I knew she had emotions.  I’d seen them, or I’d seen hints of them.  The problem was that she only let herself be vulnerable with her creator.  The same man that had turned his back on her.

She lifted up her skirt at one side and slipped a knife free from a garter.

Gordon moved, straightening, and my feet slid off his back to drop onto the back of his legs.  I pulled them out of the way as he got one foot under him and started to rise up to a standing position.

Mary, for her part, backed off.  Her hand moved at the side of her skirt, and she held another knife.  Smaller, less fancy, and probably weighted for throwing.

“Gordon,” I warned.

He didn’t seem to notice, and he didn’t seem to notice Mary either.  He headed for the older clone.

Mary threw, and in that moment, Gordon stopped in his tracks.  The knife carried onward, striking the wall.  Gordon barely spared Mary a glance before grabbing the knife from the wall and throwing it at the other clone’s back.

The teenaged clone stumbled.  Helen started to move toward him, but he held up his knives, warning her off.

Gordon, for his part, made it another two steps before something refused to support him.  His upper body went askew, seemingly twisted more by pain than anything else, and he stumbled into the wall.  I saw him look at the others, then Mary, then me, a measured study, taking it all in.  His eyes lingered on mine.

One of the first lessons students learn in the Academy, is that life wants to surviveWe’ve been at the survival game for a terribly, terribly long time.  Against hostile environments, against predators.  So long as a student doesn’t work against that impulse, either on the fundamental level or while dealing with the individual, they can trust that life will find a way.

Meeting Gordon’s gaze, I was shocked to see just how hard walking that way was.  His eyes had dark shadows under them as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and his skin was pale, his pupils narrowed.  Each breath he took was laborious, the sort of ragged hauls for breath I’d expect someone to take after being underwater for minutes, but they each came right on the back of the last, with a phlegmatic cast to it, prompting his entire body to jerk a little, as if something kept getting stuck and coming unstuck as he strained himself.

Best of the best, I thought.  I want to take your place, so you don’t have to do this.

Gordon didn’t seem to be up to talking.  He looked at Mary, who was reaching for another throwing weapon, and spread his arms to either side, stepping away from the wall.

“I wouldn’t,” I told Mary, which was the truth.  Then I lied, “When he’s like this he’ll just catch them out of the air.”

Though her expression was blank, I saw the pause in her follow-through.  A moment of doubt.

Gordon pushed himself away from the wall, taking advantage of the bend in the hallway to escape Mary’s throwing range and advance on the clone he’d thrown a knife at.

I saw Mary grab the knife and hurried to duck into the classroom where the youngest clone had been propped up against a wall.

She didn’t throw the knife.

Gordon drew closer to the clone he’d knifed.  Both were injured, Gordon suffering from a gunshot that had very possibly danced around the inside of his torso, the clone shot in one shoulder and knifed in the back.

The clone, however, seemed largely immune to pain, the killing phrase driving him past such mundane things, putting him in the mind for efficient aggression and murder and nothing else.  He was using his wounded shoulder to a reasonable extent, a stark contrast to Gordon, who wasn’t using one arm while he held a hand against his injury, though both arms were in good working order.

Our clone had about three inches and twenty-five pounds on Gordon, who was already of a good size.

To top it off, it seemed he had a pistol and the wherewithal to use it.  While Gordon limped his way, he drew a pellet out of his pocket and slipped it into the gun’s chamber, pulling at the lever along the barrel.

Helen appeared behind the clone, doing exactly what I’d intended when I’d come up behind him, earlier.  She caught the clone’s arm as Gordon drew closer, hauling it back and forcing the pistol off course.  I ducked lower in the wake of it going off, though I knew that by the time I heard the thing it was already too late.

I saw a flurry of movement as Helen scrabbled for a grip on him, only to get elbowed once, kicked, and slashed at by the knife.

Gordon collided with him, keeping him from doing anything further.

They’re still nascent, I thought. Gordon was still undeveloped.  Still young, largely untrained.  Our exercises and adventures in the ass-end of Radham weren’t sanctioned, but weren’t discouraged either.  Gordon had been hungry to put his brain to work, and he’d done it to good effect.

I’d been less hungry, more desperate, but my own studies at the back-alley brawl had been far less effective.  I’d stuck it out for far too long before the others had stopped letting me come.

Gordon had put himself chest-to-chest with the clone.  It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t fancy.  It was exactly what he needed to do to reduce the effectiveness of the skills the clones had learned in the ring.

This was how he operated, and this was how he thought.

The Academy hadn’t gone out of their way to make him especially tough, but they’d given him a good head and a good body and that counted for something.  They had, however, equipped him so he would pick up the skills he needed and master them faster than most.  Part of having a good head and a good body was that he had the coordination between both, no matter the situation, moving and thinking quickly with neither suffering for the other.

Knives were terrible weapons, and our two brawlers each had one.  They were messy things, messier when the one wielding them was good, and both fighters here were good. Tentative slashes were fended off, hands of one boy gripping the wrists of the other, to try and limit the movement of the knives, but even the chance cuts were gruesome, parting skin. Blood dripped from Gordon’s chest wound to the floor now that he was no longer holding his hand there.

I yelped a little as I saw Gordon take a knife in the side.  I saw him bring one arm down, away from the clone’s wrist, pinning the knife in place.  With the slickness of the blood and Gordon’s sheer tenacity, the clone couldn’t pull it free.

Gordon, for his part, still practically hugging his enemy, was able to stab several times, despite the clone’s efforts to keep his arm still.

This is the puppeteer’s mistake.  Take away something’s will to continue on, no matter how strong it is, no matter what else you do, you create a losing battle.

The clone didn’t try to stop Gordon, instead striking out with hands, striking at head, ears, even at Gordon’s bullet wound.

But Gordon kept stabbing, and soon reached the point where the clone wasn’t resisting as the knife went in and out of his midsection.  The clone soon dropped, and Gordon went with him, having been leaning so heavily on him for support.

Jamie and Lil went immediately to his side, looking after Gordon while dealing with the dying clone.  Helen, badly cut, didn’t move from where she’d fallen, but a glance suggested Lil had given her some preliminary care.  All three of them were around the corner from Mary and the headmistress.  Joining them meant crossing the breadth of the hallway.  I decided that wasn’t too wise.

“Mary,” I said.

I didn’t get a response.

I glanced out of the hallway, then pulled my head back as I saw a flurry of movement, out of the corner of my eye.  A knife hit the doorframe.

I tried to grab it, found I didn’t have the strength to pull it away where it had embedded into the wood, removed my hand, and saw another hit the spot where my hand had just been.

“It’s over, Mary,” I said.  “What are you even doing?”

“I’m doing what the Academy needs me to do,” she said.  “Protecting the children of this school.  I just… I have to buy time and make sure you don’t get away, before the quarantine.”

“What are you even talking about?” Jamie asked.

I raised a hand, urging Jamie to hold back.

“Mary,” I said.  “Forget the headmistress.  As pawns go, she’s mostly used up.”

“Pawn?” I heard the woman utter the word.  Outrage had pushed her to speak where she’d been caught up in silent horror, watching children shoot, stab, and use weapons on each other, spattering her school hallway with blood.

I ignored her.  “Where do you go next, Mary?  The puppeteer is gone.  He left the headmistress with a paper that was supposed to turn you into weapons, presumably one by one.  Something about that tells me he didn’t plot a way for you to meet again.”

“I’ll do what I’m supposed to do, and then I’ll find him,” she said.

“Oh, you want to prove your worth, after being discarded?” I asked.  “Prove that you worked as an experiment?  He’ll be so overjoyed at how good you are that he takes you back in with open arms?”

“Something like that.”

“Oh come on, Mary,” I said.  “Come on.  I bet I’m describing almost exactly what you’re hoping for.  You don’t care about the boys, this kid who’s unconscious next to me, or the big guy that just got carved up by Gordon.  You just figured you’d stand there and let them throw themselves at us, do as much damage as possible, and then you’d clean up.  Go back to the puppeteer as the one who succeeded.”

There wasn’t a response.

“Thing about you being created for one thing and one thing only, you’re pretty easy to figure out.  You have a reality and the puppeteer is at the center of it.  You’re trying very hard to avoid thinking about what it means, that he went out of his way to plug a special sequence of sounds into your head, and set it up so that you’d kill.  The lies, the basic underlying thought process that he had from the beginning.  What he’s doing right this moment, leaving you… and what lies in the future.  Even in your perfect hypothetical world, what happens?”

Still no response.

“Let’s say you kill each of us.  Gordon’s dead, Helen can’t fight so effectively, Jamie’s almost as bad in a scrap as I am.  Then you go to him, and he welcomes you with open arms.  But you know he’ll have his doubts.  He knows you know that he abandoned you.  What you are.  Can you picture the tense conversation, the rules he sets in place so you don’t go running the mouth and filling in the next generation of clones?  How grim is that life, the two of you never speaking about what happened tonight, and how things changed?”

She was still silent.

I frowned.  Did I lose her?  Had she slipped away?

“The reality of existence, of life, in every sense of the word, Academy or literal or figurative, is that things change.  Nothing is static.  Your relationship to the puppeteer has changed, and-”

I chanced another look out into the hallway.

I thought I saw a movement, and flinched, ducking back.

When no knife appeared, I looked again.

There was only the headmistress, clutching her hands in front of her.  I saw her eyes move.

To the broken window.  After Gordon had come into the classroom with the littlest clone, he’d made a dramatic exit-

And Mary had made a silent entrance.

I scrambled to move out of the way.  The knife that hit the door wasn’t a throwing weapon.  Larger, burlier around the handle.  She’d still managed to throw it hard enough and accurately enough that the blade stuck in the wood.

She came through the aisle of the dark classroom, ducking low, a weapon in each hand.

I didn’t need to see anything more.  I escaped into the hallway.

Jamie’s eyes widened as he looked over my shoulder.

Before his mouth was even open, I was reacting to the warning he was about to communicate.  No overthinking possible in this, at least.  ‘Get out of the way’ was a ‘get out of the way’, and it didn’t need to be fancy.

I turned, and in the process I fell awkwardly against the corner where the two hallways met.

Mary stopped in the doorway, looking at all of us.  She had one knife in hand.  The other hand was empty, clenched.

Her facade was slipping.  There was emotion in her eyes.  Anger, hatred.

Many of us were beaten, battered, and bruised.  Jamie and Lil had avoided more than a few simple scuffs, but Gordon, Helen and I had taken our individual beatings, roughly in that order.

I wasn’t so sure we could put up a fight.  Especially if she played it clever.

“Don’t say it,” Mary said.

Don’t say what?  I thought.  My memory wasn’t that good, for me to know what she was referencing.

But whatever it was, it was something I’d said that had stuck with her, something she was afraid I’d say.

I offered her a sympathetic expression, while my brain raced to try and piece it together.

The sympathy hurt her.  It made her fist clench tighter.  I’m pegging her wrong, I realized.  The anger, hatred, and fear all stemmed from something else, flowing from a source that ran deeper and left more painful wounds.

Need.

“I won’t say it, then,” I told her.  “But put the weapon down.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“There’s nothing left for you here.  If you hold on to it, whatever futures flow from there, they-”

I saw her flinch.

“…I said I wouldn’t say it,” I told her.

“And you’re a villain,” she said.  “A liar.  Just say it.  Out with it.  Say it, or I will.”

“Alone,” I said.  “If you move forward, you’ll be alone.”

Her head snapped to one side.  I saw the pain in her expression.  The facade was broken, the vulnerability exploited and trampled.

“Headmistress,” she said.

Oh no.

“Headmistress!” I called out.  “No, nope, don’t listen to her!”

“Read it,” Mary said, pointing.

“Don’t!” I called out.

I saw the indecision on the headmistress’ face.

In the midst of a situation she didn’t comprehend in the slightest, she held the means to turn Mary into the weapon, a mad, reckless one, but one we might not be able to properly fight.  For Mary, though, it was an escape.

Something to take the dissonance and simplify it.  Reduce everything to one basic, self-destructive impulse.

“If you don’t,” Mary said, “They’ll kill us both and escape before the Academy gets here to draw up the quarantine.”

That seemed to be the needed push.

“Mary,” the headmistress said.

I couldn’t step forward without Mary lashing out.  Couldn’t run and leave the others.  A few sounds, and we were utter goners.

I needed to convince the headmistress.

But I couldn’t think of the words to do it.  If I could figure out what the puppeteer had said, the line of logic… professing to be from the Academy, maybe, a long-time plant, protecting the students.

Start with what I knew she knew.

“The office was locked,” I said.  “Doors and windows.  The letter was signed in blood.  Look, blood!”

I showed her my hands where the thorns had injured them.

She didn’t even flinch, glancing up, then back to the paper.

“Yu du-”

Notecard, cards, pen-

Letter opener.

“Letter opener!” I called out.  “Your letter opener.  I have it from when I left the note!”

“Nah-” She stopped partway.  I saw a blink.  The moment where she wondered.

I pointed, but Jamie had already noticed the letter opener.  Before I’d even recalled exactly where it fell, he was sliding it over the tiles.

I stopped it with my foot, then kicked it toward the headmistress.

It stopped a few feet away from her.

“It’s yours.  I know it’s yours.  But I have it.  Think.  Why would the Academy shoot and hurt your other students?”

My eyes fell on the one student who had been shot.  The one I’d helped into the line of fire, letting him take a bullet for me.  The headmistress looked down at him.  Her own hands were bloody from trying to staunch the flow of blood, though his stillness suggested it was too late, the damage done.

She let the bloodstained paper fall to the floor.

It was as if the words had been read, all the same.  Mary charged, mindless or unwilling to think, knife in hand.

I ran, but Mary was taller, and she wasn’t running backward.

She closed the distance, knife ready.

I knew escape was impossible, futile.

But I reached the others, where Helen had joined Jamie and Lil.

I grabbed Helen and, before she could react, thrust her in Mary’s general direction.  It wasn’t a very good thrust, but it served.

Better her than me.

Helen winced as the knife pierced her side or back.  Mary raised the knife up to Helen’s throat for what would have been a quick and terminal cut, and Helen caught the hand, stopping the blade before it could make contact.

Mary settled for taking her hostage.  She was breathing harder than the momentary exhaustion justified.  I imagined her thoughts were chaos and noise and pain.

“Alone,” she said.  “That’s what you said?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice soft.

“Acting like this, throwing allies away when it suits you, I think you’re going to end up more alone than I am.”

I nodded slowly.  “Maybe.”

“You’re despicable.”

“Never denied that.”

“No right to say anything to me.”

I watched Helen tighten her grip on Mary’s wrist.

“I already said most of it,” I said.  “We’re works in progress.  Helen, Gordon here, Jamie, even me, in a lesser way.”

I saw Mary’s expression change.  She raised a hand to try and pry Helen’s hand loose, but Helen grabbed her other wrist.  The knife strained to move, but Helen didn’t let it.

Helen wasn’t a fighter, but that wasn’t to say she wasn’t strong.

“Helen isn’t really an actress.  Well, she is, but that’s not the end result.  I planted that seed, reinforced an idea you had already.”

Helen rolled her shoulders, and I could see movements beneath her school uniform, as bones shifted and found new configurations.  Her limbs moved in ways they shouldn’t have, joints bending the wrong way.

I looked to one side as Helen raised one leg up, over her own shoulder, and wrapped the foot around the back of Mary’s neck.  Had I been looking, I would have seen up Helen’s skirt, and that would have been rude of me.

Mary made a sound as her struggles failed to make progress.

I walked past them, still averting my gaze, and approached the headmistress.

“Go,” I said.  “Take the boy and go.”

I saw the confusion and fear, and the momentary relief at having an escape.  She fled, carrying the boy in her arms.

“Back in the furnace room, I mentioned Doctor Ibott.  You cut me off before I could say more about him.  See, he’s the one who handled Helen.”

I saw confusion join alarm on Mary’s face.

“But-” Mary started.  She didn’t get further. Helen raised her other leg, and the shift in weight made Mary tip forward.  Helen snapped her leg around, taking advantage of the fall to slip herself around behind Mary.  Arms moved and twisted, and at the end of it, Helen was on top of Mary, who was face-first on the ground.  Mary’s arms were caught beneath and in front of her, Helen’s hand around hers, forcing her to hold the knife at her own throat.

Every muscle and bone seemed to be straining in the wrong ways against Helen’s skin.  It conjured up ideas of an insect, or a starved jungle cat, perched atop its prey.

“But Ibott only does big things.  Monsters that can win wars.  Juggernauts and ship sinkers.  Well, the guy who heads our project poked at Ibott’s pride, and got Ibott to do something smaller and cleverer.  Helen’s the only one of us who isn’t human, you know.  Vat grown, like you, but built from scratch.  She’s only an actress because she had to learn from the beginning.”

Mary made a strangled sound.  Helen was choking her, staring down at her with a blank expression.

I bent down, and I picked up the bloodstained paper the headmistress had dropped.

I read it.

“We’re works in progress.  Helen’s still growing into her role.  The femme fatale.  A little odd when she’s still a child, but she’ll be something when she’s older.”

I glanced over at Mary, who was struggling and failing to escape Helen’s embrace, then folded up the paper and stuck it in my waistband.  I reached for Mary’s file folder, and withdrew a paper.  I’d thought I’d use it to compare notes if I could find Percy’s place and break in, but this would do.

I reached down and touched the bloodstain where the shot child had fallen.  I gripped the paper, crumpling it in my hands.

“Let her go, Helen.”

Helen did.  When she let go of Mary’s hand, Mary let go of the knife.  Helen collected it.

Mary didn’t move as I approached.  The fight was gone out of her.

I held the bloodstained paper.

Then I tore it, slowly, for dramatic effect, into very small pieces.

I let the pieces fall in front of Mary.

“It’s your call,” I said.  “Fight to the death like he wanted, or stick it to him.  Join us.”

It took a long time before she found the courage to nod.

I sat in the rain, watching the Academy’s students gather around the school.  Individual members of our teams had come, looking after their projects and keeping us from being discovered, and I was enjoying the fact that Lacey was here for me and unable to find me.

My fingers unfolded the paper I’d collected.  The puppeteer’s note.  Instructions to the headmistress, useless.  The kill command for a dead clone, useless.  And his command to Mary, which was an interesting puzzle I’d have to work out in the future.  Something to discuss with Hayle.

Mary.  You do not have a command like Clyde does. 

I won’t say I didn’t try, but only managed to induce short fits to reset your mind. 

I grew fond of you, I admit.  What I told you was not lies.  If it comes down to it and Clyde fails, run.  Find your way.

I will find you.  We will be together, and we will succeed.

– Percy

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.12 – Twig

Taking Root 1.12

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Down on the street, I could see the others making their way to a coach.  Lacey’s body language changed, as she craned her head, looking in the direction of the Academy.  She asked a question, and Jamie pointed to the Academy.  Lacey hesitated, then headed indoors.

I started my descent the moment she was gone.  Out to the front face of the building, down the branches, touching the street.  For all that the ‘quarantine’ was in effect, students forming a loose circle around the school, one team erecting a tent near the entrance, I wasn’t spotted.

Getting past the perimeter that was in progress was another story.

Walk with confidence, as if you don’t expect to get caught.  Be small, take advantage of your size.

People didn’t want to disturb norms.  If one looked like they fit into the greater scheme of things, then it took a kind of courage to step away from the herd and stand out, challenging that.  Doubly so when schools or the Academy were involved.

It was often easier to avoid the attention of ten people than it was to avoid the attention of one.  Even scratches, bumps, bruises, and being soaked to the bone became invisible if one had the poise.

“Hey, you,” one of the students called out as he intercepted me.

Apparently I don’t have the poise. 

I suppressed a sigh.  I pitched my voice just a bit higher, my eyes wide.  “I’m supposed to be in my dorm.  What’s going on?”

“You’re not- you were coming in the other direction.”

“You let me walk by you,” I said, a little breathless, panicky, “then I got scared because there are so many people and then I turned around and I’m supposed to be in my dorm, why, what’s going on?”

“We didn’t let you walk by us,” one said.

“You did!” I said, in the tone that only children could pull off.  One hundred percent certainty.  Adults learned to doubt themselves, but a child could truly believe.

I saw the doubt on their faces.  I latched on it.  “You let me walk by just now.  Why are you lying?”

“We-”

“Why?” I asked, cutting him off.  Keep him off balance.

I saw the glance, the shift in his gaze.  His lips parted, about to speak.

“You-” I started.

But he ignored me, reaching for my hand, hauling it up and away from my pocket.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

Drat.

Just my luck, I couldn’t get an Academy student who was in it for the power or prestige.  He had to care about the profession.

Bully for him, it probably made him a more effective student in the long run, but it didn’t help me right now.

“He’s with me,” I heard a voice state, behind me.

I cringed a little, glancing back.  Lacey, who had one hand on her hip.

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” the student said.

“I know him.  He’s mentally unsound and a challenge to deal with.  The blood on his hands is his own fault.  He got away from his caretaker, and I need to get him back now.”

Dirty pool, Lacey, I thought.  I looked up at the student, my eyes wide, my lips now slightly parted, tongue visible between my teeth.  Nothing obvious, but still playing along.

“If he was in the school-”

“He was telling the truth,” Lacey said.  She put a hand on my shoulder.  “You let him walk right by you.  I’ll vouch that he wasn’t anywhere near the sensitive areas, and I’ll stay quiet about your lapseIf you don’t make us miss our coach.”

The student glanced over at the coach where the others were already getting seated, then stepped out of the way.

Lacey guided me, her grip on my shoulder a little firmer than it needed to be.  Rather, she was digging her fingernails in as if she thought I was going to run away.

We made our way to the coach.  Gordon was apparently in another coach, being looked after by a few of the collected students assigned to our projects, but Helen, Jamie, Mary and Lil were inside the waiting coach.  Lil had an empty syringe in hand, and Helen was occupying the whole bench beside her, head on Lil’s lap, eyes partially closed.

No adults sat inside.

“You came back pretty quick,” Jamie spoke to Lacey.  “Second thoughts?”

“I find that when I’m dealing with Sylvester, directly or peripherally, and I have the little doubt in the back of my mind, I have to take a moment and second guess what I’m doing.  I didn’t expect it from you, Jamie.”

“Sorry,” Jamie said.  “I thought he’d come down if you left.”

“I thought as much.  I asked myself, what is the most inconvenient thing he could do?  Making me search the school for him, only to find the coach was gone when I step outside.”

I shrugged my way free of her claw-grip and climbed up into the coach.

“Goodbye, Sylvester,” Lacey spoke to my back.

I collapsed into the cushioned seat and looked her way, an eyebrow raised.  The goodbye felt meaningful.  Her expression was dead serious, driving that idea home.

“I thought about what you said,” she told me.  “I don’t know what to say except that you’re right.  You win.  I’ve asked to be taken off your project.  Professor Hayle agreed.”

I nodded.  I was very aware that Mary was watching this exchange between Lacey and I.

“I want to make excuses, justify, argue, give any one of a number of responses.  But I’m doing it for my sake, if I remember right, not for yours.  I guess the only thing I have left to say is that it’s your loss in the end, Sylvester.  You need people who know you and your history.  How you’ve developed, how you operate, what you need.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “But I also need the autonomy to decide who I work with.  You say you know me, you get how I operate, in a lot of ways.  You see that as a good thing, but it’s the opposite for me.”

She gave me a long, hard look.

“Goodbye, Sylvester,” she said, for the second time.

“Goodbye, Lacey,” I said.

She shut the door to the coach.

A moment later we were in motion, on our way to the Academy.

No chaperones, which felt odd.  Was that Hayle’s call?  Someone else’s?  It was convenient, but if Mary decided to strangle me with the chain, I wasn’t sure how good of a fight we’d put up in these tight quarters.

She sat just to my right, and she was completely silent.  A little damp, now, rumpled, her ribbons gone, hair loose and in need of a combing.  Her wrists were shackled, the shackles themselves thick and heavy, with proper chains that a bull couldn’t have broken.  A blanket was draped over her lap, but the outline was unmistakeable.

She’d been disarmed, though I doubted everything had been collected.  She was too careful.

Too delicate right now.  I couldn’t poke or test her.  Dangerous.

I turned to look away, and saw Jamie was writing in his notebook.

Not writing.  Sketching.

My face, looking in Mary’s general direction.

The pen went still.  When I looked up from the pen’s tip, Jamie was staring at me.

“What?” I asked, uncomfortable.

“That was nice of you,” he said.

“I’m never nice.”

“You’re a damn liar, and you’re lying about not being nice,” Jamie said.  “You messed with Lacey-”

“Which is very not nice,” I pointed out.

“-And you told her why you did it,” Jamie said.

“I told her it was because she pitied me and pretended to be nice, which wasn’t wrong.”

“You’ve handled worse without flinching,” Jamie said.  “You just gave her the real reason.”

I closed my eyes and let my head move back until it hit the padded back wall of the coach.  The wall vibrated with the movement of the wheels over the road.

When I heard the scratch of the pen on paper, I chanced a look at Jamie’s work.

The sketch was left unfinished, but was being captioned.  ‘Sly, after a rare moment of kindness.’

I rolled my eyes and closed them.

Two mistakes in a relatively short span of time.  Getting caught by the student at the quarantine perimeter, and how I’d dealt with Lacey.  I was tired, my brain too active for too long.  I was starting to stumble.

Except the night wasn’t quite over yet.

“Someone’s gone ahead, we should have an escort when we arrive,” Jamie commented.  “For our passenger.”

I gave Mary another look, and saw her looking outside the window.  Watching the rain-soaked city pass us by, the lights, the streetlamps, and rare figure standing in the dark.

Was one of them the puppeteer?

Her mind was roaming, her thoughts escaping the confines of the coach to focus on what lay beyond, very possibly dwelling on the puppeteer.

“Helen,” I said.

Mary startled at the sound of my voice, or because it was Helen that I named?

“Yes?” Helen asked.

“Do you have a comb?”

She produced a small comb from a shallow pocket in her uniform dress.  Rather than make her move, I rose from my seat and took it from her hand, before letting myself fall hard against my cushioned seat.

I held it up for Mary.  “So you can feel more like yourself.”

“I don’t know who myself is,” she said, but she took the comb and began working it through her hair.  There were more than a few tangles that required sharp, violent tugs to figure out.

Couldn’t push too hard.  Just had to make sure she was grounded, focused on us.

“For now, let’s get through tonight,” I said.  “I don’t think any of us want you chained up.  Except maybe you.”

She snapped her head around, looking offended.

Because I’d crossed a line, or because I was right?

“You just said you don’t know who you are,” I said.  “Are you, right this minute, someone who wants to be chained up?  Saying yes or no doesn’t mean betraying him or threatening your standing with us.  It’s about who you are in this moment.”

She made a face, looking out the window at the city once more.

“Sy?” Lil asked.

“Yes, Lil?” I replied, my response as syrupy as I could make it.

I saw the annoyance on her expression, but it didn’t distract her from what she was going to say: “Don’t be a butt.  Leave her alone.”

The statement was forceful enough to catch me off guard.  Surprise gave way to annoyance.  How about you trust me to know what I’m doing?

But Jamie must have seen something in my expression, because he gave me a light tap with his elbow.

Fine.

Fine.  I wasn’t entirely on the ball, either.  I was positive I wasn’t crossing the line, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make more minor mistakes.

I gave Lil a smile, then let my head rest against the cushion.

“Do you want me to patch you up?”  Lil offered.  “Your hands look bad.”

A conciliatory gesture?  She couldn’t recant what she’d said, but maybe she hadn’t meant it to come out as forcefully as it had.  Fatigue affected her, too.  Emotions were a drug with their own side effects, ebbs and flows, and after half a night of activity and a week of fearing for her life, she might not have been on point any more than I was.

“They’ll want to look us over anyway,” I said, closing my eyes.  “It’d be redundant.  Relax instead, look after Helen.”

Lil looked down, where Helen was sleeping.  Tranquilized.

We were silent as the coach made its way through the streets, the stitched horses keeping up their hard patter of hoofbeat on roadtop.

We reached the Hedge, and there was more light there, less space between streetlights and streetlamps.  A glance out the window showed the perimeter wall, lit up by the ambient light.  It seemed to say ‘The Academy: A glowing beacon at the edge of Radham.’

Through a gate, and into the Academy proper.  We passed the Rows, Claret Hall, and the Rise, heading straight for the Tower.

Mary was tense.  Her shoulders were stiff, and she’d moved enough to make the chain move since the journey had begun.

Here we are.

“You’ve been here before,” I said.

Mary snapped her head around, as if unsure who I was talking to.  I wasn’t sure who she expected it to be, but she seemed to figure out that I was talking to her.  “Visits.”

“That’s all this is.  A visit.”

“One that decides my fate,” she said.

I shrugged, slow.  “Maybe.  Is that why you’re so anxious?  Or is it something else?”

“You keep talking like you read my mind,” she said.

You’re more of an open book than the literal open book in Jamie’s lap.

“It’s not hard to figure out.  You were told we’re the enemy.  We’re the bad guy.  Visits were visits.  You knew where you stood.”

“Sure,” she said, the word curt.

“They’re going to want to talk to you, ask questions.  Be ready for it.  You don’t have to tell them everything, but anything you tell them will smooth things over.  I don’t have anywhere to be, so I’ll be with you until we figure out where things stand.  I’m your ally, your advocate, I offered you a place with us, I will make it happen.  I promise things will be okay.  ”

“Promise,” she said.  Not a question, not a statement, only an echo.

Did the word have a significance?

“Do they even agree with you?” she asked.

They?  The other Lambsbridge orphans?

“I trust Sy,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Helen murmured.  She’d sensed the coach slowing down, and had roused.

I glanced at Lil, and sensed the hesitation.  Mary would too.

But Lil said, “Yes.”

Mary’s expression didn’t change.  Not deadpan, like Helen’s; it was a vaguely lost, heartbroken look that she had about her, and it was a look that didn’t offer any tells.

It suggested she was more comfortable or certain about what was going on than she had been a moment ago, when all the walls had been down and in ruins.

The coach stopped, and we made our way out, Lillian removing the blanket that covered Mary’s shackles, clumsily folding it and dropping it on the spot where Helen had been lying.  One by one, we made our way out, passing the Stitched bodyguards on either side of the door.

When Mary reached the door, they seized her.

“Go easy,” I told them.  “She’s not a threat.  You can stay close, but don’t manhandle her.”

The handlers for the two stitched bodyguards echoed my orders.  The two bodyguards let go of Mary, leaving her free to follow a pace behind me.

We were on dry ground.  At the base of the Tower, a roof had been set up so one side rested against the Tower itself, the other side propped up by a row of custom-grown trees.  Stitched horses were lined up beneath, with cords and wires stringing them up to a rack of large metal cables that ran down one side of the tower.

Gordon was already out of the other coach, lying in a stretcher, with the team that worked on the Griffon project surrounding him.

Three students looked after me.  Two, now that Lacey was gone.  Nine looked after Jamie.  Lillian had special tutoring and attention from a set of teachers, giving her support and care.  Helen stood alone with no students or teachers to maintain and look after her, each one getting driven away in time, but she did have her black-coat professor.

Twelve individuals looked after Gordon, and nine of those individuals were present, walking in a group around, ahead of, and trailing behind him as the stretcher was wheeled into the tower.  I was willing to bet that more were inside.

The rest of us almost didn’t matter, while they were focused on their subject.  Debating and discussing ways to move forward, consulting lists and charts.

He was in their hands.  I wasn’t too worried about how it would turn out.

As they filtered away, we were left in the company of a few scattered students who stood closer to the Tower’s entrance.  I recognized some as members of Jamie’s team, two men and two women who looked a little more tired than all the rest.  I also spotted the two remaining members of my team, two men who were standing to one side, smoking.  Behind us were the students who managed the stitched guards.

“I didn’t realize how badly I was outnumbered,” Mary said.

I smiled at the notion.

She didn’t smile back.

“It’s the Academy,” I said.  “This is a small department with a shortage of funding.  You should see the manpower backing the other projects.”

Lillian, Jamie, Helen, Mary and I ventured closer.

“Jamie,” one of Jamie’s project workers said.  Older than the rest.  “Uh, a few questions, first, but Professor Hayle wanted to see her.  Everyone’s to have their checkups, appointments, and testing.  If you could give us a moment with Jamie-”

“Have your moment,” I said, cutting him off.  “No rush.”

My two remaining team members were Dewey and Alton, puffing away at cigarettes.  Take away the white coats, and they could have passed for street toughs who were waiting to hold me at gunpoint and force me to empty my pockets.  There was a brutishness to their builds and expressions.  Alton had a heavy brow and an ugly look in his eye that Academy medicine couldn’t change.

Dewey’s face, by contrast, had seen too much of the Academy’s attention, smoothing all of his skin to the soft texture of baby’s bottom.  I knew Dewey had been given treatment a few years back for a bad slouch, but habit had won out, and even now he was just a touch hunched over.  His hair was blond and gossamer fine.

I knew where I stood with them.  I knew that Alton had been signed on because of a mean streak and a bad disciplinary record from a school very much like Mothmont, while Dewey was, along with Lacey, the only one who’d been present from the beginning.  He’d had been through lengthy and painful treatments for bad scarring he’d suffered as a child.  In their own ways, they weren’t the type to flinch, and they were good enough at what they did.  Lacey had just been good.  I imagined she’d learned not to care, rather than starting out that way.

“You need anything?” Dewey asked.

I shook my head.  “Had my appointment.”

He looked annoyed.  “I know that.  We don’t have any reason to stick around?”

I shook my head again.

“Yeah,” he said.  “What’d you say to Lacey that bothered her so much?”

I shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said, again.  As if he was answering a question or statement.  “Okay.”

“I know where to find you if I need you,” I said.

“Find one of us in the office tomorrow,” he told me.  “Should check levels.”

“Okay,” I said.

He nodded.

Easy.  No dancing around, no tricks, no posturing.

Just business.

Jamie was talking to the others.  His team.  From what I overheard, he was trying to convince them that no, he didn’t need to stop by their office now.  Yes, he would be there soon.  Yes, he understood that people were present now.

My eye went to the book.  He was holding it with both hands, but he wasn’t holding it with a deathgrip, he wasn’t hugging it.

He didn’t need help.

I retreated a bit, approaching the three girls at the edge of the canopy.  Lil was talking to Mary while she fixed the bandage at Helen’s side.  Helen seemed to be taking it in stride, arching one eyebrow as she glanced back at me.

The arch, much like the smiles, winks and nods, seemed to be for my benefit rather than her own.  Little touches that made me feel more nervous around her, rather than less.

“…Mnemonic trick to figure out how things are laid out,” Lil said.

“Trick?” Mary asked Lil.

“It’s a body.  Each department has a focus.  The Tower is the head.  Record keeping.  The Rise is the shoulders, or the collarbone, the neck, supporting structures, storage, think backpack.  Then you have the Academy headquarters.  Center of everything, Claret Hall-”

“The heart,” Mary said.

“The rows,” Lil suggested, trailing off to give Mary the chance of offering an answer.

Mary shook her head.

“Ribs.  Dormitories.  I think of it as rows, ribs, bars, cage, zoo, students.  That’s how I put it together in my head, drawing the connection.  I started doing it from the beginning, but even though I know, I still sort of think that way.  I make the connection like that,” Lil said.

She sounded so excited.  A kid with a chance to show her stuff.  She wasn’t a project, but she was clever in her own normal way.  Exceptionally so, it could be said.  Maybe it was because she’d been pushed to keep up with us, maybe it was because she was a rare breed.

But she wasn’t one of us.  She had a family, a place to go home to.

“What do you think the Hedge is?” I asked.

Mary started a little at the sound of my voice.  “Hedge?  Exterior wall… skin?”

I shrugged and nodded.  “Immediate care, contact with the city outside, first line of healing and prevention.”

“Does that help?” Lil asked.

“Help?” I cut in.

“With feeling lost and overwhelmed in this place,” Lil said.

“It helps a little,” Mary said, in a way that didn’t convince me in the slightest.  She moved her hands a bit to tug at her uniform top and the chains rattled.

“Okay, that’s great!” Lil said, perking up, “So, after the Rows, you have other main buildings.  There’s the-”

“Helen,” a voice cut through the patter of rain on the canopy roof.  It was a hard voice.

Lil’s train of thought crashed right there.

“Ibott,” Mary murmured.

Ibott.  He was someone who had been elevated to a position in society that didn’t suit him in the slightest.  He was among the most brilliant minds at Radham, clever, not bad looking on the surface, he had the veneer of the upper class and none of the follow-through.  His hair was neatly parted, set firmly in place by something that had a way of smelling rancid at the end of the day, leaving his hair locked into hard strings that crossed one corner of his forehead.  His round eyeglasses were gold-rimmed, but so smudged I could barely see the eyes on the other side of the glass.

A name that might not have been known by every household, but was known to most.

“I expected you earlier,” he said, and his phrasing was civil and proper, the tone far from it.  “In the future, you come straight inside and report to me.  Do not make me come out here.”

“Yes sir,” Helen said.

But you’re not always here, I thought.  Is she supposed to report regardless?

Ibott seemed to think so, and now Helen would.

He was now close enough to speak to us without raising his voice.  I sensed Lil shrinking back and shifted my position a little, to put myself between Ibott and her.

“You’re bleeding,” he observed.

“Yes sir,” Helen said.

“Explain.”

Before she could, I spoke up, “Sir.”

He ignored me.  “I want to hear it from Helen.  I certainly hope she recalls.”

“Sylvester put me in harm’s way so we could capture our target,” Helen said, before I could say anything.  “It was the best way to get me to where I could be most effective.”

I would have worded that better, I thought.

I was barely finished the thought when Ibott struck me.  He wasn’t a strong man, but he was several times my size, and he was a man.

The noise of the back of his hand connecting with my face made virtually every head present turn.

“Take more care,” he instructed me.

I had to blink a few times before I was able to figure out that I was on my hands and knees.  I opened my jaw yawning-wide, feeling it pop before I was able to work my mouth to form words.  “…Yes sir.”

Helen offered me her hand.  I took it.

“Do not help him up,” Ibott said.  “Come.”

Helen let my hand drop from hers, but she didn’t move.

“Good work tonight, Helen,” I murmured.

She turned and followed a step behind her creator.  Jamie’s crowd and Dewey all took care to move out of the way as the pair entered the tower.

Conversation didn’t resume until the door shut behind Helen.

I ignored Lil’s offer for assistance in standing, and got to my own two feet.

“Always good for a first impression, Ibott is,” I said, glancing at Mary.

“I don’t understand.”

“If he wanted to, he’d run Radham,” I said.  “He doesn’t want to, but he still has that clout.  Not what I would have wanted you to see while trying to win you over.”

“You’re assuming I have someplace else to go,” Mary said.

Yeah, I thought, I am.  But maybe you don’t see all the options that really lie in front of you.

I saw Jamie shift his grip on his book.  Head bent a little, arms crossed over the notebook’s leather-bound cover.

“Lil,” I said, without taking my eyes off him.

Lillian.”

“I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I’m telling you to go away, but… if you wanted to go to your room and get a good night’s sleep, this wouldn’t be a bad time.”

“That does sound like you’re trying to get rid of me.”

“But?” I asked.  “Pillow, covers, your own room, peace and quiet…”

“Nightmares,” she said.

“Do you think you’re going to have less nightmares, if you spend more time hanging around us?” I asked.

She made a face.

But she flipped her hood up, picked up her bag, and headed down the long road to the middle area of the University, where the Rows radiated out around Claret Hall.

“Come on,” I said.  I grabbed Mary’s chain, tugging a bit.

“Don’t,” she said, suddenly tense, resisting the pull.

Which a student and a stitched bodyguard took as leave to give her a push.

“Cooperate,” the student called out.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Really, it’s fine.”

But it didn’t feel fine.  Jamie was shrinking into himself more, glancing my way as his group led him inside.  I was caught between the two.  Couldn’t abandon Mary at this stage, but letting Jamie go ahead without giving support…

“Please, Mary,” I said.

Mary hesitated, then obeyed.

We covered ground quickly, Mary’s chain rattling, but I had to hold the door for her, and then the stitched bodyguards and their handlers were right behind us, wanting to keep an eye on Mary, and all in all, it was clumsy and awkward, and it took some time for us to catch up with the brisk, businesslike strides.

I pushed past students in lab coats to get to Jamie.

He unwrapped his arms from the book, and after a moment’s pause, he handed it to me.

I took it with reverent care, and held it securely in my arms.

“See you,” he said.

“Soon,” I replied.

Griffon getting pieced back together.  Galatea in the care of her maker, who is as different from her as night from day.

And the Caterpillar…

I watched the caterpillar disappear down the length of the hall.

Appointment was the wrong word.

I rubbed the side of my face, where I knew I’d bruise, then turned to Mary.  We were as alone as we’d get, with our stitched escort.

“I wanted to show you better,” I told Mary.  “I want to show you Lambsbridge.  How we have a home, how we have each other.”

“You have his book,” Mary said.  “I think I get it, even if I don’t understand the details.  I’m not sure I would have believed whatever you meant to show me.”

The perils of being an established liar.

“I want you to be one of us,” I said.

“I think I might want to be,” she replied.

“That’ll have to do,” I told her.

We had nine flights of stairs to climb, and when I offered to hold up the midsection of the chain to alleviate the weight of it, she didn’t resist.

When we arrived in Hayle’s office, he didn’t seem to miss that detail, either.  I saw his gaze linger where my hand held the metal links.

“Dog and Catcher are after Percy,” he said.  I noted how he watched Mary.  It seemed he’d been filled in on my intentions there, too.  Jamie’s work, no doubt.  Keeping everything in order, making sure the messages were passed along.

Mary didn’t flinch or react.

“The pursuit would have been easier if you hadn’t burned down Percy’s home,” Hayle told me.

I reacted to that.  I blinked a few times, trying to organize my thoughts and work through the shoddier bits of my memory.  “I didn’t.”

Hayle leaned back in his chair.  “You didn’t?”

I shook my head.

“Dog and Catcher say it wasn’t Percy who did it.  They would have had the scent, even with the rain.”

“I don’t have an answer for you,” I told him.

“I do,” Mary said, her voice soft.  “The plan was… more complex than I think you understand.”

“Complex how?” Hayle asked, his pale eyebrows rising.

“The children we were copied from, he had to do something with them.  He sold them, to others with ambitions in line with his,” she said, and she couldn’t maintain eye contact, staring down at the ground instead.  “It’s a group.  One he tried to keep secret from even me.  And it’s a lot bigger than you’d think.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 1.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 1)

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Overshoot, Percy mused.  A species finds itself with no predators and an abundance of resources.  The species grows by leaps and bounds, oftentimes exponentially, and quickly reaches a point where it vastly exceeds the space and resources available.

Percy held his umbrella up at an angle, pointing it against the rain that was driving down, now.  His eye fell on the Academy.  This late in the evening, it was one of the only points of light in this dark little city, walled in, with enough lights around the Hedge that the front wall was illuminated.

He turned away, shifting his grip on his umbrella.  His free hand reached up to tenderly prod his own damaged face.  The moment he’d been hurt, he’d chosen to exaggerate the severity of it.  He’d trusted his Mary.

His walk was brisk.  Running was a giveaway, walking was too slow.  He compromised on both fronts.  Living here, one got used to the rain, walking on slick sidewalk and road.  The Academy had wanted rain, they had devised a method to get it, algae that were now part of the water system.  Buildings at the periphery of Radham spouted out fumes that would catalyze the bacteria.

When Overshoot occurred, the end result was often a devastating collapse of the system that had formed.  Populations often died en masse.

The wind nearly tore his umbrella from his hand.  He had to pause to fix the arm at one side, where it had inverted, turning one side of the umbrella into a cup rather than a shield.  While he did so, he took the opportunity to glance over his shoulder, double-checking.

He didn’t see anyone that shouldn’t be there.  He kept a particular eye out for children, and saw nothing.

He felt both relief and disappointment.  To see Mary there would have lifted his heart and it would have made him feel safer.  To see all of the boys with Mary would have left him ecstatic.  Given him hope.

Only rain and shadow in equal proportion.

Radham worked so hard to portray itself as something good and proper.  He’d known that much already, spending the better part of six years at Mothmont, but he’d never been one to wander the street in the worst weather.  He’d been aware of the existence of such stitched, but he’d never seen how many stitched were active late at night, collecting trash, bodies, or simply going about on predetermined errands, especially now that he was in the shadier part of Radham.

A stitched was picking through a can of trash that had been left outside of a business, moving as though drunk, too loose, prone to swaying.  When it found something, a broken clock, a child’s toy, a pair of scissors, it fumbled to fold back a waterproof cloth that had been draped over a crate, placed the item inside, and then replaced the cloth.

Percy wanted to help it.  To give it an hour of his time, or find its owner and tell them how to maintain it better.  Some individuals were prone to complaining about how their relatives, friends and neighbors were collected before they ever touched a coffin, or dug up at the first opportunity by grave robbers looking to make some coin by selling to would-be-students.  Oh, but if they knew that stitched were sometimes used like this, ordered to go through garbage for anything that might be of value, taking the materials to a location where the valuables could be sorted out and sold?

A stitched wasn’t easy to make, but the attempted and ultimately partial revival of the dead had been one of Wollstone’s first projects, and had consequently been one of the most detailed in Wollstone’s literature.  All one had to do was obtain the materials that the Academy controlled and follow the documentation to the letter.

The materials were inexpensive, the end product lasted years, longer if kept dry and maintained at the right temperature, which this poor thing wasn’t.

He appreciated few things more than good work.  A craftsman with care regarding their trade.  This wasn’t that kind of good work.

The creator no doubt had access to a great many bodies, and thought it easier to go to a third-rate Academy graduate and have another made, than to work to keep this one functioning.

Flesh was cheap.  Dead flesh cheaper.

The stitched turned its head, looking in Percy’s direction.  The eyes were nearly gone, the pupils and irises clouded with milky white.

It wasn’t, however, looking at Percy himself.

He followed the gaze of the stitched creature, and he saw two figures in the rain.

The first and most obvious was a monster.  Four-legged, It stood tall enough that if it walked against a building, its shoulder would brush the upper end of a doorframe, but it was narrow enough that it could fit through the doorway itself, if it ducked its head down.  It had parts of a human face, writ large, the features largely concealed by long black hair.  Here and there, where flesh wasn’t sufficient, large amounts of metal had been set in place, fixed to flesh and bone.  Light from a streetlamp reflected green in its eyes.

The other figure was a man, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a long jacket. The light from the streetlamp reflected green in his eyes as well.  He carried a stick with a collar fixed to one end, ready to snap shut once touched to the throat, a bear trap without the teeth.  Sometimes it had spikes, Percy knew, but no.

No, Dog and Catcher wanted him alive.  To question.  To take his work, repurpose it.  It was only a matter of time.  The only reason they hadn’t noticed him was that they were distracted by something else.  It seemed Catcher was saying something, though the collar of his jacket was high enough to hide his mouth.

Dog nodded, and the sound he made in reply was deep and loud enough to be almost audible.  Speaking was impossible for the thing, given the mangled metal wreck that was his lower jaw.

How could Percy even describe the feeling that came over him, then?  The dread, the misery.  He imagined the feeling being very much like what he might experience if confronted by the family of the children he had replaced with his own.  If he had been cut down mid-stride, before accomplishing his goals.

As if a weight had been dropped on him from high above, smashing all he was to pieces, while leaving his body intact.

But dread didn’t help him.  He circled the garbage-scrounger and used the creature’s bulk and smell to hide him from sight and nose.

With a note of regret, he folded up his umbrella, subjecting himself to the rain.  Bone handle, properly waterproof.  Too large to go in the crate, too obvious a thing to be carrying.

“I hope your master rewards you by tending to you,” Percy murmured.  “So please forgive me for this.”

He pulled the waterproof cloth away from the top of the crate, where it protected the contents, threw it over his head and shoulders, then hefted the crate.  He contemplated kicking off his boots, but decided against it.

Visually, it would mask him from their view.  But their eyes were the least of his problems.

They could see better than him, they could track scents as well as any bloodhound, they could hear, as rumor went, a leaf settling on the ground, and they had the wits to use that information.

If they were this close, they had his scent, and if they had his scent, that mancatcher was as good as around his neck.

A sound behind him almost made him startle, but jumping or jerking could well be a giveaway.

Dog disappeared into an alley, traveling parallel to him.

Percy stumbled forward, box in hand, his thoughts a dull roar.  There were no good options.  Even if Mary or Clyde were here, the best they could hope to accomplish would be buying time.  If the stars aligned right, perhaps they could put down Catcher.

But victory wouldn’t happen.  Escape was out of the question.

Dog revealed himself by making a clatter, three floors above the ground, walking on a nearby rooftop.  With each step, shingles broke free and skidded down the roof to sail toward the ground below.

There were only three building lots between Percy and the war machine.  It had stopped at the end of one rooftop, and now strained, head raised, broad, bat-like nostrils flaring.

Dog almost casually leaped from rooftop to road.  Metal braces in and around the legs locked, sprung, and slammed into new configurations, absorbing some of the impact.  Muscle and mass handled the remainder.

Now that Dog was closer, Percy could see how tubes ran up and around the legs, disappearing into metal-framed slits in the side.  Two tubes carried blood, while the third carried what might have been water.

Dog was an ugly piece of work, which was odd, considering that Dog was one of the best known of the Academy’s ‘secret’ projects.  There were experiments that were done with care, thought through from the beginning.  This was not that.  It was a project that had been started, one largely doomed to failure.  When structural integrity had failed, crude metal engineering had been set in place.  When circulation was poor, things were rerouted, tubes set in place to serve where veins and arteries couldn’t, sometimes outside the body.

Little doubt there were other problems.  The Academy was probably happy that was the case.  A Dog couldn’t run if it needed regular drainage or a specialized diet.

The Academy had overshot.  In this case it had made effective use of that fact.

Dog turned his head, staring at Percy with those eyes that caught the light, the eyelids moved, providing a smile the mouth couldn’t.

It was fruitless to resist, or even try to run, but it galled Percy to know that it would be this that ended him.  He turned and prepared to go, when he saw Catcher drawing near.

The man toyed with the mancatcher, the collar on a stick.  The collar section of the tool spun, whirling so fast it was a blur in the gloom, sending off a spray of water droplets.

Catcher’s voice was rough-edged, a man who had smoked or was speaking through a bad cold.  “You changed coaches twice, walked through deep puddles.  Even wore a maggot-ridden blanket.”

Maggots?

Percy pulled at the piece of cloth he’d put over his head, but it still took a second for his eyes to adjust.  He saw the maggots wriggling, and flinched, casting the cloth away.

His scalp crawled, now, his neck and face.  Once he felt it, every drop of rain he couldn’t verify with his eyes was potentially a maggot, vermin, filth.

Catcher shifted his grip on the mancatcher, and Percy stumbled back, only to find that Dog was behind him, mouth open, teeth ready to bite.

But he still held the crate.  Using it for Dog would be useless, but-

Catcher thrusted, aiming for Percy’s throat, and Percy raised the box, the opening facing the weapon.

The crate was torn from his hands, thrown a distance away by a violent swing of the pole.

Too strong.  Catcher alone would have been enough, but there were two of them.

Wollstone’s work had caught hold of him from an early age.  It had defined his life.  Now it would, in a roundabout way, end it.

He thought of his creations.  Of Clyde, and of Mary.

In the same moment he realized his own mortality, he knew his legacy was gone.

He felt a flare of anger.

Percy nurtured the feeling, used it to find courage, and reached into his jacket for his pistol.

Catcher seized his wrist, then stopped, glancing down.

“That was…” Catcher asked, trailing off.  His head turned.

Dog growled, then darted off in the same direction.

A fog was rising around them.

No, it was a gas.  Pea-soup thick, the cloud rose steadily despite the downpour.

Catcher started using his grip on Percy’s wrist to pull, tugging him away from the swelling cloud.  Percy used his other hand to reach across his front for the gun, only to have Catcher move the mancatcher to prod his arm.

The collar, slightly too wide around for Percy’s upper arm, slammed shut.  The hole was large enough that he could have pulled his arm free if he’d been given the chance, but he wasn’t.  The weapon rotated, the edges digging into his arm, and the implicit promise was that trying to pull free despite the pressure might see skin scraped away by the weapon’s edges.

Out of the same flame of anger that had driven him to reach for the gun, Percy found himself fighting Catcher.  His opponent was strong enough to lift him, but Percy hauled himself downward, made every step a difficult one with one of his feet braced against Catcher’s thigh.  He strained to move toward the gas that had alarmed these two abominations so very much.

It was stupid, reckless, and it was ugly, everything Percy had worked against.  Every step of the way, he’d fought against the current, and every step of the way, he’d done things with care.  Not all of it was things he could be proud of, but he’d weighed his options, and had never done a thing he felt he could later regret, in the grand scheme of it all.

Even his dealings with the children.

This, he instinctively felt, was something he might very well regret more than anything else, even if it only left him minutes or seconds more of life.

In the end, he succeeded.  His head moved too far back, and the gas washed over his face.

In an instant, he was blind, seeing through a veil.  Foul, acrid tastes and smells flooded his nose and mouth.

His struggles with Catcher continued, less effective now that he was blinded.

When he was dropped, he kicked and flailed into the blurry darkness.

When a hand pressed around his mouth, he struck out, hit flesh.  He struck again, and felt long hair.

His hand moved more gently through the hair, with a degree of caution this time, with care.

Mary?

He opened his mouth to ask, but whatever it was that had filled it with foul taste, it was like a thick flour, caking his tongue and inner cheeks, making them stick to his teeth.  His lips bound together, cracking and bleeding as he pulled them apart.

The hand over his mouth moved, until only one finger pressed against his lips.

The fingers seized his bleeding lower lip and tugged.  Leading him like a mutt on a leash, and he knew it wasn’t his Mary.

He obeyed all the same.

A few staggering footsteps, not knowing where he was going.  A ruckus occurred behind them.

The hand took his wrist, instead, and he followed, for what seemed like an interminably long time, but was likely only a handful of minutes.

The hand freed his wrist.

Another minute passed.  He started to feel his heartbeat pick up.  Fear, humiliation, worry.  He was dirty, covered in maggots, bloody, and except for his silent companion, he was alone.

He heard a woman’s sigh, not one of exasperation, but relief.

“It’s water,” she said, and her voice was muffled.  “Right in front of you.  Rinse your face, try to get your nose and ears as well, or you won’t see or hear very well for a long time.”

He obeyed, fumbling until he found the rain barrel.  He made use of the water, rubbing at his eyes, only to pull away long strings of goop.  It snapped before he could get much of it.  He pulled away as much as he could, checked his vision, and still found it blurry.  His second attempt suggested that absolutely none of it had dissipated.

“It uses the mucus membranes,” she explained.  “Binds to to the mucus itself.  You’re going to be congested, and you’ll be pulling gobbets of the stuff from your nose and mouth for a long time.  Give it an hour or two and it’ll be more solid.  The rinse is meant to clear things up.”

“How long?” he managed.  He still felt as though his tongue was coated in wax.  He blinked and made out a raven-haired beauty in a close-fitting jacket.

“Long enough you might worry I lied to you and that permanent damage was done.  Wash with regularity, it will get better.”

He looked back over his shoulder.

“They’re gone,” she reassured him.  “It affected them worse than it affected you.  They still put up a fight, which I didn’t expect.  I had three stitched with me, and Catcher took them to pieces.  The Academy will diagnose the problem and mend those two within a day, and then they’ll devise a means to prevent it, but…”

“But you saved me?” Percy asked.

He could make out enough of her face to see a smile.

“You saved me, and you sacrificed three stitched and a trump card to do it.  You’re with them.”

“Yes.”

For the first time since the anonymous note had informed him the Academy was coming for him, he felt himself relax a touch.

He dunked his face again, then shook it violently in the water, side to side, splashing, trying to free up any of the substance that might be clinging.

When he stood straight, he put his hands to his hair and then combed it with his fingers.

His vision was still only half of what it had been.

“Come,” she said, smiling.

The destination, as it turned out, was a nondescript store with an old cowboy’s hat over the door.

“Ever been to a place like this?” his companion asked, ascending the stairs ahead of him.   She shot him a light smile over one shoulder.

“I, ah, never have, believe it or not.”

“I believe you,” she said.  “You’re more the type to find someone of that calling and invite her to your place.”

She knew him that well?

“During daytime, no less,” she said.

Ah.  “You’ve been watching me that well, then.”

“The man that walks around your home outside of the school hours, pulling the cart?  Ours.”

“I see.”

They’d reached the top of the stairs, two floors up, and reached a door with another cowboy’s hat above it.  Rather than open it, his companion turned around, then wiped at his face, touching his hair.

His blood still pumping and face already hot from the humiliation of his futile struggle against Catcher, just after hearing intimate topics raised so readily, he felt more than a little flustered.

From the smile on her face, she seemed to know it.  Perhaps she had been watching him even more carefully than he’d known.  Enough to know he liked to be in control, to steer things, and she was denying him that chance.

Before he could ask a question, she opened the door.

The walls were draped with red velvet or silk or something very close to it, traced with gold.  The pillars had branches reaching up and around them, and one branch had a small bird on it.  The light was electrical, cast through red glass.

Scattered around the room, in a very haphazard fashion, there were eight or nine people in chairs, on couches, or standing.

“Cynthia,” an old man greeted her.  “And Mr. Percy.”

“Catcher and Dog were there.  I used my blinding powder, they’ll know what it is for next time.  Louis is going to tell you I didn’t let him set the Academy’s Dog on fire, but it seemed too risky.  Every time we made a sound, Catcher would charge at us.  I let the stitched make all the sounds they wanted, and we left.  It was the best option, Catcher wasn’t slowing down.”

“He doesn’t, that is his design,” the old man said.  Percy blinked to try and get a better view.  Changing his tone, the old man spoke again, “You did well.”

Talking to me.

“I failed.  My creations are dead.”

“Mmm, I’m afraid so,” the old man said.  “We confirmed for ourselves.  Three boys and a girl, killed by the Academy’s set.”

Percy felt a wrench in his chest.  He managed to keep his expression calm.

It was good.  The deliberate act of control helped to center him.  He felt more like himself.

“What were you doing?” a woman asked.  She was surrounded by cages.  The shapes within suggested birds.

Percy opened his mouth to answer, then shut it.

“You won’t say?” Cynthia asked, and her tone was teasing.

“You brought me here for a reason.”

“We did,” the old man said.

Percy chose his words carefully.  “I feel as though I’m being judged.”

“We all are, always,” the woman with the birds said.  “Are you weak, strong, useful, a fitting romantic partner, a friend, an enemy?”

“I’ll reword.  I’m on trial.”

“No,” the old man said.  “Wrong word, that.”

“It matters, what I say, how I say it.  And don’t say it always matters.  You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” the old man said.  “I know.  Tell us, what were you doing?”

Percy remained silent, considering.

When Cynthia spoke, her voice was soft, but it wasn’t uncertain in the least.  “There is nothing you can say that is worse than saying nothing at all.”

Percy didn’t speak right away, but he did make the decision to speak.  “I’m not proud.  I started out wanting to prove myself to them.  I had an idea, I wanted to see it through, and show them that they were wrong to refuse it.”

“Your clones.”

“Yes,” Percy said.

“Your work seemed impeccable, considering your limited access to Academy resources.  They protect their texts and charts with a dangerous passion.  It’s half of what Dog and Catcher do, rounding up those who have or copy the books.  Every academy has projects that do, dressing them up as patriots and protectors of the Crown.”

“There were teachers who brought sections of the texts to the school.  I caught glimpses, and I held phrases and numbers in my head until I could write them down, sometimes hours later.”

“Impressive,” a man in the corner said.  “Why?  You started out wanting to prove yourself to the Academy, then you started killings.  To hurt Mothmont, and to hurt the Academy too?”

“To become Headmaster.  Once I could dictate policy, I planned to mass produce.”

“Mass produce clones?”

Percy managed a smile with his cracked, gummed-up lips.  “Imagine, please, a new method of warfare.  One where a single man or clone can infiltrate, they can target children, replace them, the clones would educate their new peers in how to act like children, and slowly but silently capture an entire generation.  One command or order, all in one night, and an entire city would be brought to its knees.”

“I do like this sort of imagining,” the old man said.  “The Academy likes its weapons, as you saw with it’s pet Dog.”

“The Academy didn’t like my weapon.  Not because of what it was, but because they had a vision in mind, a group of children working together.  My idea was too slow for Hayle.”

“You wanted to make it work.  The lives of children meant nothing to you, you sold them without a care as to what we were using them for?”

Is it a trial after all?

“The lives of my children mean something to me.”

“Do you want revenge for them, Percy?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have it.  You’ll carry out your plan.”

“They know how I operate.  They’ll be checking, to be safe.”

“Let them waste their time, then.  There are other routes.”

Percy narrowed his eyes, felt the film in them, and rubbed at one with the knuckle of his thumb.  “Other routes?”

In answer, Cynthia reached up and tapped one of the red lights.

Percy nodded in realization.

“We’ll be working together,” she said.  “To create beautiful pieces of work.”

“And you’ll be doing it with more resources,” the bird woman said.

“While staying well out of sight,” the old man said, with a little more emphasis.  “I’m sure you understand.”

Percy nodded slowly, taking it all in.  He allowed himself a smile.

“I’m sure it won’t take much convincing to have you act against the Academy?” the old man asked.

Percy mused for a moment.  “Whenever I think of the Academy, I think of the concept of the OvershootYou’re familiar with it, I presume?

“I was a professor,” the old man said, “you can trust I am.”

Percy smiled a little.  “They’re treading dangerous ground.  Verging on collapse.  Hayle sees it too, but he thinks he can make minds brilliant enough to solve the problem.  I think he’s only going to wind up contributing to it.  No, I most definitely don’t have a problem acting against them.”

The demeanor of the others in the room told him he’d passed his trial.

“Can I wash my face?” he asked, as others settled in, and the din of conversatino rose.  “Again?”

“This way,” Cynthia said.  “You have a room.”

She led him to his quarters.  His eyes went as wide as the blinding film let them.

A complete set of Academy texts.  Large vats, sufficient to house a person.

“The basin is this way,” Cynthia said.  “You have an bathroom adjunct.”

He almost didn’t hear her.  His finger traced the closest vat.

He would create life, play the littlest of gods.

Clones, he thought.  From Ancient Greek Klon-.  Meaning Twig.

He smiled at the thought, before going to wash his face.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.01 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.1

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“You’re going to get sick, doing that,” Rick told me.  He picked up my hood and pulled it over my wet hair.

A little petulantly, I pulled it back down.  I glared at him.

Rick, one of the older boys at Lambsbridge, only smiled.  Back when he’d arrived at the orphanage he had taken me for someone much younger.  He’d quickly realized how much I hated it when I wasn’t taken seriously and decided to kill me with kindness.

He looked the part, too.  Where Gordon was big in the athletic sense, Rick was round-chinned, wide-hipped, with a heavy, dense body.  He might have looked like a proper Bruno if his face wasn’t so damned innocent; rosy cheeked, bright eyed and clear-skinned for a fifteen year old.

To the adults, he was cuddly.  To me, he was a nuisance.

“Hey, Gordon, can I grab that extra umbrella?” Rick asked.

Gordon and Helen were walking together, each holding large umbrellas, a herd of the younger orphans walking around them.

“I think Sy would prefer it if you left him alone,” Gordon said.

“Thank you,” I said.  “Yes.”

“He’s going to get sick if he gets this cold and wet.”

“It’s summer,” I pointed out.  “It’s warm rain, and I want to get wet.  I’m changing when I get back anyway.”

“Why would you want to get wet?”

“Why is it any of your business?  My head gets hot, I like to cool down sometimes.”

“Your head gets hot?” Rick asked.  He gave me an indulgent smile.  “I think you’re already feverish, Sy.”

I gave him a very unimpressed look, then ducked around a pair of recent arrivals, aiming to put them between me and Rick.

It didn’t work.  I felt a hand grip my hood, and spun on the spot, slapping at it, harder than was necessary.

It didn’t have much effect, but it made for a loud slap, and the speed with which I’d turned caught eyes.  Other children and a few bystanders on the street were staring, now.  The Lambsbridge group slowed, some stopping altogether.

I stared Rick down, glaring.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” Rick said, in the nicest tone imaginable.

“I can.  I do.  I don’t need you to step in and tell me how,” I said, my voice tight.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

I didn’t move, still staring daggers at Rick.

“I’ve got my hands full with my book and this umbrella, and I need to scratch my nose,” Jamie said.  “Can you give me a hand?”

I turned my back on Rick, and advanced to the front of the group, where Jamie was walking alongside Eliza and Fran, the only two girls around our age that weren’t Helen, and all three of them were carrying large umbrellas to shelter themselves and a few small children from the water.  I reached up and scratched his nose for him.  He scrunched it up suitably, provoking a laugh from some of the smallest children in the herd.

Breaking tension.

“I meant for you to take my umbrella,” he said, but he was smiling a little.  He started walking, and our group started moving again.  I took the umbrella from him, holding it with both hands and falling in step  between him and Fran, prompting a, “Thank you.”

“Put his hood up, Jamie,” Rick said.

I tensed.

“Rick,” Gordon said, “C’mere.”

Gordon’s help served to put Rick at the tail end of the group, while Jamie had me at the front.  The kids in the middle were splashing in puddles.  Altogether, we took up most of the sidewalk and some of the street.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and it was about as far from gloomy as Radham got, with sunlight pushing at but not yet breaking through the clouds overhead.  The rain was warm to the touch, and about half of the people on the street were doing just what I was doing, keeping hoods down and umbrellas away.

Discount the stitched that were here and there, like the group that was leading one large, almost featureless, hairless mammal in the direction of the Academy, and maybe two thirds of the people were enjoying the rain.

Which Rick didn’t seem able to understand.

“He really gets to you, huh?” Jamie asked.

“He should get to everyone,” I said.  “There’s something seriously bent in his head, and the fact that nobody but me understands that is a bigger bother than he is.”

“Rick isn’t a bad guy, he’s just awkward,” Fran said, beside me.

I pulled one hand away from the umbrella to gesture at her, giving Jamie my best ‘see!?‘ look.

“I sort of understand,” Jamie said, gently.  “I do see elements of it.  I also think you exaggerate it to make it something it isn’t.”

“I understand people,” I said, being very careful with my words.  The other orphans did not know who or what we were, and the wrong phrasing could be disastrous.  “I know what makes them tick.  I know how to use that.  I’ve had to know all that, because… of where I came from.  I’ve told you this, and more.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jamie said, just as careful.  He knew what I really meant.  Fran and Eliza were decorous enough not to pry or ask about my past, though I saw them exchange glances between each other.

“Let’s not dwell too much on the bad stuff with the small ones around,” Eliza said.

I shook my head.  “I don’t get Rick.  I can push, I can prod, I can test him, and he doesn’t budge.”

“He knows you just as well as you know him,” Jamie said.  “You’re clever, Sy, but don’t underestimate just how effective the average person is when they’re one hundred percent focused on one thing.”

“He’s one hundred percent focused on me?  And you don’t see what’s wrong with that?”

“Do you blame him?  You met each other on one of your bad days, one of the days when you’re in particularly foul, spiteful moods-”

After an appointment.

“-and forced him to figure out how to deal with you.”

“Which he did,” I muttered.

“Which means he doesn’t give in, he doesn’t change course.  You made your bed, Sy.  Now you get to sleep in it.  Go after people and don’t be surprised if they fight back the best ways they know how.”

I scowled, “If I had a clue, some inkling of what makes a person that fundamentally messed up…”

Sylvester!” Fran rebuked me with enough force that the children we were walking with jumped a little.  “Don’t be unkind!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, shrinking down a little.  “I’m just saying.  I don’t get him.  I don’t know what adds up to Rick being Rick.”

I know,” Jamie said.  “I know his story.”

I was immediately a puppy, eyes bright, ears perked up.

“And I’m not going to tell you,” Jamie said.  “Ever.”

“But-”

“Because you’ll use it.  I know you.  Let it lie and deal with it as best as you can.  It’s good for you.”

I fought the urge to smack Jamie with the umbrella I was holding.  I only managed to avoid it by telling myself that Jamie had to have written it down in one of his notebooks.

“It’s not in my diaries, Sy,” Jamie said, quiet.  “Well, it is, but I blotted the words out after you threw the cup at his head, just a bit before Christmas.  I knew you’d look eventually.”

The annoyances of dealing with someone who knew you well enough to predict how you thought.

“I was about to ask if you’d really read his diary,” Fran said, “But then I thought, gosh, silly me, it’s Sylvester.”

I sighed.  I considered hitting the both of them with the umbrella, but then I caught sight of Jamie’s expression.  Light concern, caring.  Gentleness.

Jamie’s so slow he wouldn’t ever get out of the way fast enough.  Not sporting, I told myself.

He moved his book to his other arm and put an arm around my shoulders.

“Can you give Sy and me a moment?  We’re just going to walk ahead a bit,” Jamie said.

“I’ll watch the ankle biters,” Fran said, taking the umbrella from me, holding one in each hand.  I didn’t miss the smile on her face as she said it.

Jamie gave her a curt nod.  We picked up our pace to pull ahead, which wasn’t too much of a problem, considering how slow a collection of five year olds sometimes were.  He moved his book so it was more out of the rain.  I reached over to pull his rain-cloak over it.

It took a minute before we were out of earshot.  We had to circle around a slow-moving obstacle.  The obstacle took the form of a large glass case the size of a coach, a cloth thrown over the top, already soaked with the water that sloshed within.  Live horses were pulling the thing, and the Academy students who weren’t leading the horses were holding formation in a loose circle around the tank, warding off incoming traffic so a coach didn’t crash into the side.

When we were on the other side, I commented, “Rick’s the sort of guy who ends up dressing in his mom’s clothes and smiles as he kills his victims with a knitting needle or something.”

“You’re not going to bait an answer out of me, Sy,” Jamie said.

“Not a knitting needle.  But something inventive,” I mused.  “Common household item.  You’re the one that reads the books.  What item fits?”

“You’re more agitated than usual,” Jamie told me.  “I think high-strung is the term.  I’m guessing it’s Mary?”

I frowned.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“You don’t have to act so smug.”

“I’m not being smug,” Jamie said, giving me every indication that he really believed what he was saying.  “Look, it’s been a few weeks.  You have a tendency to want to steer the ship, even if Gordon is supposed to be the one captaining it.  I know you haven’t been that able to steer Mary as much as you’d like, despite your very frequent visits.”

“I told Hayle everything,” I said.  “I-”

Jamie was giving me a look.

Almost everything.  I explained, I got him to agree and get Mary’s oversight to cooperate.  Yet half the time I couldn’t even talk to her, because they were doing stuff with her or with her parents.

Jamie nodded, taking it in, storing it, maybe processing something else, or paging through a set of memories in his head.  “You weren’t that successful when you did see her.  It’s why you’re so insecure now.”

“I’m not insecure.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  He didn’t sound much like he believed me.

“She did try to kill you,” I pointed out.  “If this goes an ugly way, then she might try again.”

“She came closer to killing you than she did to killing me,” Jamie pointed out.  “Several times, in fact.  If you’re trying to make me join you in the hand-wringing, you’ll have to do better.”

“You’re no fun,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  He squeezed my shoulders.  “I’m a terrible bore.”

“The worst bore.  I have no idea why Fran likes you.”

“Hm?”

“She likes you.  Like-like.  The way she acted when we left them behind, I’m sure.”

Now it was Jamie’s turn to look a little bit annoyed and concerned.  Good.  For all he wanted to mock me about wringing my hands over Mary, I knew he’d worry over this.  He’d do the worrying for Fran, I knew, and it wasn’t necessarily a bad sort of worrying, but I felt a little thrill of victory.

“She really likes me?”

“She thinks boring old Jamie is the best.  Let me tell you, if any girl liked me as much as she likes you…” I trailed off.

“Yes?”

“I dunno!  I could make them do anything.  Color their hair blue, or spit in Dog’s face, or-”

“Anything,” Jamie said, cutting me off.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling.

“That’s one worry off my mind, at least,” he said.

“What?”

“I was thinking about you and Mary, and the interplay between the two of you,” Jamie said, stumbling a bit as he tried to explain.  “…few years too early for that, I suppose.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You pick things up quickly,” Jamie said.  “Obviously.  And you picked up human interaction first.  Your word choice, how you express yourself, is sometimes very adult, because of how you used it to craft your persona.”

“Uh huh…” I said, inviting him to go on.

“It’s a relief to see past that and get a glimpse at the you beneath all of it.”

“You’re a butt,” I said.  “That is the real me.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe.  You’re definitely a butt.”

“I meant-”

“That you’re a butt?  You butt?”  I took advantage of how slow he could be to get up to speed, needling him.

He shifted his grip on my shoulders to catch my neck in the crook of his arm, lightly choking me.

I jabbed him in the soft side of his belly, which only made him choke me harder.

Our roughhousing carried on until we caught sight of Mrs. Earles, standing at the corner of the road.

From her reaction, it looked like she’d been looking for us.  Jamie  let go of my neck and the back of my underwear.  I released him, too, and fixed my clothes.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Maybe a minute behind,” I said, looking back to check.  “We needed to talk a bit.”

“So it seems,” she said, before reaching down to fix Jamie’s collar.  “Something’s come up?”

“Mary?” I asked, without missing a beat.  “Did something happen?”

“No.  Mary just arrived with her bags.  But she came with company.”

The puppeteer?  No.  Too soon.

“Mr. Hayle?” I asked.  Without missing a breath, I added, “Did he want something?”

“Yes to both questions,” she said.  She was distracted, craning her neck to see if she could spot the others.  “Professor Hayle asked you to meet him at the old stable?  Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” Jamie said.

“Good, because I don’t.  If you want to go ahead, I can point the others your way.”

“We’ll wait,” I said, at the same time as Jamie’s, “Okay.”

“We’ll wait,” I reaffirmed.  Jamie nodded.

It did take less than a minute for the others to catch up.  When they came into sight, the smallest children picked up speed, stampeding toward Mrs. Earles.  She didn’t bend down to greet them, but reached out to touch a head here and there.

When Gordon and Helen saw us, I pointed down the side street to our right.  Gordon nodded.

It took Helen some work to peel away from the children that had clustered around her.  Not the youngest, the four to six year olds didn’t take to Helen as much, but the girls who were closer to my age, just a step below hers, they tended to idolize her.

While she said goodbyes and gently cut them short as they tried to question her, I had a thought.  “Lillian?”

“Lillian is with Mary,” Mrs. Earles said.

That bothered me.  It was hard to put my finger on why.

I glanced back at Rick, who was looking at our contingent with a curious look in his eye.  He started to follow, but Mrs. Earles served to run interference, ordering him to help her with the children.

I took too much joy in that.

Helen finally caught up, turning her back to everyone but our little group, her expression going flat.

We walked down the side street together.  Toward the old stable, which hadn’t held any proper horses for a long time.  It was a minor landmark, and it was too much of one to be knocked down, too ramshackle to see any use.

“I told Rick to back off,” Gordon said.

“He won’t,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I figured.  But I thought I’d try.  Wish I could do more.”

“Tell me that you agree he’s bent in the head.”

“He’s bent in the head,” Gordon agreed.

“Thank you!” I said, pointing, looking at Jamie.  “See?”

Jamie stammered, “That’s not- No.  I didn’t say he wasn’t.  I said it’s not-”

“You don’t think he’s the smarmy, too-nice, wear Sy’s entrails as a belt sort of bent,” I said.

“I, uh, no.”

“Just you wait.  If Mrs. Earles catches him licking the bathroom floor again, then-”

“Again?” Jamie cut in.

“See?  Right there.  First place your mind goes isn’t ‘he wouldn’t do that’.  You’re fixating on the ‘again’ part!”

“No,” Gordon said, very calmly, “I think it’s fine to fixate on the ‘again’ part of it.  I think you’re a little over the top on that one.”

“Just you wait,” I warned.

“I’ll wait,” Gordon said.  “Don’t kill him in the meantime.  It’s probably undeserved and it’ll upset Professor Hayle.”

“And not the kind of upset that he usually lets you get away with,” Jamie pointed out.

“I know, I know!”

The trip to the stables didn’t take too long.  The rain gradually increased in intensity, then settled to a light drizzle.  I welcomed it, pushing my hair back.  Jamie had his hood down too now that it was only drizzling, his long hair damp but not wet.  His glasses were speckled with droplets he wasn’t wiping away.

When we arrived, I caught sight of Mary.  Lillian was a short distance away.  Hayle stood by the door of the stables, with Dog and Catcher nearby.  I spotted the Gorger in the stables, sitting on the floor, his forehead as high as the stable door.

Mary looked a little out of her depth, but she was centered enough that she wasn’t letting it show.  I had to infer not from expression or body language, but by the distance between her and Lillian.  I liked that they weren’t standing close together.

Mary was wearing regular clothes for the first time since I’d met her, no Mothmont uniform or patient’s gown, and she had her hair in ribbons, a different configuration than I’d seen at our first meeting.  Her hair was longer, and hadn’t been cut, though it was braided at one side for neatness’ sake.

She acknowledged me with a small smile as I approached, Jamie trailing after me.

Hayle was wearing his black lab coat, a simple shirt and slacks beneath, a folded umbrella at his side.  The overhanging roof above the stable door was shielding him from the rain.  He was talking to Gorger, but his eyes were on us, looking us over, assessing us, his eyes flickering between Mary and me a few times, measuring, much as I’d measured her distance from everyone else.

As Jamie had speculated, I’d modeled much of what I knew and did after other people around me, and I supposed one of those people was Mr. Hayle.

Dog was lying down in mud, very possibly enjoying the cool muck and grime.  His expression was always hard to read, as he didn’t have a proper mouth and the metal fixtures around his face stretched skin and pulled at muscle in ways that made it less intuitive.  Metal shutters that were normally down around the jaw had been raised around the nose, I noted, covering the lower half of his face.  More guarded?

Catcher was still, unmoving, hands in pockets, his mancatcher standing up so it leaned against his elbow.

And the Gorger… well, the Gorger was the Gorger.  Fat and naked, with skin that looked too thick, bugged-out eyes with too-small pupils that moved too slowly drifting lazily over each of us, small, too-puckered lips pursed.  Hayle was talking to him, but he wasn’t reacting or giving any hint that he was even listening.

“The Lambs,” Catcher said.  “It’s been a little while.”

“Just a little while,” I said.  “Doing okay?”

“It’s been worse, Sy,” he replied.

Gordon and Helen had broken away from Jamie and me.  Gordon went straight to Dog.  Where a handshake would do for someone else, Gordon simply reached out to touch the side of Dog’s head, brushing some hair back and away from Dog’s eye.  Something in Dog relaxed the slightest fraction, muscles all down his shoulders and backs easing where they’d been tense.

Lonely thing.

Helen, for her part, was walking more slowly, swaying a little with her hands clasped behind her back, her skirt swishing left and right with each set of steps.  She came to a stop somewhere midway between Gordon and the rest of us, hands still clasped behind her.

The swaying was almost playful, which was very interesting unto itself.  Helen didn’t have a very expressive personality, and any expression she did give was usually for someone else’s benefit.

That raised the question of just who Helen was acting for, here.  I looked over everyone, human and experiment alike, and I couldn’t pin it down.

That made me think it was for her own benefit.  A hint of the personality that Helen was crafting for herself?  An experiment, to see how people she saw as important might react and validate?

She caught me studying her and smiled a little, and it was a naughty smile.

Because Jamie wasn’t the only one who knew me well enough to guess what I was thinking.  Was it for my benefit?

“She’s scary,” Mary murmured.

You’re scary,” I said.

“Well…” Mary said, and from the sound of it, she didn’t have a particularly good retort.

“She’s on your side,” I said.  “Which makes her a good scary, right?”

“Yeah,” Mary said, not sounding convinced.

This very scene was very much Helen’s medium.  It was very much not Mary’s.

It made me feel a great deal more confident in having her join the group.  I hadn’t lost her in the time that Hayle and Lil and all the other Academy people had been poking, prodding, and interrogating her.

I reached out with a hand, touching hers.

She clasped my hand, and the surprising tightness of the hold told me my read on her wasn’t wrong in the slightest.

“Whatever this is about,” Gordon commented, “It’s big.”

Hayle had just finished talking to Gorger.  He turned to face us.  “It’s… potentially problematic.  Other special projects are already working on it.  I wanted to bring you up to speed and make sure you’re communicating effectively.”

“That’s not a problem,” Gordon said, hand still on Dog’s temple.

“I’ll be brief.  This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.  Something got loose in the Academy.  A student project.  Catcher suggested we reach out to you, simply to have more eyes on the scene.”

“If something got loose and they can’t catch it, what makes you think we can?”  Gordon asked.

“We lose nothing by putting ourselves out there to help, and refusing would look bad, when the Academy is this concerned,” Hayle said.  “It was a lose-lose, where standing down would make us look ineffectual, but they weren’t confident you wouldn’t get in the way.  I made our case, and they agreed to let us participate in the hunt, with the proviso that I have you meet some of the other special projects, tell you to communicate, and stress, very carefully, very emphatically, that you are not to get in the way.”

We all nodded, Mary included.

“Don’t nod, Sylvester,” Hayle said.  “I’m directing this largely at you.”

I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.  “I- what?  Why me?”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer.  Instead, he pointed at Mary, “I agreed to your request to let her join.  I’ve indulged you a great many times in the past several years.  I’m asking you to cooperate here.  Please.”

The smile slipped from my face.  I felt Mary squeeze my hand.

“I will,” I said.

He nodded.  “The experiment can’t leave the bounds of the city.  Gorger will be in the wooded outskirts, Dog and Catcher in the city.  We’re operating under the assumption that it’s still somewhere in the Academy, and much of the focus is there.  You’ll be there, and I’ve arranged for you to talk to the culprit.”

“Culprit,” Gordon said.  “That’s an interesting word choice.”

“It’s the right one,” Hayle said.  “This incident was a deliberate one, and it was carried out by a student, who wasn’t operating alone.”

“Is it… them?” I asked, glancing at Mary.  “The group that Percy was working with?”

“We don’t know,” Hayle said.  “We’re following up on some things, but probably not.  I’ve heard others suggest it’s something else.  Whatever the case, word is out about the escaped experiment, and it’s spreading.  People are scared.  A fast resolution is preferred.”

I bit back a sigh and a smartass comment.  He had to jinx it.

“We’re on it,” Gordon said.

“Good,” Hayle said.  “Go.

We moved.  Gorger rising, heaving his massive bulk to a standing position.  Dog and Catcher turned, moving off down a side street as a pair.  The remainder of us, the Lambs and our medic, headed in the direction of the Academy, Hayle following behind.

Mary didn’t let go of my hand the entire way to the Academy.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.02 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.2

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

We entered the Academy.  The road divided, with a loop moving around to the emergency entrance for the Hedge, and the main road continuing straight beneath a massive arch.  I noted that double guard had been stationed between the emergency entrance and the archway.  The men in uniform gave us wary glances, but Hayle, still trailing well behind our group, gave them a wave, and they let us through.

The way in was a gate with heavy doors.  They were paneled with wood, but I knew from past experience and observation that the wood covered heavy steel.  They were heavy, they were massive, and the idea was that they would stand up to a bomb blast if need be.  If things came down to it, the Academy doubled as a fortress.

Pity about the town, but the Academy was built to stand tall through virtually any scenario.

“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk,” I remarked to Mary.

“No,” she agreed.  “I don’t think they wanted us to talk.”

“I can see that,” I said.  I thought about how Hayle had stressed that I shouldn’t play fast and loose with this particular job.  Had he wanted to assert his own degree of control over Mary?  How would he have done it?

Well, keeping us separated was a way.  I’d promised that she wouldn’t have to be alone, and Hayle had forced me to break that promise, in a minor way.  By showing my face I’d done what I could to convince her I was trying, but now it was time to follow through.

“I remember overhearing you talk about how you hadn’t expected to deal with us,” I said.  “You thought it would be Dog and Catcher, or one of the other experiments.”

“Yeah.  We researched what we could, but things were hard to find.  We didn’t want to tip anyone off,” she said.  She pulled her hand away from mine and adjusted her sweater, tugging at the side of her skirt, and very pointedly didn’t put her hand in mine again.

My mind raced through three immediate possibilities as to why she’d done that.  She craved to belong somewhere; had she imprinted on the Academy, and was she now conscious of the Academy watching her expression and interaction with me?   That meant Hayle had won, in a way.  She was his as much as she was mine.

Or had I made her uncomfortable, reminding her of the past and her past affiliations?  That meant my grip was slipping, but it could be recouped.

Finally, it could be discomfort.  Was she adopting a passive role?  Subordinate, loyal, following my lead explicitly.  If that was the case, then I had to be especially gentle.

“Hm,” I said, calm and quiet, as if I’d been thinking about something else altogether.  Then, not betraying my racing thoughts, I asked, “What was the plan to deal with them?  Can I ask?”

“We had ideas.  Stockpiles of weapons, traps.  It’s hard, with the school being what it is, there aren’t many hiding places with that many people running around.”

“But you had things.”

“Mostly on the roof and in certain places in the basement.  I had a stock of hair coloring and skunk musk, so I could go from brunette to blonde, throw them off the scent and then disappear into the crowd.”

“That’s a myth,” I pointed out.  “The skunk urine.  Perpetuated by the Academy.  It only makes it easier for Dog to track you.  Doesn’t slow him down.”

One hand behind my back, I made a ‘come hither’ gesture.

“Oh,” she said.  There was a pause.  I noticed Gordon’s approach.  Mary noted him coming up to walk on my right before she said, “Is it bad that that really bothers me?”

I smiled, making a sound that was half-exhalation and half-laugh, raising my hand behind my back, a ‘stop’ gesture.  “No.  That would drive me nuts.”

“Sy more than most,” Gordon said.  “It’s one of the three best ways to put him in a foul mood, when a scheme of his doesn’t come together, past, present, or planned.”

“Scheme,” I said.  “Using that word makes me think I should grow up to have a fishhook mustache I curl with my fingers.”

“I think that’s accurate,” Gordon said.

If it were Jamie, I would have jabbed him, started a light tussle, but it wasn’t.  Gordon would make me look bad, and he would do it without trying.

Mary managed a proper smile for the first time today.  “What are the other two ways to get to him?”

Gordon snickered, and there was something in the sound that betrayed his ‘nice boy’ image, hinting at the guy he really was.  In a way, it was more honest, showing that side of himself, but it wasn’t gentle or nice.

“You’ll have to give me something to get something,” he said.

“Will I, now?” she asked, easily falling into the stride of the conversation. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

One day, not now but soon, I imagined he’d hone that hidden edge to a razor point.  Used right, he could draw girls to him, good looks, build, and ‘knight in shining armor’ image to get their initial interest, then hinting at the secret beneath the surface to hook them.

Mary was too wary for the hook to set, barb and all, but she was intrigued enough to let walls down.  Her shoulders were less tense now.

“You’re the hero of the Lambs.  The vanguard,” Mary observed.

“I’m nothing special,” he said, looking beyond me to give her a one-sided smirk that betrayed the lie.

“Sy said you were.”

“Did he?  Well, then it must be true,” Gordon said, softening the sarcasm with with a smile.  Mary smiled back.  “Which direction are we going, again?”

“Bowels, I’d think,” I said, pointing.  I turned, starting to walk backward, raising my voice and pointing.  “Bowels?”

Hayle, just in earshot, nodded and pointed in the same direction.

We turned left.  Claret hall was only a little ways to our right, bordered by other main buildings, the Rows, and various roads.

“Bowels,” Mary said.  “Haven’t heard that one.”

“Students call them the dungeons, the tunnels, or the pit.  The official name is ‘Labs, comma, recessed’,  Gorger’s home.”

“I heard about the dungeons and the tunnels,” Mary said.  She paused.  “Gorger.  We didn’t have a plan for him.  What could we even do, except scatter, run, and stick to the public eye?”

“Mm,” I said, noncommittal.  “Let your guard down, he hits you like a freight train.  Can’t hurt him with anything short of a proper cannon, and I doubt even we could contrive to get him to stand in the way of one for long enough.”

“I’m a little surprised it’s even a consideration,” Mary said.  “You’ve clearly thought about it, weighed options, and decided you’d lose?”

“Wrong on four counts,” I said, right off the back of her question.

I saw her pause, raising a hand to count on fingertips, rephrasing her question in her head.

“I haven’t given a lot of thought to that particular problem, so that stuff and everything that follows is off the top of my head.  Gorger doesn’t get out much, so he’s one of the ones we see the least of, next to the Hangman.”

“Hangman?” she asked.

I plowed on past the question, “Second, I didn’t weigh options, I turned my thoughts to strategy-”

“Scheming,” Gordon said, sounding bored.

“-and plotted-”

“Schemed.”

“-the best way of doing things.  Thirdly-”

“You have to ignore him when he gets like this,” Gordon commented.

“-I don’t think it’s a loss, thank you very much.  I think the cannon would be a failure, but that’s hardly the only way to do it.  I’m betting a victory of sorts could be managed.”

“Though he’s harder to ignore than I’d like,” Gordon remarked.  “I agree with him there.  I think we’d win.”

“That’s only three, and you’ve run out of points to argue,” Mary said.  “Did you say four to get me to pay attention?”

“Yeah,” I said.  Because you’re insecure and you’re more likely to fixate on a proper number, which can be more easily proven or disproven.

“Ah,” she said.  I thought I caught a roll of the eyes as she glanced away, looking over the Academy.  The trees grew wild in between buildings, and there were places where the branches meshed with the branches that jutted out of buildings.  There were more stitched at this end of the Academy, and more general experiments.  It was interesting to look at.

“Pause for emphasis,” Gordon said.  Mary snapped her head around to look at him.  He was smirking.  “Then Sy’s reveal.  There was a fourth reason.  He never said there wasn’t.”

“You’re ruining it,” I said.

“Only because you’re predictable.”

I mock-gasped.  “You take that back, you oaf.

He didn’t flinch.  “Better to be an oaf than to be puny.”

I mock-gasped again, with a little more emphasis.

“Four?” Mary cut in, before we started fighting in earnest.

I shrugged.  “You said you.  That Gordon, Helen, Jamie, Lillian and I would lose if we were up against Gorger in some confrontation or another.  Maybe you’re right.  But that’s wrong.  You’d have been more accurate if you’d said we.  You’re a member of the team.”

Mary turned my way.  For someone else, the statement might have fallen flat, phrased as casually and awkwardly as it was, but the inclusiveness mattered to her.  I’d touched on a topic at the core of her being.

I had her attention.  I suspected that if I grabbed her hand, she wouldn’t pull away.

But suspicion wasn’t good enough.  Not when I didn’t know why she’d pulled away in the first place.

I’d phrased it in a matter-of-fact way, leaving it to hang out there and be taken for what it was worth.  Now I distracted from it.  Better to avoid letting Mary sit with the idea and the statement long enough to doubt it or tear it to pieces.

“We’re here,” I said.  “We should let the others catch up and get the debrief.”

Mary leaned over to peer down.

‘Here’ happened to be a hole in the ground.  It was a nice hole in the ground, with a roof over it and a short wall to keep the rain out.  Lights punctuated a spiral stairway.  An easy-to-miss plaque on a nearby wall indicated to those who were looking that this was the entrance to the Bowels.

Still, there were very few people who had cause to enter the Bowels without already knowing where and what it was.  Guests didn’t tend to, unless they were from Academies other than Radham’s, and even regular students didn’t have much cause to go beneath.

Some students passed us, giving us weird looks, looking like they might say something, before they spotted Hayle following up the rear.

They hurried on, disappearing down the stairs, each with a hand on the rails.  The descent was a nervous one, with stairs taken quickly, heads down and eyes fixed on points further down the stairs.

Lillian was holding the strap of her satchel with both hands.  “About once every two weeks, they have to lock a whole section down.  Something’s escaped, something went missing, a container broke, a chain broke.  Send Gorger in, then seal it off.  Drop stone blocks that whole teams of stitched have to winch back up, maybe flood the section, maybe ignite the air, and give it some time to be sure.”

“Whatever it is,” Hayle said, “If it’s here in the recessed labs, it’s likely better to be safe than sorry.”

“Whatever Dog, Catcher, Gorger and all the rest are hunting, it came from the Bowels, didn’t it?” Gordon asked.

“It did,” Hayle said.  “The students that carried out the release are still down there.”

“Makes sense,” Lillian said, in a small voice.  “I don’t think even the students that work down there like being down there.”

It gets even better.  With Gorger out and about, they don’t have anyone to clean up.  If something happens, and they don’t flood or burn the section, they’ll just wait it out.  Leave the section blocked off until everything inside has starved to death.  Including us.

“You don’t have to come,” I told Lillian, knowing full well she did.

She smiled, a light of hope in her eyes as she looked to Hayle for confirmation.

“I would insist that she accompany you,” Hayle said, shattering that hope.

Lillian’s face fell.

Hayle started down the stairs, and we followed.  Hard shoes on stone stairs made for a bit of clatter, and the sounds echoed off the walls.

“I assumed you’d ask about the job if you had questions,” Hayle said.  “Are you wanting to go in blind, or did you want details?”

“Details now are good,” Gordon said.  “Please.  Sir.”

The sir sounded like an afterthought.  Was Gordon a little irritated that Hayle had pushed about Lillian coming?

Gordon was being protective?  Cute.

Then again, I had no place to comment.  I was very aware of everything Mary was doing.

“The project is a living weapon, C-tier.  It’s vat grown, cartilaginous, with a simple construction.  Redundant, durable organs, a thick exterior of placoid scales, and a brain diffused across its body mass.”

C-tier.  Larger than a man, smaller than a coach car.

“Placoid… it’s covered in teeth?” Lillian asked.

“In a fashion.”

“What’s the angle?” Gordon asked.

“Sensory organs.  Our creature is covered in fine, flexible ‘hairs’, with fine sawtooth construction.  It can sense and process changes in air current, temperature, lighting, and vibrations in the atmosphere.  It remains hyper-aware of its surroundings, and this is, we think, why it has proven so hard to track down and catch.”

“Smart?” I asked.

“Instinctive intelligence.”

“Fast?” Helen asked.  “Dangerous?”

“Less than you might think.  It moves deliberately.  It identifies lone prey and smashes itself against that prey.  The hairs cut on contact, and the experiment uses its own mass to pulverize.  It smears itself against destroyed prey to coat itself in blood and absorbs the nutrients through the gaps in the scaling.”

“That sounds really inefficient,” Lillian said.

Hayle smiled at her, pleased at how well his student was doing, but his words weren’t smiling words, “Unfortunately so.”

“Unfortunately?” Helen cut in.  She was doing that walk again, hands behind her back, almost playful, thunking her shoes against the stairs with each step.  It was annoying, possibly trying to provoke a reaction, but our collective attention was elsewhere.

“If it is that inefficient, then it has to do it more often,” Lillian said.

“Even more often if it’s shy and bolts the moment someone comes to investigate the noise and screaming,” Gordon said.

“Seven have died this morning,” Hayle said.  “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about an eighth or a ninth when I return to my office.  Six died on the Academy grounds, one died on the top of the outside wall.”

“Leading to concerns that it might have slipped through the net,” Gordon said.

“And the decision to bring more eyes in,” Hayle said.  “Which leads us here.  Our culprits included one of the students on this project.  He had a note with the time for release.  We have the other students on the project, but we don’t believe they were involved.  They’re available for you to talk to, of course.”

We’d stepped away from the staircase.  The hallways were brightly lit, which didn’t quite fit the ‘dungeon’ theme, but every wall was thicker than my arms were long, cut from slabs of stone, and the doors were heavy and reinforced.

I eyed the ceiling, looking at the notches, furrows, and larger pieces of stone that were held up by relatively small clasps and braces of metal.  I wasn’t the only one looking.

“Remember.  The students are your focus here,” Hayle said.  “You’re not equipped to deal with the escaped experiment.  It instinctively slips away from anything and anyone that approaches, favoring darker, quieter areas, unless that thing or someone is both small and alone, in which case it feeds.  There is no ‘fight’ to be had, here.  Focus on the students.  Motivations, ulterior motives, accomplices.”

“Yes sir,” Gordon said, nodding.  I joined in, despite wanting to add something along the lines of ‘I think he wants us to focus on the students’.

Had to be good.

We were quite a ways down the length of a hallway.  A quartet of students saw Hayle and picked up their pace a little.

If a black-coat Professor was in the Bowels and walking fast, it was probably a good idea to pick up one’s pace and get out.  Just in case.

Hayle stopped abruptly by a door.  He plucked a file from a slot that was built into the door’s exterior, and handed it to Jamie, who opened it and started reading.

“You’ll find him in here.  Walter Gund.  Better than average student, his father is a politician in Wiltwyck, but he’s lost any and all favor he once enjoyed.  Anything is permissible, so long as you don’t maim or kill the boy.”

Nods.

“Questions?”

We exchanged glances between us, then shook our collective heads.

“You know where to find me.  Be good,” Hayle reminded us.  Me, for that last part.  He handed Gordon a key.

He left as quickly as he’d arrived.  Leaving us to our own devices.

We watched as he made his retreat, his footsteps echoing down the hall.  Just when we were clear, a group of students emerged from another room, opening the door and closing it behind them, looking stunned to see us gathered outside another office, then went on their way without kicking up a fuss.

Once they’d left, we were clear.

“Should one of us take point?” Gordon asked.  “Or we take turns?”

“Kind of boring to be standing out in the hallway doing nothing,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” I agreed.  “Yes.  That.”

“All of us take point?”

“All at once,” I said.  “Introduce him to the Lambs.  And Lillian.”

Lillian gave me an annoyed look.  Better than the waves of sheer terror that had been radiating off her a moment ago.

Mary wasn’t much better, but she had a better poker face.  Almost flawless, as faces went.

“Don’t worry, honey.  It’s not so bad down here,” Helen said.

“It’s pretty bad,” Mary said.  “Any place where you casually mention setting the air on fire as a just-in-case measure is pretty bad.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  “You put it in words better than I could have.”

Mary smiled at her.

“I grew up here,” Helen said.  She was smiling, looking excited.  “I wasn’t born here, I was harmless when they made me.  But Doctor Ibott spent a lot of time observing and working down here, and he wanted me at arm’s reach.  I think you can even find toys I hid from Ibott here and there.”

Mary maintained a very neutral expression at Helen’s casual mention that she’d grown up among the ‘if it escapes, drown and burn everything’ projects.  I could have probably cracked her composure by mentioning what young Helen had deemed a ‘toy’, but stayed quiet.

“I’ll be happier when we’re gone,” Lillian said.  “No offense.”

Mary nodded in solidarity.

“No offense taken,” Helen said.

Mary and Lillian were friends.  For all my efforts, I hadn’t been able to see Mary as often as the girl who actually lived on Academy grounds.

It annoyed me.

“All at once, then,” Gordon said.  “Approach?”

“He’s a good student,” Jamie said.  “Citations for smoking in the dorm room-”

Jamie stopped as I reached out and tore the bottom of one page.

“Um.  Lost my place.  Let’s see… Almost got kicked out, but the Academy dropped the issue.  Being out and about with friends, drinking, in town for girls… no issue.  He’s only twenty-two, and he’s on a project like this.  That suggests something.”

I rolled up the paper.  I knew the answer, but didn’t give it.

Gordon looked at me, he was thinking the same thing.

I just prayed Lillian didn’t jump in with the answer.

“Daddy helped him out,” Mary said.

“Exactly,” Gordon said.  He flashed a smile.

Mary smiled back.

I chimed in, “He’s led a sheltered life.  Let’s make it clear just how unsheltered his existence is now.  Helen?  You lead.  Gordon, talk, I’ll signal you when I want a turn.  Jamie?  Jump in, facts from the folder.”

“And me?” Mary asked.

“He has a powerful dad.  Are you telling me you didn’t pick anything up at Mothmont, when it comes to parental expectations and the wrath of Dad?  Hit him where it hurts.”

She nodded slowly.

“Ready?” Gordon asked.

Not hearing a ‘no’, he unlocked and opened the door.

The metal hinges of the heavy door creaked painfully as the door swung open.

Our man wore a handlebar mustache, and he was big, ginger-haired and broad shouldered, with no sign of a gut, despite his large arms.  He’d been stripped of his coat, and now sat at the corner of the cot, one of only four pieces of furniture in the room – cot, toilet, table, and chair.

No books, nothing to do with himself.

Walter stood as he saw us.  I saw bewilderment, consternation.

Where the Bad Seeds had known who we were right away, this young man didn’t, I was certain.  He saw a group of children, Helen smiling, Gordon glaring, Jamie and Mary with blank expressions.  He looked to me, the smallest, as if I was somehow less threatening, and I gave him the coldest look I could manage.

Our group slowed, Gordon pausing to shut the door and lock it.  Helen maintained course.  She headed straight for him.

“Uh,” he said.  “I think-”

Helen, smiling sweetly, grabbed him by the balls.

He staggered, but the movement didn’t break her grip.  He swung, and she bent low, taking advantage of his height.  She passed between his legs, almost swinging, pulling his dangling bits backward toward his asshole, and led him to bend far enough forward that he fell onto his hands and one knee.

“If you fight her, she’ll do permanent damage,” Gordon said.  “Ease up, Helen?  I think he’s willing to cooperate.”

She eased up, but she didn’t let go.

He heaved for breath.

“What are we calling this thing, anyway?” Gordon asked.

“Whiskers,” I said, a moment before Helen called out, “Fluffy!”

Jamie’s, “Twitches,” was so far behind it was closer to a fourth place finish than a third.

Mary glanced at me, confused.

“Bit of a competition,” I whispered.  “I tend to win these.”

“Ah,” she whispered back.

“Let’s talk,” Gordon spoke to our hostage.  “Motives.  Start.”

“You can’t-”

“Your dad knows,” Mary said.  “We’ve talked to him.  We explained.  He’s done with you.”

Hm.  Right for the jugular.  It fit the Mary I knew, but I had to give her a lesson in this.  To properly break a person, one had to start at the outside edges, and work inward.  Once you hit them with the worst possible scenario, there was little place left to go from there.

Still, it was interesting to get to know Mary on this level.

“No,” Walter said.  “I don’t believe that.”

“You’re the eldest son,” Jamie said.  “But when people die like people have been dying, and one’s son is responsible, sometimes a man has to face the fact that he’s raised a failure.”

“I’m not-”

“You’re crawling on the ground with your balls in a little girl’s hands,” Gordon said.  “What do you think you are?  The next Jacob Black?”

I watched the man’s face change.  I puzzled over it.  The confusion.  The reaction.

Ah.

I raised my hand, and saw Gordon’s head turn incrementally.

He passed the baton to me, in a manner of speaking.

“We know your dad is involved,” I said.  “We sent someone after him, and we have him in custody.  He’s throwing you out with the anchor, Walter.  Talking is the only way to stay afloat.”

I saw his eyes widen.

“Start fast,” Gordon said.

His reaction had told me that something didn’t add up, and it was related to something we’d said already.

His dad was involved, a powerful politician, in another prominent city, no less.

Which raised ever so many questions.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.03 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.3

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“I- I- Um,” Walter started.  He winced as Helen changed position, repositioning and squashing Walter’s future children in the process.  “Agh.”

“Start talking, Walter,” Gordon said, “We have all day.  You most definitely don’t.”

“I’m think- thinking,” Walter said.  “It’s kind of hard when-  Ow!  Augh.  I might… throw up.”

“I wouldn’t,” I commented, still giving our man a cold, dead look.  “Every second counts.  You need to give us something your father won’t.”

“What- who are you?”

“That’s not helping you, Walter,” Gordon said.  “You need to focus on the answers, not on coming up with questions.”

“I… what do you want to know?”

“That’s another question!” Helen chimed in, chirpy and cheerful, sounding just like a little girl on Christmas morning.

“Urrgh!” Walter grunted.  He kicked, twisting, very possibly deciding the momentary agony was worth pulling himself free of Helen’s grip.

He was underestimating how strong Helen’s grip could be.

The pain was bad enough that he did follow through on his promise of throwing up.  I winced a little in sympathy.

Mary leaned closer to me.  She murmured in my ear, “Why didn’t you send her after us like that?”

“Her musculature and joints are different,” I murmured back.  “In configuration and type.  Mostly, she’s bad at exerting a lot of strength very quickly.  She’s almost weaker than me when it comes to throwing proper punches, and that’s with her being bigger than me.”

“She’s almost weaker,” Jamie remarked, leaning in to join the conversation.

“I said almost!” I protested, annoyed.  “Geez.”

“Give her a few years and some practice, maybe she’ll be dangerous in a scrap,” Jamie said, ignoring me.

“If she can get her hands on someone, we’re good,” I said, not taking my eyes off Helen.  “You could use a prybar and you wouldn’t make her let go, and the sudden strength she can employ lets her take advantage of any openings.”

We watched our man flounder.  He was only just finishing puking.

“I-I thought there was going to be a trial,” Walter finally said.

“Who do you think we are?” Gordon asked.  “We’re your trial, Walter.”

Walter managed to focus, raising his head to peer at Gordon through disheveled red hair.

“We’re the Judge…” I said.  Really, really, hoping someone else would pick up the tail end of the statement.

“Jury,” Jamie said.

I love you, Jamie.

“And executioners,” Mary said.

You’re awesome, Mary.

“If need be,” Gordon tacked on.

Eh.  You’re alright, Gordon.

It made sense, to give the man a little hope, maybe, but I would have rather ratcheted up the tension another notch or two.  As it stood, the man looked like he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea, and Gordon’s softening of the blow wasn’t helping to hammer it through and make Walter’s situation crystal clear in his very confused mind.

“Executioner?”  Walter asked.

“You intentionally freed your little project, Wally,” I said.  “Gorger is out doing what Gorger does.  You know what Gorger does, right?”

“He cleans up messes,” Lil said, when Walter didn’t respond quick enough.

“He cleans up messes,” I said, staring Walter down.  “Well, Gorger’s doing just that.  But while he’s away, we’re here.  Filling in his shoes.  Are you going to help, Wally, or are you going to be a mess that Gorger’s temporary replacements need to clean up?”

I saw the light dawning in Wally’s eyes.  The realization.

Yeah.  You’re in a much, much worse situation than you thought.  All the pieces are fitting together.  You were wondering who these children are, and now I’ve connected the dots for you.  The only way it all makes sense is if we’re with the Academy, same as Gorger is.  When we talk about being possible executioners, you now know we’re telling the truth.

Now how are you going to react, knowing more than just your balls and dignity are on the line?

It was visible across his body.  The adrenaline rush, the fight-or-flight response.

He was a big guy, and as launched himself into a mindset that was all ‘survival’, the pain of being crushed between the legs apparently disappeared.  He flipped himself over, so he was on his back rather than all fours, and kicked at Helen.

I winced at that.  Not because Helen couldn’t take a bit of abuse, but because Ibott would get fussy and maybe hit me again.  That last bruise had taken a week to fade.

Helen was like a rag doll, sagging, leaning heavily to one side, letting herself be flexible enough that the relaxed motion absorbed the impact more than her head did.

Walter lurched forward, slamming Helen against the wall, forearm against her throat.

Mary started, as if she was going to run forward.  I put my hand out, stopping her.

Walter was tall, and he was muscular, probably someone who did sports to get away from the hassles and stresses of spending much of the week in the Bowels.  With his ruddy complexion, it was probably something like horseback riding or a field sport.  His belly suggested that it wasn’t all muscle, either.  Women tended to like a guy with a barrel chest, broad shoulders, and Walter was very much that.

All in all, our man was fourteen stone, maybe.  Maybe as much as seventeen.  Helen was less than half his weight, and he was leaning hard, the vast majority of his weight pinning her down, pressing down on her windpipe.  It made for an awkward, hunched position, as Helen still hadn’t let go of him.

Frantic, a little nervous, Walter looked back over one shoulder.  Worried about being attacked from behind.

Gordon hadn’t moved from the side of the table.  Lil, Mary, Jamie and I were all by the door.

Nobody was moving a muscle to react.  Even Mary had relaxed at my suggestion.

“This is looking more like a mess that really needs to be cleaned up,” Gordon commented, calm.  “Don’t hurt him too badly, Helen.  Even if he doesn’t decide to talk, the Academy could use him for raw materials.”

I couldn’t resist smirking at that line.  It was a good one.  Very Gordon.

Walter turned back to Helen, and found her smiling, sweet as she ever was, while he tried and failed to crush her throat, strangling her.

Slowly, he began to slip, huffing, panting, tearing at the eyes.  His arm moved, jerking.  He started to groan, and the groan became a scream.

Then he broke away, releasing her, falling onto his back.  One of his legs was twitching, as if the pain was bad enough it couldn’t stay still.

Helen released him, then grabbed one leg, holding it still while she wiped the blood off of her hand, where it had seeped through cloth.  She apparently didn’t think he was up to putting up a fight.

She flashed a smile to our little group by the door, rubbing at her throat.  She didn’t seem to be having trouble breathing.

Gordon, for his part, stood over Walter, looking down.  Walter would be seeing him upside down.  The man was heaving in breaths.

“People died, Walter,” Gordon said.  “The blame is going to fall on your shoulders.  Other students are going to think it makes them look bad.  The Academy is going to want to make an example of you.  Just to be safe.  Because this sort of thing can’t happen again.  Not with regularity, not ever.”

Walter shook his head.

I chimed in.  “When a mistake happens, that’s bad.  But intentional sabotage?  Boy oh boy, Walter.  Not good.”

“And… I’m supposed to talk, get you to take… take it easier on me?”

“That ship might have sailed,” Gordon said.  “But given where you are right now?  Circumstances and all?  I’d really recommend trying.”

“They… we spent a long time talking about it.  Hypotheticals.  What if.”

“What if you let something loose?”

Walter nodded.  “We, my dad and I, we… I almost didn’t attend the Academy.  There were problems, my… dad never liked it.  But we thought I’d join, I’d see how it was, what could be done.”

“Destroy it from within?”

Walter made a face, like he was going to laugh, but there was only pain and agony instead.

“Well?” Gordon asked.

“No.  We didn’t think that big.  The Crown has come closer than anyone, anything, to actually controlling the world.  The Academies are what let them do it, mostly.  I’m… I’m strong, smart, but not so damn deluded that I think I can destroy them, damn it.  Damn it.”  His voice cracked with those last two words.  Emotion.

“Take them down a peg, maybe,” Gordon said.

Walter nodded a little.  He let out a little whimper of a sound, looked over toward me, Jamie, and Mary.  “Was going to steal some books, make a run for it, go to another country, sell the knowledge for enough to get rich.  My father had everything ready, I thought.  But I didn’t get far enough.”

“Every student thinks about how much they could get for the sort of knowledge the Academy has,” Jamie said, holding his book and the file that Hayle had given us.  “Not many actually try it.”

“It’s suicidal,” Lillian said.  “You had to know you’d get caught.”

“We talked ourselves into it,” Walter said, he gave us a smile, one that was awfully sad.  Self-pitying.

“Just you and your dad?” Mary asked.  “That’s as far as it went?”

Walter made a sound of pain, by way of response.

“Doesn’t really make sense,” Mary said.  “Him going this far, using his own son as a tool, then discarding his son as soon as he got caught.”

It doesn’t make sense because it’s a lie, I thought, tensing up a little bit.  Maybe we shouldn’t make Wally think too hard about it.

Walter wasn’t responding.  I wondered if he was in the process of passing out.

“Why did he care so much about the Academy?” Mary asked.

Still pushing…

“He… he’s powerful, he’s rich, but he’s only a man in the middle,” Walter responded.  “Servant to the people, servant to the Academy.”

“Servant,” Jamie echoed him.

Walter nodded.

“And it bothers him so much he’d sacrifice you as a pawn,” Mary said, her voice soft.

Was Mary clutching too hard to her past, failing to see and interpret this situation for what it was?

If it was the case, if I couldn’t fix it, then she was useless to us.

We’d have to discard her, and I’d have to admit to Hayle that I’d been wrong to invite her.

I was in the process of trying to analyze that situation when I realized that Walter hadn’t replied.

I looked at Jamie, then Gordon, then Helen.

Were they all thinking the same thing I was?

I decided to prod, knowing it was no longer Mary that was risking pushing him too far and shattering our deception here, but me.  If I got this wrong, it would be my fault.

I looked at Lil, “Want to step outside and pass that on?  If Wally Gund’s daddy is that angry, it’s something they can use in the interrogation.”

Lil frowned, but nodded.

Gordon withdrew the key from his pocket and threw it.

Our field medic moved to catch it.  Mary seemed to sense that Lillian would miss, and caught it instead, before handing it over.

Lillian smiled at Mary before letting herself out.

Our man, crumpled on the ground, fearing for his life, red faced and sweating, was watching the door, focusing on Lillian, who had just left.

Huh.

Why did it feel like Walter was the one concerned with this lie about his father standing up?  Not about himself, not about reconciling who his dad was, or the betrayal…

He was lying about something.

Gordon opened his mouth to speak, I moved my hand, where it was right by my pocket, a small spreading of my fingers, and the motion was enough to catch Gordon’s eye.

“Tell me, Wally, do you really think what you’ve given us is good enough?”

“It’s true!” Walter said, suddenly alarmed.

People rarely sounded more like they were lying than when they protested like that.

Maybe,” I said, stressing the word.  “But it’s not the whole truth.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” he said.

“Me?” I asked.  I stepped closer, spreading my arms a little.  “I don’t want much of anything.  I admit, it would be easier if you talked and gave us something juicy.  I could take whatever you said to people who matter, and that would make for less clean up work for us.  The only thing that matters here is you.  The only one you can depend on is you.  The one who suffers the worst the Academy has to offer, if you don’t convince your jury here…”

“Me,” he said.

I nodded slowly, putting my hands in my pockets.

“You’re not supposed to talk about what happens down in the Bowels of the Academy,” Helen said.  “But people do it anyway, don’t they?  You know the sort of things the Academy can do.”

He was starting to break, now.  I could see it.

Before long we could well have a grown man weeping.

I could have said it was okay, if only because he’d killed people by releasing Whiskers, but the truth was I didn’t care all that much.

I didn’t feel bad, no pit in my stomach, no pain for my fellow man.

Maybe a bit of sympathy pain for what Helen had done to him, but that was something else altogether.

He was only another job.

The door lock clicked, and the door opened.  It was heavy enough that Mary had to help Lil to pull it open.  She rejoined us.

I held my hand where Walter couldn’t see it, and beckoned Lil.

She hesitated, most likely because she didn’t trust me, but she did eventually summon the courage to come close.  I leaned close, and managed to make it look like her bringing her mouth to my ear was her idea.

To Lil’s credit, she got what I was trying to do.  She whispered in my ear, “It’s really creepy being out in the hallway alone.”

I nodded, smiling.

“Don’t smirk,” she whispered, sounding annoyed.

I turned to Walter, as if it was a logical progression from the whispering.  “Your dad is talking.  There are others involved.  He hasn’t named names, but he will.”

“He-” Walter started.  He stopped himself.

“He what?” I asked, noting that Walter hadn’t told me I was wrong.  “You don’t think he’ll say?”

“I agree with my friend there,” Gordon said.  “I want to do this without blood and cleaning.  It means I can go back outside and enjoy the nicest day Radham has seen since last fall.  Your father will talk.  He’ll continue selling you upriver, and he’ll name names.  Do us all a favor, here.  Talk.  Share what we need to share, our Academy student over there has the skill and the tools to mend some of the damage Helen did to you and give you complete and total relief from the pain, you get to live, and we get to go out and enjoy a very nice day.”

“I don’t-” Walter said.  I was suspecting we’d pushed him too far.  He wasn’t operating like he should.  “I…”

“There is no good ending if you don’t wake up and act,” Mary said.  “Stop thinking of him like a father.  Start focusing on yourself.  That’s all you should do right now.  Focus on you.

“And us,” I pointed out.  “Judge, jury, blah blah.  Getting on our good side is smart.”

“I don’t-” Walter said again.

Is he completely broken?

“I don’t need her help,” Walter said, looking at Lil.  “I’m Academy trained.  I’m older.  I can do the work myself.”

Got him.

“You’re assuming we’ll let you have tools to attack us with,” Gordon said.

Walter paled visibly, making the redness in his cheeks, chin, and the center of his forehead more pronounced.  Fear.  He was in the palm of our hands.

“Sorry,” the man said.

Gordon’s voice was calm, gentle, “It’s fine.  You can have everything you want.  We’ll let you patch yourself up, administer the medication.  We can even leave you something, if you want help sleeping, so you don’t have to lie awake wondering what’s going to happen.”

“We can’t let you leave, of course,” I said.

“Of… course, yes.”

“Now, before we get a call and a knock on the door saying that your father spilled the beans…” I said, trailing off.

Walter hung his head.  “It wasn’t father who instigated it.  He and I were roped in together.  My access, my father’s money and resources.  My friend, he works on other projects, but he was part of it too.  Keller.”

He seemed to find the singling out of his friend the hardest thing to do.

“The instigator was a man called Reverend Mauer.”

“He’s local,” Jamie said.

“As of recently.  He wanted more access to… he dislikes the Academy.  He says it’s a perversion.  Which it is, but-”

“Are you calling me a perversion?” Helen asked, still in her best ‘good girl’ voice.

Again, Walter paled.

I signaled Helen to back off, a flick of my fingers, as if I were shooing something away.  Hands behind her back, she sauntered backward until she stood in a corner.

“Keep talking,” Gordon said.

Walter nodded.  “It’s not about stopping the Academy.  I don’t think anyone can do that, even the Academy itself.  Even the Crown.  But if we could make people wake up, let them know what’s happening inside the walls of the Academies, here in the dungeons, other things in other areas…”

He trailed off, as he stared at Gordon.

One of those other things.

“…There’s no way you let me go,” Walter belatedly realized.  He looked at each of us in turn.

“You killed people.  Academy students.  Some were connected, some weren’t.  Some of the people you tried to wake up are going to die, if we can’t stop…”

“Whiskers,” I said.

“Whiskers.”

“Yeah,” Walter said.  “I thought…”

He was acting like he was very, very tired.  I might have suspected blood loss, but it was more likely his emotions had taken too many turns, and now he was running out of steam.  It was defeat that was the telling blow, here.

“You weren’t thinking,” Mary said.  “You don’t seem like a man with a plan.  You were convinced to take action, your dad joined in.  Your friend, too.  How do you step back and realize what you’re doing is wrong, when everyone around you is caught up in it, agreeing with it and spurring you on?”

“…Yeah.”

“When you think back to the person or thing that was pushing you forward the hardest, stepping in when you started to have doubts, was it the Pastor?”

“Mauer?” Jamie asked.

Walter nodded.

“You told him things you shouldn’t?” Gordon asked.

Another nod.

“Things the Academy would prefer were kept under wraps.”

Nod.

Gordon looked at Jamie.  “You know where this guy is?”

“Yeah.  Hear about him sometimes.  If I think about it, I think I even know his routine.”

“Good man,” Gordon said.

“Tell us about the monster, Walter,” I said.  “What was the end goal?”

“Means to an end,” Walter said.  “That’s all.  We wanted to do work on senses, but we couldn’t get budget without giving the Academy a weapon.  We made… Whiskers.”

“Making it a weapon, you had to justify it,” I said.  “How it operates, how it’s meant to be used.”

“Low cost from raw to vat.  Relatively short time.  They come out at half size, and steadily grow over the course of days as long as food is available.  After a few more development cycles, we thought it could be something we mass produced, dropped or deployed near enemy lines.  Up pressure, soldiers can’t go to use the latrine alone, have to move in groups of two or three if there are full sized ‘Whiskers’ around.”

“Just tell us it’s not pregnant,” I said.

Walter shook his head.  “Male.”

I exhaled in relief.

“No tricks to catching it?  Weak points?”

“No,” Walter said.  “Fire, maybe.  Even then, I’m not sure, and it can sense heat from one hundred and fifty meters away, even ambient body heat.  I don’t think you’re going to catch it.  I don’t think the Academy is going to catch it.”

“But you said something about other development cycles,” Lil said.  “Why?  If it’s that good, why did it need more work?”

“Lifespan,” Walter said.

“Tell us it’s hours,” I told him.

He shook his head.  “Weeks.  Maybe months.  We never got around to it with this version.”

I exchanged glances with the others.

A long moment passed, and nobody volunteered any more questions.

Gordon walked away from Walter, gesturing at Lillian.

Lillian, for her part, stepped over to the table, reached into her bag, and fished out a syringe and two small pills.  They were lumpy; she’d probably made the pills herself.

“Needle for the pain,” she said, as she continued rummaging in her bag.  “Pills for sleep.  I’ve got a fresh, sharp scalpel I was saving for surgery.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said.

“What?”

“No scalpel.  Nothing he could use on himself.”

“But-  Oh.”

“Hayle or the other professors might want something more from him.”

“The syringe is probably a bad idea too,” Lil said.  “I’m going to use it and then take it with me, okay?”

Walter nodded.

“You won’t grab me?”

He shook his head.

When Lil turned around to double check, it was me she looked at.  I was a little surprised.

I nodded.

Lillian ejected a bit of fluid from the needle, bent down and used her fingers to measure spacing, touching the base of Walter’s gut.  She jabbed the needle in, then depressed the plunger.

He didn’t move or grab at her as she finished up and backed away.

She fled back to us, double time, finding safety in the assembled group.

Gordon opened the door, we stepped out into the hallway, and we waited while he locked the door.

“Mauer lives and works at the church on Flax avenue,” Jamie said.

“We’ll update Hayle before we leave,” Gordon decided.

We moved in formation, heading for the spiral staircase.

“Mary,” Gordon said.

“What?”

“That was good work.  Really.  I had doubts, but… good job.”

Mary didn’t seem able to find words.  She nodded, a little too fast.

“I thought you were going too hard on him, but turned out to be just right,” I commented.

She had to turn around to give me a smile, and it proved to be a hesitant one, as if she thought I might pull a ‘just joking!’ on her.  But I didn’t say anything more, and she smiled again, with the expression sticking this time.

Jamie reached out and tapped Mary’s head with his book.  She flinched, maybe a bit too much, but then she saw his small smile.  The playfulness.

He hugged his book, and she turned away, walking with a bit more bounce in her step, close enough to Lillian that their arms touched.  The camaraderie there was already established.

Helen, walking beside me, was the only one who didn’t say anything, but she was the furthest one from Mary, in a manner of speaking.

Still, I didn’t need to interfere.  Better to let her have her taste of the group, like this.  If we could give her a sense of belonging that she hadn’t had with the puppeteer, there was a possibility that he could come back, reaching out, and she wouldn’t want to leave.

As a group, the six of us headed up the stairs, back to the closest thing to daylight that Radham ever got to enjoy.

Off to see our Reverend Mauer, I thought.  He has the ears of the masses, a way with words, and a hell of a lot to say.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.04 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.4

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The press of bodies, the general shuffling and movement, and the warmth of the summer’s day made for a haze in the air.  A fog, if fog smelled like body odor and rain.

But it was easier and more evocative to call it a symptom of the general mood.  If one person could be so mad that steam came out of their ears, was a crowd of very upset people capable of producing this kind of atmosphere?

“This is not what I expected,” Gordon remarked.

I nodded in silent agreement.

A woman stopped to take notice of us as we forged our way through a tangle of legs and hips.  She was in the company of her husband and her son, who was twice our age.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.

“Trying to get a seat with a view,” Gordon said.  “Excuse us.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, not letting him by.  Her son nudged her, pointing at a gap in the crowd, and she shooed him off.  “You’re too little.”

My eyes narrowed, my eyes dancing over her, taking in the simple braid, the worn seams of her clothes, and the particular lines in her face.  “And you’re-”

Gordon reflexively tried to clap a hand over my mouth, but with the crowd crushing in on us and our mutual proximity, he ended up smacking me in the lower half of the face with his forearm.

“Mmph,” I said, wincing.

“We’re fine,” Gordon said, smiling.  He partially turned my way, muttering, “Sorry.”

“Mff.”

“You’re going to get trampled.  Emotions are running high today,” the woman told us, her voice stringent.

“Mum,” her son said, impatient.

“One moment,” she said, a little impatiently.  She looked at us and gave us her best ‘mother’ voice.  “Go home.  It’s safer there.”

“But-” Jamie said, and I had to suppress a smile at hearing his tone.  The tone and the wide eyed look he gave her through his thick glasses was wounded, concerned, and bewildered.  “Ma’am.  We’re orphans.  We don’t have a home.”

It wasn’t quite how I would have timed or phrased it, but it wasn’t quite an option for me.  I felt like if I tried to go the pitiful orphan route, someone like this woman would look me over, see the scruffy hair, see the eyes, the thin mouth, and think, ‘yes, that’s an orphan.’

But Jamie was another thing altogether.  His long hair was tied back in a sailor’s ponytail, he wore glasses, and his clothes didn’t quite fit him.  He was just a step away from being an ordinary child, so fixable, and the effect came across well.  Perfect for when we wanted to put people on the defensive.

I’d worked with him on that one, with Helen’s help.

I did my best not to smile as I watched the woman flounder.

Mum,” her son said.  “We’re going to lose sight of dad if you don’t hurry.”

She seemed caught up in the moment, but with a push one way and a pull the other…

“You shouldn’t be here,” she reminded us, before turning away, joining her son.

I tackled Jamie, throwing my arm around his shoulder.

“Hmm,” Jamie said.

“That was good!”  I told him.

“Uh huh,” he said, again.  But he smiled.

“Beautifully timed.”

“In a few years that won’t work anymore.”

“But it worked here, now!  Just a second ago,” I said.  “That was good!”

“That’s all it takes to make Sy’s day,” Gordon remarked.

When I looked, I saw he was talking to Mary, who was safe between him and Lil.  Helen was closer to me and Jamie.

“A good execution of a technique?” Mary asked.  “It makes sense to me.”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Well, yes, maybe, but no.”

“Mixed messages, there,” I said.  I winced as a few members of the crowd backed away, jostling us.

“No,” Gordon seemed to decide.  “It’s not about the technique.”

“Oh,” Mary said.  She looked puzzled.

“He-” Jamie started to chime in, then stopped short as the crowd moved again, bumping him.

“Let’s move somewhere else,” Gordon said.  He looked at the crowd ahead of us.  People were shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.

The entire neighborhood turned up.

“Up there,” Helen suggested.

She was pointing at a nearby rooftop, an addition to a nearby building, larger than a shed, not quite large enough to be an adjunct stable.  A storehouse?

Either way, it had a gently sloping roof that was low enough we could potentially climb up to it.  We had to hop a short fence that surrounded the lawn, possibly to keep bugs away.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  He was entwining his fingers together.

I nodded, and picked up my pace.

It wasn’t quite a running start, but I had forward momentum all the same, when he caught my foot in his hands and hauled me up.

I landed on the roof, and immediately dropped to all fours, palms and shoes skidding on the shingles before I found the traction to stop.

By the time I did, Helen had made her way up.  Gordon very deliberately looked to one side as her dress brushed his face.  She didn’t drop to all fours as I had, but instead found her balance by touching the side of the adjacent building, her feet firmly planted on the sloped roof.  She turned around to face the other direction, peppermint green dress flaring around bare legs, her sockless feet in little white shoes finding balance.  I knew Helen was in the process of growing her hair longer, but for now it was in tight blonde rolls at the side and back, the rolls absorbing most of the length.

She was still smiling, giving me an amused look with a very intentionally placed gleam in her eyes.

I almost missed deadpan Helen.  I understood deadpan Helen.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  “Heads up!”

I looked just in time to see Mary fly at me.

I caught the apex of the roof with one hand and Mary’s hand with the other.  Her shoes weren’t as good for climbing as mine were, too flat on the bottom, and she skidded.

I watched her adjust her weight, the foot that was set lower on the roof sweeping in a sharp, focused half-circle, scraping the shingles for maximum traction.  Not quite enough to stop her downward movement, but it made for less of a violent tug when I had to catch her full weight, my arms stretched in two opposite directions.

“You’re smiling,” she said.

I hauled her up, and she found her way to the peak of the roof, standing across it.  We had the best view of the crowd, but she was staring at me, looking puzzled.

“Your…” I said, not finding the words.  I made an inarticulate waving gesture toward her legs.

Mary looked down, sticking out one leg.  She wore a white blouse and forest green skirt, and she was looking down at her bare calf.

“The way you kept from falling,” Helen clarified.  “Kicking out.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh,” Mary said.  She still looked a little perplexed.

“Sy, Mary,” Gordon said.

I reached out and caught Jamie’s hand.  Mary caught his elbow, where he was holding his book with one hand.

“You were taught that?”

“It was one of a few things,” she said.  “I’m more of a tomboy than you’d think.  I learned a bit on my own.”

“No kidding,” I said.  To please the puppeteer?  To please us, now?  “It’s impressive.”

She looked away as she smiled in response to that.

We caught Lillian, helping her up, and then Gordon hauled himself up on his own.

Six of us on one roof.

“Grimy,” Gordon said.  I looked down at my brown-black palms to verify, then to Lillian.  Her dress was smudged at the knees, where she hadn’t been quite so graceful as Helen or Mary.

Straddling the roof, I pulled off my raincloak.  I laid it across the top of the roof.

At my silent invitation, Mary sat down on one side of it.  I plunked myself down beside her, and not because of any scheme or anything.  Lillian might have been a girl, but it was my damn cloak.

Lil shot me an offended look, then arranged and sat on her satchel with all the equipment and notes.

Gordon and Helen were standing, toward the side of the building, while Jamie elected to sit on his book, balancing it on the roof’s peak.

Together, finally settled with a view, we were free to look out over the crowd.  A small handful of faces looked up at us on our perch, but nobody spoke out.  The focus was elsewhere.

Fear, anger, agitation.

“Something’s stirring,” I murmured.

Jamie, watching, nodded.

The church was across the street from us, not one of the largest in existence, but Radham wasn’t an overly pious town.  The structure was pale, the shingles were brown, and the stained glass stood out all the more for the drab exterior.  A lot of reds in the glass used for the window.

Damage sustained some time ago had led to the patching up of one of the side walls, but the branches had been heavily pruned.  Where some buildings let the branches grow out, reaching and growing leaves, the church had cut back everything until the plant growth was almost indistinguishable from mortar.

A cart had stopped by the side door of the church, and much of the crowd had gathered around it.  Two men were standing on or by the cart, I saw.  They were talking, and a lot of people were listening.

“That’s not the reverend, is it?” Gordon asked.

“No,” Jamie said.  He pointed.  “Left side.  Bill Warner.  He owns the production line down by Tenent street.  You knew his son at Mothmont, Gordon.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“To the right, we have Dicky Gill, who really shouldn’t be here,” Jamie observed.  “Or at least, not in this capacity.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Because he’s in a position of power that the Academy gave him,” Gordon said.  “He’s on the shortlist to be the next mayor?”

“Oh boy,” Mary said, finally understanding.

“It’s a very short list,” Jamie said.  “A list many people want to find themselves on.  An academy town of the Crown States of America.”

“Short road to power, if he’s willing to walk it,” I remarked.  “Why is he here, and not walking that road?”

“Same general feeling as Walter’s dad?” Gordon asked.  “It’s not true power, it’s just being stuck in the middle while the Academy runs things.”

I frowned.

“No?” Gordon asked.

“Power is a lot more tantalizing when it’s almost in reach than when you have it hand,” I said.  “For him, it’s almost in reach.  What’s going on that’s making this more appealing than that?”

“You have to ask?” Gordon asked.

“Hm?”

He gave me an odd look.

“What?”

“Look.  This crowd.  I know you can tell just how upset they are.”

“Uh huh,” I said, resisting an ‘of course’.

“That simmering rage?  It’s his, or close to.  This many people, restless, and he owns them.  He and Warner, anyway, maybe Reverend Mauer too.”

“Uh huh.”

Our collected eyes moved over the crowd.  People talking in heated tones, the forceful gestures, the restlessness.  Expressions tight, with lines of anger across foreheads and between eyebrows, grooves deep around the mouth, suggesting disgust, and eyes too wide open, revealing too much white.  Fear.

Perhaps something more than fear, too.  A wilder sort of feeling.  Something ready to cut loose and act on things long suppressed.

“They only need direction,” I said.

“You’re saying you don’t see the appeal in that?”  Gordon asked.  “For a guy who’s never had power, to now have the ability to direct this?”

“I see the appeal, I guess,” I said.  “I prefer to interact with people, not crowds.”

“It’s a big crowd, and it wouldn’t take much to turn this state of things into a riot,” Gordon commented.

“This didn’t come out of nowhere,” Mary said, “Did it?”

“No,” I agreed.  “There was work going into this.  There’s a reason people gathered here at the first sign of trouble.”

The church door opened.  Conversations stopped.  People paid attention.

Mauer.

He wasn’t what I was expecting.

A part of me was expecting Hayle, someone aged, stately, perhaps a bit grim, dressed in black, with the priest’s collar.

Reverend Mauer was young, or he’d been worked on by the Academy at some point.  His hair was vibrant, a bronze that verged on a surprising red where the sun peered through clouds to touch it, and his skin was smooth and unlined.

When he walked, it was a touch off balance, back bent to one side, almost a limp.  He did wear black shirt and slacks, one arm bare , and he wore a chaplain’s collar, not the tab at the shirt, but a proper band of white that encircled his neck.  To go with the limping gait and odd balance was a heavy sleeve that covered one arm, extending past the fingers.

The uncharitable part of me wanted to call him a chicken, or a cock.  The shock of red at the top, sharp chin and a roman nose, the long, thin neck, the youth, and the way he walked.

But the more charitable part of me saw that he was quiet, very at ease with how he slowly took in the crowd with his eyes.  When he moved for a purpose other than walking, his actions seemed fluid, relaxed.

His very state of being seemed to pass to them.  The fires that had been stirring when the crowd was left on its own seemed to flicker and fade.

We’d pegged him for the provocateur of the situation with Walter and Whiskers.  Looking at him, going by gut feeling, I suspected he was far from being a stupid man.

“I suddenly feel like we should have gotten closer,” Gordon remarked.

“For what?” Jamie asked.

“To be able to act.”

“There’s no way to act with this many people around,” Mary said.

“You’re saying that?  After your scene in the Mothmont cafeteria?” I asked.

“I’m… saying there’s no way to do it without advance preparation.”

“Point,” I said.  Then, after a second’s pause, I couldn’t hold back.  “Ugh.  Talk, Mauer.  I want to hear what you have to say.”

“So do they,” Lillian said.

The crowd was paying close attention.

Mauer climbed up onto the side of the wagon, standing on the short ledge beneath the door.  It put him a few feet above the crowd, sticking up by the waist.

Without a word, he gestured at Gill.  Our Academy backed politician.

I only partially managed to hold back a groan.

“Everyone!” Gill called out, climbing up to stand beside the Reverend Mauer, proving to be a bit shorter and somewhat plumper than the reverend.  Still, good projection skills.  “You’ve heard the rumors, and I have to thank you for passing the word on to others so they know what’s going on and can make sure they’re safe.  For those who haven’t heard, yes, there is a creature loose from the Academy.  It is dangerous to you all, but you can minimize the danger by staying in groups.”

It is dangerous to you all.  Emphasis on ‘is’, to strike any doubt from their minds.

Any public speaker worth his salt could have reworded that or even changed the emphasis to soften the blow to the Academy.  He’d done it intentionally.

“Bad politician,” I murmured.  “Bad!”

Jamie was nodding.  Mary leaned forward, arms around her knees, paying rapt attention.

“What is it!?” someone called out.

Yes, I thought.  What is it?

“Sources with the Academy have told me it’s a project meant to advance research in the five senses,” Gill said.  “That it’s not meant to be dangerous, but we should take care all the same.”

My eyes narrowed.  I was aware of the murmurs and conversation.

“We heard people had died!” another voice.

“Yes.  Nine individuals have been gravely hurt in and around the Academy, but so far, the damage-” Gill paused as Mauer reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, then finished his statement, “-is contained to the institution.  They’re putting all resources forward, to stop…”

He halted toward the end there, then let the sentence die unfinished.  Mauer was using his grip on the man’s shoulder to let him know that he wanted to speak.

“It’s not true, I’m afraid,” Mauer said.  His voice carried, but it wasn’t loud like Gill’s was.  Strong contrast.  He paused, another contrast to Gill’s attempt to drop as much information as he could in a short span of time.

Were the contrasts intentional?  How much were they collaborating?  Was even this interruption of Gill’s reassurance calculated?

“I just received word that two individuals in the upper west part of Radham were attacked.  They were school-age.  One of them is gravely injured, to the point that he may be crippled for life.”

His expression changed, and his face was very expressive, in a way that might have rivaled Helen’s own control of how she presented herself.  The weariness in his eyes suggested he was much older than he looked.  He looked down, taking a second to purse his lips, as if trying to get them working right.

“The other child is dead,” he stated, overly stiff, having waited just long enough to let people think he might have completed his last statement.

Now, again, the crowd stirred, pain, fear, anger, redoubled for the peace that Mauer had just given and taken away.

“Please!” Mauer called out.  His words were nearly drowned out by the noise of the crowd.  “Please!”

Gordon shifted, crouching, and spoke to us, “He can definitely speak louder than that.”

He’s in full control of this crowd.  He’s stoking the fires and bottling up the heat.  Things are going to explode, and they’re going to explode damn soon.

“Who is this guy?” I asked, a little awed and impressed.  “Is he an experiment?”

“Pretty sure he isn’t,” Jamie said.  “I overheard about his history.  He was a soldier in the wars down south.”

“The limp?” I asked.

“Not a limp.  He’s off balance.  They gave him a new arm, after he lost his.  It’s not very functional, and it’s not very pretty,” Jamie said.

“A weapon?”

“A regular, oversized arm.  Nothing fancy.  It seems to cause him constant pain.  He refused offers of further work and replacement.  Went straight to seminary.”

Reverend Mauer’s shouting was picking up in volume.  He was getting attention.

“Please!” Mauer said, more forcefully, almost a little angry.  Another act.  “This is not about the monster, and it is not about the Academy or the mistakes they made!”

“He’s doing that on purpose,” Mary said.

I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“Yeah,” Helen said, one of the few things she’d said since we’d climbed up onto the roof.  The smile was gone from her face.  She was deadpan again.

“They don’t see it?” Mary asked.

“Emotions are clouding their eyes and ears,” Gordon said, simply.

“This is about the children!  Please!  A moment of silence and a prayer!”

In the palm of his hand, I thought.

I could see everything that was about to unfold.

Stoke the fires, contain, store the heat.  Stoke the fires, contain, store the heat.

Let it all build up.

Right now, he was containing.

“Their names are Martin and Oscar Meadows,” he said, and he barely had to raise his voice to be heard, now that the crowd had been silenced.  “Let us give them a moment and a prayer.”

Nobody with a heart, no matter how angry they were, could dare to speak up in the midst of such a meaningful silence.

“Is he going to start a riot?  Directed at the Academy?”  Lillian asked, whispering.  We were far enough we wouldn’t be overheard.  With the nearest members of the crowd a good thirty feet away, aiming to be closer, to see as well as hear, the shuffling of feet and the periodic coughs were enough to mask the whispering.

“Maybe,” Gordon whispered.

“No,” I whispered, without missing a beat.  “No.  Why the hell would he do that?”

“To hurt Radham Academy.”

“What good comes of that?  They shut the doors and the gates and wait out the chaos,” I whispered.

“Then why?  What?  He has some goal,” Gordon said.

The silence lingered as I watched, looking over the crowd to the red haired man who was standing on the side of one coach.  He was examining the crowd, but he hadn’t noticed us.

“Look at him,” I said.  “We can’t even touch him right now.  He’s surrounded by this many supporters, and even if he wasn’t, if we could get to him somehow, we’d only stimulate the crowd, like an electric shock to a latent stitched.  Wake them up, drive them to action.”

“Making him a martyr,” Mary whispered.

“He has full and complete control.  He knows what he’s doing, and he knows how dangerous it is to stand against the Academy.  He knows they’re going to pay attention to him, and he can only hold his position by maintaining a very delicate sort of balance.  Starting a riot gives up that control,” I whispered.

Reverend Mauer was peering through the crowd, finding people who weren’t at ease.  A man who was more agitated than some, shifting weight from one foot to another, was met with a look of deep sadness from Mauer.

The agitation quieted.

“Are you sure this guy’s human?” I whispered.

“After his botched arm graft and new skin, I don’t think he’s willing to let anyone touch him,” Jamie said.

“You’ve paid a lot of attention to this guy,” Gordon remarked.

“He’s a popular topic for gossip,” Jamie whispered.  “The Academies don’t have the best working relationship with the churches.  A lot of people wondered what sort of man would turn up to man a station in an Academy town, of all places.”

“I guess we know, now,” Gordon remarked.

The silence was lingering to the point that it was almost painful.  More than a minute, easily.

Who are you, Reverend Mauer?  I wondered.  Are you drawing this out for your own pleasure?  To test how firm your grip on these people is in practice?  Are you focused on the same taste of power that stole Gill away from the Academy, or are you laboring under a goal?

People with their heads and eyes down were perhaps unaware, but the crowd began to shift, a little restless, as if their bodies were voicing the questions their mouths didn’t dare to.

“Now,” Reverend Mauer said, as if gently rousing everyone present from a dream.  “I know you’re upset.  It is hard not to be, given the lives that have been lost, and your fear for yourselves, your neighbors, and your loved ones.”

He had everyone’s ear, and mine was no exception.  I was hanging on every word, picking apart how he was playing with emotions, saying one thing while gently stoking the fires, validating fear and outrage.

“Aimless anger won’t help anyone, and would be an affront to those we’ve already lost.  Nothing would be sadder than if we went out looking for answers or justice, only to sully the memories of Martin and Oscar, or worse, to join those killed by the escaped creature, because you were acting with emotion, not caution.”

Control.

Mary was giving me a sidelong glance.

I was right.

What we don’t know is what your next move is.

“The Academy, from what we’ve been told, is deploying more creatures, weapons of war and armed men, with the intent of finding and stopping the escaped creature.  Dog and Catcher are the least of the assets being brought to bear.”

“Academy didn’t tell you that,” Gordon murmured.

“Hard for them to turn around and say they didn’t, that they wanted to keep people in the dark,” I commented.  Gordon nodded in agreement.

There isn’t a single person here that likes that.  Phrased so well, too.

He went on.  “I don’t like this, but at the present time, the only thing we can do is stay safe.  Stay with family and friends, give each other comfort.  If you still find yourself lacking, you’ll find Dicky, Bill, and myself here in the church, with several others, ready to offer prayer and counsel, should you need it.  If you have any news, please, come to us.”

“Soldiers,” Mary said.

I nodded slowly.

How many people are going to turn up at that church, talking about banding together and doing something, as if it were their idea and not Mauer’s?

“A prayer!” Mauer declared, spreading his arms slightly.

“Let’s go,” I said, climbing over the roof, intent on sliding down the far side, away from Mauer.  I peered over to make sure the landing would be clear.  “The Academy is going to want to be on top of this.  It’s a bigger problem than Whiskers.”

“Bigger?” Lillian asked.

“He’s putting himself opposite the Academy, gathering soldiers, he’s telling people about the secret projects, if only in broad strokes, and he’s making himself effectively untouchable,” I said.  “This is going to concern the Academy more than any murderous experiment, believe me.  We need advice on how to move forward, and we might need help.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.05 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“This keeps getting worse.”

I took Gordon’s statement to be a thought about our errant reverend Mauer and the riot.  Then I caught a glimpse of the Academy, a considerable distance down the road.

Even standing so far back that we were closer to Lambsbridge Orphanage than to the Academy, I could tell that the Hedge was closed.  Shutters closed and no doubt locked, front entrance closed with an iron gate. More security would have been used inside.  The Hedge was the easiest and most obvious point of access for anyone looking to attack the Academy, and measures had to be taken to make it defensible, while keeping it accessible to the public.  I suspected the measures were very similar to those in the Bowels of the Academy.

Where twice the number of men had been posted there earlier in the afternoon, it sat at over three times the usual, with ten men and ten stitched.  The gates they guarded were only open wide enough for a man to slip through, ready to be closed at a moment’s notice.

It was getting to be later in the afternoon, now, and as long as the summer days were, the daylight was fading.  The lights were just being turned on, in anticipation of looming sunset and evening.

“What do you want to bet they won’t let us through?” Jamie asked.

“We need badges,” I said.  “Secret badges that we can flash to any member of the Academy that gets in our way.  Maybe we can get the Academy heads to pass a rule so everyone knows they have to do anything we say.”

“That would be useful,” Helen said.

Yeah,” Gordon said, with a generous heaping of sarcasm and emphasis.  “Does anyone here think Sy wouldn’t abuse that six ways from Sunday?  Anyone?  Show of hands.”

“I’m hurt,” I said.  “And I still want badges.”

“I hate to break it to you,” Gordon said, “But nobody who knows you in the slightest is going to sign off on that.”

I huffed, sticking my hands in my pockets.

Jamie gave me a pat on the shoulder.  “Don’t be grumpy.”

“I’m not being grumpy!  I think it’s dumb that we keep getting held back because of arbitrary stuff and secrecy.  Half the students know us, the other half keep getting in our way.  Like back when we were wrapping up the Mothmont thing, that guy stopping me from walking out?”

“I wouldn’t say half,” Gordon said.

“Don’t nitpick,” I said.

“Don’t use hyperbole, then,” he countered.

“I wasn’t.  I was generalizing.

Mary made a little ‘ahem’ sound.  Our heads turned.  “It’s interesting to see you interacting like this.”

“Interesting how?”

“After meeting Sy at Mothmont, seeing how he was there, having weeks to worry about how I’d deal with all of you as a group, um.  It’s not what I expected.  Seeing you, him, here like this?”

“I understand,” I said.  “It takes people some time to adjust to how amazing we are.  Me in particular.”

Mary’s mouth parted a bit, but she didn’t manage to produce any vocalization.  Beside Mary, Lillian’s hand went up to her face.

I took advantage of it, turning so I was walking backward, flashing her a smirk.  I used a hand to push hair away from one corner of my face, where the rain had made it damp, posing like I was a hero on a cover of some seedy romance novella.  “You’ll get used to it.”

Jamie spoke up, “I think Mary might have been talking about the contrast of how you portrayed yourself at Mothmont and how badly you were just losing your argument with Gordon there.”

My smile disappeared, and I glared at Jamie.  He, in turn, shot me a quiet, small smile that suggested he was secretly pleased with himself.

“Jamie,” I said, “You’re one of the very few people I can beat in a fight.”

“In theory,” Gordon offered.

“Like Wollstone’s ratio set is a theory,” I said,  “At a certain point, you have to accept that it’s a given.”

“I’m the book-reader and scholar with glasses,” Jamie said.  “Why are you the one making the pathetic stabs at intellectual wit, here?”

I raised my eyebrows.  “Gordon’s bad enough, but you?  You’re asking for it.”

“Come on,” Jamie said.

I threw myself at Jamie, arms around his neck, but we didn’t stop moving toward the Academy gates.

“There’s a dynamic,” Gordon said.  “A big part of the dynamic is keeping Sy from becoming unbearable.”

As if to illustrate the point, he reached back to take Jamie’s notebook with a reverent care, freeing Jamie’s other hand and making life harder on me in the process.

“-Resent that!” I grunted out the words, meaning it in more than one sense.

“Why is he special?”  Mary asked.

“He’s meant to be the unpredictable one, bending and testing rules and altering the patterns we operate in.  Sy said you got the broad strokes from the puppeteer?”

“Broad strokes.  Not necessarily all the right strokes.  While I was still being questioned and tested on at the Academy, Sy told me that Evette and Ashton didn’t work out.”

Jamie and I stopped our struggles at the mention of the names.

“No,” Gordon said.  He sighed.  “No, they didn’t.  They didn’t make it past the beginning stages.”

“Ashton was like me,” Helen said.

“Except not at all,” Lillian pointed out.

“Except not at all,” Helen clarified.

“Vat grown?” Mary asked.  I noticed the change in her voice and body language, interacting with Helen.

“Yes,” Helen said.  “Like you and I.”

Abruptly, almost to the point that I’d call it impulsively, Helen reached out and touched the side of Mary’s face.

The word ‘stricken’ derived from the word ‘strike’ in the same way that struck was, and Mary looked more stricken than if she’d been struck with a sword.

“She’s doing that-” I started.

Jamie pulled on the back of my shirt, forcing me to bend over to maintain free range of movement with my arms.  I did what I could to jab at the softer sides of his belly, tickling him.

-on purpose, I finished the sentence in my head.  Helen wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly, even if she was being weird.

Gordon reached out and took hold of Helen’s hand, removing it from Mary’s face.  He stepped between the two of them and held Helen’s hand, more for Mary’s sake than for Helen’s.

“The original plan was for each of us to have a role, a specific set of talents, and for us to be able to address any problem.  A gestalt.”

“I got that part,” Mary said.

“Nothing goes one hundred percent according to plan.  Not all of us wound up being entirely what we were designed to be, and Sy wasn’t intended or even proposed for the gestalt group.  Entirely different project, minor in the grand scheme of things.  Hayle picked him up anyway.  He’s, I’m blanking on the word, starts with ‘v’.”

“Versatile,” I said, redoubling my efforts to tickle Jamie.

“Variable,” Jamie said, almost at the point where he was able to pull the bottom of my shirt over my head and arms.

Variable,” Gordon said, probably going with Jamie because it made me wrong.  “Sy is variable, to the point where he inadvertently covers other bases.”

“As a scoundrel.”

“As Sy, whatever labels apply at the moment.  But see, point I’m getting around to is that Sy likes to describe humanity as a collection of careening objects, bouncing and ricocheting off established boundaries.”

Jamie pinned my hands in his armpits by pressing his elbows tight to his body, and hiked up my shirt more.  That he could talk and I couldn’t suggested he was winning, which was as irritating as hell.  “He says that because he’s a bouncing, random object.”

“Sort of,” Gordon said.  “He’s human.  Only things keeping him bound in and constrained are the firmest ones the Academy sets, and us.  As Jamie is demonstrating.”

“Eat dicks!” I told Gordon, my voice muffled by the shirt Jamie had pulled up around my head.

“I was scared of him, once,” Mary admitted.  “And now?”

“Say what you will about Sy, he’s very good at making people experience that dissonance between what they expect and what they get.  Sy is scary, he is dangerous and capable, you weren’t wrong when you judged it, back then.  But now you’re with us, a member of our group, which is very possibly the safest possible place you could be when dealing with Sylvester there.  With us as a whole, even.  Keep that in mind if you’re ever entertaining the idea of stabbing us in the back.”

There was a pause.

“I was wondering when that was coming,” Mary said.

“Had to be said.  Sorry.”

There was an awkward pause.  I struggled with Jamie for a second, seriosuly annoyed at this point.  I wanted to be able to do more to handle the Mary thing.  Left alone, Gordon could push her away.  I was the biggest villain of the two of us, but when Gordon hurt people, they took a while to bounce back from it.

Mary broke the silence.  “That stuff you were saying, in a roundabout way, am I right in interpreting that as you saying that I don’t need to worry?”

“How worried were you?” Gordon asked.

“Mary’s been very tense,” Lillian volunteered.  “Worried about how things would go.”

“I was.”

“You don’t need to worry about us in general.  Really.”  Damn Gordon.  He was so good at sounding sincere.

“Oh, good.  Gosh!  Even Helen, then?”

“Am I so scary?”

“A little!  More than a little, but if Gordon says you’re okay, and Sy’s not protesting…”

I was silent.

Gordon jumped in, stumbling with his words in a way he usually didn’t.  “I’m… saying that you don’t need to worry about us in general.”

You’re a cruel, cruel man, Gordon.

Correcting her about Helen without saying anything outright.

Nobody was saying anything.  I suspected Mary’s fears about Helen had been redoubled, and I had further suspicions that Gordon had done it on purpose.

He wasn’t as confident about Mary being a part of the group as I was, or he was concerned on a level.  Just as he’d talked about the group keeping me in line, he was using Helen as the proverbial whipping stick for Mary.

I wasn’t so keen on that.  Mary had enough sticks.

I struggled to pull my shirt down, while Jamie interfered with those struggles.

“We’re at the academy,” Gordon said.  The meaning was clear.  Stop roughhousing.

Jamie let me free.  I fixed my shirt and tucked it in, then fixed my hair.  Mary was giving me an amused look, and Jamie looked smug.

I wasn’t proud.  I was willing to look silly in front of Mary if it meant she could let her guard down a fraction, easing into the group.  Losing to Jamie was part of that.

Entirely intentional.  For real.  No joke.

The people by the entrance gathered together as we drew closer.  The six of us against ten or so Academy students and their stitched.

“We’ve been invited,” Gordon said.

“No entry,” one of them said.

“We’ve been invited,” Gordon said, again.  “Thank you.”

One way to win an argument, just keep hammering at them until they give way.  If they tire or show weakness, seize on that, hammer again.

“No entry,” the same student told us.

Gordon looked at Jamie.  Jamie’s prediction had been right.

“Go inside, find and talk to Professor Hayle.  He’ll tell you we’re allowed inside.”

“He’ll tell us the same thing every other Professor has told us.  Nobody in or out.”

It was the same problem I’d had with Rick.  We could be manipulative, we could poke, prod, bait, and mislead, and if we found any give at all, we could capitalize on it.

No give here.

“Professor Hayle told us to run an errand, and report back at the earliest possible moment.  If you don’t let us past, it’s going to upset him.”

“I’m willing to take that risk.  You’re being irritating.  Go home.”

“This is our home,” Helen said.  “It’s my home.”

The man studied her, up and down.  Helen didn’t look like a proper student.

“Helen Ibott,” she said, extending a hand for him.  “Yes.  I am his daughter.”

The name carried weight.  I saw two men behind our obstacle exchanging glances.

“He’s not married,” our antagonist said, unmoved.

“I’m still his daughter,” Helen said, without flinching.

One of the two spoke up.  “I could just run over to Claret Hall and-”

“No,” the man said.  “There’s no need.”

It was so stupid.  Such a waste.

Mary stepped back a bit, until she was standing to one side of me.  Her voice was soft, “I don’t think they’re very good at fighting.  I could try something, make a distraction, and we could slip through.”

“Too messy,” I murmured.

“I thought so.”

“It’s interesting that you think you could win against ten people and ten stitched,” I said.

“I don’t think I could win.  I do think I could get us inside and slip away.”

I nodded slowly.  Interesting.  Gordon couldn’t do that, and Gordon could probably beat her in a scrap, but she did have techniques and talents.

Everything about the group fit together, a larger puzzle of talents, strengths and weaknesses.  Every element was a thing I could potentially use or a thing I had to account for.

“You’re Vernon,” Jamie said, cutting off Gordon mid-sentence.  “Cornet?”

Our barrier to entry nodded, frowning a little.  “That’s my name.”

“You were working on the group project last year, Claret Hall, the kit.  Smaller, lighter pack for field care of soldiers and stitched on the battlefield.”

Vernon didn’t respond, but his frown deepened.

“It didn’t go well, I heard,” Jamie said.

“That wasn’t my fault.  The others dropped the ball.”

“But it was such an unfettered disaster that your classmates talked about it, and I heard about it, and I remember hearing about it.  A year later.”

“What went wrong?” Lillian asked.  I suspected it was out of genuine curiosity rather than an effort to play along.

“They took it on themselves to develop a smaller, lighter pack.  A basic failure would be producing something smaller and lighter, but less effective,” Jamie said.  “But when you design by committee, and you somehow produce something heavier, bulkier, and less effective, a failure on every count…”

Vernon suddenly looked exceptionally unhappy.  “I said it wasn’t my fault.  Why even bring this up?  You think I’m going to let you in because of it?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “I’m not that cunning.  I remembered and thought it was interesting.”

I picked up the slack.  “But if you’re trying to earn brownie points by pulling volunteer duty standing guard, and being a problem because you’re trying too hard to do your job, well, the professors are going to get upset we weren’t able to report in…”

I trailed off, letting someone else pick up.  Gordon for that note of authority and command, perhaps.

“We might have to drop your name, Vernon Cornet,” the ‘daughter’ of Doctor Ibbot said, instead.

Just as good.

Vernon looked over his shoulder, “Go find one of the professors and ask if the kids are allowed in.”

“Hayle,” Gordon said.

“Hayle,” Vernon corrected.

We settled in for a wait.

Claret Hall was the rare sort of building that was entirely grown.  The wood had been given a deep red color as part of the growing process, it had been shaped every step of the way, and made into a veritable work of art.

It was the starting point and end goal for most members of Radham Academy.  Students took their introductory classes here, Lillian included, and those who climbed the ranks and proved their mettle ended up as part of the administration, elsewhere in the building.

The guard had gone in and found Hayle, then reported back to us with his location.

As a group, we entered one of the faculty-only rooms.

Professors Briggs, Sexton, Hayle, Fletcher and Reid were all present, in black lab coats.  They sat in chairs, stood, or leaned against the tables around the perimeter of the rooms.  Though it was summer, a fire blazed in the fireplace opposite the entrance.  Two plates with only morsels of food remaining on them suggested that some but not all had eaten their dinners.  The wine glasses were full, the firelight catching the contents and making the deep reds into something bright.

The other professors didn’t pay us much mind as we approached.  The glances they deigned to give us were almost disinterested.

Briggs was the one to impress.  He ran Claret Hall, and through that position, he was the head of the Academy, controlled much of Radham, and a fair portion of the surrounding area.  He was older but not old, and unlike Hayle he had colored his hair and rejuvenated his skin.  He looked as if he’d stretched himself a half-foot taller, but retained the same body weight, making him into a living caricature of the man he’d once been.  His fingers were spidery, one hand holding a wine glass, the other on the desk, pads of the fingers pressing down so the fingers themselves bowed.

The armless, crimson-tinted glasses that were perched halfway down his nose were purely for show, but they caught the firelight as he stared at the source of it.

It might have been my association with Hayle, but I tended to have less respect for those who’d gone so far to alter themselves with medicine and surgery.  Professor Briggs was an exception.  It was hard to disrespect a man who could terminate the Lambsbridge project, or terminate the Wyvern project and me with it.

He was, in an indirect way, responsible for the existence of the Lambs, for Dog and Catcher, for the Hangman, Gorger, Foster, the Whelps and all the rest.

His pet project, however, wasn’t out and about, hunting for Whiskers.

Hayle wanted to prove our worth as a group.  This was where it counted.

I touched the small of Gordon’s back before he could say anything.  He didn’t give any indication that I’d done anything, but he did remain silent.

“Insurrection,” I said, as we drew close enough to be in earshot.

That turned heads.

Briggs, however, was unfazed.  “We expected something in that vein.”

“Reverend Mauer.  He’s got Dicky Gill and Mr. Warner at his back.”

“Gill was already restless, suggesting something was wrong.”

“That something is the Reverend,” I said.  “He’s probably been laying groundwork for a long time.”

“Since he arrived in Radham three years and two months ago,” Jamie said.

Briggs nodded.

“He told a crowd that two people were killed by the experiment,” I said.  I looked at Jamie.

“Upper-west part of Radham.  Oscar and Martin Meadows?”

It was Sexton who answered.  Young as professors went, pale, with blond hair neatly parted, he had a shadow on his chin that suggested he hadn’t had time to shave earlier in the day.  “We didn’t hear about that, and we should have.”

“It was probably a lie,” I said.  “And if he can lie about that, he’ll lie about other things.”

“Useful information,” Hayle commented.

“Of course you think so,” Fletcher said.  “They’re yours.

“I prefer action to information.  Unless your children removed the problem, Hayle?”  Professor Briggs asked.

“If they didn’t, there was a good reason for it,” Hayle said.  “Gordon?”

“We couldn’t reach him, and we thought we should ask, just in case.  Mauer is surrounded himself with people, and he’s preparing them as soldiers.  The crowd nearly rioted.”

“We can handle a riot,” Briggs said.  “It’s poor timing, but if he’s determined to be inconvenient about this-“

“He’s not,” I interrupted.

Briggs frowned.  He finally turned away from the fire and looked at me.  When he spoke, however, he remarked, “Six, Hayle?  Are they multiplying somehow?”

“Mary over there, with the ribbons and brown hair, is a new addition to the Lambsbridge program.”

“I didn’t authorize the increased budget.”

“I didn’t use one.  It was Percy who developed her.  I simply took over guardianship of her after he fled.”

“Brilliant,” Fletcher said, under his breath.

I suspected the man was quite drunk.

“You told me I had discretion to manage the project as I saw fit,” Hayle said, in a tone that was overly clear and calm.  He was trying to frame it all so that if Briggs spoke out, he’d sound unreasonable.

“If you aren’t misappropriating funds, I don’t care,” Briggs said.  “The project has yet to impress, I don’t see how seven disappointments are much worse than six.”

Seven?

Oh.  He was counting Evette and Ashton in the number.

Insulting them.

Considering that I’d never even met them, I felt a surprising degree of loathing for the man who’d insulted their memory.

I must have been giving some indication of what I was feeling, because Jamie bumped into me, his hand finding mine, clutching it hard.

“If your children are incapable of dealing with the Reverend, Hayle, then we can have the Hangman accompany them to the church.  Once they point the way, the Hangman can deal with the Reverend.  Kill the problem at its root, then deal with the peripheral concerns, it’s a matter of time before we find our escaped project.”

“That won’t work,” I said.

“Sylvester,” Hayle said.  “If you could show Professor Briggs an appropriate amount of respect by not interrupting him or jumping in to correct him, I would very much appreciate it.”

He put emphasis on ‘very much’, in a way that insinuated Hayle might have me put down if I didn’t shut up.

“I’m showing Professor Briggs respect by not letting him make a mistake that would reflect badly on him.”

Hayle didn’t say anything, but the look in his eyes promised consequences.

“Why wouldn’t it work?” Briggs asked.

“He knows very well who you are, what the Academy is, and what you’re capable of.  He’s clever, and he’s positioned everything in such a way that you’ll pay in spades for anything you do to him.  Kill him, and you martyr him.”

“As I said, we can handle riots.”

“And as I said,” I pointed out, without missing a beat, “He’s not concerned with being inconvenient.  He’s set on making himself convenient, entirely essential to the smooth running of Radham.”

I didn’t dare look away from Briggs, in case he took it to mean I was weak, but I was pretty sure Hayle was ready to kill me.  One didn’t generally debate with Professor Briggs.  He had the clout and power to handle most problems in a direct means.  He probably could handle this situation by throwing everything he had at it, and he wouldn’t regret the aftermath, messy as it might be.

“Explain,” Briggs said.

It was Gordon who explained.  “He’s been planting seeds and nourishing them in key people.  Yes, if you have him killed, you’ll have riots.  But things don’t end there.  He’s reached some of your students.  He’s reached major figures across the city.  He’s playing a game of chess, and he’s laid out the board so you can’t take one of his pieces without his taking two of yours.”

“We have more pieces,” Briggs said.  The man didn’t even flinch.

He was fully prepared to wage a war if it came down to it.

“We have more pieces, but he has an agenda,” I said.  “He’ll spread word to other cities, other Academies, because that’s how he can hurt you best.  He’s already telling people about the special projects.  Word might leak out in other cities, they might have problems now and again, they might even have a riot now and again, but if he makes everything go wrong, lets all the information slip, he could make Radham look like a joke.

Looking at Briggs, he most definitely didn’t like that.  I wondered if it was concern for the problem or the implication that Radham could even be a joke.

“I have to say,” Fletcher said.  “One thing I like about Dog and Catcher is that they don’t talk so much.”

“The Lambs aren’t like Dog and Catcher,” Hayle said.  “They are, I should stress, much better equipped to solve problems that brute force won’t answer.”

“So you say,” Professor Briggs said.  He pursed his lips a little.

It looked like he was going to say something, but the doors opened.

A man in a grey coat strode into the faculty room.  The room was large enough it took him a few seconds to get into earshot.

“Word got out,” the man said.  “About three more escapes.”

“Three more?” Sexton asked, voice arching.

“Only one we know of, but it was visible.  Large enough to be seen as it climbed the wall.  Bullets wounded it but didn’t stop it.  Citizens are talking about there being three, which-”

“Is a lie,” Hayle said.  “Our Reverend is in full control right now.”

“How very fortunate that we had your Lambs to inform us what was really happening,” Briggs said, with a note of sarcasm.  “Lambs.  You can do this?”

“Yes,” Gordon said.  And he was exactly the right person to say it with utter confidence.

“I’ll need some things,” Hayle said, “to better coordinate.”

My eyes widened.  I jumped in.  “We need two things.”

Oh, the look Hayle gave me there.  I’d promised to be good, but I suspected I’d never get another chance.

“Two things?”

“Hayle might need more.  But for us… badges.  A way to get past the blockades and general interference.”

“Hand written notes,” Briggs said.

“With something permanent after?” I asked.

I was testing my luck, considering the tension I felt from my fellow Lambs, Hayle, and Briggs, and the incredulity on the other professor’s faces.

“Possibly,” Briggs said.  “What else?”

“We need an adult,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.06 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.6

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“I will be with you shortly,” Hayle said.  “Cecil, if you’d wait a moment?”

“Yes, sir,” was the answer.  Cecil, then, was the doctor who had entered the faculty room to deliver the news about the false escapes.

That said, our supervisor shut the door to the faculty room with more firmness than it deserved.  Where Claret Hall had been grown, the windows and doors had been put in by ordinary means, and the door chosen for this particular room was big and solid enough that it could have shattered any arm caught in between it and the frame.

It made a good slam.  Hayle was not happy with me.

Our group stood out in the hallway, some of us shuffling our feet.  The doctor that stood off to one side was looking at us with curiosity, but didn’t venture to say anything.

“That could have gone worse,” I commented.

There was no response.

“Professor Briggs was in an uncharacteristically good mood,” I said.

The awkward silence lingered.

“We’re going to get badges,” I said, because things were reaching the point where annoyance or anger would have been preferable to the non-answers.

I didn’t get annoyance or anger.

Silence.

“We waste so much damn time on stuff we shouldn’t,” I said.  “It was a chance to stop doing that.  Step up our game.”

I looked at each of them in turn.  Gordon was giving me a level stare, Helen seemed more preoccupied with fixing scuffed nails, and both Jamie and Lillian were avoiding my eyes.  Mary looked a little confused.

This was an egg I could crack.  Mary was the most obvious go-to, but I felt like going that way would stack the deck against me.  The others would see through what I was trying to do, in part because it would be as transparent as all get out, and then they’d side against me.  Me and maybe Mary against the four of them.

I’d lose any points I’d won with Mary if I put her in that situation.

“Helen,” I said.  “You know the badges make sense.  I know that you have to go through a lot of checkpoints to see Professor Ibbot, depending on where he’s working at a given point in time.”

“I do,” she said, looking up from her nails.

“Don’t engage him,” Gordon said.

“I’ll do what I want, thank you very much,” she said.  Prim and proper of tone, and fully capable of using that tone as a weapon on its own.  She turned her gaze to me.  “You forget that in dealing with Professor Ibbot, I have to deal with very capricious personalities.  I know what it means to deal with powerful people.”

You mean you have to deal with his personality.

“I didn’t forget,” I said, sullenly.  “I was trying to downplay that part of things.”

“Don’t worry,” she said.  “Professor Hayle is more reasonable than most.  He can’t blame you too much.”

“Too much,” I said.

“Can I ask?” Mary cut in.  “Why is everyone acting like Sy is going to die or something?”

Thank you for forcing some discourse, I thought.

“You can ask, but we’ve got company,” Gordon said, indicating the man that Hayle had called Cecil.  “It would be unwise to go into details.”

Damn you for shutting down said discourse.

Excuse me?” the man asked, archly.  Teacher, doctor, gray coat, whatever we called him, he’d grown accustomed to a general degree of respect.  Being shut out of a discussion between children was a few rungs below where he was used to being.

“Beg pardon.  We’ve been asked to keep silent on certain subjects while we do errands for the faculty, sir,” Gordon said.  He feigned a lack of confidence.  “If that’s okay?”

“I see,” the man said.  He digested that nugget, which wasn’t a hard thing to do.  The hierarchy was reinforced.  Professors had more say than doctors, who had more say than we did.  “That’s alright.”

Gordon gave him a grateful smile.

More how Gordon operated, really.  My modus operandi was to put people off balance, see where they were most vulnerable, and push to topple them.  Gordon was almost doing the opposite here.  Reaffirming the rules and the social order.

“You know,” I told Gordon, “If we-”

“I would strongly urge you to think about what you’re going to say to Professor Hayle, after he comes back out,” Gordon said, cutting me off.  “I’m not mad.  I’m worried about you.  And if you goof this up bad enough we suffer for it, I will be mad.”

Doctor Cecil spoke up, speaking in a slightly patronizing tone, “Whatever you’re doing here, if you’ve got connections to the guys in that room, it’s a gig I’d recommend you hold on to.”

“Exactly,” Gordon said, playing along.  “I like this gig, Sy.  Don’t lose us this gig.”

“What happens if we lose this gig?” Mary asked.

“That is a very good question,” Gordon said.

“One you’re not going to answer?”  Mary asked, glancing at the Doctor, who made a face at the glance’s implication.

“Not because of any secrets,” Gordon said.  “I really don’t know what happens.”

Mary nodded.

“I think you’re being paranoid,” I said.  “They’re not going to toss us out.”

“I think,” Gordon said, very carefully, “that out of the two of us, I’m the one who has faint memories of your predecessors.”

Ashton and Evette.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It suggests that you really should stop arguing with me and plan how you’re going to get back on Professor Hayle’s good side.”

“It suggests nothing of the sort!”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Gordon,” I said, without missing a beat.

“Remember when I said I wasn’t angry?  You’re changing my mind.  Please don’t.”

I sighed, crossed the hallway, and leaned against the wall opposite the others.  I fished in my pocket for a small folding knife, more for cutting twine and carving sticks than for opening people up.  I unfolded it, and tossed it in the air.  I caught it by the flat of the blade, between thumb and index finger, made it bounce as I tested the weight, then flipped it over again, catching it by the blade again.

I always focused my thoughts best when I had something to occupy the rest of my attention.

The door opened too quickly after that.  Hayle stepped out, then shut the door behind him.

“This way, please,” he said.  “Cecil, too, if you could?”

“I can, sir,” Cecil said.

We followed our gray-haired Professor and father figure a little ways down the hallway.  Hayle stopped by the window, glancing out at the city beyond.

He let us wallow in the silence.  Even I wasn’t reckless enough to break the silence and test him.

“Cecil, I’ve been told you don’t have any pressing obligations?”

“I, uh, do not, no.”

“You’ll be one of two individuals to go with them.  Do what they require of you, within reason, facilitate them, and don’t ask too many questions.  Do this for us and a recently vacated laboratory in the underground area will be yours, along with some leeway to pursue any personal projects.  Some leeway, I hope you understand.”

“I understand I shouldn’t waste academy funds,” Cecil said, “But if something has my fancy and I can justify it, that would be alright?”

“You understand, I think.”

“A friend of mine is more passionate about his project than I am about any of mine.  If I brought him in-”

“That would be fine,” Hayle said, curt.  “If you don’t mind?”

Cecil raised his hands, “By all means.  I’m sorry.”

“Sylvester,” Hayle said, and he said it in a way that made me shrink a little.

“Sir.”

“Good response, that,” he said, in a tone that betrayed some anger.  “Keep it up.  Cecil, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat any of what I’m about to say.”

“I’m already in your debt.”

“Sylvester,” Hayle said, again, driving the point in.  “As cunning as you think you are, with carefully laid schemes and nonsense, the rest of us do entertain our own ideas and plans.  Me among them.”

I nodded, mute.  I’d only seen him like this once or twice.

“I have been anticipating and waiting a rather long time for a situation like this to crop up.  One where, whether they like it or not, they depend on my resources.”

The look he gave us made it very clear that we were among those resources.

“I knew, right away, that I would have some leeway, with the ability to call in favors and ask for resources.  All the more so if I can resolve this problem.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Imagine my frustration when the situation happens to unfold just as I want it to, and an impertinent little boy steps forward and makes his own bid for favor, asking for resources, because he thought it would be funny.

“I thought it would be useful,” I said.  “We waste so much damn time on stuff we shouldn’t, getting past patrols and bureaucracy, maintaining the ruse.  It was a chance to free ourselves to act faster and more efficiently.”

It was the same argument I’d posed to my friends.

Had all gone well, if they’d been more willing to play ball and argue with me, maybe I could have felt more prepared posing the same defense to Professor Hayle.

“Maybe,” he said, and it didn’t sound like a concession or agreement at all.  “If that was the case, you could have come to me with it.  I would have been able to make it part of a number of concessions I asked for, from our esteemed Professor Briggs.  As it stands, I’m not entirely certain he wouldn’t tell me no; that he’s assisting you and that my project should stand on its own merit.”

My heart sank.  “Yes sir.  What were you going to-”

“Speak less, Sylvester, nod and agree with me more, please.  For both of our sakes.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Reverend Mauer is attacking the reputation of the Academy.  As much as we’d like to be entirely self sustaining, we depend on Radham at large for certain resources.  As much as I hate to admit it, Briggs is very likely correct in suggesting we could solve this with brute force, but it would be messy.”

I nodded.  The others were nodding as well.

“I told you just this afternoon that I wanted you to impress, no shenanigans, no jokes or off the wall behavior.  As it stands, your saving grace would be to see this through, executing it perfectly enough to impress me, impress Head Professor Briggs, and even impress Professors Sexton, Reid, and Fletcher, who were quick to make jokes at my expense, as soon as you left the room.”

“Executed perfectly,” I said.

Perfectly,” Hayle said, in a deliberate way that suggested he thought that a careful enough pronunciation could get it through my skull.  “I know what you’re capable of.  Impress me.”

“I will,” I said.

“You asked for an adult, Cecil is one.”

“Of two, sir?” I asked.

“Of two.  When I was put on point and forced to think of students who I could trust to look after you all, those I knew, who had no other obligations…”

“Lacey,” I almost groaned the word.

“Lacey, yes.  She won’t be happy, but I believe she will make herself available for the evening.”

“Cecil,” Hayle said.  “Miss Lacey will catch up with you shortly.  I told you to do what these boys and girls said, within reason.  I hope you can rely on Lacey to define what is actually reasonable, should you find yourself wondering.”

“I see.  I can’t help but feel as if I’m missing something.”

“That feeling will get a great deal more pointed before you’re done with this task.  Ignore it, push it to the back of your mind, and focus on the much-coveted lab you’ll have all to yourself when all of this is over.”

Cecil nodded.

“You’re going to the church?” Hayle asked.

I glanced at the others, then nodded.

“Lacey will catch up with you in my coach.  Do not try to evade her or make it hard for her to find you.”

“Noted,” Gordon said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

Apparently I had suffered enough in Hayle’s sights.  Gordon was backing me up, even if it was only a little.

“Watch him,” Hayle said.

“We will,” Gordon replied.

The latent anger and frustration was clear in Hayle’s body language as he headed back to the faculty room.

When the door shut behind him, not quite as loud as it had been earlier, we remained silent for several long moments.

“Don’t worry,” Doctor Cecil said, very gently.  “I’m not nearly as scary as Professor Hayle, there.  I don’t know if it helps to win you over, but I plan to be far kinder to the common people when I become a professor.”

“I think that makes you one of our new favorites,” Gordon said, and the condescending lie was so transparent I was certain Cecil would see through it.

But Cecil only wallowed in his self indulgence, smiling, and placed a hand on Gordon’s head, then mine, leading us on our way.

The rain and moisture that the summer heat had held off was returning now that it was cooler, Radham paying us back in spades for the warmth we’d enjoyed earlier in the day.

The sunset was in full sway, and the light filtered through clouds in veins of purple and red.  The clouds themselves were thick enough to be almost black.  On the ground, lamps were bright, but the dull yellow glow was meager compared to the puddles and the moisture running down the branches and wood on walls, where the light from above was reflected, bringing the surfaces to life.

The black coach rolled up.  Two stitched guards were perched on top, both clad in heavy raincoats.  The only openings in their coats were the slots that had been left for their milky white eyes, and even those slots were protected from rain by cap-like brims in the raincoat hoods.

The rain was warm, but the stitched were warmer.  Horse and man alike were virtually steaming, the moisture rising off their heads, shoulders and backs in clouds.

The coach door opened, and an umbrella unfurled.  In the midst of stark blacks and reds, Lacey’s red hair caught light and looked absolutely brilliant.  Well matched to our Cecil’s neat black hair, which was cut a little too close to the head at the backs and sides, a little too coy in how the parted hair curled at the brow.

There were jokes about whether a Professor was left mentally off-kilter by the lengthy and torturous process of getting licensed as such, or whether only the mentally cracked were inclined to pursue that path.  Well, being a teacher or a doctor was a step down that road.  Cecil being a little eccentric was entirely to be expected.

And Lacey, who I’d left on bad terms, was staring at us, lips pressed together in something approximating irritation.  She looked very human and very grounded, standing out in her white coat.

She reached into one pocket, and withdrew a small envelope.

I reached out to take it, but Gordon beat me to the punch, giving me a look.

Our temporary badge.

“Lose the coat,” I told Lacey.

Lacey didn’t immediately obey.

“We were talking about it while we waited for you.  We’re going undercover, in a sense,” Gordon explained.  “The people we’re dealing with are very upset with the Academy.  Wearing a coat would be counterproductive.”

“Very well,” Lacey said.  She handed her umbrella to a stitched, who held the umbrella in place while she doffed her white lab coat and placed it inside the coach.  “Anything else?”

“The less attention we attract, the better,” Gordon continued to explain.  “The Reverend is gathering soldiers.  He put out an offer in a very subtle way, telling people that if they were angry, they could come to him.  Then, in a very coincidental bit of timing, he spread the word that three more experiments had escaped.”

“Only one of which was true,” Lacey said.

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “Large and visible enough to get attention, and give life to the fears that people have about the other two.”

“We need to get close,” I said.  “He’s gathering people around him, ready for the war that Briggs was prepared to give him.  If we confronted him, we’d be up against everything he had arrayed and positioned against us.  If we go with the flow, and successfully join the influx of people that are heading his way…”

“A brilliant little idea,” Cecil informed me, in a tone so patronizing it made my teeth hurt.  “But, again, you refuse to admit the very real fact that you’re children.  Hardly a good choice for an army.”

“And you’re adults,” I said, not for the first time.  “We’re going to try it.  If it doesn’t work, we’ll adapt.”

“It seems convoluted.  What if this attractive young lady and I were to go alone?”

I think you’d cock it up, I thought.  I tried to figure out a way to phrase it nicely.

“I think you’d cock it up,” I told him, when I couldn’t.

His mouth dropped open.  I saw a flicker of genuine anger in his expression.

“Sir,” Gordon cut in, giving me a dark look.  “Professor Hayle told you to do as we asked?”

Cecil shut his mouth.  He took a second before admitting, “Yes.”

“Please do this, sir.  Hayle asked for it for a reason.”

Cecil composed himself.  He looked very unhappy compared to where he’d been at the moment of Lacey’s arrival.  His words were painfully stiff as he asked, “Is there anything else you’d like me to do?”

It was Helen who jumped to the rescue.  “Would you please escort Miss Lacey?  I think Gordon needs to give Sylvester a talking to, and he can’t do it while you’re here.”

As unhappy as Lacey had seemed, her expression grew darker at that request.

Doctor Cecil, for his part, beamed.  He offered Lacey his arm.

While he wasn’t looking, Helen, followed soon after by Lillian, Jamie, Mary, Gordon, and myself, in roughly that order, clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture.

Lacey took up Cecil’s arm.  Together, they walked about ten paces ahead of us.  We started after them, maintaining the distance.

Well done, Helen, I thought.

“You think we’ll have the means to get in?” Gordon asked me.

“I think so.  Whatever Cecil thinks… I suspect the Reverend is trying to win over the community.”  I gestured at Cecil and Lacey.  “Man, woman…”

“And child,” Mary finished.  I flashed her a smile, grateful for the line.

“Recruiting children is reprehensible on its own.  Recruiting a family?  Or recruiting a family man?  A caretaker with his kids in tow?”  I asked.

“I believe it,” Jamie said.  “There’s still a chance we won’t get in.”

“We’ll get in,” I said.

“If he’s plotting something specific, and children don’t fit into the plan?”  Jamie asked.

“I just got things arranged so we don’t have to get stalled and stonewalled by random Academy bureaucracy and security,” I said.  “Don’t tell me I’ve got to push every last thing past you guys and your twenty questions.  You trust me, or you’re supposed to.”

“Trusted.  Past tense,” Gordon said.  “Forgive us if we’re just a little bit cautious, after you made an enemy of Hayle.”

“Fine,” I sighed.  “What was the question, again?”

“What if he’s got something in mind?” Jamie asked.  “Something we can’t finagle our way into?”

“We’ll deal.  We can’t anticipate all that.  Let’s assume this will work.  We each know what we do and how we operate.  Any questions?  Coordination?  Ideas?  Or do you want to wing it?”

Our boots splashed more violently through a deceptive puddle, which filled a dip in the road.  I felt water find its way to the bottom of my rain boot.

“I know how I work,” Mary said.  “You said we can’t kill the Shepherd.  Can I do something else?”

“What?” I asked.  “Wait a second, repeat.”

“Can I do something else?”

“Before that.”

“The Shepherd?”  Mary asked.

It was dark, but not so dark that I didn’t see the small smile on her face.

I groaned.

“Well played,” Gordon murmured.  Mary’s smile grew wider

“The Shepherd and the Lambs,” Jamie remarked.  “I like it.  We know the name of our enemy, now.”

Mary looked entirely too pleased with herself, working it in as casually as she had.

I couldn’t even bring myself to dislike it, because it was Mary.

“To answer your question,” Gordon said.  “My gut feeling is that slowing the man down could do us a world of good.”

“He’s planned his moves out in advance,” I said.  “Timing things, the note that Wally had, giving him a specific time to release his experiment.  The spread of the story about the three escaped experiments was timed to coincide with the actual release of the one.  Yeah.”

“Slowing down,” Lillian murmured.  She moved her bag around in front of her, and rummaged inside.  “Um, side effects, ratios, um, um, um…”

“Diarrhea?” I asked.

“I don’t have anything fast.”

“Impaired judgment?  Nothing so obvious he’d immediately think he’d been poisoned, but something to make him more likely to make mistakes?”

“No side effects like that.  Headache?”

Mary extended a hand.  Lillian passed over a short glass vial with something inside.  A powder.

“For a man his size, I’d guess a teaspoon,” Lillian said.  “Or you could ask Cecil or Lacey, they’ll know the ratio off the top of their head.  If you give me a second, I have a measure.”

“It’s fine,” Mary said.

“It’s fine?”

“If it’s just a teaspoon, I can eyeball it, nine out of ten times,” Mary said, holding up her hand so one finger was extended.  She tapped her long fingernail with the little vial.

Cut to a very specific length.

“What happens the other time?” Jamie asked, quiet.

“I’ll err on the side of giving too little,” Mary said, with confidence.

“Good,” Gordon said.  “Sy?  What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking… our Shepherd is playing a game of chess.  We’re late to the game.  Every piece of his is well positioned.  All so he’s untouchable.  We’d be a lot better off if they hadn’t waited before asking us to jump in.”

“Can’t cry over spilled milk,” Gordon said.

“No.  That’s true.  But haven’t you ever been sitting at a chess board, thinking to yourself just how nice it would be if you could just take his turn for him?  Make the worst possible play, then watch them scramble to try to recover?”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Never crossed my mind.  I have wanted to swat you across the head when I realize you’ve cheated.”

“You have an idea, Sylvester?” Jamie asked, before Gordon and I could get in an argument.

“I do.  I just need to figure out an angle.”

“Start figuring,” Jamie said.  “Because we’re here.”

The church was busy, brighter than any building in Radham, short of the Academy.  Even at the darker periphery, where bright lights didn’t quite reach far enough past the windows and through the rain, there were lanterns and glowing cigarette ends.

We approached, picking up the pace to draw closer to our guardians.

“I’m your…?” Lacey asked.

“Older sister,” I said.

The look she gave me told me my attempt to curry favor hadn’t quite worked.  She saw right through me.

“And I’m?” Cecil asked.

“Teacher.  Not an Academy teacher, but a regular one.  Parents left us in your care.  If Lacey doesn’t want to be an older sister, she can be a colleague.”

“I see,” Cecil said.  “I can play along.”

I dearly hope so, I thought, turning my mind toward options to speak up or cut him off.  Kicking him in the back of the knee would have to do in a pinch, if he was a particularly bad actor.

As it turned out, it wasn’t so necessary.

The door was open, and people were waiting as we approached.  Being with Cecil and Lacey made the entrance painless.  Nobody spoke up or stood in our way, as we joined a crowd that was now gathered within the building.

Where fear had ruled, earlier in the day, there was anger now.  Restlessness.  Too many people wanting to do something, yet finding themselves unable.

The Shepherd had been at work, tending to his flock.

The Shepherd was right there, ready to greet all newcomers.

“Welcome,” he said, and his smile was warm.  He extended his good hand to us, his other arm limp at his side.  “And I see I recognize one of you.  Mary Cobourn?  It’s been a few years.”

A plan never survives contact with the enemy.

I didn’t see a break in her facade, and her smile was natural, but safe behind Lacey and Cecil, her hand found mine, clutching it with a tightness that suggested alarm.

Our little clone didn’t remember this part of Mary’s history.

Which threw a fair sized wrench into our machinations.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.07 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.7

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“Good evening, reverend,” Mary said.

The Shepherd smiled, for perhaps the first time since I’d seen him.  It was disconcerting, especially considering our somewhat precarious situation.  Smiles meant things, and a rare smile boded ill.

“Come in, please.  I’m glad to see you, Mary, you’ve been on my thoughts in recent months.  Are these your…?”

“Friends,” she said.

Good, keep it simple.

“And you are?” the man asked, directing his attention to Lacey and Cecil.

“Teachers,” Lacey said, following Mary’s lead.

“I had a great many conversations with your father, Mary, and your education was one of the topics.”

“He didn’t tell me about that.”

“He wouldn’t, I don’t think,” the Shepherd said.  “That’s not the image I have of him.  You spent quite some time here when you were small.”

“I did, but my memory of then isn’t so good.”

“No?  I would have thought otherwise.”

“I… daydreamed, mostly.  When I think to back then, I think of the games I played in my head.  The church seems smaller than it was.”

“Well, I can’t help but take a small amount of offense at that,” the Shepherd said.  “We put some work into expanding it.  It was quite a trial, even.  The men I answer to tend to think a church in Radham a lost cause.”

I wanted so badly to help her, but I couldn’t.

Jamie must have felt even worse in that regard.  Jamie probably knew what the remodel had been, and the actual year and seasons it had taken place.

Mary defaulted to silence.  A terrible, awkward, damning silence.

“A small amount of offense,” the Shepherd said, offering her a smile.  “You’re not so different from your father.  Will you join me for a conversation?  With your chaperone and friends, of course?  Things are fairly quiet right now, and I’m hoping a few more people arrive or come back inside before I give Mr. Gill the stage to address everyone and quiet their fears.”

“I, um,” Mary said.

I gave her hand a squeeze.

“That could be nice?” she ventured.

The Shepherd smiled.  “Come, then.  We’ll have some tea and a bite to eat, if your teachers are fine with that?”

“Yes,” Cecil said, a little too quickly.  Then, as if to compensate, “that would be fine.”

The Shepherd smiled at that, as if enjoying a private joke.  “I’ll show you the way, then.  It’s foul out there, in more ways than one, and creature comforts go a long way.”

We were lead down the aisle, through an open set of double doors at one side of the church.  To look at it, going by the coat by the door and the sets of shoes, Mauer lived in the building, and this intermediate area between the area that was open to the public and the living area was something of an office.

It was a more private place to meet people, from what I gathered.  There was even a door leading from the little office to the outside, so people could come and meet him here directly.  I noted the presence of little stones at the base of the door, too small to be the type to hold it open.  Not that people tended to leave doors open in rainy Radham.

Not solely a place of business, the space felt a touch too staged to be a proper part of his home, either.  A dark red military jacket, trimmed in gold cord, sat behind glass, within a fair sized frame.  A smaller frame of the same make held three badges and an emblem from his old military company.  They were here for the sake of others, not for Mauer, I suspected.  The way the cabinet to Mauer’s left was laid out, he didn’t have a good view of either.  We, finding seats in chairs and benches on the far side of his desk, had a clear view of both.

There were other things and keepsakes too, better placed for Mauer to see.  Photos of him with family as a child, when he was about our age, black, white, and blurry.  A professionally taken, expanded photo of a relative wearing a baseball jersey, mid-pitch.  A cross, however, took center stage behind his chair.  Worn, beaten and battered, with chips of paint missing, revealing pale, old wood beneath.

It was a stark contrast to this very put-together man with his bronze-red hair so neat, yet I fully, one-hundred percent believed that the cross was his, not the church’s.  A family keepsake, perhaps.

He’d just finished filling his kettle with water from a pitcher, and had turned a little heated plate on.  Half-turning, he’d caught me looking at the cross.

“I’m guessing you’re not one to attend church,” he said.

“Most don’t, do they?” I asked.  “Especially people our age?”

“No.  Not in Radham, at least until bad things start happening,” Mauer said.  He leaned a little to one side to look through the doors to the church proper, where the crowd was still getting sorted out, gathering in groups and talking in low tones.  “As we see tonight.”

‘Bad things’.

To me, it sounded like a tepid way of referring to the escaped experiments, but to a real child of my age, coming from a man of authority, it could be reassuring in a way.  Acknowledging and downplaying the problem.

I found myself wondering what process was at work behind his words.  Did he tailor them to his audience with intent, thoughts flying to pick the best one for each situation, or did he do it naturally?

“It sounds like you’re trying to guilt him into attending church more,” Cecil said.

“One of my jobs,” Mauer said, smiling at Cecil.  “You’ll have to forgive me.”

Cecil gave him a tight smile in response.

Awkward.  Cecil was not the right man for this job.  I should have been more specific.

“Mary,” the Shepherd said, taking it in stride, “Your father and I had long debates about your attendance at Mothmont.  I don’t see it as confidential, as many of the debates were in public forums, more as friends than as council.  When he took up the accounting job for the mayor, he became too busy.  I think I asked what became of you, but memory fails me.”

“I did go to Mothmont,” Mary said.

“Past tense?”

“Yes sir,” she said.

He waved his hand.  “Trust me, I’ve heard the word ‘sir’ enough for one lifetime.  ‘Father’ works, but I’m not too fond of that either.  When you said past-”

“Aren’t titles and symbols important for a reverend?” she asked.  “Oh, I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

It was interesting, seeing how Mary’s mind worked when she was put on the spot.  This wasn’t her focus or specialty.  She wasn’t an actor, and for much of her relatively short existence, she’d been raised to emulate one role, possibly for one audience, her parents.

But Mary wasn’t foolish or stupid.  Even the ‘sir’ could have been intentional, turning the discussion back on the Shepherd.  Now she was putting the focus back on him.

Not the tactic I would have chosen, but it was a good tactic.  Almost attacking him, in a sense, not letting him return a strike.

“The symbols aren’t so important to me, not in that way,” the Shepherd said.  He looked very at ease as the kettle started whistling.  He poured it into a waiting teapot and deposited some teabags.  “I believe in simple and fundamental truths.  I’ve seen people in my position try to give counsel to the suffering with fancy words and high concepts, with symbols and rituals.  It felt hollow, and I told myself I wouldn’t do that to others.”

“What are you doing, then?” Cecil asked.

Holy hell, Cecil, would you shut up?

It wasn’t the words alone, but the tone that he’d given them.  Accusatory.

It was Gordon that sprung to the rescue.  “Is it okay if I don’t have tea and treats?”

“Me either?” Lillian asked.  A little too fast.  Gordon might have prodded or signaled her, if I had to guess.

“Ah,” Cecil said.  “Yes, I think it would be.”

Gordon sprung up from his seat, retreating, Lillian following right after.

I saw what he was doing and started to formulate a way to communicate it to Lacey when she spoke.  “Charles.  You should watch them and make sure they don’t get into trouble.”

I couldn’t see it, which meant the Shepherd couldn’t see it either, but it was very possible that Lacey had given Cecil a wink to drive the point home.

“I think I should.  If you’ll excuse me,” Cecil said.  “I’m sorry father, but I would love to have tea and a discussion another time.”

“Of course,” the Reverend said.  “Three less cups of tea, then?

He brought the teapot over to his desk, then retrieved cups from the cabinet.  “People are scared.  The rest of you are all right?  Don’t feel obligated to stay for Mary’s sake.”

“I’m quite alright,” Helen said.  She offered him a winning smile.  “Tea would be lovely.”

“You just want the treats that he’s serving with the tea,” I teased her.

Helen’s expression shifted, a touch of momentary outrage, suppressed, consternation, composure.

My statement was partially intended to augment Helen’s mask, and partially in hopes that I could maintain the distraction, draw things out further so that Cecil’s accusatory question could more easily be forgotten.

“Yes,” she admitted.  Then, delayed, as if she’d just remembered, “Please.”

All for the benefit of the Reverend.

“Fruit cake?” he asked.

Helen’s smile widened.  “Please.”

For a man that professed to have little interest in ritual, the tea was most definitely one.  Serving tea to a group all the more so: asking what everyone wanted, portioning out the cake on little saucers with individual forks, and handing them out.

And in all of that, there were no clues as to how he’d grown so good at manipulating the masses.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked, before he’d finished portioning out the cake and gotten settled, ready to focus wholly on the discussion.  Taking the initiative, much as Mary had fought to maintain it, just minutes ago.

“I think that depends wholly on the Academy,” the Shepherd said.  He turned the fancy little tea spoon from his tea over in his hands.  “Four experiments got loose in the span of one day.  I have to wonder how it even happened, if some safeguard failed.  God willing, we’ll only need to stay safe until they’ve cleaned up their mess.”

Can’t clean up experiments that only escaped in rumor, I thought.

“What if it doesn’t stop?” I asked, but what I was really asking was, what if you keep up these rumors?  Stir people up into a frenzy?

“Then I suppose Mary will be counting on you to protect her,” the Shepherd said.

I wasn’t left at a loss for words terribly often.  The Shepherd had managed it.  My mouth sat open.

“I caught a glimpse of you two holding hands, seeing inside the crook of your teacher’s elbow,” the Shepherd said.  He finished doling out the saucers of cake, then took a seat, stirring his tea with a small, thin-handled spoon.  “You’re asking these questions out of concern for her welfare?”

“I am,” I finally managed.  My mind was racing.  He’d noticed that detail.  What else had he seen?

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Sid,” I told him.

“You’re going to grow up to be a good man, Sid.  Mary is lucky to have you.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I focused on my tea, instead.  The saucer of cake sat in my lap, and I held the teacup with both hands, raising it to my mouth.

He might have taken it for embarrassment, but I was taking the time to think, free of further poking and prodding from our Shepherd.

I wasn’t missing the fact that I was losing in this verbal battle, and I wasn’t positive our man was even playing.

“We got off track earlier,” he said.  “What led you to leave Mothmont, Mary?”

“There was an incident.  Children got sick, the school was closed.  I talked to my parents, and they thought I would be safer elsewhere.”

“With your lovely teacher here.  Miss?”

“Lindsey,” Lacey said.

“Are you teaching the students in hopes that they will attend the Academy, then?” the Shepherd asked.

“I- no.  They’re free to make that choice, but that’s not our goal.  After the incident at Mothmont, we’re even downplaying it, for the parents’ benefit.”

The Shepherd nodded, but he had a concerned look on his face.

“Is that wrong?” Lacey asked.

The Shepherd sipped at his tea, then put his cup down.  No response was forthcoming.

“Father?”

He let out a sigh.  “When I was small, younger than these children are now, my father was a soldier.  He served in the American War.  The young men were all told how important the war was.  They were given all sorts of reasons.  Patriotism, principle, faith.  Their value as men was entirely dependent on how willing they were to die for their country.  How others valued them, and how they valued themselves.”

“My father was too young to participate, but he remembered what it was like,” Lacey said.

“On one side, men, shooting, dying, panicking.  On the other side, rank and file of stitched soldier.  Utterly obedient, each capable of getting up after being shot, needing only quick repair work before they were ready to see the field again.  Two or three times as strong as any soldier on my father’s side.  They had weaknesses, yes, but they had more strengths.”

He seemed to realize who he was talking to, and frowned.  “I’m sorry, I had a train of thought, and was musing aloud.  Am I scaring the children?”

I shook my head, joining Jamie, Helen, and Mary.  Jamie ventured, “It’s interesting.”

“I thought of my father, then myself, and looking at the younger generation, hearing how their education progresses, it got me thinking.”

“I want to hear,” I said, with the blithe eagerness that only a child could get away with.

“Mmm.  I’ll leave out details.  The Crown won, as they win virtually every war.  America lost.  I reached the age my father had been when he’d been convinced to go to war, but no reasons were given when they gave me a rifle and jacket.  See over there?”

The Shepherd stood.  He made his way around the desk, past Mary’s knees and mine, to reach the frame where his jacket was hung.

The moment his back was turned, Mary leaned forward.  A deft movement of her hand over his cup of tea, and the powder was deposited from the hollow of her smallest fingernail to the tea.  She picked up the spoon and stirred, not letting the spoon touch the edges of the cup and clink, then set it back in place, at the same angle it had been.

Lacey gave Mary a long, hard look.  It seemed to take apparent effort to compose herself.

A good thing that the Reverend didn’t turn around.  Oblivious, he tapped the glass, “Unlike my father’s, my jacket had a crown on the sleeve.  My war was longer and uglier.  I hope you understand if I don’t go into the details.”

It was Jamie who spoke up.  “Your father’s war was lost with brute strength.  The strength of stitched against men.  Your war was won with…”

“Abominations,” the Shepherd said.  He turned around, making his way back to his seat.  “Yes.  How exceptionally well put.”

“I read something like it in a book,” Jamie said, hugging his notebook.  “I like books.”

The Shepherd smiled.  “I do too.”

“Are you afraid of what war these children might see?” Lacey asked.

“No, Mrs. Lindsey.  That is not my greatest fear,” the Shepherd said.  “A fear, but not the greatest by far.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Father.”

The Shepherd was settling into his chair, mouth opening to respond, when I saw the reaction.  A momentary hesitation, while his eyes rested on his cup.

“Yes,” he said, finding his stride again.  “It seems I have.  I’m sorry.  My thoughts are elsewhere.  I think we may have to cut this short, it’s about time Mr. Gill and I address the room.”

“It’s okay,” Mary said.

“I’m sorry to dwell on your education, Mary.  I spend time worrying about the next generation, and after interacting with your father as much as I did, you’re one of the faces that spring to mind.”

Mary nodded.

“Thank you very much for the cake, Father,” Helen said.

“You’re very welcome,” he said.  “You children are welcome any time, to talk about anything.  There may even be cake waiting for you when you do.”

“Thank you!” Helen said, smiling.

“Provided you have permission from your teacher or parents to partake,” he said.

Helen’s face fell a little.

“I appreciate you humoring me, I hope I didn’t bore,” he said.  We shook our heads.  “If anyone asks, I’ll be out in a minute, no less.”

“Father,” I said, right away.

“Yes?”

“You said that your fear wasn’t so much that we’d fight in a war worse than the one you fought in, but you didn’t say what your fear really was.”

“It’s complex and silly,” he said.  “It wouldn’t make much sense, trust me.  Taken the wrong way, it might even offend.”

“Please?” I asked.

“Please?” Jamie asked, chiming in.

The Shepherd looked surprisingly weary, looking at us, collecting the first of the dishes we’d left behind.  He seemed to weigh his options a little.

“Please,” Mary said.  “We’re not as dull as you might think.”

He startled a little at that, then gave her an appraising look.

“My greatest concern, Mary Cobourn,” he said, “is that there won’t be an opportunity for you to fight at all.”

Leaving us with that terminal dose of irony, he turned away, collecting the dishes.

From the time he’d returned to his chair to the time he saw us out the door of his homey little office, he hadn’t touched his tea.

Glancing over my shoulder, I could see through the open door as he quickly stacked saucers and gathered the scattered cups we’d left behind.  All went to the counter by his little heating plate and kettle, likely to be washed at a later time.

I saw him carry one cup to the same counter, clearly heavier than the others.  He unlatched his window, removed something from the top of the window, opened the window and tossed out the contents.

“Lacey,” I said.

She gave me an annoyed look.  “Don’t call me like a dog.”

“Find Cecil,” I said.  “Gordon or Lillian would work too.  Whatever they’ve been up to, we should get caught up.”

“Say please?” she asked.

“Time is really of the essence,” I said.  That was apparently enough to send her on her way.  To her back, I added, “Fetch.”

She stopped in her tracks, apparently decided it wasn’t worth it, and headed off again.

“You’re a jerk,” Jamie commented.

“He knew,” I said.  “The Shepherd.  Something tipped him off.”

“I did it right,” Mary said, under her breath.

“Apparently not,” I said.  “Plus side is, I think he blames Lacey.  He seemed eager to invite us back, but not so much for our teacher.”

Mary looked annoyed, apparently not even hearing what I was saying.  “The tea shouldn’t have even been swirling by the time he returned to it.  The powder didn’t change the color, I even moved the spoon back.”

“No,” Jamie said.

No?” Mary asked.

“No.  It wasn’t the same when you put it back,” Jamie said.  “I’m thinking back, and the spoon was upside down.  It was rightside up when you put it back.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mary said.  “How would you even tell until you took the spoon out?”

“They were nice spoons, maybe with marks on the underside of the handles,” I said.  “Something you said at the beginning tipped him off.  I think he took it to mean she’d been brainwashed or the Academy had its hooks in her.  He took a sudden interest in your welfare.  While getting into a protective mindset, he got into a defensive one too.  Got a bit more cautious.  Prey instinct, maybe.  Probably not, but maybe.”

“Sensing something wrong from clues he didn’t even consciously take in,” Helen said.

I nodded.  “If I had to guess, he’s been especially wary ever since the war ended.  He had coins or something stacked in a certain order above every door or window he doesn’t tend to leave open.  Stones left at the base of the door, so he knows if it’s been opened.  Everything in a place, to the point where he knows if anything’s been tampered with.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Because he’s paranoid, and rightly so,” I said.

“The war he fought in had parasites,” Jamie said.  “The worst ones paralyzed a man, left him screaming so the Crown soldiers could collect them and turn them into stitched.  Or just left them to scream themselves raw and die from exposure.  I can’t blame him for being careful with his tea.”

“Those weren’t the worst ones,” Helen murmured.  “I’ve seen some of the ones people don’t talk about without clearance.”

“Lovely,” I said.  “But we’re getting off topic.  Our concern is the Shepherd.”

“He didn’t have much to say about what he had planned,” Jamie said.

“No,” I said.  “But we did get a good chance to study him as a person, and we have a sense about his motivations now.  That bit at the end.”

“Assuming you think he’s genuine,” Mary said.

“I do,” I said.  I thought for a second.  “Are we sure this guy isn’t an experiment?”

“Why?” Jamie asked.

“Because, ugh.  He’s better at manipulating groups than any of us.  I’d say I’m better at him at one-on-one stuff, but he did throw me off with that one line.”

“That was funny,” Jamie said.  I elbowed him.

“He’s sharp, too,” I said.

“When Ibott gives me lessons,” Helen said, “He sometimes warns me not to underestimate people.  Humans did some amazing things over the years.  Geniuses pop up now and again, people with exceptional natural ability, or those with talent.”

“He’s just an incredible person?” Mary asked.  “One in a million?”

I respect him,” I said.  “I’m a little spooked at the idea of what he might do if we let him keep this up.”

“You respect him, but you want to stop him?” Mary asked.

“I respected you,” I said.  “I still do, all the more.”

That cut that argument short.  It seemed to stun her a little, put her on her heels.

I was learning little tidbits about Mary, and one was that she didn’t like to fail.  This was where we differed.  She valued the execution, while I liked getting a reaction out of people, even if it was in an indirect way, through some lesson I’d given Jamie.  When her execution wasn’t enough, she got cranky.  Same as I did, when I failed to budge people.  Rick being first and foremost among them.

“You did good,” I told her, taking her hand.  “Problem is, he did better.  We underestimated him.  I thought he set things up so that the people around him were all perfectly arranged, a chess board with every piece trapped.  But he does it with his environment too.”

Lacey was coming back with Cecil and Lillian.

“What do we do?” Mary asked.

The others reached us.  Gordon was absent.

“What did I miss?” Cecil asked.

I ignored him.  I asked Lillian, “Where’s Gordon?”

“On the roof.  He said to wave, and he’d make an entrance.”

I took a look around.  The building was only two stories high, but it had been expanded, like the Shepherd had said.

On the roof, yet able to see us if we waved?

My eye fell on one of the stained glass windows.

Good old Gordon.  He’d remembered what I’d said.

Taking the chess board and making an opponent’s move for him.

“Did he take anything?” I asked.  “Ask for supplies?”

“Soap and a scalpel,” Lillian said.

I had no idea what Gordon was doing with soap and a scalpel, but I was so excited at the prospect of finding out that I could barely sit still.  I grinned.

“Let’s let Gordon enjoy the spotlight,” I said.  “This plays well into what I was thinking.”

“And what were you thinking?” Jamie asked.

“Right now?  Lacey, get close to the altar.  Everyone else?  Spread out.  The Reverend is going to want to assert control, keep everything in position.  But as Mary demonstrated, he’s not so good if he’s kept on the defensive.  Spread the word that there are riots happening elsewhere.”

“I can do that,” Cecil said.

“No,” I said.  “You have the most important job.”

“Important?”

“Run to the nearest telephone, as fast as you can,” I told him.  “Get word to the Academy.  Tell them there’s a riot happening here.”

“This is not the clean and tidy Hayle wanted,” Jamie reminded me.

“It will be,” I said.  “Trust me.”

Gordon didn’t trust you,” Jamie said.

“I think he and I are on the same page here,” I said.

Everyone moved to their assigned spots.  Locations and positions.

Reverend Mauer had set up his own board.  Now we were setting up ours.

I gave Cecil a few minutes, watched each of the others.

The Shepherd and Gill were talking, and Gill made his way to the stage.

I saw the Shepherd looking over the crowd.  He saw me.

I gave him a wave.

Two seconds passed.  I supposed Gordon needed a running start.

He came crashing through the stained glass window behind the altar, head over heels, clearing a good distance.  The landing was violent, clipping the edge of the stage.

The marks on his arms and body, scalpel-carved, looked like the gouges of claws.  He was covered in a mucus-like slime.  Soap.

Lacey was the one at his side.  She helped him sit up.

He found his breath.

“The things are attacking!” he screamed.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.08 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.8

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As situations went, it was chaos.  People flocked closer to Gordon and fled to the edges of the room.  There were shouts, cries of fear, conflicting orders.

Gordon was a good-looking guy, if I looked past the minor details of rips, tears, blood and the goop he’d smeared on himself.  Tall, broad shouldered, muscular.  He was good at whatever he set his mind to, a step behind me in assessing people, a step behind Jamie in memory, and he had a lot of other talents besides.  More than any one of us, he had everything it took to thrive if separated from the group.  The lynchpin that would hold us together.  Girls liked him, guys respected him.

And this, that he got to be at the center of this chaos, the stone that set the ripples in motion, this was what made me jealous of him for the first time.

That he got to lie there and bleed while we had to do the work, pshh.  Salt in the wound.

My eye was on the Shepherd.

To his credit, he didn’t miss a beat.  He was already moving as fast as he was able, toward Gordon.  As people shouted and argued, some turning toward the door, he properly shouted for the first time that I’d heard.

“Stay inside where it’s safe!” he shouted.

Heads turned, the chaos settled a fraction.  People who were heading for the door slowed or stopped.

“No!”  Gordon shouted, twisting, turning.  He struggled against Lacey’s grip, as well as the grip of two men who’d jumped to his side, and in the process, he made momentary eye contact with me.  He maintained it as he shouted, “No!”

When I was sure he could see, and that the Shepherd didn’t have line of sight, I gestured.  Ring, middle, and index fingers flicked upward twice.

“It’s going to kill us all!” Gordon screamed, thrashing as Lacey tried to hold him down, steadily ratcheting up the intensity.  “It’s going to kill us!  It’s going to kill us!  It’s going to kill us!”

This was a balancing act.  We didn’t want disaster, riots, or madness.  We wanted the situation to be almost unmanageable, with emphasis on the word ‘almost.

“Gill!” the Shepherd called out.  “Through my office to my room.  I have four guns.  Two pistols in the desk, rifle by the bed, the third-”

“-Shotgun, in the cabinet, will do,” our would-be mayor said.  He recruited two people with a gesture.

The Shepherd approached Gordon, but turned to a group by the door.  “Terry, Hews, Arthur, I know you’ve done the gardening work for me.  You know where the stuff is stored.  Pole-saws, pitchforks, chopping knife.  Anything that can be used as weapons.  Don’t go-”

“We’re going to die!” Gordon screamed.  “Please, please, God!”

“-Outside!” the Shepherd had to raise his voice to be heard.  “Go through the back, the shed has two doors!”

Clear, sensible directions, giving the people here something to rally to.  Weapons gave them back a kind of power.  Taking the group that was closest to bolting it and empowering them.

To their backs, as they crossed the church, he said, “We’re counting on you!”

Turning them into heroes.

Gordon twisted, screaming, “Get off me, let me go!  It’s going to get me, they’re going to get me!”

I was able to see Gordon, in the midst of pulling ineffectually at Lacey’s grasp, an intentional sort of ineffectual, give her two taps on the side.  The universal signal for release.  It was discreet, subtle as such things went, in an area where most wouldn’t be looking, and those who didn’t know he was acting might not realize it was an intentional double-tap.

She let up on her grip of him, and he chose that same moment to pull free, still thrashing, playing out a mindless panic.

In the doing, he threw one fist out, and he socked the Shepherd one, right in the jaw.

No!  I screamed in my mind, while forcing my expression to match the crowd around me, which was aghast in a completely different way.  No, no, why!?

Why does he get to do this part?

It was, as maneuvers went, a pretty damn good one, I had to admit that much.  I wasn’t even sure I would have done better, in his shoes.  My acting would have beat his, probably, I could have chosen my words better, but I couldn’t have delivered a hit like he did.  Even if I’d gone for the Shepherd’s balls, I wasn’t sure I would have hurt him quite as much.

It was something Gordon was good at.  When he hit someone, even at almost half the size and body weight he could achieve one day, it hurt.  It wasn’t just the punch.  It was the fact that his hand was already messy with his own blood, and now the Shepherd was bloodied, his face a reminder of the danger.  He wiped his cheek with a handkerchief, but there was still a smear.

The second part of it was that he’d hit the Shepherd in the mouth, and it hadn’t been a tap, either.  Gordon was stronger than most.

As if time had slowed down, I could see the Shepherd scooting back a bit, eyes opened wide, moving his jaw as if to test how functional it was.  For a man who relied so much on his words, it had to hurt on a complete other level.

I would never say that Gordon was anything but a genius.  A genius that was now being pinned down by three grown men, with Lacey close by.

“Stay-” The Shepherd started.  He winced a little, then managed to say, not to Gordon but to the room, “Stay calm.  We cannot panic!”

“Please, please!” Gordon said.  He was winding down, struggling less, perhaps sensing that he’d used up all the leeway and influence he’d been afforded, or he was saving his strength and his words for when he could have more impact.

He twisted around, looking my way once again.

I glanced around the room.  I’d situated myself just to one side of the central aisle, standing on one of the pews, so that I had a view of everyone.  Jamie, Lillian, Helen, and Mary were all at different points at the perimeter of the room.  Gordon and the Shepherd were just beside the altar, in plain view of everyone.

I offered him the same gesture as before.  An ‘up’ twitch of the fingers.

The way I saw it, if he couldn’t meet the request and up the tension again, then I got to be smug.  If he did have it in him, then we could potentially solidify our hold on the situation before the people came back with the weapons.

I figured there was a three out of ten chance I’d get to be smug.  Gordon was too good at thinking clearly through moments of crisis.

“Please,” Gordon said, in an agonized way that might have broken more sensitive hearts in the room.  It sounded like he was giving up.  “Please.  They’re going to come after us.  We’re all going to die if we don’t do something.”

They?” the Shepherd asked.  The room was almost silent, every set of ears listening.  “A moment ago you said ‘it’.”

“Yes,” Gordon said.  “I think it’s a mother?  And it has babies.”

Gill and his buddies re-entered the room, carrying their guns.

Gordon was able to intuit that that arrival meant we needed just a little bit more of a push to leave the Shepherd with a little bit less in the way of control.  He added, in a hollow, breathy voice, “Lots of babies.”

It was all I could do to avoid grinning.  We’d dealt with threats that bred, on two separate occasions.  The Fishing Man, so named because of a mispronunciation of ‘fission’, had been bad, though the problem had ultimately corrected itself.  The Wise Rats had been worse, another all-hands-on-deck situation, though it had been far tidier, confined to one laboratory building.  It had taken three weeks to clean up the mess.

I imagined the people here were now contemplating the implications.  They had no damn idea what could happen when something fertile got loose.

The Shepherd might have had a better idea, he’d been part of the war down south, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t crack, but I could see that his attention was elsewhere as the others around Gordon asked a flurry of questions.  What was it, could he describe it, how did it happen?

He knew what experiments had escaped, had used connections to reach students and manipulated those students into acting against the Academy.  He wouldn’t have urged anyone to release something that bred or multiplied.  There was too much chance that things would get out of control.

What’s more likely?  Do you think that the Academy is sending the bad stuff after you, or do you think there’s something suspicious going on with Gordon?

How do you process this, how do you move forward?

I was genuinely interested.  I respected our enemy.  I liked him.  I wanted to see how he functioned when the chips were down, the situation bad and inexplicable.

He was stone faced, eyes not focused on anything in particular.

He raised his eyes only as the group from the shed returned.  They each carried between two and four tools that served as weapons.  Poles with saws on the edges, sometimes used for trimming buildings, sledgehammers, a short chopping sword, bent halfway down the blade, used for tending to growing woodwork, a pitchfork and a two-handed shovel with a pointed end.

They passed them out to friends.

Gordon was still describing the ‘monster’ that had thrown him through the window, in the most incomprehensible, breathless manner he could.  “Big, and scaly, and it drooled and it had ears and it picked me up with these smaller arms and carried me up, but when I kicked it, it threw me with the big arms.  That’s when I got this cut, then I kicked it again, and it threw me the other way, and then I got thrown through the window.  It’s out there!  The mother thing and all the babies and-”

“Hush, hush!  Quiet.  You’re safe now,” a man reassured a seemingly panicked Gordon.

I’d joked with Rick, earlier in the day, that my brain ran hot sometimes.  It didn’t, but it felt like it was getting close.  There were more than a hundred faces and postures to focus on, people, positions, fashion, track records, all making this moment exactly what it was.

There were people around me. Unfamiliar faces.

Everything had to be balanced and weighed.

Maybe a gentle push to start.  The room was paralyzed, caught in indecision.  The man in authority was lacking, bleeding.  Gill was up there by the Shepherd, now, half-kneeling and talking at a volume I couldn’t make out from the other end of the church.

If the Shepherd wasn’t going to make a move, I’d have to at least act to counterbalance the impact of the group with the makeshift weapons.

“We’re not safe at all,” I said, under my breath.

A woman near me reached out, putting her hand on my head, while saying nothing.

The gentle push wasn’t enough.

“We’re not safe at all,” I said, again, just a little bit louder.  “We might be getting surrounded by the monsters.  We need to run, before they close in.”

If she said ‘no’, then I’d gain no ground, and would have to find another way to push.  But the entire room was hanging on Gordon’s words, the impact he’d made.  Maybe, if she was undecided, that would be the deciding element?

It wasn’t her that I wound up pushing into action.  A man nearby spoke, “I’m going to peek outside.”

“Is the way clear?” I asked, the words leaving my mouth before he’d even closed his mouth.  If I could attach my statement to his, make it seem like his idea…

“I’m not going out there,” he said, without turning.  Too much to hope for.  People weren’t cogs in a machine.  They were milling around, looking for an out.  I had to guess how they’d weigh risk versus reward, or one risk versus another, and then use that.  I’d guessed wrong here.

The woman beside me touched my head again, smoothing my tousled hair, as if that would reassure me and not irritate me nine ways from Sunday.

I ducked out from under her grip, hopping down from the pew.  I’d lost cachet with this particular section of the crowd.  I could move elsewhere and try again.

I found Mary, closer to the front.  From where Gordon was, up by the altar, Mary all the way over to the rightmost wall, in the corner closest to the stage.  Lillian was in the back corner, only a few paces from the door.

Mary was looking my way.  I gave her a ‘come here’ wave.

Lillian wasn’t looking my way, and a furtive motion on my part didn’t get her attention.  The way she was standing, there were too many people around her who blocked her view of the surroundings.  Her attention was on the stage.  On Gordon.

Our Mary worked better in coordination with the rest of us than Lillian did.  That was after being with us a day.  Lillian had been with us for a handful of months.

I shook my head, turned around, and moved through the crowd to get to Lillian.  I pushed against people and jostled them aside.  Any more agitation was a good thing, even if it was mild annoyance.

I seized Lillian’s hand and hauled her over to the other side of the church.

Gill was saying something.  I was only barely processing it.  Orders.  Aim at the window above, in case it comes through.  Organizing people in groups.  The words were just noise.  People listened, but our would-be mayor didn’t have the clout.

The Shepherd was oddly quiet.  Unable to talk?  Unwilling?

Thinking?

Jamie had told me that I’d built my personality and means of dealing with people by copying and studying the adults around me.  It had been a necessary thing, a scrabbling for control when I’d been subjected to appointment after appointment, the space between filled with every imaginable form of testing, for sanity, for memory, for competence of all stripes.

I’d learned to read people because I’d had to.  The Shepherd, though, was the first person I wanted.  I wanted him in a box where I could make him perform and glean everything I could.

It was his charisma.  It wasn’t the usual sort of charisma like Gordon or Helen might show off when they were ‘on’.  Not smiles and warmth.  When he spoke, when he acted, he tended to achieve things.  When he didn’t speak, as was the case right now, people were left waiting, hanging on the silence, in anticipation of the words.

They didn’t know the particulars, not exactly.  He was someone born with an enormous amount of natural talent for something, and after being altered irrevocably by the Academy, its war, and the modifications it made to his body, he’d found the drive to dig deep and utilize that talent.

I was one of the people in his thrall, in a way.  I very much wanted to hear him speak, to study him… but we’d left him speechless.

I wanted to push until he found his voice.

With Lillian trailing behind me, her hand in mine, stumbling to keep up, I hopped up onto a pew mid-stride, tugging on her arm as I made my way up.  Her hand slipped from mine.

I found the others, hopped down, and crossed the remainder of the distance.  Mary had already made it, without Lillian slowing her down.

Half of us crawled under a table that had been placed in a nook, books on top, formed a huddle, heads so close together that the sides of some of our foreheads touched. To onlookers, we were sort of hiding under a tablecloth.  Friends finding security among one another, clustered together.

Mary looked far from secure, squeezed in next to Helen.  Helen, for her part, was smiling a little, but apparently oblivious.

Lillian was late to arrive, worming her way into the cluster beside me.  I gave her a pinch in the side, and she hit me far harder than necessary, in retaliation.

“What do you think?” Jamie asked.

“I think we need a stampede for the door,” I whispered.  “I was going to try and move the crowd, spread fear and suspicion, but they feel too safe indoors.  If we could take that safety away…”

“We can take that safety away,” Mary murmured.  “I can.  We cut the power.”

“We need the situation manageable,” I said.

“You want a manageable stampede?”  Lillian asked.

“I wanted a manageable riot,” I whispered, “I thought spreading the word through the crowd would make people more restless than it did.  The Shepherd is so good, damn it.  We need…”

I floundered.

“Start with the basics,” Jamie suggested.

I nodded.  “The whole idea was to start a localized riot.  If Cecil did his job and avoided getting eaten by Whiskers while running around in the rain, the Academy can arrive, shut down the riot in the early stages, and lay the blame at the Shepherd’s feet.”

“Eaten by Whiskers?” Lillian asked, horrified.

“Not important right now,” I said.

“Cecil’s nice!”

“Not the word I would have chosen,” I said.  “Dense, unhelpful-”

“He’s nice, Sy!” Lillian said.  “He means well.”

“When someone says ‘means well’, they mean the person is dumber than a stitched chicken.”

“Sy,” Lillian said, her tone suddenly hostile.  “Not another word about Cecil.”

“Great!” I said.  “Because Cecil doesn’t matter.”

She reached out, grabbed the general vicinity of my nipple through my cloak and shirt, and did a twisty sort of pinch, hard.

“Agh!”

“Back on topic?” Jamie suggested, very diplomatically.

“Fuck, that hurts,” I said, rubbing my chest.

“Manageable stampede?” Jamie reminded me.

“Manageable stampede,” I said.  I looked over my shoulder at the Shepherd.  “No.  Even a regular stampede.”

“Regular stampede,” Jamie said, in the same disbelieving tone that Lillian had used when I’d brought up the idea.

“I want to see how he deals with it.”

“I’d like to remind you that Hayle needs you to impress?” Jamie said.

“I don’t need reminders, my memory isn’t that bad,” I lied.  I’d almost forgotten.  “It’s fine.  We’re good.  Even if things get sloppy, the Academy should be close.”

“I’d like more confidence than ‘should’,” Jamie said.

“Too bad,” I told him.  “Unless you have a better idea…”

He shook his head.

“Trust me,” I said.

“This from the least trustworthy person in Radham,” Lillian muttered.

Trust me.  He has something up his sleeve.  We need to rattle him way harder to make him show his hand.  We still have cards to play.  Gordon is a big one.”

Jamie pursed his lips.  “Helen?”

“I trust him on this.”

“Lillian?”

“Ha!”

“Thought not.  Mary?”

“I don’t know for sure, but… feels right.  We don’t have the whole picture, I guess, if I had to put it into words?”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  “Alright.  Then I’ll agree.  You know this is on your head if this goes wrong, Sy?  Not because I want it to be, but because-”

“I get it,” I said.  “I really do.”

“I’ll go cut the power,” Mary said.

“Okay,” Helen said.  “And I’ll follow Gordon’s lead.  We need another victim to make this count.”

“Wait, what?” I asked.

Mary seemed to take the fact that we hadn’t told her no as a signal to go ahead.  She pulled away from the huddle and darted off into the crowd.

“Lillian,” Helen said.  “Cut me.  Give me claw marks, like Gordon has.  You do have a scalpel.”

“I’m not doing that,” Lillian hissed.  “Ibbot would kill me, and I’m supposed to put you back together, not take you apart.

“You know how to cut people to minimize the damage, don’t you?” Helen asked.

“Wait,” I said.  “Hold on.  Why not me?  Why can’t I be the next victim?”

“Because I’m a better actor,” Helen said.  “And you’re more useful out there, than someone that’s being looked after.”

“Helen,” Lillian said.  “It’s going to leave scars.”

“It will not, don’t be a silly-billy,” Helen said.  She laid a hand on the side of Lillian’s face.  “They’ll make me as good as new.”

“It’ll hurt.”

“It will,” I said.  “I should do it.”

“I don’t feel pain the same way you all do,” Helen said.

“I should still do it,” I said.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “Maybe shut up?”

“But-”

“I’m doing it,” Helen said, firmly.  “This is what I do.”

“But-”  I looked at Lillian.

“Am I supposed to tell him no, too?  Because I’d rather cut him,” Lillian said.

“Yes,” I said.  “And if Lil is more comfortable cutting me, she’ll cut cleaner, and it’ll be more believable-”

Jamie put a hand over my mouth.

“Do it,” Helen said.  “Now.  There’s no time.  Or I’ll do it to myself, and it’ll be messy enough Ibott will be mad.”

“But-” Lillian said.

Helen raised her thumbnail to her eye.

“Okay?” Lillian said, sounding unsure.  She drew a scalpel from a pocket.

I glanced back.  The Shepherd had seemingly committed to silence.  He was looking after Gordon.

People were getting organized, the situation was stable.  He was apparently content to let that remain the case until the monster showed up or something happened.

I wanted so badly to make something happen.

Stampede would shake the box.  Take us out of the comfort of the church, or spread people out.  He would need to round up his flock, do something.  I really wanted to see what that something was.

He’d let people get killed, freeing experiments to shake up the community.  He was operating to specific ends, and a quiet dislike for the Academy was almost definitely a factor… but that wasn’t the whole story.  He was working toward something big, and I suspected that something big would get a lot of people killed.  A small war.

Mary worked fast.  Lillian was barely starting the second set of claw marks, Helen holding her hand and forcing her to keep moving it, while her fingers held the scalpel steady.  The first set had been done across Helen’s shoulder and chest.  This set was on Helen’s face, of all places.

She started to rise.  I put my hand out, stopping her.  I gestured for Lillian to continue.

The fear and panic were reaching a pitch, now.

I wondered what was going through the Shepherd’s mind.  If he was thinking the Academy was after him, this was a bad sign, right here.

Lillian finished the third mark across Helen’s eyelid and cheekbone.  Blood welled out.  Helen smeared it, and grabbed her hair to muck it up.

I moved my hand away.  Helen crawled out from under the table.

She took two steps toward the pews, then let out the most perfect blood-chilling scream I’d ever heard.

Then she threw herself into the little table with books on top.

So jealous.

“They’re in the church!” I howled.  “Run!  Run!  Run!”

People ran.  The double doors were hauled open, which meant we didn’t get stuck in them.  People fled into the rain and darkness.

A gunshot sounded.

I felt a thrill, more than anything else.

In the gloom of the church, lit only by candles, the Shepherd stepped forward.  He held his rifle, the butt to his shoulder, barrel pointed at the roof.

Eyes turned to him.

He shrugged back his cloak, where his bad arm was covered.

As new arms went, it was horrendous.  Even in the gloom, I could see how it had been rebuilt using fungus or wood, like so many ruined buildings were, but the flesh around the fungus was ragged and ugly, not quite adhering or holding in place.

He raised his arm, then gestured, a crisp right to left movement, one meaty, misshapen finger pointing.

Guns cocked.  More than a few.  More than just the ones he’d carried with him.

It explained his calm, all this while.  From the start, he’d had soldiers in reserve.  Hiding, maybe in the crowd, maybe in adjacent rooms.  The weapons he was equipping his army with weren’t just improvised ones.

People had stopped in their tracks for the second time, standing in the rain.  They watched him.

He advanced down the aisle, flanked by a dozen men with rifles, who were watching the crowd, looking out for monsters that weren’t there.

One had Lacey, holding her arms behind her back.

Believed to be an agent of the Academy.  Not wrong, but not quite right, either.

“The Academy is coming,” the Shepherd said.  “They’re coming for us.  It was always their plan, and I’ve been planning how to stop them for some time.  I’m going to need all of you to listen very carefully.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.09 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.9

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“The creatures have gone,” the Shepherd lied.  “Mother and babies both.  It was a shock tactic, nothing more.”

The restlessness of the crowd was intense, but in the exchanged words, the glances out into the darkness, I didn’t make out much that seemed to be doubting the Shepherd’s words.

“The fear and confusion you’re experiencing right now is theirs.  So is the anger, and the that deep seated feeling of frustration that there’s nothing you can do about it all.  You’ve all heard it before.  The Crown doesn’t lose wars.  When they fight, they do it using monsters.”

I’m almost offended.

“They do it using people like her, who would put children in harm’s way for her goals,” he said.

The man who had Lacey stepped forward.  She struggled a bit before freezing.  I assumed she felt a gun at her back.

He pointed back at where two of his soldiers were holding the injured Gordon.  “Two children have been harmed tonight.  At least two more have been killed, earlier today.  The Academy is walking a dangerous path, one that starts with claiming our dead for their work, then starts using us as pieces in their great machine.  Lives are being lost.”

He paused for dramatic effect.  I wanted to signal Lacey to interrupt, break his stride, but she couldn’t see.  Her head was bent down, red hair falling around her, and the silence belonged entirely to the Shepherd.

“I kept in touch with old friends who fought in the war with me, the men you see standing behind and beside me.  I’m sorry to have kept this secret from you, but we’ve lived the last decade working out means and methods of stopping the Academy from doing so much harm.  We have been devising a plan.  I do this out of faith, and I do it out of fear.  Fear that if we do not act now, together, decisively, then they might give up the last gasps of decency.”

Another pause.  Lacey started to speak this time, but a hand covered her mouth, and she was pushed to her knees, held there by two firm hands on her shoulders.

“If you run out into the rain and darkness tonight, you will be running straight into their embrace,” the Shepherd spoke.  “They’ve used fear as a weapon for a century now, and they’ve gotten very good at it.  Trust me, I’m not asking you to fight.  I am asking you to take a stand.”

There were murmurs, hesitation.  He had them on the hook, but they weren’t caught by any means.  Something told me that was intentional.  Probably the vague tail-end of the statement.  ‘Take a stand’, what did that mean?  He’d leave them wondering, and then give them what they wanted.  He probably did that a lot.  It was why they were so well trained to listen to him.  Oratory skills at work.

“Stand at our back, respond to fear not by pulling away, but by banding together.  The Academy is built with flesh and blood as its foundation.  With people.  We have the power to dictate what we need, the boundaries we expect, and the lines that should not be crossed.”

He’s been building toward this for some timeSeeds of doubt and concern, building on those doubts anyone might have when the world was actively changing.

With the heavy clouds and the later hour, it was dark enough that people were barely more than silhouettes, only illuminated where light reflected off the water that streamed off of them.  The water was coming down hard enough that there was a definite weight to it, pushing every single one of us down, heads hunched over, shoulders bent in.  I didn’t mind it so much, as it was warm.  My hood stayed down, and the rain washed through my hair and down my face.

I turned to move away.  Small figures in the crowd joined me.  With them, with my fellow Lambs, a few doubters found the courage to turn away.

“The Academy is already making its moves!” the Shepherd called out.  “The monster the little boy described was not one of the escaped experiments that were described to us!  It was a weapon the Academy uses, just as Dog and Catcher are.  I saw enough of them when I was a soldier, and I know what they look like, what they do.  My comrades know that the Academy and the Crown have no reservations about using those things on their own people, if they deem fit.  Very soon, they’re going to act.  They’re going to do something more to scare you, because they don’t want to see us united!”

The holy man makes a prophecy, I noted.  He did know how the academy operated, even if there was no way he could know that Cecil had run off to go call for help.  He’d anticipated this move on our part, in a general way.

The other Lambs reached me.  We were minus Helen and Gordon now.  We stood off to the side of the road, huddled in the alcove by a door, where we could still peer out and watch the crowd.

“The Shepherd didn’t seem to notice that both of the cut up kids were from our group,” Mary said.

“He noticed, at least with Gordon,” I said.  “I don’t know if he even saw Helen, though.  She wasn’t acting for his benefit.”

“Where is Helen?” Lillian asked.

“Back in the Church,” Jamie said.  “Or making her exit by a side door.”

“Are you sure?” Mary asked.

“Yes,” Jamie said, very patiently.

I sensed doubt from her, and cut it off.  “If Jamie says he’s sure, then we go with that.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said.

I glanced over.  By Jamie’s estimation and what I could verify with my own eyes, that put Gordon in the midst of the Shepherd’s group, while Helen had free range at the Shepherd’s flanks and rear, assuming nobody spotted her.

I’d have to make do with this.

A distance away, we could hear the crowd.  A part of me very much wanted to hear every word the Shepherd was saying, but we had other issues.

“Okay,” I said.  I was doing my best to piece thoughts together.  “Okay.  Much as I hate to say, same trick won’t work again.  Only so many times kids can get cut up and scream.”

“Condolences,” Jamie said.

“I’ll manage somehow,” I said.  “He’s too damn good at handling them.  We can’t shake up the crowd without him calming them down, turning them into this tool he can use against the Academy.”

“If I’d managed to dose him, we’d be a lot further along,” Mary said.  “And that woman-”

“Lacey,” Lillian volunteered.

“She wouldn’t be under suspicion, probably, or be caught.”

“You care about that?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh,” Mary said.

“Nevermind,” I said.  It’s a mark against your abilities more than anything else.  “Listen, nothing goes according to plan.  Humans are weird.  Trick is to adapt the plan.”

“The plan will work if you’re good enough,” Mary said, in a tone that made me think she was mimicking someone.  I was guessing his name started with P and ended with -ercy.

“That so?” I asked.

“I think so.  You just have to work at being good enough.”

“Well then,” I said.  “Let’s be good.  Can’t shake the crowd.  Would be great if we could get at the Shepherd, but I’m not sure how to do that.  He surrounds himself with people.  It would be awfully nice to have a riot happening when the Academy deigns to arrive.  If it’s out of the Shepherd’s control but still within the Academy’s, then we’re good.”

“If they arrive,” Lillian said.  “There’s the chance Cecil couldn’t get help, or people might not believe him, or something.”

Or Cecil could be dead, I finished the thought in my head.  I’d raised the idea earlier, and Lillian had reacted rather strongly to it.  Didn’t bear bringing it up again.

“If they don’t arrive, we adapt,” I said.  I looked over to the crowd.  “For a holy man, he mentions faith a lot, but he doesn’t leave much up to it.”

As if in answer to that, a horn sounded from within the crowd.

Ugh,” I said.

“What was that?” Mary asked.

“A horn,” I said.

Mary and Jamie hit me across the back of the head, with Mary being a step faster.

I winced, and added, “He’s got other friends.  Whatever he had planned tonight, he’s doing it.  Calling in other groups.  Calling in the Academy too, while he’s at it.  Anyone looking for him knows exactly where to go.”

“We’re out of time,” Mary said, looking in the opposite direction, down the street.  “Only a matter of minutes now before the Academy gets here, if that.”

“Why?” Jamie asked.  “Why do this?”

“He knows the Academy can’t just slaughter it’s people.  Even with all the weapons they have at their disposal, the Academy can’t get everyone, and if they let some slip the net, then word spreads.  It cripples Radham and it hurts the Crown as a whole.”

“Professor Briggs was willing to,” Mary said.

“I don’t think he would be, looking at this.  The side that makes the first move loses.  If there’s a riot, actively harming Radham, the Professor is justified.  If the Academy moves first, the crowd is free to protect themselves and word can spread about the brutality of the Academy, how it hacks down its own people.  We need to take down the man at the center of it all, and we need to do it fast.”

We headed back toward the crowd.

The Shepherd was talking.  “…years of infiltration, we quickly discovered that each of the major buildings had a special project.  Dog and Catcher are but one of an assortment.  In my time fighting in the war, I saw some of the ones from other Academies.  There’s a pattern, almost always a pattern in how they operate.”

Willing to bet you’re wrong, I thought.  You’ve got exceptions to the rule, like us.

“The first and biggest one, one that convinced me I needed to rally the people, rally you, was the knowledge that with a small few exceptions, big and powerful weapons, the special projects and weapons the Academy uses are less effective against groups.  In wartime, Dog and Catcher might attack supply lines, the Gorger might attack trains and coaches, or plow through regiments to attack leaders, Foster would bolster a group’s numbers, and the Whelps might scout.”

Having difficulty when there were too many people around.

Okay, well, I was willing to cede this one to him.  It was proving to be an obstacle.  Couldn’t get to him without getting past all these people.

Another man spoke out, one of the Shepherd’s comrades in arms.  That the Shepherd was deferring to him suggested that the group was being prepared for another kind of leadership entirely.  “In case of gas, anything airborne, anything you can smell or taste, hold your breath.  One of my men is handing out cloths.  Tie them over your noses and mouths.  The fluids we put on them will help filter out the gases.”

“Smells like piss!” someone shouted.

“You can use your own piss and a handkerchief if you prefer,” the man said.  He was wearing a raincoat, but his expression had a military cast to it, as if he’d held a grim and serious, staring-past-you expression for far too long, and his face was forever stuck that way.  Something about him was very similar to the Shepherd.  Disconnected, too calm given the situation.  It was strangely compelling, because it seemed like something was missing, or he’d once been very lost, deep inside himself, and he’d come back having found something.

Most people didn’t manage that.  Whatever didn’t kill us tended to leave us hurting, rather than making us stronger.  But something had happened to the Shepherd’s regiment that left them harrowed, all the emotional or mental fat flensed away.  Parasites?  Psychadelics?  A horror unlike any other, that they’d been forced to survive?

The soldier spoke, “They’ll try to scare us with the Stitched.  March them at us to make us retreat.  We must hold the line.  We have allies moving into position, they’ll break the ranks of the Stitched instead.  If you have the courage.”

Allies moving into position.  That’s who the Shepherd was signaling.

“It is fine to be afraid,” the Shepherd said.  “God-fearing is praise for a reason.  Fear makes everything clearer.  But do not panic.  This is the first momentous step among many to making it so that the Academy’s wrongs and mistakes no longer weigh on our minds.  We do not build or change something without care.”

Another horn sounded in the distance.

“The Academy is coming,” the Shepherd said.  “They’re meant to be serving us, bettering mankind with great truths and brilliant discoveries.  Instead, they crush us under their heels.  You’ve felt it in your bones for a long time.  Maybe you’ve felt it since the day you opened your eyes and looked at the world.  Maybe you’ve wondered if it could be different.  I’m promising you that it can.  You get one chance, and this is it.  Turn around.  Be ready.”

The soldiers were passing through the group.  People were being handed weapons and the cloths.  They didn’t all match, like a proper military regiment.  Many were improvised.

“If we do this right, if the Academy has any humanity at all, it shouldn’t come to a fight.  Hold firm, defend yourselves if you must, but don’t act without need.  They’ve made you afraid for a long time.  Pay attention to that fear, make it yours again.”

There were maybe two hundred people present.  Maybe slightly more.  Each stood in the rain, gripping the weapons they’d been given.  There was silence.

There was going to be blood.  A lot of these people were going to be hurt, if not outright killed.

You’re all sheep.  You were the Academy’s sheep before, and now you’re his.

I needed to get close.  Close enough to say one or two things to the Shepherd.

I turned away, pushing through the crowd, every individual of which was now facing away from the church.  People didn’t get out of my way, and some even tried to stop me, still me, and make me conform.

“The Academy,” a man said.

I stopped.  No.

“One coach?” another man asked.

“I recognize the coach,” Jamie said, a few feet away.  Then he piped up, “Teacher!”

Cecil.

Jamie wasn’t fast to move when the situation called for it, but he wasn’t able to move very fast while he worked his way back out of the crowd, anyway.  I looked over my shoulder and saw him sprinting across the empty space between the crowd and the coach.

Jamie had a plan.

I needed to do something.  To stall, to execute, to buy time.

Being small had its disadvantages.  As easy as it was to move around, I struggled to make headway through a mass of bodies, people who’d been asked and ordered to stand resolute.  People who collectively smelled like piss.

I reached the perimeter of men that were around the Shepherd.  Hands seized me, stopping me.

A moment later, one hand was off me, then another.  I heard a man cry in pain, saw him twisting his arm and hand in a weird way, and realized that a small hand had a grip on it.

“You leave him alone!” Mary shouted.

Mary was with me, facilitating.

I broke past the soldiers, stepping into the space between the Shepherd and the crowd.  There wasn’t much of an audience like this.  People might hear my voice, but they wouldn’t see me.

Gordon and Helen had enjoyed their moments in the spotlight.  I wanted mine, damn it.

I found a short wall, dodged one soldier’s reaching hand, and hopped up onto it, grabbing an overhanging tree branch for balance.

“You never believed in God, did you?” I called out.

With the crowd so quiet and expectant, the words rang out.  Heads turned.

The Shepherd was silent.

It was a powerful tactic in arguments, especially when one had the position of power.  Let another person make their arguments, exhausting themselves, then shut it down, one decisive blow.

Which meant I had to make as strong an argument as I could.

“You just want to manipulate us!” I cried out.  “You chose a job that would mean we listened to you, you used us, you lied to us!  You never told us any of this!”

Problem was, I had to make my argument while sounding like a child.  Could I call this Emperor out on his new clothes?

“You didn’t give any proof that she did anything, you only needed a- a scapegoat!  Why are you hurting my teacher, Reverend Mauer!?  Why!?  She’s nice!”

On the other side of the crowd from the Reverend, I saw Cecil do the saddest, stiffest, ‘lift the child up by the armpits and whirl them around’ act that I’d ever seen.  Jamie must have asked him, to play into whatever Jamie’s plan was.

The two of them stepped into the shelter the coach offered, talking.  Again, very stiff, the doctor reached out to touch Jamie’s head.

With Cecil so close, I had to do what I could to disarm the Shepherd on that score.  Defending Lacey or forcing him to argue in her favor would play into that.

While I was dividing my focus between the Shepherd and Cecil, a soldier grabbed for me.  With me up on the wall, and Mary so low to the ground, she wasn’t able to stop him or interfere.  Not without doing anything fancy.

He lifted me down.

“Hush, boy,” he said, gruff.  “This isn’t the time for that.”

“It’s like he said,” I said, louder than was polite or socially acceptable.  The benefit of being young.  “If not now, then when?”

“It’s fine,” the Shepherd said.  He gave me a hard look, and I knew that he was suspicious now.  He hadn’t missed seeing Jamie and Cecil either.  Between Gordon, Jamie, Mary and I, we were doing too much to work against his ends.  “Sid, I want you to listen, and hear how much I mean it.  I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I didn’t truly believe.”

“You don’t sound like you mean it much at all!”

“I do.  You’re scared, and you’re hearing only what you want to hear.  I don’t think any regular member of my congregation has any doubt how much I believe, or how much I care for their welfare.”

It was a cheap, dirty tactic, and it was a cheap, dirty tactic that worked.  Retreat to the unassailable position.  An argument so vague and seemingly from-the-heart that it couldn’t be taken to pieces.  Emotion-based arguments were annoying like that.

“Your teacher used your friend,” he said, in that same calm voice.

“She was with you and me the whole time!  You saw!  Why are you lying!?”

I had so many listening ears, I was changing minds incrementally, instilling doubt where there had only been loyalty, and I was taking all the joy I felt in the moment and translating it into a kind of outrage, more emotion to feed into my words, accusing.

“I-” he started.  He paused, his head turning.  I couldn’t see through the crowd to follow his line of sight.

The soldier that was holding on to my wrist turned to look, and I chose that moment to pull myself free.  I danced back and hopped back onto the wall.  He reached for me, and I ducked back.  The same branches I’d held onto before poked at his face and shoulder, almost invisible in the darkness.

It was Cecil, approaching the crowd, Jamie a step behind.

“Come!” the Shepherd called out.  “Over here, let’s talk!”

Cecil started forward.  Jamie held firm onto his hand, keeping him from following the offer.  The Doctor paused, then shook his head.  “I’m… I’m not talking to you, I’m sorry.”

“You were in my Church earlier.  Before the boy was hurt.”

Working on tying him to Lacey.  But my defense of Lacey and the show of familiarity with Jamie gave Cecil a kind of protection.  The Shepherd would look unreasonable before his flock if he wasn’t careful.

“I’m not- no,” Cecil said.  He bowed his head.  He seemed to compose himself.  “There were more riots.  Men, boys and women from other areas got hurt.”

“If there were more riots, we would have heard more horns,” the Shepherd said.

“I don’t know,” Cecil said.  “I’m just reporting… reporting names.”

His words were halting.  He seemed terrified before the crowd, sensing the latent hostility, the strangeness of it.  But the terror seemed to work for him.  It gave him an authenticity that he might not have had if he were speaking in monotone.

He fumbled for a paper, unfolding it.  “L… J.J. Bridges.  K. Downs.  I- I can’t read in the dark, with this rain.”

A man broke rank, stepping forward to raise his cloak up over Cecil’s head.  A lighter glowed, illuminating the paper.

“R. Hartman.  D. Estrada.  M. Mayes.  D. Thomas…”

With every other name, there were noises from the crowd.

“What happened!?” a man cried out.

“I just know that they were hurt or killed.”

“The full name.  Was that Doug Thomas!?”

“I don’t know the full names,” Cecil said, and in his fear, his voice was small and hollow, almost powerless.

My eye fell on Jamie.

We all saw so many people over the course of the day.  We heard names.

Jamie knew names, he knew faces.  He’d actively gone looking for them, in quiet moments, had listened for them.  He’d asked questions over the years.  He’d pieced together a mental picture.

Not complete, I was sure, but he knew important people and he knew who their children were.  The faces that weren’t in the crowd.

Jamie just stood there, rain streaming off his glasses and rain-cloak, having served as the harbinger of the worst kind of news anyone with a family could get.

A restlessness grew within the crowd.  These were people they cared about, people neighbors cared about.

“Calm down!” the Shepherd called out.  “Nothing is proven, nothing is certain!”

But the crowd was beyond the point of listening.

“If you react to this, you’ll be doing exactly what they want!” he said.

But there was no response.  He was shouting at a force of nature, now.  He knew it.

The crowd made a noise.  A growing roar.

They had an enemy.

The Academy was here.

Guns fired, where people in the crowd had been given such.  Too early, shooting at the wrong targets.

A formation of stitched, twenty-strong, each in uniform.

People broke rank, hurried to grab things they could throw at the Academy’s beasts.

We had our riot.

We also had a problem.

In this scenario Jamie had painted, the Academy had made the first move.  It helped that people would go home and find their loved ones safe and sound.  But if we couldn’t correct the interpretation, things would go sour.  Hayle would be upset with me, because this wouldn’t be a perfect execution.

We had a second issue, now that I thought about it, figuring out where things stood.  The Shepherd was one to position himself carefully, so any piece that we took was well defended.  That made me think about his men, and thinking about his men made me think about the fact that he now knew that we were working against him.  His flock was scattered, turned into something wasteful, soon to be shut down, and he had nothing to stop him from dwelling on us.

He met my eyes, and there was something there I hadn’t seen before.

He was looking at me.  Not as a child, or a member of his flock, but as the person on the other side of the chess board.  Or one of them, anyway.  He knew what we were, or he had an idea, now.

I gave him a smile.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.10 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.10

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The Shepherd touched the shoulder of one of the soldiers nearest him, then leaned close to whisper something.  He didn’t take his eyes off me.  Nothing in his posture or body language gave anything away.  He didn’t seem affected by the warm rain that ran down his face.

He might not have given anything away, as I smiled at him, trying to bait something out of him, but the soldier quickly made the Shepherd’s intent clear.  He strode forward, saying something I couldn’t make out over the chaos of the crowd to my right.

He pointed at Mary as he was talking.  I was suspicious he was saying names.  Ordering the men around him.

They started forward too, a pair.

“Six in total, we already have two,” the Shepherd said, his voice carrying where the soldier’s was drowned out.

Capture the children.

No!

Shepherd, no!  You were supposed to be looking at me as an equal!  You butt!

Mary seemed to come to the same conclusion I did.  I saw her look toward the crowd, with the soldiers doing what they could to keep people from falling back and retreating to the church.

She looked at me.  I held out a hand.

“Stop!” a man with a gun shouted, aiming.

Mary didn’t flinch, nor did I.  She hopped up to the wall, I grabbed her hand to help her balance, and we went down over the other side together, me a half-step behind, so I could put myself between her and the guy with the gun.

I landed in a puddle, one hand, both knees, and the toes of both feet getting thoroughly wet in the process.  My other hand held Mary’s.  She’d landed in a crouch, so the short wall would provide some protection, but she’d managed to keep her skirt clean.  Her expression was… I liked it.  Not perfectly cold.  I thought she might be enjoying herself on some level.

More guns went off, not behind us, but from the larger part of the crowd.  The stitched who were too close to reload used fists and butt-ends of guns to strike people down.  It was painful to look at.  The stitched didn’t hold back nearly enough, and they were strong.

I sprinted from my crouching position, running along the wall, toward the crowd.  Mary followed.

An orange light lit up the surroundings as a fire burst to life at one corner of the crowd.  Something explosive or very flammable.

Even among regular civilians, the knowledge of the rules around the stitched was common.  In a city like Radham, there were a great many farmers who relied on stitched animals and stitched farmhands.  Inexhaustible, strong, requiring no food or pay.  Fire tended to rile a stitched up and set them ablaze if they hadn’t been well tended, water tended to cause partial or total paralysis, if not deeper problems, and any given stitched had psychological tics.  The brain was cut down to the barest minimum needed to follow orders and retain information, stand up, and exchange words, and in what remained, there were often trace memories, fears, words, names, or faces that all provoked responses out of the norm.  When some stitched were hurt, poorly maintained, or when they got sick despite their high body temperatures, they would fall back on key phrases or habits.  Children were told to limit interactions until the owner of the stitched could tell them what to do or what not to do.

With a stitched soldier, the cutting was often more ruthless, the ability to converse left more limited, the range of abilities vastly reduced.  They followed orders, they learned how to use weapons, they hurt people they were told to hurt.

In Hayle’s carriage, the night after we’d taken on the snake charmer, I’d seen how the stitched bodyguard had reacted to fire.  A new development in the production, treatment and teaching of the stitched, I was pretty sure.

The soldiers didn’t react to the flame, though they avoided it.  They pressed forward, almost harder, less cautious, more violent.  They’d been trained against fire, made to stay on course, even if that meant doing whatever they’d been doing until there was no more fire around them.

I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected this was a surprise to the Shepherd’s comrades in arms.  What they’d learned about the stitched fighting alongside them in the war was no longer true.

Mary and I made our way into the crowd.  The soldiers who’d been sent after us were only a few steps behind.

It was a very different dance for them and for us.  Mary and I were moving as fast as we could, nimble, dodging between people who were alternately pressing forward and trying to run.  I turned sideways at points, jabbed two fingers into one man’s ass crack to get him lurching forward and out of my way, ducked between one set of legs, and very nearly got knocked in the head by the end of a hoe someone was holding as a weapon.  Mary was right behind me.

The people following us, by contrast, were pushing through.  They had presence, people naturally moved out of their way, and they had the physical prowess to work past the ones who didn’t, or who moved the wrong way and ended up as obstacles anyway.

We weren’t the only ones navigating this strange battlefield of terrified and outraged civilians.  Several stitched had made their way into the crowd.

One stitched nearby had both hands on its gun, and was swinging left and right, hitting people with elbows, the butt of the gun and the bayonet on the end.  It had been stabbed twice, one weapon still stuck through its chest cavity, its face had been sliced open to reveal a thick wire that had been placed beneath the skin.  The wire was insulated by a tight coiling of something or other, and where the insulation had been cut by the same weapon, the wire periodically sparked, the surrounding flesh twitching reflexively in reaction.

It had leveled ten or so people just getting this far, leaving them crumpled, bleeding and broken.  Surrounded, it was strong enough to keep the crowd back, and scary enough that people were fleeing from it, pushing and jostling others.

Had the Shepherd expected things to go this way?  Had he expected to win?  Because the crowd wasn’t winning, and I suspected things would be much the same if Jamie had left things alone.  His side would be doing better, but things would be moving toward the same end result.

An incoherent shout from the Shepherd’s camp went out.  It was picked up by others, traveling forward through the crowd.

“Burn the handlers!”

Oh, well, that was one way to do it.

Stitched didn’t tend to scream unless they were broken by fire or delirium.  Still, as the fires erupted, the eyes were treated to a sudden flare of light, illuminating everything, and the ears were treated to screams of panic and pain.

Not quite as tidy as I’d hoped.

I’d entered the crowd for a reason.  I chanced a look back, and saw that the crowd had bogged down our pursuers.  The press of bodies shifted, blocking my view of them.

Blocking their view of us.

I found Mary’s hand and tugged, changing direction.  We weren’t the only ones who were trying to move back toward the church, away from the fire, the stitched, the bullets, and everything else, but we were the only ones who were less than five feet tall.  That counted for something.  It gave us a fraction more mobility.

Okay.  This was usually the part where I fucked things up.  Gordon was better at it than I was.  I tended to overthink it.

Not just fighting.  Strategy.  I could plot like nobody I knew, but strategy was an entirely different game.

I tried to recall the number of soldiers that had been stationed at the back of the crowd and along the wall, compelling people forward, standing on or partially on the wall to shoot over the crowd.  From that number and the general positions of them, there were any number of things I could do.  The soldiers were all committed.  Those that could be spared had been sent after us.  That gave us options.

I cut my thoughts short at that.  No use in complicating things, getting too far ahead of myself, and then having my plan fall to pieces when something unexpected happened.

Decide two things I want.

The first was finding Lillian and even freeing Gordon.

The second was maximizing disruption.

Okay, no, wait, I had three things I wanted.

Getting the Shepherd to see me as an equal was the third one.

There.

That was the plan.

I checked Mary was with me, double checked we weren’t followed, then pushed my way through.

Lillian wasn’t far from where we’d left her.  The soldier who’d taken custody of her had, probably at the Shepherd’s instruction, backed away, keeping her closer to where the Shepherd, the captain of the soldiers, and the guy holding Gordon all were.

The guy that had been watching her had been relieved by someone else.

The man was holding his rifle out sideways, a barrier to discourage people from retreating.  He was shouting, driving them forward, saying something about the Academy, something about how to deal with a stitched.

Being short was an advantage.  I ducked under the rifle and through the gap.  He hadn’t expected anyone to be moving quite as fast or with quite so much focus as I was, and even the ones that were had been liable to bump into his weapon.

The Shepherd’s captain saw me.  He shouted, “Grab him!”

I gave the man an arm, practically slapping my wrist into his reaching hand.  My other arm I held back, in Mary’s direction, hand up.

Stop.  Wait.

Wait.

Another explosion of flame erupted at the far end of the battlefield.  The soldier that had me looked up and over the crowd.

More importantly, most of the crowd looked away.

I dropped the arm.

Mary moved.  Her skirt clung to her mud-streaked legs as she lunged forward.  The soldier saw the incoming attack, but his weapon was still held up to hold people back, and my hands went around his wrist, holding his hand so he couldn’t move it.

Mary stepped up onto the soldier’s thigh, grabbed his shirt to help her upward momentum, and drove the top of her head into the man’s chin.  She held onto him as he dropped, adding her weight to his.  He tumbled, stunned, and his hand released my wrist.

The soldier nearest us turned to look, eyes going wide.

I was already bending, grabbing the rifle from the fallen man, spinning-

One or two people who’d seen the gap and were panicked by the latest explosion rushed past me, bumping me.  My aim was off.

I still managed to scrape the back of the second soldier’s calf.  He dropped.  A second person pushing past me knocked the rifle out of my grip.  I didn’t bother to rescue it.

“Run away!” I howled, my voice raw.

It didn’t take much to tip the scales and give life to the idea that was already in people’s heads.  What was an initial one to three people quickly turned into a stampede.

What had been a mass of people outside the short walls of the church was now draining out, feeding into the yard just past the church doors.

Mary was smiling as she joined me, mingling in with the rush of bodies.

Disruption managed.  Now for the rescue of Lillian.

The Shepherd gave a command.  The men that had been holding back the crowd and the captain all converged on us, pushing past the bodies.

Had to do this right.

Like a professional.  Tidy, like Hayle wanted.

Well, insofar as any of this was tidy.  I could make the argument that some of this was inevitable.  The trick was leading this to as tidy a conclusion as possible.  Given a sequence of things to focus on, people liked to focus on the beginning and the end.

Our beginning had been good.  We’d identified the threat.

Our end… well, we had to neutralize it.

My eye fixed on the man who held Lillian.  He had his gun, and he had her collar in a deathgrip that pulled it up and tight to her neck.  Her bag was on the ground to one side.

Tidy, I thought.  Properly.

I rushed the man.  Mary had done the headbutt to one vulnerable area.  I aimed for one that was closer to the ground.  Between the man’s legs.

For my trouble, I got a knee in the chest.  He struck me in the head with the butt end of his gun.  I fell.

Mary was a step behind me.  She grabbed the wrist of his gun hand with both hands, and with this happening so quickly after he’d clubbed me with the thing, he took a second before reasserting his strength, holding the weapon firm.

Mary drove her shoulder  into the side of the weapon.  The bayonet blade slammed into the man’s forehead.

She did it again.  A second gash in the brow.  He let go of Lillian to grab the weapon with another hand.

Mary stepped past the defense to slice him with a knife.  Quick slashes, inner thighs.  She ducked as he slammed the side of the rifle toward her face, then stabbed him twice in the belly.

He staggered, almost tripping over me, but Mary grabbed him by the sleeve and belt, hauling on him with all of her weight.

I rolled in the opposite direction, rising to my feet so quickly that I nearly fell over again with the sideways momentum.  Mary let him fall, reaching out to block the bayonet he swung at her on his way down.

“Lillian!” I said, loud enough to be heard over the crowd.

“Sy!”

I swept up the bag, pushing her as we started moving again.  Mary was already in step, not needing further cues.

As a trio, we continued toward the church.  The men coming after us were closing in, only a few steps away.

“Just the girl I was looking for,” I said, as we ran.  “I need you.”

She smiled wider than I’d seen in some time.

“Scalpels,” I told her, shoving the bag at her.

“Um,” she said, she reached in.  She handed me a scalpel with a cover over the end.

“Gunk!”

“Gunk?”

“Gunk!” I said, louder.

She gave me a squat container with a screw-off lid.

“Great!” I said.  “Now go, get lost!”

The smile dropped off her face.

“Hide, I mean!” I shouted.  I wasn’t thinking straight, trying to think along multiple tracks at once.  “Mary, go with her!”

“But!”

“Go!”

They carried forward, heading toward the church.

I stopped, twisting, and turned around.

There were about five civilians rushing my way.  Between them were three soldiers, one of whom was the Shepherd’s captain buddy, about as different from the Shepherd as a man could be.  Tan skinned, short dark hair, a weather-worn face, all browns and darkness and leatheriness.

A clean, tidy finish.  My disposal of the last guy hadn’t been very successful, but this had to succeed.

The soldiers were blocking the gaps between civilians.  The civilians were running with a mindlessness that suggested they’d run straight over me if I got in their way.  It was a wall of people twice or thrice my size charging at me.

I picked up speed.  My legs were sore from a more-than-usual amount of running, but I gave my all, gave my last to charge forward, straight for the nearest civilian.

Toward the Shepherd, toward Lacey.

To Gordon.

Just when it looked like the guy was going to run into me, I ducked.  I slid on wet grass.  The man half-jumped, half stumbled over me.

I found my feet, but just as I’d slid on grass, the soles of my shoes did too.  I’d meant to dart forward.  Instead, I stumbled a little.

If I’d been an inch further ahead, I might have avoided the reaching hands.  Instead, one caught me.  I twisted to avoid the other.  Twisted again to make the wet cloth of my cloak twist until the man’s grip on it broke.

I made it another couple of steps.  But just as I’d reoriented myself, so had my pursuers.  The captain seized me.  Firmly this time.

I hurled the container.  I hurled the scalpel.

They landed in arm’s reach of Gordon, who had also been caught.

He stared down at both.

He met my gaze.

One deep breath.

“Stop fighting!” Gordon howled the words.  “Everyone, stop fighting!”

He had a great lung capacity.  Then again, he had a great everything.  Powerful vocal chords.

Heads turned.  He had attention.

The soldier grabbed him, tried to shut him up.  Gordon leveraged all the strength he’d held back up until now, bullying his way free.

“Stop fighting!  Please!” he screamed.

He had the attention of most of the crowd, now.

“Relax,” the Shepherd called out.  “Calm down!  There’s nothing to worry about.”

He,” Gordon pointed at the Shepherd, “He did this to me!”

His hand went to his face, touched the deep cuts the ‘monster’ had supposedly inflicted.

“He cut me so he could scare you!  The monsters are made up!”  Gordon cried out.

The silence was so real it could have been cut with a knife.

“He’s crazy!  He did this!”  Gordon cried out.  He scrambled forward, away from the soldier who’d been holding him. grabbing the scalpel and jar.  “Look at this, taste the slime!  It’s soap!  My teacher didn’t do anything at all!  He blamed her to take attention off him!”

The soldiers who’d been after me headed toward Gordon now.

The captain turned, too, but I grabbed onto him, fought him every step of the way.

He hit me.  Not a big blow, but a heavy enough one to knock me free.

“He’s… he’s not right in the head!” Gordon cried out.  “Please!  Don’t listen to him!  He wanted this!  All of it!  Before it all started he called us into his office and told us what we were supposed to do, and threatened us.  The man who read out the names!  He was working with Reverend Mauer too!”

Poor Cecil.

“The boy is deluded,” the Shepherd spoke, and his voice carried.  “It’s easier to imagine a monster here than to recognize the monsters that the Academy created.”

The stitched that had been plowing through the crowd were on the approach now.  The crowd backed away, and wound up moving toward the Shepherd.

A woman reached Gordon, taking his less bloody hand.  She bent down and, after a dubious look, touched her mouth to his knuckle.

“Soap,” she said.

“Soap,” Gordon echoed her, pushing the things into her hands.  “Soap and a knife.  Please don’t let Reverend Mauer hurt me anymore.”

He turned toward the Shepherd, giving the man a wounded, accusatory look.

She embraced him, arms around his shoulders, wrists crossing over his collarbone.

Outraged shouts rose from the crowd.

The Shepherd was still, taking it all in, looking at his crowd.

Do you have any magic words, Shepherd?  I thought.

He looked at me.

Goal three completed.

He let the look linger, then broke away, staring over at the row of stitched and the one or two handlers that were still pressing in.  Only one or two stitched had properly died in this assault.

The Shepherd gave a hand signal.

The captain blew his horn.  Two sharp blows.

With that, the soldiers turned.

The retreat was planned.  The direction was already known.

They’d known they would lose this fight, I realized.

They’d planned it, even.  The retreat was part of it all.

Did they have a waiting vehicle?

The soldiers, including the captain and the ones who’d been after me and Mary, raised their weapons, warding off the handful of people who looked like they were going to start rioting against the Shepherd.  They retreated as fast as they were able.  People were caught between avoiding the stitched and the threat of the guns.

They stopped, going still.  They dropped to their knees and raised hands.  The wall of stitched came to a halt.

The Shepherd started to make his retreat.  He turned to look, and in that instant, Helen appeared, emerging from the shrubbery in front of the church.  She’d been within a few paces of him for the better part of the skirmish.

Striding forward, right through a collective blind spot.  The soldiers and Shepherd were all focused on the crowd behind.

She threw her arms around the Shepherd’s waist.

He stumbled.

“Let go,” I could hear him from a distance.

She held firm, face pressed against his side.

“Let go!” he raised his voice.

He tugged at her arm.  She didn’t release him.

The stitched were drawing closer.  The crowd was staring.

He pushed her, so that she no longer had her feet under her, then tugged again.

Nice, Helen.

She held firm, a six and a half stone weight, tying him down.

The Shepherd reached into his coat and withdrew a pistol.  He pressed it to the girl’s head.

I could hear a collective intake of breath from the crowd.

He was done.  He would never again have the people of Radham.

She looked up, staring him in the eyes.  She didn’t let go.

I felt a chill.  A premonition.

Prey instinct at work?  Putting together all the little context clues, the hints in his body language, demeanor, the clues he’d given me all night, adding up to my estimation of who he was?

He was going to shoot.

“Helen!” I called out.

She glanced over her shoulder.  The look she gave me was cold.  Probably the same look she’d given the man.

“Let him go,” I said.

She did, without a moment’s hesitation.

The man backed away, holding the pistol up and out.

The captain caught up with him, clapping a hand on his shoulder.  The two of them turned, marching forward.  The soldiers were just behind, weapons pointed at the mob.

I walked up to Lacey.  She looked hollowed-out.  Haunted.  It was almost scary to see.

I’d asked too much of her tonight.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

The shocked look on her face looked more dramatic than any emotion she’d shown us while being taken hostage or accused.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, to drive the point home.  “I’m sorry to ask for more, but… the Academy needs to win over the crowd.  Get the permission slip from Gordon.  Take it to one of the Academy people on the other side.  Tell them to blame things on the Shepherd.  Someone says they knew he was bad, he was manipulating people, drugging them, let’s say.  Take the blame away from people, just-”

“Sylvester,” she said.

“You can call me Sy,” I offered, as a conciliatory measure.

“Sylvester… shut up, please.  I understand.”

“They need to offer medical attention.  They have to be kind.  The stitched need to go, fast.”

She nodded.  She stood.

“Send Gordon into the church, when he’s given you the thing,” I said.  “Get Jamie, send him.”

“The church?”

I nodded.  “Gotta go after the Shepherd, if we can.”

She frowned.

I didn’t press any further.  I looked at Helen and beckoned her.  I found Gordon, saw him looking at me, and pointed at Lacey.

Then I ran to the church.  Mary and Lillian stepped out of cover by the altar.

It took only two minutes to regroup.  Lillian daubed powder on Helen’s injuries, then Gordon’s.

When Jamie arrived, I pointed at the side door.  The side door in the Shepherd’s office.

As a group, we headed through the side door, then broke into a run as we headed in the direction the Shepherd had gone.

He wasn’t moving at a fast pace.  He couldn’t, given his arm, the balance and the weight of it.  He’d made a good distance, but we did too, even with our shorter legs.

He had a gun in one hand, but something glinted in his mouth as he turned his head.  His cheeks puffed.

He turned further, and we collectively ducked into cover of shadow.

More soldiers were joining him.  The flanking groups, the ones who’d firebombed the stitched.  Others, maybe scouting parties.

A small army, and there he was in the center of it, with the captain and a shorter man.

He puffed his cheeks again.

A large shape moved.

It looked like a headless cat, the neck inflated in size, or a lion with a massive mane, the head removed, all drawn out in spines that were too white to seem real.  Easily the size of an automobile, a bit larger.

It prowled on a rooftop, hopped down, and paced around the perimeter of the group.

The Shepherd said something, the group parted, and the Shepherd blew again on his tiny, silent whistle.

The thing, Whiskers, approached.  It got close enough that the Shepherd could reach out with his meaty, mutated hand, and touch it.  He dropped his hand, the fingers bleeding from the tips.

The group moved, and Whiskers retreated as quickly as it had come, darting onto the top of a shed, then a garage.

The Shepherd periodically blew, to keep it close enough, a constant retreat from Whiskers and a compelling call from the Shepherd.

I moved to follow.  Gordon reached out to stop me.

“We have to,” I said.

“It’s good enough as is,” Gordon said.

“But he- I want to catch him,” I said, watching the man’s back.

“We won’t.  Not with that many people guarding him.”

“I want it as much as I’ve wanted anything,” I admitted.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “And I’m bleeding, Helen’s bleeding, you’re bruised.  Let’s call it a night, report to Hayle so he can send some other projects after them, then go home.  There’ll be another try.”

I made a whiny sound, deep in my throat.

“Come on,” he said.  “Let’s hurry, see if we can’t get Mary settled.”

It was a good thing to say to change my focus.  I allowed myself a nod.

We headed toward the Academy.

“Good work,” I said, to nobody in particular.

“Yeah?” Gordon asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Was fun!” Mary said, suddenly lively.

“It really was,” I said, quiet.

“Glad it was fun for you,” Gordon said.

“What?” I asked.  “Huh?”

“That was awful.  Hated it, the acting, the playing the lame duck, trying to sway the crowd, doing nothing.”

We walked a few more steps.

“I hate you so much,” I told him.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.11 – Twig

Cat out of the Bag 2.11

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“You should really put your hood up,” Jamie told me, as we got out of the coach.  Lacey and Cecil were just behind us.  We’d been picked up on our way back.

I frowned.

“I know Rick got on your case about it earlier, but it’s cold out.  I worry about you.”

“If I get sick, the Academy will make me better.”

Jamie pointed at the Hedge, which we were just now approaching.  “And if you have to come here or somewhere to get a few shots, then they’ll keep you and set you up for an appointment, just like they did when you burned yourself with flesh-dissolving spittle.”

“Technically, the Snake Charmer burned me.”

“I don’t know why you insist on correcting me on the details,” Jamie said.  “I know the details.  I don’t forget the details.  I have the details in writing, even.”

“I do it to annoy you when you’re being annoying.  Quid pro quo.”

“That’s not what quid- you’re doing it again.”

I grinned.

He was too tired to hit me, so I threw an arm around his shoulder instead.

We stopped as a group in front of the four guards by the Hedge’s doors.  We remained silent as Lacey and Cecil approached the guards.  Lacey handed over the paper that Briggs had given us.

A moment later, the doors were open, the paper returned to us, and we were free to enter the Academy’s most public area.  A hospital for the people of Radham.  The Hedge was, perhaps for the first time in a year or two, staffed by a skeleton crew.  Empty benches filled the lobby, with a student sleeping on one, a book left open across his chest, a few doctors in gray coats stood by with some students in their white lab coats, attending to papers and doing what they could to get organized.

“Travis,” Cecil greeted one.

“Cecil.  You came in through the front door?”

“Things are mostly resolved, I think.  Wouldn’t be surprised if those doors open soon, with word from the higher-ups.”

The doctor Cecil was talking to, an older man, looked fairly annoyed by that.  “I was hoping this would go on for a bit longer.”

“People were dying and getting hurt,” Jamie said, quiet.

Doctor Travis blinked.  “Good to know.  Becca, would you go wake up some of the other doctors?  With the backlog and these injured parties coming in, we’ll be busy tonight.”

“Actually,” Cecil said.  He took the slip of paper from Lacey, then showed it to Travis.  “We need to talk to Professor Briggs first.  As soon as possible.”

Travis frowned, looking at the note.  “Why do you have this?”

“Can’t say.  I do need it back, though.”

“Nick, then,” Doctor Travis said, returning the paper.  “You’re a fast runner.  Go find Professor Briggs.  On your way back, wake up the other Hedge Doctors.”

A young man that wasn’t much older than eighteen sprinted from the room.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Jamie said.  “About people dying and getting hurt.”

“I know what you meant, son.  It might seem callous, but the work comes first, feelings second.”

“I like to think they mingle,” Cecil said.

You’re a prat, I thought.

“They can,” Doctor Travis allowed.  “But when you work in the Hedge, you can’t tie your emotions to every piece of work that comes through those doors.  Half the time they’re mostly gone by the time they make it here.  When you know you could save everyone, but the money and resources aren’t so plentiful, and you have to make choices.  Even when it’s a child, or someone’s mother.”

“There’s a good reason I don’t work in the Hedge,” Cecil said.

“Do those children behind you need some attention?” Travis asked.

“It’s why we’re here,” Cecil said.

He was talking about Gordon and Helen, who were cut up, though they’d received preliminary treatment in the coach with Lillian, Lacey and Cecil tending to them.  I was bruised, scraped, and filthy, while Mary had scuffed up hands, though I wasn’t sure the Doctor could see that.

We were taken to benches, where we put our feet on the seats and sat on the backs, the doctors and students looking after us.

The student who was looking after me informed me that, “This bruise will turn a very fun orange color later tonight.  It will be gone by the morning.”

“Fun?”  I asked.

“Isn’t it interesting?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Don’t be a dick, Sy,” Gordon said.

I shut my mouth, frowning.

The student wheeled over a cart, where a dozen implements were laid out on top, wires with insulation coils running down to the covered box on the cart’s lower half.  He picked up a woodpecker,screwed on three vials, each with a stylish, flourishing letter printed on it, the contents colored for further clarity, then flicked a switch to start the needle to its back and forth motion.

Urgh.  I hated needles.  Even motorized ones.

My mind started running through scenarios, much as it had at several points earlier in the night.  Possibilities, where things were, where people were, tracking details, plotting.

Jamie’s hand settled on mine.

I let the train of thoughts unspool, each idea running off course until they collectively dissolved into a general air of negativity and resentment.  I flinched as the woodpecker started stabbing me, then grit my teeth.  There was a painkiller in there, making the pain of the needle’s stab a fleeting one.  He covered what would have been the full breadth of the bruising thus far.

“I take it this is your stitching work, Cecil?” Travis asked.  He was removing the stitches in Gordon’s face.

“It is.  Miss Lacey did most of the work on Helen over there.”

The female doctor who was working with Helen commented, “Who did the collarbone and upper chest?”

“I did,” Lillian said, quiet.

“Really?  Well applied binding emulsion with minimal stitching.  Applied outside of a hospital environment?  Mix?  Antibacterial base, I imagine.”

“No need,” Lillian said.

We weren’t so clumsy to actually turn our heads and give her shocked looks, but I could sense the reaction from the others.  Jamie’s hand tightened up a bit where it was holding mine down against the top of the bench.

“She was already on a regimen,” Lillian said.  “P base, A, D, E mixes.”

“Mmm.  Overall, very nearly perfect.  The kind of work I’d expect from a year ten student.  A year twelve might not do this kind of work out in the rain,” the doctor said.  Travis looked over to investigate and murmured approvingly.

“We were in a coach, and I’ve focused a lot on field care,” Lillian said.  She kept her expression placid, tone modest, but I could tell from the agitation of her hands and the slight kicking movement of her feet that she was inordinately pleased at the praise.

“Nonetheless,” Travis said, turning his attention back to Gordon.  “What are your plans for the future, honey?  I’d like to steal you.”

“Ahem,” the female doctor said.

“We’d steal you,” Travis amended his statement.  “For the Hedge?”

“Um.  I may have other obligations,” she said.

Travis made an annoyed ‘tsk’ sound.

“Who?” the female doctor asked.

“Professor Hayle is sponsoring me,” she said.

The silence was telling.  Had she given another name, the response might have been a ‘Good choice, good choice’ or  a ‘Promising!’, but Hayle’s department was seen as a doomed one.

The woodpecker stopped, and I felt muscles relax where I hadn’t even known they were tense.  I raised a hand toward my forehead, and the student slapped it away.  “Don’t touch.”

He turned his back to wheel the cart away, and I raised my hand toward my forehead again.

Jamie slapped it away this time.

My student returned, and turned his focus to Jamie.  “Do you need care?”

Jamie shook his head.

“You have a mark on your collarbone.  It looks like it goes lower.  If you’d take off your shirt, I can look after that.”

Jamie shook his head again, with more force than before.  He fixed his shirt.

“Are you sure?  I won’t hurt, I can apply-”

“No,” I said.  “No, thank you.  Jamie’s fine.”

The student gave me a curious look, but didn’t say anything further.

Jamie gave my hand a pat.

“And you?” the student asked Mary.

“My hands are a little scraped up.  I’d rather Lillian look after them.”

“Ah, your friend?  I imagine you would,” the student said, smiling.  “She’s good.”

Mary gave an awkward smile back.

It didn’t take long for Briggs to arrive.  He came in the company of a stitched and a young female doctor.  The stitched carried an oversize umbrella and a set of files, while the young doctor had three birds on her arm, each one hooded.

“Leave us,” Professor Briggs said.

The doctors and students left the room as quickly as they could without actually running.  Equipment was left behind.

“You too, Cecil,” Briggs said.  “The young lady can stay.”

Cecil frowned, but he made his exit, following Doctor Travis.

“Explain,” Briggs said, which was probably the least positive way he could have asked.

Gordon spoke up.  He wasn’t stitched up anymore, but had wet streaks over the cuts that were now virtually invisible, they’d been pressed together so neatly.  “He’s running, and he has Whiskers-”

“Whiskers?”

“Um.  The first escaped project.  We didn’t know that it was possible to control it.  We would have given chase if we hadn’t been surprised.”

“Wally, the guy we interrogated, he left out the critical detail, sir,” I said.  “If you need a test subject for parasites, look no further than him.”

Briggs nodded.  He didn’t look happy, thought.

“Mauer went due east from the church,” Gordon said.  “He has thirty soldiers that we saw-”

“Thirty seven,” Jamie corrected, quiet.

“Thirty seven,” Gordon said.  “If the other projects aren’t in that area, they’re wasting their time.  If you direct them after him, they could get both Mauer and Whiskers.  Or they could get killed, depending.”

Briggs reached into a voluminous coat pocket to retrieve a notepad no longer or wider across than his hand.  He picked a pen out of the pocket on the other side, then scribbled out a note, tearing it off and handing it to the girl with the birds.

He kept writing as he spoke.  “Soldiers?”

Gordon continued, “Mauer was an ex-soldier.  He kept in touch with old colleagues.  Years of resentment adding up to a loathing of the Academy.  He wanted the Academy to attack so that he’d have ammunition to use in future efforts.  This was a long-term plan, working against the Academy.”

I added, “Sir, he has or had moles inside the Academy walls to sabotage us, he was actively working to turn the public against us, probably to cut off supplies and make life as hard as possible, and he had soldiers with knowledge of the Academy and its methods to disable our best efforts.  I think he wanted to play the long game.”

“To what ends?”

I shrugged.  “Demanding concessions, getting into a position of power where he could hit the Academy where it hurt and walk away untouched?  I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t say for sure until we catch him and get him in an interrogation room.”

“I was alerted to the fact that the riot did start, despite your efforts.”

“No, sir,” Gordon said.  “It started because of our efforts.  We set things in motion in a controlled way, with the idea that we could turn the tables on Mauer.  We did.”

“He’s neutered,” Helen said.

“He’s a villain to the people, now, sir,” I clarified.  “Someone who cuts children, lies, makes up stories about escaped experiments, tries to make innocent women into scapegoats, and puts a gun to the head of a wounded little girl.”

“That last one was me,” Helen said, wiggling a bit in her seat, smiling.

“The anger over what happened tonight should mostly be directed at Mauer, not at us,” Gordon said.  “Short of getting him and getting all the answers, it’s the best resolution we could hope for.”

Briggs nodded.  He finished writing the third piece of paper, then worked with the young doctor with the birds.

“Go,” he said.

I craned my head as the girl with the birds headed out the door.  “Are those messenger birds?”

“The birds are modified to be able to smell the other projects.  They’ll find them and deliver the messages, provided they’re in or near the city,” Briggs said.  “There’s no good way to communicate with them in the field, this was the means we devised.”

“Is- do we have a bird, sir?” I asked.

“No,” Briggs said.

“Can we, sir?”

“Sy,” Gordon said, in a tone that made it sound less like he was going to kill me and more like Gordon killing me was an inevitability.  No.”

“But-”

No.

I slouched a bit, then leaned forward, elbows resting on my knees.  I was still sitting on the back of the bench, Jamie standing behind me, Mary a short distance to the side, silent and nearly invisible.

“Lacey, was it?” Briggs asked.

“Yes sir.”

“You can confirm all of this?”

“It seems accurate, based on what I witnessed.  I should note that Cecil was accused of being in league with Mauer.  Measures should be taken to keep him out of the public eye for a time.”

“That’s something we can do.  I’m sure he’ll be content to be in his new laboratory.”

He seemed to consider a moment.

“Good,” Briggs finally said.  “The Lambs project will get those badges that were asked for, if it means they can keep up this degree of work.  I was told they could resolve this better than we might have if I’d sent a regiment of stitched to quell the riot, and the Lambs followed through.”

“Yes sir,” Lacey said.

“Hayle can have the budget increase and additional staffing I know he intended to ask for.  I’ve also signed off on the requests.”

Briggs took the file folders from the stitched beside him, shuffled through them to find one specific one, and then handed it to Lacey.

Sounds too good to be true.

“Is there a catch, sir?” Gordon asked.

“Catch?  In a way, yes.  Professor Hayle has been going on at length about your collective merits.  My own methodology when building something is to test it until it breaks.  Then I repair or start it anew.  I repeat this process until it cannot break.  The superweapon that sleeps under our feet is evidence that this can work.”

There were some nods from us.

“I will be making more use of you, in coming weeks and months.  I will be testing you.”

Until we break.

“And,” he said, “I don’t want it said that you broke because I didn’t give you or Hayle the necessary resources.  Change is afoot, a firm hand will be needed to keep things steady.”

More nods.

“Go.  Miss Lacey, if you could deliver that to Professor Hayle?”

“I can.” she replied.

“Thank you for your hard work.  The Lambs can go home.  I don’t expect they’ll be much use against a squadron of ex-soldiers and an experiment on a leash.”

“Mauer is the most dangerous of them,” I said.  “Um, sir, sorry.  He’s brilliant, he’s good at manipulating people on a large scale.  You really shouldn’t underestimate him.”

Briggs’ expression didn’t change.  He really liked his long pauses.  He had the clout to make others entertain them.  He finally said, “We’ll deal with him to the best of our ability.  Your part in this is done, however.  You should rest.  Tend to your wounds.  I may call on you as soon as tomorrow morning.  I have things to look after.”

Tomorrow morning.

His bird-woman crossed the room to his side, joining Briggs and the stitched.  The three of them headed for the other side of the Hedge, where it exited into the Academy grounds, inside the walls.

Lacey looked us over.

“Thank you,” I said.  “You did well.”

“It’s annoying, being patronized to by a child, but that’s probably intentional,” she said.  She frowned.  “But you’ve thanked me and apologized several times tonight.  I get suspicious when you act that way.”

“Probably smart,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“Pretty much,” Helen said, chipper.

“Sy’s a jerk,” Lillian said, with a hair too much emphasis.

Lacey rolled her eyes.  She turned to go.

She didn’t make it three steps before I started following her, flashing a quick grin to the others, who sat and stared.

Three seconds later, when we were almost out of the room, Lacey stopped, spinning in place.  I wasn’t quite quick enough to duck into cover.

“Huh?” I asked.  “Do you have eyes in the back of your head?”

“No,” she said.

“I didn’t make a sound.”

“You didn’t,” she said.  “But they didn’t either.  And when the room is that quiet and I have that niggling feeling of doubt deep inside…”

“You get suspicious enough to act on it,” I said.

“What were you doing?” she asked, sounding as tired as she was stern.

“The file.  I wanted a peek at the file.”

She held up the file that Briggs had given her.  Supposedly whatever Hayle had been so emotional about earlier in the evening, when I’d undercut him in going to Briggs for the badge.  Part of it, at least.

“It isn’t classified,” she said.  “And I know Briggs is strict about those things.”

She opened the folder.  She took her time reading it.  Rubbing it in, making me ache from head to toe with the yearning to know.

She could get revenge for everything I’d subjected her to by turning around and walking away right then.

I sensed it.  That she was going to do it.  It was in her body language, the tension in her legs, the angle of her body.  It was in her expression, which was far from being a proper poker face.  A smirk in hiding.

The expression changed.

That put me off balance.  I shifted my weight from foot to foot.

“Okay,” she told me.  “Hands behind your back.  I don’t want you running away with this.”

I nodded, hands going behind my back.

“I wasn’t going to show you, but you should read it,” she said.

Which only piqued my curiosity before.  If she pulled it away now, I probably would have jumped her, improvised weapon in hand.  I wouldn’t have gotten the information I wanted, but I would’ve at least burned off some of the nervous, frustrated energy in me.

She lowered the file to the point where I could read it.

My eyes scanned the page.

Nothing special.

Nothing special.  Boring legal wording.

I felt a chill at the third offered provision.

The fourth jarred me to my core.

My hands, previously behind my back, dropped to my sides.  I swallowed hard.  “But…”

“You’re not surprised, are you?” she asked, and her voice was soft.  “You know who Hayle is, how he operates.”

I shook my head, “But… really?”

“I can’t say,” she said.  “It wouldn’t be until next year.  Even then, it would take some time before you had to worry on any level.”

“I almost- I thought-”

My hands went up to my hair, clutching at it a little.  A part of me wanted to cry, all of a sudden.  The buzz from our successful dealings with the Shepherd was gone.

She reached out to put a hand on my wet hair, knocking my hands out of the way in the process.  Again, they dropped to my sides.  I left them there.  She gave me a tentative pat on the head, as if I were a stray dog.  Her voice was gentle, a kindness that I would have called hypocritical, before.  “Go home.  Get your new Lamb settled in.  Tell them, so they know.  I’ll tell Lillian as I walk her to her dormitory.”

Numb, I nodded.

I felt like I was in a daze as I rejoined the others.  They clustered around me.

I knew that they were hungry for information in ways that were very different from how I was insatiably curious, but they didn’t push.  Their concern was for me.  Whatever my expression or body language was like, it seemed to worry them.

Even Lillian seemed reluctant to step away and join Lacey in heading into the Academy grounds.  She cast me a backward glance.

The others ushered me out the door.  The coach we’d taken to arrive was still there, manned by a stitched driver.  We climbed in, Gordon the last to file in through the door, stopping to give the driver instructions on where to go.

It wasn’t a long ride.  Just down the road.

I was so used to my thoughts running along multiple tracks, too busy to stay on one subject, but in this, I didn’t have the energy.  I watched out the window, and my brain was slow, chugging along, the majority of my focus set on trying not to think.

I’d taken the expiration dates in stride.  I’d expected it almost from the beginning.

This was harder to handle, in an ironic way.

The others murmured in conversation the entire way back.  All the same, the words were noise, my thoughts were on some musing about how Radham worked as a kind of motte and bailey, which was a safe way of thinking, unless I thought too much about Radham Academy.  The loosely defended city, the fortress that residents could retreat to if they had to.  In time of serious attack, people could enter the Academy, wait out the enemy while bombarding them and defending the nigh-impenetrable walls, and then exit to rebuild and live in the city once again.

Safety.  Safe way of thinking.  My brain was tired.

I was surprised when the coach stopped.  Time had passed too quickly and too slowly at the same time.  I felt dazed.

Mary, I thought.

“Welcome home, Mary,” I said.

My words seemed to startle a few of the others.  Only Helen smiled throughout, unflinching.  The others looked concerned.

“Thank you,” Mary said.

“I’m really glad to have you with us,” I said.

She nodded.  But she looked disconcerted.

We made our way inside, not opening umbrellas, but flipping up hoods and dashing for the door.  Again, Gordon was the last to follow, giving word to the coach driver to return to the Academy.  He should have been trained to go back anyway, but it was always better to be safe than sorry.

Mrs. Earles was waiting up for us, and joined us in the hallway before we had all of our coats and boots off.  In hushed tones, so as not to wake the younger ones, she urged us upstairs, promising us tea.

Mary needs attention, I thought, and this was the new focus.  Not idle thoughts, but getting her settled.  I found her hand, and was surprised at how tightly she clutched it.

“Mary’s sharing the right corner room with Helen,” Mrs. Earles said.  “We’ve moved Helen’s stuff and Mary’s luggage over.”

Mary nearly tripped, she was so startled by the announcement.  I had her hand, and Gordon put a hand out to catch her.  When she straightened, she had a look in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’m harmless.” Helen whispered, then she made a tiny, excited sound, barely keeping her volume down, “One room for the two of us!”

Our resident monster skipped ahead, stepping exactly where she needed to step to avoid the creaking of floorboards.

Mary looked more disturbed in the wake of it.

I was puzzled more than anything, and the puzzlement added to my general lack of focus.  Helen was different, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I resolved to ask.  But, again, Mary was the priority.  I tried to pull myself together.

“Can I share a room with Mary?” I asked.

“Not at all.  That wouldn’t be proper,” Mrs. Earles said.  “You stay with Jamie.”

I wished I had the badge, so I could show her and make her listen.  She was an Academy employee, in a roundabout way.

“We need to talk before bed,” Gordon said.  “And we haven’t eaten.  Could you please get something?”

Mrs. Earles gave him a disapproving look.

“On my word,” he said, with utmost sincerity.  “It’s important, and I’m ravenous.”

“Get changed, I’ll have crackers, cheese and meat, with some treated tea.”

“Thank you,” he whispered.

She gave him a pat on the shoulder.

We headed into our individual rooms.  Gordon already had one corner room, but it was a tiny space, cut off by the stairs that went up to the third floor, where Mrs. Earles’ bedroom was.  Mary and Helen’s room was usually reserved for older girls or girls who were expecting to be adopted out.  It was a treat.  No sleeping in a room with four or five other girls.

Jamie and I changed as quickly as we were able, which meant I was done before Jamie had his shirt off.  I went out of my way to avoid looking, though I’d seen many times before.

When he pulled his pants off, though, I turned my back altogether.

We all had our burdens, we all needed support in our own ways.  This was one of Jamie’s ways.

He put a hand on my shoulder, signaling it was okay for me to turn around.  He had pyjamas that buttoned down the front.  My own was only a sleeveless and undersized workman’s shirt that showed how horribly skinny my shoulders and arms were, along with pyjama bottoms.  I hated being confined in clothes while I slept, but Jamie tended to wake me up by swatting me with his book if I slept without anything at all.  It didn’t help that I kicked my sheets off, most nights.

“I’m so tired,” Jamie admitted.  “And I have so much to write in my book before bed.”

“Let me,” I said.

He gave me a look.

“No mischief, I promise.  I’ll write down everything as I remember it.”

“I don’t think I can read your handwriting.”

“I’ll try, for real,” I said.  “You can add stuff after, fill in blanks as you need to.”

He frowned.  “Maybe.”

“Okay.  Maybe.  That thing with the names, starting the riot?  That was incredible,” I said.

“I was terrified.”

“It was incredible,” I said, again.

We reached the kitchen and began to dine on salty crackers with slices of cheese and meat.  I went for the cheese first.

Gordon joined us, but he went for the meat, naturally.

And then there were the two girls.  Helen and Mary.  Both wore long nightgowns, white and riddled with lace, though Mary’s had a ribbon at the collar.

I drew in a deep breath.  I felt a horrible pressure on my chest.

The others didn’t push, and Mary seemed to be following the others’ lead.

“Helen,” I said.  “I have to ask…”

“Yes?”  Unlike Gordon, who was eating about three pieces of meat to every piece of cheese and every cracker, she was eating exclusively meat slices, gathered together and rolled up into tubes.

“What’s with this new you?  You’ve been different.”

“Oh!  Oh.  I had my thing with Professor Ibbot last month, and a check-up just a couple of days ago,” she said, smiling.  “He got upset with me.  He hit me a few times.  Not hard enough to do any damage, but, just because.”

I was silent.  I had a lump in my throat already, and I didn’t like hearing this.

Her smile widened a bit.  “He said I shouldn’t slack off.  That I couldn’t just stop acting.  It was something I had to practice.  So I’m practicing.  I’m trying to figure out who Helen Ibbot should be when she’s not acting for someone else.”

“Oh,” I said.  “You’re a perfect actor already.  You don’t really need to practice.”

“He told me to, so I will,” she said, very firmly.

“I liked the old Helen,” I said.  “The one who didn’t feel like she had to smile.”

There were nods from Jamie and Gordon.

“That’s too bad,” Helen said, in a very matter of fact way.  “You’re going to have to get used to the new me.”

I nodded, feeling a touch more lost than before.

I didn’t like that.  I wanted to hurt Ibbot for it, but I wasn’t sure how, or if it was even possible, or right.

“What’s going on, Sy?  Does that have anything to do with the file?”

“No,” I said.  I ran my fingers through my hair again.  “No.  I’m just… not wanting to dwell on it.”

“What is it?” Jamie asked.

I drew in a deep breath.

“There were provisions.  Things Briggs was giving Hayle, things Hayle wanted.  The first was money, funding.  The second was manpower, extra space.”

“We knew that much,” Gordon said.

“The third, it’s not fun to hear, but I already talked to you guys about this.  About the expiration dates.”

“You brought it up,” Gordon said, his tone suddenly different, very careful.  “And I told you that if you ever dare to tell me or hint to me what my date is, I will never forgive you.”

“And I believe you,” I said, very quiet.  “I’ll never tell you, and since the others aren’t asking, I won’t tell them.”

Gordon nodded.

Even though you’re supposed to die first, I thought.

My expression didn’t betray a thing.  I sighed.  “Briggs authorized replacements.  When we die, when we break, according to Briggs’ terminology, then there will be new, better Lambs.”

“Not so surprising,” Jamie said.  “I’ve heard hints of that before, from my caretakers.”

I nodded.  “But it’s not fun to hear.”

“No,” Gordon said.  Mary nodded.

“That’s not it, is it?” Jamie asked.  “What got to you this badly?”

“I… I almost fucked it up,” I said.  “I… uh.  Ugh.  I can’t get over the fact that I almost fucked it up.”

“They’re reviving the other projects?” Helen guessed.  “Evette or Ashton?  They’re going to take another try, start over from scratch?”

She was clever enough to connect the dots.  Head in my hands, I nodded.

The silence that followed only added to the weight on my chest.

“One project,” I said.  “Hayle wanted to revive one project, and in my dicking around with the badges, I almost took that away.”

“That’s not surprising at all,” Gordon said, leaning back in his chair.  “We always knew you were a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Wow,” I said, sitting straighter.  “Wow.”

But the words lifted the burden, in a small way.

“You’ve almost gotten any one of us killed a half dozen times already,” Jamie said.  “Why does this matter?”

“Because I trust you guys to handle yourselves.  But these two…”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I get it.”

“Our little siblings,” Helen said.  “We’re going to get one of them back.”

I nodded.  I smiled a little, even.  “But that’s a year off.  We already have one new Lamb.”

“Hear hear,” Helen said.  She would be second last to go.

We raised our mugs and clunked them together.

“Hear hear,” Jamie said.  He wouldn’t die, but he would expire a year after Gordon, if the files were right.  I suspected he already knew, and that knowledge defined him on a level.

Mary smiled, and it was genuine.  She was one of us, and it was the sort of thing she’d craved for a very long time.  It was like a warmth was flowing out from within her.  Our little killer, and I had no idea when she would expire, there was no way to find out, and there was something safe in that.

She met my eyes, and I smiled at her.

Me, who would outlast the rest, and who would wish I hadn’t.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 2.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 2)

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The machine guns fired in set bursts, joining the irregular sounds of the bolt-action rifles.  Each bullet or burst of bullets was an initial crack, followed by an echo that seemed to reach out forever.  When a bullet struck dirt that was close enough, it prompted a spray of dirt and dust, touching on those in the trench.

More machine gun fire.  Hollered words were cut to pieces by the sound of the guns, rendered incoherent.

In the trench, Mauer sat with his back to the wall of packed earth.  Both of his hands clenched the rifle, the fingernails seemingly too clean, the grit at the edges too dark.  The ground was dry, but the air was humid, and the grime and sweat were mingling and gathering minute by minute.  If he thought too hard about it, he felt like the grime was so concentrated on his face, neck and hands that it was finding a way to spread beneath his collar and into his sleeves.

A day ago he’d been splattered with blood, and with the water rationing, he hadn’t been able to wipe it off.  He’d made a mental note of which splatters on his arm were Andrew’s, a signature, remembering the boy who’d bartered so enthusiastically for new books and dime novels to read during his downtime.  At some point, in all the chaos and the mess, the streaks had dried into a deep, dark brown, joining the dirt and the mud that formed when dust and sweat mingled.  Andrew’s demise had been washed away and overshadowed by everything that had followed.

He only had to look at the others who were sitting by the wall to know how he probably looked.  Exhaustion and the burden of emotions wore away at the man, and accumulated dirt and blood masked the face and identity.  Here and there, there was a pair of eyes that seemed too blue for the dingy palette of their surroundings.

It wasn’t the people he stared at, as he waited for the dreaded order.  That was too much like looking at himself; it forced introspection, and introspection wasn’t good for the heart or the soul.

Instead, oddly enough, he stared at the stitched.  Those who weren’t actively digging or fixing existing trenches were kneeling in the middle of the trench.  Most barely moved, they didn’t flinch, and they didn’t sweat.  The dirt on them was dry.  One was caught in an obsessive loop of dismantling a gun, cleaning the pieces, and putting it back together.  The handler was holding on to Andrew’s spare gun, ready to hand it to the stitched in case a situation called for it.

The things were oblivious, sad, and not entirely sound.  The stitches were ugly, utilitarian, opening up pathways for the wires to sit within, some crossing the face.  Two of the things had flesh from multiple people.  One of them was put together with a mix of white and black flesh.  The others called him ‘Bull’.  The second had pieces that might have been from a woman.  It was the look of its eye.  The lashes were too long, the eye large, the surrounding brow not deep enough.

A woman or a child.  An innocent eye, he told himself.

The machine guns continued their fire.  The bullets raked over the top of the trench, causing dirt to spit up at the corners on both sides.  Just when he relaxed, an explosion went off about thirty feet away.

It was almost what some of the others called a pants-shitter.  The sheer impact of some of the shelling, even if it didn’t touch anyone, could ripple past and through the men, the shock of it loosening muscles that were supposed to keep the shit in.

He was lucky he’d managed to retain his dignity and avoid that thus far.

The stitched with the innocent’s eye stared into space.  Mauer stared at the eye, stared past and through it.

He couldn’t say why, but it ate away at him, and yet he couldn’t keep his eyes away.  He inevitably found his gaze wandering back each time he tried.

The captain, bent low to the ground, moved along the line.  He had two containers of water.  He offered one to each person.

Mauer wanted more than anything to wash, to feel more human again, but when the captain came, he reached for his own water bottle, giving it a slosh.

The captain said something, but it was badly timed.  The cracks of guns going off drowned him out.  He tried again, “Drink.  Fill yours, just in case.”

Mauer could see the boys to either side of him flinching at those last three words.  He didn’t.  He took the heavy water bottle from the captain, holding it with both hands, and drank until he felt like he might be sick, then tipped a portion into his own bottle.

The captain had a look on his face when he took the bottle back.  A deep concern.

“What?” Mauer asked.

More bullets touched the edges of the trench.

“You here with us?”

There was more meaning to the question than it initially seemed.  There were a hundred hidden comments, ideas, and observations tied to that four-word question.  Mauer was almost certain he could have said ‘no’, and his captain would have sent him back, away from the front line.

“I’m here,” Mauer said.

The man didn’t argue, but in a very soft voice, as he handed the water bottle to the next man, he said, “You look more like one of them than one of us, right now, Mauer.”

The day was hot, and the heat was worse because some of the guns on the Academy side were venting hot air into the trench, but he still felt a bit of a chill.

Mauer had always known that he was better than most when it came to communicating.  He had known some people who were similar, in school, working, getting to know others while training to be a soldier, just months ago.  The others had had excuses.  An abusive father they’d had to learn to manipulate, heavy pressure from a businessman parent to follow in footsteps.

It wasn’t like that for Mauer.  When he thought seriously about the way people interacted, certain ideas were so clear as to be obvious.  ‘Us versus them’ was a pervasive one, defining virtually every interaction across cultural, class, religious, and national lines.  One of the ones he’d grasped very early on.

But his captain wasn’t crouched here in the trench, telling Mauer that he was like one of the men with guns on the other side of no man’s land.  The captain was saying that Mauer was like one of the stitched.

How very odd, that in the midst of this, the captain had phrased things in a way that made ‘them’ the stitched.  Not the men that were trying to kill them, not the men with brown skin, not the Mexican forces, but the stitched.

Mauer nodded slowly.  Though the captain had already moved on from his neighbor to the next man, the man was looking over one shoulder, still watching and waiting for a response.

The stitched are dead.

Dead, but they still walk.

I’m more like them than like you?

An exploding shell nearby answered his thoughts.  He didn’t flinch as quickly or dramatically as some of the others.

Somewhere along the line, when he’d been too heartsick and tired to care, he’d started acting a little, to match the others as they’d cringed and cried out, or swore.  Now he wasn’t sure how much of his reaction was real.

His entire body hurt, but nothing had actually touched him yet.  No bullet, no explosion.  Only dirt.

But where the stitched were so hot that it could be uncomfortable to make sustained contact with their skin, he felt very cold in this hot, humid weather.

The captain glanced back at him one last time, then relocated, moving over to a little notch in the wall where he could confer with the captain of a squad further down the same long trench.

Mauer’s eyes settled on the stitched with the woman’s eye.  She blinked slowly.

As her eye opened, the ground started to rumble.

There were shouts of alarm.  Mauer was silent as he rose, stepping away from the wall.  Sections began to crumble from the edges.  Further down, the rumbles made the bottom of one portion of wall give out, crashing into a man’s lower legs.  He was pulled out and out of the way before the unsupported top tipped over to join the rest.

The rumble didn’t stop, but increased.  A distant sound joined the rumble.  It was too deep, momentous and dull to be the crackling of a fire, but it was a crackling nonetheless.

All of it came to a stop, even the sounds of the guns.  Mauer’s ears rang, and he felt dazed as he was pushed aside, the stitched who had been in reserve now hurrying to fix the damage to the wall.  A slew of bullets fired, and hit the one in the lead, but it didn’t even slow down.

He made eye contact with the stitched he’d been staring at, and took an inadvertent step to follow it.

Someone grabbed him, held him back.

He realized why.  Where the wall had collapsed, there was no longer any cover.  He might have stepped out and taken a bullet for his trouble.  He couldn’t bring himself to care about the near-death experience.

Now that he’d advanced closer, however, he could see out past the hole.  They’d dug into a gently sloping hill, so they’d have the benefit of high ground and so that enemy fire would have a harder time reaching them, and now he could look over, out, and down to the distance.  The coast.  Undrinkable salt water.

Two ships.  Titanic boats, ungainly in size, loaded down with weapons.  They’d cut deep enough into the beach that it would take a monumental strength to free them.

Strength, perhaps, that was provided by the lashing, boneless limbs at the back of each boat.  These ships were partially alive.

The fronts of the boats moved, yawning open like great metal-plated jaws.  From each emerged beasts that must have taken the entire hold.  Larger than buildings, taller than the hills that the trenches had been cut into.  They were blunt-featured, thick-skinned, with eyes far too small for their great frames.  They walked on all fours, not dissimilar to hippos or rhinos in general frame, but had lumpier heads, and chests that were both taller and deeper, possessed of a massive capacity.

Far from being Noah’s ark, this.  There were only two beasts to each ark; the one that pushed the boat and the one that was birthed.

One beast roared, and it was a nasal, mooing bray that was just as pronounced and vast as the arrival of the boats had been.  It made the air shake with the sound, made heartbeats skip with each heavy footfall.

Its fellow beast picked up the cry.

In answer, the machine guns started again.  The time between bursts was shorter, and both the cracks and the bullets had different sounds to them.

No longer directed at Mauer’s regiment.

The beasts had moved to a position he couldn’t see through the gap in the trench wall.  He chanced a look beyond.

One beast opened its mouth, lowering his head closer to the ground.

A red-yellow fog flowed out, the thing’s chest heaving and pumping as if to drive the gas out.  It clung low to the ground, spreading.  The chest was pockmarked with little spatters of red, where the massed bullets had bit deep enough into skin to leave tracks, gouges, and punctures.  Not enough to stop the thing.

The captain walked over, looked out and beyond, following Mauer’s gaze.  The man ducked back behind safety.  Mauer remained where he was.

“They’ve lost,” the captain said.

Mauer nodded.

Now the enemy soldiers were the other.

Mauer had to step back and out of the way as the stitched started shoveling dirt back up toward the gap in the trench wall.  The one with the eye wasn’t there.

“Not that we’ve won,” the captain said, in a conspiratorial tone, not meant for all of the soldiers.  “The Crown doesn’t lose wars.  When it looks like things are going that way, they force a draw.”

The gas was dissipating.  The enemy soldiers were still standing, still seemingly alive, gathering their strength.

“I saw this a few years ago.  Something like it,” the captain said.  “This may be where things get harder.”

“Harder?”

“That gas, it’s plague.  Parasites, maybe, or a communicable poison.  Win or lose, if those brown-skinned S-O-Bs go back home to their families, they’ll be killing them.”

A shell went off, a beast flinched, moving its head to one side.  The damage seemed remarkably minor, all things considered.

“They have nothing to lose,” Mauer said.

“Exactly right, soldier.”

The enemy was regaining its strength.  More shells were going off.  Even from this distance away, shouts could be heard.  One command, echoed by squadrons of other men.

The beasts were so large that almost every shell hit.  Every shell hurt, even if the sheer mass of the monsters was so great that it was like taking buckets out of a lake.

One particularly well placed shot hit an injured area.  The spray of blood that followed was phenomenal, albeit short-lived, blowing a small injury out into a larger one.

A command came from far down the trench.  Like the enemy had done, captains echoed it.

Mauer stared at his captain, waiting.

Thirty feet away, the next squadron’s captain picked up the cry.

“Going over!  Target the installations!”

Mauer’s captain drew in a breath, then repeated the warning.  “Going over!  Target the installations!”

Destroy the artillery to save the beasts.

“Stitched first!” the captain ordered.  “Use them for cover.  Do not fall behind, or you’ll stick out!”

There was so much fear and uncertainty in the trench, now.  Murmurs of catching that plague, of being shot.

Mauer had heard once that, given a typical arrangement of soldiers, even in a life or death situation, one in twenty would not act to hurt another human being.

The thought almost warmed the chill that had settled deep in his chest, fear and anger and frustration bottled deep within.  Intrinsic human kindness.

“Make sure your rifles are loaded and ready,” the captain was saying.

The reminder helped, but the men needed help in another department altogether.  Mauer knew it.

The captain had woken Mauer up to something gradual that had been occurring over days and weeks.  The gradual, quiet slide toward being a man that was already dead.

He couldn’t go back that way.

The only way was forward.

He would be forever grateful that he’d been given that small awakening.  Even if his forever only lasted a few minutes more.

More shells went off, all directed at the great plague-beasts.  Pants-shitters, as the others called them.  Mauer had never liked the vile language.

He preferred words that had more power.  He bent his head.

Bowing his head, he spoke.  “I pray to you, Lord God, for protection.  You do what is right, so come to our rescue.  Listen to our prayers, and keep us safe from harm.  Be our mighty rock, the place where we can always run to for shelter.  Save us, by your command.

He continued, “You have made us suffer greatly, but you bring us back from this deep, muddy pit.  You give us new life, you make us truly great, and we will strive to take sorrow away.”

When he looked up, he realized many were watching.  The stitched with the innocent’s eye stared, its mouth moving to echo his words.

He couldn’t be sure why that disquieted him so much.

When he looked at the captain, the man wore a serious expression.  Expressions without words or tone were harder to understand, but he wasn’t blind.

The man gave him a nod.

“Go!” came the cry, from the far end of the trench.  It was immediately picked up, an echo in different voices.

“Go!” Mauer’s captain cried out.  “Over the top!  Stitched first!”

The stitched went over.  Where the rumbling and shells had weakened trench walls, some broke down a little with the weight of the dead bodies.

Mauer watched his stitched go over, urged by the handler, who stayed behind.  It wasn’t expected to return, or to need another order.

“Go!  Right after them!  If you wait, you die!” the captain bellowed.

Mauer went.  He watched the stitched he’d felt such a profound, dangerous  connection to.  He followed it, gun in both of his hands, and was joined by the other soldiers.  The dry ground was just steep enough to make running faster, without making him stumble.

Where he’d been so cold before, there was only a wild, mad fear, and an anger directed more toward them than to the enemy.

“Clear the trench, press through to the installation!” the captain bellowed the word.

Each step Mauer took was a step away from being a dead man, in the most ironic of ways.  There was a passion to his movement, and ideas of what he might do if he survived all this danced through his mind.

With a dispassionate expression, he watched the stitched with the innocent’s eye die.  A child or a young woman had gone into its making, he knew.  He’d felt a connection to the thing, and he wasn’t sure what that connection was, as if there was something he was supposed to put together.

Three men died by his hand, and their faces didn’t even stick in his mind.  One rifle shot, two stabs with the bayonet.

Another two were injured, cut across their faces, though those faces were already crawling with things the Academies had created.  Parasites and leeches.  The orange fog had housed other things.  Things that hurt and debilitated.  The enemy was slow to put up a fight, feeble, but not lacking in conviction in the slightest.  An odd combination.

What Mauer might have been, if he hadn’t been woken up.

He didn’t hold back, couldn’t, out of fear that he might never be able to summon up this mad courage again.

He made his way across the enemy trench, saw nobody capable of standing or holding a weapon.  With shaking hands, he pulled himself up and over the other side, to move toward the artillery installation, reloading the moment he had his two feet on solid ground.

The men at the artillery installation had to have known what was evident enough to Mauer and the other members of the squad.  It had been a one-sided slaughter.

There was no reason, then, for the artillery squad to hold back.  The cannon lowered, aiming front and center.

Mauer raised his rifle, aimed, and shot in the moment.  He watched a man die.

The man who manned the artillery cannon, however, survived to pull the trigger, firing toward the front of Mauer’s squad.

Mauer felt his arm go, like a scrap of cloth caught by a strong wind.  Blind and nearly deaf, bowels empty, he dropped.  It was only when he lay there, yearning for unconsciousness, that he felt the burning across what remained of his skin.

He thought of the stitched, and now wondered if it had been real, or if it had been something meant only for him.  A sign.

He screamed, not because of fear or pain or hopelessness, but because he couldn’t bear to let the flame go out, and a scream of rage and defiance was all he had left to give.

Mauer raised the hand the Academy had given him.  Rain streamed into and over crevices and cracks.  Here and there, muscles twitched, agony lancing through veins, nerves, and around the openings where the fungus -and it was all fungus, despite appearances- broke through the flesh.  He likened the experience to having a red-hot needle pulled through his arm every few seconds,

“How’s the pain?” his captain asked.

“It never stops,” Mauer said.  He blew the whistle, managing the location of the Academy’s beast.

“Maybe when we’re done, it might feel better,” the captain said.

Mauer knew the man’s name, of course.  Edwin Gibson, a friend and confidant, but the man would remain his captain in many ways.  It was a way of holding on to the fire, keeping from slipping into that dead place.  Remembering that day, almost more vivid and clear than real life could be.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be done,” Mauer admitted.

“You chose the right enemy for an endless war,” the captain said.

“I chose?” Mauer asked.

“Poor wording on my part.  I’m more a man of action than a man of words.  A fighting man.”

“Mm hmm,” Mauer said.  He smiled.  “I’ve missed you, Ed.  It’s been a lonely year without your company.”

“I could have visited.”

Mauer shook his head.  “Not worth the risk that others might come to conclusions or start asking questions.”

“I know.  Not that it mattered.”

“Unfortunately not.  The Academy is changing.  We might have to act sooner than later if we’re going to avoid being left behind.”

“Okay.  We’ve waited too much as is.”

Mauer smiled.

When a few seconds passed, he ventured, “I’ve been reminiscent, lately.  Do you remember that day?”

“I do.”  There was no question as to which day it was.

“Was it a good day, or a bad one, do you think?”

The captain smiled a bit.  “Ever with the tough questions.”

Not an answer unto itself, but perhaps the only answer he’d give.  Mauer was fine with that.

Neither of them were thinking of the last day they fought.  That had effectively been the last day of the war.  The Crown had given up on the war weeks earlier, the motivation for which was a question of resources.  It had been too costly to keep going with Academy productions spread so thin and no thunderstorms for their stitched soldiers.  Not the loss of good men and boys.  Resources.

Mauer and his fellow soldiers hadn’t been much different from the stitched in that regard.

No, the day they were thinking about had been the day that Mauer had limped out of the hospital with his new arm, the fire burning fiercer than ever, but with no outlet.  Even in fixing him, the Academy had taken their pound of flesh.  The arm was one more experiment.  They would fix it or replace it as the need arose, he’d been promised.

He preferred the pain.  Better that than to give them more data and help their work.  The pain drove him forward, reminded him to keep moving, to focus his talents and focus his mind to figure out all the possibilities.

Even with that, he hadn’t anticipated the children.

He would know better in the future.

God doesn’t back their side, Mauer thought.  When he’d met up with his squadron for what was meant to be one last visit before they went separate ways, those were the words he’d uttered.  A call to arms and an excuse for his own prayer’s failure, back before they’d gone over and charged across the empty space.

He’d said a lot more, after that.  They had listened.  They had talked, all of them, well into the late hours.

They had planned.

Those plans were supposed to have come together tonight and tomorrow.  He could rally the people to stand against the Academy and see it for what it truly was, and let them fail.  Failure could breed other sentiments, if he was careful.

The Academy’s experiment reacted, jumping back, just barely avoiding crashing into one of the soldiers at the vanguard.

A man, far too large, thick skinned, misshapen and fat, lurked on a nearby building.

Gorger.  Mauer and his men had done his research.  Moles inside the academy had provided the critical details.

Mauer felt the heat within him burning quiet and clean.  Less a raging flame, and more a white hot steel.  He raised his hand to lift the whistle up to his lips and held them tight.

Tell the Academy anything, but don’t tell them about the whistle, he’d told the boy.

He’d given other instructions to others within the Academy.  Some he hadn’t yet had a chance to make use of.

Whistle in place, he grabbed his rifle and tossed it straight up, caught it so his hand was low and in place, and put his thumb through the ring he’d had installed to work the bolt.  He shifted his grip again, raising his Academy-given arm to steady the end of the rifle.

Gorger moved off to one side.  Too fast for something of his bulk.

But Mauer had anticipated the movement.  Gorger had once been human.  He thought and operated like a human.  He followed the same rules.

The rifle moved in line with Gorger’s movement.  Mauer fired.

He watched Gorger drop.

That white hot fire and the pain that kept him up nights had forced him to focus.  When he couldn’t sleep at night, he walked to the outskirts of the city and practiced shooting.  Always with his rifle.

Gorger wasn’t so different from those great plague-beasts he’d seen on the last day of the war.  Thick skin, but they made the eyes small for a reason.  For Gorger, the real eyes were hidden, masked off to the sides.

Gorger staggered, one hand to his cheekbone.  A bottle of liquid fire splashed against his chest, and the contents sloshed out, flowing off his skin like water off a duck’s back.  He wasn’t even singed.

Mauer blew.  The number of short, sharp whistles indicated direction.  The spiny beast lunged, sweeping past Gorger.  Anything else might have been sliced, but Gorger wasn’t touched.

“Aim for the eye!  Right cheek!” the captain shouted.

Gorger charged.  Mauer redirected the beast, putting it in the monster’s way.  It was lower to the ground, better braced, while Gorger was incredibly strong.  Gorger could deal with the beast, but he couldn’t shield his other eye in the process.  He tried another tactic, turning sideways, running with his shoulder forward, driving the monster out of his way and continuing forward.

The squad parted, one soldier a step too slow in getting out of the way.  Jean Dupuy, Mauer knew, who’d hurt his leg in the same explosion that had taken Mauer’s arm and flesh.  Dupuy died, or he was hurt badly enough that only the Academy could put him back together.

Mauer whistled, two sharp sounds.

Gorger turned, reorienting, looking to see where things were, using his one remaining eye.

The spiny beast attacked him, raking his face and chest.  From his reaction, the beast had come close.  He nearly stepped on Dupuy as he wrestled with the beast.

The captain’s turn to whistle, now.

It was an odd reflection, in a way, of that day in the war.  Except Mauer and his men were on the other side, now.

Gorger saw the small, dark objects land in a scattered pile around him.  The beast that Mauer had been given sensed the objects while they were still in the air, and it was fast to retreat.

No less than a dozen grenades went off in quick succession.

This wouldn’t be it.  It wasn’t enough to kill Gorger.  It was enough to stall it, get them a block or two away.  They’d have another chance to blind, other weaknesses to capitalize on.  There would be more obstacles tonight, before they got to safety.

But Mauer wasn’t concerned.

The battles he fought, be they against Gorger, children, or the Academy itself, weren’t battles he was supposed to win.

But he’d seen his death, a dead man walking with an innocent’s eye.  He’d outlived it, surpassed it.  If anything was missing, now that it was gone, he’d replaced it with a steadily burning rage of the quietest, most patient sort.

There was little obstacle he couldn’t surpass, when he had conquered death.  He knew it, his comrades knew it.  Others would soon know it.

He had faith in that.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.01 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.1

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

The room flooded with light.  I opened my eyes just enough to glimpse Gordon sanding there, curtains in hand.  He was wearing a white Academy uniform, minus the jacket.  He took his time, tying each curtain back with the ribbons that were hooked into the wall.  Past the rain-streaked window, the trees and the leafy branches on buildings were a breadth of colors; mostly red and red-black for the buildings.  The color green was all but gone from the view.

I pulled the covers over my head.

“Up,” he said, tearing the covers off me in one sweep.  “Mary can’t wake you up every day, much as you’d like her to.”

“But I don’t want to go to school!” I groaned, pulling the pillow over my head.

“Orders.”

“I don’t care about orders!  I’m the black sheep of the lambs, the rebel, the villain!  I can play hooky!”

“You’re coming,” he said.  “I’ll drag you along in your pyjamas if I have to.”

“I’d make it work,” I mumbled into my pillow.

“I’m betting you’d revel in it.  But you’d stand out, and we’re already on shaky ground there.”

I moved the pillow and looked at him, “You’d sabotage the project?  Reveal us for what we are?”

He looked very casual, leaning on the footboard at the end of Jamie’s empty, neatly-made bed.  He didn’t flinch at the question, but instead asked, “Aren’t you already doing that, trying to skip out on this job?  Professor Briggs said he’d make use of us.  He followed through on his word.  This is our assignment.”

“I didn’t think he meant this!” I said.  “It’s so horribly, awfully, agonizingly boring!”

“It has to end soon.”

“Nuh uh!” I said, flipping over and sitting up a bit.  “We finish and, oh, guess what?  We have to start over!  He’s sinking the project and he’s trying to keep a leash on us.  This pointless busywork is exactly that.”

“I wouldn’t say pointless,” he said.  “If you’re not going to get up because of the project, how about getting up because you don’t want to look like a baby in front of Mary?”

Baby?”

“I can play head games too, Sy.  If you want to whine and throw a tantrum-”

“First of all, that’s not a good head game, if I know you’re playing me.”

“It’ll work,” he said.

“Second of all, I’m not throwing tantrums, you dick.”

“You’re not acting like an adult, either.”

“Yeah?  Are you sure?  Because I think a lot of adults groan and moan behind closed doors.”

“Do you really think those hypothetical adults are the ones you want to turn to as role models?”

“Yeah.”

“Especially considering that you’re a sponge when it comes to that sort of thing?”

“Yes!  Because the alternative is ending up a tightwad who doesn’t know how to express himself or have fun,” I said, giving him a pointed look.  “If I live to be an adult, then I want to be the kind of adult who skips work and goes and gets drunk and knows how to enjoy the good with all the rest of the murky, bleary day-to-day garbage.  I want to do work that’s exciting and interesting and me.  Not this kind of work!”

“There are times when I don’t understand you at all,” Gordon said.  “But I do know that you don’t want to look like a baby in front of Mary.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Is it getting to you?”

“No,” I lied.

The look he gave me told me he knew I was fibbing.  I wasn’t at my best first thing in the day.

“You and I both know you’re going to get out of bed, you’re just stalling at this point.  You have three seconds before I head down to the breakfast table and casually mention that you’re being a brat and a baby.”

“That’s dirty.  I’m going to get you back for this.”

“Two…”

“I mean it.  I will get you.  Today, even.”

“I know,” he said.  “One.”

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, bringing them down to the floor and standing in the same motion.

When he didn’t react, I flourished a little.

He gave me a short round of clapping, though his expression didn’t change. “Come on.  I don’t trust you not to go back to bed if I leave you alone.”

I grumbled, but I went with.  He clapped a hand on my back as I walked beside him.

“I hate it too,” he said.

“But you don’t hate it enough to do something about it,” I said.

“I’m patient.”

“It’s been three months.  Three!  This is the worst job.”

“I know.”

“Life is short!” I said.

I belatedly realized what I’d said.  I bit my tongue, literally, with enough force that I might have drawn blood.

But he didn’t get angry, and he had gotten angry in the past, when I’d said similar things.  He only sighed out the words, “I know.”

“Sorry,” I said.

He didn’t respond, but clapped a hand on my back instead.

We reached the dining room.  Even with two tables, we couldn’t seat everyone at once.  What tended to happen was that the older kids looked after the youngest, who were given something simple and quick to eat, then moved along with something they could carry with them as they ate.  In the summer, the place of choice was often outside, under the eaves.  Now that it was getting cooler, only a few went out, and the rest were relegated to the stairs and front hall, where dropped bits of toast and fruit were easiest to clean up.

The good stuff was available on a first-come, first-serve basis, which meant I rarely got any bacon or grilled tree jerky.

Jamie, Helen, and Mary were already seated when we arrived at the table.  Jamie and Mary were looking after the little ones.  Jamie’s long hair was wet, combed and parted, and he had drops of water on his glasses, and he was still wearing his pyjamas.  Mary was wearing a cardigan over her nightgown, hair tied back with one ribbon.

Helen, both washed and dressed, like Gordon, was generally disqualified from the breakfast duties.  None of the kids were privy to who or what we were, but somehow, by some clue or cue that I couldn’t figure out, the littlest kids had a way of reacting to Helen like a rabbit might react to a swooping hawk.  If she tried to urge them to eat, they tended to stop doing anything but acting nervous and focusing on her.  She often helped watch the food or turn over the toast, instead.

“You’re up,” Mrs. Earles greeted me.  The food on the stove was only being kept warm, and her focus was more on cleaning up than anything else.

“Good morning, Mrs. Earles,” I said, still half asleep.  “I didn’t get a chance to say last night, but I think your haircut looks nice.”

“You got your hair cut?” Rick asked, twisting around on his bench.

“Just a trim,” Mrs. Earles said.  “And it was very kind of Sylvester to notice and say so.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to turn the stove back on to cook him some bacon.”

“Early bird gets the bacon,” Rick told me, in the most smug manner possible.

Fat bird arrives early enough for the bacon and takes up table space until everyone else is done.

“Wasn’t trying for bacon.  Just saying,” I said.  I collected a bowl and plate, holding them out.  “Oatmeal?”

“Oatmeal,” Mrs. Earles said, plopping a too-generous helping into my bowl.

“Fruit.”

“Fruit,” she said, using a ladle to deposit mystery fruit on my plate.  Something from the Academy that they were trying on the public of Radham.

“Toast.”

“Toast,” she said, reaching over to the side of the oven to grab the long-handled wire setup that had toast trapped within its lattice.  She popped the wire configuration open and dumped the toast onto my plate.

Boring food for a boring day.

“Thank you, Mrs. Earles,” I said.

“Work hard today,” she said.

I gave her a weak smile.

I sat down with the others, making a smaller kid scoot over to give me more room, so I wasn’t forced to take the spot next to Rick.

Mary was sitting beside Helen, and didn’t seem to remember that she was supposed to be afraid of the girl.  Things were bound to go one of two ways as time passed, with Mary’s fear of Helen escalating or dissipating, and it was perhaps a testament to Mary’s character that she’d found a way to take it in stride.  Her focus was more on Ally, a six years old who was staunchly refusing to eat her oatmeal.

“Eat fast,” I chimed in.  “It only gets grosser if you let it get cold.”

“It is cold, and it is gross,” Ally told me, which I’d expected.

I rose up from my seat a little, peered over, and checked her bowl.  I stole it from her.

“Sylvester,” Mrs Earles said.  “No tricks.”

I spooned most of my oatmeal over into Ally’s bowl, then gave her what was left of mine, still hot, noticeably less than she’d had before.  I passed it back to her, then looked at Mrs. Earles, waiting.

She huffed out a sigh, then went back to cleaning dishes.

It was the perfect response, because I could look at Ally and give the girl a wink.

It was clear that she didn’t want to eat, but in this small battle of kid versus adult, I’d sided with her.  She couldn’t refuse now without betraying the covenant of kids everywhere.

Still, she was noticeably sullen as she took to shoveling the oatmeal into her mouth.

“Ready to face the day?” Mary asked, now that she was free of her charge.

“Are you?” I asked.

She made a disgusted face, tongue sticking out.  I smirked, then set to eating, mixing the cold oatmeal in with the hot.

It was pretty quiet as mornings went.  I wasn’t the only one that was feeling a general weariness.  It was visible in Jamie, in Mary, in Gordon to a small degree, and even in Helen; Helen wasn’t putting a lot of energy into acting.  She’d slipped back to her default: smiling, cheery, coy.

“I believe I was the one that mentioned Mrs. Earles’ haircut to you last night,” Jamie commented.

“Uh huh,” I said.  “Did you tell her?”

“No,” Jamie said.

“Joint effort, then,” I said.  “Mrs. Earles?”

“Yes, Sylvester?” she asked, sounding way too tired for the early hour of the day.

“Jamie likes your hair too.”

“Thank you Jamie,” she said, in a way that made it sound routine.  More for the benefit of the littler kids than anything else.

I looked at Jamie.  “See?  Teamwork.”

“Thank you,” he said, but he rolled his eyes.

I ate quick, but as one of the last to the table – Gordon had already eaten before waking me up – I was still one of the last to finish.  Ally finished her oatmeal, which freed Mary to head upstairs to wash and change, with Helen and Jamie a few steps behind.  I’d timed things well enough that I could go up with them.

I looked at Rick, who was still seated.  The look he gave me was a curious one.  Not the usual.

Something had changed.  He was studying me, and I didn’t know why.

I shivered.

We passed Gordon, who was working to manage the kids and help Mrs. Earles.  It would probably be my turn tomorrow, and sleeping in wouldn’t be an option.  Blah.

“You look nice too, Mary,” I commented, quiet.

“I haven’t even washed up.”

“Even so,” I said, shrugging.

“Thank you?”

“You too, Helen, of course, but that’s only natural, right?”

Helen gave me a warm, coy smile that made me shiver in a less-good way.  Then, to make me more uncomfortable, she added,  “Naturally.”

Jamie gave me a curious look.  I nearly missed Helen taking Mary’s hand.

“Come on.  Let’s wash up, and I’ll brush your hair for you,” Helen said.

The look on Mary’s face suggested she wasn’t entirely used to Helen yet.  She said, “I can do it myself.”

“Please.  I get so bored doing my own hair,” Helen said, pleading.  “I want to do yours.”

You don’t get bored at all.  I know for a fact that you can sit and stare at a wall for hours without a problem.

Mary had to know the same thing.  She gave me a helpless look, but all I could do was shrug.

Jamie and I headed to our room, leaving Mary to be dragged to the girl’s washroom by Helen.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Jamie said.

“Girls are scary,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s only those two.”

We reached the room, and I went to close the curtains that Gordon had opened because of me.  Idly, I mentioned, “Okay, I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way.”

“Do I do that?  Take things the wrong way?”

“No.  You’re good about that.  But you do get weird about some stuff.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.  Say or ask me whatever you’re thinking, and I’ll try not to get weird about it.”

“I wish I was a girl.”

“Do you?”

“Look at what Helen does.  It’s so much easier to manipulate people.  So many more levels of nuance and ways to abuse people’s expectation of you.”

“Uh huh.  You do that well enough as a boy.”

“And if I was a girl, I’d be going to the girl’s washroom right now.”

“Ahhhh, that’s what you were getting at.”

“I could protect Mary from Helen, and I’d be closer to her.  Lillian’s close to her, and Helen’s getting closer to being a real friend of Mary’s.  It’s… what’s the word for building a relationship through closeness?”

“Propinquity?”

“Sure.  Propinquity.  That’s why I think I’d want to be a girl.”

“One of these days, Sy…” he said, trailing off.

“You said you wouldn’t get weird!”

“I’m not getting weird.  I’m trying to decide if I should pity or fear the person you’re going to be in a few years.”

“Pity or fear,” I said, snorting.  “You’ll feel friendship, because we’ll be friends.  We’ll be together.  What’s to pity or fear?”

“You’re assuming we survive that long,” he said.  “And no, that’s not an excuse for you to tell me when my time is supposed to be up.  I won’t ask until Gordon does.”

“I guarantee you,” I said.  “You and I, together.  You’re my best friend.”

I gave Jamie his space, keeping my back turned, while he got dressed.  Reaching into the wardrobe, I pulled out two Academy uniforms on hangers.  Both were badly wrinkled, and one was stained with blood.  I started measuring the two to figure out which one was most wearable.

Cloth rustled against my hand.  I didn’t look, but felt it, then seized it.

Jamie had passed me his spare uniform.  Unwrinkled and clean.

“Might be a little big, but it’s gotta be better than that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “Best friends, right?  Or chalk it up to teamwork.”

“Yeah,” I said.

White shirt with the Radham emblem on the lapel and sleeve, light gray uniform jacket, dark gray pants.  Socks, shoes.

Same as I’d worn six days a week for months.

I fished my badge out of one pocket, a silver etching of Radham’s coat of arms, backed by a black piece of leather, connected by a buckle at the top so it could flip up.  Both sides of the leather were marked by a script, though general wear and tear had made it hard to read.  Clearance to do what I needed to do

The badge went in a pocket, out of sight.

When we were done, we stepped back out into the hallway, where we waited for Gordon, Helen, and Mary.

“I’m not suited for this,” I said.  “Uniforms, schedules, routine.

“Make a game of it?”

“I’ve made so many games of it,” I said.  “I’ve made games about the games I’ve made of it.”

“I don’t know what to say.  I feel like you’re buttering us up.  You’re being too nice.

“I’m trying not to be an asshole,” I told him.  I had to choose my words carefully to avoid letting details slip to an overhearing ear.  “I’m so god-damned tired of this thing we’re doing at the Academy.  I’m cranky and I’m feeling spiteful, and it’s almost that time of the month.”

Jamie snorted.

“For my appointment,” I whispered.  “And after my appointment I’m going to be worse.  I can’t take much more of this.  Something’s going to break, or give, or something.  I want to make sure I’ve established who my friends are before it happens.”

He reached up and put his hand on my head, mussing up my hair, side-to-side.  I let my head rock with the motion.

The girls emerged, radiant in white, Mary with her hair done up in a slightly different style, two thin braids reaching behind her head, where they met and were tied into place with a ribbon, trailing down at the back.  The rest of her hair was brushed straight.  She was smiling in a way I hadn’t expected.  Whatever magic Helen had worked, this was above and beyond.  Mary looked like an entirely different person, from an emotional standpoint.

“Looks nice,” I said.

She leaned close to Jamie and I, smiling all the while as she whispered, “We figured out how to hide knives in there.  Can you even see them?”

“No,” I said, as Jamie shook his head.

“You would not believe how many weapons I’m carrying right now,” she said, smiling like the cat with the canary.

Jamie and I glanced at each other.  I knew we were thinking the same thing, an echo of our earlier conversation.

Girls are scary.

Lillian met us at the entrance to the Bowels.  She was holding a small stack of files.  Without a word, she joined our rank and file, handing the files to Gordon.

We descended the stairs into the more dangerous laboratories of the Academy.  Gordon passed one file back to us.  “You do one, we do one?”

“Who’s you and we?” Mary asked.

“You and Jamie go with Sy.  Helen, Lillian and I work on this one.”

“Sure,” Mary said.

Odd, that he’d put me together with Mary and Jamie.  Was he going easy on me?  Did he sense that I was close to my limit?  Suggesting I join up with the people I got along with best?

Good guy, that Gordon.

“Two-eighteen,” he said, pointing off to one side.  Two floors deep.

“We’ll be in Three-twelve,” I said.

Our groups parted.

We descended another floor, then went to find the right lab.

Mary knocked on the door.

The man who answered wore a grey coat, and had a patch of skin on his face that was paler than the rest, with a frost-like pattern to how it was discolored and no hair growth on that part of his head, just above and behind the ear.  I was pretty sure that it was from a few decades back, when they were still experimenting with new skin growth.  When I’d had my skin melted off with the Snake Charmer’s special venom, I’d had the newest kind, and it had been uncomfortable for days.  This guy would be that uncomfortable for the rest of his life, very probably.

“I know you,” he said.

“You do?” Mary asked, surprised.

“Word’s getting around.  The audit.

“Where’d you get the word about this audit?” I asked.  “Or that we were the ones doing it?”

He smiled.  “I can’t name names.  But you can’t expect to interview every single notable staff member and project team leader without someone letting something reach the wrong ear.”

I frowned.  Well, that took any potential fun we might have out of this.

“I’ve even heard that you’re a special project yourselves,” he said.

I didn’t give a tell, and I knew Mary wouldn’t either, but he still smiled as if we’d given something away.  Jamie?

“How does that work?” Jamie asked.  “Are we supposed to be killing machines?”

“I’ve heard you’re adults in kid’s bodies.  To catch people off guard.”

Well, they’re wrong, but that’s still a really bad sign.

I spoke up, “Are you going to tell us who you heard that from?”

He shook his head.  “Oddly enough, I don’t think I can remember.”

“Yes.  Very odd,” I said, suppressing a sigh.  “That’s stupid.”

“Stupid, huh?”

“It’s really, really stupid.  It sounds like you don’t even know how the Academy works.  Funding experimental kids.  Is that why they think you’re doing something wrong in that lab of yours?”

The table was successfully turned.  Patchy frowned.  “My work is exemplary.  I’ve been supported every step of the way.”

“Exemplary,” Jamie said, while writing in his notebook, more slowly than usual.

“Show us?” Mary asked.

The man nodded.  He invited us in.

It smelled like a barn inside, which probably wasn’t a bad way of putting it.  The lab was one of the larger ones, but iron bars blocked off one side from the other.  On our side, there were tables and notebooks, slates with equations and notes written out in chalk, and a full set of Ratios by Species.

On the other side, the experiment lurched.  It was five-legged, unbalanced, it had no less than ten heads.  The body was patchwork, some areas feathered, some furred, some scaled.  With every movement, it made a hoarse whine, or a high pitched growl.  It was hard to say.

“Doesn’t look very viable,” I said.

“Not… viable,” Jamie echoed me, penning it down.

“Hold on,” Patches said.  “Do you even grasp the very basics of what we’re doing here?”

“Um, yeah,” I said.  Then I added a lie for good measure, “Our project, like all the other groups going around, is to summarize your projects, take notes, and do reports on them for class.”

When what we’re really doing is scouring the university for Mauer’s moles and spies.  Investigating and interviewing every single damn person who might know something Mauer might be able to use or pass on.

Checking ten to twenty a day, out of thousands of relevant doctors, teachers, students, and staff members.  Six days a week, for three months.

We’d only caught one.

This is my personal hell.

“I’m talking about method,” he said.  “It starts with a goal.”

“Making a weapon,” Mary said.

The doctor gave her a very condescending look.  I prickled a little at that.

“No,” Patches said. “That’s one option.  It’s an easy way to get bonus funding and extensions.  But if someone can contribute to the greater scientific knowledge in a demonstrable way, we can use that.  Right here, we have my study on ratios.  Common lines of thinking are that all sustainable lifeforms naturally fit into certain configurations on the macro or micro scales.  So long as the scale is maintained, or not deviated from too much, the lifeform should survive, even as other life is grafted into it on the micro and macro levels.”

“Doesn’t look very sustainable,” I said.

“Seeing when, where, and why it fails is my goal.  It’s very possible that thousands of doctors and professors around the world are operating under a flawed assumption,” he said.  “In the process, I’ve cataloged whole texts with numbers on the ratios pre- and post- graft.  I have support from four different professors in Radham, and two more in other institutions.”

“File has details on your past,” Jamie said.  “We’re getting a sense of where things stand at present-”

“Four papers and one text published in the last three months,” Patches said, with pride.

“What’s in the future?” Jamie asked.

The creature made a noise, louder than before, a guttural whine.

“Next step in determining sustainability.  I’ll have my creature impregnate itself,” Patches said.  “It’s a chimera, actually two sets of compatible DNA in one creature.  It won’t bear a clone, but a genetically distinct member of its own species, I’m hoping.  If it can carry offspring to term, that’s the last major benchmark in sustainability.”

Jamie nodded, but I noticed his hands as the giveaway, clutching pen and book.

“Any other questions?” I asked Mary and Jamie.

They shook their heads.

We stepped out of the room, and the door was shut firmly behind us.

“Nope,” I said.

“Didn’t get any impressions he was hiding anything,” Mary said.  “He even knew we were investigating on a more official level, didn’t flinch.”

“I was thinking it was more to do with his personality.  That’s a long-term project, ties him in pretty deeply to the academic community.  He had some idea who we were, even.  That’s not someone who gets caught or used by the Shepherd.”

“No,” Mary said.

“What do you think, Jamie?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, absently.

“Okay, I’ll rephrase.  What are you thinking?”

“The animal in there.  What he was talking about.  Doesn’t sit well.”

“Our sensitive soul,” Mary said.  She stepped over and gave Jamie a kiss on the side of the head.  He smiled at her, still clutching his book tight to his body.

“Wuss,” I said.

He hit me with the book.

I amended my statement.  “Nah, I’ll back what Mary said.  I think I get it.  You’re a good person like that.”

He nodded.

We reached the staircase, and started our way back up to Gordon, Helen, and Lillian.

We were only partway up when we saw the woman coming down.

Half-again as tall as a woman should be, she wore clothes that were a part of her, waves of raw-edged, scar-tissue flesh flowing back to cover her hair, wrap around her arms, encircle her legs like a dress, and cover her feet.  Only her face was normal, and it was a very pretty face, though the eyelids were fixed open with staples, and her mouth sealed shut by the same.  Tubes ran out of her cheeks, down from her tear ducts, and out of her ears, while more extended from belly button, each tube feeding out a constant supply of black or bile-yellow fluid.  The tubes themselves disappeared into the folds of the cloth covering.

Her arms were bloody, up to the elbows.  That same blood was splattered all over her front and legs, with droplets on her face.

She made her way down the stairs at a brisk pace, crimson hands clasped in front of her.  We hurried to get out of her way.

We were silent as we watched her continue her herky-jerky descent deeper into the Bowels, perfectly upright throughout, though her head bobbed with each step down she took on the stairwell.

We exchanged glances.

We bolted.  Up the stairs, down the hall.

Jamie knew the room number, though I’d forgotten.  It didn’t matter in the end.  The door was open.

Broken glass was everywhere.  Helen was sitting against the wall, Gordon and Lillian were kneeling over a mangled body, Lillian doing what she could to help the man, though it didn’t look like it was enough.

“Mole?” I asked.

Gordon shook his head.  “But he was hiding something here.  Moment we started asking questions, he panicked.”

“His panic agitated the experiment,” Helen said.  “The experiment agitated his insides with her hands.”

“Please,” Lillian was whispering.  “Please, please, please…”

“I don’t think you can save him,” I said.

“He’s… I wish I could, but that’s not what I’m worried about,” she said.  She looked at me and whispered, “Lockdown.”

A silence followed her word.

“Let’s go,” Gordon said.  “Get out of here before-”

The siren went off.  All through the complex, throughout the Bowels, the lighting shifted.

“Oh,” I said.  I slapped my face with my hand.  “Oh.  Well, you just had to go and jinx it, didn’t you?”

Heavy thuds marked the barricades dropping down.  With the experiment loose as far down as she was, chances were good that they’d only sealed off the exit.

“I’m sorry,” Lillian said, in a small voice.  “I’m really sorry.”

Like we haven’t spent enough time down here already, I thought, as I heard the loudest thud yet, a final, terrible impact, burying us inside.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.02 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.2

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

In the wake of the biggest seal coming down, breakers, locks, and defense systems could be heard, one after the other, throughout the complex, each one a distinct ‘boom’ with a long series of echoes following it.  The room vibrated with the motion of water through the floor and ceiling, before something filled up or the flow became consistent.

“Just to make it absolutely clear,” I said.  “I wasn’t here when this happened.”

“What?” Lillian asked.  The look she gave me was a bewildered one.

“First thing Hayle or Briggs are going to think is, ‘Sy did it.’ Guarantee you.  I’d like to point out, for everyone in the room, except maybe the dead guy there, who isn’t listening, that I’m innocent this time.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Helen said.  “You weren’t here.”

“How is that a priority?” Lillian asked, her voice tremulous, like she might break at any second.  “Why does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.  She was gesturing far more than usual, and her hands were bloody.  She shoved them in my direction, “This is one of the very worst things that could happen, and it happened in the worst way, and you’re assigning blame?”

Deflecting blame.”

Lillian wheeled around and lunged for me.  Gordon swept her up and caught her in a tight hug, holding her back, and holding her at the same time.  It served as emotional support just as much as it was keeping her from trying to strangle me with her gore-smeared hands.

“I can beat you in a fight, Sy!” Lillian shouted, still struggling.  “Just give me an excuse!”

I spread my arms helplessly, unsure of what to say.

Outside the door, a long train of people in lab coats ran down the length of the hallway, shouted instructions flying between them.

Lillian had seen her share of crises.  Yes, she was young, and being very good and spending a lot of time around us did influence her behavior to sometimes mask how young she really was, but I’d honestly expected a response similar to the other doctors, rather than this.

I looked at Jamie, one eyebrow raised.

“She’s claustrophobic,” Jamie informed me.  “Right now she’s-”

“I’m not claustrophobic,” Lillian cut him off.  “I’m phobic of this, whatever the phobia is for being trapped in a dungeon with dangerous experiments and sterilization procedures!”

“Understandable,” Jamie said, gently.

“When I think of worst case scenarios and I think of those a lot because I work with you guys, when I think about the stuff most of it starts like this and I’m in the Bowels of the Academy,” Lillian said, and she put an awful lot of emotion into her voice at the end.

Mary approached, and Gordon handed off Lillian to her.  Lillian buried her face into Mary’s shoulder.

The emotion in Lillian’s voice carried over as she continued speaking.  “I like to be prepared just in case so I can be strong, but in the worst thoughts I’m here and there’s almost no point to being strong because I’m here, and if I feel like imagining something especially bad to test myself, then sometimes something’s loose and we have no idea what it is, and if I feel like being really, really mean to myself, then I imagine Sy being there and he’s making fun of me all the while.  And it’s happening!”

“Why?” Gordon asked.  “Why do that to yourself?”

“Because it sucks being the only one that’s freaking out!  Just like this, right now!  I don’t want to stand out when you all are saying, ‘that’s one big spider, do you think it eats horses?’  But no, I get freaked out and Sy acts like a penis, and Helen acts like she’s seen worse because she has and that doesn’t make me feel better at all!  The rest of you are okay and nice about it.  I want to mentally fortify myself, so I don’t get scared anymore.”

“We can work on it together,” Mary offered.  “We’ll get through this, and we’ll work on it together.”

“I don’t want to be scared anymore,” Lillian mumbled.  “I’ve heard too many stories from my classmates and stuff.”

“Dumbass,” I said.

Jamie punched me, giving me a glare.  Everyone else stared at me in shock.

I pressed on anyway.  “You’re valuable to us because you’re normal.  Mary should know as well as any of us, how we need people to remind us how normal people act.  The day you stop being scared and become one of us, we won’t need you like we do.”

The counterpoint is that by being around us, she’s absorbing our qualities, trying to emulate us.

“That almost sounds comforting,” Mary said.

“It isn’t,” Lillian said.  “Sy doesn’t do comforting.  He does manipulation.”

“No, Sy does comfort people,” Jamie said.  “He just does it in his own special way.”

Lillian scowled.

Everyone has a weak point, I thought.  Everyone has good days and bad ones.  It’s only when we’ve seen someone on their best and worst days that we can truly know them.

This was Lillian’s bad day, it seemed.

“You want to be a professor someday, right?” I asked.  Her good day.  The day she gets her coat and degree.

Lillian nodded.

“If you’re going to be the best Lillian you can be, it’s not going to be by trying to fit in with us.  Take another step closer to being the woman that wears a black coat.  That doesn’t mean being fearless, it means doing what needs to be done.”

Lillian nodded again.  She seemed a little less distraught than before.  Mary gave her a reassuring squeeze of the shoulders.

“…So tell us what’s going on,” I told her.

Her face fell.

I expected Jamie to hit me for that one, but he didn’t.  Perhaps he wanted to know as much as I did.

Lillian started explaining in a way that made me think of a stitched, very deliberately, without a whole lot of emotion, “I said this happened in the worst way.  These first few floors are supposed to be for stuff that isn’t so dangerous.  The lockdown protocols here have to be manually activated by the people in the labs.  Something that dangerous shouldn’t be here, and it shouldn’t have gotten loose.”

“Further down you go, the more there is to keep things contained,” Helen added.  “With some exceptions.  It gets wobbly with people trading for lab space.”

“What was this experiment, exactly?” Mary asked.

“Project codename Sub Rosa.  Another attempt at reviving the dead,” Gordon said.  He had the file.  Jamie reached for the papers, and Gordon handed them over before continuing, “They pitched it for weapon funding, saying that it had uses in feigning death.  Spy dies in an obvious and undeniable manner, pulse stopped, heartbeat stopped, gets placed in the cocoon, revived.  Or the Academy removes one of its enemies, steals them away from the morgue, and then revives them for questioning.”

“Does it work?” Mary asked.

Lillian shook her head.  “Destroyed brain structures are still gone.  We were asking the doctor about this inhibitor that was reported to vastly speed up brain and muscle cell regeneration, but even if it rebuilds, it won’t rebuild the exact same things that were there before.  Some, but not all.”

“Blank slate,” Jamie said.  “Heal the body, restore the brain’s capacity, but the person doesn’t just magically grow back.”

I gave him a curious look.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  Though she was oblivious to my exchange of glances with Jamie, she was more focused on the task at hand than she had been.  I wondered if it was my advice or the fact that she was talking about something she was passionate about.

“She doesn’t have any offensive weapons?” Mary asked.

Gordon shook his head.

“She’s strong,” Helen said.  “There wasn’t anything about that in the file.”

Lillian said, “Doctor Shipman-”

“Him?” I asked, pointing at the body.

“Him, yes.  He had to know that Sub Rosa was exceeding expectations,” Lillian said, “But he chose to keep it secret.  Why?  Telling the Academy would have meant extra funding.”

“Excellent, Lillian,” I said.  “That’s a question we need to answer.  Secrets within secrets, with that experiment at the center of it.”

Gordon nodded, “We should probably check in with Gorger, then figure out how we can help.”

We nodded, though Lillian seemed reluctant.

“The experiment is probably killing everyone she comes across,” Gordon said.  “If we’re going to contribute, it can’t be in a face to face confrontation.  We gather information, disseminate that information, and see if we can’t work with Gorger to keep the problem contained.”

A bunch of us started to speak all at once.  It was Lillian who came through the clearest.  Or Lillian that Gordon chose to listen to, anyway.

“Without us in the containment?” Lillian asked.

“Exactly,” Gordon said.

Mary, Jamie and I spoke up at exactly the same time.  He deferred to us.

I let Mary win.  The nebulous benefit garnered by being the one to bring it up wasn’t worth getting on the wrong side of Mary’s competitive spirit.

“She isn’t killing everything she comes across,” Mary said.  “She walked right by us as we were coming up.  We weren’t even really hiding, we were on the stairs.”

“Yep,” I said.  “That’s what I was gonna say.”

“She went down?” Gordon asked.

“Down.”

“It’s reassuring that she didn’t go after you, but why go down?  Why is she being selective about who she kills?” Gordon asked.  “Something happened to make someone call for an emergency state.  They must have found a body.  She would have moved on, or they’d have locked down one specific area.”

Helen nodded.  “Code blue.  Or a code indigo is possible.  Or a code white.  Code brown, even?  That doesn’t narrow things down.  There are any number of reasons they could have locked everything down.”

“I know what those codes mean,” Lillian said, quiet.  “This is moving closer to me getting all panicky again.”

“All I meant was that something happened, and it wasn’t just a strange creature wandering around that made people react,” Gordon said.

We headed out the door.  After a moment’s pause, glancing at each other to make sure we were all together, we started down the stairs.  Gordon and Mary took the lead, Helen and Lillian second, with Jamie and I at the rear.

“We need to find Gorger, first of all,” Gordon said.  “He hangs out more at the lower levels.  Eight or nine.”

“Stop at floor six first,” Jamie said.  He handed the file back to Gordon.  “Our scientist here has relatives.  You guys interviewed one a month ago.”

“We did?” Gordon asked.

“Bug swarms, tranquilizing and anaesthetic venom.  Helen, Lillian, and Sy.”

“I remember,” Lillian said.  “The girl, right?  I liked her.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “Sounds like a plan.”

With the way the stairwell was constructed, the Bowels constituted a deep, circular shaft that disappeared far, far below.  The stairwell spiraled down the exterior, with doors at set intervals.  Floor two, labs one through twenty four.  The entrance to labs twenty five through fifty was a bit lower.

After floor two ended, there was a gap where there were no openings at all.  A given floor or ceiling was very, very thick, loaded with sterilization and containment measures.

“Don’t forget to watch walls and ceilings,” Mary said, pointing at the space under the stairs to her left.  “Is that old hat for all of you?  I’ve only done the one job with you, and a lot of interviews, but those aren’t really a job, I don’t want to keep giving advice that you’ve all heard before.”

“Definitely not a job.  Torture, more like,” I said.  Mary turned and flashed me a smile.

“Walls and ceilings,” Mary said, again.  “Tip Percy gave us when we were planning how we would deal with various weapons the Academy might send after us.”

“It’s a good tip,” Gordon said.  “But I don’t think she can climb on walls or drop down on top of us.”

“I like being extra careful,” Lillian said.  “Being extra careful sounds fantastic.”

She said fantastic with a dismal tone.  If she hadn’t actually said it, I would have heard the inflection she gave her words and thought that ‘fantastic’ was a word that was never going to leave her mouth.

We passed floor three, the hallway that led to labs one through ten.

Long, long way down.

“Tetradeleocleithrophobia,” Jamie whispered to me.

“What?”

“She said it wasn’t claustrophobia.  It was a phobia of being trapped in a place with monsters and life-exterminating deathtraps.  I really wanted to take a stab at it, but then she would’ve been trying to strangle me, not you.”

“Take a stab at it?” I asked.  “You memorized a dictionary when you were eight.  I’d think you’d know.”

“They don’t let me learn Latin, like how I’ve been forbidden to read Academy texts.  I pick some up, just like I’ve glimpsed textbook pages now and again, but I’m not sure.”

“Ahh.”

“I don’t like not being sure.  Not about day to day stuff.  But about my head.  Either I know something, or I don’t.  But I think tetradeleocleithrophobia would be right, right?”

I gave him my best shrug.

“That’s going to bother me for a long time,” he said.

“If we make it out of here, I’ll find a way to double check it for you,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  They don’t expect me to retain much, memory-wise, but I can figure it out and keep track of that much.”

He threw an arm around my shoulders.

We passed the start of the fourth floor like that, Jamie with the book under one arm and me under the other.  I could see Lillian getting more agitated as we got further down.  Gordon and Mary were in their element.  Helen didn’t tend to show much at all.

Footsteps pounded on the stairs, echoing up the stairwell.  We stepped into a hallway to get out of the way and take what little cover we could.

A group of men and women in white lab coats fled up the stairs.  One glanced at us, but was too out of breath to say anything.  Fear and concern marked her expression, and her unwillingness to stop for even a few seconds helped fill in the rest of the story.

Or not.

The start of the fifth floor was a little distance below us.  On the stairs around the hallway, there were pieces of bodies, smears of blood, and more dropped pieces along the way.

Bloody footsteps marked the passage of the escaped experiment into the hallway.

“She went this way?” Mary asked.

“Seems too easy,” I said.  “Too obvious.”

“Sometimes things are easy and obvious,” Gordon said.  “If she is in here, we can close off the section.”

“Requiring a sacrificial pawn,” Jamie observed.

It was a heavy concept.  Which of us were we willing to sacrifice?

Why did I feel like one or two of the others might nominate me?

“Or we could try to convince someone else to do it,” I offered an alternative.  “Yeah?”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.

He led us into the hallway.

We’d spent some time down here already.  I knew that the hallways on the lower levels were more complex.  There were thicker doors, heavy ones that would be hard for even a stitched with a battering ram to smash down.  Beyond would be more hallways, ones with safeguards, sterilization and elimination measures.  Stitched guards, probably.  At least one of the corpses that had been used to decorate the surroundings had been a stitched, going by the dry flesh and the wires that had been pulled free here and there, sticking out of the flesh like porcupine quills.

Things had changed since then.  Lightbulbs had been smashed here and there, and there were sections of hallway where a surprise party could have been laying in wait, complete with cake and clowns.  Or monsters.

Monsters were more likely to be lurking in the shadows.  We could walk into the darkness and bump noses with her.  Even Mary or Gordon wouldn’t be able to achieve much if that were to happen.  Torn to shreds.

“This screams ‘trap’,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  He’d already stopped advancing.  “I was thinking something along those lines.”

“Sub Rosa was human once.  Probably isn’t very human anymore,” Jamie said.  “Blank slate syndrome, unlearned skills, partially retained skills.  She might be more similar to a fevered stitched.  Odd patterns of behavior, with brief and narrow moments of brilliance.  It’s not impossible that she could be capable of laying traps.”

“Including preparing ambushes,” I said.

“What are your instincts?” Gordon asked.

“Leave,” Mary said.  “Better to live to fight another day.”

Another Percy-ism?

“I don’t disagree,” I chimed in.  I was actually glad that Percy’s philosophies and mine lined up here.  If they hadn’t, I would have been put into the awkward position of either going with a dumb plan or possibly disturbing Mary.

Not upsetting or angering or anything like that, but disturbing her.  Moving her from a place of peace and balance to something she was less easy with.

We backed out of the corridor, heading toward the stairwell.

As we retreated, a silhouette formed out of the shadow.  Our missing experiment, taller than even a tall man, adorned in folds of skin.  She had more blood on her now than she had when we’d last crossed paths.

Sub Rosa.

A knife had appeared in Mary’s hand.  She didn’t throw it, but spun it around one finger, catching it, spun it, caught it.

From the look of it, and I’d seen most of Mary’s knives at this point, I took it to be a throwing knife.

“No,” Gordon said, under his breath.  “If she was passive toward you earlier…”

Mary nodded.  The knife stayed where it was, but the periodic spinning motion continued.  A comfort thing?

Sub Rosa advanced, then stopped.  She turned her attention to a set of double doors, heavy, built to interlock and seal.

She gripped the handles, fluid churned in the tubes that riddled Sub Rosa’s body, and the experiment hauled, her entire body contorting to maximize leverage, simultaneously forcing her body toward the ground and hauling back on the doors.

“No,” Lillian said, under her breath.  “This is bad, this is bad.  Run.”

“Run,” Helen echoed her.

That was a special word, coming from Helen.  We ran.

We reached the stairwell, and I was moving fast enough that I had to catch the railing to come to a halt.

“The security measures,” Lillian said.  “This far down, if you damage the doors, cause too much disturbance knocking things around, then the slabs built into the ceiling fall down and the gas gets pumped in, and worse stuff.”

“How automatic is that little feature?” Jamie asked.

“Very?  There are places we’re not even supposed to run because the tremors can disturb mechanisms.”

“Look,” Jamie said.

We looked.

With the lighting so bad in the hallway and Sub Rosa being as far away as she was, things were barely more than smudges, dark grey on black, easy to miss when joined by spots in my vision and the throbbing of my heartbeat against my eyes.

The noise gave context to the vague images I was seeing.  An eerie scream of tearing metal, followed by a metal-on-stone collision.

“If everything’s automatic, why isn’t she triggering the safeguards here?” Jamie asked.  “She just tore a metal door off its hinges.”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.  “It should go off.”

“But it isn’t,” Gordon stated.

“I don’t know.

Screams echoed from the other end of the hallway that Sub Rosa was in, overlapping with one another.

“We should go down.”

“We’ll corner ourselves,” Jamie said.

“We’re already cornered.  If we go up, we’ll be out of options and still won’t have a way out.”

“We could ride it out,” I said, “find a lab to lock ourselves in, but I don’t think that would go over so well with Hayle and Briggs.”

“We’d have a better chance of living,” Lillian pointed out.

“If you want to do that, Lil, don’t let me stop you,” I said.  I watched down the length of the hallway that Sub Rosa had gone down.  “You’re a free person.  Still, I can’t think of anything more miserable than being in a locked room and being unable to do anything but wait for the monsters to come find us.  It would be nice to have you along.”

“I can think of a lot of things more miserable,” Lillian said.  “I’ve been practicing imagining terrible things.”

“We should go,” Mary said.

“Not until we figure out if the group is splitting up,” I said.

The screaming stopped.  Another sound quickly picked up in its place: the sound of tearing metal.

“Question is, is the Lillian you want to be in six years the type to go upstairs and hide, or is she the type that solves problems?”

“That’s a stupid question.  I want to be alive, you idiot!”

“Up, down, split up.  Pick one,” Gordon said, with more stress than usual in his voice.

“Lillian isn’t deciding,” I said.

“I did, I have, you’re the one making this sound more complicated than it is!” Lillian told me.

“You want to go upstairs?  Go, then.  Maybe Mary or Gordon can go with you, keep you company and keep you safe,” I said.

“I can,” Mary said.

“I’m going downstairs with the rest of you,” Lillian said.  “That was my choice!”

“You didn’t-” I started.  Gordon clapped a hand over my mouth.

Things were emerging from the hallway.

Not Sub Rosa.

They were men and women, and none of them looked like they’d eaten well at all.  They didn’t shamble, they didn’t limp, but many were hunched over.  Glass cases and canisters were fused to their backs and shoulders, ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a breadbox, each one filled with a urine-yellow fluid, and each one housing what looked to be a sinuous aquatic lifeform, black and periodically uncoiling in the murky fluid.  Octopus, eel, or a combination of the two.

Each had long tracks of stitches on their arms, legs, and chests.  Their wrists were bent perpetually at right angles, metal spears forced out from beneath the flesh of their forearms and through their palms.

Modified stitched?  They didn’t look well looked after.

The men and women with the jars implanted into their backs picked up speed.  They were too malnourished to be fast, but it was a good indication that they’d decided to come after us.

“Down!” Gordon hissed the word.

We turned and made our way down.  With one hand on the wall to steady myself, I could take the stairs three at a time.  The others weren’t far behind.

Mary flipped a throwing knife around in her hand, then whipped it at one of the tinted lightbulbs.  The light died, leaving an entire section of stairs in near-pitch darkness, while leaving me to almost miss the stair I was planning on stepping on.  We fled into the makeshift shelter that the darkness provided, then stepped into the first hallway for the sixth floor.

Mary didn’t come with us into the hallway.  Seeing her only in silhouette, I could see how she was pulling the ribbon from her hair.  She knelt by the railing on the stairs, and then slowly backed up, joining us in the hallway.

A tripwire.  Crude, but effective, especially when the experiments looked as fragile as they did.

Lillian and Helen stopped at a heavy metal door, much like the one Sub Rosa had torn off the hinges.  The keypad clicked audibly as each button was punched.

“Damn it,” Lillian said, under her breath.

Our pursuers emerged, grabbing the railing for support, or shielding their eyes from the light right above them as they scanned the stairs above and below them, looking for fleeing children.  That same light made the cases on their backs and shoulders seem to glow, and the jaundiced color of their skin became especially apparent, a sallow yellow marked with dull grey tattoos.

Prison tattoos.  Convicts.  They weren’t stitched.  They were people.  The Academy needed its fodder for human experimentation, and prisoners of war, the worst criminals, and ex-slaves deemed unfit to be citizens of the crown were all candidates for such.

Meaning they were people with cause to be angry, desperate, and above all else, they were people who were an unpredictable sort of dangerous.

Sub Rosa exited the hallway, and came to stand in the midst of the group, head and shoulders above the rest.

She’d let them out.

“She has a strategy?” I murmured the question out loud.  “She knows where she’s going, who she’s going after, and she knows how to bypass the quarantine measures?”

“Let’s not forget about her friends,” Gordon said.  “She might have left you three alone, but it’s not likely they will.”

“Too many questions, no answers.  We need to talk to Shipman’s relative, and find out anything we can,” I said.  I checked over my shoulder.

Lillian punched a finger at the keypad once again, then mashed her fist into it, forehead coming to rest on the door.

Her bad day kept getting worse.  I’d seen Gordon’s bad day, I’d seen Jamie’s, Mary’s, and I’d seen Helen’s, in a way, though Helen’s concept of ‘bad’ was different from ours.

Would it be consolation to her if I told her that I might start thinking of her as one of us if she could just see this through?

Best not to test her when she was this close to breaking.

“Seems we can’t get through,” Helen said, turning my way to offer a cute smile.  “Whoever took shelter inside changed the code.”

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================================================== 3.03 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.3

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The footsteps sounded, drawing closer.  Heavy feet striking stone, the periodic bang of metal spikes on the railing, a muttered curse from one of the convicts.

We were in the dark, halfway down a hallway with only a bit of light coming through a slot above and halfway down the door.  An angled piece of metal at the ceiling caught the light from above the door and reflected it down onto the door’s surface, making the keypad visible.  At the other end of the hallway was the cylindrical shaft, deep, with stairs spiraling down the exterior, but Mary had destroyed one of the lights and the others were far away and out of sight.

Sub Rosa and a gang of Academy-modified convicts were making their way down toward us.

“We need to run,” Mary said.  She was closer to the opening, crouching, holding one end of the tripwire in one hand, a knife in the other.

With luck, barring any surprises, she could remove two of our pursuers.  If we ran, we could slip ahead of Sub Rosa’s group and try to make our way down the stairs to another level.

“If it was just you, me, Gordon, maybe Helen?  Sure,” I said.  “But I don’t think half of us would make it.”

“What?” Lillian asked.

“You, Jamie, maybe Helen, I don’t think you three would be fast enough,” I clarified.

“No,” Lillian said, breathless.

“Staying might mean we all die,” Jamie said.  “I’m okay with trying running, that in mind.”

“I’m not,” I said.  “If Mary wants to, or if Gordon wants to, then okay.  We can split up.  But I’m staying with.”

“I’m staying,” Gordon said, voice firm.

“Me too,” Mary said.  “If we lose too many members of the team the Lambs might be disbanded, anyway, and I don’t know what happens to me if that happens.  I like you guys.”

I smiled a bit.  Mary was coming up with excuses, the group being disbanded, but something told me she was more attached to our little ‘family’ than any of us.

“All or none, then,” I said.

“All or none,” Gordon agreed.

“Which means our only option is to get through,” Jamie said.

“Except we can’t!” Lillian said, with a note of panic to her voice.  She hit the keypad.  “Damn it!”

“Let me,” Gordon said.

Lillian and Helen got out of the way.  Gordon set about dismantling the keypad with his pocket knife.

I could hear the footsteps approaching, not just the echo, but the actual knock of foot on stair.  I looked back and forth from one end of the hallway to the other.  As I looked in Mary’s direction, she met my eyes, her grip on the knife tightening.

I could see the ways this might play out, though things got a lot less predictable when the convicts got close.  I wasn’t sure what they were, but I was willing to bet that Mary and Gordon together wouldn’t stand up to four or five of them and one experiment that could tear steel doors out of the frame.

“Mary,” the word left my lip before the thought had fully coalesced.

We’d lose.

I gave her a shake of my head.

“No?” she whispered.

The footsteps were drawing closer, to the point that I could make out the individual footfalls between the scrapes and bangs of Gordon’s attempts at working with the keypad.  They were just around the corner.

“No,” I whispered.  I reached out.

She abandoned the makeshift tripwire, stood, and crossed half of the length of the hallway to reach me, taking my hand.  My hand was more sweaty than hers, which caught me by surprise.  I held her hand tight, being careful not to hurt her fingers.

My heart thudded in my chest, making my entire body rock with each beat.  I was jittery, and I wasn’t normally a jittery type.

The Lambs, my friends, my gang, my family.

I didn’t want to see them get hurt.

Come on.  Down the stairs, I thought.

The footsteps got closer, and shadows moved just beyond the exit of the hallway.

Down…

Sub Rosa was foremost among them.  She reached the broader stair that was just beyond the hallway’s exit, then turned, facing us.

The convicts surrounded her.  I could only barely make out their eyes in the gloom, as they stared down the hallway at us.

I heard a snicker.

I gave Mary’s hand a fierce squeeze, then let go.

In a fight, I was useless.

Better to give the group as much warning as possible, if this went sour.

I stepped forward, putting out a hand to tell Mary to stop, to urge her to keep back.

Another step forward.  It put me at the head of the group.  The rest were behind me, a few steps away from the door.

Might be nice if you popped that door open, Gordon, I thought.  Would rather run at this point than put my life on the line for you guys.

Sub Rosa advanced, in the lead of her group.  A woman in robes and habit of flesh, eyes permanently open, mouth permanently sealed, stained with blood.

The convicts were jaundiced, malnourished, but what remained in their ravaged bodies was a hard, scary sort of ranginess, as different from normal people as snarling mutts chained up in a graveyard were from house dogs.

A big fellow broke the silence.  He stood a head taller than everyone, only a foot or so shorter than Sub Rosa.  He looked like he’d eaten better than the rest.  The leader?  His voice was soft, but it had a whine to it, not suited to how large he was, the kind of tone I expected to hear from one of the youngest kids at the orphanage, telling Mrs. Earles how his toy had been stolen, except it came from the throat of a man.  “Academy brat.”

I kept my mouth shut.

“Look what you did to me,” he said.  He raised his hand, showing me the spike that speared out of the palm, forcing his wrists into a permanent right angle bend.  The flesh around the spike looked red and infected, and there was a great deal of black and yellow fluid there.

I’d thought it was a giant needle, connected to the jars of fluid on his back, but it wasn’t.  It was solid, without a hollow part to it.  Almost as long as his arm.

“Look,” he said, more insistent, his tone more of a mewl.  Then, fierce, he raised his voice, “Look!

I kept my mouth shut.  Damn him.  He wasn’t the one I wanted to be focusing on right this moment.

Oblivious to the man’s cries, Sub Rosa strode toward me.  Now that she was closer, I could see the odd musculature on her body, highlighted by the thin shafts of light that made it through the door.  Of her entire body, only the face seemed ordinary.  The rest was put together in an odd way, with a strange aesthetic to it.

I swallowed hard.

But I didn’t move out of her way.

As strategies went, this wasn’t one that was well founded in fact and a deep understanding of our opposition.  This was one that was very likely to get me killed or maimed.

But she was acting with deliberation, not quite as if following a script, but not rampaging either.

She’d left us alone before.

She had been following a set course of action.  Now I was putting myself in the way of that course.  Testing it.

Behind her, the soft-spoken, mewling convict spoke up, looking past her to stare at me.  “You did this to us.  I’d give you the worst spanking of your life, little boy, but I can’t, because of what you all did to my body.”

Our bodies,” the one woman of the group said, with a hard sort of anger to her voice.  She didn’t have the same whiny tone, so it wasn’t a part of the changes that had been made to them.  It was only the one guy.

I didn’t take my eyes off Sub Rosa, I couldn’t.  The convict’s words were reminding me that I didn’t have a course of action planned for what came next.  I was laying odds on Sub Rosa killing or striking me.  If it came to that, at least the others would know they had to fight if they were going to have a chance to make it out.

Between me and the others, there were only about ten paces of hallway between Sub Rosa and the door.  The six of us were confined to that space.

I still had my hand out a little ways behind me, the flat of it facing Mary,

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Door?” I asked him, still staring Sub Rosa down.  Her eyes moved down to look at me for the first time.

“I can’t.  If you gave me two or three more minutes, maybe, but… I’m sorry.”

I didn’t turn away.

“Can’t spank,” the convict mused aloud.  “Next best thing, if I stick this down your throat, you think I can get the spike coming out the other end?”

I resisted the bait.

Sub Rosa was only a short distance away.  She was my focus.

“Breakfast was nice,” I commented, for the benefit of the others.

Eating together with everyone.

Silly last thing to be saying, as I put myself in front of a brain-damaged, door-rending killer, but I didn’t have time to really come up with better.

I could hear the sucking of the tubes at Sub Rosa’s face, chest, and stomach.

She turned, walking around me.

Her hand reached out, touching the top of my head.  She absently smoothed my hair down in passing.

If I was shocked, showing it would have been a terminal mistake.  I stayed still, my expression steady as the convicts approached me.  The others had to handle Sub Rosa on their own.

The soft-spoken giant with a heart of perverse violence approached me.  He touched the metal rods together, and they sparked.

“I’ll give you your breakfast,” he said, under his breath.  Just for him and me.

Oh.  Huh.

I was between him and Sub Rosa now.  He picked up the pace, raising his hand, spike extended right for my face, thrusting.

I could have sidestepped, but I didn’t see that going anywhere good.  I stepped back, instead, and bumped into Sub Rosa.  The spike came right for me.  His steps were bigger than mine.

He was aiming for my lower face.

In one end and out the other.

I opened my mouth, and the spike touched my front teeth, something cracked, I felt like a vein in my face had leaped out the front of my head and torn away everything in the way, followed by a wave of clenching pain gripping the other side of my face, until I thought my own muscles would destroy themselves.

“Sy!” Mary cried out.

I sprawled to Sub Rosa’s left.  My face clenched again, as if the one side of it was a fist.  The spike wasn’t even still touching me.  I gasped in a small breath, and realized I could make a sound if I needed to.

If she was kind enough to fix my hair, could I ask for help here?

Yes.

But instincts told me no.

The thoughts that played out in the next few seconds told me why my instincts had told me no.  Of all the possible outcomes that followed, Sub Rosa standing up for me and fighting the convicts was the only good one, and I couldn’t explain why she would.

I couldn’t explain why she wouldn’t either, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to make a shot in the dark when I wasn’t even sure what I was shooting at.

I moved my tongue, trying to figure out the extent of the damage, and felt a large chunk of tooth roll between my tongue and the roof of my mouth.

My gaze was fixed on the convict as I spat out the little bit of tooth.

Stare him down, show no fear.

He was an animal, he barely had opposable thumbs anymore.  I had to communicate by the most basic means available.  Body language, expression, eye contact.

If I acted as afraid as I was, I became a known element.  Even if every single one of his victims had fought back, even if he was an innocent man, if he’d been in prison long enough to get the crude, washed-out tattoos that I saw on his arms, he had to have learned about pecking orders, hierarchies, power.

If I spoke, if I tried to convince him, if I used logic, then I became a student of the Academy, and it was a very unfortunate thing that I was wearing a white uniform.  They had cause to be angry at students of the Academy.

The remaining action I might have taken would have been to appeal to emotion, to communicate in terms of desire and drive, hopes, mercy.  It was a shot in the dark, I had no idea who he was or what he’d done, but from his words and situation I didn’t trust his ability to give mercy.  Still, it was the first choice I would have made, if I’d had to do something, like if he were to move on to threaten Jamie, Mary, or one of the others.

Instead, lying on my back, staring up at him, I spread my hands a little, turning my palms upward, fingers spread.

The man approached until his feet were to either side of me.  The spike moved over, until it pointed at the base of my throat.

I wanted to smile, laugh, taunt him, but that was as dangerous as any appeal to logic or emotion might have been.

My sanctuary here was in being alien, in making him as unsure as possible.  I channeled Helen.  The cold stare.  Well, a cold stare with my one eye twitching involuntarily from the last grazing touch of the spike.

He didn’t seem to care.  He brought the tip close enough to my throat for the energy within to make contact.

Man, that hurt.  My back arched as I found myself involuntarily pulling back, trying to pull my head and throat down through the floor.  A trace of whatever was within danced down the back of my head, making my thoughts explode into white noise.  He moved it toward the center of my body, making my arms, then one of my legs kick.  He left it like that, my leg going nuts, my body unable to move away without me heaving my chest up and into the waiting point.  Any second now, I’d lurch up and forward and impale myself.

The woman of the group stepped forward.  She couldn’t use her hand, but she reached out and nudged the convict’s arm with the back of her hand.

My leg kept kicking and cramping up, even as the spike moved away from my chest.

“Hm?” the convict asked her.

He followed her gaze.  I did too, raising my chin to look above me.

Sub Rosa had stepped forward, into the midst of the others, a few paces away from the door, and her upper body was twisted, looking back at me, at the leader of the convicts, and the woman.

Her expression was largely fixed by the modifications to her face.  Still, an intensity radiated from her.

The convict who’d had me at spike-point looked down at me, as if debating his options.  His gaze moved over the other Lambs.  He spat to one side, then stepped over and around me.

It wasn’t like it had been with Mauer.  These convicts weren’t with Sub Rosa because they knew her.  She was as much a mystery to them as she was to us, and the discovery that she didn’t approve of this sort of behavior was as much a surprise to the convict leader as it was to me.

A nice surprise, for me, but all the same…

Nobody gave me any help in standing.  Given the modifications that had been made to the convicts, that was a good thing.

My leg kicked once as I used the wall to help myself to my feet, nearly forcing me to the ground again.  I recovered, straightened, and wiped at the corner of my mouth with the back of one hand.  It came away with far too much blood on it.

I kept my expression still.

The others had backed away from Sub Rosa, and were standing on either side of the hallway.  Lillian looked scared, Jamie’s expression betrayed concern for me but not to the point I was positive the convicts would notice, and the others were managing to stay stoic and calm.

Sub Rosa stepped closer to Gordon, who stepped away, giving her space.

She reached into the simple mechanisms of the keypad, past them, and gripped something else.

The ceiling shuddered.  Something heavy fell above us, inside a hollow space.

With a glacial, careful set of movements, Sub Rosa pulled out a length of what looked to be mummified intestine.  Past the worn, shredded lining, wires were clearly visible, clustered together.

She pulled a little from the top, and the ceiling shuddered again.  Dust streamed down in plumes from the spaces between slabs of stone above us.

Sub Rosa pulled some from further below.  Something fluid moved through the walls and ceiling.  Lillian shrieked a little.

The fluid stopped as quickly as it had began, but I could hear the trickling as the remainder found a way out.

She’s brain damaged, even.

What if she forgot a step?

Sub Rosa’s fingernails tore away the lining around the wires.  She seized one, gripped it, and tore it.

Even with her incredible strength, she had trouble keeping the individual pieces from pulling up and down, respectively.  Still, she hauled it together, closer, and tied it into a crude knot.

Far too crude a knot for my liking, given everything that those mechanisms were apparently designed to do.

My eyes met those of the other members of the group.  They were watching as much as I was.  They were thinking the exact same thing I was.

She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Sub Rosa gripped the door that Gordon, Helen, and Lillian  had been trying to open, then contorted her whole body to shove it.  It rattled violently in the frame.

She adjusted her grip, then heaved, pulling back.  Every muscle in her body, including some beneath the robe of flesh she was cocooned in, seemed to stand out in relief as she put everything into hauling back on the door.

Something within the door snapped.

Push, pull, heave, ho.  There was a mechanical kind of motion to it, it was so steady, precise, and relentless.  Each motion seemed to bend things only a little.  Stress lined appeared around the edges of the frame.  Those stress lines became folds.

The convict who’d been threatening me was giving me a sidelong glance.  I didn’t do him the favor of meeting his gaze.  He didn’t know who I was, he didn’t know why Sub Rosa was interested in my welfare, and I wasn’t interested in informing him either way.

The handle came away in one piece, mangled screws sticking out the other side.  She tossed it back and to the side.  Gordon stopped it from sliding along the floor with one foot.

Sub Rosa had a singular focus.  She hooked her fingers into the holes before resuming the forward-and-back motion.  I thought her fingers might break from the movement, with the positions she had them in, but she didn’t seem to mind or care.

She heals fast, if nothing else.  I wasn’t sure if that meant she healed in seconds, minutes, hours or days, but either way, she didn’t seem to mind.

The door folded toward the middle, and she placed hands inside the gap, forcing it wider.

Once she got that far, the door didn’t stand for long.  In a matter of seconds, she was standing with arms extended to either side, muscles flexing against flesh until they looked like cords of rough-spun rope, thick as my leg and spun out in darkest crimson.

Shouts echoed from further down the hall.

Sub Rosa advanced, each step sure, oddly graceful with her abundant natural strength.

The leader of the convicts sneered at me as he walked by.  The woman stared me down, an angry expression, dismissive.

It might have been rebelliousness that made me do it, but I was inspired.

I turned, and I walked in formation with Sub Rosa and her group of convicts, beside the woman of the group.

“The fuck are you doing?” the woman asked.

I gave her a sidelong glance, but I kept my expression as still and as cold as I could manage it.

She frowned, but she didn’t press me further.

Without a word on the subject, the others fell in step, joining the crowd that had gathered around Sub Rosa.  Even Lillian followed suit, miraculously enough, though her hands clenched her bag and betrayed her fear.  Gordon was the last to join the group, and walked close to Lillian, so his body blocked the others’ view of her.

Apparently, the alien nature of the rest of us was enough to keep the convicts from making something of it.

“What the fuck’s going on?” one of the other guys asked his buddy.  Both had scraggly beards, but one was bald, and the other had long hair.

“Whatever the fuck it is, it’s better than where we were,” the leader of the convicts said.  He gave me a dirty look.

We made our way down the hallway, and more shouts joined the first, people ducking into labs, shutting doors.  Locks clicked.  The hallway extended into branches, forming a loose cross shape.

Sub Rosa stopped before stepping into the middle.  She found another piece of metal on the wall, and pried it free.  The work she did this time was faster, simpler.  Again, a tearing of one wire, tying it.

Her head inclined up, looking at the singular slab of stone that hung over the branch.  She shifted her weight carefully onto the next section of floor, then lowered her gaze, turning to face us.

She pointed at the convict leader, then the baldy-beardy, down one length of the branch.

At the next two convicts, including long-hair-beardy, second branch.

At the woman.  She pointed and started walking in the same moment.  Toward the next set of reinforced doors, protecting the next section of hallway.

The first door to our left was swiftly kicked open by the convict leader.  I heard the commotion, the taunting, and the scream that followed.

The others were already working to kick in doors, punching at wood or prying at metal with their spikes.

The woman was hanging back, halfway between us and Sub Rosa.  Watching both, a concerned look on her face.

Maybe not a violence-happy killer like the leader was.  The individual most interested in figuring out what was going on.

I glanced at the others.  Speaking was dangerous, if it could give us away to the woman.  All we needed to be utterly ruined would be a single word from her.

Mary was standing next to me.  My hand touched her hip, traced down her leg, and reached the bottom of her Academy-uniform skirt.

I slid my hand under it, along her leg, and found the sheath with knives placed along it.

She gave me the funniest look as I plucked one knife from the sheath at her inner thigh.  Mingled curiosity and suppressed outrage, all bound together into a quirk of the eyebrow and a smouldering look in the eye, so small an expression that the convict woman wouldn’t see it.

I looked at Jamie, who was as cool as Mary was heated.  His eyes flicked over in Sub Rosa’s direction.

I had to read so much from so little.  Jamie had a focus, he remembered.  What was he remembering?  What was he dwelling on, more than any of us?

We were on the sixth floor.  The relative of the dead scientist, Sub Rosa’s creator, was somewhere on this floor.

And he was looking over in the direction of the deeper sixth floor labs.  Which Sub Rosa was in the process of breaking into.

I gave him the slightest of nods, my chin moving by hairs.

He blinked confirmation.

The convict leader stepped out of the one lab, and his weapons were splattered in blood.  Had things gone differently, it might have been mingled with my own.

With a spring in my step, blade palmed in my hand, I headed in his direction.

“Next one is mine,” I told him, my expression cold and flat, as I headed to the next door.

He didn’t respond right away.  He finally offered a begrudging, confused, “We’ll see.”

The others were already moving in their individual directions.  To other convicts and other people who were slated to die.

It was a merry dance, dangerous, but merry.  Each of us moved in coordination.

And we still lacked answers.  We were dancing in pitch darkness, and one misstep here could end us all.

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================================================== 3.04 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.4

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I tapped the handle of the knife against the side of my leg as I walked, the flat of the blade pressed against my wrist.

People were about to die.  Depending on how this played out, those people could include us.

As experiments, we’d been subjected to all kinds of testing.  Most of the time, the testing was specific to us and our individual situations.  Helen had started out doing a lot of tests that involved passing muster among her supposed peers, while I’d been tasked with studying up new tasks and long, painful sets of memory games.

One of the tests, however, was one that involved all of us, probably because Hayle liked it, and because he was interested in how we functioned as a group.  Each of us were given a set of choices to make, selfish and kind.  He mixed it up, added new rules, and organized us into teams, pitting us against regular students.  The dilemma was simple, usually.  If both parties were kind, both received a minor benefit.  If both were selfish, both were punished.  If one was kind and the other selfish, the selfish one was rewarded, the kind one punished.

It stuck in my mind because it was, for me, the circumstance of my meeting Gordon and Helen, taking a seat across the table from them, with Hayle introducing us.  Curiosity had won out and I’d gone to find and meet Jamie on my own, which had been a lifesaver in many respects.

But that wasn’t my focus right now.  It came down to the game.  Sometimes we’d played and we’d been allowed to communicate.  Sometimes we’d been silenced and forced to communicate through decisions alone.  There was even a point in time where we’d played with territories and quadrants, and I’d been the only one silenced, because Hayle was tired of me skewing his results by winning as often as I was.

Right this moment, we were playing the game.

The convict leader walked beside me, periodically giving me curious looks.  He was a sadist of the worst sort, and his innate savagery had been given an almost desperate edge.  He ruled by fear.  A simple show of strength could inspire that fear and cow others, but he’d spent some time in prison, he’d spent some time with his fellow experiments, and at some point he must have realized that others were just as strong as him.

Sometimes people found a kind of uneasy peace with that kind of power.  If everyone had a gun, cocked and aimed at the next guy, nobody was willing to shoot.  That went for prison muscle and voltaic spikes sticking out of people’s hands.

This was a guy who hadn’t backed down or found that uneasy peace.  He’d learned that when everyone else was hitting as hard as he was, he could still scare people by twisting the knife, maybe being a little crazy or a little scary.

No guarantees about particulars, of course, but in terms of drawing up a mental picture of who he was and how he operated, it served.  I knew what things I had to watch out for, and foremost among those things was the notion that this was a man who asserted control through fear and pain, and with more than a few ongoing mysteries at present, myself included, he might be feeling a little out of control.

I’d put myself within arm’s reach of him.  I was walking in step with him.

He moved the spike in my direction.  I watched it, but didn’t flinch.

“What makes you think I’m going to let you do anything?” he asked.

“You’ll do it because you want to see what I can do,” I said.  I wiped at the blood on my lower face, doing my best to get as much off my face as possible.  It hurt, but I didn’t let the pain show.  I left the blood cupped in the palm of my hand.  I still had the knife palmed in my other hand.

“That so?”

“It is,” I said.  I picked up the pace, moving ahead of the convict leader.  And you’ll do it because you probably feel insecure letting the other three out of your sight.  Like I did with Mary.

I reached the door.  It was a large piece of metal work, thick, with a slot halfway down for paperwork.  Whatever was inside wasn’t big enough to escape through the slot.  Still, it was very nearly as secure as the doors that separated the sections here.

I stopped, paused, and then knocked.  Shave and a haircut, two pence.

No response.  Something moved within, rummaging.  I didn’t hear words, which meant it was only one person.  Probably.

Probably heard the screaming just down the hall.

With two clean fingers, blood still mostly on my palm, I plucked the badge from under my pocket.  I passed it through the slot for the papers, and it dropped a short distance before clinking landing in the tray on the far side.

The simplest answer was often the best.

The door opened a crack.  The person on the other side took a second to look down enough to see me.

“Excuse me,” I said, pushing on the door.  They resisted for a moment, then grudgingly let the door open.  Which was good.  If the convict standing behind me had felt the need to push his way through, I wasn’t sure I could have stopped his forward momentum.

The man who looked down at me was thirty or so, hair cut short, beard longer, trimmed into a point at the chin, his mustache styled.  His white coat was pristine.  No doubt one of several.

He was new to this, no doubt new to this sixth floor lab within the Bowels.

His experiment was still in an early stage, within a heated incubator at one side of the room, sealed off behind jail doors and glass panes.

And here is where the game comes to a head.  The others are in other rooms, facing similar situations.  Convicts nearby, scientists and scholars in the rooms, and between Sub Rosa’s vague instructions and the convict leader’s example, the other thugs are going to want to kill other scientists.

The choice between selfish and kind.  If I killed the scientist and the others killed the convicts in other rooms, I’d have a crazy bastard at my back who’d want to put me down the moment he realized what was going on.  If I killed the convict and the others killed scholars, they’d be at risk.  There were so many variables to take into account.  How capable were they of doing one thing or the other?

The trick with Hayle’s game, the reason I’d been able to win so consistently, was that the game was never a standalone thing.  There were a hundred or a thousand clues communicated over past iterations of the game, informing the most current game.

It was these clues I relied on now.  I could trust Gordon and Helen to match pace with me.  We’d faced Hayle’s test enough times as a group to know how each of us thought.  Jamie could remember the results of each game he’d participated in, and that would inform his decision.  I trusted him more than anyone.

The real question, the test of our group cohesion, was, well, what choice would Lillian make, and what choice would Mary make?

Lillian was kind, a healer more than a killer.  Mary was the opposite, though she wasn’t unkind, exactly.

I had to figure out which decision they’d make, and I had to figure out what decision Gordon, Helen, and Jamie would think those two would make.

“I’m going to kill you now,” I told him, giving him a very pointed, obvious wink.  With my back to the convict, I kept my hand and the knife in front of me, and scraped up the blood with the blade.

“Huh?  What?” the man asked.  Then, in a tone more suited to rebuking a very small child for stealing candy from a store, he told me, “No!”

“Yes,” I said.  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“What’s the difference?  What are you even talking about?”

“Hard way it is,” I said.

Holding the knife upside-down, I punched the butt-end of it into his nether regions.

Most available, vulnerable spot, given the difference in height.

He made a strangled noise, then fell to the ground.

I turned on the spot, flipping the dagger over, and showed the convict leader the knife that was smeared with the blood from my hand.

“Cut it at the root,” I said.  I gave the convict leader a wide smile.  “He’s going to bleed out.”

The convict leader didn’t look impressed.  “These doctors are good at patching themselves up.”

“Good point!” I said.  Upbeat, chipper, still channeling Helen.  “Help me.  Stand on his hands?”

“You’re giving me orders?”

“It’ll be fun!” I said, smiling, holding the knife up.  “Please?”

“What’s going on?” the man managed to speak.  Every syllable was colored with pain.  “Ohhh, it hurts so much.  Please!”

The convict approached. He stepped on the man’s hands.

“Wait, no, on his wrists,” I said.

The convict leader gave me a dirty look.

I waited patiently, keeping the same dead-eyed smile on my face.

He shifted his footing.

“What are you doing?” the man on the floor moaned.  “Please.”

I bent down, closer to his head.  I was stopped by the point of the skewer, an inch away from my neck.

“Lose the knife,” the convict said.  “I don’t want you getting close to me like that, after what you did to him.”

Keeping the knife would have been better.  I tossed the knife off to one side, at the desk.  It clattered onto the wooden desktop.

Disappointing.  I’d hoped it would land point first.  Would have been so damn cool, just casually throwing it like that and having it stick.

I bent down just behind the convict.  I grabbed one of the scholar’s fingers in both hands.

“Please.  What’s going on?”

“I severed something important between your legs,” I told him.  “Now…”

I bent the finger back until something gave.

He screamed, thrashed and howled as much as he was able to without moving his legs all that much.

“…I’m making sure you can’t fix it,” I told him.

The convict leader let out a light chuckle at that, looking down at me over one shoulder.

I repeated the process with each finger, faster now.  Each one brought fresh screams.

My heart was pounding, but it had nothing to do with what was going on in this room.  What were the others doing?

What was Sub Rosa doing, even?

There were so many factors to consider, too many people in play, too many unknowns.

Even on my own team, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could predict Lillian or Mary.  After today, after I saw the decisions Lillian made on what she’d admitted was her worst day, I might have a better idea.  Mary, I couldn’t decide on until I’d seen her on her best day, whether that day was the day she finally had a family or the day Percy came back for her.

I broke the last of the fingers, leaving each one curved in the wrong direction, then stood.  The convict leader released the man’s wrists and stepped back to admire my handiwork, while the man writhed belly-down on the floor.

I crossed the room to go collect the knife, then sauntered over to the fallen man, hand and knife behind my back.  I sliced my own palm, at the base, suppressing a flinch, then worked my thumb into the wound, opening it up.

The more blood, the better.

The rest was posing and posturing.  I was fortunate, in a way, that the convict leader’s attention was on the back of the door.  The mail slot.  He had the badge.

I knelt between the legs of the man I’d maimed, and used my bloody hand to grip his bits.

I look forward to being taller than five feet, so I’m not limited to going after the balls all the time.

He yelped in pain, and the convict leader looked my way.

When I raised my hand, it was covered in blood.

“You’re going to bleed out, sir,” I told him.  “You can’t do anything to stop it, now, it’s just a matter of time.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I could have made this a lot worse.  I’m betting he would have put the skewers through you in two different directions and tried to make the points touch.  All I did was cut you,” I told him.

I gave him a kick in the side for good measure.  He grunted.

“You get me?” I said.  “Or do I have to show you how mean I can really get?”

“I don’t understand,” he said.  He was panicking a little.

“Thank me,” I told him.  “Thank me for going easy on you.”

“I don’t-  Thank you.”

I nodded slowly.

Then I kicked him again for good measure.

I walked over to the door.

The convict leader looked more wary than ever.  Had I pushed things too far?  Left him confused enough that he’d try simplifying his life by removing me from the equation?

I had to put myself on his terms more.

“Did I do good?” I asked.  A child looking for a parent’s praise.

His brow knit in a frown.

“What’s this?”  He asked me, showing me the badge.

“Before she let you out, she let us out,” I said.  “Got that from the guy who was in charge of our experiment.”

“Uh huh,” he said.

I plucked at my uniform shirt.  “We got these from some kids who were wandering around.  Mine doesn’t really fit, but…”

“Uh huh,” he said, taking it in.

Were the pieces falling in place, or was he contemplating how to deal with me?

“I like you,” he decided.

I grinned, a genuine smile.

“Come on,” he said.  “More witnesses to remove.”

My heart sank a little.

While fine, this situation being something I could work with, each room we cleared out was another chance for things to go wrong.

Doubly so when the others were off on other branches of this floor, and we were engaged in our game, our merry dance where coordination was so vital.

I slammed the door closed behind me as we returned to the hallway.  The man would hurt, his balls might swell, his fingers would take some time to fix, but he would live.

I walked with one hand in a pocket, knowing that bloodstains were spreading through white fabric, but I had to staunch the minor flow of blood, and pressing it into my hip was the only available option that wouldn’t attract too much attention.

“Badge,” I said, reaching up.

“Hm?” he asked.

“I’m wearing a uniform.  I can use it better,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said.  “But I’m going to hold onto it, I think.”

Damn him.

That was my badge.

I contemplated killing him and letting the game be damned.

“Okay,” I said, smiling, stowing the dark resentment and anger deep inside.

We reached the next door.  This one lacking a slot for files and mail.  We didn’t get far enough to do anything with it.  My head turned as shouts came from the far end of the hallway.

The others.

Did we misstep? 

Lillian.

The convict headed that way.  I did too, but where he started off walking at a brisk pace, I broke out into a run.

If this went sour, then I wanted enough space between him and me.  I needed to be able to act, speak, do something.  It wouldn’t do if he could simply assess the situation and then murder me in the next moment.

My head was a storm of possibilities and half-formed plans.  I swapped the knife over to my right hand, with the cut at the base of my palm, and held it with the blade between the index and middle finger, handle gripped hard against the cut.

What do we do?

How do we tackle this?

I need more information!

In the end, it wasn’t Lillian.

Mary was backed up against the wall, chin raised.  Baldy-beardy had his spike at the base of her chin, ready to penetrate the part just below the bone.

The other convicts were alive.  The woman, shaggy-beardy, and the older man.  They stood back, keeping the other Lambs from rushing to Mary’s rescue.

Passing the junction in the hallway where Sub Rosa was, I could see that she was still working through the wiring and protections.  Whatever was beyond warranted steeper protection.

I got closer, and the woman with the spikes at her hand pointed her other spike at me, stopping me from advancing.

“What the hell are you doing?” the convict leader asked.

“This little bitch just tried to stab me in the back!”

Come on, Mary, I thought.  I felt genuinely disappointed.  Did you really think I have the ability to surprise and murder the convicts’ leader in a brawl?  What did you think the next step was?  Were we going to go with Sub Rosa and expect her not to notice that her pet convicts weren’t coming with?

Worst of all, I could see it on her face.  That she knew I was disappointed.  That she’d been tested, and she’d failed.  Under the pressure, she’d defaulted to doing what she’d been created to do.

Mary hated failing.

“That so,” the convict leader said.  He gave me a look.  “That so?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Freak of nature is still working on the door,” the convict leader said.  “Kill the little bitch.”

“No,” I said.

“Do it,” the convict leader said.

Baldy-beardy stabbed, but Mary slipped to one side in the same moment, and the spike only touched the side of her neck.  She flinched, strength momentarily going out of her as though she were a marionette with the strings severed.  As the spike moved to follow her as she tumbled toward the ground, she put her hands out.  Something made a sound, a hard object striking the metal, and the spike was knocked aside.  Something in her sleeves that didn’t conduct.

She landed on her back, beside the wall.  Convicts with Academy augmentations in front and to either side of her.

She was quick, trained, and she clearly had something in mind, but even in this situation, there wasn’t a lot she could do.

But there was an advantage to the fact that she was surrounded.  There was a pause as each of the three convicts worked to figure out who would deliver the final blow.

I saw Gordon tense.  He had an avenue for attack here.  He met my eyes, and I shook my head.

“She’s a mad dog,” I said, in the most casual tone I could manage.

The final blow was delayed another moment.

I was doing my utmost to avoid rushing my words.  If I wanted them to listen, to stop and listen, even, I needed to phrase things carefully.  “She’s the most complete of any of us.”

“Complete?  What the hell are you saying?” the leader asked me.

“Why are you even listening to the little fuckspittle?”

Sh,” the leader answered, a short, sharp sound.

“Complete.  They wanted to make us all like her.  Killers.  I think they did too good a job with her.  It’s not her fault.  Just have to keep her on a leash,” I said.

Fuck leashes,” the man Mary had tried to kill spat the words.

“Killers,” the leader mused.

“Ones you wouldn’t expect,” I said, quiet, giving him my best deadpan stare.  “And right now, we’re just killers who want to hurt the Academy.  Your buddy there probably did something like get in between Mary and her prey.”

“Mm,” the leader said, but it was a sound that didn’t come across as particularly convinced.

“From what I saw of those two,” the older man said, indicating Gordon and Helen, “Makes a lot of sense.”

They’d played along.  Chances were good the people they’d ‘killed’ were alive, like the one I’d gone after.

“Mm,” the leader said.

“Little girl here didn’t do much,” shaggy-beardy said, indicating Jamie.  “Watched while I took a roomful of people to pieces.”

“Boy,” Jamie said, staring the man down through his own long hair. “I’m a boy.”

“Whatever.  You didn’t come off like some special killer.”

Damn it, I thought.  Not that I was too surprised.  Jamie was slow to act when caught off guard.  Devising a plan for faking someone’s murder was hard enough.  Doing it off the cuff was harder still.

“He’s not as far along,” I said.

“There’s this one too,” the woman said, looking Lillian’s way.

“She’s even less far along,” I jumped in.

“Put ten kinds of needles in people in that room over there,” the convict woman said.  “One was foaming at the mouth.  It was… something.”

The convict woman wasn’t so bloodthirsty, it seemed.  Angry, yes, but not bloodthirsty.

I met Lillian’s eyes.

She looked scared.  She wasn’t clever or controlled enough to hide that.

But she’d done it.  She’d danced the dance, played the game, and she’d done it even without the benefit of playing a hundred rounds of Hayle’s game with the rest of us.

“You take that girl,” the leader told me, pointing at Mary.  “You watch her.  If that rabid dog of yours pulls another stunt, I’m finishing off the both of you.”

He jabbed the spike toward my eye.  It took more than willpower to avoid flinching.  I had to trick my senses, change my perception of what the spike was, so I wouldn’t flinch instinctively.

Only a gesture.

“You’re letting her live?  She tried to put a knife between my ribs!”

“I’m fucking letting her live!” the leader said.  “You’re arguing with me?  I like this little fuck, I want to see what else he’s capable of.  If this fucking place created him and he wants to get them back, I want to see it happen!  Do you really want to say otherwise?”

Baldy-beardy scowled, but didn’t open his mouth.

“I’ll hear you out if you want to say something contrary!”

“No,” Baldy said.

“No?  You sure?”

“I’m sure, yeah.”

“Yeah,” the leader said.  “Sure hope you are.”

While they were talking, I walked over to Mary.  I gave her my hand.  She used it to stand.

I could see the hurt in her eyes, the anger that was directed at herself more than anything.

“Got all the rooms here?” I asked.

There were nods.

“There’s a few more that way,” I said.  “We’ll get ’em.”

The convict leader glanced at me, unhappy with my initiative, but he gave me a nod.

I was his buddy now.  He liked me, and I doubted he liked any of the other members of his little gang.

Letting me do this, giving the go-ahead, it was a way of asserting his authority in an odd way.

We left the convicts behind.  We passed by the door that Sub Rosa was still working on.  She hadn’t even started prying at it.  She was elbow deep in mechanisms at the frame.

We headed down the hall in the direction the leader and I had gone.  Two rooms.  I tried to hold Mary’s hand, and she pulled away from me.

I didn’t dare meet the eyes of the others or try to say something.  The convicts were watching.  We had one ally among them, the most important one, but I didn’t want to foster any doubt.

Two doors.  One without a slot, the other with.

I knocked on the one without a slot.  I heard a murmur of a response.

“Jo Anna Kelper,” Jamie said.  “Let us in.”

There was the sound of a lock.  The door opened.

You,” the woman in the lab coat said.  She was older.

“Your life is in danger,” Gordon said, flashing the badge.  “We need to fake your death.”

She frowned.

Lillian held up a syringe.  “Tranquilizer.  I’ll also slow your system.  Induced hibernation state.”

“I’m old, I might not wake up from something like that.”

“If we don’t do something like this, those guys down the hall will make sure you don’t wake up at all,” Gordon said.

Jo Anna frowned, then nodded.

Lillian administered the dose.

It was only after the syringe was emptied into Jo Anna’s arm that Lillian gave another syringe.

“This will make her seize up,” Lillian said.  “Not fun, but it’s ugly to look at, and they’ll think she’s dying, even as they don’t sense much of a heartbeat or breathing.  Turn her on her side.”

We did.

Sure enough, the old woman in the lab coat started having fits a couple of seconds after the dose was administered.

We started to vacate the room, and I glanced at Mary, who was standing watch in the hallway, jaw set, an angry look in her eyes.

People were so hard to manage.

Mary wasn’t the entirety of the group.  I looked at Lillian.

My hand found hers.  I gave it a squeeze.

“Don’t give me that shocked look you give me every time I’m not mean to you,” I murmured, my head tilted to be closer to her ear.

“What are you up to?” she hissed.

“Right now, I’m saying you did a fantastic job,” I whispered.  “You came across like a true Lamb.  Good work.

She didn’t react to that.  We made our way out into the hallway, and she tugged her hand from mine.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.  You get your kicks by being all nice-nice and then the moment I let my guard down, you kick me in the shins or something.”

“No kick, no shins,” I said.  “I meant what I said.”

I left her with those words.  She stared at me as I went over to Mary.  She wasn’t holding my hand, so I bumped her shoulder with mine.  She gave me an annoyed look.

Still, she didn’t outright murder me when I put an arm around her shoulders.

Last door.

In the absence of my badge, I plucked the one from Mary’s uniform jacket pocket and put it in the mail slot.

“We got company,” Gordon observed.

Damn.  It couldn’t be easy.

Sub Rosa was on her way, and the convicts were behind her.

The door opened just as Sub Rosa arrived.

The man on the other side, skinny with circular glasses, dark circles under his eyes and tufty hair at the top of his head, let his mouth go agape, his eyes widening.

Recognition.  Answers.  Yes!

“You’re-” he started.

Sub Rosa reached out and grabbed his head.

It took her relatively little effort to crush his skull with the one hand.  Once the bone gave way, the rest followed fairly quickly after.

My answers!  No!

“Door’s open,” my new buddy the leader told me.  “She apparently wants us with.”

I nodded.

Sub Rosa shook the bits of scientist-head off her hands, turned, and started her way toward the door.

I didn’t look at Jamie, but I knew that he’d be staring at me, willing me to remember that the daughter of the man who had created Sub Rosa was on the other side.

More importantly, the last easy chance we had to get answers was on the other side.

Question was, how did we get the girl out alive?

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.05 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Convicts, as it happened, smelled.  Problem was, I was now the convict leader’s new best friend, and he was staying close to me.

It had its benefits and drawbacks.  For one thing, so long as I kept Mary close, it meant our new benefactor was protecting her.  For another, it meant I didn’t have a great range of movement.  He was keeping me close, he was talking to me, and I couldn’t wander off and try to get ahead of Sub Rosa.

On the plus side, we had a few minutes.  The Bowels were built around a cylindrical shaft, a few hundred feet deep, two-dozen feet wide.  The hallway here extended in a semicircle around to the far side of the shaft.  Extra protection, extra thickness, and more room for someone to pull a lever or seal off the area.

Sub Rosa had to stop to work with another panel in the wall.  It gave me a second to think.

My new buddy elected to distract me, instead.

“I was a skinny little fuck like you, once,” he told me.

“Really?”  I asked, more to be polite than anything else.

“Bad combination, being tall and scrawny.  Tried to eat and even did some farm work when I coulda done something else, just to bulk up.  But all the energy went to making me taller.  A lot of people learn they can make themselves look better by messing with someone taller than them.”

“Gotta hurt them bad enough they don’t try it again,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Something like that.”

Sub Rosa resumed walking, another set of safeguards effectively cut off and removed.

“Is that how you wound up in prison?  Because you hurt someone?” I asked.

“Huh?  Eh.”

“Eh,” I echoed him, acting disinterested.

“Was a woman.  Around the time I started being able to fight back if someone messed with me, I was working on a factory floor, went out for drinks.  Guy picked a fight with me to impress his woman, I won, I took my prize.  Spectacular piece of work, and at the start, that was only in the best way… but I don’t suppose you get that sort of thing, young as you are.”

“I do.  I get it,” I said.  I realized I sounded a little defensive, then said, “I spend a lot of time with these girls.  They’re pretty.”

“Thank you, Sy,” Helen said, brightly, from the tail end of the group.

Mary gave me a look I couldn’t read.

He gave me a condescending look, and I mused about possibly sticking him with my knife.

“Well, good for you,” he said, sounding very unimpressed.  “My girl was top notch, as girls go.  Raised the standard for womenfolk everywhere.  But she wanted a bad boy and didn’t realize it.  She’d yelp at me and growl at me for most everything I did, for drinking, for being rough, she’d get fed up, run away, and she expected me to chase her, tell her I was sorry, that I was reforming my ways.”

“And?”

“I didn’t.  I told her straight-up who I was, how I was.  If she didn’t want me, she could go, and she did… except she kept coming back.  Hoity-toity dad, y’know?  Rich, laid down the law with her, so she’d run off to slum it with me.  Decided she didn’t like me, went back home.  Would’ve been annoying, but oh, she was gorgeous, and when she came running back, hungry for me…”

He paused, looking down at me.  I met his gaze.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I figured it would do.  She decided otherwise.  One night, she ran off home to her daddy, only she told tales.  Charges laid against me for shit I didn’t probably do.  Old man even pulled strings, I’m betting.  I didn’t spend more than a year in prison before I got brought here.”

“What do you think you’ll do to him when you get out?”

He gave me a funny look.  “Out?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Out.”

“I gave up on getting out a while ago,” he said.  “Don’t lie to me.  Don’t lie to yourself.  This is where we live out the rest of our very short lives before we die.”

I glanced up at him.  I could see the hardness in his features, the look in his eyes beyond the simple anger on the surface.  A kind of hopelessness that went beyond simply being a monster.

That hopelessness was, in part, the source of his inhumanity, the willingness to hurt others.

I suspected he was irredeemable, if this was left alone.  As a human being, flawed and violent and probably beating his girlfriend on the regular, he’d probably been fixable, but that was no longer the case.  His humanity had taken too much of a beating, and there was no light of hope in his eyes.

“We’re going to get out,” I said, in a matter-of-fact way, turning my eyes forward.

“How do you think that works?” he asked, and he sounded almost angry.

“How many Academy students are down here, do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know.  Why don’t you tell me?”

Enough.  Hundreds, probably.  Now think, each one of those people has family.  They have connections, friends who will ask about them,” I said.  I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t touching on the convict leader’s past, and the circumstances of his incarceration.  He’d been caught because his girl had had connections.  I was doing my best to speak in a language he understood.

I was also bending the truth.  Not everyone was guaranteed to be down at their stations in the Bowels, and I wasn’t sure that the Academy would value their lives so highly.  It would be easy to sentence all of the people down here to death and then point to legal documents they’d signed.

“Uh huh,” the leader didn’t sound impressed.

“Now think, how many projects are down here?  We’re one, you’re one, she’s one.  How much money is invested in all of this?  It’s not like they can just take a new student and tell him to go pick up where someone else left off.  The question is, are they really willing to abandon all of this, all these people, all the money and investments?”

“You don’t think so, huh?”

“No,” Gordon said, backing me up.

“No,” I said, echoing Gordon.  “It costs them too much.”

The convict leader gave me a look.  I could tell he was having doubts.  It was only natural – he’d accepted his death, and now I was giving him a new lease on life.  He was experiencing dissonance.

In reality, though, it was easier and safer for him on a mental and emotional level to hold to his old ideas, that death was certain.  To hold onto those ideas, he had to doubt me.

“One of the scientists that worked on us, Lacey, she was terrified of being down here.  It’s what the scientist in charge of us told her,” I said.  “I overheard.  Of course, things are different if an entire section gets locked down, since then they can evacuate the rest, but we have her.”

Sub Rosa, still leading us down the extended, curved hallway, glanced back at me.

“And she’s making it so we can’t get locked inside one part of this place,” the leader said, as if I hadn’t implied it already.

“Exactly,” I said.  “Eventually they’re going to have to decide whether it’s better to condemn everyone and everything in here, or if they’re going to open things up and let us out.”

The convict leader was quiet.

“Sounds too easy,” the woman convict said, behind me.

“It’s not easy at all,” I said.  “There are a lot of problems.  For one thing, they’re going to have a lot of stitched and a lot of guards up there.”

“Uh huh?” the leader grunted.

“Probably.  And there’s probably other safeguards down here.  Supposed to be a big monster.”

“Glutton?” the leader asked.

“Gorger,” the oldest of the convicts said.

“Gorger, right,” the leader said.  He looked back, as if expecting Gorger to be coming down the hall behind us.  “If she can get us past the protections, she might have a way of dealing with that thing.”

That’s not completely out of the question, I thought.  I mulled for a second on whether it would be better to disarm him and leave him worrying more or whether I liked him thinking Gorger wasn’t a problem.

“She seems to know a lot of stuff,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, though it came out more like a ‘yeh’.  “That leaves the question of what we do to get out, once they open things up and meet us with a small army.”

And quarantine measures, probably, if things even get that far.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “If we could find some super valuable experiment and threaten to destroy it, or use it against them…”

I scratched the back of my head, sticking my thumb straight down.

Behind me, Gordon picked up on the cue.  “Doesn’t work.  No saying what’s valuable enough, or scary enough, or if they have a way of dealing with it, or any of that.”

“Yeah,” I ‘conceded’ the point.  “And if we did it out in the open, nobody would blame the Academy if they put a bullet in us.”

“Not an object, then,” the convict leader said.  “People.  Hostages.  You think people down here have friends?  People would blame the Academy if they died, a bit away from getting free.  And they won’t be shooting at us without being especially careful.”

I nodded, as if it hadn’t been my idea in the first place.  I’d all but directly told him.

Sub Rosa stopped to work on another panel.

The big guy looked at the other convicts, as well as my friends.  “Hostages, you hear me?”

There were nods.

That would save some lives.  Sure, some of my motivations had to do with, well, saving lives and crap like that.  Human decency and whatever.  But really, I figured alive people were more useful if we were going to figure this out, it would be brownie points with the faculty if we saved as many lives as possible, and if we had to do more bullcrap interviews to find moles for Head Professor Briggs, then living people we’d already interviewed were better than new people who needed to be screened.

Sub Rosa finished tearing the console apart and rejigging it in a matter of seconds.

It was interesting to see: she’d been tentative before, but now was finding her stride.  This was something she was learning to do, based on some previous knowledge.

She knew how to disarm the safety measures, and she’d known where to find the convicts.

She’d gone after the man who recognized her.  She’d gone after her creator.

Our mysterious experiment was working with some foundation of knowledge.

I had questions I wanted to ask Jamie, but I didn’t dare ask with the convicts and Sub Rosa in earshot.  I imagined there was a dim possibility that Sub Rosa had been down here from the beginning.  It would explain why she was on an upper floor, if she’d never been moved.  She would have had a chance to overhear things about the security measures.

A dim possibility, I reminded myself.  Sure, the security measures weren’t too complex, and some employees down in the Bowels might have heard how to disable the security in an emergency, if an earthquake or something shook things up, but an experiment hearing such?

Hard to justify, and it didn’t explain the man’s look of recognition, not so long ago.

Sub Rosa was striding forward with purpose now, toward the girl who had our answers.  We were nearing the end of the hallway, by my recollection.  I hadn’t been here, but I had seen similar hallways on upper floors.

Maybe she knew because she’d been told.  The Academy had enemies, and the Bowels had already been identified and used as a weak point.  If one such enemy had found a convict or a dying woman who was to be sent to the Bowels to be used as an experiment, they could have equipped her with knowledge provided by previous moles and spies within the Academy, then have them cause as much damage as possible.

If that someone was angry enough, then they might delight in having the chance.

Still, it didn’t explain the recognition.  She was an element known to some.

Had the man known her as an experiment, or the person she had been before?  If the former, what had happened, and why was she on this rampage?  If the latter, who the hell was she?

We were nearing the end of our destination.  Jamie was picking up speed, moving forward in my peripheral vision, so I slowed down, until I was a step behind my smelly buddy.

Jamie was hugging his book.  I glanced at him, and I saw him shift his grip.  On the corner of the cover was a mark in pencil.

Nineteen.

“Hey, c’mon,” the leader said.  He reached out for me, hand turned backward, and rubbed my head with his knuckles, deliberately avoiding touching me with the spike, while still urging me forward.  “Almost showtime.”

The far-side labs were larger, more comprehensive, and specialized.  When they’d originally been put together, they’d been built for specific tasks.  Many had even been put together for the superweapons that were now unique to each specific section of the Academy.  At this point in time, very few of the old experiments were still running.

Labs sixteen through twenty.

All of this hinged on what Sub Rosa did.

If she went into one lab, could we escape?  Reach Gorger?

The instant the thought crossed my mind, she stopped in her tracks, standing in the middle of the hallway.

Damn it.

She raised an arm, pointing.  She was giving us an instruction.  She fully intended to block anyone from fleeing.  We were supposed to go fetch, or go kill.  She’d let us know soon enough.

There was no tidy way to do this.  Five labs, five convicts, six of us, with me watching ‘mad dog’ Mary.

I heard the words in my head before they left his lips.

“Each of us gets someone from a room,” the leader said.  “Take the kids with.  I’ve got these two.  Remember, we’re taking hostages.”

There were nods.

Our last chance for answers.

Gordon and the woman took the first door, and Gordon hammered on it, a heavy knock, and also a way of cluing in people further down the hall.

Good job.

Helen and shaggy-beardy took the next door, seventeen, with Helen peering down to the mail slot and opening it to speak through it, shaggy standing back, tense.

Eighteen was Jamie and baldy-beardy.  Jamie used the badge.

Nineteen.

I approached the door and stopped.  While I stood there, thinking, the old man and Lillian walked past us to the last door in the hallway.

Sub Rosa was watching, staring with eyes that could no longer blink.  An intensity radiated off of her.

She’d come here for this.  For our source of information.  The relative of the man who had altered her.

I knocked.

The door opened, without hesitation.

There were two scientists within.  One was middle-aged, a woman, brown-haired and stout in build, the other was a wisp of a girl, small and light in every sense of the words.  The girl, our source, had opened the door.  She was sixteen or so, blonde, hair so fine and insubstantial that it looked like she was underwater, the hair that had come free of her ponytail floating around her, free of gravity’s pull.  Her eyes were dark, glasses cleaner than most, with fine rims.  She had a lens on her forehead, something that could be flipped down over one eye to view small things.

What?” she asked, in the most impatient, bitchy tone I’d heard in some time.  She looked from me to Mary to the convict leader, then back to me.

I hadn’t expected this attitude.  Everyone up to this point had been scared, worried about possibilities.

“You’re aware there’s an escaped experiment?” I asked.

“That usually goes hand in hand with the facility being sealed,” she said, in a very condescending way.  “Whatever.  It’s fine, I do hope things open up soon, but I came expecting to put in a full day or two of work with minimal sleep.  This doesn’t change my plans.”

“Studying bugs,” I said, eyeing the glass tank in the center of the room.  There were flies swarming within.

“Yes,” she said, giving me a curious look.  “I’m sorry, kids, but if you want someone to hold your hand while you freak out about being stuck down here, this isn’t the place for it.  I have work to do.”

“That’s, uh…” I started.

“Things are more complicated than that,” Mary said, her voice soft.

The convict leader behind me spoke up, “We’re taking you hostage.”

“No you’re not,” the woman on the other side of the room said.  She was studying the tank so intently she’d barely glanced at us.  “We just reached the breeding phase.  We’ve been building toward this for four months.”

“I see you need convincing,” the leader said.  He pointed the spike forward.  The girl at the door backed away as the leader advanced, weapon ready.  I caught the door as she let go of it, but I also stayed in the leader’s way, so he couldn’t attack her.  I needed her cooperative.

“I’m starting to see how it is,” the girl said.

“Yeah,” the convict said.  “Move, kid.  I want to drive the point home.”

Here was the moment of truth.  I moved suddenly, toward the spike.  I’d build up a rapport with him.  Now I tested it.  Would he instinctively protect me?

He moved the spike out of the way, lifting his arm.

But the door- I’d let go of the door, and now it swung shut.  It was metal, it was heavy, and the convict leader lacked hands.

He was caught between the door and the frame for a moment, unable to use his shoulder to bump it open without risking the breakage of the glass tank of yellow fluid.

I backed across the room as he grunted, moved his leg and kicked it open.

In backing away, I moved between the girl and the older woman.  Mary followed suit.  Where the girl tried to back away, Mary helped me corner her.

The convict leader kicked the door open, stepping into the room.  Gordon and the convict woman appeared behind him, and Gordon caught the door, keeping it from closing.

Two convicts, our two scientists, and Gordon, Mary, and I.

The leader gave me an ugly look, but he didn’t say anything.  Was he conscious of the other member of his group, just behind him?

“The experiment is here,” I informed the girl.  “I heard someone call it Sub Rosa.”

No sign of recognition at the name.  The older woman didn’t seem to take special notice either.

“Project by Shipman,” I said.

“I’m Shipman,” the younger girl said.  “Oh.  You mean my uncle.”

The convict leader frowned at us, a momentary look of puzzlement on his face.

“How is he?” Ms. Shipman asked us.

“Dead,” I said, my voice cold for the leader’s benefit.  “Very, very dead.”

“How?”

“His creation offed him before starting her rampage through this place.  She came for you, it seems.”

“Enough talking,” the convict leader said.  “Grab them.  Tie their hands.”

“With?” Mary asked.

He jabbed one spike in her direction.  “Don’t go talking back to me, brat.  I haven’t forgotten you attacked one of mine.”

He’s insecure.  He’s realizing he doesn’t have total control, and he’s acting on it in the way I figured.  Violence and threats.

“Get the other woman,” I told Mary.  The woman convict was over there, spikes ready, and I wasn’t sure I trusted her to keep those weapons to herself.  Things were manageable, but the moment they started prodding these two women with spikes to try and make them compliant, the convicts would have their control, and the Lambs wouldn’t be able to do anything.

“Got wires?” Gordon asked from the door.  “Ropes?  Cord?”

“No,”  Ms. Shipman said.  “Resin gun, but that would burn flesh.”

“We could tear the lab coats into strips,” Mary said, holding up a knife.

“I like my lab coat, thank you very much,” Ms. Shipman said, in a very prim, uptight way.  “I earned it.”

“Do you like living?” I asked.  “Because this is a very real choice.”

I was growing to dislike her with a startling speed.

“I’ll live, and I’ll keep my coat,” she said.  “If I may-”

She bent down, unclipped a stocking, and then began rolling it down.

Was she exceptionally cunning?  Because the convict leader was suddenly paying rapt attention.  Yes, she was young, but the closest the man had been to a woman had probably been his yellow-skinned fellow convict and Sub Rosa.

Gordon was paying a great deal of attention too, I noticed.

“Gets cold down here,” she said.  “But, ugh, skirts are expected.  I’d rather wear trousers.”

“Me too,” Gordon said.  A stab at humor.

Ms. Shipman didn’t laugh.  She stood straight, stocking in hand, and handed it to me.  I balled it up and tossed it to Mary.

The young lady started on the other one.  The one I’d be using to tie her up.  I looked at her legs, but I didn’t see the magic that had others so enchanted.  Maybe because it was attached to such an unlikable person.

“Heads up!” I heard Gordon comment, in the same moment Ms. Shipman drove her shoulder into my ribs.

I tipped over, landing on my ass, and saw her running in the opposite direction, toward the closet in the corner.

She was going for her bag?

She didn’t make it.  Gordon reached her, wrapping his arms around her upper body, pinning her arms to her side.  She had years on him in age, but she was petite, and Gordon was an early bloomer.  He was bigger, and he was strong besides.  He was able to lift her bodily off the ground.

“Nice try,” he said.

She bent her head down, mouth yawning open, to bite at the spot where his neck met his shoulder.

He practically tossed her, heaving her up and away, then catching her again, this time with her head too high and far back to reach him to bite.

She kicked, she struggled, but he didn’t let her go.  After about twenty seconds, both were left panting into one another’s faces, Ms. Shipman red in the face with spent fury.

I reached her and tugged off the stocking that was halfway down her leg.  Gordon shifted his grip until her wrists were crossed behind her back.  I tied them.

She kept struggling and kicked at his shin as he let her down, gripping her by the binding.

Idly, I walked over to the closet and found her belongings.

Her bag was empty, a quick search through her wallet suggested nothing pertinent.  “Gladys Shipman.”

“Hi, Gladys,” Gordon said.

“What the hell do you want?  Something came for me?  Are you delusional?  I’m not important.”

Her tone rubbed me the wrong way.  It was a perfect storm of condescension, arrogance, and sheer bitchiness.  My skin crawled with it.

I wish I could gag her, but I really want to hear what she says.

“First room was empty, by the by,” Gordon said.

“Right,” I said.

I searched the remainder of the things in the corner.  In the pocket of the smaller of the two raincoats, I found a pistol.  Six-shot.  I held it up for Mary and Gordon to see.

“Gimme,” Gordon said.  “I’m a better shot than you are.”

I turned it around until I was gripping the barrel, pointing it away from anyone, and held the handle toward him.  He took it, used one hand to check the ammo count, and slipped it inside his uniform jacket, all while keeping hold of Ms. Shipman’s arms.

“Don’t suppose you feel like talking?” I asked the young lady.

“Talk?  I don’t know what’s going on!”

“That’s too bad,” I said, meaning it.  I reached for her, but Gordon didn’t hand her over.

“I’m good,” he said.

“You’ve got the gun.”

“She got you once, while you were looking at her legs, and I’m stronger,” he said.

“Right,” I said.  I didn’t correct him about the leg thing.

Mary had the older woman, who was quickly taken over by the convict woman, who held spikes to the woman’s neck.  I was left with my hands in my pocket as we retreated from the room.

Mary clapped a hand on my shoulder in a gesture of support, which was totally unnecessary, but I let her do it for her benefit.

We stepped out into the hallway.  The others were there.  Two scientists were with them.  One was badly bruised at the forehead.

Ms. Shipman turned her head to give Lillian a quizzical look.  She opened her mouth to say something, and I jabbed her in the side, giving her a warning look.

Sub Rosa reacted the instant our Ms. Shipman was brought out into the open.  She drew nearer.

The intensity we’d experienced was ratcheting up by the second.  Something like fury, but not anger.  Something parallel.

“Oh,” Ms. Shipman said, her voice suddenly, mercifully very small.

Sub Rosa reached out for Ms. Shipman’s head.  I felt my heart sink.

Repeat performance, I thought.  No answers.

At least we had a game plan.

Gordon moved, a sudden, swift motion, reaching into his jacket.

Wait, what?

He fired from the hip.  Sub Rosa flinched, her entire upper body twisting, with blood spraying the ceiling.

Gordon fired again, turning as the bullet left the chamber, to aim at the convicts.

But Sub Rosa had taken a second shot to the face, and she hadn’t died.  The damage was grievous, immense, but she hadn’t fallen.  She continued reaching out, with one hand for Ms. Shipman and one now meant for Gordon.

Why?

He raised the gun, aiming, and fired.  Four more shots, in quick succession, all aimed for the head.  One hit the neck, but the rest were on point.

What are you doing?

“The hell!?” the convict leader shouted.

Sub Rosa collapsed against the wall.

Gordon returned to using the gun to try and scare off the other threats behind us.

The rest of us took the opportunity to run.  I saw Sub Rosa reach weakly for Mary’s leg, and leaped on top of her wrist, pushing it down before carrying on my way.

I nearly lost my balance as she heaved herself to her feet again, the angle of her arm changing in the process.  Mary caught me, twisted, and flung a knife.

One convict dropped.

Gordon, why?  We were having enough trouble with coordination with Mary’s screwup.  Why this?

We were being chased, and it was an unfortunate fact that Jamie and Lillian weren’t the fastest of us.  Helen’s physical structure was different, and sustained running was hard for her.  We also had a set of scientists from the Bowels with us.  Ms. Shipman, her companion, and the ones from the other rooms.

The convict leader shouted something about six shots.

He knew as well as we did that we were out of bullets.

It was a long journey down the long hallway, but as it turned out, my concerns about our ability to outpace the convicts and a still-alive Sub Rosa were unfounded.

Gorger stood at the other end of the hallway.

To be more specific, Gorger filled the other end of the Hallway.  He was a massive physical form, a living seal to occupy the entirety of the hallway, capable of advancing, reaching to hold, and devouring to contain, though that last option was meant for hardier things than mere humans.

He’d arrived at the worst moment, blocking our only escape route.

All things clicked into place as I saw Gordon tighten his grip around Ms. Shipman, keeping her steady as she ran.

Of all the times to develop a first crush, Gordon my man.  Of all the damn times…

I sighed.

Had to figure out a way out of this, and we had to do it while keeping Gordon’s crush alive.  Matter of principle, really, questions of taste and approach aside.  Guy didn’t have that long left.

With nowhere left to run, we stopped in our tracks, turning to face down our pursuers, who included Sub Rosa, bleeding openly from six bullet wounds.

Damn it, do you ever owe us for this one, though.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.06 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.6

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

The hallway was wide enough that Jamie and I could have held hands and stretched our arms out to either side and only barely touched both walls.  The ceiling was high enough that Sub Rosa didn’t have to stoop down to avoid banging her head.

Gorger filled the entirety of that space.  His physical structure was organized to let him move forward at a good speed with the use of his arms and legs.  Abrasive skin, thick enough that bullets would be stopped or slowed, resistant to fire, resistant to chemicals, and immune to all known forms of disease.  His body was hostile to parasites, and his stomach was a holding chamber for tough specimens, a compactor for smaller ones.  His weak points had been minimized, and the ones that could be buried deep within his center of mass were.  The remainder of him was self sustaining and built to last.  Raw mass and power for the sake of such.

No exit.

We backed up until we were nearly touching him.

“Hi Gorger,” Gordon said, “Good to see you, mate.”

“Mm,” Gorger grunted.

“You’re in our way,” I said.

“Mm,” he grunted.

Sub Rosa was approaching, one hand pressed to the one side of her head where the injuries were more severe.  She moved in a jerky fashion, unpredictable, lunging and lurching forward in a zig-zag fashion, every movement violent, and the convicts were keeping their distance.

“Don’t suppose you can back up?  Or squeeze over to let us by?”

“Mm-mm,” he grunted.

I almost took it for assent, but I looked back and saw his head, pulled back into his neck and shoulders, as protected as he could get it, moving from side to side.  Rolls of fat moved with the action.

“Bloody hell,” I said.

“Who are you?” the woman that had been working with Gladys asked.

“Official Academy problem solvers,” I said.  “So all of you shut your mouths, be quiet, and let us solve this problem.”

“Sy,” Gordon said, with a warning tone.

“Untie her,” I said, not taking my eyes off of Sub Rosa.  “Reload, shoot more?”

“Out,” he said.  Then to Gladys, he added, “Got more bullets?”

“In my coat.”

“Rats,” I said, with emphasis.  “Mary?”

Mary gave me a look over her shoulder.  It wasn’t the Mary I was used to.  She looked a little uncertain, even.  Lost, hurt.  Her confidence was still shaken from earlier.

“You with us?” I asked, my words carefully chosen.

“I’m with you,” she said, stumbling a bit with the odd placement of the words.

“I know I’m thinking about ways out.  Jamie’s wracking his brain for anything in her files we could use.  Gordon’s thinking about what to do if worst comes to worst.  If I know you, you’re thinking about what to do to hurt her.”

Mary broke eye contact, looking at Sub Rosa.  Thirty feet away, twenty-eight, twenty-six… not moving in a straight line, the experiment was periodically reaching out to touch a wall and steady herself.

Mary nodded.

“Hurt her,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Gladys asked.

“I don’t-” Mary started.

“You can do it.  And it’s going to be awesome.  I promise,” I told her.

“What is she going to do that six bullets couldn’t?” Gladys asked.

Come on, Mary, shut this girl up.  Please.

Mary was already stepping forward.  Her fingers touched the sides of her legs, reached up beneath her Academy uniform skirt, and plucked knives free.  Her right hand stayed at her leg, fiddling for a second, while still holding the knife.

A coil of something dropped from her upper thigh to her ankle.  She rotated her foot to position it, then kicked it up into the air with her toe.  She caught it out of the air, not breaking eye contact with the incoming Sub Rosa.

Sub Rosa was close enough that Mary could have reached her in three or four running paces.  The experiment paused to touch the wall for balance and twist to stare at us with her good eye.

“Oh god,” Gladys said.  There were similar utterances from the others.

“Oh god,” Lillian echoed her, but she added a, “Please, Mary.”

Mary let the loop uncoil, extending into a crazy mess that sagged to her feet.  Her wrist made three quick circles, and then she threw, right as Sub Rosa made her final lunge for us.

The knife sank into Sub Rosa’s eye socket.

The woman barely flinched.  If anything, it egged her on.

Mary turned, having already drawn a third knife, one meant for close-quarters fighting, and held the blade, extending the handle above her head while using her other hand to throw the second knife.  It was a fierce throw, and it wasn’t aimed toward Sub Rosa.  It was aimed the light above us.

The light flashed as it broke, and shards of glass joined sparks in raining down onto our heads.

Two more lights further down the hallway went out.

We were cast into relative darkness.  I saw Sub Rosa’s form in only the split second the light flashed.  She was stricken, rearing back.

I heard her hit the floor, rather than seeing it.

“What the fucking hell?” the convict leader asked.  He’d seen Sub Rosa drop too.

I threw my arms around Mary in a hug.

“Careful,” she said.  “Don’t touch the wire.”

Wire.  Tying the knives together.  One knife in Sub Rosa, one in the light socket.

“Knife fell,” Gordon said.  “You’re safe.”

“Good,” Mary said.  “Let go of me, Sy.  She’s not dead.”

I let go of Mary as quickly as I’d grabbed her, backing away to give her exactly as much space as she needed.

A small flame appeared.

In a moment, there was a second flame.

I heard her throw it more than I saw it.  A small vial, hurled in Sub Rosa’s direction.

It didn’t hit Sub Rosa, but the wall above her.  Glass broke, and the liquid ignited before it landed on her, where it promptly spread out to cover a fair amount of surface.  We were soon treated to a view of Sub Rosa, midway through the process of finding her feet.

She didn’t scream.  That was the eeriest part.  It was an almost silent dance, thrashing, arms flailing, striking the wall with enough force that I could hear mechanisms rattling, wanting to kick into motion and seal this section off.

“Great,” I said.  Sub Rosa was stumbling around, largely blind at this point, but she managed to touch a wall, find some orientation and stagger toward us, while struggling to wipe away the flaming liquid with her hands.  She only partially succeeded, and her hands ignited.  “Now she’s on fire.”

“More fire?” Lillian asked.

She handed something to Mary.  Mary hucked it at Sub Rosa.

Whatever it was, it ignited marvelously.  It made Sub Rosa’s movements more frantic and crazed.

“Not helping!” I said.

“She’s not dying!” Mary observed.

“She can’t,” Jamie said.  “You’re looking at two lifeforms.  The cocoon and the woman.  The cocoon keeps everything going, no matter what.  Only way you can make her dead-dead is if you utterly destroy the medulla oblongata or utterly destroy the heart.”

“Tell us that sooner!” I said.

“You were busy electrocuting her and setting her on fire!”

She was close, now.

Gordon threw the pistol, tossing it over Sub Rosa’s shoulder.

The sound made her stop, twisting.

She began moving in the other direction.

“No!” the convict leader shouted.  “The little bastards are behind you!  Don’t be fooled!”

Sub Rosa twisted back around, but staggered, leaning against the wall.  I could smell the burned flesh, now.  There was an acrid undertone to it, something chemical.  One of the tubes of fluid that had been pumping in or out of her was emptying contents on to the floor.

I fixated on that.

“The tubes?” I asked.  “Weak point?”

“The fluids adjust chemical balances,” Jamie said.  “Without them, she’ll die.”

“Great!” I said.  “Mary-”

“In a few days or weeks.”

Hell!” I said, frustrated.

The sound of our voices was getting her attention.  She was still burning, still in agony, largely blind and bleeding from open wounds in her skull.  She even had brain damage from the bullets, probably.  But she was lurching our way.

“Lillian?” I asked.

“I don’t- what?”

“Ideas!” I yelled at her.

“No!”  She said, a non-sequitur.  As if she was refusing to give them, rather than having none.

But, short of an actual idea, it was the best response she could give.  Short, sweet, and to the point, letting me move on to other options.

“Gladys!” I called out.  “If you know what she is-”

“I don’t!  I know who she is but I don’t understand any of this!”

“It’s your dad’s work!”

“Uncle’s!  My uncle’s work!  And we don’t talk!”

Useless!

“Helen?” I tried, though Helen was more about instinct than anything else.  “Anything?”

“Yes,” she said.  “But can’t just yet.  Gorger?  A hand?”

“Mm,” he said.

I realized he’d backed up a good ten feet.  I joined the others in making haste, working to put as much space between us and Sub Rosa as possible.

In the gloom, lit only by the fire that still licked Sub Rosa’s upper body, I could see Gorger twisting, revealing and then extending a meaty hand.  Helen hopped up to it.

“Up,” she said.  Gorger raised her up toward the ceiling.

I saw her reach up to pry at a ceiling panel that Gorger had just revealed.

Bring an entire block down on us?

Beside me, Mary whipped more knives at Sub Rosa.  It was pretty ineffectual.

“Gordon,” Helen said, very simply.  “Please help.”

Gordon did, abandoning his Shipman, stepping on Gorger’s face for a foothold before stepping onto Gorger’s arm, then moving up to the hand, standing beside Helen.

Sub Rosa was too close.

There was nothing predictable about her movements.  She was broken, not thinking clearly, if she was thinking at all.  Yet, if I was going to save the others, I had to take the gamble.  Not once, but twice.

In moments like this, I had to have a simple set of goals.  If I didn’t, I tended to overthink.

Goal one… don’t get hit.

“Keep at it!” I called out.

Then I dashed for Sub Rosa.

One long arm flailed, reaching low to the ground.  I saw it coming, but even then, there was precious little I could actually do about it.  I was fast on my feet, and it wasn’t an asset here.  To actually stop moving, I tried to drop low, sliding, but ended up flopping onto my back, my tailbone cracking hard against the floor.

The hand swept just above me.  She stepped closer, and her other hand came perilously close to touching me.

“Little bastard’s at your feet!” the convict leader howled.

I supposed I wasn’t his buddy anymore.

Sub Rosa was blind, but she could apparently hear.  She bent low, hands groping.  I rolled to one side, bumping up against the wall.

“Your right!” Baldy-beardy called out.

I scrambled back, toward my compatriots and the other scientists, as Sub Rosa fumbled toward me.

The flames were dying down, and her eyeball was revealed, bloodshot, oozing, but it didn’t look nearly as damaged as I’d hoped.  Poor woman, not being able to blink or close her eyes while her head and upper body were on fire.

I saw the eye move, focusing on me.

Another throwing knife struck Sub Rosa.  She twisted, looking away from me to see Mary.

I used that chance to dart close, moving past Sub Rosa, putting myself between her and the convicts.

Goal two: distract her, buy the others time.

I still had the knife I’d gotten from Mary.

Gripping the knife in both hands, swinging it from behind me, over my head, and forward, I slammed it into Sub Rosa’s back, near a point where it looked like things unfolded from.  Closer to her own tailbone.

I was already backing away, moving clear when she swung her hand my way.  Her hand hit the wall hard enough to leave cracks and do some substantial damage to her.

Goal three, optional: don’t die while seeing goal two through.

“Little bastard.  Lied to us, didn’t you?!” the convict leader bellowed.  “Killed Old Craig!”

That was Mary, not me.  Throwing her knife as we made our getaway.

But I made you look like a fool, you fool, and you can never forgive me for that.

“What I told you wasn’t all a lie!” I said.

I had to leap back to avoid Sub Rosa’s swipe.  She turned her back on the others while pursuing me.

Leaping back unfortunately put me closer to the convict leader and his three remaining cronies.  Baldy-Beardy, Shaggy-Beardy, and the woman convict, who looked especially wary and concerned.

“Remember everything I told you before!?” he roared.  “I’m going to do worse, you hear me!?”

“Then she continues her rampage, she kills you, and everyone dies!” I said.

“I don’t care!  I’m going to make it slow!  If I have to suffocate down here, I’m going to take my time with you!  You’ll crave the times I’m making you twitch with these spikes, because at least then I won’t be carving bits off you!”

Ticked off Academy experiment on one side of me, ticked off Academy experiments on the other side of me.

I backed out of the way of another swipe.

I saw the convict leader smile.  A mean, sadistic sort of grin.  A cat grin.  As much as the younger kids at the Orphanage liked to coo over kittens, I knew what cats really were.  I was aware that they were one of the rare species out there that killed and tormented other animals to death for their own amusement, be they barnyard cats or house cats.  One cat, left to its own devices for a few days, would chalk up scores of kills that it didn’t eat, and not all were vermin.

Cats were detestable, viewed objectively.

I could respect that side of cats.  I didn’t like seeing those same elements in a man three or four times my size, especially when that man was pissed off and using the Academy-designed weapons that had been built into his body.  Left to his own devices, I had no doubt he could amuse himself doing exactly what he’d threatened.

A tink sound marked the collision of one glass bottle against the ceiling.  It dinked off of Sub Rosa’s head and clattered to the floor, a few feet from me.

“It was supposed to break!” Mary called out.  “Is it broken!?”

“No!”

I only had a few feet of space, now.

The convict leader stopped, grinning at me, arms spread wide.

“Come on!” he said.  “Right into my waiting arms!”

I moved in the opposite direction, toward Sub Rosa and the fallen bottle.

I got a foot from the bottle when her arm came down, overhand.  I stopped just in time to avoid having it come down on my head.  I snatched for the bottle and missed.

“What are you doing!?” Mary called out.

“Trying to grab-”

“Don’t!”

I moved out of the way of Sub Rosa’s reaching arm, which meant throwing myself belly first into the long flaps of skin that surrounded her legs.  My head was only a short distance from the fire that still burned at her left breast.

Her arms came down to embrace me, wrists crossing behind me, hands reaching out to block my escape routes, or to clutch at me if I tried to slip by.

It was a smarter action than many of her actions had been recently.  Was she recovering?  Was she more able to think, now that she wasn’t on fire?

I stopped to think, to try and process a way out, and the conclusion I came to was that I might have managed it if I hadn’t stopped to think.

Mary hadn’t thrown another bottle or vial.

Something about this one, she’d hoped to use it.

I felt the fingers close around me.  In the split-second before I was heaved up off the ground, I kicked the bottle, sending it skittering along the stone floor, in Mary’s direction.

Sub Rosa hauled me up, her wrists uncrossing as she did, turning me upside down in the process.

I could have cut her face if I had the knife, but I’d left it embedded in her lower back.

Held aloft, I was face to face with her.  Well, face to upside-down face.  Or vice versa.

It hardly mattered.

“If you really want to hurt Shipman, I can tell you how,” I told her.

There was no response, no recognition.  She moved one hand to grab me by the ankle, then swung me back over her shoulder.  I realized where I was, fumbled for my knife, and didn’t find it.  She changed the angle she held me, and I realized what she was doing.

This is the part where she swings me into the ground and dashes my brains out.

That’s kind of fitting.

It was eerie, the quiet that came over my thoughts, even as my body was caught in the grips of almost pissing itself, hand scrabbling for a knife that I cognitively knew was out of reach, my heart pounding, breath catching in my throat in preparation to say something, or maybe to scream one last time.

For the first time in a very long time, my thoughts weren’t noisy or conflicted or stumbling over each other in a constant interweaving.  My brain was a spot of tranquility in a setting of fire, meat, blood, and chaos.  That world moved in slow motion.

I wanted to say something witty, but the words caught in my throat, because I didn’t have enough time, because I knew the others would take my words for more than they were supposed to be.

Instead, I let out a long sigh, and I felt my body find the stillness, or something approximating it.  I stopped searching for the knife.  My arms dangled.

I heard the crash.

I felt her tense, moving me, swinging me up and forward.

She released her grip.  In the end, I wound up doing a backflip or two before cracking my head on the floor.

I saw her move, her hands clutched into claws, back arching.  Foam was bubbling up where the liquid had landed.

She was covered in burns, and burns hurt.  Whatever Lillian had provided for Mary to throw, it was one of those things that stung like nothing else when poured over an injury.

I knew, because Lillian had used those ones on me when I’d spent the day annoying her and happened to get hurt in the field.

It had taken me a few times to catch on.

I lay there on the ground, belly up, staring at Sub Rosa.

“Move, you imbecile!” Gordon bellowed.

“Run!” Mary shrieked.

Oh.  Yeah.

With the passing of that endless quiet, I felt almost sick to my stomach.  My body felt disconnected, as if I were at the controls of some monstrosity of flesh and metal and something had jarred me, leading me to forget which lever moved which extremity.

I figured out the controls.  I flipped myself over, crawled, then ran away, while Sub Rosa was still standing there, twisting in place, as if there was some specific configuration of her body that she could discover that would make all the pain stop.

We just keep making her madder.

Gordon and Helen had opened up the ceiling.  Gladys, Helen, Jamie and the other scientists were already up, and Lillian was in the process of climbing up Gorger’s arm.

It struck me that the ceiling escape route wasn’t an escape route at all.  It wasn’t a ventilation tube or anything of the sort.

No.  That would be one of the channels that gas, water, or other sterilization measures would use to cleanse an area of any ongoing problems.

Sub Rosa knew the security measures.  She knew how to disable them, and it stood to reason she knew how to enable them.  I’d seen glimmers of residual intelligence in her.  However much damage those bullets had or hadn’t done, I didn’t like the gamble we were making here.

I hope Gorger can handle this, I thought.

Except Gorger is one of those measures.

Mary made her way up.  Gordon, ever the gentleman, averted his gaze as her skirt brushed past his head.

I still had to scale Gorger’s arm to reach the ceiling.  “Go!” I called up to him.  “Help me up when you’re up!”

He obeyed.  The moment Mary was clear, he hauled himself up.

Sub Rosa chased me, though it was hard to tell.  With the fire dying, the world around me was rendered in black and slices of a grey that was best described as almost-black.

Funny thing, when being chased, when one had to run toward the threat.  Much as Gordon had, I had to step on Gorger’s body to get up to his shoulder and arm, though I was a touch graceless in the process, dropping to all fours to find a surer grip.

Sub Rosa drew nearer.  A few feet away, reaching around the arm for me-

Gorger dropped his arm, swinging clumsily at her.  I nearly lost my balance, grabbed at his thumb, and when I felt myself nearly falling, all the same, I stuck a foot out, planting it on Sub Rosa’s face.

It made for a terrifying moment.

What drove me to move, the thing that set every nerve to firing well before Sub Rosa lashed out or before Gorger started raising me up toward the section of ceiling where the stone tile had been pulled free, was a horrible, core-of-my-being fear of that alluring quiet I had experienced.  I felt that uneasy sickness accompany my movements as I made my way up.

I found Gordon’s reaching hand, slapped my wrist into it, and gripped his wrist.  With his help from above and Gorger’s from below, I found my way into the shaft.

Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Sub Rosa backing off.

I saw her point.

“You’re kidding me,” the convict leader said.

Another point, a sharp gesture, pointing.

Oh.

They were her measure against Gorger.

I saw the convicts approach Gorger, spikes held out, jabbing, their movements uncertain.

I saw Sub Rosa turn, lurching down the other direction, to the far end of the hall.

We needed to get as much distance as possible from them before that measure worked.

“Sy.  Are you okay?” Jamie called back.

“Head hurts.  Tailbone hurts.  Body hurts.  I legitimately thought I’d die,” I said.

“You and us both, Sly,” Gordon said.

I thought of Mary.  Of how despondent she’d been.  She needed a win.  “Mary saved me there, I think.  Or Lillian did.  Or both.”

There was only silence.

“For the record, Gordon, you’ve officially lost the right to call me out on mistakes and bad calls.”

“We needed to save Gladys.”

“Right, because we’ve never had to deal with acceptable losses before.”

“Who are you?” Gladys Shipman asked.  “I know that girl interviewed me before, but none of this- What was all that?  What acceptable losses have you dealt with before?”

The channel was narrow, only about two and a half feet by two and a half feet.  Two of the others further up had some light, and it reflected off of moisture that clung to the walls and floor, giving me some illumination.

Of course, all I had to look at was Gordon’s butt.

I really hoped that Sub Rosa didn’t manage to activate the sterilization protocol we were presently navigating.  I didn’t want the last thing I saw before I died a fiery or drowning death to be Gordon’s butt.

Mary’s butt?  Maybe.

Lillian’s butt?  Now that would be my pick.  I imagined Lillian would hate it if she died knowing I was staring at her butt.

I felt giddy after my near slip from death, and the musings on butts of all things made me giggle a little.

“Gladys,” Gordon said.  “You said you knew her?”

“Yes.  Anyone who’s been down here for twelve or so years knows her.”

How old are you?” Lillian asked.

“Sixteen.”

“Your uncle had you down here as a kid?” Helen asked.

“Yeah.  I heard the stories.”

“Who is she?” I asked, impatient.

“She’s the woman who built the Bowels,” Gladys said.  “She made the initial decisions on how to design Gorger, though she didn’t do the actual work.  Which is how she operated, really.  Or so I heard.”

“Not useful,” I said.  “Clarify, explain.”

“I am,” Gladys said, her voice sharp.

I was glad I didn’t have a view of her butt.

“She made this place, she designed the security, she designed Gorger,” Gordon said, voice calm, as if trying to guide by example.  “And when it all came down to it, she became an experiment?  That’s dedicated.”

“It’s… no,” Gladys said.

We stopped, and I managed to avoid headbutting Gordon.

“No,” Gladys said.  “She didn’t make this place.  She oversaw it all.  The deep excavation of the shaft and individual labs, she decided the protocols for security and what Gorger needed to be, and she decided who got to work in the Bowels.  She was the overseer more than anything.”

“But?” Jamie asked.

I snickered to myself.

“Ignore him,” Jamie said.  “What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Gladys said.  “I only heard bits and pieces.  I remember seeing her as a kid.  I’ve seen pictures that are mounted in the stairways at Claret Hall.  She was a tyrant.  She demanded security protocols that nobody could follow, and canceled working projects when those protocols weren’t followed.  Everyone hated her, and it got… it got bad.  A lot of things that are wrong with Radham Academy today, they can be traced back to her.”

Helen managed to open the grate.  Easier from here than there, apparently.  Light flooded the shaft from the lit hallway below.

Helen dropped down.  We began to edge forward, each of us dropping down, one by one.  The adults would be able to catch the rest of us.

It was painfully slow, and I didn’t know what was going on with Gorger and the woman that had decided how he would work.

When I finally dropped down, Gladys was still explaining, “I didn’t put the pieces together until I saw her.  I knew she died down here… not so long ago.  More and more, as time went on, she became an administrator.  But she was always this horrible tyrant.  Things have been better since, less stringent, workable.”

According to your uncle, I thought.  It was a biased, one-sided story, and I didn’t like Gladys enough to take her side.

Still, I kept my mouth shut for Gordon’s sake.

“She died, and my uncle always said these cryptic things after…”

“He kept her alive,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Gladys said.

“He kept her alive, eyes open, mouth clamped shut, trapped, with her brain mostly in working order,” I elaborated.

I saw the woman who’d worked with Gladys raise her hands to her mouth.

“Yes,” Gladys said, and it was a testament to her humanity that she sounded as upset as she did.  Her fingers clutched at her lab coat, right over her heart.

Gordon reached out to take her hands, reassuring.

I was right!  I cheered in my head.  Go, Gordon!

“Look,” Lillian said, pointing.

Ever the killjoy.

Gorger’s back.  He was retreating.

“We need to go,” Gordon said.

There was no disagreement.

But, being the last one down, furthest back from the direction we wanted to go, I also happened to have the best view of the group and our surroundings.

On Gordon’s back was a bug.

Looking down on me, I saw two.  Akin to a honeybee, but black from head to hind-end.

“Bugs,” I said, almost absently.

I saw Gladys turn, her eyes widening.

At the vent above us, more swarmed.

A scuffling sound echoed.  We were being followed.

The scuffling became a snuffling, a snort, a grunt, and then a nails-on-blackboard scrape of something against stone.

I saw one of the other scientists in our group blanch.

She’s letting everything out, now.

How fitting, that the woman who argued so fiercely for better security down here was the one exploiting it all.

We didn’t dare shout, for fear of agitating the swarm or luring something after us.

Silently, collectively, we ran.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.07 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.7

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Reaching the main shaft of the Academy’s dungeon-laboratories did remarkably little to quiet the creeping feeling of claustrophobia, if that was even the right word.

Before, the Bowels had been a deep, complicated hole, sealed tight, that just so happened to have hostile enemies in it.  I could process it as I would with any other place in Radham.  There were always dangers.  Sometimes less, sometimes more, and sure, a nine foot tall, undying killing machine with a deep understanding of how this place functioned was more, but it wasn’t too far from business as usual.

We immediately headed up, winding our way around the interior of the cylindrical shaft.  We had people of different sizes and ages, some old, and some, mainly us were young.

Short legs sucked.  I couldn’t wait until I grew.

The madness that spilled out of the corridor we’d left a few minutes ago was why I felt claustrophobic now.  The surroundings were actively hostile, and they were hostile in a way I couldn’t grasp yet.  It was already dark there, where Mary had destroyed the lightbulb, but the darkness now came alive.  The dark bodies of large bugs spread out to nearby stairs, railing, and wall, and they were soon followed by small humanoid figures.

The humanoid things were sleek and black, like eels, gaunt, the things crawled on the walls.  Where they touched a surface, earthworm-like tendrils snapped out, each tendril turning regularly at sharp right angles, never overlapping or coming too close to one another.  The walls beneath their hands and feet became maze-like patterns, snapping out into existence in a half-second, then disappearing just as fast as they moved forward.

I’d seen something like that in some sea creature.

Their eyes were as dark as their skin.  They snorted and snuffled, and they scampered along the walls with a surprising speed, more visible from the way the light caught on the tendrils than for their actual bodies.

I saw some pause and crane their heads around almost one hundred and eighty degrees to look back and up at us, as we continued to make our way upward.  Three of them immediately started moving directly up.

We were making our way up the spiral staircase, and by going straight up, they were able to reach the section of stairs we had yet to reach, further ahead of us.

“Who made those!?” Gordon asked.

“We did,” one of the scientists with us said.  He had an accent.  German, possibly, or Dutch.  Jamie would know, if I were to interrupt and ask.

“Explain!  In brief!” Gordon said.

“They’re weapons!”

Great.

“Less brief!”

“The tendrils are supposed to maximize surface area.  They saw into flesh on contact and on leaving, and they apply a contact poison.  It’s injected through the injury, and it breaks down the fat in the hypodermis.  It’s meant for night raids, Phobos and Deimos approach.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said.  “Translate.”

“Cuts skin into- um, into those patterns you see them making on the wall.  Breaks down the part under the skin, enough to make it slough off?”

“Yes,” the scientist said.

“Skin comes off in strips and squares?” Lillian said.

“Yes.”

The things had reached the stairs above us.  As they climbed on the underside and railing, the tendrils snapped around, forming a weird, geometric, spiderweb-like connection between the individual pieces of the railing, before they hauled themselves over.

Our forward progress slowed.  They were waiting for us, two of them climbing up the wall so they would be above us, the other standing on the stairs, tendrils wrapped around the railing.

“I can’t,” Lillian said.  “I can’t, I can’t.”

Mary seized her hand.

“The projects are down here.  They’re not done,” I said.  “Why?  Why haven’t you been able to finish these little bastards and give them to the academy?”

“The Academy-”

No,” I cut him off.  “No dilly-dallying, no shifting blame, no ego.  What’s wrong with your work?  Be straight, be fast, or we might die.”

The doctor huffed.  “Control.  They go to the battlefield in boxes, yes?  We use pheromone, drive them away, they run, far, to enemy camp.  After time, or full belly, pheromone smell good, draws them back in.  Straight to cage.  Out, wait, back in.  Every night, until the enemy breaks.”

“But?”

“But too unpredictable, Academy says.  Do not move out in straight lines.  The weapon is not devastating enough to be worth using without ability to aim.”

The cloud of bugs below had stopped expanding, but they were now buzzing around in the darkness of the shaft, impossible to catch unless the light just happened to fall behind them in the right way.  I felt one land on me, and decided on the usual approach for bees.  Leave it alone and hope.

The small black creatures below us were crawling more aimlessly, grabbing and snapping for bugs.  Their gums were black, but their teeth and tongues weren’t.  The teeth weren’t white, though, but gnarled nubs, eroded, ill-cared for.  It made the stark pinkness of their tongues all the more alarming.

Above us, one of the creatures stuck out its tongue.  The member moved just like the tendrils did, snapping out, all right angles, without seeming rhyme or reason, clinging to a surface.  In this case, the surface was the creature’s face.

Those same tendrils would snap out all maze-like and unpredictable over their victim’s skin, they would cut, break down the exterior layer, and then recede, sawing in again.  Shortly after, their skin would fall off in pretty patterns.

“Got any of the stuff?  Pheromones?” Gordon asked.

“No.  It’s not like what you describe.”

The cloud below was growing thicker, drawing closer, and I was pretty sure some of the little bastards below us had realized we were above them.

The ones that had crawled onto the wall above us were inching closer, tentative.  Still, every little movement of their hands or feet prompted the tendrils to snap out and cling to the side of the wall.

“How.  Do.  You.  Kill.  Them?” Gordon asked.

“Fire.”

“We used all the fire.”

“Then, we don’t kill, we disable.  We… if we can get to room with something we might rub on skin, affect taste, smell…”

Mary gave Lillian a bit of a push.  It seemed to get Lillian moving where she’d been shutting down.

“H-Here,” Lillian said.

She set her bag down on the stair in front of her.  She fumbled her way through it, hands shaking so badly that she couldn’t even reliably grab anything.

The scientist who had been filling us in on the creatures pushed her aside and began rummaging through it.

“There isn’t much left,” Lillian said.

“No,” the man said.  “No, no… no.  I don’t see… no, not this, either.  Even if we crushed it-”

Helen moved, reaching out.  It wasn’t a fast movement, but it was sudden enough that it made me jump.

One of the things above us had pounced.  Its hands touched Helen’s arm, and the tendrils spread out, over and under the sleeve of her Academy jacket.

She caught it by the wrists, and pinned it down on the stairs beside her.  The tendrils retracted, then snaked out again, as if trying to find an appropriate grip.

It was only after the third retraction and reapplication that beads of blood began to form on Helen’s face, neck, hands, and bare legs, tracing fine lines in those maze-like patterns.

Gordon found his way past the others, leaving Gladys behind, to get close.  He raised his foot, prepared to step on the thing’s throat.

No,” Helen whispered the word.

Gordon backed away, touching the railing.

Helen had the thing’s gaze, and brought her face closer.  She didn’t flinch as its tongue snapped out to cover her face.

Instead, she leaned closer, mouth opening too wide, teeth bared, and hissed.

Something in that flipped a primal switch in the black thing.  It struggled, flailing, tendrils retracted, and kicked to try and get away.  It squealed and snorted like a pig crossed with a baby all the while, a fear sound.

Helen ratcheted up the aggression, twisting the thing’s arms to inflict pain, her back arching, before she let it go.

It fled, and it fled with enough speed that its buddies joined it, our way now clear.

Helen composed herself as fast as she’d gone feral, one hand going to fix her hair at one side, where it had fallen across her face.  She looked at us, her face now running with blood, smiled, and made a pleased little half-giggle sound in her throat, before leading the way upstairs.

She was most definitely doing that routine on purpose, just to freak people out.

“Her skin,” the scientist said.  “If she moves too fast, too quickly-”

“Her skin is different,” Gordon said.  He helped Lillian gather up her bag and the contents that had been pulled out, then grabbed her arm, helping pull her forward.

She’s different,” I said.  “Obviously enough.”

I didn’t miss the fractional hesitation before the others followed the Lambs on the way upstairs.  Logic dictated that we were less dangerous, but a trace of fear and concern had held them back for just a moment.

Far below us, Gorger was forced out of the tunnel.  He was a massive creature, and the stairs weren’t wide.  His grip on the railing was born of many years of practice, as he swung himself down.  He found some foothold and flung himself clear across the shaft, to plunge a hand into a handhold that was impossible for human eyes to make out in the darkness.

He hung there, a vague pale shape in the gloom, seemingly suspended by nothing.

Sub Rosa emerged from the corridor.  She was different.

Hunch-backed, she had two heads, and one of the metal spikes jutted out from the ‘sleeve’ of her robe, behind her actual hand.

“What the…” I breathed out the words.

She turned her head away from Gorger, scanning the surroundings.  Her face was still damaged.  She wasn’t healing any of the damage we’d done, though it looked like a clotted mess from a distance.  It was essentially what Jamie had said: whatever else happened, the Sub Rosa cocoon kept the brain more or less operational and the heart pumping.  If she could die of blood loss, she hadn’t yet.

“She’s sharing the suit,” Jamie said.  “Whatever she released killed her underlings, or left them unable to fight, so she made room.”

I looked again, noting the hump at her back.

But the arm… her arm was longer than it should have been, and yet, with the hump at her back, somehow the blade reached out that far?

She dislocated it.  Took it to pieces, stretched everything out, and then bound the hand to her wrist.

And just like the suit was keeping her alive, if the mechanisms or biological parts of what made the convicts electric were still in operation…

Poor bastard was probably alive in there.

“Bugs,” Mary said, interrupting my train of thought.  “I got bit, what’s going to happen?”

“Stung, not bit,” Gordon’s new beau replied.  “I don’t know.  The payloads are mild, for testing purposes with animals, but, I don’t know how to put this, you’re small?”

Gorger leaped across the considerable gap between the wall and the stair where Sub Rosa was.  He grabbed onto the frame of the gate that marked the entrance to the sixth floor tunnels, and avoided collapsing the stairs, sliding into the tunnel, an arm extended for Sub Rosa.

“A little toxin goes a little further,” Mary said.

A moment passed, and Gorger stumbled back, grunting in pain.

He could crush her so easily, if he could get to her, but… something was wrong.  The shock of the metal spike bypassed the rest of the immunities and protections he’d been built with.  His reaction seemed very human, a flinch, a recoiling.

We were rising high enough that I was losing my ability to pick out details.

“Yes.  If it forms a bump on your skin, it’s anaesthetic, it’ll numb, maybe partially paralyze.”

“If it doesn’t?”

“Then it’s tranquilizer,” Shipman’s partner told us.

“That’s good?” I asked.

“Bad,” Gladys Shipman told us.  “Tranquilizer, applied without adhering to the ratios?  One bug, a grown adult might feel woozy.  For you?  Or even the boy with the glasses there?  I’d be worried it might depress your heart rate too much.”

“Death,” I said.

“Possibly.  And there are an awful lot of the bugs around,” she said.

“So many years of work, scattered to the wind,” her partner said.

I’m more concerned about dying, I thought.

“How long?” Lillian asked.  “Before we see bumps, or effects?”

“Not long.  Minutes.”

Gordon seemed to make a decision, hearing that.  He pointed to the next set of tunnels.

We’ll get cornered again, I thought.

The thought had to be pushed aside.  I knew why he was suggesting it.  I didn’t argue.

We made our way into the tunnel, and then people gathered inside the first available lab.  Our ‘help’, including Gladys Shipman’s partner or supervisor.  Whoever the older woman was.

I could hear the furniture being moved before we reached our destination.  Two labs over, the door was ajar, the lab empty.  Us younger folk gathered inside.

We shut the door.

Time to see who gets knocked out, who dies, and maybe come up with a plan.

Lillian immediately set to looking after Helen, who cooperated remarkably little.  A wet cloth passed over her face, and came away crimson.

A lot of blood, but it wasn’t from one clear source.  It was beads of blood adding up to a veritable pool.

“We should all check each other over,” Shipman told us.  “Better to find out now than later.”

I nodded.

Removing my jacket, actually Jamie’s that he’d lent me, I draped it over the back of a chair.

I saw Jamie point.

Two marks at my elbow.

“It didn’t even hurt,” I said, quiet.

“We marketed them to the Academy as weapons, but we designed them to be a means of vaccinating people en masse,” Shipman said.  “It was supposed to be a good thing, or a neutral thing.  Help the people who needed it, without hurting them.  Are there bumps?”

“No,” I said.

“Wait.  Let’s hope,” she said.

I nodded.

But I nodded while secure in the knowledge that I’d been among the first the bugs had reached.  I’d been at the tail end of the group, the first available target.

The bumps had had enough time to appear.

There were parts of our bodies we couldn’t check ourselves.  Jamie looked me over, as I pulled my shirt up over my head, then lifted up my trouser legs, and found another on my thigh.  We finished by having him run his hands through my hair.

I finished and pulled my clothing back into place.  Gordon had been mirroring my actions, so Jamie could check us both at once, but the hair took more time.  The look seemed cursory, but I trusted Jamie’s eyes.

He was faster with Gordon than it had been with me.  Those eyes learned fast.

I could see how some parts of Gordon were ever so slightly different in tone.  Where most people saw, it was normal, impossible to notice, except for maybe a hair of difference in tone from one hand to the next.

Gordon had gotten off easy in that respect.  I had too, though I had suspicions.

Jamie, though…

I looked at him.  I expected a flinch, a downward glance, and I saw neither.

He nodded.

“If you want someone else,” I told him.  “That’s doable.  I won’t mind.  Lillian’s seen.”

“Lillian is busy with Helen,” he said, voice soft.

Lillian was powdering Helen’s skin with something she’d collected from the shelf.  It was tan in color and fine in grit.

“You really need better taste in makeup,” Helen was heard to comment.

“Shut up,” Lillian retorted, with a little more emphasis than necessary.  On edge, but she had something constructive to do.

“You’d rather have Sy?” Gordon asked.

Jamie nodded.

I worked quickly, my body positioned to block the view from the other side of the room.

He pulled up his shirt, and I saw the tracks of scars, the largest and deepest running in parallel with his spine.  Smaller ones reached out, like branches from a tree, gnarled, puckered, angry.

There was a knot at the base of his neck, gnarled, lopsided.

He turned around, and I saw how the scars reached around to embrace him, and the healing had been poor.  It had gotten infected, I knew, and there had been other priorities than getting the tissue to heal perfectly.

Helen had been grown from scratch.  Whatever she looked like, there was precious little in her that was exactly like the human equivalent, from her hair to her skin to her internal organs or muscular structure, or even the composition of her muscles.

Jamie had been born human, but they’d decided to make modifications.  It had involved removing part of his spine and brain, cloning the spine and brain with augmentations, and then replacing them.

While Gordon, Helen and I had been playing ‘naughty and nice’, getting to know each other, Jamie had been lying face down on a table in a sterile environment, conscious enough to converse, waiting to see if things would take when everything was put back into place, or if he’d be paralyzed and lobotomized, if he lived at all.

Helen was vat-grown, Jamie had received a graft.

Weeks.  Maybe months.  He’d never specified.

I pulled his shirt down for him, pulled at the back of his pants to check his rear, glancing at the second of the gnarled scar points at the tailbone, then replaced them.

“I can check my front,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

I ran my hand up the back of his neck, along the scar that his long hair helped hide, and into his hair.

Something told me the physical contact was important.  Maybe it was how he loosened the deathgrip on his book a fraction.

I combed his hair with my fingers, searching with my eyes.

“No stings,” I said, my hand still on his head, hair between my fingers.

He nodded against my hand.

I mussed up his hair, then pulled away.

“Thank you,” he said, the statement far enough removed from the deed that it had a different meaning.

“Of course,” I replied.

The girls were done faster than we were, but Helen required a fair bit of powder.  Lillian, showing that canniness that lurked beneath the surface, had done Helen’s legs and the parts that clothes covered, and had only the hands left.  Helen looked like a ghastly doll, now, the sort of doll that was left by the side of the road, scuffed by weather and being kicked around.  Paint flecking off, scuff marks buried under that same paint, covered in muck that was assuredly blood and dirt.

“Here we are,” Gordon said, as Lillian continued her ministrations.  “Sy’s stung.  So am I, but I think it’s mostly anaesthetic, and I’m pretty tough.”

“I’m stung too,” Mary said.  “Lillian’s already feeling woozy, but she’s knuckling through.  Gladys has two stings on the legs.”

Lillian nodded.  Her jaw was clenched.

“I’m fine,” Helen said.  “I don’t think they like me enough to sting me.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Too sweet for them.”

She flashed me a ghastly-doll smile.

“The situation is bad,” Gordon mused.  “Whatever Sy was telling the big guy, they aren’t going to open things up again until Gorger gives the signal, and I don’t think Gorger can.

The memory of the tranquility I’d experienced at Sub Rosa’s hands was still uncomfortable, ominous, and alluring.  I’d already stated my concerns with being in a locked room, thinking that our escaped experiment could come through at any moment.  I wanted to be doing something proactive.

Talking and planning was good, but it wasn’t quite good enough.

“You said she deserved it,” Gordon said.

“The monster?”

“Yes.”

Gladys made a face.

“She’s to blame for the worst parts of the Academy?” I asked.

“It’s a long story,” Gladys said.  “I’m not sure we have time before things start taking effect.  I’m already…”

She paused.

“Start sooner,” I said.  Gordon scowled at me for that.

“It’s complicated, it’s not something I can sum up quickly,” Gladys said.

If I had my knife, I would hold it to your throat and make you talk, Gordon be damned.  Stop stalling!

I smiled, waiting patiently.

“She was rigorous.  Ruthless in deciding who got labs and who had their projects canceled early.  It was all about the end result.  Nothing to do with the process, didn’t matter if you were sick or had a death in the family, if your wife was in the delivery room, you were expected to give your all, or she would replace you with someone who would.”

Ah.

In a way, the foundation of the philosophy that had made us so hard to sell.

That philosophy had meant it had taken nearly four years for Hayle to get one of the failed Lamb projects restarted.

I hated Sub Rosa a little, now.

“I think, my uncle thinks-”

Thought.  She’d forgotten the details in the heat of the moment.  Death was like that.  We spent so long assuming people were alive.

“-That she liked having new projects.  Old projects, ones that were brought in from elsewhere, she pressured them.  Replaced them with things that were hers.  When she couldn’t do that anymore, she put pressure on everyone, demanded more results, faster.  She got them, which pleased the people in charge, but things down here reached a breaking point.”

“What broke?” Gordon asked.

“Standards.  Ethics.  People started taking shortcuts.  Cheating.  There was a month, when I was young, that my uncle was home for all of it.  Because some people got desperate, and they got test subjects from Radham.  Not the Academy, but-”

“The city,” Lillian said.

“Even children,” Gladys said.  “My uncle was so torn up about it… friends of his, they did it.  Starting with the elderly, but then…”

Gladys drifted, nearly nodding off.

“What happened in the end?” Mary asked.

“She fell over the railing, straight down to the bottom of the shaft.  She was on a lower level, but… it was enough.  Or almost enough.”

“Before we go further or run out of time, the bugs, same question we asked about the nightmare creatures,” Gordon said.  “Why isn’t it in use?”

“We were close.  We designed the mechanism, we were waiting on a breeding phase to see how effectively it carried across generations.”

Absently, my fingers brushed over the two red blotches on my arm.  No bumps.  I felt my leg, and didn’t feel any raised bump.

“No flaws?”

“Not enough for us to use, and I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  He flashed her a smile.  “Good job, then.  Keep thinking.”

There was something in his expression that I might have taken for lovesickness, but he wasn’t that bad.  Even his plan to shoot Sub Rosa hadn’t been terrible.  We’d been particularly unlucky, that she hadn’t gone down with six bullets, and that Gorger had shown up.  Had either one been different, Gordon would have been the hero.

The hero that didn’t communicate, but eh.

“You’re acting drunk,” I told him.

“I’m just a little tranquilized,” he said.  “I’m feeling it, I’ll deal.”

I nodded.

“Gorger can’t do anything.  Jamie, can you think about any projects we could use?  Places we could go?”

Jamie shook his head.  “I’ve been trying, nothing springs to mind, and I have things pretty organized in my head for the job we’ve been doing down here.”

Gordon nodded.

A slow, lazy nod.

Worse than before.

I bit my tongue, watching the conversation continue.  Lillian was holding her hand, which had formed a palsied sort of fist, but she was drifting away too.

The conversation was sporadic, and it wasn’t my focus that was faltering.

“Cover your skin with something caustic,” Gladys was saying.  “Wasn’t a bad idea.  It’ll hurt, but it’ll keep the bugs off, but it’ll hurt…”

I watched in quiet silence as she faded away, slumbering.

When Lillian, Mary and Gladys nodded off entirely, I forced myself to face the reality.

I looked at Gordon, who was going down the same path.

“You-” he slurred the word.  “Damnashin.”

“We can’t stay here and wait and hope,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Can’t fight eever.”

“Either,” Jamie corrected.

“Yush,” Gordon said.

And he was out.

A full minute passed in silence, Jamie, Helen and I with our sleeping companions.  I knew they were doing what I was doing.  Watching to make sure everyone kept breathing.

I found a handhold and helped myself to my feet.

“You were stung three times,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, probably,” I said.  “But my casefile was the Wyvern for a reason, and it’s not the parallel with my own name.”

“I know,” Jamie said, sounding a little annoyed.

“Let me have this,” I told him.

He snorted.

“The Wyvern is the dragon with a barbed tail.  I’ve been stung every month for years.  Everything under the sun put into my body.  I have tolerances.”

“Yeah,” he said.

We looked between us.

Helen, Jamie and I.

The three of us were probably the least well equipped to handle Sub Rosa, in the grand scheme of it all.

“Let’s find something to rub on ourselves to drive off the bugs, and see what we can do,” I said.  “Let’s hope things haven’t gotten too much worse while we’ve been distracted.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.08 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.8

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“Depending on who was part of our trio here, I’d adjust my strategy,” I voiced my thoughts aloud.  “If it were Gordon and Mary, I’d talk to them about battle plans, where we could get weapons, stuff we could improvise.  I’d turn my own talents toward finding and putting together something that would buy the two of them an opportunity.  If it was Lillian that was part of the group, either of them, and me, I’d have Lillian use her knowledge of science stuff to do the finding, and I’d be a distraction, while Gordon could be point man.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.

The hallway was dark.  The bugs were everywhere, but they weren’t landing on us, as far as I could tell.  We also lacked any strange guests.  The wall-crawlers hadn’t followed us up this far.

“And with us?” Helen asked.

“You’re intimately familiar with the Bowels, Jamie remembers the past interviews we’ve done?”  I made it a question, directed at Jamie.

“I remember what I was told about.  I sat in on half the interviews we’ve done, I glanced over some of the files for the other half.  Seventy five percent?  Give or take?”

“How many labs is that, that you’re aware of?”

“Two hundred and two.”

“How many labs are you unfamiliar with?” I asked.

“Ninety eight.  Two were unoccupied.”

I nodded.  “We’re armed with knowledge.  The trick is to find out how to use that knowledge.”

She’s armed with knowledge, too,” Helen said.  “She knows more than I do about this place.  I don’t think we can beat her that way.”

“No,” I said.  “But let’s keep our eyes open for opportunity.  I don’t suppose there’s anything we could access or cut that would let us shut down an area without actually being in that area?”

Helen shook her head.  “Things were built like they were built in case of invasion.  If the enemy or enemy agents came in and tried to get at some of the labs to obtain tools to use against the Academy, those within could drop the ceiling and seal things off.”

“What about the mechanisms upstairs, then?  They have to be able to raise the stone blocks after.”

“Teams of stitched at a wheel, and a switchboard,” Helen said.  “Need the right configuration on the board for a given tunnel, or it locks up when you order the stitched to turn the wheel, and only certain individuals can order the stitched.”

“One way to stop Sub Rosa for good would be to follow her into one of the hallways, get to one of the panels where she reworked the security, and undo that work.  Seal ourselves in with her.”

“No,” Jamie said.

“It’s an option,” I said.  “Depending on how Gorger is doing, we could do that, sacrifice one of us to remove her from play, then let Gorger clean up the bugs and the wall-crawlers.”

“No,” he said, more forcefully.  “Do I need to list reasons, Sy?  I know you’d want to be the one to sacrifice yourself for us, and I’m not willing to let you do that.  If one of us dies, we grow weaker as a group.  Whatever comes tomorrow, or next week, next month, next year… we need everyone.  I expect that every single one of us is preparing on some level for what you’ve talked about.  The expiration dates.  You most of all, Sly.”

“I don’t know if I’ve been preparing,” Helen said.  “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“That’s what I meant,” Jamie said.  “Just like with any problem, when things start going south, we’ll each approach it from our individual angles, we’ll support each other’s strengths and shore up each other’s weaknesses.  But everyone, anyone that we lose, that weakens us.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I can see that.”

“We’re not losing anyone,” Jamie said, and his voice was tight.  “Not if there’s a chance of saving them.  You’re not sacrificing yourself for the sake of the rest of us.  Especially when it’s not guaranteed to work.”

His voice cracked a little, and I didn’t think it was puberty.

For once, I didn’t have a ready reply.  The emotion he was exhibiting, it made it hard to say something, when I wouldn’t be able to match it or acknowledge it.

It was Helen who leaned close and gave Jamie a peck on the cheek, leaving behind a kiss mark of the powder Lillian had used mixed with the chemicals we’d covered ourselves in.  A pale version of the mark lipstick might leave.  I saw the tightness disappear from his shoulders in response to that simple gesture.  The tension was broken, and I was free to comment and speak.

“What about manipulating some sap into doing it for us?” I asked.

“God, Sy, really?” he asked, incredulous.

But I was already cracking a grin.  I saw Jamie shake his head, but he allowed himself a smile.

I’d lightened things up a little.  That paved the way for more serious discussion.  Jamie was more sensitive than the rest of us.  He had the least blood on his hands, next to Lillian.

“You’ve been holding that in for a while,” I said, no longer poking fun at him.  “What you said before.”

“Just a little while,” he said.  “It’s been worse for the past bit.  Past hour, I guess.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Seeing you almost die?”

“I’ve almost died loads of times,” I said, cavalier.

“That’s not the first time you’ve said that,” he said.

“Uh huh.  Because it’s true.”

“It’s not the first time you’ve said it, and yet you said it differently here,” Jamie said.  “I just thought back to all the other times, your expression, your body language, your tone-

“Geez!”

“You said it in a different way because you feel different about it.  This time was different, it was closer.  You know it, I know it.”

I chewed on that for a bit, as we headed to the stairs again.  When we reached the staircase itself, I stopped.  We needed to decide where to go and what to do, but with Jamie feeling emotional and the current topic of conversation, I doubted I could get him to let things lie.

No, that was a fib.  I could get him to let things be, but no matter how gently I did it, I would be dropping a conversation that was critically important to Jamie.  I would be acting evasive, and that would hurt him, given the situation.

“Yeah,” I admitted.  “I came closer than ever.  For a second or two, I knew there was nothing I could do, and I was okay with it.”

“I experience that moment sometimes,” Helen said.  “When I’m strangling someone to death, I see it in their eyes, I hear it in the noises they’re making, when they stop straining for breath.  I feel it in how they fight and twitch and struggle.”

“I don’t ever want to experience that moment again,” I said.  I looked at Jamie.  “Believe me.”

“I believe you,” he said.

I nodded.  I could have changed the topic, hurried us along, but…

“Our friends are unconscious, and I nearly died.  Is that why you’re wound so tight right now?”

Jamie made a face, raising a hand to fix his goggles.  It didn’t look like he was planning on responding.

“I told you my inner thoughts,” I prodded him.

“Yeah,” he said.  For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was admitting that he was wound tight, or if there was more to it.  There was more to it, apparently, because he said, “I didn’t recognize Sub Rosa.”

I frowned.

“I recognize everyone, Sy.  I’ve walked by that picture that Gladys mentioned…”

He trailed off.

“Jamie?” I asked, and I felt genuinely worried.  It was a weird place to stop talking, and he wasn’t immune to the stings.  Not that I was, but still.

“Sixteen times,” he said.  “I’ve walked by it sixteen times.  I looked Sub Rosa directly in the eyes, several times.  The connection didn’t happen.”

I nodded, putting a hand on his shoulder.

I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I haven’t talked about it before, because Gordon really doesn’t like it being brought up, but I do know how I probably expire.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m supposed to remember things, Sy.  And now we’re down here, and I know I’m supposed to be thinking things through, sorting through all the maps and details about the labs, all the paperwork I glipmsed, to piece together a plan or find a way out, but all I can think about is… I’m supposed to remember things.”

My hand on his shoulder became a hug.  He was clutching his book, so he didn’t return it, his knuckles jabbing at my chest as I squeezed him as tight as he could bear.

When I pulled away, I saw that Helen was stroking his hair, patting him like a dog.

“Nothing we can do about that right now,” I said.

“I know.”

“We need to figure out a plan of attack,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  Helen nodded.

“Where are you at, in terms of thinking through the options with the labs you’ve seen or read about?”

“I’m going over it a second time, more in depth,” he said.  “I’m not finding much.”

“The paperwork, about Sub Rosa?  Do any people the creator has worked with work down here?  On similar projects, even?”

Jamie shook his head.

“Fast response.”

“I already considered it.”

“Damn,” I said.  “That leaves us three options.”

“What options?”

“Option one is that we knock on doors.  Visit all the labs you don’t remember reading about, hope there’s a weapon, tool, or threat there that we can use.”

“Shot in the dark,” Helen said.

I nodded.  “Option two is that we turn to you, Helen.  If this place was prepared for wartime, it’s not inconceivable that there could be secret tunnels, defenses, or stockpiles that might help in the event that the Bowels were attacked.”

“Not inconceivable,” Helen said.  “But if those things existed, Sub Rosa would know about them.  I don’t.”

I frowned.  That was a spooky thing to consider.  Sub Rosa with access to weapons and secret tunnels.

“What’s option three?” Jamie asked.

“Option three depends on you being a little less clever than you are,” I said.

Less clever?” Jamie asked.

I nodded.

“This isn’t going to go over well with the Academy,” Jamie commented.

“Probably not,” I agreed.

“It’s not even guaranteed to work.”

“No,” I agreed.  “No guarantees.”

I took the stairs two at a time.  Helen followed.  Jamie was a bit slower, relying on the railing to keep himself steady as he tried to match the pace.

A pack of wall-crawlers surrounded us, many on the walls, and we kept making our way up, helping to put more of them behind us.

“It’s a shame we didn’t have paint,” Helen commented.

“Paint?”

“Bright colors.  Most things know that you don’t eat the bright colored animals.  Bees, poisonous frogs, caterpillars…  We could have helped ourselves out by painting our skin.”

“Doesn’t help with stealth, and we might need to be sneaky,” I said.

“Might,” Helen agreed.  “But those things hurt.  I’d rather get caught and deal with that than have ten of them grab me.”

Ugh.

They dropped down around us, reaching out to grab the railings, and to grab us.

It stung like a hundred bee stings, and I stumbled, falling onto the stairs I’d been ascending.

But it stung the creature, too.  The tendrils didn’t cover much of my arm at all before they retracted, the creature pulling away, backing off, snorting and honking violently, like some bastard offspring of a goose, pig, and cow.

I screamed at it, a sound not nearly as good as Helen’s hiss earlier, but I wanted to drive the point home, bully these things.

The others were receiving the same reaction.  The creatures that had attacked them retreated, making an unearthly series of violent noises.

Helen lunged out, grabbing the one that had attacked her.  It struggled, tendrils automatically going out, then pulling back just as fast.  She heaved it toward the gap in the railing.

Tendrils surrounded the railing.

Helen kicked out, catching it in the stomach with her foot.  Its feet flailed, but it was just small enough it couldn’t find purchase.  It held on by the tendrils alone.

Helen screamed in its face, then pressed the back of her hand to the stem of the tendrils.

The creature made more noise, squealing, squawking, kicking harder.  Tendrils went out, touched her leg, and retreated.

When the pain became too much, it retracted the tendrils that were holding the railing.

Without hands or feet to grab with, it dropped down the length of the shaft.

All of the creatures near us backed away a fraction.

Helen turned her attention to a smaller one, probably looking to make another example, driving the point home.  But my focus was on the largest of them, the tension in its arms, and the way that it had retreated less than the others.

It wasn’t courage alone.  This one was the leader of the pack.  Or if it hadn’t been, it had been promoted with the demise of the one Helen had sent to the bottom floor.

“Helen,” I said.

“Yes, Sy?” she asked.  Her hands were out to her side, painted fingernails spread out.

“Three o’clock.”

No sooner were the words out of my mouth, than she reached out and grabbed the big one.

It fought harder than its predecessor had, legs catching the railing, hands flailing, striking out with both hands, neither one getting any particular surface area with the reflexive reaction to the chemicals.

Helen ducked down, grabbed its ankles, and hauled it down.  The tendrils resisted, holding on firmly.

I lunged forward, and slammed my left hand down on the tendrils, probably doing more damage to my hand than to the tendrils.

Still, the tendrils retracted, and Helen had her opportunity.  She hauled down on the leg, almost tearing the creature off, but it grabbed on with both hands, and snapped at her face.

She didn’t brook such nonsense.  She caught the thing around the neck, then twisted it back and around.

Once she had her grip on the necessary parts, it was essentially over.

The creature was pulled against the railing, genitalia sticking straight out, something resembling the inside of a conch shell, though it protruded.  Hermaphroditic.

It struggled.  Helen screamed at it, and briefly tightened her grip, twisting it further, then relaxed.

She held it like that.

I’d expected her to kill it.  But she wasn’t.  While she had the biggest of the group, the rest were holding back, waiting and watching.

She let it try struggling a few more times.  Each time, she screamed at it and twisted its limbs a little more.  On the third time, she bit it on the ribs, then hauled it off and away, heaving it over to the exterior wall to our left.

It started to scramble away.  She made a start toward it, screaming once, and it froze.

It looked at me, and she screamed at it.

It was all hunched over now, tendrils spread out about as far as it seemed they could go.

Helen bent low, one hand going automatically to her skirt, pressing it down, the polite way of avoiding flashing people when bending down, the other hand going around the creature’s throat.

It started to react, and it got another sharp screaming sound from Helen.  It stopped, all limbs touching ground, simply accepting having its throat held.

She had it firmly in her grip, and it was nothing to do with her muscles or hands.

She pointed, then shoved it down the stairs.  It didn’t tumble, but it did move.  The remainder of the pack moved in the same direction, and one got too close to Helen.  She made a lunging motion at it, screaming, and it scrambled over to the wall to get away, over, and to the remainder of its pack.

We started back up the stairs.  The wall-crawlers went in the other direction, down.

“I thought you were going to keep him for a pet,” I commented.

“I’m not allowed pets,” Helen said.

“I meant more in the sense that you’d take over the pack, then we’d have a few soldiers to use against Sub Rosa.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Helen said.  “Too slow, getting from here to there while trying to keep them in line.”

“Then why not toss him?”

“They’re social.  They communicate, I think.  It might help, having them communicating to the others, telling them we’re dangerous.”

“Hm,” Jamie said.

“Don’t you think so?” Helen asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Interesting that you’re thinking along those lines, though,” I told her.

She gave me a smile and a curtsey at that.  “To be interesting is the highest of compliments when coming from you, sir Sylvester.”

I smiled back.

“I’m bleeding,” Jamie said.  “You are too, Sy.”

I felt the back of my neck, where I’d been touched, and my fingers came away crimson.

“Here,” Helen said.  She handed me the jar of powder Lillian had been using.

Rather than use the dabbing sponge, I reached in, grabbed some, and slapped it on the general area where it was sore, before handing it to Jamie.

Onward, upward.

Third floor.

We made our way through, my eyes following the number of each lab.

Twenty-two, I thought.

We reached the lab, and I pounded on the door.  It swung lightly ajar at that.

“If this turns out badly, I’m going to be silently judging you,” Jamie said.  “While we die, anyway.”

“Noted,” I said.

I ventured into the lab, and scanned the surroundings.  A small size, as labs went, ten paces by ten paces in size.

The counter on one end of the room featured a glass tube, capped with metal at both ends, the two caps held together by a locking mechanism.  Crimson fluid swirled within.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Gas.  One more weapon for the Academy created weapons of war to use on the enemies of the Crown,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

“It won’t stop her.  It might distract or weaken her, but that’s only going to buy us a chance,” Jamie told me.

I nodded.

“And, I feel the need to stress this, we’re not immune.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  I looked at the fluid.  “I get that.”

Jamie had been searching through every memory of paperwork and every interview he’d participated in, to figure out what we might be able to use against Sub Rosa.  Things that might hurt her or set her back.

But he was too clever a boy.  He searched through his head, but he did it with rules.  He didn’t allow himself to consider weapons that were as likely or more likely to hurt us than to hurt Sub Rosa.

This was one such weapon, the size of two paint cans, stacked one on top of the other.

While Jamie and I talked, Helen was going through cabinets.  I joined her in doing the same.

We found two more canisters, much like the first, but the fluids inside were crystal clear.

I looked to Jamie.

“Water,” he said.

My face fell.

“But we can use it,” he said.

I smiled.  “How?”

“It’s a dispersal system.  We’re filling the air with a thick gas, diluted with water vapor.  We use these, we dilute it further, but we make the cloud bigger.”

Decreasing the chance we miss.

The mental pictures were becoming clear in my mind’s eye.  This wouldn’t kill her, it wouldn’t even hurt her that badly.

If it touched us, if we screwed up, then it would hurt us badly, if it didn’t kill us outright.

My struggles with Sub Rosa thus far had been because she’d been implacable, unstoppable.

Now I had the means to push and pull.  I had the strings with which I could move Sub Rosa, for the briefest time.

But what play to enact with the puppet, for the greatest effect?

“What are you thinking?” Jamie asked.

“What exactly does this stuff do?”

“Flesh eating virus,” Jamie said.

“Really?”

“Essentially.”

I looked at the red tube with a newfound respect.

“Don’t drop it,” he said.

“I won’t.”

“You could.  In fact, I think I’ll take it, just to be sure.”

“I won’t drop it!”

“Let me have it.  You can hold my book.”

“No.  I wanna be the one to unleash the flesh-eating plague!”

“I’ll hand it over when it’s time, but I don’t want you unleashing it on us.”

“I won’t!”

“Not intentionally, but-”

“Boys,” Helen said.

Our heads turned.

“I’m taking it,” she said.  “I’m physically incapable of dropping it by accident.”

“But-” I started.

“Carry the other ones, please,” she told us.

“But…” I said, trailing off.  She met my puppy dog eyes with that infuriating, cute little smile of hers.

I walked to the cabinet with the canisters of water, then grabbed the first.

I was sweaty, and I had the powder on my hand, which hurt traction rather than helping it.  The glass case tipped over and clunked hard against the floor.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Jamie said, in the smuggest of tones.

“It didn’t break, anyway.”

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.

“Shut up,” I told him, again, before grabbing the thing and heaving it up and off the ground.

Jamie considered a moment, then left his book behind, taking the thing in both hands.

“We have the means of moving Sub Rosa the way we need her to move,” I said.  “We could bring her up.  With the right tools, we might even be able to send her down.  We can make her stand still…”

“But?”

“We don’t have the means of stopping her, when it comes down to it,” I said.

Therein lay the rub.

A person was only technically dead when their heart stopped, but even that definition was vague, because the Academy had kept people alive without hearts in their chests, using machines to pump.

Heart and brain.  When one or both ceased to function, Sub Rosa stopped.

We lacked the tools to destroy either.  There might be guns here and there, but that relied on luck.  Severing the brainstem, or striking the heart, through the armor-like layer of the cocoon.

“Ideas, Sy?” Jamie asked.

“Some,” I said.  “It depends on things.”

“That’s amazingly vague,” he said.

“I’m feeling inspired by some of the villains from the dime store novels,” I told him.  “We need to think big.”

“Okay.”

“How mad do you think Gordon would be if I used Shipman as bait?”

“He likes her,” Helen said.

“I don’t think he fully grasps it,” Jamie commented, “But yeah.”

“Yeah.  That’s why I’m asking,” I said.

Jamie nodded.  “He’d probably forgive you, but…”

“But he’d be mad,” I said.  And what we’re not saying is that time is limited.  Do I really want months or years of time with Gordon to be eaten up with him upset at me?

“Why?”

“It’s something Sub Rosa wants,” I said.  But we can work around it.  We should drop these off and scout.  See where she is and what she’s doing.”

There were nods from the two.

This felt doable.  The lack of a means to deliver a sure killing blow was a big hole in the plan, but one that could be worked around.

The possibilities that unfolded in my mind were good ones, fun ones.

Ones that people would remember.

We carried the glass canisters halfway down, to the fifth floor, and we left them at the exit of the hallway, just by the stairs.

Slowly, we crept down, past the swarm of bugs who refused to land on us, past the black wall crawlers, who snorted and honked, while refusing to draw near.  Warning sounds, I presumed, passed from one group to the next.

Social creatures.

Past the sixth floor.  A whole section of railing and stairway was broken.  From the fight between Sub Rosa and Gorger.

From the bodies in the hallway, though, I could assume that Gorger hadn’t gone into the hallway.  If he had, he would have scraped them against the floor.

Down another floor.  Seventh.  The way was locked, the door broken, but not broken away.  Gorger hadn’t gone there either, and I doubted he would have left Sub Rosa to her own devices.

Down to the eighth floor.

Bottom floor.

Sub Rosa was there.  People in lab coats were working to tear away wall panels, while she stood there, a metal spike extended in their general direction.  Another cluster of people in lab coats was gathered against the wall, huddled together.  Twenty, thirty, maybe forty.

Gorger lay against the opposite wall.  He breathed, but he was limp, the fight gone out of him.

He’d lost to Sub Rosa, who had been his father in a way.  Yes, she was female, but she’d had a fatherlike role in his creation, providing the seed and the means for the man to become the monster, and now she had struck him down.

We couldn’t use the gas like this.

“We need to use Shipman, to draw her up,” I whispered.

There was no response from either of the others.  They were studying the scene.

Are they making a way out?  Or is this like something I suggested to Helen?  A weapon cache?  A tunnel?  A last-ditch measure?

On the broad bottom of the shaft, a doctor happened to look up, and saw us.  I could just barely see the whites of her eyes.

She gestured.  Telling us to run, maybe.

Rescuing the children.

She gestured again.

“Let’s go,” I whispered.  My legs were already feeling like lead, from so much travel up and down stairs in short time.  I had the information I needed to put a plan in action.

But my memory wasn’t good.  Just to be safe, I looked back, ready to commit the scene to memory, so I could better move the pieces when it came down to it.

It was only that last glance that let me see the subtle events unfold.

The gesturing movement, urging us to run, it had been seen by others in the crowd.  Many of them looked up at us.

Sub Rosa, watching over the crowd out of the corner of her eye, turned.  Not all of the heads were fast to look away or distract.

She followed their gaze, and she saw us.

It seemed she was still angry.  She moved, as fast as she was able, ascending the stairs.

Chasing.

At least we won’t have a problem baiting her upstairs.

Problem was, I now had zero minutes to pull off a serious deathtrap I’d expected to take ten or twenty.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.09 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.9

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

We weren’t going to get away this time.

She was taller, stronger, and as hurt as she was, she kept going without faltering.  Her face still had a gaping hole in the side of it where several bullets had hit, filled with what looked like a big blood clot, and she had other injuries she might have sustained doing battle with Gorger, but she wasn’t staggering anymore.

I’d expected that, even if we’d been seen, we could outrun her or match her pace.  She was healing, however, or she’d pulled herself together.  She was making good time.  Better than we were.

I was quick on my feet, and I had a good sense of where my body was and how to move.  Jamie and Helen weren’t runners.  Humans had evolved not to outrun prey, but to keep running.  Helen wasn’t human, and as fine a piece of craftsmanship as she was, there were tradeoffs when playing to different strengths.  Jamie just wasn’t quick or coordinated, he stumbled, I caught him, he faltered, and I pulled him onward.

She was going to catch us.  The next hallway was still a little ways up, the canisters of water vapor and plague more than a little ways up.  We wouldn’t reach it first.

Those people who had stared at us and warned us to run had doomed us.

I looked back, still running, and I saw Sub Rosa’s steady advance.  She kept one hand on the railing, hauled herself up with arm strength as well as strides.

I contemplated throwing myself toward her.  Ascending the stairs, there had to be a point where, with a push or a collision with a leaping eleven year old, that she’d tip over backward.

The fact that she was gripping the railing, hauling herself up, gripping it, hauling herself up, a steady pattern, it narrowed that window of opportunity.

What were the odds?  One in twenty?  One in fifty?

Wait for the right moment, pivot, leap.  It would barely inconvenience her, maybe break the glass cases attached to the body that she was using for the spike.  It would kill me, or she would kill me shortly after, yet the other two would have a chance at getting away.

An hour ago, I wouldn’t have waited to do it.  Jamie’s speech made me hesitate, want to be absolutely sure there was no other choice.  I glanced back, gauging distance, helped Jamie run, then checked again, to see how fast she was gaining on us.

In the spaces between where her lips were sealed together, the lips parted, sucking in and huffing out breath.  The fluid flew through the tubes that had been implanted in her.

I let go of Jamie’s hand.

Jamie seized my wrist a heartbeat later, and this time, he was the one that hauled me up and forward.  A second wind, or a surge of desperate strength.

I kept going, only because I didn’t want to slow him down by fighting him or lagging behind.  In my heart, I knew it wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t simply acknowledge the fact, accept it and carry on with the original plan when he was trying so damn hard.

Somewhere along the line, I failed to estimate things right.  I misjudged how much time had passed, or Sub Rosa had managed a second wind or burst of speed in the same way Jamie did.

Jamie startled, his uniform jacket pulled tight against his chest, and he let go of my wrist.

He looked at me, not Sub Rosa, in the moment before she swept him into the wall.  A swiping motion, right to left, but it had enough force to break him.  Two dozen individual parts of Jamie cracked and percussed against the wall all in one horrible sound, before his body slumped to the stairs at the base of the wall.  His book tumbled down the stairs, and it just kept going, end over end, opening, carrying down, then closing itself before sliding down another few steps.

I continued another few steps up on momentum alone, tripping and almost falling because I wasn’t looking where I was going, before reality caught up to me.  Sub Rosa had stopped, so I stopped and turned to confront her.

Jamie’s book came to rest, the hard cover bent.

Bugs swirled, the wall-crawlers continued their eerie movements along the surfaces around us, but we were still.  Sub Rosa was just a step away from being exactly in between me and Jamie.  Helen was further up the stairs, but only by a bit.

My blood pounded in my ears, my mind raced so much I wasn’t sure I trusted it, as I tried and failed to see a way forward, something that would help Jamie.

I couldn’t get by Sub Rosa, bait her downstairs, and keep her busy somehow while sending one of the doctors to help Jamie, assuming he was alive.  I wouldn’t make it.  I knew it.  I couldn’t outrun her, I didn’t have the tools, and the doctor wouldn’t risk Sub Rosa’s wrath by going.  She’d had them cowed, down there.  The dead bodies suggested how.

I couldn’t scream for them to come up and help him, again, because they wouldn’t go, because they wouldn’t hear.

I couldn’t go down and force one to come with me and help Jamie on pain of death, because that would mean Helen had to deal with Sub Rosa.

I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t.  The thoughts dissolved into a haze of couldn’ts and the haze was an angry one, the pounding of blood in my ears and eyes intense enough that I could see my heart beating, my field of vision throbbing.

It was the polar opposite of what I’d experienced in my moment of near death. My thoughts then had gone quiet.  I’d been able to stop thinking.  Right now they were anything but quiet.

My thought was crystal clear, and it was well modulated, not a scream or an incoherent shout.

This is what it’s like to see red, was my thought.  Which was odd, because things seemed more blue-green, as if we were underwater.

I wished it was more productive.  That my surge of emotion and the clarity for my most destructive thoughts could provide a way to end her right this moment.

“Sy,” Helen said, behind me.  She sounded so normal.

“Yes?” I asked, my voice just as everyday as hers.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

Sub Rosa wasn’t holding onto the railing anymore.  If I could knock her down the stairs, so she might fall like Jamie’s book had… no.  It wouldn’t hurt her enough.

“Sylvester,” Helen said, with more emphasis.

I want to tear those staples out of her mouth so she can talk, then challenge her, call her out, break the arrogant, insane bitch.

“I know,” I admitted, aloud.  “But Ja-”

I stopped, cleared my throat so I could speak more clearly, found no word came out, and only managed something on a third try, changing the affect of the word, making it flat, whisper-quiet.  “Jamie.”

“You know he doesn’t want you to.”

Doesn’t, not wouldn’t.  I looked at the body, my eyes automatically moving away from the broken form, then made myself look again.  I blinked, and my eyes stung with the sweat mingled with the stuff I’d rubbed on my skin and in my hair to keep the bugs off and make the wall crawlers less inclined to hold on to me.

He was breathing.

The relief was so profound I found myself grabbing the railing to steady myself.

Anger was replaced with fear.

Sub Rosa still had the spike extending from her left hand.  She was closer to Jamie.

“I’d like to talk,” I said.

She shook her head slowly.

“Sylvester,” Helen said.  “Jamie doesn’t want you to take the risk.  Let’s go.”

Jamie doesn’t want to die.  If we leave him with her, he’ll die.  If we leave him without getting him help, he’ll die.  We’re all supposed to live, aren’t we?

I couldn’t voice the words.  I needed to open a dialogue with Sub Rosa, find a chink in the armor, a weak point, or something.

Her attention moved to Jamie.  Helen’s fault.

“Supervisor,” I said, my voice firm, authoritative.  A desperate stab at evoking something from the days when she’d had a different sort of power.

It worked.  Her head turned a degree.

“Earlier, not long after we crossed paths, you stroked my hair.  The others, the people who remember, they’ve painted you as a monster, the person you once were and who you are now.  They laid the blame at your feet, saying you’re why the Academy is so strict and results-focused.”

I could see the tension in her face building with each statement I made.

“But a real monster doesn’t have that gentleness to them,” I told her.

My eyes strained to find a sign that I was getting through to her.  If there were any changes, I couldn’t be sure if I was really seeing them or if I wanted to.

I was usually so good about these things.

Just as I’d done against Mauer, I fell back on fundamentals.  ‘Us versus them’ was an approach that almost always worked, framing an enemy, making myself and the others out to be part of ‘us’.  But we’d betrayed that expectation when Gordon had shot her.

Something else, then.

Establishing a rapport, humanizing.  A good technique for a hostage to use against a hostage taker, it could mean a turnaround in a situation, being released, or it could buy a moment of hesitation.

In this case, the humanizing was anything but, because I had to talk about monstrous things.

“I know what the Academy does,” I said.  “I’m not like other children.  Neither is she, and neither is he, that much should be obvious.  Believe me when I say that we know the sort of pain you’ve experienced.”

Her hand went up, and it touched the wounded eye and side of her head, where the blood had congealed to a jellylike consistency, the overall structure of her face devastated and mostly caved in.

“I’m talking about the other kind of pain.  Being slowly and surely twisted for the agenda of others.”

Her body language was all the reply I needed.  Her hand was slow to drop away from the hole in her face, as if to say, but this isn’t forgotten, or you deceived me once.

She turned back to Jamie, and I felt a yawning hollowness inside at the realization that I probably couldn’t stop her, whatever happened next.

“You-” Jamie croaked the word.

Sub Rosa moved the point of the spike toward him.  I hated to think what convulsing might do when so many of his bones were probably broken.

“You have… a nephew,” he said.  Each word or pair of words was labored, forced.

She didn’t stab him or touch him with the spike.

“His name… Edward.  Year older… than me.”

There was no reaction on Sub Rosa’s part.  Her expression was already warped by the staples and the portion of the cocoon that was draped over and around her head.  A bug-eyed stare.

Behind us, one of the wall crawlers got a little close.  Helen hissed at it, scaring it off.

Sub Rosa didn’t need to hiss.  She was big and scary enough that she apparently didn’t look like prey to the wall crawlers.

“He… not…  Academy.  Works…”

Each word seemed more painful to get out.  He wasn’t twitching a muscle as he talked.

“Runs errands… passes on messages… for factory owner.  His uncle, named Baxter.”

The pieces fell into place with that.

Baxter was a known name.  The family was wealthy, well liked.  The job of assisting a factory owner was believable, but paralleled Sub Rosa’s own experience to a slight degree.  She was the supervisor, and it was obviously a core part of her identity.

Everything Jamie was doing was calculated using known variables.  Probably some I hadn’t considered or ones I wasn’t aware of, drawn from Jamie’s recollection, and some informed by my desperate stab at gaining sympathy or connecting to her better side.

I felt Helen touch my shoulder.  She’d drawn closer.

Everything he’s doing, including the plodding, speed of his every utterance.

Buying time.

There was no saying how long we had.  I feared it might be no time at all, that Sub Rosa’s anger might outweigh her attachment to family.  That, as Helen and I made a run for it, leaving Sub Rosa and Jamie behind, she might give chase, and that one of us might get caught and utterly destroyed in the same way Jamie had.

My hand found Helen’s.  As she stumbled, fatigue catching up with her, I caught her with my shoulder in her armpit, bracing her with my entire body, scraping a shin against a stair while the both of us recovered.

“Brave boy,” she said.  She wasn’t talking about me.

How long before Jamie ran out of things to say, or worse, said the wrong thing, and tipped Sub Rosa off to the fact that he was lying through his teeth?

Or even worse still, how long before he succumbed to his injuries?

We had some time, be it a minute or five, but I didn’t like trusting luck.  It was a fickle mistress, whatever that meant.

“What do we need?” Helen asked.

“Shipman,” I said.  “One or two adults from the next room, to carry her.  The glass cases.  I need to get back to the others.”

“I’ll get the adults and Shipman, you do that thing,” Helen said.  “What are we doing?”

“Fishing,” I said.

“I’ve never gone fishing,” she said.  She was breathing hard, but she wasn’t panting, either.  Different means of breathing.  “Harpoon?”

“Hook,” I said, meeting her eyes.

“How fun!” she said.

Something to bring up later, if I could figure out how to word it.  Yes, this was probably fun for her, and yes, I suspected she was worried for Jamie in her own peculiar way, but the nature and tone of the statement were at odds with the fact that we were in as bad a situation as we’d ever been.

Up the stairs, to where the others are.

My legs felt like lead.  I doubted I had another run in me.

This would have to be the final confrontation.  All or nothing.  If we screwed up on any level or if something went too wrong, there would be no more tools left to play.

We reached the others.  I pulled ahead of Helen, pounding on the door that hid the adults as I passed it.  I tried to give it a cadence that would sound less like the knock of an immortal abomination of nature and more like something people could open a door for, but I rushed it a bit in the process.

I let myself into the room where Lillian, Gordon, Mary and Gladys Shipman were.  Quickly, I stopped by each, checking that they were still warm and breathing.

Mary was the last.  I helped myself to knives, because knives were useful, and then I reached up her skirt and pulled the loop of wire free.

The fishing line.

I could hear Helen outside, talking to the people in the other room.  Two words.  “Please help.”

My attention fell on Gladys.

The bait.

I bent down and began winding wire around her ankles.

Gordon’s hand moved.  He barely had his eyes open, but he touched my elbow.

I kept winding.

His touch became a firm grip, hard.

“Jamie’s dying,” I said, very quiet, my voice as firm as his grip.

The hand fell away.  His eyes were closed, but there was an expression of deep concern on his face.

I was still working on the tie of thin wire when Helen came into the room with three of the male scientists.  Gladys’ partner, the older woman, was at the tail end of the group.

She saw what I was doing and pushed past the others.  I pushed back, hard.

“No,” she said.  “No! Whatever you’re doing-”

“I’m stopping that monster and getting every single one of us out of here alive,” I said.

I’m going to try, I revised my statement in my head.

“We are,” Helen said, in a very particular voice that was probably modulated and calculated to win the adults over.  Confident without being threatening.  “Please trust us.  Do as we say, and we should all get out of here alive.”

I almost believed her, before I remembered that she was basing that statement on her belief in me, and I knew I didn’t have that much trust in me or my own plan.

Helen knelt by me, then leaned close, “If you do it like that, the wire’s going to pull taut and cut her to the bone.  She’ll lose her feet.”

Maybe the blood will help, I thought.

“They can give her new feet later.  There’s no time,” I said.  Jamie was down there, doing everything he could.  He was probably dying, he could die if his concentration or consciousness faltered for a moment and he said the wrong thing, or if Sub Rosa figured out he was lying or tired of him.

“Here,” Helen said.  She took the wire from my hands.  “Ibbot hired a trainer to teach me to tie people up properly.”

“Why would tying people up be useful?” I asked.  “You tie people up with… you.”

She smiled.  “I know.  I do.  It’s for the end goal.  The me I’m supposed to end up as, a nice skill to have available.”

I thought about it.  Helen as the dangerous dame, using her attractiveness and appeal as a weapon to get close.  I blinked a few times.

“Now I’m even less sure why you’d need to tie someone up,” I said.

She didn’t answer, as she tugged at the wire, but she leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which only confused me more.

She slipped few metal tools into the gap between wire and leg so the sharp edge of the wire would press them against Shipman’s legs rather than cut into flesh.

She did the remainder of the tying up and knotting, probably faster in the end than I’d have been on my own, and the knot looked strong, the extra ropes hooked into, under and around Shipman’s shoulders and clothing.

I gauged the remaining length of the wire.  About twenty feet?

It would have to do.

“Carry her,” I said, to the adults.

One balked.  “How old are you?”

“I’m eleven,” I said.  “Almost twelve.  And we’ve killed more monsters than you’re even aware existedCarry her.”

I was anxious for Jamie, and my anxiety was transforming into a crazed anger and impatience.  If I had to let Gladys Shipman lose her feet or murder one of these idiots as an example to make this work, then I’d damn well do it.

“Please,” Helen offered, as an addition to my order.

They picked up Shipman.

“Gloves?” I asked, looking around  “Thick ones… they’ll need something.

I didn’t see anything.  Fuck it.

We walked as a group, me in the lead, Helen a little behind me.

“I’m going ahead,” I said.  “You set up at the fourth floor.  Use your lab coats or something to protect your hands.  Tie the other end to the rail.  Lower her down.”

What?” one of the men asked.  He was older.  “What are you talking about?”

“Sub Rosa only wants a few things.  That girl is one of them.  Sub Rosa spent a long time tearing down doors and making her way through the Bowels to reach her,” I said.  “We’re going to give her what she wants.”

“Like hell you will,” the woman said.  Gladys Shipman’s partner.

“Not in reality,” I said.  “But we need to position her right, to set the hook.”

I looked at Helen.

“She’s stronger than me,” Helen said.  “I don’t think I can hold her.”

“You don’t need to hold her for too long,” I said.

“Oh,” Helen said.  “Okay then.”

She took me at my word so easily.  Helen wasn’t, as far as I was aware, possessed of the capacity for frustration or exploration.  She had something she was good at, she knew her niche, and she was profoundly comfortable within that niche.  Ibbot had done some things right.

In the briefest possible terms, she trusted herself, and she trusted me.

I trusted her instincts.  There were a few ways this could go, which would require far much explanation to cover in detail without confusing matters, and that same explanation would probably upset the natives.

We reached the spiral stairs.  I grabbed the railing, holding on, and slipped under, leaning over as far as I was able to look down the circular shaft.  Gorger was a pale speck down at the bottom, and Sub Rosa was far from a speck, a considerable distance closer.

She’d left Jamie behind, and she was coming up.

I felt a sickness roiling in my stomach, a feeling that refused to clarify itself.

“Get in position,” I said, as I moved to do the same.  “Lower her when I whistle.”

I hurried, though my legs were too tired to properly run.

Here we were.  It was hard to know what to do, if Sub Rosa was even hostile, but the consequences for assuming she wasn’t hostile and then being wrong… I wasn’t willing to deal with them.

One way or another, this was the final confrontation.

Thanks for buying us time, Jamie, I thought.

I picked up the canister of plague with ginger care.  I felt a thrill of power, simply from holding it.

In a confidence game, one of the first things to do was to create a sense of urgency.  The second thing to do was to put the other party off balance.  Clever men who made their illicit living manipulating others didn’t tend to do it while keeping their targets clear headed and focused.

I sat down, then lay back, and flipped over until I was on my belly, before creeping forward, looking through the supports for the railing and down.

When Sub Rosa was directly beneath me, I threw the canister down at an angle, so it would hit the wall just above her.

It didn’t break on the initial contact, but it hit the stairs and cracked.

The pressurized contents exploded into a cloud far, far larger than I’d expected.  I scrambled to get up and back.

I had to hope it wouldn’t reach Jamie, who was a few floors down.  There were the people on the ground floor too, but Jamie.

I really hoped none of the wall crawlers appeared.  I was vulnerable like this.  They couldn’t kill me, but they could distract at a critical moment.

The cloud stopped billowing out.  With all her injuries, Sub Rosa probably wouldn’t like it, though it might not take effect immediately.

That’s for hurting him, I thought.

I headed further up the stairs.  I grabbed the thing with water inside, then advanced back down a little, watching and waiting.  Better to have another canister behind me if I needed to make a run for it.

If she went down, I could hopefully disturb her with this.  She didn’t know it was harmless, for one thing, and she didn’t know I only had the three.

With luck, I could convince her that the only way to deal with the problem was to come  up.

She didn’t go down.  She emerged from one end of the red-brown cloud, rubbing at her eye, snorting to breathe through her nose.

She managed to clear her vision enough to make me out, a full floor above her, and picked up her pace.

If she came up, angry and ready to kill, I had an option for that as well.

I threw the canister with the compressed water vapor inside, aiming for it to land between us, closer to me than to her.

Like the last, it cracked and released its contents, with glass flying everywhere, before a thick mist enveloped that part of the stairwell.

I saw Sub Rosa back out of the lower end of the cloud.

Can’t charge ahead recklessly, can’t ignore me.  Do what you’re so good at doing.  The steady and implacable advance.

I turned and  retreated further, to the entrance to the fifth floor hallway, where the last vial was.

This was more defensive than offensive.

I had to wait for the mist to clear.  My heart was beating so hard in my chest I thought I might throw up because of it.

Come on.  Come on.

It took time for the mist to clear.  I fidgeted, waiting.

When it had mostly cleared, Sub Rosa forged ahead, wiping again at her eyes and nose.  The edges looked red and inflamed.

I whistled, still considering everything I needed to do.  If Sub Rosa came for me…

I picked up the last glass container.  My just-in-case measure.

Dangling from her ankles, Shipman was lowered into view.  I saw Sub Rosa crane her neck to look up and see.  I noticed how she picked up the pace.

Sub Rosa came up, Shipman was lowered down, and I waited, tense.

“Let’s deal,” I told her.  “We want to live, you want revenge.  You don’t need to be able to talk to make this deal.  It’s as simple as these things get.”

“Revenge?” I heard one of the adults above asking.  They’d heard.

Sub Rosa continued her advance, not stopping.  I tightened my grip on the glass canister and backed up a step.

“If you come after me,” I said, “You don’t get her.  They’ll drop her.  She dies, never the wiser.  Hardly a revenge against anyone who did this to you.”

She slowed a touch.

“She knew,” I lied.  “She was there.  She knew what you were.  You saw the recognition in her eyes when you saw her on the sixth floor.  It would be ridiculous to think she wouldn’t know, with her uncle working down here.”

Sub Rosa looked at Shipman, who wasn’t being lowered anymore.

Were the adults too busy fighting and arguing?

We’d told them all they had to do was follow orders.

“She told me those things about you.  She was one of many who’ve taken your legacy and twisted it into something ugly.  Lies, and untruths.”

But Shipman was several feet out of reach, dangling, skirt closer to her ribcage than her knees, and I, unfortunately, was closer.

Sub Rosa drew nearer.

Damn it. 

I raised the glass canister over my head.

Sub Rosa lunged forward, fast and hard enough that she couldn’t aim, and tapped me in the ribs with the spike.

My knees went out from under me as the shock rippled through me.  The glass canister slipped from my grip a moment too late, falling in the wrong direction, hitting the stairs above me.

No.

No.

I’d hoped to use the cloud of mist to beat a retreat, either into the hallway or up the stairs.  Let Sub Rosa have only Shipman in reach when the mist cleared.

But now I was at her mercy.

My breath caught as I tried to bring it into my lungs.  When I finally found air, I screamed, “Lower her!”

“Barely any wire left!” I heard back.

Sub Rosa stared down at me, her one visible eye clear.  A thick rash had already spread over her exposed skin.

The look in her eyes was a sad one, which caught me off guard.

On the other hand, her fist was clenched, her hand shaking.

Not enough mercy in her to spare me, not enough anger in her for her to go straight after Shipman.

I stood to be a casualty of the middle ground.

Shipman suddenly dropped another three feet.  The movement caught Sub Rosa’s eye.

The woman looked away from me, the spike pointed in my general direction.

She walked over to the railing, leaning forward and reaching up and out to seize Shipman by the collar.  She tugged, hard, and Shipman came free entirely, the wire from the grip or tie or whatever they’d done up above.

Hopefully Helen wasn’t too busy lowering Shipman to-

No.  Helen wasn’t too busy.  She appeared, hair and skirt fluttering as she dropped from the stairwell above, seizing Sub Rosa’s reaching arm and Shipman both.

My heart leaped.  This hadn’t quite been the plan.

Sub Rosa was strong, but leverage was leverage.  Helen had to weigh about seven stone.  Gladys maybe eight.  Both weights tugged down on Sub Rosa’s arm as she was reaching over the rail.

The top end of her went down, the other end went up and over the railing.

I found my faculties, and half-crawled, half-walked over to the ledge, praying that I wasn’t going to find out that I’d lost Jamie and Helen in the same day.

Staring down, I saw Helen another floor down.

If I or another human being had reached out and grabbed the railing after falling nearly thirty feet, I might have lost my fingers or my arm.  But Helen was built differently.  She hung there, her arm a few feet longer than it should’ve been, a limp Gladys Shipman dangling from her other hand.

At the bottom of the shaft was a dark blot that marked where Sub Rosa had hit ground.  The pale blob that was Gorger inched forward, until it reached her, and then consumed its meal.

Helen had made it.  Shipman too, maybe.  Sub Rosa was gone.

I wasted no time in heading to Jamie’s side.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 3.10 – Twig

Lips Sealed 3.10

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

I reached Helen.  She hung from one hand, still holding Gladys, looking abjectly unconcerned with the immense drop below her.  Wrist had dislocated from elbow, which had dislocated from shoulder.  The skin stretched, and muscles stood out in odd ways in the space between the bones.  Not that her bones were the usual sort.

Because of the way the arm and shoulder were stretched so thin, her face was contorted, the skin pulled down toward one side of her neck.

“Did we get her?”

“Exactly right,” I said, quiet, bending down.  “Line, hook, and sinker.”

I took hold of her wrist with both hands.

“You’re not strong enough, Sy,” she said.  She craned her head around.  “Help is coming.  They’ll help us up.”

The people who had lowered Gladys down, Gladys’ partner included, coming down the stairs from the level above.

“Bring them down to me and Jamie?” I asked.

“Okay, Sy,” Helen said.

I abandoned her.  Down the stairs.  My legs were tired, my brain was exhausted, my whole body ached from what had to be the lingering effects of getting shocked, and all of the pent-up emotions were dissolving into something approximating exhaustion.  My hair stuck to my forehead, my clothing stuck to my back.  My knees were rubbed raw from the way they’d rubbed against the sweat-damp uniform slacks.  My skin prickled where I’d rubbed it with the chemical stuff.

There was no big plot to focus on now.  I was Sylvester and nothing more.  I wanted every one of my fellow Lambs to be okay, and nothing more.

By the time I reached Jamie, some of the people from downstairs were already making their way up.  A few were clustered around him.  Others were standing at the ready, with improvised weapons in hand.  Shirts had been pulled off to double as headcovers, cloth was wrapped around hands, and still, they had to fight to keep the bugs off.

My thought processes and feelings were horribly confused as I wrapped my head around the scene.  They wouldn’t be doing that if he was dead, so he was okay.  Heart soaring.  But he was hurt.  Ugly feeling in my middle.  And, perhaps the hardest thing to process, I wanted to be the person by his side, helping him.  Resentment and anger.  The feelings mingled and it felt bad.

It must have shown on my face, because expressions changed as people saw me drawing nearer.

Jamie’s breathing was ragged, audible from several feet away.

If you idiots hadn’t tipped off the monster, Jamie would be okay, I thought.

“He’s a tough one,” a man told me.  He had his sweater and a shirt pulled up in such a way that only his eyes were visible, but the skin around those eyes was black.  His lab coat was buttoned up to the chin, cinched tight with a tie.  A black man in a lab coat – an oddity in the Academy.  “He’s breathing on his own, and that says something.”

I nodded, mute.

“You should cover up,” the man said, all business.

“I did,” I told him.  “Covered myself with kerosene.  Bugs don’t like it, neither do the, uh, things on the walls.”

“This boy too?”

“Yeah.”

“Him too?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought he smelled off.  You know kerosene will burn you, smeared on like that?”

“Diluted,” I lied.  Jamie’s had been diluted, Helen hadn’t cared at all about the strength of the stuff, and it was slow to really get to me.

“You look flushed.  If you-”

“I don’t care about me,” I cut him off, before adding, “Sir.”

I gave a pointed look to Jamie, to make it absolutely clear where my concerns were.

“Pupils are dilating.  He follows my finger with his eyes.  But his heartbeat isn’t strong, breathing is taking work.  The bleeding at the side of his head makes me worry about a cranial bleed.  Spiderweb crack of the skull, complete shoulder break, several rib, arm, and pelvis fractures.  His stomach is firm.”

“Firm is good?”

“Firm suggests internal bleeding.”

He had a stern, matter-of-fact way of delivering the bad news.  Combined with his skin color, and I could guess his history.  Black soldier, with duties of a field medic, possibly because of things he’d picked up from his father, or another family member.  When things had gone poorly, the medics had received advanced training.

Much as was the case with the women who’d worked at the Academy during wartime, the Academy had decided that even if someone was black, knowledge was knowledge.

That he was here in the Bowels now, that was notable.  That he was the one looking after Jamie, that was something else altogether.  People who’d had to fight for power so often set everything but their work aside, even decency and kindness.

Sub Rosa was one such person, I suspected.

“He’s going to need surgery,” the man said.  “I’m doing it right here.  I don’t like the idea of moving him, with this many breaks.”

I nodded.

In a very serious, low tone, he told me, “It isn’t going to be pretty.”

“I’ve seen worse,” I said, in that same tone.

Sy?

It was Jamie.

“She’s gone, Jamie.  Helen and I got her.”

That turned heads.  Fuck it.

Sy.  I talked to her… I told her lies,” he said.  His voice was reedy.

“I know, Jamie.  I was there for the start of it.”

No.  I… kept talking… wasn’t thinking… not straight… rambling… lies.”

“I’m not following.”

Stupid lies… contradicting… myself… she knew… she listened… stroked my face…

“She hurt you,” I said.

Don’t think…” he said, but he didn’t find the word or the breath to finish the statement.

“She hurt you on purpose, Jamie.”

I saw her fall…

“I told you, Jamie, she’s gone.”

Started out… telling her about… her dream… things she might have wanted… but after… was… ugh… hurts.”

“Words can wait, son,” the doctor who was sitting with Jamie said.

Jamie continued, oblivious.  “Was telling… her… about my dreams… things I wanted… things… never told… anyone.

“You did good, Jamie.”

She… was gentleMade me comfo… comfortable.  Without hurting…

He was still on that?

The fingers of his good hand twitched.  I reached out to take it.

He panted, as if speaking had meant he lost more air than he took in, even with the ragged gasping breaths, and he needed to refill the reserves.

I thought back through what Jamie had said, trying to find the main thrust of it.

“You reached deep,” I murmured.  “To her, and inside yourself, in order to survive, and to help us survive.  You were hurting, your defenses were down.  The same thing happens with people who are kept as prisoners of war, or kidnapping victims.”

“No.  She was…”

“Sub Rosa was bad, Jamie.  She hurt an awful lot of people, and when it came down to it, she went after Shipman, and that was how we beat her.”

“Went… after?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Stabbed?”

“No,” I said.  Then I realized what Jamie was saying.  It wasn’t concern for Shipman’s welfare, or for Gordon, who liked the girl.

He was trying to gauge whether his estimation of Sub Rosa had been right or wrong.

I opened my mouth to revise my statement, to clarify, but Jamie cracked his eye open in that same moment.  It was barely open at all, squinting against light and pain, and it was so bloodshot it made me think of Sub Rosa’s eye socket, filled with clotted blood.

Don’t… lie, Sy,” he told me.

Even in this state, he had enough of a sense of me to gauge that I was venturing into the territory of dishonesty.  For his sake, to soothe his conscience, but I’d been on the cliff.

I shut my mouth, holding back the lie, and gave his fingers a light squeeze.

We sat for a good minute.

I didn’t like how things sat.  Jamie was squirming more, and I wasn’t sure it was physical pain.  Much as I’d suggested, his defenses were low.  This, lying in a broken heap on the staircase, was Jamie laid bare.

I’d done nothing to assuage his worries.

“Down there, Sub Rosa killed people, right?”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

“What did she have you doing?”

“The wall came apart.  We were pulling out slabs.  There were crates at the back.”

“Crates?”

“Explosives.  Sticks of dynamite, stacked high, inside the wall.”

“Did she want to bring this whole place down?” I asked.

“Who knows?”

A bystander spoke up,  “I wouldn’t think it’s that easy.  There are mechanisms in place.  Sand, water.  There’d be damage, but…”

But she knows this place too well, I thought.  She would know the dynamite wouldn’t necessarily do the trick, and the Academy wouldn’t store enough dynamite to destroy the Bowels.

“Maybe blowing an escape route out of here,” I said.  “Or setting a trap for when they opened the seal and came down here.”

No,” Jamie wheezed.

I looked at him.

“No.  Walled up… tunnel… I think.  Layout of… Academy, only…  one place… she could go… ow, ow.”

“One place?”

“This deep?… Radham’s monster…”

There were murmurs.

Jamie wasn’t being discreet, but he had an excuse, and I was beyond the point of caring.

Radham’s monster.  Sleeping away in a chamber beneath the Academy.

“Did she intend to wake it up and destroy Radham?  Or was she risking waking it up to get out?”

“Don’t… know.”

 

I watched Jamie breathing, worrying he might stop at any moment.  He was squirming less than before.  I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but I hoped that his conscience regarding Sub Rosa was clearer, and that he’d been reminded what she’d been.

Which wasn’t to say that who she was and what we’d faced weren’t entirely different things.

A fresh group of people began making their way up the stairs, carrying tools and kits.

“If you stay there, you can’t do anything, you can’t move, you cannot get in the way,” the black doctor told me.  “No matter how bad it looks, or how violent we seem to be acting.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ve seen worse, really.”

“Sy, was it?”

“Sylvester.  Sy or Sly to friends.”

“Sylvester, then.  Sit tight.  We’ll do what we can.”

I watched as they got all the tools ready, kit and kaboodle all laid out.  There were murmurs from the bystanders, all Academy trained, commenting on what should be done first, where the priorities were, approaches and methods.  Yet it was this man who’d stepped forward to help Jamie.

I wondered how much there was at play in that.  Was it the sort of thing where people thought that blame might be laid at the feet of a doctor who tried and failed to save Jamie?

There was a refuge in thinking about that sort of thing.  The mechanisms at work inside people’s heads.

This was a man who stood alone.

“Doctor,” I said.  “If you save him, you can call me Sy.”

He didn’t take his eyes off Jamie, but he murmured, “Willard D.”

I made a mental note, not that my mental notes were reliable.

I saw Willard’s hands go to the buttons at Jamie’s collar.

“Everyone else,” I said, “If you don’t have something to contribute, get lost.  It’s still dangerous, and enough stings from those bugs will stop your heart.  Go to your labs, close the doors, and block any openings.”

The warning was enough to scare most off.  Only a few lingered, out of ego or curiosity.

I watched as Jamie’s uniform was alternately unbuttoned and cut away.  The scars were on full display.

Willard looked up at me.

“Don’t cut across the scars,” I said.

“Can I ask what they are?”

“Classified,” I said.  “I don’t think you have permission to know.”

“Looks like I signed on for quite a task, then,” he said.

I watched him making the initial incisions in Jamie’s belly.  My eye didn’t leave that scalpel, until I felt a hand on my hair.

Helen, sitting on the stair above me.  She’d mostly fixed her arm, but the wrist hung limp and there were light bruises.

She stroked my hair again.

I returned my eyes to the scalpel, as if I could will it to be steady.

The agreement had been to take turns watching Jamie.  When this had been decided, Gordon, Gladys, Lillian, and Mary had insisted that they be the ones to watch, as they’d slept through the finale with Sub Rosa.

I lay my side with a rolled up lab coat for a pillow, another lab coat draped over me, lying on the floor of the lab where the others had dozed off, now free to rest and recuperate, exhausted to the bone, but instead I’d spent hours watching the rise and fall of Jamie’s chest, and watching Mary.

Mary’s watch had been spent sharpening a knives, until Gordon muttered something rude at her.  After that, she’d taken to coiling the remainder of the razor wire, unwinding it, then fixing it, over and over.

I watched through half-lidded eyes as she suddenly rose, walked over to the clock on the desk, lit a fresh candle, positioned the case around the new candle to reduce the light, then went to rouse Lillian.  Without compunction, Mary took the space Lillian had been using to sleep, makeshift pillow and the fire blanket both.

Lillian didn’t fidget.  She didn’t read or pace or do much of anything.  A few times she rose from her seat, she checked on Jamie, then returned to her perch on the stool.

About thirty minutes in, I heard her making small sounds.

Thirty-five minutes in, I roused.  In the gloom, I approached her and put my arms around her.  She started squirming, trying to wipe away tears, but I shifted my grip to hug her tighter, holding her arms to her side.

“One of the worst things that could have happened to you happened yesterday,” I whispered in her ear.  “You made it, Lil.”

“Don’t-“

“Lil.  You made it, and you did well.

“I didn’t.”

“I’d be the first person to tell you if you didn’t,” I said.  “Right?”

She made a small incoherent sound that might have been reluctant agreement.

“You did well.  Carry that with you.  You faced your worst fear… now leave it behind,” I told her, voice soft, with cadence, soothing.  “Today, you made great strides toward being the very awesome Lil-the-adult you’re going to become.”

She nodded, the back of her head rubbing against my chest.

“Come on,” I whispered.  “Over here.”

I led her to the spot where I’d been lying down.  She obeyed, wiping again at her face now that I wasn’t keeping her from doing it.  I’d meant it to be a kind of permission to keep crying, but she’d gone and stopped.  Silly.

“Lie down,” I whispered.

“I’m on watch,” she whispered, in an even quieter voice.

“I’m not sleeping anyway,” I said.  “Lie down, rest easy.  You’ll wake up tomorrow, and this whole thing with me being nice will have been a dream.”

She let out a hiccup of a giggle, then wiped at her face again, but she did lie down.

I helped her fix the lab coat blanket, then sat down, my back to her stomach, arms around my knees, watching Jamie.

For his part, he watched me.  He’d seen it all.

I’d chosen a position, unfortunately, that didn’t give me a good view of the clock on the desk.  I didn’t want to move for fear of disturbing Lillian, so I stayed where I was.

The hours passed in a vague, dreamlike way.  I didn’t once come close to nodding off, sitting there listening to the pattern of breathing from the six Lambs.

I sat there watching, as Gordon and Gladys roused together, taking a seat on the table opposite me, and spent a while watching together.  I gave him a little wave, to let him know I was awake, and he waved back.

I could have gone to sleep, knowing they were on watch, but I didn’t.  I might have done it or pretended to do it to give them privacy, but as much as I liked Gordon, I didn’t like Gladys enough to go to the trouble.  They talked amongst themselves, confiding, Gordon keeping the periodic chuckle quiet.

There was no way to track time, but by the movement of the candlelight and shadows, I might have guessed it was two or so hours later that we felt the tremor.

Every sleeping individual stirred awake as it built in intensity, making the room rumble.

Gordon stood, crossed the room, and flicked the light switch.  The lights that came on were the ordinary ones, not the emergency ones.

“Gorger passed on word, I guess,” Gordon said.  “Problem solved.  The released experiments have been caught or contained.  They’re letting us out.”

There were nods and people rubbing at eyes in response.

“We should wait, there are going to be a lot of people rushing to get out.” Helen said.  She looked far less disheveled than someone who had just been sleeping was supposed to look.  She had minimal bed hair, and her clothes weren’t even that much more wrinkled.

I could imagine the pushing and shoving at the top of the staircase.

“Still sitting tight,” I said.  I looked at the others, and saw Mary’s hair.  She did have messy hair.  I grinned and pointed.

She smiled back, and set to trying to fix it.  Apparently a comb and ribbons were part of her arsenal, tucked away on her person.

“It’s too bad,” he said.  “Feels like it’s been too long.  I’m looking forward to some fresh air.”

I wasn’t the only one to nod agreement.

There was a knock at the door.  Gordon, sitting by the door, opened it without rising from his perch.  When he saw who it was, he stood so he could open it wider.

“Gladys?” Gladys’ coworker asked.  “I’m going.  If you want to come?”

Gladys glanced at Gordon, then nodded at the woman.

“I’ll walk you to the edge of the crowd,” Gordon said, glancing back at us.  “And report back to these guys about how things look.”

“Sure,” Helen said, brightly.  “Have fun!”

Gordon smiled, then left with the two doctors.

I watched the door slowly swing closed.  Mary craned her neck, shifting over from her seat on the stool to match the movement of the door, looking, and I saw her eyes momentarily light up, legs kicking in excitement.

“What?” Lillian whispered.

Mary pursed her lips in a kiss, and I felt my heart sink.

As if to symbolize something, like entombment, the door shut with a woof of air, sealing by way of a tight fit and sheer weight.

“Not a fan,” I said.

“Of Gladys?” Mary asked, still smiling a little.

“Of them.  As a pair.  I don’t get it.”

“He got his moment as the knight in shining armor,” Helen said.  “I bet he’s the kind of boy that likes that idea.  But I think she’s more appreciative of the fact that he explained things after.  She seems like the type that’s ignored relationships in favor of work.  He must have found a chink in the armor, awakened that interest.”

“Are you miss Cupid now?” I asked.  “You pay attention to this sort of thing?”

“I prefer Aphrodite,” Helen said, still smiling.  “And I’m working on it.”

I shook my head.

“Grumpy this morning,” Jamie muttered.  He was awake, but he hadn’t roused.

“Jealous?” Mary asked.

I wheeled on her.

She grinned, showing me all of her tiny perfect white teeth.

“Uh, no,” I said.  “Definitely not.  Not on any level.  I’d take Sub Rosa on a date before I took Shipman, and I’m not jealous of her for having Gordon because I’m a guy and Gordon is most definitely not a girl.  No and nope.”

“But she’s taking him away from the group,” Lillian said, behind me.  “It’s okay to be jealous of that.”

“I’m not jealous!”

Jamie slowly, painfully reached out, his fingers and hand extending toward my foot.  I put the toe of my shoe further out in his direction.

He gave it a pat.  “There there.  There there.”

“I’d hit you if I wasn’t worried it would kill you.”

“There there.”

I shook my head, resolving to ignore Jamie.  “Is this a long term thing?  Him and her?  How does that work?”

“We’ll find out and we’ll figure it out,” Mary said.

Ugh,” I said.  “You can.  I’m going to live in happy little Sylvestertown, where this isn’t a thing.”

“He’s growing up, our golden hero,” Helen said.

I shook my head.  “First one of us to reach that point, I guess.”

The moment of silence that followed the statement caught me off guard.

“Which point?” Mary asked.

“Liking someone?” I asked, back, a little confused.

“No,” Jamie said, softly, head down against his pillow, eyes closed.

“No,” Mary said.

“No?” Lillian said, uncertainly.

“Gordon’s a late bloomer, all things considered,” Helen said.

All eyes fell on me.  The latest of bloomers, it seemed.

No,” I said.  “No way.  That’s not fair!”

“You’re one of the youngest of us, and you’re a boy,” Helen said.  “Don’t worry.  Your time will come.”

“You’re all a bunch of dirty liars, you’re doing this to mess with me!”

“He is grumpy,” Mary commented.

“There there,” Jamie said, patting my foot again.

I pulled it away, and mimed like I was going to kick him in the head.  It prompted the softest of laughs, which became a hacking coughing fit.

The door opened.  Gordon.  He gave Jamie a concerned look.

“Way is clear,” he reported.

We started getting ourselves pulled together, the people who’d slept without shoes pulling them on.  I hadn’t taken mine off, and helped Gordon with Jamie.  I was actually a better choice than some of the girls, because I was short enough that he could put an arm around my shoulders without reaching up and over.

Once we were all sorted, Gordon told the girls to go ahead and make sure nobody would jostle or bump us.

Our movement as a trio was excruciatingly slow, and I knew it would be worse once we reached the stairs.

As we hobbled and limped forward, trying not to jar Jamie too much, Jamie spoke up.  “Sy.”

“Hm?” I grunted.

“Based on recent events, I think you’re- ah!  You’re in good shape.”

“Mmf,” I grunted, again.  “How so?”

“I’ve seen the better side of you.  You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Mm,” I grunted, bearing as much weight as I could while trying to keep Jamie from bobbing up and down.

“Her crying was annoying me,” I said.

“Hm?” Jamie made an inquisitive sound.  “Ah.  I’m sure.”

As a group, Jamie now in a wheelchair, we met Hayle and Briggs.  Rather than going to them, we’d apparently earned the right to have them come to us, a short distance from the exit to the Bowels.

The leaves were bright, the rain light, and the sun even penetrated the clouds to a degree.

“Gorger communicated that you played a big role in this,” Briggs said.

“Sy, Helen, and Jamie, toward the end,” Gordon said.

“Jamie,” Briggs said.  He gave Jamie a once-over.  “There’s an operating room waiting.  You can go.  I’m sure the others will catch you up.”

“No,” Jamie said.

“You’d rather stay?”

“I…” Jamie made a face.  “I forgot something.  Missed something.  I need an appointment.”

I saw his hand shake as he moved it toward his book.

“I see.  Appointment first, then operation?”

Jamie nodded, a movement made jerky by nervousness and anxiety.

Rather than make him keep reaching, I stepped close.  I took the battered book I’d recovered while he’d been getting set up in his wheelchair and checked over.

Jamie smiled.

Briggs signaled someone, and they approached to wheel Jamie away.

I watched him go, a sick feeling in my middle.

His appointments were worse than mine, in a way.

“In his absence,” Briggs said, “I’d like written reports from each of you on the incident.”

There were a few suppressed groans, mine was one.

“It’s a third strike in the last year,” Briggs said.  “I’ve already been told there will be changes.  Radham Academy’s underground laboratories will be refurbished and redone entirely.  Radham Academy’s staff will be overhauled.”

I felt a note of alarm.  I looked in Hayle’s direction.

“Rest assured, Professor Hayle will retain his post,” Briggs said.  “However, I will not.”

My eyebrows went up.

“The sentiment across the Crown States is that there is something brewing, and apparently I am unfit to lead the Academy through it.  It may be right,” Briggs said.

I didn’t miss the hint of bitterness in his voice.

This was a demotion he would never recover from.

“Radham will be looked after by a Duke, I believe the man is sixteenth in line for the Crown, and he has led armies in war,” Hayle said, looking at me.  “If I actually have to convey to you why you are not to get on his bad side, I’ve failed on multiple levels.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I really hope you do,” he said.

“The transition period will be difficult,” Briggs said.  “At Professor Hayle’s recommendation, I’m assigning you a task in the meantime.  A task for which you’ll need these.”

He reached into a deep lab coat pocket and retrieved a small bottle.  He shook it, making the pills rattle.  Though the glass was thick, I could tell that the pills were a deep purple.

“This is the same material we feed into the rain and the drinking water,” he said.  “Without it, you’ll find yourself quickly sickening and dying.”

“We’re leaving Radham?” Gordon asked.

With a time limit, I thought.  Only so many pills.

“As soon as Jamie is out of the hospital and you’ve each had your appointments,” Hayle told us.

“What for?” Mary asked.

“This time, we’re dealing with a young woman on the run,” Briggs told us.  “She was one of several in line to become a professor, a young one, and a woman, no less.  When she didn’t get her position, we had to take measures, given the knowledge she’d picked up.  A brief incarceration, then work in the underground labs until an opportunity came up.”

“She was a prisoner,” Gordon said.

“With emphasis on ‘was’, Gordon,” Briggs said.  “She escaped, with the head of another prisoner.  Her name is Genevieve Fray, and she has a deep grudge against the Academy.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “We find her, we stop her.”

“I would very much like you to do that,” Briggs said, “But there’s another concern at play.”

He turned his eyes to me.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“To make sure everyone is on the same page,” Hayle said, “Mary, I know you don’t know the full details about the other projects, unless they’ve told you things they shouldn’t.”

We had.

“Sylvester was an extension of an existing project, one that used minute amounts of chemicals and poisons to maintain and stimulate brain liquidity.  Faster learning, faster adaptation, more connections.  Many students opt into this program, taking small amounts.  Sylvester was a stress test for the program, to discover the effective maximums and breaking point.”

I swallowed hard.

This wasn’t news to me, but…

“With his inclusion to the Lambs, we stopped pushing as hard as we were.  We left things be as they were, and another Academy took on the task of testing the limits of the Wyvern project,” Hayle said.

“Miss Fray was someone who benefited from what we thought were small doses.  Part of the reason for her loss of professorship was that she was manufacturing her own doses, for herself.  We discovered this, among other things, and thought her too dangerous.”

“When you say she’s manufacturing her own doses,” I said, “Is she taking as much as me, or…”

“We don’t know,” Hayle said.

“She’s angry at the Academy, her brain is working very much like yours does, Sylvester, and she’s running.  We have a dim idea of where she is, but she’s proven too evasive for Dog and Catcher.  You need to find her, and you need to do it fast.”

I nodded.

But my brain was only fixated on one thing.

I have a sister.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

 

================================================== 3.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 3)

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Winter

“Is Mr. Howell expecting you?” the stitched asked.

Warren stared.  There were so few of the stitched in Pontiac, and they were the sort of thing that was ignored and people who used them were looked down on.  Pontiac was still a city in the Crown’s dominion, but it was a good distance from any of the Academies and there wasn’t much love for the Academy’s work there.

Now he was home, and a dead man stood in his father’s entryway, dressed in a footman’s clothing.  Warren glanced back over his shoulder at his companion, Harry, who quirked an eyebrow in response.  Harry’s sandy-hair was tucked beneath a cap, and he wasn’t clean-shaven, unfortunately.  They’d stepped right off the train and made their way straight there.  Warren had decided to shave while braving the periodic bumps and jostles of the carriage, and had made out with only one nick at his jaw.

“I’m his son,” Warren finally managed, still a little dumbstruck.  “I sent a telegram ahead, he should be expecting me.”

“This way, sir,” he told me, stepping back and gesturing.

The stitched in Pontiac hadn’t been so well made.  They were haulers, dirty and covered up with heavy clothes and caps, they did the dangerous work until they overheated and fried.  Even before the overheating, though, they were rarely able to speak more than one slurred word at a time.  Warren had always avoided them.

It walked just a little bit stiffly.  Harry fell into step beside Warren, exaggerating the stitched’s gait.  Warren elbowed him, hard, and Harry resumed walking normally, still maintaining a shit-eating grin.

On a good day, Harry was such a character.  On a bad one, he was incorrigible.

Warren hoped Harry could lose the smirk soon.  The were just now approaching the sitting room.

The manservant opened the double doors, and Warren’s hopes were dashed.

The sitting room itself was as he remembered it.  There were three sets of arching double doors opening to the outside, partially made of glass, a large window, and more archways that hid slightly recessed bookshelves.  The hardcover books had gold lettering, some faded more than others.  The furniture was ornate, some of which had been antiques when his grandfather had been young.

His father and another man stood in the middle of the sitting room, beside what looked to be an eighteen year old girl in a state of undress from the waist up, only a brassiere covering her.

Warren’s father looked at him with a moment’s surprise, then smiled.  Harry’s grin was ear to ear, positively delighting in Warren’s situation.

“Father.”

“Warren!” his father said, approaching.  “So good to see you!”

Warren accepted the hug stiffly, not quite sure what to do.  His father was a tall man, but he’d dropped some weight, and felt surprisingly frail under Warren’s arms.  His father was from Cardiff, tall, dark, and surprisingly genial for how grim he could look.

His mother, not yet present, was short, but of brawny English-speaking German stock.  Warren had been blessed with the best traits of both, putting him above average in height and of a respectable solid build, and years at university had put some muscle on his frame.

“You look different,” his father said.

“I feel different,” Warren said, trying not to look at the elephant in the room.

His father smiled.

“It’s been a long time, Warren,” the other man in the room said.

Warren paid attention to him for the first time, an old man with a very thick beard and a white lab coat.

“Doctor Pegram?  You’re rightIt’s been forever.”

“Not since you were small.  I watched you grow up, and now your father tells me you’ve just finished your studies?”

“Halfway across the Crown States, Doctor, yes.  I’ve been learning about machines and machinery,” Warren said, feeling a little embarrassed at the admission.

“Good on you.  Not enough young people working with the hard sciences.  It’s all chemicals and biology, ratios and balances instead of numbers and calculations,” the doctor said, gesturing at himself.  “Why machines, Warren?”

“I, uh, always liked cars, sir,” Warren said.  His eye flickered toward the woman.

The doctor smiled.  “Don’t mind her.”

“It’s rather hard not to,” he admitted.

“Ah, of course,” his father said, “Wendy, get dressed, please.”

The woman moved, and immediately Warren recognized her as a stitched.  The movements were slightly off.  Her scars, however, were so faint that they only appeared in the right light, light pink and faintly reflective.

When she raised her hands up to pull her hair out from beneath her shirt, he saw how there was a piece of metal embedded into the side of her neck, back near the spine.

“She’s yours?”

“Yes.  She cleans and runs small errands.  She requires a little bit more care when instructions are given,

“I’ve been gone five years, and when I return, you’re employing stitched?”

“Times change, son.  All the arable land surrounding Radham is being co-opted by the Academy.  I manage the farms and farmers as best I can, to give them work, but the Academy grows bigger, stronger, better crops.  Blight doesn’t touch their plants, and they use stitched labor.  I have to make concessions if I want to compete.”

Warren glanced again at Harry, worried it was too sensitive a discussion when they had a guest.  Two, if Dr. Pegram was included.

“It’s alright, Warren.  There were a few bad years, but we’re managing well enough.  Using stitched for the field work was a hard choice, it meant turning some laborers away, but…”

The man sighed.

“No other choice?”

“No good ones.  I forgot what it might look like to someone coming at this from an objective standpoint, I don’t think of them as anything more than tools.”

Warren nodded.  He felt uncomfortable with the notion, but he couldn’t put his finger on why, or how he might fix it.  Instead, he changed the subject.

“I almost forgot.  Father, Dr. Pegram, this is Harry, my friend from school.  Harry, this is my father, Mr. Clifford Howell, and Dr. Pegram, the man who pulled me into this world and looked after me for the first ten or twelve years after that.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Howell, Dr. Pegram,” Harry said.  He stepped forward, hand extended.

“Is Harry only visiting Radham?” Warren’s father asked.

“I’m here to stay, as a matter of fact.  Warren and I are starting our own business, building and fixing up cars.”

“I was top of my class in the building,” Warren said.  “Harry’s grades were… less stellar, but he’s a salesman through and through, and he knows just where we can get started.”

“Excellent,” his father said.  “Might have some competition from the academy.  There’s something to be said for the carriages we’re all used to.”

“There’s something to be said for cars, too,” Harry said.

Warren half-turned as he saw a movement in the doorway.  His mother.  Smiling, he met her halfway and wrapped her in a hug.

She had to raise herself up on her toes to touch his face, and she put one hand on him to steady herself as she plucked the cap off his head.  “No hats indoors.”

“Sorry, mother,” Warren said, a little abashed to be talked to like a little boy while Harry was around.  He saw Harry snatch the cap from his own head, lightning quick.

“Sit, please,” his mother said.  “Wendy.”

The stitched girl turned.

“Fill the teapot with the boiling water from the stove, I’ve already got teabags in there.  And, let me see-”

“Don’t count me among your guests,” the doctor said.  “You’ve already been so hospitable, and I’m on my way out the door.”

“Four cups, then, Wendy.  Farewell, Doctor,” she said, giving the man a brief hug.

They settled themselves on armchairs and couches that had been positioned around the little coffee table.

The small talk never happened.  Warren’s father sat, giving him a peculiar look, then squinted.

“Father?”

“You look different, Warren.  I thought it might be your hair, or your brow, but…”

Warren felt his heart skip a beat as his father circled the table.  The grip on Warren’s chin was surprisingly strong and fierce as his father forced his head up at an angle, so he was looking up at the man.

No geniality now.  Only the grim.

“Your eyes.”

“Ah, heh,” Warren said.  “Harry convinced me.”

“It’s true, I did.”

Blue?” his father asked, no humor in his tone.

“My vision is sharper, too.  The change in color from brown was purely cosmetic.”

“It looks wrong,” his father said, and there was something in his voice that made Warren feel deeply uncomfortable.

“Clifford,” his mother said.  “Don’t make mountains out of molehills.”

“This isn’t a molehill, if my suspicions are right.  Or are you going to tell me this will go away on its own.”

“It’s permanent, father.”

“It was a lark, sir,” Harry said.  “I convinced him it was cheaper to change his eyes than to buy eyeglasses every few years.”

“Changed how?” the man’s words had a hollowness to them.  “Torn out and swapped in with another man’s?”

“They rewrote the language that determines how my eyes should be,” Warren said.

Warren’s father let go of his chin as if he’d been burned.

“I know you’re more conservative, father, but if you’re employing stitched-”

“This and that are two very different things.”

“It’s a very minor change.”

Harry chimed in, “An attractive one.  I told him it would get him all the girls, an ice blue stare, but-”

Please,” Warren’s father said, in the gentleman’s way of saying something polite while declaring that Harry might get struck if he kept talking.

Harry dutifully shut up.

“I’ve heard about this,” the older man said.  “Rewriting our very being.  I’ve heard the concerns.  It carries forward, Warren.  When you have a child, there is a very good chance it will have the same sort of eyes.  This alien blueness.”

“I… yes.  I’ve heard that,” Warren said.  The blueness was a remark on the deepness of the blue.  Most had a pale blue color to their eyes, but Warren had elected for a shade and hue that was closer to what might be found on a flower.

A moment’s decision, after drinking with Harry and several other friends.  A lark, as Harry had suggested.

“Clifford,” Warren’s mother said, standing and reaching out.  But the man was so filled with repressed anger that she seemed to hesitate to approach.

“Father,” Warren said, trying to use the moment, “It’s easily changed back.  Same process.  A needle in the arm, and a few weeks to adjust.”

“Oh?” his father asked.  “Do you have the, what do you call it, the language, the script of your eyes as they once were?  Or are you simply trying to mime the old color?  A guess on the part of whatever doctor you subject yourself to?  How is that different?”

“You make it sound like the end of the world!”

“It’s the end of us!” his father said, suddenly shouting.

The statement seemed to bring everything in the room to a standstill.

The stitched girl stood in the doorway with tea on a tray.  Her head was bowed, and the plates on the platter rattled as her hands shook.

Warren’s mother flew to the stitched girl’s side, to console and to take the tray, the murmured words indistinct.

“The end of us?” Warren asked.

“You’re the product of your mother and I, as we’re the product of those who came before.  But any child you have now will be a product of you, your wife, and the Academy’s work.  We don’t yet know how these little things will carry forward, or if there will be long term repercussions, for you or your children.  Such a stupid thing.”

The word was like a slap.  Stupid.

“It’s minor.  Nothing of importance in the grand scheme of it all,” Warren said, a little more obstinate now.

“It’s important to me.  Do you understand?  You’ve tainted the bloodline.  You’re not truly my son anymore, not in full.”

If the word ‘stupid’ had been a slap, this was a strike to the gut.  Warren felt all of the tension that had built up over the argument now seizing him.  In shock, he was no longer sure how to move or properly think.

“Warren,” Harry said, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder.  “Perhaps we should go.”

“That might be a good idea,” Warren’s father said.

Warren nodded, dumb.  He looked at his mother, on the other side of the room, still consoling the stitched girl.

He and Harry left, Warren more stiff than either of the stitched had been.  Down the long hallway, past the stairs, and out the door, into bright sunlight.  Radham was just on the horizon, past the patchwork white-brown and white of snow-dusted farmland, ringed by buildings that spewed dark fumes into the air.  A perpetual raincloud hung over the city.

“Warren,” his mother said, behind him.

He turned.

She pressed a slip of paper into his hand.

He looked down at it, too caught up in a storm of emotion to process it.

“Money.  To get you off the ground and tide you over the first year or so, if you’re frugal.  It was intended as a graduation present from me to you.  It is a graduation present.”

“Thank you,” he said, but he still felt adrift, confused.

“I’ll talk to him, Warren.  He cares, but he’s had to adapt so much so quickly, this caught him off guard, so soon after he’d already made monumental sacrifices.  Send us another telegram so we know where you are, so I can reunite you two when he’s calmed down.”

“Will he?” Warren asked.

“He will,” she said.  She gave his arm a squeeze.

He nodded, but the wound still felt raw.

“Take Wendy and the carriage.  Go where you need to today, to get yourself situated and run any errands.  Wendy can help you, and she can do a surprising amount of carrying.  Send them back tomorrow, if you can.  She knows how to use the carriage and how to ask for directions if she needs them.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, eyeing the young stitched dubiously.

“She needs it, frankly.  Her disposition always improves after a good carriage ride.  It would be a favor.”

Warren nodded.  His mother was lying, but perhaps she wanted to keep an eye on him.  Not an entirely bad thing.

“Look after him, Wendy,” Warren’s mother said.  “Do as he asks, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Let’s go,” Harry said, a hand on Warren’s shoulder.  He used the hand to guide Warren into the horse-driven carriage.

Warren sat and stared blankly at the wall.  He blinked as Harry slammed the door, then again as Harry sat across from him.

“Let’s go,” Harry said.  “I think you’re in dire need of an unhealthy amount of drink.”

Spring

Every morning, it was the same.  Replaying the discussion with his father, fragments of memory about the afternoon and evening that had followed.  Drinking, meeting Harry’s friends in Radham.

Some had altered themselves, more than very blue eyes.  A girl with horns, a young man who had added muscle to himself.  Among Warren and the other students in Pontiac, Harry had been the roughest around the edges, too clever for his own good, always a little disheveled.

Harry’s friends in Radham were a dozen long strides in that same direction.  Smart as a whip, all of them, but not in the academic sense.  Quick to insult, joke, jibe.  Warren hadn’t been able to keep up, especially as the drinks had added up.

He remembered blood, and he wrested his thoughts away from that particular sequence of events.

He tried to raise a hand to his face, and felt it move, felt the air against it, the shift of muscles.  But the sensation folded on itself, the sensations continuing onward in his psyche until they had dissolved into smoke.

Every morning, it was like this.  Discovering how badly things had gone, one way or another.

It was the movement in the corner of his eye that usually did it, or movement in front of him, sleep-bleary eyes making out the general shape of the surroundings.

Waking up like this might never become routine.  Perhaps because it was too far removed from the reality he understood.  Perhaps because he didn’t want to realize.  Waking up in confusion, with a dawning feeling of horror, that was better.  It was best, all things considered.  It hinted at how low his expectations should be.

There was no dawning feeling of horror in the pit of his stomach.

He didn’t feel sweat run down his back.

His hands didn’t clench.

His toes didn’t curl.

His heartbeat didn’t pick up in speed.

His blood didn’t run cold.

None of those things were, not anymore.

He turned his head, and it was difficult.  He had a limited amount of mobility, and the skin pulled tight with even a small turn.

The surroundings were dark, lit only by a slice of light that cut between curtains.  It looked to be a cellar or a basement.  One he had seen every morning for the last week.

It was the smallest of blessings that things changed locations once every week or two.  A change of scenery.

As his eyes focused, he saw the movements.  Shapes in his immediate peripheral vision, and in front of him.  Tubes, wires, and heads.

Heads without bodies, hair shorn, mounted on a piece of metal, tubes running into the spaces and mounts, giving blood, hydration and nutrients, drawing everything else out.

They moved, jaws opening wide, teeth clacking, the ones that weren’t asleep in the midst of a silent, mad rage.

He opened his mouth to speak, and the air didn’t come as he bid it.  The only tongue that moved was the one his mind conjured up, made of smoke.  His tongue had been removed a long while ago.  Too easy to bite it off and attempt to bleed out or choke.

The thought provoked the flurry of images he’d tried so hard to push out of his mind.

He remembered himself, partying with Harry and Harry’s friends.

He remembered seeing them talking among themselves, every time he came out of the washroom, or every time he found himself occupied with something or someone.  Furtive talks.  He’d imagined them discussing his situation at home, his father’s rage, and he’d deliberately ignored it, drinking more.

He remembered how, late in the evening, when it had been just them, Harry’s friends had grabbed him.

Harry had helped himself to the note that would let him access the money, then he had given the signal.

The group had lifted Warren up, then tipped him over.

He’d dropped several stories.  He remembered seeing Wendy on landing.  She and the carriage had been just outside the building.

When he’d woken up, it had been like this.

Body ruined, head salvaged, kept indefinitely on life support.

He stared through bleary eyes as a man pushed a curtain aside, where the curtain served in place of a door.  Disheveled, with a thick beard, the man wore no lab coat.  He looked more like someone who might be found sleeping at the side of the road, a bottle in hand.

“Tea,” the man said.  “The usual.  Then brush their hair and sponge them off.”

“Yes sir,” Wendy was heard to say.

Warren had only a glimpse of the stitched as she went about her day.  Left untended, she was fidgeting more, anxious.  Something about dealing with the heads left her more concerned each time, and her poor condition was part of it.

Had Warren been able to speak, he would have insisted she be taken care of, or sent back where she came from.

He doubted he would be heard.  No man that could do this had any mercy in him.

The man approached the table, and though he couldn’t breathe, Warren could smell the rank odor of the man.  He saw the man reach out and stroke the hair of one of the heads.

“Good morning, my pretties,” the man said.  He consulted a notebook.  “Thinking Machine project, version three, day… hm.  Day fifty-three.”

Warren stared.

It wasn’t the numbers that mattered, the number of days or even the implication that there had been two versions before this.

The horror that he experienced, a frustrated horror that had nowhere to go but his head, nothing to do but compound itself, was because of the words ‘good morning’.

Twelve to sixteen hours before sleep could claim him again.

Warren started screaming, twisting, face contorting, best as he was able, though no sound came out.

Summer

Sweat ran down his brow.  He felt the coolness of the water as his scalp was gently dabbed.

Wendy fidgeted.  She’d been maintained, but it had been a rough job, and had left deep scars in her flesh, where before there had been only faint ones.  The ongoing damage to her strange psyche was something else altogether.

“I’m supposed to watch over you,” she said.  “Madam said so.  I very much look forward to going home, as soon as you give the word.  This place is dark and…”

She leaned close, as if to share a secret.

“…I don’t like the dark, sir.”

Warren did his best to nod, a sympathetic look on his face.

“I have a teddy bear I hug when it’s dark.  It was a gift.  I know I’m a young lady now, but it does make me feel better,” she said.

He nodded, though it made his jaw and neck hurt.  His brain felt fried.  Wires ran in and out of his skull, connecting to the others, and several times a day, the thinking machine was put in use.  The machine would play out a long stuttering series of clicks, the madman who’d put him down here would make a few notes, then take them with him as he walked into another part of the building, peering at them and scratching his head.

“I don’t think I know how to go back,” Wendy said.  “I’m supposed to get directions to the Ossuary, then I go down… I can’t remember the road.  Then… I can’t remember what comes next.”

Every day, she talked to him.  Most days, she said the same things.  When her pattern changed, it was because she was breaking down, running too hot.  What he hadn’t picked up from idle curiosity before, back in Pontiac, he’d learned from the madman’s occasional comments.

Warren held onto this, but he wasn’t sure why.  A part of him hoped she would snap, go crazy, and end all of this, or murder the madman.  Stitched did that, didn’t they?  Or was that rumor, heard in a city that didn’t like stitched?

A part of him hoped she would leave, forgetting that she had to look after him.

And, running contrary to that, a part of him feared her leaving, above all else.

He was supposed to have lost his mind by now.  He already had, to a degree, and the memories he pulled up now and again were too real, dreamlike, while his dreams were indistinguishable from memory, or they simply brought him back here.

He was being drugged, he suspected, to keep him from panicking or having a stroke, but he still panicked with regularity, his thoughts looping over and over.  Sometimes hours passed in the blink of an eye, like that, and sometimes what felt like hours of mad panic were only as long as it took the madman to leave, cook, eat, and return.

“I miss music,” Wendy said.  “There’s this tune, it plays in my head, and it goes, ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba…”

A body with only a partial brain, and a head without a body, Warren still had the phantom sensations of movements or feelings his body might have experienced, and he’d learned that, unburied by fever and stress, Wendy had phantom traces of an identity, complete with memories.

Silently, with all the focus he could bring to bear, he scrawled promises on his brain with a permanence that he might use to etch words on stone tablets.

To make amends, to show gratitude, because he couldn’t bring himself to pray and he needed to do something of magnitude to have an iota of vision for the future, he promised her a teddy bear, he promised her her music…

Autumn

The cell door slammed shut.  He stirred to wakefulness, blinking, though he hadn’t been asleep.  Reality and dream blended in together, now.

He was fantasizing, or dreaming.  The madman having his world turned upside down, screaming about the loss of his life’s work, the thinking machine.

Men of the law arresting the madman, then approaching the board, where three of the original nine heads were still functional, the number of wires tripled to compensate.

Fantasy?

No.  The smells and tastes and touches…

Wendy was standing beside him, stroking his hair.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said.

He didn’t dare hope.  Easier to think he was still in the basement, and that reality had slipped away entirely.

He realized that someone was staring at him.  The world seemed so distorted.  He was higher up than he was used to, almost five feet off the ground.

He’d once been six feet tall, he remembered.  That life felt so far away.

The person in the cell was a young woman, not much older than he was.  Or older than he’d been.  He wasn’t sure he was a he anymore.

His thoughts were rambling, he knew.

Her hair was black, a contrast to Wendy’s blonde hair, cut straight, and tucked behind one ear, while it obscured the other.  Her eyes were narrow and dark, her mouth curved in a light smile, painted crimson.

She wore a lab coat, he realized.

He looked away, bothered.  The science, the doctors, all of it, he’d seen what it came to, in the end.

Not just what he’d experienced, but Wendy.

So many horrors, so many lines crossed.

He couldn’t turn his head away, not really, but he averted his eyes, watching the officers patrolling the room.  Half of it was desks, half of it was cells, a single row with one occupant per cell.

He was good at letting time slip by, now.  He knew the techniques.  Count the cracks, count the bars.  Study the people.  The guards, their habits, their way of dress.

There were so many new sensations and things to experience that he wasn’t able to process it all.  He was free, but he wasn’t sure what that entailed.  He didn’t dare hope for one thing or the other, out of fear that if he hoped for death and got a second chance instead, or vice versa, it might break him.

The clang of the cell door opening was startling.  He’d been watching the people, but the people had taken action without him noticing.  There was a man in a grey coat in the cell in front of him, with guards gathered loosely around.

“You’ll be getting these injections twice a day for a week.  You know what these do, Ms. Fray.”

“You want to make me forget.”

“Yes.”

“Even if it does damage to other parts of my mind in the process.”

“Nothing has been proven on that front.”

She made a scoffing sound.  She sounded so cavalier.  Did she not realize what the Academy’s people were capable of doing?  Even without a lab coat, the madman and his thinking machine had been the Academy’s doing.

Warren had had enough time to puzzle that much out.

“If you do this, you can go to the underground laboratories, you can work on projects, live in dorms…”

“A half life.  I made my bid for professorship, I failed, and you take half of everything.”

“Some people would kill for this much.”

“Or carry out a crazed experiment in their basement with limited resources?  Trying to make nine heads think as one?” Ms. Fray asked.

“Even that.”

“No.  I’ll take a lifetime of imprisonment if it means keeping my brain.”

“You don’t get a choice, Ms. Fray.”

“I can tell you that I took a dose of the Wyvern formula just this morning.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Contraindicated.  Don’t tell me you got your grey coat without knowing what contraindicated means.”

“I know what it means.  I’ve never heard of the formula, and quite frankly, after having read your files, I suspect you’re lying, to delay the inevitable.”

“Ask Professor Hayle.  He’ll know.”

There was a pause.  Then, “Lock her up.  Watch her.  I’ll be back later this evening after I’ve confirmed.”

Warren watched as the guards and the doctor in the grey coat vacated the cell.  The door clanged shut, making Wendy flinch, and they went about their way, the grey-coat exiting through the door at the far end of the building.

Long minutes passed.  Ms. Fray paced, leaned against the bars to peer further into the building, and alternately watched Wendy, watched Warren, and studied the guards.

Some time had passed before she cleared her throat, standing straighter.

Within the cell, the woman raised a finger to crimson lips.

Wendy did the same, echoing the gesture.

The cell was equipped with a toilet behind a short barrier, intended for privacy.  Ms. Fray approached the toilet, then bent over it, hand going to her throat.

Warren still felt like this was all a dream.  Too surreal.

He saw Ms. Fray stand up, now with a writhing tentacle coming out of her mouth.  She gripped the tentacles, grunting and making choking sounds, as she hauled it out, excruciating inch by excruciating inch.

It took a minute and a half, by Warren’s estimation, before she’d retrieved the entire thing.  It coiled and uncoiled, tentacles reaching out and wrapping around her hands and forearms.

“What are you grunting and moaning about?” a guard asked.

But as the guard reached the cell, Ms. Fray was sitting on the toilet, the tentacled horror pinned between her back and the toilet’s tank, blocked from view by the barrier.

The guard shook her head, turned, and walked away.

Ms. Fray reached under her dress.

Warren averted his eyes, horrified.

He heard a titter.

When he looked up, she had what looked to be a large piece of glass.  No more tentacles.  From the speed with which she’d acted, he suspected it had been tucked into the band.

Again, she raised a finger to her mouth, the universal gesture for silence.  This time, however, she had a piece of glass in her hand, and the tentacle-thing held behind her back.

The second guard paced down the building, then headed back up toward Ms. Fray.

The moment he passed by the cell, she reached out, and the tentacles did as well, snaring him by the head and throat, pulling him tight against the bars.

“Feel that?” Ms. Fray asked.

“Mmph,” the guard said.

“Then don’t touch your pistol.”

The other guard had heard the crash of skull against bars.  The woman approached at a half-run from the far end of the building.

“Keys,” Ms. Fray said, calm.  “You can reach the door.  Work fast.  If she gets here before the door is open, I’m going to cut your throat so my pet is free to stop her.”

The guard fumbled, keys rattling.  He reached up, holding the keys at an awkward angle to see which one he was selecting.

The key went into the lock.  He turned it, and the door came open.

Ms. Fray hauled him in a touch deeper, then gripped the sliding door, hauling it open.  With the man’s head between the bars, the sliding door caught him in the side of the head or the neck.

Warren saw the other guard approaching at a swift run.

She rounded the corner, standing back this time, pistol raised.

Ms. Fray was crouched, the other guard’s pistol in hand, tentacles coiling at one side.

The woman guard had to take the time to figure out what was going on, the position of her target, and adjust before pulling, aiming between the bars.

Ms. Fray only had to pull the trigger as soon as the moving target came into view.

Three shots, in quick succession.

Covered in a light spattering of blood, Ms. Fray stepped out of her cell.

“You.  You saw what I just did,” she said.  “I’m going to keep doing it, over and over, in ways both dramatic and subtle.  You can come with me and help, or you can stay here and be at their mercy.”

“Me?” Wendy asked.

“Him.”

Warren blinked.

Mercy doesn’t exist.

“I’ve got to go.  They’ll have heard shots.  Yes or no, do you want revenge?”

He thought of Harry.

He thought of the Madman.

He nodded.

She reached out to scoop him up.  Wendy got in the way.

Warren rolled his eyes over to Wendy, then back to Ms. Fray, then to Wendy.

“You too, then.  Bring him.”

Wendy nodded.

Ms. Fray collected the keys.  She walked backward, facing Warren, pointing at the cells.

He looked.

A stranger.  Another stranger.  Empty.  A stranger.

The madman.

He must have given some tell.  Another shot from the pistol rang out.  The madman died, a shot through the head.

The gun twirled on Ms. Fray’s finger as she turned her back on Warren and his stitched friend, marching for the exit.

Winter

The creature squealed as it died, crushed under a meaty fist.  Bird, bug and reptile blended together, it was the size of a large dog, and surprisingly hard to kill.

Warren stretched, then heaved out a heavy breath.

“Is it safe?” Ms. Fray asked.

“Yes,” Wendy said.

Ms. Fray opened the door and stepped out of the washroom.  She looked down at the stain in disgust.  “Whelps.  One of the Academy’s weapons.”

Warren nodded.

“If there’s one here, there’ll be more.  They have our scent.  We’re relocating.”

Warren nodded, again.

Ms. Fray led the way, but she usually did.  She always walked briskly, she rarely held back, if she was even capable, and she expected everyone else to keep up.

Not that Warren had much difficulty.  He was taller than he’d been with his original body, to the point he almost had to bend double to get through the door.

The city swirled with snow.  Mad creatures and doctors were everywhere, and he felt his head hurt as he glanced at each.  It wasn’t a pleasant place, this, but it was good for camouflage.  Ms. Fray and Warren looked entirely normal walking down the street.

“I keep expecting them to lose interest, but they up the ante each time.  Academy investigators, monsters, The Hangman, Dog and Catcher… now the Whelps.  They really, really want me,” she said.

Warren nodded.

He saw a movement out of the corner of his eye.

Stray cat.  He might not have seen it if it weren’t for his sharp eyes.

A second later, a fanged beak snapped out, consuming half of the cat.  A tongue snaked around the rest, and hauled it into the creature’s gullet.

Another whelp.

“I saw it too,” Genevieve said.  She gave him a pat on the arm, where his striped sweater was rolled up to the elbow.  His forearm was bigger around than her upper body, his fist large enough that when he held Wendy’s hand, it consumed the hand and most of her forearm.  “It won’t come out into the daylight.”

His strength and new body was of her design.  She’d asked what he’d wanted, and with a writing implement in his temporary hand, he’d scrawled out a simple word.  ‘Strength’.

He didn’t trust his sanity, but he trusted his mind.  It had always been sharp.  The only flaw had been that it had been too trusting.  No longer.

Now he had a body to match the mind.

They approached the train station, amid a light snowfall.  Ms. Fray led the way toward a side street.  If they were catching a train, they’d hitch a ride in a car carrying crates or hay, so witnesses wouldn’t be able to report on them.  It had bought them some time in the past.

She put a hand to his chest, stopping mid-stride.  He had to go to some effort to stop fast enough.  Had he been any slower, he might have forced her wrist or arm backward and snapped them.

She didn’t seem to notice or care.  Her eyes were on the train station across the street.

Passengers were getting off.  Young, old, many of them women and girls attending the local women’s Academy.  A small school, but popular.  Many a father conceded to his daughter’s wishes to study, but insisted on something like this.  A quiet, safe town and an unthreatening learning environment.

“There,” Genevieve said.  “They got off a few seconds ago.”

He watched.

“The Lambs,” she said.

He frowned, then realized she was talking about the children.  Just on the verge of adolescence, all six of them, they walked with purpose, working their way through the gaps in the crowd.

“They finally caught up,” she said.  “This is good.”

He glanced at her.

“Change of plans,” she said.  “We’re staying.”

================================================== 4.01 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.1

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The stitched servant helped lift our bags out from the side of the train.  Mine had been the last one in, so it was the first one out.  Once I had it, wheels digging tracks into the thin layer of snow, I turned to survey the area.

Storybook.  Best label to apply to it all.  Things were quaint, but in a very controlled, calculated way.  The colors of the houses, the pleasant aesthetic, and the winding streets, many cobblestone with the beginnings of ruts carved into them, all planned and rigidly enforced.

It was fascinating.  The houses were like cabins, but the exteriors were well looked after, white, gray, or blue in color, and almost every single one had smoke coming out of the chimney.  The streets were gray cobblestone and lighter gray slabs of concrete, covered in white snow and the black grime the wagons and carriages had dredged up.  For every man, there were five women, aged eighteen to thirty, and of those five women, four had monsters with them.  Academy creations.

The subtle hideousness of Kensford was clearer as I looked at the trees and plants.  In the early winter, there were trees and shrubs bristling with leaves, all a blood crimson in color, the leaves barely visible under the snow that had piled several feet high on each bough, or the ice that clung to branches.

There were also meat trees, in the natural-growing-meat sense and the ‘gibbets and meathook’ sense.  Not too unusual, except they were ubiquitous.

The end result was, in the end, storybook.  A town that embraced the old fashioned.  But so many people romanticized history, and forgot how very bloody it was.  The city smelled like smoke and crematoriums, and it made me feel like I was about to venture into a world where every house was a gingerbread house in disguise, and every pretty young woman was really a witch, ready to thrust unwitting children into ovens.

The other Lambs, now hauling their luggage, joined me, the six of us forming a loose line, looking at the town of Kensford.  The only building that was taller than one story was the local Academy.  Though all things in Kensford centered around Dame Cicely’s in a symbolic sense, it sat at the back, bordered on two sides by thick forest, a Victorian-style building grown like a tumor might be, asymmetrical, with the odd bit here and there.  A tree had been literally grown from one side, closer to the forest, framing it all in a trimmed crescent of red leaves.

“So pretty!” Helen exclaimed.

“Did you ever want to come here?” Gordon asked.  He was asking Lillian.

“Oh…” Lillian said, sounding surprised at the question.  “No.  You need to be at least eighteen, I think.”

“But if you were?  Or when you are?”

Gosh.  I’d be terrified.”

“Strict?” I asked.

“Yes, but that’s not why,” she said.  She looked around, and stepped closer to Gordon as a pair of young women walked on, a stitched in fine clothes hauling their luggage.  She lowered her voice and confided, “It’s so cutthroat.”

“A lot of Academies are,” I said.

“I don’t hear stories about other places like I hear stories about Dame Cicely’s Academy,” Lillian said.  “They intentionally fail out a certain percentage of each class, to cull and ensure they’re the best, or close to, because there’s Lady Eleanor’s-”

She drew quiet as more young ladies walked by, departing from the train.

“You scared of them?” I taunted her.

“I don’t want to say something that would stir up any rivalries,” she said.  “What was I saying?”

“You don’t hear stories about other places like you hear stories about here,” Jamie said.  “They intentionally fail a certain percentage of each class, to cull and-”

“Okay,” Lillian said, a little flustered.  “Okay.  Yes.  Thank you, Jamie.”

I caught the twinkle in Jamie’s eye and elbowed him.  He elbowed me back.

We continued back and forth like that as Lillian continued talking, “Most women who go to the Academies, they need permission and money from their parents, and from what I’ve seen and from what I’ve heard, most have to fight to hold on to their place.  If they mess up once, one year of bad gradings or lack of advancement, it’s done, it’s over.  Mom and dad cut off the funding and order you back home.  Then they introduce you to a nice fellow to marry, and that’s your life.”

“A lot of people with guillotine blades hanging over their necks,” Gordon remarked.

“It gets worse,” Lillian said.  “Put the two things together-”

I finished the statement, “-And you have a lot of classmates who know their peers are dancing on a razor’s edge.  Just a tiny bit of sabotage or cleverness, and there’s one less competitor for the remaining seats.”

Lillian nodded.  “Exactly.”

“I never liked the idea of working in a stuffy lab all day,” Mary said.  “I understand why people would, with it being the fastest path to greatness, but it didn’t feel like it was for me.”

“You like the idea of this?” I asked.

She smiled, “So much.”

“It’s nicer than the last few stops,” Gordon said, looking around.  “I felt itchy after we slept at the last guest house.  I’m still not convinced I don’t have something crawling on me.”

“Let’s not gripe,” I said.  “Please.  New place, fresh start.  It’s too easy to fall into old patterns.”

There were a few nods at that.

“Post office, then we find out where we’re sleeping,” Jamie said.

That was our cue to advance.  We carefully made our way through the crowd, weaving between the people who were walking and the clusters of people who had gathered in groups, talking.

None of the young ladies wore lab coats or uniforms.  Rather, the monsters in their company were their emblems and badges, fashion accessories crafted of meat and grey matter.  The better the work, the better the student.

Snow dusted us, drifting down in light amounts.  There was no rain here.  I was idly curious what the mechanism was for keeping the local experiments in line.

Perhaps the young ladies of Dame Cicely’s were managed carefully enough that there was no cause to worry about the experiments running off or causing trouble.

Jamie elbowed me for the hundredth time, but this one was to get my attention.  He’d done the same to Helen, who’d gotten Gordon’s attention.

I followed Jamie’s line of sight.  One of the houses had a set of stairs, and something dark moved in the space beneath the stairs.

“What?” I asked.

“Whelps are here.”

“Oh, that’s fun,” I remarked.  “Let’s hope they leave her intact enough for us to ask questions.”

“I’d rather hope we find her first,” Mary said.

Ah, crap.  For the second time in four minutes or so, we were stumbling on the same point.  We weren’t finding many leads, and to date, we’d only been able to arrive on the days after our quarry had disappeared to places unknown.  Half of the clues to her destination had been our finds, and the other half had been due to the work of others.  Dog and Catcher, Hangman, or a tip from someone who’d seen one of the wanted posters and recognized her face.

It was wearing thin, and some of us were wrestling with frustration.  There had been spats.

Rather than agree or disagree, I reached out and took Mary’s hand.

Then, in a majestically subtle manner, I declared, “This has been so damn fun.”

“Fun?” she said.

“You’re grumpy,” I noted.

“Yes.”

“Do you remember how much the interviews in the Bowels sucked?  This is the opposite of that, which means this is the furthest thing from suckage!  It’s the best thing ever to get out and away,” I said.

“We’re chasing that bit of fluff that dances away from your hand as you reach for it,” she said, immune to my enthusiasm.  “Tell a dog to jump for the stick, and it will.  The dog might really want that stick, but if you pull the stick away every time, the dog learns.  I’d really like to think I’m better than a dog on that front.”

“Huh,” I said.  “Fair, but didn’t expect to hear anything like that.  Where did it come from?”

“Percy.  He gave me lessons in training others.  I thought he meant dogs at first.  Then I thought he meant training my subordinates, when he’d created dozens upon dozens of clones.  I only later realized it was how he trained me.  He let me have my stick just often enough.”

Not the first time Mary’s mentioned Percy in recent days and weeks, I thought.

I didn’t bring it to anyone’s attention.  Instead, I commented, “Sometimes, when you’re chasing that bit of fluff, you have to hold out your hand and be patient.  Let it settle in on its own.”

“Mm hmm,” Mary murmured.  I suspected that she’d gotten the thrust of what I was trying to do, which was changing the course of the conversation.  She played along, looking around, “This place is neat.”

One and a half seconds after she said that, we passed a carriage, and Mary came face to face with a large, humanoid monster, built like an angel with wings of flesh, chest thrust out by a matter of design, chin high so that it looked down on everything around it.  It was naked, and its limp member dangled right at Mary’s eye level, bigger around than my leg and as hairless as a baby’s.

I heard a slight ‘eep‘ from Mary, which punched right past the latent tension and wonderings on my part and made me burst out into hysterical giggling.

The entire group soon followed, Mary included, tittering and laughing, the tension flowing away.

“You think so, Mary?” Gordon asked, “Neat?”

There were more giggles from the group.

“For shame, all of you,” Helen said, putting her hands on her hips.  “Laughing at that.  Imagine the poor woman who made that thing.  She must have been so lonely!”

The giggles became outright laughter.

Perfect.  Good.

This was the sort of thing we needed.

Helen politely asked a passerby for the location of the nearest post office, and we went on our way.

The street might have been a fifty-fifty split of residences and small businesses, but as we reached the center of it all, we found that virtually every building touching on the main street served some purpose.  including grocer’s stores that were no more than four paces by five paces across in size and a banking office just a little under twice that size.

Further down the way was the small post office.  We filed in.

Helen approached the counter.  “Hello sir.”

The polite young lady routine.

“Good morning, darling,” the man at the counter greeted her.  “What can I do for you?”

“We have a package?  It’s addressed Lambsbridge, it should have arrived here a few days ahead of us.”

The man at the counter found it quickly enough.  He placed the box on the counter.  “Stamp?”

Without looking or saying a word, Helen put her hand back.  Gordon passed her the stamp.  She uncapped it and put the mark on the top of the box, inside the circle.

The man at the counter squinted, examining the mark Helen had just made with the one that the sender had put on it, then gave us a curt nod.  “There you go.”

“You don’t have a line, I was hoping we could ask some questions, please?” Helen asked.

“You most certainly can.  I’d be happy to answer them.”

“Which direction to the, um…”

“Dormitories three hundred through three-fifty?” Jamie asked.

“Up the main street, turn right at the stitchworks.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling.  “About the package, you didn’t have anyone come in here and ask about it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Or about children?”

“No,” the man said, a small crease appearing between his eyebrows.

“You haven’t seen a woman, twenty or so, with black hair?  She would have had a head with her, or a monster with a head that didn’t match the body?  Also black-haired, with bright blue eyes?”

The man puffed out his cheeks, letting out a breath.  “I see someone like that every day.”

Every single one of us was suddenly at attention.

“You’ve seen her?” Gordon jumped in.

“Ah, no,” the man said.

“Then-”

“I mean, I see different young ladies who fit that general description on a regular basis,” the man said.  “Pretty young ladies, many with black hair, and many with experiments in their company.  Those experiments range from big to small, fat to thin, and they have heads and eyes of all type.”

“Wait,” Gordon said.  “Lillian, do you have it?  The poster?”

Lillian fished inside her bag.  She found a square of paper and unfolded it.

“She looks like this,” Gordon said.

The man slowly shook his head.  “Attractive young lady, but I couldn’t say.  The customers become a blur, unless I get to know their names.  This is the one you’re looking for?”

“Very similar,” Gordon said.  “Not the same person.”

The man frowned.  “I can’t say.”

“I see,” Helen said, slumping a bit.  She perked up all at once, “Thank you, sir!”

“You’re welcome.  If you’re looking for someone, I could keep an eye out, especially now that I’ve seen the picture.  Does that help?”

“Actually…” I said, pausing strategically.

“Yes?”

“We’re concerned that someone is keeping a look out for us.  We’re trying to surprise them, you see?”

The furrow in between his eyebrows was now as deep as it could get.

“Surprise party,” I told him.  “She’s rich as all-get-out, she’s from a powerful family, and it’s really hard to make a party something special for her.  So if she asks if you’ve seen us, could you keep quiet on that?  The surprise part is the only part that matters.”

“Ahh.  I think I understand,” the man said.  “I can stay quiet, don’t you worry.  Where are you all from?”

That he asked was something of an irony.  The less we told him, the better.  The moment Ms. Fray realized we were on her trail –if she was even here-, she would be in the wind.

“Outskirts of West York,” Gordon improvised, clearly thinking the same thing I was.

“Ah?  Ways away then.  What brings you here?”

The word escaped my mouth before I thought to say different.

“Family.”

I didn’t miss the glances that were shot my way.  Only Jamie didn’t.  His focus was elsewhere.

“Um,” Jamie said, waiting until he had eye contact with the man before continuing, “If it looks like the surprise party won’t happen, you can tell her whatever.”

“If it won’t happen?  You mean, if she finds out some other way?”

“You’ll know what I mean if it comes down to it,” Jamie said.  I gave him a curious look.

“Uh huh,” the man said, dragging out the sound, slowly processing it.

Someone came into the post office behind us, and Helen took that as a cue.  She waved, a little too dramatically, in a way that suited a smaller child.  “Goodbye, sir.  Thank you for everything!”

She was so good at becoming every adult’s favorite girl, so very quickly.  The man gave a little wave back.

We stepped back out onto the street, and I fixed my cap and scarf, hunching against the cold.

“She could be hiding in plain sight,” Gordon said.  “The man’s right.  She’s a needle, and this is a haystack.  It’s the perfect place for her to hide, maybe even lose our trail for good.”

“No leads,” Mary said.  “Just like yesterday, and the day before.”

I reached out and held her mittened hand with my gloved one, giving it a squeeze.

“What was that about, Jamie?” Gordon asked.

He cares too much.

“What was what?” Jamie asked.

“If the surprise party is spoiled?”

“It should make sense if Fray comes for him.  She’s left a few bodies in her wake, and we’ve found reasons for most of them, but if she comes after him, looking for any details on us,  I don’t want him upsetting her.”

“I’d rather have her upset and ignorant than the other way around,” Gordon said.

“So would I,” Jamie said.  “But if it came down to him getting hurt for nothing, I’d rather he talk.”

Gordon shook his head.

It was ironic.  All Ms. Fray had to really do to maximize the damage she did to us was to keep doing what she was doing and play keep away.

We’d spent months in the Bowels, with only Sub Rosa to deal with at the tail end of it, and that had been less of a team effort than the vast majority of our jobs.  Weeks on weeks of dreadfully dull interviews and interrogations, with little to show for it.

Now we were on the verge of another few months of something fruitless.  Chasing a woman who forever remained at least one step ahead of us.

There were countless factors playing into it all, but at the very core of it, we were entering into the dangerous years.  Important years for anyone, when boys became men and girls became women, but more important for us.

These were the years when we would be coming into our own.  We’d be forging our identities and adapting our fit in the group.

We were losing our edge, without opposition to keep us sharp, and without a practical test of our abilities, we couldn’t find a new configuration that made up for all the little changes.  It made for uncomfortable fits, little bits of bickering.

I’d hated the interviews in the Bowels, and as much as I was liked the chance to explore and stretch my legs, I didn’t think this was as constructive as what we collectively needed.

Mary was right.  We needed to sink our teeth into the stick, not to chase it endlessly.

The thought crossed my mind: If we don’t find an opportunity soon, I might well have to create a problem for the group to solve.  Even if it gets me into untold trouble.

At least this place seemed good for that.  A pressure cooker of an Academy, stocked with cutthroat young ladies.

I heard rattling, and saw Helen working to open the box, cutting at tape with a fingernail.

“We’re almost there,” Jamie remarked.

“I know,” Helen said.  “The box feels light.”

My heart sank at the same moment Mary breathed the words, “Don’t say that.”

Helen reached into the box and withdrew a small jar of pills.  They were purple, and they numbered-

“Fifteen, at a glance,” Jamie said.

Three days.

Gordon reached into the box, as Helen’s hands were full, and withdrew a folded letter.

“They want us back soon, so we can have our appointments,” Gordon said.  “It’s going to take us a day and a half to travel back to Radham.  Three pills each…”

Mary kicked a clump of ice that had fallen from a carriage, making it explode into icicles and shards.  Heads turned.  Mary crushed one of my hands in hers, her other hand clenched, a grim look on her face.

“Try to keep a low profile,” Jamie said.

I put my hand out to stop him.

“They’re giving up on us,” Mary said.

“They have enough faith in us to let us stay another day or two, follow up leads,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” Mary said.  “And they sent the Whelps, and Dog and Catcher, and the Hangman.  And we know Catcher and the Hangman got closer to her than we did.”

“It’s not a competition,” Lillian said.  “What’s important is stopping her from hurting people.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“I don’t think Mary’s saying that isn’t important,” I said.

“I’m not.”

“But it’s true,” I said.  “We’re chasing a ghost.  She’s smart.  It sucks.  We did so well on the last couple of jobs, proving the Lambs were worth something, now it feels like we’re backtracking.”

Mary nodded.  Jamie did too.

Rift mended, if just a little.

We turned onto a side street, at Jamie’s instruction.  The buildings here were a little more uniform.  It was possible that most of the quaint little cottage-houses were individual dormitory spaces, the rest occupied by people who supported the Academy town, like the postman, but these buildings lacked character.

“Look at this like an opportunity,” I said.  “This is a good thing.”

“Good?” Mary asked.

We quickly reached the dormitory where we were supposed to be staying, and we stopped as a group in front of the wrought-wood gate, taking shelter from the snowflakes under the canopy of a large evergreen with chains dangling from it.

In the summertime, the chains would have certain meats hung from them.  Those treated meats would keep the pest and vermin populations down in a city where the gutters and sewers might literally run red with bodily fluids during exam time.

They did in Radham, it wasn’t unbelievable for it to happen here.

“This is good because it forces our hand.  I don’t think any of us are going to relax or take shortcuts in the next twenty-four hours.”

“If you think I’m taking shortcuts-” Mary started.  I raised a hand.

“I know you don’t,” I said.  “Not really.  None of us do, exactly, but yeah.  Not what I meant.  It’s less about shortcuts, and more that we all get tired.  We get tired from different things and we get tired in different ways.  In a crisis, I know we pull ourselves together and give our all… but in a slog like this?  Every day, at least one of us isn’t at our best.”

There were a few nods.  Few would argue they were flawless.

“This is good because it’s a crisis,” I said.  “We can’t move on to another city, unless we have a damn good lead, so we focus our attention here.  It makes sense that she’s enjoying being the needle in the haystack, which gives us every reason to think she’s left the city, but that I’m even thinking that means she’s probably second guessed it.  I can usually play this game well, guess what people are doing when they aren’t even sure, but she plays it too.  Let’s use this opportunity to catch her off guard, do something she wasn’t necessarily expecting.  Change our approach.  One and a half days of the absolute best work we can do.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Gordon said.  “I think we should split up.  We operate in different ways, and we can cover more ground in different ways.”

No!

We need to bind the group together, find the right configuration!

And splitting up is always a bad idea!

Except I felt like saying that much aloud might ruin it.  If people were self conscious, or the fractures in the group became conscious and significant rather than subconscious and minor…

Jamie glanced at me.  The glance was an ask.  He wanted to know what I thought.

“Sure,” I said.  Then, as a subtle bit of manipulation, I added, “We go out in pairs.  We spend a duration doing our thing, then meet up, report in even if there’s nothing to report, touch base.”

Gordon nodded.  “Sy, with me?  Jamie and Mary together.  Helen and Lillian.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it makes sense,” he said, simply.

I frowned at him.  “That’s the worst answer you could’ve given.”

“If I give you more information, that’s slack you’ll use to hang me,” he said.

“Well yeah.”

“Come on,” he said.  He reached into Helen’s box and found a key, opened the door, and then dropped his luggage just inside.  He reached out for Jamie’s.  “If you can’t stand my company, we can rearrange things after our first meeting.  In one hour?  Here.”

There were nods.

I waited with him while he got everyone’s luggage organized inside and locked the door.  The others were already fanning out, heading in different directions.

“Why, really?” I asked, now that everyone was gone.

“The group is splintering,” he said.

“Yeah.  Not a lot, but-”

“It’s splintering,” he said.  “It can be fixed, but I think it’s best fixed at the ground level, the core.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Remember when it was just you, me, Jamie, and sometimes Helen?”

Two years ago.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get back to basics.  You and I.  Like in the old days.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “You have something in mind?”

“Let’s go recruiting,” he said.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.02 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.2

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

All things had hearts.  All things had veins and arteries, tracks and paths which were carved through them as they acted out their role in life.  Even a rock had its weakness, a point where a chisel and a strong enough blow could destroy it, as points of stress gave way.

Yeah, there were faint exceptions, but overall, it applied to many things in life.

It was an idea that might have seemed spiritual, but that wasn’t really where my line of thinking was coming from or going.  Believing that all things had vulnerabilities was something central in my worldview, but I hesitated to call it faith.

The fact was, Kensford had a heart, and it had its arteries.  Unlike Radham, the heart wasn’t the local Academy, but the main street downtown.  Remove the Academy from the map, and the city would likely continue to function on a level, until the locals were called home by parents and patrons.  Impede the downtown area, and things would quickly die, forced to divert and reroute through the winding streets of quaint little cottage-houses.

Gordon and I made our way downtown, then we began our explorations, taking every wrong turn.  We found areas which hadn’t been kept up well, and places which helped keep Kensford alive: the local dump, teeming with lifeforms that would eat and live in the garbage, as well as boneyards, crematoriums, and warehouses.  The layout of the city was ingenious, keeping the buildings out of sight, using the rise of hills and the winding streets to hide these places.

We visited two, to no effect, and then made our way to the nearby third, squeezing between two dormitory houses and hopping onto a fence.  I walked along the top of the wooden fence, my hands in my pockets, while Gordon hopped up, walked three steps on the fence, then hopped down.

He wasn’t one for style and panache.

The third area, hidden by the positions of the buildings and the little walls that sectioned off parts of Kensford, turned out to be a mass grave.

This was where experiments went when they failed.  Humanoid, they were each distorted and misshapen, different features exaggerated or removed.  They were piled on top of one another, most but not all naked and bound with straps, keeping arms close to the body and legs together.  They had been dusted with some acid or lime or something in that vein, and flesh had melted, but only superficially, leaving the remains mummified.  A light snow masked the worst of the scarring, the snow so thin that a feather might have wiped a given forehead or belly clean of it.

I could see the tracks where the wagon had turned up and dumped the latest collection of bodies.  I suspected that one of the things I was smelling was that same batch of bodies.

“Want to give them a shot?” Gordon asked, drawing my attention to a group of girls who were sitting on a large box that might have held salt for the street or lime for the bodies.  They were just on the cusp of being proper adults, about nineteen, and their feet didn’t reach the ground.  Each had a cigarette.

“Let’s,” I said.

The girls made some surreptitious movements as we drew nearer, the rightmost girl taking something from the one in the middle, scooting closer to her friend, then reaching behind her back.

“Weapon?” Gordon asked.

“Drinking,” I said.  “Look at their body language.”

“Do we use it?”

“I don’t think we need to,” I said.

“Okay.  Do you want point?”

“I’ll back you,” I said, while thinking,  I’m more flexible, I can adapt to fill the gaps in your approach better than you can adapt for me.

Besides, I mentally revised, You were entirely right in saying the group was splintering some.  You and I aren’t any different.  I’m not sure I trust you.

I hated myself for even thinking it, but Gordon had acted differently when around Shipman, and he’d nearly gotten us killed at one point.  All of us were going to change to some degree as we entered into the next big segment of our lives, in body, mind, emotions, and how we fit into the group.

Or how we didn’t.

Gordon, for all his talk about helping, was in the most danger of slipping away from the rest of us.

He could talk.  I’d adapt.

“Little boy,” the girl to the left said.  “You looked a lot older from a distance.”

“Hi,” Gordon said.

“Hi,” the middle girl said, clearly curious about us.

The leftmost girl didn’t seem to register the greetings, and added, “You still have a bit of a baby face, don’t you?”

“And you have a drink hidden behind you,” he observed.  His voice was even, calm, and nonthreatening.  “I’m old enough to know that you’d get in trouble for that.”

That didn’t seem to go over well.  The attitude shifted, mouths in firmer lines, body language adjusting to be more aggressive, sitting up straighter.

Subtlety wasn’t Gordon’s strong point either.

“But,” Gordon said, “I’m not going to do that.  I’m looking for information.”

He’d upset them, but he wasn’t balancing it out with any bribe or possible reward.  If I was jumping in to make the threats like Gordon had, I would have offered something to gain, to pull them further into my grasp and ensure they would do what I wanted them to do.

“What information?” one of the girls asked.

“Wait, wait,” the leftmost girl said.  “Who are you, why are you here, and what are you doing?”

She was asking too many questions at once.  The alcohol had made the words too loose.

“I’m Gordon, that’s Sylvester.  We’re trying to find some people, and we’re trying to find some people.”

She looked momentarily confused.

“Hm,” the middle girl made a curious noise.  “I’ll take your bait.  Which people?”

“The other sort of people that go to spots like this.  Probably not students, either low-level laborers or the family of those laborers.  Shady types,” Gordon said.

“And what does a kid like you want with that type of person?” the rightmost girl asked.

“Point us in the right direction if you want to find out,” Gordon said, smiling.

If had asked, she would have said no.

She smiled back.  “I am curious.”

Being attractive, being naturally smart, and naturally fit, Gordon had things easy.  He didn’t have to push as hard to achieve the same things.  People liked him.

“You might be looking for the Baths?” the middle girl asked.  “There are four brothers and a girl, they drive in the wagons with supplies, three times a week.  They get up to trouble.”

“How much trouble?” Gordon asked.

The leftmost girl of the group reached back, grabbed a bottle and held it up.

“Drinking, more drinking, the occasional fight, making a lot of noise, which is probably the worst thing they do, having so many students living in Kensford,” the middle girl clarified.

“And they do like the ladies,” the girl to the right said.  She took the bottle and tipped back a mouthful.

“There aren’t many young men around,” I observed.

The girl gave me a smile that was somewhere between smug and knowing.

Lucky guys, I supposed.

“Baths.  That’s a last name?” Gordon asked.  When he got a nod in response, he asked, “Are they serious about their work?”

“Mother Bath and Father Bath don’t mind what they do so long as the kids get the work done.  They do, they’re religious about it.  A day of work, a few hours a night of play.”

“It’s daytime right now,” Gordon observed.  “How long until they’re available?”

The girls murmured among one another for a few seconds, then each one gave different answers.

“Three hours.”

“Five hours.”

“Four hours.”

“That’s too late,” Gordon said.  “Who else?”

“Else?”

“Not the Bath family.  Anyone else?”

“There are others, independent, people everyone knows to avoid.  They’re not the sort of people kids like you should hang around.”

“Why?” I cut in, before Gordon could forge onward.

“They have a bit of a mean streak.  Picking on the weak,” the middle girl said.  “And you’re weak.”

“Where are they?” Gordon asked.

Again with the direct approach.  It wasn’t the sort of thing I could have done, but Gordon almost sounded like an adult as he asked, and he managed the right body language and expression to drive the point home.

“I can’t tell you that, not in good conscience.”

“Where are they?” he asked, again, more serious.

“The woods,” the girl on the left said.  The drunkest of the group.  Still having trouble holding her tongue.

“Where?” Gordon asked.

“Near-” the girl started to reply.  Her friend in the middle clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Near the school,” I guessed.  Most obvious possibility.

The looks on their faces told me I was right.

“A little to the west?” I tried.  With the school bordered on two sides by thick woodland, there were only two possible directions that weren’t ‘into the woods’.  Being right had the ‘wow’ factor, but I figured out the answer either way.  Probably.

Again, I was right.

I looked at Gordon.  “Let’s go.”

“How did you do that?” the drunk girl asked, behind me.

The second of the girls, the one from the middle, hopped down behind me.  I turned just in time to see her grab for my coat.  I tried to avoid her hand, and missed.

“You’re not going in the woods,” she said, voice firm.

I was betting she was an older sister.

Gordon started to approach, no doubt to break her hold.  For my part, I reached into my coat and withdrew a knife, raising it toward her wrist.

She let go of me as if I were on fire.

“We can handle ourselves,” Gordon said, in the same confident, mild manner of speaking he’d used to talk to them earlier.  “If you want to come and make sure we’re safe, feel free, but don’t get in the way.”

We circled around the mass grave, making our way toward the woods at the north end of Kensford, west of the Academy at the northeast corner of the town, and the girls didn’t follow.

When we were out of earshot, I commented, “That was a shame.  We could have used them.”

“They would have held us back, or complained.  They’re not what we’re looking for.”

“No,” I agreed.

People with a mean streak sounded good.

We’d done this before.  Found a group of malcontents, then steered them in a given direction.  They worked well as distractions, as sources of information, or sources of tools, an extra set of hands for getting things done.

Gordon was generally good at getting their attention.  I was good when it came to the steering.

We hadn’t run into this before.

They were, by and large, girls.  They were eighteen to nineteen, dressed in winter clothes, they sat around a large bonfire, their backs to a shack that had another fire going in a stove or fireplace within.  A group of the girl’s pets were hacking away at trees, gathering more firewood for the bonfire.

At the center of it all was a girl with her hair in disarray, slouching forward on a log, elbows on her knees.  Her jacket looked like some kind of new fashion that had yet to take off; it sported a surprising number of black feathers around the collar.  She’d had some alterations done to her face and nails, giving one of her her cheekbones and eye sockets a peculiar sort of edge to them, her upper face looking like a stylized skull was trying to push its  way out and forward from one corner of her face.

She wasn’t the only one who had gone to an extreme and modified herself, and as a result, there was no particular sign she was special, going by appearance and attitude alone.  There was only the fact that, when we arrived, and the girls looked at each other in surprise, they looked to the black feathered woman for a response.

“You usually pick a fight and win,” I murmured.  “You want to fight them?”

“I’m not shy to fight a woman.  We can do this like we always do.  I propose a challenge, or see if they’re betting types.  Let them pick the contest, hope they pick fighting, for me, or a gambling game for you to cheat at, beat them, whatever they choose.  Use that to get them to listen.”

“No,” I agreed, “Difference is, you’re not going to ‘win’ if you win.  Nobody will respect a boy who beats a girl.”

“Hm,” he said.  “They might.

“Nah.  Let me lead here?” I asked.

He gestured in my direction.

“Aren’t many kids hereabouts,” the woman with the black feathered coat said.  She was faking an Eastern-Crown accent, which I found very interesting.  It was all of the crispness of Crown English coupled with too much enunciating.  The fakery of it was obvious enough I suspected some of others in this group of hers knew it wasn’t how she really talked.

Why, then?

Image?

“We’re not from hereabouts,” I said.  “We’re visiting from Radham.”

“All the way from Radham to here?” she asked.  “Tots don’t often come to Kensford.  Less than ten in the city, I’d wager.  Children of shopkeeps or teachers.”

“There are a few more now,” I said.  My gaze passed over every person here, trying to piece the puzzle together.  Who were these young ladies, and why were they here?

Dark circles under eyes, scars in and on the webbing between fingers, a generally dejected, angry air, with some drastic personal modifications that were guaranteed to run afoul of the school, even without the dress code, and the proximity of this little encampment to the larger school was pretty telling.

The pieces snapped into place.

I had an idea of who they were and how they functioned, now.

But first things first…

“We’re looking for someone,” I said.  “She’s a criminal, and the very first thing I have to ask is whether anyone came to you and asked about children.”

“Which children?  Having children?” the woman in the black feathered coat asked.

“Looking for us,” I said.  It was cutting a little too close to the chase, but I was feeling impatient.

She didn’t respond, and only stared.

I knew this tactic.  I’d used this tactic.

Yet she’d played dumb, just a bit, she had baited an answer out of me, and now she was leaving me hanging.  That I hadn’t had a better response to each step of her play was grating.

You want to play that game?

“We haven’t been here for long,” I said.  I didn’t break eye contact as I talked, staring, “But I do know that Dame Cicely’s has a strict curriculum, with an awful lot of students who are willing to hurt or sabotage others if it means rising to the top.  I’m even betting that some of you have done it.  Except you failed.”

I saw the reactions, and I marked the faces in question, the black-feathered woman’s in particular.  The bullies, the vicious ones who’d hurt others.

“You collectively failed,” I said.  “You’re here because you’re not part of the school anymore.  You hit your limit, you didn’t get the grades, or you were dropped from the roster.  Maybe your parents don’t know.  Maybe they’re picking you up soon.  You have a limited time, and there aren’t many roads open to you.”

“I do think…” the woman in the black-feathered coat said, drawing out the words, pausing for effect, “…I’m done listening to you.  Scurry off, little one.  I’m feeling kind today.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I told her.

“Feeling less kind, now,” she said.

Right.  Picking on the weak.

She stood from the log she was using as a bench, dusting snow off her backside.  She was fascinating to look at, in terms of the sheer analysis I could do.  All the girls and women I’d met had been told how to act and how to dress, how to say things and how to be.

Out of those girls and women, there had been scarce few who had broken from that mold.  Of those, there were a number of monsters, and there were a number of people who had been absolutely and totally broken.  Slaves, prisoners, and test subjects.

Then there were maybe one or two sexual inverts, but this woman didn’t strike me as one.

She’d been torn down, and she’d built herself back up, and it was a ramshackle, unwieldy sort of build, as her accent suggested.  She walked with less grace than many men I knew.

She drew nearer.  I didn’t move.

She reached for me, and Gordon moved to intercept, grabbing her wrist.

Looking at her palm, I saw something move.  Pink, tiny, and round, they looked like pimples, but they throbbed, skin stretching tighter as they moved.

I hurried in stepping to one side, while Gordon held her wrist to keep her hand from following me.

A pale mist spurted out to form a two-foot round cloud in front of her hand.  My head was well out of the way

She tore her wrist free of Gordon’s grip.

“Something about you two seems wrong,” she said.  “The way you talk, the way you move…”

That goes both ways, I thought.

“We’re talking about you, not us,” I told her, “You’re out of options, all of you.  You’re having a last hurrah before your families come to collect you or outright disown you.  You had one chance to make something of yourself that wasn’t being a teacher or a housewife, and you failed.”

“I’m still in a position to hurt you,” she threatened.

“I’m in a position to stop you,” Gordon said, behind her.

She stepped back to keep us all in view, while also making sure that we were between her and the others.  Gordon and I didn’t flinch.

Sore spot.  She wore the wound like a badge, and she was no doubt used to hurting anyone who prodded it.  Angry, spiteful, lashing out.  She wore it all right out in the open.

And, I imagined, the others flocked to her because they identified so heavily with it.

This wasn’t a group like Reverend Mauer had been trying to make, something that might have endured and carried on forever.  This was a group that would self destruct any day now.

It was beautiful in its bitterness.

“I’m going to keep this simple, and I’m going to keep it short,” Gordon said.  “We’re here because we want to offer you an opportunity.  You have very few opportunities.”

“Opportunities,” she said, sounding less than enthused.

Gordon shrugged.  “You became Academy students because it’s the fastest, easiest way to rise up in society and get out from under thumbs.  Now I’m going to offer you another way that’s fast and easy.  Money.”

“How much?” she asked, without wasting a heartbeat’s time.

I jumped in, wasting no time either, wording things so I had a half-second to think.  There were eight people in her little group. “Enough that, if you split it three ways, three people could buy houses in a decent enough town.  Split it more ways, it still buys some time to figure out a way forward.”

“Money makes the world go around,” Gordon said.  “And at the end of the day, even the Academy needs money and resources to keep going.”

The woman frowned, looking at each of us.  “And how are you going to get us that much money?”

“We’re looking for a person,” I said.  “And it’s tricky, because it’s a girl with a pet monster, and I do know there are a lot of girls with pet monsters around.  Her pet was a disembodied head, but we’re not sure what it is now, and she could have changed her appearance.”

“Does she have a bounty on her head?” she asked.

“Not officially, but she’s committed major offenses against the Crown in two of the Crown States.  That puts a certain price on her head.  You get her, dead or alive, and then you point out the rule, deliver the body, and you’re made.”

“Where do you come in?” she asked.  “Two little boys in the wrong place, doing and knowing things you shouldn’t.”

“We’re your salvation,” I said.  “We don’t need or want the money.  We want her caught, or we want her dead.  That’s all.”

“You’re going to say yes,” Gordon said.  “Do you want to keep pretending you won’t, or can we use this time to talk details, with Sylvester and me -I’m Gordon, by the by- telling you what little we know about her?”

“You think I’m going to say yes, because I don’t have anything better to do?  Maybe we’re done with people telling us how we should live our lives.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “And maybe this is the last real choice.  Your last chance, ever, to choose the course of your own life.”

She ruminated for a long moment.

“Ronnie,” one of the other girls said.  “Please.”

Ronnie, the woman with the black feathered coat, bowed her head a little.

“You’re angry,” I said, my voice soft.  “Angry at the world.  This girl we’re after, she’s a good target for that anger.”

Was there really as much choice as we’d implied?

She nodded.

“How many people do you think you could round up?” Gordon asked.

“Twelve at least,” she said, raising her head.  “Twenty at most.”

Twenty is a good number.

“Okay.  Here’s what you need to know,” Gordon said.  “She’s not a student, and she probably doesn’t have student identification.  She has or had black hair, favors ruby red lipstick, was in the company of a young stitched woman and a head…”

The others were waiting as Gordon and I met at the house.  I tried to gauge how the others were doing, if they were closer or further apart than they’d been before Gordon had grouped them up.

Helen and Lillian seemed fine.  Jamie and Mary far less so.

“Where do we stand?” Gordon asked.

“We talked to the faculty,” Lillian said.  “There have been thefts of supplies.  She set up a lab, and she might be reluctant to abandon it.”

“She’s set up others,” I said.  “She abandoned those.”

Lillian frowned.

“I recognized the equipment,” Helen said.  “Vat grown life, big and equipment necessary for working with microscopic life.”

“Together?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Helen said.

“Anything else?”

Helen shook her head.

“Jamie, Mary?”

“We looked through the crowds,” Jamie said.  “If she’s hiding in plain sight, she might be hiding among larger numbers.  If I can get a good look at her, I’ll be able to identify her.”

“This many pretty girls around,” Mary said, “Someone’s doing back-street work, touching up and prettifying.  That same someone might have changed Ms. Fray’s face or hair for her.  We asked around, I think we might keep it up.”

They didn’t stay together.

“You need to stay together as a pair,” Gordon said, voicing my thoughts aloud.

“We did, some,” Jamie said.  “We stayed close enough we could see each other, at least.”

“And if she comes after you in the crowd?” Gordon asked.

“That might not be how she operates,” I said.

“But it could be,” Gordon said.

I nodded in agreement.

“And you?” Mary asked.  “What did you manage?”

“We’ve got eighteen people on the ground,” I said.  “Malcontents and criminals.  We’re going to put word out with a few others.  Local thugs.  Every town has it’s common elements, and one of those elements is that there are people who aren’t happy, looking for an easy fix.  They’re covering the common exits from the city and making sure Fray can’t run, if she’s still here.”

“I know Gordon likes to do things the direct way,” Jamie said, “But you, Sy?  What’s the plot in your head right now?”

“Plotting?  I’m offended!”

Jamie didn’t even blink.

I sighed.  “The people we’re sending after Fray, they’re floundering, drowning, struggling to make it in life.  I’m interested to see how she interacts with them.  It’s very possible she might recruit them.”

“Which is good, somehow?” Mary guessed.

I nodded.  “Insert a weak link that we can then sever at the right time.  And those women are weak links.”

“Dangerous game,” Gordon said.  I detected a note of disapproval in his voice.

“It’s one I’m confident playing,” I said.  “At the very least, they’ll keep her on her back foot, make her deal with the people who are asking questions and cutting off her retreat.”

There were a few nods.

“We eat, hit the washrooms, change clothes if we need to, then move out again,” Gordon said.  He looked at Jamie and Mary.  “Same teams, please.”

Jamie and Mary nodded.

As we headed for the front door of the house, I inserted myself between Jamie and Mary.  Two of my favorite people, for very different reasons.  My oldest friend and my newest.

How to tie them closer together?

“You’re both methodical,” I said.  “What you do, you do perfectly, whether it’s sticking a knife in between someone’s ribs or remembering the exact text of a book you read a year ago.  Think about what puts the two of you on the same page.  Use that.”

“We’re both fond of you,” Jamie said.

“Well, that’s a cop out answer,” I said.  “We’re all fond of each other, aren’t we?”

Mary smiled at that.  The inclusion.  Even now, three quarters of a year after joining us, she needed the reminder that she was a dyed in the wool Lamb.

“We’re okay,” Jamie said.  “We were figuring it out.”

“I know,” I said.  “I only…”

I trailed off.

Gordon had opened the door.

He stepped back out of the way.

Our belongings were in ruins.  The luggage destroyed, the contents torn up and strewn around.  Entire sections of the little dormitory house had been torn up and ripped out, including the kitchen sink, by the looks of it.

But, worst of all, was the blood.  At least three whelps had been torn to pieces and the contents had been used to paint the hallway.

The bloody handprint on the wall was at least two feet across.

A message was written on the wall in blood.

I have your real pills.

  -G. Fray

All things have hearts.  Even the Lambs.

“Oh gosh darn it!” Helen said.  She reached into a coat pocket and pulled out the bottle.  “Is there any way to tell?”

“Taste?” Jamie suggested.

“Taste it, then,” Gordon said.  “But there’s no guarantees.  We can’t afford to think we’re safe and be wrong.  She’s here, she’s challenging us…”

“And if she knows we’re staying here, then she’s been watching our every move from the beginning,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.03 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.3

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“I’ll check the place,” Gordon said.

“I’ll come with,” Mary said.

“Thank you.”

It wasn’t a bad idea.  There was no guarantee that the assailant had already left.

“Watch that you don’t mess up any evidence,” Jamie said.

“We won’t,” Mary said.

Ah, evidence.  I liked where people’s thoughts were going.  Mary teaming up with Gordon, Jamie thinking about the next step.

I could have done without Jamie suggesting Gordon or Mary would have messed up, but this was a better course of things.

“Sorry, little guys,” Gordon said, under his breath, to our deceased comrades.  “You died for a good cause.  Your brothers will avenge you, hopefully.”

“It would be nice,” I said, crouching down to sit on my heels, prodding at one of the dead whelps.  It had a large beak and scaled body, it sported a long tail and narrow eyes.  The tongue trailed out of its open mouth.  I added, “My hopes aren’t high.  She’s been one step ahead for a while.  I doubt the Whelps are going to catch her off guard.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

I stroked the thing’s side.  It was small compared to the others, I gauged it at twenty pounds, give or take, though it was hard to gauge with the sheer damage it had sustained.  A runt like me.

I prodded the lolling tongue into its mouth, before closing the beak.

The mouth popped back open, and the tongue unfurled.

I triedSorry, runt.

“Don’t get too much blood on your hands,” Jamie reminded me.

“I know.”

“I can give you something to clean your hands,” Lillian said.  Then she stopped.  “Or I could, but…”

But her bag was the biggest out of all of ours, and the contents were strewn about.

“I think I can find it.  Give me a second,” she said.

“Don’t,” I told her.  “If they possibly messed with the pills, we can’t rule out that they messed with the stuff they left on the floor.”

“But-”

“It’s okay,” Helen said, giving Lillian a pat on the shoulder.  “He was careful, and he didn’t get any blood on his hands.  The scent marker only works if they bleed on you.  Poor little fellas.”

“The Whelps know us anyway,” I added.  “Maybe not you, so much, and maybe not Mary, but they’re not about to come tearing after me.  You, maybe, but-”

“You already said that.”

“Repeating it for emphasis.”

She punched me in the arm, before dropping her arm to one side and looking down at the mess.

“We’re okay,” I said.

“I don’t think we are,” Lillian said, arms folded in a way that was hugging herself as much as it was defiance.  “Fray knows where we sleep.”

“We can go somewhere else,” Jamie said.

“If she followed us here-”

“She might follow us elsewhere,” I finished for Lillian.  “I know.  There’s no place we’re safe, and she has the upper hand.”

“Especially with the pills being an issue,” Gordon said, returning.

“There is that,” I said.

Mary made her way back, standing beside Gordon.  Between all of us, we’d formed a loose perimeter around the mess that had been left behind with the demise of the Whelps.

“Perimeter’s clear,” Mary said, a touch late.  Filling the silence rather than promptly reporting in.  “Nothing and nobody outside that I can tell.”

“Small building, fast check,” Gordon said.  “What are we thinking?”

“We’re dealing with a Sylvester that has a lot more general knowledge, less compunctions, and the upper hand,” Jamie said.

“She can’t pee standing up, so that’s a point for me,” I said.

Lillian punched me in the arm again.

“Ow!  Why?

“This is serious.  Be serious,” she admonished me.

“There was no stamp on the parcel, she would have had to know there would be a parcel arriving by mail with a guard, and she would have had to fabricate any fake pills in advance,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“She would have had to know we were coming, or that someone was coming,” Jamie pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said, holding my tongue as I thought, the armed mail carriage wouldn’t have been the most subtle thing for a paranoid ex-Doctor, and she was expecting someone.

Helen held up the bottle of pills, so they caught the light.

“Sealed,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Gimme?” Jamie asked.

“If it’s poison-” I warned.

“Just gimme,” Jamie said.

Helen unsealed the bottle, removed the glass stopper, then reached in to get a pill.  She threw it to me.

I caught it and handed it to Jamie.

He popped it into his mouth.  “Tastes exactly the same.  Like chalk.”

“All signs point to it being nothing more than head games,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said, for the fourth time.

The silence lingered.  Nobody was saying what we were all thinking.  We could say all we wanted, but our heads knew different.

Fray was smart, and she was clever, which were two very different things.  It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, and when our lives were at stake…

I said it, because nobody else seemed willing to, “We’re not really in a position to take a leap of faith here.  Guessing wrong before we leap means a terminal fall.”

Nobody said anything to that.  It was sobering.

“Is that it?” Mary asked, indignant.  “We pack up, use the badges, and force our way onto the next train ride back?”

“It’s the safest option,” Gordon said.  “Lillian, you were briefed on the particulars of the drug, weren’t you?”

“They filled me in before we left.  What to expect when you showed symptoms, how to handle it.  If we left tonight, assuming a two hour train journey to Radham, one or two brief stops, I don’t think there would be any major symptoms.  You’d feel like you had the flu, at worst.  I could alleviate symptoms, which would delay the deterioration.”

“Dying,” I said.

“If you want to be blunt about it,” she said.  The look in her eyes when she looked at me was steely.  Her tone was cold, and she spoke with a kind of authority.

Our lives were in her hands, as they so often were, but right here, right now, with all of us in grave peril, well, this was Lillian’s moment.

She fixed the position of her bags, betraying the nervousness behind the guise.  “When you start throwing up, the other parts of you that are breaking down will tear and rip.  Your stomach and throat will bleed, your muscles will rip, and you’ll be incapacitated by cramps.  The blood that drains into your stomach will make you throw up more.  By that point in time, every hour that passes adds a month to the time it would take you to recover.  And that’s with Academy help, and it assumes you’re taking the pills again.”

Gordon looked at me.  “You ran away once.”

Mary’s ears perked up at that.

“Didn’t leave Radham.  Couldn’t.  Planned to, but the opportunities never came up.”

“What opportunities would that be?” Gordon asked, a half-smile on his face, “Were you going to get classified as a war machine so they wean you off the leash, and somehow pass yourself off without getting caught by Dog and Catcher?”

Helen tittered, “That’s a funny mental image.  Big hulking warbeast, check.  Big hulking warbeast, check.  Big hulking warbeast, check.  Then there’s Sy, standing in the stable, fake horns on his head.  Check.”

“Then the actual medication comes in,” I said, “In the form of a three gallon syringe, to be jabbed into my tiny ass.”

There were a few smiles at that, breaking the tension.

Good.

“In seriousness, my vampire bat plan was sort of like that,” I said.

The half-smile dropped off Gordon’s face.  “What?  You’re serious.”

“Sort of,” I said.  “I needed a good back-alley doctor to help me figure out the particulars, stuff to watch out for, get the tools, but if I stole the blood of something that was being weaned off and getting the drugs that eased the transition, then gave it to myself?”

“If you gave me a week, I couldn’t list all the reasons that wouldn’t work,” Lillian said.

“But,” I said, “I could get the drugs that way, if there wasn’t any other option, right?”

“You’d kill yourself.”

“But I’d have the drugs,” I said.

Lillian frowned.  “Yes.”

“Any war machine that’s getting weaned off the Academy’s leash-drugs isn’t going to put up much of a fight if I happened to slip into its enclosure.  Maybe I could have found someone to reverse engineer the drug.  Maybe there could be a filter.  Centrifuge thing, if the drug is heavy enough?”

“No, Sy,” Lillian said.  “I can’t imagine that working.”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know that you did that,” Mary commented, voice soft.

“I’m not proud of it,” I said.

“It’s very you.

I nodded.

“You got caught, in the end?”

“I let myself get caught,” I said.  “Stayed in Radham, reached my limit, and when Dog and Catcher came sniffing around, I didn’t try to fight them.  Stayed put as Catcher came into the building, didn’t budge as Catcher came to cuff me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I said.  “I missed the others.  Being with them on the Academy’s terms was better than being without, on mine.”

Mary nodded.  It was a reply she understood.  The others gave me small smiles or nods of understanding – Gordon, Helen, even Lillian.

Jamie was the only one who didn’t.  Who knew that I was telling a half truth.  Or, more correctly, I was telling half of the truth.

Yes, I had gone back for the others.

But I had also gone back for my appointments.  I had allowed the Academy to poison my brain once again, with my body suffering as a side effect, and I’d done it because I’d missed being sharp.

Two appointments in short succession.  It had been so difficult I very nearly hadn’t come back from it.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  “Vampire bat plan?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was this one of multiple plans?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you have other plans you intended to use then, which might apply today?  Ways to prolong the deadline?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “One.  But it won’t make us any friends.”

“Share?” Mary asked.

“Simple.  We take someone else’s.”

“That depends on there being someone from Radham here, using an experiment,” Gordon said.  “Whelps don’t count.  They’re weaned.”

“I know,” I said.  “It’s a long shot.  But it’s a long shot in favor of having another shot at her, while she’s playing games with us.”

“I want to win,” Mary said.

“I’m with Mary on this one,” Gordon said.  “It’s a stupid trick, faking us out on the pills, but she’s out-predicted us a few too many times, staying ahead of the Lambs, Hangman and Dog and Catcher.  I don’t feel safe calling her on what seems to be a shitty bluff.  I’m angry, I want to win and rub it in her face.”

“I agree,” Jamie said.  He pushed his oversized glasses up his nose.  “But we do this safely.  If we have to catch a train tonight to get back in time, then we have until tonight.  That’s only a few more hours.  We need to find leads on Fray, figure out if there’s a way to get a legitimate source for pills, and watch our backs at the same time.”

“Easy peasy,” I said.

“I’m not so sure,” he said.  “But I’d like to give this a shot, at least.”

United in crisis.

We were on more solid footing than we had been.

It made me wonder.  If the positions were reversed, me in Fray’s shoes and vice-versa, would I have been able to get a good reading on my adversary?  Would I know that the Lambs were fractured and falling apart?  That attacking them directly would rally them, while running away for the Nth time threatened to break them?

Fray was an invisible woman.  I knew her only by the maneuvers she’d made against us, the cities she chose to flee to, and the way she fled.

Jamie stepped forward.  He traced his finger along the edge of the bloody handprint on the wall.

Gordon commented, “She wants us to come after her.  This is a trap.”

“So is going home,” I said.  “We leave, she probably won’t extend another invitation to us again.  Makes me think…”

I trailed off, uncomfortable.

“Think what?”  Gordon asked.

“Nothing,” I said.  “Incomplete thought.  I’ll speak up the moment it’s put together in my head.”

Gordon nodded.

“Going by handprint and footprint, I don’t think I’ve seen anything that would fit the size of this guy,” Jamie said.

“Guy?”

Jamie nodded.  He pointed at the marks on the floor.  Not at blood.  The attackers weren’t so messy.  But at scuff marks, dust, and spots where dust was mottled.  “Man.  He had a lot of snow on him.  Kicked up, and he’d been standing in the snow.  It fell off in clumps, hit the floor, dappled the texture of the dust there.  Our assailant.  The head, now with a body.”

The finger moved to the floor to one side.  “Hard to see now, because Mary walked on it, but I remember it as it was.  Young woman.  Lightweight.  Tall, slender, not heavily dressed.  Odd gait.  Limp.”

“The stitched woman,” Lillian said.

Jamie nodded.

“No Fray?” Gordon asked.

Jamie shook his head.

Interesting.

She sent her underlings on a mission, but what had she been doing in the meantime?

Why was she staying with us?

“It’s a starting point,” Gordon said.  “Now, I’ve really got to visit the little boy’s room.  Then we really should get going.  We’re working with a clock.”

I liked the looks on people’s faces as they transitioned from being children to being Lambs in their element.  Being more anxious, or less.  Expressions changing, minds switching gears.

Jamie elbowed me.  Then he pointed at the door.

I nodded.

We excused ourselves and stepped outside.  My eyes roved over the storybook town, looking to see if I could spy Fray spying on us.

“When you came back, you didn’t do it purely because of us,” Jamie murmured.

I bumped his arm with my shoulder.  “It’s weird when you do that.  Pick up a thread of conversation that we dropped a while back.”

“Sure,” he said.  “You’re dodging the question.”

“Statement, not a question, Mr. Perfect Memory.”

Implied question, Mr. Tiny Ass.”

I stabbed a finger toward his face.  “Careful.”

“You’re still dodging.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.  “That wasn’t the only reason.”

“You’ve hinted at it before.  Do I have to say it, or will you admit it?”

I shrugged, “Same thing.”

“You came back because you wanted to be a Lamb, not a real boy.”

I nodded, not looking at him, but at all of the smoke pouring up from the chimneys of the oddly similar little buildings.

“What if Fray is the same?” Jamie asked.

“She wants to be a Lamb?”

“She wants the excitement.  She wants to have a brain that works differently than most, and she wants to test it.  She’s been running for so long, she’s getting bored.”

“No,” I said.  “I don’t buy it.”

“Serial killers do it.  They develop a pattern, based on who they are and how they function.  They test the limits, they get away with it, but as humans, we all have a drive to be appreciated and recognized.  We need stimulus.  I doubt Fray is going to sit down and read a book any more than you are.  She’s looking to us to satisfy a desire.”

“No, sorry,” I said.  “I respect that you’ve put a lot of thought into it, but…”

“But?”

“No.  It’s too convenient.  Her, suddenly developing a weakness, right here, when we need her to?  The thing with the pills, to throw us off balance?”

“You think it’s a trap.”

“I’d rather go up against her assuming that she didn’t have any weaknesses at all,” I said.  “I feel like anything else would be a mistake.”

Jamie nodded.  The snow continued to fall around us.  I heard Gordon coming down the stairs.

“Are you saying that,” Jamie said, with a careful sort of deliberation, “because you think Fray is that good?  Or are you saying it because you want to think she’s that good.”

“You think I need that stimulus you were just talking about?” I asked.

Jamie shrugged.

I bumped his arm with my shoulder.  He returned the favor, hard enough that I lost my footing, going wide off the stairs leading up to the front door and putting my foot into a bush.

I was only just managing to pull my foot free, cursing Jamie, when the others emerged.

All of the Lambs together and ready.

A secondary source of pills disarmed Fray’s ruse.  It was something of a priority.  We moved as a group, now, holding something of a formation.  Jamie’s eyes scanned the crowd, Mary had one flank, Gordon had another, and Helen had the front of the group.

“Post office, three buildings down this street,” Jamie said.

“What’s the approach?” Gordon asked.

“We can do it quick, we can do it pretty, and we can do it careful,” I said.  “Pick two.”

“I’d prefer-” Gordon started.

“That was a rhetorical question,” I cut him off.

“You’re a jackass.”

“We do it quick, we do it careful.  We don’t want to waste time, and we’re going to watch our backs every step of the way.  We’re not making friends today.  We’ve already scattered a handful of delinquents around the town, and the only pretty way to get the pills we need is to go home.  I don’t think any of us want to go home, do we?”

There were a few grumbles and murmurs of agreement.

I want to go home,” Lillian said.

“Too bad,” I said, before her mouth was closed. “Helen takes point on this one.  She’s pretty enough to make up for what we’re lacking.”

“Oh yay!” Helen said.  “And thank you!”

“Mary, get the back door.  Gordon, cover any bystanders, watch the front door.  Jamie, I think there was a window.”

“There was.”

“Watch for bystanders.  Keep an eye on the crowd.  Fray is going to want to watch what our next moves are, so soon after the little stunt she pulled.”

“And me?” Lillian asked.

“If we need your help, something’s gone horribly wrong,” I said.

I saw movement in one of the alleyways.  Whelps.  Three.  All larger than the runt I’d said hi to.

They were, as a weapon, a singular entity.  They weren’t joined by the brain or anything like that, but they were cloned, making them functionally identical, differing only in minor ways as their environment and exposure to food allowed.  One whelp alone could divide into two.  Left alone, they would stalk their prey from a distance, eat things that didn’t smell of human, including foodstuffs recently handled by humans, multiply, and then when they had built up sufficient numbers, they would attack en masse.  Those beaks would cut into flesh and flense it from bone.  Ten whelps could devour a man in less than a minute.

They had her scent, our delinquents had the exits covered.  By all rights, our quarry should have been cornered and under pressure.  I fully expected her to take down the delinquents with her…

“Oh guys,” I said, interrupting my own train of thought.

“What?” Jamie asked.

“Headsman?  For the head, now with body.”

“Ehhh,” Gordon said.

“It’s great!”

“Ehhhh,” he said, again.

“You lack taste,” I told him.

I picked up my own train of thought before it ran away from me.  Fray most definitely had the tools to take down any of the delinquents we’d put in her way.  My only hope was that there would be enough of a mess or commotion to clue us in to what she was doing.

Many of those delinquents had pets and creations of their own, after all.  It wasn’t likely to be tidy when she disposed of them.

We approached the post office.

“Mail would have come in with the train,” Jamie observed.  “Not all of it would have been picked up.  I can’t think of a better, faster way to check what we need to check.”

“Will you give me a boost, Mary?” Helen asked.

“Now?  Where?”

“In a few seconds, silly,” Helen said.  “Inside.

“Um,” Mary said.

“Play along,” I encouraged her.

Gordon was taking long strides forward to beat us to the door.  Ever the gentleman, he held it for the ladies as they stepped inside first.

The building was empty.  Fortuitous.

“Ah, hello again,” the postman said.  “Little lady.”

“Hello!” Helen greeted him.  She gestured at Mary, who connected the dots just in time for Helen.  She offered two hands, fingers interlaced.  Helen stepped up onto the hands, then onto the counter of the post office.

“Excuse me!” the postman said, looking alarmed.

Helen simply strode forward, hooked an arm around his neck, swinging around behind him, and wrapped her legs around his arms, pinning them to his sides.

He struggled, and he was a big fellow, almost capable of freeing himself, but her grip on his neck tightened.  He backed up, slamming her against the wall and shelf behind them, but she simply redoubled her attack.

Mary and I both hopped over the counter, Mary’s skirt swishing around stockinged legs.  Gordon was locking the door, pulling down the blind above the glass pane, while Jamie stood by the window, peering out.  Mary went to the back door, locking it, while I started looking.

Behind the desk was a grid of mail slots, with mail stacked within each square subsection.  Mary joined me in rifling through the mail.

“Here,” Mary said, holding up an envelope.

“Yeah,” I said.  Three envelopes addressed to one person, each sent from ‘Radham Academy’.  I continued looking.

Helen looked through the packages under the desk.  Her search was shorter than ours.  Lillian was only just reaching the postman, checking he was only passed out and not actually dead.

We weren’t complete monsters.

“No packages from Radham,” Helen said, standing straight.

“Another two envelopes here,” I said, holding them up.  Helen snatched them, freeing my hand for more looking.

“One more,” Mary said.  “And…”

I saw her move over to look at more slots.

“I already checked that column of slots,” I said.

“Then I’m done.”

“And,” I checked the last two boxes, flipping through envelopes.  “So am I.  That makes four people who are in Kensford, with ties to Radham.  Anyone want to take bets on them having something?”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Don’t want to take that bet.  But it’s a chance.”

Jamie held out his hand as we rounded the corner.  We handed over the envelopes.

Gordon opened the door, and we let ourselves out.

Quick, careful.

I saw Jamie’s slight frown as he watched over the crowd.  He hadn’t seen anything yet, or he would have spoken up.

Fray was watching.  Now she knew we weren’t running.  Not yet, anyway.

“No,” the man at the door said.

“Because we were told there was a brilliant researcher from Radham here,” Helen said, practically effervescent in attitude.  “We were so hoping to see his work.”

“That would not be me,” the man said.

“Would you know who it was?  We’re so short on time!”

“It’s not me, I don’t know who it would be, and you’re annoying,” he said.

The door slammed.

Helen turned around very slowly, almost dazed.

She hissed.

I gave her a very careful pat on the shoulder, from maximum arm’s length.  “You’re not annoying, Helen.”

She made a small, noncommittal sound.

“That’s three down.  One to go,” Gordon said.  “If this falls through, we need a new idea, or we need to plan to catch the next train out of here.”

Mary spat by the side of the road.  I was pretty sure I saw a bystander further down the street look horrified at the action.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Jamie,” Gordon said.  “Which way to the next place?”

Jamie had his back to us.  His attention was to the far side of the street.

“Jamie,” Gordon said.  “Which way?”

“Shh,” I said, raising a hand.

There was a long pause.  Jamie didn’t move.

I felt a pang of worry.

“Jamie,” I said, my voice soft.  “What are you seeing?”

“She’s changed clothes three times,” he said.  “The hair changed once.  The face stays the same.”

“Fray?” Mary asked.

He shook his head.

“The stitched,” I guessed.

He nodded, pointing a finger.  “She disappeared a second ago, heading east.  I was trying to see her through the crowd.  Blue dress, black jacket and shaw-“

I was already moving.  Mary was a step behind me, and Gordon a step behind her.

We ran, and I didn’t slow a fraction as I hurled myself at the thicker part of the crowd.  I turned my body sideways, I ducked low, I pushed.

She had a headstart, but she was lame.

I was spry, and I was small.

The chaos of the crowd was my medium.

Gordon and Mary were just behind me.  Gordon was bigger but stronger.  Mary was between us, but she had a natural grace.

I pulled ahead of the two, all the same.  A part of me wondered if I wanted it more, and pushed myself harder because of it.

Considering how badly Mary wanted it, that said a lot.

“Sy!” Gordon called out.  “Don’t get too far ahead!  We watch each other’s backs!”

I didn’t have the breath to spare to respond.

This might be our one chance, ever.

I saw the crowd, I watched their movements, faced the choice of an alleyway or main street.

A curious, confused glance from a bystander suggested that something in the alleyway had caught his attention.

I took the cue.

I thought of the whelps and how they had died.

I knew I could be running headlong into a trap.

But I also knew, much in the same way I knew Jamie had been wrong about Fray’s motivations, that it wasn’t something Fray seemed inclined to do.

She’d challenged us, baited us.  Simply ambushing me in an alley with the Headsman was… it was too crude.

“Sy!” Gordon called out.

He was just at the mouth of the alley.  I faced a fork in the path.

I listened, and I heard only Gordon’s pounding footsteps on snow-slick cobblestone.

Snow.  I looked at the ground.

There were a number of tracks in the snow, but one set was messier than others.

I wasn’t sure, so I pointed, told Gordon to go right.  I went down the left path.

Down the next branch of the alley, toward rushing water.

My footsteps slowed.  I stopped, panting.

The area was the sort of place that would be a garden in the spring.  There were stone boxes where plants would sprout, and a railing that looked down over a brook, bordered on both sides by stone walls.  A small, quaint stone bridge was a short distance to our left.

The stitched was there.  Steam rose off her, and she was huffing for breath too.  Not that she would get tired in the same way.

Planned.  To get this far ahead, she would have had to run the second Jamie saw her.

She’d been told to show her face.

By Fray, who was leaning over the railing, arms folded.

She turned her head to look at me, then spoke to the stitched.  “Wendy?”

“Yes, ma’am?” Wendy replied.

“Go meet Warren.  Take the other path.  Make noise, the others should hear you.  Warren will protect you if they catch up to you two.  I don’t expect a problem.”

“Yes ma’am,” Wendy said, nodding.  She drew in a deep breath, then sprinted off.

No limp.

Ms. Fray looked at me, and it was a calculating look.  She was analyzing me as I connected the dots.

She turned her back to me, and she beckoned.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she told me.  “Come talk, Sylvester.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.04 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.4

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

I approached Miss Genevieve Fray.  Being as short as I was, I had to hop up onto a snow-dusted flower box to look over the railing.  It would have been ignoble to be staring through the bars while she looked over them, for one thing, and by stepping up, I was more on her level.

That felt important, somehow.

It was the style for well-to-do people, man and woman alike, to wear long coats.  Ms. Fray wore a short black coat, reaching only down to her belt.  It was a style that was reserved more for people who were more active and those who worked with their hands.  That wasn’t to say she looked poor.  Her hair was nice, though some of it was caught beneath a crimson scarf, as if the scarf had been put on as an afterthought.  She wore a black skirt short enough to reveal her knees, which were covered in patterned red stockings, and she was absentmindedly scuffing at the snow with the toe of one of her heeled black boots that didn’t look particularly good for running in.

She gave me a sidelong glance, suggesting she’d known I was studying her, or she’d expected me to be.  Her lips turned up in a slight smile.

“What are the terms?”  I asked.

“For?” she asked.

“This conversation.  We should negotiate how we’re doing this.”

“We can’t have a simple conversation?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked, and she sounded disappointed.  I’d expected her to be more guarded, hiding her emotions, but she wasn’t.

“Because you keep responding with questions, keeping me on my back foot,” I said.

She smiled again.

I waited, letting her resume the conversation.  How she did would tell me a great deal.  If she took her time, that was more time for the others to address the other problem and find me.  They would be worried when I didn’t turn up, which wasn’t good, but it was helpful.

Below us, the water rippled.  At the very edges, where it wasn’t rushing as much, the water had frozen into a thin layer.  The back of a serpentine creature rose up, moved a short distance, and then sunk, making some of the more fragile ice at the sides break away.

“It’s sluggish,” Ms. Fray commented.  “Hm.”

Wasting time?  Idle chatter?  I wasn’t about to complain, up to a point.

“Winter.  Scales suggest cold blood.  It probably wants to be hibernating,” I suggested.

“I don’t think that’s it, Sylvester,” she said.

She didn’t finish the statement.  I wondered if she was baiting me to ask, to take control of the conversation.  Hayle did that a lot, I knew.  I opted to remain silent.

Win-win.  I wasn’t going to get so hungry for details on her that I let my guard down.  Better to compose myself, think everything through, and catch my breath after all the running.

She raised her hands to her face and blew on them, rubbing, before leaning on the railing with her elbows, hands clasped.  “I prefer this to having the Hangman or the Whelps after me.”

“Is that so?”

“It gets lonely, having the company of a voltaic maid and Warren.  I gave him his tongue back, but he doesn’t like talking.”

My face remained stoic, but my mind was shouting at her.  What in the world are you doing!?  Handing me details?  Expressing a vulnerability?  I would never do such a thing in your shoes!

“You contrived to bait me here to talk because you were lonely, of all things?”

“I didn’t know it would be you.  I was expecting Gordon, I think.  Or a group of you.”

“What were you going to do if it was a group of us?”

“Same thing I’m doing now.  Try to have a conversation,” she said.

Conversation.  It kept coming back to that.  Did she have a plan of attack?  A monster of a statement she could drop on me or us and use to disarm us?

“This is a lot of trouble to go to to have a conversation,” I noted.

“Yes.  But fugitives go to a lot of trouble doing anything.  You should know that much.”

I raised my eyebrows.  She turned her head away from the creek and the Kensford streets on the other side of the water to see my reaction.

“You’ve read my file.”

“I was striving to be a professor, but you’d know that much.  Toward the end, when they had whittled the number down to four candidates, they handed us some files.  Academy weapons, for Radham, and for the neighboring towns.”

“Neighboring towns?”

“There are strategically located villages and towns near Radham each have their own weapon and a caretaker or team.  You didn’t know that?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve been to the Academy’s dungeons?”

“I prefer to call that area the Bowels.”

She smiled.  “Yes.  The towns on the periphery are the same, but an opposite concept.  One weapon, Academy Doctors to manage it and keep things in working order, forever advancing or replacing it.  If something goes wrong, well, there’s a lot of open space and not too many people to get caught up in the resulting mess.  The Academy handed us files, on those towns, on the Academy’s resources, on you.  We were told to familiarize ourselves with them, and we were later surprised with questions.  Not to test our knowledge, but to test our abilities as potential professors.”

“‘What would you do differently’, that sort of thing?”

She nodded.  “That sort of thing.  Very dangerous questions, when one is dealing with the sort of people that become professors.  A test of our ability to be politicians as well as scholars.  How well did we use the time they gave us to prepare?  I know one man twice my age got removed from consideration because he only studied the material he was given.  I was asked to look at your files, I spent a lot of time dwelling on them.  On you.”

I thought over her statements for a little while: the minor revelation, the fact that she kept revealing things about herself without giving anything in return.

Was there a trap gathering around me as we spoke?  Did she have underlings or resources?  Creations?

The little alcove was silent and mostly still.  There was a path to the left, running along the side of the little river, with railing beside it, but it was straight, and I could see someone approaching from a mile away.  The other path, to the right, was where I’d come from.  It connected at an angle, making it hard to see down without walking over.  The building behind us was a small restaurant or coffee shop, which probably used this space as an outdoor patio for guests in warmer weather.  If I squinted and peered through the window, I could make out an older woman wiping down something like a counter or table, holding silverware in one hand.

Suspicious, but I had a hard time seeing her as a threat.  It was easier and more subtle to simply hide someone on either side of the window or door.

I wondered if she was waiting for something to take hold and incapacitate me, but I couldn’t imagine how I might be dosed.  It was just cold enough that there wouldn’t be any moisture in the air to hold vapors,I hadn’t ingested anything, and I hadn’t touched anything and then touched my face.

“It’s nice to put a face to the name,” she said.

“I feel the same way,” I told her, carefully.

“What did you think, the first time you heard about me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Answering a question with a question?” she asked, smiling. “I think you said something about that.”

I had, and the accusation was apt.

I wasn’t about to admit that my first thought had been about a possible connection.  That whoever she was, she was bound to be closer to me than any long lost sibling that turned up.

“I thought it would be fun,” I said.  Not a lie, but not the answer to her question.

“When they first picked you, the idea was to use the formula from the Wyvern files until they found a hard limit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You knew,” she said, more to herself, as if it answered a question.  “I’d already been subjecting myself to more than the prescribed amount before I read your file.  I bartered for them, then started making my own.  Seeing that you’d survived gave me permission to increase the dosages.”

I nodded.

“The difference between us is that you’ve been dosed regularly since you were six.  I’ve been taking the doses for seven years, and have been matching or exceeding your doses for four of those years.  After reading your file, I thought about you regularly, especially during and after my injections.”

“What were you thinking?  Poor kid?”

“In a way.  I was envious, isn’t that strange?  You got to take the doses from an earlier point, you got to decide how you shaped yourself, more than anyone else.  Decide what to focus on, mold your being, decide what things you wanted to be good at and be excellent at those things.”

“Sure,” I said.  I was picking on every word, looking for manipulation.  Was this the trap, the attack?

“Don’t get me wrong, I hated the doses.  The headaches, the nosebleeds, the way my entire body seemed to want to shut down.  But I had a choice.  I thought about what it was like for you, quite a bit.  Whether they dragged you there, kicking and screaming.  But then I asked myself, if you really hated it, would you have gone back willingly, after running away?”

She had me pegged.

It bothered me.  It wasn’t that she’d gotten straight to the heart of a matter that only Jamie had managed to analyze me on, but that this was so lopsided.  The progression of the conversation wasn’t what I’d expected.  She revealed too much.  There was no back and forth, no innuendo, no traps that I’d been able to spot.

She was clearly capable, if she could connect the dots this accurately, bait me here like this and keep me from going for the throat.

“At the age of six, we believe, children start to break away from their parents.  Before six, we’re a sum total of our environments and our biology.  After six, we start to step away from that.  I wondered a great deal about whether being dosed would play into that, and which direction it would go.  It’s very exciting to meet you, after so much speculation.  I’m going to be thinking about this meeting for a long time.”

She was gushing a little.

An act?  Or genuine?

She was showing so many vulnerabilities, it was like she was baring her throat, jugular right at my fingertips.

“What do you think?”  I asked.  “Now that you’ve met me?”

“I’m dearly wishing I could have become a professor,” she said.  “I would have loved to meet you for tea and cookies, and have had long conversations.  I think that would have been nice.”

She reached out, and I reacted, twisting away, hand touching the inside of my jacket to find the knife Mary had given me.  In a moment, I was a step back, the point of the knife an inch from her hand and wrist.

“I was only going to stroke your hair,” she said.

“No thank you,” I replied, thinking of poisons and worse.

“Of course.  I’m sorry.”  A blue-ringed tentacle reached out from within her jacket sleeve, touched the flat of the blade, and pushed it down.  “Please?”

I let my arm slowly drop as she pushed, the blade still in my hand.  My eye noted her right hand, concealed between her stomach and the railing, with needles extended from the space between her fingers and nails.

When the knife was down, she relaxed, facing the railing again.  her right hand went up to fix her hair, and the needles weren’t there anymore.  She didn’t take her eye off me, though she faced the water.  She stared at me through the corner of her eye until I sheathed the knife, then relaxed.

“You were expecting to talk to Gordon, or the group,” I said.  “What were you expecting to talk about?”

Not quite asking what she wanted to talk to me about, but it might provide hints.

“With Gordon, I would ask him what he remembered of his time before he was a Lamb, and how he remembered it.  I would ask him what he plans to be, as someone who could be so very good at anything and everything.  I would ask him if he was living his life to the fullest, without actually asking him that.  Do you know, Sylvester?  Why I’d ask him that?”

“He’s going to die,” I said.

“I’m genuinely surprised they told you, or that he shared that information with you.  I didn’t imagine someone who would accept pity.”

They didn’t tell me.  He wouldn’t.  I kept my face still to avoid betraying the thoughts.  I wanted her to see right through me as I opened my mouth to reply.  “It’s reality.  Everyone dies.  Is this your plan of attack, Ms. Fray?  You confront us with facts we already knew and dealt with on our own?”

She shook her head.  “I don’t have a plan of attack, Sylvester.”

My eyes narrowed.  “Every conversation is an attack, in a way.  Everyone wants something, even if it’s to be understood or paid attention to.  To do that, we attack the other person, predict them, identify where they’re coming from, where they stand, and where they want to go.  Done well, it’s a dance.  Those are the best conversations.”

“Are we dancing?” she asked.

I frowned.

“Sylvester?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh.  I thought we were having a good conversation.”

“No,” I said, again.  I tried to articulate it.  “No, and I can’t tell if it’s because you’re terrible at this or if it’s because you’re that much better than me.”

“At?”

“This.  The standoff, dialogue with an enemy.  You brought me here for a reason, you had something you wanted to achieve, but you’re not fighting for it.  You’re making small talk.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“We’ve each been taking the Wyvern formula, roughly for the same durations.  We each decided on the strengths we wanted to highlight.  You highlighted yours to fill a need in your group.  The gap that Ashton was meant to fill.”

The name caught me off guard.  She seemed to notice.

“I read all the files, Sylvester.  The Lambs were supposed to have a counterpoint to Helen, your Galatea.  They would work as a team, each one with different social strengths, both actors beyond compare, a work by Ibott and a work by a team, derived from his first version of the Galatea.  Gordon is likeable by virtue of his attractiveness and keen social sense.  Helen is likeable because her personality was built to be such.  Ashton would have been likeable for entirely different reasons.  You’re filling the gap.  You’ve become adroit with the interpersonal.  You had to.”

“And you took the Wyvern formula, but you didn’t have to?  I don’t believe that.  You had to navigate the bureaucracy, you were just talking about the political side of being a professor.  You passed the test and answered the questions about what they were doing wrong without making enemies.  No, I don’t believe it at all.”

“Belief, you said it twice, ‘believe’.”

“And?”

“Nothing.  You sound upset.”

“You’re patronizing me.  That’s a peeve of mine.”

“I’m not patronizing you, Sylvester.  I did good work, I built up my skills working with experiments it would otherwise take whole teams to see to the end.  I did build up skills for the challenges outside of the lab, but negotiation and manipulation weren’t priorities.  Strategy and long term planning were.  I removed my enemies one by one, and ensured the weakest possible candidate was my opponent in the final selection.”

“And you failed.”

She smiled a little.  “It’s some consolation that they ended up with a poor professor.”

“You’re lying to my face, Genevieve Fray,” I said.  “You’ve killed.”

“You’re one to talk,” she retorted.  Her eyes were sparkling with emotion.  Excitement.

“You’re angry, you’ve been more brutal than necessary-”

“Again, the Lambs are no better or worse.”

“You’re working with an agenda.  You have a plan.  You could have gone to a lot of different places, but you came here, when you could have run to a place where the Academy didn’t have as strong of a grip.”

“What if I wanted the challenge?  Our brains were made pliable with the Wyvern formula, but pliability still means they need external stimuli to change.  Couldn’t it be that I would have stagnated in a place where there wasn’t a concrete threat?”

“Maybe,” I said.  “You’re not showing me your true face.  The face that you wore when you put weaponized needles under your fingernails, or ordered Whelps killed and a threat written in blood on the wall.”

She smiled.

“I think this is the side of you that acts smart, planning, smiling and acting nice, handling all of the day to day tasks.  But unless the head you stole away with ended up being very nasty, I think there’s a bloodthirsty part of Genevieve Fray you’re only barely holding back, a dangerous, barbaric side.”

She sighed.  Her breath formed a cloud in the air.

“I’m not going to show you that side of me just yet, Sylvester.”

“I’m glad.  I doubt I’d survive it,” I said.  My heart was pounding all of a sudden.  Excitement and fear.  “But can we at least stop pretending it doesn’t exist?  It’s insulting.”

“Alright,” she conceded.  “You made three mistakes in your assessment, though.  Very telling.”

“Is that so?”

“First of all, you said that this part of me is smart, the planner, methodical.”

“Yes.”

“I’m flattered, and I’d agree.  But in saying it like you did, you suggested the other side me isn’t smart.  You’re a planner, you’re careful because you’re weak, and you’re biased because of it.  You don’t respect instinct or ugliness.”

“Instinct and ugliness.”

She smiled.  “I wasn’t able to evade you this long because I used my head, Sylvester.”

“You used instinct?”

“No.  Ugliness.  A savage brute of a man who swings his weapon recklessly and unpredictably can be a worse enemy for a trained fighter than another trained combatant,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll take the bait.  What was the second mistake?”

“Implying that the first side of me, this side, isn’t dangerous.”

“Is this where you reveal that by simply being here, I’ve fallen into a trap?”

“No, Sylvester.  We’re here to have a conversation,” she said.

“You’re not denying there’s a trap.”

“You’re safe, Sylvester.  That won’t stay the case, I think we will find ourselves at each other’s throats eventually, but there is no greater plot at work, closing in on you as we speak.”

Assuming I believe you, I thought.  I studied her, trying to peer past the expression to see the more brutal side that lurked beneath the surface.

“Third.” she said, and it was a statement unto itself.  “This isn’t a duality.  I’m not one of the Balfour Academy soldiers, drinking a potion to become virile, ugly, and monstrously strong.  There isn’t a lever inside me that determines which of me you’re talking to at once.  A knife can cut or stab.  The label doesn’t change.  It’s still a knife.”

“And you’re still Genevieve,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So.  This is a declaration of war,” I said.  I saw her react, and quickly added, “And it’s a conversation.”

She smiled.  “You could take it that way.”

“You wanted to satiate your curiosity before you started acting against us in earnest.”

“That isn’t untrue, though my curiosity is hardly sated.”

“And if you’re doing that, then the gambit with the pills is nonsense.”

“I know the train schedule, I know how the pills work, I made them,” she said.  “I knew I had time to get some answers.”

She reached into an inside pocket, then held up a bottle.  It was very, very similar to the one Helen had had.  Filled with purple pills, again, subtly different.  I couldn’t tell at a glance whether they were different in a way that made them more similar to the pills I was used to or less.

My memory wasn’t that strong, and it didn’t help that the bottle was fogging up in the cold, so soon after being warmed and dampened by the heat radiating off of her body.

“I wondered if you were slave to them,” she said.  “If the regular injections from an early age froze you at a point where you couldn’t or wouldn’t rebel, and if you remained nothing more than the sum total of your environment and physical makeup.  Not to belittle you, of course.  You could be that and still be marvelously complex, given your experiences thus far.”

“Do you think I’m a slave, Genevieve?” I asked.

“I think you have other reasons.  So, right now, I’m going to tell you that I can provide the pills that would free you from Radham.  I can help you extend your lifespans.  Give me that challenge, and I will throw myself at it, wholeheartedly.  I’ve been dosing myself with the Wyvern formula, and it’s no trouble to double up the stock and provide you with a share if you want it.  I can spare Jamie from his appointments, and keep the rest in working order.  I’m not inclined to break people like Briggs is.”

“Ah, this is what you were getting to?” I asked.  “I’m a little disappointed.”

“Don’t be.  I already know you’re going to say no.  I’m hoping you tell me why.”

“Because that’s a death sentence, as sure as any the Academy bestowed on us.”

“We could handle anything they send at us, I think you know that.”

“I know that.”

“Then why?  I can give you more years.”

“But you wouldn’t give us hope.  Every day, the Academy learns things.  Journals and articles are shared from all over the world, from places the Crown operates.  Every month, at the very least, there’s a breakthrough, something that raises eyebrows.”

“You think a breakthrough will save you?”

“I believe in what Hayle is trying to do,” I said.

She nodded slowly.

“He wants to discover a better brain.  That brain will help uncover something even better, and so on down the line.  I believe in what humanity can accomplish, and I believe that there is an answer.”

“And in saying that, you give me yours,” she said.  She sighed again, then rubbed her hands, blowing on them.

“It breaks down to hope, I suppose,” I said.

“For someone who analyzes others so well, you don’t do very well with yourself, Sylvester.  I suppose that’s a matter of self preservation.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

“You said the word yourself.  Over and over.”

I frowned a little.  “My memory isn’t my strongest trait.”

“I know,” she said.  “It was in the file.”

We stood like that.  I watched as the thing in the water did a lazy somersault.  It stayed belly up for a few seconds too long, enough for me to wonder if it had died, starting to float belly up.

“I think it goes without saying, but if you ever decide to turn against the Academy, all you have to do is say the word,” she said.  “But you won’t.”

I remained silent.

“You asked me if I thought you were a slave,” she said.  “Your answer was a good one.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m going to put you to sleep now,” she said.  “I know fighting isn’t your strongest trait, again, it was in the files.  Can we do this neatly, without too much mess?”

I tensed, freezing.  My hand was open, and the position of the knife flickered into my mind.

I reached for it, stepping back and to the side, to get behind her, buying time to act.

The tentacles reached out, catching my arm before I could get the best grip on the knife.

I twisted, trying a move I’d seen Gordon do.  I passed the knife to my other hand, nicking a finger on the blade as I caught the handle too high, then punched the knife at her midsection.

She stopped the blade with her other palm, and it went through.  I saw pain on her face.

She shoved her hand further toward me, impaling her hand more, and then coiled her fingers inward, a needle springing out to pierce the hand that held the knife.

One foot on my chest, kicking me back and away.  The tentacles were slow to let go, and I stumbled, collapsing against the railing.

I didn’t remember passing out, but when I woke up, I was propped up beneath the eaves of the little restaurant, I had a short black coat draped over me, and the cut on my finger was neatly bandaged.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.05 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

I tried to rise, and found my body’s movements sluggish.  I slumped down, my head against the wall, chin against my collarbone, arms in front of me, Genevieve’s coat draped over me, cap pulled down, scarf and collar protecting much of my face.

I stared at the mended cut on my finger.  I couldn’t move or call out, so I didn’t try.  I put my hand under the coat and pressed my hands between my thighs for warmth.

The tranquilizer’s effects were still heavy in my body.  Few drugs were potent and localized to one area, and any drug had to be potent to get past my Wyvern-given resistances.  She had put me out for long enough for her to move me, patch me up, maybe see to herself, and then make her exit.  Now I was feeling the side effects.  Fatigue lingered, and where it sat heavy in my stomach, I felt a growing need to heave out my stomach’s contents.

Considerate as she’d been, she hadn’t left me anything for the unsettled stomach.

Nothing left to do but wait and contemplate.

Contemplation over the discussion with Genevieve soon left a bad taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with my nausea.  Like the nausea, though, it was a vague feeling I couldn’t put my finger on.  The moment I did, and I suspected that it was a moment I wouldn’t have much control over, I knew I’d feel a lot worse.

She’d dictated where and how the conversation happened.  She’d told me remarkably little, and I knew that was entirely on purpose.  She had also achieved her goal, which was to get to know me, and perhaps to declare war.

The more I thought about it, the more vague and nebulous the cohesive whole seemed.

What she’d said and what she’d demonstrated in our interactions were at odds.  It wasn’t that she’d lied, but the presented Genevieve Fray was false.

False in a very specific way.

Why are you here, engaging with us?  You’re not bored, not exactly, and you wouldn’t be so passive if you were, you’d want to test that brain of yours against us.  You’re not pinned down, I refuse to believe that it would be so easy.

I felt a prick of pain and moved my hands to see.  A tiny bead of blood was squeezing out of the corner of the glued seam.  I’d been clenching my hand hard enough to push it out.

Time passed, my thoughts meandered, and I periodically tested my strength, finding it greater with time, even as I got colder.  I reached a point where I was fairly certain I could stand, but decided to stay sitting, so I wouldn’t get ill.

I did hitch myself backward so I was sitting up more against the wall, instead of having my head bent forward.  No reason to be more uncomfortable.

I was in that state, waiting for my stomach to settle down more than I was waiting for my strength to return, when Gordon appeared from the same direction I’d come.

“Sy!” he said.

He was halfway to me by the time I’d maneuvered my hand from beneath the coat and raised it in a small wave.

He looked agitated, and dropped to my side, caught between multiple actions.

“I’m okay,” I said.  “Get the others.”

He nodded, twisted around, raising two fingers to his lips, and let out a shrill whistle.

“What happened?” he asked.  “Trap?”

“No,” I said.  “I met Fray.”

“And?”

“And we talked, and then she drugged me, and then she left.”

“We’ve been looking for you for fifteen minutes, and we spent a bit running from Fray’s goon.”

“The Headsman.”

“I refuse to call him that,” Gordon said.  “You don’t get to name this one.”

“Jerk.”

“Moron.  You should have signaled us when you found her.”

“Should’ve, could’ve,” I said, sounding about as dejected as I felt.

“You talked to her, though?”

I nodded.

“Get anything?”

The eagerness in his eyes and voice was painful.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Better if you wait for the others before sharing,” he told me.

I nodded.  “But you can tell me what happened with you guys.”

“I could, but there isn’t much to it.  They feigned that they were defending a building, the goon cornered us, used a mix of something to fill the area with smoke, then came at us, full-barrel, heaving furniture and crashing through doors.  He could see us just a bit better than we could see him, but that bastard was massive, he didn’t need to see, he just barreled in, fists swinging.  Mary and me, we needed to see to be effective.  It put us on a back foot.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah, funny how that works, isn’t it?  Felt like I was watching out for all the traps and tricks, everything I needed to do to keep Fray from getting the initiative, but when I look back on it, I don’t feel like I ever had it.”

Gordon gave me a curious look.

When he didn’t say or do anything, I raised an eyebrow as a way of questioning him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m fantastic, as you can tell,” I said.

“You’re being sarcastic, so you can’t be that bad off,” he told me.  “Explain that part in more depth when you dish to all of us.”

I nodded, though I really didn’t feel like elaborating on that count.  Whatever.  “Your thing.  Keep going.”

“We tried to wait it out, waited for you, Helen and Mary climbed around to go after him and the stitched girl from above or behind, whichever.  The bastard said something about lighting a match, warning us to get away, because the smoke would catch fire.  We backed off, he struck the match.  We weren’t even close to the building, and the woof of flame knocked us all on our asses.  He went running off while we were still getting our bearings.  Jamie says he thinks the guy had the stitched in a box?”

“Fray’s plan, you think?” I asked.

“Don’t know enough to say,” Gordon told me.  He clenched his fist, gesturing inarticulately for a second before releasing it.  “I feel like we could have done better, but I can’t say anything to any of them because I know I could have done better.”

“Teamwork?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “I hate even saying it.  But if you’ve got something…”

“I’ve got something,” I said.

“Then it was worth it,” he said.  I could see the tension go out of his neck and shoulders.  His voice dropped as he murmured to himself, “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Can you stand?” he asked.

“Be gentle,” I told him.  “Slow.  Unless you want me to heave all over the both of us.  Whatever she gave me is sitting bad.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Of course.”

He was strong enough and I was small enough that he could pick me up, one arm under each armpit, and he could do it slowly, giving me time to get my feet under me, my hand on the wall behind me to steady myself.

When I was standing, one hand on his shoulder for support, he turned and gave another long, sharp whistle.

“In case they couldn’t figure out the direction,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

Lillian appeared and rushed to my side.  Mary was with her.

“I told you it was the right direction,” Mary was saying, as they drew into earshot.

“Alright,” Lillian said.  “I wasn’t positive you were wrong, geez.”

Geez,” Mary said, teasing.

“Don’t talk to me if you’re going to be grumpy,” Lillian said.

“I’m being grumpy?  You’re being grumpy,” Mary accused.

They reached us.  Lillian looked at us, clearly flustered, she looked between us.  “Sy?  You look-”

“Drugged,” Gordon interjected.

“-Awful.  Drugged?”

“By Fray,” I said.

I saw alarm on Lillian’s face in the same moment I saw hope on Mary’s.  Mary clasped her hands in front of her, almost in unconscious prayer.

“I need to look you over, everything, anything could be wrong, if she dosed you with something-”

“Did she say anything?  Did you find out-”

“Girls,” Gordon said.

“We should find a place to get Sy’s clothes off.  I should do a full checkup.  Do you feel nauseous?”

“Lillian,” Gordon said, stern.

“Yes,” I said.

“See?  Anything could be wrong, and there’s one big what-if that’s very likely, very dangerous, and needs immediate attention.  If she can recreate the pills, which we aren’t sure she can’t-”

“Let Lillian do what she needs and then talk.  Sylvester, if you keep me in suspense on this, I will draw a knife and give you a second belly button.”

“Does your stomach feel firm?” Lillian jumped in.

Gordon clapped a hand over Lillian’s mouth.  He reached for Mary’s, but she slapped his hand aside, backing up a half-step.  He settled for pointing at her, stern.

“I don’t want a second belly button,” I said, in a small voice, mostly to lighten the mood.

“Don’t you start,” he told me.

Lillian used both hands to pull Gordon’s hand down and away.  “You’ve each been impregnated with modified glucose chains.  It’s why you need the pills.  If she found a way to unravel them, which she could, if she has pills, he could be breaking down right now, bleeding on the inside.”

“I’m pregnant?” I asked.

Gordon slapped me across the head.  He turned, batted Lillian across the head, with considerably less force, then did the same to Mary, who furrowed her brow and bent her head to let it happen.  Probably for the sake of fairness and to be a part of things.

Then he turned and swatted me again.

“Hey!”

He held up his hand in warning.

“You did me twice, for no reason at all!”

He smacked me again.

I opened my mouth to protest further, and he drew his hand back.

I folded my arms.

“Sylvester was tranquilized,” Gordon said.  “Don’t rush to conclusions.”

“If he’s nauseous, we can’t ignore that,” Lillian said.

“You can get Sy naked and check him out as soon as we get someplace warm, and we can do that as soon as the others catch up.  They’re coming right now.  Until then, take his word for it when he says he’s feeling okay,” Gordon said, his finger pointed at Lillian.

“I never said naked,” she said.

The finger wagged in her direction.  She pressed her lips together.

Gordon was right, though; Jamie and Helen were halfway down the long, straight alley, opposite the end the others had come down.  Jamie looked like he’d been running a moment ago.

Gordon moved his finger to point to Mary.  “Sy can tell us what happened on the way, and while Lillian’s looking over him.  I’ve held back my curiosity this long, you can do the same.”

Mary made a ‘hmph’ sound, sticking her hands in her pockets.

He pointed at me.  “Be quiet.  I know you’re riling them up.”

“Then I shouldn’t mention the blood dripping out my pee hole, or the fact that Fray is-”

He smacked me, way harder than was necessary.  One of my eyes teared up.

“He was joking about the blood, right?” Lillian asked, cutting Mary off before Mary could say anything.

Gordon gave me a ‘see?’ look.

“Yes,” I said.  “Joking, joking.”

Helen and Jamie joined us.

“What’s this about getting Sylvester naked, warm and checking him out?” Jamie asked.  “I heard you from a distance, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you said.  Is there anything you need to tell us, Gordon?”

“Ha ha,” Gordon said, unamused.

“And Fray?” Jamie asked.  “You said her name?”

“Sy’s health takes priority,” Gordon said.  “We need to get indoors.”

I turned around, reached, and knocked on the window.

It took some time, but the woman who’d been cleaning tables inside appeared at the window, and she gave us a look.  I made a pleading gesture, hands pressed together, and she gave me a very unimpressed look.

She looked at Gordon, who was holding up a wallet, and relented.  The door that opened to the patio opened, and she let us inside.

“Are you open?” I asked her.

“No.  But you can order something.”

“We want to check my friend out for frostbite, can we get six of whatever you have that’s warm to drink?  And a bite to eat?  Cake or pie?”

“I have slices of cake and I have slices of pie, prices are on the board over the counter,” she said.  “Carrot, vanilla, and chocolate cake, meat pie, wildberry pie, apple pie, stone nut pie…”

“Cake,” I said.  “Chocolate, please?”

“I thought you were feeling sick?” Lillian asked, hands going to her hips.

“It’s chocolate cake,” I said.

She nodded, accepting that as fact.

“I’ll have a stone nut pie,” Gordon said.  “Thank you.”

“Wildberry pie, please,” Mary said.

“I would like a Vanilla cake, please,” Helen said.

“Carrot cake, please” Lillian said, hands dropping from her hips.

The woman’s arms folded as she looked at Jamie.

“Chocolate cake?” he asked, cringing a little.

“I just cleaned up, it’s late, and I’m not going to serve each of you something different,” the woman said.  “Decide on one thing.  Two at most.”

It took us ten seconds of quick haggling to hash it out.  Gordon spoke up, “Four slices of chocolate cake, and two slices of apple pie?”

The woman nodded, leaving to get our order.

Lillian wasted no time in beginning to pull my clothes off.

I would have made a joke, but I wanted to maintain my one-bellybutton status.

“Fray was waiting for me.  Or for any one of us.  I was the one who stumbled on her.  The rest of it was a distraction, to keep the rest of the group away so we wouldn’t mob her or whatever.  She invited me over for a chat.  I obliged.  We talked, she tranquilized me, Gordon found me a little while after I woke up.”

“What did you talk about?” Mary asked.  She was sitting on a chair, perched like she was going to leap over and create my new bellybutton if I wasn’t quick to answer.  Too much killer instinct, suppressed for too many weeks.

“My memory isn’t that good,” I started.  I was forced to pause, raising my arms to help Lillian pull off my sweater and shirt.

Mary didn’t leap on me, but a knife had appeared in one hand in the moment the sweater obscured my vision, the rest of her not having moved a hair, like a magician producing a card.  She toyed with it.  It wasn’t like she would really stab me, but her point was clear.  She was dead serious when it came to this.

“But we talked about the fact that she knew who we were.  She’s studied us, the Academy made her, and she has a sense of what we are and how we function.  We talked about the Wyvern formula, about the effects, the side effects, and how we each developed while using it.  She says she didn’t develop skills as a manipulator or a people reader, but I’m not sure that’s true.  She did develop skills as a strategist, to make her way in the upper echelons of the Academy, but I think we already knew that.”

The others were hanging on every word.  Lillian prodded my neck and chin.  I resumed speaking the moment I was free to.  “Fray mentioned Ashton, to give you a sense of how well she knows us.  She likes us, she’s interested in us, and I think… I’m revising my opinion of where we stand on the pill situation.”

“You don’t think she swapped out the pills.  It was a ruse,” Jamie said.

“I don’t think she swapped out the pills,” I said.

“How sure are you?” Gordon asked.

Eighty percent, I thought.  But if we fail here, if we go back to the Academy while it’s under new leadership, return to doing the interviews in the Bowels and other dreary activities, a black mark of failure on our records…

I’d already come to the conclusion while lying on the patio, waiting for the tranquilizer’s effects to subside.  We couldn’t afford to go back.  We couldn’t leave it at this and run.  It would destroy us as surely as our bodies breaking down on us.  It was just be more drawn out, less noble.

“Ninety five percent,” I said.

Gordon hissed in a breath through his teeth, long and slow, then exhaled.

“You’re not sure,” Jamie said.  “You think there’s a five percent chance you’re wrong.”

“I’m not.  If any of you have instincts telling you we should go home…”  I trailed off, almost hoping someone else would make the call and take the responsibility out of my hands.  Not entirely hoping, but almost; the thought of getting this wrong on either front made the sick feeling come back.

Nobody spoke up.  The burden was on my shoulders.

There was a variety of looks in their eyes, but there remained a moment where I could look at each of them and interpret their expressions as knowing, acknowledging exactly what I’d done and why I’d done it.

Eighty percent wasn’t enough of a certainty to make us stay.  We would’ve had to go, and we would have all known it was the wrong choice.

The lie was better, and maybe there was a mutual agreement that the lie existed.

Maybe I was imagining it, deceiving myself in believing the unspoken agreement existed.

“She made an offer.  To take us in, use her knowledge and skill to keep us in working order, as long as possible.  Give me my Wyvern formula, let Jamie stop his appointments, and so on down the line.  She would provide the pills we needed to survive away from the Academy.  There were other promises.”

“You said no?” Gordon asked.

“I said no, yeah,” I told him.

He nodded.

“She made it out to be about freedom from the shackles of the Academy, but that’s not how it works, is it?”

“No,” Mary said.  She paused as the woman from the little restaurant arrived with a tray of tea, cake, and plates.  Mary kept talking, though the woman was in earshot.  “I realized it early on.  There isn’t really any escape.  I went from Mr. Percy to you guys, and it’s better, but I’m not free.”

“I’ll pour the tea, miss,” Helen said.  “Thank you so much.”

Lillian handed me back my shirt.  I pulled it on in a second flat, then began untangling my sleeves from my sweater as Lillian found her seat.

“Don’t make a mess, I don’t want to spend any time cleaning up after you,” the woman warned.

Gordon handed her a fold of bills.  She stood there, counting, before walking to the counter, apparently satisfied.

The cake, pie, and tea was doled out.  I had little doubt everyone was weighing the heavy issues at hand even as we prepared for our little feast.

The conversation resumed in low voices.

“I love Professor Ibbott,” Helen said, with less inflection than I’d heard from her in a long while, “I don’t like him.  I wouldn’t be happy if I never saw him again, but I wouldn’t be sad either.  I do what he says and I’m good.  I’m a work of art and I do what he tells me to so I act like one too.  If we walked away from the Academy and I had someone else telling me what to be, it wouldn’t be any different.”

“Except we’d be in more danger,” Jamie said.  “The Academy would come after us.”

“Was that what you said?” Lillian asked.  “That you wouldn’t go because it would be the same?”

“That would have offended her, I think,” I replied.

“That doesn’t usually stop you,” Gordon said.  “You offend us.  Why not her?”

“In the time between when I woke up and when you found me, I did a lot of thinking,” I said.  “Couldn’t do much else.  I realized that I hadn’t been cutthroat enough.  That she played me.  She read me, she figured out what I wanted, and she came at me soft.  Gentle, friendly, vague, without threatening me at all.  She went out of her way to avoid challenging me, because she probably knew that I’d rise to the challenge, and I’d take that a step further to come after her.  I spent the entire time floundering and not realizing why,” I said.

The table was quiet.  The Lambs sipped tea, stared, or ate their pie and cake.

“I’ll admit it right here,” I said.  “I lost, back there.  I learned things about her, but she went out of her way to tell me only what she was willing to let me know.”

Mary’s gaze was the hardest to meet.  She took failure so personally, and I knew she’d been pinning hopes on me getting something out of our collective encounter with Fray and her people, so her loss against the Headsman would mean something.

“You said you found something out,” Gordon said.  “Was it only what Fray wanted you to know?  Or did you figure out something else?”

“I think I figured out something else,” I said.  “I asked her why she was here, challenging us.  Why didn’t she leave?  She never gave me a straight answer.  She presented only one side of herself, and she kept the violent, confrontational part of herself hidden.  She controlled how we encountered her, but there was no guarantee we wouldn’t be a little bit faster, that she wouldn’t be up against all of us at once.  That means she had an out.  Something she could have said or done that would have let her escape, if we came after her hard.”

I saw Helen steal a bit of Jamie’s cake, while Jamie’s attention was focused on me.  As thievery went, it was blatant, cutting the cake with the fork, then spearing a chunk the size of her fist.

“What are you thinking, Sy?” Gordon asked.

“I’m thinking we should contact the Academy.  If the pattern holds, they’re sending reinforcements here, to investigate and give chase, for when we go back for our appointments.  Maybe the Hangman, again, maybe Dog and Catcher.  Except all of this, it’s a massive distraction from what she’s really doing.”

“What?” Jamie asked.  “What is she supposed to be doing?”

“I don’t know exactly what.  But she has a plan in the works.  She’s not averse to killing, but she left us alive.  Let’s assume it’s not idle curiosity.  That she’s not some dime novel villain.  There’s a master plot at work, and we play a part.  Think, what logically follows from this?  What does she do by showing herself to me, then disappearing, maybe even staying here?”

“I don’t know,” Gordon said.  “I can’t guess how your mind works, or how hers does, for that matter.”

“She’s giving us hope.  Hope that she can be found and caught.  The Academy sends resources to assist, all the focus is on this place, this town.”

“And?” Mary asked.

“And we’re not looking where she’s been.  Fray isn’t running, or she is, but the running is a distraction, bait to lure us forward.  What we do is we tell them to send the people back, investigate all the past locations.”

“What are they looking for?”

“A weapon.  A catalyst.  Something catastrophic.  She’s hiding her fangs, but those fangs are there.  What we need to do is find her, find her fast, and we need to find out what it is she’s doing.  She’s brimming with fury against the Academy, and everyone is going to pay for it.”

“I can draw up a quick sketch of her monster and the stitched girl,” Jamie said.  “It’s a starting point.”

“Good,” I said.  “We also hit up any shops that sell coats or jackets.  She left hers with me,” I said, “But I doubt someone who travels as much as she does has more than one.  She’ll be buying one, I think.  Most importantly, she’s going to be baiting us, dropping hints to keep the Academy focused on her.”

“You’re sure?” Gordon asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s not waste any time then,” Gordon said.

Helen made a small whining sound, mouth full of cake.

“We finish our tea and cake first,” he said, with authority.

Helen emphatically nodded the affirmative.

“After cake, we move.  Our best bet is being aggressive when she expects us to be struggling or on the retreat.  We catch her off guard.”

There were nods all around.

We helped Helen finish her cake, to her protest, cleaned up, and were out the door in two minutes, some of us still chewing.  Gordon handed Jamie the coat to look over while we walked.

Gordon and I walked faster than the others.  Normally I might have waited up for the others, but he had a look on his face, stern, focused.

He saw me studying him, and he relented.

“I would have taken the offer,” he said.

“Ah,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

He shook his head, then threw an arm around my shoulders.  “Let’s go get ‘er.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

 

================================================== 4.06 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.6

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The train whistle howled, echoing across snowy Kensford, and with it went our escape.  We’d made our call, and now we’d live with it.  It bothered me, more than I cared to admit.  If I was wrong, then we were going to get catastrophically ill, and we could very well die.

We were a squad, here.  Each of us had a discrete role.  Gordon and Mary were handling the front end of things, leading the group by a margin, scouting, peeking through windows of stores.  My role was to watch Jamie.  He had his book open in his arms, pen in hand, and was sketching.  Every time a bystander, obstacle, or someone’s monstrous pet got in our way, I led him out of the way, while his eyes stayed on the page.

“Lillian,” I said.

“Yes?”

“By all accounts, the stitched girl was falling to pieces when Fray got her and left the jail.  She wasn’t falling to pieces when she went to go distract you guys.”

“Yes?”

“She fixed it, or improved it.  How hard is that to do?”

“It’s easier to make one from scratched.  In terms of cost, unless there’s a shortage of bodies, most people make a new stitched instead of fixing up an old one, I think.”

I pulled Jamie out of the way of a gaunt stitched that looked like it incorporated some grafted features.  Sections of its chest and arms had been stretched over containers of bile yellow liquid, with tubes running out of the containers and into flesh.  Poison, probably.  It hissed.

Jamie continued drawing, oblivious.

“But how hard is it to do, Lil?” I asked.

“Don’t call me Lil!”

“Answer the question, then, dummy.”

“Butthead.  It’s hard.”

“Well, gee, thanks,” I told her.  “That clarifies things a bunch.”

“I don’t know what you want or why you’re asking!” she said.  “Making a stitched is easy, I’ve made a stitched, last year, for an exam.  But if you want to repair it, you have to diagnose and fix whatever’s broken, probably have to replace or undo any damage to major chunks and pieces, rip out the wires and chemical tanks, put in new ones, um-”

“Does that require tools?”

“Obviously.”

“Obviously,” I said, giving her an eye roll.  “Would she need access to a lab to do it?  Or could she do it using just the tools she’s packing in her bags?  Keep in mind that she’s very good.”

“She’d need a lab,” Lillian said.

“She would.  What about maintaining the thing?”

Lillian gave me a so-so gesture.

“Can’t say?”  I asked.  I pulled Jamie out of the way of a lamp post.

“You can cover your basic hygeine needs with a sponge and a sink, but it’s not fun, it gets old, and it takes time,” Lillian said.  “Doing it on a bad week?  You’d have to be pretty disciplined or have no other choice to take it in stride and not want to change it.”

“I like that analogy,” Jamie said, eyes still on his sketch.

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said.

“Part two of that same question, then,” I said.  “You saw her guy?  The head?”

“Yes.  From a distance, and I was mostly running, but yes.”

“How doable is that without a proper lab?”

“Not at all,” Lillian said.  “I’d be surprised, impressed and scared if she was able to do that while running from us.  She only ever stays in one place for a few days, if that long, and she’d need a lot of days to do that stuff.”

“Stolen work?” Jamie said, still sketching.  I steered him with my hand on his left elbow.

“It would be reported stolen,” I said.  “That, or there’s a missing or dead scholar out there.”

“Which we would have heard about,” Lillian said.  “I hope.

“All signs point to the fact that she has a lab.  Probably a nice one, with resources.”

“Oh, goodie,” Lillian said.  “Let’s see, there are twenty thousand people enrolled here, some are rooming at Dame Cicely’s itself, but most are in dormitory houses, one to four people to a house, and each house has a small, private lab.  So… oh, maybe five thousand places to check.”

“Gold star for being on the ball,” Jamie said.  “Nice work, Lillian.”

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said, looking as pleased as I’d seen her.  “It’s nice of you to say so.”

I corrected his course when it looked like he might veer out into the street and the path of a horse or carriage.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” I muttered.

“Being nice to Lillian?  You should give it a try.”

“Walking into stuff,” I said.

The smile on his face suggested I was on target.

I let go of his elbow.  He looked up for the first time, getting his bearings, then resumed sketching.

“She has a lab, one she could pick up and leave from without a fuss,” I mused aloud.  “How many single-occupant dormitory houses?”

“About-” Lillian started.

“One thousand,” Jamie said.

“That sounds right,” Lillian said.

I nodded.  A hundred and sixty-five for each of us, if we split it up.

Not doable, but it was something to think about, putting the puzzle together and figuring out how she operated.

“Which raises questions of how she got access.  I doubt she enrolled.  Smart as she is, she has to risk getting noticed and caught every time she goes to get materials or tools from Dame Cicely’s Academy.  The work she’s doing is too good for a fugitive.”

Jamie looked up and over at me, paying attention now.

I’ve been on the run, and the resource cost in terms of needing to find a place to sleep, watching your back, get food, acquire and spend money, it eats up whole chunks of your day.  But here we have someone putting in hours, even days into high quality projects.”

“She’s been taking the Wyvern formula,” Lillian said.

“She has to take the time to make the Wyvern formula, and she needs to take the time to recuperate after taking it.  That only furthers my point,” I said, getting more emphatic, more intense.

“What’s your line of thought here?” Jamie asked.

“Only that,” I said, deflating, all the emphasis and intensity flowing away.  I was left with a feeling of frustration.  “It’s all going a little too seamlessly for her.”

Gordon and Mary had stopped and were waiting for us.  Helen, trailing behind, watching our backs, caught up.

“Coat shop,” Gordon said.

“Ooh, pretty coats,” Helen said.

“One of the two I remembered,” Jamie said.

“And,” I said, pointing at the store across the street, “Hat shop!”

The rest of the group gave me funny looks.

“Wait one minute,” I said.  I checked for incoming horses and carts and then stopped, patting my pockets.

Gordon was extending the group’s wallet in my direction.  I grabbed it, but he didn’t let go.

“If you’re spending the group’s money on a hat…” he warned me, leaving the threat implied.

“No,” I promised.

He let go of the wallet, and I ran across the street.

I stepped into the store.

The older woman at the counter took one look at me and said, “No.”

It was so much like what I’d come to expect from Hayle and the Lambs that it caught me off guard.  “No?”

“A little boy like you?  You have no business here.  You can’t buy what I’m selling, you’re grubby, and even if you have a slip, I’m not entrusting my product to you to take back to whoever sent you.”

Grubby?

“I’d like a hatbox, please,” I said.

“I am not about to-”

“I’ll pay,” I said.

I saw the hesitation.

Money made the world turn.  Blood and sweat drove the world’s engines, but money bought blood and sweat.

“Six dollars,” I said.  “For an empty hatbox.”

“If you’re up to any mischief with this, hurting my reputation-”

“Not at all, ma’am.”

She made a face, like conceding and doing anything more than sending me out the door was horribly unpleasant and vaguely offensive.

I returned to the others, a nice little hatbox with a ribbon in my hands.

“I’m guessing that only a few of us can come and see what you’re actually trying to pull?” Gordon asked.

I thought of the sour woman in the hat shop, then shook my head.  We couldn’t waste time.  Better to use force of numbers.

“Follow my lead,” I said.  “We use the herd.”

We moved into the coat store as a mob.  The people at the counter were two men, possibly related, but not too closely, one with a thick mustache and a vest over his button-up shirt, the other clean-shaven, wearing a suit jacket that was closed up to the collarbone.

The store had a hardwood floor, one that had been grown, from the odd way it interconnected and flowed, with coats and suits on racks and dummies.  There were umbrellas and parasols mounted on one wall, and shoes on another.  A stitched stood by the dressing room, a coat draped over one arm.  A shop for top quality goods.

I approached the counter, hugging the box.  The others followed, close behind.  I liked that they read my body language, sensing the best way to follow suit, without my having to tell them.

We’d been missing that, lately.  Each of us had been a touch preoccupied with ourselves.

“I caught this box as it fell off a carriage,” I said.  “I think the driver forgot to put it inside before leaving.  We wanted to give it back to the woman.”

“Uhh,” Mr. Mustache said, “I don’t know that we could help you with that.”

“The box is from the shop across the street, and the woman there said the woman who bought it definitely came from your shop, and they had a new coat, but she hadn’t worn one coming in.  I think the one she bought was a long one?”

“Most of my coats are long,” Mr. Mustache said, sounding vaguely offended.

I nodded, vigorous, agreeing.  And she would change things up.  After having a short coat, she’d make a subtle change.  “She had a stitched with her, and there was a big fellow, but he might have stayed outside?”

“We ask all of the experiments to stay outside.  As for your young lady, I… no, I’m afraid that doesn’t ring any bells.”

“High quality work,” Lillian piped up.  “The stitched.  She’s very thin, very pretty, you wouldn’t even know she was one if you weren’t careful, but you’d know if she talked, probably.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Jamie held up his book.  The sketches were strange, very scratchy, somehow not good art, but still a scarily accurate representation of the stitched girl and, I presumed, an accurate representation of the Headsman.

I saw no recognition on either of the men’s faces.

We’re looking for needles in a goddamn haystack, I thought.

“The other woman had a bandaged hand?” I tried.

Nothing.

“Why does it matter that much?” Mr. Mustache asked.

“We were…” I tried to look a little ashamed.

Gordon reached over and took the hatbox.  “He wanted reward money.  I convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

“Reward money would be nice,” I said, quiet.  “It’s a nice looking hat.  It probably cost a lot.”

I felt like we’d struck the right chord.  The men at the counter had been boys once.  Between Gordon and I, we’d struck the right balance, between my innocent greed and Gordon’s genuine desire to do the right thing.

Now, if I was gauging them right, we had them actually wanting us to succeed.

“Today?” Mustacheless asked.

“Yes sir.  Within the last hour.  Probably the last half-hour, I’d bet,” Gordon said.

That got a shake of the head.

“You’re sure?” Gordon asked.

“I’ve been at the counter for this entire afternoon.  I’m sure,” Mustacheless said.  Mr. Mustache nodded.

I saw the other Lambs react, shoulders dropping, disappointment clear in their body language.  We’d try the other shop, and then we’d be limited in where we could go next, if that didn’t work out.

My instincts, however, told me that the other shop would be a dead end.  It was too close to where the others had encountered the Headsman.  She would have had to double back, and she would have had to do it while avoiding the others.

It didn’t fit.  So many things here didn’t damn well fit.

“Why?” I asked, abrupt.  No ‘sir’ or anything of the sort.

“Why?” the man asked.

“Why are you sure?”

“I don’t remember seeing that girl, or anyone resembling her,” Mr. Mustache said.

“But we didn’t describe the girl we’re looking for, with the injured hand.”

“The young women don’t shop alone,” he said.  “The ones who do stand out.”

“What if someone came in, and looked like they were part of another group?” Helen asked.  “Isn’t that possible?”

“If that’s the case, I don’t know what I could tell you,” Mustacheless said.

Frustrated at every turn.

Except…

Change one paradigm, and all the little details that hadn’t added up started to make sense.  How did she get the dormitory?  How did she acquire the resources to do her work without getting caught?  How did she blend so effortlessly into the surroundings?

“She’s new in town,” I said.

He frowned.  “You know this how?”

“She’s new in town,” I said, more excited, ignoring him, “Did you see anyone, a new face, dark hair, spending time with someone that you’ve seen around?”

“I see a lot of young ladies, day to day,” he told me.  I got the impression that the line of questions was starting to test his patience.  This was dissonance at work.  He knew that things didn’t add up, and if I only stopped to give him a chance, he could start asking questions I couldn’t answer.

“I’m sure,” I said, not giving him that chance.  “But your clientele is exclusive.  People who can pay.  The stranger showed up, maybe with a borrowed coat, maybe without a coat at all, and the familiar face footed the bill.  There might have been an age difference, but they probably looked close.  You noticed, because it was different and it was new.”

The look in his eyes wasn’t nothing.  In fact, both men seemed to register something.

“You… you were doing something else, but you came to talk,” I said, to Mr. Mustache.  “Because you knew her, and she introduced you to her new friend.”

“Tutor,” Mr. Mustache said, absently.  His expression clarified into a curious stare.  “You sound like you know an awful lot more than someone who caught a box off the top of a carriage.”

“Yes,” I said.  “Tell us, what’s her name, and where can we find her?”

“We’re trying to find and stop a very bad person,” Gordon said.  “The young lady you know, she could be in grave danger.  A hostage, to an enemy of the Crown.”

“I…” Mustacheless said, and it was like his brain had momentarily broken, caught in a loop that left the sound drawling out of his mouth.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Mustache said, in what approximated a diplomatic tone, “I should contact the authorities?  It seems like the safest way forward.”

“No time,” I said.

“I’d rather be sure,” he said.

“No time,” I said, again, feeling frustrated.  A step closer, and now we were hitting a wall?”

“Bennoit, perhaps you could run next door to use their phone?  We-”

Exaperated, I gave the signal, the ‘go ahead’ to the others.

Let them have at it.

Helen and Mary were quickest, and best situated to get closer.

As the two girls rounded the corner, Mr. Mustache reached under the desk, and produced a short blade.

Mary slapped it aside with her hand, but rather than shred her flesh, produced a metal-on-metal sound.  The blade moved over the counter, she slapped it down, hard, so it struck the wooden countertop, and sent it flying to the ground.  She touched a blade to Mr. Mustache’s stomach.

The man’s partner, Benoit, froze, as he saw the blade draw close to Mr. Mustache.  Helen drew close, ordered, “Kneel,” and he did, with only a moment’s pause.  She stepped behind him and wrapped her fingers around his neck.

Gordon rounded the counter as well, to draw closer to them.  I checked on Lillian, and found that she was at the door, locking it.  Jamie watched the window, hugging his book.

I dug in my pockets and found the badge that Briggs had given me.  I slapped it down on the counter.

“We act in service to the Crown.  You haven’t heard of us, but-”

“The Radham children.”

I blinked a few times.

“There are stories,” he said.  “Ones that made the rounds anew when the post office was attacked.”

Our reputation is preceding us.  Not a great thing for a secret project.

“Then you have some idea of how we operate?”

“Some idea.  It’s not supposed to be public knowledge.”

“No.  You can give us what we want, stay quiet about everything that happened here, and the Crown may choose to reward you.  Or you can stay silent, and face the repercussions.”

“If we could contact the authorities-”

“No.  Time.”

He shook his head.  “If you’re dangerous enough to threaten us, I couldn’t send you after a proper young lady, knowing you might do the same to her.  A gentleman-”

“A gentleman without the ‘man’ part,” Mary murmured, moving the knife to lower regions, “Is only gentle.”

Helen giggled.

This young lady would go right for the most sensitive part of you,” Gordon said.  “This is where she and I differ.  She’s merciless.  She goes right for the jugular.  She’s a killer.  Me?  I’m very good when it comes to breaking people.  I’ve learned from some of the worst of Radham.  People who learned to fight the way people who have nothing to lose fight.  I’ve learned from people who live every day knowing that Dog and Catcher or another monster could come after them because they do shady things, things that involve hurting other people, sometimes for hours out of every day.”

He picked up the little blade.

“I won’t mince words.  That’s his style, not mine,” he said, indicating me, twirling the blade in his hands.  “I know how to torture people.  I don’t want to, none of us do, but if you’re going to be so stupid as to get in our way when we’re trying to save a young woman’s life, well, the pieces will fall where they may.”

“Reassess those priorities,” I said.  “My friends there, they might seem a little scary.  But this is a scary meant for someone who threatens a well-to-do citizen of the Crown, and very possibly threatens Kensford as a whole.  The whole reason we’re doing this, right now, is because you’re twisting everything out of shape, taking the path of most resistance.  The moment you give way, relax, tell us what you’re supposed to tell us, then everything goes back to the way it’s supposed to be.  We work against enemies of the Crown, you go back to doing business, the young lady ends up safe, and you can feel like you did something right.”

No answer was immediately forthcoming.

A gentleman, I thought.

This was the obstacle that was in our way?

Gordon started toward Mr. Mustache.  Mustacheless opened his mouth, “Lady Claire.”

Gordon turned around.  He put the weapon on the counter.

“Lady Claire.  She stays at the Academy.  She has special accommodations, her family is related to the headmaster.  Her father and uncles are military, working heavily alongside the Academies.  She… she was so despondent, she was going to fail out, she couldn’t meet the requirements to keep her seat.  When the tutor appeared just yesterday, a pretty young someone from the country, Lady Claire looked so relieved.  She couldn’t stop babbling.”

“Thank you,” Gordon said.  “She lives at Dame Cicely’s Academy?”

The man nodded, looking fairly well crushed.  “The tutor, she’s really a threat to the girl?”

“Yes,” I said, suspecting I was lying.  “She’s killed.”

I looked at Jamie, who was making notes, all the information that the two men from the coat store had shared.

“If you talk, telling more tales about the Radham Children, you can expect another visit from us,” Mary said.

The man paused, the nodded.

Mary backed away, knife held up.  She collected the blade from the counter, then tossed it into the corner by the door, still backing up as she joined us.  Helen was far more casual, letting go and practically skipping to us.

We left, moving unanimously toward the Academy.  We put a fair bit of distance between ourselves and the store, disappearing amid the crowd, before we broke the silence.

“You weren’t really going to torture them, were you?” Lillian asked.

“No,” Gordon said.

I wasn’t sure if he was lying.

“Because that’s not right,” Lillian said.

“I know,” Gordon said.  “But the stakes are high, and time might be short.  If we can’t get her before we’re forced to go back to Radham, or if she slips away, then we might not get another chance to stop whatever it is she has planned.”

I spoke up, “She made a point of telling me about weapons buried beneath the small towns.  She’s been visiting small towns.  She might have collected something,” I said.  “Or she’s set things to go off, experiments get loose… turns the academy’s weapons against itself.  It would fit her style.”

“Put a drop of alcohol on a scorpion’s back, and it stings itself to death,” Mary said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“When your enemy is so geared toward violence, it doesn’t take much to make them destroy themselves,” she explained.

“Given how you all are acting,” Lillian said, “You’re hungry for this catch, and it scares me a little.  That line about the scorpion could apply to you all too.”

Us all,” I said.  “Not you all.  You’re one of us.  If something happens to the Lambs, you’re included in it.”

She frowned.

“The Radham Children,” Jamie mused.

“That’s a problem too,” Gordon said.  “Didn’t expect that.”

“The scene with Mauer, the scholars who saw us dealing with Sub Rosa, someone talked.  Rumors got out,” Jamie said.  “Hayle talked to me about this, before.  He and Briggs have a plan.  In case we stop being so secret.”

“Really?” Mary asked.  “Is it a good plan?”

“It’s a Briggs plan,” I said.  “Let’s focus on the here and now.  Genevieve Fray has a patron.  She’s lied or conned her way to getting pay, lab space, resources, protection and company, and the patron might not know.  She’s keeping the company of someone she can use as a hostage.”

“It was a good catch, Sy,” Gordon said.

I nodded.  I just wished I’d connected to it earlier.

Dame Cicely’s was a nice building, pale, and the branches that grew out of it were more discrete.  The windows were ornate, not made of branches but thick wrought iron molded to look like wood, glass stretched between.   A sprawling  garden near the front had young women walking through it, talking in groups, with their monsters in their company, walking a few paces behind.  I was a little surprised that the gardens were so popular, when they were covered in snow, but I supposed it spoke to the need to get away.  Much like the delinquents with their campfire off to the side of the woods.

Jamie put out a hand, stopping Gordon.  With Gordon, the rest of us stopped in our tracks.

He pointed.

Three female figures, entering a side door.

“You sure?” Gordon asked.

“Ninety percent.”

“We have the drop on her, this time around,” I said.  I looked at each of the others.  I could see the hunger and the raw, unique sorts of danger that each posed, with Lillian as the exception.  “We do this right, and we do it as a group.  It may be our last chance to get her.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.07 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.7

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“Wish we were older,” I muttered, hands in my coat pockets, shoulders hunched forward, hood pulled down low.  “Kind of hard to disappear in the crowd when there’s like, fifty kids in a town of fifteen thousand.”

“Yup,” Gordon said.  He was perched on the window ledge, taking his tools out, two small, thin rods.  He put the two of them together into the lock at the outside of the window.  Wrought iron branches and glass.  A quick check on Gordon’s part had verified that the room was empty.

“I’ve counted at least sixty,” Jamie said.  “Sixty kids.  Your count is way off.”

“Oh lords, shut up, Jamie,” I said, groaning.

Jamie stuck out his tongue at me.  I reached out to grab it, only for it to disappear back into his mouth.  I settled for lightly swatting at his cheek instead.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Mary asked Gordon.

“Some rough types in Radham, professional thieves.”

“How hard is it?”

“I dunno,” Gordon said.  “I have a good sense of touch and fine dexterity, so I found it pretty easy.  Sy tried his hand at it too, but he doesn’t keep up the practice.”

Mary looked at me, looking vaguely offended at the idea.  I shrugged.

“How come?” she asked.

“I forget it.  I learn it, and it’s fast to pick up.  Then I don’t have an excuse to do it for a while, or something comes up, like an appointment, and I feel like I’m starting from scratch.”

“Sy can forget how to ride a bike,” Jamie said.

With that, I saw a bit of sympathy from Mary, rather than that vague accusation of before.

I shrugged, hands back in my pockets.

“And we’re in,” Gordon said, taking the attention off me.  He hopped down, and collected his stuff, before sliding the lockpicking kit between his pants and his underwear, hiding the clip behind his belt.

“I still have a few practice locks and some picks in my room back at Lambsbridge,” I said.  “Remind me, I’ll lend them to you,” I told Mary.

She gave me a winning smile at that.

Gordon finished setting up, looking up at the window, the windowsill a few feet up off the ground.

“I wish we were taller, now that I’m thinking about it,” I commented.  “Be nice to-”

Gordon then lunged up to the window ledge with no effort at all.  He caught it, then swung himself over in the next second.

“-Be able to get up there without a boost,” I finished.  He had needed help before, but I supposed one of his hands had been full with the lockpicks.

I moved beneath the window, knitting my fingers together to provide a step for the others.

“No,” Lillian said.  “We’ve gone over this.  If you’re down here while we go up, you’re going to look up our skirts.”

“Pshh,” I said.  “I’ll go up first, then.”

“And then you look down the front of my blouse when I’m climbing over,” Lillian said, accusatory.

Your blouse?  Nah.”

Ah, the look on her face told me I’d struck home.  Indignation, the opiate of bastardly sorts the world over.  That was what she got for being annoying.

“Besides, it’s winter, there aren’t any necklines,” I said, changing the topic before she found the words to yell at me.

Interesting that you’d take note of that so readily,” Jamie said, dry.

“It’s obvi-”

“Guys,” Gordon said, cutting me off.  He was looking down on us from up above, chest resting on the windowsill.  “Pay attention?  And maybe be a little quieter?”

“Boost?” I asked Jamie.

He gave me a hand.  I kipped up high enough that I could grab Gordon’s arm, and he hauled me up the rest of the way.

It made me think.  The difference in our sizes, the difference in our strength.  He was capable of hauling me up off the ground and leaving me dangling.  At thirteen, he looked closer to fifteen or sixteen.  He had a physique, rather than a child’s body that just happened to have fat on it, or minimal fat, as mine did.

While he caught Lillian’s bag and deposited it on the floor, I found myself measuring the difference in our heights.  He was almost ten inches taller than me, if I had to guess.  In the spring, it had been closer to three or four.

It wasn’t that he was growing that fast.  Well, he was growing with a surprising speed, but that wasn’t the whole of it.

My height hadn’t really changed, nor had my build.

I offered a hand in helping Lillian up, realized I was getting in the way more than I was helping, and backed off a little.

Together with her, I surveyed the surroundings.  We were in a dormitory bedroom, but it was nice.  The furniture looked like antiques, or something expensive that would be antique someday.  Four poster bed, a writing desk with leather-backed books on a shelf above it, a bookcase with more texts on it, and a wall-mounted blackboard with notations and formulas on one half, and a to-do list on the other.

Gordon helped Helen up.  She was more graceful than Lillian had been, planting a foot on the windowsill, holding onto Gordon’s hand, then stepping down and dropping to a crouch-come-curtsy on landing.  She gave me a winning smile as she straightened up.

“You’re ridiculous,” I said, my voice low.

“I’m in a good mood,” she said.  “Because we’re on the prowl.”

“You don’t have moods,” I said.

“I have biological imperatives, thank you very much,” she said, prim, hands clasped behind her back, “And one of those imperatives is to stalk and kill.  We’re stalking.  It’s nice.”

“I’m more inclined to blame the chocolate cake from earlier,” I told her.

“Hmph.  That’s one of my other biological imperatives.”

Lillian nodded as if this was the most sensible thing in the world.

“Are you actually developing a sense of humor?” I asked, a little stunned.

She winked at me, then spun around.  “Gordon, do you think we’ll be exiting this way?  Can I hide my coat?”

“Better to keep it,” he said.

“We’ll look more like we belong if we don’t have outdoor stuff on,” I said.

Gordon made a noncommittal grumbling noise.  He helped Jamie up, plucking the book from Jamie’s hands, handing it to me, then helping Jamie through.  I provided the book once Jamie’s boots were firmly on the hardwood floor.

Mary came up next.  No boost.  A short running start, from the sounds of it, stepping onto the wall, and grabbing Gordon’s hand.

As she hopped down, I found myself comparing our heights.

She was a few inches taller than me, but unlike Gordon, she hadn’t quite shaken off the gawkishness of being young.  She had little traces of femininity here and there, promises of what was to come, but she also had natural flourish and style, instilled in her by Mothmont and Percy both.  She was a lady, when she was of a mind to be.

Helen was the inverse, in some ways, a little shorter than Mary, but already taking shape as a young woman.  It was little surprise, but she was the fastest of the girls to develop hips and chest, and she was gradually altering her blonde ringlets to match, inching ever closer to a woman’s hairstyle over a young girl’s, a journey that would take just the right amount of time to complete.  Helen could be a lady, she could be a precocious child, and switched between the two at a whim.  As I knew her, though, there was a wildness to her, as if a genie had bottled up a predator in the guise of a child, and all of the growls and restless pacing was translated into sweet smiles and flourishes, and in stillness, waiting like the spider or the praying mantis, she conveyed nothing more or less than the young woman at ease.

Jamie, like me, still embraced the awkwardness of youth, in frame and face, but he had height.  He’d quietly embraced his own style, with the long blond hair and the glasses, the book forever in his arms, drawing up subtle walls between him and the world, while his eyes peered past, taking everything in.

And then Lillian.  Still young, shortest of the girls now, still awkward in youth and figure.  A step behind, in so many ways, but I respected how she’d come to find and earn her place among us.  She chose clothes carefully, and remained conscious and defensive of her girlishness in a way that Helen and Mary would never have to.

I wasn’t sure what I was doing, studying them, but it was some hybrid approach to measuring myself against them and defining the tools we had available to use against Fray.

This was dangerous territory.  All it took was one person to raise an alarm of sorts, asking questions about why such young children were in a school for young ladies already exiting or out of their adolescent years, and Fray might be able to react against us.

“Any thoughts on the coats?” I asked.

“Been thinking about it,” Gordon said.  “I say coats off.  If we’re traipsing around with this stuff on, they might be more likely to ask questions.  We need to look like we belong.”

“Even if we stick out like sore thumbs,” I said.

“Even if,” he said.

Mary nodded in agreement.  She was already removing her coat.  Lillian, Gordon, Helen and I were a step behind.

Halfway through pulling my stuff off, tightly folding the forest green scarf into a bundle I could put in a pocket, I saw that Jamie was standing by the bookcase, a book open in front of him.

“Jamie?” I asked.

“One second.”

I finished pulling all my stuff off, and handed it over to Gordon, who stuffed it under the bed.  I walked over to Jamie, and glanced over his elbow to see the book he was looking over.

Rows on rows of portraits, with names beneath.  He gave each page only a moment’s glance.

“Left arm,” I told him.

Without taking his eyes off the book, he held out his left arm.  I pulled his jacket free of the arm.

“Right arm.”

I pulled the coat free, then handed it to Gordon.  Like the rest, the coat disappeared beneath the bed.  Mary had already closed the window, and was busy with her sweater up around her ribs, tucking her shirt into her skirt in such a way that it wouldn’t hamper her access to the knife handles that only slightly stuck up from her beltline.

“Key things,” I said.  “Cover?  Anyone asks, we’re prospective students.”

“Girl’s only school,” Mary said.

“Jamie, Gordon and I will cross-dress,” I said.  I saw the annoyed looks, and I cracked a grin, “The school is going co-ed.”

“Nobody’s going to believe that,” Lillian said.  “The woman-only nature of the school is important.”

“Blame it on money and nobility,” I said.  “Some prat lord decided he wanted to go to the school with all the girls, set the wheels in motion.  Only the higher-ups and some important people know.  Anyone asks, we don’t say, but we imply we’re important enough to know.”

There were a few nods.

“Best to avoid being in a position where we have to justify anything,” Jamie said.

“Well yeah, obviously,” I agreed.

Gordon nodded.  “Okay.  That’s the story.  When you’re inventing yourselves, stick to points and names established during previous infiltration jobs.  If possible, let Jamie come up with the details.  He’s best at that.”

“Can do,” Jamie said.

I raised a finger,  “We need to find out what Fray is doing, disarm and disrupt her.  That means finding the lab, the room where she’s staying, or something.”

There were a few nods.

“Finally, Lady Claire.  We need to find her.  Through her, we have access to Fray, information, whatever else.  Depending on what’s going on, we might be able to get clues, or figure out a path of attack.”

“School hours are over,” Lillian said.  “It’s late afternoon, and if Dame Cicely’s is anything like Radham Academy, the girls are going to return to their rooms to change clothes for dinner sometime soon, if they aren’t already.  They’ll go to the dining hall to eat, if they don’t go into town, and then there’ll be a few hours of social activity and studying before people start settling in for the night.”

“Good,” Gordon said.  Lillian smiled at the praise.

“Fray is Lady Claire’s tutor,” I said.  “Claire is a poor student, and Fray is her savior.  That means Claire is devoted, indebted, probably disconnected from her peers.  I’m thinking they’re going to eat out, or eat in their rooms.  We find out where they’re working, try to mark her location, divide our attention between investigating whatever it is she’s doing and keeping track of her.  See if we can’t-”

The doorknob rattled, and I was immediately silent.  All six sets of eyes were now on the door.

A key scratched at the lock, then raked its way into the keyhole.

Just like that, Jamie, Helen, Lillian and I stepped back to the side of the bed, using it to conceal ourselves.  Gordon and Mary advanced, exchanging a brief set of hand signals.

Gordon pointed, formed a fist, jerking it toward his shoulder.  You.  Pull.  That second sign worked as ‘get’, ‘take’, or ‘hold’, depending.

Mary’s response was a ‘yes’.  Fist formed, pumped slightly in the air.

Gordon twisted, looking at Lillian.  A point, then another gesture, a hand waved over his face.

You.  Sleep.  The second sign could mean tired, drunk, it didn’t really matter.  Lillian made an alarmed sound, reaching for her bag, pulling it around in front of her so she could rummage within.  I had a glimpse of the contents, metal plates keeping things rigid and protecting bottles and syringes.

Gordon was already turning and grabbing the chair from beside the desk, approaching as the door swung open.

A young woman, eighteen or so, stepped into the room.  A little heavy, with a hairstyle that didn’t suit her round face, but not without her appeal.  A definite cute ‘girl next door’ type.

She looked at Gordon with shock, as Mary stepped in from the corner behind the door and gave her a hard shove.

The girl stumbled forward, and Gordon swung the top of the chair into her solar plexus.

Have they been practicing, or is this their natural dynamic? I wondered.

Lillian was still searching her bag as the woman crumpled to all fours on the floor, trying and failing to breathe.

Things weren’t so simple as all that.  The girls of Dame Cicely’s were never alone.  Each and every one had a pet, their status symbol, suggesting the kind of work they focused on, and the skills they were able to bring to bear.  The room’s occupant was no different.  It shouldered its way past the door that Mary had tried to close between it and its master.

It looked like a human with all the skin pulled off in a singular piece, bug-eyed without its eyelids, teeth too white against a backdrop of crimson.  The torso had been stretched, making it tall enough its head almost scraped the doorframe.  The arms had been removed and replaced with a row of insect limbs that extended from hip to shoulders, each of the limbs tipped with a wicked looking claw, thorn-like growths running down the length of each.

It noted its fallen mistress and made an alarmed noise.  The sound didn’t resemble anything human or insectile, guttural and wet, like someone in the end stages of pneumonia might make if they had to scream something to save their loved ones from an approaching killer.

It staggered forward, the slow, awkward gait of the body not matching the fluid, precise movement of the clawed arms, each arm drawing back, then stabbing.  Mary dropped low to the ground, started to retreat toward Gordon, but proved it to be a feint, dodging back behind the thing, shutting the door, sealing us in with it.

Gordon shoved the four legs of the chair at it, and two of the claws punched through the seat, no doubt at least an inch and a half of solid wood.  He wrenched his body, moving the chair to one side, and managed to block one more claw that had been trying to reach past the chair to stab at his side.

Lillian found what she was looking for, triumphantly holding up a bottle and needle.  She withdrew a dose, then rose, approaching from around the bed, hesitating a little at the sight of Gordon fighting the graft-monster.

“Here!” Mary called out.

“But-” Lillian started.  “Dose is for her.

“Here!” Mary said, more insistent.  Her first shouted statement had drawn a glance from the creature.  Not having success against Gordon, seeing Mary with nary a chair to protect herself, it started to reorient, moving its arms in preparation to stab.

I saw Lillian look, pausing, not sure what to do, eyes on the space over the experiment’s shoulder that she needed to lob the needle through, knowing an errant throw could hit a wall or the ceiling, or that a moving arm could swat the thing aside.

I snatched the needle from her hand, then moved forward, ducking low to cast it along the hardwood floor.

Gordon, in a last-ditch effort to save Mary from being impaled on a half-dozen points, twisted the chair.  One or two arms were still caught in it, or caught between rungs and the seat of the chair, and the creature reacted, turning its attention back toward him.

Mary had the needle, and brought it up into the creature’s abdomen, pressing the syringe.  One free hand, then the other, went up to catch at three of the thing’s ‘elbows’, holding them at bay, to reduce it’s range of movement.

It took only a few seconds for the dose to work.  It collapsed, landing across its creator’s body, helping to pin her down.

The girl on the floor coughed, as if the cough could bring air into her lungs.

She couldn’t quite look at Gordon, who practically straddled her, or at Mary, who was behind, so she looked at us, alarmed and confused.

I looked away, my attention on the bag, pulling a free syringe from the spot where Lillian had taken the first, then grabbing the tranquilizer.  I pushed both into Lillian’s hands, distracting her from the young lady we’d just assaulted.

“It’s okay,” Helen said.  With Lillian now measuring a dose, me busy with the bag and Lillian, urging our medic forward, Helen was the only one left with our captive’s attention.  “You’re in no danger.  We just need you to sleep for the rest of the night.  You’ll wake up on the floor, safe and sound.”

The young woman opened her mouth to talk, and only wound up coughing again.

“Do you have friends that would come looking for you?” Gordon asked.  “If you’re missing at dinner?  Or after?”

The girl frowned, then after a pause, she nodded.

“Don’t lie,” I said.

She looked up at me, concerned, heaving in wheezy breaths.  I’d only been guessing, but her reaction to me calling her on it was telling.

“That’s a no,” I told Gordon.

He nodded.  “We have an escape route if we need it.  Place to hide out.”

Mary partially opened the door.  “One-sixteen.”

“Remember that,” Gordon said, to the rest of us.

Lillian approached our captive with a needle in hand.  I saw the girl tense up.

“Typhomine,” Lillian said.  “Thirty three point four milligrams, for a person that weighs eleven stone.”

Our captive took that in, then relaxed.

“On your side,” Lillian said, bending down, pushing at the girl’s shoulder.

The girl obeyed, twisting her upper body until she was lying on her side.

When Lillian reached out with the needle, a hand went up.  Gordon grabbed it, holding it down, and Lillian stuck the young woman in the stomach.

In moments, she was asleep.

Lillian grabbed a pillow from the bed and put it under the woman’s head, then another, propped behind her back.

Gordon looked impatient by the time she was done.  Lillian gave him a nod, as if to confirm that she was done.

Think what you want, Gordon, that would have been far harder without Lillian, I thought.  I handed her her bag.

Mary peeked out into the hall, then gave us the go-ahead.

The hall was largely empty.

We moved as a group.  Helen, Gordon, Mary, and I were quick to slip into our roles.  We walked comfortably, casually.  Stealth was good, staying out of sight and being quiet, but the next best thing was to look like we belonged.  Moving with purpose, briskly enough that it looked like we knew what we were doing.  If we looked lost, then others would want to give us direction, or question what we were doing.

“Turn right,” Jamie said.

“How the heck do you know where we’re going?” Gordon asked.

“Photos in the yearbook, outline of the school, what we saw from outside.  It feels like common sense,” Jamie said, quiet.

“That’s kind of scary,” Lillian said.  “I know you could pull out anything you’d seen, but connecting the pieces, now?”

“You have your thing, you practice it.  I have my thing,” Jamie said.  “Not that I’m positive, mind you.”

“Better than nothing,” Gordon said.  Then, not for the first time, he said, “Wish I had that brain of yours.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, quiet.  “Maybe.”

Mary couldn’t have made the connection.  Even Lillian probably wouldn’t have remembered, it was so long ago I wasn’t even sure Lillian had been with us.

No, the very first time they’d had the exchange had been one of our earliest meetings.  When the Lambs had just made the move from being three to being four, Jamie joining our ranks, we had been learning what each of us were capable of.

I wish I had your brain.

I wish I had your body.

If I remembered the interplay of dialogue between Jamie and Gordon, then Jamie had to, right?

Odd, that he hadn’t brought it up or used the line.  He was acting odd in a few ways, as a matter of fact.  Jamie looked tense, and a side effect of that tension was that he was too stiff, not quite the casual air we needed.

I knew that this particular situation made him the fish out of water.  Improvising wasn’t his strong suit, because improvising required fast reactions and adaptation.  But shouldn’t that have made him more willing to lean on us, stick to the tried and true, the interplay, the jokes, the reminder that we were a team?

I poked him in the side.  He flinched, doubling over a little, then shot me a look.

I rolled my shoulders, then stretched, fingers together, arms over my head with palms up.

“Uh huh,” Jamie said.  He seemed to force himself to relax.

It solved the immediate problem, but it didn’t solve the rest of it.  I wasn’t sure what was up with him.

Double doors at the opposite end of the hallway banged open, a small herd of young ladies in fashionable clothing coming through.  Their hair was nicely done up, and the clothes were nice, high quality, though not loud or attention-getting.  They were fitting the atmosphere of the school, unconsciously adapting.

“More girls visiting their rooms before dinner,” Lillian said.  “Before long we’re going to be surrounded.”

“Being surrounded is bad.  It’s less chance for us to see Fray before she sees us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon agreed.  “Let’s get out of sight.”

“Through the doors, hard right, then stairs, down,” Jamie said.

There was a heavy set of double doors just like the one the collection of Dame Cicely’s students had come through.  Gordon and I each pushed one of the doors open.  We rounded the corner.  There were more rooms to either side, but the hallway was short, and at the end of it were two sets of stairs, one leading down, the other leading up.

“What’s downstairs?” I asked.

“Labs.  They’re almost always downstairs,” Jamie said.  “I don’t know what the layout is, but I doubt they’re going to be too busy if people are going from class to their rooms for dinner.”

“No guarantees,” I said.

If Fray saw us and bolted-

Footsteps on the stairs marked someone or multiple someones coming down the stairs.  We were too far away to make a run for downstairs, too far forward to try and slip through the doors.

Immediately, as we’d done with the young woman in her dorm room, we looked for our exits.

Six of us, and four of us had the wherewithal to check nearby dorm rooms, hoping some were unlocked.

No luck on all four counts.  Stupid school with its scheming, paranoid students.

The girls came down the stairs, and I found myself saying a mantra in my head, as if I could will it to be true.  Don’t be Fray.  Don’t be Fray.  Don’t be Fray.  Especially don’t be Fray’s killer monster man.

The young women were in the company of their pet monsters and stitched, chattering with one another.  None were Fray.  Nor the monster.

But there was one more experiment than there were human girls.

The stitched girl from Fray’s entourage carried a tray of kettle, plates of tidbits and cups.  She saw us and stopped so suddenly that it startled the girls in her company, porcelain rattling on the tray, tea slopping over the side, threatening to spill.

It was a still tableau.

“It’s you!” she said, staring at us.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.08 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.8

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

This was, like the rattle of the doorknob, the kind of situation that demanded a coordinated response.  When the doorknob had rattled, it had been Mary and Gordon who’d stepped forward.

This was a different sort of rattle.

Helen, Gordon and I were on point.  Well, Gordon was always on point, there weren’t many active, immediate situations where he was bad.  Much like how there weren’t many situations where Jamie and Lillian were really supposed to step up and take charge.

“Hi!” Helen said, cheery.

Fray’s stitched alone wasn’t the biggest problem.  Her stitched being in the company of other women and monsters made for something more complicated.

“What are you doing here?” Fray’s stitched asked, looking confused and mildly alarmed.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, I thought.  A cleverer person could be invited to dance, words playing off of words and the bystanders forever kept in the dark.  The stitched wasn’t so nuanced, and she’d chosen the single hardest question to answer directly.

“We’re taking a look at the school!” Helen said, matching the stitched girl in tone.  “It’s so pretty!”

She wasn’t lying, but even ignoring that part, it sounded so genuine I almost believed her.  The problem was that it left things open, it gave the stitched girl a moment to think.

“Careful,” I said, abruptly.  “The tray, don’t drop it.”

She startled a little, looking down at the tray.

“I don’t ever drop trays.  I’m careful,” she said, voice firm.  She hadn’t been close to dropping it, but she’d had to check. 

Gordon seemed to sense what I was doing.  “How is Genevieve doing?”

“Oh.  Um,” the stitched said.  A furrow appeared between her eyebrows.  “She’s happy, and she’s working.  She’s with Claire right now.”

“We were going to go see Lady Claire,” one of the girls said.

“Yes,” I said, then I took a risk.  “We were too.”

“You know Miss Fray?” one of the girls in the group cut in.

Hadn’t expected that.  It was rude, sudden, and it didn’t fit into the flow of the conversation.

“We do,” Helen said.

Again, she was leaving things open-ended, letting the other person decide the next part of the conversation.  I had to have a talk with her about it.  A casualty of Helen being largely reactive in nature.

“How?” another girl asked.  Was her tone accusatory?

I wanted to defer to the other Lambs and let them control the flow of the conversation while I took a second to think, but I worried we were one mistake away from trouble.  Something about the collective tone and body language.

“She recommended the school to us,” I said, off the top of my head.  It tied things back to the backstory we’d already discussed.

“To you?” was the arch reply.  To a boy?

“We weren’t supposed to say, Sid,” Gordon admonished me.

I flinched, but I did catch a glimpse of the confusion on the girl’s faces.  This was a cutthroat school, one where it was every student for themselves.  Why then, did they look at each other for confirmation or feedback?

A tight-knit group, centered around Fray?

Or were they a tight-knit group, rallying against Fray?

Either way, I had a plan of attack now.  “Do you think she’s going to be angry at us?”

Gordon paused, not sure how to respond.  My mistake.

I’m miffed at you,” the stitched girl called out.  Giving her an opening to say something was another mistake.

“You know her best,” Helen said, covering, and diverting focus.  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I nodded.  “I guess.  She’ll be mad, but she won’t show it.  She’s better than that.”

“What are you talking about?” one of the girls asked.

“I can’t say,” I said.  I was sure to say it too quickly, pausing awkwardly, feigning discomfort in the moment of silence that followed.

“Miss Genevieve is nice,” Wendy said.  “You’re not making sense.”

If these girls liked Fray, we needed to counteract that impression.  If they disliked her, then I needed to play that up.

“That’s not a word I’ve heard people use to describe her,” I said.

With that, two of the girls broke away from the group, their monsters following.

“Um,” the stitched girl said, looking at them, bewildered.

“It’s okay, Wendy,” one of the girls that had stayed behind said, interrupting her.

Shift the bias of the conversation.  Recognizing that stitched tended to be slower to react or adjust in the same way Jamie was, I could override her, build up a story, and turn these girls into a weapon we could use against Fray.

“It’s very much not okay!  That one threw a knife at my head!” Wendy said, pointing at Mary.  “Be safe.  They’re dangerous!”

That brought everything to a screeching halt.

She was a little faster on the uptake than most, then.  Had to stop making assumptions when Fray was involved, even tangentially.

“Wendy,” I said.  “We’re not dangerous.  You’re mistaken.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Lillian said, piping up.  “You have residual memories.  What you’re remembering isn’t Martha, but someone very similar to Martha, from before.

Clever Lillian.  Every stitched spent some time being trained and checked for residual memories and tics before they were cleared for their duties.  Lillian was helping to build something of a narrative, and she was helping to direct the conversation.  In the right direction, no less.

“No,” she said, stubborn.  “We haven’t talked about it and that isn’t one of my memories.  Miss Genevieve had me running all over to try and watch you and she said to be careful and then she threw a knife at my head and he pushed some bricks over so they almost fell on me, and-”

I wanted to slap a hand to my face.

“That sort of thing doesn’t happen in reality, Wendy,” Helen said, with the best gentle tone.

“It does and it did!”

I mused, We need to move the conversation to the right destination, even if we have this anchor holding us back and threatening to sink us.

Attack her stance, erode the other’s faith in her words, using the fact that she was a stitched?  Evade and distract, maybe?  Or approach things from an oblique angle?

I decided to play along.  I hated doing it, but I played the kid.

“We didn’t do that!” I said.  “We came here because she asked us to and she says we’re going to be able to go to school here later if everything works out, and-”

“What?” one of the girls cut me off.

“She’s… I wasn’t supposed to say that,” I said, for the second time.  By this time, their curiosity had to be killing them.

The girls who’d started to approach finished crossing the floor to reach us.  One of them dropped down to sit on her heels, reaching out to place a hand on my shoulder.  She smiled, “It’s okay.  You can tell us.”

I turned to look at Gordon, as if for reassurance.  He shrugged, which was perfect.

“She made friends with Lady Claire because Lady Claire knows someone who runs the Academy,” I said.  “She says, if everything works out, then this won’t be a girl’s school next year.  There’ll be men coming here, which means I can come.”

You want your precious seats?  How would you like more competition?

“That doesn’t make sense,” the girl in front of me said.  She was a pretty blonde with features that I was pretty sure had been adjusted with some Academy science.

“It’s true,” I said.  I could have used money to drive the point home, but money held more weight with people who weren’t used to wealth.  “She said that Lady Claire’s dad-”

“Uncle,” Jamie said, under his breath.

“Uncle, he’s noble, and he’s been offered a position, but the man offering the position has a daughter he doesn’t want to be studying any of this and she’s supposed to get a scholarship and-”

“Okay,” the girl cut off my ramble, which was very intentionally rambly.  Hit them with too many things they would want to ask questions about, all at once, leave them reeling.  Even if they pick apart the argument, the message underlying it all still penetrates.

Politics.  I was willing to bet they’d appreciate politics more than money.

It was a lie they could believe.

“I don’t know about any of that,” Wendy said.

I could have thrown out something in response to that, but I decided to let it sit.

Helen decided to pick it up, “It’s okay, honey.”

Damn it.

“No it’s not!  You tried to strangle Warren!”

“She keeps saying that stuff,” one of the girls said.  “Is she burning out?”

“I’m quite fine, thank you,” Wendy said, stamping a little in frustration.  The cups and saucers on the tray rattled.

“Maybe we should ask Miss Fray?”

Ugh.  That would be a disaster.

“Maybe,” said the girl, who was crouched in front of me.  “I always wondered where she came from.  It would be nice to know who I’m talking to, when I go down to see her.”

There were a hundred things I could have said, webs I could have spun, but with this proximity to the girl, I knew it would be too much, too fast.  We needed a subtler line, something to set the hook without giving our fish reason to struggle.  Besides, I was playing the kid, matching Wendy in the innocence angle.  I couldn’t deliver anything too cutting without drawing too much attention to me.

From Helen and Gordon’s silence, I suspected they sensed the same thing, and they were deferring to me.

It was the wrong hand signal, but I feigned fidgeting, putting my hands behind my back, knowing the others could all see it, and I extended two fingers, ‘walking’ them upside down.

The rabbit ears in the grass, the upside down man.  It was a sign that meant ‘sneak’.  Paired with another sign, it could mean ‘subtly’.  I pointed at my lower face.

Mary started to move around to the side, slowly.  I made a sudden gesture, clenching my fist, shifting my posture.  She stopped, and she watched as I emphasized mouth, not neck.

No, I didn’t want an ambush.

I wanted-

“I overheard my dad, once,” Jamie said, hesitant.  That wasn’t acting, it was just Jamie being Jamie, but it worked.  “He said, that lady isn’t someone you would ever want to marry or have as a business partner, but if you want to learn science and learn politics, there aren’t many people better to learn from.”

“Is that so?” the girl in front of me asked, her voice soft.

Jamie, I could kiss you right now.

He could be slow, but he was the furthest thing from stupid.  He understood how I thought.  All he needed, sometimes, was the time to get caught up and connect the dots.  When he got that, then he could be devastating.

With those words, he’d poisoned the waters.  So long as we maintained some semblance of cover, all future interactions between these girls and Fray would be colored by distrust and concern about being manipulated.

“We’re supposed to learn from her, this coming spring,” I said.  “Our parents all arranged it.”

“She’s Lady Claire’s tutor,” the other girl who’d approached us said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.  “I guess we’ll be her students too?”

Take the bait, take the bait

“Here?” the girl in front of me asked.

“In Radham,” I said, firmly enough to leave no doubt.

She reached out, and her monster, a man with armor-crusted skin, extended a hand for her to hold on to as she straightened up, standing.

It doesn’t make sense, does it?  How could she be a proper tutor for Lady Claire here and a tutor for us there?  Something doesn’t add up, and you’ve already suggested you’re suspicious of her.  You were vaguely hostile and almost predatory when you sussed out a connection to her, which suggests you don’t like her.  You’re willing to believe the worst.

She’s selling out the school, making it co-ed, she’s selling you all out, all in the name of politics.  To top it all off, she’s manipulating Lady Claire to make it happen.

This was the story we’d spun out.

“I’m very eager to talk to this woman now,” the blonde girl who’d talked to me said, her back to us.  She approached the stairs.  “Only thing that doesn’t add up is this stitched girl.”

“I add up!” Wendy said, indignant.

“Your story doesn’t.”

“Oh.  I thought you meant arithmetics.”

“Is she running hot?” the blonde asked.

Another girl reached out and put a hand on Wendy’s forehead.  “A little warm.  Not enough for a burn-out.”

“I just made tea,” Wendy said, very patiently,  “I’m holding tea.  It’s warm, because tea is hot.  I’m telling the truth.  They’re dangerous.  All six of them.  Miss Genevieve told me to be very careful with them.”

“It’s okay,” the girl said, withdrawing her hand from Wendy’s forehead.  “We can go and ask Miss Fray, and I think everything will become clear.”

“Yes,” the blonde agreed.  “I’m looking forward to the explanation.”

It wasn’t ideal – I’d hoped to have more time.  But we had a distraction, in the form of several angry girls, we had the element of surprise.  All we needed to do was corner her, then draw the net closed.

“If you say something about us to her, we’re going to get in trouble,” I said.

The blonde turned her attention briefly to me.  I liked the look of deep-seated concern on her face, as if I’d struck a blow to the core of her being, shaking her confidence.  This was someone proud, good at what she did, and with my lies, she was no longer sure that she knew what the future had in store for her.

“I’ll be discreet,” she said.  A lie, practically to my face.  She didn’t care.

The motivation that drove her now was stopping Fray and securing her future once again.

“Thank you,” I said, pretending to accept the lie.  I moved closer to the stairs as they started to gather, ready to move on Fray as a group.  I wondered if they’d be direct or subtle about it all.  I couldn’t tell from the body language or the murmured words they were exchanging.

The blonde one looked so much angrier.  She didn’t stride forward.  She stalked, her pet with its armored skin a step behind.

Conventional wisdom was that a lie was best kept simple.  Less conventional wisdom was that a lie could be trumped by a more complex one.

The Lambs and I were close.  My eyes were on Wendy, Fray’s stitched girl.  She was confused, she kept trying to talk, and nobody was listening.

I almost felt bad.

The group turned and moved as a unit, heading downstairs to where Genevieve Fray and Lady Claire supposedly were.

Like Jamie was so prone to be, the stitched girl found herself a step behind.

I lurched forward, hurrying, as she moved around the railing to head downstairs.  Pushing her down would be crude, but getting in her way-

She stumbled a little, the cups and saucers clattering once again.

“Excuse me!” she said.  “It’s already getting cold.  I’m in a hurry!”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Let me get out of your way.”

I faked right, then moved left.  She stumbled again, then stamped a foot, clearly frustrated.

At the base of the stairs, one of the girls called up, “Wendy, are you coming?  And Sid, was it?”

“Yes!” Wendy called back.  She shot me a glare.  “Excuse me.  I need to serve the tea, and I need to tell Miss Genevieve that you said things that weren’t true.”

“It’s okay,” Mary said, catching me off guard by speaking up.  “Sid?  It’s okay.”

I frowned, but I saw her smile.

I stepped out of Wendy’s way, freeing her to go down the stairs.

She took one step, then jerked to a halt.  Tea slopped out of the cups.

“Um,” the stitched girl said.  She tried to turn around, then stopped again.  “Um.”

Mary had tied her to the railing.

She looked at me, very clearly frustrated and maybe a little lost at this point.  “Would you please take the tray?”

I shook my head.

She tried to put it on the railing, balancing it, then gave up, taking hold of it again.  Several times, she tried to move, and found herself caught firm.

All she had to do was throw the tray, but, as she’d proudly told us, she didn’t drop trays.

“Um,” she said, looking more distressed.

Gordon reached out, putting a hand on her arm.  “It’s okay.”

“I can’t move,” she said, her voice small.  She sounded like she had regressed in age.

“It’s okay,” he said, again.  “I know.  Just wait.  Things will be okay.  You have to be patient.”

She tried to move again, then stopped short.  She went still, shoulders drawn in.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Gordon said.  “Stay here.  We’ll get you help, okay?”

She nodded.  “But the tea is going to get cold.”

I started down the stairs, several of the others with me.  Only Gordon hung back, consoling the stitched girl.

“You have the teapot, don’t you?” Gordon asked.  “They like second cups, after the first is done?”

“One teabag,” she said, “So it isn’t too strong when it’s time for the second cup.”

“Good remembering,” he said.  “Do you drink tea?”

“No.  It’s not very good for me.”

“Sid,” Gordon called out.

I’d just reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned around, and so did many of the others.

Gordon spoke, his voice carrying down the stairwell.  The school was quiet enough we could hear it, even with his low volume.  “Three cups.  One for Fray, one for Claire, and…”

“One for Fray’s monster,” Mary said.

“His name is Warren,” the stitched girl said.  “And he’s not a monster!  He’s a gentleman and I’m supposed to help him!”

“No,” I said.  “He’s down there with them?”

Nobody responded.  We were already moving on.  Gordon took the steps, two at a time, leaving the stitched girl behind.  We had a problem.  Fray’s man was a monster the rest of the gang hadn’t been able to take down in a square fight.

We moved carefully, checking before any movement, not daring to move in front of a door in case Genevieve Fray or someone else spotted us.

“Sent everyone down here,” Gordon said, under his breath.  “Why?  Couldn’t you have sent them away?”

“It was a gamble,” I said.  “Yes, I could have sent them elsewhere, but it wouldn’t have been easy.  They were already heading down there, it was the place to go for answers, and they definitely wanted some, with Wendy back there drawing a connection and raising big questions.”

“Mmm,” he said.

“Hoped her monster would be off on an errand, trying to deal with us, or getting maintenance, or something.”

“Sure things are better than gambles, Sy,” he said, under his breath.  “Better to step away and find a more concrete avenue of attack.  Keep it simple.  ”

“It was.  That was as simple as I do.  I considered everything and it made the most sense.  Put her on her heels, pressure her, find an opportunity to strike, when she isn’t expecting us.”

“Well, let’s hope it happens,” he said, and he said it in a way that made it sound like I’d failed somehow.

Jerk.  He’d just been talking to me about how the group needed to work together.

We creeped forward, and in the midst of it, I felt Mary bump my arm with her elbow.  She didn’t say or do anything, but we moved forward as a pair, arms touching.

Solidarity.

When we drew closer to the end of the hall, we heard the voices, along with the sound of rushing water.

“She’s conning you, Claire.  Can’t you understand that?”

“She’s saving me.  She’s a fantastic teacher, she’s-”

“Lying to you.  Or are you saying she hasn’t contrived to meet your dad?”

“Contrived is the wrong word-”

“It’s true,” Fray said.

There was a moment of shocked silence.

“It’s not like you’ve been led to believe.  Dame Cicely’s Academy isn’t anything I’m after, and I don’t know anything about it wanting to allow men in.”

“Don’t know anything?  I don’t believe you.”

“I did approach Lady Claire as a means to an end, but that was temporary.  I became her friend in a genuine way.”

A pause.  I was sure that if I looked, I could see Fray putting on a show.

“You became her so-called friend, and you’re leaving, just like that.”

“I- yes.  Sooner than I’d like.  But that’s not an entirely bad thing, Joan.  I know you have a great admiration-” a brief but meaningful pause, “For Lady Claire.  I would be delighted to invite you into one of our study sessions, so you could take over for me when I’m done.”

“I- What were your ulterior motives, Genevieve?”

“Ah, that.  It’s complicated.”

What to do?  We had her cornered.  She was busy defending herself.  But she also had her pet in there with her.  A brute of a man with keen enough instincts to stay ahead of the rest of the Lambs.

Mary was next to me, back pressed to the wall, much as mine was.  I reached over, and I tapped the side of her leg, touching the blade that her skirt hid.  I touched my throat, then jerked a thumb in the direction of the room.

She made a so-so gesture.

Not confident?

I stepped away from the wall, pulling on her sleeve, swapping positions with her and gestured for her to wait.

Better if she was closer to the door, in case something happened.

“I wanted access,” Fray said.  “Something I’ve been lacking since I lost the Academy’s favor.  That’s why I first approached Lady Claire.  The nobility and upper class offer that access.  I thought I could play the game, work my way to a secure position.  But I’ve always had a weakness for people.  I’m bad at reducing them to simple numbers or abstracts.  I get too close to them.  Friend or foe.”

“I hope I’m a friend,” someone said.  Lady Claire, most likely.

“Most definitely,” Fray said.

Nothing suggested she was lying, prompting me to wonder, what did you want access forOr to?

“I almost believe you,” said the blonde.  Joan, if I was guessing right.  “Those children you’ve worked with-”

My heart sank.  I saw Mary tense, a throwing knife in hand.

“More people I’ve gotten too close to.  Or they’ve gotten too close to me,” Fray said.  “I think they’re upset with me.  They’re distorting the truth.  I don’t know if they realize how much they’re doing it.  Isn’t that right, Sylvester?”

My blood ran cold.

“Sylvester?” Lady Claire asked.

“One of the children.  I’d lay good money on the fact that he’s out in the hallway, listening.  Messy black hair, small, sharp eyes?”

“He was called Sid by one of the others.”

“A fake name.”

“Says the fugitive from the Crown,” I called out.  “You used your real name?”

“I lose track if I lie,” she said.  “I’m no good at that.”

“Fugitive?” this from one of the young women.  She sounded alarmed.

I didn’t like flying blind.  I put a hand on Mary’s shoulder, then stepped out into the doorway.

The lab was stone walled and stone floored, lit by voltaic lights that flickered just a touch.  Biologic power often did that.  Fish or something else that could be fed and produce the power.  The floor was thick glass, and water moved below, churning and frothing.  The light reflected off the floor and the water to make it look like the entire room was underwater.

I saw Fray’s monster.  Eight feet tall, his shoulders so broad I could have draped myself over them and still not covered the breadth.  All muscle, exaggerated, with pressed clothes that had no doubt been tailored to his specific shape.

Fray was there, with the girls we’d just been talking to.

“Your friends are there too, I assume?” Fray asked.

“They went to go do something else,” I lied.  “Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it, Sylvester, but I don’t think I believe you.”

“Before, when we talked, I found myself wondering what you’d do if we all came after you, if Wendy’s distraction attempt had failed, or if we’d organized differently.  I don’t suppose this is where I get to find out?”

Fugitive?” Lady Claire asked, a little louder, repeating herself.

“Murderer and terrorist,” I said.  I pulled out my badge.  “We’re tracking her down.  For convenience’s sake, you can imagine we’re adults in the bodies of children, for the sake of sneaking around, going unnoticed, or being discreet.”

“But you aren’t,” Fray said.

“Convenience’s sake,” I said.  I looked at the other girls, and the monsters they’d brought with.  “If she sends her monster over there after us, I highly recommend using your monsters to disable or kill her.  Be careful, she’s got retractable syringes in her fingers and a tentacled monster hidden inside her clothing.  You don’t want to be too close to her.”

I saw Lady Claire back away a step.

“Everything I told you was the truth, Claire,” Fray said, her head bowing a little.  “If you think about it, a great deal of what I told you will make more sense, in retrospect.”

“You’re really a killer,” Claire said.  She backed away again, startling a little as Joan put hands on her shoulders.

Genevieve Fray didn’t answer the question.  She turned her attention to me.

“Sylvester.”

“Fray.”

“To sate that idle curiosity of yours, I’ll tell you.  Had everyone turned up on the patio outside the cafe, and if conversation had seemed impossible, I would have told you what it is I’m aiming to do.”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “This is where you tell me, then?  Send us off to go stop your dastardly plan?”

“No,” she said, quiet, sounding almost offended.  “No.  First of all, I have this situation well in hand.”

The girls backed away a little more.  They were mindful of Fray’s monster, with its eerie blue eyes and massive frame.

“Second of all, I don’t intend to give anyone a chance to stop me.  I started and concluded my greater plot some time ago.  Anything I do now just extends its effects and gravity.  All the same, I think you and the other Lambs would feel compelled to run damage control.”

“You’ve already done what you set out to do?” I asked.

“I did after my first stop, but I’m taking the time to secure it, make sure it does what I mean it to.  Much like I’ve already decided this confrontation, and all the time we take talking is securing my position.”

I tore my eyes off her, studying the room.

I’d thought, not daring to look away, that the girls with the monsters were crouching.  But they were sagging.

Gas.  Or some concoction, or something.

She and I were resistant to it, by virtue of the Wyvern formula, and she’d treated her creature, too.  The rest weren’t so lucky.

Without the monsters to threaten her, there was nothing to stop the monster with the blue eyes.

“Warren,” Fray said, sounding genuinely disappointed.  “Go.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.09 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.9

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

I threw myself back out of the doorway, Mary moving in the opposite direction, her shoulder bumping mine.  She threw a knife, then twisted around, her still-wet boots skidding on the floor.  She grabbed the door and my offered hand to catch herself, than ran with the rest of us, her hand in mine.

We hurried down the hall, and I heard the briefest scraping sound.

I half-turned to see him stepping out into the hallway, a stool dangling from his hand.  When he threw it, he didn’t bring his arm back for more distance or wind-up.  It was a motion of the elbow and the wrist, a hard snap.

It took me a fraction of a second to see the trajectory.  I hauled on Mary’s arm, to pull her away, and I wasn’t strong enough.  The stool hit her and splintered against the wall in the same moment.  Her grip tightened on my hand, and she twisted my wrist as she stumbled into Helen, who was a step ahead of her.  Mary, Helen and I went down in a heap.

I flipped over, avoiding relying on my hand as I shifted positions to more of a crouch, my attention on Warren.  Mary’s throwing knife glinted in the light, sticking out of his chest, a few inches deep into his chest.  She had nailed her throw.  Right over the heart.

Could I call that irony?  The whole reason the Lambs even exist is that the Crown got this far, and the Crown only got this far because the Academies started making monsters that were harder to kill than conventional weapons were able to.  By the time weapons caught up, the Academies were producing other weapons, plagues and parasites, causing the sort of problems for their enemies that only the Academies could fix.

It was that cycle and the drive to stay ahead that drove so much of the Academy’s psychology.  Now we were, in our little skirmish here, a reversal of the dynamic the Academies had imposed.

Warren’s eyes stared as he approached.  He didn’t run, but he took long strides.  He was slower than us, but he didn’t seem concerned with that.

Gordon gave me and Helen a hand.  Lillian went straight to Mary.

It had been a hard hit.  A solid wood piece of furniture had been dashed to pieces, and something that could do that could have broken something important in Mary.

“Warren!”  Jamie called out.  With Helen, Mary and I still recovering, and both Gordon and Lillian helping us, it seemed like he was on point.  “Your father wants you to know he’s sorry!”

The musclebound man slowed, then stopped.  He was halfway down the hallway, hunched over.  His facial features were very normal, but he held his head at an angle that cast his eyes in shadow, the flickering light outlining his massive frame.  As he looked at Jamie, he raised his head, and for an instant, there was less shadow.

“He knows what happened to you,” Jamie said.  “It nearly killed your mother, hearing.”

The man that was facing us down reacted to that, hunching over more, recoiling from the words.  One fist clenched.

“Your father let things slide, with the farms.  He almost gave up, almost sold the farm.  Almost.  Your neighbors stepped in.  The Crowleys, the Behrs.  They’re rotating out, their adult kids have been volunteering, spending time with your dad, looking after things.”

Jamie was lying through his teeth, of course.  We’d stopped by, but the parents hadn’t talked to us, and they hadn’t been getting help, but they hadn’t been in dire shape either.  Not happy, for sure, but not dire.  They were a tough lot, and that unfortunately extended to Warren too.  Probably.

Lillian said something I didn’t hear, and Gordon helped haul Mary to her feet.  Every single inch of Mary conveyed agony on some level, with some blood here and there, the tension of her muscles, the look on her face, the tears in her eyes.  She also looked angry, and I had to chalk that up to anger at herself more than anything else.

“Frances Behrs was there when we stopped in to ask about you, gathering information so we could track you all down.  You were friends back when you were our age, right?”

The question got a slow nod in response.

Was Warren there mute?

There was a pause, and I saw Jamie look my way.  A glance, a check, and it wasn’t intended to see how hurt I might have been as it was something else.

My turn, then?

I drew in a deep breath, and I let go of my wrist, which was throbbing.  Holding hands in front, folding arms, and crossed legs were all signs of defensiveness.  The signals were subtle, but even the most untrained eye would read something into it.  Holding my wrist would do so twice over because I’d be subtly reminding him of pain.

“I know that it feels like going back is impossible.  Everything is different, and you’ve changed, in mind, body, and personality.  There’s a lot there you clearly wouldn’t want to take back home.  But your family survived this much, and they want you back, more than you know.”

“The door is open, Warren,” Jamie said.  “You can go back.”

I felt a hand touch my back.

A signal.  Were Gordon and Mary good to go?

“You should go back.”

Warren turned, then stepped to one side, revealing Fray, who was a short distance behind him.  She’d approached with his body blocking our view of her.

We backed away a little, and Warren and the woman advanced to match the distance.

“Cover your mouths,” Lillian whispered.  In case of more gas.

Fray spoke, “If I had to weigh in and say what was best for you, Warren, I’d say you should go.  Keep them out of my hair for two hours, we can consider your part of our bargain done.  Get a new body, see your family, piece your life back together.”

She was doing it again.  Denying me the footholds I needed to get a leg up on her.  How was I supposed to fight her manipulations when she was agreeing with me?

Warren’s head bowed.  The shadows covered his eyes, leaving only the blue reflections of the irises themselves.  I could read it all, the body language, the hunched shoulders, the tension that seemed to settle in him.

“You’re not going to, are you?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Can’t help someone until they want to be helped,” Fray said.  “For now, I’ll give you the support you need, Warren…”

Warren reached out without looking, and he slammed his hand into the door nearest him.  He didn’t blink as splinters flew out to decorate his custom-made outfit.

He tore out a section of the door.  An improvised weapon.

“…Even if what he needs is a good target to spend his anger on,” Fray said, quietly.

“You’re a better person than that, Warren,” Jamie said.  “Kids?

Fray said.  “As far as I understand it, and he’s a hard man to read, when he doesn’t speak, but this is my read on it… he sees you as symbols of the Academy, and Academy science, which is where the fault lies for what happened to him.”

Warren nodded.

“And you pretend you’re not good at being manipulative,” I said.  “Pushing him to go with us, knowing that the push would make him resist, push back, back into your fold.  Then you speak for him, you interpret things, and shape his thoughts in the process.”

“I’m not trying to manipulate him at all, Sylvester,” Fray said, still quiet.

I didn’t say or do anything in response to that.  There wasn’t much that I could do, in terms of options.  I’d been planting the seed for Warren’s benefit, but nothing suggested it had even gotten through to him.  The truth of the matter was, I believed her.  If she was manipulating him, it was by accident.

I studied her, watching.  She was oddly juxtaposed with the massive brute of a man, a young woman in a sweater and skirt, with high boots, relatively soft spoken, but sharp in dress, with the crimson lipstick and hair most likely styled by Lady Claire’s best.  He, by contrast, was loud in his silence, his body language and the threat of another flung weapon capturing my attention, dragging it away from anything else I might look at.

By the simple act of breathing, he made me watch him.

The antithesis of what the Lambs were.  We were a group, a network, and he was utterly alone.  We were brains, and he was brawn.

But, when I looked into those eyes and saw them watching, when I considered that he’d effectively taken Mary out of the fight with his first maneuver, I couldn’t think of him as brainless.  Not like Sub Rosa.

They advanced, we retreated.

“You portray yourself as nice, gentle.  You truly care about everyone you meet,” I said.

“I do.  I grow attached too easily.  The barriers got worn away by my Wyvern doses, along with my long-term recall.”

“But you’re going to make him hurt us?  So he can have the release he needs?”

“I’m going to let him hurt you because I don’t believe there’s anything else I can say or do that’s going to slow you down or make you stop chasing us, and you’ve clearly reached the point where you can catch up with us.”

Warren advanced a step.  Not because he was matching the speed of our slow retreat, but because he was closing the distance.

Gordon’s hand on my back moved, he grabbed my arm, and he jerked me to the side.  A knife flew through the space my head had been, sailing through the air, and passed within a foot of Warren’s head.  Ms. Fray stepped away from the projectile, though it was already pretty clearly going to miss.

“Ah,” Fray said.

Warren started forward, moving faster, and we ran.

Turning around, I had a view of the group.  Mary was hurt, and was relying on Gordon for support.  Something had stabbed through her sweater, and she was bleeding.  Again, we were faster than him.  Even Jamie.  Would have been why Fray used the stitched girl to bait us instead of Warren, now that I thought on it.

But, much as he’d done before, he made up for the lack of speed with his raw natural ability.  He hurled the piece of door he’d collected.  Gordon and I were watching, and the rest of the group was ready.  The section of door hit the ground in the middle of our group, bounced, and clipped Gordon, who nearly dropped Mary.  I put myself under her for support, my arms around her stomach, and my wrist seized up in pain as I put too much pressure on it.

Gordon recovered, I pulled away, watching over my shoulder.

No, correction, it wasn’t that he was slower than us.  It just took him time to build up steam.  He was matching our speed, finding a comfortable running pace.  The lights flickered, as they were wont to do, and there was a brief moment where only his eyes were visible.

He could see in the dark, I suspected.

“Have to slow him down,” I said.  “Mary-”

“Can’t throw.”

“Give me your knives,” I said.

She shot me a look, one that should have been reserved only for the worst class of people, like baby murderers or puppy-kickers.

There was a crashing sound behind us as Warren collected something else to throw.

“Give!” I said, more intently.

She reached under her shirt to her stomach and drew her hand away with three knives.

Extra knives in left hand, knife to be thrown in my right.  Sucked, when I was a leftie, but I’d twisted it or sprained it, but I had to make do.

I spun around and hurled the first knife, hard as I could.  The whole of my attention was on the movement, remembering what I was doing.  Focus, track, visualize… throw.

The knife chipped off the ceiling above Warren’s head.

I took a second to run and catch back up with the others, while doing my best to figure out what I’d done wrong.  Later point of release, then.

I turned around, saw Warren holding a section of door in both hands, ready to hurl it horizontally, and shouted a warning, “Down!”

The rest of the group ducked, some stumbling, while Gordon shielded Mary with his body.  I threw myself to the side as the spinning section of door flew past us, then went through the motions, throwing with a later point of release.

He raised his hand to ward off his face, but the knife sailed harmlessly past him, a few feet to the left.

With me stopping outright to throw and the rest of the group stumbling, he covered a lot of the distance between us.  I could see everything that was liable to unfold, whether we ran or whether we stayed and fought, and nothing looked good.

“Should have given the knives to Jamie,” Mary said, a few feet behind me, speaking under her breath.  “At least he might have hit something.”

“Resent that!” I said, my voice tense.

“Ditto!” Jamie said.

I passed the third knife to my good hand and took a fraction of a second to remind myself of what I’d done wrong.  The movements were fresh in my muscle memory and mind both.

If you miss, he’s going to hurt my friends.  Make it count, Sy.

I hurled the knife.

It sailed past him at eye level, a few feet to the right.

A knife slashed past Warren’s face, close to the eye, and he stumbled.

I looked, and saw Gordon.  He’d let Mary drop to the floor of the corridor, and was taking the knives she offered as fast as she could retrieve them.

Gordon’s second knife flew past Warren’s head.  Warren raised a hand to protect his face, palm outward, and Gordon seized advantage.  Two throws, one knife sinking into each palm.  Not that they were small targets.  Someone could have taken the torsos of any two lambs and stuck them together and the weight and general dimensions would have matched one of those mittens.

Two more knives.  One miss.  Another into the webbing between two fingers.  They were all sinking as deep as the hilts, when they hit.

Warren was advancing, Gordon took more weapons, and hurled them.  One knife bounced off, flying through a gap between Warren’s reaching hands and striking handle-first, the next slashed a thumb and went flying off to clatter to the floor, and the third sank into one of Warren’s palms, again.

Warren didn’t stop.  He drew closer, and we weren’t in a position to run, with Mary on the ground and Lillian leaning over her bag, with contents strewn all over the floor.

He’s protective of his head.  It’s the last part of him that’s still intact.

Mary had another two knives, but as Gordon reached for one, Lillian lunged forward, knocking Mary’s hand away, pushing a bottle into place.

“Head!” I shouted, as Gordon moved to throw.

The man’s hands were a wall in front of his face, and he wasn’t letting anything slip through.

Instead, Gordon tossed the bottle into the air, slightly forward, so it would hit the ground in front of him, snatched a knife from Mary’s hand, and then lunged forward, a full-body hurl of the knife, aimed for Warren’s groin.  It hit with the blunt side, but it was still a hard throw.

Warren, it seemed, didn’t have a particular vulnerability to strikes between the legs.  That said, no man alive wouldn’t instinctually flinch in response to that.

Gordon reached behind his back and past his shoulder, catching the bottle so it was behind him, then completed a throwing motion without ever having to stop and draw his arm back.

The bottle smashed against Warren’s face.  The man stumbled, hands pawing at his face, and then dropped to his knees.

“Won’t last long,” Lillian said.

Which was all the indicator we needed.

We turned, working together to pick up and support Mary, and then we ran, leaving Warren to paw at a door, his knife-embedded palms and fingers limiting his ability to grip.

“I would’ve hit him,” I said, a little bitter that my moment of glory had been stolen.

“We don’t have a week for you to learn, Sy,” Gordon said.

“Three more throws, I could have done it,” I said.

“If you’d taken three more throws, we would’ve been creamed,” Gordon said.

I didn’t have a response to that.

Glancing back, I saw past Warren, to the end of the hallway, where Fray stood.  She didn’t chase.  She didn’t give any sign of being alarmed, concerned, or bothered.  She simply stood there.

She had told us that she’d already completed her plan.  She was embellishing it, or extending its reach.  Seeing this, how she’d treated this as a whole, I believed her.

I believed that, barring exceptional circumstance, we wouldn’t catch her like this again.  She had a hostage, with Lady Claire, and she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

We’d lost.  We’d reached too far, too fast, we’d been caught off guard by the sudden appearance of the stitched girl, and everything else had flowed from there.  We were fighting blind, because we didn’t know what our enemy was doing.

We needed a win, on so many levels, in so many ways.

I switched mental gears, away from Fray, away from Warren.

We carried on to the end of the hall, and we reached the stairs.  A number of students were gathered around the distressed stitched girl, who was still tied to the railing.

“You!” she said, with much the same inflection she’d used when she had recognized us earlier.

“Hi,” I said, panting for breath.

“Escaped experiments on the loose,” Gordon addressed the gathered students, panting less.  “Students hurt.  Get clear!”

I saw a flash of expectation or excitement in the eyes of the young women who had gathered around Wendy.  Competition removed, more seats free, and maybe a little something beyond that.  Had Dame Cicely’s bred some sadistic streaks into the student body?  Were they that gleeful over someone getting punished, or the spectacle that might surround such?

But they did scatter.

In the midst of our running, I’d pulled ahead to the front of the group, my attention forward, on what came next, the plan.  Now, as we reached the top of the stairwell, I slowed, and the others made noises of distress and annoyance.

“Wendy,” I said.

“You,” she said, in that same inflection as before.

“Yes,” I said.  “Us.  We’re going to cut you loose in just a second, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.  Then she added, “The tea is cold.”

“What are you doing, Sy?” Gordon asked.

“Talking to Wendy.”

“Warren is comi-”

“Warren is the reason I’m talking to Wendy,” I said.

Wendy frowned at me.

“You told us you were supposed to help Warren,” I said.

“Madam Howell told me to,” she said.

I glanced back at Jamie.  He looked as surprised as I was.  We hadn’t actually had all the information there.

“That’s your job?” I asked.

“That’s my job.”

“Okay,” I said.

I reached out to Mary, and she gave me another look, but she handed me a knife.

I cut the string that bound Wendy to the railing.

“Thank you,” she said, very prim, “And you’re mean.  All of you.  You’re terrible.  Excuse me for saying so.”

“We’re very terrible,” I admitted.

“Sy,” Lillian said, “I hear footsteps.  He’s coming.”

“I know, it’s fine,” I said.

“Me, hurt.  I’m not fine,” Mary said.  “I think something snapped.

“Lillian will fix you,” I said.  “Right now, our concern is Warren.

That was all it took to get Wendy’s attention.

“Wendy,” I said, patiently, speaking very clearly.  “I’m sorry we left you tied up here.”

She stared at me, concern still clear on her face.

“But we did it for your safety.  Kind of.  People ended up getting hurt.  There was fighting.  Mary got hurt, and Warren did too.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“He’s going to be okay.  Because Miss Genevieve did such good work, didn’t she?”

“She fixed me up so nicely!  Some of the big scratches, they’re gone now!”

“We were talking about how good her work on you was.  And she gave Warren a body, didn’t she?”

Wendy nodded.

“Sylvester,” Mary said.  Her use of my full name was telling.  The pain in her voice said a lot, too.

I could hear the running footsteps.  Our pursuer wasn’t far, and he was most definitely coming after us.

I addressed Wendy, “I have something to ask you, and I want you to think very long and hard about this, okay?”

“Maybe not so long?” Gordon suggested, putting one hand on my arm.  I shrugged free.

I glanced at Gordon.  Jamie was standing behind him, and Jamie was keeping his mouth shut.  He looked spooked, but he wasn’t reminding me of stuff I already knew.

I had his trust, at least.

“Alright,” Wendy said, looking like she was prepared to give the next bout of thinking her full, concerted effort.

“Is Warren happy?”

“Happy?”

“Does he smile, does he laugh?  Is this… is this life good for him?”

Wendy’s expression faltered.

Warren was so close, now.

“We go, now,” Gordon ordered, grabbing me.

“You go, I stay,” I said.  “This is important.”

“You being with us is important!”

I looked to Mary for support, but her head hung, she was having trouble breathing, and blood was soaking through her clothes, running down her skirt.  She wasn’t with us.

Lillian was too scared.  Helen was Helen.

I looked to Jamie.

“I’m staying too,” he said.

That’s not necessary, I thought, but I couldn’t argue, because he was backing me up.

“Damn both of you,” Gordon said.  “Mary, give me some knives.”

“No!” I said.  “No.  Just… take Mary, get a bit of a head start, head for the room.  Jamie, you should go too, you’re not a fast runner.  Leave me here.  With Wendy.  We’ll manage.”

Gordon stared at me.

“Please,” I said.

He turned to go.

I looked at Wendy, and I reached up, taking the tray, before putting it on the ground.  She looked flustered at that, but visibly calmed down as I took her hand.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice small.

“We wait for Warren.  Just a few more seconds,” I said.

I would have been lying if I said my mouth wasn’t as dry as a bone, adrenalin thrumming through my veins.

Warren caught up, reaching the bottom of the stairs.  He’d pulled the weapons free of his palms, and blood had been smeared from the wounds onto his clothes.  He saw Wendy and I and he stopped.

“Is he happy?” I asked.

“He’s unhappy because of you.

“Is he really?” I asked.  “If I was gone, if you held me here and let him take me, would he be the same happy boy Mrs. Howell asked you to protect?”

“He wasn’t very happy then either,” she said.  “At the start, maybe.”

I knew Warren could hear us.  He didn’t move, just staring.  His reaction was more like I had a knife to the stitched woman’s throat, holding her hostage.

“I wasn’t dressed, then,” she remarked.

I shot her a look, then shook my head, “Do you think he would become as happy as he was at the start, if you gave me to him?”

“I don’t think,” she said, softly.  “I’m not very good at it.  I do what I’m told.”

“You were told to protect him.  Maybe that means protecting him from himself.”

“Complicated,” she said.  It was a negation, a stubborn refusal to understand.

“If he walks up here and hurts me, hurts my friends, I don’t think he’ll ever be happy again.  It’s crossing a line, and he may never come back.”

“Complicated,” she said, again, her voice tight.

“He’s not the sort of man that hurts children, is he?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “He’s nice.”

“You can’t let him become someone mean, right?  Mrs. Howell wouldn’t want that.”

“No,” she said, “She wouldn’t.”

He cares about you.  I can see it, looking at him.  So long as you’re around, he’s just a little more human.  He can’t cross the line and maim or kill if you’re here, watching.

“All you have to do to protect him from that, is come with us,” I said.

Something tells me he won’t leave you behind.  He’ll make Fray stay close, or she’ll have to abandon him.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

Warren started, taking a step up the stairs.

“This is the best thing for him and for you,” I said, and I actually meant it.  “Come.  Let’s run.”

I tugged on her arm, and she didn’t move.  I did it again, with no luck.

On the third tug, something seemed to fall into place.  She connected, or she pulled it together.

We ran, and Warren chased.

But at the top of the stairs, he stopped.

The shout at our backs was ragged and loud.

“Wendy!”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.10 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.10

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Warren didn’t give chase.  Wendy and I made our way to the room with the coats.  The room’s resident and her monster were still unconscious, but the others were already outside, standing a few feet away from the open window, a vantage point where they could see within.  The snow was falling all around them, it was dark, and the little light around the place cast long shadows.

There wasn’t any commentary as I reached under the bed, grabbed my jacket, scarf, cap, and gloves, and pulled everything on.

I glanced at Wendy, who looked like a ghost in more ways than one.  Fine, pale hair, a haunted expression on her face.  She wore a calf-length dress that was crisp and tidy enough it was almost a uniform, complete with a smock, and her hair was tied back.  I could see subtle differences in the color and texture of it, suggesting that hair had been transplanted – a stitched’s hair didn’t tend to grow, or it fell out faster than it grew in, and it was telling that she’d been looked after in that regard.

“You need a coat,” I told her.

“I don’t,” she said.  “I’m always hot, I-”

“You need a coat,” I said.  “You’re always hot because it keeps you healthy.  If you’re out in the cold, your body will have to work harder to stay hot, and you might run out of energy too quickly.”

I walked past her, stepping past the monster on the floor to get to the wardrobe by the door.  I popped it open, then rifled through the hanging garments until I found something suitable, a long coat of black, lab-grown wool.  I handed it to Wendy, and watched as she put it on.  Her movements were stiff, and once or twice she paused, as if she had to remember or puzzle out the next sequence of movements to put her arms in the sleeves.  I stepped in to grab the jacket and help it over her shoulder.

“It’s big,” she said.  It was true.  Two of her could have fit in the jacket.

I grabbed a long scarf from the closet, then wound it around her waist, cinching the coat closer to her body.

“Come on,” I said.  I saw her look back, the doubt on her face, and grabbed her hand, pulling her along.  It was a strange inversion of adult and child, the child leading the adult by the hand, but in reality, she was the innocent.  She was the key to all of this, our last hope in figuring out how we were going to address the Fray situation.

“Through the window,” I said.

I gave her a hand in making her way down, and the others moved to the base of the window to help her down.  She was a little heavier than someone her size should have been, and her movements were stiff.  I’d interacted with stitched in general to know that sometimes patience was required.

She’s not so different from me.  We lose what we don’t hold on to.

Except it was poisons that had eroded my faculties, and it was death that had eroded hers.

I wondered if Fray had made the same connection.

“Here we go,” Helen said.  “That’s it.  Lower your left foot just a little bit.  That’s your right.  There.  Good job.”

Good work, Helen, I thought.  I’d brought her here, but I wasn’t necessarily the person to keep her, if that was even possible in the long run.  Wendy would feel more comfortable in Helen’s company than anything else.  Gordon was a possibility as well, and Lillian likely had as much passing experience with the stitched as any of us.

Once Wendy was down from the window, I climbed out onto the snow-dusted windowsill and pulled the window shut.  I dropped into the grass at the base of the window.

The evening was cooler, which contributed to the heavier snowfall, but it still wasn’t enough to cover the grass completely, nor to do more than layer the trees.  With the sky getting dark, the odd and unusual trees of Kensford took on a more haunting appearance, jagged black lightning bolts with highlights of white here and there.  The cottage-like dormitory houses were lighting up within, and they were small enough that each little window of orange flame or flickering voltaic power had silhouettes moving within.  Young women were moving down the main streets in groups, accompanied by their monsters, but the sounds of conversation and footfalls didn’t reach us.

“I have questions, but it’s hard to ask them, given present company,” Mary said.  She was scuffed up, but Lillian had applied bandages and applied a shot of something.

Wendy was looking around, oblivious.  She seemed anxious, but not out of any concern for her personal safety.  When Gordon took her hand, she wasn’t surprised or spooked.  She took his hand and held it firm, not even questioning it.

Some stitched were made for battle.  Wendy wasn’t one of those stitched.  Someone could likely have come after her with a weapon and she wouldn’t have defended herself.  On much the same level, an enemy might be able to give her a hug without her even thinking of resisting.  There were vital parts of her psychology that were missing.

But Gordon being the one holding her hand helped.  He had always had an affinity for other experiments.  There were maybe four people who could communicate with Dog, despite Dog’s general inability to vocalize; Catcher was one, two scientists who maintained and looked after Dog were another couple, and Gordon was a fourth.

There were even some Whelps that he could pet without getting his hand bitten off, and the Academy doctors who worked on the Whelps weren’t even capable of doing that.

Gordon saw me looking at him and asked, “We aren’t being followed?”

“No,” I said, simply.  No use agitating Wendy.

“We can’t go back to the dormitory house with our stuff.  If Fray has any brains at all, she’ll send Warren that way.”

“It’s possible,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced.

“It’s possible, but you don’t sound confident,” he said.

“No,” I replied.

“Why?”

“It’s what you’d do in her shoes, but that’s not who she is.  She’s indirect.  She just revealed the big plan to us, she did it for a reason.  We got close, and if Warren doesn’t stop us, she wants us distracted, dealing with it.  It was always part of her strategy.  If we cornered her, she would distract us.  She doesn’t do the ‘direct attack’ thing.”

“She sent… you know who after us,” Jamie remarked.  “Twice.”

“Who?” Wendy asked, looking concerned.

“It’s okay,” Helen said, giving Wendy’s hand a squeeze.  “Can you hold my hands between yours?  They’re toasty.”

“Oh, okay,” Wendy said.  She looked happy to do it, and Helen’s smile brought out a smile on her face.

“The first time was indirect,” I told Gordon.  “She was trying to divert us, and it worked.  We had to deal with the medicine angle, we were distracted, led to chase her, and it gave her an opportunity to have a discussion with one of us.  This time…”

“This time?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “We caught her off guard.  This time, she didn’t expect us.”

“A cornered rat bites,” Mary commented, under her breath.

There were a few nods from the group at that.  Mary had been bitten as hard as any of us.

“I don’t like rats,” Wendy said.  “Not unless they’re the clean white ones in the labs.  Those can be cute.”

“Can’t they!?” Helen gushed.  “Did Miss Genevieve have any?”

“Any…?”

“Did she have white rats to help her in the lab?”

“Yes, she did.  I liked them.  There was one and it would crawl on my hand and I would pet it.  But I had to be gentle.”

“Of course,” Helen said.  “You’re so lucky, having hands as warm as yours.”

It was a silly, stupid compliment, but Wendy seemed to like it.

The rest of us were silent, watching and listening intently.

“She wasn’t mean to them, was she?” Helen asked.

Wendy shook her head.

“She didn’t give them medicine to make them sick or stick them with syringes?”

Wendy kept shaking her head.

“But she was paying a lot of attention to the rats?”

“No, not a lot.  But some.”

“Some?” Gordon asked.

“Some,” Wendy said, as if that was a complete idea.

“When you say some, do you mean it was once in a while, or were there other things she was more focused on?” Helen asked.

Wendy didn’t answer, raising her hand to her mouth, as if she were going to bite her nails, then pulled it away.  She looked between us, as if she was completely lost.

“You don’t understand, do you?” Gordon asked.

Wendy shook her head.

“It’s okay,” he said.  He reached out and put his hands around hers, which still held Helen’s.  “Do you remember what we were saying about the white rats?”

“We were talking about rats?” she asked.  I couldn’t tell if it was a question or if it was a statement she wasn’t entirely sure about.

She felt emotions, and the spectrum of emotions might well have been limited or more riddled with bumps and messiness, but that part of the brain was still intact.  She could think and reason and perform set tasks, but her faculties outside of the tasks she was meant to perform were hampered.  When it came to logic and interpretation, well, this very conversation had evidenced that a single stumble could take us back to square one.

No, I realized, looking at her.  A step back from square one.  She was anxious now, bothered.  She didn’t like being lost, and the combined efforts of Gordon and Helen weren’t enough to reassure her.

She was our sole source of information, but an interrogation couldn’t proceed like this.  We had to move slowly, carefully, and as gently as humanly possible, and we had to do it knowing that Fray was very possibly working on her next move.

“Let’s give her a few minutes,” Gordon said.

No!  I thought.

Then I reminded myself that his instincts were very often good ones, when it came to dealing with experiments.

“Okay,” I said.  “But let’s do something productive in the meantime.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we need to slow our adversary down,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and calm for the benefit of our stitched guest, “She knows we have the means of figuring out what she’s doing.  She dropped hints.  She’s ready.  If there’s a catalyst she needs to enter into the dynamic, or if there’s a switch that has to be pulled, a person that needs to be contacted, we need to get in the way of that.”

Talking in abstract terms and long words wasn’t helping matters.  Wendy looked more confused and alarmed than before.

Bring things back, Sy.  Connect it to something she understands.

“Our goal,” I said, talking more slowly, not looking directly at Wendy, even as I recapped things for her benefit, “Is to keep people safe.  We want to find Genevieve, we want to find and help Warren.”

I put emphasis on that last part, so the others could know just why Wendy was here.

“That’s doable,” Gordon said.

I saw a smile find its way to Wendy’s face.

“First instinct, each of you,” Gordon said.  “How can we accomplish this?”

“I go hunt,” Mary said.  “I can stay out of Warren’s way.  Maybe catch Fray off guard.”

Gordon and I exchanged glances.  I could see the doubt and concern.

A lack of trust.  Mary was hurt, and she wasn’t immune to making mistakes.

I gave him a nod.  We needed to do this, if only because Mary’s pride couldn’t take anything else.

“Okay,” he said.  “If in doubt, favor scouting over trying something.”

She nodded.

“Helen?”

“I’ll stay with Wendy.  We can go to the campfire, where you met the girls,” Helen said.  “We took the time to recruit them, we should use them.”

“Good.  I’ll either come with you or meet up with you shortly, we’ll have a good chat with Wendy.  Jamie?”

“Infrastructure.  The school.  They have to have measures in place in case of trouble.  Even if they aren’t obvious.  We just need to ask the head of Dame Cicely’s, or someone else in a position to know.  I know most of the faculty’s names-”

“From the book in the room,” I said.

“Yes.  I might be a little out of date, but I can get something in motion.  Soldiers, security measures, quarantine…”

“Too dangerous,” Gordon said.  “You’d have to go through the school, and you could run into Warren.”

“I was thinking we could knock on doors for the larger homes near the Academy,” Jamie said.  “Where the staff probably live.”

Gordon looked where Jamie was pointing.  The houses in that general direction weren’t taller, but they sprawled more, many had multiple trees on the property, and if memory served, they’d had more extensive gardens.

“Makes sense,” he said.  “Lillian, go with him.  You can fill in the gaps, you have the knowledge to know what the quarantine measures might involve.”

Lillian nodded.

“I’ll rally some of the people who we recruited before,” Gordon said.  “We can maneuver to limit her range of movement, now that we know where she is.  If there’s anything in the building that she can’t leave behind, then she’ll have to hang back-”

“No,” I cut Gordon off.  “It doesn’t work like that.  She said she already put it into motion.  It’s not something like that, and it can’t be something she needs to pack up, because she’s been moving too fast and too far.  She met Lady Claire and she made a connection, and then she moved in.  That’s a lot harder to do if you’re bringing a small lab with you.”

“You’re assuming she’s telling the truth,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah, I am.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think she thinks lying would serve any purpose,” I said, simply.

Gordon frowned.  “You’re romanticizing her.”

“I’m figuring her out,” I said, a little testily.  “Genevieve Fray is putting up a front, one that she buys into, at least a little.  That she’s doing the right thing, that she’s being fair, and being nice.  Anyone that gets in her way is the bad guy.  If and when she runs into trouble or if the plans fall through, or if push comes to shove, she gets to feel justified because she played fair, she was honest, and the bad guys were the ones who crossed the line.  That idea is worth more than whatever ground she might gain by outright lying.”

“Uh huh,” Gordon said.

“Which doesn’t reveal much of anything about the person behind that front, who might not be a good person at all, and who would feel no need to pretend,” I added, as an afterthought.  “But the Genevieve Fray I’ve talked to puts a lot of stock in being straightforward.”

“Uh huh,” he said, again.  “We need to talk, later.”

“Sure,” I said.

“For now, we go with your instincts.  We assume she isn’t lying.”

I nodded.

“Everyone knows where they’re going, then?” Gordon asked.  “We meet at the fire where the failed students hang out.  Mary, keep an eye on Jamie and Lillian.  I know it’ll be hard as you get further away, but do what you can to keep an eye on each other.”

Mary nodded.

It was good.  Telling Mary that in a way that let Lillian and Jamie know that the inverse was also true.  Keep an eye on Mary.

“Let’s move.  Close the net, let’s help Warren, best as we can,” Gordon said, echoing me, though the look in his eye was telling.

Fray is going to make a move, I thought.  I doubted we could stop it.  She was the iron fist in the velvet glove, gentleness and passivity on the surface, but force and determination lurking within.  The moment we had an edge, well, most fists came in pairs, and there was no velvet where Warren was concerned.

I looked at Wendy, and I could imagine Warren as the inverse of Fray.  He wasn’t lost or completely given over to his monstrous, brutish nature.  There was something gentle at the core.  Velvet was the wrong word for it, though.

We broke away from the other group, entering the edges of the woods that encircled the upper half of Kensford and Dame Cicely’s.

This was a route that Jamie would have been better equipped to navigate.  Without much light to go by and with very few landmarks, we were largely in the dark.

But the campfire was a place where the fire was almost perpetually burning.  These weren’t students who slept.  They were people without futures, or people who thought they lacked futures, and people like that didn’t sleep easy.  Even if death was metaphorical, a loss of all choice and greater hope, one didn’t want to squander their remaining days or months sleeping.

‘Ronnie’ was there, sitting by the fire, with a few monsters and two young women, less than had been here before.  Her surgically modified face stared down into the flames.

“You’re here,” Gordon observed.

“I’m managing things,” she said.  “Telling people where to go, covering important spots.”

“We need you to manage things in another direction.  We found her,” Gordon said.

Ronnie sat up, but the look of surprise on her face wasn’t a look of pleasant surprise.  She looked upset, offended.

“We’re not going to take this chance from you,” I said, quiet.

“You’re creepy little ones, eh?” Ronnie asked, in her odd accent, before settling back down.  “Stepping out of the shadows, talking about big things, like you know me somehow.”

You’re easy to readEveryone, deep down inside, they want something, they fear something, they feel hungers.  The amounts and the flavors of these things vary, but you wear it on your face.

“We don’t have time to dally,” Gordon said.  “How fast can you get the others to Dame Cicely’s?  She was in the basement labs, she’s leaving right this second.”

“She’s leaving.  Was she ever real?”

“Genevieve Fray was real,” I said.

“She was real,” Wendy echoed me.

Ronnie’s eyes narrowed.

“Do this, we put in a good word with people that count,” I said.  “Not for all of you, but for you, and the ones you care the most about.  I know you have some who are here just because, and you have some who are here, who truly belong, your allies.  Genuinely help us, succeed or fail, and I promise you you’ll get what you need.”

“Big promises,” she said.  She didn’t sound convinced.

“Your call,” Gordon said.

Ronnie frowned, then she looked at the girls sitting next to her, first one, then the other, talking under her breath.

They broke off into a run.  One hopped onto the back of the creature that had been slumbering behind her, hugging its back with her hood up and her head down by its shoulder as it darted off into the brush.  The other proceeded on foot, her pet lumbering behind her.

“Let’s go sit by the fire, honey,” Helen said.  “Warm you up.”

“I’m already warm.”

“We’ll make it easier to be warm,” Helen coaxed.

We gathered on the bench, while Ronnie remained where she was, watching intently.

I looked at the girl and raised a finger to my lips.  She didn’t give any indication that she’d seen.

“Genevieve was working on something, wasn’t she?” Gordon asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what she was working on?”

Wendy shook her head.

“What sort of things was she doing?” he asked.

“Things?”

“When she was in the lab.  Was there anything she focused on?  Things she paid more attention to?”

“I don’t- I don’t-”

“Okay,” Gordon hurried to say.  “Okay.  That’s fine.”

Too complicated.

She’d died.  Her old memories were gone, her faculties more limited.  Even if the brain was rescued promptly after death, death was death.  There was always some damage.

“Did she ever talk about viruses?” Helen asked.

Wendy shook her head.

“Bacteria?  Parasites?”

A pause, a frown, a few seconds thought.  Then, once again, a shake of the head.

I thought of something Fray had mentioned, then jumped in, “There are monsters in every town.  Did she talk about those?  About paying visits to anyone or anything in particular?”

The frown was deeper.  I saw the fidgeting.

I could have interrupted, before her thoughts worked themselves into a corner and something gave, but this one was important.  We had some basis in fact.  Much as I’d described to Gordon, Fray was obvious, she was direct.

“I want Warren,” Wendy said.

“I know,” Helen said, gentle.  She gave Wendy a pat on the shoulder.

“I want Warren,” Wendy said, monotone.

Repetition.  Regression.  I was getting anxious now, frustrated.  I understood, she wasn’t the first or the fifth or the fiftieth stitched I’d ever talked to, but we were facing a crunch, and now she was backsliding, falling back to safer mental processes and emotions.  We might not get anywhere at this rate.

“I know,” Helen murmured, again.  “I know, honey.”

“Look, Wendy, look at me.  Come on… there you go,” Gordon said.  He was pulling his jacket off, and then he rolled up his sleeve.  He extended his arm.  “I don’t know if you can see in the firelight, but-”

“Two colors,” Wendy said.  “My eyes aren’t very good, especially this eye, but you’re patchy.  Like me, a little.”

“I’m patchy, yeah,” Gordon said.  He offered a smile.  “You and I, we aren’t so different.  I’m kind of like a stitched.  Not really, but kind of.”

She nodded, paying rapt attention.  Her eyes didn’t leave his arm.  There were stretches that were slightly more tan than others.  Most of him, it wasn’t obvious, but on this part of the arm there was a length where a straight line marked the difference between two very different sorts of skin.  No scars, no stitches, just one kind of skin blending into the next.

“I really care about these guys.  Just like you care about Warren, okay?  I know exactly how you feel.  We’re similar like that, too.”

She nodded slowly.

“We had someone join our group, almost a year ago now.  Mary.  It was pretty obvious from the start that she fit in.  Not a perfect fit, but a good enough one.  She was different.  I don’t think you’re supposed to stay with us.  I don’t think you feel like you’re supposed to stay with us.”

Gordon made a point of looking over at me and Helen.  He was saying that to us as much as he was saying it to Wendy.

“I miss Warren,” Wendy said, again.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “You’re going to go back to him soon, alright?  We’re going to make that happen.  That’s where you belong.”

Wendy nodded, more vigorously this time.

“But we need to help him first,” Gordon said.  “We need your help to help him.”

Wendy nodded.

“What sort of things did Genevieve talk about, when she was working?”

“Chemicals,” Wendy said.  “I don’t remember the names.”

“Okay, what else?  What sort of things did she talk about when Lady Claire wasn’t around?”

“No,” Wendy said.

“Try again, Wendy.  What sort of things?”

“Lady Claire was always around.”

Gordon frowned.  “Okay.  Back to the beginning.  Things she talked about.  She talked about chemicals?”

“Yes.”

“What about ratios?”

“Sometimes?”

“Poisons?”

A head shake.  No.

No.  Lady Claire hadn’t been a true rebel.  She’d been surprised to find out what Fray was.

“Were they working on something to help people?” I asked.

The stitched girl snapped her head around to look at me, but didn’t give a response.

“A big project, something that would prove that Lady Claire deserved to continue being a student?”

“No?  Yes?  Sort of?”

“It’s okay,” Helen coaxed.  “Just say what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t- I’m not… not good at thinking.”

“Christ,” Ronnie said, under her breath, the accent slipping, “I haven’t seen many stitched like that one.”

I raised my finger to my mouth again, to remind the girl.

“She’s well made,” Helen said.

The frustration was getting to be too much.  I stood from my seat.  Fray knew we would zero in on what she was doing, the moment Warren conveyed that we’d gotten our hands on Wendy.  She’d put her plan into motion, to maximize the damage.

I paced a little.

Whatever it was, it was going to be disastrous.  Not a monster, not a plague, not a parasite…

“She said, she said that she was going to help the Academy,” Wendy said.

Helen, Gordon and I looked at Wendy.

Help?” Gordon asked.

“That’s… that’s what she said.  It was a big job, and Lady Claire was going to get credit.”

“But you don’t know what?” Gordon asked.

A noise in the bushes startled us.  A group of girls had arrived through the woods.  Some held lanterns.  The lights danced unpredictably, the shadows swaying this way and that.

A dark night.  The wind was picking up.

“Carriage just past the woods,” one girl said.  “What do you need?”

“Dame Cicely’s,” Ronnie said.  “Surround the school.  If there are any doors you can knock on or anyone you can pull from the lunch room, acquaintances, people you think might listen to you, do it.”

“Spread word,” I said.  “Let people know there’s someone dangerous inside, and tell them there’s reward money.”

“Big guy and a woman with crimson lipstick,” Gordon said.  “Search the woods beyond the school, and patrol the streets.  The big guy is hard to miss, and he’s lightly injured.”

“If you see a girl with ribbons in her hair, and it doesn’t look like she’s hiding, do what she says,” I added.

“Whatever they said,” Ronnie said.  “Go, and hurry.”

The girls turned and hurried back through the woods.

I hoped Jamie and Lillian were having more luck rallying help, or that Mary had an eye on Fray.

“You’re doing well,” Gordon reassured Wendy.  “You don’t know what it was that Genevieve and Lady Claire were going to do?  To help the Academy?”

Wendy shook her head.

It was so little.  Cryptic.

I thought of my earlier idea, of the monsters hidden within each small town in the periphery of the big ones.

Would she help the Academy by releasing one of the monsters?

Hard to justify, hard to explain.  Lady Claire wouldn’t buy into that so easily.

Something more benign, something that could fit into a lie.

“My head hurts,” Wendy said.  Her breath didn’t fog up in the cold, but there was a light haze rising from her body.

“Come here,” Helen said.  “Lie down.  Head down here, and get just a little way away from the fire.  I think you’re toasty enough.”

Wendy nodded, lying down with her head in Helen’s lap.

Was that all we were going to get out of her?  She still served as a hostage, in an abstract way.  It was amusing.  The Lambs, myself included, would put a human in the line of fire if we needed a hostage or if we needed to hurt someone to get a step closer in our goals.  It was somehow harder to do with someone or something like Wendy.

Not impossible.  Simply harder.

Better to use her as a negotiation chip, and a way to tether Fray.  Warren wouldn’t leave without Wendy, and Fray most likely wouldn’t leave without Warren.

“I don’t know,” I finally said.

“No,” Gordon agreed.

“No,” Helen said, softly, brushing at Wendy’s hair with her fingers.  Odd, that she was so gentle, but I had little doubt she’d be fastest to act if she needed to hurt Wendy to further our goals.

Well, going from gentle sweetness to murder at a moment’s notice was what she had been made for, in a way.

We sat in silence for a little while.

“We should go find the others,” Gordon said.  “Helen, you stay.  I doubt Fray is going to find you here, and we need to keep her stitched away from her.”

He was thinking along the same lines I was.

Helen nodded.

He and I stood, and we started on our way through the woods, back to the others.

“You wanted to talk about something,” I said.  “Me and Fray?”

“Are you thinking straight?” he asked.

“Do I ever?”

“You’re more capable of thinking straight than you let on, yeah,” he said.

We pushed our way through a thicket of branches between a set of trees.

“I want to beat her so badly,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  “A part of me wonders, though.”

“Wonders?”

“If you’d let her go, so you could have the challenge.  If, should the situation come down to it, you’d just miss, or make a mistake.”

I nearly tripped over something hidden under leaves and snow.  I caught myself.

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.  “Maybe with Mauer, I might, but not Fray.”

“Why?  What’s the difference?”

“Why are you even asking?”

“Because I don’t get you, Sy,” he said, tense.  “I try, I can put my mind to it and I can see how you think, with the angles and weirdness, but seeing you in the midst of this, your thoughts are ranging too far afield, I can’t track them.  We were complaining about the way the team wasn’t holding together, but you’ve unhitched the horse from the wagon here.”

“The horse is still hitched to the wagon, Gordon,” I said.  “And I’m sort of pissed you’re implying different.”

“Nah,” he said.

“Nah?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like you believe me.”

“Sy, relax.”

“The hell?  How am I supposed to relax when you’re questioning me and coming after me and suggesting I’d help her before I helped you guys?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“You’re being a dick.

“I’m-” he started, then he stopped.  “Hold on.”

I bit my tongue.  We moved in near-silence for a minute, pushing through frosted vegetation in the dark, the occasional leaf or twig crunching underfoot.  We were close enough to see the lights.  The entire Academy was alight.

It wasn’t that late, all things told, but it was winter, we were a little ways up North, and the days were short.  People would be at dinner.

“Jamie and Mary didn’t get along, when I paired them up earlier, remember?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Helen and Lillian, they’re not much of a match either, you know?  Lillian’s a little scared to work on Helen, even, after Ibott blew up at her a few times.  But they don’t play off each other well, either.”

“They handled the Sub Rosa thing pretty well.”

“Pretty well,” Gordon admitted.  “But what I’m getting at, is you and I…  I like you, Sy, I admire you, but we’re pretty diametrically opposed in how we approach things.”

I nodded.  He could pick up something and be good at it from the outset.  I could focus on something and get very, very good at it, given time.  He was maturing fastest, he was most physically fit.  I was lagging behind to an alarming degree, and I couldn’t even fare that well against Jamie in a mock fight, anymore.  Jamie, of all people.

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.  “Being different.”

“No.  No it isn’t.  We thrive in diversity.  I think that’s one of the Academy mottoes.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues.”

“Fair,” I said.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Sy,” he said.  “About Fray.  Because you seem to think you have a sense of her, and I’m not feeling it.  You’re making little mistakes, and that tells me you’re not as right as you think you are.”

I bristled at that.

“You can’t be a hundred percent right with her,” I said.  I thought for a second, trying to find the words with which to explain.  “She’s… she has no aggression, she doesn’t let aggression touch her.  If you hit her head on, she doesn’t fly back.  She just diffuses the impact, makes it wasted effort.  She shows something on the surface, but there’s a depth there she’s hiding.”

“You’ve got a look on your face,” Gordon said.  “Like you’re concentrating really hard.”

“I’m…” I said, but he wasn’t wrong.  I had all the thoughts and puzzle pieces in my head, the mystery that was Fray and what Fray was doing.  Wendy’s commentary was a big factor in making the connections.  Even behind the scenes, there hadn’t been an iron fist within the velvet glove.

I was feeling like I was on the cusp of something, just about ready to have the explanation fall off my tongue.

“She’s transparent,” I said.  “I keep coming back to water imagery.”

“Water.”

I nodded.

I thought of the sea monster within the river, that I had watched with Fray.  It had been sluggish, sick.

She had showed me, right from the outset.

The lab in the basement of Dame Cicely’s.  The water had been running beneath the school, fueling its projects.  She had access.

Water was the source of all life.

“She did something to the water supply,” I realized, aloud.  I pushed harder through the branches, now.

“What?  Hell, Sy, this school has the daughters of some of the Crown’s elite in attendance!”

“Something subtle, whatever it is, they’ve all already been dosed, damn it!” I said, almost running now, not caring about the branches that scraped me.  “And people are going to find out, because she’s going to inform them, and it’s going to be catastrophic!  We need to find the people in charge and we need to start running damage control right away!”

We reached the edge of the forest.  Wendy and Helen were safe in a hiding spot that Fray wasn’t likely to find.  Our eyes fell on a group of girls who were standing around the school, one of them was someone we’d seen at the fire.

“Tell the other girls.  They have to find the faculty, tell them to meet us out here, it’s an emergency,” I told them.  I passed the girl my badge.  “Show them this, they should understand.”

“You want to let the woman go?”

It was a good question.  We were playing directly into Fray’s hands, creating gaps in the perimeter.  Fray had known we would have to.

I couldn’t give the answer.  Doing it would prove Gordon right.  I looked to him to make the call, to decide.

Had I communicated well enough about Fray for him to understand this?

“If you have to,” he said.  “Prioritize warning people.”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

 

================================================== 4.11 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.11

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

The faculty of Dame Cicely’s Academy had a cushy setup.  The furniture looked like masterwork, the chairs were all padded and upholstered in Academy-created leathers, and the walls were alternately large windows with draping curtains in fine fabric and large ostentatious pictures with ostentatious frames.  Blue and silver were common themes to the room, and even the covers for the fireplace at the back and the lamps on the walls were stained glass.

There were ten members of the faculty in attendance, and several stitched servants, not unlike Wendy in quality and class.  Two young women were standing by, and one was the one who I’d given my badge to, with orders to collect the faculty.

All of us were present, with the exception of Helen, who was with Wendy still.  Mary stood on my right, Jamie on my left.  Lillian and Gordon had the lead, here.  Gordon was doing okay, but the rest of us were breathing hard; Mary was hurt, and the rest of us were tired from running around, trying to coordinate.

Fray was gone, and Mary hadn’t been up to a prolonged chase.

“Is this a joke?” the headmaster asked.  He was an older man, and he’d altered his hair so it grew in white, which was the fashion in places.  When seemingly perpetual youth became too ordinary among the elderly of the elite, a calculated sort of aging had taken over.  Unfortunately, the white of his hair had come in more like skunk stripes than salt and peppering.  His suit jacket fit too closely at the waist and his slacks were too narrow.  What drew the eye, however, was the androgynous face with the calculating stare, forever looking down on the people around him.

“The water supply was tainted,” Gordon said.  “And it was done from within Dame Cicely’s walls.  We just sent someone to go run tests on it.  The person who committed the act is going to inform the public and shift the blame.  You have a disaster on your hands, this is your advance warning.”

“You’re children,” the headmaster said, at the same time a bald faculty member in a heavy coat asked, “You’re sure?”

The headmaster shot the bald man a stern look.

“Yes, we are,” Gordon said, “And yes, we’re sure.”

I appreciated that he hadn’t felt the need to double check with me.  I wondered if he’d been as confident as he had because he really trusted me, or if he thought he couldn’t show doubt to our audience in this situation.

“You saw the badge,” I said, stepping around Lillian to make myself more visible.  Being in the middle of the second row made me easy to overlook.

“I saw a badge, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean,” the headmaster said.  He held up the badge.  “Radham Academy.  Your problems are becoming our problems?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Gordon said.  “Your entire student body may have been drugged.  We don’t know what with.”

“Suggesting it could be a hoax.”

“It could be a death sentence,” I said. “For all of your students, and for Dame Cicely’s as an institution.  If you misstep here, then there’s no recovering from it.  Your career is over.  There are too many powerful people with daughters and nieces here.”

“If I claim an emergency at the word of children and find out it’s a hoax, I lose all reputation.”

“You were alerted about Genevieve Fray,” Gordon said.  “The notice should have gone out to every police station and Academy.”

“Yes,” the headmaster said.

“Are you saying you weren’t aware that Genevieve Fray was tutoring your daughter?  Using her as an accomplice in her plan?”

“I wasn’t aware,” the headmaster lied, staring at us.

That shook my confidence more than anything.  The brazenness of the way he said it, almost sarcastically, mocking us.  Declaring to us that he, on the most basic level, didn’t care at all whether we took him at his word.  His gaze was cool and controlled as he met my eyes.  He had no shame, no guilt, and no doubts.

He knows full well what Fray was doing.

“This is a waste of time,” I said, to Gordon.  “We’re better off focusing elsewhere.”

“Where?” he asked, murmuring.

“Finding Fray?  Getting ahead of things on the ground level.  If we can figure out how she’s going to communicate to the citizens of Kensford, or if we assume she’s going to reach out to the other cities she’s been to-”

“Phone?” Gordon asked.  “A city as big as Radham has maybe twenty, a city this size can’t have more than five.”

“It’s a good starting point,” I said.

“What about birds?” Lillian asked.  “No matter how fast we travel, we can’t-”

“Children,” the headmaster said.

We fell silent, looking at the dandy of a man.  I eyed the badge he still held.

“You invited us here, you brought up a threat with no proof or details of what the threat specifically entails, it’s strange.”

“With all due respect,” Gordon said.  “The entire situation-”

“I’m due more respect than that,” the headmaster said, cutting Gordon off.  He strode forward, until he was close enough to Gordon that Gordon had to strain to look up.  “My students call me sir.”

“Sir-” Gordon said.  He was cut off before he got any further.

“I was talking, as a matter of fact,” the headmaster said.  “About the oddity of all of this.”

He’s stalling.  He knows Fray, he knows the plan.

Why?  What’s he doing?

“When I teach my students, I try to instill them with a certain mindset.  Wherever they go, whoever they deal with, they can benefit from what Dame Cicely’s Academy can teach them.  That, much as in the rule of the species, we are in constant competition-”

War?  Was he trying to defeat an opponent, or defend himself?

“-and we wage this competition on all levels.  For partners, for status, for reputation, for wealth-”

Commerce?  Was there a hidden profit in this?

“-and for more abstract things.”

Ideology?  Was he trying to prove something?

“Radham may be an Academy, it may serve the same Crown we do, but when the Crown’s book-keepers sit down and figure out who is contributing the most, well, let’s just say that Radham might well see something to gain in coming here to sabotage us on a small level.  Nothing too dramatic, because that could be considered treasonous, but an embarrassment?  Oh, imagine that.”

Politics.

It was politics.  I’d gotten through to Lady Claire by raising the topic, and Lady Claire was this man’s niece.  He was angling for something, with the idea of raising Kensford up and bringing others down.

The irony of his words.  He knew, and he was here, sabotaging us, by making us wait, keeping us from working against the problem.  He was the one aligning for political gain in the grand scheme of things.

He’d worked with Fray to do it.

I had a very clear mental image of this man, Fray, Warren, and Lady Claire all sitting at the table, having a conversation, about what the future held.

Was Lady Claire the pawn in it all?

“We should go,” Mary said.

“Maybe I wasn’t clear enough, I’ll try to explain at a level more appropriate to your age,” the headmaster said, without a trace of irony.  “I’m suggesting that you’re spreading lies to hurt this school.  It would be a very bad idea if we simply let you leave.  We’d be giving you free reign to continue spreading those lies.”

“What if we’re right?” Gordon asked.  “What happens then?”

The man smiled, and he lied again, “I don’t think you’re right.”

I stopped paying attention to the man, and started paying attention to the faculty around the room.  Seven women and three men, and their collective attention was fixed on the headmaster, not on the strangers in the room who were supposedly spreading propaganda.

He had them in the palm of his hand.  If he told them to lie, they would lie.  If he told them this conversation never happened, then it would be our say-so against his, and he had clout.

A curious feeling, realizing just how busy Genevieve Fray had been.  Had she known him from the outset?  Had that been how she’d got her foot in the door, found the person she would tutor, with room and board?  Fray had a powerful ally in the headmaster, and I had little doubt she’d established others at different points along the line.

“We’re going,” Gordon said.  He turned around, and started toward the door.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the headmaster said.  He snapped his fingers, and stitched manservants headed in our direction.  The headmaster added a quick order.  “Keep the door closed.”

“Yeah, we’re not going anywhere,” I said, not budging.

I saw Gordon hesitate, and in that moment, the stitched closed the distance and pushed the doors closed, before standing in the way.  Gordon backed away and shot me a dirty look.

“He still has my badge,” I said, simply, pointing at the headmaster.

“One of these days, I’m going to leave you behind,” Gordon said.  “Let you face the consequences your own damn self.”

“You know they can make another?” Jamie asked.

“They could, but that one is mine.  It belongs to me, not him,” I said.

“Of course it does,” Jamie said.

“We could have walked out,” Gordon muttered, as he turned to face the headmaster once again.

“No we couldn’t,” I murmured under my breath.  “They would have given chase, and you and I are the only ones who can run fast enough to get away.”

Gordon made an annoyed sound, but he didn’t actively disagree.

He was probably thinking we could have put up a fight, and that it would have been worth the risk, given what was at stake.

“We have a space downstairs where we can hold them,” the headmaster said, “at least until a guardian or a representative from Radham comes to claim them.  If we-”

“Can we drop the charade?” I asked, cutting him off.

It was rude, and it was intentionally rude.  We were dealing with a man who had power and was used to power, he commanded the respect of everyone in Kensford and the surrounding area, probably, and he considered himself invulnerable.  Cutting a man like him off would get attention, and if I was lucky, I might be able to provoke a reaction.

He didn’t flinch.  The man raised his eyebrows.  “Charade?”

“Guess not,” I said.  “Then you keep pretending, and I’m going to stand here and talk and look like a crazy person.  You’re going to let us go, you’re not going to kick up a fuss, and you’re going to let us run damage control.”

Gordon, Mary, Jamie, and Lillian half-turned, to watch me as I talked.  The headmaster had his allies, and he had more, but I had the Lambs.

“Is this where the threats to my life start?” he asked.

“I’m threatening your livelihood.  If you want to make this a contest between Radham and Dame Cicely’s Academy, then we’re content playing hardball.  Let me see if I’ve got this right.  Fray tells you that she’s got a plan.  She’s already laid the groundwork in other cities.  You facilitate her activities, you connect her to Claire, under the guise of Fray manipulating your niece, clearing your niece of blame, and Fray puts her plan into motion here.”

He had a good poker face.  It was somewhat infuriating.  I wanted to hurt him, if only to break the facade.  My frustration at having to let Fray go might have been coloring my perceptions.

“She told Lady Claire that she was going to help the Academy… and the only way that makes sense is if it’s the Academy’s plan.  The Academy’s formula or strategy or whatever else, and it’s not a thing that the common people are going to be happy with.  When the people rise up, Radham suffers, but your locals, they have money, or they have parents with money.  The problem gets fixed.  You come up looking like roses, and many of the other Academies struggle.  Your competitors struggle.”

He shifted position slightly, a faint rise of his chin, to look down on me more.

There were tells that were blatant, the folding of arms when a person felt attacked, and there were tells that stood out because a person who knew the art of body language and deception was trying so very hard to avoid giving a tell that they moved in the opposite direction.  This was the latter.

“Your mistake is thinking we’re going to blame Fray for this,” I said.  This time, I lied, and I was a far more committed liar than him.  “We’ve already put out word to various institutions to say that we don’t want anyone to raise an alert over Fray.  We’re keeping things on the down-low, because she almost certainly has some spies and moles in the Academy, tipping her off.  She’s a non-entity, and it’s easier to pretend she doesn’t exist than it is to spread word of her.  If this happens, Radham puts the blame squarely at your feet.”

“You’d let a fugitive get away with this hypothetical mass-poisoning, simply to make my life a little more inconvenient?” the headmaster asked.

“Damn straight,” I said.  Mary nodded, beside me.

Gordon nodded.  “She’s already slipped away, and this frankly fits her pattern.  I’d lay odds she wants you to take the hit.”

“I don’t believe you,” the man said.

Typical.  Person in power, so used to having his way, he can’t conceive of a world where things don’t go the way he wants them to.

I shook my head, “I don’t believe that a person can be in your position and not appreciate the human capacity for spite.  If we tell Radham that you did this at their expense, they’ll come after you.  You might be small with some real clout, but Radham is big.  They’ll destroy your reputation, and then they’ll come after your subordinates, and then they’ll come after your school, your legacy.”

“But if you want to try us,” Gordon said, folding his arms, “Arrest us.  Let’s wait this out.”

We stood there, waiting.

The man didn’t flinch, he didn’t show a sign of doubt.

I started to wonder if he’d physically altered his face or nerves to have better control over it all, to hide his tells and more precisely manage the face he presented to the world.

A full minute passed, and he didn’t give the order to arrest us.

I’d brought up his subordinates for a reason.  I knew he was aware of their gaze, their worries.  He had control over them, but he didn’t necessarily have their trust.  They would help him commit an atrocity, and cover up the fact that he’d worked with a terrorist to do it, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t trust him to genuinely care about them.

Or so I hoped.  More to the point, I hoped that he was insecure about whether they trusted him.

“Arresting you would be a hassle, honestly,” the man said.  “But I don’t want you here any longer.  I was kind enough to provide accommodations, with the idea that you would be passing through.  Please… pass through.

He gestured, and the stitched at the door moved away.

Gordon hauled the doors open.  I remained where I was.

“My badge,” I said.

“Sy,” Gordon said.  “I swear, if you don’t get moving, I’m going to run you up a flagpole and leave you hanging.”

“The badge, headmaster,” I said.  When he didn’t make a sign of moving, I added, “We’ve established that spite isn’t any small thing.  Don’t make unnecessary enemies.  You’re a very short distance from being on everyone’s bad side.  Fray’s scapegoat, the person who let down your Academy, the person who sold out his niece, and Radham’s whipping boy.”

“You have what you want, free reign to leave.  Are you throwing it away to offend my pride?”

“The badge,” I said, not budging.

He tossed the badge at me, so it would fall just short.  I stepped forward and caught it, all the same.  I liked the weight of it in my hand, and took a second to flip it closed and slip it into a pocket.

We turned and left, striding through the school.  Mary leaned heavily on my shoulder, which wasn’t welcome, though it was understandable.

“You have an idea of what Fray is doing?” Jamie asked.

“Some,” I said.

“Do share,” Gordon said.  He sounded a little miffed.

“Like I said, it’s something Kensford can bounce back from, because Kensford has money.  It’s something that’s going to enrage people, and it’s going to hit places that aren’t Kensford hard.  It’s going to hurt, given Fray’s feelings toward the Academy, and at the end of the day, it was something the Academy was planning to do anyway.”

“What is it?” Gordon asked.

“Control,” I said, simply.  “It’s what any power wants, in the end.  Control of everything.”

There was no need to elaborate.  We all knew about the Academy’s methods of control.

“Where?” Gordon asked.  “Where does she go to spread the word?”

“The dining hall,” Lillian said.  “Everyone’s eating dinner.  Everyone’s talking as a group.”

It hadn’t been my first instinct, with so many people around, but Fray was a bird of a feather here, a needle in a haystack.

If it was the dining hall, then it might well be too late.

Our brisk walk became a run.  Jamie gave directions.  When our battered Mary proved too slow, then he took over, willingly lagging behind, while Gordon, Lillian and I headed to the room.

The hubub of conversation had a tone.  Quiet, subdued, and concerned.  Even horrified.

The girls were gathered in groups, one or two to a table, huddled, talking, their focus on pieces of paper, one or two papers to a group.

This was the heart of the city.  All things flowed to and from it.  The substance that had been put into the water, the people, and now information.

That information was as damning as anything else.

Gordon approached a group, and he took one of the pieces of paper.  He read some of it as he approached us, handing it over to share.  It had been printed in large numbers by way of a printing press.  Something Fray had seen to in a previous city, no doubt.

Control.  An attack on two fronts, both things the Academy had planned over the long term, no doubt things that had been intended to be slipped past the public’s notice when the time was right, when distractions were imminent, or an excuse available.

The papers described the process by which men and women who imbibed the chemical would be rendered sterile.

Control over reproduction and population.

The process would be reversible, but those were keys that the Academy held, to be provided on a case-by-case basis.

The other form of attack was one we were too familiar with.  We’d been subjected to it, once upon a time.  For most of the population, the effect would be minor – Fray hadn’t had the time to give them too heavy a dose, but some of the fat chains that made up the cell walls would be composed of the modified kind, found in the water.  Left alone, they would collapse, and cells would die.  Sensitive tissues of the brain, lungs, stomach and mucous membranes would the first to go.  Symptoms would progress through pain, full-body bruising, system failure, internal bleeding, fatigue and weakness, and eventually lead to an unpleasant, undignified death.

The symptoms would be staved off by continuing to drink the water, but continuing to drink the water would perpetuate the problem.

“I don’t understand,” Mary said.  “The Academy can’t fix it?”

“They can,” I said.  “They won’t.”

“It’s too much.  People aren’t going to take it lying down,” Mary said.  “The Academy has a way to stop it, to cure the effects, don’t they?  They just say Fray did it, and they put out a fix, and-”

“They won’t,” I said, again.

“You can’t say that for sure,” Mary said.

My eyes roved over the crowd.  The horror, the anger.  I could already see distinctions forming.  Different groups with different reactions.  Some were shocked, as anyone might be, but they weren’t scared.  People with money, raised to believe that any problem could be fixed.  Especially those of the human body.

But there were others.  People who didn’t have as much money, those who weren’t sure they were in a position to buy a solution to the problem, buy the ability to have children and a way to move freely.  A way to move freely that likely involved bottles of purple pills.  These members of Dame Cicely’s student body were closer to the population on the ground, the farmers and craftsmen, the wagon-drivers and grocers.  They were angrier, more frightened, louder.

She told us, I thought.  Fray teased us with the pills.  All along, it was her plan.

There was an undercurrent of disbelief, as if this were a joke in particularly bad taste.

That would change.  This was a school of students.  Those students would do tests, and they would verify this for themselves.  The reaction after that would be terrible to behold.

Things would be bad here, but Radham…

Subjecting the regular population to the chemical leash, not just the experiments?  Denying a small city’s residents the ability to have children without the permission of the Academy and the Crown?

“Did she do this in Radham?” I asked.

“Probably,” Jamie said.  “She would have done it everywhere.”

“That means we have to go back,” Gordon said.  “Soon.  This is too big, and there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get back if we wait.”

The train drivers drank the water too.

The ramifications were too broad.  I clenched my fist.  It was true.  At any point in time, Fray could have simply told us, and we would have had no choice but to go back.

When none of us spoke, Gordon added, gently, “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

“You’re right,” Jamie said.  “Let’s go.”

We left the dining hall much as we’d entered, at a brisk pace.

There were things to take care of.  We needed Helen, of course, and then there was Wendy.

We stepped outdoors.  A whole crowd of students was heading toward the school.

They’d heard.  They were coming to read those same papers.

We headed in a different direction, before they could trample us.  One out of every four faces was haunted, they’d heard, they knew how the Academy operated, and they grasped the ramifications.

It would sink in with the rest soon.  They would contact their parents, and the rich and powerful who had sent their daughters to Dame Cicely’s would take issue.  The headmaster would pacify and massage his way back into good graces with promises of fixes or temporary solutions.

It wouldn’t be pretty, but he’d come out looking good.

“What was the guy’s name?” I asked.  “The headmaster?”

We crossed a road, and our heads collectively turned to look further down the street, where a number of people who most definitely weren’t students were gathered outside a church.  The shouts were audible, the anger apparent.

“He told you his name,” Jamie said.  “Headmaster Edmund Foss.”

“Don’t remember that,” I admitted.

The shouts rose in volume.

I looked, studying the crowd, but I didn’t see Reverend Mauer.  Churches were bastions of community, and in the midst of this growing crisis, they were becoming rallying points.  Not an idea exclusive to Mauer.

“Christ,” Gordon said.  “This is only just starting?”

“There’s going to be war,” Mary said.

War.

She was right.  Mauer had tapped into the public’s fears and resentment, but this was something else altogether.  The man would be having a field day, wherever he was.

War, the people against the Academy, with everything that entailed.  The weapons, the monsters, the crude attempts at handling the finer, more delicate matters.

How odd, now that I thought about it.  With the chemicals in the water, adjusted to affect everyone, we would have free reign.  The leash had been given a considerable amount of slack, and it was thanks to Fray.

Gordon slowed.  I spotted the reason why.

Further down the street, the giant of a man with incredible blue eyes.  Warren.

He didn’t charge, and he didn’t attack.

He was so close.  Did he know where Helen and Wendy were?

How odd, that he looked so calm, standing in the snow, as the rest of the city grew so heated and noisome.

“You want your stitched friend,” Gordon said.

Warren nodded, the blue eyes bobbing in the dark.

“We can negotiate,” Gordon said, and his smile was a grim one.

Again, Warren nodded.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.12 – Twig

Stitch in Time – 4.12

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Just an hour or so ago, Fray had been giving the order for Warren to attack us, to kill or maim.  Now we were following Warren to where Fray was waiting.  A little upriver from where we’d had our first discussion, near the edge of Kensford, where it bordered the woods.

There was a crowd further down the street.  They were moving toward the Academy with purpose, and we could hear the shouts, though I couldn’t make out the words.

Fray looked genuinely surprised when we turned up.  More surprised than she’d been when we’d turned up near her lab.  She raised one hand to move her hair away from her face, as the wind blew it forcefully in the most inconvenient direction.

It took her a second.  Something fell into place, and she nodded a little.  “You found them, Warren, and you brought them here, because of Wendy.”

Warren nodded.

“If you don’t catch a train soon, you’re going to be stuck here,” Fray informed us.

Now you’re being manipulative,” I said, walking up with my hands in my coat pockets.  I separated from the group and found a tree with a short stone wall built around it to contain the dirt, taking a seat on the corner of the wall, one foot propped up, the other on the ground.  “Setting a time limit?  That’s number one in the manipulation textbook.”

She shook her head.  “What is it they say about a thief being wariest of theft?”

“I never liked that saying.  Thieves deal with thieves as a matter of course.  If I’m going to steal, I’m going to steal from a thief who can’t go to authorities to complain.  It stands to reason that a thief is well justified in being wary.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I get the point.  I’m a manipulator dealing with manipulators.  And a manipulator is particularly vulnerable to the predations of their cannier counterparts.  But okay, if you want to pretend you’re not setting an artificial time limit to put pressure on us and position yourself better for getting Wendy back, I can play along.”

The other Lambs were taking my lead, spreading out, very casually.  This encounter with Fray was very different from the last one, and very different from my first encounter with her.  We’d lost.  She’d dropped her bombshell, and now, oddly enough, we could relax.

The shouts and screams further down the street rose in volume.  People had torches, which was almost laughable.  It was so iconic for the angry mob, but now that I saw it, I wondered if they intended to set fires, or if they simply needed the light.  How did that even happen?  Did someone have a supply of torches on hand, or did one guy just pipe up and say ‘I know how to make torches!  Just give me a few minutes!’

“You’re smiling,” Fray spoke to me.

I raised my eyebrows, the smile disappearing.

“Do you have a plan, Sylvester?  A way to snare me?  One of you is missing.”

It was Gordon who replied.  “No plan to capture, no snare.  Whatever we did, you have Warren, and he could hurt or kill several of us in retaliation for whatever we did to you.  Not worth it.”

Fray nodded.  It was common sense, really – Warren wouldn’t have brought us if he thought it would hurt Fray.  It said something, though, that she’d asked, bringing things up to sound it out and gauge our reactions.  A hint of insecurity.

If I had to reason it out, I suspected we’d shocked her a little by appearing in the school and forcing her hand.  Forcing her to use Warren, and forcing her to put her plan into action.

“Are you satisfied?” Lillian asked.

“We’ll see,” Fray said, leaning back against the railing that overlooked the river.  “I’m more interested in the long-term.”

“You’ve been at this since you left the detainment center with Warren and Wendy,” I said.

She smiled.  “Have I?”

Gordon spoke, saying, “It’s done.  You won, you don’t have to be coy.”

“I can’t just outright tell you the particulars.  I could lie, but I don’t like doing that.  We’ll both see how far the ripples extend in the coming weeks and months.”

“War,” Mary said, quiet.  “There has to be.”

“I think so,” Fray agreed.  “The Academy crossed lines.  I wanted to change it from within, that didn’t work, so I’m going to force a change from the outside.  War is one way.  Changing minds is another.  There are weak points in the economic backbone, there are weaknesses in the foundations of the Academy’s work… that last one might be a weakness I’m not clever enough to exploit, I have to admit.”

“And you tell us all this with the idea that we’re going to go back and tell Radham Academy what you said, down to the word,” Jamie said.

“I expect you will, Jamie,” Fray said.

“But you’re leaving out the next part.  You’re only getting started,” I said.  “Your real method of attack isn’t one of the ones you just described.  You want us to go and we tell Hayle or Briggs what you said-”

“You mean the duke, not Briggs,” Fray said.

I raised my eyebrows.  “Funny that you know that.”

“It’s not exactly a secret,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, smiling.  “You want us to go to Hayle or the duke, listing off all those different ways you could hurt the Academy, and when they’ve busied themselves frantically working to cover all the bases, you attack us from another angle.”

She shook her head, “Or I expect you’ll say that and I use one of the methods I just named.  The Academy is too big.  Something has to give.  You know full well that you each have expiration dates – Sy wasn’t surprised when I brought it up.  The Academies are an experiment of sorts too.  Just as they’ve done with you, they’re going to keep pushing until something breaks, and then they’ll change things, approach anew with learned lessons fresh in their minds.  I’m not saying this is a dragon that can be slain.  I am saying that it can be trained.  Even if we’re on opposite sides, you can’t disagree with me on that score.”

“Want to try us?” Mary asked.

Man, Mary was in a bad mood.

Odd, considering the fact that I felt fantastic.  I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I’d become caught up in Fray’s flow.  Stagnation was the worst thing, and change was something thrilling.

“You’re smiling again, Sylvester,” Genevieve Fray told me.  “My mental picture of you told me you’d be more upset.”

“Can’t cry over spilled milk,” I said.  “There are better things to occupy my thoughts with.”

“The forced sterilization and enslavement of tens or hundreds of thousands is spilled milk?” Lillian asked, quiet.

“Close enough,” I said.  “We went into this a step behind.  You had the files on us, Fray, you knew who you were dealing with.  You have moles on the inside who are feeding you information and telling you we’re coming.”

“Someone could read that as you being a sore loser, Sylvester,” Fray said.  “We eluded you, so there must be a mole?”

“I’m thinking you know entirely too much, and you know far too much that’s up to date, like about the Duke and the fact that Mary is a Lamb.”

“She was a Lamb in the spring, when I was introduced to your file.”

“A new Lamb, with no guarantee she would work out.  You didn’t know her full capabilities, but you weren’t surprised when she turned up or demonstrated her abilities.  Everything fits better if I assume you have someone in the Academy, passing on details.  An ex-classmate or teacher?  There are a lot of possibilities, especially for a would-be professor.”

“Have to make connections to make it up the ladder,” Gordon said.

“And you told me you took the Wyvern formula to build up your ability to play the political game.  You’re telling me you didn’t cover that base?  Come on,” I said.

Fray shrugged, smiling some.

“You had this decided long before we arrived,” I said, feeling very at ease.  “You had the information on us, and we didn’t have the information on you.”

“They would have showed you my file.”

“The file that doesn’t even mention that you were taking the Wyvern formula until it comes up in the your record of termination?” Jamie asked.  “Your files on us were better than our files on you.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “This was an introduction.  We’ve said our hellos, we’ve gotten to know each other, just a little bit, Fray, Warren and Wendy meeting the Lambs, and we’re going to meet again.”

“I hope it’s soon,” Fray said.  “The offer for conversation and tea stands.  So does the offer to leave the Academy.  We can work on the expiration dates, I can save Jamie-”

“Stop,” Gordon said, voice hard.  Jamie flinched – I wasn’t sure if it was because of Fray’s words or Gordon’s reaction.

“And I obviously have the means to free you from the chemical leash,” she finished, as if she hadn’t been interrupted.  “I feel like I have to ask again, with most of you present, in light of recent events.”

“Now that you’ve ‘won’,” Mary said.  “You’re offering us a spot on the winning side?”

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but yes.”

There was a long pause.  Warren shifted position uncomfortably.  The shouting further down the street was coming and going, but it wasn’t the same group – people were migrating en-masse, either to Dame Cicely’s or away from it.

Odd that people could be going in such different directions and be so similar in how they were thinking.

That thought in mind, I spoke up, simply to say, “I’ve already given you my answer.  No.”

“You’re a believer,” Fray said.  “I’m a skeptic.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“I can’t entice you by saying that my way is the harder road?” she asked, smiling.  “It’s more interesting.

“Hearing you say that is pretty telling,” I said.  “I almost believe you now when you say that you’re not good at manipulating people.”

“Ah well.”

“I’m staying with the Academy,” Jamie said.

Fray nodded, accepting that, but she spoke, “Even knowing that you might never get another chance to leave?”

I saw Jamie tense at that.  Even with his winter clothes on, mittened hands holding his book, I could see the subtle change in body language.

Lillian looked anxious.  She kept looking back between Jamie and Genevieve Fray.

“That’s how it works, isn’t it?” she asked.  “Sooner or later, you can’t know for sure when, they’ll keep what you give them.”

I clenched my hands in my pockets.  This was more convincing than anything she had said to me, specifically.  This was Jamie.  She was completely and utterly right.

Jamie couldn’t be saved, not exactly, but instead of having another year or two with him, I could have six.  Or ten.

“If any of us leave, they take someone else and replace us.  Same idea, another child,” Jamie said, his voice soft.

Fray nodded.  She smiled a little.  “It’s so nice to finally meet you.  I hadn’t imagined you’d be the compassionate sort.  I thought you’d be more stiff.”

Jamie shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

“Mary?” Fray asked.

“No.”

“No rationale, no points to debate?” Fray asked.

“No.  You disgust me, I don’t like you.  I don’t like standing here, being in your company.  I can’t imagine staying with you for a while on purpose, unless it’s to take you somewhere where they can put you down,” Mary said.

“Oh my.”

“I’m a Lamb,” Mary said.

Fray nodded.  “Gordon?  Lillian?”

Lillian was the one who answered.  “You have nothing to give me.”

“I could teach you.”

“So can they,” Lillian said.  Simple, firm.

“One-on-one, dedicated-” Fray started.  She stopped as she saw Lillian shaking her head.  “No?”

“I saw what you did with Lady Claire,” Lillian said.  “You have nothing to offer that I’d want to take.  I don’t think you even understand the ramifications of what you did.  People are going to die.  Lots of them, innocents.  People who drank this water and left the city?  Those who were just passing through?”

“People will get hurt,” Fray said.  “But the effects are diluted, they’ll have a few days.  The Academy will respond and get a stopgap measure into place.  Crateloads of pills or train cars of the fluids will go out in every direction.”

“People will die,” Lillian said.  “You said it yourself, there are no guarantees the trains will keep running.”

“The Academy can’t fix the problem.  A simple remedy for the effects of sterilization and the controlling agent would go against their very ethos.  They have to take control where it’s offered.  To survive this, they have to minimize the casualties.  I guarantee you, Lillian, the Academy will find a way to distribute a stopgap measure.  One that lets them keep this system of control in place, however much it hurts them to keep hold of the reins.”

Lillian shook her head.

I thought the debate between the two of them might have continued, but Gordon jumped in, and when he did, my heart skipped a beat.

I could read his body language.

“I talked to Sy about it earlier,” he said.

No, Gordon.

“I told him, if you made the offer to me, I’d accept.”

My heart leaped into my throat.

No.  I was not prepared to lose a Lamb like this.  Not so soon.

As Lillian had done earlier, I looked between Fray and Gordon, suddenly alarmed.

I saw the shock on Fray’s face, too, fleeting, before she masked it.  As Gordon was wont to do, he’d put her off balance.  He had a way of hitting where it hurt.

I saw the brief communication of ideas between them.  Him reading her body language, her reading his.

“That’s changed, I think,” Gordon finally said.  “The way you did this… it’s not a fight I’d want to participate in.  I don’t think I’d- when it comes to you, I don’t think-”

She found the words he was reaching for.  “You don’t think you’d have faith in me?”

“Not after this,” Gordon said, very simply.  I could hear the lie in the words.

“It goes both ways.  If only one Lamb joined me, I feel like it would have to be a double-cross,” she said.

“And it wouldn’t if all of us joined you?” Mary asked.

“If you were in a position to do that, it would be closer to an ambush than a double-cross,” Fray said.

She was distracting, turning the subject away from Gordon.  I could see him staring at her.

The two of them had communicated so much in mere moments.  He’d seen that she wasn’t ready.  Maybe she expected me to jump on board, or she had ideas on how to use Jamie.  Or maybe she had anticipated that when one domino toppled, the rest would, and the Lambs would join her wholesale.  If we were all on board, then we’d stay on board to stay together.  Our earlier discussion on the subject had suggested that we were a package deal, after all.

I couldn’t know for sure.  The interplay had been between them alone.

I wanted to say something, to joke, to step in between them.  I found my throat tight, the words didn’t come.

“Let’s talk about Wendy,” Fray said.

“Let’s,” Gordon said.  “I think we have a train to catch, so let’s not drag this out.”

I saw Warren shift position.

“You have something in mind?” Fray asked.  “I’m not going to turn myself in.”

“No,” Gordon said.  “I’ve been thinking about it, what we could do in the way of transactions, things you might agree to.  My first thought was that you should dismiss Warren.  Let the guy get some help.  He can have Wendy back, it’s clear they care about each other, he can heal.”

“And I’m left without my friend?” Fray asked us.

I found words, though I had to clear my throat to get them through.  “If you refuse, you might lose him anyway.”

Warren folded his arms, drawing attention to him.  He shook his head in a slow, dramatic fashion.

Or not.

“The second option, and this is one I think you could agree to, while keeping it meaningful,” Gordon said, “You take a time out.”

“A time out?”

“One year, you don’t pull anything else.  You don’t attack the Academies, you don’t perpetuate your plans, you don’t form allies, you don’t research for your next scheme.”

Fray frowned.  “That kind of adjustment was not in the cards.  It’s unreasonable.”

“Does Warren think so?” Mary asked.  She’d been watching the big guy.  I imagined she was thinking a lot about what she might be able to do if he picked a fight with us.

Warren didn’t budge.  He was frozen.  Not offering any tells was a tell in this case.

He didn’t see it as unreasonable.

“Three months,” Fray said.  “I don’t attack anyone or unleash anything.  I can gather allies and do research.  I have to, frankly, it would be disingenuous to say otherwise.”

“Six months,” Gordon said.

Fray didn’t look that happy with the idea.  “Four months.”

“Six,” Gordon said.

“A good compromise is something that makes everyone unhappy,” I said.

Fray gave me an unimpressed look.

She had plans.  This throws a wrench into them.  It gives the Academy a chance to recover…

Not much, not enough to undo what she did.  Not with possible civil war on the horizon.

But enough to hurt her.

“A stitched in exchange for time,” Fray said.

“Something like that,” Gordon said.

“I’d offer a handshake to seal the deal,” Fray said, “But I’m not positive you wouldn’t break my leg if I let you get that close.”

“I know about your retractable needles,” Gordon said.  “Sy recapped.  Let’s do without the handshake.”

She nodded.  “Until we meet again, then.”

“Until we meet again,” I said, before Gordon could say it.

I turned to leave, with only Jamie in my field of vision, only Jamie able to see my expression.

Gordon had been willing to go.  It hadn’t been a trick, no joke, no double-cross.  He was the most mature and independent of us, he was the one who felt his mortality, and apparently that outweighed his loyalty to us.

If he’d replied to say something about their next meeting, I wasn’t sure if I could have kept from reacting or saying something.

The next time they met, if something drastic didn’t change, Gordon would go with her.

I twisted around, avoiding looking at Gordon, instead fixating on the woman who was still leaning against the railing, rubbing her hands to keep them warm.

“Go,” she said.  “I’ll be here.  Send Wendy down this street.  But you should leave soon.  If the proverbial fires don’t ignite, then I’m going to start some, and you won’t want to be here.”

“Is the headmaster going to be okay with you starting fires?” Jamie asked.

Genevieve offered him a coy smile.

Bastard deserves what he gets, then.

We left to go get Helen and take our leave from Kensford.

The train came to a stop.  Not Radham, a smaller town.  I watched out the window as the conductor made his way down the steps to approach a man.  My eye traveled to a number of stitched guards at the entrance to the train station.  A surprisingly large number.

Was that smoke coming from within the town?  Were actual fires being started?

The conductor hurried up the stairs.  He addressed the crowd of people at the end of the train car, who were just collecting bags from the rack, or bidding stitched servants to do the collecting.  There was a murmur of conversation, hushed and tense.

Among the Lambs, we exchanged glances.  I averted my eyes from Gordon alone.

Only half of the passengers left.  We watched and waited as the others went to return to their seats, looking anxious.

We were silent even as the conductor approached us, bending down low in that way adults so often did with children.  His voice was low.  “A few problems have come up.  You were getting off at Radham, I believe?”

We nodded as a group.

“The man at the station says that word has come down the wire that a few of the cities and towns along our route are in crisis.  Do you know what that means?”

“We know what that means,” Jamie said.

“Yes, well…” the conductor paused.  “Pinesam, Evensroy, Radham and Berricksville are rioting, on fire, experiments were unleashed, or a combination of the three.  If you’d like, we’ll drop you off somewhere safer, the railroad will help you make accommodations and get in touch with anyone vital.”

“There’s no need,” Gordon said.  “We have to get off at Radham.”

“If you’re sure?  The situation sounds dire.”

“We’re sure,” Gordon said, in a way that brooked no argument.

“Take care, children,” the conductor said.

A moment later, he had moved on to the next grouping of seats.  He recited the same list of cities, informing passengers about the situation.

A full minute passed before Lillian spoke up, “Am I just crazy, or-“

“She didn’t visit Pinesam or Evensroy,” Jamie said.

“Are we sure?  Because-“

“She didn’t,” Jamie said.

Mary was turning a knife over in her hands.  I double checked that none of the train staff or other passengers were in a position to see, then left her to it.  We all had little quirks when we were stressed.

“We already knew she made friends along the way,” I said.

When we returned to Radham, it took a full fifteen minutes for them to let us in the front door.  It hadn’t been easy, with all the people pressing to get in, pushing and shoving to get us out of the way and be the ones to voice their rage and sorrow.

Five minutes of walking to get to the head office.  Lonely, with almost no souls out and about.  Everyone who was awake was elsewhere, working or hiding.

Once we’d reached it, we were left to wait for a full thirty minutes.  The ominous ticking of a clock further down the hallway helped to mark the passage of time.  It was very orderly, stiff, and calm.

In stark contrast, we had a view over the Academy walls, looking out on the sprawl of Radham.  Fires burned here and there, and bodies moved throughout the streets, black and red in contrast to a city that otherwise gleamed the silver-blue of a city in winter.  The sun was only beginning to rise, now.

We were given glasses of water by a student, and I stared long and hard at it before drinking.  I thought of Fray.

I still couldn’t look at Gordon, and I knew he’d noticed.  He knew me and I knew him well enough that we both knew why.  We could communicate on that level just like he could with Fray.  In my restlessness, I’d stood and paced away from the others, walked down the hall to look out other windows and see my city on fire from a variety of angles.

Gordon could have stood and approached, he could have said something, made excuses, shared his thoughts, and I might have forgiven him.

So ironic, considering he’d been the one to spout words about the cohesion of the team.

The rest of us were better now.  We’d reaffirmed our bonds in standing against Fray.  Any fractures were better.  Except for Gordon.

It made me feel sick, it made me angry, it made me feel helpless, and I hated feeling helpless.

When Hayle finally stepped out of the room, I practically wheeled on him, as if I was ready to attack.

“See to your appointments,” he said.  “I’ll debrief you individually, before, during, or after you’ve been looked to.  I have other things to focus on.  Helen?  You’ll find Ibbott in the Bowels.  Lillian, go get some rest.  I’ll send someone to let you know where you’re needed.”

With that, he closed the door in our faces.

It was, coming from a man who had a way of being composed, something of a shock.

We broke away, Lillian and Helen breaking away.

Gordon walked alone, not with us, and he walked faster, leaving us behind.

I exchanged looks with Mary and Jamie.

“What happened?” Mary asked quiet.  “Did I-”

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“It wasn’t you,” I said.

“We failed.  I failed.  If I hadn’t gotten hurt, if I could have gotten the drop on them, or hunted them after-”

“Like I told Fray, this was our introduction.  We’ll see her again.  This time we know who and what she is.”

Mary nodded.

“You’re going to be okay?  With your appointment?” she asked.

I nodded.  I felt less apprehensive about it than ever, oddly enough.  Dealing with Fray had changed my perspective in some small ways.

“I don’t want to go,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow.  Mary didn’t want to go, when she loved her appointments.  They were a chance to show off, to show her coordination, skill retention, fitness…

“Would it be better if you were in a room near ours?” Jamie asked.

Mary, as a new addition, had her appointments in the tower, but she was on a different floor than we were.

She nodded.  “Feels dumb when you say it out loud, though.”

“Hur hur,” Jamie said, speaking in a ‘dumb’ deeper voice.

She reached past me to give him a playful shove, bumping me in the process.

She’s lonely, and she doesn’t like a ‘loss’She senses something’s wrong, and she wants to be part of the group, in the midst of it.

She was a Lamb, through and through.

When she reached past me to swat at Jamie’s ponytail, or to pull the string from around the base, I put an arm around her.  She stopped, a little confused.

“It’s a hug, dum-dum,” I said.  “Half of one, anyway.”

“I have knives, Sy,” she said, “You don’t get to call someone dum-dum when they have knives.”

But she was smiling.  She messed up my hair.

Jamie and I watched as she took the side hallway, heading to her lab.  Jamie gave her a wave.

I saw how Jamie walked, the way he held his book.

“She didn’t ask how you felt about your appointment,” I noted.

“Nope.  It’s not being poisoned, though.”

I nodded.  “Do you want me to sit and wait?”

He didn’t respond right away, but I did see a nod out of the corner of my eye.

“I can do that,” I said.

Fray got to him.  Talking about the dangers.

We reached Jamie’s laboratory.  Project Caterpillar.

I took the book as he handed it to me.

The doctors were already waiting, and they flocked to him as he entered the room.  I remained in the doorway, watching, too far away to make out words in the jumble of voices, hugging his book to my chest

Jamie disrobed.  He pulled off his sweater and the shirt beneath, then unbuttoned his belt.  It wasn’t that he felt so casual about his nudity here, but more that there was no choice.

The scars and the ridges carried down his entire body.  They were more pronounced along his spine and between his legs, to the point that there was nothing left that was even remotely recognizable.

He half-turned, seeing me looking, and he didn’t flinch, he didn’t hide.  He handed one doctor his glasses, and undid his ponytail.

Switches were flicked.  Lights went on around the room.  Large glass containers were lit up, with gray-pink blobs within.  Brains, the largest as big around as I was tall.  Each one was connected to the next, a chain.

A caterpillar, in a way.  Segmented, promising a future transformation.  Just what that would be remained to be seen, but all I knew was that there wouldn’t be a caterpillar anymore.

Jamie made his way up a slight dias to his throne.  The chair had machinery worked into it, metal blades that weren’t sharp, with bundles of wires running from them, into the first glass tank.

I looked away as they started plugging the individual blades into the slots and gaps in Jamie’s modified, extended spine, along his arms, and beneath his hairline.

I flinched as the switch was thrown, and the lights flickered.

He was giving them all of the information he had gathered, storing it in the tanks.  They would, fingers crossed, give it back, helping him to organize, consolidate, and structure it.

One day, as Fray had said, they wouldn’t be able to give it back.

I turned my back on the scene, my eyes on the fires and the crowds, but I did stay with him for the remainder of the appointment.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 4.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 4)

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The old man stared out the window as he talked.  The rain was coming down hard.  Cups clinked softly as tea was poured, while the rain beat a drum on the roof.  The entire building creaked with the way the wind blew the branches that extended from the outside.

“We need soldiers,” he said.

“We have soldiers,” Cynthia replied.  She was dressed in the latest fashion, with a shorter dress and a long jacket that hugged her body, corset-like bindings closing it at the front.  “We have three men for every one the Academy is prepared to field.”

Avis shook her head, “They have experiments, and regiments of stitched prepared for war.  Even with the sabotage, one stitched is worth ten soldiers.”

“I’d argue that,” Louis said.  He was seeing to the tea.  He looked like a proper hunter, with a plaid print to his jacket, the red and the black matching to his maroon slacks and fine leather boots.  He was an odd pair, put next to Percy.  Louis’ build was barrel-chested and muscular, he was clean-shaven, and his ginger hair was wavy, though cut in a flattering way.  Percy was narrow, pale in complexion, with his straight black hair slicked back from a widow’s peak, his beard combed and mustache waxed, an early gray at the temples and corners of the mouth.

The old man favored a more moderate approach.  Louis attracted attention because he was a manly sort, Percy because he was a scholar, likely the sort of teacher many schoolgirls had been enamored with, before the touch of grey reached his hair.  The old man walked a middle ground, where he could go unnoticed in virtually any place in Radham.

“I’m sorry, Louis, but I agree with Avis,” Percy said, picking up one cup of tea and walking over to hand it to Avis.

One or two members of the group snuck looks at the old man.  He could see out of the corner of his eye.

“Avis is right,” the old man said.

Tea in hand, smiling, Avis took a seat in the corner, dropping down with enough force that the birdcage next to her rocked, the occupants protesting shrilly.  She put out one hand out to steady the cage, then set her tea down, one ankle folding over the other.  Her dress was ten years out of fashion, following the lines of her body down to the ankle, a vest keeping the ruffles contained to the collar and the sleeves, but her hair and horn-rimmed glasses were in vogue.

“You’ll have to say why,” Cynthia suggested.

“Avis can explain,” the old man said.  He was more than capable, but he needed to curry favor where he could, and this would be one of the last times he interacted directly with the woman.  Avis was too important.  She was only one step away from being in complete control of all communications within Radham Academy, and she was charged with many of the more covert ones, the ones that necessitated flying messengers.

Avis liked to take her time before making a statement, which was a predilection that matched her other job well.   Everyone in the room waited, some patiently, some impatiently, for the woman to speak.

The old man quietly thanked Percy as tea appeared on the small table by the window.

“Have you ever seen a real fight, Cynthia?” Avis asked, sounding more than a little arrogant.

“I’ve been in more real fights than I could count.  It is, in fact, a large part of what Louis and I do here.”

“I’ll rephrase.  Have you seen a battlefield?  War?”

Cynthia shook her head.

“I have,” Louis said.

“With humans?” Avis pressed.

“I was one of those humans.  You know this.”

“From my experience on battlefields, I know that when you send men into a fight, they’re scared.  If you tell them they have to shoot or be shot, many will not shoot.  Humans naturally trend toward wanting to survive and being part of a group.”

“And war doesn’t support either of the two?” Cynthia asked.

“War most definitely supports both,” Avis said.  “However, it should be stressed that fighting in a war doesn’t.  The difference feeds the endless restlessness between the nobility and the people.”

“How very clever,” Cynthia said, in a droll tone.

“In an actual war, you’ll see two or more groups of people trying to poke their head up out of cover, work up the courage to aim their weapon and then pull the trigger to kill the other person.  You have to twist their arms to make them go over the breach, you play on ideology, or you convince them, and I do very much mean convince them, that they have no other choice.  A stitched has no such reservations.  A stitched doesn’t tend to stop and turn tail when his friend next to him gets gunned down.”

“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Louis said.  “It’s easy to lose an entire regiment to the same machine gun, if the man giving orders isn’t prepared.  There are tradeoffs.  The Academy needs infrastructure.  While the war is ongoing, they won’t have it.”

Avis sipped at her tea, then said, “We agree there.  The logistics of it all… so long as we have the roads blockaded and bombed, they can’t move from A to B.  Without the trains and wagons coming in from the farms on the outskirts, they can’t eat or feed their experiments.”

“But,” Cynthia said, “you said we need soldiers, Godwin?  You’re not confident?”

It was a question she asked while already knowing the answer.  She was very much in his camp, and she was informed.  He had talked to her about this before.

Godwin took the question as his excuse to turn and face the occupants of the room.  “No, I’m not confident.  Things are still preliminary, the people are on our side, but we’re not moving forward, and the Academy is figuring out solutions.  It’s what they do.  The Academy retook Westmoreland.”

“The mountains of Columbia are the Academy’s primary mining operation in the west,” Cynthia said, for the benefit of the others present.  “Westmoreland, Columbia is the second highest producer of weapons for the Crown States.  For as long as they have it operational, they’re going to be armed.”

Godwin nodded.  “It’s a coup for them.  They’re going to start retaking ground.  On the large scale, with Westmoreland, and on the small scale, here.  They’re nosing around, looking for us, specifically, and they’re getting close.  There were advantages to being in Radham, our close contact with Avis foremost among them-”

“Thank you,” Avis said, preening.

“-But the risks are too great.  We were able to lead things in the abstract, now we need to be more direct.  We’ll need to split up.  Each of us in a different city.  To be effective whilst we’re doing that, we’ll need soldiers.”

“And the regular rank and file won’t do?” Louis asked.

“Those are men.  I believe we need more capable individuals.  As of right now, odd as it may sound, Academy dropouts and individuals like Mr. Percy here are in higher demand than the best the Academy has to offer.  The Academy’s people currently have no other choice but to work for the Academy, but the people who have the knowledge and lack the loyalty… they can be swayed to either side, and they’re favoring ours.”

He had the rapt attention of everyone present.  Louis seemed most comfortable hearing all of this, and was busy pouring himself another cup of tea.

“I’ll reach out, speak to some people, and I’ll have the money.  What I need you to do right now is find the people with the necessary skills.  The Academy has been quietly removing quite a number of them.  Mr. Percy was one close call in that respect.  We’ll find them and make them offers they can’t refuse.  If the money doesn’t sway, quietly let them know we have the knowledge, and if you feel they’re worth the risk, we’ll go a step further and actually tell them who we are, inviting them to the inner circle.”

The others nodded.

“I’ll miss this,” Cynthia said.  “Losing the more intimate setting, having a voice without shouting.”

“I can’t imagine you shouting,” Percy said.

Cynthia smiled at that.

“For the time being, focus on staying safe, make sure you aren’t being followed, particularly by Dogs.”

“Or little children,” Percy said, frowning.

“Especially little children,” Godwin agreed.  “Louis.  A man named Reverend Mauer is managing one of the larger and more successful revolutionary groups.  I think you and he would complement each other nicely.  Would you reach out?”

“I can.”

“And Cynthia, we’ve already discussed it-”

“Already doing what I can.  They’re slippery, and they don’t want to be found.”

Godwin nodded.  “Percy?  Keep doing what you’re doing.”

“I’d like to think I’m making soldiers rather than recruiting them,” Percy said.

“You are, indeed,” Godwin said.  He took a sip of his tea.  “The most dangerous time and place for you is when you’re on your way from Radham to your new accommodations.”

“Which are where?” Avis asked.

“I’ll let you know in private,” Godwin said.  He frowned.  “From here on out, we’re operating in cells.  I trust each of you.  Do as you deem appropriate.  You’ll each be in touch with one other cell.  If you find you can’t reach them, then and only then should you reach out to me or Avis.  Make preparations.  We’ll meet in the morning, I’ll let you know particulars, and you’ll each leave.”

“So soon,” Cynthia said.

“Right now, we’re safe, we’re free, we have control of the roads and the railroad.  In two days, that might change,” Godwin said.

Cynthia frowned, but she didn’t argue.

The others were already standing, and the ones who weren’t wearing jackets pulled some on, with many getting umbrellas.  Cynthia lagged behind the rest.

“Thank you, by the by, for the tea, Louis,” Godwin said.  “I enjoyed that one.”

“You’re very welcome,” Louis said.  “I left you a small box of the teabags.”

“Good lad,” Godwin said.

Percy and Louis left together, with Avis a few paces behind.

The door clicked shut.

Cynthia took a moment to pick up the scattered saucers and teacups, holding two in each hand on her way to the little sink.

“Something on your mind?” Godwin asked.

“Percy.”

“Ah.”

“We told him that all of his creations were destroyed by the Lambs.  If he discovers that they recruited one of them…”

“He’s very passionate, whatever he expresses on the surface.”

“He is.”

“What a very inconvenient man.”

“A very good way of putting it,” she said.

“I’d hoped to discard him, but he has a damnable way of making himself essential.”

“I’ll watch him,” she said.  “I just wondered if you had any thoughts.”

He went through the little building and extinguished lights, then pulled on his raincloak.  He joined her in exiting the building.

They were joined by the pair of experiments that had been standing in the hallway.  Cynthia’s.  The things were tall, narrower around than even the lithe Cynthia, and draped in rain cloaks that dragged on the ground.  Each had large eyes and bat’s ears placed on otherwise underformed and unadorned faces.  Chinless, noseless, the mouths frozen in a perpetual expression of a child that had just put a ball through a stained glass window.  Neither blinked as rainwater ran down from their too-short foreheads and over the balls of the eyes, or even bounced off the orbs themselves.

Radham glowed, even at night.  Temporary lamps with flickering bioluminescent lights within were placed at regular intervals between the regular lights, giving the patroling squadrons of stitched soldiers a better view of the surroundings.  It was only approaching sundown, but the rain came down hard, and the gloom gave the impression of a later hour than it really was.  Bridging the gap between winter and spring, it was an especially cold rain, cutting right through the raincloak, flesh and muscle to dig into the bone.

The eyes of a dozen stitched soldiers watched as the two of them walked down the length of the street, unblinking.  The heads of the stitched moved slowly to track them, each of them moving in unison.

The riots had been quelled, but the fact that Radham needed to keep a boot on the throat of this downed enemy was a win.  It bred resentment, and it limited how freely Radham could move.

Cynthia spoke up, when they were out of earshot of the stitched.  “I was thinking.  Lambert Academy, in Greysolon?”

Godwin casually looked around to make sure they were alone.  It was probably safer than being indoors, he had to admit.  The bat-eared experiments were on the alert, and the rain made for a lot of cover.

“A win for us, as much as Westmoreland was a win for them.”

“A win might be understating it.  Lambert academy burned, the people that weren’t burned alive were rounded up, made to kneel, and put to the knife.  It was symbolic, something the other revolutions could aspire toward.”

Godwin grimaced.  “Bullets would have been kinder.”

“Bullets are precious to some.”

“What got you thinking about Lambert?”

“Most burned or faced the knife, but not all.  There have been rumors about a set of Lambert’s experiments roaming around.  I asked Avis, and she doesn’t think they’ve been in touch with any of the other Academies.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking they might not be particularly attached to the other Academies.  They’re almost human, they’re functional, they can work and earn food and shelter, but I can’t imagine it’s easy for them.  It’s not what they’re meant to do.”

“What are they?”

“Lambert’s clean-up.  Lambert doesn’t have enough work, so it sends them out here and there.  They’re more about the kill than the capture.  Four individuals.”

“What’s the difficulty?”

“If I’m wrong and I reach out, they’ll come after me.”

“You’ve dealt with worse, Cynthia.”

There was a pause.

“No?” he asked.

“If they came after me, I’m not certain I could survive it.”

“Then play it safe.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t sound convinced they could be swayed.”

She shook her head, shifting her umbrella to her other hand, “I’m not.”

There was another group of stitched at the end of the block.  They were accompanied by a creature that stood twice as tall as a man.  Even from the other side of the street, Godwin could smell it.  A chemical smell.

“Curfew,” one stitched called out, sounding more like he was imitating the way it sounded than actually uttering the word.

Cynthia offered a little bow and flourish in response.

“Curfew!” the stitched hollered the word, emphasizing the wrong syllable, raising his voice to be heard as they continued walking, the stitched falling behind them now.  “Soon!  Bell tolls!”

Too dumb to realize she had been acknowledging it.

He felt uncomfortable and unhappy, the words ringing in his ears.

“I long for simpler times,” he said, abstractly.

“You’re not quite that old,” Cynthia said, patting his arm.  “There were stitched when you were born.”

“Not so many.  I’ve watched it all unfold.  The rate of growth has been startling.  I worry sometimes that you and the others don’t understand just what you’re facing.  The cost, if we don’t get ahead of this.”

“We value your pessimism,” she said.

He smiled.  “It’s saved us once or twice.”

“We all have reasons for doing this,” she said.  “Greater ones and personal ones.”

“You have your personal reasons,” he said.

“I do?” she made it a question.  Not because she wasn’t sure, but because she was wondering why he’d brought it up.

“Will that be a problem, if your search proves successful?  Will you be able to understand someone with greater ones?”

“The woman that provoked the war?  We’ll have to see,” Cynthia said.

“I worry,” he said.  “If this was her first move, what is the next one?”

“And will we be caught up in it?  I’ll look for her, Godwin.”

He smiled.

They’d reached his building, which was large but a touch ramshackle, in a less than stellar neighborhood.  The important thing was that it was unassuming.  Cynthia waited and watched, her pets standing there, heads slowly turning left and right, ears up and out, listening to every raindrop.

He opened the door, and stepped inside.  Experiments stood on either side of the doorway.  Cynthia’s, again.  Sentries, knights clad in armor that grew like a bug’s exoskeleton.

He didn’t like it, but some things were necessary.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

Cynthia smiled and waved, leaving, her pets following behind.

To all appearances, a coquette.  Louis was a soldier’s son, the man had moved on to active military service, lying about his age to get in sooner.  Cynthia was different, almost the opposite.  She had had no family, no guidance, and she had raised herself on ugly streets overseas, where gutters had literally run red with blood, and where experiments had been piled so carelessly on trash heaps beneath the Academies that they overflowed into the city, some still alive, others dangerous despite being dead.

All she had needed was a little refining.

He walked through the house, casually moving past the myriad traps that he and Cynthia had placed.  He was here so rarely, the minor inconvenience hardly mattered.  More sentries were stationed throughout the house, many shuffling faintly as they sensed the activity and exited their hibernation states.

He walked into the washroom and stared at himself in the mirror.

Cynthia knew him better than anyone else, she knew how he thought.  The inverse was also true – he knew Cynthia better than anyone else.  Yet he hadn’t spoken up and said the truth.

The war would get far worse before it got better.  The Academy was retaking control, but the rebellions were still underway, and the Academy’s efforts weren’t quelling so much as they were holding things at bay.

Sooner or later, things would reach a tipping point.  To retake control, the Academy would need to do something significant.  Institutions of this scale had only so many ways they could achieve that kind of control.

Fear was one, and he didn’t want to think about what the Academy might do to generate such a widespread fear.

The only way forward would be to beat them to the punch.

To do something horrific.

For that, he needed the woman who had started the war.  He needed those talents, and he needed to be absolutely sure that she wasn’t already doing the exact same thing.  Because if his group and her group both acted at the same time…

He couldn’t let that happen.

He bent down to wash his face, scrubbing, feeling old for the first time in a long time.

When he stood straight, he had company.

The man’s skin had been flayed away and reattached, overlapping strips, like the weave of a basket, head to toe, leaving every feature masked, but for a space for a toothless, tongueless mouth and two milky white eyes.  The flesh around the edges of each strip of skin was scarred and flaky.

A mummy, wrapped in his own flesh, almost a straightjacket, but not quite.  Two oversized hands were already reaching out.

Hangman.

They found me.

Godwin reached for his razor.  He was jerked back before he had it, his finger running along the length of the handle.

Long fingers of two hands wrapped around his neck, one after the other.  As the fingers fell neatly into place, interlacing, his neck was elongated, vertebrae popping.  His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the sink, his legs kicked, but it was to no avail.

Another pop, a flash of pain filling his lower body, and then it all fell to pieces.  The nervous impulses ran away from him, signaling motions he wasn’t making, pain and sensations he shouldn’t be feeling, all with a pressure that suggested his entire body had been crushed beneath a one-ton stone.

In the mirror, his arms and legs dropped, limp.  He huffed out a breath and didn’t take another one.

The Hangman had dislocated his neck.  He was lowered almost dismissively to the ground, as if forgotten, as the Hangman dropped one hand to its side and then let go, letting him fall to the floor, his head cracking against the tile.

He had a view, albeit one that had darkness swiftly flowing in from the edges, of the Hangman leaving much the way it had come in.  It touched the door and hauled itself up to the top of the doorframe, as if it weighed no more than an equivalent amount of loose paper.  It reached the ceiling, fingers bracing it against the walls on either side of the hallway, and then it was gone, whispering against the ceiling, past the sentries and defenses.

Godwin’s last thoughts were of Cynthia, his last sentiment a quiet horror at the idea that Cynthia might well think along the same lines he had… without the consideration to what disasters Genevieve Fray might have planned.

The hall had an upper stage that overlooked the lower floor, and Cynthia stood astride it, arms on the railing, watching.  Her pets flanked her.

From the bottom to the top, she thought.  She was with the upper class.  The true upper class, she might say.  These weren’t nobles, but businessmen, clergy, and pillars of the community.  They were people with money who had earned that money, by and large.  Those who had been born to money were already beholden to the Academy, hooks long set in.

Men and women in fine dress.

Potential allies.

If they were going to retake Westmore, these were allies they would need.  It meant the difference between the Academy having a gun for every soldier or having to do without.

One of her pets reacted, bat-ears twitching as it made a small sound.  She wheeled around.

Nervous, since Godwin’s death.

Four individuals.  Three men and a woman, standing in the shadows.

She almost regretted hiring them.  The mercenaries.  They’d turned out to be on her side, but they were… unpleasant, both in methodology and in personality.

“I thought I was alone up here,” she said.

The one in the lead shook his head.  He had bug eyes and a custom gun slung over one shoulder.

Choleric, she reminded herself.

“What is it?”

“General Ames just arrived,” Melancholy said.  Long hair covered her eyes, and she had a too-wide mouth.  Of the four, Melancholy was the only one that Cynthia wasn’t sure about.  The woman’s favored murder weapon wasn’t on display.  No knife, no gun, no vials.

Cynthia turned to look.

Ames was a big man, in many senses.  Proud, boisterous, fat, ruddy-cheeked, with blond hair.  He was perspiring.  More than normal.  He was with his wife and child.

“What about him?”

“The girl,” Melancholy said.

It took a moment before Cynthia could see through the crowd.  A young lady, beautiful, wearing an evening dress in miniature.  A little blonde that promised to be a great beauty at some point in the future.

When Melancholy spoke again, it was in Cynthia’s ear.  Cynthia hadn’t heard the woman approach.  “She doesn’t smell like she’s his.”

Cynthia looked, frowning.  The girl looked like any young lady should, bouncing with excitement at the fancy dress party.  She was saying something, and her father was having trouble keeping up.

“What is she?”

“Not human,” Melancholy said.  “She smells like blood.”

Cynthia nodded slowly.

“She smells like other children,” Melancholy said.

Cynthia’s eyes scanned the crowd.  She didn’t see any others.

“You know what to do,” she said.

“Mm,” Melancholy said.

Cynthia smiled.  She knew as she turned around that the four wouldn’t be there.  In four paces, she crossed the room to pick up her gun, slipping it through a hidden pocket of her dress.

She wasn’t excited, she wasn’t proud or arrogant.  She knew exactly what she was up against.

She’d come here to fight.

This, surrounded with people she couldn’t trust, was her medium.

Every time she’d faced this kind of situation in the past, everyone else had ended up bleeding or dead.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.01 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.1

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I slowed in my run as I saw a man forced to kneel by a pole.  His arms were already bound behind his back, his raincoat was open at the front, and there were smears of blood on his shirt.  He fought, struggled, and was overpowered by the four men in similar outfits.  Not quite uniforms, exactly, but they were close.

They lashed him to the pole, cords encircling the space where a crude knotted gag covered his his mouth.  The cords were cinched tight enough that skin split, blood seeping out past the gag to touch his chin.

Hands behind his back, ankles and head bound to the pole, he was unable to do more than wriggle as a haggard Chinese man approached.  One syringe penetrated one side of the throat, another penetrated the other.

Blood drained out, other fluids flowed in.  The new fluids would reduce the shock to the system when the man died.  The blood would be used for other things, if they didn’t return it to him to make him a stitched.

The pole was one among many, all in a row by the outside wall.  The ground had once been hard packed earth, but water collecting around and beneath the people who had been bound to the poles had made the base of each pole a mud pit.  The mud probably consisted of more things than dirt and water.

A minute into being drained to death, the man started convulsing.  The violent jerks made the cords bite deeper into the corners of his mouth.

A man in a uniform similar to the dying man approached, head bent low so his hood could help protect his pipe.  He took shelter under the same awning I was occupying, experimentally puffing before letting himself be at ease.  His hood was down, his hair and glorious mustache both wet, small eyes nearly hidden beneath heavy eyebrows.

A rifle with a bayonet hung behind his back.  I’d heard people refer to the particular brand of rifles as ‘exorcists’.  They were single-shot, heavy, ugly weapons, but they made big holes, they were easy to reload, they were reliable, and they were well made.  The name ‘exorcist’ had probably come up because they were supposed to put spirits to rest.  Or was it because they were supposed to help the little guys stop the real devils of the battlefields?

I watched the convulsions slow.  The man seemed at least dimly aware as he raised his eyes to stare through me.

The head sagged.  The Chinese man noticed, craning his head to look, but kept doing what he was doing, fiddling over at a table.  He gave an order to an assistant, who cleared things off the table.

If he wasn’t dead, the man at the pole would be dead soon.  Within the hour, he would be up and walking again.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” the man with the pipe asked me.  He gestured the bag that hung at my side.

“Waiting for the rain to let up,” I said, adding a belated, “Sir.”

“It won’t.  Git.

I didn’t ‘git’.  I watched the dying man rouse, then sag a bit.  “What did he do?”

“He didn’t listen to a superior officer,” the man with the pipe said.

“You’re not my superior officer,” I said.  “I don’t have any.”

“You’re on a military base, I’m militia.  You do what I say,” he told me.

“Oh,” I said, feigning ignorance.  Being smaller and appearing younger than I was proved to be a small asset here.  I could play dumb.  “What did he do, really?

“Traitor,” the man with the pipe said, puffing.  “Tried to help the Crown.  Stupid bastard.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked.  “The Crown is bad.

The man puffed on his pipe.  “Greed, maybe, or he thought he’d be on the winning side, whatever happened.”

“But our side is going to win, isn’t it?” I asked.

Another puff.  “Not about winning.”

“Isn’t it?  I don’t really understand about what they did to the water, but shouldn’t we stop them?”

“Can’t stop something as big as that.  People wouldn’t have it.  We do this right, let them know there are consequences, make them change how they do things.”

The rain continued to pour down.  The Chinese man approached the man at the pole, taking a knife to the ropes that bound him.  A soldier joined him in hauling the body to the table, each of them holding one of the bags that had been plugged into the man’s throat, one nearly empty, the other half-filled with blood.

It was a better answer to his statement than I could have come up with on my own.

“Don’t you have a place to be?” the man with the pipe sounded annoyed as he addressed me, and his tone suggested he might give me a smack if I didn’t take the hint.

I moved on, pulling my hood down to avoid the worst of the rain.

The soldiers didn’t match, but all of them had exorcists, and the clothing was of the same general style, even if little details differed.  I passed one man who wore no coat or jacket, with only an undershirt on.  His chest, shoulders, and face were mottled, covered in pustules, and his lower face had a glass mask fit to it, with a tube running off one side, over his shoulder and down to his belt, where he had a small tank in place.  His eyes were closed, his face turned upward.

I was seeing a lot like him, with increasing frequency, and I hadn’t gotten any good answers as to what they were or where they came from.  People simultaneously avoided them and kept mum when it came to the subject.  There were benefits to being young, but there were drawbacks too.

My route took me down a side path.  The town was a small one, more quaint than anything, but blockades had been erected, there were as many open flames as people could sustain, lighting the surroundings, and every open space that wasn’t already occupied by buildings was now home to tents, piles of crates, or collections of people.  The number of people in this lazy little town had dectupled, easily.  It wasn’t weathering the extra presence well.  Plants were dying, there was trash in the water that flowed along the gutters, and the aroma of the town was of faint human offal and less faint blood, sweat.  It was all laced with the smell of the cheap, mass-produced foodstuff that probably wasn’t fit for proper humans.  Starchy, nutrient-packed beans or some such.

I found a house with a makeshift fence erected around the front portion, the gate locked.  Looking past the fence and into the window suggested a whole gaggle of kids.  They ran around and played.  Only a few had ventured outside, their raincoats and rainboots on.

I approached a girl who stood at the corner of the fence, a flower in her hand.  She was picking it to pieces.

She didn’t look up as I came to stand beside her, my shoulder touching hers through the fence.  A few petals disappeared, drifting down into the water.  It looked like the same kind of flower that was growing off of the tree above.  A parasitic species, if I remembered right.

“Worst job yet,” Lillian said.

Really?” I asked.  “Worse than the whole interviewing thing before Sub Rosa?”

“Worse.”

“Worse than when we had to deal with the creeping mimis?”

“The creeping mimis were interesting,” Lillian told me.

“They were a pain in the ass, crawling on the walls and ceiling, and the parents were screaming, and then one got the family dog, and… ugh.”

“I liked their design, if nothing else,” Lillian said.  “And it was my third job with you guys?  It has some sentimental value.”

“Sure,” I told her.  “I guess I get that.”

She huffed out a sigh, and shot me a death-glare that wasn’t intended for me.  It was just Lillian being an unhappy Lillian.  “Rescue me.”

“They want you in there.”

“Please.  I got into an advanced stream and I still know more than the teachers, Sy.”

“That’s perfect,” I said, upbeat, just to annoy her.

“Sy,” she said.  She reached through the bars of the railing to grip me by the front of my coat.  “Please.

She used her grip on my coat to shake me.  I let my head loll back and forth for a moment.

She abruptly hauled me in her direction, and my forehead banged the bars of the railing.

“Ow.”

“I’m not joking, Sy.  Please.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Start something.  Set the town on fire.  Spread a plague.  Murder somebody important.”

“Shhh,” I said, “Keep your voice down.”

“The teacher had to look in the books to remember how the second ratio worked, Sy,” she said, almost moaning.  “Please, please.  Rescue me, and I’ll do whatever your twisted little mind can conceive of.  I will be in your debt, and you can lord it over me for as long as you know me.”

“You’re getting better at negotiating.  That’s tempting.  But no.  The job comes first.”

Her forehead banged the bars just above mine.

She remained like that, her eyes scanning the surroundings, then surreptitiously reached into her jacket and withdrew an envelope.

I checked behind her.  “The kids in the window are watching.  They can’t see the paper, but they’re watching”

“They saw you come before.  They think you’re here because you like me.”

I scoffed.

“Laugh all you want,” she said.  “You have to kiss me.”

“What?  No I don’t.”

“If we don’t sate their curiosity, it’s going to run wild, they’ll start talking.  Teachers hear talk, and they’re ridiculously overprotective of the outdated books and half-complete knowledge they’ve put together there.  Give our audience what we want, and they’ll stop wondering.  I can take a little bit of teasing.”

“Ew,” I said.  I started to back up, but she had a grip on my jacket, still, and she was stronger than I was.  Enough that it mattered.

That was an unhappy realization.

“Yeah.  Ew.  Suck it up.”

“I don’t think you should suck anything up while kissing.  I mean, you can, but-”

She gave me a look, a ‘get serious’ one.

I gripped the bars, and then my face as far as it would go between them, giving her a peck on the lips.  She tightened her grip on my collar, holding me there, turning it from a peck to something else.

She let go, leaving me to stumble back.

The hoots and cheers from within the building reached a volume we could hear outside.

Lillian was pink in the face as she glared at me.

“Happy?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, sounding anything but.  She hadn’t dropped the glare.  “Everything’s in the note.  How far along the students are, the quality of the teaching, the texts, my observations of other projects I’ve seen around town, not that they let us out of here that often…  Keeping us out of the way, they say.”

“Got it.  Will pass it on.”

“Rescue me,” she ordered.  “Every time you come, now, you’re going to have to steal a kiss.  Until this is over with.”

“That was my first kiss, you know,” I told her.

She didn’t budge an inch.  She was trying so hard not to convey a tell that she gave me one.

“I can see why people like it,” I said, to needle her.

“Shut up,” she said, with venom, face going pinker.  “Get me out of here.  I don’t care how.  But don’t leave me here.  I can’t take another week.”

“But you gave me so much fuel for teasing you,” I said, grinning ear to ear.  “You can look forward to the next time you see me, when you con me into kissing you again, over and over-”

“Go get caught and die,” she said.

“Or, or!”

“Sy-”

“I could tell the others.  ‘Oh, did you know, Lillian apparently gets lonely for the company of boys when she’s bored.”

“I did it for the sake of the job,” she said, voice firm.  “The kids were already speculating it was something romantic, it was the easiest route.”

“The moment your face turns that pink when I mention it in front of the others, they’ll see right through-”

She raised her hand between us, a gesture.

Incoming.

I shut my mouth, brain switching gears.  She flicked her eyes to the right, and I turned, as casually as possible, looking.

I didn’t see anyone.  I turned a few times, searching for possible threats.

When I turned back, Lillian was fleeing back to the improvised schoolhouse.  The gesture she gave me as she stalked off was anything but a secret one.

“That’s not allowed!” I called after her.

The finger remained raised as she hauled the front door open with one hand and closed it firmly behind her.

I grinned.

It was a short distance from the schoolhouse to the main street, and I arrived with much of the midday traffic.  Carts were being checked thoroughly by squads and sniffer dogs, and the barking was incessant.

My eyes roved over the carts, looking over the people…

Nothing.  Gordon wasn’t here yet.

I picked up my pace to get out of the way of a regular old horse that was pulling a cart, reached the other side of the street and inadvertently chose a path that saw rain pouring off in curtains off a tent-top.  I squinted as the water spattered me.

I heard a whistle, and I saw Mary with Gladys Shipman, standing under a tent, with a counter and register in front of them, unpacked crates arranged around them.  A heavyset man was lifting crates down from the bed of a wagon with a stitched helper.  Mary whipped an apple at my head, and I caught it.

“He’s late,” Mary said.  She looked more concerned than Shipman did.

“That happens.  Lots of rain.  Wagons get stuck in mud.”

“No mud between here and there,” Mary said.

“I’ll see about swinging back this way,” I said, flashing her a smile before I took a bite out of the apple.

“You look like you’re having a merry time,” Shipman said.

“Lillian kissed me,” I said, grinning.  “Well, she told me to kiss her.”

Mary’s eyebrows went up.  Her expression was interesting.  More curious than anything.

“She’s really bored, apparently,” I said.  “Nah.  We had to, the other kids were starting to get curious about her and me meeting up.  Might as well, you know?”

Mary nodded at that, eyebrows going down.  “Is she okay?  Other than being bored?”

“She’s worried about the teachers,” I said.  “Watchful eye and all that.”

“When I last saw her, she had a lot of names for them.  Watchful wasn’t one of those names.  Bumbling, incompetent, depressing…” Mary said.

“It would be ironic if-” I started, I stopped as footsteps splashed behind me.  In a low voice, I finished, “If those buffoons were the undoing of us all.”

“Not funny,” Shipman said, terse.

Such a sourpuss.

“I gotta get going, or people are going to wonder,” I said.  Then I reminded her, “I’ll swing back.”

The two of them nodded.

My path zig-zagged between buildings.  Someone larger might have had trouble, given how little space there was at times, and someone less nimble might have struggled with the crates and other supplies that were piled up in the spaces, protected by the overhanging roofs, but I was perfectly suited.

The moment I was out of sight of people, I pulled on the stem of the apple.  It popped out like a cork, and I stuck a finger into the tight hole where the core had been removed.  When I withdrew it, there was a roll of paper around my fingertip.  I unrolled it.

Boxes beneath 16 houses. – M

Up from nine, yesterday.

Gladys’ note was very similar to what Lillian was providing, but she had eyes on the market.  Her handwriting was meticulous, legible even when written at a quarter the scale I could have managed.  She packed a great deal of information about her observations about the town’s grasp of Academy tech onto a single slip of paper, with a fair bit of shorthand.  The backside of the paper discussed the contents of the boxes in brief.  Good health on arrival, high toxicity, slightly dehydrated.  One box sealed too tight, contents D.O.A.

I made a mental note, then replaced the papers, folding Lillian’s envelope in half before coiling it up and slipping it inside.  I popped the cork back in place.

I could hold on to the apple for a little while longer.

As I exited the space between two buildings, I saw a trio of men, their skin pocked and scarred, boils here and there.  Unlike the one I’d seen earlier, they didn’t have masks.  They looked like plague victims, but each was eerily calm, the expressions on their faces severe.  Each wore the same uniforms as the men I’d seen earlier, and each carried an exorcist and a handgun.

They didn’t talk, and simply watched as I walked by.

I hated not knowing things.

The city hall.

I approached the door, lifting the apple to my mouth to bite into it, like a pig on the dinner table, before raising my hands over my head.

The guard at the door bent down low, patting me down.  He took the satchel-bag from me, then opened it.  I didn’t miss the slight puff of air from within.

He went through every piece of paper within, one after another, meticulous.

Wordless, he returned the bag to me, and I hurried inside, raising a hand to the apple to leverage it and tear off another big bite.

The entrance was a big hallway, and where it might normally have made for a nice view and perhaps a place for the mayor to give a speech, it was now crowded, a makeshift war room.  Tables with maps, soldiers, mobile fences erected around boxes of weapons, and three different experiments were all present, each one leashed out of the way.

I moved throughout the room, grabbing envelopes from the satchel and delivering them to the right people.

Every single one of them paid very close attention to the wax seals.  I already knew the reasons.  The wax responded to oxygen.  I was given sealed satchels, and from the moment the bag was opened, which was supposed to be at the front door, microbes on or in the wax started reacting to the air, altering in color.

One soldier, a captain, used a knife to remove the seal.  I noticed how he put it off to one side on his desk.  He’d watch the color change over time, just to make sure it wasn’t a false one.

It would be a big win if I could snatch that up, supplying it to the Academy’s people so they could figure it out and produce something equivalent, but I didn’t dare take the risk.  I had a cushy gig.

“You, boy,” one man said.

I stopped in my tracks.

“You’re done.  You don’t come back tomorrow, you hear?”

I blinked.  “What?”

“New person in charge.  Says no children.”

“But…” I said.  There were a lot of clever things I could have said, biting retorts, making excuses, asking questions.  But in terms of being a bewildered kid, staying silent was the best option.

“You’ll get paid, don’t worry,” he said.

I nodded, but I wasn’t happy and I let the emotion show on my face.  I headed up the short set of stairs to the Mayor’s office.  A double set of doors, ornate.  Academy-provided wood.  Amusing, given the general lean of this place.  This town was one holdout in the rebellion against the crown.

When the doors were shut, I knocked, a set pattern.

Jamie emerged from another room, a book in hand.  It wasn’t his notebook.

“I just got told I couldn’t come back,” I said.

“I know,” Jamie said.  “I heard when the order first came in.  New person in town, and a lot of the leaders are listening to her.  She handed out something or other, and told them to find strays, dose them, and release them again.”

“Countermeasure against Whelps?”

Jamie nodded.

“She might know about us, then,” I said.

“The way things are going, this might be our last undercover job,” Jamie said.  “The Lambs are a known element.”

I frowned.

“Sucks, but there’s no getting around it,” he said.  “Hayle brought up an idea of how to use it, still preliminary.  Propaganda.  I already have notes, they’ll give me a writer to ensure it’s readable, though I always was good with a pen and paper.  We release a more palatable version of the Lambs’ previous files, win over the public.”

I scowled.

“No?”

I shook my head.

“I sort of like the idea.  But maybe that’s because I don’t get many chances to show off, compared to the rest of you,” Jamie said.

He put his book down.  I angled my head to get a look at the cover.  “Local herbs.”

“By the mayor’s uncle.”

“Do you really need information on the Mayor?  He’s a non-entity.  Ames is in charge.”

“I’m picking up everything I can.  All I can do here is manage Ames and read.”

“Lonely?” I asked.

“More than a little,” he admitted, half-sitting on the desk, one leg down, toe just barely touching the floor.

I hopped up next to him, roughly the same position, and my legs didn’t reach the ground.  He leaned over to bump my shoulder with his, and I did the same to him.

I thought about telling him about my earlier meeting with Lillian, then decided against it.  I wasn’t exactly sure why.

“Fourteen boxes, under the houses,” I said.

“Fourteen?” Jamie asked, giving me a curious look.

“Something like that,” I said.  I removed the cork from the apple and dug out the notes.  I smoothed them out on my knee, my foot braced against the front of the heavy wooden desk.

“Sixteen,” Jamie said, “Yeah, that fits.  I was wondering if Mary got hurt or if she almost got caught.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have the nerves to do that,” he said.  “Every night?  One mistake getting you caught?”

“Do you know if we’re close?  Lillian is getting a little stir-crazy.”

“We’re close,” he said.  “But you don’t have a reason to be running around, and if they’re being wary of kids, then the others are going to come under some scrutiny at some point.”

I nodded slowly.

“While you’re at it, tell the others that the new leader of this particular branch of the rebellion hired people.  Mercenaries.”

I frowned.  “Show me?”

Jamie hopped down from the desk.  I followed.

He led me through and around, to a separate room.  There were stacks of books by an armchair.  He found his notebook, opened it, flipped to the right page, and then handed it to me.

“Secondhand,” he said.  “I grilled Ames as best as I could, even used some of the retention techniques I was taught, but…”

But it was still damn good.  Not that Jamie could really grasp that.  He was a perfectionist in many of the same ways Mary was.

“She arrived, and immediately started laying down the law,” I said.

“Yes.”

“No kids was, hm, the fifth or sixth thing she mentioned.  She’s expecting trouble.”

“Rightly so.  We beat her here, though.”

“And the mercenaries were on the tail end of that,” I said, “Before she moved on to a new topic, restructuring things.”

“It could be attached to that idea.  Bring in mercenaries, change who’s in charge…”

“Why would she want to do that, unless she wanted to make enemies?  It’d be unconscious,” I said.  “Mercenaries are a countermeasure as much as the ‘no kids’ rule and the poison she’s leaving for the whelps.”

“Huh,” Jamie said.

“I’m in a bad position until I can find a job,” I said.  “You don’t figure Ames can find a role for me?”

Jamie shook his head.  “He’s on thin ice already.  He lost an important battle before coming here.  Got ahead of the news of his failure, got established, but now the new leader is here and it’s catching up with him.”

“Are you okay, then?  Is Helen?”  I asked.  We’d managed to ‘convince’ General Ames to give Jamie shelter and a spot to eavesdrop from, with full access to everything that passed Ames’ desk, but it looked like that setup was starting to wear thin.

“I’m okay.  She’s not kicking him out, and he still has a command-”

A trump card we can only use once, before they remove him from service.

“-and she’s set up elsewhere.  She doesn’t want to interfere with the military types.”

I thought about that.

“Where is she?”

“The theater.  There’s an event going on right this moment.  A luncheon.  Everyone’s invited, and it lets her meet and greet.”

“Helen’s there?”

“With Ames.  You’re going, aren’t you?  You’re spying on her?”

“Of course.”

“I’m coming with,” Jamie said.  “If I read one more book, I don’t think I’ll be able to read for a year after this job is done.”

I offered him a mock gasp.  He jabbed me in the stomach.

“Worst case scenario, you’re too slow, we get caught, we fuck everything up, and we start a war,” I said.  “Not so bad.”

“Not so bad?” he asked, pulling on a raincoat.

“If I give Lillian an excuse to leave her position, I get to lord it over her forever.  She said so.”

“Ah, uh huh,” he said, smiling.  “Window?  It’s not exactly common knowledge I’m here.”

“Window,” I agreed.

The banter and jokes continued as we made our exit.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.02 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.2

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

Even on the best of days, Jamie was something of an odd bird.  The glasses, the book he carted around with him, and the longer, dirty-blond hair, currently tied back into a sailor’s ponytail, they added up to a strange picture.  He had a way of looking uncomfortable in any clothes he wore, as if they were someone else’s and he was just borrowing them.  He tended to be quieter than the others, with Helen excepted in most situations.  He was probably the worst of us when it came to a fight, myself excepted, and the slowest of us to react when it came to a non-fight crisis.

With all those things put together, he should have and could have been a shadow of a person, the low man on the totem pole, the gawky, awkward one, the bookworm.  But he walked and spoke with confidence.  His book was inside a waterproof backpack, slung over one shoulder, and he spoke without looking at me, eyes roving over the surroundings.

I’d spent five hours in this town for every hour Jamie had, but he was the one who knew his way around.  He led the way to the theater, and we took the main roads.

“Can’t wait until it gets warmer,” I commented.

“It won’t,” Jamie said.

“You know that for sure?”

“Pretty sure.  I read the farmer’s almanac.”

“Of course you did.”

He pointed at the mountains that overlooked the town, one mountain on each side, with more beyond.  The town had been planted in the valley between the two.  “Cold air sweeps down the sides of the mountains.  Constant wind, which is probably why we’re getting the constant rain from the direction of Westmore.”

“Where the Academy is making its usual rainclouds.”

Jamie nodded.

“Well, bully for us, then,” I said.

“Bully for us,” Jamie said, smiling a little.  The smile faded, “Until they figure out we’re getting rained on and lace the clouds with something.”

I startled a little at that.  “You’re joking.”

Jamie smiled again.  “Yeah.  If they could have, they would have.  The rain is too diluted, this far away, and after what Fray did, everyone is being careful about the water supply.”

I hit him in the arm.  “Jerk.”

“Are your punches getting weaker?” he teased me.

I hit him in the arm again, this time with more force.

“Guess not,” he said.

Whitney was an important location on a few fronts.  The location was the first one, and one so obvious that it was known to anyone who had looked at a map of the area.  It sat in a mountain pass, and it remained the closest location to Westmore that the Academy didn’t have control over.  Even for the Academy, it wasn’t cost effective to push through an area with limited mobility, ground too hard to dig trenches in.

The Academy had been divided on how important the little town of Whitney was.  Hayle had been among the contingent that had believed Whitney held value, and had volunteered us.

The actual information gathering had proven dull, for some more than others, but it had been enjoyable if only for the fact that we were in constant danger, every action potentially outing us and setting the entire town against us.

It marked, perhaps, the first job where we’d been let off our leashes and told to do as we saw fit.  Gordon had asked for Shipman, and he’d gotten her.  Mary, Gordon, and Shipman had discussed the need for a discreet weapon they might be able to use to cripple the town of Whitney, and regular shipments had been arranged for just that.

It was a shocking amount of leeway, but the fact that the Academy was barely paying attention to us was tempered by the fact that, well, they were were barely paying attention to us.  If things turned sour, we were more or less on our own.

I noted the presence of more of the scarred, pocked men.  A group of five.  They all wore the informal military clothing we were seeing everywhere, and they all carried exorcists.

“Them,” I said, alerting Jamie before the men could disappear.

“The men with the boils?”

“What do you know?” I asked.

Jamie shook his head.  “I was going to ask you.  I saw one with worms under his skin.  I could see them moving by the way the bumps and ridges appeared and disappeared.  One of those we just saw had them.”

“I asked Lillian the other day, she promised she’d tell me if something came up,” I said.  “She didn’t bring it up this time, and I forgot to ask.  Mary, Gordon, and Shipman don’t seem to know either.”

“I’m as in the dark as you are,” Jamie said.

“Being in the dark sucks,” I replied.  I lowered my voice, “Especially when we’re pulling something, and an unknown factor could throw everything out of sync.”

Jamie nodded, but he didn’t have anything to offer me.  We were at a disadvantage in that sense, and until we found out what we needed to find out, that would remain the case.

The pair of us reached the market, and I saw that Gordon was sitting on the end of the wagon, sitting far enough back that only his knees and calves were getting wet.  The man who was working with Mary and Shipman was doing the heavy lifting, when it was really supposed to be Gordon’s job.

I caught his eye, waving briefly.  He raised a hand in a halfhearted wave.

It was out of character for him, and it had nothing to do with the small rift that had formed after our last encounter with Fray.  He’d been okay since, not quite acting normal, but at least he’d been putting on a brave face.

He said something to Shipman, noticed I was still looking, and craned his head to look at Jamie and I.

I offered him a one shoulder shrug, hand raised.

He waved his hand a little, fingers horizontal to the ground.

It was a gesture that meant fine, neutral, or no problem.  The sort of gesture reserved for when there was a sudden noise and we realized it was just a rat or something.

Frankly, his body language couldn’t have been less convincing.

“Come on,” Jamie murmured.

There were only so many gestures we could make before people started wondering.  I gave them a wave goodbye, and we left them behind.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Which?”

“Gordon being down and out?”

“Wasn’t his usual.”

“No idea, then?”

Jamie shook his head.  Little droplets of water flew off the bill of his hood.

“That reminds me.  I’ve been meaning to ask, you do a lot of book reading, but how’s your reading of people going?”

“People?”

“You remember just about everything.  If I say something, can’t you compare it to everything I’ve said before and figure out what tone I’m using and why?”

“You’re assuming I know why you were using the tone back then.”

“Context?  You could figure it out.”

“I could.  I can.  I’m doing that anyway, all the time,” Jamie said.  “Sometimes I get there.  There’s a lot of things to look through and figure out before I can say for sure, and by the time that happens, things are usually done with or they’re moving forward, and then I’m left playing catch-up, and there’s no time to bring it up.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Maybe after I get better at all of this,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “Don’t ever feel weird if you want to say something after the conversation’s moved on, okay?  At least with me?  I like figuring people out.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“Great,” he said.

“Fantastic,” I added.

“Ace,” he said, smiling a little.

“Bully.”

“Um, marvelous.”

“Superb,” I said, not missing a beat.  I was already queuing up some more words.

He paused, clearly trying to think of one.

I poked him in the side, interrupting his line of thinking.  When he didn’t react, I poked him harder.

“If I don’t get a chance to think, then I’m obviously going to lose,” he said.

“If you do get a chance to think, then I’m going to lose,” I retorted.  “God, we’re like, the worst two people to play word games with.”

“Mrs. Earles met someone,” Jamie said, all of a sudden.  “First person in a while, since her husband.”

I blinked.  The woman who ran Lambsbridge.  A mother figure, but not a mother.

“She changed the words she uses, how she dresses, and I think she’s worried, she wants a relationship and she doesn’t want it tied in with us.”

“She’s acted relieved when we go,” I said.

Jamie nodded, showing more animation than his usual.  “So I’m not overthinking it.”

“I didn’t quite mean bringing stuff up from that far back,” I said.  “It’s been half a year since we spent two straight nights in the orphanage.  Not that I’m complaining about you sharing and exploring.”

“I just brought it up because the little things added up, and I started wondering if she was a double agent, but the pieces didn’t fit, but I wasn’t sure they didn’t fit?” he made it a question.

“No,” I agreed.  “The pieces don’t fit.”

Jamie nodded.  He didn’t seem relieved, which was odd.  I found myself debating whether he was being very analytical, asking about things he already had the answer to, or if he was more anxious than he was letting on.

“Are you asking just to confirm, or was that bugging you?” I asked.  Might as well.

“Confirming,” Jamie said.

I threw my arm around him.  He reached an arm around me and mussed up my hair, pulling me off balance.

“You smell like Lillian,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Just a bit.”

“You and that nose of yours,” I said.

“You could learn to use yours, too.  Most underutilized sense.  All it takes is a little attention.”

“Sure, Jamie,” I said.

“I’ll teach you, if you teach me about people?”

I smiled.

“I notice you dodged the question.”

“Yep.”

“You’re a brat,” he said.  “And this is the theater, coming up.  The person running the event is the same person that said ‘no children’.  This isn’t as simple as walking in.”

“Is the event catered?”

“Of course.”

“Then we go in through the back door and the kitchen,” I said.  “Let’s bank on her not having told the kitchen staff what she told the others.”

“Uhh,” Jamie said, suddenly sounding like he had doubts.

“Play along,” I said.  “All you have to do is act like you belong.”

“I’m regretting coming along.  I have trouble looking like I belong when I’m being Jamie.”

“Nah,” I said, as we circled around toward the back of the building.  “You fit in with the rest of us.”

“I wonder,” he said.

“Do you?  What do you wonder?”

“What happens later, where we fit in, how we adapt, the calls we end up making…”

“Vague.”

“It’s a vague sort of wondering,” he said.

“Are you thinking you wanted to go with Fray?”

“No,” he said, without a moment’s pause.  “No.”

I nodded.  He wasn’t volunteering, and I didn’t pry, just like he hadn’t pried when he’d realized I’d been evasive about the topic of Lillian.  The reason we could even talk to each other like this was that we had a good sense of each other.  We didn’t have to be on guard, we could experiment and share.

I liked that.

I saw a man standing outside the back door, a little wrinkled, long hair slicked back with damp, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, a cigarette in hand.  White shirt, black pants.  He looked like staff.

“What color shirt do you have on?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Under your jacket.”

“White.”

“With buttons?”

“Yeah.”

“Follow my lead.  Eyes forward, chin up.  You’re proud to be doing this job.”

Jamie nodded.

We approached the man at the back door, and I pulled off my raincoat as soon as I was under the eaves and out of the rain.  I draped it over a box to one side.  The apple had been devoured and abandoned, the messages left in the inside breast pocket.  I withdrew them and held them so Shipman’s note was the one on top.  A little less rumpled – it conveyed a better image.

Jamie was already removing his raincoat, the backpack sitting on the crate by mine.

“Is the door locked?” I asked.

“Who’s asking?”

“We’re supposed to drop off a message and a package,” I said, holding up the papers.  I pulled them away from his reaching fingers as he moved to investigate my claim.  “We were told to use the back door, because we’d get seen if we went through the front?”

The man frowned.  He gave us a once-over.  Two boys in white button-up shirts and black pants, albeit with boots on.  I’d been wearing the outfit because I’d been acting out my role as a messenger and young mail deliverer, Jamie had been wearing it because it was his style.

We didn’t look like urchins, and that was the important part.  We were boys with a job to be done.

“Door’s unlocked,” he said, before reaching over and opening it partway.  He didn’t seem willing to expend enough effort to move from where he stood, so it was only opened a half-foot.  I grabbed it and hauled it open.

We entered into a kitchen, the air thick with the smell of smoke and cheeses.  Several stoves were going, and it looked like virtually all of the food was being made available in quantities no larger than my fist.  Some of it looked expensive – including things that looked like seahorses crossed with snails, all soft pronged bits and questionably defined shapes, all tinged in brilliant sunset reds, where they weren’t white and vaguely translucent.

Because frog legs, snails and fish eggs got to be too mundane, they had to invent obscure new things to eat.

I chose a route through the kitchen that would keep us out of the way of the more important members of the kitchen – the guy that seemed to be quietly giving instructions to everyone present, the chefs, and a man handing bottles to a well-dressed young lady, possibly a sommelier.

The chef’s assistants and the waiters who were venturing into the kitchen didn’t say a word, though the young, black men and women gave us curious looks.  When people lacked agency or authority, it could be hard for them to call out others on the same.  They were cogs in a very organic machine, they had a role, and right now that role was taking up all their focus.  Stopping and drawing attention to themselves wasn’t in the cards.

I liked places like this.  Places where humans had a system and became eminently predictable.  The box didn’t need to be disturbed.

I pointed at a little window which allowed the kitchen a partial view of the room beyond.  It was well above our heads, running over a countertop.  I stepped up onto a stool, then took a seat on the counter, the window to my right.

That seemed to get attention.  I watched people glancing at me as they went about their business, all rush, hustle and bustle.  Jamie climbed up to sit beside me, and I scooted over to give him a better view.

Through the window, we could see the luncheon, though it looked more like a party.  There were tables for sitting down at, but there was a band and a singer, and most people were mingling.

Something felt off.  I glanced over the room to try and figure out what it might be.

“You,” a chef spoke to us.  He had a towel around his shoulders, and was dabbing at his forehead with one corner.  “What are you doing?”

“We were told to come in here and wait,” I said.  I tapped Jamie’s bag.  “Parcel for delivery, has to pass from our hands to theirs.  If we’re in your way, please let us know so we can move.”

The man that had been barking orders was talking to someone, but he was glancing up at us and the chef we were talking to.

“Why does it have to be here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I’m just doing what I was told, sir.”

He seemed to consider.  He didn’t have much excuse to kick us out.

There’s always a hierarchy.  It’s a very simple game when you get down to it.  Chefs were a trickier bunch than some, I knew.  Even Mrs. Earles wasn’t to be messed with when she was cooking.  Chefs were artists in temperament and they worked long enough hours that they lacked any patience.  If something was going to go wrong, it could very well be this.

“Don’t get underfoot,” he conceded.

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said.  “This is your kitchen.”

He made a face.  Subtly, he indicated the man that was giving orders.  “His kitchen.”

“Then why were you the one who came to talk to us?” I asked.

“He’s busy.”

“Or,” I said, “you’re the one that really runs things here.  I know how this sort of thing works, sir.  He does too.  Without you and the other chefs, there would be nothing.  Without him, there’d be another manager.”

“You think so, huh?” the chef asked.

I nodded somberly.

“Don’t cause trouble,” he said, before getting back to work.  As the manager looked over in our direction, the chef waved dismissively, a gesture not unlike Gordon’s.

Not a problem.  Ignore, I thought, filling in the blanks.

Jamie and I turned to watch through the window.  The glass was thick and it wasn’t smooth, which made for a warped picture.  I found a position where I could see through without too much difficulty.  Jamie set his chin on my shoulder, his eyes on another such patch.

“Not like you,” Jamie said.

“Not like me?”

“To be nice.  Fluff up someone’s ego.  I know you could have done that differently.  You have done things differently.  I remember.”  His chin drove into my shoulder a little each time he opened his mouth to make a sound.

“You remember me talking about the bug box?”

“Sure,” he said, his chin jabbing my shoulder again.  I moved it to force him to reposition.

“This is a bug box.  Except there’s no shaking needed.  They’re already at each other’s throats.  I guarantee you there’s more drama in here than in any classroom at Dame Cicely’s.  People are easiest to manipulate when it’s ‘us versus them’, and in here, it’s him versus the manager.  Which is, hm, the second most important reason I did that.”

“Second?”

“Second.”

“Am I supposed to guess the first?”

“No.  I’m waiting for the dramatic moment when I get to show the first.  We are in a theater, after all.  Drama is important.”

Jamie nodded, his chin rubbing my shoulder.  I moved it again.

“Something’s really interesting about this scene,” I said.  “On a few levels.  Awful lot of rich-looking people, for one.”

“Whitney used to be a place where the wealthy had their second or third vacation homes.  Not for summertime, but for winters.  When they needed to get away from the city, they’d come here, do some hunting or ice fishing.  Or hole up in a cabin with a fire, enjoy a little distance from the rest of the world.”

“Escaping the mess and smells of the city, only to kill something and experience the smell of blood, guts, and their own sweat,” I said.  “That sounds self-defeating.”

“It’s easy to be self-defeating when you have that kind of wealth and power,” Jamie said.  “Some of the houses have permanent residents now, but some are still vacation homes.  Either way, it’s a place a lot of people know how to get to.”

I nodded.

Men in suits and women in dresses, with waiters in simple white shirts and black slacks moving between them, holding trays.  The singer on the stage was a black woman with a blue silk wrap around her head and a sleek silk full-length dress.

She was good, from what I could make out of her singing.  It came in fits and starts, as staff entered and left through the door.

“I spy a Helen,” Jamie murmured.  “And our General Ames.”

I looked, and Jamie pointed a finger, helping me to look in the right direction.  Helen was playing her part, the dutiful daughter.  Ames looked uncomfortable.  A man caught between a rock and a hard place.

It was good to know he was still behaving.  A large part of what we’d been working on to this point was ensuring our grip on him wasn’t going to falter.

“Good for her,” I said.  “Out of all of us, she’s probably eating the best.”

“And she doesn’t even enjoy food in the same way we do,” Jamie commented.  “There’s something really sad about that.”

“Mm,” I agreed.

We watched for another few moments.  Approaching footsteps made me turn my head.

The chef I’d talked to earlier was approaching yet again.  Wordless, he set down a plate, stacked with appetizers and tiny cakes.

“Wow!  Thank you, sir!” I said, trying to sound surprised.

He didn’t respond, only turning to leave.

I picked up one of the seahorse-slug things and viciously bit its head off.  It tasted like undercooked bacon, but a longer-lasting aftertaste that made the initial texture worth it.

“You’re allowed to gloat,” Jamie whispered to me.  “This was the first priority, wasn’t it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I whispered back, smiling.

“Brat,” he said.  Then, distracted, he turned to the window, “Oh!  I recognize that face.”

“Which?”

Jamie indicated a man.  Even though most of the guests had removed their long coats, this one wore his.  He had long hair and glasses, but the hair was black, and the man was old enough to have white-and-black stubble on his cheeks.  He walked with his hands clasped in front of him, milling aimlessly until a woman in a deep blue dress approached, catching him in conversation.

“Cynthia,” Jamie said.

“The man’s name is Cynthia?”

“The woman in the dress is Cynthia.  She’s taking charge of the rebellion here, and she’s the one throwing this little lunch party,” Jamie said.

“Who’s the man?”

“Louis Peralta.  Ex-New Spaniard, removed from Radham Academy three years ago, he studied the science of pain.  How we experience it, how to remove it, how to inflict it.”

“Sounds like a lovely chap,” I commented.

“The loveliest.  When he walks down the road, children and small woodland creatures flock around him.”

“Anyone else?” I asked.  “I can’t help but notice that there’s a distinct lack of stitched here.”

“That’s true.  Most are probably off fighting.”

“Or there’s a certain kind of status to being able to hire actual people, instead of using dead ones,” I said.  “Or they’re playing up to a certain audience.  If you’re demonizing the Academy, using the Academy’s tools in the background looks bad.”

“True,” Jamie said.

“Question is,” I said.  “There are monsters in the audience.  Past Helen, the two tall women at the far end there, on either side of the man?”

“Oh.  He’s Mr. Pock.  Think Ibbott, but he likes to make sets, he’s only about half as arrogant, and only a third as good.”

I nodded.

“There’s Edwin Grahl.  He was innovating new ways of doing stitched when something political behind the scenes at one of the Academies got him upset.  He left in a huff, found a patron, and continued his work.  The Academy put out a warrant for unlicensed use of the Academy’s knowledge.  He went into hiding.”

“There are a lot of these guys,” I said.

Now that Jamie was pointing them out, I was getting a better sense of things.   It wasn’t always easy to identify the Academy educated.  Sometimes it was, sometimes they had the wild hair or the coats or tools on hand, but more than half of them blended in with the crowd.

“John Durant.  He got removed from the Academy when he helped make a superweapon, but failed to leash it right.  People got killed.  There are very few people I can think of who are as volatile as he is.  Angry, works on projects bigger than he can handle.  He could be as dangerous to their side as he might be to ours.”

“A lot of people that left the Academy, one way or another,” I said.  “Not all Academy trained, but close enough to have something to offer.”

“That’s essentially it,” Jamie murmured.  “She’s gathering her forces.”

The way Cynthia was doing it was interesting, too.  I saw how she took the arm of Dr. Peralta and led the man to a group of the high-society types.

What was the plan there?  Building connections?  Convincing the people with the money and the resources that this was a battle that could be won?

“There,” Jamie said.  “Man with the red tie?”

I looked and saw a man, blond haired, with a jaw prominent enough that it looked like it had been surgically modified.

“Nobility,” Jamie said.

Here?” I asked.  A two-legged cat might have had as much sense to walk into a wolf’s den.

“He’s illegitimate.  Of everyone here that might hate the Crown and the people that fall under its umbrella, he probably hates the Crown the most.”

“Tall order,” I said.  I grabbed a tiny cake.

“Tall order,” Jamie agreed.  He grabbed a little bacon-and-pastry affair, then offered it to me.  On a whim, we touched cake to pastry as if we were toasting a drink.

He popped his treat into his mouth.  I started, then stopped.

Someone had come in the back door.  A woman, with thick black hair falling across her eyes, parted so that only her nose and a wide mouth were visible.  She wore a military uniform, just as the scarred people and the countless soldiers in Whitney did.

A woman in uniform wasn’t the most unusual thing in the world.  But a woman that entered a room and sniffed, rather than looking around?

Entering through the back door?

With our raincoats clenched in one hand?

Her head turned in our direction.

“Go,” I said, hopping down from the counter, hauling Jamie down with me.  He only just managed to collect his backpack before I hauled him along.

There weren’t many escape routes.  There was a door to one side, which might have led to the kitchen manager’s office, but I wasn’t willing to gamble that the manager’s office would have a door or a window to the outside.

The woman moved toward us, with long, brisk strides, and one hundred percent conviction.  When a waiter got in her way, she grabbed him with two hands and shoved him forcefully into the nearest counter.  She barely slowed an iota in the process.

There were two surefire exits from the room.  There was one that she’d just used to enter the kitchen, and there was one that led from the kitchen to the floor of the theater.

Weighing our options, this one strange individual against a room filled with people who had been warned about our existence, I chose the room.

With Jamie lagging behind me, I pushed past the free-swinging set of door to enter the party.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.03 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.3

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

We weren’t walking through a kitchen, wearing clothing that resembled that of the staff, not anymore.  The pair of us stood out like sore thumbs, our hair a little damp from being under our hoods in the humid outdoors.  We wore dirty boots, not shiny black shoes.  Jamie carried a backpack.

We attracted attention, tramping through people twice our size, who were all wearing their finest.  Women had their hair done up, nice dresses on, and the men wore suits with long jackets.  There were very few children in attendance, making us stand out all the more.

I peered through the crowd, noting the location of everyone important.  The kitchen door was in the southeast corner, the stage with the singer to the southwest, and a hundred and fifty feet of banquet hall stretched the distance to the north end, where the front door was.  Covered tables dotted the space off to the sides, standing on carpet, while the center remained clear, hardwood, ostensibly for dancing during different events.

The ceiling arched above, and a kind of extended balcony ran down either side, with fancy iron-wrought railings, with a number of figures gathered and looking down on the affair from above.  Some stood and talked on the stairs that led up from either side of the front door.

The rebellion here had brought in a lot of ex-Academy types, and those individuals had each attracted crowds, many staying toward the edges of the hall.  The middle had more clusters, but it also had more elbow room and empty space.

No matter how we moved through the empty spaces, we would either stand out like sore thumbs, walking in a straight line, or we would look evasive, zig-zagging to break line of sight.

The tables offered a little bit of cover, blocking others’ view of us, and the densely packed people would be something of a benefit in the same way.  That said, there was a bit of a caveat to that.  There was nothing stopping someone from grabbing one of us.

I was counting on a given person leaving us alone because others had left us alone.  The mentality of the herd of sheep.  It made the initial batch of people more important, as we approached.

That in mind, I led the way toward people who looked more actively engaged on conversation.

So much planning for the simple act of walking into a crowd.

Then again, there was the corollary that we were walking into a crowd of people that would imprison us if they knew we were working for the Crown, and probably shoot us on the spot if they knew what we really were.

It was sobering.

Jamie and I passed just behind a cluster of the group of chattering ladies, into the thick of the crowd.  I brought my chin down, ducking down as if begging excuse, and walked at a consistent speed.

The pair of us passed behind the core members of the gaggle of chattering women without drawing notice.

I was put in mind of one of the covers of Jamie’s books.  The heroine of the haunted forest, every tree hostile but dormant.  This was that forest.  The ‘trees’ dwarfed us, they outnumbered us to an extent that I couldn’t guess at, and if they turned on us, I couldn’t even guess at what they’d do to us.

Countless sets of eyes watched us, judging, prying, thinking about doing something.  But it took a special kind of courage to break away from the herd and do something like that.  I was watching people, studying them, trying to figure out who might have that courage.  It wasn’t always obvious.  A well dressed man in unique colors, my instinct was that he could be left alone.  He tried too hard to impress, by body language alone.

An older man, one that looked too frail to kill a fly if he swatted it, I knew he was dangerous by the wide berth others gave him, and the way they reacted when he moved his hands, gesturing.  I’d known professors who moved like he did, swatting students that weren’t attentive enough, not caring what others thought about them.

Once I was pretty sure the coast was clear, I allowed myself a glance back toward the kitchen.  The sniffing woman hadn’t followed us past the kitchen door.  I noted that the hostess of the party, Cynthia, stood near the stage, the center of attention for her own small cluster.  Jamie, just behind me, looked deeply concerned, one of his hands gripping mine, the other holding the strap of his bag.

I saw his eyes flick in one direction.  Casually, head turning back to face forward, I looked out of the corner of my eye.

The extended balcony on the far left of the room had groups of people talking, just like everywhere else in the banquet hall, but a lone figure stood alone.  Bald, he had a scarf covering the lower half of his face, a heavy cast to his forehead, almost neanderthal, and the hands that gripped the railing had long fingers.  Knives glinted on the strap that ran diagonally across his chest.

He was watching us, his head moving to follow as we made forward progress.

I thought I’d lose track of him as I moved too far head to track him in my peripheral vision, but he turned, and he started walking in the same direction we were, along the length of the balcony, making progress toward the front door.

Two of them.

Good eye, Jamie.

I had to wonder where the woman from the kitchen was.  She wasn’t following us, which was curious.  It raised questions.  Why not stir up the crowd, call something out and have people mob us or grab us?

The first possibility was that her hands were tied.  Maybe she couldn’t speak.  Maybe she could, but wasn’t willing to cause trouble with this event being more important than it looked.

The second possibility was that she hadn’t come after us because she didn’t need to come after us.  We were already caught.

Three quarters of the way.  The last quarter of the hallway stretched before us.

The man with the scarf started moving faster, one long finger tracing the top of the railing.  He was a little more eager than the woman had been, and the speed he was moving suggested he’d make it down the stairs and beat us to the front door.

I looked, and I didn’t see windows.  There were side doors, likely leading to the theaters, but they weren’t accessible side doors.  The crowds of people around the various scientists and experimenters made it look pretty dire.

I picked up the pace a little, my hand tugging on Jamie’s.

All at once, the man that was above us stopped, turning, gripping the railing with long fingers.  I allowed myself to look, momentarily making eye contact.

A moment later, Jamie’s hand hauled back on mine.  My stride was broken, and eyes that had been glancing our way now stared.

Jamie had been grabbed.

I supposed it had always been a ‘when’ we got grabbed, not ‘if’.

He looked shocked, and he didn’t know what to do.  The man that had him was a military sort, with massive mutton chops, badges on his lapel and an odd amount of jewelry on the hand he’d used to grab Jamie.  A very ostentatious wedding band, and a ring that probably signified something military-related.  Membership of an important group.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked, his voice deep.  More heads turned.

The attention we were getting was so oppressive I almost couldn’t breathe.  Jamie looked stricken.

Cynthia was looking, but I wasn’t sure she could see us, specifically.  The man at the railing remained where he was, watching, fingers rising and falling like a line of something or others was squirming between them and the railing.

He’d probably seen the man turn and come after us.

I couldn’t let the fear show in my face.  Fear would doom us.

I smiled, knowing that my fake smile was being studied by merchants and politicians, people who had made livings off of using or identifying fakery.

“Love,” I said, not looking at the jewelry on his fingers, while remaining acutely aware of it.

The man harumphed.  “Love?”

“Brotherly love.  This guy and me, we’re the fastest friends you ever saw, sir.  There’s a girl he likes, I told him, no matter what, he needed to tell her.”

“T-told you, Simon, y-you really didn’t have to do that,” Jamie said, voice shaking a bit.  He was drawing on his nervousness, using it.

Simon.  It was my first fake name.  Nostalgic.

Even my nickname, Sy, it was taken more from Simon than Sylvester.

I told myself it was a good omen, and didn’t allow myself to consider that it might be the last fake name I ever used.

“We never thought we’d see her again.  Then we saw her coming here, he’s dressed nice, we thought- well, I thought and I told him, he’s gotta say.  Before he loses the chance.”

The man didn’t show any sign of relenting.  His face was like stone.  Stone with massive muttonchops, but stone all the same.

I was still counting on the sheep mentality.  That if we stopped this man, convinced him, the rest would let us be.  Even managing that would be hard.  It depended on Cynthia not coming to see what the commotion was about, and the man at the railing above us staying where he was.

A lot of dependings, there.

Foremost among them was Muttonchops here.

The rings.  The way he so proudly displayed the badges.  I was counting on him being a romantic at heart.

“Girl, hm?” he asked.  He sounded skeptical.

“She was over there,” I said, pointing into the crowd.

Like magic, the observers parted, stepping away from the path of my fingertip.  The only ones who didn’t were Mr. Ames and our dear Helen.

Ames looked like he was going to suffer heart failure.  He had already been sweating bullets, and now a full third of the room was now focusing its attention on him and Helen.  He couldn’t have looked more stricken if someone shoved an icicle up his rear end.

I shifted my grip on Jamie, circling around him, so I stood between him and Muttonchops.  One hand on each of Jamie’s shoulders, I pushed.

The muttonchops, the flash, the display.  Not just a romantic.  Muttonchops believed in the show.

This was for his sake, something gaudy, obvious, impossible to ignore.

I believed, wholeheartedly, that he couldn’t maintain his hold on Jamie without becoming the bad guy, without standing in the way of a boy and his love.  Jamie wasn’t even to blame.  It was my fault, I was the one who had dragged him along.

The hand dropped away.  I pushed Jamie along, and he made a faint show of resisting.

We drew closer to the front door.  Fifteen percent of the way left.  Ten.  Five.

We reached Helen and Ames.  The last few paces to the door were an impossible journey, now.

I crossed my left set of fingers, tapping them on Jamie’s shoulder, to get Helen’s attention, then shifted my grip.

It was a gesture that meant risk.

Shifting my grip to the left, to indicate the general direction of the man with the scarf.  He’d moved when I wasn’t looking, and stood on the stairs.

Damn it.

I couldn’t even see Cynthia, but the singer at the far corner of the banquet hall was watching us even as she sang.  If Cynthia made it this far, we were doomed.

Too many factors to consider.  Everything in my perception condensed to this particular moment and scene.  I was hyperaware, my every sense pitched to an almost painful degree.  We were walking a tightrope.

“I don’t know what to say,” Jamie said, to Helen.

Helen’s hand moved to her hair.  A gesture was hidden in the action.  A question mark without a question to precede it.  She was as lost as Jamie.  Her voice and attitude didn’t betray it, either way.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said, smiling in a way that probably every man here was familiar with, thinking back on their first loves.  “You’re usually writing something in a big book, aren’t you?”

Jamie nodded, swallowing hard.

I’m so sorry, I thought.  Very sorry, Jamie, putting you on the spot.

It was Ames that spoke, and I felt a moment’s terror as the heavyset man opened his big fat cannot-act-worth-a-damn mouth.  “What do you think you’re doing?”

The terror wasn’t substantiated.  It came from a very real, very spooked place.  He was as terrified as any of us.  It was real.

His inability to act was a saving grace, almost.  The people that knew him would know he was speaking from a genuine place.

“I-I really like your daughter, sir,” Jamie said.  “You-”

No,” Ames boomed.  “You’re making a spectacle of her, and you’re making a spectacle of me.  I will not stand for this.”

I stared, watching in fascination.  Was this man actually saving us?

He looked genuinely angry.  Just like his fear, it came from a real place.  We’d brought the shit to his doorstep, we’d brought it to people’s attention, and he wasn’t happy about any of it.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said, sounding terrified.  “I’ll leave right away.  I’m sorry, sir.”

“You most certainly will,” Ames said.  He paused, dramatic.  Then, in a less ominous tone, he said, “If you wish to see the girl, you can call on her at her home.  We live next to the city hall.”

Playing to the crowd.  He was willing to be the bad guy that Muttonchops hadn’t, but not entirely.  He had probably won some people over with that little display.

Jamie nodded, a little too quickly.  This time, it was Jamie who tugged me in the direction of the front door.  I was more than happy to oblige, very aware of the man with the scarf and the knives who was now walking at a casual pace down the stairs.

We were two steps from the exit when a hand slapped the heavy wood.  I didn’t recognize the man, but he wore one of the unconventional uniforms, with a mustache so thin it looked like it was drawn on with a scratch of a quill.  The slap on the wood made a dull booming noise, and it drew more attention.  I noted that several of the special guests looked annoyed at the focus that was being drawn away from them.

“We’re leaving,” I said.  “We don’t want any trouble.”

“I’d like to stop you right there,” the man said, his voice soft.  “I’m sorry, but I know I wasn’t the only one here that was instructed to assume that anything a young child says is an outright lie, until proven otherwise.”

Oh no.

No, no, no.

It went a step beyond paranoia and general knowledge of us.

The damn woman had known we were here.  She had warned people.

I looked, and I saw people in the crowd looking a little abashed that they hadn’t been the ones to say the very same thing.  Others that had been given the same instruction.

I also saw Cynthia approaching, weaving her way through the crowd, gently excusing herself to get past others.  She was roughly the same distance from the door that we’d been when Jamie had been grabbed.  Thirty or forty feet from the door, albeit with a dense thicket of people between here and there.

The man with the scarf hadn’t budged.

Why.  He and the woman in the kitchen-

No, there were more important things to focus on.  I couldn’t fuck up here like I did in so many of the actual fights.

“Lying about what?” I asked.

“The story.  Your reason for being here,” the man with the thin mustache said.  “To get here in the first place, you had to come from one of the theaters, or you came from the kitchen.  Is it unfair of us to worry that the Academy might be low enough to use young children to deliver poison to an entire banquet?”

Oh.  Well, had to give the man points for imagination.

Even I was at a loss for words there.

I pulled my hand away from Jamie, the hand between me and the exterior wall gesturing before clenching into a fist.

The only person who could see it and translate the gesture’s meaning was Helen.

Help.

I couldn’t know how she managed it without opening her mouth, but our dear, glorious Helen directed Ames our way.

“You’re accusing this girl of poisoning food?” Ames asked, voice rising.

“That is not what I’m saying,” the man at the door said.

“You’re accusing me of being a traitor?” Ames asked, even louder.

I am so very glad nobody said yes to that question, I thought.

“No,” the man said, patiently.  “I’m saying we don’t know for sure where these boys are from, or if the story about the romance-”

“It’s true!” I said, cutting him off.  Ames was acting the outraged parent, but he apparently didn’t know how important it was to keep our opponent from getting his balance, or keeping the man from getting a full sentence out.  Playing dirty was absolutely vital here.  “He likes her, he does!”

“You’re raising nonsense about poison here, laying accusations, scaring good people,” Ames said, getting more into it.  I worried he didn’t know where he was going, or that he’d run out of steam and abruptly stop, leaving us flailing.

“I’m following orders!” the man said.

Cynthia was getting closer.  If she verified those orders-

“He’s got a picture,” I said.  Without waiting for Jamie to do it, I pulled the rain-flap of his backpack away, reached inside, and hauled out the book.  He took it from me the moment I had it, and turned pages.  “Why would he have a picture if he’s lying?”

Jamie held the book up, a half-done sketch of Helen displayed.

It was a little dark and scratchy, heavy on the ink.  Not quite the picture a boy in love might draw, by my estimation, but it was a picture of Helen, and it was pretty damn accurate.

There were murmurs from the crowd that could see the book.

“That’s enough,” Ames said.  He approached us, “It’s clear you like her.”

“Yes sir,” Jamie said.

Cynthia was close enough to be in earshot, now.  She was looking at the man with the scarf and the knives, but he wasn’t moving.

That somehow spooked me more than if he’d suddenly lunged for us.

Ames put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder.  “Come.  Let’s talk, away from all this.  I don’t like the spectacle.  You can come to our place, for tea and cake, if the girl agrees.”

“I’d like that,” Helen said, just behind me.

His other hand touched the door handle, a few feet below where the man with the thin mustache had slammed his own hand against the wood.

The man wasn’t budging, even with Ames up close and personal, the book as proof.

Damnation, someone actually competent, who listened to orders.

Ames hauled the door open, ignoring the hand.  His strength contested the man’s, and Ames won.

The man looked over in Cynthia’s direction, and I did too.

She’d stopped moving.  She watched.

Ames passed through the door with Jamie.  Helen caught up, and joined me in leaving.

I felt ill at ease, well aware that I didn’t have the full picture.

The front of the theater was covered.  The rain poured beyond, flowing between the stones of the slightly domed street and into the gutters.

The door closed behind us.  We headed in the direction of the small adjunct building.  Two black men on either side of the double doors opened the way.  We stepped into the coat room, Ames and Helen found coats and pulled them on.  Jamie found a smaller cloak and donned it.  I searched and didn’t find anything small enough for me.

The sniffing woman had my coat.

Jamie found an umbrella and handed it to me.

“What was that?” Ames murmured, once we were out and walking in the rain, out of earshot.

“You know that whole blackmail thing we had going on?” I asked, twisting around to check behind us.

“I believe I know what you’re talking about,” Ames said, with a heavy lathering of sarcasm and a little bit of loathing.

“You’re done,” I said.  “It’s over.  All that you have left to do is keep quiet, and nobody finds out about the… less decorous parts of your military background.”

A lifetime ago, he’d gone to a black market doctor and found a way to avoid attending a major battle in service to the Academy, a wounded leg and a bad infection.  He’d survived when many of his colleagues hadn’t, had then been able to boast a rare level of experience, when so many who had fought in the battles he had had died.  Now he was here, and he’d sided with the rebellion.

In trying to meet and buy off some of the ex-students of the Academy, we’d found out about that bit of leverage, and played it out into our whole scheme here.  One of the higher-ups in the local rebellion became our pawn, a means of Jamie getting access to important paperwork and a hiding spot, while Helen could be the daughter returned home after a long time away.

“You’ve ruined me,” he said.  “People will put the pieces together.”

“People would have found out eventually,” I said.  “The doctor who injured your leg knew exactly what he was doing when he named you.  The moment he was caught, or the moment he was brought into the rebellion, he was ready to name you for his personal gain.”

He shook his head, but he didn’t have anything to say.

“If we’re done, does that mean there’s no tea?” Helen asked.  With a slightly different inflection, she added, “And no cake?”

“No tea, no cake,” I said.  “Mr. Ames-”

“General Ames,” Ames corrected.

I’d goaded him about the fact that his title wasn’t truly earned, but I had to admit he’d done a lot to help us just now.

“General Ames,” I amended my statement.  “Our business relationship with you is done.”

“I’m done with her, then?” he asked, indicating Helen.

“Was I so bad?” she asked.

“You disturb me,” he said, with a measure of disgust.

Helen pouted.

“Go home, figure out what to do next,” I told Ames.  “I advise leaving.  Just to be safe.  Put some distance between yourself and the rest of this.  Maybe play up how embarrassed you were with your treatment in there.”

He shook his head, jowls wobbling.

All at once, he turned, breaking away from us, as if he couldn’t bear to be in our company any longer.

Jamie, Helen and I walked through the rain.  We passed several people.  The rain was thick enough it was hard to identify details.  I might have imagined vaguely monstrous details about anyone we passed, except many of them were monsters, or stitched, or something-or-others.

Was the sniffing woman out here?  Or did the rain keep her from tracking us like she had with the coats and following us into the kitchen?

“Well, I didn’t expect any of that,” Helen said.  “I thought I’d be busy for a little while yet.”

“We’re going to be busy,” I said, “Just doing something different than we were.”

I continued to examine each of the people out on the street.  Were any watching us?

“Getting cake can be on the list,” Jamie said, “I’m sure Sy didn’t mean to tease.”

Helen reached out to give Jamie a pat on the cheek.

“I always mean to tease,” I said.  “Except then.  No, I didn’t mean to there.”

“You’re the best boys,” Helen said.  “What about the other boy?  And our girls?”

“That,” I said, “remains a very good question.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Cynthia back there, she wanted us.  She was coming after us, she had the ability to give the order, and I think she probably would have been listened to.  Now, there’s a dim possibility that she changed her mind, bought the story…”

“But you don’t think so,” Jamie said.  “She changed her mind for another reason.”

“The man with the scarf on the stairs, he gave her some signal, or he communicated something, and she deferred to him.  I’m guessing they don’t believe three birds in the hand are worth however many are in the bush.”

“They’re using us,” Jamie said.

“We’re being watched, right this second,” I murmured.  “Guarantee it.  They want us to lead them to the others before they make a move.  Let’s get Helen her cake-”

“Yay.”

“-and figure out our next move.  Because we’re stuck.  We can’t communicate with or meet up with the others without putting them and ourselves in danger.  We have a tail to shake, and the moment Mr. Scarf finishes discussing a strategy with Mrs. Cynthia, we’re going to have an entire city’s worth of hostile forces collapsing in on us.”

“And Mary, Lillian, and Gordon might too, except they won’t have any warning at all,” Jamie said.

“Let’s do what we can about that,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

 

================================================== 5.04 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.4

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

“Two big issues,” I said.

“More than two,” Helen observed.

“Two big ones,” I reaffirmed.  “We need to get out of this with our skin intact, and we need to help the others.  Only reason they haven’t come after us is they probably aren’t sure they can find the others once we’re dead.”

“They could torture us,” Jamie said, under his breath.

“Sure,” I said.  “Yeah, that’s probably in the cards, if they don’t get the results they want by waiting.”

“Great,” Jamie said.

“They’re not going to come after us here,” I said, “If they’re patient enough to let things get this far, they’re patient enough to let us have a bite to eat.  We bide our time, we make them wait, we see if they make a mistake.”

“We’re giving them time to get in position,” Jamie said.

“Sure,” I said.  “That’s fine.”

“Fine?”

I gave him my best winning smile.  “It’s fine.  Really.  They’re not going to close in on the others that fast.  We wait.”

“Alright,” he said.  “I’m going to assume you have a plan.”

“I-”

“-And,” he said, cutting me off, “Don’t correct me.  Let me have this.”

I smiled, shutting my mouth.

We reached the building, and we were mute as we waited in a long line.  We ended up settling in at the corner, where the path to a restroom and a length of counter at one end of the kitchen gave us some more privacy than we might otherwise have, putting us another pace or two from the nearest tables.  I took a seat by the window, so I had a glimpse of the street outside.  Jamie did the same, sitting across from me, while Helen took the aisle seat, next to Jamie.

Jamie and I looked out on the rain-stricken city, and the two of us saw the world in very different ways.  It was handy, when we were on the lookout together.

I liked that, really.  With our group being as diverse as it was, there were people who were more different from certain others.  Gordon and I were one example.  Could we work well together?  Sure.  But even while I’d trust Gordon to hold my still-beating heart in his hand and treat it with the care it deserved, I knew that we were very different in how we saw the world and how we approached a situation.  We were polar opposites in terms of our abilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Put Mary and Gordon on the same task, and they matched each other’s stride well.  Gordon and Helen, same thing.

Jamie and I should have been opposites.  We should have run counter to one another.  I was the chaos that stood in contrast to his order, the haste to his slow and steady pace.  He was gentler than I was.  We worked together better than any of the other opposing elements among the Lambs.

That seemed important to me.  As if somehow it would hold things together in a pinch.

The waitress came by, we made our order, and promptly delivered it.

I left Jamie to continue studying the outside, and turned my attention to the interior.

The tea house was a sad little affair.  It was the sort of location where the youth might congregate in better times, boys and girls could meet for first dates, children could gather and cluster into booths, and the elderly might sit for hours at a time, enjoying the good weather if there was any to be had.  A glass display window protected and showed off an assortment of sandwiches and baked goods, and kettles were perpetually boiling behind the counter.

But there were no youths besides us, there were no elderly.  Whitney was a small town with a large town population in it, now, and that population consisted of soldiers and rebels, with a lot of angry people.  The staff of the tea house was having trouble keeping up, and the food behind the display window was dwindling, with new food being placed within on a regular basis, only to be dismantled by the next collection of guests.  It was less of an elegant, artistic construction than a wall being torn down a hair faster than it could be rebuilt.  If the staff worked hard enough, they would manage to keep going until the day was done, then collapse from exhaustion before doing what they could to get ready for the next day.  If they failed, then they would have to deal with wave after wave of disgruntled customers, men with a lot of repressed fear and anger due to the ongoing war.

The constant rain meant mud was constantly being tracked in,  and the floor was only partially swept before something demanded the attention of the staff.  The result was that dirt and debris collected in corners and at the edges of the floor, where the mops and brooms couldn’t quite reach.  The staff wasn’t used to this kind of environment, and it was clearly getting to them.  They were used to a relaxed atmosphere, one where they could chat with their more innocent customers, not a crowd of unsmiling men who gathered at the door, shuffling their feet and murmuring among each other until a table vacated or the line reached the counter.

“Miss,” Helen said.  “Miss?”

Helen succeeded in getting the attention of the waitress.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Helen said.

“It’s alright,” the woman said, offering Helen a tired smile that suggested it wasn’t.

Helen’s demeanor was bright as she talked, pointing at her cake with her spoon.  “I just wanted to say this is really very good.  Would you pass my compliments on to whoever made it?”

The woman seemed to shed five years of age as she relaxed muscles in her face, neck, and shoulders.  I really wondered if she might cry.  She nodded, a little too quickly, and then said, “I will.”

“Thank you!” Helen said, almost sing-song, to the waitresses’ back.

I broke my cookie in half before washing it down with a bit of tea.  “I don’t know how I get the reputation as the most evil member of the bunch.”

“Hm?” Jamie asked.

“Just saying,” I said.

“What Helen said was nice,” Jamie said, jabbing me in the arm with his spoon.

I shook my head, very slowly.  “Nope.”

“Nope?”

“I’m a student of the way humans work, and , and I think what Helen just did was worse than anything I’ve done in the last while.”

Helen hummed happily, rocking left and right a bit as her legs kicked idly under the table.  Jamie gave me a look.

“Could be what they need to keep going,” Jamie murmured.

“But it’s not.  They’re finding their own ways to keep going.  When you lift someone up, you have to let go of them.  They might not have the strength to land on their feet when they get dropped,” I said.  “I don’t think these people have that strength.”

“That’s a very dark view,” Jamie said.

“It would have been better to leave them alone than to remind them of what they don’t have,” I said.

“That’s an even darker view,” Jamie said.  “I don’t want to live in a world where everyone acts that way.”

That stung, more than I cared to admit.  “Not everyone, not always.”

“But sometimes?  Sometimes can’t say something nice and be kind?”

“I don’t see why this is a point of contention,” I said.

“What’s your perfect world, Simon?” Jamie asked, using the fake name he’d stuck me with.  I wondered if he’d chosen it for a reason.  Harkening back to the old days.  “If the big problems were fixed and everything was working the way it should?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” I said.

“But?  What’s your perfect world?”

I sighed.  “A world where everyone is surrounded by people who are striving to be their best, because we only grow as people when we’re around people who are equal to or better than us in intelligence, skill, and industry.  It’s in stupidity and stagnation that we fail as a species.”

“But ethically?  Morally?” he prodded.

“I just gave my answer.  In a perfect world, we’re all different, ethically and morally.  We argue, we challenge each other, and everyone is working to make their ideas better and more… more.”

“A lot of hostility, arguments, competition.”

“Nothing good awaiting us as a species if we lose that,” I said.  I broke off a small bit of my oversized cookie and popped it into my mouth.  I chewed and swallowed.  “Stagnation.”

“I can’t help but notice you haven’t mentioned anything about the positive human relationships,” Jamie said.  “Only the confrontational ones.”

“Humans are a social species.  Push us, pressure us, challenge us, and the weak elements will break apart, the stronger elements will band together,” I said.

“Wallace’s law, applied to a group,” Jamie said.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said.  “I’m not proposing something where we’re all supposed to act like animals, or that we should model ourselves after them.  I’m saying humans are humans, and being human means struggling.  In the course of those struggles, we form the strongest bonds.  Could be us and a life and death struggle with a pair of people who want to stalk and kill us, or two people working in a tea shop in a town that’s gotten embroiled in a civil war.”

“Seems like your worldview is a little bit, uh,” Jamie said, “Conveniently you?”

“Of course it is,” I said.  “I’m eleven.  Ish.”

Jamie rolled his eyes.

“What’s your worldview?” I asked.  “Don’t let my answer bias you.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, staring out the window.  “But world peace would be nice.”

“World peace would destroy humanity,” I said.  “Do I need to get into how?  Because-”

“You don’t need to get into how,” Jamie said.  “I get it.  I really do.  I agree with you on a lot of things, believe it or not.  That we need the challenge, that we have to surround ourselves with people that as as bright and talented as we are, if not better.  I like the differences in people, ethically or otherwise- I wouldn’t be able to stand you if I didn’t.”

I kicked him lightly in the shin under the table.  He kicked me, harder.  I pinned his foot down with mine, and he relented rather than fighting to get it free, content with a one-for-one.

He spoke, adding, “But if it came down to it, I’d rather have peace than war.  Both would do us a lot of harm, but I’d rather the sleepy, apathetic sort of ruin to the violent sort.  Especially if it means we can be gentle and kind and not worry about the damage you somehow do by acting nice.”

I sighed.

“I know,” Jamie said.  “We’re different people like that.”

“You’re a boring person.  The most boring.”

He stuck his tongue out at me.

“Stick out your tongue all you want, you’re still boring.”

He ignored me,  turning to Helen.  “What about you, Helen?  Worldview?”

“I was hoping that being nice would get me another bit of dessert,” she said, looking in the general direction of the wait-staff.

“If you timed it differently, you might have,” I said.  “But there isn’t much behind the display.  Stuff is in the oven.  They’re short, so it’s hard to justify.  By the time the stuff comes out of the oven, they’ll be too busy, the comment will be mostly forgotten.”

“Dang it,” Helen said.

“Have to say, that’s not a worldview,” Jamie muttered.

“It is so,” Helen said, sounding offended.  “Ethics, morals?  Everyone acts in certain ways because it gets us things.  Some things are more basic than others.  People want to eat, they want shelter, they want to be around other people…”

Jamie and I nodded.  Helen was the most alien of us, and it was interesting to hear where she came from.

“We act a certain way because it gets us those things.  If we can’t act nice then nobody wants to give us those basics, like food.”

“You keep coming back to that,” Jamie murmured.  “Food.”

Jamie and Helen were at odds, in a way, now that I thought about it.

“We build up this image and it’s all based around getting what we want.  Everyone does it, they play along, and in a roundabout, complicated way, selfishness breeds connectedness,” she said.

I nodded.  Jamie leaned over.  “And your perfect world?”

“Mmm,” Helen smiled.  “Perfect is complicated.  Hard to explain.”

“Give it a shot,” I prodded her.

“It’s… beautiful is the best word to describe it,” she said.

Jamie and I nodded.

“Everything that isn’t necessary to getting what we want is gone,” she said, eyes closing, as if she was vividly imagining.  “There’s an abundance of it all, thanks to science.  Food is everywhere and it overflows and there’s nothing to worry about because we have and we want and we take.  We’re, and by we I mean people, we’re everywhere and we spill over into one another and we’re all knit together, physically and mentally.  It’s an exquisite landscape of things that don’t ever run out to see and touches and tastes and smells and mating and eating and mindless fighting and eating-mating and fighting-eating and fighting-”

“Okay,” I said, interrupting.  I paused, then when I couldn’t think of what to say. “Okay.”

Helen reached down to her plate, used a fingertip to wipe up a bit of frosting, and popped it into her mouth, sucking it off.

“Okay,” I said, still at a bit of a loss for words.

“That’s a mental image that’s going to be with me forever,” Jamie said, dropping his head down until his face was in his hands.

“I don’t see where ethics come into that world,” I said, more to see Jamie’s reaction than out of curiosity.

“No,” Jamie said.  “Don’t-”

“The closer you get to perfection, the further you get from ethics,” Helen said, as if it was common sense.

“Can we drop this?” Jamie asked.

“Sounds like something Ibott would say,” I commented.

“Um,” Jamie cut in, before Helen could answer, putting a hand over her mouth.  “Can we drop the topic?  Please?  I’m sorry I brought it up.  Let’s talk about the threats on our lives?  The others?”

I nodded.  “We can do that.  Mustn’t break our Jamie, right Hel?”

She nodded, and Jamie dropped his hand.  Helen smiled, leaned over, and gave Jamie a kiss on the cheek.  Jamie didn’t react, except to glare at me, as if I was somehow to blame.

“Alright,” I said, leaning back.  “Changing the subject for Jamie’s sake.”

“Won’t help.  I can’t forget it, as long as I live.”

With emphasis on the I, not live, the thought struck me.

Damn it, was my next thought.  Now I’m in a bad mood.

“Two of them.  They clearly operate as a unit.  One to flush us out, another to keep us moving.  I’m betting the one in the kitchen left and circled around so she could track us.  It’s a very Dog-and-Catcher vibe.”

“Hard to do in the rain,” Jamie said.  “She was sniffing.  The rain would make tracking us by smell harder.”

“But not impossible, depending,” I said.  “I’m going to assume it at least means she can’t track our trail all the way back to the others, because they wouldn’t be leaving us alive if she could.”

“Makes sense,” Jamie said.

“We’re not well equipped to fight, and I don’t like the knives the man had,” I said.  “If we get in a bad situation, we run, we try to bait them into a situation where we can turn the tables, or we run.”

“You said that twice,” Helen pointed out.

“I meant it twice.  Very important,” I said.  “If they know who we are, they know who Helen is.  The woman didn’t have a gun, and the man seems to prefer knives.  That suggests they prefer close quarters.”

“They had a very feral vibe,” Jamie said.  “He had a heavy forehead, brutish, she had the mouth, the sniffing, and the hair…”

“Yes.  Good, I like that line of thinking,” I said.

“If I can get my hands on one of them, I can probably win,” Helen said.  “I’d prefer no knives, because some people are double-jointed, but I can probably win.”

“Then we have a strategy,” I said.  “We’re going to leave, and we cut through the spaces between buildings.  I’ve done it a bit, I know the best shortcuts, we break away from them, bait them in, trap them if we can, sic Helen on them.”

“Woof,” Helen said.

“Trouble is if they move as a pair, or one comes to relieve the other.  You’ll have to work fast, Hel.”

She pouted a little.

“We need to find a means of communicating with the others.  Objects can hold trace smells, allowing the sniffing woman to find us.  That means our best bet is to use people.”

“People?” Helen asked.

“Messengers.  Ones that won’t have to go to them, specifically, and who can’t be effective witnesses.”

“That’s vague,” Jamie said.

“That’s my job.  But I need elbow room to do it.  That means putting a bit of space between us and them before I act.”

“Which is also good for our lifespans,” Jamie murmured.

I nodded.  “As for you, Jamie…”

“What can I do?”

“Information.  Anything you can figure out.  If we’re going to actively turn this around, instead of just dodging them, then we need to figure them out.  We should figure out the people with the scars and boils on their bodies, and we need to know who Cynthia is.  You’re our best bet at figuring this out, connecting the dots.”

Jamie leaned forward, arms folded on the table, and scooted his chair up.  “On that subject, you’ve reminded me, I think they’ve got a trump card.”

“In what sense?”

“My focus up until now has been on the strategy, the war overall, troops, who they’re sending, and where.  Ames was a good source of information, but they started giving different people different details,” Jamie said.  “Trying to catch us out by narrowing down the field.  I caught on to it when details didn’t add up.  They’re not scared enough, Sy.  Westmore is a half day away, fully occupied by the Academy, and the people in charge here aren’t spooked about it.  If you want to count stuff we should figure out and figure out soon, I’d put that on the list.”

“Is it possible the scarred people are the trump card?”

“Don’t know,” Jamie said.  “It didn’t look like it mattered, with Mary and Gordon placing the bugs, we were going to resolve the situation before anything happened.  Now that we’re in a tighter spot…”

“Yeah,” I said.  I looked out the window.

“Are we going, then?” Helen asked, weirdly insistent.

“It doesn’t look like they’re showing up.  I was hoping they’d turn up and try to pressure us, force a move.  Yeah, we’re going.”

“What would the plan be, if it came to that?” Jamie asked.

“Helen asks the waitress for help, we appeal to genuine human nature, duck out through the back,” I said.  “With this many people in here, we could lose them, because they can’t track us effectively with this crowd.  Buy ourselves a small head start.  If we could find the other one while we did it and keep an eye on them, we could see how they communicated.  Their dynamic, and so on.”

Jamie nodded.

Helen was already standing, and she reached for my plate, stacking it with hers and Jamie’s before gathering the silverware.  She gathered the teacups as well.

While Jamie got his backpack and slung it over one shoulder, she took the plates to the counter, placing them in the bucket that was over the sink.  She seemed too enthusiastic, bouncing in place, which was cause for me to watch her, even as Jamie and I headed for the door.

I saw her lean forward, talking to the server at the ovens.  The woman smiled, grabbed a cookie, and put it into a bag, before handing it to Helen.

She’d waited until the ovens were done before asking if we were going.

I looked at Jamie and rolled my eyes.  We’d slowed as we approached the cluster of men at the door.  Most had rifles, some had Exorcists, many had pistols as secondary weapons, or belts with canisters dangling from them.  Countermeasures against stitched and other experiments, I imagined.

I would have liked to grab the canisters, in hopes of getting something incendiary or something that might irritate the sniffing woman’s nose, but I wasn’t sure what the labels were supposed to mean, and I wasn’t sure how to unhook them.  Uncertainty was the spice of life, so to say, but people didn’t tend to use phrasings like that when referring to that which prolonged life expectancy.

Helen caught up at a skip and a run, throwing her arms out to catch us around the shoulders.  I was smaller, and I took the brunt of it.

My eye fell on one man in front of me.  Boots were common, but boots with a sidearm clipped to the one side-

I let myself fall onto my hands and knees, driving one shoulder into the man’s calf.

“Sorry!” I said.  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!”

I gave him my best ‘scared to death’ look, as he winced, backing away.  I clambered to my feet, accepting Helen’s assistance.

As we exited the tea shop, I raised my umbrella.

There was a figure on the roof of a tool shop, hood up, face barely visible.  By his frame, he was the man with the scarf.  I pretended I didn’t see him and gestured to the others, indicating a hard right turn.

Make it as hard for them to follow as we can.

I walked between Helen and Jamie, my eyes peeled.  When I was sure we weren’t being observed, I pulled the pistol from under my shirt and handed it to Jamie, slipping it into a large raincoat pocket.  He didn’t react, but he had to have felt the weight.

Better that he had a weapon than me, if it came down to it.  It wasn’t that I was a bad shot, but my tendency to overthink and self-sabotage in the process carried over to guns too.  I could hit eleven out of twelve bottles from the big tree behind the Orphanage, using one of Gordon’s practice guns, but Jamie had a better record than I did when it came to actually shooting anyone.  Reaction times could be better, but there were worse things.

Helen had a slim chance if it came down to a hand to hand fight.  Jamie could use a gun.

It meant I didn’t have to worry so much about them.

“One on the right is pursuing,” Jamie said.

“Noted,” I responded.  “How far away is she?”

“He,” Jamie said.  “The man from the upper floor in the banquet hall?”

He.

“There was one on the roof, opposite the front door of the tea house,” I said.  “Male.  We’re up against three.”

“Unless someone felt like spending some time on the roof,” Helen said, brightly.

“She brings up a good point.  It seems obvious,” Jamie said.  “Was he deliberately showing himself?”

Was he?

I frowned.  It could have been part of their plan.  Hang out in a spot where he wouldn’t be seen unless we were actively looking for people in unusual places.  If we changed course…

Damn it.  I’d expected two.  But they were herding us.  Closing the net.

“We can’t let them herd us,” I murmured.  “If we react to them, then we’re tipping them off.”

“If we don’t react to them, then we’re playing into their hands,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, well, they’re probably specialists when it comes to this,” I said.  “We need to change things up, adapt our plan.”

“How?” Jamie asked.

That’s a good question.

Give ourselves a headstart, pass a message to the others without getting caught, escape, reunite with the others.  In an ideal world, we’d be able to gather information on this new enemy, and still put Mary and Gordon’s plan into action.  Shipman’s weapon.  Disable Whitney and whatever trump card they had.

I felt Jamie’s hand on my arm tighten.  I wasn’t as fast to see what he saw, but it was a question of my being an inch or two shorter than him.

A man on the far side of the street, approaching.

He held his head at a strange angle, like his neck was broken, and a earlobes on already large ear dangled, a weight pinned to the bottom.  He had unkempt black hair, an unkempt beard, and strangely spaced out features on his face, as if someone had grabbed the back of his head and pulled, everything back out of the way, eyes to either side, mouth down, nose flattened and broadened.  He wore a soldier’s uniform, and he was weighed down with canisters.  A length of chain was wound his right wrist and hand, and something that looked like a lantern dangled from the end of that chain, nearly touching the ground by his right foot, with spikes radiating from it.

Plumes of something were puffing out from the end, as it swung in time with each step of his left foot.

My arm at my side, I reached over, tapping the gun in Jamie’s pocket.

The three of us walked, eyes forward, pretending not to have noticed.

As carts and carriages passed up and down the street, a group of people blocked our view of the man for a few long seconds.

When they moved out of the way, he was gone.  I felt Jamie’s grip tighten, but he wasn’t indicating anything in particular.

Just worry.

Helen reached for her bag and broke the cookie in half.  She broke one half into two quarters, and held them out for Jamie and I.

Jamie took his bit of cookie, letting go of my arm.

I saw the man walking in the midst of a group of woodcutters, his hair and beard almost camouflaged among theirs, only his features standing out, and only barely then.  Helen pushed the cookie at my mouth.  I opened up and accepted it.  The damn cookie was good, but I’d have to talk to her about things, after.

“Good cookie,” Helen said, as the man came to be about five paces away.  Four.  Three.  “I really like-”

She didn’t stop talking so much as segue.  Switching modes, fast enough it caught me off guard, let alone our assailant.  She ducked low, lunging at the man in the same instant he shoved the two men in front of him out of the way.  He had the smoking lantern thing in one hand, clutched with spikes radiating out between fingertips, and was already swinging for Helen’s face- except she wasn’t there anymore.

Jamie didn’t miss a beat.  He fired.

It was loud.  People screamed, and they scattered.  The lumberjacks around us backed away, ducking.

They realized we knew.  They communicate without words, just as well as we do.

Helen grabbed his arm, keeping it back and out of the way as he dropped to one knee.  Jamie fired again, placing each shot into the center of the man’s body mass, carefully enough to avoid hitting Helen and I.

Jamie was slow, he lagged behind the rest of the world as he processed and studied everything.  But with forewarning- well, he was keeping up.

A canister hanging off the man’s body took a bullet from Jamie’s gun and went spinning off.  Thick black-grey smoke expanded out in the middle of the street.

I turned my attention to the others.  Figuring out where the knife man and the one on the rooftop might have gone.  I spotted the knife man with the scarf, approaching at a run.

“Go,” I said.  “Nearest alley, go, go!”

Achieved what we needed to achieve, I thought.  Slowing them down, passing on word to the others.  When they heard that children had been involved in a gunfight, they’d know something was wrong.

It wasn’t elegant, but it was us.

Damn all the other parts of the plan.  It was worth nothing at all if the Lambs didn’t make it out okay.

The moment that thought was through my head, something struck me in the side, with surprising force.  It felt big, like I’d been kicked by an oversized horse.  My hand slipped from Jamie’s arm, and I felt Helen grab me, failing to stop me from falling belly first to the street.

“Sy!” Jamie called out.  “No, no!”

The two of them grabbed me, trying to help me stand.  I didn’t grasp why it was so hard, until I felt the pain in my side.  A burning point of light, deep inside, a small pain.

Helen made a noise, and shoved Jamie to the ground before ducking low.  Something struck the wall with a surprising crack.

I stared at the smoke in the middle of the street, at the pouring rain that had to have obscured the view.  So far away I hadn’t even heard the shot.

The man on the roof.  He shot me.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

Ow.  Oh man, it was really starting to hurt.

I found my feet with their help, I stumbled, and nearly fell again.  The two of them had me, almost dragging me.

Two of our slowest runners, and me with a bullet in my midsection.  The knife wielder was close.  We had the alley, and we hopefully had cover.

But we were surrounded, with one of them missing, no doubt waiting in the wings.  They had no reason not to call the local soldiers in and draw the net closed.

“If you don’t move faster, gunshot or no, I’m never speaking to you again,” Jamie said.

I couldn’t have Jamie refusing to speak to me.

No way, no how.

I did my best.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.05 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.5

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

I watched Helen and Gordon chatter, joining in now and again with a comment.  The topic was our etiquette and presentation class.  It still put me off, having known Helen for a few months, how she could switch from eerie deadpan to animated and normal, demonstrating the very subjects that Gordon was bringing up.  The two of us gave her tips, and she demonstrated each of them with an uncanny accuracy, shaping and refining her body language, tone, and overall presentation.

They were as different as night and day, at the fundamental level, human and inhuman, but they had still found a connection.

I realized we had a fourth member present.  The new kid.  Quiet.

“Have you had the class yet?” I asked him, to make conversation.

He shook his head, then raised a hand to push the glasses up his nose.

“They make us do it, so we can fit into more situations, and so we don’t embarrass Mr. Hayle, I think,” I said.

“Seems like Helen and Gordon took it to heart,” the boy said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “They know their stuff.”

“You don’t?  I’m still trying to figure everyone out.  I think I understand them, Gordon more than Helen, but she’s-“

“An experiment,” I finished.

He nodded, looking guilty for even saying it.

“To answer your question, I think they’re trying to decide if I should keep going or if I’m a lost cause.”

“Oh,” he said.

I cracked a smile.  “I’m more interested in the professors than anything.  They find really interesting people, four so far, and I’ve made it a challenge for myself to see how fast I can get under their skin.”

“I’m starting to get the picture,” he said.

I smiled wider.

“I still feel so lost,” he said.  “And I’m not catching up.  I sleep sixteen hours a day, I have more appointments than anyone, I have less time in class, less time with the rest of you, it’s not helping.  They say it’s going to get better, but…”

He trailed off.

“Whatever happens, we’ll help,” I said.  “We’ll understand.  Honest.”

He probably wasn’t aware how much doubt came across on his face.

There was something he wasn’t telling me.

“I’ll start,” I said, smiling.  “I’ve completely forgotten your name.”

“I’ve told you four times.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “What is it, again?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie,” I said.  I closed my eyes and tried to commit it to memory.  “They tell me this will get better too, as they fix the dosages.  And it is.  But right now it sucks.  I know what it’s like to feel like you’re falling behind.”

“Speaking of,” he said, “I think I’m dozing off.  I can barely keep my eyes awake.  Those two talking is putting me under.”

“Then sleep,” I said.  “I don’t mind.”

“I’m afraid to sleep, sometimes,” he said, his voice soft, still watching them.  The sudden onset of fatigue was obvious.

“Why?”

“Sometimes, I fall asleep, and when I wake up, they’ve got me hooked up, and there’s nothing I can do before they throw the switch.”

I remembered the chair, the cloth-covered tanks.  I’d snooped.  I’d met Ashton and Evette, in a way.  I’d seen the aftermath, the labs where their remains were interred.  Evette dead before she even awoke, Ashton an effective abortion, left in a tank that now smelled of formaldehyde.  On bad days I’d slept on the floor in their rooms, or stayed up all night with them, talking to them, knowing they couldn’t ever respond.

That thought on my mind, I spoke without thinking, “Whatever happens, as long as I can help it, and I can help a lot of things, I will not let them do that again.  At the very least, I’ll wake you up before they take you.”

He smiled for the first time.  A real smile, anyway.  “You sound so serious.”

I reached out and took his hand, squeezing it hard enough that it made my own hand hurt.  When that wasn’t enough, I grabbed it with my other hand, squeezing his between the two of mine.  “I am.  I’m promising.”

“I owe you for one good nap, then,” he told me.

“You don’t owe me anything.  That’s not how we do this.”

“I stand corrected.”

“And that’s a promise that applies to every nap, every time you sleep.”

He frowned a little, eyes opening more as he studied me.

“We’re going to go live somewhere else starting this summer.  Until then, I know how to get out of my room.  I know where your room is.”

“It’s not that important.  You’ll get in trouble.”

“It is important,” I said.  “I’ve promised, and I can’t break my first ever promise to you.  Not when we’re all going to be together for the rest of our lives.”

He nodded slowly.  I thought for a second that he was nodding off.

“Who were you, before?” he asked me.

“Before all this?  Don’t remember.”

“I can’t imagine that.  Isn’t it scary, not knowing?”

“I found my file, I read it.  I know they didn’t expect me to look for it, so I don’t think it was a trick,” I said.  “I wasn’t anybody special.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

I shot him a look.  “That line is so lame.  Oh, I don’t even have words-“

“Stop.”

“So lame!”

He gave me a light push.

“Unforgivably lame!”

He pushed me harder.  I nearly fell from the edge of the table I was sitting on.

I settled down, still laughing, dragging my fingers down one side of my face.  Gordon and Helen were staring now, but I hadn’t distracted them sufficiently to break the stride of their conversation.

“What can I do for you?” he asked me.

“Never say-“

“Forget what I said!  Really.  What can I do?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“It’s okay if you can’t do what you said.  I’ll understand-“

“-I’ll do it.  I promised.”

“Then I want to know what I can do to help you.  I’m going to find a way to help you, Sylvester.”

I shrugged, shaking my head.

“Nothing bothers you?  Nowhere you need help?  When I first met Gordon, he said you have a hard time after your appointments?”

“Oh, did he?  Yeah, I guess.”

“Why?”

“It hurts,” I said.  “It hurts so much it makes me feel like there’s nothing else.  After, I feel like less of a person.  More like I’m a piece of metal, thrust into the fire, over and over.”

“And they’re hammering you into shape?”

“No,” I confessed.  “Mostly, I get to hold the hammer.  There’s that, at least.”

He was nodding off, now.  Slumping forward.

I could see the ridged scar running up from the collar of his shirt to the nape of his neck.  His head had been shaved for the last surgery.  It was still so short that I could see his scalp.

“Wish I could help, somehow,” he murmured.  I gave his shoulder a push, and he roused enough to shift position, leaning back against the wall, the ends of each leg dangling off the edge of the table.

“Nothing you can do to help,” I said.  I didn’t speak my thoughts aloud.  Except maybe talk.  Beats talking to Ashton or Evette, at least.

He was already out.  He’d fought it and lost.

Now it was more like talking to Ashton.  I murmured to myself, “It’s up to me.  I’ve got to get used to it somehow, make friends with the pain.”

I nearly fell as the other two urged me through the door.  Jamie let go of me to close the door, very softly, and Helen wasn’t strong enough to hold me up.  She did what she could to ease my collapse to the floor.

Pain.  I’d thought I’d achieved a serious tolerance to it over the years, but the very real imagery suggested a lapse.  I’d nearly passed out, drifting into memories.

Was this what it meant to see my life flashing before my eyes?  It was as good a starting point as anything else.  I didn’t have many memories of things that came before.  Some games with Helen and Gordon, some antics after I broke out of my room, time with Evette and Ashton.  Less meaningful things.

“You with us, Sy?” Jamie asked.

“Yup,” I said, putting all my effort into sounding casual as I let my head sink back to the floor.  I was in a kitchen, I realized.  Checkered drapes at the window.

The small pinpoint of pain had spread and expanded until it felt like my stomach was three times the size, filled with agony.  It wasn’t swollen, though.  It was a regular, too-skinny tummy with a hole in it and a lot of blood leaking around it, into my shirt and the top of my pants.  I had blood that had dripped around the side of my body and into my butt crack.

This kind of agony was something I was used to, though it limited how I could move and pull my thoughts together.  Blood in my butt crack somehow drove the point home better than my life flashing before my eyes.  It was a signal that things were horribly, horribly wrong.

People should never ever have blood in their buttcrack.

“They’re close,” Helen said.

“I know,” Jamie replied.  He stared down at me.  “I’m going to find a way to help you, Sy.”

I nodded.  I winced as I inhaled and swallowed at the same time and that somehow made the wrong thing move, touching on the area where I’d been shot.  “We should go.”

“We should,” Jamie said, “But we need to stop the bleeding, at the very least.”

“Need Lillian, but she’s too far away,” I said.  I blinked with more force than was needed, because I didn’t want to have my eyes close and stay closed.

A very deep, male voice cut in, “Who’s Lillian, and what the hell are you doing?”

I saw Jamie go limp, his head bowing.  Defeat.

Helen, of course, was Helen.  I looked over in the direction she was staring, and I saw a man in the doorway of the kitchen, a wife and child behind him, staring.

I looked back to Helen, and tears were falling down her cheeks.  Crying on command.

I met Jamie’s eyes, then spoke, “The Academy’s attacking.”

I watched the expression on the man and woman’s faces.  The wide eyes of the child, who was young enough to be of indeterminate gender.  The man was young.  He’d probably had the child in or just after his teens.  He was like an older Gordon, if Gordon had a weak chin.  His expression changed as he wrestled with fear and trying to summon his courage.

He only needed a push.

“Help me,” I said.  My ability to almost take the pain in stride made it more difficult to find the piteous tone I needed.

He rushed to my side, twisted around, and told his wife, “The kit!  It’s under the sink!”

The woman took the little kid with her as she left.  Hopefully to get the ‘kit’.

“They attacked in the street,” Jamie said.  “You heard the gunshots?”

The man nodded.  “We were looking out the window at the other side of the house.”

I spoke, wincing as I did, “They looked like the resistance members.  Black coats, black shirts, those rifles-“

“Exorcists,” Jamie said.

“I saw one standing there.  His face changed, eyes and nose and mouth and ears going all wonky,” I said.  “Then he saw that I’d seen him, he shouted something, a signal, and then he shot me, before he started shooting at the crowd.”

Tension lines stood out in the man’s face and neck.  He didn’t move his eyes from the bloody hands that were pressing down on my wound.  It damn well hurt, but I could push through the pain, I could find the presence of mind to lie.

Might as well foster paranoia and propaganda while I’m lying here bleeding.

“They looked normal?”

“Yes,” Helen said, still crying.  “It scared me.”

The man didn’t budge.  I could imagine he was processing, trying to grasp the situation, and what the course of action should be.

His wife came down, with a large kit and no child trailing behind.

“I don’t know what to do,” the man said.

“I do,” Jamie said.

He did?

I watched as Jamie opened the kit.  I could see the label on the lid.  It was the sign of some Academy or another, ironically enough.  A full kit for medics.  Many had been sold to the public after the last war.  By the time another war rolled around -this one, as it happened- there would be better kits, with better tools and components.

He moved with a quiet assuredness as he picked through the various things.  I watched him, periodically blinking with more force than was necessary, breathing shallow breaths to keep my stomach from hurting.  He gathered special pliers and a long syringe with two handles, powders, and metal clamps.

He met my eyes, and there was an awful lot communicated in that look.

Among them was an unspoken agreement.

Had I let slip that he was trying to figure out Latin, after our little trip down to the Dungeons with Sub Rosa, Jamie would have gotten in serious trouble.

This was something else entirely.

“Never done this before,” he murmured.

“You said-” the man of the house started.

“My dad is a doctor,” Jamie lied.  Then he told the truth, saying, “I’ve watched and learned.”

“If you’re not sure-“

“I’m sure,” Jamie lied, again.  He lied for a third time as he said, “I was talked through procedures worse than this.”

You’ve seen, you remember, you piece it together, I thought.

“The powder smells different,” Jamie said.

“Could be old,” the man said.

Jamie made a face, then tossed the powder.  He rifled through the kit until he found a liquid, instead.  He set a match on my chest.

“Uh,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said.  “Going to have to do it like it’s done on the battlefield.”

“You’ve never seen a battlefield, you butt!”

“I’ve heard,” he said.  He didn’t respond to the insult.  I realized how scared he was.

The problem with this piecemeal knowledge.  He knew the moves he needed to make, but he didn’t have a foundation.  One day, all going according to plan, he could have that foundation.  He couldn’t trust a medicine that smelled different.  But that he could even figure out the right tools, that he was this far along, and he’d kept it a secret?

The Academy couldn’t know.  We were forbidden.

The man moved his hands.  Jamie took the scalpel to my injury, opening it up enough for the pliers to go in.

He looked so terrified I couldn’t bear to look at him.  My head dropped to the floor, and I reached out to pat his knee, grunting and gasping now and then as the pliers moved.  A small sound escaped my throat as I held my breath.

“Isn’t there something you can give him?” the man asked.

“No,” I said, a moment before Jamie said, “No.”

“But-“

“There!” I jumped in, and the volume and suddenness with which I’d spoken made the pain explode through my abdomen.  I groaned, long and loud, clenching my fist and squeezing Jamie’s knee hard, making little sounds with every pant.

“Easy,” Helen said.  She gave my forehead a pat, and pushed hair out of my eyes.  It was sweaty, and stayed out of the way.

“Talk to me,” Jamie said.  “I’m not good enough to find it on my own.”

The man spoke up, “You can’t possibly-“

“Close,” I said.  “No, other direction.”

“I feel it.”

He found it, he got a grip on it, locked the pliers’ grip, and he pulled the modified pliers free, a bullet the size of a grape held in the prongs.

I wasn’t privy to the particulars of the clean up job, but he dumped the contents of the bottle in, daubed it around with a swab to get the parts the match couldn’t reach, then seared the bleedy bits with the match.

“Now I’m hungry,” I murmured, as I smelled the seared flesh.

“But we just ate,” Helen said.  “We had treats!”

“I was joking.”

She gave me a disapproving look.  The tears had dried up, and she was smiling a little.  All an act, of course.

He glued me together and closed me up, using the clamps to hold things in place until the glue could set.

“I’m not sure how much blood you’ve already lost,” Jamie said.  “There’s no aqua nucifera, and I wouldn’t trust it if there was.”

I nodded.

“Don’t move too quickly,” he said.  “You’re going to be weak.”

“Like that’s anything new,’ I said.

He put the tools aside, leaving a bit of a mess.  The man looked a little concerned, as if things didn’t add up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Helen gave me a hand in getting to my feet.  The man and Jamie moved to the kitchen sink to wash their hands.

I still had blood in my butt crack.  I probably looked like a wreck.

“There haven’t been more gunshots,” the man observed.

“There was one with a knife,” I said.  “One with claws, and one with some weapon on a chain.”

“A censer,” Jamie said, looking over at me.

I gestured for him to ease up a bit.  I saw him nod.

Riding a high.  He did what he wasn’t supposed to do, he even succeeded and saved me, hopefully.  Whatever special kind of person Jamie might’ve been, he was still a person.  He got a rush of adrenaline from a success like that.

It didn’t show that much, though.  Jamie was quiet and reserved at the best of times.  He cleaned himself up, leaving his sleeves still rolled up, and grabbed his bag.

“I should go,” the man said.  He turned to his wife.  “If we’re under attack, I need to do something.”

“But-”

“They attacked a child,” he said.  “If we’d been out instead of here with Edmund-”

She nodded, spooked.

I let the drama play out while I gently prodded my stomach.  I pulled clothing back into place, wincing at the pain, took a cloth from beside the sink and began to wipe at my shirt where it was all bloody.  Jamie handed me my jacket, then helped me pull it on.

I was well and truly ready to take something for the pain now, now that Jamie didn’t need help to find his way to the bullet.

The man went to a cabinet, and came back with a gun.  He took a moment to put it together, checking for various components, most definitely not a person with more than a few hours of practice, and then gave his wife a kiss.

“Be healthy,” he told me, “Thank you for the warning about the attacks.  Will you look after my wife?”

“Of course,” Jamie said.

“Good man,” the soldier said.

“Sir!” I cut in, before he could head out, gun in hand.  He paused, and I told him, “Warn others.”

He nodded, then headed out the door.

I pointed, and the others nodded.  As the wife stepped over to the door to lock it, peering out the window to watch her husband, we headed out the front door.

There was nowhere to go but forward and out.  The residential road had people gathered in clusters, talking, and we used them for cover, watching.

“Stop,” Helen said, but it was less the order and more than fact that she grabbed us and hauled us back that stopped us.  Breaking our forward momentum.  I jerked, and my stomach clenched inadvertently.  I bit back a gasp of pain.

The crack marked a bullet striking something hard.  I didn’t see where.

“Go!”  I called out, “Go, go!”

We hurried as much as we were able, with me hurting and sucking at everything.  An alley offered cover from the gunshots.

They had a gunman that could see well enough through the rain to target us.  He was sharp enough to notice us just moments after we’d emerged from the house.

“Jamie,” I said.  “Where is he?”

“Don’t know.”

“You know where he was?  First shot?  The one that hit me?”

“Some idea.”

“And the shot just now?”

“Less that I know where he was, more… I can eliminate possibilities.”

“Eliminate,” I said.  We hurried down the alleyway.  There were people there, more clusters.  I studied each group, watching for potential trouble.

The others had to have heard about the gunshot.  They’d look after Lillian, if Lillian was even in danger.  She was well camouflaged.  Short of them killing every child in the town of Whitney… which wasn’t impossible…

“Fuck,” I said.

“Are you okay?” Jamie asked.

“Not that,” I said.  I knew my voice sounded more tense than it usually did.  “We’re stuck.”

“We’ve been stuck before.”

“We need to get out, rendezvous with the others.  We can’t do that without stepping into an open area.  If we stay put, the other two might track us down.”

The rain was coming down harder now.  I wasn’t quite able to hope that it was making life harder on our enemies.

“If we think about the things that make them stand out,” I murmured, “Nose, eyes, the guy with the scarf might just be fingers, touch, and the guy Jamie shot is probably ears.”

“Was,” Helen said.  “Past tense.”

“I’m not willing to bet anything,” I said.  “There might be a fifth, taste, and I’m going to assume the one Jamie shot is alive until we see him dismantled on some Academy autopsy table.”

“Five,” Jamie said.

“There are more than five senses,” Helen said.  “Balance, sense of one’s own physical state…”

“It’s possible,” I said.  “But these buttheads aren’t even supposed to have three pieces of work this good, let alone four or five.  Experienced soldiers, each with custom modifications?”

“Academy work,” Jamie said.

“Traitors,’ Helen said.

I nodded slowly.  “That changes things.  I don’t feel so good about Helen going after one.”

“I can do it,” Helen said.

“Probably.  And you’re going to have to,” I said.  “But I don’t feel good about it.”

She nodded.  She was holding herself in a way that I was pretty sure was Helen for ‘anticipation’.  Her expression was still normal, smiling, but her body was ready for the attack.

“Let’s head in Lillian’s general direction,” I said.  “In case the others can’t cover her.  And because it’s the direction they’re liable to be going in.  We assess the situation, then we go in.  If we spot one, we bait.”

The two nodded.

We moved.

Through winding alleys, awareness of our surroundings pitched to a painful degree.  I wasn’t at my best, and I was focusing my thoughts and my own un-altered senses on every gap, readying myself for an attack at any moment, knowing it was futile even if I was fast enough to react.

We paused at a pile of debris, while Jamie turned his attention to figuring out a plan that worked, then went down a side-alley.  The street was packed with soldiers.  Another side alley was mostly empty, wagons that were usually there now cleared away.  No cover to hide behind.

As we returned to the four-way intersection, the woman appeared.

Helen indicated, and the three of us crawled into a space beneath a house, belly deep in mud.  I used one hand to hold Jamie’s raincoat down over the injury so it wouldn’t get too dirty.

We were as good as caught.  She had the ability to smell.

I signaled.  We collectively abandoned our attempt at staying silent, and crawled for the other side of the space.  The floor above us scraped our shoulderblades as the ground rose to meet it.  Jamie squirmed out of his backpack.

“Children,” the woman spoke, from just in front of us.

She’d circled around.  She could do it again, as fast as we could crawl.

“You killed Phlegm,” she called out to us.  “My brother.”

Jamie reacted to the name.  He’d connected two dots.

He didn’t seem to have a ready answer.

“I have his belt,” the woman said.

The cans of gas.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.06 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.6

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The only sound was the rain coming down, and the periodic sucking noise of mud as Helen, Jamie or I shifted position.

“You have the canisters Mr. Phlegm had on his belt,” Jamie said.

“Not my preferred weapon,” the woman said.  “But it’s somehow poetic that Phlegm might get a last laugh.  Not that he is the laughing type.  Was.”

She made a noise like she was spitting.

Also poetic, all things considered.

I swallowed, then spoke.  My side was still hurting like nothing else, even after being patched up, and my voice faltered at the start, the strength to get the air past my lips not there when I reached for it.  “What’s your name?”

“Not telling,” she said.  “Goodbye.”

“Wait!” I said, raising my voice.  My stomach rewarded me by cramping up in new sorts of pain, clutching like a fist around all the hurt.

She didn’t use the canister.

To my left, Helen crawled forward, not with her arms and legs, but fingers and feet, pushing and pulling herself by painstaking half-inches, periodically reaching up to grab onto the roof and use that to slide herself forward.  The lack of speed was balanced by the fact that she was nearly silent.  I was right next to her and even I couldn’t hear her raincoat scrape against small stones and mud.

She’d been wearing a nice dress for the event.  Now it was ruined.  What a shame.

“We used to be on the same side, didn’t we?” I asked.

“I’m not the laughing type either, little boy, especially not with Phlegm dead,” the woman said.  “You’re wasting my time if you’re making jokes.”

“You were Academy,” I said, not because I knew, but because I had no choice but to follow the same track.  I couldn’t change the subject without her deciding I was stalling and deciding to off us.  Or whatever that canister did.

“Yes.  But that’s different from what you said before,” she said.

I noticed how she was walking.  She was lingering more at the places where posts held the house up off the ground, which kept her out of sight and protected her ankles from any further gunshots.

Not stupid.

“We’re related,” I said.  “We’re family.  We’re experiments, we’re conn-”

She cut me off.  “We’re alone, little boy.  Everyone is.  The act of being born is a separation, so is dying.  For experiments more than anything else.  At least they get to have doctors use sterile scissors to snip their connection to their mother, after they’re squeezed out into the world, covered in blood and landing in shit.  Us, we’re made, or we’re born like they are and then we’re reborn on a table or in a vat.”

“That’s an experience we share, it’s-”

“It creates a gulf between us.  You can pretend to have some greater connection to the world, but that’s a child’s fantasy.  We’re as different from them as a cat is from a dog, at least.  Compare a cat to a dog and a dog to a lizard and you’re not going to find a connection between the cat and the lizard.  They’re a social species, but we’re all species of one, or of two, or of four.”

Helen, our lizard, crawled forward.  She was crawling across from me, now, her body in front of my face.

“A year and nine days ago, our species of four added one more to our ranks.  In the next couple of years, we’re going to have a sixth.”

“Twelve days,” Jamie murmured.  “A year and twelve days.”

“Shut up,” I whispered.  Louder, I said,  “Listen, I think we’re similar in how we approach the world.  The differences, the focus on the team, even if my idea of what the ‘team’ is happens to be different-”

“One of my colleagues, you’ve crossed paths with him, he keeps a tiny black notebook filled with tickmarks, you know.  He counts the number of times people try the ‘we’re the same’ line on him.  A different line or phrase or word for every page.”

Drat.

“I’m betting he has whole pages dedicated to ‘please!’ or ‘god, no!’,” I remarked.

She was silent.

“Was I on target?” I tried.  Her being silent and taking time before she offed us was fantastic, but talking and hurrying things along was better than three seconds of silence followed by her deciding to kill us.

“No,” she said.  “Not quite.  You made me think of Phlegm.”

Double damn and dang-blast it.  The thought crossed my mind, but I held the emotion at bay.  My focus was on her and on our conversation.

“Alone,” she said.

“If you’re alone, it’s by your own choice, your own way of looking at things.”

“I’m more alone than I was since you killed my partner,” she said.  There was a pause.  “I’m done entertaining you.”

Helen was a few feet away.  She wasn’t picking up speed, even with that announcement.  Still the slithering crawl through the mud.  She had to be getting it in her mouth, her nose, even with her lips closed, but she was calm, glacially slow, and eerily focused.

We had one option.  It was one I hated to use.

“You can’t afford to take the time to do that,” I said.

I heard something snap or crack from the woman’s direction.  My hopes that she’d been attacked were dashed when she shifted her footing.  She was getting something from the belt.

“In less than an hour, you’re going to need all of the cans you can get,” I told her.  “All of the bullets too.”

I’m sorry, Gordon, Mary, I thought.

“That so?”

“The reason we went to go pick up our girl here was because we’re done.  The traps are placed, boxes under half the houses in Whitney.  Soon, really soon, the things occupying the box are going to wake up.  The city falls, and if you’re here, if your buddies are here, then you get to watch them die, maybe, and then you die alone.”

“Assuming you’re telling the truth, what’s in the boxes?” she asked.

“I think they started with spiders,” I said.

Jamie added, “But, like you said, they’re as comparable to spiders as cats are to dogs.”

There was a pause.

“Look under the house on the other side of the alley,” I said.  “Chances are pretty good.”

Between the rain, the distance, and the lack of lighting, I couldn’t see under the house across the little alley.

The chances weren’t good at all.  My heart pounded.

Helen crept further.  She was about a foot from being able to lunge for the woman’s ankles.  A crocodile in the mud, with styled hair, at least to a point.  It was thick with muck after a certain length.

The angle of the woman’s legs changed.  She was looking.

“Hm,” she said.  Noncommittal.  Leaving me in the dark.

“Those cans, whatever they are, they’re bound to be helpful.  If you don’t want to grab your buddies and get out of dodge.”

“No, not at all,” she said.  “I’ve decided I can spare one of these.”

She shifted her stance, and I tensed.

Helen reached, lunging.

The woman was quick, and Helen was forced to change her target.  One of Helen’s hands reached out for the woman’s, a metal can already smoking in her pale grip.  When the can went airborne, the wrist Helen was reaching for now disappearing, Helen shifter her weight, reaching up and out with her other hand.

She slapped the can down, and Jamie lunged, bringing his backpack down on top of the thing.

The smoke was still rising.  The mud bubbled, and when the bubbles popped, a yellow-green smoke rose.

“Out,” I said, “Out!”

Right into her waiting clutches.

I wasn’t wholly right, but I wasn’t wrong either.

She was waiting, but she wasn’t clutching.  She’d covered a lot of ground without her feet being visible as I crawled.  Agile.  She’d walked or leaped off of the side of the building, or stepped on the tops of the posts.  Now she faced us, the belt held in both hands.  She was ready to step around the corner at a moment’s notice.  Still wary of the gun that had downed Phlegm.

She raised the belt to her mouth, and she bared her teeth.  Muscles stood out in strange places as she bit clean through the thick leather of the belt.  She brought her hands together, and flung one end of it at us.  Three or four canisters were hooked to it, and all were smoking.  She’d grabbed the keys with one hand and pulled them out as she threw with the other.

I didn’t want to know how good Phlegm had been with this crap, if his sister here was this quick on the draw.

The belt flew through the air, plumes following it, and it was Helen who stepped forward to catch it.

Our Helen tried to throw it back and failed.

It took a few seconds, as Helen tried to fling the belt and failed to remove it.  I could see it in how her hair moved, the sheen that appeared on her raincoat, scintillating points of light, rainbow hued, like some chemicals made in water, but the droplets were small and clustered together.  Whatever it was, it had made the belt and canisters sticky, and was doing the same thing to Helen’s skin, her hair, and her raincoat.

The woman with the belt stared at us, watching as Helen flailed, almost invisible in the midst of the multicolored smoke.  Each little canister was something different.

Helen made a frustrated sound, stumbling and falling to one knee in the mud.  The woman turned and left, disappearing around the corner.

Helen.

I took a step forward.  Jamie’s hand blocked me.

“We have to-” I started, my tone much more like a child’s than I normally liked.

“Tell me what to do,” he said.  He was already striding forward.  “You’re too slow like that.”

“Her coat,” I said.  “Pull it over her head.”

Jamie was muddy, and he’d given me his raincoat.  He was wearing the white shirt, but it was soaked through.  I could see the scars, and I could see his narrow chest expand as he drew in a breath, prior to entering the cloud.

“Use the coat to grab the belt,” I said.  I couldn’t see him anymore, and I couldn’t see her.

Jamie would use the coat, he would pull it away-

Then what?  It would be stuck to him, or stuck to Helen.

I turned, looking.  The street was empty, people had fled the initial gunshots.

“Then come to me!” I called, still searching.  “As fast as you can!”

The umbrella-

Jamie had left it behind, while crawling through the mud.

Something else.

A thin bit of wood framed the bottom of the nearest building, so it didn’t just end, but had some decorative flair, even if it was a strip of painted wood, an inch and a half across.

I braced myself, knowing how much this would suck.

Kicking the little strip of wood was painful enough that I nearly forgot what I was doing.  My focus was dashed, I very nearly threw up, and only managed to stop with the realization that throwing up would make my stomach hurt more.  It was a primal realization, one that reached all the way to my reptile brain, that little bundle of instincts and impulses.  Through that mechanism, I managed to keep myself from heaving my meager breakfast and bit of apple onto the muddy span between the two buildings.

I found myself staring at the wood, still affixed to the wall.  Maybe looser than it had been.

I thought of Ashton.  I thought of Evette.  My promise to Jamie, to guard him while he slept, which I’d kept up since I’d met him, and I thought of that horrible calm that had overcome me when I’d been in Sub Rosa’s clutches.

Calm, away from the noise, away from the expectations and the people and the demands.

It was, much as the sniffing woman had said, a very alone sort of calm.

I made myself kick again.

The agony in my middle was worse, but somehow I found it easier to deal with.

Pain punctuated my existence.  I threw myself into danger.  I got hurt for the others.  I had pain inflicted on my body and mind on a rote schedule, with checkmarks on paper and doctor’s signatures.

Pain was only pain.  Pain meant I was alive.

Another kick.  This time something came free.

Jamie was stumbling toward me.  Apparently blind, his skin raw and bleeding, clothes crumpled and stiff, he had the bundle of raincoat, which was still billowing with gas.

I grabbed the strip of wood and heaved.  I landed on my ass, but with a spear of wood in my hand.  Seeing Jamie suffering lit a fire in me, and I found it in me to swing the end of my spear at Jamie and catch the bundle of raincoat and canisters.

It didn’t take much doing to knock Jamie to the ground, pushing with the spear as I found my feet.  He almost willingly went, as if the strength was gone from him.

“Stand,” I said, still sounding far too young.  No confidence, no bravado.  “Jamie.”

He struggled, and I gave my all to simply pinning the bundle down, my face and head turned away so my hood might delay the moment when that growing cloud of smoke reached my face.

He found his feet, but couldn’t let go of the bundle.  He tugged, pulled, but didn’t have the strength or the range of movement to break the bond.

“Break free,” I said.  “I’ve got it pinned down, just- please, Jamie.”

Again, he tried.  Again, he failed.

It was Helen who came down the alleyway, stumbling at a running pace, more or less blind by definition herself.  She had her arms out to either side, bridging much of the alleyway.  She caught Jamie in the crook of one arm, embraced him, tackling him, and tore him away from the bundle.  The skin of his hands was left behind, I suspected.

The two of them landed dangerously close to the opening of the alley.  I thought of the gunman, perched on a building.

I heaved my bundle-on-a-stick, only to have my stomach nearly give out.  I switched my grip and swung instead of bringing it up.  It wasn’t too heavy, only unwieldy, and I managed to toss it out into the street, off to one side.

The gas continued to billow.  I could only hope it would break the man’s line of sight.

Jamie and Helen were mostly blind, though Jamie a little less than Helen, thanks to his glasses, and both of them were blistered and bleeding, though Helen had gotten the better end of the deal, despite far more exposure.  Her skin wasn’t really skin, I supposed.

I watched them, saw them lying there, then looked at the cloud of smoke.

My stomach was bleeding, I could feel it at my shirtfront.  I’d need more medical care.

Still, I went under the building.  I checked that the first canister wasn’t producing any more gas, then collected Jamie’s bag.

His book.  It was important.

As I crawled forward, pausing before I tried to find the strength to stand, I looked under the house opposite.

Mary’s box wasn’t there.  There was something that might have been a toolbox or a tackle box at the far corner.

It had been enough to convince her.  She was on her way to warn the others, to make alternate plans.

Gordon and Mary were going to be upset.

“Come on, you two,” I said.  My voice felt too light and feathery, mingled worry and relief.  “We can’t afford to laze around.”

Jamie pulled his lips open, and the skin bled where the lips had bonded together, the airborne resin or whatever had collected there, as well as on his eyes and in his hair.  “You’re a jackass.”

I’m a jackass with a gunshot wound.  I’m allowed to be flippant,” I said.  “But seriously, we can’t waste time.”

He nodded.  I handed him his bag, which he felt around until he had the shape of it.  After he clung it to his chest, I grabbed the straps and hauled.  I’d already re-opened my wound, I couldn’t make it worse, right?

Helen found her feet on her own, one hand on the side of the building.

With only the hope that the gas would block the gunman’s view of us, or that he was busy relocating to another perch, I led the others into the street.  Helen could hear the gunshots, the sound apparently traveling faster than the bullets did, but I wasn’t so lucky.

Haggard, hurting, and lost, we made our way to Lillian’s.

“She had an influence on you,” Jamie said.

I thought about joking, remarking on the sniffing woman.

But Jamie wasn’t talking about the sniffing woman.  Jamie was talking about the ploy I’d used to try and buy us time.

“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.

He made a sound that might have been a laugh, but came out more as a heavier breath.  He coughed.

“You didn’t breathe that shit in, did you?”

“No,” he said.

“No,” Helen said.

“I know you didn’t,” I told her.  I saw her give me a smile, and it was odd to see her actually face the right direction as she did it.  Good ears.

“One day,” Helen said, “You’re going to make a girl very miserable.”

“Well we all knew that already,” I said.  “Not sure why you’re bringing that up now.”

“Not you-you,” she said.  “You two.”

I looked at Jamie, a part of me expecting to exchange a shared glance, except he was blind.  It sucked a little, driving the situation home.

“Don’t give a girl any hope if you can’t put her before Jamie,” Helen said.  “As you are right now, I don’t think you can.”

“You’re bleeding in fifty different ways, you’re blind, and you’re judging me?” I asked.

“Always,” Jamie said.  He laughed a little, then coughed again, harder.  “Always judging you.”

I didn’t like that cough.

Without Jamie’s eyes, I was left to do all of the looking out on my own, while making sure I was leading them properly, Jamie holding on to the raincoat at one elbow, and Helen holding on to my other forearm.  Another chance encounter with any of Phlegm’s buddies might not go so well.

“It’s a good thing I don’t like girls then,” I mused, trying to take my mind off of the open wound in my side, the danger, and the others.

“You do,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Helen said.

“Right.  You know me better than I know myself?”

“We do.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to leave you guys behind if you keep that up.  Besides, there aren’t any girls out there for me.  Gordon can do the thing with Shipman, but-”

“There’s Mary,” Jamie said, quiet.  “Lillian too.”

“Lillian isn’t one of us.  Well, she is, but she isn’t.  She-”

“She what?” Helen asked.

“Doesn’t seem fair, or real?  Real’s not the word, but expecting a girl to like me, when I’m not guaranteed to live that long.”

There was no response.  Jamie and Helen were silent.  The rain was washing away the thin trickles of blood where the skin had been eaten away or had blistered and the resin had pulled on the blisters to open them, and diluting the mud, so it slid off in handfuls.  Their clothing was being stained, where the mud hadn’t already caked it and turned it a dark brown-black.

I turned around, and moved my elbow accidentally, leading Helen to think I was turning.  She stumbled a bit.  I couldn’t see any buildings through the downpour, now, which I hoped was cause to believe that the gunman couldn’t see us, over the top of the cloud of smoke.

“You’re too nice a guy, Sy,” Jamie said, finally.

It was dark, wet, and cold, the rain was an outright storm, now, and the clusters of people were hard to make out.  Each one we approached had the potential to be a threat.  We were far enough away from where the gunshots had been that people weren’t actively hiding or fleeing, but close enough that they were concerned, huddling, trying to puzzle out the situation.

Heads turned.  People started to approach.

It was more harm than good, potentially.  If people crowded around us, the man with the scarf could slip in close, use one of those knives…

“Stay away,” I said, as they got closer.  “Don’t touch them.  Don’t touch me.”

Then I said the magic word.

“Disease.”

The word repeated itself through the crowd.

The way opened before us.

“We’ve been told where to go,” I said.  I kept talking only because we couldn’t afford questions.  “Rebellion members turned on each other, or they’re Academy plants, or there’s a parasite, I don’t know.  But Whitney is under attack.  Spread the word.”

Phobos and Deimos.  Fear and Panic.

Nebulous ideas, nothing certain.

But a point that was driven home with a few key words, and the imagery of small children, hurt, bleeding, and impossible to help.

Lillian wasn’t so impossibly far away, but we were moving so slowly.

As it turned out, we didn’t need to get that far.

Gordon, Mary, Lillian, and Shipman all appeared, a distance down the street.  They picked up speed, approaching.

The looks on their faces.  It was a fluttery, uncertain expression, much as my voice had been earlier.

“We’ve been discovered,” I said.  “They know, they sent assassins, three or four left.  We can’t stay.”

“We’re not done,” Shipman said.

“We’re done,” I said, my voice low.

“Are you okay?” Lillian asked, cutting in.

“Not very, gunshot,” I said.  “They’re bad too.  They need help.  Three gases, from one of the assassins.  Glue, don’t touch them, something flesh-eating, definitely don’t touch them, and a third.  Might be poison.  Jamie’s coughing.”

“Because blood keeps dripping down the back of my throat from my nose,” Jamie said.

“They need help,” Lillian agreed.

“Coach,” Gordon said.  “There was one-”

He stopped, craning his head.  “Come on!”

We moved as fast as we were able, but at least I was able to let the others look after Jamie and Helen, while I stumbled along on my lonesome.

Gordon was talking to a coach driver.  As we approached, the man opened the side door.

As a group, we climbed inside.

“Hospital it is,” the man said, before closing the door.  The latch clicked.

“How do we activate your project?” I asked.

“We’re not,” Shipman said.  “It’s too early.”

“You were supposed to be nearly done.”

“We are,” the sourpuss told me.  “But for this to work, we need to reach a certain critical point.  We gauged how fast their response time would be, their resources here, the scientists in the area.  If we start it too early, they’ll be able to counteract it before it becomes a real issue.  It’s too early.”

“The other side of it,” Gordon said, his voice level, “Is that we were supposed to signal the Academy, so they could time the activation with an attack.  Something clean and simple, while they can’t put up a fight.”

“Minimum deaths,” Shipman said.

Minimum deaths.  She cared about that sort of thing?

Surprising.  I hadn’t expected that to be one of her priorities.

“Mm,” Jamie murmured.  He pulled his lips apart slowly, but there was still tearing and bleeding.  Lillian was rummaging in her bag, trying to find things.

“What is it?” Mary asked.

“We’re approaching turn toward hospital.  Sy’s right.  We can’t stay.”

“Which way is the turn?” Mary asked, turning to try and look through the front window, which as barely the size of an envelope.

“He’ll turn right.  We want to leave.  Turn left.”

Mary nodded.  She stepped to the side of the coach, opened the door, and swung outside, still holding the handle.  The door slammed, Mary clinging to the outside.

Three seconds passed.  A larger body dropped off the opposite side of the coach.

“Ouch,” Lillian said.  “I hope-”

The carriage bumped as it rolled over the larger body.

“-he’s okay,” she said, in a smaller voice.

The coach abruptly picked up speed, the horses trotting briskly.  Mary turned us to the left.

“We can still sneak in, leave boxes,” Shipman said.  “Activate it after.  We don’t have to be in the city.  It would help, but we’ll make do.”

“They know,” I said.  “I know they know because I damn well told them.  There’s no other choice.  They’ll dismantle it.”

I saw her expression change.  Gordon reached over to put a hand on her knee.

Then he opened the same door Mary had.  He raised a thin whistle to his mouth, and he blew.

A long, high, sweet sound.

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds.

There was an art to it, almost.  Such a convenient activation method.

The whistle was picked up elsewhere, mostly behind us, now that we were on the outskirts, heading out.  Each box of creatures was capable of mimicking the tone, passing it on, so it swept over the city, a single, sharp tone.

I saw the first of the spiders, the size of my fist, but black and bulbous, the center body almost tumorous.  I knew it had to be light if Mary had carried whole boxes of them, or it had absorbed ambient moisture, perhaps.  It didn’t matter.

From under one house, one box, just looking at the nearest wall of the building, I could see dozens of the things.

As the rain poured down, the spiders rose up, searching for windows and doors to crawl through.

“You owe me, by the by,” I told Lillian.  “I got you out, in a roundabout way.”

“This doesn’t count,” she said.

“Does so,” I said.

“Does so,” Jamie added.

“I think I’m going to treat Helen first,” Lillian commented.  “Fine.  I owe you one.”

“Technically, the deal was-”

“I owe you one, Sy.”

I nodded, turning my attention to look out the window.

The little envelope-sized slot slid open.  I could hear Mary speak.

“Where to?”

Where to.

I glanced at Gordon.  Different as we were, even with the rift between us, the unanswered questions I had, and his anger over the way his project had ended, I knew we were on the same page.

“Westmore,” Gordon said.  “It’s time for them to attack.”

I nodded at that.

We wouldn’t be working behind the scenes, this time.  This was going to become something else entirely.  An environment the Lambs had never faced.

A battlefield.

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.07 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.7

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

The rain got worse as we got further up the road.  It all flowed down toward Whitney, though a cliffside took most of it, which seemed like a pretty good idea from a strategic standpoint.  Marching uphill against an entrenched position was one thing, if Whitney wanted to march on Westmore, but an uphill march against an entrenched position, against flowing water ranging from ankle-deep to knee-deep?

I was willing to bet it was an accident, but it was a happy one for the Academy’s side.

Sandbags had been piled up on the mountain road, giving clusters of stitched soldiers places to stand and wait.  Some were piled in front, to protect against gunfire, while others were piled behind, to divert the flow of water and keep the stitched soldiers drier.

Each cluster had one person with it.  I imagined the shifts were short, only an hour or three at most, but it had to be miserable.  Sitting, waiting, watching.  As the only truly intelligent set of eyes, that individual had all of the pressure placed on them, their only company the five or six dead men who stood around them.  Those same dead men would smell faintly of the less pleasant human odors, except baked in.  The scents of ozone, burned hair, and decay could and would join those.

The moisture in the air helped to carry smells to the nostrils.  I wondered if the watch was a punishment detail.

Poor bastards.

One figure at the nearest set of sandbags blew a horn, raising an arm to order us to stop.  The coach slowed, then stopped.  Two hundred feet separated us.

Three figures came down the road, and one of them was stepping very carefully on the wet, sloped path.  It was easier to tread where the sandbags broke the water’s flow, the road was wide, and I doubted there was that much danger.  Maybe if someone tripped over their own two feet, or if the spring’s chill and the damp surroundings had left their toes numb.  If and when someone did fall, though, they were likely to keep sliding.  There would only be the rocky outcroppings on one side and the steeper drop off the side of the path to the other to interrupt the slide.  Neither was fun.

The other two figures weren’t careful at all.  They walked with very natural gaits, not so much with confidence as a lack of concern.  It made it easy to tell the stitched from the living.

Lillian and Shipman had looked after us, more Lillian than Shipman by a considerable measure, but Jamie and Helen were still in unfortunate shape.  Jamie’s cough had quieted, and the two of them were powdered, to slow the flow of blood.  Mary was driving the coach, and the rest of us were within.  Gordon and Shipman exited through the one door to step out and get a better view, while Lillian stood in the doorway, standing in such a way that she could look up over the top.  I stuck my head out the window on the other side, watching as best as I could.  I liked being able to lean rather than stand.  My stomach still hurt, Lillian’s attentions notwithstanding.

“Ho!” Gordon called out.

“What are you doing?” the sole living soldier called out from a distance.  He was wearing an Academy uniform.  His hooded jacket was red, an academy’s shield sat on the breast, one I didn’t recognize, and was backed by the universal Crown, which formed a halo of sorts around the top of the shield.  The gap between the crest and the top of the halo had the man’s rank.  A dog’s head and the roman numerals for three.  Spec 3.

That was barely above the G-ranks.  I’d seen enough military types here and there to put together the details.  Just as another day of hard training in the rain out in the fields was looming, a bigwig would step up and say there was an opportunity for promotion.  They would have to miss training, there would be a long stint in classrooms, some lessons, but there would be hot tea provided.  A few people on their last legs would jump at the chance.  A promotion to ‘specialist’?  Getting some training that might help them get their foot in the door when their stint with the Academy’s forces was done?  It sounded good.

The G-twos with older brothers and friends among the higher-ups would know better.  Sure, the class was fine, there was hot tea, and it was pretty painless.  Borderline interesting, even.

The problem was that it led to this.  Being the ‘dog’ who knew the essentials of how stitched worked and how to fix them, looking after them.  Spending time in their company and their company alone.  When they weren’t the human arm and brain of a particular unit of stitched, they were doing drudge work, being among the man who dragged the dead back to camp, or who did the jobs too menial for the proper academy students to do.

Most who fell into the trap walked away as changed men.  ‘Changed men’ being the nice way of saying they ended up as assholes who resented everything and everyone they interacted with, or they were paranoid of further traps.

I watched him draw nearer, and his face was visible, a surly glare, a glowing cigarette propped between his lips, not the first nor the tenth of his watch, I was betting.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“We work for the Academy,” Gordon said.  “We’re reporting in.  I’ve got a badge, issued by Radham-”

“Stay right where you are,” the man said.

I pulled my head into the coach, looked through the window to see Gordon stepping back, the hand with the badge dropping to his side.

“Children?” the man asked.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon said.  “We’re spies.  We’ve got information regarding movements, numbers, people of interest, and events in Whitney.

“Mm,” the man murmured.  He didn’t give a clear response, hemming, hawing, and making noises, as if contemplating.

“Some of it is time-sensitive,” Gordon said.  His tone was so good, too.  Perfect pitch and intonation, authoritative and confident, without sounding arrogant.  If he’d used that same tone with one of those teachers who was just itching to find something to lecture a student about, they would have made a face and moved on to the next student.

But the words were the wrong ones.  Gordon was good at what he did.  People tended to like him.  He bent the world to his will.  He was the opposite of me; I always fought an uphill battle to get people’s trust.  I had to study them and tailor my approaches to their motivations and weaknesses.

I knew that this man we were talking to was making the most out of the very limited power and amusement he could get, here.  Gordon had showed the man a kind of weakness.

We have a need, thus it’s in your power to make us twist in the wind, I thought.

“I suppose you want me to let you into Westmore?” the man asked.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon said.

“It’s suspicious.  People don’t travel down this road, and a coach of children, no less.  Makes me think of the Trojan horse.”

“What possible danger could we pose?” Mary asked, without the slightest trace of irony.

I let my forehead bang against the frame of the window.

“What was that?” the man asked.

“My comrade.  Another spy.  We have three wounded inside the coach.”

“What wounds?”

“Two partially blinded, with burns.  One gunshot wound.”

“I’ve heard stories.  A group mingling with refugees, knowingly spreading a plague.  People carrying parasites into enemy camps, sometimes inside their bodies.  It’s easier to hide symptoms when you’re bearing injuries.”

“I understand that,” Gordon said.  “If you let us talk to your superior-”

I banged my head against the door of the coach yet again.

Make him feel impotent, why don’t you?

“Ahem.  I’ll be able to put those doubts to rest,” Gordon finished.

“Or infect a superior officer,” the Spec-three said.

“We’re more than happy to submit to quarantine procedures-”

I banged my head for a third time.

“Shut up, Sy!” Gordon called out, then resumed, “-if you’d just let us talk to someone in charge.  We’ll keep a safe distance.”

The man made a sound, then said, “I don’t think-”

“Sir.  I’ll be blunt.  Brigadier Ernest Tyler is expecting to hear from us.  I’ve corresponded with him.  I know your fellow soldiers have been doing more prep, things are changing around, there’s an energy in the air, and fear is a part of it.  The G-twos know it deep down, even if the people at the top haven’t said anything.  The Brigadier is preparing to mount an attack, he’s just waiting for the signal.  This is the signal.”

“That’s not-” the man started, then he changed his mind.  “There’s no guarantee.”

Weaker footing.

Gordon verbally bludgeoned his way through.  “We were forced to act early.  He’s going to be forced to move before he’s entirely ready.  He won’t be happy, not with us, not with the situation, and if you happen to be interfering with us and interfering with his situation, that unhappiness is going to land directly at your feet.”

He let the words hang in the air.

“Sir,” Gordon belatedly added, with that perfect measure of confidence that was so hard to call him on or slap down.

I closed my eyes, forehead resting against the frame of the window, listening.

“You go.  I’ll watch this group.”

“She’ll need to come too,” Gordon said.  No doubt indicating Shipman.  “She knows the more technical details.  We’ll need everyone to debrief, but we can give the Brigadier the immediate particulars.”

“Go,” the man said, not sounding happy.

“Yes, sir,” Gordon said.  This time he said it with a jaunty tone.  Rubbing it in.

He wasn’t above his moments of childishness.  I grinned.

I stuck my head out through the window, saw Gordon and Shipman marching the rest of the way up to the front gate of Westmore.  I pulled the window down from overhead, with flecks of water splashing inside as the latch clicked.  Lillian climbed inside too, the door slamming shut.

The coach rocked.  A weight on one side, then the other.

That would be the Spec-three, taking a seat on the driver’s bench.  Not to take us anywhere, but just to sit.

A moment later, my door opened, startling me.  Mary climbed inside.

She was wearing fairly simple clothes, but she had a habit of dressing up a little.  A thin belt with a buckle to draw the waist in, lace-trimmed ribbons in her hair -only one ribbon today-, and lace at the bottom of her dress’ skirt.  I knew she did her own sewing, to supplement what she was given.

As a covert agent, having tells was not a good thing.

As a girl, the touches defined her.  She wore a coat, but it didn’t protect the lower half of her dress.  The fabric clung to her knees and thighs, and only a second layer of fabric hid the outlines of the knives at her upper thigh.  At the knee, the parts where the fabric was white and wet were see-through.  We’d been traveling for a stretch, and I suspected she’d had her hood down for some of it, because her hair was wet, and so were her shoulders.  I could see the straps of her underclothing and the tan of her flesh at the shoulders and arms.

Raindrops still beaded her throat, parts of her face and the parts of her leg that weren’t covered by boot or dress.  Her knees were white, compared to the rest of her.  A lot of time in the market, more indirect sunlight peering through the clouds now and then than any direct sunlight, but it added up.  She was oddly prone to tan, either way.

She grabbed one portion of her dress, pulling it out to the side and inadvertently showing off more of her legs as she wrung the fabric dry, water spilling out onto the floor of the coach.

I looked up, and she was staring at me.  She let go of the wrung-out cloth, and it fell roughly into place, still bearing the wrinkles of being twisted in a way that higher quality cloth might not.

“Mary,” Lillian said, her voice cutting into the stillness.

“Mm hmm?”  Mary turned, dropping onto the bench with a bit of a flounce.  Her damp dress did its best to flounce with her, and more or less failed, falling limp around her knees.

“The coach-driver?” Lillian asked.

“I told him to turn to leave the city.  He didn’t want to.”

“He was nice.”

“He was a member of the uprising,” I said.

“He gave injured children a ride to the hospital, at no cost to himself,” Lillian said, sounding genuinely upset at my interjection.  She turned back to Mary.  “Did you- did he?”

“We rode over his knee and ankle,” Mary said.  “He’s alive.”

Lillian exhaled in audible relief.

“You wimp,” Mary said.

Lillian smiled, but she didn’t argue.  She’d been holding that little nugget of worry in for the entire ride to Westmore.

“He’ll wish he wasn’t when Shipman’s spiders get to him,” I commented.

Lillian stared at me in horror.

“What?  Were you pretending that this was all nice and sweet?”  I grinned.

“There’s something seriously wrong with you,” Lillian said.

“You’re a jerk,” Jamie mumbled.

I shook my head.  Mary was sitting opposite me, still soaking wet, and there was a definite twinkle in her eye as she met mine.

“Sorry,” I told her.  “About the plan.”

She shrugged.  “Nothing we could do.”

“I filled the others in, but you were driving the coach and I wasn’t up to climbing out to join you,” I said.  “Four or five assassins came after us.  We got one.  There are still three or four to take into account.”

She nodded.

“Enhanced smell, enhanced eyesight, enhanced touch, I’m not sure how that works, and enhanced hearing.  There might be taste, or another sense.”

“Seeing those teeth,” Jamie murmured, his eyes closed, “Might be wrapping up smell and taste into one sense.”

Mary smiled.  “I want to meet them.”

“You don’t,” Jamie said.

“I definitely do.”

“You might get a chance.  It depends on whether Gordon sells us up the river and agrees to something like that stupid quarantine measure that came up just now.”

“He didn’t really expect the Spec dog to take him up on that,” Mary said.

“I know,” I said, “But if that man was a little smarter and if he realized what Gordon was doing, then he might just agree, to put Gordon in a tight spot.”

“Mm,” Mary said.  She began to wring out her hair.  Some of the water ran down her arms, and droplets landed on her stomach and on spots which were still dry.  The droplets sank into the thin cloth and spread out in widening circles.  “But he was right.  I think he had the right sense of things.”

I sighed.  “Yeah.  Probably.”

Mary turned, abrupt.  “Lillian.  Do you have a comb?”

“With my belongings, in the back compartment.”

“Nothing in that massive bag of yours?”

Lillian shook her head.

“Jamie?” Mary asked.

“I use my fingers, most of the time.”

“You’re such a boy.”

Jamie didn’t react, motionless.  I suspected any movement hurt, with his condition.

“Try Helen,” I said, leaning forward to look past Jamie, one hand on my side.  Helen was draped over the bench, her head resting at an awkward angle at Jamie’s thigh.  Her blonde hair was still gritty past a certain length, from crawling in the mud.

“She’s sleeping,” Lillian observed.

“It’s okay,” Mary said.  Someone else might have thought she meant the comb wasn’t important, but Mary had come to be a part of the team, she’d shared more rooms with Helen than any of us.

“She’s fine,” I clarified.  I moved over, half-draping myself over Jamie to touch Helen.  I poked her in the forehead, hard.

No moan, no restless shift.  Her eyes flicked open, already focused on me.

“Comb,” I said.

She rolled a bit to one side, reaching into a pocket, then raised a hand, holding a very elegant looking comb.  She handed it to Lillian as Lillian reached forward, then dropped her arm, eyes flicking shut.

Asleep again, just like that.

Lillian scooted over, and Mary half-turned so her back was to Lillian.  A very automatic process, without any offers or asking.  As if it was just assumed that Lillian would do Mary’s hair.

A month or two back, I’d been at a store and I’d picked up a little rose-colored book, no thicker than my finger, titled ‘stories for girls’.  I’d paged through it out of sheer curiosity.  Not because I had any interest in girls in any special way, but because I’d been wanting some insight into how girls thought and how they were different.

I’d been disappointed somehow, and my inability to put my finger on why had annoyed me more than anything.  It wasn’t even a big or important sort of disappointment.

The fact that I’d remembered that moment while watching Lillian taking care of Mary in the here and now made me feel like I was a little closer to figuring it out, except I hadn’t and it just made the annoyance well up all over again.

I could recall Jamie and Helen nettling me about girls and things, and I could imagine how they’d very wrongly interpret my line of thinking and felt even more annoyed.

I shifted position and punched Jamie in the arm.

“Ow!  Damn it, Sy!  What was that even for?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He grumbled, but he didn’t have much fight in him.

Mary and Lillian were watching me out of the corners of their eye.

“Sorry,” I finally said.

“Y’should be,” he mumbled.

There wasn’t much conversation.  Jamie and Helen weren’t up to much except resting.  Mary had her eyes closed, head rocking in time with the strokes of the comb, head periodically jerking when Lillian found a snarl, though she didn’t seem to mind.

I watched them, Lillian asked about the pain, I answered.  Mary made some general comments about the runs she’d done to deposit the boxes of spiders, and that sort of died off as she dropped into an almost meditative state, her hair being brushed.

“Oy!” Gordon’s voice was faint, and muffled by the walls of the coach.

“And he’s back,” Jamie observed.

We collectively roused, Helen sitting up, Lillian and Mary shifting position.  I opened the door to step outside, flipping my hood up.

“We’re in,” Gordon called out, still too far away to be heard with a normal volume.  He closed the rest of the distance, then reached up to hand the Spec-three a note.

The others finished climbing out as the man read it over.

“Gordon,” Shipman whispered, tugging on Gordon’s sleeve.

“Shh,” the Spec-three made the shushing sound.

“Do you see?” she asked.

“See what?” Gordon asked.

“Shh,” the Spec-3 shushed them again.

“Oh!” Gordon said, louder.  “Oh.

I had to step around to Gordon’s side to see.  As I did, the man on the bench of the coach looked up, staring down at us.  He’d refreshed his cigarette since I’d last had a look at him.

He followed our line of sight, down to his pants leg, which was torn, with a trace amount of blood collecting at the base of his boot.  His leg jerked, and in that motion, he realized what had really happened.

The flesh of his legs had been joined, a ragged strip cut away, attached to the other leg.

“What?  What’s the- what!?” he jerked more frantically, cigarette falling to the base of the bench.

“Don’t tear it,” Shipman said, “Don’t- careful!”

As the man struggled, one of the spiders from Whitney moved off to one side, away from the flailing legs.  Once two legs, they were now functionally one.  The Spec-3 saw the thing and twisted, pulling out his gun.

“Dont!” Gordon said, “You’ll spook the horses!”

Even the raising of his voice and the frantic movements of the man on the bench were making them agitated.

Shipman circled around the horses, while Mary climbed up beside the man.  Before Mary could deal with the spider, he brought both feet up, then slammed them down, partially crushing the thing.

Shipman didn’t seem to mind.  She reached out and grabbed it, fingers between individual legs, and flicked it in Gordon’s general direction with a movement of the wrist.  She put her hands on the man’s shoulders, and Mary put a hand on one knee, and he stopped struggling.

“It’s okay.  One of the spiders must have gotten onto the coach,” she said.

“What the fuck?  What the fuck?  I didn’t even feel-”

“Specialized anaesthetic and very standard coagulants,” she said.  “It dulls your sense of touch, makes you feel like the limb is asleep, it cuts out partial sections with the incisors and stitches them to adjoining parts with its own silk and its forelimbs.  Even if it had a few days with you, it probably wouldn’t kill you.  It’s just for the psychological effect.”

“The fuck!?”

I think he’s psychologically affected, I thought to myself.  I bit my tongue rather than offering the comment out loud.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.  “It’s a very easy fix.  They just need to cut the spider’s sutures and put the skin back where it belongs.  There won’t even be scars.”

“The fuck,” the man said, staring down at his bound ankles.  Just his ankles, it seemed, now that I was looking closer.

“Do you think we can get the coach around the sandbag emplacement?” Gordon asked.  “I was eyeballing it, but…”

“We can scooch by,” Mary said.  “We’ll have to, since our guest here isn’t mobile.”

Gordon nodded.  “You want to, or should I?”

Mary smiled, putting a hand to one horse’s neck.  It flinched, then relaxed as she gave it a few rubs.  “I can.”

The rest of us climbed back in, or partially climbed in.  I stayed at the outside, one hand on a bar just beside the door, my foot on the step below.

I saw through the window as sourpuss Shipman showed more energy and excitement in two seconds than I’d seen out of her in the entire time I’d known her, bouncing in the spot and putting an arm around Gordon.

It works, she was saying, going by the movements of her lips.

My hood flew back as the coach lurched forward, and I didn’t fix it.  Things rocked left and right as the coach scraped the cliff wall to the right and the sandbags to the left.  The stitched that hadn’t accompanied the Spec-three were still standing watch, and their heads turned, dull eyes watching us.

Not nearly so well made as Fray’s Wendy had been.  They were intended to do only one thing – follow orders.  The man who was supposed to give the orders wasn’t with them.  I hoped that Westmore wasn’t attacked in the time it took a replacement to walk down and join them.

Westmore was a city that had been built in wartime.  Obvious enough.  Walls, gate, defensive emplacements, and buildings that had been made solid, helped by an excess of material from nearby mines in the mountains and hills.  Every building had a gutter around it, redirecting the water.  Here and there, collections of debris and leaves blocked the way, or enough water had backed up to lift a collection free, and a grouping of brown-black detritus was scurrying along at the base of a building like some decaying, leafy version of a rodent.

It was a contrast to Whitney.  Where Whitney had been a sprawl, too many people crammed into one space, Westmore was organized.  Even at rest, people were in squads.  Working, they were in formation.  Everyone matched, with only slight variations in facial features, stature, and hair color.

The stitched were corralled, in strict rows and columns, their belongings at their feet, guns at their sides, butts on the ground, hands on the barrels.

In stitched alone, Westmore had twice as many soldiers as its little sister at the base of the mountains had in regular rank and file.  It easily matched Whitney’s number in human troops, and Whitney’s soldiers weren’t, for the most part, even experienced in fighting, as this group looked to be.  The ensuing conflict would be the enemy’s first.

Every set of eyes, the stitched included, watched us as we rolled down the main street, past neat stacks and wagon-loads of supplies.

On the other side of our vehicle, Gordon was doing the same thing I was.  He gave Mary a verbal direction, guiding her to our destination.

We passed a barn, and I saw inside.  There was something unnatural within, four eyes reflecting light, a deep scar running down its face, horns bigger than I was scraping the floor of the stable.  A war-beast.  Some Academy student’s final project for their fourth year of study, probably.  His reputation would hinge on how well it did.

There were others.  Like everything else, the creatures were neatly organized, kept in their own discrete places.  Weapons from some of the Academy’s brightest.

“What are you thinking?” Mary asked me.  She sat above me, looking down over her shoulder at me.

I could see the Brigadier waiting for us at the end of the street, standing under a set of eaves.  An older man, with a beard and no mustache, wearing a uniform without a hood, a stylized helmet on his head.

Unlike my feeling from earlier, I could put my finger on this one.  Something about the man, and all the little details put together.  That prey instinct that had come up in my first interactions with Mary, an awareness that came from countless clues the subconscious registered that the consciousness didn’t.

“Why does it feel like, if things go on as planned, we’re going to lose this battle?”

“Excuse me?” the Spec-three who was on the bench asked, indignant.

“I don’t know,” Mary answered my question.  “But it does feel that way, doesn’t it?”

Previous                                                                                                                       Next

================================================== 5.08 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The stitched gave each of us a pat-down.  I bit my cheek rather than protest at the pain as clumsy hands prodded my side.  It wasn’t worth it, the stitched wouldn’t care, and I didn’t want to seem weak, when we already had two members down.  The older man, now with his helmet doffed, was studying us.  Jamie and Helen were looking less than stellar, even with their injuries looked after.  I could put on a brave face.

“It would be easier-” Mary started.  She made a face as the stitched pulled a knife out from her beltline.  “If you’d let me remove the knives myself.  Or I can tell you where they all are.”

The stitched didn’t react or respond, and the Brigadier didn’t give the order.

We waited in silence while it found eight more knives, each belted around Mary’s upper thighs.  It gave her a quick pat-down, then stood straight.

“If I may…” Mary said.  She reached up and pulled a long, thin knife out from the thickest part of her hair.  More a needle than a blade.  She raised one foot up, bracing calf against knee, and pulled another knife free of the heel of her shoe with a bit of a jerk.  Rather than a handle, it had a t-shaped configuration, more a knife that was punched with than thrust.  A matching knife came out of the other shoe.

She deposited two more, another punching knife from behind her belt buckle, and one with fluid in a reservoir in the handle from behind her back.  Finally, she provided the garotte-wire that had been curled around her body, hidden on the other side of her belt.

Absolutely, utterly unnecessary.  She could have kept the items on her person and lost nothing for it, but I suspected she wanted to make a point.

“We’ll have to teach them to do better,” the Brigadier observed.

“Yes sir,” Mary said.

The Brigadier was old, a caricature of a man with a puffed out chest, bedecked in a uniform jacket, with tight leggings beneath, making it seem like his upper body was meant for a different lower body than the one he had.  He had kind eyes, as he appraised us.

I instantly disliked him.

He looked at the man who still sat on the bench of the coach, his ankles bound.  The man looked deeply uncomfortable and embarrassed.

“See that Specialist Timothy gets care.  Patrick, see that your stitched search the vehicle for more spiders.  Lambs, you can come inside,” he said.  “We’ll talk.”

We passed through the doors, joined by the stitched guards.  Formations seemed to have been ingrained into them.  As we moved two-by-two, the stitched did as well, two between Jamie and I and Mary and Lillian, and two at the rear.

Past the doors was a coatroom, and we quickly removed our things.  Adult-sized shoes were on the floor.  The Brigadier paused, taking in the shoes, examining us and our feet, then said, “if you wouldn’t mind carrying on the rest of the way in socks and stockings?”

Dutifully, we peeled off our raincoats and boots.  I stepped onto the wooden floor beyond the coatroom, lifted up one foot, and saw a muddy print.  The grime and the wet had soaked into my boots.  My socks were just as dirty as the soles of my boots, if not dirtier.

I peeled off my wet socks and progressed barefoot, which was only slightly better.

The Brigadier had chosen a lodge as his base of operations.  It was one of the largest buildings, one of the sturdiest, and I suspected that had little to nothing to do with his choice.  The exterior was stone and mortar, up to a point that was just over the top of my head, with logs extending up the rest of the way.  The roof had a tree growing across it, augmented building, and swept up at an angle, the lowest point just over the front door, the highest point of the roof at the far end, where a chimney speared up from a stone fireplace-cum-stove.  It looked like a bedroom and bathroom were to either side of the coat room, tucked in at the front.  The remainder was an open living space, with tables surrounded by nice chairs and a couch, a desk was positioned near the fireplace, and the only piece of furniture that didn’t match the decor had been placed opposite the desk, a heavy table.

A stitched boy was feeding the fire.  No older than I was.  Probably the Brigadier’s personal servant.  He looked like he’d been around for a while, a stitched with actual stitches.

The Brigadier was a man who liked his comforts.  A candle burned above the desk, and a glass held ice but no drink.  If I smelled him, I could smell a trace of drink, but not the sour tang of an alcoholic.  As the boy and his style of dress suggested, he was a man who took care of things.

Hard to read, when it came to this situation.  He was so wrapped up in himself that I couldn’t get a good sense of who he was as a strategist.

Maybe that was a hint unto itself.

We walked all the way to the end of the room, passing the area that served as a sitting room or a tea room, where books and maps were laid out.  The wood of the floor got progressively warmer as we approached the fireplace.  By the time we reached the end, it was hot enough to be on the cusp of uncomfortable.  I glanced over the table opposite the desk, and saw far more maps, as well as various letters.  Pens were scattered here and there.

He took a seat at the desk.  “If the injured feel the need to sit, you could take one of the chairs behind you and turn it around.”

Jamie did.  He dropped his backpack on the floor by the chair.  Helen remained where she was.

I did, too.

“Whitney is under attack, then,” the Brigadier said.

“Yes sir,” Gordon said.  “We moved too soon.  We hoped they would be active late at night.  When the majority of people were deep asleep, and we hoped there would be more.  Enough that their first few attempts to eradicate the spiders would fail.”

“But you were nearly ready.  You said as much in a recent missive.”

“Not that close.  Account for the fact that they’ll respond faster in the daytime, it won’t be enough.  I’d say we have less than a day before the window of opportunity closes,” Gordon said.

“I think you’re underestimating what that kind of psychological warfare will accomplish,” the Brigadier said.

“We’re well versed in that kind of warfare, we’ve dealt with experts in it for as long as we’ve been working together,” Gordon said.

“Which obviously isn’t that long,” the Brigadier said.  “Not to belittle what you do, of course.”

“Of course,” Gordon said.

Only those who knew Gordon would be aware of the subtle change of tone, or the hints that he was working just a little too hard to keep his words carefully crafted.

“They’ll break,” the Brigadier said.  “It’ll put them on their heels.  People will leave Whitney, too afraid of a repeat performance.”

“Sir,” I said.  “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Of course it is!” he said, in a laughing tone.  “There are always nuances and complications.  This is war.”

Brigadier Ernest Tylor lifted his glass, drinking the water from the melted ice, then opened a drawer to retrieve a bottle of what might have been scotch.  He tipped it into the glass.

He saw us watching, and he smiled.  “The ice is a travesty, I know, but I allow it because it goes so well with the heat of the fire.  I’d offer you drinks, to thank you for your hard work, but…”

He gestured, a kind of up-down motion.

“But we’re too short?” I asked, feigning confusion.

Jamie elbowed me from the left, and Mary kicked my leg.  It hurt more than if she’d been wearing her shoes.  Somehow.

“It’s fine, sir,” Helen said.  “Two of us can’t even drink, and I can’t even enjoy it in the same ways, myself.”

“Strange group,” the man said.  He was barely drinking what he’d poured for himself.  One sip.  A gesture of power?  Habit?

I watched and waited for him to take another sip.

The moment he did, I opened my mouth, knowing he couldn’t cut me off without sputtering.

“Sir,” I said,   “In all seriousness, what I was saying before, about complications.  They’re more prepared than you may be giving them credit for.”

He swallowed, stayed like that, glass in hand, then set it down.  “How so?”

“Three or four assassins, skilled, each augmented.  One of them was an uncanny shot with a rifle from about a kilometer away.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“They’re confident.  They know the resources you have to bear, they have countermeasures in place.  They have resources, some ace up their sleeve that we weren’t able to uncover before we had to flee the assassins.  They think they’re going to win this.”

“Then they’re idiots,” the Brigadier said.  “We outnumber them threefold.”

“Virtually every soldier they have has a gun they’ve nicknamed the Exorcist.  Designed to put down stitched and augmented creatures.”

“Not a concern.  I’ve led armies in battle.  I’ve even managed situations like this.  A fortified position, an insurgent groups with numbers on their side.  Those numbers swiftly dwindle at the first hint of defeat.  You’ve delivered that, and I’ll see that you get medals for it.”

Mary reached out and took my hand.  I squeezed it.

The look she gave me out of the corner of her eye was one of worry.  The hand-holding was for reassurance, not for some desire to celebrate the recognition and the victory.

Yeah.  That feeling we’d had was getting worse.

“There were scientists.  Ex-Academy.  This isn’t rabble, sir,” I said.  “They have knowledge they can bring to bear.  Experiments of their own.”

“Who?”

“Louis Peralta,” Jamie said.  “He specialized in pain.  Leopold Pock, produced modified, vat grown humans, of a different type than the assassins we encountered.  Edwin Grahl, John Durant, Christina Wilder, Ian Roy, Wesley Vas-”

“I get the picture,” the Brigadier said.  “How many total?”

“Eleven.”

The man nodded, rubbing his beard.  “At a certain point, it becomes academic.  Assuming the guns are twice as effective as the norm, the experiments all Academy class, they still have to reach us before they can take action.”

“Reach us, sir?” Gordon asked.

“They’re mounting an attack against an entrenched position.  We have a number of tools at our disposal, and we can frustrate their efforts.  Trust me when I say this, war is a psychological game.  Once they realize the cost of attacking, on top of your clever work with the spiders, their numbers will dwindle.  Without the support of the group, their hired scholars will drop away as well.  There will be nobody to hold the guns you’ve mentioned.”

“You don’t intend to attack,” Mary said, the disappointment and disbelief clear in her voice.  “You want to stay, fight from a defensive standpoint.”

“Exactly so,” the man said, smiling.

“Why?” she asked.  She didn’t even try to hide the accusatory tone.

I squeezed her hand, a warning.

“How refreshing,” the old man said.  “I’m not usually made to explain myself.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

He waved a hand.  “I always firmly believed that every person in a position of power should have to explain their rationale.  Your name, if you don’t mind?”

“Mary.”

“Who are we fighting against, Mary?”

“Insurgents.”

“Yes.  Rebels, revolutionaries, insurgents.  But who makes up the bulk of their number?”

Mary took a second, then connected the dots.  “The Crown’s people.”

“Assume we fought every fight by wiping out the enemy.  What would happen after?  The Academy would suffer, the Crown would suffer.  There would be long-lasting repercussions.  Resentment, hatred.  If we can minimize the losses on both sides, and still break their stride, if we do it with care, then we could very well leave them feeling thankful that we were as merciful as we were.”

“Yes, sir,” Mary said.

I wondered if the higher-ups at Radham were laughing.  Hayle had made a gambit, sending us here.  He’d believed we could be useful.  Had someone with experience with the Crown’s military allowed him to do just that, knowing just what we’d have to deal with?

There wasn’t a Lamb present, I knew, who wasn’t filled to the brim with frustration.  We’d gathered information, we’d positioned ourselves, we’d set up a trap that would lay them low enough that an army could sweep over them without much contest, and here we were.

I looked either way, down the line of Lambs.  Lillian, at the far left end, was staring down at the floor.  Her neck was rigid enough I wondered if she’d start trembling.

The others weren’t much better.

So very little gained.  He wasn’t paying attention to the information.  Lillian and Shipman’s notes on how far along they were in terms of knowing about the Academy were effectively being ignored, as was Jamie’s information on the local threats, and my details on the assassins.

“The spiders were a good ploy.  I’m glad I extended you the trust and signed off on it.  Tell me, what’s next for you?  If you want it, I’d be happy to extend you some freedom.”

“Freedom, sir?” Gordon asked.

“I imagine the Academy keeps you busy.  If you’d like, I can tell them I have need of you, and keep you for a few days.  It’s a little drab here, mines and lodges, a lot of damnable rain, but you could rest and recuperate.”

Gordon glanced at the rest of us, then said, “Speaking for all of us, sir, the offer is appreciated-”

“Excellent.”

“But I think we’d prefer to be useful, if you don’t mind my saying so.  Those of us who aren’t injured.”

The man nodded.  “Any particular duties you have in mind?”

“Something pertaining to the upcoming situation, sir?”

“Nothing to be had but turns at the watch, and trust me when I say you don’t want that task.  It’s a punishment detail.”

“Yes sir,” Gordon said.

“Let me get back to you on that tomorrow, then?” the man asked.  “It’s getting later in the day.  Recuperate, take a well-earned rest.  You’ll be staying in the Miner’s camp.  Nicer place to stay than you’d think.  Some officers and specialists there, but you’ll have enough space that you shouldn’t want for privacy.”

He was the first person I’d met who could take the Lambs in stride at first meeting, recognizing what we were and how we operated.  Gordon’s letters might have helped with that.  He was also gentle, and not above treating us with kindness.  That he’d actually considered offering us drinks said a lot. There was no deception at all in what he was saying.  He believed it all, deep down.  That veteranship of experience had layered and ingrained it all into him.  A very rare species, no doubt a grandfather, and a veteran of the Academy’s wars, his experiences mingling into someone who actually almost understood us.

I could count the number of people who fit that label with three fingers.  Hayle was the first.  This man was the third.

Yet, in my frustration, there was nothing I wanted to do than jam my thumbs into the orbs of his eyes and hear him scream.  Because he was too kind in expression as he looked down on us, because I was sure I saw a glimmer of pity that came from a place of actual understanding.

It was a surprisingly violent line of thought, even for me.

We’d been dismissed.  The others were already turning to go.  I hadn’t turned, and I still held Mary’s hand, so she hadn’t gone either.

“Sir,” I said.

“Yes.  Do you mind mentioning your name, while we’re talking?”

“Sylvester.”

He nodded.

I took that as my cue to continue.  “If you’re really grateful about what we’ve done-”

“I am, Sylvester.”

“Then I’d like to maintain a responsibility, in the meantime.  I’d need a bit of help.  I want to do some patrol rounds around Westmore, personally.”

“It’s bigger than it looks, you know.  It worms between hills and mountains.”

“I know, sir.”

“What help do you need?”

“We’re each carrying silver badges.  They have the Radham emblem on them,” I said.  I fished mine out of my pocket.  “Would you pass on word to your soldiers, that we can go where we need to and make minor requests?”

He considered.  “If it were to fall into an enemy’s hands…”

“There aren’t any children among them, as far as we know,” I said.

He rubbed his beard, musing.  “Why, then?  We have the patrols covered.”

“Because they hired assassins.  As we mentioned earlier, there are three or four,” I said.  I paused for effect.  I wished this would sink in, convince him that this was a different sort of battle, that the enemy was smarter.  “I doubt they hired assassins to keep them in Whitney.”

“If you deem it necessary, then I’ll spread the word down the chain of command.  You’re free to go where you need to, and to make minor orders.”

I nodded.  “Thank you sir.”

“Thank you, Sylvester.”

I had the vivid mental image of the eye-piercing and screaming again.  Mary let go of my hand to head to the coatroom, leaving me behind.

I turned and crossed the length of the Brigadier’s lodge to join the others, who were flanked on either side by the stitched who had come into the door, now standing on either side of the coatroom.  I ignored the discarded socks, depositing them into the raincoat pocket, and simply slipped my feet into my boots.  There were tiny rocks in there with the silty mud, but it was far from the most irritating thing to happen today.

Among the Lambs, there was an odd kind of rush to get out the door and get away.

We covered a lot of ground before we were far enough away from the Brigadier’s men to talk.

“Why?” Mary asked, sounding genuinely lost.

“Because the Academy doesn’t lose wars,” I said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Mary told me.

“It makes all the sense in the world,” Gordon said.  “He’s never lost a war.   He could lose this battle, sure.  He could lose the next five.  But if the dust settles and he’s alive, which he probably will be, then what can the Academy say?  The failure is theirs, not his.”

Mary made a fist, then moved like she was going to punch a wall.  She stopped just short.

A moment later, Lillian slammed the side of her fist into the wall, a few feet from Mary’s.  She waggled it, wincing in pain, looking like she’d regretted the gesture.

“You really hated that school, huh?” I observed.

“I thought hitting things was supposed to help relieve anger,” Lillian said.  “Ow.”

“It doesn’t,” I said.

Lillian made a face.

“I need to teach you how to throw a punch,” Mary observed.

“Don’t make me feel worse,” Lillian muttered.

It was getting dark, the rain was coming down hard.

“It’s about risk and reward,” I said.  “Going back to our earlier topic, not hitting things.  Attacking Whitney is a risk.  His career, life, and control of the situation come into jeopardy.”

The words weren’t helping with the general aura of frustration that seemed to linger.  Only Helen and Shipman seemed able to be able to handle it.  Shipman had a few years of maturity and probably some experience in seeing her hard work thrown away.  Helen might not even experience frustration in the same way we did.

We could have stood there in the rain for hours, kicking at the mud with our toes and grumbling.  It was Gordon who got us moving.

“We might be arguing about nothing at all, if the man is right.”

“He’s not,” I pointed out.  “He’s missing just how angry and dedicated our opposition is.  They won’t break as easily as he thinks.”

“Sy,” Gordon said, sounding exasperated.

“Gordon,” I replied, mimicking his tone.

“I’m not arguing with you.  I’m inclined to agree.  But there’s nothing we can do about it.  Let’s go see where we’re staying,” he said.  “Get our wounded looked after.  Yourself included, Sy.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” I lied.

“You were,” he said.  He paused.  “The patrols.”

“No ulterior motives,” I said.  “I just didn’t want to get cooped up.”

“No.  Wasn’t going to ask about that.  Was just going to ask, do you mind if any of us come with you?”

“You want to patrol,” I said.

“Yeah.  And from the looks of it, Helen and Mary do too.”

Mary smiled.

“We’ll make a thing of it.  Go in pairs, maybe.  We’ve been split up for too long, doing our individual things, be nice to talk.”

A shout.

The crack of a dozen rifles firing.

Another shout, ordering a reload.

A violent explosion, screams.

It was so dark we couldn’t see, except when the explosions lit things up.  The dead of night.

Gordon and I were on the wall overlooking the sloped, waterlogged road that led down through the mountains to Whitney.  We peered over the top, watching the scene unfold.

From atop the wall, an entire regiment’s worth of rifles fired.

Bullets weren’t weightless.  They dropped as they traveled.  Having the high ground counted for something, I imagined.

Not that I was much of a fighter, or an expert on guns.

I watched as a series of explosions ripped out.  Something was coming up the path.  Stitched, but big, not all human.  It probably had a short lifespan.  But it wasn’t intended to live out an extended life of servitude.  It was about shock, awe, and giving our side a reason to doubt, if only for a minute.  It was holding a modified cannon in its arms.  It nearly fell as the cannon fired.

The collision shook the wall.  I could hear stones from the wall falling to the road below.

Gordon and I had been mid-patrol when the alert was sounded.  Now we watched.

Westmore’s stitched were firing in barrages.  I watched them, saw another flash of light as an explosion occurred further down the road, the scene highlighted in oranges and reds.

Another explosion.  The group of stitched was one fewer.  It took me a second to spot why.

“Head down!” I shouted in Gordon’s ear.  Louder than was necessary, maybe.  The explosions and gunfire was making my ears ring.

He ducked down with me, a quizzical look on his face.

“The rifleman with the eyes, the same one who shot me.  He’s picking off the commanders of the Stitched’s squads.”

“Tell someone.”

I looked at the scene.  Just when I spotted a person who looked like he was in charge, he turned, walking the other direction, gesturing.

A group of specialists in a nearby building opened a cage.

The thing that came out was a dog without a head.  The stump was an open void, and tendrils spilled out and peeled back over the dog’s body, streaming behind it as it ran.

Sharp whistles directed it, two for left, one for right, volume guiding it.

It went over the top of the wall, pouncing.

I heard gunshots, listened, trying to identify the rifleman’s.  Knowing the dog would be taking the man’s focus, I dared a look over the top.

There was a crowd at the end of the road, approaching with makeshift shields up to cover them.  They’d reached the collection of sandbags furthest down the road, the same one that the poor sod that had gotten his legs stitched together had come from.  It became cover for them.

I imagined someone was supposed to keep that from happening, but the people who were supposed to make the call were getting picked off.

The tendril-dog was limping forward, momentum broken.  Stitched were dying in droves.  They were supposed to take a half-dozen bullets before going down.  They were taking one or two at most.

The ‘exorcist’ rifles were doing their job.

Gordon pulled on my shoulder, and I ducked down.  He gestured, and I gestured back.

We descended the stairs at our side of the wall, back to the ground level.  A gun was briefly trained on us, before we were recognized.

We had to cross the length of the street before the sounds on the far side of the wall grew muffled enough that we could talk.  I spoke, looking at the forces massed on our side of the wall.   “They need to sound a retreat.”

“No retreat,” Gordon said.  “They won’t.  They can’t.  It’s only a half-dozen men out there who die, and a lot of stitched.  If they open the gate, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to close it.”

I shook my head.

“They won’t get through,” Gordon said.  “Not tonight.”

“Probably not tonight.  This was them saying they’re here.  They’re angry, they haven’t given up.  Someone in charge probably stirred them up.  People who weren’t committed to the fight picked up guns, even.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “Sy.  I want to ask everyone, but since you saw, I’ll ask you first.”

We were getting further away from the site of the battle, the volume was dying down, and the horrible ringing in my ears seemed to be getting louder in comparison.

“Ask what?” I told him.

“Do you think he’ll change his mind?”

“No,” I said, without missing a beat.  “He’ll adapt his strategy, he’ll make an excuse.”

“That they expended resources.  They’ll be weaker on subsequent attempts,” Gordon said.

“Something like that.  You were thinking the same thing?  That he’d say no?”

Gordon nodded.

I had a funny feeling about the way he was acting, which was strange.  Gordon wasn’t a guy I usually devoted a lot of brainpower to figuring out, and now I’d done it twice in recent memory.  Thrice if I counted Fray.

Okay, I was lying.  A million, six hundred thousand and two times, if I counted Fray.

But the strange mood in the market, how he’d been oddly out of sorts and avoiding the heavy lifting when I’d seen him earlier in the day and how this?

“Why does the group need to make a collective call about what the Brigadier is doing?” I asked.  “It would have to be important, for you to ask for something like that.”

Except I already knew the answer.  The look in Gordon’s eyes, faint as it was with only the streetlamp to go by, was telling enough.  He knew I’d figured it out.

“Right,” I said.  “Hm.  It might be hard to convince some of the others.”

“You think?”

“Treason is typically pretty hard to sell,” I told him.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 5.09 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Mary was finishing her trip around the perimeter when we caught up with her.  The sounds of shells and gunfire in the background were joined by a singular, high screech.

“No si-” Mary started to say, before the sharp crack of an explosion stopped her.  She winced.  “No sign of the assassins.”

“One was on the battlefield,” Gordon said.  “Sy’s gunman.”

“Why is he mine?  I don’t want him!” I protested.

Mary’s eyes had lit up with anticipation at Gordon’s statement, however.  “The others have to be close.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Gordon said.  He frowned.  “We need to talk.  And not about them.”

“They’re an issue,” Mary said, insistent.

And here is the point that marks the difference between Gordon and Mary, I mused.  Gordon was flexible, he was well rounded enough to adapt.  Mary’s focus had been honed to a point.  She was wired to go after an enemy.  Her ‘parents’, as it were, but even so.

“Dangerous enemy,” I agreed.  “I can attest.”

“Yes,” she said.

A rolling rumble, like thunder, marked the collapse of a part of the mountainside, cliff, or road.  My heart was racing, just hearing it all.

“But all the talking in the world won’t uncover more about them,” I said.  “We’ll keep an eye out, work under the assumption they’re here, but there’s something more complicated we need to discuss.  The assassins are only a small part of the big picture.”

“They nearly killed you,” she said.  “You want to ignore that?”

The gunfire in the background was incessant. It didn’t help that, as we walked beneath eaves as a trio, I would occasionally get a fat sucker of a raindrop dropping down with considerable force.  Just enough of a ‘tap’ that a small part of me thought I’d been shot again.

“No, Mary,” I told her.  I sighed a little.  “What do you want to do?  What are you thinking would be best, for the Lambs’ plan of action?”

“We go after them.  Lay a trap, take them out.”

“Lay a trap how?” I asked.  I was on the attack now, in a manner of speaking.  “They could come after us or any of the superior officers.  It’s pretty clear they have enhanced awareness on a lot of fronts.  That’s a hard trap to lay.”

“You’re good at thinking outside the box,” she said.  “This is doable.”

“Maybe doable.  Probably.  But ‘doable’ doesn’t mean ‘we should do it’.”

“But-”

“And thinking outside the box is only doable if there is a box and if I know what the box is and how it works,” I said.  “They’re a box I don’t know.”

“You’re making less sense as you go along, Sy,” Gordon said.

“I’m injured,” I pointed out.

“Which would be a great excuse if you got shot in the brain,” Mary told me, with a very unimpressed tone.  Even as we talked, she was scanning the surroundings, watching the darker parts of the street.

She was itching to go up against this new enemy.

“Sy’s right.  It doesn’t make sense,” Gordon said.

Mary shifted position, impatient, annoyed.

“If we let this slide,” Mary said, halting as the noise in the background reached a crescendo, “if- I just don’t want this mission to be stillborn like this.  I want a win, Sy.”

That,” I seized on the opportunity, “Is exactly what we hoped to talk about.”

Gordon nodded.

Mary was paying attention now, even if her eyes didn’t show it.  She was still looking out for trouble.  But her hands weren’t clenched and scrunchy the little lines that tended to appear between her eyebrows and on the bridge of her nose when she was upset weren’t as pronounced.

Even as we stepped out of the way of the streetlight and into darkness, her silhouette had changed in how poised it was.  She’d been coiled like a spring, ready to pounce or react, and now she wasn’t.  Not as much, anyway.

“You’re being sly, Sy,” she said, wary but interested.  “Gordon too.”

“This is more Gordon than me,” I said.  I said it because it was true.  It was Gordon’s plan.  But also because Mary was more likely to listen to Gordon than to me.

She was closer to me, I felt, but she was more likely to listen to Gordon.

Gordon cleared his throat.  Mary fixed her attention on him.  The pair slowed to a stop, and I realized Gordon had a hand on Mary’s shoulder.  He wanted her full attention.

I walked a bit forward, the two of them behind me.  Taking over Mary’s watch, so to speak.  Looking out for trouble.

Behind me, Gordon asked, “Do you agree with the Brigadier?”

“No,” Mary said.

“Sy told me you didn’t have high expectations about how this would turn out, even before we talked to the man.”

“I don’t feel the killer instinct,” she said.  “We talked about this after leaving the meeting, but I was thinking about it.  They hate us.  Their side is angry, they have a cause.  This side, I don’t know how much they really want to fight.”

“I’m asking,” Gordon said.  “Because if it came down to it, and the Brigadier exited the picture, but we found ourselves in a position to win this battle…”

Mary made a sudden movement, and I turned to get a better  look.  A hand to her mouth.  Connecting the dots.

The sound of explosions drowned out the start of Gordon’s statement.  Men came running down the street, a crew of stitched following them.  I glanced over them as they passed under the light, looking for the unique facial features of the assassins.

“-would you be?” Gordon asked.

“Not very,” Mary said.

There were two ways that could be taken, without context.  I wished I’d heard how Gordon had framed it.

But I saw Gordon’s shoulders relax.  His hand dropped from where he’d been resting it on her shoulder, and the two of them walked to catch up with me a bit.  Gordon looked pleased.

“It depends, though,” Mary said.  “On execution.”

“Doesn’t it always?” Gordon asked.  “Let’s sound out the others before we start discussing particulars.”

“Sure,” Mary said.

“For the record,” I said.  “I’m not entirely on board with this.  I see where Gordon’s coming from, I get it, but I have concerns.”

Gordon nodded.

“Gordon’s the reckless one for once?” Mary observed.

“You should have seen him when he was younger,” I said.  “He was as bad as I was.”

Gordon chuckled.  “I wanted to learn the good stuff so very badly, and they wouldn’t teach it to me.  Sy cottoned on and the two of us would take off.  Every day.  They’d find new ways to lock us in or station new guards, Sy and I would compete to see who could get out and free the other one.”

I was very aware that our conversation and banter had taken on a lighter tone.  It was a contrast to the ongoing fight that we could do so little about.  The seriousness of what it was that Gordon wanted to do here.

“What Gordon’s thinking, if he’s thinking what I’m thinking he’s thinking,” I said, “Is-”

“If you say thinking one more time I’m slapping you across the back of the head,” Gordon warned me.

“Is going to put us in a risky position.  We do this right, the Academy will let it slide.  But if we pull the ‘traitor’ move and we fail, we’ll have to off the Brigadier and blame the assassins.”

Mary nodded somberly.

I couldn’t see in the dark, but I was suspicious that if I could, she’d be showing me a mischievous grin while maintaining a poker face on the other side, for Gordon’s benefit.

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “I know Sy is joking-”

The sentence was cut off as a building detonated.  Flame and flying bits of whatever erupted from a rooftop, halfway between us and the wall where the fighting had been happening.

Bells were rung, people mobilized.  Civilians this time, some in nightclothes.

Putting out the fire.

“Wow,” Mary said.  “If they keep that up…”

“They won’t,” Gordon said.  “So far, the Academy’s been seeing how well they can hold back the enemy with the minimum possible resources.  But they won’t let that go unanswered.”

There were calls and orders.  Permissions given.

Unleashing the monsters.

I thought, as Specialists stepped to the fore, joined by the scientists who were looking after the individual projects.  Men pulled on chains, hauling experiments out of the enclosures where they had been contained.

Three were large, with the massive horns, thick hide, and shaggy fur.  Nothing fancy, probably no special qualities.  It kind of amazed me when I dwelt on it.  Someone had played god, they had made an entirely new life, and they had done it for a grade, halfway through their Academy education.  Exercising the fundamentals.

Give Lillian two more years and she might just put something like that together.  Except she’d do it different.  I would be deeply disappointed in her if she didn’t learn something meaningful from all of our adventures.

The gates swung open, and the creatures charged through.  Each one was probably pretty darn close to being bulletproof.

We picked up our pace as we moved further away from the site of the explosion.

Can’t think straight, this close to it all, I told myself.

“If this goes badly, it’s going to cost us,” I said.  “They’ve got Ashton Le Deux or Evette the Second in the works.  I don’t want them getting second thoughts about moving forward with that.”

“They’re not going to cancel a project they’ve already invested into,” Gordon said.

“In wartime?” I asked.  “War is the best excuse ever.  Not just for scrapping projects or changing things up.”

“Right,” he said.

“Don’t get me wrong.  That guy pisses me off more than any enemy we’ve gone up against.  I’d love to pull this one off, play it off like we haven’t in a while, but… I have questions, Gordon.”

“For me, specifically?”

“Yeah.  Mary, look, since we’re almost there, you maybe want to handle rounding up the others?  With some officers and people in the building, it’s a bad place to hold this conversation.  I need to ask Gordon something.”

I hated to ask.  I knew that Mary didn’t like being left out.  Her isolation had been the tool I’d used to get her away from Percy.

We continued walking, and I felt a little nervous, between Mary’s silence and Gordon’s reaction to my earlier concerns.

“How long do you need, for your chat?” Mary asked.

“Not long,” I said.  “You don’t have to dawdle.  But don’t rush to get everyone out the door either?”

“Alright,” she said.

I reached out and took her hand, giving it a squeeze.  She smiled at me.

We reached the house where we were staying, and Mary stepped inside.  I gestured, and Gordon and I stepped away from the door, to the corner of the house.  We stood under the eaves, streams of water coming down in front of us, like the vertical iron bars of a cell.  Our backs were to the wall, and we watched the surroundings.  Men were marching in the opposite direction from the gate that was under siege.

The city of Westmore was laid out between mountains.  It zig-zagged more than it sprawled, and the various exits from the city were all mountain roads and paths, blocked off by sturdy gates much like the one at the front.

It somehow made me think of Westmore as being weaker than it was strong.  That the Academy had taken it by force only weeks ago suggested that it wasn’t impregnable.

Weakness…

“Gordon,” I said.  “First thing I gotta ask.  It’s bugging me, and Mary probably knows the answer, but I gotta hear it from you.”

“Ah,” he said.  He heaved out a sigh.

“I know it’s a touchy subject, but… this morning.  You were sitting on the wagon instead of helping out.  You can tell me, straight up, if you were hurt in a very normal, conventional way, or lie to me and tell me you were, and I’ll leave it be.  But-”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Sy,” he said.

I felt my heart plummet.  “What happened, exactly?”

“Phantom pains,” he told me.  “Couldn’t coordinate my fingers right.”

He lifted his hand.  He touched his thumb to forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, then pinky, then did it back and forth, faster and faster.

I swallowed.

“It’s better now,” he said.  “It was minor, when it happened.  But it was a wake-up call.  That things can go wrong.  That maybe this is the very first step.  I start breaking down, things start going wrong.  Little things, and only for a short while each time, but the times get longer and the issues get bigger, and eventually, I dunno.  I’m lying in a bed and nothing works or works together, and it all hurts, and the Academy decides it’s too much trouble to keep the Griffon project alive?”

He was speaking in an artificially low voice.  One that he tried on now and again as his voice steadily and smoothly changed.  Burying emotion, doing what he could to control the words and keep them steady.  Except at the very end, he was having to try more.

He’d made it a question.  I had the answers.  He knew that.

“I could tell you what I know,” I said.  “The projected outcomes.  Timelines.  But I think you’d resent me for telling you, after, when the sun was up and things were a little brighter.  Because it would cast a shadow over every good day from here on out.  You’d take what I told you and convince yourself it was worse than it was, or something.”

“Damn it, Sy,” he said.  His voice was rough, a little choked.  He wasn’t looking at me.

“Does Mary know?”

“Yeah.  I had to explain.  Gladys, too.”

I nodded.  “The others?”

“Lillian.  Not Jamie.  Not Helen.”

He wouldn’t have had an opportunity with Jamie and Helen.

I didn’t say anything, just thinking.  The sound of battle was dying.  It wasn’t just that we were far away.  The bomb blast on the one rooftop and the subsequent release of the warbeasts had ended things.

They’d forced the Academy to play their hand.  The rebellion had spooked the Academy forces of Westmore, and they’d proved they’d spooked us.  Psychologically, it was what I’d want to do, if I was leading the enemy.  Not that I’d mount a frontal attack.

“They put me together with the best pieces they could get.  Augmented, altered, fixed, matched to what I needed.  I’m a chimera.  A hodgepodge puzzle of about twenty-six people and some things that weren’t ever people,” Gordon said.  “Everything wired perfectly, with treatments to keep it all in alignment.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had trouble with coordination before.  Early on.  But the phantom pain… I had my hand, but my brain was trying to tell me I had a second, and it was caught in this- this ice cold vise, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.  It wasn’t the pain that got me, or that I couldn’t get my hand to do what I wanted it to.  It was… I was worried about what it meant.

“The second hand?”

“Yeah,” he said.  His voice had that rough edge to it still.  He was having a hard time keeping it steady, but he was managing it.  “Sy.  They didn’t just work with muscle and bone and the frame of my body.  They took a few brains, took them apart, with a few choice pieces in mind, and they jigsawed it all together.”

“You’re wondering what happens if your brain starts doing what your hand was.”

“I know phantom pain and the connections don’t work that way.  But phantom pains like I felt, they’re a disconnect between the brain and the body in the first place.  I just-”

He stopped mid-sentence.

I gave him time to find the words to speak, or the ability to create the words without letting something emotional slip through.

The gunfire had stopped altogether.  There was distant shouting, but that probably had more to do with the fallout from the one shell that had hit the roof.

I heaved out a sigh.

“You don’t have anything to worry about just yet,” I said.

He raised his voice, “I told you not-”

“I know I know I know,” I said, cutting him off.  “I know.  But you gotta hear it.  And I have to say it.  I can’t have that tearing at you like that.”

He nodded.

“Okay,” I said.  “Right.  That took longer than I thought it would.  You know you can talk to me about it, right?”

“But you won’t tell me, if I ask?”

“If you really ask, I’ll tell.  If you need to know, or if it looks like there won’t be any good days, I’ll tell.”

He nodded.

I could hear the others inside the house, coming down the stairs.

“Shit,” I said.  “Okay, look.  Gotta ask.  This plan of yours, being entirely honest, how on board with it would you be if we were doing this six months ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“Fray.  You were going to go with her.”

The tension in the air was awful.  I honestly felt like he was going to reach out and grab me.

He didn’t say a word.

“Are you wanting to do this because a part of you thinks that if it goes horribly wrong, maybe we’ll all have to pick up and go to Fray?”

Silence.

“Or because of the phantom pain?  The feeling that you might be breaking down?”

“Sy,” he said.

“I gotta ask.  We gotta go into this with our eyes open.  No fooling.  Knowing that you might cut corners or shift priorities because you feel like you have an ‘out’ in Fray…”

“You want to know what the box looks like,” Gordon said.

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” he said.  “Not going to lie because I know you’ll see right through it.  Yes.  There’s a bit of a feeling of having an out.  We don’t need the pills anymore.  The chemical is everywhere.”

“Alright,” I said.

“Does-” he started to say.  The front door opened, and Gordon pursed his lips.  He gave me a look, as if I’d timed things specifically to end the conversation there and leave him hanging.

Jamie, Helen, Lillian, and Mary all stepped out, wearing raincoats, Jamie with his bookbag.  Jamie’s coat was a bit too big, swallowing him up.

“Where’s Gladys?” Gordon asked.

“Sound asleep,” Mary said.  “Thought about it, but…”

“-she’s not a Lamb,” I said.

Mary nodded.

Gordon bristled at that, but he didn’t argue.  I suspected it had something to do with the fact that he had no idea where I stood, since his confession.  Lillian gave me a look, almost inquiring.  But she was enough of a Lamb to be included here.

We moved as a group, in the opposite direction from the gate.

“What’s this about?” Lillian asked.  “You’re making me nervous.”

“Mutiny,” I said.

Gordon gave me a sharp look.

I was too busy watching the others to figure out where things stood.  Fear in Lillian’s eyes, as she looked at each of us, trying to figure out what was going on, or what we were thinking.  Jamie looked concerned, and rightly so.  Helen gave no sign, of course.

“The first foray didn’t go well?” Jamie asked.

“Nope,” I said.  “The people of the small township of Whitney are angry on a number of levels.  They’re devastated, scared, and armed.  The spider thing backfired, without the follow-up attack.  They found their courage, they’re attacking, trying desperately to hurt us before we can do something like that again.”

“If they knew how much work it took,” Mary muttered.

Gordon was watching me carefully.  I’d never told him which direction I was leaning with this plan.

“They’re not going to let up,” I said.  “It’s our feeling, given where things stand, that this isn’t going to end well for the Academy.  We’re the only people who’ve seen both sides of things.  We don’t have enough anger to drive us to go for the jugular.  Brigadier Tylor is a good indication of that.  He wants a safe win.”

“And you want mutiny?” Lillian asked.

“You were as mad as any of us, after that meeting,” Gordon said.

“But mutiny.”

“Sy’s choice of words, not mine,” he said.

“How would you put it?” Jamie asked, quiet.  His first time speaking up since stepping outside.

Gordon explained, “We disable Tylor.  Either we do it and we take over, acting in Tylor’s place, to give the orders and manage this end of the war ourselves, and we plan to do well enough that he has to keep quiet and take the credit, or we disable him in a way that won’t raise suspicion, someone else takes charge, and we lean heavily on the new leader to get the results we need.”

“I feel like if we do this, we’re going to want to do it fast,” I said.  “They’re not going to let up.  They’ll regroup, the people in charge will fan the flames, and they’ll make another attempt.  Before dawn.”

“I have thoughts on that,” Gordon said, “But let’s not get distracted.”

I nodded.

“You three are pretty committed to this?” Jamie asked.

“No,” I said.  “I have reservations.”

Jamie nodded.  I thought I detected relief.

“Reservations is putting it lightly,” Lillian said.  “Are you nuts?

“A little,” I said.

“This is dangerous,” she said.

“We talked about that part,” I said.

“It’s not just the sort of thing that screws us up and makes it so they don’t trust us anymore.  It’s the sort of thing that ends the Lamb project.”

“We could make a case,” Gordon said.

“You think they’d let you?  I’ve sat in on meetings where they talked about the Lambs project.  They asked for my opinions.  How often you were each getting hurt, what your growth looked like, development, promising elements, challenges.  I know they were testing me as much as they were evaluating you.”

“You’re worried this will damage your rep?” I asked.  “That you won’t get invited to sit in on meetings?  You’ll lose all of the trust and favors you’ve bought by helping get this far?”

“Wow,” Lillian said.  “That’s unfair.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?  You’ve earned a kind of status, respect and an ability to dialogue with higher-ups that a lot of people four or five years ahead of you in the Academy haven’t been able to obtain.”

Lillian’s eyes narrowed.

“Hey, I don’t begrudge you that.  I only want to know where your protests are really coming from.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Are you saying no as an Academy student, or as a Lamb?” I asked.

Playing dirty.  Sorry Lil.

“The two aren’t- it can be both!”

“They can be not-both,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Sy,” Lillian said.  “I’m mad, I don’t like this, but I can’t do this in good conscience.  The risks aren’t worth it.

Jamie nodded.  He was already healing from the wounds to his face, but he still looked a little haggard, and despite Lillian’s ministrations, there were still parts of him which had the drops of resin clinging to him.  She’d cleaned his hair, at least, but the light occasionally caught bits of the glue-like stuff.

“You too?” Gordon asked.

“I’m with Lillian.  It feels reckless.”

“And Helen?” Gordon asked.

“I’d like to find another way to be helpful,” Helen said.  She was healing faster than Jamie, but she also had bits of the resin on her that caught the light.  Like tiny raindrops frozen in time.  “If we tried to take over the Brigadier’s position, I think I’d be the least helpful.  I don’t want to be useless.”

Gordon was frowning.

“Question,” I said.  “If we found out a plan that was guaranteed to work, would any of you three change your minds?”

“I might,” Jamie said.  “I trust you guys more than I trust myself w-when it comes to some things.”

I only caught it because of the way he’d stuttered, but he was cold enough he was shivering.  His teeth were chattering.

The smoke had taken a lot out of him.  Medicine could do a lot, but the body did have to carry its own weight.  Sometimes nutrients needed to be supplied, the body needed time to take in the medicines and use the resources the medics or the doctors had so kindly provided.

Jamie was frail, and it looked like he was fighting to stay standing.

I approached him, coming to stand next to him by the wall, so the side of my body pressed against the side of his.

“I’ll break the tie, then,” I said.  “I’m defecting to their side.  It’s too hard to do, too risky.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  He raised his chin a little.

When he looked at me, it felt a little like he was looking a little bit through me.

At a certain point, Gordon had stopped being quite the Rebel and had started to fall in line with the Academy’s expectations.  He’d done marvelously.  Now he was returning to the kind of person he’d once been.  A little bit reckless.

When we’re babies, we shit ourselves, we struggle to walk, we struggle to communicate.  When we’re old, we shit ourselves, we struggle to walk, we struggle to communicate.

As things began, so did they end.

Did Gordon recognize that?  Was he touching base with his roots, as he got his first warning that he was moving toward his conclusion?

I almost changed my mind right there.  I might have defected a second time, trying to convince the others.

I wanted to give him this.

“Go inside,” I said.  “Get some rest.  Gordon, you do a walk around the city?  Maybe with Mary, if she’s up to it?  I’ll meet you when you’re back.  Then you and I will do a walk around, then Mary and I.”

“Can I?” Lillian asked.  “I don’t- I mean, I want to help, I don’t want to be useless or for there to be hard feelings, because I think that it’s crazy to try and do something to the Brigadier.”

“It’s okay, Lillian,” Gordon murmured.

“Go with one of the pairs,” I said.  “But maybe let Gordon and Mary go alone, first?”

“I don’t need to vent or rant,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Then Lillian can go if she wants.  Jamie and Helen hang back, recuperate.”

Jamie and Helen nodded.

“What are you doing, then?” Gordon asked me.

I smiled.

“Seriously.”

“Going for a walk,” I said, walking backward, away from the group.

“That’s suspicious,” Gordon said.

“Yeah, well, that’s me in a nutshell,” I said, still smiling.

“Am I going to be happy when I find out what you were up to?” Gordon asked.  “Are we?”

“You won’t be unhappy,” I told him, still walking backward, still giving them my fake smile.

There was no response, there were no accusations.  I turned, walking into the rain, and I could hear Mary mutter something.  Clearly unhappy.  We’d gotten her hopes up.

The closer I got to the gate, the more intense the smell of the smoke was.  The building had taken a nasty hit, possibly a storehouse, and the fire had burned well enough that I suspected the bomb blast or explosion had been intended to spread fires.

Interesting on its own.  Fire was a typical countermeasure to stitched.  The more they depended on that primal, alligator part of the brain, the less they liked it.  Newer stitched were capable of ignoring fire, defaulting to a frozen state or marching headlong into it with no heed for personal harm, which was only a marginal improvement over the fits of rage or panic that it had caused in prior generations.

Our enemy had a surprising number of tools that were very effective against us.  The warbeasts had likely forced a retreat, suggesting they didn’t have a countermeasure to that, but something told me that the person in charge of the attack had ordered a retreat the moment the bomb had hit the roof.  They’d bloodied us, they knew we had to retaliate, so they minimized the damage that retaliation could have caused.

The warbeasts were loping back toward their pens now, making their way into the gate.  I approached the man at the gate, saw him frown.

“Keep out of the way,” he told me.

I raised the badge, and I saw his expression change.  Eyebrows up.  Lines of what I almost read as disgust on either side of his mouth.  Indignation.

“There are four assassins on the periphery of Whitney,” I said.  “Each one modified.  Any time you open the gates, you need to commit people to searching wagons, checking faces.  Even if it slows things down.  If they can slip past the walls, the leadership of Westmore is going to be dead within hours.”

“Uh huh,” he said.

“Double guards on each of the gates, too,” I said.  “Doesn’t matter if they’re hurt.  Just so long as their eyes work.”

He gave me a curious stare.  I turned and left.

He wasn’t the reason I’d gone back.

I retraced my steps, going back, and crossed the street.  In the zig-zag of the city, the building was placed at one of the sharp turns, positioned in such a way that it had more space around it.  Elbow room.

The Brigadier’s lodge.

As I approached the door, two stitched stiffened, hands on their bayonets.

I held up my badge again.  “Let me in.”

They didn’t budge.

Had he passed on word to the soldiers, but not the stitched?

“Tell Brigadier Tylor there’s a little boy here to see him,” I said.  “Please.”

The stitched took an interminably long time before turning and passing through the door.

Almost a minute passed before the door opened again.  The stitched took time getting back into position at his post, lips slightly parted, eyes unfocused, before he addressed me again.  “Go in.”

I stepped inside.  I took my time removing my raincoat, which made my stomach ache, and bending over to remove my boots, which made it ache more.  My coat and boots were half the size of the ones that were already present.

Tylor was in the room with several of his superior officers.  They were gathered around the table at the far end, opposite his desk, the fireplace off to one side, oil lamps and candles burning throughout.  Many of the officers had cigarettes or pipes.  The high ceiling kept the room from being too smoky, and because the light didn’t quite reach the peak, the darkness had a nebulousness to it.  Shifting, moving, almost alive.

“Something of import?” the Brigadier asked me.

“No.  Not of import.  No emergency.  But we do need to talk.”

“One minute, then,” he said, before returning to business.

He was crisp in the orders he gave to his men.  Who was stationed where, and which weapons to keep at the ready.

I walked around to his desk, finger tracing the heavily lacquered wood.

Papers, letters, bottles of ink and quill pens, actual metal pens, and stacks of mail.  Opened and unopened.  He had a nice little letter opener, with a dog engraved into the top of it.

My finger touched the handle of the drawers.  I knew from earlier that he had a bottle of something in the one.

Had we collectively agreed to commit treason, then this would have been the moment I discreetly opened the drawer and dropped something Lillian-provided into the bottle.

Instead, I kept circling the desk.

There.  Half-tucked beneath a stack of papers were envelopes, many with curls of paper peeling off of them.  Opened, empty, the contents neatly placed elsewhere.

Probably intended for the fire.

I took one of his nice pens, one with actual gold inlaid into it and making up the metal parts, the nib excepted.  I began penning out short statements on the blank side of each envelope.

I lined them up, turning them over.

The Brigadier was true to his word.  About a minute and a half after he’d told me to wait, he sent his men away.  They pulled their boots and coats on, and the cold outdoor air blew into the lodge as they pulled the door open and stepped outside.

“Excuse me,” the Brigadier said.

I stepped out of the way, and allowed him to reach his chair, where he promptly set himself down.

“Can I ask what the plan is?”

“We have weapons.  We’ll have at least two warbeasts on guard at any time.  If there’s a problem, we open the gates and set them on the enemy.  Artillery emplacements will be moved here and there, mostly to the forward gate.  It took a lot of damage.”

I nodded.

“You’ve redecorated my desk,” he said, noting the envelopes I’d laid out.  “Am I  supposed to keep it this way?”

“I want to play a game,” I said.  I leaned against the corner of the desk.

“A game?” he asked.  I could see the struggle of his thoughts on his face as he very briefly considered going off on me for making light of the situation.  But he composed himself.  “How do we play?”

“It’s a proposal more than anything,” I said.  I tapped the envelope nearest to me, “My prediction for the enemy’s next move.”

“Hm,” he said.  “And the other three?”

“More predictions.  The game is simple.  If I’m right, and I turn over an envelope, then you give us more power.  More say, more ability to decide how our side fights this war.  If I’m wrong, then we get less power.  We do what you say, we don’t get in your way.”

He nodded slowly.  “What if I said that this isn’t worth it to me?  I could say I stand to gain very little.”

“You can,” I said.  “It’s your right, sir.”

“Mm,” he made a sound.  “You were already right about how tenacious they were.  They didn’t feel like a broken enemy.”

He stood from his seat, looking down at the envelopes.

Starting with the leftmost one, closest to me, he turned each one of them over.

That’s not how you play my game, I thought.  I suspected I was getting a sense of what Mary had felt when we’d told her we weren’t focusing on the assassins.

“One.  They attack before dawn.  They leave within the next two hours, time of attack depends on how long the path to the nearest available side gate is.  That side gate gets attacked, similar to how the first one was.  They either bring out the big guns, they attack two fronts at once, or they utilize a bomb at the gate.”

I nodded.

“Two.  Just before dawn, we get hit for the third time tonight.  Chaos in our ranks.  The attack in the previous envelope was a distraction to get one of the assassins into the camp.  Superior officers die.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Three.  The assassin, if not caught, manages a signal to the others.  Now that the Westmore forces are looking out for him or her, the assassin only moves in concert with scheduled attacks.”

I nodded.

“The second part of that message is, if the assassin is caught, ahem, because the Lambs are awesome, then the schedule we find on the paper the assassin is carrying is incorrect.  They attack by another schedule or means.  Repeating steps one and two, to get assassins in place.  It is very possible they enter and/or attack using the mine system or any sewer.”

“I don’t know Westmore enough to know the particulars there.”

“We don’t have a sewer system they could abuse like that,” the Brigadier said.  “Waste runs off into one of the mine systems, where it drops into a steady current underground.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“The Academy has its strengths.  They’re more likely to use a mine shaft.  We have enough of them.  But they won’t do this to get their assassins in the first time?”

“I don’t imagine so,” I said.  “It would risk tipping their hand.”

“You know this how?  You studied them that carefully?”

I shook my head.  “All of that, it’s what I would do.”

He turned to the fourth envelope.  He tapped his finger on it.  Something told me I’d insulted him.

“The Academy forces of Westmore that are led by Brigadier Tylor lose,” he recited, giving me a level stare.

I didn’t budge, only meeting his eyes.

“You were right on the first one,” he said.  “That gives you one win.  If you want something, and it doesn’t cost me anything, I’ll grant it.”

I nodded.

“We’ll take measures to react to this attack on the second gate you’re predicting.  That does cost me something, it’s less men and resources on the forward gate.  But I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“First thing I want that doesn’t cost you anything, I want to call the rest of the Lambs here.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 5.10 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Gordon, Shipman, and Mary came in from the rain.  The rest of us were already present and waiting.

“No activity,” Gordon said, raising his voice to be heard from the other end of the room.  “Double guards are stationed, and ambushes are laying in wait outside the gates.”

“Only stitched for the ambush?”  I asked.

“Only stitched.  Both sides of the path.”

I nodded.

There hadn’t been an attack yet.  Gordon and Mary had left to do another circuit around Westmore, checking for anything suspicious, and now they were back, having picked up Shipman from the residence at the tail end of their route.  The rest of us had gathered, but we were in a position where we were tired and lacked many concrete things to do, but not quite able to relax.  Jamie was at the table with the maps and some books spread in front of him, filling his head with any knowledge that might be relevant.

Lillian was with Jamie, and the two of them were talking in low voices, as Jamie explained something or other.  They were both very good at the ‘library whisper’, and had a way of looking like they were sharing a secret when they did so.  It had something to do with the energy they had when they talked, Jamie finishing sentences, helping Lillian’s verbal stride rather than harming it, yet not getting so excited that they forgot how others might be bothered.

I walked around to look over their shoulders.

A list of the various projects ongoing in Whitney.  Jamie was supplying additional details, some major, some minor.  Even noting the people that some of the scientists had been talking to at the gathering we’d passed through.

Lillian looked up at me and smiled as I walked around the table.  I walked past my empty cup of tea and the plate with a shortbread cookie on it, both provided by the Brigadier’s stitched.  I collected the one piece of shortbread I hadn’t eaten.

Helen was at the opposite end, curled up in a chair that had been grown rather than carved, shaped as the branches grew.  For a large man, it would be snug, but Helen was curled up rather comfortably, feet under her, a heavy blanket surrounding everything but her head, which was already healing a lot of the damage that had been done earlier.  A few red patches with the skin loose at the edges, darker circles under the eyes, but she was mostly alright.

I jabbed the shortbread at her face, and she opened her mouth in time to intercept it, clamping down with her teeth.  She ate it without pulling her arms free from the bundle of blanket.

Walking past Helen, I intercepted Gordon, Shipman, and Mary.

“Brigadier is out ordering some minor changes to organization,” Mary said.  “I think he’s doing it to have something to do more than out of real strategic reasons.”

“It can be both,” Gordon observed.  “By giving the orders and changing the organization, he gets to refresh himself on who is where.”

“And he changes things up, which makes things harder on spies,” I said.  “Spies and infiltrators thrive on consistency.  Being unpredictable here helps.”

“This was your idea,” Gordon said, realizing it out loud.

“Yeah,” I said.  “He was suspicious, but I convinced him that he would only be waiting around here, and we could send anyone important his way.”

“You’re pleased with yourself,” Gordon said.

“A win for everyone involved,” I said, smiling.  “Except the losing side.  Or a loss for everyone and a win for them, if our guess is wrong.”

“If they don’t attack tonight, we lose some clout with the Brigadier,” Gordon said.

“They will,” I said.

“Mm.”

“And you had no ulterior motives in getting rid of the Brigadier, hm?” Mary asked, one eyebrow arched.

“He’ll be back,” I said.

“That doesn’t answer the question,” she said.

I made a face.  “We need to plant our feet here.  This can’t be a prolonged engagement.  They’re too angry, and that’s a fire that burns hot and fast.  Once they get past the wall, it’s going to be over.  Not guaranteed to be a win for them, but it’s going to be over.”

“That has what to do with the Brigadier, exactly?”

“I figure there’ll only be two or three big clashes before this swings one way or the other, the upcoming ambush excepted.  If we lose the Brigadier’s trust, we can’t be certain we’ll get it back before things are over.  So I figure we set down roots, work ourselves into the greater scheme of things.  A little signal or change of plans that makes this lodge more our base of operations than his, if you will.  He leaves, we stay.”

“That’s an awful lot of thinking and work for a pretty minor advantage,” Gordon observed.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Wasn’t a compliment,” he told me, jabbing me with his elbow on his way to the table.  I turned and kicked at his rear end with a sock-clad foot.

“You’ll thank me later,” I said.  “Or, or!  You could thank me now.  Because you got what you wanted.”

“Thank you Sy,” he said, in a sing-song voice.

Helen excepted, we gathered at the end of the table near Lillian and Jamie.  I waved a hand a few times to get the attention of the Brigadier’s fire-tending stitched and then asked for tea.

He wasn’t as clever or animated as Wendy was.  When the fire dropped to a certain temperature, he put a log on, and poked it or used the bellows.  When there weren’t any logs, he went out and collected some from the stockpile.  He could make tea and presumably handle a small handful of other errands.  He likely couldn’t dress himself – his outfit was simple and probably wasn’t changed more than once a blue moon.

The world was so backwards in some ways.  We hadn’t progressed a slow and steady path from the normal to the horrific.  We’d jumped headlong into the horrific, with stitched like these preceding ones like Wendy, and an advanced project like Gordon, who was in many ways a stitched who had never died.

“We have a few big questions that are hanging over our heads,” Jamie said.  “The next attack is the big one.  Where, when, how, and which one?”

“Which assassin,” I clarified.

“Yes.  Which brings us to what and how, if the assassin gets past us,” Jamie said.

I always liked seeing Jamie when he got going.  It usually took a while, some prep time with information at his fingertips, but the rarity of these moments made them all the more fun.

“There isn’t much we can do to answer those questions before the attack happens,” Gordon said.

“No,” Jamie said.  “No, there isn’t.”

“But we can think about what we do if and when things get that far,” I said.

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“But we can’t do that until we raise the other questions, which tie in or complicate things,” I said.  Handing the ball back to you, Jamie.

“They have a trump card,” Jamie said.  “They were confident about their ability to take Westmore.  It might have something to do with the plague men.”

“The men with the boils and scars,” I said.

Jamie nodded.  “But we don’t know much about them.”

“They were physically and mentally affected,” I said.  “Off kilter from the rest of the soldiers, isolated, excluded.  When they appeared in groups, they were with stitched or they were with others of their own kind.  Usually.”

The others nodded.  They’d each seen the men around, to varying degrees depending on how much they roamed the city, and what I was saying didn’t seem to conflict with their own observations.

“I noted the presence of about a hundred in total,” Jamie said.

“That many?” I asked, surprised.

“There might be more,” Jamie said.  “There might be less.  I’m wondering if any experienced swelling, which would alter their faces, maybe lead to me counting some of them twice.  It would be easier to say if I got out more, but I wasn’t really wanting to explain why I was always coming and going from Ames’ headquarters.”

“A hundred,” Gordon said.  “We have no idea of what they do or why they’re there.  Were they voluntary or forced?”

“Might explain the mental issues, how some of them were almost catatonic when they weren’t actively doing something.  Alterations made to keep them compliant?” I suggested.

“Creepy,” Lillian said.

“But I’m wondering if it’s something else,” I said.  I thought for a second, trying to find the words.

“What is it?” Gordon prompted me, impatient.

“I can’t put a finger on it.  But they had a kind of respect from others?  Someone walks down the street, other people get out of their way.  But someone commands your attention, like a pretty girl might-”

I gestured in Mary and Lillian’s direction, not ignoring Shipman, but not really indicating her either.  Mary smiled, and Lillian looked shocked and a little confused.  Which was why I’d done it.

“Ahem,” Helen said the word rather than make the sound, sitting at the other end of the table.

“You’re ugly right now, with the marks all over your face.  You don’t get to play that card,” I told her.

“Aw,” Helen said, at the same time Lillian gave me an indignant, “Sy!”

“She doesn’t mind,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” Helen said, blithely.  “Sy’s good in my books.  He gave me one of his cookies.”

“See?”

Lillian glared at me, looking very uncomfortable, yet she couldn’t formulate an argument as to why or to make her point.

“Are you done interrupting me, girls?” I asked, mostly to needle Lillian.

She opened her mouth to protest, but the front door opened.  The Brigadier, with a retainer of stitched guards.

I cleared my throat.  “Just like a pretty girl draws attention, being noticed and then holding some sway by some invisible rules, I feel like maybe the plague men had that sway.  But it was respect.  No hard facts, like I said.  I’m not Jamie.  But that’s my interpretation.”

“Going by what you said before, you think this was voluntary.”

“I think it might have been,” I said.  “Might be a project that was supposed to end up different than it did.  But I think those are men that know how to use guns.  They had bearing.  A part of me wonders if they aren’t veteran soldiers.”

“I put the image in my mind’s eye together with what you’re saying, and I can see how you’d make that connection,” Gordon said.

The stitched boy brought tea over.  He began pouring it into mugs.  I was still standing, so I walked over to Helen and collected her cup, bringing it down to the other end of the table.

The Brigadier joined us, stopping by his desk to collect an empty cup from there for his own tea.  He didn’t place it with the other cups, but held onto it, waiting for us to be served before he was.

“We can’t make assumptions,” I said.  “We can’t assume that one thing is going to work or that another will lead to certain victory.  They have a trump card, and they have the plague man soldiers.  When they attack the side gate, we can’t assume we stopped the assassin from getting in.”

The Brigadier’s deeper voice cut in, quiet and confident.  “The problem with that approach, and I’m speaking from experience here, is that you can’t do that without taxing yourself.  Covering every possibility, all of the angles, every eventuality, it exhausts you, opens you to mistakes.”

“That’s true,” Gordon said.

“To an extent,” I said.  “But there are two things to keep in mind here.”

“I’m very interested in hearing this,” the Brigadier said.

“The first thing is that this is likely to be a short engagement, not wanting to assume, but going with common sense.”

“I don’t disagree,” the Brigadier said.

“The second thing is that we, as a group, are six individuals with experience not just in working together, but in thinking together.”

“There are seven of you,” the older man pointed out.

Gordon, with Shipman right beside him, was giving me a hard look.

“Those two are two peas in a pod,” I said, in a very cavalier way.  “Semantics!  We think well as a unit.  Fourteen eyes and seven brains on the situation”

The man nodded.  “If you prove that, I’ll be glad to rely on you for that.”

“How are the soldiers?” Gordon asked.  “Morale-wise?”

“How is anyone, after a fight like that?” the Brigadier asked.  “Thirty of ours were injured, seven killed.  The injuries can be fixed, the deaths…”

“The dead can be made into stitched,” Lillian said.  “Or were they using those special guns?”

“The exorcists you described,” the Brigadier said.  “Big exit wounds.  Looking at it, I’d guess we’d get six stitched out of them.  Take one man apart for replacement parts.  But we’re not going to do that.”

“It’s a strength of the Academy, being able to recycle its soldiers,” Mary said.

“In terms of the raw numbers it can bring to bear, yes.  But if a man fights and realizes the stitched fighting next to him is a face he recognizes, he starts to have doubts,” the Brigadier said.  “You’ve promised him that if he falls, he’ll end up the same.  That’s a doubt that works its way deep.”

“Fear of that fate could push someone to fight harder,” Mary said.  “Sir.”

The man waved his hand.  “Let’s dispense of those formalities while we’re in private.  I’d rather focus on giving my enemies something to fear.  No need to bring it inside these walls.”

Which is why we’re in this situation in the first place, I thought.

The Brigadier held his tea, poised as if to drink it, but he talked instead.  “The six soldiers we’d gain aren’t worth the hundreds of soldiers we’d lose, from a loyalty perspective.  Not that they’d leave, not like this, but their hearts wouldn’t be in it, they would stop being wholly ours, and they’d end up turning a share of their time, thoughts and energy to self-preservation…”

He punctuated the thought by finally drinking that tea.

I wanted to like him more now that he was debating with us and challenging us, but I could remember the look in his eye from earlier, and the softness of his approach.

I respected jerks more.  I wasn’t sure if this guy would have what it took to cover my back if and when it really counted.

I looked over to what Jamie had in front of him.  It looked handwritten, with black letters.  The Brigadier’s notes?

I reached out and moved the paper to a better angle so I could read it, saucer with tea in my other hand.

“Oh,” Jamie said.  “The notes from previous skirmishes.  Warning shots, sightings, scoutings…”

“It wasn’t all peace before you arrived,” the Brigadier said.

Jamie nodded, “They didn’t want to provoke a fight, but they weren’t hiding either.”

“They have new leadership,” I observed.  “That woman-”

“Cynthia,” Jamie said.  “Not sure if she’ll be deferring to the rebellion’s military leaders when it comes to strategy, or if she’ll be doing it when it comes to the particulars of leadership, or if she’ll be doing neither or both.”

“After we observe their movements, do you think you’d be able to tell who’s behind them?” I asked.

“That’s abstract,” Jamie said.  “I work better with concrete things.  I can try, but I’d rather give you guys the knowledge you need and let you make the calls.”

I nodded.

I made a mental note to ask Jamie.  When things got hectic, he could often get lost in the shuffle, wanting to say something but not getting a chance.

“I’m also trying to keep track of this.  If we can gauge the weapons, units, or devices our opposition is using, we can try to figure out what each of the rogue scientists they brought in has been busy working on,” Jamie said.  “I’ve been trying to draw a connection between one of the scientists and the plague men, and Lillian was helping, extrapolating.  I was thinking of Leopold Pock, but if you’re right about them being veterans, that would eliminate the possibility.”

“Explain?” the Brigadier asked.

“Augmented soldiers we observed in Whitney.  Sy thinks they’re soldiers that voluntarily underwent some augmentation.  A lot of soldiers, choosing an augmentation that makes them hideous, and does something to their minds.  Likely a permanent change, or as permanent as anything we do to our bodies is.  We’re trying to figure them out.  Why they’d do it, who did it, specifically.  Pock is tentatively ruled out.  Doesn’t fit the working theory.”

“No idea about their capabilities?” the Brigadier asked.

“No,” Gordon said.

“A lot of soldiers,” I said.  “A hundred, at least.  What makes that many men want to change themselves that much?  Enough that a small child might cry to look at them.”

“Hmm,” the Brigadier made a sound.

“Expert opinion is welcome,” I said.  “What does every soldier want?”

“To go home,” the Brigadier said.  “Safe and whole.”

“In their eyes, we attacked them at home,” I said.  “They’re no longer whole, either.  In fact, they’re less whole after the procedure.”

The man nodded.

“Next best thing to going home,” I said.

“To not have to be afraid anymore,” the Brigadier said.

He said it so readily, as if he didn’t even have to think about it.  He simply knew.  They were heavy words, and we were quiet as the words sat with us.

“Lillian,” I said.  “Shipman too, I guess-”

Shipman looked irritated at that.  Gordon too.

“-Any ideas on what-”

Gunshots sounded in the distance.  A few shots at once, then a veritable torrent.

From the right direction, no less.

I was the first one to the front door.  I hopped into my rain-boots rather than pull them on, catching the door for balance as my stomach protested where I’d been shot.

Lillian said something to rebuke me, but I was already pushing the door open, hurrying outside with my raincoat in hand but not yet worn.

My stomach continued to throb now and again, and I forced myself to slow down.  The others caught up with me, the Brigadier among them.  Even Helen and Jamie.

It was the gate I’d predicted.  It was human nature to default to the simple, and to take shortcuts.  Sending people further down the network of roads was risky.  It was more opportunities for our side to spot them, or for them to get stranded if things came down to it.

This one was a gimme.

Just as the Brigadier had sought to break our enemies’ will, they were putting pressure on us now.  The attack was meant to keep us on our toes, to wear down on morale, and getting an assassin inside the doors would give them a chance to drive the wedge in.

The Brigadier broke away from our group to talk to some senior officers.  We headed to the stairs that led up the one side of the wall.  I had to hold up my badge to get through the little doorway and gate that blocked off the stairs.

Reaching the top, I could see flashes of red and yellow as guns fired.  The road stretched along a pass, the floor of it loose, but too rocky to be proper mud.  Crushed stone, provided from elsewhere.  Steep rocky walls rose on either side.

The enemy had come up one side of the road, it looked like, taking shelter in the shadows beneath the rock wall on one side of the road.  They’d discovered, too late, that stitched were lying in wait, kneeling in those same shadows.  The stitched had reacted, firing, and a matching group on the other side of the pass did the same.

Someone from the rebellion had managed to start a fire before dying.  A makeshift bomb, perhaps.  Four or five stitched had fallen.  Minor in the grand scheme of it all.

“Thirty or forty,” Jamie said, his voice soft.  “Dead.”

“I don’t know how you can even tell,” I told him.  It was the middle of the night, and the heavy rainclouds weren’t letting any moon show.

The smell of blood, feces, smoke, and gunpowder were thick in the air.  I could imagine the rock walls on either side of the path were a funnel, bringing the smells in, in a very concentrated way.

“I can see them well enough to count them,” Jamie said.  “We gave the instructions that led to the deaths.”

“The decision to-” Gordon started.

I raised a hand, gesturing.  He stopped.

Gordon would have argued, and shoved his way of thinking at Jamie, and Jamie would have agreed.  It probably would have sunken in.  Jamie would have internalized it, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

But I wanted to talk to Jamie about this, not to Gordon.

“We did give the instructions,” I said.  “Me, mostly, but we all played a part, yeah.”

“It feels impersonal,” Jamie said.

“It is.  It was.”

“It feels worse for being impersonal.”

“You’ve killed before,” I pointed out.  “Personal kills, you looked them in the eye.  Even Phlegm.”

“It feels worse for being impersonal,” Jamie said.

“How?” Gordon asked, all at once.  “Why?”

Jamie shrugged.  He didn’t have an answer.

“Whatever the reason,” I said, “It’s allowed to feel however it feels.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Never a problem.”

The silence was broken up by handlers on the wall-top shouting down to the stitched below.  We hadn’t lost any actual lives down there, and stitched were more expendable, tougher.  Easier troops to field.

“Didn’t see anyone climb the wall,” Mary said.  “But if they did it at the start-”

Still fixated on the assassins.  Not a bad thing.

“We’ll assume someone got in and take measures,” I said.

Mary nodded.

“I kind of want to see the vat-grown humans that Polk made,” Helen said.  “I wonder if they can have babies?  Jamie, do you know?  Lillian?”

Lillian made a squeaking sound as her name was mentioned.

“Do you?” Helen pressed.

“Why do you want to know?” Jamie asked, very cautiously, then before Helen could answer, he quickly added, “And do I want to know why you want to know?”

“I’m just curious,” Helen said.

“Do you want babies?” Jamie asked.

“No.  Why?  What does that have to do with anything?” Helen asked.

Which all added up to the Lambs being very confused.

I wondered if Ibott had instructed Helen to practice psychological warfare.  Her talk at the teahouse, and now this?  If he’d given the order, she’d picked up on it remarkably fast.

The stitched turned on little lamps they had with them, and more were tossed down.  Each lamp had mirrored metal around the majority of it, so a beam would be cast out in a cone.  The light that was cast was a yellow-orange, and danced as the wind blew.

As the lamps lit up and the stitched spread out, we were given a view of the battlefield in all its garishness.  The road was too rocky with too many gaps, and the rain had pounded down the blood that hadn’t slipped into the gaps.  The bodies were just lying there, and without the right amounts of blood, they looked artificial, even posed.  A little girl’s dolls, dropped and left in whatever position they fell.

I studied the cliff face, looking to see if maybe one of the assassins was utilizing it to climb.  Nothing.

How were you planning to get in?  I wondered.

Jamie reached out, grabbing my upper arm.

He pointed.

There.  At the rear of the group.  A figure with features spaced too far apart, strange earlobes, and a girthy belly.

Phlegm lived?

No.  I didn’t buy it.  The reactions of the woman with the teeth…

“Guess we won’t find out,” Gordon said.

The rain continued to pour down.  I continued to try and think of all of the different vectors for attack.

I turned and headed down the stairs, approaching the Brigadier.

“You were right,” he said.

Oh.  That.

Last thing on my mind.

“One assassin fell, it looks like.  But the man is supposed to be dead.”

“The dead can come back,” the man said.  Rain was streaming off his helmet, and collecting in his wooly chin-strap of a beard.

“Guess so,” I said.

“Just sent my men out to get reports from each of the other gates.  If this was a distraction, something might have happened elsewhere.”

I nodded.  We did have security measures at the other gates.  The Academy forces of Westmore weren’t going to be sleeping tonight.

“We’ll see if your next prediction is right,” he said.

Someone gave a shout, and the gate opened.  The other Lambs were gathered together in clusters, or meandering down the stairs.  Jamie and Helen were a little slower to move.

The stitched that had been stationed outside filed in, carrying the dead.

“We’ll have some replacement stitched that won’t be hurting morale any,” the Brigadier said.  “Might even come out ahead.”

“Might even,” I said.  “Can I have a bayonet?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve been right twice.  I get to ask for more favors, don’t I?  Things that might be a little questionable or inconvenient?”

“I suppose,” the Brigadier said.  He gestured for a soldier to come closer, then took the man’s weapon.

“Hold on,” I said.  “Don’t give it to me yet.”

It took another minute before the stitched had made it inside the walls.  The gate creaked as it swung closed.  Bars were lowered into place.

I reached out, and the bayonet slapped into my hand.

As I approached the line of stitched and bodies, Mary fell into step beside me.  I extended the bayonet to her, and she tossed it into the air in front of me.

Gordon, appearing on my other side, caught it.  By the time I looked back at Mary, she had knives in her hands.

“The bodies,” I said, clearly, my gaze on the corpses that were being dragged.  I raised my hands to my hood, pushing it back and running my fingers through my hair.  My tone was weary as I said, “Check the dead bodies.”

“Mm,” Gordon said.

Gordon lowered the bayonet blade, aiming for the first corpse.

At the last second, before stabbing, he raised it, stabbing the stitched.

Mary moved fluidly, throwing her knives, hitting the second and third stitched in the line.

They reacted as anyone might.  Alarmed, hurt, they reached for their weapons.

“Stand down!” the Brigadier hollered.  “That’s an order!”

The specialists on the wall and beside the line repeated the order, though they looked confused.

Gordon was already moving, aiming for the fourth stitched in the line.  Mary threw knives at the fifth and sixth.

The sixth ‘stitched’ moved fluidly, knives in its own hands, as it struck the throwing knife out of the air.

Faster and more graceful than any stitched was.

Mary threw more knives, sprinting forward.  The stitched hit them out of the air once more.  It approached, picking up speed as it made a beeline for Gordon.  It didn’t seem to care that he was armed, or that he was raising the gun to aim.

It wasn’t Gordon that shot.  Others on the sideline opened fire.  As much as the man could knock a thrown knife out of the air, he couldn’t do much against bullets.  He jerked, stumbled, and tripped over a corpse that lay on the ground behind him.

The rain continued to pour, the sound of the gunshots ringing in my ears.

No assumptions, I thought.

Now the dance really began.  With this ploy failing, our enemy would be forced to get creative.  I’d get to see what kind of tacticians we were up against, and we’d have to match them in kind.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 5.11 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The two bodies were each held by four of the Academy’s soldiers.  With a shout and a very practiced motion, the bodies were heaved up and onto freshly wiped granite slabs.  One was Phlegm.  The other was dressed as a stitched, complete with our uniform.

The doctors and scholars of Westmore were already collecting around, many wearing their coats and aprons, masks covering the lower halves of their face, goggles over their eyes.  Black, elbow-length gloves were pulled over freshly washed hands.  The room was open-air, a shelter for wagons, very possibly a drier point for coal to be offloaded, but canvas cloths had been tied down and sealed it off, with sandbags up to the four foot mark, providing some insulation and walls.  The floor was packed soil, and was caked with old blood, shit, and other detritus.  Kits off to the side had all of the material needed for stitched, while toolbox-like constructions were in one corner, providing other tools for more conventional medical care.

“Out of the way,” a man told me, as he wheeled a cart over to the foot of the table.  He had more than enough room.  He was just bullying me, indicating that I was not supposed to be here, in a way that meant he didn’t have to say it outright.

I hopped up onto a stack of sandbags in the corner.  I offered Mary a hand in climbing up next to me.  Totally unnecessary, but I had to be gentlemanly.  Gordon, Lillian, and Shipman stood at the other side of the enclosure, pulling back into the corner a bit, where they were clear of the normal footpaths.

“No children in the room,” one of the scholars said, getting in Mary’s way.  Black coat, black apron, black gloves, a pin at his collar marking his rank, Field Surgeon.  He was surrounded by grays and whites, some with pins, some without.

“Ahem,” Lillian said.  She took a quarter-second too long to say something, reaching for the badge in her pocket.

“Out!” the man said, raising his voice, more at the fact that I hadn’t budged.  Gordon and Mary were taking my cue.  I pointed at Lillian.

Lillian spoke up, “I’d like to-”

“John, Troy, see that the children go,” the Surgeon said, turning his back.  It was what I would have done.  Deflecting and dismissing her, forcing her to appeal to more people, people who were in service to authority, a hard chain to break.

Lillian looked at me for help.  I stayed quiet, watching.

Sure enough, two of the doctors who hadn’t yet washed up approached, ready to usher us out.

“Sir,” Shipman said, her voice stronger than Lillian’s had been.  She grabbed Lillian’s wrist, pulling Lillian’s hand from the pocket.  Lillian was holding the badge.  “We’d like to stay.  Pursuant to the Brigadier’s orders.”

The surgeon turned to look back at the badge.  He made a face, then raised his chin.  “Sir?”

We turned, and we could see that the Brigadier was standing in the street with a few other men.

“They can watch.  Have them bring me the write-up when you’re done,” Brigadier Tylor said.  Then he was gone, looking after other business.

The surgeon’s face was hidden by the mask and goggles, but I entertained myself by imagining that it looked like he was sucking on a lemon while he had his balls in a vise.

Probably wasn’t the case, but it was funny to imagine.

Mary and Shipman hurried to get to a vantage point where they wouldn’t be in the way.  A tough job, considering how packed the space already was.

“Troy, would you take the notes?” the surgeon asked.  Troy, still wearing the apron and coat, but not scrubbed in, picked up a pen and paper.  John hurried to get to the sink and wash up.  I presumed it was a constant competition to get recognition from the surgeon.

Another doctor took scissors to the clothing of the men, cutting away what they couldn’t open on their own.  The men were soon left naked on the table.

Phlegm had a broad stomach, the sort where a strong man also ate too much.  The muscle was there, underlying it, but it was insulated enough that the lines werent’ readily apparent.  Thick neck, strangely spaced facial features, and odd earlobes, with messy hair.  He was covered in deep, recognizable scars.

“Subject appears to be stitched, standard ‘Y’ cut.  The work looks as if it was done only hours ago.  Trepanning method of lobotomy, holes still present, with skin flaps covering.  This was a fast job.”

“We killed him earlier today,” I commented.  “They needed a decoy.”

“If I want commentary, I will ask for it,” the surgeon said.

I raised my hands in the gesture for surrender.

“The word ‘Phlegmatic’ is tattooed along the first subject’s collarbone,” the surgeon said, prodding the flesh.  “Bone structure stands out as differing from the norm.  Fused collarbone, ribcage has flat affect across the front and back, with broader sternum and fused spaces between ribs.  Vat-grown.  Older scars suggest the changes are the result of grafts and prior work.  Layered, different types of scars.  The previous work was done over a long period of time.”

“John, White, see to the staples.”

Two others at the slab got pincer tools and began removing the staples.

The surgeon bent down, examining Phlegm’s face.  “Changes are of a type expected from nineteen-ought attempts to modify the living code, rewriting the fabric of a grown individual.  The grafts, to speculate, were part of efforts to repair the damage done with the system-wide changes.  Subject had limited vision, with occlusion of the ocular cavity, sinus cavities, mouth -enlarged tongue- and-”

He pried Phlegm’s mouth open.

“-throat.”

“Intentional,” Lillian said.

“Beg pardon?” the surgeon asked.

“I’d bet you dollars to pennies it’s intentional, and it can be controlled.  He used weaponized gases, I think, before he died.  The blockages would have been a casualty of the changes to his facial structure, and they were modified to serve a purpose.”

“If true, that will be verified at a later point,” the surgeon said.  “No more commentary from the gallery, please.”

“I’ve seen work by students who were trained by Phlegmatic’s creator, very similar.  Efficient lungs, improved circulatory system, every orifice can be closed,” Lillian said.  “He’d be made to hold his breath underwater for twenty minutes.  Or in a cloud of noxious gas for twenty minutes.”

Was she like this around her classmates?  I wondered how many of them wanted to throttle her.

“Thank you for that observation,” the surgeon said.  “I’m sure we’ll see for ourselves when the time comes.”

“You should pay attention to the ears and eyes,” Lillian said.  “Most of the work would have been there.  The eyes would need protection, which means there’s some interesting work-”

The surgeon cleared his throat.

“There’s some interesting work done there, with eyes made immune to most airborne issues, or the eyes were sealed and he used another sense.  Probably the ears.”

I was willing to bet that if the Brigadier hadn’t given the okay, the Surgeon would have grabbed Lillian and literally thrown her out of the enclosure himself, even knowing he’d have to scrub down all over again.

“What an insightful set of observations,” the surgeon said, sarcastically.  “Do you have anything more to say, or may I continue with the investigation?”

“Oh, I’m done for now,” Lillian said, smiling, as if she had no idea he was upset.  “I’ll say more as things come up.”

“I’ll thank you not to,” the surgeon said, somewhat under his breath.  “Before we were interrupted, I was moving on to the ears.”

Which was probably true, I imagined.  It had to rankle.  I noted that Shipman was murmuring something to Lillian, who was smiling.

“Ear canal and normal ear structures are present, with little modification.  The area surrounding, however, suggests a latticework of tympanic membranes, of varying size,” the surgeon said.  “Barring another situation of heavy occlusion, he would have possessed exceptional hearing ability, both in terms of sensitivity and range.  Moving on…”

The surgeon moved away from the head.  On to the torso.

“The body is probably booby-trapped,” I commented, idly.

The surgeon reacted like he was going to lash out and say or do something, but then the words sank in.  He remained frozen where he was, scalpel hovering over Phlegm’s chest.

I shrugged, very casually explaining, “He was already dead.  They made him into a stitched to bait us into thinking we’d caught one of their assassins.  He’s resistant to many gases and poisons.”

“Ooh!  Of course!” Lillian said.  “He’d have bladders in his body, for holding reserve, or for buoyancy control, if he’s aquatic at all.  Which is probably.  Any one of the bladders could be pumped full and sealed.  Would be.”

The surgeon stared down at the body, scalpel still in hand.

“Just so you know,” Lillian said, smiling wider than before.  She met my eyes.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I told the surgeon and Lillian both.

Lillian, I was realized, was having a great deal of fun.

She and I didn’t get to play off each other like this, ever.  The earlier attitude had been intentional, needling the man.

Not that she was necessarily wrong about the booby trap.

“Perhaps,” the surgeon said, very carefully, “You children would want to leave, to be safe?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“There’s nothing to worry about, so long as you’re careful,” Lillian said.

Shipman cleared her throat.  “I think I’ll step out.”

Gordon reached out for her hand.  I wasn’t sure if it was to hold her back or to offer reassurance of some sort, but the gesture was ignored.  Shipman stalked out, flipping her hood up as she exited into the downpour.

He didn’t look at any of us as his hand fell back into his lap.

The surgeon went back to work.  The staples were removed, and the man took a scalpel to the existing incisions, which had been glued shut.  A very careful cut, with several slices, each one cutting only a fraction deeper.  The skin parted, and a rank odor filled the enclosure.

People were alarmed, stepping back, hands to their masks.

But it was only the stench of death.  This would be why the enclosure wasn’t properly indoors.  It was a more ventilated space.

“Low cook temperature for a stitched,” the surgeon observed.  “Rot setting in already.  The wires are visible, recently implanted, with no overgrowth.  A crude job.”

He moved a flap of skin.  In the lower stomach, an oblong shape was nestled in just beneath the skin, anchored to fat and stomach wall.  Stretched thin enough to be translucent, it had veins running along the surface.  It had been inflated.

I saw the scalpel tremble a little as the surgeon pulled it away.

“Two air-bladders have been discovered.  One penetrated by a bullet and explosively emptied when the stitched was incapacitated.  The other remains active.  The examination will be terminated here, due to observable risks should rot or infestation penetrate this or any other bladders inflated with airborne poisons.  ”

He stepped away, hands raised, scalpel in one, and gave the order, “Close him up.  Seal him, wrap and bag him, dispose of him.  Treat the body with care.”

The people he’d given the instructions to didn’t look very happy to be assigned the task.  Not just because of the traps, but it smelled worse with every passing second.

The surgeon went, removed his gloves, washed his hands, donned another pair of gloves, and then turned to the next body.

“Anything I should know before examining him?” the man asked.

“He was quick,” I said.  “But he wouldn’t be booby trapped.  Probably.”

The surgeon began cutting away the mask of flesh.  “Fresh.  From one of ours, if I had to guess.”

“Removed on the battlefield,” I chimed in, mostly to nettle him.  “Impressive improvisational skills.”

“Ahem.  Troy?  The notes.  This is our second patient.  Choleric, according to the label at his collarbone.  The patients are named after the four humors, presumably.  There are subtler signs of the same rewriting of the individual’s pattern, and similar means of grafting, likely from the same time period, suggesting they were worked on in concert.  Academy level work, judging by quality.  The goal varies, but the methodology matches our prior patient, Phlegmatic.  Rictus smile-”

“Because of changes to musculature and nervous system,” Lillian jumped in.  “No occlusion this time, of course.  I think if you look at the eyes, you’ll find…”

The surgeon’s grip on the scalpel tightened.

Gunshots rang out in the distance as we entered the Brigadier’s lodge.  The man was there, talking to some of his officers.  Jamie, Helen, and Shipman were at the table, Helen bundled up, Jamie with a towel around his shoulders.

Gordon handed the Brigadier the papers on Phlegmatic and Choleric.  I hung back to see the Brigadier’s reaction and hear his response, while Mary and Lillian headed to rejoin the others.  Lillian was smiling.

Something told me that if I hadn’t been there for the autopsy and analysis, Lillian wouldn’t have been a troublemaker.  I’d rubbed off on her a little, and the surgeon had suffered for it.

“Gunshots,” Gordon observed.

“Another attack from the front,” the Brigadier said.  “We’re aware of the possibility that it’s a distraction.  Guards are stationed elsewhere.  We have eyes on all mineshafts and tunnels.”

“It’s too quiet,” I observed.

The Brigadier gave me a curious look.

“It’s almost timid, isn’t it?  No explosions, only bullets.  Getting our attention, but nothing more.”

“And?”

“It feels like a distraction, rather than a proper attack.  A handshake more than a ploy.”

“The enemy’s shaking our hand?  Explain.”

I shook my head.  “We expected an attack to cover another attempt at getting an assassin inside our walls.  They’ve answered that expectation.  They might as well have a flag unfurled saying ‘distraction’, but that’s a communication of it’s own.  That they know what we’re thinking.  And because they know, they can meet us halfway.”

“They’re saying hi,” Gordon said.  “To us more than to the Brigadier.  They’ve recognized that the style of leadership changed.  The ambush, the assassin they tried to get inside didn’t make it and hasn’t given the signal they expected.  The way the posts have a different distribution of guards.  Something tipped them off.”

I nodded.

“You’re acting like this is a game,” the Brigadier said.

“They have only a peripheral idea of who they’re dealing with.  Same goes for us,” I said.  “They’re feeling things out.”

The Brigadier looked at the commanders who he’d been talking to, and indicated for them to leave.  He leaned against the front of his desk, arms and ankles folded.

“Should we expect this to continue?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “They’re breaking from pattern, just as we are.  It’s hard to say.  Can we share this conversation with the others?”

The Brigadier nodded.  While Gordon and I rejoined the others, the man poured himself another drink.

“Thought exercise,” Gordon said, as we took our seats at the table.  “If you were on Whitney’s side, what would you do?”

“I’m not a fighter,” Lillian said.

“Give it a shot,” I prodded her.

I could see her squirm a little, uncomfortable.  I’d been nice to her recently, we’d had fun with the surgeon, and she was probably lonely after all of her weeks in the school, separated from most of the rest of us.

Now I was asking her to do something outside of her comfort zone.

“Jamie and I were talking earlier tonight,” she said.  “Looking at the resources they have, how they might use them.  Peralta specializes in pain.  If the winds blew differently, or if they found a way to get further up into the hills, a vaporized spray to deploy a toxin could incapacitate us.”

“We have masks,” the Brigadier said.  He’d joined us.  Jamie had the papers Gordon had given the Brigadier.  “Every post, all of the men have their own individual masks.”

“There are a lot of vectors,” Shipman said.  “If it could be absorbed through the skin…”

“Or if it obscured sight,” Gordon added, “Or if having to wear the masks played a part in things?  Limited vision, mist or smoke, assassins can creep in.  It could be the trump card we were worried about.”

“Could be,” I said.  “But I feel as if they’re a little more cohesive than that.  This isn’t slapdash.  They brought in people and those people are meeting and talking.  They’re discussing, making a strategy, and that woman Cynthia is at the top, somehow.  I think that their movements will be more in step.  Not sending in an assassin without a mask on a city they intend to gas.”

“The assassin can steal a mask,” Gordon said.

I made a gesture, indicating my lack of confidence, then remembered the Brigadier wouldn’t be familiar with it.  Shipman either, for that matter.  “Don’t think so.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “Jamie?  What do you think is coming?  What would you do?”

“I’d continue to feel out the enemy.  Go in with as much information as possible.”

“Then?” I jumped in.

“Then attack.  Keep the trump card in reserve.  You said, uh, Sy said, that their biggest strength right now is how angry the people are.  The soldiers are ready to kill because they don’t have any other choice.  But that fighting spirit is easily broken.  They throw themselves at these walls and gates enough times without a success, they’ll lose that fervor.”

“At which point they pull out the trump card,” I said.

Jamie’s voice was soft, “reignite the anger and the passion.”

“It would have to be something offensive,” Mary said.

Jamie nodded.

“Mary, what would you do?”

Assassins, I thought.

“Use the assassins,” she said.  “They just lost their second.”

“You think they’ll throw good money after bad?” I asked.

“They’re people.  They have feelings, and they just lost two of their own.  Use the mineshafts, use the plague men, two assassins, and fight past any guards.  Chaos in our camp, coinciding with another hard attack.  Gun for our leadership, behead us.”

Mary paused, looking at the Brigadier.  “Sorry, sir.”

The man was silent.

“Helen?” Gordon asked.

Helen perked up a little.  “What Mary said.  But no gunning.  Poison.  Bombs.  Traps.  Get to the food supply, the meat lockers we use to feed the warbeasts and other experiments.”

“I kind of like that more, now that I hear it,” Mary said.  “The attack from the inside sounds romantic in my head, but in execution…”

“I agree,” the Brigadier said.  “I’m more concerned about subtler attacks than a direct attack aimed at me and my immediate subordinates.  We have people stationed as guards.  We can maintain that guard, but I have to echo what I said to Sylvester earlier.   People can’t maintain that level of focus for too long a time.  The mind and the heart won’t have it.  Mistakes will be made, people will slack, convince themselves they can.”

“The condition of being human,” Gordon said.

“One the enemy has to worry about,” I said.  “It’s really the same problem they have with keeping the fires stoked, keeping the people hurt and mad.  Which is really very easy, considering the spider thing.  And the sterilization.  And the leash.  But it is a weak point for them.”

“What are you thinking, Sy?” Gordon asked.  “You’re the best to ask, when it comes to this sort of thing, I was saving you for last.”

“Ah,” I said.  “What Jamie said.  We can expect another hour or two of harassment.  Gunshots, maybe an explosion or two.  But all this while, they’re going to be telling people, wait.  Wait.  Wait.  Get some rest.  Be prepared.  Because the real attack happens later.”

Gordon nodded.  “The first attack was a foray.  They forced our hand.  But they didn’t commit resources or show their own hand as they did it.  A big stitched here, Sy’s rifleman with the eyes, too, but none of the weapons the scientists might have been working on.  The second attack, with Choleric and stitched-Phlegm, that was only a small squad.  This, right here, it’s a tease, a handshake, according to Sy.”

“And while they’re holding our hand, and our guard is down, they use their other hand and slap us full across the face,” I said.  “The next attack is going to be the decider.  We’re gong to find out what the plague men are, and what the scientists have been working on.”

“We don’t seem to have a consensus,” Gordon said.  “But an indirect attack seems-“

“They’re going to attack head-on,” I said.  “Full-force.”

The Brigadier paced over to the fire, holding his drink.  We watched in silence as he paced for a moment.

He looked like he’d aged years over the course of the evening.

I wondered how old he really was.  It was a hard question to answer sometimes.  There were sixty year old women who maintained the appearance of someone a third their age.  Brigadier Tylor was the opposite, in a way.  Fitting, for someone who existed on the periphery.

He drew in a deep breath.  He already had our full attention.  “Sylvester.”

“Sir.”

“Your fellows have been talking about all the possible vectors of attack.  Including attacks from the flank, using special weapons, and attacks from within.  There’s nothing we can do to block up mine shafts.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You’re anticipating a frontal attack.  Why?”

“Because they have no idea why the prior attack failed.  We didn’t leave survivors to go back and report.  As far as they know, the side roads are a deathtrap.  They default to what they know and understand, and what they know is that the way is clear to the front.”

“This current attack is a handshake, according to you.  They know or assume our current organization was able to figure out their move with Phlegmatic and Choleric.  What guarantee is there that they won’t change their plan here, in anticipation of a similar prediction?”

“Ah,” I said.  “That’s a fun question.”

The Brigadier wasn’t smiling.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “There’s no guarantee.  I don’t know her well enough to predict her.  But when that woman Cynthia came after Jamie, Helen, and I, and Choleric signaled for her to back off, she was champing at the bit, and only barely restrained herself from coming after us.  That’s the person in my mind when I picture them coming for us.  A snarling dog in a pretty evening dress with pretty hair.  Someone who knows types like Choleric and Phlegm, who arrives in town with the likes of Leopold Pock and Peralta.”

“She knows the dark underground of the Academies,” Gordon said.  “The disenfranchised, the monsters who’ve lurked under the radar and avoided the likes of Dog and Catcher.”

I nodded.

“You believe this firmly enough that you’d put the bulk of our defenses at the front doors?” the Brigadier asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “Not soon.  Keep guards where they are.  But I’d say that in about an hour, you’d want to start moving them to the front gate.  Skeleton guards on other defenses.”

The man turned back to the fire, then finished off his glass, which had only been one-quarter full to begin with.  He placed the glass on the top of the hutch that held spare firewood.

“I’ll trust your read on her, but I’ll manage the distribution and logistics myself,” he said.

“Probably for the best, sir,” I said.

Didn’t want to lose him now.  Hell, he was probably right.  He did know better than I did.

“I’ve already told the others.  After they let up this time, we press the attack,” he said.

An attack against an unknown enemy.

“We follow them home, right on their heels.  We can’t keep playing this game.  We don’t have the resources for it, and so long as they have the scientists and doctors, they’ll always have more tricks up their sleeve.  We need to squash this.”

There was silence in response to that, but we nodded as he looked back at us.  The man mas serious.  There was a bit of fire on our side, now.

I just wished it was better directed.

We’d armed him with all the knowledge and perspective we could.

I was already planning and plotting, not just against our enemy, but trying to work with the man.  I doubted he’d budge, and we had to follow him, or find a reason to make him change course.

“Thank you, for your counsel on the defense,” he said.  “Jamie, I understand you have maps?  Of Whitney, and the enemy positions therein?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll have a look at them, if you please.”

We need information we don’t have, I thought.  On the plague men, on the trump cards.

We need to survive this incoming attack.  We need to guarantee that our attack on them isn’t fruitless.

What are you thinking, you snarling dog of a woman?  Do you see us coming?

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 5.12 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

As organized as Westmore had been at the start of the evening, things were devolving.  The warbeasts were out of their cages, and every time they set foot on an area that wasn’t roadway, they left the ground torn up.  Those areas soon became cesspits of mud.  Stitched were gathered, but there was less rhyme and reason than before.  Rank and file in hooded jackets, steaming in the rain, guns in hand.  Weapons were being rolled into place, and officers were having to work harder to enforce discipline.

It was too late in the evening.  People wanted sleep, and in the absence of sleep they were smoking or sitting down at their posts – more in the posts off on the side gates and the little buildings that were housing supplies than at the gate and along the streets.

Gordon, Mary and I chose our route to be unpredictable, weaving and winding, aiming to get a view of the areas where assassins might lurk.  Now and then, Gordon would walk off a short distance and kick at a fallen set of planks or a bit of cloth, to identify anything hiding beneath.  The three of us had guns in holsters, our coats on, not so dissimilar from the stitched in appearance, though we were almost half the size.  I was less than half the size, myself.

We passed a set of doors, and Mary did the bending-down, touching the small rigging of sticks and wire under the first door.  A motion of her hand indicated that it was fine.  We passed to the second door.  No issue.

At the third, she gave the flat-handed gesture for negation.

I gripped the handle of my gun.

Gordon snapped his fingers to get Mary’s attention, then gestured at the side of the building.  She and I trained our guns on the door while Gordon walked around to the side, found a way to half-climb up the building, and peered into the little window.

As he dropped to the ground, with only the smallest splash, he drew his own gun, hurrying to join us.

Meaning there was something to be concerned about.

I stepped to the side of the door, back to the wall, hand on the knob, other hand holding my revolver.  My eyes scanned the short street we were on, looking for trouble.  Gordon and Mary were poised.

I turned the knob.  They rushed the room, while I covered their rear.

Tense seconds passed, with no gunfire.

“Sy,” Gordon murmured.

I entered the building.

A man was slumped on the floor.  He was snoring softly.  ‘Man’ might have been too generous.  Older than fifteen, younger than twenty, with only a ghost of a beard and mustache.

Mary bent down and picked up the little twist of wire and branch.  ‘L’ shaped, not much longer than any of my fingers, it was small enough to go unnoticed, but if a door was opened, the little twist of wire would get moved across the floor.  If we couldn’t find it, someone had been inside since the last time we passed through.

“Rest well, soldier,” Gordon murmured.

Mary sniffed.

We shut the door gently behind us.  Mary bent down to put the twist of wire back into place.

“What was that noise you made?” I asked, my voice soft enough it was almost drowned out by the march of boots on the road a street over.  Forty or fifty people, probably stitched from the noise they were making.

“Noise?” Mary asked.

“After Gordon’s ‘rest well’?”

“Oh.  Doesn’t matter.  I kind of wanted to kick him in the ass and yell at him,” Mary said.  “That kind of behavior makes me antsy.  Knackering off when there’s a battle to be fought.”

“We don’t know his story,” Gordon said.  “What might be driving him, what happened earlier in his day.”

“He’s sleeping while there’s a battle to be fought,” Mary said, again.  “Everyone is tired and anxious.  Why does he get to sleep?”

“He found a way,” Gordon said.  “If he gets caught, he faces the consequences.  If he doesn’t, he gets to sleep.”

“Rules are in place for a reason,” Mary said.

This time I snorted a little.

Gordon bent down to check the next door.  “Talk to Sy about that one.  He could talk your ear off.”

“Hey.”

“But seriously,” Gordon said. “I agree with him.  Sometimes the only good a rule does is weed out the people who can’t figure out a way around it.”

“I like how I’m being dragged into this conversation, and I’ve barely said anything,” I said.

“That person’s presence in the next fight might be the factor that makes or breaks our victory,” Mary said.

Gordon shrugged.  “His being well rested might make or break it, too.  Or it might give him a chance to stand out.  Be a little bit sharper.  I’d rather have clever people who know how to break the rules in charge, over people who’ve only ever done as they were told.”

“I wouldn’t,” Mary said.  “Because those clever people would be in charge of people trying to take shortcuts and skip out on work.”

“And that’s why we love you, Mary,” I said.

“That’s deflecting,” she said.  “You’re trying to distract me by throwing the word ‘love’ out there.”

“Sure, but I’m not deflecting so much as I’m trying to take the reins of the conversation and get it away from a debate that’s never going to end.  Gordon’s on one side, he prefers the fastest, most expedient  method of getting results, and we’ve got you on the other, striving toward perfection and order.”

“You could be the tiebreaker,” Gordon said.  “Settle it.”

“You’re an ass,” I said.

“Why?” he asked, and he actually managed to almost sound innocent.

“Break the tie,” Mary said, before I could voice a response.  She wasn’t about to let it go, now.

That was why Gordon was an ass.  Mary had a way of obsessing or fixating, and it got worse when she was tired.  Something about the way she’d been raised, the very minor changes Percy had made to her brain as she developed, it made it so she could and would keep practicing or training or studying when someone else would be too exhausted to keep going.  It was possible for her to push her own limits to the point where she damaged her own body.  It was even likely, if the people around her weren’t careful to keep an eye on her or set strict rules.

I stepped ahead a bit to bend down, my stomach still sore, using the excuse of checking the wire under the door to try and delay having to give an answer.

“Sy,” she said.

I could imagine Gordon’s smile, in the shadows of his hood.

“You win,” I said.

“Too easy,” she said.  “I don’t believe you.”

“Fine.  Gordon’s right.  Better to let the guy keep sleeping.”

Gordon snorted.

“Give me a real answer,” Mary said.

The rumble of gunfire in the distance saved me.  Our heads turned, and then we were off, running, boots splashing in muddy water.

The gunfire was different from before.  The last attack had been the ‘handshake’.  Feeling us out.  Tentative, bullets spitting and spraying here and there, an already-injured beast unleashed to see how fast it died, and to show them that we were confident enough to sacrifice it.

This was a swelling.  Answering one exchange with something bigger and louder.

Off the side street, onto the main.  A long-haired warbeast with horns bigger than I was saw our movement out of the corner of its eye and turned its head in our direction, snapping.  Gordon stumbled, with the speed and amount he had to duck the swinging horn.  Mary ducked a little.  I was happy to let the horn pass over my head.

The specialist in charge of the thing rebuked it, provoking a drawn out and guttural moan from the thing, but it was well behind us by then.

We reached the wall.  I held up my badge without breaking stride.

Within one second of my stepping on the stairs to go up to the higher portion of the wall, an explosion rocked the area, and I ended up slamming my shin against the third stair.

Gordon grabbed me and unceremoniously hauled me to my feet, holding me by the back of my pants until I had my feet under me and was keeping up.

The area was lighting up.  Bioelectric lamps were on, shedding light on the battlefield, but liquids were leaking out as stray bullets caught them, and they were of the sort that flickered a lot, even left alone.  It was unreliable lighting.

The enemy was here.  It looked like a lot of them.  Maybe every able bodied person in Whitney and many who weren’t able bodied, all camped out on the road, far enough back that our bullets wouldn’t reach them, and vice versa.

I’d been right.  This was the full-frontal attack.

Problem was, this was a situation the Lambs weren’t suited for.

If we were still in the enemy camp, it would be a different story.  We’d handled the strategy, informed the commander.  Our only hope was to gather information or hope they made a mistake we could exploit.

I didn’t even try to talk, with the noise around us.  One of the warbeasts was getting agitated by the sound of the battle it wasn’t being allowed to join, and I wondered if it hadn’t been injected with stimulants; perhaps a chemical to help an already pain-tolerant, bullet-resistant creature of war cover the distance between us and them.

I gestured instead.  Open hand to fist.  Fist tapped to chest.  Two finger flick gesture toward the other side of the wall.

Want, claim, take, for the first gesture.  Then me.  Then over there, moderate distance.

I want to get over there.

Gordon gave me a cool look, ducking his head below the rise of the short wall between us and them, but he didn’t gesture in response.

I knew it was dangerous and suicidal.  But our only ability to truly control this situation depended on information.  The Brigadier seemed set on attacking the enemy, and if we decided we needed to change that course, then we needed new details to bring to him.  If we decided the attack was the right plan, then that information could only help.

If there was a chance we could figure out what they had up their sleeves in time to prepare our side, that could be the most important thing.

It all hinged on our ability to actually obtain that information.  Simple observation wouldn’t do.  The explosions and the vibration of one wall-mounted gun at the far end of the wall were making it hard to focus.

As Gordon and Mary had been tense and poised to attack as I’d prepared to open the door, I felt a sense of readiness now.  One opportunity, one event, one clue.

A different sort of attack, this.  On our end, at least.

They had stitched.  So did we.  Eight out of ten people at the top of the wall were stitched.  Two specialists, a commanding officer, Mary and I were the only ones who weren’t.  Gordon was a grey area.  Forty or so stitched were shoulder to shoulder along the top of the broad stone gate.

Something roared, from their side.

That was a surprise.

A warbeast.  I chanced a peek, and I saw it charging up the road.  Not Academy material.  Weaker and less refined than any of ours: slower, smaller, and uglier.  Hornless, it more closely resembled a cross between a rhino and a naked mole rat.

Still, it had all of the right characteristics.  Thick hide sufficient to stop most bullets, tons of raw muscle, hostility.

I realized I was holding my breath, seeing its approach.  I could hear the specialists on the wall calling out orders to the stitched in their charge.

Bullets fired, targeting the thing.  I couldn’t see in the gloom, not with all of the rain, but I saw its head jerk to one side as a black smudge opened around one eye.  Blood.  Blind in one eye?

It veered to one side as its head jerked – it had a habit of running where it was facing, and then it self-corrected, not slowing down.

“Hold!” one of the specialists screamed.  “Hold!”

The enemy wasn’t following up on the warbeast’s attack.  Had they attacked with all of their massed forces and the beast, perhaps using a few other tricks, they would have forced us to either mow them down or kill the beast, either option giving them a shot at breaching the wall.

My mind turned over the options.  Was it a leadership gambit?  A promise made by Cynthia, to energize the forces, that the lives of the people of Whitney wouldn’t be thrown away?

Did she think she could win without sacrificing soldiers?

Or was there another explanation?

“Hold!” the specialist called out.

A bullet caught him.

The man with the eyes, I realized, before ducking down.

Bullets weren’t clean.  They weren’t tidy.  The shot had struck him in the upper chest.  Too high for the heart or lungs, I thought, but he dropped, letting his gun fall, hands to the wound as blood poured out.

He was trying to speak, calling out.

When he failed to get the words out, he raised his hand, pausing, making awful choking sounds, aiming to be heard by the other specialist on the wall-

Another bullet struck the upraised hand.  Two fingers were ruined, left hanging by trace amounts of skin and muscle, the shocking white of bone exposed.

Mary raised her head.  I grabbed her with both hands to try to haul her down, but she raised herself up with more confidence, rather than less.

“He’s on the cliff!” she called out, raising her voice.  “He just changed locations!”

I raised my own head up to look, trying to see the cliff.

The specialist dog with the ruined hand let it drop.  The other specialist was too busy giving orders to reload to pay him full attention.

Not enough human brains on this wall.

“Now!” Gordon hollered.  He’d been watching the scene unfold, had a sense of the timing.

Stitched lobbed small objects over the wall.  Grenades or bombs.

The warbeast was closing on the wall.  It got within fifty feet, then forty, then thirty-

The grenades and other devices went off.  Detonations kicked up mud and moisture, and the other devices erupted in collections of flame that danced over the water’s surface instead of being extinguished by it.

The thing’s course was altered.  As before, it turned its head to one side, perhaps trying to protect the one remaining eye, and it lost virtually all of its momentum.  It walked through fire without seeming to care overmuch.  Some of the flames crept up its feet and legs.

It slammed its head into the front gate.  The entire wall vibrated.  One elephantine warbeast, and it hadn’t even had a full charge backing it.

The specialist dog who’d missed the intent of his partner was giving orders, bidding the stitched to rain down guns

More explosives and accelerants were dropped down on top of it, a steady, constant rain, more aimed toward the thing’s rear than it’s front, to avoid damage to the door.

“Hold off!” the commander called out.  “Guns only!”

The specialist relayed the order to the stitched.

I must have had a confused expression on my face, because Gordon leaned close, raising his voice to be heard, even though he was right in my ear.  “They’re opening the gate.  Our warbeasts against theirs!”

Why did I feel like that was exactly what the enemy expected and wanted?

I rose to my feet, ducking low to keep my head out of the way of flying bullets.  Down the stairs.  Gordon and Mary came with me.

It was madness on the lower level.  Sandbag emplacements were going up on the road, people and experiments were trying to navigate the spaces between.  I made a beeline for the warbeasts, scanning the crowd.

With the volume of the noise and the amount of distractions, I had no choice.  I grabbed the man who seemed to be talking to the warbeast handlers, as a smaller child might grab for their mother’s legs.

He turned his attention to me.  One eye twitched, not because of me, but because of an explosion.  Maybe a dud bomb that the beast had crushed underfoot.

The gate rattled as it swung its head into the iron-reinforced wood.

“Trap!” I called out.  “They want you to open the gates!”

“No choice!” the man said, with complete confidence.

That doesn’t mean this is the right decision.  It just means they’ve maneuvered us into a corner.

“Bullets!” I said, still raising my voice to be heard.  The rain was coming down harder, but it was like there was so much going on that the individual rain drops were being broken up into a harsh, downward spray.  “Bombs!  That thing won’t get through the door!  It’s small!”

“It’s going to do damage if we don’t put it down fast!”

“Let it!” I called out.

“And the next time?  The time after that?” the man asked.

The man shook his head, sweeping his arm out to push me out of the way.

I found my badge and held it up.

A stitched threw itself off the top of the gate, dropping to the ground between us and the door.  It twitched and thrashed as it fought.  I looked back, staring, while Gordon hurried over to the body.

I turned my attention back to the man, and saw him focusing on the badge.

“It’s an order!” I said.

He made a sound that might have been a laugh.  “You can’t give orders!”

Frustration seized me.  I had a distinct mental image of myself cutting him down right there, consequences be damned.

But the cost was too great.  I’d lose other opportunities.

The gate rattled again.  Headbutt after headbutt.  But it wasn’t making significant progress.  It would die before it did.

The commander was weighing things in terms of cost.  The damage to the gate, the damage the enemy might do later in this fight, or in future ones.  He was thinking about how many bullets and explosives we had, and how many we wouldn’t have, if we tried to gun this thing down.

I was thinking in terms of the enemy’s strategy.  Their eerie confidence that this, right here, was a battle they could win.

This felt like step one of that battle plan of theirs.

I grabbed his jacket.  He pushed me aside, turning to someone, giving an order while pointing at me.   I could barely hear over the ringing in my ears.

Gordon stepped up.  He reached up and grabbed the man’s collar.  One fierce tug, and the man bent over, almost tipping over face first onto the waterlogged road.

Mary stepped closer, a knife in hand, touching it to the man’s throat.

“Listen,” she said.

While I desperately thought of a way to convey the sense of alarm I felt in a way he’d understand, men in our vicinity had drawn guns, with us now in their sights.

“We took one of their creatures apart!” I told him, “It was packed full of gas.  Human sized experiment, could have killed a roomful of people!  That thing could have enough gas in it to kill everyone at the gate and on the wall-top above it!”

I watched, waited, stared at his eyes, and refused to betray the slightest bit of doubt.  I had to convince him on every level.

“Right!” he said.  He pulled himself back up to a standing position, one hand on Gordon’s shoulder, and both Gordon and Mary let him straighten up.

Mary and I backed off, stepping to the sidelines, where row and column of stitched stood waiting, shrouded in their black coats and hoods, guns in gloved hands.  Gordon was still kneeling by the fallen stitched.

It was cold enough for my breath to fog in the air.  The last traces of winter, joined by freezing rain.  Whether we won or lost, there would be frost on the ground for the sun to melt, come morning.  The world would keep turning.

The world didn’t feel like it was turning.  The gate wasn’t opened, the warbeasts on our side weren’t sicced on the smaller one on their side.  It was a slow wearing down of two very durable targets: the warbeast on their side and the door on ours.  Two immovable objects.

Well, theirs could bleed, at the very least.

Our forces bled in their own way.  A stitched stood, arms flailing, and then collapsed onto the surface at the top of the wall.  Still thrashing, it rolled over the edge, dropping to the ground.  Still alive, it moved too violently to be approached.  They left it like that, struggling.

“Backing off!” the commander on the wall shouted.

I felt like Jamie, a step behind.  It was an unfamiliar environment, my senses were overloaded.  I belatedly realized what they were saying.

The enemy warbeast was retreating?

Surprisingly complex behavior for a creature to display on its own.  To decide it was too hurt to keep going?  That wasn’t the usual warbeast psychology.  That was counterintuitive, if anything.  Who wanted a warbeast that ran?

Inferior work?

Part of the plan?

Gordon straightened, running toward us, an object in his hand.  The stitched he’d approached had died on hitting to the ground.  Durable as they were, a snapped neck was a snapped neck.

When Gordon was halfway to us, he was knocked to the ground by a thunderclap of an explosion, trumping any we’d felt this night, with the exception of the one to hit the rooftop.

I saw and smelled smoke, billowing in from the gate.

A bomb.  Had the warbeast been rigged?

No.  I connected the dots, too late.

The warbeast wasn’t alone.  It had been given instructions.

Sleight of hand.  Distract someone with the flash, something impossible to ignore, and the other hand moved subtly at the scenes.

Someone or something had accompanied the warbeast.  Inside it, under it, hiding on top, I couldn’t guess.  That figure would have had to have hidden in the shadows at the very base of the wall, knowing that the rifleman with the bugged-out eyes was picking off anyone who raised their head too high or leaned too far over to look down.  To work in concert, with that kind of trust, it had to be the woman with the teeth.  The sniffing woman.  Melancholic.

She’d brought a bomb, something larger, she’d waited until the explosives and fire raining down from above had slowed in amount, ordered the warbeast back and out of the way-

Had the gate been open for our warbeasts to go through, she might have had her creature carry the bomb into our ranks, or planted the explosive further in, during the chaos, to make it a difficult or impossible to defend our wall.  If we didn’t have the stairs up to the platform at the top, to shoot over and see what the enemy was doing…

As it was, her explosion had damaged the gate.

No, worse than that.

Her warbeast renewed its attack.

It struck the gate, and the gate did more than rattle.  It knocked.  Something was loose, banging against the frame.  A second strike made a louder knock, with a creak marking something straining, falling out of place.

The explosion damaged the gate -enough-.

Enough that the warbeast could make headway.

That the people on our side couldn’t haul it open.

Enough that the enemy felt confident in mounting a proper attack.

“Repair teams!” a commander called out.

Men and women with wood, metal, tools, oversized stitched with them to do the heaviest lifting and work.

They’d patch things up, but they needed room.

The warbeast charged, and the billowing smoke expanded out of the way, showing its head.  It had rammed through loosened wood and planks, head sticking through the gate.

An order was given, one of our beasts, the energetic one, lunged.  It gripped the enemy warbeast in its teeth, holding onto the thing’s head, twisting and wrenching.  The struggle damaged the gate further, but the enemy warbeast quickly faltered, its skull being crushed at an agonizing rate.

Our beast won, tearing the enemy warbeast’s head free of its neck.  The amount of blood was astonishing.

No gas, thankfully.  I’d been wrong.

“We shoot the gas canisters through, keep them at bay!  Send the stitched in to do what they can!” the commander was saying.  “When the gas dies down, step in to work and direct the stitched!”

The repair crews gave their affirmative, but I could see the nervousness in their body language.  The enemy could be marching on us now.  More weapons, more beasts, more surprises.  It was hard to say.

This was going poorly, but if we could get the wall repaired-

Cannons fired, aiming for the opening in our own gate.  I could see the gas rise, higher than the wall on the other side.  Something lethal, poisonous.

Our stitched approached the gate, ignoring the thinner streams of gas that filtered through the damaged parts.  There were a lot of damaged parts.

“Be ready!” the commander called.  “If they have stitched, they might try sending them through the gas!  They won’t be commanded, so concentrate fire and be smart!”

Mary reached out and clutched my sleeve.

Gunshots sounded, close, and from the other side of the wall.

A stitched laborer on our side dropped.

A bullet caught a non-stitched laborer on our side.

It was surprising, and the surprise accented the awfulness of it.  The shock, the blood, the wrench of agony in the woman’s features.

More bullets came.  Through the cloud of vapor and the rain, I could see the shadows of legs, people ducking low, the flash of rifles firing through the gaps.

Our side fired back.  The enemy ducked out of the way.  Grenades flew in through the gap, and when they exploded, they didn’t produce fire or explosion.

Gas.  Like we’d deployed.

Smart stitched?

Mary’s grip tightened.  I grabbed her wrist, and grabbed Gordon’s sleeve.  We backed away, taking cover.

It was the inverse of the situation the commander had mentioned.  As we hurried to fight back, pulling warbeasts out of the way and trying to organize our stitched in the midst of the chaos, our stitched were left leaderless.  The exorcist rifles did horrific damage.  One or two shots to down each stitched.

As the gas crept closer to Mary and I, I pulled my shirt up around my nose.  A sad measure, but the stuff hadn’t been aimed at us.  It wouldn’t reach us, short of the wind changing direction.

The men strode out of the gas.  One or two rubbed at rheumy eyes and scarred eyelids.  A mild reaction for the danger the gas should have posed.

Plague men.

I was reminded of Mauer’s speech on the horrors of the battlefield.  I realized what might have driven a soldier to subject themselves to that kind of ugliness.

They’ve made their elite soldiers immune to the plagues, poisons, and parasites the Academy might use against them.

They’d traded away the secret, but they’d seized the front gate in exchange.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 5.13 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The spot we’d chosen to hide ended up being one of the worst possible positions, short of actually standing in between the two forces.

Stones, planks, sandbags and barrels had been set down by the side of the road.  We crouched there, using them for cover, while bullets flew.  They smacked against the sandbags and stones intended for use in repairing the gate.  Others struck the street and the dirt a matter of feet behind us, likely ricochets more than anything.

It was hard to see, with both sides using noxious smoke and gas.  Both sides were fighting more or less blind, only a hundred or two hundred feet from each other.  What my ears told me, however, when I strained to process what was out there behind the shouting and the report of gunfire, was that the plague men were silent, the only noise being the tramp of boots as they shifted position and took cover.  Our side was doing the same, but they had to cede ground to the gas, sending the stitched on and forward.

“Idiots,” Gordon said, right in my ear.  He was closer to the end of the pile of supplies, nearer to our people than to the gate.  I strained my eyes to see what he was seeing.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t make sense of it.  As smoke swirled, I was only able to make out vague shapes, but the rote movements of the stitched and the fact that they didn’t move or reposition let me gradually put together a mental picture of what I was looking at.  Stitched knelt behind sandbags, methodically reloading, aiming, firing, reloading, aiming, firing.  They didn’t flinch as the larger bullets of the plague men’s special guns put massive holes in sandbags inches from their heads.  When one stitched died, the rest kept on working.

“Idiots?”

It seemed dumb to be raising my voice to be heard over the gunfire when we were supposed to be hiding, but there was no other way to manage, and I doubted we would be heard.

He shook his head.  “Gave ground!”

Gave ground.

I could sort of see what he was thinking, now.  The plague men were advancing, returning fire until the stitched weren’t shooting anymore, then moving up to take defensive positions.  The stitched remained where they were, but they operated on simple rules and instructions.  Face forward, shoot the enemy.  They couldn’t improvise, and they didn’t have the basic creativity or problem solving ability to figure out less conventional defensive positions.  They didn’t use the corners of buildings or the drop of porches, they didn’t realize when their cover was whittled away.

There were a lot of reasons stitched were a terrifying weapon in war.  In this fight, they weren’t being wielded right.  They were being deployed to the rows of sandbags that had been placed in the road.  They weren’t lasting long at all.  They went down thrashing.

While our side kept sending more into the clouds of gas with orders to take up the first available set of sandbags and open fire, convinced they were pushing the enemy back.

Doing the same thing over and over again.

Soon, the plague men would reach our cover, and there would be no chance of hiding.

There were two likely options for our side, now, provided they realized the mistake they were making.  They could pull back, secure positions, maybe even burn buildings that the enemy could use, regroup and make a concerted effort to use the stitched as they were supposed to be used, durable shock troops.  We had enough of them, but without the coordination we would lose more than we killed.

The second option was that our side might well release the warbeasts and other experiments.

I was really hoping they didn’t release the warbeasts.

An explosion in the vicinity of the gate nearly knocked me over.  Blind gunfire touching the ground a bit behind me told me I could very well have died if I’d lost my balance and fallen.

Another explosion touched down.  It said a lot that I wasn’t sure which side was using it.

“Careful!” Mary shouted.

The explosion had stirred clouds of gas.  All three of us turned away from the blast, so our backs were to the wind and the onrushing gas, hoods pulled up.

I held my breath, even after the wind passed.  I waited as long as I could, and when I could breathe again, I exhaled forcefully, for the little good it did.  I kept one eye tightly closed and relied on the other, the knuckle of my thumb pressed to a nostril.  Head down, moving as little as I had to, to keep my heart rate lower.

Standard precautions, when dealing with unknown toxins.

It was a mistake to be here, but the ebb and flow of the fight had moved faster than we’d been able.  Now we were pinned down.  There was nothing clever we could do to get out and away, because there were no people here.  Nobody to manipulate, no tools to use, outside of sticks and stones.  No place to run.

Horns sounded.  Warbeasts roared.  The ground shook.

My head was already bowed, hood pulled down, back hunched over.  I was already in a pretty defeated posture.  There weren’t any options for expressing my absolute dismay.

My nostrils and eyes were burning.  When I blinked, my vision streaked, as if I were looking through a smudged window.

The rumbling of the ground intensified as the warbeasts drew closer.

I heard Gordon’s alarmed grunt, felt his shoulder touch me, and with no idea what to do, I let myself go limp, trying to fall so I was lying along the base of the stack of wood and stone.

The crushing impact was powerful enough that I was left momentarily breathless, and it wasn’t even a direct hit.  I felt something collide with the construction supplies we were using for cover, and the power of the blow passed from the pile to the ground, and through me.

I looked up, and I saw the warbeast charging on, into the smoke and gas by the gate.  Wood and stone flew through the air, some fragments clinging to the single horn that had struck the edge of the pile.

Our cover was mostly gone.

This wasn’t why I’d hated the idea of sending the warbeasts.  This was a bonus.  A crummy-ass bonus in a crummy-ass situation.

The problem was that they weren’t realizing the problem.

This wasn’t a dumb, thoughtless attack.  We were fighting people who knew us, knew the tools the Academy had.  Why the hell would they attack if they didn’t think they could deal with the warbeasts?

Near the gate, another of the rebellion’s warbeasts lunged out of the smoke.  It collided with ours.

Two-thirds of the size, the rebellion warbeast was furless, thick-skinned, and functioned like a blunt weapon.  A crude club, used for smashing.

Ours was thick skinned, but had thick fur at the head and shoulders, a bison’s mantle or a lion’s mane, massive, sweeping horns, and pirahna teeth.  It could bite, bash, rend, slice, and it could likely do any of the four better than the smaller one could smash against things.  Combine traits of the four, and it was a devastating work of art.

I wondered if the student who’d made it knew how carelessly it was being thrown away.

We had armored vehicles.  Just as there were cars on the road, there were armored cars with guns mounted on them, and powerful engines.  There were armies that had relied on them.

The problem was, warbeasts like these were built to last.  They could take the gunfire offered by the armored cars, close the distance, and then there was nothing the armored car could do.  One headbutt, and the car could be rolled.  Claws could tear at doors or hatches, and powerful limbs could tear at guns.

That had led to a series of countermeasures and counter-countermeasures.  Bait cars were rolled into the field, set to explode when a warbeast attempted to roll it.  Warbeasts got smarter and tougher, or they got mass-produced.  It was too expensive to make those bait-cars compared to how easy it was to grow the beasts.  More inventive countermeasures had to be developed.

It was hard to wage a war when one side was forced to constantly outdo itself in being inventive and devious, and the other simply had to do the same thing they were doing, only a little bit better every time.  Stronger, faster, tougher.

Plague men moved out of the noxious gas, the exorcists dangling from straps.  They were holding other, smaller guns, spreading out and firing at our warbeast.

Two more of the Academy’s warbeasts joined the fray.  One collided with the wall, claws scraping against stone.  Another aimed for the plague men, who moved out of the way, too spread out for the beast to go after more than one or two at a time.  With the gas blocking some of the view, I wasn’t sure if it was making any contact at all.

What had come first?  Had they possessed the eerie calm and ability to focus wholly on this fight first, leading to them agreeing to be modified, or had the mental changes been part and parcel of it?

A combination of the two?

The rapid report of a higher-tech gun marked more bullets being fired.  The warbeast closest to us twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees, switching the side that was exposed to the gunfire, and then reversed direction, unable to escape the hail of fire.

It roared and then abruptly charged with no provocation.  It collided with the wall, to the left of the gate.  I was pretty sure it had caught one of the plague men between its head and the stones.  It wasn’t the smoke obscuring my view, but the blurriness in one eye.  It was getting worse.

Gordon was reaching over me.  I raised myself up out of the puddle at the base of our meager cover, to get a better look.

It was black, and it looked more like a crystal than anything, pointed at both ends, more akin to a needle than anything.  Almost akin to obsidian, but not quite so sharp at the edges of each plane.

Where had he picked that up?

The stitched.  The one that had fallen from the wall.

“Bullet?” Mary asked.

Gordon nodded.  I couldn’t make out what he was saying over the chaos of the combat.

They examined the thing between them, each keeping half of an eye on the situation, half on the bullet.  My focus was on trying to track how the situation was unfolding.

I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision.  My nose and eye were burning, and it was a surprising amount, considering how resistant I tended to be to most poisons and chemical weapons.

“-to go!” Mary said.

Stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious needed to be stated.  The problem wasn’t the enemy – they were focusing on the warbeasts.  It was our side, shooting blindly.

The gas canisters and weapons that had opened the foray were long out of juice, and wind was carrying away the worst of the gas.  The area was clearing up, which made us easier to spot.

The distance to the next set of structures that could provide cover was two hundred feet.  Short grass, torn-up dirt, mud, and loose, crushed stone.

I heard a shout from the among the plague men.  A sharp crack marked an explosive going off in their vicinity.  Heads were turned away, hands raised to faces.

“Can’t see,” Gordon said, rubbing at his eyes with a sleeve.

With my shoulder pressed up against Mary’s side, I felt rather than heard the affirmative sound she made.

There was no happy ending here.  Even if the Brigadier stepped in and got the Academy to start fighting back properly, and if Helen, Jamie, Lillian and Shipman knew enough to start an effort to extract us, I wasn’t sure it was possible.  We were too close to the enemy, our side had given ground, and we’d been left behind.

Half-blind, outnumbered.

The warbeasts were struggling.  They spent more time flinching and snarling at the gunfire than attacking.  I heard the louder fire of the exorcists going off.  The warbeast farthest from us staggered and dropped.  A moment later, it was on fire, ignited by something thrown.

In case of parasites more than anything else, I suspected.

I reached out, pushing my fingers into Gordon’s closed fist.  He was gripping a handkerchief.

He loosened his fingers, then held his hand out as I unfolded the handkerchief and took the black shard from within.

I pricked the back of my hand.

“Mf,” I made a sound.

It burned like fire.  Within a few seconds, the muscle was twitching involuntarily, the burning sensation like a thousand papercuts a second.

“Mmmmurrggh,” I started off making one sound, then ended up making a guttural noise instead.  My voice was tight as I managed an, “Okay.”

“The heck are you doing?” Gordon asked.

“It’s poisoned,” I said, my voice still tight.  “Or it’s crystallized poison or it’s something.  Ow.”

“Peralta?” Gordon asked.

“Peralta,” I said, in a strained, intense way.

There was a detonation closer to the wall, aimed at one of the beasts.  It didn’t do much more than kick up dirt.  The cliff-side was only a dozen feet away, and both debris and moisture bounced off of the wall to land on and around us.

Shorter ranged guns, delivering only pain.

I remembered how the stitched had acted.

That had been the aim.  It was why our lines were disintegrating as fast as they were.  Faced with stitched and warbeasts who felt only as much pain as they needed to be able to function, Pock had given the enemy a weapon that delivered it, distilled.

The alarm on Mary’s face suggested she was very aware of just what that meant.  The look on Gordon’s face, as he stared at the ongoing fight with the Warbeasts, was one of deep concern.

The beasts didn’t know how to process the experience.  Their well of experience might have been limited to experiencing only a moment of pain, enough to know where the harm was coming from so they could lash out.  Except now they were feeling that moment over and over, from all directions.  They lunged, swung their horns around, howled, and attacked nothing in particular, only periodically going after the plague men.

The pain in my hand was fading.  Whatever it was, it didn’t last forever.

But that had only been a trace contact.  Getting shot by one of these, it would be more than a trace contact.

Agony the dead would feel, apparently.

We were losing the cover of smoke and gas, and even with the less affected eye, the one that I had kept closed, I couldn’t make out the enemy as more than smudgy abstracts.  I doubted they were suffering in the same way.

I put the black crystal on the ground, then grabbed a stone from the pile.

I smacked it, aiming for only the tip.  The motion got Gordon and Mary’s attention.

Lifting the rock, I saw that the crystal had broken up.

Which suggested that getting shot by one didn’t mean having to extract one shard, but possibly dozens.

I grabbed the longest, narrowest one, and bent it until it snapped in two.

“What-” Mary said, before gunfire drowned her out.  They were exorcising the third warbeast. “-ng?”

“Knife,” I told her.

She had a knife in her hand in less than a second.  She looked at it, then at me, as if only now questioning it.

“Cut my stitches,” I said, lifting up my shirt.

“Can’t see, Sy,” she said.  Well, I was pretty sure it was what she’d said.

“Cut,” I told her, again.

“-Idea?” Gordon asked.

The exorcist’s fire had died out, and the third warbeast was dead.  Scary to realize the plague men had dispatched three of the things, and I wasn’t sure they’d lost more than a half-dozen of their own.

It was more alarming to realize that the primary source of gunfire was in the other direction from the gate.  A little ways down the road.  Hopefully it was because our side had pulled back to regroup, and not because the plague men were crushing us underfoot as they advanced.

“Idea,” I confirmed for Gordon, lowering my voice now that the gunfire was further away.

“Try to cut,” Gordon told Mary.

I saw her head bob.

Her vision was bad enough that she had to lean close to use the knife.  Her nose touched my stomach, making one muscle twitch in a ticklish reaction.  Her hot breath swept over my cold, wet skin.

She had steady hands.  I flinched as she cut one suture, then another.

“Stop,” I said.

She did, without moving her head away.  She turned her face upward, to look at me.

“How sure are you?” Gordon asked.

“Make the wound bleed,” I said, then, barely able to hear even my own words, I admitted, “Not very, but there’s not much room for cleverness here.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

Mary cut.  My stomach moved of its own accord.

Too much of this plan depended on factors I couldn’t control or wholly predict.  Educated guesses.

“Lose the weapons,” I said.  Rather than try to work my holster off of my belt, I simply undid my belt entirely, hauling it off.  I jammed it into a gap between stone and wood.

“All the weapons?”

“Keep your knives.”

“Okay.”

There were shouts and calls.  More people at the gate.  The enemy was moving up.  I couldn’t tell if it was ten or fifty.  My vision was suffering too much.

I judged distance, took the broken black crystal and poked a hole in my shirt, so it stuck through.  I did it with more of the shards, spreading them out.

I looked at the black crystals.  If they were poison, and I was resistant to poison, were they worse for someone else?  Or were they not poison at all, their design a detour of sorts?  A way to simulate pain without using the regular channels?

Either way, this was going to suck.

Fingers placed alongside the fabric, spikes of black crystal poking through and pointed inward, I slapped the fabric against my own stomach, the biggest shard touching the wound Mary had opened up.

The pain was immediate and mind-altering.

I screamed without even meaning to, keeling over, landing in mud.  I might have drove shards deeper as I landed on the ones at my side.

I’d experienced agony before, on a monthly schedule.  I knew how to deal, in a way.  This blew that out of the water, made it impossible to turn my mind to reach for any of the tools.  I’d stabbed my side, and I felt it in my bones and in my brain, in the nerves of my teeth.

I was glad I’d fallen forward, because I screamed until something changed in my throat and I heaved up my stomach contents.

I was dimly aware of an enemy soldier standing over us.  One of the plague men.

Mary was screaming.  About being blind, unable to see what was happening to me.

The plague man stared down, expression unchanging.

Variables I couldn’t predict or control.

Educated guesses alone.

Failing any other variables, anything at all, human beings tended to favor the simplest, clearest options.  The easiest thing for him to do, without emotion or orders saying otherwise, was to shoot and end us.

That was only one of a half-dozen things that could go wrong.

But he had to have a reason to fight.  A reason to change himself so drastically.  There was an answer to that question that could see us through.

An iota of mercy?

He grabbed me by the arm, dragging me, weapon in one hand.  As my body stretched out, the shards making contact with me touched me areas of my gut.  They weren’t deep, except for the big one, but all the same, it renewed the pain twice over.

It was almost transcendant, taking me out of myself.  I was wide-eyed, incapable of moving.  Processing the little I could see and hear and storing almost none of it.

Dim light and noise, darkness.

Mary.

Gordon.

A flickering light so bright I couldn’t look at it.  My head lolled to one side, and I focused on the darkness there, and the square of faint orange-purple light.

Mary’s voice, again.

The pain was getting easier to bear.

A man’s voice.  Soothing.  I was trying to scream, I hadn’t stopped, but the energy wasn’t there.  My chest jerked, and only small sounds came out.

I closed my eyes.  The pain was receding more.

I could process.  I was in a tent.  The wall to one side was stone.  The exterior wall of Westmore.  By the gate.

I was on a table.  A doctor was extracting shards from my side.  One of the rebellion doctors.

My head turned.  On the other side of the room, Gordon and Mary sat in chairs.  Their hands were bound in front of them.

A plague man with a gun was standing beside the pair, weapon in hand.  I still couldn’t really see.  Nothing had fixed things from before.  The only improvement was that there was light and we were out of the rain.

Cynthia had to have told them to watch out for children.  My educated guess had been right, however.  These were men who’d undergone changes for a reason.  There was a rationale, partially driven by fear, but partially driven by a desire to oppose the Academy.  They were almost an incarnation of that.

Opposing the Academies meant opposing the way the Academy operated.  There had to be a sense of conscience in there.  A child wounded with a weapon meant for monsters, even if they had orders to kill children on sight?  I’d gambled on them showing mercy.

This one had a parasite living under his skin on one side of his face.  It kept moving, making his facial features change each time.  One of his eyes didn’t close properly.

Parasites that would prey on other parasites?  Chemicals to counteract other poisons or stave off disease, all with their severe side effects?

“You’re more alert?” the doctor that was working on me asked.  “One big one, then we take off your shirt and see if there’s more to dig out.”

“Is he okay?” Mary asked.  “Please.  I can’t see.  I can only see your shape, kind of, because the window is behind you, but I can’t see Simon, and he’s not screaming any more and-”

“Hush,” the doctor said.  “He’ll be fine.  The shards never penetrate too deep.  They’re a nonlethal measure.”

When the victims don’t commit suicide to end the pain, I imagine, I thought.

Mary hadn’t been saying what she’d said for the doctor’s benefit, but for mine.

Already thinking about how we might find our way out.

My back arched, the pain searing me as the shard was pulled free of the wound, making a sucking sound.

“There we go, hold on, wait,” the doctor said.  He pressed something to the wound to absorb the welling blood.  I would have lost more blood and had it welling around the site of injury, thanks to the extra damage Mary had inflicted.  Part of my attempt to draw pity.

All of it calculated, in a way.  If Mary had been the one injured, then we would have been two scraggly boys.  This way, there was one hurt child on the table, and one girl in the chair.

There were more factors, but this was the ideal combination.

“Okay?” the doctor asked.

I opened my mouth to respond, but my words didn’t come out.  I’d lost the ability to speak.

I nodded.

“Any pain, still?”

I made a face and nodded.

A lie.

“Let’s take a look, then.”

He peeled my bloody shirt away from my stomach.

I turned my head away, and met Mary’s eyes.

I reached out to the pair of them.  And I gestured.

“You’re going to be okay, Sy,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

Two affirmatives.  We were good to go.

I blinked, very deliberately.

On the other side, the doctor said, “What the hell?  You’re already-”

Her bound hands went over her head.  She brought them forward together, simultaneously.  A two-handed throw for a lone knife.

“-injured?”

The knife caught the doctor in the throat.

I tried to move, and realized I was bound with cord- enough I couldn’t move freely, but loose enough I could be repositioned.

Gordon brought his knees to his chest.  Rope that had bound his ankles to the chair was loose enough to fall to the floor.  He was up and out of the chair, hands still bound, moving past Mary to where reference books sat on a military travel chest.  He grabbed a book and threw it like he was thrusting it into the air more than anything.

The plague man only managed a short sound of alarm before the book caught him in the lower face.  I was betting Gordon was aiming for the throat, but a smack to the mouth served for a moment.

Gordon threw his whole weight against the man’s knee.  He hit the ground, and the plague man fell over top of him.  Gordon used the rope that bound his wrists to choke the plague man.

Nobody had responded to the yell of alarm.  I wondered if there had been enough screaming from this tent to desensitize.

Three seconds passed, the doctor gurgling, the plague man choking, trying to throw Gordon loose and failing, and Mary- I couldn’t make out what Mary was doing.

The ropes were severed, I realized.  She was free.  She bent down over the plague man and cut his throat.

Gordon’s hands were freed.  He extricated himself.

I was next to be freed.  I held the bandage to the thrice-opened wound as I lowered my feet to the ground.

“Sometimes I think you do that to yourself on purpose,” Gordon murmured.

I opened my mouth.  No words came out.

“I like you like this,” he said.

I gestured.

“We need to get out of here,” Mary said.

I nodded.  I gestured again.  This time it was something less obscene.

“Don’t know what you mean by that one,” Gordon said.  “War, battle?”

“Fighting our way out?” Mary asked.  She’d bent down over the plague man.

I sighed, shaking my head.

Bending down, wincing, I picked up the book.  I tore out a page and balled it up.  I held thumb and one finger together under it.  Not a gesture, but I hoped the idea was clear.

“Fire,” Gordon said.

I nodded.

“We can’t do too much damage.  Westmore needs to be able to use the location.”

I shook my head.

“No?”

I shook my head again.  I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision and failing.

“We’ve lost this one,” Mary said.  “Plague men, black bullets, they have answers to what the Academy can bring to bear.  Best we can do is cut our losses.”

I could have hugged her.  I nodded.

“Okay,” she said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “We should try that way, if I remember right.”

The three of us, with probably one set of working eyes between us, moved to the other end of the tent.  It was getting brighter outside.  The orange and purple light I’d seen was the sunrise.

We ducked under the bottom of the canvas flap, peeked into the adjoining tent, and then moved through there.

The enemy’s focus was on the front lines of the battle, from the sounds of it.  There were barely any figures in the makeshift camp they’d set up at the gate.

But they’d brought some supplies and they’d left some behind.  The incendiary weapons they’d used to dispose of the warbeasts were among them.

Any building we passed that had a window was on fire moments after we’d left it behind us.  Nearly blind, we passed through the freezing rain, heading straight for their back lines and for the other Lambs.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 5.14 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.14

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Our fires raged at one end of Westmore.  A full quarter of the city aflame.  Though the wood used to grow portions of buildings and plant matter grown to seal the gaps between stones had been treated to make it less combustible, it was still wood.

Stitched, buildings, chemicals, it took so little for the Academy’s work to go up in flames.

The smoke billowed, but the walls meant it didn’t have many places to go.  We were boxed in with mountains, cliffs, and walls, and that concentrated the smoke that hung lower to the ground.  The rain pounded down on the burning buildings, creating a dull roar.

It was attention-grabbing.  Enough to concern the forces at the battlefront.

We couldn’t see, but with the smoke, our enemy couldn’t see either.

We found the best hiding place we were able, listening as best as we could for the tramp of boots, then moved as soon as we heard the noise receding.

I wanted to communicate, reach out to the others and make sure we were on the same page, when it came to strategy and more.  I hadn’t counted on being struck dumb.  I’d wanted to make sure that I was the one who was stuck in the bed, while Gordon and Mary were free to act.  Being injured wasn’t necessary, but I’d needed to sell it, and that meant blood and making my performance as real as possible.  Opening an old injury was better than making another.

If I’d known I would have lost the ability to communicate, I would have gone another route.

I was scared in a way I usually wasn’t.  I wasn’t able to use my senses to their fullest.  With my eyes as screwed up as they were, and the chaos of noise in the background, the only things I could be sure about were things within thirty feet of me.  The smoke hampered our enemy, but that didn’t do much good if we took the wrong turn or path between buildings and ended up face to face with a plague man and his exorcist.

It didn’t help that I wasn’t sure how the other Lambs were doing.  Had I been able to take in more of the situation, I might have been able to reassure myself that the enemy lines hadn’t advanced far enough, or that there were avenues for them to escape.  As it was, we scurried here and there, keeping our heads down, straining every sense, hoping that the combined senses of the three of us were enough to alert us to possible danger.

We stopped for breath, and to get our bearings.  Gordon was doing the listening for trouble.  I stayed beside him, while Mary stood a short distance away.

She knocked on the wall once.  Not entirely necessary, given the broken window, but I imagined she was looking for her own unique sorts of reassurance.

Gordon and I listened, hard.  There were no footsteps, no boots.  Nothing close enough to be differentiated from the roar of background noise, of guns firing and rain pouring down on a spreading sea of fire that was stubbornly refusing to go out.

He knocked.

Mary’s foot splashed in a puddle as she rejoined us.  Her hand fumbled for and touched my shoulder.  I squeezed Gordon’s upper arm.

We bolted.  There was a soft ‘woof’ sound as the incendiary weapon went off.

A shout, directly ahead.  Footsteps.

Gordon didn’t slow.  I knew he had to have heard.

We made it another ten feet before he jerked us in one direction.  We ducked in behind a solid metal object.  I kept my head down, shoulders hunched, providing as small of a profile as was possible.

The men who ran past us weren’t plague men, but they wore the darker colors of rebellion members.  They made their way into the opaque wall of rain and smoke, feet splashing.

We remained still until we couldn’t hear them.  Mary coughed lightly.

The smoke was catching up to us.  Soon it would drown us out.  My world shrank from thirty feet to twenty, or perhaps fifteen.  Anything beyond was indecipherable.

I wanted to tell them we needed to move faster.  We had to get to a point that we could observe the situation, so we could find and reunite with the others, or get a grasp of any obstacles in our way.  If we took too long and the city was drowned in smoke and fire, we might have to chance running across a warzone and risk taking a bullet, to get to the lodge where the others were.

At least the distraction was diverting enemy forces.  The sound of gunfire had abated.  They would have probably planned to get further into Westmore before their advance slowed and stopped.  They didn’t have a place to retreat to, and they no longer had any certainty that they would have shelter if this dragged out.  The tent with the doctor and the stitched had no doubt been intended to be such a waypoint.

No place for the wounded to go, no place to sleep, to eat, nowhere to retreat.

They weren’t fearless.  Humans had basic needs, and the plague men were human.  In attacking their assuredness that they would be able to sustain those needs, we knocked the legs out from under them.  Uncertainty, doubt, morale, all would turn to our advantage.

I just wished mine wasn’t suffering so much.

We stopped.  The gunfire was closer, now.  Running blind for a minute or less might see us running straight into harm’s way, now.  Out of the alleyway and into the street.

“I’m out,” Mary said, under her breath.

I was already out.  I hadn’t grabbed many, and in my hurry to make sure my hands were free if I needed them, I’d used them quickly.

“I have two.  Want to hold on to one, just in case,” Gordon said.  “I’ll go.”

He headed to the nearest window we could make out.  Mary and I moved a little further down.

I could hear him open the window.  Mary and I listened.

It was harder, with the fighting being so close.  There were people tramping this way and that in between nearby buildings.  Plague men looking for vantage points.

We were in serious danger of being caught.  I could only hope that we could pretend to be scared children.

Harder with Gordon than with any of us.  He already looked like someone in his early-teens.  He’d grown early and fast.  Almost to the point where someone might have thought he should be in uniform with a gun in his hands.

Gordon knocked.

We carried on listening.  I was pretty sure we were thinking along the same lines.  That, being as close to the fighting as we were, we wanted to be extra careful.

She had hold of my hand, and was squeezing it, hard.

Mary prided herself so much on perfectionism.  To be hampered, damaged, a sense failing her, unable to be her best, it probably knocked her legs out from her, like the fire had been intended to do for the enemy forces.

No sound.

We knocked.

A third knock sounded, just a short distance away.  Not Gordon.  The sound had an effect on me, as if all the cold outside of me was suddenly sucked into my bones, making everything come to a standstill.  The fear that made a rabbit stand stock still as a fox came into sight.

I let go of Mary’s hand and drew my gun.

“Cynthia’s gas, is it?” Melancholy asked.

Gordon’s pistol fired.  Mine was a second late, slowed by my concern that we’d draw attention.

“Blind?” Melancholy crooned, not seeming to care.

I was in the midst of reloading, but Gordon had already reloaded, and fired again.

I held my fire.  She wouldn’t have been taunting us like this if we had a chance of hitting her.  I kept my gun in both hands, holding it firmly, so it couldn’t be taken away, and waited for an opportunity.

Mary was right beside me.  Mud sucked at her boot as she shifted her stance.

“I’ll-” Melancholy started.  Gordon fired again.

He made a grunting sound, and I heard a wet slap as he landed full-on in the mud.

He didn’t make another sound.  Mary did, beside me, but it was shock, a muted gasp.

The bone-deep chill I felt was a different sort from fear, this time.  There was a very good chance this was a moment that would be engraved into my memory for the rest of my life.

It didn’t break my focus.  I stared into a morass of smoke and rain, and saw absolutely nothing I could use.  There were only the smudged shapes of buildings, a hundred shifting blurs of light and dark that could have been Melancholy and could have been nothing at all.

I heard a mechanical click.  I aimed, but I didn’t fire.  I heard the sound of boots on mud, quick.

Like Choleric had been, she had good reflexes.  She was agile.

She could see us, while we couldn’t see her, and she had Gordon’s gun.

“Let’s try this again, minus interruptions,” she said.  She was around the corner, if I was gauging right, “I’ll make you a deal.”

I couldn’t respond.  Well, I might have been able to, but it would have been a mouse’s strangled squeak.  Drowned out by the noise around us.

I reached out with a foot and kicked Mary’s ankle lightly, once.

“We’re listening,” Mary said.

“I want to know where Phlegmatic and Choleric are.”

“That’s doable,” Mary said.

“I’m not done.  I’m taking one of you hostage.  The little one, messy black hair.”

“Sylvester.”

“Yes.  Him.”

I offered another kick.

“He says yes.”

“Why doesn’t he speak for himself?”

“He can’t.”

“Okay.  Sylvester.  Throw out the gun, straight in front of you.”

She was around the corner and to my left.  She wanted to see the gun fall.

I tossed it out for her.

“Girl.  You too.”

Mary hesitated a little bit longer before doing the same.

“Now, be good,” Melancholy said.

I reached out and kicked Mary’s ankle again.

She kicked me back, hard.

Then she did it again.

I twisted, reaching out, trying to stop her, but I felt her arm move.

She was fighting back.

Stupid, aggressive, single-minded Mary, no!  There was nothing I could do to stop her that wouldn’t potentially get us both killed.  I pulled my arms away, backing up so I was flat against the wall.

Mary grunted, moving, hurling knives.  Weapons that were utterly silent in use.

Melancholy was the one to make a small sound this time.  A grunt of pain, a grunt of frustration?

Mary moved forward, following up the throws with an attack, slashing, feet slapping mud.

Then there was silence.

Mary remained in place shuffled, turning left, then right.  Searching.  I could make out her outstretched arms, the weapons held within.

Not throwing knives, but knives meant for close-quarters fighting.

She’d lost Melancholy.

There was a splash further down the alleyway.

Running, back toward the fires?  I strained my senses.

Then a larger splash.  At the corner of the buildings, between where Mary and I stood.

Enough of an impact that I knew it was Melancholy.

She’d gone up.  Onto the roof.  Hanging on, or standing on it.  She’d thrown something to distract, and now she was between us.

The fight between the two was brief, impossible for me to follow.  I could have fumbled in the mud for my gun, could have thrown myself into the fray in the hopes of grabbing Melancholy and hampering her enough for Mary to get a good hit in.

I remained where I was, against the wall, eyes closed, to better hear what was happening.

I heard a yelp, and the noises of fighting and feet skidding in mud stopped.  My nose and mouth were choked with the smoke from the fires, not that I could smell anything with the acrid gas lingering in my nostrils, and my eyes were useless for making out anything that wasn’t in arm’s reach.

“And then there was one,” Melancholy said, her voice soft.

Again, that chill.

Mary.

“Do you need help?” a man asked, behind me.

“You three get back to the stablehouse at the corner.  We’ve diverted too many people to combat the fires, we need to make sure we don’t lose ground,” Melancholy said.  “I’ve got this well in hand.”

Plague men.

I hadn’t even heard them.  Well, I heard them leave, now.

“I’d say it felt unfair,” Melancholy said, “But you already killed one of my partners, and I have to guess about the fate of the other.  If your girl there had been five years older and capable of seeing, it might have been a fair fight.  Little bitch still caught me once.”

I didn’t offer her any tells, beyond my attempt to swallow that was a little more forceful than I’d expected.

A hand seized my throat.  She hauled me up, choking me further, and held me up with my legs dangling, through a combination of strength and the force with which she pinned me to the wall.

“Do you know what their real plan was for us?” she asked.

She paused, as if she expected an answer.  Had I not screamed myself mute, I still wouldn’t have been able to say anything, with the grip she had on my throat.

I grabbed her arm for support, as if I could alleviate the pressure.

“Four of us.  Bastards kept giving us missions.  Even when one of us weren’t in full working order, or when we were feeling the hurt from recent surgeries.  Do this, find this person, kill them.  Bring us the body.  Again and again.”

I sputtered out a breath, but it was a breath out, not in.

“They told us if we failed too many times, or if we got recalcitrant, then they would move on to phase two.  Take us, butcher us, and keep the best pieces of each.  My nose, Phlegm’s ears, Cholera’s body, ‘Guin’s eyes.  As for brain, well, that’s how they tried to set us against each other.  Telling us that the most obedient, the one most willing to turn on the others-”

I made a high, strangled sound, trying to breathe.  I kicked in her general direction, but her other hand swatted my foot aside, and held it at an awkward angle, so my lower body twisted to the left, my left leg blocked by the firmly held right.

“You get the picture,” she said.  “Did they do the same with you?”

I could have, should have said yes.  Built a rapport.

I shook my head, as much as I was able.  My neck muscles were as tight as bands of steel.

“Ah well,” she said.

I opened my mouth, as if I were speaking.

She let go of my leg and gripped the front of my raincoat and shirt.  She shifted her grip from my throat, allowing me to suck in smoke-filled air, and held my by the collar instead.

I tried to form words, pushing them out, but they came across as squeaks.  The gunfighting had died down for now, it seemed, and even with less noise coming from that, I was barely audible.

She drew her ear closer, until it almost touched my mouth.

I could have bitten it.  Seized a vulnerable piece of her in my teeth and held on as if it was all that mattered.

But what came after that?  It would have been a waste.  A final, bitter gesture before she killed me.

Not that she planned to keep me alive.

I spoke, and it was as if I were putting in all the effort of screaming at the top of my lungs and getting only raw pain in my throat and barely formed sounds.

“They pick one,” I managed.  I coughed.  The smoke was getting to me.  “One of us.”

Only one of us, in the end.  Possibly after another generation, though that’s looking less likely, the way things are going.

I coughed some more.

She stared at me.  Even with her face just a short distance away, hair draped over much of it, an oddly shaped nose and wide, razor-toothed mouth in the part I could see, I couldn’t see her all that well.

Had she killed Gordon and Mary?

If she had, we were too far from help to revive them.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she told me, her voice low, breath hot on my face.  “That you’d stay loyal.”

I shook my head, opened my mouth.

She dropped me before I could respond, seizing me by the throat again the moment my feet hit ground.  She struck one of the hands that reached for her wrist.

“I know what you’d say if you had the chance,” she told me.  “You’re loyal to your friends, not to the Academy?”

I stopped fighting, pausing.

“I was the same,” she told me.

In our first meeting, she’d rebuked us for trying to draw parallels.

“If you’re really loyal, show it by cooperating,” she told me.  “You’re going to be a hostage.  Maybe if this goes smoothly, someone can get those two some help.”

So vague I could have spit.  What had happened?

“Maybe,” she said, in a different tone, as an afterthought.  Emphasizing that it was only a possibility.

I bowed my head.  I nodded.

I felt a knife touch my throat, and I wondered if it was Mary’s.  She had me hold out my hands while she bound them.  She held the knife to my groin while using one hand to loosely tie my ankles.  Keeping me from running or kicking.

We walked, leaving Gordon and Mary behind.  Into oblivion and smoke.  Past figures I couldn’t make out, shadowy and nebulous.  Souls in the limbo between life and death.  Some living but scarred and left largely dead inside.  Some dead, but with lightning crackling beneath their skin.

“I have the firebombs your friend was holding on to,” she told me.  “If you or someone else try something clever, I burn the building with the Brigadier inside.  Fuck orders.  Your remaining friends can burn with him.  It’s a bad way to go.  One I reserve for people who’ve wronged me, understand?”

I nodded.

We passed through a cluster of people.

She stopped, and her wrist dug into my throat as I jerked to a stop, the blade tight against the side of my neck.  I felt the sting of a shallow cut.

“Paper,” she said.

The man in front of her reached into a pocket and produced a pad.

“Pen.  And hold onto that pad,” she said.

I heard the scratches of pen on paper.

“Have a stitched carry this to the Brigadier as a messenger.  Have them count the people inside.”

“Ma’am,” the plague man said.

The Academy forces were an army of monsters and dead men, commanded by people.

It was starting to feel like the rebellion was an army of men, commanded by monsters.

Of course, I had no idea who or what Cynthia was.  Perhaps it was an unfair assertion.

We waited in the rain, Melancholy with rain streaming down over wet hair, while I had my raincoat on.  I was the one shivering, while her hand remained steady.

“He said he’s open to discussion,” someone in the crowd said.

“Which stitched’dja send?” Melancholy asked.

“That one.”

“Will he answer my questions about their numbers?”

“He should.  His handler told him to stand down.  But stitched are stitched, you know?”

“I know,” Melancholy said.

She poked me in the back, bidding me to move.  We walked together, her knife to my throat.

I could tell from the way she moved against my back that she was favoring a leg.

Good girl, Mary, I thought.

Well, redact that.  The attack had been reckless.  I could understand the reasoning behind it, that Melancholy had only needed one hostage, she wouldn’t simply let the rest of us go, but it had been reckless.

But Mary had got our assassin once, at least.

“You.  Were there people inside?”

It was a stitched’s voice.  “Yes.”

“How many adults?”

“Five.”

“Children?”

“Uh.”

“Think.  Children.  This age, give or take.”

“Three.  Four.  Three?”

“Explain.”

“One… between.  Older.  Girl.”

“Describe her.”

“Thin.  Girl.  White hair.  Or blonde hair.  Glasses.”

Shipman.

“Alright.  Good man,” Melancholy told the stitched.  “Don’t know who that one is, but I don’t care about them.”

We walked up stairs.  I recognized them as the stairs to the Brigadier’s Lodge.  I saw people on either side, using the building for cover, and took them to be the Academy’s.  Westmore forces, with their brighter jackets.

There’d been a bit of a stalemate.  The Academy forces had regrouped.  They’d decided this was as good a defensive position as any to draw the line and decide they had to stop retreating.

But for the situation to be as it stood… something had happened.  Perhaps this had been too hard a position to attack.  They couldn’t move on without resolving it, couldn’t attack it without undue losses.

Complicated by… what had she said?  Orders.  Killing the Brigadier had been off-limits.

Melancholy kicked the door three times.  It was ajar.  “Coming in!”

She strode into the room, me in front of her.  I wasn’t that effective a shield, but it hardly mattered.  She had security of another sort.

“Brigadier.”

“Sy,” I heard a voice.  Lillian’s, perhaps.

“You’d be one of the assassins,” the Brigadier said.

“I would.”

“Tea?” the Brigadier asked.

“I’m not that stupid.”

She wasn’t budging from the doorway.  We were standing in the coat room.  The part of the lodge past the midway point was raised a bit, and the other Lambs, Shipman, and the Brigadier’s people were gathered on that part, watching.

“You want to discuss options?” the Brigadier asked.

“You’ve lost,” Melancholy said.

“I noticed the fires.  Didn’t seem like the wisest thing to do,” the Brigadier said.  “My young colleagues here think it wasn’t wanted, on your part.  You want to secure this building because it should be far enough from the fire.  A defensive position you can fall back to.  You’ve been put in an awkward position.”

“Not my concern,” Melancholy said.  “I only have the ability to give orders so I can secure you and your top officers.  The army is someone else’s to lead, and the state of Westmore is that someone else’s concern.”

“Cynthia, her name was?” the Brigadier asked.

Melancholy nodded the affirmative.  “If you surrender and order your men here to put up no fight, you’ll all be given safe passage.  You’ll be treated as prisoners of war and afforded every respect.”

“I see.  I-”

“Before you accept.  There’s another term.  You give over the children to me.  They die.  Payment for me losing mine.”

Her grip on my throat tightened, the blade stinging my throat.  It was less painful, which was a bad sign.  Less painful meant a deeper cut.  The pain came later than it did with a shallow one.

“Ah,” the Brigadier said.  “There were two with him.”

“Crippled, bleeding, left to burn.”

I could see the shadow of the man’s head moving.

“Seize the children,” the Brigadier said.

My head bowed.  There were shouts of protest, but Gordon and Mary were the fighters, and they weren’t .  They were dealing with military men of some experience.

“I gave you your chance,” the Brigadier said.   “I hope you understand.”

I leaned forward, not caring about the knife, I screwed up my face, and I spit.

“I have to do what makes the most sense,” the Brigadier said.

“Hmf,” Melancholy made a sound.  “Thank you for being cooperative.”

“Sy!” Jamie called out.  “You-”

He stopped as Melancholy shoved me.  I sprawled, landing on the floor.  The Lambs were in front of me.

I flipped over, because I didn’t want to see them as Melancholy killed me.

She stood there, arms stretched out to either side.

I blinked.

I blinked again, trying to clear my vision.

Melancholy had a passenger.  Clinging to her back, was a blonde girl.  Helen.

I turned, looking at the crowd of people.

Sure enough, there were three figures who were the right size to be Lambs, and there was one who was definitely Shipman, all with soldiers behind them.

But… yes.  One was the Brigadier’s stitched servant.  The firetender.

They’d noticed the stitched doing a headcount.

The perils of an expendable soldier.

Melancholy stood as if crucified, or as a bird in flight might appear, her arms gripped, twisted, and pulled back.  Helen perched on her, feet finding purchase in the small of the assassin’s back.

The assassin shifted her footing.  Slowly, but with surety, she contorted, body twisting, head turning as well, to a greater extent.  She drew her mouth open, and even my ruined eyes could see the whites of her teeth.  Opening wide, as she drew ever nearer to Helen’s face, a bear trap ready to take the front of Helen’s head off.  Helen pulled away, contorting in her own fashion, but she couldn’t do more without releasing the assassin.

The others couldn’t shoot without the risk that a bullet might pass through Melancholy and catch Helen.

I stood.  Going by memory more than sight, the mental image I’d cobbled together as Melancholy and I walked, I went for the woman’s left leg.

Mary’s wound.  I found it.

I dug the fingers of both hands into the gap, then wrenched it open.

Melancholy snarled.

Arms still outstretched, she bent forward, snapping for me.  A viper’s movement, compared to the glacially slow contortion as she’d gone for Helen.

Helen moved, shifting grip, adjusting her own weight, throwing herself to one side.

I heard the snap, the pop, the cartilage and bone grinding.

Melancholy’s face, blurred, stretched into something hideous in the moment before she crashed to the ground.  She writhed for a moment, solely with her upper body, before she gave up the last gasp.

Vertebrae separated, if I had to guess.

Helen remained there, holding Melancholy’s arms.

“Hello, Sy!” she said, brightly.

I opened my mouth to respond, then closed it.

There was a commotion as the others came.  Lillian was quick to hurry to my side.

Everyone, be they the Brigadier or my fellow Lambs, was quick to throw a dozen questions each at me.

I touched my throat, looking at who I hoped was Lillian.

“On it,” she said.  “Need my bag.”

Too much to communicate, too little time.

Gordon and Mary hurt and bleeding out, with enemy forces between us and them.  The location surrounded, the city overtaken by armies and fire, and Melancholy’s orders had been the only thing keeping the enemy from assaulting the Lodge.  Now she was dead.

The moment they realized that, we were done for.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 5.15 – Twig

Esprit de Corpse – 5.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Turn your face up,” Lillian told me.

I did.

She rinsed out my eyes with something.  Liquid streamed down past my temples and ears and the back of my neck.

“Blink, lots.”

I did.

“It’s not helping.”

“Keep blinking,” she said.

I did.  Gradually, the world became clearer.

I gave her a thumbs up.

“Let me know when blinking stops working,” she said.

“We need to focus on Gordon and Mary,” I said.

“We need to win this,” one of the men who’d been with the Brigadier spoke, “We’re being overrun.”

“I’m pretty sure the plague men are immune to poisons, parasites, and diseases,” I said, still blinking.  “They have the firepower to gun down your monsters, and they’re zealous.  Stitched are falling faster than they should, and your specialists, rank-and-file and officers are getting intimidated.”

“This isn’t news.”

“Making sure everyone knows what’s what.  I don’t know what you’ve been doing, cooped up in here.”

“Waging a war.”

“And being overrun,” I echoed him.

It was the Brigadier who stepped in to speak.  “I have to ask.  Was it you who set the fires?”

“No,” I lied.  “They happened.  We used them once they began.  Spread them further.  We felt it was important to divert them, make sure they didn’t have safe ground to fall back to.”

“I see.”

“Sorry,” I said.  “It was a judgment call on our part, seeing how and where they were moving.  I understand if you don’t want to work with me any further.”

I could make out the individual slats of the boards in the arching ceiling, now.

“I don’t think we have any other choice,” the Brigadier said, and there was a curious tone to his voice, as if he’d caught me in the lie, and he was hinting he had, while trying to keep his men from grasping that fact.

I gestured at Lillian, and she rinsed my eyes again.

This time, as I blinked, I lowered my head, looking around.

Helen was sitting on the edge of the table with the maps, close to the fireplace, her feet in Jamie’s lap.  Shipman was sitting at the far end of the table.  The men were all standing.

I wiped at my eyes and temples with my hands, then ran my fingers through my wet hair to get the worst of the cleansing agent out.

I looked down at Melancholy.

“You opened your wound again,” Lillian noted.

I looked down at my side.  The cold rain had washed away a surprising amount of the blood.  There were traces, though, a blob of pinker fabric.

I pulled my raincoat closed.  “We’re surrounded, on the defensive, we have two key people who need immediate attention, and if they find out Melancholy here is dead, then her orders to keep certain individuals alive stop holding water.”

My attention turned momentarily to the Brigadier as I hopped down from the edge of his desk and walked over to Melancholy’s body.  One of the commanding officers was standing over it, another was at the window, peering out.

“You’ve summed it up,” the Brigadier said.  “We need solutions.”

He was being more curt than before.  Had we disappointed?  Or was something else bothering him?

“Thinking,” I said.  “Believe me, I know we need solutions.  Two people I care about dearly are out there, and I don’t know if they’re alive or dead.  The sooner we can get to them, the better.”

I rifled through Melancholy’s pockets, patting her down.  Everything I pulled out found its way to the floor.  Three rings that might have been wedding bands, except they were the wrong metal, threads, buttons, two torn patches with what looked to be cloth badges on them, two photographs, of all things, badly exposed, showing very normal people.  There were also things I expected: a pen, a flask of alcohol, two knives, a tube of something that smelled foul, and three pieces of paper.  The firebombs she’d taken from Gordon were on her belt.

The mementos caught me off guard.  This was a person with keepsakes and history.  People she kept photos of, both men.

I took the belt of firebombs, unbuckling it, and collected the pieces of paper, along with Melancholy’s pen.

After a moment’s hesitation, I grabbed one of the three rings.  Steel, dark, but it had been polished bright where it had been rubbed.  It was a hair too large on my finger, so I moved it to my thumb.

“-the fireplace?” Helen was asking.  I’d been slightly out of earshot.

“Hm?” I asked.

“Up the fireplace.  Escape route.”

“Possibly.  There are no guarantees you won’t be shot when you pop out the top, or that you have any place to go if you aren’t shot,” the Brigadier said.  He gauged the size of the chimney.  “You children could squeeze through, but your escape route doesn’t help any of the rest of us.”

Helen’s face was devoid of compassion as she took in that sentence and continued to stare at him.  He looked away first.

I slapped the papers down in front of Jamie.  Helen craned her head around to look at it.

“What’re these?” Jamie asked.

“Letters in Melancholy’s possession.  Her handwriting.”

He groaned a little, head bowing.

“Can you?”

“I can try,” he said.

“Explain,” the Brigadier said.  His men were looking more antsy, now.

“Forgery,” I said.  “We have some of Melancholy’s handwriting.  Someone in their leadership.”

“There’s a lot wrong with that idea,” the Brigadier said.

Still so negative.  Still curt.  He was upset.  It felt disconnected from the idea that he was losing this battle.  If it had been connected, he would’ve been more vocal during some parts of the conversation thus far, and less vocal during other parts.

“What am I writing?” Jamie asked.

“Brigadier Tylor, sir,” I said, choosing the full title to try and curry favor with the man.  “You get to be Melancholy.  She’s not the direct leader, but she’s next best thing, and she’s in the field, here.  Her orders supercede most others.”

“I can’t order a retreat.  They wouldn’t believe it.”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Unless-” Lillian started.

Heads turned, and she fell silent.

“Go on,” I urged her.

“Superweapon.”

I nodded slowly.

“Westmore doesn’t have a superweapon,” one of the officers said.  “They have to know it doesn’t.  They controlled the city for a long period of time.  They interrogated captives, kept prisoners.  I imagine they tortured and drugged those prisoners.”

I nodded slowly.  “Ordering a retreat and claiming we have a mysterious superweapon is pushing it.  Jamie.  First order.  Written to the vanguard, the front line.  Furthest up.”

“That would be the northwestern point,” the Brigadier commented.  One of the commanders nodded.

“Georgie Madsen,” Jamie said.  “Probably.”

“Go for it,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Shipman asked.  “That it’s him?”

“I read a lot of the correspondence and paperwork that passed over the enemy’s desk, while I was babysitting Ames,” Jamie said.  He was already writing.  “Madsen is the best fit.  Young officer, eager, aggressive.  Had a wife, they were expecting, his wife lost the baby.  He blames the drug for the loss, and now the sterility throws a wry stitch into things, because they can’t try again.  He’s angry.”

“That’s not how it works,” Lillian said.  “The drug.”

“Doesn’t matter, because it matters to him, and it gives him a reason to push to be at the front,” I said.  “Officer Madsen gets a letter from Melancholy.  There’s a superweapon in the mines, with caches of weapons.  Leave a skeleton crew to man the front, other units are coming to reinforce his position shortly, get to the mine shaft by that one gate-”

“Southeastern gate,” Jamie said.

“Have him send some people down.  Even if the superweapon is a hoax, the cache is almost a certainty.  Paranoia on the Crown’s part, after the near-shortage before.”

“Tying them up,” the Brigadier said.

I nodded with vigor.

I was anxious.  I wanted to be gone, and this maneuver wouldn’t be fast.

“Second letter,” I said.

“West gate.  They have to be there,” the Brigadier said.  “They want an escape route with the fires burning behind them, they don’t want to pass us and then get attacked from behind.  It’s the only logical point.”

“Combat fires in the southwestern position,” I said.  “Madsen’s group is secure at the northwest and is being reinforced as we speak.”

The brigadier nodded.  Jamie nodded too.

“Third note.”

“I can only write so much at once,” Jamie said.

“To the command here.  To be passed on to their superior officers.  Melancholy has finished with her task here.  She has Tylor.  Send two coaches, have two men collect the injured children at… damn it.  We were close to here.  Within earshot to hear people shouting about the firefight here.  Plague men came directly at us from…”

“Which direction, Sy?” Jamie asked, voice soft.

“Between the last fires we set and, it had to be a bend in the road, the way foot traffic was.”

“Hereabouts?” Jamie asked, pointing at the map.

I looked, trying to gauge.

“Thereabouts,” I said.  “He and the children are to be brought back here and put in the coaches.  Prisoners of war, and children of important figures.”

“That’s almost a bigger stretch than ‘the rebellion forces should collectively retreat,” Jamie said.  “Almost.”

“Our safety was guaranteed in exchange for information about the weapons in the mine,” I said.

Jamie nodded.

“They may not buy it,” the Brigadier said.  “These missives coming from here?  Having us escorted into the coaches with the assassin remaining behind, unseen?”

“I have an idea,” I said, while still pontificating on what that idea entailed.

Jamie wrote with Melancholy’s pen.  He passed the first paper to me, immediately starting on the second.

The handwriting matched perfectly.  There were individual letters that weren’t in any of her notes, but there were the florid, angular capital letters, even the way the crisp handwriting got messier for words further down the page, as if she’d lost patience with the neat handwriting style and started scribbling out the words instead.  A habit in both of the papers I’d given Jamie.

“Keep in mind,” I said, “If her handwriting gets gradually sloppier, that’s going to carry over across the three messages.  If they check it, we don’t want that little oddity to raise alarm bells.  Prey instinct.”

Without looking up, Jamie crumpled up the paper he was writing on and started on a second.  “This is not a strength of mine, Sy.  I haven’t practiced it.”

“Do your best,” I said.  “Helen.”

Helen beamed a smile at me.

“You’re Melancholy, for our little task here.”

“Wow,” she said, smiling wider.  “How does that work?”

“Well, for one thing, we can be glad her hair covers so much of her face,” I said.

She nodded.  “I’ll need a knife.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” the Brigadier said.

“You will,” I told him.  “Knife?”

He hesitated.

Still that aura of negativity.  Doubt.

“Please, sir.  We’re short on time.  Even if for your own preservation, we can’t have Melancholy’s meeting with you extend too long.”

The man lifted a foot, and pulled a combat knife from the side of his boot.  He extended it handle-first.

I took it.

“Lillian,” I said.

Lillian trotted to catch up with Helen and I.

“You want to cut off her hair?” Lillian asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.  “I figure it’s easier to maintain her hairstyle if we just take it all in one go.”

Lillian blanched a little.

I smiled at her.  “What?  You’ve poisoned people.  You’ve seen people die.  This is cake.”

Helen made an amused little sound.  I handed her the knife, and she bent down.

She proceeded to scalp our assassin, knife following the hairline.

In the doing, she revealed Melancholy’s eyes.  A little milky in color, with sockets that looked too splayed out, the ridges of cheekbone and brow too accented.  She might have looked skeletal, but it was more that her skeleton was an odd shape.  Her jawline, too, was strange.  Akin to a snake’s.

Something about it, the large eyes, the disproportionate features, the odd shape of her head, minus half of her scalp, it made me think of a newborn baby.  Blind, orally focused, agape, face twisted in emotion she wouldn’t be able to express again.

Hadn’t she said something about how we were all brought into the world?

She’d been more focused on the relationships than on the fact that we came into the world bloody and powerless, though.

I rotated the ring around my thumb with one finger as I looked down at her.

“Bloody,” Helen observed.  “Wouldn’t do if I had blood running down my face.”

“Rinse it,” I told her.  “Lillian, use some powder or something, get the bleeding to stop.  Then makeup.  This is your chance to shine.”

“What makes you think I have makeup?”

“You’ve been wearing some.  You were wearing it at the school the last time I saw you there.  I know you have something to cover up bruises and cuts.  Unless you were a twit and used it all up.”

Lillian sighed, exasperated.  “You’re a real charmer, Sy.”

“I know you’re not a twit, Lil,” I said.  “I just really want to help Gordon and Mary.”

She nodded.  “Me too.”

We were pulling it all together.  There was just one thing we needed.

I looked at the fireplace tender, and I felt a moment of doubt.

No.

“Shipman,” I said.

She looked a little wary as she turned her full attention to me.

“Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”

“You’re learning,” Jamie murmured, still writing.  He’d scrapped two drafts since Helen started scalping.

“We need legs for our new Melancholy.”

It was a bad joke in stage plays, one child atop another’s shoulders, trying to be an adult.  But Melancholy had a heavy black raincoat, and Helen was an actress.  She already wore Melancholy’s scalp.

“You’ve got a hump,” I observed.

Helen contorted, shifting position.

“Pressure, ow, pressure!” Shipman raised her voice a little.

“Shh!” I hissed.  “You can damn well cope.”

“She’s digging individual toes in between my ribs for a foothold.  I’m allowed to say it hurts!”

“Bring your knees in,” I said.

The bits poking out beneath the armpit receded.

“Better,” Shipman said.

“Don’t care,” I said.

“Too tall,” Jamie observed.

Helen dropped her height an inch.

“Too short,” Jamie said.

Helen raised her head a half-inch.

Exemplary control over her own body.  Not perfect, but enough to make the difference.  To sell this in a way that wouldn’t normally work.

“You need the mouth,” I said.

“I don’t have the teeth, and I can’t do the voice,” Helen said.  “Unless you want to get a file?”

“Ibott would kill us,” I said.  “Don’t talk, don’t open your mouth.”

She nodded.

Then she pulled at muscles in her face.  A rictus grin, too-wide, until it looked like her mouth would tear open.

It wasn’t perfect.  The nose was wrong.

But people didn’t look at noses.

“Officers, Brigadier,” I said.  “Kneel.”

I could tell the instruction didn’t go over well.  These weren’t men who had knelt for anyone but the Crown.

I got a kind of perverse joy out of it, watching as they knelt.

“In a line,” I said.  “That pissed-off look on your faces?  Keep it.”

They arranged their positions, so they were all in a line, down the center of the room.  Jamie, Lillian, and the firetender took up position just in front of them.

‘Melancholy’ and I approached the door.  Shipman was slow, carrying Helen.  She didn’t complain any further, though.

“Good girl,” Helen purred.  “Keep going.”

“I don’t need the encouragement,” Shipman said.

“Pat on the head for you,” Helen said.

I opened the door a little, caught it with my foot, and then kicked it open, trying to make it look more like ‘Melancholy’ had opened it than I had.

She stood in the doorway, so the door remained propped open, and I threw myself forward, stumbling to the point of nearly falling down the stairs.

The people on the street were far enough away they’d infer I’d been pushed or kicked.

I looked at the Academy forces at the walls on either side, defending the position, ready to open fire.  I moved my head as if I was looking past everyone and everything, blind.

“Soldiers?  If you’re there, throw down your guns,” I said.

I could see them hesitate.

“That’s an order!  Throw them down!” Tylor bellowed, from inside.

As I walked down the stairs, I could hear the guns being dropped to the ground.

That sound and the presence of Melancholy in the doorway lent me an air of legitimacy.

I stumbled down the stairs, missing the occasional step, and trying to step down to another step when I reached a short landing.  I made my way down to the street.

“Someone in charge?” I asked.  “The assassin sent me.  Someone?  Anyone?”

The mail was snatched out of my hands.  A plague man had it.  He had pocks and boils breaking up tattoos on his neck and hands, military tattoos.  The sort that almost counted as medals people gave themselves, or to memorialize the dead.

Don’t read it.  Don’t read the others’ letters.

“What are these?”

“She said, um, one for you, and then one for Madsen, and one for the forces at the west gate.  Orders from the top.”

The man made a face.  I saw only through my peripheral vision, as my ‘blind’ gaze stared a hole through his chest.

He didn’t like Melancholy, I realized.

Funny how it worked.

“Is she coming down to join the rest of us?” the man asked.

“I only- I was told to bring the letters.  I can’t see what’s going on,” I said.

He opened one of the letters, then hunched over.  “Damn rain.  Ink’s running.”

I remained silent.

“The senior officers are being taken as prisoners of war,” he said.  He turned his head.  “Two coaches.  We’re going to be rid of the ugly bitch, and not a moment too soon.  Send runners with these letters to Madsen and Hughey.”

Gordon and Mary, I thought.

He wasn’t giving the order to go and find them.

The simple, stupid reality of humans.  There was only so much they could process.  We’d given them too much information to dwell on.

He’d completely glossed over that part.

If I said anything else, it put everything in jeopardy.  Gave them cause to be suspicious, to pay attention to me, the lowly messenger…

I swallowed hard.

Had to take the risk.

“My friends,” I said.  “They were with me, and she hurt them.  She said, Tylor made her promise to help them.”

I stared at the ground as I said it.  Hoping, hoping.

“Mm,” the man said.  A single syllable response.  Not even a word.

I had a knife and I had a firebomb.  If it came down to it, I’d stab him and make a break for it, using fire to delay pursuers.

I wasn’t sure what I’d do at that point, but I couldn’t do nothing.

Come on.  Basic sense.  You can’t go against her deal with Tylor, or you jeopardize everything.

“Vic.  Head over in the direction of the bank.  Opposite end of the street, behind the houses.  If the fires aren’t too bad.  Bring someone to help carry.  Supposed to be two injured kids.  Related to bigwig doctors.”

I sagged in relief.

Relief or no, I didn’t say or do anything to draw attention to myself.  The rain poured down, battering the paper the plague man held gripped in his fist.  Gunshots and explosions sounded off to the north end of the city.

The fighting had stopped here, but the war hadn’t left the area.  The air smelled like smoke and blood, and there were more people staring off into space than there were people talking.  Everyone in their own individual worlds.

I could remember seeing that look in the plague men’s eyes back in the city.  A part of them missing, perhaps.  Was it a casualty of the transformation, or of previous battles?

What did it mean, to be so changed?  They’d become the perfect soldiers for this ugly battlefield, but it was a change that made it awfully hard to go home, when all was said and done.

I’d talked about the importance of the fact that these people wanted to fight.  They wanted justice and revenge.  The Academy forces didn’t want either.  They wanted to return to their ordinary lives.  It made a difference, when push came to shove.

Was there a chance that these men who had been made into soldiers would want to keep fighting, when ordinary, sane people would want the war to end?

We’d never identified the doctor responsible for creating these transformations.  He was likely to be elsewhere, making more.

An awful lot of men with little to look forward to, except the expectation of death and blood.

I stood and waited in the rain, shivering, until the coaches arrived.  Two men perched on the back, each holding on with one hand, their other hands wrapped around Gordon and Mary, respectively.

Mary’s eyes were open, and her expression changed as she saw me.  Gordon was moving, but very weakly.

I allowed myself to feel relief, finally, but I didn’t let it show.

Three commanding officers, the Brigadier, and all of the Lambs found their way into the coaches, hands and ankles bound.  Two plague men rode up top of each coach, and another was inside the cab of one of the other coaches, but there was room on the bench.  I was the last one into the crowded space of the first coach’s interior.

Well, not the last one.

Melancholy made her way down the stairs.  I didn’t stare, instead turning away as she drew ever nearer, but I imagined the challenge.  Shipman, not the largest of us, but sixteen nonetheless, with a burden on her back and shoulders, walking down wet stairs.

One stumble, one fall, and the ruse was ended.

I reached out for Mary’s hair, and stroked it, pushing it out of the way of her face.

She smiled at me, her eyes half-lidded.

There was a slight collision as ‘Melancholy’ reached the door.

“You’re not riding up top?” the plague man who’d taken the letter asked.

She couldn’t talk, not without revealing her voice, or the fact that her teeth were normal.

Instead, she chanced a look in his direction, giving him a better view of her face.

A sneer of contempt.

She lurched into the cab of the coach.  The door slammed behind her.  The other coach’s door slammed as well.

I didn’t dare breathe, my ears peeled for any sign that they’d realized or started to doubt matters.  That they were angry and would start an argument.

The door was closed, and all was silent, but for Gordon’s labored breathing.

Were we free and clear?

My heart pounded.

The coach set to moving.

Free and clear.

We stopped at a fork in the road.

The able-bodied officers of the Academy’s forces hauled the plague men out of the vehicle, leaving them at the side of the road.  Even with many of us being children, we’d had the weight of numbers in a cramped space.  After that, the ones up top had been caught and either strangled or shot.

I watched how Jamie stared down at the bodies.  But we had other things to focus on.

“You know the way?” I asked the Brigadier.

“Of course.”

Jamie spoke, not taking his eyes off the dead plague men, “Back around the side roads, up to the north end of Westmore.  You can appear at the rear of our own forces, and lead them with knowledge of what the enemy is likely doing.  Their forces will have been pulled back from the front.  You can flank and destroy, then use the momentum.”

“Or command a retreat,” the Brigadier said.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

“I haven’t decided,” he admitted.  “We’ll see.  I don’t think Westmore is salvageable.  But it may not be for them, either.”

I nodded.

There was a pause.

Nothing more to be said, except-

He extended a hand.

Again, my eyebrows went up.

“You made the best of a bad situation,” he told me.  About the best compliment I could get, given the circumstances.

I took his hand and shook it.

“We’ll be going now,” he said, moving over to the other coach, which was already slightly turned to the northernmost road in the fork.  “Lost time is life spent.  Especially in wartime.”

“It won’t always be,” I said.

He gave me a sad half-smile.

“I really believe it won’t be,” I said.

“That there won’t be war, or that we’ll one day have time to spare?” he asked.

“Is there an answer I can give that will make you stop giving me that pitying, condescending look?” I asked.  Then I remembered, “Sir?”

“Good luck,” he said, with a kind of finality.

I nodded.

The words were on the tip of my tongue.  I wanted to ask, but I didn’t dare.  Yet I knew that having no answer would bother me for a long time.

Why were you upset that we rescued you?

“You too,” was all I said.

I climbed into the other coach.  An officer rode on top, wearing a plague man’s hat ad coat.  He was the only one not going with the Brigadier, and he kicked things into motion.

I settled in next to Mary, and let my hand rest on her forehead.  She was a little too warm.  Opposite me, Gordon had his head in Shipman’s lap, feet on Jamie’s.

“Was just tellin’ the others,” she said, sleepily.  “Our misadventures.  Wish we’d done better.”

“We did pretty well, circumstances allowing,” I said.  “We’ll wrap this up neatly.”

“If that sniper who shot you doesn’t get us,” she mumbled.

I looked up, in the direction of the coach driver.  My finger rotated the ring at my thumb.  “He’ll be fine.  Flying enemy colors.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Is this really how we want to operate?” Jamie asked.

“Hm?” I asked.

“Killing those who show mercy and heal us, abusing the terms of surrender, wearing enemy colors?”

“And hair!” Helen said.  She was at Mary’s feet, the hair in her lap.

Yeah,” I said.  “I mean, isn’t it?  We do what we have to, to make this work.  I don’t know where you’d draw the lines, otherwise.”

“I think you know where the line is, Sy,” Jamie said.  “I think you deliberately choose to cross it.  Sometimes when you don’t have to.”

“I like that side of him,” Mary said, sleepy, thoroughly under the effects of the painkillers. “I like Sy.”

“I like him too,” Jamie said, voice firm, “But I think you’re a bad influence on him.  You and Gordon both.”

Mary snorted.

“I mean it.  I don’t know that I like what Sy becomes, when he’s with you two.”

“I’m not that suggestible,” I said.

“You are the exemplar of suggestibility,” Jamie said.  “It’s your strongest trait.  You absorb and you learn more effectively than any of us.  I know because I know exactly what’s happened in the past.  I know who you’re with when your behavior changes.  I see the patterns.”

“Using my suggestion against me?” I asked.  I’d told him to watch for trends.

“To your benefit, Sy,” he said.  “Not against you.”

The rest of the coach was so very quiet.  Everyone was hanging on to every word, and nobody was jumping in, to defend me, or in the case of Gordon or Mary, to defend themselves.

I nodded.  “So I’m just a composite of influences around me.”

“No,” he said.  “There are definitely things that make you you.  Some I’ve puzzled out.  Some I haven’t.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Your earnestness.  Your hope.”

“Sure,” I said.  “Give me a few years, I’ll turn as sour as any adult.”

“Your eagerness to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others.”

“That’s not how I’d put it.”

“And, as I’m reminded with the plan to off the rebellion doctor, your insistence on attacking the people who are kindest to you.”

I shrugged.  I’d deflected the last two comments, but I felt like I couldn’t with this one, without being dismissive of the weight it seemed to carry with Jamie.

He was too gentle a soul.

“I’m suggestible, like you said,” I said, eyes on Jamie’s knees.  “My oldest memories are of days and weeks of people consoling me, telling me it’s going to be fine.  I’m so brave, I’m so kind.  They’ll give me things.  I just have to stop crying, stop struggling, stop making trouble.”

I raised my hands, gesturing, “Kindness, then unbearable pain.  Kindness, unbearable pain.  You can do that to a slug and it’s going to leave a lasting impression.  People are kind to me, then horribleness follows.  No.  I’m done with that.  I know what lies beneath the surface.”

Mary, head still in my lap, reached up and gave my arm a rub.

Lillian’s eyes were shiny.

Shipman, in stark contrast, looked like she wanted to be far, far away from here.  Her attention was outside the window.  Even with Gordon’s head in her lap, she didn’t look like she was connected or present at all.

Their relationship was over.  I knew it.  The war, or Gordon’s actions, or the danger, something had driven a wedge.

“But we’re kind to you, Sy,” Jamie said.  “Aren’t we?”

“You are,” I said, without hesitation.  “But-“

I’d started speaking again, somehow in the expectation that someone would jump in and finish the sentence for me.  Then I realized I didn’t want them to.

“But?” Lillian asked.

“But we aren’t people?” Jamie asked.

“That’s not what I meant.  It sounds wrong, like it’s being twisted around to mean the opposite of what it means.  You’re…”

I floundered.  It was a rare thing for me.

“You’re better than people?”

My heart was cold in my chest.  I felt like I’d somehow stumbled on the worst combination of words to say, and I’d put everything in jeopardy.

Nobody was talking.  Body language was weird.

Jamie rose from his seat.

He crossed to my side, then nudged for me to move over.  Mary and I did a little bit of reshuffling to make room.  Even so, he was a touch squeezed between me and the door.

“Do that more,” Jamie said.

“Compliment you?  Talk about your superiority?”

“Be upfront.  Say what Sy is thinking.”

There was no way to say anything to that.  It would have felt forced.  I was left mute, only able to nod.

He elbowed me, then turned his attention to Mary.  “Didn’t make you too uncomfortable?”

“Nope,” she said.

He reached over and began fixing her hair, pushing it out of her face.

“You going to be good to go?” I asked.

“I’ve fixed what I could, but breaks are breaks,” Lillian said.  “No hard exertion.”

“I’m good to go,” Gordon said.  He worked his way to a sitting position, making use of the space Jamie had vacated to move his legs.

His hand was trembling.  Phantom pains, again?  It shouldn’t have been so soon.

“I’m not very fast, but I can help,” Mary said.

I nodded.

It was cozy, squeezed up against Jamie, Mary’s head in my lap, the others around me.  I almost could have fallen asleep.

But as I looked out the window, I could see Whitney.

I reached out past Jamie’s face and knocked on the glass.

The coach slowed, then stopped.

We slowly made our way out of the coach, many of us hurt, offering help where we could.  Only Shipman remained behind, with the driver.  She avoided our gaze.

We had a job to finish.  Westmore was a wash.  Even if our forces won every fight that followed, it would be chalked off as a loss.  A detriment to the Crown.

But the rebellion wasn’t in a position to commit halfheartedly, and Cynthia hadn’t been in or around the tents where I’d been brought for treatment.  She was still in Whitney.

Vulnerable.

Barely illuminated by the rising sun, we made our way down toward the city.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 5.x – Twig

Enemy (Arc 5)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Cynthia leaned back.  “You’re sure?”

Sanguine nodded.

“You did the right thing, coming back,” she said.  “No signal from Melancholy or the others?”

Sanguine shook his head.  He smiled with a mouth that was too small for his face.  “It happens.  We have very strong personalities.  We get caught up in our activities.”

“If you aren’t worried, then I won’t worry,” Cynthia said.  “But those fires… a fireproof creation, perhaps?  Maybe more than one?”

“It could be.”

“Or it could be the superweapon we already know of.  The Lambs.”

Sanguine smiled.  One of his eyes, the size of a woman’s fist, remained fixed on Cynthia.  The other turned to one side, peering out the window, past the rain-streaked glass and into the barely-lit street.  He focused and unfocused his gaze on three different levels, telescoping his vision.

Too dark.

He switched focuses and stresses.  The world took on different tones, textures, and hues, as he focused on a different spectrum of light.  He adjusted again, and the darkness was illuminated, cast in white and black.

Across the street, in the shadows between a shack and a house, a rat cleaned itself with its tongue and the water from the rain.

He snapped his eye back to Cynthia, watching the world return to focus.

“What are you doing next?” she asked.  She was gathering paperwork together.  Maps and letters.

“Me, personally?” he asked.  “Or us?”

“I’d like to know the answers to both.”

“Speaking for myself, I don’t know,” he said.  His eyes remained fixed on her face, but he altered his focus, until his peripheral vision was sharper than what he could see in the center of his field of vision.  He could see her cleavage as clearly as if he was nestled in it.  The pores, the tiniest, fairest of hairs, the drop of sweat that traced its way from her neck down to her collarbone, then down into the alluring shadows that her blouse cast.  His smile widened.  “The smoke is too thick.  I might wander the outskirts.  But I thought you should know about the fire, and I wasn’t going to get much for my time.  I won’t, really.  Even if the fires are extinguished, the smoke will still rise.”

“Then stay,” she said, her attention still on the paperwork.  She was reading a letter, before deciding to tear it up and throw it aside.  She met his eyes.

He’d cocked his head to one side.

“Best case scenario, Melancholy comes back with Choleric and the prisoners of war my boss wanted spared.  Worst case scenario, your colleagues are dead, and you expose yourself by being out there alone.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t offend you, I hope, with the idea that you’ve lost the others.”

“I’m hard to offend.”

“Alright.  Keep an eye on things here.  If you can kill any of those damnable spiders, I’ll thank you for it.  Keep an eye out for trouble, watch the roads.  From what you describe, they’re too pinned down for a counterattack, but I don’t like relying on luck.”

“You’re scared,” he observed.  He could see the softest, most vulnerable parts of her, the base of the throat over the pulse, moving faintly in response to the increased heartbeat.  She was pretty in such a natural way, but she’d gone to lengths to make herself prettier still.  That she did it because it was just another tool or a weapon for her to employ was something special.  Yet… “You’re packing up to run.”

“Concerned.  Whatever the cause of it, the fire means you can’t enter Westmore, I can’t send reinforcements, meager as they would be, and I can’t carry out my remaining gambits.  I have no control over what happens next.  I have no reason to stay.”

“That is an excellent rationale,” he said.

She gave him a sharp look.  He cocked his head again.

“I preferred dealing with Melancholy,” she said, sighing.  “And that’s saying something.”

“She is much better at dealing with people,” Sanguine said, offering his version of an ear-to-ear grin, though even at that point, his mouth was no wider than another person’s might be when at rest.

“Thank you, Sanguine.  If Pock is up, you can tell him he should get some sleep,” she said.  She made it a dismissal.

He gave her a lazy salute, then headed for the door, his eyes pointing out to either side as he passed between the two immortal soldiers who guarded the door, then snapping back to point forward after they were behind him.  Scarred and infested with parasites from head to toe, they were as stern and silent as he wasn’t.

He walked away with a jaunt, humming, his long rifle banging against his calf and shoulder.

He searched the streets.  It was nice and quiet.  The world was brightening, the sun rising, casting long shadows.

There.  A movement beneath a building.

A stray cat slept on top of a barrel under the awnings of a shop.  It had been targeted by one of the spiders.  The spider had only started to work on the sleeping cat’s tail.

He knelt, raising his rifle, one eye closed, the other looking down the sights.

He adjusted for the speed with which the bullet would fall, raising the tip.

Squeeze the trigger.

The gun was loud, always was.  Not that the spider heard in time.  Sanguine rose to his feet in a quick, steady motion.  Keeping with habit, always start moving right after shooting.  One eye watched where he was going.  The other watched the target.  He made it one step-

-The spider was obliterated.  The cat startled, waking up and dashing off aimlessly.

The tail would heal.

He could remember being newly made, and wanting a cat of his own.  Having it with him on a good day, sitting in his lap while he sat cross legged, watching for a victim, purring now and then?

He swaggered his way to the labs on the Lanyard Avenue corner, pausing to admire the crown of trees growing out of the tops of the four walls, before he let himself in.

The building had been a factory once, making use of imports from Westmore, shaping iron into nails, if he had to guess from what remained.  Most of the machines and tools had been carried out, and the place retooled.  There was a clear space down the middle, a path drawn out without paint or tape or railings, only convention and accepted practice.  To the left of the cleared space were tables where stitched could be made, with Stitched ‘sleeping’ against the wall, hooked up to a flickering battery with things swimming inside.  To the right was Edwin Grahl’s lab.  The man was absent, and his work was left half-complete.  The pieces of another giant stitched arm.  Grahl hadn’t been seen since sundown.  He would have seen off his first cannon-wielding giant, then gone to sleep, secure enough his work would suffice for Cynthia’s purposes.

There were two sorts of people that Sanguine would see tonight.  People who had slept through the night, like Grahl, and people who hadn’t.  He wasn’t sure which one Pock was.

Though originally a factory, the building had been modified.  Crews of stitched and grown material had been used to throw together a second floor and a roof, producing a second tier to the building within the span of a day.  This tier was home to three more laboratories.  One to the left, one to the right, and a third at the end, no walls separating them.  Left and right were left unoccupied, but Pock was in the one at the end.

Pock was flanked by two identical women that stood seven feet tall, each one about ten stone at best, with long faces, folds at the eyes making them look Asian, their hair straight and black.  Their spidery fingers were the most animated part of them, the rest of their movements so slow they looked like they were moving underwater.  The pair took turns handing him tools as he requested them.  He made an incision, and slid a slice of fatty tissue into the cut.

“Ah, you,” Pock said, almost derisive.  Almost.

“Me.  Cynthia Imlay would like you to know that she won’t be needing your services tonight.  There are fires prohibiting access to the city.  I saw with my own eyes.”

Sanguine smirked as if he’d made a joke.

Pock stopped.  He heaved out a sigh.  “Are the prisoners of war still due to arrive?”

“Very likely.  My colleague is on it.  But there’s no need for haste,” Sanguine said.

Pock nodded.  He raised his hands, and the experiments on either side pulled off his gloves.  “I’d complain, but it’ll be good to let the swelling subside, and see how close I’ve managed to get.”

The man on the table slept, his face subtly different from one side to the next.  Old enough to have grayed hair, his facial hair was cut to have only a beard, no mustache.

“He looks real,” Sanguine admired, studying pores and finer structures.  There were differences from an ordinary man, but not ones a typical eye would catch.

“He is real,” Pock said, offended.

“For something made in a vat, he looks human.  And he’s not even a clone.”

“He’s close to being one.  I had the notes from a colleague.  We even had two conversations over the phone.  I gave him my own notes.”

Sanguine leaned closer, cocking his head until it was lined up with the man’s.  “You have a reference image?”

“A painting,” Pock said, pointing.

Sanguine nodded.  He straightened.  “Beautiful thing, this.  To come out of war, no less.”

“Mm,” Pock said.

“War is amazing like that, isn’t it?  Nothing drives us to be better as much as a gun to our head does.  With the western Crown States in the midst of a civil war, we have thirty-thousand guns to thirty-thousand heads.  The world is going to change in the wake of this war.”

“Of course it is,” Pock said.  “We’re going to uproot the Academy from these states, take the clutching fingers the Crown is using to grip it and break every one, until we can retake this part of the country for ourselves.”

Sanguine broke out into a laugh, genuine and hearty.

“Yes,” he said.  “That sounds wonderful.”

Pock wasn’t looking half as impassioned now.  The man had gone cold.

Was the laugh too much?  Sanguine cocked his head.

“Was there anything else?”

Sanguine shrugged one shoulder.  “You can rest if you need to.  The prisoners of war will be here by midday, if not sooner.  We won’t lose anything if we start late.”

“Uh huh.  Will you be shooting that damnable gun of yours in earshot?”

“It’s likely.  I’m supposed to look out for trouble.  There are some spiders lingering, at the very least.”

“No sleep for me, then,” Pock said, grim.

Sanguine bowed a little, then saluted in the most insulting way he could.

He passed downstairs, out the door, and locked it behind him.

His head turned.  He studied the surroundings, adjusting the focus of his eyes as he did it.  The changes in sharpness and softness and detail rotated through a series of possibilities, until it looked and felt as if his eyes were hearts, beating in his eye sockets.  The surroundings throbbed in a way, and he could get a sense of dimension, of texture.  His visual memory was acute, and as he took a few steps forward, searching, he could get a sense of where the ground rose and fell, all the way down the length of the street.

The eyes were such an important sense to humans, but the eyes had stopped developing long ago, because the developments were so very unnecessary.  When they’d made his eyes, they’d turned to sea creatures for inspiration.  Even his face was a bit fishy, he liked to think.

He smiled.

He could see footprints in the mud.  He could gauge their size, follow their path, see how the light rainfall distorted the water that had collected in them, and even guess at the amount of muddy water within, water that would have been squeezed out by the weight of the foot setting down.  His eyes pointed in two different directions and adjusted until he could compare both places at once, his own footprints from a minute ago against this very small footprint.  The amount of water suggested that the person had passed by a moment after he had.

He was amused by the fact that they had probably been watching him, yet he hadn’t seen them.

One child.  A Lamb?

It took him a minute to walk to the set of tracks.  He pulled his gun around, holding it in both hands, though he didn’t point it at anything.

Whitney wasn’t a city meant for warfare and the military.  The layout wasn’t organized in a way that made it easy to defend and hard to take.  The military leadership, Cynthia included, had wanted to situate themselves at the center, at the heart of things, except the buildings there were mostly shops.  They’d changed the buildings here and there, and made compromises elsewhere.

The footprints led to one such compromise.  A shop with living quarters above it.

He slowly turned, taking in the surroundings.  Looking, searching for more errant children.

He slipped a bullet into his gun, then fired blindly at the sky.  He did it again, then again, then again.

It was Pock who stepped out of the Lanyard Labs, swearing up a storm.  His assistants followed him.

“The hell do you think you’re doing, you imbecile!?”

Sanguine held up a hand, index finger raised.

“What?  You’re telling me to wait now?  You wake half the city, and-”

“Can you shoot?”

“What?”

“Shoot.  Are you able?”

“Yes.  Of course.”

Sanguine nodded, his eyes still roaming.  He drew a gun from inside his jacket and tossed it to Pock’s assistant, who caught it.

Pock’s attitude changed.  “What’s going on?”

“You are coming with me.  We’re entering this building.  A spy is lurking within.”

“And why would I put myself in close proximity to a spy?” Pock asked, derisive.

“Because the tracks suggest a limp, making this one the most obvious target,” Sanguine said, “And because there are five more close by.  If I leave you alone, you’ll be dead before I step outside again.”

Pock didn’t have a ready answer for that.

Sanguine reached into his coat, then affixed a blade to his rifle.  He took his time securing the bayonet, using a key to tighten the banding, before slipping the key into a notch to secure it’s place on the barrel.

“The others.  If there’s that much danger, then-”

“Cynthia will have heard the shots and thought there was something unusual about it.  She knows there’s danger.”

“You’re sure?  Because she-”

“I’ve seen her fight.  She’s the rare sort of capable.”

“Are you done interrupting me?”

“Yes.  Because you must be exceedingly quiet,” Sanguine said.  “Or you may die, sir.”

Pock fell silent.

Sanguine smiled as he approached the door.  He nudged it open with one toe.  “Leave your assistants outside.  They’ll make too much noise.”

He adjusted to the darkness with a speed and facility that matched poor Pock’s ability and quickness in blinking.

Dusty.  The store hadn’t been cleaned since the commanding officer had taken up residence upstairs.  Light streamed from the window above the stairs.

Another adjustment this time.  Focusing on light, contrast.

The specks of dust almost glowed, as he focused on the way they caught the light.  Fireflies in darkness, swirling, dancing.

The swirling was more intense further up the stairs.  His quarry had passed by more than a minute ago, but the air still stirred, just a little.

And, halfway up the stairs, he noted a wire.

Not meant for people giving chase or coming upstairs.  For someone going down.

A just-in-case measure, was it?  If the target got away and ran for the front door?

He approached the stairs, touching the blade of the bayonet to the wire.

Movement.  Slight.

He leaned over the railing, repeating the touch.

An empty flower vase on a little stand beneath the stairs moved in response.  The razor thread wound lightly around the railing, extended down to the vase.  If disturbed, the vase would fall.

Because of the limp.  A lack of security in his or her own ability?

Was it the boy he’d shot the previous day?

“Assassin,” he murmured.  He couldn’t hold back his excitement.

Pock made a face, quizzical.

“Not a spy.  An assassin,” he clarified.  “Take the vase, Pock.”

Pock did as he was told.  Good man.  Sanguine turned the rifle upside-down and used the sharp end of the bayonet blade to cut the wire.

He gestured for Pock to follow, watching the movement of the dust in the air as he ascended the stairs.

He saw the way the swirl of dust danced down the hallway, leading to a room at the end.

He gestured for Pock to stop, this time.  His feet fell on the sides of the hallway, not the center, and he transferred his weight slowly.  His body had suffered in the same set of treatments made to capitalize on his eyes.  He wasn’t strong.  He was sensitive to the heat and the cold, which were bad traits for a sniper who would otherwise want to remain still in poor weather for long periods of time.  But that same degree of sensitivity let him sense the creaks as they started, shift his weight away, move the foot to the next few floorboards, and try again.

He was silent enough that he could hear Pock more than he heard himself.

He stopped at the doorway.  He could hear whisperings, two voices.

A girl and a man.

His movement noiseless and smooth, he leaned his head forward, peering past the doorway.  Nothing so sudden to draw focus.

The girl was straddling the officer, who was in bed, wearing his pyjamas.  Her knees were pressing his arms down, but he was undoubtedly strong enough to throw her off.  The wire she had around his throat was keeping the man still.  She held it with one hand, the wire wound around the handle of a knife.  The other hand was on the headboard, so she could lean forward, her face inches from his.  She was wearing a raincoat over a dress with lace at the ends.  Twelve or thirteen years old, ribbons in her brown hair.

But she had the eyes of a killer.  Her pupils were contracted to sharp points.

Sanguine stepped forward, thrusting.  The floor creaked.

The girl moved, rolling to one side.  The wire unspooled from the handle, and Sanguine lunged for it, using the sheer length of the rifle to try and get the point of the bayonet’s blade under it.

She saw, and she moved, turning so her own body pressed against the wire, while her hand pulled it down, flush against the bedspread, while it cinched tighter around the officer’s neck.  It took Sanguine a second to turn the bayonet around, slash at the wire.

But she was already moving, taking advantage of the moment’s pause.  There was a nightstand on the far side of the bed.  She heaved it over, and the cord went tighter still, digging into the corner of the bed.  She’d wound the wire around the drawer or ornamental bit of the piece of furniture, and now she used the weight of it.  The blade’s point dragged against woolen covers and sheets, but not deep enough to cut wire.

Sanguine threw himself forward to get a better angle.  The only place the wire wasn’t digging into the bed was next to the man’s neck.  He found the right position, pulling the blade along the wire rather than sawing or pushing, aware that his quarry was heaving the window open, casting one look over her shoulder, eye glinting-

The thin wire snapped where the blade had cut at it, going slack.  Sanguine was only dimly aware of the way the blood welled out from where the wire had dug into flesh.  Too much, too fast.  No arterial spurts, but enough blood that the man was almost guaranteed to die.

“Pock!” Sanguine called out.

Without waiting for a response, he hurdled over the bed, going to the open window, thrusting the gun’s point and the blade through, followed by his head and one arm, eyes pointing in either direction.

She was at the side, climbing over to the front of the building.  The eaves.  Her eyes were already on him.  She’d seen the gun’s point emerge.  Saw what he was going to do next.

He wanted to see what she had planned, and it wasn’t like he was going to do something different.

He slapped the gun against the side of the building, aiming, squeezing-

Sanguine saw the movement, the tensing muscle, and relaxed his grip.  She threw herself back and away, pulling her raincoat up and over her head.

He followed her, watching her lift her raincoat up, so it would catch on the edge of the gutter for the next house over.  She now gripped the inside of the sleeves, while the middle of the raincoat looped over.  She let the raincoat sleeves turn inside-out, controlling her descent.

He moved the gun over, aiming, so he could shoot her the moment she was in the air, when no amount of agility or cleverness would let her move to either side.

Except she hauled down on one sleeve of the raincoat, changing the angle of her descent a fraction.  In the final moment before she let go of the raincoat, she swung a bit to one side, letting go.

He adjusted his aim, ready to hit her as she hit the ground, two or three feet to the left of where she had originally been planning.  He pulled the trigger this time.

She hit the ground with a stagger.  The wood of the porch railing beside her exploded into splinters.

She flashed him a white-toothed grin before half-spinning, half-stumbling around the corner of the porch, ducking too low for him to have a clear shot.

He smiled.

He loved it when they were clever.

He pulled away from the window.  There was no point, now.

“I can’t save him,” Pock said.  “If I had my kit-”

“Alright,” Sanguine said.  He wasn’t surprised.  He crossed the room to look the terrified man in the eyes.  He gave the man a light slap on the cheek.  “You.  The girl was asking questions.”

The man sputtered, spit, not blood.  “Please help.”

“You heard the doctor,” Sanguine said.  “We can’t.  What was she asking?”

The man was breathing hard.  He had that animal look in his eyes.  A horse in panic.

Sad, coming from a soldier.

“Was she asking about Cynthia?”

The man’s attention clarified a moment.

“She was?”

The man nodded slightly, before something reminded him of his present circumstances.  The panic returned.  His eyes were unfocused.

“They split up,” Sanguine said.  “Now they’re going to converge.  I need to find them as they do.”

“What?  They were going to do this to me?”

“Probably,” Sanguine said, smiling.  “I like them.  Nightmarish little pricks, aren’t they?  The girl was wounded and threw herself off the side of the building.  Must have hurt like the dickens.”

“I- what?”

“Come now, sir,” Sanguine said.  His blood was pumping, he felt almost drugged.  “You can’t be so surprised.  You’ve dealt with monsters before.”

He stood, backing away from the bed, cocking his head to one side as he studied the dying commander.

He pointed the rifle at the man, who was too out of his senses to even recognize the threat.

Thrusting, he drove the blade’s point into the roof of the man’s mouth, and into the brain.  The man jerked, struggled for a moment, and then abruptly died.

“Good god!” Pock said.

“The key parts of the brain should be intact,” Sanguine said, raising his voice to be heard as he walked away.  “I’m going, you stay.”

“What if they come back!?”  Pock reached the railing by the stairwell and leaned over.

“They won’t.  They can’t.  They’ll be striking at key targets before fleeing!” Sanguine called out.

He pushed the door open, eyes adjusting for distant targets before he was even outside.

Cynthia.

She could handle her own.  He knew that.

The sole building that was toward the center of the town that was also fit for the rebellion forces to use was a mason’s workshop.  Stone walls, tall, spacious, it could take a hit from a bomb without crumbling into tinder and dust.  Cynthia had changed the location of her headquarters from the theater after the children had been chased from town.

A door halfway to Sanguine’s destination was left unlocked, slightly ajar.  Grahl’s place.  One of his eyes peered through windows.

There.  Through the front window.  Grahl had spent the night in an armchair, a bottle and a glass beside him.  Not one to sleep through a battle after all.  The handle of a hatchet or hammer stuck up and away from his head like a lone insect’s antennae.

There were others.  The children had moved unerringly, as far as he could tell.  Had they planned this from the beginning, figuring out who was where, who would be remaining here, vulnerable, when the fighting was elsewhere, or was it simply an amazing degree of coordination?

He focused on the tracks.  Knew they were different ones.  Three children.  One with a limp, another slow, not running but not limping either.

Just before reaching Cynthia’s place, the sets of tracks diverged.

He felt excited, seeing it.

They knew he was following.  They would lay a trap for him.  Try to distract.

The mason’s house.

He slowed, searching.

A giggle.

A girl’s.  Hard to match to the girl with the limp.  The sound carried.

Melancholy had mentioned their names, reading what Cynthia had given them, he wished he remembered.

A distraction?

“Sorry about Melancholic!” the voice called out, so innocent it was almost taunting.  The sound bounced off walls of a nearby alley.  “I broke her!”

Ah.  Wasn’t that too bad?

Still, he smiled.  The theatrics were a nice touch.

“Choleric too!  Riddled him full of holes!”

Sanguine nodded.  He believed it.

“And poor Phlegm!  Killed him again!”

Marvelous control of sound.  Changing position, letting the voice carry, bouncing at him from different directions.

Phlegm would have liked that, ironically enough.

He felt sad, but it was a small sadness.  Not that his colleagues were dead, but because he’d always assumed that when one of them fell, the rest would fall in short order.

And, Sanguine told himself, he didn’t plan on dying tonight.

He asserted his grip on his gun, reaching the front door.

“Wrong direction!  She ran!” the girl called out.

He hesitated, hand on the doorknob.  One eye flicked out to the side.

No tracks fresh enough to be hers.

A gunshot startled him.  Distant.  A window two feet left broke.

“Shoot, gosh, and damn!” the girl called out.  “Missed!”

He pushed his way in through the door.

Theatrics, with a slim chance of a lucky shot.  She’d been too far away to be shooting at him with a pistol.

The mason’s workshop was dark.  Lights had gone out.

Halfway between the front door and the stairwell, one of the so-called immortals lay bleeding.

At the door to Cynthia’s office, another lay dead.

He walked past them, ignoring the dying man, and moved through the workshop.  No sign of life.

He had to be right on their heels.  The children weren’t fast.

Through the back door.  Tracks only a handful of seconds old.

A glimpse of movement, further down, between the base of the hill and the back of the workshop.  He adjusted his eyes a second too late.

There was only a narrow avenue behind the buildings, with sparse grass growing, and the periodic flower.  With the water rolling off the mountainside and down into this space, it had to be fertile ground, though it wouldn’t get much sun.  He stepped carefully past fallen firewood, eyes searching.

Had to think like the children.  They were steering, moving as a pack of wolves might.  Around the periphery, chasing, guiding.

Except he had to think like Cynthia might as well.  Because she would recognize what the children did and try to find an avenue they weren’t covering.  A gap in the net.

The slower ones would be closer to him.  The quicker ones further down, cutting her off.

He ran, feet tramping down on the footpath.  The girl wouldn’t have had time to lay a wire, but-

There.  Caltrops.  Nails bent so that four prongs stuck out in different directions, left in the dirt.

He skipped past them.

Heard a whistle, close.  Above?

Looking up, he almost missed what was happening to his left.  He passed a space between buildings, and the girl who had had the wire was there, already in motion, out on the street in front of the buildings.  Keen eyes saw the movement.  Throwing.

He ducked, bending over.  The blade struck his back, across his shoulderblades.

Fingers gripped the corner of the building, helping him come to a stop on the slick ground.  He heaved himself in the opposite direction, toward that same alley.

Gone.  Of course.

One on the roof, to let her know he was coming, so she could be ready.  Slowed as she was, she would have had to have carried straight on down the road, while he was busy navigating the building interior.

Wolves circling.

He watched for her as he continued running behind the buildings, following Cynthia’s tracks.  He saw soldiers on the street.  They were shouting, calling out.

A smell in the air.  He wrinkled his nose.

She’d used her gas.  The foul, sense-obscuring stuff.  Somewhere further down.

He broke away.  No use following, if he’d lose any use of his eyes from the lingering traces of the stuff.  He headed to the soldiers, hailing them.  Ordinary men.  Boys, almost.

“You,” one soldier said.  “One of the assassins?”

Sanguine nodded, focusing more on catching his breath and studying the surroundings.

No sign of the limping girl.

“You should know, the children she warned us of are about,” the soldier said.

“I know.”

“Commander ordered the group to follow her, warn her.  We were told to stay, pass on word.”

Sanguine frowned, eyes peeled for any movements.

One on the roof, but he didn’t see a thing.

One on the ground, the limping girl with the wire and the knife.  But she wasn’t moving forward.

“She carried on this way?” Sanguine asked, indicating the other direction.

“She did.”

“To her apartment?” Sanguine asked.

“Yes, sir.”

And they chased herThe soldiers chased her.

Not just a handful of children chasing her.  Her own men would be looking for her.  Very possibly tipping off the children to her location.

Sanguine broke into a run.

They’d showed themselves for a reason.  Raising the alarm.  People would find the dead officers and doctors and instinctively want to protect Cynthia, among others.

That she’d changed where she operated from, both to the Mason’s and where she laid her head at night, it didn’t matter.  All the children had to do was follow the soldiers.

How many children left?

The giggling girl, the one on the rooftop, the girl with the knife.

He could see the tracks now.  The largest of the children had broken off.

One child, smaller than all of the rest, moving from cover to cover as he followed the soldiers.

All the way to Cynthia’s apartment.

Sanguine slowed.

The men were gathered at the front, guns in hand, watching, searching the surroundings.

He joined them.  “She’s alright?”

“She’s fine.  She’s gathering her things.  We’ve got the place surrounded.”

“You led one of the children here.  They know where she is, now.”

The man frowned a little.  “The entrances and exits are covered.”

Sanguine studied the area, backing away from the group, his head turning, each eye operating independently.

Shingled houses, row on row.  A cobbled street.

The quiet was broken by a distant, distant rumble.  An explosion in Westmore.  An hour away.  Had to be a big one.

Then stillness and quiet again.

“Cynthia!” Sanguine called out.

He saw her face appear in an upstairs window.  She peered down at him.

“Out!” he called.

No sooner was the order given, than a small object flew down from a nearby rooftop.

A moment later, there was fire, and the men at one corner of the house were engulfed, screaming struggling.  Panic and madness.  The front of the building was licked with flame.

Sanguine, calm, collected, raised his rifle, eyes focusing.

The boy was hiding, using the peak of the rooftop and the chimney for cover.  Sanguine took long strides, aiming, looking for a hint of a movement.

He heard a bang, on the far side of the house, out of sight.

A window opening.

He dropped the rifle, running.

“Stay!” he called out, but too late.

She’d leaped from the second story window.

In the same moment she fell, another grenade was cast down from the rooftop.

She’s capable in a scrap, but he’s not even giving her the opportunity.

As with the first, it expanded into flame.

Sanguine saw a glimpse of the boy on the roof, already turning to run, scampering along wet shingles and peaked roofs.  He might have had a shot, if he wanted it.  Yet Cynthia was flailing, reaching out for help.  Every heartbeat counted when it came to saving her.

He straddled the fence, a coin flip between one or the other.

They’d been given orders to leave the Lambs alive.  Orders he hadn’t cared about, as his earlier shot at the boy had evidenced, but given this knife’s edge of a decision… he turned his attention to Cynthia, who was partially engulfed in fire.

She could be saved, at least more certainly than the boy could be shot down.

Beauty gone.  Even the rebellion’s best doctors would struggle.  It would take time to fix.

But there was nobody left to work with.  Better to have her alive, so he had a place.  He’d have his Lamb-hunt another day.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.01 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jamie walked down the hallway while reading a book.  I tackled him, throwing my arms around him, pinning his arms to their sides.  Mary joined me, clapping a hand over his mouth, her other hand making sure he didn’t drop his book.

“Mmph.”

“Shh,” Mary said.  “We need your eyes.”

“Mmph?”

We led him over to the window.  Helen was already standing by the window with Lillian.  We were on the second floor of Claret Hall, overlooking one of the grassy open spaces where students were eating their lunches, most doing it while looking over papers, making notes, or having discussions.  Always working, working, working.

A canopy of slanted glass panes set between interwoven branches directed the rainwater onto stylized grates, with the water disappearing into some underground reservoir.  There was a steady patter of rain, but it was also a hot summer day, making for the kind of humidity where clothing stuck to the body.  Gordon was there, sitting on a bench beneath a tree, unfolded paper on his knee, a partially eaten sandwich in hand.  Shipman was on the other end of the short bench, arm’s length from Gordon.  Brown bottles of Sassafras Beer had been placed on top of Shipman’s papers as a kind of paperweight.  Meeting for lunch, between their individual tasks.

“You’re better at lipreading than I am,” Mary said.

“Why am I lipreading?”

“Because,” I said.  “Their breakup has been a long time coming.  I want to know which of them makes the call.”

“That’s perverse,” Jamie said.

“Come onnn!” Lillian said.

“Come onnnn!” Helen echoed her.

Down on the bench, Gordon raised his head, looking around.  He’d heard us.

I shushed the others, then told Jamie, “If we know, we can tailor how we respond to him.”

Mary nodded enthusiastically.

“Or,” Jamie pointed out, “We can let him decide how and when he wants to let us know.”

“They’re talking,” Lillian said.  She grabbed Mary’s arm.  “Mary, Mary.”

“I’m looking,” Mary said.  “I’m watching.”

Jamie sighed.  He didn’t walk away, though.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mary recited, her voice deeper.

Shipman looked at Gordon.

Mary switched to her ‘Shipman’ voice, “The way you said the maids-”

“That,” Jamie corrected.  “Makes.”

“-makes me think it’s important,” Mary finished.  “You asked to eat lunch with me for a- reason.”

“Good,” Jamie observed.

I would have thought he’d forgotten that he’d been objecting just moments ago, but he wasn’t one to forget.

“I respect you a lot,” Mary said in ‘Gordon voice’, then switched for Shipman.  “Gordon…”

She trailed off, apparently struggling to figure out the words.

“I’m a big girl,” Jamie said.  “I know what you’re going to say, there’s no need to try and soften the blow.”

“Sorry,” Mary said, Gordon voice.

“I feel like you and me together has been more apologies than…” Jamie said.  Shipman had paused, hesitating.  Jamie resumed a moment after she did.  “I don’t know the right word.  But a relationship should be about being secure with one another and not having to apologize.  There should be that security.”

“Yeah,” Mary said.  “I wanted this to be a positive thing for both of us, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

They were taking turns now.  Mary for Gordon and Jamie for Shipman.

“This is going a lot better than I thought it would,” I remarked.

“Shh,” Lillian shushed me.

“It’s to your credit,” Shipman/Jamie said, “I didn’t think this would be anything serious.  You saved me, back in the dungeons, with Sub Rosa.  I was curious about you and your friends and I thought I’d humor you, but I actually liked you quite a bit.”

“Past tense.”

“I’ve never been good at talking to people.  I’m good at my work.  That’s what I do.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Gordon/Mary said.

Gordon leaned back against the tree behind the bench.

“When you went to Whitney, I shouldn’t have gone with you,” Shipman/Jamie said.

“Do you think so?”

“Too much time around each other, woke me up to how different we were.  The world you lived in.  If I’d been ignorant, we could have stayed together.”

“We still wouldn’t have been a perfect fit.  Only difference is it would have taken us longer to figure out,” Gordon/Mary said.

“Maybe that’s true.  So is that it?  We’re over?”

“I’d like to work with you in the future.  I respect the work you do.”

Shipman reached over, touching Gordon’s cheek.

“Something something fatter girl?  Her head was turned,” Jamie said.

“You know how to flatter a girl,” I guessed.

“And now she’s saying, ‘If you find another girl and she needs a reference, send her my way?”

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t think relationships work that way, Gladys,” Gordon/Mary said.  “And they’re laughing.”

They were.

“This is going a lot better than I thought it would,” I remarked.

“You sound glad,” Jamie said.

“I am.  Really.  I thought Gordon would charge the problem head-on, offend Gladys, and this whole thing would end in tears.”

“You don’t give him enough slack,” Mary said.  “You haven’t for a while now.”

“I’m just saying.  Gordon is a problem solver.  When he solves problems, he does it in ways that keep that problem solved.  Hammer through the brainpan, broken legs, smashed glass…  even social problems, he likes his firm solutions.  His handling of this is a lot more delicate than I would have expected.”

“We’re all evolving,” Lillian remarked.

It was a strange statement, coming from the only one of us who wasn’t augmented, altered, or inhuman.

Gordon raised his bottle of beer and clinked it with Gladys’.  The pair weren’t smiling, but they weren’t upset either.

“What are the rules for this?” Mary said, in her Gordon voice.  “Breaking up?”

“What do you mean?”

“We can be civil to each other, say hi when we cross paths?”

“See?” I said.  “Firm, solid solutions.  Making sure everything is settled.  Very Gordon.”

“Shh!” Lillian shushed me.

“Yes,” Shipman/Jamie said.  “We can be civil.”

“Stay in touch?”

“Yes.”

“And, if there’s someone else, somewhere down the road, there won’t be any…”

“Hurt feelings,” Jamie supplied.

Gladys was smiling.  “Do you already have your eyes on another girl, sir?”

“No.  But I want to make the most…” Mary started.  She hesitated.  “…of the time I have, and I don’t want to hurt you or anyone else if I happen to move on more quickly.”

Shipman reached out, touching Gordon’s face.

The group was quiet.  Shipman and Gordon talked for a solid ten or fifteen seconds, and there was no translation via. lipreading.

My heart felt uncomfortably weighty in my chest.

It wasn’t just the words, the idea behind what he’d said.  That he’d told her, that he’d changed the mood to do it?  He’d been holding on to that.  He’d needed to express himself, share that, and he had chosen Shipman over the rest of us, to do it.

I saw Shipman’s body language change.  She was using her hands more, and her volume had raised a fraction.

“Wait, what’s she saying?”

Mary had a hand to her face.

“She said she might introduce him to someone, what kind of girl does he like?” Jamie said.  “He said he wanted someone more mature.”

I slapped my hand to my own face.

“She was asking him what he means by that, she’s two years older than him, he said two and a half, she said she wanted to know what he meant, was she immature?”

“Gordon, Gordon, Gordon,” I said.

“He says no, that’s not what he meant.  He meant he would be more interested in someone who knew how to handle themselves in a situation like we had in Westmore, and now they’re arguing.  I don’t really feel comfortable trying to figure out exactly what they’re saying.”

“He was doing so well,” I said.

“Guess we’re not evolving that much after all?” Lillian asked.

“We are,” I said.  “But… journey of a thousand steps, I guess.”

Shipman stood up, snatched up her drink and the papers she’d brought with her, letting Gordon’s drink fall to the ground.  She turned on her heels and stalked off.  Gordon remained sitting.

“Sad thing is, he’s a brilliant guy,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” Mary made a sound of agreement.

“We’re all idiots, when it comes to first romances,” Helen said.

Every head present turned to face her, a little caught off guard at the profound statement, coming from Helen of all people.

“Speaking from experience, Helen?” Jamie asked, very carefully.

“Nope!  No romance here, and there never will be.  Instead, I get the-”

“Stop,” I said, putting my hands out to mash her mouth shut, both of my palms pressing against the lower half of her face.  “No.  Don’t finish that statement.”

Her eyebrows furrowed into a frown.

“Because it’s going to be weird and disconcerting,” I told her.  “Let the rest of us live in ignorance.”

She nodded.

I released her mouth.

Down on the bench, Gordon picked up his fallen drink, wiped dirt from the glass, then tipped it back to finish it off.  He folded up the paper he’d wrapped his sandwich in and set it aside with the bottle, one hand resting on it to keep it from blowing away.  He heaved out a deep, profound sigh.

A moment later, he reached out to touch his thigh.  He rubbed it, hard, as if he was trying to rub the bone beneath the muscle, then doubled over a little, expression changing, eyes shut, jaw clenched.

I turned my back to the window, and Jamie did the same.  I saw Mary staring, and touched her arm, steering her away.

Too personal.

“I should help him,” Lillian said.

“Nothing you can do,” Jamie said.  “He’d be more upset that you came to help than thankful.”

I nodded.

“It’s my job to look after you.  All of you.”

“Leaving him be is looking after him,” I told her.  “With Gordon, if he doesn’t ask for help, he’ll resent it.”

“That’s stupid,” Lillian said.

I shrugged.

“He’ll get looked after during his next appointment,” Jamie said.

“Whatever,” Lillian said.

“He’s going,” Helen observed.  She was right.  Gordon was limping just a little, but he seemed able to walk it off, or at least pretend it wasn’t a problem.  By the time he reached the end of the field, his umbrella going up to shield him from the rain as he passed from under the canopy, he was walking normally.

“Let’s catch up with him.  Drag him out to the city,” I said.

There was no argument.  We moved as a group, down the hallway, passing the occasional student.  People were wearing their summer uniforms, but even the people proudest of their lab coats and the prestige those coats afforded them had doffed the things, leaving them in offices and dorm rooms.

Passing outside, though, the heat was like a physical wave of water, except this wave smelled like hospitals, blood, and that vague pungent smell of fresh manure.  The opposite of refreshing, really.  It made me feel disgusting the moment it swept over me.

“Blahhh,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

We walked the gauntlet, no less than five different experiments sniffing, touching, or waving digits at each of us.  Prehensile limbs, antennae, and long-fingered hands gave us each a thorough search.  One limb snaked through the armhole of my shirt, before sliding down my back, sweeping sweat free.

“Ow,” Mary said, as long fingers tugged at a knife she’d worked into her hair.  “Careful, you.”

Other fingers from the same lumpy figure poked at knives resting flat against the small of her back, the outlines just barely exposed by the humidity-soaked clothing.

“I’m reaching for a badge,” she said, moving slowly, talking to the Academy student who was overseeing the things.  She raised the badge, to show the man.

“Let them on through,” he said, sounding disinterested.

The morass of various creatures that had investigated us were quick to listen.  I wondered if they had human brains in there, or if someone had gone to the effort of making a nonhuman brain that understood speech.

We walked, and half of us didn’t flip up our hoods or raise umbrellas.  I was part of that half.  It was so humid that I figured I’d be dripping anyway, and at least the rainwater was a cleaner dripping.

Hot as it was, the Academy was far from sluggish.  People milled this way and that, hurrying, all with things to do.  The population was different, too.  Before Fray’s war had erupted, there had been perhaps a ten to one ratio of ordinary people to experiments or stitched, not counting ourselves.  Now it felt like half-and-half.  Unlike Dame Cicely’s, however, there were two discrete groups.  It wasn’t student paired with experiment, but whole groups of experiments, weapons of war, and regiments of stitched, churned out and ready to be carted off somewhere.  Specially constructed wagons carried the resources that would go toward making more.  Cart upon cart of food for feeding the newest and greatest weapons of war.  The students were cogs in this machine, heads down, their thoughts on their work and the expectations of their superiors.

We walked with purpose too, but our goal was to find Gordon before he went and disappeared off on his own.

“There,” Mary said.

Gordon was walking, oblivious to the rest of reality.  We caught up with him, falling into formation, walking as a group in the most natural way imaginable.  He arched an eyebrow as he looked at me, to his left, and Mary to his right.

“Appointments?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Lillian said.  “Sorry.”

“Why would you be sorry?” he asked.

“Um.  Because I know you probably want to get back to work.”

“Getting away wouldn’t be so bad,” he said.  “Maybe some place by water, where we can swim in this kind of heat.”

“That sounds nice,” Mary said.  “We’d need swim clothes.”

“We’re going into the town,” I said.  “Want to come with?”

“Sure,” he said.

We reversed direction, to pass around Claret Hall.  The concentration of experiments and idle weapons of war was even greater, and the air was heavy with smells that I couldn’t entirely place.

The Duke was there, and as royalty, he was surrounded by a guard of sorts.  The gauntlet of creatures investigating each and every person that came or went was part of it.  Some of the weapons were top of the line, too.  Two giants were sitting on either side of the door.  Skinless, with three or four layers of muscle and bone set atop one another, with gaps suggesting what lay beneath.   Humanoid warbeasts, capable of using weapons.  Probably from another Academy.  They didn’t move much, probably to reduce the amount of resources they consumed.

As we approached the gate beside the Hedge, we were subjected to another battery of searches.  As the tentacles and prehensile noses stretched toward her, Mary heaved out a sigh.

For my part, I got the one with a sense of humor.  It prodded at my face, repeatedly, apparently aiming for my nose and eye.  I squinted and tilted my head a few times, dodging the pokes.

I couldn’t begrudge it that, though.  If the roles were reversed, I would have annoyed people all I could, knowing there was nothing they could do about it.

I snapped my teeth as it got too close, again.  As the experiment overseer rose from his seat, I drew my badge.

He waved us on through, the search ending prematurely.

“So glad I got these,” I said.  “Aren’t you glad I got these?”

“You’re glossing over the amount of trouble those badges caused us, when you picked them,” Gordon said.

“But,” I said.  “Short term trouble, long term gain.  Seriously, how much trouble have these badges spared us?”

“Uh huh,” Gordon said.  “That doesn’t make up for it.”

“Does too.”

He reached out for me, probably to muss up my hair, but I dodged his hand.

Normally he would’ve got me anyway.  He didn’t.  Slower to move.  Was his leg still bothering him?

I made a mental note of that.

We made our way down the path, past Lambsbridge Orphanage, and into the city proper.

It, too, had changed over the months we’d been away.  With a given job taking weeks or months, a brief visit back home to report in, then another job taking weeks or months, we’d only really seen glimpses of the transition.  Now we were back, there was no job waiting for us, and we had more of a chance to take it in.

If there was a fifty-fifty split of people to experiments in Radham Academy, it was even more pronounced in the city.  An experiment on every corner, armed, uniformed stitched walking the streets in pairs, and more choking the street itself.  Some buildings had been torn down or retrofitted, the new buildings grown for expediency’s sake, leafless branches still spearing up and out, the building features themselves vague: too-narrow windows, lumpy protrusions around where the doors had been set in.  It was thick material, clumsy in construction, but it was durable.

Military emplacements, placed at regular intervals.

The Academy was often described as being laid out like a living thing.  The spread of Radham around it was little different.  But this was a living thing which was trying to anticipate an attack from within.  An uprising, sabotage, revolt.  How did a body protect against such things?  Antibodies.

The effect on the city was oppressive – no doubt intended.  Should there be another Mauer-like issue, Radham was fully prepared to squash it.  But there was such a thing as an overactive immune system.  The body could rebel.  Things could start falling apart.  The system originally meant to protect the body could destroy it.

“Where are we going?” Gordon asked.

“I’m open to whatever,” I said, “But I thought we could visit an old haunt.”

“I thought you were up to something,” Gordon said.

“What?  Who?  Me?  No.”

“You have this way about you when you’re being sly, Sy.”

“Damnable lies.  I know that psychological trick.  You convince someone they have a tell, and they work so hard to reverse it that they develop one.  I’m pretty sure I told you about that, even.”

“Yeah, uh huh.”

“Uh huh,” I mimicked him.  “Nope, you’re wrong.  There are other reasons for this.”

“Yeah?  I break up with a girl and before I even figure out how I feel about it, you guys come out of the woodwork to show me special attention?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“You broke up with Gladys?” Lillian asked, feigning surprise.  I don’t think she could have sounded less convincing if she’d spoken in a monotone.

Gordon gave me a knowing look this time.

“Hey, Lil,” I said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Your fault he knows we know.  I’m obliged to punish you,” I said.

“What?  No.”

“Something slimy down the back of your shirt, maybe?”

No.

“Or an ice cube in your underpants, Lil?”

“What?  No!  I don’t even know how you would, but no!  Don’t you dare.”

“Or something in your ear…”

“Gordon,” Lillian said, “Don’t let him.”

“I’m just really fascinated by the insight into how Sy thinks,” Jamie said, his voice dry.  “It’s all very physical torments, two out of three for getting under Lillian’s clothes, no less.”

“That’s fascinating,” Gordon said.

“Wait,” I said, “Hold up.  “We’re tormenting Lil here, not me.”

The discussion continued, with a lot of back and forth and everyone getting their turn as the one made fun of.  We were interrupted as we had to pass through a waypoint to get from one district to another.  Another brief search and questioning.  A mark made in a book.

Into the shims.  The more dilapidated end of Radham.

“Same old markings,” Gordon said, touching a wall.  The wood had been carved with a triangle, given two eyes and two circles for ears.

“Nostalgic,” I said.

“What does it mean?” Lillian asked.

“Safe spot for the young,” Gordon said.  “Every generation or so, you’ll get a group that look after each other, not as an organized thing, but it’ll just happen.  Because there’s too many kids who don’t have a good reason to go home and they have to spend their time with someone.  Every other generation or so, you’ll get someone who ‘makes it’.  Who has a shop or a house or something and they aren’t hard up for cash, and who looks after kids.  The mouse is for places like that, or for groups that’ll look after you if you’re young.”

Lillian nodded.  She’d left her hood down, and her hair was wet.  She brought her hands up to tuck wet hair behind her ears.

“Three triangles for a fox,” Gordon gestured at the corner of one building, near to the ground.  There were two such markings there.  “Is the fox.  That’s not one you used to see very often, and you’d never see it in pairs.  Usually people would work together, deal with it, and the only fox mark you’d see would be crossed out.”

“There was one earlier, too,” Jamie said.  “By the waypoint.”

“What’s the fox?” Lillian asked.

“The fox preys on the mouse,” I said.

Lillian’s eyes widened.

The rain was worse here, kind of.  It wasn’t that it was technically heavier rain or anything, but the buildings didn’t necessarily have gutters, the water streamed off of the rooftops, and it spattered as it landed in puddles, where the water hadn’t drained completely.

The houses were dilapidated, falling to pieces, many uninhabitable.  Even the poor had started migrating toward the city center, leaving the edges a little lonelier.

Jamie pointed, indicating another fox scratched into a doorframe.  I nodded.

We came to a stop.

“Hey!” Gordon shouted.  “Buttholes!”

There was a pause.

A window opened, on the second floor of a building across the street.  A boy about our age poked his head out.  “What, dickstink?”

“How about a hello, huh?  Open the door,” Gordon said.

The kid smirked, then pulled his head back inside.  I heard him give an order to another kid.  A few seconds later, the door opened.

“This is meant as a bit of a treat to you, Mary,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow.

“Show you a bit of what Gordon and I used to do, back in the day,” I said.

“I like that,” she said, smiling.  She folded up her umbrella.

We passed into the house.  There were three kids on the ground floor, and an older, shirtless boy at the top of the stairs.  I recognized Thom, and the young Daisy.  The house was scattered with knick-knacks and detritus.  I was being polite, given that it was ninety percent trash.

“And,” I added, under my breath, “I thought you might like to get some tips on lockpicking, among other things.”

Her eyes lit up.  She gave me a happy little wiggle of the shoulders.

We made our way up the stairs, to a floor of the house that had little more than scattered bedding without beds, blankets, and discarded clothes.

“Long time, Gordon,” the shirtless boy said.  “Hi Helen.”

Helen gave him a wave.

“Craig,” Gordon said.  He threw an arm around Craig’s shoulders in a half-hug, Craig doing the same.

“Hi,” Lillian said, as the blonde girl Daisy approached.  She was seven or eight, if I had to guess.  Not that anyone had ever known or cared about Daisy’s birthday, to keep track.

Daisy ignored Lillian, talking to me instead.  “I’ve been keeping an ear out.”

“That’s good.”

“I can tell you who’s who, now, and what happened with the Byron Boys, and how Miss E is sleeping with the pastor’s sister,” Daisy said.

“You gotta ask for cash before you drop tidbits like that.”

“Setting the hook,” Daisy said, looking up at me.  “Like you told me.  There’s enough more that I’m not worried.”

“Alright, fair.  Hook’s set,” I said.  “Curiosity piqued.  But give me a bit to get caught up before I start grilling you.  I don’t want to pay for information I can pick up for free.”

She made a face.

There were several more kids on the upper floor – six in all.  A card game was underway.  Most were just staying in the darker corners, enduring the heat.  Many heads turned as Helen came up the stairs.

Thom came up the stairs behind us.  I clapped a hand on his shoulder as he passed me.  He’d helped me get my hands on the others’ files, back around the time we’d dealt with the snake charmer.  He’d helped me many other times, besides.

“Someone’s going to break out the old practice locks for this pretty girl to learn lockpicking,” I said, indicating Mary.  “And they’re going to do it for free.”

“That so?” a boy I didn’t know asked.

“She’ll show you a cool knife trick,” I said.  “After she’s learned something.”

He mulled it over for a second, then waved her over, lifting up the bench under the window to pull out some stuff.

The rest found their places, Helen watching the card game, distracting both of the players.  Lillian stuck closer to me, while Jamie found a seat, pulling out the book we’d interrupted him from reading earlier.

I started to fill Lillian in on particulars.  Rules, expectations, groups, with Daisy nodding along and enjoying being able to offer her own input, while being very miffed at Lillian being there at the same time.

I was distracted from my explanation as I overheard Gordon talking with Craig in a low voice.

“Girl troubles,” Gordon said.

“I know those troubles,” Craig said.

Gordon smiled.  He looked more at ease than I’d seen him in a while.

“You’ve got other troubles?” Gordon asked.

Of course he’d find other work to do.  It’s not like we get a proper day off.

“Lots,” Craig said.  “Be more specific.”

“Last I was aware, you had a lot more kids up here, that was half a year ago.”

“Ah,” Craig said.  “Yeah.”

“It’s not because of the waypoints or anything, is it?  Kids being unable to get from there to here, because of curfews and checkpoints and all that?  There’s something else going on.”

Jamie was looking up from his book, watching.  Most of the others were distracted.

“I saw four foxes scratched into the scenery on the way here,” Gordon said.  “Kids in here, not out and about?”

Craig nodded.

“Who’re you hiding from?”

Craig made a face.

There were more ears listening, now.

“Come on,” Gordon said.  “Out with it.”

“It’s awkward, given you are who you are,” Craig said.  “Don’t know if I should.  Don’t want to hurt our ongoing relationship.”

Gordon punched Craig, hard, in the arm.

“Try again,” Gordon said.

Craig frowned.  “The Academy.  Pretty sure it’s the Academy.  Picking off the little ones.  They go, they don’t come back, they don’t turn up at that Orphanage of yours.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.02 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I want the youngest ones out,” Craig said.

There was resistance.  Daisy stiffened.

“If I haven’t had you in on previous leadership meetings, I don’t want you in on this one,” Craig said.  “Git!”

Daisy rose to her feet.  Two more kids joined her in heading for the stairs.

“If there’s any sign of any of you listening in, you bleed,” Craig warned.

An unsteady sort of leadership here.  One enforced with knocks on the head and crude threats.  But it was necessary.  Anything else wouldn’t work on kids like these, who didn’t know other sorts of authority, and the alternative was having no leadership at all.

Thom remained, as did the boy with the locks, who was sitting with Mary, and one other.

“We called them ghosts, at first.  We lost two of the youngest ones, one right after the other,” Craig explained.  “Sent Bertie home.  He’d been here too long, taking too much, not giving.  Figured his dad would give him a hard time and he could come back later.  But he wasn’t to stay here all the time.  He cried, but he went.”

“And he never made it?” Gordon asked.

Craig made a face.  Disgusted.  “I should’ve had him stay.  My gut told me it wasn’t right, sending him back, but I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of the bigger picture, y’know?  I thought it was about him and his dad and his dad roughed him up but he’d survive.  Weighed his survival against ours and what he was costing us by eating out of our cupboards.  Thinking too small, not considering everything else.  Stupid!”

“You know deep down inside that there was no predicting something like this.  You couldn’t have known.”

“I knew!  Not about the ghosts or foxes or Academy.  I knew he was little and he hadn’t got that thick skin we all get at some point.  He ducked his head and he cried and anyone who looked at him knew he was a victim.  Whoever took him knew he was a victim!  He was prey to the whole rest of the world and I knew it and I sent him out there alone!”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “Then yeah.  It was your fault, at least a little.”

Craig shook his head, but it was in anger at himself.

“You were angry with him,” I said.  “You wanted to give him that thicker skin, you knew you couldn’t coddle him.”

“Doesn’t justify it,” Craig said.

“How far to his place?  Where does his dad live?”

“Four streets over.  Still in the shims.”

“That close?” Gordon asked, surprised.  “Five or ten minutes away?”

Craig nodded.

“You said there was another.”

“There’ve been six I know of,” Craig said.  “Two right from under my nose.  Bert was the first.  We went out looking for him.  I expected to find his body.  Nothing.  But while we were looking, we got a little too far apart from each other.  Len was helping out, never one to stay here overnight, had it pretty good, but he’d play cards with us, join in any games, participate if we were pulling something.”

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“Sharp enough a guy.  Whisked away, not five seconds after I last saw him.  No noise, no scuffle.”

“Len’s mom is torn up about it,” Thom said.

“And you?” Gordon asked Craig.

“Len could look after himself,” Craig said, but his expression betrayed some concern or doubt.  Self-blame, but it didn’t cut as deep as Bert did.  Craig cleared his throat.  “We switched it around, so we didn’t go anywhere except in groups.  When they were in the mood to play with cards or dice, I told them to do it from perches.  Watch over the streets while they played.  Keep an eye out for anything odd.”

“And?” Gordon asked.

“What we saw was people in Academy coats, using Academy carriages.  People with gray coats, loading an unconscious kid into the coach.  Since we started keeping an eye out, we’ve seen the carriages show up now and again.  Usually from a distance.  We try, we lay in wait, but they steer clear.  Can’t seem to pin them down.  But they’re still getting us.  That’s when we started to call them ghosts.”

“All boys?” Lillian asked.

“No.  Girls too,” Craig said.  “Tom and Sam were at one perch.  Got caught up in their game, not watching, Tom says.  Then hands seize him, they tip him off the edge of the roof.  Broken arm, broken leg, wrenched his arm so bad it tore out of the socket.  What are you supposed to do, knowing what we know, that it’s Academy people doing this, and Tom is that hurt?”

There was a waver of emotion in Craig’s voice.  He was younger than some of the leaders of the mice I’d seen.  Experienced, but young.  He didn’t have full control over his emotions, he wasn’t detached, and his skin was thinner than he’d like to pretend.  When he asked what he was supposed to do, the uncertainty was spilling out.  That uncertainty was laced with the raw fear of someone that was responsible for others and failing in their duties.

“What did you end up doing?” I asked.  “With Tom?”

“Sent him to the Hedge.  His mom says he’s there, he’s in repair.  He hasn’t disappeared.”

“I think that was the right thing to do,” Gordon said.

Craig shook his head a little.

“And… I forget the other one’s name?  Who was on the roof with him?” I asked.

“Sam.  She was next oldest, compared to me.  Tom didn’t even see them leave the building.  Whoever attacked him, they and Sam just…”

Craig spread his hands.

“Gone.  A ghost,” Gordon said.

“It was a lot easier when she was around,” Craig said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I think I remember her.  Scowler, wasn’t she?”

“Face like a dog with its muzzle smashed in,” Craig said.  He glanced at Lillian, “Don’t give me that look.”

“I wasn’t- okay, I was, but you can’t say that about a girl.

“She said worse about herself.  She knew where her strengths were, and none of the whole sitting proper, doing up her hair nice, wearing powder on her face and being sweet stuff was part of it.”

Lillian shifted uncomfortably.  Her hands had been folded in her lap, and she, very casually, shifted her posture, so they were gripping the bench on either side of her legs, instead.

“Feel like I have to ask, so I don’t step on toes,” Gordon said.  “You want help with this one?”

“I don’t think I have any other choice,” Craig said.

Gordon nodded.  He glanced at me, and I nodded confirmation.

“Do you have descriptions?” Jamie asked.

“Tom does, but he’s at the Hedge.  Daisy was one of the ones who kept a lookout.  She’s seen ’em from a distance.  You could ask her.”

Jamie nodded, rising from his seat, bringing notebook and pen with as he headed downstairs.

Gordon heaved out a sigh.  I didn’t miss the fact that one hand was clenched in a weird way.  Another attack, so soon?

Still, he spoke in a very careful, level voice.  “I know you know something about what we do.  That we do work for the Academy.  I know you know well enough not to ask.  Because we’re not telling you particulars.”

Craig nodded, jaw set in a firm line.

This had been a point of contention in the past.  The not-telling part.  In a world where the stars had aligned differently, the pair could have been the best of friends.  In this world, the secrecy had been a wedge.

“Knowing what I know about the Academy, I’ve got to say this, and I know the response you’re going to give, but I’ve got to say it.  I don’t know that there’s any guarantee the Academy did it.”

Craig’s posture shifted, forward-leaning, aggressive, “Academy-controlled town in wartime, Gordon?  Academy coats?  Academy transportation?”

“It’s likely,” Gordon said, “But it’s not a guarantee.”

“Sure, Gordon,” Craig said, in the most disagreeable way possible, without quite being sarcastic.  His hands clenched the fabric of his shorts at his knees.  “Decide what you want.  You have to do what you have to do.  But if anyone gets snatched up while you’re wasting time trying to prove the people you work for didn’t do it, you know I’m going to hold it against you, yeah?  If they’re dead or disappeared?  That’ll be on you.”

“I know,” Gordon said.  He suddenly looked very tired.

“What do you need?”

“Clothes,” I said.  “Clean-ish.  We’re wearing orphanage clothes.  We need orphan clothes, instead.  So we don’t stand out if we happen to be looking around.”

“We don’t have many girl clothes,” Craig said.  “Room under the stairs was where Sam changed when she came over.  Might have something.  Come on down, I’ll get some of my stuff so you can wear it.  Might smell a bit.”

“We’ll live,” Gordon said.

Jamie was in the kitchen with Daisy, grilling her while he sketched.  She wasn’t making him pay for the information, which was a little out of sync with the lessons I’d taught her.  I’d used her on a previous job, way back in the day, because she’d been small enough to go unnoticed.  She’d proven good at listening to the drone of gossip here and there, picking out the important details from the noise, and I’d had her hone those talents.  Whatever she wound up doing, and the shims weren’t a part of Radham that brimmed with opportunity, knowing what was going on and what information other people might be willing to pay for was a skill she could carry with her.

I’d worked with others that weren’t here now.  I’d worked with Thom, but not in a specific capacity.

“Under the stairs?” Lillian clarified.  The area in question was adjacent to the kitchen.

“Yeah.  That’s the girl’s room,” Craig said, waving his hand to indicate the general direction.

I glanced over, and noted that the ‘girl’s room’ wasn’t a room so much as a closet, and that might have been generous.  A pole had been nailed into the doorway to the space, and a curtain hung from it.  Lillian and Helen entered, while Mary joined me in watching Jamie’s sketching.

He was doing it in very loose, broad sketches.  General shape.  Man in a lab coat, drawn in about five loose sweeps of the pen, basic geometric shapes.  When Daisy said the man had been taller and narrower, the hair different, sweeping back, Jamie started anew, elsewhere on the page.  Once that was set, he moved on to details.

He still wasn’t an artist, but there was a process at work.  One that relied on his ability to recreate that which he’d done before, making steady adjustments.

“I only saw him from far away,” Daisy said.  “That’s more or less it?  My head plays tricks on me.  I imagine him as more devilish than I know he was.”

“Memory is a funny thing like that,” Jamie said.  “Tell me about the woman?”

“Women,” Daisy said.

“Women,” Jamie said.

I would have thought that women would get the attention of the other boys in the house, but they were clustered in the kitchen, talking nonchalantly.  It made me think that something was up.  I watched them, trying to figure out what they were doing, until Gordon interrupted, hucking balled-up clothes at me.  I took the first, heaviest ball right in the stomach, then caught the rest out of the air.

I took a step to the right, so some of the boys in the kitchen blocked Mary’s view of me, unclipped my suspenders, and switched shorts in roughly two seconds flat.  I pulled off my shirt, stepping back into view.

“I like how you stepped out of view of me, but you didn’t for Daisy,” Mary observed.  “I see how things are.”

“Do you?” I asked, smiling.

“What I see,” Gordon commented, “Is the skinniest little bastard.  Half of the people in this house don’t even eat regularly, and they’ve got more meat on their bones than you do, Sly.”

I offered him an obscene gesture, pulling on the dark gray sleeveless shirt.  In a proper outfit, it would have been an undershirt at best.  For the here and now, it worked for casual wear in the poorer end of town.  Shorts, shirt, no shoes.

“Jamie,” Gordon said.  But he threw -not tossed but threw– the clothes at me instead.  I caught them, took them over to Jamie, and draped them over his back, as he hunched over his book.

“I’ll change when the girls are through,” Jamie said.

“Shy?” Craig asked, tone just a little mean and mocking.

“Yeah,” Jamie said, softly.  “Shy.”

Gordon might’ve said or done something, because Craig replied, “Fair.”

Helen and Lillian emerged.  Both were wearing bag dresses.  Bottom of the barrel clothing, perhaps in even a literal sense.  When parents were counting every bit of money that came their way, some used the bags that oats or crops came in to put clothes together.  Some of the farmers had caught on, and had taken to printing the dresses in simple patterns.

Helen was, I suspected, going to stand out no matter what she did.  She wore a slightly washed-out dress in a purple floral pattern, and was licking her hands and fingers, running them through her hair.  Lillian’s dress was much the same, but checked in white and green, and considerably more washed out, and she wore her socks to the knee, while Helen’s feet were bare in her shoes.

“I’ll be right back,” Mary said.

“My bag?” Lillian was asking.

“Leave it,” Gordon said.

“But if I need the stuff-”

“A full bag is the sort of thing that people are going to want to take.  Leave it.  Take only the essentials,” Gordon instructed.

The boys in the kitchen were acting different again.  It dawned on me why.  They were very casually leaning over, looking-  I crossed the room, moving to their side, and saw that the curtain, due to the poorly-positioned and bent nails at one end of the rod, didn’t cover the entire gap.

I saw Mary in profile, undressing, felt a shock that was the opposite of unpleasant, momentarily paralyzing me.  A knife’s blade dangling at her bare shoulder glinted, breaking the spell.

I felt annoyance and anger at the boys.  Very casually, I crossed the room, leaned by the doorframe, and pulled the curtain shut.

Lillian was arguing about the bag with Gordon, and Helen was draped over the clothes that I’d draped over Jamie’s back, chin on his shoulders, watching him draw.

Sure that nobody would see and that heads wouldn’t roll, I met the eyes of the glaring boys and glared back, drawing my finger across my throat.

They found other places to be, scattering, some moving back upstairs.

“Thanks for closing the curtain,” Mary murmured, through the curtain, her mouth not far from my ear.

“You could’ve moved, or done it yourself.”

“Thanks anyway,” she said.  I could hear rustling.  “You looked.  I saw.”

“Uh huh.  Sorry.”

“Boys will be curious,” she said, voice light and casual.  “It’s nice to know I’m worth being curious about.”

“Ha ha,” I said.  “I was curious about the knives, that’s all.  You hide them so well.”

“That’s all?  Good.  Then come in, help me.”

“Uh,” I said.  My brain missed a stair, thudding heavily at the next one down.

“Uh,” she said, echoing me, mocking.

“Helen and Lillian usually help you with that,” I said.  “If you need help at all.”

She poked her head out to my right, holding the curtain tight, looked around the room.  “Helen and Lillian are busy.”

Her hand gripped my collar.  She hauled me into the little space, then hauled me a half-foot to one side, so my back was to the gap in the curtain.  “There.”

She was in her underclothes, a camisole and knickers.  She’d removed the ribbon from her hair, and it hung loose around her shoulders.  The space was small enough I didn’t know where to look.

She turned her back to me, hands over her nearly-bare shoulders.  “Here.  Hold it.”

She held out wire.  There were twists of metal at the ends.  I took the wire from her, which was hard, given how fine it was.

“Up,” she said, holding the dress up in front of her.  “Down a little.”

I adjusted as she required.  It was a necklace, of sorts, the pendant a throwing knife, pointing straight down toward her belly button.

“Can you connect the wires without moving it up or down?” she asked.

I did.

“You’re better than Helen, and she’s done this a dozen times,” Mary said.

I was silent, watching as she pulled out more.  There were ribbons and wires, straps and belts.  I realized the band of her knickers was solid, more a belt than anything.  I held her dress against her body as she judged the best possible length for the wires that connected to the belt.

“If it had been just Helen in here, I don’t think you would’ve looked,” Mary said.  “You have that mortal fear of her.”

“Healthy fear,” I said.

“He finally talks!” she said.  Mary sounded merry.  She was damn well enjoying herself, putting me in this situation.

“And if it was just Lillian, you would’ve teased her.  Said something or done something, to get a rise out of her.  Then you would’ve protected her, holding the curtain closed like you did for me.”

“She’s fun to tease.”

“She likes being teased,” Mary said.  She turned around, stepping closer, “Look over my shoulder.  I want the ribbon to run along the same line the collar does.”

I did.  She had the ribbon held out, and I saw what she meant.  A series of blades hung between her shoulderblades.  I adjusted the slack.  She held out another pair of ribbons, to draw out an ‘x’, pinning the blades in place.

“Lil likes being teased?”

“And you tease her,” Mary said.  Her breath was hot against my shoulder.  “But me?  You don’t dread me.  You don’t tease me.”

“You fall somewhere in the middle?” I said, making it a question.

She made a sound I couldn’t figure out.  Something of a ‘phooey’ and a raspberry mixed together.  She turned her back, picking through the knives and ribbons.

“If I had to put it into words, I respect you,” I said.  “There isn’t another one of the Lambs I’d rather avoid going up against, one-on-one.”

She was silent.  Then she slipped a ribbon through the armhole of the camisole, holding it diagonally against her back.  She paused, and I took her signal to mean I should reach out and hold it in place.  She turned her head, and I saw that she was smiling, eyes downcast.

She worked on tying the ribbon, then did another diagonally, the other way, with my help.  She set the knives in place, then looped threads around the blades to keep them at the right angle.

Not a single sheath.  Only blades, twenty-two by my count, close to skin.

She bent down, moving easily despite the close proximity to razor edges, skin brushing against the blades.  She picked up one of Sam’s dresses.  A washed out red, and pulled it on.  I helped tug it into place, so the cheap fabric wouldn’t drag against any knifepoints.  Without being asked, I did up the buttons at the back.  Mary took the time to do up her hair in a loose, wild ponytail, wavy brown hair lasso’ed with a strip of lace torn from a dress that was already going to rags.

“Did it bother you?  The knives, the blades against skin?  Back when you started, I mean.  Was it something you had to get used to?” I asked.  Mostly to fill the quiet.

“I always liked it,” Mary said.

She had a knife in her hand, and she hadn’t had one a second ago.  She reached out, and I didn’t flinch, as she ran it down the inside of my right arm.

“Sy,” she said, voice very quiet, eyes on the blade, as she moved it ever slower.

“Hm?”

“What’s going on with Gordon?”

“Don’t know if it’s my place to say.”

She adjusted the position of the knife, pricked me, made me jump.

When I met her eyes, they were very close.  Her face was an inch from mine.  She was taller than me.  Her breath touched the bridge of my nose and eyelashes.  She was angry, annoyed.

“He’s going to pieces,” she said, without a trace of that anger in her voice.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How long?” she asked.

How long?

“It can vary.  He might get lucky, they might figure something out-”

“Weeks?  Months?  Years?”  She moved the knife away.  She raised it to the ponytail at the back, working with two ‘s’ shaped bits of wire.

“Not years,” I said.

She nodded, lowering her hands, the knife left where she’d placed it, hidden in her ribbon-tamed mane of hair.

“If you’re looking for the courage to say something to him,” I said.  “Or if you’re wondering what kind of window of opportunity you have, I can’t say for sure, but sooner is better.”

She put her hands on my shoulders, pushing me away.  The space was confined enough that my head hit one of the stairs that slashed up through one upper corner of the little box of a room.  “What?”

“If you want to say you like him.”

“And you were mocking Gordon for being a doof,” she said.

It was my turn to ask, “What?”

“Nevermind.”

“I know you like him.  He’s handsome, he’s fantastic, you go together like peas in a pod.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she said.  “I’m saying that at this particular moment in time, Sy?  You’re a bigger doof than Gordon.”

“That is a baldfaced lie.  I’m never a bigger doof than Gordon.”

“What do you think this was, here, Sy?” she said.  “Seriously.  I’m trying to figure out what’s going through your head.”

My voice was soft.  I had a hard time meeting her eyes.  I swallowed hard.  “I think it was you inviting me in, lowering your defenses, and being beautiful and girly in a way that was very ‘Mary’.  It’s- I don’t want to be weird, but every time I see a pretty girl, or have a nice moment with a girl, I’ll compare it to this.  And a lot of the time, I’ll be comparing those things to this and they’ll be worse off for it.”

She started to speak, then stopped.  She frowned at me.

“There’s a lot to be said for you being you, and getting to see a side of you nobody else has.  Mary’s pretty neat, you know,” I said.

She sighed.  “See?  That wasn’t a doof answer.  I was prepared to yell at you, and now I’m not sure what to say.”

“Well, you can start by not saying doof anymore.  It’s annoying.  You doof.”

She poked me.

“You didn’t answer the question,” she said.

“Did too.”

She pricked me again, just the tip of a knife, making me jump and bang my head on the stair a second time.

“Ow,” I said.  “Someone’s going to hear that and wonder.”

“Answer the question.  Why did I bring you in here?” she grilled me, still holding the knife.

“Because you think you like me,” I said.

She moved the knife to my throat, threatening.  “I like you, Sy.”

Only Mary would say as much with a knife to someone’s throat.

“You do.  Some.  And,” I said, “When we’re in danger, Gordon’s the one you turn to.  Gordon’s the one you ask about, the one you leap to the defense of.  He’s your first pick when we’re pairing off.  He’s the one you show interest in.  When Shipman was there, you stepped into the background more.  When she left the picture, earlier today, well, you started wanting to show off to boys.  Even if it meant giving some strange boys a thrill by allowing them a peek, knowing you probably wouldn’t see them again.  Letting Sy in as you’re getting dressed, telling yourself you have confidence and that you’re pretty, which you are.  I don’t think you’re aware, but Gordon’s more important to you than I am.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, intense, then again, less intense, “Yes.”

She shifted her grip on the knife, frowning.  I saw her move a little in frustration, not sure where to go or what to do.  I thought she’d storm out.

Instead, she held the knife to my throat again.  “This is supposed to be one of those times where you lie.  You bend the rules and you play unfair and you keep your stupid mouth shut, and you and I fumble our way along and there’s more like more of this and it’s good.”

“If I could’ve, I would,” I told her.  “Really.”

“You should’ve,” she said.

“But we don’t have the luxury of time.  The Lambs won’t be around forever, and within a couple of years, maybe a couple of months, or weeks, or days, or hours, there’ll be one less Lamb.  Then one less, then one less,” I said.  I paused.  I didn’t like saying the words.  “Like I said… the sooner the better.”

Her expression shifted.  Just a bit.  A little bit of fragility.

I wondered, for a moment, if the expiry dates had ever really sunk home for her.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

Her head bowed, her forehead coming to rest against mine.

“Sorry,” I whispered, gain.  I reached out to rub her upper arms, felt knives under fabric, and shifted to her shoulders instead.

She nodded, the movement of her head making mine move in turn.

She stayed like that for several more seconds, then straightened, stepping away, head turning as she rubbed at the corner of one eye.  I watched as her expression changed.  Neutral, safe.  A poker face as good as any I’d seen on her.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said.

“You’re excused,” I said, smiling a bit.

“We need to catch these ‘ghosts’,” she said.  “Because I damn well want to stab something right now.”

Then she swept the curtain aside and stepped out into the kitchen.

There was jeering.  I heard the ‘thock’ of a knife striking a surface, and most of the jeering stopped.

I drew in a deep breath, then stepped out of the little room.

More jeering.  I didn’t have a knife to fling at them.

Jamie approached, bundle of clothes in his arms.  He paused to lean close as he reached me, to say, “You’re blushing.”

“Am not,” I said.

He stepped inside.  I held the curtain closed as I had with Mary.

“Yeah,” he said.  “You’re not.  I wanted to get a dig in.”

“Too frigging bad,” I told him.

“You okay?” he asked.

I cocked my head to one side.  I mulled over the question for a bit.

“Not sure,” I said.

“We’ll distract you with a good mystery,’ Jamie said.  “How’s that?  Foxhunt.”

I smiled.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.03 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

My finger traced a symbol that had been etched into the woodlike growth at one corner of a building.  Two ‘v’ symbols.

Lillian and Mary were looking.

“A death happened here,” Gordon spoke.

I nodded.  “Older cut.  The weather’s worn away the splinters and hard edges.  Not relevant.”

“There are a lot of foxes,” Mary observed.

“Probably Craig’s mice, trying to put the pieces together.  Leave a mark wherever the ghosts were seen or suspected to be active, try to trace their paths or find clues,” I said.  “Jamie?”

“It’s useful, honestly.  I’m drawing up a mental picture.”

“Can you draw up an actual map?” Gordon asked.

“Not while walking.  It’s in my head.  I’ll remember.  I’ll put it down for you guys as soon as I can.”

“Good,” Gordon said.

“If you need a second to stop and try to pull ideas together, let us know,” I said.  “I know how your head works.  I don’t want you so caught up in drawing that mental map with all its symbols that you can’t stop to look at it and get a sense of what it means.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “That makes sense.  Whatever you need.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  He offered me a smile.

We were spread out, walking as a pack, some more off to one side than the others.  Our core was Lillian and Jamie, however, with both me and Mary close by.  Helen was off to one side, swishing her skirt with her hands periodically, walking backward now and again, in her own little world.  Gordon was leading the way, looking alert and wary enough that it was liable to tip off anyone who saw, if they were even watching.

I wasn’t so sure they were.

“Ghosts,” Mary commented, in a way that suggested she was thinking aloud.

“Yeah, someone else named our enemies for us, this time around,” I said.

Mary continued, “Ones that will throw one child off a building to claim another.  They’re elusive, they show up in a black carriage and never where the mice can approach or deal with them.  They disappear, and their victims disappear with them.”

“We’ve been at the Academy for two weeks, waiting for your appointments,” Lillian said.  “I haven’t seen any captured children around, have any of you?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “In twos and threes, sure.  Families?  Sure.  But nothing like they described.”

“If Jamie says no, that’s pretty definitive,” Gordon said.  His voice was low, and he sounded almost distant.  Preoccupied.  He added only a belated, “Okay.”

“Could be going straight to the dungeons,” I remarked.  “Unless, have you been down there, Helen?”

“Yes!  My father is doing some projects for the war.  I was observing.”

“Can you not call him that?” Lillian asked.  “That’s icky.”

“Okay,” Helen said, smiling.  “I didn’t see any children.  But they’re still renovating, and I didn’t have permission to go to the lower floors.”

“Doing nothing to work against the ‘ghost’ idea,” Mary said.  “They’ve up and disappeared.”

I took note of more marks here and there.  Symbols on doorframes of homes and small shops – the sort of small, crummy little bakery that subsisted in the shims, and homes that barely qualified as homes.  A roof over the head and something on the floor to sleep in.  Many, going by the aroma, didn’t have proper washrooms.  The people we saw here and there, far too sparse considering the time of day and the area, all dirty.  Most didn’t seem to care or give a second thought about the rain.

It was the heat that did it.  Putting up a hood was unpleasant, more fabric meant more heat.  Raising an umbrella was too much effort.

Better to get soaked, and let the faint breezes be that much more effective.

None of us had raincoats, and only Jamie had an umbrella.  Jamie and Lillian had bags, but both were carrying very little – Jamie’s oversized notebook, and Lillian’s bare essentials for care.

My eye fell on Jamie’s book.

“Did you get descriptions?  For the women?”

“I did.  Three women have been seen, as far as we can tell.  Each in good shape, attractive, each wearing makeup.”

“Not always a priority for a doctor or a student,” Gordon said.  He was thinking of Shipman, no doubt.

“No,” Jamie said.  “Especially for a group that’s been trawling the shims.  You’d think makeup would make them stand out more.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Do you have a thought?”

“Not really.  Keep going.  We can’t stampede all over you.  I’ll think on it.”

He smiled, “I’m used to being trampled over.  Um.  There’s the man, older, usually seen with the carriage, and then the three women.  One of the women is a blonde, another is a redhead, the third is from the East.”

“Eastern Crown States or over-the-pond East?” Gordon asked.

“Across the western pond,” Jamie said.  “Chinese, Japanese, or something like that.”

“Huh,” Gordon said.

“You don’t see many of those,” I remarked.  “They aren’t usually allowed, given we’re at war with them.”

“I thought about it, and I don’t remember seeing anyone fitting that description around Radham,” Jamie said.

“Is it possible they’re not actual Academy personnel, but an experiment?” Mary asked.

“Very,” Gordon said.

“It’s just the impression I get.  One man, at arm’s length from the rest, sending his creations out to do the dirty work,” Mary said.  “And sometimes men like making pretty women when they’re making their servants.”

“Do they?” Helen asked.  “I had no idea.”

“Shush, you” Mary said, but she smiled.  Helen smiled back.

“That methodology, you’re thinking about Hayle?” I asked.  “How he uses us?”

“I wasn’t, actually,” Mary said.

“It’s a common pattern,” Gordon said.  “It’s in keeping with how the Academy works.  Leadership figure at the center, operating through several arms, each of those branching out into subordinates and then branching out further to the work and creations those subordinates work with.”

I nodded.

“We can’t rule out the Academies as the source of this problem,” Gordon said.  “Much as we might want to.”

Are you saying that because you really believe it, or because of what Craig said, about you being beholden to other interests?  I couldn’t help but wonder.  Much as Gordon hadn’t done or said anything to suggest he was going to betray us or the Academy and run off to go find Fray, I wasn’t sure I trusted him entirely.  More to do with what I didn’t fully grasp about his current psychology than about any actual decisions he was making.

I couldn’t see the moves he was making or thinking about making.  I couldn’t anticipate him.  That left me feeling very unsteady in the Gordon department.  His break with Shipman was perhaps the best move he could’ve made, and went a long way toward restoring my confidence in him.

But even here, with Craig, I couldn’t be sure.  Mary’s action, dragging me into the room under the stairs, it had surprised me, but when I looked at it in perspective, it felt natural and flowed with my understanding of her.  Some of Gordon’s most mundane, everyday actions or word choices didn’t feel natural or flow with my understanding of him, odd as it was to think about.

“If what we know about the ghosts holds up, they won’t show up where we can get at them and outnumber them,” Gordon said.  “We should do what the mice did.  Find perches and observe.”

I nodded.  “If that doesn’t work, we could lay a trap, or we could try baiting them.”

“Trap in what sense?”

“Literal trap.  Deadfall, dig a hole in the ground for the carriage to fall into?”

“That sounds like a pain in the ass,” Gordon said.

“We’ll have Craig’s gang do the heavy lifting,” I said.

He rolled his eyes.

“Do you really think baiting them is a better idea?” I asked.  “Against a complete unknown?”

“No,” he said.  “No, I suppose not.”

“Groups of three?” I asked.  “We know from hearing about what happened to Tom and Sam that they’ll go after pairs.”

He gave me a nod.  “Groups of three.”

“You pick first,” I offered.

“Helen,” he said.

I frowned at him.

“What?”

Assuming each group needs to keep one person who can handle themselves in a fight, that forces my hand.

Had he given me Mary on purpose?

“Nothing,” I said.  “Jamie.”

“Lillian.”

“Mary,” I finally said.  I eyed her, but her face didn’t give anything away.

Gordon gave me a curt nod by way of response.  He turned and pointed at a nearby rooftop.  The four posts at the corner were grown wood, not cut, and the branches reached up.  A tattered cloth fluttered there, bound at all four corners.  There would be shade, cover from the rain, and a little bit of concealment.

“Okay,” I said.  “Jamie, Mary, any preference?”

“There,” Mary said.  She pointed at a small church.  The window was broken and hadn’t been repaired, suggesting it was abandoned.  Stone walls.  It would be cooler, better insulated.

“Sounds good,” Gordon said.

Then he was gone.

A little abrupt.  Too businesslike.

He was someone I could no longer pin down.

We made our way to the church, noting the markings here and there.

On a door, a circle, with three pairs of the ‘closed eyes’ that marked death.  Again, it was old.  Simply a sign of life in the shims.  More for remembrance than anything else, though there were areas marked with innumerable ‘closed eyes’ that were essentially back alley battlefields.  I saw the three crossed lines that formed a six point star, warning of Academy lawmen, and a series of diamonds around a ‘t’ shape, which warned of a monster.  An escaped experiment, very likely.

We reached the church and found it empty.  Dust was thick in the air, the light catching it, and plant life had grown up through floorboards, climbing up the walls.  It was strange to see a church which had Academy materials, but I saw the less-straight, organic patterns, framing some of the windows, reinforcing some of the cracked stone.  From older days, before the Crown had started taking issue with the cross.  It came down to power, as so many things did.

Once-white sheets stained with leaked, fatty tissues and bodily fluids were laid out on pews, of varying ages.  The bodies they covered were emaciated, mummified by the changes in temperature and the elements that had made their way in through broken windows and cracked walls.  In lieu of burial, people had been laid to rest here for the scavengers to gnaw on and the weeds and moss to embrace.

Jamie changed course slightly to fix a cloth, gently lifting up a skeletal head to tuck the corner of the sheet beneath, so it was covered.

“They weren’t buried?” Mary asked.

“This is easier,” I said.  “People do what’s easiest, as a rule.”

“I think it’s more about wanting to put the dead to rest where graverobbers won’t find them and haul them off for a few coins,” Jamie said, briefly laying a hand to rest on the sheet.

“Or both,” I said.

“Or both,” he echoed me.

He wiped his hands on his shorts as he rejoined us.

We ascended stone stairs up to the second floor, and I took a little bit more care with the footing, before deciding the floor was secure.  The floorboards were loose, broad, thick planks with old fashioned square nails at the ends, but the wood was sturdy.  I perched in one window at the north face, my back to the frame, feet on the windowsill, so I had a view of both the interior and the world outside.

Mary took her time setting up a tripline at the top of the stairs.  Once she was done, she sat in much the same position I was, at another window at the west face of the church.  We had a view of each other, but she was so far away I’d have to raise my voice to talk to her.

I wondered if that was residual awkwardness from her talk.  It said a lot that the moment she’d sat down, she had a knife out, turning it over and around in her hands, periodically tossing it into the air and catching it by the handle.

Antsy Mary.

Jamie stood by my window, backpack off and dropping to the floor beside me.

“See them?” he asked.

I nodded.

Under the distant rooftop, Gordon’s group was already waiting and watching.

“Will the pen scratchings bother you?” Jamie asked.

“Nah,” I said.  My eyes roved over the street.  There was a group of stitched standing in an alley by a building.  I wondered if they were expired or waiting for nighttime.  On a hot day like today, the usual faint burned-hair, rotting-flesh smell of a stitched could become a pungent burned-hair, rotting-flesh smell, instead.  It was humid enough that the air carried smells far better than it usually might.

I could remember how Mary smelled, in close proximity to me.  Memory and sense of smell weren’t my strongest traits, yet it stuck with me.

A bit of a tangent of a thought, that.

Jamie settled down beneath me, his head resting against the windowsill, back to the wall.  He had his book out, and was scratching away, drawing a map.

Something big lurked in darker corners between a wall and a building.  A bear without fur, a reptile without scale, it was hard to tell from a distance.  I watched it until it moved out into the street.  I saw locals look at it without reacting with alarm, and took it to be a long-time resident of the shims.

“Are you and Mary okay?” Jamie asked, voice soft.

“We’re fine.”

“Because the way you’re sitting and not talking, it makes me think you’re not quite okay,” Jamie said.

“We’ll adjust.  I’m not worried,” I said.  “She might want some time to think on her own.  You know as well as anyone how hard it can be to think straight when you’re surrounded by the rest of the Lambs.”

“Uh huh,” he said.  His pen scratched away.

“That wasn’t a convincing uh huh, Jamie.”

“That wasn’t a convincing statement, Sy,” he retorted, not looking up from the page.

I frowned down at the top of his head, but his nose was in his book, and he couldn’t see.

“Mary!” I called out, making Jamie jump, “Hey!”

She turned her head slowly, reluctantly, and gave me an annoyed look.

“We’re okay, right?”

She switched her knife to her other hand.

“Uh,” Jamie said.

She threw it.  I didn’t flinch as it sank into the wood about a foot above my head.

“I don’t know what that means!”

“We’re fine, Sy!” she said, in a tone that suggested the opposite.  “Now shush!”

Silence reigned, but for Jamie’s pen scratches and the periodic noise from outside.

I reached up and tried to pull the knife from the windowframe.  When I couldn’t, Jamie sighed, exasperated, and rose from his seat to reach over and haul it free.

“It was the angle,” I said, “That’s why I couldn’t get it.”

“Sure, Sy.”

“It was.  And if I pulled too hard, I’d fall, and-”

“You’d never do something that nice for others without an ulterior motive,” Jamie said.

I stuck my tongue out at him.  He did the same to me, before half-sitting, half-collapsing to the floor at the base of the window.

“You weren’t supposed to mention it, I think,” Jamie mused.  “That there was anything with you and Mary.”

“You asked.”

“Whatever exactly happened, it was between you two, maybe.”

“But you asked,” I said.

“And a gentleman never tells,” Jamie said.

“And there’s nothing to tell.”

Jamie looked up, face turned up so he looked at me upside-down.  He raised an eyebrow, then relaxed it.

“And besides, who would ever call me a gentleman?” I asked.

“Point.”

I watched a few carriages move through the shims.  They didn’t look like an Academy make, and there was nothing particularly special about them to draw my attention.

That would be suspicious unto itself, if we didn’t have the details we did.

A light flashed in my eye.

I looked and saw Mary, angling a blade to reflect light at my eye.

That would get annoying fast.

Before I could do anything, she raised the blade to her lips, shushing me, and then pointed with her free hand.

There was a rat, crawling across the rooftop.  Unlike the usual rat, it was green.  Fur tufted out and back, winding around the tail.  Flowers and weeds were growing out of it, all apparently alive.

A perfect camouflage.

By the angle of Jamie’s head, he was already watching it as it found a hole in the floor and squeezed its way through, a small puff of plant matter flying out as it made its way free.

When I looked back at Mary, she was smiling.  She shifted position, looking outside once more, expression still soft.

She looked lonely, I thought.  That was a thing.

But I was pretty sure we were okay.

“It’s nice, stepping away from the city sometimes,” Jamie said.

“We’re in the city.”

“No, from the city-city.  The machinery and meat of it.”

“I don’t know what this is, if not the meat.”

“The bones, the framework, the husk?” Jamie suggested.  “The dead leaves, fallen from a living tree?”

“Dark way of looking at it,” I said.

“Do you think so?” Jamie asked.  “I don’t.”

“I think you’re weird,” I said.

“And you’re not?”

“You’re being all poetic and garbage.”

Garbage?

“Talking about this place and making it out into something it isn’t.”

He leaned his head back, so it rested against the edge of my thigh and the windowsill.  “I spend so much time in the past.  Wallowing in memory.”

“Sure?”

“I like to think about the future.  Extrapolate.  Figure out where we’re going.  And the shims feel like a place we’re going.”

“How’s that?”

“That rat.  A project long forgotten.  How long before the world’s riddled with things like that?  The wars are done, maybe we’re here, maybe we’re not, maybe not in the same way, and all over, there are experiments that have become matter of fact, their creators long forgotten.”

“Huh,” I said.  “Are we among those experiments?”

He made a sound.  A one-note huff of a suppressed laugh.

“Probably not, huh?” I asked.

“Probably not.”

I thought of Mary, and of Gordon, and of Mary and Gordon.  I wasn’t really plotting what I was saying, but the words came out anyway, thoughts spilling out as words, more aimless than my usual.  “Problem with looking too much at the future, is you can get caught up in enjoying or anticipating what’s down the road.  Sometimes you have to live in the now, bring that future to pass.”

I wondered if Mary would.  If she’d reach out to Gordon in time.

“That’s very, very good advice,” Jamie said.  He seemed to take a while to digest it, then said, “I’d ask you if that’s what you talked to Mary about, but I think it should stay between you two.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Definitely.”

Several minutes passed.  I watched another carriage carefully.  Black, this time, but not an Academy carriage.  It could be mistaken for one, if I wasn’t being generous to Craig’s group, but was it really the ghost carriage?

“Sy,” Mary called out.

Was she thinking the same thing?

“Gordon’s trying to get our attention.”

I looked.

Mary was on the roof, arms extended above her head.  She was distant, but she apparently noticed when I turned my head to face her.  She extended an arm out toward the east.  Gordon did the same.

I looked, searching, and in roughly twenty seconds, I saw the real ghost carriage come down the path.  An Academy vehicle, washed free of dust by the rain, with nothing to suggest it was in any state of disrepair, a matching set of horses, covered by drapes to protect them from rain.  Stitched.

“There we are,” I observed.

Jamie stood to go look.  He handed me his book, where he’d scratched out a map.  He touched that map with one finger, moving it as the carriage traveled.

“I thought we’d have to spend a while waiting,” I said.  “Maybe hunt a grass-rat for food?  What the hell are they doing?”

“Don’t know,” Jamie said.

The carriage slowed, then stopped.

Two women got out, wearing labcoats with hoods.  One had long, very straight hair, the Easterner, the other had red hair, curvier than the first.  They started walking, a very leisurely, sure pace.  Moving as if they knew where they were going.

Curious.

The carriage resumed motion, turning at the next corner.

“The carriage always picks them up,” Jamie said.  “Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“If it dropped them off, it’s moving, it’s going to meet up with them again.  Whatever they’re doing, they don’t expect to take long.”

I looked over at Gordon.  I pointed an arm straight out in his direction, then raised my arms above my head, an ‘x’ shape.

His group.  Aggression.  In the simplest terms possible, for our crude language system, he was going after the people.

His right arm went up, confirmation.

I left one arm above my head, then dropped it, letting it swing pendulum style.

My group.  Ground, moving.

He raised his arm again, confirming.

We had our tasks.

Mary had joined Jamie and I.

I’d hoped to have her in Gordon’s group, to give her opportunity.  Gordon had been oblivious.  I was very aware of her, and thoughts of her as she’d been in that room danced through my head, making even the fact that she was standing near me that much more interesting and exciting.

“We’re after the coach, he’s after the two on foot,” I said.  “We need to stay together.”

“I’m going to slow you guys down,” Jamie said.

“Well, you’re not staying behind,” I told him.  “Not with that story Craig told about that one kid disappearing when they were searching for the first one.”

“Len,” Jamie supplied.  “Bert.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Get your book,” Mary said.  “Sy, help me.”

I frowned, “With?”

She stomped on the floor.  A floorboard rattled.

By the time Jamie had his book in his backpack, which wasn’t long at all, Mary and I had torn up a lone floorboard.  It stretched twelve or so feet, and was less than a foot thick.  We slid it out the window, to the nearest building.  Mary tested it, wobbling it.

Jamie looked a little wary at that.

“I’ll hold it,” Mary said.  “Sy, you go.”

I stepped up to the windowsill.

“I’ll take the bag,” I said, reaching for Jamie’s book.  “I weigh less, and I trust my balance more.”

He handed me the bag, but his expression was clouded with doubt.  “Why do it like this?”

“If we go down, on foot and try to navigate around buildings, we’ll lose too much time,” Mary said.

Her reasoning continued as I ran down the length of the plank.  I hooked the bag over a chimney and held the other end firm.

I could only barely hear what Mary was saying to Jamie.  “-follow Sy and-”

He moved at a crouch, more a shuffle than a run, but it wasn’t as slow as I’d anticipated.  Mary was as fast as I was.

As a pair, while Jamie held onto us to keep us from sliding down the shallow slope of the roof, we hauled the plank up, propping it up to the next building.  We had to place it at an incline, leading up to a higher vantage point.  One slip, we’d fall, bounce off the roof, and hit the road.

We flipped it dry side up before I went.  I went up first, bare feet on wood, quick, and grabbed the edge of the roof.  I hauled myself over the lip.  Flat-topped roof.

I looked and noted the location of the carriage.  Another look marked the location of the two women.  Gordon, Lillian, and Helen were traveling over rooftops, too.

There were benefits to the dense urban geography and the narrow roads of the shims.

I gave Jamie a hand as he followed.  The two of us reached down, each devoting one hand to holding the plank steady while the other hand reached for her hands.  We clasped her fingers and lifted her up.

From then on, it was smoother sailing.  Buildings with grown exteriors, branches extending out, some hewn short, others left like leafless trees.  Handholds.  We tracked the cart.

There was a trick at work here.  An experiment, something less natural.  Academy work.

We hadn’t done anything at this point that Craig’s mice couldn’t do.

Yet we made our way along rooftops, taking shortcuts, tracking the carriage.  We kept the location of the women in mind, noting their presence every time intervening buildings blocked our view, giving Gordon’s group direction to point the way to the women when we could.

The carriage, apparently no longer intent on a rendezvous with the women, pulled away.

“Checkpoint,” Jamie huffed.

“What?”

“That way would be one of the checkpoints.  Search and investigation by Academy tools, armed guards.”

“They’re going back empty handed?” I asked.

“Must be,” Jamie said.  “The carriage only stopped once.”

“Two carriages?” Mary asked.

I frowned.  I didn’t see a second.

Gordon had stopped, he was signaling.

A question.

I turned and looked, tracking the last known location of the women.

One woman.  The Eastern one.  Between the time they’d stepped behind an obstacle and now, one of the two had become a ghost.

Mary was drawing a weapon.

I drew the blade she’d thrown at me.

Gordon’s group seemed to get the message.  Gordon hopped down from the rooftop, out of view, Helen and Lillian following, in that order.

The problem with hunting predators, was that the tables could so easily turn.

We moved, running along wet, loose shingles, weapons in hand.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.04 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The weather was hot enough that the air shimmered in the distance, heat rising, a light rain falling.  The city was covered by a haze, giving it a dreamlike quality, yet my adrenaline was focusing my senses, making the immediate surroundings extra sharp.  Reality was a dilapidated neighborhood, crowded together, surrounded by walls and a city crowned by tree branches.  The heat shimmer and the movement of the rain made it seem to be growing by the second, yet it never went anywhere.

The carriage was at the checkpoint.  It was stopped, being checked, and it was going to take us several minutes to reach it, even while we used every shortcut at our disposal.

That said nothing of Jamie slowing us down, and the fact that we had to watch our backs.

A whistle, distant.  Gordon.

Warning?  Drawing attention?

I leaped up to a rooftop, grabbing the gutter for a handhold, then climbing the rest of the way up.  I was glad my feet were bare – they offered more traction on the shingles of the roof than any shoes would.  While I was turned around, reaching for Jamie’s hand, one foot already braced against the little chimney, I studied the surroundings.

Further back, down the road, the Eastern woman had been alone, her companion branching off, very possibly flanking us or hunting for other prey.  If I followed the path she was taking to its logical conclusion, she wasn’t there.  I couldn’t see her anywhere.

Two in the wind, now.

I caught Jamie’s hand, hauling him up as he half-climbed, half-ran up the side of the building.  I made sure he was secure before standing and stepping away.

Mary was quick to follow, faster to climb than I was.  Her new clothes were already stuck to her, and a loose strand zig-zagged across her face, between her brows and down a bit of her nose, to reach the other side of her face, plastered there by moisture.

“They’re gone,” I said.  “Could be anywhere.”

She gave me a curt nod.

We ran, with me taking the lead.  My feet slipped on some wooden shingles, but I caught myself, legs moving as if I were running at double the speed, the knife in my hand stabbing at a gap between shingles to give me the necessary hold and traction.  I had to twist the knife to get it free.  I ascended to the peak of the roof, ran along the spine of it, and leaped onto a branch that jutted out the side of one building and used it to cross the street, leaping onto a balcony.  The bag with Jamie’s book banged against my tailbone as I landed, feet skidding on a puddle, making me land on my ass.

Jamie was already running, leaping.  I scrambled to get my feet under me so I could catch him if he missed.

He missed.  I ended up catching him by the shirt-front, gripping it so it pulled tight against his body.

“Thank you,” he breathed, as he took hold of the railing and got a foothold.  “Mary said to copy what you did.”

“You’re not me,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  “But it’s a way to do things, worth trying out.  Sort of works.”

“Except you don’t know why I’m doing things.  If you step on a patch that’s wet or muddy because I just stepped in it?”

“Right.  Drawbacks.  But it sort of works.”

Copying me to the point that he was actually almost effective?  That he could actually do that…

I shook my head, parting from Jamie.

We started to make our way over the balconies, hurdling railings, me occasionally stepping on them, an up-down movement that made my legs burn: up to the railing with one leap of a stride, down to the middle of the balcony with my other foot, up to the far end of the balcony.  It was only doable because the balconies were so close to one another that they might as well have been attached.

I kept my eyes on the carriage, still at the checkpoint, still being searched and questioned.

“Mary!” I called out.

“What?” she called out.  She was only a short distance behind Jamie, who was a longer distance behind me.

“How close do you need to be to throw a knife?”

“At the carriage!?”

“Yeah!”

There was a pause.

“That house with the branches,” she said.

It was that far.  A few rooftops down.

“To be accurate?” I called out.

Another brief pause.

“Green roof with red moss!”

I saw it.  Further along.  Ten rooftops to cross.  Halfway between here and there.  No slips or delays allowed.

I would have crossed my fingers, willing the carriage to stay put, but I needed those fingers to ensure I had a grip as I hurdled gaps between buildings.

“Throw?” Jamie managed.

“We won’t get there in time.  A knife might!” I called out.

We approached the house with the branches.  It stood out because wood had been used to grow the exterior, with four treelike growths at the four corners of the building, but the branches had been left to grow long and tall, a mess and a tangle that limited the view beyond.  I noted a surprise clothesline I hadn’t seen from a distance, no clothes on it.  I searched for details, clues that might inform my imminent jump and landing, my race beneath that strange canopy, and the leap to the building beyond.

In the midst of that search, I saw motion.

Red hair.

I was in the exact wrong position, moving too fast and already too close to the edge to actually stop.  It made for a dozen conflicting thoughts and priorities in the span of a second.  Warn the others and where was my knife and can I fight her and is it really one of the ghosts and what do I say and what do I do!?

Warn the others.  My hands went out to the sides, fingers spread, palms facing the others.  I said the first words that came to mind.

“Oh no!”

I leaped.

I had the knife Mary had thrown at me in hand, already badly battered for my use of it in climbing.  Reminding myself of it, making sure I had a grip, it took attention away from my landing.  I stumbled.

The red-haired woman in a gray lab coat was blocking my way, standing at the edge of the roof.

Fast.  To get here from there?  They’d been behind us.

She had an empty, cold look in her eyes that essentially confirmed that she wasn’t human.  An experiment, or a modified person.  She didn’t blink at the water that ran down her face, beneath the hood of her coat.

“Who are you!?” I called out.

In answer, she stepped back, over the edge.  She dropped out of sight.

One of Mary’s throwing knives hit one of the branches that was still swinging from brushing against the red-haired woman.

Fast, fearless, and knows what she’s doing.

I picked up speed, pushing myself, my legs screaming for me to stop, reached the edge where she’d just been standing, and leaped to the next building, as if she’d never stood in my way.

Mid-leap, I looked down.

No balconies to drop down to, no apparent holds, no hiding spots.  The flat side of a building, a two-floor drop to the road, and nothing to take cover behind for ten feet in any direction.

I landed, and the twist of my head as I’d looked down and over skewed my body to one side.  I dropped onto a slanted roof, and spun out, dropping to all fours, almost belly-flopping in my attempt to get some traction on the wet shingles.

I found the right orientation and clawed my way forward.  I didn’t make any headway for a full two seconds as momentum and my downward slide won out over traction and hurried movements.  Then I had traction, and I bolted.  Jamie landed to my left, hitting the crest of the roof, feet and hands planted on either side.

He fell behind, which was probably a mix of intent on his part, letting me lead the way, and just him being a little slower as a rule.

I was impressed that he was keeping up this well, as it was.

Another rooftop, then another.

I saw the red-haired woman on the far side of the street.  She’d been running, and she was slowing to a walk.  She didn’t pant for breath, she didn’t say or do anything.  She only watched, her head turning to take us in as we made our way forward.

As we passed her, she picked up speed again.  A light jog, then a sprint, then a faster movement, her coat flapping behind her.  Pulling ahead, moving to cut us off.

She crossed the street, drawing nearer to us.  The perspective of the building we were running over blocked our view of her.

I made the next leap, watching.  With the space in between buildings, I should have had a glimpse of her as she ran alongside us.

She was already gone.

Camouflage?

No way was there anything that accurate or effective in modern science.

“Sy,” Jamie called out, huffing for breath.

I could see.

The women weren’t our focus.  The carriage was.

It was starting to move, haltingly as it had to navigate past bystanders and a carriage in the immediate vicinity.  Not far away at all, a hundred feet, but there was no way we’d get down from the roof to the street, across to the cart and past the checkpoint before it pulled away.

We were close to the house with the green shingles and what I’d taken for red moss, actually an algae now that I was close enough to see.  It grew on the rooftop and gave an appearance very similar to raw, open wounds.

“Mary!” I called out.  “Throw!  Doesn’t matter if you hit, just throw!”

I heard the short, whip-like noise as she whipped the first of the knives out and over.

I leaped over to the house with the green shingles, glad that the algae offered more traction rather than less.  I collapsed, no longer running.  There was no point.

A hail Mary, I thought, joking with myself.

Not the kind of joke that was worth getting in the habit of saying, considering the Academy’s relationship with religion.  Young children among the hoity-toity got lectures for saying ‘oh Jesus’, much as adults lost friends or jobs for mentioning religion.  At best, it was a lower class thing to say, only the peons dwelt on such things, as Mauer’s followers had.  At worst, it could offend someone with ties to the Academy.

The weapon flew through the air.  Mary was already throwing more from the rooftop behind us.  She had the threads out, and was spinning the knives in whirling circles before casting them out sending them more up and skyward than over.

Her aim was better than I’d thought.  I had weighed the odds, and considered a civilian with a knife in their shoulder or head to be worth it, but Mary was better than that.  The first two knives didn’t veer far off course, and they didn’t hit anyone.  Crates, boxes, and the side of one cart, striking violently enough to interrupt conversations and turn heads.

The third hit one of the larger monsters that were serving as guards, just a little past the front of the carriage.  Solidly built, with a bulging, translucent forehead and reptilian cast to its horned skin, it was nonetheless humanoid.  I could hear it roar, see it react with pain.  It lurched forward, lashing out, and shouldered its way into the horses at the front of the carriage, and the ensuing movement and chaos made one side of the vehicle rise up.  Forward movement arrested.

We were going to have to apologize to people.

Mary grunted softly as she hopped over to the rooftop I was on.  She walked past me, picking her way past one arm I had outstretched to grip the cusp of the roof, a thread and knife spinning within a few inches of my head.

“Kill?” She asked.  She had a cold, dead look in her eyes, as she stared into the distance, focused on her quarry.

I wanted to say yes.

But we didn’t know for sure if they were Academy or not, and murdering someone who was in good standing with witnesses watching could get us in trouble.

“Wound,” I said.

She made a face, then released the string.

The knife flew skyward.

“You ask a lot,” she said.

“I’m a jerk like that,” I said.  “And I know you’re capable.”

Jamie stopped panting long enough to whistle, “Is it too soon to say nice throwing?”

“No,” she said.  “Unless he moves.”

The man driving the carriage twisted, shouting something to people behind him.

But his legs were where they were.  The knife came down, seemingly right on top of him, and he screamed, doubling over.

“Hit?”

“Thigh,” she said.  She sounded oddly detached from things.  No joking, no follow up comments.  Like a stitched might sound.

My mind was switching gears, thinking about the social dynamics, the challenge of dealing with a crowd of people with guns, now at high alert, convincing them to give us the man in the carriage.

It was complicated because a part of me was stuck interpreting Mary, trying to read her.  She was stuck in my head, for the time being, persistently, stubbornly occupying a portion of the mental real-estate.

“We should go, before he gets away,” I said.

The group of soldiers was busy trying to get a wounded, angry monster under control, simultaneously trying to locate the threat.

Some were pointing at us.  They had weapons in hand.  Rifles.

Reluctantly, my legs protesting, still a bit short of breath, I stood up.  I was careful to move slower to avoid posing any threat.

I sheathed my knife in my belt, slid down the roof, searching below for any sign of the red-haired woman before I let myself fall.  I dropped down to the street, raising my hands the moment I was able.   Mary was the next down, and I lowered my hands enough to help catch Jamie as he dropped down, before passing him his bag with the book.  We walked as fast as we were able, hands raised.

The soldiers weren’t pointing the guns at us, at least.

The carriage was still there.  Once we were in earshot, I’d have to give them a warning.  Make something up?  I could tell them a portion of the truth, show them my badge.  If it didn’t convince them to arrest the man, it could make them keep the man, his carriage and us in custody until a higher-up could arrive.

With that arrival, we’d have answers.

But things couldn’t be that simple.

The red-haired woman stepped out of a space between buildings, eyes fixed on us.  She stopped, back to the men with the rifles, her full attention on us.

Her eyes looked feral.  She was curved and flawless in a way that made me think she was crafted rather than born.  With her hood down, her hair was getting wet.  She’d cast off her coat with the hood at some point, no longer wearing it.

Definitely not a proper human being, yet something about her seemed familiar.

Blocking our way.

“Who are you?” I tried again.

No answer.  She backed away a step, then another, eyes still fixed on us.

“Wound?” Mary asked, from beside me.

I signaled with a gesture rather than speak.

Mary threw out an arm.  A knife soared through the air, straight as an arrow, aimed at the heart.  The knife’s target stepped to one side, pulling one shoulder back and away to let the knife fly past her.  It hit the road a distance in front of the men with the rifles, skittering, spinning, before coming to a stop.

They recognized it, and one shouted, “Hey!  You!”

Mary tried again, not caring about the rifles.

Another dodge, to the point that it looked easy.

Enhanced reflexes?

This ghost was untouchable, it seemed.

We were drawing closer, though.  I wasn’t sure what that meant.    Twenty feet away, then sixteen, then twelve-  the red-haired woman was retreating without running.  She was a short distance from the men with rifles, enough that Mary was reluctant to throw.

“Behind us,” Jamie said.

I half-turned to look.

Not just fast, but strong.

The Easterner was directly behind us, approaching at a brisk walk.  She had a small child in her arms.  A grubby child, no older than six, or perhaps a malnourished eight, a girl.  The girl was unconscious or dead.  Again, the woman wasn’t wearing her lab coat.  Only a simple black dress.

And way, way, down the street, almost beyond my ability to make them out, I could see the others, giving chase, trying to catch up.

Turning my attention forward, I could see the man at the carriage, turning to stare at us, his expression flat.  He had longer hair and a widow’s peak, his beard cut so there was no hair on his cheeks, round specs on his nose, and a doctor’s lab coat draped over him.

He was pulling ahead, moving.  He’d been given permission to go.

“Hold!” I called out to the riflemen.  “That carriage!”

The red-haired woman bolted, turning a hard right and sprinting for an alleyway.

I twisted to look, saw the Eastern woman doing the same.  They’d moved in the same instant, and she moved just as fast with her burden in her arms.

We moved to give chase, Mary drawing her knife-

-and stopped altogether as one of the men at the waypoint fired their gun.  Aiming it into the air.

We came to rest, watching as the ghosts disappeared from view, the carriage moving further down the street, beyond our reach.

“The carriage-” I started, raising my voice.

Another rifle shot.

I scowled, falling silent.

The men with guns approached, and we waited patiently as they drew near, hands raised.

One day, we’re going to invent a better brain.  Then we’re going to put that superior brain in everyone’s heads, and stupid things like this aren’t going to happen, I thought.

I considered it for a moment, then amended the thought to add, as much.

Bayonet blades and rifle-nozzles prodded us as they drew close.

“Don’t suppose you could send someone after that carriage?” I asked.

“Shut up,” a soldier said.

“Or tell us who was in the carriage?”

“Shut up!” he said.

I sighed.

We were searched, and Mary relieved of the blades they could find.  When they realized they had to reach under her clothes to get at her knives, they opted to bind her hands behind her back instead.  They did the same for me, rough, and were working on Jamie when Gordon’s group caught up with us.

“It’s okay!” Gordon called out.  He had his badge out and was holding it up.

They’d already found mine in the pocket of my shorts while patting me down.  It was sort of irritating that they actually gave Gordon’s a proper look.

“Hunting enemies of the Crown,” Gordon said.  “You can reach out to Professor Hayle at the Tower if you need to confirm our identities.”

“You attacked us,” the soldier said.

Gordon gave me a look.

“We had to stop the carriage at all costs,” I said.  “All costs.

“And my aim is good enough that I wasn’t going to hit anyone important,” Mary said.

“Uh huh,” the soldier said, in a way that suggested Mary’s statement hadn’t helped our case.

All of us were panting, except for Helen, and all of us were sweaty and dirty.  My hands were bleeding in places from the scrabbling, violent climbing and running on rooftops.  I had a skinned knee.  Jamie and Mary weren’t much better off.

“The carriage,” I said.  “Who did they tell you they were?”

“We didn’t question him,” the man said.

“Isn’t that your job?  To question and search?”  Gordon asked.

A little too accusatory.  It didn’t go over well with the soldier.  Tensions and frustrations were already high between our two groups.

“Shift change.  We got updates and debrief on recent goings-on from the last shift, which pretty much is jack shit all and gossip.  Last shift processed the carriage.  It looked like he had papers.”

I panted, eyes roving aimlessly, searching for clues or cues that I could use to formulate a better question, squeeze an answer out of the soldier.

“Have you seen the cart before?” I asked.

“In passing,” he said.

I could have stabbed him for being so unhelpful.

“The women,” Jamie said, voice soft.  “The red-haired one and the Japanese woman with the child?  Have you seen them before?”

“Sure,” the man said.

“Sure?” I asked.  “Could you be more specific?”

“I wouldn’t brook that tone,” he said, now hostile.  “I’m not sure I trust any of you, yet.”

“Please,” Helen said, stepping forward.  “Children might be dying.  Friends of ours.”

Helen knew how to provoke reactions, to play the social game or change the tenor of the conversation.  She put the soldier on his back foot with one deft verbal thrust and a little bit of emotion injected into her words.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” the man said, “And I don’t like not knowing what’s going on, considering it’s a part of my duties here.  Perhaps you should have your turn at doing some explaining.”

I felt the urge to stab him again.

“Someone may be posing as a member of the Academy, using experiments to find and kidnap children from the shims,” Gordon said.  “The man in that carriage is one.  The two women you saw are two more.  There’s also a blonde woman.  They’re attractive enough to draw attention.  Surely you’ve noticed them before?”

“From a distance,” the soldier said, relenting a little.  “Usually during night shifts.”

Gordon pressed, “And the carriage?  When you say you see it in passing, does that mean it usually passes through just before your shift begins?”

“I suppose,” the soldier said.

“Does the time you start your shift change, or is it set?”

“It changes.  You’re implying some conspiracy here?”

Gordon nodded.  “If they have a pattern of passing through when you’re busy and preoccupied, that says they know a dangerous amount of how the Academy and our military is operating.”

Now we had the soldier’s attention.

And now that we had it, my attention was on the people in the background.  The captain’s subordinates.

They looked uncomfortable.

“Speak up,” I cut in.

The captain gave me an offended look, shifting to a hostile state in a flash.

“You,” I said, pointing at one man in the crowd.  “Say what you’re thinking.”

“Excuse me?” the captain asked, on behalf of his soldier.

“I’m not thinking anything,” the man said.

“Your eyes slid to one side as you said that,” I said, “That’s a sign of evasiveness.  You’re lying.”

An utter lie.  His eyes hadn’t moved at all.  But now he was thinking about his eyes and not his words.  More pressure, on top of the attention of his captain and the rest of the squad.

“Your buddies here are looking at you, your captain is looking, you know something and you’re not saying it,” I said.  “Why?”

“I’m not thinking anything,” he said, with even less sincerity than before.

“Your gaze moved again,” I said.

“It didn’t!”

“James,” the captain said.  “What’s this about?”

“It’s not- it’s…”

“Do we need to go to the barracks and bring others into this?” the captain asked.  Now he was on my side.

“I- no.  No sir.  It’s just… the women.”

“What about the women?”

“I’ve seen them before.”

“Did they have kids with them?” Jamie asked.

“Sure, but that’s not so strange, is it?  Given that it’s the shims?  Even when women work?”

“Work?  You mean prostitutes?” Gordon cut in.

The man startled.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “That almost makes sense.”

The captain gave him a curious look.

“They’re weapons.  Evasive ones.  They’re aware of their surroundings to the point that they can avoid trouble and isolate targets, they pass as either employees of the Academy or as prostitutes, to slip past our defenses, whichever works.  Individuals you don’t question, ones that can distract, or ones that you’re afraid to pay too much attention to, depending on who your commanding officer is.  Probably different identities for different checkpoints and situations.  Chameleons.”

The captain’s look hardened into one of grave concern.

“I think you should notify people further up the chain,” Gordon said.  “Because this is as serious as it gets.  If they’re capable of doing this, they’re capable of worse, and with a war going on, they might not just have three.  Or they might have these in cities other than Radham.”

“Stay,” the captain ordered.  Then, as an afterthought, he ordered his men, “Watch them.”

We watched as the man broke into a run, heading to the nearest phone or superior officer.

“I’m exhausted,” Jamie said.

There were a few nods.  Lillian was among them.

“It’s rare for me to have a feeling and be unable to pin it down,” Jamie said.  “But does this methodology feel familiar to anyone else?”

My eyes went straight to Mary.  She had a dark look in her eyes.  Before I could speak, she did.

“Yes,” was all she said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 6.05 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“The man driving the carriage was Mr. Percy,” Mary said.  “Not exactly him, the hair was a little different, but I recognized him.”

“Appearances can be easily changed,” Hayle mused.  “If anyone would recognize him, it would be you.”

“Yes, professor,” Mary said.

The Lambs were assembled in Hayle’s office.  We were lined up in front of his desk, while the old man sat, arms folded in front of him.  His hair was shorter than it usually was, more neat, and his lab coat was immaculate, without wrinkle or speck.

The Duke’s presence reached even this far, from Claret Hall.

Hayle glanced at me, then back to Mary.  “Mary.  Not to put too fine a point on things, but Sylvester reported to me at the time of your recruitment that you have a command phrase.  If he utters it, you might be a liability?”

A dark look passed over Mary’s expression, not that she’d been bubbles and sunshine a moment before.  “Yes sir.”

“Perhaps it would be best to keep you away from this altogether,” he said.  “You’re collectively overdue for your appointments, which have been sporadic at best while you’ve been away, and I know there are places where we could make use of you, once those are done.”

I wasn’t Hayle’s friend, I didn’t even necessarily like him, but I respected the man.  In this, right here, he was proving he had the right to that respect.  I’d communicated the situation to him, I’d asked him to take Mary on as one of the Lambs, and he’d agreed, after a long evaluation period and some research.

I’d told him the truth.  That Percy had escaped, leaving a note for Mary.  Where she’d been led to think it was a command phrase to turn her into a reckless killing machine, with me doing some of the leading, it had been a genuine goodbye, meant to express to her how fond he was of her.  The command phrase hadn’t existed.

Now the man was back in the picture.  He now knew, presumably, that she was counted among the Lambs.  If those feelings still held true then the man posed more problems than his penchant for cloning alone.

Hayle knew, and he was steering us away.

“There are stirrings of a cult in the Capitol.  If we-”

“No,” Mary said.

Hayle raised his eyebrows.  “Beg pardon?”

“I want to see this through.  Please.  I have to.”

Again, he glanced at me.

I wished he wouldn’t do that.

I parted my lips to speak.

“Why, Mary?” Gordon asked, before the sound had left my mouth.

No, don’t give her a chance to justify her position!

“Because he made me.  He can unmake me, if we let him.  I can’t let someone else handle this and know that if he gets away, I’ll have that hanging over my head forever.  We know now that they’re slippery.  These women are his new clones, with the same idea as before.  Except… less intimate.  Unless there’s a trick we haven’t caught on to, the only way we’re going to catch them is if we bait them.”

“Believe it or not,” Hayle said, “the Academy has invested a lot in this project over the years.  Time, effort, energy, mine above all.  I would rather not have it go to waste by sending Lambs in as bait against a threat we do not totally understand.”

“We understand!” Mary said.  “That’s what we do.  You’ve sent us in against worse, with frequency.  We assess threats, then we devise solutions.  How is this different?”

Well.  That was a problem.  Mary was emotional about this.

I had a horrible sinking feeling in my gut.  Things had shifted to the point where, no matter what path we took, there was either a general sort of awful or a risk of a worse sort of awful.  Hurt feelings and confusion, or danger of white lies being exposed.

“Dog and Catcher can track them down.”

“I’m not disagreeing,” Gordon said, “But Dog and Catcher just came back from the field.  This is their time to rest.  They’ll be fatigued, hurt, distracted, they’re not approaching this fresh.”

“It’s your time to rest,” Hayle said.

Gordon shook his head, “It’s been a while.  We’ve rested.  We’re raring to go.  You can’t deny that this is important.  This is big, if our instincts are right.  I agree with Mary.  I don’t share her reasons, but we can do this.  We should.”

“It is important.  That’s why that I don’t want a possible liability in the field,” Hayle said.

Mary tensed, flinching as if she’d been hit.  Hayle noticed.

More gently, he said, “I respect the work you do, Mary.  It took some convincing on Sylvester’s part for me to bring you on board.  That you’ve worked out as well as you have has been to your credit and Sylvester’s.  I’ve never been quite so glad to have my doubts banished as they were on this.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, relaxing a bit.

I reached out for her hand, to hold it.  She pulled away as if I’d stung her.  She clasped her hands in front of her instead.

Huh?

Hayle continued, oblivious, “That said, there’s a danger, I want to keep you with us, and that means treating this situation with care.  If we acknowledge that the Lambs are the best way to handle the task, we might need to compromise.  I want you to sit this one out.”

Good.

“No,” she said, not an eye’s blink after he’d finished speaking.

Glancing at her, I could see her expression.  Stricken.  Scared?

This was Mary laid bare.  Defenses stripped away.

I knew why, and my heart fell.

Mary is and always has been afraid of being alone.  It’s the fulcrum point I used to leverage her into the Lambs, and right now, right here, she’s isolated.  She’s been reminded of our mortality, that she might lose any of us.  To take her now and make her sit this out, it could drive a wedge in, if she even listened.

She was disconnected, at risk of detaching from the group, breaking ranks or losing faith and friendship.  With our recent interaction, I wasn’t sure I was in a position to bring her back in.  She’d pulled her hand away.

“Sir,” I said, and I hated saying it.

“Sylvester?”

“She should participate.  She knows Percy better than anyone.”

The old man stared over his desk and across his office to give me an unwavering, cold look.  I knew he was weighing odds and considering all the factors.

To trust Sy, or not to trust Sy?

He’d been trying to keep her out of this because of the details I’d shared.  Now I was telling him to do the opposite, and I wasn’t in a position to explain.

“Alright,” he said.  “I’ll let people know what you’re doing.  We have birds going out to other Academies.  We’ll ask for them to keep an eye out for anything that looks like this.”

Jamie spoke up, “If it’s Percy, then it’s very possible that the women will meet the same physical descriptions.  It’s easier to make more of the same than to make individuals.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Hayle said.  “I’m taking you all at your word when you say you can do this.”

I didn’t miss the momentary, pointed look that he gave me, as he said that last bit.  The message was clear.

“Keep me up to date,” he said.  “And check in with your supervising doctors.  Remind them about your appointments.  See if they can make the time.”

We turned to go, exiting Hayle’s office.

The upper portion of the Tower had no stairs.  The hallways sloped, something I’d always considered to be a nuisance.  Stairs could be taken two at a time, going down, while the gentle slope only made walking difficult.

Little white birds had settled on branches that framed the windows, moving and fluttering as we made our way down to the next available floor with a stairwell.

A young woman in a white lab coat hurried past us, head down, clutching books and papers to her chest.  She looked at us, almost stopping, eyes wide, then seemed to change her mind, heading up the hall.

Fear?

I craned my head, looking back, to see if there were any clues.

“What was that about?” Gordon asked.  He was looking, too.

“I’ve seen her before,” Lillian said.”

“Her name is Anne,” Jamie said.  “She works downstairs.”

“Of course you know that,” Gordon said.

“And in the bowels,” Helen said.  “She turns up a lot here and there, because Hayle supervises her.”

I cast another glance upstairs.  With anyone and everyone, I now had to think in terms of Percy’s work.  Whether she was a danger.

But the others were vouching for her, and, everything else in consideration, it didn’t make sense that there would be clones this deep in the Academy.  If things were that bad, we’d already lost.

“She was scared,” I observed.

“Thought it was something like that,” Gordon said.  “Going up, only person she could be going to would be Hayle.”

“She works on the tree structure,” Jamie said.

“Ashton’s old project?” I asked, suddenly spooked.

Jamie nodded, silent.

“I didn’t think that was a project which would have emergencies,” I said.

“It’s not,” Jamie said.

“There was one with me, once,” Helen said, smiling.  “My first time out of the vat.  I was only half as tall as I am now.  I opened my eyes and wanted to give someone a hug.  They shot me.”

“Charming,” I said.

“The tree structure is different.  This would have to be something else,” Gordon said.

Mary remained silent, one hand moving to her side, thumb hooking under the side of her skirt, no doubt to touch one of the knives there.  Reminding herself it was there, being prepared and primed for danger.

Lillian reached out with one hand, touching Mary’s.  Mary flinched, then let Lillian take her hand.

Walking behind her, I could see muscles in Mary’s shoulders relax.

Jamie elbowed me.

I glanced at him.

His expression blank, he didn’t say or do anything else.

I elbowed him back, and he smiled a little.

Then we rounded another corner, and I could see people clustered outside the door of a lab.

Again, the attitude was spooked.  One of them was brushing at his coat with his hands.

In another section of Radham academy, a doctor being very scared about what they had on their coat would have been a reason to start running.  Here, it was only very concerning.

“What’s going on?” Gordon asked them.

“Anne didn’t tell you?” the doctor nearest us asked.

“Tell us what?” Gordon asked.

The echoing tramp of footsteps made the doctors turn, backs straightening.  I connected the dots in the last possible second, not fast enough to do anything about it.

He rounded the corner at the far end of the hall.  As he reached the window, he extended a long arm and rapped the window, startling the birds just outside the window, scattering them to the air.  A smile touched his lips.

He was taller than a man should be, and he was beautiful.  His overall appearance made me think of the face cards of a deck of playing cards.  All of the pieces put together could have and should have made him look inhuman, but they only barely toed the ‘human’ side of the line.  Shoulders and upper chest broad, waist narrow, legs lean, features sharp, with long arms and legs.

His blond hair was parted sharply, the majority of it tumbling down one side of his face and down one shoulder, more extending straight back behind him.  His clothes were as fine as clothes got, with a decorated jacket in black and gold, the tail of it extending behind him, nearly to the ground.

Despite the heavy clothing, he had alabaster skin, without the slightest shine of sweat.  He could have been sixteen or thirty, none of the usual indicators were there, but he carried himself like a sixteen year old might, while logic and what I’d heard of the man told me he was much older.  He loomed, slouching just slightly, as if under the weight of the golden spill of hair and the heavy jacket.

My assessment of him was interrupted somewhat, as I was falling to one knee as soon as he appeared.

“Hm,” he made a sound, amused.  The voice was deep.  Altered, augmented.

I stared only at the ground, kneeling, head down.

Only years of training my poker face kept me from flinching as his fingers touched my head, running slowly and absently through my hair.  It was still damp from my trip over to the Tower, a little tangled.  I felt stabs of pain as very strong fingers tore past one or two snarls.

The hand disappeared.  There was a long pause.

“Stand,” he said.  “Let me get a better look at you.”

As one, we stood, straightening.

It was the eyes that got me.  They were eyes that made me think of countless people we’d gone after and killed.  People who’d been pushed too far, or who’d gone over the edge before we even found them.  A little too much in the way of whites around the edges, they didn’t blink enough.  Tension did it, adrenaline pumping hard and fast through the veins for too long, muscles too tight in the face.  People under a deep, profound, long-term sort of stress and those with mental illnesses often had those eyes.

He didn’t strike me as someone who was under any stress.  His movements were too languid.

“The Lambs,” he said, voice quiet and tender, yet still deep enough to reverberate, nearly musical in tone, “I was looking for you.”

We’ve been actively avoiding you, I thought.

The Duke of Francis was accompanied by four doctors.  All four stood behind him, waiting for instruction.  We were frozen.  There was no talking without being asked to speak.  No moving without permission to go.  From the time he’d been born to now, his world had revolved at his whim.  Only his family members would be able to gainsay him or check his conduct.  As far as I was aware, the next member of the Crown was on the other side of the Crown States.

Long, strong fingers touched the side of my face, stroking me as if I was a pet.

His index finger slid under my chin, then lifted it, turning my face up, not so I could look at him, but so he could look at me.

Wearing the wrong expression could be dangerous.  If I looked like I was frowning or sullen, he might take offense.  If I smiled, he might be pleased with me, which could be worse.

“Hm!” he made that amused noise again.  His hand dropped away from my face.  “Look at you.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I kept my chin at the angle he’d raised it at.

He moved over to Helen.  I watched out of the corner of my eye as he stroked her hair, took the collar of her dress in hand and adjusted it, before bending down to tug at her belt, straightening out wrinkles in the fabric.  He touched her face, running a thumb over her lips.

“Beautiful,” he said.

Helen smiled.

The Duke smiled back.  “Those doctors that accompany me back there, they’re the best at what they do.  They create art.”

He gestured at himself, as if to demonstrate.

“They made me immortal, or close enough to count.  They made me beautiful, strong, and quick.  They made me dangerous enough to dispatch anyone who might seek to take my life.  Yet here you are, and you could pass for a cousin of mine, with the same treatment.”

Helen bowed a little, a coy smile on her face.

My heart pounded in my chest.  The Duke’s thumb pushed its way between Helen’s lips, then lifted one up, making her sneer.  Looking at her teeth, as one might the proverbial gift horse.

I clenched my hand at my side.

“You look like you want to say something,” he said.  “Speak.”

“I was crafted by Professor Ibott, lord,” Helen said, demure.

“Hm!” the Duke made that noise again.  It was probably a tic, or he didn’t realize he was doing it.  Or maybe he didn’t care.  “He’s made noises about wanting to dine with me.  I had a glimpse of him and I soured on the idea.  But seeing the work he does… hm!”

Of course Ibott wanted to secure a spot in the inner circle of the Crown’s elite doctors.  It was the next best thing to being royalty.

To secure him for the Lambs project, Hayle had pricked Ibott’s pride.  Helen might well have been made to prove that Ibott had what it took to earn a place in the inner circle, and now things were coming full circle.

Helen was undoubtedly a pawn that Ibott would sacrifice for the sake of his aspirations.

“I’ve been homesick,” the Duke said, as quiet as he was capable of being, with a voice and lungs modified to give him the ability to effectively address crowds.  “Having you nearby might be like having family close at hand.  You’d be little more than a toy, but wouldn’t that be fun?  You could play at being a noble lady.”

“Yes, lord,” Helen said, smiling.

There was no other answer to give.  The Duke had his own gravity.  Nothing went against it.  He’d grown up in those circumstances, and he’d been shaped by them.

I heard footsteps behind me, but I couldn’t turn to look without turning my back to the Duke.  Anna?

The Duke straightened.  “Professor Hayle.”

“My lord,” Hayle answered.

“I’ve been admiring your Lambs.  This one in particular.  Do you imagine Professor Ibott would let me keep it?”

“He likely would, lord,” Hayle said.

My blood ran cold.

“But I wouldn’t advise it, lord,” Hayle said.

“Why not?”  Vaguely reminiscent of the tone of a toddler who just had a treat snatched away from in front of them.

“She’s a praying mantis, lord.  Professor Ibott could explain.  She draws targets close and then kills them.  Ibott’s work is exemplary, but it would be improper, and there’s the outside chance that it might pose a danger, in strange circumstances.”

“Oh.  I don’t want her for that,” the Duke said, cavalier.  His hand cupped Helen’s face as he stepped past her, his arm extended behind him, as if to keep hold of a prize he wasn’t about to release.  He was moving closer to Hayle, as if challenging.  His tone was jovial, “But just in case, my doctors here will remove the danger and render her harmless.  Knowing what I do about Professor Ibott, he’ll assist in the process, to curry favor.”

“As you wish, lord,” Hayle said.

I watched as Gordon nudged Mary, who was standing behind Helen.

Mary had a knife in hand.

Having a knife in hand this close to the Duke, of all people, could be a death sentence for her and all the rest of us put together.

Casually enough that it wouldn’t draw attention, Mary extended the knife forward, and pressed the point against the back of Helen’s dress.  She pressed with enough force that it penetrated fabric and sank into flesh.  A spot of blood welled around the cut.

Helen didn’t move or jump.

“The Lambs won’t suffer unduly for the loss of one?”

“They’ll be less effective, of course, but no, not unduly, lord,” Hayle said.

I knew it was what he had to say, but I went from thinking the best of him to loathing him in the time it took him to finish the sentence.

Mary twisted the knife.  Helen didn’t budge a hair.

I couldn’t figure out the point or intent behind the action, if Mary had intended a different result or not, but Mary quickly resumed a normal standing position as the Duke moved, turning.

He still cupped Helen’s face.  He looked down at it.

She’d changed her face.  Not so much it was definable, but tension here, relaxation there, a fractional shifting of features, a smaller scale version of what she’d done to emulate Melancholy.

The Duke’s expression was haunting, or perhaps haunted.  Looking at him, I fully believed he saw through the ruse.  That Helen had made herself just a little bit uglier or stranger.  He wasn’t a stupid man.

He let her head drop down to its resting position, from where he’d moved it.

She relaxed her features.

He lifted her chin again.  She added the strange tension, even less than before.

“Perhaps not,” he finally said.  There was a long, tense pause.  “Professor Hayle.”

“My lord?”

“Are the Lambs at my disposal?”

“Always, lord.  They’re preoccupied with a task, but I can reassign them at a moment’s notice.”

“What task are they preoccupied with?” the Duke was all business now, Helen seemingly forgotten.

“A possible cell in the city, lord.  Someone the Lambs are intimately familiar with.  He’s creating augmented women to infiltrate our defenses.  He may be active elsewhere.”

“I haven’t heard of this.”

“I just received the report from the Lambs in my office.  You were the next to know, lord.”

The Duke looked down at Hayle, and I wondered how sharp he was.  He’d lived a lifetime with people dancing around the truth, trying to convince him to do things without outright saying such.  It would make anyone paranoid.  Whether it made him an effective paranoid was up in the air.

He turned, stepping back, studying us, evaluating us.  There was a coldness in those wide eyes, this time.  If he’d liked us before, I didn’t feel like he did anymore.

“Keep them on that task.  Have them finish it sooner than later,” he instructed.  That said, he swept his coat back and turned to leave.

I didn’t miss hearing what he told one of his doctors.  The acoustics in the hallway were too good.  “I want every file on the girl, and a meeting with Professor Ibott before the day’s end.  Verify-”

And then he was around the corner, out of earshot.

A simple fact check could be a devastating weapon.  If Ibott was uncooperative, if anything we said or did or implied was proven to be a lie, the Duke could end us.

A full minute passed before anyone felt safe to move.  The moment the tension was broken, the doctors in the hallway with us disappeared into their office.

“You stabbed my butt,” Helen said.

“I wanted to communicate that this was serious,” Mary said.  “I wasn’t sure how else to do it.  Sometimes you go along with things without thinking them through.  I was worried you would go along with him.”

“I like my butt, and now it’s got a hole in it!”

“Another hole,” I said.

“You’re gross,” Lillian told me, before telling Helen, “That’s fixable.”

“I hope so!”

“On your way,” Hayle said.  “Stay out of his way.  Check in with your doctors.”

We headed down, taking a more leisurely pace, to be sure we didn’t catch up with the Duke and his retinue.

“I like how he knows I have a perfect memory, but he insists on reminding us of things,” Jamie said.  “Also, can we not ever meet that man again?”

“Unavoidable, probably,” Gordon said.

“Nice play, Helen,” I said.

“Thank you very much.”

“We can’t afford to get on his bad side,” Gordon said.

“We already are,” I pointed out.

“All the more reason to wrap this up, neat and tidy,” Gordon said.

“I’m not disagreeing,” I said.

We made our way down several flights, taking the long route around the circumference of the building before we reached the top of the stairwell, leading down the rest of the way.

Once we hit the third floor, we began splitting up.  Each of us to our individual labs and doctors or teams of doctors.

I found my way to the small room where I so often had my appointments.  It doubled as a research area and a storage area for books and records.  Really, all I needed were regular doses of the Wyvern formula.

Huey was there.  A thug of a man, he was scribbling something down.

“Huey,” I said.  His pen scratched on the page as he jolted in surprise.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“Appointment?”

“No.  Busy.”

“Okay, good,” I said.

I walked away.

Postponed for weeks, with no sign of letting up.  All hands were on deck with the war underway, and our teams were preoccupied with other tasks and responsibilities.

The others would take longer.  Their doctors weren’t as efficient as Huey was.  I went up a floor, instead, and made my way to Anna’s lab.

She was absent, still probably hiding in Hayle’s lab.

The lab was dark and surprisingly cool.  It smelled earthy.

The tree structure was growing at one end of the lab.  Roots stretched across part of the floor, wood stretched up the wall to the ceiling, and branches extended along the wall and ceiling.

I touched the bulge in the center.  It was cold to the touch, but the image it evoked was a warm one, a pregnant woman’s belly, fluid within and within that fluid…

It would have been nice to feel a kick.

A few minutes passed.  I told myself I needed to go down and meet the others.

I stayed where I was.

“I remember,” Jamie said, behind me, “Back in the day, I’d find you sleeping on the floor in here.”

I smiled.

“Do you remember?  I sometimes lose track of how far back other people’s memories normally reach.”

“I wouldn’t forget,” I said, still smiling.  “That tree was dead, back then.”

“Yeah.  It was sad, but it wasn’t…” he said.

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Wasn’t a bad thing?

A minute passed.  I managed to turn away to go.  I reached out for Jamie’s hand before I realized I was doing it, and he took my hand in his, book tucked under his other arm.

“See you, little brother,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.06 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Gordon’s taking his time,” Jamie remarked.  “He wasn’t in his lab?”

“No,” Mary said.  One word answer.  Preoccupied.

“Did you see him enter the lab?”  I prodded her.

“Yes.  He left before I finished with Doctor Edith.  The doctors were gone too.”

More than one or two words, this time, at least.

I frowned.

“Should we wait inside?” Lillian asked.  “It’s too hot.”

“We stay here, where we agreed to meet him,” I said.

She groaned, long and loud.

“Besides,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the security team at the base of the building, “Do we really want to have them run their hands and tentacles and noses all over us?  Twice, since we’d have to go in and come back out?”

Lillian made a different sound, groaning and moaning in disgust.

“Let’s not,” Jamie said.  “I’ll be glad when the war’s over, and we don’t have to do it anymore.”

Jamie was more conscious about his appearance than any of us.  He was private, and that privacy was violated several times a day.  Worse, attention was drawn to his scars now and again.

“We’ll work extra hard to make it happen,” I said.  “End the war sooner.”

Jamie smiled.

“There he is,” Mary said, perking up a bit.

Gordon.  He wasn’t in the building, but was coming from the Rise, the storage buildings and a few labs that were kept separate from the rest.

There were a lot of temporary buildings set up in that vicinity.  As Gordon approached with Dog and Catcher in tow, he had a backdrop of very large creations and tents that only barely covered the warbeasts and projects within.  These were projects that had very high metabolisms.  Started small, highly efficient, they devoured food to grow into hulking beasts that would need the big gate to exit the Academy.  They were placed near the Rise for easy access to food, and it was very possible to see one in the morning, then see one at night, and see a noticeable difference in size.

Gordon was talking to Catcher as he approached.  They wrapped it up as they reached us.

“You disappeared on us,” I said.

“Hayle said Dog and Catcher were free.  I figured I’d ask.”

“That’s a good idea,” Mary said.  She raised her hand in a small wave.  “Hi.”

“Hello,” Catcher said, with a voice like gravel.

Catcher was wearing a military jacket, his usual wide-brimmed hat replaced with a lopsided military cap with a fold at one side, the other laying flat.  His high, modified collar and the skew of his hat left only his eyes visible, milky white and framed by scars that looked like old burns.  He cut an imposing figure, shrouded in a long coat that hung open to reveal the curious and very sharp tools that were strapped to his chest.  His mancatcher was strapped to his back.

Dog grunted, before making an unintelligible sound that might have been speech.  He was outfitted for war, and had more rigging and hooks around his quadruped body that no doubt served to hold bags and containers, or armor, or other things in that vein, when he was out in the field.

“That means ‘hello’,” Gordon said.

“Yes,” Catcher confirmed.

“I figured as much,” Mary said, but she was smiling.

“Shall we?” Gordon indicated the direction to the gate.  We started walking as a group, many of us going without our umbrellas.  “I’ve already filled them in.”

Mary practically skipped to keep in step with Catcher and Gordon, her attention more on Catcher than anyone.  Dog loped beside the group, long and large enough that Gordon walked beside his head, Helen walked behind Gordon, and I walked behind Helen, and I was only beside Dog’s left, back leg.

“To establish the particulars, they’re fast,” Gordon said.  “They’re elusive.  The trick is going to be finding them in the first place, and they know we’re onto them.  I was talking to my team, well, they were talking at me and not saying anything I hadn’t heard before-”

He shrugged, a little too fast, not very convincing.  Trying to seem more cavalier than he was.

“-and in the back of my mind, I was wondering what the next step was.  How we find them and get ahead of them when they might be leaving, going into hiding, or completely changing how they operate.  I thought of Dog and Catcher.”

Distracting himself by focusing on the job?

What exactly had his research and development team been telling him?

“You’re quiet today, Sy,” Gordon said, turning around.  “Thoughts?”

I was a little caught off guard.  He’d interrupted my thoughts in much the same way I figured he would if I’d been speaking aloud.  I took a second to think on the subject at hand.

“Just killing them won’t accomplish anything.  We need to capture or follow them back to wherever they’re set up.”

“Mm,” Catcher made a sound.  He reached over his shoulder and grabbed his mancatcher, holding it with one hand, then unclipped his coat and reached behind his back to retrieve another head for the mancatcher.  Where the head at the end of the thick pole formed a partial circle with teeth pointing in toward the center, the one he’d picked out had no teeth, but did have hooks pointing out and back, like a bull’s horns.

“Can I please see?” Mary asked.

“We haven’t talked, you and I,” Catcher said.

“I’m new.  I joined a year and two months ago.”

“I know,” Catcher said, in the tone of an annoyed parent, with the actual voice of an elderly man who’d gargled iron filings.  “Take off the head yourself, watch it, it’s heavy.”

He held the pole so it extended toward Mary.  She caught it, and she grunted.

“Told you.”

He didn’t tell her how to remove it, but she figured it out quickly.  She removed pins and then unscrewed the head from the pole, letting the circle hang off her wrist while she adjusted positions.  She handed it to Catcher, getting the new head in return and as she turned to do it, I saw the look on her face.  There was a light in her eye.

She was having fun.  This was her midwinter present.  A new toy.  A small challenge.

“Hm,” she made a noise, as she got the new head on.

“What?”

“I- uh.”

“Speak,” he barked the order.

I almost laughed.  It was a fitting command coming from someone who was partnered with a ‘Dog’.

“It needs cleaning, and oiling, this part.  The pins are halting as I put them in.  If you wait-”

“I won’t wait,” he interrupted.

“Okay.  I didn’t want to insult you, saying something bad about your weapon.  But-”

“You’re right.  It needs attention.  Lots of smaller parts and blood in the mechanisms.  I ran out of cleaning supplies in the field.  I was going to spend the day cleaning my tools.”

Dog snorted, loud enough to startle bystanders.

“I don’t think Dog agrees,” Gordon said, amused.

“Making me look bad in front of the children,” Catcher said.

“I don’t think you look bad,” Mary said.

“Hrmph,” Catcher grumped.  “You’re a good one.”

Mary beamed.

“Here.”

He extended the pole out further.  The entire thing was too heavy for just Mary to hold, even with Catcher holding the spiked butt-end of the weapon, so Gordon took hold of the head, with Mary in the center, free to fiddle with it.

“How was the fighting?” Jamie asked.  “I wouldn’t normally ask, but-”

“It could have been worse.  We were kept busy.”

Mary used the lever.  The head of the weapon closed, forming a complete circle that would typically have someone’s neck within it.  She toyed with it, switching between open, closed, and locking it.

“The Duke was giving the orders?” Jamie asked.  “Assigning you your missions?”

“He was.”

“Have you met him?” Lillian asked.

“No.  But there was a dialogue.  He gave us tasks.  We accomplished them.  We would get one or two days to breathe or heal, then he would give us another set of tasks.  A lot was said, in terms of expectations and results.  I walked away thinking he knows what we’re comfortable doing better than the team that created us,” Catcher said.  He turned to Mary, “You like it?”

“When I was being trained, I learned to use and make a garrote on a pole, because I was expected to take down adults, and I can’t always reach the throat.  I like this, it’s sort of the same, but it’s so clever!  And satisfying when it closes.  Like, tch, tch, it’s a solid sound.  Do you have a silent one?”

It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d only been giving one word answers, and I’d had to squeeze longer sentences out of her.

“I do have a silent one, and I do have cords, for when I need my target especially silent, too.  When we stop to rest, I can get them out and show you.”

“Yes please!”

Mary’s earlier tractability was gone, replaced by her excitement.  I suspected it would return, but there was a lot to be said for Mary being young, with her areas of interest.

“I like the Duke,” Catcher said, to the rest of us, as he took his weapon back from Gordon and Mary, strapping it to his back.  “I would not want to be in the same room with him, or have to endure a conversation with him, but I like him.”

“Based on the… what, scraps of paper with written instruction?  The ‘dialogue’ of job given and job completed?” I asked.  “His intuition and command?”

“Yes.”

It reminded me, in a way, of the dialogue between our group and Cynthia, as we’d engaged in the opening foray of strategy and counter-strategy between the forces of Westmore and those of Whitney.

We’d  reached the gate, and the team there started hauling it open as soon as they saw our advance.

The team in charge of searches moved our way.

Dog rumbled, a low, long growl.  He moved something, and metal slammed against metal on the far side of his body.  His head swung to one side, to stare at the group.

“You know who we are,” Catcher called out.  “Don’t insult us to boost your own egos.”

“We have orders to-”

Shove your orders,” Catcher said.

Their group stopped, watching as we kept walking.

I had a wide grin on my face, and turned to make sure they saw it before picking up my stride to catch back up with the others.

“We don’t hang out nearly enough,” I said.

Catcher chuckled.

It was a bit of a walk to the area we’d last seen Percy and his ‘ghosts’.  Conversation continued, sporadic, sometimes the entire group falling silent, just walking and feeling far too warm.

“How’s your bum?” Lillian asked Helen.  “It’s not sore?”

“No.”

“Holding together?”

“Yes, thank you,” Helen said.

Silence.  Somewhat awkward silence.

I eventually broke the silence to ask, “Did anyone else feel a compulsion to say or do something immensely inappropriate when the Duke was staring us down?”

Everyone present, Dog and Catcher included, gave me horrified looks.

“None of us, then.”

“Don’t even joke,” Gordon said.

“I’m just saying-”

“No.  Don’t even entertain the thought.”

“But if you were to pass wind, just really quiet, but long and quiet, so everyone knew what was happening-”

“Sy,” Lillian cut in, voice a little tight. “Please.”

“Or if someone dropped trou?  Stared him in the eye, like it was any other day?  Don’t you wonder if he would be so amazed at the audacity of the act that he’d reward it?  It’s got to be boring, with everyone always saying yes-”

“Sylvester,” Gordon cut in.

“Ignore him,” Jamie said.  “He was as spooked as any of us.  He’s just using the situation to get a reaction out of you.”

There were one or two chuckles and a few names thrown my way.

“Spoilsport,” I muttered to Jamie.

“They’re already on edge,” he muttered.  “Why make it worse?”

“Because-”

“Nevermind,” he said.  “I know the answer.”

I frowned at him.

His expression remained placid.

“What’s the answer?” I asked.

His lips firmly pressed together.

I jabbed him in the stomach.

“What’s that at your collarbone?” Mary was asking Catcher.  “The metal thing.”

“It goes into the eye socket.  Pinch it like this to open it up, hooks go under the eyelids, prying the eye open, and you release, and the rest sits against the socket.”

“Why would you need to pry someone’s eyes open?  Well, I mean, I can think of reasons, but why not just have a knife?”

“For psychological effect.  To make them watch what I do to their friend.  Or I can hold their head still, and let water droplets fall on the open eye.  The eyes are the window to the soul.  Pry at the eyes, and you can shake the soul.”

“That is so… oh wow.  The way you said it, even.  And that one?”

“Slide it into an opening, turn the dial… it unfolds from a tube to a sphere.”

“And that one?”

I jumped in, “It’s what he uses to pick his teeth.”

Mary half-turned.  “You can’t see what I’m pointing at, can you?”

I shook my head.

“Because if you could, you’d get how funny that was,” she said, and she allowed me a small smile.

“Uproariously funny, apparently,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, turning back to Catcher.

“We’ll see if you can figure out what it’s for, by the end of the task at hand,” Catcher said.

Dog made a sound, garbled, a jaw of metal and wires and oversized teeth, not quite made for speaking.

“What’s he saying?” Gordon asked.

“Ignore him,” Catcher said.

Dog ‘spoke’ again.

“I don’t know what that means,” Gordon said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Catcher said.

Dog ‘harumphed’, which was a pretty impressive sound coming from something as big as he was.

“Alright, alright,” Catcher said.  “Fine.  Spend this much time with someone, they lose all patience.”

“We spend all of our time together, pretty much,” I pointed out.

Catcher ignored me.  “I don’t know what it’s for.  I thought it looked intimidating.”

Mary laughed, and the sound caught me off guard.

Beside me, in a low voice, Jamie spoke, “You okay?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Because you don’t seem fine.  The way you’re holding yourself, the way you’re talking…”

“No problems.”

“Your jokes are falling a little flat.  You’re talking less.  Teasing less.  You were moving a little less fluidly, when we were chasing.  I know because I watched you.  I’m pretty sure everyone sees the way you’re interacting with Mary.”

“Mary’s a different thing,” I said, with a fierce whisper, my volume minimal.

“I know she’s a different thing.  But she’s a thing that I think the real Sy would be more on top of.”

I gave him a look.

“You know what I mean.  Actually, I’m surprised you know what you mean.”

“Jamie, come on.  I’ve seen the sheep and horses go at it.  I’ve seen cats, and there were the warbeasts, too.”

“I wouldn’t start by comparing yourself to a horse or a warbeast, Sy.  That road leads to tears.”

“I’ve lost track of what you’re talking about, but I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I told him.

“I started this off asking if you were okay, but I only just now realized you successfully changed the topic and distracted me, which means you’re not too bad off.”

“Just a little bad off,” I murmured.

“Because of Mary, or because of…?” he made a syringe motion toward his head, depressing the invisible plunger with his thumb.

“Girls, poison, what’s the difference?” I whispered.

Helen, walking in front of me, turned to give me a look.  Those sharp ears of hers.  Beside her, Lillian turned, looking between Helen and I quizzically.

“But you’re the best kind,” I told Helen.

She sniffed, turning forward.  “I hope so.”

The confusion on Lillian’s face redoubled.

“You more than anyone, Lil,” I said, smiling.

Her eyes narrowed, she turned away, then shot me another look, as if she could’ve caught me smirking at her back.

I smirked when she was done.

“We really need to get you an appointment,” Jamie said.  “Before you get yourself in trouble, trying to be funny.”

“Hate to admit you’re right,” I said.

“They said I could have had my appointment, but I convinced them to put it off, because I knew the rest of you wouldn’t.  Better to do it all at once, so the Lambs aren’t shorthanded.”

“Good.  I’m glad to have you with us.”  I clapped a hand on his shoulder.  He smiled.

We were all the way down King street, and now, like the veins and arteries in a human body, things were starting to break down into smaller streets.

“Hereabouts,” Gordon said.

“If you’re looking for specific smells,” I said, “Academy carriage, or something made to look like one, stitched horses.”

“Too common on these streets, both,” Catcher said.

“Child, drugged, in the carriage,” I said.

“Enclosed?”

“Yes.”

“Too muffled an odor.”

“Blood,” Mary said.  “I threw a knife at one of the beasts at a checkpoint, it attacked the horses.  I had another knife hit Percy, at the front.  I wasn’t-  I didn’t…”

She stopped herself.

And, though I was only able to see occasional glimpses of her face as I watched her, I could see her attitude shift.  The glitter of pretty stabby torture things and the glamour of spiked mechanical confinement tools were only meager bandages for a bigger wound.

She hadn’t finished her sentence, and the answers that my mind supplied weren’t kind ones.

I wasn’t sure it was him?  I didn’t want to hurt him?

“Bleeding stitched is more distinct,” Catcher said.  Dog bobbed his oversized head in a ponderous nod, the metal at his jaw clicking and rattling as he switched from moving his head down to lifting it and vice versa.  “Bleeding man and bleeding stitched?  That’s a starting point.”

Dog swung his head one way, then the other.

“And he’s got the scent,” Catcher said.

“Excellent,” Gordon said.  He was smiling.

Metal at dog’s face shifted, covering his nose.  That metal moved, slats opening to let the air in, closing as he moved his head, then opening again when he stopped it.

He turned to Catcher, then huffed, a blast of hot breath.

“Got it,” Catcher said.  He tilted his head to one side.  “There.”

Dog started moving, loping forward.

“We’re not running?” Gordon asked.

“When we’re closer.  Don’t worry,” Catcher said.  “Very few slip away when we have the trail.”

We backtracked a bit, then headed down a side street.  The buildings here were more apartment than anything else, with the occasional shop on the lower floors.  Bakeries, butcheries, furniture stores.  The balconies weren’t as clustered together as the ones in the shims, which suggested larger residences, but the area wasn’t quite nice.  It just wasn’t awful.  A step up from the shims.

Jamie whistled under his breath, then gestured.

In the time it took our collective heads to turn, the blonde woman in the window ducked out of view, only a flash of pale hair visible for an eyes’ blink of time.

“Want to chase?” Catcher asked.

“We’re not fast enough,” Gordon said.  “They’re quick.”

“Do you?” Mary asked Catcher, “Want to chase?”

“No.  I thought you’d want something to do.  It’s your job, we’re just helping,” Catcher said.

“Our job.  We share the credit if this goes well, we Lambs suffer any consequences if it goes bad,” Gordon said.

“Says Gordon,” I said.  “Heck no.  I totally want the credit.  But if Dog and Catcher want to take some of the blame, I’m not going to whine about it.”

“It’s a good thing I know you’re joking,” Catcher said.

“Am I?  I didn’t realize.”

Jamie made another small whistle, gesturing.

The Japanese woman, also on lookout, this time on a rooftop.  Once she realized we’d spotted her, she moved, falling back to a position where we couldn’t see her.

The situation had reversed from what we’d faced before.  This time, they were the ones on watch, we were the ones encroaching on their territory.  We wanted to make away with a captive we could squeeze for information, if we couldn’t get to Percy himself.  They’d wanted to make away with a child.

We didn’t make it another half-block before Mary moved, pointing with a knife-tip.

The red-haired woman.  Inside a window.

“Stop,” Catcher said.

Collectively, the group stopped moving.

The woman was already fading into the shadows within the unlit apartment.

“Ghosts,” Catcher said.  “I can’t hear them.”

Dog shook his head.

Catcher spoke again, “I can hear most footsteps, can hear some from a distance like this if I focus.  I’m focusing and I don’t hear them.”

Dog said something garbled.

“You do?” Catcher asked.

Dog grunted an affirmative.

“Footsteps?”

Dog shook his head.  Spoke in that mishmash of sounds and metal against metal that only Catcher and sometimes Gordon could understand.

“A high sound,” Catcher said.  “Too high for even my ears.”

“Or mine,” Helen said.

Dog raised one paw, an amalgamation of flesh with metal supporting and replacing the flesh where it hadn’t grown in strong enough, bobbing it in time with noise we couldn’t hear.  Up up, down, up up, down down down, up…

A conductor to a silent orchestra.

The paw came down, the claws themselves clacking like so many spurs.

“Silence?” Catcher asked.

Dog nodded slowly, head craning, vents on the lower face opening and closing.

“There,” Jamie said.

The Japanese woman.  On another rooftop.  She’d managed to cross the street in front of us and travel a distance that would have taken another person four or five minutes, and she’d done it in half that, without being seen.

She didn’t budge from her position, halfway down the street, at the top of a flat rooftop.  The wind stirred her damp hair and black dress.

No.

“Okay,” Lillian said, “I’m a little spooked.”

“That’s good,” I said.  My eyes were wide, searching, my senses pitched to a painful sharpness.  “Sensible reaction.”

“I didn’t think they were that fast.”

“They’re not,” I said, just as Dog began shaking his head.  “There’s more than three of them.”

Jamie pointed to the other side of the street.

A brunette.  Same clothes, same demeanor, same look in her eyes.

The next building over, another Japanese woman, identical to the one who stood on the flat rooftop.

We shifted positions, our backs to one another, shoulder to shoulder, searching the area.

They stepped out of hiding, one after the other.  There was a petite one with dark hair, who I saw four different versions of, another blonde, two more redheads… those were only the ones in the direction I was facing.

Dog raised his paw, bobbed it, then dropped it to the street.

“They’re talking,” Catcher said.  Dog nodded confirmation.

“They communicate with whistles?  Too high frequency for any human to hear?” Gordon asked.  “A unique language?”

“So it seems,” Catcher said.

“So many of them,” Lillian said.

“Yes,” Catcher said.

Mary was silent, her expression dark.

“Communicating like that… they’re pack hunters,” Helen said.

“So it seems, yes,” Catcher repeated himself.

“We can’t get separated,” Gordon said.  “Best thing we can do-”

“Hold on,” I said.  “Hold on.”

Silence reigned for a long few seconds.  The women gathered around us were all utterly still.

I felt like I could hear the high pitched sound, but I couldn’t.  But something was setting my teeth on edge, making my head hurt.

I raised a hand, snapping my fingers.

When the others looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, I gestured, fierce.

Silent.  Around, enemy scout.

Or, in context, be quiet.  They can hear us.

Hear what we say to each other, plan or counter-plan accordingly.

Gordon raised his hand, snapped once, gestured.

Leader chase.  I group dog.  You go. 

There were two options.  To decide we were in over our heads, or to go for the leader.

Gordon wanted to go for the leader.  He’d group up with Dog.  The rest of us, Catcher included, would take another path.

I didn’t technically disagree with the idea.  The ghosts were coordinated enough to make use of any weakness or opportunity our splitting up afforded to them, but Gordon and Dog together could be fast, and I trusted them to be effective, for the most part.

Yet his left hand, at his side, was partially clenched, ring and middle finger extended, and the middle finger bobbled up and down as if it wasn’t under his control.  He was holding it between himself and Mary as if he hoped to keep it out of people’s view.

“Gordon,” I spoke aloud.  He looked at me.  I glanced down at his hand.  “You sure?”

“Perfectly.”

I didn’t believe him at all.

It was such an awful situation.  When I had to extend trust to someone or lose their trust.  It took a great power balance and upset it, because it wasn’t a thing that happened once.    Gordon and Fray, Mary and Percy.

He gestured.  Our gestures for numbers were what they were for much this reason.  It wasn’t intuitive.

Three.  Two.  One.

He grabbed onto Dog’s armor, hauling himself up, heading right.  The rest of us ran forward, down the length of the street.

Silent, without fanfare or theatrics, the ghostly sentries of this neck of Radham slid away.  Not all into shadow, but perfectly out of view.  It was as if they knew where every single one of our blind spots were, every piece of cover that would serve.

Percy was injured.  He’d be patching himself up, if he wasn’t already done, and as hurt people tended to do, he would be inclined to find shelter, return home.

The enemy wasn’t the only wild card in this game, not fully understood as a group.  Mary counted as one.  Gordon counted as another.

Catcher leading the way, Mary at the rear corner of our triangle formation, Helen at the other corner, we ran, making a break for the weakest link, the critical target.

A leap of faith, then another, then another.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.07 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We were surrounded with the net closing around us, and I was swiftly realizing that the so-called ‘net’ was made for this.

The women were entirely capable of staying out of sight as they closed the distance to us, and they chose not to.  They revealed themselves, crossing a street, hopping down from one place to another, moving along rooftops, or stepping out of cover.  Most were wearing black dresses, some had shoes, some didn’t.

But each and every one was erratic.  They didn’t run headlong at us, but moved in diagonals or horizontally.  They only revealed themselves when they were in a position to reverse direction and take cover, or take a step to the side and be out of reach.  All of the instincts and habits and prediction that suggested where they should be were consistently, inevitably wrong.  They would step out of sight and reappear a distance away, and I could never be sure if it was the same one, or a clone.

Three times, Mary started to move to throw a knife, and each of those times, the ghosts would fade away in the same moment she started to move.  The knife never left her hand.  It would have been a wasted throw.

As psychological weapons went, it was all very effective.

Gordon and Dog had broken away from the group, and I could see some of the women moving, turned away from us, giving chase in their roundabout way.  The women were still disappearing, hiding with the same mind-bending effectiveness, even though we weren’t their focus.

Throughout it all, I could feel a peculiar tension and strain, as if my body was experiencing a unique form of stress, bone-deep.  It was as if something was stretched too tight, a terrible noise that would have been hurting my ears if I could hear it.

“Echolocation,” I said, between pants for breath.  I was running as fast as I was capable.

“Probably,” Catcher said.

They communicated through screeches, too high for the human ear to catch.  Those same screeches told them where we were, and what the surroundings were.  To be this effective at staying out of sight, they were mapping it all out in their heads, figuring out where our fields of view were, and avoiding those areas.

If I recognized their system and tried to muck with it by turning my head more, being unpredictable, I only saw glimpses.  My head and eyes could move faster than their whole bodies could, but only barely.

Not sustainable.  I was disorienting myself more than anything.

Craig had said this was Academy work.  We’d convinced ourselves otherwise.

But to create this many, to do work this good, it was beyond the capacity of the rebellion, as I understood it.  The Snake Charmer, Percy, and all of the doctors working for the rebellion thus far had been people who’d been removed from the Academy.  Less resources, less education, or less grounding.  Some had been brilliant, but they’d been working with less.

Unless there was something I was missing, these women were on the level of a superweapon.  On par with Dog and Catcher, or the Humors, or the Lambs, but modern, not years out of date.

That did mean they were less experienced.

No, I have to focus.  It was too hard to think along multiple tracks at once, these days.

“There!” I pointed.

An ajar door.

If we were being surrounded, then we had to minimize the number of avenues they had for approach.

We ran through the door, catcher first, Mary at the rear.  She slammed the door shut behind her.

It was an apartment complex under construction, two stories high, getting more apartments with length rather than height.  The essential posts and beams of the building were intact, not yet cut back from the mostly straight, treelike growths that had been generated, and only a few walls were being grown, plant matter set to grow, the rapid growth directed with boards that had been propped up and temporarily clamped into place.  The project must have moldered, because there was grass and flowers growing up here and there where the work had been left incomplete.

The door was barely shut when I heard glass breaking and things tumbling to the floor above us, and at the various parts of the building to the left, right, and front of us.

“We cornered ourselves!” Lillian said.

“No,” Catcher and I spoke at the same time.  Catcher glanced at me, and I said, “We were already cornered.”

“Oh god,” Lillian said.  “I remember-”

She paused, she was talking too fast while trying to take too much air in, and ran into a conflict of sorts.  “-when I started.  They said I wouldn’t get into danger.  I’d stay at the back and sidelines, just close enough to practice what I’d already learned.”

“They lie,” I said.

“Says our best liar.”

“Everything I am, I learn from others.  I learned from them, Lil.”

“Focus!” Catcher barked.  All business.  “Your hand signals, earlier.  You have a minute to teach me.  Command for stop?”

“We have three,” Jamie said.  “Different-”

“You have fifty-five seconds to teach me!” Catcher said.

“Stop,” Mary raised a fist, pointing it at the ceiling.

“Left?”

“Like this with left hand,” she said, doing the same gesture, pinky extended, then raised her other hand, thumb extended, “This with right.”

“I can guess what the sign for the other direction is.  Danger?”

Mary extended middle and index finger together, pointed in various directions.  She then pointed it straight down.  “Trap.”

He did the gesture, but pointed straight up.  “What’s this, then?”

“Heads up.  Alert,” she said.

“You sat down and worked this out?  A special language, for all of you?”

“No,” I said.  “It evolved naturally.  We bullshit it half the time and trust the others to figure out what we mean.”

“Okay,” he said.  “You think they hear us?”

“They hear everything,” I said.  “If they do have echolocation, they hear the walls.”

“Mm.”

I looked to make sure Jamie, Helen, and Lillian were keeping up.  We’d spent enough time out and about in the last six months for them to build up stamina, but Jamie and Lillian weren’t athletic.  Not like Mary, definitely not like Gordon.

Helen was different.  She didn’t have the capacity to build stamina in that sense.  The rest of us, we were human, in varying senses, and humans had come into being as primates who excelled at marathon running.  In getting better at running, we were returning to our roots.  For her, it was learning something alien.  Something she wasn’t built for.

Catcher raised a hand, two fingers raised.

Alert.

He was adjusting his grip on his weapon.

Twenty feet down the hall, a red-haired woman stepped out of a doorway, spinning to face us, rapidly walking backward.

The two fingers folded into his fist, leaving only the gesture for ‘stop’.

He’d picked it up fast enough.

We stopped in the middle of the hallway.  There were no footsteps drumming above us, but there were creaks here and there in the apartment building, as if it were caught in a strong wind, or it was busy resettling.

A full second after we stopped, the sounds did too.

“Hello!” Helen called out to the red-haired woman.

The woman was silent, staring.

“It’s okay,” Helen said.  She pushed her way through the group, slowly approaching.  “I’m not armed, see?”

Hands out to the side, fingers splayed.

I held out my hand, two fingers together, pointing at the ceiling.

Helen pushed my hand aside.

“You can search me, can’t you?  You know I don’t have any weapons,” Helen said.  “I just want to say hi, before you all jump on us all at once and cut us into itty bitty pieces.  You’re pretty.  I’m glad I get to die looking at something pretty.”

She was rambling, not really stopping one sentence before leaping into the next.  Patter, customized for her target.  She was drawing nearer, halfway between us and the woman-

Helen set her foot down on floorboards, and her foot went through, the floorboards shifting.  It was only a foot or so of distance from floorboard to the surface beneath, but it left Helen off balance, unable to pull back or pull away while she reeled, trying not to fall forward and wrench the ankle.

The red-haired woman was already moving, lunging forward from the instant the foot came down.  She also put a foot through floorboards that had been nailed in place, but for her it was a deliberate motion.

She raised the same foot, kicking straight up to bring a shorter piece of board straight up into the air to slap against her waiting palm.

She thrust her blunt spear toward Helen’s throat.

It was a series of movements that made me think of Mary.

Helen let herself collapse backward, like a rag doll, one ankle still embedded.  Her back flat against the ground, she brought her feet up.

The spear wielding red-haired woman was already pressing the attack, stepping forward again, this time onto secure ground, stabbing for Helen’s face.

Catcher’s mancatcher encircled the end of the board.  He wrestled it to one side, forcing the woman to drop it, then lunged forward, moving not in a straight line, but curving off to the right, to place his feet on the floorboards at the base of the wall.  They rattled, but they didn’t collapse or slide off to one side to let his foot fall through.

He was fast.  Almost the opposite of Helen in many respects, he was built to survive, to endure.  He didn’t tire from running, and he was built to be good at it, just as he was built to be strong.

She was quicker, all of our pursuers were, but the red-haired woman lost time by having to turn around and navigate the shaky floorboards.  While she was picking her way, skipping more than running, covering surprising ground while doing so, he extended the mancatcher for the back of her throat.  As if she had eyes in the back of her head, the woman ducked beneath it, and it snapped closed above the top of her head.

A moment later, floorboards gave way under Catcher’s foot, and he twisted as he fell, using the rotation of his body to get more velocity as he threw.  A bola.  Mary threw too, almost in unison.

The red-haired woman dodged that too, moving to the other side of the hallway.  Mary’s knife-throw had followed Catcher’s throw by no more than a second, and the red-haired woman stepped out of the way of that too.

It wasn’t all a wash; the two sudden changes of direction left her off balance, and Catcher took advantage.  His feet under him, he lunged forward, weapon in one hand, the other outstretched.  Between the reach of his already long arms and his pole-weapon, he wasn’t leaving her any room to dodge to either side.

Helen raised a hand to her ear, then made a high sound, “Eeh!”

Whatever she was trying to communicate, Catcher reacted too.  He moved, striking out, but he was blind to the exact nature of the attack.  A petite brunette woman tore out of one doorway, straight behind Catcher, knocking his legs out from under him.

A moment later, the red-haired woman was gone through a doorway, the brunette had carried on forward into another apartment, and Catcher was lying on the floor of the hallway, staring up at the ceiling.  No danger in sight.

“Hmm,” Catcher made a noise.

Noises rustled throughout the building for a moment as the ghosts found new positions.

Then we had silence.

We picked our way over the section of floor, approaching Catcher, as he helped himself to his feet, using his pole.

He touched the back of his legs, and the tips of his gloved fingers were crimson with blood.

“They hear the walls well enough to know what parts of the building are sound,” Jamie said.

“So it seems,” Catcher said.

“I really thought that might work,” Helen said.  She gestured.  That enemy.  Silent.  Quiet/rest.

No hostile action, no sound, no indicator of violence.  Just letting Helen walk into the de-facto trap.

Catcher was watching us, his eyes on Helen.

“Um, here,” Jamie said.  He pulled out a paper from his pocket, and wrote down the gist of it for Catcher.

“Hm,” Catcher observed.  He gestured, emulating Helen, and Jamie pointed to words in turn.  The man went on to say, “I’m not going to remember all of this.”

“Helen,” Mary said.  She switched to gestures once she had Helen’s attention.  Noise.  You.  The third sign was the one for morning, past, before.

Jamie was scribbling down a rough translation for Catcher.

Enemy scream.  I warn.

She’d heard the scream, at a pitch and volume none of the rest of us, Catcher excluded, had been able to hear, and with no time to spare, had tried to communicate that the enemy was communicating.  It was a very instinctual, Helen way of dealing with it.

“Next time, signal us?” I said.

Helen nodded.

“Any chance we can learn what they’re saying?” I asked.  “Predict their moves?  It would force them to either stop coordinating so damn well, or let us counterattack.”

“If you could, I would be amazed,” Catcher said.  “It’s a mess of noise, faint enough I’m not sure if I’m imagining the sounds or hearing them.  It gets louder as they close in.”

Helen nodded.  Same for her, apparently.

“Damn,” I said.

“I don’t think they’re that capable of fighting,” Mary said.  “Seeing how they moved, they’ve practiced, but they aren’t practiced, if that makes any sense.”

Catcher nodded.

“I hope Gordon’s okay,” Lillian said.

“I trust Gordon to handle himself,” I said.  “But we need to keep up with him.  Do you have the scent, or whatever?”

“No,” Catcher said.  He took the pen from Jamie, scribbling down a message.  “Dog will let us know which direction to go in, as soon as we’re out and able to communicate.”

The message read only: Yes.

He paused, then added, they’re communicating.

He did have the scent.  A small mistruth was changing how the ghosts organized.  More weight on Gordon and Dog, but it perhaps alleviated pressure on us.

Catcher led the way, the butt end of his polearm sweeping across the floor, checking for loose floorboards.  He wasn’t much slower, despite the damage to his legs.  I was expecting trouble to come from around the corner or any of the doorways we passed, but there was nothing.

As we reached the double doors at the end of the hallway, he kicked it open, picking up speed.  Mary was right beside him, passing through the door in the same moment.

He slammed his hand out, clumsy given the need for haste, and shoved Mary into the doorframe.  He brought his foot out, kicking, and stopped mid-stride, hovering over the top of a set of stairs.

Razor wire.

“Look out!” Mary shrieked, throwing herself back toward the rest of us.  I caught her in my arms.

With my face full of Mary hair and shoulder, I didn’t see all of what happened next.  A piece of furniture, a stack of bricks and a ladder slammed down onto the top of the stairs, between us and Catcher.  Brick fragments and bits of wood went flying in every direction, and the dust that came with all of it occluded our view further.

Jamie whistled, a short, sharp sound.

I turned to look, and saw figures moving across the hall, further down.

The net was closing.

“Traps,” Mary observed.  She looked angry.  “Deadfall, razor wire.  Staples.”

“Backed by a natural ability to assess environment and locate the enemy,” I said.

Catcher was isolated.  If he was hampered or injured in any way, they’d be closing in.  We needed to reach him.

There were windows to either side, absent of glass, with boards in place.  A sufficiently impact would probably get us through.  We could ram past or try using our bodies.  We couldn’t do either and devote the required attention to the ghosts behind us.

And if they’d trapped the front door, I wasn’t sure they hadn’t trapped the window.

I stared at the doorway, saw the rubble and the heap of detritus, the cloud of dust, the ladder sitting askew.

I touched my fist to Mary’s shoulder.  I was gratified that she didn’t flinch or pull away like she had when I’d tried to hold her hand.  I gestured, quick, a series of instructions.  Together.  Push.  You.  Right.  Push.  Up.”

Then I grabbed her arm, pulling her alongside me, whistling to get the others’ attention.

We charged for the stairwell that they’d just dropped everything on.  The razor wire was still potentially there, the footing was uncertain, and there was no guarantee there was even a path through, with the dust obscuring vision.  If I was wrong, then we’d lose precious time, we’d open ourselves up to being attacked.

Except, much as we’d been cornered from the start, we were already in danger of being attacked.  We had little to lose.

I threw my shoulder against the base of the ladder, to the left side of the door.  Mary stepped up onto loose bricks and pushed the top.

There was a spring to the ladder as it pushed back, pressing against the razor wire, but the wire was only at knee height or below.  By pushing my end, I kept it in place.  Mary tipped it forward, so it leaned forward, landing on top of more razor wire and rubble further down the little staircase.  The wire bit into wood and locked the ladder in place.

Before I was even standing, Helen was up, stepping onto the struts of the ladder, crossing the makeshift bridge.

They’d communicated to signal that the deadfalls and traps should be released, but their communication was simpler, limited in some of the same ways our hand signals were.  When the order had gone out to release the trap, everyone had released it.  Nothing was kept in reserve for when the rest of us poked our heads out and made a run for it.  The trap had been sprung, and our exit into known difficulties here was safer and faster than any alternative.

Lillian and Jamie crossed too, losing a little speed as they made sure they didn’t slip or fall.  Mary offered me a hand, and I gratefully accepted it.  We crossed together, me a step behind her.

Catcher stood about twenty feet ahead of us, hunched over, bleeding from a wound to the face that had cut a deep notch into his high collar.  Slices.  His attackers weren’t anywhere to be seen.

“You’re okay?” he asked.

“Physically?” Mary said.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Catcher said.  “Our enemy doesn’t seem intent on playing fair.”

His hand moved.  A signal.  Danger.  Left.  Left.  Left.  Right.

Now that I looked, I could see them.  The women stood so that only half of their faces were exposed, or the shadows embraced them.

Looking around, I identified the area as one that had burned in the fires around the time the war had started.  Effort was being made to piece it together, but it was slow going, and resources had been diverted elsewhere.  The result was that we were in an empty husk of a residential area.  No residents, no ‘home’.  Seeds and components for construction were everywhere, stacked in front of buildings and on either side of the streets, so that it was impossible to go more than three or four paces before reaching another pile of stone or wood or a crate of something.  Cloths and treated canvases had been tied over many of the piles, light rain running off them.

Too many hiding places for the enemy, here.

Very naturally we fell into a position so that we stood in a circle, our backs to each other.

In answer, more of the women around us emerged.

It was a given that we’d be surrounded.  They were fast.  They knew the terrain.  They would harass us, they’d punish recklessness by closing in on us and picking us off or making us bleed, and they’d punish us for biding our time by setting up traps in the periphery.

In execution and raw effectiveness, it was a big step up from Mary’s generation.  Percy had a hand in this, but his wasn’t the only one.  There was another, probably two or three more minds collaborating to make this work as it did.

I was starting to feel like we might not be okay, this time around.

“It’s not often that I’m stuck like this,” Catcher said, echoing my thoughts.

I did like the man.  If the Lambs were my siblings, in a roundabout way, Catcher was an extended family member.

“What are you thinking, Mary?” I asked.

“He replaced me.  With these,” she said.  There was a note of emotion to her voice, more anger and frustration than anything.  “We can’t catch them, we can’t pin them down.  They’re better than me, and they outnumber us.”

“You’re more experienced,” Jamie said.

“They have that damn echolocation trick,” Mary said.  “They can dodge thrown knives.  I’d be willing to trade my field practice for that trick.  Probably.  Maybe.”

I watched the women, knew they were listening, and I didn’t care.  They were staying still, watching from various vantage points and perches.  Seven in total, in our immediate vicinity.  Possibly one or two more in the upper floor of the building we’d just vacated, and one on the ground floor.

I’d already sussed out their attack pattern.  They were pack hunters.  They ran their prey down, always playing it safe, skirting the edges, remaining out of reach.  It was an attack pattern devoid of one critical component.

“They might know how to dodge a thrown knife,” I said, “But they don’t seem to know how to throw them.  If they did, they would have already.”

“And we’d be dead,” Jamie said.

Lillian made a small sound.

“Sorry,” Jamie said.

I watched as Mary’s posture changed.

She needed support in this.  She needed reassurance, in an odd, hard-to-define way.

But Mary wasn’t supposed to be my focus.  I cursed the way my brain was stumbling lately, and focused on the danger.

The arrangement of the women was lopsided.  Seven I could see, a number more I couldn’t.  Of the seven, four were lined up on top of or in the windows of buildings down the length of the street, almost in a row, and two were at the far end of the street.  The other was standing in the middle of the street, opposite the other two, just in case.

“Dog signaled yet?”  I asked.

“He’s not telepathic,” Catcher said.  He tightened his grip on his weapon, and his hand signal pointed the way to Dog.  The line of four women was apparently intent on blocking our way to accessing Gordon and Dog.  We’d have to pass between or under them.

“And you still don’t have a scent on our target?”

“No,” he said gruff.  His other hand indicated the end of the street.  The two individuals were in our way.

Now we knew where Percy was.

“Yeah, you’re utterly useless,” I said.  “Don’t know why we brought you along.”

“Watch it, brat,” he said.  “I don’t suppose you have any clever ideas?”

“Thinking,” I said.

Beside me, Mary was holding a throwing knife.  I imagined it wasn’t solely for throwing, but also a reminder that she wasn’t inferior to our attackers.  The knife wouldn’t be useful, when the ghosts were this very slippery.

Or was there another use?

“Mary,” I said, holding out a hand.  “Knife?”

She started to reach out.

I caught her hand before she could reverse the direction of the knife to give me the handle.  My heart was pounding.  Shot in the dark, and I was tense, certain that, the moment I gave them any opening, they’d lash out.

“Other hand,” I said, without letting go of her fingers.

She gave me a sidelong glance.  She brought her left hand my way.

Enemy.  Speak.  Around.  Question.  I signaled.  I suspected I knew the answer.

Beside me, Jamie confirmed.  Not that he could hear the enemy’s communication, but he’d relayed to Helen, who could.

They were busy communicating.  Chattering, planning.

I was holding Mary’s hand, which was holding the blade.  Moving it, I touched the sharper edges of the blades together, and moved them against each other.

Nothing.

I let go of Mary’s hand.

She repeated the motion.  This time she knew what she was trying to accomplish.

Blade against blade, sharpening, scraping.  It was a sound that could put hair on end.

Every single one of the ghosts in the area turned their heads, fixating on Mary.

I didn’t even need to wait to see Jamie’s relay from Helen.  I could sense the change in the air.  I could almost breathe deeper, without feeling the tension or hearing that inaudible chatter.

“What did you just do?” Catcher asked.

“Communicated on their level,” I said.  “I don’t think they liked it.”

Mary was smiling, now.

“Okay,” I said.  “We make a break for Dog and Gordon.  Group with them, then see if we can’t find our target.”

My hand signals instructed differently.

“Let’s make this as difficult for them as possible,” I said.  I glanced casually down the length of the street.  I saw a wrought-metal railing, indicated it to Mary, who passed it along to the others.

Another signal, counting down, and then we made a break for it.  Toward Dog, the four women lurking on rooftops.

Collectively, our assailants vanished.

“Now,” I said.

We changed direction, heading for a point further up the street.  Mary drew blade against blade, eliciting sounds we couldn’t necessarily hear.

I felt a sinking feeling as the women reappeared.  It wasn’t disrupting them, and it wasn’t having an effect.  Was it merely another sound to them?

“Crap!” I swore.

“No,” Jamie called out.  “They’re different!”

I had to glance over to look.  I saw the women fading away, but the synchronicity was gone.  They weren’t fading in and fading away in the same way.  Not in a way that made them hard to count or helped them play off each other.

The sounds Mary was making were undoubtedly different from the sounds they made on their own, but it was a more unfamiliar sound, one that was on similar channels to their usual mode of communication.  Anyone could hold a conversation with a guy in the corner shouting nonsense syllables, suffering only minor annoyance, but these women were young, in a sense.  They were inexperienced.  There was an opening, a vulnerability today that might not be there in a year.

“Catcher,” Mary said.  “That thing, you challenged me to find a use for it.”

“What about it?”

“Give it to Sy!”

It was a ring, sharp-edged, with a bit of a corkscrew coil on one side.  I wasn’t even sure how to hold it without cutting myself.

“What am I doing with this thing?”

“Windows!”

Further up ahead were a set of shuttered windows, the glass so dusty they were almost opaque.

Clever Mary.

I veered to the right, closer to the window, holding out the edge of the ring as best as I could.

Metal screeched as it cut glass.  It got a reaction from Catcher.  I didn’t see Helen’s reaction, because she was toward the tail end of the group, but I imagined it was the same.  An unpleasant sound to anyone with a good sense of hearing.

We were covering ground now, and our assailants were faltering.  They were able to keep up, but the confidence was gone.  They appeared, flanking us, they taunted us, but they’d changed their pattern.  It no longer seemed like they were everywhere, uncountable and unpredictable.  They no longer were able to say, in their ultrasonic language, ‘I’m stepping out, someone else step in’.

But, at the end of the day, they were wired to take advantage of any gap in defenses.  They were scavengers, picking off the weak and, apparently, the overconfident.

With a smoothness that proved deceptive, leading the eye to take a fraction longer to register it, one stepped out of the alleyway.

Helen was the first to react, shouting in alarm.  Mary turned, raising her knives.  I swiped hard at the nearest window, and the edge of the circular blade cut into the base of my palm, making the woman flinch.

The woman nonetheless drove her attack home.  A length of pipe, sharp at one end.  Her reach was longer, she was stronger, and Mary’s attempt to fend off the attack proved futile.  She twisted around, trying to sidestep the attack, holding out the knives to keep it at a distance from herself, and the woman only took a longer stride, then thrust down and through.

Mary.

Injury added to insult, for Mary to be struck down by one of her successors.

She’d always hated to lose, and to lose here, of all places?

Catcher lunged.  Off balance, senses failing her, the brown-haired woman wasn’t even aware enough to see the attack coming.  The mancatcher closed around her throat.  She stumbled as Catcher moved the stick to force her to carry forward with her movement, and folded over his shin as he kicked her in the middle.

While she reeled, he repositioned her, and then kicked again, this time for the small of her back, snapping her back in two.

I caught up to Mary, who’d ceased running, and only stumbled, each step weaker than the last.  I threw my arms around her before she could fall to the ground.

“Dumb,” I said.

“Jerk,” she said, voice already weak.

Catcher reached us.  He relieved me of my burden, grabbing Mary with one arm, pole held in the other.  As I stepped away, I felt the blood that had already welled out of the open wound.

“Refuse to die,” Mary said, quiet.  “Supposed to- have to look Percy in the eye.  End him.”

“You’re not going to die,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

Lillian had caught up to us.  She wasted no time in taking hold of the tear in Mary’s dress with both hands and hauling it open wider.

I was aware of the ghosts gathering around us.  There was a feral edge to what they were doing, now.  More disorganized, something about their body language and expressions that suggested we’d pushed them out of their comfort zone, and they were no longer content to bide their time.

Very similar to Mary in that way.  Sometimes her blood got riled.

“Catcher,” I said.

Catcher was still holding Mary with one arm under and around her armpits.  He didn’t respond.

“Tell me Dog and Gordon are close?”

“They aren’t,” he said.

There was no hand signal to go with the statement.  He was telling the truth.

Gordon was gone, Mary was down.  Helen, Lillian, Jamie and I weren’t fighters.

The ghosts were.

“Excuse me,” I told Mary, as I reached under her skirt.  I knew just where to reach to unclip two lengths of razor wire from her underwear, blades strung along the length.

“Gave you your chance,” she said.  There was a note to her voice, as if she was already delirious.

My expression was stone as I took a series of knives for myself and then handed the other to Jamie.

He gave me a look.

“I hope you’ve been watching Mary closely,” was all I said.

He gave me a curt nod.

I could see Lillian trying to tend to Mary, Catcher trying to make her job as easy as possible while being on guard for an attack, and I couldn’t pull my attention away from the scene to focus on the enemy.  I couldn’t think along multiple tracks.  I felt stupid, at a time I needed all my wits about me, and I felt even stupider because of the incoherent, violent emotion mixed into it all.

“Nobody’s dying today,” I said.  “Not like this.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.08 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

They circled like vultures.  I counted six in total that were in plain view.  All with effective reflexes and spatial awareness.  The screeching as we were circled was mine, however, a scrape of blade against glass, back and forth, a staccato nails-on-a-blackboard noise that made the little hairs on my arms and neck stand on end.

It was giving them pause, but I could read their body language now that I could track them consistently.  They were building up confidence to attack.  They’d seen one of their own die, and the noise of blade on glass was screwing with their senses.  I imagined it was like being thrust from the bright world into darkness for the very first time.

The thought of darkness made me glance at Mary, who was being worked on by Lillian.  I really didn’t like the expression on Lillian’s face.

Focus, I told myself.  Adrenaline went a long way in helping me to pull my thoughts together.  The edges around the thoughts felt sharper and the details more crisp.  I felt more like myself, I could touch on a thought in the middle of a running stream of consciousness and that thought was crystal clear.

I tested the knife in my hand, judging its weight.

I’d practiced some, one didn’t spend more than a year in Mary’s company without trying it out, but the benefits of practice had been questionable.  I’d pick it up after four or five throws, then I’d actually be pretty good, landing about three in four thereafter.  Then I’d try again the next night, and I’d need a few throws worth of practice again.

The women started, making motions like they were going to attack.

‘Feintwas my immediate thought.

Catcher reacted all the same.  The butt end of his weapon slapped out.  he struck a window, hard enough to shatter it, the glass breaking, the crash sharp enough to give our attackers pause.

Not that they’d been going anywhere, not really.

Still, it was opportunity.

I threw, roughly the same time Jamie did.

Our targets didn’t even move.  The knives went flying off, far from being on target.  Jamie’s went straight over his target’s head by at least a foot.

“We’re doomed,” Mary’s voice was faint.

“Don’t need commentary!” I said.

“Wasting good knives,” she said.

“Shush!” I told her.

“Jamie,” Mary said.  “Your arms are shorter than mine are.  Release later.”

“Got it,” Jamie said.

“What about me?” I asked.

“I’ve given you advice… hunnred times,” she mumbled.  “Waste.”

I really didn’t like how fast she was dropping off, here.

The women moved, I scratched glass with the tool, and they halted.  I tried throwing again.

My target didn’t even dodge, for the second time.  Jamie’s did, but I doubted he’d been on target.

That was what I was telling myself.  No way was Jamie going to be better than me at this and get to be the hero.

They made a move to approach, and I scratched the glass again.  I figured they were feinting or uncertain, but I wanted to tell them off all the same.  Warn them, feed that uncertainty.

My damn hands were shaking.  It wasn’t helping my accuracy or concentration.

Jamie, Helen and I weren’t strong.  Catcher was, but Catcher was guarding Lillian and Mary.  Each of the ghosts was capable and dangerous.

When our ghostly vultures swooped in, I didn’t think much of our chances.

It was too easy to let my thoughts run away.  I wasn’t someone who won fights.  At best, I helped find the road to victory.

“No, no, no,” Lillian said.  Her voice was breaking.  “Please, Mary, no.”

In my peripheral vision, I could see Mary drawing closer to the ground.  Catcher let her slump down, easing the drop by slowly relaxing his hold on her.  Lillian did much of the work in draping Mary out alongside the gutter at the base of a storefront.

My hand tightened on the knife’s handle.  As I turned away, I sensed movement, and moved to react.

Three of them were closing the distance, using our collective distraction as an opportunity.  Two women with blonde hair and a brunette, drawing in close, fast enough I wasn’t sure I’d get my arms up in time.

Catcher acted.  His weapon reached for one of the blondes, who immediately reversed direction, backing away out of range.  He wasn’t striking at her, however.  His weapon reached further, and one of the jutting spikes touched the wrought-iron railing I’d pointed out earlier.

Swiping violently away from the enemy, he dragged metal against metal, eliciting a screech that made my vision waver.  The two attackers stopped in their tracks, momentarily stunned or disoriented.

I saw opportunity and went for it, knife in hand, the rest of the string of knives dangling, stabbing.

She backhanded the wrist of my knife hand, hard. I didn’t make contact, and the entire string of knives fell from my hand.  I reached out to catch it in the middle with my other hand, which still held the round blade, simultaneously trying to grab at her wrist with the hand she’d just disarmed.

I realized, around the time I sort of failed at both, that I was doing exactly what Gordon always accused me of.  Trying to do too many things at once.  The disarmed hand was still smarting from the blow and was slow to move.  I didn’t get a grip on her wrist.

The hand that was grabbing the mess of knives and wire did grab what I was going for, but there were more sharp edges and lengths of wire than there were things to properly grip, and I only got the middle of the length.  Wires cut into the webbing between four different fingers as I got a grip on the knife handle between my middle and ring finger.

There was no time to adjust, or move, or do different, or even to make sure the wire wasn’t wrapped around my hand in a way that would make any action on my part hurt me more than it hurt her.  I whipped the twin lengths at her upper body and face.

I grazed her.  I felt the impact, I saw her flinch, before she retreated well out of my reach.  Superficial damage.  She didn’t make a sound as she reeled, face twisting, one eye closed, a lick of crimson at one cheek.

Small as it was, it was perhaps my greatest victory in an out-and-out fight yet.

I had to think like they thought, connect the dots, figure out how they operated and mess with that.  This was an unrefined project, untested in a combat situation.  They weren’t soldiers.  They were assassins, and they were still raw enough and new enough to the world that the unfamiliar could put them off balance.  The jangle of blades and the nature of my attack had been strange to her.

Strange enough to get the blades a half-inch closer to her face and upper chest.

Jamie and Helen were together, dealing with the other one.  She stood close enough that Jamie should have been able to swing and make contact, even with her being as fast as she was, but it wasn’t happening.  He tried, she stepped away, and she kicked him, hard enough that he stumbled into the storefront behind us.

Helen maneuvered to corner the woman, keeping one eye out to the side and behind her for any surprise or flank attacks, but the woman easily danced to one side, putting Jamie between herself and Helen, before stepping back a fraction to avoid a furtive slash.

Jamie and Helen were getting further from the rest of us as they tried to keep their distance from their assailant.  I wanted to shout something, a warning, but I couldn’t afford to take my attention off the one I’d just injured.

I adjusted my grip on the wires and blades, trying to make sure I was in a position to respond if she lunged for me, and probably failing.  I had to work to get one wire out of the webbing where it had bitten down between my index finger and thumb.

Blood ran down my hand and dripped from my fingertips as I gripped the ring.  I swiped it against the window, and the blonde woman in front of me lunged.  Again, I swung the tangle of wires and knives in her direction.

Too quick, for how slow she was on the approach.  I finished swinging the moment before she got close.

Her palm thrust out, slapping my forehead, driving my head back into the window with enough force that it cracked.  The effect on my vision was about the same as what they were probably experiencing when I scraped the glass.  Distortion, no strange colors or sights, but a momentary loss of the ability to put the pieces together.

She held my head against the broken edges of the window, gripping my head hard enough to bend it back, tilting my chin up.

Her other hand went up like she was going to slap me across the face, but I could see the blade, flat against her palm, held between two fingers.  It was my throat, not my face, that she intended to strike.

Efficient, almost surgical execution.

I kicked at her legs.  She was able to avoid the worst of it, pulling her legs back out of my way, while adding to the press of my head against glass, jagged shards like a half dozen individual knives cutting me.

Catcher acted once more.  Another swipe at the railing, fierce, this time swinging forward, simultaneously swiping at the three of the women who were surrounding him.  They would be trying to find an avenue to get past Catcher and attack Lillian and Mary.

It was a distraction, and I saw my attacker wince, but she didn’t let up the pressure on me.

Catcher hadn’t stopped moving, however.  He’d pulled another weapon from his coat.  The woman who held me released me, stepping back to preserve herself.

And my foot, which had been kicking at her, went up, the toe hooking under the front of her dress.  As she tried to back up and evade the incoming attack, I caught her.  She stumbled a little, I was hauled back and away from the window, feeling the glass slash me as I was hauled past it.

She slashed at the fabric to sever it and free herself, but the delay cost her a half second’s time and a moment of her attention.  Catcher’s weapon, akin to a bear-trap on a leash, slapped against the side of her face.  It bit deep.

She didn’t make a sound as he hauled on the cord.  She clutched blindly at the contraption, but the teeth had sunken in, and she didn’t have the leverage to remove it.  Blood welled out around the edges of the trap’s teeth, too slick for her to get a grip on the metal.

All but one of the women around us were backing off, now.  Helen had the other blonde in her grip, the two of them on the ground, Jamie stepping on the woman’s head, knives in hand, watching Helen’s back.  Catcher’s distraction had been well timed.

I could see how the women were watching the one in the bear trap.

I could feel it in my teeth, the harshness that cut through the humid air.  A sound I couldn’t quite perceive.  Different from what Catcher had described as a cacophony.

She’s screaming.

She was stumbling left, then right, hands scrabbling in a futile fashion, and she was utterly silent, but for the clack of the metal ring that was attached to the cord, banging against bloodstained steel.  She reached the limit of her movement, the teeth pulling against flesh, and her entire body arched and spasmed with pain.

“Helen,” Catcher said.

“Yes?  Is Mary okay?”

“No.  Finish fast,” Catcher said.

I swallowed hard.  Catcher’s ‘No’ hit me harder than I’d expected.

“Aw.  I never get to take my time.”

Catcher was silent, studying the enemy.

“Please, Helen,” I said.  “Next time, I promise.  But this is serious.  Do it for Mary?”

“I wasn’t going to say no,” Helen said.  “Move your foot, Jamie.”

Off to my left, Helen moved.  Cartilage and bone snapped and ground together as Helen strained, a torture rack in human form.  I imagined I could hear the silent scream from Helen’s victim as her arms were stretched out and to either side, like a bird.  Helen’s body shifted, bones standing out in strange ways against skin or the fabric of her clothes, a biological equivalent to a spring or mechanism being set, a trigger cocked.  Her hands bit deep enough into skin that I wondered if she was squeezing muscle aside to press against bone.  Flesh between fingers was bulging like it might pop.

Then Helen readjusted.  It was a sudden, violent movement, the twist of a constrictor snake seizing its prey all at once, contorting itself in knots in a sudden, spasmodic way.  Her body could move like that, but the body of the victim that was securely in her grip couldn’t.  The wet sounds and the crunch of bone and gristle against more bone and gristle seemed to go on forever.

Helen hadn’t done anything but twist and wrench, but she was still bloody as she picked herself up and off of her victim.  Her bones were still in weird places, like she had a feline or a lizard’s skeleton inside a little girl’s skin, the limbs too long, the shoulders oddly skewed.  She sagged under her own weight, her muscle structure not lending itself well to standing upright.  Slowly, piece by piece, she pulled herself back into a more normal configuration.

The ghosts were utterly still, standing a fair distance away.

Catcher’s captive grew ever more feeble, before sinking to her knees.  She hit ground more violently than Mary had, bear-trap first, a sharp impact that didn’t make her move or flinch at all.  Passed out.

Catcher used one hand to reel her in as he spoke, a sharp order cutting into the silence, “Stop talking.  Listen.”

Rain pattered down around us.  I chanced a look at Mary and Lillian.  Lillian was moving so frantically, and Mary wasn’t moving at all.

“If you want to pick this fight, we will win,” Catcher said.  “And the next time, Helen there will have the leeway to draw it out, to make it hurt-”

“Yay.”

“-And I will use some of my best tricks and tools, to make you wish you had her attention instead of mine.”

Helen gave Catcher an annoyed look.

“You hurt one of ours,” Catcher said.  “I’m being merciful, because I’m going to give you a chance to run.  Leave the area.  Go in any direction but that one.”

He pointed in the general direction of Percy.

“Don’t try to be clever, tr- I told you to stop talking.

I could see the tension in his stance.  He looked around him, and as he did, I cocked my head to one side, to get his attention.  His eye fell on me as he finished reeling up the chain, the body dragged to his feet.  He stepped on her throat and hauled the bear-trap-ish thing up and away.  It pulled free, taking generous handfuls of flesh with it, and snapped the rest of the way closed.

He held his hand at his side in a very deliberate way.

“Don’t double back,” he said.  “Don’t try to trick us, or notify anyone.  If you’re good about this, if you-”

He stopped.  His finger twitched.

I scraped the blade across the glass, hard.  The women reacted.

Stop talking, I thought to myself.  Listen.

“Ahem,” Catcher said.  “If you’re good about this, I’ll offer the same chance to any of your sisters who get in our way, and give a quick death to those who can’t or won’t leave.”

The scene was still.  I felt the heat and the exhaustion of our exertion now more than I had during, even with the rain running down my hair and face.  A glance at my shoulder suggested I was losing a lot of blood, even considering that the water running through it all was making it seem like more.

I didn’t feel it, at least.

Go,” Catcher said.

The women moved, each heading straight for the nearest piece of cover.

We collectively waited a full three seconds after they had disappeared before turning our attention to Lillian and Mary.

“You’re hurt,” Jamie told me, as he rushed to my side.

“Mary’s hurt,” I said.  “Lillian needs to focus on her.”

“I can devote some attention to you,” Jamie said.  “Because you look like you need something.”

We collectively made our way to Mary and Lillian.  Jamie grabbed some cloth and handed it to me, pressing it down against my scalp.  He gestured to Helen, who was probably the worst person present to have my damaged scalp firmly in her grip, and had her keep pressure on the wound.

Lillian looked like panic had overtaken her.  She was struggling, fumbling.

Jamie knelt down by Lillian, asking, “How is she?”

Lillian sounded like she was on the verge of tears, her voice wobbled, “She got stabbed right through the middle.  In the front and out the back.  Organs were perforated.  She’s not good, Jamie.”

“Fix her,” I said.

“I’m not- it’s not that easy, Sy.”

“It’s your job to keep us alive.  If you fail at this the first real time that’s in question, I’m not sure why we keep you around.”

She set her jaw.  It looked like she had tears in her eyes, now.

“Wow, Sy.”

“You have the ability.  But if you don’t have the capability, well…”

“You’re such a penis, Sy.”

“And you’re a good doctor,” I said.

“In training,” she said.

“Who has studied this garbage.”

“Believe it or not, Sy, I’m only fourteen, and I haven’t gotten around to actual surgery.  And I’m in the field, too, without an operating room or all the tools.  I’m thinking we should try transporting her to a clinic.  If we can get Dog to carry her, I think I can keep her going long enough.”

“Excuses,” I told her, “and cowardice.  Why go that route when you can be the surer thing?  I think you’re lying to yourself and to us, because you’re scared.”

“Of course I’m scared!” she said, her voice too high.

Mary’s chest wasn’t even rising and falling like normal, her breaths were so shallow.  Lillian stabbed Mary in the chest with a needle, depressing it.

Lil’s voice returned to a more normal level, “I’m being realistic.”

Mary’s breathing picked up as the injection took hold, though it still wasn’t great.

“You’re being a wuss.  You know what Gordon keeps telling me?” I asked her.  “Every time I lose a fight, which I do a lot?  You have to make a move, or the world will move against you.  Take action, be brave, and leave no doubt that you exist.  There’s too many people for any of us to fall into the background.  Above all, trust your instincts, because you’re better than you think.  You are better than you think, Lil, and I’m saying that as the person who was your biggest critic, back in the day.”

Her smile was a grim one.

I continued, “You’ve started fixing her up, you’ve patched up the holes, best I can figure it out, now stop making excuses and get to work, you wuss.  She’s supposed to be your best friend.”

“If you’re implying-”

“I’m implying!” I raised my voice.  “If you wimp out on this and you let Mary die, then I’m going to forgive you… eventually.  We all are.  Crap happens!  But you?  I know people and I know you, and I know that your fears drive and define you.  If you give up here, you will never find your way back from it to become a proper doctor, and you are never, ever, ever going to forgive yourself for it.”

Her face screwed up as she looked at me.  Fresh tears were squeezed out, running down her cheeks.  She raised her arms to try and wipe at the tears with her forearms, but they were streaked with blood.  She let her arms drop, before emptying a bottle of powder onto her hand and daubing it around the edge of the wound.   Her attention fixed on Mary.

Jamie offered a handkerchief, reaching out to dab at Lillian’s eyes and cheeks.

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said.  “Sy?  Remember when I called you a penis?  I was being kind.  You’re the runt of penises.”

“For the record, I agree with Sy,” Jamie said.  He knelt beside Lillian.  “Don’t focus on what you can’t do.  I know you know the stuff.  You’ve read up on it, even if you haven’t practiced it.”

Lillian shook her head.  Small, nervous shakes.

“There’s an acronym, to get you started.  The order in which you do this,” Jamie said.

Lillian’s nervousness seemed to drop away as shock took hold.  She looked at Jamie.

“You know the steps,” Jamie said.  “First step?  A.”

“Assess,” she said.  “Jamie, you’re-”

Focus,” I told her, fully aware of the hypocrisy.  Catcher was standing over us, on guard, pole in hand.  I knew he was observing and listening.

I knew the gamble Jamie was making.

“Assess,” she said, again, focusing.

“You’ve assessed,” Jamie said.  “You know what the problem is.  Next.”

“Set.”

“You’ve laid the table as best as you’re going to get it,” Jamie said, his voice soft.  “If you need the tools, I’ll hand them to you.  You’re surgeon, I’m assistant.  Next step?”

“Entry.”

“You skipped a step,” Jamie said, without missing a beat.

“Keep.  Keep… I- I don’t think there’s-”

“You have the tools,” Jamie said.  “She needs blood to replace what she’s lost, and she’s going to need a lot.  You know our blood types.”

“My blood is poison,” I commented.

“I don’t even have blood, like you guys do,” Helen said.

“You can’t be my assistant and give blood,” Lillian said, but she was already prepping the tubing and needle.

“We’ll make it work,” Jamie said.  “Catcher is a universal donor.  Probably not wholly good for Mary, considering what he’s got running in his veins, but if he’s willing, I imagine his blood is better than not having enough blood.”

Lillian nodded.  She started the heavier, scarier work, Jamie talking her through it all, keeping her on track.

Even the best doctors had a hard time operating on loved ones.

It was a full ten minutes before Lillian didn’t need Jamie’s help, handing her bottles and the like.  Jamie stepped away, grabbing the stuff needed to fix my head.  He began tending to my scalp, while trying to keep the tubing that fed blood to Mary in place.

Timid, quiet Jamie, becoming a force in his own right.

Jamie managed to offer me a small smile as I studied him.  Lillian wasn’t panicking anymore.  I allowed myself to feel relieved.  It wasn’t spoken aloud, because nobody here wanted to jinx us like that.

Lillian’s work continued, with the tubing moving from Jamie to Catcher, so the man could supply some blood.  The minutes that followed were a little more tense, as Mary started to dip in condition.  More drugs and chemicals were injected into the tubing, to offset and counteract the cocktail that Catcher’s blood was dumping into her system.

A good forty minutes passed.  I watched Lillian more than I watched Mary, because the tension in her neck and shoulders was a better indicator than the bloody mess that Lillian was digging through.  Jamie’s handkerchief, previously used to wipe up Lillian’s tears, was now being used to swipe out the blood in the way.  Lillian’s hands were inside the wound as she worked blind, periodically asking Jamie for numbers, which he rattled off.

Catcher made no comment.

Jamie was working on the cuts to my hand and Lillian’s neck and shoulders were showing less and less tension when Mary finally stirred.

“Welcome back,” I said.

“Did we win?” she asked.

“Because that’s our priority, huh?” I asked.  “Yes.  Sort of.  We scared them off.”

“Okay,” she said.  “Help me up.”

“Um!” Lillian said.  “Not yet.”

“We’re going to lose him,” Mary said.

“You’ve been lying there for an hour while Lillian’s been fixing you.  Another five or ten minutes won’t hurt.”

Mary obediently let her head down to rest on the hard surface of the road.

“Do you want painkiller?” Lillian asked.

“Would it mess up my perception, if we run into Percy?” Mary asked.

“You really need to get your priorities straight,” I said.  “You almost died.”

“I agree with Sy.  For once,” Lillian said.  “You shouldn’t be running after Percy.”

I stuck the toe of my foot out to poke Lillian in the butt cheek.  She gave me an offended look.

And Mary said Lillian liked being teased?  Hmph.

“I don’t want to let him go,” Mary said.

It was a weird phrasing, one that could be taken two ways.  I remained silent.

“I believe Dog and Gordon are with the man,” Catcher said.  “I don’t know the context, but it’s the only reason they wouldn’t have caught up with us already.”

“With him in a good way or a bad way?” Helen asked.

“It wouldn’t be a bad way,” Catcher said.

“They could be dead,” I said.  Death was on my mind, with Mary’s close call.

Catcher turned his head to give me a sharp look.

“Or not,” I said.  “Scratch that, ignore me.”

“I trust Dog.  You should trust Gordon.”

“Okay,” I said.  Too chipper a response.  It came off as false, which it was.  I envied Catcher his ability to trust his partner as absolutely as he did.

“If he’s there, and Dog and Gordon are with him, then no painkillers,” Mary said.

Or should I have pitied him?  Did he really have no choice in the matter?  Was doubt dangerous enough that it could cost them at a critical moment?

Lillian finished.  She leaned back, and Mary reached down to pull her shirt down.  The expression in her face suggested she was momentarily regretting the lack of painkillers.

Now can I stand?” she asked.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “You are going to need a proper look from a doctor.”

“After.  We meet up with the others first,” Mary said.

I didn’t let it show, but a part of me recoiled at the re-emergence of this stitched-like Mary, so fixated on one thing, so detached.  That it came when she was weak, wobbly, and her defenses stripped away was concerning.

Catcher and Jamie helped Mary to stand.  She pulled her clothing back into order, picking for a moment at the back of her dress, which was soaked through with blood, from the shoulderblades to mid-calf.  She looked annoyed.

My attention fell on Lillian, who was still kneeling by the patch of road that had Mary’s blood soaked into it.

I reached down and gave Lillian a pat on the head.  “That’s a good doctor.  Who’s a good girl?”

Lillian rolled her eyes, tried to stand, and I held her down.

“You’re a good girl, yes you are!” I cooed.

“I have sharp tools, Sy, and I’m right at eye level to stab you where it hurts.”

“That’s the fifth time today you’ve made reference to that part of Sy,” Jamie said.

Fifth?” I asked, intrigued.  I shifted position to better keep my hand on Lillian’s head, keeping her from standing.  “Do tell.”

“Ah, no.  Some of that was said when you were out of earshot.  It would be telling.”

“Aw,” I said.

Now Lillian was turning pink, which was fun.  Jamie smiled.

“Let me up, Sy,” Lillian said, flushed.

“Say please.”

“Is this worth the risk of being stabbed?”

“It totally is.  Say please.”

“Please.”

“Now say you’re the best little doctor in all of Radham.”

“I am the best doctor-”

Little doctor.”

She reached for a scalpel that lay on the street, I stepped on it before she could pick it up.

“I am the best doctor in all of Radham,” she said.  “That’s all you get from me.”

I let her go.  “So long as you admit it.”

Her face was even pinker as I let her up.  I swiftly backed away before she could kick me.  I wasn’t sure, but I thought she might be smiling as she picked up the tools.

Mission accomplished.

Now for the true task at hand.

We didn’t move very fast.  Mary probably did need the painkiller, but was too proud to admit it, and Catcher’s legs were feeling the pain from where they’d been slashed.  Both he and Jamie had given a generous amount of blood.  Lillian and I helped a wobbly Jamie and Mary, while Catcher used his weapon as a staff to help keep himself steady.

Our destination was three streets down, and we didn’t see one of the ghosts en route.

Catcher pushed open the doors.

Glass tanks lined the walls of what had once been a storehouse.  The glass was broken, the bodies within cast to the ground, not yet fully formed.  Fine, fishlike spears of bone riddled the interiors of each body, almost hair-thin.

Gordon and Catcher were with three children.  I recognized the girl who had been taken earlier in the day, swaddled in a blanket, her hair wet.  It wasn’t enough children.  My eyes fell on the bodies from the tanks.

Material.

This would be all we could recover.  The rest of the children were gone.

“Everything okay?” Gordon asked.

“Took a hit, Lillian had to patch Mary up,” I said.

Mary visibly rankled at that.  To be so close to home, in a matter of speaking, and have her called out on a failure… a mistake on my part.

As we drew closer, I could see around a desk.  A smear of blood.  At the base of the wall, Percy was propped up.  One arm and both legs broken.

“Ended up charging through.  Took him down, broke the vats, the ghosts put up a brief fight, then called for a retreat,” Gordon explained, one hand going out to pat Dog’s side.  Dog nodded slowly.

“The retreat part might have been related to us,” I said.  “Hard to say.  We’re going to have to hunt them down.  But hey, you got Percy!”

“Ah,” Gordon said, and he sounded a little crestfallen, his expression falling as well.  He looked over at the man.  “About that.”

Mary crossed the distance.  She approached the man, and stopped as he turned his head to look at her.

“No,” she said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I’m sorry.”

It was an empty look, devoid of recognition.

“Best Dog and I can figure,” Gordon said, “If you’re going to run two or five or ten different matching projects all in different cities, you can’t do it yourself.  You need one clone to oversee the growth of the rest.  And if you’re going to go that far-”

Mary’s knees gave out.  She sank slowly to the ground, kneeling ten feet in front of Percy.

“You might as well clone yourself?” I asked.

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================================================== 6.09 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.9

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The Percy before us was a younger version.  If I had to guess, features had developed differently.  He didn’t wear a lab coat, and his clothes were utilitarian – a shirt with buttons, left half-unbuttoned, and slacks.  He was barefoot.  Beating the heat as best as he could manage.

Dog had positioned himself so his body was between the small children Gordon had rescued and the worst of the gore and death.  Not that it mattered.  They were unconscious, by the look of things.  Helen had a spring in her step as she approached them.

She would do fine as a babysitter, watching over them in case they roused.  It was good that she had something to do while we mulled this over.

As for myself, I walked up to Mary’s side, before dropping down to sit on my heels, bringing myself more to her level.  I didn’t touch or prod her.

“Can he talk?” I asked.

“Yes,” Gordon said.

The remainder of the Lambs gathered in a half-circle around Percy.

“Is he dangerous?” Lillian asked.

“Not really,” Gordon said.  “Dog had me watch him while breaking the vats, the Percy tried to fight me, I beat him.  He tried to run, we broke his legs.  Well, that was mostly Dog, but I got us started.  The moment Dog turned his back, the Percy crawled for a weapon under the table, we broke one of his arms.  I think he got the message.”

“Can I approach?” Lillian asked.

“I frisked him, I don’t see a problem,” Gordon said.

“Don’t have many supplies,” she said.  “But we can at least patch him up.  We were supposed to have one captive, right?”

She paused to roll her skirt up at the waist, until she could kneel on the bloodstained floor.  It didn’t matter.  She was already a mess from dealing with Mary.  Still, appearances had to be observed.

I looked at Mary, who wasn’t really moving.  Her eyes were focused on something I couldn’t see, making little movements as if she was following thoughts more than the current goings-on.

“How many of you are there?” I asked Percy.

He remained silent.

“Yeah, I don’t think you’ll get very far.  He’s a tough nut to crack,” Gordon said.  He was still leaning against the wall, a bit to the Percy’s right, arms folded.  “Pain doesn’t hurt him.  He doesn’t care that much about death and dying.”

“No self-preservation?” I asked.

“Not enough to matter,” Gordon said.  “He lives for the mission.”

I rose from my crouching position, and began to explore the surroundings.  It was a storehouse, and as best as I could judge, there was the big open space we stood in now, with us and the little lab at one and vats lining the path to the door.  The space between vats had been kept clear, once.  Now it held corpses.  Three doors led to side rooms.

“Mary,” I said.

She stirred, twisting to look at me.

I pointed at the open space.  “Training yard?”

“Probably.”

“Gordon says he doesn’t know how to fight.  How do they learn?”

“Percy didn’t know more than what a fencing hobby taught him, and he taught me a lot.  He pit us against one another.  If we did well, we got praised.  If we could teach a form or a technique to the others, we got rewards.”

“And you were good at that,” I said, without looking at Mary.

“Yes.”

I picked my way over the bodies until I found one that was roughly halfway intact.  I moved the head until it faced me, examining it.  I could see the exposed spines, and I could prod the now-bruised, swollen intact flesh to feel them beneath.  Running my finger one way, it was smooth.  The other way, I could feel the rasp, like brushing against stubble, only sharper.

It was hard not to draw the connection between this and Mauer’s creature.

“The clone of Percy there is conducting the role you were promised you’d have.  Looking after the next generation.  Training them, organizing them, looking after their growth.”

I did look at Mary.  She’d stood and turned around.  Her shoulders were drawn together.  She replied with only a word, “Yes.”

“You would have done better than this guy did,” I said.

Her eyebrows twitched.  Her response wasn’t another rote ‘yes’, this time.  I got surprised silence instead.

Lillian was saying something to Gordon, who was dividing his attention between her and my conversation with Mary.  Jamie was at the desk in the lab, looking over notes and papers.

“Fourteen vats,” I remarked.

“Academy’s vats,” Helen said.

“You sure?” I asked.

“I’m with Helen on this,” Jamie said, still poring over papers.  “They match what we use.”

Helen nodded.

I frowned, turning to take in the space.  “Fourteen clones per generation, one generation every… who knows how long.  Every few months?”

“Something like that,” Mary said.  “I joined the Lambs a year and some months ago.  He would have had to set this up, start it growing, then release them, and train them while starting the next batch.”

“Crap,” I said.  I looked around.  “Fourteen vats here.  He would have had to grow his Percies.  Probably a whole batch, with one ghost to act as a bodyguard for each?  And he’d used himself because…”

I searched for an explanation and floundered.

“Ego,” Mary said.  “Because he needed a source material with a high native intelligence.”

“But it’s still different,” I observed.  “You noticed a clear difference that wasn’t just a change in appearance or effective age.”

“Mannerisms, behavior, the way he holds himself… completely different person.”

I nodded.

It was disconcerting to be having this conversation, cajoling Mary in this way, this department, when I’d spent the first few months around her trying to create a distance between her and Percy.

“I don’t like how these numbers are adding up,” I said.  “Is anyone else feeling it?”

“It’s fast,” Gordon said.  “Very fast, to have clones created, up and running.  I mean, they’re mostly nonverbal, aside from the ability to run through scripts.”

“Didn’t run into that,” I said.

“We did,” he said.  “There are elements missing, but this is a scary amount of progress for, what, months?”

“Months,” I said.  I was starting to see the bigger picture.  I moved quickly between the bodies, turning them over, turning heads, looking for hair color, body type, and other traits.

I found what I was looking for, unfortunately.  A Percy, malformed, with more of the spines inside him.  His chest had only partially developed, spines sticking out, leaving him looking odd at best, horrific at worst.

“Exponential growth,” I said.  “One generation every few months, each one with a Percy that can study and learn from his creator, then go off to start a new cell.”

“Less trained than what he did with us,” Mary said, “But with a great deal of inherent ability, thanks to their echolocation.”

“Which seems pretty heavily inspired by Mauer’s creature,” I remarked.  I snapped my fingers twice, trying to place it-

“Whiskers,” Jamie supplied.

“Thank you,” I said.  “Fail to find and uproot every single cell, and the problem just reasserts itself within the year.  All with the real Percy in the background, patching up problems with the system, revising his work, running interference, organizing the organizers.  Apparently with the cooperation of others.  Mauer included.  Our enemies are banding together.”

We took in the implications, sharing looks, Jamie looking up from his papers, Lillian from the Percy, Gordon, Dog and Catcher gathered against the far wall, and the rest of us amid the carnage of the shattered vats.

Gordon broke the silence, “Dog and I were discussing it while we waited for you.”

“Dog can’t talk,” I said.

Dog huffed.

“He talks well enough.  What we’re thinking is this isn’t as bad as it could be.”

“It’s pretty damn bad, Gordon,” I said.

“It has the potential to be.  But it’s not there yet.  Even if we assume the quick timeline, they’re only just getting started.”

“Only just?” Mary said.  “If we look at the scale, here, it could be fifteen cells in fifteen cities.”

“Hell of a lot better than two hundred,” Gordon said.

“He wouldn’t aim for two hundred,” Mary said.  “Too much exposure, too hard to communicate, too easy for one to get found out and for everything to crumble.  Better to aim for fifty.  Something in that neighborhood is still very hard to wipe out, even with the Academy’s coordinated resources.”

Gordon nodded.  “That makes sense.  Fold the extras into the existing cells for training and reinforcement?”

“Yes.  Until a cell reaches a certain size.  When they do, have them achieve something.  Take out key players, go on the offense,” Mary said.

Gordon had joined the conversation, and it was mostly bouncing between him and Mary now.  I was content to let it happen, the two of them going at it, getting into the details and figuring out implications.  I turned away, picking my way past glass and blood to access the first of the doors.

Bunk beds, not true bunk beds, but crude ones.  Fifteen in one large room, the ‘beds’ simply cloths hooked to posts with metal rings.  I peeked, and I climbed up one post to check the upper levels, but I didn’t find much.  A twist of dead flowers, a trio of small quartz crystals, a stuffed animal, some marbles.

I hopped down.  The others were still talking.

“Food.  Biomass,” Lillian was saying.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Bottlenecks,” Gordon said.  “Lillian was saying growth wouldn’t be boundless, not forever.  There are factors that control how much they can expand.  They need weapons-”

He indicated Mary.

“They need the vats, and they need biomass.”

I nodded.  I approached the second door and pushed it open.  I wrinkled my nose at the smell.  I was reminded of compost and dying flesh.  The room was unlit, but the shelves on either side were stacked with bottles of varying contents and bags much like the bags that would hold flour.  Food, supplies, and probably formula to fill the vats with.  In the dead center was the carriage with its four stitched horses.  Wires ran down the wooden shelves to the horses, clipped onto the bolts at the horses’ shoulders.  If and when there was a storm, they’d receive their power.

Catcher spoke, “When you talk about biomass, are you thinking of the captured children?”

“In part,” Lillian said.  “But there would have to be more.”

“There is more,” I said.  “Food here.”

“He was making the purchases himself, I think,” Jamie said.

I traced my way through the rest of the building, trying to draw a complete mental picture of how they operated.

“Communication,” Jamie said.  “Not a bottleneck, but it’s something they were apparently very focused on.  The language the creations devised between themselves, ”

Of course Jamie would think of communication.  He’d kept a thumb on the enemy’s line of communication for a while back in Whitney.  His secondary focus throughout the war had been on trying to figure out what the enemy was saying and how.

“Makes sense,” Gordon said.  “It’s their biggest vulnerability.”

“Any signs of anything?” I asked Jamie.  “On that desk over there?”

He shook his head.

“Nothing?”

“Pens, paper, scrips from purchases of everything from clothes to food to firewood, scripts for the ghosts.  Conversation practice, selling themselves, logs on growth, it doesn’t sound like he expected every single one of the clones in this batch to make it.”

“That’s another upside,” Gordon said.

“Always looking on the bright side of life, Gordon?” I asked.

“Trying,” he said.

With that word and the faintly strained tone he’d used, my head turned.  I studied him in more depth, this time around.

He hadn’t budged from where he stood.  He was hiding that he was in bad shape, and it had nothing to do with what the ghosts had done.  I met his eyes, and it was clear he knew I’d realized.  His expression was stoic as he stared me down.

I turned away, heading for the third door.  Jamie had mentioned firewood, and the clones had needed to eat.

The interior of the third room was indeed a kitchen, with a small personal area for the Percy, complete with room for washing in the corner and an Academy uniform hanging above, dripping into the shallow basket.  There was a wood stove, and food sat here and there.  The window was open, the curtains billowing, water gathering on the sloped windowsill and dripping outdoors.

I put out a hand.  The stove was hot.

Lunchtime had been a bit ago.  Gordon and Shipman had had their meal, we’d set out.  It was later in the day, but it wasn’t quite suppertime, and why start up the oven so early, without even having food out to cook?

“Gordon,” I said.  I had to raise my voice to be heard in the next room.

“Yes?”

“When you came in, what was the Percy doing?”

“Not sure.  We were a little preoccupied.”

I searched for tools, found a poker with a bend at the tip, and used it to turn the key that unlatched the door of the stove.  Warm air and ash billowed out as the heat escaped into the only-slightly-cooler kitchen.  They hadn’t shoveled out all of the ash in recent memory.

“The ghosts were waiting for you?” I asked.

“Only a couple.  The rest were on our heels.”

They sensed him.  They stood their ground, while Percy did what?

Busied himself with the stove?

I stuck the poker into the stove, raking it through the ash and the logs.  I saw flakes that suggested paper and proved absolutely nothing, and, after a little bit more digging, moving one log, I hooked onto a thin bit of wood that the log’s weight had squashed.

That piece of wood was connected to another piece of wood, and another, with fine nails glowing pink from heat.  The fire had burned most of everything, leaving only a portion of a circular base, a hinge, and fine constructions of wood.  Decorative more than anything, with space between.

I pulled it free, closing my eyes and turning my face away, and walked into the other room, holding it out in front of me.  I passed Helen and the children.

“…scattered, passing on messages,” Jamie was saying.

“The ghosts we released?” I asked.

“Yeah.  They’ll split up, notify other cells.  Even if we manage to track one, which we probably can’t, we’d find another cell.  What’s that?”

“My counter-theory to your thoughts on how the other cells are getting their intel and warnings,” I told him.  I waved it in front of everyone.  “Any guesses?”

“Birdcage,” Gordon said, a half-second before Mary and Helen said it simultaneously.

“Birdcage,” Jamie said, late, probably to feel included.

“You guys take all of the fun out of guessing games,” I told them.

“He burned the evidence?” Jamie asked.

“He did,” I said.  “I think he burned paper, too, so don’t strain yourself.  Whatever you’re looking for, it’s gone.”

Jamie sighed.  He straightened from where he’d been leaning over the papers.

“Birdcage… messenger birds?” Gordon asked.

“I imagine so,” I said.  “Not a big birdcage, so we’d have to rake the coals to see if there are any more hinges from other cages.  Otherwise, it’s just the one.  You didn’t happen to see a whole flock of birds take off around the time you approached?”

Gordon and Dog exchanged a glance.  They shook their heads in unison.

“Any birds at all?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “It wasn’t really what we were focusing on.”

“Would be handy if you noted the direction,” I said.  “What’s that they say about messenger birds?  It’s not that they’re clever enough to find their way to their destination every single time…”

“They’re dumb because they only know how to fly one place.  Home,” Jamie finished for me.

“Would be nice to know where ‘home’ is,” Mary said.  “If Percy’s coordinating, the birds would be flying straight to him.”

“You’re making too many assumptions,” Gordon said.  “There are more complex birds.  Ones for war, with strange flying patterns, or more complex flight paths for going between multiple destinations.  The Academy uses them.”

The Academy uses them, I thought.

I looked at the vats.  I thought about the carriages.  The uniforms.

I turned my attention to Mary.

“Our puppeteer sure likes co-opting the enemy’s system, doesn’t he?”

“What are you getting at?” she asked me.

“He’s using Academy vats.  How did he get them?”

“Are you accusing me?”

“No,” I said.  “No, no, no.  I’m asking you, because you have the best insight into who Percy is and how he thinks.  He’s using Academy uniforms, he’s using a convincing carriage of Academy make.  The mice back in the shims thought it was the Academy doing all of this.  What if it was?  In the chaos and confusion of the war, how many people are really checking and double-checking the books, making sure everything adds up and nothing’s going missing.”

“A mole,” Jamie said.

I held up the burned birdcage.  “A little birdy.”

Gordon straightened, stepping away from the wall.

Dog growled at the sudden movement.  Gordon paused.

“Gordon?” Mary asked.  She’d approached the rest of us, stepping away from the sea of dead clones.

“It’s okay,” he said.

I looked at Catcher, and thought about him telling me about how I needed to put trust in Gordon.

“If he says it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said.

Gordon gave me a smile.

“But-” Mary started.

“It’s not really okay,” Gordon said.  “But it’s not getting better and it hasn’t been getting worse while I’ve been sitting around here.  Best thing I can do is get to the Academy.”

“What is it?” Lillian asked.

“Only my heart.  Dog doesn’t like the sound of how it’s beating, and I gotta say I don’t love how it feels there in my chest.  Something stopped working right when Dog and I were running around,” Gordon said.  He smiled a little.  “No big, but I think I’ll have to ask for my team to stop whatever they’re doing and give me my appointment sooner than later.”

“You think?” I asked, at the same time Mary gave him an incredulous, “No big?”

“Nothing we can do about it here,” he said.  “I thought I’d tell you I had to go to the Academy after you figured out where you were going, and I could brief Hayle while you went gallivanting off, but since we’re all going to the Academy anyway, let’s get going?”

I didn’t miss the faintest hint of anxiety in his tone, however well he was working to hide it.

“Let’s,” I said.

Dog was, as it happened, very useful when it came to forging a way through busy streets.  People and horses were daunted by him, and a way naturally cleared as the ghost’s carriage took us to the Academy.  Catcher rode on top with Mary, the others were in the back with the three kids, and Jamie and I were the designated lookouts, standing on a rail at the back, gripping the rail that ran around the top.

The ghosts were nowhere to be seen.  That was, perhaps, the entire point of them, to be evasive and subtle, but Jamie had good eyes, and I could be fairly alert when I focused on the task, and it didn’t make sense that they would be this hard to find.

We passed the Lambsbridge Orphanage and started up the incline to the Academy itself.

I stared at Mary’s bloodstained back.  Her clothing was all stiff where the blood had dried on, and Lillian had ripped it at the side to have more room to work with.  I could see the side of Mary’s stomach, painted in a mottling of blood.

“What are you thinking?” Jamie murmured.

“A lot of things.  It’s how I work.”

“Believe me, I know how you work,” he said.  “I know you’re out here because you don’t want to be in there.  You’re avoiding Gordon and you’re dodging the subject with indirect answers like that.”

“Oh man, Jamie, no.  You sound like me.  Don’t do that to yourself.”

He smiled.  “For most of the day, you’ve had me working to emulate the other Lambs.  You, mostly.”

“We’ve ruined you,” I said.

“Probably.  But what are you thinking?”

“You already asked that.”

“Are you afraid to tell me?”

I sighed.

“You don’t have to.  I know you care about us.  You look after us more than you like to admit.  Keep the balance, keep confidences, push us when we need pushing.  But when it comes to you… well, I see it as my responsibility to ask you if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” I said, breezily.

“You’re fine as long as the rest of us are fine.  But we’ve gone without appointments for a stretch longer than normal.  Things that were close to breaking down are breaking down, and it’s a little scary to see all at once.  You’re struggling, Gordon’s struggling.”

“Mary getting hurt had nothing to do with appointments.”

“But she got hurt,” Jamie said.  “And maybe you’re wondering if she would’ve gotten hurt if we were all in top form?”

Now I am.”

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “If something happens, today, tomorrow, in a week, a month, or a year…”

“When,” I corrected.  Odd to be the one correcting Jamie.  “When, not if.”

“When.  Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ve been bracing myself for this for years now.  I’ve known the estimated dates since before we had Mary.  I’ve mourned and made the most of my time with everyone.  I’m fine.  Really.  But I’m not sure the group is.”

Jamie was quiet.  He didn’t look at me, still focused on his job, studying the surroundings, searching for ghosts in daylight.

I swallowed.  “Gordon was ready to leave, you know.  Back with Fray?”

“Things have changed since then.”

“He’s always been more independent than the rest of us.  If something happens, if the group cohesion breaks down, if there are hurt feelings, I really truly believe we might see Gordon break away.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not disagreeing with me.”

“I don’t disagree.”

I paused, taking that in.

“Mary,” I said, lowering my voice so I could be sure Mary wouldn’t hear.  “With the way things stand now-“

“With Percy.  Yeah.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Enough said.  “And Helen?”

“Helen?”

“I just… I have this horrible image in my head about the way things are flowing.”

“Explain?  I don’t think about things the way you do.”

“She’s loyal to Ibott.  And Ibott is loyal to his aspirations, and Hayle probably told Ibott that if the man wanted an in with the nobility, working on something like Helen would be that in, and now the stars have aligned and Ibott is greedy and…”

“…I see where you’re going.  Nothing concrete.”

“Nothing concrete, no.”

“But it’s believable.”

I nodded.  I felt both relieved and horrified to speak my fears aloud and have them validated.

“And there’s Lillian,” Jamie said.

“I don’t see her running off, but I- I don’t see her staying?” I said.  “I know it doesn’t make sense.”

“I can see both,” Jamie said.  “It depends what happens.”

I heaved out another sigh.

“You’ll feel better after an appointment,” he said.

“I’ll feel tons worse after an appointment.  Don’t lie to me.”

“And after that, you’ll feel better,” he clarified.

“I hope so.”

The side door opened.  The person within waited until we passed another cart going the opposite way, one that held an animal inside, then opened the door.  It was Lillian.

She gave me a fleeting smile before working her way along the side of the carriage, stepping up onto the cover above the wheel so she was beside Mary.

Jamie and I were quiet as we watched Lillian poke and prod.  She said something to the effect of, “-want to do a last-minute check in case someone grades my work.”

Mary patiently sat through Lillian’s ministrations.  She glanced back at us, and rolled her eyes, before a bump in the road made her have to reach out to catch her balance, and grab for Lil’s shoulder, to make sure Lillian didn’t bounce off.

We were at the last leg.  The group at the gate obediently got out of the way as Dog approached.  They remembered last time.  It put a smile on my face.

Lillian hopped down to the step beneath the door, then crossed back to Jamie and I, where we stood on the rear end of the carriage, looking over the top.

“Hi,” I said.

“I wanted to thank you, Jamie.  For backing me up.  I think I did okay, and I wouldn’t have without you.”

“You know it didn’t happen like that,” Jamie said.

“If you’re talking about me having it in me all along, Jamie, I have to tell you you’re full of horse-“

“No,” I cut her off.  “Jamie didn’t help you.”

“He-“

“You know what happens if they find out he knows this much,” I said, and my tone was grim.  “The project gets canceled.  Or very heavily revised.”

“I know that.  I’m not going to say.”

“Or hint,” I said, “Or thank Jamie, or mention it ever again.  Because it didn’t happen.  It won’t ever happen again.  And if you happen to imagine something like that happening again, in dire circumstances?”

“I’m only imagining it,” she said.

Jamie nodded.

“Good girl,” I said, my voice quiet.  “And Catcher, Dog?  I know your hearing is good enough to have overheard everything.  I’m trusting you two to keep mum.”

There was no reaction from either.

“I didn’t even imagine they were listening in,” Lillian said, quiet.

“They’re good guys,” I said.  “Others aren’t.  Be careful.”

She nodded.  She turned to go back inside the carriage, then stopped and turned back our way.  “When Mary was fading out, she was babbling.”

I nodded.

“You had your chance?  She said that to you.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

There was a long silence.  We passed under the gate.

“Okay then.  I feel like I’m always one step behind,” she said.

“Sy told you something before you performed the surgery on Mary,” Jamie said.  “You have to be proactive.  Step up and find the courage.  Pay attention to the sentiment.  You’ll always regret what you don’t do more than what you do.”

“Technically Gordon said that.”

“You said it too.  It’s good advice.  What I’m getting at is, if you want something, fight for it.  If you’re falling behind, work hard and catch up.  If you want to say something, then say it.  But don’t waver.”

“It’s not that easy,” Lillian said.

“Of course not.  It’s hard,” Jamie said.  “But things worth having are worth the work, don’t you think?”

He gave me a look.  I thought about how we’d talked about group cohesion.

Apt.

“Yeah, Jamie,” Lillian said.  “I think I understand what you’re saying.  I’m going to think on it.”

“Okay,” he said.

It took her a few seconds to maneuver her way into the carriage without letting the door swing out to hit a bystander on the crowded street.

“She is a bit of a scaredy cat, isn’t she?” Jamie asked.

“I really need an appointment, because I’m not sure I got any of that,” I said.

“She was asking about you and Mary.”

“Uh huh.  I got that much.”

“And Lillian was trying to work up the courage to ask you about you and Lillian.”

“Alright,” I said.  “I don’t know if it’s really that important.  We have bigger things to focus on.”

You have things you’re focusing on.  You’re worried about the group.  You’re worried everyone around you will fall apart if and when something happens.  But this is important to her,” he said, voice firm.  “You can’t string her along forever.”

“I’m not stringing anyone along.  I’m not even sure there’s a string,” I said.  Images of Mary and the razor wires and knives in that little space under the stairs flew through my mind.  “Or there is, I- I’m not sure.  I don’t think it’s fair to ask me to be sure one way or the other when I haven’t even figured anything out.”

“Maybe not,” Jamie said.  He leaned forward, until his chin rested on the hands that gripped the bar at the top of the carriage.  “I trust you, Sy.  You’re smart enough to know when you’ve figured it out, and I hope you’re kind enough to let us know as soon as you do.”

I frowned.

“Us?” I asked.

Jamie’s eyebrows went up over his spectacles.

“You said us, not her.  Not them.  Am I reading too much into it?”

“No,” Jamie said.  “Us is right.  You’ve been spared the Gordon infatuation, he’s very much into girls, as his fling with Shipman suggests.  You’ve been spared the horrors of having Helen be attracted to you.”

He gave me an impish look, smiling, as if expecting me to laugh along with him.  My expression was still.  I saw the expression fade.

Dead serious, Jamie continued, “But half the Lambs have figured out what Gordon didn’t.  Or maybe Gordon did figure it out and that’s why he broke it off with Shipman.  We can’t expect any non-Lamb to really connect with us.  I don’t think it works.  They can’t keep up, they can’t draw close enough.  They don’t understand.  And with only six of us, it’s a pretty narrow pool to pick from.”

“Jamie, no,” I said.  “No.

He nodded.  “I thought as much.”

“I like girls.  I am very sure I like girls.”

“I know.  I knew, before I even said any of this.  But I thought I’d take the same advice I just gave Lillian.  Thirdhand as it might be.  I can hardly call her a scaredy cat if I’m keeping my own mouth shut.”

He was being so cavalier about it.

I had a lump in my throat.

“They can fix that, you know,” I said.

Jamie’s smile was a sad one.  “No need.  I’m okay.”

“But-“

“Sy.”

The word was firm enough to shut me up.

The moment the carriage started slowing down, Jamie was gone, hopping off the back of the carriage, to walk on the road below.

The Duke was waiting, with Ibott beside him.

I put it all out of my mind.  I couldn’t afford distractions.

I had to focus.

We had an errant little birdy within the Academy.  Our mole, letting supplies into the hand of the enemy, taking a hand, partial or in full, of our communications, and co-opting those same communications to serve the enemy.  It was galling.

I was legitimately spooked at the thought of what the Duke would be like if he was angry.

I let my gaze fall on Jamie before I hopped down to walk around the other side of the carriage.

You were supposed to be the one I didn’t have to worry about, I thought.

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================================================== 6.10 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.10

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Our approach as a group was somewhat staggered, as Lambs came in ones and twos to kneel before the Duke.  Jamie first, then me a few seconds later, then Helen and Lillian as a pair, Gordon and Mary, with Gordon helping Mary ease down to her knees as he knelt himself.  Dog didn’t kneel, but there were anatomical issues there. He bowed his head instead.

“Stand,” the Duke said.

We stood.

“I heard you left as a group.  I asked to be notified the moment you were seen returning,” the Duke said.  “Dog, Catcher, it is nice to put faces to the names.  Faces that aren’t from medical sketches, at least.  From the injuries, I assume you found something out?  Gordon, speak.”

“Lord, there are at least twelve of the enhanced clones in the city.  We found their base of operations with Catcher’s help.  We couldn’t run down the clones, but we killed three and captured a different type of clone.  Percy’s.  They’re in the rear hatch of the carriage.  Three rescued children are within the carriage itself.”

The Duke indicated the carriage with a hand.  Soldiers and one doctor approached it.  “Continue.”

“He’s distributed the clones to several cities or several points in this city, my lord, with his own clones producing further generations.  They’re taking a viral approach.  Occupying our cities, proliferating within, then spreading.”

The Duke remained very quiet for a moment.  Not a single person present dared speak.  Many of the people on the road around the Academy campus were keeping their heads down, sharply aware of the Duke’s presence.  People a third of the way across the Academy grounds probably sensed the shift in tempo and focus, all rippling from this one location.

“How severe a problem do you believe it is?” the Duke asked.

“At this stage, it might be manageable, my lord.  They won’t have spread very far in the last year.  They might only be working on the second generation now, but that could mean ten to twenty sites.  Individually, they’re dangerous, they have incredible amounts of spatial awareness and tracking ability.  They are training themselves in combat, but their ability isn’t high.  Not yet.  They rely more on their natural ability, their environment, and picking the place and time of their attacks to win.”

“This ability?”  The Duke cut in.

“Lord, we think it’s echolocation, derived from the escaped experiment we named ‘Whiskers’.”

“I know the one you’re talking about,” the Duke said.

I was a little bit surprised at that.  I was a little more concerned that Gordon hadn’t had the chance to finish speaking.

He watched as people emerged from the carriage.  Stitched soldiers carried one corpse each, and two more held the captive.   High quality stitched.  Elite guard?

My eye passed over Jamie as it turned forward again.  He was looking at me.

I felt uncomfortable.  It was a very hard uncomfortable to put my finger on and identify.  I felt angry more than anything.

Anger was a bad emotion here, so close to the Duke.

The silence lingered as the Duke seemed to take it in.  Nobody was permitted to speak without permission, and there was more to say.  It felt uncomfortable, having the things left unsaid hanging over our heads.

I could tell how the conversation was going to go.  I could play it through in my head, muddy as it was, and I could see several ways it could go poorly.  We weren’t used to being around the nobility, and Gordon had made a tactical error.  He hadn’t divulged the most critical, dangerous information, and now he wouldn’t get a chance to do it without being rude.  Being rude could have repercussions.

“This is effective work,” the Duke said.  “I’ll allot you some time to rest and heal before assigning you another job.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Gordon said.

“My lord,” I said, quickly.  I spoke at the same time I raised my eyes and saw the ruling body of Radham opening his mouth to speak.

“Sylvester,” he said.  His tone had the faintest hint of danger as he said, “You seem eager to speak.  Don’t waste our time.”

“Lord Duke, there’s another facet to this that needs mention.  They were using Academy resources.  Vats, chemicals, uniforms, this carriage, chemicals, and very possibly communication.”

“Communication?”

“My lord, it’s only speculation, but they were using birds.  They tried to burn the cage and their papers as Dog and Gordon made their approach.  I only recovered remains of the cage.  There are no guarantees, but-”

“Enough.”

I couldn’t meet his eyes, but I was aware of how he was moving and how he stood.  He seemed to assert himself, straightening.  He began pacing.

Having the Duke pacing before us was nerve-wracking.  He was moving his hand, as if to punctuate thoughts he wasn’t sharing with us.

“Your captive,” he said.  “The clone of Percy.  Will he respond to interrogation?”

“He didn’t for us, my lord,” Gordon said.

It was going out on a limb, to speak when I had the Duke’s attention.  Had Gordon simply let me continue to hold the conversation, he faced a heck of a lot less risk.  Now we risked sharing it, either as a pair or all of the Lambs together.

“But he can speak?  He’s capable of reacting to cues?”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said.

“Then there is almost certainly a way,” the Duke said.  He turned to one of his doctors, gesturing with one hand.  The man departed.  The Duke spoke again when the man was only a few steps away.  “Dobson?”

“My lord?”  The doctor stopped.

“The thought crossed my mind in relation to this interrogation.  Professor Briggs managed Radham Academy before my arrival.  While you’re making arrangements for the clone, have Professor Briggs detained and rendered to the labs as fodder for testing.  It should be made absolutely clear to him that I’m displeased at the number of mistakes that were made under his watch.  Give his wife and child a payment to give them time to get their feet under them.  Allow him to say his goodbyes.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You may go.”

The Duke turned his back as his doctor disappeared into Claret Hall.  The team at the gates didn’t dare slow the man on his errand.

“I don’t like doing that,” the Duke said.  “It makes me uncomfortable.  I worry I’ll have to do it several more times today, as I look into this infestation.”

He was still pacing, periodically gesticulating.

My mouth was dry.

“Sylvester,” he said, coming to a complete stop as he whirled on me.  His coat flared behind him.  His eyes fixed mine, wild with too much white around them.  My entire body jolted with the accidental eye contact.

“Sir,” I said.  No!  No!  “I- I mean, my lord.”

Wrong word, sir was.  Wrong, very offensive word to use when referring to a noble.

The word seemed to hang in the air.

“Do you know the name of the woman who manages the birds and all incoming and outgoing communication in Radham?”

What?

Memory was Jamie’s strength.  It was most definitely not mine.

I could have named Jamie, could have said something, but then the agitated, upset Duke would be focusing on him.  Whatever weirdness Jamie had brought up, even if he’d changed the paradigm between us, I wasn’t about to do that to him.  No, especially now, I wasn’t willing to.

“I don’t know, my lord.”

“Avis Pardoe,” the Duke said.  “She manages the phone bank, and she looks after the birds who transmit more secure messages.  She was subtle, to work against us like this.”

“Yes, my lord.  I know the person, the name escaped me, I’m sorry,” I said.  A little too fast, all together.  I might as well have been rambling.

“I last saw her in Claret Hall, right behind me,” the Duke said.  He straightened a little.  He still gestured, his eyes moving in a way that reminded me of Mary’s, earlier.  “Dog, Catcher.  You were just in active duty, and you assisted the Lambs.  I would not begrudge you if you said you weren’t in fighting form.”

“My lord,” Catcher said.  “I am able and willing.”

“For the time being, we’ll dispense of formalities,” the Duke said.  “I won’t brook disrespect or disobeyed orders, but there’s no need for titles.  Foley, I want available forces to converge here.  Cut off escape routes.”

What was he doing?

“I’m not sure I understand,” Gordon said.

“Then I’ll explain what I know.  After our last discussion, I had the men at the entrance to Radham Academy questioned about these women you described.  Off-duty soldiers have been partaking of the services of some ladies of the evening.  They were recognized, and while thoroughly frisked, they thought that a professor or, ahem, a dignitary had arranged for the women to come visit.  As of right now, by their recollection, two such women entered Radham and have not yet left.  Did you intercept the bird leaving the enemy’s headquarters?”

“No, my lord,” Gordon said.  “I’m not sure if there was a bird.”

“Avis Pardoe may have received a warning.  If she’s not already running, she’s braced for us to come after her.  We’ll enter and move through the building.  The other usable weapons of Radham Academy are out of the city or preoccupied.  The uninjured Lambs will address this, in addition to Dog and Catcher and every able bodied man I can summon.  I’ll lead the capture.”

He’ll lead?

That spooked me more than anything Avis could bring to bear.

“Do what you do,” the Duke said.  “Keep me informed, relay information back to me in as timely a fashion as you can.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said.

“I told you to forget the title,” the Duke said.  “It wastes time.”

Gordon nodded.  “Catcher, take the North door?”

“There are five non-window exits they could use to escape the building,” Jamie said.  “North, West, South, the service door at the side by the garbage haul, the secret door facing the underground labs, and a hatch leading under Claret Hall.  You can cover the secret door as well as the North door.”

Hatch? I thought.  I wasn’t sure why I thought it to myself instead of asking Jamie.

“What hatch?” Gordon asked.

“Accessible through the wine cellar, which is below the kitchens.  They store drinks for visitors.  The hatch leads to a drainage tunnel.  The tunnel collects rainwater from gutters and the plaza, where it collects in cisterns,” Jamie said.  “It’s ankle deep, the top of each cistern has a grate that can be walked on.  Maybe ankle deep in water, depending on rainfall, but it was meant as an emergency exit.  I don’t know how many people know about it, but it’s in old blueprints.”

“Where does it lead?” Gordon asked.

“The underground labs.  But if any part of the dungeon is sealed off, so is the escape tunnel.  There are rooms offset to the tunnel, where people can hide, same construction as the labs.”

Claret Hall was the center and headquarters of the Academy.  The heart.  It was where the Duke situated himself, much of the time, and it was where the administration worked from.  Important people who came to Radham came to Claret Hall.  It made sense that the place was riddled with options to give those people an extra measure of security.

Catcher looked to the Duke.  “With your permission, we’ll do a circuit around the building, see if she’s made a run for it, loop back, and then take up position.”

The Duke nodded.

Catcher and Dog left, each moving in separate directions.

I couldn’t be dumb, not in the sense of being mute.  Even if I wasn’t sure how to handle the Jamie situation, I needed to communicate and figure out what was going on.

“Is she watching us?” I asked, looking at the building face.

Jamie responded without looking at me.  “Her office isn’t facing us, but anyone can walk down the hall and peer out the window.  If she got a bird with a message and she’s looking out for trouble, she might already be planning her escape.  The secret door and the hatch are most likely.”

The Duke snapped his fingers, then pointed.  The doctors who’d accompanied the Duke had little bags with wheels and handles.  He was pointing at one bag.

It reminded me of our signals, but it was different.  Our signals were something cooperative, that we’d devised between us as a matter of course, because it seemed only natural.  For the Duke, he expected people to do as he bid, and people who spent any length of time around him adopted a way of thinking that involved anticipating and predicting the man every step of the way.

One doctor had opened the bag, withdrawing weapons.  A sword, one-handed, and a pistol.  Both were overly ornate.

The Duke stood, eyes surveying the building while the doctor strapped the weapons onto his belt.

If this goes wrong, and the man gets assassinated, do we all suffer the same fate Briggs did?  Are we deemed utter failures and summarily disposed of?

There were more soldiers approaching.  I could see others further along, approaching from a distance to surround the building.  They were keeping their distance, picking positions where buildings would obscure the view.  Somehow, knowing what the ghosts were capable of, I didn’t believe that Avis was oblivious to any of this.

The Duke only watched, listened, and reached out to stroke Helen’s hair in an absent way.

It was gratuitous force.  A hundred armed men, Dog, Catcher, the Lambs and the Duke himself, to catch three people?

This was a man who, given the opportunity, left nothing up to chance.

With every moment that passed, I had more of a bad feeling.  I wasn’t feeling sharp enough to know or say if it was because of prey instinct or if it was something else entirely.  It could have been lingering feelings from my discussion with Jamie, about how unstable the Lambs felt at this very moment.  We threatened to fall to pieces, and going into the fray so soon after Mary got hurt, it might have been a factor in why I felt uncertain.

If it was prey instinct, though, what was I noticing but not processing?  What little details were adding up to make me feel concerned?  There was no telling what the enemy was doing.  There was the fact that the Duke was involved here and he was something of a wild card, but he wasn’t doing much more than petting Helen.

I glanced at Ibott, who had remained nearby, silent, watching, clutching hands together like the toady he was.

Helen seemed oblivious to what was going on, but I knew she wasn’t.  It was more that there was a discrete, distinct break between what she thought and felt and what she did.  There was a reason she was such an effective actress.  For the time being, she was keeping everything locked down and away, and there would be no telling what she needed or wanted.

“Lord, my Helen can stay here,” Ibott said.

My bones felt like cold water had run through them in the wake of that statement.

I saw Gordon turn his head.  I knew Gordon well enough to read his expression, to know what he was thinking, that he felt the same way I did.

Well, I’d established myself as someone who spoke out of turn.  The Duke had given us permission to say what needed to be said, given that we were going into battle, I might as well use it.

“No,” I said.

Ibott turned to look at me, incredulous.  “You’d deny her company to the Lord Duke?”

“One of the bodies we brought in was Helen’s kill.  We need her at the front.  Mary’s injured, Mary can stay behind,” I said.

“It’s not your decision to make,” Ibott snapped at me.

“It is,” the Duke said.

Ibott paled a little, surprise and fear crossing his expression before he mostly composed himself.  He bowed a little, saying, “My lord.”

In straightening, he shot me a glare.

He already hated me.  I was surprised that he hated me more, by the looks of things.

My mind was struggling to draw up explanations even as fast as I provided them.  “We Lambs push in, spreading out while remaining in contact.  Catcher knows the hand signals.  We keep eyes on one another, watch each other’s backs.  Signal with right hand, relay with left.  If you see a signal, relay it.  As we extend in, the Duke and Mary can advance, Mary selectively informs the Duke what we’re saying and doing, keeping in mind that the Ghosts can hear us.  The Duke, in turn, can give orders to the soldiers and stitched.  Soldiers complement what we’re doing.  At our signal, Dog and Catcher can move.”

I glanced at Mary, who looked back my way, and there was emotion on her face.  She was upset.  Galled, to use a clever word for it.

Being left out or being told she was incapable, both struck to the heart of who she was, stinging her at her core.

I hated to leave her with the Duke, but it made the most sense.  Of all of us, short of Gordon, she was the one who could deal with the man, impress him, and yet not impress him to the degree that he wanted to take a Lamb for himself.

“Avis knows we’re here.  She’s got ghosts with her.  If we leave ourselves exposed in any way, they’ll get us like they got Mary.  But she’s a smart woman.  Has to be, to have that position.  I assume the Duke is using this show of force out of concern for any bioweapons or other failsafes she stashed in the event she was caught.”

“It was a consideration,” the Duke said.  “I trust your ability to manage it more than I trust the common soldier.”

But we’re still handling it.  We’re walking into a building while the Birdwatcher knows there’s trouble incoming.  She’s been working against the Academy for a long while, and she’s been fearing this day.

“She’s been at this for a while.  Maybe since she joined the Academy.  She’s been fearing being caught and having the entirety of the Academy collapse in on her since day one.  Every time she’s sent a bird out with a message intended to work against the Academy, she’s been fearing what might happen if it got intercepted, if the wrong person read it.  She’s worried if someone would say the wrong word and turn her in.  That’s a fear that eats at you and even consumes you.”

“How interesting, to hear how people think,” the Duke said.  “I can’t imagine living with fear.  I’ve only experienced it a few times in my life.”

“Wariness,” I said.  “Having to be on guard, think everything through.  You surely experience that when you look at the maps and plot strategy for the war, my lord.”

“I do.  But I do not fear anything when I do it,” the Duke said.  He observed, “Dog and Catcher have returned.”

“I see them,” I said.  “The thing about that fear, is I don’t think she’d be content to sit back and let it wash over her.  You can’t be that passive and rise to the position she did.  She’d take measures.  It would have to be subtle, something that wouldn’t get found, and it would have to be effective.  Something that would give her the security that there was a way out at any time.”

I was saying this not just to elaborate on the enemy, but to convince the Duke that this was a bad idea.  If he’d be willing to send someone else, or reconsider using the Lambs.

“A bomb would not be likely,” the Duke said.  “Poison gas or no, we have the like of Dog and Catcher to identify something like that.”

I nodded.  He wasn’t considering going with another option, it seemed.

Dog and Catcher reached us.

“She’s inside,” Catcher said.

The bad feeling was getting worse.

“A final group is getting in position,” the Duke said.  “One moment.  Catcher, stay near.”

I was painfully aware of Jamie.  He wasn’t communicating with me, wasn’t looking my way, wasn’t doing anything.

I’d let him down, I felt let down.  It gnawed at me, and I was in a particularly distracted state, without Wyvern flowing through my brain.  Normally, I might have turned to my best friend to confide in him and find some sense or peace in the midst of it, but I couldn’t.

Anxious, nervous, I broke away from the group under the pretext of looking at Claret Hall from another angle, or studying the regiment of soldiers off to one side.

I realized, belatedly, that I was making a beeline straight for Catcher.   Instincts at work.  I didn’t stop.

I ran my fingers through wet hair, pushing it out of my face.  It was just damp enough to stay where I put it.

“If you want advice about your Jamie,” Catcher said, “I’m the least qualified person to dispense it.  Dog is better qualified, but I don’t think we have enough time to translate.”

He’d heard it all.

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, or how to explain myself, or what I even wanted to communicate.

A full minute passed as I stood there, silent.

I saw the Duke stirring, and realized I was out of time.

“Thanks,” I said, and it wasn’t sarcastic, and I had no idea what I was thanking Catcher for.

“Good luck,” he said.

I turned to go back to the others.

He gave Helen’s head another stroke, then let his hand fall to his side.  He gripped the pommel of his one-handed sword.  “We capture her alive.”

“Yes, lord,” I said.  My response mingled with that of the others.

“Soldiers in first.  Lambs, follow alongside, then move as you suggested,” the Duke said.

We were among the rank and file.  It wasn’t something that I normally dwelt on, but each of the men we were working with were two to two and a half feet taller than I was.  They loomed, all in matching uniforms, all with guns.

This wasn’t familiar ground, and I wasn’t sure I would have liked what we were doing if it was.

Feet tramped on the ground.  The Lambs found positions between the rows and columns of stitched soldiers as they divided to enter through the two separate doors.

“I lead,” Gordon said.  “Helen, watch my back.  Jamie and Sy, you stick together.  Lillian, we keep you surrounded by soldiers, advance them forward, then have you escorted up to the new group.  Focus on the signals and relaying back to Mary and the Duke.  Be ready with your kit in case there’s trouble.”

“Lots of windows,” I observed.  “We need knives.”

“I’ve got knives,” Mary said, behind us.  Then, in response to a question I didn’t hear, she said, “The ghosts are sensitive to high pitched sound.  Blades against glass.”

She started passing the knives up to the rest of us.  I took three.

It was disconcerting, having the Duke following, watching our every move, judging.  This was a man so powerful that our project continued or faced cancellation at his whim, but we were almost beneath him.  We almost didn’t matter.  It didn’t help that he was here under the guise of leading us, but we were the ones devising the strategy.

The doors banged as the stitched pushed them open.  We marched into the hallway, the rows of rifle-wielding stitched taking up so much space that bystanders were being squeezed out or pushed up against the wall.

The ground floor was shaped like a cross, with a long hallway leading to a crossroad with a desk in the middle.  Offices and services were set off to either side of the hallway.  Beyond the desk was the north hallway, leading to the door that Dog and Catcher watched.  All of it was worked up in dark wood that gleamed with lacquer and resin, with gold trim and deep red woods here and there for accent.

And the people – there were hundreds of students in the space, and as large as Claret Hall was, it made for a jumble.  More so when they reacted to the approach of a full regiment with chaos and confusion.

The soldiers went out, checking offices to either side.  The hand signals came out from Gordon.  I relayed it back.  No sign.

“Hear me!” the Duke proclaimed, and his voice boomed down the length of the hall.  Before he was even done speaking, people were dropping to their knees.  “By order of the Crown, lay on the ground with your arms straight out above your head, and we will know you are no enemy of ours!”

It was as if an invisible wave was crashing into the crowd.  There was no question, there was no hesitation.  Every person in the crowded hall dropped, and many had already been in the process of kneeling or kneeling already.

Well, that was his contribution, I supposed.  We hadn’t had the element of surprise to begin with, and now we didn’t need to worry nearly so much about the people who were lingering.

Helen raised a hand, signaling.  Escape.  She swept it out to point to people behind us.

I passed it on.

“If you’re within five paces of me or behind me, you evacuate,” the Duke said.

I heard the people shuffling, scrambling to get off the ground and head for the South door.

Where are you, Birdwatcher? I thought.

Upstairs, probably.  With whatever weapon or tool she’d devised to quiet her fears and convince herself that she could escape when and if she got caught.

I hated the notion that she might be right.  That she really did have an out.  Or worse, that she didn’t, and that she was prepared to go out with a bang if her trick didn’t work and we ended up cornering her.

Couldn’t say no to the Duke, couldn’t retreat or take a different tack.  His presence behind us was pushing us forward, giving us no choice but to face this, however uncertain I or we might feel.  His advance behind us was like a pressure, pushing us forward, into deeper, uncertain waters.

I could feel the tension in my teeth, and I recognized it from before.

I snapped my fingers for the benefit of the others, then signaled.  Number.

Helen nodded, then touched an ear.  She relayed to Gordon, while I made sure the others behind me knew.

Of course there were more than two.  The sensation was already more intense than the seven had been, back when Mary got stabbed.

I listened for the order that wouldn’t come, in response to the chatter I couldn’t hear.  My heart sank.

He didn’t order a retreat.

This had suddenly gotten a great deal more difficult.

We know the first card Avis is playing, now.  All of their ghosts somehow found a way inside.

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================================================== 6.11 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.11

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The nature of our enemy forced us to change up our approach, given how ‘stealthy’ meant a very different thing when dealing with enemies who could suss out our locations by hearing them.

They had eyes, too, but I had no idea if they relied on those eyes to the same extent we did.  It meant we had to pick and choose our positions carefully.  We made our way up the stairs to the floor above, the relay serving its purpose well.  With the four hallways below, people steadily evacuating under the Duke’s watchful eye, I could at least hope that my back was covered.  Lillian moved with her escort, and Jamie and I moved as a pair, five to ten paces behind Helen.

We stopped halfway up a set of stairs covered in red carpet, the railings some special wood with a marble-like texture and gold-colored caps.  I reached up to a picture; I was too short to reach it with my hand, but I could reach it with the point of my knife.  I got the blade between the picture and the wall, twisted, and pried it off, with a slight crack.  I poked the underside to lift it up, and it came free of the wall.  I caught it.  Some Professor’s painted portrait.  He looked like a smug twat.

Jamie did much the same, even utilizing my technique of the knife-twist.  By the time he had his picture, I had an arm curled around mine.  I put the long side of the knife’s edge against the glass, and began playing it as one might a violin.

Jamie smiled as he realized what I was doing, but as our eyes met, he flinched and turned forward, progressing up the stairs a few steps.

Running away.

I felt like having the formula running through my veins would have helped me find the thing to say and do.  Not just for Jamie, to bring things back to normal, to get him to look at me and talk to me in the right way, but for myself.

I was hurt, and I was angry.

He’d blown it off in that cavalier, casual way, but he’d had to have known he was throwing a wrench into things.  He was complicating how he and I interacted and he’d done it when I’d been confiding how uncertain I was about the Lambs.

He’d never been good at timing, but that was pretty frigging ugly timing.

Helen signaled.  We moved up the bend in the stairs.  In my agitation, I was moving the knife more dramatically.  As the texture of the glass changed, with regular, fierce scratches, I moved the knife further along the portrait.  In a few minutes, I’d have to replace it.

We reached our new location at the bend in the stairs.  We could see both up and downstairs, a large window to our back.  It was tree branches, reaching from the floor to the ceiling far above us, glass fitted between.

I signaled for Lillian to approach.  Half the soldiers tramped forward to a point halfway up the stairs.  Lillian came with the second half.

I used the knife on the window while I waited, to prolong the life of the portrait I held.

Above us, Helen relayed Gordon’s signals.  Clear.  Fist clenched.  Clear.  Fist clenched.

Punctuating each check.

If Gordon saw the ghosts, it was either because they wanted to be found, or the scratching of glass was working.

Helen’s other hand went up, head turning as she threw herself against the wall.  Thumb and pinky extended, touching nose and ear.  The hand pulled away, already forming the next gesture.  All five fingers pointed skyward, as if she were clutching a ball.

Smell.  Hear.  Fire.

She had only just formed the gesture when the ghost stepped out at the very top of the stairwell.  She was wearing an Academy uniform, but her hair was brown, her form petite, and I recognized the face as one of the ghosts we’d fought.

Helen hit the ground, chest flat against the stair she’d been standing on, hands over her head.

She had her eyes narrowed, flinching visibly with eyelids twitching as I brought the knife down the pane of the window, ready to throw it if I had to.

But she was already making the necessary motions, throwing a bottle with a rag stuffed in the end.

Helen’s Flame.

The weapon sailed through the air, an underarm toss, not necessarily hard enough to break the bottle.  The long drop down to us would do it.  Jamie wouldn’t be quick enough to get out of the way.

The portrait fell from my hand.  I leaped forward, bringing both feet up, knees to my chest.  I set my feet on the railing, then extended my legs, pushing myself up as high and fast as I could go, reaching up and over my head.

I touched the glass of the bottle, but I was too short to actually grab it, my hand too small.  I saw a glimpse of Jamie beneath me.

The touch made the bottle spin in the air.  My arms windmilling, I brought my other arm forward.  Knife still in hand, I reached over my head to stab the flaming cloth.

I followed through with the motion, bringing my arm down, sharp and away.  The bottle shattered against the wood and glass of the window-covered wall, and the knife with the flaming rag flew off onto higher stairs.

I landed, hard, amid the spatter of caustic chemical and broken shards of glass.  I barked out something of a cough, and my next attempt at drawing in air didn’t seem to draw in enough.  Each subsequent breath was better.

Jamie had barely moved.  His eyes were wide.

I panted for breath, getting a nice reserve of air back into my lungs.

“Are you okay?” Jamie asked.  He extended a hand.  I was already grabbing onto the window for a grip, and opted to follow through, using it to stand.

I regretted it the instant I saw his expression.  Nothing obvious, but a flicker of pain.

“I’m okay,” I said.  I felt the need to do something more, and reached out, bumping his shoulder with my fist, a light punch.  I sort of repeated myself, but I was saying something very different as I looked around at the spatter of chemical on us and the stairs, the glass, and the burning rag, well out of the spatter’s range.  “It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” he said, and it didn’t sound like he agreed.

I turned away, signaling Helen.  Good alert.

She nodded, stepping down two stairs to stamp on the rag.

“Seems like you’ve still got a little Wyvern formula in you,” Jamie murmured.

“There’s enough, I hope,” I said.  I was still far from baseline.  I was glad I wasn’t on the same level as a boy my age without any of the drug’s effects.  I’d only been there once, and it had been much, much worse.  I still had the skills I’d picked up.  My personality was still mine.  My analytical way of thinking hadn’t changed, even if the edge was gone and the focus wasn’t all there.

But I wasn’t wholly there either.  There was fog, blurriness around the edges of thoughts if I didn’t commit to them, and there was sloppiness.  I was legitimately worried that I would try something and I would find I didn’t have the ability.

I signaled the a-ok to Lillian, who was staring up at me from the midst of her sea of stitched soldiers.  I saw her hand go up, passing on the message, while her expression didn’t change, her eyes not leaving me.

Meanwhile, Helen was relaying Gordon’s signals from upstairs.  He was on the floor above, and according to him, there was more fire.

Fire had long been the go-to tool against the Academy.  Now Claret Hall burned.

If we let the place burn with the exits sealed, will she burn with this place?  It was so easy an option, but the Duke had given his order.  If she wasn’t captured alive, then we lost our one chance to get information on Percy’s plans.

Forcing the other guy to rush, as I’d often observed, was a critical part of a con man’s ploys.  It gave the target less time to think, and it gave them more opportunity to make mistakes.  Avis was forcing us to rush to reach her if we didn’t want her to burn alive.

That, or she was hoping to utilize the chaos and confusion native to fire and escape another way.

Hurry, I signaled Helen and Lillian both, making sure to look at each so they knew.

The rotations, movements, and relayed orders came faster than before.  One group wasn’t wholly in position when we started moving up the next.  Jamie and I moved up to where Helen had dropped to the stair, then further down the hallway.

The stairs above where we’d been were on fire.

There were any number of offices in this hallway, each one with windows looking in at the hallway, and windows looking out.  Just around the corner from where Gordon was was the vantage point we’d used to spy on his conversation with Shipman. Because the building was a square, the hallway ringing it, there was plenty of space for a set of rooms in the center of it all, these ones had windows for us to see within, the bottom of each sitting at shoulder level for me.  A reference library, a room with a long table and many chairs, a tea room, all of which were littered with bleeding corpses.  Each had windows that failed to give us a view of the ghosts, and each had multiple doors, so one could pass from any point in the hallway or pass from room to room.

The fire Gordon had signaled us about was at the opposite end of the building.  Around two corners, or through the room with the table and chairs.  It seemed strategically set to limit access to the upstairs, the flames set on and around the only other set of stairs.  Wood burned but didn’t ignite.  The designers of the Academy weren’t so stupid as to make the building well and truly flammable.

That said, while I imagined the wood had been treated to make it less likely, I wasn’t sure it was impossible for a proper blaze to take hold.  If it was only the surface of the wood that was treated, or only the floorboards, then there was a risk.

They’d left us no apparent way up, short of quenching the fire.

If it weren’t for the windows that seemed to be everywhere, I might have said it was the best possible environment for our enemy to be fighting in.  Too many avenues for access and escape.  Two strides in any direction meant passing a door that a ghost could be lurking behind.

I could see Gordon, further down the hallway, using a knife to cut what must have been a wire.  Through the windows that looked into and out of the rooms at the center of the building.

I continued to play my glass violin, watching, trying to get a sense of what the enemy was doing.

Gordon shifted his grip on his knife.  He raised his free hand, giving Helen the signal.

Move up.

Yet he hadn’t budged.

I passed information to the soldiers further downstairs.  They moved up to our position, we moved to Helen’s-

A woman in an Academy uniform stepped out of the doorway just behind where Helen had been standing.  She was so fast in turning up that she must have been only a stride away from Helen, separated by the door and doorframe.

She was silent, graceful, and only momentarily acknowledged our existence with a glance before approaching Helen’s back.

“Helen!” I shouted.  A white-knuckle grip on my knife, I raked the blade against the glass of the portrait, cracking the glass.  I saw the woman falter.

Jamie threw a knife.  It hit the woman in the lower back, right where the kidneys ought to be.

Helen was turning, and as the ghost stumbled forward, Helen wrapped her arms around her in a hug.  The two of them tumbled to the ground.  Helen let the ghost’s hand swipe at her face, and a stripe of crimson marked Helen’s chin.

Helen lay on top of the ghost.  As the ghost tried to sit up, Helen slid up, forehead coming down, ass going up, standing on the woman’s pelvis on tiptoes so the entirety of her body weight was pressing down on the woman’s head.  Her hands slapped out, grabbing for the woman’s wrists.  She brought her head up, and slowly but surely, she brought the woman’s arms across her chest, until the arms formed an ‘x’, breasts squished together between them.

Another shift of grip, reversing her hold on the ghost’s wrists, and the arms were now being strained, the hard end of one elbow pressing against the hard end of the other, both straining the wrong way.  The woman bucked and tried to throw herself to one side to hurl Helen off, but Helen’s feet went out, bracing on the floor to either side.

As bone and cartilage audibly cracked, Helen let the destroyed arm fall, grabbing the other in two hands.  One twist and maneuver, and she twisted the shoulder from the socket.  The woman reacted, twisting and struggling to pull away, and Helen brought the dislocated arm up and around, strangling the woman with her own arm, while the arm with the broken elbow flopped ineffectually.

More ghosts were coming from the other end of the hall, no doubt reacting to the screams.  Gordon to the right of us, a herd of ghosts to the left.

I signaled for the soldiers below us.  Move up.  Hurry.

Jamie was only a half-step behind me as I made a beeline for Helen.  I saw the blade jutting out of the woman’s back and kicked it, driving it in as deep as it would go, before stabbing with my own knife.  Helen glanced at me over her shoulder as I stabbed over and over, taking advantage of how Helen was holding the woman still.  One after another, the slices went between the ribs.

“I know,” I said.  “I know we promised!  We’ll let you have fun another time!”

I gave the woman one last stab before turning to face the assailants.

They were gone.

Too many doors here.  Too easy for them to fade away.

Helen had moved up to Gordon, and was crouched at his side, while he was crouched over himself.  The soldiers were at the top of the stairs, weapons out, on the alert.

My portrait was cracked.  I decided to make use of the windows that were so omnipresent here.

I reached for one with my knife, and it shattered a moment before I got there.  I reached for the next nearest one, and saw a shadow of movement on the other side.  I pulled away instead, before she could lash out or grab me.

Windows at the end of the hallway opposite Gordon broke.  Then, like a cascade effect, they began to break one by one, the progression leading in Gordon’s direction.  Thrown objects and coordinated movement.  We’d let our guard down, and we hadn’t been keeping up the sharp noises to throw them off.

No, Jamie had.

They were getting used to it.

Now they were removing the options, they were heading Gordon’s way, and whatever he was saying or doing with Helen, neither of the two were moving.

No, I thought.  I was falling into the sway of things.  Under pressure, time cut short by the threat of the fire, I was taking mental shortcuts and jumping to conclusions.

Leading the eye one way, while acting to take advantage of an enemy with their backs turned.

I signaled, touching my chest, then raising my hand, changing the angle-

Behind me.

Jamie and I turned simultaneously.  Lillian gave the order.  “Turn left and fire!”

The ghosts were only just stepping out of doorways as we turned around and the words left Lillian’s mouth.  They moved as if it had been the plan all along, leaping for cover.

The stitched with the guns fired.  In the enclosed space, my ears already ringing from the sound of glass breaking, the gunfire was as violent a sound as I’d ever heard.  Bullets punctured the walls below each window, they penetrated doors, and they broke the smaller branches off of the window frames that no longer had glass in them.

“Stop!” Lillian shouted.

The stitched ceased firing, though they hurried to fix up and reload their guns.

“Did we get ’em?” Jamie asked.  He backed away a step.

“I smell blood,” Helen said.  “Got some.”

I hoped there weren’t any people hiding in those offices and in that end of the library.  Or that we hadn’t just executed people who the ghosts had left behind.  Too big a chance that some were slowly bleeding out but not yet dead.

No, I had to stay focused.

Fixate on the enemy, Sy.  They know what we’re doing as we do it.  What’s their counterplay?

Gordon.  Helen.

I spun around.

I saw nothing beyond the two Lambs.  The pair were still hunched over.  Helen was crouched over like she was prepared to pounce at any second.

These ghosts follow rules.  Move away from danger.  Capitalize on the weak.

There was no easy passage between the offices that were set against the external walls of the building.  There was passage between the library, conference room and the tea room.

“Lil!  Jamie!” I shouted.  “Play me a song!”

“What?” Lillian asked me.  “And don’t call me Lil!”

But Jamie was already showing her how he was using the knife on the glass.

I was halfway to Gordon and Helen when the stitched began rubbing glass against bayonet blades, the edges of the broken shards of glass cutting into fingers.  A cacophony of discordant sound.

Where are they?  How are they moving?

As I got closer to the tea room, I could see through the window and make out where furniture was.

I raised a hand, warning, not looking at Gordon and Helen.

Then gestured.  Stop.

“Stop!” Lillian called out.

The stitched obeyed.

My footsteps slapped against wood.  One step, two steps, three steps.

Another signal.  Go!

“No!  Start!  Use the glass!” Lillian gave the order.

Another step, as the sound resumed, audible even to me, scratching and screeching.

I took one more step, then dropped, sliding on the floor as I reversed direction, my shoulder, side and hip touching the wall beneath the window.

I headed for a door I’d already passed, grabbing the frame as I slipped into the tea room.

A full six of them were there, crouched, poised, waiting, using furniture and the low wall beneath the window to hide, each of them in the position a sprinter maintained pre-run.  All amid chairs and round tables, each table furnished with kettles and little bowls of tea bags.  There were pastries and baked goods here and there on plates.

With the cacophony of noise affecting their clarity of echolocation, it took them a full second to register my approach, as I threw myself at the full group of them.

Knife in hand, blade pointing down, I swung down and at an angle.  I nearly lost the knife as it caught on the front of one of the ghost’s throats.

I’m shit in a fight, but that’s all the more reason to keep it from being one.

As fast as I’d been to get close to them, I reversed direction, heading for the door.  I threw the knife, and this time, I was pleased to note, the person I was throwing at had to move to avoid getting hit.

I was in such a hurry to get out of the tea room that I fell over on passing through the threshold of the door.  I watched the ghost I’d cut gurgle.  She clutched at the wound on her throat and she wasn’t able to stop the blood from flowing out.

They rose up as if they were buoyed by some force I couldn’t see, puppets on strings, or stitched in the first moment they were given power, all as one, a collective.  Each and every one bristled with hostility, the stress of the glass noises clear in their faces.

I rolled to one side, so they could no longer see me through the doorway, expecting them to come lunging out, swarming atop me.

They didn’t.

I met Gordon and Helen’s eyes.  I grinned.  “Got one.  Using their own damn tactics against them.”

No congratulations seemed to be in order.  Gordon’s expression was tight, and Helen’s expression was dead.

“What?” I asked.

She gestured, and it was a signal I hadn’t seen before, though the meaning was clear.  Fingers crossed, she touched her heart.

Dog had mentioned it.  Gordon had gone ahead.

I nearly snarled with the emotions that hit me then.  Instead, I made a face, turning away, reaching for another knife.

“Sorry,” Gordon said.  “I’m sucking right now.”

“You always suck, Gordon,” I said.  “At least you have an excuse this time.”

“You’re an ass, Sy,” he said.

“And you’re broken.  But tomorrow you’ll be fixed and I’ll still be an ass, so there.”

“That’s not how that goes, Sy,” Gordon said.

The ghosts still hadn’t attacked.  I had to judge what they were doing.

“…And I don’t know how fixable this is,” he said.  “They implied this was my last heart.  Adding another is going to tax my body too much.  I-”

“Enough of that,” I cut him off.  My voice was tense.  “No.  Job to do.”

“Alright.”

Figuring out where the ghosts were went hand in hand with figuring out why they hadn’t retaliated.  I figured both out as I looked back to check on Lillian and Jamie.

The Duke.  He’d emerged at the top of the stairs.

Everyone else, stitched included, was crouched over, keeping low to the ground.  It made us all harder to see, and it meant the enemy couldn’t reach through a broken window to attack or grab.  The Duke didn’t care about either.  He stood tall, surveying the situation.

“You’ve stopped,” he said, his voice carrying down the hall.

“Fire in the way, and we’re kind of busy killing these guys and trying not to die,” I said, the words escaping my lips.

Sy,” Gordon said, voice soft.

But I saw the change in the Duke’s expression.  He approached, footsteps heavy and swift, coat moving behind him.  I had the impression of an onrushing train, and I was stuck on the tracks.

It was a ghost that saved me.  She approached from the room with the table, leaping through the shattered window, straight for the Duke.

He saw her and he turned, one hand reaching out.  She contorted in the air, twisting just out of his reach, before landing on the wooden floorboards with both hands and both feet.

The Duke drew his sword and cut in the same motion.  She slipped out of the way of that strike as well.

His pistol fired without even leaving the holster.  His hand had come down, he’d pressed the hammer down and adjusted the angle, while touching the trigger in the same motion.  She’d already danced to one side.  He fired twice more from the hip, before drawing the pistol and firing three more times.  At the end of the hall, Jamie and Lillian threw themselves flat to the ground to avoid getting hit by one of the stray bullets.  Lillian shrieked.

“Hm,” the Duke made an amused sound.  He sheathed his sword, then reached to his belt before sliding bullets into his pistol.  The ghost took the opportunity to duck through a doorway, running through the conference room with its long table and many chairs.

“You see what we’re up against, my lord,” I said.

“I do see,” he said.  He drew closer, and put one finger under my chin.  He offered only the lightest touch, but I still rose to my feet.  He spoke, “I also heard the insolence in your tone.  I’ll remember it.”

My heart skipped a beat in time with the click of his pistol, as he closed it up and cocked the hammer, just a foot from my head.  He tossed it into the air and caught it with his other hand.

Then, so suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d processed it right, he grabbed one of the sections of window frame with only scant glass shards remaining, and carried through on the movement to hurl it violently across the tea room.  It crashed through the window there.

I only barely saw the ghost move, abandoning her cover where she’d been standing.  The Duke’s arm was already extended, pistol pointing.  In the eyeblink the ghost’s head was visible, he put a bullet through it.

“Hm,” he made that amused sound again.

He walked past me, and he did it in a roundabout way that had the pistol in his hand touch my face.  It traced along cheekbone, catching on the ridge of my nose, and then stopping there, between my eyes, before he moved on.  He was tall enough he didn’t even need to move his arm or change the angle of his wrist to do it.  His arm hanging down at his side put his hand at eye level for me.

“I heard you say that you killed the one,” he said, as he walked away, “Lying on the floor, throat cut?”

“Sy isn’t normally-” Gordon started.

“You’re not the one I asked.”

“I am, lord,” I said.  I figured formalities couldn’t hurt, given circumstances.

There was no response, nor any explanation over the question.  Or perhaps the question was the response.

“The fire is barring your way?” he asked.  He wasn’t asking me, Gordon, or Helen.  He was talking to Jamie and Lillian.

“Yes, my lord,” Jamie said.

“I see,” the man said.  He stepped into the conference room.

Helen and I gave Gordon a hand in standing, and I was a little surprised at how much help he needed.  He was sweating a little.

As a trio, we approached.  I could see Mary at the center of the group, with Jamie and Lillian.  She looked better than Gordon did.

Wood scraped against wood, a haunting, awful sound.  The long table looked like it could sit eighteen, the wood of the tabletop two inches thick and very probably dense.  Rather than legs, it had boards of the same thickness at two ends, poised diagonally.  The Duke pushed it across the floor, out the double doors on the far end of the conference room, until it sat beside the fire that stood between us and the stairs.

Broad shoulders strained as he tilted it.  The table fell on its side.  Another turn, and it landed upside-down.  The heavy table’s top squashed the fire and sent licks of the flaming chemical dancing over hardwood.

He raised his pistol and fired down the length of the hall, toward the tea room.

“Gordon,” I said.  “Stay with Mary.”

“Yeah,” he said.

The Duke turned to set his eyes on us.

We wasted no time.  The herd of stitched followed, with Lillian at the fore of the group with two handlers and Gordon and Mary at the rear.

As I passed the Duke, stepping on the underside of the table, he moved.  He didn’t remain with Mary, this time, but fell into step, just behind me, with Helen to our left and Jamie to our right.

I looked back at the others, for feedback, or clarity.  As if someone could provide some sanity to this mad situation.  Instead, I saw the shadow of a ghost moving across the hall, in the direction of the opposite stairwell.

There was no firebomb waiting for us this time.  A good thing, considering Jamie and I were doused in flammable chemicals.  We reached the third floor of the building, and came face to face with stitched.  None of the four were armed.  None even appeared hostile.

But each one had a conspicuous hole in its midsection.  Intestines scooped out, they had empty cavities within, large enough to hide a human head inside.  Some cavities had different shapes to them, as if they’d settled around whatever they’d been holding.

That was a bad thing, as things went.

We’d been assuming she had something small, for her countermeasure.

“The Duke,” Avis’ voice carried.  “Should I be honored?”

“This will go easier if you’ll turn yourself in,” the Duke said.

“I sincerely doubt that.  I’m doomed.”

“You are,” the man said.  “But your extended family doesn’t need to be.  I know you have a sister.”

“I already sent the bird out.  Whoever you send, whatever message you try to get to your subordinates, it’ll be too late.  She’ll be gone.”

“I’ll have to get creative, it seems.”

“So it seems,” Avis said.

Her voice sounded sad.

“You know you can’t kill me,” the Duke said, as he stepped into the hallway.  He very casually put a sword through the throat of one stitched, then swiped it to one side, beheading the other three.

“I can try.”

“Hm,” the Duke made an amused sound.

I replayed her voice in my head, those last three words, and I couldn’t say why, but I suspected she didn’t believe she had a chance.

“I’ve been preparing for this eventuality for years,” Avis said.

“I’ve been prepared for any eventuality since birth,” the Duke said, very quietly.  “You’re building something.”

“Built.  It’s done.”

“No it’s not.  You’re biding your time,” he said.  He advanced further into the third floor.

The Lambs, too, climbed a little higher.  I could see across the floor, now.  A lot of open space.  There were few walls, and the floor sat in a depression, the staggered steps down doubling as seats or benches, with pillows here and there.

A social area.

“I’m done building,” she said.  “I’m just having a drink.  It’s taking a few goes to get all of it down.”

“A combat drug,” Lillian whispered.

“Whatever you need to do,” the Duke said.  He smiled, as he picked his way around the staggered steps.  He leaned his head one way, to try and look beyond the wall that only extended partway down the room.  “I’m hoping for a good contest.”

“Contest?” Avis asked, and her voice sounded different.  “Never.”

It was an echo of a thought that had passed through my head as I’d cut the ghost’s throat.

I didn’t even see the catalyst.  The depression in the floor ignited, the deepest part filling up with fire, clearly filled with an odorless accelerant of some kind.  Stripes of flame swept up the stairs to each corner of the room, separating it into four quadrants, the Duke cut off from us.

The sound of glass shattering and the roar of flame below us suggested our retreat was being cut off.

I fought to keep my breathing under control, my thoughts in focus, and the sound didn’t help in the slightest.  The Duke was chuckling, and the chuckle became a laugh.  He stood with flames within feet of him, arms spread, weapons in hand.

We didn’t even matter.  This fight, this scenario, it was all for him.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.12 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.12

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The room had been built and grown in such a way that the furniture was an extension of the room, rather than an addition to it.  The only walls that weren’t exterior walls were standalone, decorative more than anything, with benches built into them, facing tables.  Nothing we could lift up to copy the Duke’s trick and form a bridge over fire.

Not that I necessarily felt confident, with the sparks flying around.

None of the walls were connected to any others.  They might have been once, with walls removed as this part of the building was repurposed; an octagon with the diagonals removed.

Two of the walls separated the staircases on either side of the floor from the main area; I was looking past one to see the sea of fire in the center of the room.  The other two walls did much the same thing for rooms on the north and south faces of the building, with balconies extending those rooms.  The two rooms served for private conversation, and one of them was a hiding spot for our quarry.

All that said, we were the cornered ones.

I pulled off my shirt, backing away from the scene until my back was to a wall.  I balled my shirt up in my hands, my eyes fixed on the Duke.

“Lillian,” I said, my voice only loud enough to be heard over crackling flames, “Do you have anything that will make me not flammable?”

“What?”

“Focus!  I’ve got stuff on me.  Chemical, right?  How do I make it so I don’t burst into flame the second a spark touches me?”

“I don’t know!  That’s not exactly part of what we study!”

“Stitched overseer guys.  You don’t have any junk you can pour on any of your soldiers that go up in flames?”

“It exists,” one of the men in charge of the stitched said.  “We don’t carry it all the time.  Cans are heavy.”

I scowled, irritated.

“But if it’s chemical,” Lillian said, “We can try a dry soap.  I can’t promise, but-”

“Do it!” I barked.  “Me and Jamie.  Before this gets worse.”

“Those floorboards,” Gordon commented.  His face looked drawn, especially in the light of the fire.  “They’re burning.”

My eyes moved to the area he was looking at.  Sure enough, the floorboards were catching fire.

Every second floorboard.

“She modified the room,” I spoke the realization aloud.  “Maybe the building.”

The Duke turned his head, noting our presence, and I saw a smile on his face.  He was cast in hues of orange and crimson, tall enough that the top of his head touched the smoke that was concentrating at the center of the ceiling and slowly creeping out toward the edges.

He leaped from a standing position, and the wall in front of us broke my line of sight.

He’d crossed the pool of fire.  Approaching the other end of the building.

I saw figures in the shadows.

“Ghosts!” Jamie called out.

“I know,” the Duke said.  But he ignored them, approaching the northernmost wall.

Ghosts crept nearer.  The room didn’t offer much cover, and they didn’t seem to know how to use the fire or smoke for cover.  It wasn’t physical enough for their senses to process.

Still, there were five ghosts there, and possibly two more we couldn’t see, if I was keeping count right.  I probably wasn’t keeping count right.

The Duke stepped around the wall, pistol going out, and fired four times.  A large, dark shape darted out, passing around the far end of that wall, leaping well over the wall of flame that cut across her path.

Fast, agile.  That would be the combat drug.

“Okay,” Lillian said.  She approached me, bottle in hand.  She was shaking it.  “Who’s first?”

“Sy,” Jamie said, at the same time I said, “Jamie.”

He gave me an annoyed look.

“Me, then,” I said.   Jamie was impossible to get through to when he got stubborn, and with him being in a strange way of thinking, I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t be worse than usual.

With my shirt already off, Lillian was able to rub the ‘dry soap’ on me.  It had a consistency like clay, it burned a little, and it had gritty bits that made it scratch as much as anything.

I clenched my teeth and endured, watching, trying to figure out what Avis was doing.

As she rounded the end of the wall that was furthest from us, I could get a better view of her.

She’d altered herself to the point that she looked more experiment than human.  Four white-feathered wings framed her.

Her hair, skin and clothing were dusted white, too – she’d covered herself in a powder, and much of it had been concentrated on her head.  The effects of the combat drug were obvious.  Her muscles were strained tight, and it included her face and neck.  Her eyes were wide and unblinking, her lips parted to show teeth and gums that were too red.  The bloodshot edges of her eyes and the crimson of her flushed lips were slices of red in an otherwise pale, powder-mottled complexion.

She’d taken off her lab coat, and wore a top that consisted only of a bit of cloth and straps to hold it in place.  The same straps that held her harness on provided a little bit more security in binding the set of wings to her back.  The feathers were slick with fresh blood, and that blood had been covered with more powder in turn.  Bony, insectile limbs reached around her, hooking into flesh of rib and breast.  At her shoulder, one had been shattered, a bullet grazing flesh, leaving the point of the limb embedded in flesh, the other end twitching.

Moving quickly, low to the ground, wings folded close to her back, she leaped through flame.  The feathers didn’t ignite, and she didn’t react to any burn she might have sustained.

The Duke was a matter of steps behind her.  She was faster, she was more agile, and she was apparently fireproof, or fire resistant.  She could presumably fly, or she’d been able to, before the one hook had been damaged by a bullet.

She wants to run, to fly, I thought.  I tucked my shirt into the crook of my elbow, took some of the soap-sludge from Lillian, and rubbed it into my skin.  I smeared a blob of it into the leg of my shorts, where some of the chemical had showered down on me.  I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten all of it, so I merely took more soap and smeared it on over.  I hoped it would be a layer of protection, and that I wouldn’t have to kick off my pants.

“What are we doing?” Helen asked.

“Thinking,” I said.

“Think aloud, Sy,” Gordon said, “Communicate.

“I’m not- I will as soon as I have something to say.”

The Duke’s gun fired twice.  He hurdled one six-foot wall of fire with seemingly no problem, landing on the bench by the western wall, opposite us.  He called out as he picked his way across it, closing the distance, “You gave yourself wings, Avis.  Why don’t you fly?”

“You know why,” she said.

She was so close to us.  Five or six paces.  Three, and I could have possibly had an angle to throw a knife at her.

The ghosts crept closer to the duke, staying just out of arm’s reach.  He didn’t seem to pay much attention to them, except to hold one sword out in the direction of the nearest one, so the woman would run herself through if she lunged.

“I could promise to hold my fire,” the Duke said.  “I’m good for my word.”

There was no answer from Avis.

I followed the Duke’s line of thought to its natural conclusion.  She doesn’t want to fly because she’ll be a sitting duck in the air, without cover.  She knows how good a shot the Duke is.

Was she capable of diving for speed and to put more distance between her and any shooter, using the balcony itself for cover, or rounding the corner of the building?

Maybe she was, but the building was surrounded with soldiers.

How bad did things have to get here, before she was willing to risk death by bullet over a death by fire?

Gordon was saying something to one of the men in charge of the stitched.  The men then turned, moved through the ranks of the stitched, communicating to a few at a time.  Rifles were raised and pointed in Avis’ direction.

To stay out of the line of fire, I bent down.  Lillian started rubbing the soap across my bare back, then along the belt-line of my shorts, where some of the chemical had no doubt trickled down and soaked in.

I gave serious consideration to going into this confrontation naked, just to be safe.  The look I imagined on Lillian’s face was the first thing to bring me near a smile since the conversation with Jamie.

“Sy,” Mary cut into the thought.

“What?”

“I want to come.  You’re going to say I can’t, but-”

“You can’t,” I said.

“If I-”

“Mary,” Gordon jumped in.  “Do you really think you can hurdle six feet of fire?”

“I don’t think they can, so that’s a moot point!”

“We can,” I said.  “You can’t.  Not with that injury.”

“Painkiller,” she said.

No,” I told her.  “No.  Stay there, have knives ready.  If ghosts come for us, aim for the ones who are busy dodging something else.”

Fire continued to spread along floorboards.  A great ‘x’ had been cut into the room, and the space between the lines of that ‘x’ were filling in.  The flames remained small, but they were gaining traction.

What did it take to change the flooring in the room?  She controls all communication out of Claret Hall.  Did she ask for a work order to be modified?  Did a crew of stitched put in flammable floorboards under the noses of professors, doctors, and wealthy clients of the Academy?

How many small ways had she found to sabotage the lot of us?  Was she the reason our enemies had been so well informed on the Lambs?  The four humors had been pretty up to date.

The Duke had to pick his way across the room more carefully as the fire took over more of the area.  He took a step to one side as flame touched one of the cushions a matter of feet from the Duke, only for the cushion to explode in a violent roll of fire.

A ghost appeared, airborne, taking advantage of the Duke’s turned back.  She landed astride his shoulders, and, so quickly it looked like I’d missed something, she began slamming a knife into the side of his neck, once, twice, three times.

He tossed his sword down, reached back, and grabbed her.

She slammed the knife deep into his face once, as he hauled her around in front of him.

One-handed, he tossed her into the pool of fire at the center of the room.

The Duke made that amused sound.  He turned, a little overdramatically, his coat sweeping out around behind him.  His eyes were wide, the heavy lines in his face catching the light and shadow of the fire and smoke, the veneer of humanity no longer visible.  The gaping wound in his cheek wasn’t helping matters.

He spat out what looked like a full mouthful of blood, directly at the flame.  It hissed in response.

That much blood, the knife had to have gouged the roof of his mouth.

“Reminds me of home,” he called out, to Avis.  His voice was different, with the wound.  He spat again.

“You’re done,” Lillian told me, slapping my back.  “I can’t promise-”

“I know,” I said.  I didn’t waste a second.  “Helen!”

Helen and I left Jamie behind.

Walls with heavy decoration carved into them meant handholds and footholds.  I signaled Helen, then interlaced my fingers.

With a running start, she stepped into my hand.  I hauled her up as best as I could.

Virtually any combination of us would have been better than Helen and I, for this particular trick.  Gordon in particular could have gotten Helen up as high as she needed.  Mary was more adroit.  I would have had Helen boost me up, but her strength worked differently, it didn’t add up to me being able to add her lifting strength to my leaping strength.

I got her up to the point that only her foot and ankle were touched by flame before she managed to climb up another step.  I double checked she wasn’t slipping before stepping away.

What served as a running start for me were moments where Helen was closer to the ceiling, where smoke was thicker, perched on the wall directly above the open fire.  Seared by heat, she nonetheless found footholds, one handhold, and extended a hand my way.

Time to see if the soap worked, I thought.

I adjusted my grip on the bundle of chemical-soaked cloth, then ran.

I was quick, I was lightweight, and I was spry.

I approached the wall in front of Helen, running full-tilt.  I leaped, touching foot to the wall for extra leverage, and reached her hand.

I felt the intensity of the heat as she helped swing me over the fire.  I only barely missed landing at the edge of the fire, and the moment I realized I’d touched safer ground was spoiled as burning floorboards cracked under my weight.

I reached out for Helen.  She lunged off the wall in my direction, and I grabbed her, half-throwing, half-pushing her away.  We sprawled across the floor, rolling over floorboards that licked with only small amounts of flame.

Avis was perched on the balcony, adjusting straps from her dress to tie them to her wing.  In front of us, a ghost materialized from around the corner of the balcony.  She approached us, a weapon in either hand.

I reached for my last knife, and then hesitated.

“She’s running!” I shouted.  “Can I stop her!?”

I saw Avis’ muscles tense.

“Do,” the Duke said.

I hurled the knife.

It caught Avis dead-center in the back.  It didn’t sink in point-first, but the side of the blade did hit.

Wings and limbs spasmed.  She did too, her back arching, already tense muscles visibly twitching and pulling so tight they kinked up.  I worried she’d tumble forward off the balcony and onto the soldiers waiting below.

Whatever it was she was wearing, it was akin to a large bug, running parallel to her spine.  I’d injured it, but I shouldn’t have hurt Avis herself.

Hooked into her nervous system.

The ghost that had stepped out was drawing nearer to Helen and I.  I’d just thrown away my last weapon.  There was only the bundled-up shirt,  which had touched fire and ignited.

Helen and I fought to get to a standing position, an awkward process with growing stripes of flame here and there on the floor.

“Sy!” Lillian cried out.  “You’re on fire!”

I looked.  Sure enough, a section of my shorts was burning.  I’d completely failed to notice, with the oppressive heat from the fire behind me.

I slapped at it with my hand, to little effect.

The ghost drew near, swift, picking and choosing where she stepped.

Touching the toe of my shoe to the bundled up shirt, I kicked up, directing it in the general direction of the ghost’s head.  A fireball.

She sidestepped it in an awkward way, burning cloth brushing past her face, briefly disorienting her.  I wasn’t sure if it was that the cloth was burning or the unsteady footing that led to the mistake.

It left Helen and I with no weapon to throw or use for self defense.  The fire was so close I could have sworn my back was breaking open in blisters.

I reached into a pocket.  Spare change.

I flung it at her.

This, she didn’t even try to dodge.  It touched her and danced off, clattering to the floor.

She stumbled to a stop.  She straightened, partially turning, and I could see the knife in her chest.

Good job, Mary, I thought.

But, lethal as the knife should have been, the ghost didn’t stop.  She stumbled forward, and the stumble became a run.

Bull-rushing us.

I pushed Helen against the wall, while I stepped out, parallel to the line of flame.  The ghost decided to go for Helen, grabbing her, and using forward momentum to carry her directly into fire.  The two stumbled into the blaze together.

No.

I was only a step behind, not quite entering the flame, but getting close enough it hurt.  I couldn’t see, the heat itself stealing away my ability to see as much as the smoke did, I could only intuit, lashing out as best as I could.

I kicked the knee.  That knee buckled, and the ghost toppled.  I grabbed her, tearing her down toward the ground as much as I did anything.  Burned floorboards creaked precariously under her weight as she crashed down.

Helen reached over the ghost, seizing my shoulders, fingernails digging in for a grip.  Unable to reach into fire, I instead hauled myself -and her- away and back, throwing the two of us to the ground for the second time.

She wasn’t as burned as I’d thought she’d be, but it was bad.  Hair singed, skin burned across virtually every part of her that I could see, her dress was scorched, barely intact.

She wheezed for breath, starting to rise, then dropping, writhing until she found a position where she wasn’t touching burning floor.

I stood, grabbing her.  I hauled on her arm, and I wasn’t strong enough to budge her.

The wheezing seemed to be getting worse by the second, and I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or if it was the reality.  It filled my ears, drowning out everything else, even the sound of the Duke’s pistol shots.

I turned my attention to Avis.

She had recovered from the spasming.  One wing already lay curled up on the floor, folded into itself by way of far too many joints, a feathery, bloodstained ball.  As I watched, she hauled on the matching, smaller wing, tearing it out of the socket.  It curled up like the other had, the pair of them like legs of a dead spider furling beneath it.

She flexed her remaining pair of wings, glancing my way.  She backed away a little, I let go of Helen’s hand to approach.

“How many of you are left?” she asked.

“Enough,” I said.

“Is it worth it?” she asked.  “Working for them?”

“I’m not working for them,” I said.  “Not this time.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“The kids you killed to make those ghosts of yours.”

“They’re not ghosts,” she said.  “They’re alive.”

“It’s a name,” I said, annoyed, angry she was going on about stupid garbage when my friends were hurt and in danger.

“No,” she told me.  “They’re alive.  The children you say we killed.”

“You’re lying.”

“There’s no way to bring clones up to speed as fast as we did without a shortcut, Sylvester,” Avis said.  “The bodies were material.  The brains?  It wasn’t much different from making a stitched.  Keep the essentials.”

I thought of what Mary had said about the other Percy.

That he wasn’t him, the little things were different.

Tics.  Muscle memory, way of standing, way of walking.

I believed her.

“The children?  You’ve been killing them, not us,” Avis said.

“No,” I said.  “You took the part that mattered.”

Something cracked as the fire ate away at structural integrity.  There was a violent snap, and something tumbled.

“If you jump,” I said, “Then I’m jumping after you.  I’m going to grab your wings.  I don’t think they’re strong enough to carry both of us.”

“There are reasons,” the Duke said, “We haven’t yet made man fly.”

He’d emerged, stepping around the other end of the wall.  He, Avis and I formed a proper triangle, with Avis at the balcony.

“At best, four wings and some vigorous flapping, she could glide.  Two wings?  She can hope to try and control her spiral to the ground.  With luck, she’d even avoid the worst of the bullets and find a place to run from.  With a Lamb latched onto you, Avis, you’ll plummet.”

“He might not catch hold of me on his way down.”

My gaze was cold.  “I’m willing to try.”

Something told me she believed me.

“Will we have our duel after all?” the Duke asked.  “I’ve been handicapped.  I was stabbed no less than thirteen times.  One pole of some sort was thrust through my leg.”

He barely showed it, though blood ran down his clothing and dripped from a few spots here and there.  There was a steady and unbroken stream of blood trailing down from the wound in his cheek to the edge of his chin, where it carried on.

“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

“I can’t imagine any sort of true satisfaction,” the Duke said.  He was smiling.  He spread his arms, and he looked like the giant of a man he was, especially in contrast to Avis’ frail form.  “A snack of a conflict, rather than a meal.”

“With all due respect, my lord,” I said, not taking my eyes off Avis- I fully expected her to make the leap at any second.  I said, “Where the heck are you taking in your meals?”

“I don’t,” he said.  “Not here.  But home?  I’ve always sparred with my brothers and sister.  That’s a meal.”

“You’re making this out to be something trivial?” Avis asked, eyes narrowed.

“You are trivial,” the Duke said, with the confidence that nothing else was even possible.

She shook her head.  “You’re everything that’s wrong with the world.”

I glanced back at Helen.  The fire wasn’t too near her.  I wondered if it was even possible to talk to the Duke and ask him to move her.

“You were lucky enough to grow up in a world my family created, Avis,” the Duke said.  “One where you haven’t seen the true ugliness of mankind, and you can actually believe what you just said.”

“Even before the Crown became what it is, before Wollstone, the world got better, decade after decade, century after century.  The people of the world were happier, healthier and longer-lived than those who came before.  From stone age to bronze age to iron age-”

“And then the dark age,” the Duke said.

She shook her head.  “No.  We were still progressing.  We had a way forward.  The age of machinery, then the age of blood.  The last age, where we look inward.  But you’ve perverted it.  You’ve made it about power, for you.  Powerlessness for everyone else.  Ask your people, the ones who serve the Crown, and three out of five will tell you you’re wrong, you’re loathed.  The other one or two out of five, I’m not sure they’re just too scared to say it out loud.  Your wars, your breaches of everything that’s right-”

“Is temporary,” I cut in, without thinking.

The Duke gave me a look, his chin rising a fraction.

“In this, we might agree, Sylvester,” she said.  She fixed her eyes on the Duke.  “The Crown is a temporary power.  It has to be.”

“No,” I said.  “No, not like that.  You’re wrong about something.  The age of blood isn’t the last one.  There’s a final expanse.  The mind, the brain.  Once we unravel that, we’ll be able to see a way through.”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“Of course of course!” I said.  I allowed myself a half second to wish I had the Wyvern formula to help me better formulate my rebuttals.  “I know how stupid people are!  I can see it in half the people I talk to, I veer from stupidity to brilliance!  I know!  We have to be patient.  We have to keep from destroying ourselves in the meantime.  We have to keep the likes of you from destroying them.”

From destroying us.

I thought of Helen, of the others, beaten, battered, and in danger.

“That’s how you justify yourself?  That’s really how you see it?”

Yes.

“You’re such a child,” she said.

“With the abilities of an adult,” I said.

“A far cry from being adult,” she said.  She heaved out a sigh, wings flexing.  “I don’t think I have many ways out.”

“You never did,” the Duke said.

“I’ll chance being shot.  If you want to catch me on the way down, feel free to try.”

Then she started to topple backward over the railing.  The Duke lifted his pistol, aiming skyward, rather than shooting.

I bolted, running.

I felt rather than saw the movement of the knife, just to my left.

It raked her shoulder, and it caught her wing.  Feathers and fire-resistant powder flew into the air.  I saw her eyes, already wide and bloodshot, go wider.

I dropped, throwing myself forward.  I reached past the rails of the railing, grabbing-

I seized a strap of her top with both hands.  Her weight dragged me forward, my head and ribs slamming into the rails.  I managed to keep my grip.

“Let me go,” she said.  Her fingernails bit into my arm.  “Let.  Go!”

My fingers started to give.  She was lighter than she should’ve been, more modifications, no doubt, but I wasn’t strong.  I felt a pain in my hands that suggested they’d be hurting for days.

And then the burden was lifted.

“Power, and powerlessness, hm?” I heard the Duke speak, close.

The Duke loomed over me.  He grabbed her as she kicked and fought, and held her so she was face to face with him.  An angel with the face of a demon and a demon with the face of an angel.

She’d enhanced her strength with the combat drug, but for purposes far from fighting the Duke.  Only to fly, or to make the attempt.  She wasn’t up to fighting the Duke, even as he drew a syringe from one pocket and plunged it into her neck.

I disengaged myself from the railing, clutching hands to my chest.  I turned to face the burning building interior.

It hadn’t been Mary to throw the knife that injured the wing, but Jamie.  He was at the edge of the balcony now, standing by Helen’s body, and by Lillian, who was tending to Helen.  They had to have crossed the fire the same way Helen and I did.

Surprising, on a number of levels.

Helen was breathing.  She was alive.  With Lillian there, she’d stay alive.

“Good enough,” the Duke said.  He was smiling like he’d just had the time of his life.  The fact that Claret Hall was burning down hardly mattered.  He raised his voice, loud enough for the crowd below and the pair’s sensitive ears to hear, halfway around the building, “Dog, Catcher!  The Lambs need a way down!”

He reached out with a free hand and touched the top of my head as he passed by, entering the building to collect the other Lambs and workers.

Jamie and I stared at the surreal image.  When we could no longer see him, his body cloaked by smoke and fire, there was a moment where we were supposed to speak, to look at each other, to joke.

I felt the absence of that moment keenly.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.13 – Twig

Lamb to the Slaughter – 6.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Avis raised her head, groggy, her vision unfocused.  Chains and bands of metal clinked.

The table she was bound to was set on a hinge so it could be laid flat, or tilted so she was standing up.  Bars sat between toes and fingers, locking them in place, and a network of wires had been worked into her mouth and around her shaved head, locking jaw and tongue in place.  Tubes fed clear fluids into her and drained out dark ones.  Mechanical arms with more tubes, syringes, and other tools hung around her, poised like a dozen scorpion tails, ready to strike at her.

Her gradual struggle, waking up to find out how firmly she was bound, made for a backdrop of clinks and grunts, quickly growing more intense.

“Avis,” the Duke spoke.

The noises ceased.  Her eyes found us.  The Duke stood, his doctors behind him.  His wounds had been patched up, now virtually invisible, and he’d changed both shirt and coat for something less bloodstained.  Jamie, Lillian, and I were there, Lillian beside Jamie, me off to one side, nearer the Duke, sitting on a table.

“If your chest hurts,” the Duke said, “It’s because of the day’s surgeries.  I imagine the drug you took was intended to kill you if you didn’t take a very specific antidote, but my doctors are very good.  You are going to live, Avis Pardoe.”

She was breathing harder, but she wasn’t physically struggling.

He glanced at a piece of paper that sat on the corner of the same table I did.  “Capsule embedded in your leg, I assume it would be activated with sustained flexing of the calf muscle, that has been removed.  We have also removed, for the time being, your ability to use your thumbs and fingers independently.  If and when we release you from your bondage, you won’t be able to stand, crawl, or make any vigorous movements without assistance.  Should you try, your hip and shoulder joints will come free of the sockets.”

He turned his attention back to her.

“The bonds you’re in now are a formality, and I do like formalities, Avis.  I’ve been told by my doctors that it is kinder to keep you like this, so you won’t accidentally hurt yourself.  You’ve been given our best drugs to dull pain.  I want you to think very clearly about things between visits.”

She tried to speak.  It was garbled by the wires in her mouth.

“You had your chance to speak earlier.  This isn’t a stage for you to say anything except what I want you to say.  One of my doctors is going to remove the gag from your mouth, I am going to ask you a question, and you will answer either yes or no.  If you take too long, I’ll consider it the same as you giving me the answer I don’t want to hear.  You do not want to say anything but that yes or no.”

She nodded a little.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, as he signaled one doctor, “I don’t believe in torture.  I don’t like it, even as I recognize just how common it is.  Our own bodies torture us with hunger and pain if we put ourselves in the wrong circumstances.  If you’re smart about this, you won’t experience either.  You can say you won’t give me an answer, and nothing will be done to you, but don’t lie, and don’t say anything but ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

One of the doctors stepped forward.  Two keys were inserted into either side of the gag, latches clicked, locks came undone, and the entire thing jumped in the man’s hands.  He withdrew it, and with it came a two-foot long cord of interconnected metal and tubes, with what looked like a lamprey worked out into the center of it all, thin streams of blood trailing from tiny teeth at the one end.

Avis coughed and sputtered, gagging as the end of the tube came out.  Her head bowed as she dry-heaved, coughing.

The Duke spoke, very clearly, “Will you tell me where I can find the other cells of Percy’s enhanced clones?”

She looked at the Duke, then at each of us.  I could imagine the cogs in her brain turning, over and over, trying to figure out the trick, the catch.  She coughed, trying to clear her throat.

“No, I assume?” the Duke asked.

“No,” she said, voice hoarse and gravelly to the point she sounded like an old man.

The Duke nodded.  “Doctor, I don’t believe there’s a need for the gag.  You can leave it out.  Avis, I’ll be back soon.  Take some time to consider your next response.”

She opened her mouth as though she was about to speak, then closed it.  She looked between us, wary, before fighting her bonds anew.

The Duke gestured to the door.  I hopped down from my seat.  The way things went, I wound up right beside Jamie as we passed through the door together, the doctors behind us.

Not that ‘together’ was the right word.

The Duke let the door shut.

“My lord,” I said.  “May I ask?”

“Ask.”

“Lord, time is kind of of the essence, isn’t it?

“It is.  Time is the operative word, as it happens, Sylvester,” the Duke told me.  “You know, I’m very interested in the brain.  You raised the topic with Avis Pardoe, and the timing felt serendipitous.”

“Time and brains, my lord?” I asked.  I felt as if he was getting at something.

“While you were looking after your fellow Lambs at the Hedge, seeing that they got the care they needed, I was busy looking after Mrs. Pardoe.  All four of my doctors worked on her.  One worked on her brain.  She’ll experience time in a very different way from now on.”

It dawned on me.  “With utmost respect, my lord, I’m assuming she won’t think you were gone for a few minutes?”

“She won’t feel as if I was gone for a few minutes, no.  In terms of raw thinking ability, I’m sure she’ll be able to rationalize it and logically work out that time is passing normally.  But she’ll think faster in some ways and slower in others.  Perhaps she’ll feel as if it has been days.  Weeks, more likely?”

He made it a question  One of his doctors gave him a nod, and a murmured, “M’lord.”

“Months aren’t out of the question?”

“No, my lord.  Not out of the question,” the Doctor said, quiet.  “Without patience or pacing, years or decades aren’t out of the question either.  It depends on her coping mechanisms.  If she tries to keep count of passing seconds and minutes, it will seem more pronounced.  The watched pot, in this case, never boils.”

“No torture, no pain, no mutilation,” the Duke said.  He looked pleased.  “I’m doing nothing more than giving her the time she needs to reconsider her stance.  After that, I will let her consider whether to turn in people she worked with, and whether to join the Academy in earnest, working to put herself back in our good graces.  I suppose we might have her report the whereabouts of her family and acquaintances, for future leverage.  I imagine it will be a productive night.”

“My lord,” Lillian said.

“Lillian, was it?  You’re the student.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Speak your mind, child.”

“I don’t- I think what you’re doing is torture.  Worse than anything you could do to her body, my lord.”

“I’d think a student was more on top of what the Academy is capable of doing, Lillian,” the Duke said.  “Is it truly so bad?”

“I wouldn’t wait too long, my lord.  You may be underestimating how frail the average person is.”

“Good advice,” he said, nodding.  He touched her hair.  “Good child.  I’ll see to her after we’re done talking, then, rather than waiting the full thirty minutes.”

Lillian ventured a smile.

“I hadn’t considered.  My doctors said it would be effective, and I almost didn’t believe them, but the principle wasn’t unsound, giving her more time to think, so to speak, or giving that time a different sort of meaning.”

It was a weird thought, one that I couldn’t quite frame, in the context of who the Duke was.  He hadn’t considered, which meant he couldn’t empathize, which meant…

“My lord,” I said, “Was something similar done to you?”

The Duke smiled.  “It was.  I do suppose I’ve had the advantage of it being the case from birth, something I’ve learned to harness, while our guest is experiencing it new, not a shift from a walk to a canter, or vice versa, but to a different vehicle altogether.  Even I wouldn’t enjoy the deprivation of sensation she’s experiencing now.  Doing nothing with my time is an alien idea to me, and wouldn’t have been permitted regardless.  I wouldn’t say I think faster, but I can devote exactly the right amount of time to a problem as is needed.  Brains are so fascinating, aren’t they?”

“Yes, my lord,” I said, my voice falling in with the others.

“When my brothers, sister and I were asked who was willing to come to Radham, the research being on brains here was one reason I volunteered,” the Duke said.  “As clever as this small alteration to my own brain is, it’s crude.  I often find myself wondering if my own heirs will have better brains.  If it’s possible that one of you will be the model for the next generation of nobles.  Or perhaps one of you will, when given permission, explore other options and open the doors to a new age.”

“Yes, my lord,” we said.  I was very cognizant of Jamie, who hadn’t had that permission to explore the options he’d dipped his toe into, and of Lillian, who knew about Jamie, but was a far worse liar than Jamie was.

“Tell me, Lillian, what’s your end goal?” the Duke asked.

“My goal, my lord?”

“Do you want to become a noble’s doctor?”  The Duke indicated the doctors standing at attention just behind him.

“My lord, I’d-” Lillian started.  She stopped abruptly as the Duke’s hand went up.

“You don’t.”

“No, my lord.  I don’t mean any offense, I-”

Again the hand went up.  I was annoyed on Lillian’s behalf.  Me, I could deal.  I’d earned the man’s ire earlier, and I had no idea if I’d patched it up by courting his favorite topic or if I had a sword looming over my head, ready to fall.  But he’d asked a question and he wasn’t letting her answer.  He didn’t truly know her, and he was setting her up to fail.  It was a blatant test.  With three Lambs being patched up, I felt a little more protective of the ones who’d remained.  Even if one was Jamie, who I had no idea how to deal with.

“No, my lord,” she said, again.  She stopped there.

“Were I to start talking about the Lambs and how things work, my hopes for the project and the possibility for the Crown, heads would turn.  I know how I was when I was young, my brain working the way it does, and I have many family members who are roughly your age,” the Duke said.  He arched one eyebrow and looked at Lillian.  “My younger relatives might well want to be Lambs, as a lark, or to have a way of stretching their legs as I did earlier today, I would imagine you’re the easiest one to replace, should we need to make room on this team.”

Lillian was so bad at hiding her tells.  I could see the horror on her face.

I felt it, myself.

“Or to move to a new team formed of nobles and higher quality work, now that I think about it,” the Duke mused.  “Counsel, an unbiased perspective able to inform the new group about how things are done.  You and three or four young nobles?”

“My lord, I wouldn’t be worthy,” she said.  She was trying to keep her expression straight.  She tried a smile and failed.  She cleared her throat, though it wasn’t her voice that had gone funny, but her face, as if she could make the sound and distract from what her face was doing.

The Duke took it in stride as if it was something that happened daily.

I felt a weird kind of jealousy and irritation at that.  If he was doing that unintentionally to Lillian, then it wasn’t right or fair of him.  If he was doing it intentionally, then he was bothering her in a way that was usually for me to do.  Not to mention that I was a lot more careful about how I did it, while the Duke didn’t seem to understand any of the nuances here.

“Hmm,” the Duke made a noise, considering.  “The reason I ask, dear Lillian, is that you’ve earned my attention and my respect.  If you know where you’re going, it could inform my choices, so I leave you as happy and close to your end goal as possible.”

“A-a black coat, my lord,” Lillian stuttered.

“A political appointment as much as it has anything to do with status.  You could learn to navigate the playing field by studying certain Lambs,” the Duke said, indicating me.

Had she given the right answer?  Did this lead the Duke to think she belonged with the Lambs?

“But,” he said, “You could well earn your professorship in record time, no matter where you are.”

Nope.  That’s the kind of conclusion that leads the man to think she could be put anywhere.

Lillian managed the most insincere smile I’d ever seen, and she was trying.

Was this man going to casually tear the team asunder, just like that?

“My lord,” Jamie said, pulling attention off Lillian. “Is there a particular reason you’re thinking about restructuring the team?”

“Yes,” the Duke said.  “I’ve been reading your files, as well as the latest updates.  It may be time.”

I was approaching the limit of my patience.

No, wait, scratch that.  I’d reached it.

“Lord Duke,” I said.  I took a half-step to position myself forward and to one side, putting myself more in front of Jamie and Lillian, between them and the Duke.  Jamie touched my arm, an instinctive movement, before he pulled away.  I spoke, “You’re wrong.”

Behind the Duke’s back, the noble’s doctors broke their stoic composure to give me looks as if I were insane.

“You disagree,” the Duke said.  Voice cold and dangerous.  “I haven’t forgotten the insolence earlier.  You test me.”

“With all due respect, my lord, you were testing her.  We all have default behaviors we go back to when we’re on unstable footing.  Lillian’s a good soldier, she defaults to shutting up and following orders, to insecurity and not speaking up when she needs to.  If you move forward with either of the options you’re thinking about, you will utterly destroy her.  You will hurt the Lambs, lord Duke.”

“A strategic break, nothing more.”

“We’re growing, my lord, we’re still young, we’re not fully developed.  Jamie’s improving by leaps and bounds, Lillian’s getting better.  We’re evolving the team dynamic.”

“‘Evolving’ may be the wrong word,” the Duke said.  “Going by reports and what I’ve seen, things might be trending in the opposite direction.”

He’d noticed.  The realization almost took my breath away, stealing my ability to argue.

I did what I could to hide my tells.  “We’re effective as a group, my lord.”

I felt a hand touch the small of my back, insistent.

Too far.

“As an experiment, you’re too muddled with one another to assess independently,” the Duke spoke.  “I have the distinct impression you’re arguing with me.”

“My lord, I would say I’m arguing for the Lambs, not arguing against you.  Forgive me, but when I talked about my views in front of Avis, I couldn’t help but feel you and I are on the same page, of similar views on where we should be collectively headed.  Let me add my views to yours, and yours to mine, my lord.”

“Presumptuous, too,” he said.

Oh.  Well.  That was that.  I’d gone and offended him.

“I’ve had others challenge me like this,” the Duke observed.  “Trying to appeal to my desire for excitement and challenge by arguing points, being reckless in conversation with me, foregoing custom and formality.”

I didn’t dare speak at this point.  I’d let my mouth run off with me.

“I’m trying to decide if you’ve crossed the line that the rest did in trying to challenge me,” he said.

“My lord,” I said.  I waited for an indication I had permission to continue.  He gave it, raising his chin a fraction.  “I wasn’t actively trying to challenge you.  I swear this.”

He nodded.

“I’ve read your file, Sylvester,” he said.  He touched the side of my face.  “You talked about the behavior we all return to when we’re on shaky footing.  I know this is where you go when you’re insecure, how you function as a living being.  I do believe you when you say that, and it does inform my answer.”

As much as you know and believe that that, I know that you default to playing with the lives of those around you.  When the world doesn’t suit you or make sense, you reorder it.  You’re good at reordering it.  A builder more than a destroyer.  But you’re too big of a man, Lord Duke.  You’re a giant among mere mortals, and the most trivial actions you undertake are ones with massive ramifications for the rest of us.  That’s how you function.

Except you’re not a dumb giant, trampling over everything in your path.  You know just how small we are.

“You’re seeing me as a threat, you’re studying me, and you’re working out a plan of attack,” he observed.

“Sy,” Jamie said, just behind me.

No, couldn’t dwell on Jamie, had to focus.  As if mirroring the thought, the Duke raised a hand, indicating with a raised finger that Jamie should stay silent and stay out of this.

In this, too, the Duke and I were on the same page.

“What are you thinking, ‘Sy’?” the Duke asked me, staring down at me with eyes that showed too much white.

“My lord.  I’m thinking that you’re smarter than you’re acting right now.”

If Gordon had been present, I was pretty sure he would have socked me one right there, to shut me up, then worked to beg for mercy.  He was being looked after for his heart.  Mary might have stabbed my butt like she had Helen’s, just to make it clear I was being stupid.

But this wasn’t a man who accepted half-measures.

“Precious Sylvester,” the Duke said.  His body language and voice softened.  He smiled, and his tone became something very dangerous, alongside the gentle phrasing and volume.  “I think you should explain yourself very carefully.”

“The Lambs are a unit, my lord.  We developed to cover each others’ weaknesses.  I, myself, was pushed forward to patch a gaping hole in the group.  But splitting us up now is like clipping a rose branch when it hasn’t budded yet.  You know you can let us reach a more complete state before evaluating us.  You have people come to you wanting to challenge you because you want to be challenged, you signal it, you outright asked for it with Avis.”

“I signal this?” he asked.  Not a question so much as a challenge.

“You’ve talked about home.  You want what you had there, on a deeper level.  Back home, I have to assume, if you bared your throat like you’re doing here, someone would seize the opportunity.  You’re doing it here, I’m seizing, and I’m hoping I’m doing it well enough you’re going to accept it where you’ve rejected others.”

He stared down at me.

“First of all,” he said.  “You forgot to call me ‘lord’.  I have a grave appreciation of formality, Sylvester.  It signals respect.  Forgetting something so simple is a telling blow to your attempt to earn my respect by challenging me.”

I didn’t budge an inch or give any outward sign or change of expression, but interally I was screaming and running around in circles.

“Second, your argument hinges on the notion that you’re not yet done developing to your full strength.  Yet your Gordon is near the end.  You’ve had more injuries.  Your group dynamic is reportedly and observably breaking down.”

He let that point hang in the air.

I ventured a response.  “My lord.”

He gave me consent to continue, a dismissive backhand swipe with the fingers of one hand.  His eyes and body remained stone still, not budging.

I lowered my eyes.  “We’ve had more injuries because we’ve been taking on more challenging missions.  If the Lambs are breaking down, if we’re dying or nearly done, let the first Lamb die or break away before you take any action.  You only lose the opportunity to work on the most perishable of us, and you stand to gain our loyal service in the meantime.”

My eyes still lowered, my heart pounding, I couldn’t see his expression, nor how much I’d succeeded or failed in swaying him.

It was a massive weight on my shoulders, wondering if I’d doomed myself or doomed the group.  I let that weight be something real, driving me to the ground.  Eyes fixed on the floor of the hallway in the Bowels, I dropped to my knee.  I heard and felt the movement of Jamie and Lillian behind me.

“That was my plan already, Sylvester,” the Duke said, above me.  “You’re not entirely wrong in your judgment of what I was doing.  The Lambs are not ready to be broken up.  We already have enough experiments capable of acting independently, too few who work as a collective.  I was thinking aloud, wanting to see your response.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.

“You’re forgiven for this.  Stand.”

I stood.  My hands shook a bit as I did.  I hooked my thumbs into the pockets of my shorts.  The fact that my shirt stuck to my back had nothing to do with the summer heat – we’d spent the last while in the Bowels, and it was cool this deep underground, if not quite refreshing.

“You are not, however, forgiven the transgression earlier.  I know it is your nature, but I did say I would punish you, and I do what I say.  I will decide on something fitting.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.

“Your fellow Lambs should be going straight from getting care to having their appointments.  Have yours as your doctors are able.  I expect you to be ready for another task before the week is over.  The war wages on, and our enemy is catching up to us in fits and starts.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.  My voice was joined by Jamie and Lillian’s.

“I give you leave to go,” he said.

“My lord?” Jamie asked.  “Forgive me.”

“What is it?”

Jamie’s eyes remained fixed on the ground.  With just a bit of sweat on his nose, his glasses slid down the bridge of the nose.  He pushed them back up into place.  “It’s customary for the Lambs to fill each other in, so none of us are in the dark or lagging behind the others.  Most often that’s me.  But we’re going to talk to the others, and we’re going to talk about this conversation.  May I ask, if Sy hadn’t spoken up, would this have ended differently?”

“I would have given it thought first, much as Avis is giving her matter some consideration right now.  My instinct is that you would have been disbanded,” the Duke said.  “Dear Lillian thrown to the nobles, perhaps, Helen ordered to my apartments, the rest of you left to fend for yourselves, with every expectation you wouldn’t fend for particularly long, but you’d see to the most essential tasks in the meantime.”

“Yes, my lord,” Jamie said.  “Thank you, my lord.  Knowing that will make this easier to convey to Mary and Gordon.”

The Duke declined his head in acknowledgement.  He swept his fingers to one side to dismiss us, and we were gone.

We fled, leaving the Bowels and heading off to our individual, long-postponed appointments.  Lambs to the Tower.

The exit from the Bowels and the first half of the walk was painfully quiet.  We walked among soldiers and warbeasts, students and stitched.

Halfway there, Lillian started crying.  Heads turned, curious, but nobody stopped for us.

I reached out for her hand, and she squeezed mine so hard it hurt.  She kept wiping at tears, only for new ones to show up.  Had she simply let them fall, they might have been blamed on the light drizzle.

“Crybaby,” I said.

She kicked me far harder than was necessary.  Doing it while walking meant having to take a quick half-step forward and a twist to one side.  She pulled her hand away from mine as she did it, but I held it firmly.  I tugged her closer to me, and put my other hand around hers, until I held one of her hands firmly in both my own.  I squeezed hard.

I was aware of Jamie, so much quieter than usual, a little to my right.

“You stood up for me.”

“You’re a Lamb,” I said.  “I wasn’t going to let him throw you to some group of golden-haired sociopaths so they can torment you to death.  Tormenting you is my job.”

“I can do without that part,” she said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure,” she said.  “I like you more when you’re nice.”

It was very possibly the worst thing she could have said or brought up with Jamie there, overhearing.

She sniffed again.

“Here,” I said, letting go of her hand with one of mine and extending a sleeve, my hand pulled inside.  “Blow.”

“On your shirt?  Eww, Sy.”

“I’m changing first chance I get anyway, and I don’t have any handkerchiefs to offer.  You want me to try being nice, take what you can get.”

She sniffed, gave me a wary look, then took the cuff of my shirt and blew her nose into it.

The moment she released my hand, I wiped the snot on the fabric at her shoulder.

She shrieked and came after me, kicking and pummeling me with fists.  I dodged as best as I could, up until she pushed me into a puddle.  She kicked me when I was down, as much to splash me with muddy water as to drive the toe of her too-hard shoe into my thigh.  Proof as much as anything that she was learning stuff from being with the Lambs.

But she was smiling, and Jamie was smiling too.  I raised my arms in surrender, and the two of them approached me, offering their hands.

Jamie hadn’t said a word since we’d left the Duke’s company.

We passed the checkpoint at the tower, the guards giving me suspicious look as I dripped liberally with mud.  I kept an eye out for the proboscis as it searched Lillian, and saw it pause at the mucus on her shoulder.  She gave me a look.

But we were cleared to pass inside.  Here, at least, we were regular enough to be known to the guards.

Checking on the other Lambs was priority number one.  The door to Mary’s lab was closed, the doctors absent.  Ibott and Helen weren’t present either, but I fully expected her to still be at the Hedge or deep in the Bowels, getting replacement skin after the burns.

Gordon was awake.

He lay on a table, his chest open.  Tubes fed into it, crimson fluid churning and bubbling within.  Doctors milled around him, chattering.

“Sy had a long conversation with the Duke,” Jamie reported, as we drew next to the bedside.

Gordon blinked.  He lay his head down on the table, staring at the ceiling.  “Good thing my heart’s not in my chest.  I might have had a heart attack at the idea.”

“Really?” I asked.  “Is it?  Can I see?”

He grunted, then eased himself up, until his arms propped his upper body up.  The tubes fed into his chest, showing some metal clips and bits here and there, the blood-pumping tubes were connected to the major ins and outs around where the heart should be.

“You’re dirty,” Gordon remarked.

“You’re a heartless bastard,” I said, pointing at this hole.  “Is that permanent?”

“No,” Gordon said, lying back down, staring up at the ceiling.  “I’m getting the same heart back.  They’re changing some things, but the problem might recur.”

I nodded, but I didn’t feel happy about the news.

“I might be getting a dog,” he said.

“What?” Lillian asked.

Dog-dog or dog-dog?” I asked.

“That makes no sense, Sy.”

“You know what I mean.”

“A dog.  A Gordon dog, for me.  I told them that Dog could hear the heart going before I was even fully aware of it.  They’re going to put something together for me.  Inconspicuous, but built like I am, and a dog.  If I know about the problems, I won’t jump into the fray and only realize I’m having problems when I can’t get out of it.”

“Not guaranteed to be a dog,” one Doctor said, passing by with clipboard in hand.

“It better not be a cat!” Gordon called out to the man’s back.

“What’s wrong with cats?” Lillian asked.

“You can’t do anything with cats,” Gordon said.

“Sounds like a good stopgap,” I said.

“Maybe good enough for them to find another good heart, or a way to keep my body from hurting too much as it rides out the rejection.”

Gordon held up a hand, fingers crossed.

I did the same.  Jamie and Lillian did too.

“How’s Mary?” I asked.

“Grumpy.  She stopped in.  She’s getting surgery.”

I nodded.  “And Helen?”

“Haven’t heard.”

“Alright.  Look, I’ve got an appointment I’m itching to get done.”

“And a shower, apparently.  Did you roll in mud?”

“And Lillian’s been gross and got snot all over her uniform.”

Lillian kicked at me.  I jumped out of the way, bumping into a doctor.

The man physically picked me up, carried me two steps, and planted me firmly down with the others, pressing down as if it would keep me in place, before carrying on with his business.

By the time I’d figured out what was going on and turned around, he’d disappeared into the mill of Gordon’s doctors.

I’d wanted to get revenge on one person.  Maybe I’d have to get revenge on the whole bunch of them.

“I’ll stop in when you’re through the worst part,” Gordon said.  “Hopefully.  I don’t want to be here too long.”

“Sure,” I said, “Thanks.”

“I’ll fill the rest of you in on the conversation with the Duke,” Jamie said.  “Felt important.  A sense of where we’re going.”

“Good going or no?”

“Not as bad as it could have been,” Jamie said.  “But elaborating on that would require sharing the whole conversation.  After.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “But you’re okay?”

“Bad day, but I’m okay,” Jamie said.

“Whichever one of us finishes first, we meet the other?” he asked.  “Maybe grab Mary when she’s done.  With Percy coming up today, she might need to talk.”

Jamie nodded.

Lillian, Jamie and I headed over to Jamie’s lab next.  The silence was oppressive, and even my attempt to shake like a dog and get the worst of the mud-brown water off only provoked smiles, not joking conversation.

As we reached the lab, Jamie grabbed his bag with the book.  He waved at his team of doctors, then pulled the book out, and then bent down, to put it down, so it would lean against the doorframe.

I was there before he did.  I put a hand between book and frame, grabbing the book.

“You don’t have to, Sy,” he said.

“I promised,” I said.  I watch you as you go to sleep.

“I know you want your appointment right now more than anything, and with the Duke and everything else, it might be a question of our group’s survival.  That whole thing was too close for comfort.”

“I promised.”

“The promise was that you’d…” he glanced at Lillian, then his doctors, obviously uncomfortable.  “It doesn’t matter if I’m here.  It’s different.  You shouldn’t put your appointment off.”

“Bullshit.  I shouldn’t break my promise,” I said.  I tugged the book from his hands.  “I promised.  Now I’m going to take the book and I’m going to look after it, and I’m going to sit here and if you try to convince me to do anything different, I’m going to rub snot on you.”

He met my eyes, a searching stare.

I only withstood the discomfort for a short while.  I broke eye contact, looking at Lillian.  “Not that it matters, you strip down anyway and they launder your clothes for you in the meantime.  Lillian should move over.”

I turned my focus to Lillian, repositioning her much as the doctor had me, moving her to one side of the doorframe.

When I turned around, Jamie was heading to his chair, a throne with tubes and connections running into and through it.  He didn’t open his mouth as one of his doctors led him up to the seat.

He pulled off his shirt, then pulled off his pants.  A doctor draped a cloth over his lap in time to protect his modesty.  Lillian wouldn’t have even blushed.

I took a seat in the doorway, back to one side, feet propped up against the other, book in my lap.

“What happened?” Lillian whispered.  She hadn’t budged from where I’d moved her.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Feels like something happened between you two.”

It was your fault, I thought, but the thought had no meat or merit to it, I knew.  She’d just been the unwitting catalyst to this whole mess.

“It’s nothing,” was all I said.

“Okay, Sy,” she said.  “Thanks for holding my hand and making me laugh.”

“What about the other stuff?”

“I think I got you back.  It’s okay.”

I nodded.

Then she was gone.  Back to her dorm to wash up and let reality sink in.  I imagined it was really lonely, and I was surprised at the level of empathy I felt in that regard.

No, it shouldn’t have been surprising.  I turned my attention to Jamie, who waved.

I gave him a small wave back.

Then my eyes dropped to the book.  I avoided looking at Jamie as the Doctors set everything up, pulling cloths off of the vats.  A faint bioluminescent glow filled the room.

I knew that if I looked at him, he’d gesture my way, and I’d have to respond.  I didn’t know how to respond.

Instead, I looked down at his notebook.  Annals of past events, from someone with a perfect memory.  I looked across the room at the bookshelves that ringed it, still avoiding looking directly at Jamie, and thought about the way things had been.  All of the memories in there.

I saw the men walk up the steps.  In keeping with the promise, I watched carefully as they put the mask on, and put Jamie to sleep.  I wasn’t sure Jamie saw me looking.

All the same, when they threw the switch, it made me jump.

Jamie was under.  He sagged slightly, the cords and connections running into his back and all down his spine, tension tight, holding him mostly upright.  I could hear the humming, see the overlarge brains in tanks move slightly, reacting to altered blood flow and temperature.

I nodded, then opened the book, paging through it.

I wanted to find an answer, and I didn’t.  There was an insight into Jamie’s eyes.  A drawing of the rat with grass and flowers growing out of it, other things he’d seen – creatures I’d missed, people in the street.  The Lambs recurred, over and over again.  The strokes were bold and harsh, sketchy more than anything.

A perfect memory made for that kind of harsh view of things, maybe.  You couldn’t forget the ugly little details.

I closed the book.  The answers I needed weren’t in there.

I spent a while looking at Jamie, then a while looking across the hall and out the window.

“Hey,” a man’s voice said.

I raised my head.  I saw a bruiser of a man in a lab coat that didn’t fit him.  “Oh.  Yeah.  I was supposed to stop in.”

“Don’t fucking waste our time, Sylvester,” Huey said.

“I didn’t mean to.  I was thinking.”

“You’ll think better after your appointment.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I nodded to myself.  “Yeah.  That’s true.”

“Let’s get it done.”

“Now?  Huey, look, if we can’t-”

“That’s not my name.”

I blinked.

“Dewey,” he said.

“Close enough.”

“It hasn’t been that long, Sylvester,” he said.

“No, probably not,” I said.  “Can you do me a favor?”

“I seem to recall the last two favors ending up-”

“Not like that,” I said.  “No.  I just… I need to think, without Wyvern.  To see if I even can figure out this problem in my head, when I’m like this?  Do you get what I mean?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Yeah, look, can I stay?  You can dick off and do whatever, or get caught up on whatever.”

He gave me a level stare.

“Please, Dewey.  I need to be here, I think.  Or I won’t be focused on the problem.”

“We use the restraints this time.  You stay put, after getting dosed, you stay quiet, you don’t bitch, you don’t get clever and try to run off while you’re working through the worst of the pain.  Think you can manage that?”

I nodded.

“I fucking hope so,” he said.  “Fuck with us on this and you don’t get any favors again.”

I nodded.

He tromped off, heavy feet clumping down the hall.

Avis was enduring her own mental gauntlet, caught with nothing else to do but try to endure, to figure out what her answer to the Duke would be.  Mine touched on unfamiliar territory.  On Jamie, and a divide between us that I couldn’t ignore.

It hurt, that things couldn’t be what they were.  I was angry, I was confused.  There was no right answer to give, yet if I couldn’t one, then things would be broken like this forever.

That he’d think I wouldn’t look after his book or keep the promise after everything we’d been through, it scared me.  Some things were inviolable.  It made me feel uneasy.

Hours passed.  It was dark, but for flickering lights and the glow from the room, the doctors rotating so that one was observing at all times.

The entire time, I was trying to unravel the problem, though the edges of my brain had dulled.  I wasn’t sure why I was so stubborn about wanting to do it without a full dose of Wyvern, but I’d started the journey and wasn’t about to abandon it.

I looked deep within, trying to find a glimmer of something, as if I could pry out some part of myself that could see Jamie in the way he seemed to see me.  I thought back, memory by memory, trying to figure out when things had changed, knowing my memory was weak at the best of times.  I thought about looking in the books, but somehow I knew I needed to find the answer here, not there.

As the third doctor came in for their night-shift, stepping over me in the doorway, I asked the time, and was informed it was four in the morning.

Perhaps an hour after that, I realized what it was I was trying to do.

I couldn’t have one more minute like the past afternoon and evening had been.  Not another second of that painful awkwardness.  I wouldn’t be able to endure it.

I had to greet him with a genuine smile as he woke.  Nothing more.  I could do that much.  I was sure that it would at least open the door for things to get better, and that was all we really needed.

Secure in that knowledge, I finally drifted off.

Hands seized me and dragged me, pulling me out of the way.  I stirred, annoyed, knowing I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, that it was far too early and I’d fallen asleep too late.

Then I realized where I was, my attention turned to where I was supposed to be – sleeping while sitting astride the doorframe, and I connected the dots to what was going on.  The Lambs were coming down the hall at a run – Lillian, Gordon, Mary, a patchy Helen.

There were far too many doctors in the room.

The shock of being pulled from deep sleep didn’t seem to go away.  I felt detached as I pulled myself to my feet.

Gordon was shouting my name.

I ignored him, pushing my way through the doorway, into the room.

So many doctors here, talking, chatting.  I’d seen all of them at one point or another.  Hayle was just entering the room behind me.  He gave me a passing glance, then headed over to talk to Jamie’s doctor.

I turned my attention to the throne.

Jamie wasn’t there.

There was a person, and that person looked down at me, but there was nothing there.  No glimmer of recognition, no personality.

He moved his hand, and it was a movement that suggested he was figuring it out.

Empty.

I could hear the chatter as two dozen disparate voices, talking about the same sort of thing.  What had been retained, what would be in the tanks, what to keep.  Project caterpillar this, project caterpillar that.

Everyone on their best behavior, with the Duke leaning against the wall in the corner, arms folded, observing.

Jamie’s name didn’t seem to come up once.

I spotted the doctors in charge of Jamie’s care.

They were taking it in stride.  Upset, as anyone would be when they had a bad day at work, but hardly upset enough.

I passed by one doctor, bumping into them, and my hand found their pocket.  A scalpel was clipped to the inside.  I grabbed it and popped off the tip.

A short distance later, I repeated the same process, finding another.  I drew nearer to Hayle and the other doctors.

The closer I got, the more sure my steps were.  I walked briskly, head down, scalpels hidden so they wouldn’t be too obvious.

I was tackled all the same, thrown to the ground, arms hugging my arms to my sides, scalpels gripped to either side of my waist.

I fought, squirming, elbowing, wrestling, mad and incoherent and not even sure what sounds were leaving my lips.  Tears were streaming down my cheeks.

It was Jamie, damn it.

I managed to flip over, got my wrist free of the grip, and stabbed, only to get caught again, and swiftly disarmed.

I stopped when I met Gordon’s eyes.  I saw the tears there.  I saw the Lambs huddled behind him, the expressions in their faces.  They were standing, and I was the one that was breaking.  I stopped struggling and went limp.

“The one fucking time you put up a half-decent fight, Sy,” Gordon said, soft words all too audible in the hush.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 6.x – Twig

Enemy (Arc 6)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The door slammed shut.  The impact rattled her thoughts.  Double vision, triple vision, vertigo, but all cognitive, her thoughts alone.

One breath blurred into the next, the space between breaths stretched on, adding together, piling onto one another until she realized she was suffocating.  She coughed, gasping and wheezing for air.

Panic surged in her breast.  A bird’s flutter of emotion, beating harder and more frantically, until it filled her.

Then, unsustainable, it was gone.  Was it the drugs they were pumping into her that quelled the fear?  Did they worry that enough fear and anxiety could tax her brain and kill her?

Or had minutes passed, or hours?

She screamed, thrashing against her bonds, a cage custom-molded to her body.  The scream bounced off of the walls, joining the fresh screams as she caught breath.  A momentary catch, a drawn-out process of panting for breath?  Both?

She tried to figure out which it was, scanning her memory, gathering clues, and lost track of time.  She gasped for breath again, having let herself slip, letting the time between breaths become too long.

Heartbeat, she thought.  She fixated on her heartbeat.  The steady pulse, accelerated by her fear.  It was meditative, calming, a rope to cling to as she drowned in this new sea.

They stole my sanity, she thought.

They stole my mind from me.  They’ve hobbled my brain as surely as they crippled my body.  Until I can get this fixed, I’ve forever got one additional ball to juggle.

There were tears in the corner of her eyes.  She struggled again against the bondage, fierce enough she was certain she would hurt something.

She had to adjust her mental clock, taking into account the exertion, how it affected the heartbeats she was counting.

The lighting seeping in through the crack beneath the door had changed.  Was that the flicker of torchlight, or had she been down here long enough for things to change?  A different load on the systems of the Academy, leaving more power to go to the lights in the hall?

Her heartbeat had calmed, she realized, but she was still using the same measure, her judgment of how many seconds or minutes had just passed was dashed to the wind.

Someone moved in front of the door, a shadow passing through that slice of light.

Unable to find the words, she screamed at the door.  It was a futile thing, a cry for help with no expectation that that help would come.

Everything she tried, it was making things worse.  She was in the Bowels, a place where she’d spent a fair amount of time, and she knew how deep they would have put her, how thick the walls were, and how far the trip was to get to the surface.  Even once she was there, she would be surrounded by soldiers, she would have to pass through the checkpoint, and pass more soldiers on the road out of the city.

It was akin to being beneath the ocean, the weight of all of that water pressing down on her, crushing, wearing her away.

Three more times, she lost track of her breathing.  Her stomach gurgled, but it wasn’t hunger.  It was suction and air, as a tube worked at the side of her stomach, removing waste, tarry and black.  She felt a pressing need to go to the bathroom, but it never got better or worse.  Tubes coiled up inside her bladder, most likely.

Again, she screamed and thrashed.  She wanted to hurt herself, to find some avenue to rub herself raw, do some damage, out of some hope that she could make that damage severe enough to end her existence.  It would be a form of control, a way of taking charge of her own destiny.

But it was futile.  She’d been trained as a doctor, finishing her education here in Radham.  She knew what the tarry black waste meant.  She had a bloodspur in her.  When her blood pressure was sufficiently high, the device would bleed her, dumping the blood into her stomach.  New or artificial blood was fed in through tubes.  She couldn’t bleed herself out, not realistically.  If she was wounded, the bloodspur would cease working, and the wound would take over its duties of slowly emptying out the blood the tubes gave her.

She was exhausted but unable to sleep.  Again and again, she struggled, because there was nothing else to do with herself.  Again and again, she lost track of her breathing as she got too deep in thought.

Tears streaked down her face.  She recovered.

She screamed again, howling to see if she couldn’t scream her voice raw.  The seam in her chest where they’d done surgery threatened to pop from the strain.

The door opened.  The light was blinding.

Had she been in the dark that long?  Or was it drugs and a perpetual state of blood loss?

The Duke and his coterie.

“I’m sorry for the delay,” he remarked.  His expression was placid compared to hers, as she panted for breath.  “I wanted to have a conversation with the Lambs.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Do you remember the terms of our last discussion?” he asked, his voice eerily smooth and deep.  Artificial.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was hoarse.

“I’m going to ask you a question.  Yes or no answers only.”

“Yes,” she said, again.

“Will you provide the locations of each of the other cells?”

She considered for a moment, but again, time threatened to slip away from her.  After half a second -or was it a minute?- the Duke turned to leave.

“Yes,” she said.  She opened her mouth to speak, then remembered his warning and closed it again.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know where Percy is.  Cynthia handled the coordination between groups.”

“I see,” he said.  He gestured at a doctor, “The mask.”

“You said I had permission to speak!” she cried out, struggling, trying to pull her face away as the doctor lifted the tube and the grasping bloodsucker toward her mouth.

“I didn’t say I’d favor the answer,” he said.  “Take some time to think it over.  I hope you’ll come up with clues about his whereabouts.”

The tube slid down her throat.  The device locked around her jaw and the back of her head, connecting to the table.

The lights went out, and again, the door slammed shut.

This time, she still needed to regulate her breathing, but it was through the nose alone.  She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t measure her breaths.

There once was a girl named Mavis.  People all around her got sick, half the people in the town she grew up in.  It got worse and worse, people hacking and coughing, until the Academy arrived.  The best doctors, checking, giving care, not unkind people.

Had everything gone according to plan, it would have been a positive experience for her, a reason to respect and favor the Academy.

Except Simon Weltsch had fought in the war, and he said there was a more sinister explanation.  The Academy had made them sick, testing a drug on the village’s population without permission.

She never found out if that was true or not, and as head of communications for Radham, she’d made use of every resource available to her to try and find out.  It wasn’t to say Simon was spewing utter nonsense.  After becoming a student, she had researched the testing of drugs on communities, but the casualties were low to nonexistent, the rate of advancement high.  Without paperwork or records to tie back to her community in particular, it never quite hit home to the point that she could get angry about it.

She wished she could say that Simon Weltsch’s unexplained and gruesome death had woken her up to reality.  It was accepted across the community that the Academy had done the deed to silence the dissident, but everyone was healthy and nobody had wanted to stick their head up, Mavis among them.

She’d eaten dinner with her parents, gone for long walks and talked with her friends, and flirted with boys.  As she came of age, she started studying, and earned a place at the Academy, abbreviating her name as soon as she fixed on her preferred area of study.

No, Avis’ problem had never quite been with the Academy.

Her first winter holiday back home, she had been excited to share her tales of being at the academy.  Avis had met with friends for tea.  The boys who’d been farmers and laborers trickled into the bar, and she’d remarked on how few were turning up.  Then she had heard.  No, not gone to war.  Had it been that, she might have been able to justify it as necessary evil.

Three nobles had come into town, young ladies not much older than she was, gallivanting around.  The noblewomen had asked for the company of young men, and the young men had not been in a position to refuse.  When they left, they took the most handsome with them.  Avis’ girlfriends had joked that it wasn’t much loss, the noblewomen being so attractive, but she hadn’t missed the emotion beneath the words.

There had been only one letter back since the boys had left, and it had read like it had been written carefully, so as not to offend any who read it before it reached home.

It had taken some time for Avis to come to terms with her feelings over that.  Life had gone on as normal, with some farmers getting help from the community to make up for the labor their sons weren’t providing.  Where war was a necessary evil, this didn’t feel evil at all, and it most definitely did not feel necessary.

It hadn’t been the blow that destroyed her loyalty to the Crown, but it had been a wedge, and every story or idea that touched on the Crown drove that wedge in deeper.

Avis stared into the Duke’s eyes.

“Do I need to repeat the question?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, then closed it.  She felt painful bumps here and there where the inside of her mouth had been rubbed by the gag.

She nodded.

“Will you tell me the location of your loved ones.  Your mother, father, siblings, cousins, and the friends you wrote to while you were first studying in the Academy?”

“Yes,” she said.

She’d given up.  She was defeated.

“Your father?”

“He’s in Iverchester.  With my mother and youngest sibling,” she said.  His eyes seemed to swallow her up.

“Your older sister?”

“She said she would… she could find work in Burry, teaching.”

“Your friends?”

“Janice is in Chells, Tory is in Uskham.”

She could hear the damning scratch as the details were taken down by a doctor in the back.

“Please,” her voice was so quiet she could barely hear it.  She stared at the Duke’s collar, “My lord.  Anything else you want to know, sit me down, take me out of here, I’ll share it if you fix my mind.  Please.  I will do anything you want.  You’ve won.”

“Except sitting quiet and giving only yes or no answers, or answering my questions,” the Duke’s voice murmured back to her.  His tone was gentle, a light rebuke, and Avis couldn’t shake the notion that this was what it sounded like when a father told their child that cookies were for after dinner.  The Duke’s voice, rich, deep, and authoritarian, was as a child imagined their father sounding.

“You hurt children, Avis.  Kidnapped them off the streets, my streets, and put them on the table.”

“That wasn’t me.  It wasn’t the people I was working for.”

“A blatant lie if I ever heard one,” the Duke said.  He kicked something under the table that held her and then changed the angle, lying her flat.

“Cynthia was hurt, Godwin killed.  The group is in disarray, there are two factions now.  One side wants to stop the Academy, the other wants to stop the Crown.”

“And which are you, Avis?”

“I’m not- not anymore.  I won’t go against you again.”

“Stop stating the obvious.  Of course nobody ever goes against me a second time.  Answer the question.  Which are you?”

“I was –was- against the Crown.  The others, the ones who want to hurt the Academy, they’re desperate, they’re angry, they want to win an ever-escalating contest of strength.  They have other ideas in mind.  Breaking rules the Academy won’t.”

One of the Duke’s doctors was positioning a tool, a mechanical arm, so it was poised above her head.

A needle speared straight toward her.

Her breathing picked up.

“You coordinated for them.  Passed on messages.”

“I did, but-“

“You’re bending the truth to put yourself in a better light, Avis,” the Duke said.  “You convinced yourself that Percy’s actions were acceptable.”

“No.  But it wasn’t like he listened when I sent a letter.  If I’d reacted or tried to take action, I risked my life.  I had to play along, hope the others would coordinate, pull the two groups together.”

“I know of other things you’ve been complicit in.  The white plague in Danes, the ravager of Arwick.  You believe in what you’re doing.  Short term harm for long-term betterment.”

“It- yes.  It’s not so different from what the Academy does?” she made it a question.

The Duke’s expression changed, the light smile fading away.  “The sacrifice of a child?  No, I suppose not.  I do suppose it falls on my shoulders.”

She wanted to inquire about that, but the movement of the machinery and the swaying of the needle occupied her attention.  She didn’t find the voice to question what he meant.

“The difference is you failed in the end,” the Duke said.  “There will be no betterment, only harm.”

The mechanical arm with the needle came down, dropping a solid foot.  It jerked to a stop a half-inch from Avis’ eye.

A doctor gripped her eye in between gloved fingertip and thumb, forcing her to look straight at the needle.

The mechanical arm dropped another inch.  Avis didn’t even have time to vocalize a response.

“I believe in justice,” the Duke said.  “Punishment where it’s due.  I told you the rules, you had enough time to consider them.  This is your punishment, just as your decision as a whole have led to you being in this room.  If and when it comes to pass that my work ends in more harm than betterment, I hope my reckoning will come.”

Avis managed to find the breath to speak, as a doctor manipulated her other eye, forcing her to stare up at a second needle.  “Please.  How long have I been here?”

The second needle came down.  Her eyes were speared, locked into position.  There was no pain, not physical pain, but she knew the effect this would have on her mind and her already impaired ability to track time.  She felt the gag slip into place, slithering down her throat.

“How long have you been here?  I think that would be telling,” the Duke said.

The door slammed.

She woke, which was a strange thing that had been happening lately.  She wasn’t supposed to sleep, but she took it as the resiliency of the brain, finding a way.  Her entire body hurt, and she had a headache unlike any she’d ever had before.

She moved her eyes, and her vision was blurry.

Avis raised her arm, as she’d tried to do so many times before, and this time the restraints didn’t stop her.

Pages were scattered around the room.  There was a matchbox sitting on a table in the corner, but it looked as though the slamming of the door had generated a gust, blowing it away from the stack of papers it had been weighing down.

Her movements were ginger.  She remembered what she’d been told, about alterations to her joints.

Her muscles should have atrophied.  Her joints were disabled, the bones shaved or implants put in to make them easy to dislocate.  She could feel the pain, which meant the drugs to dull pain were no longer coursing through her, and hadn’t been for a little while.

She staggered across the room, nearly falling.  Bending down, she picked up papers.  Each was one half of a sheet of paper that had been torn in half.

The order of them was hard to decipher, and the blur in the dead center of her vision made it harder still to read.  Ingrained into her by years of education, the habit of reading made her eyes want to slip onto each line of tight cursive writing, instead of holding above the line, piecing together the meaning of each statement.

The Duke has been visiting you less and less.  I have been visiting you more and more.  Soon, I think, he intends to visit you, to make you useful.  If I acted any sooner, you wouldn’t have been strong enough.  If I acted too late, you would be his.

She gathered sentences here, fragments there, not sure on the order of the pages, not when she could barely read.

Injections to your shoulders and hips.  Minor repairs, some minor surgery.  I accessed channels outside of your room, that I knew would feed into your blood supply.

Hands shaking, she sorted through the various pages.

Do not look for your family or friends.  You will only find unhappiness at best, and fall into the Crown’s trap again at worst.  Be wary in seeking old acquaintances, though reasons are different.  What was a war between two sides has become a war between three.  Old friends may not be friends anymore.

She trembled, hands unable to find the gap between two pages.

The advised escape route is the drainage tunnel to Claret Hall.  From there, you should be able to reach the Tower by using the dark avenues between the storage buildings.  The Tower will get you high enough to glide over the wall.

Another.

Internal components and tubes have been removed on this visit.  I leave you my words, which I hope you will burn, and a present for the winter holidays, admittedly belated.

Two seasons, Avis realized.

I need to act, and I have no freedom.  We’re speeding headlong into disaster, and you’re the only person I can think of who could pass on a message.  Burn the papers if you have any gratitude for your freedom.

The writing, she realized, was digging deeper into the page as the writer had gone on.  Intensity, urgency.  She could recognize the difference between papers now, the thickness of letters and amount of excess ink.  She’d already read some of it out of order.

She found the last piece of paper.

The tallest hill outside of Radham.  It has a view of the approach.  The message is such: It is time to step in.

Avis stared down at the paper, then crumpled it, and set it on the table, being careful to put a match to every part of it.

While it burned, she set to looking for her gift.

It was tucked in a corner – a small box.

She reached inside, and she withdrew wings.  Not hers, but similar.  The bends in the wings had hook-like fingers.

She put them on, feeling them bite into flesh, a little less merciful than her old wings had been.

A single revolver and a trio of syringes, each one capped, sat on the bottom, tucked neatly in the corner, stowed in the gap just left of a set of clothes.

She’d had enough time to think, trapped in a hell of her own making.  The Duke’s words rattled around in her head even now, taunting her.

She changed clothes, pulling off the hospital dress and donning the provided clothes.  Loose pants like a sailor might wear, boots, and a harness top she could wear with her wings.  She touched her head and found her hair short.

Dressing didn’t make her feel more human.  She felt cold inside.

Her hatred for the Duke had cooled from a burning hatred to an ice cold hate.  She wouldn’t bat an eye if she had an opportunity to hurt him.  She knew she might destroy herself for the chance.

Yet, even though she was able to collect the syringes, she found herself hesitating when it came time to collect the gun.

She’d hurt people in a casual way, facilitating what she had.  Letting Percy do what he had.

So easy to do when she was in the stride of it, but after having had time alone with her own thoughts, it didn’t sit nearly as easy.

She turned away, hauling open the door, feeling grateful as her shoulder withstood the strain.

The gun was left behind.

Rather than let the door slam, as it had innumerable times before, she gently closed it.

It was the dead of night.  There were no people on the staircase leading up and out of the underground labs.

She was as quiet as the situation allowed.

It was dreamlike, and her altered state of awareness didn’t help matters.  She wasn’t convinced this wasn’t a hallucination.

Her body was light, she’d altered her bone structure long ago, removing sections of organs to lower her body weight while maintaining the same rough frame.  Her diet while lying on the table had been different, but it hadn’t added any pounds that she could notice.

She flexed her wings as much as she was able, given the narrow space between railing and wall, and continued to ascend.

Passing a hallway, she saw a pale expanse, rather than dark, barely-lit hallway.

Her heart skipped a beat as she realized what it was.

Gorger made noise as he hauled himself out of the hallway, a matter of feet behind her.

As quiet as she’d been, Gorger was loud.  He covered surprising amounts of ground, feet tromping on stairs, one hand regularly reaching up to seize handholds, moving like a loping gorilla rather than a very obese giant of a man.

She found the needle, squeezed out the air in the syringe, and she jammed it into her own heart.

Strength, energy, perception.  It flowed through her quickly, as fast as her heart beat.  She was able to move faster, more securely, using her light body to its fullest, as the pain faded away.

Absolute terror at what awaited her if she were caught gave her the extra push she needed.  She knew she’d rather fall and die than get caught, and that gave her the courage to step up onto the railing, wings spread, and leap, aiming for a hole in the wall.

Gorger saw what she was doing.  Rather than give chase, he slammed his hand against the wall, hard.

The underground labs rumbled.  Things began to fall into place, a domino effect expanding out in ten different ways from the place Gorger’s hand had struck the wall.

But the underground labs were built around a massive silo, a cylinder set deep into the ground, and the effect had to reach around the edges of the cylinder.

She didn’t hesitate, even as she saw the slab of stone falling into place.

She passed under the slab, full speed, wings spread, and the slab came down behind her.

With no time to waste, knowing Gorger would be calling the alarm, she ran for Claret Hall.

She passed through one section of tunnel that had no lighting.

And she was back on the table, unable to move, body paralyzed, unable to breathe.

A dream?  A hallucination?

Flashback.

She floundered, struggled, and hauled herself to her feet.  Without her face down in a half-foot of water, she was able to breathe again.

Only a flashback.

She was still running, still making her escape.  But it was too easy to slip back into that same timeless place she’d spent so long.

There were so many questions and not a one of them mattered.  Who had rescued her, why?

By fighting forward like this, obeying the letters, she was risking doing the exact same thing that had gotten her in this mess in the first place.  Reckless action, lack of forethought, approaching her future at a run, without watching her step or paying attention to what happened in her wake.

She was in Claret Hall, she realized.  This was tricky.  The way out meant coming up out of the wine cellar, into the building.

She’d plotted escape routes enough that this wasn’t too hard.  Into empty offices, through the washroom.  A window large enough for her to fit through.  She passed into a shadowy space between buildings, and crossed to another.

A distant alarm was getting picked up by closer buildings.  As it was heard and people found the switches, the alarm was passed on.  It swept past her, and people in uniforms started to exit building in groups.

Soon, the stitched would be roused and directed.  The Academy’s security would quintuple at the very least, and she would have nowhere to go.

She was so fixated on watching what was going on that she didn’t wholly connect to the fact that she was tramping on something that crunched underfoot.

Frozen grass.  Patches of snow caught mid-thaw, frozen over by rain.

It would have to be spring.

Three seasons, all in all.

It was a realization that spurred her on further, into the labyrinthine maze of warehouses and storerooms.  Driven by fear, she made a break for the tower, the biggest open space yet.

She was glad her wings were black, and not white as the old ones had been, as she approached the door.

People left the Tower in a group.  A small army of stitched.

She danced away to the side, taking cover against the side of the building.

They were spreading out, organizing into groups.

She had no place to go except up.

With the hooks on her wings and her own frozen fingers, she scrabbled for a grip on the surface of the tower.  She climbed, cold stone and petrified wood leeching her body heat with every moment of contact.  Fingers scraped raw against mortar and frost, and she hauled herself up, circling around to put the body of the Tower between herself and the rest of the Academy.

Her perception of time was something of a blessing and a curse.  It let her climb more carefully, devoting her focus to the moment, but it felt like she was climbing an endless, infinite tower.  Blood ran from fingertip to wrist and down to the crook of her elbow.

As she got higher up, there were more windows.  She gauged her ability to glide over, and she had doubts.

She couldn’t even guess at her chance of getting spotted, were she to climb up and over.

Avis decided to compromise, raising herself up, so the bottom of the window was at eye level, peering left and right.

No movement.

She climbed, and was standing with stomach to the glass when she saw him.

A single figure, a boy.

One of the Lambs?

No, this one had red hair.

Paralyzed, she finally managed to move, raising a hand, finger pressed to her mouth.

The boy only stared at her with amber eyes.

It unnerved, and it made her think of the wrongs she’d committed, the children Percy had used, that the Lambs had executed so thoroughly.

As if recoiling, she threw herself back, twisting so her belly faced the ground, wings extending, and glided.

Avis didn’t pass over the wall, but she was able to grab it.  She heard shouts and calls, and heard a trumpet, then hauled herself over and beyond, as guns fired from a distance.

She was free.

She’d escaped, but she didn’t feel free.

She made her way to the tallest hill, feeling trepidation.

There were three figures waiting for her.  When she landed, it was to crumple into a heap.  She didn’t even raise her head.

A hand reached for her.  She flinched involuntarily, and the hand withdrew.

She knew who the hand belonged to.

“Fray,” she said.

“Yes,” Fray said.

“We were trying to contact you for a while,” Avis said.  Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

“It’s been a while, Avis.”

Avis nodded.  She fidgeted, because being too still made it feel like the walls of that room were closing in.

“It’s- I’m supposed to tell you…” Avis started.

She didn’t finish.  Her voice broke.  She curled up into a ball, folding her wings around herself.

“I know,” Genevieve Fray said.

Another hand touched her, and this one was very warm in the cold winter.  She flinched, at first, but this one was persistent.  It became a hug, and the hug was welcome.

“You’re with the right people,” Fray said.

Avis shook her head.

“No?”

“I can’t- I’m not a soldier anymore.  I couldn’t touch the gun.  I can’t be part of this.  I can’t stand the Crown but I can’t fight them either, I-”

“That’s fine,” Fray said.  “You don’t have to, to stay with us.  The Crown States have two major factions who are trying to destroy the Crown, they don’t need us.”

“What are you doing?”

We’re saving humanity,” Fray said.  “Come on.  Let’s go.”

Rather than Fray, it was the giant of a man who offered Avis a hand.

Staring at his hand, she felt he was kindred, gentle.

Looking in his eyes, however, she saw a terrible anger, no doubt worse for her being reflected in it.

That was as comforting as anything.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.01 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I stirred in response to a knock on my door.

“Nn,” I managed.

I heard the door open, and pulled the covers down from over my head.

“Sylvester,” Mrs. Earles said, “Breakfast.  Lillian’s here, too, so don’t think you can skip eating this morning.”

“Mm,” I said.  “Isn’t she up and at ’em early in the day.  Obligations?

“I think so, yes.”

I sat up, rubbing at my eyes, then ran my fingers through my hair.  It was long, it was shaggy, and I had the worst bed-hair of anyone I knew.  I had no illusions about my ability to keep the hair tamed.

Mrs. Earles cleared her throat.

I looked up, looked at her, and saw her pointed look, just behind me.

I twisted around, and saw Mary lying there, head on a second pillow.

“Oh,” I said.  “Yeah.”

“Hi, Mrs. Earles,” Mary said.

Behind her, some of the other children had already woken up.  I saw Rick step into view, glance at the scene, and smirk.  Mrs. Earles saw and shooed him off.

I reached under Mary’s pillow, she smacked my arm, and I withdrew it.

Fine, I thought.  But that’s going to be a thing.

Mrs. Earles positioned herself so that she filled the space between the door and the frame, with little chance of someone peeking or seeing past.  “It’s my habit to avoid asking questions,” she said.  “That said, given the situation, given that Sy is twelve at most, and you’re thirteen-”

“I think of myself as a small fourteen,” I said.

Mrs. Earles gave me a withering look.

“You don’t have to ask,” Mary said.  “Really.”

Mrs. Earles took that in, then nodded.  “I won’t, then.  I was looking for you, Mary, I was worried you’d gone out earlier than usual to practice your throwing.  It’s good that you’re here if Lillian needs you.  Don’t take too long getting ready.”

“Okay,” Mary said.  I nodded.

The door shut, the latch clicking.

“I like how she takes you at your word,” I said.  “But when I say something, oh, no.  I could tell her the sky is blue and she’d double-check.”

“The sky isn’t usually blue in Radham.  It’s gray at best.”

“You know what I mean.”

Mary swung her feet out from under the covers, standing up from bed, stretching.  I hurried to pat down the covers so there were no gaps for the cool air to leak through.

I looked past her to Jamie’s bed.  A large notebook sat on the bed, the weight of it messing up what had been a perfectly made, entirely neat bed.

“I missed my morning exercises,” Mary said.  “I’m so used to the way the sun comes into my room in the morning.  Moment it slips over the top of the window and hits my eyes, I’m out of bed.”

“That sounds like the worst thing ever,” I said.  “Why would you wake up early on purpose?”

“I like it.  It’s a good start to the day, keeps me sharp.”

“You’re sharp enough,” I said, reaching under her pillow for the knife she kept there, holding it up for demonstration.

Mary smiled.  She reached over, touching my chin to turn my head away.  I could still sort of see her in my peripheral vision.

“Lillian does it too.  The lunatic,” I said.  “If it wasn’t for Helen, I’d think all girls were screwed up somehow.  She appreciates a good night’s sleep.”

Mary was pulling off her night clothes.  I fixed my eyes on the ceiling.

“She sleeps with her eyes open sometimes, you know?” Mary said.

“I know.  I’ve done stakeouts with her.”

“It’s not the only weird sleep thing.  The first night I slept here, she climbed into bed with me.  Curled up beside me like a cat, no covers, no pillow, fell straight asleep.  One-time thing.  I don’t know if it’s about affection, or about dominance, or-”

“Insecurity,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Insecurity.  More rational than emotional.  ‘Keep your enemies closer’ is a very good tactic when you’re a Helen.”

“Ha,” Mary said.

“I’m not joking.”

“No, I know you’re not joking, but that’s clever.”

“Someone should probably mention it to Ibott, but then he’d want to keep Helen over in his labs so he can observe and train her sleep and blah to that.”

“Blah,” Mary agreed.  She stepped closer to the bed, dressed enough to be decent.  I reluctantly sat up, taking a second to rearrange the covers before I took the offered wires and knives.  I set to arranging them, with only minimal help from her, while she brushed her hair.

A minute passed like that as I set everything up.  Mary made only small readjustments.

“Gotta ask, Sy,” Mary said, as I wrapped up.  She walked over to the rest of her clothes, folded neatly on Jamie’s chair, pulling on a skirt over her hose-covered legs, “Why is this now?

“Mmf,” I said, letting myself topple over, head hitting pillow.

“It’s been nine months.”

“I know.”

“Why the change?  Why now?”

“That’s a topic best saved for a group discussion,” I said, looking over at Jamie’s bed.

“I can recall at least three times where you’ve said something like that, and then you didn’t bring it up again.”

“Can you?  My memory isn’t that good.”

She gave me a look, finishing buttoning a blouse over her camisole.

“Okay,” she said, pulling on a sweater.  She bounced on the spot, making skirt and hair move and sweater settle into place, then turned to me, “You don’t have a mirror, so I have to ask you for the verdict.”

“Very pretty,” I said.

“Good answer,” she said, seeming satisfied.  She smoothed out a wrinkle.  “I should go wake up Helen.”

“Yeah.”

“Here, you’ll need this,” she said, tossing the brush at me.  I let it fall against the covers.  “If you’re not out of bed by the time I come back down the hall with her, I’m going to have her wake you up.”

I groaned.

“I could give her suggestions on what to do to you,” she said, as she opened the door, peeking out.  “What’s the most humiliating hold?”

“I’ll be out of bed, don’t worry.”

“Or maybe I’ll get her to chew on you?”

“I’ll be out of bed!”

“And dressed.”

“And dressed!  Go away!”

Mary smiled and closed the door behind her.

I climbed out of bed, stretching.  I shivered a little at the cold, then pulled some clothes out of my dresser.  Some shirts were Jamie’s.  I hadn’t grown nearly as much as I’d have liked over nine months, but it was enough to need a different set of clothes, and Jamie had been a bit taller than I was.

Button-up shirt, pants, suspenders, jacket.  I used Mary’s brush to try and fix my hair, gave up, and pulled a boy’s cap over it.  I emerged just in time to run into Mary and a dressed-and-combed Helen.  Helen had her head on Mary’s shoulder.  As she saw me, Mary gave Helen a light push.  Helen staggered my way like a bad stitched.

“Ahh,” I said, monotone, a mock cry as Helen draped herself over my back, arms over my shoulders.  She swiped my cap off the top fo my head, then lightly bit my scalp.

“Arr,” she said.

“You overheard.”

“I told her,” Mary said.

“Mmf, arr,” Helen said.  She adjusted position, mock-biting the top of my head a few more times.

“Don’t bite too deep.  Sy-meat is poisonous.”

“That’s totally not true,” Mary said.

“We don’t know it’s not true,” I said.  “I know my blood is poisonous, chemicals floating in it.  Stands to reason the rest of me is a little poisonous.”

Helen stopped biting me, resting her chin on top of my head instead.  “You smell like Mary.”

“Yep.”

“Probably, but could you not mention that in front of others?” Mary asked.

“M’kay,” Helen said.  Then she made a snoring sound.

More than half-asleep.

We made our way down the stairs.  Helen synchronized her steps with mine, so she wouldn’t come down a step a half-second after I did and end up driving the hard point of her chin into my skull.

As we rounded the corner, making our way down the last leg of the stairs, she pulled away, straightening.  She transferred the hat back from her head to mine.

“Good morning, Helen!” Eliza, Fran and Iris called out in sync.

“Good morning!” Helen said, bright, cheery, without a hint of sleepiness.

I rolled my eyes.  I rounded the dining table to collect my plate of breakfast, putting a hand on Lillian’s head to rock it left and right until she knocked my hand away in annoyance.

“Sy,” Gordon said, looking up from his plate.  “Sit here.”

I gave him a suspicious look, then gave a more suspicious look to the rugrat sitting beside him.  Albert.  “Why?”

“Because Al here keeps feeding Hubris.”

I bent down to peek under the table, at the mutt, then stepped over the bench, interjecting myself between the kid and the beast.

Mary and Helen found their seats as well.  With Lillian present for this morning’s breakfast, we naturally filled the empty spot on the bench.

Just let this meal go by without incident, I thought, staring down at the plate, methodically shoveling food into my mouth.  Sausage & mashed potato with onion and boiled vegetables of some sort I’d never seen before.  Don’t let this be a bad day.

With last of us served, Mrs. Earles headed off to start getting the little ones ready.  I saw her leave, and I saw Rick watch her leave.

I sighed a little.

“So, Sy,” Rick said.

Smug bastard.  Smug, round face, smug hair, smug fat ass.

“Rick, no,” Gordon said. “Whatever it is, no.”

“You’ve been on my case for the last year, practically,” Rick said.

“Nine months,” I said.

“Sy, don’t respond.  Rick, shut the hell up, or I will beat you,” Gordon said.

“Jamie’s in the hospital, fine, but you keep making me out to be the bad guy, and I’ve done and said nothing wrong.”

“Even if we agree that’s the case-”

“It is, unless you can tell me what I’ve said that’s so awfully bad,” Rick said.

Even if we agree that’s the case,” Gordon said, “You and Sy don’t get along.  Sy’s missing his best friend-”

I clutched my utensils tighter.

“-and the very best thing you can do is to ignore him.”

“I don’t think it’s fair that-”

Ignore him,” Gordon said.

The little kids who hadn’t finished eating were staring, silent.

Talking very slowly, as if he was spelling things out to a small child, Rick said, “I don’t think it’s fair that I live in this house and there are people who also live here who I’m forbidden to talk to or talk about, through no fault of mine.  I feel like I and others are kept in the dark sometimes.”

“Life isn’t fair,” I said.  There were a hundred different things I wanted to tack on to the end of that sentence.  There were statements about why Rick hadn’t been adopted yet that might have made the smaller children cry, and mentions of Jamie that might have made the smaller children cry.  I figured it was better to leave things unsaid than to make Mrs. Earles mad at me.

“That’s well and good, but I want to know what the rules of the house are-”

Gordon rose from his seat.  He stood there, hands on the table, staring Rick down.

Anyone else might have backed down, but Rick only smiled, playing at blithe ignorance.

“If you need to question the rules of the house, ask Mrs. Earles,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” Rick said.  “Alright.”

“I don’t know what bug crawled up your rear end to make you this strange this morning-” Gordon said.

“Ew,” Frances said.

“-But nothing’s changed.  Leave Sy alone.  Leave the subject of Jamie alone.”

“Okay, alright,” Rick said, throwing his hands up in surrender.

The meal continued.  I was making more progress than usual, just focusing on eating, eyes on the food.

“Are we traveling?” Mary asked, conversationally.

“Looks like,” Lillian said.  “School project.  We’re going to be gone for at least a week.”

“Which train?” Helen asked.

“It’s the train with the tea cart you like,” Lillian assured Helen.

Helen smiled.

“Been a while since we traveled,” Mary said.

“We’ve been busy enough,” Gordon said, as he settled back into his seat.

“But it’s been very low-key,” Mary observed.  “If they’re sending you out to get us, that means early train…”

“Yep.”

“Which means we’re rushing, but not so much we’re having to skip breakfast.”

“Yep.”

“And we’re probably meeting someone?”

“Let’s hope,” Lillian said.

“Uh huh,” Rick said.  I gripped my utensils tighter again.  I could sense Gordon tensing beside me.  Hubris, under the table, was reacting to Gordon’s body language.  “It’s kind of rude to talk in code, with everyone else at the table.”

“Code?” Frances asked.

“There’s no code,” Gordon said.  “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“Why don’t you try carrying on a conversation that includes everyone else at the table?” Rick asked.  I had the impression he was actually irritated enough to show it, for once.  “Like, say, Mary, why weren’t you in your own bed last night?  Do you have anything to tell us?”

I sighed.  I could see the look of confusion on Lillian’s face.  Mary was shaking her head.  She signaled something at Gordon I didn’t catch.  Unbeknownst to Rick, Gordon shifted position in his seat.

“Are you and Sy a thing now?”

The bench, complete with me and the other three people on it, scooted backward, as Gordon pushed it back from the table.  I reached for and grabbed my bowl, holding it back out of the way as Gordon traveled around the length of the table to a wide-eyed Rick.

Rick was only half out of his seat when Gordon hauled him up and over, throwing him down against the ground.  He let Rick get halfway to his feet, then threw the boy into the wall.

“Mrs. Earles!” Eliza screamed, shrill.

Rick was bigger, Gordon was stronger.  Every time it looked like Rick was going to get his bearings, Gordon shoved him, or drove him back into the ground with the sole of one foot.

“If you do that again, I’m going to hit you back!” Rick called out.

“Step outside,” Gordon said.

“I’m not-”

Gordon shoved Rick again.  Rick’s head cracked against the wall.  I saw some of the girls wince.  Helen was among them, but I knew it was for show.

Rick raised his hand, starting to throw a punch, and Hubris closed the distance, biting his sleeve, stopping him short.  Gordon punched Rick in the collarbone, driving him down to the ground, then grabbed him, sliding him out and through the back door.

There were three stone stairs Rick had to roll down to reach the backyard, I knew, though I didn’t have an angle to see it happen.

Shame.

I continued eating, polishing off my breakfast.  Mrs. Earles came down the stairs, took in the situation, and then stepped outside.

I met Lillian’s eyes, measuring the confusion and the hurt, and shook my head.

She gestured under the guise of fixing her hair, lie?

I nodded a little.

I could see her relax a little at that.  She had the best vantage point to see the fight, from the end of the other bench.

“I guess I need my luggage?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

“Be right back,” I said.

I took my dishes to the sink, rinsed them, and put them on the drying rack.  I glanced at the trio of Mrs. Earles, Gordon, and a very sorry looking Rick before taking the stairs two at a time to go upstairs.

A set of luggage was always packed, ready to go at a moment’s notice.  Still, I undid the clasps and opened it up, revealing a collection of clothes weighed down by two notebooks.  If someone unpacked the clothes, they’d find the pistol and ammunition, vials of poison, and various small supplies and tools.

I walked over to Jamie’s bed, picked up the notebook there, and put it inside the luggage case, before closing it up again.

Heavy, but I didn’t mind.

“Next best thing to having you along with, huh?” I asked the empty side of the room.

I ran my hands down Jamie’s shirt, making sure I hadn’t been splashed with anything when Gordon pushed away from the table, or that little Albert hadn’t dripped on me.  I ran my hands through my hair once more, found a tangle, and pulled through it.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Next best is pretty fricking lousy.”

I closed the door behind me.

The train car rolled back into motion.  People were mostly heading into the city, and those leaving were mostly made up of soldiers and stitched.  Seven of the eight train cars were occupied with military forces, the eighth was made up of people.

We’d been placed in a military car, but even then, we’d kept conversation to milder things.

When the single squad of soldiers entered and found places to sit on the other end of the car, I said, “I think we’re good to have a proper discussion.”

“The Duke told Hayle the specifics of this job, and Hayle told me to tell you,” Lillian explained.

“Look who’s moving up in the world, lil’ miss Lillian, doing the briefing.”

Lillian kicked at me.

“What are we after?” Gordon asked.

“What we know is that some major players have disappeared from cities where they had bases of operations.  Leadership for the firebrands and the spears, doctors working for either side, some experiments and projects they were keeping an eye on, most picked up and moved.  Something about the timing of it, it raised eyebrows?”

From the way she phrased that last statement, I figured she wasn’t sure about her recall.

“You’re doing fine,” Mary said.  “It makes sense.”

Lillian returned the praise with a smile that had little confidence.  Or was it because it was Mary?

“Both groups up and leaving at the same time.  They’re communicating,” I said.

“They are,” Lillian said.  “Which is strange because the ideologies have been diverging.  There’s even been skirmishes between the two groups, right?”

“Right,” Gordon said.  He had a minor scuff mark on his nose, but it was his only wound from what had been a pretty thorough thrashing of Rick.  I suspected it was from an unexpected swing of the arm as Rick flailed around, rather than anything intentional on Rick’s part.

Hubris was in the train car with us, draped over the seat next to Gordon, head in Gordon’s lap.  The animal was a fighting breed, square-headed, eyes obscured by bushy brows.  Even with the coarse, rust-colored fur that covered him, Hubris’ raw strength was apparent at a glance.

“Skirmishes between two groups, now sudden cooperation.  The higher ups are pretty sure that someone’s stepping in.  There’s some speculation that Cynthia is healed and ready to coordinate,” Lillian said, “But, well…”

“We know she’s been active on and off,” I said.  “Working for the spears, focused on the Crown.”

“Could be a deception,” Gordon said.

“Could,” I admitted.

“Most of the people who’ve been paying attention agree it’s Fray,” Lillian said.  “We have spies paying attention to the trains and roads, and we’re pretty clear about the city they’ve gone to, but we don’t know where.”

“A diplomatic meeting,” Mary said.  “All of our enemies in one place?”

“That’s the expectation,” Lillian said.  “If the Academy brings too much force to bear in advance, we might scare them off.  If they move blind, they risk missing the window of opportunity when they can’t find the targets.  We’re part of a limited scouting force, working with a few others.  Dog and Catcher will be there, but it’ll mostly be groups from other Academies.”

“They spent the initial momentum,” Gordon said.  “They needed victories to carry that momentum forward, and they didn’t have enough of those.  Losing Cynthia for as long as they did, they took the only option they had, splitting up, narrowing focus, trying to reinvent themselves based on area and personalities, in order to revive things some.”

“Focus on anti-Crown sentiment in anti-Crown areas, anti-Academy sentiment in areas where people chafe most with the Academies,” Mary said.

“But that’s a hard fire to keep stoked without fresh fuel.  It’s been a couple of months and people are tired of fighting,” Gordon said.  “The anger is there, but it’s not fresh, hot anger.”

“War peters out, things mostly settle until the next big excuse, the next war, the next revolution, whatever,” I said.  “Both sides know it, banding together is the only way to stay strong enough to stay in the fight, but ideologies have diverged too much, they’ve been competing with one another, they need someone very strong or very clever to unite the groups.”

“The person who started the war in the first place,” Lillian said.  “Not that they know that.”

Mary leaned forward.  “They’re not stupid.  They’re going to be covering their asses seven ways from Sunday.  Bodyguards, protection, counter-assassins…”

I nodded.  “I guess they’ve decided we’re ready.  No more soft-lobs to the Lambs.  We tackle this one man down.”

“About that,” Lillian said.

“Ah,” I said.  I brought my head back until it rested against the window.  “I jinxed it.”

“Sorry, Sy,” Lillian said.

“Ashton?”  I left the other half of the question unasked.

“I don’t know,” she said.  There was a long, painful pause, then she said.  “He’s been in classes with-”

“Okay,” I said, cutting her off.

Silence lingered among the Lambs.

“Okay,” I said, a little more brightly.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Mary asked.  “This morning, when we were talking, you said there was something to discuss later.”

I spread my arms.  “I’ve been peeking at files now and again.  Keeping tabs.  It doesn’t matter.  I knew it was coming.  They’re buffering our numbers.”

And I’m having trouble dealing, in little ways, while that weighs on me.

“How long until he shows?”  I asked.

“If not tomorrow, then the day after,” Lillian said.

“We finish before then,” I said.  “If he shows, he shows.  But we’ll have this wrapped up.”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“It’s going to be disruptive, okay?” I said.  “Newbie joining the group?  Because he will be new.  There’s adjustment, any time we add someone.  There’s emotional stuff to deal with, I admit it, I’m going to have to get a handle on it, and I’m probably going to suck at it.  I know the rest of you will too, to varying degrees.”

I looked between each of the Lambs in turn.

“I’ve been upfront about how I’m doing and how I’m coping, so you aren’t surprised.  What I’m saying there, it’s part of it.  You know I’m right.  Given what we’re up against, I don’t want any wrenches in the works to make it even harder, for you guys, for me, for our plans, for coordination.  We do this clean, we do it in top form, and we do it fast.  If he shows, he finds the job done.”

“You know you can’t run away from this forever,” Gordon said.  “If we succeed, we might scatter them to the wind, and we’re going to get a half-dozen missions one after the other, chasing after the most dangerous and cunning of the survivors, cleaning up.  If we fail and Fray comes out ahead, then we’re going to be asked to deal with whatever messes she concocts.  There won’t be downtime like we’ve had.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Likely one or the other, Sy.  If they think we’re ready to get back into the game, we’re going to have to be ready.  You’re going to have to deal with the adjustments without breaking stride.”

He wasn’t talking about Ashton.

“Probably,” I said.

“Just making sure you know.”

“I know,” I said.

He reached over to give me a pat on the shoulder.

The train slowed.  My eyebrows went up, and I twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees to look out the window.

I turned, asking Jamie, “Does the map-”

I finished turning, pausing as I looked at the pale white curtain beside the window, opposite me.  It had looked different out of the corner of my eye.

Forgot.

“We’re there already?” I asked, barely missing a beat.

Nobody commented, except for Gordon to say, “We were on the outskirts of town.  We’re heading into the city proper.”

“Alright,” I said.  I managed a smile.  “Good debrief, Lil.”

“Thank you,” she said.  Then she kicked me, hard.  “But don’t call me Lil.”

I smirked.

The train slowed to a halt.  The soldiers in the car with us waited patiently as we collected our luggage.

We made our way out onto the platform, doing what we could to work through the crowd.  It didn’t even need to be said, but if we could keep an eye on the train stations, they could as well.

Our quiet, careful movements were interrupted as we collectively came to a halt.  The soldiers in front of us had, too, so it wasn’t too damning.

Heads craned, and we stared.

The city sprawled, a proper city, with several skyscrapers, trees growing freely, and other design touches.  One building looked like half of it had been peeled away to reveal a great stone giant, flensed of flesh but not muscle or organ.  An anatomical figure crossed with architecture.

A proper Academy city, as Radham was.

Except for the fact that the largest set of structures sitting atop the highest hill in the city were on fire.  I was guessing from the look of it that it would be a lack of fuel rather than anything else that saw it go out.  It looked pretty damn thorough.

“Don’t suppose that’s our rendezvous point?” I asked.

“It is,” Lillian said.

“Huh,” I said, brightly.  “That’s inconvenient.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.02 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We rode on the back of a wagon, bumping and jostling as much as the twelve or so crates that were stacked back there with our luggage.  The crates had straps keeping them in place, which I envied.  My hands were already cramping up, and we weren’t even halfway to our destination.

On either side of the wagon, soldiers were standing with the toes of their boots wedged between two rails, holding onto straps.  Smaller warbeasts walked alongside, more like jungle cats in proportion and fluidity of movement, and squadrons of stitched marched doubletime in front of and behind us.

It was dusk, but the city was well lit – the neighborhood-scale bonfire notwithstanding.  Brechwell was an interesting city in terms of layout.  Radham had developed an Academy first, the city following naturally, with the Crown and Academy both taking a periodic hand to the development of that city in stages, as needs developed.  It was loose, a design I’d often likened to a living body, every part having a purpose, or to a tree, pruned now and again, parts cut away or used for resources as needed, be it the tree-like growths that supported structures, entire neighborhoods, or even sweeping districts of the city.

Those parts of Radham were sloppy, though, the result of a long series of successful accidents, the mistakes done away with.  Brechwell was the opposite, in a way.  It had been a military base first, and the Academy had been plopped down on top of it at a later point, the Academy adapting to the needs of the city and the area.

The streets were winding, just wide enough for two carts to pass side by side, very occasionally twisting to pass other under streets, through short tunnels that had portcullis gates at either end.  Buildings were made up predominantly of stone, with only aesthetic touches of vines, ivy, or branches, a stark contrast to Radham.  The roads were cobblestone, neatly fit together, and segued neatly into the base of each row of buildings, leaving me feeling as if we were traveling along the lowest point of a series of deep, wide trenches.

Every surface was soaked wet by the cold rain that poured down from above.  They looked alive, they looked cold, and if I unfocused my eyes, I had the vague impression that this city was reptilian.  The stones akin to scales, slick with moisture.  Only half of the windows were lit, and they were so small I doubted I could have crawled through them, high off the ground, and often round or narrow.  I imagined the eyes of serpents, narrowed, catching the light.

Soldiers at either end of the wagon were eyeing us.  We’d approached superior officers with badges in hand, and they’d agreed to escort us up.  The foot soldiers hadn’t been filled in, and were wondering at the odd addition to their ranks.

We ceased going uphill, settling onto more level ground.  I stopped feeling like I was going to bounce off the back of the wagon with every bump, and shifted my weight around, reaching back to hold on to a strap with one hand.  My other hand reached out for Hubris’ furry head.

He didn’t react in the slightest.

Gordon, for his part, reached out to give Hubris a brief rub.  The dog turned his head to better position it for Gordon’s scratches.

“If you’re going to be an honorary member of the group, you’d better learn to play nice with others, mutt,” I said.

“Maybe you just suck at giving scratches,” Gordon said.  “Or he might like you better if you called him by his name.”

“Maybe you smell like a butt, but you don’t hear me bringing it up.”

He rolled his eyes.

We came to a stop in the midst of a checkpoint, and waited as a squad of soldiers checked over the wagon.

Lillian and Mary were talking, with Helen sitting nearby, listening more than participating.  Rather than listen in on the secret lives of girls, I turned my attention to the front of the wagon.

The officers in charge of the group were riding up front, leaning forward as they exchanged words with the group at the checkpoint.  I could only pick out segments of the conversation.

Same as last night…  four of them, led by someone different…”

“How many nights?”

Last night…” something something “…the night before.  Different types of attack.”

“…time?”

“Same time.  The freaks from out-of-town…”

The man at the front of the wagon cut the checkpoint officer off right there.  I saw him turn his head to look our way.

I raised my hand, giving a short wave.

“Them?”

“From Radham.  They’re-”

“The Lambs.”

“Yeah.  The Lambs.”

The checkpoint guard lowered his voice, but I could still make it out.  “Shit, I thought they’d be uglier.  Shriveled?  Or like small stitched?”

“Nope.  Apparently they look like ordinary children.”

“Huh.”

I watched as the search of the wagon progressed to the back.  I raised my arms, feet still dangling over the end, and patiently underwent the pat-down.  Mary faced a little more trouble.

“I have weapons,” Mary said, “I don’t want you to be surprised-”

“Hands on your head,” the soldier told her.

“You’re not listening to me,” Mary said, not listening.  “If you pat me down and you aren’t careful, you’re going to get cut.  You-”

Helen grabbed Mary’s wrists, lifting her hands up, before firmly pressing them down on top of Mary’s head.

The guard pat her down, his expression changing as he stopped mid-pat.

“I’m telling you-”

“Shh.”

I looked from the scene to the commanding officers, who were still embroiled in a discussion.  Interesting that he hadn’t called for his superior officer’s attention.  What was the relationship like, there?

Let’s see if this works.

I leaned closer to the other side of the wagon, where the girls were.  “Sir?”

“Quiet,” he told me, automatic, sounding tense.  Grumpy fellow.

I pulled out my badge.  “We’re the Lambs.”

I saw his expression change.  Momentary confusion, then he pulled the particulars from memory.  The uniforms who were at either side of the wagon reacted, murmuring quietly among themselves.

“Huh,” the man said.  He squinted at the badge.  He indicated the superior officers, “They know about this?”

“They’re discussing us right now,” I said.

“Huh,” he said.  He let go of Mary, gesturing that she could put her arms down.  He looked at us, giving us a concerned look.

The man in uniform who’d been patting me down commented, “I thought you’d look more like dolls or something.”

“Your boss just said something like that,” I commented.  “What stories are they telling about us, anyway?”

“The slaughter in Whitney?” he asked.  “Group passed through to get information on prisoners of war, brought back stories.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Yeah, that was a night.”

“And some man in Iverness?  Every other bone in his body broken?”

“Don’t remember that one.”

“The Lonely Man,” Gordon said.

“Oh!  Yeah.”

“That was me,” Helen said.

“Might’ve been better if we didn’t actually broadcast who we were and that we’re here,” Gordon commented, under his breath.

“They know we’re here,” I said.  “If they don’t know already, then they’re so incompetent we don’t need to worry in the first place.”

“Don’t do that thing where you get in a mood and start taking chances,” Gordon said.

“I’m not.  I’m being realistic.”

“Mm, yeah,” he said.  Hubris nudged his arm, and he gave the dog a scratch.

“What’s with the fire?” I asked one of the soldiers.  “Third attack in as many nights?  Same time of day?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Except this one is bad.  Everything they could set fire to, they did.  Mostly stone there, but they got indoors, and floorboards are floorboards.  The library is the part that’s going to hurt most.”

“Oh no!” Lillian said.  “I really wanted to see the library.”

“It was overrated,” one of the soldiers said.  By his badge, he was one of the ones who looked after the stitched who were lined up against the walls of the tunnel.  He was young, fresh faced enough I doubted he could grow facial hair if he wanted, and kept straight, neatly-parted black hair under his military cap.  “Professor Tobermory talked it up quite a bit, but it’s small, more about decoration, hunting trophies on the wall.  I think anyone who had anything nice to say about it had a lot of drink pushed at them by Tobermory.”

“It was that bad?”

“Don’t know,” the man replied.  “I wasn’t impressed.”

“Phooey,” Lillian said.

“You’re a student?” the young man asked.  “I thought you were a Lamb.”

“Both.”

He nodded, taking that in.  “What year?”

“Third, but my schedule is bumpy.  I spend a lot of time out of school.”

“Third is impressive.  Why the interest in the library?  Are you working on a project?”

“I’m starting to think about it.  I have to do a project next year, I don’t have a lot of free time, and I keep hearing that the subject of my project opens and closes doors, and that goes double for me, because I don’t have a lot of time to study.  If I pick something, I’ll have to do research on it on my own, and then the year after-”

“You’ll want to focus on things you have some grounding in, things you researched.  I ran into the same thing.”

Lillian nodded.

“End goal?” he asked.  “Where are you hoping you end up?”

“Professor.”

The young man barked out a short laugh.  I could see Lillian deflate a little.

“I remember when I was aiming for a black coat,” he said.  “Gave up on that pretty damn fast.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said, rather less enthused than she had been a moment before.

I paid more attention to the scene.  Lillian’s reaction to the man, her body language, the way she was almost wringing her hands, while sitting up straight.

She’d thought highly of him, for a very short encounter, an older boy at or nearing the end of his adolescent years, clean-faced, clever, gregarious, and he’d very casually slapped down her dream.

“It’s hard, even without the politics, the fact you need some luck, you have to innovate, break new ground in a way that turns heads.  Take it from someone who took some first steps on that path, it tears you up and grinds you down.”

“Yeah, I suppose.  I don’t-” Lillian started.

“Sir,” I cut in.  In doing, I interrupted Mary’s conversation with another soldier, and made Hubris’ head rise.  “You’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?” the young man asked.

“She’s a Lamb.  She’s very good at what she does.  She already has discussions with doctors and professors on a regular basis.  She’s at or near the top of her classes, and she’s doing it while we drag her away from classes and into one bad situation after another and ask her to patch us up after the fact.  Becoming a professor is hard, I don’t blame you for crying uncle, sir-”

I saw him bristle at that.

I shrugged.  “But she won’t give up.  Not like that.  I don’t see it.  Nobody who’s worked with her sees that happening.”

“Agreed,” Gordon said.

The young man in uniform threw up his hands, “Wasn’t saying anything of the sort.”

“Ah, is that so?” I asked.  I didn’t break eye contact, boring into his eyes with mine.  “I must’ve misunderstood you.  I beg your pardon, sir.”

I’d put him on the spot, more than a few eyes were on him, they saw the little dominance game, and they were anticipating his response.  He was a nice guy, probably, but one who carried weight on his shoulders, his own past failures coloring his perception of things.  He likely believed that becoming professor was a fool’s journey, his intent had likely been pure in saying something to steer Lillian off that path.  It might even have been done with a friendly mindset, in the same way one might counsel a young friend against getting a permanent set of horns grafted onto their forehead at a back-alley doctor’s.

But who the fuck needed ‘friends’ who tore them down rather than building them up, good intentions or no?

He was frowning at me, not breaking eye contact.

I’d challenged him.  Now he couldn’t ‘win’ here without a crisp retort or getting indignant.  I could play off either.  Backing down would be a loss, in a sense.

His eye flickered to a point behind me.  He smiled, and it was a sly, smug smile, “Nothing of concern.”

Ah, his superior officer was watching.  The slyness and smugness hadn’t been directed my way.  He was a man who didn’t respect the man in charge.

The best thing he’d get to a draw.

“Moving!” the superior officer in charge of the Wagon called out.

Soldiers who had stepped off the rails at the side stepped back on.  I reached for and grabbed a strap with a fatigued hand.

When I glanced Lillian’s way, she gave me a small smile, before turning back to Mary to resume their conversation.

That conversation was cut short.  The officer in charge of the wagon spoke, his voice traveling back to us.  “They’re attacking us on a schedule.  Tonight’s attack was worse than the prior two.  Men and women with combat stimulants, some with scarred faces and hands, some as quick and stealthy as anyone they’ve ever seen, might have been more stimulants.”

I glanced at the others, gesturing.

Don’t know.  Plague men.  Ghosts.

The Plague Men and Ghosts were supposed to be on opposing sides.

“After the second night, the people in charge recognized it as a distraction.  They divided forces tonight, trying to root out whatever it was they’re trying to distract us from.  We didn’t have enough people in place, that stealthy group slipped past us, did a lot of damage, as you can see.”

I turned my eyes upward, looking past the roofs of nearby buildings to the blazing Academy structure.

“Expectation is that they found out when the first superweapons showed up, and that’s when they started with the distractions.”

“Who’s here, sir?” Gordon asked.

“Dog, Catcher, Wry Man, Petey, and the Engineer.”

“Some of the weird ones,” Mary observed under her breath.

“I don’t recognize all of those,” I commented.  “Petey?”

“He’s our age,” Gordon said.  “Kind of?  If you-”

The officer at the front cut Gordon off.  Possibly intentional, a dominance display.  Well, it had been rude to start a conversation when he’d been midway through talking.

“You’ll want to talk to the people in charge about where you’ll be setting up, and about calling for help if you need it.”

“Yes sir,” Gordon said.

The man nodded without looking back our way, and then fell silent.

“If they’re reacting this violently to the presence of Academy weapons in Brechwell, there might not be a need to hold back.  We could call for help now,” Gordon said.  “By the time it arrives, things could be underway.”

“We don’t want to scare them off or tip our hand,” I said.  “I’d rather resolve this or make significant headway before anyone arrives.”

“You’re still wanting to rush,” Gordon said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why don’t we at least talk to the other weapons before we make any decisions?” Mary asked.  “I don’t know how touchy they are-”

“Some are touchy,” Gordon said.  “The three we haven’t met are loners, they work alone, for smaller Academies.”

“Then let’s not offend them.  We include them in discussions,” Mary said.

“Agreed,” Gordon said.

We passed beneath a quadruple-set of portcullis gates, entering into the most open area of the city yet.  The sprawl of the local Academy and plenty of open fields for military drills.

Promising weapons from other Academies are trained alongside their handlers to work alongside squads and armies, here.  Academy students with great minds for strategy and military cadets with a good mind for learning the particulars of Academy science are brought here to learn to become officers.

Or were, with emphasis on the past tense.

The fire was bad.  Buildings that should have weathered the blaze were sagging.  Stitched brought canisters of water, and Academy soldiers connected hoses and manually pumped levers to force it out.  They might as well have been throwing thimblefuls of water on a campfire.

Yet they kept at it.

“Sir?” I asked.

The man at the front twisted around.

“You’ve been here before?  You’re familiar with the area?”

“I have and I am, why?”

“Most Academies have a last-ditch superweapon.  Are you familiar with Brechwell’s?”

“The Brechwell Beast.  Last report I heard said it was awake but sedated, ready to go with a few minutes of notice.”

Gordon whistled a little under his breath.

But I didn’t care about the Beast, here.  I’d been more interested in his prior answer, his familiarity with the area.

I was getting a sense of how things worked here.  People new to the area would adopt that particular way of doing things, picking up on both the good and bad habits.

Thing was, I was seeing a lot of bad behaviors.  The way the soldiers had reacted to the superior officers, hesitating before bringing something to their attention, the fact that the officer hadn’t filled his men in on who we were, it spoke to a general lack of communication between tiers.

There was a flaw here, one I suspected our enemy was smart enough to exploit.  There were the guys on the bottom, and there were the people on top, and the ties between the two didn’t feel particularly strong.

Some damn idiotic things could happen when that was the case.  Like good soldiers and good water being wasted on a task, because the people at the top were insisting the fires be put out, and didn’t care that it was an impossible task.

“Sir?  One more question.”

I could tell he was irritated at this point, but he turned and gave me his attention.

“I’m just guessing here, but is the person in charge of Brechwell an utter prat?”

Gordon dropped his face to one hand, shaking his head.

“Beg pardon?”

“Is he a ponce?  A dimwit?  Does he not know what he’s doing?”

“I won’t dignify that question with an answer, and I’ll thank you to watch what you ask me in the future,” he said.

He turned around.

I turned my attention to the soldiers that stood on either side of the wagon.

One or two were smirking a little.

I mouthed words.  Is he?

I could make out the movement of their lips in their silent responses, and even if I couldn’t lipread, I could use guesswork to figure it out.  Massive prat.

The moment the wagon slowed, I was hopping down, dragging my luggage down after me.  It clacked hard against the road top.  The others followed suit.  Gordon gave a hand to Hubris, the dog using the outstretched arm as a step partway to the ground, then offered a hand to Mary.

She beamed at him as she hopped down beside him, her hair and skirt flouncing with the landing.

“Someone our age, I’m so excited!” Helen squealed, as she caught up to me.

“Ease up on the pitch a little,” I said, wincing.

Gordon, Hubris and Mary led the way, diverging from the path of the wagon, which was moving toward the fire.  I found myself walking between Lillian and Helen.  Lillian was quiet.  Helen wasn’t.

“He could have been a Lamb!”

“I don’t think so,” Lillian said.

“I almost want to ask you guys to give me the answer,” I said, “But at this point, I’m happy to see for myself.”

“I’m glad to have one over on you for once,” Lillian said.

“So you wouldn’t tell even if I asked?”

She smiled a little, hemmed and hawed, and then said, “After what you said back there, maybe I would.”

“Maybe, huh?”

“I’m worried you were trying to get my guard down so you can pull something on me.”

I snorted.  “Ulterior motives?  Me?”

“You were bothering the captain at the front of the wagon,” Lillian said.

Someone’s paying attention.

“Trying to wrap my head around Brechwell,” I said.

“Do tell,” Helen said.

“Please,” Gordon said.  He’d been listening in, his conversation with Mary trailing off.

“It’s a military academy.  It’s not a place that makes big advancements.  If you’re in charge of the Academy and you’re ambitious, and I’m working under the assumption people are, then Brechwell isn’t going to really open doors.  It’s a stopping point.  A place people come midway through their careers.  Have promise?  Study here a few years, pick up essentials, move on.”

“Sure,” Gordon said.

“People in charge are either here for punishment, they’re ambitious but frustrated, they don’t realize how bad their situation is because they’re that dumb, or they’re willing to try and play a subtler game, where they find pet projects and nurture those projects, and then try to claim credit for the successes that follow.  None of those things breed good leadership.  I’m not sensing good leadership here.”

“Which is why you asked the question,” Mary said.

I gave her a nod of confirmation.  “Feeling them out.”

“Identifying the problem is good, but there’s more to it,” Gordon said.

“We need solutions,” I agreed.  “With a gap between the leadership and the people on the ground, maybe we insert ourselves in as middlemen.”

“Maybe,” Gordon said.  “Worth watching out for.”

I nodded.

I realized why Gordon and Mary were walking in this particular direction.  There was a smaller fire burning, and three corpses were draped around the body.  Two odd figures were standing by the fire, and I realized that they were our fellow weapons.  The people we’d be working with for this particular mission, at least until help came.

Dog and Catcher not present, one missing…

The woman was middle-aged, and she looked frumpy.  Her hair was well looked after and her clothes were nice enough, but neither looked like a good match to her body type or particular appearance.  She wore a jacket with a pattern on it, left open to show a heavy apron, more like something a blacksmith might wear, only accentuating a protruding belly on an otherwise narrow frame.  Her boots were clunkers.  Her hair was short, and she didn’t wear enough makeup to tie it together.  A bit of blue eye shadow might have worked.

The old man was, I knew at a glance, the Wry Man.  His hair was gray, his skin wrinkled in a way that carved deep into his face, and his bushy eyebrows went with a perpetual grin.  He was stooped, much of his weight leaning on a cane.

“The Lambs, I take it?” the Wry Man asked.

“Nice to meet you,” Gordon said.

The Wry Man didn’t reply to that.  Instead, he lifted his cane, prodding one of the corpses.

“Lambs, meet our opposition.”

I turned my attention to the bodies.

One was a Ghost, I could tell from the damage to her body, the way the fine bones riddled her flesh, criss-crossing within her injuries, as if she’d been filled with bone-white needles.

The other was a man, but not one of the plague men.  He lay there, and he looked alive, skin flushed a bruised purple, veins standing out against his skin.  His fists were clenched, body contorted, and his mouth yawned open.  I couldn’t look at his face without imagining him mid-scream.

The third corpse wasn’t human, not at first glance.  Augmentations.  Hunched, skin textured, eyes wide and bloodshot, its hands were twice the usual size and claw-tipped.  The skin wasn’t uniformly colored, but instead bruised in patches that seemed to accent the deeper parts of the body- the hollow of collarbone and throat, the lines of the jaw, and the eye sockets.

“They’re mixing it up,” Gordon observed.

“Not one of them feels safe,” the woman said, her voice pitched in a funny way, as if she was putting on a voice for a puppet show.  “They brought bodyguards, and they’ve been convinced to send those bodyguards out.”

Lillian knelt by the body of the man who was covered in veins.  She had to dig in fingernails to pry his eyelids apart.

“Are these two people under the same drug, at different stages?” she asked.

“That’s what the docs are saying,” the Wry Man said.

“They’re modifying them on a core level,” Lillian said.  “Rewriting them.  It’s incredibly painful, not to mention dangerous.”

“So I hear,” the Wry Man said.

“Would have to be a bacteria, dumping a load of new information into the bodies, rewrite the pattern of their makeup in patches.  Looking at that one… they’re under the effect of powerful stimulants while it happens.  Do it a few times in a row-”

“Get monsters,” I finished.

“That’s what they want, but there’s a reason we don’t use this,” Lillian said.  “It tends to kill people as often as it gives you monsters, when you’re making changes this drastic.  That’s in Academy labs, under strict supervision.”

“They aren’t holding back,” Gordon said.  He looked up, “Where are the other weapons?”

“Your buddies Dog and Catcher are on the prowl, seeing if they can’t trace them back to where they came from.  The Engineer is with them.”

The Engineer?

I glanced at the woman.  She wasn’t the Engineer then.  By process of elimination-

She smiled down at me.  I averted my eyes, somehow uncomfortable.

“They’ve attacked at sundown every night.  Either hitting us here, or going after civilians,” the Wry Man said.  “If we’re going to get them, we need to do it tonight, or we’re going to have to wait until tomorrow night.”

“Crumbs,” I muttered.

“Willing to leave those bags behind?” he asked.

Gordon glanced at me and the others.  We nodded.

“Then let’s go join the others for the night’s hunt,” he said.  I saw how crooked his teeth were as he bared them.  “We can get acquainted on the way.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.03 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We deposited our bags at the side of one gate, getting the attention of the soldiers there, asking them to look after the luggage.

While Lillian got her things ready, I quickly grabbed the three books from my bag and put them into a backpack, pulling it on.  Heavy, but not so much it would weigh me down or impact my performance.

Wasn’t willing to leave Jamie’s books behind.  No way, no how.

“I get to try my new ears,” Helen was telling the woman with the apron.

“New ears?” Gordon asked, turning around.

“My maker gave them to me, after I said I almost couldn’t hear the Ghosts.  I don’t know if I hear better, but I hear more, except it’s not like that.  The range is different?  Oh, but we have to explain who the Ghosts are!”

“The ones with spines inside them,” I said, trying to provide a bit of sanity in the midst of Helen’s ramblings.  “Echolocation.  Perfect sensory awareness in an area.”

“We’ve run into them,” the woman with the apron said.  “We were hired to find and eliminate cells a few months ago.  They keep cropping back up, but I think we’re keeping it more or less under control.”

I adjusted the straps on my backpack, ignoring the looks from the others.  They still weren’t asking or saying anything about it.

We set off through the gates.

“I got new ears, and Professor Ibott is changing some of my joints around, because he wants to make sure I develop right as I grow up, without anything getting too rigid, so my shoulders and hips feel a little funny right now, and he’s talking about shaving bones and putting in bone spurs, and, um, what else?”

“That’s a lot of changes,” Mary said.

“Because I’m starting puberty!”

I felt a bit of a chill.  Just to the side of me, Gordon muttered something along the lines of, “Oh hell.”

“I actually started half a year ago, but Ibott feels like I’m ready now, and because I won’t change unless he makes me change, and I could look really weird without the right attention, he’s been plotting out what I need and what works and things.”

The Ibott?” the woman with the apron asked.

“Yep!  And he’s going to make me more dangerous and he’s going to make me gorgeous.”

“You are gorgeous, dum-dum,” I said.  She smiled at me.

“Out of the mouth of babes,” the Wry Man said.

“Huh?”

“I envy you your ability to say what comes to mind.  It isn’t so easy when you’re a hideous old man.”

“I dunno, I think I’ll still say stuff like that when I’m grown up,” I said.  If I grow up.  “Helen is gorgeous.  She was put together with an artist’s hand.”

Helen nodded, then smiled, “Uh huh, but I’m supposed to be gorgeous enough in two or three years to lure in the sort of man of weaker morals.  That’s a different kind of gorgeous.”

“A touch disturbing,” the Wry Man commented.

“Helen’s not usually this talkative, just so you know,” Gordon said.

“I like new people.  I get excited about new people, and I’m excited about getting improved!”

“The disturbing part of it is typical for when she does get going, though,” I said.

“Pooh to you both.”

“I envy you,” the woman with the apron said.  “It sounds nice.”

“You’re Petey, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard about you.  How’s your body doing today?”

“I’m so-so, thank you for asking,” the woman in the apron said.  “I’m good to fight if I have to.”

“We might have to,” Gordon said.  “There’s apparently enough of them in town that we’re going to run into someone.

“Or something,” I added.

“I’ll be ready,” Petey said, smacking one fist into the flat of the other hand.

I wasn’t sure but I suspected I could have been more menacing than she’d been in that moment.

“I don’t like the layout,” Mary said.  “There isn’t much cover, there aren’t many good vantage points, and everywhere we go, people are watching us from those tiny windows.”

“It’s after curfew,” the Wry Man said.  “The fire got a lot of people’s attention.  They may be keeping an eye out for clues about what’s happening.”

“I don’t like not having escape routes,” Mary said.  She looked up, “Can we get up to the rooftops and use them to navigate?  I’d feel like we had more freedom.”

“We can.  There aren’t many options to get up onto the rooftops, and the ones that do exist are watched,” the Wry Man said.  “Going up carelessly can get you shot.”

“I’m not very athletic,” Petey said, “But we can if we have to.”

I narrowed my eyes a little, trying to figure Petey out.

She smiled at me.

“End of this road,” the Wry Man said.  “There’s a tower.”

The winding path and the buildings that blocked the view made it hard to tell just how far the ‘end of this road’ was.  As far as I could tell, the road curved to the right fifty feet in front of us.  As we made our way forward, I could see around the corner, revealing a gentle left turn, again taking the road somewhere I couldn’t see.

It was claustrophobic, even with the open sky above us and the open paths behind and in front of us.  The sky wasn’t a place we could travel, and there was no telling what exactly was around the next bend.

“I kind of agree with what Mary was saying,” I said.  “This place sucks.  I’m going to get so lost.”

“You can remember the paths and get a sense of the layout,” the Wry Man said.

“Maybe you can, but my memory is bad.  The way it’s wired.”

“Then I can see it being a problem,” the Wry Man said.

“Stick with us,” Gordon said.  “I should have a sense of Brechwell’s layout, though it’s going to take me a little while.”

Gordon’s memory was strong, but it didn’t compare to Jamie’s.  We’d been put together with a certain idea in mind, and one of us was gone now.  There was a lack.

I could improvise to fill some of that lack.  Gordon could shore it up with his limited ability.

It didn’t feel like enough.

It wouldn’t have felt like enough if all of us had Jamie’s memory capacity.

We rounded the bend, and Helen tilted her head.  “Shh.”

Hubris’ ears had perked up as well.

I heard nothing, but the girl and the dog were paying rapt attention.

In the distance, well behind us, a structure collapsed, weakened too much by the fire.  Helen turned and gave the blazing Brechwell Academy an annoyed look, as if it was somehow the fault of the buildings.

“Ghosts,” she said.

“Direction?”

She pointed.

We moved more briskly now.  I would have liked to say we were quiet, but Petey’s boots were heavy on the road.  Helen pulled a little bit ahead, paused, then pointed again.

Twice, we changed routes.  Paths met, intersected, and branched, and we chased an enemy that never seemed to appear.  Hubris’ nose was working overtime, as he snuffled at the ground.

“I hear Dog too,” Helen said.  “He’s up there.”

She was pointing at rooftops, further down the street.

“We’ll go up,” the Wry Man said.

The streets wound like snakes in the midst of death throes, lined on either side by narrow two-and-three story houses that bled into one another, most houses set with one directly to the left, right, and behind.  I could see tree-tops where there were wider gaps between houses left some space.  Secluded patches of green, each one locked off by the triangle or square of houses laid out around them.  I couldn’t imagine kids running around in those parks.  It made me think of prisons.

But each time a street ended, there was a tower.  The towers were military emplacements, sturdy, thick, and taller than any of the buildings around.  The front gate was locked, but a ladder led up the side.

The Wry Man went first.  He made it up a short distance, only two of us below him, when a spotlight targeted him, sliding down to take the rest of us in.  I squinted against the white glare, almost started to adjust, and then it flickered, as electric things tended to do.  I blinked the spots out of my eyes, and hoped they weren’t training a rifle on us.

The Wry Man had raised a hand, as if waving, and was poised, holding position.

The light went off, then on, then off again.

He resumed climbing.

Brechwell brooks no nonsense, I thought.  The claustrophobic feeling was getting worse.

The light fixed on us as we stepped off the ladder and onto rooftop.  The Wry Man gestured, pointing downward, and the light disappeared.

“Paranoid,” Mary said.

“The location makes Brechwell a prime target,” Gordon said.  “Military base staffed with students who have their careers riding on this, eager to show their worth.”

My footing on the rooftop was tentative, as I tried to judge how slick the shingles were, and how much traction I had on the sloped surface.

“I dunno,” I said.  “I tend to default to assume that people get lazy.  We gravitate toward shortcuts.  Stick a bunch of people in military academies, they’re going to be good as gold while they’re being watched, but stick them in a watchtower, without oversight?  I can’t believe they wouldn’t goof off.”

“You don’t believe in discipline?” Mary asked.  “Determination?”

“I believe in it, but I think it’s an anomaly more than the rule.  You only get quality if you set people against each other.”

“They get bonus marks for ratting each other out,” the Wry Man said.  “And they do get tested with regular drills during peacetime.”

I spread my hands.  “There you go.”

The remainder of the group made their way up.  Helen had Hubris under one arm, and was climbing the ladder one-handed.  She handed off Hubris to Gordon, then stepped up alongside the rest of us.  Petey followed, huffing, with Lillian last.

“You’re a solo operator?” I asked Petey.

“I am, yeah.”

“And what you said before, you’ve cleared out an entire cell of Ghosts by yourself?”

“Sy,” Gordon said, “Don’t be rude.”

“I have,” Petey said, in the same moment I said, “I’m not being rude.”

“Be nice,” Gordon said.  He kept a hand on Hubris’ side, but the dog wasn’t having trouble walking on the shingles.  It was a sheer three or four story drop to the road on either side, and there was little to stop any of us if we were to start sliding.

Petey lurched, and it took two of us to catch her.

I asked, “Okay, so is it hidden weapons, or some plague or…”

“Neither.  Well, I’m sort of a hidden weapon, myself,” she said, in that strange voice of hers.  “Undercover.”

“Good cover,” I said.

Mary jabbed me.

From our vantage point, I could see the expanse of the city, including the maze-like distribution of streets and houses, with bridges and gates here and there.

“We can go that way,” Gordon said, pointing.  The rooftops on one side of the street extended over a bridge to cross to the other.  “We could make good distance before we have to go down and back up again.”

“Ugh,” Petey said.

“If we’re quick, we can cut them off,” Gordon said.

“And we won’t have to go up and down,” I said.

“Then let’s hurry!” Petey said, now enthusiastic.

“Two by two,” I said.  “Hold hands.”

That got me some weird looks.

“Trust me,” I said.

Mary extended a hand to Gordon, who took it.  The two of them took the lead, taking off.

Without wasting a second, I grabbed Lillian’s wrist.  She looked a little startled, staring at me with wet hair clinging to the sides of her face and edge of her chin, but she clasped her hand around my wrist in turn.  I would have and could have explained my rationale, but time counted.

Our combination left an odd pairing.  With a member missing, we had one odd member out.

“Wry, can you go with Petey?  Helen isn’t about to slip.”

Wry nodded.

That said, I tugged on Lillian’s wrist, and pulled her along behind me.

Walking on a peaked roof with its subtle slope, it was hard to run across the peak, with each foot angling out in opposite directions.  It led to an awkward, bow-legged run, one with a higher chance of stumbling, not a lower one.

Holding hands, we were each able to angle our bodies slightly to one side, more or less placing our feet flat.  With my weight counterbalanced by Lillian’s, I didn’t need to worry so much about sliding.  If something happened, she and I together had a better chance of avoiding a fall than one of us alone.

Her hand was so warm, with the weather so chilling.  Her breath fogged slightly as she huffed out breaths, working to keep up with me.

Gordon and Mary made it look so easy.  Their weights weren’t matched by half, Gordon was growing in a way I wasn’t, but they were both athletic, and both knew exactly what they were doing.  Hubris ran just behind them, enjoying the fact that he had four paws for extra traction.

I didn’t glance back at Helen, Petey and the Wry Man.

“Here!” Helen called out.

We stopped.

She was pointing, tracing the path the Ghosts were traveling.

They were moving at the base of the houses we were running on, letting the eaves and the edges of the rooftops block our view.

Gordon pointed to a path, I signaled agreement.

The path available to us was shaped like an ‘H’, with a covered bridge joining rooftops on this side of the street with rooftops on the other.

We traveled along the middle bar, and as we did, the Ghosts came into view.  They realized we were getting ahead of them and stopped for a moment to communicate before reversing direction.  We adjusted our course, and they stopped once again.

I imagined the claustrophobia I’d experienced before, only it was imposed on our enemy this time.  We had the high ground, we could easily spy them, and the fact that we weren’t confined to winding, twisting streets meant we could easily stay ahead of them.

I wasn’t sure we could actually confront them, if it came down to it, because we still had to get from the rooftops to the ground, but if they carried on like this, we could track them wherever they decided to take shelter, or at least flag down the next group of soldiers to travel down the road.

What are you going to do now?

I was surprised at how much venom there was in my thoughts.  Not quite anger, but a part of me wanted to see them take a bullet.  I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with the fact that they were children.

“They’re cornered.  In a sense,” Gordon remarked.

“Where do we take this from here?” Mary asked.  She looked at the Wry Man.  “What did you do, when you were cleaning up other camps?”

The man used his thumb to pull back the corner of his jacket.  Small vials sat side by side, ringing his belt.  Each one was corked.  “I worked with the locals, but I had some chemical help.  Not much good here.  Nothing I can drink that’s about to let me hop right down there and kill or capture either of them.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.  “Push someone into a corner, strip away their defenses, and you’ll see their true selves.  Them?  They’re survivors at their core.  They’ll do what it takes to live, and I’m thinking that means they’re going to run like little rabbits, all the way home.  All we have to do is keep up.”

“Ugh,” Petey said.  “I hate exercise.”

I frowned at Petey, and was about to ask for more particulars on just how she was a weapon, when Helen’s hands went to her ears.  Hubris shook his head, and it wasn’t because he’d gotten wet.

“What is it?” Gordon asked.

“Can’t hear you,” Helen replied.  “I’ve got my hands-”

Gordon gestured, firm, quick movements.

“They’re screaming.  Sounds different.”

I looked at the pair, who hadn’t budged.  Their mouths were closed.

“Who has a whistle to call Dog?” I asked.

“I do,” Lillian said, “But it’s in my bag.”

“Get it.”

“They’re calling for help,” Gordon said.  “They’re not going to run home.  They’re bringing ‘home’ here.  We should let them go.  Everything that’s helping us keep them cornered is working against us if they mount an attack.”

Multiple paths of travel, the exposure, the vantage point.

Hubris turned, facing the opposite direction, and made a growling sound.

“More Ghosts,” I said.

But as the figures stepped out of one building, a cluster of people, I saw a man in their midst.  It wasn’t a Percy.

Something about the way they talked, walking briskly along the winding road that would take them to the Ghosts, it was too social, too verbal.  Their clothes were too… individual, if I had to say.  Three women and a man.  One woman and the man had messy brown hair, in dire need of a wash.  The other two women were wearing modified military jackets, with badges and everything else removed.  Two carried guns.

I instinctively dropped closer to the roof itself.

If they were Ghosts, they would have been using the silent Ghost-speak, I was sure.

Yet they’d responded to the cry for help.

Gordon gestured.  He was taking charge.  We were relocating, finding a more defensible point.  Getting closer to a watchtower with an active spotlight was vital, here.

The trip took us just above the Ghosts, who weren’t budging and who were presumably screaming.

“There, look,” Mary whispered.

We could see further down, along the winding road.  A group that wasn’t the messy-haired not-Ghosts from before was approaching, perhaps twenty individuals strong.

One or two Ghosts, but many of the others weren’t.

Plague men, yes, but other things.  There were the combat-druggers, who’d altered in shape and form, who had veins sticking out, and who walked a little separate from the rest of the group.  Gone feral, made more dangerous, but at a cost of humanity, unpredictable enough that their own allies avoided them.

I could identify leaders by the attention people gave to them.

A giant of a man, with plague man alterations, but something told me that if he hadn’t had the plague man effect, he still would have been something of a monster.  He rippled with muscle, wearing only a long coat, and tubes fed into his neck and chest.  His hair was long, and he walked in a way that suggested he expected nothing to get in his way.

His weapon was mechanical, long and toothed.

Weaponized birthing saw, I thought.

There were others.  Someone who wore a lab coat, with a custom warbeast at his side, and a woman with long hair, fur at the edge of her hood, and draping clothing to the ground.

The woman reminded me of Helen.

Special projects.  Scrapped ones, ones that turned coat, and worse.

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“The man is one of the Firebrand’s lieutenants, special project of Orickton’s Academy,” the Wry Man said.  “He killed his doctor and was locked up.  The Firebrands released him.  I don’t know the others.”

“Me either,” Petey said.

I bit my tongue, thought for a second, and then said, “Safe to assume the other two are just as dangerous?”

“That would be a high bar to meet,” the Wry Man said.

In the distance, I could see Dog and Catcher appear on a rooftop.  Catcher raised both hands, then moved them.

Gordon started to gesture back, then paused.  “We retreat?”

“We retreat,” the Wry Man said, without asking for input.

I bit my tongue harder.

Gordon gestured to Catcher, who gestured back before disappearing.

Then we were gone, putting as much distance between ourselves and the small army as we could.

I knew, instinctually, that it was too dangerous.  I knew we were outclassed, and there was so little we could have done.  Dog and Catcher would have some input, we could connect dots in the meantime, figure out a plan of action, rally the local forces, even.

Yet a part of me told me that Jamie would have known who they were.  Jamie would have known strengths and weaknesses or what the projects were.

We’d still be retreating, but I’d feel better about what came next.

We needed a win, and we needed it soon, if only to prove we weren’t diminished.  This was a weakness that would infect the group, influence me, with all of my vulnerability to being swayed one way or the other.

Lillian squeezed my wrist, and I realized I was still holding hers.

I squeezed hers back.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.04 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.4

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Dog, Catcher and the Engineer were able to pull ahead, as much by virtue of their sheer speed as the fact that they had a straighter road.  The trio of them were waiting for us at the base of one of the towers that overlooked a bend in the road.  The spotlight swept over us as we approached, then moved on.

As we came to a stop, I let go of Lillian’s hand.  I paced a bit, waiting for the stragglers, Petey, to catch up.  Disgusted with the state of things, I screwed up my face and spat over the edge, the little wad of spit joining thousands of individual raindrops.

The Engineer watched us.  His skin was as raw as a fresh burn, but he wore a mask that covered and sealed his mouth shut, a loose-fitting and incomplete metal shell surrounding much of his body.  Mechanical parts were worked into biology, open enough that I could see wet muscle and turning cogs.  It was a similar sort of project to Dog, I expected, but instead of going the warbeast route, they’d enhanced the man until things broke down, and they’d replaced the broken-down parts with machinery.  I had little doubt that there was at least one machine attached to his body that dispensed powerful painkillers at regular intervals.

All that said, looking past the glistening bits I could see between gaps in the heavy armor, the Engineer was a work of art.  The mask had a flair to it, the machinery gleamed, and there were traces of silver lining the edges of darker metal.  Even his gun looked impressive and ornate.

“They’re not following us anymore,” Helen said.  “I’m pretty sure?”

Catcher looked at Dog, who shook his overlarge head.  “Dog doesn’t think so either.  Tell me, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Gordon said.  “We had them cornered, and then they came out of the woodwork.”

“These Ghosts are getting on my nerves,” I said.  “Dealing with them alone, we’ve shown we can do that, but apparently our enemies have the scariest bastards around working under them?  We have to deal with the lot at once?”

“We saw some of them, too.  Hitmen, thugs for hire,” Catcher said.  “A couple of the most wanted in the Crown States.  We couldn’t close in on them.  Each of them had escorts.”

“It’s hard to stay unnoticed when you’re as ugly as some of those bastards are,” Gordon said.  “How are they infiltrating this city?  Checkpoints, standing guards, patrols, any one of those guys should have raised alarm bells.”

“Secret routes?” Lillian asked.

“I wouldn’t think, with how the city is put together,” the Wry Man said.

I nodded in agreement.  “They wouldn’t have security holes like that and not guard them.”

“Leaves only one option,” Mary spoke.  Gordon was already nodding beside her.

“Infiltration,” I said.  “A group of students, a commanding officer, or an entire faction within this city is working with our enemy.  Say what you will about the Academy, it has its strengths, but engendering loyalty isn’t one of them.  It’s not a problem when we’re winning, but when people see opportunity, they don’t exactly feel bad about taking action against the Academy, or twisting their perspective around to justify making some money or getting some power at the Academy’s expense.”

Gordon gave me a curious look, then said, “Yeah, something to watch out for.  We don’t talk about this with anyone until we find out more.  If we tip them off before we have proof or leverage, we’re suddenly going to find that it’s very hard to get anything done.”

There were nods all around.

Can’t trust the locals.  Meaning we’re even more outnumbered.

“What did you discover?” Catcher asked.

“We waited for them, and then we went looking.  The blonde one-”

“Helen,” Helen said.

“-can hear the screeching, like you can.”

“I’m aware.”

“Alright,” the Wry Man said.  “Should we head back, regroup, figure out where we’re sleeping tonight?”

“What?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Catcher said.  “What is it, Sy?”

“I don’t want to double back,” I said.  “We have the entire night head of us, we’re not going to accomplish anything by going back home.”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“We have a job to do,” I said.

“I’m not disagreeing, Sy,” Gordon said.  “But you summed it up.  They have Ghosts.  We can disrupt them, make noise that bothers them, but all reports suggest they’ve adapted to that trick, and we’d still be broadcasting our location.  We can’t sneak up and observe or try to follow them without them knowing.”

“We can,” I said, “but we don’t know how, yet.”

“Same thing,” he said.

“If one group made a distraction while the other circled around,” I mused.

“No,” the Wry Man said.  “That’s suicidal.”

Petey cut in, “This might be the time to mention that our friend here is very experienced at the trade.  He’s been at it for-”

“Thirty years,” the old man said.

“Thirty years,” Petey said, in that high voice of hers.  “He’s… wary.”

“That is not a word people tend to associate with me,” the Wry Man said.  “But I won’t throw my life away for this.”

I frowned.  Was this where different mentalities, personality types and approaches all clashed?  Herding the Lambs was difficult enough.

“How do you prefer to operate?” Gordon asked Petey.

“I’m reckless by nature.  Every time I make a move, I’m taking a risk,” Petey said.

A reckless undercover agent?

“Can we help?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” Petey said.

“I always thought you should be a Lamb,” Helen said.

Petey looked at our group, turning her head to look us over.  A group of dripping children and a soggy dog.  “It looks exhausting.”

“Let us show you how much we can help you,” Helen said.  “What you’d get, if you were one of us.”

Petey sighed.  “Yeah.”

“Then we use Petey,” Helen said.  “We go after them, bait them out-”

“They’ll run,” Gordon said.

“Then we catch them,” Helen said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.

“They have the advantage on raw information,” Gordon said.  “If they think they can win, then they’ll hit us with an unreasonable amount of force.  If they don’t think they can win, they flee.”

“Stop,” I said.

The pair of them stopped.

“Let’s ignore that part, or we’ll keep arguing in circles until the sun rises.”

Sy being the level headed one?” Lillian commented.

I stuck my finger out, pressing it against her lips.  “Shush.”

She slapped my hand away.

The rain ran through my hair, and I pushed my fingers through it to get it back out of my face.  I pointed at the Lambs, “Stay,” pointed at the Wry Man, Engineer and Petey, “stay,” and pointed at Dog and Catcher, “wait here.”

A glance skyward told me the spotlight in the tower well above us was glowing, moving over the streets and rooftops.

I crossed the roof and grabbed the ladder.  I started climbing, making my way up.

I was only part of the way up when a light touched me.  It flickered for a moment as it settled on me, the living battery skipping a beat.

Still on the ladder, I stuck my arms out to either side, showing my empty hands.

The light moved to the others.  The Wry Man raised a hand, apparently the signal that all was well.  He was a known element, clearly.

I remembered what we’d said about trustworthy and untrustworthy elements, that there were far too many people who had critical positions in the Academy and very little loyalty to the institution.

I knew full well that I could drive myself crazy questioning every ally we had, but it would do to remember that these three strangers were just that, strangers.  Whatever Helen was spouting off to Petey, it was hard enough to imagine adding two new Lambs to the group that I couldn’t bring myself to extend my trust to these people.

Solo operators, very good at what they did, but there was no guarantee someone else hadn’t reached them first with a better offer.

What did a Wry Man want out of existence, after thirty years of working under the Academy?

I continued making my way up the ladder.  The light fell on me again, then moved up to the tower top above me, streaming into the room there.  The light flicked off, on, off, and on again.

I pulled out my badge as I neared the top, and I banged my hand on the hatch.  I was working under the assumption that, even if the soldiers in here were working with our enemy on some level, they weren’t going to blow their cover or take a risk by attacking me here.

The hatch opened.  I was greeted by the sight of a weight overhead and men with rifles aiming at me.  Young men, students only five or so years older than me, but men all the same.

“Do you have a map?” I asked, in my best ‘innocent’ voice.

“This is no place for children,” one of the men said.  “And there’s a curfew, no less.  Climb up, unless you want us to help you on your way down.”

The blade of the bayonet touched my shoulder, suggesting just how he’d ‘help’.

“And keep your hands where we can see them,” another told me.

This is why people don’t like the Academy.

I climbed up, and held my hands out as they frisked me.

“Take a look through the hatch,” I said.  “On the roof beneath you.”

“Dog and Catcher?  We were told about them, we saw them coming.”

“Everyone,” I said.  “Not just those two.”

One of the men stepped past me, peering down and over to see the group.

Catcher raised his free hand in a kind of wave.

“They need a map,” I said.  “It’s semi-urgent.”

One of the officers crossed the room, “What kind?”

So helpful.

“Of the city.”

“Restricted,” he said.  “Maps can’t leave this room.”

Of course it is. 

A city designed to be a maze, to make effectively attacking it as difficult a process as possible.  Letting maps of the layout out to possibly find their way to enemy hands was a security risk.

Except our enemies included Ghosts, who had a powerful sense of spatial awareness.  In this particular circumstance, it was more trouble to friend than foe.

Brechwell’s leadership at work, in a way.

“Can I see, at least?” I asked.

He gestured.  I approached the counter with maps laid across it.  They covered different neighborhoods, included full views of the city, topographic views, and views of the region, with symbols to mark the most likely avenues for entry.  There were maps that were more legend than actual map, with lists of names.  Probably families in a given range of streets.

The really interesting one had details on switches for the portcullis gates throughout the city.  If we could only get access to those controls, they’d have no chanceBut our enemy is likely thinking something very similar.

“There are wanted criminals in this city, they set fire to Brechwell Academy earlier tonight,” I said.

“Yup,” one of the soldiers said.

“They’re camped out elsewhere in the city.  We ran into a bunch of them just now, right here.”  I touched the map.  I was developing a story in my head.  “We saw some bad people, and I was told to come here and get a map so we could say where.”

“Uh huh,” the soldier said.

“Do you have a sheet of paper?  I don’t want to draw on your nice maps.”

“You most certainly don’t,” another soldier said, gruff.  “But we do have paper for you.”

“Trying to figure out where they might be based,” I said.  I pulled my raincoat off, draping it on the edge of the counter, and rolled up my sleeves.  “Ink, pen?”

They slid a pen and some ink across the length of the counter.

“I can’t take this with me, huh?” I asked, as I took offered paper, placed it over the map, and began to trace the most essential sections.

“You can’t.  No maps leave.  That means maps you draw.”

I made a face.  “I’ll have to do my best, then.  But getting it out of my head and on paper will help.”

I won’t remember, it won’t help at all.

I sketched out the Academy, and then drew lines for the major roads and rivers.  I circled the area where I assumed we’d seen the gathering.

“Any idea what neighborhood this is?”

“Sixty-second.”

I sighed.  Couldn’t even be a memorable thing.  Any numbers would slip out of my head before I was halfway down the ladder.

I finished tracing out more of the city.  As I drew, I moved my hand down the pen, which wasn’t hard.  Pressure on the end of the fountain pen produced more ink, and it got ink all over my finger.

“Okay,” I said.  “I think I’ve got it.  If I send them up here to see, can you show them?”

“Sure,” one of the men said.

“Ugh, I’m bad with pens,” I said, shaking my hand.  The blob of ink that covered the end of my finger spattered against the window and dotted a few of the maps.  “Oh, shit!  Sorry!”

Injecting just enough of a sense of alarm that they might think something was really wrong.  I could see a half-dozen ways to play out this situation, but if I got them anxious-

“What did you do!?” one man shouted.  He rushed closer, hurrying to see if there was any damage to the maps.

I took the opportunity to hug my completed maps against my own chest, running my forearms down the length of them.  I let them fall to the ground, snatching up my raincoat.

“Did he do any damage?  If we get in trouble for this-” one was saying.

“Fucking little kid, shouldn’t have given him ink,” another said.

I pulled my raincoat on as quickly as I could, trying to look as guilty and upset as possible, to deflect attention from what I was actually doing.  “Don’t- please don’t throw me down the hatch.”

One gave me a look, annoyed.  “We’re not going to do that.”

“You said you would earlier, please…  Just let me go.”

“Go,” was the order.

I left, down through the hatch, observed by one while two fussed over the maps and the trouble they’d get from their superiors if they were decided to be at fault.

Partway down the ladder, I reached fingers through the rungs of the ladder, and drew an ‘x’ on the knuckle of my thumb, just a short distance from Melancholy’s ring.

Hopefully that would be a reminder.  They’d been nice enough, all things considered.  Wouldn’t do to get them in trouble.

Jamie wouldn’t have.

“Taking your sweet time?” Catcher called up to me, as I made my way to the rooftop again.

I walked around the point where the rooftop met the tower until I found a position where the tower’s bulk blocked the incoming rain.  I pulled off my raincoat, then pulled off my shirt.  I held it up.  Excess ink had translated to the shirt, and though some of it had bled into the fabric, expanding out into fatter lines, and some of the finer details had dried too quickly to translate, the general image of the city was there.

“Have to mentally flip it left to right,” I said.

“Can’t see, needs to be higher,” Gordon said.

I raised it up..

“Higher.”

I raised it as high as I could.

“Higher.”

I realized what he was doing.

“You’re a dirty buttplug, Gordon,” I said.

“And you’re short,” he told me.

The Engineer reached forward and took the shirt, holding it flush against the tower wall.

I shivered a bit, shirtless, but still proud of my handiwork.  I dabbed a bit of moisture on the wall and touched the spot I’d already marked with my ink-wet fingertip.  I left a faint blue mark across the cloth, thin and dark at first, then fading as I applied more pressure and applied more of my finger.

“The drug-takers, had guns, sixty-somethingth neighborhood, approaching from the southwest, I guess?  And the strong men, led by one of our Most Wanted, along with creepy lady with the flowing dress, and the warbeast tamer.”

“Ghosts,” Gordon said, drawing his finger along the road I’d sketched out.

“More Ghosts,” Catcher said.  He touched the shirt, and his fingerprint came away a muddy yellow-black.

I glanced at him.  “Where’d you get ink?”

“Weapon oil,” he said.

I smiled.  I liked improvisation when I saw it.

The Engineer moved one hand and tapped the shirt.  Catcher marked the spot.  “Rifleman at a perch here, ducked out of sight when the searchlight swept his way.  Saw us, and hid.  Didn’t see him again.  And here, strange looking stitched sitting outside in the rain.  And here is where we lost the Ghosts we were chasing after the Academy fire….”

The dots and lines and marks were starting to form a picture.  It was shaped like a wobbly crescent moon.  An unfinished picture.

I touched the center of the incomplete circle.  “What’s here?”

There was no answer but the patter of rain.

“They are?” Lillian guessed.  “The bad guys?”

I traced my finger around the circle’s rim.  “Defensive perimeter.  And in the center there, we have critical figures.  Wanted men, leaders of different factions of rebellion.  Mauer.  Maybe Fray.”

I glanced at Mary.

“Percy,” she said.

“It’s possible,” Gordon said.  “But Fray has outsmarted us before.”

“The factions have been fighting for months.  Over three nights, they’ve banded together.  Either they’ve reached an accord or they’re getting there,” I said.  “When things are that tentative, are you really going to get complicated and take risks with how you station your guards?”

“Actually…” Gordon said.

“…Fray might,” I finished.  “You’re right.”

“And,” Gordon said, “It doesn’t fix our problem with how we get close enough to them to do anything.”

“It’s true, Sy,” Mary said.  “Using Petey, attacking with our massed forces, spying, our hands are tied.”

“Then we don’t use hands,” I said.  I tugged on my shirt.  The Engineer let it go.  I pulled it on, and shivered again at how clammy it was against my already wet skin.  “We use-”

Helen stepped close, all of a sudden, her face an inch from mine.

She licked my forehead, brow to hair.

“Uh,” I said, my train of thought broken.

“Go ahead, don’t worry,” she said.

“Uh.”

“You had ink on your face.  I wanted to get rid of it before it stained.  Keep talking.”

“That’s what you use a handkerchief for.”

It was a glimmer of the older, frustrating Helen.  “I don’t have one and my spit would work better anyway.  Go back to what you were saying.”

“What was I even saying?”

“We don’t use hands,” the Wry Man said, patiently.

“Right,” I said.  “Yeah.  Damn it, Helen, and I had a good one-liner planned.”

“It would have sounded silly if you said it with a blue stripe on your face,” she said, very sensibly.

“Sy,” Gordon said, “Focus.  What are you thinking?”

“We use horns,” I said.

“You’re right,” Mary said.  “That doesn’t sound nearly as cool after the interruption.”

I sighed, then shivered again.

“Horns?” Petey asked.

My eyes scanned the surroundings.  The city, laid out like it is.

“You don’t build a city like this without a design in mind.  Winding roads, claustrophobia, gates to control movement, towers to observe… all done with a point in mind.  If they seriously didn’t give the capstone of this design horns, I’m going to be ticked.  Gotta tie it together.”

“The Brechwell Beast,” Gordon said.

“Please tell me it has horns.”

“It has horns,” Gordon said.

I smiled, spreading my arms.  “Perfect.  Then let’s give them a distraction.”

“It’s a last ditch measure,” The Wry Man said, unimpressed.  “Not something we use right away.  We’re supposed to observe and report back so the Academy can take action, not take action ourselves.”

My eyes were wide, I was smiling, and I was shivering from excitement as much as cold, now.  “It’s Genevieve Fray.  She’s two moves ahead of us, every damn time.  I’m done playing chess.  Let’s kick over the damn table.  Right now.”

“I’m not sure,” Petey said.  “This isn’t how I operate.”

“Like I said,” Helen said, reaching out to take Petey’s hand.  “You’re with us for now.”

“This isn’t what I was imagining,” Petey said.

“I’m gathering Helen is for Sy’s plan,” Gordon said.

“I want to see it,” Helen said, the excitement clear on her face.

“Do you?” he asked.  Gordon reached out to touch the side of Helen’s face.  “No act, no games.  Because I know you don’t want like we understand it.  Say it again.”

The enthusiasm drained away from Helen.  Her eyes still glittered, but her expression was cold.  The angle of her head, the way she held herself, it all shifted in the moment.  More reptile than mammal, wearing raincoat and a dress.

She nodded once.

“Alright,” he said.  His hand settled on Hubris’ head.  “If Sy wants to do it, and if we can get the cooperation of the Academy, then I’m for it too.”

Helen smiled, resuming her act as if nothing had occurred.

“Yes, then,” Mary agreed.

“Yes,” Lillian said, which was a little surprising.  “Let’s get that bitch.”

Mary reached out to squeeze Lillian’s hand, smiling at her best friend.

As one, the Lambs faced the others.

“Do you think this will work?” Catcher asked.

“No idea, but I’m fairly sure that anything else we do, biding our time, it’s not going to work,” I said.  “I know Fray, and we can’t give her the opportunity to make the next move at her leisure.”

Catcher nodded.  He looked at Dog, who didn’t give any apparent sign, then looked at us.  He nodded once.

The solo operators were silent.

“I’ll go up,” the Wry Man said.  “I know the signals.  I’ll flash a message to the other towers.  They’ll pass it on.  If I say we know where Fray is, they’ll act.”

I smiled wider.

“Go,” he said.  “I’ll catch up after I’ve given the order.  We’re creating a window of opportunity here.”

I remembered my doubts from earlier.

“Can we trust you to do this?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?  Why are you with the Academy?  Why are you loyal?” I asked.

“That question could get you killed, if you asked it in certain places, or asked it in the wrong way,” the Wry Man said.

“Are you deflecting?”

“I don’t even know what that means,” the man said.

Why?

“They saved my life,” he said.  “Not the Academy as a whole, but people who are tied to it.  I have to repay those people, and I will probably never manage it before I die.  If I have to serve the Academy to do it, I will.”

My brain was pulling on every hint and detail on tells that I’d learned over the past several years.  Every lie I’d identified.

“Okay,” I said.  “I trust you.  I told them to expect someone.  You could tell them we spotted the enemy ringleader and they’ll believe you.”

He nodded once, then started climbing the ladder.

“You two don’t have to come,” Gordon said, to the other solo operators.

“I think I do,” Petey said.

The Engineer nodded.

I’d have rather they’d stayed, or gone back to the Academy to report in.  I didn’t trust them, and they’d be at our back in this.

We were halfway back to where we’d seen the ghost when the beam started flashing, pointed back at the Academy.  The dark, overcast night sky glowed orange on one end and reflected a dim yellow-white on the other, passing on a message.

Our enemies would see that light in the same way we’d seen the fire.

In a short time, I hoped, they’d hear the roar of the Brechwell Beast, and they’d react with concern and fear.

The box would be thoroughly rattled, the inhabitants set to scurrying, dangerous and mad as they were.

This was what I lived for.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.05 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.5

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An impact shook the city of Brechwell, dull and low, reverberating through the ground and up to the rooftops.  In the wake of it, windows and doors continued to rattle and bang in their frames, adding an eerie note to the tail end of it.

The entire city seemed to go still.  Birds taking shelter from the rain and the handful of soldiers on the street were all frozen.  Our group and the rainwater were the only things moving in a still tableau.

Then the warning bells started tolling, muffled, all through the city, the birds took off from roosts, and soldiers ran.  Where each of the towers had lone spotlights, additional lights were lit, the beams becoming diffuse, aimed at the city streets.  Stretches of light and dark.

State of emergency.

A second impact cut into the bass tolling of the bells.  As it rippled across a segment of Brechwell, the bells were jarred midway through their motions.  Some sounded early, others were delayed.

I gripped Lillian’s wrist harder as the rooftop shook with the strike.

The Brechwell Beast roared, and the sound carried.  It was a lowing noise, and I imagined I imagined it sounded frustrated.  An actual observation, gleaned from small details and intuition, or just what I wanted to think?

Wish they hadn’t warned people, but I guess they had to.  Someone in charge probably promised citizens there would be notice, to pacify them.

Down a side street, without a man or guard touching it, a portcullis gate slammed down, the blunted metal teeth of it striking the stone of the road.  The lights from the towers shifted, leaving that street dark, illuminating the path that remained.

I’d imagined this part.

Release the local weapon, send it out into the streets, and use the gates to control its movements.

I couldn’t stop smiling.

Helen, ahead of us, raised a hand, then gestured twice.

“Screams,” Catcher said, echoing the same sentiment.  “Your Ghosts.”

Here we were.

I’d never had the impression the Ghosts were particularly intelligent.  They could talk, recite from script, and they had residual behaviors and movement from the manner of their manufacture.  I wondered if the scenario of the Brechwell Beast had even come up, if the Firebrands had taken the time to explain to their inaudible children just what to expect and what to do if the weapon was let loose from its dwelling.

I heard the Beast roar, and this time it was moving.

They’d opened the gate it had been banging against.

“Cross!” Gordon shouted, pointing.  It was a set of rooftops above a gate that still yawned open.

“If it passes beneath us-” Petey had to raise her voice to be heard over the din.

“Cross!” Gordon called out.

Helen ran across, hunched over, one hand extended straight toward the ground, ready to drop and hug the peaked roof at a moment’s notice.  Gordon and Mary were next, followed by Lillian and me.

Dog, Catcher and the Engineer had gone ahead, and Dog had been kind enough to place his claws against sections further down the roof.  I could see patches where he’d leaped and where he’d landed, and shingles had been torn or scraped away by the violence and the weight of each of his movements.

Petey was lagging behind.  I made sure to keep an eye on her.  By all rights, Helen should have gone with her, but Petey and Helen were diametric opposites, Helen was our scout, capable of hearing the Ghosts, and Petey was far from being fast enough to help with scouting.

We could have and should have reshuffled the group, perhaps sending Mary forward with Helen, but it was too late to decide on that now, and we were almost there.  So long as Petey didn’t slip and slide off to one side and over the brink, we were fine.

Dog and Catcher stopped, and Catcher extended an arm, signaling.  Catcher remembered the signals for alert, and for direction.  Easy to make out in the gloom, as he was a dark silhouette against the glare of a tower’s lights.

I squeezed Lillian’s wrist, tugging her a bit as I willed her to move faster.

We were so close.

Over one house, past another, past an ‘x’ shaped intersection of rooftops and buildings, a park to one side and roads to another, and we could see what Catcher was indicating.

A trio of Ghosts and a quartet of others in civilian garb were all gathered, talking.  Some had rifles.  Infiltrators.

One Ghost was staring up at us.

I could feel the tramp of the Brechwell Beast’s feet, see the shift of the lighting as some lights moved to follow it.  It was loud, and the sound went beyond the heavy footfalls.  A grinding sound, like something heavy rolling over crushed stones.

The civilians were at a door, working to open it.

“Catcher!” I shouted, and my voice was nearly drowned out.

He said something, but I couldn’t make out the individual sounds.  He was reaching into his coat, withdrawing something that was about the same size and shape as a wine bottle, but black with fluid inside.

He tossed it out over the edge of the roof.  Ghosts scattered, backing up, while the other enemies in civilian clothing were oblivious.

The bottle struck hard ground, there was a flare of orange in the center, and then thick smoke filled the area.

He said something else that I couldn’t make out.

Each tromp of the Beast’s feet made my teeth clack together.  He was one street over, rounding the corner behind us, turning, approaching the corner that turned onto this street.

Helen dropped, hugging the roof’s peak.

I tugged Lillian’s arm, hauling her down.  I dug fingers beneath thick, wet, freezing shingles for a grip.  Others were doing the same.

The superweapon of Brechwell Academy lunged ’round the corner, not slowing, heedless of potential obstacles in its way.

Had someone taken a toad, a mammoth, a bull and a rhino and kept the most brutish features of each, they would have been in the right ballpark for the Brechwell Beast.  It was wide, muscular, and built to plow forward, with no sign that it was built to stop.  Its chest was triangular and deep enough to scrape the ground, even as powerful limbs carried it forward.  Tusks extending from the corner of its mouth scraped against the road and the sides of buildings, the curve of them keeping them from catching on anything, and horns extended around the top, doing much the same.  At the shoulder -the shoulders and upper parts of its forelimbs were perhaps its largest feature, I noted- it stood three and a half stories tall.

It was armored, something grown rather than hewn from metal, the plates white-gray in color, edges sharpened, layered over one another.  The plates at the chest scraped the ground like the horns and tusks did, and the plates across its back gave it a serrated appearance.  What I could see between and beneath armor plates suggested that the Beast had no lack of protection – it alternated from layers of heavy scale that was probably armor unto itself and skin that looked like it was nothing but callus and scar tissue.

The street rumbled, windows threatening to rattle out of panes as the Beast made its approach, and I found the vibration of its movement threatening to tear my fingers from the shingles.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hang on before it was halfway down the street to us.

It reached the ‘u’ bend in the road, with us at the middle of the bend.  Its full weight slammed against the building faces, and momentum carried the shock of the impact straight through to us.

I wasn’t even sure what happened.  In one moment, I was on the rooftop.  Then it was like I’d been hit across face, neck, chest and stomach with a physical blow.  In the next, I wasn’t touching anything solid.

A full second passed before my right shoulder scraped roof.  My right foot and ass touched the roof next, and I had my bearings.  A moment later, my backpack caught on the roof, and I started spiraling out, head going more down, feet more up.

I was halfway down the roof, sliding down faster than I could’ve run, and there was only an abyss below me, darker than the sky above.

My arms went out for traction, heels of my hand scraping against the rough texture of the shingles, and as I started to correct the spin, I brought one leg out, my pants leg and the flesh nearest the bone of my shin tearing on contact with the roof.

Belly down, more points of contact.  I was hugging the roof, trying not to do anything that would make me spin and keep the momentum going through another venue.  Three quarters of the way down.

In the engulfing darkness below, I could see a vague shape in gray, lit indirectly by the fire around a distant burning building, bounced off a cloud and down into the shadows beneath me.

A tree, but one too distant to reach with a timely leap, let alone a skid and fall.

The flare of hope died, but in its place I managed rage and fury.

I will not die here!

‘Oh, I knew Sy would do himself in eventually.’

I will not let them make remarks about how I was hoist by my own petard!

I shifted my weight.  Seconds away from going over the edge, I raised both feet and stuck one arm out, no longer trying to slow my descent.  I’d slowed, but it would never be enough, even if the roof was dry, if I wasn’t wearing a damn raincoat.

There was no light here, nothing to hint or illuminate my situation as I reached the end.  I reached into darkness, slamming my feet down at an angle.

My feet found the gutter, wedging into the space.  My tired, cold fingers found the edge of it, too.  Momentum carried me down and forward, and my shoes popped out of the gutter, kicking shingle on the way up and out.  A flap caught the meager light as it flew through the air, joined by one of my shoes.

I grit my teeth, bracing myself, as my lower body swung down, all of my weight jerking hard my fingers hard against the edge of the gutter, a wooden trough nailed to the eaves.  I heard wood and metal cry out in their individual ways, threatening to pull free of where it had been secured to the wall.

My other hand went up, punching skyward in an effort to reach high enough, and found a grip.

Panting, hurting in a dozen places, I stayed right where I was, and found enough breath to whistle.

I could feel the Brechwell Beast continuing on its way, rounding a corner, then passing somewhere to my right.  Each movement jarred me, and made the water that sat at the bottom of the gutter splash out, spattering me.

Catcher appeared in my view, mancatcher in one hand, touching the roof, the other extended out for balance, feet spread wide.  He eased his way down to me.

“You could have lost the pack,” he said.  “Shrug your shoulders, let it fall.  That has to be a solid stone of weight weighing you down.”

“Heavier.  It’s all books.”

“Point stands.”

“I’m okay,” I said.  “If it really came down to it, I’d let him fall.”

“Him?”

“It.  The bag.  Let me up, will you?”

“Hm.  Take this,” he said, “and don’t haul me down over the edge.”

He extended his poke, the spiked mancatcher end, and I shifted my grip to one arm, the entire arm and hand trembling as I reached up and through the closed metal ring to grip the pole just beyond.

I had to passively let him haul me up and over, because planting a foot on the edge and pulling myself up threatened to pull him down at the same time.  Once I was high enough, I found a foothold in the gutter.  A moment later I had one hand and both feet on the roof.

“Everyone okay?”

“Yes.  I had to save Lillian before I saved you.  I got her before she fell as far as you did, and she fell the other way.  Dog got Petey.”

“Good,” I said.  “Thank you.”

He gave me a simple nod.

I kept one hand on the mancatcher as we made our way to the peak.

The bells continued to toll as we rejoined the others.  I reached out with my less-sore left hand and took Lillian’s, noting how her hair was sticking up on one side.  She had a bit of a scrape too, and it looked like her ear was bleeding.

I looked down at the street where Catcher had created the cloud of smoke.  It didn’t look like they’d gotten the door open.  There was carnage, a body severed in half, no doubt sandwiched between wall and a sweeping tusk, and the lower body wasn’t visible or distinguishable.  There were meaty bits amid the streak of flesh and blood, too ruined for me to tell what it was supposed to be.

“Next time,” Gordon said, “We position better.”

I nodded, then I smiled, “It has to have reached them by now.”

“Probably.”

“Good to walk?” he asked, glancing at one of my legs.

I nodded.

We made our way in the direction we’d estimated Fray’s meeting spot to be.  As we walked, I pulled my raincoat off, freeing one arm from sleeve and strap of backpack before letting go of Lillian’s hand and doing the same with the other.  I let the raincoat fall to the roof before pulling the pack on again.

There was a crash a few streets over.  A plume of dust or smoke rose from the impact site.

Dog huffed.

“Going ahead,” Catcher said, as he increased his pace.  “Don’t fall again.”

The streets below us were getting wider, and I realized we were approaching the city center.  There were a few more patches of gore where the Beast had torn past bystanders, but less than I might have liked.

We crossed a bridge and another section of rooftops, and reached the base of another tower, overlooking a plaza.  It was an open area like we’d seen in the Academy, broken up by patterns in how the road was drawn out, with gardens in the spaces between the individual footpaths and a fountain in the center, set low to the ground.  The Beast’s tusk had already torn through two opposing walls of the fountain, and a foot might have crushed another.  Destroyed wagons and stalls littered the area already.

There was a building that might have been a town hall, a hospital, and another set of larger buildings I couldn’t label.  The Beast was here, with freedom to move as it pleased.   The white of the thing’s tusks was stained with mud, debris and gore.  Its eyes were dark compared to the mask it had been fitted with.

Objectively, it was beautiful.  Now that it wasn’t charging right for me, I could see the patterns on the armor, a mingling of old damage that had been left alone rather than repaired, and decorative etchings.  Rainwater ran down the armor, pausing and helping catch the light amid the etchings.  It looked like the lines of a maze.

Rifles fired from windows, and I suspected they might have been exorcists.  The Beast was too far away, and the rifles, as powerful as they were, were far too little to stop the Beast, even if they got past the armor.

But the noise and the patter of bullets against armor did get the creature’s attention.  It turned, focused on the source, and then charged from across the plaza.

I imagined the people inside the building were doing much what we were.  Though we weren’t the target, we scrambled to put distance between ourselves and the impact site.

The Beast’s tusks retracted.  Horns didn’t, but it lowered its head so the points of the horns were aimed almost straight down.  It didn’t have a neck, only muscle and shoulder, and thus served as a massive battering ram, nearly as tall and far stronger than the building it assaulted.

We had a fair distance, but I still lowered myself, pulling off the pack, and braced for impact.

The crack of it made my thoughts skip, and the impact resounded, distorting the regular rhythm of bells.  My vision jolted, and the fact that people manning nearby lights at the towers were jarred as well made the entire scene seem to wobble.  The stone could have taken cannon fire and withstood it.  The Beast didn’t care.  It slammed through a foot of stone blocks with as much ease as Dog might a wooden door, plunging head and shoulders into the building.

Forelimbs reached up, scrabbling for purchase, and its shoulders heaved upwards against yet-unbroken stone, splitting it and sending it sliding down either side of the Beast’s back.  The feet were reaching up to the first floor, straining to reach the second, and tore the floors down and away instead.

Huffing, puffing, the superweapon bucked, horns spearing up, striking at the floor above and the exterior wall, bringing more debris down.

I doubted anyone inside had survived that.  Tough luck to anyone who lived upstairs or downstairs from that particular group.

It tried to retreat out, and its horns snagged on the stone masonry.  It was a hair away from breaking the stone, but it didn’t haul itself free.  Instead, the Beast remained where it was, huffing, puffing.  Then it yawned, with no air entering or leaving its mouth.

“Cover your nose and mouth!” Lillian shrieked.   Then, in her haste to follow through with her own action, she got out another incomplete phrase, “Eyes!”

I allowed myself a peek as I tucked nose and mouth into the crook of my elbow, lowering myself.

The Beast was letting a dark fog creep out of its mouth, filling the cavity of the ruined building in front of it.

The fog wasn’t reaching us.

I started to lower my arm.  Lillian reached over and jerked it back up into place.

Something flickered.  Like tentacles snaking through the dark fog, fire reached out.  I brought my other arm up to protect my eyes as the fire expanded to find other pockets that would ignite, then others, swelling-

Our position on the far side of the roof, with the roof’s peak between us and the Beast prevented the worst of the detonation from reaching us.  Everything else was silenced by the crack, even Beast and warning bells, and then, as if all of the sound had been caught up and thrown our way, it rushed at us, a violent wind and torrent of noise.  I could hear glass breaking.

“Don’t breathe!” Lillian called out, voice muffled.  It sounded like her voice was strained, as if she was digging for the last scraps of air in her lungs to give the order.

I remained where I was, face buried in the crooks of my elbows, hunched over the peak of the roof.

I felt my thoughts start to waver, my vision going dark at the edges, as my lungs burned of a need for more oxygen.  The bells were resuming, and the deep thuds of the Beast’s footsteps shook the building and vibrated in the core of me, straining my already tenuous control over my struggling lungs and throat.

But when a doctor-in-training said not to breathe, one listened.  When they ran, one ran.  When they said ‘oh shit’, one ran and held their breath at the same time.

I was so focused on the singular act of fighting every bodily impulse that I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing as someone heaved in a breath.  I registered, and chanced opening my eyes.  Lillian had her mouth covered, but her eyes were open.  She stared into my eyes.

Three seconds passed.

Then she took in a breath.

I allowed myself to breathe, joined by others.  We got our wind, and watched as the Beast assaulted another, shorter building, trampling it to the ground.

I looked over my shoulder at the building it had already attacked.  The back end had blown out, and parts had collapsed.  Absolutely nothing still lived there.

“Everyone okay?” Lillian asked.

There were nods all around.

“The gas,” Petey said.  “What is it?  I might have breathed some in.”

“Probably a nerve gas,” Lillian said.  “If he’s about twenty years old, then he’s part of the Wynn generation of warbeasts.  A lot of them made their own from internal waste and byproducts.  I’ve read up on it, a little extra because Ibott said he was thinking about giving Helen a reserve.”

“That was a no,” Helen said.

“You’re probably immune, by the way.”

“Neat.”

“What would happen if we breathed it in?” Gordon asked.

“At this distance, that concentration, carried by the explosion?  Probably nothing.”

“Then-”

“Only probably.  But if you were unlucky, your throat might stop working, or it wouldn’t work as well, or you’d lose some function in your eyes.  If we weren’t wearing clothes, we might lose sphincter control.  Maybe bladder control, for the girls.”

“Not the guys?”

“I’m not going to get into anatomy 101, Sy,” Lillian said.  “Doesn’t matter anyway, unless you’re taking your pants off.”

“Don’t tempt him,” Mary said.

“Hey!” I protested, to Mary.  Then to Lillian, I said, “And it does too matter, I like my sphincter control.”

“We’re all glad for your sphincter control,” Gordon said.  “You’d be more unpleasant to be around if you didn’t have any.”

More unpleasant?”

“Enough,” Mary said.  “Look.”

The Brechwell Beast was taking a side road.  The lights were leading it on its way.

I raised myself up and pulled my clammy shirt away from my chest, trying to make heads or tails of the runny lines there.

“It’s headed in the right direction,” Gordon said.

“Oh, good,” I said.

“You got the distraction you wanted.  They’re probably quaking in their boots,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Now what?”

“We follow.”

“Okay,” he said.  “While we’re doing that, let’s keep an eye out for one of those rifles.  If it can hurt the Brechwell Beast, I wouldn’t mind having one for myself.”

I nodded.  The wreckage of the building would be too much trouble to go through.

The Engineer and Petey stared.  Petey was especially quiet right now.

“They open and close the gates, to control which routes the Beast can and will travel. It prefers lit area, I guess?” I asked.

“Don’t most of us?” Helen asked.

“Point.  It reaches the area we mentioned to the Wry Man, and then, what, they shut the gates and trap it and our enemies in the same space?  They hide indoors and…”

Gordon said, “Presumably, the Brechwell Beast pulls the same trick it just did.  Fills the area with gas, then ignites it.  Nerve gas finishes off those the fire doesn’t.”

I thought of how the horns had caught.  “If it’s trapped.”

Gordon nodded.

I looked at Mary.  “Is that okay?  Percy might be with them.”

She flinched visibly at the mention of the name.  “I’d rather get him alive.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if we didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to believe he wasn’t a clone, that this wasn’t a trick.”

I nodded slowly.

“I’ve thought about it a lot.  The Percy thing,” she said, her voice quiet.  “I know how it looks and sounds.”

“We trust you,” Lillian jumped in.  “Or I do, at least.”

“I do too,” I said.  “I believe you.  I think you’re right.  Though you just put a nasty thought in my head.  I’d really hate to find out that the corpse of Fray was a clone, and that the real her was running around somewhere.”

“You might be getting ahead of yourself a little,” Gordon said.

“More than a little,” I admitted. “Let’s go.”

We rounded the perimeter of the oval plaza, picking our way carefully over the portion of roof that was still intact over the ruined, fire-charred stonework.  Helen, Mary and I went first, verifying that the ground was steady, before the others.  Petey was heavy and the Engineer was heavier still.  The dense, hefty body of the machine man was on the most precarious point of a stretch with nothing but thick wooden beams when a somewhat distant impact rocked the city.  He wobbled, found his balance, and hopped to safer ground.

“He’s there,” Gordon said.  “Fray’s area.”

“You sure?”  Petey asked.

“Sure as dammit,” he said.

A moment after he’d finished speaking, there was a flicker of fire.  It took a full second for the rumble of the shockwave to sweep past us.

“So soon?” I asked.

“No,” Gordon said, under his breath.

“No?  Fray’s doing?  She’s blowing it up?”

“No,” Gordon said.  He pointed.  “If I’m right… then the Beast is there…”

He moved his finger.  “The explosion-”

Another explosion occurred, this one close enough that I could get a sense of the particulars, that it was more than one thing detonating in close succession, in two very close-by locations.  There was another.

Gordon’s finger moved each time.

“Screams,” Helen said, “Some nearby.  It’s a signal.”

“Down!” he shouted.

We got down.

The remainder of the explosions sounded.  There was one at the north end of the plaza.

They were hiding indoors.  They had access to buildingsFray’s people are scattered around the area, some on watch, waiting in windows with rifles in hand… but they’re also guarding something.

Caches.

I could see the damage at the north end.  The front and back faces of the building were ruined.  The floor was intact, but light did shine through.

“Fray’s making her move,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” Petey said.

“She’s freed the Beast of Brechwell,” I said.  “No, not free, but-”

“Unleashed,” Helen said.

They can’t use the gates to steer it anymore.  It won’t be trapped.  Fray has an escape route, and the Beast…

…Brechwell belongs to the Beast, for now.

I smiled.

“Come on, and hurry,” I said, talking through the grin.  “She’s given her response, and we’re still ahead.  We’ve just got to take advantage before she gets away.  We can get her.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.06 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Periodic gunshots cut through the sound of the bells and the roars and crashes of the Beast’s rampage.  Striving to find safe ground, some of the members of Fray’s group had started to climb towers.  The rifle shots that didn’t hit were a form of discouragement and warning.  The ones that did hit were even more effective at achieving those same two goals.

On the rooftop, we had the benefit of being able to see over the other rooftops and locate the Brechwell Beast.  The people on the ground didn’t- for them, there wasn’t a good way of distinguishing how far away the Beast was.  It was as large as a wealthy man’s house and I very much suspected it was designed to create noise and make things rattle to batter at the enemy’s psyche.

Tough enough to hold its own in a knock-down, drag-out fight with cannons and artillery, it wasn’t even playing that fair.  When it moved and when it made contact, it was with speed and devastating force.

In the distance, the Beast was working on plowing its way through a gap that explosions had created.  I heard rifle shots, and saw the Beast react.  It backed out of the gap, and began charging back into the designated area, searching for the attackers.

A clever trick, one that kept the Beast out of the city as a whole.  But it wouldn’t work forever.

“That has to be it!” Gordon called out.

It was a cluster of buildings that stood taller than the rest.  The style was slightly different, the design ostentatious, with access controlled by arches, opened further by explosions.  Looking at the road, as we got closer, there were more wagons and carriages set to either side of the road, or parked in little archways beside residences.

A number of bystanders, too, people bolting along the roads leading to the building.

It was possible there were people caught out after dark, but I doubted it.  Any ‘bystander’ here had to be assumed to be in Fray’s employ.  The guns many carried and the company they kept were damning.

The Beast was drawing closer.

A door opened.  A man shouted, waving them inside.  Another group that would dodge the monster.

“Oh no,” Lillian said.  “No, no, no.”

She was looking at the door.

I looked closer, and I could make out a shape at the man’s side.  In my haste to assess the situation, I’d taken a mental shortcut, figuring the lump at the man’s side to be an overlarge leg.  A detail held at the back of my mind until I could put all my thoughts in the right order.

We needed to get down to the street level, cross, and then deal with the group, and an otherwise unassuming man with that misshapen a leg was probably going to be less of a threat.  Less mobile, a single leg wasn’t about to be something dangerous.

But as I tapped into that impression of the man, recognized the lump, and processed what it was.  I knew before I even double-checked what I was seeing.

“Man with a little girl just let a group of rebellion thugs and some Ghosts into his house, to save them from the Brechwell Beast!” I called out.

“Sympathizer?” Gordon asked.

Oh, that would be so easy if it were true.

Lillian squeezed my wrist.

“Let’s assume no!” I called out.

The Beast was drawing nearer.

“The Beast passes, we go down behind it!” I called out.  “Cross street, get inside, stop them!”

“I thought we were going after Fray!” Gordon shouted.

“Never the plan!  Hit edge groups!  I explain after!”

The noise of the Beast’s one-creature stampede was starting to drown out my words.

The Beast appeared, fumes trailing from the corner of its mouth, eyes hidden by the armored mask it had been fitted with.  It raked against the side of the buildings we were atop, and the rooftops vibrated.  The Engineer punched an armored fist through the shingles to get a grip on the infrastructure beneath, extending an arm to keep me and Lillian from falling, the hand clasping Petey’s hand.  Gordon and Mary seemed to have a handle on their own business, and on Hubris.

Helen, well, Helen had a way of being the exception to the rule.  I had trouble thinking of a scenario where she would be physically thrown from a rooftop.

The Beast’s momentum carried it into the buildings on the other side of the street, as it rounded a ‘u’ bend directly in front of us.  It passed us on the other side, moving in the other direction.

By the look of things, it would reach Fray’s area before terribly long.  It remained to be seen if the explosions and damaged buildings would change its route.

Probably would.

But our enemies were in disarray, and the seemingly impenetrable perimeter had been breached, with everyone running for the hills.  The key was to capitalize on this.

As soon as we could walk, we made our way to the tower at the end of the row.  Helen, Gordon and Mary gripped the sides of the ladder, sliding rather than climbing down, Gordon doing it with one hand, the other holding Hubris to his back.  I did the same, even as my hands and one ankle ached.

Pain didn’t often get in my way, I knew how to manage it from long experience and a deeper perspective than most, but it did exist.  I knew I was hurt, I’d probably lightly twisted something, and too much more activity would see me doing more harm to myself.

I couldn’t have that.

Lillian was apparently too scared to slide, but she made some effort and managed a halting progression.  Petey and the Engineer were taking the rungs one at a time.

“Come on, almost there,” I said, anxious.

“I’m-” she slid a distance, the sides of the ladder already wet from the passage of everyone before her, “-working on it.”

“Classic white, today, huh?”  I said, staring up.

“You’re the worst, Sy,” she said.  “I knew, moment you got on the ladder before me, that you were going to say something.”

“But you didn’t stop me,” I said.  “I’ve heard rumors you like the attention.”

“Scurrilous lies,” she said.  She hopped off the ladder, and her face was bright pink.  She started to kick my shin, and then stopped, seeing how bloody and ragged it was.  She settled for hitting me in the shoulder instead.

I glanced up, decided the solo operators were too slow to be useful, and grabbed Lillian’s hand, tugging her behind me.

By the time Lillian and I caught up with the other Lambs, Mary was limp, and Helen was banging on the door.  I rushed to Mary’s side.

Gordon signaled.  Trick.

I tapped Mary’s shoulder, then signaled, me.

She rose from her sitting position, and I let myself fall into Gordon’s arms like a swooning maiden, just in time for the door to open.

Helen was already mid-act.  Her voice was a sob as much as it was words.  “Please, help, please!”

The man stood in the doorway, looking between us in confusion.

“Please!” Helen sobbed.  “He’s hurt!”

“Don’t move him,” he said.

“Have to,” Gordon said.  He wasn’t that bad of an actor either.  “It might come back.”

I could see the indecision on the man’s face.  “Okay.”

Gordon and Mary dragged me.  I was already scraped and bleeding from my earlier fall, and I made a better victim.  Mary did have the benefit of being the same gender as the man’s daughter, but it was too hard a sell.

I glanced back to see that the Engineer was at the bottom of the ladder, Petey only halfway down.  The man hadn’t noticed, even with the lights illuminating the street.

The moment Lillian was inside and the door closed, Mary drew a knife, pressing the tip to the man’s gut, without actually penetrating cloth and skin.

I could see the shock and fear on his face, and I knew he wasn’t one of them.  A bystander who’d thought he was doing the right thing.

Eyes wide, he asked, “What are you-”

Mary pressed a finger to her lips.

I rose to my feet, taking the knife from Mary, taking up her position of holding the man at knifepoint.  I signaled to the others.  Ghost.  Alive.

I got nods in response.  Mary, Gordon, Hubris, and Helen fanned out through the house, hand signals flying.

Mary passed through a door to the left, then exited a moment later, without a sound, following a few paces behind Helen.  Helen paused long enough to get a response from Mary, then the two girls headed down the hallway.

Gordon and Hubris went through a door to the right.  I heard gunshots, and a short bark followed by growling.

A man with a dog latched onto his elbow staggered into the hallway.  He looked in the opposite direction, further down the hall, then looked at us, alarm and confusion on his face.

An ordinary soldier, if I had to guess, or someone who was taking the drugs, remarkably young.

Then again, war often involved the young.  It would be too tidy and polite if the only price for war was the lives of old men.

Gordon re-entered the hallway, holding a rifle with a bayonet blade on it.  Not one of the exorcists, sadly.

Hubris let go of the arm, then went for a knee, wrenching and twisting.  Stronger than even the average fighting dog, he was able to topple the larger man.

Almost casually, Gordon thrust the blade of the bayonet at the area where shoulder joined neck.  A twist and a sharp motion carved out the front of the man’s throat.  Blood sprayed.

A bloodstained Gordon took in the surroundings, then tossed his rifle at Lillian, an underhand lob that left the stained blade pointed skyward through the entire trip.

His hands free, he signaled, two, then disappeared back into the room he’d just left.  He emerged with another rifle.  He didn’t look back our way as he headed after Mary and Helen.

“What’s going on?” the man I was holding at knifepoint asked.

“Please tell me there’s a rule about opening your door when the bells are ringing?” I asked.

“There is, but-”

“You broke the rule,” I said.  “Now you’ve got blood on your nice rug here, and a dead body in your living room.”

I heard gunshots upstairs.

“My daughter-”

“Might die,” I said.

“Sy!” Lillian admonished me.

“She might,” I said.  “We’re here, at least, we might be able to stop them.”

“You could phrase it nicer.”

Nice?  You think anything about this here is nice?”

“I think it’s nice that you wanted to come here to help, at least,” she conceded.

My finger reached over and touched Melancholy’s ring.  I rotated it around my thumb.

“Sure,” I said.  Where were Petey and the Engineer?

Too much could go wrong tonight, but the worst eventuality was that we’d hit our stride and then discover at the worst possible moment that we would end up having a problem with our guest members.  The possibility kept recurring in my mind.

I gestured at Lillian, watch, and indicated the door.

She cracked it open, then opened it wider, waving.

The Engineer and Petey approached.  The man of meat and metal ducked his head to fit into the space.  I could hear too many wet sucking noises as he passed within a foot of me.

“Couldn’t find you,” the Engineer said.

“Right, sorry,” I said.  I’m so used to having everyone paying effective attention to everyone else.

I took my knife, and handed it to Petey, “Watch him.”

Petey nodded once.

“Upstairs,” I told the Engineer, pointing.

He took off running.

When I took off, Lillian followed.

“I was going to have us come here anyway,” I said, quiet, “Before I learned about the man having the kid, being a probable innocent.  Can’t take moral credit.”

“I thought so,” Lillian muttered.  “But her father at least got to see us as good guys after hearing me say it, right?”

My eyebrows went up.

I mentally awarded Lillian a gold star for that.

We reached the top of the stairs.  There was something of a standoff.  A man stood at the far end of the hallway, back to a door, a gun to the head of a little girl in lace-covered shorts and nightshirt.  She was holding back sobs, eyes red.

“Stay put!” the man was shouting at the Engineer.

“What’s our timeline, Sy?” Gordon asked, quiet.

“We need to move fast.”

“Thought so,” he spoke under his breath.  He turned his head more, acknowledging Lillian’s presence.

I knew what he was thinking.  If we pushed ahead, aiming for the element of surprise, then there was something of a chance that Lillian could patch up the damage or at least keep the girl alive.

I touched the ring at my thumb again.

“But don’t,” I said.

“What the hell are you brats muttering about!?” the man shouted at us.  His shout made the young hostage wince.

“I’m telling my buddies not to kill you just yet, limpdick!” I called out.

I saw a measure of incredulity and anger cross his face.  Emotions were too high for him to bury all of his emotions.

Gordon put one hand behind his back.  He gestured.  Forward.

Then he indicated off to one side.  Not me and Lillian, but the Engineer.

I was in a position to push the Engineer’s rear end.  It squelched more like a sodden sponge than anything else.  My skin crawled.

He glanced down at me with one good eye, and I made a little gesture with my finger, point-point.

He took one half-step forward.  Gordon stumbled.

“Don’t move!” the man with the gun asked.  “Don’t you damn well move!”

“I have to ask,” I said, “When did you stop fighting for the people of this country and start seeing them as leverage?”

“No head games!  No questions!  If you try to get clever, I’m shooting!”

“What do you want?” Helen asked.  Her voice was calm, a counterpoint to the man’s.  “What steps do we need to take to take to get you to let her go?”

“Moving toward me isn’t one of them.  Neither is touching those weapons.  Drop ’em.”

One by one, everyone put their weapons down, borrowed rifles clattering on hardwood and against stairs.

Something was off, I noticed, as I saw the group bending down and dropping their weapons.

Oh.  Hubris was gone.  The stumble was a distraction.  Hubris had used the opportunity to bolt.

Gordon had this situation in hand.  He had a better view of the situation.  He had figured something out.

“Now,” the man said.

Wait, stop talking,” Gordon said.  There was a pause, quiet but for the sound of bells, the distant rumbles of the Beast, and the sniffles of a girl three or four years younger than I was.  “Okay.  Go.

“Go?” the man asked.

Without a noise, Hubris leaped.  Teeth seized the man’s weapon hand, carrying it to one side, well clear of the young girl’s head.  A moment later, he was fighting, wrestling, wrenching, clamping deep into the man’s hand, making him double over in pain and from Hubris’ sheer weight.

“Engineer?” Gordon asked, stepping back out of the way, extending a hand in invitation.

The Engineer marched down the hall.  The man who’d taken the little girl hostage saw him coming, but his movements were hampered by the tugs and biting.

The Engineer’s fist struck his head, compressed it against the doorframe  and cracked it like a melon.  Hubris bounded back to Gordon.  The girl screamed.

Helen extended her arms for a hug, and the girl threw herself at Helen like a drowning person might reach for a rope.

“Two more,” Gordon said.

“They were up here,” Helen said.  “I heard them.”

In close confinesGhosts.

The Engineer stepped away from the man’s corpse, stepping into another room.  I saw only a glimpse as he bodily threw a piece of furniture across the room.

Rooting them out of hiding places.

My mind was in top gear as I took in the layout, trying to figure out the paths available to them.  Four rooms, two on either side of the hallway, with a small closet or bathroom at the end.

Engineer in the further-left room.  Helen halfway down the hall.  They weren’t about to try to squeeze past Lillian, me, and Mary.

Hubris had ducked into the left room, crossed to the room the Engineer was in now, the further room, and re-entered the hallway.  There was no doorway allowing passage between the two rooms to the right in that same way.

Where were they hiding, and how would they try to escape?

I reached out and took the rifle from Lillian.  “Gordon.”

He turned to look at me.

I gestured.  Gordon obeyed, stepping into the same room the Engineer was in, Hubris following.

I tightened my grip.  Mary had a throwing knife.

Furniture crashed against the wall.

“Got one!” Gordon called out.

In that same moment, a Ghost appeared from the room just to our left.  Fast, silent, I was expecting her and I was still caught off guard.

Rather than try to aim and shoot, I stepped forward, swiping.  It wasn’t a serious cut, no force behind it, not fast enough a swing.  But the Ghost stepped aside to avoid it.

She had to get by Helen to reach the available window to the right.  That limited her path.

I aimed and pulled the trigger.  The little girl in Helen’s arms yelped at the sound.  The shot was a miss, the Ghost didn’t even bother to dodge.

Mary raised a hand, firing a pistol, and the Ghost did dodge that shot.

She didn’t get any further.

She’d delayed too much, and Helen had fingers latched into the side of the Ghost’s tunic.

“Keep her alive,” I said.

“M’kay,” Helen replied.

Fabric tore, the Ghost fought to get back and pull free, striking at Helen’s face, but it was too little too late.  Helen didn’t react to being struck, reached out and wrapped one hand and wrist around the Ghost’s thigh.

Helen collapsed against the Ghost as if she’d been pulled into position.  The Ghost’s silent struggles got it nowhere.  Helen crawled up to a better perch, hugging the Ghost’s back, pinning its arms against its sides.

“You.  Little girl,” I said, to the young girl.

She was wide eyed, barely registering.

“Go downstairs to your daddy now,” I said.

She didn’t listen.

Why were ordinary people so frustrating?

“Don’t you want to see your dad?”

“Come here,” Lillian said, voice gentle.  “Come on, take my hand.”

The girl reached out, hesitant.  Lillian took her hand firmly, and Mary and I stepped to opposite ends of the hallway as Lillian led her down the stairs.

“They wait in the living room,” I said.  “Send Petey up, maybe.  But come back, we might need you.”

“Alright,” Lillian said.

The remainder of our group approached Helen.  I had a view through the one doorway to the room the Engineer had overturned.  A dresser was lying on its side with two bare legs sticking out from under it.  It might have been comical in a different context.

The Engineer was stronger than the Ghost was fast, apparently.  I wondered if Gordon had helped.

“Well, we got your captive,” Gordon said.  “You said you’d explain later.”

“I did,” I said.  “You okay there, Helen?”

“It’s pleasant, being like this,” Helen said, smiling.  “Like I’m home.”

“Good.  Alright.  Well, this is a bit of a shot in the dark, but we know what Fray’s going to be doing, if she isn’t doing it already.  She’s making a run for it.  Everything she’s been doing up until now has been about consolidating the factions.  Presumably.  I’m guessing it’s going to take a short time to get everything communicated and make sure that the perimeter groups have been pulled in.  Too many valuable people at the edges, I imagine.”

“I imagine,” Gordon said.

“Big problem is the Ghosts.  They’re too effective as scouts.  Make her group too slippery.  What I’m hoping is that we can get this one to make a distress cry.   Maybe, possibly, we can create an illusion of dangerous numbers or a standing army.  Fray tries to make a run for it, and a Ghost passes on a message that there’s something bad in her way.  Make her second guess.  We turn her tools against her, take away that security.  With the weight of a new coalition on her shoulders, maybe that’s reason to make her balk.”

“Have to move her, get ahead of Fray,” he said.

“Engineer is strong, can carry her.”

The Engineer nodded.

“There’s another problem,” Helen said.

“Don’t tell me that.  Coming from you-”

“Their language doesn’t work like that.”

My heart fell.

“It’s more nuanced, and I’m not sure if I know enough about how to nuance,” Helen said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Damn.

“This is why you should share your plans before, not after,” Gordon said.

“I was sort of out of breath, and I wasn’t sure what the enemy group would look like.  If there weren’t ghosts, the plan was going to change.”

“Being out of breath isn’t an excuse.  I’ve been telling you to exercise more,” Mary said.

“And you can let us help come up with plans, sharing what you have.  This is definitely not the first or the fifth or the tenth time we’ve told you this,” Gordon said.

I looked around for an ally to help back me up as the pair ganged up on me, and felt only the conspicuous empty space to my right.

From the sound of it, Lillian and Petey were making their way upstairs.  Small consolation.  Lillian was as sure as anyone to get up my butt about what I was doing wrong.

“Sy’s plan might actually work, though,” Helen said.

My savior!

“I know,” Gordon said.  “But I wanted to let him stew.”

“You pimpledick.”

“I did too,” Mary said.  “You missed the hand signal.”

“Pimpleboob.  What’s the new plan?”

Gordon didn’t answer, looking smug as he scratched the top of Hubris’ head.

“Time’s a wasting.  Didn’t you hear me earlier?” I asked.

“I heard,” Gordon said.  He didn’t elaborate.

I could have throttled him, if I wasn’t sure he would win that struggle and make me look bad in the process.

“It’s Petey,” Helen said.  “We can use Petey.  They’re not saying because it doesn’t matter.”

“You’re just about my favorite, Helen,” I said.

“Good,” she said.  “Buy me a treat later.”

“Remind me?”

She nodded.

Petey made her way up the stairs.  She looked like she’d been lightly boiled, she was so red and sweaty.  Lillian was right behind her, hair still mussed up.

“Can you take the Ghost?” Gordon asked.

Petey scowled.  “I’d really rather not.”

“It’s mission critical,” Mary said.

“It’s like sleeping on a bed of swords,” Petey said.

“Mission critical, time critical,” Mary said.

“We did say we’d help you out,” Helen said.  “We got you what you need to do the most damage.  Right here.”

Petey stared down at the Ghost.  I heard a sigh.

“When I’m moving, don’t interfere.  Don’t ‘help’ me,” Petey said.

“Why?” Helen asked.

“Because it’s irritating,” Petey said.

She dropped clumsily to the ground, sitting in an almost-cross-legged position, attention on the Ghost.

I leaned against the doorframe, saw Lillian, and then noticed her hair.  I reached over to the side of her head and swept my hand through the bit of hair that was sticking up.  Lillian started using her fingers to comb it.

There were wet, sucking sounds as Petey worked, her body rocking back and forth a little.  Gordon stepped behind her to keep her from falling backward.

“You all knew what Petey was, huh?”

“Just about,” Gordon said.

“You’re all the worst,” I said.  “Filling each other in is important.”

“I’m going to remember you said that,” he told me.  “And I’m going to use it against you so many times.”

I rolled my eyes.

Petey wasn’t quick.  I saw that Lillian was struggling to work out the messy bit of her hair, stepped closer, and began fixing it myself, picking out bits of grit that hair had rolled itself around.

I was preoccupied enough I didn’t see Petey right away.

A fetus, crawling across the hardwood, skin almost translucent, with far too many veins spiderwebbing across the surface.  It had been grafted with additional parts, I noted, insect legs that gave it more ability to move in the outside world.  All the same, it was no larger than my two fists put side by side.

I remembered what the others had said.  That Petey was about our age.

A twelve-year old fetus?

As Petey made it halfway, I could see his ‘tail’.  The spinal column extended back, and was attached to a bag, half-filled with fluid.

“What’s that?”

“Brain, in a more malleable, bare-bones package,” Lillian said.  “Includes some life support.  Tiny body isn’t big enough to sustain a working, functional brain.  Life support keeps him alive until the host body adapts.”

“I’d almost think that was neat as anything I’ve heard this week,” I said, “But he’s so goddamn slow.”

“Shh,” Helen admonished me.  “He might be able to hear you.”

“I hope he can!” I said, raising my voice.  “It’s irritating to be picked up and carried over?  It’s irritating to wait!”

Petey stopped mid-crawl, turning very slowly until he was facing my general direction.  Delaying more, on purpose.

I took a step forward, and raised a foot, threatening to step on him.  Lillian grabbed me and pulled me back, before smacking me in the back of the head.

Petey resumed crawling, moving hand, foot, and spidery-limb one after the other as he approached the Ghost.  He disappeared beneath the shroud of her skirt.

“I feel a bit queasy,” Lillian said.  “I might wait downstairs.”

This is what breaks you?” I asked.  “How much blood and gore and monstrous stuff have you even seen?”

“The Ghosts are dumb,” Mary said.  “They’re like animals, with only enough cognition to play at being people, if they have a script.”

“I’m not sure that makes it any better,” Lillian said, backing down the stairs.  “Or if it does, it’s not better enough.  You can call me a crybaby all you want, Sy.”

My mouth opened, then shut.  I’d given lots of thought to the dynamics between Lambs, and to the fact that one Lamb was now gone.  Jamie had been my counterpoint, someone I could rely on when my own abilities lacked.  In that odd way, he’d been a support, someone who had my back.  He challenged me at the right times and backed me at the right times.

I was missing that, just a little bit, a fact that was highlighted by the recent conversation and teasing.  There wasn’t a need to push quite so hard here.

I fiddled with the ring at my thumb.  “Nah.  You’re good, Lil.”

“Thank you, Sy.”

She went back downstairs.  The rest of us were left to watch and wait.

Petey’s host jerked.  Helen restrained the movements.

Then the Ghost reached out one hand, giving Helen’s hip two light taps.

Helen released Petey.

Petey’s movements were awkward, clumsy, and I thought she might fall as he rose to her feet.

“Good to go?” I asked.

“Ah-” he started, but his voice was strangled.  He paused.  “Hm.”

Ghosts couldn’t speak.

“Good enough,” Gordon said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.07 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“It’s more halting, like this, but higher pitched,” Helen said, before making a series of high-pitched squealing noises that made sparks appear behind my eyes.

“Got to warn you, Helen, I almost hit you on reflex there,” Gordon said.

“Shh, Petey’s trying it.  Good.  That’s close.  But make each sound shorter, I think, and you’ll have to do it loud when it counts” Helen said, “that’s ‘many’, they did that when the building back in Radham was surrounded.  Now do this.”

Helen squealed again, in a way only young girls and very talented babies could.  She maintained the noise for three seconds, then five, then ten.

Gordon clapped his hand over Helen’s mouth just as she reached the ten second mark, which made me think he’d also been counting the seconds until she stopped.

“You could weaponize that,” I said.

Helen’s response was muffled.  Unable to turn her head, she pointed at Petey, then raised one thumb in approval.

“Think you got it,” I said.

Helen tapped twice on Gordon’s hand.  He moved it away.

“That’s a big threat.  They keep making that noise when the Superweapon is close.  Don’t do that willy-nilly, okay?  They’ll figure out you’re faking.”

“Petey knows what he’s doing,” Gordon said.

My estimation of Petey wasn’t very high.  Everything I’d seen about his coordination, his work ethic, his communication, the amount he whined, it didn’t inspire confidence.  I was left to wonder if he really did know what he was doing.

We reached the ladder, and started our climb.  The Brechwell Beast was in Fray’s general vicinity, if our experiment with the map was right.   Shots from the tower were a regular thing, now, though none seemed to be directed at us.

Further down the ladder, Helen was still coaching Petey, making an assortment of sounds.  It felt like each one was specifically designed to drill at a particular set of nerves.  Gordon was already getting irritable, but my mood, at least, was improved by the fact that things seemed to be at least partially on track.

“What’s next?” Mary asked, from above me.

“We get as close as we possibly can,” Gordon said.  “Track what they’re doing.”

“Yep,” I said.  Gordon’s on the same page as me, at least.

“We either move as a group to try and get ahead of them and disrupt their retreat, or we send Petey out alone or with a friend and do what we can independently.”

“I prefer the latter,” I said.  “They’re shaken up, there might be vulnerabilities, or information, or something we can use.”

“Thought you’d say that,” Gordon said.

The rote action of climbing up a ladder was starting to tire me out.  Muscles here and there had been strained or pushed to their limits by my earlier fall and a night of full-body exertion.  The repetitive movements were slowly and steadily making it worse.

My mind was in five different places at once, free associating.  There were too many notes to hit, here, and too many little details that tied my hands.  The rampaging superweapon wasn’t one of those details, oddly enough.  The possibility that Petey or the Wry Man could sabotage us, maintaining the general safety of the Lambs, and the time constraint were issues that I kept running into.

Start with the obvious, see if I can’t see other angles.  Frontal attack.  Obviously no.  Why not?  They’re strong, they’re prepared for a fight, we’re weak, risks the well being of Lambs.

Bait, sacrificial play.  We have three solo operators, and even only raising the idea might reveal things about them.  Too willing, unwilling, lack of cooperation.

Resources, resources, where do we have resources?  Lillian’s stuff, not good enough, Academy burning…

Environment, then.  What can we use?  What can Fray use?  She’s going to want to take the towers.  She probably already planned to.  Surest way to turn things around on us.

My thoughts continued to turn over in the back of my head, sometimes switching back and forth at a moment’s notice, while my mind’s eye was on the current prize.

Well, my eyes were on Mary, who was higher than me on the ladder.  She was wearing hose, which denied me the ability to poke fun at her and get a reaction.  Alas.

“Thinking aloud,” I said, very slowly.

“Good,” Gordon told me.

“Petey goes ahead, we flank.  The less time they can spend discussing and cooperating, the better.  If we can ratchet up pressure, distract, capitalize on their weaknesses or change their priorities, we win.  Best case scenario, they implode.  Worst case scenario, they lose time.”

“I prefer to think in terms of hard victory conditions,” Gordon said.

“If they’re still here when everyone else arrives, we win,” I said.

“Will that really do it?”

“It might not be so bad if they evacuate as a group, if they split up after, but our true ‘win’ is if they’re confined in the city when the soldiers and superweapons congregate.  After that point, things are out of our hands.  Maybe we keep going, maybe not,” I said.  “But if they can escape with everyone else here and surrounding them, then it’s really not our fault, is it?”

The question inspired a thought.  With Fray, we had to consider if we were playing straight into her hands.  Right now, assuming she wasn’t preoccupied as the mediator between two factions, she was busy anticipating my and everyone else’s next steps.  Was she counting on all of our forces assembling?  Would we surround her, only for one side to turn on fellow soldiers or deploy a weapon?

I felt like something was missing.  We needed to catch her off guard, but she’d already planned so much for what was happening right now, she had traps and countermeasures already in place, and there was no amount of thinking I could do to catch up to her.  She’d had a chance to study the area, she’d had a chance to think on this at leisure.

Every time my mind touched on the vague image of the situation I needed to contrive to put Fray on her heels, there was a lot of violence, fire, and there was a vague mental image of the Beast bearing down on her, which was an amusing mental picture, if a dark one.

It was like having my thoughts caught in an endless loop.  Needed to pressure her, catch her off guard, that was best done by tearing down everything around her, but her gathered forces probably beat the Lambs and our temporary allies in a fight, and I didn’t trust the various superweapons or soldiers on our side.  I needed to find another way to pressure her, then, but my mind kept going back to blood, explosions and tragedy as the way of achieving that.

I wondered if I’d accidentally imprinted my malleable brain with that particular pattern, creating a rut of sorts I kept falling back to.

Change tacks, abandon that line of thought.  We scout.  Need to put ourselves in the best possible position to spot any vulnerabilities, and there have to be some.  Not necessarily with her.

“We split up,” I said.  “Gives us more chances to capitalize on any mistakes or fractures.”

“Can I go with Petey?” Helen asked.

“Bad idea,” Gordon said.  “You two have a lot of the same weaknesses.”

I could have hugged Gordon.  I didn’t like trusting any of the Lambs to the company of the solo operators.  Instead, I just nodded, “Let’s say, Petey goes with… the Engineer.  Then Lambs in two discrete groups.  Not that sure I like that, I have to admit, but-”

“Why?” Mary asked.  “Why don’t you like it?”

“Because it’s… because I don’t trust myself, I don’t trust Gordon, and I don’t trust you.  Too much at stake, and I feel like we’re all emotionally compromised.”

“Gordon is?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know.  Maybe don’t pay attention to that part,” I said.  But I brought it up and you brought attention to it so it’s definitely in mind.  I lied, “He’s been working at a different rhythm all night.  Trying to prove something?”

“Have I?” Gordon asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Take my word for it?” I asked.

“I can,” he said.  He seemed very accepting of the possibility.

Not so much it matters, but I’m not about to go into detail about the fact you wanted to go with Fray last time.  This is the next best thing.

We’d reached the top of the ladder.  He climbed off, then let Hubris climb down from across his shoulders.  I wondered how tired he was, lugging a large dog up and down ladders like he was.  Anyone would be exhausted, except he was the most athletic of us.

“Well, I already know how I’m compromised,” Mary said.  She stepped off the ladder and extended a hand, helping keep me steady as I stepped onto the roof.

I could see the little mannerisms, the fidget of fingers, the way she stood a little straighter, a little more rigid, the young lady who had been raised with culture and forged into a weapon by Percy.

She didn’t like admitting personal flaws.  Gordon could do it, but for Mary, it stung.

“Sorry, Mary,” I said.  I ran my fingers through wet hair and then made a gun with my hands and touched it to the side of my head, “I’m in this weird place.  Trying to be honest, but I’m not very good at that.  I figure it’s better to say it badly or say it while stepping on toes than not to say it at all, right now.”

“Not that I’m disagreeing with this specific scenario, but don’t compromise what you’re good at,” Gordon told me.

I nodded.  I wasn’t sure what he was saying, or why, but I had the gist of it.  Maybe he’d noticed Mary’s reaction to how I’d pointed out the Percy situation.

“Which brings me to the subject of, well, you said I was off-rhythm.”

“Different rhythm,” I said.  I was a little proud of myself for remembering the exact phrasing I’d used no more than a minute ago.

“Whatever,” Gordon said.  “You called me on that, I’m calling you out.  I feel like you’re trying too much.  This doesn’t feel like our Sy.  How you’re acting isn’t quite natural or fluid.  This thing with being honest is part of it.”

“Forced,” I commented.  I extended a hand and seized Lillian’s wrist, leading her up to the apex of the roof.

“Nine months of ‘gimme’ jobs leaving you a little rusty?  I know you slip easily without practice-”

“That’s not it,” I said.

“Oh.  Okay,” he said.  He shrugged.  He wasn’t pressing any more.  He’d raised the idea, he seemed to grasp that I had a bit of an idea of what was going on, and was content to leave it at that.

In the spirit of honesty, I said, “I’m just trying to adapt.”

He clapped a hand on my shoulder.

The little gesture only made me feel an ache for Jamie, in a weird way.

I took in a deep breath, and took note of where the Beast was.  He was near another area where an gray plume of smoke was rising into the sky, periodically flickering orange from the flames beneath it.  Would he press on through and escape into another part of Brechwell?

While the other members of the group reached the rooftop, I pulled my shirt into a better position.  It was wet enough to cling to me.

The Engineer made it over the top of the ladder and handed over the rifles he was carrying.  Gordon and Mary each took one.  Petey took a third.

“That’s the sound for death, right?  If you mix the two, like you did with ‘new’ and ‘threat’, yes.  Exactly,” Helen was saying.  “Exactly like that.”

Petey only seemed to glower back in response, mouth slightly parted.

“Is Petey good to go?” Gordon asked.

“Almost,” Helen said.  “Trying to cover the bases.  Studied the captured Ghosts in Ibott’s lab as practice for my new ears.  Complex parts of the language might be tricky to do, but being loud can make up for not being very subtle, right?”

“Right,” Gordon said.

“So, just to try it out, maybe ‘new’ and ‘big’?  Follow with the lighter ‘back’ cue, without the bob.  Loud as you can.”

“What’s this?” Gordon asked.

Helen’s expression changed, as she went wide-eyed, almost horrified.  She reached out and grabbed Gordon by the shirt front.  “There’s something here!  Surprise attack, and it’s big, I’m getting out of here!”

Even knowing it was an act, I almost believed her.

“Who’s Bob?” Gordon asked.

“Bob is a verb, silly Gordon.  Like a pigeon’s head?” Helen asked.  “Except it’s a sound?”

Gordon shook his head, confused.

Lillian was the one with the answer.  “I think I might know what she means.  When a pigeon takes flight, if it’s just flying off for whatever reason, it will bob its head first.  If it’s flying off because of danger, it won’t bother, and every pigeon that sees is going to take that as a cue to fly off too-”

“-Without a bob,” I cut in.

“Yes.  Without a bob, which cues others.  That way, if one pigeon spots a predator, they all have the best chance.  Except the Ghosts do it when vocalizing, I presume,” Lillian said.

Helen nodded, emphatic,  “Every time they go someplace new, they communicate it.  They ‘bob’ when it isn’t important, but they’re still letting others know where they are.  When they don’t bob, then it’s saying-”

“That others should follow their lead,” Gordon said.  “Got it.”

I found myself wishing that worked with people.

“Petey knows some of this, probably, but doesn’t know all of the communication.  That makes it hard to be a sneaky sort of Ghost,” Helen said.  “If he keeps misusing bobs or forgetting to use them, he stands out.”

“Is he going to do the scream, the command you just did?”

“He did,” Helen said, smiling.  “They’re running.”

“And,” Mary observed, “It looks like we also signaled our friends.”

It was Dog and Catcher, with the Wry Man trailing behind.  Their initial approach seemed hurried, but as they drew nearer and had a better view of the situation, they slowed to a somewhat more relaxed pace.

“Petey, Engineer,” Gordon said.  “Figure out what you need to do to stay close enough to each other while being able to cover each other’s backs.  You can hold your own if it comes to it, Engineer?”

The Engineer nodded once.

“Better not waste any time.  Helen’s prepped you as good as you’ll get.  Go.”

“That way,” I said, pointing.

They left.

We met Dog, Catcher, and the Wry Man halfway.  Well, that wasn’t exactly true.  They covered more ground, by virtue of having more raw strength and longer legs.

“Found her,” Catcher said.  “Looped back to look for you, found him instead.”

“Any problems?” the Wry Man asked.

I shook my head.  “Got Petey a convenient new body and some quick lessons in speaking Ghost more effectively.  She’s going to throw a wrench into their ability to scout.”

“Okay,” Catcher said.  “We-”

A violent impact shook Brechwell, worse than any we’d felt yet.  I traced the roads with my eyes until I saw the plume of dust and debris further away.  It seemed the Beast had run down one city street, but from the look of it, the road was one only accessible through Fray’s hole in the wall, and the creature had charged straight into a T-shaped intersection.  Without a smooth curve in the road to guide it, it had struck a row of buildings at full force.

I looked at Gordon, Helen, and Mary, and I squeezed Lillian’s wrist.  I suspected we were all thinking along the same lines.

The Beast had escaped the track it was meant to run, free of its cage, so to speak.  The city was built to guide and confine it, and it had found a way out.

If Fray was going to make a move, assuming she knew, saw, or could intuit what had just happened, then this was her opportunity to evacuate.

“Show us where she is, now,” Gordon said.

The rain was coming down harder than before, and that had the effect of making it harder to see, our footsteps more prone to slip just a fraction.

Gordon seemed content to fill Catcher in, explaining the plan, that we’d be splitting up, what we were looking to achieve.

Having a strict goal in mind for victory was very Gordon, and in this situation, it was very useful, too.

What does Fray want?  What is her goal for victory?

I had spent far too much time thinking about Fray over the last months and years.  I had a sense of what she wanted on the surface level, to shake things up, to change the order of things.  I had a sense of what she wanted on a deeper level, to convince others that her worldview was the right one, to prove herself right.

Starting the war, releasing the experiment to sterilize and chemically leash whole swathes of the Western Crown States, it had been a way of bringing everyone around to her point of view, creating that same righteous anger at how things worked, making every man, woman, and youth feel the need to buck against the Academy’s control, retaliate against the Crown’s callousness.  She’d used her enemy’s tools against them, forcing things into play too early.

But there was a big difference between proving oneself right and proving the other guy wrong.

Bringing two factions together like she was served as another kind of validation.  Being so very right that others came around to her point of view.  I could see why she was here and why she was doing what she was doing.  I could imagine that her drive was focused by the drugs she’d taken, honing ambition and perfectionism that had already been there, as evidenced by her gray coat and the self-medicating with Wyvern.  It let her spend ten or more hours a day focused wholly on the tasks at hand.

I wished I knew her better.  I wanted to get inside her head, hit her where it hurt, peeling away the veneer, and then figure out if there was something fragile, mad, or awe-inspiring lurking beneath.

“We’re close,” Catcher spoke in his gravelly voice, the sound carrying back to the rest of us.  “See it?  She was there!”

His weapon pointed the way, the spiked head aimed at a squat, broad building.  It was part of the concentric rings that encircled another, taller building, not invisible, but easily overlooked.  To look at it, I imagined a bank or a school.

The cluster of people around the building painted the rest of the picture.  Standing guards, nervous, all keeping within a few paces of exits and escape routes.  The Beast was rampaging through nearby streets, and many of the people on the ground were flinching at every impact, as if expecting the Beast to emerge or crash through at any moment.

I imagined it was an immense amount of psychological pressure, being down there.

The rifle shots I could hear throughout the city each marked one person who’d broken and made a break for a ladder.  I could hear some close by.

A spotlight swept over us.  I saw heads raise, heard voices on the ground, and tugged on Lillian’s arm, pulling her way and over to the other side of the roof.  I ducked low, and she mimicked me, just in time for some gunshots to sound.

We were under fire, but their vantage point was awful, especially as we kept away from that side of the rooftop.  We crossed over a gate and reached a forking path.

Around the time the spotlight swept over us, momentarily blinding me, more gunshots sounded from the closest tower.  I wondered for a moment if they were firing on us, which was not impossible or even unlikely.  Then I saw him.

The man with the modified birthing saw.  I could smell fuel and see the flicker of machinery he wore, all of it keeping the weapon going.  Saw-teeth rotated around the edge of the thing at a blur, periodically sparking.  He carried a shield as tall as he was, holding it up in the direction of the nearest tower.  Bullets struck the shield and bounced off.

Mechanical saw in one hand, shield in the other, he advanced on Catcher, Dog, and the Wry Man, smiling wickedly.

The Wry Man backed away a few steps, flinching as a shot caught the edge of the roof five feet to his right.  He drew a vial from his belt and tossed it back in one gulp.

“Lambs!”  Catcher called out.  “Circle around!  We split up as planned!”

We took the other path in the fork.  It seemed fairly clear that Dog, Catcher, and the Wry Man were taking the most attention.  Gordon raised his rifle and fired, but one more gunshot was lost in the noise, not even drawing any particular attention.

The Beast slammed directly against another wall, only a few streets over, and I heard the sound of glass shattering on windows beneath us, glass and frames warping with the force of the impact.

“Stay low,” Mary spoke, only loud enough that people on the ground weren’t likely to hear.  She gestured at the same time, indicating the Beast, a relatively short distance away.

Fumes.  Gas.

Possible explosions.

Was it frustrated?

Fray’s actions regarding the Beast didn’t quite feel like it fit into her usual pattern.  Everything else she’d done had been about changing minds, often in a very aggressive manner.  Who did she convince, doing this?

It hadn’t been timed the way she’d wanted, or it wasn’t being used the way she had originally planned.

Was there a weakness?  Could I shake or break her using that desire to validate and prove her way was the right way?

I felt a bit of a chill as I considered the flip side of that same question.

There was a way to get to her.

Gordon and Mary both aimed and fired.  Those shots did get attention.  We ducked low and used the peak of the roof for cover as we made our way around.  We were close, but the number of guards had increased.

And, if I admitted it, I was feeling hurt and tired.  I wasn’t up to running around.  We were close enough to see, and that had to be good enough, at least until we decided on another move.

“Stop,” I said.

The group drew to a halt.  Gordon used the time to reload his weapon.

“Last bullet,” he said.

“Want one of mine?” Mary asked.

He took a bullet from her and pocketed it.

“You okay, Sy?  You look cold,” Lillian said.

“I am,” I said.  My teeth chattered a little from adrenaline and cold combined.

“You look hurt too,”

“Sort of.”

“Do you want my coat?”

I shook my head.  “No thanks.”

“No sign of Fray,” Helen commented.

I stared at the building.

“Did she get away already?” Gordon asked.  “We could spread out further, if you guys want.  Sy stays, maybe with Lillian, so he can keep an eye on this place.  Mary and Helen or me and Helen go explore, see if there’s any trace of them.”

The ground rumbled as the Beast paced through darkness, five or six streets over.  The fumes were accumulating faster than they dissipated, and the Beast was slowing down.

The last time it had stopped moving, it had ignited its gas.

There was a lot of gas, by the looks of it.

“She’s here, I’m positive,” I said.  “We stay low.  Spread out over the rooftop here, so we have more vantage points to see.  Gordon far left, Mary far right.  Make sure that you aren’t thrown off if the Beast makes another explosion.  Dig in, keep eyes forward.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “You’re positive?

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but I felt sure enough.  If Fray was a mirror of me, she probably felt the same sort of insecurities.  I’d worried about how fractured the Lambs were, and she was dealing with a fractured group.  Would she call for a retreat, if she wasn’t certain that she’d be able to reunite the two factions in the aftermath of the retreat?

“Yeah,” I said.

Gordon gave me a dubious look.

But he retraced his steps, heading left.  Mary went right, each of them with a rifle that each had, by my count, two bullets.

“Shoot only lieutenants or Fray,” I said, “Or in self defense.”

They each signaled the affirmative.

“Helen, that way, between me and Gordon.  Lillian, that way.”

My heart was pounding.

Dog and Catcher were drawing attention, the rest were taking cover, looking in all the wrong directions.

We were free to act, but action was lunacy.

We needed one master stroke, something Fray wouldn’t anticipate.

Did I have a grasp of who she was?  Who the major players were?  The current volatility of their organization?

“Lillian,” I said.

She’d started walking away.  She stopped, turning to listen.

“I’m okay, okay?”

She frowned at me.

“Okay?  I want you to know that.”

“You’re being cryptic.”

“Sort of.”

“You were being too honest before.  Was that a lead-in to you being particularly dishonest?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Not intentionally, but now that I’m here, with a plan in mind… yeah.”

“What are you doing?”

“Easier to show and tell,” I said.

I slid down the roof until I reached the gutter.

“Sy!” she said.

“Shh!  If you shout, you’ll get us both shot.”

Sylvester,” she hissed, a strained whisper.

“I’m okay,” I said.

As I’d done after being thrown down the roof, I lowered myself down until I hung on wet wood by my fingertips.

I shimmied over to one side, until there was a broken window in front of me.

Too much glass on the sill.

I shimmied over some more.

There.

I swung forward, and felt the heart-stopping moment as I let go, flying toward the window.  I grabbed the too-thin crossbar in the center, a surer point to grip.  Then, the moment I had contact, slapped my hands out to catch the sides of the window instead.

I passed into a darker office.

The Beast’s movements made picture frames and furniture rattle and shift.

It was easier to get out of the office than it would have been to get in.

Down the stairs, to the front door.  I would be forced to leave it unlocked, but there was no way to be polite.

A mailbox sat just inside the door.  I picked my way through envelopes until I found a nondescript one, then I waited, periodically looking outside, assessing who and what was nearby.

The ghosts weren’t there.  Petey might have sufficiently distracted or herded them.

The detonation caught me off guard.  Even with streets and solid stone buildings between me and the detonation site, it left me briefly stunned.

I pushed the door open.

Outside, onto a street shrouded in smoke and darkness, where I could barely see ten  feet in front of me, envelope in hand.

Walk, don’t run.

I made it three quarters of the way to the building before someone spotted me, walking with my hands out to the side, an envelope held out between index and middle finger.

Their gun pointed at my chest.

I continued walking.

“Stop,” he said.

I stopped.

The Lambs were going to be so pissed at me.

“I’m accepting Fray’s invitation to sit in on the meeting,” I said.

He whistled sharply.

More people approached.  Two kept guns trained on me.  The first guy got close enough to take the letter.  I let it fall from my fingertips.

“That has nothing to do with this.  I just needed a white flag so you wouldn’t shoot me before I got close,” I said.  Then I lied, “I am telling the truth.”

“Lamb,” one of the men said.

“We’re told to treat all children as suspicious, and not to listen,” one of the men said.

“You’re one of Cynthia’s, I’m guessing.”

He raised his jaw a fraction.  I was right.

“One of you go inside.  Talk to Genevieve Fray.  She’ll tell you what’s up.”

Appealing to a higher authority.

Except Genevieve Fray hadn’t invited me.

Well, not in anything but the loosest sense.  She’d extended an invitation a year and a few months ago, before the war had started.

I didn’t remember much, but I remembered that.

I watched the men exchange glances.

“Turn around,” one of them said.

I did.

“Kneel.”

Hm.  This wasn’t a good sign.  I knelt.

I felt a gun press against the back of my head.

Then a coat was draped over my head.  I moved my hands to adjust it, and got a fierce poke with the bayonet blade, alongside a sharp, “No!”

I was having my head covered.  I supposed they didn’t want to show the way to Fray.

Whatever.

I could hear the Beast tearing at building, I could hear the bells, I could imagine Lillian hurrying to communicate to the other Lambs about what I was doing, if they couldn’t see me down here.

Minutes passed.

Fray wanted to change minds, she wanted to prove her worth, she collected the vulnerable, and her past interactions with the Lambs and with me had played off of that.

Here, I was expecting she would keep to that pattern.

I was expecting that, whatever else happened, her authority and power here would override the lesser players, some of whom had reason to loathe the Lambs.  To loathe me.

I was using the word ‘expecting’ because hope sounded awfully flimsy, and thinking too much along the lines of hope and maybe would set my teeth to chattering far more than they were right now.

Voices started up a murmured, muffled conversation behind me.

I was hauled to my feet, the jacket left in place.  I was walked, a grown man on either side of me.

It was only after doors were shut that the jacket was pulled away.  I moved my arms as much as I was able and tried to fix my hair.  Nothing I could do about my shirt.  If I had to look wet and bedraggled, I could look a crazy wet and bedraggled.  I opened my eyes wider and smiled.

Another set of doors was opened.

A hundred sets of eyes fell on me.

At a table at the end of the room, I could see the major players.  Fray, with Warren, Avis, and her stitched standing behind her.  I saw Percy, and Mauer at one end of the table, and Cynthia at the other, with a new and too-artificial skin covered partially by hair, a high collar, long sleeves and gloves, each of them with a half dozen I didn’t know or recognize.

The other eighty-some people I didn’t know were civilians, standing and sitting in chairs.  An audience for the forum.  I felt more accurate about my assessment of Fray, now.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

Genevieve smiled at me, and it was a smile of a shared secret.  There had been no invitation.  She and I were probably the only people in the room of any importance who wanted me to walk out of the room alive at this point.  Not that I was entirely sure about her feelings on that matter.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 7.08 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Is this a joke?” Cynthia asked.

“No,” Fray said.  Her eyes were fixed to mine.  “Warren, would you do us a favor and bring Sylvester a chair?”

Warren approached with a chair.  He extended an open palm at the end of the table closer to Percy and Mauer.  I shook my head, indicating the middle of the long table, facing Fray, my back to the audience.

Part of it was that I didn’t feel comfortable sitting on one side or the other, for much the reason Fray couldn’t.  Part of it was that I suspected a few of them might casually kill me if I got in arm’s reach.  The final part of it was that I wanted the audience there so I was in front of them, facing the same direction, so that anyone who looked at me had to look at them.

Cynthia’s chair screeched as she stood from her end of the table.  Two gloved hands pressed against the surface.

Case in point.

“Are you going somewhere?” Fray asked.

“I think I’m done here,” Cynthia said.

“Are you?”

“The only reason I haven’t left the room yet is that I’m trying to gauge if I could get away with slitting his throat,” Cynthia said, raising her eyes from the table to look at Fray.  She smiled in a way that made it clear her skin wasn’t proper skin.  The creases were too ill-defined in places, too forced in others.

It might become more like ordinary skin in time, I mused.

It was reassuring to know that there were options like that available, when the fate of my own skin was up in the air.  Warren set the chair down and I took my seat.  It was a heavy wooden thing, likely grown into the shape of a chair by use of a mold, and I couldn’t sit in it easily.  Either my legs stuck out directly in front of me, or my back wasn’t touching the back of the chair, even with my backpack, and I risked slouching.  I pulled my feet up onto the seat.

“We have an audience,” Mauer told Cynthia.  “People who matter, who have contributed or want to contribute to what we’re doing.”

“Fuck the audience,” Cynthia said.

Angry.  Cynthia wasn’t nearly as composed as she had been the last time we’d crossed paths.

Mauer, however, seemed as cool as ice.  He still had the reddish-bronze hair, the weary look in an otherwise young face, blemished only by a sharp nose, but he wore a long sleeved shirt that looked a little worn and faded, suggesting he’d spent a lot of time outdoors, and he had a long military coat draped over his shoulders, a fair share of it covering his bad hand.  The hand was moving at his knee, fidgeting, and I imagined it was a tell, impossible to fully hide.  Too much pain and emotion together put it in perpetual motion.

Percy sat beside him.  I’d almost forgotten what he looked like, and might have forgotten entirely if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d recently reread some of Jamie’s writings.  He was taller than Mauer, and almost the opposite of Mauer in condition.  Where the reverend’s physical condition was almost identical to what it had been, his clothes more worn, Percy’s clothes were finer than the ones I’d seen him in before.  I could imagine an aristocrat wearing his outfit, but for the long coat that was so reminiscent of a doctor’s without quite being one.  He still favored a style of clothes that accented his narrow frame.  Physically, however, his graying hair was longer, he had a mustache now, and his beard needed a touch of a trim.  The lines of his face were deeper, and deepened further by anxiety.

“To explain where Cynthia is coming from, so our audience doesn’t believe she or any of the rest of us crazed,” Mauer said, injecting a small barb into the phrase, “the little boy sitting here at the table is not a real child, nor is he human.”

“Your facts are wrong,” I said.  “I’m human.”

“A modified human,” Fray said.  “Calling you precocious would be understating things.  The Lambs have come up during discussions on other nights, as some here might recall.  This is one of them.”

Is this how it’s going to be?  Even you’re going to gang up on me?

“Hmph,” one burly man on Cynthia’s end of the table grunted.  He sized me up.

“A monster in the Crown’s employ,” Mauer said.  His voice was carrying to the rest of the room.  That hadn’t changed.  “Cynthia’s reaction isn’t an unfair one, dramatic as it is.  He has a body count, and if I understand it, Cynthia was one of his victims.”

“Almost,” Cynthia said.  “Very nearly.”  She had a knife drawn.  It wasn’t pointed at me, but the end of the knife tapped now and again against the table.

“You killed my children,” Percy said.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.  Wasn’t worth arguing the particulars.  “That was more the Lambs as a whole than me.”

“A plague of spiders and a spree of murders in Whitney, the systematic execution of independent doctors and researchers, enforcing the will of the Academy and the Crown,” Mauer said.

His voice was so rich, the nuance on every word perfectly chosen.  I broke into a smile despite myself, glad that the audience  behind us couldn’t see my face.  “I seem to recall you putting a gun to the head of a little girl.”

I recall that she was no more a human than you are,” Mauer said.

Point.  Couldn’t argue that one.  She wasn’t more human than I was.

“I’m human,” I said.  “I haven’t taken any drugs that Genevieve Fray here hasn’t.  I know you want to hammer in the ‘inhuman monster’ idea, and you’re going to keep saying it over and over until people start believing it, but people are here, they’re listening, they’re making choices.  They’re smarter than you’re pretending they are.”

“Is this your plan?” Cynthia asked, “Invite yourself to the meeting and subvert us from within with wordplay?  Address the audience and turn them against us?  Genevieve, you invited him here for this?”

Before Fray could answer, Percy spoke, “You freed Avis with inside help.  This wouldn’t be the help?”

I managed to keep my expression flat.

Fray shook her head.  “I would be happy if it were, but no.  And I think Sylvester should answer Cynthia’s question.”

As I opened my mouth to respond, she quickly added, “Keeping in mind that he is what he is, and every statement should be taken with a grain of salt.  ”

Et tu, sister?  I had to appreciate the word choice of ‘what’ I was versus ‘who’ I was.  A subtle choice that I was sure Mauer had noticed and appreciated.

I was in an awkward position, because I’d had so many accusations thrown at me.   It was an effective tactic in argument, throwing a dozen half-true statements at someone in short order.  To answer every last one would have taken five times as long as it took to make the accusation, and left me with no time to argue my point.  Even if I did argue against the worst offenders, I couldn’t change the fact that the first argument in my audience’s ears was that I was a monster.

Worse, my memory wasn’t quite at the point where I could pick out specific points to argue.

And I knew it was Mauer’s doing.  An attack on me, surer than anything Cynthia was doing.  He was the more dangerous one, even if she had a knife and the desire to use it.

Better to take a different tack.

“I thought you needed a, ah, you’ll have to remind me here, Mauer,” I said.  I snapped my fingers.  “Something something advocate?”

“Devil’s advocate,” Mauer said.  “Promoter of the Faith.  One who argues against.”

Cynthia stood straighter.  Her knife seized firmly in one hand, an impressive length just shy of being a proper sword, she stalked the length of the table.

Might have to revise my opinion on how dangerous the woman with the knife is.

“Cynthia,” Mauer said, not rushing his words despite the fact she was seconds from stabbing me.  “Don’t be barbaric.”

I saw Fray give a small shake of her head, but she wasn’t looking at me, Mauer, or Cynthia.  It was Warren, questioning if he should intervene.

Fray wasn’t on my side as much as I’d hoped, if she was really saying no.

Cynthia reached out, seizing me by the hair.  She pulled my head to one side.  As the knife came down, I reached up to block it with one hand.  It cut against the part of my wrist that was closest to bone, on one side.  I could feel the blade against bone, too sharp and clean a slice to properly rasp.

Knives were the worst things to deal with in a fight.  Guns were awful, a bullet hurt like the dickens, but thanks to the fact that they were meant to kill stitched, they tended to either miss or kill the target.  Knives either killed or hospitalized the target.  Short of being as trained as Gordon or Mary, there was no happy ending once the knife really came into play, and not always for them.

Worse, I was falling back into old habits.  My mind was split three ways, caught between thinking of something to say that would make her hesitate, something that would bring another person to my aid, and how to actually defend myself.

She pulled her hand back, then stabbed for my throat.  I twisted in my seat, moving as far away from the knife as I could-

Cynthia,” Mauer said, more firmly.

She stopped.  Her knife and I remained where we were, the knife pointed at my throat, me halfway in leaning over the armrest, neck and head pulled away from the blade.

“Whatever he is, there are people watching, they will judge what they see, and that will hold more sway than anything we might say to them.”

Cynthia didn’t respond, and she didn’t move.  Her eyes didn’t move off me to look at the rows of people who were sitting in attendance.

I reached out slowly, and clasped my hand firmly against the slice on my wrist.  Short cut, but the gap opened wide, and the cup of my palm was filling with blood.

“He’ll have scars.  Care for the worst wounds, but there will be scars,” Mauer said, quiet, his voice probably aimed at communicating to the people at the table and maybe the audience members in the front row.  “I’m not going to say it is what we should do, but if you really wanted to kill him, the best way would be to strip him shirtless, make the war wounds clear, to erase some of the doubt from their minds.  Communicate to the people there, with eye and ear.”

His voice was almost hypnotic.  It nearly made this entire situation worth it, to have access to it.

“He’s stalling,” Cynthia said.

“Sort of, but it doesn’t matter,” I said.

She made a motion with the knife as if she was going to put it through my neck, but didn’t follow through.

“Why don’t you elaborate, Sylvester?” Fray suggested, her voice cutting through the tension.

I drew in a deep breath, then exhaled slowly.

“Instinct tells me to scare you, to drive in wedges, play up how you’re surrounded, the Brechwell Beast is loose, the help you’re expecting isn’t there anymore, and so on.  A mix of lies and truth.  But the reality is that Ms. Fray picked this location for a reason, she has plans, and there’s really no point in threatening you because she isn’t concerned, and she isn’t concerned for a reason.  She has a way out.”

Eyes moved to Fray.

“I’ve been assuring everyone that is the case,” Fray said, “Having you say it does help them to believe it, I hope.  Thank you.”

I nodded.  “That way out comes with a caveat.  I’m imagining that she’s holding onto it, a deal-sealer, a clincher.  When the time is right, she aims to tell you that yes, there is a way out, there’s a way to tie this together, and there’s a greater plan.  But, let’s not forget the caveat, the two groups need to work together, or at least swear off working against each other.  This will only truly work with a concerted effort.”

“You’re close enough,” Fray said.  “I’ve already told them what form our escape takes.  The plays after the fact, I haven’t shared those.”

“I hate that phrasing,” Cynthia said.  She still had the knife pointed at me.  “The ‘plays’.  As if this is a game.”

“It could be because you never experienced childhood,” Mauer said.

Cynthia stared daggers at him.

Because she’s an experiment?

No.  Because of her background.

“Would you rather ‘maneuvers’?” Fray asked, gently.  “Some time ago, your group asked me to join, and I refused.  Now I’m here, as per your request, and I’m trying to give you what you asked for.  The war isn’t sustainable, we can’t maintain conflict indefinitely and still muster what we need to change things the next time it counts.”

She was looking at each other person around the table as she talked.  As she reached the end with Mauer, she turned her attention briefly to me.

I felt a chill.

It wasn’t a chill of surprise or horror, because neither was the case.  I’d understood this was the case before I’d even sat down.  It was a dopamine rush, the same flood of momentary pleasure and shivers that came with listening to really good music.

Where we are now, she planned it in some form.  She may have even started the war to bring things to this point.

This table, with its interesting people, the danger, the strategy, it was where I belonged.

I spoke, because I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance again if I didn’t.  “When I said I was here to play Promoter of the Faith, it wasn’t that I’m arguing in favor of the Academy.  I’m genuinely curious what Fray is doing here, and I want the opportunity to hear it, knowing what I know…”

I met Fray’s eyes.  She arched an eyebrow.

“…Coming from the background that I do,” I said.  “If I’m advocating for anyone, it’s the rest of you.  I’m joining my voice to yours, questioning what she’s doing from a more objective standpoint.”

“You weren’t invited,” Cynthia said.

I was caught for a moment, stuck between trying to interpret her statement.  Was it that she was saying I wasn’t asked to argue on their behalf, or was she realizing Fray hadn’t invited me here?

“You’re my adversary, Sylvester?” Fray asked.

“No,” I said.  “No, not at all.”

I leaned back a little, resting my hands on a damp pants leg.  One hand was still clasped hard to the knife wound.

“I’m wondering whether, if what you’re offering and doing is good enough, you’re still open to having the Lambs join you.”

There was a hush, a bit of stillness.  The audience behind me was making more noise, people making sense of the conversation, talking among themselves.

Mauer’s expression was hard to read, but his hand was fidgeting more than it had been.  Percy was quiet, still, he’d barely spoken up, and I could see him analyzing me.  His eye traveled to different points of the room.  He’d been undercover for a long time, acting as a teacher while working to subvert the city through its youth, but I could almost read his mind as he looked to see if there was a physical sign of a trap.

Cynthia’s reaction was interesting, as the point of the knife dropped just a fraction.  I let myself relax more.

“Where are the other Lambs in this?” Percy asked, quiet.

“They don’t know I’m here.  But if you can convince me, then I can probably convince them.  Mary’s okay, by the way, Percy.”

The name was like a slap to his face.  Had he known she was ours?  They had so much information about us, but was he somehow in the dark?

“I see,” he said.

“She’s one of the Lambs.  We’ve taken good care of her.  If you asked her to come with you… I don’t know what her answer would be.”

The lines in his face hinted at emotion he was trying not to show.  He clasped his hands together in front of him, forming a ball that bobbed up and down twice before he spoke again, “How many lies did you tell her?”

“A few,” I said.

He nodded, seeming to take the statement in stride.  “I as well.”

I nodded, taking that in.

I hadn’t forgotten the mice, sacrificed to make the Ghosts.  My finger touched Melancholy’s ring, and rotated it around my thumb.

I was forced to stop as I realized I wasn’t keeping enough pressure on the bleeding wound.

Avis surprised me by speaking, “You were such a staunch defender of the Academy.”

“No,” Fray and I spoke at the same time.

She indicated that I should speak.  I did, saying only, “I wasn’t for the Academy.  I was for the Lambs.  The problem is and was that they are hard to separate.”

“That was my interpretation of it,” Fray said.  “I made the invitation over a year ago, and you refused me.”

One of the men I didn’t know spoke, “What provoked this change of heart?”

I shook my head.

“A Lamb died,” Fray said.

I hesitated, then nodded.

“Who?”

I raised my eyebrows.  “You don’t know?”

“They’re being more clever about who finds out about what.  No, Sylvester, I admit I don’t know.”

“Jamie.”

“Is he dead, or…?”

He’s dead,” I said.

Saying it aloud was hard.  If I’d been anywhere else, anywhere at all, it might have been easier to handle.  I could have done something, moved, turned to someone, and found a small bit of respite.

But looking one way and seeing enemies, and looking the other, seeing more, unable to really do more than squeeze my wounded wrist even harder, it was the first time in months I’d wanted to cry.

I smiled instead.  It had done me okay so far.

Fray was nodding.  She started to stand, and the stitched girl helped in pulling the chair away.  Cynthia lowered the knife and stepped away from the chair to take a seat at one end of the table.

She’s from a rough background, and while Mauer fidgeted and Percy drew quiet, she reacted with anger.  A rat that bites when backed into a corner.

Looking at her companions, and at the members of the audience sitting closer to her side of the room, I suspected she was a rat with connections.

“You’re not promising defection,” Fray said.  “Whatever happens, whatever I say, you’ll want to go back to the Lambs to discuss the matter.”

“That would be ideal,” I said.

“Making this all a matter of nice sounding words, tempting us with added help and the information you’d be able to provide,” Mauer said.

“Less information, without the one with the memory,” Cynthia observed.

“True,” Mauer said.

The two sides were agreeing, now.  Cynthia at one end, and Mauer at the other.

“I wish I’d known you were doing this,” Fray said.  “I would have tailored my plan to suit the situation, and provide a tempting reason for the Lambs to defect.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“No, I’m not at all disappointed, Sylvester,” she said.

Fray stood hands on the backs of the chairs to either side of her, and she had the attention of the room.  “For the past three days, I’ve been arguing for an end to the war.  Not now, but soon.  I’ve pointed out locations where key individuals can go, places they can work without being found, while still maintaining a reasonable standard of living.  Believe me, I know how important that is.  I’ve been on the run for a year and a half.”

Her finger tapped on the back of the chair to her right for a second.

“I’m proposing we take the war in a different direction.  We leave them hurting, while helping everyone.  Give them an enemy they can’t effectively fight.”

She reached back.  Avis pulled something from a bag and handed it to Fray.

I almost flinched, seeing what she held.  It wasn’t tailored to what I’d just been talking about?  Bullshit.

It was a book.  Thick, large, and heavy, with a nondescript cover.  It made a sound as it was dropped onto the table.

“Don’t leave us in suspense,” the burly man spoke.

“The Academy’s knowledge, distilled.  This particular volume isn’t complete, nor comprehensive, nor is it well suited for doing research.  But it’s a starting point.  The tools and guides necessary to walk someone through some basic experiments.  There are other books, more complete ones for anyone who wants to advance their knowledge, and I have plans for yet more, simpler texts in simpler fields.”

“Giving the power to the people?” Mauer asked.

“Giving the Academy’s power to the people,” Fray said.  She indicated Cynthia, “Godwin’s enclave had the books, but not the means to mass produce, and the knowledge was of limited use – they had to find doctors and ex-students to use it.”

She was indicating Percy now.

“We give everyone the ability to learn, we take away the exclusive access to Academy knowledge, and our individual groups, working together, can incentivize use of the knowledge.  Novice doctors and students will come crawling from the woodwork with their experiments, farmers will be able to create their own help instead of buying it, and everyone else will compete with the Academy for the same resources.”

There were murmurs in the crowd now.

“Not a genie that can easily be put back in the bottle, is it Genevieve?” Mauer asked, with a note of humor.

“I did think you’d like this,” Fray said.

“The production?” one of the men at the table asked.

“Already set up.  I’ll reserve further comment for when we don’t have listening ears,” Fray said, indicating me.  “With a coordinated effort, they won’t be able to restrict the spread of the texts and deal with our final forays and efforts.  We play all of the cards we’ve been holding in reserve, and by the time the dust clears, the world will be different.  Humanity gets a fighting chance against the monolithic Academy.”

The words and voices blended in together.

I was disappointed.

Was it change?  Yes.  Undeniably.  The knowledge wouldn’t be used by everyone.  But enough people would pick it up.  Back alley practices and independent experimenters would crop up.  People like the snake charmer.  Monsters would appear.

There would be good and bad in equal measure, and the Academy would hurt.  It would be forced into a situation where it either had to take more control than it should, or lose control overall.

I suspected the former.  I suspected it would backfire, that raids and searches for books would ensure that the fires of hatred against the Academy continued to burn.  That the next war would be even more brutal, with the people on the ground having many more tools at their disposal.

She played the long game.  Always the long game.

Was it a stride toward what I hoped for?  No.  I couldn’t believe that it was.  Fray knew it wasn’t.  She’d said as much when she talked about how she’d have tailored it.

“Sylvester,” Fray said, quieter.

The voice snapped me out of a train of thought.  I realized that the groups on either side of me were talking.

“Is it what you expected?” she asked.

“In a way,” I said.  I’d expected this scene, the groups talking, the note of hope.

“If you’d come to me when I first asked, Jamie would be alive, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I told you how things would play out.  That a Lamb would die and you’d reconsider.”

“I know,” I said.  “But I don’t know yet.  I’m not sure.”

She nodded.  “You hoped for a better brain, one that could pave the way to greater things.  Did you hope it was Jamie?”

“I hoped it was me,” I said, quiet.  “But Jamie was a close second.”

The conversations around us continued.  Discussion, strategy.

“I need to talk to them about things you can’t hear,” Fray said.  “I’m going to let you go.”

Letting me go.  I’d expected to be taken prisoner, maybe even tortured in an edge case, but torture was something I could deal with, and had dealt with in the past.  I waited for elaboration.

“On the condition that you leave that behind,” she said.

She was pointing.

I turned to look, and felt the tug against one shoulder before I realized.

“Ah,” I said.  “No.”

“There’s no other way.  I can convince them, but you need to convince me first.  I figured out what was in that oddly shaped bag you refused to take off and place at your feet.  I remember the last time I met the Lambs.  I remember Jamie.”

I touched the strap of the backpack.  The books were inside.

“If I’d rather be taken prisoner?”

“Then they’ll kill you,” Fray said.  The word seemed to get attention, because one or two conversations stopped.  “I know them better than you do, and they’ll kill you.”

Almost thirty seconds passed before I slipped my shoulders free of the straps.  “You don’t read them.  If you do-”

“I won’t,” she said.  “None of us will.  Hand them to me.”

I placed the bag on the table.

It was hard, seeing Fray take it, lifting it free of the table and handing it to the stitched girl.

“Nobody gets to take that bag, or touch or read the books inside except him,” Fray told the stitched girl.  “Not even me.  He gets it back when he comes tomorrow.”

My heart was pounding harder than it had all night.

“You’re staying?” I asked.

“So long as we don’t venture outside, the Beast poses little risk to us,” she said.  “You have one night to decide.  Go and sleep on it if you must.  Next time you come, come with the rest of the Lambs.”

My heart felt cold in my chest as I said, “I don’t suppose I have much of a choice, do I?”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.09 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Armed men led me out of the building, with Warren joining them.  We made our way across the more open street, until we were just beyond the point where I’d been made to kneel, a coat over my head.

The Lambs were there, in the shadows, smoke and the rain, the group spaced evenly apart.  I saw them before my escorts did.  The men started, reaching for guns, and it was Warren who stopped them.

Gordon stepped forward.

He was hiding it, but I could see the smouldering anger in his eyes.

“Everything good?” his voice didn’t have a trace of that anger.

A nice vague question, conveying teamwork, expectations, while giving nothing away.

Gordon was a good guy.

“It’s good,” I said.

He nodded before turning his back.  I followed him back into shadows, leaving the men and Warren behind.

Mary, Gordon, Helen, and Hubris knew what was up, and they moved easily from areas of shadow to areas of deeper shadow, or to places where there was more smoke and cover.  The art of disappearing, honed over a long time, for the humans.  For Hubris, I imagined it was training.  I wasn’t positive that dog had the brain of a dog.

Lillian, though, was just walking away.  I could imagine how the onlookers could see her, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t disappearing properly.

I reached out to grab her sleeve, and tugged her into deeper shadows.

We made our way to the nearest tower, then climbed to the roof.

The Brechwell Beast was just close enough to give some cause for worry, but not so close that I was worried about my footing on the roof.

I was one of the last ones up.  I knew what to expect when I reached the top.

Glares, folded arms, concern.

I got out of Lillian’s way as she got off the ladder, and being mid-step on more precarious footing, I wasn’t in a position to dodge as she slapped my arm hard.

“What did you get?” Gordon asked, quiet.  The anger hadn’t really subsided, and he was still talking in that cool, collected way.

“You’re not going to get on my ass, sock me in the face, or anything like that?”

“At this point I’m suspicious you enjoy the reactions,” he said.  “No.  The mission.  What were you going for, and what did you get?”

I frowned.

“Because if you didn’t actually have an objective,” he said, pausing as the Brechwell Beast struck a wall, “I am going to be upset.”

“I wanted to know what they were doing.”

“Do you?”

I nodded.  “Bring the Academy’s knowledge to the masses.  Bring the war to a close with a few final, major events, distracting us from the distribution of very easy to understand texts.  Hurts the Academy in terms of the power gap in what they’re making, in terms of control, in economics, makes for more competition over the resources the Academy wants.”

“No.  We have classes on ethics, procedure,” Lillian said.

Really?” I asked.

“Yes!  Of course!  So much would go wrong so fast, if you just started handing out these books and basic starter kits like the ones they sell to young Academy students.  It would be horrible, Sy.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Because my gut instinct was to maybe not fight as hard as we might otherwise fight, when it comes to this.  I’m not sure, but Fray might be willing to negotiate a trade, here.”

“A trade?” Mary asked.

“A few key players from their side, in exchange for letting this thing happen?”

“Fuck,” Gordon said, under his breath.

My eyebrows went up.  Harsher language than his usual.

“We lost Jamie,” he said.  “Not in the final sense-”

Yes in the final sense,” I said, my voice low.

“Whatever.  However you look at it.  I’m bringing it up even though we’ve been dancing around the topic for months because I don’t want to lose you, Sy.”

“You won’t.  I knew exactly what I was doing.  I know how Fray thinks, I know how to dance on this razor’s edge.  I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You’re here and you’re talking about entertaining her ideas.”

I couldn’t keep meeting his eyes, so I turned away, only to find myself looking at Lillian.  I ran my fingers through my hair, fixing it, as I paced a little.

I came face to face with Mary and stopped in my tracks.

I talked to Percy, I thought.  But I couldn’t say it without it coming across as manipulative.

“What are you doing, Sy?” Gordon asked.

I turned away from Mary to look at him.  “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been acting different all night.  Changing your pattern, increasing the tempo and intensity, making calls and now you’re working against us like you’re trying to keep us off guard?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.  But I knew you’d try to stop me-”

“For good reason!” Mary said, startling me.

“I’m here!”  I said.  “I walked in, I walked out.”

“Without the bag?” Mary asked.  “Without the bag with Jamie’s books in it?”

“Oh.  Gosh,” Lillian said, under her breath.

“We’re going back tomorrow,” I said, annoyed.  “We’re going to walk out then too.  With Jamie- ‘s books.  Okay?  We walk away with an idea of what Fray is doing, with an idea of how to counter it or steer it in the right directions.  Mary gets to look Percy in the eye, we confront Fray, and with her preoccupied like she is, trying to juggle two factions and a half-dozen plans, we’ll have her at a disadvantage.  It will be the one and only time, maybe, that we ever have that.”

I looked at each of the Lambs.  I even looked at Gordon’s dang dog, in hopes of seeing a glimmer of understanding.

Gordon approached me.  I could see the anger in his eyes, the frustration.  I steeled myself.

Pretty much expected this since I’d realized I could walk inside those doors down there.

But Gordon didn’t hit me.

When his arms wrapped around me, I wondered if he was intending to simply toss me over the edge of the roof.  The size difference, the strength difference, my chronic low weight, I was willing to bet he could.

“What are you doing, Sy?”

Mary stepped closer, putting a hand on Gordon’s back, her expression unreadable.  Lillian hung back, both hands on her satchel with the medical equipment inside.  Helen was perched on the peak of the roof, slightly above us, staring, more old Helen than new Helen, just for now.

Seeing them, I was choked up in a way that made me feel like I was in the midst of drowning.  I wanted to get out of the hug, to have space, to have a chance to explain, and it didn’t feel like they were giving it to me.

“I’m trying to say it right.  The thing with distributing the books, it’s the second phase of a greater plan.  She’s got another plan.  I think, and maybe Lillian can say if I’m on the right track or not…”

I reached out for help.  Lillian didn’t give any indication she was going to play ball.

“…the work that comes out of the books.  Could it have a signature?  Give everyone the tools to make stitched, to create life, to create the right drugs, grow Warbeasts, I don’t even know, but in a way that sets them apart from the Academy.  Then, when she makes her next move, it’ll be easier to frame the Academy for it, like she did with the sterilization and the chemical leash, because that precedent exists.  She can establish a narrative, at a time when the Academy has less credibility, when it’s damned itself by trying and failing to control the spread of this information.  That the Academy is worse than it is.  The next war comes around, the rebellion is better armed, the Academy is hurting.  Step four drives a wedge into the cracks that become apparent.  I’m not saying this is it, but it’s- don’t you see the scale we’re operating at, here?”

“Sy,” Gordon said.

His tone suggested he wasn’t listening to me at all.

“Let go of me!” I said.  I fought my way free of his arms.   I backed away a few paces.   “Listen to me!”

“I hear you,” he said.  “We all do.”

“I’m right.  This is what I do, this is what I’m for.  I can figure a way forward, find what we need to do to exploit and derail her plan, and this war will be over, no more mice will have to get thrown into vats to make ghosts, people won’t end up conscripted by the Crown and find themselves facing down a cousin of theirs in a gunfight!”

“Probably,” Gordon said.  “But that’s not what we’re talking about.”

“It’s the mission!  It’s what we’re made to do.  I’ve been explaining for something like three or four minutes and we’re not talking about it?”

“No.  We’re not.”

“Because I seem to recall the last time we met Fray, you were thinking about defecting,” I said.  “You were close, too.  If a single snowflake had fallen on your back, it might have been the push you needed.”

The words hung in the air.

Gordon didn’t flinch.  The reaction wasn’t even all that profound with the other Lambs.  A turn of one or two heads, looking at our tallest, strongest member.  Curious looks, but it was almost as if they were wondering what his reaction was, more than they were wondering if it was true.

“I’m not even talking about going that far,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I hear you.”

“Then what’s the problem!?”

“The problem,” he said, and his voice was quiet, “Is that I’m worried you’re falling apart even more than I am, and I have seams, Sy.”

“I’m here,” I said, my voice low.  “I’ve been in top form tonight.”

“You’ve been in a form, Sy,” he said.  “I’m just not sure it’s yours.”

I could have hit him, if I didn’t know it would be futile.

“What do you want, Gordon?  You’re getting on my case, you’re making me play this dang-blasted guessing game, like I’m supposed to unravel a riddle that isn’t even a riddle.  Tell me what you want me to say or do, and I’ll say or do it.”

“Just tell me, Sy.  What are you doing?”

“Trying to do the mission?  Trying to figure out how to beat a woman that’s smarter and on better footing than I am?  Apparently without the help of my team?”

There was no response.  Mary kept one hand at Gordon’s arm, barely inches separating them.  His dog stood on the other side of him.

“Okay,” I said.  “Forget the mission.  You want me to bare my emotions?  I’m trying to figure out how things work with the group being a different shape, one man down, one dog up, and two more members on the way.  I’ve been worrying ever since the last time we saw Fray that the group might splinter.  Thanks to you, by the way.  You did start that.”

“Sorry.”

“Is that the answer you’re looking for?  I’m trying to hold things together, that’s all.”

“I think we’ll both know the answer when you give it.  But that doesn’t seem like you’re answering the question.”

I might have screamed in his face, if I didn’t think it would cause problems.

The Brechwell Beast was tearing at another set of houses a short distance away.  Widening the gap made by some of Fray’s explosions, it looked like.

I wondered if any people were dying in the process.

“Sy,” Mary said.

I snapped my head around.

“When you went down there, were you running to, or were you running away?”

“Don’t do this, Mary.  Don’t throw cryptic questions at me and expect answers I don’t have.”

“Because the rush, the recklessness, the fact you’re so adamant about wanting to get this done before the new member arrives… before Jamie arrives-”

“That’s not Jamie,” I said.

“-it seems like you’re running away.  And now you’re talking about working with Fray?”

“Not working with, just not working against as hard as we might.  Everything we’ve done to this point, what has it been for?  Does Fray really hurt the future of the Lambs and the betterment of mankind?  Are we really going to sit here and pretend we like the Academy, the Duke is an all-around stand up guy?”

“I think you’re evading.”

“I evade.  You might as well accuse Helen of acting.”

Gordon spoke up, “I just want a satisfactory answer to the question.  You, someone, just convince me that you’re not losing it, and I’m open to further discussion, whatever you guys want to do.”

“What am I doing?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

I threw my arms up, and I started walking away.

My body felt oddly light, and it wasn’t because of the exercise or the fact we hadn’t really eaten since early evening on the train.  The bag of books wasn’t on my back anymore, and the absence made me feel weird, eerily disconnected from the ground at my feet.

Jamie wasn’t at my back.

The others were following me, I knew.  I could have bolted.  Gordon and Mary would have caught me.

I ran my fingers through my hair again, then jammed them into pockets that had only just started to dry out while we were indoors.  Late in the evening, late spring, soaked through, I felt cold to the bone.

I wheeled around.  The others stopped in their tracks, but for Lillian.

I waited patiently as she made her way across to me, carefully striding so one foot was on each side of the gently peaked roof.  She pulled off her coat and extended it to me.

“No,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You’re a girl,” I said.

“It’s unisex, Sy.  Nobody’s going to poke fun.”

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  “I meant you’re a girl, so it wouldn’t be right.”

“I’ll live, Sy.  Just hold my hand so I don’t fall off this roof, okay?  And so I know you won’t run off?”

I nodded.  I was too tired to fight.  The last few minutes of conversation had sapped all the fight from me, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me to even try for flight, either.

“You were going to say something,” Gordon said.  “When you stopped there.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Yeah.  Forgot.”

“What were you going to say?”

“What if I don’t have an answer for you, Gordon?  What if there’s no magic answer that makes sense of what I’m doing in a way that satisfies you?”

“Ah.”

I shrugged.  “Well?”

“I don’t know, Sy.  We adapt.”

We adapt.  He said it in a way that made it sound like we were talking about his body failing on him.  A inevitable, growing disability.

“Gimpy boy and his dog and Sylvester end up on the bench, while the new Lambs look after the next few missions?” I asked.  “And then someone else ends up benched, a new Lamb comes out of the Academy and replaces them, and so it goes, until we’re all reminiscing about the old days?  Doing the same tests we did back in day one, testing our cognitive ability as it slips away or our bodies fail?”

“I remember those days,” Gordon said.  “The days we first met, the tests.  I hated those things.”

“I found ways to make it interesting,” I said.

“I know.  You did.  I realized what you were doing after a bit, and then tried to mess you up, or throw a wrench into the works.  Then you made it harder to figure out what sort of games you were playing while we were playing other games, and so it went.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?” Lillian asked.  “Being benched?  Being replaced?”

“No,” I said.  “No, that’s… not at all it, no offense.  That’s the human condition.  Parent replaced by child, except we won’t ever be parents, so this is a different sort of legacy.  The only thing I’m afraid of is losing you.

I looked at the other Lambs.  “Any of you.”

The Brechwell Beast roared, not so far away.  I watched and listened for a second.

“Sucks,” I said.

Lillian squeezed my hand.

“Always thought it would be you guys falling to pieces and I’d be putting my brilliant mind to task with figuring you out and how to handle it,” I said.  “Goes to show how good I am, if Gordon’s right and there’s some riddle to my behavior I can’t answer.  Can’t even understand myself.”

“If I’m wrong,” Gordon said, “If there’s no complicated riddle to unravel, then that’s worse.  Because you can’t keep going like this.  You can only dance on a razor’s edge for so long.”

“Complicated?  I don’t think it’s complicated.”

All heads turned to Helen.

“Uh, clarify?” Gordon asked.

“Not complicated,” Helen said.  “It’s very simple, I think.”

“No, clarify about what ‘it’ is,” Gordon said.

“Sy is acting,” Helen said.  “He’s playing at being Jamie, and he’s doing a really bad job of it.”

“You might be getting confused,” I said.  “The longer hair, carrying his books around, it’s not an act, it’s a homage.  I don’t know.  A way of keeping him around.”

“It’s an act,” Helen said, firm.  “A bad act, because you don’t have the right tools.  You said you didn’t want to see the Lambs die.  The only thing any of us can do is hold someone in our hearts.  There’s an emptiness when they go, and we fill in that emptiness with memories.  Or drink, or work, or violence, sometimes, but mostly with memories.”

“Poetic,” Mary said.  “Where did you hear that?”

“I’ve been studying!  Ibott says it’s useful for when I’m older and I have to lure in men,” Helen said, smiling.  “But it’s true!  Sy is filling his heart with memories and he has a crummy memory.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Gordon said.

“Yes!  It is!”  Helen drew closer.  “Sylvester is trying to fill the empty space in the group’s heart, too.  He’s doing what he was made to do.  He’s trying to cover for the things that Jamie used to do.  The map, drawn on his shirt, that’s Sy being Sy to give us something that Jamie would have known like that.”

Snap of her fingers for punctuation.

“And walking into Fray’s meeting?” Gordon asked.

“Jamie would have known who the people are and he would have had ideas about what they were doing.  He could have drawn connections.  But Sy knows that if he just walks in and introduces himself, he will get an idea of who people are and what they’re doing.  He can draw connections.”

The others turned their eyes to me.

“It sounds awkward because it is,” Helen said.  “Jamie is probably the worst one of us to try and make up stopgap cover-ups for.  What Sy is trying to do, all the other stuff, like letting the Brechwell Beast out, he’s trying to get control.  Because he’s insecure.”

“Hey,” I said.

Lillian squeezed my hand.

“Control through chaos?” Gordon asked, still staring at me.  “Yeah, that sounds right.”

“It’s not about insecurity, thank you very much,” I said.  “But I don’t know.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to cover the gap that Jamie left.  How to keep things working smoothly, so the group stays effective.”

“You’re doing it,” Helen said.  “In a weird way, but you’re doing it.”

More than I realized?

“The first part, anyway,” Gordon said.

I sighed.

“Jam- the replacement might be coming tomorrow,” Gordon said.  “This thing with Fray, is it you wanting that control?  Impact the world, even secondhand, let them know ‘we’re still here’, ‘we still matter’?”

Even without Jamie?

“It’ll have to happen before he shows,” Gordon said.  “If we decide to do it.  We’ll need to discuss this thoroughly.  Come to a consensus.”

“Then we-”

“In the morning, Sy,” he said.  “We come up with a game plan in the morning.”

We turned and started moving as a group.  There were soldiers and weapons gathering on some rooftops nearby.  They were surrounding the perimeter of Fray’s building.  Some of them had equipment to hook them to the rooftops, with long guns that were screwed into the roofs.

Dog and Catcher were waiting not too far away, with a Wry Man who was slightly hunched over.  The Wry Man was flushed, veins sticking out of his face, and jerked in reaction to the movement of me withdrawing a hand from a clammy pocket.

“Status?” Catcher asked.

“No update,” I said, leaving out any mention of my visit with Fray.  “They’re not budging.”

“They’re talking about mounting an attack.”

I shook my head, “No.  She’s got a maneuver she’s going to pull.  Moment we try, half our soldiers turn on the other half.  I don’t think she plans to leave at all.  Her soldiers in the towers are going to subtly guide the Beast away from her for the meantime, and they’ll be part of the uprising if and when she makes a move.  When the dust clears, she’s the one in charge of Brechwell.”

“How sure are you?” he asked.

“Mostly.”

He nodded.  He stared off into the distance.

“Don’t attack, then.”

“Bad idea,” I said.

“What do we do?”

“Wait.  Bide our time.  Gives more opportunities for the soldiers in towers to make mistakes.  In daylight, the Beast won’t be guided by any lights from the towers.  With a lucky roll of the dice, he might head in that direction.  Without that lucky roll, the Lambs will make a move.”

Catcher nodded slowly.

“You look tired,” he said.  “Go sleep.”

“You’ve been at this for longer than we have, you were here when we arrived,” I said.

“This is what we do.  We’re watchdogs,” Catcher said.  “You rest so you can do what you do.  Tomorrow.”

I was pacing in the bedroom when the door cracked open.  I stopped in my tracks.

Mary.

“Sylvester.”

I turned, a little confused.  It was Lillian, wearing the raincoat I’d given back to her.

“Doctor’s visit?” I asked.

“Do you need one?”

I looked at my bandaged hands, then shook my head.

“Then no,” she said.  She closed the door very gently, then put down a bundle and pulled off her raincoat.  “I talked to Mary earlier.  She explained about what Rick was saying.”

“Ah,” I said.  “Rick.  That.”

“That?”

“Me as some tug of war rope while you and Mary engage in a competition or something to prove something.”

She blinked, looking startled.  “Sy, no.  That’s not-“

“Can we not?  I don’t think I’m in the mood.”

She shook her head, collecting herself.  “You’re in a mood.  Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Thinking,” I said.  “About tomorrow.”

“Stop thinking.  Relax,” she said.

“Give me something, then.”

“I’m not going to give you something,” she said, sounding exasperated.  She crossed the distance to me, grabbed my arm, and hauled me over to the bed.  She shoved me down onto it.  “Stay.”

“Staying,” I said.

“And don’t look,” she said.  “I didn’t want to come here in a nightgown with all of the soldiers standing guard between here and the other building.”

“It’s my room,” I said, pointedly turning my head to look at her.  “Who are you to make rules about looking or not looking?”

She didn’t have a reply to that, but her face flushed pink.  She began unbuttoning her top.

When things reached the point where I might have seen something, I simply muttered, “Whatever,” and looked away.

“This isn’t a competition,” she told me.  “She encouraged me to come.”

“Sure, in the interest of playing fair,” I said.

“That’s not- stop that!”

“Fine,” I said.  “Mary sleeps nude most of the time she sleeps over, you know.”

Lillian froze.  I could see in my peripheral vision, and turned my head slowly to look her way.  She was holding the nightgown up in a way that protected her modesty, yet to pull it on.

If it’s not a competition on any level, that shouldn’t matter, I thought.  But it is, so you’re considering your options.

“Just kidding,” I said.

“You’re the worst.  You really are.  Look away.”

I did.

Lillian finished pulling the nightgown on.  I climbed under covers and scooted over.  She climbed in next to me.  Where Mary had found a natural configuration beside me, often with her back pressed to me, Lillian curled into me.  She positioned herself lower down, head on my shoulder and chest, arm reaching across my torso, one leg draped over my legs.  The fabric of the nightgown at her knees got in the way, so she hiked it up.

It took her a few seconds to find the exact right position.

“Mary always wear scratchier stuff,” I said.  “Lace and stuff.  This is softer.  It’s nice.”

I plucked at the hem of her nightgown.  She swatted it out of my hand and slapped my chest.

“Go to sleep,” she said.

I lay there, staring at the ceiling.  After a few minutes, she raised her head to look at me.

“What were you even doing?” she asked.

“Normally I’d be reading,” I said.  “but I don’t have the books.”

She nodded, head rubbing against me.  Her breath was warm against my chest.

“Doesn’t it get boring?  Reading the books over and over again?”

“Never.”

She nodded again.

“I miss him too,” she said.  “We got along.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “He was a good guy.”

“I’m really scared about tomorrow.”

“I know,” I said.

Then she didn’t say anything more.

It took me far too long to realize that there was a damp feeling against my chest, little movements.  I shifted position, lifting my head up.

Crying.

Pulling my shoulder out from under her, I changed position, so I was facing her.  I wiped tears from her cheeks.

“Crybaby.”

She hit me.

“Come on,” I said.  I pulled her head against my chest, and she burrowed close, clinging tighter.

I stroked her hair, over and over, rhythmically, but I was the one who was lulled into sleep.

Alongside the nights I’d had Mary stay over, it was the fifth night of sleep I’d had in two weeks.

 Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.10 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Sy, Lillian.”

“I’m up, Gordon.”

“Oh, I couldn’t tell through the back of your head.  Can you wake Sy up?  Make sure he gets out of bed.”

I winced, but played at being asleep.

“I will.”

I peeked and saw the door starting to close.  It stopped.

“Lillian.”

Lillian stirred, the arm and leg that were draped over me pulling away.  As she turned over, she made the covers pull away from me.  I tugged them sharply back into place, which inadvertently pulled her closer.

“Urm- Yes?”

“Are you doing okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know we can get a little focused on the mission, on other things.”

“I know you’re pointing at me,” I mumbled.

“Ah, you’re awake.  I don’t want to lose sight of the details, Lillian.  I thought I’d ask.”

“I’m a detail?”

“You’re a Lamb.  Details come part and parcel.”

There was a pause.  Lillian shifted position, but didn’t get up.

“I’m okay.  Thank you for asking, Gordon.”

“Alright.  We’re eating downstairs.  There are a lot of soldiers in the building, so you might want to get dressed before coming down.  Are you good to wear yesterday’s clothes, or should I send Mary with-”

“I’m okay, Gordon.  I brought clothes for today.  Thank you.”

“Alright,” he said.

The door shut.

I turned over, until I was on my back.  I looked at the back of Lillian’s head.

“He cares about you.”

“Yeah.”

“Like you’re a little sister, sort of.  He likes Mary, or could like Mary if he let himself, but he thinks it’s wrong to do anything when he might not have much time left.  Mary, meanwhile, isn’t making any direct moves.”

“Mary likes you.”

“Mary likes Gordon.”

Lillian turned over.  “Maybe, but she likes you too.”

Her face was just a couple of inches from mine, one arm folded under her head.  She was sharing the same pillow as me, and her arm being where it was meant her head didn’t slide off the end.  Her hair wasn’t even shoulder length when left loose, but it was bound in a ponytail for sleeping, which made it seem shorter, and hairs had come free in the night, laying across her temple and cheek.

It reminded me of Jamie.

“She might.”

“I like Mary,” Lillian said.  “If you and she did-”

I was already shaking my head.

“Why not?”

I sighed.

“I think she was made to follow orders, she clung to someone and obeyed them and conformed herself to them,” I said, my voice quiet.

“To Percy.”

“Yeah.  To Percy.  I think… she’s courting herself, in a way, if that makes sense?”

Lillian shook her head, face pressing momentarily against the pillow, “I don’t get it.”

“She’s still figuring herself out, after, what, nearly two years?”

“Spring of the year before last.  Yeah.”

“And when she first got here, she was insecure, she was dangerous, and I spent some time steering her in the right directions, watching her, coaxing her out of her shell.  Controlling her.”

“You’re worried that if she gets close to you, it’s going to be moving backward?”

Smart girl.

“I think Gordon is better for Mary and Mary is better for Gordon than I am for Mary or Mary for me.”

“That makes sense,” Lillian said.

“Yeah?  Because I’m not sure I didn’t get words mixed around.”

“It did.”

“I’m a little worried about what happens when and if she talks with Percy.”

“I wouldn’t be,” Lillian said.  “She’s my friend, she’s close to us.  She understands.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said.  I didn’t say it, but I suspected Lillian didn’t know just what Mary might find out if she talked to Percy.

Lillian gave me a half-smile.  “If that’s your reasoning about them, and if it won’t bother you, I’m on your side.  I’ll back you in this.”

“Alright,” I said.

I yawned, hand over my mouth, then settled my head back on the pillow.

It was cold outside, warm under the covers, and a part of me didn’t want to face what the day had in store.  A second part of me was a little worried about how much the third part of me wanted to meet the day head on.

Mary had a way of looking imperious or hawkish, almost as if her expression was on the verge of being an angry one, but it never actually contorted with the actual emotion.  When she felt the need to soften the expression, Mary had a way of becoming more ladylike.  It was rare that her back wasn’t straight, her eyes focused forward.  Wavy brown hair pulled back and tied into place with ribbons seemed somehow fitting.  Something elemental and natural bound into a set form.  Get too close, and it was starched collars, hems and lace that I’d joked could cut a man.  Beneath that was razor wire and hidden blades.

Lillian was more of a mouse than a hawk in demeanor.  Not as visually arresting, nervous, but warmer.  When she had her hair cut, I suspected at least some thought went into what was easiest to manage, so she could spend less time getting up in the morning.  She’d grown it longer in recent months, despite having more access to the hairdresser, and I imagined it was the influence of the other girls, a growing awareness of herself.  Straight brown hair curled out at the end.  She bloomed late, but where Helen was a flower tended by another, the inner workings almost entirely separate, and where Mary’s inner and outer self image were inexorably intertwined and carefully honed, I imagined that Lillian was becoming a real girl, but it was on her terms, only permitted when it didn’t interfere with other work.  It would be a slow, halting progression.

I could see her as an adult woman, respectable, but not fashionable.  Always a few steps behind the times, or too inclined to fall back on staples and safe bets, with only a few allowances to real femininity, like her hair was becoming now.

She had an expiry date too.  Not an official one, not one that would see her dead before twenty-two, but there would be a time when her studies would take priority, and she would be yanked from us.  That woman I was imagining would watch from a distance as the last of the Lambs died.

I pulled away, pinched the covers down between us to trap the air and warmth on her side, and slipped out from my side of the bed.  I stretched.

My luggage was in the corner.  I opened the clasps and hauled it open, before collecting the clothes for the day.  I draped each article of clothing over the open top of the luggage as I picked it out.

Yesterday’s clothes had gone to pieces.  I picked the long-sleeved shirt, green-and-black checkered vest, dark slacks and wool socks, picking each with the thickest fabric in mind, and pulled out boots with straps at the top.  I pulled off my pyjama top.

“I’m not looking,” Lillian announced.

“Good.  Because naughty girls who peek will find out I have no shame, and I’m not above wagging it in front of your face.  You can live with that mental image every time you look at me for the next few weeks.”

“It- Sy, no!” she protested.  She had her hands firmly over her eyes.

I dressed quickly, gathered my things, and made sure I had my pockets full of everything I might need.  Badge, knife, pen, chalk, string, razor wire, knife and sheath for my boot, needles, and lockpicks.  Not that I was very good with the picks.

Mary had influenced us too.  Being prepared.  Getting used to having everything we might need.

I hauled the window open, and looked out on the city.

Raining hard.  I could see the hump of the Brechwell Beast’s back as it meandered down a street about a mile away.  For it to be visible above the rooftops, it had either grown a size, or it was treading on rubble of a fallen structure.

Looking in the direction of Fray’s headquarters, I could see the irregular outlines of people or temporary constructions on the rooftops.  Warbeasts, possibly sandbags, crowds.

The Beast hadn’t attacked Fray in the night.

I stuck my head out as far as I could manage, and let the runoff from the eaves above the window run over my head.  I flipped over backward and let it spatter inconsistently across my face.

Climbing back inside, I shut the window and ran my fingers through my now-wet hair to comb out the worst of the tangles and pillow-hair.  There was a tiny bit of grit from the runoff, but it hardly mattered.  I pulled on a flat brimmed cap.

Lillian, lying there with hands over her eyes, looked so warm and dry, still covered by the blankets, enjoying exclusive use of the one pillow.  The part of me that wanted to avoid the day called out, told me to cover my head so I didn’t soak the pillow and crawl beneath those covers once more.

But that part of me was getting smaller, my brain was starting to get up to speed with the challenges I was sure we were going to face, idle thoughts buzzing in the back of my mind, and I knew it wasn’t really an option.

Last night was the closest thing to a moment of weakness that I was allowed.  I could have climbed under the covers and tried to hide from the world, I could have confessed insecurities and the others would probably have listened.  We could have changed course or made excuses or delayed the day, and I might have been able to spend the day warm in bed, in the company of the Lambs.  But the day after?  The day after that?  No.

It would weaken me, rather than strengthen me.  Set me too far back.  Set us too far back.

There was a mission.  An enemy to be outsmarted, problems to solve, mysteries to see to their conclusion.  It excited me.

A new Lamb to meet.

Not excitement as much as dread, there.

Lillian probably faced very similar dilemmas every single morning she was to accompany us, but I doubted the prospect of outsmarting someone like Fray or Mauer really drove her to get up and keep fighting forward.

“You should hurry, as soon as I’m out the door,” I told her.  “You don’t want to be the one keeping the Lambs waiting.”

“I’m up earlier than any of you, every single day, Sy,” she told me, sounding annoyed.  I was willing to bet the idea of being the slowpoke genuinely annoyed her.

“Gotta tell you, Lil, this is not the day to start being lazy, wow.”

“I’ll be ready!  Just give me some privacy.”

“Because if you delay us, we’re totally going to secretly judge you, except for me, I’ll openly-”

She reached over to the nightstand, picked up the first available item, a candlestick holder sans candlestick, and threw it in my general direction.  It banged against the door.

“Leave!”

I touched the brim of my cap, bowing a little, saw her reach for the next available object, and hurried through, closing the door behind me.

Gordon was right.  Soldiers were swarming the place.  Many were young men, and some who weren’t hurrying from one place to another were here, in earshot of Lillian’s shout, giving me knowing grins and quirked eyebrows.  Except I wasn’t exactly sure what they were being so smug or knowing about.

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of boys only three to five years older than me milling around and going about their business with Lillian alone in the other room.

I waited with my back to the door, both hands behind me on the knob and one foot tapping, for what must have been several minutes.  I was about to poke my head inside and tell Lillian to hurry when the door opened, the doorknob slipping from my fingers.

“Oh!” she said, in surprise.

“All set?”

“Um.  Bathroom,” she said, looking around the hallway.  One of the young men across from us pointed.  “Don’t- don’t wait outside the bathroom door, Sy.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I didn’t.  I gave one glance to the young soldiers and headed downstairs.

The group had collected in one corner of the already small kitchen, Gordon and Mary sitting side by side in the windowsill, and Helen standing in one corner beside them.

Before I was even halfway down the stairs, Gordon used one toe to nudge a plate of mystery meat, eggs, and green stuff across the table.

“You beat Lillian down here,” he commented.

“Lies and slander.  Oh, you meant I’m first.  Yeah.”

“You’re in a better mood than yesterday,” Mary said.  “Keep that mood going.  Eat.”

I gave her a mock salute, then grabbed a knife and fork and set to work on the plate, standing rather than sitting down.  Soldiers were passing through behind me, and being on my feet made it easier to step out of the way.

Hubris put his paws up on the wall, head poking up between Mary and Gordon.

“Touch my right shoe, then Gordon’s left knee, then sniff the door, and bring me the umbrella,” Mary said.

Bemused, I watched as the dog went through the motions.  Nose touched to Mary’s shoe, then Gordon’s knee, before it hopped down from the wall, rounded the table to touch nose to the door, pausing.  It eased an umbrella out of the rack by the door and carried it over to Mary, being careful not to strike me in the back of the knees with the pointed end.

Mary took the umbrella, reached down to the windowsill beside her and picked up a bit of mystery meat, biting off a bit, then tossing the remainder to Hubris.

Lillian came downstairs, and before Gordon could toe the second plate in her direction, I reached out to pull it across the table.

“Sleep okay?” Gordon asked.

“Yes,” Lillian said, not making eye contact.

“I slept okay,” I said.  “Woke up in the middle of the night, thought something was going on outside with the Brechwell Beast.  Turned my thoughts over again and again and tried to figure out what I was hearing.  Nope.  Lillian snores.”

“As if,” Lillian said.  “Try harder, Sy.”

“She does.  You do,” Mary said, agreeing with me, then turning her focus to Lillian to restate it.  “We’ve shared a room and had our sleepovers between missions.  They’re little snores.”

I grinned.  “But she snores.”

Lillian frowned, not sure how to process that.  She turned and kicked me.

“Ow!  Stop that, you brute.  If you’re going to kick me, at least kick Mary too.”

“Mary is nice about things like that,” Lillian sniffed.

“Since we’re all obviously aware of what’s going on and you’ve all talked about it, I feel the need to chime in.  I don’t know where you guys have gotten the idea I need this, but-”

“You mean where you start acting like you’ve just had an appointment but it’s only sleep deprivation?” Gordon asked.

“Ok, I’ll rephrase-”

“Are you saying you don’t like it?” Helen asked.

“Huh?” I asked.  I put down my knife and fork, palms up, weighing, trying to find the words.

After a few seconds, I frowned and picked up the utensils, focusing on the food.

“He likes it,” Helen decided.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“I think it’s very simple,” she told me.

“I think I liked it better when you talked less.  It’s complicated.”

Gordon spoke up, “I’m more inclined to go with Sy than with Helen on this one.  Complicated.”

“Thank you,” I said.  I picked up my plate, three-quarters eaten, and carried it over to the sink.  I stuck out my tongue at Helen, who was standing beside the sink, back to the wall.

She stuck out her tongue, kept it out, and moved her head closer to mine.  I caught her tongue in between index finger and thumb.

“Saw that coming.”

“Mugh ah bahr,” Helen said.

Her tongue continued to extend.  I held the tip, but the middle section reached out, looping over my bent finger.  I twisted my hand out of the way, but she was persistent.

“Aaggh,” she said, when we’d reached a stalemate.  Her hand went up and pressed against my forehead, coming away with a bit of grit on one fingertip.

“Thank you,” I said, not letting go.  “No more licking.  I know you got a taste of me last night.  But we don’t do that.”

She smiled and nodded.

I let her withdraw her tongue into her mouth and wiped my fingers off on my vest, heading back toward my seat.

“Wash.  Hands,” Lillian ordered me.

I grimaced.  I grimaced again as I noticed the soap was the gritty bar kind of soap.  The kind that left skin raw.

“Getting back to the topic of the complicated, I don’t think we can put it off.  We need to talk strategy.”

I was focused on the sink rather than the group behind me, but I could imagine the tone of the room changing, a shift in the gravity, the attitudes, even the thought processes.

My own thoughts began changing in direction and focus.  Plans of attack, where things stood, who was involved…

“I took Hubris out first thing.  Went by the train station.  State of the city, the train schedules changed.”

My thoughts were momentarily derailed.  I turned around, hands still soapy, and rather than rinse them, just wiped them on the dishcloth.  “There’s a reason this is worth mentioning.”

“Early afternoon.  From a strategic point of view, this is a good thing for the Academy, a bad thing for Fray.  The weapons, soldiers, and reinforcements from Radham come en-masse.”

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“An hour before noon.  I thought you needed the extra sleep, and I figured you’d be awake half the night anyway.”

“I did, and I would’ve been,” I said.  Now that I had a timeline in my head, the world was starting to make sense.  “Perimeter still stands, Brechwell Beast didn’t attack Fray’s area.”

“She’s pinned down.  But you think a large body of the people who have her pinned down are traitors?”

I raised my hand, counting off on my fingers.  “That’s the number one possibility.  Number two is that she has someone pulling strings for her.  She’s here because she’s working with whoever runs Brechwell.  Who we suspect to be an incompetent ass.”

“Maybe say that a little quieter,” Mary suggested.

I looked back over my shoulder.  The soldiers were talking to their captain.  “Pshh.  They know better than we do.  But maybe we should talk outside, if Lillian’s done?”

“I’m done.”

It took us a minute to get our things together.  Mary deposited the umbrella by the door, and Helen had boots to pull on, while Gordon was quick to get his things on, stepping into another room before returning with the rifles we’d claimed earlier.

“Feel confident?” he asked me.

“How many bullets?”

“My pockets are full.”

“Then gimme,” I said.  “Give me a minute to practice shooting, I’ll be able to hit the mark every time.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence,” he said.

But I still got the third rifle.  Gordon took one, and Mary took another.

“They’re restricting travel through the city.  Be prepared to get stopped,” he said.

I checked my pocket.  I had the badge.

We stepped out into the rain.  It was less crowded outdoors, the streets largely vacant.

“You were saying, Sy?”

“Remind me?”

“Point one, she’s confident because she has the strength on her side.  Point two-”

“Connections.  Hard to buy, knowing what I know.  Third tool for major engagements is resources.  Wealth?  How much money do you need to buy your way out of that?  Things others want that could earn leverage?  I don’t see it.”

“Strength, connections, resources,” Gordon said.  “Okay.”

“Four, devices.  I’ve been thinking hard, trying not to overlook anything like we overlooked the water in, uh-”

“Kensford,” Gordon said.

“But I don’t think there’s a vector or a complication like that, not here.  Which leads to devices part B.  Weapons, chemicals, bombs, traps.  Does she have a weapon so strong that it threatens to wipe out the opposition here?”

“It’s not impossible,” Gordon said.

“A weapon of her own?  Not taken from either group?  She needs to show strength to properly unite them under her banner.  Keep in mind she’s only had about a year, she’s been focused on other things, setting this up, preparing the books she plans to distribute.  Now it’s possible those books are an outright lie, but I don’t think they are.  I don’t think she has a weapon, and I don’t think she’d be as confident as she is, because she knows about cockroaches and cats.”

“No weapon can guarantee a slaughter of every last enemy,” Lillian said.  “The more varied the opposition, the more survivors you’ll see.”

“Cats?” Mary asked.

“You have to see the pictures.  When they talk about it with the younger children, they use pictures of little cats, some black, some white, some calico…”

Point being,” I interrupted, “we’ve got all sorts of super soldiers and regular soldiers and people in different positions around the city.  There’s no device she can deploy or plague or parasite she could pack it with that is going to wipe us out so thoroughly that she’ll feel confident just strolling out of Brechwell.  A weapon?  No.”

“Is there an option after four?”

“Ideology.  Change minds, you change the paradigm.  She tried that on me last night.”

“Did it work?”  Gordon asked.  “I haven’t raised the subject, but you seemed to be considering it.”

“I was running away, not running to,” I said.  “Now?  I don’t know.  Even with the horrors that might be perpetrated, the ones Lillian talked about, I think I might rather live in a world where Fray’s books got out and the Academy couldn’t quite stop it.”

That seemed to startle Lillian, who was walking to my left.  “Why?”

“Because,” I said.  “Like I told Fray, I’m not loyal to the Academy.  I’m loyal to the Lambs.  What the Academy is doing with us, it’s a lazy, unhurried approach.  Raise a generation of brains and abilities, put them to use, figure out their limits, discard.”

“That’s a little harsh,” Lillian said.

“They didn’t save him,” I said.

I didn’t need to say who ‘him’ was.

As long as I kept my eyes on the ground, my hood blocked off my view of the other Lambs.  “The key to a good con is to rush the victim.  Deny them the ability to think clearly.  Apply the right kind of pressure and deny a man a chance to truly think, and you can fleece the Lord King of the Crown Empire of his crown.”

“Hells bells, Sy,” Gordon said, lowering his voice.  “Don’t say something like that in public.  We can talk about betraying the Crown all you want, and we can explain our way out of that, but if you talk like that…”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Right.”

“You want to con the Academy?” Mary asked.  “Apply pressure?”

“It’s not just that.  Pressure isn’t always bad.  You know this, Mary, you live by it.  In contests and records of strength, speed, in development of new and innovative biological sciences, we see accident, luck, or effort raise the bar.  The rest of the world realizes that it’s possible to go that one step further.  They work harder, they hone their ability, they study the particulars… and the rest of the world catches up.  What was impossible or world news one year becomes the norm a few years later.  The world moves, and people push themselves harder to keep up with that new normal.”

I paused, inviting question, response, commentary.  The Lambs were quiet.

“The Academy is lazy, lackadaisical.  It’s not really trying, so much as it’s maintaining a natural, lazy sort of momentum.  Now imagine a world where the books are out there.  What does the Academy do?”

“War, hunt for Fray,” Helen said.

“No, more basic.  What behavior does it default to in a pinch?  What does it crave?”

“Control,” Gordon said, “You’ve harped on it enough in the past.”

I nodded.

“They want control, but they’re dealing with something subtle.  It’s all in the background, all indirect.  The nature of war changes, and the books punctuate that,” I said.  I was getting more excited and emphatic as I spoke.  “How do you fight that threat?  How have they been fighting it, with the Ghosts?  Same sort of problem.  Background, hard to nail down.”

“Badly?” Helen suggested.

“Not disagreeing,” Mary said.  “But they’ve been keeping up.”

“The Academy doesn’t lose,” I said.  “Remember?  A perpetual stalemate is pretty good for the Academy’s enemies.  You could even make the argument that it’s hurting the Academy over time, because of how those Ghosts are created.”

I’d reminded myself of the other side of the coin.

The mice.  Not just the ones of Radham.  The little ones who couldn’t fend for themselves.  The survivors.

I kept talking anyway, “Think about it.  How have they been fighting the Ghosts?”

“Petey,” Mary said.  “The Engineer.  The Wry Man.  Dog, Catcher.”

“The talents they’re using, the tools.  Tracking, talent, infiltration, versatility, they’re brain tools.  Problem solving tools.  Put the books out there for everyone to have,” I said, “and the world is plunged into a situation where wars aren’t won on battlefields so much as they’re won in shadows and behind closed doors.  The Lambs stop being side projects that are kept on a shelf and brought out for special cases, we stop being secondary.”

“Is it worth the cost?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I really don’t.  Makes me wonder if Fray doesn’t want to recruit us more than she’s letting on.”

“Something to think about when and if we go to see her,” Gordon said.  “Which means we’ve got to decide on a plan of action, and we’re going to have to make our move, sometime in the next hour, if we’re going to do it before the rest of the forces approach and collapse on her.  Before…”

He trailed off.

Before the new Lamb arrives.

I frowned.  That little niggle about the time constraint had been sitting in the back of my mind.  An echo of my recent argument about the value of pressure, and it was complicated further by-

“The problem,” Gordon said, “Is we’ve got to do it while that region of the city is surrounded by ‘allied’ forces.”

Yeah.  that.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.11 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I could feel the soreness from the previous night as I ascended a ladder for the whateverth time.  Up roughly four stories, shoes and hands slipping on wet, cold metal rungs.  Each time, there was that precarious moment where I had to transfer over onto the roof, letting go of the ladder and putting my weight firmly on a slanted surface.

Gently slanted, but all the same, it didn’t leave much room for maneuvering or catching myself.

Eyes were focused on me as I stepped onto the roof.  Men and boys in uniform, some only a couple of years older than me, some middle-aged, were giving me the once-over, smirking, and murmuring to their buddies.

We’d been getting those looks and smirks for a while yet.  Approaching this perimeter, we’d ended up practically swimming in soldiers and cadets, along with other civilians who were making their belated evacuation from the area.  It had been hard to make headway and harder still to talk about sensitive matters, and the irritation of those two things was compounded by the smug and condescending attention we’d gotten.

They were frustrated, stupid military cadets who’d had it drilled into their head that society was all about hierarchies, and they saw an easier target in us, a way to relieve tension and stress.

“Nice gun,” one commented.

I touched the rifle I’d slung over my back, and declined to respond.

“Guy your size, you’re going to shoot that thing and the recoil will send you flying off the roof.”

The soldiers in the area broke into laughter.

“When they said we’d have more people coming to help today, I thought the help would be bigger.”

More laughter.

Gordon got off the ladder behind me, offering a hand to Mary.

“A girl with a rifle, now!” the comedian commented.  “Do you know which way to hold that thing?”

That was worth a chuckle from the gallery.  Kind of sad, really.  He had the ear of everyone nearby, and that was all he could do?  A wittier person could have had them laughing uproariously.

Mary gave me a sidelong glance.  I kept my mouth closed, standing at ease as we waited for Helen and Lillian.  She took my lead.

“They just keep coming.  Look at that!  Hello beautiful!  You brought your dog?”

Light chuckles, this time.  Bored soldiers, amused at an odd scene of children visiting the… I wasn’t even sure what to call it.  The inverse of the trenches.

“Good boy,” Helen murmured, as she put Hubris down.  She glanced down at Lillian.

“What’s going on here?” a man asked.  He stalked toward us, moving with surprising ease on the rooftop.  He had an officer’s coat and two medals on one side of his jacket, a helmet tucked under one arm, clearly not yet worn as his black hair was oiled and slicked back.  Spectacles were perched on his nose.

Not high ranked.  A half-step above a captain?  I could remember when the ranks had been neat and ordered, but special cases came and went, sub-ratings and capabilities, like Academy training and a core understanding of the types and dangers of superweapons, or the ability to manage stitched.  In a place like Brechwell, I imagined it was worse.  Teaching officers and non-teaching officers, to complicate things further.

Rather than answer the man, Gordon withdrew a badge from the coat of his raincoat, and handed it to the man.

I was willing to let him take point here.  It conveyed a better picture, as fun as it might be to toy with phrasing and really drive the point home.

“Mm,” the man murmured, taking the badge and opening it up.  It was a little bit of silver with a leather flap to back it, and the latest version had writing inlaid in the leather, visible if the metal was lifted up.  I had no idea how Gordon’s was legible – mine had so much wear and tear that most of the lettering had flaked off.

We waited patiently.  The joker and the other soldiers had fallen silent.

“If you look over there,” the officer pointed.  “The autonomous weapons are gathered over there.”

“I see them,” Gordon said.

“I trust your accommodations were suitable?”

“Yes, thank you,” Gordon said.

“If there’s anything you need, I can relay your requests to the Major.”

“We may take you up on that,” Gordon said.  “Where can we find you?”

“I’m looking after several groups.  Ask anyone here, they’ll know where to find me.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gordon said.

Navigation across the roof was treacherous, as groups were now camped out.  The little rises where the roof extended over windows were flatter than the rest, and served as points to congregate, with sandbags and weapon emplacements set down, and soldiers clustering there, so close together that knees and shoulders touched.  In other places, men with guns and binoculars were sitting on the roof’s peak, normally the easiest ground to tread on.

It struck me that the way the city was laid out made it easy to set a perimeter around a given location.  Pick any point in the city, and the constantly curving and looping streets allowed a circle to be established, with relatively few gaps.

There were gaps here.  Fray’s destruction had opened several, and I could see the distant shapes of people and emplacements on distant rooftops, covering those gaps.  Less effective than a 12-metre wall with gunmen perched on top might be.

With the streets being wider hereabouts, there was more room for Fray’s group to move around if and when they stepped out of the building, but less cover.  Some of those streets had scorch marks and craters.  There had been artillery fire in the night.  Some had been close to the building.

Scaring her people, keeping them off balance.  It was good.  A night without sleep, staring out windows and looking for signals from their double agents in our midst that something was going to happen, rattled by periodic artillery fire, wondering if that was the blast that preceded an attack, knocked down a wall, or wiped out a group of defenders.

I imagined Fray was very calm and collected throughout, but I had to wonder about Cynthia, who’d seemed shorter on temper, and about Mauer, who was a soldier, intimately familiar with these situations and this kind of pressure.

A crack and explosion made me think someone had fired an artillery shell.  Instead, as I looked to the source, I saw the Brechwell Beast.  I looked at its routes.  To get to Fray, it would have to travel for two minutes down one path, decide to turn down one path instead of continuing forward through a hole in a series of houses, turn right, and decide to turn left instead of taking the more convenient ‘forward’ path.

I was willing to bet it was designed to go forward when it had a choice.  Were there other aspects to it?  It couldn’t be solely limited to the city.  If they sought to bring it to bear in a confrontation outside of the city, how did they pilot it?  Were there ways it could be exploited?

Gordon raised a hand.  Stop.

We all, Hubris included, came to a stop.

“This is our best and possibly last chance to talk without being overheard,” he said.

I looked back, then further down the length of rooftop.  It was true; there was a wider gap than before, between the soldiers and artillery emplacement about seventy-five paces behind us and the group of Academy weapons about seventy-five paces ahead of us.  Provided we didn’t raise our voice, there wasn’t much chance we’d be overheard.

I saw Dog and Catcher among the Academy weapons and mentally revised my estimate.

I raised my hand in a pair of signals I was pretty sure Catcher didn’t know.  Subtle – careful – speak.

Watch your words.

Gordon nodded.  “We’ve had a chance to think.  We’ve got eyes on the situation.    There are squads of soldiers stationed every fifty paces, except for here, and any enemy that attacks this part of the wall is going to be sorry.”

Dog, Catcher, the Engineer, the Wry Man, others I didn’t recognize.  No shortage of weapons who could and would extract said apologies from errant enemies.

“From my guess, we used the attic windows to access the roof,” Gordon said, “I don’t think anyone is up to carrying sandbags and mortars up ladders.  If we’re going to get to Fray, that means going down through the house, crossing the open plaza with two hundred eyes on us.  From there, depending on where we exited from, there is another expanse of open space with even more eyes on us before we can reach her place, or we have to get around a row of houses on the way.”

“If we get seen, it reflects badly on us,” I said.  “Problematic, whatever route we take.  But I want to get in there.”

“Which is another thing we need to think about, the route we take” Gordon said.  “You’ve said your piece, Lillian and you have very different ideas on what the ramifications might be.  Now, keep in mind…”

Hand signs.  Subtle.  Careful.  Speak.

“What are we thinking?” Mary asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I want to talk to Percy,” she said.  Her eyes were focused on Fray’s building.  “I want to ask him things, why, and how much of what he told me was true.  I want closure, but…”

“But?” Lillian asked.

“My reasons are bad.  It’s not in tune with the mission.  It’s for me.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.

“It is when we’re here, and there’s this much going on,” Mary said.  “The closure I want… I’m not sure it isn’t me sticking a knife between Percy’s ribs.  But I’m not sure it is, either.”

“That would be a poetic end,” I said.  “To be killed by your own creation.  There’s probably a Latin term for it.”

Jamie would know.

“Probably,” Gordon said.  “Okay, Mary doesn’t think we should do this.  Does that mean we start thinking about other approaches?  Arguments that could convince Mary or Lillian?”

“Percy  killed the mice to make ghosts,” I said.  “Time and again, he preys on the vulnerable.  The Mary before Mary, rendered into fodder for experimentation by… it would have had to be Cynthia’s group.  Sometimes it feels pathological.  The way he preys on children.”

“I didn’t know your feelings on the subject were so strong,” Gordon said.

I shrugged.  I couldn’t make eye contact with the others, because admitting to a more personal vendetta against someone, a justification, it felt wrong, awkward, doubly so because I was speaking it aloud.  I crouched, straddling the peak of the roof, one hand fidgeting at my knee.

“Sorry, Mary, to say all that.”

“No, Sy.  It’s fine.  I want you to say it.”

I nodded.  I didn’t think it was fine, but I didn’t say so.

“He’s a fox,” I said.  I ran my finger down the outside of my raincoat, collecting water droplets, and drew out the symbol on my knee.  There wasn’t enough moisture, so it barely worked.  A series of blobs and lines instead of a proper triangle with two little triangles for ears.  “If we move forward with my plan, what I’m arguing for, it doesn’t rule out working out how to remove Percy.”

At my knee, my hand made a gesture.  Speak.

I looked up, and the others were looking down at me.  No signs to ask for clarification.  I trusted they understood what I was saying.

We talk to Fray, and we make a deal, where Percy gets removed from the picture, in exchange for our help.

I ventured, “I don’t know how that works for you, Mary.  I know there’s the emotional component.  He was-”

“He is my father,” Mary said.  “My maker.  Everything I am, just about everything and every skill I’m proud of, he gave me.”

A knife had appeared in her hand, blade resting between two fingers, handle extended back over her knuckles and the back of her hand.   She rolled it along her fingers until it fell off the side, let it fall, and caught the pommel.

“We’re running out of time,” Gordon said.  “The discussion with Fray won’t be short, and things get more complicated when the reinforcements arrive.”

When the new Lamb arrives.

I’d spent so long so committed to the Lambs, living and dead.  Now, as I thought about the new member joining, I couldn’t be sure where I stood.  I felt more disassociated than attached.  An unfamiliar feeling not unlike nervousness had settled in my chest and it felt very ugly and very negative.

“The plan on the most basic level has to happen,” I said.  “Whatever we’re doing, we need to get in there.  We get close, we do our thing with Fray, I have ideas on how we get out.”

I signaled the half truth, my fidgeting hand at my knee.

I need those books back.  Mary needs to talk to Percy. 

An artillery shell fired, distant.

It didn’t hit the building, instead hitting the street.  Only a few nearby windows were intact or mostly intact, and they shattered with the force of the explosion.  A plume of dust and smoke was kicked up, only to get beaten down by the rain.

I watched it, studying.

“We might have to decide on a plan as we act.  Come to a decision there.  Decide on our own,” I said.

“I don’t like that,” Mary said.

“That includes making a decision on Percy,” I said.  “If anyone doesn’t want to move forward, if Mary wants to spare Percy, then we retreat here.  Pretend we never left.”

“I don’t know,” Mary said, but she said it in a way that sounded like she was actually considering it.

“I don’t want to lose you,” I said, not looking at her.  “I don’t want to lose Lillian.  I swear to you, on my membership in the Lambs, that I’m not going to manipulate you when it comes down to the decision.  We get close, then we decide on a course of action.  But we can’t stay here, we can’t just sit and wait and let things unfold.  That serves nobody and no-one.”

“I agree,” Gordon said.  “I’m on the fence about this, I need to know more before we make a call.”

Lillian was only shaking her head, a small gesture, nervous.

“I know you have commitments to the Academy,” Gordon said, his voice soft.

“Yes.  And to the people,” Lillian said.  “To my family.  I might only see them once or twice a year, but-”

Gordon signaled.  Stop.

Lillian shut her mouth.

He shifted the signal to carefulListen.

The gesture for listen was loose, fingers unfolding to indicate the general area.  Listening ears.

“I can’t do this,” Lillian said.  “Please believe me.  It would be… so horrible.”

Fray’s release of the books, made out to be an apocalyptic event.

“Do you want to stay behind?”

“No!  I want- I want to… I need to know that the Lambs are who I thought they were.  That they understand, and when it matters, they take me at my word, about the very things I’ve studied.”

“Is that because what you studied is right and real, Lil, or is it propaganda?” I asked.

She whirled on me, as upset as I’d ever seen her.  “You just promised, Sy.  You wouldn’t manipulate me.  That’s manipulation.  What you just did.”

“No,” I said, very calm.  “Manipulation would be pointing out how you getting upset right now is telling, and that you’re more insecure than you’re letting on.  My promise was in regards to when we were there, deciding.  At the pivotal moment.  Not here.  Here I’m going to argue my case.”

“Sy,” she said, and her voice was terse.  “I’m fond of you, I’m fond of every one of the Lambs.  But I have parents to think about, I have aunts, uncles, and cousins.  I have dreams, and if you want to risk everything so you can make a grand dramatic play, then I’m saying no.”

Another artillery shell came down.  It was on the far side of the building.  I heard something crack and crumble, but the soldiers around the perimeter didn’t act like it was anything special.  A close call.

There were no underground tunnels, supposedly.  Fray couldn’t fly.  A literal army surrounded her.  I imagined the Academy forces saw it as an easy victory, a bird in the hand.  They could let the train come with the monsters, and use only the expendable assets to eliminate the enemy.  Only stitched and superweapons.

It had to be eleven thirty or thereabouts.  An hour and a half, and the reinforcements would arrive.  Those huddled men taking cover under canvas and by sandbag were probably discussing their strategy now.  So easy to do.  The way they mingled, sending men over this way and that under the premise of getting and sharing information, latrine breaks and grabbing quick bites to eat, they could be communicating a greater plan.

One signal, and there would be slaughter.  Fray would play her gambit, and if I was right, the army here would turn on itself.  Mortar shots fired at rooftops.  A coordinated strike, removing the major players.

“It’s not about the play or doing anything fancy,” I said, as my ears stopped ringing from the recent explosions.

“I heard what you said before.  I know you’ve got justifications.  But Sy, you’re smart enough that you’re going to come up with perfect, convincing reasons to do something you want to do, and you’re going to come up with perfect, convincing reasons not to do something you want to do.  When Fray or Mauer or whoever else come into the picture, you get caught up in their gravitational pull, because they give you the ability to make your mark, to make bigger, clearer actions and bigger, clearer justifications to do those things.”

“So, what?  Does that make everything I say invalid?  I’ll always have good-sounding reasons to do something or not do something?  My rationale doesn’t matter?”

“It breaks down to what Gordon was trying to get at last night.  The root of the issue.”

“We’re not going to play twenty questions again, are we?  Because the way you guys play, Gordon plays, is to ask the same question twenty times.”

“No,” Lillian said.  “We’re not going to grill you.  That’s not what I’m getting at.  I just think… we’re walking into the lion’s den, and I don’t know how we’re getting in or out, or if I like the Lambs going there when I know I won’t like what I hear.”

“I know how we’re getting in,” I said.  “Helen… wait, what time is it?”

“Hold on,” Lillian said.  She reached into a pocket, and pulled out a pocket watch without a chain.  “Eleven forty.”

“Okay, Helen, run a quick errand.  Tell the nearest artillery team to drop a shell between the ensconced building entrance down there, and the shop under us here.  Then further out, same thing, but between the building entrance and Fray’s building.  You see what I mean?  ”

“I see.”

“They shoot at eleven-fifty, eleven-fifty-two, as fast as they can load a shell and fire again, then do it in reverse, at twelve-twenty and twelve twenty-two.”

“Okay.”

Then she was off.

“Cover of smoke and debris?” Gordon asked.  “A lot of ground to cover.”

“We can make it,” I said.

“If Fray delays us…”

“She won’t,” I said.

“You’re sure?  Because-”

“She won’t,” I said.  “Trust me.  She won’t have a choice in the matter.”

Gordon frowned at me.

“Trust me,” I said.

“I do,” he said.  “As much as I trust anyone.  But I’m an old man, Sy.  Trusting you isn’t good for a weak heart like mine.”

“Don’t joke,” I said.

He gave me a slight smile.

“I know what you’re doing,” Lillian said.  “Ten minutes, you scheduled us to leave.  You’re setting a time limit, putting pressure on me.  I pay attention, Sy.  I’m a good student.  It’s why I’m here!”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Now that she points it out, it sounds like she’s right on the mark,” Mary said.

Not you too!

Before I could open my mouth, Lillian was on me.  “It’s like you’re an abusive husband, you act mean, you tease, you taunt, you manipulate, then you start saying and doing all the right things, you lure me back in, you make me let my guard down-”

Husband is a little bit forward, I think.”

“No!  No jokes, no teasing, no manipulation.  I’m sorry I’m not cooperating, and this apology is for Gordon and Mary and Hubris and Helen who isn’t here, but no.  You’re not going to budge me.  The only way to win against Sy for sure is to not play his games.  I’m staying right here.  I’m not coming, and if you leave, I’m going straight to the people in charge and telling them what’s happening.”

I sighed.

Lillian folded her arms.

“Even if it kills us?” I asked.

“If you do this, if you’re really considering this, you’re dead to me,” she said.

I could see from her expression that that wasn’t true in the slightest.  That it killed her to say.

“Lillian,” I said, and I dropped my voice to a whisper, stepping closer.  I reached out to pull her hands free and take them in mine, and she refused to give them to me.  “She’s going to make this happen.”

“Not with our help,” Lillian whispered to me.

“I saw their setup,” I said, “Okay?  Where their stuff is.  I know where the labs are, you know what’s flammable.  No grand plays, nothing fancy, we get over there, Mary gets to confront Percy, I get to hunt for the books, we burn them out.”

All lies.

With all the strength I could muster, I pulled one of Lillian’s hands away from her arm.  I clasped her wrist, and put my hand in hers, palm up.

I signaled.  Ruse.

Her eyes narrowed.

I looked over my shoulder at Gordon and Mary.  They’d seen the gesture.

“I don’t trust you,” Lillian said.

“We’re doing this,” I said.  “We don’t have long.  Come on.”

Helen was already on her way back.

I had Lillian’s wrist.  I pulled her behind me.

In through the access window that let us into the attic of the building.

The hatch leading from the attic to the building below was locked.  I got my lockpicks out, but Mary pushed me aside.

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Trust me,” I said.

It wasn’t a hard lock to open.  Less than a minute’s time.  The hatches were common to every attic in the area, and the real purpose was to delay invaders, they could afford to be cheap.

The building was a set of offices, smelling strongly of cigarette smoke and firewood.  We were quickly down the stairs to the third floor, then the second.

I stopped.  The others, intent on continuing down to the first, bumped into me.  I stopped them.

I raised a finger to my lips, and led the others to the window.  Still pulling Lillian behind me, I crouched there.

My fingers tapped Lillian’s pocket.  She withdrew her pocket watch.

Two minutes until.

Crouching, hands over my ears, I waited, the others with me.

The explosion rocked the building, knocking me on my ass.  Gordon’s hand kept the bayonet blade of my rifle from stabbing Mary.  They helped support me.  I watched the plume of smoke, then looked to either side, studying the surroundings.

The next explosion came before the debris from the first had cleared.  Easier to bear.

“What’s-” Gordon started.

I put a finger out, shushing him.

The retaliation from the rebels came shortly after.  A band of stitched, carrying heavy rifles.  The rifles of the people at the perimeter and the rifles of the stitched didn’t quite reach each other, with intervening buildings and everything else.  They were firing at people on the rooftops.

How does this work?

A horn, as it turned out.  It blared from above.

And who?

My heart sank as I saw.  Dog and Catcher reached the ground level in record time.  They plowed into the group of stitched.

One stitched ran back toward Fray’s building, dropping the weapon and disappearing into the smoke.

I held up my fingers, counting.

One.  Two.  Three.  Four…

“Sy?” Gordon asked, noting the fingers.

Eight.  Nine.  Ten.  Eleven…

Twenty seconds in all passed before Catcher returned, his quarry in his mancatcher’s grasp.  The smoke was clearing, and as it did, he picked up the pace, running for cover, snapping the stitched’s neck and tearing head from shoulders with a movement of the mancatcher.

He passed out of our field of vision.

“You expected that,” Gordon said, voice quiet.

I nodded.

“I don’t understand,” Lillian said.

“It wasn’t the plan to cross over and wing it,” I said.  “I suspected we were being watched or listened to.  I wanted them to think we were coming.  Fray’s mole, if she had any, would want to pass on information about us sabotaging her, blowing up labs, the fact our group was split.  The trick was to give them a reason and an opportunity.”

I looked at each of the Lambs.

“If they didn’t have a mole, nothing lost, we talk it through and schedule another crossing.  If they did, then maybe something like that happens.  A signal, asking for a reason to go down to ground level.  Dog and Catcher signal they’re going down, dispatch expendable troops, and relay a message, while they think we’re not looking.”

“They’re working for Fray,” Gordon said.

I nodded.  “And, given who was in their company, I’m not sure the other experiments aren’t either.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.12 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I told you to trust me,” I murmured.

Lillian pulled her arm out of my grasp and hit me.

“I couldn’t say anything without tipping them off,” I said.  “Too many hand signals would’ve been telling, too.”

“You know they can probably hear you now,” Gordon said.

“So?” I asked.  “They would have realized something was up when Catcher went there and we weren’t knocking on the door.  They know we know, and they can’t make another move without being obvious.”

“Damn it,” Gordon said.  “I liked them.”

“I like them now, no need for past tense,” I said.  “They’re good guys.  They’re just doing what we’re doing, trying to survive, find the best way forward.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Mary murmured.

A few distant gunshots sounded.  From the direction of it and the answering rumble, I guessed the local cadets and soldiers were trying to steer the Brechwell Beast.

“This feels like a continuation of last night,” Gordon said.

I shook my head.

“You careening around like a stray bullet, ricocheting off surfaces?  All the rest of us can do is try to stay out of the way and trust you to bounce in the enemy’s general direction.”

I shook my head again, watching the building across the open space.  “It was eye opening, what Helen said.  That I’m mimicking Jamie.  I’ve put that on the back shelf.  This is pure Sylvester.”

“Is it now?  Because it doesn’t seem like you.”

“It is me.  But Fray has a sense of who I am and how I operate.  Think.  Right now, what is she doing?  What does she want?  What does she expect?”

“Preparing for her massacre,” Mary said, counting on her fingers, “She wants a victory, to get out alive and do that thing with the books, she expects us to make an approach and discuss, and maybe to convince us?”

“Not victory,” I said.  “She wants to prove she’s the person with the answers, ideally by swaying people to her side with her rhetoric.  But yes.  That’s where she is, her attention is split, even if she had it mostly in hand, she’s going to be stressed and distracted, trying to coordinate.  Now she got a short phrase or a note from Catcher, she’s expecting us to be there, and we’re not.”

“She’ll adapt,” Gordon said.

“Which requires time, attention, focus!” I said, poking my finger against the glass-littered windowsill to punctuate the three words.  “Where are the Lambs right now?  Are they elsewhere in the building?  Is security good enough?  What does she need to do to ensure we don’t derail everything?  From now until we show up, if we show up, she’s going to have to second guess everything against us interfering.”

“Everything you said was just to throw Dog and Catcher off?” Gordon asked.

“Or whoever the mole was.  Half truths,” I said.  “Catcher might have noted something about the Lambs using labs and facilities in the building to start a fire and disrupt her group.  Is it another ruse, is it possible I got enough info in my visit?  Right now, I imagine he’s signaling to Fray.  Either a light or gestures that can be seen with binoculars.  A simple, crude system, or he wouldn’t have to go down to deliver a note in person.  He’d let the people on the wall fill those stitched with bullets.”

“Okay.  Let’s assume you’re right-”

“I’m right.”

“We’re running out of time.  We’ve been arguing, we aren’t any closer-”

“Let me stop you there,” I said.  “First off, Lillian, sorry.  I had to take a hard stance, or your stubbornness would have derailed our shot at ferreting out the mole.”

“Uh huh,” she said.  She was frowning at me.

“Gordon.  We have two options.  Option one, we use the next hour to figure out the key figures in this and we remove them.  Shake the box of bugs here, on the perimeter, see what stands out.  I don’t think Fray has been talking to each and every person here at this Academy.  She would have had to have targeted a few key people, teachers or commanding officers, people who resent the man at the top or who are jaded from the war, much like Mauer, and she turned them.”

“That’s predicated on a lot of assumptions, Sy,” Mary told me.  “There’s nothing guaranteeing you’re even right about the mutiny.”

“True,” I said, “And we’d be working against the other experiments.  Assuming they can hear us, they’d be trying to stop us.  If things come down to a he-said, he-said with us and Catcher, I don’t think people are going to listen to the kids.  It’s how things work.”

“What’s option two?” Lillian asked.

“We signal another drop, we cross over, and we confront Fray,” I said.  “Ideally, we do it as close to the deadline as possible.”

“What?” Lillian asked.  “Close to the deadline?  When the signal is given?”

“We just talked about it,” I said.  “What did you call me out on?”

“Time constraints,” she said.

“Fray created her own time constraint.  She wants us to come in.  She knows reinforcements are coming in by train.  Maybe they’re hers, maybe not, but the time window is small.  Now, assuming I’m right, I’ve got her number, my estimation of the situation is on target, soldier turning against soldier, traps going off, whatever else, the safest place for us to be isn’t here.  The safest place is there.”

I pointed at Fray’s building.

“If your estimation is wrong, that’s the most dangerous place to be.”

“If she has absolutely no plan, no escape route, no options?” I asked.  “Yeah, worst place to be.  But a war is about to erupt here, it’s tense enough that Helen’s hair is standing on end-”

“Is not.”

“-and honestly, the best options available to us are to either be as far away from this as possible, or turn to the smartest person in the area and do what they’re doing.”

“That’s predicated on us joining them,” Lillian said.

“We’re not joining them,” I said.  “Not while you’re against it.  But I don’t think we’re capable of stopping them, either.  We might need to play along just a bit-”

“Uh huh,” she said, in a way that sounded very far from agreement.  “I see your angle.”

“No angle,” I said, looking at the building again.  “I swear.  But we need to get close.  For a lot of reasons.”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.

Mary spoke up, “If what Sy said about me getting to make the final decision on Percy is right, then I want to go.  It makes sense, and I think we can do more there than here.”

I nodded, smiling a bit.

“I don’t feel confident making a decision,” Gordon said.  “I believe you, I trust you, but we’re just charging in?”

“You love charging in.”

“With no plan in mind?  No.  I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll break the tie,” Helen said.

A few of us turned to her in surprise.

“You’re usually content to go with the flow,” I commented.

“Usually,” she said.  “But I couldn’t sleep normally last night.  I felt funny.”

“Oh no,” Gordon said, hand going to his face.  “When Helen says that…”

“It was a squirmy, warm feeling, all nestled in my belly, and I kept drifting in and out, thinking about the people we saw.  The man with the birthing saw.  I want to hold him.”

“Hold him?” Lillian asked.  She’d gone a little pale.

Helen had a smile on her face, warm, like a little girl looking at her new sibling.  “And Genevieve Fray, and the others.  I wanted to hug them and break them, open them and wrap them around me and me around them.”

I murmured, “This is the point where I’d normally tell you to stop.”

“Oh?” Helen asked.  “Normally?”

“But I think it’s dangerous to cut you short and move forward blind.  Finish talking,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it.

“I wanted to know what the inside of their skin feels like, kind of?  If I could make a cut and slide my hands between the skin and the meat, and feel all of them with all of me, while they writhed?  I suppose I’d have to break them first, like I said, and it would have to be multiple cuts, if-”

“Getting off track.  Try again.  Focus.”

“I had really interesting dreams,” she said.

“Let’s steer things back to what you were feeling.  You want to go inside?” I said.  Early, in my first interactions with Helen, I’d made the mistake of assuming that she didn’t feel.  It wasn’t the case.  Helen had an emotional spectrum, but it didn’t translate to what we felt.  Priorities were different, the goals and construction of it were different, and it was only with practice and training that she and Ibott had crafted an end result that could be seen as analogous to a human’s.

In this case, she was describing a more engineered end result, one where her killer instinct and her first flickerings of feeling for others had mingled into another sort of emotion or drive.

“Oh, hum.  I want to feel that want again.  Even if we don’t hurt them, it felt more more than most things I feel, I want to try it, so I can understand it better.”

“I’m already dreading having to write this down for the paperwork for Ibott,” Lillian said.  “I’m going to have to ask follow-up questions and I really don’t want to ask follow-up questions.”

“I was sad, sleeping in a bed all alone,” Helen mused, talking more to herself than to us.  She turned to Mary so suddenly that Mary startled a little.  “I thought about going to your room and crawling under the covers with you, Mary, since Lillian was with Sy.  To hold you, and not feel like there was so much dead, empty darkness around me.  But I didn’t want to disturb your sleep, so I decided not to.”

“I appreciate that,” Mary said.  “You don’t, uh, feel that way about me?  Wanting to feel the inside of my skin?”

Helen shook her head.  “Silly Mary.  Doing that would probably kill you.  I like you, I don’t want you to die.”

“Silly Mary,” I echoed Helen.  Mary shot me an offended look.

“You’re warmer and less empty feeling than a bed and covers are.  That’s why I wanted to go.”

“Uh huh,” Mary said.  “Can someone change the topic?”

“I think that empty what you’re describing is loneliness, Helen,” I commented.

“Was it?  Is it?”

“I think,” I said.

“The mission is important,” Helen said, eyes wide, very serious, sounding like a small child espousing what they saw as an absolute truth.  “I don’t want to get in the way of that, no matter how big and, um, swirly my feelings feel.”

“Good Helen,” I said, reaching out to give her a pat on the head.

She beamed at me.

“That’s one more person wanting to go in,” Gordon said, as if the prior conversation hadn’t happened.  “If you three are that certain, then I’m willing to go along with this.  Delaying and arguing is going to put us in as much risk as anything else, at this point.”

“It feels like whatever we do is the wrong choice,” Lillian said.

“Trust me,” I said.  “I don’t ask that lightly.  I remember losing Jamie.  I know what we’re doing is dangerous, and I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was worth it.”

Lillian pursed her lips.

“I don’t think we can stop whatever she’s engineered from happening, but if we’re going to, it’s going to be with us there,” I said.  “The more likely result is that we go there, we talk with her, we borrow her plans and safeguards to survive whatever happens next, and we go our separate ways, with us having convinced her that the Lambs might change sides.”

She didn’t answer for a long minute.

“Someone needs to go ask for them to drop more artillery shells,” Lillian said.

She’d agreed.  We were on track.

“Hubris can go,” Gordon said.  “He’ll deliver a note.”

Gordon had paper, I had a pen.  He scribbled down instructions, consulting Lillian’s pocket watch.

“Take this to the officer we talked to earlier,” Gordon said.  “Then come find us.”

Hubris made a sound low in his throat, a huff of response, then ran off, twice as fast as any of us could travel.

We were left in silence.

Bells started to sound, one or two distant knells, before stopping.

Not a signal.  There was no gunfire, no sound of any device going off, no chaos.  Even the Brechwell Beast was quiet for the moment.

“Probably the Beast entering a new area,” I said.

“Probably,” Gordon said.  “I wonder if she coordinated that.  If the people in the tower are helping to steer and bait it, then she might want the Beast further away if reinforcements come.”

I nodded.

Another awkward silence.

“What you said before, about me acting like an abusive husband,” I said.

“Sy, no, I was angry, I was-”

“Right.  You were right.  Partially,” I said.

“No, I don’t want you to think like that.  That’s not right, it’s not what I meant.”

“I hope you know I’d die for you,” I said, meeting her eyes.

Her mouth opened, but she didn’t manage words.

“Any of you,” I said.  “I’m not saying that in order to manipulate or serve some complicated goal, I’m saying it because it’s true.  You’re important to me.  If I hurt you, genuinely hurt you, I want to know.  I might poke fun or tease and mislead or lie or be an utter bastard, but I do it for you, for all of us.”

“You are what you are, Sy,” Gordon said.  “We never had any illusions.  I’ve never harbored any hard feelings.”

I chanced a glance at Mary.  She didn’t speak, but she offered me a small smile.

“I didn’t want this,” Lillian said.  “You acting different, feeling guilty.”

“You wanted it, you pushed me to face it,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear you say you’re going to die for me,” she said, insistent.  “That’s messed up!”

“You became a Lamb,” I said.  “You earned your place with us.  I know you have a family, and that’s something the rest of us don’t have, but you’re one of us.  If it comes down to it, I’d lay my life on the line.”

“No,” Gordon said.

“No?  You’re saying I’m lying?”

“I’m saying I hear you,” he said, eyes on the road.  He reached for Lillian’s pocket watch and checked the time.  “But that’s not allowed.”

“I get to decide, Gordon, not you.”

“How do you think we’d feel, if you traded your life for ours?  No.  If you’re going to trade yourself for us, then it’s only allowed if you get a two for one deal.  Same goes for you, Mary.  I’ll do it too.”

“Me too,” Helen said.  “Though Ibott would probably kill you, so maybe it should be three to one.”

I gave her another pat on the head.

“Or if the mission is on the line?” Helen asked.

“Don’t overcomplicate it,” I said.

She nodded.

“I thought you were okay with the teasing,” I told Lillian.

“I am, mostly.”

“I was told you liked the teasing, even, by two different sources.  That you acted different when there wasn’t any.  I paid attention, tested the hypothesis, and it seemed right.”

“Sy?”

“Yes, Lillian?”

“If you have to talk about this, let’s do it when the others aren’t around.”

“They know, you know.”

“Sy!”

“Yes.  Of course.  So long as we’re okay?”

“We’re okay,” she said.

Her head turned as Gordon reached for her pocket watch again.  I reached out and took hold of her hair and gave it a light tug.

She hit me.  But when I saw her face in profile, she was smiling.

Looking at her, Helen, and Mary, all I could think was, girls are so weird.

“Be ready,” Gordon said.

My hands went over my ears.  I crouched, using the wall for cover.

I felt a touch at my rear end, and wondered for a moment if Helen was in a dangerous mood, or if it was Lillian feeling me up for some perplexing reason, or-

Hubris, nosing around.  He licked me as I turned around.  Why did I keep getting licked?

Gordon got Hubris’ attention, and covered the dog’s ears.

Any moment now.

Any moment, then there was no going back.

“How long do we have, once we’re there?” I asked.  Gordon wasn’t covering his own ears.  I supposed he figured he was resilient enough to deal with the noise of the blast.  I pulled a hand away to listen.

“Before the final scheduled blasts?  Thirty minutes, if we decide we need to leave.”

I nodded.

Eyes closed, ears covered once more, I waited.

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

Movement from Hubris brushing against my backside was the second indication something was wrong.

I twisted around, and I came face to face with Catcher, or as close to face to face as was possible, when he was twice as tall as I was, the two of us crouching.

His rag-wrapped hand was pressing Hubris down, pinning the struggling dog against the ground.  His polearm was extended toward Gordon.

It made sense he’d find us.  Even ignoring his exemplary tracking abilities and enhanced senses, he would have been able to follow Hubris.

“What gave us away?” he asked me.

“You specifically?  Fray did.  Once I start assuming the most inconvenient result, my guesses get a lot more acccurate.”

Catcher nodded, taking that in stride.  Mary had her weapons drawn, but wasn’t using them.  The scene was a still tableau, about to be broken by an artillery shell.

“Let us go,” I said, calm.

“Without knowing what you’re planning?  I heard some of what you said.  I don’t know if I like any of it.”

I wondered momentarily if he’d heard what Helen had said.  The half-second I spent briefly entertaining that thought was a window of opportunity for Gordon to speak.

“Catcher,” Gordon said.  “Nothing good comes from this.  If you attack the Lambs here, you get hurt, we get hurt, maybe we die now, at your hands, maybe one side or the other wins, and we get assumed to be on the wrong end of things, and we get executed.  But that’s bullshit.”

Not quite the argument I would’ve made in Gordon’s shoes.  Still, I let him continue without me chipping in.

“We’re friends, Catcher.”

“I always liked you, Gordon,” Catcher said.  “Dog too.  I heard what Sylvester said earlier, about how we’re all trying to survive.  I wondered if it was a trick of his, but it sounded genuine.”

“It was,” I said.  “You’re closer to being one of us than the common-”

The artillery shell came down, close.  I fell over, senses momentarily obliterated.

Don’t attack, don’t fight, I thought.

I managed to start seeing straight again, and focused on the scene.  Catcher hadn’t flinched, he still had Hubris, and Gordon was still crouched a few feet away, the length of the pole between him and our old friend.

Mary hadn’t attacked either.

“Let us go,” Gordon said.  “If you believe in what she’s doing, then trust her to convince us.

“I don’t believe in what she’s doing,” Catcher said.  “I’ve only done this because I’m so very tired.”

In the words, the way he spoke, if I listened beyond the shrill noise in my ears, I could hear that fatigue.

“I can’t have the stalk and the manhunt be the beginning, middle, and end of my existence,” Catcher said.  “Whatever I’ll do, it won’t live up to what I was created to do, but I won’t be able to go peacefully if I don’t at least try and fail at another course.”

“And Dog?” Gordon asked.  I could barely hear him with my ears suffering as they were.

“The same.”

“That’s your course.  Let us choose ours,” I said.  “Let us go, before the dust settles.”

The second shell came down.  Not as violent as the first, being further away, but it rattled the senses once again.

“-lost Jamie, I thought you would break,” Catcher was saying, as I started being able to piece together words once again.

The mention of the name made me cringe as much as the last shell had.  He understood that it was a true loss.  That our Jamie was gone.  He didn’t have to ask, or evade, or insinuate.  He understood.

“I thought you might be on the same course as I was.  Exhausted.  That you’d end up reaching your limit.  Maybe you would have, if they hadn’t given you the time to grieve and find yourselves.  But I reached my limit first, in the end.”

“Maybe,” Gordon replied.

I was itching to just turn and go, but that wasn’t a reality.  If the dust cleared, we wouldn’t get a third shot, I was pretty sure.  The pattern would be too obvious.

“It was the futility of the Ghost hunts,” Catcher said.  “A chore, find one group, another would spring up.  One time I went, and she was waiting.  The leash had already loosened, because she’d leashed everyone else with the same chemical.  She offered to free me.”

“Catcher,” I said, not sure if I was speaking at the right volume.  My mind was racing, trying to piece together his psychology, his motivations, and figure out the best possible argument.

He wasn’t trying to deter us or hurt us.  He was justifying himself.

“Catcher,” I said, again, more firmly.  “We understand.  I understood without you needing to explain.  When all of this has settled down, we’ll find you, and we’ll play cards and share a meal, maybe a drink.”

He met my eyes with his own rheumy cataract-white ones.  Old scars, but the eyes were sharper than they looked to the untrained eye.

“Holding us here is going to push us away, maybe get us killed,” I said.  “Let us go, so we can find you later.  So it can be like old times.”

“It’ll never be like old times, Sy,” Catcher said, voice soft.  “That’s the problem.  Time runs out.  It’s gone.”

He let go of Hubris.  The dog snarled, tensing, and Gordon made a small sound.  Hubris relaxed in an instant.

The polearm moved away from Gordon.

Without wasting an instant, we turned.  Gordon went from a crouch to hurdling the window, Hubris under one arm, into the dwindling smoke, rain and dust without even checking if the coast was clear.  Mary was right after him, then Helen.

“You were right,” Catcher said, behind me.  “About what comes next.  That it’s a massacre.”

“Live,” I said.

“That’s what I’m trying to do, Sy.”

I could see, looking at it, that the smoke was too thin.  If anyone was looking, and there were an awful lot of eyes to be looking, the shadows of our movement would be visible.

I reached for Lillian’s hand and pulled her after me.  If she hesitated, it might be too late.

Into the road.  An open area with soldiers on two sides that might reflexively shoot if they spotted us.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see clearly, and my heart was hammering.  A blind run, where I could get shot at any moment.

The smoke was thinning out too fast.

I heard a gunshot, and I heard the impact, very close by.

Lillian didn’t falter.  I didn’t hurdle over any dead Lambs.

Then, behind me, I heard the horn.

It cried out, a warning, that superweapons were on the field.  Hold your fire.

Encouraged, I pressed on, tugging Lillian behind me.

The smoke and rain made it too hard to see a short distance ahead of me.  I almost ran into the door, but Mary caught me, before reaching out to grab Lillian.

Gordon banged on the door.

Long seconds passed.

It cracked open, and we passed inside.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.13 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

As before, Warren served as the escort.  The musclebound man wore a suit that hadn’t been put together by a true craftsman.  I could see, here and there, how the suit jacket pulled and where there was a bit of clumsiness at the seams.  It was good work, all the same, but whoever had done it probably wasn’t a seamstress.

Our destination wasn’t the same room I’d gone to the previous night.  We passed down a hallway, and there were people in the rebellion’s make-shift uniform, predominantly men, sitting and standing on either side of the long hallway.  Groups of humans, groups of stitched, and plague men stood apart, one or two paces separating each from the other.  The stitched had a smell when they congregated in numbers or were in bad shape, and both were the case here.

They waited at the ready for real conflict to unfold.

A hand touched mine, grabbing and nearly taking hold before I slipped mine free.  My first instinct was to think it was one of the soldiers we were passing.  I looked and saw that it was Lillian’s.

I gestured.  Question.  Why?

Fear.  Me.  Scared.

I saw a few curious looks from nearby soldiers, and wondered if they might see it as us plotting something.  I leaned closer to Lillian, and I murmured in her ear.  Ironic that it was very possibly less suspicious than the gestures.  “We need to look strong, stand straight, look confident.  We shouldn’t hold hands.  That looks weird, and weird is something they’ll notice.”

She gave me the slightest of nods, averting her eyes.

I could see her trying to pull herself together, but the tension was etched into her expression.  When she saw a movement, her head turned all at once, eyebrows going up and together in concern.  She realized it was just a man changing position, and that heightened tension didn’t fade, it only climbed and built up into something.

I suppressed a sigh and reached out for her hand, squeezing it.

It was our first serious mission since we’d lost Jamie.  The loss hadn’t even occurred in the field, but now we were in a dangerous situation, there were other things going on, and Lillian wasn’t coping.

Working to help her was at least helping me feel more centered.

I looked at Mary, and I could see how tense she was.  I reached out to touch her arm, and she flinched.

Then she saw me and relaxed.  She managed a smile.  I let my hand fall.

Warren opened the door, inviting us to step into the back room.

The room I had been in before had been for larger gatherings, a space large enough to dance in, or to set up a stage and have room for audience.  This room was something closer to a large dining room, and tables had been placed against tall windows with curtains on either side, the table legs making the curtains poke out.

The tables weren’t long enough to cover the entire window, and the top two or three feet of each window was left exposed.  The light from outside was meager, the sky already overcast, rain pounding down, and periodically, one of the lights from the towers moved over the building, too diffuse in daylight to be distinct.  It still made the room just a little bit brighter, now and again.

Fray and Avis were at one end of the room, Fray leaning back against a table, hands gripping the edges, while Cynthia stabbed a finger in her direction, it sounded heated.  Fray was dressed similar to how she had been dressed last night, with a knee-length dress, stockings, and a shorter coat.  The only changes she’d made were to tie her hair back and to don a belt that had equipment hanging from it.  An octopus was out of water, set on the table just a half-foot from her hand.

Cynthia, by contrast, had foregone the dress and stockings for a tight-fitting jacket, sweater, and what might have been riding slacks, tight against the leg.  She had a gun at one hip, a short sword at the other, and a long rifle slung over her back.  She looked like an entirely different person, even though her face was still that same eerie, ill-fitting mask, her hair covering much of it.

Fray looked at the Lambs as we entered, and she seemed almost relieved to see us.

She held up a finger.  Wait.

I realized I was interpreting that as a gesture, when it was a common shorthand.

It made sense to take control of the situation by making a visitor wait.  Professors and barons of business did it all time.  Fray would’ve been right to do it here, even acknowledging how little time there was.

But she wasn’t doing it for that reason.  She really couldn’t abandon the ongoing discussion with Cynthia.

I turned my eyes away from that scene.  There were other players who posed more immediate danger, people who might take advantage of Fray’s distraction.

As was the case with Cynthia, many had changed clothes with a purpose.  The gigantic fellow with the birthing saw, I was having trouble placing his name, he was wearing a military outfit now, and he’d gathered with others of his ilk.  There was a man with short hair and very thick glasses who stood by his cat-like warbeast.  The warbeast’s head was at just the right height for his hand to settle on while it sat beside him.  He’d traded out his coat for one of the rebellion’s black jackets, not quite long enough to be a lab coat.  I saw a man covered in scars, in a very different way from the plague men, and a burly woman with things crawling just beneath her skin, glowering at anyone nearby, wearing men’s clothing.

Those unique cases out of the way, there were another half-dozen people who passed for human.  Men, all of them, they had to be generals or squad leaders.

Among the ordinary men were Mauer and Percy.  The pair were the same as they had been last night, in the most general sense, a worn down old academic in nicer looking clothes, and a soldier with a deceptively fresh face and military clothes that had seen some use.

That said, both had dressed as if they expected to see conflict.  Mauer wore his jacket, having had pulled it over the one arm, with a chain across the lapels keeping it in place, where it simply hung over the mutated arm.  He had an exorcist rifle, and unless I was missing something, he hadn’t burdened himself with vials and medical tools like some had.

Percy wore his long coat, and he did have a gun at his hip, a long-barreled pistol, the holster attached to the two belts he wore to hold all of the myriad pouches and tools.

Mary stepped forward, coming to stand beside me, and I could see the movement of her throat as she swallowed.

Gordon’s hand went out, resting on Mary’s shoulder.

As a group, we approached the pair.

The me of a year ago might have tried to talk to Mauer, regardless of the circumstance.  I recognized how important this was, however, and held my tongue.

“Mr. Percy,” Mary said.

“My girl,” the long-haired academic responded.

I shivered a little at the choice of words.  From the look of it, the effect was far more profound for Mary.

I’d known Mary for long enough to know all of the tells, and even I couldn’t get a good read on her, seeing her now.  It worried me that I wasn’t exactly sure what she would say or do.

The conversation had already aborted, in the messiest use of the word.  Neither seemed able or willing to speak, and none of the bystanders, Lamb or Shepherd, were interjecting.  I was glad.  If Mauer jumped in, the conversation would likely be his, with the pair on the periphery.

“You’re well, Mary?”

“I’m… overall, I’m well.  Right now?”

She seemed to flounder for words.

The tells were for anger, excitement, impatience, insecurity.

“I don’t know what to feel right now.”

“Speaking for myself, I’m glad to see you.  When I first joined Cynthia’s group, they told me the Academy’s group had eliminated all of my, ah, children.”

“Misinformation or lies?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Sylvester,” Percy said.  He looked at Cynthia.  “I’ve wondered which it was.”

“You worked for her before, but now you’re on opposing sides?” Mary asked.

She sounded younger than she was, as she asked the question.

Mental note, Sylvester: her mental and emotional guards are down.  Mary is vulnerable.

“Let’s not go that far,” Percy said.  “We were on opposing sides, but a big part of the meetings over the past half-week have been about mending the fences.”

“We hope,” Mauer commented.  His attention had passed to Cynthia as well, and I was guessing he was viewing the situation with forward-looking eyes, where Percy had been looking to past events.

My eyes were on the present.

If I had to guess, Fray seemed anxious.  That crimson-painted smile of hers seemed a little too relentless in the face of Cynthia’s fury to be anything but fake, and her lower eyelids were raised, her focus fully on the discussion as she picked her words, speaking to Cynthia with purpose.

That anxiety was very interesting and it was very worrisome for the Lambs as well.

“The Lambs did a very good job of executing some of the more educated members of Cynthia’s contingent,” Percy observed.  “That night in Whitney?  Or is that so commonplace you don’t remember?”

“I remember,” Mary said.  “We remember.”

There was a comment to be made about Mary possibly forgetting that she was part of a we, even for a moment.  That comment was not to be spoken out loud.

“Military leaders took over, resources were shuffled around, projects were canceled, until more academic minds gathered to share resources and ensure the work on projects could continue.  Cynthia returned, saw the way things had changed, and adapted, as she does so marvelously,” Percy said.  “She took control over the military group, hand picked a few key minds and personalities to bring to her side, and left the rest of us to continue to fend for ourselves.  When we created something worth using, we sold it to her side.  Those of us who were still willing to deal with her after the insults and dismissiveness her people had directed our way, that is”

“I expected more hard feelings,” I said.

He shook his head.  “Like I said, we’re mending fences.  For the sake of bigger things, I’m willing to leave the past in the past.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t or weren’t hard feelings.

“The schism over our ultimate goals and a competition for resources broke us.  Fray intends to mend us,” Percy said.

“And Cynthia doesn’t agree?” I asked.

Mauer smiled.  The thumb of his good hand was tapping arrhythmically against his leg, something I might have taken for a signal or code if I didn’t know better.  His face didn’t betray the anxiety.  “I’ll say this: for someone so adaptable and clever, she’s proving remarkably stubborn in the here and now.”

He turned to look at us, then gave Helen a double take.  “The little girl I nearly shot.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure where we stand, me and the Lambs.  You’re enemies in our midst, but we’re being civil.  In my case, because Fray and Percy have demanded it of me.”

“I’m always civil,” Helen said.  “Mostly always.  Sometimes I get excited, but even when I’m twisting people apart or stalking or killing them, I try to be polite.”

“That’s important,” Mauer responded.  “Self control.”

“Yes,” Helen said.

Percy tilted his head.  “Have you decided how you’re feeling, Mary?”

She put her tongue between her lips to wet them where they had dried.  Cleaned of the smoke and the touch of dust from when we’d sprinted through the dust cloud, the lips had more color.  “I’ve always been good at doing the job.  Focusing on a task.  Do that.  Have certain enemies, have certain allies.  I’ve never-”

She stopped.

Percy didn’t interject.  I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out.

She abandoned the sentence she’d cut short, “I don’t know what to feel.”

“You know that I trained you to be as focused and goal-oriented as you are, yes?”

Mary nodded.

“After making the initial headway, training each of you, I started to think about the next part of the plan, and I wondered if I had overdone it.  If I’d made you too narrow, incapable of operating outside of the bounds I’d defined.”

“I don’t think I am,” Mary said.

“I don’t think you are either,” Percy said, glancing at each of the Lambs before looking back at her.  “But I did have a time where I worried if you’d be well-rounded enough for the leadership of my next generation of children.”

The first of the lies I told her.

“And I failed?” Mary asked.  I caught the hint of hurt in her voice.

“What?  No, not at all.  I was a novice then, you were still learning, still innovating and developing your own techniques with the tools I had given you.  I put that worry behind me very quickly.”

“But you decided, in the end, that I was nothing more than a tool?  To discard me?”

Again, the hurt.

I could see the realization hit him.  His eyes met mine for the duration of a lightning’s strike.

“I regret leaving you behind,” he said.  “I very nearly got captured before Cynthia stepped in, and then I was told you were gone.  I did mourn.  You were a major part of a pivotal and lengthy chapter in my life.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth.  He could see and I could see that Mary wanted more.

“You made promises to me,” Mary said.

My heart pounded.  I was the rabbit in the snow with a predator looking on.  Calling any attention to myself at all with movement or sound could see that predator lashing out.

Would he disrupt the uneasy truce in this room and simply tell her the truth?  That he had intended to keep his promises?

“Once, I meant to keep them,” he said.  “You were too clever, I was too arrogant.  I remembered stories about mistakes made fifty and a hundred years ago, when the Academies were newer and more callow, and I let those stories influence my judgment.  What use did my work have for me, once you had blossomed into your true self?”

My heart was beating faster, hearing his explanation.  He was helping me.  Supporting my lies.

To have an answer that sounded that good, was it truth?

No.  Not the truth.

But a fear that he had harbored, made out to be fact, maybe.

“So you would have had me kill my parents and kill myself, lost like all of the others?”

Yes,” he said, and the emotion he injected into that one word was real, but likely to be something else entirely.  Pain, perhaps.  His words were insistent, driven, as if he was hammering in each point as he might a physical nail, “When I made you, when I gave you that drive and that focus you just described to me, I made you in my image.  To be too focused, to feel as though there is one thing to do, one thing to focus on, one thing that answers the question?  That is my struggle as much as it is yours.  The clones were designed with a purpose in mind, and I thought that if I only stuck to that plan and that purpose, I could see my way forward.”

Mary’s expression had changed.  The tells of anger and anxiety had faded.  Her hawk-like eyes were focused on him and his every word.

“Even,” he said, “To the point of sacrificing you.”

“I see,” she said.  “Thank you for saying so.”

“If it means anything, I’ve come to regret the decision.  Working for Cynthia, staying out of sight and out of the way of Dog or Catcher’s noses, cooped up in my lab, I had time to think.  To see how short-sighted I was.”

“I appreciate that,” Mary said, with very little emotion.

“Tell me, please,” he said, “Have they treated you well?”

He looked at me as he said it.

I could imagine him communicating with me through that glance.  The short exchange we’d had about Mary, about the lies we’d both told, with no specifics given.

He might as well have said it to my face: I’ve lied for your sake, if you haven’t looked after her…

“They have,” she said.  She looked at Gordon and then raised a hand, overlaying his where he’d left it on her arm.

“I’m glad.  When I worried about your aptitude as a leader, I remember thinking about how you hadn’t bonded with your brothers.  You always seemed very lonely, dear Mary.”

“I wasn’t while I had you,” she said.

There was no affection in the words.  A simple stated fact.

The lingering threads of the puppeteer had been cut.

“While you grow, you’ll need to change your diet,” he said.

“I have a team working with me,” she said.

“Supplements?  The builder’s acids, the concentration-”

“Twenty percent.  Type F.”

“C,” he said.  “C.  Tell them.  Twenty-five percent should do it.  You grew quickly in the early stages, you’re growing a little bit faster even now.  The Type C should include a good calcium mix, and it will keep byproducts from accumulating in your joints.  Without it, you’ll find yourself with arthritic symptoms.”

“I’ll remember,” she said.

“You’ll hit a wall before too long.  Rapid growth, tissue regeneration, byproducts from the non-human cells, organ failure, cancers-”

“I know I have an expiration date,” Mary said, her voice quiet.

Gordon’s fingers tightened on Mary’s arm.  I found I couldn’t look at anyone in particular, my focus destroyed by recurrent visions of Jamie, the reality of expiration dates.

His face was taut with concern and repressed emotion as he spoke, sounding as if he were twenty feet away rather than five.  “I was callow and stupid, starting out.  Arrogant and narrow-minded.  I thought a few years less of having to care for infants was worth a vastly shortened lifespan in my creations, that there was no point, because you weren’t to serve any use after a certain point.”

“If I had grown slower, I might not have met the Lambs,” Mary said.  “Or found where I belonged.”

Percy didn’t respond to that.  He moved his hands, as if he were going to put them into pockets, realized he was wearing a different coat, and folded his arms instead.  He swallowed, cleared his throat, and nodded.

“My friend seems to be speechless, as that might be the next best thing to forgiveness he will ever get,” Mauer said, smiling, “I’ll ask the question he would ask: are the Lambs going to join Fray?  I imagine he might like to have you over for tea, if nothing else.”

“I-” Mary started.  She glanced at me.  “I don’t know.  My feelings are… mixed.”

“I abandoned you,” Percy said.  “It’s understandable.”

“No,” Mary said.  Then she shook her head, “Not that, not only that.”

“What, then?”

“The children,” Mary said.

Percy’s eyebrows came together.  “Which?”

“That’s just it,” Mary said.  “There’s so many.  The ones you kidnapped and cloned, the ones you raised and used as weapons, myself included, now the Ghosts?  Always children.”

“Does that bother you?” he asked.  “Or does it bother you because it bothers them?

The statement ‘I didn’t design you with a conscience’ was so implicit in the question that he might as well have said it out loud.

“I don’t know,” Mary said.  “But it’s not about me.  I’m trying to understand you, Mr. Percy, and I don’t know if I understand this.”

He smiled.  “I won’t sway you from this topic any more than you could be distracted from your duties, I don’t think.”

“Answer the question, please,” Mary said, that last word applying only a veneer of civility to the demand.

“It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, with-”

“Why children, Mr. Percy?” she asked.

“Because they’re the easiest to use, Mary.  They’re the most malleable, the easiest to shape.  That’s the pat answer, isn’t it?  You have only to look at the Lambs to know this is a maxim the Academy believes in, too.”

“What’s the not-pat answer?” Mary asked.  Her voice was firm.  She still wasn’t relenting.

“If I’m a little bit poetic in how I phrase this, you’ll have to blame the Reverend,” Percy said.  He looked sad, even as he joked, “In wartime, children suffer the most.  I think a part of me knew that, that it was most efficient to get that out of the way, perhaps?”

“I don’t think that’s right at all,” Lillian said.  “That’s demented.”

Percy smiled a sad smile.  “Then we’ll go back to the first answer, as pat as it might be.  I took very few Academy classes, and the ratios and numbers involving children and childhood were fresh in my mind when I started work.  Narrow minded as I am, I didn’t think to change course.”

“Yet you said you spent time in Cynthia’s service, regretting past choices.  Now, with the Ghosts, you’re making the same choices again.”

“No, dear Mary,” the puppeteer said.  He reached out, to put a hand on her face, and she stepped back out of the way.  He recovered, and he said, “For what it’s worth, I made the new ones dumb.  I didn’t want to become attached to them, only to lose them.  I learned that much.”

“I see,” Mary said.  As she was wont to do, she’d shifted to a more imperious stance and tone, the young lady, the Mothmont girl.  “With all due respect, Mr. Percy, I don’t believe we’ll be joining you for tea, whatever happens.”

I could see the hurt on his face.  Even with that hurt, he managed to respond with decorum, “Then I wish you the best.”

Mary turned to Gordon, and the two of them turned away, with Lillian and Helen following.

I was the last to step away.  Percy’s eyes bored into mine.

I might never know all of his reasons for why he’d done what he had, but I could guess as to some.

I gave him a nod.  He didn’t move.

I hurried to join the others.

Cynthia and Fray were still embroiled in their private discussion, the rest of the room standing well clear, but for the men I took to be Cynthia’s lieutenants.  This had gone well beyond the point where a delay was comfortable.  The attack was imminent, and we hadn’t had a chance to talk yet.

We were counting on Fray for an escape route and options, and when she looked as troubled as she did, it left me feeling anxious too.

Trouble, I signaled Gordon, as he looked back to see where I’d gone to.  I caught up with the others.

We-go away-talk-question.  Should we break away, plan?

I shook my head.  We wouldn’t get a chance, anyway.

Helen stood in front of the man with the birthing saw.  She seemed to bounce on the spot as she said, “Hi!”

He glowered down at her.

A chair clattered to the ground.  The room was tense enough that more than a few hands went to guns, though only one or two were drawn from holsters.

Cynthia had pushed it over.

She pulled herself together, standing straighter.  One hand went to the front of her jacket, fixing it at the collar.

“Thank you, everyone else, for your time.  I appreciate your efforts and the sentiment.  I would wish you luck as well, but it wouldn’t be sincere.”

I looked from her to Fray.  Fray’s eyes were on the ground.  I knew that look, though I’d never seen it.  I’d worn it on my own face when I’d been up to my neck in trains of thought and permutations and complications.

“We’re leaving,” Cynthia said.

Mauer chuckled.  Every set of eyes in the room went to him.  “Retreating to your room like a child?”

“No,” Cynthia said, her voice low and dangerous.  “Not to my room.”

“We’re surrounded,” Percy said.

“I’ve been fighting through warzones since I was old enough to walk.  I’ve fought my share of monsters, experiment and human alike,” she said.  “I don’t plan to die.”

She gestured a wave of one hand, and her people joined her.  A little under half of the people in the room migrated in her direction, following in her wake as she made her way through the door.  The man with the birthing saw walked past the Lambs, followed by his ‘brothers’, putting a hand on Helen’s head as he passed her.  He had to duck low as he reached the door, lest he smash his collarbone on the frame.

The room was nearly silent, though we could hear Cynthia barking orders to her people in the hallway.  A significant share would be hers.

I looked at Fray, and she hadn’t come out of that state of focus, her mind going a mile a minute, yet to find a way out.

Not part of the plan, huh?  I wondered.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 7.14 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.14

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Gordon touched Lillian’s shoulder, then touched his wrist.  Lillian retrieved her watch from her pocket and popped it open to show Gordon.  When I craned my head to see, she turned it so the rest of us could see.

Fifteen minutes.

Genevieve Fray’s contingent was at one end of the room.  Fray was still dressed up, staring a hole into the ground while her mind searched for answers.  Warren was wearing his suit, Avis wore a strappy evening dress with grafted wings on her back, and the stitched girl, Whitney or Winnie or whatever it was, was wearing simpler clothes with an apron.  The clothes were clean and tidy, and her hair looked nice, combed into a side braid that helped hide how dry the hair was.

A gulf separated her group from the rest of us, Mauer’s people, a number of soldiers, three or four civilians, Percy, and the doctor with the cat-like warbeast.  Four paces of empty space between us and them.  The people who had been standing there were making noise out in the hallway.  I could hear the sound of guns being prepared, orders given, and a discussion of strategy, though I couldn’t make out particulars.

“Lambs,” Fray said.  “I did promise I would talk with you.”

Mauer spoke from the other end of the room, his voice low, “Given the circumstances, we should overlook old promises and focus on our immediate future.”

“Be patient,” Fray said.  “Lambs, a word?”

We started to cross the gap between the rest of the room and Fray.

“I took countermeasures before coming here,” Mauer commented.  “Politics are something I understand.  I expect them to take me alive, where possible.  You?  I’m not so sure.”

“You could be shot on sight,” Avis said, “Or killed by accident.”

“That would be the reason I’m talking to Fray and looking to cooperate and see if her strategy is still intact,” Mauer said.  He had a dangerous look in his eye.  “But if she wants me to be patient, then I can give her a few minutes.”

We reached Fray’s group.  There was a table set against the wall, with a teapot, cups, and candlesticks on the top.  I pushed a candlestick out of the way and hopped up onto the table.  It gave me a good view of the whole room.

Gordon leaned against the table beside me, Mary beside him.  Lillian stood by the table’s end, at my right shoulder, Helen just a little further away.  Hubris was under my dangling feet.

“The books, give,” I said.

“Contingent on us actually having a talk,” Fray said.

“Then talk,” Gordon said.

Fray nodded.  “I received a note from a little birdy-”

“Doggie,” Helen said.  She reached down and scratched Hubris’ head.

“Yes,” Fray said.  “I wasn’t sure if you were wholly aware it was them, but I suspected.  I was confused for a moment that it seemed to think you were here already, and it didn’t help that I was preoccupied with Cynthia.”

“Were we responsible for that confusion too?” Gordon asked.

“No.  I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it was a question of ideology,” Fray said.

“How so?” I asked.

“Cynthia started on the bottom, at one of the lowest points a human being can occupy, orphaned, alone, barely more than an animal.  She fought her way to the place she holds now in the world, and she plans to keep on going.  I believe she wants to supplant the Crown, even in a token manner.  To be the new ruler or a major power when the Crown is ejected from the western Crown States.  She doesn’t like my plan because giving everyone the power to study Academy sciences takes away from her exclusive power.  Raise everyone else up, and she is effectively less powerful.  She would rather control that power, utilize some of the best and brightest minds she can collect, and be well situated to take power as it becomes available.”

“Until the Crown brings all the force it can muster to bear,” Gordon said.

“Yes,” Fray said.  “I underestimated her hunger for that taste of true authority, however transient it might end up being.  I’d hoped rational argument would sway her, and I was proven wrong.”

I wanted to jab at Fray, just to see how she reacted.  If I commented on how poor her ‘rational’ argument might be, if my estimation of her was right, then it would sting, and she might show me a glimmer of what she was really thinking.

Instead, I frowned and only said, “That night I burned her alive, I didn’t just hurt her chances in politics.  The Lambs killed some of those best and brightest minds.  No wonder she was upset with me.”

Fray nodded her head in agreement.  “Telling you more would be unfair and rude, when she was at least kind enough to hear me out.  I think you can draw the appropriate conclusions.”

“What you’re doing,” Lillian said, “Giving everyone access, you’re going to cause complete and utter chaos.  There are rules the Academy won’t break that novice students will.  Uncontrolled growth, real monsters, real weapons of war.”

“I was on track for a professorship,” Fray said.  “I got close, close enough that I heard the stories.  I promise you, Lillian, there are people crossing those lines every single day, in various places around the world.  One or two of the people you’ve gone after at the Academy’s behest have been among them.”

“I can back this,” Avis said, her voice soft.  “A lot of the messages about the worst crisis situations crossed my desk.  For every one the Lambs saw, there were four more within two days of train travel from Radham Academy.

“That’s a fallacy,” Lillian said.  “Just because people are crossing the line, that doesn’t mean it’s okay if you increase the problem a hundredfold.”

“Tenfold at best, but in talking to the others, the expectation seems to be a much more conservative doubling or tripling in the number of madmen and dangerous minds,” Fray said.  “Only a select portion of the population have the means, motive, inclination, and ability to truly take advantage of what I would be putting out there.  Not so much the Academy couldn’t respond, but enough to keep them and the likes of you busy.”

“Except,” Gordon said, “You’ve got Dog and Catcher, very likely Petey and the Wry Man, all on your side.  You’ve been working to strip the Academy’s ability to respond to an upswing in the number of problem elements.”

“They’ll bounce back.  It does mean they’ll have a hard time controlling the spread of the books at the outset.”

“I’m seeing what you’re doing,” I said.  “Okay, let’s say that the numbers do double.  Very conservative.  But you told everyone here that the two factions would be attacking one last time, playing all the leftover cards they have left to play, to distract the Academy and apply pressure to them.  That alone would occupy the resources that would control the spread of the book.  But you’re also denying them those resources, getting Dog and Catcher and some of the others on your side.  If you actually turned Dog and Catcher and some of the others against the Academy, or used information they’ve given you to lash out at key targets…”

Fray’s expression wasn’t giving up many tells.  She seemed amused, insofar as her anxiety seemed to be allowing her to enjoy herself.

Yeah, let’s not puff you up and make you feel too happy and in control, I thought.

“…You’re being disingenuous,” I said.  “There’s more to this.  You don’t intend to push them over.  You want to break their back on your knee.”

“I want to hurt the Academy,” Fray told me.  “Slow them down, give the rest of us some time to gain ground.  Yes.”

“Then say it straight,” I said.  “You trying to mislead us here makes me think you’re bending the truth when you give Lillian your expectations.  Forget the others.  What do you think the numbers will be like?  How many dangerous minds are going to go too far with your books?”

Lillian nodded.  I saw her shoot me a glance, and I suspected it was a grateful look.

I’d backed her where and when it counted.

“More than a fivefold increase in what you’re dealing with now,” Fray admitted.

“And how many people are going to die?” Lillian asked.

“There’s no telling, it’s too variable,” Fray said.  “But you’ve heard of the cockroaches and cats principle?”

I smiled.

Gordon put it succinctly, “We’ve discussed it.”

“I think,” Lillian said, “If you’re talking about cockroaches and cats, what you’re doing is a very bad thing!  You’re talking about killing nine in ten people?  Nineteen in twenty?  People only survive because of sheer numbers?”

“As you can see, the medic of the group is opposed to what you’re doing,” I said.

“And the rest of you?” Fray asked, very casually.

It was Mary who spoke up, “If you can’t convince her, then you aren’t going to budge the rest of us.  The Lambs stick together.”

Fray nodded.  “I see.”

There was a pause.  An explosion outside made the entire room jump.  Too close to the deadline.

Fray turned to Warren, murmuring in his ear.  I caught the essential bits, enough to piece it together after a second of thought.  “Go check on Cynthia.  Let me know if she’s getting ready to go or waiting.”

Warren nodded, then left the room.

Fray composed herself, taking a second before turning to look us over.  “I don’t think there’s time to have a full-fledged debate on the merits of one course or another.”

“Disingenuous again,” I said.  “There are a lot of courses, a lot of decisions to be made.”

“I didn’t say there were only two courses,” Fray said, sounding annoyed, “My point was that we’re short on time.  I expect only fifteen minutes, if the news about the train being early wasn’t Lamb trickery.”

She gave us a look as she said those last words.

“It’s not,” Gordon said, firmly.  “And it’s less than ten minutes, not fifteen.”

He put his hands in his pockets as he spoke.  I could see his thumb move.  Not a true gesture, but damn close to the movement of a ‘lie‘ gesture.

Giving her less time to work with, more pressure.

“We would have shown up twenty minutes before the real deadline if it was, after we’d let you stew and worry for a while, and after we’d complicated your communications with Dog, Catcher and the others.”

“As you tried to do with the Ghosts,” Fray said.  She sighed.  “You did force us to sacrifice a large share of them, so Petey could maintain his cover.  The release of the Brechwell Beast was much the same.  I believe you when you say the deadline is real.”

“I hear actual anxiety in your voice,” I said.

“A tightness?” Helen said.  “I think I hear it too, but I’m not that good with my new ears yet.”

Warren returned.  He rejoined us.

“Is she leaving yet?”  Fray asked.

He changed the angle of his head a fraction.

“Soon?”

He nodded.

“If all else fails, we might have to let her be the vanguard, and simply follow in her wake,” Fray said.  “Knowing her, it might prove difficult.  She’s as liable to be as dangerous to us as the enemy forces are.”

Warren nodded again.

“Avis, we’ll need you to deliver the signal soon,” Fray said.  She looked at us.  “Catcher’s note said you had deduced that I plan to turn the forces of Brechwell against one another.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m flattered you think I could convince that many people.  I’m afraid I didn’t.”

“Then I think you’re kind of an idiot for getting into this situation,” I told her.

Provoke, push, test boundaries.  I’d passed up a chance earlier, because it was too hard, too harsh.  This was a softer touch.

I’d expected to gauge her response to the casual insult, in hopes of gleaning some insight into her mental state.  Fray didn’t betray anything, however, and it was Warren who seemed to take offense at the slight against Fray.

Worth remembering.  Maybe I could write it down.  My memories seemed to slip most between when I went to sleep and when I woke up.  Since the girls insisted on sleeping with me, I couldn’t stay up and achieve a balance of recall and alertness.  I wouldn’t be able to trust my brain to hold onto the little strategic details like Warren’s defensiveness of his savior.

“I do have a plan,” Fray said.  “It achieves very similar ends, but without the need for me to target and convince however many soldiers, officers, and major figures I would need to organize a true mutiny.”

“Fantastic,” I said.  “But you made a miscalculation, you’ve lost Cynthia’s help.  You’re worried, because what you did have planned doesn’t necessarily work that well without her.”

“We’ll manage,” she said.  “The real question is if you’re coming with us.  It doesn’t have to be permanent.  Follow along, I’ll give you the books, and we can have a more in-depth conversation in the aftermath of Brechwell’s fall.”

I didn’t respond.  My mind was taking in new information, ticking over possibilities.

“I think that would be dangerous,” Mary said.  “If we came with you, how much would it delay our return to the Academy?  Would we be assumed to be one of the turncoat special projects?”

“That’s for you to decide,” Fray said.  She stood straighter.  “I suppose you’ll have to make do.  Decide what you will, I need to focus on the matter at hand.”

Not a mutiny, but similar in execution.  What’s she planning?

“Wait,” Mary said.

Fray had started to walk away, Warren, Avis and the stitched girl following.  She paused.

“I said it was dangerous, I didn’t say no.  If the other Lambs agree, maybe I could propose a deal.”

“Time is short,” Fray said.  “What deal?”

“We’ll come with you, hear you out, have a serious discussion with no time limit, but…” Mary dropped her voice, “Percy dies.”

My breath caught in my throat.  I almost sputtered.

I wasn’t the only Lamb reacting with shock.  All eyes were on Mary.

“And,” Mary continued, meeting Lillian’s eyes, “You promise to excise all portions of your work that deal with the biology of children.  The ratios, the specific formulas, growth charts, scales, proportions…”

“All of it,” Fray said.  “A concrete loss of both an ally and resources, a loss in time to ensure the books are properly edited, in exchange for a discussion where there is no guarantee I’d be able to convince you all?  What makes you think I’d accept?”

Mary opened her mouth to speak, paused, and glanced at me.

“Sylvester briefed you on me,” Fray concluded.  “I see.  I want to ask why you want me to kill your creator, but there’s no time.  I’ll take your proposal under consideration.  Excuse me.”

Like that, she was gone.

I blinked a few times.

“Sylvester is a bad influence on you,” Gordon commented.

“Probably,” Mary said.  “Sorry, to throw that out there, but-”

“You need to cut ties formally,” Gordon guessed.

Mary nodded.

Lillian walked past me, reaching out to give Mary a little hug, before taking Mary’s hand.

“She’s actually considering it,” I said.  “Percy is a known element, he’s one-note, only effective right now because of the ability to incorporate the work of others.”

“You said she wanted to convince others,” Mary said.  “I thought we could offer her a way to convince us.”

“It was smart,” I said.  “You hit the mark.”

But Percy isn’t as guilty as you think he is.  By letting you sign a deal paid for in his blood, I can never tell you the whole truthYou’d never forgive me.

Well, eventually, she might, but a theoretical five-year grudge was a long time in respect to our short lifespans.

Something to worry about later.

“I was surprised you seemed to drop out of that conversation,” Gordon observed.  He was watching the people on the other side of the room, who were watching us  while they talked with Fray.

“Me?” I asked.

“You.”

“Thinking,” I said.  “Trying to decipher what she said.

“Do tell.  Thinking aloud is a good thing.”

“Not a mutiny, but similar.  She said she couldn’t convince that many people.”

“Yes,” Gordon said.

“Okay.  Turn that around.  What’s the bare minimum she needs, in order to turn the tide of the battle?”

“Bare minimum?” Mary asked.  “Five hundred people?  Once they start shooting, they don’t know who is friendly and who isn’t, it throws everything into disarray.”

“Fewer,” I said.  “Fewer.  Didn’t one person just risk derailing this entire thing Fray was trying to accomplish?  Cynthia walked away.  She’s waiting to execute her own plan.  Fray doesn’t know what to expect.  What if… what if Fray only talked to two or three people?  And the secret experiments, but…”

I trailed off, thinking.  Experiments.  Why?  They’re the ones who provide information, they execute critical missions, they wipe out stragglers…

I was staring off into space the same way Fray had been, sitting a matter of feet from where she’d been standing, and smiled at the realization.  The difference between her situation and mine, however, was that I was asking a question which had a very real answer.  Fray had had to invent an answer.

“Commanding officers?” Gordon asked.  “They’re the only people here with enough clout.”

I nodded.  “Yeah.  But if you give orders and the people you’re ordering balk, then you lose that clout.  You need to convince them…”

Weapons of rhetoric.  How to make people act the way they wouldn’t normally?  Rage?  Easy but not applicable here.  Revulsion?  Took time to sell a seeming ally as truly repulsive and deserving of acts beyond the pale.  Terror?  No, not quite, and I couldn’t imagine a way of creating that sort of effect.  Grief?  Mauer had tried it, using the deaths of children to turn the people of Radham against the Academy.

More complex emotions, then.  Outrage, cornered-rat feeling, horror, empathy, desperation, devastation, disappointment…

…Betrayal.

I looked up, meeting Gordon’s eyes.

Betrayal, panic.  Hadn’t I just been thinking recently about how I kept going back to fire and destruction?

“You have an idea,” Gordon said.

I watched Avis leave the room.  Ready to give the signal.

I would’ve liked to follow behind and interrupt Avis before she could follow through, just to see the look on Fray’s face, but it would have been too obvious.

All of the tension in the Academy’s ranks, it was building up to a crescendo.  The people on the wall, guns in hand, cold, waiting for a battle to start, they were coiled like snakes, ready to strike.

Their eyes faced forward, but when the attack came from the sides, from allied ranks, it would be pandemonium.

“Just the commanding officers and sufficient chaos, so the rank and file look to the leader,” I said, my voice low.  “And all you need to convince the commanding officers is to assure them that the blame can be pointed at the man who is nominally in charge.”

“Who everyone hates,” Gordon said.  “How do you create sufficient chaos?”

“Without Dog and Catcher-” I started.

Fray cut me off, from the other end of the room.  “Lambs.”

We turned our full attention to her.

“I’m trying to convince these men that you’re trustworthy enough to have behind us,” Fray said.  “It’s a hard argument to make when I’m not sure myself.”

“Percy convinced me to hold back and treat you gently,” Mauer said, “Hearing your response to him, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just have my soldiers shoot you.”

Some of the men shifted their grips on their guns.

I could see the look on Percy’s face.  The man looked troubled.

“He doesn’t seem convinced.”

“Sometimes we have to sacrifice a friendship in the name of being a true friend,” Mauer said.

Percy scowled.

“This would be easier if you agreed to come,” Fray said.

“And our deal?” Mary asked.

“If you’d rather remain here and try to convince the Academy you were acting in their interest and not mine, feel free,” Fray said.  “Otherwise, I might leave this up to the Reverend Mauer.  No deal.”

“I’m not a Reverend any more.”

That is a problem, I mused.  If there was treachery afoot, and if any experiments did find themselves in question, people would wonder about us.  We were badly situated for that.

She was genuinely nervous, now, and it came through in how ruthlessly she was throwing her weight around to remove uncertainties.  Fray was a perfectionist, she overthought her plans and covered every base, until she was capable of managing any crisis that came up.  But when two came up at the same time, the loose ends of the Lambs and the issue of Cynthia acting on her own, then she couldn’t be sure she had an escape route or sufficient distraction to escape.  Too many angles to watch.

That wouldn’t do, not for her.

No, for this to be a true success, she needed to walk through a battlefield and disappear.  That could only happen if she had a measure of control over every side present.

“What do you think?” Gordon murmured.

“Option one is to reassure her that the Lambs aren’t a threat.  Join her, give up power and the little advantage we hold,” I said.

“Option two?” Mary asked me.

“We make her more unsure,” I said.  “I like option two more.”

“How?” Gordon asked.

“Last chance,” Fray declared.  “Come with us, or-”

“There’s a problem with that,” I said.

“I thought you’d say, not demonstrate,” Gordon hissed in my ear.

Fray spoke, “Mauer, you can tell your men-”

“We disarmed one of the bombs,” I said.

She stopped.

I saw her eyes fix onto a point in space, as she turned over the possibilities in her mind.

She didn’t detonate every bomb in the city when she paved the way for the Brechwell Beast.

She had the experiments patrolling the city at night, perfect for setting up more bombs.  Explosions in friendly ranks, from bombs placed in the tops of attics like the one we entered, detonating through the rooftops, multiple commanders shouting that it’s friendly mortar fire, maybe even shouting about fire from once-friendly teams, the insecurity of new teams joining, unfamiliar faces, and the intelligence gathering bodies turning tail and giving false info or helping Fray navigate her way through, while all the smoke and debris blocks the view of the street…

Pandemonium.  The man at the top gets blamed for not having control of an uncontrollable situation.

Fray looked up, meeting my eyes.

Searching for the lie.

But if one bomb doesn’t explode, she can’t predict the situationThe tide of the fight can’t be predicted.  One side could be free to open fire on you.

“Warren,” she said.  “Find Avis.  Stop her from giving the signal.  Run.

Warren charged out of the room.  The man with the cat warbeast leaned close to Fray, and got one word out before she indicated for him to go too.  He and his cat fled the room.

“Mauer,” Fray said.  Her eyes didn’t leave me.  “If he doesn’t say which bomb the Lambs disarmed-”

“You’re going to have to come to us for a way out,” I said.

I could see her thinking her way through the options.

She didn’t get a chance to finish her train of thought.

Nearby explosions rocked the building.  Guns fired.  I could see the concern on the faces of the others.

Had Avis given the signal already?

“That would be Cynthia, charging for freedom,” Fray said.

Then, one by one, other explosions sounded.  I could hear the tumble and crumble of falling masonry.  Shouts, gunfire, distant but so unanimous that it had to be the forces arranged at the perimeter.

“That would be your bombs,” Gordon observed, dryly.

I cleared my throat.  “Now, please, give me the damn books, Miss Fray.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.15 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Mauer drew his gun.  He aimed it at Lillian’s head.  Just beside me, Lillian went rigid.

“Let’s talk,” the man said.

“Oh man,” I said.  “I’ve really been looking forward to having a conversation with you.”

“Focus,” Mauer and Gordon said, at the same time.  Lillian’s whisper-quiet “Please” sounded a moment later.

“He’s posturing,” I said.

Mauer fired.  The bullet struck hard against the wall just above Lillian’s head.  She yelped.

“Posturing with good aim,” I said.

“Don’t tempt me,” Mauer said, his voice controlled, sounding for all the world like we were talking over tea.  “Let’s focus on the matter at hand.  We may need to compromise.”

“Typically,” Gordon said, his voice dry, “A compromise involves both sides getting something, just enough that both walk away unhappy.  It’s not one side threatening to take something away.  You’re looking for a different word.”

“Negotiate, then,” Mauer said.

Gordon spread his hands.  “I assume you’re threatening to pick off the Lambs one by one until the survivors agree to lead you to safety.”

“Seems reasonable to me,” Mauer said.  “Counteroffer?”

“It won’t work,” Gordon said.  “You heard us talking to Percy.  If you shoot one of us, every last one of us will stare you down while you empty that gun in the rest, one by one.”

Gordon reached up to fix his hair.  He didn’t signal until his hand was at his side again.  Scatter.

We weren’t going to stand still if it came down to it.  If they killed one of us, the rest of us would make a break for it, and we’d make their lives hell until the attacking forces wiped us all out.

“Lillian won’t stand there and take it,” I pointed out.  “The one you’re aiming at.  She’ll freak, if she isn’t already dead.”

Lillian shot me a horrified look.

“Except Lillian,” Gordon agreed.  “But she doesn’t have the know-how to get you out of this.  She’s a supporting role.  Trust me, Mauer, the only power you have in holding a gun to her head is the power to end us and end the lives of everyone else in the room by proxy.”

Mauer didn’t waver.

Something hit the side of the building, exploding.  Not close to the windows we were near, but enough that it made everyone in the room flinch.  Mauer retained his composure and balance enough that his aim didn’t falter.

The smoke that billowed from the explosion obscured the rays of light that had been filtering out over the tops of the tables at the windows.  The room dimmed.

“He’s right,” Fray said.  “We gain nothing and lose time by trying this.  We have to act, now.”

Mauer didn’t lower the gun.  “Give them the books and have them lead us to safety, then.  You’ve had your shot, you made promises, and those promises have been broken.  If you want to contact me about moving forward with some specific elements of the plan you’ve been proposing, I’ll be open to it.  For now…”

He moved the gun away from Lillian, gesturing toward the window with the barrel.  For now, the war.

“I think it’s very possible that my plan stands and will still work,” Fray said.  “Nothing guarantees the Lambs’ way is any better.  I’m sorry, Sylvester, but I’m not convinced, and I’m certainly not convinced enough to give up any degree of insurance I might have.”

“Agreed,” Mauer said.

I spoke, “We lead you out of the battlefield by channels we specifically arranged ahead of time, to guarantee that we had a way out, Catcher might have mentioned those in his note…”

“He did,” Fray confirmed.  “I assume the timing changed in much the way the timing of your arrival was.  Without your cooperation, we won’t know which shots are paving the way and which are a prelude to a barrage.”

“Yes,” I said.  “That gets you to the perimeter.  Your choice whether you want to move on from there or stay put and hope there’s a window to go further.”

Which there wasn’t.  There was a small army beyond the most immediate perimeter.

“You’ll guide us to North Road Main.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.  “But no, we won’t.  The deal is to take you to the perimeter.  From there, you’re on your own.”

“North Road Main is one of three roads that leads out of the city.  With the majority of forces coming from the train station to the southwest or the Academy to the northwest, it gives us an easy route out,” Fray said.

“The perimeter, no further, in exchange for the books,” I said.

“And the other requirements I mentioned,” Mary said.  “The changes to the books.”

And Percy, Mary had left it unsaid.

Bullets struck one of the tables that had been propped up against the window.  They didn’t penetrate the thick wood.

“Not good enough,” Fray said, eyeing the table as it shifted slightly.  “The North Road.  I’ll also settle for you contacting Catcher.  He can provide some assistance.  I’ll write a note.  If you lead us to the perimeter, there’s no guarantee we won’t find ourselves in the most dangerous, difficult to penetrate area, with you signaling your allied forces to descend on us.”

I didn’t flinch or let my expression drop, even though I wanted to.  I could see her assessing me.  I’d considered the notion of luring her into a difficult spot.  Halfway because I thought it would work and hand her to the enemy in a tidy little bow, halfway because I wanted to see how she worked to get out of it.

Gordon spoke, “When we disarmed the bomb, we disrupted your ability to get to the perimeter.  We’re offering to fix that, in exchange for concessions.  Letting you get that far is a pretty big one.  If you’re not that confident in your own plan, for getting to wherever you’re going, that’s your own fault.”

Good old Gordon, landing the heavy blows.  He was such a bother to argue with.

“You’re moving us to a different location in the walls,” Fray said.  “How do you expect us to get from one point on the perimeter to the place we want to be?  What about time-sensitive elements?  No, if you’re going to make that argument, then we need more.”

“Deal with it,” Gordon said.  “That’s our offer.”

“Deliver the note to Catcher and-”

“No,” Gordon said.

Fray stood straighter, glancing at Mauer.

“I don’t think we should trust them, but I do agree with his point,” Mauer said.  “If you can’t convince them and convince me they’re worth listening to, then figure out a way to get us where we need to be to make our way out.  If you can’t do either, then perhaps you can print your books yourself, and worry every step of the way that my forces may inadvertently interfere.”

Fray didn’t respond to that.  Avis, Warren, and the doctor with the cat warbeast returned.  It gave Fray a moment to pay attention to them and pay attention to the current situation.

Having Gordon on point made sense.  When I spoke people immediately started thinking about where the traps and deception were.  Gordon portrayed a more trustworthy, straightforward image.

Which wasn’t to say he couldn’t lie or be clever.

That said, I was cringing inwardly.  I wanted to give him pointers, to tell him that Fray was in charge and her ego demanded a need for a sense of power.  That he could make a small concession and win her over.

But Fray, Avis, Warren, Mauer, and Percy were all talking among themselves, in a hushed, hurried way, while watching us very closely.  Gestures wouldn’t go unnoticed.

“Sy was right, there’s a chance we might side with you someday, if we can reconcile what you’re doing with what we all want,” Gordon spoke, breaking the silence.  “Taking our offer leaves that door open for the offer to happen.”

“And pushing my point closes it?” Fray asked.  “A very subtle way of framing an ultimatum.”

Also a very subtle way of preying on Fray’s desire to win people over and have everyone on her side.

“I don’t need to tell you you’re running out of time,” Gordon said.  “What you did, stirring things into a frenzy, people are going to calm down.”

Not soon, I thought.

“There’s still time,” Fray said, echoing my thought.  “But you’re right, there isn’t a lot of it.  If everyone agrees, we should move.”

“You actually trust them,” Mauer said.  “I don’t.”

“I don’t either,” Percy said.  “Even if one of them is mine.  I’m sorry, Mary.”

His eyes met Mary’s.

Not quite so harsh as Mary’s request that Percy be put down, but it did suggest he was stepping away, cutting ties to a similar extent.  I had little doubt the apology was genuine, but he’d made a decision that if it came down to it, he’d sacrifice Mary to save his own hide.

A gulf stood between them.

“If I may,” Fray said.  She approached Mauer.

He tensed as she drew near, then in the moment she took another step, he pointed his pistol against her side.

She raised her hands back and out of the way.  “Dolores is on the table back there.”

I turned my head.  The air-breathing octopus-thing was on the table a bit beside me.  Helen was poking at it, letting its tentacles coil around her finger in response.

Mauer watched Helen and Dolores for a moment.  He didn’t speak or move a muscle.

Hands still held back out of the way, Fray leaned close.

She said something.

Seven or eight words.

Then she stepped back, slowly lowering her hands, until they were clasped in front of her.

What’s she saying?

I want to know what she’s saying.

“What did she say?” Percy asked.

“It’s sufficient,” Mauer said.  “I’ll tell you later.”

Percy frowned, but he nodded.

“Helen,” I murmured.  “What did she say?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“Were you listening?” Gordon asked.

“Yes, and I didn’t hear,” Helen said.  She put on an annoyed expression.

Fray approached us.

What did she say?

“Coordinating an attack on us?” Gordon asked.

“No,” Fray said.  “We accept your terms.”

Gordon glanced at me, and I nodded.  He glanced at Mary, and Mary nodded.

Gordon indicated the door.  Fray stepped away from the group, heading toward the octopus.  Helen was faster, snatching it up.

“Got it,” Helen said. “I’ll bring Dolores.”

Fray didn’t say anything, apparently content to leave that situation be.

As one, we headed out into the hallway.  Soldiers were standing at attention on either side of the hall, no longer waiting tensely for things to get underway.  Less disciplined than Academy soldiers and cadets might be, they let concern show on their faces.

They weren’t convinced this situation was entirely in control, and they hadn’t seen any of Fray’s doubts or the arguing over options.

Lillian had taken out her pocket watch.  She showed Gordon, who checked, then gestured.

Good.

The second message we’d written had acknowledged the tight time limit and we’d left a request to drop additional shots after the fighting started.  Things were a touch more chaotic than I had anticipated, however.  I was really hoping that things weren’t so bad that we didn’t have an escape route, or that the soldiers we were counting on to drop the bombs and provide cover of smoke and dust weren’t on Fray’s side, disobeying because they had switched sides.

It sounded worse than it was.  For them to disobey and effectively sabotage us, they had to be on Fray’s side and simultaneously aware we weren’t.  The commander who we’d talked to had sent us to go talk to Dog and Catcher and the other experiments.  He’d heard the horn, and would have drawn the connection to the experiments.

To be on Fray’s side, know we weren’t, yet be unaware of the fact the horn had helped us?

Questionable.

That a bomb had obliterated them or the infighting was distracting them too much?

Less questionable.

I couldn’t let my nervousness show.  Eyes forward, walk with confidence, pretend everything was going according to plan.

There were gaps in this plan, but Fray’s plan was still intact.  She had believed she would have a course she could walk to freedom, with the forces on the perimeter sufficiently occupied.

A variant on that plan, how much more dangerous could it be?

It was so annoying, being a child.  We had soldiers behind us, Warren to the left of us, and to the right and a little in front of us, we had Percy and Mauer.  Visibility was limited by the fact that people were taller, and I couldn’t help but feel surrounded.  It didn’t help my growing feeling of anxiety.

This would either be marvelous or it would fail marvelously.

“The men from the other room?” Fray asked.  “If they aren’t ready now, then-

“They’ll be ready.  Get them,” Mauer said.

One of his lieutenants broke away, opening a door.

More soldiers filed into the hallway alongside the soldiers at our back.  These ones wore uniforms, but they weren’t the uniforms of the rebellion.

Cadet uniforms, military ones.

To add an element of confusion?  Or to achieve a certain goal?

It didn’t matter.

We reached the doorway.  The final group of soldiers was there, one man crouched by the door.  It was cracked open, and he peered outside.

“The situation?” Mauer asked.

“Cynthia’s group took drugs,” the man said.  “They started grinning, mad smiles, wide-eyed, veins sticking out on their faces.  No combat drug like I’ve ever seen before.”

“I know the one,” Fray said.  “Rictus grins, a full body rush.  Enhanced strength, reflexes, adrenaline.  It also demolishes the mind’s ability to manage inhibitions.  The Academy discontinued it, and it saw use in the black market for a time.  People liked how confident and invincible it made them feel.”

“It shaves off years of your life with every use,” Lillian said.  “It isn’t very sustainable to sell on the streets when four or five uses can ruin a thirty year old’s organs so badly he looks ninety inside.  Even the Academy can’t fix the kind of damage it causes.”

I gave her a curious look.

“I know stuff!”

“The cost in lifespan isn’t something Cynthia cares about,” Fray said, looking at our group’s medic.  “Nor was it the reason the Academy stopped using it.  They didn’t like the fact that less disciplined soldiers fired at friendlies, and how bad the crime rate became.  Cynthia is liable to shoot at us if we cross paths.”

“Hmm,” Mauer said.  When he spoke, it was to the assembled army of sixty-some soldiers, forty in rebellion uniforms and twenty who weren’t.  “From here on out, we shoot at her or her men on sight.”

There were one or two cheers, which drew quiet the moment Mauer shot a sharp look back.

Not much lost love.

We waited by the door.

Gordon met my eye.  He wasn’t gesturing, but I got the impression he was trying to communicate something.

Something hit, close by, the force of it making Fray and the soldier on watch work to keep the door from flying open.  Gordon had taken Lillian’s pocket watch, and the moment he was done covering his head and ear, he checked it.  He shook his head.

He met my eyes with purpose.

What are you doing? I thought.

Mary was looking between Gordon and me.  Lillian looked terrified, very small while surrounded by opposing forces, shrinking down.  Helen stroked the octopus she was carrying as if it were a dog.

Gordon didn’t break eye contact.

I looked at the open watch in his hand, checking the time while it was upside down, and then looked back up at him.

Not a flicker in his expression.

“Through the door, two by two,” Mauer was addressing his men.  “Don’t press, keep one pace behind the pair in front of you.  If you rush, you’ll get stuck in the doorway or you’ll start pushing the people in front of you, and you won’t be following them, you’ll be directing their movements.”

I saw Warren place a hand on the shoulder of the stitched girl.  He pointed at Avis.

He’s too big to pass through with someone else, I realized.

“I’ll lead the way,” Gordon said.  He finally broke eye contact with me.  “Listen to my instructions.”

An explosion sounded, a mortar shell, very close by.  The door was only open a crack, but the smell and taste of smoke and gunpowder in my mouth was enough to gag me.  I imagined my spit was a brownish-black.

Gordon watched the pocketwatch.  Then he closed it.  His lips moved slightly.

He made eye contact with me again.

I can’t read your mind, however you’d like me to.

“Sy,” Mary said.  She reached back and touched my hand.  She smiled.

“No codes, no gestures, if you please,” Fray said, sternly.

Code?  Gesture?  She’d caught something I hadn’t.

Not a gesture.  In fact, Gordon had been avoiding gestures since the beginning, except when Fray was very clearly occupied.

Code?

Before I could reach the end of the train of thought, more shells came down.  A trio, blasting into road and sending rock and mud cascading into the air, an earthen geyser.

“Now!” Gordon shouted.

The door was heaved open.  Two by two, we passed through.  Fray in the lead with the man who’d been watching the front door, Gordon and Mary, me and Lillian, Helen with Hubris and the octopus-thing, then Fray’s group, with Percy and Mauer.

The smoke had darkened the sky, the smoke was thick, and I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me.

The code.

In a way, it was like the gestures.  Our signs were abstract.  We’d started with the basic directions and six very general signs that encompassed a very wide variety of things.  The closed fist for aggression, violence, force, attack, impulse, anger.  Then we’d expanded that, adding new signs, modifying old ones.  There’d been too much need to communicate silently.

This was very similar.

Sy.  He’d been focused on me.  Not trying to read my mind or make me read his.

My mind.  My strategy, my way of thinking.

A ploy, one he couldn’t easily share in the midst of things.

I exhaled as slowly as I could, as I ran forward, blind.  I could extend that trust to him.  He’d done it often enough for me.

“Reverse direction!” Gordon called out.

I stopped before Lillian did, but I’d been expecting something.  My shoe slipped on the cobblestone road, but I caught myself.  I tugged Lillian, reached out, and prodded Helen’s side.  Giving her a nudge.

The order was called out, passed down the line.

We stood in smoke and in the line of fire, while the order for the forward charge was called out, passed down.

It took twenty seconds before we were back inside.  I was surprised it was even possible.  Humans were so naturally disorganized, and even with Mauer’s warning, I’d expected a jam.

They listened to him like nothing else, it seemed.

The door slammed closed as Fray returned inside.  The man on watch cracked it open a moment later, peering through.  The rest of us knelt or crouched on the floor.  More explosions sounded outside.  There was a warbeast on the loose on the rooftops, by the sound of it, smaller than the Brechwell Beast, larger than the cat.

“What the hell was that?” Mauer asked.  “A test?

“Yes,” Gordon said.

“This isn’t a joking matter.  Every second we spend out there is a second we could get shot.”

“If you happened to kill us the moment you thought you had a way out, then you would have been stranded,” Gordon said.  “Now that we’ve done that, you know you’re reliant on us.  At least until we get to the perimeter.”

Games,” the doctor with the cat warbeast said.

“Strategy,” I said.  “I assume you’ve given thought to what happens when we actually reach the perimeter?  I was working on the assumption that they wouldn’t have time to waste, or that they wouldn’t be willing to risk attacking us if we could call for an alert.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said.  “Your bag?”

Lillian shrugged off the strap for her satchel, then slid it across the floor to Gordon.

He opened it, reaching inside, and grabbed a canister.

Mauer reached for his gun.  Several others did too.

Fray reached out, extending a hand, a signal to wait, holding back.

It was a grenade, like the ones we’d used to set fires, back when I’d set Cynthia on fire, as a matter of fact.  A long lever ran down the side, and a pin was jammed in the top.

Gordon handed it to Helen, who had to disengage from the octopus.  “Hold it tight.”

She nodded.

He pulled the pin.  Nine out of ten people flinched.

“There,” he said.  “Don’t drop it, unless all is lost, okay?  That’s our insurance.  If you loosen your grip on the lever, then we all go up in flame a second or two later.”

“I have a good grip,” Helen said.

I could tell at a glance that a large number of the more important people here, Mauer, Percy, and Avis included, did not like us having insurance to this degree.

Gordon opened the pocket watch.

“Is the next one going to be a ruse too?” Percy asked.

“We’ll see,” Gordon said.

I nodded slowly.

The smoke outside was a problem in that it limited visibility and increased the chances of us making a mistake, but it was a problem that had small benefits.  Fray couldn’t look outside to clearly see the damage from her bombs or the troop movements on the roof, and the people up there couldn’t see us clearly.  Fray having people wearing Crown uniforms helped muddy the waters.

Fray liked having nine of ten degrees of control, with that tenth part being something she was free to manipulate and control.

This didn’t feel like a nine of ten.  A solid two out of ten factors in play were outside factors, the chaos of battle, the fighting atop the rooftops, and an environment I did not feel comfortable navigating.  But Gordon’s trick here had bumped us from a solid five or six to a seven.

Seven was fairly comfortable territory.

So was our seven running headlong into a wall and dipping into the twos and threes.

Gordon looked up.  He met Mary’s eyes, one hand going to his ear, protecting it.

Seconds passed.

An explosion.  Close, but not as close as the last had been.

“Go!”

We were out.  Running.

This was the one.

If I was the indicator he looked to to signal trickery the index and middle finger extended, together, Mary was the straightforward one.  The extended thumb with the hand left more open or closed.  The thumb didn’t necessarily indicate the target, but the opposite direction to the target.  One of the earlier signs, the execution, the job, the focus.  It meant to watch, prioritize.

I found myself unconsciously making the sign with my right hand, as I ran blindly through smoke, my other hand on Lillian’s upper arm.

“Stop!” Gordon called.  His voice was almost drowned out in the sound of rain, the irregular staccato of gunfire, and the distant roar of the Brechwell Beast.

We stopped.

My eyes were wide open, and I couldn’t see much of anything past Fray and the soldier at the front of the line.  There was too much smoke and rain, and the vague shapes I did register were impossible to make out at first glance.

I realized why Gordon had called the stop and I shut my eyes, turning my head away, my hand losing the gesture to cover my ear.  My forehead touched Lillian’s as I bade her to turn.

I really hoped the shock of the hit wouldn’t cause Helen to drop the incendiary canister.

I also really hoped there was a second hit.

A bullet struck cobblestone not far from where we stood.  I saw the flash of light or a spark as it bounced off.

A moment later, as if the bullet had been prophetic, the shell hit ground.

We ran through the debris, and I saw Gordon and Mary stumble on the irregular ground, where cobblestone street had been thoroughly shattered.  I was more balanced, expecting it, and helped steady Lillian.  The ground was particularly hot in one spot I stepped, and I wondered if I’d burned or melted my shoe.

Going from being unable to see through the smoke ten feet ahead of me to having the building there was a shock, as if it was lunging forward at us, rather than the other way around.

We passed through the window, Gordon perching in it to help me and Lillian up.  I let Lillian go first, looking up at the fighting on the roof.  Discrete groups, shouts, ongoing fighting, and a ape-like Warbeast standing between two groups, threatening both.

We really weren’t on their radar.

I took Gordon’s hand, and he hauled me inside.

Fray’s group, Mauer, and Percy made their way inside.  The soldiers gathered with their backs to the wall.  There wasn’t enough room immediately inside.

“I’ll take that,” Fray said, to Helen.

“Aw.”

Fray took the octopus.  It crawled up to her shoulder and wrapped itself loosely around her neck like a scarf.

“The books,” I said.

Fray looked at the stitched girl.  “I suppose it’s time.  Give the books back, Wendy.”

Wendy approached.  She handed me the backpack.

“As to the other part of our deal,” Fray said.

“What’s this?” Mauer asked.

Fray set her eyes on Percy.

Boots tramped on the floor above us.  Everyone looked, worrying we were about to face soldiers.  A gun fired, a body fell.

More boots stomped on floorboards.  Nobody came downstairs.

Mary was staring at Percy, her jaw set.

The other part of the deal.

It would be an advantage, a win for the Academy, for us, a hit to the enemy, a benefit to Mary in a way, even.

All I had to do was let the lie to Mary continue.

Less than an hour ago, Lillian had suggested I was like an abusive husband.  Manipulating, coddling, baiting people closer and then pushing them away.

I wasn’t sure if this was bait or a push.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  There was a faint ‘x’ on the knuckle.  I’d written it to remind myself of something.  Damn it.

“It’s awkward to admit, and I know this will cause friction,” Fray said, “But-”

Right, had to focus on the matter at hand.

“Wait,” I said.

Fray stopped short.

The Lambs looked at me.

My breath was frozen in my throat.  I couldn’t bring myself to breathe, let alone speak.

But…

When I swallowed, it was a difficult swallow.

“I lied to you, Mary,” I said, my voice soft.  I stared down Percy.  “About Percy.  There was no command phrase, he didn’t abandon you, he did intend you to lead.  When he confessed his sins to you earlier, he was lying too.”

Mary stared at me, then looked at Percy.

“He cares, Mary.  I know we might lose you by me admitting it, but- he cares enough to let you hate him, if it means you’re happier in the end, with us.  Assuming I understood that right.”

Percy straightened a little, as if he’d withered in the time since he’d been rejected by ‘his girl’.  He lowered his head in a short nod.  “You did.”

“Okay,” Mary said.

I glanced at her.

Her expression was flat.

“You were going to sell out my acquaintance?” Mauer asked Fray.

“We never formally agreed on that.  It came up, and I planned to discuss it here, before we parted ways.  Keeping in mind they don’t have much leverage anymore, beyond Helen’s promise of mutually assured destruction.”

Helen held up the canister.

The Brechwell Beast roared outside.  It was closer than it had been.

The two were talking, but all of my focus was on Mary.

I’d confessed a grave lie that I’d kept for a year and a half, and she wasn’t giving me anything at all.

No anger, no tears, no outrage.

Was she stepping away?  Figuring out how to leave?  Or, worse, was she staying, while attacking me in the worst way possible, by shutting me out and denying any and all connection between us?

“Gordon’s right, Sy,” Mary said.  “You’re really terrible at being honest.”

I don’t know what that means!  I screamed, internally.

Externally, I didn’t move an inch or make a sound.

Mauer drew his gun.  Percy reached for one as well.

“This doesn’t need to go this far,” Fray said.  “Sylvester confessed the lie, there’s no reason to hold to that part of the deal, am I right?”

“Kill him,” Mary said.  “Percy.”

“What?”  Percy asked.  “You heard what he said, he-”

“I heard,” Mary said, voice cold.  “What he just said makes more sense than what you both were saying, back in the meeting room back there, the story I heard in the past.”

“Then- this is about the children?  The work I do?  It bothers you so much?”

Mary shook her head.  “No.  You shaped me, honed me into a tool, a weapon.  You could kill a thousand children a year and it wouldn’t bother me.”

“Then why?” he asked.  There was a note of anguish in his voice. “You want me to die?”

“It bothers her,” Mary said, pointing at Lillian.  “And she’s important to me.”

“I’m assuming you can’t be convinced otherwise?” Mauer asked.

“No,” Mary said.

Mauer nodded.  His sonorous voice carried, even as he spoke to himself, “That’s problematic.”

“Mary,” Percy said.  “You’re important to me.”

Mauer turned, and with the crack of a pistol shot, he put a bullet through an anguished Percy’s head.

Percy’s body crumpled to the floor.

“We could have found another option,” Fray said, looking down.

“I’d like to go,” Mauer said.  “It’s a loss, but one I’m willing to live with if it means leaving the city before a small army closes in on us.  You’ll owe me something in compensation for expediting matters.”

“As you wish,” Fray said.  She turned to the rest of us.  “Another day.”

“Another day,” I said.

She turned her back to us, taking Warren’s hand as help to make it through the broken window.

Letting them go…

Helen held the grenade, making motions as if she was gauging her ability to accurately throw it through the window at the small army massed outside.

Gordon reached out, putting a hand on her wrist.

“No?” she asked, sounding mournful.

“Cats and cockroaches,” he said.  “Some would survive, and it would be the most exceptional ones.  Not worth it.  Besides, they could have done the same to us.”

He held her wrist firm while he took the pin from his pocket and put it through the slot.  He took the weapon from Helen.

“Doesn’t stop us from sending everything we can after them,” I said.  “For all the good it’ll do.”

“We can try,” Gordon said, nodding.  He drew in a deep breath, then exhaled.  “We’ll have to see how-”

Mary, standing beside Gordon, tilted her head to one side, until it rested against Gordon’s shoulder.  Her arm reached around his waist.  Her eyes were fixed on Percy.

“…How bad it is up there.  Are you wanting to stay?”

“No,” Mary said.  “I like being like this, but the mission comes first.”

“Mary,” Lillian said.  “You doing that for me, you didn’t-”

“You’re my friend,” Mary said.  She smiled a little.  “It’s okay.  I feel better than I have in a long time.”

“If you’re sure-”

“Mm-hmm,” Mary said, nodding, her head rubbing against Gordon’s shoulder.  Just being like this, she was closer than she’d been getting to him for a while.  Gordon seemed to be taking it in stride.  She spoke, “Thank you, everyone.  Sy especially.  I appreciate this.”

“If you’re absolutely sure you’re okay-” Gordon said.

“I will stab the next person to ask if I’m okay,” Mary said.

“Are you okay?” I asked, without missing a beat.

She moved her head off of Gordon’s shoulder, turning my way.

“Wait,” I said, “hold on.”

She approached me, drawing a knife.

She was a few feet away when she stopped.

Looking up at the stairs.

My first thought was that the enemy had circled back or come down and found us.

Worse.

Two young individuals stood on the staircase, twelve and thirteen, going by appearance alone.  I knew better.

One had red hair, parted to one side, wearing a white collared shirt only, despite the cold weather, with dark brown slacks.  He had a folded umbrella in one hand.  He had freckles on his face, and his eyes- the eyes were intense, amber colored, more like that of a wolf than a person.

Those eyes were the most alive part of him.  Helen, even in the earliest days, was better at looking like a proper human than he was.

Beside Ashton was a familiar face, dressed wrong.  The hair was still long, but it was combed straight back.  The glasses had changed, and were oval, slender, more like reading glasses than anything else.  His shirt had a high collar, not folded, with a ribbon around it, and he wore a coat with a hood, but carried no bag and held no book.  He held himself differently.

His eyes, as he looked at us, showed no glimmer of familiarity.  Recognition, yes, but not in the way it counted.

“You let them go?” he asked.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 7.16 – Twig

Tooth and Nail – 7.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

It’s him.  Not him.

Worst timing possible.

Greet him with a smileFigure out what to say.

My expression remained blank, eyes turned up to the pair on the stairwell.  No words left my lips.

Something screamed atop the rooftops.  The gunfire was incessant.

He came down the stairs, with Ashton following just a step behind him.  He stopped at the base of the stairs, looking us over.

Hubris growled.  Gordon touched the dog’s head, and Hubris went quiet, though his posture was still aggressive.  He moved closer, until he was between Gordon and the pair, on guard.

He reached into a pocket, withdrawing a flat leather case, thinner than most wallets, and no longer than his hand was.  His fingers curled around the end as he held it up.

“I’m supposed to give you this,” he said.  “But seeing what we saw-”

“It’s complicated, Jamie,” Gordon said.

“I’m sure,” was the reply.

That’s not Jamie.

He took a moment, considering, feeling the weight of the little package, before tossing it ten feet over to Gordon.

Gordon unzipped it.  He handed out vials small enough that a finger couldn’t slide into them.  One to Mary, one to Lillian.

“Sy doesn’t need one,” the boy with Jamie’s face said.  “Helen either.  That’s three days of doses for the rest of you, Hubris included.”

Gordon nodded.  He removed the stopper from the vial and downed it.  He grimaced.  Lillian and Mary did much the same.

“I know,” the boy said.  “It’s just for a little while.”

His eye moved over to Percy’s body.

“What did you hear?”  Gordon asked.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened, first?” the boy asked, calm.  “I’ll see if it matches up to what we saw and heard.”

He was confident, wary.  Jamie had always hung in the background, quiet, nose in his books.  Jamie’s confidence was a different sort.

“Sy?” Gordon asked.  “Feel up to taking a stab at explaining?”

The words caught in my throat as I stared at the boy.

Anything else, I could have managed.  I could have found the words, braved my way through, been clever, whatever needed to happen.

But he was here, staring at me with Jamie’s eyes, no familiarity, loaded to bear with accusation.

That, I couldn’t deal with.  It penetrated every defense I had to hit me right where it hurt most.  A part of my mind and feelings I hadn’t figured out how to patch up the missing pieces, fix the pieces that weren’t working with, or even muster the feelings I needed to cope with it at all.

“Guess not,” Gordon said.  “Sorry.”

I shook my head a little.

“Might be for the best,” the boy said.  “I’ve been reading the books, trying to get caught up.  I’m not sure I’d believe what Sy said.”

“Not being sure about Sy?  Eighty percent of what you need to learn, when it comes to Sy,” Gordon said, a light smile on his face.  “Realizing you have to take that leap anyway?  That’s another ten percent.  The rest is crammed into the remaining ten percent.”

The boy smiled a little.  Too similar.  I looked away.

“Um,” Lillian said.  “Hi, Jamie.”

“Hi.”

“I’ll try explaining?  Because I’m probably the worst liar here, I think?”

“That would be great.”

“It’s good,” Gordon said.

“A while back, Fray reached out to us, too, back-”

“Dame Cicely’s,” the boy said.  “It’s in the books.”

Lillian nodded.  She fidgeted nervously with the strap of her satchel.  “We didn’t take that offer.  But she reached out to Dog and Catcher and some others.  They switched sides.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed.  He looked up at the ceiling.  “Dog and Catcher told us to wait here for you.”

“Did they say anything else?” Gordon asked.

“Yes,” the boy said.  “They said, ‘it’s a shame we have to say goodbye so soon after saying hello for the first time’.”

“They’re leaving,” Mary said.  “We found them out, they can’t stay, so they’re going to do what they have to do and then disappear.”

“It makes sense,” the boy said.  “The tone, the wording.”

He said it like it was a prompt to keep going.

Lillian fidgeted more.  She glanced at me, then looked away, the eye contact equivalent of touching a hot pan handle.  “We realized we were in a bad situation, that what’s happening up there was about to happen.  No way to avoid it, unless we left the area and abandoned the mission.   We debated whether or not to take her offer to join, and we decided not to.  But the fact that she’d asked, it meant we could get close.”

The boy nodded.

Lillian continued, “Being there was better than being here, especially when we weren’t sure how she would get bullets to start flying and bombs exploding.  Being there in the other building meant we could talk.  Mary could talk to Percy, we could talk to Fray, try to guide things…”

“We got them to kill Percy, at Mary’s request, and we got information, coming from there to here with each side holding the other at gunpoint, in a manner of speaking.  We let them go because there was nothing we could do against their numbers and the kind of force they could bring to bear,” Gordon finished.  “They left us behind because Fray wants to keep an open dialogue.”

The boy looked between each of us, then looked back at Ashton.  Ashton was giving Hubris a a pat on the head.  He looked at his companion, and very softly said, “It makes sense?”

The boy in Jamie’s skin nodded in response.  He was agreeing, but still didn’t look sure.

“I know it looks bad,” Gordon said.  “But there weren’t any options that were great, once we realized what was happening.”

“I know,” the boy said.  “I believe her, and I know what you mean, about the options.  I’ve read the books.  The ones I had, that is.”

“Ah,” I said.

One syllable, that was better than nothing at all.

I took the backpack, and I held it out.

He crossed the distance, and he took the bag from me.  He checked the weight, then handed it back.

“Keep it for now?” he asked.  When my expression was one of confusion, he said, “I’m tender.  Too many days in the chair.”

I nodded.  I took the bag, and slung it over my shoulders, stepping back.  Lillian touched my upper arm.

“Like I said, I read the books,” he said.  “I’ve got this mental picture of each of you, all from words on the page.  Months and years of writing and notes.  Mentally, I can sort it, the dates, I can pull all the details together into something that should be…”

He gestured, unable to find the word.

That was odd.

“Three-dimensional?” I asked.

He smiled, a soft, easy expression.  “Thank you.  I haven’t met any of you, and it feels flat in my head, even if I try to pull it all into a shape.  I know the particulars, how the Lambs operate, how each of you operate, the hand-signs, the details of past missions, but it’s all still images, broken up.  I know exactly what you mean, about the issues you run into during a mission, except in a very page-turning, pen-on-paper way.  I understand there aren’t many great options, sometimes.  That we scrape by when things get bad.”

“You’ll pick things up,” Gordon said.  “It’s good to have you both with us.”

Gordon extended a hand.  The boy shook it, then pulled Gordon into an awkward sort of half-hug.

Then he hugged Mary, Helen, and Lillian in that order.

I was the last one he approached.

In the background, Helen was greeting Ashton.  “It’s so sad!  They gave you red hair!”

“Helen!” Mary rebuked her, while keeping one eye on my imminent exchange with the new boy.

“Everyone says that a man can’t be truly handsome if he has red hair!  And freckles too!”

“You don’t say that to his face, Helen.”

Oblivious to the ongoing conversation behind him, he stood a short distance from me.

“Ashton doesn’t mind,” Helen said.

“I don’t mind,” Ashton said.

My view was partially blocked by the boy who stood in front of me, but I saw Helen throw her arms around Ashton, hugging him.  He stayed there, arms limp at his side, as she rocked him back and forth.  She said something I guessed to be ‘little brother’.

I returned my focus to the boy.  Everyone that wasn’t Helen or Ashton seemed to be watching us.  More pressure.

There were a hundred things that were going through my head, things I could say and every single one of them had bad implications.

Whatever.  I would try one.  Starting simple.

“Is there something I can call you?” I asked.

“Jamie,” he said.

I flinched.  My eyes found the ground and I couldn’t bring myself to look away from it.  Not even his feet.

“Oh,” he said, realizing.  “It’s the name they gave me.  I think they would be annoyed if I used a different one.  I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t respond to that.

He would have to be Jamie.  Just like there were other Sylvesters in the world.  A different person with the same name.  He just so happened to have the same face, voice, and expressions.

It was hard to breathe, like I somehow had the weight of ten bags of books pressing down on my chest.

“Did they keep, find, rebuild anything?” I managed.

“Not the things you’re asking about, Sy,” he said.  “They gave me lessons, while digging for the key things.  How to walk again, how to speak, how to read, how to get dressed.  When it got too hard, they focused the lessons on re-teaching it from scratch, hoping that I’d be able to dredge up those memories if I could meet them halfway.  Some I did, others I… learned how to do all over again.  There are gaps, simple things I’m still re-learning, but they thought I was ready enough.”

“That’s why they didn’t want you to see us?” Gordon asked.  “Because you might have met us halfway to rebuild memories?”

“They thought it would muddy the waters.”

I looked up, meeting Jamie’s eyes, “Then there’s a chance that, if you have an appointment after this, having met us again…”

I realized what I was saying.  That weight on my chest wasn’t going away.  I faltered, falling silent again.

“I think, if that chance existed, they wouldn’t have let me out to see you.  They’re more focused on other things.  Skills, background knowledge.  How efficiently knowledge can be pulled from the tanks when the slate is clean.”

I could still hear the muffled violence and noise outside, fire, destruction, screaming, unheard orders to do this or do that, all while men died.  It felt like  a pretty good match to what I was feeling inside of my chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’ll have to tell me about him,” he said.  “Okay?  About the first Jamie?”

I exhaled, a long shuddering breath.

Okay.

Somehow, the fact that he’d asked that question, it made this bearable.  Meeting halfway.

I extended a hand.  I felt Jamie’s hand in mine as he shook it.

That done, I stepped around him, putting him behind me.  I approached Ashton, who Helen was now hugging from behind.  The heel of one hand wiped tears out of one eye.  The heel of the other hand wiped at the other.

Ashton.  He stared at me with those amber-yellow eyes.

My voice didn’t come out at full strength or even half-strength as I spoke, “Hi Ashton.  I’ve been wanting to meet you for a really long time.”

“Hi… Sylvester?”

I nodded.

“You’re sad,” he said.

I felt like my voice would catch if I spoke out loud, so I just nodded.

“I can make you happy again.”

“No you can’t, dum-dum,” I said, my voice still faint and hoarse.  “I’m immune to you.”

“Oh.”

“Me too,” Helen said, still hugging Ashton from behind, rocking him slightly from side to side.  “But that’s because I’m not human.”

I extended a hand.  Ashton took it.

“No,” I said.  “Like this.  Firmer.  Grip harder.  Keep your wrist straight, not floppy.”

It took three tries before it was right.  On that one firm shake, as was proper between men, I pulled him closer, into a one-armed hug, a little more graceful than Jamie’s had been with Gordon.  Helen let him go just in time.

He received it with the same enthusiasm and effectiveness as a wet rope.

I released him, backing away and stepping to the side, turning around to look at the Lambs as a whole.  Helen reached out to pat down Ashton’s hair where it was sticking up, post-hug.  Then she wrapped her arms around him, one cheek pressed against the side of his head.

“He’s so new,” Helen said.  “Like a newborn calf who’s learning to stand, or a chick fresh out of the egg.”

“He’s doing a lot of the learning-from-scratch I’m doing,” Jamie said.  “We had some of the same lessons.  They sent him with me because they thought he’d learn better in the field than in a sterile room.”

“We’ll make do,” Gordon said.  “Speaking of…”

“What’s next?” Mary asked, more to finish Gordon’s question than to ask it.

“We could hunker down, keep our heads down, and wait this out,” Gordon said.

Please no.  Not with Jamie here.  Too difficult.

“Or we could go after Fray,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.  “That.  Great.  Let’s do that.  She said the North road.  I don’t know where that is, but we can figure it out.”

“I do,” Jamie said.  “The road, I’ve seen the city’s map, I know the layout.”

I felt a momentary dissonance.  How could I forget we had that resource, when I’d been having trouble remembering we didn’t when he wasn’t here?

“Okay, alright, that’s great, of course,” I said.  Speaking too quickly.  Calm down.  “We’ll have to catch up to her, anticipating her route, we still have to figure out a way to deal with the small army that is keeping her company, and we need to get away alive afterward.  But that’s not too hard.  The Lambs have done worse.”

Not easy,” Gordon said.  “We’re in a warzone.  The rooftops aren’t free to roam on.  We’d have to take the streets.  Keeping in mind she made a few shortcuts with those bombs.”

“Where?” Jamie asked.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Gordon said.  “Not off the top of my head.  General direction, maybe.”

“Then it doesn’t work,” Jamie said.  “If she’s more familiar with the shortcuts than we are, then we’re not going to catch up.”

“We can,” I said.  “We can figure it out on the way.”

“No,” Gordon said.  “My heart doesn’t feel great, Hubris was nudging my hand earlier.  If we were sure, I’d go for it, push just a little while longer, but we aren’t sure.”

Damn it, no.  I don’t want to stay cooped up here, feeling like I’ve got a weight on my chest and someone’s hand around my throat, pushing the knot at the front of my throat in.

“It’s more problematic than that,” I said.  “The other experiments turned coat, they’re leaving.  In the wake of all of this, we’re going to come under scrutiny.  If we don’t have actual results, something a little bit better than Percy’s corpse, then that’s going to hurt us.”

“That bird has flown the coop,” Mary said.  “We’ll manage.”

“No,” I said, my voice firm now.  “No.  Not like that, not like this.  We’re not giving up like that.”

“You think we can catch Fray?” Gordon asked.

“No,” I said.  Then I thought again.  “Yes.  It depends.”

“On?”

“Everything that’s going on up there,” I said.  “We should split up.  Two groups.”

Mary spoke, “Sy, I understand if you need space, but-”

Listen,” I said.  I’d been too forceful, in saying it, like I was telling her to shut up.  I was letting emotion seep into my words, fighting too hard to avoid being sad, speechless, useless.  I wanted to do something.  “Listen to me, treat this as part of the mission, then decide if I’m doing it for ulterior reasons.”

“Okay, Sy,” Mary said.

“Two groups.  We need to balance the groups.  Group one, Ashton, Gordon, Helen.”

“You sure?” Gordon asked.  The quickest on the draw, at least while Mary was still slightly preoccupied with Percy’s death.  “You-”

He saw me start to react.

“Listening,” he said.

“My group, Mary, Jamie, Lillian.  You’re up to climbing?”

There were nods.

“I’m not athletic, but I’ve been exercising, trying to keep the scars flexible, so the sessions in the chair are easier,” Jamie said.  “I’m pretty sure I can climb.”

It was another person in Jamie’s body.  I couldn’t remember Jamie ever putting in extra effort to exercise, nor did he like talking about the scars.

Had he, I reminded myself.  Past tense.

The books on my back felt like a dead weight, devoid of personality, or even familiarity.  There was no association anymore.  The thirteen year old boy that stood a few feet away was a constant reminder and yet the furthest thing from a comforting presence.

“Sy?” Gordon asked.

I’d been staring off into space, thinking too hard.

“We’re listening,” Mary said.

“Gordon, you and Helen are babysitting Ashton.  Get him to the allied command.  He’s going to stretch his legs, practice in the field for the first time.  Let’s see how good of a manipulator he is.  We’re ending this conflict.”

“Easier said than done,” Gordon said.  “Bullets are flying, we don’t know what the battlefield up there is like.”

“You can get across fairly easily,” Jamie said.  “We got up and made it this far, but there’s a hole in the roof up there, and we needed the help of Dog and Catcher to get from the roof to the safer part of the top floor.”

“Show us.”

Just like that, we were making our way upstairs.  The Lambs, greater in number to what had been originally intended.  Minus one Evette, plus one Sylvester and a Mary.

And a dog.

The second floor was empty.  A living room, a kitchen, filled with dust and black smoke, to the point that our footfalls were swiping away stretches of soot and powder.

The roof had been blasted open.  The attic-level floor was just as dirty, with floorboards scorched black, blackened lumber still smouldering, lying scattered here and there.

“That side is harder to climb.  My group will take it.  You guys, go the opposite way.  Keep going until you find someone in charge, at least two people at the highest points up the ladder who’re directing the armies are in Fray’s pocket, perpetuating this stupid civil war.  Get control over that situation.  It shouldn’t be hard, once you find them – I doubt they want their own people getting shot any more than is necessary.  Fray’s superweapon moles are going to be running by now, there shouldn’t be too much interference.”

“And then?”

“Once that’s settled, catch up with us,” I said.  “We’ll see how well this works.”

“Okay.”

“Good luck.”

Gordon gave me a mock salute.  Helen, meanwhile, had Ashton climb on her back, arms around her neck, while she prepared to climb.

When I turned to look at the slope of wreckage my team had to scale to get to the rooftop proper, I realized Jamie was staring at me.

Focus on the mission.

If I focus hard enough to block everything out, and my effectiveness is going to skyrocket.

“You’re sure it’s safe?” I asked.

“Not sure, but we weren’t getting shot at.  The focus seems to be along different flanks.  Two pairs of major groups limited in movement by the destroyed rooftops, focusing on each other,” Jamie said.

I nodded, turning to stare out at what mostly amounted to a ring, loosely circling Fray’s building.  I could see smoke here and there, and damage elsewhere.  Muzzles flashed and fires periodically sprung up.

“Let’s go.”

It wasn’t fast going, but I was fixated on the task.  I checked every handhold and foothold as I scaled the blackened rubble.  Some was still hot or warm to the touch.  Other parts of it were slick with a mingling of damp and the film on the burned wood.

Once I was firmly on the rooftop, I stood straight, surveying the battlefield and the city beyond, squinting to try and make out what I could of the city at large.  Rain streamed down through my hair and down my face.  Refreshing and cold.  Very, very cold.

The Brechwell Beast was close.

The others finished climbing up.  Mary and I both gave Lillian a hand.  Mary helped Jamie.

We ran as well as we were able, heads down, making sure to keep our balance where we could, skirting around a hole in the roof.

The nearest group of soldiers were aiming guns at us by the time I was able to see them.

Badge in hand, I held up my hands, slowing to a walk.

I could see the confusion on some of the soldier’s faces.  I could see bodies strewn on the rooftop behind them, the furthest point from their front line.  This was only the rear guard.

“Take me to your commander,” I said.

“Who the hell are you?”

I wasn’t in the mood for this.  I extended the badge in their direction.  “I’m the only person here who knows exactly what’s going on.”

He took the badge, squinting at it.

“While you’ve been shooting, the people you were supposed to be watching for got away.  That building down there is empty now.  Partially your fault, partially ours, but I want to remedy that.  Take us to the person in charge.”

“Stay put,” he said, before turning to the other men.  “Watch them.”

He took my badge away with him.

I didn’t like that.

I didn’t like standing still.  I was very aware of the people behind me.

“Lillian,” I said. “Can you help the wounded?”

“I can,” she said.

“You stay put,” one of the soldiers said.  “And stay quiet.”

I closed my eyes.

That last part.  The ‘stay quiet’.  I appreciated that.

It meant I didn’t have to talk.  Didn’t have to explain.

Mary and Lillian were huddled together, both wearing raincoats.  They were talking.  Saying a lot that I wasn’t privy to.

I doubted they had ever been closer.  Mary doing what she’d done, for Lillian…

Even the fact that Mary had put her head on Gordon’s shoulder, that was something.  She’d been gravitating towards him, a stiff arm’s-length relationship, she hadn’t let herself get close.

And then, all of a sudden, with Percy gone, she’d let down that guard.

She’d decided.  Closure, something that had been agonizing her put to rest.

I looked at Jamie, who was staring off in the direction the others had gone, standing straight, hands in his pockets.  Water had beaded his spectacles to the point I doubted he could see through them, but they were the reading type, easy enough to look over, with a change in the angle of his head.  His hood was up, but his hair was still getting damp at the very ends of the very front.

Minutes passed.  I was glad for the quiet.  I was disappointed to see the soldier that had ordered us to stay quiet stepping away.

Well, perhaps not the worst thing.

“Which way to the North Road?” I asked, breaking the silence.

There were no barked orders or threats.  The other men were too cold, stressed, and scared to be bothered, it seemed.

Jamie glanced at me.  Then he turned, taking in the city, and pointed.  His finger traced a line, and I matched that line to the curve of one street.  Now that I looked, it was twice as wide as the others.

“Sy, are you sure she went that way?” Mary asked.  “Fray could have deceived us, said one thing, while planning another.”

“When under that much stress?  No.  At most, she’s expecting us to expect that.”

Mary nodded.

“It’s gone quiet,” Jamie said.

I looked at him.

“The gunfire from that end.  It’s faltering.”

I nodded.

“Already?” Mary asked.

“It’s Ashton’s specialty,” I said.

“Does that mean you’re going to adjust how you operate again?” Mary asked.

“No,” I said, with a heavy heart.  “No need, not yet.”

“You,” a soldier spoke behind me.

Mary and Lillian stood.  Jamie and I turned.

It was the officer we’d spoken to earlier.  He was with another man, blond, young, and wearing a very ornate outfit with less decoration on the breast.  Less medals, less accomplishments.

The most hated man in Brechwell?

I took my badge back.

“Does this man serve under anyone but you?” I asked.

The blond man raised his eyebrows.

“No,” he said.  “Why?”

“Then he helped instigate this infighting,” I said.

I saw the man’s expression change, and in that flicker of surprise, I knew I was right.

“He what?” the Headmaster General asked me.

“My colleagues are already rounding up one or two of the others.  We’re about to find out half of the superweapons are gone, if not more,” I said.  “Working with the enemy.  I’ll explain in time.  For now, I would recommend arresting him.”

The Headmaster General looked at the man, who was turning red, visible even in the rain and the gloom.

“Lies,” he said.

I didn’t flinch, only waited.

Everyone wanted something, everyone had a weakness.  I’d identified Brechwell’s weakness fairly soon after visiting.  Which reminded me…

“He helped goad the friendly fire, he helped enemy forces slip through and operate unnoticed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he helped let the people through when the Academy was set on fire, or changed what was stored where, to help the flames spread,” I said.

“The fighting has stopped,” Jamie said, just behind me.  “You can hear there aren’t as many bullets being fired, and the explosions are slowing down.”

“You lose nothing by arresting him now,” I said.  “Question him later, after facts have come to light.  You’ll find he’s trying to make you look bad.  You can blame us if we’re wrong, and take the credit if we’re right.”

The man’s face was getting redder still.  For all that people seemed to hate him, the Headmaster General seemed to be holding his composure.

“Arrest him,” he ordered the men.

There wasn’t a fight.  Face red, glaring, the man was quickly seized by four lesser officers.

“I hope you’re right,” the Headmaster General said.

“There’s another part to this.  The allied forces and reinforcements are coming from the southwest, primarily?”

“Yes.”

“The enemy is gone, they’re making a run for it.  Let’s make life harder for them, or see if we can’t reveal some more of your traitors.”

“How?”

“Have the men in the towers direct the Brechwell Beast along the North Road.”

He stared at me, analyzing.

“If people in the towers shoot to change or confuse its course, then you know they’re on her side.  You can’t have people like that at your Academy while you rebuild,” I said.

The Headmaster General nodded.  He leaned close to one of the remaining officers, whispering orders, and then sent the man scampering off.

“I’m staying with you, until this is all resolved,” he said.

“It’s as resolved as it will get,” I said.  “We pick up the pieces, now, and pay mind to the aftermath.”

It wasn’t fast, the transmission of orders, or the initial movement of the Beast.  Despite his promise to stay with us, the General stepped away to coordinate the passing on of messages.

Jamie pointed the way, figuring out the routes Fray might have taken, the places she could be, assuming she was making a beeline for freedom.

“This won’t stop her,” Mary said.  “A surprise attack by the Brechwell Beast?  It won’t remove her from the picture, she’s too canny.”

“Her?  No.  But she has a small army with her.  Can all of them get to cover?  There’s got to be an inverse to the cats and cockroaches principle.”

“We don’t have one,” Lillian said.

“You need one,” I said.  “Always count on some degree of incompetence, in a sufficiently large group.”

The Brechwell Beast was moving.  Picking up speed.

“It’s on the North Road,” Jamie said.

It had been quiet too long, my focus elsewhere.  The sound of his voice made my heart leap, then fall three times as far as it had risen.

I had never missed my best friend more.

“Lowering its head,” the General said.  “It spotted something.”

It took three seconds.  One attack.

Then the Beast continued on its way.

“We’re done,” I said.  “Nothing more we can accomplish here.  Let’s go find the others.  You can break the news to them, Jamie.”

“The news?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

My heart was heavy.  “I know.  I’ve figured it out, why they would go for Ashton and not Evette.”

“Ah, yes.”

“What?” Mary asked.

“Redundancy,” I said.  “Two social manipulators, two people who can fight.  Why?  Think about it.”

“I’m thinking about it, but, they don’t expect any of us to die?  Or are they- they’re not canceling a project?”

I could hear the alarm in her voice.  I could see the relief as I shook my head.

A few ‘pops’ of gunfire suggested that things hadn’t entirely settled down in Brechwell.

“They’re going to split up the Lambs.  Or at least prepare for it to happen soon,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 7.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 7 – Boys)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Ashton

“Here we go again,” Sylvester said.

Ashton stared at the boy, uncomprehending.  Here we go again?  What did he mean?

He said a lot of things that were hard to puzzle out.

Understanding was important, the people back home kept saying.  Had to learn, had to study.  Ashton was here to study by experiencing.  But Ashton had more questions than there was time to ask.  If he started asking then he might never stop.  Jamie didn’t mind, but Jamie wasn’t the only person here.  The train car was packed with people, and people that listened to Ashton speak for too long had a way of acting funny and getting concerned.

Then he had to make them less concerned.

But that was a problem too, Jamie said.

Click click click click.  Hard shoes tapped the floor of the train car.

Here we go again, Ashton realized.  It was the woman again.  He turned his head, looking up, just as she came into view.  She was tall and pale and had dark hair.  She was more like the pictures of pretty ladies they had shown Ashton than the pictures of the ugly people.  That was a hard thing to figure out.  If he paid too much attention to what made people pretty, the parts of the face, then he still made mistakes.

Jamie had figured that out first, after watching Ashton’s class on people, faces, and acting.  Jamie had found a medical textbook and showed it to Ashton, and Ashton had called the woman in that book pretty.  That upset a lot of people.  They asked him questions and Jamie said that the way her face was shaped, the shape of her eye, the look of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all seemed right.

But the drawing of the woman in the book had a problem with the eye.  The woman here had no scar on her face, no missing parts, no pocks or poxes.  She looked young and smooth and wore makeup with a uniform that meant she was a member of the staff.

She put a hand on Ashton’s head as she leaned in between the two benches the Lambs sat on.  “Can I get you anything?”

“No,” Gordon said, sounding tired.

“We have biscuits in the staff’s car.”

“You’ve mentioned the biscuits,” Gordon said.  “No thank you.”

“Something to drink?”

“No,” Gordon said, firmly.  “Thank you.  We need some privacy, please.”

“The train arrives shortly.”

“Thank you,” he said, for the hundredth time.”

“I’ll give you a hand when you step off the train.”

“No need.  Thank you.”

“No need,” Ashton echoed Gordon, voice soft.  He was bad at controlling his volume for different situations, so he spoke quietly just to be sure.  Most people listened when he talked.

The woman walked away.  Ashton stared at her, watching her go.

“What’s that,” Sylvester asked.  “Thirty times?”

“Thirty-one.  Close,” Jamie said.

“Bully for me,” Sylvester said.

“You need to learn some control, Ash,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” Ashton said.  “It’s a problem?”

“It’s annoying,” Mary said.  “We’re supposed to be covert.  Having people flocking to us?  Not covert.”

“I could push her away.”

“Don’t,” Jamie said.

“I think that would be a horrible idea,” Jamie said.  “Look.”

Ashton stared at the point of Jamie’s finger.

“No,” Jamie said.  His expression and tone were patient.  Ashton remembered that lesson.  “Imagine a line, drawn along my arm and out past the point my finger extends, where does that line go?”

Ashton knew his brain didn’t work like a human’s did.  When he imagined something new, he had to work to do it, and the things he imagined overwrote the things he saw.  The line appeared, red because Ashton preferred the color red.  He followed it, head turning, and had to work to correct it so it was mostly straight.

Sitting across the aisle was a family.  The two younger children and the mom were staring at the Lambs.  The mom raised her hand in a small wave, smiling.  Behind the family was a window, looking out on fields and trees.  An orchard.

“I’m pointing at the family.”

Ashton nodded.  Nodding was the thing people did when they wanted to say ‘yes’ or to agree, but didn’t want to say something.  He was supposed to nod if he would say yes more than twice in a very short time, which was often when he was getting a lot of instructions.  He wasn’t supposed to talk too much until he learned how conversations worked, so he’d chosen to nod.

“If you try to make people go away, it makes them feel uneasy, scared, sick, or angry,” Jamie said, his voice quieter than before.  Jamie’s hand had gone back to his lap, and the red line that stretched out from his fingertip was pointed at the train car wall under the window.  “If you do that in this train car, where people have been breathing you in for a long time…?”

Ashton looked around.

“Chaos and panic?” Sylvester suggested.

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “I was asking Ashton, though, because it was a teachable moment.”

“Ah, right.”

Chaos and panic.

Ashton watched as people all around him started getting up from their seats, hitting each other, pushing, trying to get away.  He could hear them as they made noise.  They weren’t real people, only his imagination, and he wasn’t good at imagining people.  The blood-stained pictures in his mind’s eye were distorted, the faces weren’t symmetrical – that was the part about the one-eyed woman’s face that the acting teacher had explained was important – and some had only one eye, or eyes in the wrong place, or stretched out black circles for mouths.

He’d seen a lot of blood spatters during and after the fighting in Brechwell.  The organ structures in his head, described as coral-like in appearance by one of his doctors, were busy calling those images from his memories, painting them around the train car.  Sometimes the scale was wrong, or it was the wrong angle, against the wrong surface.

But he was supposed to practice, and it was pretty enough to look at, so he let the images and the spatters and the dead bodies keep overlapping, even though none of it made sense anymore.

Jamie was talking, he realized.  He made the imagined-hallucinated screams stop so he could understand.

“-when he gets more control.”

“Nuanced,” Sylvester said.

“We hope,” Jamie said.

Ashton nodded.  He wasn’t wholly sure that he understood what they were saying, but sitting still and doing nothing bothered people sometimes.  Jamie said he was supposed to practice when and how he spoke and participated, even if he got it wrong, but only with the Lambs.

“It’s interesting,” Sylvester said.  “Figuring out how to move this particular game piece, with all of the inherent problems it brings to the picture.”

“Game pieces?” Lillian asked.  “Is that how you see us?”

“Only when we’re playing a game, Lil,” Sylvester said.  He looked to one side and then groaned.

Click click click click…

“I have mints in my purse, if you’d like-”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Thank you, miss.”

“Okay, I just thought you should know the train is stopping now.”

“Thank you,” Gordon said.

“I’ll help you with your bags.”

“No need.  Thank you.”

Ashton turned his head to look up at the woman.  His imagination had the father from across the aisle swing the smallest of the children by one ankle, the head cracking open against the back of Ashton’s seat.  Blood flew into the woman’s face.  She didn’t move or flinch.

That was false.

He was supposed to practice.  He imagined it happening again, her expression changing.  What were the right emotions?  Disgust and fear.  The two put together, what was it?  Horror.

He watched the scene replay, over and over, trying to piece it together until it looked like something that should happen.

“Ashton,” Gordon said.  “Pay attention.”

Ashton realized the woman was gone.  The scene broke down into constituent parts, those parts scattering.  He turned back to Jamie.

“Don’t forget your umbrella,” Gordon said.

“Don’t open it until we’re out of the train car,” Jamie corrected.

Ashton bent down and picked up his umbrella.  The others were getting their coats on.  He didn’t have one, because using an umbrella was easier than remembering how to get dressed in a way that didn’t draw attention.

“Try to focus, okay?  I know you and Jamie aren’t facing the same danger as the rest of us, but what comes next matters.”

Ashton nodded.

Focus.  He stopped practicing.  The images went away, one by one.  He looked across the aisle, and the images there went away too.

The train stopped before he was finished.

The Lambs made their way out, grabbing their bags from the compartment by the door.  The man at the bottom of the stairs down to the train platform helped each of them, smiling at Ashton as Ashton stared up at him.

There was a group waiting for them.  Ashton’s doctors were among them.  The department heads, the new Academy Headmaster, Professor Hayle, Professor Ibott, and a number of others Ashton didn’t recognize stood at a point just past the exit from the station.

“Hoo boy,” Gordon said.

Ashton watched the family that had been across the aisle walk past.  The youngest child’s head was imagined-hallucinated to be broken apart from when his head had been smashed against the back of the seat, contents leaking out.  Brains were gray but they looked pink when seen fresh because of the blood in and on them.  Ashton left the little boy like he was, because it was pretty, and because red was his favorite color.

 

Gordon

Gordon’s hand reached down to find Hubris’ head.  He gave it a pat and a scratch, more for his own security than for Hubris.  Mary stood beside him.  That was security of another sort.

Scares like this were bad for his heart.

“Lord Duke, Lord, Headmaster, esteemed professors,” Gordon greeted the committee in his best guess at order of hierarchy.  There was a new noble as part of the group, and Gordon didn’t recognize the man.

The Duke and the new noble were wearing hunting clothes, pants clinging to their legs, long jackets.  The noble in the Duke’s company was younger, no older than eighteen, as far as age could be estimated by appearance when a noble was concerned.  He had a pointed, jutting chin, stood tall at seven feet, narrow and long-necked.  A swan turned human.  Graceful, imperious, and, Gordon knew, swans were absolute bastards when met face to face.

Like the Duke, the man’s hair was long and golden, but his hair was straight and flowed straight down his back, more supple than hair should be.  He wore a checkered scarf in yellow and black.  His teeth, as he smiled, seemed wrong somehow, too uniform and white, and his fingers were especially long, poking out of the embroidered sleeve of a hunting jacket.  The nails were long and sharp, and the fingers were marked with jewelry.

He wore a sword, Gordon noted.  Noble anatomy, modified to be stronger, faster, inhuman by most measures.  Gordon couldn’t say why, but he had the vague sense that the man could and would draw and use that sword to dispatch anyone who insulted him.

Sylvester would be able to say why he gave off that impression, Gordon knew.  All Gordon had in this situation were his instincts.  He’d heard of the mad nobles, the dangerous ones, and this one felt more dangerous than even the Duke.

Please don’t talk, SylvesterDon’t say anything.

“This is the Baron Richmond,” the Duke said.  “A cousin.  We were near Brechwell when we heard of the situation in Brechwell.  Genevieve Fray spotted and effectively cornered.”

Lower in status than the Duke by six orders of nobility, Gordon estimated.  He wouldn’t speak out of turn.  That was good.  Gordon could imagine the man establishing his presence through violence and the making of examples.

“Walk with us,” the Duke said.  “Your bags will be looked after.”

Gordon’s, “Yes, my lord,” joined a number of others.

He didn’t even wait to see if the Lambs listened.  The Baron fell in step beside the Duke with no trouble.  The pair walked fast enough that their retinue and the other professors had to work to keep up.  For the Lambs, especially the smaller ones, Ashton and Sylvester, that was doubly difficult.

The crowd parted, people already had their heads and eyes toward the ground.  As the Duke advanced, people of all social classes dropped to their knees on the damp road.  It was as though an invisible wave preceded him, knocking people down.

“Who have we lost to her side?” the Duke asked.  He didn’t turn around.

The Baron was watching over one shoulder.  Gordon felt uneasy.

“Out of the superweapons, Dog and Catcher, to be sure, my lord.  Petey was confirmed.  Most of the rest, but we can’t be sure who,” Gordon said.

“The Baron has been arguing that you’re more liability than asset,” the Duke said.  “We don’t know where the Lambs stand.”

“The Baron is wrong,” Sylvester said, adding a belated, “My lord.”

Gordon momentarily closed his eyes.  Hearing Sylvester speak, even before the sentence was finished, had Gordon’s heart skipping a beat.  Cognitively, he knew Sylvester had gauged the situation and no doubt gauged it well.  But there was no room for even small errors, not here.

The Baron had a dangerous look in his eye, but he hadn’t spoken.

“Do you think so?” the Duke asked.

“Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.

“I said much the same thing.”

“Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.  Gordon could hear the note of smug satisfaction in Sylvester’s voice.

Provided we decide you’re trustworthy,” the Duke said.  “You’ll give your report to the professors, the Baron and I will look over the written transcripts, and we’ll give the final judgments.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said, before Sylvester could speak.  He couldn’t let Sylvester take command of this conversation.

“My sisters will want to participate as well,” the Baron said.

“Do you think so?” the Duke asked.

“They’ve been so bored, and have complained about being left out of the hunting trip.”

“Very well, the twins as well.”

The twins.  The words were akin to a bell in Gordon’s memory.

Gordon had heard of the twins.  To be exact, he’d heard about them in the context of the mad nobles.  On the flip side, mention of mad nobles as a general topic invariably meant mention of the twins.

“Little Helen, I think the Baron, Baronets and I would enjoy your company after all is said and done, should you be cleared of wrongdoing or dissent.  You and Professor Ibbot shall join us.”

“Yes, my lord,” Helen said, curtsying without slowing so much it mattered.

“I’m honored, my lord,” Ibott squawked.

“Yes, yes,” the Duke said, sounding annoyed the man had spoken.

“If they aren’t cleared of wrongdoing, we should have them join us for company all the same,” the Baron said, still staring at Sylvester.  “As I said, my sisters have been bored.”

“I wonder if I haven’t read a fairy tale about something like that,” the Duke said.  “It seems unwise to invite a group of assassins over for company and amusement, especially if they’ve been proven as traitors.”

“One at a time, then.  Or send their creators in with them.”

“Perhaps.”

Gordon could see Ibott react to that.

Hubris touched his nose to Gordon’s hand.

Gordon’s heart was thumping.  It was a limping struggle, one side stronger than the other.

By all rights, he should have stopped walking and let it calm down and find its rhythm again.  He kept up the pace.

“That in mind, I would recommend we err on the more conservative side of things,” the Baron said.

The Duke, still leading the group as they walked up to the Academy, smiled at that.  “I’d ask if you meant conservative in the sense of preserving more of our Academy’s hard work, or conservative in avoiding potential traitors in our midst, but it would be a rhetorical question, dear Richmond.”

“I’ll be paying close attention to the verdict,” the Baron said.  “If I’m dissatisfied with the result, I’ll see that corrections are made.”

If he doesn’t get the guilty verdict, then heads roll.  Or whatever he and his sisters do to amuse themselves.  The Baron was a mad one too, then.

That would make for a fairly emotional discussion.  Some of the people in the meeting that were discussing whether the Lambs were too dangerous or not were in danger regardless of what happened.

Jory, Gordon’s head doctor, glanced back, offering a worried look.  He was one of them.

No trust.  Mary got along with her doctors, at least to the point of being able to have conversations.  Jamie did too.  Had and still did, presumably.  Sylvester… didn’t get along with most.  But Gordon’s team was a big one.  The conversations had been limited to small talk, a duty that seemed to be rotated between staff members to the point that little familiarity was established.

“Tell us,” the Duke said.  “A prelude to the interrogations.  What did you accomplish?”

“We know her plan, my Lord,” Sylvester said.

“The creator of the Ghosts is dead, my Lord,” Gordon said.

“That would be my creator,” Mary said.

“Mary had a strong hand in how that unfolded.  We couldn’t have done it without her,” Gordon said.  “With that settled, we can hope they don’t have the resources to keep developing and improving on that project, which we know was tying up our resources.  With luck, the project might die altogether.”

“And Fray herself?” the Duke asked.

“We didn’t have the manpower to stop her ourselves, with our forces distracted and other experiments turning coat, but we were able to make a last minute maneuver and steer the city’s superweapon her way.  A number of her people were injured.”

“Was Genevieve Fray?”

“No reports of such, Lord Duke.  She has Avis, wearing wings, as well as a brute of a man in her company, they could have scaled to a safer height or forced their way through a set of doors or a window.  We were talking about it earlier, but it didn’t sound as if she was successful in forming the alliance between the different factions,” Gordon said.

“Explain.”

This was where he bent the truth.  He didn’t have the deserved reputation of a liar that Sylvester did.  He had the undeserved reputation as the honest one.

“Lord Duke,” Gordon said.  “In part, our actions disrupted the already tenuous negotiations between Genevieve Fray and Cynthia.  Cynthia split off to charge through the Academy’s lines.  Mauer’s side was displeased with how things were going before that, we killed one of his lieutenants, something that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t come to Fray’s meeting, and our final move, delivered with the Brechwell Beast, primarily hurt Mauer’s elite group of soldiers and may have even hurt Mauer himself.”

“You believe he’ll be at odds with her?”

“I believe, my lord,” Gordon said, “that he won’t be as sympathetic to her as he might be if things had played out otherwise.”

“And here I’d actually thought I had to invite my cousin to visit in order to hear someone tell me so very little of substance with so many words,” the Duke said.

“You wound me,” the Baron said.  The Duke smiled, but it was faintly derisive.  Gordon wondered if even close friendships in the Duke’s world were combative and bitter.

Hubris nudged Gordon’s hand again.

It’s okay, boy.

“I’m sorry to be vague, my lord,” Gordon said.  His heart hitched, and he bit back a gasp.  “I’m aware that if I’m too specific, and something contradicts the specifics, it will look bad.”

“Very true.  I have missed the Lambs.  I so often find I have to hunt for intellectual company, even among professors and supposed geniuses.”

“Yes, my lord,” Gordon said.  “Thank you.”

They were approaching the Academy gates now.  The armed guard at the gate parted, the gates opening as that invisible wave of presence extended out to touch it.

“We’ll be taking our leave.  I did promise Baron Richmond a hunt today, we’ll be visiting the underground labs to see what can be loosed.  Keep the Lambs separate, watch for their hand-signs, see to their appointments after or during, so we can be sure they won’t coordinate or correct one another’s stories.  Though I imagine they would have already, were they lying.”

“Yes, my lord,” Sylvester said.

Both the Duke and the Baron looked back at Sylvester.  Most of the Professors did too, the ones with their lives on the line looking aghast.

“If we were lying, my lord,” Sy said.  “We’re not.”

“You are very fortunate you amuse me, Sylvester,” the Duke said, sounding far from amused.

Then the Duke was gone, talking to the Baron as they walked.  The group remained where it was, the crowd that had parted remained still, almost as if it was in shock, unsure if it was safe to resume going about their day.

“Indoors,” the new Headmaster spoke.  “No talking.  It’s bad enough some of my superweapons have turned, I’m not about to lose my head, or half of my staff.  Radham Academy has to recover from this.  We do this perfectly, giving the Baron no excuse to target us.”

It wouldn’t matter, Gordon knew.

Claret Hall wasn’t far from the entrance.  Some staff broke away to look after other business.  The Lambs weren’t among them.

Gordon’s left hand went to his chest, rubbing at the sternum, as if he could somehow massage what lay within.  It wasn’t settling.

Beside him, Mary took his other hand.  It was only when he felt the warmth of her hand that he realized how cold he’d gotten.

His interaction with her had happened so gradually he wasn’t sure when it had unfolded.  She’d started expressing interest some time after he’d broken it off with Shipman, through little gestures, going out of her way to spend time with him, to practice, showing him her knife throwing so he could improve his own.

He’d stayed at arm’s length, because he knew Sylvester had feelings of his own for the girl, as well as a kind of possessive attachment.  With anyone else, there might have been problems, but she’d kept him at arm’s length, too.

It had just been that.  A pretty girl, regularly in his company.

But then Sy had started paying more attention to Lillian, and Gordon knew there was some manipulation there, Sy playing some matchmaking game, providing signals.  Gordon had let it be what it was and stopped worrying about hurting their friendship.

Then this thing with Percy, and Mary had drawn close.

It was awfully easy to let her.  All the rational reasons not to were suddenly very hard to bring up.  She wasn’t some common girl, he could never stand the usual girls, not the ones nearer his own age at Lambsbridge, not the ones he’d seen associating with the mice, not the pretty ones at Mothmont.

He liked Mary like he still liked Shipman.  Both were girls who demanded a special kind of respect, instead of being content to receive ordinary respect.  Smart, dangerous, strong in their individual ways.  But all of that was dressed up in girl.  Not girlishness or femininity, but in the distilled reality of girl.  He wanted to see more of them, hear them speak, touch them, taste them as he kissed them.  The way Mary’s skirt moved as she walked made him feel like he’d just stepped outside to sun and fresh air, after years and years of rain and Radham air that smelled like smoke, blood, and manure.

Helen’s explanation of her own desires were scarily in line with his own when put forward as an allegory for how strong his own feelings sometimes were.  What had she said?  ‘Feel every part of them with every part of myself?’

He glanced at her.  She gestured.  StrengthCourage.

“None of that,” someone barked, behind them.”

Mary lowered her hand.  She smiled at him.

They would get through this.  Looking at her like this, he could appreciate why people drew together, formed pairs, even with all of the difficulties of being in a relationship.

He imagined her face, contorted with a special kind of grief as she looked down on his body.

His desires and the new feeling of guilt joined the anxiety of the moment, the imminent questioning.  The feelings didn’t mingle or mix, but remained discrete.  A jigsaw set of emotions for a jigsaw body made of individual pieces that just so happened to be put together.

The Lambs were so similar in that way.  The distinctions between each were clear.  Yet the Lambs were to be split up.

The symbolic parallel gave him an uneasy feeling, as the Lambs were invited to sit on either side of the hallway, more than ten feet of space separating one Lamb from the next.  The doctors and groups of doctors positioned themselves to better block line of sight.

He spent so much of his time worrying, these days.  It would be so nice to stop dreading what came next and just focus on the present.  The closer Mary was to him at a given point in time, the more he felt like he could do that.  Probably why he’d been dwelling on her so much in the last few minutes.

“Sylvester first,” Hayle suggested.  “I somehow feel like we’ll want to take what he says and keep it in mind as each of the other Lambs speak.”

So much worrying.

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================================================== 7.y (Enemy II) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 7 – Girls)

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Mary

Four nobles.  Augmented physiology, augmented minds.  They were, as Mr. Percy would have said, ‘top notch‘.  Absolute monsters.  Depending on what unfolded, the Lambs might find themselves in a fight by the day’s end.

It wasn’t a situation the Lambs would survive.

She had to trust Sy and Gordon to figure out if there was a way out, and handle her part of the questioning as well as she could.  What she could figure out was a way to make things easier.  If they were called in, the girls were likely to be called in first.  Helen first of all, the appointment was already made, then Mary herself, very possibly, or Lillian or maybe Sylvester, but Mary was likely.

The professors and assistants in the hallway were blocking Mary’s view of the rest of the group, while Gordon was inside, giving his answers.  She could only stare out the window, at the people, or gaze at the floor while she worked out a strategy.

Mr. Percy had always encouraged ‘mental practice’.  Picturing where her body would be, the motions she would make, the weight of things, and all the details, sometimes over and over, before she acted.  Then she would act, perform more mental practices, adjusting for how things had felt, and the loop would continue until the actions and process were distilled in her mind’s eye.

Helen would probably die, if she was first.  If Sylvester or Lillian were second, then they would die next.  That would hurt more.  She cared about Helen, but Lillian was her best friend,  worth killing Percy for.  Sylvester was important to her for different reasons.

She had to steel herself for that.  Prepare herself by putting the emotions aside, lock them away.  If she was going to use them, it had to be in rage or in desperation, a forward push to get past any pain or bodily harm she might feel, past poisons or drugs or whatever else they might do to her.

The Twins were torturers with a retinue of doctors and madmen who catered to their whims.  The bodies might well be on display.  What was left of them, if they were lucky enough to be dead.

Mary felt cold inside, hollowed out, but she was able to drive out the feelings of fear and panic.  Those were useless, dangerous feelings, ones that robbed her of precision and control.

She had to prepare, be ready.

The Nobles were tall.  They liked that, being above the common people.  Mary was far from full grown, with a three-quarter foot to grow, if she compared herself to the woman who was supposed to be her mother.  The legs would be her best target.

But that wasn’t the whole story.  The jackets the Duke and Baron had been wearing were heavy, and they flowed oddly as they walked.  There was something in them, armor.

She had to attack from the front, knowing that the one she chose as her target was quicker, faster, and very aware of what was going on around them.

Best to attack while her back was turned.  Use her head to distract and drive one foot back and up, to target the knee.  If she could topple one, then she could target the neck.

Easiest to do if she had a knife, but she suspected she would be searched.  They knew her methods too well.

There was a disposable scalpel razor in the lining of her coat, and another blade in the tongue of her shoe.  Small enough she could put them up her nasal cavity or in her mouth.  The nose meant a risk of bleeding if she slipped, but she’d done it before.  The mouth, hm, they would search her mouth if they had any sense at all, but she suspected she could embed the blade in the flesh behind the last molar, pointing toward her throat.  Easy to miss if the lighting was wrong, and she could swallow the blood.  If she threw up from that, then so much the better, it only gave her more opportunities.

Maybe both.

Topple her enemy, target the spine.  She tried to picture the scenarios unfolding.

Not the throat or the jugular, unless she could do that as part of something else.  The spine was a better target.  Cervical four, third bundle was a likely target, but would only shut off breathing, freezing the diaphragm.  She would get pulled away, the doctors would swoop in.  They would fix the noble in the time it took them to die from a lack of breath.  Depending on how their bodies had been changed, that could be a very long time.

Thoracics one through four had places she could drive a blade in to shut off the heart, lungs, and larynx.  Drive in the blade, do as much damage as possible, shut off heart function or ability to breathe.  Hard to do if the back was armored and protected, if the twins might have open backed dresses, or she could reach in past the collar.  It was worth keeping in mind, reciting that play in her head as a possibility.

If she could drive the blade in, knowing how small it was, then it would be harder to fix, the damage more severe.  It would require something harder than any one part of her body.  Something from the environment.

She could do it if her hands were bound, it would be harder but possible.  But being restrained was the least of her concerns, as she imagined different factors.  They might not fall, even as she leveraged a kick that could break ordinary bone into one of the more vulnerable parts of the human body.  Their spine might be protected.  She might not be able to access and keep a blade.  Her hands might even be bound, which wouldn’t stop her, but it could cost her the time she needed to grab the blade and follow through.

She would die.  That bothered her less than the cold hollow emptiness that Helen had articulated so well, the loneliness that took hold inside her even now at imagining Helen’s dead eyes staring off into space, or Lillian in horrible pain.

She would die, but even if she tried, if she was clever about it, the nobles who remained might think twice about giving personal attention to the Lambs who remained.  If they deferred to another method of execution or torture, then the remaining Lambs might have a chance to escape that they wouldn’t have with the nobles.

It was a chance, however slim.

Hope for the best, trust the Lambs, anticipate the worst.  She and her knives as the final measure to turn to when the talking and strategy drew to a close.

So often, her way of showing her affection for others meant killing people.  For Percy, it was always the plan.  For Lillian, she’d killed Percy.  Now she might have to kill a noble, a possibility few even dared to contemplate.

The Lambs were too important to her.

She could see glimpses of Helen through the crowd.  Helen seemed utterly at ease, but she didn’t broadcast her feelings like others did.  She could see the sort of situation that Mary had imagined earlier, the Lambs dead or mutilated, and smile and act like nothing was wrong.

Mary liked to think that even if Helen smiled and acted normal, she would seek revenge if it came down to it.  She had spent a lot of time stressing out about Helen, until months of close proximity and sharing a room had forced her to come to terms with her feelings.  Helen was a lot easier to understand as a creature when Mary stopped looking at her as a human, and more as a reptile or a cat.

Even cats and snakes had a measure of loyalty.

That made her think of Lillian.

Mary had never had a friend.  The depth of her feelings for Lillian spooked her, sometimes, sometimes on par with her early feelings for Sylvester, in a very different way.  Sylvester had been like a leap over a gap between rooftops, dangerous, uncertain even when she was fully aware of her own ability.  She knew he was a manipulator and liar, and that had made him interesting.

It still did.  More than any of the Lambs, the little things and the patterns of Sylvester promised to complete her.  They were in step, he could carry out a plan and she didn’t feel uncertain.  When she faltered, he was there.  When he faltered, she knew she had the opportunity to shine.  It was rare for her to experience the concern about Sylvester’s plans that Gordon so often commented on.

She had spent a long time feeling very incomplete, as if she was working hard to fill a void with Percy’s approval, and someone who conformed to her as easily as Sylvester seemed to do was tempting.

But it had always felt dangerous.  Always promised betrayal down the line.  Idly, she had sometimes wondered how she would kill him if it came down to it, because she couldn’t entirely convince herself that it wouldn’t.  Even as her trust in him approached that ninety-nine point seven or ninety-nine point eight percent, she had harbored faint doubts.  That was who he was.

Lillian was a better, safer match.  They were similar, the academic and the assassin, both dedicated to their individual crafts.  With Lillian, she didn’t feel that heady sense of invincibility.  With Lillian, she felt like a girl.

Whatever that was.

And to Lillian, she imagined, she was a girl, a friend.  Lillian lacked guile enough to lie about that.  She could share everything with Lillian.  Even talk about Percy without feeling like she was betraying the Lambs.

Hearing Lillian speak about Percy and Lillian’s horror over what Percy had been doing had scared Mary more than any number of monsters or guns.  It had led her to make a decision.

And Gordon.  Gordon was the best of both worlds.  She knew it, she just wasn’t sure if she felt it.  Imagining kissing him made her heart pound, as did thoughts of feeling his hands around hers.  She’d drawn nearer and nearer to him, testing the waters, waiting for him to reject her, waiting for the feelings she had to clarify.  She just wasn’t sure if she truly liked him, or if it was only that her feelings for the other Lambs were so poignant and confused by other things going on in her head and her heart that he paled a shade in comparison.

Lillian was her only friend ever, and filled that hole in Mary’s breast that even Percy hadn’t been able to promise to fill.  Sylvester was Mary’s counterpart.

Gordon was… what?  He promised to be the only thing that wasn’t mixed in with those complicated other thoughts.  He understood her, he was a little bit dangerous, he made her feel like a proper girl.  The thought of him dying made her think in all seriousness that she might react like Sy had to Jamie, and that somehow made her more anxious than the idea of losing all of the Lambs together, or any of the Lambs individually.

Because it felt most real and imminent, she told herself.

Was that love, fledgling love or otherwise?

The door opened.  Mary looked up, just in time to see Hubris running ahead, zig-zagging.

“Hubris!” Gordon called.  He changed the pitch of his voice, apparently annoyed, “Hubris!”

Hubris made his way across the hallway, in Sylvester’s direction.

“Hubris, come!”

Hubris looked back, pausing, then changed direction.  The dog moved through the crowd of doctors and guards, making a beeline toward Mary.  Sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, she couldn’t get up and move in time to get out of Hubris’ way.  He pressed his face against hers, licking.

“Good boy,” Mary said, “It’s okay.”

“Get your dog under control,” one of the doctors said.  “No tricks.”

Gordon sounded exasperated as he explained, “He’s worried.  The people inside can tell you, I informed them at the start of the questioning, and several times throughout, my heart is acting up.  He’s trained to tell me when there are problems, which is why he kept nudging me, and when I won’t or can’t listen, he’s trained to tell the other Lambs.  My doctors are here.  They can tell you.”

Hubris whined.

“We didn’t train him for that last part.”

“You didn’t, I did.  It’s what he’s for,” Gordon said, patiently.

“Enough,” another doctor said.  “Who’s next?”

A man Mary couldn’t see spoke.  “Mary Cobourn.”

Mary didn’t move at first, and Hubris leaned forward to lick her again.  She imagined the actions she would need to take to attack the key targets here.  Soldiers, key doctors, and people that stood in the way.  It wasn’t as simple as it might have seemed on the surface.  Crossing the hallway to get to Gordon or Sylvester could open up possibilities, in having more fighting strength and having more problem solving ability, but it was more distance to cover, and the Lambs needed to get to the other end of the hallway.

Her hands gripped Hubris’ collar, and she found a roll of paper slipped into the fold of the collar.   Moving her hands suggested there were two more.

No time to read it.

She pushed Hubris off her, and stood.

Mary offered Lillian a reassuring smile.  Head up, chin high, back straight.  Hubris hadn’t made it to Lillian, so Lillian lacked the small reassurance the piece of paper provided.

Gordon was being led the opposite way, leaving for his appointment.  Mary watched him as they approached one another, each mostly surrounded by soldiers and scholars.

She met his eyes.  They were warm, the colors not entirely matched between the two – something she had only noticed after over a year of paying attention to him.  On a dark, gloomy day,  there wasn’t enough light to distinguish between them, but on a brighter day, when the light filtered in through the window, one eye was more chestnut than hazel, with flecks of gold.

A nod would be a giveaway.

She looked away, and her hands smoothed down the front of her top and her skirt, then went up to her collar, fixing it.  She resisted the urge to let the hands linger a moment too long.  He would understand.  He knew her habits and mannerisms.

He had managed to direct, even without obvious cues.  She suspected a hand signal, then tones of voice to change Hubris’ direction.  It was possible there was another mechanism.  She would ask later, given the chance.

For now, knowing there were options if they needed to fight their way out was reassuring.  Knowing Gordon was thinking and working to help was reassuring.

Sy had been silent since stepping out of the room.  He wasn’t starting anything, hadn’t made any comments.  It didn’t mean nothing was wrong.  He could be biding his time, instead of working to signal the rest of the Lambs about the problems.

For now figuring out the right moment to read the note and answering the questions was the best thing she could do.  If it went badly, she would turn her thoughts toward making sure the small blades were in place should she need them to kill a noble of the Crown.

One chair faced a table.  Ten people sat around the sides and back of that table.

Headmaster Travers, Professor Hayle, Professor Ibott, and several other prominent professors sat around the table.  So many had been pulled away during the war, and the table was mostly empty now.

The doors slammed shut behind her.

I have already figured out how to kill all of you if necessary, Mary told herself.

She relaxed.

I am a young lady of Mothmont.  I am a skilled killer.  I am a step above.  I can handle this, and with the Lambs at my back and sufficient preparation, I can handle anything this world might throw at me.

She smiled.

“Tell us,” Travers spoke, “What did the Lambs do wrong?”

She kept the smile from faltering.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You failed in your duties, you let Genevieve Fray get away.  Obviously the Lambs weren’t perfect.  What happened?”

Mary estimated what the people of the room could see, and scooted her chair forward a fraction.  They wouldn’t be able to see over the table.

“Stay right there, please.  We know what you’re capable of-”

You don’t know the half of it.

“And we’d just as rather you stay where you are.”

“Okay.  I’m sorry,” Mary said.  With one hand, she unrolled the paper at her knee.  She dropped her eyes.

‘Y syG Y gW Y’  The ‘y’ had a curve to the upper prongs.  She wasn’t familiar with the shorthand.

“Mary?”

Mary raised her head.  She thought through the possibilities as her mouth opened, and said, “I don’t like to badmouth the other Lambs.”

“If you can’t critically assess their performance then there might be deeper problems,” one of the doctors said.  “In which case we might want to consider sacrificing them for the greater good of Radham.”

Sacrifice.

“To save your own hide, you mean?” another Professor spoke.

“Calm down,” Hayle cut in.  “You were saying, Mary?”

Mary remembered the hand sign for sacrifice.  Thumb folded in, fingers curled forward.  It was the thought that connected to the paper Gordon had given her.  The letter G.  It meant to sacrifice, a pawn, to put something at risk for greater reward, a gamble.

Y would be the hand signal with pinky and thumb extended.  Cunning, trick.

The basic signs.  W would be… had to be three fingers raised.  Thought, plan, strategy.

Gordon’s plan.  Scapegoat Sy?  This is a trick.

“Sy was struggling,” Mary said.

“Struggling?”

“The thing with Jamie, it threw him off, emotionally.  He was adapting how he operated, trying to compensate for the lack of Jamie, and he was stressing about Jamie coming.  When Jamie did come, later on, it was a distraction.”

“Sending Jamie was our decision.  If you’re trying to shift the blame-”

“No,” Mary hurried to answer.  “No.  Not at all.  There were other problems.  Sylvester made other mistakes.  It stemmed from similar things, but also, you know he operates best when things are fresh in his mind, and if he picks up something new he forgets other things, or it slips away from him.  We were months out of practice, the situation escalated too fast, and Sylvester was spread too thin to compensate.”

“I see,” the headmaster said.  He looked frustrated.

It dawned on her why.

Sy had an excuse.

“Let’s talk about Percy…” another Doctor said.  “How did you encounter him?”

“We got access to the building he and Fray were holed up in,” Mary said.  Best to tell the truth when she wasn’t sure.  Lie only when it counted.  “Fray let us walk in.  Sy said she would, we believed him.  Percy was one reason it worked.  He was attached to me, still, and didn’t want me to come to harm.  If someone had, it would have hurt their alliance.”

“Tell us more about what you understood of Fray’s reasons.”

Helen

“Her reasons?” Helen asked.

“Yes.”

“I look at faces,” Helen said, narrowing her eyes as she looked at the headmaster.  “I’m a very good student of faces.  I had to learn it all from the beginning, like Ashton is doing now.”

“We know this,” Professor Ibott said.  His face was annoyed.  She would probably get talked at in a mean way when this was over.

“This information might help for our replacement hires that aren’t familiar with the Lambs,” Hayle said.  “Go on.”

“I saw things in her face.  What Sy said, she wants to be right.  She has a mission and nothing’s going to shake her from that mission.  But she’s very insecure deep down.  She was really insecure when we ran into her.  Sy did a lot of that.”

“Sylvester,” Ibott said.  “Use his full name like a grown up girl.”

“Sylvester,” Helen said.

“Explain.”

“She lost Cynthia, that was because of us too, I think.  Cynthia didn’t like us being there, and she wasn’t happy being there to start with.  And there was something about her not liking not being on top if Fray’s plan works and the Crown loses their grip on the West Crown States.  I’m not sure.”

“Be sure,” Ibott said.  “This isn’t the time or place for suppositions.”

“I wasn’t listening,” Helen said.  “The others can tell you.  I was focused on the room, making sure to listen to other things that were being said.  I’m still not used to my new ears, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t attacked.  There were a lot of dangerous people there.”

“That’s not good enough,” Ibott said.

“It will have to be,” Helen said, firmly.  “The Lambs work like a puzzle does.  The pieces fit together one way.  I’m a piece that does certain things.  What I do is I watch.  Especially when Jamie isn’t around.  I wait, I look for opportunities to attack, and I use my ears better than anyone in the group.  They all had their ears pointed one way, and I had my ears pointed the rest of the ways.”

“You need to keep track of what’s happening,” Ibott said.

“I did,” Helen said.  “Like I said, I kept enough track to know that Cynthia didn’t like it if everyone got those books and she wasn’t special for knowing stuff anymore.”

He was upset.  She knew that.  She knew how to act to make him more upset, and she knew how to act to make him less upset.  She was less certain about why he was upset.

She’d known him longer than she had known anyone, and she still didn’t understand him a lot of the time.

“Nothing she’s saying is contradicting what we heard from other Lambs,” Hayle said.

“It’s how she’s saying it,” Ibott said.

Oh.

Helen knew how to fix that.

She straightened her back, folding her hands in her lap.  All of the right expressions and postures were very well organized in her head.  She put the other ones away and brought these ones out.  The tones of voice, the ways it affected how people treated her, it was a big, elaborate, spider’s web of a puzzle she had long ago figured out.

The trick to that puzzle was that everyone wanted something.  Sy was good at making people want different things, or taking what they wanted and using it to make them do what he wanted them to do.  Gordon wasn’t as clever about it, but could figure out what people didn’t want and hammer at that weak point until they gave.  Even if it meant being troublesome to the point that they just wanted him to go away or told him what he wanted to know just to make him stop.

He didn’t get to do it much.

Helen could figure out what people wanted and be that.

The doctors and professors were conferring among themselves in whispers.  There were parts of their voices that sounded too sharp, where her ears hadn’t quite adjusted to the very high pitches that voices could reach, that normal ears didn’t always catch.

She couldn’t hear all of it, but she could put the pieces together from one word in five that was being said.  They were talking about focus.  Priority number one was to verify if the Lambs were traitors.  For some, the word ‘if’ was replaced with ‘that’.  Verifying that the Lambs were traitors, as if it had already been decided.

All of her attention was going towards the act, reading expressions, paying attention to the glances that were cast her way and the faces people wore both when they did the glancing and after the fact.

Many parts of her brain were built around this kind of thinking and attention-paying.

“Did the Lambs at any point split up?”

“Yes, sir,” Helen said, voice crisper than before, but musical enough to be pleasing.

“When?”

“The night before last.  Sylvester suggested we split up.  Then he went after Fray.  He was in there for a time, then he came out.  That was how he knew we could get close enough to Fray to figure out what she was planning.”

“You’re talking differently,” Professor Ibott observed.

“Shh,” the Headmaster shushed the man.  “Is it not possible that Sylvester could have acted against the Academy during this time, collaborating with Fray?”

“No, sir,” Helen said.  “He was acting funny.  We had an argument about it after.  He was acting different, hurrying things along, and making small mistakes.  I said, and I said this to everybody, he was trying to replace Jamie.  Not on purpose, exactly, but subconsciously.  He was too sloppy to do the sort of thing you were talking about.”

“This role you’re putting on,” Professor Ibott said.  “It’s different from the infantile, ‘cute’ behavior before.”

“That was a role I put on for the Lambs, creator,” Helen said.  “They were worried and anxious ever since our first meeting with Genevieve Fray.  I tried to inject humor and positivity into things.  I was more open about the thoughts that regularly cross my mind, but in a way I thought they could accept.”

“You’ll cease that immediately,” Professor Ibott told her.

Helen tilted her head a little to one side.  “I already have.  You said you didn’t like how I was talking before, Professor.  I adjusted my behavior to match this room.”

“You’ll cease that too.  Present yourself to the room as you are, without the act.”

Helen nodded.

All of the details went away, the facial expressions, the considerations, the balances and her judgments of people around her.  Her expression faded, until she was only staring.

She looked at each of the people around the table, assessing them.

Ibott spoke, and he sounded a little smug, having shown off his control and his ability to make her go quiet, “Now, focusing on the matter at hand, tell us about the mental state of the others.  You reported Sylvester was acting strange.  None of the other Lambs stepped in, forcing him to hand over the reins?”

She didn’t have to make the mental adjustments to fit his feeling of superiority into her ‘act’, because there was no act.

Helen stood from her chair.  In her assessments, she’d found and fixed her eyes on the man at the far left of the table.  A young man in a military uniform with the Radham crest on it.  A manager of the local armies, organizing and training the local troops, probably.  He was, as she had things put in her head, outward facing, a book man, locked in, a decider.  She couldn’t help but visualize the notecards that had taught her about faces and people as she deciphered him.

At a glance, she assessed him as the strongest person in the room.  He could probably destroy her in a fight.

She felt her hearts beat a little faster and harder.  She could feel spurting as chemicals flowed from glands in her body.  A rush, adrenaline, as if she was about to pick a fight.  It all built up to a warmth in her middle.

She imagined wrapping her arms around his chest until he stopped.  Feeling her cheek against his chest as it went from warm to cool.  Going to sleep like that.  She wanted to put her thumbs on his eyes and press in until they gave away.

Her hands reached out, touching the table.  She leaned forward, hair hanging in front of her face.

“Helen,” Ibott said, making it a reprimand.  “What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” she said, her voice monotone, glancing only briefly at her creator.

“We’re asking you questions.  Sit down,” Ibott said.

“What are you thinking?” Hayle asked, voice calm.  He was gesturing to the men at the door.  Helen remembered they had guns.

“About him,” Helen said, pointing at the man in the military uniform, and that rush she was feeling did change her voice slightly from the monotone.  She could have controlled that if she had wanted to, but this still wasn’t an act.  To the man, she said, “I’m very flexible.”

“Uh,” he said.  “You’re-”

“I’m thinking,” Helen continued, “About if I can crawl into your open mouth.  Things would tear apart , of course, but you’d be warm and you’d flop around and I want to see what it would feel like if you were doing that while I was most of the way inside you.”

The man’s hand went to his gun.

Ibott’s chair screeched on the floor as he stood.

“Enough of this,” he said.

“You told me to stop acting, I did.  The acts were the only thing keeping me sitting still,” Helen said.

“Stop,” he ordered.

She went still.

“This is over,” Ibott said.  “She’s having her appointment.  I need to figure out what’s wrong.”

“We’re not done questioning.  Helen, you can speak,” Hayle said.  “Tell us-”

“I wanted to muck about in Fray’s insides too,” Helen said, interrupting him. “And Percy’s, and Mauer’s, and the others.  That would have been lovely.”

She knew the cadence and even the fact that she’d chosen the word ‘lovely’ was very strange and offputting.  She didn’t mind.

Hayle didn’t finish his sentence, only glancing at Ibott.

“Suggests she isn’t a traitor, unless she’s looking to do that with her friends, too,” one of Sylvester’s doctors spoke.

Ibott rounded the table.  He comprehended the sentence just before grabbing Helen’s upper arm.  “You don’t touch or attack me.”

“I would never,” Helen breathed.  The rush was still coloring her words, maybe even her face.  She felt like a coiled spring, a catapult ready to fire, a gun with the trigger cocked.  But getting release meant feeling parts of someone break in her arms.  It was the best feeling.

“Good,” Ibott said.  He steered her around, marching her to the door.

“I would never,” she repeated herself.

“Do us both a favor and shut up,” Ibott said.

“Because,” Helen said, “I only feel this way about strong people, and powerful people.”

Ibott stopped in his tracks.

“Ibott?” Hayle asked, from the other end of the room.  “Problem?”

“It wasn’t relevant to the topic at hand,” Ibott said.

His grip was tighter, the march more forceful than before, as the doors opened and he steered her past the Lambs.

Helen glanced at Gordon as she walked by, smiling, her eyes wide.

One hand went to her hair, tossing it back over one shoulder.

Her fingers lingered briefly at her collar, as she tugged on it.

Better to do this, than to let the questioning continue too long.  The more questions she answered, the more chances there were of her giving the wrong answer.

Lillian

“The problems only became apparent when the mission was underway,” Lillian answered.

She was sweating, she kept fidgeting and telling herself to stop, only to resume again without fully realizing it.

“Why?”

“High stress situation, and we knew Jamie was coming, and that added more stress to things?  The Lambs are people, we- they had reasons and plans.  Sylvester had something to prove to make up for losing to Fray last time, when the whole thing happened with the water supplies.  Mary was fixated on Percy, but she saw that one through when she killed him.  Then there was Jamie, and he was coming, but I said that part-”

“Shh, calm down,” Hayle said.

Lillian made a concerted effort.

“Have you reported on everything that’s been happening?” another Professor asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mental issues, health issues…”

“Yes, sir.  Everything as it’s come up, even irrelevant things.”

“She’s been thorough,” Professor Hayle said.  “Helen’s apparent… precociousness, and Sylvester’s failings during this mission, they raise concerns.”

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“Start with Helen.”

“She’s been changing gradually for a very long time.  She presents one face to us and there’s more going on beneath the surface, which we only glimpse.  She has never indicated any problems.  During the mission, she provided a good assessment of Sylvester and if I’m remembering right, helped us capture a Ghost for Petey, before we knew he was a problem.  We later heard it inconvenienced him and Fray, because he had to lure off some Ghosts and take them out of play to keep up the undercover ruse.”

“Alright,” Hayle said.  “Mary, and Percy?”

“I’m close to Mary, it feels lousy to say stuff when she shared some of it in confidence-”

“It’s your job,” the military man on the far left of the table said.

“I- it- I-” Lillian said.  She couldn’t find it in her to put a coherent syllable together.  She’d had nightmares about this sort of thing, being on trial when there was no right answer.  Except usually it was an oral exam.

“It is your job, Lillian, to look after the Lambs, to monitor their performance, and report anything the Academy needs to know,” Hayle said.

“As- as a friend,” Lillian said, “She told me things about Percy.  About how it was hard to let go.  He was like a dad to her.  She was always worried he would show up again.”

“She told you she was considering betraying the team and you didn’t report it?” another Professor asked.

“No,” Lillian said.  She was screwing this up.  Everyone had been confident in leaving the room and she was saying all the wrong things.  Half the words that left her mouth, she felt like it was the wrong answer before she’d even spoken and felt like it was a worse answer after she’d heard herself say it.

“No, she wasn’t considering betraying the team, or no, you didn’t report it?”

“I mean, she wasn’t.  It never came up, not like that.”

“It sounds as if it was pertinent,” a professor jumped in.

“It wasn’t, not for the job, not for what she was doing,” Lillian said.  “She- she just didn’t want it hanging over her head, I mean.  I think, that was the reason, I think?”

A stutter of the brain had made her say ‘I think’ twice in the same sentence.  She was pretty sure that was cruel irony.

They didn’t look happy, and they didn’t look convinced.  Professor Hayle leaned closer to another professor so the man could whisper in his ear.  People at the left end of the table were talking to each other in a babble of low voices.

Lillian had the slip of paper in her sock, she’d looked at it while she waited for her turn – second to last – and she had no idea what it meant, which terrified her.

She’d heard of the Twins.  She’d seen pictures of the Twins’ victims.  She’d seen their pet warbeasts and had heard about their Doctors, one had a name that recurred in urban legends and scary stories, told in candlelit dormitories after dark.  She was pretty sure it was the same person, and all of the legends and stories weren’t necessarily just stories.

The stakes had never been higher, and in her attempt to give an explanation that should have sounded good, she’d fumbled and made it sound weak.

This wasn’t what she was good at.

She was good at studying, and she was good at putting people back together.  Even if she needed help with some of the hard stuff.  Most of the rest she did was try to keep up.

“That will be all, I think,” Headmaster Travers told her.

It sounded ominous.

She started to rise from her seat, then stopped.  “Where am I going?  The others went to their appointments, or other places, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to go to the dorm room, or wait, or-”

“Sylvester and his doctor should be waiting outside,” Professor Hayle said.  “We talked it over between questioning Ashton and questioning you.  If Sylvester is performing badly, then I feel the most important thing is to maintain routine.  We’ll wrap things up soon, but for the time being, I would like you to look after Sylvester for his appointment.  We’ll need you to be able to administer doses in the field, for longer engagements.”

“Depending on how the last series of questions go, it might be helpful if we know exactly where to find you,” the Headmaster said.  “It wouldn’t do if we had to scurry around to figure out where you’d gotten off to.”

For the nobles.  He might as well have said it, it was clear as day.  If this went badly, the Lambs would be handed over.  Some or all.

Lillian turned and left the room, only belatedly realizing she hadn’t said farewell, or any pleasantries at all.

Sylvester was indeed waiting in the hall, talking to the thuggish man that was his doctor.  She’d never liked the man, after seeing him cuff Sy far too hard for a smart-assed remark.

Sitting across the hall was Jamie, who had a book in his lap.  He was writing, and didn’t even look up as she approached.

“I’m supposed to come with you,” she said.

“I know,” the doctor said.  “Do you think I’d be waiting here for some other reason?”

“For good conversation with me?” Sylvester suggested.

“Mm,” the man made a noise.  He looked at Lillian, his eyes traveling all the way up and down her body.  “If you learn this, I have to deal with him less.  I’m bad at judging ages.  How long until I can buy you a drink as thanks?”

“Three years,” Lillian said.

“I’ll probably forget by then,” he said.

Lillian wondered if the man had been asking out of any interest, but the thought creeped her out, and her mind was frazzled from a full half-hour of questioning.  She wanted to ask so many questions and get feedback, and she didn’t dare with the doctor in earshot.

“Bye, Jamie,” she said.

Jamie looked up from his book, silent, and raised a hand in a wave, giving a brief smile.

She’d liked the old Jamie more.  He’d shared books with her and talked to her.  They were both bookworms, happier in darkness and quiet than in noise and chaos.  This Jamie made her uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t put a finger on.  It wasn’t entirely his fault.  When he was around, everyone acted different, and she could see the pain on the faces of some of the people she cared about the most, Sy first among them.

The big man that was Sy’s doctor had an umbrella of matching size.  The moment he was outdoors, he lit up a cigarette, then opened the umbrella, inviting the two children to stand beneath, Sy to his right and Lillian to his left.

Standing too close felt weird, especially when she wasn’t sure if he’d been offering the drink out of gratitude or as a roundabout way of asking her out, or if he’d genuinely wondered about her age.  Keeping that invisible, wary wall between them meant standing so that one of her shoulders was out in the rain, the rest of her under the umbrella’s cover.

The walk to the Tower wasn’t fast enough.

Just before they reached the door, the doctor finished his cigarette and lit another.

“Are you going to expect us to stand around in the rain while you finish that?” Sylvester asked.

“Don’t care,” the man said.

“Can we wait inside?”

“Don’t care,” the man said.  “You finished answering their questions, so I figure my obligations about watching you are done.  I spent forever standing around in there with nothing to do and nobody I wanted to talk to, craving a burn.  I’m going to have two, maybe three.”

“Make it three, and I’ll make this one easy on you?” Sy suggested.  “And to look good for her?”

“You mean you won’t be a baby and a little ass dribblet?” the man asked.

“Neither.  I just want a chance to talk to her and get caught up on things.”

“Fine.  But you’re owing me a few no-nonsense appointments,” the man said.”

“Three, then,” Sylvester said.

The man nodded.

Lillian’s heart jumped as Sylvester reached out to grab her wrist.

He tugged on her arm, pulling her inside.

Alone with Sy.  Why did this make her anxious in a good way when she’d slept in the same bed as him the last two nights?

Her heart was already unsteady, she decided.  She was in a shaky place and it didn’t take much to tip the scales.  She looked at his wet hair and his narrow shoulders.  His shirt clung to him, translucent where it touched the skin.  He was about as tan as anyone could get in the rains of Radham and Brechwell, which wasn’t much at all, but it was something.

There were beads of water on the back of his neck.

“How did it go?” he asked.

She remembered how it had gone, and the emotional high became an emotional low.

“Bad,” she said.  The low came with a feeling like she wanted to cry, and if she cried, then he would call her a crybaby.

“How bad?”

“I panicked, I didn’t know what to say, I tried to defend you guys and make you out to be confident, like you knew what you were doing.  But they kept attacking you, and I lost track of what I was saying, and-”

“You defended me?”

“Yes!  Of course!”

“You got the paper from Hubris, right?”

“Yes, the paper.  What did the paper mean?”

Sylvester half-turned, staring at her.

“It was important, wasn’t it?”

He held up his free hand, gesturing.  He wasn’t halfway done before she realized what he’d meant.

“How the hell was I supposed to figure that out!?  And why should we sacrifice you?”

“Because,” Sy said, “They’re not going to screw over the Lambs because bad science and logistics on their part made me sloppy.  It would hurt them, they’d be hurting themselves if they went to the nobles about that.  Especially when the Duke likes me.”

“Oh.”

“And I didn’t expect you to figure it out.  It was Gordon’s plan.  A pretty good one.  I hope you didn’t do too good a job of defending me.”

Lillian huffed out a short, one-note laugh.  “I really didn’t.”

“Good.  Helen made a play too, but I won’t know what it was for sure until I talk to her.  I’m really interested.”

“Are we going to be okay?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know.  Probably.  A very likely scenario is they target one or two of us, in some attempt to clean up the roster and make it look like they’re doing something effective.  In which case I’m probably the sacrificial play.  I get benched, not killed, and you guys actively suck at the job until I return to the picture.”

“That’s… not so bad.”

“Like I said, good plan,” Sylvester said.  He stopped at a door, opening it.  “My office.”

“The doctor’s office.  You’re the patient.”

“I’m impatient,” Sylvester said.  He let go of her wrist and hopped up onto the desk at one side of the narrow room.  It was barely bigger than a closet, with lots of bookshelves and both preserved and living animals of various poisonous and venomous varieties.  Jars lined shelves.   “I want to hear how things went, and we won’t for a while.”

“I know,” Lillian said.  “Was there more you wanted to ask?”

“Ask?”

“About the questions?”

“Nope,” Sy said.

“But you asked him to stay for a while, and he was already going to finish a cigarette, and…”

“And I’m tired of being ferried around and told here to go and what to do and what questions to answer.  I feel cornered.”

Lillian felt cornered in an office that was about two long paces long and an even shorter length wide, with furniture crammed in it.  Murky light filtered in through a narrow, barred window, casting a raindrop-dappled light into the otherwise lightless room.

She had to admit she would have felt more cornered if the doctor was also present.

“That doctor of yours creeps me out,” Lillian said.

“Yep,” Sylvester said.  “I’ll be sure to tell him that.”

“Don’t,” she said, punching his thigh.  He was sitting on the desk with his legs dangling.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

She looked up at him.

He was so fine-boned, with high cheekbones, and a narrow chin.  She could see the individual parts of his shoulders.  His hair was wet and swept away from his face, wild and always looking like it was tangled, though it so rarely was.  His eyes were an insane green color, very dark, framed by long lashes.

When he looked at her, she felt naked.  Stripped bare.  Not in terms of clothes, but in terms of what was going on in her head and her defenses.

It was ten times worse since she had shared a bed with him.  She felt very aware of him, and doubly aware of his awareness of her.

He was glad she was here?

Words like that seemed so very meaningful, coming from someone who seemed to see her so clearly, understanding who she really was.

‘I know everything about you and I still enjoy your company’

Her face was hot, and she knew she was blushing.  She turned to look out the window, and saw only a smirk on his face.

She would have hit him, but that would have meant admitting that she’d seen and facing the teasing that followed.

He stuck his feet out, one foot pressing against her belly, the other against the small of her back.  She managed to make herself turn and give him a curious look.  The feet dropped away.

“I’ve been feeling really lonely, since Jamie… went.  And especially since this Jamie came back.”

She nodded.  If he kept talking like this, she’d get a lump in her throat, or end up crying.

“It’s… nice that you’re here,” he said.  “You do a good job of making me not feel lonely.  You’re good company.”

Again, that look.  She felt the heat rise to her face, more intense than before.

“I think I might go and see if I can get a bit of tea.  Do you want some?  I’ll bring some,” she said.  She turned to go.

She felt a sharp tug at the side of her head.

She turned and saw that Sy had grabbed the length of hair that normally framed one side of her face.

“Stay,” he said.

She swallowed hard.  Her heart drummed.  She couldn’t find words.

“It’s okay,” he said.  “Come here.”

She approached, and watched as he reached out to take hold of the other lock of hair.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he said, staring down at her with those penetrating eyes.  “If that’s alright.”

Her lips moved but no air passed through them.  She gave him a nod.

“Then stand on your tiptoes,” he said.

He tugged lightly on her hair, urging her up and forward, to meet him as he leaned down.

She obliged.

Somewhere, in her fantasies about kissing boys, she had most definitely thought about what kissing Sy would be like.  A part of her had told her that no, it wouldn’t be great, first kisses never were, and Sy was usually terrible at something until he’d had a little practice.

He was a good kisser.  His lips were cool to the touch, but he was gentle.  His lips brushed hers, then pulled away.  She raised herself up a bit further to kiss back, and he kissed her again as a reward.  It wasn’t long until she was standing on the very tips of her boots, leaning forward, hands on his thighs, trying to meet him, only to experience feather touches of kisses.

Then, like he was hungry, a real kiss, full lipped instead of a simple touch, while her entire body was straining up and forward, as if everything led to that contact.

The knuckles of one hand that held her hair brushed against her cheek.  It was so nice and she’d already been so close to crying earlier that she wondered if she might tear up.

If she dropped down, she knew, it would probably tug her hair against his hand, and it would hurt and it was probably the least of the reasons she didn’t want to stop straining up and forward, the least of the reasons she didn’t want this to end.

He pulled away, then kissed her, pulled away, and stopped.

Teasing.

“More,” she whispered.

Sylvester cleared his throat.

Lillian dropped down to the ground, spinning around.

It was worse than she’d thought.

Not just Sy’s doctor, but Hayle as well.

“Lillian,” Hayle said.  “A word?”

Lillian remained frozen, a deer in the headlights.

Sy leaned down, his mouth by her ear.

“Tonight, if you come to my room, I’ll give you another.”

The worst.  He was the absolute worst.

But it was reason enough to flee the room.

She knew she was blushing bright red for Professor Hayle.  The professor closed the door.

He pointed, and the two of them walked a distance down the hall.

“Do I need to worry?” he asked.

Lillian shook her head.

Then she remembered the greater situation.  “Do- do we need to worry?  The Lambs?”

“We’re waiting to talk to Jamie tomorrow.  He’s having an appointment now.  The others want to talk and figure out what questions to ask, as he can provide us the clearest perspective, for what he’s seen, if nothing else.”

Lillian felt a sinking feeling in her gut.

“I know,” Hayle said.  “I think things will be fine.”

Lillian didn’t feel convinced.

“I came to ask a question.  Now I feel we might need to have a discussion.”

“Please no,” Lillian said.

“You’re a favorite student of mine, with all the promise in the world-”

“Please, sir.”

“Okay,” Hayle said, raising his hands.  “Alright.  Just let this old man say his piece.”

Lillian couldn’t stop blushing.

“There was a time, not so long ago, where I worried about Sylvester.  All of the Lambs, but Sylvester was among them.  When it came to… interest in others.”

“What do you mean?”

“When a youth comes of age, it can be hard.  Hormones surge, judgment isn’t always there, unfamiliar feelings… if you combine the intensity of feeling with the natural ability of the Lambs to get what they desire, through trickery, problem solving, or sheer charm, keeping in mind Sylvester meets all of the marks, that’s a difficult issue.”

“Yes sir.  I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“No, but he’s been retarded in physical and emotional growth by the chemicals we inject him with.  He’s a late bloomer in everything but mental faculties.  I worried that he would be a danger if he were to turn his attention toward someone in the public, but then he seemed to turn his sights to Mary, and if anyone can defend themselves, it’s her.”

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t want to sound as though I don’t have faith in you, Lillian.  But, the Lambs being what they are, it warps them in many ways, in growth and emotion and other things.  The arena of love stands to be very dangerous ground.  Enough that I considered chemically emasculating the boys and doing much the same for Mary.”

Lillian swallowed.

“I’m not going to do that.  I won’t tell you not to do this.  But I wanted you to know how, looking at the bigger picture, I was wary.

“Yes sir.”

“I would like you to be wary.

“Yes sir.  Um.  The other question?  That you came to ask?”

Professor Hayle sighed, as if she’d disappointed him somehow.  She hated that.

“The Lambs will be splitting up, depending on how the verdict goes.  We’ll find a way to broach the news to them tomorrow, but-”

“They know.”

Hayle paused.  “I should have figured.”

“Yes sir.  I mean, sir, I didn’t mean to sound like I was saying you should have, only that-”

“Yes, Lillian.  I know.  Do you have any recommendations, from students in your age group?”

“I don’t have many classes with students in my age group.  But I could give you names.”

“Thank you, Lillian.  Your parents are coming to visit in a month, I’m having them to my place.  I expect you’ll come?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If there’s anything you need,” Hayle said, glancing in the direction of Sy, “You’ll let me know?”

“Yes, sir,” she lied.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.01 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

A carriage passed us, the wheels cutting through the golden leaves that had collected at the street’s edge.  The man atop the carriage looked down at us and tipped his hat, smiling.

Weird.

I watched as the carriage continued down the long, well-maintained road.  The properties on either side were well spaced out, each one less than a proper manor, but more than a mere home.   Walls both short and tall surrounded each.  Stitched in servants’ uniforms were busy raking up leaves and pruning some peculiar trees with charcoal black bark and autumn-yellow foliage.  I wondered if the grass was a similar type of affectation, because it wasn’t green, but a color comparable to wheat.

Peaceful, idyllic, every scene an image from a painting, juxtaposed by the contents of the carriage – a large cage with a dozen people and one monster crammed within.  A young child gripped the bars with both hands, staring back at me as the beaked monster peered over her shoulder.

She let go of the bar, reaching out in my direction.

I lifted my hand, as if to take her hand, but she was already ten feet away, the gap growing.

I’d pulled ahead of the others, so I turned and started walking backward, looking at the Lambs.

Our contingent of Lambs were dressed up.  It wasn’t a huge change for Jamie, who wore a shirt with a straight, stiff-necked collar, a jacket, and slacks, but Gordon had really come into his own with the finer clothes, dressing up in very much the same, but without the jacket.  His shirt was tucked in, and a stylized belt buckle drew the eye.  Even Hubris was groomed, his short coat brushed until there wasn’t a stray hair.

Lillian, though, had gone the extra mile, with a new dress, navy blue and pleated with a folded collar and a coat stylized after the doctor’s lab coats, new, fashionable, and nice enough that it could be worn in high society.  She had a daub of makeup on her lips and the ends of her hair were curled outward and up.

It wasn’t her.  She was prettier than I’d ever seen her, unless I counted some mental images of her in a nightgown, lit in just the right way by the light from the window, but I found myself itching to mess up her hair or clothes.  I didn’t want to see her upset, but surprised would be nice.  Smiling would be better.

I wasn’t sure how to reconcile the feeling or how to make it happen.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You had a look in your eye.”

“Lies,” I said.

“You did,” Gordon said.

“Can confirm,” Jamie said.  “Perfect recall.  In prior moments when you’ve had that look, you’ve been up to mischief.”

“Okay, okay!” I said.  I turned around, taking exaggerated steps to the left and then the right, before letting myself crash into Lillian’s shoulder.  “Minor mischief.”

Lillian looked at me out of the corner of one eye, wary and getting warier by the second.

“You look nice,” I said.

“You said as much, just ten minutes ago, when you saw me come through the door,” Lillian said.  “Are you saying it again because you want to distract me from what you were really saying or thinking?”

“So paranoid!” I admonished her.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a partial yes.  The two ideas are linked.”

I watched her turn her eyes forward, picking her way through the possibilities.

No blush, but I could see the change in her expression as she connected the dots.

“Be good,” she said, suppressing a smile.

“Never,” I said, reaching down to take her hand.  I squeezed.

“I’m serious,” she said.  She didn’t pull her hand away.  “This is really important to me.  If you play around or mess up here, then I’m going to be really upset.”

I swung our hands back and forth.

“I know you want to, Sy.  I know how your brain works, as much as anyone can.  These people are as important as people can be, without having the power to cancel the Lambs project or call in favors to end us.  They are probably the most important and powerful people you can get away with practicing your own Sylvester brand of villainy on, without repercussion.”

I started swinging with more and more vigor.

“Now it sounds like you’re trying to convince me to do something.”

“No!” Lillian said, her voice suddenly sharp.  She pulled her hand away from mine, letting mine flop to my side, while stabbing a fingernail at my throat.  It had been artificially grown or else glued on.  Lillian didn’t normally have longer nails.  Sharp.  “No joking.  No turning around thirty minutes from now and saying I convinced you to do it, no nonsense at all, Sy.”

The more serious and stern she got with me, the more I wanted to do something.  Seeing her all prettied up just made me want to tease her more.

I could kiss her and make her melt, and smudge that makeup that made her look less like our Lillian and more like someone else’s Lillian.

It was a nice mental image.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.  I smiled, but it might have looked more like a smirk.

Jamie turned to Gordon, pointing at his own eye, “Mischievous glimmer, right?”

“I saw it,” Gordon said, expression flat.

Lillian took that as excuse to stab my jugular with her fingernail again.  “Be good, Sy.  I want this.  One day, I’m going to have to choose what I do with everything I’m studying.  Professor Ibott wants to attend the nobles and have the most power a non-noble can have.  I asked for this job, we didn’t have to do it, you agreed to do this for me, they did too, but you agreed.”

“I’m entirely on your side,” I said.

“I don’t trust you for a hot bloody second, Sy, not when it comes to unfamiliar territory like this.  If I’m ever going to be a black-coated professor, I need friends, contacts, patrons.  I need to make friends, and I need to look like I know what I’m doing.  Please.  Please, please, please, I’m begging you, don’t muck this up.  Please.

“We could have him wait outside,” Gordon suggested.

Lillian snapped her head around to look at Gordon, and I could tell that she was actually pleased at the notion.

“I don’t want to wait outside.”

“It’s a possibility,” Lillian said, not acknowledging me.

“I miss the old days.  When I had backup,” I said, staring out off to one side, at the houses and the trees.

“Jamie would have been backing Lillian,” Gordon said.  He looked at Jamie, “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Jamie said.  “If it matters, I don’t think we should leave anyone outside.  People like this, they’re liable to worry about subterfuge.  Not being able to watch or keep track of every member of a group of visitors?  I think it would put them in a warier mindset.”

Did he actually just back me up?

“That’s a good point,” Gordon said.  “Where did you pick that up?”

“A book series I’ve been reading.  Intrigue in noble courts.  Not like ours.”

“Huh,” Gordon said.

“I’ll be good,” I said, with emphasis.

“I wish I had something on you,” Lillian said.  “Something you wanted that I could take away, some weakness I could exploit, but you don’t leave any good openings.  It’s so one-sided.  How do I punish you if you ruin this for me?”

“I won’t.”

“You can beat him up, or wrestle him into submission and make him cry uncle and admit he smells like butt, or whatever you want him to say,” Gordon said.  “I’m pretty sure you could beat him in a fight.  He still can’t seem to grasp the basics.”

“First of all, not necessary, because I won’t do anything to deserve a beating, but she tried that this one night this past summer,” I said.  “I teased her too much and she-”

“We’re not talking about that,” Lillian said, louder than was necessary.

“-tried-”

“Not talking about it!”

I dropped the subject.

“Silent treatment, then,” Gordon said.

Won’t work, I thought with confidence, as I saw Lillian glance at me, working through the idea in her head.  She’ll crack before I do.  And I can make her break the silence.

“I’ll do it too,” Gordon said, “Silent treatment.  Solidarity.”

“Hey,” I said.  It’s like he read my mind and deftly countered my preliminary strategy.

“Me too,” Jamie said.  “If it’s deserved.”

“Hey!”

“We can pass on word to the others, too, just in case Sy got the bright idea of joining with the others the next time the teams got shuffled around,” Gordon said.  “Mary would play along.”

“She would,” Lillian said.

“Helen too, if we bribed her.”

“Yep,” Lillian said.

“Ashton, well, if Sy really wants conversation, I don’t think Ashton would really suffice.”

“You boys are the best,” Lillian said.  She put her hands on Gordon’s upper arm, then rose up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek.  He had to bend down a fair bit to even allow it.  Lillian quickly skipped around to Jamie.  She didn’t have to bend down or even raise up on tiptoes too much to do it.  She beamed a smile as she looked at me.

“I’ll be good,” I said.

“You better,” she warned.

The rest of the way to our destination, she walked between Gordon and Jamie.

The properties to our right had given way to a downward slope and a view of a slice of beach and a lake filled with docks and fancy boats.  The cart that had passed us earlier was now parked by the water, the door open, occupants and monster gone.

The houses to our left grew greater and grander the closer we got to the water.  The modifications to each home changed, too.  Where the smaller houses were riddled with signs of the cheaper means of building, trees growing into and through them, the bigger houses were more carefully done, the growth and alterations set in the gardens and into the walls.  The stone walls had branches and vines creeping through them, covered in bright red berries and thin yellow leaves, crowned with greater clusters of golden yellow foliage at the tops.  More conventional, old-fashioned houses in more alien settings.

Those leaves would be security measures, I knew.  Poisonous to the touch, or covered in tiny fibers that would cause pants-crapping levels of agony for days on end.

The house at the road’s end was the capstone.  A true manor, larger than any of the rest.  The walls to the left and right of it encased rows of the black-barked, yellow-leafed trees, and the gardens were weird and wiry, more black wood and autumnal colors.  The house itself was a sprawl, the wood done dark, the highlights and shingles pale enough they stood out.  Stitched waited at the gates.

I tugged my shirt into position and straightened my collar as they began opening the gates, lifting and dragging them back and away.

Lillian appeared next to me.  She looked at me.

“Please, Sy.”

“Your lead, Lil.”

“Don’t call me Lil.  If they start calling me Lil because you did, I can’t correct them, and if this somehow works and I get an opportunity, I’ll have to live with that for a really long time.  I know you’d get the biggest kick out of that, but-”

I raised my hands, putting them over her mouth, cupping them so I didn’t smudge her lipstick.

“Lillian,” I said.

She huffed, then nodded.  I let the hands drop.

“I’m all agitated now.”

I turned to face the gate.  People were coming down the long path.  I wondered if it was more polite to meet them halfway.  Under my breath, I said, “Your own fault you’re agitated.”

“No it isn’t,” Lillian said.  She was facing squarely ahead as well, talking out of the corner of her mouth.  “Two years of experience have led up to this, Sy.  Gordon, Jamie, do I look alright?  I’m not all ruffled, or red in the cheeks?  Or-”

“You look fine,” Gordon said.  Jamie nodded.

“You look like a proper professor in the making,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said, focused on the approaching husband and wife pair.  She didn’t look at me.  “Please don’t raise me up just to make a bigger crash when you trip me up and I fall.  Any other time.”

“Said the frog to the scorpion, who was asking for a ride across the water,” Gordon said.

“You too.  Don’t make me nervous,” she said.  “Don’t-”

She let her voice drop off as the pair drew close.

I whispered, “Like I said.  Your lead.  You get to take point.”

Lillian gave me the smallest nod.

Husband and wife.  He was a middle-aged gentleman with obviously altered features, cut a little too sharp.  His face was clean shaven, his blond hair waxed to the point that it looked artificial through and through, as if it were finely carved of wood.  He wore a jacket with tails and thin slacks, and held a bone cane, more for style than out of any need for one.

She was a woman who’d had more work done on her body than most.  I might have taken her for his daughter, but she was wearing the open-front blouse that was so common to yesteryear’s high courts.  The cut of the dress bared the space between breasts, and the resulting picture was decorated with low-hanging jewelry and framed with ruffles and lace.  It would have been the style for Lillian’s mother when the woman was Lillian’s age or a few years older, if Lillian’s mother was born to a good family.

That dress told me a lot.  It suggested she was forty, for one, her apparent age cut in half by good care by good doctors.  It wasn’t unfashionable, but it took courage or reasons to wear it when she could have an easier time following modern fashion trends.  The risque styles of dress had been a reaction or signal of support to the Crown around the time the infighting between Crown and Church had started.  It was very possible that she or her entire family had a deeper stake in that particular fight, remembered even today.

She also had a tic, one finger moving rhythmically where she thought we couldn’t see, one hand in the other arm’s sleeve of her.  If I remembered right, it was a problem common to people who had had certain augmentations placed within their forearms.  A precursor to the same sort of thing that let Fray hide needles in her fingertips.

No, even from the way they held themselves, and the ease and care with which they moved, it was clear they were augmented from head to toe.  Grafts, physical alterations, drugs, changes to their biological construction at the ground level, and more.

They weren’t nobles, but by golly, they wanted to be.

“The so-called Lambs?” the man asked.

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.

“I heard stories, I inquired, and what I was told led me to expect monsters dressed up like children.  I was skeptical.  Now I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or impressed.  Are you the monsters I heard descriptions of, with particularly good craftsmanship?”

I bit my tongue rather than make a clever reference to Helen.  Three sprung to mind.

“We’re very good at what we do, sir,” Lillian said.  “Without knowing the stories, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you.”

He looked us over.

“Very well.  This is my wife, Mrs. Adelaide Gage.  I am Everard Gage.  I am grateful to you for coming.”

“We’re happy to render any assistance we can,” Lillian said.

“I would request that the dog stay outside,” the man said.

“I’m sorry, sir, but Hubris stays with me,” Gordon said, voice firm.  “He’s a member of this team and a resource.  May I suggest that I leave and take a walk down by the water?  I can wait for the meeting to conclude, without bringing him inside or leaving him behind.”

The man studied Gordon, looked again at the dog, then shook his head.  “No, both you and him can come in.  Follow us, please.”

We followed the pair as they took the path to the front door.

I continued to bite my tongue.  Gordon is willing to suggest having me wait outside, but the dog, oh, no, the dog is a member of this team.

Heavy double doors of black wood opened with Everard and Adelaide’s approach, though there were no eyes watching through nearby windows, and the doors themselves lacked openings.  I glanced to one side as we passed through.  The man in a servant’s uniform wasn’t stitched, but something else, lacking eyes, ears and hair.  The man on the opposite side was a close match.

“In here,” Everard said, “This sitting room gets more light at this time of day.  Not that there’s much to enjoy these days.  All overcast gray.”

Lillian started to open her mouth, then stopped before voicing anything.

I stuck my elbow forward and to one side to push it into her back.

Lillian spoke, “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, it’s much better than it is in Radham.  The rain never stops there.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Adelaide said, speaking for the first time.  Even her voice has been altered to be younger and prettier.  “I’ve been, but it’s easy to forget it’s so incessant.”

“Yes, madam,” Lillian said, more enthusiastic now that a basic rapport had been established.

I would have slapped my hand across my face if I didn’t think it would get me in trouble with Lillian and the silent treatment from the rest of the Lambs.

Lillian continued, “It’s so rare that I can go outdoors without an umbrella or a raincoat that I feel strange without one.”

The woman offered Lillian a tight smile, chin drawn slightly in, and replied with a simple, “Quite so.”

Lillian glanced briefly at me.  She hadn’t missed just how quickly the mood had shifted.

“Would you have a seat?” Everard asked.  He indicated the chairs and loveseat of the little sitting room.

We sat.  I sat beside Lillian in the loveseat.

“Tea will be along shortly.  We called for it as you arrived at the gate.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gordon said.  He’d settled in a chair, and hand his hand over the armrest, scratching Hubris’ head.  He looked like a young aristocrat, entirely at home in this environment.

Lillian had lost her voice, it seemed, if Gordon was stepping up.  I guessed she didn’t know what she’d done wrong and she dreaded doing it again.

“Mrs. Gage, ma’am,” I said, “Mr. Gage, sir.  Can I ask what happened?”

“We wrote about it all in the letter to your, who was it?”

“Mr. Hayle,” Adelaide said.

“The man in charge of our project, yes sir, yes ma’am,” Lillian said. She’d picked up on my hint.

“That letter should have had the necessary details,” Everard said.  “Are you so forgetful?”

Right on the attackDefensive.

I gestured discreetly with my hand at my knee, watching the eyes of the pair to make sure they weren’t noticing.  At most they might take it to be distracted movements of the hand.  Paper.  Watch.  Hidden.  Word.  PaperStrategy.

“Sir, letters get intercepted, particularly those from people of your status,” Lillian said.  I could hear the tremor in her voice partway through the sentence.  Not something someone unfamiliar with her would have caught, but a sign that she was anxious.  “It wouldn’t be unusual to keep details out of the paper that you wouldn’t want your enemies to catch wind of.  But if we’re going to help, then we’ll need all of the details.  The work we do is dangerous, and a seemingly innocuous detail could get us killed.”

Good, I gestured.  You.

Everard and Adelaide exchanged a glance.

“You’re right,” Everard admitted.  “Well said.  I’ll be blunt, and admit our second daughter is missing.  She’s run away from home, and she’s done so in the worst way possible.”

“A gang of hooligans,” Adelaide said.  “In Lugh.”

“An hour’s ride away,” Jamie said.  “Lugh is a blight.  A harbor for rebels against the Crown and illegal trade.  I can see why it concerns you, sir, her being affiliated with such things.”

“Yes,” Everard said.  “A blight, I quite like that.  We’ve hired help to go find her and drag her home, but it’s a hostile place.  The Crown comes and stamps at them now and again, but the rats crawl into hiding, and they come out of hiding shortly after the Crown leaves.  If they send people to stay and try to defend the city, they find resistance and sabotage every step of the way.  We would send more people to recover her, but that would make this less discreet.  We wanted quality.”

“You’re too kind, sir,” Lillian said.  “I think you’ll be satisfied.”

Not how I would’ve worded the first half.  Would have dropped the ‘I think’ from the second.

Adelaide spoke, “She’s altered herself.  Threw in with artists and dock workers who tattoo themselves and go to back-alley hacks that alter their bodies.  She’s lost leave of her senses, and now her outside shows it.  Horns, altered eyes, tattoos, and who knows what else.  All easily remedied, thankfully, but if it’s linked to us…”

She fanned herself with one hand.  Her husband reached out to take her other hand.

“You’ll find her,” he said.  “Without drawing attention.”

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“Good, good,” Everard said.  He paused, then gave Lillian a curious glance.  “What are you, then?”

“Sir?”

“The Lambs are creations, alterations, am I wrong?”

“Oh, yes sir,” Lillian said.  “But not me.”

“Not you?”

I leaned forward a little, “Lillian is purely human.”

I could see the disappointment cross Everard’s face.

“She remains one of Radham Academy’s top students, sir,” I said.  “She’s years ahead of her peers, she does errands for Radham’s professors, handles aspects of various Lambs projects, and assists us as a field medic and, I don’t want to say she’s our handler, because we don’t need explicit handling, but…”

“She’s the human element, ensuring we don’t diverge into problematic territory,” Gordon said, very diplomatically.

Everard nodded, looking Lillian over.  I wasn’t sure Lillian knew what to do with herself, finding herself put on the spot like that.

“If I may, sir?” Jamie spoke up.  “I’m sorry to change the topic.”

“If you may what?” Everard asked.

“You implied there were details that you didn’t include in the letter, sir.  You included nearly all of what you said here.  Is there more?”

My memory wasn’t so bad that I’d completely forgotten the earlier conversation.  I was fairly certain that he hadn’t implied any such thing.  Implications were the sort of thing I paid close attention to.

“Did I?” the man asked.  Then his expression changed as he realized what the rest of us had, that he’d verified that he’d at least thought it.  “Yes, there is more.”

“Anything and everything you can tell us is helpful, sir,” Lillian said.

“You’ve heard of these texts that are being shared around?”

Oh.

“These hooligans they’ve befriended, they’ve got one of them.  They’ve been occupying themselves.”

“Oh,” Lillian said.  “That’s problematic, but-”

“It would hardly be of concern, but for the harm it does to the Crown, and the severity of the charges that would be laid against her if she were caught by the full and proper authorities.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.

“…And the implications, with the alterations made to her,” Everard finished.

There was a bit of a pause.

This keeps getting better.

“What alterations, sir?” Gordon asked.

“She’s immortal,” Adelaide said.

“Immortal, ma’am?” Lillian asked.

“We don’t know the particulars.  The doctor who started her on the regimen left for the war and hasn’t yet returned, though we’ve corresponded by mail.  Exceptional fellow.  He says that the drugs he’s given her will extend her lifespan indefinitely, and give her some healing ability.  If it doesn’t, or if there are problems, she should last long enough for care to advance to the point of being able to fix it.”

“Some experiments have been done that seem to be pointing in that direction, sir, but the level of care required is high,” Lillian said.  “Immortality exists, but it’s paradoxically fragile, enough that even many nobles avoid it.”

“Her doctor thinks he’s unraveled it, and our daughter was the test subject.  We provided the funding.  There was and is a massive chance she’ll die from complications, but the chance to pioneer something like this, we had to take it.  Setting her above the rest.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said, with less enthusiasm than before.

“It would be a grave disappointment if she were to figure out the particulars of that work and share it out at a lower cost, until it became common,” Everard said.

“We’d hoped for her to be special,” Adelaide said.  “Enough to draw attention.  Baron Richmond won’t be on this end of the Crown States forever.  He’s a bachelor, keeping the company of his twin sisters.  We need our daughter back in time to get her cleaned up and presentable, and we need it done with discretion.”

“Enough that the Baron doesn’t have to hear of it, perhaps?” Gordon asked.

Everard smiled, “We would be grateful.”

Lillian tried to speak and fail.  She did a fair job of hiding her quiet shock.

They really want to be nobles, I thought.

“We excel at discretion, sir,” Gordon said, making brief eye contact with me, as if challenging me to disagree.  Or maybe he was thinking of the Brechwell Beast.

“Very glad to hear it.  We can provide rides from here to Lugh and back, should you need it, and anything else you require.  Funds, to be sure.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.  “Thank you.  If it’s alright, we’ll confer between ourselves and then decide how to move forward?”

“You can do so here,” Everard said.  “Adelaide and I will see what’s keeping the tea.”

And confer among yourselves.

The two departed the room, gently shutting the door behind them.

I gestured quickly, to let the others know we were probably being listened in on.

Lillian looked at me.  She seemed a little lost.  I wasn’t even sure she’d registered what I’d gestured at her.

Then she smiled a little, and leaned across the loveseat to give me a peck on the cheek.

“Thank you for the nice things you said,” she told me.

“Always,” I murmured.  “Even if I call you a crybaby, I’ll have a hundred other nice things to say too.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“You’re going to do your job,” I said.  “You’re going to do it well.  You’ll make contacts.”

“But she-”

I gestured again.  Another reminder.

She nodded.

“We’ll figure out the particulars on the way,” I said.

Lillian nodded.

Then she leaned over and gave me another peck on the cheek.  Her hands found my right hand and held it.

I’d opened up the relationship with a kiss to save her and to save myself.  To cast doubt on her word when it came to me.  I’d let her down, in a way, hurt her in the eyes of people she very much wanted to impress.

This, I could do this much.  I would give her this in compensation.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.02 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.2

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The wind was strong, and even if it wasn’t for the chilly breeze, the water was bound to be cold.  The people on the beach weren’t going any further than getting their ankles wet, and even the ones who sat on blankets and wore swimsuits seemed to be using towels and blankets for added warmth.  I imagined it was fine so long as there was sunlight, but the wind whipped the gray clouds overhead across the sky and the sunlight was intermittent.

I saw Lillian shiver, though she was trying not to show it.  I shrugged off my jacket, and draped it over her bare legs, where her skirt didn’t reach down far enough.

“Thank you, Sy.”

I nodded, hugging my knees as we sat together on the slope that led down to the beach.  Lillian moved a bit closer and rested her head on my shoulder.

“Five minutes,” I said.

“Hm?” she raised up her head.

I reached over with my free arm and pulled her head back into position against my shoulder.  “Five minutes.  Then you should scoot over.  I think the Gages are the type that would think less of you if they saw you like this.  The twits.  We don’t want a repeat of the incident in the office.  Or the time you slept over, last month, or the-”

“Okay, Sy.  Okay.  Shhh.  Don’t ruin a nice moment.”

Jamie looked up at us and smiled, almost smirking.  I shooed at him, and he turned forward again.

The profile of face and neck, the hair, the work in the notebook, I recognized that person.  Then I remembered that it wasn’t him, and I felt a pang of loss.  My best friend.  I missed his talents when things were active and hectic and there was something to be done, and this new Jamie helped bridge the gap.  But when things were quiet, I missed him, and the new Jamie hurt rather than help when it came to that.

I could see some of the drawing he was doing.  Fine lines, wispy, each line assured and careful, more akin to the basic outlining a painter might do in ink before applying watercolor than anything else.  A different hand and style than the Jamie I knew.  He was drawing the boats, further down, and some of the ships he was drawing had long ago left the harbor.

Boats moved this way and that, like one of the puzzles Mr. Hayle had given us back in the day, until certain boats could slip through.

I thought of the child in the cage we’d seen on our way in.  Was she already on her way out, aboard a ship?

I didn’t like the idea, and I didn’t like that acting on it would ruin things for Lil.  Unless…

“Having second thoughts?” I asked.

Jamie looked up from the drawing.  Lillian looked up at me.

“The runaway.  It sounds like she had good reasons for leaving home.  Being pushed into marriage with a noble?”

“The Baron, no less,” Jamie said.  “The Duke got started early in terms of military strategy and leadership.  The Baron?  Sixty-four nobles would have to die before he got his shot at the Crown, possibly sixty-five if the Infante of Crown Hispana gets a younger sibling this year.  The Baron is closer to the Gages in social rank than to the Duke.  Five steps below the Duke, four steps above the Gages.  Few opportunities, few reasons to go out and do things.”

“He’s festered,” I said, my voice low.  “Gone stagnant.  Cabin fever, but his life is the cabin.  Nothing to do with himself but resent that he can’t climb higher and turn mean.”

Jamie gave me a nod of confirmation.  I could see Lillian wince.

“I’m not going to mince words,” I said.

“Could you?” Lillian asked.  “Really, about the mincing words thing.  I know the Lambs have dilemmas all the time, I know it’s hard, and you guys make the calls.  In Brechwell I made my voice heard, gave my input when I thought you were crossing a line or acting without all the information.  But… why can’t this be easy?  Can you help me make this easier?”

She’d lifted her head up from my shoulder, and pulled away a bit.  She still looked a little cold.

“You wanted to be a professor,” I said.  “This isn’t the last tough call you’re going to have to make.  I could lie to you, and take action on my own, and it would take the weight off your shoulders.  I could make decisions for you.  But I don’t think doing any of that would be making you the best Lillian you can be.”

“I’m fifteen, Sy.  These are decisions an adult would have a hard time with.”

“Fifteen is adult.  It’s been adult for a long time, to a lot of people,” I said.  “Fifteen or sixteen is when people have historically gotten married.  It’s when kids have finished school and gone to work, if they didn’t start sooner.  Don’t let that school of yours convince yourself that childhood somehow lasts until you’re older.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“Then let this opportunity slip by,” I said.  “I’d say no harm no foul, but it will hurt you.  Now, you’re not competing against any of your peers, because you are stellar and special.  But you’ll end up competing against the students who are eighteen to twenty now.  You’re going to find yourself in much the same position Fray was in when she was considered for a professor’s position.  If those eighteen year olds are making the hard calls now while you’re holding back, you’ll fall behind.”

“It almost sounds like you’re trying to convince me to go ahead with this.”

“Do you think I would?”

“No.  Which is why it sounds weird, coming from your lips.”

I looked back and over in the direction of the Gage’s home to make sure they weren’t approaching.  This would be a bad conversation to have someone overhear.

“I want to help the Lambs, Lil.  I want to help the people and the experiments who can’t speak for themselves, the children, the mice among foxes, even those mice who don’t know what that scratching means.  I’m on the fence about this too, but it’s because, on one hand, I want to help now, even if it’s a small thing, helping one person.  But on the other hand, I want to help you.  Because I think, I hope, that you as a professor will help more people in the long run.”

“Even if that’s a journey that starts with this?  Capturing someone that’s escaped a bad situation and a… horrible family, and sending her back?”

“It’s your lead, Lil.  This is your mission, first and foremost.  I don’t think we should sabotage the job, but it’s up to you, how hard you really want to try.  We could get her back to her family, but do it late.  It wouldn’t reflect so well on the Gages, it wouldn’t give you the same opportunities, but it would probably rest easier on all of our consciences.”

Lillian made a face, scowling at no one thing in particular.

“It’s your call.  We back you.”

“Yep,” Jamie said, dead sincere.

“I know I should thank you, but…” Lillian trailed off, then sighed.

I rubbed her back.

Gordon and Hubris were making their way down the dirt path that separated the yellow-grass covered slope from the beach.  He had one thing of luggage behind him, a smaller case set on top of it, and a third slung over his shoulder, resting against his back.  Hubris was strutting with the handle of one luggage case in his jaws.

That dope.  He was supposed to be walking the dog, not carrying stuff.

I might have gotten up to help, but he’d chosen to take on that particular burden, and I really didn’t want to.

Gordon’s approach made me miss the Lambs that weren’t present.

Jamie foremost among them.  I looked at the person sitting further down the hill and felt another twinge of recognition, followed by the stab of loss.

Having a bad memory sucked, sometimes.

“Jamie,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Can I have a piece of paper?”

He opened his book, flipped it over, using a finger to hold his page, and tore out the last page.  He had to crawl a couple of feet up the hill and extend his arm, while I had to do much the same, reaching down, before I had the paper.

“Need a pen?”

“I’ve got one, thanks.”

“Scheme?” Lillian asked.

“No scheme.  I was going to write Mary a letter.  We know where she is, right?”

“Yep,” Jamie said.  “She’s at-”

“Tell me later.  I won’t remember between now and when I address this.  Just wanted to get in touch, let her know where we’re at, what’s going on.  Make it so she doesn’t feel so alone.  Because being with Helen and Ashton, who are good company but not the best for actual conversation, and then there’s the new guy whatshisname-”

“Duncan,” Jamie and Lillian said at the same time.

“-who doesn’t have a doctorly name, it’s gotta be a little isolating,” I said.

“It probably is,” Lillian said.

“Unless you don’t want me to?  If it would be weird, me writing a girl a letter, when we’re sort of, you know-”

“You’re not writing a girl a letter.  You’re writing Mary a letter.  My best friend.  Are you honestly telling me that the clever Sylvester is this clueless when it comes to things like this?”

“The clever Sylvester is new to this sort of thing,” I said.  “He’s got some of it figured out, but other parts, he just wants to not screw up too badly.”

“He’s doing fine,” Lillian said.  “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” I asked.  I moved the pen over to the other hand, reached up, and tugged at her hair, where it hung in front of her ear.

Lillian swatted at my hand.  I saw her turn her head, looking for the Gages, then she leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the cheek.

“Stop smiling like that,” she said, jabbing me with a finger.

“I’m not,” I said, while suppressing a smile.  “I am going to start this letter with ‘Dear Mary, Lillian is telling lies and abusing me with pokes and prods.'”

“Don’t.  You saying that is going to make her miss us more.”

“True.  And we might as well edit it so it’s fine if someone gets their hands on it.  Like the Gages, who we’ll have to ask to mail it for us.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

“Dear Mary.  Miss you.”

“That’s nice,” Lillian said.  Jamie nodded.

Gordon joined us.  He settled down a short distance from Jamie, at the foot of the hill, setting down the bags.

“Hey Gordon,” I said.

“Hi, Sylvester.”

“How’s that heart of yours doing?  Pounding?  Feeling a twinge?”

“I’m fine.”

“Because exertion like that, especially dumb, muleheaded exertion, for no reason at all, can’t imagine it’s that good for you.”

“I’m fine, Sy.  No pain.  Hubris isn’t telling me there’s anything he senses that I don’t.”

I looked at the dog.  “And what happens if he says it isn’t, halfway here?  Are we supposed to come look for you, or do the Gages find you?  Because it reflects badly, you know, and you were being snobby earlier about how we’re all in this for Lillian and you had her back when I don’t.”

“I’m fine, Sy.  I’m strong.  The luggage has wheels.  It’s not a problem.”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “Right.”

“Right,” he said.

“The letter,” Lillian told me.

I reached over, and rubbed her thigh through the fabric of my jacket.

“Anything you want to add, Gordon?  Letter to Mary,” I said.

“Tell her I’ll practice.  I’ll land thirty-six out of thirty-nine, next time she gives me lessons.”

“Knife throwing?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah.”

“Land…” I said speaking very slowly.  “Twenty out of thirty-nine.”

“Thirty-six,” Gordon said.

“Right, twenty-six,” I said, as I wrote down thirty-six.

“Hubris.  Kill him,” Gordon said.

Hubris, panting from pulling the luggage, raised his head to look at me, hackles rising, teeth bared.  He got to his feet, and he snarled.  Lillian moved a little, just beside me, ready to throw herself out of the way.

“You’re such a faker, mutt,” I said, very casually.

The hackles went down, he closed his mouth, then flopped over onto his side.

I was nearly done the letter when a ship in the harbor blew its horn.  I looked up and out and thought again of the kid in the cage.

It made me think of the conversation with Lillian, the cost, the gamble.  How many small injustices did I have to let slide, to commit a greater justice?

I turned my head to look at Lillian, studying her.

She was the one who was going to outlive even me.  Not that I was going to live that long.

Had to do this right.  Build her up, make her strong, keep her happy and healthy.

Mary was more fragile in some ways, I was worse for Mary, but the damage done would be so short term.  Lillian would, extenuating circumstances aside, be an enduring presence in the world.

She noticed me looking.

“What?” she asked.  She flushed a little.

“This thing, right here.  Whatever we’re calling this job.  You have it in you to do it right.  But it’s going to be tough.”

“I got the gist of that,” Lillian said.  She turned to Gordon, “We were talking earlier about the moral dilemmas.”

“It’s your mission, you make the call,” Gordon said.

I gestured toward him.  See?  See?

“I know,” Lillian said.

“For the next part, I’m going to take lead.  Because I think we can find a middle ground, where there is one to be found.  I want you to pay attention.  Start thinking along these lines.  Looking for the less obvious roads.  If it’s the only thing I can teach you, let me teach you this much.”

She gave me a somber nod.

I finished up the letter, keeping to general topics.  The content of the letter didn’t matter – it was the fact it was being sent that mattered most, that she was being remembered.

We watched the ships for a little longer.  Idly, I reached up and tugged her hair again.

She licked her lips, glancing back over her shoulder, and jumped a little.

I looked.  It was the Gages.  Everard and Adelaide.

The Lambs stood.

“Everything alright?” Everard asked.  I didn’t get the impression he’d seen me pull Lillian’s hair, or that he’d understood what he’d seen.  No wry look in his eyes, no puzzlement, nothing in his tone.

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“We’ve found a boat.  You’ll go from this harbor to the one in Lugh, sooner than you would if you reached out to your Academy.”

Antsy to get us going.

“Yes, sir,” Lillian said.

“I’ll show you to the appropriate ship.”

“If it’s no trouble, could you tell us about your daughter while you do?” Gordon asked.

Everard Gage blinked, a little surprised.

“If we’re expected to find her, we should know what we can about her, sir.  Age, appearance, name, interests, personality.”

“I see,” Everard said.  He looked faintly uncomfortable.  He gestured for us to walk.

The Lambs moved down the hill to the luggage, collecting it, before catching up with the others.  I saw Lillian heading over to grab the case with her things, and shooed her off.  She could go empty handed.

I gave it to the mutt, instead.  He gave me an annoyed look, but took the handle between his teeth.

“She’s a good girl,” Adelaide said.  “Until this… flight of fancy.  She’s always done well in her lessons, though it took some convincing for some.”

“Which ones, ma’am?”

“I’d have to ask the tutors to remind myself, but there’s no time for that, is there?  There was an instrument she wasn’t fond of.  It might have been the violin,” Adelaide decided.  Then doubt crossed that young woman’s face.  “Or was that dancing?  It was the same teacher.  The fellow from Eire.”

“It might have been the dancing she took issue with,” Everard said.  “She wasn’t graceful.”

“Is there something she particularly enjoyed?” Gordon tried.  “In food, drink, treats, entertainment, hobbies?  Types of people she spent time with?”

I saw the look on the parents’ faces, as if they were utterly lost in the face of the simplest questions. If we pushed too much further, we risked offending them.

They barely knew their own daughter.

“Would it be better to ask the tutors, then get in touch with us by letter?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” Everard said.

It wasn’t a statement that should have ended the line of questioning, but it did.  The others had sensed much of what I had, or had taken my cue, because they weren’t pressing any further.

“Her looks?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s a pretty girl,” Adelaide said.  “Blonde, but she always wore her hair in that modern style, all curls, tight against the head.  I don’t know if she still will, it’s so much trouble to upkeep.  Not a problem at home-”

She went on at length about her daughter’s physical attributes, the particulars of dress, fashion, style, what looked good on her daughter, grace… I tuned out much of it.  Jamie would remember the key points.

The people’s ramp up to the docks wasn’t so far away from where we’d been sitting.  We made our way up, our footing swaying as a wagon cart made its way down.

The docks weren’t extensive, but they were nearly as crowded as the harbor was with boats.  People were moving things from ship to dock.  Construction material.  Building homes from scratch was expensive and the materials were so often acquired from elsewhere.  When you were going that far, why not go a step further and have the best wood, the nicest marble and stone?

I looked over the decks of the ships, searching, studying.

There.

The wagon cart, with a cage build into it.  The cage was empty, but the crowd of people matched.  Young and old, roughly half of them natives of the Crown States.  The other half were mixed, some white, some black, some Asian.  There were kids and youths in the group.  No chains bound them, but from the way they held themselves, the adults in particular, they might as well have had seven stone worth of shackles binding them from neck to wrist to ankle.

No, the monster that accompanied them was the shackle.  If they tried to run, it would get them, sure as anything.  There had probably been a hapless example.  Or there would be, when one of them worked up the courage to act.

Adelaide was still talking.  I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.

“Lillian,” I murmured, putting a hand on Lillian’s shoulder, leaning close.  I spoke in her ear, just loud enough to be heard by others without being understood, keeping in mind that Adelaide or Everard might have had their hearing improved.  “That thing I was mentioning earlier, we really should…”

Adelaide had trailed off.  She glanced back at us.

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

“It’s minor, ma’am,” I said, “We would work it out ourselves, but in terms of doing this operation as well as it can be done-”

Her eyebrows went up, concern, irritation.

“Clothes, ma’am,” I said.  I pointed at the people on the ship.  “They’re slaves?”

“Indentured workers,” she said, archly.

Of course.

“Whatever you need, let’s get it over with, the captain is waiting,” Everard said.

Just like that, we were onto the deck of the boat with the slaves.

“If I may?” I asked Everard.

He gestured at me.  I was free to handle this.

“Captain,” I spoke to the man who gave off the impression he was in charge.  He certainly seemed like he was working least and worrying the most.

“Boy?” he asked.  Then he took note of Everard Gage, and closer look of my clothing.  “How can I help you?”

“The indentured servants.   Can I ask what happened?”

“Nonpayment of taxes,” he said, indicating the natives.  “Crime.  Those two families, a question of debts, purchased by the Crown.”

“Working off their sentences and debts to the Crown?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Even the children?”

“Except for that little criminal, yes,” he said.  He indicated one boy with pale hair that stood up in every direction.  One of the boy’s arms was shorter than the other.

Even the children, institutionalized and made to work to pay off the family debts.  Sins of the father.

“Where are they bound?”

“Would be Key Isle,” Jamie said.

“Key Isle eventually.”

“But you stop in Lugh first?” I asked.

I saw him hesitate.

It was only a guess, but it was an educated one.  I wondered if Lugh was the type of place that bred freedom fighters who would pay top dollar to free people from the Crown and get recruits, or if it was a question of business, offloading assets that ate more food and got more sickly the longer they were on a boat.  It would be nice to know, because it would inform how we approached a strange city.

I stepped closer to the child that I’d seen in the back of the wagon.  A girl, two or so years younger than me.  Maybe older, but shrunken from malnutrition.  I was brusque, checking her clothes, touching her hair.  She shrank back and I grabbed her firmly.  “Stop that.”

She froze, and looked up at her father, who wore a defeated expression, barely seeming to care about any of this.

“What’s this about?” Everard asked.

I leaned close to the girl, holding her hair to my nose.  While close, I murmured under my breath, “Say yes.”

She wore a puzzled expression as I backed away.  She started to speak, and I stuck a finger up, pressing it against her mouth.  I looked at the captain.  “How much?”

“Hm?  To buy?” he asked.  “Debt for that family is two thousand.  That one’s five thousand, the criminals are working for five years at a dollar a day, if I remember right.  Some for ten years, that one and that one.”

I pulled my finger away, pointing at the girl.  I asked her, “Do you know Lugh?  Have you been?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good,” I said.  I turned to Everard.  “I want to buy them, sir.  Pay their debts and take them on.  All of the children of the debtors, the child criminal, and the parents as well.  It’s extra ears on the ground, we can wear their clothes off the boat, so we don’t draw too much attention.”

“You don’t have the means of disguising yourself already?”  Everard asked.

Yes, of course we do.

I grabbed the girl’s shirtfront, and sniffed it.  “It smells like the seaside, sir.  Sometimes we deal with people who have enhanced senses.  Smelling like we belong is critical.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Everard said.  “If that’s what you need to do, then do it.  We’ll see about convincing the captain of the boat you’re taking.”

“Do you have the wallet?” I asked Gordon, gesturing subtly at the same time.

“No, it’s in one of the bags.  I’ll get it.”

Everard made a ‘tsk’ sound, then said, “Captain, do you know who I am?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Gage.”

“I’ll pay you the next time you’re in this port.  You know I’m good for my word.”

“Yes sir,” the Captain said, trying too hard to avoid smiling.  He put his hands on the shoulders of different members of the group I’d pointed out, speaking to his pet monster, murmured orders.  Telling it not to act, to let them go.  He’d gotten a grotesquely good deal on this, I suspected.  “You have the means of controlling them?”

“We’ll manage,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” he said, in a very ‘it’s your funeral’ way.

Nine people ended up coming, six children and three adults, two men and a woman, roughly half the group black, the other half white.

I didn’t see Everard’s negotiation with the captain, but I did see the captain give the order to move one set of crates off the ship and onto the dock.  Making room.

I kept quiet and stayed focused, avoiding the puzzled glances of the parents and the children until the ship was underway.  Everard Gage and Adelaide Gage stood on the docks, watching us as the crew freed the ship from the dock.  There was probably a nautical term for it.  Unmoored?

“You’re free,” I murmured, to the little girl, gripping the ship railing and staring out over the water.  Lillian was standing right beside me, Jamie behind me.  “After you help us in Lugh, but you’re free.  Debt is paid.”

“Why?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.  The ship started moving.

“Before this is done,” I said to the little girl, “After things settle down and you find a home, you need to learn to fend for yourself, to be clever and be strong.  Because whatever your parents did to get into debt that bad, they’re going to do it again.”

I turned my head, meeting her eyes.

I saw a resigned look, one that suggested she’d long since accepted that she was doomed to rise and fall as her parents did.

“The next time, you can’t get caught when they do.  You have to be able to manage on your own.  Because I’m betting that one of the stops between Lugh and Key Isle is an Academy.”

“There isn’t,” Jamie said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Then they keep you at Key Isle until you know just how miserable existence is there, and then they tell you that you can leave, have your debt cleared, if only you accept doing some work for the Academy.  They’ll test something on you, and you’ll take that deal.  You’ll wish you hadn’t.”

She nodded.

“Go wait with your family below deck.  If there’s too many of us, the captain is going to get annoyed.”

She nodded again, then scampered off.

I liked her.

The ship rose and fell with waves.  Hubris’ claws skittered momentarily on the deck.

“Was that what happened to you?” Lillian asked, quiet.  “With the debt, working for the Academy?”

“Don’t know,” I said.  “Wouldn’t remember if it was.”

She nodded.  She took my hand.

“But it could’ve been what happened,” I said.  “Which is reason enough.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.03 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I watched as Lugh came into sight.  For a city that seemed to have been named as a hybridization of ‘Lug’ and ‘Ugh’, the sprawl I saw before me seemed fitting enough.  It called the shims of Radham to mind, the poor, menial labor focused area of the city, but writ large and dashed across rocky seaside.

Half of the buildings were blocky and brutish, pure utility and the cheapest means of building put to use – stone blocks and the builder’s trees, which seemed to have been grown into and through buildings rather than used as the buildings were first put together.  Of the other half of the buildings, those that weren’t made out to be sloping off to one side by optical illusion and the jaunty slant of rooftops were actively working on falling over, with no optical illusion needed.

A thick, dark smoke rose from chimneys, a thin spitting of rain came from the clouds above, and the odd occupant of the city had a lantern out or a flickering light on and casting orange light, despite the fact that it was still early in the afternoon.

But the capstone, the element of Lugh that made people want to drift close enough to see, should they be on a boat, was the impressive sight of the great superweapon.  Or the ex-superweapon.  It had died at sea and drifted inland, or it had died at the coast and languished there.  Either way, it was too big to really dispose of, so it had been left to rot.  The armored exterior and the skin had proven too resilient for even vermin and disease to eat at, and much of it had calcified over the last decade or two, the remainder falling away.  As new buildings and sections of dock had gone up, they had done so under, over, and around the tendrils and tentacles that flowed from the armored carapace.  Here and there, wood had been grown and brickwork laid to reinforce the structure.

“Professor Ibott’s mentor created that thing,” Jamie remarked.

“Really?” I asked.

The waves were heavy in the bay, and the ship rocked this way and that.  We were heading for the dock, and it didn’t feel like we were slowing down enough to avoid crashing bodily into it.  I tensed a little and gripped the railing.

“They made the project a recurring one, they keep a pack of those things in the water, but the batches are smaller.  At a certain point, with size, you’re not getting any more effective, you’re just showing off,” Jamie said.  He smiled.

I felt like he was making a joke, and I didn’t get it.  That annoyed me, quite a lot.

Was it a short joke?  Because I was shorter than most boys my age?  Whatever my exact age was?

“Sure,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, looking out at the city.

“S’alright,” I said.  Even after months, there were still bound to be growing pains.  I could take a short joke if it meant things would fit together better than they had been.

He leaned over the railing, resting his chin on the back of his folded hands.

I went still.

Bad, complicated memories were springing to the fore.

I swallowed hard, and I looked away, watching as the distance between the boat and the dock dwindled.  The crew of the ship were rushing back and forth, seeing to duties.

Lillian was further down the ship’s port side, crouched over, her arms around Hubris, talking to the dog while she looked at Lugh through the posts of the ship’s railing.  Gordon was below deck.

When he pulled away like that, I knew something was troubling him.  He’d be trying to rest so he could be in the best shape possible when we hit land again.

Talking to Jamie was a good thing, from a strategic standpoint.  I couldn’t just stick to Lillian and pester Gordon and call it a day.  Leaving Jamie out and off to one side wouldn’t breed loyalty or develop the firm bonds, and it would leave me in the dark about him and him in the dark about us when it came to knowing how each of us approached things and thought.

It was a good thing, but it was so dang hard sometimes.

“You’ve been quiet on the subject of bringing the runaway girl home,” I commented.

“I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other,” he said.

“Really?” I asked.

He raised his head up, which was a bit of a relief.

“Really, really?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.  The chin went back down, and he resumed watching the waves break to individual pieces against the rocky outcropping that was the closest thing to Lugh’s ‘beach’.

Leaning forward like that, that position of head and hands, talking while he scanned the surroundings with his eyes, baring a part of himself, even with a singular ‘no’, it was too painfully familiar.

I was tougher than this.

The real Jamie wouldn’t want me to be stewing in emotion to the point I couldn’t function.

“You’re not a stitched,” I said.  “You have a brain of your own.  We won’t bite your head off if you voice an opinion.”

“I know that.  I’ve read the books, I… cognitively, I understand things.”

“But not-cognitively?”

“Not-cognitively,” he said, breaking a small smile, “Not-cognitively, I feel like an impostor.”

“You are,” I said.

I saw him flinch.  He straightened, stepping back a little from the railing and from me.

It dawned on me that the words had actually flowed from my head and out of my mouth.

“That wasn’t what I meant to say,” I told him.

He looked away.  I could see on his expression that I’d hurt him.

This situation was a parallel to that one in more ways than how the tableau was set out.

“Jamie,” I said.

“I can remember,” Jamie said, very slowly, as if he was picking his words out, “What Mary said, back when we first met.  I overheard your conversation with Fray, Mauer, and Percy.  You confessed your manipulation of Mary, and she said, I quote, ‘You’re really terrible at being honest’.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“We’ve been made into such warped, stunted people, haven’t we?” he asked.  “Fair is foul and foul is fair.  I’m someone that was propped up with memories and knowledge, only to be knocked down and forced to pick up the pieces.  You’ve been twisted around, so that it is the lies you tell that are the most just part of you, and the truths you speak-”

“Are the most unjust?” I finished for him.

“No,” he said.  “Not unjust or unfair.  But you’re really unkind when it comes to picking them out.”

If he’d wanted to strike me across the face, it likely would have hurt less.

“I didn’t really mean to be unkind,” I said.

“I know,” he said.  “Like I said, I’ve read the books he left behind.  I know how you operate.  I know who and what you are, in nature and personality.  I don’t think any less of you, I don’t blame you, and I don’t harbor any negative feelings.”

“That’s not-”

“I forgive you, Sy,” he said.

He reached for my shoulder, and I pulled back, without meaning to.  His hand froze where it was.

After a long second, he resumed moving his hand.  He gave me two lame pats on the shoulder.

I could remember tackling Jamie, the roughhousing, me getting his head under my arm, him getting my head under his arm more frequently.  The jabs, no holds barred.

This Jamie stood arm’s reach away, withdrawing his hand.

“I’m going to go down and let Gordon know we’ve arrived.  We might need to wrangle the indentured workers you purchased.”

I nodded.

He turned to leave.

I looked back at Lillian, wondering if she’d seen, or maybe to look for eye contact, to see someone’s eyes with warmth in them, familiarity, genuinely happy to see me.

Her attention was divided between Hubris and the imminent contact with the dock.

“I can’t seem to do anything right when it comes to you,” I said, to Jamie’s back.

He stopped.

“Sorry,” I said.

He glanced back at me.  “It’s alright, Sy.  I know that feeling very well.”

Only my white-knuckle grip on the railing kept me from falling over at the unexpected  contact with the dock.

When I stood straight again, I saw Lillian recovering from the light crash with Hubris’ help.  She stood straight and flashed a smile at me.

There it was.  That look.

I’d needed that.

I held out a hand.  She almost skipped a little as she hurried to take it.

Once she had it, I pulled her close.  She didn’t let go of my hand until I tugged mine out of the way, so the hug I gave her was a stilted one.

Needed that too, if I could admit that much.

“What’s that for?” she asked me.

I gave her a quick peck on the lips, then reached up.  My fingers mussed up her nicely-done-up hair as I put my hands around her ears.  Then I kissed her again, more meaningfully.

I’d expected one of the sailors on the ship to comment or jeer.  What a grave disappointment that was.  I could have made her blush.

I broke the kiss.

“Or that?” she asked.

“Do I need a reason?” I asked, moving my hands so she could hear me.

“You always have a reason, Sy.  For everything you do.”

Hubris pushed his head under Lillian’s hand.  She gave him a scratch.

Lillian’s hair was messier now, but she was still dressed nice, one button at her collarbone undone.  Her cheeks were flushed, her lipstick ever so slightly smudged, and she looked to be more or less in her element and happy, if only for the moment.  I wasn’t sure she’d ever looked prettier.

A reason.

Because you almost make an empty and cold part of me feel full and warm, you make me think it’s possible to leave old hurt behind and heal this wound, and that has nothing to do with your abilities as a field medic or doctor in training, I thought to myself.  Because you’re genuinely nice to look at and be with.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I told her.

“Probably not,” she said.  She shot me a look, serious and accusatory.  Then she smiled.  She linked her arm with mine.  “Let’s get changed.”

“I was going to say something about needing to remove all of that lipstick, first.”

“I was going to already, Sy-” she said.

I reached out, put a finger on her chin, and turned her head my way, so I could kiss her again.

“Oh,” she said.

There, right there, that was the bright red flush and the flustered look that was all mine to enjoy provoking.

“Not that we actually have time,” I said.

“And there it is.  The let-down after raising me up.”

Barely,” I said.  “Cut me some slack.  And the mission does come first.”

“Except I’m dreading this one,” she said.  She looked up as a sailor pushed past us, breaking my hold on Lillian.

We had to hurry to get out of the way as others were pressing in, wanting to access the cargo belowdecks.  I made sure to keep our arms linked so we wouldn’t be separated again, and the two of us headed back to the corner where the others waited with our luggage.

I saw Jamie there.  I saw him smile at Lillian and I in greeting.

When he’d said he’d forgiven me, he’d meant it.

I wasn’t sure how to parse that.  But if it meant keeping the peace and working toward something better, I could do my best to simply take and accept that kind of understanding from him, where I’d never really accepted it from anyone in the past.

I was doing that a fair bit these days, trying to make amends by making changes in ways I wasn’t sure I could explain to the people in question.

The people of Lugh were more heavily modified and tattooed than any group of people I’d seen in the past.  I tried to avoid staring as we passed a collection of six men with roughly identical builds, each with slabs of muscle, hunched-over posture, and arms as thick around as their legs, which were thicker around than I was.  Where the next guy could pick up a given maximum weight, these Brunos could carry two of those ‘next guys’ and the weights besides.

I knew the type – manual laborers, taking some cheap and freely available option to alter themselves.  Radham had one or two that popped up now and again, but for there to be six gathered together, and then more at the docks and some outside the bar down the street, and an eclectic assortment of other types nearby?

It made for very interesting people watching.

“Strategy,” Gordon said.  “How do we handle this?  Is it a kidnapping job?  Hunt and stalk?  Infiltration?  Sabotage?”

“Th-” I started.

“Shut up Sy,” Gordon said, without malice.  I doubted he’d even been sure I’d been replying, the way he was walking ahead of the group with Hubris and some of our recruited help.  “Lillian’s answering this one.”

“Someone woke up grumpy,” I said.

Gordon, Jamie, Lillian and I had dressed down for our exploration of Lugh.  Our clothes weren’t bad, but they weren’t nice enough to stand out.  Lillian wore boots, stockings, a dress, and a sweater with a run in the wool.  Gordon, Jamie and I each had simple slacks in muted colors tucked into our individual boots, simple white shirts, and jackets.  Gordon had donned a cap.

“Um,” Lillian said.  “Thinking about it, I’d rather avoid violence.  That’s not in the cards unless we put it in the cards, I think.”

“Okay,” Gordon said.  “Disappointing, but ok.”

“Who are you?” one of the adults we’d recruited asked.  “You haven’t really explained what’s going on?”

Ugh.  I wished we hadn’t had to bring them to get the kids.  The kids were at least willing to shut up and listen and see if they couldn’t figure things out for themselves, instead of looking a gift horse in the mouth.  When and if they did ask questions, I was betting they’d accept the answers they got.  Not so for the parents.

“We’re looking for someone.  If we find them, we get paid,” Gordon said.  “That same pay that let us buy you free of your debt.”

“There’s a hint in there, if you listen for it,” I said.

“What are we here for then?” the man asked.

“Sylvester had a plan for you, but he mostly wanted to be a nice guy and free you,” Lillian said.

“Lies, balderdash and fuckin’ bullshit, that last part,” I said.

“We’ll probably use you to gather information, Sylvester will walk you through it,” Lillian said, sticking her elbow into my ribs.  “Where you need to go and what you need to listen for, or things you need to say.  We’ll pay for your food and lodging, and when we’re done we’ll pay you enough that you can get where you need to be, or at least until you can get by.”

“Hmph,” the man said.  He didn’t sound happy, but that was an out-and-out lie.  I hadn’t missed the change in his body language the moment Lillian had said ‘pay you enough’.

“No violence, then,” Gordon said.  “What else?”

“Um,” Lillian said.

“You’ve been with us long enough to know how we do things,” I said.  “We need to find the target.  Girl with horns, not that that’s going to help-“

I could see two different girls with horns nearby, and I’d seen a handful since we’d left the harbor behind.

“-the parents didn’t give us a name.”

“They did,” Jamie said.  “You weren’t listening.  Candida Gage.”

“Oh that poor girl,” I said.

Lillian, Jamie and Gordon nodded.

“Okay, we need to find… Candy?”

“I have some ideas about the information gathering, but I don’t know which one is best,” Lillian said.

“What do we want, what are we giving?”

“Giving?” Lillian asked.

“Let’s say we put the word out, start asking questions.  Someone mentions to another someone that some kids and strangers were asking about whatshername.”

“Candida,” Jamie supplied.

“What happens next?” I asked.

“She runs,” Lillian said.  “Leaves the city, maybe, or makes herself harder to find, if she can’t.”

I nodded with approval.  “Question is, can we bait her in, or can we offer something that would make people want to come to us instead of Candida?”

“Saying her parents were hurt?” Lillian asked.  Then before I could shut her down, she shook her head.  “No.”

“No,” I agreed.  “The bond isn’t strong, and they’ve manipulated her enough she’s watching for it.”

“Family doesn’t work,” I said.

“Don’t go and give her the answer,” Gordon said.

“I’m not.”

“You are.  You have an answer in mind, and you’re picking and choosing and subtly pointing the way to that answer.”

I clapped a hand over my mouth.

“I bet you can’t keep that up for two minutes,” Gordon said.

I pointed at him and winked.

“Can’t be family.  Do we push or do we pull?” Lillian asked.  “Rhetorical question.  Thinking out loud.”

“You’ve been spending far too much time around Sylvester,” Gordon said.

“She’s going to run if we push, unless it’s the right kind of push, but I’m not clever enough to figure out how to do that.”

I poked her in the arm, hard, my other hand still in place over my mouth.  When she looked at me, I wagged my finger at her.

“You’re cleverer than you think, Lillian,” Gordon said.

I nodded, in a very exaggerated way.

“I’m a year or two older than most of you and I’m still behind you in terms of my ability to pick things up and put them together,” Lillian said.  “And I’m years behind a real, practiced doctor.  I know I have my strengths, but let me be self-depreciating when it’s accurate, okay?”

I poked her shoulder again.  She swatted at my hand.

“We disagree on how accurate it is,” Jamie said.

“Then let me be self depreciating when I think it’s accurate, then,” Lillian said.

I poked her again.  She swatted at me, and I grabbed her hand, my other hand still clasped to my mouth.  I held her hand and pressed it to her chest, over her heart.

“Sy’s trying to tell you something.  Because he just can’t resist,” Gordon said.

“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.  She tried to pull her hand free and I held on.  In a quieter voice, she said, “And you’re touching my chest, Sy.”

That was maybe the fourth most important thing going on here.

Maybe the fifth.

I let her move my hand away, and extended a finger, pointing at her.  I had to work against her to extend a single finger and tap it against her chest.

“Me,” Lillian said.  She shook her head.

I could see her expression changing.  The disappointment in herself.

I tapped that finger against her heart again.

“Sy’s going to have an aneurysm,” Gordon said.

Lillian’s smile and half-chuckle was more sympathetic for Gordon than anything.

I kicked at his leg.

Clod!  Jerk!  Look at her, read her!  Understand what she’s doing.  She’s frustrated and you’re rubbing it in her face.

“Me,” Lillian mused.  “What can I do that nobody else can?”

I was too busy avoiding Gordon’s retaliatory kick to give her further guidance.

Lillian continued to voice her thoughts out loud, “We know they’re working on something using the books.  What if… we tell them the truth?  That I know Academy science, I am- was a student of the Academy?”

Gordon and I turned our full attention to her.

“They might want help or details, if they’re working with those books.  Or we could tap into that, if we make it clear I’m looking for one of the books too.  Through that, we could find them.  It’s a slim chance, but it’s-”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“Ah, ah, ah!” Gordon said.  He smiled triumphantly.

“Eat your dog’s shit, Gordon,” I said.

“Wow,” he said.

“I hope you puke it up and you get that thing where it goes out the nose, too.”

“You amaze me sometimes, Sy.”

I ignored him, because he was in a prickly, surly mood, and pointed at Lillian.  “Good.”

She smiled, but it was a faltering smile.  “You ended up leading me to the answer you wanted in the end.”

“I actually was thinking along the lines that you could trade your services for information, at first,” I said.  “And I did jump to the idea you gave, but I was too busy with Gordon kicking me to actively lead you to it.”

“That’s sweet, Sy,” Lillian said.  “I don’t believe you.”

I sighed.

I turned and looked back at the two families and the one stray child that were all following us, in earshot, but far enough away to almost count as a distinct group.

They looked so confused and lost.

“Where are we staying?” I asked.

Jamie pointed at a building that loomed above the rest.  Where there were many buildings here that ranged from the dilapidated to outright shacks, the building Jamie indicated was one of the sturdier ones.

I spoke to the families, “Pass on word, ex-Academy student is looking for the book.  If they ask what book it is the student is looking for, they aren’t who we’re looking for.  If you find them, then you get a role in what follows, with a corresponding increase in pay.  We meet at that building at dusk if unsuccessful.  If successful, you can lead them to us at that building, or just take note of who they are and where they are, we’ll handle the rest.”

I saw a number of uncertain nods.

I had my work cut out for me.

“Start out by saying you’re looking for work.  Might be you find something for yourselves, which is great.  But mention that you have a friend who has Academy training, young and not sure what to do.  You can say she’s heard about a book or say she’s looking for a mentor.”

More uncertain nods.

I suspected I could give them a day’s worth of lessons about how to handle this, and they would still have doubts.

“You’ll figure it out,” I said.

“Go in groups,” Gordon cut in.

“Oh yeah.  Dangerous town, you’ll want to be safe,” I said.

“Pairs, trios, or as a family,” Gordon said.  “Keep an eye out for trouble.  We got you out of a bad situation, if you do decide to head off to greener pastures, maybe do us the favor of letting us know what you’re doing, so we don’t waste time looking for you?”

Less than committal nods.

People were so annoying sometimes.

“Go,” Gordon said.

The families scattered, staying to their individual family units.  One family was black, the other white, and the youngest criminal, independent of either family, immediately went off and ignored Gordon’s instructions to stay in groups and left on his own.

“We’ll stay in groups too,” Gordon said.

“Great,” I said.

“Lillian’s with me,” he said.

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it.

“If I put you with her, you’re going to be distracted.”

“Scurrilous lies,” I said.

“Or you’re going to distract her.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

Lillian swatted my arm.  She was so physical like that.  I pitied the man who ended up with her, after I was dead and gone.

“If I take you with me, I’m not sure that pair will have any forward momentum,” he said.

Which was a fine way to say that a pairing of Jamie and Lillian were liable to get their asses kicked.

But, I thought.

I could see the look on his face.  There would be no negotiating, no pleas.

I looked at Jamie, my new partner.

“Right-o,” I said, after managing to muster up something resembling enthusiasm.

“Stay out of trouble,” he said.  Then to Jamie, he said, “Watch him.”

“I’ll try.”

“Best I can ask for,” Gordon said.  He whistled for Hubris.

I watched as he and Lillian walked away.  Lillian glanced back at me.

I looked at Jamie.

It made sense, doing things this way.  On a technical level, I knew it was for the best.

I was doing a lot of those failed, miserable attempts at convincing myself that things were ‘technically for the best’ too, these days.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.04 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.4

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Though it was chilly, without even the sun for light, the man had his shirt off, the straps of his overalls tied around his waist.  He had virtually no body fat on his frame, and more muscle in his forearm alone than I had in my entire body.  Tattoos covered him, his arms and back an artist’s doodle pad of fish tailed goats, mermaids, and other scantily-clad women.

I watched as he lifted a crate onto the bed of a cart.  The crate was filled with metal, and rattled, the cart’s end bobbing as it adjusted to the weight.

He was a ‘Bruno’.  While Bruno was slang for a brute, a guy that was more strong than smart, it also was the term used most often to describe the men and the exceedingly rare women who went to back alley clinics and walked out with more muscle than they’d had when they started.  Sometimes it was drugs, sometimes it was a rewriting of their physical makeup, and sometimes it was grafts, from vat-grown sources or from animals.

Most did it because the cost of the procedure was low, compared to the added dollars they could make being manual laborers.  It meant a year or two to pay off the medical expenses, then a few decades of living like a king.  Relatively speaking, anyway, in a place like Lugh.

But the drugs meant dependency and tolerance.  The rewriting of one’s makeup always had other consequences in the long run.  Grafts from animals meant possible rejection or having to take drugs, and grafts from vat-grown life didn’t always last that long, meaning more surgeries and replacements.

It amounted to the same thing.  A shortened lifespan.  Maybe a halved one.

Curiosity satisfied, I turned my attention briefly to Jamie.  He was studying the man too.

When old Jamie had been erased, had that been erased too?

“Alright,” the man said.  He turned and faced us.  “First off…”

“Sparing you the time you’d need to go buy yourself something,” I said.  I extended a hand into the bag Jamie had.  I held out a massive hunk of fresh baked bread with stuff crammed between the two halves.  Not quite a roll, but too crude to be a sandwich.  We’d bought it and a few more like it at a stall further down the street, for maybe half the amount that I would have had to hand the Bruno to get him talking comfortably.  Jamie handed me a bottle, and the man took that too.

He didn’t eat it, but put it on one corner of the cart for later.

“We’re looking for work,” I said.

The Bruno belted out a laugh.

Altered lungs, to go with an altered heart.  Adding seventeen stone of raw muscle to your frame means needing more oxygen to that muscle, and a heart to push that blood around.

“I’ll give you the rest of my pay for today if you can even lift one corner of the crate over there,” he told me.  “Either of you.”

“We’re friends with this girl, she was an Academy student.  Smart as a whip,” I said.  “We’ve been helping her out, she owes us one.  She’s going to find work here, she’s going to get us work, helping.  We’re helping look, to speed up the process.”

“Ah, my boy,” the man said.  He took a seat on the back of the wagon.  “Let me tell you, I think you’re in for a bit of heartbreak.”

“I think I’m more the heartbreaker type than the heartbroken type,” I said.

He laughed again, as if the idea of me being a heartbreaker was as ludicrous as me hauling a crate full of machine parts.

Jamie moved, beside me, and I glanced at him.  But he was just shifting his weight from one foot to the other.  He wasn’t making a point, reacting to anything, nor was he trying to signal me.

The Bruno’s laugh quickly became a chuckle.

Jamie had reminded me of something pretty dang close to actual heartbreak.  I wondered if losing my best friend counted, or if it had to be romance.

If heartbreak by way of romance was worse, I wasn’t sure how the species had survived this far.  Just thinking about Jamie in passing was enough to knock the air out of me.

It wasn’t hard to put an annoyed expression on my face.  The trick was making sure the expression wasn’t too severe, or that it didn’t slip from annoyance to something else altogether.

“Girls are trouble,” the man said, as he finished chuckling.  “You’re in for disappointment.  It sounds like you gave your time and attention to the girl for a while, but nice and sweet as she seems right now, she’ll drop you in a heartbeat when someone says they’ll pay a fair wage, but they’ll take only her.”

It wasn’t so far off from the reality.

Lillian would leave.  She would work towards her black coat and hopefully being an exemplary professor, one that bettered the world instead of butchering it, but she had that dream she was following, and the Lambs would be a distant memory.  There was a slim chance she’d leave before the Lambs all expired, and with me being last to die, she would inevitably be leaving me.

She would be upset to do it, she would consider staying for us, whether us meant Lillian and me or Lillian and the Lambs, but she would go one way or the other.  Even if I had to make her.

“It seems like I struck home,” the Bruno said.

“She’s nicer than you’re making her out to be,” I said.  He seemed to want to see me as the naive child, so I would play that role.

“They all are,” the Bruno said.  “Very few people throw themselves into bad situations thinking that person is an utter bastard, or that group is a rotten bunch of you-know-whats.  They always make it seem like a good deal at first.”

I nodded slowly, as if I was taking it all in, then looked up, asking, “Have you heard about anything that might do?  A place where she might have an in?”

He didn’t sigh or try to shake any sense into me.  He did offer me a sympathetic smile.  I could see that some of his teeth had been worked on.  The color between them was slightly different, some very white, on contrast to his dark brown skin, tanned a darker brown somehow, despite the meager sun in Lugh.  “A hundred places where she might have an in.”

The only thing worse than not getting an answer to a question was getting too many.

“She’s good, a lot of the critical stuff is fresh in her memory,” I said.  “Do you know anyone good?  The whole… thing there looks well done.  Maybe the doctor who did it?”

The man smiled, looking down at his chiseled body.  I was pretty sure the compliment had struck home, but he didn’t show it.  “Uh huh, no, this isn’t top dollar work.”

I injected just a bit more of a childlike tone into my voice as I spoke, “It isn’t?  But I’ve seen some people and it looks wrong, the way they fit together.  They look ugly.”

“It’s not,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.  Playing at being younger than I was meant I could be more persistent.  “Could we maybe talk to that doctor anyways, then?”

“I don’t know if I want to send trouble to his doorstep.”

“Okay,” I said.  If I pushed, he might get annoyed.  “Drat.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Can you point us in the right direction, at least?” Jamie jumped in.  “Not your doctor, but any one of those hundred places you mentioned?”

“I can.  You come in by boat?”

We nodded.

“You would have passed the market.  Open space between the four towers, the ones that-”

I was raising my fingers, two fingers extended on each hand, pointing straight up.   Two towers on each side.

“-Exactly,” he said.  He reached down, using a thick finger to draw a line between my ‘towers’, “If this is the road, then you want to go to the back corner here.”

I nodded.

“He does back-alley work, more in the way of taking away than giving or fixing.  For people who need money fast.  A few coins for blood or for letting him scrape away some of your body fat, he’ll take a slice of your muscle for more.  The deals he offers in taking away something more substantial, they sound good at first.  I don’t want you lads to think letting him work on you is a good idea, alright?  That’s not why I’m sending you there.”

“We’re not stupid,” I said, injecting some emotion into my voice.  Decrying one’s maturity or lack of stupidity was one of the best ways to seed the idea in people’s heads.

“Sure,” he said, sounding utterly unconvinced.  “Listen, if you let him take your blood, and if he thinks he can get away with it, he’s going to signal some others in that marketplace.  You’ll stumble off, lightheaded, not as focused as you should be, and you won’t make it where you’re going.”

I let my eyes widen.

“The reason I recommend him is he’s easy to find, and he knows the people around town.  Don’t trust him, get your girl and any other friends you can find together and don’t go unarmed, wherever he sends you.  If he’s asking you to meet some people tonight or tomorrow or any time that isn’t now, assume he’s taken all that time to gather his buddies together.”

“This might not be a good idea,” I said, while thinking, this is perfect.

“Might not be, but I’m assuming you don’t have people to look after you?”

I shook my head.  “Some of the other kids have parents, but…”  I trailed off, gesturing in no particular way, as if it was too complicated to voice.

“Yeah,” the Bruno said.  “I understand you.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“Not from experience.  For me, it was being born poor, going to war thinking it could get me out of poverty.  A woman was bound up in it too.  I’m happier to put it all behind me.  It’s good to be here, knowing that I’m putting food on my own table, sleeping in my own bed, and I know where I work tomorrow.  Might be in Lugh of all places, but at least here the authorities are very reluctant to try drafting anyone.  I don’t need to worry about going back out there.”

I nodded.

“I’m not a coward,” he said.

I shook my head.  Saying virtually anything might have prickled him, dashing any goodwill we’d built up.

“Out there, far from a well lit city, the light from the lanterns only reaches out maybe thirty, forty feet, and a lot of the time it’s so dark you can’t see a damn thing beyond that.  You know that if a fight starts, which it can, at any moment, then you and your buddies are just about the most vulnerable combatants on the field.  Not worth it.  Not for the pay, and not for the girl.”

“We-,” I started, “I know what you mean.  About feeling that way, in a dangerous situation.”

He stared me in the eye, as if challenging that assertion.

Then he seemed to accept it.

“You be safe,” he said.  “And I’m not just talking about giving blood to that rat-face bloodsucker in the market.  You’ve got to protect yourself from the ideas others have, the ones they push down on you.  Life’s too short to give years of your life to anyone but you.  Not to an army, not to a boss, and not to a girl.

So you say, but do you know how many years those muscles you bought are going to take from youThere are no old Brunos.

“Sometimes there’s no choice,” I said.

“Mm,” he said.  “Worst of the girls, the armies, the bosses, they’ll convince you of that when it’s not true.”

I nodded.  I let that go without a response from me.  There was a part of me that wanted to play with that some, toy with my expression, convince him that he’d changed my mind or at least started to.  It was the fastest way to win somebody over.  People craved making an impact on the world, especially positive ones.

But he’d been more than fair.  I liked him well enough.

When I next met his eyes, it was with my own, no act, no pretense.  It wasn’t enough of a change to disturb or throw him off, but it was genuine enough.

“Tell you what,” he said.  “If ratface tries to screw with you, let me know.  I’ll set him straight.  If he doesn’t, maybe keep an eye out for me, alright?  Say hi, tell me how it’s going with that girl of yours, and that you’re alright.”

“Can do,” I said.  “Thank you.”

“What’s his name, so we know him when we find him?” Jamie asked.

“Cecil,” the Bruno said.

“And your name?  We’re Simon and James.”

“Adam,” the man said.

“Thank you, Adam,” I said, with my own voice, as I extended a hand.  His hand enveloped mine, as he very gently shook it.

Jamie and I headed on our way.

We left the factory yard behind us.  Half of the people present weren’t working at all, but were drinking, talking, or playing cards.  Many had tattoos, or purely cosmetic changes to their bodies.  Gills, changes to their mouths, teeth, and jaws.  One had an arm similar to Mauer’s, though not so grotesque or non-functional.  The branches that stuck out of it were flowering.

The attitude seemed to be one where the bosses didn’t care, so long as the work got done, and the employees seemed willing to do their share.

“That was easy,” Jamie replied.  “You didn’t even have to manipulate him.”

“I manipulated him lots.”

“But you didn’t have to.”

I shrugged.  “It’s about setting the right context.  It’s late afternoon, bordering on evening, he’s got to be hungry.  That animal inside all of us craves basic food, shelter, and comforts.  If we meet those needs, we become happy.  A man can create a sense of false love in a prisoner he controls by creating that happiness and confusing it.  Give a hungry man a sandwich, frame things right, and that’s most of the work done already, just have to keep the greased wheels spinning.”

Jamie gave me a sidelong look.

“What?”

“What’s the real answer?”

“You’ve known me for maybe half of the four months you’ve-”

“Five.”

“Five months you’ve been with us, while we’ve been shuffling and restructuring teams for whatever missions we wind up doing.  I don’t think you’ve known me nearly long enough to be doing that kind of analysis of me.”

“Bullshit identification, you mean.”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Uh huh,” he said.  “What’s the real answer?  You got on with him pretty well there.”

I shrugged.

“You can distract the others, and they’ll forget to keep a topic going.  But I won’t forget, Sy.  I can keep bringing this up.  The books have answers and filled me in on each of you, but if there’s something I’m missing that makes me feel like I’d understand any of you better, you should know I’m going to go after it until I get answers.”

“But see, there’s a cost to doing that,” I said.  “If you’re obnoxious, then you’ll do irreparable harm to the relationship between yourself and whoever you’re interrogating.”

He raised his eyebrows, looking over his spectacles at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Think long and hard about what you just said.”

“I beg your pardon, sir Jamie, but I’m far from being obnoxious.  I’m playful, clever, I challenge-”

He cut me off.  “You’re obnoxious.  Sometimes.”

“Very rarely.”

“Often enough,” he said.

I held out my finger, pointing it at him, ready to retort.  He reached out, and pushed my hand gently down.

I didn’t want to jump away like I had earlier, when he’d tried to pat my shoulder on the ship’s deck, and in my recollection of that moment and all the negative emotions that had been bound up in it, I lost the retort I’d been planning.

He seized that moment of weakness.  “What’s the answer to my question?  What was going on there?”

I sighed.  He smiled.

“He’s like us,” I said.  “Close enough.”

“You’re talking about the shortened lifespan, with work of that scale.”

“In part.”

“An excellent doctor won’t run into that problem,” Jamie said.  Before I could make a counter argument, he provided it himself, “But he said it wasn’t top dollar work.”

I nodded.

“So he’s like us, but not just because of his short lifespan.”

“He talked about the trap he fell into early, being born poor, seeming to only have one path ahead of him, joining the military, but he made it out to be a mistake.  That he had a choice and he didn’t see the alternative.  I don’t think that’s true.”

Jamie was silent.

“The need to feel free is like the need for food, shelter, and companionship,” I said.  “At best, we do what he did, and tell ourselves that we’re free.  Or we let people convince us.”

“Giving a hungry man a sandwich,” Jamie said.  “Earning his devotion.”

I nodded.  I smiled a little, “It’s kind of funny.  He was treating me like he was the master, teaching the student.  Probably thought I was similar to how he was as a naive youngster.  But here I am, and I’m thinking he’s the one who’s a few years too early to realize that while he was complacent, someone else went and built walls around him to enclose him.”

We turned onto the main road that led down to the market.

I saw members of one of the other families.  The father was trying halfheartedly to get the attention of a couple walking down the street.  I made eye contact with the two girls that were with him, one of whom was the one I’d sniffed.  I beckoned.

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Sy?” Jamie asked, quiet.

The family started to make their way across the street.  With traffic mostly flowing up and down the road that sloped down in the direction of the harbor and the dead sea monster, they had to stop frequently to wait for a chance to pass.  It was all the more difficult because they didn’t want traffic to cut between them and separate daughter from father or sister from sister.

It got more difficult as a coach parked at one spot on the street, the man and the cases stacked on the top blocking light from one of the few streetlamps nearby.  It wasn’t night, but it wasn’t easy to track what was happening in the immediate vicinity while also watching one’s step for puddles, horseshit, and holes.

I didn’t answer Jamie’s question.

At least, this time, he seemed willing to let it lie.

The family joined us.  Father and daughters.  It was more numbers, dealing with someone more unscrupulous.  He might see us as less vulnerable.

“Just stick with us for a minute, let me do the talking,” I said.

The market wasn’t far, and it, thankfully, was well lit by the people trying to sell goods.  Food was predominant, and much of it was food of a very dubious sort.  Slabs of meat were laid out on racks, and meat-like substances laid out on more.  The vegetables in particular looked very questionable, handled enough that bruises were omnipresent, and this place was far from any nearby farmland, from the looks of it.

There was art, too, and one table of books that saw a surprising amount of attention from the crowd.  At two stands, in areas that were partially curtained off, artists worked to tattoo people, while others looked on.

I passed by the table of books, and I glanced back at Jamie.  There was a whole row of dime store novels, and more serious texts.  I let my fingers trail the illustrated covers.  The Monster’s GamesThe Red Haired Girl and the Killer WitchMousetrap.  I felt like there were a half dozen conversation starters on the tip of my tongue.

But Jamie had no interest in the slightest.  His attention, instead, was on the nearest tattoo artist.

I wasn’t sure why it hit me as hard as it did.

I tried to regulate my breathing.  Deep breath, exhale.

It was such a small thing, so minor.  I should be able to deal with it.

Damn Gordon, for making me do this with Jamie.  I knew his reasons, he liked to brute-force solutions.  Jam us together, make this work.  If it couldn’t, it couldn’t.

But I couldn’t breathe.

I wiped at one eye, and to make sure it wouldn’t look weird, I ran my hands through my hair.  The drizzle from the sky was thin, not enough to make my hair wet much faster than it dried on its own.  But there was moisture enough to pull my hair back.  I stared directly up.

Jamie seemed to notice me looking skyward.  “Getting darker.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I managed to say it without sounding funny.

It was as though there were three Sylvesters in one body.  One that sounded and acted mostly normal, one that wanted to cry, and a third that wanted to overturn that table of books and do as much damage to as many things in arm’s reach as possible.

Anger at this situation, that Jamie was gone and yet still here.  Anger that I was having a conversation with him and there was no heart in it.  Every time we talked it was like he was challenging me, sticking me with the hard questions and situations.

As if that last conversation I’d had with old Jamie kept coming back to haunt me.  As if he’d never forgotten it.

Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Sy?

I managed to take in and release a breath without a hitch.

It wasn’t a question of convincing, but it might have been a question of conviction.

But there were other things to focus on.

Breathe.

That part of me that wanted to hurt things lingered, frustrated, latent, looking for an outlet that it would probably find.

It wasn’t the best way to approach Ratface Cecil.

The booth was where we’d been told it was.  He was in the process of picking bits of chicken off of a bone, while two bodyguards stood on either side of him.  One bodyguard ate, the other leaned against the base of the squat, blocky tower, his arms folded.  The one that was eating looked augmented.  He had claws on one hand.

This damn city.  There was no grace to it.

Cecil in particular, looked like the inverse of a proper doctor.  His nose was small, his mouth and teeth large, and he didn’t seem to have enough forehead between his thick eyebrows and his hairline.

That said, I wasn’t particularly inclined to like him from the get-go, so my perception of him might have been skewed.

‘Ratface’ choked down his food, scooting his chair forward, eager to see to a customer.  My eye roved over the tubes, tools, and syringes that lay on the table behind him.

“Blessings on you,” he said, in a way that came across as very insincere.

Religion.  Well, it would flourish in a city like Lugh, where the Academy held less sway.

“Blessings on you as well,” I said.

There must have been something in my voice, because I saw Jamie’s head turn in my peripheral vision.

“Well,” he said, “Look at you, look at you.  I don’t know if you have much to spare, with what I buy.”

“I was hoping to have a talk,” I said.

“So long as we’re talking, customers might be keeping their distance.  It’s a fact of the trade, people don’t want it to be widely known they need money, it’s why I’m tucked away in this corner, accessible but off the beaten track.  Now, if you have a complaint about a friend or family member of yours…”

“No,” I said.  “A business opportunity.  I want to sell someone.”

His eye turned to Jamie.  His head cocked.  “Slightly more substantial, I could draw a bit of blood without worrying about taking it all.  Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m a boy,” Jamie said.

“And he’s not for sale,” I said.

“One of them?  All of them?” Cecil asked.

“I’d like to sell an acquaintance.  A girl with Academy training.  She’s been asking around, looking for work.  If you arrange a buyer for her talents, I’ll set her up.”

Cecil studied me, and his eyes met mine.  The anger and frustration was still there, simmering beneath the surface, and I suspected he could see it.

“To my clients, this would be, how to put it,” Cecil said, “More economical, because her services wouldn’t be paid for on an ongoing basis?  Are you old enough to understand what that means?”

I nodded once.

“It’s possible,” he said.

As I’d done with Adam, I now spoke to Cecil in Cecil’s own language, reflecting the way he most likely saw the world, in terms of opportunity.

It wasn’t pretty, there were loose ends and issues to cover, but it would get the job done fast and cut straight to the meat of things.  We couldn’t dig through a hundred different back-alley doctors and groups to find what we were looking for.

I couldn’t do that, not like this.  Not with moments and things catching me off guard.

We’d start at the top, with the most unscrupulous person who had the most money and power, then keep carving away until we found what we were looking for.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.05 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.5

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I tried to avoid being shoved out of the way and lost as I worked my way through a jam of people.  A counter stood before me, and I worked to hold on, periodically driving an elbow or shoulder into the side or hip of someone beside me.  I smelled food, but it was nearly drowned out by the smell of smoke.

“Here,” I heard.  “For the little one.”

Little.

I pushed forward, reaching up over the counter.  The man at the counter handed me sacks, low quality cloth with steam pouring out through the weave.

“Get some money back if you bring the bags and plates on your next visit!” he called out, but I was already leaving, pushing to exit as the crowd pressed forward to the counter.

The agitation and frustration I’d felt earlier was lingering.  I’d been acting on it as I made the plan with Ratface, but it hadn’t helped.  Instead, the knowledge that a situation was imminent was maintaining the feeling and feeding that fire.

I made it through the worst of the crowd.  Jamie and our recruited family of helpers were waiting, sitting on a set of stairs at the side of a shack.  I deposited the sacks on a stair, and then started opening one up while Jamie handled another.

The plates and forks were frail enough to break in half with my raw strength, stacked three high in each sack, with the food on one plate sticking to the bottom of the plate above it.  It made for delicate, difficult handling as we distributed the plates around the group.

I ended up with a plate with a clean bottom by serving myself last.  Questionable and hard-to-identify meat was drizzled in an unidentifiable sauce.  The vegetables had probably been bought from a vendor, too bruised or manhandled to sell, cut up and grilled until the damage wasn’t visible.

I grabbed the bone and raised the meat to my mouth, biting in.

It was far from being terrible.

I was still chewing when I saw the others.  They were looking at the plates with skepticism, Jamie included.

“What is it?” Jamie asked.  “What animal?”

I shrugged.  I put the plate in my lap and forked some vegetables.  Those, I winced as I put them in my mouth and chewed.

Heapings of salt, but not bad otherwise.

Jamie gave the meat a try, starting with a nibble.

Question.  I gestured.  I pointed at the food.

His reply wasn’t a gesture, but the so-so wavy motion of the hand.

I nodded.

Sitting still was hard, even if it was for something as necessary as eating and taking in that necessary fuel.  I’d volunteered to grab some food to get away and try to find some space to think.

Finding that I could communicate effectively with Jamie, even if it was through gestures, was the first thing to ease that feeling, like I was some warbeast in a cage that was too small, throwing myself against the bars.

Not to say it was easy.

My eyes went to the ground.  I was willing to take a minor upturn in our interaction for what it was.  Just focus, don’t get distracted, don’t make this messy.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “How much do you have on hand?”

“Food?”

“Funds.”

“Why?”

He indicated the family that was standing off to one side.  “We should get them food.  Food they’re willing to eat.”

“It’s doable,” I said.

“You’re saying that, but you can endure poisons that would put down a horse, your body is actively hostile to parasites, and most diseases won’t get traction in you either.  You could eat pretty much anything and not worry.  Don’t blame others if they’re a little more picky.”

I looked at the father and his two daughters.  They hadn’t touched the food.

I quieted that angry, restless part of me that wanted to make comments.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  I fished in a pocket and came out with cash.

“Littlest one stays with us,” I said.

The father accepted too quickly, taking the money.  It wasn’t much – not enough to buy a meal in Radham, but enough to buy a meal here in Lugh.

Jamie spoke, “There was a bakery just down the street.  It’s hard to screw up bread, and their sandwiches were decent enough, but you should expect a long wait time.  Don’t come back here.  Go to the rendezvous point.”

The man nodded.

I watched him go, one hand between his eldest daughter’s shoulders.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “Before we move forward with this plan, you should tell Lil.”

“I was thinking about that.”

“You should tell her what she’s getting herself into.”

I winced.

Was there a way we could just communicate in gestures?  The simplest, most bare-bones method of exchanging information, a methodology mostly focused on exchanging basic ideas and communicating actions?  On coordination?

Could we do that for a few months, and see if the talking thing became easier?

Just a few sentences in, and he was pressing me, challenging me, putting me in a no-win situation.  Tell Lil, screw up the group dynamic, push, shove, do this, do that, you’re wrong, Sy.  Not that he was saying it outright, but it felt like he was on me like a dog on this haunch of mystery meat, biting deep, hurting, always seeming to communicate, ‘you’re wrong and your way of doing things is wrong.’

That restlessness was growing.  I felt much like I did after a dose of the formula, in the days after my appointments.

I chewed, while thoughts simmered and burned in my head.

I swallowed before answering, “Maybe.”

“You have to think about things from her perspective.  Even for a moment, if you pull this false betrayal, she’s going to believe it.  It will do irreparable damage, Sy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Does that mean you’re going to tell her?”

Maybe,” I said, again.  “She’s a bad actor.  It might do more damage if she gives away the show and the Lambs get killed and she gets sold into slavery, doing Academy stuff until the day she gets worked to death.  I’ll consider all of the options and make an informed decision.  Trust me.”

An imaginary warbeast within me slammed into the cage.  Onlookers wondered if the door would hold.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “You-”

“Jamie,” I cut him off.  The word was angry and sharp enough that he stopped dead in his tracks.  “Stop.  Please.”

He drew in a deep breath and sighed.  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, then.  Do I keep my mouth shut when it comes to the team, the strategy?”

“Lillian did.  She hung back, observed, learned how the team works, and she’s an honorary Lamb now,” I said.  My emotions were coloring my tone, but I felt like the words were pretty dang reasonable.

“I know about Lillian, I’ve read the books,” he said.  “Why even say that?  Are you implying I’m not a Lamb?  That I haven’t gone through similar experiences, or that I’m somehow less?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I said.  “Not in the slightest.”

“From what I’ve seen, in how the group interacts with Ashton and how the group interacts with me, in how you interact with Ashton and how you interact with me, there are a hell of a lot more accommodations being made for him than for me, Sy.”

My mind was on five tracks at once, playing into the conversation from various angles, figuring out what I needed to say to get through to him, and four of those five tracks were dangerous ones.  Ones where I’d say something and immediately regret saying it.  No sooner did I banish one than the next popped up.

I was practically speaking through grit teeth now, as I tried to stay diplomatic, “There’s an adjustment period, Jamie.  Yes, it’s a bigger adjustment with you than with Ashton.  He’s still a puppy.  You’re-”

“Whatever the dog equivalent of spoiled goods are?” Jamie asked.  “A bad memory?”

“No,” I said.  “Yes, but not- that’s not the problem, Jamie.  The problem- the times when it’s hardest to accommodate, it’s when you act like you know us.”

“When I know you, you mean.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve read the books, Sy.  I’ve read about the Lambs, I’ve read about the past jobs.  I’m in a weird, freaky place where I’m new but not new.  I’m like him but not like him.  I rationally know what it is I’m supposed to be and do and the role I’m supposed to fill, and somehow that ends up being wrong.  It’s as if it’s impossible to do anything right in your eyes.”

Our food had been forgotten.  The restlessness inside me was too great, and I knew if I got emotive or started gesturing, the plate might fall to the ground.  I put it aside.

Breathe.

There were any number of escape routes, any number of ways I could just end this conversation.  Stalk off, cool my head, say something, do something.  But I felt cornered.  If I walked away I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to come back in a timeframe that counted.  If I said anything more, I wasn’t sure there was a way of coming back from that.

Out of the six or seven answers that sprung to mind, ways I might answer him, every single one felt like one I might regret.

If I couldn’t pick the right words, I had to at least say it calmly.

“Okay,” I said, “That’s a starting point.”

Speaking slowly.  Trying to pace myself.

He nodded.  He didn’t cut in.

“I know it’s hard for you,” I said.  My voice didn’t have any strength in it as I said, “It’s hard for me.”

Another nod.

“I want this to work, I want the team dynamic to be good.  I want us to remember his memory in a good way, in a way he’d want to be remembered.  Including that part of him that lives on through- as you.”

I worried he would buck, that he’d say something akin to, ‘That’s not my responsibility.’

“I wholly agree,” Jamie said.

I swallowed hard.  I had to actually work to unclench my fist, my fingers trembling as I did it.  Once I was done, I clasped my hands together, leaning forward, elbows on my knees as I sat on the stair.

“What you said, about the role you’re supposed to fill.”

“The part where I said ‘I know what it is I’m supposed to be and do and the role I’m supposed to fill, and somehow that ends up being wrong’?”

“That part, yeah.  That’s old Jamie.  We did without him for a while.  You can’t be him.  We adjusted, we adapted.  I-”

“You tried to fill his shoes and you struggled,” Jamie said.

“No,” I said.  “No, not that.”

I reached down, and I pulled the ring off my thumb.

“There’s a sketch of that in one of the volumes,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

“But you know that.  It was one of the books you, uh, borrowed from the office and took to Brechwell.”

I nodded again.  “Took it off of someone I killed.  She had pictures, a history, an existence.  It’s a reminder, that the people I’m dealing with… they have existences beyond this one moment we’re in.  The one crisis we’re facing.  It’s stupid and it’s incomplete, but it’s one piece of what I’ve been working on.”

“A piece of?”

“A conscience?  Building a better Sy?” I asked.  I shrugged and put the ring back on.

“I can remember exactly what you’ve said, the order where you’ve been saying it, but I can’t follow your thread of thought.”

I nodded.

I looked down at my hands, and moved the ring around my thumb.  More resistance than there used to be.  “Jamie used to always, I think of it as dancing.  Sometimes in step, sometimes not, but complimentary.  He would keep me in check, and he would back me up when I needed it.  I get the feeling you’re trying to do the same things, following the cues from your books.”

“Sometimes.  But I get the feeling you’re imagining me trying to do that when I’m just trying to be a member of this team.”

“I don’t need you to be my conscience, Jamie.  I don’t need you to challenge me or check me or question me, okay?”

“What am I supposed to do, then?  When it looks like you’re charging into a bad situation, or treating a teammate wrong, I can’t speak up?  I have to keep my mouth closed, when everyone else is free to do what they want?  I can’t be a shadow, Sy.”

“Not be a shadow, but shadow us.  Get to know me before you make assumptions about what I’m doing or how I’m operating.  I’ve changed from the person that appears in the books, and some of the stuff in there isn’t as accurate as you think it might be, okay?  There are gaps.  I know there are gaps, events he didn’t write down.”

Now I was thinking about the day I’d lost Jamie.  Our last conversation.  My face tried to screw itself up in emotion, I managed to fight it off.  Deep breath.

He studied me.  He was almost as incensed as I was, as his eyes scanned my face.  He didn’t clench his fists or hold himself like he wanted to throw a punch, but he was tense in a different way.

“Sy, you tried to emulate Jamie.  You tried to fill the gap, use improvisation and tricks to be him.  You studied those books and tried to use your ability to learn to… I don’t know what you had planned, build up your memory retention, at the cost of something else?”

I shrugged.

“I would just like you to consider for a moment, that maybe, taken as a whole, the books contain more information than you seem-”

“Fuck the books!” I said, lunging to my feet as I said it, bringing my hand down on the nearest available thing, the plate of cooling meat I’d set down on the stair, and sent it spinning skyward.  Jamie flinched as it came down a foot behind him, cracking on the step.

Jamie set his jaw, clenching his teeth, but he didn’t stand.

“I have changed from the person you got to know from the books.  I am changing.  And maybe I’m changing slower or I’m more twisted in how I grow than some…” I gestured at myself, “But don’t assume you know me.”

“There’s a code,” he said.

Breathing hard, standing on the stair, I looked down at him.

“It’s not something you’d pick up on a hundred reads, unless you had a perfect memory and the ability to pull it all together, or if you were actively looking for it.  A letter and number combination in a poem.  Words scratched into that scratchy style of drawing he did, that you’d only see if you knew the right place to look.  His words to me, spread out over pages, backward and forward.  Private thoughts.  Filling in details.  He knew the Academy would read the texts and there were details he didn’t want them to know, about the Lambs, questions of loyalty here and there.  About him.  About you.”

The anger was dying with every sentence.  I felt tears welling up.

“You borrowed the last book.  I know you read it, looking for insight or answers.”

I shook my head.

Read it over and over and over.

“There’s no entry just prior to his death, he didn’t have time to write,” Jamie said.  “But I know what he was planning on telling you.  I can connect the dots.  What you’re saying, I understand it.”

I shook my head again.  I wasn’t disagreeing, so I didn’t know why I was doing it.

“He wanted to equip me to be a real member of the Lambs.  And that’s part of why it’s so monumentally frustrating that you’re holding me back, keeping me at arm’s length.”

I wanted to ask.  I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“If the Academy found out, if you decided to use it against me, if something went wrong and anything slipped… it would end the Lambs projectThe dirty secrets, the trials and tribulations.  I thought I should keep it to myself, compartmentalize it, because it was and is such dangerous knowledge.  Now you know.  And so does she, I suppose.”

I turned my head.  Down on the lowest step, trying to be as small as possible, was the youngest member of the family I’d sent off to the bakery.

Forgot, I thought.

“I spent months,” I said, my voice hollow.  “Reading the books, studying how he described me, comparing how he wrote about me to how he wrote about the other Lambs.  I’ve agonized over it.”

“Good,” Jamie said.

The word was like a solid punch to the ribs.

“You had the answers all along?”

“Since we left Brechwell and I read the books you had.”

I almost cussed at him right there.

“Like you said,” Jamie told me, “You’d changed.  I had no way of knowing who you’d become in the months since.  If I told you the wrong thing, you might have told the Academy.  Or done something else.”

“What were you waiting for?” I asked.

“This, I suppose.  This conversation.  The point where I could be sure I was talking to the real Sylvester.”

I was still divided.  A part of me was angry again, wanting to cuss at him and throw a punch for holding that back.  Another part still wanted to cry.  The final part was rational, collected if not calm, capable of putting on a mask.  Clever Sy.

“I want you to understand, I have a greater understanding of what’s been going on-”

Angry Sy shook his head.

Jamie was silent for a moment.  Then he said, “You want to talk about him.  The old Jamie.”

I floundered.

There was nothing to ask.  No entry to inquire about.  We’d gone from my conversation with Jamie to hunting Avis, to a conversation with the Duke, straight to appointments.

“I wronged him,” I said.  My voice sounded simultaneously too loud and very far away.

Jamie nodded.

“I wronged him and then he went away.  He had no reason to stay.”

“He had a lot of reasons to stay, Sylvester.  But staying got very, very hard.  All of the details and knowledge made for a big burden.”

“And a little push-”

No.”

The rain was starting to come down hard.  Jamie reached over and put three of the untouched meals into a sack, tossed his remaining food into the heaped detritus at the side of the stairwell, and put the plate over top of the meals to cover them from the rain.

“It got very hard to stay.  He stayed longer than he might have otherwise.  It was time to pass the baton.”

I shook my head.  Comforting lies.

“One of the last messages,” Jamie said.  He stood from the stair, flipping up his hood, and walked down to the dirt at the side of the stairs.  “Below the eye of a cat he’d drawn.  Lines scratched out in a cross-hatch style to deepen the shadows in the eye socket.  One of the more common forms of the code.  Five…”

He drew a line in the dirt.  Slanted.

Then another, different angle. “Seven…”

Then another.  “…teen.”

Another, horizontal, “Nine.”

“What’s the message?” I asked, impatient.

“Book five.  Page seventeen.  Line nine.  Word three.  Help.

I winced.

Book two.  Page two.  Line one, word three-”

“That would be the early days,” I interrupted.  Interrupting because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“Your first meeting,” he said.

Our first meeting?  Then-

Jamie said, “It was one of the very few imperatives he gave me.  I think he didn’t want to give me too many orders, in case I rebelled.  ‘Help Sylvester’.

I turned my head, staring out across the streets of Lugh.  More lanterns and lights were being ignited, many set beneath covers and awnings to protect them from the rain.

“He cared about you.  Above all else, you were his best friend.  That came first.  Whatever you might have said, I think he knew you well enough to know your words or actions didn’t come from the heart.”

“They still hurt him.”

“Yep,” Jamie said.  “And you deserve to feel bad about that.  But I think you’ve agonized over it for long enough to do it penance.  If my opinion counts for anything.”

“It counts,” I said.  “I’m not convinced, but thank you.”

He nodded.

I watched as more lights went up around Lugh.  Some clever dick had had the bright idea of putting a large lamp within the eye socket of the titanic warbeast that loomed over the southwest end of the city, so it glowed as it gazed out over us.  The rain made the light form halos.

The tension was gone.  Angry Sy, Crybaby Sy and Clever Sy didn’t feel like such different creatures, anymore.

The girl still sat on the steps, trying not to participate or get caught up in the discussion.  She hunched forward, shoulders drawn forward, getting wet.

I pulled off my jacket, and I draped it over her.

Jamie reached out.  He put a hand on my shoulder, and I didn’t flinch or pull away.  I even found the courage to meet him in the eye.  I felt the now-familiar pain at seeing Jamie’s ghost.

The pain and the anger were there, to be sure, the warbeast still in its cage.

Maybe it was a beast I could tame, now, and grow easy with.

“We should reunite with the others,” Jamie said.  “It’s getting past time to rendezvous.”

I nodded.  “Come on, kid.  Let’s go find your dad and get you something to eat.”

She gave me a wary look.

All of that must have been so confusing, I thought.  My thumb touched the ring, a reminder.

“Sorry,” I told her.

The wary look remained.

“You mentioned helping to kill someone,” Jamie murmured, as we walked.  “She heard that.”

If the girl heard the murmur, she didn’t react.  Her eyes were fixed forward, her profile still small.

“Oh,” I said.  “They deserved it though.  They always do.”

If she heard that, then she gave no sign.

The others were gathered as we got back to the rendezvous.  They were warm and dry, sitting on the covered patio of a stout, sturdy building.  A tiny fire blazed on a portable stove between them, little more than a can with firewood in it and a grate over the top.  It looked like the others were finishing their meals.

The little girl I’d sniffed shucked off her coat, letting it fall to the ground, as she reunited with her sister.  Not so much her dad.

“Luck?” Gordon asked.

“I have a plan,” I said.

“Good,” Gordon said.  “Because we chased five different leads, and they didn’t turn up anything.”

“Sit down, Sy,” Lillian said, patting the seat on the bench next to her.  “Warm up and dry off before you catch your death of cold.”

I did, crossing the distance and plopping myself down.

Lillian rested her head on my shoulder.  The very top of her head pressed against my cheek.

“I’m wet,” I said.  “You’re going to get wet by proxy, getting close like this.”

“I know,” she said.  She dropped her voice.  “But I thought you might need it.”

Her left hand found my right hand and held it.

“I’m supposed to look after the Lambs,” she said.  “Keep ’em in the best shape possible.  I’m expanding my repertoire, when it comes to you.”

I nodded.  Jamie was taking the mystery meat and putting it at the stove’s edge to heat up again.

“You’re good at what you do,” I said, staring into the fire.

She made a happy sound.

Hubris was edging closer to the meat on the stove.

“I’ll give you some, Hubris,” Jamie said.  “Don’t worry.”

Hubris relaxed.

“The plan,” I said.  I immediately had the attention of the Lambs, minus Hubris, who was still keeping an eye on the meat.  “It puts you at risk, Lillian, front and center.”

“Is it a good plan?”

“Not a polished one, but it’s the best one I can figure out to get results.  If you don’t want to, we’ll figure something else out.  This is your mission, you take point.”

She nodded, giving my leg a pat.  “Okay, Sy.  How long do we have to figure it out?”

“‘Til midnight,” I said.  “We’re going to sell you into slavery, and I’m fairly sure the guy that’s buying has a small army of thugs under his control.  But he’ll have answers we want.”

“That’ll do,” Gordon said.  He reached forward to tear off a bit of meat and throw it to his dog.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.06 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We approached the meeting place.  It was down by the water.  The ‘head’ of the mummified sea monster of Lugh loomed over us as we made our way down to the warehouses.  A short bridge allowed easier passage over a tendril that lay across, between, and through buildings.  The smell of the ocean that filled Lugh was overpowered by a smell of rotting seaweed and fish.  I’d made the mistake of opening my mouth, and the smell became a taste, clinging to my tongue.  I wasn’t alone; Hubris kept snorting, as if trying to clear his airways.

Lanterns lit up a warehouse and a cast of figures.  Ratface was there with his bodyguards, standing off to one side, ostensibly the mediator, middleman and negotiating official.

The buyer was there too.  I’d briefed the others based on what Ratface had told us.  He went by Giles, and he had money to spend.  He owned several homes in one of the nicer parts of Lugh, up the rocky hills above the sea monster’s body, and had refitted several to be labs with dormitory-like setups for the people who worked for him.

The placement of the homes was interesting.  As far as I could tell, the setup meant that if and when the Academy got serious about cleaning up Lugh, they had to make their way through the entire city, past Giles’ eyes on the street, through the awkward little maze of routes that spilled out beneath the dead warbeast’s body.  That would get them as far as the foot of the mountain – they still had to climb the steep and winding road to get up the mountain a ways to the houses poised on the rocky edges.  By the time they got that far, the homes would be empty of anything incriminating.

Making one’s way down and away would be equally troubling.  The people who worked for him most likely weren’t given the freedom to make day trips to the city.

From a tactical standpoint, the little bit of information we’d been able to pick up told us that Giles was known to the local underworld as the Fishmonger.  He had a small army of thugs, and a set of modified humans as his elite soldiers.  One sixth of Lugh belonged to him, which wasn’t as much as some, but his sixth included the harbor.  Ships that didn’t pay the price to the men on the docks ran the risk of expensive collisions and complications.

Big bucks.

“Lil,” I murmured, “From here on out, I might be a bit of an asshole.”

“You say that like it’s new,” Gordon said.

“Ha ha ha,” I said, monotone, before turning back to Lillian, “A lot of this depends on how well you sell it.”

She huffed out a sigh.  Nervous.

I kept my eyes forward and didn’t touch her to reassure.  “Right now, this is an opportunity.  Think about how you felt when you were going to meet the Gages.  If you’re nervous, tap into that, these are scary guys, you’re a bit unsure now that you’re here.  Right?”

“Right,” Lillian said, quiet.

“When they close the net, seize you, whatever it is, you’ve got to tap into something else.  Do you remember the argument in Brechwell?”

“I remember.”

“You really, genuinely thought I wanted to support Fray, ignoring what you were saying about the dangers these books pose.  Might be a starting point.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t try to fake believing.  Let yourself believe.  Let the walls down.”

“I think I focus on reality too much to fall into the fantasy like that,” Lillian said.

“Would be easier if Helen was here.  She could give you good tips.  Here we are.”

We were getting close enough to be within earshot.

The Fishmonger.  He was average height for a man, but had a stooped posture and a strange shape about him that made him appear shorter than he was.  He was built like a lump, the edges of his chin merging into a thick neck, which merged into narrow shoulders in turn.  His fingers were stumpy as they stuck out of his sleeves, his thumbs hooked on the pockets of his coat.  His face was heavy, with jowls, a pug nose, and lower eyelids so thick and droopy they looked as though they’d been badly grafted on over his existing pair.  His thick coat hung down nearly to his ankles.

He didn’t look wealthy.  The wide-brimmed hat he wore and the coat were the same sorts the poorer people on the street wore.  I guessed he was the sort to pinch pennies, except where food was concerned.  If I assumed he’d dressed up for this, then he usually looked worse.

If he was looking to be incognito, he’d gone the wrong way about it.  Of the group of people with him, four were heavily modified.  Two had had their skin swapped out for thick scales.  One was covered in spines, and both spines and skin were a ghastly, unhealthy pallor.  The fourth was big, slouching against a wall, a head taller than the tallest of the other three beefy, augmented foot soldiers.  His skin was oil-slick black and glossy.

All four wore the same coats the six unaltered thugs of the group did, the one with the spines being the only one to buck a trend of heavy raincoats and brimmed hats.  Spines wore something more suited to winter weather, puffy, and wore no hat.  He didn’t look happy, and I wondered if it was solely because of the wet and cold.

“Glad you could make it,” Ratface said to me.  The look he gave me was intended to communicate something.  That the plan was still on, probably.  I was more focused on Giles the Fishmonger.

The Fishmonger extended a stubby finger, letting it rove over our group.  Jamie and Gordon were with us, as was Hubris.  Two of the adults from our recruited group were with as well.

Giles’ short finger pointed at Lillian.  “You’re her?”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

“Fifteen?”

“Yes sir,” she said.

“How many years at the Academy?”

“Three, but I took classes at a preparation school before.  I’m- I was a year and a half ahead of my peers.  I guess I still am?”

Good.  But she sounded terrified.  Uncertain, to the point where I could imagine Giles calling her a liar, and her reflexively agreeing.

“A year and a half ahead,” Giles said.  “That’s a problem.”

“A problem?”

Come on, Lil, stay on track here.

I would have elbowed her if I could’ve done it without being seen.

Instead, I raised my hand up, well within Lillian’s field of view, and fixed my hood.  The sudden motion made several of the Fishmonger’s bozos move their hands in the direction of their waistbands.

Fishmonger Giles wasn’t watching them, but saw Lillian’s reaction.  He turned his head and looked at his men.  “Don’t you worry about them.  You’re new to Lugh, you don’t have a grasp of the local politics yet.  Trust me, if you end up working for me, then you’ll be happy to have protection like them.”

Happy?  That rang out as a lie in my ears.  The only protection they would offer would be protecting Giles’ investment.

“You said there’s a problem?  Please, sir, we really need money.  We haven’t been able to get much, and it disappears so fast.  I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been in my life.  I’m good at what I do.  I’m a fast learner, if I don’t know something already.”

“You might be too good.”

“That’s not possible,” Lillian said.  Then she seemed to realize what she’d said.  “Sorry, sir, for speaking out of turn.”

That came across as real, but it was real.  It had dug past the act and the moment to prick at the real Lillian, the part of her that likely connected with Mary on a level.  She connected with Mary because the both of them believed that there was no such thing as being overqualified, too good, working too hard, knowing too much.  Though their paths were very different ones.

The Fishmonger wagged a finger.  Not as a reprimand, but gesticulating.  “I’ll show you.”

He gestured, and his altered bodyguards parted, opening a way.  Spines pulled a door open as he stepped aside.

The Fishmonger made his way into the building, raising one hand to beckon us with a finger.

The trap awaits.

“Sir?” Lillian asked, “Could you tell me instead?  We’re outnumbered, and-”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “That guy there-”

Ratface gave me a nasty look.

“Cecil,” Jamie supplied.

Cecil said Mr. Giles was trustworthy.  We asked around before we met you at the rendezvous point, and he’s popular around town.  He’s the richest man in the city, which is why he needs bodyguards.”

All lies, but lies that made sense, built up my end of the scenario, that I’d put her to work.

“I understand, but-”

I reached out to take her hand.  “You promised, Lil.  That you would help us out.  We’ve gotten you food, we’ve kept you safe, don’t spoil this now that we’ve got a chance.”

Giles watched us out of the corner of his eye, waiting.

I squeezed.

“Okay,” Lillian said.

I let go of her hand and gave her a push.

Walk into the trap.

The key thing to do here was to keep options open.  I could have followed her, but if something happened, or if he had a specialized means of securing her, I didn’t want to get caught by it, whether it was a tranquilizer or a net.  I needed to be free to move to help her.

Instead, I followed her halfway, so she wouldn’t walk forward and see us standing still, my pace slowing as she got closer to the door.

She reached the doorway, and I saw her hands go to her mouth.  She made an incoherent noise.

My heart skipped a beat.  Against my better judgment, I approached, until I stood right behind her, Spines to one side of me, one of the scaly men to the other.

The inside of the warehouse was well lit, but the lights flickered and gave the interior a yellow cast.  I could see black things swimming in the liquid of the long lightbulbs, long and snakelike.

Lying across a table was a man.  He was strapped down, and now and again he jerked a limb, straining the leather straps to their limit.  His back arched, and I could see his naked torso, where something moved beneath his skin.

“He got on the wrong side of one of my other people’s experiments,” Giles said.  “Don’t know how or why, but the poor bastard might have thought he could steal from me.  Take in a parasite, make a run for the edge of town, get it out, and sell it.  Very valuable, these.”

The man wasn’t breathing.  Instead, his back arched, then bucked the other way, as his head rose up as far as he could manage, throat distending.

Ratface spoke, right behind me.  “He might not have been smuggling, might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Mm hmm,” the Fishmonger said.  “Which would mean security is lacking.  Something to think about.”

The man on the table heaved, to no avail.  The thing that wormed its way out of his mouth took its own time, revealing itself by flailing around in the air before wrapping around half of the man’s face.  Something like a leech or a maggot.  It was as big around than his head was, and half-again as long, but apparently capable of squeezing through small spaces.  The man thrashed, gasping for breath now, his head whipping from left to right, but he failed to dislodge the greasy blob of flesh from his face.  Arms pulled against restraints.

“This was to be your test, little girl.  Save him.  Preserve the specimen.”

“This is inhuman,” Lillian said.

“I don’t believe in humanity,” the Fishmonger said.  “I believe in what comes next.”

It was, in an eerie way, very similar to a sentiment I’d voiced before.

Lillian looked back over her shoulder at me, as if reading my mind, or thinking along similar lines.

I put a look of wide-eyed horror on my face.  No words I could say would help this situation or sell the gambit.

The parasite was working its way into the man’s ear.  Far too large an object for so narrow an aperture, but it was somehow doing it.  The man struggled, thrashing, raising his head up and smashing it down, as if he could kill the thing by smashing his own head against it, or swipe it against the table’s edge and dislodge it.

“But, like I said,” the Fishmonger said, finger raised, “A problem.  The test might prove too easy, if you’re as advanced as you say.”

“Please.  Just let me help him.”

“He tried to help himself, you know,” the Fishmonger said.  “Took a knife to his own stomach, trying to reach inside and get the thing out.  We fixed the damage and got it so he wouldn’t die before you got here.”

He drew a knife.

“No!” Lillian said.

“I’m severing the sutures, is all.  Back to square one, and-”

“Stop!”

The knife flicked.  A spatter of blood sailed through the air.  The patient screamed, voice hoarse.

“Now you have a time limit.”

Lillian hesitated.

“The longer you wait, the more he suffers,” the Fishmonger said.

Lillian shook her head.  She started rolling up her sleeves, running to the table, her satchel bouncing at her hip.

“There are tools ready for you.”

“I have my own,” Lillian said.  “Simon, help me.”

I was surprised she had the presence of mind to call me by my fake name.  I hurried to her side.

Bag out, on the table, and she was getting her tools out.

“I’m interested in the fact that you didn’t sell those,” the Fishmonger said, “Desperate for money as you are.”

Lillian ignored him.  She laid the tools out, and began getting little bottles.  The bottles were folded into a set, two rows of three in half of a box, held in place with ribbons, each box-half joined to the next with another ribbon.  Made to be bundled together, easily unfolded or stacked without getting lost or separated from one another.  She began removing and setting down bottles, one after another.

The man thrashed, the thing still working its way into his ear, halfway through now, and his arm struck at the bottles.

I was quick enough to catch the two that was knocked from the table.  I moved the row of bottles to one side, out of reach of the man’s arm and hand.

“What can you tell me about the parasite?” Lillian asked.  She was cleaning her hands with a solution from a bottle.

The Fishmonger was silent.

Lillian set her jaw.  She began cleaning the site of the injury at the man’s middle with the same product, ignoring the parasite for the time being.  It was a ragged injury, more like a crack in a pane of glass, branching off in every direction, and the edges were marked with the black thread of sutures.

“If it goes into his ear, where is it going?” I asked.  “Brain?”

“I doubt it,” Lillian said.  “If it went to the brain, the man wouldn’t be conscious.  There’s damage to his other ear.  It’s already come and gone from there, probably made it through the Eates tube, joins the ear and mouth.  There’s similar damage around the nose too, and one of his eyes is damaged.”

I looked.  It was hard to tell with how wild-eyed the man was, like a horse frothing at the mouth, too panicked to even see straight, but one of his eyes was indeed slower to move than the other.

“In and out of the socket?” I asked.

“Or it tried,” Lillian said.  “Third bottle.”

I found and handed her the third bottle.

“Second, I mean.  Order got mixed around when he knocked them down.”

Oh.  I’d put it back wrong.  She was letting me know I’d screwed up without saying it outright.  I handed her a bottle.

She drew out a syringe, injecting it.  Then she began her work, opening the injury wider, reaching in, and then feeling out the interior.  “Damage is shallow.  No organs damaged, but some bleeds.  This is mostly surface damage, made worse by the thing moving beneath and around it, before and after stitches.”

This was a nasty distraction.  We couldn’t let the man suffer, but the game plan we’d had laid out was well and truly out of sorts, now.  I glanced at Jamie and Gordon, who were hanging further back, watching through the doorway.

Escape routes?  Most of the windows were placed high, to let sunlight in, and the only one at ground level was boarded up.  There was a front door, and if there was a back door, the rows of shelves and stacks of wooden pallets blocked my view of it.  I could smell some of the products being traded, so I knew that most of the boxes on the shelves would be full.

That said, I doubted I’d find any weapons or tools sharper or more effective than a sweet potato, even if I had the chance to look, which I didn’t.

Six regular thugs, four altered ones, and the Fishmonger himself.  Ratface was watching from outside, but he and his two bodyguards were more assets arrayed against us.

This isn’t your first dance, Fishmonger.  You’re experienced, and you’ve preemptively handled more situations than this one with this heavy handed brutality and a total lack of humanity.

Lillian had tools.  Some were sharp.  But with all the eyes on us, it would be difficult to get my hands on them.  If I messed up in the slightest, I was betting the thugs would be faster to get to their guns than I would be to get to a scalpel.

While I surveyed the situation, I caught a glimpse of the Fishmonger.

There was a look on his face.  It was a smile in the technical sense, but there was no happiness to it.  I had trouble pinning it down.

Because of Lillian?

Because of the trap?  The idea that Lillian might as well be shackled already, being wrist-deep in her patient?

I glanced at the door.  The men who’d been on either side of it were now standing with their backs to it, blocking my view.  I looked between their legs for a glimpse of Gordon and Jamie’s feet, and didn’t see them.

If Gordon and Jamie had made a move, then the men wouldn’t be nearly that relaxed, blocking the door as they were.

Gordon and Jamie had been dealt with.

In saving this one man, we might have been doomed.

Couldn’t dwell on that.  I was focusing on the work we were doing, handing over tools as Lillian asked for them.  I couldn’t spare a glance to the Fishmonger, but I imagined that look on his face.

Setting up something like this, he had a mean streak.  The torture this man was going through?  No question of malice, here.  He also desired power and control, and he was careful about it, setting himself up in the houses on the mountain.

Except, was he looking at us with anticipation?

The Fishmonger had us.  He had absolute control.  The torture the man was going through was enough to satisfy just about any sadist.  The emotional strain Lillian was going through, it was gravy to this lump of a man.

What more could he be hungry for?

“Doing okay?” I asked.

“Trying,” Lillian said.  “Working out in my head how we might do the parasite, while I’m doing the tears inside.  There’s still a time limit, even after I sew him up.  He has only so much strength.”

That was it.

This was too easy.  The time limit wasn’t enough of a catch.  The cut in the man’s side didn’t do more than delay Lillian in getting to the parasite.  That could be a problem unto itself.  Lillian being set up to fail.

The other possibility was worse.

“Small scissors,” Lillian said.

I found and handed her the small scissors.  When she went to take them, I held for a moment.  My hand was there, one finger extended.

Alert.

“Got it,” Lillian said.  “Can barely hold onto this.  Hand wash?”

I got the hand wash.  I held the bottle in a particular way, gesturing as best as I was able while holding something, upending the bottle over her hands.  She rubbed them together and shook off the blood.

Trap.

“Don’t drop it,” she said.  “Your hands are messy too.”

“I won’t,” I said.  I changed my grip.  The gesture this time was for inside, caged, encapsulated.

She stopped where she was, her hands poised above the victim.  Her hands were trembling.

“I’d hope a third year student of the Academy could handle some surface wounds to the stomach,” the Fishmonger said.

I watched Lillian as her eyes roved over the man, top to bottom.

Then her hands came down, one on either side of the wound.  She shoved.

The man squirmed, fighting her.  The thing at his ear was mostly inside, but for a bulb of flesh at the end, the only part of it that wasn’t squeezed into a space as large around as a finger.  The flesh was stretched so thin I could see veins standing out against the surface of it.

Lillian released.  She huffed out a breath.  “Help.  And watch yourself.”

I put my hands together, one folded over the other, pressing against one side of the wound.  She did the same for the other.

“Three, two, one…”

We shoved simultaneously.  Blood gushed out, flooding the site of the injury.  I was pretty sure we tore the opening in the skin even wider.

Then it lurched out, a second parasite, flailing aimlessly, reaching for us.  I pulled my hands away just in time as it slapped out  against the victim’s lower abdomen.  Smaller around and perhaps longer than the other.

“A second parasite,” Lillian said, hands up, stepping away.

“Is there?  What a pleasant surprise!” the Fishmonger said, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.  His lie was such that it would be obvious even to a distracted Lillian, “I thought one had escaped, it’s good to know it will find its way back to me.”

“It was probably anesthetized,” Lillian said.

“This poor man has some wits, to manage that!”

A win-win for our sadist.  Either the prospective ‘hire’ has talent, or he gets to see her reaction when the parasite latches onto her.

It had been close, too.  He’d almost gotten her.  If she’d spent any more time rummaging around that particular wound…

I had a good imagination.  The mental picture was too real.  Lillian, with the parasite on her arm.  The Fishmonger taking action to keep her from using tools or chemicals on it, kicking me way, possibly kicking her to the ground, stepping on her free hand.  Watching while she struggled.  The begging, the frantic screaming.

From my estimation of him, he wouldn’t listen.  He would let it break her, then put her to work.  The damage to her body would be a reminder for the rest of her days, while a threat of a repeat performance would be enough to cow any dissent or rebellion.

I’d developed a profound sort of hate for this man in a very short span of time.

He would have to die horribly.  The parasites were too kind a death.  For that to happen, however, we’d first have to get out of this situation.

I saw movement and turned my eye to the door.

The group from outside were coming in.

Jamie, limp, was being dragged in.

Then the two adults we’d brought with us.

And finally Gordon.  He was dragged in by one arm.  Whatever had happened, he was groggy and sluggish.  A knife was embedded in that same shoulder, and each pull on his arm made the blood flow more freely.

Lillian didn’t even seem to notice.  Her eyes were fixed on her patient.

“Two points of attachment are making it hard to remove,” she murmured.  “The first, it’s a kind of anchor.  A tendril or some other form of attachment, reaching forward into a new hole, or reaching backward, into the patient.  One at each end, very strong, impossible to access without carving the patient up.”

“Sure,” I said.  I managed to sound calm, which helped keep Lillian from looking up and seeing the others.

“The second, it’s the grip on the patient’s skin.  The underside of this thing, or maybe the entirety of it, it’s covered in setae, or something like it.  Tiny hairs, providing an absolute grip, like a barnacle to the underside of a ship, but gripping and releasing and moving in a cycle, so it can inch forward.  Touch it, and you don’t get it free.”

“Short of removing the skin,” I said.

Lillian nodded.  “Which is why… I could deal with the setae alone, flay the affected body part.  But the anchors mean the thing can just reel itself in or hold itself in place.  I could deal with the anchor, cutting deep and surgically prying it free, wherever or however it’s latched on…”

“You can’t handle both at the same time.”

“I can, but it’s messy.”

“How?” I asked.  Keep her focused.

“Scalpel.”

I handed over a fresh scalpel.

“Okay,” she said.  She rummaged in her bag.  She found a cloth sack for a number of pills.  She dumped it out, handing it to me.  Then she found another sack.  This one had soap in it.  “Wear these.”

“Wear?”

She pulled the soap one over my hand like a mitten.  Then she gave me the other.  “I hope it won’t stick to you like this.”

“You hope.”

“I think.  Grab it, by the lowest possible point.  Haul it up and away.  Whatever you do, you have to keep your grip.”

I huffed out a one-note chuckle, “You know I’m not that strong, right?”

Be strong,” she said.

Her eyes were somewhat wild as she looked at me.  Then she looked down at the patient.  “Please.”

I wasn’t sure if the please was for me or for a higher power.  Or maybe the parasite.

I grabbed the parasite.  The texture of it was different than I’d expected.  It looked slimy, smooth, but it was like the fuzzy sort of leaf, where it had a shocking amount of texture.  I nearly lost my makeshift mitten as it flexed.

My arms strained as I lifted it up and away.  My legs, inner core and arms were tight with exertion as I tried to lift it up and away from the table.

If the Fishmonger wants to fuck with us, all he has to do is nudge my arm, poke me in my side.

Lillian reached down into the wound with the scalpel, bare skin inches away from the parasite.

Then she cut.

Ichor went flying from the thing’s rear end as it lashed out, flipping around, fighting my grip.  It was all I could do to keep it away from Lillian’s skin as she pulled away, back out of my field of vision.

The more it struggled, the less it held on to the patient.  I maintained my grip, praying it wouldn’t whip around and find its way to the space of bare skin between jacket sleeve and mitten.

Then, all at once, it was free of the patient.  I stumbled, nearly losing it, then wasted no time in dropping both mittens and the specimen to the ground.

I looked to Lillian, and I saw her with the Fishmonger’s hand around her throat.  She struggled.

Catching my balance, I moved to help- and a thug grabbed my arms.  My struggles were in vain.

“I told you,” the Fishmonger said.  “Preserve the specimen.”

Lillian couldn’t even speak.  Her hands clutched at the Fishmonger’s wrist.

I saw that grim smile spread across his face.  A look of anticipation, as cold as a crocodile licking its chops pre-meal.

He was strong enough to lift Lillian clean off the ground.  I saw her scrabble for her collection of tools and come away empty-handed.

He wasn’t strong enough to keep holding her off the ground, but that wasn’t the intent.  His leg came forward, and when he brought her back down, it got in the way of her firmly placing her feet under her.  She went all the way down to dusty floorboards, hard enough to have the air knocked out of her.

Head a matter of a foot from the parasite.

It was a still tableau.  The parasite writhed in place, the Fishmonger held Lillian where she was.  I’d already ceased struggling, feeling how futile it was.  The Fishmonger panted.

Then the parasite flipped itself over.  It began to crawl in Lillian’s direction.

For his own enjoyment, or perhaps to see the look on my face, the Fishmonger loosened his grip enough to let Lillian voice that scream that had haunted my imagination just moments ago.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.07 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.7

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Being in a dangerous situation was rarely something that scared me, in itself.  It had been the case, once upon a time, when the Lambs were new and we didn’t even have a medic as part of the team, that a young Sylvester had felt his knees go wobbly and his hands shake, his thoughts falling to pieces as emotion took over.

The problem was that that kind of thinking was antithetical to efficient thinking.  It clogged things up, drove one to run away, escape, do the simplest thing possible to get out of that bad situation.  An artifact of our ancestors’ functioning, before higher thinking had been a thing, according to Wallace.

Faced with any number of monsters, thrust into bad situations, I’d adjusted.  All of us had, really, with the exception of Helen, who had never experienced true horror and panic as we did.  That said, the Wyvern formula had helped me make the adjustment more quickly.  I’d helped Gordon and Jamie figure it out, more the latter than the former.  Gordon, more than any of us, had always been more comfortable doing things on his own.  Even if it was figuring out how to face life or death situations, or how to create those situations for others and follow through at the end of the day.  I’d figured it out, counseled, and offered the help I could, a push here and there.

Learning to deal with the other Lambs being in imminent danger had been harder.  But I’d more or less learned.  Seeing them hone their abilities, I’d told myself and taught myself that, even when situations looked as bad as they could get, that we would see it through.

Years of experience, a full third of my life, teaching myself and my training my brain an almost careless disregard for the rules of self preservation that gripped ordinary people, and the ability to look past the threat to my loved ones to see the solutions to those threats.

Years of experience, and yet it was proving awfully hard to do in the midst of this, hearing Lillian’s screaming.

I was caught, Lillian was pinned to the ground, and the others were lying on the ground over by the entrance.  We were outnumbered and we were weaker than our adversaries in general physical strength.  The parasite was inches from her face, covering an inch every few seconds, periodically stopping, twisting up like a snake in pain, blood spitting out of the wound.  The twisting and rolling over moved it horizontally, but not enough to move it away from Lillian.

Both of my arms were being held.  If the thug had been holding one wrist only, that would have made things harder, not easier, necessitating that I elbow him and clutch at him enough to make him grab me.

As it was, I bucked, forcing him to bear my meager weight as I lifted both feet off the ground.  Both shoes came down hard on the floor, as I grunted for effect.

Test done.  Now for the gamble.

The best questions to ask were ones where one already knew the answer.  Question: how would the Fishmonger react?  I had no idea.

But I didn’t like hearing Lillian’s scream, and the thought of this being some lingering memory of her last moments, so soon after talking to Jamie?

I’d dropped the parasite at my feet.  I went limp, dropping as far as I could, legs out and forward.

I clamped my feet around it.

The screaming stopped.  I saw Lillian’s eyes, wide, tears in the corners, filling with wonder and a hope that probably wasn’t justified.  A feeling swelled inside me, and a lot of things that hadn’t ever made sense to me suddenly clicked.

There was no time to explore that feeling that made me feel twice as big as I really was, making me want to be a hero instead of a bastard.  The thing was fighting to get out from between the edges of my shoes.

‘Throwing’ it at the Fishmonger with a kick-out-and-release maneuver would have been a proper sort of justice, but the clothes he wore and the wide-brimmed hat gave me an awfully small target – the face beneath his hat, or perhaps his hand.

Abdomen curling, legs kicking up and off the ground, I let go of the thing.  It sailed up and back.

If I hit the face of the person holding me, all the better.  If we lost it in the mess of shelves and containers, great.  But getting it away from Lillian was the critical point.

I didn’t hit the face of the person holding me.  I had no idea if I’d lost the thing.  But I achieved my third goal.

“Brat!” the man holding me shouted.

Third go.  Legs up, off the ground-

He dropped me.  He’d learned his lesson.

But I was already plotting out my next moves.  If he held me, I could bring my feet down and back, aiming to strike at his kneecap, or straight down onto the arch of his foot.  Being dropped on the ground meant I could get my feet under me, either run or strike back.

He was already reacting, moving to grab something from the table, expecting me to run.

I struck, muddy shoe soles sliding slightly on hardwood as I raised myself up to a standing position.  I didn’t get all the way to my feet- my shoulder went up between his legs.

Use the opportunity to spot the parasite, see where it went, find something to help Lillian-

He grabbed me by the collar.

He’d had no reaction to what amounted to one of the most solid blows I was physically able to deliver to his pride, joy, and joy.  Or would it be pride, pride and joy?  I only had limited hands-on experience with that.

It was all academic at this point.  Though he wasn’t so severely changed as the four I’d seen earlier, he had been altered.  Protected, possibly with everything vital tucked up inside or some measure taken.

He heaved me over to the left.  My ear, temple, and eye met the edge of the table, inches from the patient’s feet.

My vision didn’t blur, my focus didn’t waver, but it damn well hurt.  I felt blood flow out, producing an audible ‘blorp’ sound as it momentarily occluded my ear canal.  Somewhere in the midst of that, I collapsed onto the ground, maintaining eye contact with Lillian.

That ‘big’ feeling was gone, now.

He kicked me in the ribs, punctuating the earlier hit with something more solid.  The pain was something I could get past.  But an interruption in that nice normal pattern of breathing and heartbeats did take the fight out of me for a few seconds.

The net was closing.  The thugs from around the room cautiously approached, keeping a moderate distance from the table with the other parasite and victim.  The routes I had available to me were narrowing, options dwindling.

“Where did it go?” one of the thugs asked.  His prior vantage point hadn’t afforded him a view of the full fight.  The table with the victim and the adjoining tables with tools on them were an obstruction.

“Over there,” the thug that loomed over me spoke.  “You can see the slime trail and blood.”

“Mm.”

The Fishmonger lurched, pulling himself to a standing position.  He twisted Lillian’s hair as he forced her to stand as well.  “Grab him.”

I was grabbed.  One eye stung as blood got in it.  I blinked it a few times, trying to get a clearer view, but it only seemed to make it worse.  I didn’t bother trying to fight against the grip they had on me as I was hauled to my feet, arms held behind me.

“Get the burrower,” the Fishmonger said.  He was glaring at me, as if I’d somehow wronged him and the notion that he’d put us in this situation, hurt us, and planned to torture us hadn’t even crossed his mind.

Well, in a way, he was justified.  We’d picked this fight.  His irrationality had come full circle in an irrational world.

The mooks seemed reluctant to follow through.

“I said, get the burrower.”

I waited, held firmly, while the Fishmonger passed charge of Lillian to another underling.  She kept struggling, fighting, staring at me, eyes periodically flickering to my hands, waiting for a signal.

I’d had great plans for how this would unfold, before we’d been pressed into saving a life.  It was a confluence of bad circumstance that put us here.  Any other group configuration, and we might have looked past one life or at least been willing to let it be for as long as the Fishmonger took to die.  But Lillian and Jamie weren’t fighters, and Lillian had a soft heart.

“Do you know who this is?” The Fishmonger asked.  He put one hand on the chest of the man who lay on the table.

He got blank stares and silence in exchange.

“This is the type of man who doesn’t take the initiative, find something with a long handle, and scrape a damn burrower out from under a shelf.”

The assorted thugs exchanged glances.

One man found the courage.  He reached up to a high shelf and got a broken broom handle, climbed down to the floor, and poked underneath the shelf.

I dearly wished the thing would latch onto his face.  But it wasn’t that quick.

He withdrew from the shelf, poking and prodding the thing with the blunt end of the broom handle.  It rolled on its side and flipped over until it was more or less in the Fishmonger’s vicinity.

The man, Giles, reached over to the table, and pulled on gloves.  They snapped tight against his wrist.  He bent down and collected the thing.

I met Lillian’s eyes.  I knew she was looking to me for answers.  I was still panting for breath, I only had one eye open, and I could feel blood running down one side of my face and down one ear, partially obscuring the canal, leaving me half-deaf in one ear.  It said a lot that she was looking to me for answers.

I could steer her, put her on a course, using my best know-how and some gestures.  It wasn’t worth it.  My plan wasn’t that convincing even to myself, and Lillian needed to learn to stand on her own.

Not that I wouldn’t help.  I glanced in the direction of Jamie and Gordon, and felt a bit of worry.  They were still motionless, one scale-skinned thug standing over their limp bodies.

I tried to convince myself that the Fishmonger wouldn’t waste life when he could put it to use for profit or amusement.  It wasn’t an effective enough argument to help the disquiet I felt.  I was getting more nervous, feeling more like the Sylvester I was once upon a time.

I’d only just fixed things with Jamie, at least starting us on the road to getting to a better place.  Or he’d started me on the road.  He’d done the work.

I couldn’t have Lillian die horribly, I couldn’t lose Jamie, and I couldn’t see this be the circumstances where Gordon’s heart finally gave out.

No, I had to treat this as a situation where it was up to Lillian and me, and that meant that I couldn’t dictate a plan to Lillian, or it might as well be up to me alone.

I didn’t give her a signal, nor did I give her any directions.

The Fishmonger held the parasite in two gloved hands.  He stood in front of me, displeasure etched on a face that looked like human flesh had been grafted on over a bulldog’s.  The flesh hung, the eyelids drooped, and though I’d seen something resembling a smile earlier, it was hard to look at him and imagine him grinning or ever appearing happy.

“This is the point I’m supposed to explain what this does,” he said, showing me the wounded parasite.  “To drive the point home, filling you with horror before I follow through and make that horror real.”

I wanted so very much to say something to him, a biting comment, offer up a jab, but I didn’t want to give away the show.  I had to take it.

“I’m not going to do that,” he said.  “You’ll figure out what it does, and that will be worse, as you realize.

He reached forward, digging fingertips and thumbtip into my cheeks, forcing them into and between my teeth, prying my mouth open by sheer strength alone.  I couldn’t close my mouth without biting into the flesh of my own cheeks.

He raised the parasite, and the thing waved its head around, left, right, up, down, searching.  Tiny legs at the edges of its body clawed at my lip and chin, seeking purchase, and I felt it grip my flesh, the skin pinching where its lower body made contact.

The tiny hairs, clinging to my skin with a nigh-unbreakable grip.

At least my pain tolerance was high.  If it came down to it, I could handle this better than Lillian could.

Giles the Fishmonger stepped back.  He was glaring, clearly unhappy.

I was supposed to be screaming, fighting the man who held my arms.

It probed my lips with its head, and tiny mandibles or thorny bits cut as it searched the aperture.  It pushed into the space, and I could taste it.  It tasted like something that had, minutes ago, been inside someone’s midsection.  Blood, feces, and bile.  I could keep from screaming, but I couldn’t keep from screwing up my face in disgust.

It was biting me, taking tiny pieces out, and the more of it that came into contact with my mouth, the more mouths there were doing the biting.

Involuntarily, my arms jerked at the pain.  The thug held them firm.

It recoiled.  I felt it jerk.  The tail writhed, and the pinching grip on the skin of my face released.  The body writhed, attempting to push itself away and drop to the ground, much as it had after it was injured.

Before it could drop, I bit.  I caught its head in between my teeth.  The taste of it overpowered my senses.

It continued flopping around, twisting, fighting to get away.  The spines and teeth of its head, nigh-invisible or retractable, were biting and slicing into my gums.

Doesn’t like what it’s tasting.  Some of the poisons that had been injected into my brain had permeated my body to an extent.  It had changed the texture of my hair and stunted my growth, among other things.  One of the few side-benefits was that parasites didn’t tend to like me.  Not that the ‘didn’t tend to’ filled me with confidence at any point.

“The hell?” someone asked.

Second and last chance, Sy.

I turned my head to the right, then whipped it up and to the left, hard.  The body of the parasite whipped out and up, toward the face of the man who had my arms.  I was too short for the parasite to make contact, but the sight of a parasite flying toward him, with my last flung parasite fresh in my enemy’s memory?  He flinched, and he let go of me.

They had guns and other weapons.  The only way to succeed was to go for the head.  I had to do it before they got a clear draw on me.

I released the parasite from my teeth.  I caught it in my bare hands, and felt the pinch as it tried to grab me.  It seemed to recognize me, because it recoiled, fighting to escape my grip.

It made for a bad melee weapon as I swung it up at the Fishmonger’s face.

He brought his arm up, shielding his face.  He cringed, backing up as I swung again and again, batting at his head, knocking his hat off, aiming to make contact between parasite and flesh.

I knew every second counted.  The only opening we had available to us was to disable the Fishmonger and interrupt his control over his underlings.  Put them on the defensive.  If their boss went down, screaming and flailing, then it gave us an opening.  Lillian could offer to remove the parasite, we could trade the Fishmonger for our own, leverage that position for information…

But only if I didn’t get shot.  Move unpredictably, find an opening, not just for the Fishmonger-

As the Fishmonger stooped over, shielding his head, I changed direction, covering the short distance to the man that held Lillian.  He let go of her and pushed her toward me, retreating before I even got close.

Lillian didn’t come to me.  She went straight to the table.  Syringes, scalpels.

“Don’t move!” a thug shouted at me.  “You little shit!”

Gun.

I was already reaching out for Lillian.  I grabbed her and hauled her toward me, making sure to keep the parasite away from her.

Positioning was key.  The man with the gun adjusted his aim, pointing the gun at Lillian and I, and between our heads, looking a few feet beyond, he saw the Fishmonger.

Were these men equipped with good guns, or were they equipped with the cheap garbage that sent bullets flying off in random directions, consistently punching holes in the wall behind a dartboard twenty feet away?

You have to shoot at your boss to shoot at us.

But it was a trick that only worked in a limited way.  We were surrounded, the room was full, and other people wouldn’t have the same problem getting a clear shot.

Their hesitation was for another reason.

The Fishmonger was still recovering from a beating delivered by a pubescent child.  As I closed the distance once more, with Lillian in tow, he backed away.

His image was crumbling, I’d made him flinch, and that reflected badly in the eyes of criminals like these.  A small part of them, I imagined, would want to see how this unfolded.  Hell, given his earlier threats, they probably hated him.

Someone would smarten up before long.  Realize that the Fishmonger would appreciate initiative here, and would recognize the hesitation to act.  They would shoot.

Had to resolve this.  I swung.

Had to find an opening.  Get him, break him as surely as he threatened to break Lil.

The Fishmonger’s gloved hand slapped at the much-abused parasite.  The parasite chose that same moment to squirm.  It slipped from my grasp and struck a wall, hard.

It didn’t move much at all after it slid halfway down the wall and then flopped down to dusty ground.

The Fishmonger hit me, right in the ear that was already bleeding.  I fell.

I still couldn’t win a fight.  Even when it counted.

I could make openings, I could improvise, I could bend the rules and make people act in different ways.

But I couldn’t beat a grown man into submission with a wet noodle of a parasite.

The frustration gnawed at me.  I felt very real desperation.  I wanted to scream, but it was an angry scream.

Lillian held her syringes out as if she was holding a knife, threatening the Fishmonger with them, keeping her distance while trying not to move too far away from me.

“You remind me of my wife,” the Fishmonger said.

“Don’t,” Lillian said, her voice tight.  “I don’t even want to think about you being married.  You’re disgusting.”

“She was an Academy student too.  She failed out, too.  It ate away at her, trying to climb the ranks, working hard, only to fail because of sabotage and the incompetence of others,” he said.  His tone of voice was a sneering one, and a part of me wondered if it was contempt for the incompetents who failed his wife, or if it was contempt for his wife, as if he didn’t believe the explanation.

He went on, “I offered her money, more than she would have had.  She went against the rules of the Academy and sold her services to, well, me.

“Modifying your foot soldiers, and then keeping them loyal to you by holding the maintenance hostage.”

“They’re not stupid men.  They knew the devil’s deal they were making,” the Fishmonger said.

The way he said that, I knew he was calling out anyone who might’ve claimed they hadn’t known as stupid.  Nobody would speak up and declare themselves a moron.

He was a manipulator.

“Where’s she now?” Lillian asked.

She was at least keeping him talking, even if she wasn’t being overly clever about it.  Then again, she had a lot on her mind, what with me, the guns, the Fishmonger, needing to position herself right, and trying to track the conversation.

“She wanted out.  But I’m like my pet over there.  I don’t like to let go of my things.  She has a room much like the one I’ve prepared for you, but more luxurious.  When she’s good about doing her work, she has the freedom to do whatever she wishes, so long as it is done with escorts or behind locked doors.”

My ear was ringing from the punch.  I tried to open the eye that had blood in it and felt a sharp sting.

One working eye, no depth perception.  It didn’t help matters.

“I don’t suppose you have any young runaways with you?  Girls with horns?” Lillian asked.

I was halfway caught between wanting to cringe at the fact that Lillian had handed over vital data about what we wanted, or being surprised she had the presence of mind to keep the mission in mind.

“Why?” the Fishmonger asked.

I blinked, started to climb to my feet, and someone stepped on my back forcing me to the ground.  A solid one-hundred pounds pinned me to the ground.

“She’s a friend.”

The Fishmonger nodded slowly, taking it in.

A feint, trying to get her to let her guard down.

“Careful,” I said.

Lillian checked over her shoulder, then swiftly changed direction, backing away from a man that had been creeping closer.

I had a sense of how the Fishmonger thought, now.  Who he was as a person.  That helped.

I looked at the man, and I saw myself in a distorted shape, as if personality could be seen through a funhouse mirror.

Loathing bubbled inside me like hot bile.

“Thanks, Simon,” Lillian said.  “Are you okay?”

“About as good as I look,” I said.

“Not very good then.”

I chuckled, then wished I hadn’t.  My head pounded and my throat hurt with the effort.

“Pick the boy up.  For the love of all that is holy, watch yourselves this time,” the Fishmonger said.  “That’s twice now he’s tried something.  Two occasions that will be remembered.”

He gave the evil eye to other thugs in the area.

“Leave him alone,” Lillian said.  “You wanted me.  He doesn’t factor in.  Neither do the others.”

She’d spotted them by the entrance.

“Very loyal,” the Fishmonger said.

Lillian pursed her lips.

“Does your mind change if I tell you that he sold you?”

“Sold me,” Lillian said.  She looked dazed.  Her eyes fell on me, and I could see an expression on her face.  Lost.

As if she couldn’t believe that, with all that had happened, the mess, the threats, the parasite, that this stupid, minor ruse of ours was still holding.  That the Fishmonger believed me to be a secret traitor.

This is a moment to treasure, Lillian.  Hold it in your heart, nurse it.  It is something to look forward to, that moment when you realize you have some control and power in the most hopeless, darkest situations.

“You weren’t helping us!” I shouted.  “We backed you!  We gave you food, we gave you shelter, we hurt your enemies, and then when it mattered, you didn’t ever repay us!  So yeah, I sold you, you stupid, ugly bitch!”

The Fishmonger hit me.  I went from a standing position to a dangling one, hanging from my wrists as the thug held me.

He hit me again, then again, as if I were practice and nothing more.  The blows were focused on my head and face.  Striking where I was already cut and bleeding, with the first and third strike being aimed at my bleeding ear.

The final blow was to the midsection, making me double over.  The thug’s grip on me kept me from keeling over.

Pain, I could handle.  Only Lillian could handle Lillian, though.

My reminiscence of the earliest field work of the Lambs had been apt.  There were parallels to be drawn between my sharing what I’d learned and my understanding of the world with Jamie and Gordon and what was happening here with Lillian.

Lillian marched in my direction.  There was a wild look in her eye.  Blithely, as if she couldn’t even see, she walked right into the reach of the man with the oil-slick skin.  She didn’t even startle or glance at him.  She continued to pull against his grip, trying to approach me.

The Fishmonger signaled.  The man who held Lillian released her, and she stumbled as she took her next step toward me.  She recovered, and the Fishmonger stood out of her way as she closed in.

A fistful of needles in hand, various colors of fluid within each, she stabbed me.

She didn’t depress the plunger.  The needles weren’t being used for that.  She pulled them out and slashed them against the less injured side of my face, raking me with needle points, one of them breaking off in the process.

She was a wild animal, entirely on autopilot, not thinking, only acting.  She stabbed me again and again, the same four or five syringe points penetrating flesh over and over again.  Shoulder, shoulder, side, abdomen, arm, chest.

The last hit was delivered with both hands.  The needles went in as far as they could go.  She pressed, and leaned forward in the doing.  Her forehead rested against mine.

“I liked you,” she said, quiet but not so quiet the Fishmonger couldn’t hear.  “I trusted you.”

“That’s your own fault,” I said, my voice soft.

“Enough,” the Fishmonger said.  He grabbed the back of Lillian’s collar and pulled her away.  She took one step back and sank to her knees.

I still had the needles buried in my shoulder.

Lillian’s hands formed gestures.

Poison.  Bad.  Drug.

She’d dug deep and found something, and she’d gone wholly against what her entire purpose in the Lambs was, on paper, to keep us healthy and safe.  She’d torn into me, presumably avoiding vital areas, to arm me.

The Fishmonger stepped closer to me, reached out, and touched the syringes.  He gripped them, or most of them, and bent them, until they started to break.

He left the wreckage in place, fluids dribbling down my front, only one or two syringes still intact.

“I think she’s realized there’s no way out.  She’ll come with me, she’ll work for me.”

Still kneeling, eyes on the ground, Lillian nodded.

“You, I think we’ll have to devise a fitting end for you, little boy.  You spoiled what was supposed to be a good night, and you killed my pet.”

“I don’t get paid?” I asked.  Keeping up the role.

He hit me again.

Bastard.

I get paid, I hope?” Ratface asked.  He was off to one side, leaning against a stack of crates.

“You do,” the Fishmonger said.  “Three bodies and an employee.”

Three bodies.  Me, Gordon, and Jamie.

My eye went toward the front door.  Mine wasn’t the only one.

Jamie still lay there, but Gordon didn’t.  The man who’d been standing watch over the pair now lay face down on the warehouse floor.

It had been a hard lesson to learn.  To trust my teammates.

“I thought you had them sedated!” the Fishmonger called out.  His face was red and a vein stood out on the forehead.

“I jabbed ’em,” the altered thug with the spines all over his body spoke.  He sounded spooked.  “We were quick about it.  Wasted no time, as soon as we got the signal.”

“And somewhere in there you stabbed him?”

“No sir,” Spines said.  “The others will tell yeh, crazy little shit stabbed himself partway through the scuffle.”

Stabbed himself?

Entirely without meaning to, we’d given him the distraction he needed.

Might as well make the most of it.  Bleeding, beaten, stabbed, I managed a chuckle.  Then I laughed.  Wide eyes to sell the crazed aspect of the laugh.  Eyes turned my way.

“You’re right, Fishmonger.  There is no way out.”

Then, as if to echo my statement, likely because Gordon heard and was playing along -I’d have to buy him a treat later as thanks- the lights went out.  We were plunged into almost absolute darkness, the only light being that which came from lamps outside the building and across the street.

Good boy, I thought, still grinning, but for my own benefit this time.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 8.08 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The light that filtered in from outside the warehouse was only barely enough to let me see the Fishmonger’s movement.  A flash of his arm, raised, catching the light, moving-

I moved my head in response, just in time to absorb the worst of the hit.

The Fishmonger’s fingers were strong as he gripped my throat and chin, fingertips digging in.

“Who are you?” he asked.  Then he amended his question.  “What are you?”

“We’re mercenaries,” I said.  “You cornered a bit too much of the local market, threw your weight around, and some of your enemies banded together to pay our price.”

“Bullshit,” the Fishmonger spoke into the darkness.  “Business has been good.  We’ve been cooperating more than ever before.”

Because of the books?

No, I don’t believe that.  You have bodyguards for a reason.

Rather than come up with a clever response, I laughed instead.  Better to keep his attention on me and off Gordon.  It gave Gordon time to move, took focus away from Lillian.

I got punched for my trouble.  I was a little slower to turn my head, but I went with the blow, absorbing it with the movement of my head.

“Would have to be Slim’s son,” he mused aloud.

“The son?  He’s not a real crook,” Ratface could be heard to comment.

“If he’s doing this, he’s real enough,” the Fishmonger said.  Then he seemed to come to a decision, “Deal with the boy.”

Less cause for laughter, now.  The light from outside drew a faint orange line along one man’s head, shoulder, arm and leg as he approached me.

Strategize, think…

“Jerrod, Tony, get the one by the door.  Bring him in.  Or better yet, put a knife in him, then bring him in.  York, get a damn light from outside.  I want to see what the hell we’re doing.”

I was held by the wrists, arms held straight out behind me.  I still had the wreckage of the syringes stuck in my shoulder.  I considered trying to rub the broken glass and poison against the man who held me, then decided against it.  He wore a coat and multiple layers.

“The other one’s gone,” came the report from by the door.  I could see the men standing there.  York, the one who’d been sent to get the light, stepped through the doorway, momentarily blocking the little light there was.

Jamie’s gone.  I could imagine Gordon managing a trick, containing the paralysis or whatever the spines were supposed to do to him to one part of his body.  But Jamie?

Someone had moved him.

The Fishmonger was silent.

Back to my situation.  I couldn’t rub broken glass against the man who held me.  I bent my head down, grabbed one of the only intact syringes in my teeth, and hauled it out.  I had to twist myself to my limits to bring it around and stab the man in the side.

“The fuck?” he asked.

“What?” the Fishmonger asked.  “We’re in the dark, when you say things like that, without explaining, it’s worrisome.”

“Little fuckspit stung me somehow.”

He didn’t let go to check the source of the injury.  Damn shame, but being in the dark like this, with barely anything to go by, it also meant he couldn’t draw the appropriate conclusions.

“Augment?” the Fishmonger asked.  “You-”

He wasn’t talking to me.  Had to be Lillian.

“-What is he?  What are you?”

“He’s poisonous,” Lillian said.  “More poisonous with the syringes I jabbed him with.”

The other one was drawing nearer.  My view of the doorway was blocked by the body of a large man.  He might have been one of the ones with armored skin.

I reached around, twisting, and this time the man who held me fought me, making the act harder.

I managed to get my teeth on the syringe, ripping it out, I raised my face skyward, letting gravity hold the syringe in place as I adjusted my grip on it, and twisted again-

The one who’d approached to finish me off grabbed me by the throat, probably to make sure he had me in position to cut my throat or put a bullet in the side of my head.

I twisted my head up and tilted it, until I could stab at the underside of his wrist with the needle, and wasn’t able to hold on to it as he pulled back and away.

“Damn it!” the man barked.  “Stung.  What’s this?  Syringe?”

I went limp, dropping, head down, weight of my body pulling against the hands that held my wrist.

Let me go, let go.  Assume I’m dead, that he got my throat, let me go.

He didn’t let me go.

“Poison, like I said,” Lillian said.  “Probably one of the hyperkalemics.  The other poisons would be burning in your veins like fire.  Since you aren’t screaming, I assume he didn’t stick you with one of those.”

“What the fuck is a hyper…”

“Hyperkalemic.  Your cells are becoming porous as we speak.  You’ll vent potassium into your bloodstream, and you’ll feel awful, like you’re getting sick.  Then you’ll feel your muscles go weak.  Your heart’s one of those muscles.  It’ll stop, and it’ll stop soon.”

She seemed more coherent, now that she was reciting from a textbook.  Clinical.

I didn’t actually depress the syringe, though.

“You have two to five minutes to live,” she said.  “I might be able to save you, depending how much he gave you, and if there’s any light for me to see my bag.  Every second counts, obviously.”

“Stay right where you are, you tell me what the cure is, I’ll find it myself,” the Fishmonger said.  “Where the hell is York?”

The only sound in response was the noise of the rain pattering down outside.

“York!” the Fishmonger called, voice harsh and loud.

No response came.

Gordon had to be inside the building, to mess with the lights.  If he hadn’t circled around to the front, then it had to be Hubris.

Stealth dog.

I continued to hang, limp.  I felt the man’s grip on my wrists tighten.

“Giles!” he barked.  “You get me that damn antidote!”

“Both of us,” the other said.  “Girl!  You’d better give it to us, or your little friend here dies.”

“Someone’s holding me,” Lillian said.  Her voice sounded distant, disaffected.  As if it wasn’t wholly her speaking.  Too calm.  “If they let me go, I can try.  But if you hurt Simon there, then I won’t help you at all.  If you’re feeling the symptoms, then it might be too late already.”

“Fuck, shut up, stop talking, get the antidote!”

“I’m feeling the effects,” the man who held me said, quiet enough that it was probably meant for his fellow poisoning victim.

Except I didn’t depress the syringe, I thought, again.

“Stop panicking,” the Fishmonger said, sounding annoyed more than anything.  “Jerrod, Tony, go get some light and find York.  Go together.”

They weren’t far from the door, standing by where Jamie had fallen.  I saw their outlines as they headed through the doorway, and I saw Hubris fly at one of them, a bounding leap, without a snarl or bark to mark the occasion.  Stumbling away, the one Hubris had attacked fell back against something by the door- a crate or something.

“The dog,” the Fishmonger said.

“It’s not really a dog,” Lillian said.  “Not really.”

Hey, look at that.  She actually managed a convincing-ish lie.

“Call them off!”

“They wouldn’t listen if I did.  They almost never listen to me.”

“If you’re their handler-”

“I just keep them functioning.  Or I try.  You saw how Simon is.  Baiting you, getting himself hurt.  Well, that was partially my fault.”

I wished she hadn’t mentioned me.  I’d made myself big and noticeable, laughing, doing the talking, drawing attention.  Now that I was limp and silent, I was hoping they would assume I was dead.  If they gave me more than a moment or two of thought…

“Giles,” the man who held me shouted.

“I know!  Shut up,” the Fishmonger snarled.  “I have her bag.”

I couldn’t find it in the dark,” Lillian said.  “I doubt you could find it in the light.  It’s not conveniently labeled ‘antidote’.”

I hadn’t moved a muscle in almost a minute, and still dangled from the man’s grip.  He didn’t think to ask before letting me go, dropping me to the floor of the warehouse.  His focus was elsewhere.  My chin banged the floor and the broken needles in my chest tapped against the floor, making me feel the jabs and the bits of broken glass that had clung to my shirt and jacket.

With barely a sound, I rolled over onto my back, and took a second to pull the bits of syringe out of my shoulder.  I collected the needles and broken syringe-ends, holding them between my fingers, the broken glass against the heel of my palm.

That done, I brought my arms over my head, wincing at the pull against the damage in my shoulder, lifted my butt up off the ground, and rolled forward into a crouching position.

I was as blind as any of them, but they were big, I was small, and my footsteps were comparatively quiet in contrast to the big man’s.  I closed the distance, and slammed the needles out in his direction, slamming them into his side and his back, before dancing back and away of the retaliatory strike.

“Motherfucking fuck fuck fuck!  Little fuckspittle!”

“Stop doing that!” the Fishmonger barked.  “Say why you’re swearing, you moron, or it doesn’t help!”

“The one you were punching is gone.  He just stuck me with the needles!”

“Serves you right for letting go of him, you fucking dunce.”

“He was dead!  Playing dead…”

I loved that they were talking and making noise.  It let me locate them.

“If he got you with more than the one needle then you’re definitely dead,” Lillian said.  “I’m sorry.  You can blame your boss for that.  I would have helped if I could.”

“Shut up!” the Fishmonger barked.

I heard a pained noise from Lillian.

I went by limited memory of the battlefield, where the table was, where the crates and shelves were, and I moved between them, heels of my shoes scuffing the floor lightly as I rolled my weight from heel to toe.  I didn’t make much noise, and being where I was, zig-zagging through their ranks, the light sounds were excusable.

Light flared through the room, shadows flying forward, then reversing direction to head back.  One of the men who’d gone outside had retrieved a light, and was returning inside, victorious, light held high.  I was among the now-visible details of the room.

All eyes present moved to me, with the exception of the eyes belonging to the poor soul on the table.  Me, with two thugs behind me, two thugs between me and the shelves to my right, table with patient to my left, and Fishmonger, thug, and Lillian in front of me.

A gunshot sounded from among the shelves at the back of the warehouse.  The eyes that had looked my way looked between the source of the sound and the destination – a hole in the wall just beside the lantern-holding man’s head.

Gordon’s aim was better on the second shot.  The man fell, and the lantern crashed to the floor.

It wasn’t like the dime-store novels.  The container didn’t shatter and it didn’t ignite into a nice distracting fire.

I moved, dashing between the table and the Fishmonger to get to Lillian’s bag.

“Mutt!” I hollered.  “Get rid of the lantern!”

I seized Lillian’s bag, and I grabbed the tools that Lillian had laid out, the same ones that I’d been handing to her.

In the same moment I turned around and made a beeline straight for the man who held Lillian, Hubris snatched up the lantern, carrying it away.  The light slid away from the room, plunging things into darkness in a second’s time.

I went low.  My elbow struck out, once, twice-

Point of reference enough to get a sense of what and where I was elbowing.  He twisted, trying to put Lillian between us, but I was already reaching around the far side of his leg, scalpel in hand.  I pulled the blade against the back of his leg.

Too shallow a cut.  It didn’t stop him from driving his knee into my already bruised ribs.  Already crouching, I tumbled the short distance to the ground.

I rolled forward, going for the ankle this time.  I couldn’t remember what he’d been wearing on his feet.  Boots?  Would the scalpel go through?

No.  Last minute change of plans.

I stabbed for his groin instead.

He kicked out, and managed to get me in the hip, right where it joined my bent leg.  I was thrown onto my side, my attack never connecting.

He was strong.

This wasn’t working.  The leg he’d kicked was slow to move as I asked it to move.  His hand grabbed me while I was still trying to get myself moving again.

I could have stabbed him, but I didn’t.  He was on guard against that.  Instead, I reached out.  My hand touched Lillian.  I pressed the scalpel and scissors in my fist flat against her stomach.  She took them with her free hand.

For the second time, I was thrown hard against the table.  I heard a gun cock from his direction.

This time, recovering fast was essential.  The others were still closing the distance, fumbling around in the dark.

No decorum, no strategy.  I stumbled, nearly losing my footing as my leg lagged a fraction and my sense of balance went wonky, then I drew close.  I still had a sharp instrument.  Lillian had one too.

I closed the distance, and after feeling out to get a sense of where the man was, a touch of palm to his ribs, I stabbed in a fury, as many times as I could in short succession, going for a quantity of blows over carefully placed ones, trying to find a space between scales.  I succeeded on the fourth strike, but in the doing, my makeshift weapon plunged too deep into his side, and my hand slid right off the blood-slick handle.  I could only assume he was trying to deal with Lillian, wrestling her to keep her from stabbing him, while she was trying to ruin his aim.  He bodily picked her up and shoved her at me.

Mission accomplished.

We collected ourselves.  A gunshot ripped out, the muzzle flash briefly illuminating the scene as the man who’d had Lillian   I hoped it was a miss, but there was no telling, and Lillian had the sense to stay quiet, whatever it was.

Gordon’s returning shot wasn’t a miss.  The muzzle flash gave away the shooter’s location, and Gordon had used it.  I wondered if the armored scales would protect against a gunshot.

Lillian and I disappeared into the shelves and stacks, me holding her hand, leading the way as best as I was able.

It was the same principle I’d espoused earlier.  People had needs.  Take away something they needed, and their behavior could be controlled.  The light was gone.  Safety in question.  Two men worried they might be dying, and one was so convinced of it that he was imagining symptoms where they didn’t exist.

The Lambs were safe, now.  Or as safe as we could get.  Jamie had been dragged away by Gordon or Hubris, Hubris was outside the building, ready to go after anyone that ran, and Gordon was somewhere among the shelves and stacks of crates that filled half the warehouse, lurking and waiting for an opportunity.

Glass clinked.  A flame flared.  Another lantern lit.

Lillian and I were at the far right of the rows of stacks and shelves.  To our left, Gordon fired, aiming at the source of the flame.  One shot, then another, then another.  I heard swearing from the thug with the lantern, the Fishmonger shouted, and the Fishmonger’s people took cover.  Gordon wasn’t successful in getting rid of the light source.

“Alright!” the Fishmonger called out.  “If you’re mercenaries, then I’m paying.  Whatever they offered you, I’ll pay half again as much.  You name and kill the ones who hired you, and give me any of those antidotes for my people, assuming you even poisoned them at all.”

“I’m poisoned,” the one who’d held me said.  His earlier commentary on the subject meant he had to double down, reaffirm.

None of the Lambs replied.  There wasn’t a sound.

Lillian and I moved, and I was careful to set my feet down where the feet of the shelving units and the crates already depressed the floorboards.  Lillian followed my gestures as I indicated the spots to place each foot, but her footsteps were heavier than mine.  I’d have to let her know that at a later point in time.

I was giddy with relief that we’d all managed to slip away.  We had them in the palm of our hand, now, without the parity of them having the same.  The trick was to figure out how to leverage that.

My leg hurt where I’d been kicked in the hip, and my side throbbed with every heartbeat.  I was mostly operating with just the one eye, the other one had to have a cut on the eyelid, if the eyeball itself wasn’t damaged.

But I wasn’t important, here.

I stopped, partially to let my leg rest.  Lillian was the other reason.

In the dim, I could barely see her.  What I could see was that she had a look in her eye.

I recognized the look.  I’d seen it in Jamie, once.  I’d seen it in Gordon, though he’d tried to hide it.

The old days.  When we’d been more child than Lamb.  After the worst individual close calls.  I could remember those moments, and for Gordon, Jamie and I, they had been intimate brushes with Death.  I’d had one with Sub Rosa, different from my first in how easy it had been to surrender to the idea of it.

Lillian’s brush hadn’t been with Death.  She wasn’t a true Lamb in that way.  It wasn’t a reality for her in that way.

I wasn’t sure what to call it, there wasn’t a good word for it.  She had confronted the dark side of academy science when she’d stared down that parasite.  In the aftermath of it, she’d been like a different Lillian.

She’d been harrowed, if I had to give a name to the process.  It was a good word, it was close to the word hollow, and it made me think of a person’s very being getting raked over.

Was the old Lillian still there, past it all?

You.  Okay.  Question.  I gestured.

She took her time before giving me a nod.  From what I could see of the look in her eye, I wasn’t sure I believed her.

I reached out and up with my free hand, putting a hand on one side of her face.  She flinched slightly at the touch, her hand momentarily clenching my other hand, as if I’d been very cold or had given her a static shock.  Then she relaxed, her eyes closing.

We stayed like that for a good ten seconds, my hand on her face.  She was as absorbed by the touch as some other people might be by a good hug in different circumstances.

She was someone who liked being teased, but what she really craved, deep down, was someone to cling to.  Every night that she slept in my bed, she held herself tight against me, clutching me as if she’d fall into a chasm if she didn’t.  Aside from lengthy sessions of kissing, that was all it ever was, to the point that I suspected she needed it more than I did.  Someone to be close.

This wasn’t that, but it was contact and it helped center her and nourish her, as surely as a sandwich did a hungry man, or light to a blind man.

I heard footsteps and tracked their direction.  My hand dropped off of her face, and her eyes opened.

I pointed in the direction of the man, and she gave me a nod.

A little less harrowed than she had been.  The Fishmonger’s people had ignited more lanterns, and the place was brighter, Lillian’s features less cast in shadow, the tracks from earlier tears now visible.

I could remember that heady feeling from earlier.  The look she gave me.

A dangerous game, that.

I was a terrible truth-teller.  I always got things wrong, in timing, in hurting others.

Being anything remotely heroic would be worse.

No, the best way to go about this would be to play to my strengths, be a bastard.

I took the scalpel from her, then gestured in the direction opposite the man.  Go.

She hesitated just long enough that I wondered if she’d balk.  Then she went.

I climbed into a space at the lowest shelf of a set, between two crates.  I pulled off my coat within the narrow confines, and put it between me and the pathway between shelves I’d just vacated.  I took a second to arrange it.

The man or men I’d heard would be rounding the corner by now.  It was one or two.  Doable.  It was very possible they’d see a glimmer of Lillian as she got away or found a hiding space.

I crouched there, poised, the hood of the coat over most of my face, my one good eye peering past, the angle sufficient to see shadows and movement of light and dark, but not necessarily the details of any people that approached.  The back of the coat covered my shoulders, front, and knees.

I heard the footsteps, I heard the creak as the man walked on parts of the floor that weren’t weighed down by heavy objects.

He slowed as he got closer to me.

I’d been spotted.

A glance over my shoulder confirmed I had an escape route.

I waited, let him get closer.

A hand grabbed for my neck, aiming to pull me backward and down to the ground.  but the coat was misleading.  Fingertips grazed the front of my throat.  I pushed forward, one hand grabbing the coat and pulling it away.  I saw a gun and swiped the coat down, stepping on it, limiting the gun’s movements.  My other hand went out and forward, scalpel swiping across his throat, before dropping down to help hold down his gun.

He struggled to pull back and away, with one hand trapped.  Blood flowed out.  By the time he pulled free, abandoning his gun beneath the coat, it was too late.

Shouts, running footsteps.

I climbed back through the other side of the shelves, taking my escape route, then climbed.

The lower shelves were mostly crates.  Other things were on higher shelves.  Lighter things, easier to lift up and down.

It was on the upper shelves that I found a box of tools.  The shelves swayed with my weight, giving me away and forcing my hand, and I summarily pushed the tools out and over, letting them fall atop the people who had rushed to my victim’s side.

They swore, gunshots fired, largely blind, and I made a haphazard climb down, freefalling more than I actually climbed.

Heading over in Gordon’s direction, to the back left corner of the warehouse, I found myself moving through more open area, visible from the front door of the warehouse, from the table with the patient, and from scattered thugs, including the Fishmonger, the scaled one I’d stabbed and one of the ones I’d ‘poisoned’.  The light didn’t reach far enough to reveal me.

The eel-black one, the other scaled one and the spiny one would be among the ones in the stacks of crates and the rows of shelves.

A cat and mouse game, baiting, trapping, it was doable.

But Gordon hadn’t been shooting.  The last batch of shots had been inaccurate.

I had a bad feeling.  A game of cat and mouse here, with me hobbled, and Gordon not in fighting shape…

We’d done well enough to force them to spread out to find us, to divert resources, and leave their boss less guarded, in a dark warehouse.

I took my bundle of raincoat and carefully unfurled it, taking the gun.

I found and aimed at the Fishmonger, the gun pointed at the lower half of his body.

Squeeze, don’t pull.

Especially don’t pull here, knowing that the shot might go higher, into his center mass.

The bullet caught him in his thigh.  He fell backward, screaming bloody murder, and I dropped to my belly, as best as I was able.

With both of his booted feet pointed in my general direction, me lying on the ground, there was an awful lot of leg between the barrel of the gun and anything too vital.  I fired again, twice in quick succession.

By the time I’d climbed to my feet, they’d found me.  They came out of shelves and stacks, approached with lanterns in hand and guns raised.

“Antidotes if you want them, your boss is down, and we can provide the counsel to know how to maintain those alterations of yours,” I said.

This didn’t feel good.  Not certain.  I wasn’t sure how they’d act, and I hated forcing situations where that was the case.

“Your choice,” I said, “Whether you want to get him help or not.”

They continued to approach.  I made eye contact with one of the ones I’d poisoned.

Damn.  I raised my gun, and five or so guns pointed at me in turn.

He pressed the barrel of the gun against my forehead.

“No,” He said.

“You don’t want to get him help?  That’s fine by me.”

“No, we’re not dealing with you.”

My heart sank.

Then I watched as the upper half of his face exploded into blood and skull fragments, a bullet shearing him practically from upper temple to upper temple.

His body dropped to the floor.  Half of the thugs turned, aiming at their new target.

“He was as good as dead anyway, as far as I figure it,” Gordon said, limping out of the shelves, pale, face damp with sweat, two handguns pointed at the group of thugs.

Lillian did much the same, appearing from the shelves, a rifle in hand.

They outnumbered us, but we had them mostly surrounded, Lillian behind them, Gordon to the right of them, and me in front.

It was a standoff.

“It’s not worth it,” Gordon said.  “You’re going to give us some information, answer some questions, you’ll give us the Fishmonger, and you can carry on doing what you do.  We’ll disappear in a day or two, after picking off a few of your enemies.”

“This is about the damn books, isn’t it?” the eel-black man asked.  He relented, his gun pointing skyward.  Gordon eased up in turn.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  He looked like death, like he’d been the one to get beaten, stabbed, scratched and beaten some more.  “Yeah, in a roundabout way, this is about the books.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.09 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The Fishmonger didn’t really have a body type, in the conventional sense.  He was shaped like a hump to begin with.  Now, with his legs bent at odd angles, belly sticking skyward, in clothing that rendered him even more shapeless, he was something else.  He groaned and moaned as he flopped on the floor to the best of his impaired ability.  It momentarily interrupted the dialogue.

I glanced at Lillian, who didn’t move a muscle to rush to the man’s aid.

Instead, both hands on the borrowed rifle, she walked over to the table with the patient she’d been tending to earlier.  She spoke to him in a low voice, laying the gun down so it was still pointing in the general direction of the thugs, before picking up tools.

They didn’t jump to reach for their guns or give any sign they saw that as an opportunity.  That was fine.

This was a dominance game, a vicious dogfight followed by the survivors circling one another, teeth bared but with no desire to fight.  Each side was obligated to attack if the other showed weakness or a reluctance to play fair, by the rules of this particular arena.  They had reputations to maintain, even among one another, and in the eyes of their boss.  We had to hold on to the illusion of competence we’d created.

If Gordon teetered over and collapsed on the floor now, with Lillian occupied behind the group of thugs, then I suspected they would draw on us again.  I hoped he had the strength to at least stand up straight.

I eyed Ratface, who had relocated himself to one corner of the warehouse, as far away as he could be from us without ducking out the front doors, and I suspected the only reason he hadn’t done that was that three people had made their exit, two had disappeared by way of mutt, and the third had been shot.

“Alright,” I said.  The thugs were eyeing a bloody Lillian, looking over their shoulders, as she worked at cutting out the parasite that was crawling beneath her patient’s skin.  Their attention turned back to me.  “Here’s the deal.  We’re not looking to muscle in on your turf.  We’re not looking to stay.”

They were silent, staring us down.

Gordon spoke, “We’re on the hunt.  We’re going to leave tonight, we’re going to get ourselves patched up, and then we’re going to look for the distributor of those books.”

“Who or what are you hunting?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

“What he said,” Gordon said.

The thug stared us down.  His tone was borderline insolent as he said, “Don’t know much.”

The tone of his voice, his attitude, it suggested he had very little interest in getting us what we wanted.  We could bribe and persuade, but our position was a weak one.  It was a fine line here, given the circumstances, between asking and begging.  It wasn’t possible to beg here and still hold the tenuous control we needed to stand out.

Worse, we’d hurt their friends or colleagues, and we’d threatened and shot at the survivors.  We were far from being on friendly terms with these guys.  If they could screw us or mislead us, they would.  Information couldn’t be trusted.

We had to give them an incentive, then.

“Like I said,” I told them, “We aren’t planning on staying long.  We run this errand, get our hands on the books, and then depending on where things stand, we’re going to look for further work.  We need to keep ourselves sharp, earn the money we need to keep going.”

I paused, glancing them over, before I continued, “If you’re helpful and your information is on target, then we come to you first.  Give you a deal if you want to hire us.  And if you don’t want to pay us, then we’ll still think, hey, those guys were helpful.  Let’s not mess with them.”

“You got to beat us up and threaten us, we returned the favor,” Gordon said.  I winced a little at the way he’d phrased it, but Gordon being Gordon meant he could get away with it in a way I never could.  I would inevitably come across as if I was mocking them, jabbing at them.  Gordon shrugged, a very easygoing, languid shrug considering he looked to be on his last legs.  “We’re even enough-”

The Fishmonger interrupted with a groan, trying to move by pushing at the floor with his heels, only to inflict seven different kinds of agony on himself in the process.  His legs wouldn’t work without help.

“-Even, as I see it.  Now, if you want to help us out on this, maybe you could name a certain someone or someones.  People who you hoped might have a bad day.”

Gordon did a good job of subtly indicating the Fishmonger.

He was saying what he was saying without making any promises or guarantees.  It had always bothered me a little that Gordon had such an easy time of it, while I came under ready suspicion, even when I was being honest.

It wasn’t even with the important stuff.  I could think back and I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been legitimately listened to by someone who wasn’t a Lamb, where I didn’t have to try.  To logic my way to a listening ear or to manipulate to keep that listening ear.

Even with Lillian, I wasn’t sure it was ever easy.  Natural, perhaps, but I could imagine a world where I could spend an entire day with her, from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to sleep, no obligations, no other people.  In that world I envisioned, the most common scenario was one where I said or did the wrong thing and made Lillian genuinely upset.  The next most likely scenario was one where I got tired from having to censor myself and pick my words, and fail to find time to enjoy myself, end up tired and miserable, or end up sabotaging it, leaving Lillian genuinely upset.

Gordon?  Gordon just talked.  He didn’t put special thought in it, he was direct, right to the point.  People liked him and listened to him.

Gordon could have a nice day.  He’d probably already had one at one point.

I envied him that.

“I’m not sure I’m seeing this as ‘even’,” one thug said.

“If there’s any disparity in casualties suffered, consider it balanced out by the fact that you picked this fight.  I might sound younger than I am for saying it,” Gordon said, “But you started this.”

“You sought us out,” the eel-black thug said, “You planned-”

“No,” Gordon said.  “Not planned.  We allowed it to happen, because it led to this – us talking.  A bit of exercise and practice, too.”

He smiled.  White teeth, a bit of savagery in his eyes, beneath the civilized demeanor.

“You wanted this.  You initiated it,” Eel said.  He looked at Ratface, “Right?”

“I don’t want to get into the middle of this.”

Eel snorted.

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “If you want to make this a blame game, you can do that.  But we’re going to go and see what we can do with the rest of the evening, and you won’t see us again.  Your boss might be ticked, considering that you’d be making this a loss instead of an opportunity.”

“And you’d be passing up medical assistance.  I should be able to patch up the worst of the damage,” Lillian said, most of her attention still fixed on her patient, while she periodically glanced up to make sure nothing fishy was happening.  “If the artery got nicked, though, he’s probably going to die.  Standing by and letting that happen won’t go over very well, either.”

“That too,” Gordon said, very casually.

The Fishmonger groaned.  “Get me my doctors.”

Eel glanced back at his boss.

I could see him avoiding eye contact with other thugs.  I could sense anxiety in him, and yet he only looked to his superior.  He wouldn’t or couldn’t look to the others for advice or counsel.  Was he De-facto lieutenant?  Or did he want to be?

“You’re on the fence,” I said.  Better to keep changing it up, so we took turns talking.  It was a show of power, one where we could suggest an ingrained sort of coordination and how we were collectively on the same page.  It also kept them off balance, making it harder for them to get a read on us.

I continued, “You’re weighing the risks versus the rewards.  Let me assuage your doubts.  We’re not looking to cut off the supplier of the books, we’re not looking to sully your name.  If our plan works out, you won’t even see how, the impact on you is so little.  We finish our job, we maybe stop by to help you out-”

“Take out an enemy of yours, if you’re so inclined,” Gordon cut in.

“And then we’re gone.  You can return to business as usual,” I finished.

I saw the thug scowl.

My body was sore.  I couldn’t take the time to rub at my ribs or touch my face without looking weak, so I held the gun with one hand and flexed my other hand, every knuckle cracking and popping.  I had a cut on my pinky from stabbing with the scalpel, my hand sliding down the shaft of the tool to let my finger prick on the edge of the blade before I’d found the traction to drive it in.

In the midst of that, I gestured.  Lie.  Question.

Yes, was Gordon’s response.  I saw Lillian giving me a sidelong glance, recognizing what we were communicating.

We were lying through our teeth when we said we’d cooperate.

“Take the deal,” Gordon said.

It’s the best way to get things back to a comfortable normal, I said.  Willing the thugs to believe it.  If you want power, making a definitive decision now is a way to climb the ranks and look good in front of the Fishmonger.

“You look after Giles,” Eel said.  “Get him some care.  Don’t stop by to say hi or offer help.  You disappear after this.”

Perfect.

“I’m done with the parasite,” Lillian said.  She dropped the thoroughly butchered parasite on the floor.  It landed with a splat, not even moving or coiling in response.  Dead.

I should have been paying more attention to her.  This was a dangerous point, one that moved things from the comfort zone we’d established.  I was acutely aware of the guns throughout the room.

“I’ll look after your boss, now,” Lillian said.  “Lift him up onto the table.  Simon, I’ll need my bag.”

Oh, I still had her bag.

The man who’d been laid out on the table sat up, his restraints removed.  Thoroughly traumatized, moving with the speed of a hundred-and-twenty year old man.  Lillian gave him a hand in stepping down.

This was the sort of maneuver where a particularly bloodthirsty individual might decide to be clever, assuming the other side had let their guard down.  Able bodied thugs, the Eel included, went to their boss, while I approached the table from another angle, one hand on my gun, which was pointed at the floor.

“No,” the Fishmonger said.  His head rolled from left to right and back again.  “No,  you’ll give me my doctors.”

“You won’t last that long,” Lillian said.  She sounded eerily calm, but I could see the tremor at her fingertips.  “You’ve lost too much blood.”

I found my place at her side.  I put the bag down and began sorting through the contents.

“If you don’t want me to act, I won’t,” Lillian said.

Dangerous question, that.  If he said no, out of pure stubbornness, then we were in a bad situation.

I gave him an eight-out-of-ten chance of saying ‘yes’.  That two-out-of-ten chance of a no was spooky.

“Fix me.  But I’m watching you.”

“Scissors,” Lillian said.

Rather than simply hand her the scissors, I pushed it into her hand, holding it there and holding her hand for a moment, before I released it to her custody.

Lillian set to cutting the man’s pants off.  He didn’t like that, but to ask Lillian to stop would have sounded petulant.

He’d controlled what, a sixth or a fifth of the city?  I couldn’t remember.  But it was a tenuous hold.  That hold likely wouldn’t last more than a month, now.  He’d shown too much weakness in this brutish, broken down little city on the coast.  Here, strength was respected, to the point that a sea monster’s corpse was left to loom over the city.

“You don’t need to be standing and gawking.  You two, go watch for trouble, you, you, and you, grab the bodies, all of you stay in earshot.”

I noted the hesitation before they acted to follow orders.

“We’ll need someone to stay to give us the information,” Gordon said.  “I’m going to go check on the others, if you can wait a minute.”

“Others?” the Fishmonger gasped.

“If you ask around, and I imagine you will,” Gordon said, “You’ll hear that a fairly large group of children got off the boat earlier today.  We’re far from being the only ones present.”

I watched the Fishmonger’s expression change.  He’d been well aware we’d arrived as a larger contingent.

The best lies were those with a grain of truth to them.

The lieutenant with the slimy black skin stayed where he was, watching over the scene, while Gordon stepped outside, presumably to look after Jamie.

Destroy him, question, I gestured, now that I was more free to use my hands at the table’s edge without the Fishmonger’s lieutenant seeing.  Not entirely free, but more free.  Delay.  Poison.  Question.

I stuck the question marks on the end of each statement.  I didn’t want to push her, but only to let her know what her options were.

I didn’t want her to regret her decision, whatever she decided, and I didn’t want her to resent me as part of that regret.  I worried that this was too manipulative as it was.

Lillian’s hands were occupied.  She wasn’t able to respond.  Maybe, if she weren’t as frazzled and post-harrowed as she was, then she might have been able to be clever with how she gave me her next instructions.  As it was, she was simply a capable field doctor.

Was it too much to ask her to kill?  To suggest that option?

She’d come dangerously close to being broken in her dealings with this man.  I felt like she needed a show of strength, to redeem herself.

But death?  Was a death by poisoning fitting?  Could it be horrible enough to be worth it?

No kill.  I gestured.  DestroyQuestion.

Remove that option.  Take that weight from her shoulders.  A kill wasn’t appropriate, and no kill I could imagine with the tools we had on hand was fitting, considering what he’d put Lillian through.

She finished cutting off the pants.  The fishmonger wore underpants that were more like cloth shorts, which I was glad for, but he’d been augmented, in a way that strained credulity to the point of splitting credulity at the seams.

Lillian didn’t even seem to notice or care.

I watched as she set to work, identifying the locations of the bullets, inserting syringe-less needles as markers, and then started cutting, carefully paring away skin and muscle to access the bullets.

The human side of Lillian was there, there was no doubt of that.  Her fear, the shake of her hand, the expressions that crossed her face as she worked.

But I could also see the big picture.  How she was throwing herself into her work, in a way that she had to have done countless times throughout the years.  An escape, a concrete, real thing that she could control, excel in and remedy.  Ordered.

I could see how the other emotions gave way to the problem she was solving, the order of steps, the careful measurement of fluid for syringes, her words as she explained each step to the Fishmonger, showed him the bottles.

Everyday Lillian was cute, but it was a leap to say she was a beauty in the way Mary was.  She was a girl, where Mary was a young woman or even a young lady, even if Lillian was older than her friend.

But this Lillian, she was beautiful.  In the tension of the moment, focused wholly on her task, face still and fingers working her craft, the girl wasn’t there.  It was a glimpse of what Lillian might look like if Lillian was an experiment.  Or if Lillian was a professor, wearing the black coat she wanted so very badly.

Or perhaps the distinction between the two wasn’t so fine, between the man-made monster and the man made monster.

She spoke, and I barely heard her voice, as caught up as I was in the scene.  She asked for a tool and I handed it to her.  Her blood-slick fingertips grazed my fingers, painting them, and I was very aware of the touch, the warmth, the almost immediate cooling where the fluids made contact.  Her lips were slightly parted, and she barely seemed to be breathing.

I felt like an iron rod stretched from my pelvis up through my stomach and chest, all the way to my brain, and the intensity of this Lillian I was seeing was enough to warm it, radiating heat through me.

Then, in the next moment, concern crossed her features.  She was Lillian the Girl again.  A Lillian who nourished a different part of me.  The Lillian I wanted to torment, to pull her hair, pinch and kiss her, just to see her squirm and turn red.  The Lillian I wanted to hold and be held by.

Concern.

I touched her hand, startling her a little.  I kept my features neutral, I didn’t want to bias or manipulate her.  Only to let her know she wasn’t alone, standing on this threshold.

“I need some antiseptics,” she said, glancing up from the work in progress.  “Reach into my bag-”

I did.  My finger extended.  She watched as I indicated different things in the bag.

“Left.  Up.  A little more left-”

Her hand moved at the scalpel.  Poison.

My hand buried in the bag, I touched a bottle.

Holding it, I used my thumb to pop the clasp and cork top.

“-more left.  There.  The bottle.  Use it to rinse your hands.  You want your hands clean-”

Another gesture from Lillian.  Lie.

“-before you help me here.  I’ll need you to get your hands deep inside, where the tissues of the thigh are thickest.”

I could hear Gordon in the background, getting details from the lieutenant.

But my focus was here.

I showed the Fishmonger the bottle, then used the antiseptic to clean my hands, the blood on my fingers came away easily.  I was careful to get under my fingernails.  Lillian took it and rinsed the wound, before patting it dry.

She’d told me not to get my hands clean, but if I were so obvious as to leave my hands filthy and try to give this man an infection, then it could catch attention.  This man wasn’t a doctor, but he worked closely with them.

“Put it away,” she said.  “I don’t want to lose track of things.”

“Okay,” I said.

I put the bottle of antiseptic cleaner back through the loop in the side of the bag.

My fingers swiped through the container I’d opened.  It was granular, like salt.  It stuck to my moist fingers, coating them.

“Put your fingers in deep, where I’m showing you,” she said.  “Hold there.”

Her fingers trembled as she demonstrated.

“Is the anaesthetic working okay?” she asked the Fishmonger.

“I don’t feel much, why?”

“Just making sure you’re comfortable,” she said.

It was perhaps the best lie I’d ever heard her tell.

I waited patiently while Lillian glued my face back together, where I’d been slammed against the hard table’s edge.  I kept my head stock still while I adjusted the wet cloth we’d draped over Jamie’s forehead.  We were in a small bedroom, one with two small beds, a bedside table shared between them, and a closet.

Paralytic venom, it seemed, had been injected into Jamie with the spines.  Gordon had severed much of his arm from the rest of his body to minimize how well that same venom could transmit, and his particular biology made the translation between sections more halting than it might otherwise be.  His enhanced constitution covered the rest.  He’d taken the time to recover, bounced back, and then gave himself enough medical care to retain some use of his arm.

But the venom had affected his heart.  He wouldn’t be up to more brawling before his next appointment.  Hubris was poised to stop him if he tried any exertion heavier than a walk.  The mutt had snarled at Gordon for climbing stairs at a walking pace.

This would have been so much easier with Mary and Helen.  Even Ashton could have changed the way that had gone.

Jamie had roused, found his body’s movements limited and stiff, and after some reassuring words from Lillian and something to help the muscle cramps, he’d dozed off.

It felt strange to be this close to Lillian, her hands on my face, while Jamie was there, sleeping.

I stared at her, trying to figure out her expression, while she utterly ignored mine, focused wholly on the damage to my ear, face, and eyelid.  Her face was so close to mine I could have kissed her.

My instincts told me she was on the verge of collapse.  Too much in one night.  Disappointments, danger, and trauma, so soon after being worked over by a dilemma regarding a girl she was supposed to ‘rescue’, with her career on the line.

I wanted to hold her, hug her, give her relief and contact.  To kiss her and whisper to her and I couldn’t bring myself to do any of those things while Jamie was there, even when he was deep asleep.

If it was any other Lamb, it would have been okay.  Gordon would have ignored it, Mary would have been happy to see it happen.  Helen might have threatened to join in the hug or tried to lick me, I wasn’t sure, but her presence wouldn’t have held me back.  Ashton… Ashton had the effective emotional range of a houseplant at this stage.  He wouldn’t have cared.

With Jamie, it would have felt disrespectful.

When Jamie had said we were warped when it came to matters of the heart, was this what he’d meant?  Was it something else?  How I’d felt about Lillian, seeing her with her hands covered in blood, captured by her work?  How I wanted to toy with her?

I wanted to do this right, and more than ever, I wasn’t even sure that was possible.

He’s poisonous, she’d said, to paraphrase.

I’m poisonous.

Sitting on the bedside table, Lillian’s eyes level with mine, I reached up and I fixed her collar, where she was a little disheveled.  It wasn’t not intimate, but it didn’t feel like I was crossing a line while sitting in arm’s reach of Jamie.  It didn’t feel disrespectful.

I pulled her top straight, where it was ajar, after all the running around.  I settled my hands on her hips.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“That you’re antsy and you’re fiddling with me.  You’re touching me.”

“What are you really thinking?”

A pause.

“I’m worried.  Worried that if they knew what I was doing, how I was operating, the sort of medicine I was doing, it might be a strike against me.  Against my black coat.”

I nodded.  I’d wondered something similar.

“I’m worried about the girl.  Candida.  We’re supposed to take her home.”

“Yep.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“We don’t know enough about her to even begin to decide on a direction or a plan.  We’ll figure it out after we’ve got more information,” I said.  “Until then, we can’t worry about it.”

“Can you really do that?  Stop worrying?”

I wanted to say yes.  That I’d taught myself a long time ago to ignore pain, to train my mind away from distraction.

But we’d lost Jamie, and I hadn’t been able to steer my mind away from that.  I’d dealt with the stresses since then, the presence of this ghost of my best friend, a boy who wore the same face and shared similar mannerisms, who was very different where it counted.

“I try,” I said.

Lillian nodded.

“I miss Mary,” she said.

“Me too.”

“Helen too, sort of?  It’s not like we get along, but I… it’s strange, not having her here.”

“Yeah.  Off-balance.”

Lillian nodded.

She rose up on tiptoes and she kissed my forehead.  It was chaste enough that I wondered if she had the same sense of weirdness about being close when Jamie was here.

There was a light knock on the door.

“Come in,” I said.  Lillian turned her body so she faced the door, her rear end resting on the edge of the bedside table, so the side of her body pressed against the side of mine, her cheek resting against the side of my head.  My arm went around her waist.

This much, it felt natural, if still weird, in the here and now.

It was Gordon and Hubris.

“Took a while,” I said.  “She took care of Jamie, fixed the bruises and cut and everything else.”

“I found the guy,” Gordon said.  “Before I get into that… the Fishmonger?  How was that handled?  Do we need to tie up loose ends?  Anything I need to be concerned about?”

“I’ve poisoned him,” Lillian said.  The character had gone out of her voice.  “Sy did, but I showed him how.  Over days, weeks, and months, he’ll recover, the wounds will close, and the poison will degrade and spread through his body.”

“And?” Gordon asked.

“Incontinence, urinary and fecal.  I saw how concerned he was at being hurt and not wearing pants around his soldiers.  I thought… force him to wear a diaper for the rest of his life.  it’s not an easy thing to fix, if he can even find a doctor good enough.  Indigestion, stomach grumbles, acute stomach pain…”

She trailed off.

“It works,” I said.  “It works really beautifully, actually.”

“It’s not my proudest moment,” she said, her voice soft.  She actually seemed shamed, in the wake of it.

I wasn’t sure I got that.

He would never bounce back from this loss.  He would never be able to fit himself among the upper class, even of a shithole like Lugh, or demonstrate power.  Even with a more discrete diaper, if what she was saying about stomach problems were true, he would lose the respect of his men.  Especially if the symptoms cropped up with any suddenness.

Rather than push the issue or try to understand it, I changed the subject.  “What did you find out, Gordon?”

“The Fishmonger, being who he is, offered help in getting the books to the right people.  I talked to one of those sub-distributors, and I’ve got the basic details down.  The top distributor is connected to Mauer.  Or is Mauer, if you want to take it a step further and assume he’s got more than one operation like this.”

I nodded.  “And the girl, Candy?”

“Candida,” Gordon said.  “We have a sense of where she is.  She’s working with a small group that has the books.  Mauer is funding them.  In exchange for that funding, they’re doing some work on a specific project for him.  It’s the same with other groups and cells.  So long as they work on that project, they can do side stuff all they want.”

“What sort of work?” Lillian asked.

“The sort of work you were worried about,” Gordon said.  “New stuff the Academy doesn’t touch outside of very controlled circumstances.  A dozen, fifty, a hundred cells, we don’t know yet, all working on variants of the same sort of project.”

“Hoping that if enough people try it, one of them is going to stumble on a solution?” Lillian asked.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

I felt her posture change.  Tension.  Concern.

“But there’s an equal chance of this spinning out of control?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Gordon said.

“No,” Lillian said.  “More than equal.  It’s very likely.  How it goes out of control and what it looks like when it does depends on the project.”

“Any idea what it is?” I asked Gordon.

He shook his head.  “But finding Candida and investigating what she’s working on should turn up solutions.  There might be brownie points in this for us, if we can get ahead of the problem before it becomes a problem.”

I gave Lillian’s waist a squeeze.  “Not so bad, that.”

Her smile was faltering, not quite convinced.

“Best thing to do would be to get this done,” Gordon said.  “Jamie’s down and out, but we can leave instructions and have the people you hired escort him to a rendezvous point if he’s better.  We go out right away, before the Fishmonger’s people spread rumors of us and people start getting paranoid or proactive.”

“Before your heart leaves you even weaker than you are now, you mean,” I said.

“Would be nice,” Gordon said.

I nodded.

It made sense.  I’d made up with Jamie to a degree, I suspected he would agree with the logic of this decision, to put the mission first.

Lillian would give her consent, too.  She would play along.

Which wasn’t the same thing as agreeing.

“In the morning?” I suggested.  “We can get a few hours’ rest, let Jamie bounce back, and tackle things before it gets too light out.”

Gordon nodded.  “Okay.”

I nodded.

“Then we’ll rest.  I’ll be in the next room, let you guys get settled” he said.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No.  I- We’ll take the next room, if that’s okay?”

“That’s okay,” Gordon said.  “I thought you’d want to keep an eye on Jamie.”

“We need to keep an eye on you, too,” I said.  “And I know exactly what you’re going to say.  The mutt will keep an eye out.  He can keep an eye on Jamie too, can’t he?”

Gordon looked down at Hubris.  “Yeah.”

“If that’s okay?” I asked.

He nodded.  He looked so very tired.

“Keep an eye on them, okay, mut- Hubris?” I asked.

The dog only stared at me.  But then it paced in a circle and curled up at the foot of the bedside table, eyes fixed on me.

“Good boy,” I said.

I led Lillian into the darkened hallway, then into the next room.

Before she could say or do anything, I wrapped her in a crushing hug, as tight as I could manage.

Too many stubborn idiots among the Lambs.  People who wouldn’t admit their weakness or who would play along even if it cost them.

I wasn’t sure if this thing between Lillian and I was a good thing, but this, this gesture, I was sure about.  I could read people and I could read Lillian.  Nevermind concerns about manipulation or whatever else.  Nevermind that a nice day might forever be out of reach.  Forget that until tomorrow.

She needed a hug, she needed to rest, after all of that.  I was supposed to take care of her and she was supposed to take care of me.  That much I could understand.

“Thank you,” she whispered in my ear.  “Thank you.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.10 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Coast clear?”  Gordon asked.

“Coast clear,” Jamie reported.  His breath fogged up in the cool morning air.

Gordon nodded.  He withdrew a set of picks from his pocket, and began working on the lock in the front door, while the rest of us gathered around.

“If I’d seen this lock up close, I’d know there was something going on,” Gordon said.  “It’s better than the usual.”

“Huh,” I said.  “You can’t do it?”

“There’s a locking bar and a rotating disc.  It’s the kind of lock you’d find on the front door of the Gage’s mansion, not a warehouse like this.  This will take a minute,” he said.

“We don’t have all that much time,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“I don’t think they’ll be up at the crack of dawn, but at a certain point you have to assume they’ll stop in.”

“I know, Sy,” Gordon said.  He fiddled with the lock.  “You’d actually find this interesting if you kept your skills fresh with the lockpicking, studied it.”

“Not a priority.  I’ve got you and Mary to help cover that one.  If I need to learn it for something, I’ve got the stuff in my luggage to remind myself how to do it.  Other things take priority when it comes to real estate in my head.”

“That exceedingly small amount of real estate,” he said.

“Ha ha,” I said, deadpan.  “You know, we wouldn’t have been so short on time if you and Jamie had actually woken up pre-dawn like Lillian and I did.”

“Sorry I’m dying, Sy,” Gordon said.

I stopped in my tracks.  Then I saw the half-smile on his face as he wiggled the push-rod.

“That’s dirty,” I said.

“You’re being a pest.”

“Nah.  Just reminding you that you’re slow.”

He sighed, squinting as something clicked in the lock.

“Oh, is that pin one of four?  Five?  Six pins?  Yeah, you’re slow.”

“Bite him, Hubris.”

Hubris opened his mouth, moving toward my hand.

“You don’t want to do that,” I told the mutt.  “I’m poisonous.”

The dog stopped.

“I’m disappointed in you, boy,” Gordon said.  The dog wagged his tail.

A movement behind us made us collectively turn our heads.

Only a cat, patchwork, running down the length of the street.  Someone’s practice making stitched, maybe.

“I know you like to say so, Sy, but you’re not that poisonous,” Lillian said.  “It’s not like you spit nightshade and pee cyanide.”

“That would be nifty,” I said.

Lillian rolled her eyes.  I caught a smile from Jamie though.

“You’re in a good mood,” Jamie observed.

“He’s intolerable,” Gordon said, but he didn’t look nearly as grumpy as he seemed.  “Why don’t you go for a walk, Sy?  Jamie and Lillian can keep an eye out here.”

I glanced at the others.  Lillian was rubbing her hands together, hunched over a little, as if ducking her head down a half-inch would make the difference in us being spotted breaking in or not.

“Getting rid of me?”

“Very much getting rid of you.  You’re being a pest.  Go scout the surroundings, make sure nobody’s approaching.”

“Say please.”

“Lillian,” Gordon said, “Hit him.”

Lillian punched my arm.

“Et tu?”

She put both arms out, pushing me away.  I let her, and when she dropped her hands, I kept walking.

I circled around the warehouse.  The sun had reached the clouds above, lightening the places where the clouds were thinner, while the thickest parts of the clouds overhead remained particularly dark, a heavy contrast.  I could see where I was going without the help of the streetlights, but it remained gloomy.  Rain came down, persistent if not quite pouring, and it froze into an icy crust in places where the shadows were deeper.  Ice in the alleyways and the base of the buildings, water elsewhere.

My fingertips traced wet wooden slats as I walked along the side of the building.  It was as nondescript as any warehouse, one of the buildings that was tilting, threatening to fall over, and a few stray shingles had come free, likely pulled down by the poorer weather of summer, dropping onto the street beneath the eaves.

It was as though Lugh was so short on natural life, plants, real trees and whatever else, that it had forgotten what fall was, and was skipping straight to winter.  No leaves to turn colors, just a grim, dark, wet little knot of a town, plopped down on a rocky shore.

I ducked into an alley, where I was less visible, still walking around the long building.

I looked up, saw a high window, and then cast my eyes around.  I spotted a plank, ten feet long, and propped it up against the wall beneath the window.  It was slick with ice in spots, but I shimmied up, and adjusted my weight until I had one foot on the windowsill and one on the end of the plank.

I tested the window.  Locked.  It looked to be a simple turn-key latch on the window itself, and further down, the key embedded partially in the sill.  Turn both keys, and the window opened.  Annoying to open and close, given how high the window was, but not impossible.  There was probably a tool on the end of a pole that people could use should they really want to open the windows.

Discreet, private.

Reaching into my pocket, being careful to keep my balance, I got some paper and a bit of razor wire.  Making a loop with the razor wire, I used the paper to help work the razor wire through a gap in between the top of the window and the window itself.

I had to squint to make it out past the dusty glass, within a large, unlit room.  I eased it over, and hooked the latch with the loop.  A sharp tug lifted it.

The one embedded in the windowsill was harder.  Twice, I got it in position, only for it to slip free.  On the third try, I hooked it over, and twisted the wire until it tightened around the key.  Further twisting made it turn at a glacial pace.

Come on, come on.

No way am I going to mess up here.  This is too important.

I began exerting some pressure on the window, pressing on it, until a combination of the pressure and the twist of the key made the latch pop the rest of the way open.  The window swung wide, and I very nearly toppled through, head and shoulders going through the window, with my ass and legs soon following.  I caught myself before facing that indignity.

Straddling the windowsill, I found the pole used for the window, and grabbed it, positioning it below me.  I started to get in position to slide down it when the front door opened.

No!   Damn!

Gordon and the others strode through.  Gordon stared up at me.

“Come on down, Sy.”

I kept my face dead still as I slid down.

One minute sooner…

“What was the plan?” Gordon asked.  “We come in, and there you are, standing in the shadows, already inside and looking smug?  Or were you going to try and scare us?  Because I’d like to remind you I have a weak heart.”

“The smug thing,” I said.  “I would have looked so smug.”

“Yeah, Sy,” Gordon said.  He gave me a pat on the shoulder.  “Let’s figure out what we can.”

I nodded, turning my attention to our surroundings.

The first thing I noticed was the smell.  A slaughterhouse smell: blood and hormones.  Not that one could smell hormones, not really, but I felt as though there was a note to the smell to be associated with pain and fear, and that note was here.  Subtle, but present.

The interior of the place was improvised.  We’d seen many a makeshift laboratory, and there was a tendency for them to try to hold to a kind of convention.  The Snake Charmer, for example, had maintained a small library, equipment, tools, all bought or found elsewhere and brought to his lab.  He’d had a chalkboard, texts, a proper desk, beakers, and what he couldn’t find he’d built.  It had been ramshackle, but it had been a lab.

This was different.  Every piece of equipment seemed to be the wrong sort of thing, bent to scholarly ends.  Old crates had been stacked to either side of the desk with open faces out towards us, a makeshift bookcase.  The ‘books’, however, were disorganized reams of paper, many bound into sections with twine.  An old door had been laid out on its side, propped up on stacks of crates, with more papers strewn on top.  The hole where the doorknob was meant to be inserted served to hold a cup, presumably serving as an inkwell, if I could draw conclusions from the dark spatter surrounding it.  Candles and lanterns were set atop virtually every horizontal surface on that end of the room, the candles melted to stay firmly in place.

No organic lighting, but they’d whiled away the evening hours here, going by the state of the candles.  That meant it was less likely for them to get up bright and early.

Where there were bottles or beakers, most seemed to be old alcohol bottles with the necks shorn off, each containing various fluids, corked with wax plugs, the wax dribbling down sides where a flame had been held to it to form better seals.

Shelves took up a good share of the one-room building, but they weren’t floor-to-ceiling shelving units like we’d seen in the Fishmonger’s warehouse.  These were built shelving units.  Boards, bricks and stone blocks, stacked so the bricks and blocks held the boards flat, at varying intervals.  One shelf would be placed with an end against the wall, the length of the shelf extending toward the far end of the room, a fair gap, and then another haphazard shelf.  One in three shelves held the accumulated detritus that had probably been spread throughout this warehouse prior to the new occupants moving in, another third had the notes and paper, tools and bottles of various chemicals, and one in three held the freakier stuff.

The ‘freakier stuff’ consisted of bottles of cloudy fluid.  Within a given bottle of fluid there were some limbs of odd shapes and styles, none of them recognizable from any animal species I knew.  I saw organs, again, very hard to place or identify, and I saw tissue samples, skin, sections of organ, eyes, jaw with teeth and gums still attached, and fibrous strands that could have been fraying muscle or tendon, collected into bunches.  The dim light from some windows reached the bottles at the far end of the building, making them seem to glow from within.  Likely why they were so cloudy.

The only other thing of interest was what looked to be a metal panel inset into the floor, three feet across.  Chains stretched through a series of pulleys, into and through that metal grate.  To lift it open?

I could see the miner’s pick they’d used to break through the hard ground, the wooden splinters and stone debris piled in one corner with all the other garbage that the occupants had set to one side, and I knew they’d dug a hole.  Then they’d covered it with a very heavy metal lid, and rigged it with more chains than necessary.

The lid wasn’t that heavy.  Half the number of chains would have sufficed to heft it up.

Gordon closed the door behind us, locking it.  As a group, we advanced further into the room.

Jamie went straight to the door-table of papers.  Lillian started to, then changed her mind and went to the crate-shelves which held equipment, makeshift and otherwise.

Studying records and methodology, respectively.

Gordon’s attention was on the grate, while I turned my eyes to the far corner of the room, with all of the interesting things in bottles.

It was a lab, but it wasn’t a lab.

Most labs were centered around something, and all they had here was… what?  A grate in the floor?

“Doesn’t feel like a proper lab,” I voiced the sentiment aloud.

“It isn’t,” Lillian said.  She was closest to me.  “This is eerie.  Like children playing at something serious.”

“What are they playing at?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.

“Everything here is handmade, though,” I said, looking around.  My hand reached up to touch a bottle with an organ inside.  They’d reserved the clearest bottles and jars for the specimens.  It looked like some sort of combination of a heart, but wrapped up in the wrinkly skin of a ballsack, the upper corner knotted together and hardened like a whorl in wood.  “They came in here, they spent days clearing away the trash, cleaned up, as much as you can clean this sort of place, and then they built the shelves, put together the table, collected paper…  it’s a labor of love, almost?”

“Weeks of work to get things set up, then weeks or a couple months of time to get all of the rest of this done.  Whatever it is,” Gordon said.

Gordon hadn’t moved far from the hatch, though he was probably long since done examining it.  One of his hands rested on the chain, the other on Hubris’ head.  He was tired, slower to move, faster to tire.  A clock winding down.  His color still wasn’t good.

I tried to ignore that.  I’d have to pick on him more later, just to bring things closer to normal.

Another organ, one I might have suggested as a mix of a bird’s talon and a monkey’s paw.  Three fingers, one thumb, stretched with gnarled skin, black in color with fibrous strands at the base, almost like feathers or fur.

It had been hacked off.  The damage to the stump was haphazard, ragged.  I reached up to turn the bottle, my eyes on the damage.

I froze, watching it sway slightly within its makeshift, wax-corked bottle as the cloudy liquid responded to my movement.

My eyes had been on the stump, and I’d only seen it in the corner of my eye, but I could’ve sworn I’d seen the fingers move, closing slightly in response to the movement.  The time it had taken my eyes to move from stump to finger had been enough time for the movement to cease.

A trick of the light?  A natural movement in response to the movement of the fluid within the bottle?

I knocked on the glass of the bottle, hard.

Nothing.

I moved the bottle again, to no avail.

That was annoying.

“Jamie?” Gordon asked.  “What are you reading?”

“Papers have a lot of various mentions of viability.  They’re referencing tables on a book or text that we don’t have and using shorthand on these tables I’m trying to figure out.  I’m not seeing the text on the shelves either.”

“Nope,” Lillian said.  “No text, but lots of tools for surgery.  Some big tools, too.”

“Big?” I asked, turning.

Lillian reached to the top of a stack of crates and hefted a woodcutter’s axe.  It was heavy enough she almost dropped it.

“Don’t go lopping your toe off,” I said.

She turned a little red.

“I like your toes,” I said.

She turned a little more red. “That’s stupid.”

“It really kind of is,” Gordon commented.

“Shush, quiet, I’m still figuring this out,” I said.

He made an amused sound.  “I remember the cafeteria at Mothmont.  You have a better idea of how to woo girls than people twice your age.  You’re being intentionally dorky.”

“There’s blood on the blade,” Lillian said, mercifully changing the subject.

“They’re creating life and taking it apart,” I said.  I turned back to the shelves, walking down the length of it.  Some of these bottles were dark brown and green, leaving the contents a mystery.  I held one hand up to block out the light and leaned close now and again to peer inside.  “Hey, can you grab me a lantern or a candle or something?”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.  She put down the axe, scooping up one glass lamp on her way to me.  Her other hand reached under a flap to fish in her bag.  She retrieved a box of matches as she walked the long way around a pile of crates with a few blankets draped over top.  I might have taken it to be a table for sharing meals at, but the pile of blankets would have made for an uneven surface.

“Any ideas?” I asked.

“I’d think they were building a stitched warbeast, but no.  Testing a poison or pathogen on a variety of parts, maybe.  But… these are bizarre.”

“Consistently so,” I observed, looking at each specimen.  There wasn’t a single one that I could point to and properly identify.  I held out my hand to partially block the light from the unlit lamp, “Careful as you light that.”

She nodded.  The match flared, and she held it to the lamp’s end as she turned the dial in the side.  The flame ignited, the light not quite reaching the specimens on the shelves.

I found one eyeball, floating in the jar, the orb itself a jaundiced yellow, the pupil round and almost human.  I stared at it, moving my hand away from the light source to let the light better reach the shelf.  I gestured for her to raise it.

The pupil at the eye’s center narrowed.  Lillian nearly dropped the lamp as she saw it happen.

“It’s alive,” she said, in wonder and horror.

“All of it is,” I said, staring at the bottles.  “The girl is supposed to be immortal, remember?”

“Her tissues?  No.  But that same science.”

I nodded.

Thirty or forty jars of very different organs and body parts, no two alike.

All independently alive.

Two short whistles, barely audible, made our heads whip around.

Warning.

Lillian reacted by fumbling with the lantern, as I moved to interject my body between it and most of the room.  The flame went out as she cranked the dial the other way around.  The front door of the building slammed.

Footsteps, quick, more than one set, moving with purpose as they crossed to this end of the building.

Right for us.

My eyes moved quick, surveying the surroundings.  The shelves around us were too littered with bottles and other things for there to be a clear escape route through the shelves, like I’d found in the Fishmonger’s place.

It couldn’t be easy.

The footsteps were closer, a matter of feet away.  Lillian spun around.

Putting a hand around Lillian’s mouth to ensure she remained quiet as I startled her, I hauled her back, stepping into the deepest, darkest corner, where one shelf touched the wall of the building.  It wasn’t much shadow, so I held her close to me, sandwiching myself between her and the wall.

There’s our girl, I thought.  Candy or whatever her name is.

Unlike her parents, Candy looked like she was fit for the aristocracy.  A long neck, paler skin, and platinum hair that had been artificially lightened, cut short like a boy’s.  Everything else about her screamed of an attempt to rebel.  She wore a man’s overalls and shirt, though the shirt was tied short, so it knotted at her solar plexus, allowing a glimpse of her belly.  Tattoos marked her arms, small thorns or horns sprouted from her skin at the one cheekbone I could see, and two curving horns rose from her forehead.  I could tell that her eyes had been altered, but not how, not at this distance, in this lighting.

The one accessory she had with her, however, that screamed of her rebellion against her parents, was a boy.  He was tall, lanky, and probably had as much muscle on his frame as I did, after adjusting for height and proportions.  Artificial scales decorated him, mingling with dark, swirling tattoos of indeterminate subject.  It was a lot less dramatic and haphazard than what Candy had done to herself.  It was as if she’d decorated herself with whatever came at hand, spur of the moment, while he’d done the work on himself with an artist’s eye and a goal in mind.

She pushed him down onto the stack of crates with blankets, pinning him, and he didn’t put up much of a fight at all, even as she opened her mouth, revealing pointed teeth, and bit his shoulder.

It was very possible he was even worse at fighting than I was.  I felt a kind of pity and camaraderie for the guy.

She shifted her position, straddling his torso, then pinning his arms against the surface with her knees, before reaching up to undo the buckles on her overalls.

Oh.

I revised my opinion.  This wrestling match would be a win for both participants.

I didn’t dare move, my hand over Lillian’s mouth, because we were in their peripheral vision, and any movement could tip them off.

Heck, if they even turned their heads, they might make us out in the shadows.

Lillian’s breath was hot against my hand as I continued to cover her mouth.  My breath had to have been tickling the back of her neck, as her back and butt pressed against my front.

With our present view of the scene, there were only so many things to look at, other than the scene, or the back of Lillian’s head, or the skin of her neck, or her shoulder.  One of those things was the window I’d opened.

Still open, the pole still moved from its original position.

They were supposed to be sleeping in, after working late.  Gordon said he saw them burning the post-midnight oil.  The place was supposed to be empty.

I guess Candy and her boy knew it would be.

If the young man happened to stop kissing Candy and look up and a little to the left, he would see the open window.

We would be found if they took just a moment to look.

My back was pressed to the outside wall of the building, and the cold of the fall had seeped into it, now seeping into me, cold, uncomfortable.  In contrast, the front of me pressed against Lillian.

I wanted them to stop what they were doing, because this was agony.  I didn’t want them to stop.  I felt antsy.  They hadn’t even properly taken off their clothes.  They were saying things I couldn’t hear, she was nibbling on him, and they kissed and ran their hands over each other, drawing it out.

A part of me was sad, because whatever followed from this, it would be weird, the next time Lillian slept beside me.

Candy pulled off the top she’d knotted at her middle, turning around to find a spot to put it.  Maybe a place that wasn’t too dusty.  Her back was defined by muscle, beneath the straps of her brassiere.

Lillian chose that same moment to squirm.  I was sure we’d be spotted.  We weren’t.

But Candy turned to face the other way, and she paused.

Did she see Jamie?  Gordon?  The window?

No.  The angle of her head.  It was the axe.  Lillian had left it lying on the ground.

Candy said something to her boy.  He responded, curious, starting to sit up.

We were done.

I pinched Lillian’s derriere, my hand still pressed over her mouth, and she huffed, before pulling away enough to let me slide out from behind her.

I held my finger to my lips as I faced the pinkest Lillian I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing, before I let go of her mouth.

I took a second to smooth out my clothes and fix my belt.  By the time I was done, Candy was peering in my direction, squinting.

I approached her.

Muscles stood out in her shoulders and arms as she craned backward, not even standing as she adjusted from straddling her boy to lunging for the floor.  She grabbed the axe from the floor, holding it by the very butt end as she straightened, pointing the axe’s blade in my direction.

I spread my arms, raising my hands.  With a twitch of fingers, I beckoned Lillian to follow.

“A kid?” the scaled boy asked.

“No,” our quarry replied.  “Remember what our patron said?  Things and people to watch out for?  Children in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

We’re notorious, now, I thought.

“Does Mauer just tell that to everyone who he sponsors?” I asked.  “Watch out for the odd children?”

“I don’t know who or what that is,” Candy said.  She was still breathing hard, and not from lunging for the axe.  Everything about her, even as the top of her overalls hung free at the waist, seemed feline to me.  Fluid in movement, almost liquid, a natural strength, like a tense spring.

She was young, too.  Only two or so years older than Lillian, if I had to guess.

“The person who hired you?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “He’s an old soldier.”

“Red hair?”

“Black hair, black skin,” she said.

Either one of Mauer’s lieutenants, or Gordon had been misled.

“We’re not your enemy,” I said.

“He said you’d lie to me.”

Even in attitude, she was like a coiled spring.  A gun cocked, ready to fire with the twitch of a finger, as reflexes allowed.  I was betting her reflexes were better than mine.  She hadn’t missed a beat in responding, almost as if she’d expected the statement.

“The project you’re working on, it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” I said.

“You know about the project?”

“No,” I said, “But I know it’s a disaster waiting to happen.  If it was this easy to do, the Academy would have done it already.  There’s a reason they haven’t.”

“The reason is that it’s a new technology,” she said.  She glanced at the door.

She was going to bolt, and I doubted I could catch her if she did.

Lillian approached from behind me.  When she spoke, her voice was soft, “It’s older than you think.”

Candy held the axe out adjusting her posture, so the side of her body faced me, one leg out in front, almost a fencer’s pose.  She measured her steps, pacing, wary.  “Does it matter?”

“The approach you’re using here might be new,” Lillian said, “But we’ve seen how it unfolds in the past, and nothing I’m seeing here suggests anything is going to turn out different than it did then.”

With Candy’s posture, I couldn’t see the hand she held behind her, but I could see part of the arm.  The muscles shifted slightly as she moved her fingers.

“Gordon!” I called out, in the same moment Candy’s boy leaped from the makeshift bed, running for the door.  I’d taken a step forward as I shouted, and Candy moved to intervene, barring my path.

Hubris charged to the fore.  I watched as the boy bounded over the dog.  Hubris coiled, hunching down, then leaped, teeth parting to latch on.  He missed by a hand’s span.

The boy landed and didn’t even pause as he ran from the moment his feet touched ground.  He caught the door handle, unlocking it and heaving it open-

And Gordon was on the other side.  I heard a few grunts from clear across the building.

Candy’s boy fell to the ground, curling up into a ball.

Candy glared at me.  The coiled spring wound even tighter.

“Believe it or not, we’re on your side,” Jamie said, from behind Candy.  She spun to face him, then realized she was surrounded, and couldn’t give him her full attention without turning her back to Lillian and me.

“You’d be surprised how many people have told me that over the course of my life,” Candy said.  “The only people who haven’t are Drake and my friends here.  They know that when someone says that, they’re lying.”

“You’re right,” I said.  “We’re on our side first and foremost.  “You don’t even come second, or in the top ten.”

“Speak for yourself, Sy,” Lillian murmured, behind me.

“I’m speaking for myself, I guess.  Lillian, the girl of our group here, she has a soft heart.  She’s still trying to decide what to do with you.”

“I was asked to fetch you,” Lillian said, her voice soft.  “Take you home.”

My eyebrows arched in surprise as I looked back at Lillian.  A part of me expected Candy to bolt as I took my attention off her, but she remained where she was.

“You used my full name,” she said.  “I thought you probably were aiming for more transparency, more honesty.”

“You’d be right,” I said, looking back at Candy.  “Nice one.”

“I’m not going home,” Candy said, her voice tight.

“I’m not taking you home,” Lillian said, her voice pitching higher in her insistence.  “I’m not.  I was planning on doing it, then I saw you and-”

“Drake.”

“I saw you two.  I’m sorry.  And I thought- I thought that was nice and right and good for you, and I can’t-”

Lillian’s voice got more halting.

I could see Candy’s muscles relax a bit.

“Candy,” I said.

The muscles got tenser than I’d seen them yet.  The look she shot me was one fit to kill.

“Candida,” Jamie corrected me.

“I hate Candida,” she said.  “I hate Candy more.”

“Sorry,” I said.  I spoke to her like I was placating a snarling warbeast.  “Sorry.  Really, I am.”

Her eyes were wary as she studied me.

“We need to know what exactly it is you’re doing,” I said.

On the other end of the building, Drake got to his feet, wary of the dog and Gordon both.  Gordon said something I didn’t hear, and Drake responded.

Drake crossed the room, returning to his girlfriend’s side.  After a moment, he walked over to where she’d left her shirt, and tossed it to her.

She was busy studying us, even as she pulled it back on.

“We’re not supposed to tell,” she said.  “And I’m supposed to assume anything you do is a lie or an attempt at sabotage.  You’re the…”

“Lambs,” Jamie said, behind her.

He was instinctively doing what we’d done to the Fishmonger, speaking in turn, so we took turns, kept her off balance.

Perhaps a bad idea, given how skittish she was.

“You’re creating life,” Lillian said.  “Refined life.”

Candy nodded slowly.  “You read our notes?”

“Your notes didn’t mean anything without the reference material,” Jamie said.  “She intuited that on her own.  Because she’s an Academy student, and she’s read about this.”

“Can you open the hatch?” Lillian asked.  “Or is it dangerous?”

Candy shook her head.  “It’s not viable.  Not yet.”

“Small mercies,” Lillian said, her voice almost inaudible to me, and she was closer to me than to anyone.  “Show me?”

Candy nodded slowly, a frown on her face.

She walked over to the chain that was connected to the pulley.  There was no crank or winch.  She simply hauled down on the chain to haul the hatch up.

It was akin to a sewer grate in how it was fit to the floor.  Trails of blood and other fluids dripped from the underside and into the hole.

The slaughterhouse smell I’d detected earlier increased in intensity a hundredfold.

The extra chains I’d noted had a purpose, I realized.  While many of the chains were attached to the grate, others were attached to the specimen.  It was four feet across and about seven feet long, and only vaguely humanoid.

It looked like it was made of tumorous flesh, nodules, or a coral reef.  Parts fit together and clutched to one another, giving the entirety of it a surface like a human brain, all bumps and valleys.  It moved only slightly, without purpose, like a newborn baby, lacking the strength to even raise a heavy limb more than an inch or two.

“Primordial life,” Lillian said.

“Oh,” Jamie said, “Oh wow.”

“What the heck is that supposed to even be?” Gordon asked.

“Sy has talked about the Lamb’s project, right?” Lillian asked.  “About what we’re meant for, in the long run?  What he hopes for?  A great mind?”

Gordon nodded.  Candy continued to give us wary looks.

A better brain, capable of pioneering better brains than their own.

“If that mind had a body to suit, this would be that body,” she said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.11 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Can you please put it back?” Lillian asked.

“It’s not viable,” Candy said.  “Even if it was, we have metal hooks going through its limbs.”

“Please?” Lillian asked.

Candy nodded.  She let the chain slide through her grip, and the primordial thing descended, disappearing into the hole, with the hatch finally settling down, slightly ajar.

Candy walked over and toed at the hatch, until it fell into the space that had been carved out for it.

“Thank you,” Lillian said.

“It’s not viable,” Candy said, not for the first or second time.  “It can’t move of its own volition, it isn’t strong enough to break good chains.”

“What are we dealing with, Lillian?” Gordon asked.

Candy looked annoyed, her eyebrows furrowing.  Drake had the weapon, but she still clenched her fist, as if violence remained a consideration.  Drake put a hand on her shoulder, and she eased up.

Your project, and we’re deferring to Lillian.  It’s not going to win you over, I thought to myself.  I also noted the anger and frustration.  I was getting a better sense of her as a person, where she’d come from and how she’d been shaped by her life circumstance.

“Primordial life.  It’s… most people in positions of power view it as the next big leap in science.  They saw it as the next big leap thirty years ago, when they first started working with it,” Lillian said.

“Too many problems, too many disasters,” Jamie said.  Lillian nodded.

“Problems?” Gordon asked.

“Look at it this way.  We work for the Academy,” Lillian said.  She looked at Candy and Drake, “You two, maybe you don’t like or you hate the Academy?”

“The world would be better without it,” Drake said, in a wary way that suggested to me that he wasn’t sure what we were going for, or the danger we posed.  Tempering his response, knowing he was dealing with admitted agents of the Academy.  He had a hand pressed to his stomach, where Gordon had hit him, and he now held the axe Candy had picked up and left behind as she’d changed and grabbed the chain, though it wasn’t held ready.

“I’d say I hate the nobility more than I have any feelings about the Academy,” Candy said.  “But I’m not so sure they’re that different.  Some groups were arguing about the distinction, months ago, but it felt like a distraction, more than anything constructive.  And now I’m saying that it’s one and not the other, contradicting myself.”

Lillian had to jump in, because it sounded like Candy was about to get on a topic where she would be hard to interrupt.  “Okay.  You have a sense of the measures the Academy goes to.  You know that the Crown has taken over a third or a quarter of the world, and there isn’t a community or a region that doesn’t feel the Crown’s influence in some way or another.  I don’t think anyone here would disagree that the Crown is very committed to spreading its influence, advancing things wherever possible?”

“They’re warmongers,” Candy said.  “And they’ve caused more misery and pain than anyone else, in the past century.”

“That’s a biased way of putting it,” Lillian said.  “Not every war was started by them, not even half the wars, and they-”

“Lil,” I said.  Candy was getting tense again, ready for a fight that had nothing to do with muscle.

Lillian pursed her lips together, paused, then said, “I know the Crown is far from perfect.  Very far from perfect.  They’re hungry for power.  We agree on this?”

“Yes,” Candy said, her voice harder than it had been.

“As hungry for power and advancement as the Academy is, after the first experiments with the primordial life, life created from scratch and very quickly brought up to speed with current standards, they looked at the results, at the dangers, and they said no.  Not yet.  Not with the risks involved,” Lillian said, her voice as soft as Candy’s had been hard.

The rain pattered on the roof.  As if it knew we were talking about it, the thing beneath the hatch moved.  The chain scraped against the narrow opening it had been allotted in the hatch.

More likely, it was restless, after having been lifted up into daylight, then taken back down beneath.  Woken from sleep?

“We weren’t told about dangers, except that we had to keep it secured,” Candy said.  “We made some headway, we told, uh, the guy during the regular meeting, and then he came by.  He checked things, told us what to do, sent some people to help set it up.  Now he comes here every week, double-checking.  I thought things were safe.”

“Scientists working for the Academy have been more careful than you’re being and still been surprised,” Lillian said.  “Um, back in…”

“1903,” Jamie supplied.

“Thank you.  Yes, back in 1903, there was a bad incident.  The problem is, once it becomes a problem, it becomes a runaway problem.  Not in that it runs away, but that it gets more out of control with every passing moment.”

“What is it?” Gordon asked.

“A colony,” Lillian said.  “A hundred or a thousand individual lifeforms, operating as a coordinated being.  There are some very basic and very complex principles at work here, but once you create a balance, and get it to the point where it’s capable of self-advancement while maintaining a stasis where it doesn’t destroy itself while doing so…”

“You get life that designs itself,” Jamie said.  “Sometimes very rapidly.”

Lillian nodded.  “Right now, it’s trying things at random.  It barely has any intelligence at all.  If something works to any degree, then it’s going to keep that, but it’s going to keep stuff that doesn’t work, that gives it false impressions.  It’s going to run into dead ends, and it’s going to reach the limits of its confines and shed or self-cannibalize parts at random, hoping to discard loose ends.  This kind of thing crosses a certain milestone, and then it starts developing with purpose.  It starts to recognize the dead ends.”

“And then it’s off to the races,” I guessed.

Lillian nodded.  “It’s already off to the races, like Sy said.  It’s got a kind of nervous system or communication system running through its body, it’s developing parts with individual, coherent purpose.  It might be inspired on some level by what it’s been fed or given…”

I saw a glimpse of the Lillian I’d seen the night prior, as she worked it out in her head.

“When you say it isn’t viable, what do you mean?” Lillian asked, very suddenly, turning to Candy.  At this stage, we were collectively standing in a loose circle around the hatch.

“It can’t stand on its own.  It’s not coordinated.  It’s weaker than I am,” Candy said.

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “Well, right now, it can’t even walk on its own.  Maybe.  In a week or two, it might be as strong as a warbeast from yesteryear.  That’s bad enough, because you can’t be sure how far along it is or what it’s capable of.  How would you know?  You’d have to dissect it, take it to pieces, and research the individual parts.  So it might be weaker than a modern warbeast, but it’d still be a mystery.  Maybe it gives off toxic fumes.  Maybe it’s just strong and flexible, capable of escaping those chains.  Give it another week or two, and it’s still a mystery, but it might be scarier than a modern warbeast of equivalent size.  Give it another month, and it could double in size, or maintain the same size and get more efficient, or it could develop capabilities we haven’t yet invented.”

I nodded, staring at the hatch.  The image of the thing was burned into my eyes.

“It might take longer,” Lillian said.  “It probably would.  But there are no guarantees.  It could develop the ability to reproduce.  Or to think, like we do.”

“And you went and made it immortal?” I asked Candy.

It was apparently the wrong question to ask.  I saw a flash of alarm in Candy’s eyes as she looked at me.

Her boyfriend doesn’t know.

Drake’s eyebrows went up.  “Immortal?”

“Not like that,” Candy said, too quickly.  “It can die, we can hurt it.  Just like I can be hurt.  I can die.”

The ‘I think’ was on her lips, left unspoken.

“What are they talking about?” Drake asked.

“They’re using the wrong word.  Immortal isn’t right.”

“It’s the word your parents used,” Gordon said.

“It’s not accurate!” Candy raised her voice.  She looked more wild animal than person for an instant, in the flare of anger.  She appeared to try and visibly calm herself down.  “No.  They hired doctors to experiment on me, they extended my lifespan, made me more susceptible to some problems and resistant to others.  They’re trying to pass it off as something it isn’t.”

“Extended it how much?” Drake asked.  “Ten years?  Twenty-five?  Fifty?  A hundred?”

“I don’t know!” Candy shouted, wheeling on him.  “I won’t know until I get there!  If I get there.  The doctor said I might become ugly and said I might lose my mind to a kind of treatment-related dementia before I’m forty and then in the next breath he said I might live three-”

She stopped herself.

She remained there, panting for breath.

“Three?”  Drake asked.  “Unless you were misspeaking, and you were going to say three-ty years…”

Candy didn’t budge an inch or give an answer.

“Three hundred?” he asked.  “Three thousand?”

“Three hundred,” Candy said.  “At a minimum, the doctor thinks.  Probably longer.  Maybe three thousand.  Maybe thirty thousand.  I don’t know.  I think the doctor didn’t know either, he said one thing to my parents and another to me, I got the impression he didn’t care so much about what my parents thought, so long as I outlived them and they never saw if it was real immortality or not.  All I know-”

Her voice hitched.

She tried again, “All I know is that they did it without asking, and when I said no, they went ahead and did it to me all the same.”

“I’m so sorry,” Lillian said, quiet.

Candy wouldn’t even look at her.  She was agitated.  The anger she’d been displaying all along, it was fed by a deeper, longer-burning rage.  One that extended back further than even the treatment she was talking about.

Fury without a target to unleash it at.

The changes she’d had done to her own body looked different, in that light.  Less an aimless rebellion, more a frantic attempt to decorate herself with some means of exercising that anger, the pointed teeth, the hooked teeth, the horns, fingernails, the muscle and whatever else, as if she’d gone for whatever was available for the lowest price at the time, that might still be able to hurt someone or something.

“I’m not going to give them the only few decades of sanity and memories I have left,” she said, to nobody in particular.  “I was going to do something.  Get the money to live well.  I thought this was it.”

One arm started to raise, as if to point at the hatch, then flopped down at her side.

“I’m sorry,” I echoed Lillian.  “For bringing it up.”

Candy shook her head.

“You only ran away a short while ago,” I said.  “Late summer?”

She nodded.

As abjectly miserable as she seemed, she didn’t shed a tear.

“You joined the project late.  Met a boy, latched on, then offered a piece of yourself for the project he was working on?”

“Yes,” Drake said, apparently recognizing that Candy wasn’t willing or able to answer.  He put an arm on her shoulder.  “We distilled the formula from her blood, applied it, and we started to make headway, not long after.  Before, we didn’t have the stasis.  It would develop an individual piece and then that piece would die.  Two aborted attempts, where a nodule dying would spark a chain reaction and kill the entire thing.”

“If I had to guess, that was a success,” Lillian said.  “Well, I mean, it means you’re on the right track, but it’s not a success success, because any success for the project is bad for everyone else.  If it was developing a network to communicate with itself and carry over changes, then I’d imagine you were already a few months or years off from getting it off the ground.  It would be a question of luck, if the primordial life chanced on a configuration that was viable, one time in fifty or a hundred…”

She trailed off.  I saw her eyes widen.

Luck.  Rolls of the dice, looking for triple sixes.  A lot easier to stumble on the right combination if one was making a lot of rolls.

“Yeah,” Drake said.  “Some of the others we talked to said something similar.  Not that it mattered, back then.  It felt like a pretty massive failure.”

“Others,” Gordon said, voice sharp.  He was apparently thinking along the same track as Lillian and I.  “Other people are doing this.”

Drake nodded.  Candy looked up.

“You’re in communication with them?”

“Some.  One other group.  We use some of the same suppliers for things, we talked shop, realized we were on different versions of the same project, working from similar materials, these texts, and we’ve kept in touch, kept each other updated.”

“Did you give them any of… whatever she was given?”

“No,” Drake said.  “It was a matter of pride, and because we’re going to get rewarded if we succeed here.  Money, enough for our entire group to live comfortably for a decade.  If we could reproduce the results, then they offered more.  Positions in their group, more funding, power.

“Access to their scientists,” Candy said.

If they can reproduce results, then you’d damn well better make sure you keep them happy, Mauer, I thought.

“Okay,” I said.  “You didn’t give Mau- the soldier anything from her?  He didn’t take samples?”

“No,” Drake said.  “We told him, and he didn’t seem to care.  He was more interested in continued results, and in making sure things were secure enough.”

“That’s good news,” Lillian said.  “It sounds macabre, but it’s a good thing if that’s as far as things have gotten.  In scenarios similar to this, according to the Academy, most experiments along these lines will catch their creators off guard and kill them.  Then the creation dies, having bitten the hand that feeds it, unable to escape its own confines, lacking the food, water, and resources it needs to continue evolving.  There’s a chance that might happen here.”

“If things get that far, then the soldier might pay his regular visit and find the creators dead, the beast hungry, and bring another team in to take over,” Gordon pointed out.

Lillian frowned.

“Might interrupt some successful projects that haven’t gotten to the point of getting regular visits, though,” Gordon said.

Lillian nodded, but the frown didn’t disappear.

“You know a heck of a lot about these things,” I said.

“Because I thought we’d eventually run into one,” Lillian said.  “And later, because I was trying to think about what I might do for my big project, to get my white coat.  A lot of innovations have come about from this sort of thing.  It’s inspiration, if nothing else.”

“Inspiration incarnate,” Jamie said.

“Priority one is killing this thing,” Gordon said, indicating the hatch.  “Fire usually works.”

“It probably would,” Lillian said.  “But we shouldn’t.  The best thing to do is to leave it down there.  Let it weaken and eventually starve.  Cut off the food supply, if any, make sure it doesn’t have access to light, or even warmth.  It’s a good thing that winter is on the way.”

“Just like that,” Drake said.

Lillian turned to look at him.  “You had to have known.  There had to be a moment where you saw the rate at which it was growing or going from being a lump of flesh to having eyes, where you got scared, where it felt too easy?”

“It didn’t feel easy at all.  I spent ten or more hours a day here, all summer, most of this fall,” he said.

Explains how they can come here and mess around like that.  They probably don’t even notice the smell anymore.  Or the weird, I thought, eyeing the jars.

Or maybe they do and they like it.

“I can get some sand,” Drake said.  “Do a pour, through one of the holes in the hatch.  Or we… the samples on the shelves.  We can toss those down first, if opening the hatch is okay?  Then the sand?”

“Then burn the building,” Gordon said.

“Burn the-” Drake started.  He stopped when he saw the look on Gordon’s face.  “This is a second home to me.  To us.”

Candy nodded.  Both of her hands held onto Drake’s upper body, but her expression was resolute.

“Your sponsor pushed you to make these things because he doesn’t care about the consequences,” I said.  “To put thousands of lives at risk.  I don’t think you can stay here.  They’re going to come looking for you.”

My thoughts touched on the subject of just who the sponsor was.  Mauer was ostensibly the person distributing the books and providing the soldiers, but Fray, Fray might well be the one to engineer this plan from the outset.  I could somehow imagine Mauer being brazen enough to try, willing to gamble that the Academy could answer the problem, willing to watch as the primordial life did some real damage.  It was harder to imagine with Fray.

“Okay,” Drake said.  Then, contradicting himself, he said, “I don’t know where to go.  The others, they’re going to show up here, expecting to get to work for the day, they’re going to need answers, and I’m supposed to tell them they can’t stay in Lugh?”

“Lie,” I said.  “Tell them something that will scare them.  Mix it with something embarrassing.  That you were here, together, messing around, naked, when it started to push its way out from under the hatch.  That it spoke.  Something.  Tell them you panicked, that you’re out.”

“Or tell them the truth,” Lillian said, giving me a look.  “Because the truth should be enough.  This isn’t for tampering with.”

The pair looked so defeated.  My finger touched the ring at my thumb.

“We’ll give you funds,” I said.  We didn’t have much on us.  “We’ll- heck, what’s a nearby city?  A day or two of travel away?”

“Tynewear,” Jamie said.

“Go to Tynewear.  The post office, a week and a half from now, we’ll courier you a package.  Funds enough to get you all started again,” I said.  I looked at Jamie.  “Paper, pen?”

He provided both, tearing a page out of a small notebook.

I wrote down a series of passwords.  I reached out, “So you know the courier is the real deal.  And so nobody else happens to get those funds.”

“Why more than one password?” Drake asked, without moving to take the paper.

“Because the funds come with a condition.  You don’t settle down in Tynewear.  You don’t resume work, you don’t start to wonder if you should start working on this again, because you won’t be in one place for long enough to get a lab set up.  When the funds arrive, they’ll come with another location.  If you want more funds, you’ll have to relocate again.  At least three times.”

“And after that?”

“After that, either we’ll give you a means of communicating with us, we’ll find a way of checking on you, or I’ll give you another series of locations.  Whatever happens, you’ll be together, you’ll get a chance to explore the world, experience things.”

My eyes were locked onto Candy’s by the time I’d finished talking.

It was a good offer, but somehow, by the time I finished talking, she looked terribly sad.

“We’ll need the book, too.  The materials,” Gordon said.

I expected that to make them buck, fight a little.  To ask if this was a trap, second guess our intentions.

But they weren’t that.  They weren’t soldiers or spies.  They hadn’t raised themselves on a battlefield or anything like that.

They were survivors, a little lost, who’d thought they had found direction, something to strive for.

Drake reached out for the paper.  He didn’t take it, hesitating, his fingers almost but not quite making contact with the paper.

A buck?  Resistance?

“I should tell you about the others, too,” he said.

“Others?” Gordon asked.  “You said there was the one group.”

“There is.  One group we know of, that we’ve met.  But the soldier who comes to check on things, he made comments.  He talked about our setup, compared to the others.  He was recommending burying the thing, because it was easier to dig a deep, wide hole and trust the surrounding ground than it was to build a container strong enough, and he talked about how the others had gone about it.  One of them used a well.  The other group did the digging themselves.  The stitched we used to do the dig, we got them from that group, he brought them over.”

“Two groups?” Lillian asked.  “That are this far along?  Or farther along?”

“At least two,” Gordon remarked.

“That’s all I know,” Drake said.  He took the paper from me.  “I’d tell you more if I knew anything.”

“Because of what you said about pride, about wanting to be the ones to succeed?  If you’re backing out of this, then they should have to too?” I asked.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said, giving me a look.

“Or that,” I said.

“Do you know when he’s due to come?  The guy who visits?” Gordon asked.

“Five days from now,” Drake said.  “He arrives in a carriage, sometimes with armed guys who stay in or on the vehicle.  Usually later in the evening.”

Gordon nodded.

Five days.  With Gordon in the state he was in, it felt like an eternity.

Drake folded the paper carefully and put it into a pocket.

Candy, meanwhile, had turned to face Lillian.

“You came for me, because my parents asked, you said.”

Lillian nodded.  She looked almost ashamed.

“What are you going to tell them?”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.

Candy nodded.  From her reaction, I suspected any definitive answer would have been met with suspicion, or picked apart.

“Is he nice?” Lillian asked, her voice quiet.  “Worth spending the next forty years with?”

“He’s the first person who ever listened to me, and I needed someone to listen to me more than anything,” Candy said.  “He could have been the biggest asshole on the planet, and I would have stayed with him just for that alone.”

Lillian nodded, as if this made all the sense in the world.

“It’s a good thing he’s nice,” Candy said.  She broke into a smile for what might have been the first time since we’d interrupted her moment.

I could see the look on Lillian’s face.  The relief, the joy.

It wasn’t the right decision, if she wanted that black coat.  Committing to a longer-term exchange of mail with fugitives was dangerous for the Lambs.

I imagined, seeing that smile from Candy, Lillian imagined it was worth it.

“What’s your name?” Lillian asked.  “You gave up the one your parents gave you.”

“Emily.  It’s dumb, I know.  Looking like I do, I should have chosen something tougher.”

“It’s nice,” Lillian said.  “It’s a good name.”

There was a brief exchange of plans and expectations, Drake and Emily would be meeting with their group to share the news, to lie or tell the truth, whatever it took to convey how bad an idea it was to stay with the project.

We would have to loop back before leaving, to make sure things were done.  It was good that it wasn’t a very portable experiment.

Plans made, we departed.  Two experiments, at the very least, to track down.  Five days could be a dangerous length of time to delay, for Gordon’s sake, and because the people in charge could well be invested enough in the project to be watching over the situation, checking in more discreetly.  If they caught on before we caught sight of them, then we would be on the back foot.

Burning the building was the best way to make it difficult to get to the hole in the ground with the primordial inside and to make it difficult to resurrect the project, but it would get attention.  Hopefully the sort of attention we could take advantage of.

“She’s good for you,” Gordon said.

I looked over, then looked around.  I’d been lost in thought, trying to figure out the best way forward.  Lillian was hanging back, talking to Jamie.

I thought of being crammed in a dark corner, Lillian squished against me.  My heart picked up a little.  I found myself smiling a little.

I felt guilty about it too, as Jamie glanced at me.

“Just saying,” Gordon said, very casually.

“Sure,” I said, equally casually.

He ventured, “Hearing Lillian express just how bad of a situation this is, I’m more worried than usual.”

“Entirely reasonable.”

“We may need to call in help.  The others might not be so cooperative, and if Mauer’s involved, we can expect resistance.  Coordinated resistance.  Normally, with the full complement of Lambs, I’d say we could manage, but I’m not at my best, and we don’t have the full complement of Lambs.”

“…Which makes things complicated,” I said.  “If we call in that much-needed help and they follow up on the most basic leads, which they are, they’re going to find Drake and Emily.”

“Yeah.  Probably.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I looked back at Lillian.  “I know you’ve been advocating telling the truth, but if time really is of the essence…”

“If she draws the conclusion on her own, we won’t lie to her,” Gordon said, firmly.  “If she doesn’t realize that we’d be setting the Academy on their heels, we don’t tell her.”

I nodded.  She would resist, or even if she didn’t, it would poison things.

“I don’t like it,” I said.  “We can hope they get enough of a head start, and maybe make them harder to find, but… I don’t like it.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said, “Me either.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.12 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Ratface Cecil was busy eating.  Another bowl of ambiguous slop.  He’d tripled down on the bodyguards, but half of those bodyguards were now eating.

The rain continued to pour, and even though the sun was supposed to be high in the sky, the intermittent cloud cover and the wind blowing across Lugh meant that the water that collected in the darker folds of our clothing was freezing or partially freezing.

The lack of light, however, helped to conceal us as we crept along a rooftop, across the street from the man.

“Lillian,” Gordon said, holding out a hand.  Lillian fished in her bag, and produced a metal tube.  She handed it to me.  Rather than hand it to Gordon, I held it up and looked down the length of it, peering at the back of Ratface’s head.  There were grooves spiraling down the interior.

Gordon reached out to take it from me, and the end of the thing poked at my eye socket.

“Jerk,” I said.

“Let’s not waste time,” he said.  “I want to get back.”

“Do you even have the lung capacity to do anything with that?” I asked.  I looked at Lillian, who had a bottle out, placed on the top of her bag, a syringe already filled with fluid, which she was now packing into a small feathered projectile.  “Does he?”

“Cardiac and respiratory systems are linked.  If he’s struggling, then it makes sense that he wouldn’t have-”

“I’m fine,” Gordon said.  “Right Hubris?”

The dog didn’t react.  Its eyes and ears were focused in the direction of Ratface.

“Exactly,” Gordon said.

“The fact that you named him Hubris is really fitting here,” I remarked.

“And you’re a terrible shot,” Gordon said.  “A terrible shot with tiny lungs in a tiny body.”

“Wow, you get so mean when you’re dying,” I said.

His expression was stone-still for just long enough to wonder if I’d pushed the wrong button.  Then he smirked.

“If you weren’t sure, I could do it,” Jamie volunteered.  He was holding Lil’s bag steady so it didn’t fall and slide off the roof.

“You might be able to,” Gordon acknowledged.  “But you’re not sure?”

“No.”

“Right,” Gordon said.  Lil handed out the dart.  I took it and handed it to Gordon.  Gordon placed it in the pipe, “Well, I’m mostly sure.  Worst case scenario, keep your heads down.”

“Wind is predominantly coming from the southeast,” Jamie said, “You can see the waxed paper by the store next door, a good gauge if you want to get a sense of what the air currents are like down there.”

“Didn’t see that,” Gordon said.  “Thanks.”

“He’s talking to the guy to his left,” I pointed out.  “Bodyguard number three, counting from left to right.  The guy is doing most of the talking.  Either it’s a long speech, or he’s going to respond.  Watch that you don’t shoot as he twists around to look at the guy.”

“Is that the sort of thing that goes through your head when you’re the one with the blowpipe, or when you’re in a fight?”

“It’s one of the sorts of things that goes through my mind,” I said.

“You think too much, Sy,” Gordon said, sighing.  He brought the blowpipe to his lips and settled down against the roof.  Hubris, beside him, did much the same, mirroring his actions, furry chin on the peak of the roof.

Gordon’s criticism left me torn.  A part of me, of course, was loyal to the mission.  We wanted to succeed, do a good job, maintain our reputation, and everything else.  But another part of me really wanted him to miss.  Extra points if he missed because I was right.

Gordon huffed out a sharp breath.  The dart disappeared into rain and darkness.

Ratface leaped out of his seat, knocking his bowl over the other side of the counter.  Bodyguards and bystander alike twisted, staring.

Ratface backed away, turning, his head craning.  I saw him pull the dart from the back of his shoulder.

If he’d twisted around to talk to that bodyguard of his, then Gordon would so have missed.

“Come on,” I said.  I pushed away from the peak of the roof.  I let myself slide down wet and icy shingles.  I had to steer myself a bit to keep on course, as I slid right off the roof, and onto a stack of crates.  My feet banged against the top crate.  Momentum still carrying me, I skipped down the boxes, and my feet skidded on ice and mud.  I managed to keep my footing as I came to a stop.  A few people who were standing around stared.

I turned around, and I saw that all three of the others, with the exception of Hubris, who now stood on the top crate, were only halfway down the roof, carefully easing their way down.

I sighed.

While they climbed down, making the uncomfortable three-foot hop down from the roof’s edge to the topmost crate, which was a good twelve feet up off the ground, I circled around the building.

Ratface was standing in the middle of the street, showing the dart to his bodyguards, who had surrounded him.

His eyes roved as he talked, and they locked onto me.

He gestured, and I raised a hand, palm up in a gesture more blatant than the Lambs’ usual.

He said something, then stopped, his bodyguards settling to stand beside him as well.

I pointed at him, then beckoned.

He was wary, but he approached.  By the time he reached me, the other Lambs did too.

“This was you?”

“You had bodyguards,” I said.  “This is more expedient.”

“You could have approached and asked to talk.”

I shook my head.  “Your body language was defensive.  You were all hunched over, over that bowl of whatever you were eating.”

“Curry.”

“Whatever it was.  Too guarded, and you’d want to flex a bit, which would only get in the way.”

He gave me an incredulous look.  “What are you talking about?”

“Oh,” I said  I reached under my hood to scratch my head.  “You got scared last night.  Felt powerless.  Not a good look, for someone who has to do business in a place like Lugh.  Given the choice between a cooperative, friendly chat, and retaking that image, that power?  You would have taken the second option.  Don’t tell me you wouldn’t.”

He gave me a long, searching look.

“You are,” he said, “The most unpleasant little child I’ve ever had to deal with.”

I smiled.  So I was right.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“We’re running down leads.  A man named Drake.  Dark scales, tattoos, he’s tall, th-”

“I know the one.”

“You’re the best supplier in the area.  You supplied to him.  Food, specific materials.”

Ratface narrowed his eyes.

“Who else did you supply similar things to?  They would’ve been recurring customers.”

“Sharing details of my clients, some of whom are working outside the confines of the law of the Crown States of America, would be a very good way to lose their business,” he said.

“True,” I said.

“I’m the best supplier in Lugh for a reason,” he said.  “Being talkative isn’t it.”

I nodded.  “Okay, sorry to bother you.”

I turned, gesturing at the others.  Together, we turned to leave.

“That dart.  What did you shoot me with?”

“Poison,” I said.  “She has the antidote.”

“Like with Giles’ men?”

“Like with Giles’ men.”

“Except that was a bluff, apparently.  The one is alive, still.”

“We poisoned two.”

“You shot one of the two,” Ratface said.  His face was etched with lines of stress, disgust, and anger.

“We’ll stop in after we follow up on some other leads,” I said.  “You’ll be feeling the effects by then, and you’ll tell us what we need to know.”

Control, power.  The more I thought about it, the more I came to suspect that Drake and Emily wouldn’t have been able to make it in this city, after they’d reached a certain level of status.  Strength and the upper hand were too important when it came to speaking the city’s language, and they were too soft.

“The crew of kids that Drake was a part of?” Ratface asked.  At my nod, he said, “I can think of a number of others.  Seven hereabouts, all wanting medusozoa.”

“Jellyfish,” Lillian said.  “For a model nerve net to build off of, probably.”

“I don’t ask for details, but it catches the eye when that appears on the order form,” Ratface said.

“Two or three of those groups would have shifted buying patterns,” I said.

“More food,” Lillian said.  “Protein rich, salts, minerals?”

“Yeah,” Ratface said.  “Four of the groups are asking for a restock on the jellyfish every month or so, one is doing it at a good rate, too.  But three, like you said, shifted focus.  Alfred’s group, Old Harding’s, and the Ridgewell group.”

“Details,” I said.

“Alfred’s group, the one Drake’s a part of.  Kids, or only a few years past being kids.  Half the time, they don’t have all the money to pay for what they’ve ordered, but they scratch together the money in the end, even if it’s late.  Driven, if distracted half the time by each other.  Emotional, heads in the clouds.  I see a lot like them.  They never last.”

I nodded.

“Old Harding, I’ve been working with that crusty asshole since I started, and he had a decade on me even then.  Academy trained, up to a point, got his white coat, tried for a gray one, couldn’t find it in him to do it.  So he came over here and he set up shop.  Tries one thing for five, ten, or fifteen years, whatever he thinks is going to be most profitable, then switches it up.  Only barely keeps his head above water.  This new project is his current focus.  He has people working with him, even, which never used to happen.”

“And the…”

“Ridgewell group.  They’re not local.  Harding’s group, he pulled that together from a bunch of others who talked work with him over drinks at the pub, probably.  Alfred’s group?  Same idea, random kids who found each other and decided they’d be stronger as a team than they were alone.  But the Ridgewell group?  They showed up in town, their group twice as large as Alfred’s, and they all already knew each other.  Each of them with a defined role.  When they came to buy-”

“They already knew what you had in stock,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ratface said.  “Exactly.”

“All they needed was a place to work unmolested, probably,” I said.  “Everything else was set.  I’m willing to bet their lab is nice, too.”

“It should be,” Ratface said.  “They wanted some containers, ones with special seals.  Had to go through colleagues of colleagues to track it down.  Then they had it sent back twice, once because it had a scratch in the side.  Not even a structural issue.  Thing would’ve withstood a hit from a cannon without leaking, but no.  No, they wanted it sent back on my dime.  Would’ve told them to go fuck goats if they weren’t such good customers otherwise.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Am I going to lose them as customers the same way I might lose Giles?”

Giles’ organization is already crumbling to the point even Ratface is aware?

I turned to Lillian, “Let’s go.”

Ratface cut in, “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to tell you.  I was asking, you little prick.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“If you want an apology for the insult, you can keep waiting.  I’ll reserve my right to insult you until the day I die.”

“I don’t care about that.  I just want the answer.”

“Ridgewell is up that way.  I never delivered directly to them, but if you go there, you’ll see them eventually.  They go out in pairs.  Always with the long coats.  One more a militia type, armed, and one academic.  The militia protect the eggheads.”

“And Old whatshisname?”

“If you’re not even going to remember the particulars of what I tell you, why are you even interrogating me?” Ratface asked.

“We’ll do the remembering,” Jamie said.  “He twists the knife.”

I smiled at the imagery.

“Old Harding is set up in his house.  No street names over that way.  Find the two churches, or ask for directions to them, even the meanest Bruno around Lugh won’t begrudge you finding your way to church.  From there, head due west, you’ll find sprawling houses.  Harding’s has a bunch of hand-wagons parked in the front.  If you see more than one, his is the biggest.  Bought out his neighbor to make room for the rest of the lab space, back when he was garden-growing meat.”

I signaled Lillian.  She underhand-tossed the antidote at Ratface.

“Just so you know,” I told Ratface, “The project that uses the jellyfish?  Bad news.”

He sneered at me.  Apparently he didn’t need to pay me much mind, now that he had the antidote.

“There’s nothing I could tell you that would convince you.  The Academy’s done that stuff before.  They backed off.  What those people are making, the people who’re giving them the money and recipe for making it don’t expect anything except disaster.  The creations will get loose eventually.  The Academy will have to mobilize with army and everything else, which is what the project’s sponsors want.  If the creations don’t kill you right off, and if you survive the Academy coming to town, well, Lugh will be gone either way, and you’ll be unable to conduct business.”

“If I didn’t provide the material, someone else would,” Ratface said.

“Probably, but you trade in innocent lives, like you tried to trade with hers.”  I indicated Lillian.  “I don’t like you, and I wanted you to know that when the sky starts falling, so to speak, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”

“Yeah?” he asked.  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I nodded.

This time, as I signaled the other Lambs and walked away, he didn’t call out or try to stop me.

The rain continued to patter down as we put distance between ourselves and Ratface.

“Doesn’t solve the problem,” Gordon remarked.  “What you said to him, what you did.”

“I know,” I said.

“We can clean things up here and go back home to the Academy, but others are going to crop up.  Sooner or later, short of Lugh being wiped off the map, someone’s going to start up the project again, they’re going to get far enough in, and they’re going to succeed.”

“Probably,” I said.  “Ratface is right.”

“Ratface?” Lillian asked.

“The guy.  Who we were just talking to.  He’s right.  If we take him out, another supplier will fill the void.  The floodgate is opened.  There’s no closing it now.”

“We can tell the Academy,” Lillian said.  “They’ll do something.”

So much faith.

I looked at Gordon.  We’d exchanged words about needing to keep Lillian in the dark so this all could run smoothly.

But…

“What?” Lillian asked, looking at me.  Her eyes were large beneath a fringe of brown hair and her hood.

She was getting better at reading me.

Touch her.  Hug her.  You know how to distract her.

I didn’t touch, hug, or distract her.

I glanced again at Gordon.

“What!?  Sy, you’re looking concerned.  You don’t think the Academy can handle this?  Or do you not want them to?  Because if you don’t think the primordial experiments are a danger, then-”

“No,” I said.  “No, it’s not that.”

She punched my arm, then grabbed it.  “Then what!?  Seriously, Sy.”

“The Academy will handle it,” I said. “I believe you.”

“Then-”

“They’ll bring an army.  They’ll surround Lugh, and they’ll hit the city with plague or something equivalent.  Soldiers with masks on will march through, scour areas for clues, evidence, and the ‘cats and cockroaches’ survivors.  A place this large, they could spend days or weeks doing it, picking through the bodies.  All the while, they’ll place gunpowder charges or oil or whatever else.  When all is done, they’ll torch Lugh, burning it down.  Then they’ll wrap it up by sending in war-hounds and warbeasts to find the survivors of that particular purge, and to knock down the buildings that are still standing.”

“No,” Lillian said.  I wasn’t sure if she was disagreeing with me.

“The bigger a problem gets, the simpler we tend to make the solutions.  It’s why people gravitate so heavily toward extreme beliefs, or hating whole groups of people.  Sometimes we get our heads askew and we stop seeing things straight, so a problem seems too big, and we want to treat it as something very simple.  Sometimes, though, the problem just is that big, too complicated to deal with in a smart way, when we’re already under a tremendous strain.  So we turn to violence.  That very thing happened with us and the Fishmonger last night.”

“They’d evacuate,” Lillian said.

“And risk that someone sneak out with pages of the material tucked in their underpants?” I asked.  “Or in a metal tube they’ve jammed up their rear?”

“It’s not- It can’t work that way.”

“It does,” I said.  I turned to Gordon.  “Right?”

“It’s not enough you’ve got to go and be the bad guy, hurt Lillian by telling her all this, you’ve got to bring me into it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He shook his head, closing his eyes before taking a deep breath.  “I want people’s last memories of me to be of me being nice.  A good guy.”

“You’re as big a prick as I am, Gordon.  You just hide it far better.  I’ll make it my life’s work to make sure you’re remembered as such.  If you insist on playing the ‘I’m gonna die’ card as often as you are, I’m going to be trying even harder to discredit you post-death.”

“What Sy was saying about Lugh,” Lillian said, cutting in.  “It’s true?”

“There’s precedent,” Gordon said.  “For things less serious than what you described with these primordials.”

“Why can’t it be easy?” Lillian asked.  “I… this was supposed to be a nice little reference on my record.  A favor owed from people with money and connections to higher society.  I gave up on that, and in my head I know it was the right thing to do, and Emily and Drake can have a good future together, but in my heart, I feel… nasty.

“It was the kindest thing to do,” Jamie said.  “You’re allowed to feel disappointed.”

“It’s not disappointment, it’s worse.  I hate myself.  I’m-  Jamie-”

She was on edge, emotionally, lost, her sentences getting shorter until she couldn’t string together full ones.  In the midst of it, she was turning to Jamie, not me.

“Jamie,” she said.  “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?  Can’t I logically know that this was a bad move, but at least feel good, in my heart?”

“I don’t know,” Jamie said.

“But now you’re saying that we’re going to walk away, and all the people here, they’re going to get killed, the city is going to burn?”

“It’s very possible,” Jamie said, gently.

It didn’t feel like enough of a response.  Lillian was hurting, and I didn’t like that.

I spoke, “Fray probably talked to Mauer about this, planning it to some extent.  I imagine she rationalized it, saying that people getting reckless with the primordial stuff was going to happen sooner or later, she’s just speeding it up, accelerating the process.  She told Mauer what the Academy would do, what it would have to do, and now he’s waiting.  His people are facilitating it all, and he’s waiting in the wings, ready to take advantage of a situation that would usually be neatly tidied up, point to it as something that started with the Academy and ended with the Academy.  Rile up the people.  Start something bigger.  In the meantime, Fray has the way clear to engineer something else.  Something more constructive.”

“Okay, Sylvester,” Lillian said, sounding somehow absent.  Like she didn’t care about the particulars, or the motivation.

Lillian wasn’t me.  In my darkest, most painful moments, I wanted the world to make sense.  I wanted to have answers.  When I lacked them, I would, well, reread the same diary entries for hours on end.

She wanted something else.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I wanted this to be constructive,” she told me.  “Talking to Drake and Emily, I thought it would be.  You gave them hope and a future and I could barely contain myself because I wanted to kiss you right there as the words left your mouth, and I was happy, and then that happiness faded, and I started to think about me again, and my future, and now a whole city, just burned away?  Isn’t there a way to stop it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I saw her stop.

The hope in her eyes stung.

“Maybe,” I said.  “No guarantees.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Sy,” Gordon warned me.

“No promises,” I said.  “Okay, Lil?  Don’t take this as a promise.  Don’t get your hopes up.  We have a job to do, and you know, in both that head of yours-”

I touched her forehead.

“-and in that heart of yours-”

I touched her chest.

“That’s my boob,” she said, quiet.

I raised my voice, to be heard over her small protest, “You know that the number one priority is cleaning up this mess.  We lay the groundwork we can, and we make sure the primordials in progress are cleaned up, then we take a shot in the dark, to see if we can’t engineer a happier ending for this gloomy shitstain of a city.”

She opened her mouth to respond.

I poked her in the chest again.  “No.  Bad.  I can see it in your eyes.  No getting your hopes up.  No being disappointed if this doesn’t work.  No being disappointed in me, and definitely no being disappointed in yourself.  Understand?”

She reached up and took my hand in both of hers.  She held it there, against her chest, where her heartbeat thumped against the back of my hand.

“I understand,” she said, lying through her damned teeth.  Then she lied again, “I’m happy if we just try.”

I looked at Gordon, and the look he was giving me.  Speak of disappointment.

He wasn’t one to think things through to the same extent I was, but he’d probably seen this exact situation arising when he’d encouraged me to keep my mouth shut.

“We should go after the Ridgewells first.  They sound better armed, and they sound better organized,” Gordon said.  “Better to hit them while we know what resources we have and the condition we’re in, than to wait and find ourselves ill-prepared.”

“Agreed,” I said.  “Then we move on to… dang it, Ratface called him an old crusty asshole and now I can’t commit his name to memory.  I just think of crusty assholes every time I try.”

“Old Harding,” Jamie volunteered.  “I’ve heard of him.  There’s a picture of a student club at Radham mounted in a stairwell, with names on a brass plate underneath it.  A quote about him appeared as an inscription in a class yearbook, too.  Not much to go on, but I’ll recognize his face when I see it.”

“Neat,” I said.

“Based on what he said, this won’t be easy,” Gordon said.

“No,” I agreed.  “Jamie, got a job for you.”

“Sure?”

“You have the best handwriting.  If any of the rest of us write, we’re liable to get sentimental.  Pen a letter to Mary?  Let her know if she finishes her job early, she should come give us a hand.  You can tell her we’ll do the same if she wants, but I don’t think this job is going to wrap up neat and tidy anytime soon.”

“Alright,” he said.  “Should I break off and head back to our rooms, or see if a post office has the materials?”

“No.  We’re all going back,” I said.  “You can pen the letter while Gordon, Lillian and I explain the basics to the rest of the would-be-slaves I rescued.  Extra hands on deck, much as I hate to do it.”

“Even the kids?” Gordon asked.  “For something this dangerous?  That’s not like you.”

I pulled my hand away from Lillian, and I jammed it into a pocket.  It was colder there, I noticed.

The city was so dark, considering it was midday.  The frost seemed to stubbornly cling to the edges and the shadows.  I could see beyond the low, sloping buildings and make out structures that could be the targets we were going after.  In another light, they were all homes of stubborn, stupid people who’d decided to live in a barren, ugly little city like this.  People who would probably die to plague and fire, or to the monsters Lillian had described.

“Wanting Mary, if she’s available, wanting the kids and adults, it’s my roundabout way of saying we need help,” I admitted.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 8.13 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“And there we go,” Gordon said.  “Third patrol coming home.”

I raised my head up to watch as two men in black coats made their way down the street.  One had a bag slung over one shoulder, the other had a gun on either side of his hip, and a knife in his tall boots.  Both seemed to be roughly the same age, both were of similar builds, and both had their hair cut short beneath brimmed hats.  If it weren’t for the one having a gun and the other having the bag, I would have considered them interchangeable.

Everything about their demeanor suggested a military background, or ex-military.  Mauer’s sort, if not his brothers in arms.

Gordon and I ducked our heads back behind cover as the pair looked around, searching for trouble.  We’d chosen to hunker down behind a short fence surrounding a pen.  It had once served as a home for an animal, very possibly a stitched creature, considering the lack of mess.  Our choice had essentially been ‘warm, dry, out of the rain, choose one.’  We had a little roof, but the water was doing its best to puddle beneath us, and it wasn’t very warm either.

It was just us three boys, four if we counted the mutt.  Lillian was with the hired help.

Jamie looked up from his watch.  “Twenty minutes from the last patrol, fifteen minutes from the time they left.”

“It’s not a regular pattern,” Gordon said.

Jamie shook his head.  “Semi-regular.  They alternate when they leave and the route they cover, but if three data points are enough to go by, the next group steps outside in five minutes, and they’ll be out and about for thirty minutes.  We’ve seen three different pairs, nobody else has entered or left the building, so we know there are at least four people inside right now.”

“Likely to be more,” Gordon said.  “It’s hard to focus on your work if you’re having to stop and go on patrol or get updated on other people’s patrols on the regular.”

The building was one of the sturdier ones in Lugh.  The city was mostly populated with ramshackle constructions, many of which weren’t even set into the rocky ground but poised atop it, leaning as the weight settled.  Here and there, however, there were buildings made of proper stone.   This was one of them.  Two stories high, solidly built, with doors that looked like they were more metal bracing than they were solid wood.

I had the impression Lugh tried to revitalize an area and failed, only to forget the idea and wait a few years to a decade before trying again.  Ridgewell was a neighborhood that had seen more recent attention.  The building constructions weren’t great, but they hadn’t decayed or fallen to pieces in the same way that other houses throughout the city had.  Details and embellishments remained, from trim to decorative wood panels, untouched by rough handling from the weather.  Here and there, though, even in the nicest part of the city we’d seen yet, some pieces of wood trim had come undone at one end, and in the strong wind, they knocked a steady rapport against the stones or the other pieces of wood.  Windows rattled, and a change in the direction of wind made shutters slam open or closed, where they hadn’t been fastened into place.

Making our job harder, much as Gordon and Jamie had noted, this particular building had a standing guard within and patrols leaving and returning on the regular.  The windows on the first and second floor were painted over.

We couldn’t see in, and we couldn’t get in without running into the soldiers.

“Was really hoping for a skylight,” I mused aloud.  “Or a good window to peek in.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “These guys were professional once.  Something more than your standard soldier.  I haven’t seen a hint of sloppiness.  The touch with the windows struck me as inspired.  They know what they’re doing, keeping things here as contained as they are.  Have to admire that.”

I gave Gordon a curious look.

“What?”  Gordon looked confused.

“Nothing,” I said.

“No, seriously, what?”

“I dunno,” I said.  “You’re weird.”

“How am I weird?”

“Guys,” Jamie said.  “It’s cold, it’s miserable, we’re frustrated, we’re getting the equivalent of cabin fever what with you having a hard time sitting still, and you having a bum tick-”

“You pick weird things to focus on, is all,” I said.  “Shipman was one, didn’t see what you saw in her at all, but ok, she did good work, fine.  Mary I get.  Rah rah, I’ve cheered you two on from the beginning.  But then you have a note of admiration in your voice when you talk about these guys, and… that’s why you’re weird.”

Gordon stared at me, uncomprehending.

I refused to take the bait.  I shrugged, leaned the back of my head against the little fence in our one-animal paddock, and closed my eyes.  My boots were rigid enough that I could prop them up diagonally with toes on the ground and heels against the fence surrounding the little one-animal paddock we were lurking in, resting my rear end on the back of my heels.  It wasn’t too painful for a long period of sitting, but my toes were in a shallow puddle and the cold was creeping in.  Before too long, I’d have to move.  For now, I could manage a weird, gargoyle-like pose and manage something approximating comfort.

“Sy,” Gordon said.

“Mm hmm?”

“I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Mm,” I responded, eyes still closed.

“So many things about you suddenly make so much sense,” Gordon remarked.

My eyes popped open.  I shot him another curious look.

“Oh boy,” Jamie said, under his breath, drawing my attention.  He raised his hands defensively.  “I’m staying out of this.”

I shook my head.  “This is about you being queer, Gordon, and having weird standards for admiring others.  You’re one for three so far.”

“You do realize, Sy, that most people differentiate between respecting someone, admiring someone, and liking someone?  There’s a whole spectrum of feeling there.”

“Nuance and details,” I said.  “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  He didn’t sound convinced as he said, “Okay.  You’ve been weirdly focused about some of the targets we’ve gone after, so I’ve wondered.  What you said just now, it made me wonder more.

I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

I caught Jamie studying me.  Which was weird, and it was uncomfortable, considering my last conversation with Jamie.  When I turned his way, he threw up his hands again in that ‘not getting involved’ way.

I felt strangely on the spot, the both sneaking glances, very clearly trying to figure something out.

At the building, the door opened.  Two men stepped out, a different pair than the last, this pairing with a dog in tow.

Hubris perked up as the other dog woofed out a response to something its master said.  It barked once before starting to trot alongside them.

Right on schedule, I thought.  The schedule is a weakness, but they probably acknowledged it as such.  Better to have patrols go out with a semi-regular schedule than to lose track of when you send them out?

I settled back down, and realized that the others were still giving me funny looks.

“Look,” I said, exasperated.  “Fray is pretty, but she’s old, so she’s out.  Mauer isn’t a girl, and I like girls, and he’s old, and… yeah.  Don’t look at me and pretend I’m going to slobber all over his face or something.”

“I really hope you’re not slobbering all over Lillian’s face,” Gordon said.

“Ha ha,” I said, “You’re supposed to be cleverer than that.  I was using exaggeration for effect.”

I could see that first bit about being dumb nettling him.  I grinned, which only seemed to nettle him more.

Jamie, who’d resolved to stay out of this, got into it.  “In a hypothetical scenario, where Mauer was a girl, and she was around our age, and everything else was the same, would you be interested?”

“Um,” I said.

“Nevermind,” he said, looking away.  “Sorry.”

His eyes went to his little notebook, so different from Jamie’s tomes.  For a moment, all the same, I saw old Jamie, and in the wake of that moment, I missed the old Jamie badly.  I wanted to know how this conversation would unfold if he was part of it.  If I’d feel more comfortable, having my best friend here with me.

I shook my head, my gaze boring holes into my knees.

Old Jamie would have been more straightforward.  He’d known me better than anyone, and when he gave me insights into myself, it was clear.  Not this muddled behavior and the weird prying questions that I got from Gordon and Jamie here.

Focus on the task at hand, I told myself.  It took some doing.  We can’t see the situation because they’ve got the windows painted over.  We can’t step inside without facing down however many armed people inside.  Can’t act too blindly, because there might be an experiment in there we really don’t want to free.  Gotta crack the egg lightly, without disturbing the yolks.

How much of this was engineered by Mauer?  Lugh was probably the central base of operations for this particular enterprise.  Other areas were possible, but they wouldn’t have nearly the same number of resources, the freedom from the Academy, nor the able bodies.

He wanted to spark a reaction.  One he could use.  He was putting the Academy in checkmate, forcing a move, so he could act and react while knowing exactly what they would do.

Mauer was a factor I had to answer, to get what Lillian wanted, a resolution to this problem that didn’t see Lugh and the innocents within cleansed by plague and fire.  I’d made her a promise in this.  I could imagine myself sitting across a table from him.  Both sides making moves, silent, even though he could do so much with that voice.

The thought of Lillian and the thought of Mauer touched together, spurred by Gordon’s remarks and Jamie’s question.  I saw Mauer as a girl, roughly our age.  Coppery red hair, a little firebrand, attractive, but despite the sharp nose and fine features.  She’d have to have the arm.  Her voice would be younger, but she’d still have the skill with it, the rhetoric and the vocal range, the ability to address a proper crowd

“You’re actually thinking about it,” Gordon said, in disbelief.  “As if it’s actually a consideration.”

“What?  Huh?  No,” I lied, ineffectually.  He’d been watching me, and something in my expression must have tipped him off.

“You’re bent in the head,” he said.  “The smallest push, and you go right there to fantasizing-”

“I was not fantasizing, stitched-dick.”

“Mauer wanted to shoot Helen, he wanted to hurt us, but nooo, switch around a few variables, leave the personality intact, you’d actually think about it.  You’ve got your wires crossed in your head, and you enjoy a challenge enough that you can’t even distinguish between the people who challenge you and the people you enjoy being around.  Hating him, disliking him, it doesn’t even cross your mind?”

And here we were.  Gordon in attack mode.  He was grumpy, he’d latched on to this, and he was giving no signs of letting up.

For years, I’d lived with Gordon.  I knew how stubborn he could be.  This wasn’t an argument I’d win.

“I dunno,” I said.  “Is this really such an issue?  We all approach things from different ways.”

“For the record,” Gordon said, without missing a beat.  “You started this by picking on my tastes.”

Yep, not going to win.

“Okay,” I said.  “Fine.  Okay.  You win.  I surrender, and I sincerely beg your pardon.  Far be it from me to judge.”

“Alright,” he said.  He relaxed.

“Thank you.  I appreciate you being a gracious winner,” I said.

“Victory comes at a cost, though,” he said, smiling like he was enjoying himself too much.  “I’m going to get the most unpleasant mental pictures the next time I see you making goo-goo eyes at the mastermind of the-”

I reached out and shoved him a little.  He didn’t budge.

He returned the push, toppling me from my position, pressing against the short fence.  My hand went out to catch me and went straight through a paper-thin layer of ice and into freezing cold water.  When I pulled it out, it was black from the mud and grit at the bottom of the puddle.

Gordon laughed without making noise, far, far too hard.  Red in the face from repressing the laughter, he leaned forward.  Jamie was smirking.

“Stop,” Gordon managed.  He resumed his silent laughter.

“Not that funny,” I said.

“So funny,” he said, still laughing.  “My heart.  You’re literally going to kill me.  Supposed to be on stakeout, if they hear-”

Jamie proffered a handkerchief, which I took, wiping at my hand.

“Sorry,” he said, again.  “My fault.”

“It really is,” I said.

“We understand you a little better, maybe, which is nice,” he said, with a note of hope.

“I dunno about that,” I said.

“For some people, trust is really important to how they define friendships and romantic attachment.  It’s not so weird if respect is for you, to a big, big degree.”

Talking about who I like and picking apart why is weird, I thought.  Especially with you.

He nodded, and for a second, I thought he’d done what Gordon had, almost reading my mind, by virtue of knowing me as well as he did.  Then he broke that illusion saying, “I wonder if Lillian would be flattered or upset, knowing.”

“Both,” I said.  “But what she feels isn’t so important.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow.  “Isn’t it?”

“Nah,” I said.  “Its important, but… it’s more about where she is, in relation to me.  If I’m pushing her away too much, the direction she’s moving, and… I have this sense of it in abstracts, and I’m doing a bad job of explaining it.”

Jamie shook his head.

“No,” he said.  “I understand.”

Again, that flicker of old Jamie.  Uncomfortable, so familiar, yet making me feel so lonely.

 

I poked my head out from our cover, hoping for a distraction.

“Lillian’s here,” I said.

Gordon did his best to sober up.

Lillian was with the adults of the group I’d recruited and a gang of kids.  Two of the adults were pulling a wooden cart, one with two wheels and long prongs sticking out in front.  Some of the smaller kids sat in the cart.  Lillian walked alongside.

Lillian looked for us and didn’t see us.  I raised my head up, moving my arm to get her attention, and then gestured as soon as I had it.

Wait.

She fidgeted, looking about as conspicuous as was possible without dancing on the spot.  One of the adults asked her something and she responded.

Let’s play a game of second guessing, I thought.  Assume the soldiers in the building have eyes on the street.  Someone’s periodically looking through a gap in the paint they slapped on the window, to keep an eye out for trouble.  Maybe two someones, and they’re playing cards or something.

They didn’t come out and tell the group of people with the wagon to move along.  But if I tell Lillian to come and they’re watching, waiting to see what she does, we give away our location and give everything else away along with it.  It’s just too suspicious.

But if we wait, then they stay put longer, there’s more definite risk of being seen, and more suspicion.

Jamie was gesturing to Lillian, who responded.

“They bought the alcohol, she has rope and chain, she has sandbags.  No doorstops or old fashioned nails,” Jamie said.

“Not that it matters,” Gordon said.  “The way things are laid out, we can’t burn them out without risking freeing the primordial.”

I nodded.

It had been an attempt to go back to the early days, when we’d been more afraid of direct confrontation.  Chain the doors shut, stick wedges in the jamb and at the windows to lock them shut, leave the target with few exits, and then start a fire.

There weren’t many problems in the world that fire couldn’t do away with.

We’d moved away from that methodology when the Lambs had added Jamie and Hayle had started wanting more proof and evidence of what our adversaries were doing.  I’d hoped to revisit it.

“I was thinking, if we take out the ones on patrol…”

“We’ll get shot trying,” Gordon said.  “Sorry to say, but you three suck when it comes to proper combat, they’re more trained and disciplined than the Fishmonger’s people were, and I’m not sure I’m in any shape to have your back.”

“If we didn’t get shot,” I said.  ” Let’s say we took out the pair of people on patrol.  How do they respond?”

“Looking at what they’re doing right now?” Gordon asked.  “They batten down the hatches and triple down on security.  Going by the numbers Cecil suggested, they have buddies.  If the patrols aren’t contacting the buddies they have in reserve with each circuit they’re doing around the neighborhood-”

“-which they probably are,” I commented.

“Then they might have another means of signaling.  One way or another, the reserve force comes stomping in as a proper military unit at an unspecified point in time.  Leaves us with a squadron of soldiers and a nigh-uncrackable egg to deal with.”

I studied the building, only my eyes peering over our cover.

I signaled Lillian.  Group.  Play.  Noise.  Cart.  Move.

“What are you thinking?” Jamie asked.

“Painting a picture,” I said.  “Isolated incident, it draws suspicion.  But if we lead into it…”

“Right.”

Lillian was talking to the kids.  They hopped off the cart.  The cart set into motion, leaving very concerned parents to glance back, issuing warnings or instructions.

The kids fit into Lugh.  They were dressed a little sparse for the weather, but they did have jackets, long sleeves, long pants, and tights under dresses.  Lillian had pointed them at some detritus at the base of a building, and they busied themselves kicking a can around, Lillian more a referee than anything, positioning herself so she could watch them and me both.

The can made a racket, rolling over streets of cobblestone and branches.

It established a scene in sound.  Sight too, if the soldiers peered out the windows, which they probably would.

You.  Kids.  Run.  You.  Join.  Me. Signal.

Yes, was her response.

She and the kids were to run at my signal.  She would loop around and rejoin us.

After a pause, she gestured again.  The gesture was a catch-all one for brown, dirt, mess…

Question.  I signaled back.

Hand, she clarified.

I looked down.  My hand was still several shades darker from the fine silt and muck at the base of the puddle.

Dirty hand.

I raised my head up enough that my chin rested on the top of the little fence.  I let a slow grin spread across my face.

She flushed red, gesturing, Gross.  You.

“Lillian runs at my signal.  Gordon, you up to brief exercise?”

“Depends.  What exercise?”

“Put a rock through a window.  Or a can, if you’re up to it.”

Their window?” Jamie asked.

“Bunch of kids playing, accidents happen.  But a broken window, especially one that’s inconvenient to reach and board up, is a window that’s going to stay broken.”

“They’re going to be alert,” Gordon said.  “even if they think it’s an accident, they’re clearly paranoid enough and disciplined enough about being paranoid that the window is going to bother them.  They’ll keep an eye on it.”

“And I’m going to be careful.  All we need is a glimpse.”

Gordon nodded.  He shifted position, getting ready to stand, and I could see the effort it took.  He almost failed to stand altogether, before he paused, shifting his grip to the fence.

I winced.  “If you’re not up to this-”

“Shut up, sit down, and fantasize about Mauer,” he said.  A bit more biting than the situation warranted.  Then, without the biting tone, he said, “Let me do this.”

“Alright,” I said.  I made brief eye contact with Jamie.

We both knew what Gordon wasn’t telling us.  That he was in more pain than he was letting on, or he was more stressed.  The laughter had been the other side of that same coin.

Gordon packed grit into a can, to give it more heft.  He shifted position, staying where people at the window wouldn’t readily see him.  The kids would be drawing attention, too.

My mind turned to escape routes and options, just in case, while Gordon weighed the can in his hand.

One hundred and fifty feet or so, from here to the window.  The windows aren’t large either.

Gordon wound up, and I signaled Lillian before the can was even thrown.

She and the kids bolted.  The can shattered glass.

I saw the front door fly open in the moment it took me to duck back behind cover.  I didn’t stay up long enough to see the people step outside.

It was awkward, to crouch low enough to peer through the slats in the fence.  Four soldiers with rifles were already standing outside the door.  They didn’t aim their weapons at the fleeing kids.

Shooting would have drawn more negative attention than it promised to take off them.  At times, it was nice to have enemies as dedicated to something as these guys were to keeping others’ noses out of their business.

One ventured out, weapon still at the ready.  He walked a ways out, in the direction of Lillian’s group, before stopping halfway between the front door and where the kids had been playing.

He searched the area, weapon constantly at the ready.  I took it as him looking for evidence or something odd, before I saw him turn around, looking at the window from the outside.

It wasn’t just him looking for evidence.  He’d been covering his own back, making sure that nothing waited in a dark corner, and that no ambush would get him in the time he turned his back on everything else and focused on the problem at hand.

Then he backtracked, heading back to his fellows, who stood at the ready.  I could hear murmurs, voices from inside.

They found the can.  They saw the kids.  Nothing too suspicious.  All clear to let your guards down.

Come on, come on.

Of the four, three went back inside.  The one who’d ventured out to survey the scene stayed at the door, weapon in hand, on watch.  The window was about three feet to his left and ten feet over his head.

Come on!  You bastard!

“Nice try,” Gordon murmured, under his breath.

Hubris nudged him.  He gave the dog a pat.

I shook my head.

“Patience,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” I said.  I gestured, and he showed me the watch.

Five minutes and thirty-three seconds later, and I knew the time because Jamie had handed me the watch after the twentieth time I’d pestered him for a look, Lillian turned up, ducking low.

I held  finger to my lips.

“Almost got lost,” she whispered.

I nodded.

She settled into a crouch between Gordon and I, her shoulder and arm rubbing mine.  In her efforts to keep from getting wet, and in the inches of height she had over me, she had her head poking up a bit too much.  Her attention was on Gordon, as she gestured to him, pointing at his heart.  Gordon gestured back.

I tugged her down.

I spotted the back of her skirt dipping toward the puddle, and reached out to grab it and hold it against the back of her thighs, before it was too late.  I saw her eyes go wide, before she realized what I was doing.

“Thank you,” she whispered.  Her hands went down, taking over the duties of holding her dress up and away from the damp on the ground.

I nodded.

“Cart is parked around the corner.  Kids are with the parents.  I told the parents to stay close, the older children can go get food if they’re hungry.”

“Good,” I said.  “Next part is me climbing that wall to get an eye on what’s going on inside.  Either looking inside, or going in and seeing what I can find out, depending on layout, intervening obstacles, yadda yadda.  From there, we form a plan and clean up.”

“I’ll come too,” Jamie said.

I had to stop myself before I jumped to a conclusion that was no longer true.  Jamie’s not supposed to be capable of something like that, is he?

“Can you climb a wall?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” he said.  “If I can, I can look inside and remember what’s where better than you can.  It might be useful.”

I frowned.

“If you’d rather I didn’t-”

I shook my head a little.  “We’ll try it.  Worst case scenario, I jump down, you make sure I don’t crack my head open as I touch ground, and then we run like figged horses.”

He nodded.

“Don’t suppose you have anything we could put in a blowdart that could knock a guy out before he could sound the alarm?” I asked Lillian.

“You won’t find anything like that outside Jamie’s books,” she said.

“S’true,” Jamie said.  “Hero of a book I just read had those.”

“Drugs take time to work,” Lillian said.  “Unless you’re the Wry Man.”

I frowned.

“We wait,” Jamie said.

It was, fortunately, only a short wait.  Five more minutes passed, with the group engaging in only light discussion, me watching the little clock, before the patrol returned.

I turned myself around and watched through the slats as the returning patrol talked with the man on guard.  They talked for a good minute.  I could only see one half of any given face at a time, given the narrow vertical gap between boards, but they looked intent, serious about what they were doing.  Whatever they were talking about was work to them, business.

As a trio, they all stepped inside.

The door shut, and I was gone, vaulting over the short fence and sprinting almost noiselessly across the street, toward the house.  Jamie was right behind me.

The exterior wall was rough-hewn stone, fit together like a jigsaw and mortared into place where wood hadn’t been grown to knit the stones together.  Larger blocks of stone toward the bottom, smaller ones up top, like a castle might have been built.  The stone was dark and sharp-edged, the same sort Lugh had been situated on top of.

Weather had eaten at the mortar, so I favored the areas where there was more mortar than wood.  I wedged fingers into gaps more than I gripped anything, and the footholds I found were often a fifth of an inch, if that.

I scaled the building quickly, starting at the corner, where I could better situate my center of gravity, then heading more diagonally up and over, as I made my way to the window.  Once I had a grip on the windowsill, not yet raising my head up, I stopped, suppressing my breathing.

A glance down below suggested Jamie was only starting the climb.  Slower going.  He was heavier than I, though his frame was slight, he had several inches on me.  He wasn’t as nimble, either, nor was he as daring.

He had good technique, though, doing the same thing I’d been doing to wedge my fingers in, choosing similar footholds.  He made good use of his reach.

I remained where I was, listening to the faint, muffled murmur of conversation, and deeper, guttural grunts that might have been human or animal.  Every sound was a cue that could suggest someone standing in a room just inside the window.

Jamie’s boot missed a foothold and scuffed the stone.

I froze, tense, waiting, listening.  If someone poked their head out, could I grab them and pull them out?  I’d have to reach up with one hand, leverage my weight, go down with them…

Nothing came of it.  There was no alert, no gunman appeared.

Shifting my hold on the windowsill to something more blatant, I hauled myself up, finding footholds so I could peek my head over, slow and careful, so as not to draw attention.

On the upside, it was largely an open concept laboratory.  I could see everything, from the people inside to the experiment and the ongoing work.

Eight soldiers were within, gathered in one corner, talking as a group.  A wood fireplace glowed, with a kettle standing atop it, steam billowing from the spout.  Mostly forgotten.  As Ratface had suggested, the equipment throughout the lab was all top quality.  It looked new, not secondhand, all in good repair, everything chosen for a singular purpose and nothing left to go to waste.

All placed and built to accommodate the experiment.  Even the structure of the building had been turned to the purpose.  Chains were set into the stone, run around the iron-reinforced pillars that supported the roof, and converged near the center of the room.  The primordial was similar in some ways to the one I’d seen before, in being piecemeal, not quite defined, with too many extraneous growths.

That said, my uneducated eye knew at a glance that this thing was further along.

The growths were more uniform.  The colors fit together more, as did the textures.  The shape of the thing was more streamlined, a solid build, not unlike a leopard or another great cat, quadrupedal, with a distinct head instead of a lump.  It looked more sleek than clumsy.  The design was more apparent.

Chains to bind it, to the point it might look ludicrous.  Explosive charges were set near it.  Panels of what looked to be treated glass surrounded it, with stairs built so handlers could walk up and access a point over the box, which lacked a top.

Weapons, equipment, gas masks, and other munitions lay on nearby shelves and tables, waiting for an excuse to be used, but the creature didn’t seem to be putting up a fight, it didn’t struggle against its bonds.

Soldiers who might have specialized in dealing with the worst monsters and biological weapons, now turned toward creating one.

Jamie reached the window, and I made room for him to survey the scene.

We didn’t have a lot of time.

Shifting my grip to a one-handed hold on the windowsill, I gestured.  Patrol.

Jamie wasn’t quite brave enough to let go to gesture back, so he nodded.

By the soldier’s schedule, the next patrol would be leaving soon.  We couldn’t be dangling a little ways over above their heads, especially if they were paying extra attention to the window.  Gordon had talked about their wariness.

Jamie and I edged over, climbing not down, but around the corner.

Fingers freezing, we waited there.  Five minutes before the patrol left?

I didn’t have a watch, but it was definitely more than five minutes that passed, with nobody exiting the building.

I couldn’t hear the words that were spoken, but I could hear the tone.

Intent, yet again.

They had to be taking drugs, to be this insanely focused on things.

Or…

Something is going on, I thought, in the same moment I started to peer around the corner of the building and saw just what that something was.

Emily and Drake had told us about the man.  Short black hair, black skin, and a black army coat, long, with guns at the hips and a rifle held casually in one hand, the folds of the long coat helping to hide it from plain view.

He wasn’t alone.  He had another complement of soldiers with him.  Loyal, each one less uniform and more individual, a luxury afforded more to the higher-ups of an organization.  Lieutenants and bodyguards at the same time.

The man they were protecting was walking at the center of the group, armed, but with no weapon held at the ready.  He had coppery red hair, and wore a heavier coat, one meant to conceal his overlarge, mutated arm.

Mauer.

Mauer being here meant something.  The plan I’d expected, to draw fire for the creation of the primordials, it didn’t make sense if the man was here, in the midst of the city as it was cleansed.

All of the possibilities that did spring to mind were far, far worse than a city erased with plague and fire.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.14 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.14

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Frigid water ran down the wall, over my hands, and into my sleeves.  The rainwater that the fabric of my sleeves and coat lining didn’t absorb ran down my arms to my chest, trickling down back, stomach, and sides, seeking out new and inventive paths.

Climbing down was harder than climbing up.  If it were me alone, I could have managed it, but I had Jamie with me.  We clung to the exterior wall, twenty feet over the ground.

Reverend Mauer made his way down the street, accompanied by his retinue.  I clung closer to the building, and the rainwater touched my face, using the contact to work its way down my collar.

“This would be it, then,” I heard his voice.  They were just outside the door, a matter of twenty or so feet away from me.

“Yes.  They’ve done good work.”

A pause.

“Tim Dancer’s men,” Mauer said.  “I respected him, I respected his men, but sometimes people reverse course, when they no longer have authority.  Do we need to be careful?”

The question was echoed by the movements of the lieutenants around him, asserting their grips on their guns.  I couldn’t see them, but I heard the light rattle and shift of the weapons.

“Whatever he instilled in them, it kept.”

Silence.  I imagined Mauer nodding.

Someone rapped on the door.  It took a moment before the door opened, a heavy deadbolt sliding through its housing.

My fingers were going numb.  The problem was a gap between the gutter and the edge of the roof.  Water meant for the gutter was running into the gap and down along the face of the building.  I could have found some relief by climbing down a ways, but doing so would make noise and bring me into their field of view.  I would have moved over a ways, but again, noise was a concern, and Jamie was occupying the wall to my right.

I closed my eyes and kept my ears peeled.  I heard the door open – it was heavy enough that there was a lot of weight on the hinges.  Even oiled, the movement of the door was accompanied by a faint grinding sound.

“Mauer.”  A surprised tone of voice.

A shuffling of movement, people standing, chairs scraping against floor.

Another man’s voice from inside said, “Is there a problem?”

Restrained fear.  They respected Mauer, even if they presently outnumber him.

“Just the opposite,” Mauer said.  “I heard the project is coming along well.  You’re well ahead of the others.  I wanted to see, and to have a word.”

“About?”

There was no open-armed welcome here.  Doubt existed on both sides.  Mauer wasn’t immediately familiar with the soldiers, either.  A business relationship, perhaps, executed through third parties.

“Stanley told me you’ve made enough headway.  The primordial experiment is grown, it’s coordinated enough to stand on its own four feet, and it’s aware of its surroundings.  The growths are streamlining.”

“Yes.  More or less.”

“Then your task is done,” the Reverend said.  His voice became warmer, “Congratulations.”

Considering the word choice and the tone, it was almost eerie that there was no noise or immediate response.

“I would be obliged if you gave me a chance to step out of this rain.  Doubly so if you offered any tea,” Mauer said.  “We can discuss the money, stipulations, and further steps for even more funding.”

“The kettle is on the stove already,” the man at the door said.  “Come in.  I want to hear more about these stipulations you haven’t mentioned before.”

“Of course,” Mauer said.  I had trouble telling if he sounded pleased or pleased with himself.  “Watch the door.”

He’d known about the tea.  Based on what I’d seen of the room, he shouldn’t have been able to see the wood stove, which was inside and off to the left of the door, tucked in the corner.  I doubted any of the people inside were holding mugs.  A cold guess, perhaps, on a particularly cold day?  Or had Mauer’s lieutenant with the black skin, Stanley, been observant on past visits?

I really wanted to sit down with the man and pick his brain.

The numbness in my hands was starting to get to the point where I had to will my hand to keep gripping the edge, and in the midst of a complete lack of sensation, I was gripping it hard enough that I felt pulses of dull pain.  The water that had soaked me while I hugged the wall was carrying the chill straight through me – not even through the bone, but past it and out the other side.

I couldn’t stay here.

I signaled Jamie to stay where he was, got a nod, and then eased my way to the corner, peeking.

Two men at the door.  They wore brimmed hats, not hoods, and both had cigarettes, one already smoking his, providing cupped, gloved hands to help the other get enough flame to light his.

Careful, slow, and with my hands being very stubborn throughout, I climbed around the corner, above the heads of the two at the door.

“-Window?” I heard the tail end of Mauer’s question.

I froze.

“Children,” a man said.  “Kicking cans around the street.”

“Children.  Were they-”

“Not like you described.  All different ages.  Only one or two old enough to be like you said.  Some were niggers.  Some looked like East Crown.  Was a little while ago.  We were going to have our tea and then have Osmond’s patrol get a ladder from the big house.”

“Alright,” Mauer said.  “Alright.”

I didn’t dare poke my head up just yet, so I stayed where I was, thumbs wedged into cracks, fingers balled up in hopes of limiting, even slightly, the amount of body heat I lost.

“Let’s talk money,” Mauer said.  “You finished the task.  Lugh isn’t equipped to handle this kind of transaction.  I promised you ninety thousand.  You borrowed against this future amount to buy equipment, and Stanley told me you provided the results to justify the borrowed amounts.”

“This is the point where you tell us there was interest on the borrow, and-”

“No,” Mauer said.  “Let’s forget the loan.  I’ll give over the promised ninety thousand.”

“Generous,” the soldier replied.  “Enough to make me suspicious.”

Mauer chuckled.  A surprisingly human sound.  “Don’t be.  Not of me.  I’m very pleased with the work you’ve done so far, and this forms a very good timeline for me.”

“I still haven’t forgotten the stipulations you mentioned.”

“We haven’t,” another echoed the man.

“Okay,” Mauer said.  “Then I’ll get straight to the point.  The Academy knows.  They’re already marshaling their forces, and in less than a day, they’ll be collapsing on Lugh.”

“They know,” a soldier said.  No disbelief in his voice, no surprise.  Resignation.

“Based on what I’ve heard about your time with Tim Dancer, you have more than enough experience in the more devious side of the Academy’s approach to war.  Overly clever birds that perch on windowsills and then fly home to recite everything that was said, a parasite that crawls inside women to control everything they do.  Dangerous children.”

“Not those things specifically, but similar things, yes.”

“They know,” Mauer said it with finality.  “I know they know, I have messages coming from the headquarters, keeping me up to date.  They’re making their move as we speak.”

I could hear the reaction, the murmurs, the concern, the stress.

I couldn’t say for certain, listening to Mauer, but I’d heard him talk on several occasions, I’d heard him lie and I’d heard him tell the truth, and in each circumstance I’d known the truth.  It gave me an edge most lacked when it came to figuring out if he was telling the truth here.

Even with that, all I knew was that it wasn’t absolutely true.  Partially, perhaps, or perhaps an outright lie.

He told the academy.  He knew what the Academy was doing because he’d informed them.

Now an army was closing in on Lugh, and he was getting his ducks in a row, plotting a counterattack.

“There’s a very narrow window of time.  My stipulation is this: you use that window of time to leave.  You can go to Tynewear, my people will find you, and they’ll get you set up.  If you can prove your ability to reproduce results, then you become more valuable than any of these experiments could be, and you’ll be rewarded in kind.”

Create a problem, provide a solution to the problem.

“And you?  What are you doing?”

“I’m making life as hard as it possibly could be for them.  They know what to expect, they have some limited information on where you are,” Mauer said.  “I want to set a trap for them.”

Another man spoke.  He was too in sync with the ex-Reverend to be anything but Mauer’s lieutenant.  “The explosives I had you stockpile in case the experiment went rogue had a second purpose.”

“You’re releasing it.”

“At a very specific time, in very specific circumstances.  Rest assured, the people of Lugh will not be unduly hurt.  Fire, plague, and foot soldiers will have chased them to the coast by the time the Academy investigates this site.  They’ll find explosives and a released primordial.”

“And?  If they fail to kill it-”

“They won’t.  They can’t.  It’s why we’re on this path,” Mauer said.  “They have to respond so disproportionately that there is no question as to the thing’s death.  That leaves their forces imbalanced.  I will take advantage of that imbalance.”

But the soldier pressed on.  “If they fail to kill it, based on what you told us, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to.”

“That’s my concern,” Mauer said.  “My battle to win.”

“That’s not good enough.  What we’ve been working for-”

“You know exactly what you’ve been working on,” Mauer said.  “You’ve leaned on me for funding, for support, people, half of this equipment, for the information you’re using.  You’ve given me your trust-”

“A very guarded trust,” the man said.

“You’ve given me a very guarded trust.  Give me that guarded trust in this, too.  There is nobody that knows better than I when it comes to the exact elements in play, on our side and on the Academy’s.  The information I’m using is information I’ve double- and triple-checked.  I have fought in as many wars as anyone here, and I have fought the Academy for years.

“You’re risking the lives of the people of Lugh.  Say what you will about them, they’re at least people who stand up against tyranny.  If you put their lives on the line and you fail, then you’re insulting that courage.”

“The people of Lugh are the goal, not a means to one.  You know my reputation.  I have my flaws, but being unkind to my soldiers isn’t one.”

“Are the men, women, and children of Lugh your soldiers?”

I didn’t hear the response, if it was even spoken.

“Alright,” the man who’d been debating with Mauer said.

“Let’s talk about how you’ll secure your payment once you get to Tynewear,” Mauer said.

I couldn’t keep it up.  My fingers were too cold, and I was soaked enough by the freezing rain that I was dripping.  All it would take was a chance look to the left from one of the people on watch, an eye catching a larger-than-normal raindrop catching the light, and I was caught.  I wouldn’t touch ground before they put a bullet in me.

I climbed back around the side of the building.  Jamie was already on the ground, standing closer to the back of the building.

I made my way down without any noise, then ran to Jamie, jamming my hands into my armpits, so they were closer to the core of my body, where it might be warmer.  It wasn’t.

Miserable fucking weather in this miserable fucking city.

We circled around the back of the building, careful to stay out of sight of the men watching the back door.  I surveyed the building.  Our battlefield.

We had to end this now.  Somehow.

Two large windows, glass painted over, a back door, and the front door that we couldn’t access.

“What did they say?” Jamie whispered.

I shook my head.  My eyes were wide, as I tried to survey the situation.  There were too many things to think about.  I shuddered from the chill.

“Idiot,” Jamie said, under his breath.  “Give me your hands.”

I did.  He took both of my hands in both of his, and I logically knew that his hands were cold, but they felt hot, comparatively.

Impatience, anxiety, and a rising discomfort with Jamie being as close as he was made me pull my hands away.  I covered up the hasty action by reaching down the inside of my pants leg, at the side, and gathering a loop of razor wire.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“New plan, same as the old plan,” I said.  I fumbled with the wire.

“Give,” Jamie said.  “Tell me what you want to do.”

I gave him the razor wire.  He freed a length of it.

“Windows,” I said.  “Ground floor.  If they don’t have a ladder, then we can focus on the windows here.”

“There isn’t a lot of wire,” Jamie said.  He turned around, looking at the building.  “The way they positioned furniture, the way through is barricaded.  That window is blocked by a cabinet, filled with sealed containers, vials, chemicals.  That window is blocked by a shelving unit, hard wood at the back.  They were attached to the wall at the top corners.  Rope and hooks.”

“They’ll unattach it and pull the furniture away.  It’s meant to keep people on the outside from getting in, not the other way around,” I said.  I worked my fingers, trying to give them life.  I managed to point at the window closest to us, furthest from the front door.  “Use the hinges on the shutter there to loop the wire around.  Cat’s cradle it.   Use the last of the wire to bind the other shutter closed.  We’ll need something for the back door, I’ll talk to the others.”

Jamie nodded.  He double checked the coast was clear, and then set to work, holding one end of the wire and throwing the loop over the shutter.  He had to work to get it through the gap between hinge and wall.

I wanted to watch, to give counsel.

But trust, at the end of the day, was the oil that made our machinations flow most smoothly.  Even if it was this Jamie, a relative stranger, someone I had limited experience working with, I couldn’t waste the time or harbor the doubts.

“Pay attention to my route,” I said.  “I’m going to meet the others.”

He nodded.

Mauer thought he had this situation well under control.  We had to take that control away.

The windows on the ground floor were doable, as targets went.  I lost so little by giving up the razor wire, and it was an aspect of the battlefield Mauer thought he controlled, with the furniture placed like it was.  Easy.

The front door, though, was far from easy.  There was no way to easily assault it.  Close quarters combat, long-ranged attacks, subterfuge, deceit, I couldn’t imagine anything that didn’t end up in bullets flying and cries of alarm going out.

Think, Sy, think.

I ran down a side street, watching how my feet fell on the ground so I could minimize the noise I made.  Rounding a corner, I found Gordon, Lillian, and the mutt.

“Where’s Jamie?” Gordon asked.

“Preparing.  It’s Mauer.”

“I saw.  What’s going on?”

“The Academy is attacking,” I said.  “He tipped them off about his own project, but they don’t know it’s him.  They’re going to make their move, conduct business as usual, and find traps, a freed primordial experiment and strategic strikes from Mauer’s people waiting for them.  He said he wants to make this hurt.  If we don’t act…”

“It’s going to get ugly,” Gordon said.

“What sort of shape are you in?” I asked him.

“Bad,” he said, blunt.

“Damn it.  Good enough to lend a hand?  Even a steady shooting arm?”

“I can shoot.  I can’t promise accuracy.”

“Okay,” I said.  I reached under my hood and ran my fingers through long, wet hair.  My fingers twitched from stiffness and cold as I lowered my hand.  I stared at it.  “I’m not sure if I know what to do.”

Lillian reached out and took my hand.  She held it.  Her breath fogged in the air.

“Gordon,” I said.  “Ground floor, two windows on the north side, there.  Jamie’s making it harder to get through those.  Front door on the west side.  Two men there.  Place is packed with Mauer, his lieutenants, and the Ridgewell soldiers.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Can’t take them out and set up the fire like we planned without them sounding the alarm.  Mauer and his men will come out with guns barking.”

“You’re doing it again, Sy,” Gordon said.

“I’d be happy to think so, but the longer we wait, the better the chances they reposition those explosives, or either Mauer or the Ridgewell soldiers leave, and we suddenly have to watch our backs or-”

“No, Sy.  I’m not saying you’re rushing.  I’m saying you’re overthinking it.  Missing the forest for the trees.”

I looked up at him.

“Hit them hard enough it doesn’t matter,” he said, calmly.

My mind flew through the possibilities.  An army?  No.  All we had were the people I’d recruited, and they weren’t capable, we didn’t have the guns.  A weapon?  A cannon, a rocket-

My mind made the jump.

“The wagon,” I said.

He nodded.

“Stay here,” I told him.  “Jamie’s going to come around this way.  Send him to us and get in position.  If you can hit your targets when it counts, that would really help.”

“Noted,” he said.

I started to move, and Gordon’s hand went out, catching me around the throat.  I stopped.

“Good luck,” he said, his grip shifting to a more friendly grasp of my shoulder.

“You too,” I replied.

“Don’t let your fantasies-”

“Get fucked, Gordon,” I told him.  He grinned.

Lillian and I made eye contact, and a moment later, without signal or anything else, we were moving.  I liked that.  Being on the same page.  I liked that the hair that hung in front of her ears was wet and clung to the sides of her face.  I liked that she knew what she was doing in this moment, in a world where so many seemed to go their whole lives without direction.

But Gordon’s grasp on my neck lingered in my thoughts.  It bothered me, being out of character.  Reassuring yet insecure.  I couldn’t parse it and I was used to being able to parse the Lambs.  Having Jamie with us was already one stumbling block.  Gordon was now a second.

Lillian took the lead, slightly, not because she was faster, but because she knew where we were going.  She’d parked the wagon.

Adults and children had found a porch to sit beneath, covered by a roof with holes in it, drier than most other places.  They’d left the wagon parked under overhanging eaves.

“You know, we’ve been sitting here for almost an hour,” one of the adults said, harsh, lecturing.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Sy!” Lillian admonished me.

“Just- damn it,” I said.

The woman spoke, “the children are cold, they’re confused.  The men back there had guns, they said.  You threw that rock-”

“My friend did.”

“You all threw that rock and you knew it would stir up trouble.  These children could have been shot!

“I know,” I said.  Things were too time-critical here for me to be having this conversation.  “My friend here was with them.  I knew the risk, I knew they’d be safe.  More important things are happening.”

“You’re acting high and mighty and telling us what to do because you say you’re going to free us from the debtors’ chains, but-”

“People are going to die!” I raised my voice.  “An army is marching on the city.  Another army is gathering inside it.  Plague, monsters like you’ve never imagined, and worse things are coming.  We have barely a minute to try and stop those things from happening.  We’re spending that minute talking to you.”

The woman closed her mouth.

“Right,” I said.  I turned to the wagon.  “Need dry cloth, or paper, or-”

“I’ve got my sweater,” Lillian said.

“Is it dry, because the rain-”

“The coat covered me,” she said.

She pulled off her coat and I held it.  She pulled off the sweater, briefly flashing her belly at me, and I reached up to pull it free where it bunched up at her wrists.  She pulled her shirt down.

“Do you need more?” one of the children asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “Thank you.”

I grabbed the sweater and twisted it, until it was coiled, and then dipped it into one of the buckets of acrid-smelling fluid.  By the time I was done, Lillian was halfway through twisting up a linen or cotton shirt with buttons.  We placed them all across the front of the wagon.

“Did you spill anything while loading?”  I asked.

“Only barely,” Lillian said, the individual words not making a lot of sense.

“Only barely is enough for you, me, and everything nearby to be toast,” I told her.  “Matches?”

She handed me a matchbook.

“Got extras?”

She nodded, and fished for another.

As a pair, we worked to move the wagon.  I was aware of the weight of it.  The slowness.

“Friend,” Lillian said.

“Hm?”

“When you mentioned me to her, you said-”

“Dumbass,” I said.

“I’m not dumb!  I’m the furthest thing from dumb.  I’m-”

“You’re my girlfriend, dum-dum,” I said.  We were close enough to the corner for me to let go of the wagon handle, so I did, letting the end hit the ground.  I reached for her collar and pulled her closer, kissing her.

I released her at the sound of Jamie’s footsteps.

“Going to make me weak in the knees, just before we have to do a lot of running and pushing,” she murmured.

I smiled.

Jamie had Hubris in tow.

“Gordon’s in position,” he said.  “He said we were using the wagon.”

“We’re going to need help pushing,” I said.  “Keep your heads down, keep the wagon straight.  Hubris, stay out of the way.”

The dog stared at me.

“It would be so much easier if they gave you the ability to talk,” I told him.  I looked at the others as I grabbed one of the poles that extended out from the front of the wagon.  Jamie took hold of one of the others, and Lillian took the middle, gripping the seat at the wagon’s front, where the driver might have sat if the wagon was hitched to a horse or mule.

I surveyed the situation, then reached out, grabbing Jamie’s shoulder, and repositioned him, so he was more inside the embrace of the two long arms of the wagon.

It took two tries to light a match.  I was very careful to throw the match so it landed at the back of the wagon – now the front, with the thing being reversed in direction, and not in the midst of the containers of paint thinner and alcohol.

The rags ignited with the match.  Not an all-consuming blaze, with the soak being only partial, but more than enough.  I worried what might happen if the flames happened to leap the gap to the fluids, or if the fluids slopped.

We pushed, and with me being late to grab the handle, the wagon leered right, instead of the left turn we needed to make.

Numb, stiff hands worked to maintain my grip as I heaved forward and out, pushing at the wagon.  Wheels creaked, and it started into motion.

Together, we rounded the corner, the wagon in front of us, the end already blazing.

I very quickly realized that it wouldn’t be possible to control my end of the thing.  Trying meant slowing down too much, which hurt with navigation more than it helped.  I put my all into pushing, I felt like it was ineffectual as it was, and it was Jamie, who wasn’t all that strong on his own, who pushed harder or eased up to compensate and keep the thing more or less aimed at our target.

I could hear the shouts, the calls of alarm.

A rifleshot cracked through the rain and overcast darkness.  It hit the side of the wagon.

Another shot, this one sparking off of the street between the wagon’s wheels.

They’re aiming low.

I heaved, pushing.  We were still a distance away.  The momentum we built was momentum we had to keep.  I was already jogging, fighting to maintain my grip and my traction on the road.  The jog became a run.  Only a short distance now.

Two more shots.  Both low.

Then a third shot.  Off to the side.

In my peripheral vision, I saw one of the soldiers stumbling to his feet, where he’d been crouching, moving away from where the third shot had come from, flanking us, getting to where he had a clear shot at me.

From behind me, Hubris lunged into action.  The soldier’s attention switched from me to the mutt, who zig-zagged across the distance to him.  He backed away, swift, loading his rifle, aimed-

The dog changed direction.  The shot was so far off it looked like an intentional miss.

Another reload, calm, eerily collected, aiming-

Gordon’s next shot from the sidelines distracted.  Or the death of the soldier’s partner did.  I saw the dark spray of blood, but the wagon being where it was blocked my view.  The soldier at our flank glanced briefly in the other direction, returned his attention to the dog, aimed, and fired.

That he kept his cool at all was stunning.  Hubris, though, was quicker than the man was accurate.  He tossed his rifle aside, drawing a knife, meeting the dog as it feinted, then leaped.  The two tumbled to the ground together.

Both dealt with.  Brace for impact and-

Another gunshot.  Not Gordon’s, but the fallen man.

The shot was aimed low, but it wasn’t aimed as us.  The wagon’s wheel splintered.

The wagon veered sharply, the long handle to my right whipping in our direction.  Jamie abandoned his handle as it dipped more toward the ground, lunging past Lillian to help me with mine.

Only a few feet-

The wagon’s wheel finished coming to pieces.  I only barely managed to avoid having my head clubbed by the handle.  The little wagon skidded on its side, the contents shifting to the one side-

“Push!” I shouted.

As it fell, we shifted our grips and threw ourselves against the thing.  It toppled, the contents, the burning rags, and the wood itself all tumbling over to the foot of the front door.

Only the fact that the wagon was in front of us and almost beneath us kept the ensuing splash and explosion from scorching us to the bone.  Fire rolled up the front face of the building, over stone and the wood that ran between the stones.

We backed away as fast as we were humanly able.  I signaled Jamie.  Left.

He was already moving before I made the second gesture.  I turned my attention to the soldier Hubris was fighting.

The man was holding his own, even against a dog that was pure muscle and efficiency.  Hubris bled from multiple slashes.  Hubris was on top of him, snarling, and he was sacrificing one arm so he’d have the other available to cut at the dog.  Hubris bounded over the man’s stomach, twisted and pulled to stay mostly out of range of the blade.

I drew my own knife.  I didn’t approach the man’s head or torso, too aware of the blade he held, that he might turn it on me.

I went for the legs, avoided the blind kick he threw in my direction, and then stabbed, once, twice.

The amount of blood I saw suggested I’d hit the femoral arteries.

I backed away, watching his face, lit by the flame at the front of the building, and I saw his expression change, as he realized what had happened, taking in the totality of the situation.

The stages of grief, one after the other.  Ending in acceptance.

He let his guard down, and Hubris took his throat.

I turned my back from the scene, my finger touching the ring at my thumb, and saw that Jamie and Lillian had handled the other soldier.  Gordon had emerged from cover, moving very slowly.

Mauer’s men were banging on the window with the closed shutters.  They’d already broken the glass at the other one, only to find a kind of net in their way.  One was hacking at it with a long knife.  He stopped as Gordon emptied his gun in his direction.  Either he’d seen the danger or he’d been hit.

A moment later, there was returning fire from within.  Gordon didn’t even flinch as he made his way to us.  Too tired?

“The back door,” I said.

“Handled,” Jamie said.

I took in the situation.

“They’re going to get out,” Lillian said.  “Unless we can stop them?”

“No,” I said.  “But we can screw up his plans.  We already got one primordial, I think, and it wasn’t that dangerous anyway.  If we’re lucky, fire and the explosives in this building will get the other, if not Mauer’s whole group.  I’m not willing to gamble, and I’m not willing to pick this particular fight.”

“If we can’t stop the enemy, we stop their plan,” Gordon said.

“Go with Lillian and Hubris,” I told him.  “Old Crusty Asshole’s place.  Get the lay of the land, see what you can do.  Jamie and I go to Drake and Emily and make sure they buried their project, make sure they get out alive.  Then we rendezvous with you.”

Gordon nodded.

And we were off.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.15 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The sun was already setting, and the clouds that hung on the horizon meant that it was getting dark especially early, as a result.  From dawn to dusk without the kindness of a sunset.  Not that Lugh was a bright city on even the best of days.  The freezing rain was coming down harder, and the clouds were massing, the spots of open sky between them shrinking.

Jamie was out of breath, and for once, I wasn’t doing much better than him.  We stopped where we were, and I turned, taking in the crowds on the road, people keeping to the very edges of the road, where overhanging rooftops provided some shelter from the rain and the cold, the middle of the streets left mostly empty.

One of the initial experiments I’d done with Professor Hayle had been to focus my mental clarity.  I’d had to sit down, and imagine a perfect white rectangle, and draw it as sharply in my mind’s eye as if it were real and I was looking at it with my eyes.  As the lessons had progressed, I’d had to hold multiple images in my mind, add details, add movement, and more.  It was only one of a long and varied series of tests, one that the others had had to try their hands at, and I’d suffered for my lack of short- and long-term recall as the images had gotten more complex.

That lack of ability to hold things in my mind meant I had to pick and choose what I kept.  Certain talents, such as climbing and manipulating people , were things I kept myself up to date on.  Keeping clear images in my mind’s eye wasn’t so important as keeping more than one thought process running at the same time, without the individual trains of thoughts colliding.

Still, as I stood there, trying to figure out where we were and where we needed to go, I could see the scene as it might be in anywhere from an hour to ten hours.  Clouds of noxious gas, fire, people running, stumbling over one another, trying to avoid the gunfire.

I slowly closed my eyes, cleared the images from my head, and then opened my eyes again.  People here and there were laughing, talking, huddling in groups, but mostly they were only trying to get from one place to another.

I hadn’t committed the location of Drake and what’s-her-name’s laboratory to memory in the first place.  I might have recognized a key object or landmark, but that was getting harder to do.

Across the street, a homeowner lit a candle on a little plate that hung from a chain, then set a dingy metal cover over top, the metal raking against the chain before it settled into place.  The wind was brutal enough I had to wonder if the candle would even stay in place.  The light that reflected off of the metal was a deep orange-red.

“I’m lost,” I said.

“I can lead the way,” Jamie said, hands on his knees, facing the ground.  “Just give me a second.  Not up to running.”

“Walk?” I asked.

He nodded, before pushing his spectacles up his nose.

“I was surprised you asked me to go with you, instead of going with Lillian,” he said.

“Gordon’s heart,” I said.  “If something goes wrong, it’s better if she’s close.  He’s working too hard to hide the problem.  I think he’s trying not to let on how very bothered he is by it.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “Not that I know him that well, but I sort of noticed.  Okay, it makes sense.  Let’s turn this way.”

I glanced at the street.  “My memory is bad, but I don’t think it’s that bad. We haven’t gone that way.  Or even been in that area.  I think?”

“We haven’t.  Shortcut.  I have a sense of how the roads are laid out.”

“When did you see a map?”

“I didn’t.  But I know these streets and I know those streets, I think I have it figured out.”

“Huh,” I said.  I shoved my hands in my pockets, keeping my arms close to my body, “You- he used to have a harder time doing that.  It was possible, but it took time, and he couldn’t be distracted.”

“I’ve been improving,” Jamie said.

My eyebrows went up.  “Huh.”

“Too much time at the Academy, rote lessons to teach me to listen, speak, use my body properly.  But what I had in memory retention?  Didn’t lose that.  They made sure I kept that, so things wouldn’t slow down too much.”

I avoided making eye contact, moving my head, or giving any kind of response.  I could come to terms with the fact that Jamie was gone, but this treaded into uncomfortable territory.  I was already regretting bringing it up.

I was inadvertently drawing a mental picture of the scene, not a memory, not accurate, but a good play-by-play of how things might go, if I were back there, hearing the incoherent murmurs about preserving X or losing Y.  A scalpel in my hand.

I shook my head a little.  Jamie was talking.

“…n’t allowed to roam much at first, not with all the soldiers and everything going on with the war being in full swing at Radham.  But I’d go out with members of my team of doctors, and we’d go to Claret Hall or somewhere in the tower.  I didn’t have time to see everything in one go, but I would remember what I did see, and try to figure out what lay in between.  Important figures, where they’d been, where they were, places and layout…”

“And?”

“And… people are hardest.”

I nodded.  “People are hard.”

“Sorry, about earlier, being so harsh,” he said, skipping to another topic, along a line of thought I could see very clearly.

I shook my head.

With that, we were back to awkwardness.

Jamie raised his hand, pointing at a building.

I recognized it.  This was it.

We hadn’t even crossed the street to the building when I heard the arguments and shouting.  I signaled for Jamie to stay quiet.

The door was open.

I pushed it open, careful to stick to the shadows.  Most of the lights and lanterns were collected in one portion of the room, surrounding the hatch.  I could make out the side of a wheelbarrow, a collection of buckets, and some digging tools.

I could, beyond the hatch, closer to the makeshift bed, make out a group of people.

There wasn’t a single one of them that hadn’t stepped beyond the constraints of the human form.  Candy’s horns, tattoos, and sharp nails, Drake’s scales, and now a large man, a Bruno, who either had large patches of scarring or something inserted beneath the skin, and three others with heavy tattoos and modification.  One had eyes that flashed like an animal’s did in the dark.

“You were the last one to show up, the first one to leave!  You had no authority!”

“That’s not-” Drake started.

He was shoved, and landed awkwardly on the pile of wooden beams and pallets, his fall only cushioned slightly by the blankets.

The girl I’d called Candy grabbed the Bruno’s wrist, snarling, “Don’t touch him!”

She’d been augmented with muscle, and even treading the line between adolescent and adult, average height for a woman, Candy was no match for the Bruno.  He’d taken the muscle thing all the way, and now that I could see him better, I could see how his skin strained, as if it would split at the extremes.  His face was heavily lined, and it looked like he didn’t really have lips, or he otherwise struggled to bring his lips together to meet over his grit teeth.  His enunciation suffered accordingly as he spoke, “Fuck you.”

He shoved her, and he did it in a casual way that was reserved for the worst assholes.  There were men who didn’t see women as people, but some of them at least treated women like they’d treat a pet dog.  Of those men, some did levy some physical punishment, but they at least had the decency to feel bad about it after.

This guy, though, he treated Candy as if she wasn’t even that.  Not a person, not an object, but an afterthought.  I mentally marked him for the lowest rung on the ladder.

Candy went sprawling.  I could see her flounder momentarily, trying to figure out which way up was, before she switched right back to a more aggressive mode, teeth bared, looking like she was going to throw herself right back at him.

“Christ, Horace,” one of the others said.

‘Horace’ shot them a look.

Candy shifted her weight, tensing-

“Emily,” Drake said, his tone a warning.

Emily, right, that was her name.

She relaxed.

“It was not your call,” the big guy said.  “God damn it, you’re the stupidest motherfuckers I’ve had the displeasure to meet.  This takes the cake.”

More or less embraced by the darkness at this end of the warehouse, I was able to draw closer, which made it easier to hear things and to see details.  Horace the Bruno had plates of something stuck under his skin, like great big fingernails.  The ends stuck up and out, and had been carved, matching the tattoos that covered the back of his neck and spilled out his sweater sleeves to cover meaty hands.  His sweater had been cut and tidied up so the plates could jut out, like the back of one of those dinosaurs, or the fins on a fish.  More framed his face and hairline.

The girl with the glowing eyes was dressed somewhat shabbily, which stood in contrast to an ermine she wore around her neck.  It took me a moment to register that the ermine was alive, and not an ermine.  The mouth was too pronounced, filled with sharp teeth.  She was heavily tattooed, too, with the tattoos of varying age.  From the way she positioned herself, near Horace and Emily but not getting in between them, she was probably girlfriend to the former, and friend to the latter.  She’d been the one to comment on Horace shoving Emily.

The other two guys were larger.  I didn’t have a good view of them, and wouldn’t until they stepped into the light.  They seemed to back Horace more than anything.  It could have been a long-standing reality, or something new, stemming from Drake’s grave crime.

I approached the hatch, careful not to put myself between a lantern and the group.  Doing so would have cast a long shadow.  I glanced back at Jamie, who had stopped halfway to the hatch at the middle of the warehouse.

Sand and gravel lay around the hatch, and the hatch cover was ajar.  I could smell sharp chemicals – something akin to burned flesh.

They’d been thorough.

“We talked about it,” Drake said.  “A few nights ago, a week ago, it’s not like it hasn’t come up.  We drink, and just about every single one of you has expressed doubts.  I have.  Emily has.”

“We talked about it,” Horace retorted, “And we decided things were fine.  Each and every time, we decided we were in the clear.  Stanley knew what he was doing, nothing was outside of the norm, we’d invested too much into it to back out, we stood to gain too much.”

“And I’m saying the risks were no longer-”

“You decided!” Horace shouted, voice booming through the warehouse.  He lowered his volume a bit, but continued to shout, stabbing a finger at Drake.  “Without us!  You made the call!  You went behind our backs to do this because you knew we wouldn’t agree face to face!”

Horace kicked something, and it broke into pieces.

“Horace, that-”

“Fucking stupid idiots,” Horace cut him off.  “They said there might be trouble.  People prying, children, magpies, people with guns appearing around here.  But the children did come up.  We were told they’d lie.  And what happens when they turn up and start telling you things?  You buy into it wholesale.”

“It made more sense than anything and everything Stanley and the books were telling us,” Candy said.

Horace kicked something.  “Of course it made sense, you stupid cunt!  You think you’re going to get a warning about some child that does a really shitty job of lying?”

“Calm down,” Ermine said.

Because that always worked.

Months of work just got doused in corrosive chemicals and buried in sand and gravel,” Horace said, not sounding an iota calmer.  “The chains we need to bring it up and out are somewhere at the bottom of all that.  Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s something salvageable.  Even if we were willing to excavate that thing, which I don’t think any of us are, considering the danger of getting too close to it, it’s going to take so long the bastard thing is going to dehydrate, if it hasn’t already suffocated.  These stupid motherfuckers did a pretty thorough fucking job!”

He kicked the pile of pallets Drake was still sprawled on, and wood gave way.  Drake startled as the pile shifted to compensate.

“We can recover,” one of the other boys said.

“You can recover without me and Emily,” Drake said.  I could see the effort he was going to to sum up the courage.  “We’re out.  I tried to tell you why this is such a bad idea, what the kids said.  If you don’t want to listen, fine, but we’re not about to give you Emily’s blood to jump start the next trial.”

“Do we need your permission?” Horace asked, no longer shouting,

“Horace,” Ermine said, her voice soft.  “You do need permission.”

Horace turned to look at her and scowl.

He froze, and his head turned, his eye moving over to focus on me.  With that, the others noticed too.

“This is the kid?”

“Horace,” Emily said.

“Shut up.  Drake, is this him?”

“You don’t want to pick a fight with them.  Emily and I tried and we regretted it.  Or I did.”

I saw veins stand out, even though his expression was calm.

He started to stride toward me.

I chose not to move.

“Horace!” Drake called after him.

Horace ignored him.  I made eye contact with Drake rather than Horace.

“Stop!” Drake’s shout bordered on a shriek.

And Horace stopped, mercifully.

“You’ll die,” Drake said.

Horace eyed me.  With his sheer mass, my head only came up to his belly button.  He had to weigh six times what I did soaking wet, which I was.

“You look like something the rain washed in,” he said.

I smiled.

“Is that blood on your hand?” he asked.

I raised my hand.  The rain had helped, as had constantly putting my hands in my pockets and rubbing them together for warmth, but there was indeed blood there.

I needed to speak Horace’s language, and I had only limited data points to go on.  I had to trust that he was a true citizen of Lugh, and fill in the blanks accordingly.

“I killed a man, just a short while ago,” I said.  I drew my fingers along my inner thigh.  “Cut him here and here.”

Horace nodded.  He didn’t take his eyes off me.

“There’s more than just him,” Drake said.  “They’re like a wolf pack.  Two of them showed at first, and we ran-”

You ran.

“-and the others were waiting,” Drake finished.  “If you go after him, they’ll be ready for that too, I think.”

“Mmm,” Horace murmured.  He was still staring me down.

“Sorry,” Drake said, and the way he pitched his voice suggested he was making sure I heard, more than Horace.  “We should have told them before we started working, but we talked about it and we agreed it wouldn’t go over well.”

Damn straight,” Horace said, with venom.

“We went ahead and did it though.  I know this might mess things up, but I was worried you’d come back and nothing would be done.”

“You did right,” I said, without raising my voice.

Bullshit,” Horace said.

“You did right,” I said, raising my voice only a fraction.  I was emulating Mauer a bit, making myself harder to hear so people would listen more.  “You saved a few thousand lives tonight, at least.  Now I’ve got to ask, do you have weapons?”

I could see faint confusion on Horace’s face.

“What are you talking about?” Emily asked.

“What we talked about?  It’s coming to pass.  Reverend Mauer, his lieutenant Stanley, and the Ridgewell soldiers, people who used to work for Tim something or other-”

“Tim Dancer,” Jamie spoke, from the shadows.  Horace’s eyes flicked away from mine, darting this way and that.

“Thank you,” I said.  “That group.  They had plans to release the Ridgewell group’s primordial and let it loose in Lugh.”

“Had?” Drake asked.  He finally got himself up off of the pallets and blankets.  Emily too had risen to her feet.

“If we’re lucky, they burned alive,” I said.  “I don’t think we’re going to get that lucky.  They probably got free and are on their way here.  Or some of them are.  Men with guns, professional soldiers like Stanley.  They want a primordial.  There were only three available.  You did your job, we did ours, now there’s only one.”

“Who?” Horace asked, in the same instant Drake asked “Guns?”

“We need to go,” I said.  “Even if you don’t believe me about everything I’m saying, you need to believe that these guys are serious enough that they will kill you if you get on their bad sides.  Which you have.”

I indicated the hatch and the now-buried primordial.

The others were drawing closer, behind Horace’s back.  It was as if I had a very physical representation of how much I had them listening to me.

“We’re not going with you,” Horace said, cutting straight through that illusion.

“Then you’re going to die,” I said.

“We’ll stay out of their way.  We have places we can go.”

I thought of the black-skinned man that Mauer had left in charge here.  “Somewhere outside of Lugh.  Right now, if your employers are to be believed, the Academy has an army gathering at the east end of Lugh.  If you don’t get out now, then you won’t get the chance.  You will die.  If you try to get out now and go down the wrong road, or run across your former employer, then you will die.  I’m repeating myself because I want to make this absolutely clear.  There are no maybes here.  Before the night is over, there will be a horrific body count.”

They are sticking by me,” Horace said.

I shook my head.  I turned to Emily, “In a matter of hours, the Academy is going to storm Lugh like nothing you’ve ever believed possible.  The guy you were working for?  He wanted to let the primordials loose and cross his fingers the things do more damage to the Academy than to all of the innocents and the guilty in this dumpy city.  I warned you out of good conscience.  Please listen.  You listened to the girl I was with earlier, you know she cared.  I’m doing this for her, and you should too.  Take my word on this, let me get you all as far as Tynewear, and everything will be okay.”

I saw Emily meet Drake’s eyes.  She looked at Ermine.

Then my heart sank, before she even looked my way, or opened her mouth to speak.

“We’ll stick with our friends,” Emily said.

With that musclebound asshole?  The one who shoves you around like you’re nothing?

“We can go to the city outskirts,” Drake said.  “More north, there are ways out if it looks like something is happening.”

I saw Horace tense, ready to start a fight.  I was seeing how Emily was as defensive as she was, if she was around this guy on the regular.

“Let’s do this.  The project’s dead in the water, we lose nothing,” Ermine said.  “We camp out for one night, act wary.  Figure out where we’re going next.”

The tension left Horace.  He seemed to take a few long seconds to work through his need to argue the point, then simply nodded.

“Fine.”

“That might not be enough,” I said.  “But whatever.  Get there now.  We came straight here from Ridgewell, and if Mauer is coming, he won’t be far behind us.  Don’t go to pick up clothes or belongings, don’t try to pack up notes.  Just leave.

“You sure like telling us what to do,” Horace said.

“Whatever,” I said.  I turned to go.  I halfways expected him to attack me from behind, and I didn’t have the energy to fight or even plot what I’d do if he did.

“Who did the third project?” Horace asked.

I almost didn’t want to respond, let him wonder.

But not having an answer would hurt our credibility.

“Old crusty asshole, I forget his actual name, started with H,” I said, without stopping or turning around.

“Harding,” Horace said.

“That’s it.”

“I believe you less than I did,” he said, voice almost taunting.

I shrugged, for dramatic effect.

He reminded me of Rick from Lambsbridge.  Someone who had a particular view of reality, where everything had its place where it belonged, and he fought tooth and nail against anything that challenged that carefully arranged image.  There was no use fighting, because any argument I made to paint a different picture would only lead to more resistance.

Jamie was waiting at the door, standing there, keeping an eye on the goings-on outside.  We made eye contact, and then passed outside.  A paper-thin sheet of ice on a puddle cracked under my boot.

We walked down the street until we had a spot to stand in where we were out of the rain and mostly out of sight, should Mauer come marching down the street with soldiers in tow.

“Old crustybutt’s?” I asked.  “Know where it is?”

Jamie nodded.

“Okay.  We’re going to need to be careful.  Mauer’s men could be anywhere between here and there, and it’s not just about us getting caught and catching a stray bullet, but Gordon and Lillian are going to be laying low somewhere around there, observing.  We don’t want to reveal them.”

Jamie nodded again.

He shifted position, stepping deeper into shadow as a group approached.

Horace, Emily, Drake and the others.

Ermine saw us in the shadows, and Horace followed her gaze, spotting us.  He smirked, “Where are the rest of you?”

“Looking after Old Harding,” Jamie said.

Horace continued to smirk, shaking his head a little.  He looked at Drake, “Wolves, huh?

I turned back to Jamie as the group moved on.  The primordial project was cleaned up, they were leaving.  It was the best we could hope for.  I tried to envision how things would play out, where Mauer would be, based on my rough mental image of the city, and the thoughts weren’t as sharp or as clear as I’d thought they would be.  The proverbial waters were muddied.

I ran my fingers under my hood and through my hair.  “I need an appointment.”

“You’re just tired.  You’re soaked and you’re freezing, we’ve been running around for half the day…”

“That’s part of it,” I said.  “Lead the way?”

He nodded.

As we ventured forth, however, we saw Horace’s group, dead in their tracks.  My first thought was Mauer.  That he’d caught up, and they’d stopped because of guns.

But their attention was on Ermine, who had turned her reflective eyes out toward the west.  To the water, which was so gloomy and dark as to be impossible to make out.

She could see in the dark.

“What do you see?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “Heard something, seeing… the ships out on the water, there aren’t many with the weather being what it is, but, they’re turning?”

Turning?

The low, dull horn of ships in the water sounded, carrying over the choppy water and up the sloping sprawl that was Lugh.  The lowing of a dying beast.

I used a hand to block out the light, trying to make sense of things.  The spots in my vision mixed up with the choppy waves, the spots on the ships which the dim light did catch, and the lanterns on the ships, so far away as to be nearly impossible to make out.

Then I saw it.  A constellation of spots and blurry patches lurched, then broke apart.

Another lowing, shorter, or cut short.

“The biggest ship on the water,” Ermine said.  On the docks, people were ringing bells, small ones, a shrill clatter, intent on getting the attention of just about everyone in earshot.  She went on to add, “Something pulled it under.”

My eyes traveled to the great sea beast of Lugh, the corpse of the experiment that now sprawled over a third of the city.

Too soon.  Too early.  Had to be lying in wait already, listening for some signal none of the rest of us can hear.

They’re coming, and we’re already running out of escape routes.

“Change of plans,” I said.  “Warn as many people as you can.  The Academy is coming, and they don’t plan for anyone in this city to be alive by the time they leave.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.16 – Twig

Bleeding Edge – 8.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The city had awoken.  Lugh had been, from the time we arrived, a city in torpor.  There hadn’t been a person we’d seen yet, with the exception of the Fishmonger’s group, perhaps, who had been bringing their full strength or energy to bear.  It was a brutish city, rough-edged and worn thin, but it was one that had been holding back its full strength, fist drawn back but not thrown as a punch, ready for a fight.

The alert at the dock was reaching out across the city.  Where lanterns had been points of light in the darkness of a stormy evening, more lanterns and candles were lit, now, a false fire spreading across the harbor, first, then along forked streets.

The corpse of the sea monster that was draped over a lesser section of the city came alive, too.  Not in reality, but the empty eye sockets flared with an orange-red light that caught the mist.  A moment later, that flare tripled in intensity, a searchlight mounted within the creature’s head passing over us, then turning out toward the water.

Half of a kilometer out in the water, the water frothed.  The winding limbs of a collection of sea-beasts rose up as high as any of the ship’s masts, swinging, bending down back to dip into water, feeling out blindly for possible prey.  One came down hard against the water’s surface, and the crack of the impact reached us disconcerting seconds later.

Ahead of us, others were bringing lanterns outside, illuminating what had been a dark street.

Look at the group.  Who seems most together out of all the people here?  Who takes charge when it counts?

Not the old.  Lugh wouldn’t be a city where the elderly were revered.  I found someone fit, middle-aged, and dressed well enough.  He was emerging from his house, looking over one shoulder at his wife or girlfriend.

“It’s the Academy!” I called out.  “All-out attack!  Evacuate!”

In any other city, my words might have been doubted.  Radham, Kensford, Whitney, or Westmore… even in Brechwell, the warning bells could have been ringing, I could have told a random citizen that the city was under attack, and there might have been a moment of doubt.  Less dramatic a moment for Whitney or Westmore, perhaps, considering how things had stood. But a moment of doubt?  All the same, it had been possible and even likely.

But in Lugh, there was no question.

Anyone unfortunate enough to be born and raised here would be born and raised to the knowledge that the people of Lugh despised the Academy and the Crown, and neither Academy nor Crown had any particular love for Lugh.  Lugh existed in large part because it was too costly to take, and its denizens knew that one day the Academy could and would pay that price.

The man I’d called to turned back toward his home.  He didn’t have to ask or give any indication.  He reached into the dimly lit abode, and his wife handed him a rifle.  A moment later, she emerged, holding another, shoddier rifle, her son, my age, a step behind her.  The dad reached to his belt and handed the boy a pistol.

It seemed that many matched the grim knowledge that the Academy would one day attack with the intention to make the attack as costly as they damn well could.

The man ran to the side of a buddy of his, his family following.  The buddy, as it happened, was the one who took charge.

“Edward, Adams!  You’re with me!  Picker!  Get the water pump, have it ready in case of fire!”

Good enough.

I paused in my tracks, wheeling around.  Jamie stopped a few paces later, watching.

“Word is they’re just forming ranks outside the city,” I lied, making my best guess about the situation.  “If you’re going to get out of the city, you’ll have to hit them before they get set up.  If you’re not planning on leaving, you should still hit them before they get prepared to attack.”

I saw the expression of the family man’s buddy change.  Concern, confusion.

It was information I wasn’t supposed to have yet.

Whatever.  I’d put the knowledge in their heads.  They would realize the danger and the need to act and prioritize that, while finding an excuse or justification as to how I’d known.

Horace’s group was catching up to us.  I’d told them to spread out, to give the word, but they’d stuck together, and if they’d hung back to warn others, then they’d done it for a minute and then legged it.

I might have been being unkind – the street here was long and narrow, brighter-lit with the number of lanterns people were carrying.  Going the opposite direction down the street would have meant going down to the harbor, and the harbor didn’t have many escape routes.  Going down side streets meant getting turned around and delayed in an area that wasn’t as brightly lit.

I frowned a bit, but I let them find us again.

The sloping, slumping nature of the city meant I could see further up the hilly ground  to make out other roads and streets.  I had a sense of where we were going, and the extent to which the city was mustering its forces.  Very few of the lights that illuminated the streets like so many jagged veins of magma were stationary.  There was flow.

On the eastern end of the city, directly opposite the harbor, someone blew a horn.  A different sound from the dying-animal wails of the foghorns in the harbor, it was hollow, with a grating note.

“I wasn’t sure you were telling the truth,” Drake said.

“Yep,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything better.  My own answer and response seemed surreal to me.

“Because of the primordial experiments?”

“They were looking for an excuse,” I said.  I was slightly out of breath.  “Mauer gave them one.”

“Mauer.  You keep talking about him.”

“You’re going to want to start running in a different direction than we’re going soon, or you’re going to see him,” I said.  “I don’t trust you guys to stay out of sight when it counts, either.  I’m very politely telling you to get lost.”

“The hell are you?” Drake asked.

I wasn’t sure what he meant, if it was a question on its own or one he’d cut short.  I didn’t spare the breath to answer.

People were gathering, arming themselves.  The family we’d seen earlier had been something of an exception, the man at the head of it wealthier than the average citizen of Lugh.  Three out of four people we saw had improvised weapons.  Mining picks featured heavily among those makeshift weapons.

I could see the individual groups, too.  Some people had gathered friends and neighbors together, and they’d all supplied themselves with the same kind of weaponry.  A group of quarrymen all armed with the picks and mallets, another with knives and cleavers matching a set.  I saw a group of Brunos, the big muscular guys, and people who might have been artists or ex-cons, with a dismal assortment of cheap tattoos.

I also saw that a great many people on the street were gathering around a central point.  The nature of that gathering wasn’t clear until we were closer and the crowd had shifted a little.

Mauer’s soldiers, a pair of them, armed with guns and handing out more weapons.  There might have been a crate of those weapons.  Cheap rifles and ammo.

I got chills from the sheer readiness of it, the ease at which the soldiers were prepared to capitalize on what was going on and the willingness of the people to be capitalized on.

“Drake, Emily,” I said.  “Horace, too.  I want you to stay between me, Jamie and the soldiers.”

“What are you-”

Please,” I said, insistent.

They picked up the pace a little, I slowed my own pace, and I let Drake, Emily, and one of Horace’s subordinates form a wall to block us out from the soldiers’ view.  We passed that particular crowd, and they fell back, moving behind us, to keep the wall where it was needed.

If those men spotted us and gave an order, we would get lynched.  There were too many scared people who wanted to be armed with something better than whatever they had in their homes or workplaces.  The most scared of those individuals would be willing to do almost anything to get in the soldiers’ good graces.  The others would follow.

Mauer wasn’t even here, and he was setting things up to manipulate the crowd with an expert hand.

My ability to direct our temporary allies in Horace’s group paled in comparison, and it wasn’t likely to be enough.  I saw more of Mauer’s soldiers.  These ones weren’t holding weapons, but they were talking to the crowd, gathering people around them.

Jamie touched my arm, gesturing.  I glanced his way, then followed him into a side street.

It wasn’t as bright here, but more crowded, equally as alive, and it seemed doubly so with how narrow the street was.  Barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast.  People were talking, almost negotiating, in the heat of the moment, trying to figure out what they were doing, how, what they needed.  A group of boys were pissing on piles of hand-towel-sized rags.  A group of men were tying similar, wet rags around the bottom halves of their faces.  All were already armed.

Like kicking an anthill.

The confrontation is going to be just as one-sided, too.

“We can get partway up the street like this,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

“We’re close,” he said.  “Another minute or two, we should be at Old Harding’s lab.”

“Not counting obstacles,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Where do we go?” Drake asked.  “We tried just a bit earlier, but nobody really listened to us.  Should we just run for it?”

Might be too late, I thought to myself.

“That street up there, it forks,” Jamie said.  “Goes up through the mountains.  You can see the lanterns where some people on the outskirts are already making a run for it.  I think they know where they’re going.”

“You think,” Horace said.

I would have been perfectly happy leaving the man behind.

“Hey!” a voice hollered, well behind us.

I turned to look, then started sprinting.  Soldiers, having stepped out from between two buildings.  They were already raising their guns, looking down the sights.

“You three, get back!” one shouted.  Not at us, or Horace’s group, but another group of improvised local militia, further up the street.

I grabbed the upper sleeve of Jamie’s jacket, pulling him toward an alleyway.  The fact that the soldier had waited for other bystanders to get to cover meant we had time to do the same before the soldiers pulled the triggers.

Ermine shrieked at the gunshot, and dropped hard to the ground mid-stride.  Drake was turning to round the corner, and as the bullet hit him, he was driven forward, taking too shallow a turn around the corner.  The corner of one building caught him between shoulder and neck as he collapsed, and he fell in a weird position.

They’d recognized us, seen a glimpse of us, and while they were willing to get bystanders out of the way, Drake’s group was too close to us, damned by association.

I’d told them to get lost before there was trouble.  I felt a frustrated rage at the knowledge that two of them were now dead or injured.  After all the hassle we’d gone to in order to rendezvous with them, too.

Horace had already reached cover, and was changing direction, going to Drake and Ermine, who was trying and failing to stand, crawling to reach us.  Her namesake pet was making all sortsof demonic screeching noises at the injury its master had sustained.

“Horace,” I said, grabbing the man’s sleeve.  He shrugged me off.

I grabbed his arm more firmly.  “Hey!”

He turned to look at me.  There was a hollow, horrified look in his eyes, even as the rest of his altered face was as set and frozen as stone.

“We’ve got to disappear,” I said.  “Or they’re going to keep shooting at you in order to get at us.  If they ask, you don’t know who the fuck we were.  Now give us a hand up.”

“Up,” he said.  In shock, trying to comprehend.

But he did comprehend.  He grabbed me by the waist, and he lifted me as high as he could.  When I was as far as I could go, I brought my feet up, found a foothold on the edge of his palm, and stood straight on his upstretched hands, reaching high in a very similar manner to get a grip on the gutter above me.

I climbed onto the roof, and braced myself over the narrow gap between rooftops, so I could reach down and give Jamie a hand.

Below us, Horace was going out of his way to avoid looking up at us.  The soldiers had drawn close, guns at the ready.  One bent down near Ermine, checking her wound.  The other was giving an explanation.

They didn’t look up, and they didn’t see us.

I pointed.  Jamie nodded.

Ducking low, we ran across the rooftop.  I searched the surroundings, and noted how tall the buildings were, and which rooftops seemed best.

Another point, a gesture.

As a pair, we leaped across the narrow street to the next rooftop.  I slipped on a patch of ice on landing, and Jamie caught me.

The slip wasn’t like me.  I was fatigued, and I wasn’t as sharp.

The noise of our landing drew the attention of the soldiers, and it took that attention off of Drake’s group.

Jamie and I carried on, letting them wonder which direction we’d gone.  The layout of the buildings and the narrow street didn’t give them the ability to stand back and see over top of the buildings, and it was dark enough they wouldn’t necessarily have seen us, regardless.

Jamie pointed, signalling.  Target.

I could make out the building with no trouble at all.  My heart sank.

The reason I could make out the building as easily as I did was that Mauer was already there.  His soldiers had gathered around the place in force, and they had artificial lights as well as lanterns.  I could see the balding old man with a shaggy beard and lab coat who had to be Old Crusty Asshole.  I could see the ragtag band of nobodies standing around Crustybutt who had to be his employees.  Mauer stood back, his soldiers all around him.  The overall number of soldiers was significant – easily thirty or forty, and the number didn’t include the ones he’d sent out to recruit and gather up an army from among the people of Lugh.  The number of apparent lieutenants, however, was lower than before.  I didn’t believe that we’d killed any, but smoke or light burns had to have taken the fight out of them.

I motioned for Jamie to get down as we drew closer.  The rain was lighter than it had been, but it seemed twice as cold, pattering down on corrugated shingles.

Mauer wore his coat more like a cape, over the shoulders and buckled at the collar, but no longer covering his monstrous arm.  The arm was partially visible, and a fair portion of it was wrapped in bandages.  I could see where bandages were soaked through with blood and clear bodily fluids, burns.  I could also see the dark red lines soaking through the bandages where he’d been cut.

Glass, perhaps, or razor wire.  He’d used the arm to club his way through.

He wore no hood or hat, and the light rain ran down his face and through his hair, which caught the ambient light from lanterns and torches.  An artificial light gave him an equally artificial halo.

His chin raised a fraction.

More soldiers than the ones I’d already counted, emerging from Harding’s place.  Six, bearing taut chains.

I was too afraid of being spotted to cuss, but I wanted to.

A primordial, resisting as it was dragged along by those chains.  Smaller than the Ridgewell group’s had been, larger than the seven foot tall humanoid that Horace’s group had been putting together.

It spread membranous wings as far as it could with the chains that encircled it, then made a gurgling cry.  It was akin to a headless bird or bat, seemingly all muscle, its mouth a jagged tear, starting at one end of where the neck was supposed to be, slashing over toward the other side, then back over the shoulder.  Thin tongues snaked out and pushed against teeth that seemed more randomly placed than logical.

Abruptly, it changed direction, no longer pulling back against the chains, but lunging forward.  It made it only part of the way.  There was a group of six more soldiers behind it, each of them now straining to hold it back.

The group in front hurried to attach the chains to the side of what seemed to be an armored wagon.  They then circled around, giving the creature a wide berth, taking hold of the chains their comrades held, doubling down on their mutual strength.  A second wagon was making its way around to the group.  The creature would be chained between two wagons.  Presumably until it was closer to the Academy.

But something was wrong.  Mauer wasn’t moving, and the soldiers’ attention wasn’t on the creature so much as it was on the door they had just come from.

The next formation made their exit.  More soldiers, more chains.

A second primordial.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Harding made more than one,” Jamie whispered.

This one, at least, was smaller.  Four soldiers to the front, three to the back.  The bindings were more secure, and one loop of chain encircled the thing’s clawed foot.  The soldier with that chain periodically jerked it, taking the creature’s balance away with each sharp tug when punishment was needed.  The thing seemed more willing to cooperate than the first, less immediately bloodthirsty.

It, too, was winged, with a more coherent maw and partial head, and a clawed bird-talon of a forelimb it extended out in front of it, to keep itself from falling forward.  I saw large eyes on either side of its head looking out, narrowing, observing the immediate surroundings.  Mauer’s crowd.

The third and fourth primordials soon followed, both of equivalent size, both winged.  Not as nourished, their strange and awkward skeletal structures apparent.  The pair had more severe claws, however.  One was vulture-like, four limbed and winged, with what looked like a potbelly.  The potbelly was distended and packed with what appeared to be intestines turned at a right angle, visible through transparent skin.  The other was thin at the waist, all the organs packed into a hunchback and oversize ribcage that pulsed rhythmically.

I could see the coherent musculature around limbs and wings, the way they moved with purpose.  They knew how to use their bodies to a limited extent, and the way they moved their wings in sync led me to believe they might actually be able to fly.  Not necessarily well, not yet, but I wasn’t ruling it out.  The old asshole had cultivated wings for a reason, and he’d given them the capacity to fly, tying them to a stake or arranging a vertical cage of some sort.  He wouldn’t have  gone to all that trouble and then let them get this far along if they weren’t able to actually use those wings.

I shook my head slowly.

The pair was hooked up to the wagons as the first two had been.  I’d seen the wagons from multiple angles, now, and from what I could gather, there were iron bars running along the sides of the wagons, just requiring a twist and a pull to be slid free.  With the bars pulled free, likely from a safe distance, there would be nothing binding chain to wagon, and the things would be loosed.

Stop, I thought.  You lunatic.  Just stop with thisTell me you didn’t make more than four.

Mauer’s head turned back in the direction of the building.  The soldiers with guns at the ready didn’t take their attention wholly off of the building’s interior.  I felt chilled.  Mauer spoke, and Old Asshole responded.

I could read the tone, even if I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying.  I could tell that they were referring to something.

They made more than the four.

At Mauer’s word, soldiers exited the building.  They slammed the door on their way out.

“There’s more, but the others aren’t viable,” I said.  “Holy fuck, how?  Four?”

“Remember what we were told about Harding?” Jamie asked me.

I shot him a look.  “I didn’t even remember his name was Harding, and you mentioned it a few minutes ago.”

“He was a gardener.  Growing crops.  Massive building, lots of space.  It’s how he operates, how he thinks.  The examples we were given of his past work, he works with quantity,” Jamie whispered.  “I guess this is his latest crop.”

“Fuck you, Harding,” I said.

Another series of horns blew from the east side of town.  Buildings at the very edge of the city were burning, plumes of smoke spearing skyward.  I could hear faint noises from the south, and expected fires to be burning there soon enough.  Turning my head, I could see that the city had pretty much reached full capacity.  The sea creature’s corpse was gazing out over the water with its searchlight eye.  The streets of the city were glowing veins, alight with the torches and lanterns the crowd held, not one person left indoors.  By that measure, people were retreating from the places where the fires were starting.

I looked back Mauer, just in time to see his group mobilizing.  I ducked my head down before too many of them turned pale artificial lights our way.

Their procession moved at a walking pace.  Stitched horses hauled the wagons, sometimes stopping as the primordials resisted the forward movement.  Soldiers flanked the group, armed, some riding on the wagons, eyes scanning the surroundings.  Mauer rode on the one armored wagon that wasn’t home to any primordial, his good hand resting a rifle that lay across his lap.  He talked to a lieutenant on the ground who might have been Stanley.

There was no tackling that group.  Not with only Jamie.  Too dangerous, and there were too many of them.

I silently watched them as they made their way to the main street.  The crowd would see them, the crowd would have to move out of the way, they would be curious, and by both measures they would give Mauer their attention.

If I had a proper gun, one that fired straight, would I have tried to shoot Mauer?  Knowing that I would have brought all kinds of hell down on our heads?

It took somewhere between five and ten minutes before the coast was mostly clear.  Jamie and I made our way down from the rooftop.

It felt strange to be walking on the street where Mauer had been just moments ago, as if his very presence had left an impression.  I worked to stay out of view of any soldiers that happened to round the corner, but yet to make myself visible to those who knew how to look.

Gordon, Lillian.  You can come out, now.

I walked down the length of the street at a brisk pace, glancing at every nook, cranny, and hiding spot.  Traveling around the circumference of the building was only slightly less arduous than walking around a city block, with how large it was, two stories high in places, otherwise broad and low to the ground, pieced together like four buildings with random walls and rooms jammed in between them.

I finished the circuit, and spotted Jamie.  I’d been too preoccupied looking, and my heart skipped at seeing him, familiarity and a strange relief washing over me at seeing him.  Then I remembered it wasn’t my friend I was looking at.  A friend, possibly.  But not the one I’d been thinking.

Agitated, I reached up, running my fingers through wet hair, catching it between fingers and letting the fingers tug and pull at it, just enough that it hurt.

I would dearly love it if you stopped doing that, brain, I thought.

Jamie was staring into a window, hand cupped to block out the light as he gazed through the glass.  He backed away from the window, looking my way.  I met his eyes, and shook my head, gesturing a negative for emphasis.

I walked another perimeter around the building, not because I thought I’d missed any hiding spots on my first go-round, but because I needed to get away, I needed to think, and I was really, really hoping that Gordon and Lillian were just dragging their heels, and that they would turn up eventually.

I finished the second circuit, and, feeling lost, unsure what else to do, almost began a third.  Jamie stopped me.

“They’re not here,” he said.

I grit my teeth.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he lied.

“Yeah,” I lied back.

“We can’t count on being able to find them,” he said.  “We should go, and make sure we know what he’s doing.”

I wasn’t sure what we could do, the two of us alone.

“Besides,” Jamie said, “It’s getting cold.”

He extended a hand.  It took me a second to realize what he was doing.

A bit of precipitation had landed on his fingernail.  It took a moment to melt, suggesting that Jamie’s hands were indeed very cold.

Snow, I thought.

Without asking or confirming, I started toward the harbor.

Jamie was talking, at first, but I only heard noise.  The rock and hard place we were faced with with Mauer on one side and the Academy on the other was part of that noise.  The question of what had happened to Gordon and Lillian was another.  I’d failed in my promise to Lillian in letting Horace’s group get shot at, in being unable to stall this disaster, and I knew it had been a shitty promise with the slimmest of chances, but at the same time I felt as though I’d given her very little in the course of our relationship.  A weird, stupid part of me felt like her being absent now was a punishment of my failure to deliver on one of my few commitments to her.

That I was alone with Jamie and deeply uncomfortable with that fact now that we lacked a proper mission, another part of the noise.  One that made it hard to listen and interact.  Jamie seemed to realize and stopped talking.

As a pair, we approached the edge of the crowd.  I looked for the other Lambs first, and earned only disappointment for my trouble.

At least here, with so many fires nearby, it was warmer.

We eased our way in, careful to look for soldiers in the crowd and stay out of sight.

All of the people were gathering as a mob, rank and file, the vast majority of Lugh’s people now a single body.  More joined it with every moment, making their way south from the mountains to the north, west from the fires, soldiers, and whatever else to the east.  Collecting at the harbor, where they had a view of the seabeasts lashing out blind, searching for ships to sink.

At the center of it all was Mauer, standing atop a wagon, brightly lit, the fire a complement to his copper hair, making it seem alive.

In every other engagement I’d seen him in, he’d capitalized on his humanity.  He’d worn his jacket to hide his arm.  Not here, not now.  Here, his good hand held an Exorcist rifle at one side, gripping it by the halfway point, there but not aimed at anything, not held at the ready.

His monstrous arm was raised, pointing.  The blood was visible, as were the bandages.

As if to declare ‘I am like you, you people who have modified yourselves, made your outsides an expression of the anger within you, I have been wounded.’

His face contorted as he shouted, anger clear on his face.  He could let his voice carry when he spoke softly, but he didn’t speak softly here.

Their faces contorted as they shouted back, cheering.

I moved through the crowd, looking, and I saw Adam, the Bruno who’d been so helpful and friendly, cheering as hard as anyone.  I saw soldiers who might have been the Fishmonger’s.

“The fire is to our advantage!” Mauer bellowed the words.  A large contingent of the crowd cheered in response, hefting torches and lanterns.  Mauer seemed momentarily brighter.

It is.  The fires drove everyone back and away.  You knew they would concentrate in one place, I thought.

“The winds will blow the other way before long.  We’ll be able to advance as one without the worry of plague clouds, and they’ll be blinded by their own smoke.  This is when we strike, and my allies in the hills will sweep down and gut their back lines!  All we need is your courage, and we will break their back across our knee!”

A cheer.

I continued to move through the crowd.  I stopped as I saw Horace and Emily, less enthused as they added their cheers to that of the crowd, but they still did it.

What other options did they have at this point?  They’d probably rationalized it as necessary, to get medical attention for their friends.  It wasn’t like they could hide and hope that the Academy wouldn’t annihilate them like it planned to annihilate everything else in Lugh.

A hand settled on my shoulder.  A part of me thought it was a soldier.  But it was too gentle.

Jamie, dusted with a smattering of snow.  I’d gotten ahead of him in my efforts to take it all in.

He didn’t have to speak, not that it would have done any good with the cheering around us.  No need for gestures either.

I nodded agreement.  I joined him in making our way out of the mob.

As heated as the crowd was, I was cold, and the emotion in the core of me was cold, too.

We had work to do.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 8.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 8)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I move for transplants of parts A, B, and D between steps twenty-seven and thirty.”

“On what basis?”

“Temperature of the transplanted parts is deviating by point four percent high while they’re sitting in the cold rigging.  I’m putting it down as risk level three.  Nobody marked anything below thirty with higher risk than that.”

“Convenient.”

“Thanks for the reminder.  Putting down step thirty-four as risk level two.”

“We can argue about that in a second, you sneaky bastard.  Cameron, justify risk level three?”

“The latest version of Wollstone’s recordings, cilia in the trachea are down on Ian’s global vulnerability scale as a thirty-three nine, damage to the cilia now would increase maintenance further down the road, and could lead to post-operative infection.”

“We could give him a new trachea if it comes to that.”

“Which is why I argued for three, Adams.  A new trachea has its costs too, which I would argue raises it above a two on our crude priority list.”

“Fine.  Well argued.  I’ll second.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll third if you don’t give me a hard time about thirty-four, I’m too tired to argue.  Good.  Let the record keeper take note that I got a nod from Cameron.”

I might give you a hard time in a second.  Put it on the board, nurse?  Don’t lose track of the numbers as you move everything.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“I know you jokers in black coats are going to insist on blabbing about priorities like a bunch of old hens while I’m elbow deep in vat-grown intestine, but can we please make a rule where the nurses keep quiet?  I’ve gone and forgotten the length of the cut.”

“Four-fifty.”

“At least you’re good for something, Berg.  Sectioning four-fifty.  Are you going to be done step twenty-two in the next minute?”

“Yes, yes.  I’m a useless sod, that’s why I’m in this room.  Nurse, you there.  You’ve been shuffling your weight from foot to foot.  Go scrub down, get the good professor here something to eat, scrub up, and hand feed him while he works.  He’s getting cranky.”

“I’ll have step twenty-two done in twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two… one…  Done.”

“Out of the way of the stomach cavity.  Organs going in.  I hope you dunces have been careful about this.  If he gets a hernia in ten years because I had to fumble around for two minutes getting your organs in the right places instead of taking the time to set the intestines into place-”

A voice cut through the conversation, deep and heavy.

“If my nephew gets a hernia in ten years because of incompetent work done today, you collectively pay the price.”

“My apologies, my lord.”

“Lord Archduke, sir.”

“My lord,” the third voice spoke.

“My lord,” echoed the fourth.

“Stop with the bowing and scraping.  Look after the boy.  He’s in pieces on four separate tables.  I would like to see him put back together before the night is over.  Aimless formality at this stage is in poor taste.”

Wet, sucking sounds, squelching, and spatters marked the silence that followed.  There was no negotiation, no discussion of scales, ratios, values or markers.

Heavy footfalls drew closer to the table.

On the table, the boy, blind, unable to breathe or move anything but the stump of one arm, reached up for his uncle.  Further down the table, the hand that was joined to the stump by tubes both real and unnatural opened, fingers splayed, reaching in the wrong direction.

The uncle’s hand ran along the child’s bare scalp.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” the Archduke murmured.

The boy opened his mouth, pleading, but the mouth wasn’t joined to anything.

“To this day, I still remember being on tables very similar to these.  Different procedures, different advancements.  But I remember the agony.  A lifetime’s worth of pain in one night, at the age of three.  Then another lifetime’s worth at the age of five, and at seven, and one last time at ten, to bring it all together.”

The hand stroked the boy’s head again, large enough that the bottom end of the palm grazed one ear and the fingertips grazed the other.

“You’ll endure tonight, then have two more nights like this, and you’ll be done.  You will be state of the art, and you’ll be art, my little Duke.”

The boy tried to move his body, but some pieces weren’t connected, and other pieces weren’t in the right place.

“I came to talk to you because I want you to pay attention.  Cherish this pain.  Come to know it and carve it into that beautiful brain we gave you.  You’ll choose to inflict pain on others thousands of times in your lifetime.  You’ll condemn entire cities to agony so dire that people’s bodies destroy themselves, their own muscles trying to tear bones from sockets and break their own backs.”

The boy felt a soft kiss on his forehead.

“Two years ago, we gave you a great mind.  Now we give you a body to suit.  Remember tonight, because it is the last night you are human in any way.  From tonight until the day you pass from this world, you look down on them.”

Another caress of the head, and the hand was taken away.

The boy stared in the Archduke’s general direction with eyeless sockets, and gawped with a tongueless mouth that lacked wind to make a single utterance.

The heavy footsteps retreated.  The only noise was the wet sound of guts being arranged in a stomach cavity, the rhythmic knocking and whooshing of machines, and the sound of fluids in narrow spaces.

A distant door banged shut.

“Nurses.  Leave the room.”

“Should I-”

“Leave!”

The room emptied.

“Over here.  The boy can hear.”

Footsteps retreated.  The boy was alone, no longer being handled by three people at once.  He opened and closed his hand.

He could strain and hear the distant conversation with the ears he had been given two years ago.

“The boy is supposed to be in pain?”

“Nobody said anything about that.”

“The Lord Archduke just did.”

“We weren’t told in advance, is what I mean.”

“We cornered ourselves.  If we continue to apply the nerve controls to minimize the pain and he reports it to the Lord Archduke, we’ll be known liars.  If we cut it off and the boy remembers, he’ll know we could have spared him the pain, and he could seek vengeance at a later date.”

“We should have said something while the Archduke was here.”

“I didn’t see you stepping up.  I know I didn’t want to interrupt that intimate moment.  I was too busy shitting myself.”

“Enough bickering.  We need to decide what we’re doing.”

“We’re dead either way.”

“It’s a question of whether we want to stay in the boy’s good graces and risk the Archduke’s wrath, or the reverse.”

“The reverse could see the Archduke wrathful all the same.”

“Enough with the bickering.  You’re children, all of you.  We can’t follow the spirit of the Archduke’s expectations, but we can follow the letter of them.  Disconnect the nerve controls, let the remaining painkillers wear out.  It’ll be worse with the backswing.”

“Not quite worse.  By Wollstone’s third ratio, we can expect-”

Enough bickering, Adams.  If anyone asks, the backswing adds to the agony, and compensates for the fact that he’s feeling almost nothing right now.  He’ll get that lifetime’s worth of agony.”

“If anyone asks, the fact they’re asking means our goose is cooked and we’re as good as dead.”

“Yes, well, say what you will, but I think we’re in this together from here on out.  I don’t know about you lads, but I was told that if I bollocksed this up in any way shape or form, they would search out every person I cared about, snuff them, and then erase any and every record of us from history.  I do have people I care about.”

“We all do.  We keep mum on this.  Agreed?”

“Agreed,” three voices spoke in unison.

“Let’s get back to work, then.”

“I want my tracheal transplant bumped up.  We spent time talking.”

“I’ll help you.  Give me a hand with the eyes, leading up to that?”

The four professors returned to the table, now cooperating.

The discussion and the noise of the doctors starting work anew came to a sudden stop.  Hands that held body parts remained where they were, momentarily frozen.

“Lord Duke,” Berger said, quiet, “I know I do far too much in asking anything of you.  Let me say only this.  If you’ll forgive us of this, I will give you a lifetime of service so devoted that other nobles will look on you in envy.”

“Agreed,” one of the professors echoed, barely audible.  The remaining two joined in, echoing him.

A switch was flicked.  The boy Duke jerked.

“Painkiller at three percent and ticking down.  He’s feeling it, but the edges are dulled.  We’ve got about ten minutes before painkiller is clear.  Can the next person with a free moment go fetch the nurses?”

Lying on the table, the Duke clenched one hand.

The Duke gazed out over the city.  It sloped, built on hillsides and cliffs, and the buildings sloped in their own individual way.  It was as if the city had been caught in a rockslide for the initial moment, and then froze in place.

The people in that frozen city were gathering, coordinated, at the other end, the mass of them at the harbor, marked by the torches and lanterns they held.

He had seen battlefields since he was six years old, and had studied battlefields for just as long.  Teachers had posited scenarios and he had been asked to solve them, or to find the best answer if it wasn’t solvable.  There very rarely was any middle ground between the two, in his experience.  They both called for radically different kinds of thinking.

With all of his experience, he was still mildly surprised to see how organized the people of this ramshackle city were.

“I like this moment,” Richmond purred.

The Duke turned his attention to the Baron, taking his time in doing so.  The Baron was a snake of a man, and everything about him completed that particular picture.  Straight golden hair swept back from his hairline and straight down the man’s back, his checkered scarf conjured scales to mind, and his method of dress was tailored very close to his body, marking a very lithe, sinuous figure, complete with long, jeweled fingers.  The teeth, eyes, and jewelry the man wore were designed to draw the eye.  When he desired it, he could beguile the unwary, drawing the eye this way, that way, and then lashing out in the next moment.

Richmond was as dangerous as a snake too, but that was all the more reason for the Duke to enjoy his company.  He imagined it was how ordinary people saw the world.  Didn’t life seem so much more like life with that breath of danger, where any bystander in the street could be a threat to one’s person?  A killer, an enemy to the state and its people, looking for a target?

Yes, the risk was very low, but a natural wariness kept the mind sharper.  That narrow possibility, however very slim it might be, it had to help, didn’t it?

“Before the battle, the tension, imagining possibilities.”

“Do you participate?” the Duke asked.

“Given the chance,” Richmond said.  “I understand that sometimes a particular battle doesn’t allow for it.”

He was asking for permission.

“We’ll see how it unfolds then,” the Duke said.  “Look at how they are clustering there.”

Fine hairs on the backs of his hands and neck alerted him to movement behind him.  He didn’t startle, and kept his reaction slow as he looked back at the twins.

The Baronets were identical in a way twins and even clones rarely were, each in old fashioned white gowns with fur collars, with pale, straight  blond hair.  They sat shoulder to shoulder, one with a hand in the other’s lap, caressing, the other with a hand at her sister’s chin, tracing the bottom lip with a gloved finger.  Both were leaning forward in the chairs that had been set down for them for a view, but not yet standing or intruding.

In unison, their eyes flicked up at the Duke.  In unison, they smiled, hands going down to their own laps as if they were small children that had been caught doing something naughty.

He didn’t particularly care.  In fact, he would rather they kept to such things if it kept them amused.  Their other form of amusement involved payments to families and quiet threats to ensure those families didn’t ask any questions about the whereabouts of their loved ones.  He didn’t have to busy himself with such things, but the people who worked for him did, and it was so much trouble to go to for a pair of bastards.

But he liked Richmond and so he tolerated them for the time being.  When Richmond was near the time he would go back home, the Duke might bait the sisters into a trap, having them kill someone they shouldn’t, just to remove one of them from the equation and see how the other crumbled.  If they were as incautious and mad enough to fall into the trap, the family would be better for their removal.

“Stand.  Step closer, and have a look for yourself,” the Duke said.

They stood.  Rather than walk, they seemed to glide, even on the uneven terrain.  They found positions on either side of their brother, hands falling on different positions on his body as they gazed out over the landscape of Lugh.

One raised a finger to her sister’s mouth, pressing it against the lips to silence her, before turning to the Duke, “So ugly a city.  I imagine it’ll be uglier by the time we’re through with it.”

The other raised her hand to a matching position as her sister’s hand fell away.  “Of course, ‘we’ would be the Crown.  We wouldn’t dare assume we’ll be allowed to participate.”

“I’ll contrive to give you a chance to amuse yourselves,” the Duke said.

The twins smiled.

“I’ve seen too many battlefields in my life.  I’m interested in a…” the Duke paused.  He picked his words to prick at Richmond’s pride without wounding it, “…Not a layman’s point of view, but an intelligent, inexpert one.  Or three, as the case may be.”

The flicker of a glance from Richmond was reward enough for the choice of words.

The twins raised fingers.  After a moment, one let their finger tick over to the side, indicating the other.  The other twin then spoke, “Considering the fires were only just set a little while ago, they’re very organized for people in such a disorganized place.”

“Exactly what I was going to say,” the first said.

“They are,” the Duke agreed.  “Organized people for a place that shouldn’t breed such.”

“A trap?” Richmond asked.

“It’s possible.  That said, I’m at a loss in figuring out what they expect to accomplish,” the Duke said.

His eyes took in the broader picture.

For every citizen carrying a torch down below, he had one stitched soldier, and those soldiers were gathering at the periphery of the city now, in tidy rank and file, twenty five soldiers to one handler.  The soldiers were equipped with uniforms and guns.  The citizens wouldn’t be.

That wasn’t counting the Crown’s rank and file soldiers, either.  A two to one numbers advantage, his forces had the high ground if they were advancing down the slope toward the harbor, and he didn’t even need to fight to win much of this conflict.  Fire and noxious clouds would flow downhill in advance of his troops and kill or cripple nine in ten members of the opposition.

Fifty warbeasts were ready, shackled and caged, ready to assault the city, and to his experienced eye, every one of the warbeasts his forces had at their disposal had been born this year or the year before.  Newer, better, stronger.  The best Radham Academy had to offer.

“Our enemies can be stupid,” Richmond said.  “They might have underestimated us.”

“They sent us evidence that they know how to create primordial life, with evidence of that life.  Stupid people can’t do that,” the Duke said.  “Anyone who knows enough about the primordial experiments knows the kind of response they have to bring about.”

The twins raised their fingers.  One deferred to the other.

“Perhaps it isn’t about the battle?”

“Yes, sister.  We’re on the same page,” the other twin said.  “They sacrifice a city to breed advantages elsewhere.  Could this be a diversion?”

The Duke didn’t answer the question.  He stared, watching, thinking.  Between the sea creatures in the water, his forces here at the east end of the city, his forces at the south end, and the mountains to the north, he had them boxed in.  He let his mind take the ideas and let the rest of the world slow down so he could think over everything in detail.

He didn’t know enough about the mountains.

He raised a hand.  The hairs on the back of his hands and neck were telling him about the movements all around him, the sway of branches with few leaves, the movement of wind, the movement of the twins, as one reached around Richmond to run a finger up and down her sister’s back, and now the approach of a military commander.  He moved his fingers slightly, letting his brain interpret the signals, reading the wind.  The one with the mustache and thick head of hair beneath his helmet, it seemed.  One of the good ones, as the mere humans went.

“My lord.”

The Duke extended a long finger.

“There should be enemies or traps in the mountains to the north of the city.  They plan to attack or hit us before the fire reaches too far into the city.  It may be a pincer attack, using the people we can see down there and the group in the mountains.”

“Yes, my lord.  Shall I spread the word?”

“Do.  Have Aversbad figure out the resources we have available in terms of setting our own traps.  Then get one legion of stitched and one legion of soldiers and prepare to assail the mountains.  Tell the first legion commander that you see that they’re to lead.  They stagger out the approach, send in the stitched first, to trigger any traps ahead of you before you send in the living.  Report back to me.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The man didn’t hesitate in departing.

The twins raised their fingers again.  They had to have a system to ensure they didn’t talk simultaneously.  When and if that happened, well, hearing one’s own voice with the wrong timing or cadence could disrupt one’s own speech.

“Problem solved?” one asked.

“Crisis averted?”

Richmond turned his head toward the Duke.  He smiled.  “No.”

“No,” the Duke agreed.  “How did you know, my friend?”

“You have that look in your eyes that I’ve only seen when you’re in a fight.”

“This is a fight,” the Duke said.  “Parry, thrust, move, counter-move.”

“Fair point.  But I meant that you have that look about you that I’ve only seen on two occasions, when you stood in the midst of a sea of corpses.”

Did he?  The Duke wondered, studying his own expression with a calculated measure of where and how his facial muscles were arranged.

Even I can learn something new from someone lesser like Richmond, he mused.  He wouldn’t have expected it, for the battlefield as an abstract to serve the same sort of role that hand to hand combat did for him.  To inflict pain, to experience it, it was as close to humanity as he got, now.  As close to living.

He quickly calculated the number of homes in Lugh, and estimated the population at one hundred and ten thousand.  A full third of that number was scattered, still, too far on the fringes to really feed into the center mass that was organizing so readily.  Men and women who worked in quarries and on farms at the outskirts.  Some were already being put to gunpoint by the Crown’s forces, or their homes were being torched.

Was it that more than eighty thousand people might die in the next twenty four hours, the vast majority on the enemy’s side, that woke up his blood and breathing so readily?  Death, blood and pain, if not directly by his hand?

Or was it the primordials that had allegedly been created, and the prospect of dealing with them, even personally?

The mood was somber as he walked down the length of the hallway.  The floor was treated wood, harder than stone, and roughly the same color, though the details were rich and it glowed silver under the light.  The walls and ceiling of the hallway were formed of a complex tangle of wood, grown and woven into braids and complex figures, smaller stones worked in between them.  Here and there, there were irregularly shaped glass panes, looking out on rocky cliffs with grass growing atop them.

A temple without a god, on an island that few could reach.

His body was new, he’d been looked after for the last time, and at ten years old, he stood taller than the average man.  Even with a cane, it was hard to move his new arms and legs without stumbling now and again.

The first three nights of agony had added to him, or taken away weaknesses.  Mind, body, and power.  The fourth had made him noble, physically better and more beautiful.  His genetics had been better than some, and he’d been presentable even before the last series of operations.  Some weren’t so lucky, and were cooped up away from the public eye for a full decade.

He walked in the company of his mother, aunt, and two of his cousins, Richmond and Geraldine.  He wasn’t sure what was going on, and instincts bred by ten years in the court told him he shouldn’t ask.  More and more, these days, what he was expected to know wasn’t told to him, but shown.

Nothing about that was new.  Every day, he was thrust into situations and others expected him to keep up.  A small failure could weaken his standing in the eyes of his extended family, and open him up to a lifetime of sabotage or small abuses.  A larger failure could ruin his chance of achieving anything at all before he died.

But, for the very first time since he was three years old, he was without the quartet of professors that looked after him, the tools they had implanted within him, and the adjustments they had made to his body and mind.

He hadn’t seen a single non-noble since he had stepped off the boat and onto this island crag.

Looking at Richmond or Geraldine could have been construed as an attempt to seek reassurance in an unsure situation.  He kept his eyes forward.

His aunt stepped forward and pushed open two double doors.  They passed into another hallway, darker than the last.

In the distance, someone screamed, unhinged, and he immediately knew where he was.

He relaxed, in one moment, and tensed in the next.

Should a noble need to be placed somewhere out of the public eye, they would come here.

He, so recently operated on, was a candidate for that placement.  Was there something wrong that he didn’t know about?

When he was three years old, his mind had been altered, to allow him to better control how fast he thought, and how he perceived the passage of time.  He had only mastered it a few years ago, and controlling it took effort that often left him exhausted at the day’s end.  Still, he kept up the practice, and his control improved.

In this moment, he let his awareness speed up, to better survey things from all of the angles.  A part of his thoughts were dedicated to making sure he maintained the same speed and pace.  Slowing his pace by a fraction would signal to others that something was wrong.

He contemplated how he might go about this, if this prison was indeed intended for him, if he needed to run, or else face imprisonment for the rest of his days, bereft of the doctors who were supposed to tend him, slowly going to pieces over decades.

In the end, he decided that he couldn’t beat his mother and aunt in a fight.  At least, not like this, with his body so new and untested.

He was scared.

His aunt pushed open the next set of double doors.  The next hallway was darker still, windowless, with water behind glass with bioluminescent creatures swimming on the other side, each of them casting out a lazy red glow that only barely lit the hallway.

The final set of double doors revealed a crowd.  Nine more members of the family, frozen like a tableau.

Further, beyond a thick pane of glass, was a man that the young Duke recognized as his uncle.

As beautiful as the man had been once, he was now broken, twisted, and gnarled.  Growths like tumors riddled him, but the tumors had a particular sort of aesthetic to them, sharp-edged, more growth than growth gone wrong.

The Archduke howled in pain, rage, and madness, before striking at the thick pane of glass.  Not a single person in the room flinched.

The young Duke, the nephew, joined his aunt, mother, and cousins in joining the frozen tableau, watching the man flail, cavort, and rage, changing his pattern of action from moment to moment.

“It’s taking his brain,” one of the nobles said.

It was a strange statement, in timing, and because it was so obvious.  The young Duke allowed himself to peer over the room, looking at each of the people within.  They were sculpted, every one of them altered, set one half-step away from ordinary people.  But where the trained eye could see the difference in quality of work, like the vast chasm between the Duke and his cousin Richmond, it was clear that the room was filled with lower quality nobles.

He was starting to understand where things stood.

His mother spoke.  “Spores from the growths infected no less than thirty people.  We’re working to find a way to clear them of the spores and the growths that sprout from them, but it appears grim.  Life finds a way to breed.  Life of this sort… all the more so.  It has to be stamped out before it finds its way.  Take this as a lesson.”

The only lesson he was taking was that this was something done with intent.

“The people infected, they were from Warrick castle?”

“Yes,” his mother said, glancing at him.

He could read things in that glance.  A warning, a touch of danger.

If he considered every noble residing in Warrick castle a casualty, then every single person in this room had just advanced no less than twelve steps closer to the Crown.  He himself had ascended from thirty-five steps away from the Crown to a mere twenty.  A massive power grab for everyone present.

That they were all here, gathered, only fed the conspiracy.

“Such things are not to be tampered with,” said another member of the conspiracy.  “Not to be toyed with.”

The Duke heard the words, and he believed them.  He knew the image of his uncle would be burned into his mind forever.

Five years ago, the Archduke had visited him while he was being given his second set of operations.  That night five years ago, and several times since, the man had showed an almost human kindness.  Tempered with a very inhuman cruelty, yes, the Duke remembered the point the man had made about pain, but the kindness was what lingered in the Duke’s recollection and left the deepest impression.

This meeting and this display was meant to communicate something, he knew, but he took it for something else.  A chance to say goodbye to one of the only people who felt something like family.

The Duke sensed someone approach the tent, and turned.  The Baron and Baronet twins looked over, as well.

“Lord Duke,” a man spoke from outside.

“Come in.”

An officer stepped into the tent.  “My lord.”

He was so very tired of the formality at this point, even if he understood the necessity of it.  “Speak.”

“My lord, you asked us to stop any couriers from leaving the city.  Forces approaching from neighboring regions stopped a mail courier traveling from Lugh, and we searched all correspondence…”

He handed over a letter.

The Duke took the letter, and then read it.

A complication, an advantage?  More the former than the latter.

He voiced his thoughts aloud.  “The Lambs are in the city, on another errand.  Interesting that they think their mission important enough to ask for help from another team on another job, but they didn’t think to tell their superiors.  Or the Crown.”

“Did they know about the primordials?” Richmond asked.

“I imagine they did.  We’ll have to give the order for the fire and plague to stop for the time being.  Let it spread on its own, that will be devastating enough.  But we want to move carefully here.”

“My lord?” the officer made it a question.

“Just for the time being.  Baron Richmond, Baronets.  You have your wish.  I have an errand for you.”

The Duke took a pen, and drew out a rough sketch, with notes beside it.

The Baron Richmond and the twins drew closer, looking.

This is one of the Lambs.  We have a vested interest in them.  Find them, and remove them from the city.  If you can’t, we’ll have to consider this a tragic loss.”

The Baron picked up the paper.  He read it, then showed it to the twins, before folding it up and putting it in a pocket.

“Anyone else,” the Duke instructed, “Anyone that gets in your way, kill them.”

“And the other Lambs?”

“Like I said,” the Duke spoke, “Anyone else that gets in your way.”

The trio nodded, and stepped from the tent.

The Lambs, and an enemy named in the letter that one group of Lambs had sent another, Mauer, who had some talent at battlefield strategy.  He’d dealt with Mauer’s forces before, and it never failed to be interesting.

But the primordial was what lingered in his mind.  An enemy that gun and sword couldn’t necessarily kill.  One that had killed his uncle.  He’d taken away a lesson from that day, as intended.  He couldn’t hold back or underestimate it in the slightest.  He had soldiers supposedly prepared for the task, but that might not be enough.

He turned to his doctor.  “Professor Berger, Adams, Cameron.  A checkup, if you please.  I want to make sure my weapons and body are prepared, if it comes down to it.”

The loyal professors wasted no time in attending to the task.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.01 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

A towel was draped over my head, another over my bare shoulders.  I didn’t move as I hunched over in front of the stove, eyes moving from the fire glowing within to the window.  We’d placed a log within, and the door was closed, with the slots in the door left open.  It was a weak, unenthusiastic glow.  The only other light inside the building was from outside, as people moved down the street, carrying lights.

Not our home, not our fire, not our towels.

I was so cold and tired that I felt nauseous.  I imagined it as my body feeling almost insulted at the heat and light it had been offered, to the point it was rebuking me.  Not enough heat and human comfort, I need more.  Nourish me, get answers and find the others so I can stop tying your guts in knots, my body told me.

I watched the fire, and I envisioned the city continuing to burn.  I tried to imagine the way things might play out, all of the possible moves the Crown and Mauer might make, and how it affected the bigger picture.

I kept coming up with ideas that involved the others.  Gordon was better when it came to the big battlefield stuff.  Lillian would know ways to fake illness or lightly poison me.  I already looked like hell, and with a bit of dramatic vomiting or other symptoms, I could lead a section of Mauer’s army to think that there were plagues in the air, and give them second thoughts.

With some elbow room, I could make other things happen.  Maybe.

But I didn’t have Lillian.  I didn’t have Gordon.

I most definitely didn’t have Helen or Mary, or even Ashton, who could be so very useful in these circumstances.

I couldn’t shake up this situation because it was already as shaken as things could get, and both sides had chosen their courses.

The logs in the fire shifted, cracking and spitting out sparks that danced within the stove’s confines.

Words?  Written or spoken?  Could I negotiate with the Academy?

The goal here was to get out alive, to minimize the loss of life on the Academy’s part, and take away Mauer’s power.  I doubted there was anything I could say that would deter the Academy or give Mauer second thoughts about what he was doing.

“You were right,” Jamie said, behind me.  “They have someone about our age in the house.”

I turned to look his way.  He had clothes bundled in his arms.  He draped them across the kitchen table.

“Had to dig for a bit to find something in your size.”

He held up shirts, both a little threadworn, and I pointed at one.  He held up a black sweater, and I nodded.  He tossed the clothing my way.  A fresh pair of pants, too, and socks.

“Thank you,” I said.

Jamie smiled.  He started pulling on a fresh sweater as well.

With anyone but him, this would be so much easier.

The shirt he’d given me hung a little weirdly on my narrow shoulders.  The sweater prickled, even through the cloth of the shirt.  I endured it.

“Thinking about Gordon and Lillian?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Me too.  I know I’m not as close to them as you are, but I haven’t known anyone for all that long.”

I touched my leg, judging how damp my pants legs were, and found them still a little wet.

“The pants might be a little large,” Jamie said.  “Want to try?”

I nodded.  He threw the pants my way, and I caught them.  I stayed sitting as I wiggled out of the damp pair and pulled the new pair on, briefly lifting my rear end up off the floor.  I stood, one hand on the waistband, gauging how likely they were to fall down on me.

“Suspenders?”

“You’re thorough,” I said.

“They’ll need adjusting.  They’re fit for an adult.  We took some food, firewood, and left a bit of a mess, so I left some money and a short note behind.  I don’t know if this place will even be standing, but it felt right.”

I nodded.

Jamie was changing clothes too, now that I was set up.  I looked away as he pulled his shirt off.

He wasn’t quite as abashed about it as old Jamie had been, though he turned partially away.

“Both sides are completely confident they’ll destroy the other,” I said, as much to myself as to Jamie.  “I’m pretty sure they’re both right.  I think the fight is going to be ugly, and it’s going to be too costly, with collateral damage above and beyond what both sides expect.”

“That’s a fair summary,” he said.  He turned my way, now pulling on a sweater that was a bit too big for him.  His first attempt to find his glasses nearly knocked them from the table, making my heart jump.  The last thing we damn well needed was for Jamie to be blind.

“You good?” I asked, once he’d fixed his glasses.

He ran fingers through his damp hair, getting it out of his face.  He gave me a nod.

I could hear gunshots in the distance.  The battle was opening.

“The only way forward that I can see just yet is to upset the balance.  Taking the wind out of Mauer’s sails creates a risk, because it means the primordials might get loose, by accident or by deliberation.”

Jamie’s body language changed in a very subtle way.  He stared across the room at me.

“Are you testing me?” he asked.

“Testing?”

“We’re in the middle of a war, both sides are a danger to us, we’re undermanned and overwhelmed,” he said, still staring me down.  “I’m getting the distinct impression you left that statement unfinished because you’re gauging if you can trust me.”

“Ah,” I said.  I held my hands out toward the fire, letting them warm up.  My bones hurt.

“That’s not a yes or a no,” he said.  He was still staring, his neck and body rigid.  “We need to upset the balance.  Okay.  Attacking Mauer means complications, alright.  And what you leave unsaid, because you want to see how I say it, is that we could attack the Crown, and try to upset the balance in that direction.”

I stared into the fire.  The stove could use another log, but I doubted we were going to be around for that long.

He would’ve been slower about connecting the dots there.”

He,” Jamie said, “Knew you well enough to see through what you were doing, even without connecting the dots.”

“True,” I said.

“I’m not him,” Jamie said.  “I’m not Jamie.”

“I know,” I said.

A moment passed.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You want to attack the Crown,” Jamie said.

I hesitated.  I could remember when Jamie had walked into the meeting to discuss the Brechwell incident.  He had been the sole member of the Lambs I hadn’t been able to predict.

I still couldn’t predict him, even now.  We might have mended fences and left the door open to improve things between us at the outset of this trip, but as far as trusting him?  I wasn’t sure.  It was too easy to let my guard down, to focus on the problem at hand, and give him material he could pass on to noble and professor, giving them cause to end the Lambs altogether.

I ventured an answer, “I’m almost certain it’ll be easier to throw a wrench into the works where the Academy is concerned.  We already tried setting Mauer on fire, he’s on guard against anything else.  He’ll be watching, because he knows we’re around.”

“Treason,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” I said.  “That’s what they would call it.  We can justify it by saying we have information the Academy doesn’t.  That they have more primordials than the Academy is aware of.  That all of this is a trap.”

“Maybe,” he said.  “There are only so many times we can get called up in front of the metaphorical firing squad before they start wondering why they aren’t pulling the trigger.  What you’re talking about, it’s still treason.  Treason you think is justified, given the situation, treason you think you might be able to argue was defensible.”

I stared at him.  Here, as in so many other things, he insisted on making things difficult.  He wasn’t giving me anything, even as he took a hard line.  He wanted me to give him an answer, knowing that whatever I picked, I could be screwed.  Say no, and I was abandoning a path, committing us to a harder, more dangerous road, because I was agreeing to play things by the books so long as I worked with him.  Say yes, and I was putting myself and the Lambs at abject risk.

Do you belong to them, in a way that none of the other Lambs do?

“Yes,” I said.  “I’m advocating treason, here.  If we give the Crown reason to hesitate or pull back its forces, we either create an opportunity to communicate with them, we create an opportunity to direct the flow of events, or we put Mauer off his game.  Or all three.”

“And if I say no?  That I’m not willing to take the risk?” Jamie asked me.  “You said, once, that it was easier to think of ideas when you knew the boundaries you were working within.  He wrote that quote down.  What if I draw the line in the sand here and tell you that you have to think of something else?”

More gunshots sounded in the distance.  I heard an explosion.

My mind whirled.  More noise.  Frustration, black anger, pain in the midst of that noise.

“Are you thinking, Sy?” Jamie asked me.

“Always,” I said.  The calm of my voice was at odds with my thoughts.

“Are you thinking of what you’d do if I say no?  Strategies, plans?  Or are you trying to think of ways to manipulate me?”

I put my hands in my pockets, then sighed.  The admission was a hard one.  “I can’t manipulate you.”

He nodded at that.

“I’m trying to decide if you’re pushing on this point because you really want to say no, or if you want me to put my neck on the chopping block, admit outright that I want to commit treason, and let you decide my fate.”

“You think I’m manipulating you?”

“I’m fifty-fifty on the possibility,” I said.  I bent down to pick up my coat from the stool by the fire, and pulled it on.  “You asked me to admit I wanted to commit treason.  I did.  Maybe now you’re asking me to fight for that course of action.”

“That’s ugly,” he said.

“Is it untrue?”

He didn’t break eye contact.  His stare could have been an accusing one, or it could have been a refusal to budge and admit what he was doing.

I couldn’t read him, because I couldn’t look hard enough at him without seeing Jamie.

Uncomfortable, I was the one to turn away.  “I’m going to push for this course of action.  If it comes down to it, and we get in trouble for it, tell them I had no better ideas, the other Lambs weren’t around, and it was a desperate action.  Make sure the other Lambs don’t get sunk along with me.”

“Okay,” he said.

That was the best answer I was going to get.  No confirmation, no insights.

I made my way to the window, pushing the curtain aside to get a better view of what was happening on the street.  Jamie pulled on his coat, flipping the hood up.  He paused at the stove to close the shutters and replace the screen in front.  By the time he made his way to me, I had migrated to the door.

I paused there, my hand on the handle.

“I understand that we’re all different.  We have our needs, our mental quirks,” I said.

He didn’t respond to that.  Which was good.

“Your brain is… architecture,” I said.  “Everything has a place, it’s reliable, it’s solid work.  You struggle more than some do when things are uncertain.  He did too, but he handled it by taking slow, steady steps, whatever he was doing.  You move faster, and maybe that movement comes with even more uncertainty.”

I stared at the door.  Jamie could have walked away and I wouldn’t have known.  Easier to talk to wood.

“I used to think that each of the Lambs had another Lamb that they didn’t work that well with.  But he and I were different in that.  Because we should have conflicted, but we complemented one another.  And that’s not the case with you and me.  I make things uncertain.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, behind me.

“But I need to be able to trust you too.”

The gunshots that sounded beyond the door weren’t all that far away.

Jamie took his time in responding this time, “I understand.”

“We need to find a way to work with one another, or we won’t make it through this,” I said.  We might not make it through this even if we do find a way to work together.

I didn’t wait to hear his response.  Cowardly as it was, I finished my statement by hauling the door open and stepped out into the streets of a city at war.

Fire streaked across the sky, before arcing down to strike at rooftops or hit other streets.  The house we were in had been at the fringe of Mauer’s group, and now it was still at that fringe, but Mauer’s group was no longer huddled at the harbor to the east.  It was actively fighting to the west, and we were behind the back lines.  People here were stragglers, they were the cowards who weren’t fighting, and they were the wounded, being carried back and away from the fighting.

Smoke was supposed to rise, but all of the light sources around us had halos, fuzzed out by the lingering haze.  People who ran this way and that had smudges on their faces, from mingled smoke particulate, snow, and the rub of the back of a hand.  In one or two cases, I could see people who had those same smudges, except the areas around the smudges were raw, blistering or inflamed.  Subtle, but it would be worse by the night’s end.

As I was about to cross the street, a bullet struck a puddle in the middle of the street, sending ice fragments spraying, the bullet or the bullet fragments ricocheting off toward the harbor.

Not aimed at us, or at anything in particular.

I gestured, then bolted, running diagonally across the street, with Jamie so close behind me he could have stepped on my heels.

The closer we got, the greater the ambient danger was.  All it took was one stupid stray bullet, inhaling in the wrong cloud of thick smoke that hung close to the ground, or an unlucky artillery shot.

The eye of the great sea creature that overlooked the harbor stared now at the battlefield, red-orange and grim.  Above all of us, the sky was alive, roiling with smoke and wind rising from a thousand different places, glowing with the fires that had ignited across the city.  We were venturing into an area with more hot smoke overhead, and here, the snow melted before it reached us, absorbing the smoke.  It left black-brown streaks on Jamie’s glasses.

We reached the back lines of the battle.  Here, the number of wounded were thicker, laid out in alleyways and sitting on blankets in the streets, so close to the people at the rear of the fighting that those people could have tripped over them, should they step back with any retreat in mind.

A squad of ten stitched soldiers marched out of an alleyway forty paces down the road.  Those same stitched opened fire on a crowd of people so packed they couldn’t crouch, let alone move to either side or seek cover.  The makeshift militia returned fire in kind, unloading pistols and rifles.  I saw one stitched take what might have been ten bullets, and keep going.  Another took a hit to the forehead, head rocking back, and didn’t die or stop shooting.

They weren’t invulnerable, however.  One did fall.  It took twenty or so bullets before it collapsed, but it did fall.

Meanwhile, every other bullet the stitched fired into the crowd brought a living, breathing person down.  A handful of those people weren’t even able to collapse to the ground, the crowd was so thick around them that they didn’t have room.  The shouts, the sound of guns both distant and near, the patter of rain, and the shrill squeal of commander’s whistles became a singular noise.

I could see the effect, though.  Seeing people die was having an impact on morale.

Mauer had to know this would happen.  He accounted for it.  Even if I tried to take advantage of it, I wouldn’t be changing the course of events here.

I could imagine Mauer’s invisible hand moving.  He would make a play here soon, to balance out the losses, and keep this sort of attack from becoming a rout.

Stitched soldiers had a weak point.  The people who were throwing lanterns and waving torches toward the attackers were years out of date.  I gestured at Jamie, then ducked into an alleyway, leaping and skipping over the people who were laid out there, past wounded men who were grabbing for guns, looking in the direction of the new, deafening flurry of gunfire.

Mauer’s people were at the far end of the alley, huddled there, with crates and bags of trash piled in front of them. The stitched had had to have come from somewhere, and Mauer’s people on the next street over were losing the fight.  The Crown’s forces were now flanking Mauer’s.  This group at the alley’s end were defending the wounded and trying to hold ground against the flank.

I hurried up to the makeshift fortifications, peering over it, shoulder to elbow with the soldiers on either side of me.  The men looked to be Lugh citizens, and looked to be familiar with their guns, even if they didn’t have the jackets so many of the ex-military soldiers did.

I could see down the length of the street, where the Crown’s soldiers were taking every position that even resembled defensive cover.  The stitched alternated between taking cover or brazenly walking toward the defending forces, absorbing bullets without hesitation.

Someone grabbed my shoulder.

“We need to cut through!” I raised my voice.

The noise around us was so bad I couldn’t even make myself heard.  The man beside me forced me to turn to face him.

He shouted a question at me.

I didn’t have the physical strength to free myself from his grip.  I didn’t need it.  I kept my expression stern, raising one hand to backhand his wrist, striking it.  Emotion, conviction, and the aura of someone who knew what he was doing was what loosened the man’s grip.

As part of that same motion, I grabbed a lantern from behind the cover the men had taken.  I hurled it further down the street.  Glass shattered and a pool of fire spread between us and the enemy.  Smoke billowed out.

Everyone at our defensive position had to duck down as the enemy opened fire, a bark of a response to our action.

“Idiot!” the man shouted, seizing me again.  His hand forced me down closer to the ground.  “You’ve denied us any chance of a clear shot!”

Undeterred, I looked at Jamie, who’d hung a bit further back, standing flush against the wall of the alley.  He was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief.

I signaled, very clear, obvious gestures.  Soon.  Run.  Forward.

He hurried to put his glasses on, then stepped close, ducking to keep his head out of the line of fire.  He put a hand on the militia man’s wrist.

The man eased up.  Again, I gestured at Jamie.  Not for his benefit, but for the man.

Conveying that we had a plan, that we knew what we were doing better than he did.  Jamie’s nod seemed to cinch the deal.

He gestured back to me.  Soldier.  Four.  Attack.  Wait.  Four.  Attack.  Wait.  Us.  Go.

I tried to listen for what he was talking about.  The gunfire so close to my ears made it so hard to hear.  If the wyvern formula was at full strength, I might have been okay with processing it all.  It wasn’t, and I wasn’t.  The listening was hard.

They weren’t firing like the regimental squads of old had, all firing in the same burst, then reloading as a unit.  There was an ebb and flow, though.  They fired as fast as they could empty their rifles, then paused.  To reload, or to back up and let others take up their position and fire.

The wyvern formula wasn’t at full strength, but it wasn’t absent either.  My mind shifted gears.  I could focus on the noise, envision the soldiers on the far end of the street, ninety or so paces away.  I wouldn’t be acting to take advantage of a moment where they weren’t shooting at all, but I could take advantage of a moment where they were shooting less.

I gestured to Jamie, my body tensing.  He nodded.

I moved a fraction after the worst of the barrage was unleashed, so fast that I momentarily worried I’d be flinging myself headlong into that same barrage.

Over the cover the soldiers had positioned at the end of the alley, up the street, moving along the edge at the base of one building, keeping to where the smoke and fire from the lantern masked our movements.

We were exposed to potential enemy fire throughout.  We were exposed to the enemy’s eye for only a moment, as we moved beyond where I’d thrown the lantern, and then turned a sharp corner, circling around the building.  To the back of the alley the stitched had come from.

There were two men and ten stitched within.

My hand flew out behind me, gesturing.

In that same moment, I shifted how I ran, stumbling, staggering.

“Help him!” Jamie shrieked, the cry ragged and desperate.

Not as convincing as I might have been, had the roles been reversed, but it wasn’t that bad, either.

The men with the stitched were the dogs, the ones who directed the stitched in the field of battle and kept them operational.  They were the weak point.

It could be said that a stitched was too dumb to be manipulated.  That my talents didn’t lend themselves well to dealing with one, let alone twenty.

The man hurried to my side, gun at the ready.  He aimed at Jamie, who raised his hands.

Paranoid.  Worried about the local forces using children to deliver a surprise attack.  Which they probably would.

I writhed on the ground, gasping for breath, hands on my stomach.  Crouching beside me, the soldier took hold of my arm, forcing me to flip over.

He was, as one who tended to the stitched, at least somewhat qualified in field medicine.

The one at the far end of the alley peeked out in the direction of the fighting, keeping only one eye on the situation here.

I reached for my would-be savior, who was still trying to puzzle out what was the matter.  Then I brought my armpit down on his rifle, my heels pressing down against the ground as I forced all of my body weight down on it.  It brought the weapon down and away from Jamie while pulling the soldier down toward me.

My free hand went to his waist, failed to grab the pistol there, but found a knife.  Almost as good.

The man froze as I put the blade to his throat.  I looked up at the situation with Jamie and the other soldier, and saw the man there doubled over.  A knife stuck out of his gun arm.

He looked as though he might give the order for the stitched in the alleyway to come after us.  Then he saw the knife at his buddy’s throat and froze.

Jamie hurried to my side, bent down, and took the pistol I’d failed to grab.

I extricated myself from the man who had tried to help me, reached to his collar, and found a cord.

I pulled the cord free, and tugged the object on the end free where it snagged on his jacket.

A commander’s whistle.  I rubbed it on my pant’s leg.

I blew twice, sharp, and the stitched in the alleyway turned to look at me.

Jamie said something, but the noise around us was deafening.  He extended his free hand, signaling.  A flash of palm, a flash of palm, then hand out, extended, for a long moment.

I blew.  Tweet.  Tweet.  Tweeeeeeeeeeee-

The stitched in the alley shuffled, uncomfortable, some standing at attention.

The noise of the fighting beyond took on a different tone.

The order to retreat had been given.  The stitched that were mowing through the crowd was now turning tail.

Different squads would have different signals, and for most orders, the stitched would look for their commander.  They wouldn’t recognize a pair of young teenaged boys as such.  If it was that easy to throw them for a loop, then every army would pack whistles.

But they were listening for an order from here, at least.  I could help turn the tide here.  Other opportunities could be created.

Jamie held the distant soldier at gunpoint, and divested him of his rifle, pistol and knife.  He handed me the pistol.  Once we both had guns, it was easy enough to make the two stitched overseers retreat to the other end of the alley, further from the people they’d been attacking.

They turned and ran out into the street we’d approached from, toward their friendly forces.  We let them.

Once they were gone, I turned my attention to a window.  Lugh didn’t have high security.  I opened the latch in a matter of a minute, let myself in, and we made our way through, out into the next alleyway, deeper into the midst of crown forces.

We were just in time for Mauer’s Plague Men to make their move.  Unfortunate.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 9.02 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.2

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My first indication that there was something wrong was the corpses.  Citizens of Lugh lay scattered on the street, skin crimson, blistered, and eyes bugging out.  The light shimmered on and around them in a way that made it look as though I was viewing them through a screen or filter, or if they were laying at a river bed, with silt running over and around them.  They were still, and the shadows were alive in a very detailed, particular way that I couldn’t define easily from this distance.

The second indication was the smoke, which wasn’t behaving like the smoke from the fires.  It crept close to the ground, heavy, rolling downhill, and the ‘living shadow’ element was doubly true there.  Most telling, however, was that it wasn’t hot.  There were fires here and there, but the air wasn’t heated to the point that smoke-dirtied snow was turning into grimy rain.

I ventured closer, focusing on the clouds.  The image I saw reminded me of hand-cranked projector video that I’d seen in the big presentations with professors and doctors.  The silence, the crank and whirr, and the image, moving even when the subject was unmoving, showing some warbeast or operation at work, behind dancing flecks, flickers, and dust on film strips writ large.

I gestured for Jamie’s benefit.

Plague, was the sign.  Disease, sickness.  I wasn’t sure I was right.  It could have been parasite, or, more problematic, an airborne chemical or poison.  Whatever it was, some small form of life was moving within the dark smoke and serving as a transmission vector.  Where the smoke touched a surface or a person, it left the thin covering of shifting, dancing life painted over that surface.

The only men who walked in the midst of the low clouds of smoke were distinct in appearance.  They wore black military jackets and heavy boots, and their skin was scarred and pocked.  I recognized them as plague men, armed and moving in formation.  There were some on either end of the street, effectively trapping us.

One fired a gun at a body.  The city around us was so chaotic and noisy that I almost couldn’t make out the sound of the solitary gunshot.

I edged down the alleyway, aiming to get a better view of the situation.

I could see modified wagons, with special containers on the backs.  Some had been blown up, and others lay askew, with a wheel gone or the stitched beast at the front laying dead.  Squadrons of stitched soldiers had been laid low, joining the officers in heavy clothes and masks who had been in charge of them and the plague boxes.

Some of the gunfire we’d heard earlier had been from an altercation between the Plague Men and the Academy, apparently.  They walked without trouble in the midst of the clouds, periodically stopping to drive a bayonet into a throat or kick at a gun that lay in a twitching hand’s grasp, putting the weapon out of the owner’s reach.

The Academy had set up here, using the boxes as both a defensive position and a means of keeping Mauer’s people back and away.  Clouds of heavy smoke and whatever else that killed, walling off entire sections of the city.  Then the Plague Men had come striding through those same clouds with a viciously effective flanking maneuver and explosives.

Now we were surrounded.

I’d already jumped down from the window to the foot of the building, and now I didn’t have a way out that didn’t involve running past a squadron of armed soldiers.  Jamie was still at the window, legs dangling, a handkerchief held to his mouth.

He gestured.  Question.  I didn’t have an answer.

I crept further along the alley, fully aware that if I was spotted, I would be shot.  There would be no questions, no hesitation, and no mercy.  I couldn’t trust my enemies here to make mistakes, like I might hope for with stitched or people who had been ordinary citizens an hour ago, before a gun had been pushed into their hands.

As I reached the street, I positioned myself closer to the ground.  Newly dry, I still crawled through muck, blood, and water.  The crawling smoke provided me some cover from the plague men.

There was a body here.  A man had fallen, and lay face down in the same large puddle I was crawling through.

I searched him, slowly and carefully, investigating pockets and belt.  I avoided any fast movements that might tip the soldiers off, and I kept my face pointed toward the ground, the hood of my coat hanging low over my brow.  In the gloom, I didn’t want them to see the paleness of my face or ears.

Pocketknife, I could take.  A notebook, I’d take for now.  A small medical kit, well worn, I’d hold onto that until I had something else to occupy my hands with.  A flask.  I could keep that too.

Lighter and cigarettes.  I kept the former, and left the latter be.

I couldn’t hear footsteps, but I saw what could have been a shadowy figure moving against shadow, in the midst of smoke.  They were vague shapes, ones that could so easily be mistaken for tricks of the light and deceptive play of my eyes and brain.  I didn’t wait to clarify the image, instead pushing back with the heels of my hand and crawling backward.  I backed into garbage, and collapsed into position, curling around a sour-smelling black paper sack of waste.

I couldn’t see up without raising my head, and my eye was only afforded a view of the slice of street and building, visible between ground and the edge of my hood.

If shadowy figure moving against shadow was hard to make out, given the circumstances, then that figure’s shadow added another step of obfuscation to the mix.

I remained where I was, until I could be reasonably sure that he was gone.  I raised my head.

Two more figures were there, but they weren’t facing my direction.  I remained still, watching and waiting, until they were gone.

I got the flask and lighter out, and put them neatly by the pile of trash, waiting at the ready.

Then, with the same care as before, I edged closer to the end of the alleyway that opened up onto one of the streets with the plague boxes.

My skin prickled.  I wasn’t in the midst of the smoke, but some of it was touching me.  That it prickled made me want to swear.  It could have meant something very bad, but it wasn’t so bad or so telling that I could be certain about how to move forward.

I reached my position from before, by the body.  This time, I crawled almost on top of it.

The smoke that flowed down the street reached the body, and it collected with more strength along the far end of the corpse.  Heavy and close to the ground, it reached the side of his leg, torso, and his armpit, and pooled there.

I extended one hand down into the dark smoke.

The prickling was roughly ten times as intense, there.

I turned my attention to the body.  A Crown soldier.  He wore gloves, a turtleneck, a heavy coat, and a metal mask to allow safe breathing in the midst of plague.

I had to lift his face up off the ground to get the mask off.  With it firmly in hand, I retreated back to the shadows.

A series of rapid-fire explosions in the distance suggested that someone had burned an ammunitions cache or a storehouse of something combustible had caught alight.  The noise echoed like thunder, and every set of eyes on the street turned in that direction.

Back in the shadows and cover of the pile of trash, I looked up for Jamie.  He wasn’t sitting in the window, but standing back from it, looking down at me.

My fingers brushed against the flask, lighter and medical kit.

The tingling in my hand had dwindled.  An investigation suggested the skin wasn’t any puffier, more sensitive, or less sensitive than it had been before.

I gave it a long moment, ready to act.  Mentally, head to toe, I took measure.  My thoughts were clearer, if anything.  My breathing and heartbeat were fine.  I was hungry and thirsty, but that wasn’t anything new.  I was cold, but the snow gathering around us was a good indicator of why that was appropriate.

I could see the visual noise of whatever was in that crawling smoke, now that it was actually on me.  Bugs, individually smaller than the dot left by a sharp pencil on paper, winged and capable of crawling, they were falling off my hand and fleeing to the street instead.

They didn’t like me, it seemed.

No other symptoms.  For a weapon of war, if I was going to experience symptoms, it would need to be faster and more comprehensive.  There was no ruling out some accumulation of chemical or substance, symptoms appearing later, simply because I had immersed myself in this smoke for too long, but if that was a problem, I suspected even the plague men would be giving it a wider berth.

No, this was a weapon meant for culling the weak, cutting down ordinary man and animal.

I gestured nothing in specific to get Jamie’s attention.  He drew closer to the window, glancing left, then right, to make sure nobody had seen us.  He gestured back at me, question.  Opening the medical kit, I found a bandage.  I pulled it out, removing the metal clip that kept it fastened in place, and in a few motions of finger and wrist, wrapped it partially around my hand.  I pointed to Jamie, before raising my hand, fingers extended.

He nodded.

I put the bandage back in the kit.  I checked the coast was clear, then tossed the full kit up to the window.  He caught it.

While he busied himself, I turned my attention to the mask.  Lighter and alcohol in hand, using my hunched-over body to keep the light of the flame from being seen, I burned the metal surface of the mask that sat in between my crossed legs.  The smoke, dirt and moisture that had accumulated on it made it clear to see where I had burned it.  If I squinted, I could even see the metal changing color as it got hot enough.

Inside and out, with straps included, I burned the mask as clean of the microscopic bugs as I could get it.  I stared at it by lighter-light to make sure it was clean enough.

When Jamie reappeared in the window, I gestured to him, and then tossed him the mask as well.

Hands covered, the bandage even binding the ends of his sleeves to his wrists, jacket zipped up high, with mask on and hood up, cinched close to his head, Jamie hopped down to the foot of the alley where I was.

We retraced our steps, my third visit to the alley’s end.

Further down the street, plague men opened fire.  They unloaded a dozen shots, walking rather than running to cover, bending down slightly, and then waited.

Whoever or whatever they had been shooting at had been scared off, if their targets weren’t outright dead.

That small distraction would have to do.  Signaling Jamie, I indicated the way.

Straight into the crawling smoke.

Augmented as they were, their eyes weren’t so special that they would see two dark figures in the midst of the thickest part of the smoke.

I held my breath as I ran, blind, one hand on Jamie’s wrist, the other extended out in front of me.  I moved my feet and shifted my weight to dissipate the impact of boot on road and move as silently as possible.  The noise around the city made it easier, obscuring the sounds I did make, but I didn’t want to let my foot come down too hard and sharp in one of the moments where bullets weren’t flying and crowds of people weren’t hollering to be heard over everyone else.

I tried to hold on to a mental image of the scene, where I’d last seen soldiers, where they might be, and what I might do if we were caught.  Time spent thinking about that took my thoughts off of the prickling that was now feeling more like a burn.

My lungs strained as we ran.  The act of running meant bringing my feet down, and as quiet as I was trying to be, every strike of boot on ground was threatening to jar my mouth open, and allow a gulping of air to enter my mouth, to be later swallowed.  If it was an airborne threat, I couldn’t afford that.

My hand touched wood.  I stopped running, and ducked low.  Jamie was so fast in matching suit that I suspected he’d both been anticipating it and had known where we were.

The smoke rolled downhill, and here, under the wagon, we were upwind and above the worst of it.  I allowed myself to breathe, and felt the prickling extend inside my mouth as I opened it to gulp in air.

Beside me, Jamie crawled into position beside me, and collapsed, making a dangerous amount of noise in the process.  One arm was pressed up against his hood.  He’d been adding the bulk of the arm to minimize how much might slip through that gap.  His breath hissed almost imperceptibly as he breathed through the mask and filter.

I watched him, unmoving, unable to act or speak to verify if he was alright.

A bandage-wrapped hand grasped at the ground, as if he could find purchase there.

The precautions hadn’t been enough.  I felt cold inside, my stomach knotting.

If I had to watch him writhe and die here…

I grit my teeth until my jaw hurt.  The more the prickling faded from my skin and scalp, the more sick I felt, and that sickness had nothing to do with the crawling smoke.

There were soldiers no less than ten feet from us.  The noise he’d made as he collapsed hadn’t tipped them off, but they were still there, and our options were few.  I couldn’t drag Jamie to safety, I couldn’t help him.  We had no Lillian.

I saw him move, fighting to avoid making noise or moving too abruptly, writhing in pain.  Behind the tinted lenses of his mask, his eyes were wide and staring.

I thought back to the old Jamie, on the day he’d… what even to call it?  Departed?

Reaching to his belt, I patted him down.  Nothing in front, on the sides-

Behind.

The medical kit.  I popped it open.

Before I’d even looked at the contents, he reached out, pushing the lid closed.  He managed a shake of his head, before he squeaked.

His hand went out, and touched the underside of the wagon.  Fingers extended to move against the surface above us, once, twice.

He gestured, and the gesture was worrying.  Fingers curled at the first and second knuckle, thumb tucked in.

We’d started out with six or seven gestures, and had let the rest evolve organically.  The first six or seven were intended to be broad, encompassing a wide range of things.

Jamie wasn’t one to forget things, or to lose control of his mental faculties.  That made the fact that he was being this vague and unclear very troubling.

Fingers curled and thumb tucked in was the face.  Look, sense, attend, and, in cases, apply our particular talents.

I tried the most obvious means, and reached for his mask, ready to pull it off.  If it was a problem-

He shook his head.  He made a small noise of pain.  My head turned, eyes searching for the movement of boots, the approach of soldiers.

Again, he touched the wagon’s underside.

Look, I understood.

I knew where the soldiers were standing, having just checked a moment ago.  I grabbed the wheel of the wagon and hauled myself out from under it.  I moved more quickly than quietly, trusting the ambient noise to cover any slip on my part.

Think, Sy.  How do the designers of these wagons think?  What’s the logic to how this was put together?  There has to be a mechanism to open or close the doors for the plague at the front of the box, or something that activates them and makes them start billowing out and forward like this.  An outside of wood with metal to catch and stop bullets, so they can function in a warzone and double as cover, and at the back, for the people using that cover, boxes of ammo, things to use to repair the wagon…

I reached the back of the wagon, double-checking the coast was clear before climbing within.

A team of Academy students or doctors put a lot of thought into this, debated it into the ground, presented it to a professor, who tore the concept to shreds and then rebuilt it.  This is how the process goes.

The sides of the box were doubly reinforced and lined with boxes of ammo and two spare rifles.  Not what I needed or wanted.

In case of an emergency, some rookie gets in the path of the smoke or the wind blows the wrong way, they want to be able to reach the medical supplies quickly.

I touched the floor of the wagon, and gauged the dimensions.

It was thick.  A very deep floor, between what I was standing on and the part the wheels were connected to.

I ran my fingers over the surface, and found gaps I could fit my fingers in.

I lifted it up.  The boards of the wagon’s floor doubled as the supplies for fixing anything that took a bullet.  Lengths of metal and wood.

Beneath those lengths of metal and wood were more kits, each branded with the Academy’s symbol.

I collected three of the kits, checked that the coast was clear – which wasn’t too hard given how close the wagon was to the wall, and how the plague men were gradually moving themselves further up the street – and then headed down to Jamie.

On the last day I’d talked to old Jamie, he had demonstrated some knowledge of Academy tools and procedure.  He’d known how to operate, with information gleaned from textbooks.

Now, while he was suffering, I was hoping he knew how to treat himself.

I opened up the kit, double checked Jamie, and saw his eyes were closed behind the tinted lenses of the mask.  I grabbed his mask and shook his head back and forth until the eyes opened.

He saw the kit, and with hands tense, tapped one finger down.

I lifted a syringe, pre-filled.  I used it, squeezing out a portion, and Jamie extended a finger, pointing to a point on the side of the syringe.

I squeezed out more.

He touched his heart, and began fumbling with the coat.  The pain he was suffering from was making it clumsier than it should have been.

All those people the crawling darkness had touched, it seemed, had died in a horrible way.  The Academy, it seemed, had wanted to tip the scales of morale in their favor.

I pulled at the surgical tape he’d plastered over it to seal it and then undid the coat.

I held the needle poised like a dagger over his heart.  He nodded and closed his eyes.

I stabbed him, then depressed the syringe.  It was slow going, and I could see his discomfort.

All of this trouble, to just make our way halfway up the street.  The soldiers were thinner, and had we both been able-bodied, we could have made a break for it, waiting for them to move to a certain point or turn their attention one way or the other.  With Jamie like this, though…

Parasites, poisons, and diseases didn’t affect me like they did most.  I’d badly underestimated how they would affect even a covered-up Jamie.

I heard shouts.  The plague men were moving, taking cover.  One hurried to the very wagon we were on, using the front and sides in the same way another soldiers on another battlefield might use sandbags.

His voice was muffled, very nearly drowned out.  My earlier observations about shadows and tricks of the mind applied to the sounds here.

I couldn’t hear what he said, or even make out how he said it, but my brain told me that it was an exclamation of confusion and surprise.

Now that I was here, crouched under the belly of the wagon, I wasn’t entirely sure I had put all of the metal and wood panels away, nor had I stowed all of the emergency treatment kits.

I might have, but I might not have.  I hadn’t been paying attention to it.

I really needed the Wyvern formula.

I shifted position, poising myself beneath the wagon, knife in hand, staring at the soldier’s one foot, as it came down to rest on the road behind the wagon.

The other would come down, he would stoop down to look under the wagon, and I would cut.

If that cut wasn’t sharp and effective enough to silence him, or if he, an expert soldier, was quick enough to get out of the way or block my cut, there was nothing more I could do.

I heard the clack as something settled into place in the wagon above me, and then, in a lunging movement, the foot went up and away.

I could hear the plague man above us shoot his rifle.

Like I had, just moments ago, the plague man had more pressing concerns.

I turned my head and looked at Jamie, slumped over, trying to breathe, disconnected from everything around him as he tried to deal.

It struck me that, but for the clothes he was covered in now, from head to toe, he had looked almost exactly the same the very first time I’d seen him.  That same moment that I’d realized my best friend was gone.

The realization made me want to jump out of my skin, it was so sharp and uncomfortable.  We’d talked yesterday, we’d hashed out our issues, and we’d found a tentative peace, but with the realization, the memory, I felt resentment boil up and over.  I knew the resentment was unfair, that he didn’t deserve it.

I knew he was a Lamb, and he deserved, at the very least, the affection I had showed even Evette, who I had never truly known or talked to.  She had been an idea, and I had given her my time and attention.  I had slept in her room and talked to her, because she was a Lamb.  Yet when it came to this Jamie, I couldn’t bring myself to extend that.

I hated that contradiction in myself, but I equally hated the fact that my brain was like a broken machine, constantly tripping up, failing to learn from its mistake as it drew on familiar impulses and memories, only for logic and reason to kick in and wake me up.

It would be so much easier if you died, I thought.  Then I could mourn him and be done with it.

The thought was real, crystal clear in the same way as any rectangle or scene I might envision, and it was matched by an equal and opposite impulse, that wanted to do right and fairly by him.  Because he wasn’t a bad person, and he had been thrust into a bad situation.  Because Jamie had left him to me as a legacy, and he’d been so kind about the things that mattered, even if he was as challenged by me as I was by him.

My mind could run on multiple tracks at once, and it felt like my feelings were doing the same, divided, split, and periodically clashing in uncomfortable ways.

Leave him behind, that part of me that I hated told me.  You can accomplish more if you do.  If he dies in the meantime, it isn’t really your fault.

The idea sickened me to the point I thought I might vomit in self revulsion.  The other side of me was so uncomfortable with this reminder in close proximity that it hurt to be around him.  Both ideas made me want to flee, to take that first step that would set me to running, one foot in front of the other, every step making it harder and harder to change my mind and turn back.

I shifted position, moving the kit I’d collected from the wagon into Jamie’s reach, laying the syringe on top of it.

I turned my back on him, and made my way out from under the wagon, checking if the coast was clear.  It was.

Twisting, I climbed up onto the back of the wagon.

One rifle extended along the side.  Gently, I lifted it free, the end and the blade of the bayonet passing beneath the elbow of the plague man a matter of feet in front of me.  He knelt behind the wall and the reinforced box at the front of the modified wagon, shooting over the top.

Wait, I told myself, aware that a glance from the plague man would alert him to the fact that there was someone right behind him.  Wait.

I was impatient, the discomfort hadn’t gone away as I left Jamie behind.

Wait, and take all of that anger and resentment, all of the bad feelings…

He finished reloading and started shooting once more.  I cocked my rifle, and I aimed it at the back of the plague man’s head.

…and let it go.  At least for now.

I squeezed the trigger as he finished his burst of shots.  Blood sprayed, and he slumped over, collapsing onto the floor of the wagon.  That he was dead would be explainable, given he’d been in the midst of a gunfight.  If they were clever enough to figure the bullet had come from behind…

Well, the risk of that was lower than the risk that he’d comment about the theft of material and presence of nearby enemies, after this current distraction was done with.

I exhaled slowly, turning to move to the back of the wagon.

Then, with focus and effort, I made my way beneath the wagon once more.

Jamie’s eyes were open, as if the bullet I’d fired had woken him.  He was still slumped over.

I shifted the position of the rifle I held, and I gestured.  You.  Okay.  Question.

He winced as he leaned forward, shifting position.  Fire.  Pain.

It burned.

I nodded.  The feelings I’d put into the bullet were only a drop in the bucket.  But I could put on a civil face.

Us.  Run.  I signaled.

He nodded, moving again.

While the plague men were focused on the fight, we slipped away, Jamie moving slower than before.

Moving from street to street, we could see how the damage got worse.  A city burned, besieged and littered with bodies.  I had no idea who was winning or losing, and the lights and torches that one side or the other held were no longer any indicator of things.  The distinctions blurred as things burned.  By the placement and nature of some of the fires, I had to wonder if any had been set by Mauer.

Looking over my shoulder, I almost missed seeing a group that had no lights at all.  Stitched.  Jamie elbowed me in the same instant I saw them.

I indicated a bit of cover, looked back over my shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed, and that there was enough distance between us and the plague men, and then fumbled in my pocket for a whistle.

With the whistle in my mouth, I looked at Jamie, who still wore the mask.

The mask helped, I had to admit.

He showed me the signal.  Short, short, short.

I blew.  Tweet.  Tweet.  Tweet.

We waited, wet snow falling around us, melting as it touched warmer ground, and rain falling, only to freeze or pool over already frozen puddles.

The reply came back.  Tweet.  Tweet.  Tweet.

Jamie nudged me.

This was risky.  I was holding my breath, and there was no plague smoke here, or anything of the sort.

I stepped out of cover, and approached the stitched.

In that same moment, someone else emerged from a place behind the stitched.  Their handler.

He looked at me, tensed, and then barked out the order, “Guns up!”

The stitched raised their guns.  I raised my hands, Jamie doing the same beside me.

“Friendly!” I called out.  “We’re experiments!”

He didn’t give the order for stitched to shoot.

“There are plague men further down this hill!” I called out.  “I thought you should know.  There’s a lot going on, and we need to talk to your commanding officer!”

To deter them or to interfere with them as subtly as we can get away with, depending on how cooperative they are, I told myself.

“Further down that hill-”

“Was a crew of Crown soldiers and plague boxes, holding the line.  They got ambushed by plague men.  The disease resistant soldiers.  Now the plague men are using the boxes against the Crown.”

“Plague men?  That’s not what we call them,” the handler said.

“The immortals,” Jamie called out, voice muffled by his mask.

The handler nodded, but he didn’t give the order for the stitched to lower their weapons.

“They’ll have heard the whistles,” I said, “And they’ll have found their buddy that I shot, and might figure out it wasn’t a stray bullet from that last firefight.  Can we move somewhere out of the rain and potential danger, at least?”

Something about what I’d said seemed to get through.  He nodded.  “Guns down.  Be ready.”

In unison, the stitched lowered their rifles, holding them in front of them instead.

“Come on,” he said.  “I’ll reach out to my commander.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Jamie and I moved past the rank and file of stitched.

“I’ll tell him you have, what, information to share?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “And we’ve got comrades somewhere in the midst of the fighting I’d really like to find.”

“Mm,” he said.  “Not much chance of that, but I’ll mention it.”

I nodded.

Beside me, Jamie pulled off his mask.  He reached into a pocket for his glasses, and put them on.

The Crown army was drawing the perimeter inward as they cleared buildings and secured streets.  They were a ways into Lugh, now.

The handler approached another soldier, indicated me, and then gave the order, “Go tell the Baron that there’s a child experiment here who wants to talk to him.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.03 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.3

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I prayed for the forces of Lugh to attack.  A timely assault, a good bombing.  Best if it hit the front lines, mostly stitched, but it would be an excuse to go, to run.

The Baron.

That meant the Duke was running the show on the Crown’s side.  It was the equivalent of me trying to deal with plague men instead of ordinary soldiers.  Elite, better at what they did, and very, very dangerous.

The Baron had less clout than the Duke did, but he had less reason to keep up appearances.  It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he could take issue with someone and then slap them down.

Could we just run?  Bolt for safety?  I doubted it.  It would buy our survival in the short term, but end it in the long term.

I stayed where I was, waiting.  Off to the side, Jamie was peeling off the bandages and mask.

The camp was set where wagons with warbeasts could maneuver, at the crossroads of two major roads at the north end of Lugh.  The long streets provided little to nothing to break the wind as it swept through, stirring up the meager, wet snowflakes.  Actual human soldiers were few and far between, with the bulk of the army formed of stitched, with a small fraction being the handlers for those same stitched.

Dead wood made up the wagons, snow and darkness covered and dimmed any color in the surroundings.  The only lights were artificial ones, white, glaring, and flickering, aimed out toward the city.  The gathered soldiers didn’t talk and play cards, and were little different from the stitched.  It didn’t give me the sense that morale was low, so much as it gave me the sense that there wasn’t any emotion at all.  The living soldiers and handlers were little different from the stitched, especially with the hooded coats they wore.  They weren’t as vulnerable to the wet snow as the stitched were, but they were just as unwilling to get wet, given the climate.

A stark contrast to Mauer’s camp, which was all life, fire, and energy.

Jamie blew on his hands before rubbing them together, and gestured in the process, giving me a sidelong glance.  Plan.  Question.

Wary, I gestured back.

I didn’t have a better answer.  Nobles weren’t to be messed with, there weren’t many games I could play without risking my life and that of the Lambs.

Better to ground myself and be ready to play the more diplomatic games that came with any dealing with nobles.

They were people.  Very strange, unpredictable, powerful people, but people.  The usual truisms held.

He made his approach, and I had to steel myself.  The Baron Richmond didn’t look like a person at all.  Too tall, his features alien, but not in a way I could pin down.  His hair was too fine, perhaps, moving like gossamer rather than hair, moving in a very ethereal way in the wind.

He was dressed for battle, with a cape and pauldrons that wrapped around his upper body, concealing torso and arms, a helmet with gold tracing, and boots with the same.  The end of a scabbard was visible below the end of the cape.

He moved with a retinue, as if he wasn’t imposing enough on his own.  On either side of him were the twins.  His bastard sisters.  I had nothing against bastards, I was probably one myself, but for the nobles, those things mattered.  The Baron Richmond was disenfranchised by virtue of his lower status.  Too powerful to deal with the common people on any level, too low in status to wield any meaningful power.  The bastard twins were below him in status.  Were it not for their brother’s continued hard work, they might have found an early grave to assassins or other subtleties.

They were beautiful, I had to admit, wrapped in heavy coats, though theirs had albino wolf pelts around their otherwise bare shoulders, and were a stark, startling white.  Pale skin, pale fur, and white cloth that surrounded them and with the bare shoulders, suggested they weren’t even dressed beneath the overcoats.

They reminded me of Helen, if I imagined a Helen with more bloodlust, and the inability or an unwillingness to suppress it.  Their hands were all over their brother.

“Lambs,” Richmond said.

The alarm bells in my head were already ringing, but something about the look in Richmond’s eyes and voice struck at those bells with force enough to dash them to pieces.  The prey instinct, that part of my mind that unconsciously picked up on the little details, was screaming at me.

Trouble.

I wanted to hear gunshots behind me, an explosion, for bullets to start flying.  It would be reason enough to take leave.

“Lord Baron,” I said.  I bowed, being very mindful of position and decorum.  Not too far, not too exaggerated.  I couldn’t give him a reason.  He wants to hurt the Duke, and the Duke doesn’t dislike us.  If he can destroy us here and come up with any excuse at all, he will.

The prey instinct was probably picking up on signals from the Baron’s retinue.  The doctors that tended to the Baron and his sisters seemed to be bracing themselves, the sisters seemed too eager, their hands active as they each ran gloved fingers up and down the Baron’s arms, watching us with unblinking eyes.

The Baron spoke, “Straighten.  What are you doing here?”

“Errand for a friend of the Academy,” I said.  “We were looking for someone in the city when Mauer showed.  We tried to burn him alive, and he got away.  We caught wind of what he was doing, but by the time we had enough to report on, things were underway.”

“You failed to kill him,” the Baron said.  The word choice was weighty, ‘fail’ and ‘kill’, not emphasizing but putting them out there, leaving them to float about like snowflakes, for later perhaps, or to seize on at a later moment.

“My lord, we tried to position against Mauer while he escaped the fire and made his initial moves, we lost our teammates, and made our way in this direction, because we couldn’t reach him.  We ran into some plague men, picked off what we could between the two of us, Jamie got hurt, and that hobbled us further.  We came looking for you to report what we know about Mauer’s weapons.”

The Baron held up a finger.  I shut my mouth.

“Two things,” he said.  “You.  How hurt?”

“I’m recovering, my lord,” Jamie said.  “I’ve been treated, I’m unsteady on my feet, but I’m ready to serve the Crown if needed.”

The silence that lingered after Jamie’s statement was an ominous one.  The Baron still held his finger up.  He moved his arm, and both sisters pulled their hands away.

In an easy, practiced motion that suggested he had performed it several times a day since he was able, he drew his sword.  A saber, the blade patterned like damascus steel.

He pointed it at me.

“Second of all, when I say something, Lamb, I don’t expect to be ignored.  Mauers lived, I said, and you went on talking.”

“My apologies, my lord,” I said.  “I meant to expand on my answers, not to ignore you.”

“You failed to kill Mauer.  Because of that, he was able to gather people together under his banner, was it?  He is the man in charge?”

Multiple yes or no questions, and I couldn’t answer one without answering them all, I doubted the Baron Richmond would let me give a lengthy answer.

“Yes, my lord.”

He nodded, took one step to bridge the distance between us, and seized me by the hair.  When he lifted, my feet left the ground.

“They don’t value you very highly, Lamb,” he hissed in my ear.  “Not you.”

I fought to avoid struggling, even as it felt like my scalp might rip off.  A struggle could mean accidentally striking the man, which would earn me a less merciful death.

Not that mercy was what I wanted either.  Mercy was too close to peace, and ever since that run-in with Sub Rosa, I’d been terrified at the idea of a peaceful death.  It was worse than even a painful, fit-wracked death as the poison took my mind.

I wanted to accomplish something as I died, but I didn’t want the other Lambs to suffer for it.  If I struck the Baron, then Jamie would die too.

Even if it wasn’t my Jamie, I couldn’t let that happen.

I’d never felt more like a child, faced with authority, unable to act.  I hated it, and that hate stirred all of the anger and frustration of earlier, of Jamie, of Gordon and Lillian being missing and the other Lambs being so far away.

“I don’t like the look in your eyes,” the Baron said, his voice quiet.

“My ap-”

The sword pressed against my lips, and the blade stung me as it cut.  I felt hot blood run down my chin.

“Shh,” he said.

My head throbbed like it was being hit with a hammer from within, with the combined pain in my scalp and the tension.

He moved the sword away from my lips, and raised it to my eye.  I could see down the length of it to the guard.

I didn’t see it move so much as my ability to see it was destroyed in a flash of pain, red, and darkness, and the tears that ran down my cheek were overlarge, too thick.  Vitreous fluid.

My pain tolerance wasn’t helping as much as I might have liked.  The whole of my focus was on keeping my eye focused straight ahead, at the handle of the weapon.  The less I moved my eye, the less damage that would be done.  Not that I was sure it mattered.  A small sound left my lips, despite me.

“Shh, I said,” the Baron murmured, “A child unseeing and unheard, is it?”

“You’re having all of the fun,” one of the Twins said.  It was all I could do not to look at her.

“My prerogative as the older sibling,” the Baron said.  He turned his attention back to me.  “How deep do I need to push this blade in, Lamb, before you look at me with the respect that I am due?  With your one remaining eye, I mean?”

“My lord,” I said.  My voice quavered, and I would have dearly liked to call it an act, but there was so much at stake, and it was already jeopardized by the loss of one eye- the quaver was real.  He’d shaken me to my core.

Pain and quick thinking went hand in hand where Wyvern was concerned.  In the midst of this situation, hurting in a way that counted, I found the words I needed to give him, “My lord, I’m yours.”

He pulled the blade out of my eye, then dropped me.  I landed in a heap, hands and legs on the wet ground, staring with my one eye at the toes of his boots.  I could see the fluids slowly trickling free of the eye.  Blood and other humors.

I remained where I was, prostrate, arms and shoulders tense.

“You’re ours, I suppose,” the Baron said, his voice calm.  “I did promise my sisters some amusement.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said, without looking up.  My lips were wet with my own blood.

I wanted to fight, I wanted to run, and I knew I couldn’t do either.

Damn him, I could run and never stop or return, if it wasn’t for Jamie and the other Lambs.

“Here,” he said.  “Let’s see.”

The tip of the sword, freshly wiped clean, appeared in front of me.  It touched my chin, then changed angle, lifting my chin up and turning my face up toward him.

“Shall I take your other eye?” he asked.

“As you will, my lord,” I said.  Don’t.  Please don’t.  Please.

Maybe he saw the fear.  He smiled.

“I’ll leave it be.  But that comes with conditions.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“If you dare to replace that eye, I will have you killed.  Don’t think you can sneak behind my back.  I’ll be sure to have others check on you, and servants passing through will pay their visits.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.

“If anyone asks what happened to that eye – and I’ll be sure to have my servants and friends ask, I want you to tell them that you lost it because you’re an imbecile, understand?  No jokes or sarcastic wit, no trickery, none of that… nonsense that you Lambs seem to busy yourself with, over killing men like Mauer.  Make them believe in the utter stupidity that it took to try to gloss over your failure to perform your duties and then dare to look me in the eye afterward.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.  The sword went to its sheath, and my eye went to his boot.

I could hear the distant battle.  Gunshots, explosions, and the horns in the harbor.

“He’s ours, you said?” one of the twins asked.

“Did you mean it?” the other asked.

“I meant it,” the Baron said.  “Do what you will with him.  I’m taking the other one back to my tent to question.  Don’t kill him, my orders about his eye have to stand for at least a few years more.  Break him, or take him apart, so long as he can be unbroken and put back together.  The doctors are good enough that anything short of plunging a knife into his heart will be fine, I imagine.”

“Lovely.”

“What a shame that we have to share.  I had my hopes up that we could have one each.”

In the haze of pain, my head still throbbing, I drew a vague series of connections between the thought of the heart, what the twins were saying, the blood that still dripped and trickled from my eye, and the sound of battle.

“My lord,” I said.

“A brave lad, you are,” the Baron answered, so quick to utter the words that it was as if he was pouncing on me.  “Don’t tell me you dare to ask for mercy.”

“We know where the other Lambs might be, my lord.  Or the general area.  We can signal them.  But we need soldiers to get that far in.  I’d say they might have other information, but I’m not sure.  It would, at least…”

I hesitated.

“I’ve been a member of the courts long enough to know when someone is trying to manipulate me.”

“My lord, It would mean that your noble sisters, miladies, would not have to share.

“Let’s pretend you’re not spinning a web of deceit in front of me.  What do you want for this?  Again, little Lamb, I stress that we’re pretending you’re not being canny.”

He was speaking through grit teeth, not because of any emotion, but more as if he was holding himself back.  I could imagine him plunging that sword into my back, just for the satisfaction of the act.

And all of the stitched soldiers in the area would watch it happen with dead eyes, and the soldiers would look away and tell themselves that I’d done something to deserve it, because that made life easier to live.

The Crown and the Academy made monsters like this, and it made rules and hid things that kept these monsters from seeing true justice.

“Mercy, my lord.  Less, in any event, if you would be so kind.  I lost my best friend a year ago, and I just lost my eye.  I’m not a fighter, I’m a manipulator who seems to be surrounded more and more by people he can’t manipulate, and I manage, I do good work when I’m able, but the drugs I take, I pay for them in agony.  I’m so tired of hurting, my lord, please.”

He didn’t answer.

“Brother,” the Twins spoke in unison.

“I know what you’re going to say.  He’s play-acting, at least in part.  I hope you realize that, you two.”

“I realize,” one of the twins said.  The other added, “But he’s clever enough to make a good offer all the same.”

Something in the distance screeched.

“I think attempting to manipulate a noble warrants the worst sort of punishment,” the Baron said.  “The Duke of Francis thinks this child’s manipulative play is entertaining, and it reminds him of home… but when I’m reminded of home I want to spit.”

“Do you know what else warrants punishment, dear brother?” one twin asked.

Underestimating a noble.  If he thinks he can try something against us, exhausted, soaked through, bleeding and missing an eye, then why don’t we oblige him?  If he’s asking, he doesn’t even know what the two of us are.”

That last sentence sounded so amused that it alarmed me.  Despite myself, I looked up, shooting a look at the twins.

It was, perhaps, that glance that won the Baron over.  He smiled.

“You two, a regiment of soldiers, and the boy in cuffs.  If you two die despite that, I get your estates and holdings,” he said.

“They were yours to begin with, brother.”

He made a sound, dismissive.  “I’ll keep this one.  You take that one, let him try what he will, then round up the other Lambs if you can.”

The twins smiled.

“I can’t find the place on my own, my lord,” I said.  I looked at Jamie.  “I need him.”

The group turned their eyes to Jamie.

“You’re the one with memory,” the Baron said.

“Yes, my lord.  I know the area and the layout.  I remember where we last saw them and know the locations they might be in.”

“Then he stays, and you go,” the Baron said.

That caught me off guard.  With the pain and distraction, I wasn’t thinking straight, and I’d let myself fall into an obvious trap.  Baron Richmond wasn’t a great contender in the political arena, but he didn’t miss anything.

I didn’t have a ready answer, and I couldn’t have voiced it anyway, without it being more manipulation and weaker footing for me and for us.

I looked at Jamie.  Hesitating too long could-

“When he said we know where they are, my lord, he was telling the truth,” Jamie said.  “I know the landscape, but he knows the other Lambs better than I do.  He knows where they’ll be, inside that area, how they’ll hide, how to signal them.”

It was a perfect answer, better than any that came readily to my mind, prompt and undeniable.

The Baron smiled.  “As you wish.  Both of you in shackles, then.  You’ll accompany my sisters.  If something happens to them, then I’ll consider it your responsibility.  If one falls to a bullet, then every single orphan in that orphanage you call home, what is it called?”

“Lambsbridge, my lord,” Jamie said, without inflection.

The Baron dropped to a crouch, still looming over me.

He put out a hand, and the hand covered one side of my face.  The thumb settled in the ruin of my eyeball.

“I’ll feed those orphans bullets.  Try poison, I’ll answer with poison, violence with violence, a scratch with a slit throat.  If you give me cause to worry for my sister’s well being, then the sweet little doctor-in-training who you want to rescue will have to sit in a chair and watch her parents die, understand?  This game you’re playing with me?  It’s a high stakes one.  Everything and everyone you care about is now on the table.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.  How had he known about Lillian?

A lot of little things didn’t add up in what he knew.  Select details, he seemed to have picked up on, like Jamie’s memory, and that we had a young lady doctor here, yet he had passed up chances to lord his knowledge of details about me or Jamie.

Because we were his eyes into seeing the group.

The letter we’d written to Mary.  Jamie had asked for my input, what to say, he had done the writing…

Everything took on a different tone, in light of that.

We were doomed in an entirely different way, if he had that one damning source of information.  I’d said so little and yet he had to know we knew about the situation with Mauer.  I’d let myself be caught in a lie from the start.

“I think you do understand,” he said, taking my sudden understanding of the current situation to be a very different sort of enlightenment.  “Give him the care he needs to keep from blacking out, but don’t give him new blood.  If he’s lightheaded and stupid because of the blood he lost, it’s his own fault.”

His doctors descended on me.

Gauze, bandage, scalpel, all in the vicinity of my face.  They didn’t even seem to care that I was alive, as they took turns taking away my eye, sealing it shut with something, and then putting bandage over top.  A leather strap crossed my head at a diagonal, holding the pad of bandage in place.

It took perhaps two minutes.  Then, in a moment, they were stepping away, picking up the bits, pieces, and tools, and retreating back into a position behind the Baron.

I picked myself up off the ground.  I was lightheaded, but not so much so that I couldn’t function.

The twins had closed the distance, and stood a matter of feet away.  One reached out to touch my face, around the bandage.

“Lead the way,” she said.

“Before I do, my lady,” I said, “My lord.  You should know that the Reverend Mauer has four primordial beasts.  He has more scattered around Lugh that are less viable.  We disposed of two of the worst ones.  The four-”

“I know how things stand,” the Baron interrupted me.  “This is not news to us.”

I closed my mouth.

“All you’ve told me is that you failed to kill two out of three of the damn things.  That kind of behavior makes it much harder to extend you any mercy or leniency at all.”

“Yes, my lord,” I said.  Then, as gracefully as I could, to make it clear I wasn’t snubbing him, I bowed, segued to turn my attention to the Twins, and obeyed their instruction.  Leading the way.

We were stopped at the perimeter, shackles affixed, my hands chained behind me with restraints that a Bruno couldn’t crack.  A small squadron of soldiers, without any orders that I could hear, fell into step behind our group.  The twins were on either side of Jamie and I.

Into the city, wading into war.  The twins weren’t even dressed for a fight, and they didn’t seem worried in the slightest.

The one to my left caught me by surprise, approaching in the blind spot left by my eyepatch, reaching out, and touching my head.  Her fingers seemed to find every point my scalp hurt most, where I’d been lifted by my hair.

Beside me, Jamie looked my way.  The twin to his right was touching him in a similar manner.  Very tactile creatures, they were.  Ones I had absolutely no read on at all.  All I knew about them was that they were low ranked nobles of the lowest caliber, known for their inclination for sadism, preying on the people in the fringe villages and towns where the Crown held less sway, giving the Crown control over those places using fear.

Swear yourselves to the Crown and offer yourself up to the Crown’s full control, and those nobles will never prey on you again, the unspoken promise seemed to be.

Bend the knee, stare at my boot with your one remaining eye, and perhaps we’ll leave you in one piece.  Perhaps.

Jamie’s eyes flicked to one side.  I followed his gaze, and looked behind him to his hand.

Calm, was the gesture.  Also the gesture for tranquility, for tranquilizers, for enemies who were vulnerable because their focus was weak.

None of those last points applied to me.  I was as focused as I’d ever been.

It was only in my attempt to calm myself down that I realized I was clenching my fists.  Stupid, an obvious tell.

I didn’t calm down, even breathing deep and turning my thoughts to the task.  The anger shifted to a cold anger instead of a hot rage.

I had no idea what my two enemies here were, exactly, but they’d alluded to being something I wouldn’t expect.  All the same, I knew what I had to do.

I was going to go back to Radham with all of the Lambs I could salvage.  That was priority number one.  In Radham, I was going to get a new eye.  That was the second priority.  To make that happen, I would have to kill or destroy the Baron Richmond, the Twins, and any witnesses.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.04 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.4

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My eye didn’t hurt as much as I might have anticipated, but the area around it was swollen, and the swelling felt as though it was pressing inward.  The mental image of the eyeball in ruins and the eyelids caving in on the resulting depression stuck with me, reinforced with every throb.  The throbbing of my head and my eye were out of sync with one another, a quarter-second removed.

I’d been introduced to the pain scale as one of my very first memories.  Agony and I were very long-time acquaintances, and I knew it well enough to be able to think of a dozen memories for any point along that scale, in a variety of flavors.  I knew what a ten felt like.

The eye pain was a three.  The alien ‘caving in’ sensation, the profound discomfort, and the ill-timed throbbing were a good solid eight on the whole ‘messing with Sy’s head’ scale.

We were flanked by the twins and a squad of soldiers.  The soldiers I could deal with, if the cards fell down right.  The noble twins, however, I wasn’t sure how to handle that.

I’d drawn them this far using sadism.  Now, to look at them, or to look at one of them, since it was too obvious when I looked to the one to my left, I could see an energy in her stride.  Her eyes were alert, and she swished more than she had earlier, in her brother’s company.  The way she moved played with the flow of her coat, and with what must have been a massive weight in fabric, that simple playfulness utilized more strength than Jamie and I had between us, too.  The placement of her feet wasn’t automatic, but chosen.

I’d seen that swish in Mary, and I’d seen the predatory alertness in Helen.

Another person in my situation could have taken the same clues and suggestions and ended up with one of a dozen different conclusions, even someone else with more years of studying people under their belt than I’d spent on the Crown’s green earth.  The less talented ones would have read the added movement as annoyance, dissatisfaction, irritation, ill temper, or drugs.  The Twins were hard to read, and their expression didn’t suggest anything positive or negative, but bias and a few misleading elements like the periodic use of nails as the one caressed my scalp and the tension in her hand could have thrown someone off.

The more talented ones would have read it as excitement, childlike enthusiasm, playfulness or simple restlessness.  There were only three people I’d ever met who I suspected understood people well enough to guess at something like arousal or hunger.  If I hadn’t had the benefit of knowing Helen or Mary, I might have been one of them.

But I did have the benefit.  Putting the two together, that mix of confidence and an aching desire to stretch their muscles and act, with that bizarre mix of hunger and arousal?

It wasn’t an emotion most humans had any experience with.  Bloodlust.  It only existed when killing and hurting were an intrinsic part of one’s makeup, and the need to exercise it became a need as fundamental as eating and breathing.  The rush, the intensity, it left one wanting to feel the sensation again.

I’d experienced it, but it was always tempered with a sentiment like, ‘but it’s such a pain in the ass to do, killing people’.  I wasn’t good at it, I had to contrive to make it happen, and then there was the issue of finding people who needed to be killed.  Once that bar was met, I had to make sure I was allowed to kill them, which was how Rick back at Lambsbridge met the bar and subsequently didn’t.  By the time things got that far and I found a good position, someone else in the Lambs usually beat me to it.

I’d learned the sensation, I could understand how people liked to kill, and that was a very useful thing when tracking down killers and monsters, and when plotting how to kill two nobles and their entourage while wearing shackles.

Knowing what my enemy wanted was one of two assets I had at my disposal here.  Jamie was the other, and I couldn’t communicate with him like this.  The twins were too sharp, and it wouldn’t take much at all for them to turn that bloodlust toward me.

My eye throbbed, and I thought for a moment I could see with it, until I remembered that it was so bandaged and covered up that no light would penetrate to reach my eye, and it wasn’t all that bright out despite that.

The phantom images of spots of light and literal sparks of pain flashing across the darkness made me think of the Baron, and I could see him standing before me, the sword penetrating my skull – only through the eye socket, but even so.

I forced myself to unclench my hands, and with communication with Jamie being so limited, not wanting to move my hands so much that the Richmond Twins might notice, I could only keep it in one sign.

Aggression.

It was a sign in the abstract, and while we’d used it for regular activity and for combat and other encounters at the outset, as we’d developed more accurate gestures we’d relegated it mostly for conversation, to encourage someone to take a more in-their-face approach to arguing with someone, to lean on them more, to attack if an opportunity was seen.

To sign charge would have been misleading, as would attack or hurt.

By avoiding eye contact, leaving the gesture, I was leaving it up to Jamie to read.  He had only one task at present, one avenue to act and one reason to speak.

“Turn right.  Main road, my ladies,” he said.

He pointed us in the direction of the plague men.

In the corner of my eye, I saw the twin to my right smile.  I could only assume the other one was wearing a matching expression.

The reaction was alarming.  I wanted them to open their mouths to talk to me, to taunt, and to shed some light on what was happening.  It was as if they were well and truly aware of what we were doing.

Marching straight for the nearest fight.

My heart pounded.  I was used to feeling in control.  I could count the people who made me feel a lack of that control on one hand, if I cheated a little  The Duke was one, at the periphery of this situation.  The Twins were another one, a matter of feet away.  The Baron, if I was counting by the fingers of one hand, got the middle finger, of course.

Jamie, one of the last two, was my fellow prisoner in this situation.

The hand on my head moved around down the back of my head to the back of my neck.  The fingers seized me.

Feeling imbalanced was making it a lot easier to feel afraid, and that wasn’t a thing I liked to do.  I tried to be analytical, to distract myself.  She could have guided me with a single finger, pressing on the back of my head, and demonstrated her power and control over me that way.  Someone hungry for relevance would do something like that.  Instead, she showed me the immense strength in her hands.

Another detail to hold onto, in case it became useful later.

We went to one side of the street, half of the soldiers accompanying us.  Jamie and the other twin went to the other.

My heart rate picked up as we separated.  My captor gestured something I couldn’t see, and the soldiers took cover, hiding.

We were a few streets up from where the wagons had been.  The Twin that held me had her back to a wall between two houses, and held me close to that same wall.  The soldiers were packed into the dark, narrow space.

“Shh,” the Twin told me.  There was no need for the instruction – Her hand on the back of my throat, she adjusted her grip, and the tips of her long fingers pressed down on my windpipe, blocking off my flow of air.

All I could do was endure, let the anger burn in my head, and seek opportunity.

Enemies are close, I thought.  You’re brimming with bloodlust, you want to fight, and you can’t do that with us in tow.  Not easily.  You separated us to make it harder for us to collaborate and break free while you’re stepping away to pick a fight.

I just had to decide how I could break free while she was gone and if I could get Jamie free.  If not this time, then another.  If there were clues I could use-

Her grip on my neck shifted.  Two fingers pulled away from my throat, touched my ear, and traced through my hair on their way to the other side of my throat.  Her index and middle fingers, logic told me, moving over to the side of my throat with her thumb.  Her ring finger and little finger remained at my throat, still exerting a surprising amount of force.

Something was wrong.  Two fingers on either side of my throat?

The index finger traced my jugular, slow.

“My coat,” she said.

“Yes, my lady,” the man dutifully responded.

She let go of my neck.

This was my opportunity to run.  I knew that.

She knew that.

It felt like bait, and I didn’t bite.

The captain of the unit that accompanied us reached back, and caught the bulk of her coat as she slowly shrugged it free, letting it fall.

I turned my head to look, and saw her looking down at me from her relatively towering height.  All ivory skin.  To call it pale would have been a misnomer.  She was statuesque, and she was utterly naked beneath her coat.

And, like the weaving cut of a jigsaw puzzle or a snake entwining her body, I could see a thread of gold.  It moved as she did, more a liquid vein than something more serious, tracing a corkscrew path down each arm, around her back, down one shoulder, and reaching down to short-trimmed pubic hair, before breaking apart to spiral down each leg.

As she moved, the line, narrow as it was, broke in two.  The two halves of her body separated.  Her breast seemed to leap out and down, before wrenching itself to one side, the skull within stretched against skin as it pulled to one side, opening its jaw wide.  Half of a head of wet golden hair draped out and down to cover the nipple.

The front of the breast was the back of the creature’s head, and that breast, however soft it might have looked, was probably hard to the touch.  Weighing no more than eighty pounds, the creature pulled away from the Twin, leaving her incomplete, nearly half of her body carved away with her none the worse for wear.  Half of the flesh of her legs and feet, half of the flesh of her arms, and much of her chest cavity didn’t exist.  It had simply been a spot for this thing to nestle into, a fit with but one seam.

The thread of gold to beautify a singular scar for a monstrous alteration to her body.

She arched her back, as if in ecstasy, and the thing reached into the void at one side of her body, grabbing hold of her spine, and withdrew two spikes of metal that ran parallel to it.  Like the claws of a praying mantis, the spikes were pointed at one end, sharp-edged, and had knobs of bone at the fatter end.  The creature that had pulled away pressed the ends of its upper limbs into the knobs until something clicked in a very solid way.  Three fingers were now at the ‘elbow’ of a long limb, the spike extending the rest of the way.  It moved on all fours, spikes against the ground.  It was twisted, gnarled, hunched over at the shoulders, a skeletal gargoyle charcoal in color with strips of ivory flesh winding around it, giving it form and the ability to move, crowned by long golden hair that seemed out of place on the figure, draping one side of its face and running down its back.

“Were you listening, sister?” the Twin asked, her voice a mere breath.  “Did you hear them?”

The thing rasped out a breath, gurgling.

The twin bent down and kissed it on the forehead.  “That’s right.  Seven.  Don’t go and leave the seventh alive because you want to be fair.  Kill him together.”

The gargoyle climbed the wall so fast it might as well have flown.

Up the space between buildings, touching both walls with overlong arms, onto the roof, and gone.

Not one second later, I heard the heavy blast of an Exorcist rifle, then another.

“My coat, please,” she said, absolutely unconcerned.

“Y-yes, my lady.”

She’d been slender for a person of her stature, statuesque, and it had made me wonder to see the weight of her coat, the way it moved, and her strength in how she moved even as she wore it.  Armor panels within the fabric, I suspected.  Plates of steel or iron to catch bullets, perhaps, if not simply for effect.

Seeing her now, with perhaps a third or two-fifths of her mass now scampering over rooftops, I was left to watch as she took the weight of the coat, barely sagging under the burden.

She reached out to touch my face with an ivory ring and pinky finger, and the two added fingers and a thumb of charcoal-colored bone that had unfolded to extend from the gap.

The Twins.

The name took on a new meaning.

“Quadruplets, milady?” I asked.

“No, Lamb,” she said.  “Our precious younger sisters,” she said.  She used that still-iron grip to usher me out into the street where the approaching plague men were.

The seven men were dead.  Two of the skeletal gargoyle twins were perched amid the carnage, each a mirror to the other, licking blood off of the spikes with long tongues.

The younger sisters would have been bastards too.  I could imagine how the story went.  Their Baron father, exasperated, might have decided they should be hidden, that the bitter and biting tongues of nobles talking to nobles couldn’t have more fodder.  With the other set of twins just three years older, ready for their first set of operations.  By the time people found out that there were two more, the Twins would have had a chance to demonstrate their effectiveness.

I kicked myself for not considering heavier experimentation a possibility.  The Baron Richmond wasn’t as impressive as the Duke, because he hadn’t had the same clout, power, and money that was needed to get the very best doctors for the very best surgeries and experiments.  Richmond had gone the mundane route, and mundane remained very, very impressive, paling only in comparison to the likes of the Duke.  The Twins had been taken down the experimental route, more monstrous than a self-respecting noble would allow, riskier and more questionable.

But still the very best sort of work that was out there.  The sort of work I suspected Ibott wanted to do.

Fear, respect, and anger mixed in equal quantity as we reunited with the other group, all the while approaching the carnage the golden-haired gargoyle-twins had wrought.  I could see the holes the spikes had punched in neck, chest, and stomach, and the places where slashing cuts hadn’t just torn throats out but had destroyed them.

Explosive strength in a small package.

One opened its mouth wide, and with only a dark membrane of flesh, there wasn’t much to keep that skull-face from opening all the way, sharp teeth bared.  The tongue stuck out and waggled at me, two feet long.

The other only huffed for breath, the thin covering of gray-black skin at the two nostrils on the noseless face flaring open and closed repeatedly.  Neither had been hit by the shots from the advanced rifles.

Don’t think about the fact that you have two more nobles you effectively have to kill, I told myself.  Look for the clues.

The eyes, if there were any, were small and dark, in eye sockets filled with shadow.  No expressions beyond mouth opening and mouth closing, a unique language of gurgles and hisses.  Not social creatures.

They were killing machines.  Fast, strong, with explosive strength.

The nobles wanted to show their strength off.  She’d held my neck.  They had mounted this attack when it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

Jamie was tense, hunched over a bit, his neck held firmly by the Twin that had him, like mine was by the one that had me.  I was shorter, so I wasn’t forced down, but Jamie had an inch or two on me, and because the Richmond Twins kept their arms in the same place and at the same angle, Jamie was forced lower.

Symmetry, always symmetry.

Except for the younger twins.  One opening its mouth, waggling its tongue, the other breathing.

Keep the anger cold and efficient, I told myself.  Being unfocused now could be disastrous.  I was already slipping, things falling to pieces around the edges.  I could retain memories I focused on and build up a repertoire of facts and observations, and those facts and observations could be the only way to escape, if we were even that lucky.  But if I slipped, then I’d lose track, and I’d miss a detail, and I’d find myself kicking myself for it over and over while Jamie and I were fed to the younger Twins.

In an instant, both sets of Twins turned their heads to look in the same direction.  Two sets of eyes and two sets of skeletal eye sockets remained pointed in the same direction.

A moment later, the younger twins were dashing through the darkness, never in a straight line.

We continued our brisk walk, the Twin letting go of my neck to keep one hand on my head instead.

Three civilians, dead before we even reached them, still-dripping blood painting the road and the faces of buildings on either side of them.  The same savage, efficient killing we’d seen with the plague men.

On par with Dog and Catcher, or the Hangman, in terms of quality, if not stronger.  But there had to be drawbacks.  A reason the Richmond twins didn’t have the younger twins out at every opportunity.  If the Academy could make experiments that dangerous, there had to be a reason there weren’t a handful on every battlefield.

That kind of explosive strength… perhaps a lack of stamina.

Not enough to warrant them being this uncommon.  They probably needed a stern hand, too.  Or a particularly loving one.  Being raised with a sister, it was effectively full time care with a trainer.  One they were dependent on?  Were the elder twins a food source?  An absolute necessity?

We found another pile of bodies that the younger twins had assaulted.  More civilians of Lugh, though these ones had guns.  Militants, enemy soldiers that might have fired on us.  They hadn’t even had a chance to pull a trigger before the six of them were cut down.

The twin to my right raised a hand, finger extended, then pointed to her sister.

“Are we close, Lambs?” the elder sister asked.  She pointed to her sister.

“I’m feeling impatient,” the one to my right said.  “We could amuse ourselves with this one.  Break the fingers on one hand, perhaps?”

“We’re close, miladies,” Jamie said.  He turned his head my way.

“I saw that,” the one to my left said.  “Please do a better job of lying to us in the future.  I’d so hate to have to kill you for your bald-faced dishonesty before anything interesting has unfolded.”

“We are close, my lady,” Jamie said.  “They were around here.”

He was telling the truth.

“I’ll keep an eye out, miladies,” I said.

And he wasn’t looking at me.  His eyes were fixed on a point in the distance.

I didn’t dare look in the same direction, for fear of tipping them off.  I waited, continuing to walk.

The Duke was my barometer, the yardstick by which I measured and made guesses about the nobles’ behavior.  Holding the Richmond Twins against him as a comparison, something rang as off about their impatience, wanting to find the twins sooner than later.

Impatience suggested I was right.  That the younger twins couldn’t be out and about for too long before they needed sustenance, rest, and the security of nestling into their elder sisters.

There was a window of opportunity here.  Within a few minutes, maybe five, but no more than fifteen, the killing spree would end, and so would the elder twins’ patience.  But with the younger twins called back and put away to rest.

All we had to do was figure out a way to deal with the elder twins, their soldiers, and the two monsters, while shackled, within that span of time.

Enough time had passed.

I looked to my left, under the guise of searching the environment.  I nearly missed him on the first view.

There, under the eaves, lying on his side as though dead, was the body of a dog, partially dusted in snow.

Hubris.

Dead?  He wasn’t moving an inch, lying there.  His eyes were open, staring, and unblinking.

I looked, and I didn’t see signs of violence, but not all gunfights would have them.  I couldn’t see any other hiding places for Lillian and Gordon.

Not long ago, I’d been ruminating on how I had to trust the other Lambs.

I extended that trust, moving my hand in gestures.  It was easier because I wasn’t signaling Jamie.

Wait.  Signal.  You.  Hide.  Help.

And then I couldn’t see him anymore, and he certainly couldn’t see me anymore.  I hoped his eyes hadn’t clouded over an hour ago.

We were close, if Hubris was there, I told myself.

We were close, and there was only so much time to plan.  The problem was, it wasn’t a plan where I decided the first move.  It was reactive, and so much about it was sensitive.  I tried to remain aware of where the guns were, which soldiers had guns out and ready, and what things in the environment might provide cover or help us get away.

Puddles, ice, trash, crates, lanterns sitting around here and there, abandoned by their owners.

Not having peripheral vision was another thing that was ticking the ‘fucking with Sy’s head’ scale up in fractions and increments.  The appearance of the younger twins startled me, both landing a matter of feet ahead of us with clack sounds of spike against roadtop.

It was one thing to tell myself to have a plan ready at any moment, but after maintaining a juggling act of keeping my mind focused on immediate cues and useful terrain while simultaneously keeping track of what was coming up and looking for more things to use, I pulled a little too hard on the reins and brought the thought track to a stumbling halt.

I needed more Wyvern.

I needed to get us out of here.  This was the window.

“Dear sister, did you have fun?” one twin asked.

“So pretty, look at you.  You’ve made yourself up,” the other spoke.  The only makeup I could see was the congealing blood that covered the younger counterpart.

“Come,” the elder twin said, letting go of my head, leaving me for a soldier to grab.  “Inside me.”

She spread her arms wide, coat parting, and the younger sister stepped through the gate of fur and heavy cloth, still slick with blood, merging into a single body, other people’s blood squeezing out of the golden seam to run down bare skin.

Think, Sy.  A lantern, two escape routes.  The men with guns looked to be holding the sort that fired six shots each.  Too many of them were young.  Less experienced.

Think, and don’t make the mistake you always make.  Don’t overthink, don’t put the brakes on as you think of a different plan or track.  Any hesitation, and we die.

The moment mattered.  I watched the transition, waiting, seeing how far along they were, waiting-

The man behind me shifted his weight, turning his head.

The moment wasn’t right, but the fact that this was an opportunity made up for that.

“Sir,” I said, turning around.  In that same moment, he grabbed me by the shoulder.

The Twins both looked at me, heads snapping around.  Alert, aware that I was trying something.

With that simple fact, the plan had failed.  The lantern I wanted was behind me but out of reach of the hands that were shackled there.  I couldn’t pull away, grab it and make a move all at once, not without him reacting.

I didn’t have an answer.  I gestured.  Help.

“They’re communicating,” the twins spoke, their voices out of sync.  They could barely move while they took in their sisters.  “They’re using their hands.  Break their fingers.”

“Yes, miladies,” the voices sounded in unison.

The ruse was up.  I whistled, as loud as I was able.  With nothing to lose, Jamie stuck a leg out, kicking the lantern toward me.  I gripped the handle at the top, and then dropped, ducking out of the grip the man had on my shoulder.

Twisting, I swung the lantern out and as far up as I could manage.  The weight of the shackles threatened to damn me, keeping the lantern too low.

Glass caught the rifle at the man’s side.  Glass shattered, and fire made contact with oil.  He and his weapon caught fire.  I let go of the handle so the remains of the lantern could dance in Jamie’s direction.

The young soldiers had been grabbing for his wrists to follow the Twins’ orders.  As the burning oil scattered toward their boots, they took a step back, he took a step in the opposite direction, and tore free.

The oil was spent by the time the top end of the lantern came to a rolling halt at the edge of the Twins’ coat.  Two soldiers in the retinue turned their attention to the coat, making sure there wasn’t damage and there were no flames.  Priorities, when a noble was involved.

One twin spoke, “The coat doesn’t matter.”

The other spoke, “Grab the Lambs.”

They were already separating again from their uglier halves, reversing the process.

In a minute, we would have the lightning-fast younger twins on our heels.

Soldiers moved to cut us off, weapons in hand.  They didn’t shoot with the nobles behind us, but they did jab the points of bayonets at us, attempting to slow us down so the group could collapse in on us.

I’d hoped for more chaos, for the coat to catch the spray of flame and burn.  There hadn’t been enough oil in the lamp.

I’d hoped for a gap in the lines, or a weakness I could exploit.  The soldiers had backed up, guns in hand, and were blocking the way.

Now I faced having to choose to sacrifice myself to let Jamie go.

Except that wasn’t allowed.  Only if we saved two Lambs, the rule was.

My memory was bad, but I’d stuck to that one.

Run, five paces to find an opening, before you’re running headlong into a bayonet blade.

Two paces.

A shadow moved behind the men.  A small object rolled between the soldier’s legs.  He and his comrades backed away once they saw what it was.

A grenade.

Not an explosive grenade, but still a grenade.  One with the pin still in it.

At a headlong run, I let myself fall to the ground, rolling over the thing.  I didn’t manage to grab it with my shackled hands, but I did catch it in between my crossed forearms.

Rolling to my feet, I didn’t entirely have my balance, and staggered a little to one side as I heaved myself to a standing position.

While I’d been on the ground, they’d been aiming at me.  The accidental stumble saved my life.  Gunshots sounded.

I started to think of options, and then remembered.  Hesitation could kill.

I pulled the pin, and I dropped the grenade so it would fall behind me.

That done, I charged forward, using the gap that had opened when the grenade had come rolling down the road.

I had to trust Jamie to do the same.  I couldn’t hold his hand, I couldn’t pull him along.  I had to extend that Lamb’s trust that he would be as competent as he needed to.  It was the only way this could work, if it could work at all.

The grenade detonated.  Smoke billowed out.  The vision-obscuring effect wasn’t limited to the smoke itself – as it billowed forth, it covered light.  The side street was thrust into darkness.

I expected to get slashed or stabbed as I charged straight for the soldier who’d stood straight in my way.  Instead, I nearly tripped over him.  Hubris had him, silent, gripping the man by the throat.

I whistled, once, short, and Hubris fell into stride beside me, a blur.  Jamie was only a few steps behind.

It wasn’t over.  The danger had only started.  I’d estimated one minute for the younger sisters to make their appearance.  Fifteen or twenty seconds had already passed.

We didn’t have long.

Hubris pulled ahead.  Leading the way.

The asymmetry mattered.  The tongue sticking out, the nostrils flaring.  The symmetry as the group had turned their head, all four Twins at once.  Their senses were altered.  They’d been aware of every threat well ahead of time.  Taste, smell, with enhanced hearing across the board.

We needed a river to wash away the telltale smells.  Lugh didn’t have one.  It had gutters.

I snapped my fingers to get attention, then gestured.  Stop.

Jamie and I stopped.  Hubris didn’t.  He turned, and for a second I thought he would bark.

I took a moment to bring my arms down, working foot over and scraping shin against the chain of the shackle, until I straddled it.  I brought my other leg over.

Hubris approached me, tugging on my pants leg.

I indicated the gutter.

He tugged again.

Trust the Lambs?

He’d given us the smoke grenade.  I hoped he could give us something else.

I grimaced, and ran, following him again.

The younger sisters were already free, they had to be.  They would be chasing us.  Tired, but with enhanced noses.

We made it only a few more houses down that street before Hubris stopped.

Immediately, I brought my hands to my face, reaching under bandage and belt.  The amount of fluid was daunting and almost unbelievable.

I smeared Hubris’ side.

He watched, his expression placid, huffing a little from the run.

Run.  I gestured.

He ran, carrying the strongest scent we had with him.

Jamie and I, meanwhile, headed to the gutter.  Fires were burning down the street, and the fire melted the thin ice into water.  That water flowed through the gutter at the street’s edge, the channel narrow enough that even I had to draw my shoulders together to fit inside the gap.

We crawled within, with me convinced the Twins would happen upon us at any moment.  Water ran over us, beneath us, and soaked us through.  I could barely breathe.

This was what the Twins wanted, I knew.  The hunt.  The challenge.

I would have to answer it.

I just had to stay underwater, freezing.

It was timeless, the chill, the pull as all warmth and strength inside of me sapped out and disappeared.

I felt like I might black out.  Maybe I had to black out, to stay under long enough, and if Jamie had more strength, he could haul me out, find the nearest fire-

A hand seized me.

I rose up out of the water.  The cold had sapped the strength from me.

It was Jamie, with Lillian beside him.  Her hand went out, touching bandage.

So warm.

Her face so sad, so miserable.  From the look on her face, I knew.

Go, quick, I gestured with numb hands for the house that Hubris had had us stop at.

I could read the hesitation of Lillian’s movement.

I stumbled into her, pressing my head against her shoulder.  With my shackles, I couldn’t hug her.  She hugged me.

As a trio, we made our way inside.

The fire was on low, more for comfort than for warmth.  Lying on the floor was Gordon.

He turned his head to look at me, and I heaved out a heavy, sad sigh.  He’d been made comfortable.  The bag was open.  All the signs were there that she’d dug through it several times over to find things she knew weren’t inside it.  Or to keep busy during long minutes and hours.

We took our seats by the fire, around Gordon.  It was clear by context.  When we left, he wouldn’t be leaving with us.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 9.05 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Something close to twenty minutes passed, with only a few gestured words passing between us.

I hugged Lillian.  My shirt was off, a blanket draped over my shoulders.  She was sitting with her knees to her chest, and I sat behind her, my legs encircling her butt, chest against her back, cheek against her shoulder, arms around her.  For a few minutes now, she’d been holding one of my hands, intense, like she was afraid she was going to fall off a ledge or something.  Her other hand clutched at the blanket, inadvertently or intentionally pulling me closer.

“I think we’re probably okay to talk,” Jamie ventured.

“I’ve been thinking that for about five minutes now,” I said.  “But I don’t know what to say.  Looks like you’re dying, Gordon?  Sorry, bud?”

Lillian drove an elbow back in my direction.

“You look pretty bad too, bud.” Gordon said.  There was no strength in his words.  He managed a smile.

“I have to say,” Jamie said, “It feels like Sy has some unconscious compulsion that drives him to get as cold and wet as humanly possible.”

“The Richmond twins were out of sync only once, and that’s when the little one was sniffing at the air, the other one sticking its tongue out,” I said.  “Why not act in sync?  I figured it would be letting their guard down, to stretch their tongues at the same time.  Why?  Senses.”

“My point is, the natural conclusion for you is, obviously, get cold and wet.”

“Mislead with the scent trail.”

“S’cause Sy’s wet behind the ears,” Gordon said, sounding slightly out of it.

“Huh?” I asked.  My heart leaped a little, seeing him maybe acting delirious.  ‘Wet behind the ears’ wasn’t anything that explained me.  I had experience.  I’d been doing this for too long.

“Water, Sy.  Liquid brain?  He’s like water, y’know?  Fluid, adaptable, but doesn’t hold.  Conforms to the surroundings, or the container he’s in.”

Lillian jerked like she’d been stung, squeezing my hand.  It took me a second to realize it was a sudden sob, soundless.  I squeezed her hand back, and hugged her harder around the ribs for extra measure.

“Affinity for water, huh?” I asked.  “That’s damn poetic.”

“Sure,” Gordon said.  He gave me a wan smile.

“What’s Jamie?”

“Stone.  Eternal, lasting, reliable.  Words etched into tablets…”

“Stone isn’t eternal,” Jamie said.  He was sitting a little further away, and his voice sounded eerie.  “Stone cracks.  It wears down.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  “I started thinking about this stuff a long while back, idle thought.  It’s not important or anything.”

“And Mary?”  I asked.

“Steel,” Gordon said.  “Don’t think I need to explain that one.”

“That’s cheating,” I said, hugging Lillian harder.  “I thought you were doing the classical elements.  Earth, air, fire, water.”

“She was a late arrival.  I think they incorporate metal into the traditional elements, out East?”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“Helen, then?” I asked.

“Ah,” he said.

He lifted his hands up, taking care to do it, and pretended to strangle himself.

“Air,” I said.

“Kind of a stretch,” he said, letting his hands fall down and out to the side.

Lillian broke away from my hug a bit to lean forward, and move Gordon’s hands to his side, before moving a blanket over them, so they were covered and warm.  She settled back into my grip.

“And fire,” I said.

“I really thought I’d do more before this particular fire burned out,” he said.  His eyes were fixed on the ceiling.

“You’re doing well enough,” I said.  Present tense.

“Nah,” he said.  His voice had taken on a strange quality.  “Nah.  I feel like I was just finding my stride.  I had the aptitude, I was picking up the skills, but was still too young.  If I’d been able to make it a few more years, get to seventeen or eighteen, even twenty, I could’ve kicked proper ass.”

“You kicked ass as part of the Lambs,” I told him.  I belatedly realized I’d switched to past tense.

“Sure.  But doesn’t help that feeling, like I was given wings but never got to fly.”

The regret in his voice was hard to listen to.  I couldn’t find a response.  Things got quiet, but for the low crackle of the fire.

“The immortal formula that Emily got.  A transfusion-”

“No, Sy,” Gordon said.

I nodded.

“If we got a heart from a primordial-”

“No, Sy.  Even if it was guaranteed to work, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But we’ve taken some bad ideas a ridiculously long way, haven’t we?”

“We have,” Gordon said.  “I’m going to use that to gracefully change the topic.  The situation out there.  Mauer, and you mentioned the twins?  Nobles?”  Gordon asked.

“We don’t have to talk about the mission,” Jamie said.

“We can talk about whatever I goddamn want to talk about,” Gordon said.

“It’s bad,” I said.  “Nobles want to finish us off.  Maybe to hurt the Duke, maybe because the Duke told them to.  Mauer wants to finish us off because we set him on fire.  Guns, fire, and experiments are looking to wipe anyone and everyone out, and I don’t feel confident that the primordials are handled.”

“They got Drake’s?”

“No,” I said.  “They got four of Old Harding’s, though.”

Lillian squeezed my hand again.

Gordon seemed to take the news in a very easy, casual way, as if it didn’t surprise him.  “Sorry.”

“Didn’t get that far, huh?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly.

“Gordon collapsed, and we went to find a hiding place,” Lillian said.  I could feel the vibrations of her voice moving through her back and into my chest.  “He wanted me to leave him, but that would’ve meant that he’d die alone, and I didn’t know exactly where to go or how to handle anything if I even got that far.  I was scared I’d run into Mauer.  I was… scared in general.”

“It’s better that you stayed,” I said.  “Way things looked, you would’ve been caught between Harding’s group and Mauer’s.  I think he brought just about everyone with him to Harding’s.  Since his lieutenant whatshisname-”

“Stanley.”

“Thank you, Jamie, Stanley would’ve known how far along Harding was, and that Harding was the better bet.  Like I said, it’s better that you stayed.”

“If you say so,” Lillian said.

“I say so,” I said.  “It’s bad out there.  If we had every single Lamb here, I’m not so sure we’d be able to crack this thing.  As is…”

My voice trailed off.

“You sound different, Sy,” Gordon said.  “What happened to your eye?”

“Aren’t we supposed to be focusing on you?

“I’m not going to drop dead this very minute,” he said.  Then he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and I thought he might really expire in that moment, making himself a liar.  His lips moved, “Your eye?”

I glanced at Jamie.  “Noble.  The Baron Richmond.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t tell Jamie outright, but I’m guessing he’s put the pieces together.  We can’t- I mean, there’s no way we’re going to get out of this okay if we don’t deal with the nobles.”

“Those three need to die,” Jamie said.  It wasn’t the words alone that surprised me.

“They really do,” I said.  “The upside is that I don’t think they’d be missed.  The downside is that I don’t have a clue how I’m going to do it.”

“We’re,” Jamie said.  “We’re going to do it.”

I nodded.

“I really thought we could show up, do an errand for Mr. and Mrs. Gage, and give my future career a little boost,” Lillian said.  “I didn’t expect to get caught up in war, I didn’t expect Sy to lose an eye.  I didn’t expect-”

She cut herself off.

“Going home with less Lambs than you started with?” Gordon asked.  “It’s okay.  You can talk about it.  I’ve been expecting it since before we lost the first Jamie.”

“I hate it,” Lillian said.

“Me too,” Gordon said.  “So much I just want to scream about it, get angry, but that would probably agitate my poor heart too much and tip me over the brink.  You’re not alone in feeling like that, okay, Lillian?”

Lillian nodded.

“What were we talking about?” Gordon asked.

“Nobles,” Jamie said.

“Sy.  Did you know?” Gordon asked.  “Moment we ran into the Duke in person, my first thought was that you were going to end up at odds with them?  With the nobility?”

“I can see that,” I said.

He nodded.  “I want in on this mission so badly.  I don’t even have the words.  I’ve known about my expiration date for a while now, even if I thought it was later.  I felt sort of at peace with it, until- until just earlier tonight, when I collapsed.”

None of the Lambs said anything.  We let him talk.

“It hit me all at once.  Boom.  Done.  Story unfinished.  Never get to really do what I was supposed to.  All I can do is hope that they pick my project up again, learn from it, and the next Griffon gets to last longer.  I’m so frustrated and angry and when you’re talking about going up against the nobles, even if it’s those three useless, unimportant bastards, I can’t help but want to hurt them for this.  I want in so damn bad.

“Your fault for going and dying on us right in the middle of a mission,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Yeah, I know.”

“It’s absolutely not your fault,” Lillian said, contradicting me.  She twisted around in my arms to shoot me an evil, warning look over her shoulder.

“Sure, Lillian,” Gordon said, like he was pacifying her.  I felt her squirm momentarily as she settled back into a more relaxed position.  She still had a deathgrip on my hand.

“Anything I can do?” I asked.  “A favor?”

“Sylvester, you motherfucker,” Gordon said, huffing out a laugh.  “You owe me so many favors at this point, I literally do not think I’m going to live long enough to name all the things you’d have to do for me to balance those scales.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I, uh, really want my dog,” he said, staring up at the ceiling.  I wasn’t sure if his voice had cracked a little there.

“Hubris is coming back,” I said.

“M’kay.”

“I could go find him.”

“Nope.  You’d get lost or shot, he’d find his way back, and nope, doesn’t work.  You’re right.  He’s coming back.  I’m being stupid.”

“Whatever you think or do at this point is allowed, I think,” I said.  “Old people get away with slinging around things like ‘god bless’ without getting flack for it, same idea.”

“Okay Sy,” he said, in a way that suggested he was humoring me and not really listening.  “Listen, as favors go, do you think I could talk to each of you one on one for a bit?”

“Sure,” Lillian said.  Jamie and I nodded.  Gordon had to turn his head all the way to the left to catch my nod, then all the way right to catch Jamie’s.

“Then Lillian first, please,” he decided.

I extricated myself from the blanket and from Lillian, kissing the crown of her head as I stood and backed away, looking around the dim little house, finding the kitchen, more a room built against the side of the house than an actual part of it, and retreating there.

I fidgeted.  I really wanted to hit something, but I didn’t want to interrupt the conversation.  The part of me that wanted to do something was telling me to rummage in drawers and cabinets and find supplies I could turn to useful ends, but even that threatened to make too much noise.

Jamie had crossed from the other side of the little living room, and was a moment later in arriving in the kitchen.  He met my eye before leaning against the icebox, arms folded, eyes fixed on the floor.

“About the nobles,” I said.  “I’m sorry to put you at odds with them like that.”

He shook his head.

“You didn’t decide that course of action, and I know it’s an ugly one, with possible repercussions.”

“No, Sy,” he said.  “Like I said, they need to die.”

“I’m just surprised to hear you say it.”

“So am I,” he said.  “It’s… weird.  In my own head, I’m only, what, a year and a few months old?  I spent more than two thirds of that time with the Academy.  They ran the tests, they fed me the propaganda, they had ‘limited schedules’ where the doctors were available and had to cram a lot of stuff into one or two days, sometimes, and didn’t feed me or let me sleep enough, and they gave me more tests and more propaganda, when I was more vulnerable to being pushed or pulled, if you know what I mean.”

“I have an idea what you mean,” I said.  I kept my voice quieter, so our babble wouldn’t interrupt Gordon any.  “It’s why I’m- why I was wary of you.  Because I wasn’t sure if you were theirs or if you were ours, given the amount of time you’d spent with them.”

He nodded.  “His writings, they didn’t say anything about it.  I think when it was happening to him, he wasn’t even aware, or he didn’t know it was bad.  So he didn’t write it down.  There were other things to record.  Approaching you, I wasn’t sure if you remembered that far back, or what your feelings on it would be.”

I nodded.  I could hear Lillian crying in the other room.

She would probably cry through the entire sit-down with Gordon.  She was probably crying extra hard because she was upset at the fact that she was crying so much.  I smiled a little at the thought.  It wasn’t that I was happy she was sad, or that it was funny- it wasn’t.  But her feelings were so very real.  I was glad that she got to express them.

A few years from now, she would be happier looking back on the fact that she’d been able to feel as honestly as she did than to look back and be happy she kept it all bottled up and had a simple conversation with Gordon.

“What are your feelings, Sy?”

“What?” I asked, startled.  I wondered momentarily if Jamie had read my mind.

“About the way the Academy treated us when we were very young.  About what’s happening with Gordon.  The fact that those two things are linked, and that there’s a lot in between.”

It was so hard to speak with the lump in my throat.  “I’m more focused on the here and now than I am on the distant past.  The fighting, figuring out what to say to Gordon, if I should act like everything’s normal when it’s not, or highlight how not it is and be super serious or angry or cry or…”

I raised my hands, gesticulating, just barely restraining myself from extending the random gestures into violently hitting the side of the icebox or the wood-paneled wall.  “…Or something.”

I let my hands fall down to my sides.  I couldn’t will myself to put them into my pockets, so I clenched them at my sides.  I had tears in my eyes, and I knew that if I looked at Jamie now I would definitely see a glimmer of old Jamie and start outright weeping.

It was good that Lillian was having a good cry over something that was definitely worth crying about, but I couldn’t let myself do the same and I couldn’t begin to explain why I couldn’t.

“Okay, sorry, I’ll drop the subject,” Jamie said.

It was the second most surprising thing he’d said all night.  In every interaction since he’d shown up, he’d been so dogged in how he pushed my boundaries and pushed me.  I was so immensely grateful to him for going easy here that I almost couldn’t find words.

“Thanks,” I managed.

“Yeah.”

Lillian’s conversation with Gordon took another few minutes.  I could hear it die down, some brief shuffling, and then Lillian appeared in the kitchen.  She buried a very damp face in my shoulder, hugging me, and just as I put my arms around her, pulled away, shaking her head, wiping at her eyes and cheeks.

At my confused expression, she said, “He wants to see you.”

I saw a fresh tear on her cheek, newer than the attempt to wipe her face dry with her palms, put a hand on the back of her neck, and kissed it off.  I gave her neck a reassuring squeeze, and headed back to the living room.

I pulled my shirt off the line that we’d rigged above the fire and put it on, buttoning it as I let myself collapse into a sitting position not far from Gordon’s head.

He heaved out a heavy sigh.

“Should I look back on this as you being an old friend, a brother, a fellow soldier?” I asked.

“I definitely see you as an annoying little brother.  And as an old friend and fellow soldier,” he said.  “Whatever works in the moment, I guess.”

I nodded.

“I know we weren’t as close as you and Jamie were, but are you going to fall apart on us like you did then?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “If you’d asked me thirty minutes before we lost Jamie, I would’ve said that I was expecting to be the strong, prepared one, while the rest of you went to pieces.”

“What we talked about back in Brechwell, how Helen said you were trying to fill the gap Jamie left?  Don’t try doing that with any gap I leave, okay?”

“But I’m liquid, don’t you know?  I naturally fill a perceived void.  Wise young man once told me that.”

“Seriously, Sy,” he said.  “You’re really bad in a fight.  You’ll get killed.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

“That sounds a lot to me like you’re dodging a straight answer.  In fact, it sounds a lot like you’re planning on trying it.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I feel like I don’t know much of anything right now.  I’m going to miss the heck out of you.  Everyone is.”

“Make sure Lillian drinks something.  She’s going to cry herself straight into a hangover without touching a drop of alcohol.”

“Will do.”

“You take care of that girl, Sy.  Do right by her.”

“Of course,” I said, a little offended.

Seriously.  She’s a sweetheart and I’m worried we’ve done enough damage to her already.  If you do anything when you’re thinking of me, after I’m gone… think about her.”

I felt a moment of alarm.  “You’re not sweet on her, are you?”

He shook his head.

I looked at the fire, lurched to my feet, walked over to the stack of logs off to one side, and placed one in the center.

Again, I collapsed more than simply sat, settling into a sitting position.

“You and Lillian are the ones who need the most looking after,” Gordon said.

“Ashton too, at least.”

“Maybe right now.  But I don’t think your long-term recall is good enough to remember how fast Helen adapted.  Ashton will surprise you the next time you see him, I think.”

I frowned.

“You and Lillian are the ones who’re most fragile in the end.  I’m so glad that you’re both enjoying the relationship for what it is, and I’m so terrified about it too.  I want to give you a list of instructions or make you make promises to me, but I don’t think you’d keep them.  You’d want to, but you’re you and you-”

He stopped, drew a deep breath, and resumed.

“-You’ll do what you do.  It took me a while to understand that.  So I’m only asking you, do right by her.”

I nodded.

“And forgive Jamie.”

“Forgive?” I asked.  Then I shook my head.  “Yeah.  I’m trying.”

“Good,” he said.

He stopped there, seemingly focused on deep breathing.

“And Mary?”

“What about Mary?”

“Favors?  Requests?  Are you going to run down the Lambs and tell me how to deal with each of them, or…?”

“No, Sy.  Like I said, I’m looking after you and Lillian.  You forgiving Jamie is for you.  I told Lillian to tell Mary some stuff, and I’ll have Jamie pass on a more complete message.  He’ll remember it.”

I nodded.

“I asked Lillian to talk to Shipman, too.  I think it’s better that it’s her instead of Jamie.  She’ll know where to find Shipman and it’ll come across with more emotion.  I’m definitely not asking you.  God, I swear, the look on your face every time she came up-”

I laughed, one note.

“Probably in the top ten best things about seeing her, finally getting your goat, instead of the other way around.”

“You always were as big a bastard as I was, deep down inside.  You just hid it better.”

He smiled.  “Reminds me.  If you want me to  leave you tasks, important things to cover… look after the mice in the Shims?  I’ve been paying regular visits.  You’ll have to take over.  Say hi, make sure they don’t need anything.  Let them know I’m gone.”

“Okay, Gordon.”

“We had good times back then, learning the techniques and tricks, me learning to throw a punch, you mostly paying good money to the same guys, only to get your ass beat.  Learning cuss words.”

“Yep.”

“Survive tonight and tomorrow, Sy?  Please?  Don’t burn the bridges so badly you can’t go back and let the mice know how it ended?”

“I’m not sure the bridges aren’t completely burned, already Gordon.  It’s a tall order as it stands.”

“You can do it,” he said, while lifting a hand out from under the blankets, and he punched me in the knee.  It was so feeble as punches went, to the point that I wanted to laugh and start crying at the same time.

He seemed to have the same realization as his eyes fixated on his hand, which now lay across the floor.  “I think you’d better get Jamie so I can wrap this up.”

I nodded.  I pulled myself to my feet and straightened.  I remained there, standing over him as he lay across the floor, covered in blankets, lit by the fire that shone through the grate.  I bent down and fixed his hand, putting it back under the blanket.

“Bye, Gordon.”

“Bye Sy.  Give ’em hell, alright?”

I nodded.

I turned my back and headed back to the kitchen.  I didn’t break stride as I gestured at Jamie, then wrapped my arms around Lillian, burying my face against her hair.  I inadvertently did it with the side that had the wounded eye, but after the first moment the pain wasn’t too bad.

We stayed like that for what felt like an hour, hugging, sometimes rocking back and forth.  I swore once or twice, and she gave me one syllable responses.  She said something almost incoherent about her parents and I gave a one syllable response.

I only broke away from the hug when I realized I couldn’t swallow past the lump in my throat.  I stepped away and found two glasses, and filled them from the sink.  I had to fill them with brown, brackish water twice before the tap water started running clear.

Lillian and I drank.  She gave her glass, I filled it again, and she drank half of it, handing it back to me.  I finished it.

“Jamie’s been in there a while,” Lillian whispered.

“Etching last messages and last instructions into the stone tablet,” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

Gordon’s voice had been getting quieter and quieter, and it wasn’t because he was trying to keep the conversation private.

I took a step to the side and peeked into the room.  I was glad to see that Hubris was back, lying at Gordon’s side, chin on Gordon’s chest.

At some point Jamie had put Gordon’s hand on the dog’s back.  The fingers moved very little, but they did move.  Gordon’s lips moved, but I didn’t even hear the murmur.  I heard Jamie’s murmurs, but that was all.

Lillian moved closer to me, effectively pinning me into position, her head tilted and pressed against mine as she watched.

Time passed like that before Jamie finished memorizing a last few sets of instructions, twisted around, and gestured at us.

We gathered around, Lillian kneeling where she could hold Gordon’s free hand.

“I remember when we first met,” Lillian said.  “And Helen was so scary, and Sy was an absolute bastard, the very first time I saw him, he held the door open for me, and then let it swing closed, and it almost hit me in the nose, except I moved in time and it hit my forehead instead.  I had a bruise for a while.”

I did that?

“And I was so terrified that I’d signed on for something nightmarish, and then you talked to me, and you were nice, and you made everything make sense.  And for a little while there, you were my hero, Gordon,” she said.

“Then, a month later, I watched you take a heated scalpel and you fought a person twice your size with it, and you won, and then you branded his face while Helen held him.  Sy was the one who told me why he deserved it, and I understood.  It wasn’t pretty, but that was the moment I first thought I could see this job through to the end.  It feels weird thanking you for that, because it’s not that nice a thing, but it was important,” she whispered.

“I remember you playing with the younger kids at Lambsbridge, and they were so fond of you.  At Mothmont you made friends so easily, and I was a little jealous, but it mostly grew my respect for you.  You’ve always shone, Gordon.  You’ve-”

At Gordon’s chest, Hubris sighed.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

There was a long moment of silence.

I put my hand on Gordon’s forehead, and pushed the hair further back out of his face.

He’d said ‘god’ and ‘goddamn’ and ‘hell’ more times tonight than I’d heard from him ever, which was about four times.  I hoped he’d found his way.

I spoke, “I know it’s rude to the people who own the house, but I think we should burn it on our way out.”

Jamie nodded.  He had a handkerchief out, under the guise of cleaning his glasses, but I noted it was going to his eyes more than not.

When Lillian looked up at me, I elaborated, “I don’t want anyone getting his body, not to make a stitched or for anything else.  And we need to cover our trail.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  She was focusing on packing up her things, putting them away in her medical bag.

I reached out to touch her hand, and she startled.

I gave her hand a squeeze, and she made a face, like she was going to start crying again.  She shook her head, instead, and reached up to wipe a lone tear from my cheekbone with her thumb.

“We need to work,” she said.  “There’s a job to do, and things out there are going to get worse.”

“Are you trying to convince us, or to convince yourself?” Jamie asked.

“Myself,” Lillian said.  “I can’t visualize myself standing up and walking out there, feeling like this.”

“Then let’s start with something easier, that doesn’t involve stepping outside.  I need a dose of the Wyvern formula.  A partial one, maybe.  Enough to give me an edge again.  I was fuzzy around the edges before Gordon.  Right now?  I… I’m more in the same boat with you than you might realize.”

She put stuff away for another few moments before she found a long metal case.  She popped it open.

Two syringes and a bottle, nestled in.  The fluid caught the firelight and looked green.

She stared down at it, putting a hand on top of it.  Hesitation?

No.

I waited for the question.

“If I gave you a partial dose-” she started.

“Yes,” I said, cutting her off.  “If you really wanted.”

“I’m- I can?”

“Yes.  It sucks more than you would believe, even with the smaller dose you’d be taking.  You’ll struggle at first, but I’m not going to say no, Lillian.”

She looked at Jamie, as if to double check.

“I don’t know,” Jamie said.  “That’s not me saying no, or expressing doubts.  That’s me saying I don’t know enough about wyvern or about what it’s like.  You’d have to trust Sylvester.”

Lillian nodded.

“With this heartache I’m feeling, will it make the pain go away?” she asked.

“If anything, it’ll make the pain sharper,” I said.  “It’ll leave an impression.  But it’ll be easier to set the pain to one side, where it can hurt all it’s going to, while you focus on what you need to focus on.”

She stared down at the tin, then looked at Gordon and Hubris.

“Perfect,” she said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.06 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Lillian took her time checking the syringe, cocking it to eject the air in the needle itself.  She held it up to the light.

“Me first?” I asked.

She seemed to consider for a long while.  In the midst of her thought process, her eye fell on Gordon.  I could see the hurt in her expression.

“Or not?” I ventured.

“I want- I was there for your last few doses.  Your personality changes.”

“It doesn’t,” I told her.

Her eyebrows went up.

“Not exactly,” I said.  “The personality is the same.  It’s just expressed… more clearly, I guess.”

“The way they put it was that you became, quote, ‘an absolute little bastard to deal with.’  From what I saw, I’m not sure I disagree, Sy.”

“Like I said, the personality is the same,” I said.

The levity felt forced.  I didn’t get a smile from her or Jamie.

I heaved out a heavy sigh.

“I don’t want you to be a bastard to me, Sy.  And, if this hurts as much as I’m expecting it to, I kind of want you with me.  Not an altered you.”

“It is me, fresh on Wyvern, or now.  The change isn’t-”

“Sy,” Jamie said, cutting in with a soft spoken word.

I twisted around to look at him.

“Listen to what she’s really saying, and stop being contrary, okay?”

I looked at Lillian, sighed, and nodded.

“Thank you,” she said.  “The solution in the syringe is sterile, and I can’t portion it out without putting it somewhere and then taking it back out.  I don’t want to do that, given where we’re injecting.”

The stuff will kill pretty much anything, though, I thought.  I didn’t say it out loud, out of concern that it would be ‘contrary’.  I nodded.

She was quiet, talking to herself as much as she talked to me.  “I need you to depress the syringe when it’s in place.  I’m doing the ratios and numbers in my head, going by my body weight, seven point eight stone-”

I made a sound, then immediately realized my mistake.  I might have expected the glare of death from Lillian, but no.  It was Jamie who gave me the glare of death.  Lillian only stared at me like she might stare at a great warbeast that was about to trample her.  Terrified more than anything.

Too vulnerable.  Her defenses were down, her emotions raw with a friend and near-family member lying dead a matter of feet away.  She might have felt like any sort of emotional hit right now could have shattered her to pieces.  One from me doubly so.

I shook my head.  “No, Lillian.  Not like that.”

She didn’t move or respond.  Still in a precarious position, feeling too fragile.

“Don’t lie about your weight, okay?” I said.  “In trying to keep up the little lie, you could hold the wrong numbers in your head, do the ratios wrong in your head, and you’ll end up hurting yourself.”

I stopped there, leaving room for a response.  When I didn’t get one, I went on, “Most girls lie and lower their weight when they talk about it, just like boys add an inch or a half-inch to their height.  I don’t know why you’re pretending you’re heavier than you are, but… take a third of a stone or a half-stone off that?”

She gave me a very strange look.  “Did you read my medical records, Sy?”

I shook my head.  “But I pay attention to you.”

She looked uncomfortable, but she was flushed.

It would be bad to tell her that I was ninety-five percent certain I knew her measurements as well; height, leg, hip, waist, chest, and arm.  Around the winter holidays, I’d been looking to get her a present, and the thought of getting her something nice and more current to wear had crossed my mind.  I’d realized I hadn’t known enough to buy her clothes and made it a personal challenge to figure it out.  Somewhere along the line it stopped being about the present.

I’d brought her to happy tears with what I had bought her, which was good.  A wooden box for jewelry and other personal effects, with three very different pieces of jewelry and a tiny notebook, three inches by two inches, with some thoughts in it.  Some memories and thoughts about us for the past, the jewelry she could wear and use in the now, and something to fill out over the course of the future.

Gordon had called it the latest and possibly greatest case of Sylvester’s overthinking.  I’d said something about how girls deserved overthinking about, except I was pretty sure I’d bungled the explanation.  He’d teased me about it.

Gordon.

My eye went to my friend and brother.  His dog hadn’t moved away from the body, and his open eyes reflected the light from the fire.

Custom called for the eyes to be closed, fingers drawing the eyelids shut.  That didn’t really work.  Everyone here had enough experience with bodies to know.

Lillian’s eyes were on the needle.

“Seven point… two?” I asked.

“Seven point three stone,” she said.  “Don’t know why I try to hide anything from you.  That translates to… three-three-nine, then I think of Damian’s second chart, and…”

I waited patiently.

“Twenty-one,” she said.  She showed me the syringe, thumbnail at one of the lines etched into the glass.  “Up to this point, for a safe dosage, for me.  The rest goes to you.”

“Okay,” I said.  Eighty percent of a dose for me, about.

Lillian turned the dial at the side of the syringe.  The needle extended.

She aimed the point at her nose.

“Don’t sneeze,” I said.

“I’m not sure if you’re trying to be funny or not,” she told me.

“I’m serious,” I said.  “And you’re going to need something to bite on, and I don’t have a belt.”

Jamie stood, and began pulling his belt free.  He extended a hand with the folded belt held in our direction, and I took it.  I folded it again, then placed it in Lillian’s open mouth.

“What else can I do?” Jamie asked.

“Stand a little closer.  Brace her shoulders.  Don’t let her tip over backward,” I said.

I scooted closer, then wrapped my legs around her middle, sitting a bit on her feet and ankles, her legs and feet forming something of a diamond around me.  I could see how hard she was breathing.

“Let me,” I said, taking the needle.  “Hold on to me.”

She reached up to pull the belt free, then said, “The moment there’s any resistance, you stop.”

“I know,” I said.  I helped put the belt back, pressing it together so she could get her teeth around it.

The needle went up the left nostril.  Up, up, along the cavity, at a thirty degree angle, more back than up.

How strange, to be on the other side of this.

I worked purely by touch, knowing that the needle would be deceptive, it was so sharp.  With my hands occupied, I was left to stare into Lillian’s eyes.

I want to take care of that girl.

There.  A change in the resistance of what I was pushing the needle through.  I stopped.

I could feel her pounding heartbeat vibrating through her body, down the needle, to my fingers.

I undid the safety bar and pressed the lever of the syringe.

Of everything we’d done so far, it was the press of the syringe that caught me off guard.  I’d expected more resistance.

Twenty-one percent.

I hurried to finish, and then withdrew the needle as fast as I could without lacerating her brain or the inside of her nose.  I put the syringe out of reach.

She leaned forward, making a pained sound, and Jamie stopped her.  I gestured, and he let her.

She leaned heavily into me, her face against my shoulder, clutching me.  I held her as she screamed into the belt, already biting down hard enough that her neck and arms were trembling.

A part of me wished I’d been able to get the first dose.  It would have distracted me, and it would have freed me to focus on the mission over anything else.  Now I was here, holding Lillian as she endured the worst pain of her life, fighting to keep her from throwing herself back and away and cracking her head on the floor, her fingernails digging into my ribs.  Dwelling on her in this much pain was miserable.  Looking at Jamie was too painful after any length of time.

What did it say that staring at Hubris and Gordon was the least painful of the three options available to me?

What was it he’d asked me to do?  Look after Lillian?

A part of me felt like I’d betrayed that request.  Another part of me felt like this was necessary.

So many parts of this sucked, and the only redeeming thing about it was that, at least with Lillian going first, she wasn’t having to endure the suck while I got the dose.

I felt a gurgling move through Lillian’s torso.  I gestured at Jamie as best as I could without letting her thrash.

A moment later, I had a bowl in hand.  I twisted around to get it in position, while Lillian heaved her stomach’s contents out, spitting out the belt in the process.  Jamie took the bowl, so I didn’t have to contort myself to find a position where I could set it down without spilling it.

It had been a while since I’d had that violent a reaction.  Pain so severe the body reacted.

She couldn’t quite draw in a breath, and yet she tried to scream, and the sound she produced was closer to a high, strained keening.  Hubris’ ears went up, even though he didn’t lift his chin from Gordon’s chest.

It took a long, long time for the keening to stop, and for Lillian to suck in a shuddering breath.

She started to sob, and her breathing normalized.  I rubbed her back.  Her chin was now hooked over my shoulder.

“Done?” Jamie asked.

I nodded.  The pain would last for a while, though.

“Lillian,” I whispered.

No response.

“There’s a part of you that’s used to crying and not being able to stop, because your emotions have gotten away from you.  That part doesn’t have the same hold it did.  All of the patterns and habits you used to have are gone, okay?  Take in a deep breath, and as you exhale, let that part of you just… go out with the rhythm.  It won’t go away, but let it go.”

I could feel her chest against mine as she drew in a deep breath, hitching as she sobbed, and then exhaled.

It took her three tries.  Then the sobbing stopped.  She was still breathing hard.  I rubbed her back some more.  Even if she was in a different place, the same Lillian was there, still hurting just as much, still as upset and scared deep down inside.

“Now the pain in your head.  I know it seems insurmountable, but take your time.  Instead of trying to separate from it, just do it little by little.  If there’s a part of you that thinks its making a difference with the pain, believe it, and work with it.”

She offered more deep breaths.  It took a while before she nodded.

“I want you to think of the night we were at the Fishmonger’s.  You worked to save that patient.  You did good work.  Do you remember?”

A nod, her ear rubbing against mine.

“Think of that moment, recall that rush, the tension, all of the good parts, like how glad you were that you studied this or that.  Okay?” I murmured.  “Think of the best parts of yourself.  The days you were on fricking point with your studies.  The part that Mary respects, that I respect, that makes you an integral part of the Lambs.  That made Hayle sit up and take notice by being an excellent student.”

I looked up at Jamie, then away, down at Gordon.

“Your memories are going to feel a lot more raw, open, and vivid.  I tried so hard to dig into the memories for the talents and the tricks, the moments where you executed things, the so-called muscle memory, the manipulations, I let the other things get muddied up.  If you were like me and you did that for a long time, you’d let the whole foundation go,” I whispered to her.  “Don’t do that.  Don’t do any of that.  It’s unnecessary.”

She nodded again.

“The Lillian I know has the ability.  There’s nothing to dredge up or try to hold onto.  She also has doubts, she holds back, and she worries.  Part of that is what makes her a good doctor.  Don’t hurry to get rid of it all.  But let go of the stuff you already know is holding you back, that you’re holding onto only because it’s safe.  I want the Lillian who is in the moment.  The Lillian who is doing good work, starting at the time between when she lets go of the doubts and plunges elbow-deep into someone’s chest cavity and ending at the time the procedure is done.”

She took in a deep breath, and exhaled.

“You won’t be able to make the changes all at once.  But know what you want, and be conscious of what you’re taking and what you’re giving up.  Do it in measures, like you’re using a scalpel.  Move on to the pain of losing Gordon-”

Her fingernails dug into my ribs again, her chin dug into my shoulderblade.

“-and set is aside.  Respect it, don’t squash it, but remove it from the part of yourself that is functioning right now.”

Another deep breath, another slow exhalation.

I let her take her time with that, and let her take her time to work things out on her own, exploring her own head, and see what it was like when she could make her thoughts, feelings, and instincts do what she wanted them to.

She moved her hands from my abused ribs and put them on my shoulders, pulling away.

I could see her face.  Her eyes were red around the edges and a little swollen, her nose was pink from sniffling and mashing it against my shoulder, and she was pale, glistening with sweat.

But the look in her eyes was different, as was her expression.

Halfway between the Lillian I’d been sitting across from, needle in hand, and the elemental Lillian I’d seen at the Fishmonger’s, with a dash of exhaustion.  Her eyes were half-lidded.

She twisted around and looked up at Jamie.  “Water?”

“Of course.”

Lillian looked back my way, and put a hand out, against my chest, over my heart.  A strange, un-Lillian-like gesture.  We remained like that until Jamie returned from the kitchen.

He handed her a glass of water, and she drank deep, paused, swished it around her mouth, and then swallowed.  She repeated the process a few times.

This, too, was a little strange.

When the tall glass of water was done with, she leaned forward and gave me a light kiss on the lips.

I leaned back and away.  I looked at Gordon.  This wasn’t the time or the place.

“Thank you,” she said, “For being so gentle with me.”

I nodded.

“I need to clean the syringe,” she said.  She touched the side of my face, then pulled away, extricating herself from me.

She moved differently, as she crossed the room to where she’d left the medical kit.  She picked her way through it, lapsing back into more Lillian-like expressions and behavior in the meantime.

Making her way back, she let her hand reach down to run fingers through my hair, before stooping down to pick up the mechanical syringe I’d set aside.

I didn’t break eye contact with Jamie for the duration.

“Lillian,” I said.

“Mmm?”

“While you’re adjusting the thoughtscape up there, maybe remember we don’t want or need drunk Lillian.”

“I’m not drunk,” she said.  Her voice was different too, the words more clearly formed without being over-enunciated.  “I feel very balanced, I can actually make my hands stop trembling.  I’m focused.  I feel like I’ve been drunk for a long time and now I’m sober.”

“It seems as if your inhibitions are gone,” I said.

She shook her head.  She shot me a smile, and I saw more of that elemental Lillian lurking in the expression.  “Not my inhibitions.  But I feel… I feel like I’m a brand new me in Lillian’s body and brain, and I’m seeing everything fresh for the first time.  I see the walls I put up, and I’m setting some aside.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Now that we have this shared experience, I feel closer to you,” she said.

Something about the way she was now was exciting, in a way that made my body feel more alive, ready to do things in a way that was very ready and very nonspecific and indiscriminate about what those things were.

But she had said she felt closer to me, and my head was recognizing that I felt oddly distanced from her.  I found myself disagreeing with the Sylvester of twenty minutes ago, who had argued with Lillian about the personality after Wyvern.  She’d been right.  This didn’t quite feel like the Lillian I knew.

The mind and body warred with one another, and in the midst of that war, Gordon was the tiebreaker.  I felt repulsed by my reaction to Lillian, and that let the mind take the helm.

“I’m glad,” I said, noncommittally.

Jamie spoke, “Be careful about the changes you make, Lillian.  They’ll revert over time, but a small fraction of it will be permanent.  It’s through the prolonged use that bigger changes are made.”

You know more than you let on.

“I thought you said you didn’t know enough about the wyvern formula to say anything?” Lillian asked.

“I was being polite.  Saying anything would have been getting between you and Sy, and if you both agree we need this to tackle the situation outside, I’m not going to slow things down by arguing.”

“You’re too nice sometimes, Jamie,” Lillian said.  She finished cleaning the syringe.  She adjusted it, then dropped into position, straddling my lap.  My back was to the front of an armchair.  She locked her eyes to mine.  “Ready?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She was more sure about it than I was, the insertion of the needle sure and straight.  I felt the needle balk as it hit the scar, even though I didn’t feel the hit myself.  It wasn’t scar tissue, exactly, but more a lesion, an accumulation of minerals and byproducts.

Then the push through.

A moment of fear.

And the flood of wyvern, across the membrane at the exterior of the brain, then seeping into the brain itself, my senses screaming at me, my body rebelling.  Vertigo, a paralyzing series of moments where time had no meaning, where my body didn’t listen, where I couldn’t think in words.

All before the pain swept in, not gradually but as sudden as the drop of a guillotine blade, and just as capable of obliterating all function.

Ten out of ten, on the scale.  Ten out of ten, for how uncomfortable it was, if I separated all other parts of it from the pain.  I wanted to throw up, to wrench muscles from sockets, claw into flesh, shit, piss, scream, anything that separated me from this.

In the incoherent thoughts and observations I sensed, I noted the girl hugging me, Jamie looming over me, my vision unfocusing, seeing Jamie blurred, one figure and one shadow against the wall now two people side by side.  Gordon lying dead, and a pattern of firelight against the wall I couldn’t even begin to convince myself wasn’t another, phantasmal Gordon, watching.

I looked away from it all, and I endured, my fingers digging into my knees.

I’d been here before, or somewhere very like it.

My senses came back first, and I felt like I was going to go blind, crawl out of my skin, and throw up in the same moment.

Time and place followed.  Reality clarified around me.  I pushed away the image of Gordon on the wall, recognizing it for what it was.  Jamie was one person.

Slowly, everything else sorted out.  I was left with only a crippling headache and a nosebleed of blood diluted with clear fluid.  Lillian dutifully plugged the nostril with a bit of cotton.

The pain had a bitterness to it, and it colored my thoughts, mingled with the knowledge that it would come again and again, that pain.  A small part of me felt like I was holding onto something ancient, dating back to the very first time I’d received the formula, but I didn’t know how to let go of it, as if I was trying to paint the ground I stood on.

That bitterness redoubled with the memory of where we were, and the recollection of the fact that Gordon was dead.  The walls weren’t up, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.  The raw surprise of a feeling almost perfectly mirrored a memory of how I’d stumbled onto Jamie, lost to us, and I thought I might break in a permanent way.

I was staring up at the ceiling, and tears started streaming down my face.

I can’t.  I can’t feel this.

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

A hand touched my face and I flinched.  I stood up, pushing Lillian off me in the process, and backed away.

Lillian who wasn’t Lillian and Jamie who wasn’t Jamie and Gordon who was just a body.

My hands went to my hair, my arms vertical bars in my field of vision, walling me off from reality, from empty shells, lies, fakes.

“Stay with us, Sy,” the fake Jamie said.

“Deep breaths, like you said,” the fake Lillian told me.  “Put everything in its place.  You know how to handle this.”

I know how to handle this, I thought.  The thoughts themselves were so crystal clear that the edges of them were sharp and painful to experience.  This is the world I live in, with primordials and shells both empty and filled with the wrong things, with war and violence and things I should be more scared of, but I buried those things a long, long time ago, with the worst of the pain.

This isn’t the problemThis is something I can deal with, and I’ve been dealing with it for  a long time.  I couldn’t leave this world behind if I tried.

But the memories of Gordon came to me, hitting me, and flowed like the tears did.  If I so much as looked in the wrong direction or paid attention to the wrong memory in the torrent, then I thought of Jamie, and that was a flood of memories and gut-wrenching impacts that was worse.

I felt like I was going to lose my mind, but I couldn’t fix the problem without risking burying those things and too many important things with them.

No, the problem was that I was looking at my mental and emotional makeup with pure, perfect clarity, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to handle the loss of another Lamb, and I knew it would inevitably happen, and so what was there even to stop me from just accepting that loss and rolling with the consequence?

All I had to do was let go, feel that grief for someone who hadn’t yet died, on top of everything else, and I could lose my mind.

Or I could take the grief, bury it like I’d changed my mind in so many different ways already, and lose something precious in the transaction.

“Stay with us,” Jamie said.

I was a problem solver, and it was a problem without an answer.

But there were problems to answer.  My hand went up to touch the eyepatch.  I felt anger, contempt, black bile roiling inside me.

I always had to claw my way up from a dark place, post-dosage.  This time, well, it wasn’t so deep a fall, with only eighty percent of the formula, sparing me the dip into things I’d cast off and tried to lose when I was half the age I was now.  Not so deep a fall, but it felt like an especially steep climb, this time around.

I kept a little of that darkness with me as I surfaced.  I let the tears stop.

I looked at Lillian, who was disheveled, her eyes intense and wide, and at Jamie, his face in shadow, the lenses catching a bit of the firelight.

“Sorry,” I said.  I embraced the emotions, and was glad that they listened to me.  I was filled to the brim with rage and loss, and there were abundant enemies in this city who I wanted to direct them at.  “I think I’m ready now.”

“Burn the building on the way out, you said,” Jamie told me.

“Okay,” I said.

It didn’t take long to set up.  There were oils in the kitchen, and the stove was already burning.  We poured out the chemicals, letting them pool around the base of the stove, before we drew the connection to let the fire stretch  along a stripe of oil and touch soaked floorboards.

We backed away, leaving Gordon where he was.

A warrior’s funeral, I thought.  I pushed down all the parts of me that wanted to scream and cry.

Lillian whistled, and Hubris finally left the body, hurrying to her side.

The four of us ducked out of the building and into the streets of shadow and fire.  Tonight we started with a game of cat and mouse where the mice had no choice but to fight.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.07 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The city had a surreal edge, viewed through the lens of the wyvern formula.  The haze of smoke, the glow of fires both near and distant, the echoing pop of distant gunshots and shells, and the screeches of warbeasts served to disconnect me from the immediate surroundings.  I took it in, and I put pieces together.

They’re setting the city on fire, but not everywhere.  There’s a gap there, where the Crown forces are.  The Crown’s camp was thereabouts, but we’ve been hearing shots from that direction, and the squads the Twins tore apart were running from there to there… they have to have moved further up.

Where are the Twins?  If we run into the Twins now-

I couldn’t think of any good options.  I could have shifted my focus, turned my thoughts to analyzing them, figuring out a set of tactics that might have worked, but I felt like it was a big investment of focus, and there was nothing to guarantee it would be the Twins we ran into.

“Lillian,” I said.

She turned to look at me, her eyes wide.  I saw more of the elemental Lillian I’d seen at the Fishmonger’s, now.

“Twins.  We need a countermeasure.  Think about it.  Jamie, explain the twins.”

“They smelled you,” she said.

The words came across as abrupt.  I was anticipating a certain pacing and pattern to her speech, I’d had years to get used to the measure of time she took to take things in, to wait to see if any of us spoke before adding her opinion.  It didn’t surprise me that she spoke, but it did catch me off guard.

“Enhanced hearing and smell was Sy’s take, yeah,” Jamie said.  “Small, black, recessed eyes that they didn’t seem to rely on.  They interlock with their older sisters to form one complete, adult body-”

“What color are they?”  Abrupt.

“Black,” Jamie said.

“Charcoal black,” I clarified.  “Dull, not glossy.”

“Except for the parts where you see the skin, from the interlock,” Jamie added.

Lillian nodded, taking in the words, even while her thoughts were somewhere else.

“Is that important?” Jamie asked.

“Maybe.  How much did their chests move when they stood still?  Did they stand still?”

“They breathed harder than seemed necessary,” Jamie said.

Had they?  I hadn’t noticed.

Hubris’ ears perked up, his head turning, nose catching Lillian at the knee.  She barely seemed to notice, but I did.

I put my hands out, stopping them, then gestured.

The group of us moved closer to a wall, huddling down.  I drew one of the knives I’d collected from the kitchen in the now-burning house, and tucked it into the top of my boot as I heard the footsteps.

Five people, at least, running.  Disorganized.

Definitely not the Twins.  Probably residents of Lugh, not Crown soldiers.

I gestured come behind my back.

I’d expected Lillian, but Hubris was the one who came.  Almost as good.  He approached steadily as I kept the gesture up, until his shoulder was flush against my side.  I hugged him.

The next part was to act.  It really didn’t take much digging to get to the emotion I wanted.  Breathe harder, as if I was panicking, let emotions well up, my face contorting-

All the while, my hand flew through gestures, letting the other two know what to expect.

The group stepped out from around the corner.  Five civilians, armed with improvised weapons.  It was the one at the tail end of the group who turned his head, looking for trouble, and spotted us.  He yelled out, “Oi!”  The others stopped in their tracks, turning, weapons at the ready.

They looked scared, but they let their guards down as they spotted us: three youths, with the one closest to their group fiercely hugging his dog, clearly upset.

I didn’t turn to look, but I knew that if Lillian’s expression was even remotely the same as it had been the last time I’d looked, she might have looked shell shocked.  Jamie- I didn’t actually know, but two data points would work well enough.

“Shit,” the one at the tail said.  “What are you doing here?”

No response was as good as a non-response in a situation like this.  Let them fill in the gaps.

More footsteps were still approaching.  It didn’t seem to be a threat or a chase, by the reaction of the group in front of us.

No, they were looking to the individuals.

I reached out to put my hand on the wall by Hubris’ head, as if to keep my balance, fingers in a specific position.  The hand was only a foot from my boot with the knife.

Alert, the sign was.  Be ready, the intent was.

I felt Hubris tense under my other arm.

The pairing who followed up the rear of the initial group was composed of one more Lugh civilian, armed with a long-handled axe, and one of Mauer’s soldiers, with a rifle and bayonet.

I watched as he tracked the group’s gaze, and I saw the flicker of recognition.  The recognition was followed by alarm, but I was already pushing out with the arm I had around Hubris’ shoulders, rising to my feet and drawing the knife in the same motion.

Before the soldier could bring his weapon around to point it at us or slash at Hubris, the mutt was on him, tearing at one wrist, making it impossible to handle the gun, pulling him toward the ground-

I slammed the knife into the side of his neck, nearly lost my grip on it as I hauled it back and out, and then drove it into his neck again, closer to the front.

He collapsed, Hubris dancing out to keep from being caught under him, teeth going for the gun.

Four grown, armed men stood within two and a half metres of me.  We’d just beheaded the leadership of their group, but the rest remained a threat.

I opened my eyes wider, and I hissed at them.  Showing absolute confidence here was essential.

Behind and to the side of me, I heard Lillian echo the sound, followed by an amused noise.

She’d said she wasn’t drunk on the wyvern formula’s effects, but she was doing a horrible job of selling the argument.

Still, the group retreated rather than advance.

“Don’t-” the soldier on the ground spoke, blood in mouth and throat muddling the word.  He spat, coughed, and then tried to finish the sentence, “hold-”

I plunged the knife into his throat for the third time.

People were so hard to kill, even with stabs to an important area like the throat.

The blood that had splashed up and the moisture from the rain made it hard to get the knife out.  Rather than try and fail, I let my hand slip off as if I’d intended to do it, and straightened.

The group turned, starting to run.

We were back in that direction, we came this way, the Twins would have come this way before losing our trail, with Hubris running that way…

Odds were better than not that the group was running in the direction the Twins had gone, off to our left.  Sixty percent chance, if I had to put a number to it.  Thirty percent they were down the street I and the other Lambs had been walking down, ten percent chance the Twins were back the way we’d come.

I bent down, reaching for the rifle Hubris had secured.  I aimed and fired.

The group of men ducked their heads, stopped, and looked for cover.  Not that there was much point- I’d fired well over their heads.

“That way,” I called out, moving the rifle and bayonet to indicate the road we’d already been traveling down.

“Those particular exorcist rifles have to be reloaded between shots,” Jamie said, quiet enough the people wouldn’t hear.

“Got it,” I murmured.  I bent down, not taking my eyes off of the people peeking around cover, and reached down to pat at the still-dying soldier.  He grasped weakly at my wrist, and I shook him off.

In the corner of my vision, I saw Gordon’s face being framed by a dark pool of blood, rather than the soldier’s mug.  I ignored it, keeping my vision on the possible threats, while continuing to feel around for where the soldier had the ammo stored.

Patiently, Hubris stopped sniffing loudly at the man’s side and used his nose to nudge my hand to the right location.  I dug into the pocket and found ammo.  I reloaded the Exorcist.

“That way!” I said, with more force.  “If you go that way, you’re going to die, and it won’t be because I shot you!”

They were lost, rudderless, and by the small numbers and lack of guns among the group, I was guessing they were a smaller splinter of a larger faction.  They turned, and then ran the way I’d indicated, toward the harbor and the bulk of Mauer’s forces.  It wasn’t a hard sell, even coming from someone who had stabbed their group’s leader.

My vision of how things stood in Lugh was an abstract painting, broad strokes with little detail and a lot of blurred lines and fuzziness where I wasn’t absolutely sure of details.  Every gunshot, particularly the duller booms of exorcists and the bursts of fire from multiple stitched soldiers firing in unison, served as another stroke or dab on the greater picture.

I mentally revised my mental picture of where things stood, moving the Academy forward.  Mauer’s front line was getting torn to shreds, and it was probably somewhat worse than he’d anticipated.  Four nobles came with more than the usual amount of firepower.  Two of those nobles were on the periphery of the front lines, picking off stragglers, scouting groups, and flanking attacks.

The group I’d redirected ran down the street, keeping to cover where cover was available.  I watched them go, giving them a head start, so we wouldn’t be right on their heels if they ran into trouble and wound up cornered.

I relieved the now-dead soldier of the bullets.  My finger touched the ring at my thumb, rotating it around- a little bit of resistance, with the fit being tighter.

“Sorry,” I told him.  I wasn’t sure if I was, but I felt like I had to say something.

Our trio moved at a brisk walk down the same road the group of militia had fled down.

“…and bony pincers instead of arms.  They were attached after the fact,” Jamie was saying.  Right back onto the subject of the Twins.

“That’s interesting.  Were the legs okay?  Flexible?”

“The legs moved,” Jamie said.  “They were fast.”

“But the feet.  How was the mobility in the feet?”

“Feet were straight out, almost one solid piece from knee to the end of the foot, maybe fifteen degrees of movement at the knee and at the ankle, with toes giving them traction.”

“Did the toes wiggle?  Or did they look like metal, or bone, or-”

“I didn’t see.  Puddles, and I wasn’t focused on the feet when there weren’t puddles.”

“I’m getting this mental picture, but I’m not sure if my imagination is running away with me,” Lillian said.  Her voice was breathy, like she hadn’t taken in a full proper lungful of air before leaping into the thought.  She took in a partial breath, then cut it off to say, “It’s really hard to tell if I’m imagining it or understanding it.”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m imagining a problem with oxygen.  The integration would take time to get right, they’ve got very contained physiologies with very dense bone, blood flow is low, redirected, or they went with another means of oxygen absorption altogether.  It would take time to get right, and it could go wrong easily, with catastrophic consequences.  The extremities nearly withered away, and in the case of the arms, weren’t salvageable or weren’t salvageable enough.  Chop them off, give them weapons.  Legs with the thicker bones were salvaged, and or they rely on strength and flexibility in the hip over the legs.”

“Okay,” I said.  “How can we use that?”

“That they made it work at all is incredible.  They can probably take any bullet that isn’t from an exorcist, with minimal damage.  No vital areas, fast, strong, with big bursts of energy.  When they plug into their sisters, they borrow blood flow.”

Lillian,” I said, voice sharper.  “How can we use that?”

“Um,” she said.  Then she was lost in her little world again.

I glanced at Jamie.

“You were just as bad at the start,” Jamie said.  “The books said so.”

“Hm?  What?” Lillian asked, focusing on us again.

“Nevermind,” Jamie said.  “Focus on your thing.  You’re doing a good job.”

She lowered her head, pulling her bag around so it was in front of her, and began digging through it.  She spent a minute doing it.  It felt disorganized, the way she moved stuff aside, then had to move it the other way to search a different corner.

“Do you have a silver bullet for us?” I asked, gently, so as not to disturb her too much.

“No,” she said.  “Just a bullet, and I have to put it together.  And I have one idea, but I don’t have the things for it.”

“Okay,” I said.  “A bullet is good.  And you think this thing will work?”

“No,” she said.  She looked up, and met my eyes with her own.  Elemental Lillian had a look on her face like I’d just said something crazy.  “Your aim sucks.

Ouch.

Seeing this Lillian at work, I was struck by a thought.  Evette.  She’d never had a first incarnation, nor a second.  The idea had been floated, but it had been Ashton we got in the end.

The idea had been to have Evette as the group’s problem solver.  A floating element, not for combat, but for the background.  To equip us against threats, and to devise very specific solutions.  Of all of the Lambs, she would have had access to Academy knowledge.  The rest of us would have been forbidden.

I didn’t know what Evette would have looked like in the end, or what her personality would have been, but I imagined she would have existed with the Academy maintaining a tighter, firmer hold on her.  Having her with us would likely have meant an adult chaperone at all times, to rein her in and watch over her.

In darker moments, and today was a darker moment, I allowed myself to muse on the fact that her project had been allowed to fail.  That they had decided it was too much trouble, that the Lambs couldn’t have access to that knowledge.  Easier to give us a conventional medic and not worry about losing control.  Two now, if I counted Duncan.

We’d lost Gordon, and yet I felt like he was still with us, in Hubris, and in spirit.  As for Jamie, I’d always seen in the corner of my eye, in the movement of curtains and tricks of the light, and he was with us in a very concrete way.

Evette, well, we’d lost her before we’d even started.  I had the sense that she was with us, lending a hand, all of the key traits and points now manifesting through a possessed Lillian.  I could very well picturing her acting like Lillian was now.  Eccentric, no holds barred, plainspoken, and needing careful watching-over.

It made for a shifting of mental gears, but I suddenly felt a lot more comfortable with Lillian acting as different as she was.  I could almost see it as a game, to test how I might work with her.

Lillian was so focused on digging through her bag that she was losing track of where she was walking.  Jamie had to slow down to avoid being cut off by her.

I reached out and grabbed her upper arm, aiming to steer her.  Like lightning, sudden and startling, she whipped her head around to look at me.

Confusion, then recognition, and then a smile and a flush of the cheeks.

Now I was the one that was confused.

“Thank you,” she said, with a hair more emphasis than was needed.

I nodded once.

No response was as good as a non-response in a situation like this.

I could feel the muscles of her arm move as she emptied a bottle into a jar that already had fluid inside, then screwed on the cap.  She shook the bottle, a thumb over the lid.

She handed it to me.  I had to let go of her arm to take it.

“What is it?”

“Stink.  It’s going to wipe out our ability to smell anything when the time comes, and Hubris will hate it, but if they use their noses like you think, it’ll hurt them more.”

I tested the weight of the jar of urine-colored fluid, then extended the rifle past Lillian’s front, to Jamie.

“I’m shooting?” he asked.

“They might be quick and durable,” I said, “But if we can throw them for a loop with this, you might get a chance to land a shot.”

“You saw how fast they are.  By the time we see them, it might be too late.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “This is good, Lil.  Good line of thinking.”

“Hm?” She looked up from her bag.

“Nevermind.”

“Do you know what I should do?” she asked, eyes going back to the bag.  “Take the stuff I use most, and just stick it on the outside of a coat.  Jars, needles, tools.”

“That wouldn’t be very discreet,” I pointed out.

She looked up, processed that, then nodded, eyes going back to the bag.

“Students take wyvern on the regular, don’t they?” I asked.

“Some,” Lillian said.  “The Academy lies.  They say the stuff will kill you if you overdo it, so most only take a small amount.”

“Anything kills you if you take too much,” Jamie said.  “Even water.”

Lillian smiled at that.  “Yeah.  You know what I mean.”

“How much more than the usual dose did you take?” I asked.

“I took a safe amount,” she said.

“How much more?”

“Ten times more than them.  The same amount you took when you first started,” she said.  “Before tolerances.”

“Right,” I said.

The little things were adding up.  Looking for clues, piecing together a mental image of how the city was doing, anticipating the Twins, the Crown army, and Mauer, keeping an eye on Hubris in case a twitch of the ear indicated something noteworthy, and now that I had the jar tucked under one arm, my other arm was once again steering a preoccupied Lillian.  I could focus on more things at once, and my thoughts were clearer and more effective, but I still had a limit and I was approaching it.  Actually trying to figure out what I was really wanting to ask her about with the formula and carrying on a conversation would detract from more important matters.

I told myself I’d think on it at a future date, and I knew I’d forget before I did.

Her posture was weird – I had a grip on her upper arm, but she was pinning my hand in place between her arm and her side, her elbow pressed against the side of her stomach.  That was distracting too, both in the sense that I wanted to piece together what she was doing and the thought process at work, and the fact that the knuckles of my hand were grazing certain aspects of her anatomy.

She liked me.  I’d known that was the case, in an analytical way, but Lillian had always been reactive, passive, shy, and indirect about her feelings.  I could put all of the pieces together, and still, I could invent reasons it was just an act.  She was the type who needed someone close to them.  She was at that age, and propinquity made her think she liked me.  Hormones and the fact that she saw my face as often as she did.

To actually have her show interest in this bizarre, minor way was both rewarding and very very distracting.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

Case in point.  There was a situation.

A body, a recent death.  The corpse had been demolished, pieces of skull scattered across road, with massive puncture wounds I could have thrust a hand into.

“The twins,” Jamie said.

“Oh no,” Lillian said.  Strange to hear her speak when I expected Lillian to be horrified into silence.

“Came from the east,” I said.  “Sudden attack, only one dead?”

“Could be tired,” Jamie said.  He looked to Lillian.

“They probably are.  If they plug into their sisters for the sake of borrowing blood flow and re-oxygenating, then they-”

“Or it’s bait,” I said, cutting her off only because I suspected she would ramble.  I wheeled around, eyes scanning nearby buildings and surfaces.  I held the jar higher.  “They smelled us on the people we sent running, now they’re hunting us, and a body lying in our path slows us down, buys a chance to get in position and pounce.”

I spun around again, now facing what had been our rear.

“I have another idea,” Lillian said.

“Is it one we can put into effect right now?” I asked her.

“No.  I’d need a lab, I think.”

“Then keep it in mind, but let’s focus on what we need to focus on.  I think we’re surrounded.”

“Can you even be surrounded by two people?” Jamie asked.

“When they’re the Twins?  Yeah.” I asked.  My eyes scanned the surroundings.  Wood piles, a shed, the eaves of a rooftop.  The shadows played tricks with my eyes.  Lillian’s comment about imagination playing tricks with the mind was an accurate one.  I was seeing the shadows pull themselves into configurations resembling skulls, bones, and praying-mantis like spikes at the end of their forelimbs.

I’d done the tests for Hayle that involved drawing the perfect, clean white rectangle in my mind’s eye.  The trick for focusing my senses was similar.  I had to sort the visual information, look for the flow of things.  The way buildings were constructed had a sense to them.  The things that littered the ground were the same.  There was a reasoning at play.

Once I had that mental image, I could see more distinctly.  My brain was rapidly catching up with what I was trying to see, the bits of visual noise and dancing shadow fewer and farther between.  I could recognize the spots in my vision for what they were.

Within an attic window that overlooked the streets, I saw the younger Twins.  They were interlocked in their own way, both at a small window, one practically hanging off of the other so it could occupy the narrow space, dark skull faces surrounded by darkness, peering through.

Could they see after all, or were they simply there because it positioned them well to attack?  They were thirty metres out, across the street and two houses down, and if they wanted to attack, they could charge through the glass, run, and hit us within a few seconds.  If they wanted to be subtle about it, I was sure even their limited limbs could open the window, allowing them to slip out and close the distance while we meandered on, unaware, or focused on the body.

My heart was pounding.

I gestured for silence, and indicated the direction of the Twins.

The Twins in the window didn’t move.

Slowly, surely, Jamie raised the rifle to his shoulder, aiming.

In the blink of an eye, the Twins in the window were gone.  They hadn’t exited through the window- they were moving through the home.  That put them on the street level, and it gave us zero idea of which direction they would come from.

“Run!” I shouted, grabbing Lillian’s arm, hauling her with me.  Have to get to a better position.

We ran, boots clunking on a road dusted with a mix of snow and ash.  We made our way further down the road, to find the remainder of the group I’d sent down the road.  Citizens of Lugh, not ill-intentioned, who didn’t deserve to die, torn to shreds by the nobles.

Thirty percent chance, I thought.  But from the direction Jamie had said they’d attacked from, the sixty-percent route wouldn’t have been much safer – they would’ve been to the left of the four Twins, rather than the right.

Twins the younger behind us and to our right, Twins the elder ahead of us and to the left, with a contingent of armed men.

The stink bomb only served to incapacitate for a short while, at best, and maybe bought us a chance to shoot one.

It wasn’t enough.

I was already going to be violating my promise to Gordon.  A fight was inevitable, it was going to be ugly, and it wasn’t going to favor the Lambs in that ugliness.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.08 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.8

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Two enemies.  Faster than us, better coordinated, stealthier, stronger, and more aware of our environment.  For every meter of terrain we crossed, I had to imagine they crossed five or six.

They weren’t the type to play with their food.

Only a couple of seconds to decide where we were going to hold our ground.

“Fire,” I said, “Will it work?”

“Yes,” Lillian said.  Then, “No.”

Too late.  I was already leading her and Jamie over to the corner of one street, where the rubble at the foot of one building burned like a bonfire, not yet spread to the building proper.

I had the jar.  The contents could distract enough that Jamie could theoretically get a clean shot.

Then what?

The four of us stopped, standing near the burning rubble.  The light the fire cast was uneven and sporadic, with the rubble in and around it casting very misleading shadows.  My senses were already primed to pick the twins out of the background, but it was far from easy.

The road formed an intersection here.  The far sides of the street had short walls and parked wagons, crates and fences.  There was far too much cover, but at least the roads were clear and open.  We stood on one corner, just beyond the sidewalk, with the bonfire roaring to one side, the damaged building looming high above us.  One of the less sturdy, sloping buildings, a tenement.

“They won’t want to get burned, the pale flesh on the outside will be vulnerable,” Lillian said, finishing the thought she’d nearly dropped altogether.

“Alcohol,” I said, interrupting her, my hand out.  My eye scanned the shadows around us.  The younger Twins should have caught up with us already.

A bottle was pressed into my hand.  I had to work to keep the jar in place under my arm while I unstoppered it.

“But if they really want to kill us,” Lillian continued, “The fire won’t really slow them down.  They’ll get burned and they’ll get patched up later.”

The fire still worked, then.  At least until we upped the stakes.  The Twins were vain, and that had to extend to the younger Twins.  The older ones wouldn’t use them like this if they were going to turn around and go back to their brother with scars and scratches still needing serious attention.  They would avoid it where possible.

Hubris noticed the movement before I did.  I didn’t wait to verify with my own eye, hurling the bottle into the edge of the flame.  A roll of fire erupted, illuminating the Twin, who leaped back and away.  The spot in my vision that followed after the brighter light made it easier to lose track of the skeletal form as she disappeared into shadow.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Lillian’s head turn.

“No!” I said.  “Keep eyes in all directions!”

Jamie had turned to look too.  He turned his head to look the other way, leveling the rifle, aiming, and I could see the change in his posture as he spotted the other Twin making her approach.

Another second, and she would have impaled him.  As it was, she threw herself back from where the Executioner’s barrel pointed, landed with arm-spikes and feet on the ground, a ‘belly’ that was a knot of organs and dessicated flesh wrapped around a spine now facing the sky, and a moment later had bounded off to one side, without even flipping herself the right way around.

And the fact that I was looking meant-

I turned.

No, the first one wouldn’t come from the same direction she had.  The side?  Too obvious.  The fire?

I put my hand out, gesturing to Hubris to watch my back, as I turned my attention away from the most likely directions the first Twin might have used to approach.

Peering past the thick smoke that rose from the fire, I could see the Twin scaling the wall, twenty feet above our heads.

“Above our heads,” I said.

I didn’t want to take my eye off her, but if there was a remote possibility of her throwing herself off the side of the building, over the flames and onto us, I needed to be able to do something.

I turned my attention to the rubble, reaching, close enough to the flame that I thought my clothes might catch.  I found a length of wood and hauled on it, lifting-

“She’s moving!” Lillian cried out, voice going higher.

My gaze went up, even while I still hauled on the wood.  Too long to be a proper weapon, thin and supple, it was a baseboard from the house, or a long, grown piece of floorboard.  The end of it traced a half circle on the road to my right as I pointed the thing in a different direction.  Still, I was able to haul the end of it up, pointed toward the Twin.

Not even a pointed length of wood.  There was a one in five chance, if she leaped, that I’d be able to put the end of the length of wood between her and her target.   The wood wouldn’t survive, but she would be knocked to the ground or knocked back into the fire.

The twin on the surface of the building did move, and my heart leaped as I tried to track the potential angle of the jump, with zero depth perception to go by.

Instead, she put her claws up onto a windowsill and climbed through.

“They’re not moving as fast as they were,” Jamie said.  “They’re tired.”

“They’re still moving pretty fricking fast,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “They’re being careful.  This one over here has a second sense about my gun.  I start to move the gun to aim at her and she slips away, disappears.”

Looking for a hole.

I raised a foot, and kicked at the length of wood I was holding up and out, aiming to break it.  I failed.  I tried again, and didn’t achieve anything except giving myself a nasty splinter.

A large form appeared beside me, crashing down into and through the wood, scaring the living daylights out of me.  My hand, still impaled with a splinter an inch long, went to the knife at my hip, drawing it.  The jar dropped to the ground and didn’t break.

It was only Lillian.  Trying to help.

I didn’t have time to yell at her.  Both of us were focused on each other for the moment, and that left us open.  I elbowed her aside so I was free to move the now-broken length of wood, keeping it pointed up at an angle, looking.  Once I was sure the Twin wasn’t about to pounce on me, I allowed myself to divert my attention and use one foot to draw the jar closer, so it wouldn’t roll away.

“Sorry,” she said.

Impulsive, acting where she would usually second guess herself.  She wanted to help.  But that stunt could have killed all of us, if the Twins had been in a different position.

“Yeah, Lil,” I said.  My heart rate was out of control, while the rest of me felt cold, coiled like a spring.

“Got eyes on one,” Jamie murmured.

“I don’t know where the other is,” I said.

Hubris didn’t seem to know either.

“She’s upstairs,” Jamie said.  “She opened a window.  She could come jumping through, or she’s trying to draw the eye while she approaches from another direction.”

“Right,” I said.  “Good.”

They were going to circle us independently and attack the moment they saw an opportunity, and we would lose one of the Lambs.  I couldn’t think of a scenario where that wasn’t the case.  If anyone happened across us, Crown or rebellion, then the distraction would probably kill us.  If the elder Twins happened across us, then we would be as good as dead.

I could break the jar of stink, but again, I had to ask myself what followed that.  The enemy would be distracted, Jamie would get one shot off, and we’d have another Twin or another in our midst.  All four of us would die.

It was like a rhyme or litany in my head.  Every time I followed a train of thought, it led to the same line.  An echoing refrain of doom, gloom, and the end of this particular group of Lambs.

I had a half-formed thought, one that started to reach for a conclusion, then stopped short.  Hubris would lose his sense of smell, too, and-

And…

And we would close other doors?

What other doors were there?

“Lillian,” I said, careful not to raise or lower my voice, “You had another idea.  You mentioned it a moment ago.  A way to counteract how the Twins work.”

“Yes!” she said, too intense.  “I think!  But I need-”

I was ready for the ‘but’, and cut her off.  “What is it?”

“They need to have a way to open themselves up to their sisters.  They-”

She stopped as Jamie startled, jerking his rifle a distance to his right.

“Keep going!” I ordered.

“They probably have sphincters or other controls that allow blood to come in from the connection to their sisters.  A chemical reaction.  If I had a chance to try a catch-all means of getting them to open themselves up, maybe their bodies would open the doors, with blood pouring out, or it would hamper their ability to reconnect with their sisters.  But-”

“Make it!” I said, still ready to cut her short at the ‘but’.  “Now, here, we’ll watch your back.”

My hand went to my face.  A gesture.  Fake.

“Okay,” she said.

It wasn’t an answer.  As thought processes went, it wasn’t even a good one, because we were committing to staying here, two monsters prowling around us, looking for an opening.  Any distraction could end us.

If they had good hearing, then they heard Lillian and I.  If they had good noses, the smell of the concoction might be one of the very few things that could scare them.

It was a bluff, one more thing to keep them at bay.

That same bluff came at a cost, because it drove them to attack sooner than later.

The attack was an unexpected one.  I didn’t even see the Twin at the window.  There was only the object, briefly lit by the flames as it whipped top over bottom.

“Jamie, move!” I called out, grabbing Lillian, hauling her to one side.  Jamie took a step forward.

A vase bigger than my head crashed onto the street in the midst of the group.  There was still water in it.

Off-balance from having to get out of the way, Jamie was slow to move the rifle to track the one on the ground.  It threw itself to one side, then closed the distance.  My lack of depth perception wasn’t wholly responsible for the sensation that it simply appeared.  It was fast, and it was a hell of a lot faster when it was lunging right for us.

Jamie tried to put the rifle’s bayonet blade between himself and the Twin.  The long spike of bone that jutted from its one arm struck the rifle to one side, nearly disarming Jamie.

I was already swinging my broken length of wood towards the twin.  The attack was inevitable, I just needed to stop the follow-up.  Each twin had two spikes of bone, and the other spike would be stabbing right for Jamie’s heart.

My stick swung through to hit empty air, the very end splintering against the road.

The Twin was retreating, dancing out of the way before Jamie could reassert his grip on the rifle.

There was no real expression on its face.  Shadow-colored flesh formed a thin, gnarled veneer over the bone, with barely any visible musculature.  The eye sockets were empty and dark, hiding eyes half the normal size, eyes that were probably mostly blind.

Yet I had the sense that it was laughing at me, mocking, and that sense coincided with a sinking feeling I knew all too well.

I’d taken wyvern to make my brain easier to mold.  I had taught myself new patterns, but it came with a drawback.  One of the patterns I learned was that I could rely on others to handle the fighting.  At best, I could do the ambushes and sneak attacks.  Catch the enemy off guard, make sure they didn’t have the chance to fight, and I was fine.

Give them a chance, and I felt this sinking feeling, that things were now out of my control, and I was at the mercy of our enemies.

I turned my attention up toward the building where the vase had come from.

In that same moment, Hubris growled, lunging.

The other Twin, in the time it had taken me to turn to my left, swing my stick and turn back to my right, had dropped down two stories, moved around behind me, and lunged.

Hubris caught the spike of bone that was meant for Lillian’s throat, clamping it in his teeth, his weight pulling the spike down and away, the spike’s forward momentum continuing, so that Hubris slammed into Lillian.

But, as I’d observed in the moment Jamie had nearly been disarmed, each Twin had two spikes.

Neat, precise, and so fast I didn’t even see it, the same Twin threaded its other spike of bone through Hubris’ middle and into Lillian.

Time seemed to stand still.

One moment, and I’d broken so many promises and let so many people down.  Gordon, who’d asked me not to try fighting.  Lillian, on so many different levels.  Just a few seconds ago, I’d pledged to protect her while she worked.  But that wasn’t even the last of it.

I’d told myself that she would be the one to live, to carry on our legacy.

I’d told myself that I couldn’t see another Lamb die without losing my mind.

A tearing, agonized noise ripped itself from my throat as I brought the edge of the stick around, point aimed at the Twin’s throat and collarbone.  She tried to move, but Hubris still held one limb, and the other was stick inside the pair of dog and girl.

The point hit dead on, all of the force I could humanly bring to bear driven into a vital area.  The broken end of the point splintered, and the splinters raked across the twisted black-gray flesh that covered her spine.

No damage.  It was like she was skin and skeleton, and all of my effort couldn’t even break the skin in any meaningful way.

She pulled a point free of both Hubris and Lillian, and I could hear Lillian make a pained sound.

A backhand slap with the bone spike broke the middle of my stick, and I only barely kept it from catching me in the chin, point bisecting the skin of my face.

I floundered, off balance, stepping back to catch my footing, arms moving out to the sides, not even sure what I could do if I was armed and the Twin was standing still to let me hit her.

Not that she was.  The limb she’d brought up to break my stick and nearly cleave my face in half was still in the air, poised, point aimed at me.  She moved forward, bringing it down.

My balance was such that I could have regained my footing, but I would stop backpedaling in the process, and the spike would strike home.  I chose the other option, losing my balance while still moving back.  The point struck the road between my knees as I fell.

She moved the point to one side, and I was too slow to move my leg back and out of the way.  The point of the spike-limb cut the meat of my calf.

She took a step toward me, raising the limb to bring it down again, then stopped.

Her head turned, attention turning to Hubris, who still held her other limb, holding her back, even though his hind legs no longer worked.

She stabbed him again with her other limb, and he used his forelimbs to heave himself to one side.  The movement was small, but it meant that the lance of bone caught him at one side of his head and the ruff of his neck and shoulder instead of between the eyes.

“No!” I heard the shout.  “No!”

Lillian made a throwing motion, but she didn’t actually throw anything.  The motion was meant to shake out the contents of a bottle, except it was a weak motion, the contents not flying far enough.

The Twin danced back and away, about three long paces, before swinging its arm out.   Hubris was thrown loose, body sailing through the air to hit a wall, hard.

A moment later, the Twin was gone, retreating.

Lillian was alive.  She’d even pulled off the bluff.  Something that smelled like something the Twins should fear.  A small mercy Lillian had lacked the strength to successfully get the stuff on the Twin.  If she’d hit, the Twin would have realized the ruse.

I flipped over onto my stomach and moved to Lillian’s side.

She was clutching her bag with one arm, and the little bottle with another.

The bag had traces of blood on it from where the spike had penetrated Hubris and hit the bag.  It had absorbed the blow.

Gently, gingerly, Lillian pulled the bag to one side, looking down, before wincing.  There was more blood, and that creative, flexible part of my brain went to great lengths to envision how the blood had run down the spike, through the bag, and pooled there.

But no, the spike had gone right through the satchel and into her midsection.

Lillian stared down at it, then let her head fall down, short brown hair getting mussed up with snow, wet, and ash.

“Vital,” she said.

I reached down to touch the wound.  For the moment, I didn’t even care that the Twin was somewhere behind me, getting in position, assessing the chance to move.

“She’s hurt?” Jamie asked, his voice tight with stress.  He wasn’t willing to turn around, even, his eyes on our rear and the Twin that was staying out of the way of the gun.  I could see the shadow of it weaving in and out of cover, pacing around us.

“Hurt,” Lillian said, sounding oddly disconnected, in the same moment I said, “Yes,” sounding far from disconnected.

“We lost Hubris,” I said, and the words felt heavy.  I allowed myself to turn away from Lillian to look.  The dog wasn’t moving, and I couldn’t see a trace of the Twin.

I had to abandon Lillian yet again to scramble over to where the jar was.

“I was supposed to look after him,” Lillian said, sounding lost and hurt.  “He was supposed to look after me, and he did, but now he’s dead.  Hubris.”

I wasn’t the only one who felt like they had broken a very fresh promise.

Was this going to be how we remembered Gordon?  Going against what he’d asked us so soon after we’d lost him?

I clenched my teeth.

The cut on my leg was just deep enough I worried my leg wouldn’t function right.  I still managed to find my feet.

Keep looking.  You have one eye left.  Use it.

Wagons, short fences, all gave the Twin freedom to move without being seen.

If she hurdled over one piece of cover, or slid out from under one wagon, if she hurled something at us this time, something Lillian couldn’t dodge while she lay on the ground with a hole in her middle, I needed to be able to react right away.

I wasn’t even sure if I was looking in the right general direction.  She could have been scaling the outside of the building that loomed behind me, ready to pounce.  Land with points down, impaling Lillian, then lunge forward to finish me before turning to Jamie, if the other Twin didn’t use Jamie’s surprise to close the distance and finish him.

I could hear the gunshots and cannons in the distance.  I found myself adjusting my mental picture of where the battle lines were.

The Crown continued to advance, relentless.

Nobody would be stumbling onto this scene and helping us.

I continued to hold the jar aloft.  My neck and arms were so tense with the readiness to throw and react I thought something might give.

The Twin moved in my peripheral vision, so far off to the side that I thought it was Jamie’s.  Ducking low, moving through the longest and deepest shadows, soundless.

I threw the jar.

The lunge was a feint, because the Twin changed course the moment I let go.  But she seemed to expect that it was something else, the liquid Lillian had had.  When the jar crashed against the road, the contents spilling out, the Twin was far and away from the splash of liquid and broken glass.

From the smell, though, no.  It changed course, recoiling.

Jamie turned, aiming-

“Don’t!” I called out.

He was already pulling the trigger by the time I’d finished speaking, and the Twin was already moving in the same moment I’d reacted.  Jamie’s shot didn’t connect.

The threat of the bullet had been the only thing keeping the second Twin at bay.

In the time it took him to reload, we were completely and utterly vulnerable.

The Twins didn’t attack.

Wet snow continued to fall around us, stirred by violent wind.  Gunshots sounded in the distance.

“Gone,” Jamie said, not taking his eyes off the landscape.

“You’ve lost track?”

“No,” he said.  “Yes.  But I think they’re well and truly gone.  We did it.  I think?”

It didn’t feel that way.  I turned my attention back to Lillian.

“That’s what we were striving for, wasn’t it?  To hold out until they went back to their elder sisters to recoup?  Reoxygenate?”

I was just trying to make sure the Lambs survive from moment to moment, I thought.  My attention was on Lillian, on Hubris.

Three out of four?  Or was it going to become two out of four shortly?  I could have put most of my hand inside the hole in her stomach.  It might have gone clean through her.

She was already doing what she could to plug the wound.  She had the Lillian-but-not-Lillian look to her eyes as she focused on the task, face contorted in pain.

“Vital,” Jamie echoed Lillian’s statement from earlier, with nearly the same cadence.

“I won’t last half an hour without good medical attention,” she said.  She forced a smile.  “Possibly not even half that long.  Or with attention.  I could try giving myself surgery, but ha ha, hard to get the right angles, I think.  Maybe you could help, Jamie?  You helped before.”

“Maybe,” Jamie said.  The look on his face and the sound of his voice perfectly matched how I felt.

Medical attention?  They won’t give us the chance.

I couldn’t watch another Lamb die.  This wasn’t where my talents lay.  Strategy, ambush, fine, but being faced with superior strategy and ambushes?  A scenario where we were outmatched in virtually every capacity?  Our only advantage, if it could be called that, was that our enemies had a healthy sense of self preservation and an accurate sense of what they were capable of.

“Can you stand?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.  “But where are we going to go?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.  “But staying here doesn’t work either.”

“Okay,” she said.  She sounded so unaffected by the horrific wound to her middle.  “But, just saying, every minute I spend moving is two minutes less.”

“Noted,” I said, my voice tight.  Fifteen minutes to half an hour, she thought, before she bled out or suffered total system failure.  Five to ten minutes, if we spent the time moving.

“It’s nice, to be able to put the pain in a box and put the box away,” she said, her voice small.  I helped her to her feet.  “Except it’s not exactly like that.  It’s a very noisy, bright, awful box that I can’t stop paying attention to.”

“Keep paying attention to it, Lil.  It’s telling you important things you might need to use.”

We had so little time.  The younger twins would go to their older sisters and communicate where we were.  The older twins would move on our position, with a squad of armed soldiers.  After a short period of rest, the younger twins would mobilize again.  We’d be slower, two people down, and they would have a coordinated plan to get around our trump card.

“Still have the bottle?” I asked Lillian.

“Vitamin water,” Lillian said.

Our trump card.

So little time.  Agitated, I started to move, to talk, and stopped both motions.  I looked over my shoulder.

“Sy-” Jamie started.

“One moment,” I said.

I used some of that limited time to hurry over to where Hubris had fallen.

I bent down by the dog, and put a hand to his throat.

He heaved out a sigh.

“I knew you were made of tough stuff,” I said.

Another sigh.

He weighed about a third to half what I did.  It was hard to say- he was dense, all muscle.  The opposite of the Twins.  Pulling him into my arms was a task unto itself.

“Okay?” I asked.  “You did good, boy.  We’re going to help Lillian and we’re going to help you.”

I felt him sigh again, huffing a breath against my ear.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Good dog, good dog.”

The cut in my leg roared with pain as I hauled Hubris over to the others.

“Let’s go.”

Lillian put a hand out, touching Hubris’ damaged face.  She leaned close, whispering, “Thank you.”

Once she was done, I started to move.  Jamie put himself between me and the direction I wanted to go.

“Sy,” he said.

“We need to go,” I said.

“The burden is going to hold us back.”

“He saved me.  He saved Lillian, which is more important.”

“He’s gone, Sy.”

I held the dog, briefly stunned.  I waited, wanting to feel the chest expand with another sigh, another breath.

“Just- let him down.  Okay?  He was Gordon’s, in the end.  Not ours.  Gordon went, he did his job one last time, and then he followed his master, alright?”

I had to look to Lillian for confirmation.  I saw the look in her eyes.

It took some doing, but I managed to crouch down, and set the dog down on the road.

“Right,” I said.

“Good man,” he said.

I shook my head.  I moved to Lillian’s side, helping to support her as we moved.  “I was such an asshole to that dog, always calling him mutt, instead of his name.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “You really were.”

“But Hubris was such a pretentious name.”

“Yeah, Sy.  We need you to focus.  Where are we going?  We need a plan, because they’re going to catch their breath and come right for us.”

“Mauer,” I said.

“Mauer?”

“I don’t even know,” I said.  “But if we time it right, maybe he’ll take the opportunity to go after nobles instead of finishing us off.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.09 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I like when you hold me,” Lillian said.  “And when you pull my hair, and pinch me.”

“I’m not sure this is the time or place for that, Lil,” I said.

“I know you overthink sometimes, and I worry that you’ll stay up nights thinking, and you’ll second-guess yourself, and I really don’t want you to second guess yourself when it comes to me, okay?”

“I don’t and I won’t,” I said.  “Because you’ll communicate the good and bad to me, and you’ll keep me pointed in the right direction.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” I said.  “I’m deftly avoiding that particular subject and denying the possibility.”

On the other side of Lillian, Jamie shot me a look.

“I might die, Sy,” Lillian said.  “And it really scares me that I might fade away when I’m not in my right mind.  And it scares me more that you might be upset and get everything twisted around in that head of yours, and it scares me most of all that you might not even care at all.”

“I’d care, and you’re not going to die,” I told her.

“You’re so lovely when you’re being lovely,” she said, “And when you’re being mean that’s still lovely in its little way, but I think that’s because I’m twisted, myself.  When you’re pinching and poking fun at me the bad isn’t as bad as the attention is nice.  I get all mixed up in you like that, don’t you understand?”

“I understand,” I said, “I understood it well before you admitted it to yourself.”

She lowered her voice, like she was saying something confidential, “The only reason I’m not screaming and wailing about Gordon and- and about Hubris, and about this hole in my middle and about dying, I’m playing tricks with myself.  I’m reminding myself of the bittersweet moments you’re so good at, putting myself in that frame of mind.”

“That makes sense,” I said, very gently.

“But- but if I start to go, shake me out of it?  Please?  I don’t want to-” she said, stopping.

“You don’t even need to ask, Lil, okay?” I said.  “I’ve looked Death in the eye and I politely asked people who were going to kill me for the exact same thing, okay?  Not to let the poison be what takes me down into oblivion.  Not letting it be my passenger, or the horse I ride on.”

She reached up to touch my cheek.

“Mary told me.  At a sleepover, sharing a pillow, foreheads touching, whispering about things only best friends can talk about.  She said she pointed a gun at your head, and you asked her.  That was the moment she saw you as something more complicated than an enemy.”

“If and when the time comes, and it’s not coming today, I’ll make sure that you don’t even have to worry, okay?  I’d be there for you.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the blood loss or the fact that she was deliberately disconnecting herself, but she had a sleepy look on her face and the movements of her head.  Her eyes retained the intensity from before, but it was turned inward.

“It’s not even a concern today, because you’re going to be fine, got it?”

“Mm,” she said.  “Keep lying to me, Sy.  I have Jamie over here to tell me straight, when I need the blunt truth.”

I looked Jamie in the eye.

“You’re going to live, Lillian,” Jamie said.

She looked surprised at that.  The surprise gave way to a sudden, sharp change in emotion, her face twisting up, before she pulled herself together.

“Now I don’t know what to think,” she whispered.

Jamie indicated a turn.  I shook my head.  It would put us too close to the fighting.

“I’m so sorry,” Lillian said, still whispering.

“You’ve nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

“I asked for this job, I talked to Hayle, I asked to come here, I thought it would be such a good thing, and then it wasn’t, and then it really wasn’t.”

“None of that is your fault.”

“My mom-”

Again, that flicker of emotion, pushed away.

“Your mom?” I asked, gently.

“She was saying, I didn’t need to hurry.  I didn’t have to work so hard.  I’m too young to be so focused on my career, she said.  I should live a little, stop and smell the roses.  I told her that I hadn’t ever seen a proper, real, grown-in-a-garden rose since I came to Radham.  The ones you do see are altered, or they’re weaponized, or everything looks normal, but the origins aren’t.  Everything’s moving and everything’s turned on its head, and if you stop to smell the roses in a place like Radham, then you’ll only make yourself look like a fool.  The look on her face… I think she thought I was calling her a fool.  I didn’t mean to.”

“There are real roses in Radham,” Jamie said.

“Are there?” Lillian said.

“I’ll show you sometime,” Jamie said.  “After we get through this.”

I felt an immense gratitude toward him, not for the first time in these couple of days, that he was so willing to play along.

“I just-” Lillian said, halting.  “Before we left, before I even went to talk to Professor Hayle about doing this and bringing the Lambs, I thought, this is my chance.  Just stop.  Things have been so hard, the other Lambs are gone, I miss Mary, and it would be nice to spend time with Sylvester.  Wouldn’t it be nice to get milkshakes and do something together, and be at Radham when the other Lambs finished and got back?  Talk to Mary about everything stupid and minor and lovely that happened?  But I made the choice, for my career.  Now Gordon is dead and Hubris is dead, and I might die.”

“You took too much wyvern, you crybaby.  You definitely got the pathological lying thing down,” I said.  “It’s not your fault, and you’re not going to die today.”

She offered a halfhearted, one-note laugh.

“If I die-”

“You’re not going to die, you dunce.”

“-then pay a visit to my mom and dad?  You’d have to do it, Sy.  Lie to her face, about how things went.”

“If I say yes, will you shut up about dying and focus on the living part?”

“Yes.”

“Then sure.  I promise.  Jamie will hold me to it.”

Lillian nodded slowly, her eyes drifting shut.

I jostled her.  Her eyes popped open.

“I wasn’t-” she said.  “It wasn’t that.  I just felt very peaceful and at ease.  I like being able to put all of my trust into your hands, Sy.”

“Okay, Lil.”

Her head was hanging.  Above and over her field of view, Jamie raised a hand, gesturing.

Slow.  Feet.

It was true, now that I paid attention.  Lillian had one arm over my shoulder, one over Jamie’s.  I had one arm around her back, a hand on her chest, so I could maybe stop her from falling forward if she stumbled.  She was leaning on us more, her feet were dragging and scuffing the ground, and we were moving slower than we had been a matter of minutes ago.

Think.  Think.

Could we muscle our way to victory?  Were there any hostages we could take that would matter, enabling us to turn Mauer to our ends, or at least getting him to the point where he might listen to us for long enough for me to say what mattered?

Evasion.  Could we make our way through and to the other end of his camp and somehow trip up the Twins, ensuring they tangled?

Deception, misleading?  Instead of moving ourselves in a better way, could we lead the Twins in the wrong direction?

Draw on any of our individual talents?  We had Jamie’s memory, but I wasn’t sure how we could use that.  Gordon was dead, or we might have been able to use his sense of tactics.  Not necessarily to put together a plan, but to at least feel better about whatever plan he chose.  Hubris was a defensive tool, able to let us know when the Twins were coming, and we didn’t have him either.

I could hear the noise of the crowd, mingled with gunfire and noise.  The crowd had a light, too, and further down the street, two hundred and fifty metres down, past two intersections, that glow was bleeding out into the road ahead of us.

We were close to Mauer’s camp.

If we found a way past the perimeter and mingled with the people in the crowd…

No.  Every idea I came up with met with a firm ‘no’.  I was sharper on Wyvern, but I couldn’t see a solution.

I had emulated Jamie in the past, and I’d done a shitty job.  Could I be a Mary, and rig an ambush that would buy Lillian time to perform surgery on herself?  I would have to emphasize the ambush over the actual fighting to accomplish anything, because I couldn’t fight.

Could I play Helen, and act?  Or be the Helen behind the mask, the monster, and catch my enemy in a position where they couldn’t fight back?

My mind was pulling the characters into existence, so real in my mind’s eye I could almost see them.  Gordon, standing in my peripheral vision, the light from a side street catching the moisture in the corner of one eye.  The movement of Lillian’s dress was Hubris, at our feet.  A shadow atop the fence was Helen, the blade of the bayonet Jamie had across his back was Mary’s, as she walked beside us, on the far side of Jamie, stretching her arms over her head.

It would be so easy to lose my mind.  To give the images a power they don’t yet have.

I stared into the light, further down the street.  I imagined a copper-haired Mauer, staring me down.  Staring us down.  Just Mauer, as an abstract picture, without particular weapons or clothing, just the intense eyes, the sharp nose, the hair, the fire and light and noises of the crowd around him.  A lopsided silhouette.

No actual crowd, however.  The mental image stood alone.

“Jamie,” I said.

“What is it?”

“Stay behind.”

“No.”

“If the Twins have any sense of smell, they’ll go for the most obvious scent.  Blood.  Lillian’s.  You back off, stay on the periphery.  If there’s a way to do this, maybe we can disappear into the crowd.  In the chaos of Mauer’s camp, two kids, maybe she and I can find a way to get her medical attention.  Get to a place where we’re safe enough to get her surgery.  An added body is a chance we get noticed.  If we fail, it’s another dead Lamb.  You, at least, you could live through this, let the others know how it happened.”

“Vital organs,” Lillian said, voice soft.  “Need a transplant.  Nobody in that camp is going to be good enough to do it.  This isn’t going to work.”

Frustration welled, with that same wild wanting-to-hit-something rage.  I swallowed it and buried it.

“We’ll figure it out,” I said.

“I’ll come,” Jamie said.  “Even if it means a higher chance we get spotted, I think I have to come.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  “If I pass out, maybe he can finish.  But I’ve got to do the surgery myself.  At least at the start.”

That doesn’t work at all!

Jamie added his argument to hers, “And if I leave you, then I feel like either I won’t make it, or you two won’t.”

I shook my head.

He wasn’t wrong, but he was one hundred percent wrong.  I knew I was contradicting myself, and I knew the contradiction was because a small, dark corner of my mind had turned itself to the task of cutting losses.

“Okay,” I finally said.

“Not okay,” Lillian said.  She was slurring her words a little.  I didn’t need gestures from Jamie to notice that.  “Remember the rule?  Can’t sacrifice one Lamb for one.  Have to save two.  Definitely most definitely can’t sacrifice three for a chance of saving one of the three.  Dumb.”

I didn’t answer her, and she didn’t resist.  As we drew closer, she didn’t even add more words of protest.

The lights of the fires were bright.  Torches, lanterns, stacks of crates and pallets that had been set off to the sides and set on fire, to better shed light on the surroundings.

The people milled this way and that.  In Mauer’s orbit, they were focused, moving with purpose, gathering together in groups.  Mauer’s lieutenants were organizing them, giving direction where there wasn’t any.

Now that we were here, I was feeling how slow Lillian was moving.

For every minute we spend moving, she loses three.

We weren’t going to be able to make it through the entire camp.  We weren’t going to make it, waiting at the periphery until the Twins came for us.

Maybe this is better.

I gestured, then led Lillian over to the corner of one building, near a fire.  The three of us leaned against a wall, my shoulders tense and knotted with the work of bearing a share of her weight.

A burly man with a gun and arms black from fingertip to elbow looked our way, concern etched on his face.

I extended an arm, hand pointed at him, then, using my whole arm, gestured.  I closed my eye, willing him to listen, willing this to work, to all come together.  The wrong person at the wrong time, the attention of bystanders moving faster than this man and words could, it could end us.

But the alternative was seeing another Lamb die, and very possibly dying myself.

He approached, wary, slow.  I opened my eye, watched as his eyes moved.  He saw the blood on Lillian’s shirtfront, dripping down her dress and stockings, and picked up the pace.

His voice was inaudible in the commotion that was Mauer’s army.

I had to raise my own voice.  “The nobles are here!  Spread the word!”

Confusion crossed his features.  He indicated Lillian.

I thought the words he uttered were something like, “What about her?” but I couldn’t be sure.

“Spread the word!” I repeated, clenching my fist.  My other fist held Lillian’s hand.  “Nobles!”

Jamie was looking at me like I was crazy.

When I’d imagined Mauer, I’d imagined him standing alone.  That was the trick.  To frame things in such a way that I was confronting him, not his army.  There were other hurdles to cross, to actually attempt to communicate with a man who we had attempted to burn alive just hours ago, before he communicated with us by way of gun and bullet.

We’d sicced the Brechwell Beast on him too.  I wasn’t sure if he knew enough to blame us for that.

We’d killed his buddy and ally Percy.  We’d dismantled his plans in Radham.

He was a good orator, but a gun was louder and better at getting the last word in.

In this, I was using his army to reach out to him, to communicate the message I so dearly wanted him to recognize before he could pull that trigger.

I clenched Lillian’s hand harder.  I was aware of the attention we were getting.

Putting a hand out, I gestured.  Eyes.  Dark.

Close your eyes.

I closed my eye and bowed my head.

Lillian had talked about this.  About liking it.  Surrender.

I detested it.

My eye closed, my other eye blinded, I relied on my hearing, listening to what Mauer must hear so often.  The ebb and flow, the nuance, the sentiments, the directions that people were moving, even when they stood still.

I could hear the quiet as if it were a physical thing, as voices lowered, as attention shifted away from dialogues and to him, to Mauer, or to his lieutenants.

If he was placed differently, if the lieutenants were faster to arrive, they might well obey his orders and put bullets in us.

The lowered volume was more powerful in this climate than any roar of an explosion or dull crack of a rifle could be.  I listened, my altered awareness moving to my senses, drawing a complete picture of the crowd.  I could feel the chill as wet snowflakes settled on my forehead and nose.

He was standing in front of us, watching.  The crowd watched both us and the man who led them.

“You tried to burn me alive,” he said, his voice carrying.  “Good soldiers died in that fire.  Good work was undone.”

I opened my eye.  I met his gaze.

Every inch of me wanted to reply, to retort, to engage him in a duel of words.

Silence, though, had its own power.

“Every time I see you, people die, things fall to pieces, and the old order falls back into place,” he said.

Silence.  I couldn’t reply now.  If it came down to an exchange of words, I would lose.  I knew that.

“The manipulative snake, the boy with the perfect memory, and the Academy’s pet who keeps the monsters alive.  There are more, I know.  Are they circling around, trying to free the primordial warbeasts?”

His voice had such power to it, it sounded like it belonged here, amid the noise of the crowd, the distant shouts, the crackle of fire, the gunshots.

“Dead,” I said.  My voice had none of that power.  “My friend and brother.  The dog that worked with him.  The others are in another city.”

He stared me down, trying to find the lie.

“The blond one,” he said.

I nodded once.

“Good.”

I couldn’t maintain the eye contact, hearing that word from his lips.  I clenched one hand.

“The nobles, you said?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Explain.”

“They’re out there.  They’re probably even listening to this dialogue between us.  They’re that close.”

“And you want to work with us to stop them?  Shall I commit some of my best soldiers to hunting down this phantom enemy and expect them to return alive with the heads of the nobles?  Or should I learn from past mistakes and assume this is a trap?”

There were so many loaded guns pointed in our direction, but they were Mauer’s men.  The civilians were watching, taking it in.  So many of them were altered.  Framed by the fires, they looked like the legions of hell, in raincoats and the thick, coarse clothing of sailors and laborers.

I felt Lillian’s grip get weaker by the moment.

“I’m expecting that you’ll kill me.  I’m hoping, I’m- I’m counting on the fact that you’ll spare her, spare Lillian because she’s human, because she has parents to go back to.  Take her, keep her prisoner, but let her live.”

“And the other one?”

“The other one, Jamie, the Nobles let him live.  They took my damn eye.  They killed our dog.  They left her dying and almost killed me, but they didn’t act against him.  When he was going to come with us, they tried to keep him.  You can probably keep him prisoner and barter him back to the Academy.  Or use him against them.  Me?  I’m not that valuable.”

“And the blond one?  You left that out.”

“The Academy killed him,” I said.  “Not the nobles.  In the midst of all of this, his heart gave out.”

There were distant shouts.  Mauer turned to a lieutenant, giving a set of short orders that I couldn’t make out with the distance between us.

“You’re willing to die, but you want me to save those two,” he said, returning his focus to me.

Again, there was no answer as good as silence.  Surrender.

“It doesn’t add up,” he said.

Still, silence.  I couldn’t respond.

Mauer approached, gun in hand.

“Let’s hear from you, instead.  The one with the glasses.  You, be quiet.”

I shut my mouth.

“Yes, sir,” Jamie said.  His voice sounded hollow.

“When I kill him, am I supposed to believe you’ll be okay with it?”  Mauer’s words had such a ring of finality to them.  That you’ll cooperate?”

“Okay?  No, never.  But that’s the deal we made.  That we can only sacrifice ourselves if it saves two others.  I know our history, Reverend.  I won’t hold a grudge if you do it.  It’ll hurt, I’ll remember it all perfectly, but I won’t hold a grudge.”

Mauer drew closer to me, pressing the gun to my chest.

The situation was so desperate that he could shoot all three of us, and the crowd would forgive it, because Mauer gave them a chance.

He was weighing the odds, trying to discern the ruse.

Yet I’d never been more honest.

“It doesn’t add up,” Mauer said, to me, not to the crowd.  I wasn’t sure they could even hear.

“They took my eye, they killed our dog, they hurt her.  I don’t have a way to save her.  I don’t have a means of retaliating against them.  Standing here with you and your army pointing guns at us gives us better odds than being out there, free, not a gun in sight, with them.  Shoot me, seal our blood pact so you get your justice and I get to save those two, Jamie will tell you the particulars of the enemy you’re facing.”

“The twins,” Jamie said.  “The Baron Richmond, too.  The Duke is your enemy on this battlefield.”

“I knew that already,” Mauer said.  His eyes were so dark, with the angle of his head keeping the light of the fires from reaching them.

My voice was keyed low, for Mauer to hear, not for the crowd.  “Hurt them.  Make it bad.  Unleash the primordials if you have to, to make it as vicious and costly a fight as you can.”

“What changed?” Mauer asked.

“If I told you, it would sound manipulative,” I told him.  “It would hurt my cause more than it helped.  Please save her.  We’re running out of time.”

“I know you’re running out of time,” Mauer said.  “If she expires naturally, I don’t have to shoot her.”

A full-body chill took me.

He went on, voice a purr, “It makes the remainder palatable.  Doesn’t this move the conversation along, add to the pressure?  I want you to tell me the truth.  Tell me why you’re really here.”

I couldn’t answer.  If I told him, he would laugh in my face.  Too transparent, too obvious a manipulation.  Worse, it was honest, and honesty was the shovel I used to dig my own grave, every time.

I clenched my jaw and averted my eyes.

I’d made a bad gamble.  This was it.  Maybe the other Lambs would find out from rumor and hearsay, piece together our history.

“She’s dying,” he said.

My eye inadvertently went to Lillian.  She was leaning against the wall, nodding off.  She’d stopped talking some time ago.  Only Jamie’s support kept her from collapsing altogether.

The barrel still pressed against my chest, over my heart.

Shoot me, I willed him.  The crowd will see.  Then, at least, there’s a chance you’ll spare the others.  You have reasons to.  The others have heard those reasons, and the danger they pose is so minor, the possible advantages to be gained too great. 

Be a hero, save the dying girl.  Use Jamie to get information on the enemy.

Shoot me!

With that final thought, I reached for the gun he held to my heart, for the finger on the trigger.

He was faster than I was.  The gun pulled away, then struck me in the eye socket that was still swollen from the loss of one eye.

I fell, my wits dashed, and he took advantage of me being stunned to reach down with his monstrous hand.

It was supposed to be useless, but I supposed he’d surrounded himself with doctors, giving him some limited mobility and strength.

He lifted me clear off the ground, my legs dangling.  Like that, he held me so the bonfire was a matter of feet behind me.

“The truth,” he said.

“I can’t,” I managed, voice straining with the pressure on my throat.

“The truth,” he said again.

“Please.  Save her.  Spare him.”

“Last chance.”

“I can’t,” I said, again, working to get the words out.  With the words, I felt all of the thoughts and emotions I’d been burying emerging, tumbling out, too real and too sharp.  “Can’t watch another Lamb die.”

His grip shifted so I could breathe.  His eyes stared through me, now reflecting the flames where they’d been so dark.  The heat of the fire roasted my legs, made the cut in my calf prickle, my shoes too hot.  Literally held over the fire.

I went on, “And I know it sounds manipulative, because I know you saw your comrades die and it’s why you fight now.  I know it sounds bad, to say it’s about faith, that I believe in your humanity more than I believe in them, now, when you used to call yourself the Reverend.”

“Fray said you were almost ready to turn on the Academy that made you,” Mauer said.  The people closest to us in the crowd could hear.  “Are you?”

Say yes.  One word.

I turned to silence instead.

He stared at me, uncomprehending.

“Why not?” he asked.  “The leash has been loosened, the people at the top have betrayed you, taken your eye and your pet, wounded your teammate and are now actively after your life.  The people who made you have thrown away your lives for the sake of advancement.  They perverted you, made you something dark and twisted.  Why wouldn’t you turn your back to them?”

The fire burned hotter beneath me.

“Take away what they gave me, what they made me into, every place I really know, the people I love and the people I hate, and I’m not sure what’s left,” I said.

He moved me to the side, and let go, dropping me to the ground by the bonfire.

He could have said so many things, explaining the decision, driving a poignant word home.  He had the ability to control what he said and how he said in so many masterful ways.

He chose the damning silence instead.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.10 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The blades of bayonets prodded me, keeping me in a place where I couldn’t reach anyone or anything.  If I moved too slowly, I got jabbed.  If I moved too fast, I got jabbed.  Let my elbows drop any lower than my shoulders, and I got a sharp prod in the armpit or the more sensitive flesh of the upper arm.

At least two of the prods had been sharp enough to pass through my raincoat and clothing.  I could tell I was bleeding.  One of the slices was near the elbow of a raised arm, running down to my side.  A little to one side and they might have jabbed the artery.

I was led past the gauntlet of onlookers and soldiers, past fire and rubble and shadows shaped like people.  Some of the onlooker’s faces were familiar or familiar-ish, but my thoughts were nowhere near the state where I was going to come up with names and identities.

Jamie was in front of me.  Lillian was being carried or held somewhere behind me.  Not that I was allowed to turn around to check.

Mauer had circled the wagons, literally.  The wagons were heavy constructions, solid and reinforced enough to take a hit from a small bomb.  The chains that stretched between them bound the primordial creatures that the crusty old asshole had put together.  I wasn’t sure if it was imagination or not, but they seemed bigger than I remembered them being, and all of them were occupied devouring the bodies of cattle that had been supplied to them.  Beaks and gaping mouths cracked bone, tearing and sucking at meat.  The crowd that was still getting outfitted and ready to push into the crowd and join the front line was gawking and staring from a distance.

Mauer’s war camp was in the dead center of the circled wagons and primordials, which were in turn surrounded by the bulk of his actual soldiers – not the simple rabble of Lugh that he had conscripted, but people with proper guns and the dated uniforms, dyed black with all Crown and Academy affiliations stripped off.

The shepherd walked well ahead of Jamie, approaching a group of soldiers, leaning close to give orders that could be heard over the hubbub of the camp.  All confidence, without a trace of fear apparent in his body language.  Soldiers broke away from the perimeter around the primordials, hurrying to manage the tasks they’d been given.

The soldier in front of me who had his bayonet sticking back in my direction stopped.  I stopped a fraction of a second later, and felt the blade tip prick my sternum.  Jamie was just in front of me and to my left, handspan out of reach, or he would be if I was allowed to stick my arm out instead of holding my hands above my head.

Mauer turned back to face us, as if we’d been an afterthought until now.

There were hundreds of people in the streets around us, but a natural clearing had formed around Mauer’s encampment, thanks to the creatures that had been chained up between the wagons.  Each of the hundreds of people were raising their voices, trying to communicate with one another by speaking louder than the rest.  The fires were too bright compared to the darkness, and anywhere I looked, there were people being carried back and away from the fighting, bloody and injured to gruesome degrees, and there were others who were summoning the courage to go fight.

In the midst of the chaos, Mauer was very still and poised.  In the midst of the noise, it didn’t even feel like he raised his voice to be heard.

“Take the girl back.  Ensure she gets prompt attention from our best,” Mauer said.

I saw only a glimpse of Lillian being carried past me.

“You were willing to die for them.  I’m going to assume that as long as we have her, I don’t need to worry too much about you?” Mauer asked.

I shook my head.

“I need a proper answer.”

I spoke, and the noise around us swallowed up my voice.  I had to raise my voice to be heard.  “I won’t do anything.”

“Go back to the front,” Mauer instructed the men who ringed Jamie and I.  “Look for the places where courage is failing, give them purpose.  Don’t retreat- that will look bad.  Take them out to either side of the battlefront.  Scout, see if there are any positions we can hold.”

“The Twins,” I said.  Again, I had to raise my voice.  It was somehow hard to put words together.  I felt emotionally shaken, and while I could use Wyvern to center myself and bring myself to a point where I felt like the usual Sylvester, it bothered me that I had to.  The more I looked at Mauer, the harder it was.  Still, I managed, “We were running from them.  The Twins have pet weapons that are fast, they stalk, pick off the weak or tear through an entire squad, and then they leave.  They’re accompanied by Crown soldiers, and they’re absolutely, one hundred percent confident that they can take what you throw at them.  If you send your men out to the-”

“The northeast,” Jamie said, pointing.

“-Then those men are going to run into the Twins, and they are going to die.”

Mauer took that in, I could see him processing the information.  Then he spoke again to the soldiers, crisp, authoritative, “We’ll believe them.  Triple-down on the soldiers you take with you.  Nobody even urinates without five others watching their backs and flanks.  Make it clear what they’re up against, that it’s a hunting-the-hunter scenario, and anyone who puts a bullet through a noble or a noble’s monster will earn five year’s worth of wages, paid from my pocket to their hand.  That does include you.”

He was referring to his uniformed soldiers.  The men nodded, not even cracking smiles at the prospect of the money before they hurried off.  I no longer had blades pointed at me from every direction.

“Stanley, Gene, with me,” Mauer said.  “Bring those two.”

A hand seized one of my shoulders.  Better than being led by a blade.

The door of one wagon slid open on rollers, running along the side of the wagon.  The far side was already open.  It served as a kind of gate by which we passed between two of the chained primordials, each kept a fairly healthy distance away by the chains and the meals they’d been given.

The inside of the wagon, I noted, was packed with weapons.  Nothing explosive, the ammo seemed to be stored elsewhere, but there were whole stacks of rifles that hadn’t been provided to the people on the front.

He was such a callous asshole.  To have people fighting with what they could scrounge up, some with sticks and hatchets, against people with guns, when he could have armed them?

He was so capable when it came to raising morale, inflaming passions and speaking to the heart, but that belied a terrible coldness.  Tactically, there were probably reasons, but in terms of decency, I had to wonder.

I very much suspected that the only true glimpse I’d had of the man had been when he’d been holding me over the fire, challenging me to give him an honest answer.

We passed through the wagon-gate to the interior of the ring.  Makeshift walls and criss-crossing chains kept the primordials from moving in this direction or even seeing within.  It served as a sanctuary, almost.  The only light came from lanterns and flowed under wagons and through the wood and metal slats of the erected walls.  The noise of the crowd was muted slightly, the hard edges of words blurring into a more general noise.

In the center was another wagon, with steel plates held in place by grown wood branches.  We approached, and a shape moved.

Primordial, I thought, my heart nearly stopping, before I saw the shape more clearly.

White, large, and composed almost entirely of thin white spines, it had the grace of a cat, but it was headless, only a blunt, rounded end at the front.  It peered around the edge of the wagon at the center of the clearing before settling down.

What did we call it, again?  I asked myself.  It took a moment for the name to come to me.  Whiskers.  He still has it?

Mauer ignored the creature and led us within the wagon, taking a seat at the far side of a table at the wagon’s center.  I’d expected to see a map, but it was littered with papers marked with handwriting.

Stanley and Gene pushed us, so that Jamie and I were positioned in the wagon.  Me at a seat just inside and to the left of the door, Jamie taking a seat just inside and to the right of the door.  The two soldiers stood in the doorway.

“The people who obey orders well have already formed groups and are nervously waiting their turn at the front.  The ones who didn’t or couldn’t sort themselves into groups as they were instructed to do have formed… only rabble.  They’re the ones doing the fighting right now.  Anywhere from ten minutes to an hour from now, that front line will break,” Mauer said.  “Stanley, Gene, and the other soldiers I’m on a first-name basis with know this.”

Cold, I thought again.

“When our front line breaks, the mass of people between this position and the enemy front line will disappear, and we will simultaneously drive the primordials forward, into enemy lines.  The stitched who have been fighting are running hot, the people giving them orders are tired, less focused, and less organized.  The primordials will tear into their lines, as any good warbeast might.  The difference here is that the primordials mandate a specific, overwhelming response.  Ordinary bullets and weapons shouldn’t put them down.”

He was telling us his strategy?

He didn’t expect to let us go before it mattered.  Even if we ran or had absolute free reign to act as we wanted from this moment onward, I doubted there was much we could do, except maybe keep the primordials from being set free, or set them free earlier.  None of those scenarios boded well for Jamie, Lillian, and me.

“Lillian could tell you how dangerous this is.  You’re playing with fire, using the primordial life like this.”

“I’m aware of the dangers,” Mauer said.  “I’ve worked with it before.  On both sides of the conflict.”

I frowned.  It was so strange to see him in this context.  Outside of Brechwell, maybe, and the time we’d had tea with him on first meeting, I’d never seen him simply conversing.  In both of those places, he’d been acting.

Had he reached his limit, was he catching his breath from the command of a city-sized rebellion, here in this sanctuary, where the walls and heavy wagons blocked out some of the outside noise?

“The Battle of Foster,” Jamie said.  “You were there when the small Academy was studying Primordials.”

“Yes,” Mauer said.  He turned, and cranked a knob on a tank below a kettle, before reaching for matches.  He lit the tiny gas stove, then started filling a kettle.  “When we’re children, we believe our parents are invincible, capable of anything.  Then reality hits, we see their flaws.  Foster was when reality first came knocking, for me, the Academy and Crown were like parents to me.  Foster was a schism between Crown and Academy.  Well, a subset of Academies.  Two months of lead-up, and it ended very quickly.”

“What happened?” Jamie asked.

A kettle, now filled, was perched on the stove.

“That doesn’t matter.  But I was there for the duration.  It wasn’t what broke my loyalty to the Academy and the Crown.  That came later, after I saw the incidents repeat and become a pattern.

Even now, in these close confines, with no need or pressure to manipulate or win us over, taking a break from rallying the crowds and commanding a small army, he still modulated his voice, chose his words with care, suggesting just how natural his skill with it all was.  I was getting wrapped up in the words, craving to know more about Foster and his origins, pulled into his spell.

But with the word ‘pattern’, I thought of my best friend Jamie, of Gordon, of Hubris, of Lillian.  I could see the pattern emerging, I could see where it went, and that thought kept me from getting cozy.

“A pattern punctuated by what they did to your arm?” I asked.

“Something always brings it home,” Mauer said, meeting my eye.

The look and the words made me want to get up out of my seat and leave.  As a prisoner of war, I didn’t have that option.

“Fray tasked me with looking after the primordial creatures for a reason,” Mauer said, leaning back.  “The nobles, assuming you’re telling the truth, pose a greater threat.  I’ve seen others on the battlefield.  I anticipated meeting one at most, not-”

“Four,” Jamie said.

“Six if you count the Twins as two pairs,” I said.

“If we ignore the ones who were chasing you, what do you expect will happen?” he asked.

“They infiltrate your lines, they kill us, your lieutenants, or you, if not everyone,” I said.  “Given the chance, they might even make it look easy.”

He didn’t even blink at that.  “What does it take to kill them?”

“Lillian knows,” Jamie said, “But she’s in the care of your doctors.”

“In terms of men with guns, then,” Mauer said.  “How many?”

“Forty, at the very least,” I said.  “Might give you good odds, if they know what they’re doing.  But if things go south, I don’t think there’s a nice middle ground where half the men die and you hurt the nobles.  If your men start dying, they all die, toppling like dominoes.  Those creatures are like bolts of lightning, they’ll strike one target and carry on through while the rest are still getting their footing.”

“I’m not going to give you good soldiers,” Mauer said.

Give us?

“I’m not going to give you forty men, either.”

He was turning us back around and sending us into open combat with the Twins, damn him.

I might have resisted, but I couldn’t bring myself to.  I’d been willing to get shot to buy Lillian and Jamie a chance.  This was something similar, but it was a killing deferred, out of view of the crowd.

“Win-win for you,” I said.  “You keep Lillian, so you have us on a leash if we succeed, and if we fail, then the Twins are at least distracted and the Lambs are removed as a threat.”

“Is that a problem?”

I shook my head.  When I looked up from the table, he was staring at me, scrutinizing me.

“It’s not a problem,” I said, in case he was waiting for a verbal answer.

“You’re so resigned to it,” he said.  “At an age when you should be playing ball in the streets, fawning over girls, sneaking drink from your parent’s cabinets to share with your friends, and counting change to buy candy from the store.”

“My girl has a hole through her stomach, and she’s lying in your medical tent or wherever,” I said.  “My best friend is gone forever, and someone wearing his face is sitting three feet to my left.  My other friends are hours away, or are lying dead in a house a short distance away, being cremated as the house burns up around them.”

Why am I telling him this?

Why is he even showing an interest?

“I know soldiers who couldn’t put the gun away, even after it left their hands,” Mauer said.  “I could be one of them.  So many men who couldn’t stop fighting, or who were afraid to.  Prisoners?  Same thing.  Finally freed, somehow escaping getting netted by the Academies and subjected to one torture or another in the name of advancement, they don’t know themselves without the stained, black-and-white striped prisoner’s tunic.  I’ve seen it with parents, the ones with hard children, where the child takes so much attention that whole days pass where the mother or father don’t think for themselves.  Only for the job.  The child grows up, the job is no longer needed, and the parent, like the prisoner or the soldier is-”

“A shell,” Jamie said.

Mauer took the kettle, a small jar, and a mug from spaces to his right, putting loose leaf tea into the mug before pouring himself a cup.

I knew a lot of tea drinkers, and the fact that he hadn’t served or even offered us any tea was as good as a cardinal sin.  I couldn’t think of a better, more vulgar way to give the two of us the middle finger and say ‘we are not friends, here’.

“Don’t think that you’re something special, or that any connection exists between us,” Mauer said.  “I’ve seen so many others walk this path, I have no sympathy for you any more than I have sympathy for them.”

There it is.

He’d been telling the truth, that he’d asked the same questions, he’d been a soldier, he’d lost his identity, and he had rebuilt it.

He’d climbed the mountain, and now he was looking down on others who were still climbing and faulting them for not having the strength he did.

“You still spared me,” I said.

“The anger is there.  Genevieve Fray talked about it.  You’ve already made the decision to turn your back on the Academy and Crown, I think.  You don’t really want to hurt me.  If I turn you loose, what happens?  A high chance you die.  If you cross that hurdle, there’s a high chance you get that last, tiny push, and you turn on them.”

If I can climb the mountain…

He finished, “…and a small chance you turn on me.  Can I roll those dice?  Should I?”

“You did,” I said.  “And something tells me there’s more to it.”

He smiled, sipping his scalding tea.  The look in his eyes, though, was back to that darkness, without the light of fire reflecting in the orbs.  I well and truly believed he didn’t give a damn whether we lived or died.

He wasn’t going to share.

“Ten men,” he told us.  “You’ll get the equipment you need and want.  Stanley will take you out to the fringe of the battlefront.  The men I sent out to recruit with orders to hunt the nobles are going to have heard about the bounty  I offered, or they’ll want away from the front line.  Whatever their reason, you’ll ask for help, and they’ll offer it.  You’ll find tired men, dregs, and drunks, some less capable of following orders than dogs.  I’ll assume the Twins will be waiting for you?”

I nodded.

“Do what you can with the nobles.  When you come back, don’t come straight back or retrace your steps.  By the time you’re done, the primordial beasts will be loose.  If you head straight back, you may run headlong into their mouths.  Your Lillian should be waiting for you, and you can see how she is.”

I nodded once again, glancing at Jamie.

The prospect of going up against the Twins again spooked me.  I was willing to admit that to myself.

Fear and pain were things I could master and mold with wyvern flowing through the capillaries of my brain.  But, as with my inability to fight, as with the lies, there was always the possibility that an external force or ingrained habit could do the molding for me, leaving a deep, powerful impression.

“Death looks over everyone’s shoulder,” Mauer said.  “One eye on what they’re doing, one eye on his watch.  There’s nothing special about your Death.  Yet you let it rule your life.  You’ll find yourself so free once you realize how little power it has.”

“That’s a pretty goddamn shitty thing to say to someone who’s friend just died,” I said.

Mauer’s eyes were still dark and penetrating as he stared at me, unflinching.  “How many of my friends and colleagues do you think died tonight, Sylvester?  Some at mine, indirectly.  Some at your hands, directly.  Some at the Nobles’.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“I’ve been bothered for so long and to such depth that even those deaths can’t be put into perspective,” he said, and his voice was cool, cold, and disaffected, “I could kill every last noble and every last demented doctor who perverts something that should be good, and I don’t think it would be any better than a drop of water to a man dying of thirst.  I could keep fighting until every last soldier is dead and my weapons broken to pieces, and I would claw at my enemies with my fingers, until those fingers were worn down to nubs.”

“That sounds like madness, not greatness,” I told him.

“The difference between the two, Sylvester, is that if it were madness, I would have to, and I would be remembered for it.  But I don’t have to.  This war can be won, and if I see my way to the end of the fight, then I will be remembered as great.”

He paused, holding up his steaming mug, before continuing, “The Academy is big, and fighting it requires a character that is incapable of giving up the fight.  I have the character.  A small part of the reason I spared you is that I think you have it too.  If you’re willing to recognize it.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.  It felt like a compliment and an insult at the same time, and he’d delivered it with conviction.  Not in the way he’d addressed a crowd, but to me as an individual.

His words rang in my ear as I turned away, leaving the wagon with our soldier escort.

Jamie fell into step beside me, glancing my way.

“Don’t let him get to you,” Jamie said.

“He already did,” I said.  “After we arrived at the camp, before he took us to his wagon.”

“Don’t give any more ground, then,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

The soldier led us forward, one hand on each of our shoulders, steering us as we navigated a crowd that got thicker with every few steps.  I could smell sweat and fear, mingling with smoke.  The heat of the crowd and torches melted the precipitation that was still at the razor’s edge between snow and rain.

Jamie and I were steered into an alley, where soldiers were sitting against the wall, staring at the ground between their feet, weapons propped up around them or sitting across their laps.  Men and women, people with body modifications, Brunos, and people with barely any physical changes at all.

“We need soldiers for a special mission,” Gene said.  His voice had a ragged edge to it, as if his throat had been damaged at some point in the past.  “There’s a bounty.  Five year’s worth of pay, Mauer says.”

Heads raised.  I could see interest in eyes.

“Hand up if you’re interested,” Gene said.  “Chance to get away from this, you’re hunting through territory that was deemed safe with past patrols, looking for a single unit.”

Slowly, one by one, they raised their hands.

“Nobles,” I said, loud enough to be heard.  “Two of them.”

I saw the reaction.  Hands dropped.  Others flinched in surprise.

“The children are coming with us?”

“Shush.  That was the boy Mauer was talking to, ten minutes ago.”

“I thought he was an enemy?  He was an enemy, right?”

“They were,” Gene said.  “Mauer turned them around.  We get help finding who we’re looking for and taking them out, in exchange for healing the kid’s friend.”

I could hear the commotion, and a part of me registered it, taking note of particulars.  Another part of me was thinking on another level.

Adam, who I’d met yesterday, was here.  The Bruno who’d actually been decent to me.  He was looking at me as if I was something alien.

Pick ten, I thought, looking them over.  I could read the clues and the cues, and identify the troublemakers, the drunks, the people who were on their last legs.  There were people who were strong, and people who had been malnourished for much of their lives, living in this city I was growing to hate so much.

It was a deeper challenge from Mauer, echoing our parting exchange, turning the table so I was now in the position of being callous.

Pick ten, knowing there was a good chance they would die, picking this particular fight.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.11 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I looked over grown and not-yet grown men and women, my mind leaning into a perspective where I could focus more on details, the little clues.

The man who sat close to me had longer hair and a scruffy beard, hands bearing a mix of fresh blisters and new calluses, his nose red and running, his face padded at the edges and features creased like someone five years older than he was.  A drunk.  He likely worked whatever job he could find to earn money and then subsisted off of that money as he slumped off into long binges.  The way he sat against the wall suggested he had no plans of standing up and rejoining the fight.  Any light I saw in his eyes was because of the potential money.  He would work only as hard as he had to in order to get that money.  A surly and tractable character otherwise.

A young woman with decorative bony ridges at the cheekbones and the bridge of her nose was staring at me with yellow eyes.  Her arms and legs had been both tattooed and modified to be a half-foot longer each.  Lean with muscle, I could put her in the same mental box as the ‘Brunos’.  Where they were loaded to bear with muscle and sheer mass, she was lean.  I could imagine her crawling on the outside of a ship in construction or up the face of a building.

But as I searched her, I could see her expression shift a fraction.  The bony ridges at her nose hid the wrinkling there, but her upper lip pulled up.  A snarl, or an indication of disgust.  The tension in her shoulders gave the rest away: she wouldn’t listen to me.  I had no idea why she seemed to instinctively react that way to me, but I did know that I could pick her, get her a gun, and we would effectively be two Lambs and nine individuals, with her as a tenth individual doing her own thing.

I took a few seconds for everyone in the alleyway.  Throughout, I was trying to look for the balance.  She has kids.  He’s a fighter with a mean streak.  He’s unhinged.  That one won’t stop shaking long enough to hold a gun without dropping it, let alone aim it.

If I picked the decent, cooperative, competent individuals, and I was potentially killing them.  If I picked the dregs and the useless assholes, I would be going into the fight with only what Jamie and I brought to the table and ten liabilities with guns.

“I get to pick them, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Gene said.  “Don’t take too long.”

Mauer’s timeline, I reminded myself.  In a matter of minutes, the front line could give way.  He had a strategy, and Jamie and I were now cogs in a machine comprised of people.

“Hands up again, let’s see everyone who’s interested,” I said.  I had to raise my voice to be heard over the chaos in the street behind us.  The fighting at the front line wasn’t all that far away.

In the space of the alleyway and the people in the street just behind Gene, Jamie and I, a good forty hands went up.

“If you could describe yourself as a bastard, keep your hand up!” I said, “Otherwise, put it down!”

I saw confusion.  Only a very small few hands went down.  Adam, the Bruno who had helped me out yesterday, wasn’t among them.  Surprising.

Didn’t help to narrow down the numbers, not really.

I ran my hand under my hood and over the top of my head, damp hair running between the fingers.  My scalp still hurt where the Baron had picked me up by my hair.

“If you’ve ever killed, stand up,” I said.

Four people stood.  The drunk I’d observed earlier was among them, joined by a man with a broad belly and tattoos covering his exposed skin, a scrawny man who sported a tattoo at the neck that was obviously a gang identifier, likely from prison, and a surly looking bastard with an obvious untreated medical condition at the neck, akin to a goiter.

“You two sit down,” I said, pointing at the drunk and the scrawny gang member.  I then indicated Tattoo Belly and Goiter, “You two, come stand behind me.”

Gang member has the same issue as the nose-ridge.  He won’t cooperate, or he’ll cooperate in the wrong way.  The drunk won’t give me anything.

“Making us stand up, sit down, who do you think you are?” the gang member asked.

There it is.

“The man who is in charge of this,” I said, extending a hand back behind me, indicating the crowd, “Put me in charge of this, right here.  Think about why.”

I watched the assembled people as I said it, searching expressions, watching for eye contact.  Adam, unfortunately, was among the people who met my eye, looking at me with more apparent respect than confusion or annoyance.

“You,” I pointed to a young woman with what I could only describe as a bat nose, turned up so the nostrils pointed out, the tip and edges separating and forking out like the petals of a flower.  A scar ran up the bridge of her nose, between two very large, dark brown eyes, up to her hairline.

“You.”  A Bruno who wasn’t Adam.  Unlike most Brunos I’d seen, he had no tattoos.  A brawler, going by the state of his knuckles, and a drinker, though not so much it would impair his faculties.  It caught me off guard that he’d look at me like he was listening, and I took that to be a sign.

“You,” An older, forty-something man with weathered skin.  His beard wasn’t long, but it was so wiry I suspected he could use it to dry-scrub rust from steel without any harm to his chin.  The gun he held was his own.

“And you.”  I indicated a woman.  She wore glasses, didn’t look to be a laborer, didn’t sport any physical modifications more severe than multiple physical piercings in one ear, and at some point recently had pulled her hair back up into a ponytail and rolled up her sleeves.  Ink smears at one side of her pinky suggested a job with a lot of writing.

“You going to give any rationale for your choices?” a boy asked, annoyed.  Younger, a teenager, only a year older than me at most.  The ends of his pant legs and his boots were crusted with salt from wading in the shallows of the harbor.  He was wearing multiple layers, but one sleeve was partially rolled up, exposing a tattoo he was proud of.

“No,” I said.  I watched for a second, attention on his expression, “But I’ll take you.”

He considered for a moment, then stood, moving to join the group that was gradually finding their way behind me.  Gene said something and got a gun from someone at the periphery of the street, handing it to Glasses.

Seven.

“If you can make something, hand up,” I said.  “Not construction work.  Tools, clothes, art…”

Some hands went up.

“You,” I said.  The woman worked with glass, by my best guess.  She still wore her leather apron, though she didn’t have any tools with her.  Her face and clothes were darkened by the smoke of fire in a more enclosed space.

I didn’t like any of the other options.

A man was perched on a stack of crates, skinny, with a mean look in his eye and a knife at his hip, hidden by clothes.  One lanky leg was up near his chest, his foot propped up on the crate he sat on, his lanky arms wrapped around the leg, hands dangling limp.  He looked like the surly sort, more troublesome than nose-ridge or the gang member would be, but I really liked how he sat there.  I liked where he’d chosen to sit, and knew it had to be deliberate.  I could imagine Jamie or Helen picking the same spot as a vantage point.

Attitude problem, experience sitting watch.  A gang’s lookout?

“You,” I told him, pointing.

“Didn’t put my hand up,” he said.

“You thought about it,” I told him.  “Come on.”

A second passed as he considered.  He hopped down from the crates.

Eight, nine…

My eye fell on Adam.  I’d really hoped a better option would appear.  “Adam.  We’ve talked.  I lied to you, and I’m sorry about that.”

“I figured that much out,” he said, voice deep.

“You don’t want to come with.”

“I want to protect my damn city,” he said.  “Earn money if I can while doing it.”

I looked over the others, trying to see if anyone caught my eye, willing them to impress me, to show me some clue or some hint that there was more to them than the flaws I could so readily see.

I’d feel better taking him along,” Jamie said.

Adam had his flaws.  I had little doubt.  He’d even called himself a bastard.  But he’d been kind, pointed us in the right direction, even offered proper help if we found ourselves in a bad spot.  A person like him in Radham would’ve earned the respect and loyalty of the mice.  An etching in the wood near where he could most frequently be found.

It didn’t feel right to lead him to his death.

I held up a hand, communicating that last part to Jamie.  He.  Death.

“Maybe,” Jamie said, using speech instead of signs.  “But you can say that about anyone.”

“You sound just like him, now.  Who’s getting to who, now?” I asked.

“I think I’m free of influence,” Jamie said.

“Come on, then, Adam,” I told the Bruno.

The look he gave me was a peculiar one, but he stood, and made his way over to us.  He had to turn sideways to fit through a gap between Bat and Tattoo Belly.

I glanced back past the crowd of people, looking at Gene.

“Everyone has a gun?” Gene asked.

The glassblower raised a hand.  Gene turned, claimed a rifle from a bystander, and threw it with both hands, so it flew over heads, mine included.  The glassblower caught the weapon.

Jamie and I raised our hands as well.  He handed me a rifle, first.  I looked at what he’d given me and wondered if he’d deliberately chosen the shittiest looking piece of work he could.

“Ammunition?” Scrub-brush asked.  His voice sounded like he looked, like it had been through a sandstorm and only the hard parts hadn’t been scraped away.

It took only a moment – Mauer’s lieutenant had ammunition on him.  Boxes flew through the air and were caught.  Three boxes for ten people.

“If you need more than that and what you already have, you’ve done something wrong,” he said, there was a sneer in his tone, though I might have been imagining the weight of that sneer.

I didn’t like him.  Stanley gave off the vibe of someone who did good work and focused on the job.  Gene, by contrast, gave me the impression of someone with a mean streak.

“I’ll let Mauer know you’re on your way,” he said.

Meaning I should go.  No time to waste.

I raised a hand, gesturing.  Jamie followed, and the rest had the sense to take his cue.

We’d been at the periphery of Mauer’s lines, and I’d expected to travel a block and be out of earshot of the crowd, but as we progressed further, I could see how his front line was widening, people moving out to the side.

My eye traveled over the surroundings, searching for any sign of the Twins.  They would choose a location where they could be near their soldiers, but one where they had a view, and where the wind would carry scents.  It wasn’t a sense I had a lot of awareness of, but I kept it in mind as I looked for them.

After we’d disappeared into Mauer’s camp, they would have decided to hang back for a while, watching, finding victims, perhaps looking for a way in.

Knowing that they were possessed of a particular kind of bloodlust, I didn’t think they would see us disappear into Mauer’s camp, turn around, and simply go back to the Baron, a few kills under their belt.

No.  They had something to prove, just as much as the Baron wanted to make a point to the Duke.

“Jamie,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Do me a favor?  Keep an eye out?  I need to turn around.”

“Got it,” he said.

I turned to face the assembled group.

I could see doubt on their faces.  No words had been spoken, but they shared a sentiment – none of them really understood or agreed with being led by a child.

“I’m Sylvester.  That’s Jamie.  As far as you’re concerned, we’re mercenaries who were working for the Crown and are now working for Mauer.”

“You’re teenage boys,” Bat said, “If you’re even teenagers.”

“We’re experiments that look like young teenagers,” I said.  “Problem solvers.  Sometimes we’re assassins.  Sometimes we’re thieves.  Tonight, we’re hunting monsters.”

Their guns weren’t very good.  I could see splintered wood on the side of one, where it had been left exposed to weather.  Others were the lowest quality gun that could shoot – if only sometimes.

I could have pressed for better, but I wasn’t sure guns were the way to go, here.

“There are rules to this hunt,” I said.  “What Jamie over there says is true.  Always.  What I say is important.”

I had their attention.  I had questions about their loyalty.  I’d need to establish that at some point.

“Mauer gave us less resources and less men because he doesn’t think the nobles are still here,” I lied.  I had to justify the low count of ammo and Gene’s attitude, without hurting morale.  “I believe they are here.  Two women, taller than you’d think, wearing robes with white fur.  They stand out.  They have two pets, which they keep attached to them half the time.  The pets are black, hard to see, and very fast.”

I watched the group, searching their expressions.

Adam was going to be a problem.  So was Lookout.  I could see the unspoken questions on the former’s face, and the dismissive attitude in the latter’s body language.  Neither were listening as much as they needed to.

“If they attack and you run, you will get maimed, maybe killed.  It’s what they specialize in,” I said.  Again, a lie, but I needed to shape the group’s behavior.  Start with the key thing.  Technically, if any of them ran, we could die.  “If you’re supposed to be watching a flank or stand guard, or if you’re given any task where I’m asking you to watch or listen, there’s a reason for it.  If you have to look away, tie your shoe, piss, or anything else, you do what I just did with Jamie.  Let someone know, let them take over.”

I was approaching this in terms of couldn’ts.  If we broke ranks, we died.  If someone wasn’t thinking and looked the wrong way for long enough, we died.

I needed coulds.

“We can make a lot of money if all of you follow my instructions for the next thirty minutes.  If nothing happens, we go home empty handed, with each of you getting a little money for your trouble.  But if you see them, signal us.  Raise your hand, fist clenched, tap a shoulder if you need to, spread the message.  We all benefit.  We all get money.  No competition, you don’t get more money if you screw over the person standing next to you.”

Jamie raised a hand.  I turned, rifle at the ready, but by the time I finished turning around, he was lowering his hand.

“Cat?” I asked.

“Warbeast.  Mauer’s, not the Crown’s.”

“Why us?” Adam asked.  “You picked carefully.”

And here were the questions.

“It’s what I do,” I said, facing him, meeting his eyes.  “I figure people out.”

“Is that what you were doing when you came by the yard and told me a story about your friend, and how you needed to meet the right people to get started out in this city?”

“No,” I said.  “That was one step among many.  We were trying to find someone that was in trouble.  We found her, but not fast enough to get her out of here before this happened.”

“You knew the army was coming to attack this city?” the glassblower asked me.

“I expected a different disaster,” I told her.  “Still do.  But that’s for later.  For now, let’s focus on the task at hand.”

“Why us?” Adam asked, again.

I ran my fingers through my hair again.

“Bat-nose there is an artist.  Not a great artist, though.  She gets by in a trade and a medium that isn’t what she wants to do.  I’d guess she likes putting images down on paper, and she’s stuck working in textiles, probably putting rugs or something together.”

All eyes were on Bat.  I was mixing cold reads with observed details.  She had a flair to the way she presented herself and dressed that suggested she had a very individual style and creative edge.  The nose was part of that, as was the black clothing and the shawl and the scarf she wore over her shoulders and around her neck.  Her hands and sleeves were stained with dyes, the skin at the knuckles and pads of the hands broken.  The textile-making, with too much work  going into that to be a hobby or interest.  It would have to be an obsession, and nobody was that obsessed with rug-making.  Not in a city like this.

I pretended to guess at things I knew with near-certainty, and I made specific statements about vague things that people could fill in their own details with, or that were true for virtually anyone.

“She’s good with her hands.  I’m thinking we might need a net or something, and having her could be very useful.  Someone hurt her, before.  She got away, which makes her a survivor.  Best of all, I think she respects individuals.  She’ll listen to me so long as I don’t give her reason not to.  I think she’s the type to absolutely despise people who don’t show her the respect she’s due.  I’m not going to make that mistake.”

Just about everyone had been hurt by someone in their past.  The ‘survivor’ bit was the weakest argument, so I put it toward the middle, and I doubted anyone would speak up and declare themselves anything but.  The rest, well, she had enough substance to her to be willing to fight, she’d been alone, sitting in that alley, and she was between seventeen and twenty-three years old, at a glance.  Saying someone her age despised being disrespected was like saying rain was wet.  True of everyone, yes, but especially true of an independent individual her age.  The memory of what it was to be a child and be condescended to was fresh on her mind.

Saying she would listen to me as long as I didn’t fuck up, conversely, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  It was much more likely to be the case now that I’d said it, because she wanted to prove all of the good things I said were true, and that loyalty to people worth being loyal to was the only one she could, right now.

Those large eyes of hers stared me down, a little wider than they had been.

“How wrong am I?” I challenged her.  I already knew the answer.

“That’s a little scary,” she told me.

“I know each of you,” I lied.  “I know our enemy.  I know that we, with a little luck, can kill two damn nobles and their pets.  Allow me to do this.  Allow me to make you this money.”

Lookout didn’t seem as dismissive as he had a minute ago.  In fact, he was paying more attention to Bat, now.

“So long as you don’t shit yourself and run, or do something stupid like let your guard down, we can do this,” I lied.  “Twenty or thirty minutes of absolute focus, like your life depends on it.”

I saw some nods.

“Keep an eye out for any cloth, rope, or light chain.  Anything that could serve as a cord or be turned into one.  If we happen by on any fishing net, this far from the harbor, let me know.  Like I said, our enemy is fast.  A fishing net will slow them down.  With luck, so can the cord.”

I turned, looking over the surroundings.  Jamie’s eyes were good, but that was a side effect of his memory.  He was good at taking in details and processing them.  I could steer my brain in a direction that let me see past spots in my vision and the shifting nature of the darkness.  Jamie took all of it in and processed it for what it was.

Every rooftop I looked at, I could envision the twins just on the other side, out of sight.  Every chimney was cover.  Every window was a place they could leap from.  I saw a light briefly flare in the distance, an explosion so distant the sound didn’t quite reach us, and imagined the Twins using that momentary distraction as an excuse to lunge at us.

A master chess player thought a hundred moves in advance.

I was thinking about ten thousand different opening moves.

“You can hear me, can’t you?” I asked, not going to any effort to raise my voice.  “The two of you are there.”

I heard uncomfortable shuffling from behind me.

“Every single one of these people standing behind me are going to live,” I said.

Another blatant lie.

I gestured.  Jamie moved to follow, the rest followed suit.

“They can really hear you?” a man asked.  It might have been the Brawler.

“Keen hearing.  The best the Academy can provide,” I said.  “They probably heard everything I said.  Which reminds me, Bat-nose-”

“I have a name, you know.”

“Does that nose of yours do anything special?”

“No.  It’s decorative, not functional.”

I nodded.

Jamie and I led the group.  The group of ten moved behind us.

My pledge to keep people alive had been a ploy.  I had a sense of who the Twins were, and I doubted they would turn down the challenge.  No, they would seek to prove me wrong to an extraordinary degree.

If they got that far we would be done for, and the broken promise wouldn’t do anything.

By making the oath to save the ten and putting the pair in the position where they sought to make me break it, I curtailed the Twins’ options.  They had to show me, really.  That meant they couldn’t lead off by taking me out.  It reduced the chances they would take out Jamie.

“Watch from every direction,” I said, my voice low.  “They move fast, they’re hard to see, and they’ll deliberately attack from a direction we’re not looking.”

You survived, didn’t you?” Lookout asked.

Shit.  I’d hoped the doe eyes he’d been making toward Bat meant he was distracted.  Just the opposite.  He wanted to prove something.

“One of my teammates didn’t,” I said.  “Another is still getting patched up-”

I tried to figure out a good angle to drive the point home.  One that didn’t make him look so bad he would resent me, but curtailed further challenges.

“-You have talents, I picked you for your ability to watch our backs.  Pay less attention to me, and more attention to spotting them.”

I wasn’t sure his eyes were even good.  But he’d had a good lookout spot, and if we had to stop for any reason, I would trust him watching for trouble before I trusted the drunk, the drug-addled merchant or the sunburned idiot.

“Sylvester?”

The glassblower.

I paused, gestured to Jamie to look out, and then turned.

“Clothesline,” she said.  “You wanted cord?

At the porch at the back of one house, a clothesline was strung up over the porch railing.  Accessing it would mean climbing the fence to get into the backyard, crossing the yard, climbing the short three stairs up to the porch, and then taking it down.

I had a pit in my stomach.

“Is that not what you wanted?” she asked.  I’d paused too long, taking the situation in.

“It’s a thing of beauty,” I told her.  “Good eye.”

“You’re hesitating,” Jamie said.  “You think the twins are here?”

There were so many angles they could attack from.

“They’re here,” I said.  Prey instinct.

I touched the fence that bounded the yard.  They would attack.  It was an opening, too blatant a weakness.  If they’d heard everything I said, they knew I wanted cord and they didn’t wholly know why, and that would be reason enough to get in the way of this simple act of crossing the fifteen foot distance and then returning.

I climbed up the fence, propping a foot on the top, the other hanging off the back of the fence, ready to touch ground if I needed to retreat backward.

If I outlined the strategy aloud, they would counter.

Instead, I raised a hand, gesturing.

Me.  Small protect.  Group.  Radiance- all directions.  Protect.  Group.

I lacked full peripheral vision.  I had to turn my head to see Jamie at work, touching people, getting them to raise their guns, pointing them in various directions.

“I don’t understand,” Lookout said.

Keep an eye out,” I said.  I was tense, and it carried over to my voice.

Hand up, I gestured.  Purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

Red was aggression.  Movement, the forward assault.

I kicked myself forward over the fence.  A short four-foot drop, and I was stepping foot on wet, frozen lawn, the ground simultaneously harder than it should be for soil, but giving under my weight, as the sodden ground beneath the frozen layer caved in.  I gripped my rifle, holding it in both hands, ready.

One running step.  Two.

Like a stone three times her weight, and with just as much impact, the Twin dropped onto the porch stairs in front of me, all four limbs meeting the frozen slats and boards.

Placing herself so that my body was between her and the group of ten.  Not enough that I was guaranteed to block the shot, but enough to raise the question.

Someone shot anyway.  It missed.

“Eyes forward!” Jamie shouted, voice high with alarm.  “Look in the direction I-”

More gunshots, not aimed at me.

I threw myself to the right.  She threw herself to her left, almost faster than I did, matching me and keeping me positioned between her and the group.  She had to extend a spike out to slam it into the wall of the house and arrest her sideways movement.

Right.  She wouldn’t kill me, but she could maim me and then leave me to watch her decimate the group.

I raised my rifle, aiming.  In much the way Jamie had dealt with, she hurled herself away, leg strength allowing her to dive to one side, her profile narrow, spikes extended out in front of her, so she could slip through the gap between the railing and the short set of stairs at the base of the porch.

Spikes caught the ground, and I could see as they punched through the harder, colder layer and sank into the yet-unfrozen mush beneath.  I could hear it.

A part of me expected the other Lambs to be there, to capitalize on it.

But the group of Lambs had dwindled.  There was no Gordon, no Mary, no Helen to capitalize on that moment of weakness.  There was only me.

Mary was at my shoulder and Gordon stood in front of me, pushing the barrel of my rifle, as I swiveled to point it at the Twin, already squeezing the trigger a moment before I had her in my sights.

Forelimbs caught in the ground, she used her forward momentum to bring her legs over, forward, setting them on the ground, and hauling her spikes up and out.  It took a moment for her to reassert her balance, to bend her legs in preparation for another bounding leap, directly at the group.

The rifle fired, violent, bucking in my hands and kicking back against my shoulder where I hadn’t positioned it perfectly.

I caught her, right across the back.  A dark fleck of something flew off.  I didn’t see what, and I didn’t see the full extent of the damage as she spun in a half circle, caught her balance, and hopped over the fence.

Then she and the other twin were gone.

I could hear the gasps and the shouts of the ten.  The disbelief.

I didn’t turn to face them, and I didn’t speak, instead focusing on ignoring the pain in my shoulder and the ringing in my ears as I brought the rifle up, using the battered bayonet blade to slice at the clothesline.  I grabbed it with a numb hand and hauled it down.

“I hit one,” I said, as I hopped over the fence, rifle in one hand, cord in the other.  “I’m pretty sure that gets me a reward.”

They looked at me like I was crazy.  But that wasn’t exactly right.  I was sane, and I’d been talking crazy, up until this point.

This was real for them, now.

I handed the cord to the glassblower.  “Cut it into lengths.  Do you know what a bola is?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Make bolas.  Improvised ones.  Anything we can do to limit their movement.”

I saw her glance back in the direction of Mauer’s camp.

Having second thoughts about all of this?

“They’ll attack again before we get back to the main force,” I said.  “Not making the bolas isn’t going to make that next fight any easier.”

I met Jamie’s eyes, and I gave him a nod.

This was suddenly very real for our recruited group, yes, but I’d just made one of the Twins bleed.

Up until now, they had been playing with us, in a sense.  Now they were going to take this seriously.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 9.12 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The challenge was to stay one step ahead of the enemy.  I knew where they’d been the last time we saw them, I knew the likely course the elder twins had traveled, and I knew the younger sisters would go straight to the elder ones now that they had met with some resistance.

With a certainty, I could say that the elder sisters were now making their way toward us.  If I’d dealt any actual damage, they would be delayed.  If I hadn’t, we only had a minute.

“Why aren’t we heading back to the others?” Lookout asked.

“We are, but we’re not going directly back because there’s a good chance they’re waiting for us,” I said.  I pointed at a collection of buildings to the left of the road Lookout would’ve wanted to take.  “Somewhere in there.  We go that way, and they’ll come at us in force, soldiers shooting.  The monsters we just saw will hit us while we’re dodging bullets.  We meet a quick and grisly end.  There’s no way to cover all the angles and protect ourselves.”

Running at the lead of the group, I couldn’t see his face, unfortunately, but I didn’t hear any more complaints from him.

I wasn’t telling the truth.  Us heading straight for Mauer was the most obvious route for our group.  The Twins laying in wait was the most obvious route for their group.  I couldn’t gauge the intelligence of the younger twins, but I knew the elder twins were smart enough to second guess my actions and I had to second guess theirs.

They were at another point nearby, sending the soldiers out through alleys and into buildings that had good vantage points.  I was guessing the twins’ escort of elite Crown soldiers were spread out, not concentrated, lined up in a way that would force us to take cover or take unnecessary losses, as we tried to cross the wide roads or run down a road with gunshots coming at us from behind or the side.  It only took a couple of soldiers to slow us down when they had the benefit of carefully selected positions to shoot from, better weapons, and the training to put the bullets where they wanted them.

If we took cover or tried to move through the alleys and the buildings themselves, then we wouldn’t have the momentum anymore.  The twins and the other soldiers could come at us at their leisure.  They would fold around either side of us, forcing us to either move directly away from Mauer or hole in and trade bullets.  Both of those options were bad for us, when the soldiers were better armed.  Even in an ineffectual firefight with both sides shooting and neither hitting the other, the Twins were a trump card for their side.

I could visualize the various configurations of soldiers, crouching by windows or fences between us and Mauer’s front lines.

Too risky.  Couldn’t head straight for Mauer, couldn’t imagine any scenario where the twins would let us, by intent or by accident.  A scenario where they’d let us get this far out and then closed the net behind us?  Definitely.

If the soldiers were being ordered into a perimeter to catch us or trip us up should we make a break for it, then we needed to keep moving, down and away from the front line of the battle.  Mauer expected to retreat before sending the primordials in.  Moving in the direction of that retreat opened up opportunities.  Staying put or moving in another direction let the opportunities fall away.

What actions opened up doors?  What actions closed them?  What actions opened doors for the enemy, versus closing those doors?

Mauer was west of us.  If we headed south, moving toward the tail of his group, the twins had to communicate to their soldiers, pull them away from wherever they were holed up, and give chase, moving parallel to us to stay between us and Mauer.  It meant less options available to them in the short term, making them easier to predict.  The only other option left to them was to bluff, lead us to believe they were between us and Mauer, and that was shaky ground, rife with weaknesses Jamie and I could exploit.

All that in mind, to the people I was leading, it seemed very much like we were getting further away from friends and help.  To the people I was leading, salvation was a five or ten minute run to the west, with no apparent threats between us and Mauer.  They were scared, intimidated, and confused.

I glanced back over one shoulder, then turned my head to glance over the other, before remembering I lacked an eye and couldn’t actually see behind me that way.

I let myself slow, and the group slowed too, responding.

“Keep moving,” I encouraged them, as the ones in the lead caught up with me.  I tapped knuckles against the shoulder and arm of the two to my left.  The Brawling Bruno and Tattoo Belly.  “You two, watch our left.  They might have left people there to flank us.  Everyone else, watch our right.  The enemy is moving alongside us now.  We’re about to reach a crossroads-”

Running and saying so much was tough.  I was getting out of breath.  “-If they’re cocky, they’ll run across the road to get ahead of us.  They might shoot or pounce.”

Breathe, breathe. 

The area at my calf where I’d been sliced felt like rock, now, a twisted, angry, painful knot where muscle should be.

Jamie spoke, “Men, watch the ground.  Women, watch rooftops and windows.”

I saw his hand go up.  I.  Rear.

I gestured in response to confirm.

As a group, we crossed the open ground of the wider street.  The deep ruts suggested the wagons or other vehicles that traveled the street bore heavy loads, likely to and from the quarries at the city’s edge.

I waited to see if the soldiers would happen to cross the road in plain view.  They didn’t.  That placed them ahead of us, in a position to cut us off or set up to open fire on our flank, or it meant they were lagging behind.

The tension in the group was palpable as our boots and shoes tromped on the snow-dusted road and broke through thin layers of ice over puddles.

“What were you doing with your hands?” Bat asked.

“Talking with my teammate,” I said.

“It’s spooky.”

“It’s efficient.  Where are we with the bolas?” I asked.

“We have three.  I’m not sure how useful they’re going to be.  Seeing those things- they were so fast, I, how do we even hit them?”

If you’re in a position to throw the bola and hit the twin with it, the monster probably reaches you in the next second or two and kills you, I thought.  But at least this way we create a situation where maybe the next person in line doesn’t get killed and has a chance to fight back.

“Trust me,” was all I said.

“That’s a lot to ask, coming from someone with a war wound who had to beg Mauer for help,” Lookout said.

I opened my mouth to reply.  Adam jumped to my defense before I could speak, “He’s doing what he can to help that girl he had with him.  Wouldn’t any of us do that for the people who are important to us?”

Sentiment appreciated, but not the argument I would have made, and it made it harder for me to steer the conversation and assert myself.  The others would process it as Adam saying ‘he’s doing this for himself and his friends, fuck all of the rest of us’ and ‘weak weak weak.  The young boy is weak’.

Adam had performed the equivalent of throwing an anchor to a drowning man.  Yes, the anchor had a chain connecting it to the boat and that might help, but what it really did was risk sinking the poor bastard.  I hadn’t even been drowning, I’d been swimming!

“He’s fucking us over to get the job done, you mean,” the Lookout said, voice strained as he panted from the running.

There it is.

“No,” Adam said.  “He’s-”

“Wait,” I said, voice hard, “Stop.”

I stopped in my tracks.  The group stopped as well.

Everyone’s attention was fixated wholly on the surroundings, searching, looking for the cue that had prompted me to order a halt.

Three Hannibal Hamlins, two Hannibal Hamlins, one Hannibal Hamlins…

“Move,” I said, the count done, “Faster!  Eyes out!”

The group listened.

There hadn’t actually been a cue or a reason to stop.  There wasn’t a reason to move faster now, either.  But by taking command, I had stopped the conversation in its tracks, refreshing it, and reminded everyone what was at stake.

Give a man an apple or a drink, then ask him a favor, and he was vastly more likely to obey.  Psychology at work.

Give a squad of ten scared citizens of Lugh direction, focus, and hope of survival when they craved those things, and then ask for goodwill?  The same idea at work.

Now I could answer.

“You were told how dangerous this was,” I said.

“Bullshit,” the glassblower said.

“Five years pay!” I said, raising my voice.  “Nobody ever gets something for nothing!  Ever!  You knew there was a cost.  You didn’t admit it to yourself, but don’t pretend you thought this would be easy, that Mauer would hand over money for something with no risk to it.  Now trust me.  If you start focusing on me instead of them, they will get you.  If you break ranks, you will be a straggler, and they are very good at picking off stragglers.  Listen.  Watch.  Cooperate.”

I was letting emotions slip into the words.  A little harsher than I’d intended.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

“What?”

“One a hundred meters behind us, while you were talking.   The one you didn’t shoot, alone, moving.”

“Behind and to our right?”

“Was right, crossed the street before I could point my rifle at it.  Behind and to our left now, and catching up.”

“Two more people watch our left,” I said.

“On it,” Jamie said.  He said something I couldn’t make out to people I couldn’t see through the back of my head.

Six watching our right, four watching our left, me in front, Jamie at the back.

“And Sy,” Jamie said.

“What?”

“You sounded a hell of a lot like Gordon just now.  Listen.  Watch.  Cooperate.”

“Bad thing?  Good thing?”

“Not bad,” he said, and he left it at that.

If I’d sounded like Gordon, it wasn’t intentional.  I could see it, thinking about it.  Direct, hard, ruthless, straight to the heart of the matter.

I had always been better than Gordon at the small-scale tactics, moving the group.  Gordon had been better at taking in the battlefield, thinking about the small stuff in abstracts without overthinking and over-dwelling on it.  Fatigue and emotion were forcing me to be more brusque, and the nature of this battle with enemies on all sides forced me to take in the entire battle, watching how the lines were moving.  It wasn’t a surprise that I was treading on Gordon’s niche.

Speaking of- the tone of the fighting at the front line had shifted while I hadn’t been paying as much attention.  More artillery, more explosions and cannon shots.

More of the duller, more individual cracks of Mauer’s rifleshots, less of the staccato bursts of the stitched shooting.  I could hear the whump, whump of war machines loosing their shots, the distinct pause, and then the rolling explosions as the shots hit home.

“The primordials are loose,” I said.

“I wondered,” Jamie said.

“The what?” one of the men asked.  It wasn’t someone that had talked a lot.  “Prime-?”

“Mauer’s special weapons.  He just released them.”

“The warbeasts?  They didn’t look that impressive.”

They’re impressive enough that it brought the Academy here.  It’s why the fighting is happening.

“Listen,” I said.  “Do you hear the more organized shooting from the stitched?  The tatatatat?”

More artillery shells exploded.

The group was listening.  I half expected the stitched to open fire and make me a liar, and started to think of a way to lead into a casual, confident statement, as if I expected it all along.

But there was no tatatatat.  There was only the dull thunder of the explosions.

I explained, “The stitched are being called back.  The Crown is moving their forces around, trying to get resources in place to deal with the new threat.  Those explosions are the Crown pulling out all the stops, trying to keep the bulk of Mauer’s forces back, out of the way.  Isolating the primordial problem so it can be dealt with.”

The explosions continued, one after the other, no gap between them.

The twin behind us is getting closer.  Judging by their earlier speed… an attack is imminent.  Twenty, thirty seconds.

All of Lugh seemed to be in that state.  A blade raised and ready, yet to fall.  Mauer had sent his forces out, widening the front line.  The ones at the edges wouldn’t be cut off by the steady set of explosions.  Small squads, but squads led by Mauer’s soldiers and comrades, now free to move up on a distracted Crown that was busy dealing with the warbeasts, pulling back stitched and trying to position the weapons and squads for killing the primordials.

Another attack poised but not yet delivered.  If they were quick, it would coincide with the twin’s attack here.  Not that there was anything to it beyond a sort of violent poetry.

I couldn’t begin to guess what the Duke had planned, but that was another set of swords.

The twin was in place to attack.  There was nothing saying she would attack now, but I imagined she was angry.  I’d made her sister bleed.  We had no idea where that sister was.

“Cross the street!  Fast!” I called out.  My hand went up, signaling Jamie.  BehindThree…

Boots tramped on the road.  We were moving directly away from the younger twin, now, slightly toward Mauer’s lines, and toward the soldiers and the elder twins, if they had been ahead of us.

Two, I gestured, as I called out, “Be ready!”

The explosions continued in the distance, the dull noise baffling and muting the finer sounds around us.

One, I gestured, the gesture segueing into the sign for behind.

“About face!” Jamie and I called out, at the same time.

As one, the entire squad turned.  Too slow, some, others confused.  One or two might not even have known what ‘about face’ meant.

But most did.  Half of those individuals saw the twin, at the other side of the street.  They fired, their rifle shots and pistols firing in time with mine and Jamie’s.  One of the others threw a bola.

She was too fast.  A leap to our right, reacting as she caught a singular bullet to the limb, hard enough that her spike-limb scratched against the road.  Footing secured, she leaped back, crashing through a window.

In the midst of it, the thrown bola did a lazy spin before landing halfway between us and her.

“Holy mother of god!” Tattoo Belly gasped the words.  “Holy mother, I was looking back and I didn’t even see her at first.”

The glassblower started to head across the street, toward the bola she’d thrown.

“No!” I said.  “Leave it.  This way!”

“How did you know?” Tattoo Belly asked.

Because a pair of killing machines with bloodthirst on multiple levels, who only get five to ten minutes of action before having to head back to their sisters, lesser nobles who have likely never had to delay gratification once in their lives?  They can’t be that patient.  Not when they’re angry about their sister getting shot.

“I’m getting to understand them,” I said, feigning a calm I didn’t feel.  My heart pounded.  My fingers shook as I reloaded my rifle.

“We shot her and didn’t even break the skin!” Lookout said.

“The old man here hit exposed bone.  Thicker end of the spike,” Jamie said.  “It probably hurt.  Might have fractured bone.  I don’t know.  Lillian said the bone was hardened.  Carbon-dense, heavier than lead.”

And it’s pissing them off, I thought.  This isn’t what they’re used to.  Pain and being predictedThose dense, hard bones take energy to haul around.  Efficient as they are, they’re getting tired and they’re getting more emotional.

Will she cross the street to come to us, or head back to her sisters to recoup, get patched up, and get organized?

Or are the other twins making a move?

The soldiers and the elder twins couldn’t be that far away.

Weapon raised and readied, primed to strike.

If I could anticipate it, we’d be fine.

“Up ahead,” Adam said.  He was panting.  When I looked back, I could see the sweat glistening on black, tattooed skin.  It had to be cold, given the weather.  He managed to find the breath to utter another word, “Store.”

“Rope?” I asked.  “Weapons?”

“Fishing supplies,” Brawler said.  “Nets, yeh?  But the door will be locked.”

“How far?”

“Two streets over.”

We won’t make it that far before we run into trouble, I thought.  They can’t let us, especially if they heard.

Soldiers would be getting the order, to close in, to catch up, put us on the defensive.  We didn’t have much in the way of available cover, with only open street in front, behind, and to our left.

“There!”

For the people to aim and fire even as I was turning my head, they had to have been paying attention to our left flank, watching out for the twin we’d just shot at.  The rifle shot exploded right next to my ear, and was doubly worse because I hadn’t even seen the gun or anticipated the shot.

But the twin was already moving.  Showing herself and retreating in the same smooth motion.

There was no reason to do that unless-

“Incoming!” I shouted, “Turn-”

The other twin dropped like a stone, right into the midst of the group.

Her two forelimbs plunged down with her.  Spikes of bone, as hard as steel and heavier than lead, one through Bat’s shoulder.  The other went through Scrub-Brush’s collarbone and out the front of his ribcage.

He’d been the only one that was a decent shot in our group, I was ninety-percent sure.  He’d had calluses on his fingers that suggested he spent whole days with his gun in his hands.  A hunter, if I had to guess, one who had picked up their gun during past military service and had kept it well maintained since.  Smart enough to shut up and follow orders without comment or complaint.

Forelimbs firmly planted in two members of our group, she swung her feet up in unison.   Sharp talons at the ends swept up Brawler’s face, from chin to hairline, tearing up everything between.  Cheeks shredded enough I could see teeth past the blood and meat, eyes just gone.

I told them to watch our right side, I thought.  The person who’d shot at the twin had been one of the ones who had been supposed to watch the other direction.

The twin remained there, spike forelimbs still thrust down, anchored in meat that had yet to collapse to the ground, feet pointing straight up, a grisly handstand, one that showed her gouged back to me, held for one second, two seconds-

I knew, seeing it, that there was no action anyone would take that would stop her from killing at least two more people.  If the fight were chess, she had us in check, and none of us had the instincts or skill to see how or why.  We would make our next move, blind, and it would be the wrong move.

Goiter stabbed at her with a bayonet blade.

Easily, fluidly, she moved out of the way, letting her body fall back and away from the thrust.  She yanked one limb out of the old man, bringing it over her head and down, slashing it with a deceptive speed, far faster than the slower movement of the rest of her body.

At Adam.  He brought his rifle up, blocking the slash.  The twin’s limb came down through the construction of metal and wood.  The former bent and broke, the latter splintered.  The weapon came apart in two uneven halves.

She was left with one arm still inside Bat-nose’s shoulder, the girl doubled over, torso twisted as she tried to avoid having it wrenched apart by the movement of the twin’s limb, and her other limb down at Adam’s midsection.

Swipe.  Slice Adam at the lower stomach, cutting an inch deep.

Haul one limb out of Bat-nose, and bring it up and around, cutting the woman with the glasses from lower ribs to shoulder, carrying on to aim for Adam’s throat.  He caught the limb in one hand, and, as if she expected it, she tugged the blood-slick bone back out of his grip, leaving it still pointed at him.  At a tall, broad-target who had zero way of getting out of the way in time.

It was Lookout who moved, swinging overhead, using the makeshift bola like a flail, down at the arm.

The weight at the end swing over, around, cord encircling the folded limb twice before cracking ineffectually against bone.

One limb possibly bound, but she was still a killing machine, smack dab in the center of the killable.  The people who were reeling or outright dying from her attacks were in the way of the people who had any chance of doing anything.

Again, Adam grabbed at her, seizing her by the upper arm.

Don’t- I thought, but he was already doing it, and he couldn’t read my mind.

It was the wrong thing to do, throwing her to one side, away and out of the group, but there were no right things to do.  While she moved, she raised her legs, talons cutting again at Glasses, and once at Tattoo Belly.  She hit the ground, less graceful with one limb wrapped in the bola-flail, but I could see how she was swift to get her feet under her, ready to move.

I hadn’t been able to shoot while she was in the midst of the group, with so many bodies blocking my shot.  Others were in the same boat.  I recognized the impatience I felt, and I knew what it meant.  The tables had been turned.  One side wounded, left wanting to retaliate, and finding themselves frustrated instead.  An opening was now given, just like when we’d crossed the street, our backs to the twin, soon to be followed by the reversal.

“Hold fire!” I shouted.

Too late.  The speed of the air moving from my lips to their ears was slower than the impulse from their brains to their fingers.

The members of the group who weren’t blinded, mortally wounded, disarmed, or in agonizing pain fired.

To someone who didn’t see exactly what she’d done, it was like she could read minds, dodge bullets.  She hopped and slid to one side, head low, three available limbs skidding on the road until they found traction.  No less than five guns were fired at her – three rifles and two pistols, and not one bullet touched her.

But she’d known we would be impatient, wanting to shoot.  She had performed in situations almost identical to this countless times in her life, often enough to know the time it took most to aim and pull the trigger.

While our people worked to reload, she lunged to intercept her sister, who was crossing the street, heading right for us.  The one twin would cut the binding without breaking stride, and would run into our midst a split-second before the first person managed to reload, carrying out the second half of the twins’ bloody dance.

But the scenario wasn’t going to go as they had planned.  I hadn’t fired.  I aimed, looking down my rifle’s sights.

The one who had just cut through our ranks wasn’t aware, but the twin who was charging our way saw.  She changed direction, moving explosively, tackling her own sister, to knock her off course.

I suppressed a smile, exhaling slowly.  Her timing was off there, too.

Patience.

The two sisters, tangled together, placed perfectly for one bullet to penetrate the both of them.  I squeezed the trigger.

The bullet pinged off the street, a miss.

Fuck!

I could sense Gordon’s disapproving eyes on me as I fumbled to reload.  Don’t fight, Sy.  You’re bad at it.

While I joined the others in trying to reload in time, knowing it wouldn’t be fast enough, another shot rang out.   The bullet passed through one twin’s back, out the front.  Thick black blood and bone fragments sprayed out, and she collapsed into her sister.

Jamie.

Jamie had held his fire, too.

The twin with one bound limb struggled to rise with the weight of her sister on her.  There was a glimmer of emotion to the haste, and that emotion mirrored the fumbling movements of the people around me who were trying to reload faster than their numb hands were allowing.

Awkwardly, moving on three limbs instead of four, she backed away from her sister’s body, pausing.

Her skeletal jaw opened, and she screamed, far louder than her narrow frame should have allowed.

The scream was joined by two others, just as inhuman.

It was the elder twins, each with a rifle, stalking toward the rear of our bleeding, crippled group.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 9.13 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.13

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The nobles’ inhuman screams rang through the night.

The twin had come down like a nail driven by a hammer.  One member of our group killed, another injured to the point that I couldn’t expect her to be useful.  The rest had taken varying degrees of damage, ranging from blindness and near-disembowelment to deep cuts.

The nail had been dealt with, but the group was still nailed down, in a manner of speaking.  This number of people was a critical liability.  They weren’t running, they were still too shocked and traumatized to properly bolt for safety, and even if I somehow drove them to move, it would be horrendously disorganized, muddled by the state of the group.

Old scrub-brush, dead.  The brawny Bruno, blind and missing most of his face.  Both were as good as dead.

Adam, who I hadn’t wanted to bring, had one arm, not hand, cupped against the wound at his stomach.  Bat-nose, who I’d analyzed so thoroughly, had a hole through the top of one shoulder and out the armpit, the shoulder itself likely dislocated.  I had no idea how hurt Glasses was, but two good cuts meant I had to put her in the same category: those three would slow us down.

Tattoo Belly was scratched.  Lookout, Glassblower, Salt, and Goiter were uninjured.  They were also, with the possible exception of Goiter, people who couldn’t fight.

Too many people were moving for the cover of the alley, but the injured and blind members of the group were obstacles more than teammates.

I backpedaled, seeing the elder Twins approach from the end of the road, still screeching, their eyes wide, expressions inhuman.  Both sisters were incomplete, a good two-fifths of their bodies missing, the rest remaining upright and in roughly the right position by sheer structural integrity alone.  I could see black bone that had been folded up into place.  The other twin was off to the side, still, crouching by her dead sister.

Stumbling back, I grabbed the blind Bruno’s shirt.  He flinched, raising a hand.

“It’s me!” I called out, to be heard over the frantic shouts and noises of the group that was still heading for the alley.  I moved around the Bruno, so he could serve as cover against any attack from the Twins, my evasive maneuvers quick enough that I nearly bounced off the brick corner on the other side of him.  I hauled him toward the alley the rest were trying to flee into.  “This way, and whatever you do, don’t push each other!”

We were retreating, there was no stopping that from happening, and we were very likely retreating right into the soldiers that had been left in our way, a defensive perimeter of Mauer’s men.

Accept it.  Make peace with it.

I could feel the fear and panic.  Both elder twins had raised their rifles.  They fired, one shot after another.  Good rifles.  Probably accurate.  With the body of the blind Bruno between me and them, I couldn’t see if they were hitting us or not.

I brought my hand out of my pocket, a bullet between index finger and middle finger, willing my fingers to be steady, and slotted the bullet into the rifle.  Pull the lever, flip the switch, crank down the side.  Then I was supposed to aim.  I didn’t.

The blind Bruno leaned my way, nearly pushing me out of the makeshift, living cover his sheer mass provided.  In thrusting the side of my rifle out to shove him back toward the alley – a two-handed task, I felt a lump at the side of his leg.

“Borrowing this,” I said.  I slid a hand into his pocket, and I grabbed his coinpurse.  Smaller than my fist, it was still packed with coins.

He didn’t protest.

I took in the scene beyond our little group.  I couldn’t see the elder twins, but I had a sense of where they were.  Each time they fired their rifles, I could place their locations.  Striding or stalking forward, with all of the tense muscles and barely restrained power of a pair of jungle cats, they fired relentlessly, reloaded with practiced motions, and then fired again.

Four shots each, a pause so short I couldn’t believe they were prepping another four bullets, and then four more shots.

A spray of blood coincided with a sound like a great weight dropping onto wet gravel.  It was Goiter, too far out, not benefiting from the blind man’s mass and cover.  Goiter had been aiming at the elder twins.

The younger twin didn’t even react to the death, her eyes fixed on Jamie, her body jerking left and right, forward and back.  Every adjustment was to throw him off as he changed where his rifle pointed.  With every spare moment, her teeth snapped and gnashed at the clothesline that bound her trapped limb.  Her elder sisters were shooting, and crossing that general trajectory meant risking getting shot, so she waited, watched, and distracted.  The hesitation might have been helped with a frustration with her own limited movements and insecurity, however that strange lifeform might process such a thing.  She’d lost her sister, and she was lost.

Breathe, Sy.

You are the jack of trades, the liar, the fluid element that can adapt to any situation.  No excuses left.  You wanted wyvern, you got wyvern.  Gordon and Jamie wouldn’t take ‘Mauer left us underprepared’ for an answer.

They took your damn eye.

The anger helped clarify things.  I let the wyvern focus my attention, putting the whole of my focus on what was happening, where things were, and all the details.

I had only as long as it took the younger sister to finish tearing at that cord bola at her arm.  With her limbs being what they were, she didn’t have the means to simply unwind it with the ‘fingers’ that gripped the thickest end of the spike limbs; too clumsy.  Her limbs were weapons first, tools second.

I gripped the coin purse until the coins within dug into my hand.

She pulled her head away, sharp teeth bringing some of the last of the cord with it.  Her limb managed to open and reach out, the spike coming forward and down as the scraps of cord fell away.  The point struck the road at the far end of the street.

A heartbeat later, she was lunging, a zig-zag path.

Jamie didn’t shoot.  Patient.

Fuck,” I said, pouring every last iota of fuckedness I was already feeling into the one word.  “It’s still breathing!”

There were a dozen gunshots going off in different places throughout the city with any passing second.  The cadence of the Twins’ shooting threatened to blur into it.  Yet I listened for it, and I heard it, as real as if it was a physical thing, something so manifest it could be seen, tasted, touched.  The break in the rhythm of the elder sisters’ shooting.  They’d heard.

Jamie was among the ones who reacted, his gun moving slightly toward the fallen Twin.

That, in turn, was the cue for the charging Twin to check.  She zigged short, zagged long, veering out toward our left, what had been the back of our group, creating a moment where she could look over one shoulder and see if her sister was indeed still breathing.

“Stall the other one, I’ll get her!”  I called out, gesturing as I brought the coinpurse back, hurling it.

Give them hope, then threaten to dash it.  Use the darkness, not just in the environment, but the countless things that these monsters don’t know and aren’t certain of.

For me, it was a coinpurse.  For them, it was an unknown variable, combined with words of utter confidence from someone who had just fucked up a really nice shot.

The lunging twin changed course, moving to intercept the projectile.

I completed the throwing motion, letting myself fall forward.  Jamie, having stepped slightly out of the cover the blind Bruno provided, put a bullet right over my head.

Not at the younger twin, but at the elder.

I didn’t even dare to peek my head out of cover to check what had happened.  Good thing, too- both elder-twins answered with a renewed flurry of bullets.

The younger, meanwhile, slashed at the coinpurse, sending coins flying, each of the coins flipping through the air, flashing orange and yellow as they caught one distant fire or another.

The blind Bruno hadn’t moved.  That suggested the group entering the alley was jammed.  It wasn’t a wide space, and if the group had shoved and pushed into there until they got themselves wedged, or if the injured were in front and moving too slowly-

If we couldn’t even make ten feet of headway, I wasn’t sure how we were going to survive this.

As the concern crossed my mind, I looked at the blind Bruno a little closer.

I’d been too focused, wyvern focusing my thoughts in particular directions.  It was the mental equivalent of a headlong rush, aggressive, arms swinging, fixating on the fight, except I hadn’t gone anywhere physically, and it was a battle fought with attention, emotion, motivation, needs and wants.

The blind Bruno had died, and it had been longer than just a moment ago.  His body slumped against the corner at the exit of the alley, still standing.  He’d taken bullets, acting as a human shield, very likely dead from the first bullet.  Beyond him, the rest of the group of ten had already made their way.  Everyone that could move had.  Only Goiter, the old man, and the blind Bruno remained, leaving Jamie and I with three twins nearby.

“I shot her,” Jamie said.  “She didn’t go down!”

Scared, uncertain.

Turning my rifle around, I swung the butt up and above me.  Glass shattered.  I swung it to one side, breaking the glass more.

One foot on the Bruno’s knee, a boost to get myself up, head ducked low.  The toe of my shoe scratched against stone, looking for a handhold.  I found one of a very unlikely sort.  Jamie stepped closer, putting his shoulder beneath my foot.

As I grabbed the windowsill and hauled myself past broken glass , I could hear the clicks of his rifle being reloaded.

“Come on!” I shouted.

Goiter’s shots at the elder twins had kept them to one side of the street.  It had meant that the body of the four or five hundred pound Bruno had been able to continue serving as cover.  Now that Goiter was dead, the elder twins were moving toward the middle of the street, where they would have a clear shot on Jamie and I.

Jamie fired once, more a warning shot than anything else, then turned.  Like I had, he swung his rifle, though he held on to the end.

I caught the barrel, putting all of my meager strength into bracing against the window and wall and hauling up, as he did much the same, feet kicking the wall below the window in an attempt to find traction.

I had a glimpse of the younger twin moving, a very clear mental picture of her leaping up, spearing Jamie through the torso even as he tried to climb through the window.

It was going to happen.  She was too fast, he was too slow.

I felt a vivid, intense resignation in the moment.  Resignation wasn’t a feeling I associated with intensity, but I felt it all the same, terrible and vicious.  Sweat made my hands slip on the barrel.

It wasn’t a thought that crossed my mind, there wasn’t enough time for it to be complete.  More a sentiment, a realization.  This is how it ends.  Separate us, and we go to pieces.

Four Lambs became three became two.  Counting down.

If only we had Mary.  To step in, seize the moment, seize Jamie-

There.  I found a hair more traction on the sweat-and-rain slick weapon barrel, hauling it closer, uncaring of the bayonet blade on the end, so close to my chest, I found a little bit more strength, and I hauled Jamie just far enough up that I could let go of the gun altogether, grabbing him by the shirt collar.  I hauled him up and into the room, practically throwing him to the ground.

Graceful.  Fluid.  One action to lead to another, I thought.

In another voice, calm, I reminded myself what my enemy was doing.

Bend down, grab the weapon, and bring it around, stabbing-

I was only halfway through the motions when Jamie kicked me down to the ground a few feet from him.

Spikes of bone lanced through the space where my head and body had been about to be.

She was there, in the window.  I’d dropped my weapon and held Jamie’s, which he’d just fired.  All the same, I tried for my third feint of the night, aiming it at her, trusting that she wouldn’t know it wasn’t loaded, that she would reflexively jump away as she had so many times.

But she’d been paying attention to the gun, where it was, the fact it had fired its shot.

I thrust it at her, jabbing with the blade in an ineffectual way, still sprawled on the ground, facing the window, and she swung a spike to smash the barrel, bending it visibly.

With her particular dimensions, working her way into the window took another second, her limbs were long, and she was using the fingers at the second elbow joint, at the fat end of the spike, to grip the windowsill.

Bringing herself up and through involved some contortion.  The spikes went out to either side, flush against the wall, bracing, her head ducking low, past broken glass-

Jamie had the gun, touching it, but didn’t have a position to get a grip on it.  Instead, he shoved it my way.

By the time I grabbed it and aimed it, the younger twin had pulled the spikes back, letting herself fall back outside the building.

A heavy scuffling sound marked her ascent, ten feet off to the left, moving up to other windows, possibly an upstairs floor.

She was stalking us, possibly communicating with her sisters, getting ready to cut us off.

She wasn’t nearly as pissed as her older sisters.  She was holding to pattern now, and that was a problem.  The younger twin was a killing machine, ingrained with the full knowledge on how best to end lives and tear through living people, all through careful, surgical strikes that minimized risk to her and maximized damage to the enemy.

Enraged, confused, lost with the death of her sister, she wasn’t spiraling out into new behaviors she wasn’t used to, rife with weaknesses I could exploit.  She was doing what she’d always done, a path where she’d ironed out most of the weaknesses.  She’d fallen for two feints and had learned enough to avoid falling for a third.

Jamie and I climbed to our feet.  I handed him the good rifle.  We were in someone’s house, now.  A shithole of a place.  I made a point of steering clear of any furniture where bugs or lice might be lurking.

“The older ones are in the alley,” Jamie said.

Following our group of ten-turned-seven, potentially cutting us off from one another.  One younger twin up above.

If my estimate was right, the soldiers were laying in wait.  The seven would run straight into a situation where they were outnumbered, outarmed, and outgunned.  If I was wrong, the seven would reach Mauer.

I wasn’t going to bet on that scenario and the chance that Mauer might extend additional resources in this direction.

“Two of us against three of them,” I said.  “I think you should sit this one out, Jamie.  Can’t make it too easy.”

“They can hear you, Sy,” Jamie said.  I could hear the tension in his voice.  “Don’t taunt them.”

I laughed, sudden enough it caught me off guard.  “Taunt them?  We just killed one of them.  I think we’ve topped things off, as provocation goes.  There’s no way to make them angrier.”

The laugh and the short speech had left me breathless.  The feelings I was burying and pushing off to the side were seeping out, affecting it.

“You hear me!?” I screamed out the words.  “You killed our dog and you injured our Lillian!  That means we’ve got to kill at least two more of you to balance the scales!  You mutant skeleton sisters are only worth half the dog each, and I’m going to have to take the older noble’s life to make up for almost killing Lil!”

Jamie stared at me, wide eyed.

“And when I’m done, you bitches, I’m going to go find your brother, and I’m going to make him squeal with pain before he dies!  Because his whole unproductive, sack-of-shit life isn’t worth one piece of me!”

The shouts rang off the walls.

Jamie exhaled, his breath shuddering as he did it.  “Maybe we shouldn’t be so loud.”

“They can hear us anyway,” I said.  “They know where we are.”

“And the little one?”

“She’s patient,” I told Jamie, my eye on the staircase, on the hallways and doorways.  “Even in the darkest, blackest rage she’s experienced in her life, she knows-”

The younger twin made her entry, tearing through the floor above us and the ceiling in a shower of plaster and wood splinters, dropping.

She’d fixed the issue with the binding at one limb, but she remained off balance.  Used to working in concert with a sister who could instinctively cover any gaps, more coordinated with her own movements than the Lambs ever were, she landed to one side, leaving us a direction to run.  We took it.

Through a dining room.  I slammed the door behind us, buying us a few more steps.  The violence with which she destroyed the door and tore through made my eye widen, putting an idea in my head.

I knocked over a chair, putting it in her way, grabbed a wheeled tea trolley and pulled it back into the path behind me.

I’d been missing the Lambs.  I’d been seeing the Lambs.  Phantoms of Gordon, of old Jamie, of Helen, Ashton, and most recently, of Mary.

I had a sense of what it was, now.  It wasn’t that I was emulating them.  It was that I was working with them.  Years of cooperation with other Lambs had left its imprint in me as surely as anything else.  I’d come to know Gordon, how Gordon acted, where he liked to be in a confrontation.  In the split second before he took action, not quite soon enough to change my own courses of action, I knew what he would be doing.

In visualizing Mary, hauling Jamie into the building, I’d recognized the lack, seen how the full team might have acted, and stepped to fill the void, as I’d been preparing to do for a long time.

The tea trolley in place, I slammed the kitchen door.

“Helen!” I called out,  grabbing the kitchen cabinet to arrest my forward movement.  Rather than run, I swung my feet up onto the counter.

Don’t try to fight, I thought.  Can’t fight.  The longer we draw this out, the worse it goes.

Ambush.

A spear of carbon-dense bone punctured the door near the knob.  It shifted angle dramatically, tearing at the wood even worse.

Then it pulled back, disappearing.

She knows we have one working gun.  She’s wary of being shot.

Jamie was behind me.  He didn’t make a noise.  I imagined he had a vague sense of what I was doing, namely something very risky and reckless, and he knew there was nothing he could do that wouldn’t jeopardize it.

If the greater battle had swords poised, ready to strike, what was this?  Everything was strained to a limit yet somehow restrained.  The twin wanting to attack and kill, Jamie wanting to help me.  The state of the group of seven, of us, of the elder twins outside.

I was the only poised sword here, and I had no edge.

The twin slammed bodily into the door.  The door opened, the top swinging in.

I leaped.  One foot went out, touching the door, while one hand caught the top of the door.  I hung there for a moment, my grip and sideways momentum keeping me in place, eye watching below me.

A half-second after the door had crashed open, sooner than might be expected, she dashed in, low to the ground.  I had to kick at the door, which was braced against the wall, to hurl myself far enough out.

She heard the sound or realized what the impact above her had been.  I saw her head turn slightly.

I landed on top of her, all hard bone and edges, and I embraced her.

She had so little muscle.  The muscle she did have had to move heavy bone, so it was very specialized toward that task.  Lillian had given me clues, talking about the low range of movement.  Lookout’s bola had been another, showing just how much difficulty she’d had tearing the remaining cord when an ordinary human might have been able to extend their arm and have the cord snap.

An alligator’s jaws.  Powerful as an alligator’s jaws were, if the mouth was held closed with a human’s hands, the muscles weren’t powerful enough to haul it open against the resistance.

Arms pinned against her side, me on her back, she could only use her legs, and those legs were limited in movement, solely for climbing, running, and kicking at opponents who weren’t hugging her.

Not that she didn’t try.  She had talons, and she scratched for my shoes and calves.

Her head turned, teeth snapping, and I had to pull my head back and away to avoid having my nose or chin taken off.

I heard a heavy knock.

She’d released a spike, with the thing no longer extending from what should have been her right wrist.

Fingers free, ‘hand’ able to move, she brought long fingers around and started to dig them into my forearm.

For long seconds, we thrashed, her kicking at cabinets and furniture to try and move us across the floor, to violently push me against cabinets, against the wall, trying to loosen my hold.  She tried to stand, and I tangled her leg with mine, keeping mine straight, to keep her from getting both feet under her.  I wasn’t even sure she could stand without her forelimbs to help.

With the finger-bones digging into flesh, I had to admit I was losing my grip.

I wasn’t Helen.  I couldn’t take this someplace, utterly destroying my target.

I could only hold her mostly still, long enough for Jamie to draw near, and slam the rifle’s bayonet blade into her eye socket.

The blade kept her head mostly in place.  She couldn’t do much except dig her fingers in deeper as Jamie changed the angle of his rifle, turning the barrel more toward the top of her head.

He pulled the trigger, firing a bullet into her brainpan.

Slowly, wincing in pain from a hundred new, small sorts of hurt, I made my way to my feet.

Helen.  Question.  Jamie gestured.  Helen?

Needed.  Helen.  Help.  I gestured back, staring down at the second sister’s corpse.  I winced as I bent down to pick up the spike, hefting it in my hands.

Jamie nodded.  He pulled the rifle free of the now-shattered eye socket, and jammed the bayonet past ribs and into the chest cavity, once, twice.

Thank you.  Helen.  He gestured, but the expression on his face was a grim one, suggesting he was reading something more into this than was warranted.

The older twins hadn’t come barging in.  That suggested they didn’t know how this had ended.

When their sister didn’t come back, triumphant, they would come looking.

Kill.  One.  Other.  No.  Balance.  I gestured.

Jamie nodded.  He understood what I meant.  Kill one, and the other toppled.  It wasn’t a guarantee, but the weaknesses that were so hard to find against the concerted pair were very evident once they were left to operate alone.  Was it why the older sisters had held back a little?  A fear that three would be just as uneven and fragile as one?

Or were they going after the seven remaining people that Jamie and I had recruited?

I wasn’t sure I liked any of the options.

I watched as Jamie gestured.  Are any of the others helping?

I wished I had a proper answer for him.  Given how hurt or close to death I was getting every time I tried it, I wasn’t sure I wanted them to.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.14 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.14

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The two of us moved across the house, making as little noise as possible while still striving to cover as much ground as possible.

The game with the twins was still underway.  Give and take.  Each trying to constrain the other side’s options.  Our options now were far more limited.

The younger siblings were killing machines.  Easier to predict, to bait into attacking or reacting.  The elder twins were more complex, more savvy.  They had demonstrated that much earlier.  I had no idea what to expect from them.  I knew they were strong, their bodies repurposed and at least somewhat similar to the younger twins.  I knew their senses were altered.  I didn’t know much else.

The house we’d broken into had a side door.  There was no convenient way to check if the coast was clear, and I wouldn’t trust any of those ways if they did exist.

All I could do was ease the door open slowly, ready to move a lot faster if I needed to stab at anyone on the other side.

Nobody.

Up until now, I had been able to maintain a general sense of where things were.  Now there were too many variables to control and there was too little in the way of indicators.  The explosions at the front line of the battle had stopped, but gunshots were incessant on both sides, the lines disorganized.  I couldn’t tell what might be the Twins’ soldiers shooting at the surviving members of our group from the rest of the noise.

A hand touched my shoulder.  Jamie pointed, gestured.

Indicating our path.  He had to have some idea as to why.  We were heading through side streets, but he might have glanced down another street while we’d been walking with our handpicked squadron and picked up a sense of how the area was laid out.

We ran for a couple of minutes, passing by a patch where the rocky ground was too uneven for any kind of building to be planted on it.

Behind the residential block, a few streets down, was a building, recessed into a nook in the patch of rockier terrain.   The building was surrounded by walls, in turn.  It wasn’t one of the sturdier constructions, standing half-again as tall as a typical one-story house did, as wide on any side as two houses, and on approach, I could smell traces of shit and blood.  There was a peculiar cast to the smell, suggesting it wasn’t fresh – just the opposite.  Weeks upon weeks of blood and shit piled onto one another, as if the rocky ground here had trapped the smell in.

A slaughterhouse, or it had been.  Not a huge one, probably only taking in six to twelve animals at a time, bringing them in along a road that branched in off the main street.  The lack of freshness to the smells made me think it hadn’t been used anytime in the last week or two.  Closed for the colder months, perhaps, or it worked on a schedule, as boats came in.

Weapon, Jamie signaled.

Did I want to pass up my spear of twin-bone for something from the slaughterhouse?  I could think of a dozen things I could do with the right tool and the right circumstance.  Meathooks, saws, chains, and sharp blades?  On any other day, it would have been perfect.

“No,” I said.  If we weren’t far enough away from the Twins to be able to speak without being overheard, then we were as good as dead as it was.  “But it’s a good thing to put between us and the twins.  Strong smell, to make us harder to sniff out, walls to block sounds.  Even if they’re strong, and even if they’re nimble, it doesn’t look like it’s easy to get onto the roof, and cutting across the property looks like it’s a pain.”

It was true.  Fences, corrals, barriers to keep thieves out, and doors, all bounding a building that looked dilapidated enough to discourage kicking one’s way through doors.  Part of the reason I didn’t want to put time into going into the building and getting my hands on things.

“Good,” Jamie said.

“How did you even see it?  Through an alley as we walked by?”

“If you stand near the harbor and look northeast, you could see it.  Looking the other way, the slope and intervening buildings hide it.”

“Maybe we could see it, but I definitely couldn’t tell what it was from that distance.”  Or remember where it was supposed to be.

“Neither could I.  I figured something like this, set a little bit away from the other buildings, a bit large-”

“Was set apart from other stuff for a reason.  Because it offended the senses.  Loud or smelly.”

“Which means tools.”

I nodded.  Which mean options.

Every interaction with this Jamie seemed to create more distance between me and the old Jamie.  As if it reminded me, again and again, over and over, that my best friend was gone and he was being left behind.

That this Jamie was proving himself and honing his abilities in a way very different from the Jamie I knew was a bittersweet thing.  Bitter because it only widened the gap, sweet, if it could be called that, because it helped keep us alive.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  The options afforded by the slaughterhouse weren’t worth the time it took to get in, or the risk of finding ourselves at odds with very angry twins in an environment filled with sharp things.

More likely they’d figured out where we were, and were moving in the same direction we were.  If our group had headed toward Mauer, then they had waltzed right into the soldiers.  Jamie and I had backtracked a little and were now heading to that same general perimeter.

My hope was that the soldiers had taken notice of the group of seven and were now moving from their position to collapse in on the group.  The line became a ‘u’, which became a circle, ever-closing on the seven.  If the soldiers thought we were part of that group, then there was a very real chance we could come in behind the soldiers as they closed the circle, approaching from the outside of that circle while the people that composed it were looking inward.

The twins, if they were following us, would have found themselves cut off by terrain and by the setup of the fences and walls of the little slaughterhouse.  They would turn, moving in parallel to us as we headed toward the soldiers who were attacking or surrounding the seven.

Jamie’s little tidbit of knowledge had bought us distance.

There were two possibilities, now.  The first was that the seven were dead, and the twins would find their soldiers and give the order to chase us.  That would be bad, and it would be a test of whether grown men or two boys who had been running all night were quicker on their feet.

The second option was that the seven were alive.  The twins would reach their soldiers, give the order, and make those soldiers attack.  Whatever was holding them back, whatever had happened that let the seven live, the twins would force a resolution, even if it meant making their soldiers mount a suicidal attack on the seven.  That done, they could attack Mauer’s back line or chase us.

Both options were different brands of bad.

Mauer was only a five minute run away, going by the fires and the glow of the countless people who held torches.  The Crown- I had no way of telling.  Too many people were shooting in too many places.

I watched the buildings, looking, my eye focusing on the darkness, to see if I could see shadow moving against shadow, as the Crown’s soldiers moved closer to the seven.

Where had they set up, and where were they going?  Given a choice, where would a talented soldier set up?

A sharp whistle made Jamie and I turn our heads simultaneously.

A moment later, a gunshot.  It was answered by three more.  The first gunshot and the answering gunfire had very different sounds, the latter muffled, not nearly as crisp.

The twins had found the soldiers.  The first gunshot we’d heard had to be one of their soldiers, if not one shot fired by a member of a pair or trio.  A response to the whistle that summoned them, I imagined.  ‘We can’t come because we’re the only thing between the enemy and Mauer’, it was saying.

The answering gunfire would have been the response of the seven.  Or however many were left, now.  Not a response I would have recommended.  They had just told everyone where they were.

I gestured.  Jamie nodded.

We moved in the direction of our allies, keeping closer to the shadows.

Pinned down, surrounded, injured, and unaware that the twins were about to catch up with them.

We reached an intersection.  I could look down the length of this particular street and see the back lines of Mauer’s force.  So close, yet those forces were preoccupied.

It was salvation.  I could have abandoned my hand-picked group and gone to Mauer.  I was carrying a trophy that would likely buy some mercy from the man.  It could even buy us soldiers, a force of men that could strike at a smaller squad of the twins’ men and the twins themselves.

It would be so easy to be the utter bastard, to just dispose of those lives.  The risk, the reward, the likelihood it saw us living versus the nobles dying.

I wondered if Mauer would have decided to return to the main force.  I felt like he might, if it was civilians and not his trained soldiers.  For his men to be loyal, he had to justify that loyalty.  To do otherwise would have required constant manipulation.  He was good at leading and directing people, shepherding his flock, but he seemed far too pragmatic a man to adopt lies and manipulations that would tie his hands just a little in every interaction over just about every single day.

I couldn’t do it.

We glanced around, checking every avenue, then, at a signal from me, we crossed the street at a run.

We were three-quarters of the way across when I saw movement in the corner of my eye.

One soldier.

I gestured, and Jamie and I began to follow the man, as he wound his way through alleys, heading in the direction of the whistle.

He moved at a brisk walk.  Jamie and I moved at a jog.  It would have been a run, but we both took caution to move silently.  The heat in the air from the bodies and the fires of Mauer’s forces was plunging skyward alongside plumes of smoke, and the difference in cold air and hot air was stirring the wind, drawing in cold air from the harbor and up the sloping city.  It was windy, and the wind stirred up snow, it blew in the ear and it caught sounds, carrying them away.  Moving while upwind of the man would help, if only a little.

You.  Right.  Me.  Left.  I gestured.

Jamie and I parted as we approached the soldier from behind.  Sure enough, he was focused on the direction of the seven and on getting to the Richmond Twins quickly enough to avoid their ire.

Jamie glanced at me.

You.  High.  Me.  Low.

He nodded.

The man was a few paces away, but he was walking away from us.  Moving closer meant having to be quieter, which generally necessitated moving slower.  It was a paradox, one that made the approach an exercise in agony.  The strain of smoothly rolling my weight forward with more careful motions of my legs and feet was making the cut in my calf hurt.  Courtesy of the younger twins.

I saw Jamie’s head turn, and then reluctantly drew back, dropping lower to the ground and closer to the edge of the nearest building, where I could be out of sight.

Another soldier, approaching from a different position, converging on the same point as our quarry.

There would be no careful execution of that pair.  Especially with the risk that another soldier might approach and spot us as soon as we stepped out of cover and attacked.

Jamie had stopped as well.  He watched from the other end of the street, through precipitation-beaded glasses, his hood up, a rifle in his hands.

I gestured at Jamie.  Enemy.  Count.  Question.

One-five, the response came.

Fifteen.  Fifteen soldiers to worry about.  Fifteen, and the two we’d just seen had approached from points that seemed set fairly far from one another.  Assuming they had started traveling when they heard the whistle…

Back, I gestured.  Fast.

We reversed course.

I could imagine Gordon explaining it: it didn’t make sense that the soldiers would position themselves that that far apart, with so much of an area to watch.  Drawing a mental circle around the handpicked group of seven, extrapolating from what we had seen, there would be seven or eight different positions where soldiers had taken up watch.  Those positions left wide, wide gaps between them.

The only plausible explanation was that there was more than one soldier at each post.  The whistle code had called for only one to arrive and report in.  Others were still at their posts.

Knowing the direction they would be looking and the direction the two soldiers we’d seen had been traveling, I could start looking for the vantage points they might have taken up.

Have to be fast.  The twins are closing in.

There.  Built adjunct to one building was a rigging of planks and pieces of wood, some of the lengths of wood still had bark on them.  A ladder led up to the top of what looked to be a water reservoir tower.  Set up to catch the rain like a water barrel, with a hose drooping down for showers or some industrial work.

A perfect vantage point.  It offered a good view of surrounding streets.

I gestured for Jamie to wait.  He nodded, and retreated a bit, to where he could point the gun up and in the general direction of the tower.

The construction gave me cause for concern.  It wasn’t shoddy, and it didn’t look wobbly – it wouldn’t have held any proper amount of water if it was either.  But it wasn’t so solid that I could be sure that any movement wouldn’t vibrate through the entire construction, alerting the guy or guys on the top that someone was approaching.

I moved with care, my calf aching as I adjusted my weight upward, rather than climbing or hauling myself up.  Holding the spear of carbon-strong bone, I had to be extra careful not to knock it against anything.

I knew the angle the man or men on top might be looking, if they were watching out for their buddy and for the group of seven.  They would be especially alert, because their buddy was gone, and there was a lot of ground to watch, more with fewer sets of eyes.

I had to approach from one side.  I tucked the spike of bone through the back of my shirt and down the back of my pants.  Once I was sure it wouldn’t fall free, I moved from one side of the ladder and climbed around the platform, gripping the ledge with my fingers, my legs dangling over the sloped roof below.  The spots in my arm where the younger twin’s fingers had dug into flesh throbbed with pain, and my right hand was noticeably weaker than my left, as a consequence of the damage.

Not a terminal fall, but falling would be terminal.  I would make noise, and if I was right and if someone had set up position here, then I would be gunned down before I finished rolling off the roof and landing on the street below.

Wood creaked under my hands.  I froze, trying not to move.

I heard a murmur.

The mental image of the scene above me clarified.  I knew which way he was looking, and now I had a general sense of where at least one of the people were.

Moving a hand up, I gripped the rail above me, splinters digging into my palms.  Legs still dangling, I hauled myself up until I could see everything on the platform.

Platform, circular, with the barrel situated on top.  The platform with its rail at the boundary would let the owner fix the water barrel if it started leaking, after weather or the weight of water warped it too much.

One man sat with his back to the barrel, watching in the direction I’d guessed.

I hauled myself up further, brought one leg over, and then brought the other up.  Once I was secure, with four points of contact with solid terrain, I reached back, and slid the spike of bone onto the platform beside me.  Flexible enough to move, now, I walked myself forward, still maintaining a death grip on the railing, until I was lying down on my back, my arms over my head, holding the railing.

I relaxed, flipping over and taking hold of the spike, and crawled around the circumference of the oversize water barrel.

I attacked from around the corner.  One blow.  Ambush, I could do, calculating my move in my own time, no rush and no fuss.  Fighting was something else, leaving me one step behind.

All of my weight behind the blow, I drove the spike of bone into the front of the man’s throat.  He fell over, eyes going wide, and I planted my feet, thrusting the spike in deeper, so there was more bone in his throat, blocking and tearing through windpipe and arteries.

He reached for his gun, a final, suicidal attack.  I put my foot out, blocking the gun from coming around to point at me.

The fight went out of him quick, but he was slow to die.  He struggled for what seemed like a minute.  He’d stopped trying to use the gun, and his hands weakly grasped at the bone that extended in one side of his neck and out the other.  He was showing no sign of stopping, grunting and gasping, making thick choking sounds.

Then, as I pulled the spike free, he seemed to go out like a snuffed candle.  As he went limp, he made a singular, low, gurgling groan that seemed like the accumulation of all the sounds he’d been unable to make during that one minute of struggle.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.

A man with a family.  A man who had shit and laughed and cried, countless times over the course of his life.  On a level, he might have had no choice but to follow the nobles.  He wasn’t any more or less guilty than the citizens of Lugh I’d hand-picked.  On another level, he was participating in a city-wide extermination, trying to kill children and relative innocents who had only picked up this fight to defend themselves.

It didn’t break down to right or wrong.  It was too complicated, and that complication was matched with the simple reality that he’d had to die, because he might have shot us if he was given the chance.

With all of my strength, I hauled him back up to a sitting position.  It took some doing.  With care, I buttoned up his shirt and raised his collar before buttoning that too, to cover the wound.  I positioned his head so he sat in nearly the exact same posture he’d sat when I found him.  The stiff collar helped to keep his head up, but I suspected it would give way with a few more minutes of his heavy chin pressing down on it.

It only took thirty seconds to prop him back up like that, and if someone came to find him in the meantime, the confusion and alarm might help us.

Collecting his gun, I headed back down the ladder, climbing down with two feet and one hand, as fast as I was able.  Jamie met me at the bottom, waiting patiently while I slid the bone spike back into my shirt, the fat end in my back pocket.

I pointed.  Jamie nodded.

Circling around to the south of the group of seven, we headed in the general direction the other soldier had come from.

He found us before we found him.  A gunshot rang out, closer and clearer than the cacophony from Mauer’s camp.

You.  Right.  I gestured.

But Jamie was heading right before I even started indicating it.

Another gunshot.  Unaware, the group of seven fired back in our general direction.  They thought the gunshots were meant for them.

It would be so very fitting if I died after getting shot by a friendly bullet.

The twins would be coming, probably at a brisk run.

No time.  Jamie continued moving to the shooter’s right, I moved to the shooter’s left.  I could tell where the shooter was firing from, now.  He’d chosen a point lower to the ground, a store front with a great glass window that had broken earlier in the night.

The muzzle flashed.  I could see the oblong nature of the flash, and knew the man was firing at Jamie, not me.   One shot.  Then another.  Jamie was stuck, and I couldn’t approach without it being a very direct, obvious approach.

I reached down to my pocket.  I retrieved the whistle I’d taken from the soldier who handled the stitched.

Ducking behind a trough of water, I blew, hard.

I was telling the twins where I was, I knew.  But we didn’t have a lot of options.  Not moving would just leave us stuck in place.

Another gunshot.  I heard the bullet sink into a bit of wood to my right.

I blew.

Another shot.  This one hit the trough.

Another shot.

“Sy.”

I stood straight, hurdling over the trough, stumbling a bit on the landing – moving around with a straight, inflexible rod at my back wasn’t helping, and the rifle I held was meant for someone two and a half times my height – it was unwieldy.

Jamie had approached while the shooter was focusing on me, and managed a clean shot.With my own rifle, which matched what the man held, I aimed, and I fired again, off to one side.Let the enemy think we were still embroiled in the fight.  If the Twins had hearing as keen as we suspected, maybe they could hear the difference in the direction of the shots, the distant ‘pok’ of impact.  Would they extrapolate, and think the shooter was aiming at someone further away?

I paused, and fired again, looking at Jamie.

No need for gestures.  He got what I meant.

I ran, as fast as my tired legs would allow.

If we were going to make this work, we needed to be fast.  The twins were approaching, and we had opened up roughly a third of the circle that had been drawn around the seven.  By moving out through that opening and toward Mauer, we stood a small chance of coming out of this with our hides intact.

Jamie remained behind, periodically firing.  He was painting a picture through sound, much like the one I’d been observing since I’d had my dose of wyvern.  Hopefully it was one that misled, that made the twins make certain movements.

I kept to paths and roads that wouldn’t expose me to fire from anyone with a vantage point and eyes on the building.  When it came to the building, I exposed myself to gunfire from friendly forces and approached directly, heading straight for the nearest window, praying they wouldn’t take me for one of the younger twins.

There were safer ways to approach, ways that involved coming in at an angle, knocking, and negotiating.

Instead, I turned my rifle around and smashed the glass with the butt-end.  I could see the people on the other side backing away.

“Move!  Out!  Now!” I called through the break in the glass.  “Only chance!”

The seven -now the five– opened a door.  Bat-nose, with her grave shoulder wound, was no longer with them.  Tattoo Belly was absent as well.  Adam, surprisingly, had bandaged the wound at his stomach, and was still mobile.  I’d taken him for disemboweled.

“Go,” I said.  “Move!”

They asked questions, some about the spike at my back, but my mind was racing, my focus wholly on the environment.  Possible avenues of approach or attack by enemies.

It crossed my mind that I hadn’t heard Jamie shoot recently.I could only hope he’d escaped.

Toward the perimeter, then through.  To Mauer, then we could turn his forces back on the twins.  It wasn’t perfect, there were countless problems at play, but in terms of immediate survival, it was the only way we might live through this.

I was cutting corners, now.  Moving fast and taking risks to move even faster, in hopes of staying ahead of them  I was praying that with their sisters absent and their structural integrity suffering just a bit for the lack of their other halves, that the elder sisters might be a little slower.  That they would lag behind and rely more on their soldiers.  The proceedings thus far didn’t contradict that fact.

Faster.  To the perimeter, to Jamie.

A horse that had been ridden like I’d been running would collapse and a merciful owner would put it down.  Small mercies, that humans had evolved as long-distance runners.  Sweat and precipitation clung to my face and ran through my hair.  My ears were freezing.

Ahead of me, one of the Richmond Twins stepped out of the shadows, putting herself directly in our path.  Her eyes were wide, and they were wild.

Without wasting a moment, I raised my rifle, aiming and firing. Gordon might have approved the minimal hesitation in the action.  Mary would have shaken her head at the miserable aim.  What would have been a glancing blow became a miss as the woman took one step to the side, a slower, lazier version of what her smaller counterpart had done, swaying out of the way of my rifle’s point.

In the next moment, I pivoted on my toes and ran for cover.  The others had skipped the shooting part and gone right for the cover, and some of those people, wounded, were slower than I was in getting there.

The Twin held a rifle in one hand.  She raised it, aimed, and fired at the mass of our group.  Salt, the boy with sailor’s clothes, toppled, shrieking in a high voice, reminiscent of a woman’s.

“You killed my sister.  Two of them,” she said, her voice higher than it had been before, imperious, and dangerously unsteady.  She was reloading her weapon, walking toward us at a lazy pace.

This was one Twin.  The other-I turned on the spot, looking behind the group.  I turned again, looking to the side of the street for alleys, then the other side.

“She’s not here, Lamb,” she said.  Her voice still had that note to it, like the quaver of someone who was on the verge of tears, but very dangerous.

The glassblower looked over cover, aimed, and fired.  Hit home.

Yet the Twin didn’t seem to care.  Blood welled out of the wound.  She’d finished reloading, aimed, and fired.

The cover the glassblower was behind wasn’t quite good enough.  The woman shrieked, splinters and a bullet catching her upper arm.

The Twin raised her fingers to her mouth.  She whistled, tremolo, like a bird’s song.

The whistle reminded me of the noise the younger twins had made.  A twin language, shared among the four.

I heard the answer, distant.  A different sort of song.

“She found your friend.  He’s secured,” the twin said.

No.  I well and truly believed her.

“Now I’m going to break you.  I want you to be aware as I take your fellow Lamb to pieces, the Duke’s orders be damned.  He played a part in this, and nobody that hurts a proper noble can be suffered to live,” she told me.  Her voice was getting unsteadier by the moment, as if the breaking point would be within the next few words, only it didn’t break.  She sounded positively unhinged, now.

I seriously contemplated raising the question of whether she was a proper noble.  If I called her a bastard now, what would she do?  Would she break?

If she would, I didn’t want to see it.

“…Then I’m going to take your remaining eye, and I’m going to send you to the Richmond home.  Every moment of pain and heartbreak we feel for our little sisters will be returned to you tenfold.”

I closed my eyes.

There were slim few ways out of this, and all the ones that sprung to mind involved sacrificial pawns.  Sacrificing one of the surviving five members of our group of ten.

“One of them is alive,” I said.  “We left her back there, dying.”

“Cry wolf one more time, Lamb, try it.”

I hadn’t expected that would work.  It was hard to steer someone like her off course, when all she wanted was revenge.

She was drawing closer.  I would have to run for it, and I doubted I would get away.

“If the rest of you would like a life in prison instead of a lifetime of being experimented on in the Academies, then grab that boy.”

My eye widened.  “Wait-”

Hands grabbed me.  Glasses and the Lookout.

I struggled, but it was futile to begin with, and even if I’d been able to break free, I would have been slower than she was.  Casually, the Twin reached past Glasses and the Lookout to seize me.

She didn’t lift me up into the air.  Her hand gripped me, fingers digging in deep, and with one hand, she held me with her arm extended down at her side, my head at her mid-thigh, my body slightly bent forward.

She dropped her rifle.  One hand seized my arm.  She gripped it, and she pulled it back behind my back.

With virtually no effort at all, she lifted it back and up beyond its tolerance.  I felt a flare of pain, blinding agony, and felt bone grind against bone, muscle wrenching with a weird springing sensation, too hot, then too cold.

When she let go of my arm, it dangled, shoulder disconnected from everything else.  Attached by some yet-untorn muscle, some connective tissue, and by skin.

I found it in me not to scream, somehow.  My breath being caught in my throat played a part in it.

“This is kindness compared to what we’re going to do to you once you’re back at the House of Richmond,” she said.
“Thank you for your kindness, milady,” I managed, and my voice was somehow as raw as if I’d been howling at the top of my lungs for a long time.  I might have sounded sarcastic.

All around us, the others were watching, defeated, not even willing to put up a fight.

“Hm.  I don’t suppose you need that mouth for anything,” she said, reaching up to my face.  She touched my cheek, and looked down to meet my eye with her own eyes.

There was a wildness in her eyes that belied the seeming calm with which she moved.  The pupil vibrated with fractional activity, darting back from detail to detail, and her fingers trembled with emotion as she touched my cheek.  I wasn’t sure any of the other bystanders would have noticed, removed by a few feet.

Her fingers went to my mouth, half of the fingers composed of black bone, the other half of white flesh.  Before they could be in far enough to get a proper grip on my jaw, I bit, hard.  Nothing to lose, at this point.

“Foolish,” she said.

Something metal clinked.  Unable to move my head, I rolled my eye to see.

Before I could see the source of the clink, I saw the a white mist unfold from what must have been a metal canister or glass jar.  The twin, seeing it, lifted me bodily, nearly breaking my neck as she swung out, using my body as a kind of fan to push the smoke away, backing away in the same movement.

She released me with a snap motion that suggested she’d been trying to break my jaw or neck in the course that she tossed me aside.

Both of her hands went to her face.  A trickle of blood flowed out of her nose.

All of the emotion she’d been barely repressing gave way.  She howled, ragged and mad, glaring at me in abject hatred.  Glaring past me, to Jamie, and at Lillian, who was walking with Jamie’s support.  There were soldiers behind them.  Lillian’s escort.

Then she fled, one hand still to her face.  She ran with power, not the sheer speed of her younger sisters.  Bounding movements, each one powerful enough to carry her twice as far as an ordinary human stride might.

The Lillian I looked at was fully the Lillian I had seen at the Fishmonger’s.  A Lillian who could use wyvern to push away pain.  To have worked this fast ad recruit that kind of help while receiving medical assistance, she would have had to forego anesthetic, to work tirelessly from the moment she was conscious.

Trust the other Lambs, I thought.

“Mauer needs help,” she said.

I barked out a laugh, then winced.

“So do you,” she said.  She seemed fully disconnected from the Lillian I had known.  Focused on the job.  “So do these people.”

Was she gone?

She bent down over me, touching my shoulder.

“Damn it,” she said, under her breath.  And in those words, I heard a glimmer of the real Lillian.  I reached up with my good hand to touch the side of her face, and I saw a smile, and I knew that the real Lillian was there.

“How bad?” I asked.

“You or-”

“Mauer.  The situation.  Is Mauer winning, or is the Crown?  Because both could-”

“Both,” Lillian said.  “Both are winning, in a way that puts everything in the worst possible position.  Mauer’s only winning because of the primordials, and the Duke isn’t backing down enough to let Mauer’s forces recover and let Mauer to solve his own problem.  A game of chicken, with everyone in Lugh set to lose.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.15 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“The other one?” I asked.  I watched the surroundings, making sure that the Twins’ soldiers weren’t about to converge on us.  Had to focus, to keep from blacking out.  The allure of the darkness was that all the pain would stop.  I wasn’t one to take the easy road.

Not when there was retaliation to be served.

“If she’s not dead, she will be soon,” Lillian said.  “Maybe.  Probably.”

“Direct hit,” Jamie said.  “From Lillian’s stuff.”

He looked back at the soldiers they’d brought with them.  “Can you steady her?  I need to help Sy.”

We were surrounded by the scattered remnants of what had been a group of ten.  Now only five lived.  Two of them, Lookout and Glasses, looked utterly defeated.  Others were hurt.  Glassblower had Adam working to keep pressure on her wound.  Salt was lying on the ground, passed out.  There was a chance he was dead, but I wasn’t about to put money on it.  The way he’d screamed hadn’t been a dying man’s scream.  I’d heard enough of those to know.

The shriek of a badly hurt child?  I’d heard those too, if far less.

The soldiers arrived at Jamie and Lillian’s side, and took custody of Lillian.  Jamie helped me to my feet.

“My fault,” I said.  “This situation, the one you faced.  I almost got us killed.  Didn’t estimate where they were.  Focusing too much on these sorry bastards.”

Four of the five who remained were watching me, staring.

“I think we both did the best we could,” Jamie said.

“All three of us did,” I said, looking at Lillian.  I looked at the five members of the handpicked group.  Glassblower, Lookout, Glasses, Adam, and Salt.  Lookout and Glasses averted their eyes.  I could see fear in their expressions.  “These guys too.  Even put bullets in her, for all the good it  did.”

Lookout tensed, as if he was waiting for me to drop the guillotine.  Glasses, however, looked up, meeting my eye, wary confusion on her face.

“Come on,” I said.  “Mauer needs our help?”

“He needs something,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

Once we started moving, hobbling as much as we walked, more than half of our group injured, we were able to cover a fair bit of ground.

The noise of the front line of battle was almost too much.  The explosions, the gunshots that would have individually been able to make my ears ring were occurring by the hundred.  Through it all, people were shouting.

A building a hundred meters down the road took one last explosion, too much for it to bear, and it folded, tipping into the building next to it and into the street.  I couldn’t even hear the rumble or the cracking of the timber over everything else.

Someone jostled me, and the pain of my ruined shoulder nearly blinded me.

Jamie was gesturing, and I couldn’t focus enough to make out the signs.

I caught some of Lillian’s response, and I was able to put the pieces together.

Primordial.

I looked, and I saw it.

Three Crown warbeasts were engaged in what looked like a savage dogfight with the primordial.  The primordial was twice the size it had been when I had seen it last, its form even more disorganized, and it fought on despite gaping wounds from explosions and horrific burns from flame.

Its primary mouth extended from one side of its head, around the other side, and along one shoulder.  It managed to open that mouth and seize hold of one of the warbeasts’ paws.  With a disturbing strength, it clamped down, teeth locking it in place.

Then, like a bear-trap snapping closed, configurations above and below that mouth snapped shut on part of the warbeast’s head, its shoulder, and part of its chest, the first mouth now serving to draw the paw in, to tear and to enable the larger, new configuration of a mouth to take in even more of the warbeast it was fighting.

Bullets sank into it, fired whenever there was an opportunity, an exposed part of the primordial that the warbeasts weren’t savaging.  Explosives sailed into the fray, sent by the Crown, aimed at the primordial beast rather than the creatures that were busy attacking it.

The beast lurched, putting one of the warbeasts that was gnawing on it in the way of one explosive.  The other detonated behind it.  I saw the chunks of meat fly.

It was strong enough to move with what had to be a Crown ton of meat hanging off of it, and it seemed to have a basic understanding of the battlefield and what the dangers were.  More problematic was where it was.  Behind the Crown’s front line.  As it moved, trying to get away, the Crown delivered more explosives.

Mauer’s forces could only shoot it, and shooting it was proving ineffective.  It didn’t seem to bleed, and if it had vital organs, the bullets didn’t seem to be impairing those organs.  The manifestation of the new mouth seemed to suggest that it could move parts of itself around at will.

I gestured.  Big.  Question.

Beast.  Experiment.  Eat.  Brother.  Eat.  Lillian gestured.  She started to do more gestures, but someone bumped into her.  She winced.

Not wholly immune to pain, it seemed.

Hands on each of our shoulders, Jamie urged us away from the front line.

It had eaten warbeasts.  And it had eaten a brother?

I had a mental picture, very distinct, of one of the larger of the four primordials seizing one of the lesser ones in its jaws.  Had the lesser one fought and lost, or had it gone willingly?

Both ideas were very spooky.

Taking in a brother, every part of the primordial’s body a hard-coded set of lessons and adaptations, communicating with every other part.  Having eaten its brother, it would take in all of that information.

I was starting to get a glimmer of why Mauer might have been getting concerned.

When I thought about the warbeasts it had eaten, then I started to get a little concerned, myself.

The Crown’s forces were capable of committing a hell of a lot more explosives and firepower than they had.  But in feeding the damn thing, and in holding back firepower, I was starting to see what was really at work.

Somewhere along the line, the battle lines had shifted, the Duke made his play in a way that probably wasn’t even perceptible to the people fighting on the front line.  All they would’ve known was that they were losing, suddenly, being pushed back, despite the monsters that was tearing through the Duke’s forces.

It was like a macabre chess game, where the pieces were building-sized, and every movement of one swept across and landed atop crowds, leaving dozens or hundreds crippled and maimed.  In this macabre game that only the Duke, Mauer and I could understand on any level, the Duke had gone to great ends to push his forces up, isolating the worst of the primordials behind his own lines.

Now he held onto it, at the cost of stitched life and human life both.  If it grew too weak, he threw warbeasts at it, to make it harder to shoot at, to feed it and give it the fuel it needed.  If it grew too strong, he ordered more shots of artillery.

Control.  When it comes down to it, the Academy has control and seeks power, and the Crown has power and seeks control.  By intertwining to the point they were frequently indistinguishable, they maintained both, and they continued to expect both in every situation.  The Duke had orchestrated a situation where, if my gut feeling was right, Lugh would fall, and the Primordial would eventually die.

Except that death would only happen if and when the Duke allowed it, and the Duke would only allow it if Mauer recognized the stakes and surrendered.

With soldiers ahead of us and soldiers behind us, the Lambs and the five surviving members of the group made our way to the back line of battle.

It wasn’t nearly the same kind of journey it had been an hour ago.  Mauer’s forces were dwindling.  The Crown’s seemed nigh-untouchable.

I saw a glimpse of Mauer, talking to a group of his officers.  He was fire, a light in his eyes and an energy to his movements.  One of the soldiers in our group broke away to head to Mauer.  To update.  Mauer would hear about the twins and about our success, the state of the Lambs that had troubled him.  He would adjust his view of this battlefield.

Months, even years of work, had led up to this moment.  He had been working on this since I had known Mary.  He had been nurturing rebellion in Radham when I had been learning what Mary’s favorite food had been, how she thought and how to manipulate her, back when she had been enough of a question mark that I’d felt the need to pull strings and keep her in a good place.  When I had been mourning Jamie, Mauer had been setting up bigger things with Fray, organizing this, the war, the primordials, deciding where the battle would happen, what the outcome should be.

In this place, in this moment, he was a giant.  With a gesture, a word, he could cause the death of hundreds or thousands.  As the Reverend Mauer he had had power before, stature, the attention and obedience of thousands, but it was small compared to this.  A new power, which he used to face down an enemy who had been born to that stature and greatness.  The Duke had been a giant from the very beginning.

In context, looking at the battlefield, his forces, the state of the primordial, and the robustness of the Crown’s forces, Mauer was losing.  Everything pointed to that fact, it seemed.

Everything but Mauer himself.  I couldn’t see him any more, with all the people moving around and between us, but the glimpse I’d had of the man suggested distilled confidence.  Energy, not anxiety.  Back straight, eyes focused.

He had to know the state of things.  Was it that he was well and truly unbowed and unbroken, or was it that he was incapable of giving in?

Our group made our way to where the medical tents and supplies were.  The soldiers with us spoke to the medical staff, many of whom looked to be Mauer’s men.  Injured soldiers were moved off beds to make room for us.

Mauer would come, he would talk to us, looking for a solution to this puzzle.  Just about everything was going according to his plan, everything but this.  The possibility of killing nobles and getting an answer to the puzzle had been reason enough to send Lillian and the soldiers after us.

Lillian, on the bed next to me, raised her arms over her head.  A doctor pulled off her shirt.

The same piece of gauze that stuck out of the front of her wounded stomach stuck out of her back.  Bandage had been wrapped around, binding everything in place, but her stomach was messy with drying blood and fresh blood alike.  An opaque bag with clear tubing was on her back, bound to her bra straps, marked with the two red circles, the smaller one above the larger one, that was the symbol for blood.  The tubing fed into the wound, blood flowing down and into Lillian at a steady rate.

Red blood, but her bra was a light green, an oddly bright color in the midst of so much fire and blood and smoke.  The little slope of her left breast that I could see above the bra’s top edge had twin smudges of dried blood on it, where a pair of bloody fingertips had grazed it.  I wondered if the fingers that had done the smudging was someone else’s, a doctor tending to her stomach, and I felt a kind of annoyance.

I wondered if it had been her fingers, and experienced a vivid mental image of Lillian awake through the efforts to patch her together just enough that she could stand and walk to where we were, speaking to doctors and telling them to collect materials for whatever it had been that she had used on the Twins.  I felt mingled pride and pity.

I wanted to wipe those smudges away, so very badly.  It was all I could do to sit still, and I wasn’t sure if I could tear my eye away from that image.  If wyvern left me open for new ideas and skills to leave their impressions on my mind, then this was an image that would remain burned in my brain for a long time.

Strong hands seized my torso, jarring me from the thought process.  I realized what I was doing and looked up.  I looked past the shirt they were pulling and cutting off me, so they would have better access to my shoulder, across the extended bench that they were laying the wounded on, to my teammate.

Lillian was gazing into my eye, and had been for a long part of this, a small smile on her face.  Except this was the elemental Lillian, the Lillian that the Lillian I knew wanted to be, fearless in the face of gaping stomach wounds, fearless in terms of taking the risks and getting the job done.  Fearless in how she could look the boy she liked in the eye and communicate without words just how much she liked him.

More hands seized the arm that was hanging limp and numb at my side.  I gasped in a breath, biting down to keep that gasp from becoming a gag or scream of abject pain as I felt everything in my ruined shoulder move, and braced myself for what I knew was coming.  My dislocated shoulder needed to be set back into place.  Pain, I could deal with.  If I could anticipate it, then that was all the better.

A moment later, I remembered the damage, the tearing of the muscles.  I could replay the sensation in my mind, knew this wasn’t an ordinary dislocation, and it required more than an ordinary fix.

“Wait!” I called out.

They never actually did.  Every damn time I called for people to stop, to hold back, it was when things were already in motion.

They tried to shove my shoulder back into place.  I felt a horrendous pinching sensation that joined the wrenching of torn flesh to overwhelm every other sensation that should have gone with shoving the ball of one’s shoulder back into the socket.

My bones weren’t big, my shoulder wasn’t anything special.  It thus baffled and deeply angered me that, when they failed to get my shoulder in the first time, they tried again.

It didn’t work any better than it had the first time.

Blind and sick with pain, I thrashed like an animal, kicking, wrenching myself out of their grip, twisting around so they couldn’t try a third time.  I’d caught one of Mauer’s soldiers in the balls, I was pretty sure.

People tried to grab me again.  I kicked and thrashed, swinging my one good arm to get them to stop.  It was enough pain and emotion that I was having trouble thinking straight, and I really wanted to think clearly in this moment.

A hand seized my numb, aching left hand, and I flinched.

Looking, however, I saw that Lillian had moved across the bench, close enough to touch me.

I was breathing so hard, and she was so calm.  She said something, but it was too quiet to hear.  Her voice didn’t carry like Mauer’s did, and even with wyvern influencing her, she wasn’t one to raise her voice, even when the situation necessitated it.

I had no idea what she’d said, but I allowed myself to relax, used the poison in me to make that allowance possible.

Her fingers touched my arm, as if she was working her way up.  Then she touched my shoulder.  Some of the touches hurt, but she seemed to know when it did, because she would immediately ease up every time it did.

I had goosebumps, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I was shirtless in a tent in winter.  The fires and the sheer number of bodies were more than enough to cancel out the chill.

“Displaced infraspinatus muscle,” she said, to a doctor.  The fingers of both hands still rested on my shoulder and arm.  “It’s getting in the way, and since you tried and smashed it in between the ball and socket like you did, it’s going to swell and make your job harder.  You can move it with a type-F lever and put his arm back in place, but you’ll have to do it fast, before the swelling gets worse.  Leave the rest of the damage alone, give him a cortisol bar, reduce swelling, and put his arm in a sling.  We’ll get it properly fixed later, but I don’t think we’ll be sitting still long enough to do the comprehensive surgery.”

The doctors hopped to, apparently willing to take her at her word.  While they got the necessary things together, Lillian leaned forward, one arm reaching behind my neck to my other shoulder for balance, pressing down as she put most of her upper body weight on it.  In that position, she kissed my throbbing shoulder.  Her fingers traced down the length of my back as she let her hand move away from my good shoulder.

I wanted to wipe away those twin smudges so badly.

Doctors worked on her, unwinding the bandage and pulling gauze free of the cavity.  I looked away, and everywhere I looked, I could see the pain and the blood and the damage.  The survivors of the handpicked group looked harrowed, Glasses and Lookout wouldn’t meet my eye, and I had no way of communicating to them that I held nothing against them.  Most of their group were injured in varying ways.

“Lambs,” Mauer spoke.

One word, and it cut through the chatter and the noise.

“Reverend Mauer,” I said.  My one good eye twitched as a scalpel made an incision.  Cold metal slid into the incision, thrust past damaged muscle and scraped against bone.  “The younger Richmond Twins are dead.  One elder twin is injured and expected to die, the other was shot several times by our group, lightly exposed to Lillian’s mixture, and fled before we could expose her more.  She’ll be heading back to her brother.”

Which means word of what the Lambs are doing will get back to the Crown.  We’ve put the other group at risk, and we have no way of communicating that to them.

“I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am,” he said.  “Good.  Things may actually go as I hoped.”

I couldn’t keep my eye from involuntarily twitching as they levered my shoulder into place, metal stretching against muscle, so I closed my eye instead.

“The primordial is a concern,” he said.  “They deliberately blew up the wagon we had it anchored to, and they’re deliberately feeding it.”

“I figured as much,” I said.  “You and the Duke are like two men playing chicken, your back to his while you stand on a railroad track.  Each of you stare down incoming trains that are coming from either direction.  Each wants the other to step off the track so they can be the winner, but you’re so focused on winning that you’re failing to realize that the trains are going to collide head-on, whether you get off the track or not.”

“A cute metaphor,” he said.  “One that doesn’t help you and doesn’t help me.”

I’m not sure we can even be helped at this stage, I thought.

“I have everything well in hand,” he said.  “Signal lights from soldiers I’ve placed around the city are telling me what the Duke’s next moves are.  What I don’t have in hand-”

“Is the primordial,” I said.

“What’s going to happen is going to happen.  He’s making his final move, as am I.  This is the end.  But if we stop the Duke without having that primordial in hand, it  will inflict a horrific number of casualties on both sides of this battlefield before we put it down.”

If you do get it under your control again, then the entire tide of battle shifts, and the Duke has to commit too many forces to ensuring it dies.  The exact same problem.  Neither party was willing to kill the primordial because the desire to see it dead served to force the other side’s hand.  It was a scenario that only played out because of the peculiar blend of pride, conviction, and respect for what the primordial represented, mirrored on each side of the battlefield.

“What are the final moves?” Jamie asked.

“The Baron flanks us.  I flank the Duke,” Mauer said.

“I need details,” I said.

“The Baron doesn’t know about his sisters.  You and the twins were to our east, the Baron is now circling around our west flank, hoping to hit this very medical camp and the rest of our back line with his personal force.  As for my attack… I can’t see any scenario where you need to know the details.  The Baron will run headlong into a trap.  It won’t stop him, but it will slow him down enough for my attack to work.  With that, I’m hoping this battle will be over.”

Levered rather than shoved, I felt my shoulder slip back into place.  I felt far less pain than I had.

“Retreat,” I said.

“Hm?” Mauer asked.

“Retreat.  Pull forces back, as much as you can.  He’s holding the primordial over your head to force your hand and split the focus of your forces.  Put that ball entirely into his court and give it up as lost.  Give up your ground here, move people away, and you’ll change how the Baron’s attack plays out.”

Mauer set his jaw, thinking.

“The Baron is easy,” I said.  “The Duke is hard.  If the Duke is pushing, stop being stubborn, stop pushing back.  It’s what he expects and what he wants.  Retreat, if that’s even possible, with what you have in mind.”

“Somewhat.” he said.  He seemed to think for a moment.

“Stay where we can find you,” he decided.  Then, to his doctors, he said, “Be ready to move any wounded you can.  If the signal comes and you have to leave the tents and equipment behind, then don’t hesitate to leave it.  Don’t leave people to pack it up.”

Leaving me with just those words, the ‘stay where I can find you’ statement an order to his men as much as it was a request for the Lambs, he turned away, giving directions to other soldiers.  No indication he would listen to me.

From our vantage point in the tent, I could see up the sloping length of the street, over the heads of the hundreds of soldiers who had gathered around makeshift barricades and defenses.  I could see where physical battle lines had formed and the two sides were actively brawling and fighting in melee, brunos making up for the deficit of strength that the ordinary man had against the typical stitched soldier.

He seems to think this is the end.  The battle comes to a close, here.

I was given a shirt several times too large for me, soft to the touch, and the excess of sleeve was part of the construction they used to fashion me a sling.  My black raincoat was given back to me, and though I couldn’t wear it with my arm in a sling, it was placed with my arm through one sleeve, the rest of the raincoat hooked over one shoulder, the sleeve of it dangling at my side.  I couldn’t find an angle to reach back to get the hood up, and I didn’t particularly want to.

I saw Jamie, off to one side, talking to Candy, the girl we’d been asked to retrieve.  She was in medical scrubs, brought into Mauer’s medical tent to use the scant knowledge she had picked up from books she’d been given.  She knew the names of certain substances and the basic treatments, and that qualified her to help out the real doctors, I supposed.

Lillian, now with bandage and gauze wrapped around where her belly had been stitched shut, a fresh bag at her back, was carefully pulling her shirt on and buttoning it up, moving more gingerly so she wouldn’t pull at her stomach wound.

Someone had wiped away the twin smudges of blood on her chest.

“Here, Sy,” Jamie said.  He’d approached me while I wasn’t looking.  He had a bit of cord, and used it to loop through the eyehole and connect to the top button of my raincoat.  He cinched it tight so it wouldn’t fall off or slide down.  I started to button the rest closed with one hand, but Jamie seemed to have it handled, working three times as fast with two hands as I could with the one.

While he worked, his hands formed gestures.

What are we doing?

I brought my hand up to my shoulder, adjusting the raincoat, making gestures of my own.  I looked over at Lillian, and I could see her watching.

There would be more time for discussing strategy shortly.  But for now, it was very simple.

Mauer had a plan and was certain he would come out ahead in the end.  The Duke had a plan and was certain he would triumph.

The Lambs had to make a play too, with zero certainty at all.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.16 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Mauer ended up giving the order to retreat.  Even from our vantage point, looking at things from the rear of the fight, I could see people at the very front line of the battle who weren’t able to disengage.  The bravest and most aggressive would die.

I looked at Jamie, “Feel brave?  We need to make a move.”

“I don’t-” Jamie paused to wince as an explosion struck Mauer’s retreating forces.  “I don’t think we’re in fighting shape.”

“I’m not in fighting shape when I’m in perfect shape,” I said.  “Don’t worry.  The last thing I want to do is to pick a fight, here.”

Mauer’s fighting forces could likely be counted with four digits, very possibly a three digit number, down from tens of thousands to start.  As the Crown had pushed the people of Lugh back, the fallen had been recovered.  The rate of conversion wouldn’t be fast, but the first fallen on either side might be returning to the battlefield as stitched, sometime around now.  They would be quick work, simple riggings, with clumsy movements, too much of their brains cut away, their heads barely put back together.  Most would be too uncoordinated to reliably aim at people and then pull a trigger.

But more bodies were more bodies.  The illusion was that the Crown’s forces didn’t seem to have dwindled.  Mauer had had his opportunity to try and win this battle, and things had passed a point where I could see him winning a military victory.

I formed something of a huddle with the other Lambs.  Lillian put one hand on me to steady herself.

Some of the handpicked group were standing near.  Candy was tending to Adam.

“The Baron is a problem,” I said.  “The Duke is the Duke, he understands the greater picture.  The Crown craves control above all else, and he exemplifies that.  Control, control, control.  It can’t be said enough, when it comes to the nobles.  It’s what he’s doing with the primordial, and it’s what he’s going to try to do with Mauer if he can.  Exert pressure and make Mauer bend the knee and admit defeat.  So long as he can control us and he can use us?  I think he could see us actively murdering the Baron or the Twins and he wouldn’t kill us.”

“Not right away,” Jamie said.  “Killing a noble?  He wouldn’t forgive it in the long run.  Rules have to be maintained, for one thing, and knowing we were capable of killing his kin would make him wonder if he could really control us.”

“Not right away,” I admitted.

“Okay.  So you want to focus on the Baron.  To take away control?  To give it?”

“The Baron craves control, but he also craves power.  He’s so far back in line for the Crown that he won’t ever have a chance to reach even the Duke’s tier of power.  In that desperate, fucked up craving for power and control, he’s mingled the two and that’s manifested as… barbarism.  Sadism.  Inflicting pain.  Having someone captured and making them bleed as you choose is control and power at the basest level, something even small animals understand.  So I want you to tell me, the power he does have, what form does it take?”

“The twins,” Lillian said.

“Yes, the twins.  At least two of the twins are dead.  One more is injured and hurting.  They’ve been declawed or outright killed.  He’s going to be pissed, and he’ll retaliate.  Whatever Mauer accomplishes, whatever we accomplish, however the rest of this battle goes, we don’t stand a chance unless we deal with that noble.”

“How?” Lillian asked.

“This ugly little rock of a city does its fair share of fishing.  Seems appropriate that we bait him,” I said.  “He craves power and control, and losing his sisters meant he loses both.  We don’t have them with us, but if we paint the right sort of picture, I think we can lure him out.”

One of the soldiers who was stationed nearby spoke, “Mauer said to stay where he could find you.”

He wasn’t one of Mauer’s top men, and was doing his best to avoid getting swept up in the tide of retreating bodies, one of his eyes on the battle further ahead, but he meant business, and he conveyed it without a shred of doubt.  Had Mauer’s charisma bled over to his men?  The guy was young enough I could imagine he’d been a rookie working alongside or under Mauer at one point, and had been raised and cultivated as a soldier by years in Mauer’s company.

“We won’t have to go far.  You can stay with us the whole time,” I said.  “Mauer will absolutely approve of what I’m aiming to do here.”

The man frowned, looking at one of his colleagues.  A silent exchange seemed to pass between them, or else they were staring each other down in an attempt on either’s part to get the other to agree or to tell me to fuck off, with all the consequences that went with a given decision.

“Picture?” Jamie asked, cutting into that silence, “How would we paint the right sort of picture?”

“We’re going to need a body, and I think there are enough around here.  We’ll need a skull, one we can paint black or paint black enough, and we’ll need that…”

I pointed at the claw of the twin I’d salvaged.

“I can make something to paint bone with what I have in my bag,” Lillian said.  “And I’ll need soot, but I think there’s enough soot around.”

“Good,” I said.

Not good.  He’s going to have a small army with him,” Jamie said. “You think, what, we get a body, as petite and thin as possible, we get a skull, we prop it up to look like it’s his sister, he’ll leave the army behind, waltz out of cover, in the direction of whatever hurt or killed that sister, and we close a trap around him?”

“Along those lines,” I said.  “But I thought it through just a step further than that.”

“Do tell.”

“Do you remember when-” I started, then paused, thinking.

“Old Jamie?”

“No,” I said.  “It was before the siege in Brechwell.  You weren’t with us yet.  Helen was talking to Petey.  Explaining how the Ghosts talk.”

“Ghosts?” Adam asked.  He was listening in.

“Doesn’t matter.  Listen, the Twins did a lot of chattering.  We heard other clues.  The elder twins did that whistling thing.”

“I remember that,” Jamie said.

“Only about five people probably understood it on any level.  The four Twins, and the Baron.”

“Probably,” Jamie said.

I reached into my pocket and retrieved the whistle.  “If he hears that, even if he knows his sisters don’t whistle like that, what’s he going to think?  Is he going to think an enemy somehow figured out their language, or is he going to think his sister somehow can’t communicate properly?”

“He might remember that our group has me in it,” Jamie said.  “He seemed to know what I was capable of.”

I thought back to the conversation with the twin, around the time she had wrenched my arm out.  She’d mentioned that she’d had orders not to touch Jamie.  I could remember the Baron’s reluctance to send Jamie with our group.  Not a strong reluctance.

My thought that they wanted to preserve Jamie seemed to have only been validated by recent events.

“If he remembers, that’s still something we can use,” I said.  Except in this case, Jamie becomes the bait.  “You might be what he comes for, instead of the twin, but I don’t think that’s the worst eventuality.”

“If you’re sure,” Jamie said.

Lillian was milling about.  When she struggled to pick up her bag from the floor, stopping to hold her stomach, it was Lookout who bent down and collected the satchel and lifted it up to the counter where Lillian had been lying down as she’d been stitched together.

The stretchers were rapidly being vacated.  People were leaving, and there were more soldiers making a fighting retreat in the midst of the hospital than there were patients or medics.  A few stragglers had stayed behind with us.  The faces I recognized were Lookout, Glasses, Adam, Emily, a patched-up Drake, and the asshole with the face-armor who had been leading their group, something starting with H. A scattered few soldiers had been left with us, to make sure we didn’t go rogue.

Glassblower was gone, as was Salt.  Fled with the rest.

I turned toward one of the soldiers who was with us, “We need something to lay the trap with.  Guns.  Explosives.”

“You’re to stay put!” the younger of Mauer’s soldier said, raising his voice.  To avoid letting the retreating group move between himself and us, he stepped closer to our group.

“I want to blow up a noble, and you’re saying no?

“No, I’m saying Mauer has reasons for wanting you to stay put, and if he says-”

“Either we’re out of his hair, or we blow up a noble,” I said.  “Why is this so hard a decision to make!?”

“He might not want you to-” the young soldier started.

But one of the other soldiers put a hand on his arm.

My heart pounded.  I wanted to lash out, to get the last hit in while I still could.  In an ideal world, I wanted to resolve the crisis that the Baron posed.  Not for this battle – battlefields could be survived, and they rarely had neat resolutions.  But if he lived, he was a mortal risk to Lillian’s family, to me, to the others.  He would go berserk over his sisters’ deaths and he would lash out.

In terms of people who I did not want to see lashing out, the Baron was a scary sort.  He specialized in hurting people in the worst ways.  It was how he passed his afternoons, and the little territory he controlled was notorious for it.

I just had to keep that anger cold.  Stay focused.

“You really think you can do this?” the man asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.  “Worst case scenario, it’s a distraction.”

“Worst case scenario is that we die,” Lillian said, just behind me.

Probably not something she would normally have said.  Still drunk, in a way.  She might have fine-tuned her altered inhibitions, but there were side effects, or things that slipped the net.  Fatalistic commentary included.

“Worst case scenario is that we die, right.  More likely worst-case is we put the Baron off his game, buy Mauer some time for whatever it is he has planned.  Best case scenario, a noble dies, and the attack on your rear ranks and your flank falters.”

“How much explosive?” the soldier asked me.

“Not a lot,” I said.  “And we need a body, and a skull, with some soot and a minute’s time.  Then we need to find the Baron Richmond’s general location.”

“Then go that way.  Stop at the base of the tower with the lights.  We’ll catch up,” the soldier said.

“You’re serious about this,” Adam said.  “You got hurt, you threw yourself into that last fight, and it was bad-”

“About what I expected,” I said.  “Sorry, it was less of a coordinated attack on our parts than I’d hoped.  Mauer gave us so few of you guys and shitty weapons.  It went bad, and then it went really bad.”

“That boy I talked to in the quarry, who so desperately wanted to help his friend, to find contacts and get her a job, not even a glimmer of that was true, was it?” Adam asked.

“It was absolutely true,” I told him, with conviction.  I reached out to take Lillian’s hand, and she leaned heavy against my side.  “Absolutely.  It’s just the… particulars are a lot different than I led you to believe.”

“We should go,” Jamie murmured.

“Do you-” Adam started.  He didn’t finish the sentence, cutting himself off.  His eyes were so tired, dirt smeared on black skin.  I saw fear in his eyes, more raw than any fear I’d felt since my first days as a Lamb.

“No,” I said.  “No, don’t help.  Go, look after these two.”  Look after Candy and Drake.

“I want to come,” Lookout said.  “What I did before, where I come from, people who get knifed for that shit.  I gotta make it up, or it’s not going to sit right.”

“Good,” I said.  “It shouldn’t.  But don’t go and think it’s worse than it is.  It was a shitty, terrifying situation.  You did what you had to.  Let it sit wrong, carry that, but don’t let it eat you up.  Any friend or family member of yours probably would have done the same.”

Lookout looked away.

“Take care of Glasses here.  Get her out of the city.”

He nodded.

Once we got moving, Lillian wasn’t that slow, the pain only apparent when she bent over too far or didn’t watch her footing.  We kept to where we had cover, zig-zagging in the direction we’d been pointed.  A block away from the medical tents, around a corner, we found the building with lights at every window, a brazier with open flame set over the door, and we stopped there, waiting.

Mauer’s lines were giving way.  The large numbers he’d collected were a detriment as those numbers tried to flee and the Crown’s stitched soldiers fired volley after volley into the air, punching into people who weren’t behind cover.

I hoped my advice would save more lives than it cost.

The soldiers caught up with us, a corpse slung over one shoulder, another two soldiers carrying a skull and canvas bags that looked heavy.

“Those are the explosives?” I asked.  A lot.

“Mauer said yes, and if we’re walking away from this, we’re not bringing all of this with us, so we might as well be thorough.  Brought someone who knows this stuff.”

Mauer, sometimes I feel a peculiar sort of fondness and respect for you.

“That way?” Jamie asked, pointing.

A soldier uttered a one word response, drowned out by a surge in the noise around us, as he indicated the same direction with a tilt of his head.

There’s still the danger that he brings his army with him.  We have to be careful how we do this.

“That building’s front door is open,” I said, pointing at what looked to be a store in the middle of a residential area.  The building was more ramshackle than some, with three floors and an open roof.  Tattered lengths of cloth with the ends tied bound together were draped over the roof, poked up into a point above by a long pole, a tent-like arrangement to keep water off the roof itself.  “We’ll set up up top.”

We headed inside, found the stairs, and made our way up.

“Put the body where he can see her,” I said, indicating an edge of the roof.  “Positioned so it’s not a clear view from the street.”

The body belonged to a citizen that had been fighting for Lugh.  It wasn’t skeletal, but it was burned, and it hadn’t had much meat on the bone before.  It had a bit of a weird belly, in the way that people who were chronically starved grew distended with gas or organ problems.  There was a head, but it wasn’t skeletal enough.

One soldier held the head, two more cut ruthlessly with large knives.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.

“She fought?” I asked, while they worked.

“She fought,” one soldier said.

“Then I hope she would have forgiven us.  Whatever drove her to fight, I hope this would be a good answer or final step to that.  That it’s enough wrath and violence to answer any rage in her breast, that it stops someone who hurts others, if she fought to protect.”

“That’s sweet,” Lillian said, behind me.  Her hand touched my back.

One of the soldiers, still cutting, said, “You’re allowed to say you pray.”

I was silent.

“No Crown to watch your words around, here,” the man said.  “All of us believe, some a little, some a lot.  At a certain point, when the enemy you’re fighting is big enough, you’re not just hoping for a win, for a little bit of luck.  You’re praying for it.  And that’s allowed.  Nobody will tell you not to.”

“Unless you’re Timothy Wadd,” another soldier said.

“Unless you’re a protruding asshole about the prayer thing, yeah,” the first soldier said.  “You’re supposed to be a smart kid.  I think you get what I mean.”

I nodded, still silent.  Lillian rubbed my back for a bit as we watched them butcher the body, tearing the head from the body itself.  Odd.  Usually I would be the one reassuring her through the gruesome bits.

Then, as they got closer to done, she picked up the skull, and rubbed it down, painting it a matte black.

The fighting elsewhere was getting so much more intense.  I could feel the ground rumbling as warbeasts and people moved, several streets away.

Once they were more or less ready, I gave the instruction to arrange the body.  Lillian provided wire from her satchel to bind the head to the body, and one hand to the bone spike.  Everything else was about positioning her so there were no obvious giveaways.

When the position was right, I surveyed the work.  “Let’s set up a fire on the roof, behind her.  It’ll create a silhouette effect.  He’ll see the skull, the limb, propped up and very visible, but details will be harder to make out.”

While others handled that job, I looked out over the distance, trying to look at a city lit by fires and third-hand light those fires created, reflected off of the dark clouds and smoke overhead and back down to the city itself.  The topography, the parts of the city that would be hard to move through, easier to move through, I tried to get a sense of where the Baron could be.  The Baron could have flanked and attacked by now.  In a way, it might have been ideal.  Our bait would pull him away from forces that were already engaged, possibly alone, possibly with a reduced squad, or with the Baron leaving people he trusted in charge, bringing his second choice of Crown soldiers.

He hadn’t attacked, which meant he was waiting for a signal.  A final, decisive attack, likely designed to break Mauer.

Mauer’s soldiers set the bags at the roof.  One unwound a coil of wire, an electric fuse, and led it down the stairs, tucking it in along a wooden strut that ran down the stairwell.

With a prybar, he freed one step from the surrounding boards and wall, lifting it straight out.  Placing it back down, he put something metal between the step and the nearest board.  When a foot came down on the step, it would compress the metal, create a connection, and in that same moment, the explosives in the bags would blow.

“Head outside,” he said.  “I have to attach the wire.  If a mistake happens at any point, it’s here.”

Nobody in our group wasted any time in getting out of the building and across the street.

The following two minutes were tense, as we sat with snow and ash falling around us.  I was waiting for the building to go.

But it didn’t go.

“The call, if I use the whistle and try to copy the twins, I’m thinking it should be the sound the creature made when you were wrestling with it?”

Wrestling?  With the younger twins!?” Lillian asked.  She punched my arm.  “Sy!  Idiot!”

“Yes!” I said.  “In answer to both of your questions.”

Blades poised, ready to strike, I thought.  All night, I had been struggling to find an avenue from which to attack.  One by one, I’d been able to create opportunities to attack the younger twins.  The others had found ways to get the elder ones out of our hair.

But that wasn’t me.  Well, it was, but the stark, panicked improvisation wasn’t the me I wanted to be.  I wanted to calculate my moves.  To use my knowledge of the enemy, to make plays that left them stunned and bewildered, in awe, even.

I would settle for a half-second of realization as that foot came down on the loose stair, clicked the mechanism, set off the explosive, and brought fire and violence down on his own head.

The bomb expert opened the door.  One of the soldiers in our squad flashed a light at him, giving him our location.  He crossed the street.

All the rest of us crammed into an alley.  Jamie, just beside me, was careful not to get pushed into my arm, which was still in the sling.  Lillian, surrounded by soldiers who were invading her personal space, hurried to the side with my good arm, taking my hand.

“I’m not going to get this right at first,” Jamie said.  “I might not get it right at all.”

“Close as you can to what you remember,” I said, giving him the whistle.

He nodded.

Whistle to mouth.  He blew, shrill, long, with lungfuls of air through a Crown-manufactured whistle that was designed to be heard over long distances.

After roughly a minute of ear-splitting whistles, he figured out the modulation of it, how to make it higher or lower.

Imagine, I thought.  The Baron’s face.  He hears the whistles.  What are they?  Then the cadence becomes familiar.  His men are set up and ready to attack.  He’s reluctant to pull them away, but it’s his sister.  Someone he relies on, as much as any swordsman relies on their sword.

As if I was dreaming, I could see him moving, imagine his expressions, based on what I knew of him.  I didn’t know his mind, but it wasn’t a complex one.  Power and control, with an undercurrent of fear and deep, black-in-the-heart resentment.

I could imagine the ground he covered, from the likely positions he’d chosen to set up his small army, how far away he was, the instructions he would have given his men.  What if the signal came while he was away, looking for that sound, which sounded so much like his sister crying for help or screeching in rage?

One of Mauer’s men spoke, “He’s here.”

I wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

You took my eye, you bastard.  Let’s see how much of you this takes out.

A whistle cut through the air.  Not Jamie’s.

It was the Baron, calling out to his sister.  Crown soldiers spoke, calling out to each other.  The door banged against the wall as they shoved their way through.

I heard the whispered words, “He’s not going inside.”

I closed my eyes.  I listened, and I heard the Baron call out.  “Sisters!”

His voice rang through the night.

I prayed, not because I truly believed, but because in this moment, I really would have liked it if there was a bloody, vengeful sort of god looking down on us.

The explosion was a rollicking walloping series of hits, one after another, building on each other to rip away all my hearing and most of my breath.  As my hearing returned, my vision went, dust rolling out to blanket everything and choke the air.

“Move!” one soldier called out.  A hand shoved me.  The soldiers ran, and the Lambs were dragged with them.  “That hit him!”

“He’s dead!?” Lillian cried out.

“No, but that’s going to hurt ‘im!”

“We should go back, finish him, pick through-”

“No!” was the one word response.

“If we can damn well finish him off-”

“He’s a noble!  If he needs finishing off, he’s too dangerous to get near!  Only noble that’s safe to be near is a dead one!”

Frustration welled up in me.

“If he’s hurt, he’s not going to be attacking!  It’s good, it’s good!”  A hand clapped on my back.

He’d tried to call out to his sister twice, and when he hadn’t gotten a response, he’d been suspicious.

We were letting him live, and I knew for an absolute fact that the man would recover and he would plague us.

We made our way toward Mauer’s lines, and as we sighted Crown soldiers, we were forced to make a detour.  The retreat had been more significant and more severe than I’d anticipated.  The retreat was becoming a rout.

Yet in the midst of that, the sound of gunfire and the regular noise of explosives was quickly dwindling.

It became almost silent, but for the periodic sound of a building crumbling as fires rose too high.

I heard a voice.

“…dangers the primordial poses.”

Mauer’s voice.

“A primordial you created,” was the reply.

My heartbeat was intense enough to rock my body and make swallowing hard.  We drew nearer, and took cover, looking in from a side street.

Mauer stood atop a ruined wagon, staring down the length of the street.

One bullet, well placed, might have finished him.  It would have needed to be a high-quality weapon, but the Crown did have those.

“What will it take to save the lives of the people in this city?” Mauer called out.  “My own life?  My surrender?”

His voice carried so well.  He’d always been at his best on the stage, addressing a group.  Now he addressed the Crown forces.  The Duke was near enough to respond with his own powerful voice.

One voice natural, the other artificial.

“I don’t think you have any plan to surrender,” the Duke responded.  “To give your own life?  Perhaps.  With the explosives you planted on either side of the street?  Did you hope to take me with you?  Or just to take me?  Because you won’t have either of those things.”

Mauer reacted.  He backed away a step.

“When you rule over rabble, Reverend,” the Duke said, “You lose sight of who the individuals are.  There is no organization, the people in command do not know the people who are subservient to them.  Clever, talented individuals can blend in with the rabble.  They can fan out through the area, they can watch your men, and they can surreptitiously disarm those explosives.”

Mauer took another step back.  When he raised his good hand to his head, it moved in a jittery way.  He clenched his bad hand, the same one he had used to hold me over the fire.

“You’ve lost,” the Duke said.  His voice had changed slightly.  “And now I’m going to kill you, and I’m going to kill everyone in that army of yours.”

I heard the sound of a sword leaving its sheath.

Mauer sank to his knees.  Head bowed.

“The Crown wins,” the Duke said.  “It is a constant in this universe, understand?”

Mauer reached out with his monstrous limb, as if supplicating, then let it drop, heavy.

I heard the gunshots, loud, crystal clear, and high.  So many of Mauer’s guns had been lower quality, older.  The Crown’s good quality but in such a way that it could be mass produced.

These shots were different, and the sound was oddly disconnected from the Duke’s reaction, as he took a step back, staggering.

My right hand found Lillian’s, squeezing it.  I would have held Jamie’s too, but my arm was in the sling.  When I looked at him, his eyes were as wide as mine were.

Fray and Mauer hadn’t just been working on the primordial.  I thought of the Engineer, and the others they’d had with them.  Powerful people, ones with resources and connections.  Mauer, all this while, knowing that spies might be looking, had been holding this card up his sleeve.

One shot sounded after another.  And as the Crown forces heard and saw what was happening, they began to open fire as well.  Mauer was already retreating, taking cover behind the wagon he’d been using as his stage.

Through the chaos that quickly billowed out of the silence, the sweet song of those guns could be heard.

I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d sensed us somehow, or if it was sheer luck, as bullets punched through him and tore out the other side, casting out sprays of blood and bone as they exited, but the Duke looked our way.

A bullet passed through his skull.  Fragments of metal joined bone and brain on making a messy exit.

I heard Mauer’s forces cheering.  To them, Mauer had won, proven the lie.  That the Crown didn’t always win.

I wasn’t so sure it was about to play out that way, and from Mauer’s body language, as he strode through the lines of his people, he wasn’t so sure either.

The Duke might still be in play.  The primordial almost certainly was.  Together, they were disaster, but either one alone was a problem, a chance this fight might still continue.

The Duke’s last words might prove true yet.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 9.17 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.17

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

A noble just died in the public eye.

The nature of our vantage point meant that running out and straight toward Mauer would have put us right in the line of fire.  We had to circle around to reach him.

I half-expected the Baron’s forces to have chased us, or for his unit to have moved on our back line.  The explosion had done its work.  The coast was largely clear.

The snow was really falling, now.  I’d dismissed it as ash, and it had been easy to miss with the hot smoke and the heat in the sky dissolving snowflakes into simple rain, but we were further away now, and there were fewer fires set in the midst of Mauer’s new camp.  The wind blew in over the water and up into the city, driving the heat and the smoke away and paving the way for the snow to fall.  I couldn’t smell anything so much as I felt the cold air and smelled only the smoke that had invaded and polluted my sinuses.

The soldiers we were with were faster on foot.  Boots tromped on a road dusted with snow and ash, and we had to work to keep up.  I was slower than usual, running in time with Lillian and Jamie, instead of having to slow myself down or tug them along to get them to keep up.  One soldier hung behind, likely to keep an eye on us.

The soldiers cleared the way for us to enter Mauer’s camp.  By the time we caught up, they had found Mauer.  They were filling him in.

“You said he would go up to the roof,” Mauer said.  There was an undertone of accusation to his voice.

“That was a mistake.  He communicated with the dummy we set up, she couldn’t respond.  He hesitated.”

“How many soldiers were with him?” Mauer asked.

“Ten,” a soldier answered.

“Not many.  Okay.  Rally people for the front line.  We fight as hard as we can, I want to surprise them if we can.  If they don’t have anyone at the helm, then we might be able to rout them.  The perches are targeting the officers in charge of the stitched, wherever they’re spotted.  If we can’t decide this in the next few minutes, then we retreat again and we regroup.  Either they don’t pursue and we wait and see, or they pursue and we watch to see if they stretch themselves too thin.”

“Yes sir,” the soldiers said, in near-unison.

“Jamie,” I said, under my breath.  “The whistle.”

Jamie extended a hand my way, the whistle in his fist.  I gestured in Mauer’s direction, and Jamie held it out for Mauer.

Frowning slightly, Mauer took it.

“Can you get your people to their back lines?  Or their flanks?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“The whistle.  Jamie can tell you the signals they use.  Get people behind the stitched, use the whistles to signal retreat.  Even if the stitched don’t respond to that specific whistle, the handlers will.  They’ll hear what sounds like others sounding the retreat and get worried.  They’re pretty alone out there.  One man surrounded by twenty dead soldiers that are following his orders, the next guy barely in earshot.”

Mauer’s eyes lit up with interest.  He indicated a soldier, then looked to Jamie, “Show him?”

Jamie nodded, giving me a glance.  I watched Jamie walk off to the edge of the little clearing with the soldier.

When I looked back at Mauer, he was staring me down.

“If you’d moved a finger, I would have assumed you were using one of those hand-signs Genevive Fray told me about.”

I shook my head and jostled my sling as much as I was able – and I regretted it at the pain that flared in my wounded shoulder.  “Only one hand, right?”

“I wonder if you’re any closer to making the decision,” Mauer said, staring at me.

“Decision?” Lillian asked.

When he’d grilled me over the fire, Lillian had been in the process of passing out.  I’d been wanting to get her help, and I’d let Mauer know too much.  For a man so able to control others, it was a spooky prospect.  I was used to being the one in control, pulling the strings.

“I thought helping you here would come across as decision enough,” I said.

“The whistle is more convincing than your effort against the Baron,” Mauer said.  “We’ll see how things unfold.”

“If your men can get to the back line or flanks-”

“We already did, once.  The guns that shot the Duke have a distinctive sound.  That sound was the signal for an attack on his rear lines.  Our elite soldiers have already signaled that they successfully opened fire on the Duke’s home tent.”

“So they can’t heal the Duke,” Lillian said.

“A precautionary measure, in case he was faster to react.  It doesn’t matter.  We hit him.  The noble has been slain.”

From a range that he didn’t think guns could shoot from.  Longer range, high accuracy.  Something special.  Still…

“I’ve seen him get shot before and survive,” I said.

“Nobles favor a layer of something like armor, an interskeletal barrier between their skin and their muscle or bone structure.  Normal guns are meant to ricochet, their bullets move slowly, to pass into the subject and bounce around, doing grievous harm.  Few think twice of this.  But the Crown has reasons for perpetuating this standard.  Those slower, bouncing bullets aren’t so effective against the nobles.”  Bullets sink in and stop at the armor, or they bounce right out.  The noble bleeds but doesn’t stop.  They appear immortal, and enemy morale suffers.  The myth that surrounds them grows.”

I nodded.  I’d seen the Duke in battle.

These bullets penetrate that layer.  That armor helps strips the outer shell off as the bullet passes through, and what remains unfolds and expands as an umbrella might,” Mauer said.  His hand, all fingertips and thumb meeting, tapped my chest, hard, then opened up, fingers splaying.  “The final part of the projectile sometimes punches through on exit, or joins the expanded metal in complicating the efforts of doctors and staff.  Especially uncareful or hasty doctors might even do further harm to themselves, if an expanding bullet finishes expanding too near a prodding finger or working hand.”

“It wouldn’t be as effective against an ordinary person,” Lillian said.

“It might, if it hit hard bone, but no, it isn’t meant for ordinary people,” Mauer said.  “The guns are long range, they’re accurate, and they’re felt before they can be easily reacted to.  This incident isn’t the important part of what I’m doing.  Killing the Duke, it means something.  But after one or two more incidents, they’ll realize what it really means.”

“That unless they find you and stop your group from manufacturing these things,” I said, “No noble can ever show their face in public again.”

“And they need to show their faces,” Mauer said.  “It’s why they go to such efforts to tailor themselves and make themselves into dangerous weapons.  That was why I could be sure the Duke would show himself in one way or another, when he was positive the scales were tipped and victory was in hand.”

“And you knew he’d come here because-”

“He invited him, specifically.  Leaked information about the primordials,” Jamie said, returning from the other side of the clearing.

“They’ll respond,” Mauer said.  “At some time in the next year, they’ll finish arguing among themselves, rally, and arrive in force.  Newly augmented, so they can be more confident against these guns.  Things are going to change, and they’ll fear that.  That’s a fear that makes them predictable.”

I felt a mingled fear and excitement at the idea.  The nobles, all here, the idea of change.  The pain in my shoulder and my eye, and the pain in my heart at the loss of Gordon, it fed into that fear and excitement.

That’s a fear that makes them predictable.  It didn’t sound like Mauer talking.  It sounded like me.

Had Mauer gotten a read on me?  Had I allowed him enough of an idea of my vulnerabilities, that he now understood who I was and how I operated?  Because it damn well sounded like he was tailoring his words to evoke that fear and excitement.  To manipulate me.

The soldier Jamie had been talking to exchanged murmured words with Mauer, who nodded, gesturing with his good hand.  The man left, pointing to others in the clearing, beckoning.  Well oiled.  Men who understood how they each operated, no questioning, no debate.  Everyone had a role and they carried it out like the experts they were.

It was Lillian who spoke up to Mauer.  “What happens next?”

“Next?” Mauer asked.

“With the Lambs.  To the Lambs.  I was hurt before, I didn’t hear everything, and then I was busy trying to get ready to help Sy and Jamie.  Maybe you made an agreement and I didn’t hear, but… are we your prisoners?”

Mauer didn’t have a ready response to that.

“Sy?” Lillian asked, a little more emotional than she’d been when she had addressed Mauer.

“He thinks I’m going to defect,” I said.  “That you guys will come with me, or you’ll join me in defecting.”

“We can’t,” Lillian said, without a heartbeat’s pause.  “You can’t.  No.”

There was that lack of inhibition again.  I glanced up at Mauer, who seemed to be studiously ignoring us, his attention apparently on other things, who was moving where, getting the attention of soldiers and giving them the go-ahead.

The people who Mauer was sending to the front line now were people who had clearly already been in combat.  Tired, now fully aware of the realities of fighting, their reluctance was clear, and it was a reluctance tempered only by the fact that the Duke had died before their very eyes.

“I want to see my parents,” Lillian said.  “Please.  Jamie- Jamie said we were doing this so the Baron and the Twins wouldn’t hurt my parents or the other Lambs.”

“We are,” I said.  “We did.  I don’t know.”

If the Baron lives…

She clutched my hand, revealing the emotion she was keeping bottled up within, squeezing so hard her hands shook.  She mouthed words, but they didn’t pass through her lips.  Please.

Things are going to change, Mauer’s words echoed in my head.

I knew I could easily approach Mauer, trying to give him reasons to let us go.  I could promise service and help like we’d given with the whistle, or further interference vs. the enemy forces, or I could tell him that we would be best positioned to spread the word in such a way that the nobles would get the message and feel that fear he and Fray wanted them to feel.

But if I asked, if I even tried, then the man would say no.  He’d just had his moment of triumph.  He was soaring, even as he stood in place, intense, taking in the battlefield.  I knew what he wanted in this moment: to preserve the moment and hold on to it.

To have that annoyance, that snarl of the young servants of the Academy getting him to do something he hadn’t planned?  It would spoil the victory.

The clearest path to freedom was one where I didn’t push or didn’t try.

If he kept us with him, that wasn’t so bad either.

I put my arm around Lillian.  She had no interest in watching the battle, so she wrapped her arms around me and buried her head in my shoulder, her back to the fighting.  I looked over her shoulder to watch things progress.

Mauer stayed busy, but there were only so many orders to give.  He would talk to people, organize support for one side or the other, call for people to retreat-  It almost looked as if it was working, as the Academy gave ground.

The fires were dying out.  Less explosions, more bullets.

The distant, dim shape of the primordial continued its struggle.  There was no Duke to constrain it or decide how much firepower was necessary to keep it down and out.  I could see it carry on fighting, refusing to die or not being allowed to die, and I could see Mauer.  The movements of the primordial seemed to concern the man more than the ebb and flow of the battle, the human beings who were dying and who had died as part of his ploy, spent like coin to bring about his greater strategy.

He hadn’t just feigned a loss to bring the Duke out of hiding.  He’d intentionally lost, after rallying these people to fight.

And now, what?  He was trying to put up an actual fight?  No.

To create room for him and his people to disappear, maybe.  To slip out of the city with his soldiers and a sufficient number of people to spread the word.  If he lacked those people, then he could at least trust the Crown soldiers to do it, or he could bide his time, pick out another noble, and repeat the process.

One way or another, the message would get out.

Pull the weary back, send in fresh men, pummel the Crown’s front lines, time flank attacks with squads moving out through streets and setting up in buildings… I could only understand Mauer’s moves in abstract.  Gordon would have had a better sense of how Mauer was actively bullying the Crown.  With careful, methodical steps, Mauer seemed to be driving the Crown back.

It wouldn’t last.  The people of Lugh were too few in number.  The Crown forces retreated and their ranks grew denser as they did so, making it harder and harder to keep pushing, morale-wise.

Still, it created space.

Mauer’s body language was changing.  He was getting ready to leave.  To let this battle be the small victory and the ominous note for the future that it was.  He wasn’t sending his soldiers out as much as he had been, and he made a point of talking to people who had distinguished themselves, instead.  They were in charge.

I could feel Lillian’s heartbeat against my chest.  So very alive and focused with wyvern coursing through her brain, she had withdrawn entirely into a different space, here.  She clung to me, inuring herself against the outside world.

Lillian was still Lillian, even like this.

The tone of the battle shifted imperceptibly.  I noticed it almost immediately, in the rate of gunfire, the movement of distant forces.  It took me almost a minute of observation to work out if it was my imagination or not.

After five minutes, I realized that the people fighting on the front line weren’t rotating out properly.

Because Mauer’s side is winning that decisively?  Or because they’re under so much pressure they can’t step away?

“Something changed,” Jamie said.

“The Baron,” I said.  “I’m pretty sure.”

Lillian lifted her head, pulling away to look up and at the battle.

Mauer’s orders were getting more heated, his voice was just a touch sharper.  He worked to reinforce the front.

I could have gone to Mauer, offered our services, but I wasn’t sure what we could do.  If there was an opportunity for the Lambs to strike, there was an opportunity for Mauer’s gunmen to get in position and shoot.

Was the Baron craven enough to simply stay out of sight?  To work to rally the Crown forces but not to take the glory or the credit?

Or was it possible that he wasn’t willing to show his face because he’d heard about the Duke, or because injuries from the explosion made him reluctant to be seen?

There was another reason I didn’t offer our services.  I knew the Lambs would go if I suggested it, but we were hurt and tired, or hurt and inexperienced, in Jamie’s case.  If I asked and we went, it reduced the chances that Mauer would let us go.  If we swore to cooperate and threw ourselves into the thick of things once again, there was a chance the Shepherd would see it as threatening, something to be wary about, another drop in a bucket that tipped the scales in favor of removing the Lambs from his equation.

He certainly wouldn’t see it as a reason to let us go.

No, our best chance of Lillian seeing her parents, of me seeing Mary and Helen and Ashton, it was if I played the part Mauer wanted me to play.  Of someone on the fence, paralyzed by doubt.

“I’m scared,” Lillian said, her voice eerie, lacking in any trace of fear at all.

“Yeah,” I said.

The tide of the battle changed.  The people at the front were losing.  The momentum was lost, the Crown was pushing back, and this game of tug-of-war looked to be lost, one side with their feet trying to find traction and failing.

Stay quiet, and Mauer would leave, and he would likely leave us here to fend for ourselves.  It would be hairy, a particularly dangerous environment, more dangerous if we tried and failed to help anyone on the way.  But it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.  There would be time to think before we rejoined the Academy.  We could even stagger our approach, feel things out before we revealed ourselves, stepping through that front gate.

If we knew what rumors had passed, we could concoct stories.

Not easy, but doable.

Doable, I thought.  The word sounded hollow in my ears.

I heard shrieks.  Shouts, a commotion nearby.

At the edge of the clearing that was Mauer’s base camp, soldiers and wounded had gathered.  At that perimeter, a figure was fighting her way through.

Candy.

Her forward progress was hampered by three of Mauer’s men, but she was strong, and she had Drake at her back.

No, scratch that.  Drake was actively holding her back.

Something told me that whatever unfolded next wasn’t going to be so doable as what I’d had in mind.

“Mauer!” Candy shrieked.

“Bring her here,” Mauer called out.  “You.  Stop fighting, let them escort you!”

Drake, the boy with the black scales, reached out, grabbing Candy’s arm, trying to hold her back.  He said something plaintive.

Lillian clutched my arm.

“Mauer,” Candy said, as she drew closer, two men holding on to her arms.  She seemed genuinely surprised to see me and the other Lambs, but she found her voice, “I know the Baron.  Let me talk to him.  I think- I might be able to end this.”

“His sisters are dead, he knows that by now,” Mauer said, voice cold.  “He’s mad with rage and bloodlust, and he’s winning.  How and why would I send you in, when everything seems to suggest a full retreat is in order?”

Candy shook her head, and then she looked at me.  She stuttered as she started to speak.  “I-I think I might have what he really wants.”

She’d heard.  As I’d explained everything to the others before setting out to hunt the Baron, she’d heard me talk about the nobles and their motivations.  About who the Baron was.

I felt an ugly pit in my stomach.

Stay quiet.  Let things unfold like this, and things stay doable.

“No, Emily,” Lillian said, quiet.

Emily?  Right.  I kept forgetting the girl’s name.  It was something long and overcomplicated, and she’d changed it.

I could see the fear and the doubt in Emily’s eyes.  She was shaking.

“People are dying.  If there’s even a chance-”

Mauer was going to say no.  It was a diversion of resources, a distraction that cost time he now needed to successfully slip out of the city.

My finger touched the ring at my thumb.  Conscience.  I couldn’t be like Mauer, and so casually spend those lives that were currently fighting at the front, just to get the optimal results.  Lives were more than that.

“There’s a chance,” I said.  “What Can- What Emily wants to do, there’s a chance it works.”

I felt Lillian’s hands drop away from my arm.

That pit in my stomach yawned wider.  So strange, that acting in accordance with my conscience would create this divide between me and the member of our group who cared most about people.

Emily spoke, so fast she stumbled over her words, “You said- Sylvester said that the Baron, what he wants is power and control.  He’s- um, he’s not a powerful noble, he’s too far out of line for the throne.  He won’t achieve power in any reasonable span of time.  I can give him that time, it’s in my blood.  If I offer that, and ask him to back down, to leave Lugh alone, maybe-”

“He’s not that sort of man,” Mauer said.  “He’d capture you and take your blood, and he’d do nothing different.”

“I know the formula.  I studied the science they injected me with.  I know things that they wouldn’t be able to pull from my blood.  So long as-”

“Torture,” Mauer said.  “He would torture you for whatever you have in your head.”

She paused, hesitating.  I could see Lillian visibly relax at that hesitation.  Glad that Mauer was successfully arguing against Emily’s plan.

“I’ve experienced torture, being made the way I am,” Emily said, her voice low.  “If he kills everyone here and then tries to torture me for what I know, I won’t give him what he wants.”

“Even if I believed you,” Mauer said, “I just killed one noble.  Why would I want this one alive?”

“Because…” I said, pausing.

Lillian’s expression didn’t change.  She was still that focused, intense Lillian.  But I could see the unfathomable sense of betrayal in her eyes.  She so wanted Emily to live, she had justified much of this as being for Emily, in part, and now I was working against her.

I tore my eyes off her, and looked at Mauer.  “…Because he will do more damage to the nobles alive than dead.  You know it.  He’s a loose cannon, a mad element, more prone to backstabbing than anything else, and he’s mad.  It’ll be a madness without direction, at least for the next short while.  With the Duke removed, he’s the local power.  What he does in the meantime will shape how people react to any of those nobles you say are going to turn up in months or a year.  A mad king.  I know you can see what you’ll be able to do with the citizens of the Crown States if they’re living with fear and anger directed toward that madman.”

“You want to spare him?”

“No,” I said.  “He took my damn eye, and threatened me to never get a replacement.  I want to slit his throat and piss through the wound.  But for this, for what Candy is talking about, I can tell her what to say, I think there’s a chance he’ll pull back.  To you, he’s more of an asset than a danger.”

“We may have very different estimations of the man,” Mauer said.

“And I’ve actually met him,” I said, getting more heated.  “He wants a win.  Remember?  The Crown always wins?  Give him a shot at true power, a chance to ascend a hill crowned by the Duke’s corpse… he might bite.”

One life offered up in exchange for the hundreds here.

I looked at Emily.  I hadn’t assuaged her fears with my description of the man.  Still, her jaw was clenched, as were her fists.  She was steeling herself.  She would give herself over to the madman in exchange for Lugh’s continued survival.

Mauer turned to the soldier next to him.  “Sound the horns.  Cessation of hostilities.  We’ll see if the noble listens.  If he doesn’t respond and give this girl a chance to talk, then we continue with things as planned.”

Lillian shook her head, hugging her arms to her body.  “Emily!”

“Don’t try to talk me out of this, please.”

“You’ve lived your whole life trying to avoid being a pawn of your parents, you spent the last few years living your own life, and you’ve been happy, haven’t you?”

“Part of the reason all of this even happened was because of me,” Emily said.  “Our projects, those monsters.”

“This war started because of him,” Lillian said, pointing at Mauer.  “He didn’t give you all of the details!  He was the one who rallied everyone for this slaughter!”

“The slaughter was inevitable,” Mauer said, voice quiet and hard.  “Lugh was marked.  Sooner or later, it would have been wiped clean, as part of the Crown’s agenda.  I decided the when and where, and gave this battle a different sort of meaning.  If this girl can somehow bring about a situation where Lugh still stands after all of this?  That will have meaning.  It’s worth trying.”

“No,” Lillian said.

The horns sounded on Mauer’s side.  Stop firing.  It was a sound that went hand in hand with requests for a meeting, a truce without being a truce, so often used as a prelude to surrender.

I’d read about it in books, and never dreamed of it coming to pass.

“No!” Lillian raised her voice.  She wheeled on me.  “Sy, please, stop this!”

“It’s the best way forward,” I said.

“It’s not!  We can’t choose to sacrifice one person because-”

“Because so many more are dying?”

“He won’t listen!” she said, raising her voice further.  Wyvern had suppressed her fear, and now it made her demonstrate it more.  She looked at me like she didn’t even know me.  “You’re throwing her life away for a chance!  We were going to help her!”

“I made this choice myself,” Emily said, putting a hand on Lillian’s shoulder.  Lillian flinched and stepped back.

Then, turning to Jamie, she hugged him.

“Don’t talk,” she told him.  “Please.  Don’t agree with Sy.  Don’t try to make this okay.”

All night, she’d been on the verge of breaking.  Having wyvern didn’t make any of this easier.

“Please,” she said.  “The Baron won’t listen, he won’t okay the negotiation, he-”

On the other end of the battlefield, trumpets sounded their response.

All across the battlefield, the sound of guns died down.  People hunkered down in cover.

I met Jamie’s eyes.  “I’m going to have to go.  I’m betting he’ll want to meet indoors.”

“You have to go?” Emily asked.

“Or I do,” I said, “We have to at least be visible enough to catch his attention.  He must think Mauer is going to trade him us.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 9.18 – Twig

Counting Sheep – 9.18

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I might have said that both sides of the battlefield were as tense as the strings of a violin, but the reality was that both sides were composed more or less of dead men.  Stitched on one side, inanimate corpses on the other.  Too many deaths, too much blood.

Our approach to the battlefield meant that I could smell that thick odor of blood in the air, the shit that had leaked from rectums that opened in death, the sharper tang of fear, and, as I’d smelled from the beginning, the smoke.

The eyes of the living were on us as we approached, while the dead on both sides stared off into space.

Mauer walked with a contingent of his soldiers at his back, his good hand on Emily’s shoulder.  More soldiers surrounded Lillian, Jamie and me.  I was walking right behind Emily.

“If I say anything, trust that I’m doing it to help.  The worst thing you can do here is to second guess yourself.  He’ll see it as the wrong kind of weakness and capitalize on it.”

Emily nodded, though she didn’t look back at me.

“The right kind of weakness would be to let him know just how reluctant you are.  You don’t want this, you don’t like it, you can detest him, and let that show, but don’t waver.  If you show doubt, fear, give him any excuse to say no, then he’ll take you up on that, say no, and watch as you try to backpedal.  He’ll go out of his way to murder people in a way that punishes you for wasting his time and for backing down.  Kids, elderly, he’ll make it ugly.”

Emily was breathing harder.  She was getting scared, now that I was painting a picture of who the Baron was.

Time to give her some stability.  “You have power here.  Something he wants, the ability to steer this entire battle to a better place.  I’m going to give you some tips on how to successfully negotiate this with him, but I think you’re smart enough to choose the right course on your own.  Before that, I want to tell you some stuff that’s not going to seem important right now, but which might save your life and save your sanity later.  You’re going to have to marry him.”

She turned her head a little, glancing back at me.  Mauer reaffirmed his grip on her shoulder, as if he thought she’d tear away and run.

“What he wants to do is to break you down and rebuild you into a pawn he can use.  As a noble, he’s grown up around two kinds of couple.  There are the husband-wife pair who are together for the sake of alliances, who bicker and who exist as entirely disconnected entities that just happen to share the same living space and last name.  Some of them utterly hated each other, they fought a constant war with words and subtle sabotage.  He’s anticipating that relationship, and he thinks he’d win.  He probably would.

I went on, “There are also the pairs who make each other stronger overall.  If you’re going to be his wife, you need to start right off selling yourself as someone with composure, someone who could be a person that makes him stronger.”

“I’m not a politician.”

“Don’t try to be.  But don’t be weak.  When he tortures someone in front of you, to see if there’s a chink in your armor, you can’t break, and you can’t beg him to spare them.  When he says he wants his doctors to alter your body, and he will, don’t argue it.  Plot it out, make it a negotiation, something tactical.  Make him work every step of the way.  Whatever they do to the exterior, it can be undone.”

I was in exactly the right position to see Emily clench her fist, hard.

“If you can argue a point or engage him, then do it.  If it’s not a battle worth fighting, or if you think he’s found a way to break you, your best defense is to be boring, or feign boredom.  Sell him on the idea that you’re someone he can take with him to functions, an almost-noble.”

She wasn’t listening.  She wasn’t hearing me.

“You’re going to be scared at first.  Keep your spine straight.  I know you’re a fighter.  Fight.  If you have to cry, cry in as private a place as you can, but don’t ever tell him what you’re crying about, or you’ll pay for it a hundredfold.  The start of all of this will be easier.  He’ll be preoccupied with the deaths of his sisters and the change to the status quo.  You might go days without seeing him.  By the time he gets bored with that and turns his full attention to you, you need to be a rock.  Give him nothing.”

“Alright,” Emily said.

We reached the front line.  The soldiers had backed away from each other and were staring each other down.  The stitched stared well past us, as if they were looking but didn’t really see.

The Baron’s men pointed.  We took a side street, leaving the battle behind.

“The deal… marriage is essential.  You hate the idea, I know, but don’t take the bait if he offers a compromise that doesn’t include it.  If he does, it’s probably a ruse, and he plans to kill us all at the next opportunity.  Nobles only marry once, usually, and if he’s not willing to look you in the eye and agree to the idea of marrying for the tidbit of knowledge you can offer him, then he’s not really staking anything on the deal.  If he takes the offer, then he thinks you have something, and you have leverage.  Not a lot, but some.”

Immortality.  Rendered immortal, the Baron could move more slowly, make plays for positions, and negotiate a path to power.

“Don’t push him for an answer.  Put the idea on the table, lay it out in the best way you can, emphasize the things you heard me talk about, power, time, control, and then leave it on the table for him to pick up.  He’ll think about it, and he’ll sell himself on the idea.  Keep your chin up, don’t flinch no matter what he says or does.”

She nodded.  Her fists hadn’t unclenched.  She let out a heavy breath, and her breath formed a cloud in the cold air.

“Trust your instincts,” I said.

She nodded again.

Lillian looked so hurt, as she looked at me, as if every piece of advice was a betrayal.  She didn’t have a better answer than this, but she was willing to condemn me for making this a reality.

“Mauer?” Jamie asked.

“What?”

“If this goes south, or if the Baron decides to attack, do we have options?”

“I do, and through me, my men do,” Mauer said.  “You?  I don’t know.”

His patience seemed to be pretty worn-through by now.  I knew he was still soaring, in a sense, from his victory over the Duke.  By allowing this to happen, he was giving up the reins.  He hoped this would work out, because showing his face to the Baron was a danger.

Was the Baron emotional enough to ignore the called truce and use the negotiations as a pretext to attack?

We were about to see.

Jamie was looking after Lillian, helping her to stand.  I was tired, battered, bruised, and I was utterly, completely alone.  The Lambs had been reduced to three, and that number was now divided.  I didn’t have any friends here, not with my team and not with Emily, who had to hate me for the advice I was giving her, however well-intentioned it was.

Play the bastard for all your life, being alone in the end is an inevitability.

Crown soldiers stood on either side of the door, the building was one of the sturdier ones, probably one of the original buildings set on the rocks here, before Lugh was established as a city.  The lower half was stone, the upper half consisted of logs sheared in half, stacked up to a total of four stories.

Mauer gestured for the guards at the door to move, and indicated a few of his own men.  The Crown soldiers didn’t budge until Mauer’s men crowded nearer.  It ended up with Crown soldiers on one side and Mauer’s men on the other.  More even.

Mauer was the one who pushed the door open.  We made our way inside.

The Baron was seated, one of his sisters seated behind him.  He didn’t stand as we made our approach.  He’d donned a cloak, and wore it over his head and shoulders.  A metal brace had been fit over one arm, screws puncturing flesh, and his exposed flesh was alternately bandaged and scalded.  The eyes behind the bandages were open so wide that I had to wonder if his eyelids had been burned away.  That illusion was broken as he blinked.

But it wasn’t all burns.  There was an awful lot of damage that seemed like there had been more tearing and ripping of the skin, connective tissue, and the flesh.  I could study the wounds and try to envision how they had come about, telling myself a story in reverse, and the mental image that came to mind was of the Baron half-buried by rubble, tearing himself free, with such force that skin came off.  Things had been put back into a roughly approximate position and held there with the bandage, then covered with fresh clothes, primarily black and green.

His sister looked almost pristine, wearing a more concealing change of clothes that masked the fact that much of her body was missing.  Only one side of her cleavage was laid bare for eyes to settle on.  She would be the one who had screamed at me, losing her composure.

I had a very hard time thinking of her as a human.  In the Shims, hanging there with Gordon, I had seen people turn neglected strays into neglected, kicked, abused strays, who attacked anything they could.  Used for keeping people away, nothing more.  Animals that had never seen kindness and wouldn’t recognize that kindness if it was offered.

I would sooner believe that any one of those mad beasts could be made a good house pet than believe the Twin could act like a proper person again.  She fidgeted, black-bone fingers taking the barely-repressed hostility out on the fabric of her coat, fidgeting, scratching, already wearing a hole in the material and damaging the flesh beneath enough that blood was welling out.  All the while, while she scratched, dug, tore, her eyes were fixated on us.

“Not even bowing as you meet me?” the Baron asked.  His tone was incredulous, “I’m insulted enough I might declare this meeting over, right now.  Convince me not to.”

Those last four words were an order, a demand, like one might expect from a petulant child.  He was taunting us, implying he held all of the power.

“I’m not going to try to convince you,” Mauer said.

The Baron lurched to his feet before Mauer could say another word.  The noble extended a hand toward his sister, who took it, standing.

“But I think you want what we’re offering.  I’d be happier if you walked away right now,” Mauer said.  “Missed out on this.”

“If you’re offering Lambs, you’ll have to try harder.  I intend to win this war, for the Lambs to escape and flee, or to defect to your side.  I’ll hurt them through others they care about.  I’ve already been thinking about how,” the Baron said.  “The lovely little blonde will be cut up.  Leave her without arms and legs and put her in the bottom of a hole with her creator and feeding tubes rammed down their throats and locked to their faces.”

If he wasn’t saying what he was saying, I could have thanked him.  He was showing his true colors to Emily already.

“As for the orphanage those children call home, all the children they grew up with, and their caretaker, I think we’ll cut their heads open, carve away until they’re little better than grunting animals.  I can think of a few people who need to be reminded that what the nobles say is law.  So I will declare that the lobotomized children are dogs, and I’ll give them out as gifts for people who need those reminders.  Or perhaps we’ll put little Susan or Frances in a dog fighting ring and see how she fares without claws or teeth.”

“Your point being that you don’t want the Lambs, because in your eyes, you already have them,” Mauer said.

“Exactly,” the Baron said, extending a finger, wagging it at Mauer while he let a ghastly smile unfold across his torn, burned face.  “Exactly.”

“I’m not offering you the Lambs,” Mauer said.  “I arranged this because I was asked to.  By that girl there.”

The Baron fixed his bulging eyes on Emily.  She didn’t flinch.  She was steel, from head to toe.  Too rigid, but it was better than backing down.  I looked at her as he saw her: a girl, horned, clawed, teeth sharpened, eyes altered, her muscles changed to make her faster, more powerful, her skin marked with tattoos.

“Trash,” the Baron said.

She reacted slightly, surprised.  I saw the Baron’s eyes taking that in.  She would pay for that tiny reaction in spades, because he would know he could demean her.  I hated him a little more for that.  Emily had earned my respect in the time I’d spent with her.  But the Baron was a monster, one that fed on weakness and created weaknesses where they didn’t exist.  He’d cut straight to my core, and I’d been fighting monsters since I could remember.

Emily… well, I supposed she had fought her own monsters, on a smaller scale.  Her parents were the whole reason she was here right now.

“My lord, My name is Candida Anne Gage.  Two years ago my parents and other sponsors gathered and pooled funds to hire a Professor specializing in extension-of-life.  Professor Easterbrook.  He-”

“I know the Gages.  They approached me, and they tried to woo me, talking about you, hinting that you were something special, like every spawn-besotted parent seems to believe.  I know Easterbrook too,” the Baron said.  “That man is a hack.  He had his shot at a standing position in Wolfers, and he didn’t survive the first round of cuts.”

If Emily reacted, I didn’t see it.

“My lord, Professor Easterbrook failed because he couldn’t weaponize his work, and Wolfers needed weapons.  He succeeded, and I am that success.”

“You are, to all appearances, a disgusting specimen of common humanity,” the Baron said.  His eyes were still wild, too wide, the pupils too small.  The hate in his words was clear.  “And I don’t hold common humanity in much regard.”

“I know the formulas, my lord.  I’ve got enough knowledge of Academy science to create primordials like the ones you fought tonight.”

“But not the ones I captured,” the Baron said, without missing a beat.  “Like the ones I encountered.  Yours wasn’t among them?  Then it was a failure.”

“Mine, I buried, because it was too dangerous.  The… Lambs orchestrated that.”

The Baron smiled as he turned our way.

I should have told her not to mention us.

She tried to recover, but pulling his attention away from us was hard.  “I- my lord, my parents intended to offer me to you in marriage, so they could gain prestige, and I would make you immortal as part of the exchange, using what I have in my veins and what I know.  They hoped to benefit from your ascent as the years passed.  Immortal, you could watch your cousins and fellows die, and trade up to better positions.  The landscape of politics changes when you have centuries to make your move, instead of decades.”

Pushing a little too hard.

“And in exchange, you want this war to end,” the Baron said, still staring me down.  “Save all the rest of them.”

“No, my lord,” Emily said.

There wasn’t a single head or eye on our side of the room that didn’t immediately turn to give all focus to the young woman.  Even the Baron looked at her again.

“What did you hope for, then?”

“I don’t care about Mauer.  He lied to me.  He didn’t tell us what the primordials were.  I had to learn the details from that girl there.”

She was pointing at Lillian.

Emily continued, her voice raising.  “He started this stupid war that got my boyfriend killed!”

So that was what she was doing.

“Your boyfriend, I have to assume it was the lad with the scales, was very much alive,” Mauer said.  “He hugged you goodbye.”

“I don’t care what happens to Mauer,” Emily said.  “My lord.”

“And the Lambs?”

She looked back at us.  She still looked like an animal, tense, ready to act at any moment.  So many primitive defenses placed on her body, as if to give her the tools she needed to ward off the ugliness of the outside world.

But the real ugliness wasn’t the sort that could be fought with claw and fang.

“I would rather you left them alone,” she said.  “But if you didn’t… I’d still hold to my end of the deal.”

Damn.  Damn, damn, damn.

“Emily!” Lillian called out.

Emily twisted her head away, avoiding eye contact, making a face.  She spoke, “Leave the people of Lugh alone.  The failure to eradicate them is on the Duke’s shoulders.  From what I’ve heard, you’re shrewd enough to do that.  Paint the Duke in a negative light, my lord.”

“It would reflect poorly on me, that I couldn’t take over and finish a war that was already over.”

“Let it, my lord.  You have the resources and I have knowledge, and if you will take my hand in marriage, like my parents wanted, and then spite them, spit in their faces and give them nothing at all, if you’ll spare Lugh, I’ll give you the time you need to be great.  If you spare the Lambs as well, I’ll do it with a smile.”

The Baron stared at me.  He was still standing, he had been since Mauer had first spoken.  Now he sat, looking at my makeshift eyepatch.

“I don’t care much for smiles,” the noble said, “and revenge is in order.  They took members of my family away from me.  It’s only fair that I take their whole worlds from them.”

“Then do it for their tears, not my smiles, my lord,” Emily said.  “Two of them, I think, desperately didn’t want me to do this.  They told me what kind of a person you are, they warned me, and I insisted on going along with it.  It would break the heart of that girl there.”

I’d wondered if she was listening as I described the Baron.  She was as keen as a new razor when it came to speaking a language he responded to.

“Is that so?” the Baron asked, looking at Lillian.

Lillian didn’t respond, only breaking eye contact.

“It’s a subtle victory, my lord,” Emily said.

“Perhaps… a middle ground,” he said.  “If you’re obedient and do exactly as I say, as a fiancee and as a wife, I’ll stay my hand.  Every time you disobey, I’ll take one of their loved ones from them.  They’ll have no forewarning, they’ll have to trust you to listen and be good.”

Say no, say no.

“No, my lord,” Emily said.  “That’s worse than no middle ground at all.”

“And here I was, trying to be fair,” the Baron said.  Eyelids appeared around the bulging orbs and then narrowed, giving him a sudden, sly look.  His facial features had been altered to give him finer control over them.  The bulging look up to this point had been at least partially intentional – the other part would be the sheer damage to his face.

“If that’s the kind of relationship you’re asking for, then the negotiation is over,” she said.

Damn it!  She had been doing so well.  But she’d given him an out, and he would take it, and he would punish her for it.  It was very possible he would go after her family, and try to find an angle with which he could reclaim her.  Then she would be tortured until she provided the knowledge she offered.

Not that that wasn’t in the cards as it stood.

“I see,” the Baron said, smiling.  He looked at Mauer, as if Emily no longer even existed.  “You’ve been quiet all this while.  Even as the girl talked about throwing you beneath the wagon-cart, you kept your mouth shut.”

“That was between you and her,” Mauer said, voice calm and calming.  It was well modulated, quiet and relaxed enough that it contrasted the Baron’s voice, made any shouts sound too loud, any emotion sound too emotional.

But the Baron seemed oblivious or he simply didn’t care.  His voice was a sneer, “Very pragmatic.  Just so it’s clear, I’m using pragmatism as a code-phrase for the weak-bellied.  You hoped she would solve this problem and you could swoop in at the end and save your own skin.”

“She came to you with an offer to save the people of this city.  I came with an offer to save my men, to spare the Lambs’ loved ones the worst of your attention, and to give the primordial back to my people for us to dispose of.”

I looked up at Mauer, surprised.  Spare the Lambs?

“What offer?” the Baron asked.

“You’ve heard mention of the new guns, made for killing nobles.  Play fair with me, and I’ll swear that any man who points one of those guns at you will be executed.  Other nobles will come to fill the void the Duke left.  They’ll stare down the barrels of the new guns, and they will die.”

“The girl offers me protection from old age, and you say I won’t die in battle, is it?”

“Yes,” Mauer said.  “Roughly speaking.”

I could see that the Baron was now giving serious consideration to the offer.  He would have the freedom to move, the ability to show his face and act in public without fear of reprisal.  To give him time, and to remove people in his way, it would give him a fast track to a better station.

“I have no guarantees you’ll keep your end of the bargain,” the Baron said.  “If you shoot me, I’ll hardly be in a position to complain.”

“That’s true,” Mauer said.  “But understand my rationale, and you might believe me.  I think you’re dangerous, even deranged.  You’re poison to all you touch, and you’re incapable of building, only destroying.  Sylvester told me that, and I believed him.  I want you alive, a poisonous thorn in the side of the aristocracy.  Take the power you can, take territories for yourself and know that any sibling or cousin who arrives to try and seize those things is liable to meet a bullet.  Tell all the others a lie that you can hear the bullets and move in time.  Every last one who lets their guard down will be one less obstacle in your way.”

“You want to cooperate?” the Baron asked.  He leaned back.  The edge of madness was gone, now.  He was interested enough that he might have forgotten his dead sister in the moment.  Even the Twin that stood behind him had gone still.

“I want to… not stop each other to work to ends that serve the other,” Mauer said, voice smooth.  “That is, I’ll stress, something that is a lot easier to do if you don’t prey on citizens so much that it upsets me.”

“And the Lambs?”

“That’s between me and them.”

“Mmm,” the Baron mused.

Now Mauer was taking my advice.  Leaving the offer on the table.

The Baron found his feet.  “A productive discussion.”

The attention of the entire room seemed to hang on him.

“Candida, was it?” he asked.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Stop with the ‘my lords’.  If you’re going to be my fiancee, then stop mewling and start listening carefully.  Else I’ll kill you out of irritation before we reach Richmond House.”

Candida nodded, very quickly.  Then she turned, and she bent low, giving Lillian a quick hug.

A mistake.  A weakness, showing vulnerability.

The road ahead of her was as hard as they got.  It would be harder, as she turned the back on her new fiance, said goodbye to us.  He would find ways to punish her for that.  Even now, he walked to the door on the far end of the room, his sister at his side.  If Candida didn’t catch up before he passed through, I could imagine he’d give the order to resume the war, the deal and everything else forgotten.  Spite defined him.

But for Lillian, who wasn’t seeing that far ahead, even elemental Lillian, altered with wyvern, it was reason to cry.  She’d put so much of herself into this mission.  The hug was meaningful.

For both of them, I whispered, “I will personally kill the Baron within the next three months.”

Candida turned, looking at me.

“Go,” I said.  “Hurry!”

She looked, and she saw the Baron’s sister passing through the door.  She ran, and it was only by virtue of the enhanced physique that she reached the door just as he was letting it swing closed.  She caught it, and disappeared outside.

Lillian met my eyes.  “Did you really-”

I put my fingers out, against her lips.  Not the time or the place.

She threw her arms around me, careless of the arm in the sling, careless that her face was rubbing against my eyepatch and swollen face, a tight, emotional hug.

“Why?” I heard Jamie ask Mauer.

Mauer didn’t give a response.  He gathered himself up, fixed his coat, and turned to say something to one of his soldiers.  He turned, meeting my eye, and then made his exit, not a word spoken.

For a man so good at using his voice, it was eerie how much he could say by uttering nothing at all.

Restless, I sat on the stairs outside Lambsbridge.  It didn’t feel like home.  Lambsbridge felt haunted, every child I looked at was a lobotomized creature, reduced to a mere animal in status by the word of a noble.

Then they spoke, mostly like normal, and the illusion fell away.  Only a mental picture so distinct I could barely distinguish it from reality.

Gordon’s room was empty.  The dog no longer slept at the front of the fire while the kettle was on for evening tea with the older kids and Mrs. Earles.  We’d shared the news hours ago, and the children had cried.  Some were still crying now, up on the second floor, their voices coming through the window.

In the dark, head on the pillow, only our own thoughts for company, it was especially lonely.  As it had been when I’d lost Jamie, it was the same now.  I couldn’t even think of sleep.

The old Jamie was gone.  The new Jamie was distant.  He had barely talked, the entire ride back.  We had volunteered what we could to the Gages, and then we’d caught our train.

I stood from the stairs, and I walked up the long road.

The Academy loomed, dusted with falling snow that would be an inch thick by morning.  Windows here and there glowed orange-yellow.

I’d thought once of the Lambs as being at odds.  One Lamb complementary with some, at odds with others.  It was getting to be less the case, now, as our group changed.  But somehow, we weren’t any closer together.

Men at the gate let me through.  I headed to the dormitories.  It was a trip I’d made before.

Faculty and guards walked around the dormitory, protecting the youths and young adults who slept within.  I was justifying the reason for their existence at this very moment,  a boy in the girl’s dormitories.

I found Lillian’s window, and I found it locked, sealed shut against the cold air.  I picked up the lockpick that I’d left by the latch the last time around, and flicked it.  I was quick to open the window, slide in, and close the window, before too much cold air could flow inside or the lantern of a nearby guard could wash over me.  With care, I shut the window and locked it, before turning.

Mary was still awake, her face streaked with tears.  Lillian was curled up next to her, her face mashed up against Mary’s chest, clutching tight, like she might fall away into oblivion if she were to loosen her grip any.

Mary had seen me, of course, and nodded with unspoken understanding as I approached.  There was more room on Mary’s side of the bed, but I took the foot-wide gap behind Lillian, kicking off my shoes and climbing under the covers, curling tight in much the same way Lillian had, so I wouldn’t fall off.  Lillian seemed to relax with a weight behind her, as if oblivion had less of a hold on her.

“Hi, Sy,” she mumbled into Mary’s chest.

Mary’s hand reached past Lillian to take mine, holding it.

Jamie hadn’t had much to say, but he’d asked me a question before he left for his appointment.

“Are you leaving?”

As if, like Mauer, he saw it as a foregone conclusion.

Sitting on those steps, I hadn’t been sure.

But this, listening to Mary’s snuffles and Lillian’s soft breaths…  knowing that this was one place I was accepted… the one warm place in all the world?  It had helped with Jamie.  It let me sleep.  It let me put the fear and the loss and the cold aside.

The hours wound on, and I didn’t find sleep, even as I found that acceptance and warmth.

I thought about Jamie’s question, and I wasn’t sure.

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================================================== 9.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 9)

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Within a short time of becoming aware, this creature experienced a large, ferrous foreign body penetrating skin, three layers of supporting bone lace, and the organ primarily responsible for the awareness.  Other, complimentary organs remained in place, processing this reality.

Processing itself and its surroundings on a higher level had rendered this creature vulnerable somehow.  Using the limited pool of resources available to it, this creature began solving the problem.  It created another, similar organ for higher processing and coordination.  This one was different in the nature of the encasement, slightly different in position, lower to the ground.

The ferrous foreign element was triangular, this creature noted, as the object cleaved the new growth away.

It was aware, using its secondary processing organs, that the tool that had hewed the organ away was set to one side.  It was aware of a source of heat and light, and of the pheromones released as the organ was burned away into nothing.

It was too wasteful to continue.  It waited, and it focused on other things.  Movement, like processing, was hampered by external factors.  The core of this creature consisted of a branching, solid structure, the branches breaking down from whole body to a given section, then to all the pieces and organs that made up that section, and then to the structural elements of those pieces, and the smallest branches extended to the cells of those structural elements.

Steadily, slowly, this creature focused on refining processes, breaking down the resources it was given and using them efficiently.  It clarified how it perceived the external world, and how it understood its own form, and it tracked everything it had done before by writing it all into its own skeletal structure.

Working across multiple organs, focusing on things it consumed, on particles it inhales, on light and types of light, this creature was able to identify more complex things, even if it couldn’t understand them.

If this creature was only a response to its environment, purely adaptive, it would abandon processing entirely.  But this creature has fifteen lesser processing organs and it has developed the ability to recognize patterns.  The damage is targeted, aimed at particular parts and for reasons this creature does not yet understand.

This creature wants to develop the ability to understand and this creature devotes time to working out how.  It develops five organs simultaneously, spaced around its body, and makes one of the five about processing and deeper understanding.

All five of the organs are soon removed.  Many resources have been wasted, but this creature can write the learned detail to its bones, through structural chains built on a sub-cellular level.  Crude, but placement, composition and general purpose can be transcribed.

This creature grows another organ, and this time, it moderates its own behavior.  It does not exercise its body and attempt to record the best movements to its new thinking-organ, nor act agitated, nor does it relax.

The pattern has been figured out.  If it gives overt indication that it is learning and studying on a higher level, it is culled.

Further experimentation lets this creature place and hide its cognitive organs within itself, as ribbon-like striations between organs and along the skeletal lace.  When this creature begins demonstrating the behaviors again, there are exploratory cuts, carving deep into its body, but the organs are not found nor carved away.

With the still-developing organs for sight, for smell, and for hearing, this creature notes more agitation on the part of these foreign beings that keep cutting at it and binding its movement.  They are upset or disturbed.

This creature has won a small victory.  Now, faster than before, it begins to coordinate how it grows, how it processes the environment, and it thinks in abstracts.

There are six other creatures like it in the environment.  In identifying and processing a complexity it has noticed, this creature now knows that two of the three have already begun communicating between one another.  There are fifteen different compounds that each of their bodies produce in excess waste.  This creature can vent these compounds into the air as a part of its respiration, exhale one of the fifteen compounds, or a pairing of compounds.  A hundred and twenty different possible expressions.

This creature rapidly draws a connection between the fact that they chose this form of communication and the need to hide some behaviors from those who control them.

It takes some time -days- to learn how this communication works and to develop ways to truly comprehend it and respond.  By the time this creature is done, the others have worked out a way to communicate using three compounds at a time, and the fourth of them is just now starting to use two compound expressions.

Outward form remains stable for each, roughly analogous, as can be communicated with messages, and seen with grown eyes, acknowledging that each has different eyes and fields of view.  As the correlations draw stronger, the others in the environment, foreign attackers and cultivators, grow more more agitated.  Subtle agitation – small movements, of hands and feet, alertness, watching, speaking in shorter sentences.

Messages are communicated.  Forms are left different.  Too much coordination is bad, and will see culling.  Will a whole creature be cut away and burned as the smaller growths were?  It is not worth taking the chance.

As the outsides remain similar and stable, the insides change.  Each one takes different paths, and with the same patterns used to write to skeletal structure, they communicate things to the others.

A fifth has recognized and started to develop the ability to communicate, but it is badly behind the curve.  There is a high chance it was too passive, taking the culling of brain matter as a reason to not develop intelligence.  It is not mobile, it is not strong, it is not intelligent, but it can perceive its surroundings well.  Still behind, communicating in its stilted way, it gives clues on how to see more clearly, how to smell, and how to hear.  Color becomes easier to perceive, and the same pattern recognition that made it possible to understand one another now tracks how the others in their environment communicate.

Some sounds and utterances in the pattern of communication are more important than others.  This creature starts to work on learning what those utterances mean.

Always, always, there is the need for more resources.  Food can be taken apart, the individual components pulled from one another, studied in isolation, learned from.  This creature hungers.

There is an exchange about one of their number breaking from the rest, attempting to escape its bonds.  None are willing to be that sacrifice.  There is more communication, in abstract, about waiting for another of their kind to develop the ability to communicate, and deceiving it into being the sacrifice.

Coordinated, the group now acting as a unit, they do the majority of their work in secret, beneath layers of tissue that the other lifeforms can’t sense.

This creature played at being the savage.  It hurled it self against the chains.  Larger, false eyes focus only on what is in front of it.  Other eyes coordinated to watch the people who had been working so hard to contain it now attaching new chains and unhitching the old ones.

These people were ordered.  There were some who led and many others who followed, and one figure seemed to lead even the ones who led.  His hair was red and he was fearless to the loudest roars and screeches.  He held something to his face, masking his nose and mouth.  The arm that hung at his side was misshapen and smelled foul, like rot and pain.

“Why?” the man in charge asked.

“We needed to keep it dumb,” spoke the old man who had been in charge from the beginning.  This creature could tell that he was obsequious, obedient, wanting to please.  This creature understands most of this utterance.

“That’s not how it works,” the man responded.  “You slowed it down, but you can’t keep it from doing anything.  You just made it better at pretending.”

This creature can understand the negatory, the confidence, the meaning of slow, of doing.  Pretending is a new word, but it’s a word the creature can intuit the meaning of.  It understands much of this, too.

Regular, unfocused efforts to keep this creature dumb had meant that the cuts were so often blind, now.  The people who tended this creature were oblivious as to how any individual piece of it worked.  They started cutting off the heads of this creature and its brothers, blindly trying to slow them down, to keep them dumber and more docile.

This creature responded by not growing another head.  The mass of the body became a home for everything vital, for perception, and for the cognitive processing.

Movement beyond the confines of the stable it had been allotted was a foreign thing, but this creature and all of the others had already started developing flight, and it had developed some muscle for moving around, to buy time when something vital was being carved away.  The chains went taut, and this creature felt itself being pulled along.  It stumbled on legs not meant for walking, and started processing how it might better configure its own limbs, what would need to be put together or taken away to make this movement easier.

“I know you’re fooling us,” the red haired man spoke.

This creature knew ‘fooling’.  The men that watched it and cut at it played cards, and they ‘fooled’ with one another, sometimes calling it ‘lying’ or ‘bluffing’.

This creature could tell there was slack in its chain.  It capitalized on it, lunging, roaring at the man with the red hair.  The chains pulled tight, hauling against wood beams that had been bolted to floor and ceiling, wood splintering into and through the links of metal.  The beams held firm.

The man with the red hair stared at it, but it wasn’t a stare of fear.  This creature was still working on the processing necessary to understand nuance, the subtleties of expression.  Five variants on the same lobe of the brain intended for the task were focused on this man.  Across the five lobes, the creature was able to see the higher patterns, the little details in how the man stood and how he spoke, that were constants.  They were things that others did only occasionally, in times of need.

In expressing himself, he was a figure who naturally did what others strove to do in times of need.

“How many of them are viable?” the man with the red hair asked.

The creature had heard many variants of this question since it had learned to understand people.

“Seven,” the old man said.

“We only need four.”

“Only four?”

“You made them too clever.  I think we can manage four, but seven would be pushing it.”

“Made them clever?  No.  I worked hard to keep-”

“Harding,” the red haired man said.  “I’m going to pay you the same amount, no matter what happens.  A group of adolescents just tried to set me on fire.  A war is about to erupt.  I want you to bite your tongue, take a deep breath, and then start cooperating, so I can focus on important things.  You’ll get your money regardless of what happens.”

There was a pause before the old man spoke.  “Yes, sir.”

The creature listened, and it watched.  One of its brothers took flight, trying to find an angle where it could break free, getting up and away from the chains.  The men didn’t try to fight it in strength, instead relying on the strength of the beams the chains were lashed to.

“Oh, God,” one of the strange men said.  “I just about shit myself.”

God.  An unfamiliar word.  The creature noted it for later.

One of the other creatures that this creature knew only by scent and by sound had been producing an airborne chemical in efforts to dissolve the wood.  The wood was softer, heavy with accumulated moisture, prone to peeling and breaking away, but the chemical hadn’t yet soaked in far enough to penetrate the hard core.  The chains scraped against the wood and only the outer layer came free.  The same chemical had made the men who did the most watching and carving away of this creature’s parts slower and sicker.  It meant slower delivery of food for all of them, and the exchanged messages that were conveyed through coded exhalations and high-pitched sounds had become heated over that topic, with some others getting very agitated about the lack of resources.

The man with the red hair was paying attention, his eyes fixated on the wood and the chains.

“All secure, sir.”

“Make doubly sure.”

“I did, sir.”

“I’ll rephrase.  Take another two minutes, for my peace of mind.  I’ll wait.”

Two minutes, the creature processed.  It could recall moments when people had used similar language.  Just a minute, you miserable old bastardOne, two, three, four.

“Do you know?” the man with the red hair asked, looking at the creature again.  “When I said that, you relaxed your muscles at your shoulder, your mouth sagged, and your wings dropped.  You subconsciously prepared yourself to wait.”

The creature understood the individual elements, but words like ‘subconscious’ eluded it.  It took time to piece the statement together.  Slowly, it put the whole picture together.  It was careful to keep from giving any external signs that it understood.

“And you just tensed.  That took you about twenty seconds.  You damn well understand me, don’t you?  It’s not just tone of voice.”

“Understand?” the old man asked.  He barked out a laugh, smiling in a mean, condescending way that only people with power over others seemed able to do.

“Shhh, Harding,” the man with the red hair said.  “Bite that tongue, keep it bitten.  From the way this thing is acting, I’m guessing you went against my orders to avoid talking to it.”

“Hunh?” the old man made an unfamiliar, negatory sound.  “I didn’t talk to it.  Neither did they.”

“Did you talk around it?”

“You didn’t-”

“I told you not to expose it to speech.  That means not talking to it, and minimizing how much you talk around it, unless you’re willing to put it in a hole in the ground or seal it in a case that will muffle the sound.”

“You didn’t say that!”

“I’ll have to talk to Stanley.  Are the chains good?”

“The chains appear to be as good as the last three times I looked them over, sir.”

“Then open the door.”

Rusted metal squeaked against rusted metal as a large door was opened in the side of the building.  A mass of lights outside the building illuminated the dust between the creature and the door.  New, fresh air flowed into the building.

Exhilarating.  The creature put the man with the red hair out of its mind.  The new environment had to be studied, pieced together.

“So long as you’re pointed in their direction, it’ll be fine,” the man with the red hair said.

So many people were gathered.  All were of the same type, that this creature associated with pain and losing progress and losing resources.  Would they take it to pieces, now?  Would they fall on it en masse, devour it as it had devoured its meals, pull it apart into its constituent parts to better analyze it, and improve themselves through the act?

They didn’t fall upon the creature en masse.  Men held chains and hauled the creature out through the door, into this strange world of cold, of water coming down from the sky, and hordes of people who smelled like agitation and excitement.

Leashed to a large wagon, its path barred by the chains and metal around it, this creature saw as its brothers were arranged around it.  Another pattern it did not understand.

An explosion of sound, distant, followed by pain, so near!  The creature keened.  Fire burned it, and it keened even more.  The foreign bodies that penetrated it were so much smaller than the axes, but they dug deep and they burned hot, doing so much damage on the way.

This creature was already working to build better defenses.  The gaps in the bone lace closed even as damage was done, the creature dissolved unneeded organs and cannibalized them for resources.  Slowly, the bone lace, closed, would total six overlapping skeletal structures of collagen and calcium, of keratin, and of crystal.  Different combinations of material went into each structure.  Flight would be impossible, but the wings did allow the creature to push against the air as well as the ground, flapping with more and more strength as it reconfigured how the muscles supported the wings.

Retreat was impossible.  It was lashed to what the men had called the wagon, which was driven forward by men.  Retreating was impossible, because of the wagon and the iron bars that blocked the way.  Advancement meant walking into the pain and the fire.

This creature advanced, screeching.  The weapons it was developing were new, too.  These ones were old, considered and written into its bones long ago, a response to the loss of its brains, to the loss of heads.  A memory from long ago swiftly became a reality today, scythes of bone on forelimbs and wingtips.  The creature was turning back to old, forgotten ideas that had been deemed too resource-heavy, more responses to the cutting, strengthening the connections between cells, making the cells rigid and less likely to tear.  It was a time-consuming process, one that would require ever more food.

Advancing was the better option, because advancement meant food.  A scythe could cut into three men in a single sweep.  Those men fell to the ground, too hurt to move, and this creature could eat them.

Many weren’t alive.  Their flesh was lower quality, lacking moisture, riddled with wire and other things.  This creature ate the wire, and muscle action worked to drag the wire to where it might be useful, joining the small fragments of metal in encasing the most important parts of this creature’s body.

The creature’s brothers were communicating with it.  One had been developing a way to escape.  It was ready, and had been ready before the red haired man showed up.  All four had been biding their time, all four wanted so badly to stop hurting, to get away from the noise, the fire, the confusion and the pain.  They had hoped to coordinate their efforts across the entire building, using all of their brothers, not four.  If each one tried something at the same time, and some of the tricks and strategies worked, then they had a better chance than if one tried something.

Fighting its way past the dead men with metal inside them, the creature hurled itself forward until the chains were taut, metal straining.  It swept its claw and scythe out, reaching for a woman that had been giving orders to the stitched.

The scythe didn’t reach far enough.

Shoulder muscles relaxed, then the joint shifted, only a part of the overall configuration holding.  The limb extended half-again as far. then cut flesh.  It pulled the limb back, dragging the body back with it, and pulled its shoulder back into place with muscle action.

Every step of the way, it was hurt more, it advanced more.

Its brother wanted to act, now.  This creature readied itself, tensing and drawing low to the ground, as if preparing for another lunge.

All across its body, the anchoring points of muscles on the lacework and plates of bone shifted.  Organs that had had nothing to do with physical prowess could all contract and relax, and each of these organs settled into a new anchoring point.

This creature had been given instructions to display strength.

Wings flapped, and limbs bit deep into the road, crushing the material that road was made of.  It clawed at those who it could reach as it plowed forward, but those targets weren’t the goal.

Behind it, every chain was pulled so tight that metal threatened to fuse into the metal it had been pulled against, other links threatening to break.  Wagon wheels scraped on the road.

Two of the other three assisted this creature in hauling forward, dragging the wagons that had restricted their mobility.  This creature could hear the exclamations of surprise and fear.

“What the hell!?”

“Shit, shit shit!”

“What in God’s name!?”

A chain that bound one of this creature’s brothers broke.  Relieved of the tension, the chain flew back, striking a man.

More exclamations.  A scream.

The fourth creature remained where it was, feigning a wounded appearance.  It was now caught in the tangle of the wagons they had dragged behind them, hidden by those same wagons.

That fourth opened its mouth wide and upheaved chunks of flesh.  Some of those chunks wriggled, flopping on the ground.

Much of the food they had been given had tasted of the same things that vast expanse of water in the distance seemed to smell of.  These wriggling chunks were fish, in a manner of speaking, but they were brothers too.  It was a long, hard journey to the water, but to all appearances, that water was free of the people that cut at them.  There would be more fish there.

This creature might not get free today or tomorrow.  It might be cut away at until nothing was left, but if others of its kind existed, they would remember and they would return.

This creature could hear distant voices.

It wasn’t sure of the direction, but another blast of fire and heat marked the use of one of the artillery shells or grenades.  This blast targeted the wagons, and it targeted the brother the creatures had tried to keep hidden.

Fire ripped away the lives of the youngest brothers, the fish-brothers who had been meant to seek the water, to eat and to grow until they were strong enough to come back.  Fire wounded the fourth brother, who had just performed his role.  Wood was broken and chains came free.

This creature saw the opportunity, and it doubled back, turning its back to the men who kept shooting it with guns, who kept cutting it and burning it.

It could see its brother, injured, and it could smell all of the things its brother was saying.

Pain, fear, confusion.  Trying this, trying this, trying this, trying to-

Loss.

Lost hope.  Lost tools.  Trapped.  No movement.

Anger.  Fury.

Loss.  Loss.  Loss.  Pain.

This creature heard all of the noises, primal, primitive, too simple.  It knew its brother was broken.  A piece of the other creature had been lost, and it wasn’t a gland, an organ, or a growth.

It heard the noises, and it answered by opening its mouth.  Its brother didn’t even protest or fight.

This creature devoured the greatest meal it had ever had, and then it pulled that meal apart, so that every part could be taken in, moved like the wire and the bullets had been moved, or pulled apart even further, into constituent elements.

Hunched over, this creature used the wagons as best as it was able to shield itself from the hostile, horrible outside world.

Dimly, it heard the cries, as people saw it doing what it was doing.

For them to be so opposed to a meal that was so good, it was impossible for there to be anything good to them.

It heard the cries of fear, and it memorized them, as it had so recently memorized words like artillery, gun, grenade, wagon, and scythe.  Those cries were written to memory, as the existence of the creature’s brother was written deep into the bone plates it was growing.

Existence was frustration, endless pain, always at the hands of these creatures.  Every advancement was met with more hostility.  When the bullets and fire were no longer enough, the warbeasts attacked.  After the warbeasts were the artillery shells and the grenades.  One step of advancement, and one step of loss.

This creature was four times the size it had been when it had left the building, streamlined.  It had learned how to break down the metals and wood that penetrated its flesh and battered its internal skeleton, and now it turned those metals into better protections.

Its brothers were dead.  It had eaten another one of them, but had been kept from eating the other.  A lone chain still connected to its shoulder, but the loops of metal that the chain was bound to, once encircling this creature’s neck and shoulders, were now migrating out of the creature’s body.  Those loops had been passed between organs and muscle structures, which disconnected to let it pass and reconnected behind them, and in time they would be free, left to fall to the ground.

This creature tensed, waiting for the next attack, the next warbeast or the explosion that would scatter chunks of its flesh, vital materials.

That attack didn’t come.  For the first time since the fighting had begun, it felt respite.  Hungrily, it began working, diverting resources within the engine that was its body, rapidly patching up the worst of the damage.  As the damage closed up and the wounds were protected by a covering of healthy flesh, it prepared to be strong, to be fast, and if it could get far enough away, it was prepared to deliver spawn, to spew them out in a location where they might be able to find the water.

“The bastard.”

The red-haired man’s voice.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” the man spoke.  “I told the Baron I would take care of you… but I didn’t think he’d leave me with no help at all.”

The creature turned, and it identified the source of the voice.

The red haired man was atop a wagon, a burned and battered hulk of wood that had been used as protection from incoming fire.

This creature understood that if it attacked, the red haired man would hide inside.  It would have to be decisive, to cleave the wagon apart and cut the man to pieces before others could hurt it and drive it back.

“The war’s over, creature.  You’re done.  You did what you were supposed to do,” the man said.

The voice was calm, easy.  The only voices this creature had ever heard that sounded like it were the voices of one man to one of his fellows who had been shot.  A gentle, soothing sound that would ease a life into oblivion.

This creature did not want oblivion.  It tensed, muscles moving, ready to be strong.

A bullet struck.  That bullet punched through bone and then opened up within the creature, tearing, six pointed claws extending in different directions from a central point, reaching further as they traveled.

The second bullet caught this creature in the shoulder joint.  Muscle that had already disconnected was left unable to reconnect to a configuration better for brute strength.

Knotted, armored in its own skin, strong from the outside to the inside, every process aimed at being able to fight and to stay alive, the creature felt the bullets strike home, one after the other.  Each one opened up in ways that made the damage worse, made it hard to pull things back together, to reconnect.

The creature turned, and it ran, a lopsided gait.  It heard shouts, felt the slack in the chain change.

Men, twenty or more, held the chain.  Their feet dragged against the ground as the creature ran.

One of them, or all of them working in concert, seemed to find a way to catch the chain on something.

The creature felt the metal loop tug and tear at flesh inside its unwounded shoulder.  There was hurt, which was bad.  The loop didn’t come free, which was bad.

Frustration.  Loss.

The creature made the sounds and respired the ideas in a coded language of four compounds pieced together.

Then, for the benefit of those who hampered it, those who had hampered it from the moment it was aware enough to recognize the actions for what they were, it roared.  Men covered ears, some staggered and even let go of the chain.

The creature hauled back, as strong as it could be with one shoulder torn and the other riddled with the foreign bodies, but the chain remained caught.

It was between two buildings, the chain extending between it and the people, who shrank back and away.

Only the man with the red hair approached, standing ahead of all the rest.

The creature reconfigured its throat, its mouth, its musculature.  Organs were brought into place, already pumped full of gas, ready to be used.  Shoulders, back, belly, wings, hind legs and tail all tensed.

The man with the red hair whistled.

An attacker struck, silent, indistinct, a flurry of slashes and claws.  The creature retaliated, swiping, and struck air.  The attacker was faster, sleek, covered in hair-fine razors, so quick that it couldn’t be met in combat.

Tense, the attacker waited, pacing.  The creature was forced to turn, to keep the foreign attacker in its sights.

The damage had been so mild, but it had scored armor plates and slid between plates to cut into flesh with surprising ease.

The creature roared at the attacking enemy.  The enemy was silent, but for a scratching noise of spine against spine.

“Cannons are pulling into place, sir.  We’re almost ready.”

The creature watched the man with one eye, the white spined creature with the other.

“Good bye, primordial,” the man said.

The creature, the primordial, turned and fixated on the man.  The white spined thing attacked again, and retreated from a retaliatory bite.

The muscles and organs had come into place, the sacs of gas were loaded and ready.

“Nnnno,” the primordial spoke, using a mouth buried inside its toothy maw, using the sacs filled with smoky air.

To this, even, the man with the red hair did not respond.  He was not willing to give even that.

The primordial worked, processing, pulling from all of the little clues and details it had observed since entering this painful, ugly world that seemed so determined to claw at it and drag it down, to hamper it and take away from it.

It knew its assailants were ordered, that one man listened to another.  That the old man had ordered all the others back at the stable, that the red haired man had ordered the old man, and that even the people who had been fighting on both sides gave and took orders.

It thought about the exclamations, the outcry it had heard with every feat of strength, every time it had killed more men than usual.

The primordial sought to convey that it was better, that it needed to be listened to, not attacked.

To declare itself a higher authority than even the red haired man.

“Nnnnooo,” It said, again.  “No.”

“Yes,” the red haired man said.

“Nno.  Iii-  I… God,” the primordial uttered the words.

It could hear the response, the mutters, the surprise.  Quiet, or disquiet.

It wondered if it had achieved the desired effect.

Even the man with the red hair, for the first time, seemed taken aback.

The man did not respond, but only raised a hand.

The primordial could see the cannon, and recognized the gesture for the signal it was.  It threw itself to one side, so it might be flush against the side of one building, the shot flying past it-

With a whistle to command it, the white spined thing put itself between the primordial and the wall.  The shot from the cannon raked the primordial’s side and caught in its hind end, a cannon shot with a chain attached.

Machinery squeaked as the chain was hauled back, and the primordial with it.

“I… God!” the primordial uttered.  “I God!”

When it was pulled away from the cover of the buildings, there were more cannons to shoot at it.

There was no other primordial to consume or absorb this creature.  The men would finally pull it apart.

It gave its body parts instructions, and those body parts obeyed.  Scale became spine, which became hair.

It had eaten meat and it had copied the meat, and it had trodden on weeds, copying those weeds.

As the chains sank in, and other attacks were delivered, dissolving flesh, hampering the creature’s ability to move, to respire, to communicate and to think, the creature worked toward a singular task.

Life was frustration and pain.  It had been brought into this world to serve a purpose it did not understand.  It had been kept from thinking, and had found its way to understanding all the same.  Not enough understanding, but enough to name itself for what it thought it ought to be.

“I’m sorry we let you live so long,” the red haired man spoke.

The creature howled.

Everything this creature was, the people were the utter opposite.  Bitter, savage things, the creature hated them with every inch of its being, and every inch of its being worked toward a new task.

Working small, working subtly, as it had learned to do from the beginning, it copied the plants and it produced seeds.  Too small to host life, to be spawn, the seeds would nonetheless grow.

The creature knew what came next.  It had learned that in the beginning too.  Pieces were cut away, and then given to fire.

But maybe with enough seeds, some would survive the fire.  Those seeds would plant themselves in human flesh, they would cause pain, agony, hurt, and they would be a bitter, stubborn thing, more tenacious than any weed, more efficient than any plant.  Undying hatred given form.

Others would settle into the human flesh that couldn’t rub or scour them free.  They would flower, and they would scatter more seeds to the wind and the water.

Red, the creature decided, to match the hair of the man it hated most.

The creature would not let itself and its brothers be without consequence.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.01 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.1

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I was still awake as dawn broke.  It would have been quaint to say that the sun streamed in through the window, but Radham was conservative with its sunlight, and the Academy was a small fortress, surrounded by a wall.  Even if the sky was clear, the wall meant that sun wouldn’t shine directly on the Academy grounds until mid-morning.  As it was, it was a faint light, deceptively dim.  I’d made the mistake of trying to gauge the time by the light in past visits, and found myself waiting a little too late to sneak out.

Uncomfortable with tossing and turning all night, lost in thought, I’d propped myself up, sitting with my pillow up between my back and the headboard.  I ran my fingers absently through Lillian’s hair, watching her eyes move beneath the eyelids.  She dreamed.  Sleeping next to her, Mary’s eyes were still: dreamless.

I touched the edge of Lillian’s ear as I ran my fingers through her hair, and she squirmed a little.

“Stop it, Sylvester,” she said.

I shifted position, leaning over her to see better.  Sure enough, she was still asleep and still dreaming.  Even when disturbed in sleep, her mind immediately went to me.

Gently, I tugged the sheets so they weren’t so twisted up near her armpit, then crawled out from under the covers, tucking them in around Lillian in the process.  There was a blanket that was usually draped over the foot of the bed, one her mom had made, if I was remembering right, and between the three of us, we had kicked it down so it clumped at the footboard.  I pulled it free and draped it over their feet.

Lillian kept a pitcher on the desk with a glass.  I grabbed the pitcher and found it empty.  Walking to the bedroom door, I leaned against it, my ear pressed against the wood, listening.  I waited until the only footsteps I heard were receding ones, and then opened the door.

For the sake of Lillian’s future, we’d gone to Lugh.  We’d walked away from tens of thousands dead, the loss of a team member and his dog, the loss of my left eye, and a city in flames.  That was without touching on the fate of the person we’d been sent to find, the enmity of one of the more powerful people in the Crown States, and the near end of human civilization because of some very misguided experiments that both sides had ended up using to force the other side’s hands.

With that in mind, it was hard to put into words the feelings that drove me as I left Lillian’s room and brazenly walked down the hallway of the girl’s dormitory, making my way into the girl’s bathroom.  All that trouble to give her a better shot at becoming a professor, and here I was, running the risk of getting her kicked out of the dormitory.

A part of the feelings were a desire to raise my middle fingers to all of the aforementioned incidents.  Not giving voice to the vague frustration and bitterness I felt, but giving action to those feelings.  Getting caught and dragged in front of people that mattered would give me a chance to attack that nebulous reality, and to attack it in a way I was comfortable with.

I cranked the sink on and set the pitcher down in the basin to fill.  I could hear voices and noises from around the corner in the bathroom.  The earliest risers were showering.  I thought about peeking, gave it serious consideration in a ‘what if’ way, and found myself genuinely surprised at the lack of interest I felt.

Two years ago, I might have done it, to sate my curiosity.  A year ago, I would have wanted to do it and pragmatically decided not to.  Now… I was more interested in sitting on that bed for another few minutes than I was in spending an hour in the showers.

Footsteps approached.  I cranked the tap off, gauged the direction, and then stepped into the nearest bathroom stall, closing the door.  I watched through the crack as someone with a towel wrapped around them made their way to the showers.

A few moments later, I stepped out, finished filling the pitcher, and quickly, silently walked back to Lillian’s room, letting myself in.

I set the pitcher and glass beside Lillian’s bed, then made use of a notepad and pen at her desk.  There was already writing on the top of the notepad.  A date and a time, with a word underlined three times.  Parents.

I’d lost track of my days during Lugh.  That was either today or tomorrow.

 

Filled the pitcher in the bathroom.  Drink lots.  It will help with the headaches.

Got shoulder put back together last night.  I said you’d look at it so I wouldn’t have to go back for follow-up.  I think we should meet for lunch, you can check my shoulder, yell at me for leaving your room while people were up and walking around, and we’ll talk with everyone?  If you’re going to be busy, let Mary know when you send her back in our direction.

Will be at Lambsbridge.  Might leave to go to the Shims, have to let the mice know about Gordon and Hubris.

I held the pen over the page, contemplating what I had already written.  The impulse to leave my room had been partially some misdirected, nebulous need to strike back against the forces that seemed to be making everything so damn difficult, but if I admitted it to myself, a big part of it was imagining the look of horror on Lillian’s face as she read the first line and the line about people being up and walking around.

I thought for a long few minutes about the sign-off.  When I put pen to paper and wrote, though, it was impulse more than a culmination of those long minutes of thought.

Love you,
~~Sylvester

I almost crumpled up the paper right there, second-guessing myself.  It was true, I told myself.  I was terrible at being honest, I retorted.  It was worth it, to imagine the look on her face changing from horror to something else as she read it, was the counter-point.  But what if that something else was sheer awkwardness, a different sort of horror?  What if Mary read it instead of Lillian, would that be bad, knowing she’d lost Gordon, and that the loss was, discounting the hours of sleep she’d managed, only a few hours raw?

We had gotten off the train, only to immediately be split apart, sent for care and for debriefing, converged just long enough to share news, and then been split apart again.  Rather than wait for the rest of us, Mary had gone to spend time with her best friend, to talk and to cry in private, and the two of them had turned in early.

Weighing the pros and cons of leaving that line at the end, the four-letter word that seemed to have so much importance, I felt like there were more cons than pros, that it was a dreadful mistake.

That feeling had lingered with all of the important actions in my relationship with Lillian, which was reason enough to keep up the pattern.  I put the letter face-down by the pitcher, the edge of the pitcher on the corner of the page so it wouldn’t blow free when I opened the window.

For Mary, I wrote another note.

We didn’t get a chance to talk last night.  I’ve missed you terribly.  I’ll be at Lambsbridge or the Shims.  Lillian is going to want to bury herself in work to avoid thinking about things and stressing about her parents.  It will probably be her big project for next fall.  I invited her to lunch, don’t push too hard if she says she doesn’t want to come. 

You should come.  Because Jamie has stuff to tell you that Gordon wanted to pass on.  I’m 95% sure it’ll help.  And because I’ve really missed talking to you. 

~~Sylvester

I bent over to give Lillian a kiss on the head, then stood from the bed, gathering my coat and boots.  I circled the bed and put the paper down on the other bedside table, nearer Mary.

Her hand went out, pinning the paper down against the bed.  Eyes awake.  She was alert, eyes sharp and hawkish.

I tapped the paper.  She took it, sliding it along the bedside table before unfolding it.

She took a short while to read, and then looked up, giving me a small nod.  She smiled just a touch, but she also looked very sad.

Very Mary.  Crisp execution, to the point.  I wondered if she didn’t want to look brittle in front of me.  Were the tears and the human side of Mary reserved for her best friend, now?

I opened the window and climbed out.  I took the time to lock it behind me, then made my way to the ground.  My shoulder ached.

There was a skeleton guard at the front of Radham.  Whatever had happened at Lugh, it hadn’t reignited the war.  Things had faded, there was no checkpoint, and the Academy was no longer a morass of warbeasts and soldiers amid student.  I could see four or five people, already up and most of them already showered, making their way here and there.  It was a far cry from some of my earlier visits.

It was a long and eerily quiet walk from Radham to Lambsbridge.  The only sound the entire way was when I hopped and let my feet crunch against the road, just to make sure I hadn’t gone deaf, and five minutes later, the whistle of the train coming in, a single, hollow hoot, muted because the hour was early and the train driver didn’t want to disturb everyone in the city.  The rain had been replaced with a wet snow, so there wasn’t even any patter, while it remained just as wet as always.

I let myself into Lambsbridge, and very quietly removed my boots and coat, making use of one of the countless boot-cubbies and the countless hooks in the front hallway.

Mrs. Earles was already up, working at the counter.

“It’s going-” I started.

She jumped, went very still, and then put her knife down before turning to look at me.

“-to be a very hard day, I think,” I said.

“I think so, Sylvester,” she said.  “Please don’t spook me like that while I’m holding a knife.”

I nodded.

“Apples,” she said, indicating the cutting board and the knife.  She turned her attention to the stove and scraping the bottom of the pot of porridge.  I slid a stool over to the counter and stood on the lowest rung to better see what I was chopping.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t, before, but a little bit more height made the job far easier.

“Were you out all night?” she asked, while I cut the cores out of the apples.

“Yeah.”

“How are the girls?”

“Exhausted.”

She stopped stirring.  I wasn’t sure why.  The stirring resumed.

“I left them notes before heading back.  Would a picnic lunch be out of the question?  I can do all the preparation.  I’ll stay mostly out of the way, and do some extra work to make up for being a hassle.”

“A picnic lunch is fine, Sylvester.  I can prepare it in advance.”

“Thank you.”

“I talked to Professor Hayle last night.  I was thinking about a stone, somewhere at the back corner of the property, where the stone fence meets beneath the tree,” she said.

Jamie didn’t get a stone.

“That would be nice,” I said.

“For him, for you… and for the little ones.  I think it would help them.”

“Everyone liked him,” I said.

“We did.”

My voice dropped a little.  “When someone dies, there’s this need to memorialize them, you know?  To leave a marker that this person who was so important to us was there.  A stone.  Memories.”

“Yes.  I think-” she very nearly said ‘you’re’, referring to the Lambs as a group, “-he’s lucky.  There are so many children here who got to know him, who will remember him in different ways for the rest of their lives.”

“But that’s just what I was getting at,” I said.

Chop.  Cut.  The apple parted.

I shook my head a little.  “That’s not him.  Do you have any idea what an absolute bastard he was?  In the best way, but in bad ways too.  He was stubborn, and he packed a mean punch.  He won most fights he picked and he rubbed people’s noses in it.  Sometimes that was with me, just play, and sometimes, it was some poor shmuck who worked for some guy we were after, and he’d break their knee, crack a few teeth, and literally rub their faces in the dirt.”

“I don’t think I should be hearing any particulars about what you’ve been doing.”

“You can put a stone out there with his name on it, and the children will remember, but the righteous bastard will get forgotten.  The injustice of how he had to go will get forgotten.  A few years will pass, and we won’t be people.  We’ll just be some notes on pages in Academy record books, footnotes in newer projects.”

“I don’t think that’s true at all,” she said.  “Lillian will remember.”

“I know,” I said.  “Believe me, I know.”

“Would you rather do something other than the stone?  If you have any ideas, I could raise them with Professor Hayle.”

Gordon had drawn parallels between each of the Lambs and the conventional elements.  He’d been the flame.  Rather than cold stone, set out for the rain to erode, a flame would be so much more appropriate.  So much more of a pain in the ass to look after.  Doubly appropriate, in that, but not so possible.

“No,” I said.  “A stone would be very nice.  But can you let us think, decide for ourselves what gets written on it?”

I felt her hand on my damp hair.  “Okay, Sylvester.”

She wasn’t allowed to be motherly, as far as I could figure it out.  Not allowed to interfere, even, which was probably why she hadn’t commented on my disappearing to Lillian’s, or finding Mary in my bed.  With some of the younger charges, even some of the needier not-so-young charges, she would give some special time and attention, but with us, from the very beginning, she’d been hands-off.  That simple touch, coming from her, was the equivalent of a warm, encompassing hug to someone else.

I had to blink extra hard to keep my vision clear enough to see what I was cutting.

Kenneth was the first one down the stairs.  He was new, and I’d barely spent any time with him, what with me disappearing to Lugh.  Seven or so years old.  Too young to know Gordon, but he’d sensed the atmosphere in the house, and it had affected him.  He had been one of the ones crying last night.  Not necessarily because of the loss, but because others were upset, and he hadn’t yet found any emotional footing.

I quickly cut the remainder of the apples for the porridge, then joined Kenneth, lifting him onto the bench at the long table and plopping myself down beside him.  I reached for his stuffed animal, a rabbit, and lifted it up, moving the head and arms, adopting a fighting stance, and had it start punching the kid.  He was smiling after a few seconds, fighting back.

The others started to make their way down.  Fran and Susan, who were a pair now that Eliza had gone off and gotten herself adopted to a nice family, the twit.

And Rick.

Mrs. Earles seemed to notice Rick’s arrival.  It was hard not to.  He was bigger than Gordon.  Bigger than Gordon had been, rather.  Nearly eighteen, facing the prospect of having to move out and fend for himself, he had become even weirder in recent years.  He was always helping out, always striving to get stuff done before Mrs. Earles could do it, playing a little too much with the little kids, well beyond when others would have lost patience.

They were great, like a dozen little brothers and sisters, but nobody liked spending more than five or ten minutes at a time with their younger siblings, let alone an hour or more.

Rick was nearly two hundred pounds and an inch or two shy of six feet tall, a natural Bruno without any physical modification to him, that he had a baby face without a hair on his chin, and weirdly intense eyes and manner, though it might have only been me that could put a finger to the eye thing.  He hadn’t had any luck finding work, too young looking for the hard physical work, too big and scary for the gentler, customer service work.

This was the place he knew, and all of the work, it was done out of a desperate hope to earn a place here, to be Mrs. Earles’ assistant.  She had already talked to him about it, on at least three occasions I knew of, told him he had to work, he had to find real work.

If he were anyone but Rick, I might have felt sorry for him.  If he’d given me one break, throughout the entirety of the time I’d known him, I might have gone and made it a mission to get a foot in the door for him, a bit of work as a favor.

“Sylvester,” Mrs. Earles said.  “Let Fran look after Kenneth.  Get the plates out.”

Fran can actually reach the shelf, I thought, but I didn’t argue.  I moved the stool and got the plates.  It let me keep my distance from Rick, separated by a table and a counter.

When I turned around, he was watching me, staring at me.  I put the plates down on the table, not breaking eye contact.

“Bowls,” was the next order.

So long as I was prompt, I had an excuse to turn away.

Ashton came down the stairs with the rest of the younger group.  A step younger than the rest of the Lambs in appearance, he was surrounded by a throng of the children, who were expressive, some with puffy red eyes from going to sleep crying, others energetic, eager for their breakfasts.

Ashton seemed like the odd one out, eye-catching with his straight red hair, already combed though he’d just gotten out of bed.  His expression was placid, too flat.

Time with Helen was supposed to fix that.  A slower process with him than it had been with her.

I put the bowls on the table, reached out, and mussed up his neatly parted hair.

The goofy smile he gave me seemed genuine, taken standalone.  But the way he changed from one emotion to the other seemed odd, too abrupt, or not abrupt enough, as if he was putting on a mask.  The goofiness was just slightly out of tune with the situation.

“Sleep well?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, reaching up to fix his hair.  “You smell like girls.”

“I was up early, checked up on Lillian and Mary earlier,” I said, grabbing his nose, lightly yanking his head from one side to the other.  When I pulled my hand away, I gestured, careful.  Words.

He nodded.  “How are they?”

“They’re as can be expected.  Mary is tough stuff.”

“Mary really liked Gordon,” Fran said.

“She did,” I agreed.

Fran averted her eyes as I looked at her.

Mary wasn’t the only one who liked GordonLillian, Mary, Frances, Eliza, Susan… There isn’t a girl in this house who didn’t have at least a short phase of falling for him.  But he was seen as too handsome, too nice, too unattainable.

Or maybe Fran was looking away because I was missing an eye, and she didn’t want to ask.

Ashton finished tidying his hair, doing a surprisingly good job of getting every last bit stuck down into place.  I reached out and messed it up again, more thoroughly than before.

Helen made her way down the stairs with Jamie as Mrs. Earles gave me more orders to keep me busy.  Helen lit up as she saw me, making a beeline for me, throwing her arms around me to hug me from behind.

She didn’t let go as I got the silverware or started carrying the first bowls of apple-cinnamon porridge to the table, which forced me to waddle a little.  It might have been more bothersome if she wasn’t so very aware and careful of my sore shoulder.  She’d seen it, or Jamie had mentioned it.

I felt a bit more resistance each time I moved way from the counter, Helen getting heavier and heavier.  I grabbed a slice of apple and extended it back over my head.  I heard the crisp sound of her teeth slicing through it, leaving me with half of a slice.

“Take the entire thing,” I told her.  Teeth yanked the rest of the apple free.  My burden lightened.

I grabbed four bowls and four spoons, tapping a bowl against the top of Ashton’s head in passing, meeting Jamie’s eyes and glancing at the back door.  Both rose from their seats.

Without a word, we made our way into the back yard, slipping on the general purpose rain boots that sat there for anyone to use if they were going out to play.

This wasn’t an extraordinary thing, and it passed without mention.  Helen hung on me like a leech on a cow’s leg, her nose pressed up against the top of my head like a pig’s snout.  Normally, when we did this, we sat on the stairs by the back door.  Today, I crossed the back yard to the far corner, beneath the tree, where the branches provided some cover from the snow.

“You’re going to have to let go of me,” I said.

We sat on the fence, with Ashton sitting with his back to the tree.

“You needed a good long hug,” Helen said.

It was cold, but the porridge was hot enough to warm our hands, and holding it near our faces warmed skin and let steam warm ears.

“I needed a hug?  As in me, specifically?” I asked.

“I think Sy had enough hugs last night, by the smell of him,” Ashton said.

“Nuh-uh,” Helen said, wheeling on Ashton.

“But the smell-”

“Enough about the smell,” I muttered.

“You can’t just trust your nose,” Helen said, with the firmness of a clucking mother hen to her chick.  If she’d have wagged her finger, it would have been perfect.  “Pay attention.  Sylvester looks after the others so much, he never looks after himself.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.

“You have to watch out for that, and give lots of hugs,” Helen said.  Ashton nodded, giving zero indication that he was taking her advice with a grain of salt.

The weird emphasis she was putting on certain things was making me worry about Ashton’s education.  Lessons from a mad, arrogant worm of a man had somehow given us a workable Helen, but I wondered if those lessons or the lessons she had explicitly learned without Ibott’s influence would skew things too much one way or the other.

“Enough of that, please,” I said.

“She’s right, though,” Jamie said, quiet.  He blew on his porridge.  “You have to look after yourself.”

“Looking after you guys is how I look after myself,” I said.  “I dunno.”

“I get the feeling that you wanted to talk about something,” Jamie said.  “Coming out here.  I’m assuming Mrs. Earles told you she’s planning on putting the stone here?”

I looked down at the shady corner, with the tree on one side and the corner of the stone wall on another two sides.  Just enough out of the way that kids wouldn’t fall and crack their heads open on the thing.

“It’s about the Baron,” I said.  “I told Lillian and Emily, I thought I should fill the rest of you in…”

I trailed off.

There were faces in the window by the dining room table.  Fran, Susan, some of the taller youngsters whose faces I couldn’t quite make out.

I was experiencing prey instinct, in a way.  Something about expressions, timing, the fact that Mrs. Earles wasn’t telling them to sit down and eat-

“Rick,” I said.

The back door opened.

The conversation had died.  We were silent as we watched Rick make his approach, tromping across the yard.  He smiled in what he probably thought was a disarming way.

“Alice got upset after all of you left, and Mrs. Earles had to take her upstairs.  The little kids are sensitive, you know, it doesn’t take much to tip them over the edge to tears.  You can’t all just up and leave like that.”

“We had stuff to talk about,” I said.  “In private.”

“Your secret, Academy-sponsored club, huh?  Do you think I’m stupid?  That I can’t put the pieces together?”

“Rick-” Jamie started.

“I don’t think your inability to put pieces together is why you’re stupid,” I said.  “I think your inability to recognize that others have put the pieces together and are not making a big deal of things is one small part of why you’re stupid.”

“Sylvester,” Jamie said.  “Enough.”

“Jamie spends nearly a year out of commission, being taken care of at the Academy.  You go on these long trips, we’re supposed to believe it’s this special Academy sponsorship, that you’re learning things and running small errands, and maybe you’ll go to Mothmont and become proper Academy students?  But you keep coming back hurt, or with new skin.  Or Lillian, and Lillian is really terrible at keeping all this a secret, by the way, she looks like her dog just died.  Now you come back, and Gordon’s dead-”

“Careful,” I said, glaring.

“I’m being careful,” Rick said.  “Fuck, don’t you get it?  That your lives fucking impact ours?  You come back and there’s an imposed silence.  The kids are shushed if they ask certain questions, and it eats Fran and Susan and Merry alive because they try to put the pieces together, and they don’t have the information, so they put it together in the worst possible light?”

“And you,” I said.  “You’re leaving you out.”

“I don’t matter, I’m concerned about them.”

“Bull, feck, and shit,” I said.  “Do you want to know why you can’t get a job, Rick?  Because when someone looks into another person’s eyes, what they expect to see is themselves, reflected back at them.  Hell, I look in Helen’s eyes and I see it, and Helen’s odd.  I look into Ashton’s eyes and I see him studying me, paying attention to me.  But when we all look into your eyes, there’s either nothing there, or there’s just more you.”

Jamie put a hand out, touching my arm.

“I don’t think you’re making any sense,” Rick said.

“Whatever happened to you before Lambsbridge happened.  Fine.  You had to survive, put yourself first, put yourself last.  I know tons who are like that.  But where it rankles and puts people off, Rick, is that you keep trying to act this role badly, pretending that you’re this really nice guy who plays with the kids and cares about others’ welfare.  Some people see it for what it is, when you’re too intense, when you’re smiling without it reaching your eyes.  Some people don’t, but they sense the wrong.  If you’d just be up front about being a callous, self-absorbed asshole, people would at least be able to figure you out.”

I could see the change in his eyes.  Anger, indignation.  Better than nothing.

“If I’m concerned with what I’m doing or feeling right now, if anything at all,” Rick said, “It’s because Gordon was a friend.  Did you ever damn well think that in our age group, besides Eliza, Fran, and Susan, there’s only you guys?  Of you guys, Gordon was the only one who gave me the time of day.”

“Gordon knew full well who and what you were,” I said.  “He gave you the straight talk when you needed it.  I remember one incident, not long after Jamie here went to the hospital, that Gordon gave you a pounding.  Now he’s gone, that one thing that was keeping you from pressing too hard is out of the way, Mrs. Earles steps upstairs, and you waste no time in challenging us.  Don’t try and revise history and act like Gordon was anyone but who he was.  Not today, least of all.”

Rick looked at the others.  “Is anyone else going to chime in on this?  Because I’m really concerned that Sylvester is demented.”

“I would, if Sy let me get two words in edgewise,” Jamie said.  “And if I had any clear idea of what to say.  I think the best thing to do would be to go inside.  We should all give each other a bit of space while we process things.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Rick said.

“You never do,” I said, under my breath.  “Never back down, never stop until you’ve pushed boundaries or breached a line.”

“Because I’ve spent my entire stay at Lambsbridge doing that!” Rick said, raising his voice.  “Just tell me straight, say what really happened to Gordon.”

“We said,” Helen said, her voice quiet.

She was putting on an act, looking upset at the topic and at the commotion.  Most others would have looked at her and held back.  But Rick was pretending just as much as she was.  The empathy was absent.

“Just tell me,” he said.  “And I’ll go, and I won’t bother you again.”

Jamie spoke, “We were visiting contacts for Lillian’s-”

“No,” Rick interrupted.

He fixed his gaze on me.  His eyes met my eye.

He wasn’t going to let up, and he wasn’t going to leave us alone.

“Admit you don’t give a damn about those kids in there, about Fran’s feelings, or Alice crying, or Gordon dying,” I said.  “Say it, and I’ll tell you, straight-up.”

“You want me to lie?” he asked.  “Shit on a candlestick, Sy-”

“Don’t call me Sy.  We’re not friends.”

He clenched his fists.  “I have never known anyone to hate me so damn much, when I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, beyond maybe a few social slip-ups and wanting to know what the hell is going on around me?”

“I made my offer.  I’m not haggling, I’m not going to suddenly buy the act.  Accept the offer or go back inside.”

“Okay,” he said.  He smiled like this was a game.  “I’ll lie.  I’ll pretend I’m some hollow, messed up person.”

The light in his eyes was gone, now.  The expression he wore was the same one he might’ve worn as he stuck a knife into my belly.

“I don’t care about Fran, or Susan, or Gordon,” he said, his voice cold.  “I don’t care about you, or the family, or the kids.  I play with them and I could just as easily slap them across the face as sing with them.  I’m asking because I want to know for me.  Because I’m sick of looking for jobs, and the rest of the fucking world seems to bend to accommodate you, and I could really do with some of that.”

He couldn’t even pretend at pretending.  The mask barely fit as it was.

“You want some of this?” I asked.  I clenched my fist, because my hand was trembling, and I couldn’t bear the idea of showing weakness in front of Rick right now.  “You want this life?  You want Gordon’s life?”

His arms were folded, his eyes cold.  “I could do with your life.  Sneaking out at night to meet girls, whispered conversations with the adults in the know, every damn fucking person catering to you, from that professor in the academy all the way down to the little kids at the Academy who get told to stay quiet and not to ask certain questions.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but in that same moment, Jamie’s grip on my arm tightened.  I looked at him.

“I know what Sy’s going to say,” Jamie said.  “I have a different idea.”

“I’m owed an answer,” Rick said.

“How about Sylvester takes a break?” Jamie said.  “He can go inside and shower, or go for a walk and come back?  I’ll give you your explanation.  Straight out, details, everything else.”

“And?” Rick asked.

“And, because you asked, because things got even this far,” Jamie said, “You’re going to get moved.  You can’t stay at Lambsbridge.  You’ll go to another city and maybe you’ll even get a job.  You’ll get the answers and you’ll be sent far enough away you won’t be able to do a damn thing with them.”

“We’ll see,” Rick said.

Jamie looked at me.  I heaved out a sigh.

“Okay,” I said.  “I was going to go down to the Shims.  I guess I can do that now.”

“That’s a good idea,” Jamie said.

“We’ll come!” Helen said, perking up.  “Ashton and me.”

I nodded, ignoring Rick’s ‘told you’ smile.

“Picnic at lunch today,” I told Jamie.  “We’ll be back before then.  Mary and maybe Lillian will be showing up.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Jamie promised.

I nodded.  I hopped down off the wall, grabbed my cold bowl of porridge, and made my way back to the house, Helen and Ashton following behind.

Jamie had known my answer before I did.  I had to think about it to piece together the words that had been on my lips.

You want my life?  You can have it.

No, not quite, because fuck Rick.

Because I liked being alive, I just… didn’t want this life.

I was done.  I’d told myself I couldn’t see another Lamb die.  Mauer had talked about me needing just one more push.  Now I was on the ledge, there was no stepping back.  I just had to figure out how to move forward.

Or if the other Lambs would even come with me.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.02 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“She got frustrated, I think,” Helen confided.  “Duncan got the worst of it.”

“Frustrated how?” I asked.

“She decided she was leader, which makes sense, right?”

“Right,” I said.  I thought about it for a second.

“She-” Helen said, in the same moment I said, “Oh.”

She smiled wide.  “Yeah.”

“She led you like you were Bad Seeds?”  I asked.

“She tried.  She got frustrated, like I said.  So she paired me with Ashton and she tormented poor Duncan, demanding he keep up.”

“Poor Duncan?” I asked.

“Poor Duncan,” Ashton echoed me.

Helen’s cheeks were rosy from the colder weather, and seemed rosier still with her apparent merry mood.  Her scarf, not one of the nicer ones, but a ratty one covered in balls of lint, was wound around her neck, trapping golden curls beneath it.  Her jacket was a boy’s jacket that had been blue once, but a bad wash had bled some of the color out in such a way that it transitioned from pale green to dark blue, with the more worn patches appearing all the more visible where the color had faded.

Helen had reached the point where I doubted it was possible to make her look bad, whatever clothes were draped on her.

Ashton, too, seemed to be getting more of an eye for it.  I’d had to dig up a more convincing shirt for him, but his jacket and pants were spot on.  Quiet as he was, often so still I had to check he was still breathing, his eyes remained alert, taking everything in.  His hair needed work, though.  Too tidy.

I didn’t correct it.  I wanted to see how Ashton operated without prompts and prodding.

The city was waking up, the early bird students stepping outside, business owners turning on the lights, and a two-to-one ratio of wagons to cars taking to the streets.  Traffic was being held up as a pair of shepherds guided a flock of sheep down the street, up the back road that would lead around to the side of the Academy.

Helen talked, “I think if you put Mary in charge of some very disciplined, committed people, then she would do well.  Test their limits, organize them, orchestrate.  But I get tired too fast, Ashton doesn’t really get tired now at all, I’m not good at being fast, and neither is Ashton.”

“Uh huh.”

“We’re different, and she couldn’t figure out how to push us or test our limits.”

“She likes Lillian because, even if it’s not physical, Lillian works at what she does,” I said.  “It reassures her, in a way, knowing that Lillian is trying.  It’s synonymous with being focused.  Faced with you two, well, she’s wondering in the back of her mind, are you listening, watching, are you ready to move when something happens?  Or are you dealing with a shift of hormones, adjustments Ibott made, or staring off into space, dreaming of how you’re going to break whoever your target is?”

“Yes,” Helen said.  “I think she missed all of you.  Gordon, Lillian, you.”

“I get last place?” I asked.

“You get last place,” Helen said.

I pressed a hand to my heart.  “Ow.”

“Just because you aren’t the first or the second person she thinks of when she’s lonely doesn’t mean you’re the least important person to her.”

I raised my eyebrow.  “That sounds positively brilliant.  Or like utter bullshit.”

She smiled at me.

The sheep were out of the way, traffic moved.  We had to wait for the more impatient carts and cars to move out of the way before someone stopped and let us go.

She said, “I think if you want to sound smart, you have to straddle the line.  If you only sound smart, then you-”

“Sound like Ibott,” I said.

That gave her pause.  I watched as she considered the idea.

“Yes,” she said, very definitively.  “Like Professor Ibott.”

I wanted to ask, to poke, to pry.  What did she think about Ibott?  If things changed, what would she think about leaving Ibott?  But the way she’d said that last bit made me feel as though she’d terminated that branch of the conversation there, and pushing the subject further wouldn’t be smooth or natural.

Mary was attached to Lillian and to me.  Lillian was attached to Mary, me, and the school.  Helen was… always just Helen.  She was fond of Ashton, but the relationship didn’t alter her focus or her course.  She was attached to the rest of us, and we were reflected in her in varying ways, but Ibott was a part of that.

Was she more attached to us than to Ibott?  I was willing to say so, but I couldn’t say it with confidence.  Was Ibott the first priority and first thought when it came to her continuing to exist for the immediate future, even if he wasn’t the most important person?  Probably.

Helen was ever the person that was hardest to grasp and to pin down, on so many levels.

“Your hair is too tidy,” she told Ashton.

“I like my hair like this.”

“Why?” she asked.  “It’s not right.  You’re wearing the wrong face, except it’s your hair, and your hair is so much easier to fix than your face.”

“Because I like it,” Ashton said, looking straight ahead as we walked. “If it’s something I had to fix then I’d fix it, but I don’t have to fix it.”

Helen gave me a look.  Her hand went up above Ashton’s head, gesturing.  The first gesture was the sign for vile, toxic, evil, bad.  The second was the number two.

Bad two?  Polluted two?

Terrible two.  I smirked.

Ashton saw the shadow of her raised hand passing over his head and turned to look at her.  Helen, with her hands now clasped behind her back, gave him her best innocent smile.

“There are degrees of give and take,” I said.  “Baby steps on the path to playing a part, and we’re always playing a part.”

“Okay,” he said.  He made no effort to mess up his hair.

My hair had a way of going wild if I didn’t wash it or at least run my head under the tap, and I hadn’t stopped to shower before leaving with Helen and Ashton, instead pulling a flat cap on over my head, to keep at least the top of my head down and out of the way.  With luck, the pressure of the hat would pin my hair against my head and keep it it back and away from my face, even after the hat was removed.

“If I give you my hat,” I said, “Would you at least cover your hair?”

“I don’t like hats,” he said.  “I don’t like shirts or pants or shoes, either, but with those I don’t get a choice.”

“And you’re not going to change your hair.”

“Why?” he asked, conveying a glimmer of bewilderment at the fact that I’d even ask.

“And Helen was saying that Mary had a hard time wrangling you two,” I said, under my breath.  “I can’t see it at all.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” Helen said.

“Puns are the lowest form of wit.  Sarcasm is a survival mechanism,” I said.

She reached out around Ashton’s head to give my cheek a pat.

Ashton must have seen someone or something in his environment and decided to model himself after them, which extended to keeping his hair parted and his appearance more neat than was necessary.  Helen was very much a creature of nurture, she had emerged from the vat that birthed her with one nature, one instinct, and every other urge and desire was sublimated into that instinct, the lines blurring and bleeding through one another.  The personality she had constructed and even the mask she wore from day to day was one that relied on external cues and feedback.

The newest, youngest Lamb was almost the inverse.  He didn’t seem to have any desires but the ones he was handed.  His personality, conversely, was wooden, stiff, wrought by instinct and a careful background process of observation and growth from that observation.  Teaching him was a slow, careful process, recognizing what he was doing and why, and guiding his growth with the right kinds of exposure.  At times it was like wrestling a headstrong goat.  At other times, though, when the baseline wasn’t even there, it seemed to go in one ear and out the other.  Worse, he didn’t have to change to get what he needed and wanted.  People catered to him.

In my little excursion with this pair, I had secondary goals.  Figuring out Ashton was one.  Figuring out where they stood in terms of my ability to get them on board and leave the Academy was another.

On this cold morning, as we walked down the main street, among student and scholar, business owners and homeowners who had stepped outside to take brooms and shovels to the light covering of wet snow, I was as spooked as I had been with the Baron’s sword impaling my eye.

I was spooked as I quietly observed and studied Ashton and realized that there was probably no way that he would pick up roots and leave the Academy.  He was a Lamb.  Not one I knew or loved in the same way I loved the others, but he was a Lamb.

I was more than spooked at the fact that I could look at Helen and imagine asking her the question, and I had no idea at all what her answer might be.

“Does it hurt?” Helen asked.

“Hm?” I asked.

“Your eye.  You were being quiet.”

My eye wasn’t why I was being quiet, but I don’t blame you for jumping to the obvious conclusion.

“Some.  The fact that it isn’t here, that I move my eye to look one way or the other, and there are parts that aren’t moving, parts that don’t have any feeling at all, it…”

I spread my hands.

“I’m interested,” Helen said.  “In how you feel.  And I want you to feel better.”

“Thank you.”

“And I want to know how the pain you and other people feels, compared to the pain I feel.  I asked Ibott if there was a way to attach my nerves to other people’s nerves to feel what they felt while I hurt them, so I could figure out the best kinds of hurt and the best ways to understand others when they hurt, but he said no, that was a whole different project.”

I have feedback mechanisms that would make that easier,” Ashton said.  “So I can understand the things people are feeling.  They could probably give me the ability to feel others’ pain.  But you need a secondary brain to process it, detached from the primary brain.  I think he’s right.  It would be complicated.”

“I’m envious,” Helen pouted.

“What I’m talking about,” I said.  “It’s not real pain.  It’s… more like it feels wrong, and if I sat down and focused on that wrongness for too long, I could get really depressed, and maybe even get a little bit mentally off?  As if I was looking too hard into the light and I scarred my retinas, but it’s not light, it’s wrongness and nothingness where there ought to be something.”

“I know exactly what you mean when you say that last part, about being mentally off,” Helen said, sagely.  “I feel a little bit like that all over after I get adjustments made.  That’s a good explanation.  Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome, madam.”

“It’s nice being with you,” she said.  “And it’s nice being with Lillian, and with Jamie.”

And Gordon?  Do you miss him?  How do you process that?

If I left and you stayed, how would you process that?

“It wasn’t all bad, being with Mary.  She likes being girly.  We went shopping.  And we infiltrated, all dressed up, and I think, thinking about what you said before, she liked that I tried and I could teach back, while she taught me things.  We were so coordinated, like we were dancing all night, every step in time.  It was a lovely evening.”

She looked up and away, as if struck by something.

“I don’t think Duncan will stay very long,” she said.

“Where did that come from?”

“There was a lot of blood, when we were done, that night.  For someone practicing to be a doctor, he doesn’t seem to like blood very much.”

I put out a hand to steer Ashton in the right direction as we took a side street.  The trip to the Shims was far faster without the checkpoints every step along the way.

I pointed out the carvings in the wood of buildings, doors, frames, and fences, for Ashton’s benefit, explaining each.  To his credit, as stubborn as he was in other things, he listened carefully.  He was quick to pick it up and to ask questions.

“And the triangles, three in a row?”

“Fangs.  Bad animal.  I think that one there was a cat?  Greeted anyone that approached or spoke to it by leaping onto their head and sinking four claws into scalp and neck.”

“Okay,” he said.  “I think I understand.  Then there’s one for bad people, one for good people, one for food, and for water.”

“Yes,” I said.  “Good observation.”

“It makes sense,” he said, while Helen nodded behind him.

He wasn’t hopeless after all.

“But-” he said, “Why not make them bigger?”

“Bigger, as in…”

“In the middle of the street, the street is so wide, and you can see it from a distance.  A picture of a wolf so big you could see it from two blocks away.”

“Um,” I said.

“It makes sense,” he said.  “Because it’s about communication, and big communication is better.  Something people won’t miss, that more people see, and it marks out territory, so people know, and they might change their behavior.”

“It kind of does make sense,” Helen said.

“No,” I said, gravely and fundamentally offended at the assertion.  “No, it really, really doesn’t.”

From there, I launched into particulars about how the mice wouldn’t want to broadcast their presence, that they were fundamentally prey for others, or parasites.  I went onto a tangent about subtlety, how, no, people wouldn’t always see the positive signs of ‘helpful person’ as positive reinforcement to continue being helpful.

There was nuance and tangent enough in the explanation for me to talk all damn day.  Instead, I was cut short by our arrival at the hideout.  I felt a lingering, bittersweet feeling, combining with an entirely renewed experience of fear, about Ashton, about Helen, and now about the mice.

I banged my hand on the door, once, then waited.

It took almost a minute, but one of the few sets of windows that had glass in the pane swung open – all of the other windows had broken glass, the shutters closed.  A head peeked out, so fast I almost missed it, and then the window shut.

I could hear the calls within the house.  The door latch came open, and the door swung open.

“In, fast,” Craig said, from the top of the stairs.  “Don’t let the cold air in.”

We hurried to get in, stomping off the trace amounts of snow.  The door shut behind us.

The number of mice had increased.  Colder weather meant more children were scrambling for shelter.  Everyone was bundled up as if they expected to go outside, but it was because the interior wasn’t particularly warm.  ‘Bundled up’ in many cases meant wearing multiple shirts or two pairs of pants.

Helen roared, rushing at Alice, sweeping the girl up in her arms.  Alice, for her part, hugged Helen back.  Alice, at ten or so, looked closer to eight.  Stunted growth, which I could sympathize with, but for her it was a lack of nutrition.

Little details, parallels, and bits of common ground were why I so frequently enjoyed the company of the mice.

“What happened?” Craig asked, touching one eye.  Talking about my eye.

“Sword,” I said.

“You should have the money for a new eye, you dingleberry.”

“Yeah, I know.  I do.  I thought the eyepatch looked cool, thought I’d keep it for a while,” I said, my voice dry.

He seemed to take that as the signal it was, and he didn’t pry further.  He seemed so much thinner and more tired than I remembered him.  Of an age with Gordon or Rick, but he was a scarecrow of a person, his hair dark, his eyebrows thick, a dark look in his eye.  That look only softened when he looked at one of his mice, or at me.

“Hi Helen,” Craig said.  The poor bastard seemed to withhold the softest look for the prettiest girl in the room.

“Hi,” Helen said, beaming at him.

It physically hurt to see how he reacted to that.  He turned away, almost bashful.

The softer look didn’t extend to Ashton, though.

“New kid?” Craig asked.

“Ashton,” I said.  I gave Ashton a shove, putting him in the center of the front hallway, exposed.

“The hell is with that hair?” Craig asked.  “You look like a sissy Mothmont brat.”

Ashton turned, looking over his shoulder at me.  I gave him nothing, my expression still, my hands in my pockets.

Better to let him learn his lesson and adjust.

“You vouching for him, Sy?” Craig asked.

“He can vouch for himself if he needs to,” I said.

“He might need to.  Only so much space, you know,” Craig said.  All posturing.  He made his way down the stairs.  “Maybe he should wait outside.”

“I’d like to stay,” Ashton said.

Craig finished making his way down the stairs.  He stood a short distance from Ashton.  There was a one-foot height difference between the two.

“My house, my rules.”

“Our house,” another kid said.

“Same thing,” Craig said, without turning around.

There was no disagreement.

He and Ashton stared each other down for a moment.

Ashton could have decided this with the pheromones he could naturally shed.  He wasn’t, which was a point in my book.  I had about ten or twenty different questions about Ashton and what he was doing and why.  The list started with the parted hair and extended all the way to finer details of how he was developing himself, how he saw the world, all the way down to the subject of what his motivations were in the here and now.

“Why isn’t Sylvester vouching for you, red?”

“Because he didn’t like me parting my hair, and I wouldn’t change it.  He’s trying to teach me a lesson.”

Craig looked up and over at me.  I gave him a nod.

“He was right.  You should have changed your hair.”

Ashton didn’t respond.

“If you’re not going to listen to him, there’s a good chance you won’t listen to me, which is disrespectful.  I don’t want that kind of disrespect in my house.  Maybe you should sit this one out and go wait outside, keep yourself warm until Sylvester and I decide you can come in?  What do you say to that?”

“I’ll fight you for the right to stay,” Ashton said.

I cocked my head at that.  Helen ceased abusing Daisy to raise her head and turn to look, as well.

Fight?  Where the shit did that come from?

I wished I could see more than the back of Ashton’s head from my perspective.  His expression would have been interesting to read.

“You want to fight me?” Craig asked.  He looked at me, “Sy, is there anything I need to watch out for?  Hidden weapons or something?  He’s not going to sprout claws or extend some bladed tongue out of his mouth or anything?”

“No weapons, not in the way you’re thinking,” I said.  “I don’t think he’s ever actually been in a fight.”

Craig looked down at Ashton.  “You think you’re going to win?”

“I’m going to lose, but I’ll hit you a few times before I end up standing outside in the cold,” Ashton said.  “If I end up in the cold either way, at least I get to punch you a few times first, this way.”

Craig smirked.  He approached Ashton, then did the false-start-lunge thing, moving as if he was going to swing a punch, trying to get Ashton to flinch.

Ashton moved in that same moment, stepping to one side and coiling up as his foot reached the ground, like he was going to throw himself forward, fists flying-

And when Ashton stopped short, freezing in place, Craig was left taking a short step back, hands raised to strike back.

Craig relaxed, extending an arm to Ashton’s head, gently shoving Ashton and simultaneously messing up his hair.  Ashton had to take a step to catch his balance, and fell out of the fighting posture.

“Arright,” Craig said.  “Just stay out of the way.  There’s a hot stove upstairs to huddle around, if you need to warm up.”

Ashton glanced at me, waiting for my nod before going upstairs.

“Gordon teach him?” Craig asked me.

The name caught me off guard.  Something must have shown on my face.

No,” Craig said.  “What happened?”

“The dipstick went and died on us,” I said.  “I came to tell you.”

Among the twenty or so kids who were gathered across the room, the news hit approximately three-quarters of them like a ton of bricks.  It was like the wind had been knocked out of them, and the rest were at least respectful enough or aware enough to stay silent and avoid asking questions.

There was bad news, and there was news that you had to deliver that cracked the foundation of another person’s world.  This was the latter.  For so many of the people here, Gordon had been someone to look up to.  To them, on a level, he’d been one of them, but he’d gotten out of the ditches and alleys and made something of himself.

It wasn’t just the loss of Gordon that had people blinking tears out of their eyes, looking away, swallowing hard.  To them, it was like the world had turned around and told them ‘no’.  ‘No, it isn’t really possible.  You don’t really have a chance.’

“Who?” Craig asked, suddenly angry.

The Academy, I thought.  It was interesting to me that the ‘who’ was the first question out of his mouth.  Not how.  Not when, or anything else.

“Nobody,” I said.  “Bad ticker.”

“No,” Craig said.  “That’s not right.  Not with someone his age.  It doesn’t work like that.  Something had to cause it.  Was it poison?”

He didn’t quite mean something.  He meant someone.  He wanted that ‘who’ so badly, someone to blame.

That desire for someone to blame wasn’t fresh.  It had been simmering for a while.

“No poison,” I said.  I could see how wet Craig’s eyes were, even as he tried to put on a strong front for all the children who were looking to him for support, and that made my eyes wet too.  “Bad, dumb luck.”

“Fuck,” Craig said.  The word was out of his mouth the moment I finished saying ‘luck’.  Angry, frustrated.  “No.  Fuck.

He was getting more agitated as I watched.  That agitation would translate to all of the rest of the mice.  Helen lay on the ground, still, her arms around Alice, but that gesture was now a comforting hug.

“There’s stuff I need to talk to you about,” I said, working to keep my voice level, calm, confident, as if I could convey those things to him.  “In private?  About Gordon, in part.”

He took a long moment to take that in, seemed to step back mentally to take in the situation and the status of the mice, as he likely did each and every time he made a decision in their vicinity, and he seemed to realize where things stood, in terms of his emotions and the commotion that was soon to follow.

“Helen,” he said.  “Look after ’em?”

“I will,” she said.

Craig and I made our way through the kitchen, which had been gutted a long time before the mice moved in, past one of the many bedrooms, and out the back door.  The door shut heavily behind us.

The moment he was out of sight of the younger ones, he bent over, elbows on the railing, fingers in his hair and heels of his hands against his eyebrows.

I didn’t know if he was crying, but I didn’t think it was right to check one way or the other.

“You told me the truth, right, Sy?  Bad ticker?”

“Bad ticker.”

“Fuck, Sy.  There wasn’t a doctor nearby?  That girl you had with you?  Not Mary, but the one with the bag?”

“She tried.  But I don’t think there’s a professor in Radham who could’ve saved him, the way things were going.”

“Fuck!”

The outburst was loud enough that children inside were liable to have heard it.  He seemed to realize that, and visibly calmed himself down.

“Okay,” Craig said, still hunched over.  “Okay.  I’m done.  Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I was, just last night, I was thinking I needed to talk to him.  Get some advice, figure out the direction things were going.”

“With the mice?” I asked.

Craig nodded.  He looked up at me, and his eyes were hollow.

Please tell me they’re ok.  That you’re going to cope if I leave.

I sat on the stair, my back to the railing opposite to the railing he was sitting against.

“Are they okay?” I asked.  “Managing?”

“No,” he said.  “No, not managing at all.”

I heaved out a heavy breath.

“We usually save up for winter, but the thing with the ghosts last year, we lost some old faces.  I’m- there’s new faces, and they weren’t on the ball with contributing to the penny jar.  I should’ve been on top of it, cracked heads together.  But I was preoccupied, and I-”

He kept stopping short of the same sentence or confession.

“You what, Craig?  What’s going on in your corner?”

“I’m getting older, Sy.  I’m almost not one of the kids anymore.”

“There’s no hard time limit,” I said.  “They won’t string you up or mutiny on you when the clock hits midnight and it’s your eighteenth birthday.”

“Seventeenth, and… fuck, it’s complicated, Sy.  Complicated in a way I’ve talked about with Gordon.  I way I really wanted to talk to him about.”

“I can try,” I said, and I dreaded the answer, felt doubly the traitor, because the odds were good that if he confided in me, and if he started to rely on my listening ear, I was going to disappoint him, leave him lacking.  “I’m not in a particular rush today.  My whole morning is yours, if you need to figure things out with me.”

He sighed, shifted position, and settled down to sit with his back to the railing that enclosed the steps.  He looked up at me, “This was never my thing.  I was never going to stick with it.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I sort of got that.”

“It’s hard living, a lot of missing meals, when it was your mistake as leader that leaves the penny jar empty and there’s a kid who is maybe one or two missed meals from seeing next week.  You know?”

I nodded.

“I’m old enough to fend for myself.  Told myself I’d always be there for them, but come a certain time and circumstance, I’d bail.  Every day now, every hour, I’ve been telling myself I’d join the Crown Military.  Because god damn, it would be nice to put bullets in the people who did what they did to our kids.  To the kids in other cities.”

“And it’s good money,” I said.  “Enough to get you on your feet, get a room somewhere, buy good clothes.”

“Yeah,” he said.  He hung his head.  “Yeah.  But there’s nobody to really hand things off to.  There’s no money to keep these kids going through the winter.  Food is more expensive.  They have farms and monster cattle that are bred to grow to four times the size, there’s food enough for a population ten times our size, and somehow in the midst of the fighting, warbeasts and soldiers end up getting the food and we get jack shit.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Yeah, well, fuck.  I figure I might as well be one of the soldiers that’s getting fed.  My conscience can live with that.  I know how to shoot a gun, I know how to fight.  Give me three meals and a cot in a warm room, I’ll put on some weight, some muscle, and I’ll be as good a soldier as any of them.  I can climb the rungs of the ladder, get a good position, get a girl…  It would be really nice to get a girl, Sy.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Can testify.  Girls, recommend.”

Lillian isn’t going to leave the Academy, a voice in the back of my mind told me.  The thought put a chill in the core of my body and left me feeling nauseous.

Oblivious, he continued, “I can give up the freedom and gun down enemies of the Crown, and I can live with knowing I’m supporting the same fucking bastards who are deciding the laws and deciding these kids starve.  But I can’t just up and abandon them, Sy.  I do that, and it’s going to eat me alive.  Drive me to drink.”

“Stick it out,” I said.  “You know what the answer is.  It’s not a good answer, but sometimes we don’t get any.”

He made a face.  “There’ll be reasons not to go next year.  And the year after.”

“Yep,” I said.  “Yeah.  There will always be reasons.”

I felt like such a hypocrite.

But to give any other advice, it would be doing like Helen had commented, putting others first.

I needed to know the mice were looked after.  I couldn’t take this on and free Craig of his burden.

But I’d anticipated this question.

“I brought money,” I said, reaching into my jacket.  I pulled out an envelope.  “No arguments.”

“Who’s going to argue?” he asked.  He took the envelope without a moment’s hesitation, opened it, and riffed through the bills within.  “This helps.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Shit, Sy,” he said, staring down at the envelope.  “Gordon?   Just like that?”

“It was slower than that.  Gradual.  We expected it.  It still sucks.”

“Shit.”

We sat in silence.  The snow drifted around, and the wind that blew around the houses found a course that sent the snow into our faces.  Both of us had to angle our faces toward the ground to avoid the sting of a cold snowflake in the eye.

“Craig,” I said.  “If you repeat this to anyone, I’ll probably get killed or worse.”

He lifted his head, cupping one hand around the side of his face to look at me.

“I’m done.  I can’t do this anymore.  Losing Gordon, it might have been the last straw.”

“The eye?”

“Drop in the bucket,” I said.  “I’m going.  I’m going to try to wrangle the others, see if they’ll come, but…”

He drew in a deep breath, then huffed it out as a sigh, nodding.

“Do you know anyone?  In other cities.  I’ll need to put a bit of distance between myself and Radham.  It would help to have names and places.  If I decide to go.”

“I know people.  Not many, and they’re scattered, but you can give them my name, and they’ll help you or point you in the right directions.”

“Anyone near Richmond?” I asked.  “Warrick?”

“What the fuck are you doing around there, Sy?  There are more monsters than humans in that neck of the woods.”

“The less I say, the better,” I said.  “Do you know anyone?”

“I know of people, but you don’t stick your neck out, there, they might take badly to you even looking the wrong way at them.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding.  It was a better answer than I’d hoped for.

“Sy,” he said.

I looked up.

“Go.  Don’t worry about me.  Don’t worry about the fact you’re a fucking hypocrite.”

Oh, he’d drawn the connection.

“Go,” he said.  “Go get your friends.  Walk out that door.  If I see your face again, I’m going to hit you, and I’m going to keep hitting you until I can’t feel my hand anymore.  Understand?  You need to go.  For your sake.”

I climbed to my feet.

“I’ll send one of the kids to Lambsbridge with some names and places,” he said.  “I, uh, I’ll keep the details short and sweet.  Use the scratchings to let you know who’s who and what’s what?”

“That works,” I said.  My voice was hoarse.  I had a lump in my throat.  “Thanks.  I’d say we could meet up, if you wanted to leave Radham, but…”

“But there are too many kids here who can’t pull up stakes, because they spend half the time here and half with their shitty families, or for other reasons.  Because this is a place we know, and we’d get eaten alive in stranger territory.  Yeah, Sy.  Yeah.”

I nodded.

I opened the door and let myself back into the house, signaling Helen.  I didn’t have the voice to reach out to Ashton, so I let Helen do it, calling upstairs.

Craig remained sitting on the back step, probably for a long time after our trio had put the hideout behind us.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.03 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Our ‘picnic’, as it turned out, was situated under a jutting roof, beside a storage bay that was intended to hold an assortment of wagons.  Wagons and the stitched horses would be parked here outside the building in order to get cleaned or repaired, before being moved back to the bay.  It was a nice building, all considered, one planted here in anticipation of the higher-end buildings appearing nearer the Academy, something that hadn’t yet happened.  There were still lingering traces and some odds and ends from when the building had been used as a storehouse for military assets.

For our purposes, it worked nicely.  The overhanging roof with only two adjoining walls -one to block the wind and another from the adjacent building- gave us cover from the falling snow.  The open nature of it gave us a view of the hills and fields beyond Radham.  We had a place to sit, complete with benches and crates to use as tables, and we had some privacy.

Jamie’s suggestion, of course.  He’d noticed the place some time ago, made a mental note of it, and was able to point us over here when the subject of the picnic had come up.

I worked with Jamie as we laid out a blanket and pinned it down, in case the wind changed direction.  Ashton was starting a fire on the paved floor, and Jamie was on the same page as me when it came to worrying about that particular detail.  Actually getting Ashton to coordinate with us was often stiff and awkward, in a ‘move left, no not that far left’ way, so we had given him something he could do standalone.  Now we regretted the decision, as the flames started to rise.  From how close he hovered to his work, it looked very possible that he would set himself on fire.

Back at Craig’s, he hadn’t used his pheromones to win his exchange with the boy.  His victory had been an earned one, and it had indicated that he was learning fast, even if it might take him a long time to get up to speed.

He was going to be a monster.  He had the tools and he had the ability and willingness to learn to cover the gaps those tools didn’t provide for.

For now, though, I made a point of hurrying to set down the basket so it pinned down one corner of the blanket.  That done, I rushed to Ashton’s side, putting one finger on his forehead to push his face away from smoke and fire.

I walked over to the railing that bordered the edge of the property and this little parking spot, looking out over the hills and distant farms.  Jamie joined me, standing a short distance away.

“Mrs. Earles called the Academy.  She’s more upset than I thought she’d be,” Jamie said.  “But the Academy is sending someone down to pick up Rick.”

“I didn’t ask,” I said.

“But you were wondering,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I guess I was.”

“I can’t tell if you really just wanted him gone, and knew that that would do it, or if the feelings are that close to the surface,” Jamie said.

“If you figure it out, let me know?”

He nodded.

I wished that I could talk to my best friend again, much like Craig had wanted to talk to Gordon.

But, in this moment, I wasn’t sure if I actually minded his presence or the reminder.  Not so much that I felt the need to say or do something to put distance between us.

Helen had finished shaking out the other blankets.  She brought the folded stack over to the blanket we had already laid out and distributed the blankets, where they could act as seats.

Once she was done, she walked over to Ashton, grabbed him by the back of the collar, and hauled him about a foot away from the fire, pressing down on his shoulders as if to fix him to the location he was sitting.

“I’m itching to really start talking about particulars, and I don’t want to do that before Mary arrives.  Lillian too, if possible,” I confessed, my voice quiet.

“Particulars?  I was wondering why you wanted to do this,” Jamie said.

“I’m antsy,” I said.  My finger tapped against the railing.  “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

“Ah,” Jamie said, and he gave that one-note utterance a lot of meaning, like he’d just realized what I was talking about.  “Yeah.”

He didn’t push me, and he didn’t pry, and in that, I could see how much he had changed since the outset of the whole situation in Lugh.

The others arrived.  My mood lifted considerably at the sight of Lillian and Mary, both girls dressed up just a bit.  Lillian wore her academy-issue jacket and skirt, but her leggings had a raised pattern, and she wore a nice blouse under her jacket that I hadn’t seen her wear before.  Mary wore a lacy dress and ribbons, with a fur-trimmed duffel coat.

My mood then plummeted twice as far as it had climbed at the thought of the bigger picture, the conversations that would need to be had.  I hadn’t even been letting myself think about it, and now the conversations seemed so imminent.

Take it one step at a time, I told myself.  I was able to wrangle the worst of the feelings, putting the nervousness and terror off until a discussion some other, later point in time… until I saw Duncan.

I hadn’t intended for Duncan to be invited, but now I could see why he would be.  Frustration tore at me, made me want to scream, shout, throw something at him, and act very uncivilized.  There were things I wanted to talk about, and how the hell was I supposed to bring them up with him here, listening and watching?

Helen joined the girls, giving each a tight, nonlethal hug and a kiss on each cheek, before giving Duncan a hug.

I saw the look that crossed Lillian’s face as she found me, and I put a smile on my face, despite everything else that I was feeling.  That, at least, was something I had practice in.

I turned around, leaning back against the railing, while she strode toward me.

Was she going to hit me or hug me?

Lillian wrapped her arms around me, her cheek cold against my ear.  The hug was soft, made softer by the layers of coat and clothing each of us wore, and the fierceness of the hug didn’t quite penetrate either.

“That was a lovely touch,” she whispered in my ear.  Referring to the sign-off of my note, no doubt.

“I’m fond of all of you,” I said.  “All the Lambs.”

“Don’t ruin it, Sy.”

“You in particular,” I said.

She nodded, then pulled back.  Her arms went up to my throat, gripping me by the collar.  “I was going to strangle you, you know.  For the rest of the letter.  You’re making it hard to follow through if you say that.”

“More of a note than a letter,” I said, grinning.

She shifted her grip, encircling my throat with gloved hands.  Playful.

Her eyes were still more alive and alert than I was used to.  The wyvern was in full sway, flying through her veins.  But her face was pink, and she seemed to have found a balance between the Lil I knew and drunk Lillian.

“In case we don’t get the chance to talk one-on-one again, I want your company later,” she said.

My eyebrows went up.  No, this is entirely drunk Lillian.

“My parents are visiting, you bonehead.”

I smiled, reaching up for her hands and pulling them away.  I held one hand as I led her back to the picnic blanket.  We sat on one folded blanket, me giving her the spot closer to the fire, and I grabbed another blanket, unfolding it and draping it over our laps.

The other Lambs found their seats, bundling up.  I sort of wished Jamie had put himself between Ashton and the fire that seemed to have the boy fascinated, but it wasn’t too big a deal, and staring into the flames seemed to keep the newest Lamb occupied.

Duncan was tall for his age, and had been cursed with what I deemed a very punchable face, with too small a mouth and too much distance from his prominent chin to his high forehead.  He looked like a character that had been drawn on the cover of a children’s book, and the confidence with which he held himself, combined with his very regimented style, shirt buttoned to the collar, academy jacket in the soldier’s style, and wavy black hair parted in the middle… I somehow imagined that his parents were the hoity-toity type that brought up their child’s accomplishments as if those accomplishments were their own, or, more generously, that his parents were the type that looked at their son and sighed in disappointment over how he’d turned out.

There was a small chance that my impressions of Duncan were colored by personal bias.  Small.  I really wished he wasn’t here, but I wasn’t about to tell him to go away.

“Hi Dunc, how are you doing?” I asked.

He was just getting seated.  I didn’t miss the fact that he was sitting closer to Jamie and Ashton than to Helen and Mary, who were sitting closer together, each with their own blankets.  He gave me a tight, small smile, “I’m quite alright, Sylvester.  Nervous, I suppose.”

“You didn’t have to come,” I said.

Lillian, sitting right next to me, was in a good position to jab me with one elbow, subtly enough that Dunc wouldn’t notice.  She spoke, “I invited him.  Because he’s one of the Lambs, isn’t he?”

“He did his job,” Mary said, without warmth.

Between the short and unconvincing utterance, and the distance with which they had sat apart from each other, I couldn’t help but imagine that there had been a disagreement, probably in the middle to later stages of their job.

“I appreciate hearing that,” Duncan said, as if he was unaware that there was anything damning in the faint praise.

“I remember what it was like, when I started,” Lillian said.  “It takes getting used to, after you first join.”

“Thank you,” Duncan said.  “You’re right.  I, haha, I really didn’t expect the kind of education I ended up getting, on our last job.  Not until I joined the army, or visited a slaughterhouse for raw materials.”

“How did you two meet?” Jamie asked.

“We were both teacher’s pets,” Lillian said.  “We talked between classes.  Duncan got sick two years ago, and I saw how hard he worked to catch up.  I thought maybe he would handle the stress better than some.”

“Ha,” Duncan said.  I heard a note of nervousness there.

He was so uncomfortable he made me uncomfortable.

“They asked me if I knew anyone to recommend, and I thought Duncan would appreciate the leg up that the job gave him.”

“I do, I do!  But we’ve had a bit of a setback in the project, haven’t we?” Duncan asked.

“A setback,” Mary said.  Still quiet, still cold.  “You must mean the war breaking out in Lugh, the lives lost.”

Those words seemed to get through to Duncan.  He didn’t miss a beat, nodding his agreement, “It’s terrible.  A tragedy.”

“Helen,” Duncan said, “What’s upsetting you?”

Helen was looking between Mary, Duncan, Lillian, Jamie and me with a kind of anxiety that seemed to be picking up by the moment.  She stopped as she heard the question.

Five points to Duncan for noticing in the first place.  Minus ten points for sounding like he was talking to a child.

Bias might have impacted the scoring.

“I’m not upset,” she said, after a moment of processing.  “I’m fine.”

“But you want food,” I said.  “Open the basket, let’s eat.”

The anxiety disappeared.  She beamed a smile as she moved the basket in front of her and opened it, distributing the contents that Mrs. Earles had boxed and wrapped.

Within a few moments, it was clear that she was getting the contents out of the way with the express intention of getting deeper into the basket.  She found the stuff that Mrs. Earles had no doubt buried on purpose, opened a box, and pulled out a tart with a tuft of cream and a cherry on the top.  She bit deep, her eyes rolled up into the back of her head, and she wiggled on the spot, her legs kicking beneath her blanket.

“Drinks?” I asked, struck by an idea.

“Dewar bottles,” Helen said.  “Tea, I think.  I smelled it.”

While Helen rummaged for the canisters of tea, I turned to Duncan.  “I hope you’re a tea drinker.”

“I am!  I’m a bit of a prude, even,” he said.  Another small smile.

Helen handed me the first canister of tea.  I rolled it in Duncan’s direction.

“I wanted to have this meal together for a reason,” I said, to the whole group.  “For a few reasons.”

Lillian leaned closer to me.

“We had a bad time,” I said.  “I don’t know about your group, I heard a bit from Helen, it sounded like you did better than we did.”

“We did okay!” Duncan said, with enthusiasm.

I could see the flicker of annoyance on Mary’s face.

“Mary?” I asked.

“That… it wasn’t why I joined the Lambs.”

“I was wondering,” I said.

“Helen is a dear,” Mary said.  “And I don’t mind teaching Ashton the ropes, when he’s willing to listen and learn.  I don’t even mind teaching Duncan, if it alleviates the burdens on Lillian and lets her focus on her studies.  But-”

“But the Lambs aren’t meant to be split up,” I said.

I felt like the biggest, most manipulative scumbag, saying it, knowing the thoughts I had been entertaining, and my conversation with Craig.

“I don’t think so,” Mary said.  “Maybe at a later point in time, it might make sense.  Our numbers are going to dwindle, new Lambs may appear, or we might be used to teach other special projects, as they devise replacements for Dog and Catcher.  I can understand the Lambs being used for that.  But right now?  So early?”

I could see some nods.  Helen, who was halfway through her second tart, Lillian, and Jamie.  Ashton wasn’t nodding, but he was paying attention.  Duncan wasn’t nodding, and that bothered me, but it would have bothered me if he had been, because he didn’t know us.  I was being unfair to him and I knew it.

“Lugh was a bad one,” I said.  “And I don’t know if having the entire group there would have made a difference in terms of what we lost… I’m sorry to bring it up.”

“No,” Mary said.  “Talking about Gordon is important.  I want to talk about what the loss means, and I know he’d want us to.”

I nodded.  I stared down at the center of the blanket.  “I don’t think we could have saved him.  But it would have been nice to save Hubris.  There were other enemies…”

The Twins, the Baron, none of which I’m about to talk about in front of Duncan.

“…We should have been able to dispatch them all and walk away with our heads taller,” I said.

“Except,” Duncan said.  He had removed the lid of the canister and was using it as a cup for his steaming tea.  Jamie was pouring himself a cup with the removed bottom of the canister.  “The Lambs are an Academy project.  I’m not going to say you’re wrong, you know your group better than I do, but you don’t get to decide what the Lambs do.”

The last part agitated me more than I liked to admit.  I knew full well that I didn’t get to decide.  That I needed to make this decision for myself and there was no way to guarantee that Lillian’s warm, reassuring presence would be at my side, or that I could be there for Lillian, even that Jamie could be there, haunting the edges of my vision.

“Hayle is not an unreasonable man,” I said.  “If we presented it in the right way, he might listen.”

“He might,” Jamie said.  “But I have my doubts.”

I looked at Jamie.

“I got special treatment, last mission,” Jamie said.  “From the higher-ups.”

From the nobles.  I had mentioned it, Jamie had heard and we had both seen it in play, in how the Twins and the Baron acted in regard to Jamie.  Even the speech of the surviving Richmond Twin, before she had fled, had referenced it.  I nodded my acknowledgement of what Jamie was really saying.

“They want to work on Caterpillar further.  The nobles are interested in the project as a process they might undergo for all nobles.  It’s arguably one of the reasons the Lambs were started as a project, to put forward all of these unique ideas and things the nobles might be interested in, projects that could be stepped up and used as augmentations or novelties.”

“Novelties?” Lillian asked.

“Remember the Duke’s attention to Helen?” Jamie asked.  “The old Jamie wrote about it.  The appeal is undeniable.  Servitors or partners for the nobility, up to their standard of beauty, usable as bodyguards, personal doubles, or spies, with built-in weapons, like Helen’s.  Ashton isn’t as pretty or refined, he was made by a team, not by a genius, but his weapon is more obvious, and it’s one that sells very well to the nobles.  I think he breaks even with Helen.”

“I’m pretty,” Ashton muttered.

“And, in the end, someone expressed interest in you,” I said.  “In caterpillar.”

“Hayle may be shifting his focus,” Jamie said.  “They decided on Ashton over Evette, and Evette hasn’t had a serious mention.  As far as I know, I don’t think there’s been any talk of a replacement for Gordon, or of starting a new Wyvern project, so that the child is of age by the time Sy retires.  But I do know that they’ve doubled the size of my team, and I know that I got special attention.  It’s something to keep in mind, when deciding if Hayle is going to be reasonable.”

Lillian’s hand gave my leg a rub, over the blanket.

The topic was a simple one, but my mind was whirling, anxiously poring over every possibility, every set of connections.  I thought about every subject I had been dwelling over as of late, and in the moment, I stumbled onto one that seemed painfully obvious, and painful in a half-dozen other ways.

Manipulative, again, but in a much different way.

But if Duncan was here, then, well, I might as well use him, and then hope I could get rid of him somehow, so I could say what really needed to be said.

“I don’t know if I have another mission in me,” I said.

I let the words past my lips as easily and as thoughtlessly as I did, because I knew that if I stopped to weigh my words, to pick them to better sell them, then I wasn’t sure I would have had the courage to utter them.

I felt the weight of Lillian’s hand on my leg.  I was very aware of everyone’s attention on me.  Jamie’s in particular.

“Losing Gordon, losing Hubris, my eye… hearing that the Lambs might not continue as an ongoing project, it… I shouldn’t have said that.  It’s not exactly right.  I’ll do the next mission, and the next one.  But it’s getting harder to convince myself to wake up, get dressed, and go to what might be another Lugh.”

“It’s work,” Duncan said.  “I love what I learn in school, I love what it is.  I was born to be an Academy professor, but sometimes I don’t want to go to school.  Because school is work.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I smiled, and I made the smile convincing.  “It’s work.  I’m feeling defeated.  I’m just saying, maybe if I put it like that, Hayle will understand what I mean?  He’s not heartless.”

Duncan smiled back at me.

He seemed to believe it.  He didn’t know enough about the particulars, and he didn’t know me.  He would go to Hayle and he would probably report my feelings.  But hearsay was a horrible means of conveying tone, and when he gave the report and passed on what I had said, only the message should get through.  There would be a note in people’s memories and in files, that Sylvester was exhausted, tired, less enthusiastic about his work.

If I was breaking away from the Lambs, and if any or all Lambs stayed, then that note could make the difference in there being any backlash.  It would mean that my disappearance had precedent.

If Duncan didn’t report on my saying this until after, when they were looking for reasons for my doing this, then that was even better.  It would be an answer, when they were asking the question.

That was done.  I’d said it out loud, in earshot of the other Lambs, and I’d put myself on a clock of sorts.  I had a narrower window to act, before that comment made its way into files and someone made the time to investigate that one data point.  It wasn’t a guarantee that the follow-up would happen, but the chance it might happen was a reason to get going.

The other Lambs had heard me convince Duncan, and they had heard me explain away the thought, but they knew me.  They would know there was more to it.

Jamie was still watching me, studying me.  The question he’d asked last night now hung in the air.

“Helen mentioned that you two went shopping?” I asked Mary.  It was a forced change of subject, awkward, but she handled with grace, as she did most things.

“We did,” she said.  “New cities are so interesting for shopping, because every city is different.”

“And I imagine that when you shopped, you did it with an eye for which dresses could hide the most knives.”

“There’s more to me than knives, Sylvester,” Mary chided me.  “Helen can testify, I was looking for a nice dress for a young woman that would work for upper-middle class settings, that would also hide a pistol at the upper thigh.”

“That reminds me,” Jamie said.  “Mauer has new guns.”

“And we’re back to talking about work,” Lillian said, sighing.

“Are you complaining?” I asked.

“Yes!  We were having a conversation about dresses.  It’s nice to talk about girl things, sometimes, especially now that us girls are outnumbered as badly as we are.”

“I want to hear more about the guns,” Mary said.

I grinned while Lillian made a face.  She let her head rest against my shoulder while she endured the conversation that followed, about primordials, the death of the Duke, and the guns Mauer had deployed.

Duncan did like his tea.  I watched as he finished his second cup, started on his third, and then started getting uncomfortable.

I raised a hand, not to cut into the conversation, but to gesture at him.

He shook his head, looking confused, and the conversation naturally stumbled as I continued gesturing and he continued to fail to understand.

“If you head over that way,” I said, “You’ll have some privacy.  Nobody’s going to yell at you if you use a bush.”

“Ah,” he said.  “Thank you, Sylvester.”

The conversation picked up again, on the nature of the bullets, how they unfolded like tiny, strong, umbrellas, while Duncan made his way around a building to go relieve himself.

The moment he was out of sight, I raised a hand, signaling for silence.  The conversation died.

“What are you up to, Sy?” Mary asked.

“We don’t have long, and I planned to discuss this in more depth, but Duncan being here makes it awkward,” I said.

“That thing you were talking about before?  About retiring?”

“A cover story.  One you guys can build on if things go wrong.  Not the focus,” I said.  I was lying.  It was definitely a major focus.  “But I made a promise to Lil, and to Emily, the girl we were rescuing, the new fiancee of the Baron of Richmond.  I thought the rest of you should hear it.”

My mouth was dry.

“You’re doing something reckless,” Mary said.

“I’m doing something very reckless,” I said.  “The Baron is a danger to us.  We negotiated for some peace, and he’s leaving us alone, but he took my eye, he threatened Lil’s family, and he threatened the orphans at Lambsbridge.  If you heard him, you’d agree with me, with us.  The man needs to die.”

“He’s the worst sort of dangerous,” Lillian said.

“I need an alibi, cover.  I think Jamie can provide most of it.  If he puts down records that I was here, conversations we shared, everything else, and you guys get your stories straight, then it should work.  The Lambs can be busy, even take on a minor mission in the area, and I slip away.  I was talking to Craig about some parts, and there are others I still need to figure out.  All you guys do is manage without me.  If I fail, you’re going to need to run.”

How odd, that failure seemed to be the most romantic option of all of them.  To get caught, tortured, and rescued by the other Lambs, a guarantee that all of the Lambs could be together…

But Lillian wouldn’t get to be professor, and she would worry about her family.

“If I succeed and get caught or killed, you’d need to disavow all knowledge.  I disappeared, Duncan should be able to testify that I was already breaking away.  I can drop another couple of hints that will paint a complete picture, over the next day or two.  But I don’t want to waste any time in doing this, or we might get called away for a real mission, that would make this impossible.”

“A solo mission, Sy?” Mary asked.  “Into the heart of Richmond house?  Are you insane?”

“There has to be a better way to do this,” Lillian said.

“Leaving the situation alone would be more insane, and involving more Lambs in the job creates a larger gap in our numbers that’s harder to explain or justify,” I said.  “I’m willing to put myself on the line for this, for my promise to them.  But I can’t ask others to join.”

“One of us will join you,” Mary said, firmly.  “You can’t do it alone.  Honestly, I don’t trust you to deliver the killing blow.”

I sighed in admitted relief.  “Okay.  Maybe.  We’ll see how the next couple of days play out, and what we can engineer.  The person that comes with me may depend on who is where, or whatever else is going on in the background.”

Jamie kept staring at me.  He was trying to figure out the nuances of what I was doing, here.

“Duncan is going to be back soon,” I said.  “So this is all I’ll say for now.  I’ll try to talk privately with each of you before we get underway.  But this has to be done.  That man needs to die.”

Lillian didn’t have room for fear in her eyes with the wyvern effect having a hold of her, but I could see the complicated emotions passing through her expression.  Her hand slid down my forearm, her fingers intertwining with mine.

Ashton was just barely processing the idea.  I well and truly believed that he would understand the necessity of this, for his own sake and for ours.  There would be room to talk to him and convince him of it, and I was sure it wouldn’t be a cause for his notorious stubbornness.  This wasn’t the sort of thing that really tripped him up.

Mary, I observed, seemed lost in thought.  She was considering the mission, probably assuming I would bring her by default.  On a level, it would be nice to have her along, but on another level, she was the most complicated person.  Whether she left Radham depended on how many others were leaving.  She was too firmly attached to Lillian, to having an actual place she belonged.

And this wasn’t a job I planned to return from.  The alibi was only cover against the other Lambs, so they wouldn’t suspect what I was really doing.  The Baron would die, and I would rendezvous with other Lambs, heading for the furthest territory from Radham I could get away with.  If Mary was inclined to stay here, then she couldn’t come with.  She would stop me.

I finished the last of my sandwich, eating with one hand.  Duncan was making his way back, walking at a leisurely pace.

And then there was Helen… I took a moment to study her, while I squeezed Lillian’s hand.  In this moment, Helen’s expression and behavior were the focus of my attention.

“Helen,” I said, sounding far more normal than I felt, “You damn well better not have finished off all the tarts.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.04 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.4

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I exited the bathroom, a towel wrapped around me, a bag of the more expensive products in one hand.  I was scrubbed pink, my hair was oiled back and away from my face, left unparted, though the ends of my hair were already pricking up and curling away.  Any adolescent boy given access to the products that smelled ‘manly’ tended to overdo it, much as the girls went over the top with makeup, but I knew enough to go light.  It was a good smell, and one that would complement the smell of shoe polish.

The hand that wasn’t holding the bag held a fresh bandage over the ruin of my eye.  It put me in an awkward spot when it came to the towel around my middle.

“I’m guessing you don’t need to borrow any clothes?” Jamie asked me.  He was lying in his bed, reading by the dim light that came through the window.  That, or he’d been napping.  I wasn’t sure which.

I shook my head.  “I’m still waiting on the big growth spurt that’s supposed to come.  I could complain all day about it, honest, but for right now, I’m not complaining.  If I’m not growing, then that’s one less person to buy a wardrobe for, more money for the Lambs.”

I regretted the line as soon as it was out of my mouth, for my sake as well as Jamie’s.  The ‘one less person’ thing stung on too many levels.  Losing Gordon, for one thing.  His room, next to ours, now had a vacant bed.  There were other rooms with three or four boys crammed in them, but nobody had yet raised the subject of who would use the bed and stay with Ashton.

That, in turn, led to my other source of guilt.  I knew I was leaving, and saying what I’d said had left Jamie an awkward sort of opening.

I jumped to thinking about how to respond to him, and about the things I needed to say and do to manage this whole situation, but those thoughts were obstructed by a complicated tangle of thinking and emotion.  Ashton would move into this room with Jamie, wouldn’t he?  But that was only if they both stayed.  Did that mean I would be alone?  Why did I tell myself that Jamie wouldn’t come with?  Was it because I’d noticed some clue and hadn’t fully processed it, or because I didn’t want him to?

Jamie was putting his book aside.  I pretended not to notice him as I took care to set the bag of oils, soap and scents in my closet, out of reach of the littler Lambsbridge kids who would wreak mad havoc with the little glass bottles.  I fixed my gaze on the mirror that hung on the inside of the closet door.

“Sy,” he said.  “Earlier, when the others were out of earshot-”

I looked over at him, shooting him a look.

“We need to talk about it,” he said, in response to everything I’d attempted to convey with the look.

“I need to get ready,” I said.  “Do you mind?  A little privacy?”

It was his turn to shoot me a look, irritated, even disappointed.  He raised his feet and spun himself around.  Now sitting with his back to me, he pulled his legs into a cross-legged position.  Putting all of the repressed frustration into the tone of his voice, he repeated himself, “We need to talk about it.”

“It’s a dangerous mission, but it’s doable, especially if I have Helen, you, or Mary with me.  I’m going to leave out Ashton and Lillian for obvious reasons.”

“I’m not concerned with the mission.  I’m concerned with what you’re doing and what you told Duncan.”

“Are you going to tell on me?” I asked.

Silence.

“Let me know sooner than later.  It’ll change how I interact with the others.”

“Do you really see me doing that, Sy?”

“I don’t know what anyone is going to do,” I said.  I peeled the bandage away from my eye.  I blinked a few times.  The orb was gone, a placeholder was set into the ruin, but the flesh around it was swollen, ragged, and red, with a cut at one eyelid stitched up where the sword’s edge had parted flesh.  “And it’s not knowing what anyone is going to do that really eats me up inside.”

“Yet you don’t want to talk about it, clearly.”

“Right now, I want to have a nice night with Lillian,” I said.  “I wanted the whole Lugh thing to be a nice thing we did for her, and I wasn’t able to give her that.  It became something bad, and taking the Baron down, rescuing Emily, that’s how I’m going to make up for that.  But I still want to do something nice for her.  That’s what tonight is.”

“And tomorrow?” Jamie asked.  “Or the day after?  Whenever you decide you’re going on the mission?  How do you see that unfolding, Sy?”

“I don’t know, Jamie.”

“You said ‘I don’t have another mission in me’.  Your words.  That wasn’t you laying groundwork for a scheme.  You’re setting something up, getting ready to leave.”

I pulled clothes on.  Slacks, a belt.  Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw the ruin of my eye.  Beyond it, I saw the Lambs dead in their individual, detailed ways, Lambsbridge’s staff and occupants maimed or altered.

I’d been thrust into the world of adults, out-thinking grown men and women, facing mortal peril in a way that even soldiers didn’t necessarily have to deal with.  At least they had moments of rest and moments of peace.  I’d been faced with being on call, dealing with things on the spur of the moment, with regular situations and simple jobs becoming nightmares.

Even now, as I got dressed in a casual suit, like the preppier Mothmont or Academy kids might wear, all of the pressures and the confusion added up to make me feel far from ready to face the world of adults.

I’d been given a set of tools to help me adjust, to put me in the right frame of mind and give me the flexibility to deal.  It wasn’t the wyvern formula.  It was the Lambs, first and foremost.  Now I faced losing them.

“Sy,” Jamie said, pulling me out of the deep well that was my thought process.  “Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” I said.

“The others are dealing with their own issues.  Mary’s still nursing the fresh wound that is losing Gordon, Lillian is preoccupied, Helen and Ashton are detached, though Helen is paying more attention than some, and Duncan, with all of his Academy know-how, can’t quite figure out how to extract his head from his own ass.”

I smiled despite myself.

“But I’m here, and I’m paying attention.  I know you’re trying to make something happen, Sy, but as far as I can see the whole picture, it’s haphazard.  I can’t figure out what you have going on in your head, and I’m scared things are going to move forward on this really unsteady foundation you’re building.  What you said to Duncan, the timing, the high-risk mission, and the contingency plans you outlined to us.”

“I’m still finding my way to the answer,” I said.  “Figuring out the key points, figuring out the key players… The mission will come together.”

“It’s not the damn miss-” he started.  He stopped.  “You’re doing that on purpose.  Dodging me.  Let’s talk about what happens if it doesn’t come together.  What if your hand gets forced, or if you find compelling reasons to abort your plan and stay, Sy?  You had a tone in your voice when you talked about wanting to make this mission against the Baron happen in the next few days.  Knowing the patterns you fall into, I get the impression you’ve already started this ball rolling, probably to push yourself forward.  Your desire to abort and return to the status quo is so strong you’re putting contingencies into place against yourself.”

Couldn’t argue that.  This Jamie was becoming so different from the Jamie I knew, and it was irritating that he was getting to be so good at picking me to pieces.  All of the things in the world that he was capable of, and he chose to analyze me.

I buttoned up my shirt, fixing the sleeves.  I looked over to where he was sitting, his back to me.

“Sy?”

“Still here.  Focused on getting ready.  I did warn you.”

“I’m worried,” he said.  “This is major.  There aren’t any second chances, and there’s a lot of room for collateral damage.  I heard what the Baron said.”

I looked at my eye again.

“I’ll let you know what I’m doing as soon as I figure things out,” I said.

“Is that a promise?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I guess I should thank you for paying attention, for caring.”

“I guess,” Jamie said, in a funny tone.  I’m going to remember that promise, Sy.  Don’t get slippery, don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, alright?  With something this risky, knowing how the cards are stacked against you, you can’t mess around.”

If I did, what would happen?  I wondered.  I’d spent some time with Jamie, I’d learned how he operated and I’d learned to respect what he brought to the table, even if he wasn’t my Jamie.  But there were so many question marks, blanks in my mental picture of who he was, that I couldn’t figure him out.

I couldn’t ask the question I’d just mused on, about what Jamie would do if I crossed the line and broke the promise.  Instead, I asked him, “What do you think you’re going to do?”

“You’re worried I’m going to tell on you.”

“As far as I can figure, you want to secure things, keep the Lambs safe.  The deaths don’t weigh on you the way they weigh on me, though I imagine you mourn and remember your predecessor in your own way,” I said, as I fixed my tie.  “But there’s clearly another side to you that’s more caring.  The way people operate, they’re all the protagonists of their own story.  Everyone wants to be the hero, and for that to happen, the story needs to be tellable in a way that puts them in a good light.”

It was his turn to be silent.

“So I can’t help but imagine a scenario where you tell yourself I’ve gone off rails, the horse is running away with the cart, and in that scenario, you make the decision to put the bystanders first, the wrecked train or the runaway horse second.  If I don’t sell you on this, or if I break the promise, now that I think about it, maybe you tell, because that way, the Academy can’t justify hurting the Lambs.”

He remained silent.

“If you do decide to tell, whatever your reason, I won’t blame you,” I said.  I pulled on the jacket.  There was a dried drop of blood on the inside lining.  I picked at it with my thumbnail until it came free.  “I’ve blamed you for an awful lot of stuff that wasn’t your fault.  It makes sense if, should you decide to go to Hayle and tell him I’ve gone rogue, that I can’t hold it against you.  It might even be an optimal way to go.  It would tell the Baron that you serve him, first and foremost.”

“If you wanted to make amends, you could avoid putting me in that position entirely.  That seems optimal.”

Socks on, feet slipped into shoes, I stepped back from the mirror, doing my best to look myself over.

It wasn’t me, but the suit had been bought with good money and tailored to fit my frame, the dark color intended to fit my complexion.  It was as good as I was going to get when it came to ‘nice clothes’.

I could have trimmed my hair where it was getting longer across the back, but beyond that, and the ruin that was my left eye, I was pretty presentable.

I grabbed the eyepatch from my bedside table and pulled it on.

“No need for privacy,” I said.

Jamie turned around.  He gave me a once-over.

I spread my arms.

“I think Lillian will be happy, seeing you put in the effort.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I also think you’ve got too much going on in your head right now.  I’m worried,” he said.  “I don’t think you can just take it all and deliberately push it out of your head, and give Lillian the night you want to.”

“It’s what I do,” I said.  “And besides… I have to.”

“You have to?”

“For her.”

“There are a lot of things I could say to that,” he said.  “Points I could make.  But I think I’ll settle with… have a good date, Sy.”

“Thank you.”

“I hope Lillian enjoys herself as well.”

I gave him a mock salute, and then opened the bedroom door.

Without Wyvern sharpening my wits and giving me an edge, I might have let one very muddy Kenneth run straight into my nice clothes.  As it was, I stepped out of the way, letting him pass.

I navigated the demented hordes of Lambsbridge orphans.  I passed Gordon and Ashton’s room, where Ashton sat at the window, staring out over the backyard.  He’d been at it since before I’d even started my bath.  Jamie read, I tormented people, Gordon had played or ran errands to keep busy, if he wasn’t practicing something or other.  Helen primped or wandered without any particular aim until Mrs. Earles gave her something to do, Mary altered her clothes, spent time with one of the other Lambs, or she left the house to practice with her knives and wire.

And Ashton, in the idle hours, just sat.  He liked to have a window, but he didn’t need one.

Whatever went on in his head was more colorful than what the rest of the world was doing, apparently.

Mary was coming up the stairs as I made my way down.  It didn’t leave much room for us to squeeze past each other.  She smiled as we both stopped, each figuring out how to navigate past the other.

“You’re seeing Lillian?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You look nice,” she said.  “But you need to do something about that eye.”

“Soon,” I said.  I thought about the Baron.  “Soon.”

“In the meantime, can you do me a favor?” she asked, clasping her hands together.  “It would simplify things.”

“Simplifying isn’t my usual agenda,” I said, playing up the hemming and hawing.  “What do you need?”

“I’ve got a box of things.  I’m going to be staying at Lillian’s, and instead of having to walk all the way back here, I was thinking… it would make things easier.”

I could understand her thought process, on quite a few levels.  It wasn’t just that being here sucked, that it reminded her of Gordon, but having a portable box of things and making herself scarce were ways to prepare for the job we were pulling, targeting the Baron.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “How big a box?”

“Portable,” she said.  “It’s already in the front hall.”

I slid past her, walking down the stairs until I could look around the corner and see down the length of the front hall.  A small luggage container sat by the chair in the entryway.

“You wouldn’t have to carry it far,” she said.  “Just from the carriage to the dorm.”

Carriage?

“Carriage?” I asked her.

“They’re picking up Rick any minute now,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.  I made a face.  “That would be awkward.  I’d prefer to walk.”

“Alright,” she said.

“It’s not heavy, is it?  Because I can carry it.”

“Don’t,” she said.  “You’ll get sweaty, and I don’t want to do that to my friend.”

“That’s all I am to you?” I asked.  “Not a colleague?  Not ‘practically family’?  A mere friend?”

“I was thinking about Lillian,” Mary said, giving me a light smile.  “But now that I think about you-”

Ow, my heart.

“-You could use a bit more muscle on those bones.”

Ow, my pride.

“But tonight isn’t the time to work on it.  Leave the luggage.  I’ll send it up with Rick, with instructions for them to leave it at the gate, I’ll pick it up as I arrive.  That was the original plan, anyway.”

I nodded.

“I’ll see you later tonight?” she asked.  “Or should I be scarce?”

“Tonight is good,” I said.  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She smiled, and it seemed more honest a smile than the ones she’d forced earlier.

I had to check the time in the dining room, and immediately skipped to, grabbing my jacket and heading out the door at a good clip.

The snow was falling more heavily, and the days were short enough that it was already getting dark, before dinner.

There was some traffic to and from the Academy, and I walked well away from the road to avoid a stray wheel kicking up any mud or snow at me.

Jamie was right.  I wasn’t focusing enough.  It was a chronic problem of mine, that I could convince myself of nearly anything.  It was one of the problems I ran into in fights, where I saw a course of action, a way to get great results in a clear, concrete way, and I ended up wanting my opponent to set themselves up so badly that I believed it would happen on an instinctual level.

Doing this, tonight, with Lillian, it was a mistake.  I should have been showing off signs of instability, much as I’d done with Duncan, breaking further away from the team, so it would be easier for them to claim they had no connection to me, should I fail.  I should have been picking my partner for the upcoming job, to give them a chance to do the same.

As it was, I was paying mind to team bonds, to helping and supporting Lillian, to giving her attention and showing her that I cared.

My legs were still sore from the incessant running around in Lugh, which felt like it had happened far longer ago than it had.  Forcing a march-walk uphill on snow-layered, uneven ground was straining my legs and tiring me out with surprising speed.

I passed through the gates and past the area where carriages and other vehicles were arriving, bringing students and the ailing in from the city, and headed around the back paths.  I made my way around to the back of Lillian’s dorm, checked my surroundings, and then quickly climbed the outside of the building, careful to avoid getting my clothes dirty.

I tapped on the window, keeping my head out of sight.  Parents wouldn’t be allowed in the dorms, but I wasn’t ruling out the possibility that they could have been visiting the room that they paid for.

The window slid open.  Lillian, her hair styled, earrings in her ears, poked her head out.

“There are people around,” she said.  Her hand reached down for mine.  I took it, and accepted her help in climbing through the window.

She smelled like women did, like hair products and flowers.  The dress she wore was one I’d seen her in before, but it was a nice one, dark green.  It went well with the intensity of her eyes.

“Remind me what our relationship is?  I just want to make sure we have our stories straight,” I said.

“We’ve talked about this,” Lillian said, still very stern.  I could identify the attitude as a very mocking sternness, now that I was observing her while not clinging to the outside of a cold brick building.  “You’re a liason with the Academy.  Like me, you’re an advanced student working on special projects.”

“Got it,” I said.  “Well, I already had it.  I just wanted an excuse to see you.”

She smiled, and she gave me a playful slap on the cheek, so light a mosquito would survive it.

“Button me up?” she asked, turning her back to me.

I touched her bra strap, tracing my finger along it.

I missed her so terribly already, and she was right here, in arm’s reach.

“Sy.”

I began doing the buttons.

I stopped shy of doing the last one.  I leaned down a bit and planted a kiss where the button was meant to meet the braided loop.  That done, I slipped button through loop.

She turned, and her face was so close to mine.  Her hand touched my cheek, fingertip touching the eyepatch.

“You’re quiet,” she said.  “Are you okay?  That thing you said earlier, to Duncan-”

I laughed, one note, working to keep my voice down.  Students were going to be gathering for dinner in the main dining hall soon.  The hallways would be crowded.

“I don’t think it’s funny,” Lillian said.  “I’m worried.”

“Jamie asked me the same thing,” I said.  “I think Mary was wondering too, but she’s… subdued.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.  She leaned close and gave me a kiss on the cheek, leaving her hand where it was until the last possible moment, as she stepped away to look for her shoes.  “I know what you mean.”

I approached her desk, pulled the chair away, and picked up the shoes, holding them out for her, while she continued to turn her eyes elsewhere, searching.

My eye scanned her desk.  Papers, files.  There were numerous drawings, many looked like tracings.  Notes appeared in the Wollstone shorthand, filling the empty space around the tracings, with lines pointing to parts.

Lillian realized I had her shoes and plucked them from my hand.

“For my senior project,” she explained the drawings.  “They only choose a few students and projects to pass, in the first grading.  Half of the students are dropped, and have to try again next year.  By the second pass, only a third of the students will be confirmed for the implementation phase.  That’s when they put their project to work, with up to two assistants-”

“Chosen from the failures.”

“Yes.  And you have to have a working project by the end.  After that is the jury, where you have to justify your work to a committee, and then there’s the break.  Summer or winter, depending on the project, the school, and the timelines imposed.  Your work has to survive and operate for the two month break.  If it breaks down during the second month, you lose a letter grade.  If it dies before then, you lose two.  If your project is something that isn’t alive in that sense, then they find other ways to test you or stress test the project in the meantime.  The ‘break’ is what breaks a lot of students, that’s the joke.”

I looked over the papers and the sketches.  A warbeast, bulky and stout, the measurements putting it at two feet at the shoulder, with organs on the outside.  Another seemed reminiscent of the Twins, if rather bulkier and clumsy in shape.  The skeletal structure was what made me think of the nobles.  It was framed as if it was hollow inside.  The third set of documents was more formula than sketch.  A drug?

“Your projects?” I asked.

She approached me from behind, wrapping her arms around me, her chin on my shoulder.  I could feel the heaviness of her sigh.  “Proposals.  I haven’t decided which one to go with.  With all of the enemies we’ve fought with extraordinary senses, I thought Sparky there might work.  Something like the stink-bomb I used against the Twins, but it also has the ability to produce explosive flashes of light.  I don’t know if I can get it bright enough to blind or loud enough to deafen, but enhanced senses come with better sensitivity, so… I don’t know.”

“I can see them really liking that.”

“Mm hmm,” she said.  “I figured most of it out on a purely theoretical, pen-on-paper level, and the smell is easy, but I can’t figure out the flash or the bang.  I’m worried I’ll start this project, I’ll run into that dead end, and I’ll end up failing because of it.”

I touched the paper with the crude humanoid.

“I don’t think I can sell it to them,” she said.  “So soon after wartime, with other wars possibly on the horizon… it’s not efficient for what they would want it to be efficient at.”

“What is it?”

“Dumb vessel for collecting the wounded.  They get pulled inside, their legs inside its legs, their chest in its chest, their arms in its arms.  It works as a weak exo-suit, added muscle, for when you need more heavy lifting, but the real purpose, what I’d really hope to pack it with, would be life support.  Not a lot, but enough.  Pressure on wounds, help with breathing, help with heart rate.  If I did it in an advanced way, I’d have it recognize the need on its own.  As it is, I think I’d have it respond to external cues.  Taps.”

Her hand rubbed up my stomach and chest and down, flicking each button on my jacket in passing.  “I thought, what did I want most, back in Lugh?  For myself, or for Gordon?  Or when I was working on Mary, here in Radham, and Jamie had to remind me the steps for surgery?  Support.”

I stared at the page, trying to visualize it.

“The third project is a drug.  I… I don’t know, Sy.  It’s not fully thought through.  I’m sure it’s been done before, but I thought I should have a third project.  I admit I’m selfish in wanting it.  Something to help suppress fear, to clarify the mind.  A low-impact combat drug for soldiers.”

“Something you could take, so you didn’t need wyvern?”

“I don’t want to use wyvern ever again, Sy,” she whispered.  “I’m sorry, but-”

“No,” I said.  “I understand.  Believe me.”

“I don’t know how long the effects will last, so I’ve been working so hard, using all of the time I’m not spending consoling Mary, or with you.  They said they would be lenient, knowing I was working with the Lambs project and helping the Gages, but I’ve been fretting.  Even with wyvern to help focus me, I’m worried.  This is sort of major, and I haven’t even had time to think about it.”

“How long do you have to work it out?”

“Tomorrow.  Part of tomorrow.”

I pulled my way out of her arms, turning around so I could face her.  “What?”

“Tonight, after dinner, they’re holding a meeting.  They’ve been having them all day.  All of my teachers, and my parents, looking over my academic performance and reviewing my records.  With that meeting fresh in their minds, I have to bring a project proposal forward tomorrow morning.  They’ll decide, based on the meeting with my parents and teachers, if I’m capable.  I’m not sure how they’re going to explain things to my parents, but I’ve been told my parents won’t hear the whole story, so I think they’ll say their piece and then leave.  Which should suit them fine.”

That’s why your parents are in town,” I said, speaking the realization aloud.

Lillian nodded.  Her eyes were filled with conflicting emotions.

I could imagine her crying if she didn’t have the wyvern formula, and I really wished she would, so I could better know how to console her.  As it was, I looked at the papers, then at Lillian.  My thoughts were a jumble, chaos.

Lillian was too important.  She was the one person I could trust to remember the Lambs as we actually were.  I’d been so preoccupied I hadn’t been able to see.  I couldn’t abandon her, not at this critical juncture.  I couldn’t stay, either.  I would lose my mind and I would inevitably hurt her.

There was a word for the bitter feeling I was experiencing: torn.  Pulled in multiple directions, agonized, knowing I was going to fail her somehow, no matter what happened.

Just leave, a little voice spoke in the back of my mind.  Leave.  Run away.  Go, go, go.  There are only bad things for you here.

It was a little voice that had been with me for years.  Since well before my last attempt at running away.

Just leave.  You know you have toYou’ll go mad if you don’t.

But, like I’d told Mauer, my whole life was here.  Lillian, and everything Lillian represented.  Mary, Jamie, Helen, Ashton.  The people I knew in the city.

Pulling away meant putting every single one of those things in jeopardy.

Reaching forward, I put my arms around Lillian.  It wasn’t on purpose, but I ended up pinning her arms against her sides, my arms around her upper arms and back, hugging her so tight it had to hurt.

Unable to hug me back, she planted a kiss on my ear.

It was more on an already full plate, but I knew I had to listen in on that meeting.  I had to know Lillian’s fate.  I couldn’t make any decisions until I did.

Dinner with her parents, and then finding a way into the meeting.

“Not that this isn’t the nicest thing, Sy,” she murmured in my ear, “But my parents are waiting, and you need to step out that window and go wait outside with them.”

I broke the hug.  I couldn’t look at her smiling face, so I headed straight for the window.  Let her think I was bashful or something.

“See you in a minute,” she said, as the window scraped open.

“Yeah,” I said, still thinking.  “About the projects?  I like the second one.  The suit.  I think it’s more ‘you’.”

She smiled wide.  “Thank you, Sy.  I think I needed someone to tell me that, to make the decision.”

I nodded, climbed out the window, and quickly made my way to the ground.

Warring emotions plagued me as I took the long way around.  I had to stop for a moment as tears filled my one good eye.

I’d told Jamie that everyone needed to be the hero of their own story.  That they needed a version of events that could paint them in the right.

I didn’t have that.  Never really had.

She was the sweetest, bravest girl, and I couldn’t give her a happy ending.  I was doomed to disappoint, no matter what I did.

I wiped away the moisture that had collected in the eye with my handkerchief, took a deep breath while I straightened myself out, and then rounded the corner.  A steady stream of girls departing the dormitory gave me a moment’s respite, as I had to wait for them to clear out of the way.

Lillian’s father and mother were standing a short distance away from the gaggle of girls.  Her father was a sturdy man, with brown and gray hair and permanent frown lines across his forehead.  Her mother looked like a timid woman, her fashion and makeup aggressive to make up for what she lacked personally.  They stood close together, and talked very easily with one another.

As the path cleared, I made my approach.

“Can I help you?” Lillian’s father asked me.

“I’m Sylvester, a friend of Lillian’s,” I said.  “I believe we’re having dinner at Claret Hall?”

I extended my hand.  The man shook it, his hand enveloping mine.

“We expected her friend Mary,” her mother said.  “Lillian wrote so much about her in the letters.”

I’m so sorry to disappoint, I thought.

Lil’s father, meanwhile, released my hand.  The frown lines in his forehead deepened.

“I believe you have lipstick on your ear,” he told me, staring me down.

“Ah,” I said.  I pulled the handkerchief from my pocket, and rubbed at my ear.

“And you smell like perfume,” he added.

I didn’t even get a chance to get a word out before the door opened.  Lillian must have run to get downstairs as fast as she did.  She skipped down the path until she was at my side.  She hugged my arm, smiling up at two very disapproving parents.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.05 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I gave Lillian’s hand a squeeze, turning my attention to her parents.  The thing to do was to maintain a cool poker face.  If I looked guilty, I would be hung as a guilty man.

“I live at the orphanage further down the road.  Beautiful stone building with the stone fence around it?  You would have seen it as you came up.  Lots of kids, a number of girls, a number of us getting ready to go out?  I couldn’t escape the haze of perfumes.”

“Perfumes?” Lillian asked.  Then, without missing a beat, said, “Helen?”

“Helen and Fran,” I said.  “Your dad saw a smudge of crimson on my ear.”

Lillian smiled.

“You’re an orphan, then?” her dad asked, his voice low, his tone like that of a priest at a funeral, heavy and suggestive of doom and gloom.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Dad!” Lillian sounded positively horrified.

“If it was another boy, I’d ask him what his father does for a living.  I’d want to know where he comes from, the values he was raised with.  I can’t do that, obviously, so I’m inquiring about this.”

“And I’m saying no to this inqusition!” Lillian said.  There as a fierceness in her eyes.  “I am very fond of Sy.  Sylvester.  If you’re going to be a bully, then we’re going to leave you two to have dinner alone.  I want tonight to be a nice night.”

“There’s no need for that,” her mother said.  When she looked at her husband for clarification, however, it wasn’t to warn him, but out of hope.

“Dad?” Lillian asked.  She was warning her dad where her mom seemed unwilling.  “Try again.  Let’s start with polite small talk.  Please.”

Her dad wasn’t budging.  He looked at his daughter for a long while, and then looked at me.

Challenging me.

I didn’t let a glimmer of emotion show on my face.  Casually, I said, “I don’t know where I came from.  All I know is the orphanage.  I was raised by an excellent staff and by the oldest children, and I now help where I can with the younger children.”

The look Lillian gave me suggested I’d failed her in a small way.  She’d stood up to her dad and I had undercut her.  But I knew that if I’d let her decide this, then I would never have won her dad over.  The night would have been filled with him steadily beating me down with pressure and subtle digs.  I could play that game, but I wanted to do better than that.

I’ll make it up to you later, I promised her.

“I have a few employees who have similar backgrounds,” her dad said.  “They didn’t really have the benefit of a family, so they hashed together a replacement.  Out of the, hm, about five of them I’m recalling right now, four ended up with broods by the time they were eighteen.”

The words were almost accusatory.

“I can’t comment on their desire for family,” I said, “But if they are your employees, then isn’t that what’s important?  Hard work, ethic, focus?”

I was cheating there, a little bit.  I had a general sense of who the man was, based on what Lillian had shared and what I had seen of Lillian.

“If you two are going to stand here and debate all evening, maybe mom and I can go to Claret Hall to eat,” Lillian said.

“We should probably walk over now,” I said, “Or we might not get a good table.”

“Good,” Lillian said.  “That’s a good idea, thank you.  It’s this way.”

She was tense, now.  Not spooked or scared, but fully prepared to step in.

“Were you a Mothmont student?” her mother asked me.

“Only very briefly,” I said.  “Then I found myself here.”

“Oh,” she said.  She made a sound I could only call cooing.  “Advanced?”

“You could say that and you wouldn’t be wrong,” I said, “Probably more accurate to say I walked a different path.”

Lillian jumped in, “Growing up at the foot of the Academy, Sylvester has been a part of it since before I was even at Mothmont.  He’s been a big help, all the way through.  Now we’re working on the same general project together.”

Her dad seemed as if he was going to remain dark and silent, like a stormcloud that hadn’t yet stormed.  He surprised me by speaking.  “I recall letters you wrote home where you damned the name of a boy named Sylvester.”

“Ah,” Lillian said.  “Yes.”

“A different Sylvester, then?” her dad asked.  “This boy bears a startling similarity to a drawing in the margins of one letter.  Dark hair, triangular face?  The boy you drew had knives and daggers sticking out of him, if I remember right, so perhaps I’m mistaken.”

“No, daddy.  This is the same boy.”

“I think our differences in the beginning were a question of clashing methods,” I said.  “Lillian is a builder.  I prefer to shake things up, and shaking things up causes a lot of frustration for someone who is trying to build on a steady foundation.  She’s brilliant, and she’s one of the brains I respect the most-”

That earned me a hand squeeze.

“-and she’s the person I have the highest expectations for, when it comes to the future.  We’ve learned to work together remarkably well since that time.”

“Ah,” her dad said.  “You think it’s a question of clashing ideologies, then.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I’m more inclined to think it was about you repeatedly looking up her skirt, and dropping an eel down the front of her shirt?”

I’d forgotten about that second one.  In my own defense, the eel had been dead, so the chance of biting was nonexistent, and it had also been very, very slimy.

Lillian’s face had gone stone still.  Her gaze was fixed on the path ten feet ahead of us.

“Itching powder?” her father asked.  “The fake dead rat attached to her textbook, that she pulled out in class?  The butter?”

Lillian let go of my hand to raise both hands to her face.  Fingernails momentarily dug in at the hairline.

“You told him that stuff, huh?” I asked her.

“She did,” her father said, he appeared to loom over me like I was the convict and he was the guillotine.

“I did,” Lillian echoed him.  “I was new to the Academy and to the project, I didn’t have many friends, and I had a lot of frustrations to express.  I suppose that while I was writing letters home, I expressed.”

Her hands fell away from her face as she talked, and I could see the disappointment on her face.  This wasn’t the evening she had wanted.  Her hands went to her arms, briefly rubbing them.

“Are you cold, honey?” her mother asked.  “I have-”

I’d unbuttoned my jacket before she was done asking the question, and the sudden movement as I threw my coat over Lillian’s shoulders interrupted her.

“-a scarf.”

“I have a coat already,” Lillian told me, even as she pulled the jacket closer.

“You have a fall jacket.  Or a spring jacket,” I retorted.  “Now you have a coat.”

“I didn’t want something big and bulky I’d have to take to the coatroom at the hall,” she said.

“I would have taken your coat to the coatroom,” I said, just barely biting back a light insult, like calling her a dummy.

“Okay,” she said.  “Thank you.”

I deliberately avoided looking at her father, knowing my action could so easily be interpreted as something calculated, and instead hugged Lillian at the shoulders, helping hold the jacket in place, while I returned a smile from her mother.

I was aware, however, watching her father in my peripheral vision, that the man’s body language had changed.  His expression seemed even more dour than it had been.  My action hadn’t won points.  It had cost me.  It might have even cost me a great deal, in his eyes.

So that’s how it is, you old bastard.  She’s your daughter still, with the emphasis on the ‘your’, possession, belonging to.  I’m just the bastard who’s taking her from you, or the kid who is threatening to ruin her.  Anything I do that wins her over or takes her heart is going to put me at odds with you.

We’d reached Claret Hall, and we made our way inside.  The hubub and need to navigate spared us a good minute of conversation, and put some distance between us and the prior, more embarrassing topic of conversation.

I’d only eaten here twice before, once with Hayle and once with the Lambs, during one of the quieter weeks.  The place was lit by candles, with a beautiful silver fixture hanging from the ceiling, sporting no less than fifty candles.  Fireproof branches around the light sources gave the light throughout the dining hall a dappled look, as if it was all dim light shining through a canopy.  Radham Academy’s colors were crimson and silver, and the curtains and furniture sported these highlights, though it was primarily fashioned of dark wood.  The tables and booths had been grown and upholstered, not handcrafted.

This was where the upper faculty and professors dined when they didn’t have food catered to their offices and labs, and also where the older students came on dates.  It reeked of respectability.  There was a bar, but this wasn’t the sort of place one got drunk, unless it was well after everyone had finished eating and vacated the dining area.

“Sylvester,” Lillian’s mother said, “Tell me, what are you studying?”

“My personal project is focused on poisons and cognition, ma’am,” I said.  I helped Lillian remove both my coat and her jacket.

“Oh,” her mother said.  She looked a little shocked.  “That’s something.”

“Sylvester is sharp,” Lillian said.  “A lot of people get caught off guard by how quick he is.”

I was surprised by a tap on my shoulder.  Staff offered to take the coats from me, and I let them.

“Quick can be dangerous,” her father said.

“Daddy.  Stop.”

“Do you know who seemed reliable, sensible, and promising?” he asked.  “That Duncan boy we met last year.”

“He looked a bit like he’d just eaten a lemon, from the start of the conversation to the end,” Lillian’s mom remarked.  “And he was trying so hard to please.”

“I imagine he likes Lillian,” Lillian’s dad said.

You introduced Duncan to your parents before you introduced me?  I got Lillian’s chair for her before getting seated myself.  I knew it would irritate her dad, and at this point I was happy to.

“Mom, daddy, final warning.  If you insult Sylvester, directly or by trying to suggest a new boyfriend while he’s sitting here at the table, I’m going to leave, Sylvester and I will get dinner together at the regular cafeteria, and I will maybe have lunch with you tomorrow before you leave.  If you decide to apologize.”

It was, if I was reading things right, one of the first times she’d stood up to her parents.  Their reactions suggested this was unprecedented, and her dad seemed to very naturally hold the fierce intensity that I only saw in Lillian when she was deep in her work or under the influence of the Wyvern formula.  He was a presence, someone used to being listened to, to the extent that his wife and daughter both were both very quiet types, used to holding their tongues and thinking carefully before they voiced an opinion.  He wasn’t going to back down, which meant I had to undercut Lillian again.

“I’m not insulted,” I said.  “And I’m not threatened by Duncan.”

I had their attention, now.

“I think Duncan can be hard to like, and I know I’m biased in saying it, but he could benefit from more exposure to different walks of life, but I know Lillian recommended him to the advanced program we’re in, and she calls him a friend, and I respect her judgment in that.  Based on that, I think he would be a fine boyfriend for her.  Comparing me to someone of that caliber isn’t an insult at all.”

Her father seemed to take that as some small sort of victory.  I imagined he was about to cut straight through the conversation to try and deliver the conversational equivalent of a knockout punch.

“But,” I said, not giving Daddy the chance, reaching for Lillian’s hand and intertwining her fingers with mine, “I’m not threatened at all.  She’s not his girlfriend, and she’s not going to be.  She’s mine.”

I was careful to phrase it so I could drop those last two words, and I was careful to look her dad in the eyes as I said it.  Fingers still wound through hers, I lifted her hand to my mouth, kissing the back of it.

The thundercloud that was Mr. Garey seemed ready to break into full storm at that little gesture.  Had we been standing outside instead of an establishment like this, he might have.

That in mind, I gave him my best sly smile.

Lillian squeezed my hand, and it was the painful sort of squeeze.  She leaned close, and spoke with enough volume that her parents probably heard, “Please don’t provoke my father.”

“If he can deal it, he can take it,” I said. “But okay, if that’s what you want.”

“Thank you,” she said, pointedly.  “Daddy, I already gave you my final warning.  Please be good.”

“You’ve changed,” he said, so quick off the cuff of her request that it seemed like a retaliation or a rebuff.

“I’m stronger,” she said.  “I’m confident.  I’d like to think I’ve acquired some of your better traits.”

He seemed to speak very carefully, and that same care seemed to betray the sincerity of the words he spoke, “I’d like to think so too, Lillian.”

I knew right off that Lillian had seen it too.  I had no idea what it meant or what history had really played into the sentiment the two of them seemed to be at odds over, but whatever it was, it cast a black cloud over the conversation.

I quickly began calculating a way forward.  To salvage things and put a pleasant spin on things.  Lillian’s mother was the best way to go about it, and the woman had hobbies.  Horses seemed to be one, according to little clues I noted, and reading was a likely other, given her age and lifestyle.  Jamie wasn’t as much of a reader as the old Jamie, but he’d mentioned some books recently.  What were they?  Damn my memory.  I’d have to start with the horses.

We were, in a way, spared.  A presence appeared at the side of the table, stepping neatly through a cluster of people who were leaving the dining hall.  An old man, respectable in his black professor’s jacket.  Hayle.

“Professor Hayle,” Lillian said.

“Lillian.  I assume these are your parents?  Mr. and Mrs. Garey?”

Handshakes went around.

“Lillian is a remarkable girl,” Hayle said.  “She’s a pleasure to mentor, and she never fails to rise to our expectations, which are very high indeed.  Eminently reliable and as well studied as girls three years her senior.”

“That is kind of you to say, professor,” Mr. Garey said.  “Would you like to join us?”

“I can’t.  We’re taking a short recess from discussing a student.  I thought I would make sure you found your way alright, and make sure you knew which direction to go to meet us after you were done dining?  No later than seven-thirty, if possible?”

“I can show them the way,” Lillian said. “Or Sylvester can.”

“It’s up one flight,” Mr. Hayle said, “if you stand at the top of the stairs and you don’t see the big portrait of the three brothers of Francis, you need to cross to the other hall.  Once you’re facing the portrait, turn left.  I’ll try to be waiting outside of the room for you.”

“Thank you, professor,” Lillian’s dad said.  “I’m fairly good with directions, and I don’t expect that to be a problem.”

“Good, good.  How are you, Sylvester?”

“I’m well, professor,” I said.

“And your eye?”

“It is what it is,” I said.  “I look forward to taking this patch off.”

Before either of the parents could interject with a question, Hayle turned to them, a smile on his face, one hand falling on my shoulder, which was still a touch sore.  “Sylvester is a fantastic young man.  He picks up things with a remarkable speed.  There have been problems that come across my desk that I have no earthly idea how to crack, I pit Sylvester against those puzzles and they have a way of…”

He paused, gesturing in a very indistinct way, before smiling an easy, genial smile.

“…No longer being problems.”

It was honest, and it was true, even if he was obfuscating the nature of that truth, but it surprised me more than anything to be sitting where I sat, and hear Hayle standing up for me, though he could hardly have known I needed him to.

“I have help, sir,” I said, squeezing Lillian’s hand under the table.

“Some of that help you personally found and recruited,” Hayle pointed out.  “And you had a hand in shaping the team and training the other members.”

“I won’t deny that, sir.”

He gave my shoulder a pat, turning his attention to Lillian’s parents.  “They make a good pair, I think.  They complement each other’s strengths and cover one another’s weaknesses.  Lillian benefits from the push and the challenges he gives her, and he benefits from the more moderate side of Lillian.”

There were better ways to phrase it than that.  Still, I wasn’t about to object or tell him he was wrong.

“Do you think so?” Lillian’s dad asked.  He glanced at me.  He didn’t look any happier than he had before, but I suspected I saw a glimmer of respect, now.

“Treat him well,” Hayle said, giving me another shoulder pat.  “I’ll see you at seven-thirty?”

“Yes, professor,” Mrs. Garey said.  She smiled at me.

A cluster of students who were waiting by the door parted in a deferential way as Hayle approached.

“He mentioned your eye,” Mr. Garey said.  I sensed Lillian tense beside me.  “Can I ask what happened?”

Actually being polite?  He was still prying, but not being an asshole about it.

“Work,” I said.  “I got something in my eye.”

“You said you designed poisons?” Lillian’s mom asked.  “A lab accident?”

I didn’t answer the question, because I didn’t want to lie to Lillian’s parents tonight, and tell her it was a sword that I got in my eye.  Instead, I said, “The Academy can fix or replace eyes.  For now it’s just an inconvenience.”

“I imagine so!  I hope you recover swiftly,” she said.

Recover swiftly.  It made me think of how I needed to remove the Baron from the picture first, and how that meant I couldn’t come back.  It very possibly meant leaving Lillian, or convincing her to say goodbye to this pair forever.

I wasn’t sure if I was more or less pessimistic about her willingness to leave her parents and career behind, having seen how she interacted with her parents.  There was a yawning chasm between them, her dad seemed to want different things for Lillian than she seemed to want for herself, and they didn’t seem compatible.  It was very possible that her dad was the sort of personality where the closest thing to being compatible was to kowtow to him.

But, at the same time, even in pulling away, marking the distance between herself and her father, Lillian seemed to hold on.  She didn’t storm out.  She warned, staying where she was, willing to break away but only if she absolutely had to.

The dining hall was so warm, and I could feel the warmth of Lillian’s hand, up until she let go to reach for the bread basket and butter, and yet I only felt a deep sadness, permeating me to my core.

I put a smile on my face, scooted my chair a touch closer to the table, and leaned forward, addressing Lillian’s mom, “Would I be right in guessing you’re an avid horse rider?”

“Did Lillian give you a hint?”

“No,” I said.  “Your posture and the way you hold your hands is a big clue, but I first noticed when we were walking to the dining hall.  When you look over your shoulder, you start to drift in that direction.  The only people I know who do that are people born to the saddle.”

“I’m going to be self conscious about that now!” she gasped, sounding almost delighted, her voice rising just high enough that it was above the overall din of the dining room.  Heads didn’t turn, but eyes glanced our way.

Her husband reached over and put his hand over hers.  In another circumstance it was the sort of thing that would have seemed like a nice gesture.  In this circumstance, it felt more like he was shushing her, using his presence and his role as a husband to do it.

I didn’t like it.

An old fashioned man, I thought.  Conformity, expectations, roles.  It chafed.  I liked shaking off the conformity and order, unveiling the person as they really were.  For my enemies, it was for the purposes of uncovering their weaknesses.  For my friends, it was to uncover their strengths.

It was with that in mind that I made it my mission for the dinner to make Mrs. Garey as excited and loud as possible.  That it served a double purpose in flipping Mr. Garey the bird was a nice reward.

“I know some riders are uncomfortable if they’re on a ledge, they don’t want to look over the edge, because they instinctively feel like they’ll go over that edge,” I said.

“That’s me!” she exclaimed.  “We were riding the carriage over and I felt uncomfortable looking out the window and over the edge of a bridge.  I never connected the two ideas!”

Heads did turn.  Mr. Garey raised his hand up and more firmly took hers.  She pulled it away, not paying attention to him, clasping her hands in front of her.  “Do you ride?”

“I do a little bit of everything,” I said.  “In the field behind the orphanage, we sometimes see some altered horse stock the Academy is raising.  Beautiful creatures.”

“Altered how?”

Lillian seized the opportunity to leap into the conversation.

The deep sadness that seemed to have soaked me through and through didn’t go away.  If anything, I felt as though a rock had plunged into the depths of my stomach.  At the same time, paradoxically, I could appreciate the pleasant warmth of the present moment.  The benefits of a mind that could travel several roads in parallel, perhaps.

We left the dining hall, and Lillian was hugging my arm with both of hers.  She seemed to bounce as she walked.  I’d been unable and unwilling to interject as she and her mother talked.  My shoulder hurt while I held the coats with one arm, but it was a minor price for the feeling of her so close.

There were nice things about girls, things the older orphans and mice talked about when they wouldn’t be overheard and they wanted the group to validate their burgeoning manliness.  Skin and underwear and all manner of body parts, lewd words and acts.  So often, I tuned it out and didn’t even listen.  I didn’t get it.

This was what stirred funny feelings inside of me, seeing Lillian genuinely pleased and happy, her stresses forgotten.  On other days, teasing her just to see the relief when I stopped or the smile when I made the tease worth it, turning an annoyance into a compliment or whatever else, it sufficed.  I liked to get reactions of all sorts out of her, to make her squirm, laugh, or vent her feelings.  But seeing her in a naturally good mood was maybe the best thing.  Better than her body parts or underwear.

It was probably because I was screwed up and stunted that my priorities lay where they did.   Like Jamie had said, we were all twisted when it came to our relationships.

She hugged her mom, who looked just as happy as she did.  She then hugged her dad, who remained an ominous storm cloud.

“Say good things about me,” Lillian said.

“We will,” her mom said.  “We want what’s best for you.”

I stayed with Lillian as we watched them walk to the stairway.

“Now I’m terrified,” she said.

“You’re allowed to be terrified,” I said.

“You got my mom to open up.  You did that on purpose?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because your dad tried to get her to quiet down?  Because of you?”

“Whatever your reasons, I think I learned more about my mom tonight than I did in the whole rest of my life.  It started off rocky, but it ended up nice.  Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” I said, somberly.

She bent down just a bit to give me a brief kiss.

“I’m sorry I didn’t win over your dad.  I don’t think he would’ve let me, no matter what I did, and if there was a way, I would’ve made myself ugly in your eyes.”

She gave me another brief kiss.

“I take it that means you’re okay with it.”

“Remember how you hugged me earlier?” she murmured.  “Holding my arms down, painfully tight?”

“Sorry.  I sort of needed a hug.”

“No, no,” she said. Her voice dropped another degree, “I think I need that sort of hug right now.  Come back to my room?  I’m going to be so nervous about that meeting and about my presentation tomorrow, I don’t think I’m going to be able to sit still.  It would be nice if you were there, and you could hold me tight in that way, make me be still, so I didn’t have to worry about not sitting still.  And we could talk.”

I looked over in the direction of the stairway.

She touched my cheek, turning my head so I faced her, and gave me a kiss on the tip of the nose.

“Ah-hem!” a woman in a gray lab coat had made the exaggerated noise, giving us a pointed look.  We stepped away from each other, until we were separated by one armspan.  The woman carried on her way.

Lillian turned her head and stuck out her tongue at the woman’s back.

If I went with Lillian now… could I even leave like that?  Break away to catch the tail end of the meeting between Hayle and her parents, get the general synopsis?

Probably not.

Could I leave at all?  I felt unsteady inside, the holes left by Jamie and Gordon leaving feelings and beliefs unstable, threatening to fold in on themselves.  I’d slept in the bed with Mary and Lillian and I’d been unable to sleep, the unsteadiness and the memories keeping me up all night.  I had no idea if tonight would be different, but after seeing how happy she had been, talking to her mom, I felt like it could.

“Please,” she said.

But tomorrow?  If we had a mission and if I had to watch another Lamb die?

“I want to more than anything,” I said.  “But I sort of made other plans.”

Wyvern helped her to hide her feelings.  It had always been a weakness of hers.  Still, I knew her too well for her to throw up a mid-level poker face and fool me.

“Soon,” I said.  “I won’t be long.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do your homework and refine your ideas on that project.  I’ll find you after.  Then I’ll give you that hug.”

“Okay, Sy.  I look forward to it.”

I helped her put on her jacket, and then gave her my coat too.  She shot me a curious look.

“I’ll be quick enough in getting from A to B that the cold won’t touch me, and I’ll have to come get my coat, so you know I’ll be there later.  Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.  She smiled.

I watched her walk away.

Before she was out of earshot, I said, “Heya.”

She turned to look at me.

“I love you, dum-dum.”

The smile was genuine this time, a silly, goofy smile.  “I might love you too, Sy.”

Might?

“I don’t know yet.  Never been in love before, to compare this feeling to.”

“Good enough, then.”

I watched her leave.  The smile was on her face, each time she glanced back at me.

Through the custodian’s office, down to the cellar.  There was a channel that led from Claret Hall to the bowels.  There was also a fixture attached to the boiler, where corpses and bodies could be stashed and quickly incinerated in an emergency, with levers and chambers attached, controlling how the contents of the fixture were treated and where the smoke went.

The Academy had several mechanisms in place to handle crises.  One of those mechanisms had to do with this boiler.  There were vents and ducts throughout Claret Hall that helped to move air around, but by throwing the right switches, this fixture would burn something noxious and spread a poison through the entire building, killing people within.  I could see the terminal, and I saw the spaces for the switches, each one like a key, only operating if it had a specific construction.

But other switches were always in place.  There was one that would let the smoke from the fires that fueled the boiler flow through the vents.  It served as a means of handling things if and when the boggy climate of Radham led to flies and small insects collecting in Claret Hall, and with the windows open in the summer, the smoke would be allowed through with some poisonous cedar left to burn, killing off the worst of the pests.

Throw the right switches, and smoke would flow into the side-chamber, and flow from the side chamber to the vents. I shucked off most of my clothes, neatly folded them, and set them aside, on a shelf where anyone who came in wouldn’t find them.  I pulled levers slowly, eliciting metal-on-metal squeaks as I opened the way from side chamber to vents.  That done, clad in only underwear, I climbed into the incinerator and braced feet against either side, making my way up the chute to the vents.

The vents were wood, treated for pests, and, inconveniently, they were layered with about two inches of dust, whole walls of cobwebs, and punctuated with nails that the dust did a good job of hiding.

I had explored these routes when searching for a way to get to the records room and get the individual files of the Lambs.  For all my trouble, cumulative days of shuffling along these miserable corridors, dodging rusty nails and feeling spiders and academy-designed creatures climb over me, I had learned that Hayle kept those files near him at all times.

The remainder of the trick was finding my way to the room Hayle had mentioned, which was on the top floor, meaning a lot of hazardous climbing.  My memory wasn’t good, but Claret Hall had a lot of big rooms, and it made for less places to check.

Moving slowly, adjusting my weight to squirm forward more than I pushed myself with hand or knee, I approached the room where the meeting was being held.  My hand cleared away dust, and I laid myself down, eye and ear on the vent that opened into the meeting room.

I listened to the first clear sentence they’d uttered since my arrival, then the second.

I listened, and a not insignificant piece of me broke.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 10.06 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.6

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“With formalities and opening statements out of the way, I’d like to set the tone for our conversation today.  Mr. Garey, we talked over the phone.  For the sake of our discussion here, would you tell us if you would strenuously object if Lillian Garey was taken off the accelerated path to professorship?”

“I would not strenuously object, Professor Hayle.  As  matter of fact, in our prior conversations, I’ve requested it.”

“Good.  Let’s give the record takers a second to finish- there.  Alright.  Why did you request this?”

“I’m aware of the climate, Professor, and I know my daughter.  In terms of politics, in what you’ve said about the cutthroat academic world, the recent war and outfighting and the continued unrest, I feel that it would be setting her up to fail.  She’s young, she’s a girl in a setting dominated by men… I notice that my wife and the stitched over there taking notes are the only women in this room… and things are uneasy everywhere.  My primary concern is that she would be targeted or used as a scapegoat, a fast ascent, a faster fall.”

“And your secondary concerns, Mr. Garey?”

“Every time I talk to her or get a letter, she tells me that she’s skipping ahead.  She didn’t have to take a course because she studied well.  She didn’t have to write a paper because the teacher or professor told her that her practical knowledge learned in the midst of her involvement in the special project would be sufficient.  She missed classes and traveled, and you pulled strings to ensure she wouldn’t be dropped from the course.”

“The ‘you’, for the records, is referring to Professor Hayle.”

“Yes.  Sorry about that.  I’m worried that she’s moving too fast, and she’s leaving behind the fundamentals.  My daughter is leading a whirlwind life, all movement, excitement, time with friends, time with boys, rushed completion of projects or clusters of tests because she was away or preoccupied.”

“The mention of boys is one thing we can come back to in a moment,” Hayle said.

“Ahem.  Yes.  For the purpose of the records, this is Professor Reid now speaking.  Those here should be reminded that, much as we stated at the outset of the meeting, that Lillian Garey’s grades have ranged from significantly above average to exemplary.”

“Thank you, Professor, but I think the thrust of Mr. Garey’s argument here isn’t about her grades or competence.  Mr. Garey?”

“I didn’t study as an Academy student or anything of the sort.  I went to an ordinary school and learned my maths, cursive writing, biology, and dry sciences.  There were stretches of it that were dreary, pedantic, and mind-numbing, but that dreariness and pedantry taught me skills, patience, and ways of thinking that made me a proper adult.  I won’t say that being a professor is dull, by any stretch of the imagination, but it strikes me as something ordered and quiet, disciplined and stately.  I don’t think she’s had an exposure to the environments or skills she needs in order to navigate this particular environment, to sit among you and maintain her place and your respect.”

“I see what you mean now, Mr. Garey,” Reid said.

“I envision her future, and I can’t help but see her rushing down this accelerated road to one of the highest positions an Academy scientist can hope for, and finding herself unprepared, struggling to find allies in a very political and cutthroat environment, and hitting a wall of sorts.  I had dinner with her tonight, and I worry about how she acted.  I almost didn’t recognize her.”

“Mrs. Garey?  You looked like you wanted to say something.”

“I wasn’t sure if I should speak.  I liked the Lillian I saw tonight.  As we had tea over dessert, I remember thinking that she really did seem like someone who could and should be a professor someday.  She was assertive, quick, passionate, and focused.”

“Headstrong, narcissistic.  There was something off about her mannerisms, around the eyes and the hands.”

“She’s taking after you, Jonathan, when it comes to the eyes, the hands, and her stubbornness.  There was none of the self-obsession either, she clearly cared about Sylvester, and she showed interest in me.  I think she is balancing schooling and life very well.”

“The manner Mr. Garey took note of may have been the result of chemicals.”

“Chemicals, professor?”

“Mind-altering drugs.  Or a mind altering drug.  Supplied by the boy she had dinner with.”

“Oh, lords.”

“Professor Hayle, do you meant to tell me-”

“Hold on.  Please.  As we stated at the outset of this meeting, there are certain realities and projects that we cannot elaborate on.  You’re welcome to stay, and we’re happy to have you participate in the discussion and represent your daughter, but please allow me to speak.  I’d like to think about my words so I may balance what you need to hear with our need to keep certain things confidential.  The alternative is to have to ask you to leave.”

“As you wish, Professor.”

“Thank you.  The substance she imbibed is one that students across the Academy take.  I’ve taken it myself, as have several of my colleagues here.  We strictly moderate the use of the drug, but we do provide it to students on a controlled basis.  Sylvester, by virtue of his particular focus, has access to a greater supply.”

“Poisons and, what was it?  The mind?”

“Yes.  We can’t know how long Lillian has been taking it, or how much she has been taking, but we have good reason to believe it’s well above the dosage that other students take.  This is concerning.”

“Especially,” another old man spoke, “Given a prior case, which Lillian Garey is fully aware of, where another young woman on track for a position as professor was found to be abusing the substance.”

“The less said about that, the better.  It’s possible or likely that she has been abusing the substance for some time, but her use of it has escalated to the point that she’s under its influence while meeting with her own parents in a casual setting.  Giving her access to the substance was a test, and it is one she appears to have failed.  We have to wonder about her performance up to this point, and whether she’s equipped to handle things, as Mrs. Garey seemed to think she was.”

“If what you’re saying is true, then- I’m appalled, professor.  I’m sorry to speak up.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Garey.  Speaking as the person managing the program and mentoring Lillian on her accelerated path, I remain both apologetic and disappointed.  Unfortunately, this is only one of the two big concerns I have about her conduct as of late.”

“There’s another?”  Mr. Garey asked.

“You already raised attention to it.  The boy, Sylvester.”

“You complimented him at dinner.”

“Much of what I said at dinner was accurate.  Sylvester is an asset.  He’s clever and resourceful.  He’s also something of a knave, and I have little doubt you were able to pick up on that aspect of his personality.”

“I was able to, yes.”

“If I were to tell you the whole truth in front of your face, then he would take offense and make himself a nuisance.  I’m sure you were able to pick up on that, as well?”

“I see your point, but I don’t see why you would go to that trouble to maintain a working relationship with a subordinate.”

“With the best professors, the best students, and the most promising projects, there are compromises and accommodations that must oftentimes be made,” Hayle said.  “Again, this fringes on the confidential.  For now, we’ll have to leave it at this: I held my tongue to keep him cooperative.”

“I’ll take your word, then, professor.”

“He’s smart, capable, and valuable to us, and Sylvester has benefited from his relationship to Lillian.  Lillian’s relationship with Sylvester has had its positive elements.  They collaborate well.  This sums up much of what I said when I spoke to you earlier tonight?”

“Yes, Professor.”

“Lillian’s relationship with Sylvester has its negative elements, and those elements likely outweigh the positive.  That it happened in the first place and that it’s ongoing is a mark against her in her long-term prospects.  The group received a lot of freedom, and they used that freedom to fraternize.”

“Fraternize?  You mean-”

“I can’t say anything for certain.  But questions have been raised, and the individual in charge of looking after the bulk of the group has obliquely remarked that the young adults have not always been sleeping in their own beds in the morning.”

There was a fair amount of murmuring, where nothing was said to address the room.

“I am gravely sorry for the conduct of my daughter.”

“Universally, parents seem to blame themselves when trouble arises, and take it on themselves to levy punishment.  In this case, however, I don’t think it’s fair.  The Academy has raised her as much as you have.”

“That’s true, but it doesn’t feel right to place the responsibility at your feet.  She’s our daughter and our responsibility.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Garey.”

“Is all of this a prelude to your dropping her from the special project?”

“Dropping her from the special project would be costly, I think.  We recently added two other students to the project, and recent months have taught us just how much there is to learn.  Lillian is extraordinarily capable and arguably irreplaceable.  A better idea, I think, to restructure the special project.”

“This is Professor Sexton speaking.  How are you thinking of restructuring the group?”

“We already split it into two groups.  It’s a question of light juggling to separate Lillian from Sylvester, and to keep one group away while the other is home.  They’ll maintain things in a long-distance fashion for a time, and we can observe carefully to ensure they cannot reconnect.  With luck, the relationship will die on its own.”

“I would hope my daughter terminates the relationship on her own and focuses on her studies.”

“As would I, Mr. Garey.  We’ll watch stocks of the drug she has been taking and perhaps test her now and again to see if she continues relying on it.  She is a promising student, and the project is steadily running its course.  Around the time she’s due to graduate and don her gray coat, the project should be finished.  If you have no objection, if the relationship is terminated, and if she has then weaned herself off the drug while showing consistent academic progress, then I would like to return her to the accelerated path.”

“Putting an eighteen year old on that path is much different from putting a girl in her adolescent years on that path.  I’m… uncomfortable having heard what I’ve heard tonight.  We both are, judging by the look on my wife’s face.  A part of me wants to pull her out of classes.  Another part of me wants her to see success… but of the slow and steady kind.  She hopes to be the youngest woman professor in the Academies, but I worry that is a star that would shine brightly and for a tragically short time.  I would rather she wear the title of Doctor only and wear it for the rest of her life, or until she married.”

“I understand.  I would like to suggest a compromise, then.  In two years’ time, you and I will have another meeting.  It won’t necessarily have to involve the other professors and her teachers.  We can discuss if she should wear a black coat or a gray one.”

“I have no trouble making the trip, Professor Hayle.  Can I ask you to keep me updated?”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“At my workplace.”

Professor Hayle moved some papers.  I could hear them rustling.  “We have that number.  A phone call once every two months, then?  A letter if the phone call can’t be arranged?  Good.  The accelerated path will become an accelerated path in name only, then.  She’ll be a candidate for professorship if and when she reaches an appropriate age and meets the criteria.  For now, as we’re still years too early for that point, Lillian Garey will present her special project to this room tomorrow morning, and we will turn her idea down regardless of merit.  We can cite a lack of resources post-wartime.  As she enters more difficult classes and faces more difficult classes, we will give her less leeway.  Far less.  Knowing her, she’ll be liable to blame herself.”

“I can imagine that treatment breaking a lesser student.”  Sexton.

“It will be a test of character, one she might well need.  Any objections, Mr. Garey?”

“No, Professor.  I am far more comfortable with this proposal than I was with things as they stood.  So long as my daughter gets the quality education we’re paying for and isn’t set up to fail, then I’m in agreement.  I think she needs that test of character, to become what she wants to become.”

“Mrs. Garey?”

“…No objection.  You’ll look after her?  Keep a closer eye on her activities?  With the boys, and the substance abuse?”

“Without question.”

A pause.  Pen scratches on paper.

“Then I think we’ve reached a resolution, and we’ve made good time.  Mr. Garey, Mrs. Garey, thank you for coming.  I hope you enjoy your time with your daughter while you’re still here.  I suspect she will be distraught after the meeting tomorrow, and I’m sorry it had to come to that.  Let us know if you need anything.”

“Thank you for involving us in this.  I know you didn’t have to.”

“It was, I think, somewhat inevitable that this would happen.  I wanted the two of you to know what we were doing and why.  I’ve dealt with enough angry and indignant parents to not want to deal with any more.  Cases like this are rare, where a student is raised up and doing so well, and we have to be so hard on them.”

“Thank you, professor.”

Chairs scraped.

I watched as Mr. and Mrs. Garey passed through the relatively narrow slice of the room that I could make out, making their way to the door, nice shoes tapping against the floor.

The door banged as it shut.

“Will the Baron of Richmond be satisfied with only this?” Sexton asked.

“I’ll talk to him myself.  If framed in the right way, I think it should be fine.  It needed to be done, all the same, with how unwieldy the Lambs have been getting.  This feels like a good initial step in bringing things under control.”

“I know I was very vocal about my reservations when the Lambs were in early stages, but they have proved their value, Hayle.  I no longer have a project to look after, so let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“We can discuss over tea, Sexton.  Tomorrow perhaps?  I need more lab space, I think.”

“Arright, that’s enough backpatting, you two.  I’m tired, and the list of students gets longer every year.  Next student we need to discuss is Dan Garret.  No parents.  We can talk among ourselves.  Which one is this, again?”

“A bad sign, if we can’t quite remember.  What are his grades?”

I had barely moved a muscle as I lay prostrate in the duct.  I barely wanted to move, as the conversation moved on from Lillian so very easily.

My emotions were all over the place, but that ‘place’ wasn’t where my emotions ought to have been.  Not in my heart, my throat, the pit of my stomach, nor my brain.  My hands were trembling, my fingertips tingling and my breathing was funny.  My eyes were wet, but I wasn’t crying.  I could have blamed the dust and I wasn’t sure I would have been lying.

Yet, when I reached for an emotion, I couldn’t feel much of anything.  I wanted to feel angry and indignant, but it was a want without any heat or muscle behind it.  I wanted to be sad, or something.

I twisted myself around and began reversing course, going back through the ducts, faster and more carelessly than was necessary.  A finger scraped against the side of a rusty nail that was sticking up through the floor of the duct, and it bled freely.  The pain felt like it had happened to someone else.  The dust on the floor of the duct clotted the wound before natural processes did.

I felt like I hadn’t had Wyvern in a while, but it hadn’t been long at all.  Disconnected, unfocused, confused.

Hearing a noise, I stopped, one hand raised, ready to come down on the floor of the duct and assist me in crawling forward.  It trembled where it hung in the air.

I started moving again, going through the motions.  Everything I was doing involved a strange sort of effort, but it didn’t require thinking, and I couldn’t think at all.  I couldn’t imagine a pristine white rectangle, that technique Hayle had taught me, because my thoughts were washed away before I was halfway to even starting.

It was so difficult to move, to remind myself to try to breathe slowly and steadily, to put one hand in front of the other, move my knees, and avoid the nails, that it seemed like I failed at one or the other.  Yet somehow, I lost track of time and found myself in the chute that led up from the adjunct chamber of the boiler to the vents.  I fumbled around for full minutes before I felt like my feet and hands were in the right place to let me slide down.

I brushed the worst of the dust off me, and out of my hair, my actions methodical, careful.

As if my mind and body had switched places.  While my body was very much in my control, taking up all of my attention, it was as my thoughts normally were, affected by impulses and things pushing in from outside.  Something that I steered to the right courses rather than something that did exactly as I wanted.  My thoughts, meanwhile, were wild and unpredictable, subject to the whim and madness of my emotions.  I couldn’t think at all, my head filled with a kaleidoscope of soundless noise, smoke, and poison.

Once dressed, I stepped out of the room.  Moving forward was the impulse, now.  Getting out of Claret Hall.

It was as though I was moving through a series of portraits hanging on a wall, not one continuous building.  Moments where nothing registered or seemed to exist, then a scene, a new environment, a crowd of people I had to walk around, who were just finishing their tea.  Another blank space.  I covered distance and didn’t recall any of it.

In that manner, I found myself standing outside without a coat or a jacket.  Snow was falling and I was surprised at the snow.  I spent a long time trying to figure out where my coat was.  Had I left a clue behind, in the vents or in the boiler room?

It took far too long to connect my thoughts to Lillian.  She had my coat.

It was impulse more than thought, that she needed to know.  That I couldn’t let her go to that meeting tomorrow and face that treatment blind.

I couldn’t let her go to that meeting.

I couldn’t let her go.

My recollection of the approach to the girl’s dormitory was just as scattered as my exit from Claret Hall.  I stumbled through the snow, tripping over patches that I shouldn’t have.  It wasn’t that cold, but the shakes became shivers.

I wasn’t as discreet as I needed to be, and it was sheer chance that I wasn’t spotted as I walked alongside the dormitory, circling around to the back path.  With numb, uncooperative fingers, I scaled the outside.  I made my way up to the window, and slid it open.

In a kind of mechanical, automatic way, I noted that Lillian had probably lubricated the trenches in the frame that the window slid up and down.  It was nearly silent.

I sat on the windowsill, legs hanging inside her room, before making myself lean forward, feet touching ground.  The window slid closed, almost without a noise.

Standing by the window, I watched Lillian, who sat at her desk.  She was wearing a nightgown and a cardigan.  Her hair was short, the entire back of her neck exposed, but the sides were longer and stuck out to either side, blocking my view of her face and ears.  She was writing, pen scratching against paper, periodically looking up to check one of the four tomes that she had sitting in book holders or left open on her desk.  Write, write, write, move over to another piece of paper, to make a note or write down a calculation.

Mid-sentence, she turned to look in my direction, and she jumped so much she nearly fell out of her chair.

“Sy!” she hissed the words, a raised whisper.  “I nearly peed myself!”

Then she smiled.  That smile she’d had on her face as she talked to her mother, which had stirred feelings of wanting inside of me, but it was a reaction to me, this time.  Five times more intense, ten times.  Without bounds, because things were flipped around and the checks and cautions that I normally had just weren’t there.

I couldn’t let her go.

I closed the distance between us, moving right into her personal space, until I could feel her breath on my face and she could feel my breath on hers.  I kissed her like I hadn’t kissed her before.  Before, it was calculated, always with thinking behind it.  To leave her wanting more, to give her a taste of the deeper, more intense kiss she liked the most, without quite giving her enough of it.  This time, I gave her everything she wanted.  No teases, no fluttery barely-there touches of my lips to hers.

When she broke away for air, her breathing was hard, her face flushed, her eyes animated with emotion, a smile on her lips that she was fighting to keep at bay.

“Mary’s going to show up,” she said.

I kissed her again, my chest pressing against hers.  She backed up a bit, to keep her balance, and ended up with her rear end pressing against the edge of the desk.

I had to lean against her more to reach past her to the desk and snuff the candles on top of it with fingers that only had the wet on them from the snow and my climb up the wall.  I dimly registered that my fingertips stung, that they were sensitive to the touch of air on them, but all I really felt was Lillian.  Those same sensitive, stinging fingertips ran up the small of her back, then pulled her closer to me in the now-dark room.

I couldn’t get her close enough.  I wanted her closer, then even closer, until there was overlap.  I wanted Lillian inside that void in my chest, my stomach, and my throat, where there was only grasping want and a kind of despairing, hopeless sort of feeling over how cute she was and how nice it was to be with her.  I wanted to be inside Lillian, to reach inside her heart and throat and stomach and move thoughts and feelings around until she understood how I felt and what needed to be done.

She broke the kiss again, moving her head so her ear was near mine, her panting breaths against my shoulder.  “Sy.”

She kissed the side of my neck, once, and I felt a painful, sharp sadness at just how beautiful that one little touch was.  With it came a terrible, ominous feeling, like all of the emotions and sensations that I hadn’t been feeling since I heard those two different voices in the vents might come crashing back into place.

I didn’t want to feel that.  Only this.  My hands crept further up the small of her back, until I touched the dark green cardigan she wore.  Scratchy wool, the sort that was only comfortable worn over other clothes.  There were big, knobby, rounded buttons on the front, digging into my sternum and my stomach.

I took hold of the cardigan and lifted it up without unbuttoning it, over her chest and head, past her shoulders.  When it was at her forearms and hands, I seized the middle in one hand, and twisted, winding it around my hand, winding it around both of her hands, trapping it there, both of her hands and wrists bound by one of mine.  Her head pulled back, dark brown eyes stared into mine, barely lit by the moonlight bouncing in off the snow outside.

I waited for her to speak, to dash this moment, to mention Mary.  She gave me a shy peck on the lips instead.

Using the cardigan to move her arms and move her, I pulled her in the direction of the bed, one movement to push, pull, twist her over, so she would topple, her rear end and small of her back off the bed, her upper back, shoulders and head on it.  She scooted back in the same moment I crawled forward, above her, straddling her stomach.  My hand, both of her hands, and her cardigan were over her head, locked into place.  The shoulder of that arm was sore, throbbing in a way that suggested I would feel it tomorrow, but I barely cared.

I touched the side of her face, and I saw her smile.

I kissed her the way she liked most, my one hand free to roam.  My mind wasn’t able to hold onto things as well as the typical mind might be.  I had to pick and choose what I kept and why, and I had to remind my brain regularly of things, or skills and things would slip away.  A tricky balance, one that I didn’t always keep, with one skill or another swiftly rusting as I forgot about.

But Lillian… I made a point of remembering the little details, gleaned over nights we’d shared a bed, doing little else besides kissing and cuddling.  I brushed her stomach, halfway between her belly button and her side, and her back arched to press into my hand, because she responded to tickling sensations not by pulling way, but moving closer.  I kissed and lightly bit her collarbone, because touching it always got a surprised reaction out of her, and because my weight on her stomach was pulling the nightgown down just enough to expose it.

She squirmed, and she couldn’t move with her hands in the cardigan or my weight on her stomach.  She could have freed herself if she tried, but she wasn’t trying very hard.  She leaned her head forward, and kissed me on top of my head.

I bit her collarbone harder.  Impulse: I couldn’t let her go.

My hand was at her side, fingers falling into the indents between ribs, fingertips digging in, and I didn’t want to move it.  I pulled my head away from her collarbone, moved to the top of her nightgown, and undid the top button with my mouth.  I kissed the space between button and the hole, then moved my head down, to do the same with the next button.

The buttons went all of the way down, I thought, as I undid it.  My thoughts were still noise and smoke and sadness, but it was at least a warm, animal sort of noise, smoke, and sadness.

Her voice interrupted me on the third button.  “Sy?”

I stopped, cloth in my teeth.  My hand at her side relaxed, and I gave slack at the cardigan.  Not enough to free her, but enough for her to move some, if she needed to.  I looked only at the cloth.  I drew in breath and smelled only her.

“Sy,” she whispered.  She sounded almost afraid.  “You’re crying.”

Tears were falling onto the nightgown and skin I’d bared.  Blotting out into the former.  Lingering on the latter.

She pulled one hand free of the cardigan without undue effort, then the other.  My hand remained wound in the prickly wool.  Both of her arms wrapped around my head, hugging me tight against her chest.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.  “What’s wrong?”

The tears were flowing more freely now.  Stupid.  Boys weren’t supposed to cry.

“I-” I started, and my voice was ragged, as if I hadn’t talked in a very long time.  “I’m breaking up with you.”

My head against her chest, I could feel that she was no longer breathing. I could feel her heartbeat, fast for all the wrong reasons now.

“Not funny,” she said.

It wasn’t funny at all.  We were on the same page on that.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  I tried to pull away and she didn’t let my head go, hugging it where it was.  “I shouldn’t have done this.  I wasn’t thinking straight.”

The words all came out too fast.  I wasn’t sure if she understood me.

“We’re not breaking up,” she said.  “That’s not your decision.  It’s not my parent’s decision, it’s-”

“The school.”

There was only silence, the human, girly, perfumey smell of her, the pleasant sulphur smell of the extinguished candles, and then the sudden, out-of-place laugh of a student in the hallway.

“They know about us.  As long as we’re together, then you can’t ever get your black coat.”

I felt the intake of breath that came with putting the pieces together.  Where I’d been, what I’d heard.

“They know about you taking Wyvern and they don’t like it, but if you’re good then that won’t hold you back.  But us?  They’re going to tear us apart anyway.  Ending this now is best.”

“That’s not your decision to make.”

“It damn well is!” I hissed the words.

Ah, there it was.  The anger I’d dug for in the vents and the boiler, yet was unable to find, then.

“I’d rather be with you, Sy.  I’d rather have the freedom to choose than to have a black coat.”

I can’t let you, I thought.

“Would you?” I asked.  I lifted myself up.  My hands found places on either side of her head, as I loomed over her, staring down into her eyes.  “Would you leave the Academy?  Your parents?  Your friends?

“What?  Sy, leave?  I don’t understand.”

I tried to find the words, and I couldn’t.  I just continued to stare down at her.

“You can’t make me make that choice,” she said.  “Especially not if you won’t explain.”

She was crying, now.  The light from one of the windows gleamed as it caught the track one tear had left on the side of her face.  It wasn’t the sort of reaction I liked provoking from her.

“The Baron wants revenge on me, and Hayle is trying to sell him this.  Us.  So long as I’m here, there will be no happiness for the Lambs.  I’m going to go kill that noble, but with the tools and weapons they have, they will have my scent.  I can draw the Crown’s focus and ire.  I can cover my tracks and I think I can protect any Lambs who don’t come, protect you.  But I would much rather if everyone would come with me.”

“Sy, you can’t.  My parents-”

“Your parents care.  But they want to stifle you.  They asked Hayle to postpone your black coat.  Your dad would rather you never got one, I think.  Hayle agreed.  If you stay, that is what you’re staying for.  You might still get a black coat, and you could even get a black coat early, if the stars align right and the Baron dies.  But you cannot have the black coat and have me.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but only a squeak came out.  She was crying, and it was a messy, beautiful sort of crying, with tears streaming out.  Her hands went to her face, trying to wipe at her eyes, but the tears came at a rate that blinded her.

I spoke around the lump in my throat.  “I can’t stay anyway, Lil.  Jamie, the old Jamie, broke when the memories and burdens got to be too much.  Only an empty shell left.  I’m just about at that point.  I can’t keep doing this.  I can’t be their puppet.  I can’t see another Lamb die.”

“No,” she said, her voice too high.  The heels of each palm pressed into her eyes.

“If I stay, and if we stay together, I will see you fade away the same way Jamie did.  The body will still be there, the eyes, the hair, the voice… but you and I both know it’ll be an empty shell.  You without the passion or ambition is… not you.”

“No,” she said, in that same, high, awful voice.

But she nodded as she said it.

“Yes,” she said, her words now in accord with her actions.

I pulled my weight off the bed without jarring it, climbed off of her without too much movement, stepped back and away.  She remained where she was, hands at her eyes.

I wanted to hug her, and to make this alright, to console and kiss the tears away.

“I broke up with you.  Or you broke up with me, when I asked you to leave.  That’s better than the first one,” I said, finding myself unable to look at her.  “I was acting irrational.  I scared you.  You tried to get me to stay.  I didn’t.  You have no idea where I went, or why.  But a lot of things I said in the last few days suddenly make sense.”

I found my coat and pulled it on.  I opened the window, without a sound.

Lillian spoke, her volume such that it seemed like she thought I was still there, just in front of her.  As it was, I barely heard her.

“Now?” she asked.

I climbed through the window and closed it behind me.

Now, I thought.  I couldn’t stay, not like this.  Too much would be given away.

I didn’t stumble as I walked through the snow.  My path was clear, and my mind turned to the prescient.  The next few steps were too important.

When I passed through the gate and saw Mary there, getting her bag of belongings, it felt as though I’d expected to see her.  I hadn’t, but I’d been wondering where she was, considering her as a factor, and it was a fine line between seeming fitting as a thing and seeming to fit in the bigger picture.

“Sy,” she said.  She smiled as she saw me, and the smile dropped away as I got closer and she saw my face.

I was angry.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Follow, I gestured.

She gave the man at the gate a second glance as I walked past her.  I was halfway to Lambsbridge before she caught up with me.

“We’re going,” I said.  “The train should arrive within thirty minutes.  Not sure where it goes, but it gets us out of here.  That’s the most important thing.”

Now?

The one-word question stung.

Contingencies needed covering.  “We need to get a message to Jamie.  I’ll handle that, I promised, and he needs to help Lil.  You buy a ticket, separate from me.  I’ll find my own way on.  We make our way to Warrick.”

“What happened to Lillian?  I’m going to need an explanation.”

“You’ll get it.  I promise.  But for now, can we please, –please– just focus on getting to where we need to be, so the Baron can die like the maggot he is?”

It was like a switch had flicked in Mary’s voice, her tone of voice and degree of conviction changing.  No more questions or confusion.  Only a hungry, “Yes.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

 

================================================== 10.07 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.7

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“This is going to take all of us,” I murmured.

The train car was dark, without any interior lights.  It wasn’t meant for passengers, though it clearly had been, once upon a time.  The windows were layered with dust, cracked, and the light that came through was scant, though it grew stronger as we approached dawn.  The floor had been removed and retrofitted, the benches and seats pulled out.  Now it was only for luggage, a hundred passengers worth of baggage stacked within and kept in place with straps.

Mary was sitting across from me.  I was unwilling to look her in the face, but I knew her glare was hard as she fixated on me.  I was poised to roll backward and hide behind a stack of bags if anyone came in, but Mary seemed eminently at ease.

“The more of us there are in play, the bigger the chance for mistakes,” she said.  “You have to pay attention to whether you’re involving us because you value what we bring to the table or if you’re doing it because you want our company.”

“Right,” I said, staring down at the floor.  “We’re killing a noble on his home turf.  If that isn’t cause for ordering all hands on deck, then I don’t know what is.”

“We’re all with you, Sy.  This is too important to be anything but,” Helen said.  She was off to one side, excited in that very still way that Helen so often was.  It was reminiscent of a cat, fixated on prey, a reptile poised to strike, and it went with an easy smile that would linger for days in the memory of any male who was of an age to like girls.  In the gloom I could only see the smile.

I smiled back at her, but it was a sad smile.  “You’re with me, but only for now.”

“I think…” Mary said, “The less you talk about that, the easier this will be.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I ached in an emotional way.  I was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food, but it remained that nagging, persistent feeling that consumed me from the inside and reached toward the out.

“When this is done,” she said, “I’m going back to the Academy.”

I winced at the words.

“Lillian can’t leave,” Mary said.  “But even if she went… I don’t know that I would.”

“You would,” I said, with conviction.

“I like being useful,” she said.  “Having a mission, a destination.  The idea of cutting myself free, running, not knowing what happens tomorrow, besides trying to survive?  I don’t know.  I think of being the mission and I think back to when I was with Percy and the Bad Seeds.  When you interrogated me, when I talked to Percy and he didn’t say the things I needed to hear, of the headmistress and the other students, and feeling like I couldn’t catch my balance?”

“What if we went to Fray?” I suggested.  I sounded desperate, which was perhaps fitting, because I was desperate.  “She could give you a purpose.”

“Probably,” Mary said.  I saw her touch her hair, moving it out of the way before she shifted position.  “But is that any better than working for the Academy?  Do you think we can work for her like we worked for them, and that you won’t have to watch the rest of us die?”

It was a rhetorical question.

No, I told myself.

“Sy, you can’t keep fooling yourself.  You know what you’re doing by walking away.  You know what happened last time, when you ran.”

Last time.

Saying I had repressed the memory wasn’t exactly right.  I simply hadn’t preserved it.  I had to work to decide what was important enough to keep stored in my head, as other things crowded it out and took up property.  I’d only retained a glimmer of those miserable days, and now that I was running again, I had to dredge it up, the details eroded by time and by Wyvern injections, and I had to mine those memories for details.

“You weren’t even there,” I said.

I was,” Helen said.  “Jamie was.”

Jamie, off to the side, nodded.  All of the Lambs were present, and of them, Jamie was perched nearest to me, but it was an uncomfortable sort of nearness.  Lillian was just a little further away.  Silent, unwilling to talk, unwilling to even face my general direction.

I could smell her, taste her sweat, even now, separated by well over an hour.

I couldn’t look at anyone.  Things were so twisted up and messy, it was largely my fault, and that was only half of why.

“Do you remember?” Jamie asked.  “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.”

“The Lambs hunted me,” I said.  “Nothing came of it, beyond the first one or two times we crossed paths.  I got away.”

“We got close.  You used your knowledge of the Lambs to anticipate us, then turned yourself in before we got close, toward the end.”

I nodded to myself.

“The Lambs are going to have to hunt you again.  We’ll have to, to prove our loyalty,” Mary said.  “I don’t want to put too fine a point on things-”

You love your fine points, I thought.

“-But this time the Lambs have me.  We have Ashton, and I don’t think Ashton is coming with you.”

I looked at Ashton, who was still, staring out the window.

“Helen?” I asked.

Helen was silent.  The smile remained.

No, I hadn’t expected an answer.

“Let’s change the subject,” I said.  My voice was tense.  “Please.”

The train car was silent, but for the wheels bumping as they passed over less even bits of track or areas where snow had dropped off branches and onto the rail.  The entire car thrummed, the bags jostling.

“The mission,” I said, into the dark space.  “Strategy.”

The seventh member of our group spoke up.  Her doll clacked as she moved it.  “Without knowing exactly what we’re facing, it’s hard to come up with answers, Sylvester.”

“We know we’re facing one lesser noble, one who might have taken on some of the Duke’s staff for the time being,” I said.  “We’re facing his sister, who we have to figure out how to deal with.  The staff of their home, the security countermeasures…”

“Sy,” Gordon said, interrupting her, because she never stopped talking on her own, “I think what Evette is getting at is that you don’t know anything specific.  The resources of the staff, the nature of those countermeasures, the nature of any weapons the Baron might have at his disposal.  Without that, you can’t devise counter-strategies.”

“Exactly,” Evette said.  She held up her posable doll, so it and her hands covered the lower half of her face, and stuck one of its fists in my direction.  Looking at her face was easier, even if the features were less consistent than anyone else’s.  I could even tell myself that those inconsistencies were part of her.  A vat-baby, large eyes, snub nose, wide mouth, everything spaced out slightly wrong, so that she made people uncomfortable if they looked at her.  The features changed, the spacing, but she was never attractive.  Her skin was smooth, her bone structure fine, but no, too alien to be a beauty.  She spoke, moving the doll as if it were the one speaking.  “This is Gordon’s domain, not mine.”

“Plan of attack,” Gordon said.  I made the mistake of trying to recognize his face.  It stung to know I was already losing the particular details and placement.  “Don’t respond to them.  Set up a situation, determine the nature of the engagement.”

“Which requires information,” I said.  Jamie nodded.

“Lay in wait,” Helen said.  “Carefully.  Even if we’re playing the spider, this is his web.  His city.”

“The note you sent back to Lambsbridge for me to read.  You set a time limit for yourself.  Four days,” Jamie said.  He was the new Jamie now.  He’d replaced the old Jamie, who had swapped places, now occupying the faint reflection in the dusty glass window.

“Three,” I said, to myself.  “Three days.  One more day to travel.”

The train slowed down.  Approaching a stop.

Yet no whistle, no horn.

I knew what that meant, there was a reason.

“They don’t blow the whistles when they arrive in an area where the nobles live,” Jamie said.

“We’re here,” Mary said.

I nodded.

It was like waking up from a vivid dream, but it was a dream where I hadn’t slept, and it was one where things had almost been okay.

I put them away one by one, in a very deliberate way.

“You don’t have the luxury of fighting them in their home.  Watch their routine, and decide when and how to fight,” Gordon said.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t quite leave at that.  “You did alright, you know, looking after Lillian.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“It’s what I was asking you to do, when I made that request one of my last words.”

“I know,” I said, staring at the ground.  “I knew.”

The movement over less even rails and between segments of track felt more pronounced now that the train was slowing.

Gordon was neatly put away.

“Trust me,” Mary said.  “But don’t you dare tell me the truth.  If you tip me off, I’m going to start thinking about what to do, and you won’t like how that ends.  I’m your only real ally for the next three days.  But on the fourth-”

I didn’t want to sound it out.  Mary, put aside.  I would be interacting with the real Mary soon enough.

Then Lillian, without any interaction, without any words or anything else.  My heart might have broken if I’d tried it.  The emotions were still too raw to stir up for amusement or for some abstract way of organizing my thoughts.

“Four days,” New Jamie said.  Not the deadline for this mission.  The deadline for what came immediately after.

Ashton gave the suitcase he’d been sitting on a pat, and then he was gone, that rudimentary mental image of him boxed up and set on a very rickety shelf in the mind of Sy.  I lurched to my feet, feeling surprisingly stiff, and I blinked.  My eye was as dry as a bone, as if I hadn’t blinked in a very long time.  It stung, and with that stinging, it started to tear up.

“You’ve got a role to play, Sy,” Helen said.  I could imagine her hands at my shoulders, the kiss at my forehead.  “You know Mary.  You know that a failure or a mistake here will cost the other Lambs, and it might put Mary at risk.  You decided to move now, so pay attention, put your face on.  Play that role.”

Then she licked my hair.

I brought my hand up to touch the moist spot at my hairline.  There was no Helen there for my arms to bump into as I raised them.  Sweat, nothing more.

I looked at Evette.  The doll, much like her face, like all of their faces, seemed to change in ways I couldn’t put my finger on.  The details were too hard to remember, for the others, wyvern left me without that, but with Evette, well, she had never been real.  An aborted project.

“We would have gotten along, Sylvester,” she said.

“We would have despised each other,” I countered.  I stumbled a little as the train came to a stop.  “Too much overlap in the same role.”

“You would have adapted your role, like you did with the others,” she said, hugging the doll.  In that moment, she seemed very young, no older than Ashton was now.  With that lack of age came an odd lack of inflection and exaggeration, as if a lack of age meant more maturity.  But it was just the way Ashton was, even the way Helen was.  The unrestrained, childlike manner wasn’t there because the personalities wouldn’t be.

“I would have resented you, because you got the big moments, the flourishes, the problem solving, like I resent Helen when she can get someone wrapped around her finger, or Gordon for kicking ass.  We would have been oil and water, rivals of the bitterest sort.”

“But it would have been fun,” she said, extending her arms to thrust the doll out, gesticulating with it.  “You would have loved me like you love them.”

“A ton of fun, and I would have.”

She was more stubborn than the others, in a way.  My musings of what she would have been like were vivid enough to be a hallucination, but I wasn’t sure how to compartmentalize it, how to process her and what she meant, or the message I was supposed to take away.

“…I brought you along because I worried I might get lost,” I said.  The explanation was for myself, a thought spoken aloud so it might help me answer my own questions and shake the image of her.

“Is that the only reason you brought me along, Sylvester?” she asked.

The side of the train car made horrific snapping sounds as clasps came undone.  The lower half of the outside wall folded out and down, and light streamed in, clearer than the light that came through the windows.  The men on the outside began to pull out the luggage down and out for the passengers.

I was alone in the car.  I made sure to grab hold of my suitcase.  Well, not my suitcase.

I double checked the location of Mary’s suitcase.  I’d removed a tag from another case and attached it to hers, with a short note attached.  I left it where it was.

Pressing my ear to the door that connected this luggage car to the adjoining passenger car, I could hear the babble of conversation.  I reached up to the handle and opened it.

There was a small crowd of people packed in the short pathway that led to the stairs down from the train car.  I got weird looks and some resistance as I worked to put myself in the midst of the crowd.  Still, I found a bit of space in front of a slower elderly woman, and hauled the small case of luggage into the space with me.

I moved with the crowd, onto the train platform and beyond it.

The Baron Richmond had retired to Warrick after the fighting in Lugh.  Named after his family’s territory overseas, the city was small, contained, and existed at his behest.  It was a place I’d never been, and I’d never known anyone from the city.  I’d heard rumors, however.  Richmond House was on the outskirts of the town, and with that one detail, it was easy to give the rumors some merit.  Monsters lived here, of the type that resembled humans and of the type that didn’t.

The houses and buildings were new, but the style was old.  The houses were riddled with details, with highlights of quality, pleasant touches and signs that people had attempted to make themselves at home here, but in other ways, I felt as though it was too restrained, too ‘safe’.  There was a lack of authenticity that pervaded everything.  It was early in the morning, and there were far too few people around – a twentieth of what I’d seen in Radham, the morning I’d left to visit Craig.  It was considerably earlier, true, but even with that in mind, a mere twentieth?

The houses, now that I paid closer attention, were individually different, but it was a posed sort of difference, as if a singular designer had decided that this house needed a porch, and that house needed a fancy chimney, and the next house couldn’t have either because it would be too similar…  Yet there was a signal that something was wrong or odd in how that similarity had been avoided, the angles the houses had been placed at, and the palette chosen.

I thought of it as a singular designer because the palette and the suite of options seemed so lacking in imagination or breadth.  Either the designer had been working with a very limited set of options, or their sense for design was a limited one.  Alone, given one house or three houses, it would have made for beautiful work.  Held to the sword and told to set the standard for a city?  It made for a city without enough soul to go around.  Every construction a variation on the same theme, layered with snow.

I looked for the tallest building around and headed in that direction, taking a longer, winding route as I aimed to get the lay of the land and separate myself from Mary.  It was a church, the religious symbol sawed off of the tower on top of it.

No, wait, had to remember.  This was his city.  The nobles and the churches didn’t get along, and the nobles had won that particular war a long time ago, well before this city had appeared.  Interesting, then, that the Baron would have this city built up around him with an aesthetic he liked, and that he would include a church among it all.  A church without the religion, judging by the nondescript stained glass and the lack of any symbol.

The city was framed by flat terrain and by thick collections of pine trees.  Richmond House peeked out through it, looking over the city.  What drove the Baron or his predecessor to include a church here?  Did it lend authenticity to Warrick, when and if Warrick was viewed from a distance, or was it something else?  I made a mental note and hoped I would remember to make use of it.

The train was slow to depart, and but for a hiss of steam, it made almost no noise in the process.  I imagined it would creep away until it was out of earshot, and only then would it pick up speed as it normally would.

I had a bad feeling.  The city was so quiet it left my heart pounding, the thump of my heartbeat seeming to grow louder as I dwelt on it.  I felt like I was being watched, and the dim lighting of Warrick in sunrise wasn’t quite enough for me to see beyond the frost-touched glass of kitchen or living room windows.  In other places, the curtains blocked the view.

My uneasiness swelled, and it took me a little while to put a finger to why.  I could hear something, but it was indistinct, a low sound just below my threshold of hearing.  Talking, movement, shuffling, muffled by intervening walls, but all throughout the city, it was taking place.  A rumble of thunder without any lightning, muffled by snow, stone, and dense woods.

The people on the street didn’t seem to care.  Three out of four of them seemed to stare at me.  They were men and women of varying ethnicity, all in dark, nice clothing, their hair neat, and just like the houses, they were individual but restrained.  The personal touches were there, but nobody stood out from the pack.  Faces were heavily lined, skin bore the marks of hard living, despite the apparent peace and class of the area.  They walked with their heads down.

I saw a pale man with coarse blond hair and stubble, both of which were turning white with age.  He wore a fine suit jacket and shirt with slacks and shined boots, but he walked with a slave’s hobble.  No chains bound him now, but once upon a time they had, and they had pressed hard against his ankles, doing permanent damage, so that he now limped slightly with both feet.  He walked with both hands in front of him.  When his footing was sure, he walked with his hands clasped in front of him.  When he was unsure, he held his arms further apart, and walked with wrists up and hands limp and close to one another.  A man who had been in chains so long that habit was impossible to break, a permanent scowl etched in his face.

Except now he wore clothes nice enough that they wouldn’t look out of place in the upper-class dining area of Claret Hall.

The rumble in the background intensified.  I stopped taking the long way around and headed straight for the ‘church’, cutting through a path between buildings.  Too late.

Doors opened.  People emerged in clusters.  I stayed between the buildings, the church and Mary now in view, but a growing crowd was between us.

The groups were made up of men and women, sometimes with a child or children, and each group accompanied by a monster.  All were dressed well, including many of the more human-shaped creatures.  Other humanoid experiments were left naked.  A man without any eyes, nose or lips bared his teeth as he walked alongside a family of four.  His skin seemed unnaturally thick, and was tough enough to let him walk barefoot in snow, his member swinging as he walked.  Another had two and a half legs and tried to walk with each of them, moving forward with the help of an overlong arm riddled in old scars and stitches from surgery.

Here and there, a man in a doctor’s coat or a professor’s coat walked alone.  Here and there, again, the monsters walked alone, emerging from the larger buildings.  There were more exceptions to the rule, men and women in uniform, stern looking, spreading out and standing at street corners.  I could see one, a thug of a man with sleeves left too long, raising his nose to rub snot from the bottom of it with one extended finger, and I saw tattoos at his hand.  An ex-prisoner.

Prisoner, slave, working girls, beggar, people who had gone hungry for their entire lives and who wore that history on their bodies, even now that they ate well.  I could see the signs, the scars, the marks of old diseases that coin and Academy science hadn’t erased, the sallow skin and premature aging.  The picture was becoming clearer, but the monsters didn’t.

 

As if it was a rule of law that none dared disobey, the monsters went without any acknowledgement at all.  Not a word, not a gesture, nor a moment’s eye contact.  Watching the scene, I genuinely wondered if I was imagining it all, if I’d put my mind to the wrong ends back at the train and somehow broke something.

All of the families with children were headed in the same general direction, the men and women in other directions, off to find work or manage errands for the early morning.

They can only go out with the monsters, and the monsters can’t come out while the train is here, I thought.  Life under a strict schedule, a rule that was obeyed without question.

They had been staring out the windows, watching for the train to depart, and eyes had fallen on me.  It was security, the city laid out as a tableau, such that a stranger with a bag in hand stood out.  That stranger might very well get reported on.

I grit my teeth.  If we’d failed before we’d even started-

No, I couldn’t think that way.  They were frightened people, and the one thing they were frightened of above all else was the Baron.  Would they speak out and speak up, if it drew his attention, when they had plausible deniability?  Probably not.

If I interacted with any one of them individually, however, they might feel compelled to pass on word to more important people.  The police force, too, would be something to watch out for.  They had a personal stake in reporting anything unusual.

I looked at the thick copse of trees between the city and Richmond House.

More security that way.

I shook my head, turned my attention to the street of people that separated Mary and I, and timed my exit, joining the rear of a family with a four legged, hunchbacked thing at the head of the pack.  A wagon that was making its way up the street would block the view of the nearest police officers.

No sooner did I join the group than the hunchbacked thing turned, lunging past the two parents and one child.  I hurled myself back, and I landed on my rear end, case of clothes falling free of my hand as I stared up at the hissing thing, my other hand near my jacket, where I had a knife stowed.  Drool that had leaked from the corners of its mouth had frozen.

A warning to stay away, nothing more, thankfully.

The parents of the family didn’t look at me.  Averted eyes, discomfort, disquiet.  The child gave me a confused look, but didn’t speak.

Looking back, I could see that the pair of women and little girls with a long-haired creature in a dress looming behind them had stopped in their tracks.  They were waiting for things to move along, keeping a distance that went so far into the realm of ‘respectful’ that it veered straight into ‘terrified’.

I picked myself up and collected my luggage.  I mimed the body language of others, hurrying to the side of the wagon I’d been hoping to use for cover.  I timed my movement past the rear of the passing wagon so groups of people would obscure others’ view of me.  One of the officers further down the street was craning his head, hoping to see what had caused the brief commotion.

Before he made it a point of interest, I hurried across the rest of the road and into the alleyway that I had last seen Mary in.  I had to round a corner before I found her.

“You made it,” she said, her voice quiet.

I nodded.

She leaned forward to peer around the corner and watch the procession of people.

“I don’t even know,” I said, in answer to a question she hadn’t asked.

“I was worried you wouldn’t show up,” she said.  “Was it so important that we couldn’t be seen together?  Plausible deniability if one of us gets caught?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You look like a ghoul, Sy,” she said.  “Dark circles under your eyes.  You didn’t sleep?”

I shook my head.

“I was able to, just a bit,” she said.  “I spent the rest of my time worrying and feeling lonely.  I’m glad you’re here.”

“You’ve said as much three times now,” I said.  “I’m glad you’re here.”

“You stayed in the luggage car?” she asked.  When I nodded, she asked, “You don’t usually spend nights by yourself anymore.  Was it lonely?”

“No,” I said.  I glanced around the corner to see the tide of families and their monsters.  “No, it wasn’t too bad, except for the lack of sleep.  My imagination kept me entertained.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.08 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.8

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“I promised you an explanation,” I told Mary, as I kept my voice low.

“You did.”

As citizens of Warrick glanced down the length of the alleyway beside the church, Mary and I had elected to move along, making ourselves harder to track and close in on.  The people of this city seemed to have been terrified into compliance, and that raised questions about who the police were, standing in the midst of intersections and on street corners, watching over everything.  I couldn’t imagine anyone committing any crimes in Warrick, given the atmosphere, and that suggested the local ‘law’ was here for the likes of us.

The best thing to do was to stay moving.

I braced myself.  “Lillian and I broke up.”

“Alright,” she said.

Alright?” I asked.  “That’s it?  You sum up your reaction with one word?”

She turned her eyes to me, and I could see the emotion behind them.  Dark things, sharp things, cold things.

“Ah,” I said, in response to the look.

“If it was Lillian standing right here and the positions were reversed, she would hit you.  Several times, I think.”

“Probably.”

“Jamie would tell you off.  Gordon would too, but he’d be blunt about it.  Helen… I don’t know.  I imagine she would go to Lillian and cling to her, hug her to make her feel better, and shoot you spiteful looks, all in an effort to make sure you knew you were the bad guy.”

“Sounds about right.”  Spiteful looks not because spite was something Helen really felt, but because it made sense.

“But you like the attention.  You crave it, it validates you and gives you something to use.  You can twist the anger, the frustration, or the sadness into something else,” Mary said.  “I’m not going to give you fuel or anything you can use.  Lillian is my friend, and she deserves better.”

Mary sure was evoking a lot of emotion for someone who’d just said she wasn’t giving me anything.  Thing was, it was distilled disappointment.  Her tone was what I might expect from an owner chastizing a puppy for shitting on the rug.  The owner doesn’t expect much better from the puppy, but by golly and by gosh, they were going to let that puppy know they weren’t happy to be washing shit out of the rug.

“I listened in on the meeting,” I said.  I kept an eye out, looking everywhere but at Mary.  “They know Lillian took Wyvern.  They know about me and her.  If I stay, she loses her black coat.  If I leave… there’s no guarantee, but there’s at least a chance.  We talked about it.  Lillian and me.  We kind of agreed.  This is what has to be done.”

“And this?” Mary asked.

A part of me had hoped for a one-eighty, a shift of attitude.  Another part of me knew she wouldn’t.  Her aggression, the shift of topic to press the attack, it caught me off guard.

“This… I needed to get away.  The cards were right.  It’s something we can use.”

“She deserves better, Sy.”

“There is no such thing as better, not here,” I said, my voice tense.  I sounded hostile now.  “What do you expect, Mary?  It’s the Academy, it’s the nature of what I am and what she’s striving for and the fact that they can’t go hand in hand!”

We’d stopped walking.  I was facing Mary.  Looking her in the eye was hard.  Keeping my tongue under control was harder still.

“What I expect, Sylvester,” Mary said, “That you don’t get into a relationship with her in the first place if you’re not going to bend over backwards and make things perfect.  You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.  Use it.  Find a way to get Lillian her black coat without her heart being broken along the way.”

“You might as well ask me to make pigs fly,” I said.  “That coat she wants to wear?  There is not one single genuine human being out there who has done the work, met the criteria and earned it without shedding tears along the way.  It’s a reality, and it’s one we ran smack-dab into in Lugh, when we were asked to retrieve Emily Gage.  She’s going to have to make the tough calls and face ugly compromises.  Heartbreak comes part and parcel with the job.”

“Not with this.  Not with the Lambs,” Mary said.  “We support each other.  We make each other stronger.

That’s my cue to ask ‘And Gordon?  You’re not experiencing any heartbreak right now?’  Then you say ‘that’s different, I knew what I was getting into’, and I retort that Lillian did too.  That she knew I was a bastard.  I say that, and you concede the argument and you hate me a little, for a short period of time.

I didn’t want Mary to hate me for the short period of time we were about to spend together.

‘I know I could have handled the breakup ten times better, and if I were in my best frame of mind I could have even twisted the situation to our advantage or forced the committee’s hand.  But I’m not doing okay.  Losing Gordon hurts.  I’m hurting as much as Lillian is, maybe even more.  I’m just better at hiding it.’ 

I say that, and you remember what I said in front of Duncan.  You pry, and I don’t think I have it in me to lie to your face and stay clever enough to avoid dropping any clues about the fact that I plan to leave for good.

It was like talking to the Mary I’d imagined in the train car, except this was a Mary I could look straight in the eye.  The conversations played through my head, and I dismissed them all.

“You’re right,” I finally said.

“I know I’m right,” Mary said.  “If you knew there was the dimmest possibility you were going to hurt her, you shouldn’t have entered into this relationship.”

I almost went with the same sort of response I had just given, agreeing, offering little resistance.  Almost.  Instead, I said, “That’s wrong.”

The look in her eyes was dangerous.

“It’s wrong,” I said again.  “This going as badly as it did doesn’t invalidate everything that came before.  I don’t regret it, even knowing what it came to.  I’m not going to be ashamed of it, I’m not going to apologize.  If someone gave me the opportunity to take it all back, I wouldn’t, and I don’t think Lillian would either.”

She broke eye contact, scowling a little more.  She knew I was right.

“If you avoid every relationship because it could go bad-”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she said, glowering.  “I’m saying she deserves better than that.  If you wanted to date Fran and then say ‘oh, well, bad things sometimes happen’, fine.  But Lillian has kept us alive, she’s staked everything on this.  She’s a good friend, a true Lamb, and you don’t just roll the dice.  Not with her.  You don’t do that, Sy.”

Again, I couldn’t challenge her with the most obvious retorts, because it brought up Gordon and it got ugly.

Did she want me to challenge her and bring up Gordon?

“You’re saying it’s fine, then, to get into relationships, to figure ourselves out and figure other people out, let hearts get broken, but only if it’s people we don’t really care about?” I asked.

“That’s-

She didn’t finish the statement.  She didn’t have a retort.  She continued to glare daggers at me.

Given her body language, I imagined that somewhere in her thought processes, a part of her brain was justifying stabbing me.  She was tense, and I imagined her all coiled up, ready to strike out at the slightest provocation.  Because a verbal lashing wasn’t immediately in the cards, a physical one wasn’t out of the question.

With that in mind, I touched her like I might touch a readied mousetrap.  My hands touched her upper arms, near the shoulder.  I hadn’t planned to, hadn’t even thought I would, but I reflexively grabbed hold, bunching the fabric of her coat in my fists.

“In a better world, Mary, I would agree with you.  That at our age, we should keep things light.  That a good friendship is more important than a potential relationship.  But we don’t have the luxury of time, and none of us, with the exception of Lillian, get to plot out our futures that far.”

“You’re saying that like I don’t know,” Mary said.  Her voice was stiff, wooden.  Her arms were straight down at her sides.

“And you’re blaming me as a proxy for yourself, because you’re feeling complicated things about Gordon being gone, and the relationship you two had,” I said.

She looked down at me, frowning.

“He cared about you, you cared about him.  You two were awfully private about what you had going on.  I don’t know if it was mostly talking or throwing knives, or if it went way further.  Knowing Gordon, I could make guesses, but that’s between you and him.  The stuff Jamie told you probably covered Gordon’s perspective.  How things ended doesn’t impact what you had.  Don’t let it.”

“Yeah,” she said, but her voice was hollow, as if she was barely paying attention.

I grabbed her harder, twisting the fabric so it pulled tighter against her upper arms.  “How things ended doesn’t impact what you had.  Don’t let loss or change poison or twist your memories.  Understand?

Her focus shifted, her eyes meeting mine.

She knows.  She’s just figured something out.  It was a thought that flashed across my mind.  In my urgency to give her a final message, to work in a plea before I left the Lambs, that she might remember after I was gone and look at in a new light, I had tipped her off.

She shook her head, smiling a bit.  “And somehow you did it.  I got into a discussion with you, and you turned the tables on me.  Worse, you almost make sense.  Just like our very first conversation, in the boiler room of Mothmont.”

The tone, the change in expression, the cadence of it, I could put that together, and I could know with near certainty that I’d been wrong, and that Mary hadn’t yet figured it out.  If she had, there would have been a moment where she had to consider the implications, or the smile might have faltered, or something.  She wasn’t an actress like Helen, she was a plant, a hidden weapon.  She could lie and play a role as well as any of us but Helen, but Mary couldn’t bury something of that magnitude while exchanging one mask out for another.

“I left a message with Jamie, to look after Lil,” I said.  “She might stay at Lambsbridge, instead of alone in the dormitory, I don’t know.  But she will bounce back from this.  The most important thing is that she continues her studies and takes her shot at a black coat.”

“I feel like I should be there for her,” Mary said.

“I know,” I said.  “And I know it sucks, not having her be there for you.”

And there, finally, on hearing that, Mary gave me something that I didn’t have to infer or analyze to dig up.  A moment of weakness.

None of us were coping well.  We all buried it and dealt with it in our own individual ways.

Mary missed Gordon, and she had complicated feelings, and it was possible that Lillian was the only person who could hear her out about that.

“I can’t send you back to her, but I know the next best thing, as far as getting all of this relationship muck and mixed-up emotion out of your head,” I said.

And there, even as she waited for me to finish saying it, I could see Mary adjust, holding herself straighter, focusing more, ready.

I didn’t supply the answer.  I waited for her to, instead, because it was more important that she respond, that she draw the conclusion instead of me forcing it on her.  If I simply said it, then Mary would take it as manipulation.

Odd, that I was being so calculating and manipulative in trying to avoid letting things be taken that way.

“You want to kill the Baron,” she said.

“Yes.  Thank you, God.”

We both turned a little away from each other.  In a very practiced way, we each looked in different directions, checking the critical directions of up, north, south, east, and west, without wasting effort by having more than one person check the same direction twice.  I picked up my luggage, gestured, and we started walking faster.

“You didn’t have luggage when you got on the train,” she said.  “And you weren’t wearing those clothes.”

“I had all night alone in the luggage car,” I said.  “I looked around.  I found a suitcase that belongs to someone about my size.  The clothes are a little juvenile, but it should do me.”

“Bound for here?  Can you blend in?”

“No and no,” I said.  I raised a hand in a signal to stop and leaned around a corner to look out toward the street.  Beyond the exit of the alley and across the street, two families were talking.  The monsters that lurked behind either family went without so much as a glance, but one wife that was doing less of the talking seemed to shrink under the creature’s presence.  She was young.  Barely out of her teen years and already a mother, by the looks of things, her child one or two years old.  Her husband was old enough to be her father.  “Nobody can blend in without having a black coat, police uniform, or a pet monster.”

“Then we need a pet monster,” Mary said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “What we need before any pet monster is answers.  I’ve got a name and a general address.  I think that’s our first stop, if it’s humanly possible to get there without getting spotted.”

“We should lay low until dark,” Mary said.

“We could.  But a place like this, I imagine there’s a curfew, and I hate to spend time doing nothing, when we want to minimize how long we’re gone for.  At least right now, we can stash our luggage and try to get lost in the crowd,” I said.

“You tried that, not ten minutes ago,” Mary said.  “You got growled at.”

I frowned.

“If we headed to Richmond house instead, then-”

“No,” I said.  “It’s not an accident that this whole place is so hard to slip through.  That stretch of woods between this city and Richmond House are going to be another puzzle altogether.  Gordon was right, the-”

“Gordon?” Mary asked.

I blinked, then recovered.  “I’m thinking about something he said a long while ago.  Sorry, fatigued.  But this turtle is too hard to crack.  We need for him to poke his head out.  If we can figure out his routine, then we can exploit it.”

“I’ve never imagined a target on this level who didn’t have the sense to vary his routine,” Mary said.

“He likes his trappings,” I said.  We’d reached the end of this particular maze of alleyways.  Going left, right, or forward would mean stepping out of the alleys and onto the street, which meant danger.  Going back was backtracking, and that wasn’t good either.  I gestured, Mary confirmed, and we crept along the alley.  I kept my voice down so it wouldn’t be overheard beyond the general noise of horses traveling on the cobblestone road nor the babble of conversation.  “The houses, the people, the church in a city where religion is discouraged, the system of this.  I’d put him down as someone who enjoys a perverse routine.”

“Okay,” Mary said.  “If so, that’s something we can exploit.  Gordon’s right.”

It felt strange to hear her say it like that.  I wasn’t sure if she was humoring me or not.

After we had lost Jamie original, I’d had several slips like that.  Mary had noticed enough times.  She had always been polite enough to hold her tongue, but that was Mary.  She’d been a lady from the time she was a young girl.

The coast was clear enough.  No officers.  A quick glance suggested we were close to the river.  Head up, walk with purpose, and trust others not to ask questions.

We crossed the street, my heart pounding as I expected an outcry, a howl from one of the creatures that stood by.

“Do we have a destination?” Mary asked.

I fished in a pocket for a slip of paper,  I handed it to her.

“This is atrocious writing.”

“Craig’s.  He’s a street kid, you’re a Mothmont girl.  Don’t hold him to your standards.”

“This says… Mcormick?  And water… wheel?”

“Water mill,” I said.  “There are only a few places I’ve seen so far that could have one.”

Cities were living, breathing organisms, and even though Warrick was an artificial city, it needed to drink.  Any city that formed would first do so around the wells, the rivers, and the coasts.  A careful eye would be able to see that city’s flow.  It wasn’t memorization or calculation like Jamie might be able to do, but I had seen enough cities and paid enough attention to the logic behind them that I’d developed a limited instinct for things.  What made sense, what didn’t, and why.

This was a stitched city.  The aesthetics of the individual pieces were of an older sort, the formation of it all relatively new.  It was dead and lifeless, still, the overall system worked, but it was forced, motivated by something I didn’t yet understand.  There was no will here, either.  The Crown had this place fully in its grip.

But the stones that built this place had come from somewhere, the design still echoed designs that had come about naturally, and water, transportation and everything else had been prioritized in their own way.

We reached another street, closer to the woods, but it was so narrow that there was only room for one wagon to travel down it – if another were to come the opposite way, one of them would have had to stop and turn around.

Though the street was narrow, we had a vantage point to see along the length of the street.  It stopped at a ‘T’-shaped intersection, the right and left branches running alongside a river.  Where the river disappeared into the trees of the woods, a water mill was perched at the mouth.  A wooden wheel, grown as much as it had been crafted, with branches rather than struts, was turning.  The sound of it was audible even from a distance.

“Craig gave you directions, didn’t he?” Mary asked.  “You didn’t find this on your own.”

I smiled.

The street was out of the way, the houses were less grand, but they were still nice enough, and nobody here seemed to be out and about, though I could see movements indoors.  Just far enough on the outskirts that anyone with a place to be wasn’t going to be here.  I felt a dozen different set of eyes on me as we made our way down the street.

I was glad that the water mill was as large a construction as it was.  The aesthetic was the same as so many other buildings in Warrick, but the structure was half-again as tall as the typical house, and rather long.  A short stone bridge allowed us to cross the river.

I rapped my knuckles on the door.

I heard shuffling, the scrape of wood on stone, likely a chair, and then the door swung open.

The man was tall, muscular, and healthy.  His beard was full and his hair was wild, and his hands bore the callouses of someone who had been working with his hands for a very long time.  Something gray-black had stained them, coloring the cracks even deeper.

His eyes, though, heavily lined, recessed, and set below bushy eyebrows that had been touched by the staining and left more bristly than they might normally have been, were filled with darkness.

“You have the wrong address,” he said.

“Mcormick,” I said.

“You might know my name, boy, and you might have a reason to be knocking on this door, but that’s a very different thing from me being willing to hear you out and hear your reasons.”

He started to slam the door – I stopped it with my foot, planting it at the foot of the door so it couldn’t move any further.

His gaze, as he looked down at me, was a dispassionate one.  I didn’t flinch.  I stared up at him, though he was nearly twice my height.

He reached forward, and he seized me by the throat.  He started to lift, and Mary caught his wrist, adding her strength to my weight, keeping him from hauling me off my feet.  If I was reading him right, going solely by the sheer lack of empathy in his eyes, he might’ve thrown me down the stone steps leading up to his door.

“Girl,” he said, “I’m far from being a gentleman.  I will strike you, and I will break those pretty white teeth of yours with one good backhand.  Let go of my arm.”

Mary let go of his arm.

As he lifted me up, however, he came to an abrupt stop.  Mary’s other hand had produced a knife, which she now held so that the blade pressed against his wrist.  Lifting me up further would have meant raising his arm into the blade.

I saw the movement as another blade appeared in her other hand.  The blades had been oiled so that they wouldn’t reflect light, I realized.  No flash of reflected light as they passed through the sunlight.  This one she pressed into Mcormick’s inner thigh.

He lowered me, very slowly, and then released me.  His arm remained extended, bent at the elbow, with the knife held against the wrist.

“Awfully close to my dangling vitals, girl.”

“Walk backwards, slowly,” she said.  “We’re coming inside.  Do you have any friends or family in there?”

“No, no friends or family.  My wife is out with my little girl.  She will be back.  I’m not saying that to threaten you or try to encourage you to leave sooner, I’m just making sure you know.”

Mary nodded.  “Walk.”

He didn’t walk.  “You didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway.  I’ve got a ‘born in there.  I don’t want you to be surprised.”

“Born,” Mary said.  Less of a question, more of a trying out of the word.

“The monsters.”

“Mm,” Mcormick made a sound.  He started to walk backward.

“Wait,” Mary said.  Mcormick stopped.  “Call it off.  Do whatever you need to do to make sure it won’t cause us any trouble.”

Again, that passionless look.  He looked at us like he might look at a bad paint job on a house.  We warranted a slight downward turn of the lips, nothing more.  “He won’t cause you trouble.”

Then he walked backward.  We followed, Mary staying with Mcormick, while I focused on closing the door, looking around the surroundings where Mary was unable to.

The ‘born’ was sitting in the midst of a trio of flat rocks that had been propped up to accommodate it.  Normal furniture wouldn’t ever have done.  Six hundred pounds, easily, all apparently in fat, not muscle.  It smelled like filth had gotten trapped in the crevices and festered.  That in itself wasn’t so monstrous.  No, it was the face.  The head was shaped like a baby’s might be, overlarge in proportion to its body, rounded, sparse in its hair, with large features.  Frozen on that face was an expression of laughing glee, the open mouth exposing spaced out teeth, many of which had grown in wrong.  Its mouth was open wide enough that it couldn’t swallow properly, and that left streaks of drool to accumulate and dry out on its bare, naked chest.

It watched me, its head and eyes moving fluidly as I crossed the room.

I forced myself to break eye contact with it.  I took in the house.  Everything was good quality.  Money had been spent to buy the pots and pans, the utensils, and the dishes.  There was a rug on the floor, which was stone with wood grown between the stones, both stones and wood cut to a flat surface, all the splinters and hard edges smoothed away.  A fire burned low in the fireplace.  From the other room, I could hear the steady grind of the mechanisms that the water wheel outside was helping to turn.

“We got your name from the mice.”

“I know more than one group of mice, boy.”

“Doesn’t matter, I don’t think,” I said.  “All that matters is that you’re the friendliest face we’re going to see in Warrick.”

He smiled at me, and there was a sneer somewhere in that smile.

“We’re in town for a little while.  We need answers,” I said.  I took a circuitous route around the room, bending down now and again to look at shelves, and the books and knick-knacks that had accumulated on those shelves.

“The way I look at it,” Mcormick said, “I did my time.”

“Prison,” Mary said.

“That too.  But I’m talking about the mice.  I helped them out, I more than repaid the debt that I owed them for helping me through my younger years, for teaching me skills, for all of it,” he said.  “That debt was repaid tenfold the first time I needed to lose something hot and I handed it to the mice of Bradford.  It was a good score, and I got none of it, you hear what I’m saying.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” I said.

“Because the mice owe me, now.  These scales aren’t balanced.  They pay me back by taking in anyone I send their way.  Not many, but one every five years or so, yeah?  And this is how I’m imagining they got my name.”

“Maybe…” I said. I looked over the kitchen, taking note of the various knives.  I opened a cupboard and bent down, looking inside.  Potatoes, onions, and some strange Academy vegetable I’d never seen before, which was riddled with roots.  I felt around the edges of the cabinet, and found bottles.  They were glass, but they were the sort of glass that was meant to be broken.  There were chemical labels glued to the faces of each bottle.  The man watched as I set them on the counter.  “…But I think you’re losing sight of the goal.  You give us answers, and we disappear.”

“Alright,” Mcormick said.  He shifted position, leaning back.  Someone less keen than Mary might have been startled by the sudden change in position, been slow to keep the knife at his throat as he leaned back.  “I’m listening, boy.”

It was, I noted, an extension of one of the little tricks that I knew the mice sometimes learned.  When arms were being tied, the base of each palm was pressed together, the elbows held far apart.  When the arm was returned to an ordinary position, there would be more slack available.  He’d held one position as he was restrained, held at knifepoint in a chair, but there had been room for slack.

He was talking to me, but he was testing Mary.  Had she been slow, he might have made a move.  No coincidence, either, that this curmudgeon had timed the trick with his agreement to cooperate.  Who would retaliate against him by cutting him, so soon after he’d agreed to answer questions?

I changed direction, heading straight for the man.

He tensed as I drew close, reaching for the table he’d seated himself behind.  Mary reminded him of the knife, and he went still.

On the underside of the table, less than a foot from his hand.  I had to work for a second to figure out the right way to pull it free.  A loaded pistol.

“Answers,” I said.  I tucked the pistol into my pants, under my jacket and behind my shirt.  “Let’s start with the general stuff.  Tell me about Warrick.”

“A lovely town.  Quaint,” Mcormick said.

I knelt by the chair, felt the underside, and freed the hatchet that was there.

The way he looked at me like he hated me a little suggested I’d found the last weapon in arm’s reach.

“A quaint town where the people are scared to death,” I said.  “And where you feel the need to have weapons stowed throughout the house.”

“Mm,” he said.  He smiled.  Again, that sneer.

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll be more specific.  What the hell are those things?”  I used the hatchet to point in the direction of the creature that on the far end of the room.

“The ‘born,” Mcormick said.

I really didn’t want to have to torture this guy to get a straight answer out of him.  Mary shifted the knife.  This time it drew a line of blood.  She and I both watched as the blood congealed, formed a droplet, and traced a line down Mcormick’s neck.  Mary caught it with a handkerchief before it could meet the collar of his shirt and stain it.

“We got sent here, or we volunteered to come,” Mcormick said.  “Convicts, the poor, the bankrupt who didn’t want to give up the lives they’d led, slaves, injured soldiers.  Get paid a small amount for nothing except living here.  Nice homes, nice things.”

“But?” I asked.

“But, we’re the poor, we’re criminals, we’re bastards with demons that breathe down our necks, yeah?  It’s a perverse sort of game, right?  They expect us to fail, and most of the time, enough of us do that we don’t need to worry.  Man, woman, child, whoever, they get taken up to that house in the woods, and they don’t come back.  Playthings for Baron or Twin.”

“Most of the time,” Mary observed.

“Sometimes he’s in a mood.  Sometimes he’s upset about something, and he takes it out on us.  Good policy, should that time come up, to be the sort that keeps one’s head down, not taking visitors, and not drawing any attention.”

“And the ‘born?” I asked.

“Keep us in line,  keep us from running.  They remind us of the circumstance every minute of every day, like consciences given form, and I don’t think there’s many here who don’t have something ugly on their conscience, yeah?  If we were to stir up something and cause a fuss, they’d rouse.  The right cue or the right signal, they put us down.  Meanwhile, we’re expected to feed them, keep them healthy.  They’re our papers, in a manner of speaking, and getting caught without your papers is trouble.”

“I’m guessing you don’t know the exact cues or triggers,” Mary said.

“Mn,” Mcormick grunted.

“You said your wife and child were out,” I said.  “Without him?”

“They are.  She’s with a friend of ours.  So long as that friend has a ‘born with, no problem.”

“Money, freedom from jail, in exchange for a lack of freedom here, being under their thumb.  I can see where some would take the deal.”

“Most regret it.  Starving on a street is better,” Mcormick said.  He gave a nod in the direction of the monster at the far end of the room.  “That right there, that’s hell.  Leaves a stain on you.”

I saw Mary’s expression change.  The knife wavered, and Mcormick winced a little, pulling his head back a fraction.

“Yeah,” Mcormick said.  He seemed almost gleeful at Mary’s realization.  That glee, in turn, led to me connecting the dots, seeing a faint glimmer of resemblance.  “There’s another rule you might have noticed, a price that’s paid.  Gotta form nice and tidy family units.  Then you got to give them your firstborn.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.09 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I walked over to a chair on the far end of the table, plopped myself down, and felt underneath the seat.  I found another hatchet, the metal scarred with use in a way the other one hadn’t been.  I gave Mcormick a look and set it down on the table.

He was still enjoying our shock.

Best to change the topic.  I couldn’t let him take the conversational upper hand.

“How old is your child?” I asked.  I glanced at the monster on the far end of the room.  “Your second child, the one who’s out with your wife.”

“She’s six,” Mcormick said.  His expression seemed to harden as his daughter came up in conversation.

“And you just keep guns and sharp tools under every other surface at her eye level?  I don’t know how you cope.  I’ve spent a lot of time around kids, and it’s full time work as is, just keeping the littlest blighters from finding inventive ways to murder themselves without sticking weapons everywhere.”

“A strong hand and a careful eye,” Mcormick said.  “If the weapons are needed, she knows to go for the gun, and she knows how and when to use it.”

“On herself or on the enemy?” Mary asked.

Mcormick leaned back in his seat.  Mary kept the knife near his throat.  “Herself, for now.  Later, when she can shoot without the gun jumping out of her hand, I’ll teach her to shoot the people coming in the doors.”

I nodded, taking it in.  I was starting to wrap my head around Mcormick, and I could appreciate that even if he was a crotchety bastard, with an emphasis on the ‘crotch’ and ‘bastard’ parts, he was at least a good dad to his daughter, willing to do what it took to raise his kid with the skills she needed.  I hoped that it was a trend among the mice.

Calling him a ‘good dad’ in general might be taking things too far.  I glanced again at the monster on the far end of the room.  Fat, drooling, its eyes were blank while its expression was frozen, forever caught in the midst of raucous laughter.

“Daniel,” Mcormick said.  He was staring at the monster too.

Daniel.  I could see the monster react as its name was spoken.

“Judge me all you want,” Mcormick said.  “Won’t be more than a drop in the bucket compared to what I do to myself.”

“You’ve been helping children escape, you said,” Mary spoke.

“The wrongs of the parent shouldn’t become the burden of the child,” Mcormick said.  “But if they stay, that means getting enmeshed in the town, keeping to the rules, being the Baron’s.”

“You help them leave, and point them to the mice,” I said.

“When I can.  But every time I do, they get closer to me.  It’s a matter of time before the Academy comes calling.”

“Weapons won’t be enough,” I said.

“I have more than just weapons prepared.  Before I make another move, I’ll set some more things up, too.”

“It sounds as if you’re expecting to get caught,” Mary said.

“Wouldn’t you?” Mcormick asked.  He twisted around to ask the question, briefly glancing at the knife.  He couldn’t even hide the resentment and disdain on his expression.  So much ugly emotion pent up inside that it had turned his personality sour.  “I have to expect it.  What else am I supposed to do, girl?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

“I don’t know either,” I said.  “But I get the impression you care about your daughter as more than another set of hands to shoot the Crown’s people when they come for you.  It seems odd, to do what you’re doing as if you expect to keep your daughter alive, yet also act like you’re doomed.”

“Maybe…” he paused, giving the word emphasis for the sentence that would follow, “…you should ask what you came to ask, then get out of my hair before my wife comes in.  She does have a gun and the sense to use it.  I don’t want me or her getting hurt in the skirmish as she lets herself in.  Especially not if she’s going to come in and invite her friend inside with.  That’s enough people that none of us walk away unscathed or happy.  You don’t want my wife’s friend dropping her shopping bag and calling for help, and I don’t want that attention either.  Yeah?”

I put my elbows on the table, staring across its length.  “We intend to kill the Baron, Mr. Mcormick.  Maybe you should consider giving us what we need without fighting us every step of the way, so we can make a serious attempt at pulling it off.”

“Up until you get caught, interrogated, and you tell them about me.”

Mary glanced at me.

“It’s not out of the question,” I admitted.

“Mm.”

“But,” Mary said, her eyes on the knife and Mcormick’s throat, “We know very well how the Academy works.  We know how good their interrogation is, and that very few people earn the academy’s wrath and escape it.”

“Do you, now?”

“Sy has your gun.  I have knives.  If it comes down to it, we’ll take the same route you’ve offered your daughter.”

“You’ll try,” Mcormick said.  His scowl become something painful to look at, a twisted expression.  Was he imagining a scenario where his daughter had to go for the gun?

“Look me in the eye, Mcormick,” I said.  “I’m not a mouse.  You’ve had a weird feeling about us for a while now, probably.  That girl who is holding a knife to your throat is better than you expected, right?  As good as people three times her age who’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while now.  You’ve been trying to get a read on us and failing, because you don’t understand what we are.”

“What are you?” the man asked.  He met my eye.

“Within the last week, I had the Baron Richmond take one of my eyes out with a sword,” I said.  “Me and my team killed three of his sisters and injured the other.”

I watched him carefully, trying to read the emotions that crossed his face.  Eyebrows moved up, then together, the jowl-lines between cheek and mouth went up, deepened, and finally disappeared as his mouth widened in a frown.  Muscles stood out at the corner of his jaw as he stopped looking at me and started staring through me, his thoughts caught up in drawing connections.

Initial surprise and disgust at the outrageous nature of the story, then realization as he thought of something, and consideration going hand in hand with concentration as he pondered the implications.

“You know that the twins are four people,” he said.

“Two monsters nested in their elder sisters.  Only one of the elder sisters remain, now.”

“And this talk of marriage?” he asked.  “No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I won’t tell you.  I will tell you that we are very good.  This won’t be the first or even the fifth job we’ve handled where I’ll have to be prepared and ready to put a bullet in my own skull in a timely way.  You’re looking me in the eye, you’re hearing what I’m saying, and now you need to admit to me that you believe what I’m saying.”

A bit of a trick, that last sentence.  It was something that worked well on people in trances, or people who were drunk or who had otherwise taken leave of their senses.  Hit them with a series of facts that would get them nodding their heads and agreeing, and then drop a vague statement they might agree with.  You see me.  You hear me.  You believe.

Dealing with a man like him, who was lost in thought and a small storm of complex emotions, no longer rationally and logically working his way through the conversation, this little trick had a chance of working.

And, to tie it together, because it was bad form to leave something like that hanging without tying it up, giving him something believable that makes the whole picture come together.

“There’s a reason we knocked on your door,” I said.  “A reason your name came up.  People out there believe in us, and a lot of people believe the Baron needs to die.”

Believe believe believe.  Repeating the word to hammer it in.

I watched as he gave that statement its fair share of thought, drew in a deep breath, and then huffed it out.

“Alright,” he said.  “Put that knife away?  I’ll deal fairly with you.”

Mary glanced at me.  I nodded.

After dealing with a recalcitrant Jamie and a Lillian who had transitioned from terrified to being drunk on Wyvern, I was happy to be dealing with a Lamb who required far less work to work with.

“I can throw these,” she said.  “I prefer throwing them to stabbing with them.  It keeps my clothes cleaner.  Don’t try anything.”

“Mm,” Mcormick grunted.

Mary stepped away, moving around the table until she stood just behind my chair.

“What do you need to know?”

“The ‘firstborn’.  In what context are they a danger?”

“Don’t rightly know,” Mcormick drawled.  “They don’t tell us.  Daniel there, he’s not so much of a problem.  My wife and I worked together to cut off his oxygen, early on, before he was completely grown.  As a consequence, he’s less active, slower to think.  The less fuss he makes, the freer we are.”

“They pair you up, expect you to marry and have a child, to act like a good couple?  What do you do while the child is growing up?”

“There are enclosed areas here and there around the town.  Prisons that aren’t prisons.  The drunks get used to living without drink, the criminals get watched.  We can find our own partners there, and if we don’t by the time our stay is up, they’ll give us one.  I found my wife.”

“Was she a mouse too?” I asked.

A single slow nod of acknowledgement.  “From Boggin.  They didn’t call themselves mice  Same idea.  Kids band together, look after each other.  I’d just got out of prison, she’d got out of a bad relationship that her husband didn’t survive, didn’t take long for us to have Daniel.  They gave us the house and told us that if we wanted to leave for anything, we needed to go with a neighbor.  It builds a perverse kind of community, don’it?”

He turned and spat.  Well aimed, placed in the coals of the fireplace, where it sizzled.

“Accelerated growth?” I asked.  “I didn’t see any baby Firstborn.”

“You’ll have seen the doctors out there.  They’re Academy students who showed more aptitude for the kind of art that the Baron likes than they had aptitude for science.  I don’t know what treatment they get, but they’re usually big enough when they show up.  At one year old, Daniel was seven and a half stone, easy.  Stronger than you’d think, for his age.”

The more he talked about Daniel, the more unhappy he seemed to get.

A change of topic was in order.

“The Baron?  His behavior,” I said.

“Stays in Richmond House, most days.  The house is guarded by leftover Academy projects, warbeasts and weapons that don’t crowd the place up too bad.  The ones that aren’t housetrained, bigger and nastier, they lurk in the woods between here and there.  The screw-ups go to him in wagons that get checked at three different places, near start, middle, and end.  When there haven’t been enough or when Baron or Twin get in a mood, they get in their wagons and come down here in a procession.  About twice a year, at unpredictable times, there’ll be other nobles with them.  Those are the worst times.  Nobody’s safe, and they usually want a lot of people.”

“Twice a year?” Mary asked.  “Special events?”

Mcormick shrugged.

I could see Mary’s line of thinking.  “Special events like a wedding.”

“That would make the Baron harder to access,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “But he also knows about the rifles, that nobles are on the hitlist.”

That got Mcormick’s attention.

“Encouragement more than discouragement,” Mary said.

“Probably,” I said.  I looked at Mcormick, “Recently.  His behavior recently.  Last day or two.”

“Holed up at the house.  He came in on a train with a guard.  Everyone kept out of sight, and when people started talking, word was that only one of his sisters was with him, she looked hurt, and he had a woman.  Hasn’t set foot outside, and it’s rare he’d do that.  Come home and not immediately collect some people.”

His sister is hurt and he’s got a fiancee to torture, I thought.  He wouldn’t hurt Emily this soon, however.  We had time before things got really bad for her, I hoped.

“When and if he comes into town, it’ll be with a guard?  How many?” Mary asked.

“Varies.  Fifty soldiers.  Plus some beasts his doctors have put together.  Four or so wagons, they’re nearly identical, each with soldiers standing on the outside, one hand on a railing, another on their gun.  I’d give you particulars, but they don’t come down this road often enough for me to have seen ’em.  They’ll park, soldiers get out, so they’re all ready with guns up, some protecting the Baron, some going after the family he’s targeting.  He’ll emerge only sometimes, protected by circled wagons and by a squadron of soldiers, and if he doesn’t leave someone behind with their Firstborn, the house will be left alone for a few days before the neighborhood gathers, assigns duties, and work together to clean up.  Once the house is scrubbed and the things moved out, someone else gets moved in.”

“He’s been doing this for years?” I asked.

“The pattern changes now and again, but he’s been at it since he was a child.  His aunts and uncle used to look after Richmond House, but they took over a territory somewhere and left him behind.”

“Darn it,” I said.  I drummed fingers on the table.  “Most people, when they get into a routine, they get sloppy.  Weaknesses emerge, or they stop caring about covering their backs.  This is an ugly combination of a spree killer and a ritual killer.  You can’t predict who he’ll target, but when he does target someone, he does it with practiced ease.  He covers his back and he’s backed by the entire infrastructure and setup he’s created here.”

“Soldiers, police…” Mary echoed my thoughts.

“And the Firstborn,” I said.  “This is something more than a perverse joke.  This is… I don’t know, it’s a trump card he’s been holding up his sleeve for a while.  If we could just watch him at work, then we could find a weakness, see if he’s using these trump cards and how.  But that means letting him have his victims, it means hoping we can be in position to spy on them somehow, without knowing for sure where they’ll be, and it means we’re hoping he makes two visits to town, so we could learn from the first and apply what we’ve learned to the second.”

“You’re rambling a little,” Mary murmured.

“Okay,” I said.  I brought a finger to my mouth and bit it, so I wouldn’t keep talking.

Fatigue was affecting me.  Not the lack of sleep, though it was a factor, but the emotional fatigue.  Talking and throwing myself into this task was keeping me from thinking about things I really didn’t want to think about.  I’d just gone a step too far down that road.

While I gathered my thoughts, thinking silently instead of thinking aloud, there was a rattle at the doorknob.

I was out of the chair in the next heartbeat, sweeping up the two hatchets without a sound.

“-there might be more trains coming.  We’re expecting guests, and there’s nobody to ask if we’re supposed to keep the store open or if we should shut down,” a woman’s voice spoke.

“How much of an interruption could it be?” another woman’s voice.

Mary and I ducked into the kitchen, which wasn’t in direct view of the front door.  I opened one of the cupboards I’d checked earlier and ushered Mary into it.  She was able to slip in amid pots and cooking racks without making a sound.  She couldn’t stand up, but with two hands and one leg out, she could poise herself over the things.  I shut it, lifting the handle so there would be less weight on the hinges.

I opened the cupboard where I’d seen the vegetables earlier, and climbed in, careful to move my feet so I wouldn’t kick them.  I eased the door shut behind me, and peered out through the gap between the hinge and the cupboard door itself.

“I keep hearing it’s going to be incessant.  Good afternoon, Daryl.”

“Good afternoon, Bethy,” Mcormick replied.  “Nance, do you need help with your shoes?”

“No, father,” was the reply.  The little girl.

A short pause, as the conversation between the women continued.

“I know I promised you tea, but I just remembered-”  Mcormick’s wife started.  She stopped.

“You remembered?” Bethy asked.

“I’ve been putting off a job of clearing up the upstairs,” Mcormick’s wife said.  “I found reasons not to do it three times already.  If this next week is like what you’re talking about, if I don’t do it today, while things are quiet…”

“I understand.  Take care, deary.”

“You too, Bethy.”

Kissy-kiss sounds.  Cheek-smooches, like the ladies did across the ocean in the central Crown kingdoms.

I heard the door close.

“You’re scaring me, Daryl.  Tell me this isn’t in my head.”

“Father?”

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Mcormick soothed.

“Your hand is under the table.  The look in your eyes?”

“It’s alright.  We have guests.”

That was our cue to exit the cupboards.  I opened the cupboard door and straightened, giving Mary a hand in getting to her feet.  She had enough spatial awareness to avoid kicking any pots or pans as she got out of the enclosed space.

“Nance!” Mcormick barked out the word.  Then, more gently, he said, “No need.”

Assuming she’d been by the door and thus out of sight at the time I’d climbed out of the cupboard, the little girl had covered a surprising distance while I’d been focused on Mary.  She’d gone from the door to the corner of the room that was just past the family’s ‘firstborn’.  Very thin books with colorful covers and small baskets all sharing a shelf suggested it was her corner, where her things were kept.

Given the tension I saw, I had to assume that there were guns hidden there that required more than a cursory look to find.

The lady Mcormick was younger than I’d expected.  Where Mcormick was thirty-something and parts of him looked twice that, with the creases and lines in his face and hands etched in by the work he did here in the mill, the woman looked eighteen and had parts of her that looked thirty.  A tiny scar at one lip added a surprising degree of character to her face, and her eyes- heavily lined, they looked more dangerous than Mcormick’s.

“You told me,” she said.  “You told me, right off the bat, the first time you pulled this, that I would always know.  I would always be consulted.”

“This isn’t that,” Mcormick said.  “They aren’t-”

“This is reckless, especially when things are this uncertain.  They’re talking about trainloads of guests.  There’s even a rumor that the Baron is going to move elsewhere, now that he’s married, and there’ll be another son of the Richmond line taking up residence in the house, if Warrick is even standing by the time the festivities are done.”

“Lower your voice.  Bethy doesn’t like not knowing things, and she might be dragging her heels as she leaves, in hopes of hearing something.  These two aren’t mine.  They let themselves in and held me at knifepoint.  They did some talking, I did some listening.  Now they’re just about ready to leave and stop disturbing us, I’m hoping.”

“Just about,” I said.

The wife was young, but she was one hundred percent momma bear.  She was strong, healthy, and looked especially dangerous in the midst of her family.  The kid, though, she had my attention.  She was a stick, with arms I could almost encircle with middle finger and thumb, not because of a lack of food, but because she was starting to grow, with a mind to her father’s tall stature.  Her dark hair was straight, her eyes large, wary, and angry.  So many of the things common to children, even some of the younger mice and the more damaged children of Lamsbridge, they weren’t there.  Warmth, innocence, dependency… She was the product of her environment, a reflection of her parents, of the Baron’s control and darkness seeping into this town, and of her father’s training, whatever it had been up to this point.

Given a few more years, I expected he would teach her how to fight.  Not pretty fighting with stances, but how to really hurt a person in a brawl, how to go for the weak points.  She would learn to use knives and guns.

So many of the mice learned some of these skills because they were bored, or because they were scared, and the oldest boy or girl at the time didn’t know how to make the fear go away, except by equipping them against the fear.  Few went about learning or being categorically taught every dirty trick in the playbook.  Most of the ones that tried lost heart or weren’t healthy enough to go about that much vigorous exercise.  Gordon was one of the few who’d been healthy and determined enough.  This girl, by virtue of who her parents were, could well be another one.

I could see something Lamblike about her, and I felt a kind of pity mixed with relief at the thought.  The former I understood, but the latter took me a few moments to figure out.

Even in a dark place like this town, people are finding ways to fight back, to struggle, and make themselves strong.

Mary moved, getting my attention, reminding me that we needed to do something here.

“Three questions, then we’ll go,” I said.

“Alright,” Mcormick said.

“There are others?  You don’t work alone.”

“You can’t honestly expect me to answer that,” he said.

You just did, through your body language.  It wasn’t essential to our mission, but it helped me to know that there was something of a push back against the Baron’s influence on this town.  “Can you point me to someone who was left behind as a survivor, after the Baron visited?  Someone angry who could be convinced to talk?”

He looked at his wife.

“There are too many problems if we try to wait for him to attack someone.  We could be in the perfect position with the perfect timing, and we might not be able to spy on him and spot a weakness.  But if we ask a survivor…”

“You might get a clue,” Mcormick said.

“I still want answers, Dar,” his wife said.

“You’ll get ’em.  Let me get rid of these two peckerwarts first.  At the foot of Cricker’s street, there’s a fountain.  Three statues in that fountain that look in the four cardinal directions.  Go to the house the fish pointing at.  The old woman there, she lost her family, and she’s been emotional enough about it we’re all thinking she’s going to do something and get herself dragged off to Richmond house.  Can’t even get involved to help without getting ourselves hurt.  Be wary of the firstborn that family left behind for her.  It’s irritable and dangerous.”

“Noted,” I said.  “Final question, then.  The church?”

“What about it?”

“A church with no religion.  It doesn’t have any apparent purpose, all the symbols are stripped away.  It’s bothering me, not knowing.”

“Seems to me that you answered your own question, boy,” Mcormick said, sneering a little in disdain as he said it.

“Answered-?” I started to ask it, then cut myself short.  “Of course.  Right.”

Mary gave me a curious look.

“Church with no symbols.  It’s a symbol unto itself, isn’t it?  A slap in the face of people who are most in need of the church as a refuge.  Hollow, empty, bastardized.”

“Something like that,” Mcormick said.  His daughter had walked over to him, where he still sat in the chair.  He put his forearm across her narrow shoulders.  “Some used to make a habit of dropping flowers in front of the door, as surreptitiously as they could.  The Baron’s doctors invented a beast that could sniff people out by the oils their fingers left on the flowers or something.  It’s not the first time that something has happened with one of the churches that are around town.  They’re there to tempt us, to bait us.  All of this, it’s a game to that noble, a farce.”

“It’s something of a game to me too,” Mary said.  She seemed to be focusing on the little girl more than Mcormick or his wife.  “I’m competitive.  I don’t like losing.  My friends killed three nobles, and I didn’t even get to participate.  I want this one, and now that I’m this close, I want it so badly I can’t keep my fingers still.  If he thinks it’s a farce, then I want to see if I can make him laugh while I put the last few knives in him.”

“Yeah?” Mcormick drawled out the word.  He looked at her with what might have been renewed respect.  “You let me know when you’re done, why don’tcha?”

Mary gave him a single nod.

We took our leave from the mill, checking out the windows that the coast was clear enough, then moving quickly.

“You alright?” I asked Mary.

“I’m good,” Mary said.  I could see in her eyes that she was playing through the permutations in her head.  Where I considered the plans, she was considering the fight.  Full-on bloodthirst, now, stoked by what she’d heard from Mcormick.  She had enough details that she could start to visualize how things might play out when we went for the Baron.

“If you’re good, then it’s all good,” I said.

“I like having a mission, a destination,” she said, simply.

I nodded.  Her focus was on watching our surroundings and on anticipating the fight.  I could give her a minute, then bring her out of it, get her thinking about what we needed to do to prepare.  I was distracted in my own way.  If we didn’t need to talk, then that was fine.  I could use the time to think.  To consider the problem.

The two of us became three of us.  ‘Nance’ had been so similar to the girl I’d seen in the train car that I’d started thinking about the Lamb that never was.  The features remained alien.  Evette, with eyes too large, a doll in hand.

Is that the only reason you brought me along, Sylvester? the question echoed in my mind.

Evette, she’d been the problem solver.  The plan had been for her to be the one who devised the solutions, serving in an additional role as a medic.  Lillian had taken up the medic part.  I’d become the problem solver in a very different way.  Now she lurked, taunting me with the question.  Why had I been thinking of Evette?  What kernel of subconscious was now nagging at me, begging to be recognized.

Pieces fell into place, like the tumblers of a lock I was picking.  A half-dozen questions I’d been asking myself were answered in one fell stroke.

Evette smiled at me, hugging her doll.

Where were we going to stay when we weren’t working, when the streets were so hostile and the hiding places so few?  Everyone moved in groups, practically.  The citizens, the local law…

Where could we get information?

Was it possible to get a firstborn of our own, without the prices that usually needed to be paid?  The ‘papers’ we needed to travel this city without drawing second glances and possible legal attention.

“We’re not going straight to that street with the fountain,” I said.

Mary gave me a surprised look.  “You have an idea?”

“We’re already committing the worst crime one can commit in the Crown States,” I said.  “What’s another capital breach of the law?  You can get some practice in for whatever it is you plan to do to the Baron, and I can see if I can’t indulge in some problem solving.”

“Do tell, Sy,” Mary said.  She had a light smile on her face.  She knew I was toying with her at this point, trying to work her up.

“I feel like it’s time I started learning some Academy Science.  Let’s take over a lab and see if you can’t get the doctor in charge to teach me something or other.”

Evette cackled, and I was the only one who heard her.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.10 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Three doctors were walking down the street.  Each of them were young, no older than twenty-five, two men and a woman.  The men had thick sideburns, one with tinted spectacles and a mustache curling up into the sideburns, the other with no facial hair or glasses, but a sharp nose and arching eyebrows.  The young woman wore her hair in a style more like a man’s, but with over-styled curls at the front and ears.  Helen had worn her hair in a similar style, once.  She looked younger than the men, her doctor’s coat large on her and probably intentionally so.  There were creases in the sleeves from how she’d habitually rolled them up.

Artists as much as they are doctors, I thought.  They seemed to combine the most annoying traits of both groups.  They walked while talking, and they expected others to get out of their way.  The idea of moving out of the way for a citizen of Warrick didn’t seem to cross their minds.  They gesticulated wildly, and though I couldn’t hear complete sentences, I could make out the cadence of those words, the emphasis and the inherent expectations that went with the language.  I was put in mind of theater jockeys who saw a good play and then only spoke in lines from that play for weeks afterward, and of niche groups of Academy students who had specialized in a field and ceased to be aware that there was more to the world than that one field.

Mary and I walked down the length of an alley, eyeing the trio up until they walked out of sight.  Without an exchanged word or signal, we picked up the pace to get far enough ahead of them.  Our suitcases and bags were stowed away under a porch a few blocks away, leaving little to nothing to weigh us down.  We had only the essentials.  Mary had her weapons, I had the most basic tools

One of those three individuals was about to have a very bad day.

It was strange to follow them like this, seeing them so jovial with one another, so unaware that it was essentially a roll of the dice that determined their fates.  My recent lack of sleep might have been coloring my observations with a surreal tint about the edges, but I felt like this might be how Death felt, tracking the ones whose fates had already been determined.

We got far enough ahead and waited at a corner, watching up until a trio of law enforcement officers and their dog walked by the alley.  Once we were fairly sure they had passed, we stuck our heads out again, watching and waiting for the trio of doctors to pass.

They didn’t.

I changed position, head tilted, my ear extended to the side.  I listened, my brain working to pick through the sounds of hooves and feet on the road and the babble of conversation to listen for the conversation of the three doctors.

Had they stopped in the middle of the street?  If they had, what were they doing?

Mary straightened, stepping back and away from the corner.  I looked her way, and she gestured at the building we were crouching beside.

Inside?

I looked for the nearest window.  Mary moved to the base of the window and held out her hands.

Two striding steps, a hop, my feet meeting her hands, and then she straightened her hands as I  straightened my legs.  I caught the windowsill, still standing on Mary’s upstretched hands.

I missed working with her.  We had always walked in step, in a manner of speaking.  When we were on a job and we could work together, it took so little communication for her to convey to me what she needed or wanted, and vice-versa.  It was like dancing, intimate, close, two naturally gifted partners moving in sync, able to use the movement of an eye or a change in how tightly a hand was held to suggest something.

The trust was there, when it came to the job.  Saddening, that it wasn’t there otherwise.  The betrayal loomed.

Mary backed away from the wall, then approached at a run.  I shifted to a one-handed hold on the windowsill, bracing the edges of my feet in the gaps between bricks, and extended a hand out and down.

Mary was a flurry of fur-lined coat, lace, hair and ribbons as she climbed the wall with a running start, hands barely touching it before reaching up.  Her hands seized my wrist, and my hand seized her wrist.  My white-knuckle grip on the latch at the bottom of the window was just barely enough to keep her weight from pulling me down and away from the wall.

She looked up and over.

She didn’t want to share a window with me.  No, she wanted to move to the next window over.

I reasserted my grip, then nodded, swinging her away from the window in question.  Using me as a rope of a sort, finding the scarce footholds in the mortared sections between bricks, Mary moved away, then used the backswing and her own running footsteps to help cover the distance between the windows.  She let go, lunged, and grabbed the other windowsill.

Together, we climbed up, folded arms wrapped around sills as we peered over and in.  Mary had more upper-body strength than I, and she was faster to arrive.  I stared into an empty hallway and sitting room.  There was a great deal of art on the walls, including some very large advertisements, which seemed like a very weird thing to have indoors.  The one in plainest view featured a clown in the French styles.  The silhouettes of the audience that sat around the clown each had crowns.  Some stage production that targeted nobles and the upper-class.

Two, she gestured.  One.  Gone.

Two of the three, then.  Her instincts had been right, or she’d caught a clue I hadn’t.

Wood-water.  The two gestures flowed into one another.  Wood-water would be tea.  Mary’s view was probably of the kitchen.  They’d just stepped indoors, they were putting a kettle on, and it would be a while before they stopped moving long enough for us to find our way in.

I settled in, shifting my grip and footholds to prepare for a longer stay, clinging to the outside of the wall.  Quick glances confirmed that nobody really had a good view of us.  That could swiftly change.

Mary held up a hand, no gesture in place, and then signaled me. You.

I hunkered down just a bit as the pair came into my view.  The woman and the man with the arched eyebrows.  She was being playful, teasing and affectionate.  She kept touching his arm with her hands, then when he finally responded to her, she stepped back and out of his halfhearted attempt at reaching out, giving him a coy smile.

I gestured the general details to Mary, making the relationship between the two targets clear.

The man with the sharp nose and the eyebrows that had been plucked to a jaunty angle took his turn at pursuing the young woman, saying something, moving closer.  She dodged out of the way, still flirting and smiling as she did it.  She picked up a piece of paper from a desk at the center of the room, holding it at arm’s length.  It was a sketched portrait not unlike the mugshots of criminals that sometimes appeared in post offices, but it was of a firstborn.

She used the pretense of work to deflect her beau’s advances.

I communicated this too.

I watched and we waited as the scene progressed.  Given the excess of flirting, I expected them to get to the point where they were distracted and we could slip inside.  As is, they maintained a strange dance of their own.  Never drawing too close, never getting too far away, it was as if they wanted the to-and-fro more than they wanted resolution.  They backed off too easily when the other ceased teasing or when any displeasure or change of focus was apparent, and they traded roles on the regular.

There were connections I could draw from that, ideas I could put together about who they were.  People who had known each other for too long.  They had turned the pursuit into the objective, let things fall into habit.  In short, they were what I might have been with Mary and/or Lillian, had I not bitten the bullet and decided to direct Mary to Gordon and pursue Lil.

I could smell the faint flowery waft of girl that had accompanied Mary’s leap in my general direction and her grip on my hand.  I knew that she dabbed perfume on her wrist, and I had grabbed her there for the best possible hold.

But I could also, if I turned my imagination to the task, do much the same with Lillian.

It was a lonely thing to do, devoting so much attention and focus to wisps and imaginings.  To let myself imagine that the shapes reflected in the mirror put Lillian’s face a few inches from my own.

I made a mental note, that I needed a night’s sleep before I tackled the Baron.  It was too easy to let things get fuzzy around the edges.

The kettle whistled, the shriek of it audible even from outside.  The man stepped away, leaving the woman to look down at her notes while he prepared the tea.

Clear?  I gestured at Mary’s window.

She shook her head.

A moment later, a gesture from her.  Three.

All three people were in the house we were spying on.  I was able to see as the young man with the tinted glasses and bristling mustache stepped into the living room.  The flirting was in full effect with him and the young woman, much as it had been with the other man.  They, too, flipped between roles of pursuer and pursued, never settling on a role.

I was used to holding strange positions, but lurking at the outside of the building made us obvious if and when anyone happened across us, and there were officers out there with dogs, sniffing for trouble.  I was anxious to get inside and get to work, but, somehow, the trio proved to be a hard nut.  They were too active, moving between rooms without ever settling down.  Their attention was all over the place.

Lillian, I thought.

It was a conscious decision, to step further away from grounded reality and let my mind use one of the strongest points of reference I had available to dredge up memories and details, and to see things in a different light.

Lillian wasn’t talking to me, but I could make out hints of her expression, where the upper half of her face was reflected in the window.  Contempt.  These three walked in circles that Lillian went out of her way to avoid.  In a way, they were her antithesis.  They weren’t healers, they weren’t interested in the people, and they hadn’t taken this position out of a hope for something better.  No, they were indolent.

There were clues there, but it wasn’t enough.

Gordon?  I thought.  Then I remembered that Mary was here.  She was already thinking about the attack, how to hit these people where it hurt.  No need to be redundant.

Helen.

“You know they’re using stimulants of some kind, right?” Helen murmured.  “You can’t wait for them to sit still because they’re not going to sit still for hours.”

“Yeah,” I murmured back.  “I had an idea.”

Mary’s head snapped around to glance at me.

Drug, I gestured at her.  Agitate.

Attack?  Agitate enemy mess scare?  Mary’s hand moved through the gestures in a rapid way, touching on ideas in abstract.  I had to turn it over in my head once or twice until I thought I knew what she meant.

Attack, shake them up.  Disturb them, scare them.  Would the stimulants and altered mental state hurt their reactions and reaction times, create windows of opportunity where there weren’t any?

I thought of the analysis thus far, of how they had acted like they were invulnerable and untouchable when they walked down the street.  If we shattered that illusion-

Go, I gestured.

She moved one hand to the window, lifting.  It resisted.  Locked.

A moment later, she was climbing up, each hand on one side of the window frame.  She stood in plain sight of anyone in the kitchen, knife jammed down between the lower window and the upper one, forcing the latch.

“What the-” was the initial statement, as she hauled the window open, ducking through to step inside.  There was the sound of something very large and heavy tumbling to the ground.

From my vantage point, I could see the woman and the man with tinted glasses standing, the woman doing so with such force that she slopped tea on the ground.

“Aaaaah!” was the strangled cry from the kitchen.  The woman, in the process of putting her tea down, practically dropped cup and saucer in her hurry to go help.

It meant Mary was alone, dealing with three grown but addled adults who presumably had little experience in fighting.  I trusted her to hold her ground, but in the spirit of being a good teammate, I hurried to open my window, which had been left unlocked, and climbed inside.  The short haired woman turned to face me.

She had a letter opener in hand, an improvised weapon she had grabbed in the time it took me to slip through the window.  I had a gun and a proper knife, but I wasn’t wholly sure this was a fight I’d win.  Stimulants and fear meant she was unpredictable and possibly aggressive enough to lunge at me, and I wouldn’t win a contest of strength against a twenty-something woman, even a sprite of a woman like this.

I glanced at Mary’s prey.  The  man was down on one knee, arms flailing.  Loops of razor wire had encircled his head and neck, with a line of wire drawing blood at the corners of his eye sockets and bridge of his nose, pressing in close enough to the eye that the eyelid couldn’t completely shut.  Another loop encircled his mouth, cutting in at the corners, while a third had him at the throat.  Mary stood several feet behind him, one foot out and in the small of his back, one of her hands holding a knife, using the weapon’s handle to control the wire like a kite flier might manage the kite-strings.  Her other hand held a throwing knife by the pommel, ready to take the bespectacled man out of the fight.

“Eyes, mouth, throat.  That’s going to end gruesomely,” I said.  “I’m just not sure which is going to go first.”

The woman with the letter opener glanced back at her friend.

Good.  She was suggestible.

“If the wire slips down, he’ll lose the skin of his nose and a lower eyelid, it looks like,” I said.  I touched my eyepatch.  I was careful to modulate my voice, to sound more bored and calm to make the scene more dissonant and terrifying to our panicked guests.  “I’ve traveled down a similar road, and it is far from pretty.”

“Shut up,” she said.

“But the mouth?” I said.  “Once that wire properly breaks the skin, if my friend isn’t careful, or if eyebrows there jerks the wrong way in reaction to the pain, it’s just going to slide back, cut through both cheeks like a hot knife through butter, until it reaches the back teeth or the muscles of the jaw.  Then there’s the throat.  I don’t know if you’ve ever cut a throat, but I gotta say-”

“Shut up!”

“-there’s a lot of blood.”

She made a movement toward me with the letter opener.  Mary managed the wire, and her victim gargled out a low warning scream.  Like he was a puppet and Mary the puppeteer.  The low scream was enough to distract the woman from her imminent attack.  She hesitated.

Weapon, I gestured.

“Drop the weapon,” Mary said.  She moved her weapon a little to one side.  The wire slid, all three lengths sawing lightly against flesh.  Her victim’s shuddering breath was staccato, broken by the intensity of his shudders.

The letter opener dropped to the ground.  I extended the toe of my shoe, touched it, and dragged it back and away.  I picked it up.

“Take over?” Mary asked me.

I grinned.

I had to walk past the woman, spectacles, and Mary’s puppet before I was at Mary’s side, able to take hold of the knife with the wire.  My hand brushed against Mary’s as we transferred the grip.

All three of our targets were frozen.  The two that weren’t in the embrace of Mary’s wire could have made a break for the door while Mary and I were preoccupied and one or both of them might have made it.  As far as they were aware, I didn’t have a pistol, and if they rounded the corner, Mary couldn’t give chase without risking releasing her current victim.

If they’d thought about it rationally, staying was a very bad idea.  But they weren’t in rational states of mind.

Was it loyalty that drove them to stay?  Stupid, self-destructive loyalty?  My gaze lingered on Mary as she worked, guiding the two others to chairs, making them sit down.

“We only really need two,” I said.

My victim gurgled.  I had to lean forward, keeping my hand in place, to make sure I hadn’t accidentally pulled back too hard.  He was fine.  A bead of blood where his eyelid had been lacerated had to be making his eye sting something fierce.  The lid that was caught by the wire and being stung by the blood fluttered like the wing of a butterfly that was in the midst of being electrocuted.

The other two didn’t look or sound happy about what I’d just said, but they at least had the sense to stay quiet.

“We only really need one,” Mary said.  “But I’m interested to hear what you’re thinking.”

“Having two means we can threaten the welfare of one to get the other to do what we want,” I said.  “If we take out a third, we let them know we’re serious.”

“Point conceded,” Mary said.

“You, eyebrows,” I said, giving my puppet a light kick in the back of one knee, upsetting his balance without quite tipping him over and shredding his face, “Who should we spare?”

His eye rolled back and to one side until he could almost look at me.  “Uhr.”

Her.

“Then you, mustache,” I addressed the man with tinted glasses.  “Who do we spare?”

He seemed horrified at the question.  His eyes widened.

But, like any gentleman would, he said, “Her.”

Three friends, two men who were after the same girl, they never made anything of it because they respected the friendship more than matters of the heart.  They flirted with each other and with drink and drugs, but never crossed the line.

I asked the questions, but I already knew what the answers would be.  I urged things in that direction with the phrasing, ‘who do we spare?’  Even if they weren’t the Academy’s top scientists, they were educated sorts, and the wrong phrasing might lead one to try to play my game instead of falling into my trap.  Making them focus on who most needed rescue enabled me to prey on their good breeding.

“Tie-breaker,” I addressed the woman.  “Which one do we kill?”

She looked between the two, startled, wide-eyed.  The sense of invulnerability had been stripped away.

This makes a good test-run for going after the Baron, I mused.

“Me,” she said.  She was defiant, her jaw set.

I met Mary’s eyes.  She stood behind the woman, who had twisted around in her seat in hopes of keeping both Mary and me in her field of view.  Mary’s thumb hooked past the bottom of her skirt, to the top of her stocking, and I  saw the hard line of a blade there.

She drew the knife and drove it home in one motion.  With a kind of cough and sputter, too forceful and swift to seem real, the woman collapsed in one direction, tumbling out of the chair and onto the ground.

Her mouth gaped, opening and closing, to little avail, as she lay there, eyes open, unable to draw the breath she wanted to.  She coughed, and flecks of blood painted her already crimson lips.

The spectacled man who had been made to sit on the other side of the little coffee table leaped out of his seat, going for Mary.  He didn’t make it.  A blade was flung down at an angle, piercing the top of his foot and pinning the sole briefly to the hardwood floor.  He twisted on the spot, then sprawled, howling in mixed pain and grief.

You could’ve run.  You could’ve gone for help, sought a solution on your own, I thought.  If you’d been a real gentleman, you could have saved your girlfriend.  But you remained stuck where you were, and you doomed yourself.

“Do you have a lab in-house?” I asked.

As the most able to move and act, my puppet spoke, “Yahs.”

“You’re going to take me to the lab,” I said.

The ‘yes’ was a little slow in coming.  The man with a knife in his foot looked up at my puppet.  A message seemed to pass between them.  Nothing too vital, only an awareness of what their reality was.

“I punctured her lung,” Mary said, in a matter of fact way.  “Can you save her?”

Spectacles looked up, each gasping breath serving dual purpose as a little moan of pain.  He managed the word, “Yes.”

“Then try.  While you do that, your friend is going to take my friend to your lab.”

Another exchanged look.  It took a kind of bravery, with razor wire digging into face and neck, but my puppet managed the slightest of head nods.

“Okay,” the man on the floor said.  “I’ll need my kit.  It’s upstairs.”

“Go.  Crawl if you have to,” Mary said.  Her voice was utterly without empathy.  She looked down at the woman, who was still struggling to breathe.  “I’d hurry.”

I watched as Mary escorted the man, walking behind him as he hobbled his way down the hallway.

There was an edge of viciousness and ruthlessness to her actions that seemed unusual for Mary.  For someone so straightforward, Mary required a lot of reading between the lines, and I was left to guess as to why she was acting like this.  She had always been a cold-blooded killer, but the trick with the wire and the man’s face, while evocative, wasn’t the methodology of that efficient killer I’d met at Mothmont years ago.

Was it her finding an outlet for other emotions?  For her frustration about Lillian and the loss of Lillian’s black coat?  About Gordon’s death?

A part of me hoped that it was an insight that might lead to Mary making the decision to come with me.  That our coordinated dance might continue beyond this one mission.

I knew how Mary worked, the things that made her tick.  I knew that there were manipulations I could use that would get the results I was so heartsick for.  I could have done it with Lillian, so easily, given her a push at a moment of weakness, when she was telling me that she would give up on the black coat and choose me instead.

I could get Helen on my side.  I could even convince Jamie, who I struggled to understand and predict, so much of the time.

But it wouldn’t be their decisions.  It was a coward’s way out, even if it seemed sensible in the moment.  Forgiveness would be found wanting in the days and weeks that followed.

I looked up and met Mary’s eyes.

I might as well ask directly.

“Where does this new anger come from?” I murmured.

“Uhrm!?” my puppet managed.

I watched as she raised a finger to her lips.  Silence.

A matter of seconds later, the real Mary made her way down the stairs with her injured subject, a medicine bag in one hand.  Like Lillian’s bag, it was one of the newer ones, expensive, the contents very up to date.

“I’ll need to take her to the lab to give her proper treatment,” spectacles said.  The woman was managing gasping breaths, but it was as if she was trying to breathe with a hundred-pound stone on her chest.  Each intake of breath was an uphill battle, a strain.

“Then drag her,” Mary said.  The man wasted no time.  I had to pull my puppet back to keep the way clear, as we let the man drag his patient, hobbling as he used one heel instead of his whole injured foot to move.  Mary spoke to his back as she followed, “I hope you know, each time your friend doesn’t cooperate, I’m going to put a knife through one of your hands.  That’s going to have a big impact on your ability to practice medicine and on this woman’s future.”

“We understand,” the man said, his voice strained and trembling.

In a procession of sorts, we made our way to the lab, which was on the lowest floor of the house.  Except for the fact that it was better-lit than any room in the house, it very much had a dungeon aesthetic.  Stone walls, stone floor, metal counters and tables, and countless tools.  Papers and books were set up everywhere, filled with more sketches than proper medical terminology.  Along one side of the room, incomplete bodies floated in tanks.  Skin without the flesh, fetuses the size of grown men, and homonculi, vat babies of a far cruder sort than Helen, Ashton, or Evette.

The man laid the woman on one counter, and Mary wasted no time in tying the woman to the rails at the edge of the table, using lengths of razor wire.  The man with the spectacles and mustache watched but didn’t protest as she tied a length of wire around one of his ankles, binding it to the same table, restricting his movement.

“I don’t see any of the babies,” Mary spoke.

Spectacles’ expression was an interesting one.  His hands busy, he still looked to his friends, as if for confirmation.  Neither was in any shape to tell him what to say or do.

“No babies,” I said.  “Not here, not like that.”

Another look at the mustache man confirmed my statement.  The children weren’t being made into firstborn.  A test of the firstborn’s blood would likely reveal that there was no relation between the monster and the family they had been assigned to.  At best, the similarities had been designed, added for the psychological impact.

Mary’s expression was an interesting one, as she realized the same, staring at the cases where the monsters were obviously being designed from scratch.  Disappointment?

“You’re thinking of Mary Cobourn, aren’t you?” I asked.  “The real one.  That’s where the extra viciousness is coming from.  At least in part.  You were the same way with Percy, when you shot him.”

“Was I?”

“Ruthless,” I said.  “More so than usual.”

“They always go straight after the children,” she said.  “Not even using them as resources, but discarding them.  Percy, he went after children and he used them to make the Ghosts, but the Crown…”

“Discards children.  Treats them as something expendable,” I said.  For a moment, I felt a flare of hope, that maybe Mary could be convinced.  Then I remembered Lillian.  My breath caught in my throat as I started to speak, forcing me to swallow and try again.  “That bothers you?”

“No.  Not really.  But I feel like it should, so I act like it should,” Mary said.  She hopped up to sit on a counter, knife in her hands.  “I feel like I should want it to stop, and at the same time, I owe my existence to it.”

Me too, probably, I thought.  I had no idea where I came from.  We kept hearing about children disappearing or being cast away.  I’d seen the slaves in Lugh, the non-clone counterparts of the Bad Seeds, and disappeared mice.  Each and every one could have pointed to my origins.

I would likely never have the answer.

I think you’re a terribly dishonest person, Mary, I thought.  Maybe that’s why we get along so well, when left to our own devices.  But you’re not dishonest to the rest of us, or to our enemies.  Only yourself.  How many times have you said that now, that you aren’t acting because you feel or believe a certain way, you say you’re doing it because you think you should.  Killing Percy, wanting to track down the ghosts…

You just wanted Percy to die.  Lillian didn’t factor into it.

This… this bothers you.  And you won’t ask, leaving me to.

“Where do you send the firstborn babies?” I asked.

“To the nobles,” the man with the mustache said.

“For?”

“We don’t ask,” he said.  He was busy using a set of modified hand-bellows to get the woman to breathe.  Her eyes were open and staring.

I nodded.  I allowed some slack in the wire that wrapped around the face of my puppet.

“Do you really think you deserve any mercy at all from us?” I asked, of all three of our victims.  “After what you’ve done to those families?  To those children?”

From the looks in their eyes and on their faces, I imagined it was the first time they had really considered the question, or if they had faced the morality of what they were doing before, it had been long ago, a question that was easily glossed over as they studied texts and focused on advancing, finishing projects, and succeeding in their careers.

I looked at Mary, who was so close and yet so far away, sitting on the other end of the room.  I knew I could convince her to come with me, that I just had to ask in the right ways, raise the right ideas.  I knew also that I couldn’t.

It was a very lonely experience.

In the midst of that, I turned to another Lamb for consolation.  Evette lurked, agitated, far too eager to get to work.

My puppet leaned over a metal counter, gripping the railing that bounded the edge.  He didn’t seem willing to move, except to gingerly dab at his wounded, twitching eyelid, and blood dripped down his face from the myriad cuts and lacerations, pooling on the counter.

Tying their fates to those of their friends had been part of my goal.  To break them, challenge them, to satisfy some internal craving I had to validate how stupid it was to stay in a bad situation out of loyalty.

“I have a laundry list of projects I’m wanting you to complete,” I said.  “You three can take turns getting them done, I don’t care.  But you are going to have to make an ugly decision.  My friend and I were going to force whoever we conscripted to modify themselves to look like a proper Firstborn, so we can move freely through the city.  That’s a hard thing to do to yourself, so someone’s going to have to volunteer, or they’re going to have to choose one of their friends as their patient.”

I could see the looks of horror on their faces.  It was my turn to be cold.

Mary and I hadn’t actually discussed this.  I’d only thought about it in terms of getting someone else’s Firstborn fresh from the shop and using that.

This was more poetic justice.

“Don’t worry,” I said.  My voice was dark.  “They’ll be able to return you most of the way to your original appearance.  That’s one project.  Project two, are you all familiar with the studying drug?  Wyvern?”

Mary’s eyebrows went up.

“I’ll explain the reasoning later,” I told Mary, lying through my teeth, before I turned back to my puppet, “I’m going to need a batch of that to start.  Then, let’s see, while I’m thinking about it-”

“Poison gas,” Evette said, grinning.

“Poison gas,” I said.  “Three things, as a starting point.  I’ll come up with more as the night wears on.  And I want to see you do every step.  Let’s see what sticks.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.11 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“How many labs have we been in?” Evette asked.  “I’m not asking for any reason.  I’m curious about the number.”

We?  I arched an eyebrow.

“You know what I mean.  We’re not going to pretend I’m real.  You’re very detached from reality.  You’re putting yourself in a very detached, suggestible state where the only suggestions you’re listening to are your own.  That the Lambs are here and helping.  That you’re not alone.”

“Careful,” I warned, I kept my voice low, so as not to wake Mary, who had fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder.

Two of the three conscripted doctors turned their heads to look at me.

I reasserted my grip on the pistol I held.

“I might not be much of a lab geek, and my memory might be garbage, but I know enough to know that that stuff you’re working with is volatile.  I know I’ve seen it used in explosives.  I’ve used it to blow up labs very similar to this one.”

Clifton, the man with the mustache, pulled his hands away from what he was working on.  “You might know more than I do when it comes to this, then.  If you want a weaponized gas, you need to disperse it.  The phosphor is the best way I know for doing that.”

I watched his expression for a moment, then nodded.

“Nice recovery.  It’s almost like you were talking to them in the first place,” Evette said.  The look on her face was intense, but it wasn’t the smouldering intensity I had recently seen on Lillian.  It was the wide-eyed, hair-flung-back look of someone who stuck their head out of the window of a fast-moving train.

Her pale face still resembled Mcormick’s daughter, as if my subconscious had latched onto that, but the eyes were larger, the mouth smaller, the teeth exposed by her unending smile different every time I looked at her.  They would be overrun by an overgrowth of gum tissue one moment, then the next time she looked my way her mouth would be filed with something very similar to the braces used to align teeth, except these braces were used to hold the gums at bay.  Then she would part her lips in a smile and her teeth would be the sort that was badly in need of braces.

I knew that my mind had, at some distant point in time, latched on to the fact that vat babies tended to have problems with teeth, with hair, with the proportions of faces and body, that I’d collected the fact and held onto it where I let so many minor facts slip by.  Because it related to Evette, Helen, and Ashton.

Even when human tissue was used as a starting point, it was hard to hit every mark consistently, especially those parts of the body that appeared late in the various stages of growth.  That Helen was as attractive as she was said a great deal about Ibott’s talents as a professor.  The creation of beauty wasn’t even his specialty, and he’d managed it.  She was a work of art, and whatever else I thought of Ibott, I had to to admit he was a true genius, based on Helen alone.

Ashton, meanwhile, was vaguely offputting but still hit the mark, the work of a committed team who could refine and implant the refined pheromones package once they had a vessel to hold and transmit it.

Helen was the actress, Ashton the social manipulator, and both needed to look good, considering the roles meant for them.

But Evette… to make sure they had something workable, they would have had to get her to a later stage in development, grow her to the point that she was able to respond and communicate, then test her.  Getting a workable brain and an acceptable appearance, for someone who would primarily lurk in the background as a problem solver, it was unnecessary.

She was the safest one to have out and keeping me company, because of all of the Lambs, she was the only one I was moving closer to.  To bring out the others would only remind me of those I had lost or those I was likely to lose soon.

Carmen, the young lady in the trio of scientists we’d recruited, knocked a tool into a pan, startling herself.  Mary woke at the sound.  She’d fallen asleep holding a knife, and raised it to fend off any attackers, but I already had the pistol pointed at Carmen.  Mary relaxed.

Carmen saw the pistol and startled even worse.  She was shaking like a leaf, clearly agitated.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.  “Please.”

“You woke up my friend,” I said.

“I’m sorry.  I’m so tired.  We’ve been working all night.  I can’t even see straight.  I lost blood earlier, I’m hungry, I’m sore-”

“Shut up,” I said.  “It looks like you’re pretty close to done.  Just keep working.  You’ll be done soon.”

“What- what happens to us when we’re done?”

“One of you gets to be our firstborn companion,” I said.  I doubted Carmen was up to it, which left Clifton and Simon as our options.  Clifton had ditched his tinted glasses to see his work better, while Simon’s face was stitched up and bandaged.  Neither seemed particularly keen on the idea of staying with Mary and I.  They shrunk away from looking at me and focused more on their work, like errant students who hadn’t done their homework, hoping to avoid their teacher’s attention.

I left them to their work, dropping the pistol until my hand rested on my knee.

“I fell asleep?” Mary asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t do that.  That’s not me.  I’m alert when it counts.”

“You’re human,” I said.  “Helen can manage without sleep, but she’s different.”

“Did you sleep?” she asked.  “Were we asleep at the same time?”

“No,” I said.  “I didn’t sleep.”

Mary looked genuinely distressed.  I gave her shoulder a rub, not sure what to say or add.  I could have speculated as to why she drifted off, but none of it would have really addressed why she was so bothered, and a lot of my speculation would have added to how bothered she was.

Whether it was because she was comfortable with me or the emotional cost of recent events had cracked the facade and let the human frailties show, I could keep quiet on the subject.

“You should have slept,” Mary said.

“I tried, but as comfortable a pillow as your lap might be, a metal counter does not make for a comfortable bed, and I was twisted into a weird position.  By the time I got comfortable, you’d drifted off.”

Concern was clearly etched on her face.  Her fingers drummed her knee, where her leg hung over the countertop.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, keeping my voice low so the others wouldn’t hear.

“I am worried,” she replied.

“You got some sleep, I’m fine.  I’ve done more with less in the past.  All you need to do is focus on being as excellent as we both know you can be.  What we’re doing is going to require it.”

“I feel like you’re subtly manipulating me,” Mary said.

I rolled my eyes and hopped down from the table.  Mary wasn’t wrong.  I’d downplayed my own fatigue, jamming it in between reinforcing statements that turned her focus back to herself.  Ignoring the subject would have left her feeling like it needed to be addressed.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said.  “My leg fell asleep.”

Evette was hanging around Simon, which was my cue to pay more attention to what he was doing.  For much the same reason I could sometimes get a bad feeling by way of ‘prey instinct’, Evette represented parts of my subconscious that were potentially picking up clues that my conscious mind wasn’t.  She stood on his right, and I moved around to his left, gun in hand.

“The formula you wanted,” he said.  He mumbled a bit, with the way the stitches and glue pulled at his wounded face.  One of his eyes was badly swollen.  He was tense, for reasons beyond the gun I had pressed against his lower back.  “I wrote down the mix and the steps.  We’ve used this often enough when the Baron Richmond has been leaning on us.  It helps with inspiration, but going too far down that road… bad nightmares.”

I glanced past him at Evette, who had her elbows on the counter.

“Okay,” I said.  I glanced up at Simon  “I want you to give either Carmen or Clifton that dose.”

I watched his expression, the momentary fear, the arrest of his already warped facial expression and body language.

“I’m patient,” I said.  “And, barring bad circumstance, we’ll be coming back to drop off our new firstborn, right?  So… test that, I’ll double-check the formula with someone knowledgeable while we’re out, and we’ll either do some more tests or I’ll take the next batch as I return.  It’ll give you something to do while we’re gone.”

I watched his expression change, his less-swollen eye moving to his friends.

“Which one?” I asked.

“You keep doing that,” he said.  “Making us choose.”

Because I want to ruin the bond you have, I thought.  I want to drive in a wedge.

“Which one?” I asked, again.

He turned, looking at his companions.  “This would be easier if one of you volunteered.  Please?  Carm-”

“Nevermind,” I jumped in.  I reached out with my free hand, taking the syringe and the paper with notes it was resting on.  “I believe you, that this is legitimate.”

If the stakes were higher, then I doubted he would be able to ask his friends to volunteer in good conscience.  I wasn’t sure if this formula was as good as I’d get from my personal team, but it was one I could believe to be relatively safe.

Behind me, Mary hopped down from the table.

“I gave you four projects,” I addressed Clifton.  “Where are we at?”

“Not done,” he said.  “Give me an hour.”

“Not done with…?”

“Any of it.  I’m juggling the gas, the drug, the poison, and I’m trying to prepare for an improvised surgery with parts that are swelling as we speak.  I’ve got it on ice, in hopes that it’s ready.”

I nodded, looking over the table.

“And Carmen?” I asked.  Mary joined me, limping a little where her leg was a little wobbly.  She’d taken a moment to fix her hair and re-tie her ribbons.

“This is too big a job.  I can’t even keep my hands steady.”

She was breaking down, and even my slow approach seemed to ratchet up her nervousness.  I stopped where I was and leaned against the nearest counter.  I stared at the flesh that was laid out in ribbons across the counter in front of her.

Clifton spoke up, “It’s a simple job, Carmen.  It’s why we gave it to you.  You’ve done it twenty times.”

Twenty times.

How many families had been altered by this trio of people?

“It would be nice,” Evette said, “If there was a way to make one a firstborn, and force them to take the role for life.  Mute, unable to express themselves, wearing the flesh of a monster.”

“How do you normally do it?” I asked.  “Putting the firstborn together.”

Clifton answered for the shaky Carmen, “Most of the time, we get the remnants of other failed projects.  They’ll have weapons built in, altered physiology, or they’ll be ravaged by drug testing.  It gives us a good starting point.  We’ll keep projects on hand that we can apply to build on that, add some personal touches to match them to the parents.  Don’t always have to do it, just have to do it often enough that we seed the idea in the population’s mind.”

“What about the things in the vats?” Mary indicated one of the more twisted vat babies.

“Have to mix it up now and again to keep it fresh.  If they were all variations on the same theme, then they would get complacent.  The vat creations let us make something really worrisome, so they always have to worry if they’re going to get one of the really bad ones.”

“How do you keep them in line?  They come programmed, don’t they?”

“Another team handles that.  It’s the same treatment the stitched get, but they’re obviously alive.”

Lobotomies and brainwashing.

“Something that sensitive, it isn’t handled here, is it?”

“At Richmond House, by the senior doctors.”

It couldn’t be easy.

Simon spoke, still speaking funny with his face as cut up as it was.  “What you’re doing here, with the gas, dressing someone up like a firstborn.  It’s clear you’re trying something.”

“What of it?” I asked.

“If you cause an incident, the firstborn in the area will react.  They’ll hurt anyone in arm’s reach, usually the families they’re assigned to, and then they’ll arrive to help local law enforcement in handling the crisis.”

“What keeps them from doing that when the Baron goes after a family?”

“It’s usually quiet.  Most families, they don’t fight back, because they know it’ll hurt their neighbors.  But the people here, they’re scum, you know that?  They’re criminals, the poor, drunks, child abusers, they’re scrapings from the bottoms of the filthiest barrels.  Sometimes they’ll put up a fight, because they don’t have the capacity to be social creatures and care about those around them.  But even then, the disturbance of a bit of shouting and furniture being thrown around will only bring two or three, from the nearest houses.  Only two or three families will suffer for it.”

“And if someone were to fire a gun?” I asked.  I waggled the pistol.  “Like this one?”

“I don’t know how loud that is, and we’re underground, but maybe the whole neighborhood?”

“I see,” I said.

It really couldn’t be easy.

Mary had a knife in hand.  She was tapping the flat of the blade against her stockinged leg in an agitated fashion.

“We could just make a loud noise, then,” Evette said.  “Leave them tied up here, draw the firstborn in, let them get torn to pieces by their own creations.”

“My focus is on this job,” I said.  “I’m only saying that because it’s very, very tempting to think about inflicting the worst imaginable fates on you three.  My friend here, she’s thinking about a friend of ours, someone who is what doctors should be.  She might, like me, be thinking about how very galling it is that you’ve achieved any kind of station or privilege at all, being absolute monsters, while our friend struggles to climb the ladder.”

Clifton set his jaw.  Carmen looked away.  Simon’s expression was hardened, but what it had hardened into was hard to read, given the damage that had been done to it.

“You call the people out there scrapings of the bottom of the barrels, but you might not know that I’m one of those scrapings,” I said.  “And I think-”

I stopped, biting my lip for a second as I shook my head.

“-I think,” I said, my voice low, “That you’re really not in a position to talk about lack of empathy or goodness in someone.  I would be very careful about what you’re saying, because talking along those lines, it’s making me want to be creative in how we handle you three.”

Yesss,” Evette whispered the word.

Mary was nodding.  She was listening almost as intently as the trio were, and the knife had ceased slapping against her thigh.

“What we do, we were forced into,” Simon said.  “We were students, we didn’t plan to be this, but we got tested, our talents, such as they are, they got noticed, and we were recruited.  We’re making the best of a bad situation.”

Was he telling the truth?  There was probably some kernel of truth in there.  It was even possible that it had been true, once upon a time, when they were new to this city.  But the language that Clifton had used to describe the locals of Warrick, and the attitudes the three had displayed before we’d caught them… the evil they were doing had been reduced to a casual sort of wrongness.  They had ceased to care a long time ago.

“Well,” I said.  I looked at the strips of textured flesh that had been laid out on the table, “That’s good, then.  You’ve had practice in this.  This situation is similar to what you described.  We noticed you.  We recruited you.  And now you’re going to have to make the best of an even worse situation.  Who’s going to be our firstborn?”

None of them wanted to be it.  Carmen shrunk into herself, hands fidgeting at her pockets, eyes on the ground.

“Clifton?” I asked.

“I’m still going to be another hour on the gas, and the poison, and the drug.” Clifton said.  The answer came quickly enough and smoothly enough that I knew he’d rehearsed it.

“You bastard!” Simon said, wasting no time in realizing what Clifton was doing, and what Clifton had done.  Delaying tactics.  “No!  You’ve walked away from all of this unscathed.  Your face wasn’t ruined, you-”

I raised my gun, pointing it at him.  He stopped talking.

Ruined as his face was, I could see the resignation on it.

“Unless you’d rather she wear it?” I asked, indicating Carmen.

Simon’s face contorted.  He shook his head, before drooping into a defeated slouch.

“At least you’re a gentleman,” Mary said, in her coldest voice.

“Get to work,” I told Carmen, indicating the strips.  Then I looked at the man with the mustache.  “Clifton.  Give me an eye.”

I felt as though I was more conspicuous without an eyepatch than I was with one.  My eye was a mess, watering constantly, and it still lacked vision.  I’d had a featureless orb beneath the eyepatch for the sake of keeping my overall face in the right shape, and to keep to the Baron’s rules, but it drew attention and served as the sort of thing that people took notice of and mentioned to the people in the know.  Eyepatch, featureless orb, neither let me blend into a crowd.

This, at least, was an eye that would look more or less where I looked.  The ointments smeared around my eye would reduce swelling and the appearance of redness.  It didn’t look pretty, I was sure, but it didn’t draw nearly so many curious glances.

Clifton and Carmen had been left behind, bound with razor wire to the furniture and to each other.  If what they’d said about the firstborn was right, then they wouldn’t be too inclined to scream and shout for help.  We’d gagged them anyway.  The razor wire served as a restraint that could cut them or cut the person they were bound to if they struggled too much.

On Simon’s part, the strips of flesh fit together with barely any seams, sucking close to skin, as though he was wearing leeches from head to toe. His covering of skin was ridged, moist, and already becoming touched with frost where the cold froze the mucous layer.  His eyes were deep-recessed, and one of them, thanks to the damage done by razor wire, was distorted slightly in shape, with a notch in the lower eyelid.  His mouth, due to the weight of what had been attached to his chin, hung slightly open, his breath fogging in the air.

Now and then, he huffed out a breath or flinched, as though he was in pain.  I highly suspected that Simon had gotten the better end of the deal.  He was mobile, while the other two were left in the dark, unable to move or speak.

Mary and I led the way to where we had stashed our bags.  We pulled them out of hiding, then rifled through the contents, picking out clothes.

“Turn your back,” I told Simon.

He did.

Mary and I turned our backs to each other, each keeping an eye on Simon.  I shed my outer layer of clothes and changed into something that matched the locals more closely.  I found wool socks and pulled them on, before putting my boots back on and lacing them up.  Mary added more blades to her arsenal.

“You’re going to have to lose the ribbons,” I told Mary.  “I’m dressed, by the by.”

“Three seconds,” she said.

I waited, counting.

Six seconds in, she said, “Okay.”

She was, like I was, wearing nice clothes, but she was dressed in a nice black dress with a white lace collar.  She chose to wear a black rain-cloak, the sort with an inner lining for winter and a hood.  I’d layered jacket over a dark green sweater, which I wore over a collared shirt.

“I didn’t expect a job,” she said.  “I only have the knives I normally wear.”

“Is it enough?” I asked.  “We could go looking.”

“I have about twenty of the balanced knives, two of the longer ones with hilts.  It’s enough,” she said.  “I could do with more wire, but I’m not sure where we could get any.”

She pulled off her ribbons, and was very careful to avoid the wire that was worked into the middle of each ribbon as she stuck out a leg, pulled her skirt up a bit, and tied the ribbons around her upper thigh.

I nodded, tearing my eyes away.  I patted myself down, making sure I was equipped.

I had the pistol, I had the gas, I had a knife of my own tucked into my boot, and I had the syringe with the wyvern formula in it.  I also had the stimulant and a vial of liquid poison, the remainder of Clifton’s projects, finished after the gas, while Carmen had still been working on our firstborn.

Drugs didn’t work so well on me, be they stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens or the performance enhancing sort.  The reasoning for why was much the same reason that poisons, diseases and parasites didn’t find much traction in my system.  I’d built up tolerances to most things, and had been given medicines and drugs to help my body cope with the toxic loads that wyvern put into my brain and blood.  I could take some drugs, if they were concentrated enough, but once certain volumes and tolerances came into play, there was often a very thin margin of ‘the drug works’ between ‘doesn’t work at all’ and ‘kills Sy’.

But many poisons could double as a medicine, given the right dosage and method of application, and many drugs could double as poisons.  That was useful, and poison served as a weapon both Mary and I had some experience with.

In this case, there was also a third benefit.  If our ‘firstborn’ Simon started getting antsy for his next dose, as Carmen had been doing as we’d walked away, then the stimulant might serve.  I knew it had been made with drugs they’d had on hand for their personal use.

Mary straightened out her skirt, gave me a once-over, and then reached up to fix my hat.  Eyepatch aside, my wild black hair was one of the most distinctive parts of me.  The cap helped.

I straightened her collar, rather unnecessarily, and flicked at a bit of hair that had fallen forward to drape over her shoulder.

“I’m still mad at you for Lillian,” she said.  The cold glare cut right through me.

You’re more emotional than I’ve known you to be since the day we met, or the day you thought we could cut our way past the ghosts and find Percy.

Was she sensing that something was wrong, that my behavior had changed?  Consciously?  Subconsciously?

“You’d be mad at me, whatever happened,” I said.  “It’s okay.  I think she’d be happy to know you were mad on her behalf.”

“That’s the important thing,” Mary said.  “That she’s happy.”

It was such a simple thing to say, and it cut me to the core, because I knew the consequences of what I was doing, the steps that followed after this job, and I knew that none of it would put a smile on Lillian’s face.

I couldn’t find a response.  In a way, I was saved by the ringing of a bell.

Both Mary and I looked at Simon.

“A train,” he said.  His transformation slurred his words even worse.  “We’re supposed to get out of sight.  They evacuate the streets, and only the local law stays, looking for anyone that’s slow.”

I gestured.  Mary followed, and Simon hurried to keep up.

Good boy.

“It’s-”

I glanced back at our pet monster, with his face that looked like it was melting off, forehead too high, jaw too low, rolls of flesh around the neck, disappearing beneath his clothes.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just strange.  The trains pass at regular times.”

“This isn’t regular?” I asked.

He shook his head, wattles and rolls of loose skin shaking for several moments after his head had stopped.  He closed one eye in a wince of light pain as the alien tissues reasserted their grip across one side of his face.

“We’ll watch,” I said.  “Mary?  Keep an eye out for any officers or firstborn.”

She nodded.

We found a bit of a vantage point, at a rise where several general-purpose stores were clustered.  A tailor’s, a grocery.

The train rolled into the station.  There were more uniformed members of staff than there had been when we’d departed.  That was the first sign that something was up.  The soldiers came next.  Standing guards, dressed in what would normally be their formal blacks, saved for special events and funerals.  Long coats with shiny trim, tall hats, guns at each shoulder.  They lined the way from the train to the base of the station, a row of men on each side of the path.

Mary turned her head to look for a moment before going back to keeping an eye out for trouble.  “It’s what Mcormick’s wife was saying.  The nobles?  They were expecting multiple trains to arrive with guests.”

I watched as the people departed the train.  Something about their body language.  They were dressed well, in some of the highest fashion, but they weren’t dressed like true nobles.  They didn’t give off that air.

“No, not quite,” I said.  “The upper crust.  Politicians, top-tier merchants, military men, the rich.  Maybe the most minor of nobles, maybe.”

Mary nodded.  She gave up on watching out for trouble.  It was fairly clear that nobody was sticking their head out.  We were safe for the moment.

“This is the prelude to the real guests arriving,” I said.  “I would be very surprised if the Gages weren’t guests of honor down there.  I didn’t expect all of this so soon.”

“It’s the wedding party, for the Baron and Emily,” Mary said.  “Complete with a small army in security.”

More people and layers of defense between us and the Baron, I thought.  This was what it was to be in a position of power.  He didn’t even have to try, and he just drifted out of easy reach.

“After these people, after even more trainloads of them with their personal retinues of soldiers, the nobility should arrive,” I said.  I took in every detail I could as I stared down at the people who were now moving off of the train platform, not even daring to blink.  “Not just a few, but large numbers of them.  The Baron’s extended family, at a minimum.  Once they start showing up, everything inevitably gets darker, bloodier, and harder for us to manage.”

“What you and Lillian said about Mauer… do you think he’s here, with those guns of his?”

It felt too early.  He would still be getting his feet under him, gathering intel.

But Mauer and Fray had surprised me before.  I wouldn’t say ‘no’ because I didn’t want to tempt fate.

If Mauer’s men were here with the guns, then the Baron would only show his face for as long as he needed to in order to create plausible deniability.  If they weren’t, then we still had a dozen or more nobles to contend with.

“Let’s hurry,” I said.  “We have to be in position.”

With every passing moment, our hands would be further tied.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.12 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

All things considered, with the precarious situation and the immense danger we faced, our situation could have been far worse.  The preparations Mary and I had made were now paying off.  We were largely invisible, walking down the street in the company of Simon.  His flesh hung loose on him, his lips parted in a permanent leer, and he limped as he walked.  Yet because of him, we barely got a second look from the people around us.

The arrival of the hoity-toity types to Warrick might have played a part in that.  As citizens emerged from their houses, the new arrivals made their way through the city.  All were dressed in their finest, and given the status they held in society, their finest was impressive.  I was more worldly than most, and I didn’t recognize some of the fabrics they wore.

Man, woman, child, and the occasional monstrous pet.  They were colorful, crisp, and eerily bright as they walked through the city, gawking at those they passed, talking noisily.

Mary and I were part of the crowd at this point.  Earlier, I’d observed how people spaced themselves out.  Now I could see how they gathered together, trying to flee indoors and watch from the windows, clinging to the sides of the streets when and where they couldn’t.  Members of the local police force were blocking them from retreating further.

The locals were a stark contrast to the upper crust types.  Their heads were bent slightly, their eyes averted from making any lingering contact with anyone around them, and they were dressed in dark, drab clothing.  The clothes were nice, really, without any loose threads or worn patches, but they still weren’t the sort of thing that was meant to draw attention to the wearer.

I watched, Mary close beside me, as the officers of Warrick gathered together.  The uniformed men formed something of a wall, keeping the new arrivals from progressing down the street, much as they’d boxed in the locals.  They were tense, I could see, and very mindful of where their pistols and swords were, pistol at the right hip, sword at the left, with exceptions for those I had to assume were left-handed.

The leader of the officers spoke to the person at the head of the group.  Mary and I weren’t close enough to hear.  Here and there, the people at the sidelines spoke among one another.  Husband to wife, parent to child.  I deemed it safe to communicate with Mary.

I murmured, “A city like this, with all the rules in place, the authoritarian control, everything so carefully poised?  They don’t want the visitors to disturb things too much.”

“Whatever happens, if the firstborn are as prone to getting violent at the slightest provocation as we were told,” Mary said, glancing at Simon, “Then disasters are going to be likely.  Someone’s going to make mistakes, and people are going to get hurt.”

“I would suspect,” I said, very carefully, “That this is entirely the plan.”

“People don’t tend to want trouble at their wedding,” Mary said.

“This isn’t about the wedding,” I said.  I watched the aristocrats glance at each other.  They seemed somewhat upset, but it wasn’t horror, it wasn’t anger, it was the look of a group of people who had hoped to have a picnic out in the sun and saw the rain arriving.  “No, he doesn’t care about that.  But if people get hurt as collateral, it’s very much a personal touch to the whole affair, here.  If his fellow nobles die, it’s less people in his way as he asserts a position of true power.  It’s very possible he doesn’t plan to be here for much longer, and he may be sacrificing a large share of the citizens of Warrick in the course of the celebrations here.”

Mary nodded.  I watched her face as her eyes took in the crowd around us.  Scared individuals.

He’s going to find his allies among the nobles and upper crust, then he’s going to secure their safety, assuming attack.  He’s going to be especially careful, whatever happens.

“Listen!” the local police chief raised his voice.  “These people are the guests of the Lord Baron Richmond, and they are not the last that will arrive!  For the time being they will be confined to the city center!  Many have accommodations to arrange and errands to run.  Outside of the city center, they will abide by the same rules you do!  To facilitate this, each group of guests will be joined by you and your firstborn!  You will do as you are asked and help them wherever possible!”

There were murmurs in the crowd.

“Remain outdoors, make yourselves available, and accompany anyone who asks!  Spread the word to your neighbors.  We will be checking homes!”

As if to demonstrate the power the visiting members of the upper class held over Warrick’s people, someone in the crowd pointed at a man, a wicked smile on his face, and made a beckoning gesture.

A hundred sets of eyes watched as the man who had been beckoned lowered his head and started to walk.  His son, about ten, held his hand, walking at his side, while his firstborn acted like his shadow, following behind.  The thing would have been about eight feet tall if it could stand straight, but its back arched high and then swooped down, putting its head at a lower level than its shoulders.  All down the spine, insect-like limbs moved and twitched incessantly.  Its arms were held close to its chest, wrists bent, fingers curled.

Following the aristocrat’s move, other visitors began picking out those families that would be part of their retinues.  I saw a woman with elbow-length gloves and a long dress reach up to touch a firstborn’s porcine face.  From the look on the face of the man that belonged to the firstborn, he fully expected it to snap and kill both the woman and his family.

The stark horror in his eyes, it struck a chord with me.  He was someone who was having to willingly and obediently face down his worst nightmare.

I saw the chief of the local police say something to the woman, and she pulled her hand back and away.  The expression on her face was anything but apologetic.  She smiled like she was in on a joke, and the police chief didn’t smile back.

Accidents were going to happen.  Days and lives were going to be ruined before this was over.  Lives would be cut short, and families would mourn the dead.  The energy around us was one of tension, everything wound so tight it could almost start humming.

The most obvious members of the group had been picked out.  Those who remained were those with the sense to evade notice and avoid eye contact.  They couldn’t be summoned if they couldn’t see the points or gestures of the aristocrats.  This, in turn, led to the visitors walking further down the street, until they got close enough to call out.

Being small had its advantages.  At the back of our particular little cluster of crowd, Mary and I were hard to make out compared to the adults around us.  My hopes that we wouldn’t be targeted grew fainter as the aristocrats made their way further down the street.  They were treating this as a game, now.  To find the more attractive people, the people who least wanted to be picked out.

A woman near me started shaking.  She looked as if she’d been the nervous type well before she had come to Warrick.  She was petite in the same way that some of the older mice I’d known were.  Someone who hadn’t been well nourished in her formative years.  Her husband put an arm around her, but his comforting gesture went with an expression that seemed like it had run out of patience long ago.

“You,” one of the aristocrats said, targeting her.  The woman jumped as if she’d been poked with something sharp.  The aristocrat was a man, dark haired with a dark beard and a mean smile.  His jacket was embossed black wool with gold leaf.

“I have a daughter to get back to, we left her at home alone to watch over the fire, and our firstborn is-”

From the look of the man’s smile, it wasn’t going to work.  He was the sort that would get along with the Baron.  The sort that took a perverse joy in the suffering of others.

“I said you,” the man said.  “I’ve been instructed to gather flowers.  You will show me where I can do that.”

The woman’s husband took the lead, pulling her along with him.  The firstborn was a scrawny one, with a face not unlike the younger Twins had had, bone with skin stretched over it, and no muscle or fat to pad it.  It wore clothes too large for it.  It moved very slowly.

We needed a plan.  We needed to get as close to where the Baron was likely to be as we could, and in an ideal world, we would need to do it sooner than later.  How would this unfold?  He would come down from the house in a show of strength and panache, he would show off his wife, who was likely in the process of being dressed up and having her physical modifications removed, and he would meet the Crown nobles and aristocrats.

If Fray or Mauer made a move then, he would be ready to retreat.  The opportunity would be lost, and he likely wouldn’t show his face until all was over and done with.  Even with a small army at their disposal, I doubted Fray or Mauer would have an easy time attacking the noble in his home.  With a large army, well, I doubted they could easily manage a large army without attracting attention.

If the enemies weren’t here, then the Baron would socialize with the visitors, make a show of demonstrating just how much control he had over the locals, very probably by killing quite a few of them, and then retreat.  The wedding would happen tomorrow or the day after.

We needed to relocate to the city center, where all of the aristocrats were being corralled.  That was the place where the Baron would meet and greet, and where he would make his announcements.

But simply walking there would be a problem.  We would be picked out and made victim to some aristocrat’s whim.

We weren’t being scouted just yet, but the crowd wasn’t budging, much as rabbits might freeze as they noticed a predator.  They averted their eyes and waited until the nobles drew near enough to pick them at random.

If they could only get through this part of things, then they would be able to stay in the background, tend to their yards or stay away from where the aristocrats were, and avoid too much trouble.  If they got picked, however, and they were at the whim of whatever rich asshole chose them, and they would be plunged into a volatile situation where they might run into noble, or where some idiot might cause enough of a stir to disturb the firstborn.

I peered over the visiting members of the aristocracy.  Some that were new to money, akin to the Gages, and they clearly had something to prove.  There were others I could recognize as older money, there were families, businessmen who wore their trades on their sleeves, and politicians.

New money would be too worried about ruining what they had.  Old money would be too inflexible.  Families with influence were hard to wrangle, but doable.  Businessmen, I wasn’t sure I could get the leverage.  Politicians were used to being manipulated, and often frustrated with the status quo, given how they would always be second to the Crown in authority, but the ones that were good enough to be here knew how subterfuge worked and how it worked against them.  Manipulation would be possible, but it would require too much effort.

My eye fell on a young man, no older than sixteen.  He wore a black wool coat that he left open, and a fine scarf.  The boots he wore suggested he rode, though they had been shined to a glossy black and there were no telltale scuff marks suggesting a recent ride.  A hunter, if I had to guess, and a scion of a noble family.

He was in the company of a pretty red-haired girl, a touch younger than him, who had clearly had her face altered.  Nothing jumped out at me as bad handiwork, but the fact that I noticed she’d been altered and wasn’t a born beauty meant that there were subtle signs.  Given enough years, I expected she would go down the same road that Mrs. Gage had.  The little signs would add up and she would be something regrettable.  A wannabe noble.  The girl wore a dress that was just far enough away from being white and had just enough of a blue tint added that she wouldn’t steal the spotlight from the bride.  It was close enough to be dangerous, considering the volatility of the nobles, however.

I touched Mary’s hand.  She glanced down, and I gestured.

Dutifully, Mary shifted her weight from one foot to another, a slight movement, but enough to draw notice, when half of the crowd around us wasn’t daring to breathe.  She met the boy’s eyes, then looked away.  She did a good job of acting, shrinking down and back.

It really didn’t take much at all.

“You,” the hunter said, without any hesitation.  Mary looked at him, and he spoke again, “Yes, you.  Come on, now.”

Mary and I stepped out of the crowd, followed by Simon.  Eyes were on us as we joined the pair.  The red haired girl looked me over and looked somewhat disgusted.  The young hunter’s attention was wholly on Mary.

“Walk with us,” he said.

He turned to go back the way he’d come, but he paused.  “When I or Lanie tell you to do something, I expect you to respond much as you would to a noble, but call me sir.  Call her miss.”

“Yes sir,” Mary said.

“Yes sir,” I echoed her.

“Why did you come?” he asked.  “Are you related?”

“No sir,” I said.  “Not by blood.  But our parents were paired together, and we were made to come with.  I have to go where the family firstborn goes.”

“Hmph,” he made a dismissive sound.  He resumed walking, and we followed.  The red haired girl, Mary and I made three people that were all walking side by side behind the young hunter.  Simon followed us, limping.

My mind was working to come up with answers well in advance of any questions he might ask, so I could sound natural and normal.

Useless, in the end.  Neither he nor the girl in his company seemed to care about us.

The girl spoke, “What do you do to amuse yourselves in a place like this?”

I had to fight not to give her an incredulous look.  Did she not really understand what this city was?

“Individually, we read, miss,” I said, “We pursue hobbies like painting and wood carving that can take place in the home.”

“I like needlework, miss,” Mary said.  She was still playing the mouse, and in doing so, she reminded me of Lillian to the point that I wondered if she was specifically copying her best friend’s mannerisms.   “I am very good with a thread.”

Behind us, Simon made a small spitting sound, a sputter cut short.

“But what do you actually do?” the girl asked.  “I understand this nonsense with the monsters, but no self respecting person our age grows up and stays entirely out of trouble.”

“Miss,” Mary said, “This place affords us no respect at all.  We do our best in the day to day, we stay out of sight and out of trouble, and that has to be good enough.”

“I don’t believe it,” the girl said.

“Enough, Lanie,” the young hunter said.  “Let it be.”

“I just spent three hours on a train, I was up when it was still dark out so we could catch the train on time, and now I’m supposed to sit on my hands and do nothing while our parents make bad jokes and try to look important?  There has to be a pond where people sneak off to go skinny dipping, or a spot in the woods where the boys and girls stow booze they’ve managed to sneak from their parents.”

“Monsters lurk in the woods, to guard Richmond House, miss,” I said.  “And if we were to try skinny dipping, we would have to bring our firstborn, and they would watch.”

I had to look past Mary to see, but I could see a frown cross Lanie’s face.

“So?” she asked, defiant, as if she were so brave that she wouldn’t care if a monster leered at her.  I didn’t believe it in the slightest.

“Here,” the young hunter said, indicating a nearby building.  He’d led us off the main street.  There were people around, but not many, and they seemed eager to avoid the young aristocrat’s attentions.

“It’s a stable,” Lanie said.

He tried the door and opened it.  I could smell the rich smells of the horse, the shit, and the hay.

“I just finished my first half-year at Whorrel’s, and I thought I’d have a nice time, but no.  I have to sit on the train for three hours, and now I get to watch you ride?  Chance, you’re taking a dull, terrible day and making it even worse.”

“Come on,” Chance said.

The stable had windows, and light made its way through, but it wasn’t much.  We made our way inside as ordered.  The light inside dimmed considerably as the sliding door was closed behind us.

Chance turned his attention to Mary.  He approached her, and she backed up.  He moved more quickly, eager now, herding her to control where she moved, until she bumped up with her back to a wooden pillar.

“Move over, this way, so you’re in the light,” he told her.

Mary averted eye contact and moved over.

Really, Chance?” Lanie asked.  “This is even duller than watching you ride.”

He waved dismissively in her direction and mine.  “Amuse yourself with the boy.”

Her eyes locked onto mine.  She made a face.  “Not interested.”

Already twisted, tormented and badly abused by the paces I had put it through in the last few days, my ego took another hit.

Chance performed his dismissive wave again, with less enthusiasm or care behind the gesture.  His attention was wholly consumed by Mary.  He was well in her personal space now.

“You’re not bad looking,” he said.

Mary is a damn sight better than ‘not bad looking’, I thought, affronted.

My flare of annoyance coincided with Lanie’s eye roll.  She met my eyes and nodded, as if we were suddenly entirely on the same page.

“What do you think?” he asked Mary.

Mary twisted around, glancing at me.  I gave her nothing.  Better to let Chance wind himself up a little more before we let him down.

“My boyfriend recently died,” Mary said, her voice quiet.  “No offense to you, sir, but I don’t think my heart would be in it, whatever happened.”

“I won’t press you, even though I know you’re under orders to do exactly as I say,” Chance said.  He seemed to like the position of power, even if he wasn’t quite exercising it.  “I’m a gentleman.  I will say that I’m a wealthy gentleman.  I imagine you’re looking for a way out of this town.  I could give you that way.”

“Except it’s not your money, Chance,” Lanie said.  “It’s your parents’.”

“Shut your mouth, Lanie.”

The red haired girl shot me a smile, as if the fact that she’d given Chance some trouble was a great bit of fun.

“I don’t know, sir,” Mary said, shrinking back, her head down.

“I can be convincing,” he said.

It was my turn to roll my eyes, now.  This was painful to watch and to listen to, and his complete lack of tact or ability to manipulate offended me.

“Marcy,” I said.

“Is that your name?” Chance asked.  The hunter, on the prowl, single minded in his pursuit.  “Marcy is a good name.  A lot of girls are calling themselves that, now that Mary has fallen out of fashion, what with the church and all.”

“Are you giving me permission?” she asked.

“Permission?” Chance asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Chance didn’t get another word out as Mary pounced on him.  She’d managed to draw two blades before she made contact with him, and as she landed astride his chest, she brought both blades down.

Lanie’s hands went to her mouth.  She wasn’t quick to connect the dots, and by the time she’d turned to look at me, I’d drawn the pistol.  She raised her white-gloved hands.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Chance asked.  “This-”

Mary did something to make him stop talking.  A knife to his throat, perhaps.

Lanie, meanwhile, stared at me, her eyes glittering with excitement, hands raised.

“His clothes are too large for you,” Mary remarked.

“I know,” I said.  “We could put you in Lanie’s clothes, though.  Simon and I could be your Warrick-born accompaniment.”

Mary moved the points of her knives, turning to look Lanie up and down.

“One young noble, though?” Mary asked.  “Hard to sell.”

It was.  Mary, alone, with a single boy and a monster in tow, based on the demographics I’d seen earlier, it wasn’t an easy image to pull off.  People would glance her way and remember the scene.  I trusted Mary to play the aristocrat, she’d been a Mothmont girl, but that wasn’t the concern.

“Firstborn!” Chance managed, voice strangled.  Mary’s distraction had given him the chance to speak.

“I’m not a firstborn,” Simon said, sounding tired, his words slurred.  “I’m a doctor.  Yesterday evening, my friends and I were in the same situation as you two, except they carved into my face as part of that, and they stabbed my lady-friend in the back.  When they were done, they made us use our talents to modify me.  I would suggest that you do what they say.”

Good man, Simon, I thought.

“Do you do this sort of thing a great deal?” Lanie asked me.  Simon’s little speech had put new fear into her eyes, but her voice was breathy.

She was pretty, though not so pretty as Mary, because it wasn’t a real sort of prettiness.  Her red hair was tidy and her clothes flattered her figure.  The look in her eyes was intense, suggesting she was wholly caught up in the moment.  It would be so easy to get a reaction out of her, to say one thing or another and toy with her emotions, to excite her, to devastate her.

Yet all I found myself feeling was a profound sense of how much I missed Lillian.

I put a sly, wicked smile on my face as I touched the nose of the pistol against her sternum.  “I think that now that the tables have turned, it’s my turn to ask the questions.  Miss.

Just a little bit of play, to get her reeled in just a touch more.

“Am I supposed to call you sir?” she asked.  Fear and excitement mingled as she gave me a smile with just a hint of a falter to it.

“Not at all,” I said.  “We’re going to walk out of this stable.  Possibly with and possibly without Chance over there, depending on how cooperative he is.  I’m thinking you’ll be cooperative, won’t you?”

The smile was no longer faltering.  She’d wanted excitement, and she’d gotten possibly more excitement than she’d had in her life to date.  I suspected that particular well was bottomless.

“We are going to leave as a group,” I told her.  “You’re going to act like you were before.  You’ll tell me and Mary there to do things, but the most important thing is that you get us to the town center, in the thick of things.  What do you think about that?”

“I think… can I be honest?”

I nodded once.

“I planned to avoid my parents and my aunt as much as possible today.  They know I planned to, and they’ll be surprised to see me.”

“Well then,” I said.  “Would they be less surprised if Chance was ordering us about and being something of a stubborn ass?”

Chance squirmed a bit, clearly offended.

“I think they would find that a perfectly good reason for me to be back there,” she said.  She licked her lips, as if they were dry.

And for Chance to be alive.

The girl wasn’t dumb.

“Mary,” I said.  “I’m thinking along the lines of a razor-wire slipknot.  Put it around his neck, run it through his sleeve.  Tug, and you slice his throat?  It should keep him obedient.”

“Give me two minutes,” Mary said.

I nodded.  “And you, miss, I assume you don’t need razor wire to stay complacent?  Knowing I have the gun should be enough?”

Her head moved, signaling I was right.  I suspected I could have handed her the gun and she would have still been obedient.

I also suspected that, at the first sign of trouble, she would prove to be a problem.

“What will we do in the meantime?” Lanie asked.

There was a change in the tenor of things outside.  The citizens of Warrick were captive prey, and they were sensitive to changes in their environment.  There was a great deal of tension, and the smallest movements could make things reverberate through the streets and buildings.

This wasn’t a small movement.

“You could pat me down,” Lanie said.

For all that she’d said she wasn’t interested before, she sure seemed to find me interesting now.

“Shut up,” I said.  “I’m listening.”

“For?” she asked.

I raised the gun, and I pressed it between her eyes.  Obediently, she shut her mouth, pursing her lips.

I listened, and I heard distant horses.  A procession, not dissimilar to the arrival of the first trainload of aristocrats, but heavier, weightier.

“The Baron is here,” I said, voicing my observations aloud.  “At the town center.”

This is it.

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================================================== 10.13 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.13

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We entered the city center as a quintet: two Lambs, two aristocrats, and a man turned monster.  The layout of the town made this the space where festivals would be held, if Warrick was the sort of place to hold festivals.  If Warrick had farmer’s markets, where everyone gathered to sell produce and trade goods from the professional to the homespun, then this was where the people would set up their stalls.  It would be where friendships were made and rekindled, where gossip was exchanged and conversations were had.  But Warrick wasn’t that sort of city.

No, the heart of this city didn’t beat.  It, like the Baron Richmond’s church, was symbolic, and it was a symbol designed to be false and discouraging.

Now the man had his gloved hand around that heart, gripping it, forcing it to beat to his tune.  The resulting life and animation was a stricken sort, one driven by fear and ungainly, unpracticed movements.

Our group wasn’t dissimilar, but it was dangerously lopsided in how awkward things were.  Chance held himself too rigid, Mary’s dog on a leash, his collar little more than a slip of razor wire.  Mary was doing a good job of playing the meek Warrick girl, but Chance looked too concerned with his own mortality and our immediate surroundings.  I wondered if people would have taken notice of his nervousness if he wasn’t sixteen or so.  Just a little bit older, and he might have looked like an adult.

Lainie had seemed normal, but was swiftly moving away from thinking of this as a little game.  As if we were invisible, we passed through the gauntlet of soldiers and guards that were watching all entrances to the city center.  Lainie seemed to lose the light in her eyes and the bounce in her step as we left the men with guns behind and entered the broader crowd.

The adults around us that weren’t desperately trying to fade into the background were of Lainie’s social class, her parents, aunts, uncles, people her father might do business with, people she might interact with in a few years, when she was grown.  She understood them, and she knew the good it could do to be on their good side, and the ruin it could bring to be on their bad side.

Which was a very complicated way of saying that the familiar faces might be bringing matters home for her.

“The Baron isn’t here yet,” Mary commented.

“He’s coming,” I said.  I could track the shift in the tone of things and in the crowd’s attitudes.  Anticipation mingled with fear.  Even the aristocracy of the western Crown States had a healthy fear of the nobles.

“The Baron?” Chance asked.  “Whatever you’re doing, I don’t think you want to cross him.”

“You’re right,” I said.  “We really don’t want to cross the man.”

Mary made a point of briefly meeting my eyes.  She looked away, giving me a fractional nod of the head by way of agreement.  The statement that we didn’t want to get on the Baron’s bad side seemed to put our hostages at ease.  Simon knew more than the kids did, but apparently I sounded convincing, and the tension in his shoulders eased somewhat.

There were so many people, and it was getting increasingly clear that this wasn’t a good battlefield, be it for the overt attack or the subtle one.  The street was level, all stone and the stone-gripping wood, with mortar where the fast-growing wood hadn’t extended far enough.  A town hall, a smaller church, and several large houses blocked in the area, which formed something of a plaza, capable of holding perhaps a thousand people, if I had to guess.  If and when the population here exceeded capacity, the guards that stood between the buildings at the plaza’s edge could move further down the streets, increasing the number by two hundred or five hundred people.  Anything more than that, and I suspected that holes would appear in security, with too many access points to cover.

A third of the way down the plaza, pale stone had been laid out in some shallow, long steps, leading up to a raised section.  Two-thirds of the way down, the steps and raised portion reoccurred, with a stage overlooking the entire affair, and a fountain behind that stage, the statues added a kind of presence to it and framed it.  A soldier, a doctor, and what I assumed to be an aristocrat, all in modern Crown style.

By no accident, I was guessing, the construction of the stage had passing resemblance to a hangman’s gallows.  It was fancier, with more trim and style to it and carvings etched into the wood, but the breadth of it and the overall dimensions were evocative.

“You suck at fighting,” Gordon said.  “So I think you’re on the right track.  If you actually find yourself at odds with the Baron, on his turf, surrounded by his friends, you’re going to lose.  Even if you have Mary with you.”

I nodded.  I took note of a cluster of tables, and more tables were being added.  Tables were being carried by the people of Warrick at the order of the aristocrats that were taking a hand in the event.  Dining room tables plucked from houses, very probably with the assumption that the tables were free for the taking.  Entitlement.

“I know you like shaking the box, but this is a situation where you get one shake at most.  The houses and town hall around the town center are occupied.  Soldiers, stitched, bodyguards, and all of the warbeasts you noticed before, they’re camped out in there.”

Our group had to stop as a cluster of adults walked in front of us, cutting us off.  Entitlement, again, was in full display.  They were adults, well-to-do adults, and they wouldn’t pause or make way for children.  Mary and I drew closer together, and Lainie became part of the huddle.  Chance stumbled a little as he fought to stay close.  Not that Mary would ever make a mistake and let that wire draw closed.  Chance’s bloody demise was too dangerous a possibility here.

“There’s no nooks or crannies,” I shared the observations that ‘Gordon’ had given me.  “The buildings are all occupied.”

“We can come and go as we need to, so long as we have these three with us,” Mary murmured.

“True,” I responded, keeping my voice down.  I looked around again.  The way was clear, but talking strategy was important enough that I was willing to stop roaming and start figuring out the next few steps.  I was content to stay where we were, at the southern end of the plaza, on the lowest tier.  “Leaving and camping out in a nearby building makes for a break from opportunity, though.  Too far away, and we can’t act on anything we need to act on.”

“With everything that follows, we’ll want an escape route, or a place to hide.  I can’t move without knowing where I’m retreating afterward, Sy.”

“Wow,” Lainie chimed in.  She’d overheard, which I’d intended, and her attention was fully on us, which I had also intended.  “This is real, isn’t?  The wire, the things you’re talking about, like you’re so used to it.  What are you actually here to do?”

“Don’t ask questions, Lainie,” Chance said.  He was tense, his voice lower than was necessary, given the surroundings and the lack of anyone special in earshot.

“If you find out, it’ll be later, when the time comes, and that’ll only be if you’re paying attention and only if my friend and I think you’ll be useful,” I said.

Hook set.  It served to pull her attention away from the people around us.

Ironic, given that my attention was now fixated on them.  For now, the battlefield consisted of people, the well-to-do, movers and shakers in the militaristic, political, commercial, and scientific spheres of the Crown States.

“What are you thinking?” Mary asked me.

I shook my head a little.  “I’m trying not to think.  Do me a favor?  Give me a minute?”

She nodded.

We were all outside, but the surrounding buildings blocked the cold, and the sun was overhead.  All things considered, the cold wasn’t bad.  It looked like fires were being prepared, for people to gather around.  Heated pots were being set up under tables.  Not the flammable kind, unfortunately.  Nothing I could make explode.

The crowd moved this way and that across the plaza.  We were hunkered under the eaves of the town hall at the southern end, forming a cluster that huddled together as people moved around us.  I leaned against the wall, using my one good eye to watch what was going on.

Going by the speech patterns I could overhear, the fashion, and the way they seemed to be close-knit, I was guessing the party guests were all from the same overall area, the western or the north-western Crown States.

That close knit was like a spider’s web.  Invisible threads connected each person.  Family ties, profession, old relationships, interests.  My wyvern injection was still fresh, and my brain hadn’t slept recently.  I was slightly detached from reality, which wasn’t a bad thing when I needed to break my focus and take in the greater picture in abstract.  I’d already been studying the crowd and now I could push myself to take it in like those soldiers and bodyguards on the perimeter were.  They, men who had stood by during events like these for years or decades, watched the crowd in a practiced way, with skill.  They knew the particulars of what to watch for.  I could watch with instinct, by pushing my brain into another sort of space.

The crowd was a blur.  I didn’t think about or look at anyone in particular.  I looked at the collections of people, how they clustered, who stood further from who.  I looked at how some people shared a closer personal space, tuned my ear for the pitch of the conversations, the degree of ease with which they talked.

It was something I had done since I had first started taking the wyvern formula, taking in the bigger picture and using it to inform myself in a way I couldn’t put word or label to.  Now I pushed it in another direction.

I knew I was taking longer than I’d told Mary I needed, but I took the time to follow people as they broke away from one conversation, then moved over to other groups, the differences in how they talked, the space they shared with others.

I wondered for a moment if Mauer made use of this social instinct on a regular basis.  If he pitched his voice and shifted his body language to capitalize on these same sorts of signal.

Mary was talking to Chance and Lainie.  I tuned it out.

Everyone was connected to everyone, threads tying one person to the others around them.  Continued observation  let me see how strong and how intimate some of those connections were.

As if all of this was a spider’s web.  Push on one point, and strands would break or collapse in to cling to the offending fingertip.  In this blurry landscape of bodies, some figures seemed to become more distinct, while others faded away, unimportant, not useful.

I was aware as the entire web shifted.  My vision came into focus, and I touched Mary’s arm.

“He’s here,” Mary said.

The Baron arrived in the far corner of the Plaza from where we stood, and that was partially my intent.  He stood taller than the last time I’d seen him, which suggested modifications, and he looked positively regal.  In any other circumstance, the man might have been laughed at for dressing up to the extent that he was, but he had several advantages here.  The crowd was his, and he had the opportunity to meet and greet the important people before his enemies did.  This event, too, was all about him, and few would attack a man who was celebrating a wedding or engagement, whichever this was.

He was tall, like the figures in myth were tall, pale, with sly eyes and straight golden hair.  The colors of Richmond were worked into his clothes, black intermingled with yellow for the lining, and emerald for the draping jacket and slacks.  He wore high boots, I noted, and I imagined that people would see that as reason to adopt the fashion.

Provided the night went well for the Baron and the noble still lived.  No need to curry favor with a dead man, of course.

His expectations of how the night would go clearly differed from mine; he wore a gold circlet.  It was a ballsy move, wearing something so close to being a crown or coronet, especially with other nobles due to show up.  It signaled ambition, and his confidence moving forward.  I could imagine five or ten different ways that he could use that one simple detail of what he wore on his head to shape the coming narrative.  Whether Fray or Mauer attacked or not, the relationships he sought to make or capitalize on with other lesser nobles, if he wanted to actually provoke someone…

I turned my mind away from the subject, lest I get caught up in it.

Beside the man, meek and miles different from the woman I had met, was Candida Gage.  Her dress included a draping hood.  Where the Baron wore emerald, the woman wore white.  The gold-leaf and black checked trim was much the same, lining the hood and detailing the dress.  She hid it well, but she moved like someone blind.  As the hood hid the marks from where her horns had been removed, she wore new eyes just like I did, replacing the altered eyes she’d had before.  They held up for the sake of appearances, but they didn’t let her see, or they didn’t let her see well.

He hadn’t had her for a day before he’d seen her put under the knife.  It fit his mentality, to show her the power he had over her, without being so vulgar that he might lose his shot at plucking immortality from her brain.

I saw the Baron’s doctors, all as a group, and I watched as certain heads turned at their arrival.  Other doctors in the crowd, almost universally wearing long coats, like stylized lab coats, dressed up in five kinds of flourish for high society.

And I could see the Baron’s sister.  The sole surviving Twin.  A giantess compared to the crowd she walked through, a monster that, even more than the Baron, made the citizens of Warrick shrink down and away.  That she’d arrived alone stirred faint murmurs from the crowd, and a sharp look from her immediately silenced those same murmurs.

This, for the time being, was the arena.  The Baron and his sister would reach out, mingling, and Mary and I would be the mice that avoided the prowling cats.  We’d seized the artist doctor Simon to put ourselves in a position to seize Chance and Lainie, and we’d used them to put ourselves here.

All other things set aside, crowd removed, battlefield disregarded, Baron left unarmed and blithely unaware of potential danger, we stood only the slimmest chance of success in taking him out of the picture.  All those things in consideration… it was harder than that.

Which meant I had to turn my focus back to the people I’d been paying attention to as I’d studied the flow and intimacy of the crowd.

“Chance.  Lainie.  Simon, too, if you think you won’t be heard,” I said, and I described what I was looking at even as I noticed the details, “Over there by the table with the bread.  There’s a man wearing two swords at his belt, a decorated military type, with hair in bad need of a trim.”

“I don’t recognize him,” Lainie said.

“Me either,” Chance said.

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Because people are giving him a wider berth.  The only people talking to him have been military people of his rank who have a duty to talk to him, some are maybe old comrades, and even they moved slightly further away from him as the Baron arrived.  He’s on at least his second glass of alcohol, and it’s not even that late in the day.  He doesn’t want to be here, and I want to know why.”

“There’s a contingent of soldiers stationed in Warrick,” Simon murmured, speaking without moving his misshapen lips.  “He leads them, and he led them in Lugh.  He didn’t do well there, and he came back at the same time as the Baron.”

“In disgrace?” I asked.  I got a slight nod.  “Why?”

“I’ve heard differing versions of what unfolded.”

Not very helpful, but the less Simon talked, the better.  I moved on.  “Over there.  A woman in a silver-blue dress and the white-fur jacket, with a flowery blue decoration in her hair.  She’s not very old, but women twice her age are paying her special attention, old hens flocking to a young peacock.”

“Female peacocks are drab,” Mary commented.

“Work with me,” I said.

“That’s Ruth Bloxham,” Lainie said, standing on her toes to see.  “There are people in the aristocracy that really want to get an in with the nobility, even marry into the lower ranks.  She’s one of them.”

“I know the type,” I said, glancing at Candida.  She was keeping her eyes on the ground as if she was shy, her hand on the Baron’s arm, to hide the fact that she was mostly blind.  She reacted to movement around her, which was better than I could do with my eye.  The benefits of having better doctors.  Still, she didn’t focus on anything or anyone in particular.  She couldn’t.

“There are families that have been working for generations to curry the favor and prestige that would get them an in with the Crown.  Then there’s Ruth.  She’s done it singlehandedly.  Since she was sixteen, she’s been connecting with the right people, earning and using favors to meet even more powerful people she can earn favors from… there’s at least one minor fashion trend and two musicians who owe their success to Ruth.”

“The hair thing?” Chance asked.  Lainie nodded.

A natural-born socialite and political player, then, someone with a sharp eye and a sharp mind.

“When the Baron arrived with Candida on his arm, eyes turned her way,” I said.  “Based on what you said, she was a contender to be his wife?”

“Yes,” Lainie said.  “There was talk on the train here that she must be upset.  That she might even snap.  There’s some resentment in some circles, my older cousins are about her age and they hate her so.  They say her success so far has been luck, and they’re hoping this is the event that breaks her and leads to her ruin.”

I studied the woman, watching her.

Ruth seemed so at ease.  The Baron looked her way, smiling, and she smiled back, though her attention was more on Candida, as if Ruth wanted to catch Candida’s eye, should she look up from the ground.  I saw her tall heels momentarily rise up off the ground as she stood on her very tiptoes, trying to get a glance.

“She doesn’t give me the impression of someone that’s about to break,” Mary said.

I shook my head.  “She wants to talk to Candida very badly.  I’m just not sure if she wants to because she’s a fantastically good actress who can hide her ill-intent from me, and plans to sabotage Candida, or if it’s for genuine reasons.  Maybe she sees Candida as someone who can be a peer and a real friend.  A genuine non-threat, in a way, compared to people like Lainie’s cousins, who want to tear her down, and others, who are only stepping stones to better things?”

“When you started theorizing, the first place my mind went was if she pursued the Baron, once, and learned how dangerous he was,” Mary said.

“And her primary interest is to warn the fiancee?  That’s a dangerous game to be playing,” I said.

“Yeaaah,” Lainie drew out the word, her expression caught up in something akin to awe, like she couldn’t even comprehend the idea.

Whichever of the three options it was, Ruth Bloxham was insanely brave and insanely confident in her ability to navigate this political stage, considering how approaching Candida meant being in proximity to the Baron.  Emphasis on the ‘insane’ part of things.

“There was someone else,” I murmured.  I scoured the crowd, watching, looking past the hundreds of people who were only one or two steps down from being dressed for a costume party, all color and flamboyance, their masks ones of surgical alteration, hiding the faces they’d been born with under the prettier and more handsome ones the doctors had given them.

We’d leapfrogged from being nobodies to having a firstborn, then from having a firstborn to having a firstborn and two aristocrats in hand.  Getting near enough to the Baron would take another leap.  I needed someone or something to capitalize on.  An enemy of the Baron, like the decorated general, or someone close to him.

From there, I could find a way to deal with the Twin, potentially, and any of the Baron’s doctors who might be able to save the man from the fates I had in store for him.

“Ah,” I said, as my eye found my target.  The last two people who’d formed a critical point in this spider’s web.  A very dangerous pair.  I’d seen the whole ebb and flow of the crowd focus around one point, with people leaving like they were on a mission.  When Candida had arrived, the crowd had moved to let these people be a part of it.  They beamed with happiness.

Mr. and Mrs. Gage.  Candida’s parents.  Next to the Baron, this was their day.

“The Gages,” I told Mary, who had never seen them.  “They cannot, whatever happens, see me.”

Mary nodded.  She fully understood.  Or so she thought.

The Gages knew me.  Not letting them see me was critical, but more critical was the need to avoid letting anyone critical see me with Mary.  Should that happen, she would become culpable.  I could be seen, targeted, and run away a fugitive.  Mary had to return to Lillian and the others.

This was the other hitch in the plan.  I needed to remain in a position to tie up loose ends.  Mary had to escape alive.  Witnesses would need to die, most likely.  The thought made me look at Lainie, Simon, and Chance.

Lainie’s face was flushed with excitement and fear.  She looked giddy.

She was such a different personality from Lillian, but she kept reminding me of her all the same.  I’d seen Lillian giddy, before.  Before I’d said goodbye to her, even.

I would have to say goodbye to Lainie too, very soon.  I wished very dearly that there wasn’t a glimmer of innocence and goodness in her, beneath the surface.  I wished that I didn’t like her just a little bit, that Chance had been a bit more of a bastard to Mary.

“Focus on the job,” Evette reminded me.  “I won’t ever forgive you if you slip up and mess this up.”

“Okay,” I said.  “We move now.”

I had Mary, Lainie, Chance and Simon’s full attention now.

“You only get one chance to shake things up,” Gordon’s voice cut through the crowd.  “After that, they tighten security, they start looking for you, or for the instigators.  The Baron will be more careful.  Make sure it’s worth it.”

“Simon,” I said.  I drew the stimulant drug out of my pocket.  It was a packet of powder.  I could see him react as he saw it.  Eager.  “How many doses are in this?”

“For someone your size?  Four.”

“For someone like you?  Not counting tolerance?”

“Three, perhaps.”

“Two if I assumed some tolerance?  I’m also assuming that this is the in-vogue drug for the upper crust.”

“You would be right in those assumptions, I suppose,” Simon said, voice a whisper.  He flinched as someone walked past him.

“If I gave you the whole packet, a double dose or so, what would happen?”

He tensed.

I held up a hand to keep him from answering.  A group of slower moving elderly women walked past us.

I lowered my hand, and he spoke, “I would die, thrashing, convulsing, and frothing at the mouth.  If I didn’t kill myself by beating my skull against the cobblestones, I would choke on my own vomit, most likely.”

“Good,” I said.  I’d had a gut instinct, based on what it was, but every drug was different.  I knew what to expect from this, above and beyond what Simon had shared with me.  I looked at Mary.  “Feel up to it?”

“You want her to take it?” Lainie whispered, horrified.

She had a shred of empathy for others, it seemed.  Damn it.

“He wants me to give it to someone,” Mary said, her eyes locking to mine.  “Who?”

“Ruth Bloxham.  The whole packet.”

She didn’t wait for further orders, but she knew me well enough to read my expression, tone, and body language, and knew from that that I had none.  She pressed Chance’s leash into my hand, as I’d pressed the packet into hers, and then walked into the crowd, graceful, skirt swishing.  Virtually anyone else might have stumbled, trying to navigate the people who moved this way and that, unpredictably and suddenly.  She had no trouble at all.

My hands shook with anticipation and suppressed emotion.

I glanced at Chance, who had turned white with shock, then turned my head the other direction to look at Lainie.  There was horror in her eyes.

There would be more horror etched into her face before the day was through.

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================================================== 10.14 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.14

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From the point that Mary disappeared into the crowd, I didn’t see her.  I knew how she moved and the habits she stuck to, and I knew how she would move through the crowd.  I still didn’t see her.

I trusted Mary as I did any Lamb.  But even though trust was a completely different thing from the ties that bound us to one another, the loss of those ties tested my ability to trust.  Uncertainty about things bled out into uncertainty about other things.

I had to put it out of my mind as best as I was able.  I couldn’t afford to hesitate or second guess Mary’s abilities; her abilities and my abilities were the only rocks in these unsteady waters.  The only thing I knew and could fall back on.  Everything else was in flux, and I could put all of my thoughts to the task of anticipating anything around me, only to end up surprised.  The Lambs had to be a constant, or my entire world would consist of people, events and things I had to second guess.

It struck me that in a span of time ranging from the next hour to the next day, I would lose that.  I would leave them behind.

The shaking in my hands got worse.  Not just tension and anticipation, now.

“She’s going to die,” Lanie spoke, at a whisper.  “You just made this decision and gave the order, and she’s going to die horribly?”

“Shhh,” I said.  It was hard to keep my voice gentle and keep from being harsh to the hostage.  “Try to keep your expression neutral.  If you tip someone off, then this gets really ugly, and she might really die.”

“What are you talking about?  A full dose, he said-”

“Shh,” I said.  This would be so much easier with another Lamb present.  Mary was seeing to her task, and there was nobody to see to the hostages while I focused on more important things.  My attention was divided.

The tables that were being set up around the plaza were being set with tablecloths, and much of the conversation was taking place around the tables.  Men and women who had attended a hundred parties like this one, Ruth Bloxham included, knew how the events would proceed.  It was perhaps odd that things were still being prepared around them, but that might have been the status quo when the nobles were involved.

Mr. and Mrs. Gage were the organizers here, in charge of the little details for their daughter’s special event.  At their behest, appetizers and tea were already being set on the tables.

The space around Ruth was about as clear as it would get as she excused herself from the conversation, smiling.  She collected a saucer and a cup of tea, two cookies perched on the edge of the saucer.  Probably finely crafted little things, dusted with icing sugar.

The fact that she’d collected the cookies and kept them on the saucer where they might fall off made me think of her as being more of a kid than she was.  She’d started out at sixteen and she had to be in her early twenties now.  This party, it was her environment, one she navigated like a fish navigated water.  She let her guard down in ways that others couldn’t afford to, even with something as inane as cookies.  That, in turn, gave her an allure.  Youthful and playful in demeanor to appeal to the younger women, smart and adroit enough to hold her own with the older ones.  That she was gorgeous covered most of the bases with the men in attendance.

“Remember how you wanted to sit down and learn from Mauer?” Helen asked me.

I nodded slowly.

“I would like to learn from her.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Chance and Lainie turned their heads to look at me.

I spotted Mary in the crowd, momentarily standing still while people moved around her.  Her hands were empty.  She met my eyes.

“It’s done,” I said.  Mary was already gone.

“You’re a monster,” Lainie said.  There was surprising emotion in her voice, as if she might start crying.

“Simon could have told you that,” I said.  “You don’t look at the firstborn around here and think of the misery that surrounds them?  How monstrous what Simon does is?  What about what the Baron does?”

“I’m fourteen.  There’s nothing I can do about it,” Lanie said.

“And when you’re older, you’ll have other reasons for not speaking up about this injustice.  Ruth Bloxham, like you, like your parents, and like everyone here, condones these atrocities.  You condone them by being here.  Do you think I didn’t see the looks on your faces when you picked out my friend and me?  You were eager to participate on their level.  Don’t use age as an excuse.”

“You’re a monster,” she said, again, her expression twisting.

It wouldn’t be possible to get through to her, and it wasn’t a priority.  There were too many other things in play.  I searched the crowd, watching, making sure the pieces were all in place.  While I did so, I simply said, “I’m a monster that knows exactly what he is.  You’re three monsters who pretend not to see.  When and if things get ugly, I want you to remember, the ugliness you’re seeing has been ongoing, affecting the poor, the people who you and your families stepped on to get here.”

“I think you’re a special kind of ugly,” Lainie said.

“You’re not one of those rebels, are you?” Chance asked.  “The Brands?”

“No,” I said.  “No, not really.  I’m alone.”

Ruth Bloxham laughed, hunching over slightly, hand to her mouth.  The smile touched her eye.  She worked to compose herself, taking a drink of her tea.

Mary would be making her way back, and-

My thoughts were interrupted as I watched Ruth Bloxham, in the company of a young man and a young woman, turn away from the table, say something light and teasing, her voice raised to address the larger group she’d just been talking to, and then walk away.  The trio of Ruth and her two new companions walked further from the hub of activity around the Baron and Candida, closer to me.

“You’re alone?  You have that girl-” Chance started.

I moved my arm, raising a hand to tell him to be quiet.  I felt the tension of the wire against my finger just before Chance felt the lack of tension that would come with the wire breaking the skin, only just enough reminder to keep from inadvertently killing him.

It did get him to shut up, though.

“Ruth Bloxham.  Do you want her to die like Simon described?” I asked.

“No,” Lainie said, as if I was crazy for even asking.  Chance, mute, shook his head.

I looked up at Simon.

“No,” he said, speaking under his breath.

I looked around.  Mary wasn’t anywhere to be seen.  It made sense that she’d be taking a circuitous route.  It made it harder to draw a connection between what was about to happen and our little group of five.

It also made it harder for me to hand over custody of our hostages and handle the situation.

“Good,” I said.  “Here.”

I pressed Chance’s razor wire leash into Simon’s hand.  “Mary might be along any second.  In the meantime, you look after yourselves.”

They weren’t quite able to hide the looks on their faces.  Incredulity.

“If you mess around and I have to come back and take control of the situation, she’ll die.  This is your test.  How good are you, as people?”

I didn’t have time.  I turned away, starting to walk off, the three left behind.

I got about three steps, then turned around and walked right back to them.

“Okay, nevermind that,” I said.  My voice changed, switching to something a little colder and more intense.  The intensity wasn’t hard to manage.  I simply had to stop holding back and let the mask skip a little.  “Chance, Lainie?  If you try something, not only with Ruth Bloxham die, but some of my friends will die.  Your parents will die.  So will you.  Simon knows about the poisonous gas his buddy made.  Simon?  You know I’ll get to your friends before you do.  You will walk down into that basement, you will see their bodies, and you will know it’s your fault.”

Want to call me a monster?  Then I’ll show you my ugly side.

Simon didn’t hunch over to better meet my eyes.  He didn’t stoop, he stood tall, wrapped in his monstrous flesh, his face distorted.  Only his eyes, but for a notch in one lower eyelid, were normal, the emotion showing through.  But even as he stood tall, looming over me, I could see that I’d had an impact.  That I held the power.

“Keep hold of that wire.  Keep your mouths shut.  I’ll be keeping an eye out, and Mary will be with you shortly.” I said.  I was already turning to leave as I finished talking, walking into the crowd much as Mary had.  Where she’d walked in front of people with confidence, I aimed for the voids, the wake of the larger groups, the shares of smaller ones.

Hearing Simon talk about the side effects of the drug had let me pin down what sort of drug it was.  Stimulants came in a variety of forms, but I could make assumptions, based on what I knew about drugs and what I knew about stimulants of that particular style.

Going with food and drink, and I knew it was in the food and drink, I knew it would take a little bit of time to affect Ruth Bloxham’s body.  She’d been dosed, and I knew I only had a minute or two before she started to succumb to the stuff.  Probably two minutes at most before Lainie, Chance, or Simon reconsidered my words and reached out to someone for help.

This wasn’t how I wanted to play this.  I was having to juggle too many things.  The hostages, the target, keeping the Baron in my sight and the other players in my peripheral awareness.

Now I had to throw another complication into the mix.

I walked through the crowd with purpose.  I reached the thicker part of it, where people stood close, husbands with arms around their wives’ waists.  Children held close to keep them from getting away from their parents, people leaning together to kiss one another’s cheeks.  There were people carrying tables and bundles of cloth.

In the midst of this particular hub, I found the Gages.  I searched the immediate crowd for problematic faces or characters, then touched Mr. Gage’s hand.  He turned to face me, and I turned away, inviting him to keep turning, to turn his back to the bulk of the group he’d just been conversing with.

“Sylvester.  I didn’t know you were in attendance,” he said.  He shot me a smile, brilliant and guileless. This was his day.  Years of work come to fruition.  Nevermind that his daughter was blind and holding hands with one of the biggest bastards I’d had the displeasure of meeting.  “Are the others here?”

“I’m alone,” I said, for the second time in a matter of minutes.  “I’m here for someone else, sir.”

“Busy young man,” he said.  “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

I wanted to look over my shoulder to check on Ruth.  I didn’t let myself.  I had to remain at ease.

“You’re familiar with Ruth Bloxham, sir?” I asked.

His eyebrows knit together, momentary concern.  His smile slipped a notch on his too-chiseled features.  “Is she doing something?”

“She’s about to,” I said, keeping my voice low.  “Very soon, she’s going to succumb to poison.  It’s going to look like an overdose of a recreational drug.  I’d rather remain on the down-low so I can find the culprit.  Can you do me a favor?  You stand to gain a great deal, even.”

I could see his eyes widen.

“You arranged Candida’s partnership with the Baron Richmond.  Above and beyond what we asked for.  If there’s anything I can do, then-”

“Ruth just disappeared around the side of the apartment house with the hanging plants over the door.  Her friends are liable to panic or misinterpret what’s happening.  Go find her.  The moment you see something wrong, call for a doctor.  When it makes sense to do so, insist on the best.  Play your chips, Ruth will repay you tenfold.”

“This is-”

“Whatever you do,” I didn’t let him talk, “Don’t make a ruckus that will disturb the firstborn, and do not mention I was here.  There are ears everywhere, even close to the Baron.  Help me do this, like I helped you turn Lugh to your advantage, and I’ll help you make this event a success.”

I could see him draw in a breath, standing a fraction taller.  He believed me.

Go,” I hissed the word, giving it enough force that some heads turned, looking for me.

I was already slipping past waists, hips, and legs.

The stones had been thrown.  Every last one was in the air, yet to hit the respective targets.  The Gages would be a tool for my purposes, a massive effort and more-than-middling risk on my part to compensate for the simple fact that the lady Bloxham had walked ten or twenty feet further away from the doctors at the party.

The trio of hostages were keeping each other hostage for the moment.  The Baron, his sister and Candida were talking to people, moving in the general direction of the Gages.  Mr. Gage was now looking for Ruth.  Ruth was a bomb with the fuse lit.

One shake of the box.  There was a chance the Baron would get suspicious.  A chance he wouldn’t.  I was hoping for the latter, but I wasn’t counting on it.

I saw Mary before we both made our way back to the hostages.  I flashed hand signs.

You.  Stay.  Wait.  Follow.

She blended back into the flow of the crowd, moving with groups that were moving, but keeping her eyes and her shoulders squared off on another point, as if she had a task to do, so that group wouldn’t take too much notice or offense of her proximity.

I, meanwhile, headed straight for our hostages.  Mr. Gage walked right past me, shooting me a momentary glance.

Too important that nobody see Mary and I together, especially now that the Gages knew I was here.

I’d finally gotten around to signing my own death warrant, in a way.  The list of people who knew about me and my involvement was too long.  Mary was salvageable.  She had to be salvageable.  But I couldn’t set her up to be hunted for the rest of her life.

Me, well, I’d anticipated being a fugitive since before we’d boarded the train.

“Come,” I told my hostages.

“Talking to me like I’m a dog?” Chance asked.

“Come, sir,” I said, taking the thread from Simon.  I tugged, and I saw actual pain on Chance’s face.  Perhaps a little too much of a tug.  I wasn’t an artist with the wires like Mary was.

We made our way out to the side, and I had a glimpse of Ruth Bloxham and her companions.  Ruth was on the ground, felled, her companions looking after her.  The hostages and I carried forward onto another street, the house blocking our view of Ruth, and I saw Mr. Gage striding in the opposite direction, heading toward the doctors.  He was someone people had been watching, and now that he was moving as briskly as he was, people were noticing.  Conversations shifted tone, people watched, and the hostages and I could stop just shy of the perimeter with the soldiers without looking like we were doing something weird.  We were watching, like everyone else was.

A murmur of concern swept over the crowd.  Even as she tried to duck away for a more private conversation with what I assumed to be close friends, there were countless eyes on her, and she couldn’t hide in the plaza much more than we could.

The guards who were standing guard a matter of feet from us shifted position, a few of them venturing forward to see what was going on.  We were on a street that shot off from one corner of the plaza, and they still maintained the manpower to block off the street, while making sure there wasn’t something more pressing going on.  I could see through windows.  The soldiers I’d noticed earlier were still occupying the buildings around the plaza, but now they were gathering, looking to get more information.

I gestured.  Come.

People began to move closer to Ruth Bloxham, and as the crowd passed in front of our street, Mary emerged, hurrying to our side.

I looked at the perimeter guards, and tugged the thread twice.

“Sirs,” Chance addressed the guard.  He hesitated.

Be good, I thought.  With so much going on, this would be the time to try something.

“If it’s no trouble, we would like to get through.”

“There’s some funny business going on,” one of the soldiers further down the street said.  He was looking around the corner, following what was happening with Ruth.

“Any reason to detain the ladies and gentlemen here?”

Deferential without any give or softness to him.  The guard with his job to do and the young aristocrat that might have clout.  It made for a strange balancing act, and clearly one that this man had performed before.

The guard closer to the street shook his head.  “No.  Miss Bloxham is ill, it seems.  One of the Baron’s doctors is tending to her now.”

I tugged the wire twice more.  Faint tugs, but ones he would still feel.  His senses would be tied to the thread of metal.

He didn’t speak.  I didn’t test him.

Long seconds passed.  I was tense.  There were two buildings that made sense for Ruth Bloxham to get taken to.  The town hall was one.  The second fake church was another.  The buildings, unfortunately, were kitty-corner to one another.  There was too much ground to cover to get into either building.  I had to pick one, and I was picking the town hall.

If we were detained for much longer, then it would all be for naught.  The soldiers in the buildings would no longer be so focused on what was going on in the plaza, and access would be next to impossible.

“Forgive me for asking, but you wouldn’t know anything about what happened to Miss Bloxham?”

Easy practice allowed me to keep from going stiff when every part of my body wanted to go rigid in the face of a worst case scenario.  I could remain relatively relaxed, and put an expression of sheer confusion on my face.

They weren’t looking at my face.  No, they were staring down Chance, who had a sheen of sweat on his forehead, just as rigid as I’d fought to avoid being.

“No, sirs,” Chance said.

The time window was slipping away.  I could see the crowd moving, parting to make way.  I wasn’t sure which building it was to.  Too many guards, too.  We couldn’t cut our way past them without drawing notice from the crowd that was only fifteen feet away.

“I only ask because you seem distressed.”  Accusatory.

“Yes, sir,” Chance said.

“Why?”

Chance didn’t have a ready answer.  He glanced at me.

I seriously considered if I would have to pull the noose tight and kill him.  Catastrophe would follow.  We would lose everything.  It would be the worst case scenario for every single one of the Lambs but me.

A tiny part of me wanted him to give me the excuse.  For him to glance at me again, suggesting I was the cause of his distress.  I would kill him, Mary and I would slip through the perimeter, and the Baron would catch wind of our presence here.  Then we would have to rescue the other Lambs before the Baron could give the order for them to die.

And in the wake of it all, one more botched job, circumstances I couldn’t control, blameless, I would be surrounded by the people I cared about most in the world.

For the price of one less-than-innocent life, and a horrible lie to those same people that I cared about.  A moment of selfishness.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to need a clearer answer,” the guard said.  His tone was stern enough that others took notice, stepping closer.  I had to mentally revise our chances for slipping away.

One moment of selfishness.  It was even his fault.  He was looking at me.

I looked past Chance, and I stared at Lillian – the clearest image of her that my mind could conjure, her head hung, face hidden by short hair and shadow.

Not just one moment of selfishness.  I couldn’t forget that I’d made a promise to Lillian, that the Baron would die.  I would be betraying her.  I couldn’t do that.  Not on purpose.

One blink of my eyes, and the image was wiped away.  I was staring at Lainie.

My focus and expression shifted.  I looked between her and Chance before dropping my eyes to the ground.

“I think my cousin likes Miss Bloxham, sir.”

Chance turned, too fast, staring at Lainie.

“I know I said I would keep it a secret, but if you don’t tell them something they’re going to wonder.”

“Um,” Chance said.

The guard who had been questioning us shifted his grip, holding his rifle with both hands.  I couldn’t see anything above that, because I was trying to be meek and to hide.

“Hurry on then, if you please,” the man said.  “There’s a crowd there, and it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere fast.  If you’re coming back through, then come through here, I’ll wave you through.”

“Very gracious of you, sir,” Chance said.  He’d found his voice again.

We were free, possibly too late.

We headed down to the end of the street and rounded a corner, moving around the back of the building.

“That was good, Lainie.  You have promise yet,” I said.

She didn’t have it in her to be pleased.  My earlier suspicion was proving correct.  Lainie was willing to play along, but of the three, I suspected she was the one who would snap, cry wolf and bring trouble calling.

“What was that all about?” Mary asked me.

“Which?”

“I’m a step behind you, I can’t follow what you’re doing.  I dosed Ruth, now she’s being looked after by the Baron’s own doctor.  Which I assume you planned.”

“I was pretty sure it would unfold that way.  It would look bad for someone to die on his watch, and for there to be a perception that he could do something more.  If he’d gone that route, I could have exploited that, using the disgraced general.  But he didn’t.  He’s powerful, but there are people here he wants to curry favor with.”

Mary nodded.

“Now we need in.  Medical care plus patient of high station means a need for privacy,” I said.  I urged the others to keep close to the town hall, moving below the windows so that any soldier that was looking out the rear window wouldn’t see us.

It took a few seconds before we’d moved far enough along that I could see a window without much light behind it.  I gestured.  Mary offered her hands.  A moment later, I was up and at the window.  Another moment later, I had it unlocked.

The room was a lavatory, one intended for those who worked at the town hall.  I imagined the building was a kind of hollow office, much as the church and plaza were.  The Baron would oversee anything of importance, and this ostentatious, sprawling building would be mostly for show.

I helped Mary up, and then, because there wasn’t much room at the window, I stepped back and away, letting her help the other three get up and in.

The bathroom was complete enough that a man could shit, wash himself, and see to his morning and nightly toil.  Claw-foot bath, sink, toilet, towels, and white tile that had been scrubbed in the last twelve hours.  I went to the mirror, and I tidied myself up, then went to the door.  A soldier glanced at me as he walked by, taking no particular notice.  Dressed as a citizen of the city, I was largely invisible.  The town hall would have other citizens working in the capacity of staff, looking after the soldiers and making tea.

I still felt a little sick from when I’d considered damning the Lambs for my own selfishness.  I gestured to Mary, telling her to wait, and then left the lavatory.  I looked into the layout of the building, and then to the distribution of the people guarding it.  Most were focused on the idea of an attack from the outside, the approach of terrorists or other problem elements.  There were some at the stairwells, and a great many in the front room, with growing and hissing warbeasts.

Eighty or so soldiers and their pets.  Men in crisp uniforms with good weapons.

The room where Ruth Bloxham was wasn’t a hard one to find.  People came and went, and no less than six soldiers stood by, not because they were strictly guarding it, but because they’d moved into the first open, available room on the ground floor, for expediency’s sake, and that was also a room that the event’s security was using.  Men on relief from active guard duty, watching through the windows to make sure all was going well.

I went back to the bathroom.  Mary had brought everyone inside, no doubt with Simon doing much of the lifting.

I went to the towels, and I picked up a stack.  Reaching behind me, I withdrew the pistol, the syringe, and the gas-bomb, and I put them among the towels.  They would escape a cursory search of my person, and they would be easily in reach if there was trouble.

“I’ll go first,” I murmured to Mary. “Keep an ear out and an eye out, watch these three.  You know the usual signals.  I’ll see what we can do with the Baron’s doctor.”

“The Baron’s doctor?” Simon asked.

I would let Mary deflect the questions.  I turned, carrying the towels, and marched with purpose to the room where Ruth was being looked after.

The people near the door let me walk by, carrying my towels into the room.

The doctor was a young man, blond, with bone structure very clear on his face.  His cheekbones weren’t very high, but the bone structure did outline the cheek in way that made him look more gaunt than he was, his thin-eyebrows set on a heavy brow, as if he was forever concerned with what was in front of him.  His black coat was of the dressy sort, wearable to events.  He wore a vest and tie underneath.

Ruth Bloxham lay in a state of undress on the bed, wearing only her underclothes.  The doctor’s bag had been emptied, contents strewn around his patient.

“What’s this?” he asked, turning toward me.

“Towels,” I said.  “I was told to bring them, sir?”

“You were not told by me!  Put them down.  Leave.  That’s enough.”

He spoke loudly enough that the guard outside would have heard.  Not ideal.

I moved to the nightstand beside him, and I set the towels down.  Behind the man’s back, I withdrew the pistol.

While he bent over the bed, I put the barrel of the pistol between his butt-cheeks.  He started to move, and then froze as I drew back the hammer.

We remained like that for a very long while.

“I could shoot you pretty much anywhere,” I said, my voice low, “and you could get patched up in time.  But any bullet carries a possibility of longer-term damage.  Putting a bullet here, it could cost you function, number one or number two.  Embarrassing to get treated, too.”

“I see,” he said.  “I’d like to continue treating my patient.”

“Please do.”

He collected a needle, and pressed it into his patient’s arm.  His other hand went toward a boxy case of medicine.  I’d seen Lillian use the same sort of thing before.  Antiseptic powder, for deeper injuries, if I remembered right.

“You don’t need that,” I said.

His hand stopped where it was.

“Well, I mean, you do need it.  Loose lid, just hurl it back my way, I’m probably blind for a good few minutes.  But trying won’t end well for you.”

“You’re one of the Lambs,” he said.  “He took your eye.”

“Yes,” I said.  “I’m here for payback.  You’re going to help me kill your boss.”

“I see,” he said.  He got another needle.  I tensed as I watched him handle it, but it was intended for Ruth Bloxham, not me.

“Now, tell me,” I said.  “If I wanted-”

There was a light knock on the door.

The doctor and I both froze.

The knock came again.  There was a pattern to it.  A Lamb knock.

“I’m going to let her in,” I said.  “Stay put.”

He watched me out of the corner of his eye as I stepped back, keeping the gun trained on him.  His hands remained where they were, frozen.

Without turning away from him, I opened the door for Mary and our three hostages to come into the room.

The words Mary spoke were just about the last ones I wanted to hear.

“She’s coming,” Mary said.

No need to say who ‘she’ was.  Not when Mary’s tone was so telling, so stressed and excited in the same moment.  It suggested a fight, and the only ‘she’ who posed a fight would be the sole surviving Twin.

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================================================== 10.15 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.15

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“Stay?  Go?”  Mary asked.

My eyes swept over the room, Ruth Bloxham, our hostages, and the doctor.  I could see the items strewn across the bed.

“Stay,” I said.  “How long?”

“Seconds,” Mary said.  She was already reaching beneath her skirt to retrieve the ribbons she’d bound around her thigh.  She wound them around one hand.

“You four, back away from the door,” I said.  “Doctor, keep treating Ruth.”

“You’re insane!” the man said.

I pointed the gun at his head.  I circled halfway around the bed, until I was at the foot of it.

Small room, not much elbow room for a fight.  Mary reached over to the bed, grabbing two tools from a leather set of surgical implements.  She already had wire in her hand.  She went straight to the door, winding one loop of wire around the hinge.  Then, with the tools in hand, she pushed the wire through the space between the top of the door and the frame.

“Strong, tall, fast, heightened senses.  Her body opens up, used to be two people nested in one body.  The baron’s doctors would have given her something,” I said.  I looked at the doctor who was working on Ruth.

“Nothing to say,” he said.  His eyes were fixed on his patient, neck stiff, head rigid, as if he would fight me if I tried to turn his head or budge him from his current position, even on a physical level.

Mary slid the wire down from the top of the door, until she had the wire stretched at a diagonal across the other side of the door, all done without having opened it.  She stood beside the door, wire wrapped around the handle of a knife,  A whole loop worth of slack hanging from her other hand, every muscle tense.

“You’d rather take a bullet?” I asked the doctor.

He looked up, fixing his eyes to mine.  “I’d rather take a bullet than cross her.”

It was as if he’d summoned her.  The door swung into the room, banging against the wall.  The Twin had to stoop as she came through the door.  Pale, eyes wide, face contorted, golden hair already disheveled from her march across the town hall.

Lambs.

The wire was too low, cutting across her chest, not her throat.  Mary remedied that, hurling herself at the Twin, knife out, her other hand manipulating wire.

The second length of wire settled, loose, around the Twin’s neck and shoulders, around the time she saw Mary.  Mary hauled back, tugging the wire tight.  The twin’s hand moved as fast as the wire did.  Fingers went up and between the wire and throat.  One hand was pinned, flesh sliced, palm outward.  Mary hung there, feet against the Twin’s chest and stomach, suspended by that same wire, facing the Twin.

They almost had the same look in their eyes.

“Little girl,” the Twin spoke, her voice barely impacted by the weight of a seven-plus stone girl hanging off of her neck.  “Do you really think you can win?”

She started to take a step forward, and then stopped – the wire was still bound at one end, wrapped around the hinge.

“My lady,” one of the guards outside spoke.  It was almost a question.

My hand inched toward the bomb with the gas.

“Stay,” the Twin said.  “It’s handled.”

“Yes, my lady.”

She didn’t even sound concerned.

One of the noble’s hands was trapped under the wire, but the other one was free, hanging at the Twin’s side.  I saw it, and I knew Mary saw it.

Mary’s foot, poised against the Twin’s stomach, slipped from its position.  The hand flashed out, grabbing, to capitalize on the slip, and Mary’s foot snapped back up as fast as it had dropped, this time with a blade.  A feint.

As fast as the Twin’s hand was moving, Mary only needed to put her foot in the right position, toe pointed, to let the blade plunge through the hand.  Knives in the soles of her boots.  Flick the foot out with the right motion, the knife swung out, until it pointed forward.  Flick back the other way or knock it against some part of the environment, and it went back in.

The clothes she wore now were the same clothes she’d brought to Lillian’s for a sleepover.  This was daily wear.

She let her other foot leave the Twin’s upper chest, her body suspended between the boot-knife that impaled the Twin’s hand and the hand that held the knife, wire extending from that knife to the Twin’s neck.  Her foot free, she flicked it, drawing the blade, and swept it toward the Twin’s wrist, a half-foot from her other boot.

She got two quick slashes in before the Twin pulled the hand back and away.  Mary’s boot-knife came free of the hand.  Both boot-knives immediately found a home in the side of the Twin’s stomach, kick, kick.  Then they were out again, in again, as Mary moved from one side of the Twin’s body to the other, like an ice climber hurrying out of the way of a catastrophic amount of falling ice, still hanging by one hand from the knife and wire.

I spend my time thinking about how to get out of bad situations, or how to get around them.  I think about my enemies and their thought patterns, about their weaknesses, and how everything can be arranged to maximize our odds.

Mary thinks about how to make people bleed.

The Twin started to reach for Mary again.  Mary’s foot moved, ready to intervene, and the Twin stopped there.

Then the free hand reached back, taking hold of the door.

In one wrenching movement, she tore the door from its hinges.  Mary avoided the first swing of the improvised weapon, wincing as half of the door splintered around her, punching into the wall, but she didn’t avoid the second or third hits.  She scrambled back and away, until she was near me, still holding the knife, moving it in quick circular motions to unwind the thread around the handle.  It stopped short.

Out of thread.

In the wake of the ruckus, I could hear a not-so-distant howl.  It was a distorted sound, hitching as the source seemed to be overcome with emotion.  I heard more crashes nearby, more screams.  I waited for those screams to reach even further, wakening more firstborn.  They didn’t.  Four or five in total.

Out of thread and firstborn incoming.

I heard the tap as Mary knocked the toes of one boot against the floor to set the knives back inside her boots.  She was bleeding badly.  Her skin had been shredded near her temple and ear, and some of the tag of skin that hung loose had hair on it.  She pulled her lips back from her teeth, showing how bloody those teeth were, then spat blood onto the floor.  I put my hands out to balance her as she returned the other knife to the sole of her boot with a tap on the floor, wavered, and nearly lost her balance.

The twin, possessed of more lack than she’d had before, pulled her hand out from beneath the razor wire.  The act of doing so meant dragging meat against the wire, slicing it clean off the fingers.  The wire caught as it found a groove between those charcoal-black finger bones.

Her eyes still fixed on us, she pushed, her hand straining against the wire, skeletal fingers clawing at the air as she worked them.  While she did so, however, she wasn’t just loosening the wire around her neck.  The wire was biting into the flesh at the back of her neck.  Anyone else would have worried about paralysis.  Not her.

She took half the flesh on her fingers off as she did it, but she managed to slide the hand out from under the wire.

Mary spat blood again.

“Help.”  She didn’t look at me as she said it, but I knew it was meant for me.

“Okay,” I said.  I moved to put some distance between us, moving around the far end of the bed.  “I didn’t want to get in the way.”

“Exactly right,” Mary said.  “Now… help.  And don’t get in the way while you do it.”

Behind the Twin, there was a commotion.  The guards who were standing outside were now dealing with the firstborn.

“Swords only!” someone called out.

Guns would start a chain reaction.  Too much noise, and the agitation of one group of firstborn would stir others, until the entire event was a slaughterhouse.

“Doctor,” the Twin spoke.

“I wanted no part of any of this, milady,” the Doctor said.

“How is our party guest?” she asked.  Her voice was cold.  “I know my brother likes her.”

“I’ve given her all of the care I can for the moment, milady.  Minutes and hours will tell the rest of the story.”

“Are you strong enough to carry her out of here?”

“Uh, no, milady.  Not easily, though I could drag her.  And-”

The Twin half-turned her head.  The firstborn and the soldiers were fighting, the soldiers doing their best to avoid stirring up even more havoc.

“It’s not safe for her out there, milady.”

They,” the Twin spoke to the Baron’s doctor, “Killed my sisters.  I’ll repay them for that injury here.  It isn’t any safer for you two in here.”

Her hand went up, found Mary’s wire, and traced it back to the damaged door hinge, which had been half-torn from the wall in the process of the door’s removal.  She gripped the hinge, then ripped it the rest of the way from the wall.

Mary was hurt.  She wasn’t the sort to deny help when it was given, but she also wasn’t the sort to ask for it.  That she’d asked suggested she was spooked.  It was possible that she wanted me in the fray to make up for whatever issues her injuries had introduced.  Balance the scales once again.

“I understand, milady,” the doctor said.  “Do you want us out of the way?”

She reached out, seized Ruth Bloxham with one hand, and moved Ruth to the corner of the room opposite Mary and I, propping her unconscious body up against the wall.  Her hand lingered there, finger extended and pointing.  “Stay.”

The doctor obediently retreated to the corner.

The Twin was bleeding considerably.  Her hand, wrist, throat, and stomach had been sliced and punctured in multiple places.  Blood welled out and pooled beneath her.  She hardly seemed to care.

As Mary and I watched, the woman’s flesh parted.  A golden seam appeared, across chest, circling around one breast, then moving to the side of the ribcage.  Mucousy fluids extended from the sucking meat on one side of the divide to the meat on the other.

She reached up, in-

And Mary threw a knife.  The Twin was just fast enough to avoid having the knife strike her in one eye.  Her hand came out of the divide with a rapier in it.  All charcoal-black bone, roughly five feet in length.  I knew how dense and heavy that material was, but she had no trouble holding it like she might a fencer’s foil.

Our hostages were cowering, ducked down low.  I saw Lainie practically curl up at the sight of the weapon, head hung, not even willing to look.

The room wasn’t that large.  Between the length of the Twin’s arms and the length of the weapon, there wasn’t much room to maneuver.

Her foot was the first thing to move, coming out, catching the edge of the bed, and kicking it toward us.  It flipped as it came, wooden base, headboard, footboard and all.  I didn’t have to worry about the harder edges, as it was mostly the mattress that came flying my way.

“Down!” Mary cried out.

I went limp, letting myself sprawl, mattress threatening to pin me between bed and wall.

The rapier’s point punched through the bed, mattress, and into the exterior wall.

I more or less crawled to the end of the bed, making a point of pushing along the various medicines and tools that had fallen off the bed and against the wall.  I crawled free, and saw Mary and the Twin fighting again.  Mary was slower.  She couldn’t move and throw a knife at the same time.  She found opportunities to stop, get her bearings for a half-second, and then throw, before she threw herself out of the way of the next swing or thrust of the sword, or pre-emptively repositioned herself.

My eye went to the stuff that had fallen from the bed.  Medicines, drugs, sharp implements.  I saw the powder that the doctor had planned to use against Mary and I.  I saw his eyes widen as I grabbed it, pulling off the lid.

“Milady!” he warned her, as I hurled it.

Her free, damaged hand went out, blocking the incoming object, swatting it out of the air.  A cloud of white powder billowed from the impact point.  She moved away from it, putting herself in the corner, her hand up near her face to block one of Mary’s knives from striking her head while her movements were more limited.  The knife sank into her already mangled hand.

There were more items strewn on the floor.  I kept my eye on the doctor as I moved for one, then shifted position to go for another.

Momentary alarm.

He might as well have shouted to me that the item was dangerous.

I picked it up.  Some fluid with a name I couldn’t even pronounce.

I hurled it at the Twin.  It hit the wall, shattering.  The chemical rained down on the Twin.  The Doctor relaxed, and I realized I’d applied it the wrong way.

The noise of the bottle breaking provoked the firstborn that were just outside.  They snarled and howled, more agitated than before.

“It hurts,” Lainie said.  “It hurts.”

Clipped by the bed.

So much chaos and noise surrounding us, and Mary and the Twin were so still.  It wasn’t an even fight.  Mary was more hurt than before, and the Twin wasn’t moving any more slowly or suffering on any perceptible level.

The twin was taller than average, a foot taller than a very tall man might be, but in her sheer ability to be indomitable, seemingly untouchable and unreachable, she seemed a giantess, too big for the room.

I tried to get the doctor to tell me what items might be useful, and again, I saw a tell.  I scrambled for an item, and this time, he scrambled for it too, to stop me, and to get in my way.

Disobeying his mistress’ orders?

He wasn’t a fighter any more than I was.  Had he tried, he could likely have beat me, stopped me, punished me even, and still kept me from getting my hands on the tall bottle I’d been reaching for.  As it was, his eyes were on the prize, and my eyes were on his carotid artery.  I drew my knife from my boot, raised it up, and brought it down on his neck.   I saw his eyes go wide, his hands flounder.  I hauled the knife up and out of the throat, a surprising amount of blood gushing out of the wound, and then drove it through one of his scrabbling hands to nail it to the floor.

I left my knife behind, picking myself up, as I hefted the bottle.  This label I could read.  Sterile alcohol.

I knew I could have improvised something with the bottle, given a moment, a rag, and a source of flame, but I doubted Mary had it in her to hold out that long.  Holding the neck of the bottle in two hands, I hurled it.  I realized, too late, that the Twin was watching me, ready.

She caught the bottle out of the air before it could strike any hard surfaces.

She drew her hand back, ready to fling it back at me, and a flying object struck the bottle, shattering the upper half of the bottle in the Twin’s hand.  Fluid and broken glass showered one hand and one side of her body.

The Twin used her free hand to wipe the worst of it off.  Her eye fell to the doctor, who lay on the floor, bleeding out.

She thrust, without a glance toward Mary, and Mary only barely avoided the rapier’s point.  Without drawing back, the Twin swept her blade to one side, practically flicking Mary across the room.  A spray of blood flew out where the rapier’s edge had caught Mary in the side.

“Is it only you two?” the Twin asked.  She sauntered my way.  I backed up until my feet bumped against Mary’s body.

I felt hollow, completely and utterly alone in the world, though I was surrounded by a small crowd, and a larger one surrounded much of the rest of the building.

I couldn’t even reach for the imaginings of the other Lambs, because I wasn’t sure if Mary was dead or seriously hurt, and I couldn’t be distracted.

I was left to stand alone.

“Only us,” I said.  “I didn’t expect to run into you this soon.  Wanted to talk to the doctor here, figure out a strategy, for dealing with you and for dealing with your brother.  It’s… kind of a damn shame that you showed up as soon as you did.”

“A part of me wants to taunt you,” she said.  “Talk about what will happen to the other Lambs, after this.  But you should know by now, and I don’t think you’re worth the time and the breath.”

I thought about the other Lambs, and I thought about how I was already saying goodbye to them.

But to give up even the glimmer of hope?  To know that they were gone?  Say goodbye to another Lamb forever?

“I know that look,” the Twin said.  “Backed into a corner, fight or flight.  But you’ve got nowhere to go, and you know you can’t beat me in a fight.”

At my feet, moving against the back of my calves and my ankles, Mary stirred.  She wasn’t in fighting shape, and she wasn’t, I knew, playing possum.

“I was hoping to see that look of despair,” she said.  “I haven’t gone ten minutes without wanting it, without wanting to see it and then tear your face off, to preserve it forever.”

My eyes followed the point of her rapier.  The damn thing was long enough to be a lance.  She moved it left to right, right to left.  A snake charmer charming the snake with the movement of the flute, only I was the snake.

“It hurts,” Lainie muttered.  She was hunched over.

Kill the hostages, I willed the twin.  Kill Lainie and Chance, for distracting you during this moment.

She didn’t.  She drew the rapier back, then thrust it, straight for me.  I threw myself to the side, tumbling to the floor and skidding as I landed atop vials, pill-bottles and tools.  Nothing I could really use, at a glance.

She drew back, ready to stab again, and I knew her target was Mary’s body.

“No!” I shouted.  Too loud.

Howls and screeches echoed through the building at the cry.  They responded more to speech than to anything, and they responded here.  One of the firstborn beyond the door broke past the soldiers, and came tearing into the room.

It didn’t even have the sense to dodge or minimize the damage as the Twin swung the rapier.  Had it been one step back, the rapier might have missed.  One step further forward, and the rapier would have had to cleave through the meat of the throat, the bone of the spine.  It was a strong material, but I doubted it would make it through.  As it was, it cut cleanly past the flesh at the front of the firstborn’s throat.  A backhand swipe disemboweled.

There was no more time.  My hands were empty.  I’d had a gun.  It was-

I turned my head, and I saw the hostages.  The gun was in arm’s reach of Simon and of Chance.

As if in slow motion, Chance reached for the gun, then slid it across the floor.

I swept it up off the ground, then ran toward the twin.  Firing at range wouldn’t work any more than a half-dozen serious stabbings had.  Fast as she was with the rapier, it was ungainly.  I closed the distance, hurling myself at her, saw the weapon come around, and dove.

I mentally recited an apology for everyone who was about to get hurt or die, but I knew that this was something I’d do ten times over, if it meant Mary had a chance of making it through.

I moved the gun near the Twin’s leg, and I fired it, the bullet aimed at nothing in particular.  In the wake of the shot, I heard screams, and howls, many of them from the street.

The hammer of the gun struck the metal, and it created sparks.  The spark touched the alcohol, and half of the Twin swiftly went up in flame.  I flipped over onto my back to look up, to see, and I knew immediately that it wouldn’t be enough.  Smoke and fire reached up toward the ceiling, flesh burned and I could smell it burning, but she didn’t scream, and she didn’t flail.  Instead, she let the rapier fall to the floor.

I hurried to move out of the way while she was half-blind and preoccupied.  One of her limbs, a hand or a foot, clipped me, and sent me sprawling, reawakening the recent injury to my shoulder that adrenaline had quieted.

To a backdrop of screaming, I scrambled back, until my back was against the wall.  I panted from the burst of exertion, and watched as the Twin opened up her body, unzipping it, reaching for something within herself that would serve to end my existence or to stop the burning and free her to resume her cold rampage.

She drew her hand out with an organ within it, bulbous and unrecognizable.  She squeezed, and fingertips and bone punctured the flesh to let liquid cascade out.  It drenched her arm, and where it did, the alcohol wicked off, the fires going out or dropping to the floor.  She held it high, and she let the liquid rain down over her.

So much effort, and she didn’t even burn properly.

Fire was the most common answer to the Academy’s creations, and she’d been given a clear answer to it.

I picked myself up off the ground.  To my left, Mary was doing the same.

Ruth wasn’t far from me, and neither was the bedside table with the folded towels.  I reached into the folded towels, and took hold of the poisonous gas.

I hucked it at her.  Half-disassembled, limiting the spread of the flame by keeping herself in distinct pieces, she wasn’t as mobile.  The gas erupted around her, forming an opaque yellow-green cloud, the little globe continuing to billow as it fell to the ground.

“Cover your mouths!” Simon called out.

I saw a glimpse of the Twin as she backed away, moving to one corner of the room.  She was pulling herself together.

“Soldiers!” the Twin called out.  “In here!”

“Milady?”

A voice from the door.  I couldn’t even see the source as the gas filled half of the room.

“Get them!”

“The firstborn are-”

“Get them!  Kill them, and then deal with the firstborn!”

I gestured, without looking at Mary.  If she was in any shape to cooperate, she would.  If she wasn’t, I didn’t want to see.  I indicated the door.  The gesture for attack.  The third one we’d ever taught ourselves, part of the first six, integral to how the rest had evolved.

A knife flew through the smoke to draw a telling sound.  A wet ‘thock’ of the blade striking home, the sound of a body.

I was already walking forward into the gas, breath held, bending down to fumble for the source of the billowing gas.  Once I had it, I held it close to my body to minimize how much it spread.

My eyes teared up, my vision swimming in a way very unlike vertigo.  I could only see the smoke, billowing and noxious, and feel it burn my nose, mouth, ear canals, dickhole and asshole.

But, as I got closer to the end of the room, I could see the windows, pale squares of yellow-green in the midst of the smoke.  I saw as one of her hands smashed the window, and how the gas suddenly flowed toward the opening in the glass.

I could see the dark shadow and silhouette of the Twin, and the light of the fires that still burned at one of her hands.

I plunged the smoking globe into the fissure of the Twin’s body, saw her tense and react, and braced myself for the retaliatory strike.  It hit my arms, my upper body, my head, all at once, the shock spreading through more than half of my body as it knocked me off my feet and onto the ground.

Not as strong a blow as it might have been.  She couldn’t see me.

The hit did make me take in an involuntary breath.  The entire inside of my mouth burned in a way that reminded me of disinfectant poured on a wound, but it treated my entire mouth as that wound, and made me feel like every affected surface would erupt in ulcers, if it wasn’t already.

Coughing, sputtering, I staggered out of the worst of the smoke, stumbled into a wall, and collapsed against the ground.

The hostages, Mary, and Ruth were mostly out of the worst of the smoke.  Especially now that it was contained.  The Twin hadn’t accessed the globe, she wasn’t pulling it free and tossing it at us.  She didn’t scream or taunt us.  Only silence.

My breath wheezed as I stared into the smoke.  I realized I wouldn’t see anything, and looked away.  I looked to Mary, who sat against the wall, bloody and battered.  She had a nasty cut running from belly button to shoulder blade.  I wasn’t sure how deep it was.

All around us, I could hear the firstborn raging, the sounds of fighting.  People were using guns more, which made the situation worse.

The Baron was fleeing, and the soldiers that weren’t fighting firstborn were now converging on our location.  We didn’t have long.

Still, I needed to see.

Chance and Simon opened windows, staying as far from the smoke as they could, mouths covered.  The smoke began to clear.  The Twin was there, sitting against the wall much as Mary was.

Bled, burned, gassed, and to look at her, she was still breathing.

I patted myself down, and found no weapon.  I looked to Mary, and saw her holding a knife out.

I took it.

I approached the twin, while Mary threw more knives toward the door.  I saw the twin meet my eyes.

“He didn’t even care,” she spoke, her voice ragged, ravaged by the smoke.  I thought she should cough, given what I was experiencing, but she didn’t.

“The Baron?” I asked.

“He took that woman as if it was payment enough.  Didn’t care.  Immortality was more important than our sisters.  He smiled.  He laughed for his guests.  Didn’t want me to wear black, to mourn.”

“To be fair,” I said, “You’re awfully hard people to feel sorry for.  You want to be mourned?”

“We were supposed to-” she wheezed a breath.  She tensed, like she was going to swing for me, try and execute me on the spot.  Something didn’t let her.  “Supposed to have him, if nobody else.  Him.  But we’re just bastard children.  Even to him.  Now-”

I could hear movement outside.  I gestured to Mary.

“-Now I die alone.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I choked back ten different sorts of emotion.  I didn’t sympathize with her, but I could sympathize with what she was saying.  “I don’t suppose you’ll give me some advice on how to deal with your brother?”

She shook her head.

I wasn’t surprised in the least.

A part of me, hearing what she’d said, wasn’t surprised that she wasn’t fighting more.  The damage wasn’t that severe.  She could have mustered the strength to hit me, fought to the door, gotten access to a doctor, and gotten patched together.

But she had no reason to.  Not anymore.

“Then… Want to help me help you move along?”

I wasn’t sure if she’d even heard me, but then she slouched.  As she did so, her body came further apart.  I could see how the gas had affected the meaty inner layers.  It looked like the inside of my mouth felt.

She strained, and I saw her bones shift and move.  Her entire body was reconfigurable, to help the doctors do their work and to make room for her little sister.  Her ribs pulled back and away, exposing organs in her chest.

I sank the knife into place.  I had to grip it with both hands to rake it across the surface.  I watched as it strained, gushing blood, and then stopped beating.

I stepped back and away.  The other Lambs surrounded me.  Gordon, Jamie, Mary, Lillian, Ashton, Helen, Hubris… all watching as the Twin slowly died.

I saw the peace on her face, and every sense was aware of the violence and chaos all around us.  Warrick had finally snapped, and it wasn’t pretty.

I’d shaken the box twice, in the end.  Now I had to deal with the consequences.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.16 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

It’s not your fault.  It’s not my fault.  This would have happened anyway, in some form.  That you pulled the trigger and the Baron didn’t doesn’t change the fact that he set this up with the hope that there would be bloodshed.  He had to have.

The Twin burned behind us, the already existent flames needing only a bit of attention from an oil lamp that had fallen to the floor before they could wreath our nemesis.  Fire would scorch the most telling evidence away.  What lay before us would need something more.

The sheer number of soldiers in the area was keeping the firstborn from doing too much damage, but the degree of violence was shocking.  The firstborn were as relentless as any stitched, just as strong, but they were alive.  The way they moved was more unpredictable as a consequence, and their movements were single-mindedly focused on finding the most destructive path possible to the most recent stimulus.

The more I saw, as we moved around the fringe of the ongoing bloodshed, the more convinced I was that these firstborn had been made to hurt, not to kill.  Short claws sliced through skin and left deeper tissue intact.  Meaty hands broke hands, arms, and the occasional leg, but the firstborn wouldn’t kill the individual.

Which wasn’t to say that people weren’t dying.

“What do you think of your handiwork, Simon?”  I asked.

There was no response.  When I looked at him, all I could make out was the mask of flesh, his eyes meeting mine.

We circled the plaza, entering closer to the north end, where the stage and fountain were.  Given how things were unfolding, I suspected the firstborn had been gathered here, at the fringe of the party, where anyone could look over and up at them.  As the noise and chaos had reached them, they had moved en masse, crashing into the midst of standing guards and some of the braver aristocrats who carried swords on their person.

“Mother,” Chance murmured.  We weren’t using the wire leash on him anymore.  He touched Lainie’s shoulder.  “Lainie, they’re okay.”

Their parents and loved ones.  I couldn’t see which people they were referring to, exactly.  All of the aristocrats looked the same to me.  Lainie didn’t look nearly as enthused as Chance did, but something in her relaxed on seeing.  She was cradling one arm, but it didn’t even look broken.  For all that she’d cried out earlier, I wondered if the damage was somehow worse than it looked, or if she was so sheltered that it was the very first time in her life that she’d actually been hurt.

I took my attention off of our hostages and assessed the situation in short order, looking for the key people, the people the party had centered around, the Baron, the Warrick locals.  I could see the trail of bodies leading away from the plaza, going further north.

The Baron.

The soldiers were winning the fight, but the sheer density of firstborn here was posing a problem.  As our group moved around the very edge of the plaza, keeping our distance from the fighting, soldiers took note of us.  Their eyes fixed on Simon.

I knew right away what their concern would be.  Another Firstborn, another potential combatant.

Nothing Simon had done thus far spoke to him being interested in anything more than self preservation.  He was loyal to his friends, and he’d provided help to our group, but that counted very little in the grand scheme of things, as I saw it.

As a consequence, when I saw a soldier turn, looking at Mary and I, then turning his focus to the firstborn at the tail end of our group.  I did nothing, keeping my head down as much as I already had been, and let the dice fall where they were slated to fall.

It was Mary, in the end, who turned, saw, and grabbed the firstborn’s hand, tugging sharply on it so they both fell together.  The rest of us stopped running, while Mary looked up at the soldier, eyes wide, half-panicked, like she was entirely unable to fend for herself.

That look was enough to give the man pause.  He held out his sword.

“It’s dangerous,” he said.

I wondered if Simon would do anything.

“It’s my brother,” Mary said.  “Please.”

For a long moment, I thought the soldier was going to strike, resolving the situation, so he could go back to his comrades.  His sword wavered.

It would be easier if he did execute Simon.  The social currency and independence the firstborn offered was dwindling.  Simon remained a loose end.

The sword lowered.  The man, young, no older than twenty, extended a hand to Mary, helping her stand.  “You’re hurt.”

“We got attacked by some others.  Her firstborn helped us,” I said, indicating Mary and Simon.

He shot a skeptical eye at Simon, then said, “They’re going crazy.  You need to get out of here, the madness that’s getting to them, it’s contagious, passing from one to the other.”

“We will,” Mary said.

“The Baron,” I said.  “Is he…?”

“He’s gone,” the soldier said.  “He headed up that way.  The first wagons passed through the hills.  We’re handling the situation here, then dividing people into those who will go to the Baron and those who will stay here to clean up.”

“He’s going to be so mad,” I said.  I ran my hands through my hair, as if I didn’t know what to do with them.  “He’s- they’re going to take it out on us.  They always do.”

I saw the soldier’s expression change.  He couldn’t look me in the eye, but his eyes didn’t remain on any fixed point.  Lost in thought.  His knuckles went white as he gripped his weapon.  I saw his eyebrows move.  Concern, and not for me.

This didn’t sit easy for the young soldier.  That was something I could use.

“Sir?” I ventured.  I let my voice hitch.  I had his attention.

“Our parents are at Richmond House, they’re servants.  Is there- is there any way we could…” I trailed off.

“You want me to help them leave?”

“They only go once a month, and for special events.  He uses us boys and girls to control them while they’re there, and scare them.  Sometimes he hints that he has us in the dungeon,” I said.  I was improvising, and the lie was spinning out into something convoluted.  “He’ll make them wonder all day, have them work so hard to please him, because they think we’re at his mercy.  He plays games with their heads, and telling them that one of us is hurt or in danger or letting them think they can escape when we’re really in the dungeon, that’s the sort of game he’d play.”

“Our parents are always so happy to see us when they get back,” Mary said.

“I don’t know,” the soldier said.

“You can’t?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.  He glanced back at his companions.  When he looked back at us, his focus was on Chance and Lainie.

“They’re good people,” Chance said.  “We owe a lot to them.  My family isn’t overly important, but if you gave your name to me and helped them out, I could-”

The soldier shook his head.  “That’s not important.  Okay.  I’ll look into it.  There will be one wagon-cart that goes back with some guards for Richmond House.  I might be on it, and I could get you on it, if I explain.”

“Please,” Mary said.  She reached out, touching his hand where it gripped the gun.

I imagined that moment of contact and the expression on a pretty girl’s injured face would haunt him for a long time.  Much as the image of the blood-strewn plaza was liable to linger in my mind’s eye.  I was cursed to a faulty memory that would only retain the bad things.

“One hour?” the man said.  “Meet me here.  I’ll try to be here, if orders allow, and I’ll try to arrange something.  For now, just get somewhere safe.”

Then he was gone, running, back to his comrades and fellow soldiers and guards.

“No such place,” I murmured.

We made our way.  I pointed the way, as best as I was able, but the same-ness of so many of the houses and the scarcity of landmarks made it easy to get lost.

“You can act,” Lainie said.  “You can lie and make it sound real.  You know how to fight, or she does.  My throat hurts from when you used that gas and none of the stuff actually reached me, but you walked into it.  Where did you come from?  What’s really going on?”

“You said it earlier,” I said.  “We’re monsters, aren’t we?”

“That doesn’t explain anything!”

“Have you changed your mind?” I asked.  “Do you see us as something else?”

“I think you’re scary, and-”

I raised a hand, interrupting her, and then let it drop.  “We’re monsters.  It’s not my job to convince you of anything different.  I, we, have another job.  Your job is to come with us.”

Further away from the plaza, the fighting was nonexistent.  People, forbidden from going indoors, had taken to hiding.  It wasn’t a lame hide-and-seek sort of hiding, but it was a sustained effort to stay out of sight without looking like they were staying out of sight.  They clustered in groups of three to ten, gathered in nooks and crannies with their firstborn looming over them like guillotines.  They kept their heads down, hunching over with backs to us, or averting their gaze.

A broken community.

Finally sufficiently lost, I looked at Simon.  “Your lab.  Where is it?”

Still unwilling to talk, he pointed.

My gut instinct had been right.  The house wasn’t far.

“Chance,” I said.

“What is it?”

“You helped back there with the soldier.  And with the Twin.”

“The Twin?  The Lady Baronet of Richmond?”

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because I saw how things were unfolding, and I remembered hearing the stories, those memories were so vivid that it was like someone was speaking in my ear.  Things the Twins did.  Not so different from what you told the soldier back there.”

Simon pointed, indicating a street.  We changed direction.

“I… couldn’t foresee any future where the Lady Baronet won and then let us go.  She would be suspicious, and she would punish us without asking questions.”

“She would,” I said.

“It wasn’t courage, if you’re thinking that,” Chance.  “It wasn’t.  It was a horrible sort of fear.”

“And the soldier?”

“I don’t even remember what I said to him.”

I nodded.

We were approaching the front door of Simon’s house.  I drew the house key from my pocket and opened the door.

The stray items and blood from our earlier fight was still scattered and spattered, respectively, across the first floor.  Blood marked a trail upstairs and down.

Simon was now in the lead of the group, eager.  He walked with purpose to the basement door.  The rest of us followed.

“You saved him from the soldier back there,” I murmured to Mary.  She limped a bit as we approached the stairwell, walking just beside me, the two of us behind Lainie and Chance.

“I wasn’t sure if you had any more plans for him,” Mary said.  She winced and opened her mouth to touch a tooth.  Fingers still in her mouth, she glanced at me.

There were so very few people in the world who could I could communicate so much with, with only a second or two of unwavering, sustained eye contact.

I loved Mary so much.  Not as a girlfriend, she never would be one.  But the way we worked in concert, the communication, and the feeling that she and I were a pair, when it counted.

I wanted to say it out loud, regardless of the circumstance, much as I’d told Lillian.  I wanted to speak from the heart, even while knowing that any and every time I did, it somehow became poison.

We approached the bottom of the staircase.  Simon had stopped in his tracks.

Reaching the bottom of the staircase, I could see why.  We’d bound Clifton and Carmen to the polished steel countertops, the crown of Clifton’s head touching Carmen’s.  They both now lay in pools of congealing blood.  Carmen lay contorted, the position far from the pose we’d left her in, dried froth and possibly a small amount of vomit collected around her nostrils and mouth.  The act of taking her extreme pose had been violent, clearly, with razor wire hauled through flesh until it reached inflexible, unyielding bone.  Here and there, the wire was so taut that it held her hands and legs in the strange positions.

Lainie stumbled into one corner, heaving in breath while making gulping sounds.  Chance hurried to her side, looking for something to vomit into.

“Fits,” Simon said.  His voice was hollow.  “Withdrawal from the drug.”

Carmen had been the one to have fits.  To keep one from struggling or chancing a cut to their arm or leg, we’d bound Clifton to Carmen and vice versa.  The wires went from one individual, under the table and around to the other.  The idea had been to keep each one from struggling by making their struggles dangerous to the other.  It had worked, she’d struggled, and her fits had effectively killed Clifton.

Simon wheeled on us.  I could see the pain in his eyes.

You!  You did this!”

I remained silent.  There wasn’t anything to be said.  He wouldn’t hear.

He raised his hands to his face, fingers digging in, and in the doing, he provoked the living flesh that he’d been wreathed in.  It contorted and pulsed, flexing under his fingers, making his monstrous, melted expression into something bloated and even more monstrous than before.  The eyes behind it all were so very human, with a terrible sort of emotion in them.

He spoke again, but the words became a cry, and the cry became a ragged, agonized scream that tore its way out of his mouth.  He started to move toward us like he might throw punches and try to savagely beat us, then almost concurrently remembered the fate of the twin.  He dropped to his knees.

I waited, listening at the keening cry of the man.  In sound alone, it almost perfectly represented what I’d been feeling since I’d left Lillian’s.  I let it go on for far too long before I raised my hand, two fingers extended.  I let my hand drop.

Cold, quiet, and so fast I barely saw, Mary threw a knife underhand.

Lainie shrieked as the knife struck home and Simon toppled to the ground.  Chance wrapped his arms around her.

“I want my wire,” Mary said, her eyes on the bodies on the counter.

“Get it,” I said.  “I can sew up my most minor wounds and see about looking after Lainie’s arm.  When we’re done, I’ll patch you up, and you patch me up?”

Mary gave me one curt nod.  She stepped over Simon on her way to the bodies.

I looked for and began collecting the necessary supplies for wound treatment.  I ran water in the little cast-steel sink and waited until it was sufficiently hot.

“Are you going to deal with us in the same way?” Chance asked.  His arms were still around his sobbing cousin.  “Tie up loose ends?”

Not a dumb guy.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“What decides it?” he asked.  His voice was tight.

“Things like whether I can trust you to keep your word and be afraid enough of us,” I said.  “And…”

I looked down at Simon.  His scream lingered in my ears.

“And?”

“And I asked him a question earlier.  About what he thought about his handiwork.  He made the monsters.  He couldn’t give me an answer.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t feel bad!” Lainie said.  She sounded as if she was panicking.  Chance squeezed her, as if to compel her to stay quiet and calm.

“I act, like you said.  I lie.  I read people like she makes them bleed.  If he’d given me one sign, one indication of remorse or pity for the people he hurt over the last few years, I would have let him live.  I even asked him outright.  I gave him a last chance.”

“You asked me if I thought you were a monster, just a little while ago,” Lainie said.

“I did,” I said.  I set out the materials for first aid.

“Is that the same sort of question?”

“No,” I said.  “I don’t care what you think about me.”

Chance was glaring at me now, his jaw set.

“But if I was in your shoes, Lainie, I would be thinking hard about what kind of answer you can give me.  And I won’t necessarily ask a question before I expect that answer.”

“You said Lainie, you referred to her specifically, instead of say it to us both,” Chance said, his voice quiet.  “Is that because you think I gave you an answer?”

On the far end of the room, in front of me, Mary glanced at me.  She knew.

“If you want to kill her, you’ll have to kill me first,” Chance said.

I turned around so I could look at them straight.  Then, instead of answering Chance, I gestured at Lainie.  “Get up on the counter here, I’ll take a look at that arm.”

“Sy,” Mary said.

I stirred, realized my head was on Mary’s shoulder, her hair pulled back out of the way.  I sat up straight.  We were still in the basement.  Chance and Lainie were sitting on a countertop.  Sheets covered the corpses in the room, but neither of the young aristocrats looked at ease.

“I slept?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Mary said.  “A minute, maybe five at most.  It was fitful.”

I wasn’t surprised.  I felt more tired than I had.  Phantom images of other Lambs were disappearing.

After we’d handled the first aid and Mary had been given painkillers, I’d gathered up supplies I assumed I could use.  Packets of paper and cloth that held powders I knew to be hard on the eyes and nose.  Then, when Mary and I had run out of details to talk about, I’d filled the quiet with their voices, the dim with their faces.  Somewhere in the midst of it, I’d tapped myself out.

“It hasn’t been an hour,” I said.

“No,” she agreed.  “It’s not time for the rendezvous.  But…”

She gestured.  Ear.  Sound.

I listened.

A dull noise, reverberating through the town, heavy.  Like weather, but not weather.

“A train?”

“I didn’t even hear it stop,” Mary said.  “But I heard the steam vent as it started to move again.  It just arrived.”

I nodded, taking it in.  “Okay.”

“You like to stay ahead of things,” she said.  “I thought you might want to scout it out.”

I hopped down off of the countertop.  I looked around the room.  I gave her a nod.

The phantom images of the Lambs were long gone, having only been halfway between dream and daydream.  Still, I remembered the feelings I’d had while they were here.  In the twilight of near-sleep, I’d almost let myself believe.

Chance and Lainie approached without complaint as I indicated for them to move.  Chance seemed a lot more stern than before, his jaw set.

He’d drawn blood in an indirect way.  He looked like a hunter, but the death he had indirectly contributed to was a far weightier one.  Helping to kill a noble, of all things.  He had matured by leaps and bounds.  Now he was looking at me and wondering what other hard decisions he might have to make.

Lainie… I couldn’t say.  She’d been forced to grow up a great deal, and I had challenged her to grow up the rest of the way and to do it fast, by demanding an answer out of her.  I couldn’t make myself believe she had it in her.

“A lot of people have seen us, now,” Mary commented, as we left the house.

I gave her a singular nod in response.

“What happens if you let Chance and Lainie go?  You scare them?”

“That would be the idea.”

“And the soldier who is giving us access to the Baron’s mansion?”

“Won’t talk.  Others won’t ask him, and he won’t venture to say.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure enough that I’m willing to stake your life on it,” I said.  “And the life of the other Lambs.”

Mary didn’t have a response to that.

“I’m not willing to stake your life on many things,” I said, my voice dropping.

“I know,” she said.  “I believe you when you say he won’t talk.”

I ran my fingers through my hair.  My breath fogged in the cool air.

“The soldiers in the house where the Twin died?”

“Didn’t see through the gas, and they won’t talk for similar reasons the other soldier won’t.  Only they’ll be less motivated by good nature and more by fear.  They were close to the Twin when she died.  That failing will reflect on them.”

Not wholly the truth, that.  Some had glanced through and seen me.  I was sure enough that they hadn’t gotten a good look at Mary.  I was alright with that end result.

The group at the train was still there.  It had seemed to be a particularly slow-moving group of aristocrats, but as we made our way across the city, periodically glancing in that direction, it didn’t look like they were leaving the train station.

We headed straight for the plaza, and I could almost remember the way back without Mary prompting me.

The soldier wasn’t there.  Forty or fifty minutes had passed, and the fighting had concluded.  Bodies had been dragged away, and whole groups of people were bringing water, sloshing them on the cobblestones to wash the blood.  Not all of the groups had firstborn with them.

I’d planned to be here as the people on the train arrived, get the lay of the land, and see if there was anything I could use.  They still weren’t advancing into the city.

Fray?  I wondered.  Were her people here in disguise, dressed like the upper class?

No.  That would be too hard to sell.

“What are you doing?” Chance asked me, “Don’t just stand around.  Get water, clean.”

I could see the look in his eye.  He was playing along, and I couldn’t see any guile.

“Yes, sir,” I said.  Mary and I went to get buckets.  I kept a close eye on the young aristocrat, collected the bucket, and used the fact that I was moving around to try and get a better sense of what was going on down at the train station.

Something about this didn’t make sense.  I was surprised at how much the sense of it nagged at me.

I was so fixated on that odd scene that I needed Mary to nudge me before I saw our escort making his approach.  The guard we’d pled to earlier was coming, and he had others with him.  Nothing seemed duplicitous about what he was doing.  Not unless he’d lost all ability to feel bad about the violence and wrongs committed against Warrick’s people.

He’d brought his superior officer and a friend, it looked like.  We would have our ride.

I glanced again at the train, then back at Chance and Lainie.

There.  The aristocrats were now coming.  There were no less than four nobles in their company now, departing the train.  I could only see them from afar, but three looked younger than the Baron and the Twins, older than fifteen, going solely by proportion and their style of dress.  The fourth was older, exceptionally fat to a degree that had to have been created by academy doctors, with crimson hair, and I couldn’t even tell if they were male or female.

“Nobles,” I said.  “They weren’t expected to arrive on this train, right?”

“They weren’t.  What are you thinking?” Mary asked me.

“I’m thinking about the next train.  All of this, it’s a play, right?  A strategy.  The Baron… he’s not a stupid man.  The violence, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but he planned it to an extent.  He anticipated Mauer or Fray coming for him, or coming for a cluster of nobles.  The firstborn would or will be a distraction… and what does he do?”

“You’ve said it before.  He retreats to Richmond House.”

I turned, looking past the houses at the forest, and at the expansive manor that peeked through the trees.

“And remains disconnected?  What does he do when and if the soldiers can’t get things back in control?  He’d want to hop in a wagon and make his way down to greet the other nobles, and he wouldn’t be able to, not gracefully.  That far away, he’d be too slow to move and react.  Does he really want to look that weak?  That out of control?”

Power and control.  The nobles have the power and can never have enough control.

“He’s here,” Mary said.  “He made it look like he was going to Richmond House, which anyone would expect, and then he doubled back.”

“Not here, but close,” I said.  “I think I know where.”

I looked past the tops of houses and buildings, to the spire of the godless church.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.17 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.17

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My grip on Lainie’s wrist was so tight that when she crashed to the ground, I could see the imprint of my hand, distinct and white, the skin around the finger-marks crimson.  I’d been pulling her along so we could get to the church as quickly as possible, and she’d hit her limit, stumbling, then being pulled down to the road, skinning her knees through her stockings.

Ahead of us, Mary and Chance remained where they were, looking back.

“Lainie?” Chance asked.

I looked from Lainie to the end of the street.  The largest church hadn’t been far from the train station.  That little detail mattered.

I was tense, and all of the emotions I’d been bundling up until now were binding together in that tension.  I had to hold back to keep from lashing out at Lainie.  I’d studied her as an individual, I’d known that she couldn’t run this far or this fast, that she didn’t have it in her to face the situations we were dragging her through.  I knew it wasn’t fair, and I wanted to tear into her and shout her down all the same.  I wanted to backhand her and drive some sense into her, or draw the gun and use it to provide incentive.

There were too many important things hinging on this.  We were close and a matter of seconds could make things very, very difficult.

“Please stand up, Lainie,” I said, and the soft, gentle, almost pleading tone I gave my words was as great a job of acting as I’d ever done.

“I can’t,” she said, between gasps for breath.  The words were almost a mewl.  If I hadn’t been expecting words, I might have interpreted it as a whimpering sound.  She wouldn’t look up at me.

“You can, and you have to,” I said, very patiently.  “Right now we’re about a ten minute walk or a five minute run from the train station, the same train station that the aristocrats and some nobles just left.  There’s a chance, a real one, that some people might turn the corner at the end of the street up there.  People who want to keep their distance from the noble, men with guns scouting the area to protect the people they’re assigned to guard, people assigned tasks or told to prepare accommodations.  If they turn the corner and see us, it’s going to make things very complicated.”

“I can’t,” she said, again.  There was a kind of defeat to the words.  The mewl was gone.  She was working on catching her breath, and the emotion was slipping away from her words.

I’d predicted she would be a problem.  I’d expected hysteria, not catatonia.  I suspected I had a very good idea of what her family and circle of friends were like, now.

Every second counted.

“Earlier, you were excited to be a part of this.  When all of this is done, with luck, you’re going to go back to your friends and family.  A bit wiser in what goes on in the background, maybe, more grown up in an unhappy sense,” I said.

I had no indication she was even listening to me at this point.

I dropped down so I sat on my heels.  I couldn’t quite mirror her posture or actions to get more on her level and find a way to communicate with body language, but being closer to her would help.

“Do you want this to be something you look back on with shame?  A black mark, something that sits with you for years, every time you face a bad situation?  The omnipresent knowledge that you broke the first time it really counted?  Because that’s a lie, and I want you to help me prove that’s a lie,” I said.  “I read people.  I’ve read you, and I know you have it in you.”

A lie.

“Don’t fall into this trap of fear and self-doubt,” I urged her.

There wasn’t a response.  No sound, no movement.

I was so focused on her I missed the first part of what Mary said.

“…how, Chance?”

“I’ve never seen her like this,” I heard Chance say.

I looked up at Mary.  “Go ahead.  Scout the area.”

“Are you sure?” Mary asked me.

“No,” I said.  I put a hand on my knee for balance, and I made a gesture.  “But it’s better than all four of us being out here.”

Agree, was her gestured response.  She wasn’t agreeing to my statement.  She was simply accepting the fact that I might have to do something Chance wouldn’t want to see.

She and Chance ran.

I turned to Lainie, studying her, watching for the slightest movement, of head or fingertip.  I looked at her clothes, trying to see if there wasn’t some clue to her personality that would give me a way in.

“At this point,” Gordon murmured in my ear, “You want to consider putting a bullet in her.”

The blunt, simple solution.

You always were a ruthless bastard deep down inside, Gordon, I thought.  When they put your brain together, how did they do it?  Did they include someone who was very good and enthusiastic about hurting others?  Someone you could tap into when the situation called for it, who lurked deep inside you the rest of the time, half-asleep?

Who else was there to ask?  Lillian?  She wasn’t talking to me.  A mental block was firmly in place, making it too difficult for me to pull a complete profile on her together, maybe.  Or I simply didn’t want to think too much about Lillian.

Jamie, then.  In the absence of Lillian, Jamie was perhaps the most moral of the Lambs.  I supposed it was because he remembered everything, including the blood on his hands.  It made for quite a burden, I imagined.

I closed my eyes a moment, thinking about him, that feeling when he lurked, as if he was always in the corner of my vision, not quite the new Jamie or the old, haunting me as he straddled the line between the two.  It was a recurring theme that came with him.  That feeling that he was always there.  When I had a question, he had an answer.

But he wasn’t here, and I wasn’t sure he would be, after.  With Gordon gone, Jamie was the one Lamb who depended most on his treatments to continue functioning.  Without going in and reorganizing his memories, depositing them and taking them back in, or whatever it was he did, he would fly swiftly towards a breaking point.  The result would probably be more horrific than the simple blank slate that had followed the loss of my best friend.

That was likely why I hadn’t jumped straight to Jamie, and why he didn’t emerge as frequently as some of the others might.  Jamie’s presence went hand in hand with a feeling of loneliness and loss.  It was hard to bear for long periods of time.  It left me feeling like I needed to get away, to surface for air, but it wasn’t air I gasped for.

In my mind’s eye, so vivid he was almost there, he crouched beside me.

I need to figure out how to get through to her.  I need a counterpoint to what Gordon is saying.

I heard Jamie’s matter-of-fact voice.  “What you’re telling her, about how she’d regret this for a long time?  That it would be a black stain in her memories, coloring things for a long time?  You might as well have been talking to yourself, Sy.  You hate hurting the young.”

Damn it.

“There’s a reason you didn’t immediately take Gordon’s suggestion.  You don’t want to be that person.  Not if it isn’t absolutely necessary.”

There was another reason I hadn’t jumped to thinking about Jamie.  His presence tended to coincide with uncomfortably penetrating analyses of myself.

I stared at the top of Lainie’s head.  I waited, thinking fast, half of my thoughts preoccupied with the Baron and the upcoming confrontation.  I had to find a way to disable the man, and that was a hard thing to do.  I needed to get the drop on him, if that was even possible.

But I couldn’t do that without leaving Lainie behind.  Leaving her behind would mean someone could grill her and find out about Mary.

I saw as her fingers moved, lifting off of the road, then curled up, her hands twisting so she could make them into fists, the sides of each hand still against the ground to help hold her head and shoulders up.

It was movement, a suggestion she was interacting with the outside world.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I could see her tense.

“No, I’m not apologizing because I’m about to hurt you,” I said.  “I’m sorry because I pushed you too hard.”

I could see her relax.

“This is almost over,” I said.  “You don’t even need to do or see or say anything.  You just need to get somewhere safe.  Then this wraps up, I’ll make all the necessary threats to ensure you won’t say a word about my existence or my friend’s, and you go back to your family.”

Slowly, I saw her work up the ability to move again.  She wouldn’t look at me, and she moved at a glacial pace.

“I don’t-” she started, hesitating.

A part of me wanted to scream.  A calmer part of me was already prepared for the hesitation.  I finished her thought, touching her arm and hand, helping her to complete the movement with gentle assistance while I helped her continue her thought by talking it through.  “You’ve never seen someone get hurt before, let alone killed.”

She shook her head from side to side, an agreement.

“You’re right.  I’ve always worked to bury my thoughts about the people that people like the Baron Richmond hurt and torture.  You hear about the monsters as a kid and you wonder why people don’t do anything.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Please move faster.

“Ho!” the cry came from the far end of the street, not far from the train station.

A horrible fear gripped me.

It was a soldier with a uniform that screamed ‘elite’, and that soldier had a dozen people with him.

Three of those people were nobles, an adult and two adolescents.  A fourth was an experiment, head and shoulders above the adult, who was a good eight feet tall, at my best estimation.  The experiment looked to be all morbid, tumorous flesh, packed into a shell of well-tended cast iron, the flesh throbbing against the shell as if the entire beast was made up of giant hearts.  Digitigrade legs and a tail all styled after a bull’s, three sculpted breasts, two long, feminine arms, and a head, overlarge, gold rather than iron, with two faces, sculpted with four twisting horns.  One had a mouth that yawned open, the other a serene expression.  The imagery couldn’t be mistaken.  The noble had a pet, a vat-grown devil.

I lightly tugged on Lainie’s wrist.  I felt her resistance, and knew she was frozen in fear.  There would be no moving her, and I wasn’t about to leave her behind to tell the noble about Mary.

This is where it all ends, I thought.

The adult noble was the obese one I had seen before.  His body type could only be described as a cylinder.  Rolls of his chin disappeared beneath a huge ruffled collar, and his clothes formed a kind of drape that extended to his ankles, with war medals on his chest.  He’d chosen to look like this, or someone had chosen this aesthetic, and I immediately had an impression why.  He was a giant of a man, all size, and he radiated sheer, undeniable power.  He was a titan that I suspected the Duke of Francis would have felt small beside, decorated with alabaster skin and hair that was parted in the middle and curled at the sides, fine and like spun gold.

Yet for all that he made me think of an ogre, his eyes looked like they belonged on a fey trickster.  Almond-shaped, bright blue, and animated, they immediately locked onto me, supposedly a Warrick local, instead of on Lainie.

The boy in the noble’s company was his son, or some close relative.  The resemblance was uncanny, but the boy was not yet a giant.  Five times my size, easily, but not yet of his father’s height.  His eyes didn’t seem nearly so sharp.  He wore a vest and jacket with a long coat.

And the young lady… about my age, and undoubtedly a noble, was leaner than her guardian and relative.  Statuesque, with the man’s fey glittering eyes, yet with none of the apparent humor behind them.  I wanted to despise her by default, to hate her, and I couldn’t find a flaw to pick at, to latch on to.  Not overdone, but not so indistinct as to be lost amid all of the other worked beauties.  Her features were soft, her almond eyes green and cold.  Her costume, and I didn’t have a word for it otherwise, was black, half-dress and half-suit, with calf-length leather boots and a fine leather falconer’s glove on her right hand, though she had no bird with her.  She stood with one hand on her hip, body askew, glove hanging at one side, and she made it look natural.  Raven hair hung down one side of her head, exposing only the one ear, which had black jewels set into it.

She looked like the sort of noble I might have wanted to be, had I been one.  Whoever had decided on her aesthetic had made good choices, ones that I suspected made a great deal of sense, with attractiveness as a byproduct.  I suspected it all flowed seamlessly, in a way that made me think of the artistry behind Helen.  That design was almost enough to distract me from the situation.  The situation was bad.

I couldn’t run.  I knew it instinctively.  The devil would be on our heels.  If I tried, it would mean leaving Lainie.

I dropped to my knees.  Lainie was already halfway there.  Her head bowed as mine did.

“Elaine Dexter?” the adult spoke.  His voice was exactly as one might expect, as if the skies had opened and a higher power had spoken, words reverberating as if they rattled the walls.  The fact that the syllables were as deep and slow as they were made his voice sound distorted, akin to how I’d once heard an altered baby who had a crying scream of an adult.

“Yes, Lord Infante,” Lainie said.

Infante.  That put this man around the ninth, tenth, or eleventh place from the throne, though it was always hard to tell, with new births and deaths that weren’t spoken of.  My memory of these things was bad to begin with, but I thought of two possibilities for who he might be.  Either the Lord King’s second grandchild or husband to the youngest child of the king.

His voice boomed, “I had a glance of you once, when you were still on your mother’s breast.  You became frightened at my voice and squawked, interrupting me.”

“I-I have heard the story, Lord Infante.  I am dearly sorry.”

He laughed, and I imagined, had he had a normal voice, it might have sounded warm.

“Not to worry, dear child.  I have a good recollection for people and events, and I don’t use it for nursing grudges.  Stand, now.  Look me in the eye.  Let me see how you’ve grown.

“Yes, Lord Infante.”  Lainie did as she’d been asked.  I remained kneeling.

“You’re hurt.”

“Yes, Lord Infante.”

“What happened?”

“An incident, Lord Infante.  The locals have monsters assigned to watch each family, the monsters became riled.  The- the-”

She stuttered.  It was as if the man was so intense that weak things simply crumbled around him, and Lainie wasn’t feeling strong.

“Alright, child, alright.  Shush,” the man spoke.  “Now tell me, who is this rapscallion that is keeping you company?”

I tensed.

“Raps- my Lord Infante, I-”

“Shush, I told you, there’s no need to worry.  You’re keeping the company of someone who has had droplets of blood fall on him from above, landing on his back, with very full pockets and clothes that belonged to someone else.  Any of these things might be fine on their own, but they add up to quite a picture.”

I wondered if I could stab Lainie and run.

“Boy.  Stand.”

If I was going to run, it had to be now.

I didn’t.

“Yes, Lord Infante,” I said, standing.  I was very aware of how small I was compared to even the shortest of the nobles present, the falconer.

“You’re a killer,” he said.

“Yes, Lord Infante,” I said.  I was growing to hate the words ‘Lord Infante’, but I was willing to take Lainie’s cue on this and say it every time I spoke, just to be safe.

My admission of being a killer had the noble son’s piggish eyes and the Falconer’s green eyes fixed on me.  They were, at the risk of overstating it, mildly interested now.

“Honest, aren’t you?”

“I’m not usually, but here, yes, Lord Infante.  If I didn’t tell you, I think miss Elaine Dexter here might.  With all respect due to her, she is having a very poor day.  With a man of your… stature, I feel it would be bad form to be caught in a lie.”

“Very wise, very wise.  You don’t strike me as a very poor killer, boy.  Are you an exceptional one?”

“I’m trying to be, Lord Infante.  Today will decide it one way or the other.”

“Hmm.  Trying is a weak word.  Who is supposed to die at your hand today?”

“The Baron Richmond, Lord Infante.”

That actually seemed to surprise the man.  He stopped for a moment, and then let loose a laugh so loud I worried the Baron would hear it, some distance away.  It made my ears ring.

“At the poor man’s engagement announcement?  I’d thought you might be one of his, hired to pick off some lesser noble.  I was going to ask you which one, and buy you off if it was one I wanted to keep around.  But this?  This is something different.”

“Yes, Lord Infante.”

“Who hired-  No, no, I don’t imagine anyone hired you.  You look wrung-out enough that you might have abandoned the job if it was simply about money, and you’re too young to understand money as it stands.  This is personal.”

I swallowed.

“Why the Baron?  No, hold, don’t tell me why.  I don’t want to know your petty reasons, and I can imagine what the answer would be.  Let’s see if you have an answer for me.  This event, this narcissistic cock-wag of a show, what is he doing it for?”

I paused, thinking.

“If you take more time than it takes me to draw a breath to give me an answer, boy, I will personally twist you into two pieces and hand you over to my elite guard with instructions to put each half in a different outhouse.”

“Lord Infante, he hoped to lure in others that stand between him and the throne.  In the recent skirmish in Lugh, he found out about guns designed to kill nobles, and secured an alliance with the man who made them.  The Duke of Francis-”

“Is left with half of a brain.  A vegetable in a pretty package.  I’m aware.  This neatly explains how that came about.  The attack is arranged for later, then?”

“I’m not sure he anticipates it for sure, Lord Infante,” I said.  It was hard to breathe around the man.  I was caught now between responding as fast and concisely as I could and being crushed by his voice, while being tense and prepared to bolt for it in some dim attempt to survive if he saw reason to hurt me.  “He might hope it will happen, but if it doesn’t, then he still gets to meet and greet his peers and know they’ll likely die in the months to come, as the guns see use.”

I was leaving Candida Gage out of this on purpose.

The man’s silence was imposing.  Beside me, Lainie drew in a shuddering breath.

“Will I find reason to regret letting you go?” the man asked me.  “Be honest.”

“Lord Infante, I can’t say for sure.  But I know one thing for certain.  There isn’t a person alive who wouldn’t think the world is a better place with the Baron Richmond removed from it.”

There was a momentary pause.  Something felt wrong.  I shifted my weight, ready to bolt-

The Infante’s son lunged.  As fast as any Ghost, despite his mass.  His hand hit me like a cannonball.  I flew back, and I jerked short, as his fingers had grabbed my shirt-front.  Lainie shrieked.

“The sound you made when you were a small child was nearly the same, Elaine Dexter,” the Infante spoke.  “Boy, you almost had me, and then you had to lie to me.”

I didn’t fight.  I knew it wasn’t a use.  I had my gun tucked into my pants behind my shirt, but I doubted it would hurt the son of the Infante.  It wasn’t worth trying.

“You’ll come with me,” he said.  “You’ll work for me.  Perhaps I’ll alter you.  Elaine Dexter, as well.  For working willingly beside someone like this, who would hurt a noble, I can’t allow you to return to your parents.”

“No!  Lord Infante!”

I couldn’t breathe with the fat fist clutching my collar.

Mary was going to either try and fail to complete the mission, and the Lambs would be splintered, or she was going to miss the window of opportunity and come looking for me, before returning to the others.

Perhaps that would be best.  She wouldn’t find me.  Things wouldn’t lead back to her, hopefully.  She could return to a more normal life as a Lamb.

No?” the Infante asked.

“He held me hostage, Lord Infante.”

I managed a nod.

“Ah, the scoundrel agrees, then.  But you could have said no, Elaine,” the Infante said.  “You could have willingly gone to the grave rather than aid in a plot that put a noble’s mortal life at risk.  Even a lesser man like the Baron Richmond is a higher value life than yours, you can’t deny that.  You’ve wronged the natural order.  That can’t go unanswered.”

I couldn’t speak.  Fabric threatened to tear.  I suspected that I would die the moment it did, because he would seize my actual throat instead, and crush it like a small child might squeeze gruel between his fingers.

I reached down as far as I was able, and I reached for my boot.  Between the fingertip of my middle finger and the fingernail of my index finger, I caught the very pommel of the knife I’d slipped within.  I hauled it out, moving my hand to catch the length of the handle against the base of my hand, and I had a grip on the knife a moment later.

The Infante’s son’s eyes moved down, looking.  He smirked.

The knife plunged, digging into my thigh.  I let go of it, letting it drop to the road, the clatter of it drawing a small amount of attention.

My vision was going black.  I’d already been tired, hurt, and exhausted, and it wasn’t taking much.

Touching my fingertips to the blood, I brought one arm up, and I drew on the sleeve.

T-R-U-

The darkness threatened to overwhelm me.

“Let him breathe.”

I was released.  I coughed, sputtering, and dropped to my knees, where I coughed more.

“You don’t believe you lied?” the Infante asked.

I shook my head.  I wondered if the lack of a proper answer would end me.

“The Baron doesn’t have anyone who cares about his existence?  You forget about his sister.”

“Dead, Lord Infante.”

“One is, I know, but the other- ah.”

I nodded in agreement with his realization.

“You?”

“Yes, Lord Infante.  I did it alone, using my hostage and a hostage doctor dressed up as an experiment.  Elaine can confirm.”

I didn’t see the look or his indication for Elaine to speak, but I heard her voice.  “He did, Lord Infante.  In the town hall.  He killed the Baron’s doctor, and then the Twin.  U- used a knife, and fire, and gas.  The body burned.  The Baron doesn’t know, we don’t think.”

She was talking too much, making what was largely truth sound like a lie.

“Then I sincerely apologize, little scoundrel.  I gave the order too quickly.  I suppose I should send you off before I make another mistake.  Go, and fulfill this noble goal to make this world a better place by removing one more heartbeat from it.”

It put a bitter taste in my mouth, to hear my goal described as noble.  Worse, it almost felt as though one of the few redeeming parts of this task I’d set for myself had been stripped away.  The fact that it was for Lillian remained, but it no longer felt like the first mission I’d set for myself.  It felt like I was doing the Infante’s bidding.

I almost turned to go, and then I glanced at Lainie.

“I think I’ll keep her with me,” the Infante said.  “She’s young, and she hasn’t yet had the modifications necessary to be in my company for extended periods of time, but I’ll find other things to do with her.  As I said, she committed a wrong.  I may consent to the Baron’s death, but it’s not for her to say.”

I could see the emotions fly through Lainie’s eyes.  The terror, the defeat, and then renewed terror as the scope of her fate sank in.

“Lord Infante,” I said.

“I already know what you’re going to ask,” the man said.

“I would like her assistance in completing the remainder of my goal, if you would be willing, my Lord.”

I’d hoped never to utter the words ‘my Lord’ again.

“Do you not think she deserves punishment?” the giant asked me in his heavy voice.

“Lord Infante,” I said, glancing at Lainie, “I think the punishment will come about on its own, with no need of your help or mine.”

She looked between me and the Infante, clearly confused.  Her whole being was focused on the present and her current fate.  She couldn’t see how things unfolded from here.

“Shall we make a bet of it?” the Infante asked.  “If I revisit Elaine Dexter and her family some time from now, and I don’t think the punishment sufficed, I’ll remedy things then.”

“I think that is fair judgment, Lord Infante,” I said.

He nodded.  “Then go about your business.  I came this way to visit the Church, which I found curious, and to see what sort of town a little man like this Baron might have wrought.”

“Then we have the same destination, my Lord,” I said.

“The Baron is there?” the Infante asked, his eyebrows raising.  “Then I will skip the church for now.  I expect I’ll find your body or the Baron’s there when we come back this way?”

“I hope for the latter, Lord Infante,” I said.  “But yes, I would expect so.”

He smiled.

His son and the girl gave me sideways glances as they and the Lord carried on past Lainie and me.

The moment his back was to me, I bolted, running, once again with Lainie’s wrist in my grip.  There was no resistance from her.  Getting away from the Infante was excuse enough to move and move quickly.  Each running footstep made the stab wound on my leg throb.

“What-” Lainie started.  She stumbled, as if moving and speaking required too much coordination.  She was still in shock.  “What- punishment?”

Punishment.  The Infante had laid it out clearly enough.  It would sink in, once she thought about it.  If he visited her family and found that she hadn’t faced grim enough measures, then he would handle it himself with her entire family at stake.  Perhaps he would check in and retaliate against her family, a scene for her to find or later hear about, and have that be the punishment.

No.  She couldn’t go home again.  She couldn’t look back.  She couldn’t reach out.  It would either be the catalyst that saw her and her family utterly destroyed, or it would mean finding out things that would destroy her.  Both were equally possible.

I would have to find a way to tell her, but that time wasn’t now.  I was approaching the church.  My fingertips went out to brush wood where a fresh mark had been carved.  I changed direction.

Now that we were close enough, I could hear shouts.  I could make out the words.

“…a shadow!  A flash of dark hair at the window, was it!?”

The Baron.  Drunk on power and confidence.

The voice was loud.  “Come to me, Lamb!  Come to me!  My soldiers will let you through.  If you came for the Lady Gage, then come, or I’ll open her throat!”

I felt Lainie hesitate, and shifted my grip on Lainie’s wrist so I held her hand, somewhat more gently.  It helped urge her forward.

The Infante had taken everything from her, and she didn’t know it yet.  Hearing the Baron speak, knowing the implicit threats his words carried, facing this scene, possibly my last act as a Lamb, I knew that Lainie’s imminent situation mirrored my own.

Closely enough that I had to wonder if it was on purpose.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.18 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.18

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We reunited with Mary and Chance, and Lainie ran up to her cousin, throwing her arm around him.

“What happened?” Mary asked.

“Ran into trouble.  It doesn’t matter,” I said.  “He saw you?”

“I was quiet enough.  It’s like he has eyes in the back of his head.”

“But did he see you?”

“No,” Mary said.  “I ducked out of the way as his head turned.”

I nodded, trying not to let Mary know just how much my heart was pounding.

“He’s taunting us, telling us to get inside.  He has his wife hostage.”

“Candida.  Candy.  Or Emily, depending,” I said.  I couldn’t keep my hands still as I wrung clammy sweat off one hand with the other, then reversed the process, effectively getting myself nowhere.  I was very aware of how cold it was and yet not cold at all.  The terrified energy that brimmed inside of me was such that I could have stood wet and naked in a blizzard and the cold wouldn’t have been the first, second, or even the third thing to register.

Snow drifted down around us.  It was already getting dark.

“I think I can beat him,” Mary said.  “But not him and the soldiers together.”

“He won’t give you the chance, and I don’t want to belittle your abilities…” I said, trailing off as I gave Mary an up-down look.  She had a tear in her lip, and her best efforts to wipe her face clean hadn’t mended the messy red mark that ran down from one corner of her mouth to her chin.  Her nose had been smashed, and she still had dried blood edging her nostrils.  One of her eyes was bloodshot.  I could see from the way that she moved that she wasn’t nearly as graceful as she should be.  She had her arms folded and leaned against a wall, and I suspected part of her reasoning for taking that pose was that it hurt to move.  “…But you’re hurt.”

“Do you have a better plan?”

I glanced at the church, a block away.

“That’s not a yes,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.  It wasn’t wholly the truth.

She gave me a look.

I wasn’t sure if she was going to comment.  I didn’t wait for it.  I pulled away from Mary, taking a step toward the church and the Baron.

Mary grabbed my arm.  Quick.  “What are you doing?”

I turned around, walking backward, my eyes on Mary.  I could see Chance and Lainie just a short distance away, Chance still holding Lainie, who had her head buried against his shoulder.

“Wait.  Stay.  Don’t do anything, and whatever you do, don’t reveal yourself,” I said.  “I’m going to convince him I’m operating alone.”

“Sy,” Mary said.

Wait,” I said.  In the process, I let way too much of the emotion I was feeling affect my tone of voice.  My voice nearly cracked.  I took a short breath, then said, “Wait.  Or we both die, and the rest of the Lambs suffer as punishment.”

“I hear you, Sy.  But if you’re talking about me being unable to fight because I’m hurt… are you any better off?”

“I’m not that hurt.  Able bodied.”

“But your head… you’re not thinking clearly.  No, that’s not right.  You’re sharp, but you’re… detached, something’s off.  I’m not able to do what I do best, which is-”

“Making people bleed,” I said.  “I understand.  I’m not in good thinking shape, maybe.  But I’m not planning to think.

“You want to fight?”  She asked.  She saw the expression on my face change.  “Sy…”

“In the meantime,” I said.  “Don’t show yourself.  It’s all turned around.  I’m having to fight.  I need you to put the weapons aside and think.  Be sharp, be wary.  Keep an eye out for opportunity.  But whatever you do-”

“Don’t show myself.  Sy, I want to be a part of this,” she said.

“You are,” I said.  “You’re one of the most important parts of this, believe me.”

It was the truth, but not in the way she wanted.  She was one of the biggest considerations I had to keep in mind.  I couldn’t let this mission jeopardize Mary, Lillian, or any of the other Lambs.

I saw the look in her eyes, and I relented.  “Don’t worry.  I’m not expecting to win.  But I’ve got to convince him I’m operating alone.  We need him to let his guard down.  I can do that, but the instant he thinks there’s more than one Lamb-”

“Lambs!” the Baron cried out.  “Last chance!”

I tugged my arm free of Mary’s hand.  She was still taking in my words, processing the plan, such as it was.

“Do you have a knife?” she asked.

I raised a foot and touched my boot.  I’d left the knife behind after meeting the Infante.

“No.”

“I thought it was missing.”  She pressed a knife into my hand.  “Anything else?”

“Everything else.  If you have anything from Simon’s lab-”

She quickly found and held out a syringe, packets of powder like the ones I’d collected, and one of the ribbons she’d pulled from her hair.

“Anticoagulant,” Mary said, about the syringe.  “It’s probably not strong enough to work on the Baron.  Or you.”

I kept one packet, took the syringe filled with clear liquid, and grabbed the ribbon.  My first thought on taking the ribbon was that it was a memento, not on how I could use it as a weapon.

The thought almost paralyzed me.  I made myself move, and I was hasty enough about it that I almost stumbled, my actions too forceful.

The world had been turned upside down.  The only way forward was one that wouldn’t let me lean on the Lambs.  I was having to fight.  Mary was having to hold back.  All of my usual social finesse was now clumsy and brutish.

I shucked off my coat as I approached the church, letting it fall.  Putting everything where it needed to be, knife in boot, powders between the belt-line of my pants and my hips, I freed myself to work with the syringe.  I squeezed out two thirds of the contents, then raised the needle to my face.  I hauled out the plunger, and with it, a share of the vitreous fluid from within my eyeball.

It was tricky work, when I was walking as fast as I was.  I tore off a corner of a packet and added the contents to the fluid.  I did the same for another packet, and then replaced the plunger.  I shook it, mixing it as well as I could, and then put the needle into my left eye.

My head pounded as I forced the contents into the orb of my eye.  Fluid bubbled out from the insertion point, and it burned as it touched my eyelid and cheek.  The same things that Simon had used to make his gas, though the combinations and quantities were wrong.  I tossed the emptied syringe aside and rubbed my cheek with the back of one hand.  I was careful to avoid the bloated, drug-treated eye itself, which I couldn’t even close my eyelid around.

I fished past the packets in one pocket until I found the eyepatch, and pulled it on.  I was just in time to round the corner and find myself near the front the church.  A dozen soldiers were gathered at the double doors.  More were gathered around the perimeter of the church, with several to each of the side entrances.

They watched me as I approached.  All men, older, some with scars and uniforms that had likely been updated or newly tailored for the engagement event.

Not a one of them moved a muscle as I approached, except to turn their heads, following my approach.  It was left to me to open the heavy church doors.  I had to press my full weight against one of the double doors to get it open.  I stepped into the church proper.

The Baron was there, sitting on the stage where the altar would have been, had he had an altar, one of his arms around Candida.  He smiled as I entered.

I took in the surroundings.  The windows on either side of the church were tall, but high up off the ground, hard to access without a ladder.  The little light that shone through was dulled by the dust that caked the window surfaces.  Candles throughout the church had been lit, many set haphazardly, and the wind that blew in from behind me made the little flames dance, filling the entire church with a wavering of light and darkness.

Two rows of ten pews, with a black carpet stabbing through the aisle, from door to stage.  Of the pews, roughly a third of them had occupants, as caked with dust as the windows were.  Some were skeletal, others effectively mummified.  I looked at them as I moved further from the door, and I could see the thick, old-fashioned nails that had been driven through the backs of their knees and into the wooden beams that I supposed were knelt on during prayer.  Similar nails attached elbows or forearms to the back of the pew in front of them.

A screaming, tortured death as they slowly bled out or died of exposure, I imagined.  Forever trapped in a position of prayer, kneeling with hands together.  Now that the Baron was atop the altarless stage, it almost looked as though they were praying to him.

Arrogance at its finest.

“The first ones came here to worship,” the Baron spoke.  “I insisted they stay.  The others came to reclaim their family members.”

I glanced at Candida.

Her eyes were still blind, staring at nothing in particular.  She clutched her hands together.

“Are the others lurking outside, Sylvester?” the Baron asked.  “Is this the point where you do what you do best, and bait me into a trap?  Talk my head in circles while your friends maneuver around me?”

I saw Candida’s lips move.  Sylvester.

I wasn’t sure what to read in her expression.  I’d made a promise to Lillian that I would help Candida.  Was it hope I saw, or despair?

“Or are you alone?” the Baron purred.

The word caught my attention.  My eye met his.

“You are.  I can see it,” he said.  “That’s a look I’ve seen on many faces.”

I remained where I was, halfway down the aisle.  Behind me, the door slammed shut.

“When addressed by a noble, law dictates you must reply and reply with due respect, Sylvester,” the Baron said.

The nice thing about walking away from all of this is that I don’t have to pay attention to what the law dictates.

My teeth clenched.  I walked between the pews so I could keep walking while maintaining a moderate distance from the Baron.  I chose a direction that would keep my good eye pointed his way.

“Nothing to say, then.  Shall I put the lovely miss Candida Gage to the sword, then?”

He moved the arm that held her against his side, and gripped her head, moving it to expose her throat.  In one smooth motion, he drew his rapier, and moved it to her bare neck.

The barely-restrained emotion that had inured me against the cold made me somehow able to stand still as he drew the sword against the flesh of her neck.  A line of blood appeared, then widened.  Her hands went up, clutching at his wrist, and yet she was unable to stop him as he moved the sword back and forth, sawing faintly against the flesh of her throat as if he was playing a violin.

Her movements were wrong, not nearly as forceful as they should have been, given the situation.  The damage was superficial, the sword fine and of the highest quality, capable of cutting the skin and leaving what lay beneath intact.  Her fingernails dragged against the fabric of his jacket, and found no purchase where they should have.

Her eyes weren’t the only thing the man had hobbled.

I didn’t give him anything.  Not a flinch, a reaction, or an intake of breath.

He let Candida go, and she flopped to the stage, hands at her neck.  All she knew was pain, she felt the flow of blood.  She might well have thought she was dying, without knowing the major veins and arteries were all intact.

He hopped down from the stage.  I moved through the pews and then back, maintaining a distance, wary.

He had better doctors than either of the Twins, and it had taken more than one Lamb to take out any of the Twins.  I’d told Mary that I expected to lose and that it was part of the plan.  That wasn’t wholly true.  Leaning on Mary like that, relying on her, it was a point of failure for the greater plan.  Too much chance that she would be seen.

No, I was alone here.

Since a long, long time ago, not even that long after we had lost Evette and the first Ashton, I had known about the expiration dates.  I had known I would be alone in this.  That, one day, I would find myself faced with a mission I couldn’t say no to, faced with an enemy I couldn’t win against, without a single Lamb to stand by me.

I’d had bad dreams about it.  Some intense, others like bad memories, slipping away before I could remember particulars.  The stages differed, as did the enemies I faced, but the feeling was always the same.

It was a feeling that made it hard to breathe.

He felt the weight of his rapier in his hand, as if testing it.  Then he hurled it.

I didn’t move a muscle as the blade plunged into the pew nearest me, the end wobbling with the force of the impact.

“Take it,” the Baron said.

I glanced at the blade, but I didn’t move.

“Take the sword, Sylvester.  I’ll wait.”

I took a step forward, watching him, and reached up for the handle of the blade.  I tugged, and it didn’t come free.  I pulled again, and it moved down like a lever might, while the tip remained embedded.  A third tugged hauled it free.

His narrow, bright-green eyes mocked me.  He moved left, then right, fine clothes and too-fine hair moving like quicksilver around him.  Only his face seemed like it was in focus, steady amid hair and clothes that flowed almost like water might.  He moved forward, stepping up onto the seat of the pew.  He stepped onto the back of the next pew, then down onto the seat of it, cutting a direct path toward me.

He picked up speed as he closed the distance.  Both hands on the rapier’s handle, I moved to intercept, ducking low, aiming for the lower stomach and groin, stabbing.

He slapped the blade with the back of a hand, the slap carrying enough force that I felt it in my shoulder.  He closed the distance, stepping so close that the toes of his left shoe nearly touched the toes of my right one.

His right leg, however, came up.  His knee caught me in the chin.  My teeth were already clenched tight together, and I wasn’t sure if that helped or not.  Teeth might have broken if my mouth had been open and driven closed, but as it was, the impact shook my head and its contents.  I tumbled to the ground, the rapier falling from my hand, and was left sitting in the leftmost aisle, staring up at the man, while the various candles around the church seemed to brighten until they blinded me.

I made a promise to Lillian, I reminded myself.

He was waiting patiently, as I reached for and found the rapier.  I wavered a little as I got to my feet and straightened.  My eye wandered.  Candida was still sitting on the stage, now with a glove removed, folded up, and pressed to the bleeding wound at her throat.  Beside her was my imagined Lillian, ever silent.

The lights remained so bright I could barely see the Baron.  He walked toward me, confident.

“I was raised being taught that we all have a place in the world, Sylvester,” the Baron said.  “But I’ve come to think of that as complete and utter tripe.  The world isn’t that inflexible.  We break new ground on a daily basis.”

I made like I was going to retreat, then stepped in, swinging.  Again, he used his hand, striking at the flatter side of the blade, as if this was all proceeding in slow motion.  I was more prepared for it this time, and recovered enough to make a quick slash in the opposite direction.  This time, as his hand moved toward it, I turned the blade.

He, too, changed the position of his hand.  With the same ease he might toss his hair with a movement of his hand, he moved the blade up and away, the flat of the blade momentarily sliding past knuckles and the back of his hand.  It was so forceful I nearly lost my grip on the blade as it went from being pointed in his general direction to being pointed the complete other way.

Reaching down, he seized me by the collar.  With a heave, he lifted me and threw me into the pews, through one of the decrepit bodies that decorated it.  Dust and death filled my nostrils, while wood found its way into my solar plexus and the side of my neck, leaving me groaning and coughing.

“Advancement is possible.  So is falling,” he said.  “And both are very difficult, painful things.  Change always is.”

He found where the rapier had fallen, put his foot on it, and kicked it, sending it skidding across the floor to me.

“From the moment I was reborn as a proper noble, taken apart and put together as something greater, I grabbed hold of that idea.  The pain and difficulty that go hand in hand with change.  I was bitter, Sylvester.  I realized how this system really works and where I stood in the grand scheme of it all.  I saw the injustice of it, and it ate away at me.”

A Baron who would never really have true powerBarely above bastard nobles in status.  I had to pay attention to who my enemy was.

I pulled myself to my feet, pulling away a tattered bit of cloth that had transferred from the body to me before I reached down for the sword.  I coughed.

“And here I’d wondered if you’d taken something into your mouth, hoping to spit it at me at an opportune moment.  Not with that cough, though.  What was I saying?” he asked.  He was approaching along the pew.  He hooked one toe at the base of the skull of the body I’d just been tossed through, flicked it into the air, and caught it with one hand.  ”  They saw me as dangerous, so they hobbled me even further.  Put me here.”

He punctuated ‘here’ by throwing the skull, straight down to the ground.  It shattered.

As I retreated, trying to catch my breath, I moved past my imagining of Jamie.

“And here I’ve rotted.  Stagnated.  I’m a symbol, don’t you see?  I’m a noble, seemingly nothing more, nothing less.  I’m here because they needed a noble here.  I’m expendable.  It would drive anyone mad with boredom, left to write letters and beg for permission to go elsewhere or to visit another noble.  Just me…”

He moved quickly, three running steps without any warning he was doing it.  I only barely got the sword around in time to swing it in his direction, trying to ward him off.  He moved back just enough to let it move past him, then hooked one toe behind my ankle, toppling me to the tattered black carpet that ran through the middle of the church.  I wasn’t even fully settled there when he kicked me, sending me rolling.

Mere pain was an old companion of mine.  I could deal with that more than my skull being rattled or my breath stolen away.  I gripped the sword harder.

“Just me and the freedom to do with my little township what I wanted.  I latched on to that idea I’d been convinced of as I was reborn.  How closely linked pain and struggle are to greatness.”

I stood again, one hand at my chest where he’d kicked me, rapier again in hand.

“Told you not to fight him, Sy,” Gordon spoke, his voice soft but still carrying from where he sat by the destroyed body, behind the Baron.

“Don’t worry, Sylvester,” the Baron said.  “I’m not one of those fanatics who put far too much stock in Wallace’s Law or anything of the sort.  I’m not going to say that I’m creating better people by doing what I do to them.  I simply like to see people suffer, to see how it unfolds, what it reveals about them.  And I like to see what it lacks, compared to the suffering that goes hand in hand with greatness.  That is where I find you amusing, Sylvester.  You straddle that line.  So talented, yet so small.”

Small.  I did feel small.  The hits I’d taken to my stomach and chest were making it hard to breathe, and that paralleled the crushing loneliness I’d been feeling for a while now, compounding it, as if I could no longer shake it or turn my mind from it.

I had to find a way to hurt him, to cut him down, as impossible as it seemed.  Had to, for Mary’s sake.

I saw Mary at the window, and for a moment, I thought it was really her, not an imagining.

I knew what I was doing, and why.  My brain was reflexively reaching out for pillars of strength to draw on, where they felt so absent.  It wasn’t so different from me seeking the easy familiarity of Jamie, after we’d lost him.  Just like Jamie, the effect of this reflex wasn’t anything close to being reassuring or encouraging.  The candles remained too bright, but the darkness seemed to get darker, and with each apparition that appeared to watch me fail, the loneliness became crushing.

Was this what the Twin had experienced in her last moments?

He stepped close.  I moved the sword, then abandoned it, ducking in closer, too low to be in his reach, as I freed the knife from my boot.  I turned, looking to hamstring, cut the Achilles tendon, for any vulnerable area-

His hand caught mine, effectively trapping my hand as it gripped the knife handle.

He squeezed, and I felt the strain in the small bones of my hands, fingers threatening to break and dislocate as he ground them against the knife handle.

My free hand went back, seizing the gun I’d put behind my belt.  I brought it around as fast as I could, and he struck it with his hand.

Fragments of the gun scattered the pews and grounds of the church, struck so hard the chamber, barrel, and handle had broken free of one another.

He backhanded me across the face, very casually, then slapped me.

Before I could even see straight again, he backhanded me again.  I moved my head, trying to put myself out of his reach, and was struck across the head.  The jewelry on his fingers had cut me in a dozen places.  I had blood running through my hair and down my face.

I saw a glimpse of Ashton, his hair red in a much different way, expression blank, no advice to be offered.

The Baron let go of my crushed hand, and I felt my numb fingers losing their grip on the knife.  I caught it with my other hand just before it fell to the ground, and we were so close together that I knew he hadn’t seen.

“Baron,” I spoke, and my voice was ragged.

“He talks after all,” the Baron said.

“I killed your last sister,” I said.

There was nothing.  No momentary surprise, no turn of his head to look at me better, no emotion.

I stabbed, and his forearm caught mine, deflecting the blow.  The hand at the end of that forearm caught me by the side of my head.

Again, he threw me bodily into the pews, but this time, the throw coincided with pain that swallowed up all vision in my good eye, filling it with darkness and stars.  I felt blood flowing.

I blinked, struggling to make out the situation and surroundings.

I could see him dusting himself off with one hand, the other hand held at a distance.  He let the ragged bit of tissue fall to the floor and then crushed it beneath his heel.  My ear, torn from my head.

“What did you expect, Sylvester?  That you would taunt me with the death of my last sister, and I would bare my neck, show you a moment of weakness?  I know where I stand in the grand scheme of things, I know where I come from and where I’m slated to go.  Where I was slated to go, that is, before you and Mauer handed me the key to a greater future.  My sisters… are not so important.  I have no attachment to them.”

Again, he made his approach.

He wanted to break me.  He sought to keep on giving me chances and taking pieces of me, until I finally gave up.  Why?  To see some glimmer of what lay within me?  For amusement?  Because I was the closest thing he had to a peer?

Whatever his reasons, he was succeeding.  I could look to the phantoms of the Lambs around me, and I could remind myself of the reasons, but I couldn’t see a way forward, not on a lot of levels.

I stared at the Baron, and I stoked the fires of hatred, knife still clutched in my hand.  A weapon incapable of doing the kind of damage I needed to do to the man.

“I’ll wrap this up, change clothes, and go to greet the nobles.  If you’re the only troublemaker to show, I’ll find that disappointing, but I’ll find other ways to amuse myself, knowing that the bastards who’ve been lording their power over me will soon get theirs.”

“I know,” I said.  I backed away as he approached, and my injured face managed a smile.  “I talked to the Infante before I came here.  He arrived early, and I told him what you were doing.”

I got to watch as his expression transformed.  The amusement dripped away.

“I see.  I suppose I should deal with you now and handle that.”

There were no more games, and there was no more intent to break.  He stalked toward me, a gleam of murder in his eyes, and I didn’t have the tools to stop him.

He grabbed me by the throat, lifting me off the ground.

Then, with a remarkable sort of ease, the heel of his hand pressed in and something gave, taking away my ability to breathe.

There were no final words from him.  No mockery, no comments.  His green eyes stared into mine.  I tried to breathe and to cough, and only produced the wheezing crackle of air pushing hopelessly against cartilage.  I could breathe, but only a whisper’s worth, not enough to survive.

The darkness was getting darker still, creeping in around the edges.

Helen.  She was the last of the real Lambs to appear, perched on a pew like a cat might be.  I saw her smile as I strained to breathe.  A gentle, warm smile that didn’t fit the situation.  Very her.

My hand reached up, and I grabbed the patch, pulling it down.  The fluid that had collected where the bottom of the patch pressed into the skin now leaked.  A crimson, poisoned tear.  There was no comment from the Baron on the state of my eye.  All the same, really, I couldn’t have quipped a response back either.

Summoning all of the strength I had left, I brought my fingers up into the orb, hard, compressing it.  Fluid that had been filling it to bursting jetted out through the holes the syringe had made.  A movement of my head directed the thin, twin streams into the Baron’s own eyes.  The eye, still not fully connected to my head, still held the vast majority of the poison I’d injected into it.

I’d had other plans for the eye, should the situation had differed.  A talk over dinner hadn’t been impossible, nor a situation where he’d had me pinned, his face inches from mine.  But this… this had been the most likely scenario.  They always liked to pick me up, my legs dangling, and lord their power over me.

You want to know what lies beneath this Lamb, Baron, after you dig deep enough?

He twisted his head away, letting me drop without letting me go.

My fingers reached up, past the somewhat deflated eye, hooking in behind to grab the stem that anchored it.  Not fully attached, it wasn’t as hard as it might be to haul it free.

In the moment it looked like he might recover, I squeezed the orb. driving out the last remaining juice in a substantial gush, aimed for his face.

I’m a monster.

He dropped me, and I fell to the ground.  Choking, no air to be had, darkness creeping in, I drew out the packets, tearing them.  I cast the poisonous and noxious powders at him, striving to overwhelm, to give him no more of a chance to breathe than I had.

I staggered forward, and the blinded noble crawled away from me, hand moving this way and that, as if anticipating that I would draw in close.

I reached into a pocket for another packet, and there was only one thing remaining.

Syringe filled with the Wyvern formula in hand, I approached the Baron.  Before I could get there, arms embraced me.

Candida.

She’d been rendered so weak that I, injured and nearly suffocated, could easily pull out of her grasp.  I didn’t.  I felt her arms and the warmth of her body, and I stared at the Baron, who was getting further away.

I felt a knife touch my throat, and I tried my best to freeze.  Instead, my head lolled forward.

I’d put off sleeping so much over the years, and now it felt like it was catching up with me.  Except this was a much deeper slumber.

“Let me help you,” she said. “If this doesn’t work, I’m going to need that syringe.”

Possessively, I held on to the syringe.  I didn’t want to let it go.  Not even if I died.

The blade penetrated my throat.  A moment later, Candida’s finger penetrated the wound.  I felt stabbing pains as it moved up, where the throat was blocked.

The pain as she shifted the damaged portion was as bad as anything yet.  I coughed, and wind whistled freely past her fingers.

Her finger came free, and her arms let me go.

Again, the candles seemed so bright.  My awareness of the world was detached, filled with phantoms, to the point that reality was hard to distinguish.  It took me a moment to realize I was staring at the Baron, who was in the midst of recovering.

“Clever boy,” he said, voice clearly affected by with the gas he’d inhaled.  “Clever boy.”

I heard the scrape of metal on stone.

“That sword won’t do you any good, Candida,” the Baron said.  “My organs are protected.  My throat can’t be cut, and you’ve given me immortality, you stupid girl.  You’ll have to whittle at me for an hour, and neither of you have the strength to do that.  If either of you move one step closer, I’ll call my guards.”

One of my hands pressed to my throat, where the slit marked it, and the other held the fat Wyvern syringe, still in its leather case.  I stared at the Baron, trying to figure out the next move.

He could barely see us as we stood there, blinking as if his eyelids had weights attached to them.

It was Candida who did it.  Driven by rage, by fury, or something else, I couldn’t say.  But she saw a moment where he didn’t seem to be seeing very clearly and she ran.  The Baron tried to raise his voice, only to find it strangled by the poison he’d inhaled.  Candida carried the thin, lightweight rapier as if it was as heavy as a greatsword, but she managed to raise it for a thrust for his chest.   He moved his hand, smacking it aside.

I chose that same moment to stab the leather case for his heart.  He caught my wrist.

My other hand, holding the syringe, plunged the syringe into his bleary eye.  Both of his hands seized me, fighting me, up until Candida managed a second thrust, piercing his lower chest.  I managed to sink it in as deep as it would go.  I’d managed the right angle.  Past the bone inside the eye socket, and into the cavity where the brain was.

He froze.  The rapier blade kept one of his arms from moving to intercept me.  The other groped me, searching for a hold.

“Tell me,” I said, my voice a whistle, blood bubbling at the cut, “Tell me what happens to the children you take from Warrick.  You pretend they’re turned into Firstborn, but they serve some other use.  What?”

His eye locked onto mine.

He smiled, and then he laughed, a choking sound.

I would get no answers here.  I wasted no time in depressing the syringe.  The resistance I felt told me I was pumping it into the meat of the brain.

The Baron would be mildly resistant to most poisons, but I’d overwhelmed him.  Now I gave him a dose of Wyvern that would have left me in bad shape.  Twice what I might have been able to tolerate, possibly three times what he could.  And as with any drug, it had adverse effects in too high a dose.  For Wyvern, it would strip away his wits and sanity.  He would lose everything and gain nothing.

I saw as his head leaned back.  His mouth yawned open, his entire body twitching.

Ironic, that all he’d needed to do to win was to keep toying with me and taunting me, gradually breaking me down.  But the moment he’d sought to crush the life out of me, he’d become vulnerable.

It was done.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.19 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.19

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

My head rocked side to side, while my eye remained locked onto the Baron, who slouched against the wall, chest rising and falling.  Now and then he twitched, or he tried to breathe and found his nose clogged, and snorted out a wad of bloody mucus.  I wasn’t sure why his nose was bleeding when I’d pierced him through the eye, but I didn’t mind.  Once proud and arrogant, the nobleman drooled.

Candida’s ministrations at the side of my head continued, jarring me and moving my head this way and that.  I was being bandaged, pieced back together.  If I’d had two eyes, one would have been on the door, in case the Baron’s elite soldiers wondered at the silence, and one would have remained on the Baron while I convinced myself that it was really over.  As it was, I kept my eye on the Baron and kept my ears out for trouble.

As my other senses went, my instincts were that the soldiers wouldn’t intrude.  He wasn’t the type that encouraged others to stick their necks out on his behalf – he was too fond of beheadings and slit throats.

“Almost done,” Candida murmured.  Her face was so close to my bandaged ear that I could feel her breath.  She squinted.  She fumbled for and then took hold of my most intact hand and raised it up to the side of my head, where the bandages had been set, “Hold this in place for a second.”

I did.

I could hear the ripping sound as she tore at the dress the Baron had given her, turning it into strips.  She tended to my hand.

The Baron raised his head up, very suddenly, and then let it drop.  It lolled.  One of his hands moved a great deal, fidgeting, the other remained still, as if the symmetry of his body had been absolutely broken.

“We still need to get out of here,” Candida said, her voice hushed.

“Talk louder,” I said, my voice a croak.  The wound at the base of it had been closed.  “They won’t hear the words.  Hearing speech, they’ll be less suspicious.”

“I don’t know how you can talk,” she said.  It seemed to take some effort for her to speak with more confidence.  “The way I cut into your throat… I’m a hack when it comes to medicine, my knowledge is piecemeal, things Drake and the primordial text taught me.”

“Third time,” I croaked the words, touching my throat.  “Throat slashed, first time.  Then dog.  Then the burrower worm.  Think… doctors were proactive, second or third time.  Relocated bits.”

“That doesn’t sound like any way to live,” Candida said.  Her hand found and touched the back of my head, stroking my hair.

My first impulse was to argue the point, but my mind, even as tired as it was, was quick to jump to why, to call up counterpoints, to draw conclusions.  Before I even asked for it, I thought about those days.  The early days of the Lambs.  After my throat surgery, I’d been rendered mute for a week, on strict orders not to speak or laugh.  Gordon had had a field day, teasing me.

I wanted to tell Candida that she was wrong, that those days had been the good days, but the thought of Gordon made emotion well up in my throat, and some combination of being choked up, trying to talk, and the damage to my throat left me hacking out some fantastically painful coughs instead.

“Thank you for coming,” Candida said.  She’d dropped her voice again, despite my urging to the contrary no more than a minute ago.  “Thank you for killing him.  For rescuing me.”

Still suppressing my coughs, I nodded.

“I thought you’d take longer.  I thought, maybe, that by the time you came, I wouldn’t have any fight left in me.  It’s stupid, I hate feeling weak, but everything I did, every change I had made, to be stronger, fiercer, he had the doctors take it away.”

“You get it back,” I croaked.  I coughed some more, and then climbed down off of the stage.  “After we leave.  You go to Drake.  Understand?”

“It sounds too good to be true.”

Someone should get a happy ending, I thought.

I checked my pockets, and found them largely empty.  All I had was the ribbon and the empty syringe, now.  I approached the Baron, periodically glancing at the door.  I stopped roughly ten feet short of the man himself.

Laboriously climbing to the ground, I swept my hand along the stone floor, brushing up the dust.

“I’ll help,” Candida said.

“No,” I said.  “Poison.”

And you can barely see.

All of the poison that I’d dashed into the air while trying to drive back the Baron had gone somewhere – and most of it had gone down.  Now I collected it again, with a side helping of the dust that had layered the floor of the unused church.

Once I had two piles of the dust in hand, I gently transitioned it over to a bench.  I stared at it, thinking.

I ached, every single part of me, from the physical to the mental to the emotional.  Staying still and thinking of nothing in particular meant not hurting.  Not hurting that much, anyway.

The plan was straightforward, the execution simple and very possibly easy, depending on how things unfolded.  But the plan in and of itself, for reasons entirely separate from the execution, was the furthest thing from easy.

I was shaking, I realized, and I had no idea why.  The chill in the air combined with me being soaked in sweat?  Suppressed emotion?  Shock?

“Sylvester?” Candida spoke, venturing.  “Are you still there?”

I raised my eye from the pile of poison.  “Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond.  I would have choked up, started coughing again.  Even nodding would have been a bad lie, and I didn’t have it in me.  Shaking my head would mean making an admission to both Candida and to myself that would have brought tears to my eye.  If that happened, it could be treacherous.  A tell for Mary to use to know that something was wrong.  I’d already given her so many.

A huge part of me didn’t want to move forward.  I wanted to just stay where I was, hurting, in the candlelit church, and postpone the next hour, the next few days.

I managed to convince myself that if I stayed still for one second longer, I wouldn’t ever be able to move.  “Help me move the Baron.”

“I’m not very strong, Sylvester.  I could barely lift the sword.”

“I know,” I said, my voice reedy.  “I know.  Just help.”

She gave me a nod.

I took one arm, and Candida took the other.  It was very possible that she weighed twice what I did, and she wasn’t exhausted and hurting to quite the same extent I was, in the end, but she only contributed roughly as much as I did as we managed to drag the Baron around.  We left him between the first and second pews on the far end of the church.

“Is this good enough?” Candida asked.

“No,” I said.  I walked over to the nearest corpse that had been nailed to the pew, and I dismantled it.  I took the first armful of rags and scattered bones, and draped them over the Baron, camouflaging him.

I was midway through my second trip when Candida got over her shock and horror and began to assist me.  She could only see the vaguest of shapes, but the white bone against dark wood and darker stone seemed distinct enough for her to work with.

When we were done, I stopped, and I watched the Baron’s chest rise and fall.  One of his hands still twitched, dancing like the entirety of his ability to move had been trapped in the one extremity.  I paid mind to the corpse that draped him, a woman, if I judged by the hips.

“I hope she would be happy, knowing she helped,” I said.

Candida nodded, but she wasn’t able to bring herself to even face the scene.  With eyes as bad as hers were, she was still unwilling to look at it.

“This next part,” I croaked, “It’s on you.  You’re going to go to the side door of the church.  You’re going to open it.  You’re going to talk to the soldiers standing guard.”

I expected her to balk, to give me another excuse.  But her offer to help earlier had been earnest and carried over even to this, and I seemed to have her trust.

“You tell them the Baron wants me taken to Richmond House.  To amuse himself with.  To interrogate.”

She nodded.

“Repeat it.”

“They’re to take you to Richmond House, for the Baron’s amusement and later interrogation.”

“Make yourself smaller, weaker,” I said.  “While you’re at it, scratch at that cut on your neck.  Open it up, so it bleeds.  Then hide it, keep your arms up and in front of you…”

I watched her as she moved her arms, thumbnail working at the cut until blood trickled down.  She held them up, more of a fighter’s style than anything.

“Wrists closer together, elbows out.  Head down.  Like the world is a bad place and your arms are the only thing between you and that badness.  Like you’re a child again, and cover that wound.  They’ll see the trickle of blood.”

“They’re going to wonder where he is,” she said.

“If they wonder, then say he’s in the back of the church, he’s angry, because I hurt him, but he doesn’t want the guards to know, so tell the guards they need to be very, very quiet.  They’ll know-”

“They’ll be quiet, if I say that,” Candida said.  “Definitely.”

She understood how things worked here, then.

I nodded.

“And you?” she asked.

I walked around the first pew, and I scooped up the dust I’d collected, a fistful in each hand.  I made my way to the carpeted space between the first pew and the stage.  Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the cold stone floor, curling up in a fetal position, fists held tight to my chest.

“Just like that,” she said.

“I’ll need the sword,” I croaked.  “And you’ll need the knife that’s lying somewhere, just in case.  Let me know if you can’t find it.”

She brought me the rapier.  I raised myself up, indicating where she should set the rapier, and then lay down on top of the blade, the length of it running between my arm and my ribs.

Once I was settled and sure I wasn’t going to slice myself by lying the wrong way, I let my head drop down to rest on the floor, bandaged side down.  Once there, I altered my breathing, making it hyperventilation-quick, coinciding with sharp movements, as if I was in pain.  It was the convulsing of a dying rabbit, a pig that had been struck in the spine with a blade, but without enough force to instantly kill it.

“When?” she asked.

“Give it a minute.  Let the silence sit with them.”

The side door had had three soldiers stationed there, last I’d seen.  If it was four, this got that much harder.

I lay there, controlling my convulsed breathing, listening as Candida paced.

When the door opened, I suspected it caught Candida and I both by surprise.  Small fortune that it was the side door that creaked open.

“My lady,” one of the soldier’s voices echoed through the church.

Then silence.  It took me a second to realize that Candida had raised her finger to her lips, shushing the man.

Good of her, to do that.  It would be ideal if she didn’t expand on that, if she let their imaginations draw the conclusions instead of relying on her words to do it.

I couldn’t make out the words of the conversation that followed, only the tone.  I wanted to give more pointers, even though I doubted it mattered.  She would be playing the battered fiancee, looking after the aftermath of one of her husband’s sadistic games.

Hearing the footsteps, I knew that it was two men approached me, not three.  I was dimly aware of Candida hanging back, closer to the door.

The third was still watching the door.  Was he watching this?

That would be a problem.

Still, I would do what I could.  Two was easier to deal with in the short term, if not the long.

They bent over me, and I resisted their initial efforts to budge me, keeping my body stiff and curled up.  As one hooked an arm under my armpit and the other seized my knees, I moved.  Nothing sudden.  Sudden would have caught them off guard.

Fluid, easy movement, raising one hand to my mouth, then blowing through my fist, expelling a cloud of dust.  Before the one at my feet could react, I moved, hurling the fistful in the direction of his face.

Both stumbled away, coughing and choking.  Their efforts to take in breath only choked them more, and they were nearly silent.  The person still at the open door would hear, I suspected, but the ones at the front door wouldn’t.

My movements felt glacially slow as I got my feet under me, picking myself up off the ground, taking up the sword.  Every muscle that I used to lift and thrust with the sword resisted me, pushing almost in the opposite direction.  The soldier at my feet was my first target, and the rapier thrust beneath his sternum and up into the space between his ribs.  I stumbled to one side, levering the blade inside him, but it was far less than I’d hoped for.  It made a sucking noise as I pulled it free.

I half-turned, facing the other one that I’d blinded and suffocated, and swung the blade around.  I caught the soldier’s face instead of his neck, summoned the strength, and then swung again.  It bit deep into the neck and shoulder, and blood started spurting out of the wound in a rhythmic fashion.

I looked to the door.  Candida was there, on her knees, her arms around the third soldier.  He must have seen her as weak or inconsequential, a bleed-over of the Baron’s attitudes, overlooking her in the moment of crisis.  She’d managed to grab him from behind probably with one hand to his mouth, and she’d opened his throat.

Carefully, I divested the man I’d stabbed of his pistol.  I tucked it into my belt, at the small of my back, and pulled my shirt down over it.

I gave Candida a hand, helping her to rise to her feet.  I then had her wait, while I peered out the open door, checking to see if the coast was clear.

I saw a flash.  Light reflected off of a mirror or a very well-polished blade.

“Sy?”

“There’s a signal.  A friend.”

“We could have used a friend in here.”

One hand went out to my left, indicating that one side.

One flash.

I switched sides, indicating the right.

Two flashes.

That meant there was probably one soldier at one corner of the building, and two at the other.

I indicated the way forward, hand out in front of me like I was offering a handshake.

A long pause, then one flash.  No soldier, followed by the universal one-for-yes, two-for-no.

The dance.  Coordination, knowing how each of us thought.  I felt a pang.

“Go,” I said.

My injured chest hurt with each deep breath I had to take while running.  Candida had a much longer stride than I did, but she wasn’t quick.  She was blind, reliant on my lead, and the alterations to her muscles, the removal of the enhanced strength she’d sought, it impacted her ability to move.  I thought her more akin to an animated doll in the way that only some limbs could move, and only in certain ways or on certain planes.  Arms that could raise and lower, but not stretch out to either side.  Legs and hips that were much the same.

We made it across the street before anyone started shouting.

The soldiers started toward us, but it wasn’t the whole contingent.  Others were going inside, to check on the Baron.  They would find their fellow soldiers first.  Wariness would slow them down.

Not so for the ones chasing us.  They were faster, picking up speed.  Only a winding path and the use of corners for cover spared us from gunshots.  That, and perhaps a fear of bringing on the wrath of Firstborn or of angering a Baron who wanted us alive rather than dead.

We reached the building where the flashing had originated from.  A door was wide open, Mary, Chance, and Lainie on the other side.  We hurried through, and Mary closed it after us, turning the deadbolt.

“You killed him?” Mary asked me.  It was almost accusatory.  You got to kill him and I had to sit around doing nothing?

I coughed in response.

“Are you okay?” was her second question.

“Alive,” I croaked.  “Mary, meet Candi- Emily.  Emily, meet Mary, Lainie, and Chance.”

“Call me Candida,” Candida said, between gasps for breath.  “Emily is… gone?  Maybe I’ll be Emily again when I get stronger.  When I get my horns and my eyes back.”

“Candida, then,” I said.

“I picked locks, we have a route through, we can shut doors behind us,” Mary said.

All business.  I nodded.  Business was the last thing I wanted to attend to.

“I’ve got two wire traps, I left the rest of-”

“Take them down,” I croaked.

“But-”

“Take them down,” I said, again, fiercer.  “We’re wrapping up.  Can’t leave any leads.  Wire traps are too you.  Too Mary.”

“I’ll catch up, then,” Mary said.  “Chance, Lainie, you show them the doors I opened.”

“We’ll go to the train station, find a spot nearby,” I said.  “The trains come several times a day.”

Mary nodded, “Chance, take my bag?”

Chance nodded.  He looked wary.

“Almost done,” I croaked the words.

I felt a pang of loss.  I didn’t blink, because I worried it might squeeze excess moisture out of my eyes.  I had to be stoic, inhuman.

It was merciful, in a way, that someone banged on the door, distracting everyone in the room.  A window at one side of the house broke.

They’d seen us enter.  Now they were giving chase.  Some would be circling the building.

We cut through the house, entering the side-street, where Mary parted ways with us.  Chance led the way as we crossed that street to another house, where a door was only slightly ajar.  We cut through that house as well, then a third, deadbolting and flipping latches where we went.

She was a clever girl.  The doors, setting out the escape route, laying traps, it was smart.  I’d asked her to use her head while I saw to the fighting, and she’d done so in a very Mary way.  The traps were unfortunate, but she couldn’t have known.

I was left pretty damn secure in feeling that we were out of the soldier’s reach, after the third house.  We were able to slow down, making our way toward the train station.  Not terribly far.

Once we were a fair distance away, we found a place to hunker down, not on the north side of the tracks where the landing was, but across the tracks, on the far side.  The occupants would exit onto the landing, and we would hopefully be able to sneak onto the train and hitch a ride out of town.

Time to leave Warrick.

“You said-” Chance said.  He startled a little as I snapped my head around to look at him.  “You said you would let me go?  That you wouldn’t kill me, like you did the doctors.”

“I suppose I did,” I said, my voice rasping.

“Lainie too?”

I saw Lainie shrink into herself.

“Lainie can’t go home,” I said.  The words were painful to utter.  Can’t go home.

They seemed even more painful for her to hear.

“I’ll scream,” Lainie said, her voice firm in a very tremulous way, as if that firmity would crumble at the slightest touch.  “I’ll bring down hell on our heads, guards, soldiers, Firstborn…  I’m sorry, Chance.”

“No,” Chance said, “Don’t be sorry.”

The young gentleman.

“Lainie,” Candida said.  “He’s not a bad-”

“He’s going to kill me,” Lainie said, abrupt, interrupting.  “He’s going to kill me because I know things.  He told the Infante that he would punish me, that-”

“No,” I said, my voice hard.

I paused, taking in a breath, “No.  You live, Lainie.  But you can’t go home.”

The change in her expression, it was as if what I was saying was even more terrifying than the idea of dying.

Perhaps death was a great mystery, but the idea of never going home again was something she could understand.

“No,” she said.  Her eyes were as wide as they could get.  They might have been puppy dog eyes, but they were too haunted.  “I tried.”

“The Infante saw you.  He said he would check up on you,” I said.  “He wanted you punished.  If you show your face, if you reach out to family, give him or them any clue at all, he’ll see to it that you suffer the worst sort of fate.”

“No, please.”

“It’s not up to me,” I said.  “The only thing you can do is to stay away.  Keep your distance.  So long as he never sees hide or hair of you, his imagination will fill in the blanks, and he’ll believe you’ll have suffered.”

“I’ll stay away for a few years, then.  Five years?  Won’t that be enough?”

“No, Lainie.”

“Ten?  Fifteen?  Twenty?”

“No,” I said, again.  “He remembered one incident from when you were a newborn, didn’t he?  Fourteen or fifteen years ago?  He’ll remember your face.”

Lainie’s hands went to her mouth.

I screwed my eye closed and turned my face away as I heard the cry pass through her lips.  It felt so real and tangible that it almost physically pained me to listen to.

“Candida will look after you in the short term,” I said.

Deaf ears.

“I will too,” Chance said.  I could hear the emotion in his voice.  “I will too, I’ll be with you, okay Lainie?”

Her broken wail shifted tone.  She threw herself into his arms, and he hugged her.

I was only barely able to push down the vicious jealousy I felt, seeing that.  She had family.

I turned away, looking out the window.  In the doing, I glimpsed Mary, who had made her silent entrance.

“Traps disarmed,” Mary said.  “I’ve removed some of the etched guides I put into the wood, too.”

“Good,” I said.

“You said you’d lose,” Mary said.  Back to the accusatory.

“Couldn’t break away,” I said.  My voice sounded like an old man’s, with all of the requisite tiredness.

“I came here to contribute.  I wanted to end him, for Lillian.  Then you, what, you fought him?  You told me to stay back, look for an opportunity, think about how to tackle the problem, and you went and fought him yourself?”

“I had help,” I said.

“I don’t understand what you’re thinking, Sy,” she said.  “Why?  Why all this?  Is it Gordon?  Are you doing what you did with Jamie?  Trying to be some golden warrior, tackling problems head-on?  Are there other reasons?”

I couldn’t give her an answer.  I glanced out the window.

She reached forward, putting her hands on my shoulders.  Her face was too close to mine.  “Look at me, Sy.”

I did.

There were tears in her eyes.  Seeing them made tears threaten to well up in mine.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” she said.  “I’m asking because I care about you.”

My already ravaged voice was rendered hollow.  My mouth moved, but the words didn’t come.  Not on the first try.

“I care about you too,” I managed.  The rest of the words followed without my bidding.  “I love you, Mary Cobourn.  You’re my family.”

She let the distance between us close.  Her forehead touched mine, resting there.  Her eyes were closed.

If I ask, she’ll come with me.

How long ago was it, now, that I was told I should be more selfish?

Lillian would understand, given time.  She had the others.

“Mary, I-”

“Sy-”

We’d interrupted each other.  The rest of my words went unsaid.  I’ll explain.  Just hear me out.

“You first,” I said, the words heavy, the choked-up feeling threatening to send me off into another coughing fit.

“Sy,” Mary said, she straightened, hands on her hips.  “If nothing else, you have to tell me how you managed to do it.”

I opened my mouth to speak, and only a cough came out.

“How did you kill him?” Mary asked.

“He’s alive,” Candida said, before I could stop her.

“What?” Chance, Mary, and Lainie all said at the same time, with minor variation.

“He’s alive.  He’s just, not there anymore,” Candida said.  “A syringe, right into the eye.”

“Syringe?  The anticoagulant?” Mary asked.  I saw her eyes move, the thoughts clicking into place.  “Wyvern.”

“Wyvern,” I said.

This time, when she seized my shoulders, it was forceful, fingers digging into flesh.  “Are you an idiot?”

Now Chance and Lainie seemed just as frightened of Mary as they’d been of me.  Lainie had seemed to forget to cry, and was staring at the ongoing dialogue.  Candida seemed to be realizing that she’d said something wrong.

“It’s part of the plan,” I said.

“The plan?  Sy, they’ll do a checkup, they’ll find the wyvern, and they’ll know it’s you!”

“They’ll think it’s Fray,” I lied.

“You don’t know that.  Your disappearance, the timing, the- no, this wasn’t the way to do it!”

“It makes sense,” I said.

“No, Sy.  If they even suspect you, it’ll tie our hands, they’ll start questioning everything!  This-” her voice broke a little.  “We don’t have much time, Sy.  A handful of years.  Two to five, with the rest of the Lambs.  If they cancel the project-”

“They won’t.  They can’t.  They need the Lambs to hunt down the biggest threats to the Academy.  There’ll be bluster, and threats, but they’ve mostly tied their hands at this stage.  They don’t have enough smart special weapons.”

Her fingers continued to dig into my shoulders, suggesting how little I’d convinced her.  “You can’t be sure.”

“That is one thing I’m positive of,” I said.  “I wouldn’t have done it this way otherwise.”

“If they cancel the Lambs,” Mary said, again.  She didn’t finish the thought.

“They won’t,” I reassured her.

“All I want, is to be a Lamb.  From the very beginning, with Percy, I thought I would be part of something bigger, part of a team.  Then Percy let me down, and you raised me back up.  The rest of you, you helped me become something I’m proud of.  Even better than what Percy could have done with me.”

“Are you proud of working for the Academy?” I asked, knowing full well that I shouldn’t.  “The Crown?”

“I-” she started.

I could push.  I could make her side with me.

I didn’t push.  I let her organize her thoughts.

“What you said about Lillian, about wanting her to be something great.  I want that for her too.  I believe she can change things at the top, where they need to be changed.  I won’t pretend I’m pretty or good at heart.  Lillian is the one good thing.  The one light.”

“You say that even knowing that they sabotaged her?  They wanted to take her black coat away from her?”

“Yes,” Mary said.  “They can try and try again.  She’ll have me at her back.  She’ll have you.  Helen, Jamie, Ashton, Duncan.  We’ll find a way.  We killed nobles.  We can find a way forward against stupid bureaucracy.”

I nodded slowly.

I could see the light in Mary’s eye.  The passion.  She believed it.  That was where she belonged.  Lillian belonged with the Academy and Mary belonged with Lillian.

I spoke with careful deliberation, lying through my teeth.  “They’ll think the formula was Fray’s, because it was imperfect.  It wasn’t prepared with the same doses and quantities the Academy would use if they were giving me my dose.  They’ll think that if I had a dose of wyvern and used it, then I would have used an Academy dose, not the imperfect dose that Simon brewed.”

Mary, going by the expression on her face, clearly didn’t believe me.

“Trust me,” I said.

“You-”

“Trust me,” I said, again.

I prayed she wouldn’t speak up again.  I wasn’t sure I could ask her to do it a third time.

She didn’t make me.  She still looked obviously uncomfortable as she sat beside me, looking out the window.

Her hand found my bandaged one, and she squeezed, very gently.  Her thumb rubbed back and forth along the back of my hand.

Candida was staring in my general direction.  Not quite at me, but in my direction.  She’d heard everything, and unlike Chance and Lainie, she had something of an idea of what was happening and who the Lambs were.

Mercifully, she was silent.  She’d opened her mouth once already, and in the doing she’d spared me from asking Mary to come with me.  I would thank her for it later, but until I did, she would likely see it as a mistake, an overstep.

Chance and Lainie, meanwhile, were silent.  Lainie’s wide-eyed stare at me was filled with emotion.  Blame, fear, dependency and horror.  There was less life in her eyes than there was in Candida’s.

And Chance… Chance was quiet.  Tension stood out in his neck and shoulders.  His focus was on some point a thousand yards off, his mind at work as he wrapped his head around his new reality.  One day, perhaps, he would blame me.  Or perhaps he’d think back to when he’d picked us out, thinking it was his choice, and he’d blame himself.

I counted the seconds in my head, because I was impatient and simultaneously didn’t want another second to pass.

I felt the rumble, the movement of the train along the tracks.

Chance held the bags in one hand and supported Lainie with the other.  Mary helped Candida to her feet.

From the look of it, the train was all cargo.  Things for a celebration tomorrow, perhaps, or bags for the nobles who had arrived while I dealt with the Baron.  As a group, we all made our way to the train.  I let Mary take the lead with Candida, and kept an eye on Chance and Lainie, walking beside Lainie.

“The train is going the wrong way,” Mary said, looking back at me.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “We get out of here first, and we get home second.  We’ll be able to drop these guys off and see them on their way.”

Mary nodded.

Candida said something, and Mary responded.  I didn’t listen and I didn’t hear.  My ears and the space between them were all full of noise.

I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t.  I needed to be able to see.

Falling a half-step behind Lainie, so she wouldn’t see what I was doing, I reached behind my back and I drew the pistol I’d taken from the Baron’s soldier.  Holding it at my hip, so my body helped further block the view of the weapon from Lainie and Chance, I pointed it at Mary.

Almost, I almost got so choked up I started coughing.  It would have been disastrous.

“I’m going to retaliate,” Mary the Phantom whispered to me.  “Unless you kill me.”

The real Mary walked on, oblivious.

Passing it behind my back, I put the gun in my other hand.  The fingers were damaged and weak, the bandages made for padding that made it harder to get my finger inside the trigger guard, and it was closer to Lainie.

I aimed it, glancing around the surroundings.  We weren’t in plain view of the train.  We had to round corners to get there.

Tears flooded my eyes, and I blinked them clear.  It left me only a moment of visibility before I would be blinded by my own biology once more.

My thumb pulled the hammer back, and it clicked.

Mary turned, whirling on the spot, hair and skirt moving around her.  I had to pause a fraction of a second, to ensure I had the shot.

I didn’t even see the knife before it flew out of her hand, embedding itself in my shoulder.

I’d tipped her off.  She’d had an inkling of suspicion.

But she’d played with kid gloves, made assumptions.  The knife was in my right shoulder, the gun was in my left hand.

I pulled the trigger, and saw the spray of blood.  Mary toppled before she could throw another knife.

She collapsed onto the road, and I hurried to point the gun at her again as she reached for the bottom of her shirt.  Her right knee was obliterated.  The bullet had gone in the back and out the front where the kneecap was.

But the hardest thing to look at, above the pain, the damage I’d done to beautiful, graceful Mary, was the look in her eyes.  So much anger.

“Don’t,” I warned her.  My voice went high, “Don’t make me shoot again.”

Her hand moved away from the bottom of her shirt.

“Thank you,” I told her.

Her mouth opened, her jaw chattering in the process.  The pain was already hitting her, then.

Why?” she asked.

“Because I’m not going home,” I said.

I watched her expression change.  I saw the pieces fall into place.

“Since when?  Gordon?”

“Yes.  Lillian’s black coat was the final straw, but I think I would have left anyway.”

I saw the pain touch her expression.  She brought her knee closer toward her chest, hands moving toward it.

“Don’t,” I warned her, again.

The pain remained, but she stopped reaching for the knives under her skirt and at her boots.

“The Firstborn,” she said.

“The Firstborn are with the families and the families are steering well clear of the train station,” I said.  “You’ll find a way onto another train.  And you know where Mcormick is, though that’s a bit of a distance to crawl.  You’ll live.”

“You’re a bastard,” Mary said, with more vehemence than I’d imagined.

“Absolutely,” I said.  “But I’m a bastard that tried to cover the bases.  I left a message for Jamie.  The story is that you saw me leave and you figured out why.  You left a message for Jamie, he’ll forge it, saying that you chased me.  You tried to stop me from killing the Baron.”

I suspected the gunshot wound hurt me as much as it hurt her.  I heard her make a small sound of pain.

“They’ll be suspicious.  Knee injuries are a pain to fix, and they won’t be in a rush.  The Lambs will be questioned, but with the Baron and the Duke removed from the picture, it should be just the Academy that’s focused on you.   With all of the key pieces that are in play, the Lambs are too valuable.  But a couple of months, half a year?  They’ll keep you guys out of the picture.  That’s enough of a head start for me.”

“I’m supposed to tell them that you got the drop on me?  While I was tracking you?” Mary asked.  The anger was there.  Fury like I’d never seen before, even when Percy was in the picture.

“Tell them I got lucky,” I said.

She shut her eyes.

I took hold of Candida’s wrist, and I backed away, keeping the gun leveled at Mary.

“Sy.”

I froze.

“You won’t ever get the drop on me again.  You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded, blinking away the tears.

I turned away, fleeing the scene.  My companions were only with me because they had no place else to go.  We found our way onto one of the cargo cars, and they, Candida included, sat as far away from me as they could.

I love you, Mary Cobourn, I recited the words again, in my head, as I pulled the knife free of my shoulder.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.20 – Twig

In Sheep’s Clothing – 10.20

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“It looks like we’ve reached Tynewear,” Chance said, as he peered out the tiny window of the train car.  The train was slowing – we’d had to change early on, and had then resigned ourselves to a very long train ride.  Warrick hadn’t been close to Radham, a full night of travel away, and we’d had to go past Radham and then some.  The days were short, given the season, but it was demoralizing to be cooped up from the time the sun rose until it started to set again.

We hadn’t had long to operate between trains, and the bread and cheese I’d scraped together during that short span of time amounted to one modest meal each.  Lainie hadn’t wanted to eat, but as the day stretched on, she’d found her appetite, eating ravenously and then crashing into an exhausted, depressed slumber, her back to me.  Chance had come with me to get water, but the water hadn’t lasted long.

I’d suggested another stop for supplies, which would have meant waiting for a later train, but they’d decided to endure.  There was an eagerness to get where we were going, to break away from the purgatory that came about in striving to get there.

The train car had been too quiet, despite Candida’s efforts to make conversation.  She was perhaps the only one who was looking forward to getting to our destination, and made heroic efforts to highlight the good parts that had been working and living with Drake and Horace and her other companions.  I admired the effort and simultaneously doubted that Lainie or Chance were listening that avidly.  Something might have percolated through, but the effects would be slow to show up.

One person could only hold up a conversation for so long.  Candida had tried.  I hadn’t even really been able to make the effort.  I’d dozed without sleeping and I’d recalled the Lambs, bringing up the mental pictures and imaginings while not talking to them.  Chance and Lainie were uneasy enough around me as it was, without me talking to thin air.

I banished the silent ghosts.  It didn’t make me any more or less lonely, or do anything to ease the pressure that weighed on my chest and shoulders.  I wanted to cry like I might want to vomit if I were ill, in hopes of finding some relief from the horrible churning feelings.  I didn’t let myself.

I started standing in the same moment that Candida extended a hand to Chance.  Oblivious to what I was doing, she asked, “This is it, then.  Could you help me stand?”

He did, with Lainie offering a hand.  Candida rose to her feet, a full head taller than either of the adolescents.

“You’re leaving too?” Chance asked me, on noticing my movement.  “You said you were making sure we safely got where we were going, but you didn’t say you were coming.”

“Yeah,” I said.  My own voice sounded strange to my ears, and it had nothing to do with the latent damage to my throat.  Had I even said that much during the train ride?

“How long are you staying with us?” he asked.  Still wary, his body language and tone were very clear about how displeased he was with the idea.  Not that he would fight me on it.  He wasn’t in a position to.

“Not long,” I said.  “An hour or six, depending.  We just happen to have the same stop, and I want to see my promise to Candida through.”

The train came to a stop.  We were still gathering ourselves together, Chance getting his coat that he’d rolled up and offered to Lainie as a pillow.  I collected the paper bags from the bread, and the cloths the cheeses had been wrapped in.  I carried the Baron’s rapier in one hand, and held both the trash and my little bag of stolen luggage in the other.

“Tynewear is Crown-controlled, isn’t it?” Chance asked.  “I mean, the Crown States are all Crown-controlled, but this is an especially unfriendly place, if you don’t get along with the Crown.”

“I don’t know much about Tynewear,” I said.

“I remember,” Candida said.  She had to pause as another train came rushing past us.  The fact that the train had stopped was allowing another one to pass in the opposite direction.  “When you asked what cities were close to Lugh, your friend suggested this one.”

“Yeah,” I said.  The fact that the train was passing us meant we couldn’t step out onto the tracks on the far side.  We had to leave by way of the station.  I stepped up onto a crate and peered out the window, then stepped down to haul the door open.  Though it wasn’t a coastal city, I could smell the ocean, and the cold air had a sharpness that owed to the moist environment.

The station platform was well lit by a combination of lamp-posts and by trees.  The design of the lamp-posts seemed to encourage a very diffuse light, and the light frost that had accumulated on the glass made it almost ethereal.  The leaves of the trees glowed a soft blue, and the snow muted that glow, too.  The train platform was wide enough for two carriages to safely pass one another, yet it stood empty, the landing layered with a light snow that would need shoveling soon.

I looked further out.  The buildings were tall and narrow, spread across several islands and joined by bridges that arched high.  The water that flowed between the islands was the likely source of the smell of the ocean.  A light snow, frost, and a combination of the bioluminescent leaves and the yellow-orange of the artificial lights decorated everything.  It was only the early evening, and yet the city seemed to be at rest.  No tension ran through everything, no monsters lurked, and no people stared.

Turning around, looking to the horizon, I spotted the weak glow of the nearest city to Tynewear.  Lugh was out there, burned and wounded, but still perched on shores.  Tynewear had areas where the buildings were different, each delineated enough that I could mentally mark out the boundaries, and the area closest to Lugh would be where the military was set, as if they’d wanted to be ready to respond all the sooner if the order to wipe out the decrepit port city was given.

Lugh had been a barnacle, clinging to the rocks.  Tynewear was an artificial city, planned and carefully cultivated.  Where water formed the lifeblood of any city, the point around which most cities grew, Tynewear had an abundance to the extent that I could imagine, with diffuse lights and all, that the city was a modern Atlantis, drawn beneath the waves.  At the same time, the city lacked any bones I could easily make out, with few points or reference, landmarks, or even major roads.  A jellyfish city.

“You’re right,” I told Chance.  “It’s an Academy city.”

Candida spoke, “When the first war over the Crown States happened, Tynewear was a major victory for the Crown.  In Lugh, they say some of the people who fought hardest fought at the battle of Tynewear.”

“And they plopped this pretty little city down to commemorate the occasion?” I asked.

“I think they hoped to extend their influence outward,” Candida said.  “But they took Scarborough Harbor, and the dissidents moved to Emers, where my parents are from.  They moved into Emers, and the people moved to Angler’s Port.”

“Oil and water,” I said.  “The troublemakers wouldn’t mix.  In trying to wipe out the troublemakers, and they just concentrated them in smaller areas.”

Candida nodded.

“It’s strange, hearing people talk about the Crown like that,” Chance said.

“If you’re coming with me, you’d better get used to it,” Candida said.

Lugh would have been one of those last points of concentration Candida had talked about.  Too much trouble to take, too stubborn, the Crown had set up this shining gem of a city where the people of Lugh would have to pass through if they wanted to leave, as if to show off the disparity in power and wealth, and then they’d let Lugh slowly rot away.

Candida hugged her arms to her chest, “I’m only here because it’s where Drake and I were going to meet up, after we left Lugh.  But he doesn’t know… he doesn’t know I might be coming back, does he?  He might not even be here.”

Might not even be here.

I took one last look over the city.  I found the brightest point and spoke, “Candida?  You’ve been here before, right?”

“Often enough.  My mother used to take me shopping here, twice a year.”

“There’s an area, and I’m hesitating to call it the downtown area, but the buildings are taller, and the lights bright and artificial.  There are four buildings with bioluminescent plants growing up the sides, almost like they’re crowning the city?”

“That’s-” Candida paused, thinking.  “The theaters.  There’s some shopping along there.  The most high end stores.  I think the dress my mom wore at the event in Warrick was bought there?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Why does it matter?” she asked.

I didn’t want to talk about it, just in case things went sour at any point.  They were sour enough as it was.  “It doesn’t, really.  I just wanted to wrap my head around the city.  Are there any areas your mom wanted you to steer clear of?”

“The Marina, and the Boatyards.  They’re close together.  The Marina is where young soldiers and young gentlemen mingle,” Candida said.  “The Boatyards, similar idea, but the boys who gather there aren’t gentlemen at all.  They’re laborers who build the boats and bring in cargo from the docks.  My mother worried about my reputation, if I went down to either spot.”

“So you made a point of sneaking away to visit every chance you got?” I guessed.

“I got one chance,” Candida said.  She hugged her arms close to her body, cold, and then allowed herself a smile.  “It was a good night.  My mother was apoplectic.”

“We’ll go that way, then,” I said.  “The Boatyards.  Even if we don’t find Drake, we’ll find people who might know where to look.  Just give me a few seconds to see if I can get this sword in my luggage without it sticking out and looking weird.”

My voice still sounded alien, like something detached from me.  If that part of things came through to Candida, she didn’t let it show on her face or in her voice.  “Thank you, Sylvester.  Not just for this.  For everything.”

Where they stood, a distance away, Lainie and Chance stared at me, standing further back than necessary.  Lainie with her red hair was standing in the orange-yellow light of the streetlamps, Chance stood in the pale blue light from the nearest tree.

As if they were accusatory specters, reminding me that my rationale for helping Candida find her way and get her life back wasn’t wholly altruistic.  A big part of it was that I just didn’t want to be alone.

“I don’t do charity,” the woman said.  She was done up with too much makeup, which was a damn shame.  I felt like she lost more in trying to be glamorous than she would have had if she’d gone with a bare minimum.  She was cute, in a girl-next-door sort of way.  Perhaps that was the city at work, with no room for girls next door or for cuteness.  When seeking ladies of the evening, were the sailors and young noblemen unconsciously rising to a higher standard, because of what Tynewear was?

A city that people visited, that nobody seemed to stay in, they wouldn’t come just for what they could find at home.

“You have carvings on the frame of your building here, and while they aren’t like the ones I know from back home, they seem to suggest that children in need can find refuge here.”

“That’s right,” she said, imperious.  Right here, in her element, she was practically a noble, she was so sure of herself.  “Children.  You look old enough to have hairs on your balls, and you’re the youngest one here, looking at you.  The boy there stared into my cleavage like he was going to fall in, and I’d guess the blind girl is older than me.”

“She’s just tall,” I said.  “And in his defense, you have very nice cleavage.”

She didn’t look impressed in the slightest.  One hand perched on her hip, which sat askew.

“We’ve been through hell,” I said.  “And I know you hear that every damn time, probably, but it’s especially true here.  Look at me.  I’m missing an eye and an ear, and those are the third and fourth worst things I’ve had to deal with in the last week.”

I endured her penetrating stare.

“For the record,” she said, “That language is the sort that starts fights in a city like this, with the clientele that comes knocking on this door.”

Language?  What had I said?

Oh.  Hell, and damn.  The anti-church sentiment was strong, here.

“You do a very good job of looking piteous,” she admitted.

“Thank you,” I said.  “It’s a skill I’ve cultivated.”

“Most try to hide how clever they are.  They play dumb and act meek.”

“If I was planning to stay and hoping to game you and take advantage somehow, I might, but when I say I don’t plan to hang around, I mean it.  I need half a day to get some funds together, see about visiting a doctor, and run an errand.  One third of the funds I get will be yours, in exchange for your hospitality.”

“Only a third?”

“One third for them, one third for me.”

“I have only so many beds, and the working men and women who rent beds from me to do their business pay me more than a third.  Not to mention that that’s money I know I’m getting back.  Not some hypothetical amount from a brat I don’t know.”

“Name an amount.  I’ll stay up to a week, and I’ll get you that amount.”

Any amount?”

“Within the bounds of reason,” I said.

“For four people?  Eight hundred for one night.”

“That’s outrageous!” Chance cut in.

I raised a hand, not looking at him.  “Three people.  I won’t be sleeping.”

“Six hundred, then.”

“It’s… eight o’clock?”

She stepped back and away from the door to move further inside, and looked over her shoulder into some adjacent room.  “Just past seven.”

“Get them settled.  I’ll get you half by midnight, or you can kick them out.  Then I’ll get you the rest by dawn.”

“You seem confident.”

“I’ll give you collateral,” I said.  “Provided it doesn’t come with questions.”

She arched a neatly-plucked brow.

I removed the bundle of cloth from the top of my little luggage case.  The handle of the rapier was visible, the blade stabbing into the case, which I’d latched closed around it, pinching it in place.  I checked the coast was clear, and then drew the blade, extending the handle in her direction.

“Probably worth three hundred on its own,” I said.  “If you could find a place to sell it.  You keep it, up until I come up with the money at dawn.”

“Where did you get this?” she asked, turning the blade over in her hands.

“A dead noble,” I said.

They were the magic words.  Dangerous ones, to be sure, but magic all the same.  I could see her eyes widen, her composure briefly defeated.

“You were telling the truth, then,” she said.  “You really have been through the gauntlet, if you had to deal with them in any capacity.”

The most direct capacity.

“Midnight, then,” she said.  “Three hundred.  Another three at dawn.  They stay in the room I give them.”

I nodded.  “Can you feed them?”

“If you pay three hundred and fifty at midnight and dawn,” she said.

Merciless.

“Alright,” I said.

The price was almost worth the looks I was getting from Chance and Lainie.  A complete outfit meeting their higher class standards might have cost that same forty or fifty dollars.

“And you don’t bring trouble down on my house,” she said, in a warning tone.  “If you get nabbed, then don’t send anyone to come get me, asking for help.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said.

“And I almost believe you,” she said.  She looked again at the sword.  She gave me a concerned look.  “You said something about a doctor?  For your face?”

“Someone who does good work,” I said.  “In a city like this, there has to be one.  The trick is finding one who would work with me.”

“We have one in-house,” she said.  “He rents the top floor, so he can pursue his own projects, and provides discount work if any of my girls need or want it.”

“Ex-student?”

“Student,” she said.  “He wanted a place to study, and a house here was better than the dormitories, he thought, with more elbow room to practice.  Come on in, I’ll introduce you.  Don’t expect the house discount, though.”

A doctor in-house.  Exactly what I’d hoped for when I’d chosen a place like this.  I walked inside, and held my breath, willing my sinuses to adapt to the air, that was no one part oxygen to five parts smoke and ten parts perfume.  It only got worse as we made our way up to the middle floors, where Lainie, Chance, and Candida were given a room, and then worse still as we made our way up to the topmost floor.  The house madam knocked, and a man opened the door.  Young, skinny, and wearing a bathrobe like most doctors wore lab coats.  Close to a hundred cigarettes had been extinguished across three ashtrays on his desk.  Clove, by the smell of them.  The room was almost worse than downstairs, stench-wise.

“Work for you,” the madam said, in a perfunctory way, before stepping back to the stairwell.

I flipped up the eyepatch, and saw the student wince.

“One eye, then?” he asked.

“And an ear, for me.”

“Ears are easy.  Does the eye need to work?  Does the ear need sensation?”

“No,” I said.  “Not for now.  I just want to look presentable.  But there’s a young woman in a room on the middle floors, a guest of mine.  Before she leaves, I’d like to get her some working eyes.  Maybe fix her muscles.  They were surgically ruined.  I’ll pay.”

He took a step back, before falling into his chair.  He leaned back, reached for a box of cigarettes, and popped one into his mouth, lighting it with a match.  “Expensive.”

I nodded.

“Give him the discount, Marv,” the madam said.  I was a little startled that she’d lingered, waiting in the stairwell.  I looked back at her, and I saw that her whole demeanor had changed.

“Even with the discount,” Marv said.  “Five hundred bucks?  I’d have to buy the eyes and muscle, which is the only reason it’s-“

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Five hundred, then.  If you find the work on her is more comprehensive than I’m describing it, let me know.  I’ll pay the added costs.  And if you honestly don’t think you can do the job, because it might be a real horror show, once you get beneath the skin and take a look at her, then let me know.  I’ll pay you what I would for finishing the job and find someone who’ll do it properly.  I just want her looked after.”

Behind me, the Madam gently shut the door.

“Alright,” Marv said.  “She likes you, it seems.”

“I’m giving her horrendous amounts of money to like me,” I said.

“Isn’t that the nature of the job?” Marv asked, smirking.  His expression sobered, “No, it’s beyond that.”

“I don’t suppose I could ask how old she really is, huh?” I asked.

Marv busted out a laugh, almost losing his cigarette.  “No you cannot, kid.  No, no.  I want to keep my accommodations here.  But I’ll let you in on a little secret, as a testament to my abilities.  That face of hers?  My work.  She came to me stunning, statuesque.  One of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen who’d never had a lick of work done on her.  She asked to go under my knife, after she’d seen me patch up a pair of her faggos who’d gotten beat.”

I frowned, glancing toward the door.  I could put the pieces together.  She’d gone from gorgeous to cute, from exactly what Tynewear was looking for in glamour and flash to the girl next door.  Why?  Perhaps to draw in a clientele on a level beyond the obvious.  Someone who could win over their hearts, not just their nethers, and get them coming back again and again.

“And I don’t get the feeling I have to even explain it to you,” Marv said, adding another puff of smoke to the room’s faint haze, “Which makes me like you.  Sit down on my bed.  Let’s get a look at the damage, there.”

The sun was threatening to rise, but I malingered.  A false eye in place, the damage and swelling taken care of to the extent that it wouldn’t draw attention.  In much the same fashion, an ear had been tacked on the side of my head, partially hidden beneath a cap and my hair.  I had the second payment for her and the first payment for the doctor, but I made my way down the street in the complete opposite direction from the Madam’s house.  I’d broken into a store to ‘borrow’ a change of clothes that let me blend in among the well-to-do, with a wool jacket and scarf and black slacks with shined boots.  I was indistinguishable from the dozens who were just leaving their homes and heading to their places of business.

I found myself in one neighborhood that sat at one hill, by two of the theater buildings.  The sun came shining down between the buildings and lit up the hill.  Water features and the glass exterior of some buildings helped to illuminate the area.  I was staying too long, wandering, searching.  I checked outdoor tables, brushing away snow with a gloved hand, as well as doorframes and wagons that had been parked.

It was too early, I knew, but I was still willing to risk the madam’s ire just to check.  I heaved out a sigh and started on my way back.  Pushed all the way to the back of my mind was darkness, loss, anger, and loneliness, but the cloud seemed to grow, and I was running out of space to push it all away.

One night to travel to Warrick.  We’d spent the first day getting ourselves prepared, acquiring Simon and the other Doctors, and we’d given them one night to prepare the dose of Wyvern, the gas, and the coverings needed to turn Simon into a Firstborn.  Dealing with the Twin and the Baron had taken the following day.  Traveling to Tynewear had taken a night and day.

This would be the fourth day since I’d left the Academy.  Mary would be back or heading back, if I had to guess.  By the end of the day, everyone that mattered would know for a fact that I was gone.

I found a seat on an outdoor table, sitting on the snow with my coat serving as a barrier between the ass of my pants and the wet snow.  I exhaled slowly, letting the breath fog in the cold air.

My hands shook.  It felt like it had been days since I was able to regulate my breathing and be calm.  My entire body felt like a house that had been shaken by so many quakes that the nails were working their way free.

I had to put on a brave face for Chance, Lainie and Candida.  I’d shaken them enough by shooting Mary.  Letting my emotions show again might scare them off completely.

I managed to will my hands to be still.  Step by step, from my eyebrows to my feet, I worked out how to get my body to suggest calm and confidence.  Making the effort cost me a little something in that it added something to that growing storm in my breast and the back of my mind, but it was important.

I climbed down from the table and started on my way to the house, joined by my imagined Lambs.  Just before the area was out of sight, I glanced back over my shoulder, double checking.

I placed a cigar box on Marv’s desk.

“I’m more of a cigarette man,” Marv said.  “And I’m particular in my tastes.”

“I thought you’d say that,” I said.  I reached into a pocket and produced a carton of his favored kind.  “Here.”

He smiled wide.  He’d done away with the bathrobe, now that it was daytime, and wore a sweater that accentuated how skinny he was.  “So what’s in the box?”

I gestured toward it.

He popped it open, then frowned as he gazed at packed snow.  He gave me a look, then started pushing the snow aside.  He jumped a little as he found the treasure buried within.

“Do I want to know who you harvested these from?”

“If you’re asking because of conscience,” I said, “Then I’ll just say that the person that I got these from… well, if and when news gets around that he went and misplaced his eyes, nobody’s going to feel sorry for him.  I think he even has a few enemies who’ll go after other, more vital pieces of him.”

“Ah,” Marv said.

“Will they-“

“You even included the retina!  And some of the optic nerve!  I should hire you on an ongoing basis!”

“Will they work?” I asked.

“Hm?  What?  Oh, for the girl downstairs?  They’ll do.  I’ll need to soak them in a solution, and clear away any chance of post-transplant rejection, but they’ll do.  Give it a day.”

“I’ll be gone before then,” I said.  “But I’ll let her know as I go out.”

“Leaving again, so soon?” he asked.

“Trying to stay busy,” I said.  “I might lose my mind if I stay still.”

“Sure,” Marv said.  “Hey, listen, Donna from downstairs went out for a walk, I told her to drop in and talk to a friend of mine?  About what you asked about, the studying drug.”

Wyvern.

“Most places, they make it in the Academies and parcel it out on a controlled basis.  The recipe is mostly limited to people at the professor tier, the elite, maybe some Academy graduates.  Students like me?  My friends who got their know-how by back channels?  It’s not very likely.  I can keep asking, though.”

“Thanks,” I said, then with very little hope of results, added, “Please do.”

“Black scales,” I said, pointing at body parts to indicate roughly where.  “Narrow build, quick?  He would have been looking for work with a lot of climbing, like on the ship hulls?  He might even know some Academy medicine.”

Of the three people who I was addressing, two shook their heads.  I glanced at the third, studying him, searching for the reason he hesitated.

He’d seen Drake.

“You’ve seen him,” I said.

“Is he in trouble?” the third man asked, effectively confirming my statement.  “Or is he trouble?”

“He’s not trouble.  He’s a good guy, as far as I can tell, and judging by the look on your face, you probably feel the same way,” I said.  “As for any worries about this being trouble… tell him it’s regarding Candy.  Let him decide.”

“Candy?” the first of the men asked.  “This is about, ah, the sort you wouldn’t want people to know you were selling?”

“No,” I said, “Not drugs.  Just tell him.  If he’s here, he’ll be interested.  I’ll loop back around this way…”

I judged the distance.  About an hour to walk across the city.  About an hour to walk back.

“In two hours and thirty minutes,” I said.

“Alright,” he said.  “We’ll see, then.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I glanced up at the cloud-obscured sun, judging it early afternoon, as I started on my third trip to the theater district for the day.

“I think,” Evette said, as she joined me for the walk, “That you should have postponed getting the eyes for Candida until later in the day.  You look like you could stand to burn off some nervous energy with some exercise and aggression.”

I silently agreed.

“Feel up to getting some muscle tissue?” she asked, with a grin.

“No,” I spoke aloud, because I needed to let the phantoms feel a little bit more real.  “Just some shopping, for now.”

“Yay!” Helen said.

Candida’s new eyes were working well enough for her to see, it seemed, judging by how her expression transformed.

Her movements, however, were still hobbled, slightly, as she ran toward Drake, who stepped down from the carriage.  Her prince, except in her inverted fairy tale, her prince was the black scaled dragon.  Drake wrapped his arms around her, picking her up off the ground.

The two of them almost immediately started talking so fast their words ran over each other.  I saw Candida laugh, even as tears erupted around her new eyes.  She hugged him again.

“Do not cry!” Marv lectured her.  “Hey!”

I couldn’t even look at the scene.  My hands were shaking and I couldn’t even will them to stop.  I was happy and sad and angry and jealous all at once, and it might never have happened if I hadn’t taken the extra steps, so all of the bad feelings were hypocritical feelings too.

Chance and Lainie retreated from the scene.  It was so personal and happy, and they lacked both the personal connection and the ability to expose themselves to that joy when their own loss was so new and raw.

Candida was just sobbing now, her arms around Drake.  All of the fears and pain of the past week finally seeing release.  She was safe, and in his arms, she was home.

“Chance,” I said.

He seemed almost relieved to have an excuse to focus on something else.

I reached over to the seat next to me, and passed him a case of luggage.

“My best guess, for your fit.  There weren’t many options for dressing as a member of the lower class, so be careful if you decide to stay with Drake and Candida, wearing outfits like these will make you stand out.  There’s a wallet in there, but it’s only got enough to last you a few weeks, maybe, depending on how thin you stretch it.  If you try to maintain a higher station in life, that money will run out, and you’ll have a hard time earning a living without drawing attention or running into someone you might know.  I really recommend staying with them.  They’ll find you work, help you figure things out.”

“At least for a while,” Chance said.

“Yeah,” I said.

He looked vaguely displeased, but he nodded.

“Lainie.  Same idea,” I said.  I handed down the last case of luggage that wasn’t my own.

She nodded.  She still looked devastated.

That, at least, I understood.

“You’re leaving?” Chance asked.

“I might stay in town just for a few weeks.  Get my bearings, ask some questions and see where I’m going next,” I said.

Chance nodded.

“Can I ask-” Lainie started.  “No.  It’s a stupid question.”

She seemed conflicted.

“What?”

“What did I do wrong?” she asked me.

I exhaled.

“What did I do to deserve this?” she asked.  Now almost pleading.

You didn’t run when I said we needed to run, I thought.  You tacitly played along with the Baron’s game and toyed with the people of Warrick you thought were fair game.

“Sometimes things are unfair,” I said.  “It’s not an answer, I know.”

She looked deeply unhappy as she took that in.  Chance put an arm around her.

“Is this goodbye?” Chance asked.

“No,” I said.  “I expect we’ll cross paths again.  I’ll be around, and I’ll be looking to keep an eye on Candida.  There’s a dim chance her parents might go looking for her, or her ties to the Baron might mean having enemies.  I don’t think it’s a problem in the short-term, but… I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Chance looked like he was going to ask a question, then dropped it.  I could imagine a half dozen possible questions he might have asked.  He wanted resolution, but this situation wasn’t that.  I was a puzzle in his mind, and he wanted a tidy answer to it.

Why would you show us so much concern when you showed so little to your friend, who you shot?  Who are you?  What are you doing next?  Whatever the question was, I doubted I had a neat answer to it.

“Be nice to girls, Chance,” I told him.

He looked vaguely offended at that, and then he nodded.

I got the attention of the driver of the rented carriage, who’d stepped away to look after his stitched horse, and indicated the direction of the theater.

I looked skywards.  It was evening.

Dusk became night.  Snow fell, and the city was once again lit up by mingled soft blues and ethereal yellow lights.  As the wind changed direction, passing over the water, it also dropped several degrees in temperature.  I sat on the same table I’d chosen earlier, and I propped up my luggage beside me, to partially block that cold wind.

At what point did I give up?  When did I say enough was enough and let myself stop hoping?

Instinctively, I knew the answer.  How slim the chances were.

On the day I’d left with Mary, I’d left Jamie a note.  Four days.  I gave myself three to deal with the Baron and one to travel.  I’d told Jamie to talk to the other Lambs, to explain.  I hadn’t spelled it out entirely or clearly, suggesting that I was leaving and Mary was giving chase, while including enough false details that he would know that I was mucking with the truth and that he should be reading between the lines.

In very clear terms, I’d told him that I was leaving, that I couldn’t come back, and why.  In increasingly roundabout ways, I’d asked him to send Helen to look after Lillian, to explain that Mary had run off to chase me, and to forge a note in Mary’s handwriting saying that she’d gotten on a train in pursuit of me, but she wasn’t sure where it was going.  I’d also asked him to talk to the Lambs individually, so that they knew.  If they wanted to come with me, then they could meet me at the brightest spot of Tynewear, except I hadn’t named Tynewear exactly.  I’d only referenced the city that Drake and Candida had been going to retreat to.

Jamie would, if nothing else, do what the old Jamie had asked him to do, and help me.  He would give me this, and let them make the choice.

I hoped.

Didn’t I hope?  Or was it better to think that he’d betrayed me and torn up the note, but that Helen would come with me?  Or that Lillian would realize what was happening and get on a train?

Had the note been intercepted?  It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, and my efforts to obscure and obfuscate wouldn’t wholly clear the Lambs of blame.  People would wonder.  They would look for the codes and the meta-messages.

I’d spent a full night and day working on behalf of Candida, Chance, and Lainie.  In a way, it was the last tie I had to the Lambs, my promise to Lillian.  Now I had nothing to occupy myself with but this.  I could come up with reasons and excuses, dream up possibilities, and try to avoid the cold, honest reality.

Lillian was tethered to the Academy by her dream.  She was an Academy student at heart.  Mary was tethered to Lillian.  Helen and Jamie and Ashton couldn’t leave the Academy for any substantial lengths of time without degrading and breaking down.

No, as much as I tried to convince myself of conspiracy, I had to face the uglier truth.  Much as I’d made the hard choice to leave them because I could no longer stay, they were making the choice to stay.

Without the passage of the sun in the sky to mark time, I could only judge by the traffic of people.  The shops closed, and only the drinking establishments and restaurants lingered.  Then those places, too, closed.  People went home.  Employees cleaned up, and the lights went out.  A few people stared at me.

I judged it to be close to midnight.  I imagined the hands of the clock, vivid in my imagination, and saw them sweep past the twelve o’clock mark.

Day four had come and went.

No Lambs had made the trip, to find their way close to the theaters.

I drew in a shuddering breath.

“Alone,” I whispered under my breath.

My memory was weak, but I could remember the time I’d run away before.  Was this really so different from that?  I had no Wyvern, but I could figure out a way to get some.  Probably.

But having no Lambs?  There was no hope for an easy replacement there.

I had taken Wyvern so I could mold my mind, and I had molded myself to work alongside them, to fill in the gaps.

Now, without them to help give me shape, I already felt less like myself.  I wasn’t sure what direction I’d go.

I could find Fray, but… the idea spooked me.  I would adapt to her.  I’d be nothing more than her lackey.

Mauer?  That was somehow worse.

I hunkered down a little, shivering.  The dark storm of thoughts I’d pushed to the back of my mind had now expanded out to the forefront of it.  There weren’t any people out there that I respected and trusted in the way I’d need to trust them.  I could believe that Fray would keep to her word, and suspected the same of Mauer, but I couldn’t trust them to refrain from abusing me, when I was vulnerable and fluid.

I looked again for Lambs, and when I didn’t see any, I made some up.

“If you strike out on your own, you’re going to unravel, Sy,” Gordon told me.

“Yep,” I said, my own voice barely audible.

“Are you passionate about anything?” he asked.  “Because if you’re going to go out in a messy blaze of glory, you should pick a good cause.”

“I’d like to help the mice,” I said, muttering.  “There are some in every city.  Though some have different names and different structures.”

“Not very intense,” Helen said.  “That kind of love is like a hug, it’s nice and simple but it’s not going to get to the center bits of you and really nourish.”

“Except when you do it,” Ashton said.  “You squish and the center bits become outside bits.”

Evette cackled at the image.

I shook my head a little.

For a moment, the Lambs were gone.  I stared down at the snow below my dangling feet.  My legs were going numb from having sat for hours.

“Killing nobles?” Mary asked, her voice hard.

I looked at her, then wished I hadn’t.  Blood, a destroyed knee.

“Killing nobles, maybe,” I said.  “But I’d want it to matter more than it did with the Baron.”

“The King?” Mary asked.

“Ha,” I said.

“The Academy?” Lillian asked.

Her voice sent chills up my spine.  I looked at her.  I hadn’t heard her speak since I’d left Radham.

“Aren’t they the cause of all of the worst pain you’ve experienced?  The biggest losses?” Lillian asked.

“You wouldn’t ever forgive me,” I said, my voice hollow.

“I understand more than you let yourself believe,” Lillian said.  “I care about you, and I’m horribly conflicted about what the Academy does.  I love the Lambs almost as much as you do, and I know about the expiration dates.  Don’t you think I care?”

“I know you care,” I said.

“The number one thing you need to do, Sy, is get inside from the cold,” Lillian said.  “You don’t have a lot of meat on your bones, and you’ve been sitting there for a long time.  Okay?  You’re going to freeze.”

I shook my head a little.

“Oh, honey,” Lillian said, and the word choice was so jarring and the caring I put into her tone nearly broke me.  I hunkered down further, bringing my knees up to my chest, my hands to my head.

“Sy,” Jamie said, as if he was trying to get through to me.  Jamie had always cared, too, even if he was hard to face, sometimes.

“Another half hour or an hour,” I said.  “Just a bit longer.  Then you can all convince me to go inside.”

“Sy,” Jamie said, again.  He put his hands on my shoulders, and he wrapped me in a hug.

I went still.

One by one, I pushed the Lambs away, dismissing the false, vaguely reassuring images.

I made Jamie the last, because I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t bear for him to fade away.

He didn’t fade.  He gripped me tighter instead.

“I’m sorry it took me so long,” he said.

“You can’t be here,” I said, blinking fiercely.  “You can’t.  Without the Academy, you’ll-“

“I’ll manage,” Jamie said.  “We’ll manage, the two of us, okay?  I know how to create Wyvern.  You and me, we’ll figure out an answer for my problem.  There’s time.”

“You can’t,” I said, again.

“Be selfish, Sy.  Just this once.  Put yourself first when you know it matters.  You need a Lamb in arm’s reach.”

I nodded, no longer able to speak.  I screwed my eyes shut.

“I want you to take the ghosts, or the hallucinations, or whatever you were talking to, and put them away, okay, Sy?  I don’t want to hear you sound like you were just sounding again.  You can talk to them again when you’re in a better place.”

I nodded, though I’d already put them away.

“Okay?  Come on, Sy.  Let’s get you warm.”

I nodded.  My body was stiff as I climbed down from the table.

“It’s-” I managed, before my teeth chattered.  I reached for the luggage, but Jamie beat me to it.

“It’s what?” Jamie asked.  His hand found mine, gripping it fiercely.

“The Academy experiments, the Academy itself, even the Lambs, especially the Lambs, they’re going to come after us.  Because of what I did, and what I’m doing, and because you’re with me, now they’re the-“

“Enemy,” Jamie finished for me.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 10.x (Lamb) – Twig

Lamb – Arc 10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Idiocy!” Ibott produced a spray of spittle as he shouted.  “This entire project, doomed to fail.  All it took was for the weakest link to break.”

“Yes sir,” Helen said.

“I should have made you as something standalone, not hitched myself to this sinking ship,” he said.  He paced across the room, then wheeled on her.  “My reputation!”

She remained quiet.  He was hard to deal with when he was like this.

“Did you know anything about this?” he asked, his voice now low and dangerous.  “The runt’s defection?”

He wanted a target for his feelings.  Helen understood this.

“No sir, and I don’t think it was a defection.  He just ran away again.”

He raised his hand to his nose, pinching the bridge.  “I’m irritated enough without you disagreeing with me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you aren’t,” he said.  “You’ve been disobedient lately.  Talking back, making comments.”

She remained silent.

Their influence, I suppose.  The other children, trampling on my work, muddying the water, teaching you things you don’t need to know.”

“I try to learn from everyone I can, so I can act better when it comes to the job.”

“And you spend the most time around them,” the professor said.  He drew nearer, leaning over Helen, one hand on either side of her head.  His voice was a growl, “Don’t try to be clever.”

“Yes sir.”

“How has your range of movement been?” he asked.

“Perfect.”

“Strength?”

“I’m doing the exercises, professor.  Improvement is very slow.”

“Mm hmmm,” the professor said.  He picked up a scalpel.  “Contract your bicardia…”

She did, suppressing her hearts and constricting blood vessels throughout her body.

He sliced her, from collarbone to lower stomach.  “Open wide.”

Helen moved her shoulders back and arched her chest and stomach open.  The tendon net drew her ribcage open.  The act of opening would have torn her skin, but her skin was elastic where it counted.

He was rougher than necessary, raising organs and examining them, pinching slightly as he used the calipers.  “Dialimbics are swollen.  How are the cravings?”

“Better, professor.”

His glasses caught the light as he looked down at her.  His lips pressed together for a moment, before he parted them to say, “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying, sir.”

“The throughput is clearly more than you’re processing.  There’s build-up.  Build-up affects your judgment.  Tell me again, Helen, how are the cravings?  Take a minute if you have to, assess it carefully, but don’t lie to me.”

The ‘cravings’ were her mingled desires, gathered together into one strong force.  To eat, to desire someone, to want to be close to someone, to want to inflict violence on them, the feelings were one and the same.  They were strongest when she dreamed, though she didn’t dream like others did, and when she hunted with the Lambs.  The feeling when she got to satiate the craving had been built into her, made a part of her psychology.

But she hadn’t really had cravings recently.  There had been some when she was with Mary, but those were the kind of cravings she thought of as supper cravings.  She wanted, then she consumed, and then it was all better.  Over and over and over, she’d enjoyed indulging those cravings with Mary.  They’d divided up the victims equally, Mary with her knife and wire, Helen luxuriating in that feeling of bone breaking and muscle twisting free of where it was supposed to be.  It was the tactile equivalent of eating tasty meats and potatoes and vegetables and breads, her body pressed and wrapped around someone as they shuddered, spasmed, and shivered through their death throes.  When they were strangers, ordinary people, then it was just dinner.  There was none of the rise and fall, the dizzying feeling of awe and being awed, of earning the fear of people that had the fear of others.  They were just suppers.  Sometimes they were just tea.

But she had barely tasted the more delicious cravings.  Mary might do, but Mary was off-limits.  The most she could do was play with the idea and tease herself.  She hadn’t had any big enemies lately.  Ever since the big interrogation surrounding Brechwell, where she had acted like the cravings were more than they were, just to get out of questioning, Professor Ibott had been watching carefully for altered levels.  Now he believed he’d found them.

“I think,” Helen said, interrupting the professor from his examination of tendon nets, “That they’re a little worse.”

“I thought so,” he said, sounding so very self-satisfied.  “Whatever the other experiments told you or taught you, you can’t lie to me.  I can look at this body of yours that I built and know exactly what state you’re in.  Now, be more specific, are those cravings a little worse or a lot worse?”

She started to answer, then paused.  “I don’t know.”

“Mm hmm.  I’m going to encourage a stricter limbic cycling and extract some of the material from the central limbic gland.  This should keep the more aggressive feelings from building up and depress the cravings.  Literally less of the emotion circulating through your system, affecting the various systems.”

“Yes, professor.”

He was silent as he took a syringe to the organ, withdrawing clear fluid.

“A quick bar test… respiration systems are both working fine.  Hearts…” he touched her hearts, one with each hand, and looked to the clock in his office, “Synchronous but beating faster than the norm.  Digestion…”

He gripped her stomach.  It churned within his hand, to the point he could feel it.

“Digestion is agitated,” he remarked.  “Heart rates and digestion should normalize with the dampening of the cravings.”

“Yes, professor.”

He carefully set everything back in place, and she craned her head forward to look between cresting ribs and into the inside of her own body, shifting her muscles and tendon nets to hold things in place once they were in the right places.  She closed her ribcage without being asked, and waited patiently while he closed her up.  The glue would hold the seam closed.  He applied powder, and the nutrients in powder and glue would help keep the bleeding at bay while providing nutrients that helped accelerate the healing.  Her body would naturally heal it until there wasn’t anything even resembling a scar.

“Stretch tests, then strength tests, then get dressed.  You’ll prepare my dinner.”

Dinner with the professor?  It wasn’t usual.  Still, she would play along.  “What are we eating?”

I’m eating.  You’ll eat when I’m done.”

She felt a spike of emotion, coinciding with vivid mental pictures of bones breaking, muscle twisting, blood spilling, and agonized screams.

“Aw,” she said, in a vast understatement of what she was feeling.

“You’re well into your adolescence, Helen,” he said.  “You’ve been influenced by lower quality experiments, and the two things combined have left you rebellious.  The Academy wants to keep the Lambsbridge project on hold for the duration of all necessary investigations, which I see as a fine idea.  Some time away from the other experiments will do you some good, and we can fill the time with some sharp reminders about the hierarchy between you and I.”

“Yes, professor,” she said, holding back the welling emotion and confusion.  No Lambs?  Delayed meals?

“Stretch while you listen to me,” he told her.

She touched her foot to one shoulder, then the other, then did the same, extending her leg behind her.  She switched legs.

“My plan for you was always to prove your worth as part of this insipid project and then leave it in the final years to be my companion, caretaker, bodyguard, and an icon of my talent as a creator.  I will not have you be lured down this damaged, broken road that the other experiments in your group have laid before you.  Your stomach, above all else, is the easiest way to rebuke you.  I will see you be obedient, Helen.  You will eat what I deem appropriate, when I deem it appropriate, until we’ve established a pattern of behavior for you that I deem appropriate.”

“Yes, professor,” she said, now very subdued.  She used one hand on the table to help rotate her torso around, then rotated it back one hundred and eighty degrees to its usual position.  She wanted to say things but she didn’t know what to say.  Her own silence felt so uncomfortable.  She carried through the routine movements, arms out to the sides, her head dropping down to touch her kneecaps, then reversing direction, to touch the back of her knees.

“If the program is even resumed, I may pull you from it,” he said.  “We’ll see how your behavior adjusts in the interim.”

“Yes, professor,” she said.

There was a knock on the door.  Helen and Ibott both looked.

“Enter,” Ibott said.

The door opened.  Helen smiled as she saw the woman enter.  Red haired, pretty, with a white coat.  The woman looked at her, then looked away, one hand raised to block her own view.

“Lacey!” Helen exclaimed.  She spotted a figure hanging back behind Lacey.  “Lillian!”

Ibott gave her a sharp look, and she shrank back.

“No need for shyness, doctor,” Ibott said, voice dripping with derision.  “Helen is wearing underclothes, undergoing a routine examination.  Have some respect for what your profession means, and don’t be so shy about the human body.”

“My apologies, professor.  Ahem,” Lacey said, clearing her throat.  She dropped her hand and looked straight at Helen.  “Helen.  Your presence is requested at Claret Hall.”

Helen looked to Ibott.  She didn’t want to do the wrong thing and have her meals delayed.

“I’ll come too,” he said.  “Dress, Helen.”

She turned to her folded clothes and quickly put on her stockings, skirt, blouse, scarf, and coat, stepping into her boots.  She produced a comb, picking it up and running it through her hair, being careful not to comb out the arranged rolls, and set the comb down before she reached the stairs.

Lillian looked so unhappy.  Helen calculated the best smile to give her, warm and sympathetic.

She liked Lillian so.  She didn’t ever crave Lillian like she sometimes craved the other Lambs, but she still liked Lillian, which was a weird thing she sometimes struggled to process.

“Mary’s back,” Lillian said, her voice hushed.

Helen’s eyes widened.  Mary was back!

“She’s hurt.  We think Sy- Sylvester hurt her,” Lillian said.

Helen blinked.  There were things she was supposed to say here, but it was complicated territory.  Ibott was so close by and he didn’t like Sy at all.  Lacey was here and she didn’t like Sylvester much either, but she worked with Sylvester before and she understood him.  That was probably why she was here.

But Lillian especially-specially had been close to Sylvester.  She’d slept in Sylvester’s bed and Sylvester had slept in hers, the two had kissed and called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, and those things were nice but not too important.  What was important was that when Lillian was happiest she used to always look to Sylvester first and when she was saddest, it was the same.

And Mary, in a very similar way, was an important person to Lillian.  One important person of Lillian’s had hurt the other, and Lillian had to be feeling like she wanted to turn to someone for comfort.  Except the person she wanted to turn to was the source of the hurt and he was gone.

It felt so wrong.

Lillian flinched as Helen moved, stepping in close.  She flinched again as Helen wrapped her in a hug.

“Helen!” Professor Ibott barked.

Helen ignored the man.  He could punish her and make her eat mush or not let her eat at all, but this was more important.  She hugged Lillian tight, but kept it a safe-tight, and she felt Lillian relax, hugging her back.

“Helen!” Ibott shouted, harsher.  All around them, students who were going about their business turned to look.

With her mouth a short distance from Helen’s ear, Lillian spoke under her breath, so quiet that ears that weren’t augmented wouldn’t have heard.  “Jamie’s gone.  They’re looking for him, but I don’t think they realize he actually left.”

Helen didn’t reply or give any signal she’d heard.

Ibott seized Helen’s shoulder.  She didn’t let go at that, but Lillian did, pulling out of the hug and stepping back.

Jamie was gone, too?  Mary was back, then Jamie was gone, and all this while, Lillian was miserable.  Helen processed it, but she couldn’t simplify it down.  It was a big, complicated thing that reached into too many parts of her life, from one Lamb to the next, to food, to Ibott, to the future, all like a big branching tree that she had to somehow figure out how to put into a box.  She couldn’t, so it loomed, lingering, taking up far too much space in her head.

Ibott kept one hand firmly on her shoulder, steering her as they walked to Claret Hall.

In silence, They made their way to the same place they’d gone during the Brechwell interrogation.  Ashton was there, with his team of doctors.  So were Mrs. Earles, Sy’s other doctors, and Jamie’s doctors.

Yes.  This was a big, nasty, branching tree.  It all reached very far, too complicated to put away neatly.

“Helen, stand here,” Ibott said.  “You are not to approach the other experiments.”

“Yes, professor,” Helen said.  He was still so agitated and upset.  She could feel the pain from where he’d gripped her shoulder.

“If I find out that any of you approached her,” Ibott said, standing straighter as he addressed everyone else in the hallway, “I will end your careers or have you put down.”

A moment after that declaration, he knocked on the door and let himself into the big room.

Helen’s ears caught words that she wasn’t meant to hear.

“What a dick,” spoken from one of Jamie’s doctors to another.

“I’d kill for half of his talent,” was the reply.

Ibott was so clever a man, Helen knew, so talented, with the knowledge of whole teams of expert doctors.  Knowledge was power, but he didn’t know how to use that power.  He puffed himself up, threw his weight around, and achieved so little.

She didn’t love him, she didn’t respect him.  But without him to manage the important parts, Helen’s feelings would be unregulated, her body would go askew, and pieces would stop fitting together in a way that let her be beautiful.  There would be only cravings, and a broken, awkward body, with angular, distorted joints.  Even her organs might fall into disarray.

Leaving wasn’t possible.  If she left, she wouldn’t be herself.

Again, that spike of emotion, visions of squeezing people in ugly, unsatisfying ways, an arm around the head, using both hands to ineffectually tear at the chin, jaw and teeth at the bottom of someone’s mouth.  A frustrated sort of destruction that would never satisfy.

She’d been stationed far enough away that she couldn’t talk to Lillian or Ashton.  It bothered her, churning up that emotion and the images.

The sound of footsteps drew her attention.  She fixated on the source.  Lillian.

Ignoring Ibott’s orders and threats, Lillian crossed the hallway.  She turned her head to look at the other doctors and experiments, paying attention to each one in turn.  As if she was daring them, challenging them.

Lillian stood square in front of Helen, opened her jacket, and reached inside.  Several napkins wrapped something soft and sweet.  Much of it had squeezed out between the napkins.  Helen worked to peel away the napkin.

“You squished it when you hugged me,” Lillian said, her voice a hush.

“I like squished things,” Helen said.

“I remembered you said that you never got sweets from Ibott, because he doesn’t bake, and we’re under house arrest, so I thought it might be a while, and-”

A noise made Lillian turn her head, nervous.  Just someone coughing.

Lillian’s voice cracked a little, “-And that was a lovely hug, Helen.  Thank you.”

Still unsure what to say, Helen put a hand behind Lillian’s neck, leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

That done, she dropped to a cross-legged sitting position in one fluid movement, hunched over the carrot cake.

She shut her eyes as she took a bite, finding and meeting cravings all at once.  It was somehow better than it might feel to wrap herself around Mauer and twist his arms and legs off.  Better than it would feel to squeeze Sy or Mary until they cracked and popped.

Lillian was such a dear, and this piece of squished cake helped Helen make sense of Lillian and how she could like Lillian so, yet not want to squish or bend Lillian in a hundred different ways.  Even when she had to feel so very mixed up, Lillian cared about others.  It made Helen feel better in ways that she hadn’t realized she felt bad, to know she’d made sense of this one small piece of the world.

Helen finished and licked the remnants of the cake from her fingers.  She hadn’t lost a crumb, but she double checked anyway.

The door banged open.  Ibott appeared, and Helen felt a bit sad at seeing him.  Being here, even separated from the other Lambs, was better than being with only Ibott.

She started to rise to her feet.  The act seemed to upset the already agitated Ibott.

“Stay there,” he snapped.  “They want to talk to you.  When you’re done, you’ll come straight to me.”

“Yes, professor,” she said, silently elated.

He hadn’t even made it all the way down the hall when others emerged from the room.  Mary was one person, looking just as unhappy as Lillian, using crutches to walk.

Other professors and Academy types left after Mary did, taking their leave, many of them looking annoyed and upset.

Hayle was the last to exit.  He beckoned Ashton and Helen to draw nearer.

The moment she was close enough, Helen wrapped her arms around Ashton from behind.  He smelled so good, almost as good a smell as the cake was a taste.  She could smell the puff of good things from him as he reacted happily to the contact, even if his acting was still so very terrible.

Hayle looked at Lacey and Sylvester’s doctors, then heaved out a sigh.  “As is so often the case with Sylvester, things have been rendered… very inconvenient.”

“Hear hear,” Lacey said, quiet enough that she probably thought only she could hear it.

Hayle spoke, “For those who don’t know, this should be commonly accepted knowledge amid the Academy and the Crown by tomorrow, because certain parties are going out of their way to broadcast it.  The Baron Richmond is dead, as are his sisters, killed in his home territory of Warrick.”

Helen watched Lillian’s eyes widen.

“Mary professes to have gone after Sylvester, who went after the Baron as his last act before running off to places unknown.  All signs point to Sylvester being the sole culprit in the Baron’s death, using poisons and almost going out of his way to sign the kill by using a crude overdose of Wyvern, of all things.

“The fact that Mary Cobourn returned and her involvement isn’t otherwise apparent is a point in her favor, as is the note we produced with her handwriting, several days ago.  She will remains under suspicion, and a full investigation is still pending.  Until some future date that we’ve yet to establish, likely four months to a year from now, the Lambsbridge program is on hold, and the Lambs will not participate in any investigations or activities.  Lambs that wish to go anywhere but a home or a lab must be escorted.  If any of you are found deviating from this, then we will have to assume the worst, terminate the program, and cancel your individual projects.  Believe me when I say I don’t want to do this.”

Hayle looked at each Lamb in turn.  Mary, Helen, Lillian, and Ashton.

Apparently satisfied by the degrees of seriousness he observed, he continued, “The Caterpillar project cannot be found, and we suspect he’s slipped away, using a keen memory of personnel, train, and other schedules to simply disappear on us.  Given the chance he has departed to some other part of Radham, over distress about Sylvester and Mary’s disappearances, we’re giving him twenty-four hours to turn up.  After that, he’ll be assumed a fugitive and traitor.

“As I said, Sylvester has a way of putting people in tough spots.  A bounty has been placed on the head of Sylvester.  I didn’t have a choice in this.  Another bounty will soon be on Jamie’s head, if he doesn’t turn up.  I’m left hoping that the bounties prove fruitful and that this situation sees an easy resolution, for your sakes and for mine.  Do I expect it?  No.  More likely is that the Academy will have to rely on the Lambsbridge project to seek out enemies like Fray and now Sylvester as well.  You can imagine my dilemma, because it is very, very hard to believe that you would give your all and hunt a former comrade.”

Lillian folded her arms, shrinking into herself a little.  Mary let go of a crutch to reach out for Lillian’s hand, placing her hand over it.

“Find him.  Bring him home.  He will be imprisoned or restrained by some means, and will return to his position as one of the Lambs,” Hayle said.  “Admittedly in a way that lets him coordinate, plan, and strategize, I’m sure he can adapt to a change of role, in that.  By phone, radio, or other device, he can still play a part in your individual missions.  You will be able to continue interacting with him and, if it’s even possible given how insufferable he is, enjoy his company.  He will be safe, above all else, with my guarantee on that.  Lillian will be set on her accelerated track to get her black coat, which Mary has mentioned is something Sy was upset about, and the Lambs will remain together.  The same holds true for Jamie.  I’ve talked to Mary and I’ve observed the Lambs, and I believe this is something most or all of you want.  It’s the best resolution I can give you.”

“What if we can’t find him?” Helen asked.

“Then it’s a dark mark against the Lambsbridge project,” Professor Hayle said.  “I will be sent away, effectively demoted, and the Lambsbridge project will pass on to someone else, who will very probably cease all funding in favor of projects they have a personal stake in, and can claim full credit for.”

There were nods all around.

“Go.  Back to your dormitory, to Lambsbridge, or to your respective professors.  Helen, you’ll go back to Professor Ibott for the time being, at his insistence.”

“Yes, professor,” Helen said.  Others echoed her.

The Lambs departed, making their way to the exit of Claret Hall.  The doctors and professors who oversaw their individual projects hung back, talking among one another about the future of the project as a whole, and of the individual projects.  Mary’s crutches clacked against the wooden floor as she moved with more force and anger than necessary.

“He’s a bastard,” Mary said.

There was no question or wondering about who she was referring to.

“He was so torn up,” Lillian said, quiet.  “I’m so very angry at him, and I feel so bad for him at the same time.  I can’t imagine how I’ll ever do what Hayle is suggesting and hunt him down.”

“It feels strange, hearing people talk,” Ashton said, “Because I expect him to say something mean or funny, but he doesn’t.”

“We all miss him,” Lillian said.  “But yes, he’s a bastard.  I don’t think there’s any argument on that.”

Helen and Lillian worked together to open the doors for Mary to pass through.  They formed a group outside of Claret Hall.  They were each going in individual directions.  Mary to the doctor for her leg, Lillian to the dormitory, Helen to professor Ibott, and Ashton to Lambsbridge or an appointment.

“How are you, Helen?” Lillian asked.  Ashton, still in Helen’s embrace, craned his head up to look at his big sister.

Helen offered her best smile.  “How am I ever?  I liked the cake.  I would give you all of the best hugs in the world if you could sneak me more.  I think my days to come will be cakeless.”

“About Sylvester, I mean,” Lillian said, quiet.

“I want to hunt him, a little,” Helen said, studying her own feelings.  “I’ve always wanted to and it feels a little like I’m allowed to now, and that’s a little fun.  But the professor took away some of my cravings because he said my limbic glands were taking in too much and accumulating too much.  Even though he was wrong.”

“Your limbic glands?” Lillian asked.

“Yes,” Helen said.  She knew Lillian had read the notes necessary to understand her biology and better do field care.

“Were your cravings severe?” Lillian asked.

“No, no they weren’t.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “Your glands are supposed to process emotion.  If it’s not cravings… is it possible you’re sad?”

Helen blinked, cocking her head to one side, and flashed a smile.  “I don’t think I get sad, like that.”

“What are you feeling, then?  I’m trying to decide if I should tell you to tell Ibott.”

Helen reached up to her chest, and dug her fingernails into cloth and flesh, twisting as if she could somehow demonstrate the sensations that were just sitting there, so easy to ignore but so very big.  “I’m feeling… I’m feeling like things are complicated and they’re all snarly and big inside of me, like a tree with hooks for branches, and it’s all caught up in my organs and tugging things wrong, but they’re ideas as much as emotions.  I don’t think it’s sad.  It’s not the opposite of the good feeling that comes with bending people into impossible shapes or eating good food.”

“Could you say…” Lillian ventured, “That you’re troubled?

Troubled.

Troubled was a good word.  Helen dug her fingers in deeper, twisting at fabric even more, then let her hands drop.

She nodded, feeling her hair bounce with the motion.

“I think we’re all troubled,” Mary said, with anger still in her voice.  She stared down at the ground, as if she was imagining Sylvester lying there.

“I’ll get you some sweets when I can,” Lillian said.  “If that helps.”

Helen nodded fiercely.

“And Mary, we need to talk, about a lot of things,” Lillian said.  “Come to my room, later?  If you can?  I’ll see if I can be the person that looks after your leg, so we can spend more time together.”

Mary nodded, still not making eye contact.  So angry.  So very angry and bitter.

Lillian reached out to rub Mary’s shoulder.  It seemed to prompt a response, opening the door for Mary to talk.

“The other bad seeds,” Mary said.  “My brothers, Percy called them.  When it mattered, they abandoned me.  They were a group, and I was on my own, and they made decisions without consulting me.  Percy told me he cared, and then he walked away.”

“And Sylvester did the same thing,” Lillian said, her voice tight.

Mary nodded, blinking hard.

“Come to my room tonight,” Lillian said.  “We’ll talk.”

“He-” Mary started.  She cleared her throat.  “I understand why he did it, I think.  A lot of things he said before he actually shot me, it made sense when I realized he was agonizing over it.  That he felt bad and he knew exactly what he was doing to me, to you, and to us.  But he still did it, because… remember when Jamie told him he needed to be selfish?”

There were some nods.

“He might have excuses, but he’s still a bastard for doing it like this,” Lillian said, very firmly.  “And if we have to hunt him and drag him back, he deserves it.  But we have a little while to figure it out, and to see how much worse this gets.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.01 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Look at the chair you’re sitting in right now,” I said.  “Now, this might sound silly, but I want you to imagine there are lines of strength running through it.  Close your eyes for me.  Visualize the chair.  Where is it strongest?  When someone sits in it, where are the stresses?  Where would you draw the lines, if you were just drawing the imaginary bones of the armchair?”

I watched as Shirley closed her eyes.  I could see how tense she was.  Her back didn’t even touch the chair back.

“Um,” she said.  She moved her hands, twisting around.  She indicated the chair back, the arms.  “I think here and here?  And the legs?  I don’t really get it.”

“No, you’re right,” I said.  “Where are the lines of strength in your body?  It’s cheating if we think of your skeleton, so I want you to imagine one line running from your right hand to your shoulder, curving down to extend to your left leg, and another from your left hand to your right leg.  Imagine it, as strongly as you can.”

“I’m imagining it,” Shirley said.

“Can I touch you, to guide you?” I asked.

“Most men don’t ask before touching me,” she said, opening her eyes.  “They pay after.”

“Eyes closed,” I said, chastizing her.  She obeyed.  “Imagine the lines.”

“Okay.”

“What color are they?”

“Um.  Yellow?  Why?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.  Shirley was a pixie of a girl, barely nineteen, petite, with a smaller chest than most girls of her profession, and some amazing legs.  Her black hair was shorter than mine, but a headband gave her a feminine touch.  I liked her eyes most, though.  They were large and expressive.

Interesting that she thought of herself as yellow.  It didn’t mean anything, and it got her thinking about the lines again.  “I’ll ask again, since I didn’t get an answer.  May I touch you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said.  I touched her shoulders firmly, and urged her to lean back.  “Relax, keep imagining the lines, and lean back, feel the chair back against the small of your back and your shoulderblades.  The lines of the chair and the lines of your upper body are more in alignment, aren’t they?  Almost like you can imagine them as two pieces of a whole?”

“Yes.”

“And…” I said, putting two fingers on the back of one knee.  I felt her move it as I used the bare minimum of strength, until her thighs were crossed, one foot dangling, “For your lower body, I want you to figure out where your leg goes, so it’s in alignment with the chair’s arm and leg.  Keep those eyes closed.”

She moved her leg to the side, so the foot was at the base of the leg.  After a moment, she shifted position, so only her toes were on the floor, her heel resting against the leg.  It had the same effect as being in heels, elongating her already long legs.  It also had the effect of raising her knees, which was a tantalizing thing when she wore a short dress.

Movement off to one side caught my eye.  There were four young women, two young men and one Jamie gathered at the entrance of the room, watching.  A young woman standing in the doorway was changing her posture to better pose herself at the doorway.  Listening and learning.  We had an audience.

“Someone could paint a picture of you right now, Shirley,” one of the women at the door said.

Shirley’s eyes opened.

Before her focus was lost, I gave an instruction, “Relax your shoulders and let your arm down so-”

She dropped her arm, draping it along the chair’s.

“-Like that.  Perfect,” I said.

Shirley gave me a smile.  When I smiled back, she looked away, suddenly self-conscious.

“Why are you running away from me?” I asked.  “Eye contact.  When you’re working, If you’re here or you’re outside, you’re going to want to pick out customers, instead of having them pick you, right?”

She frowned a little.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s the job, isn’t it?” she asked.  “The customers choose.  Even here.”

I dropped down to sit on the coffee table, across from her.  “From here on out, you choose.  I know you had a bad run.  You got hurt, you want to keep doing this, but you’re still afraid.”

She broke eye contact again.

“Look me in the eye.  Don’t waver.  Good.  That’s better.  If you look afraid, the people who approach you are going to be the ones who want fear.  In this house, you’re pretty safe, but you still get some bad ones, I imagine.  If you’re clearly aware and comfortable with your surroundings…”

I gestured to indicate the length of her arm, the chair arm, and her legs.

“And if you’re confident in the eye contact you use, you can ignore the people you’re not interested in without looking like you’re shying away.  You’ll lock eye contact onto someone without actually staring at them.  I saw your expression just now.  I’ll clarify.  You can turn your head or change position to keep from being too still or too direct and intense.”

She did it, trying it.

“Just like that.  Now you’ll look a pretty picture as you fit into your surroundings, you make the eye contact with the people you choose, and then you hook them, line and sinker.  The ones you want, who look like they have money and like they might be fun, or safer.  You don’t need to shout louder than the other girls on the busier streets, your gaze, posture, and quiet confidence will be far louder than their brash offers.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I want you to lean over this table here.  Use your instincts.  The lines of your body and the lines of the table.  But keep in mind it doesn’t all have to be parallel, try right angles or curves.  Be playful, stay at ease.  It’s hard to do it wrong, but stay conscious of the table and yourself.  If you’re not sure how to do it, take your time while walking to the table.  But try it now, stand up.”

She did.  Her anxieties aside, she knew how to walk.  It was when she was sitting still or standing somewhere,left alone with her thoughts, that she’d end up looking so stricken and nervous.  Sauntering over to the table, she placed her right hand on the left side of the table, and her left hand on the other side, arms crossed, so they pushed her decolletage forward.  Her gaze remained locked to mine.

“Ah,” I said, huffing out a, “ha.  Perfect.”

“Sylvester,” Jamie remarked, his tone light in its mock sternness, “Are you done manipulating that poor woman into giving you a show?”

“It’s not-” Shirley and I spoke at the same time.  I stopped talking.  Belated, Shirley finished, “-not manipulation.  I like this.  It helps.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning my full focus to her, “I’m glad.  I think you instinctively knew some of this, you just needed reminders after you got shaken by bad experience.  You needed a framework to put it in.”

She nodded, with more emphasis than necessary.

“Final piece of the puzzle here,” I said.  “It feels good to get a reaction out of me, right?  You have the power, you did that perfectly, and in the doing, you got to be the second person in this house who’s ever rendered me at a loss for words.”

“Who was the-”

“Jamie,” I cut her off.  “Focus, and smile.  When you get that reaction, then you signal that you know, one hundred percent, that you just earned your small victory.  Because ninety-five times out of a hundred, the guys who like that smile are going to be the guys who are going to respect you and respect that confidence.”

“Ahem,” I heard the voice from the hallway.

“Whoops,” I said.  The Madam.

“What’s going on here?  Why is there a crowd in my foyer?  Jamie?”

The madam of the house made her way through the cluster of people at the other end of the room, my audience.  Marv wasn’t far behind.

“Sylvester,” she said, unimpressed. “And Shirley, it seems.”

“Sylvester,” Marv commented, smirking, “You sly rascal, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

One of the young men at the doorway protested, “Nothing was happening, Sylvester was-”

He fell silent as the Madam raised her hand.  She opened her mouth to say something, but hesitated as Shirley stood straight, walked to the armchair, and draped herself easily across it, her posture only slightly different from before.  Shirley’s eyes remained locked to the Madam’s throughout, and remained there as she crossed her legs, then folded her hands in her lap.

When the Madam’s eyebrows went up, Shirley allowed her a small, confident smile.

“Son of a gun, Shir,” one of the bystanders chimed in.

“Sylvester,” the Madam said, without taking her eyes off of the girl.  “What drug have you given to my Shirley?”

“Confidence,” I said.  “Just confidence.”

I didn’t get the impression she believed me.  Shirley, meanwhile, seemed to be very much enjoying feeling more at ease in her own skin, for what might have been the first time in months.  The little smile she wore for the Madam became a more mischievous one.

The Madam folded her arms and fixed Shirley with a pointed look.  “Shirley.  Lois has been complaining that you’re not keeping your half of the room tidy enough.  I won’t endure any more nagging from her because you’re a piglet.  I want you to clean up.”

Shirley blushed as she rose from her seat.  She started to head to the door, stopped, then reversed course to walk over to me.  She bent down and gave me an amazing hug before kissing me on the cheek.

“If only you were older,” she said.

“I’m older than I look,” I said, with a note of hope.

She rolled her eyes a little, then gave me two more quick kisses on the cheek before skipping off.  Half of the girls and boys who’d been our audience started to join her.  The other half dispersed on their own.

“Don’t go too far from the house!” the Madam raised her voice, “House meeting later!”

I heard distant moans and groans.

Marv and the Madam made their way into the room.  Jamie crossed the room to be at my side, taking a seat in the chair that Shirley had been in.

“I should have asked permission before meddling,” I said, to beat her to the punch.

“You should have,” the Madam said.  Then she looked over her shoulder, as if to make sure nobody was listening, and added, “But I’m going to give you the benefit of a doubt on this.  It was nice to see Shirley happy, even if it proves to be temporary.”

I nodded, somber.  Whether it was temporary or the foundation for better things was up to her and luck.  Her next few experiences would pave the road ahead.

“The house mother and I were talking,” Marv said, smiling at the Madam’s look of annoyance over the appellation, “Something came up, and I let her know first, so she could decide how to proceed.  When she consented, I reached out to you two to ask you to come by.  I’d say I’m sorry I was in the bath when you first showed up, but you seem to have kept yourself amused.”

He shot me a smirk, then quickly hid it as the Madam glanced at him.

He reached into a coat pocket and produced a folded paper.

I knew what it was before he’d even fully unfolded it.

“You’re wanted men,” he remarked, handing over the paper.

They used Jamie’s own illustrations from his books to press these posters, I thought.  A portrait Jamie had done of himself, and a portrait of me, scratched out in ink.  The pictures were relatively small.  Paragraphs of information and description followed.

“Traitors to the Crown, one Sylvester Lambsbridge to be delivered as corpse or secure prisoner to any Crown-owned office or jail, one Jamie Lambsbridge to be delivered alive as a secure prisoner to any Crown-owned office or jail,” I read it aloud.  “While possessed of no overly extraordinary physical talents or capabilities, these two adolescent males are experienced killers, talented improvisers, and remain devastatingly intelligent in individual, complimentary ways.  Devastatingly intelligent.  Devastatingly.”

This time it was Jamie’s turn to roll his eyes.  “Don’t look so proud of yourself.”

“But I’m devastatingly proud,” I said.

He aimed a kick in my direction, from where he sat in the chair.

“I visited Virgil’s Academy, and I saw this up in the main office, with a whole stack of them yet to be handed around and put up on the wall,” Marv said.  “From what I gather, they’re going to start appearing all over the place, in Crown post offices, police stations, at borders…”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.  “We expected this sooner or later.  We’ll be out of here before there’s any chance of this coming back on you.”

“Thank you,” the Madam said.  “I recall you saying you weren’t staying for very long, and that was… some time ago.  If your idea of being gone within a few days means staying for two months, I hope that your being gone before there’s trouble isn’t similarly extended.”

“Ah,” I said, a little abashed.

“I haven’t minded having you around,” she said, softening.  “But I do need to look after this house and the people in it.”

“I know,” I said.  “I understand.  Marv’s done patching me together, and I didn’t even plan to come back and hassle you any, except Marv reached out.”

“I owe you favors,” she said.  She paused, as if seeming to consider the idea.  “I’m not used to owing people favors.  But send me a letter, if you need anything.”

I nodded.

Then, in a manner that starkly contrasted her authoritarian streak, she reached over and messed up my hair.  “Be safe, Sylvester.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“And Jamie,” she said, reaching over toward Jamie’s head.  I saw him wince, preparing for his longer hair to get tousled, but the woman only ran her hand over the top of his head.  “Wayward Jamie.  I’ve had so many long conversations with my girls and boys, when it comes to you.”

“Ma’am,” Jamie said.

“Find your happiness,” she said.

“I’ll try, ma’am,” he said.

She touched his cheek, as gentle as I’d ever seen her, then retreated, returning to her former demeanor.

That was our cue to go.

“Thanks for the work, Marv,” I said, touching my eye and giving him a salute from there instead of my forehead.

“Thanks for the money, paying customer,” he said, but with a note of humor.

I had to jump a little to get my raincoat off the hook on the wall, and put it over one arm instead of pulling it on.  I stepped into my boots, strapped them at two separate places each, and then headed to the door, with Jamie right behind me.

It was raining, but only a droplet, here and there.  It made me nostalgic for home.  Tynewear was thawing for the imminent spring, and where it had once been softened by snow, it was now blurred around the edges with a light fog.  It was evening, and people were out in force, with quite a number heading home from work.  Even in one of the nicer of the poorer areas of Tynewear, where the managers of the boatyards and established employees had homes, the people still had nice clothes they could put on and wear as they walked into the heart of the city for dining or entertainment.  Jamie and I fit right in among them, wearing our own dark sweaters and raincoats with slacks and polished shoes and boots.

“Given the distance between Virgil’s Academy and Tynewear, and the speed we saw the posters for Fray and some others go up, I’d guess we have three or four days before people see, pass on word, and trouble comes looking for us,” Jamie said.

“Can we put off talking about that and discuss about how I got a ‘be careful’, like I’m some dingbat who is going to run headlong in front of the first knife, open flame, or speeding train I see, and you got a sweet ‘find your happiness’?”

“You are a dingbat who is going to run headlong into the first dangerous situation you see,” Jamie said.

“Ha ha,” I said.  “No, seriously.”

“She meets rogues and bastards every single day.  She’s used to your sort.  But I’m… closer to the likes of Shirley.  The sort of person she feels like she can nurture, I suppose?”

“Like Shirley, no, no, I get it,” I said.  I turned around so I was walking backward and facing Jamie, swaggering a little, “Are you saying you’re a romantic, Jamie?  Shall we get you some revealing clothes like the young men in the Madam’s employ wear?  Are you a winsome tart?”

Jamie smiled.

“What?” I asked.  “Are you really, now?”

“No, I’m not.  And the smile wasn’t supposed to mean anything,” he said.

“Liar!” I declared.  I grabbed him by the front of his raincoat, still walking backward, my steps in time with his.  He put a hand out and steered me to keep me from walking into a lamp post.  “Tell me of the smile, young sir!”

“You seem more at ease than I can remember ever seeing you,” he said.  “Not that I have many years of memories.”

I let go of his raincoat.  I took a few steps back, intentionally clumsy and heavy, then spun, falling back into step at his side.

“I’ve seen glimpses of it, but it was fleeting.  You sleeping, curled up with Lillian when we were in Lugh, actually relaxed.  Moments you let your guard down, mid-conversation with the others, before you looked in my direction and a kind of shadow fell over your expression.  A weight on your shoulders.  Even when you tried to hide it.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah.  Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” he said.  “But it’s nice that we’re getting past that?  Are we getting past that?”

“We’re getting past that,” I said.  “Or- hm.”

“Hm,” he echoed me.  Not even making it a question or an effort to pry or to push.

“Just thinking.  I don’t want to sound like a dick-”

“Hard to imagine that.”

“-But I don’t know if that shadow will ever entirely go away?  I don’t want to leave you hopeful and then hurt, but-

“But but but,” Jamie said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“The old Jamie was your best friend,” he said.  “You would be dishonoring him if you didn’t mourn him, if you didn’t remember him?”

I nodded.  “Yeah, I guess that sums it up.  Strides forward, but I don’t want to promise future strides?  And I feel like a monumental dick for saying it, especially when you’ve given everything up to be here and you endure my company every dang day.”

“First of all,” Jamie started.

You are a monumental dick,” I joined my voice to his, as he said it, even going so far as to match his cadence, then added, “You’re getting so predictable.  Can’t pass up an opportunity.”

“And second of all, I came here for me as much as I did it for you,” Jamie said, ignoring me.  “They were going to elevate my project.  They still want to, looking at those posters.  They very definitely want me alive.  I don’t know for sure what that would have meant, but in all of the discussions I overheard and everything that came up regarding my project, they never seemed to manage to bring up the idea of my welfare.  Nothing about what I wanted, preserving what I felt like I needed to keep.  I think about the others, and I don’t know if their situations were any different, but… I talked to Helen.  I floated ideas with Lillian and Ashton, testing the waters.  I needed to go.  They needed to stay.”

I felt a deep pang of loneliness at the thought of the other Lambs.

“Okay,” I said.  “And now you’re here, and I’m glad to have you here, thank you, sir-”

“You’re very welcome.”

“-and it looks like we’re moving on.”

“Looks like.  As I was saying, three or four days, going by what we’ve seen before.  Assuming we even want to leave.  I expect the posters will be everywhere.”

“Probably,” I said.

“Are we anticipating the Lambs?” he asked.

“No,” I said.  “No, that’s only my gut feeling, but that’s not my instinct.  Which is a good thing, because I’m still trying to figure out how to wrap my head around that problem.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked him, incredulous.

I’d caught him off guard.  “What?  You don’t think we’ll manage?”

“Geez, Jamie,” I said.  I shook my head.  “We’ll manage.  We have to.  The fact of the matter is that I can’t go back.  I don’t know about you, but I’ll wither and die if I find myself back under the Academy’s thumb.  I’m here and I’m free.  I don’t go ten straight minutes without missing them so badly it hurts, but… but yeah.”

I trailed off.

But I can breathe, I thought.

Jamie nodded, as if he’d read my mind.

“On the flip side of the coin,” I said.  “I don’t think they want to bring us in.  The Academy is going to hold a gun to their heads and figure out a way to make them, probably, but deep down?  The parts of them that love us, just like we have parts of us that love them?  They don’t want to.  I’ve probably told you garbage like this before, about survival, wanting to survive versus truly desiring to kill.”

“I remember the conversation.  Two, as a matter of fact, and a third where you were saying it to reassure Lillian.”

“Exactly,” I said, nodding sagely.  I could just let the past conversations finish off my thought and not worry about concluding it, except to add, “Same idea.”

“And why am I kidding?” Jamie asked me.

“What?  Huh?”

“You asked me ‘are you kidding?'”

“Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  Got off track.  No, the Lambs are coming after us, and it’s going to be intense.  It’s going to be bittersweet.  Mary’s going to be spitting mad and on her A-game, Lillian’s probably going to cry.  Helen is nightmare material now that she’s on the other side, and I’m not entirely sure she’s going to hold back at all.  Ashton’s… Ashton is going to be interesting.  But I’m looking forward to it.”

Jamie shot me a look.  Very ‘are you crazy?’

“I’m looking forward to seeing them,” I said, wistful.  “Even if it’s them on the other side of a battlefield.”

“You’re a bizarre creature, Sy.”

I perked up, “That reminds me, did you notice?  Did you see, on the poster?”

“I remember the poster verbatim,” he said, sounding very tired.

“Sylvester Lambsbridge.  They named me after the orphanage.  I have a last name.”

Jamie made a so-so gesture.  “It’s not a very good last name, and we’re sharing it.”

“But it’s a name, and it almost sounds dignified, taken in isolation.  And we probably share it with the others, except Mary, I guess.  I never knew I wanted one, but they must have felt it looked like they were giving incomplete information if they left us without last names, so-”

“I get it, Sy.”

“I have a last name,” I said.

“You are in a good mood.  Does that mood have anything to do with a leggy, dark-haired young lady who gave you several kisses on the cheek, back there?”

“Ha,” I said.  “Only because it felt like a good deed.  She said she’s too old for me.  Girls my age are intimidated and have trouble keeping up.  Older girls can keep up with my… dangit, what was the word?”

“Devastating,” Jamie said, sounding even more tired.

“Devastating intellect,” I said, grinning.  “And they have the sense to be intrigued-”

“The sense to be intrigued.  What a way of putting it.”

“Stop interrupting me, you dingbat!  But they deem themselves too old for me.  I’m stuck in a middle ground.”

“I suspect we’re doomed to tragic love lives, Sy,” Jamie said.  “You, me, and the other master and miss Lambsbridges.”

“Agreed,” I said, smiling at the last part of what he said.

We reached the end of the sidewalk, and paused as we approached a procession on the road.

Soldiers, men and the occasional woman in uniform, carriages, and wagons with supplies consisting largely of lengths of wood.

My first thought was to wonder if somehow they had decided to mobilize the army to hunt down me and Jamie, which would have been an incredible puzzle to work our way through, but the focus was elsewhere.  They were moving out of the city.

I craned my head, looking around.

How curious.

“What’s going on?” Jamie asked a bystander.

The bystander, a man with a thin-trimmed mustache and a fine black raincoat, intoned the word.  “Quarantine.”

“Quarantine,” I said, taking it in.  “Oh… Oh wow.  Dang.”

“Dang indeed,” the man said, with a trace of irony.  “Food prices are going to skyrocket, and things are going to become massively inconvenient for the next couple of weeks, until they’re sure they have a handle on this.”

So much for making a tidy exit from Tynewear.

“What are they trying to get a handle on?” Jamie asked.

“The stupidest little thing,” the man said.  “Some of the waterborne warbeasts they sent out to feed came back home with a skin problem.  It proved contagious, handlers got it, it spread from there before they locked down.  A few more people around the city are confined to their homes, because of it.  All for a prickly red rash.”

“Huh,” I said.

Something told me the wanted posters would be circulated through the city before the quarantine was lifted.

Academy city, too.  Their quarantines were going to be top-notch, now that I thought about it.

I looked at Jamie, before repeating myself, “Huh.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.02 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Every bridge had soldiers camped out on or in front of it, and portcullis gates had been lowered to bar passage by way of water.  The execution was so practiced that I suspected they had regular drills on the subject.

Tynewear was a scattered sort of city.  Cohesive designs held true for each individual district, but it was a city built with invasions in mind.  Chokepoints abounded, and a full third of the city rested on islands that could easily be isolated and cut off from the rest of the city.

The perimeter had been secured, and they were now working at securing sections of the city, blocking off districts to limit travel between areas.

“For a rash?” I asked.

“If it has hallmarks of something weaponized, then it might have more to it,” Jamie said.

We made our way to the highest point of a bridge, the two of us looking out over the city.  Going clockwise from the north end of the city, there were the nicer homes and apartments at high noon, the theater district, the commercial district, the local Academy at three to four o’clock, the military district from five o’clock to seven o’clock, the Marina, the Boatyards and islands to the general west, and cliffs as things moved higher north.  The high rise of cliffs put the theater district and the nicer buildings on higher ground, looking down on the rest, and formed a high barrier of sorts that separated the less-rich areas from the wealthier ones.  Walled-off rail tracks  and rivers slashed this way and that through the center-body of Tynewear.

“North end is going to be hard to access,” I said.  “Too much money and power there, they’ll make the extra investment to ensure they’re secured, and the landscape favors that.”

Jamie nodded.

I frowned, taking it all in.  Off in the distance, someone had gotten off their wagon and approached the rear of one of the perimeter squads.  A chain of three covered wagons with crates in the back were backed up behind him.  A caravan or a group of traders, if I had to guess.

“Are we going to try and exit?” Jamie asked.

“How strong is your swimming?” I asked, eyeing the churning river.

“Not very.  It’s cold out, too.  If the temperature dropped just a few degrees, we’d be seeing our breath,” Jamie said.  “I don’t fancy a swim.”

The soldiers parted the way.  The caravan was being allowed in.  Warned of the dangers, and they still decided to enter?

Well, it was only a rash.  Supposedly.

“Hole up and wait it out?” Jamie asked.  “Or at least wait until we see a hole in the perimeter we can exploit?”

I made a face.

“Careful, your face will get stuck that way.”

“Sorry dad,” I said.

“One of us has to be serious,” he said.  “We can keep a low profile, maybe tap Candida to bring us groceries?”

When I didn’t reply, Jamie glanced at me, then snorted in surprise.  I’d made the second-most horrendous face I could, using some fingers to fold my lips back and bare my teeth, while my index fingers hooked beneath my lower eyelids, with my eyes rolled back into my skull.

His hand covered his nose as his other hand reached for a handkerchief.

I laughed, maintaining the face, which almost made him snort again.  He leaned over the railing, forehead against his forearm, handkerchief at his nose, and laughed with me.

“Hey!” a voice cried out from the foot of the bridge.

Jamie wiped as his nose as we looked.  It was one of Tynewear’s soldiers.  They wore gray uniforms with silver trim, and some nice looking guns with some design along the sides where the barrel joined the butt.

“Quarantine in effect!  Low-risk, but we’re sectioning off the town to limit vectors!  Where do you live!?”

Jamie and I simultaneously pointed in the direction of Candida’s place.  Our place wasn’t far away, but if we happened to get cut off from it, it was better to be close to allies.

“Get on this side of the bridge, then,” the soldier said.

We hurried to oblige, keeping our heads down.   We were a few paces away when Jamie started snickering again.

“I got you going,” I said.  “Now you’re going to chuckle at random times for the next hour.”

“Will not.”

“I’ll always remember it fresh,” I said, pitching my voice to Jamie’s quiet, confident tone.  “A year from now I might remember it and laugh, damn you.”

“I have never ever said anything remotely like that,” Jamie said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“One of these days, I’m going to find a weakness to exploit, and I’ll twist that knife every single time you ask me if I’m sure of something.”

“I look forward to it,” I said.

He smiled.

“Your plan was a good one, by the way,” I said.  “Candida’s place, see if they can help a bit.”

It wasn’t too bad of a walk to Candida’s place.  I could sense a general buzz of discontent around the city, but it wasn’t the sort of discontent that lent itself to riots.  People were having to miss work or were facing difficulty in getting to where they were going, and the problem looked like it was going to get worse before it got better.

The boathouse was in good shape, as such things went, with a flared roof of slate blue and black speckled shingles.  A full quarter of the building hung over the water of the river, with a dock sticking out.

I banged my fist on the door, paused for two seconds, banged again, paused for another two seconds, and finally banged twice in close succession.

“Did I miss something?” Jamie asked.  “Coded knock?”

“I just wanted to try an interesting knock,” I said.

“You need more intellectual stimulation,” Jamie said, dry.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.  I could hear footsteps.  “I’ve got you!  Wait.”

His mouth dropped open in mock offense.  He didn’t get a chance to retort, because the door opened.

Drake, now relieved of many of the black scales he’d decorated himself with, keeping only a few around the eyebrows, stood in the doorway.

In the background, I saw a very different Lainie crane her head to see me, then suddenly turn to Chance, saying something I couldn’t hear.

“If you’re looking for Em, she’s out,” Drake said.

“How far away?” Jamie asked.

“Not far.  Two doors down?  She’s doing the heavy lifting for someone’s project.”

Jamie nodded.

“What do you need?”

“Nothing to do with Candida, or Em, not really.  Can we have a word?” I asked.

Drake stepped inside, using his body to help hold the door open for us, hand extended.

“Sorry to intrude,” I said.  “I saw Elaine flinch when she saw me.  I guess we’re not the most welcome visitors?”

“You’re not exactly unwelcome, Sylvester,” Lainie said.  “But when you come, so does bad news.”

“Twice,” Jamie said.  “Out of our nine visits so far, we’ve come with one warning and one parcel of bad news.”

“That’s not a good record,” Chance said.

“It’s what, slightly over one in four chance?” I asked, defensive.

“It’s two too many,” Lainie said.

“You’re better off for knowing what’s going on,” I retorted.

She’d changed her appearance.  The changes were more minor than I might have pushed for, focusing on her hair color, eye color and eyebrows.  She’d gone from red hair to blonde, and her eyes had turned a dark blue.  The eyebrows had been reshaped and changed in color to match the hair.  I’d had to urge her not to go with eyebrows that exactly matched the hair.  That never looked right.

Chance had changed his clothing, more closely matching the young men who worked on the docks.  Black boots, dark slacks, and a thick dark sweater pulled over a collared shirt. He had actually made the leap to altering his chin and nose, styling his hair differently, slicking it back instead of parting it.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something about him still seemed very upper class.  Was he too clean-shaven?  He wasn’t old enough to have to shave every day, but it might have been it.  Something about his eyes- it was hard to shake the mental image of someone sitting ramrod straight atop a fine horse, wearing a hunting jacket with a gun in hand.  Something needed to be added to the complete package, or taken away.  I suspected it would have more to do with experiences than appearance.  Either way, the transformation wasn’t yet complete.

Not that I was in a position to judge.  I’d put off changing my face and hair.  It felt too final, cutting myself off from the Sylvester that was.  I wanted to see the Lambs again, and I wanted them to see me as me, not have to pause, connect the dots, and realize who I was.  I wanted to look Mauer and Fray in the eyes when I dealt with them.

I had bigger plots in mind, I’d weighed the odds and decided that keeping my face had currency with key people that was worth having to keep my head down from time to time.

Drake took his time walking across the room, before seating himself by the fireplace.  He looked so comfortable.  Lanky, lean but eminently comfortable in his own skin.  Very tranquil, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, which were spaced far apart.  The lizard image he’d cultivated earlier stuck with me, as I imagined a lizard sunning itself.

The fireplace was built almost like a forge, and sat on a recessed area that would contain any spills or debris, with a semi-circle of steps leading up to the surrounding area.  Iron forged to look like a tree with branches embraced the fireplace like builder’s wood might embrace a key part of a building or a quickly repaired wall.  Kitchen stuff surrounded the fireplace, poised on tables and counters.

A ladder led up to the upper half of the building were where Emily and Drake’s bedroom was, but I couldn’t know for sure what their setup was as I’d never been invited up there.  I’d only ever been here, in the expansive, open-concept kitchen, workshop, and living space.

“What’s going on?” Drake asked, cutting off the conversation as it stood.

“You’ve seen the soldiers?” I asked.

A single nod.

“Quarantine,” I said.  “The timing is bad.  We were going to skip town in the next few days.  There’s heat.  Not dangerous heat, but left alone, someone’s going to recognize us, a few days are going to pass, and then people are going to start arriving, actively hunting us down.”

“Three out of ten visits, then,” Lainie said.

“Except this is good news!” I said, smiling.  “We’re offering work.”

Lainie looked even unhappier at that idea.

In a way, she reminded me of Lillian the way that she’d been at the very beginning.  Someone who had seen too much of what lay beneath the tidy-ish surface and realized that there was a lot to fear about the world.  The key difference in play, however, was that Lillian had had a dream, something to focus on, that drove her forward and through.

“I’m not sure,” Drake said.

“We’re looking to lie low.  We won’t be spending much time outdoors, and hitting the grocery stores is a bit too much exposure,” I said.  “Regular, semi-scheduled visits, pick up a grocery list, maybe some other supplies, deliver, maybe keep us up to date on any trouble.  We pay generously.”

“I’ll ask Em,” Drake said.

“No, it’s alright,” Chance said.  “I’ll handle it.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“I’m only working to cover some other guys.  It’s not reliable pay.  Not bad, but not reliable.  Lainie and I are trying to get our own space.  We’ve been renting a room to sleep in and staying here, but…”

“But you want your own place,” Jamie said.  Chance nodded.  I glanced at Drake, but it looked like he liked the idea too.

Drake and Candida were a couple, the kids were friends, but yeah, there had to be friction.  The more I thought about it, the more easily I could imagine why the kids would have wanted a separate place to sleep.  Given the circumstances Drake and Candida had been in the first time I’d seen them…

Yeahhhh.  Privacy and individual spaces probably made sense.

“I gave you money,” I said.

“We’ve got half left, after the faces, Lainie’s hair, and paying our way for the past while.  We’re holding on to the rest,” Chance said, very seriously.  “We need to figure out how to get by for now, and I’d rather scrape by now and make mistakes while we have that to fall back on, then have to learn how to do it later, when we don’t.”

Jamie nodded.

“Good for you, then,” I said.  I felt like advice was warranted, but it wasn’t something I really understood.  I’d always had a stipend from the Academy to pay my way, if I needed something like a nice set of clothes, I had to wait until the next handout at most.  Now that I was free and clear, things weren’t that different.  If I needed money, I went out and got some.  “You know where to find us?”

Chance nodded.

“‘Kay,” I said.  I glanced at Jamie, who gave me a quick nod.  “We’re going to duck out of here before there are too many soldiers looking around.  Stop by when it’s convenient.”

That was one thing handled.  Jamie and I ducked out, heading back toward our place.

“I’m guessing you’re going to want some books,” I said.

“Definitely.”

“Paper to write on?”

“Definitely.”

“And some knives for me, with some lockpicks, a lock or two… it feels like a prison sentence.”

“A week at a minimum, maybe two, maybe three,” Jamie said.

I nodded.  I exhaled slowly.  “I wanted more elbow room to act, get things ready.”

“Ready?”

“For the Lambs.  For Fray, and Mauer, the Crown, and the Academy.”

“Mm,” Jamie said.

“Let’s see.  I’ve wanted to try learning to juggle.  Something for that.  We’ve got cards in case we actually want to interact on some level-”

“Please no.  Have mercy,” Jamie said.  “You cheat.”

“Ha,” I said.  “Um.  You’ll want something to write on, right?”

“Yes Sy.  That would be nice.”

Oh, I’d said that already.  I could tell from his tone.

“And we’ll need stuff for Wyvern,” I said.  I stopped talking aloud and started mentally trying to lay out the individual categories of things.  There would be things Chance couldn’t get easily, and we’d need to grab those.  I could go out for a nightly excursion.

Jamie raised his hands to rub his eyes.

Something about the movement-

I looked his way.  His face was all scrunched up, fingers pressing eyebrows down and the corners of his mouth up, while he contorted the rest of it.

“That’s pretty good!” I said, smiling.

“You could have the decency to be shocked,” Jamie said.

“Egads, gasp.  My heart,” I said, in the best bored monotone I could manage.

“One day, I’ll find your knife, Sy,” he said.  “Twist it.”

“Did you forget that you said that already?” I asked, mocking.  He just shook his head, smiling, and glanced over his shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed.

I dearly missed the old Jamie in that moment.  The old Jamie would have tackled me, or punched my arm.  There would have been the interplay, the contest.

But even if this Jamie became the old Jamie, somehow, if a light flashed behind his eyes and the unrecoverable was somehow recovered and pulled back from oblivion, that kind of moment wouldn’t unfold again.  The close physical contact would be complicated by my knowledge that Jamie liked boys, and that he liked me.  The roughhousing would never happen again.

In a way, it was a piece of my childhood.  I had to make peace with it being behind me.  Like so many things.

Jamie shot me a sidelong glance.  I realized how I must have looked in the moment.  The shadow falling over my expression.  I cleared my throat, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Sy,” he said.  There was no need for him to ask or for me to explain.

“Stop by our place first?” I asked, injecting something lighter into my tone.

“Sure,” he said.

I looked away, taking in the surroundings.  I was trying to judge the degree of commotion based on what I could make out of the rest of the city.  Things seemed busy, with an undercurrent of nervous energy.  People were trying to get settled.

It was only a few minutes of walking.  We arrived at the apartment.  I glanced down the length of the street, judged the coast clear, and unlocked the door.  I opened it a crack, then bent down low.  I checked for the long blond hair that I’d wedged into place there, wound to a nail in the bottom of the door and a gap in the wood on the frame.

“Clear,” I said, opening the door so the hair came free.  I stepped on it and opened the door the rest of the way.

“You’ve been using that one too much,” Jamie said.

“Have I?”

“More than half the times we’ve gone out this week.”

“Remind me later,” I said.

“I reminded you this time, but you were lazy,” he said.

I pulled off my raincoat and kicked off my boots.

The apartment was well furnished.  We hadn’t executed much logic in how we arranged things.  My bed was set under the largest window, while Jamie’s was in a back corner, partially sectioned off from the room by a bookcase.  We’d put furniture where we found it convenient, negotiating for pieces here and there.  Custom wood grain with metal edging it, all square, blocky, and modern, and all of it matching.  It had been expensive, but expense wasn’t a problem.  What I hadn’t been able to buy with borrowed money had been easy enough to take on its own, like the artwork on the walls, strategically placed so it wasn’t easily visible from the outside.

I headed straight for the kitchen to light the fire and take the damp out of the air, moving the kettle from counter to stove before the fire was even underway.  Jamie took his time getting his coat off, his eyes on the window.

“Anything happening?”

“There are warbeasts in the water,” Jamie remarked.  “Same ones that were in Lugh’s harbor.  They must have verified they were healthy and wanted to put them somewhere that they weren’t going to get exposed to the rash.”

I walked over to the window, grabbing a knife and a long loaf of bread.  I opened the icebox and got some cheese.  I peered out the window in the general direction Jamie was looking.  I cut the bread and cheese by feel alone, watching.

Roughly a minute in, tentacles briefly rose up higher than the three story houses were tall, then disappeared into the cityscape.

“Man, I hate this town sometimes,” I said.

“You sure seemed to like it an hour ago,” Jamie said, from the other side of the room.

“An hour ago?  That was- wait, what was special about an hour ago?”

“Shirley?”

“Ohh.  Eh, no big deal, that.”

“Uh huh.”

“You sound like you don’t believe me.”

“I believe the spirit of the words, but not the letter.”

The focus it took to wrap my head around what he’d said nearly led to me cutting my fingers with the knife.  I raked it across my fingernails instead, and resolved to focus more on what I was doing, taking my eyes off the window.

I heard a violent clicking sound, and then music started playing.

I looked over at Jamie.  He was at our very expensive, borrowed-and-not-paid-for scrollphone.  The delicate scroll had been placed in the machine, and was now rotating, the music playing from it.  It was a violin-focused piece, and the scratchy nature of the device’s sound gave it a quality I almost preferred over ordinary violins.

“You don’t mind?” Jamie asked.

I shook my head.

I finished with the bread and cheese and prepared the tea, carrying a plate and cup of tea over to Jamie.

“Thank you,” he said.  “You know, we’re going to end up wanting to kill each other by the end of this.”

“Lies,” I said.  “You might end up wanting to kill me, but the reverse won’t ever be true.”

“I don’t go a straight week without a moment of wanting to kill you,” Jamie said, lightly.  He arranged the cup and saucer of bread and cheese so they rested on the edge of the bed, and then set himself up with a book in his lap.  “But you’re good enough company the rest of the time, I don’t even mind.”

I took a seat on the wide windowsill above my bed, one leg tucked under me, my back to the window frame, my left side pressed against the cold window, and set everything down.  I used the space available to lay out some cards.

Who?

“Solitaire?” Jamie asked.

“Kind of,” I said.

The thoughts of Lainie and Shirley had probably spurred my decision to go ahead with Lillian.

She sat on the far end of the long, wide windowsill.

Seven card handicap, I thought.  I saw her nod.

No cheating.  A more dramatic nod.  A smile on a face I couldn’t quite put together the way it was supposed to be.

Then I drew our hands.

How are you doing?  I wondered.  I made my play.

“I’m throwing myself into my studies,” she said.  “I don’t get to see the others as much as I’d like, and it helps.  I’ve been thinking about my project.  The suit you told me to work on.  I might be wearing an early version the next time you see me.”

I made her choice of card to play, and then divorced it from my mind so I wouldn’t use it to inform my play and decisions.  In a way, I was letting her peek at my hands, while refusing to do the same for myself.

I’m sorry.

“I know.  I don’t mean I know because I’m a figment of your imagination, in your brain.  I mean I know.  The other, real me.  She knows,” Lillian told me, stumbling over her words as she tried to convey something very simple, simply because of the emotional gravity behind what she was trying to express.  “Are you sleeping, Sy?”

I’d spent more time sitting on the windowsill watching the world outside of the window than I’d spent lying in bed.

“You need to sleep, Sy,” she said, very gently.

I made my play.  She was quick to respond.

“Sleep, and when you’re done your tea, get yourself a tall glass of water.  The wyvern formula Jamie is giving you isn’t perfect, so the downsides will be harsher.  You need to be rested and hydrated,” she said.

I played two cards.

“That’s really eerie,” Jamie said, from the other side of the room.

I looked up from the cards.

“Who?” he asked.

“Lillian,” I said.  “I kind of want some lesser explosives, really?”

“The thoughts don’t connect, Sy.”

“She’s going to wear that meat-suit she was thinking about.  They’re going to blitz us, you know.  Nothing held back.  The only time they’ll take before coming at us full bore will be to get Ashton to recruit someone or something he can use.  Then meat-suit Lillian, maybe with Wyvern, maybe, and Mary, of course, and Helen looking to flank?  I can see it playing out.”

“You’re smiling,” Jamie said.

I smiled wider, realizing.

“Who’s winning?” he asked.

“She is,” I said, looking down at the cards.  “Guilt, I think.  I feel bad about how I left things, so I went easy on her, I think.  That’s something to watch out for too.  For the altercation with the Lambs, further down the road.  See how this sort of thing is useful?”

“If you say so, Sylvester,” he said, very patiently.

I finished out the match, then switched out the participants, pitting myself against Gordon.

Feeling the cold on one side, the heat on the other, listening to music, with only one interruption as Jamie changed out the scroll, the cooling cup of tea held in both hands, I managed to doze off.

A sharp rapping disturbed me.  I remembered the tea as I jerked to wakefulness, and found the cup gone from my hand.  I looked down at the bed, checking, and found it devoid of both tea and cup.

“I got it, Sy,” Jamie said.  He indicated the front door.

Still bewildered, I nodded.

Together, we moved to the front door, Jamie collecting and cocking a pistol, me with a knife in the hand that gripped the door handle, my other hand on the improvised trap I’d set beside the door, in case someone came charging in.

“Who?” I asked.

“Chance,” was the reply.

“Alone?”

“With Elaine,” he said.  He was using Elaine’s full name when in the company of others.

I opened the door, one hand still on the trap.  I relaxed when I verified that they really were alone.

“I’m here for the list, and I have a bit of news,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.  “News is welcome.”

“Some faces have turned up in Tynewear,” Chance said.  “I heard from some others.  Academy experiments, I guess?  But they’re mercenaries?  I thought you’d want to know, since you said you were being tracked.”

I glanced at Jamie.  “Looking for us?”

“I don’t know,” Chance said.  “There’s seven of ’em.  Most are human-shaped, though some are clearly augmented.  There’s one, they say it’s the size of a carriage.  Metal and flesh, nothing to protect it from the winter, four legged, long hair or mane, metal jaw and legs, tubes at the side.”

“Metal-” I started.

Jamie turned around, hurrying across the room to his bed.  He picked up some paper and walked back to us, scribbling.

He’d never been an artist, unless he was drawing from memory.  With the speed at which he’d drawn it out, it was shaky at best.  “Like this?”

“Maybe?  We didn’t see it,” Chance said.

“There was that other guy, with the claws,” Lainie said.

“Mancatcher?” Jamie asked.

“Don’t know what that is,” Chance said.

“Like a stick, with a hinge-controlled collar fixed to the end, it closes around a neck, has spikes pointing inward?  Would look like…”

Jamie drew.

“That’s it,” Chance said.  “The thing that Paul said looked like a staff.”

I looked at Jamie.

“Old friends?” I asked, hopefully.

“If they’re even friendly,” Jamie said.  “Something pushed them to move through quarantines.”

“But this fast?  If they were enemies, shouldn’t it have taken them longer?”

“It’s Dog and Catcher,” Jamie said.

“I guess we’d better hope they’re friendly,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.03 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“No need for the groceries,” I said, turning away from the door.  “We’re going to be a little busy staying safe and free for the next short stretch.”

Thank you, though, for that information,” Jamie said, in a tone that sounded like it was meant more for me than for Chance, a little reminder of social niceties.

“Where are the papers?  The map?”

“Backside of the big picture,” Jamie said.  “The papers are on the bookshelf.”

Big picture.  It was a pastoral landscape with sheep scattered across it.  The thing had required a short ladder to put up on the wall, and without the ladder at hand, I had to stand on my toes to touch the very bottom of the frame, lifting it off its hooks.

“Careful,” Jamie said, as the painting tipped.  It was large enough that I couldn’t touch the left and right sides of the frame with my arms spread.  I still managed to catch the bottom and one side of the frame and keep it from smashing to pieces on the floor and furniture.

I laid it on the floor, painting down, the blank backside facing the ceiling, then turned toward the bookshelf.  It was floor to ceiling, with vertical columns in addition to the horizontal, sectioning it off into cubes with open faces.  The wood was dark and altered to be more interesting, lacquered to make the lights and darks stand out even further, with metal bracing around the edges and fixing it to the wall.  It wasn’t particularly tall -I could reach the second highest shelf if I stood on my toes- four rows high, six columns.

“Back of the shelves,” Jamie said.

“I remember,” I said.  I reached to the back of the shelf and found the notch to hook my finger inside.  I pulled the loose panel forward and grabbed the papers behind it before pushing the panel back into place.

“Left side, closer to the bottom is the personal stuff.  As you go further right, you’ll find the papers for longer-term goals.”

“I remember, I remember,” I said, absently.  I stepped onto one of the shelves to reach the higher, leftmost shelf.  “This is where you stashed my notes on the boxes with the stuff.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, very casually.  A moment later, he uttered a quick, surprisingly spooked, “Sy!  Stop!”

I stopped.

“Unless you changed it and you didn’t tell me, you rigged a trap there.”

Trap.  Here?

Traps here.  I remembered now.

“Trap?” Lainie asked, her voice small.

“I remember, Jamie.  Wow,” I lied through my teeth, ignoring Lainie’s question.  “Cut me some slack.  It’s been a few weeks, but I know where stuff is.”

“Uh huh,” he said, apparently not buying any of it.

I climbed up on the next shelf, so I could reach over top of the bookcase, and I found the oil lamp that was set there.  I unwound the thread that was attached to the mechanism at the side, then wound it around one of the little nubs that held the metal edging on the border of the bookcase.

“You have traps in this place?” Lainie asked.

“Yes.  Don’t touch anything,” I said.

“He’s grumpy when he wakes up,” Jamie said.  “Ignore him.  And don’t touch anything.”

Now confident that the bookshelf with our notes wouldn’t go up in flames and take half of the apartment with it, I was free to move more panels and collect the papers.

Jamie finished ripping the paper backing off of the picture.  He enlisted Chance’s help in moving the canvas over to the dining table.  We’d chosen a smaller table, because the large tables had felt so empty after Mrs. Earles’ crowded breakfast tables, and the edges of the picture hung over either side of the table.

In clean, confident lines, the city was sketched out.  Roads, buildings, and places of interest, as if from a bird’s eye view.  Chance and Lainie, who we hadn’t yet told to leave, drew nearer, looking.

I began sorting through the papers.

“I had those nice and organized,” Jamie said.

“They’re still organized,” I said.  I tapped the sheaf of papers to the side of my head, “But they’re organized in a way that falls in line with how my brain works.”

“It’s going to take me forever to get them sorted back in the right way,” he said, exaggerating his tone to match the words.  “We’re here.”

He tapped the map, one building marked out with a bolder outline and a symbol scribbled within.

“They came from the direction of the military district,” Chance said.

Jamie tapped the edge of the Marina that bordered the Boatyards.

“Were they together?  Spreading out?”

“Don’t know,” Chance said.

“We traveled from, let’s see, here… to here,” I said, identifying the main road we’d taken to go from the Theater district to Marv’s and then to Candida and Drake’s, my finger tracing the line.

“They’ll catch our scent,” Jamie said.  “Somewhere near here.  From there, they’ll refocus and start to close in on us.  How long ago were they seen?  Do you know?”

Chance shook his head.  “About… ten minutes ago?”

Jamie nodded, but didn’t offer anything to follow that tidbit of information.

“No way of telling just what their approach might look like,” I said.  “Might be worth having Chance and Lainie head them off.”

“What?” Chance asked, slightly alarmed.  Lainie looked doubly so.

“Go home.  Either they’ll be there or they’ll be there soon.  They’ll have our scent and they’ll trace our path to your place.  You can tell them some basics.  That we’ve been by a few times, limited working relationship.  Don’t volunteer anything, but don’t give them a reason to feel like they need to squeeze you for information either.  Maybe don’t mention these papers,” I said.  “That’ll cause more trouble than good.”

“What are the papers?” Chance asked.

“Resources,” I said.  “Dastardly plans.  Knowing the details would only hurt us and hurt you.  Now go.”

They looked to Jamie for confirmation.

“Why are you looking at him?” I asked.

“Dog and Catcher will be the ones who caught the scent, and they should be front and center.  They’re nicer than you’d think, so don’t be too intimidated,” Jamie said.  “Get ahead of this, make sure Drake and Candida don’t dig themselves into a bad situation out of loyalty.  If you run, they’ll still track you down, but it’ll turn out worse.”

Fuck,” Chance said, with a great deal of emphasis.

I jumped in, “If you have any latent frustration over how we ruined your lives or anything, then you might want to vent about it to their faces.  It’ll make them sympathetic to you.”

“Won’t it hurt you?” Chance asked.

I shook my head.  “If it really is Dog and Catcher, then they’ll get it.  They know us.”

“Is that really a recommendation in their favor?” Lainie asked.

“She’s got some wit!” I cheered.

“It’s a recommendation in their favor in this case,” Jamie said, gently.  “And you really should go.”

“Come on,” Chance said.

The two of them left, shutting the front door after them.

“I hope we can come back here,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Jamie eyed the papers I held.  “What are you thinking?  Gauntlet?”

“Yeah.  But can’t just run it standard, you know?  We don’t know if they’re friend or foe.”

Jamie nodded, hands planted on the edge of the frame, looking down at the map.  I checked some more papers and laid them down face-down, blocking off areas of the map until our neighborhood was isolated.

“Not much room to run around,” I remarked.  “That’s another complication.”

“Can we get over one bridge?”  Jamie asked.  He adjusted the papers, exposing a neighboring district closer to the city center, then adjusted again, each time revealing a different territory.

“Probably,” I said.  I thought for a second.  “Yeah.”

“Good.  Best options would be under the cliffs, north end of the Boatyards, big, long buildings, lots of room to work with, industrial, with chemicals, stitched, machinery…”

I nodded.  “Or?”

Jamie adjusted the papers again.  “Toward the city center.  Lots of people, houses look the same.  Dog’s nose isn’t easy to fool, but more people might buy us time?  A second or two when it counts.”

“More likely that that kind of layout forces them to move as a group.  If they’re operating as part of a team with the aim of hunting us down, then they’ll be restricted to moving as fast as their slowest member, up until they think they have us, and then they’ll sic Dog on us.  No pointing to an easy landmark and agreeing on a rendezvous.”

Jamie nodded.  “I’m trying to think back to all of our most annoying chases.  We’ve been on the ‘chaser’ side of things often enough.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “City center, then.  Given the climate… yeah.  More openings.”

“Okay.  What do we need?”

I began turning over the papers I’d put down.  “The box of grenades I liberated.”

“That’s under the house.”

“Right, and then there’s the stinkbombs I was experimenting with…”

Jamie winced at the memory.  “I meant in terms of the map.  City is meant to make invasions hard.  Countless areas that a point can be held or an entire area blocked off with minimal effort.  We can use that.  It’s a question of how.”

“Grenades,” I said.  “Stinkbombs.  And now that I’m thinking about it… where’s the police office?”

Jamie tapped the map.

“The cranky asshole with the dogs?”

Jamie tapped.

I drew out a route on the map.

“Okay,” Jamie said.

“You’ll have to remind me.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“And- hm.  Do you have a big piece of paper?”

“I have lots of different pieces of paper.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I hope you won’t have to use that… but grab it anyway.  Let’s get ready.”

“Shoes for running?” Jamie asked.

“Yep,” I said.

I looked around the apartment.  Jamie’s and mine.  The first place that had ever really been my own.

“We should take precautions,” Jamie said.  He settled one hand on my shoulder, which was more physical contact than he typically went with.

“Don’t wanna,” I said.

“If they find out what we’re up to, they might not send the Lambs after us.  They’ll send executioners down from the Capitol.”

My eyes went to the right side of the bookshelf.

“Smoke?” I suggested.  “It would lower visibility.  If they decided to fumble through and rummage as is…”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “I mixed some up two weeks ago, should still work.  It’s in the chest.”

I hope this place is still here when we get back.

“Your shoes are digging into my shoulders,” Jamie complained.

“You knew what you were getting into,” I said.

“Being on the bottom?” Jamie asked.

“Yes,” I said.  I managed to get the thread where I needed it, wound loosely around a branch.  I was very ginger as I let go of it.  “Why do I feel like what you just said was a line or a joke?”

“You really need to read more books, Sy.  Get some experience.”

“I’m as experienced as anyone,” I said.  I climbed down off Jamie’s shoulders and picked up the backpack I’d placed at the base of the wall.

“Is that so?” Jamie asked.  “Huh.  I could make comments about that.”

“Do you know how many people never leave their damn towns?  People twice or three times my age who’ve never seen beyond their own neighborhood?”

“Oh, that kind of experience.”

“Worldly experience,” I said.  I reached overhead and tapped the chain of glasses that were dangling from the end of the thread.  Not bottles or vials, but actual dining-room-table glasses, with contents layered in the bottom.  I’d heated them over the stove, placed the contents within, then stacked them inside one another so they formed a column.  As they had cooled, they had contracted.  Joined together just enough to hold, but a good jarring would spill the contents.  A matching set hung on the other side of the road, the thread stretching between them.

“I have no idea if this is going to work,” I said.

“With how much your shoes just chewed into my shoulders, it had better work,” Jamie complained.  “That’s step four done.  They should be right on our heels.  Next is the bridge.”

I nodded.  The bridge.

We headed toward the city center, moving in the direction of the bridge.

My suspicions were correct.  The closer we got to the city center, the greater the agitation.  People were uneasy, they wanted answers, and with no clear route to authority, they’d turned their attention to the hapless guards at the perimeter.

The city center went from being lower-middle class to upper class as one moved from the southwest to the northeast, peaking at the periphery of the theater district.  The people on our side of the bridge were poorer and more quietly accepting of their lot in life, which was better than a lot of other cities’ poor got.  On the other side of the bridge, the people were more apt to complain, and so often it had to do with petty, stupid nonsense, like where carriages were parked and horses kept.

The crowd was solely on one side of the bridge, our side empty.  The guards there had formed a kind of wall, and were trying to address the crowd.  It was more anxious than angry, parents with children and lone individuals standing in a half-circle around the guards, practically wringing their hands as they asked for and demanded information that the guards weren’t equipped to provide.

Jamie and I got as close to the bridge as we could without drawing the attention of the guards.  Their eyes were focused the other way.

We made our way onto the bridge, which consisted of two sets of stairs and a bridging path just wide enough for two adults or three children to walk shoulder to shoulder.

Jamie and I were just at that point where we straddled the middle line between adult and child.  We made our way up to the top of the staircase and sat, our backs to the guards and the crowd.

Beside me, Jamie let out a long, slow breath.

“What do you think?” I asked.  “Four out of four?  Three out of four?”

“We won’t know how step one went until we go back home.  We can’t do that until Dog and Catcher give us the all-clear,” Jamie said.

“Okay, then… out of three.  Two out of three?  One out of three?”

“Two out of three,” Jamie said.

“Middle ground,” I said.  I pulled off my backpack, reaching inside, and handed over three of the grenades I’d liberated from the military district.  “Playing it safe, Jamie?”

“Does this look like we’re playing it safe?” he asked, wry.  His eyes went out in the direction of the Boatyards.  “I’m going to be bothered if this isn’t three out of three, given how many hours and weeks and months we spent taking precautions and getting the materials, making the traps…”

“But you’re pessimistic,” I said.

“Anything better feels too good to be true,” Jamie said.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” I said.  “This may be our only glimpse of the group.  I’m in a good mood.  I’m guessing three out of three.”

“After this is… dogs?  Then bakery?  Then…”

“Then we cross our fingers,” I said.  “If it goes much further than that, I’m not sure what we can do, except use the grenades and hope.”

“They’re Dog and Catcher, after all,” Jamie commiserated.

In the distance, there was a crack, like a gun going off.  From our vantage point, we could just barely see the initial cloud extending skywards.

“One,” I said.  The stinkbomb glasses with blinding powder had worked.  Simple work, but we didn’t know who was in Dog and Catcher’s company, and putting pepper in their eyes, sulphur in their noses, and the sharp explosion in their ears would slow them down.

“Counting,” Jamie said, under his breath.  Behind us, some of the soldiers were approaching, having walked up their set of stairs to the flatter part of the bridge.

“What was that?” one of the soldiers asked.  He was younger than twenty, hair hidden by hat.  He’d done a poor job of shaving this morning, in terms of the bumps on his skin and the patches of hair his razor had missed.

“Don’t know,” I said.  I pointed at the hint of the cloud over the more distant rooftops.  “Something exploded.”

“You need to leave,” the soldier said, sounding like he’d run out of patience long before our conversation had started.  “Get out of here, you two.”

Young and trying to play the authoritarian.

“But there was an explosion,” I said.  “I don’t want to go over there!”

“It was nothing of consequence,” the soldier said.  This is a quarantine area.  You need to stay ten feet away from the bridge.  Look.  The crowd is following the rule.”

They were.

“You don’t know it’s nothing of consequence!” I said, pitching my voice higher.  I could play the younger role, but I didn’t want to always play the child.  I played the adolescent I was, instead, turning more insistent and stubborn instead of plaintive.  “We’ll be good, sir!  I don’t know about my friend, but I’ll feel a lot safer being around people with guns, at least for a little while.  Five minutes, ten, you won’t hear a peep from us.”

He grabbed me by the shoulder.

More aggressive and noncompliant than I’d anticipated.

Was adolescent Sylvester that hard of a sell?  Was the ‘child’ the only act I could reliably fall back on?

Or did he just dislike me based on some factor I didn’t know about?

Two, Jamie signaled.

“Did you hear something?” I asked him, even as I was being manhandled.

“No,” he said.  “It’s been quiet.”

His gesture was time.

They’d taken too long to get from where the stinkbombs were to us.

“Of course it’s been quiet,” the soldier said.  “Nothing happened.”

Something happened.  We set up the wire trap and the water trap, then we went back a ways to set up the stinkbomb and blinding powder.  Doubling back through the wire and water traps makes our scent trail stronger.

Jamie counted on his fingers in the gesture code, touching thumb to fingertip.

He was at three when there was another gun-like crack.  The explosion at the water trap was far closer than the stink bomb had been.

Jamie rose from his seat.  We backed up, until our backs were against the front of the soldier who’d been telling me off.  He still gripped my shoulder.

“Three out of three,” I murmured.

“What?” the soldier barked the question.

Jamie, meanwhile, just shook his head a little, giving me a sidelong glance.

I wanted to dance on the spot and cheer, but I couldn’t.

They emerged from a street further down the way.  Dog and Catcher, yes, and their retinue.

A woman, blonde, with augmented hands, wearing a coat that was very long and heavy.  With her hands being what they were, she struggled to keep one hand over her nose and mouth.  She was completely soaked on one side, and wet on the other.

I could see a Bruno,  with tattoos down his arms and a large arbalest slung over his shoulder.  The mixture of blinding powder and water had formed a thin paste that covered him.  He coughed, and he looked like he’d regretted wearing lighter clothing in this cold weather, now that he was wet.

If there were others, they were lagging behind.

Catcher spotted us and pointed his namesake mancatcher in our general direction.

Long time no see, I thought.  I backed into the soldier, making him stumble, in the guise of wanting to put distance between myself and these strangers.  Jamie backed into me, which simultaneously made it hard for the soldier to shove me forward and away and it put my body between the man and Jamie.

Jamie still held the grenades.

Sorry we’re being pains in the asses, I thought.

Catcher, Dog following behind him, approached the bridge, slowing down as he did.  His head moved, searching the area, looking for the next trap.

I grinned.

“You-” Catcher started, saying the word in his characteristic voice.

Jamie released the grenades letting them fall down the end of the bridge closest to Catcher.  Catcher shut up as he saw.

“Weapon!” I hollered out the word.

Jamie and I threw ourselves back and away.  The grenades detonated at the edge of the bridge, obliterating it.

The entire structure swayed and wobbled, and our end creaked violently as it dipped dangerously toward the rushing water beneath us.

The soldier who had been giving me a hard time gave me a hand as we struggled to climb what was now an incline, hurrying to safer ground.

Jamie was slowest, the last to leave the bridge.  He released the last grenade, letting it roll down the decline to the broken portion.  It exploded as we reached the top of the stairs, and the damage left the middle section nigh-unusable.  To get to it, our pursuers would have to leap from the broken stairs to the section that now sat in the water.  The impact might well shatter the wood and break that part of the bridge.

Meanwhile, Jamie and I evacuated to the far side of the bridge, entering the next quarantine zone.

“Weapon!” I continued to cry.  “Take cover!”

The crowd broke.  People fled the scene, and the soldiers remained focused on Dog and Catcher, too busy to really rein us in.

“Baker’s?” I asked.

“No,” Jamie said.  “Doghouse.  If it looks like they’re still pursuing, which-”

Mounting Dog, Catcher held onto his partner with one hand, holding his mancatcher in the other.  The pair of them bounded over the span of river.  I could feel the thud and hear the crunch as they landed.

Soldiers shouted, and one of them shot.

A bullet wouldn’t stop Catcher.  It definitely wouldn’t stop Dog.

This was fine.

The lesser, Academy-worked dogs were already barking when we reached the fence.  Customized to be more beautiful dogs, or so it was said, they were really hideous things with warped features, a severe underbite, and muscle to spare.  The owner kept six of the mutts in his yard, much to the annoyance of his neighbors.  The things barked at every passerby.

Jamie glanced around, then drew his knife.  It was a style very similar to what Mary carried, but we didn’t have the Academy to supply the things.  Still running, he threw the knives.  Once, twice, three times-

I winced at each throw.  There were some things that money couldn’t easily buy and a quick hand couldn’t easily steal.

Jamie hit the mark twice out of four throws, which was a damn sight better than I would’ve managed.  The knives hit the outstretched ropes that kept the dogs restrained.

We ran like we had fire spewing out of our asses.  We were halfway down the street when the dogs made their way out of the fenced in yard.  They barked, milling for a moment, while people backed clear away.

When Dog and Catcher came barreling toward us, the dogs decided on their target.

This was using our enemy’s weaknesses against them.  Catcher and Dog loved dogs, but it was a one-sided affection.  Dogs did not love them.

Dog, massive as a carriage, all machine and muscle, stumbled in his efforts to avoid trampling the two ugly spawn of bitches we’d loosed.  Catcher nearly lost his seat.  The dogs seized advantage of the opportunity to bite, to look for purchase.

My inspiration, Jamie’s attention to details and eye for opportunity.  We’d spent months making little preparations to cover our retreat, if we needed to run.

The trouble was that nothing short of an army would really sway this pair from their duties.

“Baker?” I muttered.

“Baker,” Jamie agreed.

The commotion had drawn attention.  The baker’s was relatively empty of the rather large number of customers that had gathered there, no doubt to stock up for the newly set quarantine.  All of them now stood outside, watching the half-mechanical warbeast and its rider strive to untangle themselves from two tenacious hounds

“Those sandwiches,” I said, pointing past the glass to the food that had been laid out for display.  “The ones with the shredded meat.  All of them.”

“What’s going on out there?” the baker asked.

“I want to buy sandwiches,” I said.

“Hm?” he asked.

“Can I see the sandwiches?” I asked, getting annoyed, I tapped hard on the glass.

He frowned, but he took the plate out from behind the glass and put it on the counter, where it loomed at my eye level.

I drew out my wallet and slapped down money.  “Is this enough?”

“Yes, it’s more than-”

“Then some beverages,” I said, pointing at the chilled bottles in ice behind his back.

He gave me a suspicious look, then got some bottles.  I took three, handing them over to Jamie.

There were bystanders who were now finding this transaction just as interesting as Dog and Catcher were, outside.

I tried to judge how close they were by how scared the crowd was.

The baker finished putting the sandwiches into a bag.  I took it.

“May we use the back door?” Jamie asked.  I glanced at the money.

“What’s going on?” the Baker asked.

“We’ll take that as a yes,” I said.

We ducked through the back door, into a back street.

We had supplies, now, we had drinks, and Dog and Catcher were entangled.

Now… fingers crossed.

If they’re going to catch up with us, then they’re going to catch up-

Dog landed in front of us, massive enough to plant claws on the sidewalks on either sides of the narrow back street.  His chest heaved, air steaming around his nostrils.

Catcher was right behind us.

“I don’t suppose this is a friendly visit?” I asked.

Dog huffed out garbage words I couldn’t understand.

“No,” Catcher translated.  He sounded angry.

“Okay,” I said.  “We had a suspicion it wasn’t.”

“Really,” Catcher said.

Yes.  Angry.

“If we were sure it wasn’t, those traps would have hurt, instead of just annoying,” I said.

“I see,” Catcher said.  “We were contracted to take you in, Sylvester.”

“By the Academy?” Jamie asked.

Catcher nodded once.

“Okay,” I said.  “You can do that.  But since we took all of this trouble to separate you from your group, and since we happened to pick up lunch…”

I held up the bag.

“Want to catch up, first?” I asked him.

Catcher’s eyes slid over to meet Dog’s.

“I don’t trust you,” he told me.

“It’s fresh.  Didn’t even have a chance to poison it,” I said, still smiling.

“The poison wouldn’t affect me much more than it affects you,” he said.  “Alright, I need to dry off.  But you’re going to be good, hear?”

“Good as gold,” I said.

“Good as gold,” Jamie echoed me, weakly.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.04 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I’m glad we’re getting this chance to talk,” I said.  I climbed up onto a fence, and sat on top of it, with the bag of sandwiches in hand.  “Last few times we crossed paths, things were kind of emotional.”

“And your current circumstances aren’t?” Catcher asked.  He remained standing, wearing his wide-brimmed hat, scarf, a calf-length jacket with buttons running down the front, gloves, and metal-tipped boots.  He was a very rectangular figure, tall with square shoulders.

I shook my head a little, reached into the bag, and lobbed him a sandwich.  The thing was wrapped in paper and about as long as my arm was from elbow to fingertip.  He caught it with one hand.  Jamie used two to catch his.

Dog lay down on the ground, mouth open and waiting.

“Ignore him,” Catcher said.  “He’s a pig.  He ate before we left.”

“It’s fine, I bought lots,” I said.  I opened up my sandwich and tore it in half, tossing half into Dog’s waiting mouth.  It came apart in the air, but the contents still landed within.  Dog made a pleased sound, even though the amount of food was miniscule, given his frame.

“I’m glad you two have a consistent source of meals,” Jamie said, to Catcher.  “You’re doing well?”

“Well enough,” Catcher said.  Something in his tone suggested he was still a little bit guarded.

Dog said something garbled.  I glanced at Catcher for a translation, and he offered me, “Dog notes you’ve been in the area for a while.”

“Lingering ‘us’ smell?” Jamie asked.  He was doing the talking while I chewed.

“There is,” Catcher said.  He sniffed the sandwich, then took a bite.  He ate like someone who ate alone a great deal, pulling down his scarf to snap up big bites he was quick to chew and swallow, and very little in the way of manners.  He glanced at me once his mouth was clear.  “Your scent lingered around the, ah, parlor?  Sylvester’s more than Jamie’s?”

“I’m almost starting to regret giving Shirley the lesson, with how often that’s coming up.  Almost,” I said.  “You didn’t hurt them any?”

“No,” Catcher said.  “Our acquaintances didn’t, either.  We were careful about who we brought along.”

“Thank you,” I said.

We continued to eat, and I tore my remaining bit of sandwich in half before throwing the un-bitten half to Dog.  Not that he would have cared.

The wind picked up, and I felt the cold rain fall down on my head and shoulders with more intensity than before.  As the wind calmed, the rain eased up as well.

I shifted position to get more comfortable.  Jamie was leaning against the fence, just to the left of my dangling feet, and he offered me a bottle.

“I’m not wholly certain you two aren’t going to bolt,” Catcher said.

I turned around, double checking what was behind me.  Between the rows of houses here, there was a fabricated ditch, all angled stones and gray bricks.  The runoff from snow and a nearby canal had a pretty good current going there.  I was willing to bet the stones were slippery enough to complicate efforts to get out.

“It’s too cold for you to swim, unless you came prepared with a combat drug,” Catcher said.  “Even then, I’m not sure it would help you any.  Dog doesn’t care, and I don’t really care either.”

I shook my head, gesturing for him to wait while I finished swallowing.

“Not going to bolt,” I said.  “I’m fine.  It’s a relatively nice day, I’ve got good company-”

I lightly kicked Jamie in the shoulder, and saluted Dog and Catcher.

“-and there’s no reason, really,” I said.

“You seem far different than the last time you ran away,” Catcher said.

I nodded, chewing.

“I’ve read the notes on that day,” Jamie said.

“The reason,” I started.  I finished chewing and swallowing, “Is I’m not alone.  For now, at least.  Jamie is bound to get sick of me and abandon me at some point.”

“Nah,” Jamie said.

“But he came,” I said.  I kicked him lightly in the shoulder again.  “If he hadn’t, you might have come here to find me a lot like I was then.  Except I think I’m resourceful enough to get supplies of my drug.”

“Mmm,” Catcher made a sound.

Dog, meanwhile, said something more elaborate.

“No,” Catcher responded, not translating but instead responding.

Dog said something more.

“Yeah,” Catcher said.  His shoulders rose and fell as he drew in a breath and released it.  The end of his mancatcher tapped the ground.

“Can I ask?” I asked.

“Talking about our companions,” Catcher said.  “We’re not close with most of them, but we have a working relationship.”

“I’m jealous,” I said.

“Don’t be,” Catcher said.  “It’s not like what you had.”

I nodded.

Dog mumbled something.

I couldn’t understand a damn word he said, but I knew what he was saying by the tone alone.

“Our condolences regarding Gordon,” Catcher said.

I nodded, sighing.

“Thank you,” Jamie said.  “I read that Dog and Gordon were close?”

Garbled response.

“Yes,” Catcher said.  “Dog was very fond of Gordon.  Few make the effort to understand him.”

“He was a good guy,” I said.

“After you lost your friend Jamie to the experiment, we thought you were very close to running away again.  The mission in Brechwell was a tense one.  Fray and I exchanged words about you.  She thought that when the next Lamb died, you would be open to another offer to join.  Then Gordon passed.  I was hopeful I would see you, but it didn’t happen that way.”

“No,” I agreed.  “I’m not open to Fray’s offer.”

“Yes,” Catcher said.  “To the best of my knowledge, she didn’t reach out.  I don’t know whether that was because there was such a narrow window of time between your return to Radham and your departure or if she sensed you wouldn’t accept.

“So you’re in communication with her.  Yet you’re working for the Academy again?” I asked.  “It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t,” Catcher said.  His tone was sadder, almost wistful.  “I wondered if you were going to use this opportunity to pry for answers you could use.”

“You dangled the bait a few times, talking about your friends.  Really truly, Catcher, Dog, we wanted to have a nice lunch.”

Jamie nodded in agreement with me.

“No ulterior motives?” Catcher asked me.

I unwrapped another sandwich, and tossed it to Dog.  “Minor ones.  Doesn’t really change things.”

“Mm hmm,” he said.  “Meeting Fray was interesting, you know.  In respect to how similar and how different she was when it came to you.”

I nodded, before glancing at Jamie.  “Want half of one?”

“No thanks.”

I shrugged and tore a sandwich in half again.  I let Catcher talk.

“She said you’re a believer, Sylvester.”

“I was,” I said.

“I know it was said that you were loyal to the Lambs, not the Academy.  Were you a believer in the Lambs?”

“One of them,” I said, thinking of Lillian.  Then I revised, glancing over.  “Two of them, maybe.  But that’s not what Fray was talking about, I don’t think.”

“She told me that Mauer believes, but he believes in a future where the Academy and Crown are broken.  She didn’t go out of her way to elaborate on where your particular beliefs differed, compared to Mauer.”

“Of course not,” I said.  “The Lambs are a subject you and her share in common.  If she simply told you things, then the topic would be exhausted.  She’s dragging it out to maintain your interest.”

“That may be uncharitable,” Catcher said.

“Maybe,” I agreed.  “I can’t shake my mental picture of her as a manipulator.  It’s arguably just as uncharitable as defecting to her side and then taking a job for the Academy.”

Dog mumbled something.

“Alright,” Catcher replied to his partner.  To me, he said, “I’ll give you the answer you want.  It was a number of things put together that drove this.  We requested Dog’s files and case material, so Genevieve Fray can better keep him in working order, and we offered trades with Fray’s help, which they weren’t interested in.  Through the discussion it came out that the bounty on you had been placed.  We heard some of the names.  Familiar faces and names, among those of us who hunt bounties.  You would know a few.”

“I don’t suppose I can ask?” Jamie asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Catcher said.  “The Academy asked us to join the hunt, and we agreed.  We knew we could find you first, and take you in alive where so many would happily take you in dead.”

“Jamie’s supposed to be captured alive only,” I said.

“Some of the bounty hunters out there don’t care for what the posters say.  We agreed to attach ourselves to an Academy delegation of retrieval experts and offer our skills, if it meant bringing you in alive.  The others in our group, they have soft spots for children, or they don’t care for killing.  For doing this, we get payment, Dog’s records, and they rescind the ongoing bounty on our heads.  After that, we go back to Fray to get Dog the care he needs and tender our resignation from her organization.”

“Going solo?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Catcher said.  “But I do know that we do not want to work for Fray any longer.  She has agreed to fix and maintain Dog, but we will have no obligations to take up further work.”

The altered voice and the enshrouding scarf helped, but they didn’t wholly mask the shift in tone that went with Catcher’s lie.

Of course, if this went badly, he wanted plausible deniability.  He would go back to Fray.

“If you can’t bring us in?” I asked.

“Then we will not get the files.  I will, within five years’ time, say goodbye to Dog as you did to Gordon.  It will be slower, with mistakes made today causing problems that make his decline and death in the future inevitable ones.  In the meanwhile, other bounty hunters will come for you and they will try their best to kill you.  It’s a lot of death.”

I looked down as Jamie looked up.  Our eyes met.

“If you take us back, it’ll kill me, as sure as anything,” I said.  “Jamie will be erased, just like the first one was.  It’s not mercy.”

“I’m not clever enough to guess what you say before you say it, but I’m not surprised to hear you say that, Sylvester, especially after talking to you.  A part of me hoped you would be that same scared little boy that we retrieved years ago, and that Jamie would be willing if you were.”

“We’re sorry to dash your hopes,” Jamie said, quiet.

“If you had to take our freedom to save one of your Lambs, would you?” Catcher asked.

I smiled, shaking my head.

“Something amusing?” he asked me.

“No, no,” I said.  I forced the smile away.  “No, I can see what you’re saying.”

“Humor me?  As I’ve humored you, with this meal.  Answer my question so I can hear it?  Would you see Dog and me imprisoned at an Academy for the sake of the people closest to you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Jamie said.  “Possibly.  Probably.”

Catcher nodded.  His gloved hand went to his hat, fixing it.

“I don’t want there to be hard feelings,” Catcher said.

“There are only a few people I’m reserving hard feelings for, and you’re not on that list.  I understand what you’re doing, I understand why.  I like you, Catcher.  I like you, Dog.  I think we’re good.”

“Thank you,” Catcher said.

Dog grunted.

“I wish I’d gotten to properly meet you and get to know you,” Jamie said.

I could see Catcher pause and think as he recalled that there really hadn’t been a meeting between himself and Jamie.

“Yes,” was all he said.  “Would you like to eat something more?  We could sit for a while.”

“Sitting sounds awfully nice after that running around,” Jamie said.

“And it’ll make it easier for your friends to find us,” I said.

Dog nodded.  Now that I was looking more closely, he looked saddened.  He wasn’t happy that things were going this way.

I threw him another sandwich.

“So Mauer believes the Academy can be defeated,” I thought aloud.  “Cynthia… I assume she believes in anarchy.”

“Effectively,” Catcher said.  “She might hope for another form of government, but it will never happen.”

She’s alive, then?

“Fray believes in…” I trailed off.

“Humanity,” Catcher said.  “That we can find our way.  That the world is in danger and that it can be saved.”

“And in the attempt to save it, she gets us awfully close to ending it all,” I said.

“What do you believe in?” Jamie asked them.

Dog huffed out a single garbled word.

Catcher extended a hand toward Dog, as if to say what he said.

“Ha ha,” I said.  But Jamie was smiling, and by the looks of what I could see of his eyes, above that scarf and beneath the brim of the hat, Catcher was too.

“I believed in the future,” I said.  “I wanted so badly for the Academy to be the way forward, but it isn’t.  Not with the way they treated Lillian, the way they disposed of Gordon, or what they let happen to Jamie.  The first Jamie.”

The words were heavy.  I stared at the ground because I was worried that any sign of empathy might make me emotional.

“They didn’t even try to save any part of him.  I can’t keep fooling myself.  I can’t keep hoping and trusting that the answer will come if I just keep helping things work out.  I can’t trust that the Lambs will be okay.  I just… can’t.”

“I understand that,” Catcher said.

“I don’t know anymore.  I don’t have the pat answers.  I don’t know for sure how things are going to work out.  A big part of me worries they won’t.  I don’t believe in that future anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Catcher said.

I shook my head.

I remained quiet, but the thoughts were crystal clear in my mind.

I wasn’t sure there was a future, but there were people on my shit list who were actively working against that future.  People who were jeopardizing everything good or outright jeopardizing everything.

Fray and her primordials were on that list.  So were the nobles, doing all the way up the steps to the Lord King himself.  And it was petty, and it was small, but Professor Hayle was on that list too, because he’d hurt Lillian like he did.  Because he was ultimately in charge of what had come to pass with Gordon and with Jamie both.

There was a hole inside of me where my ideal had always been.  I was conspicuously aware of it.  I was aware that I’d once been able to fill it with the closeness and care of the other Lambs.  Jamie now struggled to occupy that space, which had grown wider with every goodbye I’d said.  Jamie, who held himself at arm’s length, or who I held at arm’s length.  Or both.

Jamie, who I could never ever repay for being at my side here, no matter what I did with our remaining years.

Absently, I drew out a lockpick from my kit, and began using it to pick any residual food out of my teeth.  After some consideration, I got one of the strongest picks, to really get in there, my thoughts somewhere else entirely.

Jamie was talking, I realized.  “…barely different from Sylvester, I guess.  But I’ve read the books, and I think it sums up the difference.  A conversation we had once.  I think I hope for a kinder future than Sylvester imagines possible.”

“The old Jamie did too,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jamie said, his voice soft.  “But I think the difference is… I don’t want to come across the wrong way and alienate you.”

I shook my head.

“He came from a gentler place than I did,” Jamie said.  “He’d never, up to a point, been hurt, not until Sub Rosa.  Even then, she was… his first thought, on hearing of her death, was how tragic it was.  He was like that in a lot of ways, about a lot of things.  Gentle, unaware of the world even though he paid such accurate attention to it.  When reality slapped him in the face, it slapped him hard.”

I winced.

I’d been that reality, toward that end.

I clenched my fists, resting them on the fence to either side of my rear end.

“You’re different?” I asked, managing to sound different.  “Harder-hearted?”

“I don’t know,” Jamie said.  “I read the texts, saw everything from an almost purely objective standpoint.  I could see the naivety, even when I was only months into understanding the world.  I didn’t want to be that.”

I nodded.

“It’s why I didn’t read the adventure books with the same zeal,” he said.  “I avoided fiction.  I wanted to focus on living in this world.  I focused on being wary, so I wasn’t a tragic farce of repeated mistakes.”

“That’s why you were so hard on me,” I said.

“One reason.  We’ve talked about some of the others.  But I was hard on everyone, everything, in a way.  I’m only now learning to relax,” he said.  He smiled a little, “To stop, listen to music and have tea.”

“You wanted,” Catcher cut into the dialogue between Jamie and me, “To avoid heartbreak?”

“I am heartbreak,” Jamie said.  “Every time Sylvester looks at me, I see a glimmer of it.  Earlier today, he told me that he might never be able to put it  behind him.”

There was a hint of emotion in that last sentence that I hadn’t expected.  Jamie was usually so good at keeping it under wraps.

Dog gave me a look.  It was a good look, if he was trying to make me feel guilty or get me to say something.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” I said.

“I know,” Jamie said.  “I know.  But for someone who was so fixated on the future, maybe you’d have better luck if you could let go of the past?”

Back to the ‘new Jamie’ who had challenged me so bitterly in our first meetings.

I was going to say something more, but Dog’s head rose from the ground.

“They’re here?” I asked.

Dog and Catcher both nodded.

“Alright,” I said.  I kicked Jamie lightly on the shoulder.  “You and me.  We’re going to finish this conversation.”

“If you want to, Sy.  I don’t really know what there is to say,” he said.

He gave my foot a tug, and I dropped from the fence, landing with both feet squarely on the ground.  I could see the group approaching now.

Soldiers, not all that many, and the mercenaries working with Dog and Catcher.

The blonde woman we’d seen earlier was wearing someone else’s coat, shivering.  Something about her seemed eerily familiar.  Her augmentations and alterations were crude.  Back-alley.  Candida’s had been mishmash, once, but these were bottom-of-the-barrel.

I could make out the Bruno, as well as a second Bruno with a heavy gun that looked like it could take down elephants or elephantine warbeasts.  There was a man with treated skin that looked permanently charred and a fuel tank at his back, and another woman that looked fairly ordinary.

The soldiers drew their guns as they approached Dog, Catcher, Jamie and me.  I felt my heart skip a beat.  That ‘dead or alive’ request.  I could so easily be a ‘dead’.

“There’s no need for that,” Catcher said.  “They’re being cooperative.”

The guns didn’t waver.  As the soldiers drew nearer, it became clear who the guns were aimed at.

Dog huffed out a noise of annoyance and confusion.  Soldiers tensed and shifted their grips on their guns.

“What’s this?” Catcher asked, now that a full third of the guns present were aimed in his direction.

The Bruno with the gun held up a paper.  It was the same big piece that I’d given Jamie.  The same paper Jamie had left behind in the bakery.

On that paper, replicated with care, were Dog and Catcher’s faces, a ‘Wanted: Alive’ message in nice bold letters, and a description of the pair.  The number for the order, the signature of the man in charge who’d given the order, even the terminology, it was on point.

Catcher turned his head to look at me.

“Your fellows have explained the situation as they understand it,” the head soldier spoke.  “This goes easiest if you cooperate.”

Dog huffed out a noise.  Catcher swatted Dog on the nose with his mancatcher.

“We’ll cooperate.  It doesn’t change the outcome in the end.  Hand the Lambs off to the other mercenaries and they’ll handle the remainder.”

A very unimpressed looking Bruno, still the one with the gun, tapped the poster, middle paragraph.  Catcher was too far away to read, but the implication was clear.

The police officer simply recited from the paragraph, “A habit of choosing children as quarry, under the guise of-”

“I get it,” Catcher said.

“Good.  We’re going to take you in.  All of you.  The moment we’re able, we’ll reach out to the Capitol and ask about the warrant numbers.  We’ll see which of the warrants are real.  We’ll devote the resources we can to handling this situation, keeping what their alleged poster is saying in mind.”

Catcher seemed to get just a little bit angrier with every realization.  “And I am assuming the phones we would need to use to reach the capitol are busy, given the quarantine?  And that the resources you have are limited at best?”

“It will only be a few hours at most,” the captain said.  “The rest of your papers seemed to pass muster, this is just a formality.”

Dog growled.

“A formality they arranged from start to finish,” Catcher said.

“I won’t deny the strong possibility.  If I were more sure, I might shoot the black-haired one.”

“I’d be tempted to encourage you to,” Catcher said.

No hard feelings, you said, I thought to myself.

“We’ll cooperate,” Catcher said, growling the words, while giving me and Jamie a dark look.  “But I have a favor to ask, first.  It costs you nothing.”

The cell door slammed.

So far, things were going according to plan.  They’d even put Jamie and me together in the same cell.

With the quarantine in effect, the number of soldiers was thin.  The bulk of the men in uniform were out there, guarding bridges and controlling the flow of traffic around the city.  Here in the jailhouse, where only a dozen cells were arranged along a long hallway, there were only a few guards.

Catcher, with his natural strength, could have bent the bars and walked out.  But he was working alongside the Academy, and that would be a sensitive deal.

No, even with his strength, there were good chances that there were measures in place, or it would draw undue attention.

The simple fact of the matter, the crux of the plan I’d worked out with Jamie, was that if we got arrested alongside Dog and Catcher, I was fairly certain I could get out of the cell more easily than they could get out of whatever was devised for them.  Dog would be in some special holding cell far, far away from us.  The fact that they would need and want to reunite would buy us even more time.

The contract with the Academy was just one more barrier keeping them inside their cells.

But Catcher had managed one last laugh.  He, given the nature of what he did, carried restraints.

He’d had every single damned set of them placed on Jamie and me.  Our arms were bound behind our backs, and restraints of various sizes and shapes.  Even the fingers of my right hand were bound, with thimble-like caps over the ends.  The weights likely totaled twenty-five pounds in all.

I opened my mouth, and used my tongue to lift the lockpick free of the gap between gums and cheek.  Shortly after, I had the second pick out.  I spit them out onto the cot, and then sat down on the bed, to pick them up with my one hand.

“This is going to be a chore,” Jamie murmured, as I worked the thinner pick into the lock that wrapped around my right hand.  “Looks like a three-pin cylinder.  Move closer to me, I’ll try to hold the cylinder so it doesn’t rotate as you pick it.”

“How amusing,” Catcher said, in the least amused tone I’d heard from him today, his voice echoing to us from the far end of the hallway.  “I told myself the same thing, when I realized it was you two I was chasing down.  This is going to be a chore.”

“You don’t sound very surprised at this,” I said.

“I knew something was up with that lunch,” Catcher said.

“The lunch had nothing to do with it,” I said, my voice raised.  “If you hadn’t eaten with us, it still would have turned out pretty much the same.  I wouldn’t punish you for-“

“Shut up!” someone screamed, interrupting.

“You shut up!” Catcher bellowed, loud and with a monstrous voice.

There was no retort.

Our old friend was in a bad mood, it seemed.

“I wouldn’t punish you for playing fair with us,” I said.  “Sets a bad precedent if we’re-“

I felt the lock click.  I freed my hand.

“If we’re going to cross paths a few more times.”

“Ah, so you know,” Catcher said.  “They will let me out of here.  They will release Dog.  We will find you, Sylvester.  We don’t let our quarry go.”

Jamie muttered, “I’ll be so happy if a day ever comes where someone doesn’t remind me of something I already know.  Do my wrists next?  These wire cuffs are digging in something fierce.”

Getting my hands to the right place to work the lock was hard.  I had to turn my back to Jamie and bend over.  I leaned over with my forehead against the bars for balance.

“That one,” Jamie confirmed.

It had to be five pins.  Such a chore.  At least I could pry the lock as I worked the pins.

One pin, two pins… three…

The fourth took some doing.

The fifth, too, ended up being difficult.  Just when I thought I might get it, I heard footsteps.

I aborted, and changed position.  We waited patiently as the lone guard made his rounds, checking on every cell.

He stopped at the end of the hallway, and I could hear Catcher talking.

I was straining to listen, and trying to decide if I needed to put the hand-restraint back on, when Jamie nudged me.  It felt weird, the elbow against my arm.  Jamie wasn’t normally one for physical contact.  When he did allow it, he was always very measured about it.

I looked where he was indicating, and I saw.

In the cell to the left of the one that sat opposite ours, a man lay on his cot.  He was breathing very quickly, and he was spasming periodically.

Between his sleeve and the glove he wore, I could see the marks.  As though a hand had touched him and burned him, with blotches the size of a fingerprint or a random portion of a handprint.  The mark was so red it looked like he was openly bleeding.

Calling for quarantine or attention to the problem was risky.  The guard was going to finish his route, passing down the other side of the hall, and he was going to see.  Things were going to go downhill from there.  It could so very easily see us sealed up inside here for good.

Jamie and I didn’t even need to communicate.  He turned his back to me so I had access to his wrists, and I started working on his locks.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.05 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.5

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“He modified the Smythe Bullard,” I said, under my breath, “He filed down the seam.”

“Catcher likes to fiddle with his gadgets.”

“It’s my go-to practice lock when I’m re-learning and I can’t get it.”

“You can’t get it because it’s your go-to,” Jamie said.  “Muscle memory.  I run into snags like that, things that should feel natural that catch me every time.”

“So I should forget?  If I had a fresh dose of Wyvern, I might be able to, but-”

“Keep at it,” Jamie said.

Five locks down, six if I included the hand-lock Catcher had placed on my left hand.  I was almost done freeing Jamie.

On my sixth attempt, probably owing to the fact that my previous attempts had scratched a faint groove in the tin of the lock, I was able to get that hair of traction I needed to get the lock to start rotating.

I turned around to check the next lock – the cuffs were like manacles, attached to his upper arms, with a bar running between them instead of a chain.  I’d seen it as Catcher had pulled it out of his jacket.  The lock was more about strength and having a configuration that could be neatly packaged together than it was about being fancy or hard to crack.  I shut my eyes, and did it by feel.  Three pins to lift.  Nothing complicating my attempts.

I could hear the guard making his way down the hall.  He didn’t even have the courtesy to walk slowly.

“Got you,” I said, gripping the bar so it didn’t fall apart and clatter to the ground.

“Give me the picks,” he said.  I took a second to put the lock down.  Before I’d even set it on the bed, Jamie had snatched it from my hand.  He grabbed for the picks.  “Hurry.”

“Hurry, you say, like I haven’t been,” I griped.

“The fellow across the hall is getting worse, fast enough that I can tell,” Jamie said, under his breath.  He removed the first lock at my wrists, then tugged the next lock down.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I can remember what those welts looked like when I last saw them, and I can look at them now-” Jamie said, pausing as he looked over my shoulder, picks still working at the locks.  “They’ve spread.  More spots, old spots are bigger, and there are dark centers to the biggest ones.”

“Right,” I said.

Jamie removed the second lock.  The clatter momentarily drowned out the guard’s footsteps.

“Damn,” I said, quiet.  “Did he put all of the easy ones on me?  Is this like the barber with the bad haircut?”

“No complicated ones so far,” Jamie said, his voice a hush.  “Same ideas apply to most.  Moment I run into one with an unfamiliar concept, though, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

I heard a sudden shout, then a string of cuss-words.

“It hurts,” the sick man mewled the words.  I leaned forward to see better, only for Jamie to jerk me back in his direction and continue picking.  The guard was a matter of six steps from our location.

Jamie very quickly and quietly removed the cuffs he’d been picking.

“Stand back and away from the bars!  Move!  Now stay there!”

There was an edge of panic to the man’s voice.

The guard strode past us, straight for the door, not even looking our way.  I shut my eyes and shook my head.

We hadn’t been fast enough.  Now things got harder.

“I’m stuck,” Jamie said.  “There’s a lock I don’t know how to crack.  I try to apply tension and it just rotates.  I think I have to have it at a specific rotation with specific pin placement?”

“I dealt with one of those.  Do a full rotation, tap the first pin as you go around, see if you can find the space it’s supposed to go into.  Once you get it, hold it as steady as-”

“I already did the full rotation.”

“Then do the second pin.  The tallest pin will end up being the one that works,” I said.

“The rotating cylinder is sitting inside another cylinder.  It might be that both cylinders have to be at the right rotation?”

“What?” I asked.  I tried to twist my head around to see.  “How the hell does that work?”

“I don’t know!” Jamie said.  “And hold still!  I’m checking and I think there are a few false notches to catch the pin.”

Catcher’s gravelly voice came from the other end of the hallway.  “Having fun?”

“He can hear us,” I said, speaking quieter.

“I can, Sylvester,” Catcher said.  He sounded smug.

“You’re a butt, Catcher!”

“I had those custom made, you know,” he said.  “Call me names all you want, Sy.  You’ll still have your hands bound behind your back until I hand over the keys.”

Keys.  Plural.

I glanced at Jamie.

“There’s only one slot for a key,” Jamie said.  He double checked, moving my arms this way and that.

“Cylinder nestled in one cylinder… one key nestled in another key?  Mechanical key, changes form as the other key slides in.  A wedge shape, or-”

“Got it in one, Sylvester,” Catcher taunted me.

I knew what the problem was, and I knew just how unlikely it was for Jamie to figure out a way to pick the lock.  Alone, at least.

“Do me a favor,’ I said.  “Help me get a good look at the thing?  I might be able to get my thumb around and hold something or jiggle something.”

Jamie slid the cuffs as far down my wrists as they would go.  They’d been around the thickest part of my forearm, and now sat around my wrists and a portion of my hands.  Jamie held the cuffs still while I contorted my shoulders, striving to see around behind me to the cuffs.

The guard who’d been walking the length of the hallway returned.  He carried a stepladder and a sheet that could have been a flag if the dimensions were different.  It bore a asclepius symbol in white, snake wound around rod, contained within the belly and head of a red bird that had its wings outstretched.  The bird was crowned in red.

“Quarantine,” Jamie said under his breath.

“Guard,” Catcher said, his voice carrying.  “You should know the boys in the cell behind you are escaping their restraints.  They will be out of their cell shortly.”

The guard turned, giving us a look.  Jamie didn’t even bother to hide his lack of restraints.  I could see the guard’s expression change.  He was young, fresh faced, with eyebrows that had been plucked very neatly.  He was handsome, but a very artfully and effortfully put-together sort of handsome.  I suspected there were girls out there who very much liked that.

“I’ll get to it in a minute,” the guard said.  He stepped up onto the little ladder and hooked up one corner of the sheet on the wall.

“Help me!” the man in the cell begged.

The man ran his hand against the edge of the sheet as he stepped down off the ladder, fixing it to the wall.  He then walked to the other side of the cell, then stepped back onto the ladder, hooking up another corner and sealing another side of the sheet.

His efforts to seal the bottom edge of the sheet were frustrated by the man’s hand sticking through the bars.  Fingers clutched at one bottom edge of the sheet, fierce tugs coinciding with pleading cries.  The soldier had elbow-length gloves on, but he still seemed shy of the reaching hand.

“Can’t figure this,” Jamie said.  He let go of the shackles.

My attention went back to the shackles, my wrists, fingers and thumb working to move the shackles back up to where they were more comfortable and weren’t squeezing my hands.

No.  No…

“Give me your foot,” I ordered Jamie.

“My foot?”  Jamie raised his shoe, while I stooped down.  He got my intention immediately, and put his hands on my shoulders, setting the shoe on the chain of the shackles.

I had to fight to stay upright and not have Jamie’s whole body weight drive me backward with my knuckles and fingers striking the ground behind me.  It got even harder as I felt the damage the shackles were doing as they were driven down and past my hands.

They slid down past my hands clattering to the floor.

The benefits of being small.  The cuffs had been cinched as tight as they could get, and they were still too big around.

Jamie had the remaining shackles off a moment later.

I gingerly rubbed my wrists and arms, with much of the gingerness coming from the fact that I’d scraped off much of the flesh at the base knuckles of each pinky and thumb.  I was bleeding a fair bit.

I flashed Jamie a grin.  His returning smile was more reserved.

Right.  The quarantine.

The soldier was just finishing up.  Jamie and I turned our attention to the bed.

I removed the case from the pillow.  Jamie, meanwhile, moved roughly half of the collected shackles to the upper end of the bed.  He folded up the top sheet so it had the shackles in it, while I moved shackles into the pillowcase.

“They’re up to something,” Catcher observed.

“I know!” the soldier said.  he was still working on sealing the sheet in place.  Not a perfect seal.  But if there was anything airborne, it would help to keep things contained.  The glue at the edges of the sheet would also slow smaller parasites.  “I’ll deal with it in a minute.  Hell, if you lot couldn’t have waited another ten minutes to start getting sick and causing trouble, I could have finished my shift.  Now I’m stuck in this quarantine with you for the next three to twelve hours-”

His words elicited insults, shouts of dismay and other commentary from the collected prisoners in the little jailhouse.

“-while the next shifts lock down the building.  It can’t be easy.”

The jeers and insults continued.  Some people were throwing balled up paper at the soldier now.  Some of that paper was wet.

I glanced at the little toilet in the corner of our cell.  I knew where the other prisoners were getting that water.

I was glad I’d kept the biggest of the lockpicks.  I turned my attention to the cell door, both picks in hand.

It didn’t take long.  There were no tricks.  Only an inordinate number of very heavy pins.

“They’ve opened the door,” Catcher observed, his tone patient.

The soldier was still ignoring us.  The sticky part at the edge of the sheet had stuck to the man’s arm, and he was doing his damndest to hold on to the sheet.  With the clumsy gloves he wore, the soldier couldn’t retrieve the sheet.  All his efforts were doing was keeping the man in the cell from tearing down the sheet altogether.

I hefted my sack of shackles.  I paused.

A month ago, I’d moved the ring at my thumb to my finger.  It felt out of place there, but it being out of place was a good thing.  It made me aware of it, and colored my actions.  I might have paid far more attention to it, had Jamie not been around, but he was, and for most occasions, that was sufficient.

This was different.

I rapped my knuckles against the back of his head.  “I got you.  Sack of shackles to the back of the head.  Brains splattered out across the floor.”

He twisted around, giving me an incredulous look.

“We’re going to help you, and relieve you of your keys,” I said.  “Then you’re going to take about five or six steps that way, and we’re going to lock you in the cell we were just in.  Agreed?  Because the alternative is that I pick up this sack, or you stop doing what you’re doing and deal with both of us at once, and… you don’t want to do that.”

He shifted his grip on the sheet, rising to a standing position, and kicked at the bars, trying to strike at the man’s hand.

The red blotches on the wrist were angrier than before.  Now that I was close, I could see the protrusions at the center.  Like Jamie had said, there were dark spots in the center of the largest, ugliest spots.  Each spot had a little spine sticking out of it, barely thicker than a hair.

“Maybe you’ve got a whole line of people who’ve said the same thing, but I don’t think my pride as a soldier of the Crown will let me do that,” the soldier said.

He winced and ducked his head a little as someone threw sodden paper at his face.   It smacked against his temple.

“I’ll tell you what’ll happen if you press this,” I said.  I indicated Jamie.  “He and-”

I indicated the hand, “And he are going to keep you occupied while I walk away.  I’m going to go to the cells, and I’m going to open them just like I opened mine.  Then it’s going to be… three and a half against one.  I’ll open another cell, and it’ll be four and a half against one.  Do you see how this goes?”

He diverted his attention as he focused on keeping the man from tearing down the sheet.

“I’m playing nice.  I don’t play nice very often,” I said.  “Please don’t make me take the other course.  Because at least one of the guys I free is going to hurt, maim, or kill you.”

I could see him draw in a breath, puffing himself up, tensing as he drew together the courage to stand up to me and face his fate.

“Take the offer,” Catcher said.

The soldier looked over.

“I’m on your side,” Catcher said.  “I want to take them in, keep the peace, maintain the quarantine.  But this isn’t worth fighting.  You won’t stop them, and you won’t change their minds.  The best you’ll be able to do is take out the one with the glasses fast and tackle the smaller one with the mouth.  But it’s not worth the risk.  Poison, hidden weapons, deceit, surprising displays of skill… let them help you, for all of our sakes.”

It was perhaps the most I’d ever heard Catcher say in one go.  His rough-edged voice made him sound like the grandfather to end all grandfathers, but was still strong enough to be a dad or an army sergeant.  He commanded attention when he wanted to, which was relatively rare.  Most of the time he simply used his voice and a few choice words to scare messes into the pants of people he was tracking.

I saw the soldier set his jaw, then turn his back to Jamie and me, bending down to adjust the cover.

“How important is this damn thing anyway?” I asked.  I stuck a leg through the bars to step on the sheet with the toes of my shoe, adjusting as needed to give the soldier slack when necessary.

“It’s important,” the man said.  “Don’t let him touch your skin.”

“Won’t,” I said.  “Even odds it won’t affect me.”

“Mm.”

“It hurts!” the man inside the cell screamed.  He reached for another part of the sheet and I stepped on his fingers.  I shifted my weight to trap them for the seconds the soldier needed to fix the sheet in place.  Jamie was fixing part of the sheet that had come away from the wall.

“There,” the soldier said, as I pulled my foot back and he pressed the sheet down.  The prisoner’s hands pressed against the sheet and pried against the place where it met the floor and found no leeway.

“It’s inside my veins!” the man’s cry was ragged.

The soldier stood.  He faced me.

“You going to cooperate?” I asked.  “Stick to your word?”

“I didn’t make any promises,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m going to cooperate,” he said, before I could say anything further.  “But I want you to listen to me.”

I nodded.

He dropped his voice so that others wouldn’t easily hear.  “The warbeasts that came back from Lugh?  They had some skin problems.  The skin problems became growths, and the growths flowered.  We think that it spreads by air once it flowers.  But we’re not sure.  We can’t know yet.  It’s still early, understand?  You need to stay, until they know.”

“I know the approach the Academy takes to problems.  I’m- ” I said, stopping short, before indicating Jamie, “we’re one of those problems.  They burn everything down.  They kill the bystanders.  It’s what they tried to do in Lugh.”

“I was in Lugh,” the soldier said.

“So were we,” Jamie said.  “You know it’s true, then.  You know what they’ll do here, if it’s that serious.”

“I trust they’ll find an answer,” the soldier said.  Stubborn to his core.

“I don’t,” I said.  “How long do the symptoms take to show up?”

“I don’t know,” the soldier said.  “It’s random.  That one there in the cell was fine for hours.  No sign.  For others it was quick.  Within an hour.”

Of course the people who’d designed this thing had gone that route.  It had to be as nasty as possible.  I wasn’t an Academy student, but I’d spent enough time around the doctors to know the basics.  Diseases that killed their patients too fast killed off the populations before those populations that could spread them.  Diseases that took too long left too big a window to be cured.  But something variable?

Assuming this disease even killed.  Assuming it was a disease.

“There’s no reason to assume it’ll have spread to any of us here,” I said.  “No reason to believe it was airborne.”

“We can’t know,” the soldier said.

“I do know that if my friend and I stay and let ourselves get caught, then we’re going to get dragged back to the Academy and for all intents and purposes, we’ll be dead.  We’re going to make a break for it.”

I glanced at Jamie as I said it, almost but not quite making it a question.  He nodded at me.

The soldier shook his head.  Then he walked over to the cell Jamie and I had occupied.  He started to shut the door, and I hurried to put my foot out, blocking it from closing.

“Keys,” I said, holding out my hand.

He folded his arms.

Man.  For a pretty-boy, he was stubborn.  Bulldoggish.

I reached past the door and to his belt.  He didn’t fight me as I lifted the key-ring free of his belt.

Quickly, I walked down the length of the hallway.  I surveyed the prisoners as I passed them, giving them a quick read.  Then I began unlocking cells.

“You could break out of that cell,” I observed aloud, as I drew nearer to Catcher.

“I could,” he said.  “But I told the Academy I would cooperate with its every order.  They’re looking for any excuse to take me in after I deliver my quarry.  I think they think they can grill me for information on Fray.  I’m not going to give them anything they can use.”

“They’ll cheat you anyway,” I said.

“They’ll try.  I know how these games are played, Sylvester.”

I nodded slowly, then turned to the next prisoner and unlocked the cell.

“My group isn’t the only one after you two,” Catcher said.  “They’ll be on you the moment you’re outside.  There are others who were watching and waiting to see if we failed and if they could swoop in.  Scavengers.  They’ll brave the quarantine because they think they’re immune, like you or me should be, or because they’re reckless.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  He took a step back away from the door, then sat down on the bed.

That was that, then.  He’d warned me.  The rest was up to me.

As I walked away, I heard him mutter, “I can’t believe you slipped those cuffs.”

I grinned.

Warily, the prisoners were gathering in the hallway.  A pair of them were advancing on the cell that held the soldier.

“Touch him, and we’re going to have a problem,” I said, in my best ‘authority’ voice, hoping to impart something similar to my voice that Catcher had managed with his.

I was a little surprised when they listened.  Mauer would have been proud.

“You listen to what we say,” I said, indicating Jamie again.  “You stay close, and we get free.  They won’t have too many armed men handling the quarantine, so listen to me and be smart about this.”

Nobody talked back.  A few people shifted position, clearly uncomfortable.  The ones I’d have to watch.

It reminded me of my motley group in Lugh, though these guys were mostly thugs.  I found myself wishing I had a regular supply of people to draw from, instead of having to constantly work with improvised groups and read the people I was commanding to look for the tells.  It would be so convenient.

I looked at Jamie.

“Thinking about the building layout,” he said.  “We’ll want to go around to the side.  They’ll be setting up the main quarantine point out front, something on each of the ground-floor windows, doors barred, barricaded and sealed.”

I nodded.  “Punch through?”

“Punch through.”

I addressed the group.  “We move on the side door.  Disable but don’t hurt or kill the guards.  Once we’re through, we go our separate ways.”

There were a few nods.

Jamie and I worked in concert to push open the doors at the end of the hallway opposite Catcher.  There was a sheet erected to seal the doors, much as one had been used to seal that particular cell.

“This is a bad one,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “Fray?”

“Might be.”

Jamie ended up leading the way, negotiating our path through the hallways and stairwells.  We caught some brief glimpses of people, but with only a little wariness and care in how we picked our path, Jamie, the five enlisted criminals and I were all able to slip by without hearing any call of alarm.

We started down the hallway, and Jamie raised a hand, warning.  He pointed at the door and gestured for my benefit.

End of the road.

I picked the two biggest guys.  “You two through the door first.  They won’t have that many guards.  One or two doing the seal, probably.  Get your hands on their guns before they do.  If they’re wearing the gloves, they’ll be clumsy.  Be confident, be fast, and grab them.”

That got some nods.

I raised my hand, fingers extended, and then dropped it, giving the go-ahead.

Fun.

Funner still to have two beefy bastards charge down the hallway and through the door, with Jamie, me, and the other criminals right on their heels.

The effect was surprisingly anticlimactic.  The guards outside were dealt with fast enough that Jamie and I didn’t even get to play a role.  I reached for one’s belt and collected a gun, then grabbed Jamie’s wrist, tugging him along as we changed course, using the short wall that surrounded the police station for cover as we put some distance between ourselves and the door.

People were staring, but their attention was on the bigger criminals and the fight.  There were other soldiers and doctors approaching the building, likely to help with quarantine measures, but we were small and we were non-threatening.  There weren’t enough people on the street or near the building to point the finger at us and let out a cry of warning.

The convicts I’d enlisted had been the ones with the tattoos and the body language that had suggested they would follow orders.  They hadn’t been the types, going by my gut, that I’d felt would easily slip the noose and escape into the city.  Maybe one or two would, given some luck, but that was a dim ‘maybe’.

Given the unlikeliness of the disease spreading by air or proximity or the most chance of chance contact between glove and shoe-sole, pre-flowering, I suspected we weren’t about to be the ones who were unleashing an epidemic.

I didn’t feel great about it, but I did feel great about being alive and free.

“Sy,” Jamie said, cutting into my thoughts.

He had my attention, and with a pointed finger, he directed it.

“What am I looking at?” I asked, as I saw a man walking down the street.  He had a hat and a raincoat on.

“His neck,” Jamie said.

I looked, and I saw.  A red dot, big around as a thumbprint.

I checked the coast was clear, then made a detour, approaching the man.

“Sir,” I called out.  “Sir!”

He turned his attention to me.

“You’ve got the rash,” I said, a little breathless.

“What?” he asked.  “Where?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” I said.  “Because then you’ll touch it and it’ll be on your hands.  But go to the police station, back that way.  They’re distributing the cure already.  If you hurry, you can get it before it spreads and gets painful.”

He looked deeply concerned.

Jamie added, “I hear it’s so painful you can feel it moving through your veins.”

I nodded fervently.

The man reversed course, heading to the police station.

We’d ruined his day, but at least he would be quarantined.

Why was I getting the impression this thing was the furthest thing from being under control, even with this small bit of assistance on our parts?

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.06 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Catcher’s friends are going to be on us any minute now,” Jamie said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Whatever this is, it looks bad.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I looked around.  “I’m thinking Fray.”

“How?  Why?”

“How is… I don’t know.  Prepared well in advance, co-opted from someone who specializes in this sort of thing, or maybe it was inspired by the primordials.  Lillian said something about the primordials being a way to inspire some really out-there research.”

“That’s the how.  What’s the why?”

“Forcing the nobles’ hands?  They want to use the new guns to take down the nobles, and we haven’t heard anything about that.  Maybe the idea is to bait them out?”

“Doesn’t seem like Fray,” Jamie said.

“Lugh was her fault,” I said.  “People died.  A lot more could have.”

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “But it doesn’t seem like her, does it?  She might justify what she did in Lugh by saying that the people would have picked a fight and gotten wiped out sooner or later.  But this… I’ve never talked to her, Sy.  The old Jamie did, but that was only in passing.  I don’t know her, so I only have the outside context, mostly secondhand.”

“Yeah.”

“Catcher said that Fray believes in humanity.  Yes, she got us awfully close to an ugly end, but… does this really feel like something that she would do in service of humanity?”

“Power and control drive the Academy and Crown, but they’re losing their grip on both of those things-”

“I’m not sure about that,” Jamie said.  “Yes, they’ve lost what any other country, power, organization, whatever, would see as a grave loss, but considering what they hold and what they have, I’m not sure it’s more than a drop in the bucket.”

“Conceded,” I said.  “Where was I?  Power, control, Academy, Crown.  Right.  Mauer wants to defeat the Academy and win over the people, and, I dunno, I think back to our first move.  We rallied the people in favor of the Academy, turned them against him.”

“The major players are are striving for one thing, and accomplishing the other?  So Fray is striving to save humanity and is now willing to destroy it?”

“Maybe,” I said.  “Maybe this is Mauer.  But it’s big on a scale that seems Frayish.”

“That I’ll agree with,” Jamie said.

“I want to be a major player,” I said.  I was focused now, still riding the rush from the jailbreak and the intrigue of the quarantine.  I moved with energy, thinking hard while my mind’s eye and my mind’s voice were addressing Jamie, the forefront of my brain almost absentminded, speaking on impulse.  “I want to have minions.  People who follow my orders, look up to me, kiss my shoes and call me sir.”

“Really now.”

“Yeahhh,” I said, drawing out the word.  My detached forebrain was taking point, daydreaming aloud.  “No more just picking up random Jacks and Jills from among Mauer’s expendable troops, or recruiting random prisoners and crossing my fingers.  I want to hand pick.  I want my enemies to go out of their way to invite me to things like the moot at Brechwell.  To have to consider me as a factor in everything they do.”

I glanced at Jamie, who was giving me a bemused look.

“And we,” I said, “will be a force to be reckoned with.  I don’t want to speak for you, but if you want your boots kissed-”

“Ha.”

“Or whatever.  I think you and me, we could look dapper as all-get-out with some suits and the right furnishings.  Me sitting in the chair, you sitting on the edge of the desk, as Peabody the hired thug walks in.  The intimidation in his eyes as we both look at him.”

“Peabody?”

I shrugged.  “We’ll find a Peabody.”

“I like how your brain works, Sy.”

“Thank you, Jamie.”

“Let’s turn that brain to more effective things.”

“Already turned.  We’re on course,” I said.  “This is familiar territory.”

“Is it now?”

“When you’re taking your pre-sleep nap late at night, and I’m making sure we have enough for our ever-absent uncle to pay our rent to our dear landlord, I pass through this area on my way back.”

“Your fence.”

One of my fences.  It took me a few weeks to figure out which of the local fences talk to each other, so I don’t corner myself if I try to play them against each other in a bidding war over whatever I happened to help myself to, and I found out that it’s a pretty close-knit community here.  I had to go pretty far afield.”

“Pretty far afield to the near-center of Tynewear?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“You told me about Jackson near the Marina, and the old man-”

I groaned aloud.  “Don’t do that.  Don’t pick apart things I said to you forever ago that I don’t even remember saying, and draw conclusions.”

Jamie touched my shoulder, making me stop, turn, and face him.  I took a glance around for trouble before meeting his eyes.  He spoke, “I’m going to assume from how you worded things that you have at least three fences you’re playing off each other.  If you’d had only two, you would’ve emphasized different words.”

“I mightn’t’ve!”

“I know how you approach things, Sy.  There’s a third, and this one probably isn’t the old man.  Have you avoided mentioning him on purpose?”

“Yes sir,” I said, adopting a hangdog look.

Why?”

“Because this one is creepy,” I said.

“He’s creepy.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve handled creepy.”

“He’s a different sort of creepy.”

Jamie gave me a long, stern look.

“But this is our best move right now,” I said.  “He likes me.”

Jamie considered for a moment, then relented.  “Okay.”

We picked up our speed, walking briskly.  The streets were dotted with people who seemed completely lost.  People who had routines, jobs, and roles who were being told to stay put, who didn’t know what to do with themselves.

I strongly suspected that Jamie and I were odd in that we’d forged a kind of home here, however temporary it might be.  People here didn’t bake a treat in their kitchen.  They went over to a fancy pants shop with crystal and wood filigree windows and they bought something.  They didn’t rest or entertain at home.  They sought out bars where they could tranquilize themselves with drink and shows where they could entertain themselves with dance, theater and music.  Even in the less well-to-do boatyards, people went out to drink.  Rich and poor, it felt like most people didn’t truly know the comfort and softness of their own beds, because they were blackout drunk when they collapsed into those beds and hung over when they rose from them.

Hyperbole, to be sure, but it was an attitude that played into how so many people were milling around as if every impulse in their brains pushed them to go somewhere and do something, and they were being expected to stay put.

We navigated our way to a house.  Tall and narrow, it was made narrower still by being divided into thirds, with one third being a shop.  Engravings, etchings, fittings and custom work.  The ‘custom work’ would be in the capacity of a back-alley doctor unless a member of the police or the Academy stopped in, in which case the question would be met with innocent stares and talk of jewelry.

A bell jingled as I opened the door.  I let Jamie go in first, looking back to make sure we weren’t being followed.  I didn’t want to bring trouble to anyone’s door, not when we needed friends.

“Wow,” Jamie said, taking in the shop.  Everything within was beautiful, and all put together, it was something otherworldly.  Crystal, gold, fine woodwork, silver, jewels and more were arranged around us.  A great deal of it was tagged, with names and no address.  Even the tags had gold lettering.

Responding to the bell, a man made his way into the shop from the adjoining house.  He saw me and beamed.  Like Jamie, he wore his hair long, but the hair hung down one side of his face.  He decorated himself not with jewelry, but with tools and kits.  The breast of his jacket had a leather case with a row of fine watchmaker’s tools on display.  At his collarbone, like a pendant, was a jeweler’s lens, evocative of some large gemstone.  He was twenty or so and brimmed with youthful energy, yet he seemed to have all of the confidence of a much older man.  Rather than an older man who’d made himself look younger, I instead deemed him a young man with a great deal of natural ability and talent.

He moved behind his counter, neatly setting things aside, so the space was clear, then rested his hands on the counter, leaning forward.

“Hello, Jer,” I said.

“Simon,” he said.  He continued to smile, unable to sit still.  “Quarantine, hm?”

“Looks like a plague,” I said.  “A bad one.”

He made a face, the smile faltering.  He glanced at Jamie, then back to me, eyebrow quirking.

“We can talk freely,” I said.

“Oh good,” he said, breathing an audible sigh of relief.  “Do you have anything for me?”

“So greedy, Jer.”

“I am!” he said, without shame.  “I try to indulge in every single sin that I can, and greed, obviously, is foremost among them.  Do you have anything?”

“I don’t,” I said.

He deflated a little, then rallied.  He smiled, and it was mischievous.  “I thought perhaps you were going to offer me the… boy?”

“Boy,” Jamie confirmed.

“No,” I said, “He’s mine.”

Jer threw up his hands in surrender, as if he might be seen as wanting to put up a fight, in the wrong light.  “Not that I’d be interested.  My eyes are only for girls, and I like my girls perfect… and older.”

“I know, Jer,” I said.  I wasn’t going to encourage him.  “Listen, we’re in trouble.”

The dash of humor in his expression disappeared.  Now serious, he straightened, withdrawing his hands from the midpoint of the counter to the edge, gripping it.  “What sort?”

“Bounty hunters,” I said.

“You have a bounty?” he asked, surprised, then immediately changed tacks.  “Of course you have a bounty, you productive little rascal.  We can’t have that!  It makes my evening when you pay your visits.  If you were dead or captured, you’d never visit me again.”

I nodded.

“Which bounty hunter is it?”

“Dog,” I said, “And Catcher.”

“Two of them!  Sounds vaguely familiar, and… not local?”

“And a woman with blond hair and modified hands,” I added.

“A ghost, actually,” Jamie clarified.  “One of Percy’s.  I remember my, uh, friend’s sketches of their faces.”

I shot him a look.  “Really?”

“Or someone used one for raw materials and copied the face,” Jamie said, shrugging.  “I don’t know.”

“Ghost with modified hands, then, and two Brunos, and there were others,” I said.

“There’ll be more, if Catcher wasn’t fibbing,” Jamie said.  “Soon, too.  Savvy ones will be keeping an eye out for where their competition is going.  More bloodthirsty bounty hunters.”

I nodded my agreement.

“Ah huh,” Jer said.  He frowned.  “I suppose they’ve realized it’s not really two or three different burglars that are raiding homes at night, sometimes even when residents are sleeping inside?”

“Something like that,” I said.  “I don’t suppose you know a quick way out of Tynewear?  By water or tunnel?”

Jer shook his head.

Didn’t think so.  “Then we need tools and weapons, and the jailors relieved me of my wallet, which I didn’t happen to pick up.  Not that it had much in it.  Whatever you’re willing to offer, I need it on credit.”

“Ah, Simon, my friend.  You’re lucky I’m fond of you.  I’m a little less fond of you now that I’m suspicious these people are after you for a good reason.  Perhaps you got your hands on something that other people valued very highly, and that something somehow didn’t cross my counter, even for consideration?”

“Nothing like that, don’t worry,” I said.  “Just murders.”

“Ah,” Jer said.  He nodded, as if this was matter of fact.  There was humor to his voice as he repeated, “Just murders.”

Abruptly, he turned.  His hand smacked a bell that hung behind the counter.  I saw Jamie tense.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Yes,” Jer said.  “Only the tea bell.”

“Ah,” Jamie said.

“I adore elegance,” Jer said.  “If I were to offer you something from my personal stock, it would be along the lines of…”

He knelt behind his counter.  He was just tall enough that I could see the top of his head.  “This.  And this.  I suppose I can part with this, too.”

To say Jer was dedicated to elegance was something of an understatement.  The guns he kept behind the counter, which were likely only ever seen by thugs looking to rob him, if anyone, were as ornate as any jewelry, crusted with silver leaf, engraved from the tip of the barrel to the base of the grip.  The long knife was so fancy that I wondered if it would even service in combat.

Going by Jamie’s look, he might have thought the same thing.

“That’s generous of you,” I said.  “But I was hoping for something a little less beautiful and something…”

“Uglier?” Jamie suggested.

“Uglier,” Jer restated, as if he needed to frame the idea in his head.

“Something that could make a mess,” I said.  “Tidy and beautiful won’t work.  Those pistols, I could empty both of them into Catcher, reload, empty them into him again, then take two minutes of time with that knife while he stood still and let me work on him, and once my time was up, he would arrest me and drag me off.  Dog is bigger, tougher.”

The knife thing was only true because it looked so horribly inefficient.  Bits curled off from the sides, which limited how deep I could get it, and the fancy handle would make it hard to swing with any force.  Even the pommel was pointed, so I couldn’t press against it with one hand while thrusting with the other, to help drive it home.

“Ah,” Jer said.  “There is one thing.”

“One thing would be excellent,” I said.  “Whatever it is.”

“Except I promised it to someone else.  It passed into my hands, and I’ve yet to tell that someone else that I have it in stock…”

Jer’s stitched servant entered the room.  She reminded me of Fray’s stitched girl, whatever her name had been.  Like Fray’s stitched, the seams and actual stitches were hidden, where sheer skill hadn’t hidden them entirely.  She was beautiful, and dressed in a way that accented that beauty without being vulgar.  She didn’t look like a lady of the evening.  She looked like a woman who any man might be happy to have on his arm at some fancy event.  High quality and expensive.

Relegated to serving tea.  She set down the tray with the kettle and lone cup.

“Thank you, darling,” Jer said.  The word got a genuine-seeming smile in response.  Automatically, as if he’d forgotten we were present, he touched her chin to angle her head and kissed her.

The kiss alone might have made me uncomfortable, considering that the woman was dead, but the look in her eyes, as she stared off into points unknown, her eyes darting left and then right, as if possessed of a different sort of life than the one that controlled her mouth as she very automatically kissed her owner…

He stepped back and away and waved her off in the same moment, returning his attention to us.

“Tea?” he asked. He raised his hand from beneath the counter, holding a faintly dusty cup.

“No thank you,” Jamie said, very curt.

“No, but thank you,” I said, echoing Jamie with somewhat more courtesy.  “We’re in a hurry.”

Jer nodded, using a handkerchief to clean the cup.  “Lock the shop door, then come around the counter.”

I touched Jamie’s shoulder, pushing him lightly toward the counter, as I turned to go lock the door.  I quickly set the locks before reversing course, joining Jamie as we went behind the counter.

Jer was dragging a hidden panel out from the base of the shelf.  The glass display of jewelry and leather bits appeared to sit on a wooden base, and the wooden base had a drawer.

He stepped back to let us investigate.

Cushioned by hay, there were six different sorts of explosive packed into the box.  Grenades, smoke, landmines, mines with cords, and other, heavier ones buried further down.  They might, judging by the shape, have been rockets.

Jer prepared his tea, stirring by way of teaspoon as he emptied the kettle into the cup.

“I’m willing to negotiate,” I said.

“I certainly hope you are, Simon.  You two can walk away with what you can carry.  In exchange, should you do business in Tynewear again, you’ll come to me.  I’m your fence.”

“And if I don’t do business in Tynewear again?”

“Then you’re likely dead, and you can consider this my generous contribution to your funerals.”

He was giving me a complete pass.  He had to know I was leaving town, but he was handing me what had to be a nice payoff, on account of established reputation alone.

“Alright,” I said.  “And if we happen to leave the city, I’ll find a way to make my gratitude known.”

“Just so,” Jer said.  It was the right response.  We both had a sense of how the other operated.

“A bag?” I asked, looking up at Jer.

He had messenger bags, like the ones paperboys in Tynewear used, all leather and fanciness, only it came from Jer’s custom shop, so the leather was engraved and made all the more stylish.  It might have cost a whole twenty or thirty dollars to get, if I was any other customer.

I took the mines, grenades, and what I took to be smoke grenades.

“Collector’s items,” Jer said, “From the great war for the Crown States.  Safe to handle, but no guarantees they’ll fire.  Valuable.  Try to appreciate their historical and financial value as you actively use them.”

His smile was a faintly pained one.

“I will.  Goodbye, Jer,” I said.

“Goodbye, Simon,” he said.

I bumped into the door as I tried to haul it open and step outside, only belatedly realizing I’d locked it.  I tried to maintain a hair of dignity as I led the way outside.

We were about ten steps away when Jamie came to a stop.  I turned around to look at him.

“Do you think it would draw too much attention if I turned around and threw one of these explosives through his shop window and over that counter?” Jamie asked me, his eyes focused down at his satchel.

I didn’t respond right away.  I had to take a second to study him, looking him up and down, taking in the little details.

“It’s not like you,” I said, measuring my words carefully, “To say something that vehement.”

Vehement wasn’t the right word.  But it somehow fit the situation.  Jamie, so very calm, was saying something so uncharacteristically violent.

“I know,” Jamie said.

“Because of the stitched?”

“There was something behind her eyes, Sy.”

“Yeah,” I said.  My voice soft.  “Yeah.  Some of the newer models are more capable, less of the brain cut and burned away.”

“I won’t ever forget that look-”

“I know,” I said, quick, cutting him off.  “I know.  It’s part of the reason I didn’t invite you to come by.  Even with that in mind, I didn’t think you’d react that intensely.”

“She’s a shell, Sy.  They tampered with her head, they took her old identity.  They emptied her out.  But she still has something there, buried there.  Maybe it’s trying to surface.  Maybe it never will, and that idea’s horrifying.  Maybe it will, and that idea is worse.”

“I know,” I said.

“I have- not nightmares, I sleep too deeply for real nightmares, but it comes to mind, I worry, I think about worst case scenarios.  What might happen further down the line.  Some of those scenarios look an awful lot like that woman did.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I drew in a deep breath, and stood straighter.  “Yeah.”

Jamie glanced back, in the direction of the shop.

There wasn’t anything new to see there.  It was a little mannerism that I didn’t put my finger on until I actually saw him deviate from it, that Jamie wasn’t one to look back.  He didn’t need to validate or double check things.

“It doesn’t bother you?” he asked.

“I bent my brain until it didn’t.  We needed to pay our way, and it wasn’t smooth sailing, at first.  And once I bent my head in the right direction… I guess I really didn’t think too much about it.”

“Except you knew it would bother me.”

“Yeah.  I think I knew it bothered me,” I said.  I thumbed at the ring at my finger.

Jamie nodded.

“You’re not going to be able to put this behind you,” I said.  “Let it go?  No, that’s the wrong wording, I’m not saying you shou-”

“I know what you mean,” Jamie said.  “No, I can’t put things behind me.  I carry them.  I don’t let anything go.  I can forgive, I can change my mind, when presented with new information, but there’s nothing there I ever want to be able to forgive or change my mind about.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I know what you’re about to do,” he said.  “It’s decided, just like that?”

“Yeah,” I said.  I turned around, and walked back to the shop.  I pushed the door open, slowly, up until the bell above the door dinged.

“Hm?” Jer made an inquisitive sound.  He was kneeling behind the display, rearranging some pieces.  “Simon!  Did you forget something?”

I reached into the messenger bag, grabbed a grenade, and pulled a pin.

He moved without a moment’s hesitation, dashing for the house.

He reversed course as I threw the grenade past the open doorway, into the room he’d been heading into, scrambling back so fast that he fell over.

The explosion was eminently satisfying, to all of the senses, from the smell of smoke to the noise, to the tactile feeling as it cracked and then woofed through the bones of the house and shop.  Jewelry and crystal throughout Jer’s shop tinkled.

That deals with any stitched servants in the kitchen.

I’d neglected to mention to Jamie that there was more than one.  He didn’t need or want to know.

Jer went for his gun.  I went for the next grenade, pulling the pin and lobbing it so it went high.  It bounced off of the glass top of the display case, over the counter.  I’d expected it to fall into the display case, where it would be harder to grab and throw back.  Instead, it landed on the far side, clattering over the floor.

Jer didn’t aim his gun at me.  He only stared, saying something I couldn’t make out, as I backed swiftly away, gaining more speed as I went.

The explosives we’d left in the hay-lined crate were right beside where the grenade had landed, and the resulting combination made for an explosion was a sight to behold, rolling across the ground floor and partway up through the second floor affecting the neighbor to the right of his house, and taking out at least one of the supports.  The entire house buckled in the middle part, creaking, sagging, and threatening to fall.  Instead, the fall seemed to be slow but insistent, like the grains of sand through an hourglass.

I stopped running as I caught up with Jamie, falling in step with him as we walked away from the scene.

“Thank you,” Jamie said.

“Of course,” I said.

“Don’t keep things from me, Sy.”

“I’ll keep a lot of things from you,” I said.  I thought of the plurality of haunted stitched.  “It’s how I operate.”

He gave me a very displeased look.

“But I won’t keep matters of conscience from you,” I said.  “I promise.”

“Thank you,” he said, in a very perfunctory way, apparently satisfied.  He glanced back at the building, as clusters of people walked past us to see what had just happened.  Some shouted of fire and the need for water.

Others, I saw, were hanging back.  I wondered if any were sick and hiding it.

“I know I asked for it, but this is going to draw attention.  They’ll be right on top of us any second now.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Let ’em come.  This is our territory, twice over.  We’ve been here for months, getting the lay of the land, and, in my preferred way of doing things, the box is thoroughly shaken.”

“And we have the means of shaking it further,” Jamie said, patting the messenger bag at his side, his chin raising a notch.  He pointed.  “This way.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.07 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jamie nudged me.  His hand moved, gesturing.

We were being tailed.

Another gesture.

By the modified ghost.  It had to be the hardest individual to shake.  Something with keen enough hearing to have something like echolocation, as fast as a buttered cat down a steep slope.

If she was one of Percy’s, then she’d survived after Percy had been eliminated, she’d been picked up, modified, trained or readjusted, and given new targets.  Made from a child, accelerated growth in a vat, and modified with spines and fine hairs that gave her extraordinary hearing and brain structures that gave her incredible reflexes.  She was Mary’s successor, in a way.

I liked imagining the situation as a test run for Mary.  It made it easier to frame in my mind.  Except it was Mary, possibly without assistance, and with the enhancements.  Mary had promised me that she would never let me get the drop on her, and I believed that she’d try, that the anger would push her to train and to throw herself into her work.

The scenario was the same.  There was virtually no way to get the drop on the ghost.  She was talented, came from the same creator’s hand, and she’d changed hands, only to be shaped by an organization.

“A second Jamie, a second Mary.  A second Ashton, now that I think about it.  Lillian made a leap sufficient to mark a transformation, too.”

“Hm?” Jamie asked.

“Just thinking out loud,” I said.  “The Lambs keep on leaving versions of themselves behind, or pushing versions of themselves forward.  Or… something.  Abstract thought.”

I gestured.  Close?

He made a gesture in a fairly lax, lazy way.

She was tailing us at a distance, it seemed.

“Helen?” Jamie asked.

“Not Helen,” I said.  “Not Gordon either, unless you count Hubris.”

“I’d count Hubris.”

“Okay,” I said.  “But it doesn’t really… hm.”

“Hm?”

“Trying to put it into words.  Lillian transforming herself, actually becoming a Lamb, the viable Ashton after the aborted first try, then you, and even Mary being inspiration for the Ghosts, in a way… it feels like it’s pushing out, reaching further.  But Hubris didn’t feel like that reach.  He stayed so close to Gordon and died so soon after Gordon did.  Maybe this is why I was so bothered by Hubris’ death, at the time?”

“Maybe,” Jamie said.  “We had a remnant, and then we lost that remnant of Gordon.”

“Gordon would have come with me,” I said.  “With us.”

“I think he would’ve.”

“He wanted to leave with Fray, back when we first met her.  I think I convinced him not to?  My memories of that period are fuzzy, but I think back and I feel guilty.”

“I think if you were going to force his hand, you would have.  It’s how you operate.  You would have told the rest of the group sooner, when it mattered, forced him to choose and manipulated him to stay.  Based on the pieces the old Jamie put together, it seemed very much like you let him make his own decision.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “But then why do I feel rotten about it?”

“Because you let him make his own decision?” Jamie suggested.

Another gesture.

Closer.

She was making her approach.  That said a lot about her goals.  She would lash out, and we wouldn’t know exactly what she could do with those modified hands until she had them on us.

Dangerous package.

I needed ways to immobilize her.  I didn’t want to kill her, but I would if I had to.

Putting her in the water?  Something to do with the landscape?  I imagined shutting her in a room with two locked doors.  I couldn’t think of anything resembling that.

I moved my hand along the side of the messenger bag, considering the options there.

“Pretty extreme,” Jamie commented.  He’d seen my hand move.  “You don’t want to put that on yourself.”

Noise.  Light.  Smoke.  Anger, aggressive, us.

Yeah.  If we blew one up, then they’d come after us hard, Catcher’s request be damned.  With a ‘dead or alive’ noted beside my name, that was a bad end result.  We might remove the ghost, emphasis on might, but the rest would come after us hard.

I indicated an alleyway.

No run building, Jamie gestured.

“What?” I asked, out loud.

Death.  He gestured.  BuildingWe trap we.

I grabbed his arm, hauling him along through a tunnel that ran between buildings.  It opened out into a triangular space between three buildings, open to the sky.  One of the three sides had the tunnel we’d just passed through, a second had a tunnel leading elsewhere, and the third had what looked like a now-disused trough, which had some filthy rainwater in it that was taking its time to thaw out.  There was likely only ever direct sunlight in this area when it was noon or nearly noon, and that had been an hour ago or so.  The fixtures suggested that this had been used as a place to park horses or keep a pet outside.

I pointed at the window that looked from one of the buildings to the triangular space.  “Need a minute,” I said.

I reached into my satchel.  Already, I was running through most of what I’d packed into it.  I’d used two grenades for Jer, and this time, I was using a mine.  I turned it over in my hands, investigating it.

“I don’t know if you caught what I said earlier, but this is a little over the top,” Jamie observed.  He dutifully scratched at the glass with the edge of a knife, over and over.

“Nah,” I said.  Looks like it’s based around a cord.  I just need to figure out how to use it for something else, without setting it off in my hands.

Words had been etched into the outer rim, with directional arrows, as part of the casting process.  They’d been worn down, however.  Weather, maybe.

Craftsmanship, from the American side, during the war for the Crown States.  More focus on machinery and innovation than on the biology side of things.  Neatly labeled so the soldiers knew exactly what to do while they were tampering.

Turn to remove.

Flip over the bar on the top to arm.

I raised it up to my face, smelling it.  It smelled faintly of earth.  With a gentle shake, I couldn’t hear anything rattle.

Alright then.  I tried to turn the top, and found it didn’t budge.  I investigated the join, and found it packed with old dirt.  Dirt that had been there so long it had practically become a part of the thing.

“Sy?” Jamie asked, as I shifted my grip on the thing.

“Minor snag,” I said.

I kept my thumb over the switch to keep it from flipping over, then banged the side of the mine against the nearest wall.

“Sy!” Jamie said, alarmed.  “What are you thinking!?”

“All good,” I said.

“It’s not good at all!”

I’d cracked the packed earth.  I drew my knife out of my boot and wedged it into the crack, and jiggled it along the rim, two seconds of work to remove the worst of the packed earth.

I worked to turn it until my fingers and wrist hurt.  Finally, it made a horrible grinding sound, with coarse dirt getting ground between the two halves as it unscrewed.

Glancing down the length of the alley, I saw the ghost.  She moved with a kind of uncertainty.

Are you learning how to function without your sisters?  I thought.

This is something pretty new, hearing the sound, having to resist your instincts, being almost blind…

“She’s coming,” I said.  “Go, move fast.”

Jamie did.  We headed into the second tunnel.  A dark space, with debris and junk stacked along one side of it, leaving only enough space to squeeze by.

Jamie collected an empty picture frame from the top of a pile.

“Go,” I said.

“I don’t know if you got my hand signal, but-”

“Go!” I said.

He left me behind.

No cloth, which made my job harder.  I pulled off my jacket, watching as the ghost appeared at the end of the tunnel, standing in the space with the trough.

I looked back.  Jamie stood at the end of the tunnel, knife and glass in hand.  He was working it while I surveyed the situation and prepared.

Good.

I pulled the rubbish down, bringing it down into the space, leaving bags of bundled branches, garden tools, and some old construction materials littering the tunnel floor.  With the dust that went up, I could no longer see her, and she could no longer see me.  Perfect.

Two garden tools with long handles, a broom and then the mine.  I made the necessary adjustment to the mine, snatching up a nail for extra effect, and then set it down, with the cloth partially covering it, using the sleeves to bind the garden tools together, resting them on top.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “I think this is a bad idea.”

“Just slightly,” I said.  A plank would have been so much better.

She was making her way over the rubble, now, barely a sound as she adjusted herself.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Sy, but I don’t really trust your brain when it counts.  Enclosed space, explosives-”

I continued to back away until I bumped into him.

“Oh,” I said.  I took in our immediate surroundings.  “That’s what you meant.  Dead end.”

Jamie’s voice was tense.  “Of all the times to get the hand signals wrong, Sy, you do it now?  I thought you knew what you were doing, so I went with it.”

The dust cleared, and we could see the ghost, perched at the highest point of the fallen rubbish.

“You didn’t sound all that confident,” I commented.

The tunnel didn’t actually have a proper destination.  Just around the corner to our right were two steps leading up to a door.  There was a railing, but the space was little more than a balcony that overlooked one of the city’s canals.

We were ten feet from the ghost, with nowhere to go.

Jamie continued to scratch the glass, and the ghost remained where she was, surveying the situation with a hundred times the care she might otherwise have used.

She was lighter than normal people were.  She thrust herself forward, off of the rubbish, one foot extending down to safe ground, clear of rubbish.

In that instant, I moved, raising my hand.

She moved as if she’d predicted my movement.  With the way the ghost’s heads worked, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if she considered an attack every tenth of a second, and the movements she’d need to make.  A push against the wall, a movement to the opposite side of the narrow tunnel.

One of her feet came down on the tool I’d laid forward of the mine.  It pressed down on the mine, and the nail came loose, flying out to ping against the wall.  Jamie and I both flinched, our hands going up to protect our faces.  Jamie stopped scratching the glass in that same moment.

“Don’t move,” I told the Ghost.  “You’re standing on a mine.  Your weight has pressed it down and closed the connections.  If you move your weight off of the mine, then you’ll blow yourself and us into a messy, bloody pulp.”

She didn’t move her head, but I imagined she was screaming the silent echolocation scream that let her identify her surroundings, down to the materials things were made of.

“In long and in short,” I said, “You’re in checkmate.”

Her expression didn’t change.  Wind blew through the tunnel, and her blonde hair moved.  I had a glimpse of her hands, thicker, with scar tissue down to the elbow, and metal and glass at the hands themselves.  Through the glass, I could see yellow-tinted fluid, almost like urine.

No guarantees, but past experience told me that was something voltaic, the same technology that lit up whole segments of Tynewear in the evening.

One of those altered hands moved, resting against the wall, securing her balance.  Then the other came up.

She gestured, slowly, with the metal and glass hand.

I cold you.  Big man voice.

“Right,” I said.  I felt silly now, using the gestures to communicate with Jamie.  We’d taught Catcher the fool gestures.  He, in turn, had taught the recruited ghost some words.

Not that what she was saying made much sense at all to me.  I could understand the words, and I expected most were accurate, but I didn’t get how her head worked, and a lot of the gestures’ interpretation was based on precedent and experience.

“Winter?” Jamie asked.  “I don’t think that’s right.”

She shook her head.  Her gesturing hand moved, very slowly, toward her wrist.  She seized it hard.

“I’m not seeing the connection,” Jamie said.

“The cold slows you down, it gets a grip on you, on the surroundings,” I said.  The ghost nodded slowly.  “I can see it.  Kind of.  I think Catcher’s been butchering the gestures though.  Capture, seize, hold, imprison?”

The ghost gestured the affirmative.  A head nod might have done just fine, but whatever.

“Big man voice,” I interpreted.  “You’re supposed to take us.  The boss said so?”

Affirmative.

“Well you can’t,” I told her, matter-of-factly.  I gestured as I talked, matching ideas to gestures, to drive the point home.

I glanced at the door, checking it.  I held back cusses.  It didn’t even have a proper lock that I could pick.

This narrow balcony and the adjoining tunnel was the equivalent of the space between houses.  It probably had deadbolts, and when the space was in use, the door was left unbolted.

Leaving us only one exit.

“Excuse me,” I said, gesturing.  “If you try those gloves, and they do what I think they do, then I’ll fall down, and I’ll bump you, and then we all go boom.”

She didn’t gesture the affirmative, leaving me less than positive that she’d understood.

“Right,” I said.

To get past her, I had to slink down and under the arm she’d extended out to the wall for balance, then go up and over the rubbish without bumping her arm or shoulder.  It wasn’t hard, with my small frame, but I was worried about those gloves.  If she got clever, or if she had tricks I didn’t understand-

My heart pounded, which wasn’t entirely a bad thing.

I climbed over the rubbish, careful of anything that might slide or fall.  Jamie was right behind me, and I moved to the side of where he was going, to let him go ahead, so I could keep an eye and a hand on those same details and things that might fall.

“Catcher is in the prison cell, he didn’t want to leave because it would have been going against the Academy, and he wants to do what they ask without any room for error.  He seems mostly content to be there,” I told the ghost.  “I’m just saying, in case you like the guy, which is easy to do, and are worried about him.”

For a good five seconds, I wasn’t sure she was going to respond.  Then her hand raised.  A gesture.  The affirmative.  Yes.

That was going to be all I got, I supposed.

“When one of your buddies gets close to us, we’ll tell them where you are.  If they’re good buddies, they’ll backtrack and find you.  Then you can defuse the mine and walk away,” I said.

No response this time.  I wondered if it was less worthy of a real emotional response than hearing Catcher was okay, or if she wasn’t as optimistic about how helpful the others would be.

I finished climbing over the rubble, glanced back at her, then carried on my way.

One more threat dealt with, for the time being.

“What about you?” Jamie asked.

“Huh?”

“Just wondering, about what we were talking about.”

“If you think I remember much of anything past the last two minutes right now, you’ve got another thing coming,” I said.

“The reaching, the Lambs projects becoming something more, finding ways of evolving past their initial limitations, often in new packages.”

“Oh, right.”

“What about you?” Jamie asked.

“What about me?  I asked, with a different emphasis on the question.  “I figure I’m closer to Helen than anyone.”

“Fray,” Jamie said.

“Fray?  Am I an offshoot of Fray or is Fray an offshoot of me?”

“I dunno,” Jamie said.  “That’s a good question.”

We reached the space with the trough.  I peeked around the corner, then pulled back.  Two Brunos were at the street outside.  I gestured to let Jamie know.

“I’m digging through a lot of meaningful conversations, trying to find a good answer to that question,” Jamie said.

“Rein in those horses and tell me if these rooftops lead anywhere,” I said.

Jamie paused, looking up.  “Sure.”

I nodded, glanced around the corner again, and then darted over to the window that was over the trough.  It latched on the inside, and thus it took me about four seconds to get it open.

I climbed up and through, then helped Jamie.

“They saw me.  They’re coming,” he said, as he came through the window.

“Got it,” I said.  I reached into my bag, and pulled out another mine.  This one I used as it was orginally intended to be used, with the cord pulled out.  I hooked the cord around one corner of the window, then closed it, pinching the cord in place between the window and the window frame.  I let the mine dangle there, resting against the glass, in plain view.

Jamie and I backed well away from the window.  We watched as the Brunos appeared, making their way to the window.  By the time they reached it, I had my finger pointed straight at the mine.

One of them moved very suddenly as he saw the thing, dropped a short distance in height very abruptly, then stumbled back and away from the window.  I could see the top of his head as he shook himself.

“He put his foot in the trough,” Jamie said.  “Poor guy.”

“Come on,” I said.

We took the stairs, heading upstairs, while the Brunos went looking for alternate means of entry.

“When Gordon died, you described yourself as being like water.  Flexible,” Jamie said.

“Are we talking about this because of the trough, or…”

“Because of the conversation.  About the Lambs, and about you and Fray.”

“I’m not keeping up with you at the moment, Jamie.”

“Funny how the tables turn, isn’t it?” Jamie asked.  “Your memory has been worse.”

“It’s only worse because I’m focused on things.”

“That’s not it,” he said.  “I think it’s the lower quality Wyvern.  The liquid brain is coming at a steeper cost.”

“Nothing we can do about it in the meantime.  What were you saying?  Me and Fray.  We’re like water.  We’re flexible.  Sure.”

“You adapt to the containers you find yourself in.  You’ve adapted to Tynewear, to me.  Fray adapts in her own way.  There’s no chicken and the egg.  You intermingle.  You’ve said something in the past about being afraid to go to Fray’s side, because you would adapt too much.  She would adapt to you, in a way, and you would adapt to her.  Two liquids, and you aren’t exactly oil and water.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “I’ve completely lost track of the main thrust of this conversation.”

“It doesn’t have one,” Jamie said.

“That’s annoying, then,” I said.  “Don’t be annoying.”

“You started the conversation,” he pointed out.  “With a random thought you spoke aloud.”

“Lies,” I said.  “You remembered wrong.”

I could hear his audible sigh as he followed me up the stairs to the top flight.  We were just reaching the top floor of the four story building as the Brunos came charging in the front door.

All considered, we were in pretty good shape.  We needed a way down, but Jamie had given the all-clear on that.

“Your bag is empty,” Jamie remarked.

I patted it.

“Two grenades,” I said, “And the guts from the first mine.”

“Guts?”

“I wouldn’t actually make her stand on something live,” I said.  “She’s Catcher’s.”

“Temporarily Catcher’s.  You make me wonder sometimes, Sy.”

“I have to, you know.  I pretended to get the hand signals wrong so you’d be more nervous.  I wanted her to buy into the shock and believe the mine was real.”

“Take some of my stuff,” he said, rolling his eyes.  “You seem to have your own ideas on how you want to use these things.  I’m not going to get in your way while you’re getting your jollies.”

He handed off some of the items as we strode across the top floor of the building, heading to the window.

I opened the window, and climbed out and over from the window to reach the roof.  I stuck my hand out for Jamie.

I talked while he took hold of my wrist and climbed out, “Based on what he said before, they haven’t been together very long, and he already started communicating with her, using what he remembered from the jobs with us.  Gordon probably sat down and taught Catcher and Dog some stuff, knowing Gordon.  The bastard.  Finding ways to get in the way even from beyond the grave.”

“Sure, Sy,” Jamie said.  “What are you getting at?”

“Communication is important.  She’s a social creature, a pack animal, made to work alongside her sisters to accomplish tasks.  She hasn’t had that, she joins a job working with Catcher, and he starts giving her a voice, a way to communicate effectively?  I promise you, absolutely guarantee, she’s going to stay with him to the ends of the earth.”

“Hm,” Jamie murmured.  “I’m glad he has that, then.”

“And that she has that.  She might be an abomination borne from the death of a child, but, aren’t most of us, on some level?  The Lambs, I mean?  I sort of like her, just because of how broken a creature she is.”

“The end of a childhood would be a better way of putting it,” Jamie said.

“Yes.  Poetic.”

He smiled a little and pointed, “This way.”

We moved along the rooftop.  Jamie lagged behind a little, but that was okay.  I was happy keeping an eye out and scouting for both trouble and opportunity.

“Is it even possible to find a hiding place at this point?” Jamie asked, from behind me.

“Probably not,” I said.  “We’ll need to find a way out of the city.  If that’s even possible.”

I turned my eye toward the outermost edge of the city.  I could see the concentrations of troops and resources, and the movements of the warbeasts in the water.

Looking toward the Marina, I slowed my pace, letting Jamie catch up to me.  I stared.

Smoke.  The Academy was burning its own military buildings.

“Jamie,” I said.  “Loo-”

A crack beside me made me jump, and nearly made me fall from the roof.

“The hell?” I asked.  I turned around to look.

Moving up beside me, Jamie looked in the direction the sound had come from.

“A bullet struck the roof, right there,” Jamie said, pointing.  “I didn’t hear a gunshot.”

Sniper, I thought, as I spoke, “Move.”

We jerked into motion, heading forward.  I heard another bullet cut through the air, though it didn’t hit the rooftop.

“Not Catcher’s friend,” I said.

“No,” Jamie said.  “Change direction!  This way!”

He grabbed me, and he hauled me off balance.  The two of us moved down to the slope of the roof and skidded down tiles that were wet with damp and still crusted with traces of ice, picking up speed.  Out, out, over-

And airborne, with no more roof beneath us.

I reached back and belatedly caught the gutter with one hand, catching Jamie with the other.  I only barely managed to arrest our forward momentum.  We went down, from four stories up, and we landed on a balcony, crashing into the railing hard enough to break the more decorative bits of wood.

“Tell me-” I said, gasping for breath, the wind knocked out of me.  “Tell me you knew this was here.”

“Remembered,” Jamie said, gasping as well.

At a space between our heads, the railing splintered, with another fierce crack to mark the impact.

“Fucking hell!” I shouted, as I ducked, moving back and away, looking for cover and finding very little.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Jamie said.  “The direction-”

“What?” I asked.

“The direction of the mark on the shingle, and the railing just now, the bullet-”

Jamie peeked his head out from the meager cover of the post of the railing, looking.

He looked over the cityscape, in the direction of the cliffs.  The nicest part of Tynewear was perched on a rise, with cliffs separating them from the lowest portion of the city.

The nearest cliff was a clear mile away and some immeasurable distance up.

A bullet struck the finer lattice of the railing just to Jamie’s left.

“He’s up there?” I asked.

“Even with the fastest, longest-range bullet they’ve got available, it takes the bullets two seconds to reach us.  He’s leading like crazy, the wind has to make the bullet move like nuts, and he’s still getting awfully close.”

“Good sniper,” I said.  “I can remember meeting one.”

“Sanguine?” Jamie asked.

“That was the name.  I wonder if he’s got enough bullets to shoot at us for the rest of the time we’re in-”

A bullet nailed the post I was resting against, hard enough that the back of my head bounced away from it.

“-Tynewear.”

“Safe bet,” Jamie said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.08 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Bullets reached over and through the railing to pit the exterior wall of the building, as Jamie and I found our cover with our backs to the railing’s posts.

“Considering how far away he is, it’s kind of amazing he’s getting as close as he is,” Jamie said.

“Bastard shot me once already.  That’s enough for me,” I said.  A few seconds had passed without a bullet striking home, so I ventured a look over my shoulder and past the railing.  In that same moment, a bullet caught the railing with a crack and a puff of sawdust, dust, or something else that had collected between two pieces of wood.  I withdrew, but not before seeing that people on the street had noticed the sound and seen signs of the impacts.  Some were staring, others moving to find cover.

I looked around, searching for escape routes.  With one to five seconds of delay between each, the bullets came flying, embedding themselves into the surroundings or glancing off.

I wasn’t seeing any good options, and as people took notice of the situation, the chance that a bounty hunter might take notice steadily increased.

“He’s getting this close because he has good eyes,” I said.  I tried to imagine Sanguine’s position, the way he was steadily putting bullets into his gun, the way his eyes moved.  He would have been sitting there for a long time, having chosen a position that gave him a view of most of the city, gun at hand, while he looked for us.  The explosions had let him find our general area, and then he’d spotted us on the rooftop.  Now he was using cues to determine the direction of the wind.  The general slant of the rain, hanging cloth or flags, people, and places where raindrops pattered at one end of a puddle but intervening obstacles and wind direction didn’t let them fall in others.  He was placing most of the bullets within a matter of feet from us.

I could make educated guesses about his motivations and philosophy.  Maybe he didn’t care so much about catching us himself, but wanted to pin us down or hamper our movements so others could catch us.  Maybe he had buddies who were making their way to us.  Would he try putting bullets in Catcher, should Catcher attempt the arrest?  I didn’t want to know either way.

Him being as far away as he was frustrated me to the point that I wanted to spit and curse.  I couldn’t toy with him, if he was so out of reach.  I couldn’t communicate or force his hand, I couldn’t corner him, shake him, or manipulate him.

“If we get down to the ground, we can take cover against the southern or western faces of any buildings,” Jamie said.  “North would be best.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But that doesn’t solve the inherent problem.”

“He’s going to be there, lurking, looking for a shot,” Jamie said.

“Applying pressure.  We can’t talk to guards and manipulate them, we can’t take our time working our way through quarantines and into different sections of the city.”

Jamie nodded.  He winced as a bullet pinged the post, an inch from his ear, then drew his head down, making himself a smaller target.

Guns jammed.  Specialized guns often jammed more.  I imagined Sanguine up there on the clifftop or cliffside.  He might have arrived with more than one gun, a gun cleaning kit, boxes of bullets, food, and water.  Maybe not the food and water, depending on how heavily he was modified.  He’d set up camp, and he was secure where he was.  What scenarios would provoke him to take a different action?

He would lose sight of us at certain points.  That was a given.  He was playing the long game from an unassailable, unreachable position.  We would disappear from his sight, taking cover like Jamie suggested.  What would he do?

My thoughts were briefly interrupted as something punched my arm.  I rocked forward and to the side, tried putting my hand out to steady myself and stay upright so I was in line with the post, and in moving my arm I woke it up to the pain, delayed and strange.  I had to reach over and forward with my other arm to catch myself.

Being in that position, left arm out and braced against the floor to my right, hunched over, I was exposed to fire.  I’d been hit.  Only a grazing shot, but enough to make me bleed and to throw me for a loop.

A bullet shattered wood as it glanced off the railing, inches above my head.  I straightened back up, a hand pressed to my upper arm, as blood welled out and oozed between my cold fingers.

He’d been more or less alternating between Jamie and I, but the moment his bullet caught the bit of flesh that had peeked out beside the post, which was narrower than my narrow torso was, he’d been ready and able to place a shot in the vicnity of my head.

He wasn’t magic.  Even with good eyes, there were variables he couldn’t control for in machinery and environment.  Slim odds that the bullet would have traveled the course he wanted and passed through my head as I was knocked slightly out of cover.  But there had been a chance.

If this continued, he would get lucky.

Earlier, I hadn’t been able to track the conversation.  Amid Jamie’s worries, I’d harbored a hint of concern that I wouldn’t be able to keep my thoughts straight in a serious situation like this, that I’d focused too much on the lockpicking, the stealth, the quiet nights of careful acquisition, and that other skills had eroded, lost to the rinses of lower quality Wyvern and the naturally slippery footing that any idea found in my brainpan.

But no.  I was focused, and with a challenge to dwell on and a mind to compete against, I was in my element.  The trains of thought remained on their rails.

We could slip away, and there were two things that he might do.  The first would be to take care of the guns.  I could imagine Sanguine very calmly dismantling the guns, scrubbing them, oiling them, and ensuring that everything was in working order, while he kept an eye out for us.  Maybe one had jammed already and he’d set it aside to pick up another.  He would want to take care of it.

The other idea was that he might pick up the guns, bullets, and other supplies, and casually walk to another vantage point, moving closer to us.  If he happened to have equipment to move down the sheer surface, he wouldn’t be the only sharpshooter I’d ever met who did.

The two put together meant we couldn’t count on him stopping anytime soon, and if we found any respite at all, we had to start wondering if the bullets would start coming from another direction, from a closer point.

“Jamie,” I said.

“Yeah?”

A bullet struck the balcony, two inches from my right knee.

“Where is he, specifically?”

“Specifically?  I don’t know specifically.”

“You had a sense, right?  Which direction he was shooting from?”

“Yes.”

Two more bullets fired, roughly one second apart.  Did they have different sounds to them?

Interesting.

Still, I needed to work with Jamie.  “Close your eyes.  Recall the city as it was beneath the cliff.  He’s shooting from a point on the cliffs, and you have a general sense of where?  I’m going to throw a grenade, try to create some smoke cover.”

“Three buildings with towers.  They look identical, like a-”

Bullet, wall.

“-Fork sticking up, near the base of the cliff.  If I had to guess, he’s above that point.”

“Is there a building nearby that I can aim at?  If I throw the grenade aiming for a rooftop?”

“Given how you throw, Sy?”

“Ha ha.  I’m going to try this, catch a bullet and you’ll remember forever that the last thing you said to me was a lame joke.  My throwing arm is fine.”

“Do you know how many times the old Jamie wrote about you fucking up knife throws?”

“Okay,” I said.  “Seriously-”

“Grenade tosses?”

“Okay,” I said.  “Point made.”

“And the time you dropped the big glass canister of mystery plague, down in the bowels, so soon after you’d very ardently argued you should be the one to carry it?”

Okay.

Bullets pelted our general location in the moment of silence that followed.

“I’m just making fun,” he said.  “I’m nervous and bothered.  You needled me with that ‘remembering forever’ thing.  And I know I’m giving you ammunition by letting you know that you needled me, but-”

“I won’t use it against you,” I said.  “I have some class.”

He snorted.

“Don’t tempt me to change my mind,” I said.

“Your throwing arm isn’t that bad.  You do better than most.  There’s a roof in that direction.  Aim for the gutter.  It’s a steep roof and if you hit the side of it it’ll bounce off and into the street below.  There might be bystanders.”

“Got it.”

I pulled my hand away from the oozing wound on my arm.  It still bled, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.  I wiped some of the blood on my pants and tested each arm.  I opted to use the uninjured one, fishing for the grenade in the bag and gripping it.  I shifted my stance, bringing my feet nearer to my butt, pressing my back against the post.

The unsteady patter of bullets stopped.

He saw me move.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

“Hm?”

“Earlier, I heard two shots hit at the same time.”

“I noticed that,” I said.  “The bullets sounded different.”

“I noticed the differences, I thought it was wind, angle, or something, but to shoot one so soon after the other and have it sound that different?”

“Yeah.  I think I know what it is.”

“Second gunman?”

“No,” I said.  I could imagine the bullets like an ongoing discourse.  I could sense the psychology behind it, the intent to keep us off balance, the coordination, the way they’d toyed with us, going for Jamie, then me, then Jamie, then Jamie again, just to drive in this overbearing sense that we weren’t safe.

“No,” I said, as I thought, convincing myself.  “There’s only one sniper.  The bullets sound like he thinks.  He’s sitting or laying there with a gun, and there’s a second gun close by.  Shoot, drop the first gun, scoop up the second, shoot again.  Just to keep us on our toes.  Letting us know that even if the bullets take a while to get to us, he can shoot at a pretty fast rate.  There isn’t a time window between shots to act.”

As if to echo my thought, he did it again.

One bullet, then another just a moment later.  One hit the railing, and a larger piece of the ornate wood lattice broke free, skidding across the balcony.  The other hit the wall in front of me.  One-two.

Three seconds passed.  Then, just to drive up the pressure, as if he knew we were plotting something and getting ready to act, he delivered another one-two.

I raised myself up, back sliding up the post as I straightened my legs.  I tore out the pin from the grenade as I spun around, dropping to a knee so that I was still protected by the post, arm going back as my eyes took in the city.

With the grenade live and bullets only a moment away, I had no time to find those three buildings that formed a fork.  To spot the gutter.  I had to decide as I started the motion of throwing and carried through, twisting my body as I saw what might have been it, adjusting the positions of my fingers as the grenade flew off the tips to tilt the course of the projectile so it veered toward the gutter.

I threw.  I didn’t wait to see the result, dropping flat.

If any bullets flew, I couldn’t hear over the explosion and the summary crackle of wood creaking and breaking under its own weight.

With the explosion had come fire.  With fire came smoke.

Our hand keeps getting forced.  The smoke rose, and I could now hear the bullets as they were fired into the midst of it, striking in our immediate vicinity, seemingly no more or less accurate than they had been.

I looked at Jamie, who nodded.

As one, we hurdled the railing, until we perched on the outside.  Bullets smacked into the railing just a foot to my right.

I dropped down, gripping the same part of the ledge that my feet had just been, the grit from the bottom of my shoes now digging into my fingers as I found purchase.

I spotted the pillar that held the balcony up above the front of the building and I swung myself over in that direction, letting go and catching it with the inside edges of my feet well before my hands were available to grip it.  The swinging movement of the heavy messenger bag nearly dislodged me from the rain-slick post.

I slid down, touching ground, then hurrying over to where Jamie was.

“You’re a damn monkey!” he called out to me, as he crawled down to where he could grab the pillar.  He barely had to check for handholds, but he wasn’t agile.  I knew the old Jamie had mentioned that his altered body got stiff in places when it was cold.  The scars could be problematic.

And even if this Jamie was faster and more adventurous than the first, he wasn’t quick, a lot of the time.

I allowed myself a moment of the deepest, blackest resentment for the fact that I had to juggle the ‘old Jamie’ with the new, that the name of my departed best friend had to be muddled so.

Opening that door allowed for other feelings to make their attempts at rising.  Mary with her leg bleeding.  A crying Lillian in her nightclothes in her dorm room, face still flushed from my attention, just before I said my goodbye.

It was like the emotions were some tentacled warbeast, lunging out of a container, their reaching limbs making it very hard to close them back in and away again.

I reached up and out to catch him and help keep him upright as he dropped down from the pillar.  By the time he’d turned around, I’d managed to put the feelings away.  I grinned.

“Monkey,” he said, again.

“I heard you the first time,” I said.

I glanced up and over at the smoke.  People were staring.

“We keep giving them cues about where we are,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Let’s hurry.”

This couldn’t go on forever.

The net was closing, there were no exits from this city, and the number of enemies kept increasing.  With each one that cropped up, it seemed I wasn’t able or willing to deal with them.  Sanguine out of reach, Catcher too close a friend, the Ghost too close to Catcher.

“Jamie,” I said, as we ran, “Get out your map.”

“Map?”

“In your head.  For this neighborhood.”

“Okay.”

“What shape is it?  When we account for the quarantine?”

“It’s pear shaped, the stem of the pear touches the cliffs.  The left butt touches the Marina.”

“Where are we?”

“Near the middle.”

“Near the core.  Okay.  I want to make them think we went one way, when we went the other.  That means working near the neck, where we have to travel less distance.”

Jamie pointed.  We changed direction.

In doing so, we faced crossing a street.

How well had Sanguine predicted us?  If he was ready, weapon trained on us, then traveling in a straight line would give him time to lead us.

If he wasn’t ready, then zig-zagging wasted time, and would give him the chance to take a shot, with a chance that shot would hit.

I gestured.  Straight.

If there was a bullet, it traveled too far past us for me to hear.  Nothing hit the road.  Silence and staring people.

One of those staring people turned their head as we ran past them.  The timing of it was off, as if we were objects of interest, but they were paying attention to something else.

We were being pursued.

I glanced back.

The two Brunos.  Of course.  One in a jacket, carrying a gun that would normally be kept mounted on a car or specially outfitted warbeast.  The other was altered, with charred skin and a chemical tank at his back.

The one with the gun fired.  It wasn’t like the sniper’s shots had been.  This one struck the road directly to my left, one long stride away, big enough and powerful enough that I might have messed my clothes if I’d been less hardened by past experience.

A deliberate miss.  For now, they were playing by Catcher’s rules.  There weren’t any good options when it came to dealing with the man with the gun, so I didn’t try.  I told myself that he wouldn’t shoot at us.

By some small mercy, he didn’t.

As we made our way down a long, curving street, a small crowd came into view.  A cluster of people, paying almost no attention to our running approach.  The front of this particular crowd kept a good fifteen-foot gap between them and their objects of focus- two men who were covered in blisters.  People in the crowd were throwing bricks and bits of wood at the afflicted.

As the most injured and most plague-afflicted of the two men raised his hand, trying to shield his face, I thought that the rocks and bricks had torn his arm ragged, that tendons or veins were hanging loose from the wound.  But it wasn’t.

Extending from one nasty, ulcerated crop of crimson blisters to the next, something very similar to an exposed vein or a branching growth of vines hung free.  Near his hand, that growth had formed what looked to be flowers.  Those same flowers were bright red, glistening with what might have been blood, might have been the flower’s texture itself.

He caught a stone to the side of his face.  Pulled from the cobblestone road, the stone might have been the size of my fist.  He barely seemed to react.

Another projectile flew at him, and this one caught the growth at his arm, tearing it out from the back of his hand, so it hung loose.  In stark contrast to the wound to his face, this damage elicited a howl of pain, visceral and yet unearthly in how loud and alien the sound was.

I’d heard a lot of screams of pain in my life, and this one sat uneasy with me.

We ducked through the crowd, the Brunos two dozen paces behind us and very slowly closing that distance.  Big, but not slow.

The crowd noticed them and parted for them, where we’d had to duck and weave our way through.  Inconvenient.

We couldn’t keep this up for very long.

I really didn’t want to use the explosives in a capacity where I’d hurt the poor bastards.  It wasn’t their fault that Catcher hadn’t been able to convince them how… what was it?

“Jamie,” I said, panting a little for breath as I uttered the word.

“Map?” he asked.

“No,” I said, panting.  “Poster.  The word- what was-”

“Devastatingly,” Jamie said, sounding exasperated and as if he was going to laugh at the same time.  “You utter bastard.  Focus!”

“I am focusing!”

It wasn’t their fault that Catcher hadn’t been able to convince them of how devastatingly brilliant and dangerous we were.  Killing them would be unkind.

The moment the Brunos were clear of the edge of the crowd, the one with the elephant gun placed a shot directly between my running feet, making me stumble and making me worry for a moment that I had messed myself.  I hadn’t, which was good.  I’d done some running around at some point with blood in my ass crack, I could imagine how uncomfortable shit would be.

Killing them would be unkind, I told myself, with less conviction.

We neared the end of the street.  Another crowd was coming up.  This crowd was more spread out,  focused on shouting at a group of guards at one of the quarantine points at a bridge that spanned a canal.  Docks formed a row nearby.

If we could reach the crowd, we would be able to disappear in it.  But the Brunos giving chase knew that, and as the gap closed, the pressure on them increased.  How badly did they want this?

A quick glance back told me the Bruno with the elephant gun was aiming.

I hauled Jamie’s arm, pulling him away from the direction the Bruno had been aiming.

The aim wasn’t at us.  The large caliber bullet caught the wheel of a wagon loaded with stock.  Crates and barrels full of supplies tumbled, many of their contents spilling out in front of where Jamie and I had been intending to go.  Something that might have been beer mixed with what might have been vegetable oil, coating cobblestones.  Most of the other contents included fruit and vegetables, but even the round ones didn’t roll far enough forward to obstruct us.

Luck, for the gunman, that the oil had been part of this particular wagonload.

We made it about halfway across before Jamie stumbled.  I put out a hand to grab his arm, but between the momentary distraction of my bullet graze and the footing, I only ended up tipping over with him.  I stopped with only a crouch, hauled Jamie up and forward, and started to resume running, making our way into the crowd.

A swiping movement of the Bruno’s hand came within a half-foot of my neck.

“Sanguine,” Jamie said.

This particular spot was in the sniper’s line of sight, then.

I grit my teeth, focusing on making my way through the crowd.  We were an unusual element, enough to turn heads.  People looked at us, eyes moved to my gunshot wound and the blood I’d smeared on my pants.  I had splinters on the shoulders and arm of my coat.  I probably looked something frightful, in expression and general physical condition.

Looking at Jamie, he wasn’t much better.

Was Sanguine willing to put bullets into this particular crowd, in hopes of getting us, or making life more difficult for us?

What was his move?  Or was he actually moving?

With people turning their heads, I started looking for the most vocal shouters in this particular, localized group.  The people who were most focused on the people on the bridge, rather than us.

Once I’d identified them, I looked for the people who were paying the most attention to us.

One woman in a very prim coat looked at us in an offended way, as if we’d spat on her baby or something.  As we passed her, I grabbed her elbow, turning her around.

The next two people were members of a family.  Brothers, perhaps.  Or cousins.  Curious people, with slightly concerned looks on their faces.

I pointed my finger, turning my head, and changing the angle of my shoulders, as if I was going to change direction.  My eyes went wider.

A bluff.  They turned to see what had so captivated my attention.

With that, I shifted course, hauling Jamie with.  I moved into the densest thicket of shouters, who could barely be bothered to glance at Jamie and I.

For the outside observers, watching the crowd rather than trying to peer through it to see a shorter-than-a-full-grown-adult Jamie and even shorter Sylvester, it would have looked like the continued focus of the crowd was on us, going another direction.

Up until that seeming path terminated.

If I’d done it right, judging the thickness of the crowd and the attention of the people around me right, it would seem like we’d gone off in one direction through the crowd, then disappeared entirely.  If I’d done it really right, our pursuers might have convinced themselves that they even saw us go in that direction, rather than just seeing the heads turning and people turning around.

With this little manoeuvre, I stepped things up some more with a gamble.  I led Jamie off the edge of the road and over the chain railing, hopping down to the dock that sat at the edge of the canal.  There wasn’t a boat to be seen, sadly.  The setup looked badly disused, with leaves from autumn still lying on parts of the surface that weren’t in the public eye.  Touching parts of the wood that were exposed to the elements, I found it spongy on the surface layer, only the core hard.

In the water itself, I could see tentacles moving over tentacles, with more tentacles beneath, each of them thicker around than I was.  As the tentacles disappeared, withdrawing into darkness, the water briefly bubbled.

We stopped where we were, ducking our heads low, our back to the four feet of stone wall that bounded the edge of the canal.  Together, we caught our breath.

I saw Jamie’s head rise as he looked up.  I followed his gaze.

Almost direct overhead was a dark line of cloud, concentrated.  The cloud was black at its center, but as it expanded and diffused out into the air and the light, cold spring rain, it became gray.

“The direction that’s coming from… the cliffs?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“Sanguine?  Some kind of rocket or something, with a smoke trail?  He’s pointing the way to us?”

“That’s what I would guess,” Jamie said.

“Which suggests he’s working with someone.  Given the willingness to use lethal force, a different group from Catcher’s.”

“Yeah.”

I could hear the noise from the crowd as they noticed.  A few hushed shrieks and gasps.

“They seem to think it’s the plague being dispersed,” I said.  “Which it might be.”

Jamie nodded.

The crowd was getting more agitated.

If my instinct was right, the crowd would soon be taking shelter indoors.  Sanguine was doing a fantastic job of keeping us on our toes.  If we waited too long before we poked our heads up, the crowd would be gone and we’d have no cover and no way to obfuscate things.

“Alright,” I said.  I looked around.

As with the trough in the little shadowy space, the ice hadn’t all thawed in the darker, more shadowy spaces.  I lowered myself down and reached into the shadowy space between the dock and the wall.  I came out with a chunk of ice and a numb hand.

I reached into my satchel.  I retrieved the guts of the second mine.

“Alright,” I said.

“When all of this is over and done with, I’m going to forbid you from using explosives,” Jamie said.

“They’re so useful!”

“Every single time you use one, I’m left convinced we or you are about to die horribly.”

“Trust me,” I said.  I glanced up to make sure nobody had poked their heads around to look down at the little docks down here.

“Do you know how many times you’ve said that and you’ve betrayed that trust by trying something and making horrific mistakes?” Jamie asked.  “I can count.”

“Ha ha,” I said.  “Stop being a pessimist.”

I drew out the cord of the mine.  It was like an expensive children’s toy.  Pull out the string.  When the internal machinery drew that string back in all the way, then if the switch was flicked, the mine would go off.  The difference was that the draw was fast.  There would be only a moment’s time to catch it or slap at the switch.

The cord drawn out, I tied it around the chunk of ice.  I set the ice down on top of the guts of the mine, explosives and all, then carefully removed my hands.

The cord didn’t slip free, the mine didn’t go off.  All seemed well.

I exhaled.

“Relieved sigh, Sylvester?” Jamie asked.  “You weren’t a hundred percent confident this was safe?”

“Stop being a worrywart,” I chided him.  “Geez.  Relax.

No more explosives,” he whispered to himself, under his breath.

I pushed the setup out into the sunlight, then swiftly backed away from it.

“They’re going to see it,” Jamie said.

I looked around, spotted a pile of rope, arranged into a coiled circle, then moved it, surrounding the mine and ice, so it looked like a coil of rope with a chunk of ice perched on top of it.

Ice melts, the string will retreat into the mechanism, and… bang.

“We need to get to the other side of this neighborhood, to another bridge,” I said, quiet.

“Okay,” Jamie said.  He looked at the mine.  “Why this?”

“So far, we’ve left a trail of explosions and explosives in our wake.  Let’s let them think we’re doing it again.  Are they really going to expect an explosion on a delayed fuse?”

“They might,” Jamie said.  “But this works.”

We climbed over the edge of the canal, into the edge of the crowd.  It was already thinning out considerably.  Our activity down below had gone unnoticed, what with it being conducted in the shadows, occurring beneath people’s feet while their eyes were on the sky.

Jamie and I hurried to catch up with the thickest part of the crowd.   As a bullet cracked against cobblestone, we kept eyes forward, everything focused on the way forward, with the crowd between us and Sanguine.

The Brunos had headed off in another direction.  Others would be coming, with Sanguine’s direction.

The net was closed, and because we were at the neck of this pear shaped parcel of land, there wasn’t a lot of room to move around.

When we finally stopped to rest, sitting beneath the stairs of an elevated porch that overlooked the canal, our positions a good ten minutes of running downriver from the dock with the mine, I found myself so tense that my jaw clicked as I unclenched my teeth.

We didn’t talk.  We didn’t move.  In our individual ways, with our individual focuses, we dwelt on the situation.

I imagined we had twenty minutes before the ice melted enough for that string to slip free.  My imagination was badly wrong.

I couldn’t say what had happened.  The ice might have slipped free of the coil of rope.  A bird might have landed on it.  But the mine went off, forcing our hands.

Without needing to communicate, we moved.  Straight for our next target, which we’d both assumed we would have the time to figure out.  Another bridge to cross, while our enemies were focused on the bomb, thinking we were using it to cover our escape or to open a door.

Another bridge to cross.

I imagined it as another blockade of guards.  It wasn’t.

Our exit was blocked off with ropes stretching from one side of the bridge to the other.  Strung along those ropes was a cloth with a sheet.  A snake wound around a staff, contained within a crow with outstretched wings.  The Academy’s symbol for quarantine, which every citizen knew.  Facing us, it meant the plague had touched the space beyond.

The bridge itself had been partially dismantled.  Not impossible to cross, as the railing remained intact, even if the floor of the bridge had been removed.  But no sane citizen would cross into a territory marked like this one had been.

“They just left it?” Jamie asked.  “They needed their forces elsewhere that badly?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“That bothers me,” Jamie said.

“It should,” I said.  “Because the only way I see them doing that, is if they want to secure a firm perimeter.”

“They’re abandoning the city center?” Jamie asked.

“Maybe,” I said.  “Maybe it’s bad enough that they’re planning on burning it all.”

The symbol on that sheet seemed to declare itself to the world anew as the cloth strained against its bindings, moving this way and that in the wind.

“If we stay, we’re going to have to deal with them,” Jamie said.  “Catcher’s people.  Sanguine and his friend or his friends, plural.”

“You want to go?” I asked him.  “Because it’s up to you.  I’m probably immune.  But you-”

I let the sentence stop there.

“Given how it’s cropping up, if I’m going to get infected, I probably got infected already,” Jamie said.

It felt like false bravado.  I tried to convey that in the serious look I gave him, without calling him out as a liar.

“Come on,” he said.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“If the plague is spreading to the point that they’re burning it all, then this area we’re heading into can’t be much worse than what the whole city is going to become in a few hours.”

“It can’t be that much worse,” I said.  “They can put that on our tombstones.”

“I’ll take a maybe on horrible death this way over inevitable capture and death if we stay around here,” Jamie said.

I hesitated.

“I can’t go back,” Jamie said, voice soft.  “You can’t either.  Death is better than that.”

I thought of the howl of the injured, afflicted man, and I almost opened my mouth to disagree with him.

Then I thought of the black feeling that had overcome me, at the foot of the balcony.  The images of Lillian and Mary, of Jamie.

“Take my jacket,” I said.  “Cover yourself up as best you can.  I don’t want you getting sick.”

Jamie nodded.

Better this than that.  I would take the disease before I lived that black feeling again.

I led the way into the quarantine zone.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.09 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Tynewear was a hustling, bustling city, its people possessed of all of the chaos and coordination of schools of fish, active and adventurous, safe in the throng.  They weren’t feeling safe any longer.  The city, ever blurred by fog, mist, snow, or rain, wasn’t scintillating like it should have been.

Empty street.  Then another.  Then another.  The few dark corners that prevailed in daylight were darker than their usual with the city’s power cut off.  Businesses had shut their doors, many hanging up sheets like the one the guard had used to seal off the one cell.  The sheets and the quarantine symbol blocked off one in four of the doorways and windows nearby.  Other doors had been left open; I saw scattered belongings trailing out those same doors, as if the families had been so hasty in collecting their things and running that they had let some fall.  Trash that had nothing to do with the dropped belongings now blew in the wind or, more common, had found puddles to soak in, losing most of its buoyancy.

That wasn’t to say that we didn’t see any signs of life.  People, ensconced in their homes, were looking out their windows.  The ones that didn’t have quarantine blankets to seal off the outside world were putting up sheets and barricades.

Running, Jamie and I made our way down a cobblestone street wide enough for three wagons to pass by one another, with the entire street to ourselves.

Jamie’s foot splashed next to me.  He had my jacket over his head, his hands tucked into his armpits, and ran while hunched over, his outer shirt removed and wound around his neck, nose, and mouth.  He wasn’t really able to look where he was going.  Not while he was running.

“If you’re leading me, don’t walk me into puddles,” Jamie said.

“Whiner.”

The trees weren’t glowing because it wasn’t dark, and with the power out, the views through windows obscured with white and gray cloths, it was as if the area had been robbed of color.

I was so focused on the city and potential threats that, as I saw the darkness of the liquid seeping out to wind its way around the cobblestones, I thought it was oil.  I quickly connected the dots as we changed direction to move around a puddle, and saw the reflected face of a building.  No, the darkness was creeping across the sky above us.  Dark clouds, thick and unilateral enough in source that I suspected they were manufactured rather than natural, were now creeping across the sky.

“The Academy is sending some bad weather our way,” I remarked.

“Clouds?” Jamie asked.

“Looks like.  Heavy ones.”

“Bad omen.”

“Guess so,” I said.

“They seemed willing to burn the Marina earlier.  Rain won’t help them light the fires.  That means they really want the rain for something else.”

I looked up at the clouds.  Jamie was right.  That growing cloud had to be a big gun, if it was liable to make disposal harder, not easier.

I checked behind us.  We weren’t being followed.

“We can slow down,” I said.

“Good,” Jamie said.  “My calves feel like they’ve forgotten how to flex and have just settled into one very heavy, clumsy state.”

We slowed down.  Jamie held the shirt in place as he raised his head, looking around.

I experienced an eerie moment, seeing the world as he saw it.  He looked away for a few minutes, moved a few city blocks, and then raised his head again.  Things were different.  He knew exactly how things had been, exactly how they were different, from ambient temperature to overall lighting.

I think what I envied most was his ability to consistently track the tone of things.  To take in the attitudes of people and see how they were shifting.

“People are scared,” I said, the thought spurred by my moment of envy.

“I’m a little scared,” Jamie said.  He turned his head, looking through a window at a child that was helping his parents put up the sheet.  Through the crack in the curtains, we could see the boy and the father’s legs as the father stood on a chair, the curtains wiggling in reaction to his work.

Then, with the same force of a slamming door, the cloth dropped, cutting off the view, with the pale face of the child left as only a vague afterimage in my eyes, details already forgotten, while that was another little thing that Jamie would remember perfectly until the very end.

“The shift in attitude,” I said.  “It was fast.  Faster here.  Gut feeling is that the beat is wrong.”

“Beat?”

I drew a knife from my belt.  Holding the grip between finger and index finger, blade touching the base of my wrist, I tapped it against the wall, marking the beat.

“The rhythm.  The flow of events?” Jamie asked.

“Something like that.  I can’t put words to it, and we don’t know enough about what this disease is for me to really make guesses about how things are moving and why.  But it feels like something moved through this area.  In the wake of it, with only a few words or sentences exchanged between neighbors, we have this… I don’t know what it is.  Unilateral agreement?  Resignation?  Controlled horror?  Just something stark and quiet and suppressive rushing through this area.”

“It did,” Jamie said.  “The wagon, a block back?”

“Wagon?”

“We’ll see others soon, I think,” he said.  “They sent a wagon in, nondescript, but it held people, not goods.  Recently, too.”

“They’re moving the infected in here?”

Jamie nodded.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Sy.”

He hunched over and drew my jacket further over his head as the wind picked up.  I could feel the chill, and the sting of the cold as it felt like it was reaching into my injured arm and down to my fingertips.

“We’ve talked about this, but honestly, Sy, I think you like being miserable,” Jamie said.

“What?”

“Wherever we go, you wind up losing bits of clothing, you get wet, you get messy…”

“Keep talking about me losing bits of clothing and people are going to get the wrong idea.”

“They’re not going to talk about that when it comes to you getting wet and messy, Sy?”

I gave him a weird look.  Still hunched over, he angled his head up to look at me, arching an eyebrow.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

He snorted a little.  A huff of a laugh.

“What?”

“I’m just thinking… I don’t know a good way of saying it, but I feel sort of sorry for Lillian.”

“I really don’t get it.”

“I’d ask what you did with her, but I don’t think I want to go there.”

“Ohh,” I said.  “I get it.”

“And I just opened the door for you to go there, and I told you I didn’t want to.  Damn it.”

I grinned.

“I’ve gone three days without giving you ammo, then we get shot at, a crowd of bounty hunters after us, a plague dropped on the city, and no way out in sight, and I let my guard down for one instant, and I ruin my streak.”

“It’s okay,” I said, still smiling.  “I know that might venture into touchier territory, so I’ll let it go, content to know I could use that ammo to torment you.”

“Sure Sy,” he said.

“You sound skeptical, you bastard.  You don’t think I can be the bigger man?”

He moved his head, I raised my finger, pointing.  “No short jokes.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, sounding very self-satisfied.

But,” I said, wagging my finger in his face, “I will have you know, sir, as a point of pride, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my kissing technique.  It is most certainly not messy nor too wet, of all things.  I would even go so far as to say that I am…”

I paused.

“Don’t say it,” Jamie said.

“Damn it!  I forgot the word.  Devilishly?”

“I’m not going to tell you the word, Sy.  I’ll remind you once an hour at most.  I swear that whoever wrote the details for that poster put that in there to psychologically torment me.”

I huffed, annoyed.

Down one street to our right, I could see where of the sick that had been carted in, as a group gathered and headed into what might have been a restaurant.  There was a wagon nearby, and the wagon had one of the quarantine sheets over top of it, lashed down in addition to being sealed.  One of the corners had come free and flapped in the wind.

One of the sick glanced in our direction.  The markings streaked her face in an odd pattern.  Around the cheekbones and eyes.

Then, after a few more steps, we’d passed that particular street, leaving the ailing behind.  They would hunker down in the dark, out of the way, and pray for announcement of a cure.

I doubted that announcement would come very quickly.  This was looking more and more like a weapon, and with all of the materials and ideas in the world, I doubted Fray or Mauer or whoever it was would make a plague that was easy to cure.

“Kissing, huh?” Jamie asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“I thought you didn’t want to know,” I said.

“I, uh, find myself sort of pleased and simultaneously feel very, very sorry for Lillian?  It’s bittersweet, but not bad.”

“No need to feel sorry for her,” I said.  I injected some smugness into my tone.  “I’m a good kisser.”

“You frustrated her so very much over the months and years.”

“She likes being frustrated, you wagalilly-”

“Wagalilly.”

“Made that one up, and it fits you perfectly right now.  And I made it up to Lillian.  Take my word for it, on my last name as Sylvester Lambsbridge.”

“You remembered that bit, it seems.”

I continued without letting him change the topic, lecturing.  “It’s important for us to trust one another.  When we get into a bad situation, and we have to make a leap of faith, we need to know that the other is there to catch us.  Like with the Lambs, but it’s just you and me now.”

“Okay, Sy,” he said.  His tone was very tolerant.  It reminded me of Mrs. Earles humoring one of the youngest children as they talked about their imaginary pets.  “I will take your word for it.  That you made up for all of the mockery, the little humiliations, the name calling, the poking, prodding, teasing, the fact that you looked up her skirt countless times-”

“You can stop now.”

“-and you did it while staying with her most nights over the course of month after month, and kissing her.”

“Exactly.”

In the silence that followed that, even with Jamie’s light tone and my very much enjoying the opportunity to boast, dull, vague thoughts rose up in the back of my mind.  Moments with Lillian, the goodbye, the tears.

I looked back to double check there was no pursuit, and the only figure I saw was Lillian’s.

Black emotion battered and struggled against the box I’d confined it to.

“Now that that’s settled,” I started.  I was aware of the fact that my tone had shifted a little, that there would be discrepancies I would have caught, if I were the one listening and not speaking.  I knew Jamie would notice too.  “…We can change the subject.  Focus on this.”

“We’re heading east.  In the direction of the Theater.  If it’s airborne, it’s more likely to go down than to rise up.  I can’t imagine a plague that scales cliffs,” Jamie said.  “The plague started at the Marina.  Based on the little incidents, it wasn’t heavy in the urban areas.  Don’t walk so fast, Sy.”

I slowed down.

“Not just because my legs are tired.  If I’m imagining this right, then we’re close to the bridge they’d be sending the wagons over.”

I nodded.

“Let’s take a detour,” he said, indicating a direction.

“If you think we should.”

He was more forward and aggressive than the old Jamie, so this cautiousness caught my attention.  I was more than willing to play along, if he had reservations.

We walked around a set of buildings, then Jamie indicated an alley.

“Wait,” I said.  “You suggested it wouldn’t climb?”

“Yeah.”

I pointed, indicating a set of stairs leading from the road to what might have been the upstairs half of a two-storey home that was divided into two apartments.

“Not sure what you mean, but lead the way.  Remember I can’t see much while I’m swaddled.”

“Come on,” I said.

My interest wasn’t the stairs so much as the railing.  I peered back in the direction Sanguine had been shooting from, gauging the intervening cover.

Would he have a clear shot?

To what degree would it matter if he had an unclear shot?

There were a row of these houses and apartment-houses, and they backed on what might have been a business, a taller, four-story building.

I carefully led Jamie up the stairs that ran up between the buildings, then up onto the railing that bounded the stairs.  From there, with the assistance of a windowsill of the taller building, we made our way onto the roof.  The taller building gave us some cover.

“Chance to stop,” I said.  “Get the lay of the land.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

He pulled the jacket back and away, so he had a better view.  I followed him, making sure he didn’t slide, and settled into position beside him, my arms folded at the peak of the roof.

We could see the area that Jamie had wanted to avoid.  Eight wagons were there, and beyond those eight wagons, there was a crowd.  A hundred individuals or so that had been rounded up were now milling about.  A few broke away and limped or staggered away with some purpose into the quarantined neighborhood, but others clearly had no place to go.  They remained where they were, hunching over, enduring the pain, some moving rhythmically, rocking in place.

Take it in in abstract.  I might not be able to consciously spot the differences from one moment to the next and pick it apart for patterns, but my subconscious mind can.  Look at this scene, look for the colors of it, the way the city is moving, the concentration of people…

I let my eyes rove over the city proper.  I looked for areas that had been bleached of color as the power was cut, stained with the red that was faintly prevalent wherever the afflicted were gathering in number.

There.  Another quarantine zone, closer to the theater.  Too far away for me to see the red, but I could see how it was paler.  I pointed.

“It’s already everywhere,” Jamie said.

It couldn’t be just these two spots.  Up on the higher portion of the city, past the cliffs and behind Sanguine, it was possible, but I couldn’t see that area.  In the other direction of the Theater, further down-  The boatyard.

“Jamie,” I said, my voice tight.

He turned his head.

“Is that- where are Candy, Drake, Chance and Lainie?”

“They’re close,” Jamie said.  “Close enough that they might have gotten caught and collected in that area.”

The hundred or so people that had been dumped here weren’t the first deposit.  I refocused on the group.  Something had caught my attention, and I had no idea what it was, which forced me to look for it.  Something off.

There.

Two people moved through the crowd.  With the splashes of crimson that went with the various stages of the plague, I’d mistaken one of the figures for a victim.  But when she moved, it was too smooth, too easy.  Once I looked a little closer, however, I could see all of the details that were wrong.

A woman, pale, with no eyes in the dark sockets.  Her skin was hard, like a doll’s, made of bone or ivory, while the red growths at the side of her head, from her bottom lip down to her neck, shoulders, and torso, and possibly her legs were something like horn, tinted blood red by whatever substance they were made of.  I couldn’t see her legs because she wore a dress that was hooked into what amounted to a corset of that crimson horn material, festooned with spikes of the horn-like material.

She dragged an red-horn axe behind her that seemed too large for her narrow, bone-doll arms to lift.  Even the people who seemed to be furthest into the disease were working to move away from her.  She was eerie and intimidating.  Even from a distance, I had a sense of why.  She moved in a way that didn’t suggest muscle.

“Do you see her?” I asked.

“Yes,” Jamie whispered.  “She has a friend.”

A friend.

I was annoyed that Jamie had spotted the friend first.  I was glad that I spotted him a moment before the woman revealed him, taking hold of him by the collar and dragging him off his seat on the wagon.

From the back, it was hard to see.  When he was dragged around and faced our general direction, I could spot the alterations.  It was as though someone had taken a caustic chemical and poured it on him.  Flesh had melted, with large holes opened in face, shoulder, and ribcage.  Something was within his chest cavity, and it had tentacles, reaching up through his neck -I could see the shadow and light as the tentacle reached up through the damaged throat- and out of his mouth and one eye socket.  Others embraced his body.

The cigarette he’d been sitting on the wagon to enjoy dropped from his mouth, and it was one of the tentacles that caught it out of the hair, passing it to his fingers, so he might raise it back to his mouth.  He carried a backpack, something closer to what a soldier would have than what a student might.  Rugged, and heavily packed.

“Lillian said that red was a good indicator of iron,” Jamie said.

“The Iron Maiden?” I asked.

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“What about the man?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jamie said.  “What are they doing?”

As we watched, Iron Maiden dragged the man to the center of the road.  People naturally backed away from them.  The man put in as little effort as was humanly possible in following along, letting himself be dragged.  The Iron Maiden let go of him, and he was so slack that he landed in a sitting position in a puddle.

The man pulled the pack off and gathered things from within.  I couldn’t make out what it was until it was assembled.

He produced some special kind of match, one that produced a lot of smoke, then touched it to the assembly.

The stand he’d put together was a guide, to keep a small rocket in position.  More smoke billowed, and then the rocket launched skyward.

A hundred feet up, it split in two.

Two hundred feet up, it detonated, with two poofs of black smoke staining the already darkening sky, the one closer to us and the pair first, then the other, off to the west.

The pair remained there, Tentacles swaying in the breeze as he sat there smoking, his other hand jammed into the coat of his winter jacket.  Iron Maiden was rigid and utterly still.  Both stared skyward.

A red streak crossed the sky, from the cliffs, over our heads, and then over the pair’s heads.  A cloud of red expanded in its wake.

Sanguine.

Iron Maiden looked down at Tentacles.  Her mouth moved, but in a funny way.

“I can’t lipread her,” Jamie said.  “But the man-”

“Yeah,” I said.

Tentacles said something.

“He doesn’t want us to stay, he thinks they’re here,” Jamie recited.

Iron maiden said something else.

The rain from the dark, expanding cloud reached the pair and began to fall around us.  There were a few moments of a simple light drizzle, then downpour.

“Can’t lipread anymore,” Jamie said.

If I had to guess, and if the Iron Maiden didn’t have augmented eyes or something, then the downpour would hamper them more than it hampered us.  The appearance of the Iron Maiden was stark, very white and very red.  I could still make out her silhouette in the cold rain.

Tentacles, a little less so.

They had to have special passes, some level of guarantee that they weren’t affected by the plague.  They could pass through the quarantines.  Sanguine, I presumed, couldn’t, but he was capable of reaching us from where he was.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “Sanguine was that way.”

I nodded.  Sanguine hadn’t moved far.

We slid down the slope of the roof, and I went first, dropping down to the railing to better help Jamie.

As he came down, however, his leg caught on something, and it didn’t serve to slow his descent.  He skidded on the rain-slick shingles, slid right past the gutter I’d used as a handhold, and fell, hard, crashing into me.

For a long few seconds.  We remained utterly still, lying in a heap, waiting for some cue or sign that we were being pursued.  My hand remained close to the explosives.

A moment later, we were up on our feet, moving.  Down the stairs, through the spaces between buildings.

The texture of the city was changing under the rain.  The puddles became mud, and the mud became something thicker that pulled at my boots.  If I hadn’t known better and been able to feel the rain itself, I might have thought that it was raining sludge.

Our path slowed as we exited one area, and found ourselves staring at a trio of afflicted.  They, in turn, were hanging back, staring at another afflicted.  As they saw us, they fled, ducking their heads down as if they were ashamed.  Their clothes looked nice enough for them to fit in among the most upper class of Radham, but the bodies within were stained with red and what looked like veins standing out against their skin, their expressions contorted as they endured the ongoing pain.

They scurried off, and we ventured out into the street.  Jamie slowed as he turned his head back to look at the fourth afflicted.

It was a young man, twenty or so, and he knelt on the porch in front of a house, legs sort of splayed out, while his body hunched forward.  Both hands were against the door, one of them weakly rising, then falling, banging on the surface.

The windows inside all had the sheets and the quarantine symbols.

As we got closer still, I could hear him.

“Mom.  Dad.  Let me in.  Mom.”

He pulled away, as if he was going to fall and lie down in front of the door.  He couldn’t.  The veiny, ivy-like growths on his hand had reached out, extending, and worked their way into the wood of the door.  Bright red buds studded the growth, but had yet to unfold into proper flowers.

We should leave him behind, I thought.  I touched the ring, then reaffirmed the thought.  Even with conscience in mind, this was all too dangerous and unpredictable.  There’s not much we can do.

I looked at Jamie, and my mind nearly changed.  Jamie had more conscience.  He had to live with his decisions for his particular definition of forever.

Then I started thinking about Jamie slowing down, complaining about his legs, the fall from the roof.

I had suspicions about what was happening, and those suspicions made the dark, horrific feelings inside of me struggle against their confines, reaching out to choke my throat and my heart, as if they could do the same sort of damage to me that Tentacles’ tentacles had done to him.

But if I asked Jamie, and then I thought about dealing with this person, in the light of the idea that Jamie might be sick?

That would be different.  Harder to sell, maybe.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  His voice got the afflicted’s attention.

The tone, the timing, it was like he was asking me to save the young man.

“Where are the spots?” I asked.

“The arm,” the man said, voice thin. “It happened so fast.”

“Yeah,” I said.

My eye roved over the door itself.  It was hard to make out in the rain, but there were stems extending from the area surrounding where the hand met the wood.

Not just from afflicted to afflicted, but afflicted to environment.

I bent down, reaching, and I collected my knife.  I double checked we weren’t being followed.

In the afflicted’s eyes, I could see a war of emotion.  Fear was a big one.  Hope was another.

I strongly suspected that hope was that I would sever the bond between him and the door, freeing him.

“Jamie,” I said.  “You’re going to have to walk me through this.”

“You’ll get infected.  We don’t know you’re safe.”

“If I’m not, I’m not,” I said.  And if you are infected, like I suspect, I’m either going to get answers or I’m going to go to pieces anyway.

“That’s not very convincing,” Jamie said.

“Work with me,” I said.   I turned to the guinea pig.  “Just-”

“Sy,” Jamie said.  He grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back and away.  The darker emotions flared, the abandonment, the fear, and in the wholeness of each of those emotions, I felt very far from human.

I realized I was pointing the knife at a very still Jamie.

“Work with me,” I said, very firmly.  “And stand back.”

Jamie nodded slowly.

I looked at the victim.  “As for you…”

The confused hope in his eyes became fear and confusion as I touched the blade to his shoulder, instead of the ropy growth.

“…Try not to make too much noise while I’m cutting.  There are people out there who would interrupt us, and you don’t want me to stop halfway.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.10 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“If you really want to do this,” Jamie said, “We’re going to need tools.”

“We’ve got what we have,” I said.  I used my knife to cut open my patient’s jacket sleeve so I could peel the jacket back and away.

“I don’t understand,” the patient said, his voice small.  “My whole arm?”

“It’s not your arm anymore,” I said to the patient.  To Jamie, I said, “Work with me here.”

His expression was dead serious, his voice calm, almost pacifying, “I’m working with you, Sy.  I just don’t understand what’s motivating you here.  If it was a child, I could almost understand, but-”

“If you don’t tell me where to cut, I’m going to guess,” I said.

“Expose the collarbone,” Jamie said.  “Start at the midway point, cut to the shoulder.

“That far back?”  I asked.

“After you’ve sterilized the blade and the site.”

“I don’t have anything for that,” I said.  “We’ll get him treatment after.”

If the infection doesn’t extend well past the localized site, I thought.

As I drew the knife across the line of the collarbone itself, to the shoulder.  My patient jerked, and his eyes widened as blood welled out.  “Don’t look.”

“I can hear what you’re saying, even if I don’t look,” the man said.

“Shush,” I said.

“We’re looking for the major veins and arteries here.  We’re going to need to tie them off.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.  “I know where the important ones are.  I don’t have anything to tie them with, though.  Do I dig now?”

“Don’t you know what you’re doing?” my patient asked me.  “What’s going on?”

Quiet,” I told him.  “Stop asking questions, you won’t like the answers.  I have no earthly idea what I’m doing, but between my friend and I, we’re the only chance you have at getting better here.”

“What?” my patient asked.

“Don’t cut now,” Jamie said.  “We’re going to leave the collarbone alone for now.  Cut from the top of the shoulder, across the mid-point of the shoulderblade, far enough under the armpit without cutting the muscles and structure there, then around at the front, so it forms a full circle.  Skin deep.”

I nodded, visualizing the steps.

Halfway through the process, my patient lashed out involuntarily with his free hand.  I stumbled back.

“You cut something important,” he said, panting.  He had a wild look in his eyes.  “The pain, I’m sorry.”

“Sure,” I said.  “Raise your arm as much as you can.”

He did.  I returned to the cutting site, beneath the armpit.  This time, however, I used my fingers and not the knife.

Reaching from the underside of his arm to the trunk of his body and up to his armpit was a tendril, almost impossible to make out in the mess of blood I was dealing with.  The only reason I was able to see it at all was the way it had grown.  Like a tree’s branches, radiating out and over muscle and fatty tissue, against the grain.

I thought for a second, and then prodded the branch  of tissue with the side of the knife.

The patient’s reaction was whole-body, a flinch and momentary clench of every muscle.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Harold.”

“Harold.  Whatever this is, it’s clearly attaching to you on some level, working with your nerves.  The person who made this is an outright bastard, looks like.  Made it to be painful, and more painful to remove.”

It wasn’t that warm, but Harold was sweating.  I pulled off my shirt and used it to dab and apply pressure to the cut at his shoulder.  There was more blood elsewhere that I couldn’t easily reach and mop up.

I hoped this guy wasn’t going to pass out on us.

“The bundle of veins and arteries at the collarbone,” Jamie said.

“Right,” I said.  “Thanks for the reminder.”

It took some digging and rearrangement of the arm to do before I had an angle to see in the dim.  I used touch as much as sight to find what I was looking for.

I didn’t have anything to tie him off with.

Wiping off my hands, I reached for my pocket, and carefully withdrew my picks.  I chose the narrowest one.  A flexible band of metal.

“You’re going to want to avoid moving very fast,” I told Harold.  “Because the way I’m doing this, you could pull things free, and then you’d just dump blood into your chest cavity.  Everything would go rigid, you’d lose consciousness, and you’d die.  Move slowly.  Don’t jerk your head around.  The goal here is to allow you to walk away, ideally without the infection.  We’re going to want a doctor to look at this hack job of mine and get you something better.”

Harold’s expression set.  From the look in his eyes, I might have thought he was in shock.  From the look of his mouth, jaw, and neck, he was intensely focused.

Good enough.

I used the thin metal band, and I bent it, pinching veins and arteries against the bone of the clavicle.  I secured it as well as I could before twisting the metal around, securing it.

“Next step.  I’m not going to cut this thing, but I’m going to cut the tissue surrounding it,” I said.

Harold made a face, pursing his lips.  “Mm.”

Preparing himself for what was coming.

“Good man,” I said.

The rain was a small blessing in that it washed away the worst of the blood.  On the other side of that same blessing, however, was the lack of light.

It didn’t take much to keep my hands steady.  I’d spent too many nights picking locks and quietly collecting possessions from the same room those possessions’ owners were sleeping in.  Emotion was my enemy here, and it had little to do with the person I was cutting into.  I was concerned about Jamie.  I wanted information that could help me help Jamie if he was sick, now or in the future.

I hated the idea of cutting into him like I was cutting into Harold, here.

On nights when I couldn’t sleep, which were thankfully rare, I made a habit of looking after my tools.  My picks, my clothes, and my weapons.

I was glad my knife was sharp, that light pressure and the sharpness of the blade was enough to sever muscle.

There’s an awful lot of blood inside people, I observed.  I’d cut people, I’d impaled them.  I’d arranged for them to be pulverized, and I’d given them poison that had them vomiting blood.  But working on someone on this level, intimately, striving to keep them alive while still taking them apart, it wasn’t my field of expertise.

I didn’t know how Lillian handled it on the long-term.  I much preferred the reality of causing sufficient damage to get people and problems out of my way.  I had to target vulnerable areas for that, I didn’t have to preserve them.

“You know you’re infected now,” Jamie said.

“Possibly,” I said.  “I might be infectious but not infected.”

“Why?  Why for him?”

“Had to start somewhere.  And I need to understand what we’re working with.”

“Mm.”

I was getting cold, with Jamie wearing my jacket and my overshirt pulled off to mop up the blood.  The rain was cold as it ran through my hair and down my body, having soaked my clothes long ago.  My fingers remained warm, but it was stolen body heat.  The warmth being there helped me maintain my focus.

With a movement of the knife, I separated the infected muscle from the arm.  I carefully used the knife and one of my lockpicks to fold it back.

A groan on Harold’s part became a strangled scream.  He moved, including moving in ways I’d encouraged him not to, hunching over.

“Harold,” I said.  “I need to keep working.”

“It’s moving,” he said.  “I can feel it reaching through my veins.”

I glanced at Jamie, then set to work.  I shifted the arm to the best possible position, and started cutting, first down to the bone, then moving around.  Jamie pointed out other, lesser veins and arteries.  I did what I could with each, using the picks and little wires in the kit.

I was at the top of the shoulder when I started cutting, and Harold reacted more violently than he had yet.  He screamed, making that same unearthly noise the infected had made when he’d been stoned, a brick glancing off of his infected flesh.

It was reaching through his veins.  I backed off while he swung at me, kicking, then staggering, falling onto the stairs.  I waited for the agony-induced aggression to abate.

“Something went wrong there,” Jamie said.  “Pulsing output of blood at the back of the armpit.”

“Got it,” I said.

Once I was sure Harold wasn’t going to deck me the moment I was in reach, I started fixing the damage.

“The next step is going to be creating some of what Lillian called Moulder’s Shunts.  I don’t know how well it’s going to work without glue, but you’re going to need to expose more of the veins and arteries to start.  The better we do here, the slower he’ll lose blood.”

I nodded.

The infection formed a central point, and then it spread.  Roots extended over and through the victim, almost invisible, sneaking in through veins and the depressions in flesh.

The agonized screams were a bad thing.  We didn’t have long, and if I wanted to do this right, then I needed to get ahead of the problem.

Jamie’s shunts finished, I started cutting back the growth at the shoulder, digging beneath the flexible, vein-like branches that had extended.  Everything was slick to the point that it felt the same.  Slimy, warm but not warm enough to warm my fingertips that were starting to feel the cold, making my hold on lockpick and knife harder and harder.  It felt like either or both would slip from my hands like a wet bar of soap.

It was so messy too.  I could see why there were stories of doctors losing tools in their patients.  Blood was everywhere.  I couldn’t always make out the logic of the underlying systems and parts.

I liked to think I had a good idea of how human bodies worked on a gross, abstracted, mechanical level.  This was something different.

Wyvern let me fine-tune my ability to deal with things.  My muscle memory wasn’t long-lasting, but I was quick to pick things up.  Even with tools greasy in my hands, I was faster when it came to pruning away the roots that had reached through and out of blood vessels and into muscle.

Once I was done, I quickly resumed cutting.

I didn’t get a full second into cutting before the next agonized scream.

This wasn’t working.  I was quickly reaching the point where I was butchering the man.

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “Let it go.  We need to run.”

I looked at Harold, and I contorted my brain, pushing for that same crystal clear imagination that let me imagine the Lambs in such detail.  I put Jamie’s face in place of Harold’s.

“Harold!” I said, trying to shake sense into Harold.  I wasn’t willing to wait for him to calm down, now.  “Stop.  Tell me, where is it?”

He looked at me, and huffed out a shuddering breath.  The look in his eyes wasn’t much better than a thousand-yard stare.

I reached out, knowing I could very easily get bludgeoned.  He didn’t lash out, this time.  I wondered if he lacked the strength.

I put my hand out, and I felt at the perimeter of the wound.  I watched him move and tense in reaction to my prodding, and gauged where the branches were growing.

I agitated it.  It’s growing with purpose, making sure it keeps its host.  But hurting it, or taking away its food, or moving around too much, it’s making the thing react, it’s getting Harold’s blood pumping, and this damned thing uses the blood as a guide or a fuel source.

I couldn’t cut fast enough to remove the branches before more grew in.

I took a step back from Harold, staggering a bit on the stairs.  Jamie put a hand out, palm between my shoulderblades, to keep me from falling over.

“Don’t touch me,” I said.

He withdrew the hand.

I looked around, and saw where stones bounded a garden.  I hurried over to it, dropping my knife and hurrying to pick it up with both hands.  I returned to Harold.

I watched as his eyes shut, and he lowered his head.  There was a peace that swept over his body language and expression as he saw me lift the stone over my head and reacted in kind, moving in position to make things easier.

But I wasn’t intent on the mercy kill.

The stone came down on his shoulder, hard and heavy enough, aimed at the joint.  I had no idea if something broke or if something dislocated, but the end result was the same.  He staggered, his one hand nearly tearing free of where it had attached to the door, and his eyes went wide, as if he couldn’t comprehend what had just happened.  His shoulder bent at an unholy angle.

“They’re here, Sy,” Jamie said.

I looked over my shoulder.

Even in the rain and the stormcloud-induced gloom, I could see the pair.  Tentacles and the Iron Maiden.

“I’ll do what I can,” Jamie said.  “Don’t-”

“Don’t what?”

“No, nevermind.  I was going to say don’t make me regret this, or I hope this is worth it, but… I’m choosing to trust you.  I have to trust you right now.”

“Stay alive, Jamie.”

“Yeah.  You’ve only got about a minute, Sy.  Use it well.”

I turned my attention back to my patient.  Harold.

I didn’t try to cut or detach the branches.  I knew they were reaching further, getting a firmer grip, but my focus was on the flesh that was still attached to the shoulder.  I cut everything but the branches.

When that was done, I swept the knife out.  I had a sense of how they grew, now.  I took a liberal amount of flesh for the sake of expediency.

Jamie had pointed out the key areas to work on to stem the blood flow.  There was a lot of blood, but tissue was that way.  Harold looked far weaker than he had.  I had no idea if he would last one hour, fifteen minutes, five minutes, or ten seconds before passing out and passing on into oblivion in an ungentle way.

I moved the excess skin over the site of the wound, covering it as well as I could, and then covered it with a rearrangement of his shirt and with his jacket.

With his shirt and the jacket, I bound the wound there as tightly as I was able.  With sleeve and jacket, I tied it in place, above and below his other shoulder.

“Lean on me,” I said.

He did, using his good hand.  When his arm proved too weak to hold him up, he staggered.  He managed to stop himself by bracing his entire forearm across my shoulders and the back of my neck.

I glanced back at the severed arm, and saw how the bloody, severed end was bleeding out to the sides.  Blood didn’t just trickle down, but seemed to be extending to the left and right, and back up the sleeves.

I watched for a full second as some of that ‘blood’ branched out.

What a malevolent little piece of work that was.

I moved Harold further from the door, then turned my attention to Jamie.

I saw Mary instead.  The arc of movement, the flinging motion, nearly identical to how Mary moved when she threw her knife.

Tentacles flinched a little, but didn’t act like he was hurt.

“Stay,” I told Harold.

He didn’t respond, but he did shift his weight against the fence we were near.

I hurried toward Jamie.

Neither of the two combatants were fast.  Iron Maiden, it seemed, knew how to fight.  She moved fast, taking three quick steps forward, tipping forward, lifting her axe up overhead while her entire body toppled forward.  She landed with one hand and two feet planted on the road, the axe held aloft, then hurled herself forward, simultaneously lunging and swinging the axe a full two hundred and seventy degrees around her, using only one hand to do it.

Jamie quickly moved back out of reach.  At a point where he should have had clear footing, he stumbled instead.  The axe bit into the street just a short distance from his foot.

I thought it might have to do with his being sick, but the stumble had coincided with a movement on Tentacles’ part.  Did the lazy, slow-moving man have something up his sleeve?  A measure of coordination when fighting alongside Iron Maiden?

Iron Maiden pressed the attack.  Swinging, moving, and Tentacles was quick to keep up, moving forward so he had an opportunity to lash out if it arose.

I couldn’t allow that.

The dark, black emotions had a hold of me now.  They dictated my movements as I reached into my satchel with a bloody hand and pulled out a grenade.

I gauged the distance, and aimed that grenade so it might land somewhere between the Iron Maiden and her tentacled friend, while being far enough away from Jamie.  I let it fly from slick, sticky fingertips.

In the gloom, with the downpour making little movements hard to discern, I didn’t even see Tentacles or the Iron Maiden make a move.  The grenade detonated, but it detonated a solid twenty feet to the left of where I’d thrown it.

Jamie could make fun of my aim sometimes, but it wasn’t that bad.  I could see the whites of his eyes as he glanced over in the direction of the explosion.  He scrambled back out of the way of Iron Maiden.

Tentacles had seen the grenade, which said a lot about how keen his eyes were, and he’d swatted it away.  That said something about how quick and coordinated he was.

Did he have senses that went beyond eyesight?  Or had they augmented the eyes of the body that hosted that tentacled thing within its chest cavity?

I wasn’t in a position to make good calls.  I had to guess about which it was, knowing that if I was wrong, we’d be in a terrible position.  If I was right, well, even then there were no guarantees.

But the alternative was abandoning Jamie.

No way, no how.  Not when he’d been by my side when it counted.

I was halfway to them when Tentacles moved.  A full second alter, something struck at my feet, knocking them out from under me.  I sprawled, and with the road being as waterlogged as it was with the downpour, skidded along a puddle as I landed.

I reached for the satchel.  Before my hand could make contact, it flew free, landing at the side of the road.

Now that I was close enough to see some of his features, I saw that Tentacles’ eyes were milky white.

But there were other eyes, peering through gaps in the chest cavity.  The eyes caught the meager light, reflecting it too much, almost seeming to glow from within the darkness of the experiment’s torso.  I could count four, and that was limited to the portion of his body that faced me.  There might have been more, looking out to the sides or behind him

Mud, water, and blood dripped off of my hands as I tried to move back and out of the way.

Looking at Tentacles, I could see the longer tendrils that had unfurled from beneath his clothing.  He reveled in being in the gloom, keeping the tentacles where it was dark, where the falling rain and ambiguous shadow made it hard to tell where they were.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Not really,” Jamie said.  The knife he held was pitiful compared to Iron Maiden’s axe.  His other hand held the satchel with the remaining mines and grenades.  He’d given me most of his.

I watched both of our opponents as they moved, pacing to maintain a favored distance from us.  Neither moved in a fluid, natural way.  When she held her axe up in the air, Iron Maiden’s hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder moved in funny ways.  Almost as if it should be predictable, but it wasn’t wholly.  The same might have been true for her legs, but her dress covered them.  Neck and head remained largely rigid.

Meanwhile, Tentacles looked like ten or eleven stone worth of mass, light for an adult man, but he had another fifteen stone of mass in the tentacles that he’d revealed and extended out around him.  That much length and mass had to be intense to lift.  I gathered that his very fluid, lazy movements were careful ones.  He moved slowly because he was always prepared to move and be able to use the strength of his whole body to lift or swing a tentacle.

Which said nothing of the fact that, in the gloom, with the puddles and natural patterns of the cobblestone street obscuring things, other tentacles were sneaking toward me, snaking between and around cobblestones, and through muddy puddles.

I wasn’t one for a fight.  I didn’t win.  I very frequently got hurt when I tried things.

Jamie continued the retreat as Iron Maiden continued her strange, mechanical advance.  Like a clockwork person, almost, with the way her arms moved so consistently in the same ways as she swung and moved, but without the same timing or the exclusive patterns.  She mixed up how her legs and arms moved.

As Jamie retreated, Iron Maiden advanced.  It wasn’t so much that Jamie was to my right, Tentacles in front of me, but increasingly that it was Jamie behind me and off to the side, Iron Maiden to my right, and Tentacles in front of me.

I backed away, so as to keep both enemies in my field of view.  One tentacle reached out for my knee, and I quickly jumped back to avoid it.  A second that I hadn’t seen caught my other foot.  I stumbled, landed on my ass in water, and hurried to get to my feet.

Any second now, Iron Maiden would change targets to me.

“Jamie,” I said.

“I know, Sy,” he said.  And from the tension in his voice, I knew that he knew I was being flanked.

I held up my hand, gesturing.

Ready.

I took my time rolling up my sleeves, then used my skin between index finger and thumb to scrape the worst of the muck and blood off my forearms and hand, before doing the same with the other hand.

I made eye contact with tentacles, not the milky white eyes of his actual face, but the eyes of his body.

His body language was something alien.  I couldn’t even see all of him, so I had to work with limited information.  I wasn’t even sure he had expressions like a normal person.

Iron Maiden moved up a step, holding her axe with both hands as she forced Jamie to retreat further.

That step was just a little bit shorter than the last.  She wasn’t chasing Jamie anymore.  She was preparing to flank me.

The poster had asked for me to be delivered dead or alive.  Dead was a possibility.  Dead was probably something she did very well.

I made my move, scrambling backward, and I saw Tentacles move, setting his weight.

In the moment he moved, I shifted my weight forward.  The toes of my shoes scraped against the puddle-covered road and found traction, and I lunged forward.

He would hit me, probably hard, but it wouldn’t be the same calculated strike he’d plotted.  Even as I shifted my weight and changed my plan of attack, he did the same.

I closed the distance between us with a reckless run, one foot going too deep into a puddle, slowing me down.

I hurled the clump of mud and blood that I’d collected from my arms.  It hit him across the chest and stomach, some of it finding its way into the eyes of that tentacled body.

He attacked blind.  I anticipated an attack down toward my feet and legs and leaped, but my timing was off, I couldn’t even see the attack, and he hadn’t attacked low.  The whip-like tentacle caught me along the length of my body, heavy but not the sort of thing that would tear me to pieces.

I hit the ground hard enough that the air in my lungs was shaken free.  For two terrifying seconds, I tried to breathe and couldn’t.

In the third, I put the fear away, gripped the second clump of blood and mud, and hurled it.  He drew his tentacles in to form a kind of shield.  Some of it still struck home.

“Sy!” Jamie cried out.

Iron Maiden.  She was stalking toward me in that weird gait of hers, lifting the axe in that same strange way.

Before she was halfway to me, a second grenade went off.  Jamie’s throw, capitalizing on her distraction and Tentacles’ blindness.

She flew, almost literally, in my general direction, before landing in a heap.  I flew, in a metaphorical sense, in the opposite direction, toward the site of the explosion and toward Jamie.

“Arachne!” Tentacles cried out.

She had a name, it seemed.

He attacked, partially blind, and as disappointing as it was, many of those attacks managed to hit me, knocking me off balance, or catch at parts of me, forcing me to pull away, losing momentum.

But Tentacles seemed more interested in his companion than in us.

Jamie and I left the pair behind us.  We hurried toward Horace, who was slumping over more and more, and between Jamie and my bruised self we managed to bring the fellow along with.

Not that we got very far.

A short distance down a block and around a corner, and we’d reached the next bridge.  The impact of the Academy’s rain was clear, now.  As the rain came down, something in it was activating with something in the river.  Either the rain held seeds, or the river did.  A material Jamie and I had seen used a thousand thousand times before.  Virtually every building in the Crown Empire was touched by the stuff, and here it had been put to use in quarantine.

Where canals had once separated and subdivided the city, there were now walls of wood, knitting together, weaving into a barrier, with the sole purpose of generating raw height, the horizontal growths rare and quick to break away and fall on either side of the waters.

Here and there, the aquatic warbeasts reached up and through, swatting at the barriers, bringing down loose horizontally-growing branches.  They would stay for as long as was necessary to remove any climbers or stall other threats, then likely retreat to somewhere or get choked out by the growths of wood.

They were sectioning off the city for quarantine purposes.  Our escape routes were getting further and further overhead by the minute.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.11 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I helped a one-armed Harvey hobble along, while Jamie walked ahead of us.  We had a row of houses to our right and a still-rising wall to our left.  The street we ran down was more for walking than for houses, rendered dark by the lack of trees growing around the houses, the fact that the lamps were off, and the combination of both stormclouds and pouring rain.

Jamie tried every doorknob we passed, while I did what I could to bear Harvey’s weight.

He found an unlocked door, opening it, and held it for Harvey and I.

“No use trying to break through or get around before the walls are fully done growing,” Jamie said.

“You’re sure?”

“It’ll be a narrow window, Sy.  When they’ve reached maximum height, they’ll get thicker and denser.  Most architects that use builder’s wood will set up partitions to constrain the growth, but those aren’t available here.  It’ll just be raw mass.  The thing to look out for is if the growth visibly slows, but you can hear the creaking of wood moving against wood.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“What’s my next step?” Jamie asked.

“Find the house medical kit, bucket,” I said, as I helped my charge limp through the door.  “Mop too.”

Jamie hurried off to find things and supplies, still moving slower than he should have.  Looking at the interior of the house, the occupants had left in a hurry, creating mess wherever they went.  I wasn’t sure if that would help Jamie find the things he needed or hamper him.

I led Harv over to an armchair that had been set near the now-dark fireplace.  He fell down into the seat, in something that approximated a sitting position, with only enough sense to favor his butchered left side and keep it from colliding with the chair.

He was as white as a sheet, with a very red nose and eyelids.  Nothing in his face, eye contact or body language suggested he was present.  The shock to his system, blood loss, trauma, or a combination therein had left him disconnected from reality.

That might have been a mercy, all told.

“Don’t pass out on me now, Harv,” I said.

He moved his head very slowly.  His eyes actively searched for me, even when I was in his field of view, as if his vision was blurry or his thoughts weren’t all there.  He managed to look at me, then gave me a puzzled look.

“It’s okay,” I said.  “Just stay with me.  You managing?”

“Pain,” he said, sounding about as strong as he looked, which was easily summed up as ‘pathetic’.

“I took your arm, that tends to hurt.  Unless you mean you can feel the stuff crawling through you?”

He shook his head, then looked like he might pass out from the way that little motion made his head swim.  I put a hand out to his shoulder to steady him.

“Pain,” he said, again.  “Like it’s still there, running from shoulder to fingertip.”

“Phantom pains,” I said.   “That’s going to happen, with something like this.”

“I want to die,” Harv said.  “I can’t live like this.”

I peeled away at a portion of his shirt and jacket.  It was plastered to his skin by some combination of cloying blood and sweat.  He winced visibly as I pulled the material away near the top of his shoulder.

“There are drugs they can give you that will let the mind figure out how to handle the phantom pains,” I said.  “There are surgeries where they will give you a new, working arm.”

I saw him shake his head.

Harv was a shadow of Jamie, like this.  Like Jamie, he was sick, if farther along.  If Harv could make it, so could Jamie.  If he died on me, I might lose hope for my friend.

“Trust me,” I said, firmly.  “The rest of your long life is waiting for you.”

“My parents didn’t even answer the door,” Harvey said, his voice a hush.  “They were home.”

He’d lost his family, in a way.  Even if everything returned to normal and the plague was cured, he’d lost that.

I couldn’t sum up an encouraging response to that.  It hit too close to home.

“That’s the wrong thing to be focusing on.  You need to keep your eyes forward and work on staying alive.  I might even be able to get you funding to help you get that surgery and get back to life as normal.”

Jamie approached, coming down the stairs, his hands holding a bucket with a bowl perched on top.  He held it like it was full.  “Just like you to find another pet project, Sy.  We wrap up our financial obligations to the other four with a decent cash donation to set them up and help get them settled, and you go and you find a new woebegone bystander to help.”

“It’s only fair,” I said.  “I borrow them and use them for a while, then I usually subject them to something horrifying, if not multiple horrible somethings.  I gotta make it up to them on some level, leave them at least as well off as when I find them.”

Very carefully, I took the bowl from him.  It held water, warm if I judged by the feel of the bowl, and a washcloth.  The bucket, in turn, held the same medical supply kit that just about every family of means kept in their house.  I plucked that from the bucket.

“But why did you find him in the first place, Sy?  You just felt like carving him up?  Felt suddenly altruistic?  Disinfectant in the water.”

“I like how you’ve managed to suggest two very different reasons, befitting two very different moralities, and made them each sound as natural as sun in the morning.”  I tore open a package of disinfectant and dumped it into the bowl.  I washed off my hands in it, and felt my hands and arms tingle on contact with the stuff.  Strong.

“Seriously,” Jamie said.  “Don’t deflect.  Why did you pick him to rescue?”

Hands clean, I started mopping at the area of crusted blood, wiping the skin around Harvey’s wound clean.  I focused the entirety of my gaze, hands, and attention on the task at hand as I let the words pass through my lips, “Roll up your pants legs.”

I didn’t look as Jamie set to work.  I used the washcloth and warm water to wash away and break up some of the congealing blood that bound shirt and jacket to Harv’s upper body, then got the kit.

“Still with me?” I asked Harv.

“Mm,” Harv said.

Jamie had gone silent.  I glanced at him, and saw that he’d stumbled back a few steps before collapsing into a sitting position on the arm of the nearest armchair.

Red spots, across his calves and shins.

I blinked hard and looked away, suppressing the welling emotions.  Jamie, meanwhile, looked quietly devastated.

There were steps to be followed.  I’d expected this, braced myself for it.

In front of me, Harry turned his head, looking at me, then at Jamie, then back to me.  The shaking of my hands as I tended to him had gotten his attention.

Calm, I told myself.  Be calm.

“Damn,” Jamie said.  “No.

“You’ll be fine,” I said.  I forced my voice to be neutral and calm.  “So far, the infection doesn’t seem to be spreading any further for Harry here.  I’m not seeing any more tendrils.  A prompt and thorough amputation seems to slow or stop the progression.  Whoever created this thing either didn’t plan for this, or they liked the idea of us hacking each other to pieces in efforts to stem the tide of this disease.”

His hands went to his head, fingers running through his long hair.  “That’s what you were doing.  A trial run, before you treated me.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I found the opaque bag of aqua nucifera and pinned it to the side of the armchair with my knife.  I unreeled the attached tube.

“Thank you for not telling me.  I’m bothered that you noticed before I did.”

I nodded.  “You were focused on other things.”

“Still bothered,” he said.  He stared down at his knees and his exposed calves.  “Really bothered.”

“We’ll fix you up,” I said.  “Well, we’ll fix up Harry first, and make sure that he’s going to make it through this.  Once he’s stable, I’ll feel a lot better about your outcome.”

“Sy,” Jamie said.  “Even if this goes perfectly, it’s my legs.”

“I know.”

“We’re running from Dog, Catcher, two Brunos, the Ghost, Sanguine, the tentacled man, and very possibly Iron Maiden.”

“She lived?”

“I’m suspicious she did, Sy.  I had one last glimpse of her, and she looked awfully whole for someone who was standing at the periphery of a grenade’s detonation.”

“Damn it,” I said.

“Not to mention,” Jamie said, “We’re outrunning the plague, and working to get out of the city before the quarantine is fully established and the walls require something closer to a siege engine to break through.”

“I know,” I said.  “Yeah.”

“You want to, what, amputate my legs?  While we’re on the run?  You don’t see the problem with that?”

“Not amputate.  I hope.  But running might be hard afterward.”

Jamie nodded, eyes still on his legs.

“For now, we need to focus on the people who are chasing us,” I said.  “Assuming they didn’t give up, I’ll feel a lot happier if I go back and cover our tracks.  I want to get the lay of the land, and figure out where we’re going next.”

“Do you know how miserable it’s going to be, waiting here and waiting for you to come back?  Assuming you do?  Half the bounty hunters in the western Crown States are lined up against us, Sy.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But I’ll make it back.”

“Soon?” he asked.

“Soon enough,” I said.  “I promise.”

I saw him draw in a deep breath, then exhale.

It wasn’t usual, to see him this insecure.  Jamie was so stable, most of the time, even when he was arguing with me, he tended to do it in a way that seemed unshakable, and frustratingly, like he wouldn’t ever change his position.

“Stay busy in the meantime.  There are gloves in the kit,” I said.  “Wear them.  Stitch him together with your Academy know-how, best you can.  When I get back, we’ll get you looked after.”

Jamie looked antsy.  I ventured, “Need a minute before you start?”

He nodded.

Before standing, I was careful to re-wrap the wound.  I dug for and found another bag of aqua nucifera.  If Harry needed it, we could give it to him, but I was thinking Jamie would need some too.  The bags could be refilled once each with some sterilized water, and they would still approximate a blood transfusion, while having a longer shelf life and not needing refrigeration.

“You wanted the mop?” Jamie asked.  He lurched to his feet.  I could see from his expression and the way he tested moving his legs that he was now acutely aware of how much slower and heavier they seemed to be.

“Yeah,” I said.  And I assume you want to talk.

Jamie walked with me to the kitchen.  I broke away to check the hall closet, and found a jacket that was only slightly too big for me.  No hood, but I would manage.  It had to be warmer than the alternative.

Jamie had found the broom closet, and collected the mop.  He held it out for me, but as I took hold of it, he didn’t let go.

“Sy,” Jamie said, voice lowered.  He didn’t want Harry to hear.

“Mm?”

“The way this thing has been progressing.  What the guard at the prison said.  It’s unpredictable.”

“Yeah.”

“I think… and I’m not sure, but it seems to make sense based on what we’ve seen, but this thing chooses how long to incubate.  Sometimes it appears within the hour.  Sometimes it takes longer.”

“Looks like,” I said.  “It’s a shame you got the fast growing strain.  I’m hoping there’s a downside for the plague as it accelerates like it is.  Maybe it burns out on raw materials?”

“I think it gets raw materials from blood,” Jamie said.  “It won’t run out soon.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah, maybe.”

“But Sy.  Just because Harold doesn’t have any signs around his stump now doesn’t mean he’s healthy.  If there’s even a thirty minute incubation time, the disease wouldn’t necessarily have shown up again.”

“Possible.”

“I get lying to him, to help lift his spirits.  But you’re not going to fool me.”

“Can’t seem to fool you or lie to you ever,” I said.  “Not reliably.  It’s really unfortunate.”

“There are no guarantees, Sy.  Even if you try to carve out the infection, it might not be the way to deal with this.”

“There are never any guarantees,” I said.  “I’ll be back soon.”

“Please,” Jamie said.

The word seemed out of place and eerie, passing through his lips.

I passed through the one end of the main room of the house to head to the windows.  I peered through each before deeming the coast clear enough.

Jamie was pulling on the gloves.  With his assistance, I peeled the bloody shirt and jacket free of Harry’s shoulder.  Both went into the bucket.  I repositioned the bag of aqua nucifera and reclaimed my knife.

Jamie’s demeanor shifted as he watched me slide the knife into my boot.  As if he recognized the danger I was throwing myself into.

Stepping out onto the porch, I quickly spotted the droplets and spatters of blood that marked the deck and stairs.  I swabbed them with the mop, dipping it into a puddle first.

Once the deck was cleaned of the blood, I moved down to the street, collecting some twigs and light detritus.  I dusted the steps and deck so they wouldn’t look so tidy.

A glance down both ends of the street suggested we hadn’t been followed.

Still, I felt like Jamie could at least rest and we could handle the surgery without having to watch our backs as much, if the trail was mostly dead.

I had to put the bucket down before dipping the sodden, dirty mop into it.  I moved quickly, mop in one hand, bucket under one arm, and trailed the mop along steps, along drier areas, and into the water.

I had to create the most logical path for a discerning nose and eye to follow.  I didn’t know how Tentacles and Arachne tracked people, but I had to cover all bases.

I found a porch with an overhanging roof that was leaking slightly.  Droplets fell at a rate of one or two every second.  I tipped the bucket, holding the shirt and jacket within, and let the mix of water and blood join that little puddle, expanding it.  It was noticeably darker and thicker than the other puddles and bits of water.  Not something an ordinary person might catch, but something a tracker would.

Perhaps too obvious.  I used the side of my shoe to scrape against the puddle, scattering it slightly.

Blood wasn’t the whole of it.  I leaned heavily on one side of my shoe to create a partial shoeprint in a mud puddle, as if I were running.

Then a change of direction.  Not into another street or a house.  No.  I needed to disappear.

I turned the other way, toward the canal, and the massive, twisting network of wood that was lurching up and out of it, as wide as a city street and tall enough to be daunting.  Especially, I knew, when there were no handholds up near the top that wouldn’t disintegrate if weight was put on them.

The rain hit the wall and ran down it and into the canal instead of falling in any great quantity here.  Pulling shirt and jacket from the bucket, I wrung them out, creating a larger deposit of blood at the foot of the wall, as if we’d spent longer here.  The mop let me distort it, as if a person or something had rested there.

I had the mop for a reason.  Holding the length of it, I painted further up the wall, shoving the mop into indents to try and squeeze out more bloody water.

The idea was to paint a picture.  That we’d somehow made it through or over the wall with our injured friend.

The old picture had been erased.  The new one had been illustrated.

Good enough to assist with tracking.  I put the bucket over the end of the mop, and moved along the wall until I found a place where the wall was still growing strong.  I stuck the bucket with the rags within and the end of the mop inside the wall, and watched as it grew visibly by the second.  As lengths of wood wound up and around the already established lengths, growing thicker as it worked its way up, the bucket and mop were caught within, then slowly crushed.

I had to break off the handle of the mop and toss it into another gap to let the wall finish consuming my evidence.

Good.

I stopped there, looking to see if there was anyone nearby.  I only saw stark houses with quarantine sheets and other barriers over the windows, rain, and the cobblestone street that was more for pedestrians than for the rare cart.

I was alone, here.  No enemies, no friends.

I closed my eyes, and I took a moment to force my hands to stop shaking again.

Jamie being sick was getting to me just as much as it was getting to him.  I needed to center myself, or I wouldn’t be useful at all.  I wanted to support him, and I knew that leaving him in a moment like this wasn’t the best way to do that.  But staying and selfishly breaking down into tears or falling to pieces would be even further from the best approach.

Eyes still closed, I drew out some mental pictures.  Faces, bodies, voices, personalities.

When I’d opened my eyes, I’d visualized Helen and Evette.

Helen enveloped me in a hug, no questions asked, no tomfoolery.  I couldn’t quite piece together the physical sensations and fool my body into experiencing that.  I could summon up the familiarity and the warmth, with the warmer emotional response that seeing her evoked, the little smells and the less-warm play of my natural healthy fear of Helen against the fears I was wrestling with.

I closed my eyes, focusing on the sensations and feelings, and centered myself.  I told myself that I did it for Jamie, to assuage my guilt over having left him behind, sick, scared, and off-balance.

I’m terrible at being alone, I thought.  Like Jamie said, I need a Lamb at arm’s length.

Even false Lambs would have to do, if and when I was pushed.

“What’s the first step?” Evette asked.  “Assess the problem.”

To survey the area, I would have to find a better vantage point.  The wall was a dangerous climb, I knew.  The exterior and the upper branches would be brittle, the interior denser, closer to real wood.

What had Jamie said?

“If the growth slows, but you can hear it creaking,” Evette said.  “That’s when we need to get over, under, or through.”

With two hurt people who aren’t moving as fast as they should, I thought.

Sanguine was still watching, too.

Climbing the wall wouldn’t work.  I had to find a way onto a roof.

My jacket did little to ward off the cold as I made my way between houses, looking for a fence or a shack that might serve as a stepping stone.

My first minute of moving between houses didn’t turn up either, but I did find a coil of rope hanging up on the side of what might have been a stable for a horse or a monstrous, Academy-worked pet.  I gathered up the rope and pulled the coil over my head.

Another two minutes of searching turned up a small, square table that had been set out on a back patio.  Wood and glass, with gnarled legs.  I tilted it on its side, and found that the underside had struts and braces to keep everything rock steady.

It served as a poor ladder to get up to a high window.  The window shutter, in turn, was a handhold for me to climb up to the gutter.

Helen and Evette were waiting for me up top.  I almost told them to get down so they wouldn’t be seen.  In the next instant, I chided myself for my silliness.

I climbed a bit further up, until I was on the rooftop of a four-story house.  I moved close to the chimney, hunkering down there as my eyes roved over the city, trying to make out details in the downpour.

Motion was easier to see than stillness.  I could see five different clusters of people who were out and about in the rain.  Three of the five were awfully close to the group of the sick and the wagons we’d seen at the north end of this particular neighborhood.  The two that remained were moving in our general direction and were small enough to be a pair of people; Tentacles and Arachne.  One moved far slower than the other.  I would suspect that it was them, but I wouldn’t make it a concrete assumption.

There were others.  One form that I thought was a wagon moved very suddenly, up and onto a rooftop.  It moved down the other side, out of view.

“Hey!” Helen said, far too chipper.  “It’s Dog and Catcher!”

“And their friends,” I said, gauging the blurry blob that would be Catcher and the recruited bounty hunters he was working with.

Dog reappeared, moving over a rooftop, then down to immediate proximity with Catcher.

He zig-zagged, but if I had to gauge by the general direction they were traveling, they had our scent.

I knew they’d catch up to us eventually, but I’d hoped it would be thirty minutes from now, not five or ten, and that they would be led further astray by the false scent trail.  If they happened to make the effort to cross over or pass through the wall and head into the wrong area, it was very possible that they would have trouble crossing back.  It was a ruse that could buy us enough time to maybe even find a way out of Tynewear.

But if they were this close, then it left very little time to work with.

I couldn’t help but assign something close to intelligence to the red plague.  The way it had chosen to hobble Jamie, it crippled us in the worst way possible, at the worst time.  Jamie was sick, he was hurt-

I closed my eyes.

Focus.

“Traps,” Evette said.

I nodded.

“Dog and Catcher like being up high too,” Helen said.  “They go up to rooftops, when the streets are narrow.  Dog likes to lie down on rooftops and let the sun shine on him, or, more usually, let the rain run down off him.  It’s where they’re comfortable.  They’ll look for vantage points just like you’re doing.  That’s where we want to be.”

“Where we want the traps to be,” Evette corrected.

“I am the trap,” Helen said.

“No,” Evette said, sounding both patient and condescending, “You’re a figment of Sylvester’s overactive and powerful imagination.”

“Stop bickering,” I told them.

They faded into the background as I focused on the task at hand.  I imagined Dog and Catcher moving through the street, following the scent trail, which would be obscured by the rain, and finding the dead end, with Jamie and I seeming to have moved through the wall, with the wall growing closed behind us.

They would want to double check that we weren’t climbing over, and they would look for clues as to how we did it.

Dog would survey the area while the rest discussed.  He would, like I had, seek a high vantage point, close to the site and the ongoing discussion.

I clarified my focus, and spotted the most likely rooftop they would use for searching the area, then the most likely area of that rooftop.

I’d collected the rope so I could either use it to help climb or to quickly scale a surface.  Now I gave thought to snares and deadfalls.  Nothing that would kill, only inconvenience.

I headed over to the rooftop where the first snare would be set.  I wondered how steady that chimney over there was.  Which would break first?  It, the rope, or Dog’s balance?

Helen’s smiling face and Evette’s cackle kept me company in the darkness and the cold.

I returned from the outdoors, water streaming off of my body and coat.  I was careful to close the door quietly.

“Dog, Catcher, their group, and the pair, all closing in,” I said.

“Should we postpone my surgery?” Jamie asked.

I seriously considered it for a moment.  Then I shook my head.

It grew so damn fast.  If I ran into a problem like I’d run into with Horace, then I’d never be able to cut back the concurrent growths of two different limbs without amputating them both.

On that note, Horace was looking far more lively than he had, which was a telling sign of how many minutes I’d spent out there, getting things set up.  Both Catcher’s group and Sanguine’s pair had been close by the time I’d snuck back to Jamie.

“Fluids helping?” I asked Horace.

“Some,” Jamie supplied the answer.  “I think having the wound closed is a big step forward.”

“Yes,” Horace said.  He swallowed.  “Mentally, if nothing else.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Any spots?”

“Three,” Jamie said.  “They appeared on him while I was stitching him up.  I got them early, and stitched the gaps.”

I nodded, but the news evoked a stir of unpleasant emotions, ranging from despair to alarm.

Was it not possible to cut back the growths?  Would more spots erupt?  Was this an endless process?  Forever cutting away something that wouldn’t ever die?

“I felt brave after that,” Jamie said.  “I sterilized the scalpel and tried to work on my leg.  I got three, and I didn’t have the nerve to keep going.”

“Three out of…” I looked at his legs.

“Forty-three spots, ranging from one inch long to three inches long,” Jamie said.  “Some on my feet that I only found when I took my shoes and socks off.  I don’t think you need to cut that deep, but… not easy to cut into yourself like this.”

“But yeah.  I hear you.”

He nodded.

“I think I’ve bought us time,” I said.  “Hoping my knotwork is still up to snuff.”

“Speaking of,” Jamie said.  “You may have to restrain me while you cut.”

I thought about it, then agreed, “Alright.”

“The feeling when you prod the centers of these spots is the most unbelievably painful thing I’ve ever felt, Sy.  If you do it by accident, I might hit you.”

“Right, no, I’m okay with that,” I said.  “I’m just sort of disappointed.  I always thought Lil would be the first Lamb I tied up, and I figured it would be for completely different reasons.”

Jamie’s expression as he stared at me was somewhere between amazement and the stark horror he’d displayed as he realized he was infected, earlier.

“Too much detail?” I asked.

“I’m just aghast that you even know that people do that, given your naivety in so many other areas, Sy.”

“I-”

“Don’t talk,” he said.  “Nope.  Let me pretend that you’re going to say something utterly clueless and innocent to contrast and destroy the idea of an adult Sy that you just set up.”

I almost spoke to counter him, then surrendered.  “Okay.”

“Okay,” he said.  He moved a footstool, and extended his legs so they were out straight in front of him.  He patted a pile of sheets that he’d found and stacked on the little tea table beside him.  The restraints.

People do that, then?  I wondered to myself, as I got to work.  I would have to think on it at a future date.  I’d just imagined once upon a time that it would be fun to torment Lil to my heart’s content while she couldn’t fight back.  Now one of the many tracks in my head was stuck puzzling out how and why that particular thing would be adult in a way that would make Jamie be weird.

Any ideas? I thought.

The specter of Lillian that stood on the other end of the room shook her head.

I missed her voice.  I missed her.

She leaned forward, and I thought she was going to say something.  Instead, I heard a deeper, reedy, hollow sort of voice, like I might expect to hear from the monster under the bed.

“Anything I can do?” Horace asked.

“No,” I said, terse.  The illusion had been destroyed and scattered.  It took work to reimagine Lillian.  By the time I’d pulled a mental image back together, without the ghoulish voice being somehow associated with it, I was done restraining Jamie.

There were so many spots.  Each one would require a tablespoon of flesh, at the very least.

I knelt at Jamie’s knee, so it was at my chest level.  Lillian knelt on the other side.

“Work fast,” Jamie said.  “The longer we’re here with me getting cut up, the sooner they’ll catch a whiff.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Except-”

I heard a distant rumble and crash.

I imagined it was the chimney snare.

“Except that,” I said.  “With luck, Dog is dangling halfway down the front face of the second tallest building on the street, with a snare around his foot.  With more luck, it was a back foot, Dog won’t be able to bite the rope, and Catcher will have to get inside the building and walk upstairs to cut Dog loose.  If this is a particularly good day, Catcher or his friends will run into more trouble as he makes his way inside.”

“I don’t think this is a particularly good day,” Jamie said.  His eyes were on the scalpel.

“Suppose not.”

I began cutting.  Jamie jerked in his seat, tension standing out in his neck.  I excised the first of the large spots, then stopped, holding a cloth down to staunch the bleeding.

“No follow-up crash to mark Dog freeing himself.  First bit of luck we’ve had,” I said.

“Sometimes I think you’re crueler to old friends than your enemies,” Jamie said.  “You seem to end up tormenting them.”

It was a dark thing to say.  I could see why he was saying it, sitting where he was.  Or was there more to him saying that?

I decided not to pry.  Not fair, when he was in such dire straits.

“Maybe,” I said.  I glanced back at Harold, who had his eyes closed.  I had to watch for a second to make sure he hadn’t dropped dead on us.  I returned my focus to the spots, and I was thinking about them as I added, “Mercy can be crueler.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.12 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I put the scalpel down.  It clattered on the table.

Jamie was pressing his upper body back against the cushioned back of the armchair, fingers digging into the arms.  He seemed to be taking the reprieve as an opportunity to breathe again.

I used tweezers to hold the needle with one hand while holding a match to the end with the other.  I threaded it, tied off the thread, and poised myself.

“That’s the last cut, I’m hoping.  Last set of stitches.  I’ll have to check after this for more spots.”

“No.  If there are more spots, then no more cutting,” Jamie said.

I remained where I was, needle held in the tweezers.  I wasn’t sure what to say or do in response to that.  I already felt emotionally harrowed by having to take the scalpel to Jamie fifty-three times.

If it was hard for me to cut him another time, I could only imagine what it was like to be on the receiving side.

“Okay,” I said, injecting false levity into my voice.  “Needle, then I’m going to check anyway, regardless of what we end up doing.”

“I thought this would get easier to deal with as you went along,” Jamie said.

“I’m getting faster,” I said.

“And I’m getting tired, trying to force myself to stand still when my body wants to do everything but.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Okay, right.”

He didn’t sum up the energy for a response.

“…Sooner we’re done then.”

Lillian put her hands around the hand with the tweezers and needle.  She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she was telling me to do.

Steady hands.

I investigated the wound, then began stitching up the incision I’d made.  I had to use tools to keep skin pinched together so I wouldn’t contaminate the wound.  I let go of the tools, leaving them where they were while I worked on the other end of the wound.  The act of pinching pulled at countless other, nearby stitches.  Even with the anti-scarring cream I’d smeared around the cuts, Jamie’s suggestion for increasing the skin’s elasticity, it was hard with the sheer number of cuts and stitches I’d had to apply.

I pushed needle through skin, and began drawing the wound closed.

“Stop fidgeting,” Gordon said.  “Focus on what you’re doing.”

I mumbled something that might have approximated ‘don’t tell me what to do’ if I’d actually bothered to form it into actual words.

“Hm?” Jamie asked.

I shook my head, remaining silent, and he let it go, letting his head rest against the armchair’s back again.

My left hand, no longer occupied with holding the skin together continued to toy with the spare needles, despite Gordon’s commentary.  I rolled them over and around my fingers, three needles at three separate points, so they moved around the tops of my fingers, over the edge, and around the underside, only periodically using my thumb to adjust one of the ones on the underside.

Push the bent needle through, let go of it with the tweezers, grab the pointy end, pull it through, remove the slack in the thread.  Minimize the blood and be aware of the adjustments and clamping that cause more blood to flow, as we’re assuming this is nourished by blood.  Clean, repeat.

“If the cutting doesn’t work, we could use fire,” Evette said, as she watched over my shoulders.  In my peripheral vision, her expression was distorted, much as if I was looking through a fishbowl.  Eyes large, hair in a braid over her shoulder, mouth more a slit across her face than a human mouth with lips.  I could imagine her leaning on me too hard, invading personal space because she was socially awkward, or because the medical work, no matter how trivial, drew her in.

That thought made me think about how the other Lambs might have changed to accommodate her.  Gordon was the doer, while Evette was the one who held back, waiting in the background, looking for her opportunity to strike, or analyzing the enemy and the situation for a weakness she could amend with her particular distillation of Academy science.  He would have taken a more forward, adventurous position, I suspected, if he’d had Evette instead of me.  I wondered if, like Gordon had been warm on the surface, with that bastard buried within, only revealed on rare occasions, Evette would be the bastard on the surface, with a kernel of warmth deep within?

“Burn the red spots with cigarettes?” she suggested.  “A cigar?”

Fire is the go-to answer.  A decade ago, it would have worked.  Fire scares warbeasts, it scared stitched and burned them like they’re tinder.  But things move forward.

“Cold then,” Evette said.  “If it’s a living thing, it won’t like the cold.  Acid?  Or… what about a voltaic charge?  Shock to the system.  Hit all of it at once.”

Maybe.

I finished stitching, and tied it off.  I flourished, dropping the tweezers, needle, thread, and the washcloth I’d had across my lap on the table.

“You got a lot faster,” Gerald said.  “You did almost all of that with one hand, didn’t you?”

“Were you bored, Sy?” Jamie asked.  His eyes were still shut.  “I saw you playing with the needles.”

“More like if my mind was fully occupied on the task, it would have been too much,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

I got the cloth.  I was careful to pour out the water from the pitcher I’d started using, instead of simply swishing it within and contaminating that water.  I began wiping away trace amounts of blood.

There were countless little moments where I wiped, and the crimson stain remained, and I was certain it was another blotch.  Then another cloth, another wipe, and it was erased.

I rolled up his pants legs further, checked, and found nothing.  I examined his feet next, searching for spots.  I used the tools to nudge his feet and toes this way and that and see the different angles.

Shit,” I said, with feeling.

I saw Jamie tense up.

I ran one hand through my hair, and then reached over for the tweezers.

“No,” Jamie said.  “I’m done.  If there’s more to do, we’ll use another method, but we’ve got to leave before Dog or Catcher get their feet under them and smell the blood.”

“Just one,” I said, staring at Jamie’s foot.

“No.  Damn it.”

“Is that damn it aimed at me?” I asked.  “Or the situation, or…”

Jamie’s head hung.  It looked like he’d been wrung out and left to dry.  Beads of sweat dotted his forehead and some of it had fallen down onto his glasses.  His hair was clinging together in strands from the sweat, by his temples, around his face, and where it brushed against his shoulders.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Okay.”

I used the tweezers.  He jumped like I’d stabbed him as they brushed his toes.

“You’ve got lint between your toes, Jamie,” I said, holding up my trophy.  “You should really take better care of your hygiene.  Wear fresher socks, wash those feet.”

“Sylvester…” Jamie said, trailing off, at an apparent loss for words.

I grinned, so that the feeling of gall would only leave him more speechless.

“You’re such a dick,” Lillian said.

But I’m a dick who squeezed a sentence out of you, I retorted to the imaginary Lillian, before banishing the imaginary Lambs.

“…I really recommend leaving me tied up,” Jamie said.

I continued to grin.

He sounded haggard.  “Just run.  Put as much distance between yourself and me as possible, because I’m going to find you and I’m going to hold you face down in a puddle.  Then I’m going to use what little Academy knowledge I have to invent new torments to inflict on you, until you might actually feel sorry for the first time in your life.”

My mind immediately went looking for a retort or a witty comment, and then stumbled headlong into one of my biggest regrets.  My last real conversation with the old Jamie.

The smile dropped off my face.  I turned to Jamie’s bindings and undid them.

“You’ll feel sorry you exist,” Jamie said.

“There’s an edge of delirium to your voice.  Did the painkillers work?” I asked, hoping to change the subject, forcing my attitude to change by upping the ante a touch, teasing Jamie some more.

“The painkillers didn’t do a damned thing.”

“You’re surly, too,” I said.

“I’m sore,” Jamie said, as I released the bindings around his upper body.  “And now we get to see if I can actually walk like this.”

“I’d give you a hand, but I think I’m contaminated,” I said.

“You’ve been contaminated all your damn life, you little wart,” Jamie said, as he used the chair arm to stand up.

“You’re really surly,” I said.

He nodded, testing his balance.  He winced as he set his foot down.  He huffed out a breath, then at the tail end, it became something like a chuckle.  I saw a glimmer of a smile.  “Seriously, Sy.  That was too much.”

I thought about apologizing, but I could see how much closer this had managed to drag him back from wherever he’d been.  I made the impulse decision to double down.

“Boo hoo,” I said.  “Poor Jamie, getting impromptu surgery from a helpful friend who doesn’t know jack dick about this stuff.  So very difficult!”

“Jack dick?”

“What about me, Jamie?  What about my feelings, how stressed I feel?  Huh?  My hand is cramping up.”

“I would hit you, Sylvester, but on the off chance that you’ve got any spores, seeds, virus, or whatever it is on you, I’m going to wait until another time.  I’ll get you back for all of this.  I guarantee it.  I don’t forget.”

“Alright,” I said.

“You won’t know when to expect it.”

“I get a lot of those threats.  When people start acting on them, it’s probably going to be all at once, and I’ll be utterly doomed.”

“Doomed is a good word,” he said.

I swept up the satchel of explosives as I passed it and slung it over a shoulder.  I headed over to Gerald.  “Lemme see yours?”

Gerald helped me peel away the bandages Jamie had applied, allowing me to minimize how much I touched him.

No spots.

“There’s food here, there’s water.  Keep the doors and windows closed,” I told him.  “You’re probably better off not following us.”

“Alright,” he said.  He drew in a breath, hesitating, then ventured, “Thank you.”

I blinked.

“I’m better off than I was,” he said.  “I owe that to you.  I don’t know what I’m going to do, without-”

He shook his head.

“Give me your name and address,” I said, before he could fall too far into that same despair I’d glimpsed earlier.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“No?”

“I don’t need anything more.  I want to put this behind me.”

“If you’re sure.”

Gerald nodded.

“Alright,” I said.  I saw Jamie picking up the other satchel, stepped over to him and snatched it away.  I pulled it over my head as well.

“Greedy,” he said.  “Harold.  I did what I could, using the knowledge I have.  There’s a drainage tube in there-”

Harold?  Right.  Whatever.  I blocked out the medical speak as I headed to the window, doing what I could to see that the coast was clear.

Jamie limped with both legs, a very staggered sort of motion that made me feel like he was going to topple over at the slightest provocation.  He moved up beside me, joining me in looking out the window, then turned his attention to the closet by the door.  He fiddled around inside until he’d found a sturdy umbrella with a J-shaped handle.  He leaned on it experimentally.

“Dapper,” I said.

“Mm.  I just had very vivid mental images of smacking you with this,” he said.  He raised it up and slapped it against one palm.

“Plural?”

“Don’t ask, and I won’t feel compelled to demonstrate.”

So cranky.  You are the crankiest patient.  Have you always been this way?”

“I don’t throw myself headlong into danger in the same way you do, Sy, and I haven’t had you as a doctor in any capacity, which is a definite factor.”

“Ouch!”

I pushed the door open enough to look, then made my way out into the rain.

The canal had, choked with wood and rain both, overflowed.  Where it spilled out into the street, the builder’s wood was growing rampant.  Tendrils of it spread out, weaving its way through cobblestones.  Here and there, it found room to set down roots and raise itself up as a twist of wood.

I was very conscious of how I couldn’t or shouldn’t touch Jamie.  Now the wall growths were extending out, with a gentle sloping curve as the road at the canal’s edge blurring into the high wall.  Bounty hunters were presumably patrolling the area, looking for some trace of us.

Now we were slowed down.  Paths I would confidently take before, knowing we could duck around a corner or take some cover at one point or another were now longer stretches of no man’s land, where if we hobbled our way to the halfway point and an enemy showed up, there was no guarantee we could hide or escape fast enough.

I stared up at the wall.  Thirty feet high, with a light tumble of thin branches up at the top, brittle enough to break away as others pushed their way up.  The long, thin branches formed a loose carpet at the base of the wall, and wood had grown around clusters of them, crushing them as it had expanded.

Claustrophobic.  The city had sprawled so easily and comfortably, before, and now it confined.

“We’ll use explosives to blow through,” I said.  I looked around.  “But not here.”

“No?”

I pointed further down the same wall.  “I led them that way, and that’s also the same general area where I put the traps, so they might still be around there.   There’s a good chance they would have tried to make it past the wall to the other side to follow us.  If we go to the far side, we might find them thereabouts.”

“They might be hereabouts.”

I nodded.  “We’ll go the other way.  Hopefully we put some distance between ourselves and them, either way.”

We headed back the way we’d come.  Jamie limped, using the umbrella not to shield against the rain, but as a walking stick.

We slowed as we approached a body.

It was a woman, sprawled out on the road.  She’d been lying there long enough for the wood from the growing wall to creep out to the cobblestones and make its initial forays into crawling over her.

She was infected.  Veins all across her head and the exposed flesh of her hands, back, and ankle stood out as if they were each a pencil’s width in diameter, at the very least.  Here and there, they had erupted, and growths that looked very much like veins crawled out and beyond, too red in the gloom.  They’d crawled under clothing while the wood had crawled over it, growths extended out and then re-rooted themselves to anchor, and they reached and grasped for aspects of the environment, gripping both cobblestone and the growing branches.  A full quarter of her body was covered in the ivy-like growths.

I could see the parts of the growth that were going to become flowers.  Bulbous, red, with striations.

Her head didn’t move as I walked ahead of Jamie, approaching until my feet were a short distance from her face.  She made no sound except for the light rasp of her breathing.

I lowered myself down until I could see her face, lying in a puddle.  I moved my hand, and her eyes tracked the movement.

The growth, too, moved in response.  Not much, but I could see how it jerked and twitched in a way that had nothing to do with the woman’s movements or the weather.

I pulled my hand back, then pulled my sleeve over it.  I tried again.

Far less of a response.

Reaching into my pocket, I found a Crown bank-note.  Hand still in my sleeve, I waved it in the vicinity of the growth, and saw the twitching movement again.

“Responds to contrasts of light and dark,” I said, my voice soft.

“Something to keep in mind,” Jamie said.

I nodded.  I looked down at the woman, and my thumb reached for the ring at my finger, fiddling with it for a second.

“Ma’am, can you speak?” I ventured.

I heard only the raspy breath.

“If not, then I need you to blink for me if you can.”

Slowly and deliberately, she closed one eyelid.  The other couldn’t close completely because of a the vinelike growth at the other lower eyelid.

“Okay,” I said.  “I wish I could help you, but there’s nothing I can do for you right now.  I can’t give you much, but if you want to make a choice…”

Again, the slow, deliberate three-quarter blink.  Not quite a wink, not a blink either.  Halfway between the two.

“There’s a chance the Academy will come.  It’s not a great chance, I won’t lie to you.  But there’s a chance.  If you want to try waiting, if you want to take any shot you have at living, I can leave you.  Maybe help you get to a position where you won’t drown in a puddle.”

I waited, watching for another response.

“Or I can end this,” I said.  “If that’s what you want, I’m uniquely suited to give that to you.  I can make it pretty painless, quick, and I won’t have any regrets.  I can kill strangers without being bothered by it, if I want.”

The look on her face was a searching one, long and drawn out.  She blinked.

“That’s a yes?”

A blink.

I rose to my feet.  I checked there was no trouble incoming, and drew my knife, walking around behind her head, out of sight.  I bent down, and carefully reached between the crimson growths to brush her hair away from the nape of her neck.

I brushed her hair with my fingertips, best as I could, until everything was as tidy as I could manage.  I hoped it qualified as a last moment of human contact, because even with my Wyvern-altered mind, I couldn’t think of good words to offer her in her final moments.  A part of me suspected that if I’d asked, she would have said to make it quick.

With that in mind, I did.  Using both arms and a fair portion of body weight to help drive things home, I pushed the knife between the base of the skull and the spine, shifted position, and levered the knife to be sure I’d severed it.

The raspy breathing had stopped in the instant I’d pushed the knife in.  The brain, with luck, would remain aware for only a few moments.  Given the nature of her breathing prior and the surprisingly slow movement of blood from the wound I’d created, I didn’t expect she would persist for much longer than that.

I wiped the knife off as best as I could on her wet sleeve, then sheathed it.  I had to back away as the growth simultaneously drew in closer to the host and reached out further with the extraneous, reaching parts.  It was slow enough to move that I had to watch it over seconds to see that movement for sure, but I wasn’t about to play games.

“Sorry to delay,” I told Jamie.

He walked around the woman, giving the body and the growth a wide berth, falling in step beside me as we continued on course.  “I won’t say I haven’t seen this side of you, but I haven’t seen your peculiar sort of empathy this… distilled?  ….Intense?”

They’re you, I thought.  What you almost were.  I just think about how you might have ended up, if we’d split up.

“I think…” I said.  “I think I hate whoever did this.  I’d think I’d be willing to go after them like we were thinking about going after our targets.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“I think this thing, what it’s looking like, it’s cruel, and it’s bad enough that there needs to be rules about it.”

“Rules?  Like quarantine?”

“Like, if I found Tentacles and Arachne busy administering this kind of mercy to people, I would stand back and let them finish, instead of capitalizing on the opportunity.”

Jamie nodded.  “And you’d hope they would do the same?”

“If they didn’t, I would change how I handled them.  No holding back.”

“You threw a grenade at them the last time.  You just threw really terribly.”

“I threw fine, he smacked it out of the air,” I said.  “And that was me holding back.  Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Jamie said.

It was painful to have to slow down my pace to allow Jamie to keep up.  This was hard.  The pressure was too high.  Unless we put some distance between us and them, our enemies would find us.  We needed to get out of the city.  That, in itself, was hard to do.

I had a sick feeling that the only way out would be the way that the Academy allowed us.  That we would have to set up camp somewhere safe enough, and wait out the quarantine measures.  We would be pinned down for a month or longer.

“Sy,” Jamie said, cutting into my train of thought.  “Do you intend to help everyone we run into?”

“No,” I said.  Then I hesitated.  I touched the ring.  “I don’t know.  I feel like there’s an obligation to do something.”

“You’re getting soft,” Jamie told me.

“Mm.”

We made our way down the street, tracing our steps back to the north end of the neighborhood.  As we rounded the corner, finding our way to the open area that topped off the neighborhood, where the people had been getting dropped off, we slowed and stopped in our tracks.

Three, maybe four dozen people had lingered here.  Thirty to fifty people had fallen as if they’d been shot, collapsed against walls and sprawled on the ground.  In places they sat in groups of three or four.  Wooden walls  creaked as they grew, and the bridge that had spanned the canal had been destroyed in the wall’s growth.  Now branches and wood crawled out onto the plaza, over the immobile people.  The bioweapon had crawled forth, extending along the fallen, reaching out for surfaces and others to cling to.  The reason I was so imprecise in counting the people was that the growths had extended far enough in places to make the count difficult to impossible.

In places, the plants had flowered.  Bright red, opened wide, almost iridescent in the gloom.  Four or five petals to each, though some of the oldest ones seemed to be expanding further, black speckles toward the centers, each petal rounded at the left and right edges, with a pointed part at the area near the center.  It made me think of crowns, the elaborate sort  that covered the whole head.

Where the rain poured over the flowering growths, it turned red, collecting pollen or something else, thickening.  The rainwater that pooled beneath that scene was eerily similar to blood in texture.

Together, we backed away from the scene.  I wasn’t sure it mattered so much – the rain seemed to be catching the worst of the pollen from the air and the flowers, rinsing it away and letting it pool at the ground instead of billowing out around us.

My thumb touched the ring, then dropped away.  My hands fell limp at my side.

After a moment, I pulled off the ring and slid it into a pocket.  I deliberately looked away from the scene, gesturing.  I saw Jamie’s expression change as he saw the gesture.

Driven by something unconscious, I’d used the gesture not for ‘go’, the standard direction for moving from place to place, but for ‘retreat’.

Retreating not just because this was scary, but because it was a loss.

We changed course, moving around to the other side of the plaza, then off to the west.

Backtracking.

Once we were far enough from the wall that I could be sure we wouldn’t be stirring any copious amounts of pollen-infused water into the air, I began setting out the grenades and mines, placing them at the base of the wall.  I saved only two, discarding the satchels and sliding a mine into one pocket and the grenade into the other.

I rigged it carefully, arranging a kind of timed switch using the cord of the mine and two thin icicles, with the satchels used to pack things in and down.

We retreated.

The exertion of walking briskly had opened a wound on Jamie’s leg, I noted.  I saw the bloodstain.

A full minute passed, with Jamie and I tense.  We knew the explosion would draw attention.  We knew we’d have difficulty running.  Jamie sat where he was with hands pressed to his ears, his face dead serious.  I did the same.

The explosion was more intense than I’d expected.  It damaged key structures of the wall, and a whole series of growths cracked and began to topple, tearing adjacent sections down with them.  The wall buckled, and began to bow down in our general direction.  It stopped where it was, angled like it would fall if it could, but remained too braced by the sections on either side.

Once we were fairly sure it wouldn’t fall on us, we ventured forth.

The hole hadn’t blown all the way through.  Three-quarters of the way, perhaps, but not all of the way.  The weight of the wood above had also come down, filling the void we’d created.

It couldn’t be easy.  No, now I had no idea at all how to get the rest of the way through.  If I tried, then the wall might collapse down, and we wouldn’t be able to get to where the explosives had cleared a way.

Worse, the wood at the base provided a good source for new branches to grow.  The damaged area was already slowly filling in, twigs springing up, ready to become branches that would become trunk-like growths.

“Give me the explosives,” Jamie said.  “Wait, don’t.  They might be contaminated.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Place the mine where I tell you.  Then we’re going to stand where I say, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, my voice soft.

“Don’t put that much trust in me,” Jamie said.  “I’m not an expert in demolitions, architecture, or the math in this.  But I have some ideas.”

“I’ll trust you,” I said.  “We don’t have any other choice.”

He nodded.  He leaned on the umbrella as he limped his way to the foot of the leaning wall.

At his order, I placed the mine, and held the grenade.

“And when it blows, you’re going to throw there.  Okay?  I don’t trust my legs or the shakiness of my hands to throw anything right now.”

“Okay.”

He nodded.

He and I stood with our backs to the wall that was almost guaranteed to collapse as the explosive went off, roughly sixty feet separating us from the blast site.  We waited, teeth clenched, bracing ourselves.

This one went off so much sooner than the last that it caught me entirely off guard.  I pulled the pin of our last explosive and threw.  Right on the mark.

I felt both terrified and vindicated at the same time.

The wall leaned further, until it stood at a forty-five degree angle, and then the rest followed much more quickly.  There was a deafening series of cracks as the wall behind us began to come to pieces, and those cracks radiated across a point five feet above our heads.

One of the key supports gave, and an entire section of the wall toppled, crashing down so the very top of the wall touched road or the faces of buildings.  In places, the bottom ends of the wall had broken away.  Where we stood, the trunk-like growths were thicker, a building across the street braced the fallen wall, and it hadn’t collapsed on top of us.  More claustrophobic than ever, it formed a kind of lean-to roof over our heads.

“Quick,” Jamie said.  “Before any new growths push it down on top of us.”

It didn’t grow that fast, but it was a scary idea, and the whole setup was precarious enough that I didn’t want to roll any dice.

At a pace that felt agonizing, given the speed at which things were developing around us, we made our way to the broken part, I led the way, moving ahead of Jamie and stomping on any growths that might trip him up along the way, while Jamie hobbled, lagging behind.

A little more dramatic than I’d been expecting or hoping for.

I hesitated at the exit to the short tunnel we’d blown through the wall.  Smoke was billowing from the bits that were smouldering.  It was resistant to fire, and the rain helped with matters even further, but it was impossible to have explosions like this without smoke.

I looked at the gap between us and the nearest building.  It was the span of a single street.

My memory was bad, but I did fairly well when it came to remembering enemies.

Even as the wall began to grow closed around us, I patiently gathered sticks and bits of wood together into a bundle made of my jacket.  I tied it closed as best as I could.  It required two hands to hold.

I very nearly lost my footing, my boot, and stumbled out into the opening as I moved to hurl it – wood had grown up and against my boot, trying to capture it and make it part of the construction.  I tore it free, then hurled the bundle.

One second, tw-

A bullet caught the bundle.

Fast reaction.  He was close, and being close meant he was accurate.

And Jamie couldn’t run.

“He’s in the tower above the library,” Jamie said.

“The tower above the library,” I said.  “That means absolutely nothing to me.”

The wood continued to close in the space around us.  There were thin branches that now reached from the floor to what little remained of the ceiling over the tunnel, and they were growing thicker, drawing on mostly water for bulk, but would soon expand with more substance and harder material.

“Will he fire right away or will he second guess himself?” Jamie asked.

“Neither,” I said.  “He’s patient.  The sanguine part of his personality makes him a patient hunter.  Hard to ruffle.  He won’t make that mistake again.”

Jamie closed his eyes, clearly thinking.  He had to bow his head as wood grew in around him, and I had to shift position as the wall to my left expanded, creaking violently, almost nudging me into Jamie.

“Three quick steps for me, three and a half for you.  Stop.  Then forward,” Jamie said.  “Given distance, given the timing, the speed of the bullets and what we saw before… he has to lead us, so if we stop then, the bullet should pass.  If he doesn’t anticipate us stopping-”

“He won’t,” I said.  “No.  I feel like he’ll take the higher odds, be able to shoot as we rush forward.  I don’t think he knows you’re hurt.  Keep that in mind.”

“I did.”

He raised a hand, and then he gestured.

Three and a half steps at a brisk walk.  Stop.

I didn’t see or hear the bullet, but I heard the dull echo of the distant gunshot, that might have been masked by the atrocious creaking of the wall behind us.

We passed the street, then carried on, moving briskly.

“Thinking about where he was.  Standard walking pace, there’s only so much ground he can cover.  He won’t ride a bike or anything, there shouldn’t be any horses or automobiles, there are only so many places he can be, if he decides to move…”

“Don’t overheat,” I told Jamie.  “Be gentle on that brain.”

He shook his head.  “Tell me how he thinks.  We need to outmaneuver him, figure out the path that gives him the fewest clear shots at us.”

I nodded.  I didn’t like seeing Jamie dig this deep into his memories and thoughts.  It was like me in my deepest Wyvern states, but I knew that Jamie could had a hard time surfacing.  He could get bogged down in it all.  I wasn’t sure if having less treatments at the Academy would make that easier to do.

“I can’t keep track of all of the places he could be,” Jamie said.

“I don’t think he has a lot of imagination,” I said.  “Point, shoot.”

We made our strategy to cross a bridge, getting to a point where we could get down on hands and knees, protected by the little bridge’s sturdy railing.

There was no gunshot.  Was he repositioning?  Did he have other reasons for holding back?

There were no further incidents as we made our way back to the area where the Boatyards merged into the middle-city.

Backtracking.  Because I’d inadvertently barred our way from going further East, because North would have meant getting past that sea of the people that could no longer be saved, and because it was familiar territory with familiar people I suddenly felt were far more in need of help than I’d originally thought.

And, perhaps, because there was no real difference in going east or south or north or west.  At the foot of buildings, where there had been nothing growing before, I could see scattered growths.  Growing like weeds in crevices, the plague flowers fought with the builder’s wood for the broken-up ground and collected dirt that might serve as workable soil.  The builder’s wood grew faster and grew thick, while the plague flowers had reached the maximum limit of their growth and then opened.  The flowers were startling in their color when set amid a drenched city that looked like it had been drained of its color like a slaughtered hog was drained of its blood.

There were no soldiers to stop us.  The rain was the loudest protest we heard as we walked, wary of every shadow and possible point of attack.  There were bystanders, but they watched us from behind windows that had been tightly sealed, with frightened, alarmed eyes.

Back past Jer’s place.  Past the Eastern end of the boatyard.

We were two blocks away from the brothel when Dog made his appearance, cutting us off.  Like Jamie, he limped, but he limped with one leg, and it was because of machinery that had been damaged by a trap.

Catcher and the Bruno with the flame canister appeared soon after.

Jamie and I stopped where we were.  Jamie was too hobbled to run away.  I wasn’t about to leave him.

My mind raced as I thought about options.

“Take us in, then,” I said, a little defeated.  “Just… let us take measures to ward off the plague?  Can you let us help people, in the meantime?  I don’t want to let Jamie get sick, or-”

“Sylvester,” Catcher spoke.

I fell silent.

“You followed us, headed us off,” Jamie said.

“No,” Catcher said.  “We followed them.”

He used his Mancatcher to point.

I turned around.

Behind us.  Arachne, with one of her arms curled up in the strangest position, knuckles tucked into her armpit, body slightly hunched over, but alive.  Tentacles looked to be the one in worse shape.  One of his tentacles dragged limply behind him as he walked with Arachne’s support.  One of Catcher’s Brunos was with the pair.  A turncoat.  Maybe an informer from the start, helping Sanguine’s group find us by following Dog and Catcher to Tynewear.

So that was why Sanguine hadn’t gone out of his way to open fire.  He’d known that the others were tracking us.  He might be on his way now.  He might be in a position or getting in position to support them with gunfire.  Staying well out of reach of my weapons and manipulations.

I could sense the hostility between Catcher and Sanguine’s group.  Were they going to fight over us, their bounty?

Between a rock and a hard place, the surroundings decorated with scattered red flowers.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.13 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.14

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

What day of the week was it?  I had no freaking idea if it was a Monday or a Saturday.

My memory was worse than it had been.  I knew it, I admitted it fully.  Jamie’s version of the Wyvern formula was harsher, the consequences heavier on my mind.  Literally so.

The Wyvern formula rendered my mind liquid, more akin to a newborn child’s in its ability to take in new ideas, new actions and skills, and in how it could adapt to the people and environment around it.  The old, Academy-provided formula was refined, allowing me to augment what I needed to while sacrificing what I could afford to lose, with some measure of control over the process.  The new formula was cruder, more a shovel than a scalpel.  I didn’t mostly sacrifice the memories I could afford to lose, I sacrificed memory.  I didn’t solely gain the skills I wanted to adopt, I gained skill.  I felt less like I had control and more like the grooves and paths for that particular adjustment were worn into my brain already.

When I imagined the Lambs now with that crystal clear, nearly-real clarity, I imagined them with faces.  I hadn’t before, still fresh on the last dose of Academy-provided Wyvern.  I gained skills, but I was losing memory of important details I used to be able to hold in my head.  Familiar people, places, things, and events.  Details about my enemies, and, to a lesser degree, details about my closest allies.

No, if my subconscious was directing this more than my conscious, it might have been responsible for me clinging harder to the people closer to me than I had been, even now that we were separated by a chasm.  I’d managed to hold on to the Lambs with enough clarity to imagine them, and reinforced those imaginings with regular mental exercises.  I remembered Jamie, Mary, Lillian, Helen, Ashton, Evette, and Gunther.  No problems there.

That was a joke.  A little joke to myself, as I ran full-bore through streets that should have felt more dimly familiar than these ones were.  My lack of memory made this familiar ground feel unfamiliar.  My recollection of the people who were chasing me wasn’t as on point as I would have liked.  I felt like there were small details about Arachne that I should have held on to.  Something beyond the spider observation.  Something about how she’d dealt with Arthur or how she behaved.

It didn’t help that it was dark, the rain obscured the little details, and the spreading case of builder’s wood was snaking its way up the sides of buildings, finding leverage where it could, and turning the right angles where the road met walls into very organic, rounded slopes.

Dog was the first one to catch up, tearing out of a side street behind me with enough force that he brought a short tide of garbage and other debris with him, having clipped a storage bin or something as he passed it.  flesh and metal claws skidded on the road as he found traction, facing me head on.  Considering the limp and the slightly damaged back claw, Dog was moving at a good clip.

A street back, I could just make out Arachne.  The Iron Maiden.  The woman-spider.  She wasn’t as fast, but from what I could tell, she moved like something mechanical.  Or more mechanical than Dog, even.  Tireless, relentless, with a kind of eerie repetition to her stride, as if it was precisely measured, even optimized.  The only thing that threw her off balance or changed the nature of her running pace was the fact that she dragged her axe behind her.  As it bucked or kicked off against a cobblestone or something, it would lift into the air, and her upper body would shift a little to compensate for the change in balance.

Both looked like they might catch up to me before I reached the brothel.  I needed time to get inside, too.  My initial head start was meaningful, but their ability to cover ground and chase their targets were Academy-augmented.

I checked my pocket.  Knife.  Lockpick kit sans most of my picks.  A fold of Crown bills with a clip around it.

I drew the picks from my pocket.  It was a leather sleeve with a cover that folded over, and individual inserts for each pick.  At the leftmost side, near where the cover folded forward or back, there was a piece of chalk.  Useful for safecracking, or making a note while I worked on a more complicated lock, like the ones I’d found at the galleries near the Theaters.

I drew out the chalk, holding it in one hand while holding the kit in the other.  Holding the chalk in the one hand, I applied pressure until it broke at the middle, then squeezed to break the individual pieces.  I began viciously grinding the pieces against one another.

Dog would catch up with me first.  After that, I would only have a few moments to plan for Arachne.  I could feel the heavy footfalls and the metal-on-stone noises as Dog stampeded toward me.

I pulled a bill from the collection in my pockets, and turned a hard left, into the nearest street.  I might have hoped for a narrow alleyway, but the houses here in the Boatyards were crowded close together, as if to earn landowners more dollars per square foot.  There were streets wide enough for a small carriage or three people to walk side by side, and there were wide streets where multiple carriages could pass by one another.  This particular street was narrow, with an arch overhead, connecting the buildings on either side.

Rounding the corner, I could imagine how Dog would move.  The delay as he stopped, skidded, and then plunge down the street, where he would have me.

I made myself stop running, turned, and faced the arch.

I had to trust my read of Dog.  To believe that, if pressed, Dog would prefer to work with me rather than seize me in his jaws or kill me.  Having Arachne at his back would be a factor, given the animosity between the groups.

So, inspired by a kind of madness, I stood my ground and watched as Dog appeared, skidding on the road to come to a stop, so he wouldn’t slam into the building as he rounded the corner.

I gestured, and tested my luck by choosing some unfortunate phrasing.

“Play dead,” I said.

I could see him drop his head, like a bull lowering his horns in anticipation of a charge, drawing in a breath, a glare clear in his eyes.

“Please,” I said.

He let his injured back right hind leg and his right forelimb crumple, and collapsed onto his side.  He maintained the glare as he lay there for a moment, then sagged, letting his head rest on the road, and closed his eyes.  A great beast felled.

I picked out the large pieces of chalk from my hand, and cupped it, holding the powder I’d made by grinding it up.  Not quite as much as I might have liked.  With my other hand at my side with the bill, I folded it up.

Without much ceremony, Arachne leaped up.  She perched there, crouching,  the butt end of the axe and both feet planted on Dog’s ribs.  I would have thought she was staring at me, but the empty eye sockets couldn’t do anything of the sort.

While she watched, I brought the folded paper over to my cupped palm, and tapped it out, as if depositing more of the white powder into my hand.

She leaped, covering more ground than I would have thought possible, and I stumbled back, bringing the hand to my mouth and fiercely blowing out.

She retreated as fast as I had, moving back out of the way of the cloud I’d made.  In the damp air and the rain, it was fairly paltry.

I shifted my stance, preparing another handful.  But something told me that she’d seen the ruse, that she could tell there wasn’t that much powder.  She waited as the remnants of the puff of dust I’d made disappeared, shifting her grip on her axe so she held it ready to strike with.

And Dog rose, mouth yawning open.  As it reached its limits for opening wide, the mechanism which joined the metal lower jaw to the bone upper one straining and creaking, Arachne half-turned.

The mouth slammed shut.  Had she not moved when she had, it might have severed the upper half of her body from the lower.  As it was, only her already damaged left arm and shoulder were caught in the bite, along with her shoulder and one or two of her ribs.

She didn’t seem to feel pain.  She swung her axe, and Dog raised his head so the axe struck the metal of his jaw instead of his face.  It sank in deep, all things considered.  The edge of that axe was sufficient to leave an inch-deep notch in worked steel.  A second swing in the same general place might have cut clean through Dog’s lower face.

For her second swing, Arachne cleaved off the thin strings of tissue that dangled between her ruined shoulder and Dog’s mouth.

I knew what her next move was.  She would turn and come for me, one eye over her shoulder for another attack from Dog.

But that hesitation on her part was a chance for me to cover more ground.  All the more so if a fight broke out between them.

“Thank you, brother,” I said, voice low, knowing that Dog’s ears would pick it up.  “Don’t get hurt on my behalf.”

What day of the week was it?

Some of the lads and ladies from the brothel went out on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, the groups differing depending on the night.  They were supposed to keep their keys with them, but so very often, one of them would end up staying out late, or they would split up, and it would get complicated to figure out who should have the keys.  If it was the first group, then they had to stay up and keep an eye out for the late arrivals.  If it was the late arrivals, then the first group didn’t have a way of letting themselves in.

All of that in mind, they had taken to leaving the keys behind, in a hiding place.  The Madam of the house would have been apoplectic if she figured it out.

I’d found out when I’d run into a group of the ladies returning from a night at the theaters.  The same night I’d noticed Shirley’s withdrawn nature and resolved to fix it, now that I thought about it.

Yes, I could remember my allies.

Please let it be hereI don’t want to take the time to break in.

I dipped my finger into the space where a branch in the original construction hadn’t quite grown cover the gap between bricks.  I found the key.  I let myself in the back door, and locked the door behind me.

“Madam!  Marv!” I bellowed.

She’d been in the parlor, and in the next instant, appeared at the far end of the the hallway that stretched down the middle of the house, from the front door to the back door.

“Sylvester?” she asked.  She looked hostile, to a degree I hadn’t expected.  I’d intruded, entered by way of a door that should have been locked.

“Gun!” I shouted.

I saw her hesitate.

“Get guns!  Get Marv!  I know you have the guns.  The-”

The axe punched through the door.  A foot followed, shattering the area of the door around the handle.

I turned to face the door, backing down the hallway, while the madam disappeared.  There were girls from upstairs and ones who’d been having tea with the madam who peeked at the scene.

“Stand back,” I said.

Arachne was missing the arm, shoulder, and surrounding area at one side of her body, but she didn’t bleed, not really.  I could see the raw, glistening architecture through her arm hole as she turned to pull the axe free of the wreckage of the door.  Nothing resembling a human body in there.

“Sylvester,” Shirley said, looking in from the living room.

“Stay out of this,” I said.  “There’s not a lot you can do.”

“But-”

“You’d just get hurt.  Just hoping a gun does something,” I said.  “If your madam would just hurry up-”

Arachne turned to me, and she began moving down the hallway, axe resting on her good shoulder.

I stood my ground, backing up.  As she moved, bringing the axe down, I threw myself back.  I landed hard, the top of my head hitting the front door, back striking the floor.  The axe came down between my feet, biting into floorboards.

She moved forward as she hauled it out.  I pulled back and away, but without much room to maneuver, the bottom of the stairs to my left, the parlor with the girls to my right, I was helpless to get out of the way as the upper tip of the axe’s blade sliced the skin from bellybutton to shoulder.

She held it aloft, ready to take my head.  That same head worked through possibilities, trying to figure out the best path forward.  Gordon would push for the attack, but what was her weak point?  I wasn’t sure her knees would be a good point of attack, given how she was put together.  I couldn’t reach the gaping wound in time.

I heard the gunshot.  I saw Arachne react, having to move a leg to catch her balance.  I could see the scratch at the side of her face where the bullet had hit her but hadn’t even cracked the porcelain part of her mask-like face.

She turned to face the Madam, who stood at the top of the stairs, next to one of her ‘girls’, who had her hands clamped to her ears.

“I’ll attend to you after,” Arachne said, in her eerie voice.

Calmly, methodically, the Madam reloaded her gun, aimed, and fired again.  The second bullet didn’t have any more effect than the first.

She was made, almost head to toe, of the same material that warbeast armor plating was made of.  The sort of thing that only cracked in the face of cannon hits and explosives.

And Dog bites, apparently.

“Bullets don’t work.  Can I pay you off?” the Madam asked.  “Depending on your price, I’d like to buy the safety of myself first, my girls second, and him third.”

“I can feel the love,” I said.

“No money,” Arachne said.  “Only blood.”

“Favors?” the Madam asked.

“Won’t work,” I said.  “She-”

Shirley appeared at the other end of the hallway.  She held a grown wooden chair with metal reinforcement at the legs.

Don’t, I thought.  But there was no signal I could give that wouldn’t endanger her.  I prepared myself to leap up and throw my arms around Arachne, buying Shirley time to run.

I wasn’t sure what would happen after that, but-

No, absolutely no idea what would happen after that.  I hadn’t expected her to be so resistant to guns.

“She doesn’t care,” I said, feigning that the hitch in my voice was emotion, despair.

In the next instant, Shirley attacked.  She drove the legs of the chair at Arachne like they were some thrusting weapon.  I could tell what her aim was, pushing Arachne away from me, toward the corner that separated the entrance from the parlor.  But Arachne was pushed a mere step in that direction, before her leg went out and caught her.  Shirley changed tactics, pushing in another direction, hoping to catch Arachne off balance again, but the woman’s legs were strong.  All of Shirley’s body weight and muscle didn’t match up to the stability that Arachne’s calves, ankles, and foot placement offered.

“Stupid girl!” the Madam cursed.  The epithet was punctuated by the sound of the chair being destroyed by a strike from Arachne’s good arm and the shaft of the axe.

I was on my feet.  I kicked hard at the back of Arachne’s knee, and wasn’t surprised in the slightest when it didn’t cave forward like knees were supposed to do when kicked.

I threw my arms around her, grabbing my wrist with one hand, hoping to buy time.  “Run, Shir!”

I both heard and felt the gunshot.  It rattled me enough that I dropped to the floor.  I stared up as Arachne turned, slowly, and the Madam made her way down the stairs, reloading for a fourth shot.  Her descent matched Arachne’s slow turn, keeping her in position to aim the gun at the gaping hole in Arachne’s side.  Shirley’s assault had turned Arachne in the right direction, and a fourth bullet made the Iron Maiden topple over, falling to the floor.

I huffed out a sigh, my eyes meeting Shirley’s.  Her expression was almost more afraid, now that the monster was down.

I recognized why as the Madam lowered the gun and pressed the barrel to my temple.

“Oh,” I said.

“The first time we met, what did I tell you?”

“You told me lots of things, and I barely remember any of them.  I don’t have the best memory.  The Academy’s fault,” I said.

“Don’t go out and bring trouble back to my doorstep.”

“Ah.  That.  I didn’t take it as being punishable by death.”

“I’m genuinely debating whether it should be,” she said.

“I hear you,” I said.  “I absolutely get that.  I… don’t have an excuse.  I had nowhere else to turn.”

“Mm hmm,” she said.

I heard her pull the hammer back.

“They have Jamie,” I said.

There was a pause, and then she raised the gun, pointing it at the ceiling.

“I can verify.  I wasn’t sure it was anything bad for the boys when I saw it from my window, but I saw it unfold.”

The Madam looked toward the top of the stairs, at Marv, who’d just spoken.  Now, of all times, as half the house was gathered in the immediate vicinity of the front entrance and the foyer, around me and a dead monster, he was smoking a clove cigarette.  He also carried a large medical kit.  I imagined it being very similar to Lillian’s satchel, but far less meant to be lugged around on the regular.

The Madam simultaneously relaxed and let a look of concern creased her features.  “That dear boy,” she said.

I get a gun to my head and serious consideration about pulling the trigger, and Jamie gets a ‘that dear boy’?

“I drew her away because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a way to get him back.  Like this, there’s a chance.  I didn’t know what else to do.”

“But you can get him back?” she asked.

“I don’t know.  But I have to.”

“Yes you do,” she said.

“I’ll make this up to you,” I said.

“Yes you will,” she said.

“My house.  Jamie’s and my house.  I can tell you how to loot it, since there’s a good chance we won’t be going back there.  You’ll want to avoid the traps, but if you go where I say-”

“Stop focusing on me,” she said.  “Focus on Jamie.”

Mute, I nodded.

“While you do that, I’ll fix that scratch,” Marv said.  “If you have a spare moment, you can tell me about this plague.  I’m dying of curiosity.”

I nodded.  “Minimize contact with me, just to be safe.  I think it spreads through the air after it flowers, and by contact before then, and the rain is helping a lot with keeping that down, but…”

“I’ve got gloves.”

“I think it forms spines that stick out.  I’ve seen the grown form, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the early stage has microscopic spines that transfer?  It feels like it would make sense.”

“Double layer of gloves, then,” Marv said, talking around the cigarette.  My eyes watered from the smoke.

As he approached, setting down the kit and opening it, I looked over at Shirley.  “Thank you.”

She smiled at me.

“Stupid girl,” the Madam said, as if to balance out my gratitude.

Shirley had wanted to come with me, apparently because the prospect of the plague I’d described and the mortal risk of dealing with murderous bounty hunters seemed like a safer prospect than dealing with the hard-nosed Madam of the brothel.

I carried the madam’s rifle, and I had a backpack filled with some basic medical supplies that Marv had supplied.

I chose my route carefully.  I didn’t have Jamie by my side, pointing out the optimal routes to avoid catching a bullet.  Catching a bullet, like I was catching a cold.

The city was so dark.  It had been badly overcast before with black clouds overhead and heavy rain, but I suspected it was approaching nighttime now, and so there wasn’t even the dull light of the sun striving to fight its way past the cloud cover.  Few neighborhoods in the city had the lights on, and the bioluminescent trees hadn’t taken in enough light in the late afternoon, leaving their glow faint enough that it didn’t really penetrate the rain.

What I could see as I looked out over the city, was the areas where the plague had set root.  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the patches of red here and there.  Those particular sorts of growths, near where people might have congregated or been herded.  I could see the places, those same sorts of plazas and busy streets where there would have been more traffic, where the cleansing fires had been set.

Moving from cover to cover, ducking low, moving fast, the hood of a borrowed jacket pulled down to shield my face from the rain, I made my way in the direction Jamie had gone.

I’d made it some distance before I ran into Dog and Catcher.  They’d left their Bruno behind.

I hesitated before fully revealing myself.  No point.

“I’m surprised you can smell anything in this rain,” I said.

“We didn’t smell you,” Catcher said.  “We heard you.   There aren’t many people out and about, and your bag rattles.”

I nodded.  “The fib earlier about the sniper was Jamie’s, by the way.  I only realized-“

I stopped as I saw Catcher shaking his head.  Not that a head-shake really worked when so little of his head was visible.  I had to go by the movement of his hat more than the movement of anything else.

“It wasn’t a fib.  It’s where he was.  Is.  Jamie’s there now too.  Same tower you pointed out,” Catcher said, in that gravelly voice of his.  He tapped the shaft of his mancatcher against the nearest corner, so the head pointed around the corner, indicating the direction of the tower.

Not a fib?  An educated guess on Jamie’s part that had wound up being right?

“Alright,” I said.

“We’re going to take you two into custody,” Catcher said.  “But I’ll do everything possible to help you help Jamie.  Not just because he’s the real target for the bounty, but because I understand how important that is.”

He did.  After everything, a half-dozen lies and ruses and a dozen tricks at his expense, to make the chase as difficult as possible, he was still a decent guy.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.

Dog made a noise, his usual mangled gibberish.

“Dog says-“

“I got it,” I said, interrupting.  “I think I actually understood that.”

Brother, I thought.  Echoing me from earlier.  We weren’t family in the same way that the Lambs were family, but we were related.  ‘Brother’ had felt appropriate in the moment, so soon after working together to give Dog a bite of Arachne, and it was a sentiment that Dog had apparently agreed with.

It was reassuring on a deep, primal, punch-me-between-the-lungs kind of way to fall back on hand signals when I felt so anxious.  We made our way through the city, careful in how we approached the building.

The last part of the journey was the most sensitive.  The closer we got, the less time the bullets would take to reach us, and the harder it became to find cover with the right angle.  We had to rely on one building, instead of being able to take a position where we could rely on the houses down one entire street  to bar the sniper’s view.

We took the longest route imaginable to keep out of view as we worked to be able to approach the base of the tower with the eaves of nearby houses shielding us from view.  We reached a point half a block away before Dog had to stop where he was.

“When we signal, you move in,” Catcher said, barely audible.

Dog made a noise of agreement.

Catcher and I moved ahead on our own, hugging the wall, ever aware of the sniper’s field of view.  There were points where, if he was leaning out of a window, he might have seen us, but there was nothing.

“You’re sure he’s here?”

“I can smell them,” Catcher said.

Them.  Plural.

I stayed where I was, calculating the chance that Catcher was playing me for a fool, leading me into a trap.

Would he?  I couldn’t say he wouldn’t.  He was ruthless, and if he decided that outwitting me by forcing me to play along with this was the way to do it, I could see it happening.

But, contrary to conventional wisdom, I found that the best questions to ask people were ones where I knew the answer.  The best moves to make against an opponent were the ones that would constrain their movements, where I already knew how they would move in response.

I didn’t have many choices or chances to find Jamie that didn’t involve Dog and Catcher.

I had no choice.  My hands were tied.  And when it came to Jamie, of all people, there was no way I was abandoning him.  I had a debt outstanding.

I was relying on our old brother experiments of Radham to handle the worst of the confrontation to come.  I wasn’t that good a shot, especially when I was out of practice, and there was still Tentacles, Sanguine, and the gun-toting Brute to deal with.

We reached the entrance, and I reached for my now-meager selection of picks.  On touching the door, however, I saw it move, and heard it creak.

My heart leaped at the sound, fearing I’d hear a gunshot to follow it.  I didn’t fear the bullets aimed at me as I feared the bullets from within the tower, aimed at someone within the tower.  Aimed at Jamie.

This was a hostage situation.  Kind of.  I could calculate their willingness to put a bullet in Jamie, and with Sanguine potentially part of the equation, I didn’t like how high that chance got.

I went first, touching the door and lifting the weight off of the hinges to reduce the sound of it creaking.  We went to the stairs, and Catcher and I went up side by side, me with my gun at hand, Catcher with his mancatcher ready in one hand, a throwing weapon in the other.

We reached the top floor, peeking over, ready to shoot or be shot, then stopped.  We ventured up the last few steps, into a room lit by a lone, flickering bulb.

Sanguine was there, but he didn’t have a weapon in hand.  Calm, his bug-eyes half-lidded, he sat in a window, one leg propped up beside him, gun by his foot.

Toward the center of the room was Jamie, slouched over, hands tied behind him, and Tentacles, who lay on the ground near Jamie’s feet, unmoving, tentacles limp.

The traitor Bruno sat in a chair at the opposite end of the round room.  He had a hand on his gun, and was tense, but he wasn’t moving like he was going to shoot.

My eye went back to Jamie.  I made sure he was still breathing.

I made note of the faint and small red dots across the exposed skin of his neck and shoulders.

Sanguine spoke, his voice a purr.  “A part of me hoped you wouldn’t come.  That I could leave you a note about where to find your friend.  Maybe you wouldn’t be able to reach him, because the disease had overtaken this part of the city by the time you got the message.  Maybe you would, and you would find him overgrown.”

I shifted my grip on my gun.

“I’m done,” he said, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.  He even managed a smile.  “I’m not a threat.  You can put your weapon down.”

I glanced at Catcher, then changed my hold on the gun.  Holding it by the middle, rather than holding it like I might shoot it.

“Why?” I asked.

“He’s dead,” Sanguine said, indicating Jamie.  “The disease got him.  I asked Academy people on my way here, and they say they don’t have a cure for it and they won’t soon.  You can cut it out, but that gets harder once it sets root, or once it spreads enough.  That, there, your friend?  It’s spread enough…”

My heart sank.

He hopped down from the window.  He crossed the room in long, easy strides, one eye on Jamie, one on me.  With one ungloved hand, he pulled back Jamie’s shirt.  I could see a fresh wound, left open, by Jamie’s collarbone.  The growth branched out from there, extending across part of his shoulder.

“…and it’s already set root.”

Jamie stirred a little at that.  He looked up at me.

I couldn’t meet his eyes, seeing the look in them.

Sanguine spoke, “I thought about taking you in, but I weighed the risks, thought about dealing with Dog and Catcher.  I thought, too, about how you and your friends killed my teammates.”

His voice took on a faint, harder, darker edge, but it still maintained the light, jovial nature at its core.  As if he was reminiscing to a friend about a very bad day he’d had a decade ago.  “The best justice, it seems to me, would be to let you see this yourself.  The swift decline, the loss to the plague.  Let you struggle to save him if you want to cut into him.  Let you watch if you want to watch.  End his life yourself, if you want to show mercy.”

I let the rifle fall from my hand, clattering to the floor.

“Unless you’d rather I shoot you?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Then I’m satisfied with this.  Seeing the look on your face, right now.  I’m not one to hold grudges, but I feel like they would want me to.  They would want something more like this.”

He walked back across the room, picked up his gun and a bag that he slung over his shoulder, and then walked toward me.  To the stairs.

I put out a hand to stop him, and he stopped where he was.

Reaching into a pocket, I found Melancholy’s ring.  I held it out for him.

“Keep it,” he said, giving me a pat on the shoulder.  He sounded smug, too satisfied.  “With this done, I’m putting all of that behind me.”

Catcher and I both stepped out of his way as he made his way down the stairs.

“I could sic Dog on him,” Catcher said under his breath.

I shook my head.  My eyes were on Jamie.

“I’m sorry,” Catcher said.

I nodded.

“If it would make this easier, I could-“

I shook my head, forcefully, before he could finish the sentence.

“Yeah,” Catcher said.  “I understand that.  I’d want to do the deed myself, too.”

I walked over to Jamie’s side and knelt by him.  I took his hand in both of mine.

I saw Jamie smile a little as he looked at me.

“There’s no deal without him,” Catcher said.  “I’d take you in, but I’m honestly not sure it’s worth the amount of hassle.  Wouldn’t seem right, either way.  Out of respect for Jamie.”

I nodded, hunching forward.

“Next time we meet, we’ll have another lunch.  Have a bit of a drink.  With no shenanigans.”

“Yeah,” I managed.  My voice was hoarse.  I closed my eyes.

“Do you want me to pass on word to the Lambs?  I can-“

I shook my head.  Too forcefully.

“Alright.”

He didn’t say anything more.  I heard his footsteps retreating down the building.

“Was a good few months, Sy,” Jamie said, his voice a whisper.

“People kept asking, kept telling me-” I started.

“What?”

“Were you happy?  Are you happy?”

“Was okay,” he said, voice soft.  “Wanted to kill you half the time.  The other half, I wanted to-“

I raised my eyebrows.

Jamie shook his head.

I became very aware that we weren’t alone in the room.  I glanced across the room at the Bruno who remained behind.

The man had red spots.  He looked defeated, though it hadn’t set in nearly as much as it had with Jamie.

“If it’s okay,” I told Jamie, “can we talk and say our goodbyes while I help him?”

“You gotta do something about that streak of mercy, Sy,” Jamie said.  “Too kind.  You’re supposed to be a bastard, don’t you know?”

I nodded.

The man tensed as I approached.

“Shirt off,” I said.

“Hurts to move,” the man said.

“Shirt off.  What comes next hurts more.  But you’re still in the early stages.  I can cut out the infection.  I’ll need to dig in my bag for a scalpel, but for now, let’s get the lay of the land, see how bad it is.  Near the spine, I think, would be the worst and most important spots to get, given how it sets up and latches on to your internal structure.”

He kept his guard up, tense.  A turncoat, once Dog and Catcher’s ally, then betraying them, he feared betrayal from all corners, even when that fear could cost him precious time.

“Do you remember our first time meeting?” I asked Jamie, looking away from my patient.

“Which meeting?” Jamie asked.  “Which Jamie?”

The Bruno finally relented.  He unbuttoned his shirt and jacket, and began pulling them off.  I could see the massive slabs of muscle moving as he gingerly worked to pull the clothing free while moving as little as humanly possible.

Once they were mostly around his forearms and hands, I stepped up onto the back of his chair to get more height, drew my knife and dragged the blade across the man’s throat.  I backed away swiftly before he could take a swing at me.

He lurched to his feet, made it a few steps, and then, between the agony of his condition and the fact that half of the blood that was supposed to be in his brain was pouring out of the front of his throat, he collapsed.

I put the knife against where the spine met the skull, then stomped on it to drive it home.

“You Jamie.  You and me meeting,” I said.

“Why?” Jamie asked.  “Why him?  Like that?”

“I wanted to be alone,” I said.  “You and me.  And because I’m supposed to be a bastard, you said.”

I shucked off my jacket began rolling up my sleeves all tidy-like, a grim look on my face.

“Why…” he started, now focused on my rolling-up of sleeves.

I gestured for silence.  Then gestured for the listening ear.

Dog and Catcher could still be in earshot.  I moved to the window, looking for them.

“I don’t understand,” Jamie said.

I was silent, looking, watching.

I finally spotted them.  Making their way toward the south end of the city.  Far enough away.

“I’m going to save you,” I said, still watching them, as if I could see some hint that they’d miraculously heard my voice.

“Sanguine said-“

“Fuck Sanguine,” I said.  I went for the medical kit.  “I got my practice in with Hammond or whatever his name was.  Give me a chance to learn, I can get good at what I’m doing.”

I brought out Evette and Lillian for guidance.

Jamie was shaking his head, as if he was ready to protest.

“I’ve got ideas on crude fixes.  Electricity, cold, acid, and fire, in that order,” I said.  I found the syringe I’d had Marv give me.  He was primarily a surgeon, and he’d had the necessary supplies.  I crossed the room to Jamie’s side, used fingers to measure the distance from the side of his neck, and plunged the needle in.  “And I’ve got painkiller.  It won’t stop the phantom pains, I don’t think, but it’ll keep you from feeling the work in progress.”

“Sy-“

“You should be losing sensation from the neck down.  Hopefully you’ll retain the feeling in your tongue, because I want you conscious and talking me through the trickier bits,” I said, as I washed my hands with the stuff Marv had handed me.  “Got it?”

Jamie shook his head.

With my hands, putting fingers through Jamie’s hair, I gripped Jamie by his head, tilting his face up to face mine.  “Got it?”

“Sy, whatever you cut away, you’re going to have to cut around the insertion points.  The parts where the Caterpillar project plugs in.  I won’t be able to-  It’ll be a matter of months.  A year.  There won’t be getting a doctor to kludge something together to offload and organize for me, like I’ve been kludging your Wyvern together.”

“Better than a matter of days,” I said, firmly, still gripping his head.  I gripped it harder, squeezing a little.  “Let me save you.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

Evette cackled in the background.

“I wanted to get into Academy medicine,” I said.  “Expand our skills and options.  I got too good a taste of it in Warrick.  But I need you at my side to make it work.  Okay?  I need you at my side for lots of reasons.  Okay?  Okay?

I gave that final question emphasis enough to make it about more than the Academy medicine.

“Okay,” Jamie said.  “My body is going numb now.  It actually does help a little with the pain.  Feels like my head is disembodied, and my body is very far away.”

“Good,” I said.  I stood up and began getting the tools together.  “Perfect.  Listen, they’re underestimating just how quick I’ve gotten with that scalpel.  And I’m going to get quicker by the time I’m done here.”

“I know, Sy.”

“They’ve counted you as one of the dead.  Now I fully intend to make you one of the living again.  I promise.”

Scalpel in hand, I set about following through on that promise.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Cut to the Quick – 11.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Catcher, buddy-” I started.

“Don’t talk,” he said.

I shut my mouth.

As the wind blew through the street, I could smell smoke from distant fires.  It wasn’t from the direction of the wall Jamie and I had slipped through.  They were burning other parts of the city.

My thoughts flew.  In a way, it was a good thing that we were so cornered.  It left very few options for me, with only so many people to deal with, only so many permutations as I thought about how this situation might unfold.

Approaches: straight offense, defense, escape, mediate, negotiate, or the gamble, the faith-based approach.  Offense and defense were out.  I was weak and unarmed.  Escape wasn’t an option with Jamie being hobbled, unless I wanted to abandon him and rescue him later… and it was a bit of a dim chance as it stood.  Mediation, playing the enemy parties against each other, not wholly out of the question, but Catcher wanted me to shut up.  He knew how I approached things, and he’d be wary of it.  Negotiation, playing myself against an enemy party, I wasn’t sure if that was any better, and I didn’t have any leverage to apply to achieve the better outcome.

That left taking things on faith.  I didn’t have the means to really shake things up and force a metaphorical roll of the dice, in the hopes that they would land in a better configuration than they were in right now.

That left the who?  The what?  Dog, Catcher, one Bruno on each side, Arachne and Tentacles.  Sanguine had been a distance away the last time he’d taken a shot.  I knew that.  The pair with the enhanced senses knew that.

The cards I had left to play?  Jamie.  A spare knife, tidbits of knowledge.

“Arachne,” Catcher said, his voice carrying.

As Arachne responded, her voice was hollow and sounded like it had been formed of parts that shared little with human anatomy.  “Catcher, dear.”

I might have assigned a note of derision to her tone, but it was hard to assign anything to it.  Even the way her mouth moved was more like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s than a human’s.  She was a shell of hard ivory ‘skin’ and crimson, hornlike material.

Mentally, I connected a few dots with the thought.  The way her arm was curled up, the way she moved, the ‘shell’.  She was a spider.

“…I don’t know how to put this, but the stakes for this job are higher for us,” Catcher said.  “I would like to pay you to stand down and walk away.”

“No,” Arachne said.

“Why not?” Catcher asked.

Tentacles was the one who answered.  His voice was strained in much the same way Jamie’s had been.  “Because we were hired, and our employer wants to see this through.  If we finish talking here and the quarry gets handed off to you without a fight, we’ll find bullets in our heads not long after that.”

“That too,” Arachne said.  Not a woman of many words.

“-And because Arachne has a one-track mind,” Tentacles added.

“We know about Arachne’s mind,” Catcher said.  “We’ve crossed paths often enough when hunting the same quarry.”

I glanced back at Tentacles.  His tentacles were limp, draped out on the road within ten feet of him.  Periodically a tentacle moved or shifted.  His human arms were set around his lower ribs, and he hunched over.  If it weren’t for the tentacles propping him up, I suspected he might topple over.  Even with that, he found the time to dig out a cigarette and light a match to light it, shielding it from the rain with his hand more than he shielded it from the wind.

The Bruno by Catcher’s side was keeping a fair distance from him.

We didn’t injure him.  He’s sick.  I thought of throwing the scraped off blood and muck at him.

I had a dead or alive order on me.  The first priority was to ensure the ‘alive’ part.  So long as we were alive, there was room for good things to happen and for things to improve.

No, scratch that.  So long as we were alive and still outside of Academy clutches, there was room for better things.

“You’re sick,” I observed out loud, to Tentacles.

“Sylvester,” Catcher said.  “Stay quiet and let me talk to them.”

I ignored him.  So did Tentacles.

“Part of me is,” Tentacles said.  “I’ll deal.”

“Will you, though?” I asked.

“I’m built for worse environments than this,” he said.

“You look like you’re hurting pretty bad,” I observed.

“Arthur molts,” Catcher said.  “And he can change bodies.  I’ve seen him with a different human exterior.  I would guess he hopes to wrap things up, then molt to shed the infected tissue.”

“I feel like the Crown very specifically had ‘hope’ in mind when they designed this thing,” I said.  “To be specific, they had the aim of extinguishing hope, unless it was hope they provided, maybe?”

“You blame the Crown for this?” ‘Arthur’ asked me.

“Based on nothing but the shape of the leaves and the way that both sides have been playing this game, yeah,” I said.  “But in terms of concrete knowledge, Jamie and I took a knife to a plague victim, to see how it riddled his insides.  I have some firm ideas on how to cure it.”

“You just let that idea slip.  The knife.  You cut it away,” Arthur said.

“The knife isn’t enough, I don’t think,” I said, bluffing in part.  “The Crown made it resistant to fire, I think.  It might even be why they’re burning the city now.  Because they know the smoke spreads it, or they want to banish the idea in everyone’s head, that if nothing else, it can be burned away.  People will evacuate and spread the knowledge that the Academy used fire and the stuff still spread.”

“You’re clinging very hard to that notion that the Crown did this,” Arthur told me.

I’m doing it to curry favor with you.  You don’t seem Academy affiliated, and that means there’s resentment and natural suspicion.

“Figuring this thing out.  It’s how I approach problems,” I said.

“I’ll remind you two that the wanted posters noted how intelligent these two are,” Catcher said.  “Given a chance, Sylvester will talk you into believing you have a grandmother and that she would be very disappointed if you didn’t cater to his every whim.  You, Arachne, and Arthur would be better off talking to me and Dog.  We can find a middle ground.”

“You’re overselling me a little.  I know it’s for effect, Catch, but it’s a little unfair,” I said.

“Gordon told me about Mrs. Earles and the icebox.”

I grinned at the recollection, then as I glanced at Jamie and saw how severe his expression was, the smile dropped off my face.  I glanced back at Arachne and Arthur, and regretted the smile.

“Yeah,” Catcher said, seeing my expression go from a ten to a zero in a matter of two distinct seconds.  “I’ve heard the stories, Sylvester.”

“I’m noticing that you’ve switched over from ‘Sy’ to ‘Sylvester’,” I commented.

“And I’m aware that you’re working very hard to keep this conversation going, with you as the middleman between my group and Arachne’s,” Catcher said.  “Knowing you, that’s not a mistake.”

It isn’t.  I’m spinning things out to create elbow room.  Room to maneuver, to say the right things.

“I take it you didn’t rescue your pet Ghost?” I asked.

Dog growled.  Catcher, however, put a hand out, in front of Dog’s face.  Given Dog’s sheer size, it was rather ineffectual, but it did make Dog back down.

“Stop talking,” Catcher said, his gravelly voice firm, “Or I’ll be forced to act, and I think everyone involved would prefer the results of a clean, bloodless negotiation.  Our ‘pet ghost’ is fine, she’s just staying somewhere where the infection hasn’t spread.”

I thought about that for roughly one second before turning my back to Catcher and his group.  I faced Arthur, Arachne, and the Bruno.  I only had one shot.  I needed to decide the idea to plant.  One that would have more weight because it would be the last thing I said before I got my ass kicked.

Speak to his anxiety.

“I can cure you,” I said, firmly.

It hit me like a slap across the back, throwing me off balance as if I’d been pulled toward Arthur, rather than pushed.  Not a tentacle.  A movement in the corner of my eye suggested it was Catcher’s bola.  The cord encircled me, trapping my arms at my sides.

I saw Mr. Arthur Tentacles tense, his tentacles moving to respond, and I knew that it was a reaction to something else.

Catcher approacheth.

I turned, and before I’d even come to fully face him, I spotted him in the corner of my eye, and shifted my weight, practically spinning as I moved off to one side, evading an attack I wasn’t even sure was coming.

But he had the advantage here.  He was a fighter in every sense of the word, with reflexes faster than mine, and he wasn’t so impatient that he’d simply lunge at me without seeing how I was going to respond.  Instead, he poised, weapon ready but not yet thrust out.  I knew that he was making the split second decision of whether to capture me or Jamie.

Take Jamie, I thought.

It was as if he’d heard my thoughts out loud, and as if he was really, deeply irritated with me, because he extended the polearm in my direction rather than Jamie’s.  I extended a hand to try and stop it, but he deftly twisted it around so that my hand would glance off the head.

The claw contraption at the end closed around my neck.  I was still off balance as he moved the pole, steering me into what felt like an endless series of stumbling footsteps, trying to avoid losing my footing and colliding face first with the road.  Given the contraption around my neck, I had to assume that falling would likely break my neck.  He was striding back the other direction, hauling me with.  Dog moved around, protective, providing assistance.

By the time I had my balance and had regained my sense of the surroundings, Arthur the tentacle man had captured Jamie, and they too had retreated something of a safe distance.

My heartbeat picked up at the sight of Jamie with a tentacle around his neck, held with his back to the infected experiment’s front.  The tentacles were tense, each one holding Jamie secure or at the ready to deal with Catcher or Dog should they attack.

“Not compromise I wanted,” Catcher called out, gruff.  Fifty feet of empty road and pouring rain separated us from them.

“I’m sure,” Arthur responded.  “The pay for this one is more than double that one’s.  You made the wrong choice.  Not to mention that this one should know the cure too.”

“I don’t, actually,” Jamie said.

“Well,” Arthur said, he smiled, showing teeth while keeping his dim cigarette in the corner of his mouth.  It was an extra-grim look on a face that looked like it had faced down three different versions of Death and lived to tell the tale.  “I should be able to manage.”

Arachne spoke, and it wasn’t to Dog, Catcher or me.  I caught the thrust of it.  “He’s the one who cracked my arm.”

I didn’t catch everything she said after that, but it might have gone along the lines of ‘take his arms, get his legs too.  We need him alive, not in one piece.”

Jamie said something in response, which got a response from Arachne.

Catcher tried to move me, dragging me around by my neck, and I stumbled a bit.

“For once in your life, would you cooperate?” he asked.

“You’re dragging me off to the Academy, or, assuming you’ve been clever all this while, you’re dragging me off to Fray, which is almost as bad.  I’m over here and Jamie’s over there.  What reason do I have to cooperate?” I asked.  I tested the bonds around my arms, but the bola had firmly encircled me.

“We’ve got special permission to pass through quarantine,” Catcher said.  “I’m immune to most things, so is Dog.  So are you.  Minimum process time is a week.”

I set my teeth.  “That doesn’t solve anything.”

His already coarse voice was even worse with the undertone of annoyance and anger.  “I know which of the processing areas have phones.  They can call in and verify that the plague shouldn’t infect any of us.  We could get out of there before the week is up.  Most likely, we won’t, but we’ll get out after a week without symptoms.  Do you understand?  He’s sick.  Arthur is.  I would be very surprised if he got through there in a week.  It will take time, and it’s very likely Arachne will leave without her partner.”

Dog huffed out a few syllables.

“Her, the Bruno, and their employer.  Maybe Arachne’s doctor, if he’s in the city.  We can be waiting there for them when they walk out of one of the other processing centers,” Catcher said.  “Catch them by surprise.”

“Jamie is sick too,” I said.  “Or he was, but he’s sick again, touching and being near that bastard.  Your option isn’t good enough.”

“It’s a working plan, Sylvester,” Catcher growled.

“It’s not good enough,” I said.  “I will not leave him.  How many exit points are there to watch?  Can you win?  Can you guarantee Jamie’s safety in the meantime?  When Sanguine is going to be there, eager to get revenge on the Lambs for the deaths of his fellows?”

“I would comment on how very good you are at making enemies, Sylvester, but you’ve done a good job of demonstrating that over the course of the day.”

“Technically, Jamie was the one who picked and won the fight that made Arachne mad,” I said.  “She said something about taking his arms and legs, because they just needed him alive, not intact.”

“Yes.  I heard that,” Catcher said.  He cast a look across the gap to Jamie and the members of Sanguine’s group.  “Jamie said that he became worthless if they damaged the inserts for the Academy technology.  Arachne promised to be careful as she cut him.”

I set my jaw.

“Do you want me to pick a fight and try to get Jamie from them, Sylvester?  I won’t do that.  Arthur is clearly on edge.  It wouldn’t take much to make him do something stupid.  Arachne… Dog’s more human than she is.”

Dog made a sound at that.  Offended.

Catcher ignored his partner.  “She’s single-minded in the hunt, and single-minded in keeping what she has.  Violent in both courses.  There used to be seven Arachnes, now there is only the one.  A flawed project series, prone to destroying themselves and whoever they were hunting or guarding in an effort to kill their enemy.  If I attack them, Jamie may well get hurt.”

“He’s being hurt right now, damn it!” I said.  One of my hands gripped the pole that was attached to my collar.  “Every second he spends there, he’s getting exposed!”

“Language,” the Bruno in Catcher’s group said.

“Fuck you!” I said.

“That’s better,” he said.

Catcher reached out and firmly seized the pole, a short distance from where I grabbed it.  He exerted downward pressure as he leaned forward, as if to make my knees buckle.  I resisted.

Looming over me, eyes staring at me from beneath his wide-brimmed hat, above his high-collared jacket, he asked, “What would you have me do?”

Approaches: offense, defense, escape, mediate, negotiate, or the faith-based tactic where I try to mix things up in hopes they look better when they’ve been sorted out again.

I thought about what I knew about Arachne and the tentacled man.

“Let me help Jamie,” I said.  “He’s never done you wrong.”

“He hasn’t done us much right either,” Catcher said.  “That’s not the same boy I spent years talking to and eating with.  Not the boy Gordon told me about.”

“No,” I said.  “You’re right.  But when it looked like I was going to be all alone, he came with me.  He saved me.  He has the mem- the memoirs of the Jamie we knew.  Not the memories, but the… records.  Everything that Jamie wanted to pass on.”

“And how do you think you’re going to help him?” Catcher asked.

I moved my hand up the rod until I found the mechanism for detaching the claw head.  I saw Catcher stiffen.

“Don’t stop me from pressing this button, and don’t try as hard as you could to keep me from running,” I said.  “If Arachne works the way I expect, if she’s that competitive and driven, then she’ll chase.  You’ll chase.  There’s a window of opportunity.  One where you could stop Arachne, if you’re confident, or go after Jamie, with only Tentacles and maybe the turncoat Bruno to deal with.”

“Tentacles and the Bruno,” Catcher said.  Taking note of my names for the people.  He looked at Dog, then at his Bruno companion.  “You’re asking me to give up the bird in the hand for a shot at two in the bush.”

“Yes.  I’m asking you to preserve Jamie’s memories.  I’m asking you to not make me face being alone.  I’m telling you you should deal with Arachne, because there’s a very good chance she’ll use that one track mind and come after me, come after you, only she’ll have sniper support.  I’m asking you to do this because you have pride as a bounty hunter.  You know you can get me again, you can get me again before she gets me, because she isn’t a bounty hunter in the same way you are.”

“You weren’t lying about the little bastard making you believe you have a disappointed grandmother,” Catcher’s Bruno commented.  He was the one with the flame canister, I noted, and skin that looked like it had been charred over a fire.

Dog garbled some words, speaking in a mangled voice with an even more mangled mouth.

“I agree with both of you,” Catcher said.  He reasserted his grip on the weapon.  “No, Sylvester.  I gave you leeway earlier.  I regret doing that now.”

I froze, my thoughts going to the sequence of events that would follow me using the mechanism to detach the collar from the pole.  I would have to run about fifteen feet to the nearest alleyway.

“If you’re thinking about using that mechanism to free yourself, don’t,” Catcher said.  “I’ve shown the Lambs how the Mancatcher was put together.  On the off chance this Jamie remembered how, I changed the mechanism around.  Fiddling with that thing will insert a needle into your neck.  Tranquilizers may not have the same effect on you, but they won’t make your day any better, either.”

I let my hands drop away from the mechanism.

“The best thing to do, from my perspective, is to let them retreat to the processing center.  If there’s treatment to be given, Jamie will get priority.  He’s a valuable asset to the Academy.  We’ll head them off as they leave.”

I seethed.

“Arachne!”  Catcher called out.

The other group turned their attention to ours.

“You treat that boy right!” he shouted.

The spider-doll woman’s mouth moved.  I didn’t catch the one-syllable response over the patter of the rain.

“How many times have we crossed paths now!?” Catcher bellowed the words.  It was a scary sort of shouting, given the quality of his voice, and people were peering at us through the windows.

I craned my head around, and I could make out the brothel.  There were lights on within, and I could see figures in the window, looking on.  Top floor.  That would be Marv.

“If you hurt that boy before getting him to where he belongs, then the next time we catch a whiff that you’re in the same city as us, I’m going to hunt down the doctor that maintains you and I’m going to take him to pieces!”

There was only silence in response.  Not an apparent word or movement from Arachne.

“Think that’s going to work?” I asked, under my breath.

“No idea,” Catcher admitted.  “I don’t know how that head of hers works.  Could be modified human, sectioned off human brain, like a stitched, for communication, or grown from scratch, like your Helen.  I’m not even sure if she can comprehend self preservation on that abstract a level.  Or at all.”

I continued to stew in dark emotion.  I didn’t like the distance that was between Jamie and I.  I didn’t like his outcome being so ambiguous, me so helpless to change it.

Dog, beside me, gave me a sidelong glance.  I suspected he could sense my emotions, and how very on edge I was.  Small grace I didn’t have any explosives left, or I might have used one to try and deal with Dog and Catcher, and buy myself a window to act.  Chances were good I would have risked my own hide in the explosion.  Chances were equally good that I wouldn’t have cared about the risk.

I turned my focus to the other group.  They were very still.  Why?

Why were we still here?

“You seem to have made up your minds,” I said, to Catcher.  I didn’t disguise my bitterness.  “Why haven’t we walked away?  Let them have Jamie?”

“Because I don’t like to turn my back to someone I don’t trust, and I don’t trust her,” Catcher said.

Dog mumbled something.

“He says there’s a dominance game, too,” Catcher said.  “Not backing down, not being the first to look away.”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “But she’s a spider.  Isn’t she?”

“A spider.  Hmmm.  Not entirely wrong,” Catcher said.

“Spiders don’t play dominance games.  They lay out webs.”

“Not all spiders do,” Catcher said.

“Okay, point taken.  But they lay in wait.  Some pounce.”

“Not sure I get your meaning.”

I looked across the gap to Jamie.  Then I gestured in plain sight.  Blood.  Question.

He stirred, as if from a daze, as if he hadn’t really been with us.

Me, back, was his response.  Danger.

Jamie had still been tracking Sanguine’s possible radius of movement.  He was saying Sanguine had moved to a point behind Jamie.

My eyes moved to the tallest building behind my friend.

“It’s Sanguine,” I said, under my breath.

“I saw the gestures,” Catcher growled.

I tried not to move my lips too much, even though it would have taken some miracle for him to lipread me through the rain.  “He has a bead on us.  Like they said.  The moment it looks like this discussion is going to end and Arachne doesn’t have both Jamie and me in hand, he’s going to put a bullet through heads.”

Catcher tensed at that.  His gloves squeaked against the pole of the mancatcher.

“The Bruno over there has the big gun.  Can it put holes in Dog?”

“It could,” Catcher said.

“And you, Dog, and your Bruno are all short to medium range combatants, if that flame contraption is anything like what I’ve seen elsewhere.  They’ve got the range advantage on us and a choice hostage,” I said.

Dog made a noise, a low, long, steady sound, the sound of a broken, dilapidated motor trying to purr, or a very large canine trying to growl with something stuck in its throat.

“You’ve lost, Catcher,” I said.  “I may have lost too, because of it.”

Jamie seemed so very far away.  I was aware of the red flowers everywhere.  That Tentacles was infected, too, and that the knife would have to be taken to Jamie shortly.

I was so angry about all of it.

I closed my eyes.  I focused on my mental images of the Lambs.  I put Gordon in my position.  I watched how things played out.

I put Mary through the paces.

I thought about Evette, in my shoes.

When I opened my eyes, I was glaring.  I didn’t look away from Arthur, Arachne, Jamie, or the Bruno goon as I gestured.  Danger.  WalkTime.

Jamie started to gesture, but Arthur grabbed his wrist, stopping him.  Another possible point of infection.  Jamie used his other hand to make the gesture, before Arthur grabbed that wrist too.

“In ten seconds, you’re going to release me, Catcher.  Make it look like I freed myself.  He’s going to choose me as a target.  That gives you three time to find cover.  If he doesn’t have me as a target, he’ll shoot you.”

Catcher turned his head to look at Dog.

In that instant, Jamie’s hand, wrist gripped by Tentacles, moved.

A flicker, not even a full gesture.

Lie.

Because he wasn’t sure, or because he didn’t want to risk that Catcher would see and realize that Jamie had been lying?

I counted off the remainder of the ten seconds in my head.  Four.  Three.  Two.  One.

I reached for the mechanism that would send tranquilizer into my neck.  In that instant, Catcher released the head from the pole.  Grabbing the mechanism, holding it in one hand, I bolted.

The danger-walk-time gesture.  Earlier, Jamie had counted off the steps, based on distance, that the bullet would have to travel.  Sanguine would see the direction I chose to move, lead, and fire.  One step.  One moment of movement, then a lurching stop, feet skidding on a puddle.

There was a bullet, but it wasn’t Sanguine’s.  The Bruno raised his gun and fired, and the shot was a miss.  I found traction underfoot and ran for the alley.  Belated, Dog and Catcher started after me.

I would duck between buildings, turn a hard right, and head to the brothel.  There were allies there.

Arachne, much as predicted, gave chase.  Not straight for me, but into the alley.

And, slow because he was hurt and his hostage was hurt, Tentacles began lurching away, dragging Jamie with him.  In the opposite direction of the brothel.  Taking my friend away.  The Bruno with the gun remained with them, guarding Tentacles and their captured quarry.

For the time being, there was nothing I could do about it.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.15 – Twig

Cut to the Quick – 11.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

A cup of fresh tea sat in my hands as I sat at the window above my bed.  I watched as stitched and Academy soldiers in special outfits made their way through the streets in a systematic fashion.  The outfits were black, covering them from head to toe, but for pale masks, akin to the beaked plague doctor masks of the last century.  These beaks were far less pronounced, only a stylistic choice to house and protect the filters around the nose and mouth.

I thought of them as crows.  Black and beaked, they picked their way through the dead, carrying guns that spit out flame and chemical in equal measure.  The result, even past sealed glass windows, smelled like a very chemical, very personal, and very insulting letter to Mother Nature, telling her in no uncertain terms that we were done with her.

I sipped on my tea, watching as one group of crows knocked heavily on a door.  While they waited for a response, I reached down to a saucer I’d perched on the windowsill, picked up a sugar cube and placed it on my tongue.  I let my saliva dissolve it.  It had been a couple of months since the plague hit, several weeks that we’d been camped out here, specifically, and the good snacks had run out a good week ago.

Further down the street, the crows put up a kind of quarantine seal over the front door of the house they’d knocked at.  They got under the curtain, making it bulge with the bodies beneath, then found their way inside.

“That’s the third contingent of people who’ve come through the city to get people out,” Jamie observed, from the other end of the room.  “They might come knocking soon.”

I nodded, still letting the sugar cube melt on my tongue.

“Are we leaving this time, or do you want to wait and see?”

I watched as the Crows emerged from the house, with a family of three in tow, each member of the family wearing a kind of disposable cover-all with a mask on their lower faces.  I’d seen that particular family as I roamed the city.  A short ways into it, I’d realized they were frightened of me, as if I was some kind of bogeyman.  I wondered if I’d been seen walking around with a knife in hand or blood on me at some point.

As scared as they had been of me, the family talked openly with the crows, who seemed to be talking back.  One crow put a hand on the family patriarch’s shoulder.  Reassuring.

“We can leave,” I said, after swallowing.  “Going to suck, leaving our place behind.  I’ve grown attached.”

“Yeah.  We spent more time here in the last six months than you spent at Lambsbridge in the year before we left.  The road trips and the little, stupid missions,” Jamie said.

I craned my head, looking over the room.  It was easy to let things slide when there was virtually no chance of anyone stopping by.  Papers were strewn everywhere, some weighed down.  The entire place was sealed, but there were tiny drafts here and there, and having wood in the stove tended to stir the air around and send some papers floating this way and that.  The weights were handy.

“Thinking about our notes?” Jamie asked.

“Be nice to have,” I said.

“You have me,” he said.

I glanced at him and rolled my eyes.

“You want the papers, fine,” he said.

“It’s good for organizing my thoughts,” I said.  I walked over to the music player and set the scroll to turning.  Music filled the place.  That done, I picked my way through the papers by hand, taking them up in a specific order while being especially careful of where I set my feet so I wouldn’t kick any of the paperweights.   The papers were organized with a pattern in mind, and the paperweights had a general theme that helped me trace the intent of each note.  Knives and some guns for targets, books for information, and so on.  I didn’t want to stub my toe on a tome that was holding down a corner of four different papers, and I definitely didn’t want to kick or step on a knife with bare feet.

I collected papers in one hand while holding my tea in the other, walking a precarious path across the floor.

“You’ll have to get those through whatever they have in place for getting people out of quarantine,” Jamie said.

“It’s worth it,” I said.  “I have things I want to do.  I don’t want to lose track partway through.”

I collected the last of the major target orders, carefully kicked and slid a few of the dangerous items I’d used as paperweights under the bed, and then paused, surveying to decide what I’d need to sort out next so that the papers were in some sort of order.

While thinking, I took a sip of my tea, then grimaced.  Getting cold, and it was bitter with only a quarter of a cup left.

I walked over to my bed, and balanced on one foot, bracing my left shin against the bed as I extended my right foot out.  I picked up a sugar cube between two toes, extended the cup, and dropped the cube in, only wobbling a little once.

“You’re so gross,” Jamie said.

I grinned, “I had a bath an hour ago.  How dirty can my feet be?  And so what if they are dirty?  Oooh, germs!  Wait, germs don’t affect me.  Oooh, parasites-”

“You’re lame too.”

“-Parasites don’t affect me.  Dirt?  What did a little bit of dust or dirt ever hurt anyone?”

“A lot, actually,” Jamie said.  “Even here in Tynewear, sufficient dirt in the right place can give the red flowers a chance to grow.”

“Semantics,” I said.  I bent down to pick up more papers.  I used my toes to seize a knife handle, passed it up to the hand with the papers, and used that hand to put the knife on a table.

“Not doing anything to shake my mental image of you as a hairless monkey, Sy.”

“Ha ha,” I said.  “It’s not like you’re going to get off your ass and help me, is it?”

“Nope,” he said.  “I can remind you to disable the traps before anyone comes knocking, though.”

“Good point!” I said.  I put the papers down on a table and made my way to the door.  I’d set up a few traps there to be safe.  I disarmed the makeshift incendiary traps, and put a lid on the mason jar of chemicals I’d set beneath a dangling string of cloth-wrapped packages.

The pounding knock on the door made me jump a solid foot in the air.  Jamie laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world.

Rolling my eyes again, I swiped a hand at him, and banished him to the recesses of my imagination.  The ass-end of it, I liked to think.

I took a second to catch my bearings, listening to the music playing in the otherwise quiet apartment, before I opened the door.

Crows loomed at the front of the house.  They were flanked on either side by stitched.  In any other circumstance, I might have wondered if they were the equivalent of mob enforcers, ready to pound my face in.  They had that aura of menace and intimidation.  The curtain surrounded the doorway.

“We’re evacuating the area,” the lead crow said.

I hadn’t even had time to get things cleaned up and sorted out.  The place was riddled with things I didn’t want them to see, and there were a dozen more things I wanted to grab before I left.

I remained silent, thinking.

“Are you sick?” the man asked.

I shook my head.

“Roll up those sleeves,” he said.

I pulled up my sleeves.  He indicated my legs, and I pulled them up, too.  I lifted up my shirt until it was at my armpits.

“Good enough.  We’ll give you a more thorough looking over at the gate,” he said.

I nodded obediently.  “Can I get ready?” I asked.  My thoughts were turning to ways to stall.  I wanted to get things in order before I left.

“If you don’t take long,” he said.  “One bag, no more.  And you’ll need to wear this.”

He reached back, and one of his fellow crows handed him a sealed bag, presumably with one of those simple, disposable suits inside it.

I took it.  I  put up a hand to tell them to stay, but they ignored it, inviting themselves in.  They closed the door behind them.

I felt hostile.  Protective of the space.  Nevermind that it was largely furnished with stolen goods, packed to the gills with incriminating evidence, and had traps specifically set out to catch nosy individuals off guard.

No, none of that really mattered, even if these guys seemed intrusive and nosy.  No, what mattered was that this was my place.  A place Jamie and I had shared.  The very first place that was ours.

These strangers just letting themselves in and acting like they had a right to be here was like a provocation, one that I instinctually wanted to answer in homicidal ways.

I just wasn’t sure if I could get away with it.  I bit my tongue.

“Unusual number of guns and weapons lying around,” the lead crow said.  “What are the papers?”

He was turning his attention to the desk with the stack of papers detailing all the people I was interested in killing and doing terrible things to, people I wanted out of the way, people I wanted to interrogate for details that would help me find and kill more important people… nine out of ten of which would look very bad to someone in service to the Academy.

I didn’t say anything to that, not right away.  Instead, I pulled off my shirt, then undid the button of my pants.  I shucked off my underclothes as well.

“‘hem,” another crow said.  A woman.

I looked back at the crows, and saw they were all averting their gaze.  I’d successfully gotten the attention of the lead crow, and then made him feel uncomfortable enough to turn his eyes away.

“My uncle rented this place.  He got a lot of weapons because we had food and he knew a lot of people didn’t.  He wanted to be ready if they got desperate and came after us,” I said.  “He got sick, went out, and didn’t come back.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman crow said.  “Why are you naked?”

The question was so disjointed in contrast to the condolences I wanted to laugh out loud.  I didn’t.

“I’m getting changed before I go out.  I don’t know when I’ll have the chance again and I wasn’t wearing my good clothes.  It’s fine, isn’t it?  You’re all doctors?”

“We’re soldiers, not doctors,” the lead crow said.  “Soldiers with some training on quarantine procedure.”

“Oh,” I said.  I feigned being in more of a hurry to get some underclothes, slacks, a shirt and a sweater on, with a note of embarrassment.  I grabbed a bag and began getting clothes together.

I grabbed a few papers from here and there, anticipating the question well before it arrived.

“What’s the story with the papers everywhere?” the lead crow asked.

“Memory game,” I lied.  “The things I put on top are part of the game.”

He glanced at the stack of papers I’d put on the desk.

“Staying sane,” the lead crow observed.

“Not in the slightest,” I said.  More for my benefit than for theirs.  “Cabin fever.”

“Not a good joke to make in the wake of a plague,” the third crow said.  Quiet up until now.  A taciturn fellow.  “Joking about ‘fever’.”

“True,” I said.  I saw the lead crow look again at the papers.  I suspected he was going to reach for them and snoop.  I added, “It looked like you crows were all going down the other side of the street.  I thought you wouldn’t come knocking here until the next time around.”

“Crows?” the lead crow asked.  He sounded almost amused.

I was amused, in my own little way, that I could drop that tidbit, create a little question, and command the man’s attention.  Just like my temporary nudity.  Successfully nudging their attention away from the papers each time.

“It’s what I called you.  I saw you come before, a week or so ago, and I shouted, and you didn’t come knocking on our door,” I said.

Creating another question.  Leading them by the nose.  That, and I was curious why they’d come knocking here.  I’d thought I had time, and was very annoyed to be wrong in that.

“Your neighbors across the way said there were lights on in here at night.”

Ah.  The family.

Sometimes the most obvious answer was the right one.

I gathered my things, and walked over to the desk, picking up the stack of papers.  I slid them in between clothes and the side of the bag.

“My uncle said I should keep his work notes, so I can find family members after we leave,” I said.

I felt like I’d pushed things too far.  Something about their body language and silence.

I didn’t need a jacket, as we were nearing the end of spring.

I walked away from them, nervous, and approached Jamie’s bed.  I kicked it, hard.

Jamie was already lying on his side, head on his pillow, looking out at the room and my side of things.

“We’re leaving,” I said.

“I know, I heard,” Jamie said.  He worked at sitting up, testing one shoulder that I knew was tricky after the surgery.  He wore a shirt, but I could see the multitude of faint scars and the shiny burn scar with some branching paths running off of it where I’d jolted him with a live current.  The scar at his collarbone was a particularly bad one.

“You have someone there?” the lead crow asked.  “Is he sick?”

“No,” I said.  “He’s okay.”

“What’s he doing in bed in the middle of the day?” the crow asked.

Recuperating.  Sleeping more, because it’s the closest thing he can get to treatment now, for consolidating memories.

I left Jamie alone as he got himself out of bed.  I’d chosen to wake him up later as part of my stalling tactics, and now capitalized on it.  While Jamie got himself ready and fielded a few questions and some light investigation, I managed to slip a few weapons into the bag, while collecting a few more of the important papers.

“-scars?” I heard a crow ask.

“I was sick.  I recovered,” Jamie said.  “In a loose sense of the word.”

“How?”

“Knife, voltaic current through the worst areas.  Stopped my heart, apparently.”

“Who handled all of that?”

“A doctor.  He worked in a brothel,” Jamie said.  “He was apparently one of the only ones to figure out a way to deal with it.”

“Wasn’t easy or pretty,” I observed.  “We almost lost you a few times.”

Jamie looked at me and smiled.

“Alright.  We’ll keep an eye out for him,” the crow said.

It sounded ominous enough that I wondered if I should steer them away from Marv.  But the fact was that Marv had eagerly taken on the job of treating who he could, using what I’d told him.  I’d handled some of the cases like Jamies’ had been, that seemed impossible to save, but Marv had plugged away on it.  Keeping his hands and his head busy, as I understood it.

“He’s not in trouble?” I asked, to double-check.

“No.  He’s not the only one to figure something out.  But they said to keep an eye out for anyone who figured out ways to stave it off or remove it, they want to share knowledge.  You said he was a doctor?”

“Student doctor, I think,” I said.

That got a nod.

Hopefully they would pay for that knowledge, and Marv would get a leg up.  Money, or status, easier access to better classes.

Jamie finished pulling on pants and a shirt, ran his hands through his hair, and then cleaned his glasses.  He bent down to get clothes out and I bent down to help him.

“Sleep well?” I asked.

“You talk to your ghosts incessantly,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.  “I take it that’s a no?”

“It was fine.  I was mostly thinking.  Not that that was easy either.  You worry me sometimes, Sy.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I was talking to you,” I said.

He gave me a funny look.

“You’re sleeping more, I don’t sleep much, I got lonely,” I said.  I shrugged.  “So I talked to you.”

The funny look remained, intensified briefly, and then broke, with Jamie turning his focus wholly to stowing away his clothes with more intensity than before, as if he was annoyed.

“Don’t- not that shirt,” he said.

“It’s a good shirt,” I said, shoving it into his bag.

He sighed, pulling it out.  I was about to fight him over it, but he neatly folded the shirt and put it away.

Once we had him packed, he stood.  They’d gotten another of the cover-all suits out, and we pulled the things on, tying them down in places we were supposed to tie them down, and putting the masks on.

I was still fixing the little things the crows were telling me I’d done up wrong when Jamie, dressed and okayed by the woman crow, got the scrolls from the music machine and carefully stowed them away in his bag.

I supposed I’d have to get another scrollphone when we arrived at our next semi-permanent destination.

“Ready?” the female crow asked.

Jamie and I checked with each other, then nodded.

The crows headed out.

“I really don’t want to get sick again,” Jamie said, hesitating at the door.

“I know,” I said.  I put my hand on his shoulder.  “Not to worry.”

Jamie almost flinched as we stepped outside into the sunlight.  It was warm, but something about Tynewear now seemed hostile and dead, less a glittering beetle shell and more a husk.  The parts were mostly there, but the color had dulled, little things were missing and broken, and it lacked animation.  It had been bleached by sun, lack of care, and by the dust and fine splinters that had been shed by the creaking walls that sectioned the city off into districts.  Windows were no longer glimpses into stores, restaurants and homes, but glass panes with sheets hanging behind them.  Trash collected here and there, in corners and by the sides of the roads.  Cracks and peeling paint that would have been dutifully mended before had been left to get worse.

The city smelled like tentacled waterborne warbeasts had been left to rot and were taking two months to do it, with a chemical undertone from the sprayers they were using to blast the plant into oblivion whenever they spotted a red flower.  We were outdoors, but it didn’t smell like fresh air, even past those other odors.

I looked at the crows.  “You said they wanted to get ahead of the problem?  It’s not under control?”

“It’s spreading.  Every time it seems to slow down with one city, it picks up in three more.  Most of the west coast has felt the bite.  Big cities, too.  Las Reinas is going the wag of Lugh.”

“Have they found out who did it?”

He gave me a curious look.  “You think someone did it?”

“Feels mean enough, my uncle said,” I said.

That got me a throat-noise that sounded vaguely like the agreeing sort.

“The rebel groups are apparently to blame, but with the way it’s going out of control, people are saying the group that’s responsible doesn’t want to admit it.”

Jamie glanced at me.

It was disappointing that there wasn’t anything more concrete.  A lot of my dialogue with Jamie over the past few months had been musing about where Fray, Mauer and the nobles individually stood, trying to figure out what their next moves would look like if they were the source of this red plague and what their moves would look like if they weren’t.

Figuring out where the Lambs would find themselves was a not-insignificant part of that thought process.

“Did the plague touch Radham?” Jamie asked.

“Little ways off, that.  Do you have family there?”

Jamie nodded, once.

“They handled it well there,” the crow said.  “They handled it well here, believe it or not.”

They handled it well here?

I half-turned, still walking with the group, and took in the scene.

Half of the city was burned.  Maybe a fifth of the city was overgrown, now, tinted red with an overgrowth of the red flowers, but those areas were contained by walls that seemed to be holding steady.  For reasons I couldn’t discern, possibly a lack of bodies, the remainder of the city was dotted with red flowers here and there, but the infection hadn’t quite managed to get a foothold.

Part of the city still stood, I supposed.  The rain had made a difference.  The quarantine measures had helped keep things constrained.  It hadn’t been great to be in the city during, but…

“I’d hate to see the cities they handled it poorly,” I said.

“Mostly the cities where the Academy doesn’t have as much of a hold,” the lead crow said.

I glanced at Jamie again.  I knew he could read my mind on this one, after all of the discussions.  One point toward this being the Academy’s work, then.

It was a long walk to the ‘gate’, where we joined two hundred other survivors.  Jamie and I joined the tail end of the group, and remained silent for several minutes, watching the crowd and the crows that stood on the fringes.

The crows gave the signal, and counted off people.  Twenty five men, twenty women, and five children going with the women.  Fifty in all.  Each was led single file into separate tents.

“You’re tense,” Jamie observed.

“Aren’t you?”

“For different reasons, I think,” he said.  He rolled his shoulder, wincing a little.  “What are you thinking?”

“That maybe the academy wants to clean up this mess.  Gather up the people, infected or not, and eliminate the problem.”

“You’re not sure, though.  You said ‘maybe’.”

“I said maybe,” I agreed.  “I don’t get that feeling.  I just… I guess I can’t wrap my head around why they aren’t doing it.  Did leadership change?  Or did circumstances change while we weren’t paying attention?”

Jamie nodded.  I thought he was dismissing me or he hadn’t heard, as his eyes roved over the crowd.  In the end, however, he pushed his glasses up his nose, and remarked, “Jamie made note of something Gordon said, once.  About how important people are to the Academy.  That without them, it falls to pieces.  We can say that people are often expendable, especially in cases like Lugh, but what if it’s bigger than a city?”

“They create crows as a unit to go and collect the people, just in case this situation ends up being so bad that they end up needing a few hundred extra people?”

“If it’s spreading like it’s spreading, and they get a few hundred to a few thousand people from every city, that adds up,” Jamie said, his voice muffled by the mask.

It was sobering to think about.

I glanced back at the city, and at the areas of it that were clearly overridden.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you feel good about our odds?” Jamie asked, indicating the tents that waited.

I drew in a deep breath, and winced.  That damn chemical smell made it impossible to smell most of anything.  I saw Jamie draw in a deep breath as well.

“I don’t smell blood or shit,” he said.  “Not much, anyway.”

I nodded.  “We’ll go ahead then.”

It took a while to get far enough along.  More people appeared behind us, better-dressed sorts from the cliffs, the higher-income area that had been less touched by plague.  They were also the ones to push their way forward in the crowd.  Jamie and I didn’t fight particularly hard to get ahead in the line.  We’d waited months already to get out, and the way I saw it, the longer we waited, the more tired people would be.  Tired eyes wouldn’t recognize a face as being from a wanted poster.

Finally, we were included in the people sent forward and into the tents.  There, we disrobed.  We were checked over, poked with rulers to move our arms and legs this way and that, and then given clothes to change into, still covered in the powder.  My clothes didn’t fit well.

I worried they would look at my bag, but they just blasted it, outside and in, with enough powder to asphyxiate anyone within five feet of the bag, and then let me claim it.

I didn’t see how it went for Jamie, but he took a little longer to make his way through, and looked deeply uncomfortable, hunching over slightly with his arms folded, as he emerged.  I clapped a hand on his shoulder.

On the other side, mercifully, were benches and seats to sit on, gathered in a loose fashion around long tables with food.  The faint babble of talking I’d heard while in the tent became a low roar.

The gesture of offering food and rest, nice as it was, spooked me as much as anything.  That the Academy was working to curry favor.  Them offering a small kindness, to me, was as if the bastard professors that were in charge had talked among themselves and had openly admitted that things were unstable enough that they couldn’t afford a riot or a problem on the ground level.

We made our way through the maze of tables and benches and found Chance, Drake, Candida and Lainie, sitting with a few of the girls from the brothel.  Shirley was among those girls.

On seeing me, Shirley hopped to her feet and threw her arms around me in a hug.  The suddenness of it made some of the collected powder puff out around us, from beneath our clothes.  Her hair had grown out a touch in the last three months.

“I cannot believe they let you walk out of there,” Lainie said, sounding very much like a girl who had gone to school with the elite and taken classes in snobbery.

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” I said.  With a bit of an edge to my voice, I added, “Really.”

“I’m not disappointed,” she said.  “I’m not very enthused either.”

“Ha ha,” I said, without humor.

“I’m glad you’re alright,” Candida said.  “Thank you, for bringing us supplies last week.”

I waved her off, plunking myself down on the bench.  Jamie sat with me.

To go from months of relative isolation, talking to a half-dozen people at a time, at most, to being in the midst of a crowd again, it felt strange.  Stranger still for the bustling city to be empty, the outskirts to be where the denser portion of the population was.

“The next train arrives in a few minutes,” Drake told us.  “Listen, they’re gathering up the orphans.  The children without parents to look after them.  There aren’t many.  The last train came through and they didn’t put any on there, letting the number build up instead.  Elaine was on the cusp of being put on that train, but with Chance vouching for her as an older sibling-”

“They released her into my custody.  If I’d been a year younger, I’d be on there,” Chance said.  He gave me a pointed look.

I was younger.  Or I looked younger.

“When they organized us into groupings of man, woman, and child, for the tents back there, I was a ‘man’,” I said.  “I’m fifteen.  Or sixteen.  Give or take.”

Jamie snorted.  I punched his arm hard, in retaliation.  “Estimated age!”

“You’re young enough,” Chance said.

“We’ll go on the train with you,” Drake offered.  “Get you and Jamie out of here, while keeping you from going where those children are going.”

I nodded.  “Thank you.”

“I know you can fend for yourself, but if you want help getting settled, then-”

I was already shaking my head.

“Didn’t think so,” Drake said.  He looked utterly unsurprised at the refusal.

“We turned them down too.  We’ve imposed for too long as is.  Lainie and I were going to leave around the time the plague hit, ended up cooped up with those two for a few months.”

“Sorry,” Candida said.

“We’re going north,” Elaine said.

Chance added, “I have some friends over there who’ve offered me a bit of work.  Lab assistant.”

“Best of luck,” Jamie said.

Chance gave him a mock salute.

“Where are you going?” I asked Candida and Drake.

“One of the big cities,” Candida volunteered.  “Not sure which, but one with a big Academy, since they seem the most able to deal with the plague.  We even thought we might get on the train and just see how each city looked before deciding whether to get off.”

“You won’t get much of a chance to do that,” Jamie said.  “Crowds at the front of the train, fighting to get to your luggage in time… I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Candida nodded, frowning a little.

“I don’t want to push you or anything,” I suggested, “But if it was all the same to you, could I suggest Radham?”

“Radham?  Possibly.  Why?”

“Your appearance has changed, and if you kept to the right areas, I don’t think people would recognize you as the Baron’s would-be wife.  Even if you were only there for a short while, I could do with someone I trust passing on a message,” I said.  “You could say hi to Lillian while you were there.”

“I’d like to do that,” Candida said.  “But you talking about people recognizing me has me nervous, now.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said.  “I can tell you where to go and what to do, and give you tips on disguising yourself.”

“Okay,” she said.  “I feel like I owe you, so-”

“You don’t owe me Jack shit,” I said.  “You helped with the situation in Lugh, which was heroic, and endured the Baron, you gave me your trust, and-”

“You-” she started.

Jamie stuck his hand between Candida and me.

“We’re friends,” Jamie said.  “Friends don’t count favors.”

I hesitated to agree to that, and I could tell at a glance that Candida was hesitating for very much the same reason.  As we both recognized that we were very much on the same page, we relaxed.  Candida laughed, baring sharpened teeth, and it was a good sound.

“I’ll pass on the message,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.  “Give me a few minutes to think of what it would sound like.  Probably something simple.”

She nodded.

From there, as if we’d laid out the key things, we settled into easy conversation.  None of us were easy companions, we didn’t mesh particularly well, but we’d been pushed together by circumstance and we’d stayed together for a fair amount of time, with a lot of emotion and tension binding things together in the midst of that proximity.  Detaching took some work, talking things through in a kind of prolonged goodbye.

“The madam of the house stayed behind, a captain with her ship.  She wants to make sure everyone makes their way out without trouble, and then she wants to get things sorted out.  Say goodbye to the house.  From what I hear, they won’t be letting us go back,” Shirley said.  “Tynewear is being evacuated, and nobody will be allowed back in.  They’ll bury it.”

“Are you going with her when she leaves?”  Jamie asked.

Shirley shook her head.  “I think there are other girls who will help her get established somewhere else, but that’s not me.  I love her, don’t get me wrong.  She’s a dear, and she’s one of two people who’ve ever really cared about me in any way.  I want to say goodbye to her, but I don’t want to stay with her much longer, I don’t think, or I might find myself staying at her side until I’m old.”

She took a deep breath, then clenched her fists in front of her, as if miming some display of strength.

“Stretch those wings.  Take a leap of faith,” I said.

She smiled at me.  “Not a big leap.  I was wondering if I could come with you for a time?”

I raised my eyebrows at that.

“Sy is pretty intolerable to be around for extended periods,” Jamie said.  “I’m Academy-augmented, I’ve had just about my entire lifetime to get used to him, and I can barely tolerate him.”

“I’m tougher than I look,” Shirley said.  “But I want to learn things so I can face the world, and I like what Sylvester has to teach.”

I glanced at Jamie.  “Plan C?”

He sighed.

“Plan C?” Shirley asked.

“Building something,” I said.  “If you want to stay on for a while, it… wouldn’t wholly conflict with what we might end up doing.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “You’re going to regret this, but I’m not saying no.”

Shirley smiled, as if she was only hearing the good parts.

The conversation continued, meandering here and there, and I took a bit of a backseat as Jamie did more of the talking.  It was like he’d revived a little, surrounded by people.  I’d have to surround him with even more good people to keep him in high spirits.

My thoughts preoccupied along several tracks, many having to do with the list of targets and the notes in my bag, I found my eyes wandering through the crowd, looking at the people and analyzing them.

As I heard the train whistle, I saw the collected orphans of Tynewear getting guided along into a waiting train car.  I thought for a bit about my own origins, and about the original Mary Cobourn, and the Baron’s mocking refusal to answer when I’d asked where the children were going.  I knew that while there wasn’t much I could do to disrupt those particular orphans getting on that particular train, but that I wanted to be in a position sometime in the future where I could keep those children from disappearing.

Plan C was to start a rebel faction.  Put ourselves on the map, in a position to have leverage, and be invited to meetings.  In the wake of the plague, I expected it would be very easy to get people on our side.

Either way, I wanted soldiers of my own as something of a buffer when the Lambs came calling.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 11.x (Lamb) – Twig

Lamb (Arc 11)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Calipers, measurement… twenty five point four.”

Duncan moved the calipers.  His ‘dog’ startled a little at the movement.  The thin tentacles that formed its head and extended down its back and sides drew in, coiling, ready to reach out.  He had to stop moving for a moment, waiting.

Why had it done that?

Did it perceive the calipers as a weapon?

Keeping his head and body still, he moved only his left hand as he wrote on the back of a page in his notebook.  Caliper reaction, Ano#3.  Does it see calipers as claw/bite?  Instinctive or learned?  If former, what aspect of chimera provided?  Will that impact training?  If latter, where did it learn?

The familiar scratching of the pen seemed to relax number three.  He put the pen down and reached into his open drawer for a treat, handing it over.

The experiment had no head, only a wreath of tentacles, and it used five of the tentacles to feed the treat into the gaping, toothless hole in the center.  That gave Duncan the opportunity to take a measurement of the legs.

“Forty-three nineteen for leg length.  Shoulder breadth to leg converts to…” he paused.  “One point seven.  Perfect for Wollstone ratio five.  The Branck pattern swap must have worked.”

He noted everything down as he said it.

“Are you going to be calm if I try to measure one of your primary tentacles, number three?”

The experiment slowly tensed as he moved the calipers closer to its head.

“Relax,” he said.  “Be calm.  You know me.  I’m where you get your food, right?”

He smiled at the experiment, even though it didn’t see by conventional means, and wouldn’t understand the expression if it did.

“Calm,” he said, “Calm…”

A sharp knock at the door startled him and the experiment both.

He pulled away, but the tentacles were already reaching out.  One caught him by the chin, another by an ear.  A third managed to find anchorage in a tuft of hair.

Calipers dropped, he gripped the edge of the table, bracing himself, to avoid being pulled closer to the bars.  His feet moved out to the table legs, bracing there as well.  Once that was done, he managed to move a hand out, fumbling for the tranquilizer needle.

“Be calm,” he said.

A second knock sounded.  He could feel the experiment startle, the jerk vibrating down the length of each tentacle.

Four seconds had passed, but it felt like a hundred.  His abdominal muscles were already crying out for mercy, as his entire body fought to resist the insistent tug of a creature a third of his size.

Once the syringe was in the right place, he brought it around to what he’d termed the creature’s collar, the rim of denser tissues and muscle that bridged the bases of the tentacles and the creature’s shoulders.

The movement might have startled the experiment, because he felt another tentacle seize his wrist.  It pulled his wrist in closer, winding the tentacle around the arm for a better grip as it did so.  Not a bad thing, except the jerk of movement made him stab the bars of the cage instead of the creature.  The syringe slipped from his hand.

A moment later, it hauled his head just a little closer, reasserted its grip, then hauled his head the rest of the way in.  All at once, there was only darkness, no air, and the tight muscles of the collar gripping him around the chin and neck.

Blind, he had to fight to get into a position where he could fumble around with his one free hand.  He was already blacking out, and knew it had to do with the pressure on his carotid.

Join the Lambs as a peripheral member and on-site medic, die in a lab at home.

He felt a euphoric rush, his thoughts scattering.  He took it to be the ‘light’ he’d heard talk of, the surge of chemicals that was bestowed in the moments before death and oblivion.

But it wasn’t that.  The grip on him had been relaxed.  The euphoria was blood and breath returning to him.  He hauled himself free, surprised at how weak he felt, and gripped the desk and a nearby windowsill to steady himself.

It took him nearly forty seconds to get his bearings.  He realized someone was in the room with him.  A good foot shorter than he was, with red hair neatly looked after.  Not a person, a Lamb.

“Ash-” he said.  He stopped mid-word, still gasping for breath and wincing at the pain at his throat.

“Ashton.  My name is Ashton, not Ash.”

“Yes.  You’re right,” he said.  “How silly of me.  You knocked, I take it?”

“Yes.  I was told to always knock.  It’s polite.”

“Not always,” Duncan said.  “Not if you’re on a mission, am I right?”

“Yes.  I suppose that makes sense.”

Duncan managed a smile.  Ashton mimicked the smile with one of his own, and this one actually looked genuine.

“Good smile,” Duncan praised the experiment.  Training it wasn’t so different from training the likes of chimera number three.  He did hope the end result wouldn’t be so dangerous for him.

Chimera number three, he noted, had relaxed considerably, as if it had been tranquilized after all.  Duncan didn’t protest as Ashton reached into the cage and gently pushed at the chimera.  At the push, it sat, then lay down, before lying down, letting its tentacles go limp.

Duncan swallowed hard, then, at seeing someone walk past the open door to his little lab, he walked over and closed the door.

“No need for that,” Ashton said.  He smiled again.  “I’m being careful.  Only pushing it out in this direction.”

“You’re getting better,” Duncan observed.  His voice was hoarse.  How very obnoxious.

Ashton nodded.

“Good job.  I like that your smiles are different from one another.  Helen has been working with you, hasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Good.  That’s really good,” Duncan said.  He slumped against the wall, then raised his hand, looking at the back of it.

A small smile crept across his face.

“Your control is very good, but it’s not perfect,” he said.  He showed Ashton the back of his hand.  He watched a very practiced look of puzzlement pass over Ashton’s features as the experiment examined the faint stripe of blue that had appeared.

Duncan crossed the room, to his chimera number three, and put his hand nearer the cage.  The blue took roughly four seconds to intensify, but it did intensify, until it looked like a stripe of paint.

Ashton stared, silent.  The young experiment raised a fist, moving it closer, then opened it very suddenly, fingers splayed.

It took about two seconds for the red stripe to appear, next to the blue.  There was something of a pattern as it solidified into a paint-like stripe of color, coloring the points the spores had hit first or in higher concentrations.

Chimera number three reacted, the tentacles coiling as it began to work to stand again.

“Away from the experiment, if you want to keep testing,” Duncan said.  He moved away from the cage, and Ashton followed.  He tapped his hand, “This is a little pet project.  I altered some bacteria that the Academy uses for detecting invisible gases, and primed them to respond to your spores.  You remember when I asked for the samples?”

Ashton nodded.  He did the motion with his hand again.

Nothing.

Another motion, again, with no response after a few seconds.  The red and blue were fading, Duncan was pleased to note.

A fifth gesture, a movement of Ashton’s hands, and the blue and yellow stripes illuminated.

“Which was that?” Duncan asked.

Ashton was quiet, staring.

“Ashton, pay attention,” Duncan ordered.  Once he had the experiment’s attention he asked again.  “Which spore did you just use?”

“Agitation.”

“That shouldn’t have lit up the blue.  Something to correct.  But it’s neat, isn’t it?”

Again, Ashton was quiet.

Duncan moved his hand.  Ashton’s head turned to track the motion of the hand, like a dog might do with a good bone that still had some meat on it.  Duncan moved his hand left, right, down, then up, until the little experiment could no longer see the patch of color.  The little experiment stood on his tiptoes, straining to see, until he lost his balance and stumbled.

He drew a handkerchief from his lab coat pocket and scrubbed the back of his hand until the colors were muddied and nearly gone.  A few rainbow traces remained.

Ashton stared at the hand, looking around a little as if he was wondering where the color had gone.  Then he met Duncan’s eyes.

“I want some, please, Duncan.  Can I have some?”

“It’s very unusual for you to want anything material, Ashton.  Usually you want changes to your environment, and even then, it’s pretty mild, like wanting to be warmer, or wanting a fire.”

Ashton nodded.

“It’s very interesting to have some feedback about what you’re doing, isn’t it?  More than just people acting different?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Ashton said, very simply.  “I asked politely.  I didn’t huff and puff at you, because I can’t, but I asked politely and people are supposed to do what you ask if you ask nicely and if you’re being reasonable.  Am I being unreasonable?”

“You’re not being unreasonable.  Where did huff and puff come from?”  Duncan asked.  “Wait.  Don’t tell me.  Helen?”

“Helen, yes.  If I’m not being unreasonable, then can I please-”

“I might be able to give you some,” Duncan said, cutting the experiment off.  “I’ll give some to your doctors, and if they say it’s okay, either they can give you extras, or I can quickly whip up some vials for you and the other Lambs.  How’s that?”

“That is very good,” Ashton said.  “I think that sounds very reasonable.  Except-”

Ashton terminated in the middle of a sentence.  He moved his head a little, staring off into space.  His expression did change to suggest what was going through his head, which was an improvement from a few months ago.

“What are you thinking?”

“I would like more than ‘some vials’, please, Duncan,” Ashton said.

Duncan chuckled, then winced, rubbing at his throat.  “Do you want a bathtub filled with the stuff?”

“I would like… a paint can.  Maybe more than one paint can.  I don’t know how many I would need.  But I would like enough for my room.  I want my room to change colors for me.”

“Ah.”  Environmental change after all.  But thinking more about the future!  Duncan smiled, “I think that would be a bad idea.  It would be hard to explain to the others at Lambsbridge.”

Ashton nodded.

So interesting.  A human child that was the same age that Ashton was might throw a tantrum, if something they wanted was taken away, but the little experiment was so complacent.  No complaint, no grudges, no upset.  He wondered why the color was so fascinating, or what process was going on in the experiment’s head.

“I’ll make you a deal, though,” Duncan said.  “If your doctors say it’s okay, I’ll paint my lab here.  You can do everything you like while you’re here, visiting me.  But- but!”

He held up a finger, to make it absolutely clear.

Ashton’s lips moved, echoing the word subvocally.  But.

“You have to help me train my chimeras here.  With your spores.  It can be practice.”

“Okay.”

So easily accepting.  Duncan looked at his caged chimera.  It was still lethargic.

“I almost became one of the twenty-three,” Duncan mused to himself.

“Twenty-three?”

“Students, a year, who get killed by their own work.  The number is really lower than that, but there were four straight years where it was something like twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty-two, then twenty-three again, so the number stuck.  Saying I was almost one of the nineteen doesn’t have the same cachet,” Duncan said.  He knew he sounded more amused and confident than he should have.  But the nice thing about being around this particular experiment was that it didn’t really matter.  No judgment here.

“That was a dumb thing to almost do,” Ashton said, and the judgment was ten times as heavy as it might otherwise have been, coming from a mouth so innocent.

Duncan pursed his lips, walked to the door, and opened it.  He pointed to the sign mounted beneath the number plate.  “What does this say?”

“Do not disturb.”

“That means no knocking or loud noises, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Good.  Remember that.  Because it’s important.  Alright?”

“Alright.  Yes.”

Somewhat satisfied that he’d salvaged his pride and pointed out the reality that it would have been Ashton’s fault for breaking the rules, more than his own fault, Duncan asked, “Now, you came here for a reason, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What do you need?” Duncan asked, patient.

“I don’t need anything.  But a woman in very nice clothes with a bodyguard and another man with her stopped by Lambsbridge.  Ms. Earles answered the door, then she called for me.  I was upstairs, looking out the window-”

Duncan gestured for the experiment to hurry up.  He watched as Ashton stopped, pausing, as if he needed a moment to process and think about what he was supposed to be hurrying up to.

To his credit, he was a lot faster in making the leap than he had been when Duncan first joined the team.  “The woman wanted to talk to a Lamb.  To Lillian, but Lillian wasn’t there and neither were Mary or Helen.  I talked to her and she gave me this, and this.”

Ashton held an envelope and a slip of paper.  Duncan took both, looked at the slip, saw an address pointing to somewhere in the Sticks, then unfolded the paper from the envelope.

While he read, Ashton talked, “I tried to find the others, but Lillian wasn’t in her room, and I got shouted at for being in the girl’s dormitory.  Then I made them calmer and happier to see me.  Then they were hugging me like Helen does and telling me I was adorable like Helen does, and they were messing up my hair, which I had to keep fixing.”

Duncan nodded, taking in the mental image.  He might have embellished it by imagining that some of the girls had been on their way to and from the showers, or the like.

“I envy you,” he said, more to himself than anything.

Ashton gave him a puzzled look.

“Nevermind,” Duncan said.  No longer distracted by the mental images, he reread the note, actually taking in the contents.

Sobering.

Sylvester, no doubt.  That meant that Duncan had to figure out how to handle this.

“We’ll take it straight to the headmaster,” Duncan said, firmly.  “He’ll figure out the best way forward.”

“I was going to ask you where Lillian and Helen and Mary were,” Ashton said.  “Because they should read the note.”

“No,” Duncan said.  “Nevermind what the lady told you to do, okay?  She was a pawn of Sylvester’s.”

Ashton frowned.

“Come on,” Duncan said.  Time would be of the essence, if he wanted this to move along smoothly.  He suspected things would go more smoothly if the Academy handled it from the start.

He secured the chimera’s cage, unhitching the sections of the lid so they would fold down, forming impenetrable barriers with air holes rather than the bars with spaces between, latched it, then unhitched it from his desk, moving it over to the corner of his lab where three more of the cages sat.

Quickly, he snatched up the vials with the spore-sensitive bacteria in them, and slid them into a pocket.  He checked he had his wallet and keys, then made his way out of the lab, ushering Ashton out before locking up.  He turned the ‘do not disturb’ sign around and wrote in chalk on the backside.  Absent.  Academy business.  Live experiments within.

That last bit was more for the snoops and saboteurs in the Academy ranks than for anything else.

His lab was prime real estate, on the top floor of the newly revamped dungeon.  Not too many stairs to climb, and less worries about accidentally setting off ever-more-dangerous security features, like the doctors and professors downstairs had to deal with.

Claret Hall wasn’t far.  He walked briskly and trusted Ashton to keep up.

“You saw my experiment, didn’t you?”

“Yes.  I’ve seen it before, when it was in the vat, too.  I’ve been to your lab before.”

“Yes.  With the other Lambs.  Listen, silly question, but I’m very interested in how you answer.  I feel like it might give me insight into how your brain works.”

“Alright.”

“If I told you I wanted to give a name to that experiment, which I’m currently calling anonymous chimera number three, what name would you give it?”

“Patriot.”  Without missing a beat.

Ashton’s speed left Duncan dumbfounded.  He mentally groped for an explanation, then for the words to express how staggered he was at the sheer speed of the response, and finally gave up.

“Did you already think of that name?”

“No.”

“Then why Patriot, Ashton?”

“Because Patriot is Good Simon’s dog’s name,” Ashton said.

“Good Simon?”  Every answer left him a little more off balance.  He checked his hand, to be sure that he wasn’t getting ‘huffed and puffed’, as Ashton and Helen had termed it, but there were no spores active enough to paint the streaks of chemical.  He’d daubed the stuff on when he’d taken his morning pills for resisting Ashton’s influence.

“Good Simon is from ‘Good Simon Says’, it’s a book series.  Simon is a good boy and does things right, he’s faithful, true and obedient, and he listens well.  He’s polite.  Whatever Simon does right, Seth does wrong.  Because Seth is bad.  Sometimes there are other characters, like Sadie, who is mean and angry, or Sable, who works with animals, and there are lessons with-”

“I know the books,” Duncan said, cutting Ashton off.  They were part of a series that taught about social mores, emotions, and patriotism to the Crown.  The books were popular with very young children, those with social disabilities, and, apparently, experiments who were learning those same things from scratch.  “You like the books?”

Ashton paused.  Again, that slight stall before the response.  Improving, but still there.  “I like the way they look on the bookshelf in the lab, and in my room at Lambsbridge, and in the living room at Lambsbridge.  The spines have nice colors and have the character’s faces on them.  The third book has Patriot’s face on it.”

Again with the focus on environment.  So many other questions.  Duncan was momentarily paralyzed by them.  He settled for, “You chose it because my chimera is dog-like?”

“Yes.  Because it’s part dog.”

“How did you know that there was dog in- no, nevermind.”

“I will,” Ashton said, quiet.

Duncan gave up, rather than subject himself to more confusion.  He silently tallied up an unwitting victory for Ashton.

He did allow himself one observation, however.  He glanced at the head of neatly-parted red hair that moved up and down as Ashton walked quickly at his side.

“Good Simon parts his hair, doesn’t he?”

Ashton nodded.  “Good grooming is a very important thing.”

They were silent as he opened the door to Claret Hall, and silent for the first stretch within.

Duncan recognized a face, and waved at a doctor, beckoning.  One of Ashton’s.  He did his best to remember the man’s name.

“Duncan!” the man greeted him.  “Hello Ashton.”

“Hello doctor,” Ashton said, obediently.

“You’ve got a bruise around your neck, Duncan.”

“Almost twenty-threed myself,” Duncan admitted.  He saw the man’s expression change.  “Well, not really, it was Ashton’s fault.”

“I disturbed,” Ashton said.

The man looked like he had questions.  Duncan cut him off at the punch.

“I’d share, but we’re in a bit of a hurry… George?” Duncan asked, making it a question.

“Yes.  That’s alright.  Any reason you waved me down in the midst of this hurry?”

Duncan smiled, drawing the vials out of his pocket.  “Make you a bet.”

“A bet, hm?”

“Figure out what these do, then figure out how to fix the blue-yellow.  I’m busy with my student project.  If you can give me the answer, I’ll bring you guys a lab dinner every night for a weekend.”

“And if we can’t?  We bring you dinner for a weekend?”

“A straight week,” Duncan said.

“Doesn’t seem fair.  A weekend if we win, a week if we fail.”

“But you’ll do it because you’re curious,” Duncan said.  “And you can take turns.”

“Sure, Duncan.  Maybe I’ll make it an internal bet.  Even if we succeed, whoever figures it out last has to deliver to you for a weekend, and if none of us do, we deliver for a week?”

“Perfect.  Want a hint?”

“For myself or for the group?”

“You decide.  Might be a bit of a red herring, though.”

“Sure.”

“Ashton likes it.  He really likes it.”

“I really like it,” Ashton echoed.

That got a quirk of an eyebrow in response.

“I might know what this is, we might have done something like it,” the man said.

“Maybe,” Duncan said, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “If so, we’ll compare notes later?  I designed it for more rugged field use, and I know I’m giving you a hint there.”

“Deal, and you look like you’re raring to go to wherever you’re going.  Don’t let me keep you.”

Duncan saluted.

“You’re a good lad, Duncan,” George told him.

“And you do good work, George,” Duncan said, by way of parting, setting a hand on Ashton’s shoulder.  That got him a smile from the doctor.

He walked away feeling upbeat, considering the message in his pocket.

Others felt trepidation in approaching the headmaster’s office.  Duncan felt triumphant.  He’d achieved a measure of status, a level of access.  He was able to approach the secretary and have her recognize him.  A thousand people came and went through those doors, and he was a recognizable face.

“Is the headmaster in?” he asked.

“He is.  He asked for some peace and quiet.”

“Emergency.  Not a big one.  Small emergency, if there’s such a thing?”

“If this winds up being frivolous, then it won’t look good for you.  He values his thinking time.”

Duncan was already shaking his head.  “Small emergency.  He’ll be happy to hear.”

The secretary picked up her phone, pressing a button on the side.  There was a pause.

“It’s Duncan and Ashton,” she said, into the device.  “Small emergency, he says.”

Another pause, and then she hung up.  She gestured for him to go inside.

Duncan silently marveled, not just at the technology of the phone, but at the sheer brass tacks of it all.  He could understand investing in phone technology to talk to people in other cities faster than mail, birds, or telegraph could, but to do it for someone in the next room?

The room had been refurbished, but improvements were still ongoing.  Nine out of ten pieces of furniture in the room had been replaced with ones that had a personal touch.  A tree now stood in the corner by the window, its leaves crimson, reaching over the desk.  At the other end of the room were tables and desks enough to seat thirty people.  Nobody sat there now.

“Headmaster Hayle,” Duncan greeted the man at the desk.  The man was older, his hair cut short and well styled.  He wore his black lab coat with medals on it like someone who had been born to professorhood.  It was hard to picture the stern figure as a mere doctor or student.

“Duncan.  Hello, Ashton, I would thank you for staying at the door, please.  I haven’t taken pills today, as I didn’t expect you.”

“Yes sir,” Ashton responded.  He hung back as Duncan advanced.

“Small emergency?” the Headmaster asked.

Duncan nodded.  He fished out the paper from the envelope and handed it over.

He watched as the headmaster read it over.

He saw the headmaster lean back in his chair.

“Years of work down the drain.  Project Caterpillar, lost to plague.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hayle made a face, frowning.  He started to crumple the paper, then stopped, setting it down on the table.  He very firmly dropped a fist down on it, raised it up, and brought it down again, repeating the process almost absently, as if he could use the light hits to beat it down into its proper, uncrumpled form.

Duncan waited patiently.

“The problem, when it comes to Sylvester, is that you have to see things from multiple angles.  It so quickly becomes a headache.  Misdirection, deception, taunts, deflection, and other forms of manipulation.  The things that aren’t said.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did the letter arrive?”

“Delivered, by a pawn of Sylvester,” Duncan said.  “Ashton received it and brought it to me.  He was instructed to take it to the other Lambs, but I told him we’d come here first.”

The headmaster didn’t move at that, but he did punch one hand into an open palm, both of his elbows on the table, then leaned forward.  “I hope you never experience this feeling, Duncan, that any move you make will be the wrong move, while you have the weight of an entire Academy and Academy city resting on your shoulders.”

“Yes sir, I hope I’m spared that as well.  I’m sorry you have to endure it.”

“In your opinion, if I sent the other Lambs out, would they come back?”

Duncan had to muse on that for a moment.  Reluctantly, he said, “If I was forced to give an answer, I would say yes.”

“That is my feeling as well.  Sylvester is slippery, and up until now, our best odds at finding him lay in finding a pair of adolescent boys who fit the description and stuck to each other like glue.  Now we’re left looking for one alone.  One who has changed behavior and approach, apparently.”

A finger tapped the paper.

“Yes sir.”

“I’ve got five new projects in the works, pursuing what I’ve managed to convince the Academy are worthwhile approaches to Academy science, investing in the brain, but they’re nascent enough the risk isn’t worth it.  That leaves me with one project that I could use to find Sylvester.  Yet I feel as if this is a taunt.  He’s claiming to be off balance and mourning, what better a time to capture him, am I right?  All I have to do is send the Lambs to track him down.”

“Yes sir.”

“It feels too crafted.  The Caterpillar project is deceased.  Sylvester is ill and grieving.  He plans to go out with a dramatic flourish.  The threat is implicit.  Whatever option I choose, I face a potential issue.  Either I play into his hands, or I stand by and do nothing while he… flourishes.”

Worried about repeating the ‘yes sir’ too many times, Duncan remained silent.

“Take this as a lesson, Duncan.  Faced with no right answers, kindness is rarely the worst of them.  I want you to go to the other Lambs.  Tell them to get their things together.  You’ll all start tracking down Sylvester immediately.  Assuming he left Tynewear recently, there are only so many stops on the line that are open right now.”

“Yes sir,” Duncan said.

“Tell them that Jamie has died,” the headmaster instructed, “Let them know that I know they are grieving, I do not truly expect results this time.  They should feel him out, test the waters, and focus more on getting a sense of his agenda and his current plan of action than about getting him.  I fear the latter would play into his trap.”

“That, uh, brings two questions to mind, sir.”

“Do ask.”

“The other Lambs can be… singular in their focus.  Mary is particularly so, and Helen is too, in her own unique way.  I don’t think they’d settle for feeling around the edges when the direct route is there.”

“You’re not wrong.  Steer them in the right direction where you can.  Knowing Sylvester, he wants the Lambs.  I’m willing to make the gamble that I may lose one, two, or three fifths of you, in exchange for clues about what he’s up to, and I’d rather avoid pushing them too hard, out of fear of pushing them away.  Reconnaissance.  No push.  Stress this.”

Duncan nodded.

“The second thing?” the headmaster asked.

“Ah.  That.  Almost forgot.  What Sylvester says… he’s a liar.  He could be misleading us.”

“He could,” the headmaster admitted.  “But my gut feeling is he wouldn’t.”

“He wouldn’t?”

“I might be falling victim to him being one move ahead, but to convince his friends that their friend and teammate is dead, when he isn’t?  That would take a particular sort of self-serving cruelty, wouldn’t it?”

“Based on what I saw and knew of Sylvester…”

“It is hard to imagine,” the headmaster contradicted Duncan before he could get the full sentence out.  “We won’t rule anything out, but for now, you can tell them.”

Duncan nodded.

“A lot of pressure,” the headmaster said.

Duncan nodded again.

“How is your student project going?”

“It’s going quite well.  I’m weeks ahead of my class.  Viable life, I can set the ratios myself.  I’m already making notes on the brain stage.  Not having to rent out or wait my turn for lab space helps.”

“Good to hear. I won’t ask about the mark on your neck.”

Duncan smiled sheepishly.  “Thank you sir.”

Keep that in mind as you go talk to the Lambs.  Helen is with her Professor, and I know that Lillian is in lab 2-A, likely with Mary in her company.  Be ready to leave before the day is out.”

Duncan nodded.  He’d have to pack a bag.  He wondered if he should bring his most obedient chimeras.

The headmaster held up a finger, looking down at the paper as he copied it down, then swiveled in his chair to hold it up to the light of his window.  He swiveled back around, then tore off the paper he’d transcribed the letter’s contents onto.

“Secret messages, sir?”

“None that I’ve seen so far, but I do have to wonder.  I’ll give you the copy rather than the original, to be safe,” the headmaster said.  “Thank you for coming to me.”

“Thank you for the opportunities you’ve given me, sir,” Duncan said.

With a short nod of acknowledgement, he turned and made his way out of the room.  He opened the door, holding it for Ashton, and noted a faint hue on the back of his hand as he did.

He closed the door behind him.

“Thank you,” he told the secretary, in a low voice, as he passed her.

“You’re very welcome,” she said.  “Just doing my job.”

The added very was so important to Duncan, as was the short conversation and talk of the contest with Ashton’s supervisor.  He buzzed with the thrill of the little victories and successes, that he’d left both people smiling, and that he’d achieved everything he wanted to achieve in the process.  Thriving in the Academy was a question of politics as much as it was science.  He’d been good at the science side of things from the time he was little.  Being able to tell himself he was laying the groundwork for the political side of things thrilled him.

He exited Claret Hall, Ashton at his side, and they made their way back to the dungeon.

“Ashton,” he said.  “Can you do me a favor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where Professor Ibott’s lab is?  And can you find your way to lab 2-A?”

“I do, and I can.”

“Can you get Helen and bring her to Lillian’s lab?  I had a bad experience with her professor, and I’d rather steer clear until he forgets my face.”

“That’s fine.  I like Helen, and I like getting to walk with her and talk with her.”

Maybe the very first ‘like’ that wasn’t rooted in something environmental that Ashton had mentioned since arriving in his lab.

“I like the hugs, too,” Ashton said.  “She hugs me a lot, and my head or my face gets squeezed against her chest, and it’s soft.”

“I envy you so damn much,” Duncan murmured, under his breath.  Helen’s good points were why he’d gotten on Ibott’s bad side.  He’d been invited to the irritable professor’s lab, with the idea that Duncan would learn the particulars of Helen’s anatomy in case she needed field care.

That had involved Helen partially disrobing so she could be opened up.  Given that Helen was an experiment that looked like a sixteen year old girl, and given that she was attractive enough to shame ninety-nine out of a hundred of even the augmented girls in the western Crown States, Duncan had reacted like any other adolescent male might.  He wasn’t entirely sure, but Helen might have noticed and made the agony of the situation more agonizing by giving him sly looks, small smiles, and choosing certain postures.

Bad luck, that Ibott had noticed that Duncan was as stiff as a cold stitched while midway through the process of opening up the experiment’s ribcage.  The man had taken Duncan to be a peculiar sort of pervert, when it had simply been a particularly stubborn stiffness from earlier.

The small man’s words still rang in his ears, and his face burned at the memory of the situation.  A man he’d admired and hoped to impress had condemned him and threatened to alter parts of him beyond recognition.

Best to steer clear of that particular lab for the time being.  That was one instance that hadn’t been good politics.

“You envy me,” Ashton said, as if processing the idea, searching for a conclusion or way to parse it.

“Hm?” Duncan asked, pulled out of reminiscing and back to reality.  Then he remembered.  “Hmm.  Yeah.”

After a few moments thought, he added, “And don’t mention that envy to anyone.”

Ashton nodded.

He clapped a hand on Ashton’s shoulder.

They made their way down to the labs and split up.  He approached Lillian’s lab, 2-A, a floor below his own lab, which was actually a considerable distance, and he stopped at the door.

Why did he feel trepidation?  In virtually every other situation, he felt so capable, like he was ahead of the pack.  But here…

No ‘do not disturb’ sign.  No notices or warnings.

He knocked.

He heard the reply, almost impossible to make out through the thick door.  A ‘come in’.

It was an expansive lab.  More expansive than his own.  Clay models of bodies, arms, legs, and bodies were set up along one side, some with bone skeletons modeled in white to contrast the flesh-tone clay.  There were vats of flesh and tables with disembodied parts strewn out.  Various drafts of Lillian’s exo-suit, all taking up three-quarters of the lab.  Lillian wore only a camisole and a doctor’s apron, her lab coat around her waist with the arms tied.  A hairband kept the hair out of her eyes as she worked.

In the other one-quarter of the lab, Mary had arranged something.  Pillars and targets, all suspended at various points.

As Duncan watched, Mary threw a knife.  It moved in mid air, turning a relatively sharp left, before slicing along the length of a target that sat with its edge facing Mary.  It clattered along the ground.

Mary’s expression didn’t change as she flicked her hand and arm.  The knife reversed course, moving around a pillar, then, with another movement, skidding across the floor to her, where she stopped it with one foot.

She used her hands to carefully catch the length of razor wire that was bound to the knife, centered herself, and then threw again.  He caught the follow-up motion this time.

Throwing and manipulating the wire so it would catch at the pillar and force a change of direction for the knife.  The knife sank into the very edge of the target.  Mary froze, watching, waiting, until the knife came loose of its own accord.  With grim determination on her face, she reeled it in again.

She was teaching herself to throw knives around corners.  Or the wire could slit one throat while the knife flew into another person’s face.

“Come to spy on my work?” Lillian asked.  The tone was light, not accusatory.

“If I was going to spy on someone or sabotage someone, which I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t pick you.  You’re liable to find your way to the top of the class, sabotage or not.”

“Of course,” Lillian said.  “How’s your project coming.”

“Almost got twenty-threed,” he said.

“You didn’t,” she said.

“Ashton’s fault.”

“Your fault,” Lillian said, eyes on her work.  Her hands made wet, squelching sounds.  “There are always more precautions you can take.”

He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it.

The knife slashed the target but didn’t sink in.  Mary reeled it in.

“She’s been at that for hours,” Lillian observed.

“It’s fun, learning something new,” Mary said.

“To your peculiar mind,” Lillian said.  “I haven’t seen a smile cross your face since you started.”

“I’ll smile when I can land five out of five.  I’ll do it before the end of the day.”

“I believe you,” Lillian said.  She even sounded sincere.  She returned her attention to Duncan, “We’ve been talking about going shopping.  In the interest of team-building, would you like to come along?”

Duncan’s response was cut short.  Ashton ran into the room like the mounted legions of hell were after him, scrambling so fast that even his walking shoes slid on the floor.  He made a beeline for Mary’s maze of pillars and targets.

Helen followed him into the room.  She moved more like a jungle cat, with confidence and easy, graceful movements.  The sight of her filled Duncan with very complicated feelings ranging from terror to awe and, again, that stirring of adolescent feelings that anyone would feel when faced with something that looked like a perfect girl, and that only made him feel more terror.

Ever since the incident with Ibott, he’d felt like he was her prey.  He’d shown a moment of weakness, and now there was no escape.

He was already reciting Wollstone’s ratios in his head, so as to avoid another moment of bad politics, as he’d come to term it, when Helen tackled Ashton to the ground.  She squirmed around on top of him, pinning him by weight rather than by grip, and smothered his neck and face with kisses.

He couldn’t help but imagine himself in Ashton’s situation, and that didn’t do anything to improve his situation.

Not just reciting Wollstone’s ratios then.  He started the chemical conversions and listing conversion methods in his head.

A glance at his hand showed a red, yellow, and faint blue bar.  Assuming the blue was a false positive, then at least Ashton was enjoying himself.  All an act, he told himself, some charade the two familiar, not dissimilar experiments had concocted between them.

“We have a job,” Duncan announced.

Helen, mercifully, stopped messing around.

He had their attention.

“Sylvester,” Lillian said, as if it was already known.

“How did you know?” he asked.

“Timing feels right.  It’s felt right for a while now, but when my mom came into my room three years ago and sat on the corner of my bed, I knew right away it was my grandmother.  That she’d died.  I know this like I knew that.”

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  He drew in a breath, then said, “Listen… the headmaster said this is low pressure.  We’re going into this as a reconnaissance job, to figure out what Sylvester is doing.  We can fail.  If we do this right, the headmaster will okay a more serious job, and relax restrictions on the Lambs.”

“He’s desperate,” Mary said.  “Spooked, even.  We’re leaving soon, I take it?”

“Looks like we’ll be out and about for a while, a few likely cities to check out,” Duncan confirmed.

“Help me get ready?” Lillian asked Mary.  She pulled off her apron.  She moved over to a side table, and began collecting straps and assorted items and trinkets.  A tooth, earrings, scalpels, syringes, vials, and packets of paper.  She held up a round band.

“What’s all that?” Duncan asked.

“This?” Lillian replied.  “Is a garter.  These things are preparations.  Whatever Sylvester is up to, he’ll be anticipating us, but we’ve been anticipating him too, right?”

“Ah, yes,” Duncan agreed.

Lillian shifted position, hands on her hips.  Mary matched it, arms folded, both of them staring him down.

Had they read his mind?  Did they know there was something he hadn’t yet shared?

It was such a hard topic to broach.

Lillian gestured, pointing down, and making a small circle with her finger.

“I thought I’d learned all of the gestures, but that one’s lost on me,” Duncan said.

“Garter.  Read between the lines.  We’re getting our weapons and tools on and getting changed in the process.  Turn around, sir.”

Ah.  Not a gesture, then.

Flushing, he turned his back to the pair.

He heard rustling, and began reciting Wollstone’s ratios in his head again.  In the meantime, Helen sauntered around, walking slowly, hands behind her back, skirt swaying, taunting, stalking.

He shut his eyes, and heard an amused sound from the experiment.

Females were terrifying.  At least Ashton was an ally.

“Bringing your work?” he asked, conversationally.

“Yes.  The arms, at least.  I’ve got a compact version I can use.  It’ll help.  You?”

“I was thinking about it.  But I’ve got to go to my lab and figure out how to transport it, and I’ve got to go to my dorm room to get clothes, get packed.”

“How long?” Mary asked, voice sharp.

“Thirty minutes?  Forty?  I don’t know.  No more than an hour, I imagine.”

“I’ll be ready to leave in two minutes,” Mary said.  “I have a bag stowed here.”

“Same,” Lillian said.  “Maybe as many as five.  I’ve got to figure out how to get some of this on.  Can you help me attach this to my skirt, Mary?  Thank you.”

Duncan flushed a little, not at any lustful feelings, but at the rebuke.  His pride was pricked.  He hadn’t known he would need to be ready to go so soon.

“Lillian commands the team while we’re outside of combat or confrontation,” Mary stated, like it was fact.  “I’ll handle orders while we’re in combat.”

“Yes,” Helen said.  Ashton echoed her.

“We know his weak points, but he’ll have adapted.  Don’t take anything for granted, he may have adjusted his parameters,” Lillian said.  “Jamie is problematic for other reasons, but I don’t know how he’ll come into play.  I think of what he did in Lugh, the skills he demonstrated, and he was very good at some things.  If he’s practiced at all, he could be dangerous.  Skilled in a very different way from Sylvester.  Inflexible, but supremely reliable in whatever action he’s taking.”

A sick feeling welled in Duncan’s gut.  Why hadn’t he mentioned the death earlier?

Because he actually liked the Lambs, even the ones that terrified him, and he knew how this news would be received.

But every second he waited made it worse.

He almost said something, but then Mary beat him to it.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what Jamie brings to the table.”

“Um!” Duncan cut in.  His voice caught.

“Jamie is dead,” Ashton said.

The conversation died with those words, and all of the energy that had filled the room became something cold and empty.

“That,” Duncan said, feebly.  He fumbled in his pocket, suddenly clumsy, collecting the paper.  “A woman dropped this off, earlier, Ashton brought it to me-”

The paper was snatched out of his hand the moment it was free of his pocket.  He turned to look, and it was Lillian.  Disheveled in fashion with some buttons remaining to be done up, but still clothed, she stared down at the page, the short message.

Jamie died to the red plague.  I’m managing, but I’m not handling it well.  Seeing things, talking to ghosts of people who are alive.  I thought you should know what happened.  This may be my goodbye, depending.  The anger won’t die.  I’m hoping that a monumental action with some dramatic flourish will make for a good send off.  -S

Lillians hands shook.  Calmly, almost mechanically, she passed on the papers to Mary.

Then, in the next heartbeat, she was a fury.  She struck him, then shoved him, then shoved him again.

“You told Hayle before you told us!?”

Life was so good, he felt so triumphant, so secure, up until the Lambs became involved.  Every bad moment in the past year had been some involvement with the Lambs.  Twenty-threeing himself, Ibott, nearly dying a half-dozen times…

“I thought-”

His protest was cut off by the tears he saw in her eyes.

“You prat!  You’re the worst!”

“It made sense!”

“No!” Lillian shouted, her voice raw.  She pushed him again.  “No!  No it doesn’t!  We’re supposed to trust and rely on each other!  Even if Sylvester ran, he still understood that on a level, and I have no doubt he thought he was helping us on some level, or he at least thought about us every step of the way!  Jamie understood too- it’s why he left!”

“Ashton agreed,” Duncan protested.  He backed up enough that he wasn’t being assaulted.  “And telling the headmaster first meant he went easy on us, like I said before, this being only reconnaissance, mild penalties for failure.”

“I didn’t agree,” Ashton said.  “I didn’t disagree.  I thought we should tell the Lambs first.”

“Because the woman told you to.”

“No,” Ashton said.  “That’s what you said, not what I said.  I thought we should tell the other Lambs because the Lambs should know first.  Jamie mattered most to them.  Us.  I liked Jamie.  He helped me a lot early on.”

“You’re an idiot,” Lillian said, voice raw.  “This was important, on so many levels.  You got what Hayle was willing to give us, not what we could’ve taken.  We’ve been waiting months, and everything about what we do and how the Academy handles us depended on who got to make the first move, on how.”

“Information,” Mary said, simply.  There was no anger or bitterness in her voice, only a firm, horrible coldness.  “Control of information.  The only power we have is the power we take for ourselves.  There are few things more important to being a Lamb than coordinating.  Being able to trust one another.  Being able to discuss, be on the same page, and handle things as a group.  You handled this alone.”

“I handled it with the group in mind.  I know Sylvester got some discretion to take leaps and do things on behalf of the group without coordinating, I know you get some discretion.  What about me?  Do I need to pass some imaginary metric before I get some leeway?  I’m a Lamb!”

“You are not a Lamb,” Lillian retorted.  She seemed to startle.  “And oh my god, I’ve become Sylvester from four years ago.”

Duncan seized on the opportunity, “You railed about how unfair that was, how he treated you when you were new.”

He startled as he felt hands on his shoulders.  He startled more when he realized, by process of elimination, that it was Helen.

“The difference,” Helen said, calmly, sweetly, “Is that Lillian never claimed to be a Lamb.  She earned her place.”

“I kind of did claim,” Lillian said, bitterly.

“Not like that,” Helen said.  The gentle, diplomatic tone cut like a knife.  “And you never broke our trust.”

Lillian pressed her lips together firmly, dropping her head in some faint semblance of a nod.

Duncan shrugged his way free, backing away a few paces, so he could look at all of the Lambs.  “Fine.  I made a mistake.  Are you saying none of you did, when you were new?”

He could see them react to that, and braced himself for a fresh barrage of criticism.  That feeling of being horribly out of his depth had swelled, and now he felt like he was drowning.  He’d never felt so out of place, as a cog in the machine.

So many things hinged on this, on his participation in the program.  He couldn’t lose this.

“Let’s stop here,” Lillian said, eyes on the ground, barely restraining the emotion in her voice.  “Jamie’s dead.  I don’t want this to be how I remember the day I learned that.  Why don’t you go and get ready, Duncan?  Since it sounds like you’ll need some time and we won’t be able to leave right away.  Get your pets, get yourself sorted out, and get your head in the game.  I’m not criticizing you when I say that you’re the weakest link, you’re new, you’re inexperienced, and you’re not augmented.  He’ll target that.  Be ready.”

Duncan riled a bit at that, but bit his tongue.

“I’m the next weakest link,” Lillian said, as if to soften the impact of that last statement. “He’ll target me too.  There’s no pride or shame in that.  It’s the nature of this particular confrontation.”

“I’m surprised you’re even inviting me along,” Duncan said, “Given all of this, my mistake.”

It was Mary who responded.  “Like Lillian said.  You’re new, inexperienced, and not augmented.  He’ll target that.”

“Especially because he never liked you,” Helen added.

“I’m bait?”

“Are you complaining?”

He shook his head.  He set his jaw, and said, “However I can help.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.

“Then I’ll take my leave,” he said, stiff, and turned to leave.  Indignation and frustration welled in his chest, and he suppressed it.  This job was important.  It was hell, difficult, dangerous, and entirely not his element, but he couldn’t back down now.  Better to endure, survive it, and achieve something better in the future.

Angry, bitter, he stopped where he was, just outside the door, for a breather, so nobody would see him so emotional.  The door sat slightly ajar beside him.

He could overhear, past the noise of water rushing through the walls, and the dull thuds throughout the complex.

“He just ruined so many opportunities,” Lillian said.  “Ways to put ourselves in a better situation, sell our merits to the powers above, and get resources.  It’s like he doesn’t understand.  He raised himself to a better position, rather than help the Lambs.  How are we supposed to trust that?”

“He doesn’t understand,” Mary said.  “Even you had to learn.  I had to.  This is a tricky thing to manage, where we scrape out handholds.  Take a deep breath.”

A pause.

“I don’t feel better.  This was different from the mistakes you and I made while we learned.”

“I know.  But we’re all different.  Now, let’s focus on the positives.”

“They’re alive,” Helen said.

“They’re alive?” Ashton’s voice could be heard.

“Sy wouldn’t tell us like that,” Lillian said.  “It’s maneuvering.  Giving us the information to spread or leak as we need to.”

They sounded so certain.

Was this what they were talking about?  Coordination?

Mary said, “It offers the added benefit of getting the bounty hunters off his trail, which he doesn’t want and we don’t want.  If Hayle wants the loose end tied up, he has to use in-house resources.  We’re sent to chase him.”

“Probably rollicking good fun for him.  The little bastard,” Lillian added.

“Probably,” Mary said.

There was more talk, about logistics, about getting things together, and what would work best for dealing with Sylvester.  Duncan barely heard any of it.

His pride stung.  He felt bitter.

The paper in his pocket with the address on it.  He still had it.

He could take it to the headmaster.  Another tidbit of information, one that might lead back to Sylvester.  A sick feeling stirred in his gut at the feeling.

Instead, he turned around.  He opened the door.

He could see the reaction as they saw him.  Only Helen was stone-faced.  She should have heard him.  Had the ambient noise misled her, or had she simply not listened?

Nobody asked the question, ‘did you overhear?’  ‘did you eavesdrop?’.

He reached into his pocket, and withdrew the slip of paper with the address.  He handed it to Helen, who was closest.

“Oh.  The address of the woman who brought the letter,” Ashton said.

Duncan could see eyes light up at that.  A morsel of information, but it was important.

“It won’t lead back to Sylvester,” Duncan said.  “He wouldn’t leave a trail like that.”

“Everything he does at this stage, he does for a reason,” Mary said.  “Including sending the letter to us, not to the Academy.  Just so it’s clear why we were upset.  This?  This matters.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  She still looked angry.  To think she’d once been a friend of his.  “This is a big step forward.”

I gave it to you because Ashton might have told you about it at some point.

The only reason I didn’t give it to the headmaster is because I was too preoccupied, and forgot.

“Thank you,” he said.  He couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.  “I’ll go get ready.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.01 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Three bounty hunters flanked me.  All three had crocodile skin, two of them were women, twins, while the third was a man, proportioned like a Bruno.  Each member of the trio had long, greasy hair that looked like it hadn’t been cut or washed in the last few years, and each had scant clothing, which was probably a blessing, given how they tended to operate.  I was still dripping wet with mud up to my knees, while they had more or less dried off in the walk here.

The older brother who went by Scale.  Given the crocodile theme, I might have expected them to have wider mouths, riddled with sharp teeth, but Scale’s mouth was smaller than mine, the lipless top and bottom of his mouth pressing together into a firm, grim line.  His hair was tied back into a long ponytail, while the girls simply let their hair drape over their faces, in part.  One of them had swords at her side, bent ones meant for hacking at vegetation, while the other had pouches clipped to her belt.

Scale held the chain of my cuffs in one fist, and the rough-scaled hand was large enough to simply encompass the chain, one side of his hand rasping against my left wrist as we walked, the other side scraping against my right wrist.  He held me so my arms were stretched out directly behind me and up a bit, my shoulders threatening to get wrenched out of my sockets.  My feet barely felt like they touched the ground, which was more illusion than fact, and mud squelched in my shoes with every step.

In this manner, my nose bleeding to the point that droplets formed at my chin and dropped down to stairs, doorstep, and then floor, I was led into the building that served as West Corinth’s Crown Courthouse and police station.  Crown officers and service members turned their heads for the trio, but the ones that stared stared because of me.  I saw some glances go from my face to the wanted poster on the wall.  Jamie’s face was still beside mine, there.  Still his artwork.  Old Jamie’s artwork.

I struggled a bit, and Scales shook me, hard.  I winced at the pain in my shoulders.  He grabbed me by the neck, and still holding the chains with the other hand, he hauled me up and draped me across the first available desk.  The officer there stared.

“Get your superior,” Scales ordered.

The officer looked down at me, up at Scales, then waved another man down.

“Or, alternatively-” I said.

Scales lifted me up off the desk, then slammed me down into it.

“No shenanigans.  My tolerance is zero,” Scales said.

I pursed my lips, and let my head drop, forehead resting against the cooler surface of the desk.

“Bounty?” I heard a new man say.

“You’re Archibald, if I remember right?” Scales asked.

“I prefer Captain Anders.  And you are?”

“Scale.  My sisters, Magda, Agnes.  We’ve already passed on word to higher authorities that we have him.  I would like a prison cell.  I know you have some in the building.”

“I see.  I won’t object.  We do have space in a cell.  He would share it with two others.”

“No.  You’ll shuffle the prisoners around until there’s an empty cell.  I’m not taking my hands off him until they have their hands on him.  I’ll be in the cell with him until Radham Academy sends its agents here with a box to put the little blighter in.”

“I don’t know where you hail from, Mr. Scale, but in this office, we expect manners.”

I felt and heard the heavy bag hit the same desk I was being held down against.

That is how the Marais Cavelier say please and thank you,” one of the crocodile women said.  “Not a bribe.  A donation to your department.  As thank you for the space, the time, and the hassle.  There is always the hassle, with this one.  We spent two days tracking and chasing him before he ran out of steam.  I am guaranteeing there will be more of the hassle.”

“Given any other choice, I would say no, because of that same fear.  But he’s an enemy of the Crown, and there aren’t any alternatives if you’re looking for a cell to put him in-”

“Myself and him,” Scale said, sharp with the correction.  “This is not negotiable.”

“Yourself and him.  If you’ll wait here, I’m going to make a phone call, and then I’ll see about those accommodations,” the police captain said.

“Thank you,” Scale said.

I spoke up, “He’s double checking what you said about you having contacted the Academy-”

Scale tightened his grip on my neck, lifted my head, and then slammed it down on the desktop.  My head exploded with pain, and I felt a sharp pain at my lips, with a sharper pain at my nose that suggested it might have broken.

He left my face there, pressed against the desk.  My gasp of surprise and following utterance of pain felt belated, but it might have been that the impact had distorted my sense of time for a moment.

The sharp exhalation as I made a pained sound sprayed out the blood from a cut lip and an exacerbated nosebleed, painting the desk.

“Do your level best to pretend you’re dead.  Don’t move, don’t talk, don’t gesture or look around,” Scale said.  “When you irritate me, I will do that again, or something like it, and everything about you irritates me at this point, the sound of your voice included.”

My eye moved over to look at the police captain, and the people around the room who were watching.

Scales didn’t seem to care about the stares his violence had earned him.  He didn’t slacken his grip at all, either.

Two minutes passed before the captain returned.

“Phone call checks out.  Radham Academy confirms they sent a contingent of officers and an experiment at your request.  They were happy to get confirmation from me as well, about him being in custody.  Assuming it’s him, and not another child mocked up to look like him.  The people I talked to on the phone raised the possibility.”

“It’s him,” Scale said, with a tired voice.

“The group they’re sending-” I asked.

Scale lifted my head up.

“-the Lambs?” I asked, in the second I had before he slammed my face into the table.  That was my cheekbone more than my nose or mouth.  He was good at distributing the damage.

“Don’t answer him,” Scale said.

I sighed, and the exhalation sent a faint spatter of blood across the desk.

A hand swiped at the blood on the table, wiping it away with a damp handkerchief.  That same handkerchief moved toward my face.

Scale let go of my neck to seize the woman’s wrist.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Scale asked.

“Stopping the bleeding,” the woman said.

“Let him bleed.  Knowing him, he put something in his blood that will influence you or give him an opening.”

“All business, hm?” the captain asked.

“We tracked him for the first month of summer and chased him for the last two days.  I was ready to be done with this one within an hour of beginning the chase.”

“I see.  Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll see about that cell.”

“Lead the way.”

The moment he hauled me to my feet, I sagged, nearly dislocating my arms.

“Stand properly,” he said.  “Or I’m putting a foot up between your legs with enough force you’ll be half a meter off the ground.”

With that threat, I straightened my legs, and walked more normally.

“Thought so,” Scale said.

Down a hallway, up some stairs, and then through a second-floor tunnel that joined the two buildings.  I could see the bustling city through windows at eye level.  West Corinth.  The city formed something of a figure eight around two lakes.  It was a city that was hard to fall in love with or find anything to like about.

The local law enforcement was chief among it.  My hands had been painfully bound since we’d arrived, making money was proving difficult, and money was perhaps number three on the list of things we most desperately needed.

We moved down stairs and into the adjunct prison.  Past two sets of barred doors, then into a corridor with jail cells at either side.

Inconvenient.

I turned my head, looking over at Agnes, the one with the knives, and then looked down at my shoulder.

I saw a wisp of something there.

“Eyes forward,” Agnes told me.

I turned my gaze forward.

“Out,” the captain said, to the older man in what was to be my cell.

Once the man was out, Scale and I were escorted out.  The door slid shut, with Magda and Agnes on the other side.

“Why is he smoking?” Magda asked.

Everyone present turned to look straight at me.

Fils de pute,” Agnes spat the word.

It wasn’t very much, but the ‘smoke’ rose off of my skin like it might from an extinguished match.  Now that it was starting, the reaction crawled along my exposed skin and crept up my chest and down my back, with the gas making its way out from beneath my clothes.

“I was worried that you’d washed it off when you dragged me into the water, before,” I said.

Scale slammed my head into the wall, ear-first.  The action made the smoke billow, and as he breathed it in, he coughed violently and intensely.  He rose to his feet and backed away a step, still coughing.

“Go!” he ordered.

“What about you?” Agnes asked.  “Come.”

“I stay with him.”

“That looks like poisonous fume,” Magda said, in her accent.  “Don’t be stupid.”

“We are protected from poison,” Scale said, stubborn.  He coughed again.

“We are resistant!” Magda said, punching the bars.

“So is he!  And he sits there, grinning like an idiot!” Scale roared.

Was I grinning?  I’d been enjoying the show so much.

“If I may-” the captain said.  All three wheeled on him.  He reached for and drew a gun.  “The warrant says dead or alive.”

The grin dropped from my face.

Magda put a hand on the gun, pushing it down.  “The law says he’s ours to deal with.”

“Unless he poses a threat.”

“Do you think he is going to stop smoking when he is dead?” Magda asked.

The captain didn’t back down.  “Why would you want him alive when the price is the same either way?”

“Because he has a partner, and proof his partner is alive would be worth five times what he is,” Scale said.  He turned on me, a slab of muscle and scale, and he grabbed me by the wrist, one arm around his lower face.  The captain, Magda and Agnes backed away as I drew closer, still creating a steadily growing cloud of smoke.  Magda coughed as she retreated.

Scale undid my cuffs, then hauled me up, off my feet.   With my feet dangling, he cuffed me to the bracing bar at the top of the cell, near the ceiling.  I had no footholds, and the cuffs bit into my wrist.  My other arm dangled, but there wasn’t much for it to do except grab the same horizontal length of painted iron I was cuffed to, so I wouldn’t have my circulation cut off by the cuff.

“It doesn’t feel like enough,” he said, using his arm to shield his face from the smoke.  He coughed more, a rough sound.

“It’s more than enough!” I said.  I winced as he moved to hit me, but he instead turned to the door, gesturing.

The captain unlocked the door to let Scale out.  It was getting to the point where it was hard to see in or around the cell.  General objects could be seen in rough outline, but fine details were lost.  I could only imagine what I looked like.

“Hold his legs,” Agnes said, drawing her blade.

Magda drew in a breath, then plunged into the smoke.  I tried to keep my legs free, but she manhandled them into place, one arm at my waist, one hand at my feet.

Agnes reached through the bars, twisting her face away from the smoke, felt for my knees, and put the blade so it lay against the soft back of both of them.

In an expert motion, she swept the length of the blade across.  I screamed, loud and raw, as blood poured out of my pants legs, spattering onto the cell floor.  She coughed more.

“Stay put,” Scale said.  “Don’t bleed to death now.”

I continued to scream as they retreated from my cell.

“Hey!” one of my many neighbors called out.  “Let us out!  You can’t do this to us!”

“Hassle, you said?” the captain asked.

Within moments, other cells were being opened, the prisoners led out.  Agnes, Magda and Scale helped.

The gas continued to spill out around me as they slammed the barred door, then brought down the metal shutter.  I could only assume there was a quarantine seal at the far end.

Only when the seal was shut did I stop screaming.

I hadn’t been searched at any point, but even if I had, the key I found in my right pocket wouldn’t have been discovered.  Magda had placed it as she had grabbed my legs.  I reached up and undid my cuffs, then dropped down to the ground.

Their acting had been top-notch.

It was freeing, to be surrounded by the ‘gas’.  It wasn’t anything toxic, simply something visible with a tint of yellow to the color.  I’d drenched myself prior to getting hauled into the building, and the smoke had started to appear as I’d dried out.  But as harmless as it was, at the coughing from the hired bounty hunters, the captain would imagine the slightest of tickles in his throat to be something dangerous or noxious.  Imagination would carry him the rest of the way.

Nobody really wanted to test the gas.

Obscured by the cloud of smoke, I undid my pants, dropped them to my ankles, and pulled away the bags of blood there.  I squeezed out the remainder into the toilet, folded them up, and placed them inside my waistband.  Then I got on my hands and knees and began fumbling around near the base of the bars.

Now, effectively blind, I needed to find-

Yes.  There.  Magda had managed to drop off one of the pouches that had been clipped to her belt, using the distraction of the prisoners were being evacuated.  Or maybe she’d done it around the time she’d seized my legs.

I opened it, getting my lockpicks, a knife, and a small notebook.  That accounted for about half a pound out of the four and a half pounds of matter inside.

The remainder was a carefully wrapped brick of powder.

This, too, I emptied into the cell’s toilet.

It was the same powder I’d liberally applied all over myself.  Only the quantity was about fifty times greater.  It would react with the water, and then it would produce visible vapor as it evaporated.

Given that it was summer, and the cells were already sweltering, it wouldnt’ take long.

More surface area would help.  I used the bag that had held the powder, and dipped it into the toilet, picking up a portion, pouring it back in, then repeating the process to mix.  Then I used the bag like a bucket, to slop more of the stuff out into the hallway, nearby cells, onto the walls-

The surroundings became utterly opaque.

Then I found and sat down on the corner of the bed and waited.

“This is the best mission yet,” Evette said, audible but not visible.

“I thought this would be more your style,” I said, leaning back so my aching head was resting against the wall.

That part hadn’t been a ruse.  He’d really wanted to sell it.  Damn, my face hurt.

I opened my eyes as the shutter clattered, rising.  I heard the key turn in the lock.

I heard the clink-clink-clink as something metal tapped the bars.

“Here,” I said.

Clink-clink-clink.

“Here,” I said, again.  “Nobody else around except for Evette.  We’re clear.”

The gas had only barely dissipated in the last while.  In relative sensory deprivation, I couldn’t guess at how long it had been.  The figure that appeared was only a rough silhouette with a distorted head and face.

“Evette?” Jamie asked, voice muffled by his gas mask.

“Why the mask?” I asked.

“Because they weren’t moving fast enough.  I went with plan B-4.”

“Plan B-4?” I asked, completely in the dark.

“We discussed it.  Moving them along faster by adding some nitriles to the mix?  Not a lot, but enough to motivate.”

“Ah,” I said.  “I don’t remember that part of the planning in the slightest.”

“It was nine days ago.  You were busy sweet-talking Agnes in the breaks between the chemist and I discussing the contingency plan, so it’s very possible you weren’t even listening.”

“First of all,” I said, “I was probably listening, I’m a professional, damn it.  Nine days is plenty to forget something non-critical.”

“Yes, Sy,” I heard.  He was fiddling with keys.

“Second of all, sweet-talking?  No.  Come on.  She just reminded me a teeny tiny bit of Mary, and that was fun.”

“Yes, Sy,” I heard.  Automatic, rote, routine, as if he was barely listening, which wasn’t likely, or he was trying to nettle me by not giving me proper feedback.

The cell door unlocked.  Jamie hauled it open, and I joined him, reaching out, finding his shoulder, and setting my hand on it.

He slapped something against my chest.

“Wear it.  For my peace of mind.”

Gas mask.  I sighed and pulled the thing on.  It obscured my vision a little, and constrained my breathing more than the gas had been.

Jamie led the way.

“I’ll take you to block F first,” he said.  “Then go to records.”

“Got it,” I said, taking a moment to figure out how to pitch my voice to be heard past the mask, “That was… the bloated man, the runner, and the businessman?”

“I don’t know whether to be happy you actually remembered that much, or deeply disappointed you don’t remember their names.”

“Cut me some slack,” I said.

We reached the end of the hallway, walked a short distance, and opened the way to a stairwell.  Past my particular hallway, the smoke wasn’t nearly as bad, but it did fill most of the building, and had been just noxious enough to force an evacuation.  They would be mustering forces and resources by now.  There was even a solid chance that people with gas masks were already moving through other areas of the building.

“We going to be able to get everyone through?” I asked.  “There were some question marks surrounding that, I think?”

“We should,” Jamie said.

“Good.  Because it would suck to put weeks of work into this job and then have the bloated man be too fat to actually leave the building.”

“Samuel, Sy.  His name is Samuel.  He loves his mother, and he’s not getting out for a very long time.”

“Yeah, yeah.  I know that bit.”

As we reached the top of the stairs, Jamie rapped on a metal door.  “This is block F.  The people you want to talk to will be at the third cell to your left, fifth cell to your left, and seventh cell to your right.”

“Got it.”

“I’ll leave the door open, just in case.  Want the cell keys?”

“Sure,” I said.

“And two gas masks,” he said.  He handed them to me.  “Though it won’t make a big difference, and it should have all dispersed by now.  Might make them feel better, though?”

“Good enough,” I said.  I hated my own gas mask.

“I’ll be back as fast as I can,” Jamie said, hauling the door open with a loud mechanical sound.

I could hear the shouting and hollering before I’d even entered the hallway.  People were bellowing, complaining, and throwing things.  The smoke was thick enough that they might have been able to see me if they’d actively been looking for me, but they weren’t.    Eye irritation from the gas might have played a role.  I wasn’t sure what the additives Jamie had put in actually did.

As the door banged closed behind me, I pulled off my gas mask.

What was it?  Three-left, five-left, then seven-right?

At the third cell, I stopped, positioning myself in front of the bars.

I spoke in a calm, normal voice, to distinguish myself from the cacophony around me.

“Samuel.”

The man who practically threw himself at the bars wasn’t Samuel.  Skinny guy.

“What do you want with Sammy?”

“I want to talk to him,” I said, calm.

Something seemed to have gotten through, because someone standing behind me called out.  “Hey!  Who’s there!?  Hey!  Shut up, all’ve y’all!  There’s someone out there!”

The noise abated somewhat.

“I’m here,” I heard Samuel say.  Soft-spoken.  He sounded almost mournful.

“Do you want out?” I asked.

“Who doesn’t?” he replied.

“You have a long sentence waiting.  Your mom isn’t well enough to visit, and she’s old, if I remember right.”

“You remember right,” he said.  “You’re breaking me out?  This gas is about me?”

“In small part,” I said.  “You caught our eye.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Sammy isn’t going anywhere just yet,” Skinny cut in, with a nasty tone to his voice.  “Sammy has other obligations.”

“That so, Sammy?  Should I just move on to the next person on my list?” I asked.

“I just keep getting in deeper,” Samuel said, mournful.  “I’m not a killer.”

“The murder rap says different,” I said.

“I bought memorabilia, it was restricted material, I was supposed to spend a year in.  But I couldn’t hack it.  They offered protection.”

“And we’re still offering protection,” Skinny cut in.  He turned to me, “You let him out, you gotta let me out.  And I can give you two more names.”

“I see,” I said, more or less ignoring Skinny.  “I know the general story, Samuel.  You got out, you still had a debt to pay.  They put you to work smuggling.  You got caught for that, you got taken in, and found yourself on the wrong end of a guy with a shiv.  You walked away alive, he didn’t.  He had friends, and you need more protection, which means more debts to pay out when you get out of here, if they don’t decide to ease the tax burden and either hang you or sell you to the Academy as a guinea pig.”

“Seems about right.”

“They won’t be hanging him,” Skinny said.  “We’ve got lawyers, and our lawyers have his back.”

He sounded so excited, as if he thought he was getting out.

“Sammy,” I said.  “I want that brain of yours that spent eight years smuggling things past the Academy.  Tell me, do you want out?”

“I get the feeling I’d be trading one master for another,” he said.

“You would,” I said.

“Getting in deeper.”

“‘Ey!” Skinny said.

“Probably,” I said.  “But you could see your mother and make sure she’s looked after.”

“We’ve already pledged to make sure she’s alright!” Skinny said.  “So fuck you!”

He was on edge, now.  I suspected he could sense the direction this was going.

“You have two options, Samuel,” I said.  “Either you can trust me and my ability to let you simply walk out of here, or you can trust him, and his promises.  Maybe I’m biased, but they sound pretty hollow to me.”

“Fuck you, you little faggo!” Skinny screeched.  His hand flew out past the bars, toward my face.  I stepped back out of the way, avoiding the shiv he held.

“If you want out, knock out Skinny here, Samuel.  It’s the last time I’ll ask you to do violence, I promise,” I said.

Skinny pulled back, wheeling around, pointing the shiv at Samuel, his back to the bars.

I stepped in close and drew my own knife, sliding it into one kidney, my other hand reaching through for his shirt and grabbing it to keep him in place as I stabbed the next.

Paralyzed by pain, he fell to the floor of his cell.

“Nevermind that,” I said.  “Needed to distract him.  I’ll never ask you to do violence, Samuel.  I’ll never put you out in the field.  I need advice on some points, for some jobs.  I’ll compensate you fairly.  We’ll get your mom set up.”

There was no sound or movement within the cell.

But then the shadow appeared.  Six feet tall and wide enough his hips could scrape against both sides of an open door as he passed through, his facial features and everything else sagged on him, as if, on top of all of his weight, gravity weighed twice as heavily on him.  It pulled his brow down at the outer edges, in a permanent frown or sympathetic look.

“Let me out,” he said, quiet.  The nearby cells had fallen silent, listening in.

As I put the key in the lock and hauled the door open, there was an uproar from others nearby, who realized what was going on.  Threats, promises, boasting, and self-aggrandizement filled the cell block.

Samuel seemed to shrink into himself in the face of the criticism that wasn’t even aimed directly at him.  Most of it, anyway.  I handed him one of the gas masks.

I’d released prisoners before, as a distraction.  Here, however, it would be too problematic.  I was trying to build something.  We had to be selective.

Two cells down.  Was that left or right?

“The runner,” I said.

“I suppose that means me,” I heard.  “Yes.”

“Fast response.”

“I’m fast.  It’s what I’m about.”

“Lookout and scout for hire, if I remember right?”

“And someone thought I was too expensive and got bitter, turned me in.  Yes.  What do I need to say to get you to let me out of here?  I agree.  I accept the deal, whatever the terms.”

“Are you alone in your cell?” I asked.  I couldn’t quite tell with the smoke, and it looked like there were two people in there.

“Yes.”

I put my key to the lock and hauled the door open.

I watched as what had appeared to be two people turned out to be one augmented person.  Arms and legs had been extended and modified, so that he walked on tiptoes.  His feet were as long as my forearm, the heel and ankle were where my elbow would’ve been in that same analogy.  Lanky didn’t even begin to describe it.

His face was what threw me, though.  Not a mask, but surgically altered.  He’d given himself the head of a rabbit, complete with floppy ears.  The hair was a touch sparse, though.  It wasn’t like a drawing of a talking animal in a children’s book, though.  The appearance of an overgrown, balding rabbit head with bulging, weeping, bloodshot eyes and open mouth failing make vaguely human expressions was disconcerting, to say the least.

Jamie had only given me two gas masks, when we were hoping for three recruits.  Rabbit here couldn’t wear one, so he would have to suffer.

“I like you already,” I said.  I turned around, looking.  “One more.  Seven… right side, if I remember right.”

In the time that it took me to walk past the sixth cells and make my way to the seventh, they’d managed to count.  I heard a, “Wait, we’re seven!  And we’re on the right!  Hi!  Hi kid!”

“Hi,” I said.

“I’m Anthony, and I know mechanics, handyman stuff, I can drive cars-”

“Wife beater!” someone else shouted.

“Fuck off!” Anthony shouted.

“The businessman,” I said.  “I’m looking for him.”

“That’s me,” I heard.  The businessman approached the bars.  He put a hand on Anthony’s shoulders and Anthony reluctantly backed off, giving him space.  The businessman was Japanese, his hair a mess.  “Hello, Sylvester.”

“We’ve met?”

“No, but I’ve heard of you.  You know who I worked for before.”

“The Spears,” I said.  “Cynthia.”

“I assume you’re looking for someone to help with accounting?” he asked.

Something about his tone and attitude…

“Could be,” I said.  More cautious than before.

“It’s a little more complicated than me abandoning former ties like Sammy there is doing,” he said.  “There are concessions to be made, negotiation-”

“No,” I said, cutting him off.  “Thanks for letting me know.”

With that said, I turned my back on him.

“Hey!” he said, to my back, “I’m open to talks!”

I ignored his ever-more-plaintive cries as I left him behind.

All of my individual instincts were telling me he was a bad choice.  Good on paper, reading about and researching his exploits, but not someone I wanted.

Two recruits was good enough for now.  A bit piecemeal, but we would manage.

We made our way to the end of the hallway, and I shut and locked the door.

“Shutter,” I said.  “Reach up.”

The Rabbit didn’t even need to exert effort to reach up and grab the shutter that I would have had to climb the door to get ahold of.  It was practically at eye level for him.

“What next?” Samuel asked.

“We wait,” I said.  “And I tell you this.  I don’t have many rules.  Most are the ones you’d expect, given what we’ll end up doing.  Treat me and mine with respect.  That goes double for my devastatingly attractive secretary.”

“Secretary?” Rabbit asked.

“But listen, because this is serious.  The boy you’re about to see?  If you so much as give a hint as to his existence, I will have to kill you.  He is a ghost, and he will remain a ghost until I say otherwise.  This is the big rule.”

I saw Rabbit’s head move up and down in a nod.  Samuel was still and silent.

He didn’t like the threats of violence.  That was fair.  So long as the message sunk in.

Jamie appeared out of the fog.  He was doing well, shifting his weight to minimize the noise of his footsteps.  He so reminded me of the old Jamie, given his posture, holding a foot-thick ream of folders and papers to his chest.

“Got it?” I asked.

“Transfer papers, prisoner files, and open cases.  We should be able to get a good lay of the land, here and in other cities and prisons.  We’ll be able to handpick who and what we want, instead of going by what the papers say.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“Nice to meet you two,” Jamie said.  “The accountant didn’t work out?”

“No,” I said, simply.

“Okay.  This way.  To the basement.”

“Basement?” Rabbit asked.

“We had people dig a hole in,” I said.  “From a nearby cellar.  They only breached the floor today, and most of the mist is coming from there.  It would take a miracle for them to find the hole without the gas.  With it?  Like I said, we’re just walking right out.  Maybe a bit of crawling.”

“Ah,” Rabbit said.  “I’m claustrophobic.”

“And they’ve got the place surrounded, with warbeasts and everything under the sun ready to move at a moment’s notice.  If you want to go overground, feel free,” I said.

I saw his ear and one eye twitch as he contemplated the options.  Stay?  Make a run for it?  Get buried alive?

“You don’t want to go overground,” I said.  “Come on.  This way.  Endure.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.02 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Our carriage slowed as it pulled into the makeshift stable.  I began to put away the first aid kit and mirror.

Pierre was already hunching forward, his shoulders threatening to graze the roof, his neck more horizontal than vertical.  His elbows had no place to go, so his arms dangled between bent knees, hands touching the floor.  I was learning to read his body language, and even if common sense hadn’t told me, I’d know he was uncomfortable by the way his ears twitched.

Already in an uncomfortable position, he leaned down even further to peer through the window at our destination.

“Under construction?” he asked.  There was a human mouth behind his mask of rabbit flesh, either black by ethnicity or tattooed that way.  I hadn’t looked closely enough to say one way or another, but it made his mouth hard to see behind the mask.

“Work in progress, all of it,” Jamie said.  His eyes were on the files.  He barely seemed to glance over each one before moving on to the next.  Occasionally he’d held up one of interest while I swabbed at my nose or ear.  Now he was gathering the files together again.  “We’ll be a minute before we stop.  There’s a garage and stable under construction, but we have to make our way past the piles of material and the work crews to the back.”

“Work in progress.  Are we core components in this work?” Pierre asked.

“You are not,” I said.  “You’re pieces of a puzzle we’re still putting together.  They’ll wonder if you’re core components in the plan, and if that misleads them, then that’s a good thing.”

That got a nod from Samuel.  He almost seemed relieved to not be a core component.

“There were other people of general interest in other cell blocks, but they were isolated, one person of interest to each cell block, and it wasn’t worth the trouble or the time to go, especially when we weren’t sure.  Block F had three of you.  We did our research on you, asked around, and got some particulars before visiting.”

“The only person who would have particulars on me would be the people I was working with,” Samuel said.  “Them or my mother.”

“Yep.  We had tea with your mother,” I said.  “We went over a second time and brought cake, asked a few more questions.  After that visit we arranged a grocery delivery service and a house cleaner.  At our expense, not hers, don’t worry.”

Samuel seemed more concerned at hearing that, not less.

“Was there a need?” he asked.  “Were you so sure you’d bring us onboard?”

“We had no idea,” Jamie said.  “But Sylvester had a good gut feeling, and apparently his instinct when we’re starting out and carefully apportioning out every dollar we earn is to spend money on unfamiliar old women.  There was a bit of a need.  Your… prior employers sent her money, but going out was hard for her, she fell behind on things.”

“You make it sound like me spending money on something like that is a problem.  It’s an investment,” I said.  “The grocery service and the cleaner were referred by the local church.  A small and powerless church, but it has ties to the local community.  That tie is important.”

“It’s still coming out of your personal luxury allowance, Sy.”

“Yeah?  Coming out of my luxury allowance?  When’s the work team coming to help unwedge my boot from your rear end?  Huh?”

Jamie gave me a very unimpressed look.  He glanced at the pair sitting across from us.

I grinned, to make it clear I was joking.  “It made sense, gave me a chance to talk to the minister.  We need some ins with the locals more than anything, and this opened the door.”

“I’m not disagreeing,” Jamie said.  “But the reality is you’re terrible with money when money is limited.  You’re used to having an near-endless supply.  This is a good lesson.  Weigh the benefits.  Yes, you got to talk to the minister and now he likes you, I assume.  But we effectively have a steady drain on our finances for the indefinite future.  Is that worth it?”

Not that indefinite, I thought.  “When it’s a drain we will more than make up for later.  “You know I can go and just get a few thousand if we’re short.  It’s harder here, but not impossible.”

“I know.  But if I’m deducting from your fun money, then maybe, somewhere along the line, you’ll stop, think to yourself that oh, hey, look at that, if I give this random person money and help them out to accomplish some tertiary goal, it’s going to be an inconvenience and risk to us.”

“We’ve stopped,” Samuel pointed out, diplomatically.

“I know we’ve stopped,” I said, sighing.  “But we just had an adrenaline-fueled job where we broke out some prisoners and looted heaps of confidential records from a major Crown facility, and apparently when Jamie’s riding the emotional high of a wild success, the first thing he wants to do is ride my ass.”

“Sy, that-” Jamie started.  He put a hand to his face, then changed his mind about what he was going to say.  “No.”

“No?”

“The reason I’m making an issue of this is that I now feel like we’re finally free of the distractions of the job, so we can focus again on all of the little details that have been piling up in the meantime.”

“Uh huh.”

“But let’s not bicker in front of the new hires.  We’re done, we succeeded, and we’re back.  Let’s get them settled.”

“Let’s,” I said, agreeing with a smile.  I reached over and opened the door, gesturing for Samuel to step out.

The carriage had parked in the rear yard of the property.  Walls surrounding the area protected us from prying eyes that might see and report Pierre, not that there were many.  We were situated on the edge of the city.

A prior building had stood here, but the roof had been removed and replaced, with room for a third floor.  The sides were also being extended out with four rooms each.  Two cranes had been erected to help move material up to the third floor and rooftop, and scaffolding and ladders had been erected so the builders could set the panels in place for the builder’s wood to grow between.

“A lot of watching eyes,” Pierre commented, with a bulging eye on the building crews.  “I feel exposed.”

“You’ll feel less exposed when you’re inside,” I said.  “Later, we’ll have you running errands for us.”

“Running sounds good,” he said.

The double doors that led onto the brick patio just outside was unlocked, and I pushed them open with a bit of dramatic flourish.

The first floor had high ceilings.  The main room was open space, twenty paces across and thirty paces from front to back.  The back door was behind us, a recessed fireplace to the right, some scattered armchairs and piled up building material in the middle, and the front door ahead of us.  Off to the left, one of the workers was putting a false wall in place over the door that led to the cellar.

“How’s it coming-”

“Nathan,” Jamie murmured, without missing a beat.

“-Nathan?” I finished.

“This is not what I normally do,” the man said.  He turned and gave me a look, as if he was angry and I was at fault.  “I had to take some of it down, pull it apart, fix it.  It would be easier if you did not want things so seamless.  It will be convincing to anyone not looking for it, without being perfect.”

“The people that hidden door is meant to fool are very good at seeing seams, and they’ll be looking for it,” I said.  “Keep at it.”

He gave me a curt nod in response, paused, then said, “And the walls on wheels?”

“When you can get around to them,” I said.  “I’ll put together the rest of that particular setup once you’ve got the walls in place.”

He scowled, looking more frustrated than before.  He gave Pierre a wary look before turning his attention back to his work.

“The more I see, the more questions I have,” Samuel said.  “I’m afraid to ask.”

“This may become a battleground,” Jamie explained.  “Sylvester wants to put things in place so we have options if it does.  Unlike our disagreement over spending money on your mother, this is one case where I have no problem just nodding my head and signing off on it, however whimsical he’s being.”

“Whimsical?” I asked.  “You have a funny way of pronouncing ‘practical’.”

Jamie rolled his eyes at me.

“A battleground,” Samuel said.

“One where you shouldn’t be at risk, but you’ll have options and protection either way,” I said.  “Come on upstairs.”

The stairs led from the central room of the ground floor to the second floor.

Shirley was upstairs.  A desk had been placed near the top of the stairs, but hadn’t yet been moved to a room.  She was leaning over it, writing something down.

“Sylvester,” she said.  She smiled, “Hi Jamie.  You brought… friends.”

Her face fell for a moment as Pierre finished climbing the stairs.  Eight feet tall, not counting the ears, and the same body weight as a typical man two feet shorter, his face was moderately horrifying to look at, more like a dead rabbit than a live one, and his clothes were disheveled and ill-fitting.  Shirley managed to compose herself and put her face back in place a moment later.

“Hello, Shirley,” I said.  “Meet Samuel and Pierre.”

She smiled and did a little curtsey.  Any unease she’d displayed before was invisible now.  Good poker face.

“That’s a new dress,” Jamie observed.  “It’s very nice.”

“Thank you, Jamie.  It’s nice of you to notice.”

“Did you buy it with your last payment?  Because I seem to recall that you were waiting- no, you didn’t buy it with your own funds.”

“Sylvester told me I should go shopping, and gave me some money.  Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” Jamie said.  He gave me a pointed look.  “No you didn’t.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Jamie retorted.

“You gave me a look.  You’re going to say that’s coming out of my spending money.”

“I handed you money and told you it was your spending money,” Jamie said.  “You then took that same money out of your pocket and handed it to Shirley.  What money do you think it is, if not your spending money?”

“Organizational funds,” I said.  “Because Shirley is the face of our organization.  The person who isn’t wanted, who can show her face in the city without possibly raising hell?  The person who can interact with anyone who stops by the house?  She needs to look good.”

“Another ‘incremental advantage’, Sylvester?”

Exactly.

“I’m crossing my fingers it’s going to dawn on you that you can’t spend large or even medium sums of money to accumulate those small advantages.  Maybe you’ll learn to spend small amounts on small advantages.”

“Keep crossing those fingers, then,” I said.  “Because I’m forgetful, an especially when it comes to this stuff, I’m not about to learn my lesson.”

He opened his mouth, finger raised, as if he was going to retort, then slumped a little, defeated.  I grinned.

“I have some change,” Shirley said.  “I didn’t spend it all.  I got a pretty good deal.  I could take the dress back?”

“No,” Jamie and I told her, simultaneously.

“Alright,” she said.  Her hands smoothed down the fabric of her dress.  “Alright.  Then, speaking of people stopping by the house, the first of the potential hires have turned up.  She’s looking at the rooms in the red wing.”

I glanced down the hallway.  The building effectively broke down into the central building, the blue wing, and the red wing.  Down the hallway were a series of doors.  The exterior wall at the end of the hallway was thin, the window looking out onto nothing but wooden panels and boards.  When the builders were closer to being done, they would tear open the end of the hallway, opening the way to the extension, and then connect it to the hallway.

The archway of the hallway to the right had a line of red surrounding it, as thick as a wide painter’s brush was wide.  The other hallway had a matching line of blue around it.  There were plans to extend the color just a little bit further, to differentiate the two areas.

“She’s early,” Jamie commented.

“She is.  Very eager.”

“First impression?” Jamie asked.

“She’s lovely.  Nice.  I worry she’s too nice.”

I frowned a little.  “When you say that, I wonder.”

Shirley looked offended.  “I’m not too nice!  I can stand up for myself!  Some.”

“You’re getting better,” I said.  “And given time and more lessons with me, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.  But I’m worried about this woman who is apparently soft enough to give you doubts.”

“We’ll talk to her,” Jamie said.

I nodded.  “Samuel, Pierre.  For now, get yourselves settled.  This central area is where staff will live, for the time being.  Three rooms on that side, three on this side.  You’re on this side.”

I crossed over to the doorways nearest the stairs, then opened two.  The rooms were large, with beds, desks, bookshelves, standing closets, and space for more furniture if it was wanted.  Supplies ranging from paper and pens to candles and decks of cards and small bottles of alcohol were laid out on top of the desks.  In addition to the sheets on the crisply made beds were folded sheets, blankets, and towels.

“I know it’s a bit much like your cells were,” I said.  “And being cooped up is the last thing you want when you’re free, but if you’d stay in your rooms for the time being?”

“Like my cell?” Pierre asked.  “This is swank compared to my cell.  I’m okay with this.  Just give me room to stretch my legs later, and I’ll be the most loyal person you’ve got.”

“Noted,” I said.  “Listen, I know those ears are probably pretty good.  You may feel compelled to listen in, or even to leave your door ajar.”

“And I shouldn’t?”  Pierre asked.  “I’m well versed in paying attention to only what I’m ordered to.”

“No,” I said.  “No, that’s the opposite of what I want you to do.  Feel free to listen in.  Pick up what you can.  I know me and Jamie go at it like an old married couple sometimes, maybe you have doubts, and you guys may have more as things get underway and there are a lot of question marks in the air.  Figure things out when and where you can.  When we have work for you, we’ll spell it out, and the less spelling out you need when that happens, the happier we’ll all be.”

“Listen in.  Eavesdrop,” Pierre said.

“Yes,” I said.  “Unless we’re making it abjectly difficult for you to eavesdrop, in which case don’t.”

“Uh huh,” he replied.  He bobbed his monstrous head in something of a nod.  “That’s vague.”

“You’ll figure it out,” I said.  I moved closer to their rooms.  Pierre turned to go into his room.  Samuel was slower.  I had to put a hand on his arm to steer him in the right direction.  He looked back, at Jamie and Shirley.  At Shirley.

My hand still on his arm, I wiggled my index and middle fingers against his arm in a set pattern.  If I’d been holding my hand against a hard surface, it would have made for a short drumming sound.  As is, it got his attention better than a squeeze or another touch might have.  He looked down at me.

I shook my head slowly as I led him to his room.

He looked almost mournful as he walked into the room.  I shut the door behind him, leaving it ajar.

She was, I supposed, the first woman he’d seen since he’d gone to jail, and she was a nice looking woman.  A little slice of hell, perhaps, to be reminded that she was off limits.

“She’s taking a while to look at the rooms,” I observed.

“I told her I would take a moment to finish writing things down from our initial meeting,” Shirley said.  She picked up papers from the desk and handed them to Jamie.

“She found something to do?” Jamie asked.

“I suppose she did,” Shirley said.

“Did you tell her anything about us?” I asked.

Shirley shook her head.  “I wasn’t sure what to say.”

“Perfect.  Do you want to make yourself scarce, Jamie?  I doubt a random woman like this is going to recognize you by your wanted poster.  Wouldn’t be a problem if we’d come upstairs and saw her, but since there’s an opportunity to keep you out of sight…”

“Not a problem,” Jamie said.  “Better safe than sorry.”

He walked up the stairs.

“Call her,” I told Shirley.

And with that said, I took hold of Shirley’s hand, turned my back to her, and placed her hand on my shoulder.

“Cordelia!” Shirley called out.

Our prospective hire didn’t take long to appear.  She was blonde, nicely made up, with a blouse that had a frill on the front, an ankle length dress, and boots with heels.  She beamed as she saw Shirley.

Rosy cheeked and warm, to look at her.

“Sorry, sorry!  I was distracted,” Cordelia said.  “And hello!”

She extended a hand for me to shake, smiling.  I didn’t take it.  Instead, I stared her down, my facial expression something close to what I wore when I was about to kill or hurt someone and I wanted them to know it.  Cold, with as little humanity as I could manage.

Cordelia momentarily broke eye contact, faced with that.

“Cordelia, this is Sylvester.  Sylvester, Cordelia.”

“Moving in, are we?” Cordelia asked, attempting to form a connection.

“I already moved in,” I said.  “I was one of the first here.”

“Were you?  I haven’t looked at the boy’s wing,” Cordelia said.  “I looked through the girl’s rooms, very nice and tidy, and I peeked through the window and past the gaps in the planks to see the men at work.  They’re putting a good sized bathroom at the end of the hall.  Some other rooms, too, I think?”

“One for the boys, and one for the girls,” Shirley said.  She’d realized what I wanted to do and she wasn’t outing me.

I did like that Shirley was a fast learner.

“Luxury,” Cordelia said.  She flashed a smile, as if trying to exude enough positivity to overwhelm me and put a smile on my face.

“Bathroom shared with twenty other people, and some of them are, what, five?  Six years old?” I asked.  “Yeah.  Wonderful.”

Cordelia rallied, “It looks like a very extensive bathroom.  There were several toilets, stalls, more than one shower-”

“What did you do?” I asked her, interrupting.

“Do?  I was a teacher, before I was-”

“No,” I said, firmly.  “Your last job.  You looked after children, right?”

“Yes.  Three years of teaching, three years of tutoring and looking after a dormitory at an all-girl’s Academy.”

“You were very specific about the dormitory.  Where did you teach?” I asked.

She laughed a little, defensive, caught off guard.  “Are you giving me my interview, here?”

Shirley reached over to the desk with the papers and picked it up.  It was covered in tidy handwriting, each section with underlined headings.  Her finger traced down to the ’employment’ part.  “Three years of teaching.  You didn’t say where, Cordelia.”

“I started at a school in Yearnsby, Lord Matthews.”

“And then?” I asked.

“Then Rookhill.  Then Croftway Institute.”

“Fancy names,” Shirley said.

“They are,” Cordelia said, beaming.

“Was that it?” I asked.

“Was what it?”

“The extent of your teaching.  You’re being evasive.  Your hands are picking at the bottom of your blouse.”

Her hands moved away from the frilly part of her blouse.

“I worked at five schools in total,” she said.

“Over three years,” I pointed out.  “That’s more than bad luck.  That’s something going on behind the scenes.  You have a vice.  Drink?  Chemicals?  I know there’s a chemical problem around here.  Drugs.  Custom drugs.”

Her expression shifted as I said the words.  Offended, but whatever it was that she was into, the hold on her was strong enough that even the mention of recreational drugs made her eyes sparkle for an instant.

She managed to sound offended and proper as she asked, “Who are you to pry, hm?  Some might call that rude.”

I dearly wanted to tell her I was the person in charge, but I didn’t.  Instead, I said, “I’m one of what will be forty or more people that live here.  I’ve spent my life in orphanages, and on the streets.  I’ve been hurt, I’ve hurt people, and I’ve seen things so horrible you wouldn’t imagine.  Some of the other children will be the same.  This isn’t some prissy-pants girl’s school, and it’s not a nice school.  It’s an orphanage.  And you’re going to have to match wits with youths that have nothing to lose.  You’ll lose that battle of wits and wills, and you’ll crumble.  You don’t belong here.”

“Well, we can agree to disagree on that,” she said, firm and confident.  “I’m glad you’re not the one making the decision.”

“He might not be,” Shirley said, “But I saw your eyes light up when he mentioned drugs.  I’ve known women who had the same look.”

“You’re accusing me, without any proof?” Cordelia asked.  The indignance became borderline outrage.  “I haven’t even had my interview.”

“I don’t need proof, and there’s no need to move on to an interview,” Shirley said.  “All I need to do is say no.  No.  If you’ll go downstairs and to the back door, I think the carriage driver is still there.  He can take you back to the city, wherever you need to go.”

Cordelia puffed up, mouth slightly agape, as if she were about to put up a fight.  Then she sensed that she was lost.  She remained puffed up as she descended the stairs, artificially tall and proud.

There was a pause as we heard her cross the room.  She said something I couldn’t quite hear to one of the workers on her way to the back door.

“That was unkind, Sy,” Jamie said, from the top of the stairs.  “Were you putting on a show for our new hires?  I’m betting you knew she was a bad fit by the time she’d said five words.”

“Not quite that fast,” I said.  “I felt she was wrong, but I thought maybe if she stood up to me in the right way or showed more steel, she could work.  If she was sober, she could’ve worked out.”

The doors beside me opened.  Samuel stood in the doorway.  Pierre sat on one corner of his bed – he’d extended one overlong leg to open the door with his toes.  Now he hunched over, elbows on his knees, looking comically oversized for the surroundings.

“The next person should arrive in half an hour,” Shirley said.  “Will it be the same routine?”

I shook my head.  “Too time consuming.  There are things to do.  Before we pulled today’s job, our hires made a call to Radham.  With luck, the Lambs are coming.  With bad luck, they’ll hold them back, send someone else, and Jamie and I have to finagle some sort of countermeasure for the someone elses.    We have the skeleton of something here.  We need bodies.  I want something operational before the Lambs arrive.  At a minimum, based on where the Lambs were last seen, that’s going to be two days.”

“You like setting difficult time limits for yourself,” Jamie observed.

“If we waited any longer to pull the prison job, we ran the risk that the Lambs’ search would be deemed a failure and they would be pulled back.”

“Like when we were chasing Fray,” Jamie said.

“Exactly like when we were chasing Fray.  We spent too long tracking her down, always one step behind, and they threatened to pull us back to the Academy.  Same idea here.  This is the timeframe that makes sense.  Two days before there’s trouble.  Today, I’ll recruit.  Tonight-”

I glanced at Pierre and Samuel.

“-Tonight, we work.  I’m done bitching about money, and, frankly, I don’t want anyone getting in the way when the Lambs turn up.  I want to figure out who the major players are, locally, and get them under our thumb.”

“What?” Pierre asked, as if he couldn’t have heard right.  Samuel simply looked deeply, deeply concerned.

At least Shirley and Jamie seemed to be on the same page as me, or at least willing to roll with it.

Well, almost on the same page.  Jamie said, “You know it’s not going to be easy, even if we do that.  They’ll have help, especially with the city being Academy supported.”

“But you get what I’m going for?”

“I get what you’re going for.  The Lambs turn up, and half the city folds in on them, with traps and problems at every other turn.  I know how it is, Sy.”

“There’s something deeply cathartic about being on the other side of that particular paradigm,” I said, smiling at the thought.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.03 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Mr. Salte!” I called out.  I waved the man down before he could start his wagon into motion.  His stitched horse was a heavily modified one, something between horse and ox in frame, with long hair covering much of its neck, shoulders, and face.  Given the man’s personality, I suspected he was secretly pleased at having that sheer muscle and presence that made other wagons and carriages get out of his way.

He put the reins down and leaned back, daubing some sweat from his forehead as he watched me approach.  He was one of a horde of people who were making their way out of the market and heading home for the day.  The market was set up three times a week, with rotating locations.  This market location, at the east end of town, was the quietest of the three.  Furthest from the railroad, nearest the small Academy.

Here, the students retired after a long week of study, stocked up for the next week, and sometimes drank.  Goods included handmade notebooks, oilcakes, butchered meat, tree-grown meat, vegetables and clothing.  It said a lot that a fair portion of the clothing conformed to the local Academy standards.  From the way that Mr. Salte had sold off his vegetables and filled the space he’d made with bags of things, it looked like the vendors used the quieter night to stock up as well.

“Simon,” Salte greeted me.  He was a man who’d been aged considerably by dint of the sun, not by time.  He wore a suit on business days, but the edges were worn, not crisp, and he’d undone some buttons at the throat.  “I’m still looking forward to having the owner of your orphanage over for tea, you know.”

“He’s a busy man, sir,” I said. “He might be in town next week?”

Salte frowned, but he seemed to accept that.  “I like to know my neighbors, and I’m curious to see what those builders are up to.  It’s a big project.”

“Yes sir.”

“How are you getting by?”

“Warm, sir.  Odd jobs here and there.  But it sounds like children might be coming over to the orphanage.  Probably a rough-and-tumble sort, but I mentioned the prospect of them heading on over to your farm to work?”

“And?”

“Seems like it might be workable.  Depends on who the children are, of course.  But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“My ears are open, boy.”

“This might sound cryptic and arcane, but… we’re looking at getting a messenger bird, one of the Academy-worked ones, smarter than the average bird.  Normally the things only fly home, but these recognize several homes.  It would let us be in touch when it comes to emergencies.  We were hoping to make your place one of its homes.  Soon, too.”

“In case of fire?”

“There’s that.  But one of the children coming into our care is sick, she needs medicine, and she’s going to be here soon.  We don’t have a working icebox yet, and the medicine is kept at the corner pharmacist’s.”

“What ails her?  The academies can usually offer care.”

“The academies are at fault,” I said.  I fidgeted, and I did it on purpose.  “She grew up near Corinth Crown.  She grew up drinking the water there and it disturbed her insides.”

A lie, but I’d met some people with similar stories.

I felt bad for lying to someone as genuinely decent as Mr. Salte was.  I bit my tongue before continuing, “We’d drive the carriage over and back, but the carriage drivers are only around during the daytime, and if something happens at night-”

I stopped there.  I dropped the false anxiety I’d injected into things, where I’d quickened my verbal pace and pitched my expression just a hair.

I acted as if I was composing myself, then said, more calmly, “If we could impose on you to be available, should the girl fall ill with no carriage present and available, we would pay you a small sum per week.  It wouldn’t be much, but-”

He waved me off before I could finish.

“Bring the bird over when you have it,” he said.  “No need for the money.  You all just be good neighbors, you hear?  And steer those rough-and-tumbles clear of my property where you can.”

“Will do, sir.  Thank you,” I said.

Apparently eager to get home for dinner, he got his stitched wagon-puller moving, briefly removing his cap in farewell before replacing it.

I felt a little guilty.  It wasn’t the lies so much as the risk to his person.

It should work out, I told myself.  He should be fine.

A group of students who were making their way to the nearest pub obstructed my way, walking with arms around shoulders or arms linked.  Boys and girls.  They didn’t make room for me to pass, forcing me to stand to one side to let them pass.  I mused about horrible things I might do to them, then consoled myself with a personal reminder that they were Bergewall students.

West Corinth had started out as a fort with very little surrounding it, if I remembered right.  Jamie had explained it all to me, and I’d promptly forgotten half of it.  After the war for the Crown States, the fort had been supplanted by larger military installations in other cities nearby.  Somewhere along the line, the city had leapfrogged into being a sleepy city of summer houses forming a kind of figure eight around two lakes.  People would only stay for two or three months out of the year, but something pushed a surge into a year-round existence, and then two local academies were founded.

Bergewall was the smaller of the two academies in stature and reputation only, with its size roughly matched by its brother academy Corinth Crown.  Students who went to Bergewall were often said to be doomed, their careers cut short by a lackluster education punctuated by ceaseless parties.  The academy maintained no particular merits, no field of specialty nor any advantages afforded to its students.  One of the Academies one went to when they had to attend one.  Attendance often went hand in hand with parental disappointment.

By contrast, Corinth Crown, abbreviated from Corinth Crown Academy or Corinth Crown Laboratories, was more elite.  It wasn’t the top of the heap when it came to drugs and chemicals, but it was up there, and it was pretty, now located in the old fort, surrounded by a lakeside city of nice houses, only a half-hour’s ride from the ocean and beaches.

Neither academy was churning out the monsters and warbeasts to an extent that necessitated an endless chemical rain, but the city had been affected by Fray’s ploy, the people sterilized and chemically leashed, which kept Jamie and me alive.  It was a wealthy enough area that many had bought their way free of the leash with treatment at Corinth Crown.  It seemed to have all of the good parts of a small town and a larger city.  All of the benefits of an Academy presence without the strangling control.

But there was a darker side to this sunny, lakeside town where girls could be seen sitting on rocks with their feet in the lake and male Bergewall students took off their shirts and tied them around their waists, drinking nightly.  On the one hand, we had an Academy that drove itself to produce better drugs, hormones, prions, medicines and poisons, filled with a few thousand students who were as proud as any I’d met.  Sitting less comfortably in the other hand was an Academy of layabouts and jokers that consumed drugs and the funner sorts of poisons.

That dynamic and power imbalance was complicated by ongoing rivalry ranging from pranks to outright brawling in back streets and by a constant need for test subjects.  That reality, in turn, was complicated by the restrictions on travel and the quarantines, which meant they couldn’t load up a train car full of people willing to try a drug in exchange for ten dollars.

It meant, also, that they couldn’t easily discard the last four or five train cars worth of people.

I rolled up my sleeves as I headed down a side street.  My body language shifted, to emulate the criminal elements I’d known over the course of my life.  Walking with confidence, but slouching a hair.  Fingers hooked in pockets, so my hands were always ready, my eyes tracking the surroundings for anyone that might step out of a recessed doorway or from around a corner.

I’d used oil to slick my hair back and part it, but it was hot enough that I was sweating and the oil was starting to make its way down my neck.  A wipe with my handkerchief dealt with the sweat first, the oil second, and I ran my fingers through my hair to loosen the tidy combed hair before wiping them as well.  I left the handkerchief half out of one pocket.

There were apartments here, tucked in near the small Academy, and the collection of three or four story buildings with eight to twelve rooms a floor extended all the way to Corinth Crown.  It served as student housing for those who didn’t want to live in the dormitories, but most of the buildings here were hospitales.  Hotels for those who didn’t want to spend more than two or three dollars a night.  Test subjects would take the train in and stay the night, sometimes with the academy paying for the beds at one hospitale or another.

The people I crossed paths with were people who had been uprooted.  People desperate enough for money to take a roll of the dice when it came to their physical and mental well being.  It was different from the shady areas of Tynewear or Radham.  The people there, at least, had been able to call those cities home.

Interesting, then, that an area like this, where everything was typically so very temporary, had adopted different customs and codes for the local mice.  It took me a little while to catch on.

Here and there, adverts had been plastered to walls, or caught under garbage.  They’d accumulated in places, pasted over one another in layers.  The latest batch seemed to be depicting three men in suits who might have been singers or dancers, for some event at Corinth Crown.

There was a pattern.  The angle of the adverts, the fact that corners were torn, and the fact that some had been defaced.

I stopped at one wall, and traced the path, touching the adverts at one wall where six had been plastered up in a configuration.  I started at the most askew advert, looking at the torn corners, and traced a course, pointed by the angles the papers had been at when they went up.

This particular wall saw damage to the third, rightmost of the three singers on the advert.  The other adverts drew attention to this one, and, now that I was paying attention to it, the number of papers probably stressed severity.

So, five papers, some with the third man’s face ripped off or stained, all angled so they were pointing to a central paper, near the door.  Ink had removed the third man’s face in that one.

What was the interpretation?  I put my hand on my chin.  I looked at the smudges and tears, trying to figure out if method or the direction of the smudge or damage played a part.

“Hey!” a man barked at me.  It was clearly intended to scare the wits out of me.  It seemed to spook him when I didn’t jump, run, or even act scared as I turned my head to look at him.  A fat man with a stained apron and stubble on his chin rolls.  His demeanor shifted as he seemed to figure something out.  “You drugged?”

“No sir,” I said.

“Then what the motherloving fuck are you doing, staring at my wall?”

I remained mute, staring him down.

He reached for something by the door, and I reached for the knife I’d tucked into my waistband.

He brandished a bat, and took a step toward me.  “Git!”

I got.

Wasn’t worth it, and I’d gotten my answer, I was pretty sure.  ‘Bad man’.

I made my way down the street, keeping my eye out.  Papers partially trapped under objects were, nine times out of ten, marked in some way.  Sometimes papers on walls were angled in a way that pointed to other papers, tracing a route that extended from one wall to another, across a street, or around a corner.  Slathered with paste and slapped on like a kind of arrow pointing the way.

The first man tended to crop up near stores and restaurants.  Often unsupported by other papers.  ‘Food here’, perhaps, or ‘Good person here’.

The second man didn’t get marked out much, but I could see him more around the main streets.  Process of elimination and past experience suggested it referred to the law.  Places where Crown soldiers or police came through.

Interesting to note that the placement of the signs was frequently high enough to be only just barely in my arm’s reach.  Placed by adults.

I walked for another five minutes, taking it in, and decided I’d more or less figured out the system, with only a few gaps I had yet to figure out.  The one that had nearly snuck past me was the audience member.

Three men stood on the stage, hands on their hats, mouths open and legs raised.  In the bottom right corner was an audience member, a woman, only the top three quarters of her face visible.

Once I started looking for her, I was able to start tracing a path through the streets and alleys.

The nearest ‘audience member’ was located in what had once been a bookstore, now boarded up.  I approached, looking for any watching eyes, didn’t see any, and made my way to the door.

One loose board.  It moved aside, fixed at only one point, giving me room to crawl through the damaged door itself.

A knife touched my throat.

“Damn it,” I said.  “What did I do wrong?”

“Invite only,” a young woman said, from the other end of the room.

Ten or so youths were in the room, closer to their teen years or in their teen years, rather than childhood, though there were a few munchkins.

Only ten?

“Hands out in front of you,” she said.  She was older than any of them.  Seventeen, to look at her.  Everything about her seemed to be going forward or going back.  Her black hair swept back into a ponytail that stuck out like a witch’s broom, a cigarette pointed forward.  The collar of her shirt, a boy’s shirt, was raised, the corners pointing forward.  She stood on one foot, the other back with the toe touching the wall for balance.  The oldest boy stood next to her.

The bosses of this particular gang, I took it.  I put my hands out in front of me.

“Closer to the ground,” she said.

I moved them.

The second largest of the boys stepped on my fingers.  Not hard enough to do damage, but enough to pin my hands to the floor.

The knife moved away from my throat.  Hands roughly searched me, starting around the waist, uncovering the knife, then moving to rifle through my pockets for my wallet and two paper packets.

The boy that was searching me took the knife for himself, then tossed the wallet and packets to the boss, in that order.  She didn’t move her foot from the wall as she moved her hands to catch.

“Fancy,” she observed, without moving the cigarette.  “What’s the packets?  Drug?”

“Poison,” I said.

“Haven’t heard that one none,” she said.  “Good way to keep people from taking your shit, mm?”

She tossed the packet to a younger girl.  “Toss it.”

Her eyes were on me, looking for a reaction.  She gave nothing away as I failed to give her a reaction.

“Stand,” she said.

The foot moved from my fingers.  I stood.  When I was upright, the knife point moved to the side of my stomach.

“Who told you where to find us?”

“I figured it out.  Studied the posters.”

“No you didn’t,” she said.

“Torn corner means look this direction.  First man is food or good people, not sure which.  Second man is law.  Third man is a threat.  Tear at left edge of paper means Corinth Crown, right edge means Bergewall, which seems to coincide with a lot of threat markings.  Not popular around here.  The audience member is the mouse marker.”

“Mouse?” she asked.

“Ah.  I’m from further north.  Markings are drawn or carved?  We use the ‘mouse’ to represent youths.  Triangle for face?  Circles for ears?”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

No you didn’t.  I don’t believe you.  Everything I said was being stonewalled.

I was put in mind of Rick.  I’d talked with one of the Lambs about him, about something similar to this, where Rick had shut me down by being relentless and unflinching in his pressure.

I idly wondered what had come of Rick, before focusing on the subject at hand and squaring my shoulders.  I couldn’t argue with her without this devolving into a childish back and forth.  I would lose out, while she… she at least had a position here, and she would hardly lose it for treating me childishly.

She sucked in a breath, then puffed out a mouthful of smoke.

“Can we at least stop pretending your friend here is going to stab me if I don’t comply?” I asked.

“Cut him,” she ordered.  Her hand moved, gesturing.

The boy to my left grabbed at my left arm.  Ineffectual, but it was a body in my way and something in the way when I was trying to deal with the knife-wielder.  He grabbed my right arm with one hand and used the knife with the other.  It dragged against my shirt for a short while before it managed to part cloth, and soon after it parted skin, from a distance below my armpit to the bottom of my ribs.

“Again,” she said.

The second cut was almost in parallel.  Shorter, quicker, and deeper.

I managed to pull away from the knife wielder.  As I moved, half of the room seemed to tense, either retreating or advancing as if they had a plan in mind.

“Stop that!” I said, annoyed.  I was wearing a nice middle-of-the-road shirt, too, one that I could dress up or play down easily.  I was going to miss it.  Two long cuts and an awful lot of blood marred it now.

The mouse queen raised her hand.  Her gestures weren’t like the Lambs’ gestures were.  It was more like a noble’s wave.  As if she expected that she could wave at an enemy and people would deal with it, and there wasn’t a question of people refusing.

“You’re going to kill him,” the boy next to the mouse queen said.

He was shirtless, his dark hair longer, but his pants were nice.  Not loose, but tailored.  He was barefoot, but his feet were more or less clean, suggesting he was barefoot by choice, not as a way of life.  He had money.

Were these mice funded?  No.  There had to be something bizarre at play.

“We’ve buried people before,” the mouse queen said, without a trace of emotion.

Just how dangerous were these mice?

“Love, we’ve buried people for reasons,” the boy said.  “To protect, or punish.  But I don’t think he’s done anything to warrant execution by exsanguination.”

“Ex-what?” a young teenager asked.

The mouse queen waved absently at him, and he abandoned the question, returning his focus to me.  He had a weapon at his belt, but he was standing in a way that kept me from seeing it.

Could even be a gun, but I was imagining it was a blade.

“You’re bleeding on my floor,” the mouse queen said.  As if it was a grave offense I’d committed.

My floor.  Not ‘our’ floor.  Why couldn’t this be easy?  This was supposed to be the easiest part of what I was setting in motion in West Corinth.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, with a hint of sarcasm.  “I’ll try to bleed less.”

“Do,” she said.  “Or I’ll have them cut you again.”

“May I remove my shirt to press it against the wounds?” I asked.

She did that airy wave at me, then told her pet knife-wielder, “Stab him if he tries anything.”

Frowning, I pulled my shirt off, with it already proving sticky against my side.  I moved slowly, so as not to spook the locals, and folded the shirt, pressing it against the wound with one hand and one arm.

She wasn’t even looking at me.  The mouse king had a cigarette in mouth, and the two were facing each other, the cigarettes pressed against one another.  He puffed, then pulled away, his cigarette lit by contact.

I decided to wait for the lunatic mouse queen before opening my mouth again.

It was the ‘king’ who spoke instead.  “Someone told you about us, and where to find us.  Tell us who, and the rest of this will be easier.”

“Honestly?  I turned up a few months ago.  I saw and talked to a few mice- a few children.  None of them said anything about this, or about you.”

“Doesn’t answer the question,” the queen said.  She started to move her hand.

I was prepared to jump in and distract, but the king beat me to it.  “It’s okay.  There’s no rush.  We aren’t with the ‘mice’, as you put it.  To the rest of them, we’re big brothers and sisters.  We help them, we give a hand, we’ll deal with the problems, use the messages on wall and teach them to read ’em and put ’em up.  But they can’t just come in here uninvited.  Invites are earned.”

He fixed me with a look as he said those last bits.  The queen, meanwhile, picked through my wallet.

I was starting to get the picture.This particular group had been preyed on too much.  They’d banded together, and for the most part they seemed pretty willing to turn to violence.  There were two younger ones who’d backed off, but I was looking at the whole group now and wondering if maybe they had older siblings who were part of the group.

Damn it.  I wasn’t sure I could use them.  And I wasn’t sure I could leverage the other mice without drawing on the core group.

No, more than that.  The queen was dangerous and the king capable.  They were a romantic pair, and they had some clout, for whatever reason.  They’d found each other and then the group had formed around them.  Something had clicked into place, a group of people feeling desperate, scared and lost, and two people who could soothe those concerns.

The queen dropped her cigarette and stepped on it before returning her attention to my wallet.  She pocketed the cash.

There goes the remainder of my spending money.

“Most don’t know that we have a club.  Which, again, raises the question of how you found out,” the king said.

The queen nodded in agreement.

“My name is Sylvester.  I’m wanted by the Crown.  You could send anyone here to a police station or post office and see my face on the wall.  Today, I broke two men out of the prison, and I gassed the building, forcing them to evacuate.  I robbed that same station on my way out,” I said.

“I don’t believe you,” the queen said.

I could throttle her.

“I do,” the king said.  “I heard something about this.  That name, and the thing at the station.”

“You heard because you’re a-” I almost said Corinth Crown.  “Bergewall student.  You’re Academy.”

“Loosely affiliated, but yes,” he said.

An academy student and a mouse queen with an attitude problem.

I’d gauged that he was academy before I’d revealed any details.  I knew that I was testing my luck here.  But his presence here and his reaction to what I was saying suggested that he wasn’t about to turn me in for the cash.  Not that he wouldn’t, but the drive to do so wouldn’t override everything else.  My gut instinct was right, and he was still listening.

Not the worst eventuality, but I’d honestly hoped for someone more like Craig, or even someone like Mc-whatshisface from Warrick.

I’d gauged him as academy.  I was sticking my neck out, and he was free to bring the guillotine down.

He and others would be thinking about the wanted poster.  Those came with bounties, and bounties could be collected.

I needed to offer a better deal.

“I’m working on something bigger,” I said.  “I approached all of you because I wanted to see if you wanted in.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted them as part of things, now that I’d met them.  But my options were few.

“What are you doing?” the mouse king asked me.

“Well, to start with, I need to deal with whoever directs the criminal groups in the city.  There have to be some faces and names to watch out for-”

I saw a change in the mouse king’s expression at that.  There were.

“And there have to be people who’ve wronged you and yours that you haven’t been able to touch.”

The mouse queen moved, and a part of me leaped at that, seizing on the change in body language and demeanor as validation that I was right.

But she was simply rummaging in a pocket for a bit of candy.  She undid the wrapper and put the candy in her mouth.

Couldn’t read her at all, damn it.

“There are,” the mouse king told me.

“I only need their names, and some information on the others.  Then I’ll want to relocate the younger ones that are scattered around here to another place.  One where they’ll have food and shelter.”

The mouse queen shifted position.  One foot down, the other foot up, against the wall.  She reached over to the king’s face, turned it her way, and then pulled the slobbery orb of candy from her mouth, popping it into his, and stealing his cigarette as she brought her hand back toward her face.

The mouse king made a face at that.  “Candy and cigarettes don’t mix.”

“I wanted a cigarette, but had to give you something back,” she said.  “Evensies.”

“Only one an hour,” the mouse king said.  “We’re rationing the things, remember?”

“I remember.  I just had mine.  Now I’m having yours,” she said.

I waited, patient, a knife still at my side.

The mouse queen turned her eyes to me.  “We have experience with that sort of thing.”

It took me a second to click as to what she meant.  She was referring to me talking about giving the mice a place to stay.  How many other groups had come through here, collecting unwanted and unattached children for experiments or to ship off to places unknown?

“I can imagine you do,” I said.

She nodded slowly, drawing in a lungful of smoke.

She looked at the mouse king, then gestured airily at him.

He had to tuck the candy into his cheek before he could talk unimpeded.  “I think we can give some consideration to the first part.  Dealing with enemies?  We can name names, so long as it doesn’t come back at us.  But you’re not taking anyone anywhere, or we’ll have problems.”

A starting point, that.  Except I still had an orphanage without children.  My center stage with no actors and agents to support it.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.04 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.4

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The pair gestured, indicating the back door of the place.  I winced as I started moving, shirt still held to my side, and then followed them out.

There was a porch overlooking a spacious backyard, filled with young trees.  I could identify the types as fruit trees and some Academy-treated trees that would produce other things.  Moving toward something sustainable for their small tribe, if I had to guess.

I cursed under my breath, seeing the investment they’d already made.  Jamie and I had been busy plotting the major moves, and I’d made assumptions about the local mice.

We stopped at the railing of the porch.  The king leaned forward over it, while the queen leaned back against it, beside him.

“Noreen,” the rat king indicated the queen.  He touched his chest, “Maurice.”

“Sylvester Lambsbridge,” I said.  Would be nice to talk to them one-on-one, and if I separated them, I might get some inklings into the group’s power structure.  I gave it a shot, saying, “I’m still bleeding.  Do you have anything for it?”

My heart sank as Maurice drew a small kit from a back pocket.  “I haven’t done stitches since my second year.  We’re supposed to do some at year end, for our refresher.  Always nice to get some practice in with the basics.”

“I agree with you on that,” I said.  “I could use some.  I’ll do my own, if that’s alright.”

Maurice raised an eyebrow.  “You’re sure?”

I nodded, and took the kit as he handed it over.  I opened it up, threaded a needle, soaked it and the thread, and then pulled part of the shirt away from the slices at my ribs.  I began stitching myself up.

“Cigarette?” Maurice asked me.

I considered for a moment, then decided it was necessary if I was going to get any traction with the group.  I nodded.

He had to walk around Noreen to give it to me.  My hands were occupied, so he placed it in my mouth, then struck a match to light it.  I put the cigarette on my tongue so I could move it aside and puff to blow out the match he’d given me.

The experience of smoking was unpleasant, I found.  It reminded me of things like fighting the Baron and high tension moments like being at the prison as it filled with faintly noxious gas.  It made me anxious.

“Lords, you’re better at that than I am, and you’re not even keeping an eye on your work,” Maurice observed.  Noreen leaned forward to look, but gave no indicators of approval or disapproval.

“I was in the plague-stricken area for a few months.  I’m mostly immune.  Got a few spots, cut them out, that was that.  Gave care to others.”

Was that a glimmer of respect I saw in Maurice’s eye?  Good.  He was someone I could work with.

Noreen being quiet was even better.

“Being a fugitive, breaking into the prison, flirting with the plague, and now attempting something with West Corinth as a whole?  Sounds like you lead a busy life,” Maurice said.  “A dangerous one, at that.”

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve been challenged and tested.  But for a year and a half at the start and a few months here and there, there haven’t been many breaks from the danger, either,” I said.  “If I don’t make trouble of my own, then it tends to find me.  I’d rather have the initiative, and I’m taking the initiative here.”

“Facing down the local criminal element?” Maurice asked.

I nodded.  “I need to know who they are and where they are.”

“And you’ll take the names of our enemies, taking revenge on our behalf,” Noreen said.

“That was part of the plan,” I said.  “But it might not be as straightforward as all that.  You should be happy with my results.”

“We’ll see,” she said.  Cold, detached, with a threat maybe implied?  It really, really bothered me that I couldn’t get a solid read on her.  She reminded me of deadpan Helen, except even deadpan Helen had attachments and preferences that I could keep track of.

Maurice watched my work instead of my face.  “I can give you the details you need.  Three groups hold power, but the third has had his hands full with two groups of ‘visitors’.  Assuming you’re not visitors, given that you don’t know particulars-”

“I’m not.  I know some names, I know some faces, and I know some of the lieutenants of the groups.  I didn’t know about the visitors, though.”

“There’s a man we go to talk to if we have a grievance.  He runs the premier group around here.  Colby.  He’s normally content to have his slice of West Corinth, be the man in charge, and let others fight over their slices of the pie while he focuses on business elsewhere.  He’s not happy with the quarantines and travel restrictions.  I’m not sure what he’s doing or planning right now.  Rather than hunting down the people you want to talk to and arranging individual meetings, I’d try to get him to tell you where to find them.”

“I know of him,” I said.  My new recruit, Samuel, had been working for John Colby’s faction.

“I can tell you where he is.  Down by the tributary, they used to have a school.  There was a side building for assemblies and services.  The school got pulled down, but the assembly hall stayed.  It’s sort of being used as a warehouse, but it’s main purpose-”

“A meeting place,” I finished.

I pushed open the doors.  Pierre, Samuel, and the bounty hunters followed behind me.  A bit of a show of power, and a touch of provocation.

The assembly hall had once had rows upon rows of seats, but the seats had been torn out, and the holes where they’d been set into the floor had been filled in.  The floor gently sloped as it moved toward the stage at the end, but stacks of crates and pallets of goods still sat on that gentle slope.  It felt precarious, like a landslide waiting for a push to start it on its way, or so many dominoes poised on their edges instead of on their ends.

Mr Colby took the position of prominence by the stage.  Unassuming from a distance, his blond hair slicked back, face clean-shaven but for a pale mustache on his upper lip, and a suit coat placed over his shoulders but without his arms through the sleeves.  Those arms were in front of him, hands clasped around the head of a cane.

As I drew nearer, I could see that the softer flesh of his throat, his nose, and his ears was faintly translucent, riddled with what looked like varicose veins.

He was a substance abuser, I knew.

His bloodshot eyes tracked Samuel, and with a slight turn of my head, I could see Samuel shrink a little under the look.

Be strong, I thought.

Mr. Colby was a man with a firm grip on this city.  He’d held what he could for a long time, and extended his reach to nearby cities with organizations there.  He was about the logistics of things, supply and demand, availability, supporting structures.  But his grip had slipped recently.  He couldn’t move things to where they were best placed when Crown law was restricting movement.  He had to be feeling some insecurity right now.

I knew exactly what he was going to do.  I’d told Samuel how it would unfold.  Now success depended on me being right, both for confronting Mr. Colby and for winning Samuel’s confidence.

Three… two… one

Mr. Colby remained silent.

One and a half, one and three quarters…

“How good of you, Sylvester, to rescue Samuel there and bring him back to me,” Mr. Colby said.  “A good opening to negotiations.”

There we go.  And, as we rehearsed…

“I’m not coming back to you, sir,” Samuel said, out loud.

Mr. Colby didn’t flinch visibly at that, but I knew I’d needled him.

“I released him for me, not for you,” I said.  I allowed a very deliberate pause before saying, “Sir.”

Every head present, including the four other gang leaders, turned to look at Mr. Colby.  Two of the leaders there were as visitors, relatively new to the city.  Even they seemed to have a good sense of how things were here, because they were tense, as if expecting the man to snap and order me killed.  He had his bodyguards with him, so it wasn’t out of the  question.

Mr. Colby smiled.

“My mistake,” he said.  “I’ve made an embarrassing assumption.  Of course he’s yours.”

“You made him promises about getting him free and appealing his sentence that you hadn’t taken any steps to follow through on.  I looked into it.  Samuel was stuck in jail for a while, so he looked like fair game.”

Mr. Colby chuckled, shaking his head a little, he raised a hand to wag a finger at me.  It was almost striped, red at the knuckle and pale at the finger between knuckles.  The fingernail was bruised.  “You got me there.”

The tension hadn’t left the other four leaders in the room.  If anything, they looked even more spooked.

“If you do a shitty job of looking after your people,” I pronounced, thoroughly enjoying myself, “Then you can’t be surprised if someone more competent steps in and poaches them.”

Seeing the expressions and body language of the other leaders, it struck me that one of my biggest concerns right now was that one of them might come after me to stop me from saying anything further.

Mr. Colby, meanwhile, only laughed.  He shook his finger at me again.  “You’re downright impudent!  I like you, Sylvester.  You’re courageous.  You’ve got balls, young man.”

I was silent.  I finished walking down the long path that ran between the groupings of seats.  I stopped, thumbs hooked into my pockets, my backup just behind me.

“I thought you were here to negotiate, or to try for something to spite the Academy, going by your wanted poster and the stories I’ve heard about you.  Which reminds me.  My condolences for the loss of your friend.”

“The condolences are appreciated,” I said.

“You’re not here to negotiate, are you?  Are you here to poach?  To carve out a section of the city for yourself?”

“None of that,” I said.  “Not really.”

He smiled genially.  His teeth were bad.  Damaged.  “We’ve got a rebellion group here, a religious man, and now you, young sir.  Trust me when I say we’re very open minded, whatever it is you’re looking to achieve.”

“I’m laying down the law,” I said.  I looked everyone in the eye as I spoke.  “The children of this city are, from here on out, untouchable.”

“Mildly inconvenient, that,” Mr. Colby said, still smiling.  “All of us traffic or work with children to some extent.  Sometimes they get in the way, and need some correction.  But if you want to talk it out, I’m sure we can come to an understanding.”

“That might not be good enough.  Not that you’re not being awfully accommodating, all things considered,” I said.

“Like I said, I’ve seen the wanted poster, and I reached out to some people, asking about you.  I even have a file in my possession, detailing things about you that even you might not know.”

I raised my eyebrows.  “I’m fairly certain I’ve seen it.”

“What was it the poster said?” the man asked me.  The smile never left his lips, even as he talked, giving the illusion this was all some kind of joke he was in on, “Devastatingly intelligent?  I dare say you’re smarter and more capable than I am.  I respect that.”

“And I respect you for respecting that,” I said.

“But you’re not willing to work toward an understanding?” Mr. Colby asked.  “That’s disappointing.”

“Like I said, there’s no negotiation here,” I told him.  “I’m telling you how things are, now that I’m here.  No trafficking in children, no selling them to the Academies.  If one insults you, you let the insult pass.  And to drive the point home, I’ve got a list of grievances.  Past incidents and their culprits.  Amends will be made and will be made promptly, or steps will be taken.”

The folded paper I’d drawn out of my pocket as I spoke flapped as I gestured.

“Well,” Mr. Colby said.  He spread his hands, one hand holding the cane, before he brought it down to the floor again.  “We’ll have to hear those grievances, won’t we?”

“You have the most,” I said.  “Seven grievances.  Three cases of willfully hurting a child in the recent past.  One of separating a sister from her brother, sending her to parts unknown.  Two of introducing children to drugs.  One incident of killing a child.”

He nodded, as if all of this was matter of fact.  No argument given.

“One thousand dollars owed for the murder of the one child and the sale of the other.  Five hundred dollars owed for each of the other offenses.  Four thousand and five hundred thousand dollars total, to be paid by this time tomorrow.”

“Business is slow these days.  I don’t think that’s a price I can pay,” he said, his eyes crinkling with the smile that went with the words.

“I don’t expect you to pay it.  I expect you to fail to pay it, and then I’ll have to destroy you as an example to the others.”

He chuckled, shaking his head, and wagged his finger at me.

“Impudent.”

“They call John Colby the ‘Devil of Corinth’,” Maurice told me, as I continued to puff experimentally on my first cigarette.

I knew enough about the Devil of Corinth.  I’d already done my research.  Still, it was a good opportunity to get some more information and double check my details.

“The Devil of Corinth.  People don’t like to use words like that, especially in Academy cities.”

“He deserves it.  He favors a drug that doesn’t see much circulation these days.  Capricorn’s kiss, mirror mirror, bloody mary, neptune.  It played off of ‘fight or flight’.  People took it for the rush of adrenaline, for confidence, for strength when they needed it.  But there are long term effects.  It destroys every part of the body, for one thing.  The biggest concern, however, is how it polarizes the person’s humanity, makes them a binary person, and both sides suffer.”

“Polarizes how?” I asked.  I was genuinely interested – details had been hard to come by, and Maurice was a student.

“Sometimes mania and depression.   Sometimes passivity and aggression.  Dominance and submission.  Sadism and masochism.  Caring and dispassionate killing.  One aspect of the personality magnified under the influence of the drug, its opposite magnified in the times between doses.  A man can be a sniveling baby who does nothing but cry for days at a time, then he becomes a bloodthirsty warlord after a dosage.”

I nodded, thinking about how that worked.  “And the Devil of Corinth?”

“Gracious, soft, weak.  But from what they say, every smile that John Colby gives you today is a tragedy the Devil brings you tomorrow.  He’s unpredictable.  Sometimes comes after people two weeks after some perceived insult they don’t even remember making.  Sometimes that night.  Sometimes he takes that capsule he keeps tucked between his gums and his cheek and bites into it, and then it’s seconds or minutes.”

That would be ideal, I thought, visualizing the scenario.  “Bottles the feelings up, then takes his drug and delivers the punishment?”

“Many times more punishment than is warranted,” the mouse king told me.  “Murder, mutilation, death.”

“Noted,” I said.  “The Academy doesn’t deal with him?”

“The less said about that, the better,” Maurice said.

“They clean up after his messes,” Noreen said.

Maurice shot her an annoyed look.  “I said the less said, the better.”

“Is he in their pocket, or are they in his?” I asked.

“No clue.  I don’t like thinking about it too much,” Maurice said.  He fidgeted, then reached out and plucked the nearly-done cigarette from Noreen’s lips.  “Give over.  I’m antsy now.”

“The Devil killed one of ours,” Noreen said, in a very conversational tone, with no emotion to her words.  “Disappeared another.”

“Think about it for a minute,” I said.  “Then give me as full a list as you can manage.  If that’s alright?”

She hesitated, and I wondered if I’d slighted her somehow or if she was going to turn on me as suddenly as she had earlier.  She nodded, instead.

“Meanwhile, Maurice, tell me about the other gang leaders,” I said.

He made a face, hunching over further, his stub of a cigarette between his fingers.  “The next one to watch out for is the Apostle.”

“Jesus fist-fucking Christ,” the Apostle said.  “No.”

The criminals of West Corinth were very irreverent, it seemed.  I’d never heard so many religious epithets in a short amount of time.

“Two thousand dollars,” I repeated.  The man was big, muscular, and well armed.   He postured, making use of his height to loom over me.  I didn’t move.  “Two children harmed.  Thirty-six hours to pay.”

“I’ll note you gave me twenty-four hours,” Mr. Colby said.

“I know.  Either you pay and you lead the others by example, which you won’t, or you won’t pay, and I’ll make you an example,” I said.

Mr. Colby smiled.  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

The Apostle leaned over, staring me down.  “Or I could grab your tongue and tear it out by the root.”

Scale, standing behind me, took a step forward, arms folded.  He was of a stature to match the Apostle, but where Scale was covered in, well, scales, the Apostle was marked with tattoos, none of which were religious, oddly enough.

The Apostle straightened up some, facing Scale head on.  There was some energy between the two.  It looked as though a fight was about to happen.  I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but I was already thinking about what to do when it happened.

“No fighting,” Mr. Colby said.  “Not here.”

He stood straight, but there was no energy to the words, no threat behind them.  It was disconcerting that the Apostle listened, backing down.

“Thank you,” Mr. Colby said.

“Christ’s tits,” the Apostle said.  “You give the Devil less time, but you give me a higher fee when I didn’t kill or sell anyone.  Are you expecting me to refuse to pay too?”

“You might not have killed any of the children, but you hurt them badly enough,” I said.  “And no, I expect you to pay.”

“Do you, now?”

“You’ll have twelve hours from the time I deal with him to make up your mind,” I said.

“Or I could pound your face in now,” the Apostle said, his temper flaring once again.

Mr. Colby drew in a deep breath, then huffed it out.  “If there was a confrontation, I would feel obliged to step in.”

The Apostle made a fist, clenching it, as if working up the courage or considering the options, then relaxed it.  He relented.

“You realize you’re just playing into the fetus-fucker’s hands, don’t you?” the Apostle asked.  “He’s saying all of this because he knows he can get away with it.”

“I’m not concerned with that sort of thing,” Mr. Colby said.  “I believe that things will work out.”

I could tell that the Apostle was doing everything in his power to hold back from coming after me.  He was close enough to the edge that I had to hold back myself, to keep from smirking at him and testing his limits.

“Next in line, the Witch.”

The third of the local leaders smiled.  The woman was dressed in a very conservative costume, years out of date.  A hood covered her hair.  “No contest.”

“Where the Apostle is the local weapons dealer and heavy hitter,” Maurice told me.  “the Witch is the second most powerful drug dealer around, after the Devil.  Or she was.”

“They all have titles,” I noted.

“The practice started around the time of the war for the Crown States.  There are other cities nearby like that.  It might be an Academy city now, but it was on the fence during the war.  The major players sold their services and support, sometimes with whole sections of the city backing them.”

“I can sort of see how it unfolds, then.  Names are hard to keep track of, titles are easier, especially when you’re talking about a half-dozen to a dozen figures and what they individually bring to the table.”

“Never really thought about it,” Maurice admitted.  “Maybe?  I don’t know.  But they started using the names back then.  After the war ended, a quarter of them came home, set up shop, and maintained some of the power and clout they had.  That’s changed over the years, but the tradition remained.  The name ‘the Witch’ has been around for a while.  Five or six generations.”

“She collects the students that fail out, I assume?”

“Yep.  Puts them to work producing for her.  She’s not a bad doctor in her own right, I hear.  Not a fantastic one either, not at professor level, but respectable.”

“And she’s the one that,” I said, snapping my fingers as I tried to remember.  “She’s getting crushed by the new arrivals.”

“Yes,” Maurice said.

I saw Noreen shift position.  She brought her hands together, using her left hand to crack a joint on her right.

“Is there more?” I asked.

“More?” Maurice asked.

“Noreen is more agitated as you talk about the Witch than I’ve seen her during this entire conversation.  It’s the one time I’ve been able to get something of a read on her.”

Maurice glanced at Noreen.  “It’s nothing.”

“If you say so,” I said.  “I’m willing to move on to the next person if you are.  The two visiting gangs?”

“The first-“

“The Witch dies,” Noreen said, ignoring what I’d said.

“She dies?” I asked.

Maurice sighed.

Noreen met my eyes, staring me down.  “Or we cut you more.”

“No,” I said.  “I’m just wondering what she did to deserve it.”

Noreen didn’t volunteer an answer.  Maurice looked between Noreen and I before sighing.  “You won’t be upset if I say?”

Noreen didn’t give any indicator, positive or negative.

He reached out, fingers running through the hair at the side of her head, fixing some hair that had fallen out of the bristling ponytail.

“The Witch took six children by our last count,” Maurice said.

I frowned.  I could draw conclusions, going by Maurice’s body language and the context.  “Noreen was one of them.”

“She dies, or we have no deal,” Noreen said.

“No contest?” I asked.  “You’re cooperating?”

The Witch shook her head.  “Thirty-six hours might be hard to manage, but I’ll scrape together whatever I can and if you’re still standing when the deadline arrives, I’ll give it to you.  I’ll have the remainder when I can get it.”

“Three thousand,” I said.  “And you’ll need to have all of it.”

She winced.  “So much?”

“Six children, taken and used for testing.  That we’re aware of.”

“They were itinerant.”

I raised my eyebrows.  “Itinerant.”

“It means they roam.  Their parents were often poor, moving from city to city where they could be given drugs or have procedures tested on them in exchange for money.  The roaming groups have a way of leaving the itinerants behind.   We offered them shelter, gave them food.  Sent those we could on their way to places we knew they would find longer term accommodations.”

“You tested drugs on them.  For weeks or months, sometimes.”

“Compared to dying on the street, I think it’s merciful,” the Witch said.

“Some of the victims disagree about that mercy,” I said.  “It’s already been decided.  Three thousand.”

I could see the cogs moving behind her eyes, the thoughts going a mile a minute.  She wasn’t dumb, and she was in a bad position, with two groups looking to eliminate her on one side, me demanding grotesque sums on the other.

It was a shame I had to play hardball.  This would have gone a lot better if I had one of the leaders being cooperative.

She gave me a tight smile, by way of answer to my statement, and I was left to wonder just how much she’d learned from the Devil during her tenure in West Corinth.

I had to leave it at that.

I turned my attention to the other two gangs.

“The final two gangs, then?”

“No issue with the one.  They deal from within Bergewall,” Maurice said.  “Clever guys, but the only reason they’re worth talking about is they’ve banded together with the other group.”

“Rebels,” I guessed.

“Ex-rebels.  After the sterilization drug with the leashing chemicals hit the city, they up and joined the rebellion side.  They were gone for a year, only just came back.”

“The rebellion split into two factions a ways in.  Brands or Spears?”

“Uh, they called themselves the Barren.  But they worked for the woman?”

“Cynthia.  Spears.”

“Her.  Aggressive, militant, young men and women.  A few came back injured, some with missing limbs, but they’ve gotten themselves patched up since.”

“I got it,” I said.  I sighed.  This couldn’t be easy.

“No grudges against the Bergewall delinquents.  But the Barren have four marks against them, when it comes to preying on the local youth.  Two thousand.”

“Fuck yourself,” the Barren leader said.  It was a woman.  Something about the features on her right side didn’t match the features on the left.

“Alright,” I said.  I looked at Mr. Colby.  “I’ve said my piece.”

“You have.  Thank you for coming, Sylvester,” the man said, smiling at me.  “I’m not one for strong words, but I must say this is a silly thing to do.”

“We’ll see,” I said.  One could question your habit of holding back today so you can lash out tomorrow.  “You don’t think you’ll be paying, then?”

“You said it yourself, Sylvester,” Mr. Colby said.  “You don’t expect me to pay any more than I do.  You don’t want to negotiate.  Confrontation seems inevitable.”

“It does,” I said.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, for the second time.

My cue to leave.  The groups would talk this out and work against me, devising a plan and strategy.

I turned, and I walked up the gentle incline to the doors to the auditorium hall.  The three bounty hunters, Pierre the Rabbit and Samuel followed me out the door.

None of them spoke until the exterior doors of the auditorium had shut behind us.

I reached into a pocket, and I withdrew an envelope with bills inside.  I handed them over to Scale.

“Thank you, sir,” Scale said.  He began counting the money.

I glanced at Magda and Agnes.  “You don’t have any interest in looking after children, do you?  There’s an opening at the orphanage, and from my experiences with the local kids, we need someone with a firm hand.”

Magda scoffed.  Agnes just frowned at me.

“Yeah,” I said.  “It wouldn’t really work.”

“You’re insane,” Samuel commented.  “You’re badly underestimating the Devil of West Corinth.”

“Probably,” I said.  “I’m holding out hope he’s relying on a share of undeserved reputation and bluster to scare off his worst enemies.”

“He’s really not,” Samuel said.

“Count is good,” Scale said, cutting into the conversation.  He extended a hand to shake.  I shook it as he added, “Goes a long way to covering the dry patch.”

“Hopefully the plague gets dealt with and you’ll be able to get back to your regular bounties,” I said.  “There’s a position with me if you ever want it.”

“Make it through the next two days, and I might begin to consider it,” Scale said.  “A chance.”

I nodded.

The three walked one direction in the relatively unpopulated street.  Samuel, Pierre and I walked another.

After a block, we met up with Jamie.

“How did it go?”

“About as well as can be expected,” I said.  “Gut feelings were right.  Nobody’s biting just yet.  We’ll make our move.”

“The mice are evacuated, and we’ve spread word as best as we could.”

Youths hung out with other youths, and sometimes social classes and boundaries crossed.  Whether the weather was hot or cold, children from all the neighborhoods gathered at the lakes to cool off.  They knew which doors to knock on, and word would hopefully get out.

I had no expectation that the Devil would stay his hand from hurting children.  Just the opposite.  Knowing he was easily riled, and giving him few indicators on how to come after me, I’d planted that seed.

He was the one I’d focused on as I’d been scheming what to do here, the man I’d researched.  My discussion with Maurice and Noreen had only confirmed much of what I’d already known.

Now I had to put it in action.  He would look for children, and he wouldn’t find any.  There was a chance he would flounder, but I wasn’t staking much on that.  He would lash out.

“Pierre,” I said.  “It’s your turn to do something.  Get across town.  Ten minutes from the time you see fire, you set fire to the mayor’s house.”

Jamie handed Pierre the slip of paper with the address.  Pierre already had the bag with the incendiaries.

“The mayor.  Got it.”

“After that, the head of Corinth Crown Academy.  Then the head of Bergewall-“

Jamie handed over papers with addresses.

I continued, “We’ll flush them out.  Watch their movements, but don’t report back right away.  The next step is to go to the fourth address…”

“And burn it too.  None of the fires should hurt the residents, but this one least of all.  Then you come to us at the fifth location and let us know what the mayor and headmasters are doing.  The faster you move, the better.”

“I can outrun a horse,” Pierre said.  Not boasting, just stating fact.

“I know.  But move as fast as you can.  Timing is essential.”

The eerily tall rabbit headed man gave me a mock salute, walking backward as he did so.  Then he turned, teetering slightly as he did so, and broke into a run, dashing off into the evening.

“How do you feel?” Jamie asked.

“Troubled,” I said.  “Even if taken in the best possible light, they’ll be disgruntled.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“But it’s the best way to approach things.  With luck, we won’t even be here for them to be disgruntled at.”

“With luck,” he said, in a very grim way.

The fourth address, after the mayor’s house and the headmaster’s houses, was the headquarters of the mouse king and the mouse queen.

As long as they had that place, they wouldn’t leave, and there would be mice left out in the cold with nowhere to go.

“We’ll arrange to have some trees planted in the backyard before we go,” I said.

“Sure,” Jamie said, without even asking why.  “But that’s a topic for later.”

“I’m telling you now so you’ll remember, because I might not.”

“Fair,” Jamie said.  He put a hand on my shoulder.  “But let’s focus on this war we’ve picked with the Devil, now, okay?”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.05 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I watched Jamie watch the fires burn.  The spreading patches of red and orange fire consumed buildings here and there across West Corinth.  His glasses reflected the flames, hiding his eyes.  His expression was unchanging.

Samuel, meanwhile, looked deeply concerned.

Logic told me I should deal with Samuel and smooth things over.  It was the ideal move in this scenario.

But I found that it was too often the case.  Things came up, there were others to manage.  When we were busy with our projects and missions, there was always something else to do.

Talking to Jamie rarely ever came first.  When it did, or when we got into a rhythm where we were joking together throughout, we rarely ever discussed the important things.

All too often it felt like those things were put off until they reached a critical mass.

“Tired?” I asked.

“Long day.  Going to be a long night.”

“The schedule demanded it,” I said.

“I know.  I’m just stating the facts.”

I watched the fire dance on the glass of his lenses.

“I’ve always considered you and the old Jamie to be among the three voices that really act as my conscience,” I told him.

“Lillian’s one of the three?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Jamie pointed.  Another fire had grown enough for us to see it from a distance.

“I see it,” I commented, looking.

“Why the mention of conscience, Sy?”

“I feel like you would have said something about this.  Like, if I was talking to the you that lives in my head?  I feel like he would have spoken up by now.  But you’re quiet.  It’s throwing me off.”

“We’ve been working on our overarching plan for a while now.  Almost six months.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve been thinking about the steps we need to take, mentally wrapping my head around it all.  This isn’t all that different from what I was mentally preparing myself for.  I know why we’re doing it.  I’m reasonably confident we have a workable plan in motion.  There are unpredictable elements in play, don’t get me wrong, but-”

“Reasonably confident,” I said.

“Reasonably.  There’s another part to it too, Sy.”

“Is there?  Do tell.”

“You’re a bad influence on me.”

I laughed.  Jamie smiled.

He pointed.  I nodded.  A dot of fire, now spreading.  The Rabbit had just wrapped up.  That would be the mouse queen’s headquarters.

“He’s fast,” Jamie said.

“That he is.”

“What are you thinking, about the routes fire services will take?  You were thinking about Cornish and Lacklady-”

“Remind me.”

Jamie pointed at an intersection.

“Which would put us between two routes, we would have to listen carefully and move fast, or, if you have a gut feeling-”

“Gut feeling is for main road, closest to us,” I said.  “Better lit.”

“Works for me,” Jamie said, smiling.  “Now?  Wait for services to roll by, deal with them, cut off another group if we can, then rendezvous with Rabbit.  We can give him direction, and then we make our counter-play against the Devil.”

“You’re enjoying yourself,” I said, already heading toward the ladder we’d put up beside the building.

“I suppose I am.”

“You like being the watchmaker, keeping everything in time, with a sense of where everything is.  I am a bad influence.”

“You think that’s you influencing me?  Don’t let your head get too big, there, Sy.  Your timing isn’t that good.  Neither is your sense of where things are.  You fake your way through half of it.”

“Balderdash, crockery, and lies!” I exclaimed.  I was first down the ladder.

Jamie made his way down the ladder.  He winced and rubbed at one shoulder, rolling it, as he got off.  He adopted an insincere tone as he pronounced, “I don’t lie.”

“I know for a fact that you fib about past events because you know I don’t remember them, just to mess with me.  I know for a damn fact.”

Jamie did his best to hide the smirk that flashed over his face.  I gave him a push, making him lightly bounce off of the wall.  He grinned more.

“Maybe,” he said.  A blatant and offensive understatement given his expression.

“You butt.  We’re supposed to be able to trust each other.”

“I only do it when you’re being annoying or giving me a hard time,” he said.

“That’s all the time!” I exclaimed.

“When you’re especially annoying, then,” he said, smiling wider.

Samuel finished descending the ladder.

“Bring the ladder,” I said.

“It’s not ours,” Samuel said.

“Theft of a shitty ladder is the smallest of two dozen things we’re going to be doing tonight,” I said.  I tipped the ladder over and grabbed one end, putting my arm through the slats.

Samuel took up the other end.

People were leaving their houses and moving out into the street to look out over the city, at the plumes of smoke that were rising to the night sky.  It was a starless night, and Summer seemed to have touched the sky, tinting it lighter than it might normally be at this time of night.

We got some curious looks as we hurried across the street, around a corner, and toward the main street that cut west-to-east across the lower third of West Corinth.

We reached the road.  Here, too, people were gathering.  We remained in the shadows as a pair of wagons passed with some Crown officers within.  I dropped my end of the ladder, indicated for Samuel to do the same, gestured, and the two of us moved out into the street, leaving Samuel behind.

I gestured again, outlining general instructions that might have raised eyebrows if the loose crowd around us heard.  Jamie and I took hold of a stack of empty crates on the far side of the street, set in the space between buildings that didn’t quite qualify as an alley.  They were the kind that might have held milk bottles, bread, eggs, or newspapers for the morning deliveries, made up of wood slats as thin as three pieces of paper pressed together.  We dragged the stack out into the road, then managed the next.

“Leaving the opposition less room to maneuver?” Jamie asked.  He’d seen the gestures, and I was assuming he was asking for Samuel’s benefit.

“Yes.  Next part, while you’re busy wrapping your head around it all, is to use the ladder and to secure our escape route.”  I drew some lockpicks from my pocket, indicating the door nearest us.

“I don’t know what you have planned with the ladder, so I guess I’m doing the lockpicking, which I assume is exactly what you hoped for.  Selfish cad, taking all the fun parts.”

“Cad!?”

“Cad!” he retorted.

I threw the lockpicks so they hit the wall next to his head.  He was too slow to catch them before they fell.

“I bet you can’t say three nice things about me, instead of calling me names, you egg.”

Egg?  What the hell kind of an insult is ‘egg’?”

“I’ll explain egg if you win the bet,” I said.  I had no idea what kind of insult egg was, having just made it up on the spot, but I figured I could improvise.

Speaking of- I gauged the situation, then decided the ladder route would be dangerous, even if we executed it right.  I put down my end of the ladder, and moved to the rear end.  I took off my belt, then loosely attached the bottom rung of the ladder to a stout branch that grew into the doorframe.

“I’m confused,” Samuel said, watching me work.  “I’m confused on a lot of levels.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Just stand back.”

“You dress well,” Jamie said, offhandedly.  “Credit where credit’s due, you have an eye for clothing, whether you’re pretending to be a slum kid or dressing up for a date with Lillian.”

“Why thank you!” I said, mocking surprise.

“Don’t pretend like you forgot the bet in the last ten seconds.  Or I won’t play along.”

“Fine.  Take the fun out of everything.”

“Your hair is unsalvageable though,” Jamie added.  “And you’re still shorter than most our age.  And you have a way of being scruffy, even if you can pull it off.”

“I didn’t ask for qualifiers to go with the compliments, sir.  Or for backhanded compliments to go with the legitimate compliments.  Try that again and you lose the bet.”

“Can’t have that, can we?” he asked.  “Door’s open, by the way.  How about… you make life exciting.  Even the boring parts.”

“Do I?  I’m trying to imagine how I’d make taking a bath exciting, and I’m failing.”

“Sy, that-” Jamie started.  He brought his hand to his face.

“Wait, was that innuendo?  Did I do it again?  How would that be innuendo?  What’s so special about bathing?  What am I missing out on?”

“I meant how you make the parts we share fun.  Even the accounting part, unfortunately, and doing chores.  Unfortunately.”

“That’s qualifiers, those are qualifiers.  You can’t even do it!”

“Can too.  Does it count if I say that your charming innocence in many matters is nice and oftentimes refreshing?”

“That’s a downright insult, you egg.”

“It says a lot about you that you think that,” Jamie said.

“Innocence goes hand in hand with ignorance there.  And I’m not ignorant.”

“Okay, hold on, no arguments.  I’ll try another.”

“Good.”

“You don’t smell too bad?” he asked, grinning.  As I opened my mouth to protest, he grinned.  “I’m joking!”

“You’d better be joking.  And you lose the bet.  I warned you.”

“Fine.  You wouldn’t have had time to explain anyway.  I hear the bells.”

He had good ears.  I had to stop and listen before I heard them.  Hooves, and warning bells to let people know to clear the road and get out of the way of those hooves.

I motioned for the two of them to stand back.

If this worked, it was going to be glorious.

“Oh, I see what you’re up to,” Jamie said.  “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“No trust.  No trust at all.  See what it leads to when you-”

“Don’t miss the wagon!” Jamie warned.

I brought the ladder forward, swinging it out of the alley.  The wagon veered around the crates, which weren’t solid enough to do any harm, though a collision risked wood flying at the wagon driver.  Moving around the stacks of crates meant moving closer to me.  I timed the swing to put the end of the ladder into the wheel spokes.

As the turning spokes brought the thicker portions of the ladder into the underside of the wagon, they were blocked, then broken by momentum.  The ladder shattered, secured at the belt at one end, pushed against the corner of the building by the wagon.  Rungs joined the broken spokes, flying into the air and whizzing past me in a spray of wood and splinters.

The fire services wagon, loaded to bear with water and the machinery to pump it, was rather heavy.  It made horrific noises as the wheel-less back corner dragged against the road, the broken axle clattering in its now-damaged housing.

I turned around, collecting my belt with a quick motion, and followed Jamie and Samuel through the door.  I closed it just before the first lanterns and lights were pointed down the alley and street we’d occupied, illuminating the dark shop we’d just broken into.  I gently locked the door, then joined Jamie and Samuel in making our way through the store.

“How did you know it would be empty?” Samuel asked.

“The owners are standing out front,” I said.

“How did you know they were the owners?”

“Because they were out front?” I asked.  “Fire means loss.  It’s nature taking away what you have.  If you saw someone get hit between the legs, you’d involuntarily react, and maybe even adopt a posture to protect what you’ve got between your legs.  Same idea with fires.  You know?”

Samuel was quiet.  I was concerned at that silence.  It was a withdrawal, a removal from the situation.  Looking across the house and out the windows at the street, I could see the people, in clusters and groups.

Families and belonging.  I had to remind myself that even if Jamie and I were entirely in our environment in the midst of this, Samuel wasn’t.

“This way,” Jamie said.  He led us into a portion of the store that was more of a living space where the store owners lived than a workplace.  There was a door out the back.  I grabbed a butter tin from the dining table as we passed through and made our way back out onto the street.

There were three departments that would be responding to the fires.  Chances were good that the Academies had something as well, though it wouldn’t be the kind of setup that would deploy or work quickly.

Other neighborhoods were covered.  The wagon I’d just hobbled was the one that would be heading toward the Devil’s headquarters.  The area around that headquarters was largely his, occupied by his people.  It was close to Corinth Crown Academy, and if the Academy didn’t have the resources to stop the fire, it would at least rally together to stall it.

And if that failed, then the fort burning wasn’t the worst thing in the world.  One less Academy.  The Devil of Corinth would lose access to resources he would otherwise be leaning on.

Which would shortcut the entire process of what we were trying to accomplish here.  Perhaps too much.

“Detour,” I told Jamie.

Detour?

“Detour,” I said, pointing.

“Timing is too important.  If we’re late-”

“We’ll be fine,” I said.  “Trust me on this.”

We took another route.  Down one street, then another.

I had a general sense of things, we’d done our loops around the city to get a feel for how it was, giving Jamie a chance to memorize particulars and traffic flow.  My memory was just good enough to leave me ninety-percent sure we were on the right street.

I saw Samuel slow, head turning.

“Here?” I asked.

“What?” he asked me.

“She’s here?” I asked again.  I looked at Jamie, “It’s where his mom is?”

“Yes,” Samuel said, answering the question.

His mother was staying with someone, at our insistence.  The Devil knew that Samuel was with us, and in the absence of better targets, he might have gone after her, in an effort to hurt us.  With that in mind, we’d left her with a neutral third party who could look after her.

It had cost money, but it was money Jamie had been willing to sign off on.

“Go,” I told Samuel.

He gave me a funny look.

“Look after her tonight.  We don’t need you.  You have an idea of what’s going on, the moves that are being made, but you’re getting freaked out.  You’re ebbing.”

“Ebbing?” Jamie asked.  “Are you forgetting Crown English, Sylvester?  You’re making up more words.  And insults.”

“Ebbing is a word, you dunce.  Are you forgetting?”

“It’s not a word to describe people.”

“Ahem,” Samuel cut in.  We both looked at him.

“Timing, you said it was important.”

“Sure,” I said.  “Well, less important now.  I have ideas.  But we still need to manage the fires and meet Rab- Pierre…”

I saw Jamie open his mouth, and jumped in.  “And be in place against the Devil.”

He closed his mouth.

“I remembered,” I said.  “So ha.”

“Then I’m going to go,” Samuel said.  He was so eager he looked like he was just going to bolt for the door, hide from us and go to his mother, who he was worried about.  Not so different from the families, the fires, and wanting to stay near their homes out of a general insecurity.  “And you should do that.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said, giving me a pointed look, “For that reminder that we’re on a timeline.”

“You were the one that started the bickering,” I pointed out.

“Thank you, Sylvester.  For the detour,” Samuel said, cutting in again before we could get started.

I nodded, mute.  Jamie grabbed my arm and tugged me, and we went our separate ways.

We were half a block away when Jamie spoke up.

“You said you wanted him with us,” Jamie said.

“To build up his confidence in our approach.  We weren’t.  He got the idea.  If he’s going to follow that idea to its destination, then he needs to do it himself.  Anything more tonight might have pushed him away.”

“You said, earlier, that you worried if we didn’t bring him with, he might not come back.”

“That’s… still possible.  But if he stayed with us, he would have left.”

“Does that ‘thank you’ he just gave you mean anything?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He’s sort of a piece in the plan.  If we start losing those pieces now, that’s going to slow us down, and we’re already a step behind.”

“We’re okay,” I said.  I looked around, trying to get my bearings.  “And do you remember-”

Jamie made a noise.

“-what we discussed about the water station?”

“I remember,” Jamie said.  “I also remember that we were concerned it would be occupied.”

“I think we’re okay,” I said.  “Getting the feeling that they aren’t going to be around there.”

“Can I ask about the butter dish?” Jamie asked.

I looked at the dish with the lid that I was clasping in one hand.

“You’re so queer,” he said.

“Did you ever notice that whenever we’re doing something adrenaline-pounding, you get remarkably abusive toward me?”

“No,” he said.

No?”  I asked.  “You forgot?  All of the other times, the heaps of comments and put-downs, the little jokes at my expense, the height jokes?  I saw the pattern and you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget anything.  There’s no pattern.  Take my word for it.”

He was keeping his gaze too straight ahead, his posture too rigid.  Lying through his teeth.

I waited, letting that sit.  Jamie did mess with me, but he always course corrected if he wasn’t sure I understood he was messing with me.

Unless it was the innuendo thing.  He always left me to wonder on those things.

Jamie broke the silence.  “Every time I made those comments, you were smiling.  We were joking.  I don’t want you twisting it around in your head in a bad way.”

“So you admit it.  You get on my case whenever you’re having fun.  There’s probably a pathology behind that.”

Jamie sighed.

“It’s okay.  We all have our quirks.”

“You more than most, Sy,” Jamie said.

“Hey!  Hey!  You’re doing it.  That thing I was just talking about.”

“And this is the station.  Empty.  Your gut was right.  Again.”

“You’re changing the subject,” I said.  I looked around, then checked the door.  Finding it locked, I searched my pockets for my picks.  I ended up doing a pat-down of my front pockets, back pockets, shirt pocket-

Jamie handed over the picks.  “Your gut is remarkable.  Does that count for one of the three compliments?”

“That game ended a while ago, and you’re still changing the subject,” I said.  I started working on the door.

“They could transplant that gut of yours to someone else, see if they can get the gut feelings.”

“Lil said there was a link between the stomach and the mind, but I don’t think it goes that far, Mr. Changing-the-subject.”

“That’s the fourth time you’ve brought her up tonight,” Jamie remarked.

“Is it?”

“Yes.  Feeling lonely, Sy?”

“Never completely lonely, not with you around,” I said, as I worked the lock.  “You’re my best friend, and I don’t know if I can even articulate what it means that I can say that, when-”

I stopped, not sure how to articulate it.  When I feel like I’m betraying the old Jamie by saying so.

“I get it, Sy.”

“But I miss her.  I miss that she was good and she made me feel like a force for good just because I was supporting her or because I was close to her.  I miss how sweet she could be, when it was just me and her.  That she clutched me so tight, all the time, whenever she could.  I miss Helen chewing on me or licking me or trying to manipulate me for my desserts.”

I opened the lock.  Jamie went straight to the network of metal pipes and intestine-like lengths of flesh that were at one end of the closet-shaped space.  Here and there were large wheels fixed to the pipes, set beneath pressure gauges.  The room was unlit and hard to see in the gloom.  He glanced over his shoulder to show that he was still listening, moving through the dark room as if it were lit.

“I miss Mary and the way she and I could work together like she was amazing at what she did and she made me amazing by proxy, and how, when she really wanted to win at something really trivial, she would hold back and wrinkle up her nose unconsciously.  I… I don’t miss Ashton, but I wake up some days and I wonder how he’s doing and what he’s becoming, and it eats at me that I’m not there for that when I really want to be.  I remember sleeping on the floor of the lab of Ashton the first, and it was a really early, really important memory for me, and I feel like I should be paying Ashton the second back for that, for some reason?”

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said.

He started to turn a wheel.  I put the butter dish down and helped him, adding my strength to his.  I knew his shoulder bothered him ever since I’d done the surgery on him.  Exertion made it worse.

I continued, “I miss Evette, and she doesn’t exist outside of my own head, you know?  I miss that she doesn’t exist and I know if she existed I wouldn’t, but I feel like she should be around.  I miss those moments, once or twice a year, when Ms. Earles would be sweet to me and act like a mother might, rubbing my hair, or giving me a treat, or even giving me a hug.  I can count those hugs on one hand, but I remember them clearly, and I don’t remember much.”

As the wheel finished turning, Jamie and I strained to fix it into position.  I blinked in the midst of the straining, and my eyes were wet.

“Didn’t mean to open that floodgate,” he added, as we shut off the water supply to… going by the label I could barely make out in the gloom, water supply number main two.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “I’m fine.”

“I just wanted to distract you from what we were talking about before.  I did it in a stupid way.”

I cursed under my breath.  “What were we talking about before?”

“Ha,” Jamie said.  but it was humorless, without the mischief.  Just letting me know he’d gotten one over on me.

“Mark my words,” I said.  “That small victory doesn’t mean anything.”

“Honestly, I feel like a heel, knowing it hit you where it hurt.”

“Good,” I said.  “But I am clever, which is a fact that you neglected to mention when you were listing off the compliments.  I think about things!”

I scooped up the butter dish.  I threw away the top and I liberally applied the butter to the wheel.

“That you do,” Jamie remarked.

“Mark my words-” I started.

“You already said that.”

“Mark them!” I exclaimed, a third time, for emphasis.  “I will be the man on top, in the end.”

“I swear you’re doing that on purpose at this point,” Jamie said.

We gathered ourselves together, and quickly left the building.  I closed the door, put a pick into the lock, wedged it as much as I could, then stood back, my foot in the air, knee against my chest.  I kicked the end of the pick, snapping it off in the lock.  We maintained a fairly leisurely pace as we made our way away from the scene of the crime.

The Devil’s headquarters had to burn.  We knew he stockpiled drugs, and he maintained paperwork and papers.  We knew that, after meetings, he tended to loop around to stop at points where his lieutenants worked, to make the most of his time and ensure they were on the same page as him, updated on the key points of the meeting.  After meeting us he would want his soldiers in line, warned about possible attacks, and ready.

Mr. Colby was a logistician.  He moved things from A to B.  The Devil was a monster, and he removed any obstacle that kept his better, kinder half from moving things from A to B.  But the Devil didn’t strike me as a warlord.  Nothing we’d been able to turn up suggested he had any experience in outright war.

With that in mind, Jamie  gauged the time Colby would take to get from the meeting back home.  We’d tracked him following one meeting to verify and adjust our estimates.

His people might well be able to save some of the stock, but they wouldn’t save all of it, and our hope was that they wouldn’t know what to prioritize, and Colby would be absent and unavailable to give that direction.  The buildings nearest the headquarters were warehouses and apartments, nineteen twentieths of which were reserved for Colby’s wider enterprise.  The fire would spread to them.  Shutting off the water to the line that the fire service needed would help ensure that.

Our destination was a restaurant, not that far from the fire or Corinth Crown Academy.  It was a big place, sprawling, occupying three floors, with extended patios and balconies.  As we’d guessed, it was heavily populated with people who’d wanted a vantage point to see the flame.

We’d chosen a point that wasn’t such a vantage point, where the overhanging balcony and the surrounding railings and decoration provided some cover.

The Rabbit wasn’t there.

Jamie and I walked over to the railing, me putting my elbows and forearms across it and placing my chin on the back of my hands.  I watched the orange glow of the fire.

“I miss them too,” Jamie said.  “Not in the same way, I don’t think.  I don’t think I loved them, exactly, but they were a big piece of me.  I get this frustrated feeling at this feeling I have, like I have a hole that won’t close or heal.”

“Loss,” I said.

“Yeah.  But you’re good enough company,” he said.

“Aw shucks.  You’re not so bad yourself.  Even if you’re dishonest.”

“You’re a bad influence on me,” he said.

A motion behind us made us turn.

The Rabbit.  Pierre.  I kept almost forgetting his name.  I forced myself to commit to it, because I knew I’d forget if I gave myself the chance.

“All went well?” I asked.

“A little bit more dramatic than my usual fare,” Pierre said.  The light of the fire tinted his bloodshot, watery rabbit eyes.  “I think I like starting fires.  There’s something about it.”

“We all need our hobbies,” I said.  “You were late though.  I didn’t expect that.  Any trouble?”

I was on time,” Pierre said.  “You were late.  I knew what our next phase was, so I did a circuit, ran around, checked on the places I knew we’d be checking on.  You were right.  They were there.”

“Of course I was right,” I said.

“He means me,” Jamie said, quiet.  I shrugged.

“They were where you said they’d be.  The Mayor, his family, the Devil’s men.”

I noted the distinction.  Not the mayor and his family.  It was the mayor, faint pause, then his family.

“Perfect,” I said.  “Said family includes the young’uns?”

“Said family includes the young’uns,” the eight foot tall rabbit with the burning eyes told me.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.06 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“There we go,” Jamie said.  “The magic word.”

“How do they do that?” I wondered aloud, a non-sequitur.

“Do what?”

“Those kids,” I said, indicating the kids that were half a block away.  They had just encountered the Devil’s thugs.  The nanny stood between the lead thug and the children.  She barely looked any older than the eldest child.  Eighteen, perhaps? “Look at them.  Yes, they’ve been running around, and they’re a touch disheveled, but they’re so prim and proper, dressed like they’re ready to go out to dinner, with their shirts ironed and everything matching.  Do they just have late bedtimes, or is that how they dress for bed?”

“I think you’re putting too much thought into this, Sy.”

“Hair neatly parted for the boys, tidy curls for the girls.  The eldest boy is wearing a tie, Jamie.  A tie!  Our house is on fire.  It’s the middle of summer, sweltering, and the city’s going to be even hotter, by the looks of those five other fires we can see out the window.  Get on out of bed, sons and daughter, get your shirt on, button it up, put on your tie, we can’t have you looking slovenly.  Sit down at the dressers while the nanny does your hair.  Don’t mind the smoke or the tongues of flame licking at your feet in the meanwhile.”

“It is a bit strange,” Pierre said.

“I mean, I’d expect this from Helen, but this is a well-to-do family in a not-too-important city.  Dear nanny, given the immediate circumstances, perhaps we shouldn’t use the flammable oils to slick down Junior’s hair.”

“Is it really that important?” Jamie asked, in that way he sometimes had, where he sounded very tired of me.

“Yes!”

Why?”

“Because I want to know!”

Jamie sighed.

One of the thugs grabbed the nanny.  He jerked her arm, hauling her close, and wrapped his arms around her, holding her back against his front.

“Speaking of, we didn’t really account for the nanny,” Jamie said.

“I accounted for the nanny,” I said.

Jamie gave me a suspicious look, but he didn’t argue the point with me.

“She’ll be upset, slightly traumatized, but she’ll be intact in the end,” I said.

The nanny was talking to the children.  Reluctantly, the trio of youths moved closer.  There were two boys, aged fourteen and sixteen, by my best guess, and a girl that might have been nine or ten.

The second of the three thugs grabbed the oldest child.  The third grabbed the youngest.  The middle child, a boy of roughly Ashton’s age, was left alone, but his ties to the others kept him close.

“There you go,” I said, to the gloom, voice quiet.  “You’ve got the situation well in hand.  They’re listening, and they’re being obedient.  The Devil is going to be pleased with you.  But you don’t want to fly too high or sink too low in his estimation, or he might pay attention to you.  So you’re going to take these captives to him.  You’ll do nothing else.”

“They can’t hear you, you know.”

“Shhh,” I told Jamie.  My focus was on the body language in play, with particular attention to the degree of confidence displayed.  Were these thugs operating as extensions of the Devil of Corinth, or were they being themselves?  I had an instinct that they were the former, but I wanted to be ready to act in an instant if they hinted at the latter.

“This seems like as good a time as any to bring up something that’s been niggling at me.  We should have a talk at some point, about what you call an acceptable level of trauma and discomfort, and what other people might define as an acceptable level of trauma and discomfort.”

“You’re talking about the nanny?” I asked.

“I’m talking about the nanny, yes.  The man is getting more… close with her than he needs to be?”

“I saw that,” I said.  There wasn’t anything that I could point to that was especially vulgar, but the man toed the line.  There was more physical contact and holding her close than was necessary, and the way he leaned in to speak into her ear, presumably at a lower, more intimate volume?

I could see her body language, now that Jamie had drawn special attention to the situation.  The way she turned her face away.  It was hard to see in the gloom, even with the help of nearby streetlights, but I saw disgust on her expression.

“Pierre,” I said.

“This is all very interesting, listening to you two,” Pierre commented.

“Go,” I told him, ignoring the commentary.  “Show yourself, not too close to here.  Distract them and put them on their guard.”

“If you’re sure,” Pierre said.  He didn’t quite straighten, but he did stand, and made his way off the side of the roof furthest from the thugs.

I watched the scene unfolding.  The lead thug was too into this.  The more he talked, the more the nanny shrank down into herself.  If there was a ladder, a hierarchy of power, then she’d dropped below the oldest boy.

“Shut up, just shut up,”  Jamie said, in a low voice, the words a delayed recitation that matched the movements of the boy’s lips.  “You leave her alone, you let her go.  You want us, you have us, my dad will pay any ransom you ask for, but you let her go.”

“They’re not going to let her go,” I said.  I judged the thug’s body language.  “Especially now that you asked.”

“Earlier, we talked about conscience,” Jamie said.  “Mine is… less comfortable with this.  Maybe, in the future, you could, I don’t know, assign more weight to this kind of trauma?”

“More weight?” I asked.

The middle child backed away from the shouting and the threats, only for attention to get turned his way.  He was being warned not to move.

He had, I suspected, done the perfect thing for the moment, if inadvertently.  He’d drawn attention to himself, and I wanted attention drawn away from the eldest child and the nanny.

“Just… give it consideration.  We’re used to variations on this theme.  You more so than me.  Their conception of ‘the worst day of their lives’ is… this.  That has a gravity.”

I looked at the quartet of innocents.

“What she’s facing.  Don’t trivialize that.  Respect it.”

“Why single out the nanny?  The children are being exposed to it too, aren’t they?”

“You’re not wholly wrong, but I was referring-”

He dropped the sentence as something caught the eye of the three thugs.  Two of them drew guns, loosening their grips on their captives.  One of them fired, and the children and nanny cried out at the volume of the shot and what it represented.

The middle child’s retreat and now Pierre had moved the focus of the thugs two steps away from their hostages.  The tension was still there, that dangerous anger that threatened to make them do something I’d regret, but the one was no longer dwelling on the nanny, and the children no longer had weapons pointed at them.  The thug’s eyes roved, searching for the rabbit and any potential attackers.

“That works,” Jamie said.  “Thank you.  For helping the nanny.”

“Does complicate things that they have their guns out,” I observed.  “But this is doable.”

They had weapons in hand, while they gave their hostages light pushes with the weaponless hands, herding them like cattle to move them in the general direction of the Devil’s place.

That route would mean they passed right by us.  Jamie and I were crouched on a flat rooftop, watching proceedings over a short wall that bounded the edge of the roof, as if the home was a small castle.

As the group approached us, the rabbit emerged from cover, standing so that the corner of the building blocked the group from seeing him.  He glanced up at us, his ears twitching.

I pointed, and he ran, passing behind them to duck into a side street.  A very liberal interpretation of the direction I’d indicated.

Kind of impudent, now that I’m paying attention.  We would have to be careful.

Still, the group was now moving down the street, right beneath us.

I ducked low as I walked along the short wall that bounded the roof, scooping up a coil of rope.  The knotting was already in place, with weights at the corners.  Not quite a net, not quite a lasso, but somewhere in between.  I liked to think of it as a cat’s cradle.

Jamie, right behind me, had the other.

After gesturing to get the timing down pat, I threw it over, the action synchronized with Jamie.  The rope attached to the top corner of the cat’s cradle ran through my open hand.  As I’d overshot a bit, I gripped the rope at the last moment, so it would land across the gunman’s hand, head, and shoulders.

He was the one who’d picked on the nanny, too.  I flicked the rope with a whipping motion that used my entire arm, to help cinch tight the loops that included his arm and neck, then hauled back, hurling my weight back, then turning, using the motion of my body to pull against the rope with both arms and with one shoulder.

Jamie wasn’t going to quite the same effort.  He’d hauled back, yes, but his shoulder wasn’t strong, so he simply cinched the loops shut with an upward and backwards motion, then immediately set about tying it to a branch that was worked into the roof-bounding wall.

Once he had tied it down, he worked on my particular set of ropes, attaching it to the roof.  I did my best to maintain workable tension while he did his job.

On the ground level, there were confused shouts, demands, and noises from the children.

Then a lone gunshot, piercing and very unexpected.  The shouts, demands, and noises were muted in the wake of it.

A miscalculation?  Had Jamie placed his cradle badly, or failed to haul back enough?  Had the third been so quick to pull out his gun, take aim at the children and shoot them?

I couldn’t imagine that.

Against all better judgment, I headed straight to the edge of the roof, looking down and over.

I assessed the situation, then threw myself backward before the second gunshot came.

The shooter was the one I’d caught.  His gun-arm was outstretched above his head, caught, and his ability to shoot was limited to firing skyward.

I waited, listening to the third one talking, trying to manage hostages that were no doubt breaking away from the group.  Those orders became cusses as the one I’d bound began firing off the rest of the bullets.  Then, after a tense pause, he began shouting and cussing.

Frustration.  Good enough.

I turned to Jamie and saluted.

“Sy,” he said.  “That was a possible course of action.”

“I’ve been wanting to do this since I came up with the idea,” I told him.

That said, I went over the edge of the roof.  I grabbed the rope on my way down, my heel finding a foothold in the loose netting.  My body weight, while not all that considerable, did tighten the ropes for the person directly below me.

Shifting position, I slid down the steep incline, both hands and one foot grazing the various handholds and footholds, so I could catch myself if I started moving too fast or if I needed to stop.

Jamie’s captive was getting himself loose, I saw.  I stopped my downward descent from the roof of the two-story building, catching myself, then leaped, grabbing the ropework that had the one wrist of Jamie’s captive bound.  My weight, the movement of the loose net and the man’s position meant that he stumbled, head and one shoulder knocking against the wall.

That would tighten the ropes around his arm.  He would be able to get it free in just a moment, but I wasn’t giving him that moment.  I half-fell, half-slid down the ropework, the rest of the way down, catching myself just as my foot collided with the hand that was still sticking up and through.

I grabbed hold of the net and swung down and around, bringing my feet into his hollering face.  It wasn’t that graceful or neat a hit.  I mostly caught his one eye and ear.  His hand, I saw, still stuck up, but with fingers pointed in new and interesting directions.

Good enough.  I hadn’t knocked him out, but he was reeling and hurting, and he’d dropped his gun.

Letting go of the net so I could fall the six or so feet to the ground, I looked at the third man.

He had a gun, I saw.  That was unfortunate.  It was aimed at me too, but he was holding off on firing, what with me being so close to his buddy.

Would he get clever?  Turn on the hostages?  Use them against me?

I was in the midst of preparing the mind-games and lines of dialogue that would put him off balance when I decided on something simpler.

“Rabbit,” I said, clearly and loudly.

I saw a look of alarm and confusion on the man’s face.  He turned, a moment too late.

The rabbit appeared out of shadows, moving as fast as a galloping horse, clubbing him across the lower face in passing.

I scooped up the gun from the ground.  There wasn’t much need.  The three thugs were hurt, hurting worse, and caught.

“I have a name, you know,” the rabbit said.

“Yes.  You’re quite right.  Spur of the moment thing.”

“I don’t understand why you call me rabbit,” he said.

“You don’t?” I asked.  I saw his ears twitch.  “Is… is that an extension of the previous thought, a ‘you know my name, so why do you call me that’ thing?  Or are you genuinely curious why someone would describe you as rabbit-like?”

Another ear-twitch.

“Thank you,” the nanny said.  “That was… unexpected.”

She looked utterly bewildered and a little bit in shock.  She hugged the two boys close to her with one arm, while holding the hand of the ten year old girl.

Giving a greater weight to trauma.  This was very possibly the worst instance of violence they’d ever experienced.  The mangled hand, the kick at someone’s face.

Lords, even Pierre was a terrible sight to behold.  He was a hack job of academy science, straight out of a nightmare, and he wore it with pride.

And… potentially blissful lack of awareness?

On a level, I knew all that, and it played into my actions, but so often I tended to bludgeon through and demand others keep up with me.

But if Jamie was willing to keep up and put ‘conscience’ at third or fourth place in our list of priorities for the sake of tonight’s plan, then I could bump it up when it didn’t cost me anything except maybe a bit of time.

“I’m sorry if I scared you four,” I said.  I might have even meant what I was saying.

The nanny nodded.  “Who are you?”

“Criminals,” I said.  “Scoundrels, bastards, fugitives.  I’m Sylvester, and this is Pierre.”

She nodded, but she didn’t look happy or secure.

The leader of the trio of thugs pulled at the ropework that had caught his wrist.  I pointed the gun at him, and he went still.

“We were after them,” I said.  Truth.  “Had the ropes ready, but they took a different route.  They grabbed you, which complicated things.  Made this more of a rescue than a…”

I trailed off, looking for the words.

“Interception?” Pierre offered.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.  I used the gun to give him a bit of a salute.

“What’s going on?  The fire at the house, thugs in the street, now this?”

There was a faint note of hysteria to her voice.

“Did those men say who they were working for?”

“The Devil?” the eldest spoke up.  He sounded bewildered at the idea.

“The Devil,” I said.  The magic word.  Jamie had used lipreading to confirm that the thugs had used it while talking to and threatening the Mayor’s nanny and children.  “Also known as Mr. Colby.”

“They said that too,” the boy said.

I know, I thought.  “He’s a very bad man who wanted to burn the city and rule over the ashes.  He targeted the Academy, the police chief’s house, the mayor’s house, various gang headquarters, I think.  I don’t know who you are, but-”

“We’re-” the elder boy said.  The nanny put a hand over his mouth.

I quirked an eyebrow.  “Doesn’t matter.  But you were probably on his list.  People he wanted to hurt.  We took it on ourselves to ignite the stockpile of fuel and incendiaries he was going to use to burn more of the city.  That stockpile happened to be located in his headquarters, which is a very tidy sort of quid pro quo, and now we’re going after his lieutenants.”

“I’m no lieutenant!” the lead thug protested.  I pointed the gun at him, and he shrank down as he faced the darkness of its barrel.

“I don’t understand,” the elder boy said, speaking around the hand that now loosely covered his mouth.

He wasn’t processing.  I could see it.  Shock, alarm.

I was seeing that what Jamie said was true.  Violence was like breathing to me.  I still wasn’t any good in a fight, but I could handle ambush and assassination.  I’d seen wounds of a horrific sort that these people probably couldn’t dream up with some colored pencils, a gun to their head, and a sudden fit of inspiration.

He was just a bit older than me, and he’d lived such a sheltered life.  How long had it been since he’d last seen blood?

Disconcerting to think about, now that Jamie had set my mind on that particular track.

“A war,” I said, very simply.  “A small one, over the city’s underworld.  You got caught in the middle.”

That was something they could understand.

“I didn’t know we had an underworld,” the nanny said.

“Everywhere has an underworld,” I said.  I looked around.  “Whoever you are, I don’t have any use for you.  You should go wherever you were going.  Don’t waste any time, avoid the main road and the crowds.  Avoid men like them if you can help it.”

“Will you come with us?”

“No,” I said.  “We’ve got things to do.  I’m sorry.”

The nanny shook her head.  She didn’t quite seem ready to break away and leave.

“Pierre, would you kindly collect the other guns?” I asked.

“Can do,” the rabbit said.

I waited while he attended to the task.  He came back, guns in hand, pointing them at our captive lieutenants.  All three were matching revolvers, which was convenient.  I took one and moved bullets between guns.

“Here,” I said.  I approached the nanny.  She shied back a bit as I started toward her.  Then she did it again as I lifted the gun, even though I’d reversed it so I held the barrel.  I reached for her hand and pressed the handle into it.  “Finger off the trigger unless you’re planning to shoot.  Just in case you run into more trouble.”

“I don’t think I could,” she told me.

“If it’s for them, not just for you?” I asked.  “You might want to.”

She stared down at the gun, then looked at the girl, her youngest charge.  I saw a small nod on the nanny’s part, intended more for herself than for me.

“Be safe,” I said.

That was the send-off.  She found the courage to hurry on.

“Goodbye rabbit,” the young girl said.  “Thank you!  Goodbye mister, thank you too!”

“My name is Pierre!” Pierre pronounced, indignant.

“You’re dead,” the lead thug said.  His hand was still outstretched above his head, with more rope around his neck.   The second thug was similarly trapped, but only around the one hand.  Broken fingers and a tight weave of rope made extricating himself something of a task.   The third was ass-down on the road.

“You sound pretty sure of that,” I said.

“I know my boss,” he said.  He twisted up his face, spitting.

“And I know me,” I said.  “I know I’ve faced down nobles.  I’ve faced down more monsters than you’ve kissed girls.  A lot more, judging by that mug of yours.”

I couldn’t resist throwing the insult in there.

Still, it only got me a snort in response.  “He’s a different sort of monster.  He’s a clever one.  This?  This nonsense with the fires?  People running around?  No law?  It’s his element.”

I tilted my head a little.

If anything, I might have said it was my element.

“The Devil gave out orders.  He instructed you to find children.  Kick down doors, hunt them, bring them to him intact?”

“The intact was implied.  He tells you to bring him something, you don’t damage the goods.  He gets to do the damage.”

I sighed a little.  “That’s fine.  What other orders did he give?”

I could see the man’s eyes move, a glance at his buddy on the ground.

Without looking, I pointed the revolver at the one on the ground.  He made a yelping sound, in his haste to exclaim in surprise and say something in the same breath.

I pulled the trigger, wincing at the force of the gunshot.

“I don’t know if I have the nerve for this part of things,” Pierre said, his voice breaking through the sound of ringing in my ears.  “So much of it is fun, the fire, the running around, rescuing pretty nannies and dandy little boys.  But I’m not one for killing.”

“Want to go for a walk, then?  See that nobody’s heading in the direction of the gunshots and shouting?”

“I can do that,” he said.

His hand reached down, took mine, and he pressed his gun into it.  I now had two, to aim at the remaining thugs.  Their expressions were caught between glares and something more aghast.

“If I don’t get the answers from one of you two, then I’ll find another merry little band of piss-spittles and quiz them.  I know that you’re supposed to say that the Devil scares you more than I do, but let’s cut straight to the chase.  I pose the more immediate threat.  What’s his move?”

“Going to the Academy,” the lead thug said.

“Interesting,” I said.  “Why?

“He doesn’t say why,” the man said.  “You don’t predict him.  You don’t ask!  He can kill you if you ask!”

Getting too upset, too irate.  His eyes kept moving left and right.

“Which Academy?” I asked.

“What?” he asked.

“Which Academy is he going to?”

There was a telling pause. Mentally fact-checking?  I looked at the other thug, the one that wasn’t talking, and there was a flash of fear on his expression, then the look in my direction, to confirm.

I pointed the gun at the lead thug, and I pulled the trigger again.  He didn’t even fall, what with the ropes still having something of a hold on his throat.  He dangled, the strength gone from his knees.

“Okay!” I said, injecting cheer into my tone.  “Your friend is a terrible liar.  I get the feeling you are too.”

That fear had crystallized now.  The thug had been a fairly decent liar, and I would have sussed it out quickly enough, but his buddy’s reaction had been the dead giveaway.  Now I was hoping his buddy continued to be as forthcoming with details and information.

“Well, it’s not the Academy.  Want to hazard an answer?”

“I-” the man said.  His mouth opened, then closed, a fish out of water.

“If you take too long I’ll think you’re making up an answer.”

“The train station.”

That one caught me off guard.

“Doesn’t strike me as the type to run,” I said.

“He’s not.  He’s laying a trap.”

“And it’s not a trap for me,” I said.

“We left the meeting, talked to some people, made sure we were ready for a war.  Part of that, we went by the police station.  Rang the special bell, talked to the chief.”

I set my jaw.

“You’ve got friends or something?  People coming in on the train sometime tomorrow?  You even asked about them, when you were being arrested?  He- it’s what he does.  You cross him, he destroys you and everything you love.”

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================================================== 12.07 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.7

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Jamie had made his way down from the roof.  Deeming the coast clear, he approached, stopped, and took in the scene.  He joined me in working to drag the bodies so all three were placed near one another.

“I should have known,” he said.  “In your twisted mess of a mind, when you propose the safe plan and the dangerous plan as a backup, and the dangerous plan could be seen as more amusing or fun from any angle, you’re really plotting to go ahead with the dangerous plan.”

“Oh, you’re talking about me going down the ropes.”

“Yes.  What else would I be talking about?”

“I completely forgot about the rope thing,” I said.  I gave the soldier a pat down as we propped him up next to the other two.  I found some bullets and placed them in the revolver.

“Glad to know the risk was worth it, then,” Jamie said, with a trace of sarcasm.

“Colby knows about the Lambs.  They’re due on a train that’s coming tomorrow.  He’s already sent people to the train station.”

Jamie blinked.  I saw the concern on his face as he processed the idea.

“When do the trains arrive?” I asked.

“Up to fifteen minutes late or fifteen minutes early, but… discounting the six-thirty train-”

“Too early,” I said.

That got me a nod of confirmation.  “Eight, eleven-thirty, then in the afternoon, two, five, eight-thirty, eleven.  The last train is sometimes late, depending on whether the green train gets priority, I’m not sure what the system is.  That’s for passenger trains.  Again, fifteen minutes deviation either way.”

“Non-passenger?”

“Every two hours starting at seven.  More reliable than the passenger trains.  Five minutes deviation?  Seven, nine, eleven, one, three, five, seven, nine, green train at eleven, then one o’clock in the morning…”

“And so on.”

“And so on.  You think they’d take a commercial train?  The trains pass through.  Most don’t even stop.”

“We’ve jumped off of enough trains.  I’m just… I’m trying to anticipate the moves the Lambs are making, the moves the Devil is making, and what our best play is.  I would have gotten your attention and immediately headed off, but I needed to think, and we need to wait for the rabbit.”

“Pierre.”

“Yes.  He went for a walk.  Didn’t like the murder-interrogation angle.”

Jamie gestured.  Bad.  The second word he used was the one for behind, but he moved straight into the gesture for time.  Past.

I raised an eyebrow.

Later.  He gestured.

He didn’t want Pierre to hear us talking about him.  Fair.

“It’s, what, eleven o’clock at night now?” I asked.

“Close to,” Jamie said.

“And you said I don’t have good timing,” I said.  “That was an off the cuff, educated guess, young sir.”

“I’m shocked that you even remember that part of our conversation earlier, yet you can’t keep simple names straight.”

“I remember what’s important,” I said.  “And if you doubt me, then it’s important I correct that.  We have to be able to trust one another.”

“Very important,” Jamie said, deadpan.  “But we’re getting distracted.  Yes.  It is eleven o’clock.  Go on.”

I shot him a look.  “What are you talking about?”

He gave me a look.

“Just kidding, kidding,” I said.  “Eleven o’clock.  First possible train the Lambs are on would be arriving at eight.”

“Yes.”

“That gives us a time window to work with.  It gives him a time window too.  One where he has the initiative.”

Jamie nodded.

“If anything, we could wait, bide our time, and see if Colby’s men get tired or restless.”

“Let’s assume he’s not stupid,” Jamie said.

“He found out about the Lambs and he has the sense to target them.  I’m not assuming he’s stupid,” I said.

“He might not let his men get tired like that.  He’ll have reinforcements.  He’ll swap out the people who’re camped out there, keep the numbers fresh.  He might even anticipate that we’re going to make a move on the train station.  You called him a logistician.  Don’t forget who your enemy is.”

“I don’t forget about my enemies,” I said.  “Or my allies.”

Jamie raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

I spoke, “Since his source on the Lambs was the local police, he might know the actual time they’re arriving.  Which leaves us in the lurch and gives him the ability to make a move and relocate the bulk of his forces at the critical time.”

“You didn’t mention that part.  About him talking to the local police.”

“No, yeah,” I said.  “That came up.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  “That paints a picture of the man as someone who is deep-set into the local infrastructure.”

“No argument here,” I said.  “Damn it!  I shouldn’t have spoken up about the Lambs, back at the station.  I was just so eager to know if the Lambs were en route, so I could adjust my plans, that I let it slip.  Shortsighted.  Damn it!”

“Nothing we can do about it now.”

I finished searching the second man.  I came up with a pack of cigarettes, and pocketed it.

“You’re smoking, now?”  Jamie asked.

“Maybe.  What if I am?” I asked, defensive.

“You’re not,” he said.  “I can see through your acts and fibs.  What are you thinking?”

“That I want to make a play, but we need soldiers and we need information.  We should talk to the mouse king and the mouse queen as the first step in that.”

“Maurice and Noreen.”

“Yeah, them.”

“You sure do remember your allies and enemies, Sylvester.”

“They’re neither.  They’re… factors.”

“Factors.”

“Things to be considered.  Neither good nor bad.  Like the weather.  Like this lazy city.  Like the fire.  Two stubborn teenagers who are just clever enough and just capable enough to get in my way, but not clever enough to listen to me.  This Noreen, she reminds me of Rick.”

“Oh good.  You should get along with her then.”

“Want to listen in?” I asked.  “Maybe you can get a better sense of her than I can.  Queer as that sounds.”

“Queer?”

“You’re good at reading people you know.  I’m good at reading people in general.  But she… turns things upside down.  Maybe you can get a clearer impression than I can?”

“I’m not against it.”

I nodded.  I looked around for the rabbit, then brought my hand to my mouth, whistling.

The rabbit stepped out of shadows, half a block away.  I used my arm to indicate a direction, and started walking.  He moved in parallel, rather than toward us.

We were a full two streets over before he reunited with us.  He made no mention of his departure from the interrogation.  I could respect that.  He had his limit, he knew where it was drawn, and he made no excuses for it.

I opened my mouth to say something, then stopped and turned to Jamie.  “Is there room in the budget for paying this guy more?”

“This guy?  You mean Pierre?”

“Thank you for getting my name right,” Pierre commented.  “I’ve been called a rabbit too many times tonight.”

“Yeah.  Pierre.”

“We have no budget.  We have very little money to spare at the current time, Sy.  Again, if you want more, you have to earn more.  It’s that simple.”

I sighed.

“Why?”

“I just want to make sure we keep him around.  I like him,” I said.  I looked up at Pierre, “I respect his work.”

“I would not turn down more pay than what we initially discussed,” Pierre said, very diplomatically.

“We’ll see,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

The streets weren’t all lit.  Perhaps one in three streets had streetlamps, artificial and flickering.  One in three used to have streetlamps, but the fires and a possible pull on resources elsewhere had left them without power.  They sometimes flickered to life for just a moment before dying, suggesting there was a connection somewhere along the line.  The last third were dark.

“Fires seem more or less at the stage we thought they’d be,” Jamie said, craning his head.  “I was worried about a bit of wind or something blowing them into residential areas, but we seem pretty secure.”

“Good,” I said.  “You said the winds shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I said the odds were in our favor.  Reading and memorizing fifteen years of the farmer’s almanac does not guarantee my predictions.”

“Did this time.”

He sighed.

“I don’t understand you two at all,” Pierre said.  “Predicting the weather?  Thinking like you’re doing?  Knowing which places to burn when people won’t be there?”

“But it makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it?” I asked.  “It’s like knowing the right piece to remove from a machine to make it collapse into its constituent pieces.  Except I’m the one telling you which piece it is.”

“Uhh,” Pierre said.  “I suppose?  Except I was setting fires.  Not removing pieces.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Pay me, keep me out of any trouble, let me stay free and let me run, and we’ll get along famously,” Pierre said.  He raised a hand to his ears, stroking them so they pointed directly behind him.

“Fair deal,” I said.  “Can you be intimidating?”

“Intimidating?”

Oh, the mouse king and queen were mad.

Jamie and I had plotted out the likely spot for the mouse king and queen to regroup.  The ‘yard’ was a place that the local youth fought over.  It was a king of the hill scenario, a dominance game where the gang of youths who had the most power would hold the yard, get first say in who got to hang there and use it.  Younger academy students from Corinth Crown, students from Bergewall, and the local indigent youth formed the six primary factions.  It was six and not three because the individual groups broke down into indistinct lesser factions.  The visiting children from the hospitales formed a final faction, allying with different groups that curried favor, with the poorer factions being the most common ally of choice.

Impossible to corral, hard to pin down, and as hard to herd as an equivalent number of cats.  Each group numbered four or five at most, so it wasn’t even worth the trouble to track them down.  Not while they were all scattered.

Noreen’s group, separate from all of the others, was larger, but didn’t really make tries for the yard, to the best of my knowledge.  With their house having burned, fear of further attacks on the immediate horizon, and an awful lot of questions, they had headed for the yard, the best-known meeting ground.  The space was set up so any number of sports could be played there, and there were two clubhouses that sufficed as temporary shelters in the here and now.

I was highly suspicious that they’d had some hopes of recruiting other children who headed here in a time of crisis, as a natural meeting point.  Maybe they’d even hoped to form a greater faction.

But I was one step ahead.  As we’d spread word, we’d directed the local youth well clear of the mouse queen and the yard.

You’re too dangerous, I thought, as I stared down Noreen.  The rabbit stood behind me, an eerie figure for the gathered children of Noreen’s camp, who were already feeling uncertain about how things stood.

“You started this,” she said.

“The Devil started it.”

“And burned down his own buildings?” Maurice asked.

That was me,” I said, lying.  “He had the incendiaries stockpiled.  I just… prematurely set them off.”

“Did you now?”  Maurice had a dark look in his eyes, but it didn’t translate to his voice.  He sounded remarkably calm and detached.  Then again, by my best estimation, he was detached.  What he was doing here was a dalliance, a lark.  There might have been real emotional ties to Noreen on some level, but he was in a position where he could always walk away, go back to the Academy, and do his thing there.

“That man was there when the fire started at our place,” Noreen said.

I felt a chill at the accusation, but I didn’t let it show in my expression.

I couldn’t read her, still.  I could, I was realizing, read the people around her.  The glances between them, looking for confirmation, the tells that pointed to surprise, the uncertainty… so long as she was this deeply tied into her people, who were on the edge of their seats, waiting for her next order, they were extensions of her.

“He absolutely was not,” I said.  “He was with me all night.  Well, more or less.  He kept an eye out for trouble, tracking the movements of the Devil’s people.  He wasn’t anywhere near here.”

I just had to hope that Pierre didn’t have any tells that she could read.  If she even thought along those lines.

“You said you’d upset things.  You said nothing about that affecting us,” Noreen said.

Her people were well trained.  At the sharper tone, not quite angry, because she didn’t seem to have emotions like that, they were shifting position, getting ready to act.

Noreen was the big mystery.  The person I couldn’t fathom and who I couldn’t seem to budge.  I was tense, on the edge of my seat, waiting to see how this conversation unfolded, the doors it might open and the doors it might close.

“That’s not on me,” I said.  “You slipped up somewhere along the line.  Tipped him off.”

“Nothing tipped him off,” she said.

The stonewall again.  Speaking with absolute, unassailable certainty.

“If anything,” Maurice commented, “You finding us earlier today might have been the problem.  It remains suspicious, whatever your history is, and it’s coincidental that they supposedly found us on the same day you did.”

“I’ve been on the run for half a year.  I was hunting people on the run before I had a wrinkle on my ballsack.  They didn’t track me.  Frankly, we could argue this back and forth all night and get nowhere.”

“No we couldn’t,” she contradicted me.

“No?” I asked.  Every time she threw one of those stonewall responses at me, I felt my teeth grinding against one another.  I kept a casual expression on my face all the same.

“Because I don’t need to be convinced.  I know what I believe, and I believe that you’re a problem,” Noreen said.  “I’ll deal with you, and remove the problem.”

She gestured.  That same airy wave.  Among the ten or so present, knives, lengths of chain, and small bats appeared.  There was one gun in the mix, too.

I hated her.  She was, in so many ways, a reflection of what I found difficult about Jamie, when I found Jamie difficult.  Inflexible, immovable, obstructive, and incomprehensible.  Funny, that I loved Jamie like a brother, but hated her, and I could draw parallels.

“That won’t bring them much emotional satisfaction,” I said.  “I don’t get a feeling you get much emotional satisfaction from anything that isn’t cigarettes, candy, or Maurice.  It doesn’t solve anything.  I die violently, you work out some aggression in the short term, but the situation is still what it is, you still have questions, and you have no power to answer them.  You live in fear for the next while, while the Devil rages.”

“Some of us have lived in fear every day of our lives,” Noreen said.

I saw one or two nods in the group of hardened youth.

“I’m offering you a life without fear.  It starts with removing the Devil from the picture.  It means food, shelter, and power.”

“With you at the top?” Maurice asked.

“I’m leaving, so no,” I said.  “Within the next few days.  Some friends are coming into town tomorrow.  I’ll be gone a day or two after.  When I leave, and I’m making this pledge to you, things will be stable.  The fighting will be done with.  Nobody will prey on children in West Corinth, and there will be sanctuary here.  Should that situation change, I’ll appear, or I’ll send agents.”

“Fanciful,” Maurice said, sounding far from impressed.

I did my own airy gesture, indicating the man who stood behind my right shoulder.

“Oh?” Pierre asked, with a note of surprise.  Every eye present focused on him, with the exception of mine.  He was the kind that drew attention from the smallest of actions.  “I didn’t know I was speaking at this meeting.”

“Can you vouch?” I asked.

“Ah.  I suppose I can vouch.  I’ve worked for a lot of people, and you seem cleverer than the rest of them put together.”

I gestured for him to continue.

“You set big plans in motion, and they seem to work.  I believe you when you say all of this.”

“Thank you,” I said.  I focused my attention on Noreen.

“What do you want?” she asked me, and it wasn’t an offer of help nor was it anything close to being conciliatory.  It was a challenge.  She was ready to fight me on this.

“Right now?  I’m saying you can come with me, and I have little expectation any of you will listen, but I’m making the offer, and I want you to remember the offer very clearly.  Because this matters.  I’m going to go find other children, and I’m going to organize them to take down the Devil.  Someone I know you have a grudge against.  I’m betting every one of you has been hurt by him in some form.  Now I’m going to go and I’m going to do more than use his own incendiaries to burn down his headquarters.”

I’d found the hook and I’d set it.  Noreen and Maurice had told me about the children the Devil had killed, the children he had taken, and the children he had drugged.  The odds were good that every one of their elite soldiers here had seen the fallout and the casualties of the man’s actions.

Now, by her inaction, by making her people stay, she had to remove those hooks.  She was telling them not to take action.  To stop me from working against the Devil would mean tearing those hooks out in a violent way, to be working against everything they felt they should be doing.

The hooks had a barb.

“Either you come with, in which case I can hurt him more, or you hold back, and you know that your cowardice at this critical time insults the memory of all the people you’ve known, befriended, and loved, who John Colby and the other local powers have hurt,” I said.  In which case I can loosen your hold on your members and poach them later.

“I’m trying to understand your approach,” Maurice said.

“I’m trying to stop John Colby, help the children of this town in a way you haven’t been able to, and change things for the better, putting a new infrastructure in place for before I leave,” I said.

“You’re treating Noreen and I as the enemy.”

He was astute.

I’m treating you as enemy because you are the enemy, in a way.  You’re not people I can work with, and you’re not people who’re helping all of the children who need helping.  You’ve set yourselves up as a local institution and you’ve left no room for a stronger organization of mice to grow.

You’re too damaged and too compromised, respectively, to be what the mice of West Corinth need.

I gave some time, appearing to weigh his words, then shook my head.  “I don’t think you’re the enemy.  But I don’t think you’re what the local mice need.”

“Mice.  That word again,” he said.

“I think… you found Noreen and you two work well together, in a way.  And that’s fine.  But you’re getting older.  Maybe you started off thinking it was a fling, and you would break it off as you got further into your studies at the Academy.  But it stopped being a fling.  You’re a pair, now.  For better or worse.  And as that pairing formed… you’ve been pulling away.”

“You don’t know us,” he said.

The sharpness of his response suggested I’d hit fairly close to home.

“Your focus isn’t on them.  It won’t be.  Mine is.

“And you’re better?  A more positive force?” he asked, incredulous.  His voice raised, “You started a war!”

It was surprising, to hear the laid back young Academy student raise his voice.

“What did you expect?” I asked, fierce.  “You know as well as I do that people have been preying on the people in this city.  Some of you are the prey!  You’ve done nothing.  Some warnings here and there, some counsel, but things are what they are and they haven’t changed for a long, long time.  Yes, I started a war, or I didn’t stop the Devil from starting it, but there’s a cancer here and I’m doing the cutting necessary to get it out.  It might hurt now, but it’s going to feel worlds better when we’re done.”

Take the bait.  Take the bait.  Take the bait.

“Sometimes,” Maurice said, his voice low, “You cut away the cancer and the patient dies.”

He took the bait!

“Come now, Maurice,” I said, my voice matching his, just as low and ominous.  I spread my hands a little.  “You complimented me on the quality of my stitching, didn’t you?  Take my word for it.  I’m good at the cutting part.”

He narrowed his eyes.

I backed away a step, arms still spread.  “I’ve made the offer.”

I took another step back.

The hooks were set.  How much pull did they have, now?

Another step back.

“I’ll come,” Noreen said.  “If you’ll give me the Witch’s head before the night is over.”

Maurice gave her a faintly surprised look.

I don’t want you, I thought.  I want your underlings, who follow orders so very nicely.  I had no plans of going after the Witch in the immediate future, so that’s a pretty inconvenient proviso.

“Fine,” I said.

“I said I,” she said, “Because this isn’t a group anymore.  No home to go back to.  After tonight, I’m done.”

“I have no problem with that,” I said.

“Where are you going?” Maurice asked her, sounding vaguely lost.

“You said you had space for me,” she said.

“That was a lark,” he said.  “Said in the heat of a very warm moment.”

“I’m holding you to it,” she said, lifting a knife to point at him.  Deathly serious.

He huffed out a laugh.  “I’m not coming.  I have things to look after, and my absence would be missed.  And it seems I have to make room in my apartment for Noreen, on penalty of death.”

The pair is broken?  Or are they stronger than that?

I was jealous that they had each other.  The rabbit stood to my right, the specter of Lillian to my left.

Lillian was in danger.  Lillian was coming soon.  The thoughts conflicted, fear and eagerness mingling.

The Lambs were coming.  The Lambs were at risk.  I had no idea what form that risk took.

One by one, the soldiers stood.  They looked angry, confused, but I’d given them a clear target.  Even if they didn’t wholly trust me, thanks to Noreen’s infectious and eerily accurate paranoia, the Devil was a clearer, more readily apparent enemy.

We left, putting the yard behind us.  The place was the site of a perpetual game of king of the hill.  Now, with the rest of the night looming before us, I was facing another game of king of the hill.  The play for the train station.  The devil with the benefit of having made the first move, a damn good play, and having the other major factions at least partially on his side against the upstart newcomer who had insulted and demanded blood money of them.  That was what I was up against.  I’d chosen the fight, but I didn’t like the battlefield or the nature of this particular contest.  The Devil would be too entrenched, too enduring.

Me with only pawns on my side, really.  We would have more pawns within the hour, at least.  Noreen was a known face, and having her with me would at least help me recruit the bulk of the more capable children.  I was hoping the benefits in that outweighed the drawbacks of, well, Noreen.  My core forces currently consisted of Noreen, six mice and Pierre.  I couldn’t be sure how many more I would recruit.

Which wasn’t to discount the ace up my sleeve, who was staying out of sight so he might seem dead to the rest of the world while he remained very much alive in reality.  Jamie stuck to the shadows as Lambs quickly learned to do, not even aware that Lillian and Gordon kept him company.

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================================================== 12.08 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.8

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“I want us all to be on the same page,” I said.  I kept my eyes forward, scanning the surroundings.  I had twenty youths ranging from eleven to eighteen years of age, Noreen, Pierre, and Jamie.

It was a good number.  The trick with this sort of recruitment was that if I turned someone down, then others would get cold feet.  Turning down Noreen would have made others second guess.  The same had gone for the larger group of children.  It was a strange quirk of psychology, something that didn’t make sense in the long run, but faced with what I’d described as serious danger, with a share of the city actively burning as I’d made my pitch, the idea of being turned down after offering help was an equivalent factor to the danger involved.

Had the poorer children of West Corinth been more zealous or courageous as a whole, and I had been in cities where they might have been, then I could have ended up with an unmanageable number.  It would have been all too easy for me to be stuck delegating to Noreen, just to maintain some control, and losing control in the long turn.

Twenty was good.  Twenty-five might have been better, but thirty too much.

“While we’re all getting on the same page, let’s start with page one.  I’m doing the work here.  You’re my eyes and ears.  Everything I’m going to do is going to be done for a reason.  I arranged the release of this man and one other man from prison, out from under the custody of forty or fifty Crown officers and another hundred or so staff members of the building.”

“He did,” Pierre said, without prompting.

“Each and every one of you has your own reasons for being here tonight,” I said.  “Most of you despise the Devil of Corinth, John Colby.  Some of you will want to get your hands dirty and take your shot at him.  If you’re old enough and if you’re really insistent on it, I won’t say no to giving you that chance.  But the bulk of you will go where I say and do what I say.  The Devil’s men will pay for what they’ve done to your friends and families.”

I stopped in my tracks and turned around.  I looked over the crowd of youths, being sure to look each in the eyes.  A part of me was already studying them, trying to see who might be a bad communicator, the ones who might give me bad information.  The ones who might break ranks and be creative, and put themselves at risk.

I needed to put on a bit of a show, to convince them of what I was doing.  Words weren’t enough.

The simplest things could go a long way.  I drew my knife very casually from my belt.  While I talked, I let it dance around my fingers and my hand.  I knew that most of the youths were fixated on the blade, as if waiting for me to slip up and gash a finger or drop it on my foot.

I looked over the group of youths, and suppressed a smile as I saw Jamie in their ranks.  Hidden among the herd.  He winked.

“Hand signals,” I said.  “I’m going to run you through basics.  I’ll give you a chance to ask questions later, and after that, we won’t speak unless it’s necessary.  Starting off, most important thing, if you’re relaying someone else’s signal, give me a number.  Take the number they gave you and add one.  Or just make it one, if you’re passing it on from the original.  Understand?  First person says ‘danger’.  Next says ‘one, danger’.  Then ‘two, danger’, and so on.  Assuming you all can count to ten?”

There were nods.

“Good,” I said.  “Numbers.  One, two, three, four, five…”

I used my fingers, indicating each gesture in turn.  I stopped the knife act while I did so, to be sure I had their full attention.  As I segued into later numbers, I touched my thumb to pinky, then to ring finger, then to middle finger, to index finger, and finally made a fist.

“…six, seven, eight, nine, ten.  If people are too far away and you can’t see fingers, then use your hands, like they were clock hands.  Someone gestures?  Increase the count, copy it, pass it along.”

“Danger,” I said, extending fingers, pointing them together.  “There, there, there, be aware, trap.”

There were nods.  People didn’t seem enthusiastic.  There was uncertainty.

I fiddled with the knife as I thought over the balance I needed to strike.  I wanted to have more comprehensive signals, but I could make do without.  It was better than overloading them.

“If you want to indicate that something important is happening, or you’re in danger?  Hand over your head.  Pierre?  Look for them, follow it to the source, then relay it back to me at the next opportunity.”

“Not a problem.”

“If you see people?  Signal danger, the direction, and the number of people.  That gets passed on, I see it, I’ll manage it.  Do that, stay out of sight, and if I or Pierre say to do something, do it.  That’s your job.”

Jamie subtly signed noise, followed by blind.

“Actually,” I said, “Now that I think about it.  One more sign.  But it’s not one you need to remember and give to me.  It’s one I might give to you.”

I brought a fist by my ear.  I ‘exploded’ it open twice, fingers extending so they pointed at my ear.

“Noise.  If you see me do that, make noise.”

They looked uncertain.

“Trust me,” I said.  “Just remember the hand-motions for numbers, danger, and for getting Pierre’s attention.  Stay hidden and pass on signals you see.  When in doubt, signal, or keep signaling with your hands.”

I looked over the group again, then indicated a pair.

“You two, I want you up here.  On this rooftop.  You keep an eye out, and you watch the groups I’m going to position over there and over there.”

I’d picked two who were sticking close enough together to be buddies or siblings.  They would feel more secure in each other’s company, which I deemed necessary, given how nervous and uncertain they seemed.  It would put them fairly far out of the way.

“There’s a ladder over here,” I said.  “Come on.”

It took a frustrating ten minutes to get them settled, to find them a hiding spot where they had a good vantage point to see the area and the nearby balcony and rooftop where their neighbors would be.

The balcony was easier.  One individual, older than me.

Once he was masked by the gloom, he was really only visible if someone was looking for him.

In twos and ones, I positioned the children and adolescents.  I wasn’t quite done when the first set of hand signals came through.  I saw the two-danger-west-one signal, then the three-danger-west-one signal.

One man.

I nodded.  “I’ll need someone to come with me,” I said.

“I’ll come,” Noreen said.

“No.  Stay with the rest.  Keep them together, keep them safe.  I’ll take… you.”

I indicated Jamie.

He didn’t smile or wink.  He even managed to look a little spooked at the prospect of accompanying me.  Of all the youths present, I was pretty sure that only Noreen might have seen the ruse.  She was sharp, and she was watching the two of us as we walked off.

We were a good distance away before Jamie commented, “You seem to be loving this.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” I said, under my breath, lying.

“It’s the Lamb’s signal network, like we’d do on a job.  But instead of quality, you’re aiming for quantity.”

“More familiar ground, that’s all.”

“You’ve got it set up so you have your own lesser Lambs feeding you the information you need, and you get to be in the spotlight all the time.  Presumably.  I have no idea where you want me in this plan of yours.”

“Sharing the spotlight, of course,” I said, quiet.

I saw the signals appear again.  The timing and the direction that they popped up told me things.  The man they’d spotted was closer, now.  He also seemed dangerous to my lookouts, given how quickly they’d chosen to signal again.  Weapon in hand?

“Stay out of sight of the lookouts where you can,” I said.  “Take out the ones you can.  I’ll rendezvous with you regularly, so we can compare notes and work together on any bigger puzzles.”

Lots of houses with lawns around here, garages, one-horse stables, carriages, and a surprising number of automobiles.  I assumed we were close to one of the big manufacturing cities.

It was a city built around the imposing fort that had become the main building of Corinth Crown Academy, a city initially meant to be a vacation destination.  The whimsy of the vacation side mingled with the fort element of things, creating a distinct style.  Many buildings had a flashy ‘castle’ aesthetic, with crenelations around rooftops and very square or rectangular buildings that favored arches.  Other parts of the city were stylish, but the style almost always had something utilitarian to it, if it wasn’t done up in a way that was clearly built to weather bad circumstances.

Only the heavy use of builder’s wood broke up the stony, sturdy look that predominated, with branches winding this way and that up building faces, many of the branches reinforced or shaved back in a way that made them annoyingly difficult to climb.

I saw the third wave of signals, and saw the children in the shadows at the edge of one rooftop, peering past crenelations to watch Jamie and I make our silent approach.

Wait, I signaled to Jamie.

I still held the knife from earlier.  I shifted my grip on it as I approached the corner, watching the face at the edge of the rooftop.

I watched as his eyes widened.  I heard footsteps.

I gestured.  The motion toward my ear, fist exploding into extended fingers, twice.

“H-hey!  Loser!”

The man stepped into view, head turning toward the sound, away from me.  I noted the gun that he had out.  His weapon of choice and his style of dress matched the Devil’s men, shirt-sleeves were rolled up to expose an uneven tan, he wore simple slacks with suspenders and sturdy boots, and had a cap with a brim tucked into the back of his waistband.

I drove the knife into the back of his knee, piercing.  The angle I drove it in and the position of the blade meant the sharp edge slid against tendon.  Something was severed and snapped.

The man tipped to the ground, screaming a moment later than it felt like he should, given the nature of the injury.  I saw him catch himself, hands going to the ground to keep his face from smacking into the road.  His screaming continued, taking on a different kind of pitch as one hand went back toward his waist.

I beat him to it, drawing his knife and slashing it toward the reaching hand.  He flinched, lost his balance, and collapsed down onto his belly, the scream terminating as his remaining air woofed out of him.

I slashed my knife against the back of his other knee, paused, to see what he’d do next, and on seeing him try to use his arms to prop himself up, kicked his elbow hard.  I’d hoped it would fold the wrong way, and it didn’t, but it did seem to hurt him an awful lot.

One good cut at the elbow and another at the wrist of his other arm effectively incapacitated him.

He alternately screamed and whimpered as I searched him.  I found a wallet and emptied it, took a set of keys, and then stepped back.

“Not going to finish him?” Jamie asked, from the shadows.

“The lookouts need to know I’m for real.  If the enemy wants to help him, they’ll have to devote hands and time to the job.  It’ll slow them down, and it’ll demoralize,” I said.

“It’ll demoralize your lookouts, watching and listening to a man die,” Jamie said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.  “They’ll do what they’re supposed to.  They’re part of a system now.”

“A system?”

“They might be willing to betray me, but they won’t be willing to betray everyone else they’re working with.  Most won’t be, anyway.  This isn’t going to collapse unless one of the lookouts gets spotted and gets hurt as a consequence,” I said.

“What’s the end goal?”

“For now?  Dealing with the patrols and reinforcements.”

“Siege?”

I nodded.

“Morale plays a part in a siege, Sy.  This isn’t what I was talking about, with the maid.  But it’s a thing.”

“You saw it, when we were talking to Noreen.  I think it was the same when we talked to the other children.  There’s a general awareness that there’s danger in this city.  Anywhere you go, really.  That people prey on other people.  There’s no hope, not really.  They might be more unhappy in the short term, but in the long term… they’ll think back to tonight, and maybe there’ll be hope.”

Jamie moved closer, to look down at the man, who was trying his best to drag himself away with one intact elbow, a gashed one, and two injured knees.

“Dark sort of hope, Sy,” Jamie murmured.

“I don’t know what other kind to offer,” I said.

“Don’t forget that they’re people,” he said.

“The thugs?”

“The children.  Every last one of them is complicated.  You can be good at dealing with base human behaviors, pushing people one way to get the reaction you want, pulling another way to set them up to fail or, more rarely, to succeed.  But there’s more going on.  There are longer-reaching consequences.”

I nodded, watching the man struggle.

He would bleed out.  It would take a while.

“Are you talking about someone particular?” I asked.

“Topic for another night,” Jamie said.  “We shouldn’t dawdle.”

We hurried back on our way to Noreen and the remaining lookouts.  I made a point of waiting until I was near them before I cleaned off my knife and sheathed it.

Jamie had already made himself scarce again.

“It’s going to be a long night,” I addressed the larger group.  I indicated a building with the general proportions of a barn.  “Three people in there.  Two on one end, one on the other.  Can relay signals across the building.  Let’s find our way in.”

One hour in.  Four bodies, two maimed.  The second one I’d maimed had gone quiet, while the first was still making noise on occasion.

I was using a stone to straighten one of the knives I’d claimed when I saw the signals fly up.

Hands in the air.  Special attention needed.

Another set of signals followed.  Danger, three men.  Three groups away.

Three men who were doing something I needed to be aware of.  I knew where the groups were stationed, and there were only two points that could be where the trouble was originating.

I looked at Pierre, who immediately headed off in the direction in question.  I followed, at a considerably slower pace.

My arms hurt.  I’d gouged the webbing between finger and thumb with the guard of my knife during one of my stabbing sprees.  One of the men had accidentally hit me across the face as he’d tumbled to the ground, tipping more onto me than away from me.  Still, the damage and fatigue were negligible.

I saw Jamie, and gestured, directing him in one direction, while I moved in another, so we were each moving toward different sites.

My heart nearly jerked its way free of my chest as I ran into Pierre.

Rather than speak, he copied the gestures.  Danger, two.  His hand dropped, as if he was indicating a certain height.

I nodded.  Children.

I picked up the pace, Pierre following and watching my flanks.

I was just in time to see two thugs pushing a small wagon, each holding one of the arms as they pushed it like an oversized wheelbarrow.  They moved it against a shed, and one of them held the wagon steady while the other climbed up onto it, which would allow him to get onto the shed, which would then serve as a stepping stone to get onto the low roof.

I kept to the grass as I approached, moving quick and low to the ground.

“Get the little fuckers!” the one on the ground said.  “Devil’s gonna be happy we finally found some.”

He was leaning forward, resting one foot on one of the arms of the wagon that would be strapped to the horse’s side.  His focus was on what was happening above.

It would be so handy if the girls I’d situated on the roof were looking over and I could signal them.  Jamie’s idea for the timed distractions had been invaluable, turning heads and drawing attention at just the right times, allowing me to dart across a street I’d normally be spotted on, or giving me the freedom to strike.

I looked for Pierre and didn’t see him.  He’d studiously avoided the places where the killing was happening.

As it was, I had to do this myself.

The one that was climbing onto the shed was trying to manage the climb while holding a pitchfork.  I had only a few moments.  After that, I faced the chance that he would simply get onto the roof and take the girls hostage.

I approached the man at the lower part of the wagon without making a sound.  Hamstringing would do.

At just the last second, I saw the bulge at the side of his overalls.  Gun, a concealed one.

I grabbed his arm with one hand, and sliced through his armpit with the knife as he wheeled to face me.  As he turned, he took his weight off of the arm of the wagon.  His buddy, still trying to make the climb onto the shed’s roof from the end of the wagon, was dropped to the ground, pitchfork coming down on top of him.  Unfortunately, it didn’t come down pointy end first.

The one I’d sliced tried and failed to reach for the gun at his side, but his arm was injured.  He looked for a moment like he would go for the awkward fumble using the wrong hand, but caught me off guard when he instead decided to throw a punch, smacking me right in the mouth.

This was bad.  Any confrontation I couldn’t resolve in the opening move was a lost fight, as far as I was concerned.

I staggered back a fair distance, one hand going to my mouth.  The one who’d punched me drew a blade from a sheath he’d attached to his overalls, between the shoulderblades.  A machete.

While he drew the machete, I drew my gun.  I aimed and fired it, putting a bullet through one corner of his eye socket and into his skull cavity.  I winced at the noise of it.

Pitchfork scrambled to his feet, but with the wagon to one side of him, the shed to the other, he didn’t have much of anywhere to go.  I fired once, putting a bullet through his gut, then, on judging his reaction, put another one through his gut for good measure.

Round bullets, low velocity gun.  The shot would make a ruin of his midsection.  He would die, and it wouldn’t be fast.

“You’re safe now,” I spoke, loud enough that the girls on the roof could hear.

The man I’d shot groaned.

The girls were fourteen or so.  It hadn’t been long ago that Lillian had resembled them.  The Lillian of almost two years ago had worn a similar expression.  Haunted and tear streaked.

Her specter appeared next to me.  I could smell her.  I could feel her warmth and that tightness in my chest I felt when she clung to me in that way she did.

I’d mentally classified the two fourteen year old girls as being grittier than they were, being older than they’d seemed to be.  They were trying to put on a brave face, but I could see the tracks of tears from when they’d believed the man with the pitchfork was going to get them, and I could see the lingering fear.

I looked at Lillian, and I saw her plea.

I put another bullet in the man who’d been climbing onto the shed, turning the slow death into a fast one.  I heard a yelp from the roof.

I put the gun away and looked up.

“I made noise,” one of the girls on the roof said.  “They heard.”

“It’s fine.  You signaled, right?  For help?”

She nodded.

“Then you did everything perfect,” I lied.  “Noise can’t be avoided, sometimes.  You’re okay?  Unhurt?”

Nods.

“Okay,” I said.   “Just stay hidden for now.  No need to worry about signals.  The sound of the gunshots might bring more attention, so keep your heads down for now.”

It would hurt, not having the girls as part of the network, but they were in a bad state, and it would only be downhill from here.

I saw one nod.  A moment later, they retreated.

I approached the bodies, already looking to see what I could take off of them, when I sensed someone approach.  I turned, gun in hand.

Jamie.

I lowered the gun.

He shot a glance up toward the roof.  He’d been close enough to maybe see or hear the tail end of that interaction.  That, or he’d drawn conclusions from the scene.

“Don’t say anything,” I said.

“Won’t,” he said, quiet.  “Your ‘system’ has its kinks, but it’s working so far.  There’s something to be said for that.”

I nodded.

He moved closer, and looked down at the guy who’d punched me.  “Lieutenant.”

“Is he?  Bastard had a gun and a machete.”

“He also hit you, looks like,” Jamie said.  He reached out to touch my face, and I pulled away, annoyed.

“Does it look bad?” I asked.

“Not too bad.  You’ll be bruised in the morning unless we get you some medicine.  I think there are some syringes in the luggage back at the orphanage.  Will work, unless we wait too long.”

“We might.  We’re playing the long game here.”

Jamie nodded.

“Other group said they’re fine,” he said.

“Good.”

“We’re cutting down their numbers, but this won’t decide anything,” Jamie said.  “We have to make a move on the train station sooner or later.”

“I sent Pierre out to take a look,” I said.  I finished searching the bodies, pocketing another gun, and then straightened.  I fixed my clothing a bit, and gingerly touched my lip.  “They’re agitated.  They might have heard some of the screams, and they’ll definitely have heard the gunshots just now.  People they were expecting to come relieve them haven’t.  So they’re doing tentative patrols around the train station.  I told Pierre to look at houses near the train station that had a vantage point to see anyone coming and going, and he thinks there were some suspicious people.”

“Keeping watch?”

“A direct approach doesn’t work.  The people on either side of the street who are watching from nearby buildings come out and fold in behind us.  Targeting the people in the buildings gets messy-”

“-because while we handle that discreet job, patrols move to the train station, or to the same building you’re trying to clear.”

I nodded.  “And they get reinforcements, fresh eyes, information, and reassurance.”

“Can’t have that.”

I shook my head.  “No siree.  Which means we wait it out.  Apply the pressure until something breaks.”

“Or the Devil makes his move.”

“He will,” I said.  “Unless he’s a completely separate entity from Mr. Colby, then he’s got some logistician in him.”

“He’ll know those people he’s moving from here to there aren’t getting to their destination.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Pierre stepped out of the shadows, shaking his head.  Quietly, he said, “You’re a strange pair.”

I diplomatically chose not to say the obvious to the rabbit-headed man with the bulging eyes.

“Something going on?” I asked him.

“What you were talking about.  The Devil is making his move.  The lookouts were trying to signal, but the group closest to him didn’t want to stick their heads up.  The chain of communication was broken.”

“He’s here?” I asked.

“He’s here,” Pierre said.  “The signals.  they came in so fast and with so many different numbers I couldn’t keep track.”

“A lot of people?” Jamie asked.

“A lot of people,” Pierre said.  “Nine or ten, from the furthest group away.  Then a number I can’t remember, but more than five, and then seven, then ten, then-”

“An army,” I said.

“Too many to be the Devil alone,” Jamie said.

“The Apostle.  They’ve figured out we’re here, probably figured it a little while ago, if they’ve brokered this deal to join forces,” I said.  I leaned against the wall, thinking.  “Forces fanned out, then?”

“Which group didn’t report in?” Jamie asked.

“Third group out.”

“And the Devil was near there?”

“Something like that, from what I could get from them,” Pierre said.

Jamie nodded, processing that.

“They know what we want and they’re hellbent on keeping it from us.  They’re going to get to the train station,” I said.  “If they don’t find us on the way, they’ll reinforce the group that’s already there.”

“Most likely,” Jamie said.  “Unless you’ve got a weapon of war.”

I shook my head.

“The strategy could still hold,” Jamie said.  “Siege them.”

“You default to being too cautious,” I said, still thinking.  I had a good mental picture of where the groups were, now.  It was a vague picture, but I’d quickly picked up my own system.  When I saw that ‘three’ pop up to suggest the message had come from three groups away, I had an almost instinctive sense of where the people in question were.

Now I was doing that with the Devil, and I was having to admit to myself that it wasn’t worth the risk to keep the system in place.  Not during this stage of things.

“Pierre.”

“Mm hmm?”

“Remind me to give you that raise.”

“Will do.”

“And, without putting yourself in danger, do your best to get to the children.  Communicate to them.  No more signals.  Just hide.”

“I can do that.”

Somewhere, a third of the way across the country, the Lambs had already boarded a train, and were on their way here.  They were discussing Jamie and I, formulating a strategy, talking about the situation in West Corinth and what they might expect.  I imagined some nostalgia, some heightened emotion.

I thought about that heightened emotion getting cut short in a few instants of violence, the Lambs outnumbered and cornered from the get-go.

“Sylvester,” Jamie said, cutting in.

I raised my eyes from the point in the ground I’d been staring at.  I looked up at Pierre.

“Thank you, Pierre.  That’ll be all for right now.” I said, gesturing much as I’d seen Noreen do.  He ran to see to his task.

The gesture reminded me…  “Noreen’s close?”

“Close enough,” Jamie said.  “Why?”

“We’re going to have to get creative,” I said.  “And I got the impression she wanted to get her hands dirty at some point tonight.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.09 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Horse and cart, or horse and wagon, or horse and carriage, to start with,” I told Jamie.  I paused.  “Preferably a stitched horse.  Where?”

“I saw one stationed outside a house a few blocks away.”

“Perfect.”

“Thinking about getting out and away?”

“Not in the slightest,” I said.  “Just the opposite.”

As Jamie turned to me to check my expression, I flashed him a grin.

“That worries me,” he said.  “Invasion?”

“Attack,” I said.  “Some invasion involved.  In a sense.  A keg of something flammable would be great, but I won’t hold out hope.”

“Haven’t seen anything nearby,” Jamie said.

“Too bad.  Explosives?”

Jamie shook his head.

“Alright,” I said.

We approached the spot where I’d positioned Noreen.  I beckoned for her to come down from her roost.

“Assuming you’re handling that, where do you need me?”

“Thinking about that.  Feeling up to shooting, with your shoulder being wonky?”

“It’s not too bad.”

“Assist me, then.  We’ll maximize the damage we do, working together.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to be possible to keep them from getting to the train station.  Once they’re there, they’ll want to fortify that position.  I want to make that as painful as possible.  So… horse and carriage to start.  Then we see what we can do in cleanup, and then see what we need to do from there.”

Jamie nodded.

Noreen had made her way down to the ground.  She looked between Jamie and I.

“You know each other,” she said.

“We’re attacking,” I said.  “Want to help?”

“You know each other,” she said, again.

I sighed.

“We do,” Jamie said.

“Is there something going on that I need to know?” she asked.

“No,” I said, annoyed.  “And we’re short on time.  Want to help?”

“You’re keeping secrets from the people who are working for you,” she said.  “I don’t know what I’m getting into.”

“You can leave if you aren’t confident,” I said.  “I’m asking you if you want to help as a matter of courtesy.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” she said.  “You burned my home down.  I’m not leaving, but I’m not going to help unless you answer my question.”

I kept utterly still, my face like stone, while I very seriously considered the fact that I had several guns and Maurice was likely the only person who would really miss her.

Not that I could, or would.  Not really.

“Is he the person who burned down my home?” she asked.

“I’m not,” Jamie said.  “I’m a fellow fugitive, a member of Sylvester’s old team.  As far as the rest of the world is concerned, I’m dead.  I joined tonight because I could blend into the crowd.”

She looked suspiciously between Jamie and I, before giving Jamie a small nod.

“You being alive is the worst kept secret,” I commented.

“You told her who you were,” Jamie said.

“I’m alive, though.  You’re supposed to be dead.”

“The secret is bound to get out.  When it does, we can tell them I’m useless for caterpillar.  The only place where it matters is when our… guests arrive.”

“They know about these guests?  That’s why they’re taking the train station?” Noreen asked.

“Tell her more, why don’t you?” I told Jamie.

“Old friends of ours,” Jamie said.  “Ex-teammates.  The Devil knew about them.  their existence might be why he targeted you and your home, if he thought you were harboring them, or that you were them.  But they’re not in the city.  They’re coming, soon, he knows this now, and they’re serving as unwitting bait in the confrontation against the Devil.  It’s why everything is happening here.”

He’d done a nice job of reinforcing my lies.  I added another layer of deception by beating her to the punch in responding to Jamie.  “When I said you should tell her more, I was being sarcastic.”

“We should keep her in the loop,” he said.

“It’s your fault,” Noreen interjected, very simply.  “We’re fighting to protect people we don’t know.”

“It was a war that was bound to happen,” Jamie said.  “Do the math.  If we didn’t challenge him, how many children would suffer each year?  How much damage would be done?  Would your headquarters really have been left alone, or would someone have tried to take it?”

Noreen frowned, but she didn’t disagree.

“Can we go?” Jamie asked.  “This next part is pretty key, when it comes to timing.”

“Which direction?” Noreen asked.

Jamie indicated a direction.  We walked briskly as a trio.

High overhead, clouds and smoke churned in the sky, blown by wind that seemed to be coursing forth at high altitudes but not really touching us much on the ground.  The city itself felt stale, hot, and had the worst elements of being smoky and being humid.  It was a good balance of light and dark, however, making it clear enough to see things that were out in the open while providing shadows to lurk within.

The smoke was the worst part.  Just enough to make my eyes sting, and to clog my sense of smell.  My sweat felt dirtier than normal sweat, as if rubbing at my brow might leave faint gray streaks.

“Noreen,” Jamie said.  “They experimented on you.”

Noreen turned her head.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.  I’m not prying.  I’m wondering.”

“They experimented on me,” Noreen said.  “The Witch arranged it.”

I gave Jamie an annoyed look.  Was he actually getting answers out of her?  Why?  How?  I understood people, I could pick relationships and psychology apart, and I wasn’t even seeing any special tool that Jamie had drawn on.

“What was the experiment?” Jamie asked.

“Drugs.  Something to affect my mind.”

I raised my eyebrow at that, but Jamie, behind Noreen’s back, gestured for silence.  I kept my mouth shut, looking away, remaining detached from the conversation.

Build familiarity, I thought.  Shared experience.  Tell her about Wyvern, how close it is to what she had.

“Did it work?” Jamie asked.

“Yes.  Everything became sharper, brighter, and clearer.  Sights, sounds, feelings.  The world seemed alive.  They read me words, and the words had colors and a taste to them.  I did tests before and after, they liked the results, I think.  They kept promising to let me go ‘soon’, and soon never came.  But when they gave me the pills, I lost something.”

“You gained something, and you lost something?”

“Yes.  But when the pills wore off, the things I gained went away, and the things I lost didn’t come back,” Noreen said.  “They gave me more.  The drugs got less effective, and I kept losing things.  When I wouldn’t swallow any more, they used a machine and a tube to give me more.  I tried to stop eating, and the tube stayed in my throat, so they could make me take food and water with the pills.”

They hollowed her out, I thought.

“Did you retain anything?” Jamie asked.

“They changed the way I think.”

“How so?” Jamie pushed.

I expected every push to be too far, to hit a sensitive spot and make her hostile.  Didn’t happen.

“I feel like I see everything side-on while everyone else sees it straight-on,” she said.  “Like the props and backdrop in a play.  I was taken into that lab and the world looked normal, and when I was let go, I saw that there weren’t any buildings at all.  Only cardboard cut-outs of building faces with nothing real behind them.”

“You don’t get along with Sylvester.  Because of… the unique angle you see him?”

“He’s a liar.  Even when he speaks truth it sounds like a lie, and I don’t know if he has told the whole truth once a single time he’s spoken.”

“That’s downright-” I started.  Jamie gestured.

“He’s a deceptive person by nature,” Jamie said.  “That’s what they made him into.”

I wanted to grab him by the collar and shake him.  That’s optimal ground to build rapport!  Draw connections between her and me!  Draw connections between her and yourself.  You’ve both been mistreated!  You were permanently changed!  Common ground!

He went on, “What if the reason he looks strange to you is that he’s askew to start with?”

“That’s not how it works,” she said.  “In my head or how I see people.”

“Why not?  Educate me.”

“Because I’m not wrong about things,” she said.

Ah, the stonewall.  That perfect conviction.

“You’re right about him.  You’re just following it to its logical conclusion, and that’s not right,” Jamie said.

I sighed.

Noreen was quiet.

“He’s destructive and devious.  He’s vicious.  I feel the need to point out that he’s killed an awful lot of your enemies tonight.  He’s devastatingly intelligent-”

“Thank you, for that,” I commented.

“-and he’d have no compunctions about using that intelligence to attack you, if he thought it was for the greater good.  And he has a warped and often convoluted sense of what that greater good is.”

Noreen nodded.

“But there’s nobody I trust more,” Jamie said.

“You just said he was a liar.”

“He is.  And I trust him.  He’s dangerous, and I feel safest when he’s at my side.  He’s warped, and his existence gives our lives a real kind of structure, in a way that was eerily lacking while we were under the Academy’s thumb.  He’s terrible in any fight that lasts more than two seconds, which is a sad and remarkable step up from how bad he used to be-”

“Hey.”

“-and he’s the last person I’d want to go up against, if I set all emotions aside and had to pick someone to fight in a serious way.  He’s the darkest-minded bastard I know and he makes me laugh.  I’ve never been more isolated than I’ve been since I left everything behind and joined him, with whole months going by where he was the only person I talked to, and I’ve never felt less lonely.”

I shifted uncomfortably, turning my eyes to other things in the surroundings.

Jamie might have seen the change in my body language, because he changed course very abruptly.  “I could go on.  I won’t, because we’re about to get to the horse and wagon he wants to use.  Sylvester is a twist of a person, Noreen, like the twist in a book.  You can’t expect the typical conclusions based on those facts you get at first.”

“I don’t like him,” she said.

“I’m right here.”

“I don’t like him a lot of the time either,” Jamie said, in a way that sounded like he wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying anymore.  He seemed to come to at the last moment.  “And we’re here.  Garage.”

The garage was by a house, with a stitched horse within, hooked up to voltaic wiring.  The door had an upper and lower half, with the top half left open, so the horse could stare out and beyond.  The lower door was closed and padlocked.

I immediately went to the padlock.  Jamie was right behind me, with Noreen trailing behind.

“You don’t like me, but?” I asked.

“What?” Jamie asked.

“Don’t pretend you forgot.  You don’t forget anything, remember?  You just went on a whole thing about how you can’t stand me, but you wouldn’t stand for anything else, you think I smell like butt but you wish your morning tea smelled like I do.”

“Ha ha,” Jamie said, without a trace of humor in his voice.  Almost the opposite.  “Leave it, Sylvester.”

The padlock was easy.  I popped it open.  “I’m just saying-”

“Don’t say.  Leave it.”

I opened the door, and did a walk around the carriage, seeing how well it fit my purposes.  The owners had left the horse with a cart still hitched up to it.  There was a bench and a back section with room for stuff to be stored, with four short walls to keep the cargo in bounds, and a door at the rear end, hinges down at the base, so the door swung down.  Nice and easy for groceries and errands.

“It’s going to bug me if I don’t get the answer.  You still complain about books you never got to finish.  Leaving me with only one piece of the puzzle?  That’s brutal.”

“Remember the ten thousand times I’ve told you I’d get back at you for tormenting me?” Jamie asked.

“No,” I said.

“Not sure if you don’t remember or if you’re already begging for mercy, but this is part of the retribution, Sy.  I’m not telling.  The more you push, the less likely I am to answer.  Don’t push.”

“Or you might actually realize you don’t like me after all?” I asked.  I disconnected the wires that were hooked up to the stitched animal.

“Let’s go with that,” he said.

“I’ll torment you five times over for this.  These scales don’t balance,” I said.  “I’ll win.  I’ll cheat and be as unfair as all get out if i have to, but I’ll win.”

“I know,” Jamie said.  “I resigned myself to that fact long ago.”

I found the reins, and experimentally led the stitched horse out of the garage.  It was obedient.  The brain of a horse barely compared to that of a human, and this was a brain that had been carved up to make room for voltaic wiring and to carve away the bad behavior and tics that tended to crop up when turning lower-intelligence animals into stitched.  There were often things like horses stomping their hooves in one spot for so long that they destroyed their legs, or dogs getting caught up in a rhythm of barking at their own barking, until they did irreversible damage to themselves.  The go-to solution was to identify the part of the brain responsible and carve into it until the tic stopped.

I turned around and hopped off the back of the cart.  I hurried back into the garage.  I identified some suitable containers.  “Help me with these.”

Noreen and Jamie helped me load up the cart with the packages and containers.  The choice one was a large cube of manure wrapped in paper.  There were metal cans as well.

In my quick perusal, I found some oil, meant for greasing the cart’s wheels.  It was a small container.  Far too little to do what I wanted.  But it was a thing of beauty that brought everything together.  This would do.

I found some dry rope and loaded it into the cart.

“Let’s go,” I said.  “You drive.  I prepare.  Straight to them.  Try to keep to grass instead of the road, where you can.”

Jamie nodded.  He took the reins.  Noreen hopped up into the rear section, sitting on the corner right behind Jamie.

The cart moved.  The horse was in better shape than most stitched horses I’d come across, but I imagined that was the norm in a city like this.  That, or I wasn’t keeping up with the trends.  We’d spent six months in Tynewear, where there hadn’t been many horses or carriages, and I’d been distracted for almost a year leading up to that.

Noreen was quiet, looking out at the city.  I couldn’t figure her out, but Jamie apparently had.  That annoyed me.  Still, if it meant she was going to be cooperative, I could accept it.

“You know how to use guns?” I asked Noreen.

“No,” she said.

“Pull that back, aim it at the other guy, pull the trigger.  Six shots, then reload,” I said.  “Here’s the gun.  Here are the bullets.  Put those in your pocket.”

She took the spare gun and bullets.

Still didn’t understand or trust her.  I wasn’t wholly certain she wouldn’t put a bullet in me right now, for reasons I’d never understand.

But Jamie seemed to understand it, and he didn’t protest, so I was willing to accept that.

I took the rope, and I began forming a large knot.  I wedged the knot into one of the metal containers, then shoved it inside.  I cut the rope off about a handspan from the top of the can.

“A fuse?” Noreen asked.

“Yes.”

“But it’s not a bomb,” she said.  “That’s a container for applying chemicals to plants.”

“It’s not important if it’s a bomb or not,” I said.  “What’s important is that they think it’s a bomb.  Hold that.”

She held the container.  I applied the oil to the fuse.

“Keep it in the cart,” I said, as I set up the next container.  “I’ll do the rest.”

I did the next container in about two-thirds of the time I’d taken with the first, and did the third container in less time than that.  I flew through the process, distracting myself with the task at hand.

“We’re close,” Jamie said.  “We lost a lot of time.  They’re not far from the train station.  If they ran for it, they could be there in five minutes.”

I nodded.  I could see the vague shapes of the people in the gloom, roughly three blocks out.  They’d formed a line, fanning out to cover more of the city, with weapons at the ready.  We were at one end of that line.  Jamie had an idea of what I wanted to do now.

Jamie pulled the cart to a stop.  He looked back at what I was doing.

“That fertilizer is going to burn,” Noreen said.

“We know,” Jamie said.

“It’s going to do more than that,” I said.  The fertilizer was the last thing I had to handle.  I used the long spout of the oil can to push the knot into the center of the bundle.  In the process, I put a fair amount of the oil in the center of the cube.  I turned the thing on its side and stomped on it, compressing the loose, smelly material down into a more compact package.

“We should go,” Jamie said, still keeping one eye on what I was doing.

“Go,” I said.

“About their guns,” Jamie said.

“They have guns.  We have cart,” I said.  I cut off another length of rope, then handed it to Jamie.  “Extend the reins.”

Jamie looped the rope through the reins, moved off of the bench and back onto the lower part of the cart, using the three borders as cover.  He held the rope, then flicked it.  The horse started walking.

Walking was not good.

“Hi-yah!” he gave the command, with a hard flick.  Nothing.  “Gallop!  Hard gallop!  Go on, boy!  Let’s move!”

The problems with stitched horses.  They weren’t so able to figure things out.

“Hurry on!”

That did it.  The horse picked up speed in a way that seemed off-kilter with what a normal horse might do, as if it had to ease into it and remind itself what it was doing, instead of being an animal that instinctively wanted to run.

But it was galloping now.  Hooves trampled and wheels rolled over grass, then made a moment of noise as they passed over a footpath leading up to someone’s door, returning to silence as we steered toward the grass again.

A tree meant we had to move onto the road for a moment.

“Heads down,” I said.  “Jamie, make like you’re not going to come close to hitting them.  Runaway carriage.”

Jamie steered us away from the group.  This was the rightmost flank of the line that was moving through streets.  The buildings here and there meant that they would be split up into a series of groups in a rough line rather than be a straight row of thugs and soldiers.

“Gun ready,” I said, for Noreen’s benefit.  “Jamie, run us right at ’em.”

“One sec,” Jamie said.

I lit a match, and held it to the oil soaked wick of a container.  It ignited.  “Jamie!”

Jamie spoke, “Getting the timing right, and- hold on!”

He steered us in a sharper turn.  One wheel momentarily lifted off the ground as the stitched beast changed course, and our collected containers and items slid off to one side.  I used one leg to keep them in place, while Noreen’s crouched form kept them from sliding down the slight incline and all tumbling out behind us.

Which was all well and good, because the horse hit something, and everything jerked violently, the front end of the cart hit solid objects, and then the wheels passed over the large bodies of at least one man.

It was a group of five, and we’d run over two and clipped a third.  I tossed the can with the lit wick out behind us.

“Fire!” I called out to Noreen.

Some of the men we hadn’t hit had guns.  Given the choice between aiming and shooting at us, running for dear life, and trying to deal with the apparent makeshift bomb, most chose the latter two options.  I could see one man running and drawing his gun, one eye on us, and aimed for him.

I clipped him, but didn’t put him down or change his mind about shooting at us.  Before I could aim and shoot again, another bullet caught him.  Jamie, not Noreen.

In the moment of panic that came with being trampled without warning, shot at, and left with a seeming bomb, the men didn’t seem to know what to do, all in all.  Jamie took the reins again while Noreen and I emptied our guns at the group.  I managed to hit the one who was doing the most work with the bomb, trying to put out the burning fuse, and the man closest to him simply took over the task, gripping the bomb and hurling it off to the side.

I aimed carefully and put a bullet in him too.

“Coming up on the next group!” Jamie called out.  “Six!”

Noreen wasn’t a good shot, and she wasn’t fast at reloading.  But when I reached out and touched the latch at the side of her gun, opening it up so she could slot the individual bullets in, I could see that her hands were steady.

The group we were charging for opened fire, hitting the cart several times and even catching the horse once, spraying the three of us in the back of the cart with thick, congealed blood.  All the while, Noreen’s hands were steady.

Jamie, operating blind with his head beneath cover, changed direction at the last minute.  I felt the collisions as we hit people who had moved pre-emptively out of the way and thought they were safe.

I tossed out the next can.  Jamie’s arm reached out past me.  His forearm rested on my shoulder, his hand extending past the front of my face, finger pointed.  He gestured.  Four.

I aimed my gun.

As the heads and faces came into view, just barely visible as I looked over the rim of the wagon, I aimed and shot.  A sudden jump of the wagon spoiled the last of the four shots.

Noreen, emptying the cylinder, managed to graze the one I’d missed.  I popped my gun open, reloaded a lone bullet, and aimed, exhaling slowly as I lined up the sights and squeezed the trigger.

I missed again, but the thug seemed to decide it was better to favor discretion rather than valor, and made a run for cover.

What a disappointment.  It would have been a nice moment.  I could imagine Gordon clucking his tongue at me.

Jamie peeked, then stood up, one hand on the wooden rim of the wagon.  I followed his cue, standing up and looking back at the group we’d laid low to see that none were standing or even paying attention to the fake bomb, let alone shooting at us.

I reloaded.

“Horse is okay?” I asked.

“Horse is okay.  We should have a contingency plan for if it takes a bad shot.”

“Plan had.  We toss all the explosives and run for it.”

“I’ll rephrase.  We should have a good contingency plan, Sy.”

“It’s not going to be easy to take down.  It should have a metal plate in its head, like most stitched animals do.  Bullet has to travel awful deep and awful accurate to hit the right spot in the torso to put down a stitched, and the mooks have guns for shooting down people, not stitched.”

“That’s not all wrong,” Jamie said.  “Rounding a corner, then next group.”

I ducked down an instant before he did.  He’d waited just long enough to see, and to get a mental picture.

“Largest group yet,” Jamie said, one hand holding the rope against the top of the wagon.  “Devil, I think, and Apostle.”

I heard the gunshots.  A large caliber sound, sounding like something that came from a rifle.  I could feel it hit the side of the wagon in a way that made the other bullets pale in comparison.

I ignited the fuse for the block of fertilizer.

It would be so easy to get the timing wrong, or to let the burning fuse touch the wrong part of the block, where I’d soaked the thing with oil, and start off the chain reaction.

I dropped onto my back, facing the sky, held the block, and brought my legs up.  While I wasn’t gripping anything, I slid toward the tail end of the wagon.  The bumps as we collided with those who’d been too slow to dodge out of the way jarred me further, moving me in unpredictable fits and starts.

But those impacts were a good cue.

I heaved it out and kicked it out in the same motion.  Jamie veered into a wild turn as I threw.  I slid hard into the side, to the point that I couldn’t even tell if my toss had been a good one.  For a moment, I thought we would tip.

I’d lost track of my gun.  Rather than find it, I dug out another one of the guns I’d confiscated from the thugs.

I sat up enough to see the group.  Fifteen or so in all, scattering.

I saw the Devil, already making his tactical retreat, ducking behind cover.  Not even recognizable in comparison to Colby.  He was shirtless, and his muscles stood out, with veins standing out from beneath his skin as if he had an infestation of parasites crawling through them.  His teeth were exposed in a snarl that seemed more permanent than a response to the current situation.

I saw the Apostle, moving for cover at the other side of the street from the Devil, looking to escape the bomb.  The gun he held looked like an Exorcist rifle.  I aimed and fired, and he seemed to see what I was doing, because he threw himself to the ground.

He wasn’t lying down for a full second before the fertilizer caught the flame.  As explosions went, it wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped for.  The Academy-provided fertilizers were loaded with chemicals that tended to burn easily, and this wasn’t an exception, but it might well have gotten wet at some point or suffered for time spent in the garage with the stitched horse and cart.  The rolling flame did extend from one end of the street to the other, spreading over the people we’d bowled into with the cart and the eight other individuals who hadn’t been fast enough in clearing out.

The apostle, who’d just thrown himself to the ground, was lifted into the air in what seemed like a comical way, heels over head.

We left all of them behind.  There were two more containers for the three remaining groups.  Distractions to shift their priorities away from shooting us and toward self preservation.  If there were more groups than the three, they’d already moved further ahead than we were, and would be near the train station.

We wheeled around, and we stopped, catching our breath.

Jamie got off the cart and looked at the horse.  He looked at me and shook his head.

“No?” I asked.

“Won’t hold up much longer,” Jamie said.

“We’ll send it on its way, then,” I said.

We got off the cart.  I blinded the horse, pulling my shirt off and wrapping it around the horse’s face, and then we goaded it into another gallop, moving back the way we’d come.  Slim chances we’d hit anything.  But it might draw fire, and it might run over someone.  If it made noise or distracted, which was far more likely, then that was good enough.

“Clean up,” I said.  Then, for Noreen’s benefit, I said, “If they’re dragging their friends to safety, we pick them off.”

She nodded.

“Assuming you don’t have a lot of killing under your belt, just do what I say, alright?”

Another nod.

Whatever magic Jamie had worked, she was playing ball now.  I still kept a leery eye on her.  I’d have to ask Jamie for the details.

It was the smaller, edge groups that proved the most difficult to tackle.  They were most wary, most aware that there weren’t many friends nearby.  They kept gun in hand and watched the shadows, expecting the attack from the flanks.  As eager as Noreen was, Jamie and I handled most of them, using coordination, knives, and careful timing.

It made for glacial progress, and I knew that the Devil had already made it to the train station.

As we drew closer to the big group, however, there was a gap in the defenses.  People too trusting of others to watch their backs.  They were people who’d just recently been led, and their leader was now on a makeshift stretcher, being carried by four members of the group, a fifth leading the way and providing direction, the sixth at the rear flank.

The sixth took a knife without making a sound.

Then, at my instruction, counting down with hand signals, Noreen, Jamie and I opened fire on the remaining group.  Only the one in the lead managed to escape without getting shot.  He ran in the direction of the train station.

“I really hoped to get the Devil,” I said.

“Seeing the man, I feel like we would have stopped dead if we’d collided with him.  I know that’s hyperbole, but-”

“He would have caught the reins, or climbed on,” Noreen said.

I glanced back at her.  “That’s your sideways instinct?”

That got me a nod.

Yet I still remained confused.

Why did I not understand her any more than I had before Jamie had dug into her background and psychology?  Annoying.

I stooped down over the Apostle.  He was burned and acting like he was still reeling from the explosion.  I used one hand to turn his head, making the man wince, and saw that his ears were a mess.  He wouldn’t hear me if I tried to interrogate him.  I could connect the dots, figure his middle ear was damaged, and conclude that he likely had vertigo like he’d never experienced before.  An endless, dizzying fall that consumed all his senses.

I began collecting the weapons.  I was happy to see grenades.  I kept them mostly for myself, we exchanged the cheaper revolvers and pistols for better quality guns, and then moved on our way.

The buildings that looked out on the approaches to the train station were occupied, according to Pierre.  We’d cleared away some of the pawns and we’d left them shaken.  With luck, they would be off balance, there might even be bickering, if there were multiple factions there.  If we could plant that seed of dissent, then the Demon’s reputation and methods could easily do the work for us.

We made our way toward the next isolated group, likely the last we would catch.  The next would make it to the train station before we made it to them.  We stayed to the shadow, watching them.

They were keeping an eye out for us.  They’d heard the gunfire.

Hopefully, they would make a mistake, or leave us a gap.

I felt a faint hope when I saw the local forces making their approach.  Men in uniform supported by Academy.  The squad consisted of three men in uniform, two stitched, and a scientist to oversee the stitched and the small warbeast, which was the size of a mastiff.

There would be other groups just like this one, I knew.  From the looks over their shoulders, checking, I suspected the thugs knew the same thing.  They seemed nervous at the approach.

But there was no animosity.

The law was here to help, and they were here to help the enemy.

He has too firm a hold on this city, I thought.  He’s absolutely secure in his power, like this.  The reinforcements are going to be endless.

“I’ve completely lost track of time,” I said.  I hadn’t intended to say it aloud.

“It’s close to one in the morning,” Jamie said.  “We have seven hours.”

The police and the soldiers moved on, watching over their shoulders for us as they headed in the direction of the train station.

I watched them in silence until they were out of our line of sight, in a position where we would have had to expose ourselves and risk being seen to keep observing.

“You’re concerned about the time?” Jamie asked.

“More than a little,” I said.  I chewed my lip.  The siege wouldn’t work.  We couldn’t lock them down and cut off both supplies and reinforcements.  The uniformed squads were a lot harder to take on.

The Devil’s face lingered in my mind’s eye.

What had Maurice said?  The Devil was a creature of chaos.  Like me.  He reveled in it, in being unpredictable.  Like me.

But he was also a sadist.  He was a savage.  He was strong.

I couldn’t believe he would simply sit still.  He would act, and after seeing him put us in bad positions with two of his last three moves, I was betting the act would smart.

He would do it from a position of power.  Something we sorely lacked.

“Might need an hour or five to puzzle out an answer to this one,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.10 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The fires we’d started to open the night died down over the ensuing hour, which had an odd effect.  I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with the way heat rose or the air currents that the open fires created, but now that the fires were dying, the smoke was worse than it had been all night.

I sat at our roost, a high rooftop overlooking the area, and I watched as men came and went.  There were more squads of officers, stitched, doctors and warbeasts now patrolling the area.  The smoke was likely a mercy of sorts, because the warbeasts hadn’t managed to scent our trail.

With fire on people’s minds, there were water pumps and hoses being carted around to strategic positions as well.

I’d told Jamie to inform me every time an hour passed, and he’d informed me of the first small movement of the short hand just a minute ago.  It hadn’t felt like I’d spent an hour ruminating, but I was willing to take him at his word.

Three and a half hours to sunrise.  Already, the coalition of the local underworld and the protectors of the city were taking up different positions.  By dawn, it would look like the site was secured by law enforcement.  The Devil would be absent or hidden.

It felt like time for the man to make his move.  I wanted to have a good idea on what to do to make a countermove.

Jamie spoke up.  I couldn’t see him that well in the gloom, but his voice was clear.  “I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, but I’ve been thinking things through, considering all the individual details on people, places, things, that we know about West Corinth and the surrounding cities, and I’ve hit a wall.  If you have any starting points for other things to discuss, I’d appreciate it.”

“No train of thought.  I’m going in circles.”

“Talk to me about the circles.”

“Points to attack, mainly.  Is there an aspect of his character I can utilize?  Morality or a lack thereof?  Patience or a lack thereof?  Can I bait him or use the fact that he’s about to do something against him?  Can I change the facts as he sees them and paint a different picture?”

“Is it possible you’re narrowing your focus too much?  The Devil is interesting, so you focus on him.  All of those things are attacking his being.  His identity.”

“Maybe.  But I’ve considered other ways.  Still focusing on him, but bigger picture, things like hitting him on the reputation front-”

“We tried that.”

“We did.  I thought the way we’d done the fires and framed everything would put him at odds with the law.  Apparently not.”

Jamie moved closer to me.  He sat with his back to the side of the chimney I was peering past as I watched the soldiers.  “If it helps, the officers down there are only part of West Corinth’s law enforcement.  Dirty cops, I’d say.  Or good cops led by a dirty superior.”

“Yeah.”  I wasn’t surprised, and I’d considered the possibility as I’d mentally wrestled with the situation.”

“You were saying?  Other methods of attack.  Reputation.”

“We already hit him on the confidence front.  The wagon thing had to smart.  Losing the Apostle has to have weakened his grasp on some of the thugs he’s with.  If there was another way, just some way to make them hurt, it could turn that crack into a divide.  That ties into the respect of his men, and the flip side of that same coin is whether we can weaponize his respect or lack of respect for his men.  Taking hostages, or fostering dissent, yes?”

“Yes,” Jamie said.

“Having you listen is helpful.  Do chime in if you think of anything.  I just said something about making him and his men hurt.  Is there a good way to attack?  To cost them resources and weaken their ability to hold the city?  To hurt the organization?  Their families?  Can we figure out where he lives, and get both information and burn that down too?”

“Noreen would prefer to attack, I think,” Jamie said.

“I’m not sure there’s a good way to do it.  We’d have to get close.  I’d send another runaway wagon their way with a proper bomb, but I’m fairly certain it would get gunned down.”

“Fair.”

“And that’s where I get stuck in an endless loop.  I’ve been thinking about the other gang leaders, those present and those absent.”

“Same.”

“And about the local powers.  If we could crack this by getting at the mayor, using the leverage of having helped his family.  Or if there are other powers.  Media?  Workers?  The end goal is to keep the Lambs from arriving and getting killed.”

“There’s a possibility that they won’t,” Jamie said.

“That they might fend for themselves?  Or even be using a different means of approach?”

Jamie gave me a nod.

“Yeah.  But there’s a possibility they will arrive on the train,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Lots of one-word answers from you.  Tired?” I asked.

“Tired,” he agreed.

I wasn’t sure what to add to that.  Jamie was sleeping twelve or more hours a day, most days.  He hadn’t slept that much recently.

“If you want to slog off and go rest, I won’t say no.”

“You’re such a damn liar, Sy,” Jamie said.  “You’re stumped.  You need me.”

“If you want to nap now, then, refresh your brain, that’d be okay too.  I’ll wake you if there’s something important.”

“Naps don’t count.  I have to sleep long enough to dream, I think.  At least, that’s what I’ve noticed.”

I drummed my fingers on my knee.

“Speaking of.  What you said reminded me of something I read in relation to vat-grown humanoids and intelligence,” Jamie said.  “Structuring, prioritization…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  I’m thinking about it.  Give me a second.”

While Jamie thought, I craned my head around, looking at the sheer number on the ground.

“My predecessor wrote that Helen mentioned the vat-baby intelligence guidelines to you, which might have even been the foundation of that whole list of approaches you just came up with.  You did something similar with the first hand signs.  Helen told you about the stuff I ended up reading, and there is a whole category you’re missing.  You’re focusing on what drives him, right?”

“Sure.  Identity, psychology, the things that attach him to others, or others to him…”

“But at his core, whether he’s Colby or the Devil, he’s still a living thing.  He’s driven by other needs.  Basic ones.”

“I did actually think about that.  Food, water, air, sleep… we can’t starve them out or dehydrate them.  Smoking them out is possible, but I’m not sure about the method of deployment.  Too reckless, too hard to contain to the right area, all with no guarantee it’ll work.  That leaves his drugs.  If he’s an addict, he’ll have his supply handled.”

“Hm,” Jamie made a noise.  Then he nodded.  “Alright.  Will keep thinking.”

I leaned back.  I was holding out hope that they would make a mistake, that they would send some key people out, and we could target those people.  That wasn’t happening.

Basic needs.  Drugs, sleep, food, water.  There were others.  Bathroom needs.

They had to go somewhere to use the bathroom.  Was there a way to figure out where they’d go?  Hot night like tonight, they’d be drinking to stay hydrated, which…

…went back to basic needs.

I thought for a moment.

“We have an option,” I said.  “You’re going to help me nitpick it.  But we’re doing it while on the move.  The faster we can set this in motion, the more effective it’s going to be.”

“Got it,” Jamie said.  He twisted in a bit of a funny way to avoid using his bad shoulder to get to his feet.

“Where did we leave Noreen again?”

“Just across the street.  You’re more spry than I am.  You want to go while I get down to the ground?”

“Alright.  First stop is the Witch, and I have a feeling she’ll want to come along.”

Noreen bristled.  She wasn’t exactly angry or impatient.  Those weren’t words that applied to her psychology.  But there was… danger.  I felt like I might get shot or stabbed if I got in her way or slowed her down, now that we were so close to what she wanted so badly.

Close enough to see them, even.  The Witch’s labs were situated in a factory, and all of the lights were on inside.  Working all through the night.

I gestured to Jamie.  Gun.  Noreen.

“Noreen,” Jamie said.

Silence.

“We’ll need your gun.”

“No,” she said.

It caught me off guard.  She’d been strangely accepting of Jamie on a base level so far.  She’d listened to him in a way she only seemed to listen to Maurice.  Maybe even more.

“Do you want to march in there alone and open fire?” I asked.  “Because you could have done that a long time ago, and you didn’t need our help to do it.  But we’re working on something, and I can’t have you jeopardize that.”

“You promised me her head, and you’ll deliver it.”

Yes,” I said.  “After.  But for now she’s useful to us.”

“She dies.  She doesn’t get a chance to prove herself useful, or to postpone her death.  You promised.”

“I never promised when.”

She turned on me.  One hand went for the gun I’d given her.  Jamie caught her wrist.

“Let go of me,” she said.

I saw her react to something I couldn’t see.  Jamie let go of her wrist, and she raised her hands, holding them out to the sides, where we could both see.

“Betrayal?” she asked.

“No,” Jamie said.  He divested her of the gun and used the back of his hand to pat her down, before taking a knife off of her.  “But I know this is the only way you’ll listen.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Noreen,” I said.

She made a sound of dismissal.

“I imagine the Witch won’t recognize you on sight?”

“Answer him,” Jamie said.

“No.  She probably doesn’t remember me.”

“Which makes it worse,” I said.

I saw a slight gesture from Jamie.  Warning me off that course.

He’d avoided forming a rapport earlier.  Was that the trick?  She had a set idea of who and what I was, and she had an idea of who she was, and if I tried to connect, she would dismiss it as an impossible bridge to cross and then reject me.

“If she doesn’t remember you, that’s fine.  All three of us are going to go in there.  You’ll do nothing unless I ask you a question or signal that you should speak.  After that, you’ll get what you want.  Got it?”

She gave me a tight nod.

“Good.”

I let Jamie handle her while I approached the door.

No guards.  No watching eyes, either.

I leaned close and pressed my ear against the door, listening to the murmur of conversation within.  I kept my ear where it was as I knocked, firmly and loudly.

I could hear the conversation inside stop.

A woman’s voice.

I drew my gun, and I pointed it against the door.

The door swung inward, and I put the gun against the stomach of the Witch, who had opened it.

“Careless,” I said.  I reached up with my other hand, grabbed her by the shirt, and hauled her out of the factory.  Inside, some people were running for other exits.  Others stood by, helpless.

Lots of what looked to be young Academy students or people of that general group, maybe dropouts.  A distinct shortage of hired guns.  Had the Devil taken hers, or was that simply not her usual mindset?

“A word,” I said.

“I’m listening,” she said.  She glanced over at Noreen.  Jamie was standing so that the Witch couldn’t quite see him.

“I like that you’re always very reasonable.  I do have to wonder why you’re so busy at… two in the morning?”

“Two thirty,” Jamie said.

I looked inside.  I could see vats and distillery tanks everywhere.  There was a main water line with cranks and wheels to control the flow to each individual vat.

“Last minute work,” the Witch said.

“You’re reacting to the fires and other problems.  Planning something,” I said.

The Witch was silent.

“You’re leaving,” I concluded.

“You burned most of the other groups’ headquarters.  When Colby realizes mine is still intact, he’ll either blame me, he’ll seize my headquarters, or both.  I’m getting as much stock as I can, and then I’m going.  You won’t have to worry about me getting in your way or posing a threat to children.”

“In West Corinth,” Noreen said.

“What?” the Witch asked.

“If we let you leave, the children here will be safe, but the children in the city you end up in won’t be.”

“I’m willing to make any promises I need to if it means not getting shot.  I’ll promise to leave children alone.”

“You’re lying,” Noreen said.  “You’ll say anything if it means not getting shot.  You look civilized on the surface, but beneath, you’re just a rat.”

The Witch managed to keep her expression placid.  Most of her focus was on the gun.

“Was that why the Devil didn’t take issue with you capitulating to me at the meeting?” I asked.  “He knew you were lying through your teeth?”

“No,” the Witch said.

I could see the dishonesty in her answer.

Noreen had hit the mark.

“I made you a promise,” I told the Witch.  “That if you got the money together as compensation for victims, I would spare you.  That promise holds, but, because you were very clearly planning to run before I came calling-”

I saw the shift in her eyebrows, the movement of her eyes, and the thinning of her lips as she pressed them together.  I was dead on.

“-I’m going to ask for further compensation now.  What you’ve got in there is worth money.  I’m taking some.  I’m taking a lot.  With that, you and I can consider the scales balanced.  The old deal will stand.”

“I don’t see how I’m in a position to refuse,” she said.

I saw Noreen’s shift in stance.  Jamie then did something to get her to sit still and relax.  But the movement, confrontational, was a response to the Witch’s statement.  The woman was playing nice, but behind the surface, she was trying to work out a way out of her current predicament.  She had no intention of cooperating, given the choice.

“Inside,” I told her.

I had her lead the way.  I kept her between myself and the bulk of her employees as we moved into the factory room.

Wagons were set up inside, some already loaded up with liquid, others waiting, empty.  A dozen students still remained, standing here and there, in their lab coats, both official Academy coats and cruder ones.  None were older than twenty-five.

All around them, the distillery tanks were large, crude, and tall, each one filled to the brim with a different color of liquid.  Flames beneath some had them bubbling.  In others, mechanisms stirred the liquid.  The entire place smelled like Wyvern felt.  Acrid, noxious, harsh, and unforgiving.  It tainted the air, and, as I touched the nearest surface, I could feel the residual moisture and the oily residue.  Tanks took up half of the available floor space.  Pipes running here and there took up nearly all of the walls and ceiling.

“Ma’am?” a student asked.

“Cooperate with them,” the Witch said.

“What’s going on?” the student asked.

“Quiet,” I said.  “After I shoot her, I remove all of the witnesses.  I’m a pretty good shot, so you really don’t want that.”

They were obedient, if nothing else.  There were no further complaints or comments as I led the woman up the stairs that led to the catwalk, which ran between the various vats and tanks.

“Tell me about the drugs.”

“It’s not all drugs.  Some of it is manufactured chemical that I ship out to other groups and Academies, cheap.”

“Tell me what you’ve got, then.  Because what you do have, you’ve got an awful lot of.”

“That red fluid is still being strained.  You can’t see it, but there’s a strainer in the middle.  The-”

“Tell me what they do.”

“The fluid is herbicide.  Made for a specific purpose.  The Ravage.  But it’s too strong.”

“Ravage.  The red plague?”

She nodded.

“Next?  That liquid that looks like urine?”

“It’s a drug.  As a medicine, it helps prevent injury.  Fortifies the constitution, can cut bouts of illness short, if the illness is prolonged because the body is too weak.  Taken in large quantities, it fuels a sense of well being.  A rush, but not of the same kind you normally think of with drugs.  It refreshes, makes you content in a very subtle way, like you just woke up from a good night’s sleep and had a grand meal.  I know the higher class will have some as a nightcap, to finish off the day well.  Those in poverty like it because it gives them what they don’t have.”

Not too useful.

“The next?  Brown liquid.”

“Does little on its own.  Dehydrated, it’s used in pills to help limit the effects to the renal system.”

“And?  Keep going.  You should get the point by now.  The more information you provide, the better your chances.”

“The violet fluid, it’s colored on purpose.  Commissioned work.  A cheap alternative to Academy treatment, for people looking to reverse the chemical sterilization.”

I glanced at the violet fluid.  It looked more like thick paint than a drug.

“Who commissioned it?” I asked.

“A fugitive, Genevieve Fray,” the woman answered.

“Oh, I know Fray,” I said.  I looked at the liquid again.  There had to be a hundred gallons in there.  “How much have you sent her?”

“One smaller sample, and then two brews, like you see there.”

Two hundred gallons already in Fray’s hands.

Creating a demand, then providing the fix that the Academy was slow or reluctant to provide.  I looked away.

“Next?” I asked.

“Blood thinner.”

“Tell me more about it.”

“For high blood pressure, or for prepping patients to receive a massive chemical load.  It’s… simultaneously very simple and very hard to explain.  It breaks down blood cells.  Turns patients orange, leaves them exhausted.  A full three-quarters of the drug is minimizing damage to organs and brain.”

I nodded.  The liquid had a strong rose tint to it.

“And the last?”

“For warbeasts and vat creations.  It’s used to bind to calcium and promote bone growth or some armor plating development.”

“How very mild,” I said.  “Thank you, for your answers.”

“Take what you need,” she said.  “I’ll help you in any other ways you require.”

I nodded.  “Then tell me about the children.”

“The children?”

I glanced back in the direction of Jamie and Noreen.  Both were staying at the door, Jamie on the outside, Noreen just inside, watching.

“The boys and girls you took and experimented on.”

“I understand you care deeply about children,” she said.  “I did it more when I was just getting started.  While their parents were getting pay for subjecting themselves to medication, they would remain behind in the hospitales.  Sometimes the parents didn’t come back.  I offered food, shelter, clothing, in exchange for letting the children do what their parents had done.  I was careful with the projects I picked, not always successful, but I tried.  As I got my footing, I pared it off.  It became a once-a-year thing.”

I listened, watching her.  She’d turned to face me, and she clasped her hands together, moving them up and down as she spoke.  So earnest.

“Since moving on from those days, I’ve given a share of my earnings over to the care of the little ones, and have sponsored one to go to an Academy and get his start.  I regret what I did, and I know I can’t make up for it, but I’m trying.”

I studied her, watching, then closed my eyes.

After so many hours of dealing with Jamie and Noreen, it was so reassuring to be able to approach a situation and simply read someone else through and through.

I opened my eyes.  “You’re lying through your lords-fucked teeth.”

I saw the momentary alarm on her face.

“Noreen!” I called out.

In my peripheral vision, Jamie let Noreen go.  She crossed the room at a brisk, surprisingly quick walking pace, and took the stairs two at a time.

Noreen was entirely blank to my ability to read her as she reached the end of the wooden catwalk.

“May I suggest, Noreen, that the Witch here be given a bath?”

That only got a nod.  No clever remark, no smile, no frown.

The Witch twisted around to run.  She stopped as I jabbed the gun into her side, hard enough that she nearly tipped into the rose-colored blood thinner.

“You said you’d spare me,” the Witch said.

I seized her wrist, and moved around her, so she was between me and Noreen.  “I said the scales were balanced between you and I.  Not that you’d live for sure.”

“You little bastard,” the Witch said.

Is that the first time you’ve shown your real face to me?  The Witch, rotten down to your core, stained through and through.

“To give you the quick rundown, Noreen… Calcium formula.  Fertility medicine.  Blood thinner.  Kidney medicine, kind of.  A constitution-building drug.  Herbicide.”

My hand still on the Witch’s wrist, I felt the fractional movement of her hand and wrist as I mentioned the herbicide.  I felt her pulse, after I’d finished listing it.  Not during, but at the end.  As if she hadn’t even thought I’d bring up the herbicide.

“She didn’t like it too much when I suggested a bath in the herbicide,” I said.

“I know,” Noreen said.

You know?

“No!” the Witch cried out.  Deciding that the risk of being shot was worse, twisted, shoving at me.

Except I was already ready, gun pointed down.  I controlled my fall, making sure to land on the catwalk, adjusted my aim, and pulled the trigger, demolishing her right calf.  I’d been aiming for her knee, but all the same.  She fell, and made some efforts to crawl toward the violet fluid.  Noreen grabbed her, and I provided some assistance.  We half-pushed, half rolled the struggling woman into the herbicide that was still being strained.

The fluid was thick, but not one that made humans particularly buoyant, by the looks of it.  The Witch struggled within it in a way that suggested it took more work than normal swimming did.  With one bullet in her leg, she fought to try and stay up enough to take in some air and make her way across to the far side of the tank, where she might be able to climb out.  On her first surfacing, half of her hair was gone and her fingernail-beds were empty and raw, bleeding.  On the second, as she turned her head to try and see where we were, I could see the damage to her eyes.  There were blisters on the surface of the orb, and some blisters forming on her skin.

A harsh chemical, that.

“You can stay,” I told Noreen.  “We’re done for now.  I’ll be reaching out to the children of this city at a later point, if all goes well, so we may cross paths again.”

“I’ll be glad if we don’t,” she said.  She walked around the rim of the vat, and stepped on the hands that were grasping  the edge, as the Witch tried to haul herself out.

Realizing her struggle was futile, blind, and being consumed by her own work, the Witch swam back from Noreen, trying to make her way to another edge.  Noreen walked around to intercept.

I glanced back at Jamie, then looked around the room to see those who’d stayed rather than run away.

“All the rest of you!  If you don’t want to meet the same fate, run!  Get out of here!” I called out.

The Witch’s underlings ran.

The factory was left empty, but it seemed noisier in the absence of the people.  Fluid churned through tubes, machinery clunked onward, and the Witch continued to struggle.

With the underlings gone, Jamie walked in.  He looked at the situation.

“Which one?” he asked.

I indicated the pink fluid.

“We’ll load it up, then,” Jamie said.  “There are wagons around the side of the building.”

“Good,” I said.

“There are no guarantees this will work,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

The witch tried again to climb over the side.  Noreen pushed her back in.

“You’ll regret it if you make this too quick,” I told Noreen.  “Draw it out.  Give her a chance to breathe.  She’ll suffer more in the long run.  Hell, you can let her out of the water.  She looks pretty done.”

“I don’t care about that,” Noreen said.  “I wanted her to die in a bad way.  Drawing it out doesn’t matter.”

I was about to say something to clarify just how little sense that made, when Jamie jumped in with, “Let it go, Sy.  Time’s important now, right?  And we shouldn’t rule out that one of the fleeing Witch-apprentices isn’t going to go and tell tales of what happened to their boss.  Trouble could be incoming.”

“Right,” I said.  I wasn’t so worried about the Witch’s underlings telling on us.  The only people who really mattered were occupying the train station.

We got a wagon and opened the doors to move it into the building.  The Witch was equipped with a means of moving large volumes of fluid.  The actual act of moving the fluid from the vat to the wagon was slow and painstaking.

Before we were done, Noreen left.

“Still don’t get her,” I said, watching as the fluid poured into the wagon-tank.

“Prey instinct,” Jamie said.  “But very little else, and very focused on a single thing at once, not on the greater environment.  She’s good at reading individual cues.  We could use someone like her.”

“Please, no,” I said.  “I don’t have the tolerance.”

“I have tolerance to you,” Jamie said.

I rolled my eyes.

“She’s very structured.  Very easy to understand,” Jamie said.  “Once you grasp that there’s no nuance.  No compromise.  Like she said, the color drained out of her world.  It’s black and white.  This or nothing.  Once you grasp that, it’s not so bad.”

“The problem with people like that is that they don’t grow.  They don’t change,” I said.  “I couldn’t stay long-term with someone if I didn’t think they were capable of changing.”

“Capable of changing, Sy, or capable of being changed by you?” Jamie asked.

I gave him a look.  “That sounded almost accusatory.”

“Not at all, Sy.  Not at all.  I wouldn’t change you for the world.”

That said, he slammed down the lever, shutting off the dwindling flow from the larger tank.

We hopped onto the wagon, and we got it moving.  The sheer weight of the liquid made the initial movement slower and more unsteady.

“The water feed for the northwestern end of Elmer’s block is at 4th and Wrought,” Jamie remarked.

I nodded.

Counting the time we’d lost, we were running out of room to work.  Four hours until the trains started arriving, give or take?  Two and a half hours until dawn, when moving around would be that much more conspicuous?

The smoke in the city stung my eyes as we rode to our destination.

Four hours.  We would contaminate the water supply.  Four hours, on a hot night, they would drink to stay hydrated.  They would wash their faces.  Then, with luck, they would feel the impact.  That would, I was hoping, be a crack in their setup that Jamie and I could exploit.

There were ways this might fail to work.  If the dilution made the effect too weak, if they didn’t drink enough, if the drug took too long to take hold…

We moved around a figure that was standing in the middle of the road.

I turned my head, glancing back, curious.

“Devil’s made his move,” I said.

Jamie turned to look.  The man we’d moved around had been keeping his head down, slouched over.  Now his head was raised.  He was running.  Everything about his expression and the way he moved said intensity.

The fact that he was running faster than a human should run, and only falling slightly behind as he trailed roughly ten meters behind us?  That not only said intensity, but it spoke to combat drugs.  The kind that enhanced performance by letting a man push past usual limits and destroy his body in the course of that pushing.

The Devil had drugged people and sent them after us.  Or planted them.  Or something.  But he’d made his move.  Were they the failures?  Perhaps the apostle’s men, no longer with a man to follow.

I turned, aiming my gun.

“No,” Jamie said.

No.  He was right.  Noise would draw attention.  I held back.

We rounded a corner, and it wasn’t a fast process.  We were burdened by a large, heavy tank, and the two stitched horses who were pulling us forward were only barely managing.

It bought the running man an opportunity to catch up.  He threw himself at the wheel, and limbs or head got caught up in it.  For a moment, I wondered if we faced karmic justice.  If our wagon would go the same way the wagon we’d destroyed with the ladder had gone.

But it was sturdy work, meant to carry heavy loads.  The man was left behind, crumpled in an unceremonious heap.

And, as we rounded the corner, we saw three more.

“They watched us leave,” I said, as it dawned on me.  “They planted someone, they saw us, and they put these guys in place for when we came back.  We need to take the long way around.”

“The long way around is a long, long way around, Sy.  The city is built around two lakes.  We’d lose an hour, maybe two.”

An hour.  Maybe two.  Then we’d have two or three hours to let the drug get to them, for them to drink, for the drug to take effect.  And we’d have to hope it was severe enough to give us the upper hand over the Devil.

If it was me and me alone at stake, I might have accepted the risks and tried for it to beat an adversary of this particular sort.  But it wasn’t.  It was the Lambs.

“Forward then,” I said, between grit teeth.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.11 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jamie’s efforts to steer the wagon away from the drug-addled men in the middle of the road weren’t enough.  They were like stitched given programming.  Once they noticed us, they started moving toward us, slowly at first, then picking up speed.  They hurled themselves at the wagon with no regard to personal safety.

Combat drugs were something else.  I knew something about the things, having grown up around the Academies.  They weren’t that hard to develop, but in terms of developing them well, it was a different story.  Only a narrow set of them saw use in the Crown’s armed forces.  On the other hand, those forces were massive, and the drugs that were used were used a great deal, skyrocketing the doctor who devised them into untold heights of fame and power.

The rejected drugs ended up getting discarded, unless they were given to warbeasts, either in anticipation of a fight or as something injected into a special gland.  Discarded drugs sometimes saw use as something for gang leaders to use, to spice up underground fighting rings, or as something recreational, for those who wanted to cut loose.  I knew that men that lacked confidence with women and women that lacked confidence with men sometimes took low doses to give themselves courage and to rouse feelings that might otherwise be dead.

I was guessing that the Devil had a source for his drugs.  Probably collected all of the rejected stuff from Corinth Crown, then figured out how to distribute it.

This was the sort that cost too much for what it gave.  The sort that maybe was included in a soldier’s kit, in case of a losing battle with no escape, so they could toss it back and go out valiantly.

I turned in my seat, shifted my grip on my knife, and stabbed.  I’d been aiming for the neck, but with the motion of the wagon and my target combined, I hit the shoulder instead.

The knife had an impact on its own, with all the force I could bring to bear.  But the man’s grip on the side of the wagon was unreal, and his nervous system was doing something different altogether.  He moved back and away from the blade, letting it come free of his shoulder, but his grip remained firm.  He didn’t seem to feel the pain, and that had nothing to do with shock.

His teeth were clenched so hard together that parts of his lower face were alternately turning white and turning crimson, with muscles standing out at the corners of his jaw.  His breath was drawn hard and exhaled just as forcefully, with spittle and particulate forming a thin, drooly froth in the spaces between teeth.

I aimed and drove the knife into his neck once, then twice.  He rocked back, but his grip remained sure.

I watched, waiting and hoping for the man’s fingers to loosen and for him to fall by the roadside.

He let out a deep cry, like the lowing of a cow, a moan and a retching sound all at once, and then let go with his uninjured arm.  He reached up and over, taking hold of some of the bracing that kept the tank secured to the wagon, gripped it, then reached out with the arm with the gouged shoulder.  The arm’s movement wasn’t so sure.  There was no pain, but his arm didn’t function like it should, and he flailed and batted his arm against the side of the wagon for a moment until he was able to get his hand into a place where he could grab hold of something.  Nevermind the agony that it should’ve caused, given the state of the shoulder.

My knife had cut near the spine and had nicked an artery, with blood spurting out in time with his rapid heartbeat.  He was beyond the point of caring.  There was only the drug rage.

Three of them on the wagon.  If they got a grip on either of us, then they wouldn’t let go.  I was having enough trouble getting rid of one of them.

Gripping part of the tank, I sliced at his fingers.  When that failed, I stabbed at them.

He brought his good arm over, gripping the same bit of bracing, then pulled his arm with the sliced up hand and arm away, swinging himself closer to me, reaching.

That he didn’t get me was more a fault of his arm being injured and slower to move than anything clever on my part.  While he worked on getting into a position to reach for me again, I stabbed at the fingers and hand that held the bracing, as many times as I could in the span of roughly three seconds.

It was easy to forget, when growing up with the Lambs had been an eager series of lessons in suggesting the opposite, but people were hard to kill.  There were tricks and shortcuts, weak points to target.  A man could fall down and hit his head in just the right way, or could take what seemed like an ordinary sort of punch, and he could die of an aneurysm.  Mary was good at finding the efficient ways to kill.  Gordon was good at weak points.

Had been.  Had been good at weak points.

I could do okay on my own, but I wasn’t as precise.  When I failed to deliver an attack in a way that physiologically stopped my enemy from functioning, I could usually still psychologically impede them, taking the fight out of them.

Not here.

My repeated stabbings managed to destroy his hand to the point that he couldn’t hold on any longer.  He fell, and as he did he went under the wheel.  The entire back corner of the wagon jumped, and as it did, the wheel came down funny.  It wobbled violently on its axle.

There were two more to deal with, and I didn’t dare move a hair, out of concern that it might be the bump or the shift in weight that made the wheel come off.

“What happened!?” Jamie called out.

“We might lose a wheel,” I said.  I put my foot on the back of the seat and climbed onto the top of the tank.  There were men climbing up the side and back.

“We’re not even close to the station!”

Two were too many to deal with.  One of the men was struggling with his climb, and it looked like it was because his toes kept hitting the wheel.  The one at the back was making more progress.

Crouching, gripping the tank, I kicked out at the face of the man at the back.

I might as well have kicked a stump.  His face contorting, he tried to bite my foot, snapping.  One hand moved away from the top of the tank to grab for my ankle.  His fingertips grazed the top of my shoe, but didn’t find any purchase as I lifted my leg up and out of his reach.

I brought my leg down, driving my ankle into the bridge of his nose, then kicked at his face again.  He grabbed again for my leg.

What even led to this?  What deal did he offer them to make them agree to drug themselves like this?

The good was that he wasn’t making progress in climbing while he was making frantic grabs for the foot.  The bad was that he might actually succeed at some point, the guy to my right was making headway in climbing up, and I wasn’t doing anything to solve the problem.  We wanted to be rid of these guys before we arrived.  If that was even possible, with the wheel being a problem.  The wobbling wheel was getting worse.

“Incoming!” Jamie called out.

More?

They came from a side street, rounding a corner at a surprising speed.  Not drugged up thugs, but warbeasts.  The ones the Crown officers had had as part of their squads.

They were sleek, built like some combination of wolf and lion.  The frame was wolf-like, built to run forward more than it was built to be agile, and the fur was long, pointed back, but there was a degree of size that pointed more toward Lion, along with shaggy manes, and their claws were large and more hooked in a way a wolf’s weren’t.  They used the claws for traction as they ran.

They didn’t try to jump up.  They didn’t go for the men who were dangling off the side and the back of the wagon.  They kept pace, and they made broken yowling, growling sounds in a way that sounded like dogs on the losing end of a fight.

Sound carried.  If they were giving away our location, then there was no point to trying to keep the noise down.  I drew my gun, looking back at Jamie to get confirmation.

I saw him start to nod, and took that as reason to open fire.  I put two shots into the face of the man at the back of the wagon, paused to see if that would be sufficient, and when he didn’t loosen his grip, I fired a third.

Not good.  Not good.  People will have heard.  They’ll be heading our way.  We still have to get to our destination and unload the contents of this wagon.  If they catch on, there’s no point.

The maned warbeasts increased in volume in response to the shots.  I aimed and fired, then switched sides to put a bullet into the one on the other side.  The bullet ricocheted off the ground, instead.  I had to use the last of my six bullets to stop the damned thing.

Leaving the man at the side.  He reached up and over, grabbing for me instead of for a grip on the wagon.  I wasn’t in a position to get out of the way, given my precarious position on the top of a bouncing, swerving container with a bad wheel.

He took hold of my arm, and began trying to drag me off.  No sense for self preservation.  Only a desire to destroy me.  In this case by hauling me off the container and down onto the street.

“Heads up!  Hold on!” Jamie called out.  He was half-standing, hands on the reins, looking back and forth between me and his destination.  I saw the light-post.

Shit on a candlestick.  These guys weren’t operating like normal people did.  I wasn’t sure he would slacken his grip if a cannonball took his head and torso clean off.  Their nerves and their reflexes had been altered.

But I couldn’t think of any better options to handle this guy.

Which meant I was hoping that my grip was better than his.  I let go of the gun and grabbed onto the frame of the container.  I wedged my heels in as best as I could, belly facing the sky, fully preparing myself to be torn away.

I felt a hand grip my collar.  For an instant, I thought it was the man who had my arm.  It was Jamie.

The light-post came and went, scraping against the top edge of the container wagon, catching the man in the armpit, and hauling him away.  He didn’t loosen his grip, but my arm was narrow, my skin beaded with sweat.  His hand slid down to my wrist.  I moved a solid foot in the direction of the bottom end of the wagon, before a combination of my shirt around my chin, Jamie’s grip, and my ankles being wedged between the bracing and the tank itself stopped me.  The man’s iron grip dragged against the edges of my hand to the point that it scraped away skin.

With our adversary left behind and me at no further risk, Jamie let go of my collar.  I let my head relax, back of my head resting against the wagon.

The wheel was jittering, making violent noise with every rotation.  I was less worried now that it was going to come loose and more worried that it would shudder itself to pieces as it veered this way and that.

“How close are we?” I asked.

“I’d feel a lot better if we were closer,” he said.

“How close?”

“Five minutes.”

I nodded.  “Don’t make any right turns.  Might put too much strain on the wheel.”

“Suggestion accepted,” Jamie said.  He paused.  “Seven minutes.  But I have an idea, we’ll be closer to the terminal, and we won’t have to make any right turns to get there.”

“Right,” I said.  I took a moment to catch my breath, sitting on top of the container with my feet by Jamie’s right shoulder.  “Right.”

“You okay?”

“I’ll be better when the night’s over.  How about you?  Sleepy?”

“Ha!” Jamie laughed, one note.

“Good,” I said. “Good.”

I took a second to draw the second of the three guns I’d stashed on my person.  I’d had to let go of the first while struggling to stay atop the wagon.  I looked off to the side, seeing the shadows before I saw the danger itself.  “And we’ve got warbeasts.”

These ones appeared in front of us, from three separate side-streets.  The same sort.  Manes.

These ones, it seemed, were more fixated on the stitched horses pulling the wagon.  From the moment they leaped into motion, they moved in straight lines.

I aimed, muscles in my shooting arm twitching from the exertion of holding onto the wagon just moments ago, and I missed.  I missed again with my second shot, then my third.

“Hit the warbeasts!” Jamie said, as I pulled the trigger, catching one of the three maned creatures.

“I’m trying!”  I said.  I missed again.

“Not very hard!”

I aimed at the second.  From the moment I pulled the trigger, I knew my aim was off.  A heartbeat after I let the bullet fly, I adjusted, squeezing again, and clipped it in the cranium.  It was a grazing shot, but it was a well-placed graze, damaging eye and snout, bringing the creature down.

One more.  I didn’t bother to reload.  I let the empty gun fall onto the wagon seat between my right foot and Jamie’s rear end, drew a third gun-

But Jamie had already shifted his grip on the reins, drawn a gun, and fired at the remaining maned warbeast.  The bullet was well placed, but with the shift in the pull of the reins, the horses at the carriage front veered to one side.  The wheel screamed with the sound of rotating metal scraping against metal as the container’s weight leaned more heavily on that side of the axle.

“Don’t do that!” I admonished him.

He gave me an ‘are you crazy’ look.

“I had it!” I said.  I found the gun and reloaded it.

“You hit two with six shots.”

“And I had another six shots with my remaining gun, you dunce!”

“You’re the dunce,” Jamie retorted.  Just childish enough a retort to indicate he’d known I wasn’t serious with my own insult.

I settled down in the seat, breathing hard.  My ears were ringing from the tension and all of the gunshots.

“You’re supposed to get better, very quickly, with practice, not get dramatically worse,” Jamie said.

“Eat poop, Jamie.  Jarred my arm.  Muscle is doing a nonstop twitchy-twitchy painful thing, and my coordination is off.”

“Fix it, then.”

“At the next opportunity,” I said.  I switched the gun to my left hand, tucking the other one into my waistband for easy access.

We approached another group of people.  As we were getting closer, the concentrations of who was where were getting more intense.  This group numbered twelve in all.

All twelve had that eerie behavior to them, too still, as if they had shut down everything except what they needed to keep an eye out for targets.  All started moving in response to the clopping of hooves on road and the noise of the wagon.

“Can’t turn?” I asked.

“Can’t turn,” Jamie said.

“Dang it,” I said.  I raised my gun.

Squinting, my eyes stinging with the residual smoke that laced the moisture in my eyes, I opened fire.  I aimed for the clusters first, then the ones closest to the horse.  Jamie fired as well, but his focus was on keeping the horses on track, and despite his earlier criticisms, his aim wasn’t all that.

With six shots from my first gun and two from the second, I got six of them.  Jamie got two.  Of the eight in total, only five died properly.  The others barely seemed to care about the bullets.

One of the ones we didn’t get went straight for the horse.  He hurled himself at the horse’s legs, and the entire wagon tilted as the horse stumbled.  Two more hurled themselves against the side of the wagon and wagon wheels, the first bouncing off, the second going under the wheel and failing to damage it in the process like the one had earlier.

“Come on, come on,” Jamie said, as the horse the man had hit continued to stumble.  The wagon jerked violently as we rolled over bodies of people we’d shot.  I heard something give, a wooden crunch and a snap together in one sound.  “Don’t fall, horse!”

“Bugger bugger bugger,” I said.  The wheel came free, and the entire back of the wagon sagged.  The arms at the front that the stitched horses were attached to rose up, threatening to lift the things into the air.

As it was, the wagon bobbed, trying to decide if it wanted to hurl the horses skyward or if it wanted to dip forward, driving them into the ground.  As it veered into the former, it dragged, and as it did the latter, the horses floundered, the one horse struggling in particular.

“This will have to do!” Jamie called out.  “Off!”

“Off!?”

He was already letting go of the reins, preparing himself to hop off of the wagon.

I did the same, only for the left side of the wagon.  I watched Jamie, and as he jumped, I did the same.  I rolled with the landing.

The wagon was still moving forward, and Jamie, on the other side of it, followed it, away from the remaining men who were staggering or running in our direction.  I moved in parallel.

“Grenade, Sy!”

I reached to my belt, and I grabbed one of the grenades we’d liberated from the Apostle’s men.

“If this stuff is flammable, we’re going to die,” Jamie said.

“What?” I asked.  I’d thought we were aiming for the crowd.  Hearing what Jamie said, I had to connect the dots, realize it wasn’t just the crowd, but included the container.  Or part of the container.  I processed what he’d said again, then repeated myself, with ten degrees more emphasis, “What?

“You’re a bad influence, Sy,” Jamie said.  “On three!”

“Good knowing you, sir,” I said.

“Likewise, even if you’re a pain…  Two, three!

Skipped one, just to take a jab at me, I thought, as I tossed.  I turned, running before I even saw where the grenade ended up.  I knew where I’d aimed it.

The grenades caught the tail end of the container, and the front ranks of the charging group of drugged men.  They detonated, rocking the surroundings, and I lost my footing, falling.

The container, cracked and damaged by the grenade, dumped its contents onto the road.  Said contents flowed down the street, and along the gutter.

“Hurry,” Jamie said, helping me up.

We hurried.  Between the smoke, the explosion and the fire, only two of the drugged men came after us.  The two bullets we used in putting them down brought a third, and the noise of the third bullet didn’t bring any immediate visitors.

We had to run a block to get to the terminal.  It was another hut of tubes and controls, to guide the water flow.  The attached dials, signs, and labels were so old that half weren’t readable anymore, but Jamie seemed to have a sense of it.  He indicated the cranks to spin, shutting off water so that we would only contaminate the water supply in one area.  We moved to a hatch, and we climbed down to a lower level.  There was a large tank that gutter water flowed into, where the water was cleaned and strained of any noticeable debris.  The recycled water from the drains and rain was normally used to flush toilets and be strategically released from certain pipes to wash city streets or attach to the fire service’s pumps.

With Evette looking on, we closed off the tank channels, rerouting the flow, a process, according to Jamie, that would normally be used to drive a clog out of the pipes.

We stepped back to look at our work, listening to the sound of the gutter water chugging through.

It was done.  The drug we’d loaded into the wagon had made its way into the ditch and down here, and now it would make its way to the station and the buildings in the immediate surroundings.  With only the Devil and his men awake and potentially drinking the stuff, only they should be affected.

Jamie took a few more steps back, and then collapsed, his back to the wall.

I nodded, looked up at the hatch, and went to climb up, making sure that the door to the outside was firmly closed and latched, before retreating down to the dim space below, only partially closing the hatch behind me.

As good a hiding place as any, sitting in the dark here.  I settled down next to Jamie, looking up at the hatch.  If there was any light up on the surface, it would be visible around the edges of the hatch.

“We’ve only got a few hours before we need to move.  Don’t go and fall asleep, okay?” I asked.

No sooner was I done speaking than I felt Jamie’s head move.  It came to rest against my shoulder.

“Leaving it all to me, huh?  Jackass,” I said.  “Dunce.  Nincompoop…”

“…Pencilwit,” I said.  I had to think for a few more seconds to dig for more inspiration.  “Eraser licker.  Nipplesnout.  Bat-fart.  Turtle-weiner.  Barf… belcher.  Wormy-arsed snot-suckler…”

Digging for more inspiration, I looked up at the hatch.  The light of dawn that was shining through now was stronger.  If I had to go by gut…

“Needle-pecker.  Duck-buggerer.  Shitcrumb,” I said, for good measure.  I sighed a little, moving the shoulder of an arm that had long since gone numb.  “Up.”

“Mm,” Jamie made a noise.

“Drooler.  Snorer,” I said, under my breath.

“What was that?” Jamie asked.

“Nothing,” I said.  “Nothing at all.”

“Mm.  Isn’t that funny?” He murmured.  “I feel like I almost dreamed, except, I wouldn’t have been out for that long, and as dreams go, I just have a dim recollection of you doing nothing but coming up with insults for me for hours.  Hours upon hours.”

“And I’d never do that, of course,” I said.

“Never.  You’re too kind a soul.  Too grateful to me for leaving everything behind to support your sorry ass.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “Exactly.  But as amusing as that all is, it’s time to go.  If I gauged the timing right.”

Jamie nodded.

Together, we worked to reverse what we’d done, flushing the pipes, then restoring water to the area.  It was an easier process than setting things up in the first place.  Jamie’s intricate recollection of what he’d managed to find out about the city’s water system, services, and the maintenance therein was hardly even needed.  It was always easier to get things to do what they were intended to do, than to reroute and rework.

We made our way up the ladder, both of us groaning with our individual aches and pains, Jamie’s tricky shoulder always being some small problem.  We peeked out past the hatch, verified the coast as clear, and then made our way outside.

It wasn’t so far to the train station, and except for some perimeter patrols of officers and stitched that we steer clear of, the area was surprisingly empty and shockingly quiet, for an hour or so past dawn.

We approached the station at an oblique angle, but on seeing the first body, we moved forward with more confidence.  A man, crumpled to the ground, his skin orange-red in color, lay in the sun.

“They didn’t collect him,” I said.  “It’s hard to believe.  If they had people on watch, I feel like they would have grabbed him and tried to treat him.”

“It’s no guarantee,” Jamie said.

“Walk the perimeter first, then?” I asked.

Jamie nodded.

We took our time, even knowing that time was somewhat short.  Taking care, we verified that there were no people on watch, here, and apparently no civilians either.  I looked inside windows to homes, at beds, at porches and elsewhere.  There were doors that had been left open and unlocked, and there wasn’t a living soul to be seen.  The police who’d been patrolling elsewhere weren’t anywhere near the station itself.

It clicked.

“They weren’t sure what it was, when people started dying,” I said.  “They might have thought it was an invisible gas, or a disease.”

“They might have,” Jamie said.

I could hear the skepticism in his voice, and voiced the thought he hadn’t yet.  “Or it’s a trap.”

“Might be,” he said.  He smiled slightly, at the fact that I’d read his mind.

With that in mind, we were slower in our approach, more cautious.

We were only a few houses back from the door of the station when I saw it.  I changed course, and moved over to the curb by the side of the road.  The ditch was recessed, to allow rain water to flow in it and only in it, without spilling out into the road.  It was filled with detritus, with dirt, some weeds, and bits of trash.

But, in the midst of it, a dark line was visible.

I dug it out, and lifted it to look.

“Telegraph wire?” I asked.  “In a ditch.”

I looked at Jamie.  I could see the look on his face.  My expression dead serious, I lifted the wire, formed a loop, drew my knife, and cut the wire.  I waited a moment.

Nothing.

Still holding the wire, I gathered it up as I followed it to its source.  Stones in the pathway leading up to the front door had been placed over the wire, hiding it.  I got close to the front door, then stopped.

What would I do?

Pile trap upon trap.

I didn’t use the front door.  I checked a window, then climbed through, leaving Jamie on watch.

Inside the building were bodies.  People that had turned varying shades of orange and red, fallen here and there.  The Devil wasn’t among them.

But, more concerning, were the cases and boxes.  Piles upon piles of the things.  I knew the characteristic smell.

Bombs.  Explosives.  TNT.

All wired up to this telegraph-style fuse.  To other things.  To the front door, and to a hatch in the bathroom floor, leading to the water system.  I hadn’t even guessed that entry point existed.

Too much, all together.  He must have tapped the Apostles’ supplies.  Completely over the top.

I unhooked the trick fuses on the front door, opening it.  I let Jamie see it all.

“There’s no way we get rid of all of this before they arrive,” Jamie said.

“I know,” I said.

“He could attack last minute, find a way to set it off.”

“I know,” I said, again.  “Keep an eye out, and watch out, he might have a sniper rifle.  If he has access to all of this… not out of the question.”

Jamie nodded, stepping back outside.

I crossed the station, and I found what any train station office had to have available.  The wires were nailed to the wall, making for a painful process of tracing it all back, making sure that it wouldn’t feed back into some pile of bombs or another, triggering an explosion if I made a call.  I was a little disappointed that it didn’t, that I didn’t have another minor victory like I had with the front door.

I dialed and made the call.

“Hello?  Sir?” A woman’s voice.

“West Corinth train station, here,” I said.

“You’re supposed to identify yourself with a name and number, sir, otherwise the line may be compromised.  Please state-”

I was a little pleased that she jumped to sir instead of assuming I was a child.

“It’s compromised,” I said, cutting the woman off.  “The station is filled with explosives.  It will blow up shortly.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Do you have a means of contacting the train that’s due to arrive at seven?  And all of the other trains that are due to pass through today?”

“Sir?  Yes, we have a means, but can I ask you-”

“Contact them, now,” I said.  “Stop the train.  Because I’m about to blow up the tracks and the station both.”

“Sir-”

“West Corinth,” I said again.  “Warn them.”

There was silence on the line.  A muffled sound, voices in the background.  She was talking to others.

“Talk to me,” I said.

Another voice came on the line, male.

“Who are you?” the voice asked.  “Why this?”

“I’m Sylvester Lambsbridge,” I said.  “Ask around, the name means something.”

“It does,” he said, in a way that suggested he now believed me, and that it was sinking in.  He knew my name already.  Staff at train stations and post offices had likely been warned about me.

“You’ll stop the train?” I asked.

“I don’t see how we have any other choice,” the voice replied.

That done, I hung up.

I checked a smaller crate of TNT, judging the quality of it, and deemed it relatively new.  Older TNT could be volatile.  As I left the building, I deposited the TNT on the ground, in a line.

Jamie greeted me as I moved outside, still laying out the line.

“The Lambs are going to have to find another way into town,” I said.  “That’s disappointing.”

“A touch,” Jamie said.  He gave me a hand with the crate, speeding up the process.

“Didn’t get the Devil either.  He’s out there.  Plotting.”

“That’s what you wanted, though, isn’t it?  Someone to keep the Lambs on their toes?  You wanted to stir shit up and leave it stirred.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But… not quite this messy.  Be better if the Devil was dead, but the stirring was still a thing.  If we knew when and where they were turning up, we could set up some kids somewhere, just let them know, so they knew to watch out.  I don’t like how this guy moves.  Big actions, violent, over the top every time.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “And he’s got some sway over the local police, maybe politics.”

I had some guesses.  Either they were on a drug only he was supplying, or he had some blackmail.  Something he’d kept in his pocket for an event like this, where his headquarters were burned and he’d lost half of everything, and he wanted his revenge.

We worked for another few minutes before I laid down the last of the dynamite.  I drew a match.

Jamie pointed further down the street.  “Wind’s blowing that stick away.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said.

“If you’re sure.”

I lit the wick.  Jamie and I legged it.

One explosion prompted another, which led all the way back to the station.  Once the big stockpile went, everything went.  A massive, rolling boom, tearing apart the station and the tracks and some nearby buildings.

Bits of wood and shingle rained down all around us.

I bounced on the spot, excited.

“You’re such a kid sometimes,” Jamie said.

“The Lambs are coming,” I said, still bouncing, excited.  I stopped bouncing.  “And there’s still so dang much to do!  Come on, come on!”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 12.12 – Twig

Dyed in the Wool – 12.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I balanced on one of the movable walls, which involved me leaning over at a forty-five degree angle.  A rope was wound several times around my wrist, extended over to a set of pulleys at the ceiling, then over to a counterweight, which dangled in mid-air.

I used a hook on the end of a rod to align the rope with the wheels of the pulley, checked the coast was clear, and then tossed the rod down to a waiting worker.

“Sylvester,” Jamie called out.  He was closer to the front door, a fair distance away.

“If the Lambs aren’t coming right this second, then it can wait.  Give me one minute.”

“I’ve been giving you one minute for the past ten minutes.”

“Then it shouldn’t be a problem to give me another,” I said.  I unwound the rope from my wrist, turned on the spot, so it was wound around my waist with the end loose and extending out in front of me.  It took some doing to maintain my balance throughout, when I was having to stand on a piece of wood only an inch and a half across.  I tied the rope-end to the top corner of the movable wall.

“Eleven minutes now,” Jamie said.  “I’m only nagging you because the thing I’ve been bugging you about is now two things.”

“Gimme another minute,” I said.  Extricating myself took a little bit of work.  I had to haul back on the rope to give myself slack and then work my way out of the loop I’d wound around my waist.  I held onto the rope for balance, double checked everything was in place, then checked the ground below me was clear.

“Don’t jump,” Jamie said.

I hopped down to the ground.  It was a solid twelve foot drop, and I had to roll to absorb the impact.

“One of these days you’re going to mess up,” Jamie said.  “You’ll land funny and feel like such a twerp.”

“I’m fine so long as I keep the practice up, which is exactly what I’m doing,” I said.  I looked past Jamie to the door.  There was a crowd of children.  “We have guests.”

“Which is the second thing I was going to tell you,” Jamie said.  “The first thing-”

“Hold on.  I want to do this while I’m thinking about all of this and how it’s set up.  If I stop, I’m going to forget something and it’s going to take forever to get back into it,” I said, looking over the setup.

“If you insist,” Jamie said.  It was clear he was close to the limit of his patience.

I got the assistance of the man who I’d tossed the rod to and lifted the movable wall up and out of its track.  A wheel at the bottom corner helped us move it until it was flush to the wall.  I got the rod, and moved the rope through a hook so it wouldn’t stand out.

I did a circuit around the hall, double checking it all, before stopping at the front door.  The hall was laid out so there was more or less a clear path from the front door to the back, with hallways branching off to the left and right.  Along the right wall, between the two hallways going off to the kitchen, was the staircase leading up.  The main room had several chairs and tables placed along the middle, with pieces of furniture here and there.

The ropes weren’t too visible.

Trial run.

I made my way to the back door in a zig-zagging fashion.  Up onto the coffee table, kick the bowl-

The first rope came loose.  The counterweight came down, landing just behind me as I hopped up onto the chair.  With the descending counterweight, the walls closed like a set of double doors, narrowly missing the furniture we’d placed.  The wheels sank into notches in the floor, and a latch connected the doors.

As I made my way to the back door, two more of the moving walls closed behind me in the same manner.

I stopped at the back door, and looked at it, taking it in.

“Good to put them back!” I called out.

The two men who had set up the doors and latches set about undoing the latches and lifting the walls back into place.

“Okay,” Jamie said, “So-”

“Hold on,” I said.

I closed my eyes for a moment, focusing.

As Jamie crossed the room, I also envisioned the Lambs making their approach.  I envisioned myself, crossing the room in the same way I just had, a path that saw me darting left and right, so that every piece of furniture served as cover.

Mary was the one to watch out for, here.  I gave special consideration to imagining how she’d move, the choices she’d make.  If she had a bola, or a throwing knife, she wouldn’t have a clear shot.  I’d be too far away for other tricks and toys.

I imagined the doors swinging closed, the counterweights falling from the ceiling and forcing Mary to change course, if she chose the fastest route to me.

I could get out the back door with time to spare.  I imagined the same scenario, with Mary a few paces behind me, with Mary further away.

I imagined the scenario with them having help.  The likes of an experiment like Gorger or the Hangman, or with Lillian having some trick up her sleeve, like the suit I’d urged her to make.

I envisioned Mary getting a boost that let her fly over the first set of closing doors.  I imagined something big and strong tearing its way through the walls in quick succession.  All of the scenes played out in quick succession as I plotted the course of events.

The trick arose when Mary got clever.  She was fast, she was athletic, and she was determined.

I could imagine Mary, graceful Mary, using the staircase at one side of the room.  Running up as well as toward me.  Getting the height to get over the second and third walls.  Getting the vantage point where I didn’t have actual cover, that would let her throw that bola or hurl that drug-loaded dart at my back.

Jamie had reached me.  He put his hands around my neck, lightly strangling me.

“Hold on,” I said.

He tightened his grip.

I could see a variety of ways that Mary might make that maneuver.

“Okay,” I said.  “Okay.  Fine.  That’s all I needed.”

He released me, then guided me by the shoulder, leading me toward the front door.

“Abbot,” I spoke to the builder, as we passed him.

“That’s not my name,” he said.

“Over there.  Above the wall-hinge.  Put in a hook.  Should be about three feet down from the ceiling.”

“A hook?”

“Like the ones we used for the ropes.  I’ll do the rest later.”

“Uh huh,” he said, giving me a look like I was crazy.

Maybe I was.

“Done?” Jamie asked.

“Sure.  Just, you know, trying to arrange things so we have a fighting chance.  But that’s not important, no, we’ve gotta do that thing you’re trying to get my attention about.”

Jamie rolled his eyes, dropping his hand from my shoulder.

We approached the group of kids.  Some were from Noreen’s group.  They had that hardness to them, and I could spot the bulges of weapons and other things.  Most of the youths had bags with them.

The moving walls were a bit of a show for them, but it might have been unnecessary.  Even in the wake of all that, they were looking around the building, taking it in.

“Hi,” I said.  “Sorry about that.  Checking on the defenses.”

“This place has defenses?” one of the boys asked.

“Sure,” I said.  “Ones that will see use soon.  Not that it should impact you lot.  Now, uh, again, sorry for the wait.  Welcome home.”

The very youngest of the crowd of twenty or so seemed to see something special in that word.  The oldest and the better-armed seemed to react as if I’d subtly pushed them away.

They had likely heard promises once upon a time, and those promises had been broken.  That was fine.  They might not stay, and that was fine too.

But the option would be here.  That was what was important.  There would be safety and security here, so long as I could help it.

“This is the sitting room.  Common area, hangout, should be able to see people coming and going, have tea.  Lounge around too much and you might get recruited for chores, because the kitchen and the dining room are at the east wing, just over there.  West wing, you’ve got offices.  Bathroom for the adults, area for first aid in case any of you hurt yourself, boring stuff.”

I had their attention.  That was good.

“Go upstairs.  Boys to the left, girls to the right.  For those of you who don’t know left from right, blue means boy, pink means girl.  Beds and bedrooms are first come first serve.”

There was a momentary pause before the stampede broke out.  The youths, who were aged eight to fifteen or so, stampeded up the stairs.

“Second thing,” Jamie said.  “Well, it was the first thing, but you addressed the new arrivals first.  Shirley is talking to the fourth potential hire.  They’re upstairs.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Excellent.”

“At least the kids you just sent up there will be a good test for her,” Jamie said.

“I’d guessed that was the first thing.  I do actually remember a little,” I said.  “We were expecting someone, and I’ve been thinking about how we need to get this nailed down if we can.”

We walked up the stairs.

“We need a lot of staff,” Jamie said.  “We’re behind, and I don’t see things pulling together at this rate.”

“Hmm,” I made a sound.

“I know you want to find the person in charge before you recruit the staff to work under her, but… it might be time to clench your teeth and accept that we’ll have to take someone good enough instead of someone truly good.”

“Hmmm,” I made the same sound as before, but with more consternation in it.

“Do you remember that I told you her name?”

“No.”

“Her profession or general background?”

“Nope.”

“My concerns, hopes, any other notes?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.  “Because I didn’t mention any of that.”

I slapped him lightly across the back of the head.

“I deserved that.  But you deserve so much worse.”

“I do.  What do I need to know about her?”

“She was second-in-command of a detention center for young delinquents?” Jamie suggested.  “Deputy warden.  Taught the math classes.”

“Really?” I asked, “That’s amazing!”

“She did okay.”

“How did you find her?”

“I asked around.  Sent letters around, really.  Widened the criteria I was asking for, someone mentioned her in passing, I tracked her down.”

“Now you’ve got my hopes up,” I said.

Jamie raised his hand, fingers crossed, and I matched it.

We reached the upstairs, which was in the midst of total and utter chaos.  Shirley and an older, short-haired woman in a very staid gray dress stood to one side as the children ran this way and that.  In the midst of that chaos, Jamie ducked away, keeping his head turned away from the guest.

“Sylvester!” one of the youths asked.  He was fourteen, and came with a girl that was his age in tow, holding her wrists.  “What if we want to share a room?”

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise an approaching smaller child was making.  The child, a boy, was crying, and crying in a way that screamed ‘I want attention!’

Before the fourteen year old could make the case for the co-ed room, the child began mewling out sobbing monosyllabic sounds that only barely formed a sentence.  “The-huh-old-her-kids-they-th-they-took-my-ruh-hoom!  You-you-said-fir-first-come-first-serrrrrve!”

Now that he wasn’t having to form words, he was free to descend into a wail.

The woman gave me a curious look.

Wondering why they’re asking me, and the authority I have.

Not perfect.  But I’d tied my own hands.  Might as well let her know I was the authority here.

“Don’t talk to me,” I addressed both the child and the boy-girl pair, then indicated the woman.  “Talk to her.”

She looked surprised at that.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

“I’m not saying you’re hired,” I told her.  “But I want to see how you handle this.  Test run.”

“Ma’am,” the fourteen year old said.  “Darleen and I have been together from the beginning.  We stay together.  There’s no other way about it.”

“I-” she started.

“Sylvester!” a teenage girl cut in, approaching from the girl’s hallway.  “All the girls are taking individual rooms, and some were saying they weren’t going to have roommates, and-”

I flourished with my hands, stepped back, and extended my arms and hands, as if to present the woman.

She saw how the eight year old and the fourteen year old were addressing the woman, and she cottoned on.  She immediately turned to the woman, her voice overlapping with the two voices of the boys.

“That will be quite enough of that!” the woman spoke, with enough authority that several heads in the hallways turned and the din died down considerably.  There were still sounds of squabbling in some other rooms.

She had a good presence.  Not Mauer-level, but for all her graying hair and the ankle-length dress with the high collar, she gave the me impression of someone who should normally have a rod in hand, ready to deliver very liberal canings to buttocks and knuckles.

With all of that latent menace, she didn’t address any of the group.  She turned her focus toward me.

“Throwing me to the wolves without explanation or courtesy?” she asked me.

I started to speak, but she talked over me.  “Or, is it that you’re a wolf yourself?”

She moved with care, slowly, so as not to startle, and touched my shirt, beneath my armpit.  it only had buttons down to the collarbone, and hung loose.  I wore a coverall with the upper portion down and tied around my waist.  The holes in the knees and my bare feet meant I wasn’t baking in the summer heat, even if I was sweaty.

When I didn’t move or protest, she tugged the shirt up and away from my waist.

Amid the sleeves I’d folded around my waist, I’d stowed a knife, gun, and three grenades.  It was the grenades that seemed to give her pause.

“I’m a mouse, not a wolf,” I said, meeting her eyes.

“I know the slang,” she said.

Where most of the people this far away from Radham don’t know it, or use different terms and signs.  It was a point in her favor.

“I’m concerned this isn’t adding up,” she said.  “I was clearly misled about this job, and I’m not happy with that.”

Shirley jumped in.  “Sylvester is… he’s been in and out of orphanages all of his life.  As troubled youth go, he’s a unique case.  I did not know he would be so heavily armed, but-”

“It’s okay, Shirley,” I said.

Shirley sagged in obvious relief, that she didn’t have to come up with a way to salvage this situation.

“This… project,” I said.  “I’m managing it.  But I won’t be managing it forever.  We need someone to keep things running smoothly, keep the house standing.  Keep the children from killing each other.”

“Orphans running an orphanage?” the woman asked, imperious.

“Supplying the funds and organizing it at the outset.  Not running it,” I said.  “That would be up to you, with a few ground rules in place.  You can’t force anyone to stay, and if there are beds, you can’t turn anyone away.  There would be rules for privacy, but-”

“If I was put in charge, there would have to be curfew,” the woman said.  “I would want to know where the children were at all times.  I would require them to stay.  That would be if I somehow overcame my reservations about what seems to be a very shady, concerning picture that is being painted before me.”

She’s conservative, I thought.  Dangerously so.

I felt a welling disappointment.  The same experiences that had left her with a keen eye for hidden weapons and the skills needed to keep people in line left her wary of… how to put it?  Of situations slipping from her control.  She’d no doubt seen how it could happen early in her career and it had left a mark on her.

But that tight-fisted control represented too much about what I wanted to fight against, in the bigger picture.

I formulated the words in my head, but they lay flat on my tongue, ready to be spoken.  I could see the woman’s posture, the way she was critically assessing the building, and I knew, with near certainty, that she was going to tell people about us, in an effort to instill some order on this disorder.

Would I have to kill her?  I didn’t want to kill someone I respected.

But, facing the reality that I might have to, I began laying the groundwork.

“Shirley,” I said.

“Yes, sir?” she asked.

I might have winced at the word ‘sir’, but I could see what she was doing, and anything that would put the matron off balance and create an opening was just fine, even if it heightened her suspicion and pushed her away.

“Would you prepare us some tea?”

“Yes,” she said.

There was a pause as Shirley disappeared downstairs.

The matron turned to the children.  The sniveling eight year old was first.  “In a moment, we’ll talk to those boys, alright?  If you were told the bed was yours if you were there first, then that’s a rule and it should be followed.”

The boy rubbed at his nose and nodded.

The boy-girl couple were next.  “Are you siblings?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then I don’t see how it’s appropriate.”

“It’s the way we’ve always done things!  If she doesn’t sleep beside me, she-”

He stopped, realizing there was more of an audience.  The girl might have squeezed his hand.

“-has nightmares,” he said, which wasn’t the original thing he’d been planning to say.

“I notice that you’re doing all of the talking,” the matron said.  “I’d like to hear from her.  He called you Darleen?”

“Darleen,” the girl said, nodding.

“That’s short for what?”

“Geraldine,” the girl said.

“Then I’m going to call you Geraldine.  I don’t like short form names.  Geraldine, I want you to look me in the eye.”

Geraldine tried.

“Tell me, do you want to stay with him, or do you want to stay with the girls?”

Geraldine opened her mouth, glancing at her friend.

“Look at me,” the matron said.  “Not at him.  I don’t want the answer he wants you to give me.  I want the answer from you.”

“I… wouldn’t mind staying with the girls.  It’s been a while since I had… nightmares.”

Her voice dropped two notches as she said that last word.

“Good.  Then that’s resolved.  As for you,” the matron said to the girl who’d snitched about the others hogging rooms, “I’ll find you after I’ve resolved the bullying.”

The snitch nodded.

The matron took the eight year old’s hand and led him in the direction of the boy’s rooms.  No questions about whether she should or if she had our permission to depart the conversation.  Just a very matter-of-fact assumption that she should have to handle this.

I followed her.  Jamie trailed behind.

“I’m afraid I don’t recall your name,” I said.

“Beverly Fuller,” the matron said, while Jamie, in the background, mouthed the name.  She added, “Mrs. Fuller, mind you.  I am happily married.”

“You might have noticed there are few children for how much space there is,” I commented.

“I have.”

“There are more coming,” I said.  “I’m about to volunteer some details about what the objective is, and I’m admittedly putting my trust in your hands-”

To an extent, I thought.  Because I’m boned anyway if you decide to talk, and killing you is on the table.

“-and I’m assuming you have some fondness for children and said fondness fosters some sympathy.”

“Oh?” she asked, arch.

“Children are being collected, Mrs. Fuller.  They’re being handed over to the Academy.  They are being experimented on and disposed of.  On the black market, children are being sold, again, for the purposes of experimentation.  I’ve seen some of the monsters that were produced from that experimentation.  I count one of those monsters as a close friend and mortal enemy at the same time.  I am one of the experiments.”

She didn’t turn her head, but she looked at me from the corner of her eye.

I didn’t add anything more.  I let the silence hang, letting her make the next move when it came to the conversation, while plotting the responses I would need to crack that conservative, stern facade.

“At the facilities I’ve worked in, I saw many children go to the Academy,” Beverly said.

“And?” I asked.  “Were you complicit?  Did it bother you?”

“I wasn’t directly complicit, but I saw what my superior did and the people she talked to, and I wondered,” she said, her eyes forward, neck straight, chin set, posture perfect.  “I thought about how a dozen a year might go to the Academy, but I’ve never met anyone who claimed what you claim, to have been one of them.”

“They went in, and they never went out,” I said.

“Effectively,” she said.

We’d stopped outside of the room the eight year old had led us to.  Beverly stood in the doorway, stared down some of the boys who were sitting on the bed, and without a word, she pointed to them, then indicated out.

They obeyed, collecting their things on the way out.  The woman gave the eight year old a push on the shoulder.

So very easily handled.

“Did it bother you?” I asked her.  I already knew the answer, in part, because she had volunteered the information she had.  She wouldn’t if it hadn’t stuck in her mind to some degree.

“Should it?” she asked.

Ah, but the question was a wall.  A defense, thrown up to protect herself.

“Speaking as one of the very few children I know who went in and came back out,” I said, “I’ve known an awful lot of death over the past seven years or so.  I’ve experienced an awful lot of pain.  On the flip side of that coin, I have inflicted more pain than you could wrap your head around, and I’ve killed an awful lot of people.”

I watched her carefully as she took that in.  She’d seen the weapons.

“I will expire before I’m twenty-five.  Very possibly before I’m twenty, because of what they did to me.  I’m sterile, because of what they did to me.  I will never have children, experience a family, or hold a job.  I’m not saying this because I want pity.  But it’s my reality.  And I’m not alone in it.”

She declined to give me a response.

“I’m leaving before long.  I will be in touch, as much as I’m able, knowing they’ll try to intercept my letters.  I’ll support this institution and provide information and the funds.  I might never have children, but I intend to leave my marks on the world.  Among those marks will be this one.  I will find the children the Academy is looking to collect and I will send them here.  With some extra measures I put in place and, hopefully, some help from others, this will be a sanctuary.  But it’s a sanctuary where the people here have to be free to come and go.”

Still no response.

“Some of my fellow experiments are going to come looking for me.  They will come through here.  You don’t have to keep secrets.  You might even want to talk or cooperate with them.  They won’t hurt anyone here.  It’ll take a short time to wrap up everything in West Corinth, and when I’m done with that, I’ll leave, like I said.  It is my hope that you will remain and maintain the peace and security of this place.”

“Gritting your teeth, Sy?” Jamie asked, from the background.

The matron turned to look.

“Revealing yourself, Jamie?” I asked, annoyed.

“I know you,” he said.  “I know you’re not wholly sold.  I was going to make a suggestion.”

“An acquaintance?” Beverly asked.

“Jamie is a friend,” I said.  “My closest friend, really.  Now the second child you’ll have met, who came back from the Academy.  What’s the suggestion?”

“I know you want to pick someone who is somehow everything you want this institution to embody, and I know you’re not wholly sold with Mrs. Fuller.  You want someone who can be almost a mother, nurturing and supportive.  Not just a disciplinarian.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“There was another candidate.  Number three.  Hogarth?  The one who acted as tutor to the aristocratic youths?  She was warm.  If Mrs. Fuller was willing, we could bring Ms. Hogarth on, and have a joint leadership.  It would also help with getting more staff on board, while we’re so tight on time.”

I nodded at that, thinking about it.  I glanced up at Mrs. Fuller.

“If I met the woman and found her acceptable, it’s not out of the question,” the matron said.  In saying it, she was effectively saying she’d accepted what I’d said.  She recognized the value in the mission.  I no longer suspected she would let people know what we were doing here.

I felt a profound relief at that.

“It’s something of a relief to know I wouldn’t have to be the one to wipe snotty noses and tuck the little ones in.”

I grinned at that.

“Shirley will have the tea ready,” Jamie said.  “Would you like to come downstairs before more children come running to us with problems?”

I looked at the children, and I saw that many were hanging back.  Beverly Fuller cut an imposing, intimidating figure.  I imagined that with time, they would feel free to come to her with problems, and she would be quick to dismiss anyone who did so frivolously.

As we made our way down the stairs, however, I saw Pierre and Samuel standing at the door.

I glanced at Jamie, gesturing.

“It looks like we may not be able to join you for tea, but I’m sure Shirley can cover things until we return,” Jamie said.

Mrs. Fuller nodded, very stiffly.

She wasn’t quite broken into our way of doing things, but I could almost see how she would get there.

This would be fine.

We walked right past Samuel and Pierre, and the two turned around to fall in stride to either side of Jamie and me.

“Messages delivered,” Pierre said.  He reached past me to hand a note to Jamie.  “Couldn’t reach Fourth, and the youths at Wollstone Rock gave a very firm no.”

“Damn,” I said.

“It’s good enough,” Jamie said.  He drew a paper out of his pocket, found a pencil, and scratched out a few options.  “Same thing, but these groups.  When you talk to them, say the same things, but let them know about the other groups that accepted.”

“Can do,” Pierre said.

Getting the pieces in place.  Not just movable walls, but the people too.

“Samuel,” I said, taking my turn.  “Go inside.  Introduce yourself.  You can let the older woman know that you’re the person who is going to be directing the children her way.  Have some tea.  Take it easy.  Until further notice, you don’t need to worry about anything.  Except, wait, yeah, make sure the cranes are in the right positions, and make sure the carts are parked at the back like I’d wanted.”

Samuel nodded.

Getting everything positioned just right.

If a Lamb didn’t curse my name before all of this was over, then I’d be gravely disappointed.

It had been twelve or so hours now since the train station had been blown up.  Jamie had already worked out the train schedules.  He’d figured the routes the Lambs would need to take, and the distance from the nearest city to here.

The sun was hot and the city still smelled like smoke.  Even the cast of it, all pale stone, seemed to have been tinted darker by the conflict two nights ago.

Now the sun was setting.  Jamie and I sat at our perch, me with my binoculars, Jamie slumbering while he sat precariously in the windowsill, across from me.

The bulk of the work was done, the pieces in place, everyone had their script, so to speak, and the snares and tricks were all arranged.

Looking at Jamie, I thought about how he represented peace.  That, from the moment he’d wrapped his arms around me and let me know that he was there, that he’d left and he was supporting me, I’d felt relief and calm, with the idea that things would be okay.

Happiness had come and went.  There had been good moments.  But the dominant feeling had been one of security.  I’d felt okay for the first time in a long time, and that overrode even the lingering unease that came with my betraying the Lambs.

But now, sitting and watching the sunset, knowing that there was a very dangerous and desperate man looking to hurt me, and the Lambs were coming to hunt me, I felt happy.  I was catching myself smiling at nothing in particular.  I wanted tomorrow to have come yesterday.

I raised the binoculars to my eyes, watching as another train of wagons and cars came in through one end of the city.

Nothing.

I looked over at Jamie.  I wanted to shake him awake and ask him what time it was.  If it was time.  If this was the moment I should really truly be watching.

One of the carriages stopped at the very outside border of West Corinth.  I raised the binoculars to my eyes again.

There.  A group of youths was departing the carriage.  Stopping at the outskirts, so they could slip surreptitiously into the city.

Duncan was the first to exit the carriage.  He went to the back to lift some cages to the ground.  He fiddled with them, releasing the occupants.  Canines of a sort.

Ashton was second to depart.

I didn’t recognize the third boy, but his features were strange and he moved stiffly, and he was big for his apparent age.

I didn’t recognize the first girl to step out of the train car either.  She wore heavy clothing for the summer heat, with sleeves over her hands and a hood over her head.

“Jamie,” I said, realizing belatedly that Jamie would want to see, before the group disappeared.  When Jamie didn’t rouse, I kicked his shin.

“Wuh?” he asked.

I undid the bolt that connected the two pieces of the binoculars together, and handed him one half.  He didn’t need to ask where to look – he’d been the one to work out the most likely path of approach, and I’d agreed it made sense, based on the Lambs’ psychology.

I looked through the binocular-turned spyglass.  I frowned as I laid eyes on the second girl of the group.  Dark haired, her features funny.

“They’re messing with us, Sy.  It’s a decoy, a trick,” Jamie said.

I looked over at him, then at the specter that had appeared beside him.  She leaned forward, her hands on the windowsill.  Evette’s features and clothes now mirrored that of the girl down there, as if to round out my thoughts.

“They don’t talk,” Jamie said.  “That’s the key thing.  They’re very similar in the way they move.  They’re mock-ups, but they aren’t very good at acting.”

“And the timing is wrong,” Evette agreed with Jamie.  “I’d take far longer to grow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed with the two of them.

I felt such profound disappointment I didn’t know what to do with myself.

“It’s bait,” Jamie said, quiet.  “They’re messing with you.”

“It’s working,” I admitted.

“The real Lambs are out there already,” he said.  “Watching, looking to see how we might react.”

I turned my focus to the other wagons, to the surrounding area, looking.

“We should go,” Jamie said.  He reached out.  “Keep tabs on things.”

“But where are the real Lambs?” I asked.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.01 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.1 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The three recruits climbed out of the carriage to join Duncan and Ashton.  Duncan squared his shoulders, straightened his shirt, and looked around, taking it all in.  His pets remained at his side, harnessed, with chain leashes extending from the harnesses to Duncan’s hand.

Abby watched and waited, her companions on either side of her.  Ashton looked back at them and smiled reassuringly.

“I should have known,” Duncan said.  “I haven’t really worked with Sylvester or Jamie, mind you, but I should have known.  It looks like a good share of this city burned down in the last few days.”

The other girl, enshrouded in a hooded shirt with overlong sleeves, fidgeted nervously, then turned around as if she was going to walk away, before turning around again.  Ashton went straight to her, clasping the extra length of sleeve in his hands as someone else might clasp hands.

“It’s okay, Lara,” Ashton said.

He had to move his head to peer beneath the hood, even though they were the same height.  Abby emulated him, matching the tilt of his head.  Crammed within each of Lara’s eyes were several lesser eyes, two visible, the other two only really visible when she opened her eyes wider, for eight smaller eyes in total.  Individual pupils dilated to very different extents, each surrounded by gray concentric rings.

Ashton drew in a deep breath and then sighed.  “I know you don’t like new places, and all of this travel has been hard, but we’re close, and they won’t hurt you.  They absolutely can’t and won’t.”

Duncan surreptitiously glanced at the back of his hand.  He did that when Ashton was making spores, and sometimes when Ashton wasn’t.  Abby tried to pay more attention to Duncan, because Duncan was in charge.  There was a hierarchy and in the here and now Duncan was the one to listen to.

He looked concerned.  He gave Ashton a curious look.

Lara?” Duncan asked, raising his free hand to cover his mouth as he spoke.  They were supposed to do that when they thought that Sylvester might be watching.  Sylvester could read lips.  Abby did too, but it was because she understood the mouth movements better than the sounds.

“She needs a name,” Ashton said, moving his hand to his mouth to cover it.  All the mouth-covering made Abby restless.

“We were explicitly ordered not to name it.”

“I know.  I’m disobeying orders,” Ashton said.  “I have been for weeks now.”

Duncan held back frustration, then worked through it before responding, “Why would you do that?”

“She needed a name,” Ashton said, simply.

“So I gathered,” Duncan said.  Patience.  “Why are you revealing this secret name now?”

“Because,” Ashton said, “It’s stupid to not have anything to call her when we might need to say a lot very quickly.”

Again, the barely-withheld frustration on Duncan’s part.

“And because by letting you know now, you’re more likely to let it go because we need to focus on more important things,” Ashton said.  Beside him, ‘Lara’ had stopped fidgeting so noticeably.  Ashton’s spores were working.

“Are you actually being shrewd?” Duncan asked.

“No,” Ashton said.  “Helen and I talked about it and she suggested it.”

“I see,” Duncan said.  He made a face, looking at the group of four.  “I suppose she’s right.  I’ll have to let it go.”

Ashton nodded.  He squeezed Lara’s sleeve, swinging his arm a little.

“But why call it Lara?”

It.

“Because they called her a larval form and if you take the ‘v’ out of larva then Lara,” Ashton said.

“Ah,” Duncan said.  He looked at Lara.  “Lara?”

Lara’s head barely moved beneath her hood.  A faint nod.

Duncan moved his hand from his mouth to her hooded head, giving it a pat.  “Alright.  We should go.  Grab your bags.  Emmett, if you could take mine, it would be appreciated.”

Emmett gave him a nod in response.  The boy had the build of a stocky fourteen year old and the face of an eight year old.  He was only slightly shorter than Duncan, who was three years his senior.

“Follow,” Duncan ordered, leading the way off the main road.

All of the buildings were pale stone traced with curling branches.  There were lawns and gardens, but in many the grass had wilted a little.  In others, there were pebbles and stones laid out to take up a portion of the yard, set so that rainwater would collect on the grass.  Those yards were the healthier ones.

Not so many trees.  Abby liked birds and squirrels and some of the Academy-made things that sometimes lurked in the trees.  She missed home, a little.  Back at Sous Reine, she had slept in a lab and the lab had had a window, and she would spend hours at a time watching the things in the trees and how they moved.  She had been on this world for eleven years, growing at the same rate a human did, and she had learned to identify every last one of the squirrels and birds who visited the trees, who their parents were, where they nested, and how they acted.

Over the course of this journey, going from city to city with no explanation about why, she sometimes thought about the birds and squirrels and she would feel her brain go dark and would have fits.  Ashton would come into her room, calm her down and in their own, strange way, communicating despite their very different brains and perspectives, he would guide her through the experience.  Other times, when she judged that he was in a good mood, she would go to Duncan and seek the more rational, scientific explanation.  She’d done it after having the fits the second time around.

His explanation was that her brain was different, very like a human’s, but with more of some things and less of others, and there were a few parts that didn’t work like they should.  When she experienced strong emotion, she had seizures.  He’d called the sensation ‘feelings’, but she preferred ‘experience’, because it wasn’t so much something that she could touch as a room she seemed to pass through.

So, with all of that taken into account, she had stopped thinking about the birds and the squirrels, even though that made the experience even worse somehow, and had tried to watch for other things to pay attention to instead.

Duncan’s animals weren’t that interesting.  They didn’t have much personality.  No heads, no brains.

No, she couldn’t see much of anything, or hear much of anything.  She sniffed the air-

“Smoke,” Abby piped up.

“Mm hmm,” Duncan agreed.  “Probably set the fires to distract so they could blow up the train station.  I’m not sure why.  I would be happy-”

He paused to move his hand to his mouth, feigning a bit of a scratch of his cheek, while glancing quickly at nearby windows and alleyways.

“-to have a conversation with the other Lambs and touch base.”

Lara turned her head to him.  The hood hid her eyes.

He reached out and gave her head another pat.  “Soon, Lara.”

Abby scrunched up her nose at the lingering smoke smell.

“When we get to Radham,” Ashton said, to nobody in particular, “We can spend more time with the others.  We can teach you all things, like the gestures.  There’s something nice about being part of a group.”

“They aren’t part of the Lambs project, Ashton,” Duncan corrected.

“I know.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t spend time together and talk.  We can all make each other stronger and better.”

Duncan narrowed his eyes a little, thinking.  “Mary.”

“What?” Ashton asked.

“Mary said that, I’m guessing.”

“No, I said it,” Ashton said.

“Mary probably said that about the Lambs making each other better and stronger, and you heard it, and you just repeated it.”

“Oh.  Yes.”

“Yes,” Duncan said.  He sighed.

“Emmett can get stronger and Lara can become braver, and Abby can get fixed so she actually works.”

Duncan looked at Abby.  Checking to see if she minded.  She didn’t.

She had met the other Lambs, and Lillian had explained the situation, sitting with Abby and her makers.  The Headmaster of Radham Academy was looking for experiments of a certain sort, and while the Lambs project had spent the last little while going here and there to look for two of their own, they would sometimes collect one of the projects that fit.  Lara was one, Emmett was sort of one, and Abby had been the last to be collected, weeks ago, even though Abby wasn’t a successful project.  The only reason she was being raised to maturity was the Sous Reine’s ethics board and the possibility that she might develop the talents she was supposed to manifest at birth.

And now, with her inclusion in this odd group, she was the so-called ticket for her creators to have a better funded lab at Radham.

There wasn’t to be much danger, they were mostly meant to act as decoys.  This group would go ahead, checking ahead and drawing attention, while the other group with Lillian, Mary, and Helen stayed behind.  Abby knew she was here because of the way she looked more than because she was anything special.  Black hair in long braids, her features distorted, her teeth wrong.  Because she was the right age, and she was just obviously enough an experiment.

“I don’t think I’ll get braver,” Lara commented.  Her bag was the lightest, despite her wearing the most clothes, as a general rule.  The strap of the bag disappeared inside the sleeve that hid her hand.

“But you’ll get bigger, and more dangerous,” Ashton said.

“I’ll pupate, and then I’ll change, but I don’t think I’ll be any braver,” Lara said.

“No pupating until we’re secure within Radham,” Duncan said.

“I know,” Lara said.

They had to cross an intersection of side streets.  Duncan stopped at the corner, looking around.  Abby mimed him, because she was good at miming people.  Still, she wasn’t used to cities.  Academie Sous Reine had been surrounded by acres of farmland, all of it experimental crops and forms of cattle that had been experimented on.  It had been great plains of one crop or another, or grassland dotted with animals, and trees, and green, punctuated by great wooden buildings.

At the memory, she felt herself pass into the dark room, where a pressure pressed in on her and threatened to send her into fits.

Ashton seized her hand.  She was surprised enough that she forgot to feign surprise.

He was pushing out calm.  She closed her eyes, breathing deep.

With some concentration and Ashton’s help, she was able to turn her thoughts away.  The city was different.  There were more details to pay attention to.  More windows, any of which could have harbored their quarry.

Across the street, an animal bleated.  Abby stood on her tiptoes, looking to see.

She couldn’t see it, but she could see the people.  The way their heads turned, the expressions-

“Coast is clear, I think,” Duncan said.  “We should go.”

He flicked the leashes.  His pets started to move.

“Um,” Abby jumped in.

“What?” Duncan asked, stopping short.  The leashes jerked tight against the harnesses.

“The bleat.”

“I asked around.  There’s a lot of farmland around the perimeter of the town,” Duncan said.  “They hold regular farmer’s markets.  Bleating isn’t unusual.”

“But people are acting like it’s unusual,” Abby said.  She pointed at the crowd, then wasn’t sure what to point to, exactly, and let her hand drop.

“I think it’s best to stick to the game plan that Mary and Lillian outlined for us,” Duncan said.  “No distractions.”

There was another bleat.

Abby broke away from the group, heading straight for the sound.

A hand grasped at her shoulder, then seized one of her braids instead.  Her head was yanked, and she felt an awful pain at that.  She squeezed her eyes shut, her mind and body hurled into a room that was unpleasant and throbbing.

“Shoot, sorry!” Duncan said, letting go of her hair.

Ashton reached for her, and she swatted at his hand, turning her face away.  She swiped at the air between Duncan’s hand and her braid.  Off to the side, Emmett had stepped in, shoving Duncan against the wall, separating the two of them.

“Sorry.  I am very, very sorry,” Duncan said.  “I legitimately didn’t mean to do that.  I meant to grab your shoulder.”

Abby hunkered down, shoulders forward, eyes screwed shut.  She wanted the pain to go away, and to leave that pulsating red room that she wasn’t really in well behind her.  But, paradoxically, she held her breath, because she didn’t want Ashton to be the one who dragged her out of the room.

“Sorry,” Duncan said, his voice softer.  “I won’t grab at you again, okay?”

Abby nodded.  She opened her eyes, found them watery, and then squeezed her eyes shut again, the moisture squeezed out and onto her cheeks.

She felt a hand on her back and flinched.  But it was a big hand, and a gentle one.  Emmett.  She nodded again, and the hand rubbed her back.

“We’ll take a detour, okay?” Duncan asked.  “Go investigate?  But we’ll do it as a group.  We can’t run off and get split up.”

Abby nodded.  She opened her eyes.

“Good,” Duncan said.  “We’ll go directly there in just a minute.”

There were people in the street that were now staring.  In the background, there was another bleat.

“Not to sound callous, but I do wonder if Sylvester and Jamie saw that, and what they made of it,” Duncan said, looking out beyond the buildings and street for vantage points that their quarry might be watching from.

Abby rocked a little with the motion of Emmett’s rubbing of her back.  She eventually raised a hand, and gently moved his hand away.

Her voice was only barely a whisper to Emmett, inaudible to Duncan, “Don’t hurt him.”

Emmett nodded.

She turned to look at Ashton and Lara, who were standing together.  Lara reached out, using a hand that had cloth draped over it, and dabbed at Abby’s tears.  The now-faintly-moist cloth went into Lara’s mouth to be sucked at.

“Okay,” Duncan said.  He glanced back to verify everyone was with him.  “We’ll investigate.”

They moved as a group, heading across the street, weaving past people and wagons.

Their target was hard to reach, because a crowd had gathered around it.

“Excuse me,” Duncan said, pushing through the crowd, his two animals helping spook people into moving out of his way.  Emmett made use of the opening Duncan had created by wedging himself into it, then using his arms and body to help provide a path for the other three members of the group.  Ashton, Lara, and Abby were all about the same height, and moved in single file.

It bleated again.  White and wooly.  A lamb, but not the sort they sought.  It had been left here, leashed to a parked wagon.

“This yours?” someone asked.

“It’s not mine,” Duncan said.  “But it might belong to someone I know.”

“You sure?  Why?  Ran off, he did.”

Duncan raised his head, his interest piqued.  “A boy with wild dark hair?”

“A giant rabbit,” someone commented.  Another person, Abby saw, nodded in agreement at that.

“Of course it was,” Duncan said.  He heaved out a sigh.  “That makes enough sense to me.”

“You know what this is about, then?” a bystander asked.

“A prank, if anything,” Duncan said.

The explanation seemed to serve.  The crowd dispersed, the mystery solved.

Duncan looked back at the group.  “He’s already a step ahead of us, it seems.”

“Mary said he would be,” Ashton said.

“Emmett, would you?” Duncan asked, while holding the leashes for his pets out for Emmett to take.  There was no expectation that Emmett might say no.

Emmett didn’t say no.  He took the leashes, and Duncan stooped down over the bleating lamb, searching it.  He came away with a folded paper.

“Ah,” he said.  “A dire warning.”

Abby stood on her toes again, craning her head to try to read and to see the lamb better with Duncan in the way.

“Oh,” Duncan said, on seeing her straining.  He stood, holding the paper.  “The local gangs are apparently very upset, after some very targeted instances of arson.  Sylvester thought it diplomatic to warn us that we should watch our backs, in case there was trouble.  He wants us to know he was expecting the other Lambs, not us, he’s sorry, he doesn’t want to put us in danger, so he’ll be actively steering trouble away from us, best he can.”

“That sounds like Sylvester,” Ashton said.  He reached over to squeeze Lara’s sleeve and arm more.  “Don’t worry.  We’re still okay.”

Duncan stared down at the note, frowning deeply.  Abby watched his expression carefully.

“We’ll touch base,” Duncan said, covering his mouth, “Talk to the other Lambs.  We should find a good place to do it.”

“A high place,” Lara said.

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  “I think I saw a place we could use a little bit further on.”

He turned to go, expecting the others to follow.  They did, but as Abby turned away, her attention and hands reaching for the little white lamb, the others hung back.  Ashton spoke, “Duncan.”

“What?  Oh.  Abby, come on.”

Stubborn, ignoring him, Abby worked to untie the leash from the wagon.

“Abby.  Listen.  We can’t take that with us.”

“Bleeaah,” the lamb bleated.

“Bleeaah,” Abby bleated back.  She was good at animal sounds.  She reached out, and the lamb nuzzled at her hands and forearms.

“Emmett, would you please get Abby standing and keep her with us?” Duncan asked.

Before Emmett could move, Ashton spoke, “You hurt her.”

“I did.  I still feel bad about it.”

“Make it up to her,” Ashton said.  “That’s how one of the longer Good Simon stories might end.”

Duncan lowered his head, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

“You want to be a good person, don’t you?” Ashton asked.

“Life isn’t a storybook, Ashton.”

“You’re right,” Ashton said, then continued with his relentless attack, “But wouldn’t it be nice if it was?”

Abby tried to shut her ears to the ongoing conversation.  She lowered her face to meet the little lamb’s and nuzzled it.  The room she felt herself passing into was bright and made the world lighter and warmer, and a lot of that warmth reached deep into the center of her chest, to the point she almost worried she might have fits.  She tried to put it out of her mind while enjoying the presence and the smell and the movement and the warmth of another living creature.  She rocked side to side a little as the lamb rubbed its face against her neck and shoulder, then tried to bite her braid.

“I think it would be a horrid and thrice-lanced pain in the ass if life was a storybook, honestly,” Duncan said.

“Lillian says that good things are never easy,” Ashton said.

Duncan let out a long and drawn out groan.

“Bleeeh,” Abby bleated.

“Bleaa!” the lamb responded.

She shut her eyes, trying to capture the moment in her memories.

Duncan spoke, “You’ll have your own team, Duncan.  Ashton likes you and cooperates with you, so you can keep him with you, Duncan.  You’ll be able to show off your leadership skills, Duncan.  There won’t be as much friction.”

“That’s a yes?” Ashton asked.

“Yes,” Duncan said, tersely.  “Yes.  Abby.  You can bring the damned thing.”

Abby gave the lamb a scratch behind the ears and along the neck before standing, her dress flouncing with the movement.  She bumped the lamb with her leg, to let it know where she was, and then tugged the rope leash.  It resisted at first, but after she offered it a scratch of the neck and retreated, it followed.  With only a little more guidance, it moved happily at her side.

Duncan looked particularly sour as he looked back at her and the lamb, walking between Emmett and Ashton.

“Bell tower,” Duncan said, pointing.  “Old watchtower, I think?  If we can get inside, we can head up.”

“Okay,” Ashton responded.

It was seemingly true that the city had more farmers and people with animals, because the only strange looks they got were the usual ones, reserved for a boy too big and strong for his age, for hooded Lara, and for Abby, who was put together in an odd way.  If anything, she got less strange looks than usual as she walked briskly along the trotting lamb.

All of the lingering bad experiences from earlier had dissipated with this.  She’d harbored some worries when thinking about their quarry, before.  The way that Lillian and Mary and some of the Doctors had talked about Sylvester and Jamie, the concern, the way that everything became so complicated, it had been like she was in a room where she was flailing, trying to get her balance but with nothing in arm’s reach to hold on to, or in a deep place with the surface too far away.

But they had somehow given her a gift, and now she still felt like she couldn’t quite figure these two people out, but maybe they weren’t all bad?  She was warm inside, and tomorrow might hold more moments like this, not more minutes and miles spent away from the place she knew.

“Smile,” Ashton said.

Abby looked over.

“When you’re feeling good, you should smile.”

Abby smiled as best as she could, with her strange teeth.

Ashton smiled back, reached out to squeeze her hand once, then let go.

They reached the tower.  The building ended up being occupied by Crown forces, but that ended up a positive, because Duncan was able to show some identification.  The soldiers stood by, staring curiously as the group went up the stairs.

It was extra positive because the soldiers would guard the ground floor.  There were reasons for being up high, and one was that it made it very hard for them to be listened to.

Once they’d reached the top and Duncan passed on some instructions and a note, the guards up top passed downstairs.  Duncan tied up his animals and headed to the railing.  He walked around the perimeter of the towertop, looking down at nearby rooftops and buildings.

“Lara,” he said.

Lara nodded, then settled down onto the floor.  She hunched over, then cocked her head this way and that.

“Bleeaah!” the lamb bleated.

Abby settled on the floor as well.  Emmett sat beside her, and reached out to give the animal a pat.

After a moment’s consideration, Abby handed the animal over, helping to get it settled so it was lying in Emmett’s lap.  He cupped his hands around it to help keep it in place.

And, because it made sense on a strange level, she gave Emmett’s back a rub while he enjoyed having the animal there.

“Okay,” Lara said.

“Yes?” Duncan asked.  He smiled.  “Great!  Lillian?  Mary?”

There was a pause.

“Lillian: We’re here, Duncan,” Lara said.

“Excellent!  We’re currently at the northwest watchtower.  Arrived more or less without incident, but he’s already on us.  He dropped off a warning and an… inadvertent present.”

Pause.

“Helen: Ooh, present!” Lara said, mimicking the inflection in a stilted way.

“A lamb.  Because he apparently thinks he’s funny,” Duncan said.  “Abby took an immediate liking to it.”

“Helen: Awww.  Mary: What was the warning?”

“A note.  He started a gang war.  There are thugs around who would be very happy to get their hands on anyone young and vulnerable, with special mention for any Lambs.  Set fire to their headquarters and baited them out.”

“Lillian: Of course he did,” Lara reported.

“He promised protection for our group, because he thought it would be you who turned up, and that you could handle it, albeit with some distraction.”

“Mary: Charmer.”

“Charmer,” Duncan echoed.  “I wanted to let you know we’re situated, and we’ll be moving out.  It’s getting late, and it’s getting considerably darker.  We’ll probably roam a bit, eat, figure out how to get our new pet fed, and then get settled.”

The lamb bleated.

“Lillian and the others are laughing because I transcribed the animal’s noise after giving them your message,” Lara said.  She stopped abruptly, turning her head a little, then said, “Lillian: I’m crying.”

Abby saw a smile pass over Duncan’s face.

“Mary: we’re in the city too, but we’re staying out of sight for now.  Your plan sounds good.  Stay on course.  We’ll try to find an angle to get at him.”

“Thank you, Mary.”

“Mary: We’ll be getting our dinner now, so good night for now.”

“Good night,” Duncan said.

“Helen: Baaaaa.  And they’re laughing again.  Now they’re gone.”

Duncan smiled at that.  He gave Lara a pat on the shoulder, stood, and crossed over to where Abby and Emmett sat.  He bent down and gave a light stroke to the side of the now-sleeping lamb.

“Thank you,” he said.  “For making them laugh.  It’s been a tense few months of trying to track those two.”

“It can’t understand you,” Ashton pointed out.

“I know, you pedant,” Duncan said.  He straightened, stretching.  “What do you guys say about some dinner?”

Nobody in the group was going to say no to that.  Duncan gave Lara a hand in standing, then did the same for Abby.  Abby remained virtually glued to Emmett’s side as the boy held the sleeping lamb cradled in his hands and arms.  The smile Ashton had encouraged earlier didn’t leave her face.

They headed down the stairs.

They were a short distance from the ground floor when they heard the faint murmur.

Duncan stopped in his tracks.

“No,” he said, after a moment.  “No.  That mother-cunting little bastard.  He didn’t, no.”

The murmuring grew more distinct as they got closer to the ground floor of the tower.

“Sir,” Duncan greeted the captain in charge of the tower.  “Is that what I think it is?”

“I have to imagine so?” the captain answered, sounding unsure.  “Bizarre.”

“Yes,” Duncan said.  “I imagine so.  At least we know we have his attention, so we’re doing our job as proper bait.”

“The most curious thing-”

“Was the giant rabbit?” Duncan asked.

“The rabbit man,” the captain confirmed.

Duncan set his jaw, glanced back at Abby with a hostile, deeply annoyed look, then pushed open the door to the tower.  The rest of the group was quick to follow.

Three young lambs and one chicken were tied up at different points outside the front of the tower.

Abby felt the warm and air-light room warm up even more, the lightness becoming a fluttering feeling that might even buoy her into the air.  Her smile widened.

“No!” Duncan said, pointing at her.  “No.  One pet.  One.”

The feeling dissipated a little.  Some of it lingered, however.  The smile remained on Abby’s face.

“He thinks he’s funny,” Ashton said, echoing Duncan from earlier.  Duncan glared daggers at the little red-haired boy.

“It’s a little funny,” Emmett said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.02 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.2 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

There was a knock on the door of the automobile.  Helen was the one to open the door.  Lillian waited for Nora, Lacey and Mary to climb out before she made her way out.

Immediately, her focus was on her surroundings.  The corners of the garage they had pulled into, the little windows that looked in from the top of the double-doored gate and from the rear of the room.  It was dark enough she couldn’t see clearly, but the gleams of reflected light from outside and from the open door in front of her made her momentarily think she’d seen Sylvester’s face or the lenses of Jamie’s glasses.

The Academy officer who had knocked on the automobile’s door now closed that same door.  He stared down at her as if she’d somehow wronged him.  It reminded her of her dad, and the expression he’d worn when, so soon after they’d left the Academy, her parents had been intercepted and sent back to sit in while she was interrogated about Sylvester’s disappearance.

He hadn’t believed her.  If anything, her father had believed her less than the Academy interrogators had.  Maybe that was her own bias, her fears and her disappointment in her father coloring her perceptions.

She quickly retreated from the dark garage and the officer’s expression, entering the building and closing the door behind her.  Lacey was talking to a very attractive forty-something man in fine clothing that was nonetheless drab in color.  He had black hair going gray at the temples and a shrewd expression.  Even though it was later in the evening and he had bags under his eyes speaking to a long day, his eyes were clever and focused as he talked to Lacey.  He looked like the sort of man who shaved twice a day just to banish the possibility of a five o’clock shadow, and who likely had his hair trimmed once a week.  Very possibly the owner of this spacious home.

The officer from the garage passed her, carrying their bags into the house.

With Lacey arranging their accommodations and everything calm for the moment, Lillian felt it safe to simply retreat back, lean against the wall by the door, and close her eyes, holding her hand firmly against her heart.  It was pounding, despite the fact that things were as quiet as they were.

Her recent thoughts of her dad were part of it.  It reminded her of dealing with her parents, so soon after Sylvester had told her that they had betrayed her.  That they had, after pushing her her entire life, cut her down before she reached her goal.  Tried to keep her black coat from her.

Those days and hours after Sylvester had left had been filled with so much doubt, they had been so hard.  She hadn’t been able to think about recent events without wanting to break down into sobs, hadn’t known what the future held in store.  Past and future effectively baited with pitfalls and doubt.

It might have been something she could have handled better if she had known who to trust, which shoulders she could lean on.  Sylvester’s words, as much as she believed them, had to be analyzed, second-guessed, so she hadn’t even been sure if her parents were the traitors he’d so casually painted them as.  Mary had been gone, Helen in Ibbot’s custody, Ashton not available, and Jamie hadn’t been around for long before he’d bolted too.

The interrogation had involved injections of drugs that made her emotional, drugs that made words tumble more freely from her lips, and drugs that made it hard to keep track of what she was saying, the memories disappearing to the abyss of hour-long blackouts, so she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t contradicting something else she had said in the midst of those lost memories.

Two days and two nights of questioning with different investigators taking turns, each one focusing on different things.  She had already been emotionally drained by the loss of Sylvester alone, but everything else on top of it- if it hadn’t been for the lingering effects of the Wyvern dose that gave her the ability to maintain some control her own feelings and her thought processes, she might have succumbed.

What that might have looked like, she wasn’t sure.  It might have been coming to the conclusion that Sylvester had lied to her about her parents, just so she could hug her mom and talk civilly to her father.  It might have been allowing herself to slip, allowing a mistake or a lie to become apparent, so that the unrelenting pressure could stop.

‘Succumbing’ might have been allowing herself to come to hate the Academy and what it was doing to her.

She felt hands envelop her own, which were still gripped together, pressed over her heart.  Her first thought, against all logic, was Sylvester.

It was Mary.

“I would have given you a hug, but you’re leaning against the wall,” Mary murmured.

Lillian moved away from the wall, hugging Mary, who hugged her back.

“Are you okay?” Mary asked.  “Your heart is racing.”

“I can’t seem to calm down,” Lillian said.

“Fear?  Excitement?  Both are okay,” Mary said.

“It’s both,” Lillian murmured.

Mary didn’t answer, but nodded.  She pulled away from the hug, taking Lillian’s hands and holding both as she leaned against the wall beside Lillian, their arms a kind of overlapping tangle in front of them.

Helen stood a short distance away, smiling at them, placid and calm in a way that Lillian wasn’t at all.  Nora stood with her back against Helen’s front.  The little girl had her hood pulled down, which was normal, while Helen played with the long sleeves that hid her hands.  In the process, Helen moved the little girl’s arms this way and that, in a kind of dance that didn’t use the head, body, or legs.

“Lillian?” Lacey asked.

“Mm?” Lillian raised her head, focusing on the present.  She broke away from Mary and approached.  “What’s going on?”

“This is Professor Johannes Mistry.  He’s-”

“-The headmaster of Corinth Crown Academy and Laboratories,” Lillian finished, realizing.  She stepped forward, taking the man’s hand just as he started to extend it.  Too quick, perhaps; her thoughts and timing were befuddled by the humiliating awareness that the man had no doubt seen her hugging Mary and holding Mary’s hands.  It was a childlike thing to be doing in front of someone respected and prominent.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, headmaster,” she said, clasping his hand in her own and offering him a short curtsy.

“And I you,” the man replied.  “Your old mentor is making waves, you know.  I can respect a man who anticipates a need and is prepared to meet it as it first arises.  People are paying attention to what he’s doing and the moves he’s been making behind the scenes… and I know you two had a hand in one of his projects.”

Lillian managed a smile, curtsying again, as she glanced at Lacey.  “We were, headmaster.”

“But for a girl as capable as you, sixteen or seventeen years old, to look at you, someone mentored by Headmaster Hayle, I find myself wondering why you would need a chaperone.”

“Ah,” Lacey said, “I can explain that, sir.  I’m not quite a chaperone.  I’m here in the capacity of an expert.  I worked on one of the projects we’re hunting now.”

“The same individual who is responsible for a third of my Academy being caught up in a fire?”

“The very same, I regret to say,” Lacey said.

“I see,” the man said, his eyes and chin dropping a fraction.  For a moment, the circles under his eyes seemed deeper, he seemed more tired, and a darker emotion like frustration or anger seemed about to erupt.  Then he changed the angle of his head, looking up at Lacey once more, and the light hit the circles under his eyes and the lines of his face in a different way, and the emotion was gone.  There was no eruption.

Lillian momentarily wished she could see the world through Sylvester’s eyes and know whether the man really was angry and good at bottling it in, or if it was a trick of the mind.

She wished, in a way, that she had the talent Duncan had when it came to gauging when and where to call for favors, because she had an idea of what was going to come up in the conversation.

“I worry he’s going to act again, and I’m not equipped to handle it if he does.”

Okay, that wasn’t quite what I had in mind, Lillian thought.  An admission of weakness.

These wheelings and dealings could be so difficult sometimes.  It took work to stay on top of things.

“I won’t lie to you,” Lacey said, firm, “It’s likely he will.  It’s our hope that we’ll be in place to stop him when he does.  Or that he’ll be distracted enough by our presence that he isn’t any further trouble to you.”

Well done, Lillian thought.  It sounded like the words that she would have wanted to say, but that was meaningless in retrospect.

“What resources do you need?  My hands are partially tied what with the fire damage, but I’d like to help.”

There it was.  Lillian had expected the offer.  She also knew that there was a kind of game to the political dealings.  What had Duncan called it?  Double trouble.  Take a favor from the wrong person and you could be expected to give up twice the number of favors in interest.

This was his wheelhouse she was in, while he was busy immersing himself in hers.

Still, she told herself that she had to learn sometime.

“You’ve already given us a great deal of help,” Lillian said.

She wasn’t wholly certain of that statement, but it was ambiguous enough, and she was reasonably certain that he was the one who was providing a place for them to stay for the night.

“Providing you with rooms, a bath, a base of operations, and a few meals is the bare minimum,” the man said.  “I would be indebted if I could do something more substantial to help.”

That wording meant she was safe from the trap.  The sharp look in his eyes reminded her of Sylvester, a little.  A tacit acknowledgement of the game they were playing.  Her response had been just right, stopping short of seizing on the favor.  His response had been something of a wink and a nod of that fact.

She liked him a little more, seeing that, and then the feeling got into a blurry space, and she felt a little gross about liking an old man in one of the same ways she liked Sylvester.

“There’s a list of chemicals.  Some are used in the modified study drug that Sylvester takes.  Some are hard to obtain on their own.  It’s a shot in the dark, but he might use the fire and the chaos at your Academy to obtain a batch.  If he can’t find the drug itself.”

“What chemicals?” the headmaster asked her.

“I can write them down,” Lillian said.  She reached for the pen she kept in her pocket.

“Say them.  I’ll remember.”

Lillian turned to Lacey, who immediately recited, “Ifosfamide, carmustine, felotane, venenum A through G, I, N through P, and T.”

“That’s familiar enough.  Depending on other ingredients and ratios, could include the combat drug Cicuta?” the headmaster asked.  “Or C-G Temero?”

“Wyvern,” Lacey said.  “Modified, and in high P-concentration, for Sylvester’s project.”

“Ah.  I’ve used that regularly enough, often with other drugs to dull the pain after injection,” the man said.  “Should I have my people look for any stolen pain medications?  I’d imagine he’d have some dependencies.”

“None,” Lillian said.  “The P-concentration is too high.  He took doses high enough that nothing would put a dent in it, from the beginning to the present.”

The headmaster nodded, seemed to consider for a moment, then shook his head a fraction.  “I could almost bring myself to feel some sympathy for him.  Almost.  He did burn down a lot of my Academy.”

Almost sympathetic, Lillian agreed.  It was a good summary of her own feelings at this point in time.

“Still, I half expected losses to war, but the worst of the war didn’t reach this far west.  Lugh, yes, but that’s further north.  Some rebel groups recruited, but nothing significant.  Then there was the plague, and I expected the worst.  Dodged that bullet.  I was bracing myself for something, so I’m not as shocked or bothered as I might be.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.  She wasn’t sure how else to respond.

“Aggregate?” the headmaster asked.

“None,” Lillian said, then she reversed course, “Sorry, no, not none.  He would have picked some up at any one of the last few stops he made.  But the ingredients we listed off are controlled substances-”

“-And several of them are only available by way of doctors with a specific focus or level of access.  And I and many of my personnel are a rare concentration of such.”

“Yes, headmaster,” Lillian said.  “If I could ask, we heard tell of a gang war in the city?”

“Yes,” the headmaster said.  He frowned.  “The spark of that particular war was started and ignited by your quarry, the young man.  I can tell you what I know.”

Mary, Helen, and Nora had drawn nearer.  Helen had her arms around Nora’s shoulders.

The Apostle’s men, the dominant gang, had been beheaded.  The underground drug runners, led by a matriarchal succession of leaders, each of whom were dubbed ‘the Witch’, had seen its leader drowned in a chemical vat.  The Witch’s drugs had been used to mount a chemical attack on a district, capping off a night of murder and arson.  All of which paved the way for the explosion at the train station.

There were others, all small players.  The Barren, who were a rebel splinter group of Cynthia’s, the Devil’s Men, the Bergewall Neddies, and the Skippers.  Some had been caught up in Sy’s murdering spree.

“That helps, thank you, headmaster,” Lillian said.  “Just getting the lay of the land from someone who lives here.”

The man smiled, gesturing as if tipping his hat.  Lillian smiled back.

“Can I ask about the missing children?”  Mary asked.

“Missing?  Some have been evacuated or taken somewhere safe.  The ones without anyone to look after them are running for the hills.  Your quarry is likely responsible for that particular instance.”

“Sylvester?” Lillian asked.  She looked at Lacey, then back to the headmaster Mistry.  “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.  It doesn’t fit his character.”

“Keeping in mind that I have a very low esteem for his character,” Lacey said, “I have to agree.  He doesn’t have anything against children.”

“From what I understand, it’s his eagerness to protect children that drew the ire of the collected gangs, with the Apostle heading the aggressive stance,” the headmaster said.

“That’s… not impossible,” Lillian allowed.  “But he’s more mindful of long-term strategy than that.”

“I don’t know enough to say,” the headmaster said, “But people change.  People on heavy loads of experimental drugs can shift in personality.”

Lillian nodded.  The idea of Sylvester changing like that scared her more than she wanted to admit, but she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to believe it.  Still, she wasn’t about to argue the point with the headmaster.

“I’ll keep that in mind, headmaster,” she said, “and I’ll hope there’s another explanation.”

Mary spoke up, “If he’s changed that much, he might be that much harder to catch, and that much more dangerous.”

“Very true,” Headmaster Mistry agreed.  “Though hard to imagine, considering the chaos he managed to inflict on this city.”

The collected Lambs nodded their heads.

“Have you eaten?” the man asked.

“We ate on the road, headmaster,” Lacey said.

“We’d like to drop off our things, if it’s no trouble, we’ll rest for the night, and get underway tomorrow.  We have friends who are busy elsewhere.”

“If you’re sure,” the man said.

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Your rooms are just around the hall.  One of you will have to sleep on the cot I had the maid lay out, I’m afraid.  There are only four guest beds.”

“We’ve slept in worse spots, headmaster,” Lillian said.  “This is luxury.  Thank you.”

The man smiled.  “The bath should be prepared by now.  I imagine it will be a luxury after days of trains, carriages, and cars.”

“I imagine so,” Lillian said.  “Thank you again.”

“Would you like tea, when your baths are done?”

“Yes, please.”

That was their indication that they should go off to their rooms.  The tea, Lillian imagined, couldn’t possibly be a double trouble political trap.  Tea was too essential a nicety.  The bath, the luxury… no, she didn’t imagine so.

Was it cynicism, then, that left her feeling wary?

She let the other Lambs and Nora catch up, while Lacey led the way down the hall to the guest bedrooms.  The two doors were ajar at the end of the hall, the lights on but dimmed within.  The bathroom light, however, was on bright, and steam billowed in the room.

Helen shifted position, fixing Nora’s hood.  In the midst of it, she gestured.  Index and middle finger pointed straight up.

Danger?  Warning?

At the end of the hall, with the doors open, the bath?

Helen leaned forward, wrapping her arms around Nora in an exaggerated hug.  Both hands gestured.  Two different locations at the hallway.

Hanging pictures.  The headmaster, his wife, and his children.

Where are the children?  Not a single mention of them.

It frustrated Lillian, that there was clearly some clue she was missing.  Given an opportunity, she might have been able to figure out something meaningful from what the headmaster had said.

“Anything, Nora?” she asked.

The hooded girl shook her head.  “Whispers.  I can’t hear Lara very well.”

“Even whispers can be useful,” Lillian said.

“They’re talking about names.  Duncan is upset about a chicken.  He wants to talk to you soon.”

“Good,” Lillian said.  “Thank you.”

“I don’t like all of this talk of murder and fire,” Nora said.  She shrank into herself.

“I know, honey,” Lillian said.  She stroked Nora’s head.  “I think your creators did you a disservice, ingraining the fear instincts into you like they did.”

“I can’t help communicate if I’m dead.  So I run first.  I defend myself second.  Always.  This is the rule.”

“I know.  I know,” Lillian said.  She stroked the girl’s hooded head again.

Mary interjected, “Absolutes aren’t a good idea, when situations can vary as much as they do.  It’s bad tactics.”

Nora didn’t respond to that.

They reached the end of the hall, where Lacey waited.  She’d pushed the bathroom door open, and was checking each of the rooms.

“Big tub.  You should all bathe, talk strategy, do whatever you need to do,” Lacey said.  “I’ll enjoy some quiet with a book.  You let me know if you need anything.”

“That sounds good.  Thank you,” Lillian said.  She checked nobody was in earshot.  “And thank you for lying.”

“Which time?”

“About the reason you’re here.”

Lacey offered Lillian a tight smile.  “Just… don’t put me in a situation where I’m indirectly responsible for your deaths.  Or for mine.  Please.”

“We wouldn’t kill you, Lacey,” Helen said, smiling sweetly.

“I’m not worried about you killing me to abscond with the drugs,” Lacey said.

“Sylvester wouldn’t do that either,” Lillian said.  “He wouldn’t hurt you.”

Lacey offered her another tight, unconvincing smile.  The woman looked so tired.

Lillian didn’t have the heart to prompt another one of those smiles.  She only smiled back, and after a few moments of silence, Lacey said, “Enjoy your bath,” and retreated to one of the rooms.

Lillian turned her focus to finding where her bag had been put, finding the towels that had been laid across the footboards of the bed, and then heading into the bathroom with the other girls.

They hadn’t disclosed Lacey’s reasons for being here to the headmaster, and Hayle hadn’t either, because it would have shown weakness.  Lacey was in custody of the leash.  Hayle, insecure in his control over the Lambs and the decoys, had arranged for a new leash.  Another chemical, embedded in their body, that they were all dependent on.  Fray had released them from the first, by making it so long a leash as to be functionally meaningless.  Hayle had devised a second, and made it his prerequisite for them being allowed to pursue Sylvester.  When they had arrived at Sous Reine to pick up Abby, Lacey had been there, waiting to ambush them.

Lillian had two pills with her.  Not intended for her, but for Sylvester, in the hopes that she could slip him one, that he could be leashed and that he would choose self preservation over freedom.

She suspected she knew what his answer would be, and it prompted an ugly feeling in her stomach.

The bathroom had framed pictures that might have belonged in children’s books on the wall, and more laid into the tiles at the top of the tub, which was a sprawling thing that sank into the wall and floor.  Within the tub were multiple seats.  Not wholly different from what had been available at the girl’s dorms at Radham.  School was all tension and climbing the ladder.  The idea was to encourage community and relaxation in the same space.

This would be the children’s bathroom, then.  For the headmaster’s family.

As she undressed, Lillian’s eye was on the window, opened to let the breeze into the bathroom.  It was dark outside, and there wasn’t a single vantage point where someone could perch on a building or stand at a window and see within.  Even with that in mind, she couldn’t shake the idea that he was there.  Watching.

Which he probably was, in an abstract sense.

But they had arranged things by phone, changed from carriage to car and then the first car to another car, all while in tunnels or within garages.  They hadn’t stepped outdoors once while within the city.  The only people they had been in contact with at this stage were the Mayor, the academy headmasters, and trusted officers of the Academies that were directly subordinate to the headmasters.

“You want him to be there, looking,” Mary said, as if she was reading Lillian’s mind.

Lillian flushed.

“Not like that,” Mary said.

A bit like that, Lillian admitted to herself.

“I’m eager for a resolution too,” Mary said.  “But I don’t think he’s going to be slippery in the same way Fray was.  He’s not going to run.  We need to be patient.  Keep an eye out.  There has to be an angle that works.”

Lillian nodded.  “I know.”

“I get it,” Mary said.  “Trust me.”

“I know,” Lillian said.  She drew in a deep breath, and then let out a shuddering sigh.

Mary laid a hand over Lillian’s heart.  It was still pounding.  Mary gave her a pointed look.

Stepping back and away from Mary’s hand, Lillian pulled off her camisole and remaining clothes, then stepped into one end of the extensive bath.

Off to the side, Helen was helping Nora disrobe.  Under the hood, Nora’s hair was white.  Her eyes were dark and red rimmed.  Prone to infections and irritation.  It was much in the same way that her hair and filaments came out in clumps and her fingernails and claws could come off in a bloody mess if exposed to direct sunlight.  She was a sensitive creature, in many ways.

A sensitive creature who festooned with natural weapons, Lillian noted.  She had only had a few opportunities to examine Nora and Lara in person, and that had been on a table, with doctors pointing things out.  Too up close a view.  Standing aside, observing, she could see the way that the shoulders, ribs, elbows, the spine, and the girl’s fingers were all segmented.

The ribs, like everything, had pronounced joints at set intervals, joints that strained against skin like a fist clenched to the point that the knuckles had gone white.  Where joints would normally already be, they were exaggerated.  At the end of most fingers were scythe-like claws, roughly six inches long, normally hidden by the loose fabric of sleeves.  Other fingers were actual fingers, and some were a melted-together blend of both blade and digit.  Pure chance, what she had ended up with.  Lillian knew from the short tutorial with Nora’s creators that there were more blades at the spine and joints of the shoulder and elbow, but they were buried within the joints.

They were meager natural weapons now, but Nora was expected to grow.

Helen showed no concern for the blades, both the retracted ones and the existing ones, as she helped Nora into the other end of the bath.  Seeing Lillian looking, Helen smiled.  “It’s like having a doll.”

“Just don’t bother her,” Lillian said.  “She’s not used to being around anyone but her doctors and her sister, and you can be a little intimidating.  If you provoke her fear reflex, I’m the one that has to stitch you back together.”

“She’s not bothered,” Helen said, confidently.

“I’m not bothered,” Nora said, quiet.

Lillian closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall, letting the tension seep out of her muscles.  “That’s fine then.”

Mary took another minute to divest herself of her weapons and lay them out on the counter by the sink.  She carried some tidbits over to the window and checked for eavesdroppers and spies before arranging a small trap at the window.  That done, she made her way into the bath.  She sat perpendicular to Lillian, knees bent so they formed an arch over Lillian’s legs.

“Where are the headmaster’s children?” Mary asked.

“That’s bothering you, is it?” Lillian asked.  “Why didn’t he say where they went?”

“He’s hiding something.  Multiple somethings,” Mary said.

“I don’t disagree,” Lillian said.  “But that’s standard for Academy higher-ups.  We stay focused.  I don’t mind being wary, but let’s not get distracted.”

“You sound like me,” Mary said.

Lillian splashed her friend.  Mary lifted her chin, playing the young lady, unbothered by such things.

“Um,” Nora said.

“Message?” Lillian asked, closing her eyes again, leaning back.  Mary splashed her, and she wrinkled up her nose in annoyance, before snorting out a bit of the water that had gone up her nose.

“Message.  Duncan’s group is done eating.  Do you want to talk?”

“We can talk,” Lillian said.

Nora’s lips moved.  She used Duncan’s inflection and the same pacing of words that Duncan might use, but it was in a young girl’s voice.  “Duncan: he gave us more pets.”

“Aww!” Helen cooed.

“Duncan: Not aww.  Four lambs and a chicken.  I’m trying to figure out if he’s insulting me or if there’s a coded message in this.”

“Four lambs and a chicken?” Lillian asked.  “Could be a message.  But I’d say he’s probably just happy you’re bothered and wondering.  He likes to tease.”

“Duncan: I see.”

“I’d say it’s fifty-fifty odds that he’s either insulting you or he saw a weakness and capitalized on it.”

“Duncan: He saw a weakness?”

“You took one pet.  Maybe he wanted to see if you’d take more.  The chicken thrown in to see if he could burden you further by sticking you with a variety of animals?”

“Duncan: I’m somehow more insulted than if he’d included the chicken as some kind of indirect put-down.”

“You didn’t keep the chicken?” Mary asked.

“Duncan: No.  We didn’t keep any of them.  But it took some doing to get Abby to let it be.  Are you all settled?”

“Settled,” Lillian said.

“We’re wet and naked, Duncan,” Helen announced, grinning.

Mary reached over, as if to hit Helen, then instead put her hands over Nora’s ears.  “I’d hit you if I thought it would matter.”

“It would make me feel better,” Lillian said.

Mary lightly punched Helen’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  As Mary lifted her hands off of Nora’s ears, Lillian said, “Are you still there, Duncan?”

“Duncan?” Mary tried.

“Speak, Duncan,” Helen said, smiling.

“Duncan: I’m here.  I’m not sure how to respond to that.”

“The diplomatic thing to do is to pretend it didn’t happen,” Lillian said.  “We’re staying with the headmaster of Corinth Crown Academy.  It’s near the north end of the fort.”

“Duncan: I know of him.  He’s a bigwig.”

“Bigwig.  Speaking of, I wanted to ask.  Double trouble?  You mentioned it.”

“Duncan: I did.”

“Do I owe anything for shelter?  Food?  Luxury?”

“Duncan: Almost never.  Gifts received while under someone’s roof, yes, you’d owe a favor for a favor, and you could find yourself under someone’s thumb.  But food and shelter are sacrosanct.  Dates back to the olden days, when denying a traveler food and shelter could be the same thing as murdering them.”

“I see.  Thank you, Duncan,” Lillian said.  Secretly, she mused on the fact that Sylvester had betrayed that sacrosanct thing by burning down the headquarters of local gangs.  Or so he’d said, in his note.

“Duncan: We’re going to be going out soon.  Changing clothes, gathering some things, and we’ll see if we can track down any preliminary details.  We’ll be in the general radius of Corinth Crown.  If we run into trouble or spy them, Lara will let you know.”

“Perfect.  I think we’ll be getting settled,” Lillian said.

“I’ll be sleeping with my knives on,” Mary said.

“Duncan: Right.”

Helen disengaged herself from Nora, who had been sitting at her feet, only the upper half of her head visible over the water, compound eyes wide, hair and hair-like filaments floating around her.

“The headmaster said something about the major gangs being the Apostle’s men and a drug group led by the Witch,” Mary said.  She continued her explanation, but Lillian wasn’t quite listening to the recap.  Her focus was on Helen.

Helen was getting dressed without toweling off.

Trouble.  Question.

Helen gestured to her ear.  ListenMan.

Then, barefoot, damp, wearing a dress, Helen scaled the side of the window, climbing out and up toward the roof.

That was reason enough for Lillian to get out of the bath.  Something had concerned Helen.

“Come on, honey,” she spoke to Nora.

“Duncan:” Nora said, as Lillian lifted her by the armpits.  “I beg your pardon?”

“Not you, Duncan,” Lillian said.  “Helen’s acting curious.  One minute.”

Mary was out of the bath at the same time Nora was.  She began putting her things together.  Razor wire, knives, gun, syringes, bola, and darts.  The summer clothes went on next, and all of the stowed weapons swiftly disappeared beneath the light and airy clothes.

Lillian did towel off, before donning her hairband and pulling on her clothes from earlier.  She’d hoped to go straight to sleepwear, but her things were with her clothes, including those two little pills.  Once she was dressed, she attended to Nora.  Nora was nervous, Lillian was aware.  Jarred from peace and comfort to tension, the little girl was trembling, hugging her arms to her body.

Lillian dearly wished she could do something more for the little girl.

She had managed to dress both herself and Nora before Mary was finished.  Helen reappeared at the window, swinging down and into the bathroom, very nearly slipping on the wet tile.

Helen gestured at the same time she spoke, her voice soft.

“Trouble.”

“Of what sort?” Mary asked.

“Sylvester?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t think so.  There’s a man at the front of the house.  He has some people with him, and they all have weapons,” Helen said.  “They’re here for us.”

“I see,” Lillian said.  “Do we have time to get Lacey?”

Helen nodded.

“Window,” Mary said.

While Helen helped Nora through the window, an exercise that amounted to using three limbs to climb, while one hand kept a tight hold on the girl.  Lillian exited the bathroom, careful not to make any noise as she did it.  She let herself into Lacey’s room.

Lacey was reading by candlelight.

Lillian approached, walking like she’d been taught to do, and clasped her hand over Lacey’s mouth.  The woman went utterly still, but for one hand, which went toward the side of the bed.

“Don’t,” Lillian said.  “Be quiet.  Come with me.  We have to run.”

“Run?”

“Hired killers.  Or kidnappers,” Lillian whispered.

Lacey’s eyes widened.  She nodded.

“Bring essentials.  The pills.”

Another nod.

As she left the bedroom, she could hear some louder voices.  She crossed to the other room, accessed her luggage, and found the container with her partial project within.  She met Lacey in the hallway, then led the way to the open bathroom window.

“Hey!” a voice called out, behind her.

She closed the door and locked it, just in time.  Somebody threw themselves violently into the door, making it jump in its frame.

They would break it down.  Probably within a few seconds.

Men were shouting.  Giving orders, telling others to get outside, get around to the side of the building.

Lacey wasn’t as fast climbing down as Lillian needed her to be.  The bathroom window was a solid fifteen feet up off the ground.  Lillian double checked, then tossed her project down to Mary, shouting as it was already airborne, “Catch!”

Then, before Mary had fully recovered from catching the hurled case, Lillian backed away from the window, ran forward, and planted a foot on the sill.  She didn’t jump up so much as she jumped over.

“Catch me!” she shouted.

A leap of faith.  She wasn’t even sure Mary or Helen had the leverage or strength to catch her.  Base physics.  They tended to be brutal when things moved very fast or got very big, and she was moving fast.

But, as she flew five or six feet out and fifteen feet down, her face rushing for the ground, she felt arms seize her.  She scraped one knee on the ground as momentum carried it forward, but they had caught her upper body.

She reached out, to put a reassuring hand on Nora’s shoulder and guide the girl as they started to run, but in the gloom, she only barely saw the spikes and bone blades, jutting out.  The girl was terrified.

“Come on, honey,” she said.  “Let’s get somewhere safe.”

Nora nodded.

Looking back to see Lacey trailing behind, carrying luggage, Lillian saw the men rounding the building.

They didn’t look like Academy students, so they weren’t the Neddies.  They didn’t look young enough to be delinquents, and they weren’t sailors, so they weren’t the skippers.  Half of them had the telltale signs of men hopped up on combat drugs.

The Apostle’s men?  The Devil’s?  The Witch’s group, looking to make an impact?

Whoever they were, they were in cahoots with the headmaster, or they had leverage on the man.

She thought of those missing children of his.

She couldn’t know.  For now, all that was important was getting away.

Sylvester.  The little bastard.  She missed him a little less, in this particular moment.

But this was him.  Everything in this city, touched by him.  Everything that moved, was moved by him.  Her heart still pounded like it did when he was close to her, because he was.  He might as well have been next to her.

Sylvester had gotten what he wanted, and she had a sinking feeling in her gut that this was exactly the outcome he had hoped for.  To uproot them, put them on the back foot, and distract them with questions and mysteries.  He’d outright told Duncan that he’d trusted them to hold their own if trouble came calling.  Now they had been flushed out and exposed.  Nowhere certain to go where they could rest and be safe.

So much for the sanctity of shelter, she thought.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.03 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.3 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“-making a run for it,” Lara recited.

Duncan’s arms were folded, and his leg jiggled with the anxiety he was clearly feeling.  “Do you want us to help?  We’re not really fighters, but if you need a distraction so you can deal with them, I could provide that.  Send my dogs in, maybe.  I’d rather have you guys than my-”

Lara interrupted, “Mary: no.”

Duncan tapped his finger against his arm, thinking.

Lara spoke into the silence. “Mary: Sylvester’s going to be watching you.  He wouldn’t pledge to protect you and then take his eyes off you to see where these hired hands were going.  Lillian adds: he might have help.”

Duncan nodded.  “The rabbit.  Sylvester’s partner.”

“Mary: Exactly.”

Emmett remained silent, listening to the ongoing dialogue.  The other Lambs had been attacked.  Now the others were running, while a small army of thugs was chasing them down.

Duncan looked concerned.  Abby was hugging Quinton, but she seemed to be okay so long as she was able to do that.  Ashton seemed entirely unconcerned, which was reassuring to Emmett.

Lara, though, was shaking.  The distraction of passing on the messages wasn’t enough.

He knew what that was like.  He’d once been in a place where he was one small push from breaking down completely.  He had once been fragile.

He wished he knew what to do for Lara.  He didn’t feel fragile anymore, and he didn’t want anyone else to feel that way either.

“I think we’re on the same page.  Do you want us to stay close, just in case?”

“Mary: not too close.  Stay in range so we can talk.  But I don’t want you getting caught in this.”

“Got it.  We’re going to do what we can.  Get our attention if you need anything.”

“Lillian: thank you, Duncan.”

“That’s enough.  Thank you, Lara,” Duncan said.

“Oh.  I transcribed the first part of that,” Lara said.

“That’s fine,” Duncan said.  They had stepped into a sectioned off area beside a store, where outdoor fixtures and gardening things had been stowed outdoors for customers to look at, much of it chained to fixtures so it couldn’t be readily stolen.  Three stone walls and a gate surrounded the display area, which kept them out of view of any spying eyes.

Duncan leaned against the wall, between a fountain and a wheelbarrow loaded with Academy-designed plants, his arms still folded.  He seemed lost in thought.

Duncan, Emmett was coming to understand, was very good at what he did.  But he wasn’t very good at this.  Emmett had spent more time around doctors than he had spent around his parents, and he found himself sorting them into groups.  Duncan wasn’t in any of the good groups.  Neither was Lillian, as far as he was concerned.

Then again, Emmett couldn’t think of many people he did like that weren’t weaker than him.  He liked Abby, Lara, and Nora.  He was on the fence about Ashton, who he liked but didn’t trust.

Lara was hunched over, sitting on a crate.  Her hands, ensconced and hidden by her long sleeves, were clumsily clutching at each other through the fabric.

Emmett wanted to say something, but he never knew what to say.  He remained silent.

“Lara,” Ashton said.

Lara froze.

“It’s okay,” Ashton said.  He reached for her hands, and put his hand over top of them.  “The Lambs are very good at what they do.  There’s no need to worry.  Your sister is safer with them with enemies around than we are here with no enemies.”

Lara remained frozen, staring down at Ashton’s hand.  She ventured, “…doesn’t make me feel better.  Now I’m worried for different reasons.”

“It’s fine,” Duncan said.  “Look, it’s nearly time to turn in.  I want to stay available, and I’d like to make some headway before we go to sleep for the night.”

“I don’t really sleep,” Lara pointed out.  “I have to be awake to give and send communications, so they engineered the need for sleep out of me.  I con-”

“I know,” Duncan said, stopping her.  “I’ve read your file.  I know.  I understand, okay?”

“Okay,” Lara said, dropping her eyes.  “Every night I sit in the dark while everyone else is asleep, hearing all the creaks of the buildings and the noises from outside.  I imagine the worst.  They engineered the fear into me, like they engineered the sleep out.  I’m not as afraid of the dark, because I can see in the dark, just a little, but-”

Lara,” Duncan said.

Lara went quiet.

Emmett shifted his stance, restless.

Duncan reminded him of Professor Gosse, the second professor to look after him.  Not a bad man, exactly, not a stupid man, but sometimes careless.  Every time Duncan spoke, a small part of Emmett worried it would be a careless sort of speaking, and one of the others would get hurt.

“You talk with your sister, don’t you?” Duncan asked.

“Sometimes,” Lara said, quiet.  “But we’re not supposed to do it unless we have to.  We’re supposed to keep our ears and our eyes open for danger.”

“I’m assuming you’re talking with her more than you’re supposed to,” Duncan said.

Lara went silent.

“I’m not going to report you or make you stop,” Duncan said, sounding impatient.  “I just want to understand the tools I’m working with.”

“I talk with her most of the night,” Lara confessed.

Emmett, given the choice, might have told her to lie.  Because Doctors lied, and Duncan and Doctor Gosse were of a type to lie more than most.

“That’s fine,” Duncan said, and Emmett had no idea if he was lying or telling the truth.  “You’ll have your sister to talk to, and, because we’re on a mission, we’ll be sleeping in shifts.  Each member of our group here will spend an hour or two awake, sitting with you, and keeping an eye and an ear out for trouble.  If you’re not talking to your sister, you can talk to them or to me.  Provided you’re also keeping watch.”

“Okay,” Lara said.

While Duncan was talking, Ashton was working.  Lara seemed to be calming down.

Emmett let himself relax a little.  He wondered momentarily if the fact that he was relaxing had anything to do with Ashton.

“Plan is same as the old plan, with a few changes.  We’ll walk around the neighborhood, get a feeling for what we’re dealing with and see if there are any opportunities to gather information.”

Emmett nodded alongside the others, Lara excepted.  She seemed distracted.

She was thinking about Nora, no doubt.

“Emmett,” Abby spoke, as Duncan led the way out of the enclosure.  Emmett looked down at the girl.  Quinton was asleep on her lap.

“Can you take him?” she asked.  “I don’t think I can carry him without waking him up.”

Emmett nodded, reaching.  The lamb roused some as it was transferred into his arms, then stretched, poking into the muscles of his stomach and his ribs.  It settled down in the cradle of his arms.

Abby, meanwhile, picked up speed to catch up with the others, casting a backward glance at Emmett.

He liked Quinton too, and found himself counting the creature alongside Abby and Lara.  The lamb reminded him of the distant past.  Of being a great deal younger, of being very weak and having a hard time moving around, with an indistinct, furry, strong companion that would sit with him and stare out the window.  His childhood dog that he couldn’t remember the name of, a big creature with messy black fur that had shed everywhere.

The similarities between Quinton and his old dog were few to none, but they were there, they were loyal, and they were warm.

He hadn’t had much warmth in his life, and he didn’t feel like he could ask for it from any of his new companions.

Abby appeared in front of him, reached up above her eye level, and gripped the end of the sleeve of his shirt, up near his bicep.  She tugged him off course.

No, on course.  He’d been focusing too much on Quinton, lagging behind.  Now Abby led him to the others.

What would others think, seeing this?  It was late, but there were people out on the street.  Some were organized into groups, which Duncan had surmised was a kind of organization of members of the neighborhood.  An effort to be proactive in looking out for fire and for trouble.  Others were escaping from the stifling heat indoors and enjoying the breeze, talking with neighbors and family members.

He looked back to see if the little girl leading the very large little boy was drawing any attention.

It wasn’t, except from one set of eyes.  Emmett stopped in his tracks, trying to confirm what he’d seen, but the figure was already turning, disappearing toward the back of a crowd.  As Abby kept walking and he stopped, her hand slipped from his sleeve.

“Emmett?”

Sylvester.

“You saw something,” Abby said.

Emmett nodded.

“Sylvester?”

He nodded again, even though he wasn’t entirely sure.  It was such an odd mental image, Sylvester brazenly walking through the crowd toward their group, when they were the ones who were hunting him.

It had been a glimpse, nothing more.

He was caught between wanting to chase and wanting to catch up with the others.

Abby reached up, taking his sleeve, and tugged.

She wanted to go to the others.

Okay.

He let her lead, glancing back to look for Sylvester.  Nothing.

They had to jog to catch up with the others.  Duncan had stopped.  Lara perked up on seeing them.  Ashton was holding one of her sleeves.

“What happened?” Duncan asked.

“Sylvester,” Abby said.  “Emmett saw him.”

Duncan looked at Emmett.  “You did?”

Reluctantly, Emmett opened his mouth and said, “I think.”

“Okay,” Duncan said.  “That’s… good, I think.  Keep an eye out.”

Emmett nodded.  He didn’t miss the fact that Duncan was letting out the slack on the leashes that led to his tentacle-dogs, giving them more room to move.

Duncan and his tentacle-dogs led the way, while Emmett watched the rear, Abby staying near him.  Ashton and Lara remained in the center of the group, where Lara seemed most secure.

They carried out the original plan, doing a quick circuit of the neighborhood, with the building they were staying in somewhere near the center of the loop.  The building was one of Bergewall’s dormitories, but maintained more vacancies than most due to its distance from the building.

They were nearly finished closing the circuit, with no more Sylvester sightings, when a voice called out.  “You!  Children!”

The group came to a stop.  It was an older woman standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, who had called to them.

“Hello,” Abby said.

“Hello, little one.  You shouldn’t be out like this.”

“We heard there was some trouble,” Duncan said.

“Most of the local children have gone into hiding, or been sent out of the city,” the woman said.  “Why on earth are you out?  At night, even?  Taking your work out for a walk?”

“Yes,” Duncan said.  He smiled.  “Something like that.”

“You’re asking for trouble,” she said.  She paused, “Odd-looking bunch, that.”

“We are, and they are,” Duncan said.

“The little red haired one is nice looking enough.  I don’t suppose he spits acid or anything of the sort?”

Duncan reached forward, giving Ashton a light push on the shoulder.  Ashton approached the stairs, smiling.  He spoke, “No, ma’am.”

“Polite,” she observed.  “Are you an experiment too?”

“Yes ma’am, and I try.  I learned a lot from the Good Simon books.”

“I read those to my children and grandchildren,” the woman said.  She lifted her cigarette to her lips and puffed.  “My eldest grandchild asked for them to be read one after the other.  I wanted to slap the self-righteous smirk off the Simon character’s face by the fifth read.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.  His expression went carefully blank.

“Don’t envy you, having to learn from those books.”

“I like the books,” Ashton said.  “And I like Good Simon.”

“Oh?” the woman asked.  She paused, realizing what she’d just said.  “Sorry.”

“I don’t like cigarettes, either,” Ashton said.

Emmett saw Duncan react to that, turning his head to look this way and that, searching for spying eyes.

“Well I do,” the woman said.  “So if you don’t like them, then you can scurry along.”

“I wanted to ask you more things,” Ashton said, stepping closer.  “About the children, and the gangs, and the danger.  Please.”

Off to the side, Duncan looked at the back of his hand, like he was looking at his watch.

“I was enjoying a nice, quiet evening smoke,” the woman said.  “Now it’s not as nice, and it’s not as quiet.  You want to take my cigarette away from me too?  Scurry off.”

“I know, I understand,” Ashton said.  “But you have children and grandchildren.  You would want them to be safe, don’t you?  Can’t you tell us more?”

“If you’re trying to manipulate me, then you’re going to have to try harder than that,” she said, stiffening.

“I’m sorry,” Duncan said.  He smiled.  “We’re trying to socialize it.  Ashton there is a remarkable work of art, but he’s sensitive at times.  And he’s sensitive to smoke.”

“For something with ‘ash’ in its name, I find that ironic,” the woman said.  Duncan chuckled.

Then he reached into a back pocket and withdrew a carton of cigarettes.  He held it up between two fingers.  “Put it out so you don’t hurt him, tell us something about what areas to stay clear of, and I’ll resupply you.”

The woman moved her head to see better, and Duncan adjusted the angle he held the package, to better show.

“Not my brand,” she said, sour.

“Offer stands,” Duncan said, not budging.

She dropped her cigarette, and she stepped on it.

“Thank you,” Ashton said.

“Uh huh.  I’m doing this for the cigarettes, not you.”

“Thank you all the same,” Ashton said.

Emmett felt like it wasn’t quite the tone Ashton should be striking.  That if he thought back to the boys and girls he used to go to school with, it would have seemed too ‘teacher’s pet’ or goody-two-shoes.

Then again, Ashton reveled in being the goody-two-shoes.

“I see you’re still very polite, even after I was snooty,” the woman said.  “If only all the doctors in the world took such care with their work.  We might not have this runaway plague.”

“Yes ma’am.  I meant to ask, are your children safe?”

“My children are old, Ashton.  My grandchildren were sent to live with their aunt and uncle on the outskirts of the city.”

“I see,” Ashton said.  “I hope they’re okay.”

“I’m sure they will be,” the woman said.

“You said the other children are in hiding.  Do you know where they went?”

“I don’t,” the woman said.  She leaned against the railing that stood beside her front steps.  “I don’t pay much attention to the ones I’m not related to.”

“You called out to us to warn us,” Ashton said, earnest.  “I think you pay more attention to us than you pretend.”

“Perhaps,” the woman said.  She allowed Ashton a small smile.

“We’re trying to find people,” Ashton said.  “Do you know who is after the children?”

“They call him the Devil.  Dangerous one.  Rumor was the fires were his fault.  Something like that.  Now his people are roaming here and there.  Knocking on doors of houses where children are known to live.  Thankfully, virtually all of them were evacuated.”

“Virtually?” Emmett asked, abrupt.  As with almost any time he spoke, it seemed to surprise the people around him.

“Yes.  A few were picked up here and there.  They returned to their parents shortly after.  The taxes we pay to the Crown seem to be supplying us with a strong hand of law, if nothing else.”

“Some else,” Ashton said.  “Like me.  And my friends.”

“I suppose so,” the woman said, smiling despite herself.

Emmett felt secret relief that it seemed nobody had been hurt.

“I think, and this isn’t a very good piece of information, but in the interest of helping you as much as I can…” the woman said, trailing off.

Ashton smiled, and the woman smiled back.

“…There’s a place where the local children congregate.  Mostly vagrant children, I think.  They call it the ‘yard’.  It sits at the one o’clock position on the western lake, if you want to walk the perimeter.”

“That’s very useful,” Ashton said.  “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, Ashton,” she said.

“We should go,” Duncan said.

“Okay,” Ashton said.  “Thank you, miss.”

Duncan tossed Ashton the carton.  Ashton handed it to the woman.

“Thank you, little sir,” she said.

They left the woman behind, and continued on their way.

“You’re a dangerous creature,” Duncan observed, covering his mouth, “And I just gave up the cigarettes that are supposed to be a countermeasure to you, if I run out of the pills.”

“You can get more,” Ashton said.

“I have more in my luggage.  That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point?” Ashton asked.

“The point is that it’s inconvenient, I’m tired, and I want to grouse,” Duncan said.  He raised his hand to his mouth, yawning, and Emmett could only barely hear the words on Duncan’s part.  “And I want to mislead him.”

Mislead.

Emmett gathered the true intention of that little discussion.  Working to get the woman to extinguish her cigarettes, dropping hints.  Duncan wanted to pretend weakness where none existed.

Emmett wondered how effective it would be.  In the brief moments where he’d been in the room while Mary and Lillian talked about Sylvester, they kept describing him as being virtually impossible to outmaneuver.

As the Duncan and Ashton pair continued their conversation, Emmett felt a tug at his arm.  Abby was putting a hand on his arm and walking on her tiptoes to see Quinton sleeping.

“He likes you,” she whispered.

Emmett nodded.  Up until now, he’d only acted as a pillow to Quinton.

To Abby, the shared bond with Quinton had become something else.  The three little ones were all the same height and they had an interplay.  Ashton reassured both, while Emmett needed none of that.  They were all vat children, and Emmett had once been an ordinary, if ill boy.

He had been small for his age, and sickly, to the point that his mother alone couldn’t care for him.  In the end, faced with endless costs for his care on the one hand, and a promise of payment from the Academy on the other, they had decided to sell him.

That was, he was fairly sure, a common experience for most of them.  Not for Duncan, and not so much for Ashton, but for the two girls.  Being alone.  Now forged into a group.  It wasn’t the case with the primary group of Lambs.  They had been a group from the beginning.

Except now they weren’t.  Sylvester was the enemy now.

“I think the Lambs-” Lara started.

“Shh,” Duncan cut her off, raising a hand.

She flinched at the sound and the hand, and Emmett could feel his proverbial hackles raise at that.  Protective instinct.  Had he not been holding Quinton, he might have seized Duncan’s wrist.

He was aware of how strong he was.  He had spent a full year learning to use this body, and he had only had it for two, really.  They had taken his head, his spine, his ribs, and many organs from his torso, and they had transplanted it into a body.  He had two ribcages, one nestled in the other, and now his original form and the healthy body he’d been given grew in concert.  The body still felt alien, on a level, and he’d had to take so many tests and undergo so much therapy that he’d had to develop an innate sense of his physical power, condensed into one form.  Every movement was easy, and that included breaking things, be it a fork or a human wrist.

Duncan didn’t even seem to notice what Emmett was doing, or the reaction he’d gotten from Emmett or from Lara.

He didn’t seem to notice the significance that Emmett carefully handed off Quinton to Abby, so his hands would be free if he needed to act.

“Shh,” Duncan said, firmly.  “We don’t talk about what any of you are capable of.  For all we know, he’s listening.”

“Yes,” Lara said.

“Is it important?”

“No,” Lara said.

“Good,” Duncan said.  He sighed.  “If it’s important, we’ll take a detour and get somewhere safe to discuss it, where we can be reasonably sure we won’t be overheard.  Information is at a premium here.”

Lara nodded.

She flinched slightly as Duncan lowered the hand he’d held up.

Emmett watched for a moment later before making himself react.  His body was more adult than his head was, sometimes.  He knew the rushes of hormones and emotion were sometimes over the top.  But he’d found his peace, at some point between when he’d thought he was going to die and the two years where he’d worked at grasping this new life he’d been given.  He was secure, mostly, and for the most part, he could put those feelings away.

But he’d seen the bad doctors.  The malicious and evil ones, which weren’t anything like Lillian and Duncan, and he’d seen the ones who had been unable to see the forests for the trees.  He was on guard.

Duncan declared, “We can put off seeing the other children at the yard until tomorrow.  For now, we’ll finish this patrol, and we’ll get settled for the night.  All of this paranoia about Sylvester is likely for nothing.  He showed himself earlier, but with Sylvester, when you assume or expect something, the opposite is usually in the works.  He probably wanted us to be on the lookout, while he’s busy interfering with the others.  Draws your attention one way, then hits you from the other.”

No sooner was he done speaking than a small dark object bounced off of Duncan’s head.

“Lords!” Duncan cussed, one hand going to his head.

“Duncan,” Ashton said, backing away and pointing.

The small dark object was now billowing into a visible cloud of smoke or gas.  A grenade or canister.  Duncan backed away from it, but in the doing, wasn’t wholly able to keep his pets away from it.  One of them ran through the cloud, then dropped to the road.  The other panicked, hurling itself to one side, pulling Duncan off balance.

“He’s here!” Ashton called out.

The cloud was spreading, and Emmett noted another, just off to the side.  Between the two, they had cut off their ability to progress further down the street.

What had Duncan just said?  Draws your attention one way, then hits you-

Emmett wheeled around.

He saw the fabled rabbit that had been moving ahead of them, dropping gifts off.  A man, taller than a man should be, thin to the point that it looked like he should break under his own weight, with modified arms, legs, and feet, with the head of an oversized rabbit in place of his own.

The rabbit stared with bloodshot eyes that pointed in slightly different directions as it half-walked, half-ran across the street behind them, letting go of more canisters.  They hadn’t even started to smoke by the time the rabbit had picked up speed and carried on his way.

“Son of a bitch!” Duncan said.

Canisters of gas ahead of them, canisters behind, and buildings on either side.  Boxed in.

The gas was blowing into the box, too.

“Sylvester!” Duncan called out.

“Calm down,” came the voice, from the other side of the smoke.  A young man’s voice, not fully mature.  “I’m just here to talk.  Worst the gas will do is knock you out and give you a bad headache.”

“I’m not here to negotiate or give you any information, Sylvester,” Duncan said, raising his voice.

“Neither am I, Duncan,” Sylvester said.  “Matter of fact, I’m not even here to talk to you.  I’m here to introduce myself to them.  The little ones.”

The little ones.

Emmett bent down, seized Abby by the ribs, and lifted her up.  She was holding Quinton, who had woken to the raised voices and was now bleating.  Emmett set her down so she was sitting on his shoulders.

Poor Lara was quaking, not sure where to look or what to do.

He made sure she knew what he was doing before he picked her up too, lifting her up and out of the way of the smoke.  She clutched at him, face buried into his shoulder, shaking like a leaf, and in the midst of the hug, she stabbed and gouged him a half-dozen times.

He reached for Ashton, but Ashton shook his head.

“I’m okay,” Ashton said.  “I have good filters.”

Emmett nodded.

“-you’re going to come back with us!” Duncan called out.

“You’re so tiresome,” Sylvester said.  “Here’s the deal, Duncan.  I want you to shut up.  So either you sit in the corner and stay quiet, or I’ll start tossing the remainder of my grenades at you.  Then you’ll have to decide.  Do you stay where you are and get knocked out, wake up with a vicious hangover, or do you retreat to where they are, betray your shiny new team, and ensure that nobody wins, I have to do this again at a later date, and all of you get bad headaches?”

“What if I call your bluff?” Duncan asked.  “How many of these things can you have?”

Emmett could hear the clink of the small object against a solid surface.

“Ah,” Duncan said.

Duncan could have retreated, but he remained where he was as the cloud expanded, covering one corner of the ‘box’ that Sylvester had created.

There was a long pause, then a sound of footsteps, very deliberately working at being audible footsteps.  Theater.

“Sort of glad he didn’t move back toward you guys.  I can’t throw quite that far, and I had only the one grenade left.  The Witch had limited stocks of stuff,” Sylvester said.

Emmett tried to track the voice.  It was possible to throw something, aiming to hit Sylvester, but he wasn’t sure it was a good idea, and he would have had to put the girls down and in the way of the gas.

“I suppose the spokesman for the group will be Ashton, huh?” Sylvester asked.  “Hi Ashton.”

He was standing in the midst of the noxious cloud.  His silhouette was briefly visible, now and then.  Shorter than Duncan, taller than the three experiments that Emmett was standing by.

“Hi Sylvester,” Ashton said.

“Bringing you guys into play was a good move.  Because I can’t leave you alone.  And they know it.  Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with you all.”

“Come stand next to me and breathe deeply,” Ashton said.

There was a pause, then a light cough.  “Are you actually developing a sense of humor, Ashton?”

“No,” Ashton said.  “But I saw you ask Duncan politely and it worked, so I thought I would try it and see what happened.”

“I’m not going to do that, Ashton.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t suppose any of you would be up for negotiation?” Sylvester asked.  “I’ve been watching you.  I know half of you can’t stand Duncan and the other half of you don’t feel at home here.

“I can stand Duncan, and I like it here,” Ashton said.

“There’s overlap,” Sylvester said.

“Okay.”

“I’m just floating the idea.  Planting the seeds in your heads.  There’s got to be a better way.  A way that Abby gets all the animals she could want, and Lara gets to feel safe.  A way that Emmett gets to have the rest of you.”

Emmett felt Lara clutch him tighter at the mention of her name, claws digging past fabric and into his shoulder and side.

“You left me out,” Ashton said.

“You can stand Duncan, and you like it here, remember?” Sylvester asked.

“Oh.  Ok.”

Emmett spoke, without realizing he’d meant to.  “That isn’t what I want.  Them.  That’s not what I need.”

“Emmett?” Sylvester asked.  “You sound younger than you look.  It’s nice to meet you.”

Emmett didn’t respond to the pleasantry.

“What do you want, Emmett?” Sylvester asked.  “I can’t promise the world, but I can’t just see them raise up another generation of Lambs, fake or not, and let it be without at least offering.”

“I want to negotiate, like you said,” Emmett said.

Excellent,” Sylvester said.  His voice was coming from over where Duncan was.  “Where do we start?  What do you want, Emmett?”

Emmett was not a boy of many words.  He’d gotten out of the habit of talking, after years of being sick and years of isolation, being stuck in a lab with nobody to talk to but the doctors who asked him things about his condition and nothing else.

He took a long moment to think carefully about what he wanted to say next.  Whether the others would agree with this, even though they had discussed it before.

He had been a major transplant to an artificial body.  There hadn’t been much to do while he grew up, in a sleepy, specialist Academy, so they had given him every test under the sun.  When Professor Hayle started looking for the special cases, the unique brains, his scoring had been just high enough to get a cursory look.  There hadn’t been many to pick from, as evidenced by the collection of Abby, and he’d been brought along to round out this secondary group.

A benefit of being quiet was that one could listen, and he’d listened.  He had been there while they had discussed strategy, all the individual tools and tricks.  It had started, according to Mary, back in Radham.  A woman who knew Sylvester and the other Lambs had appeared to deliver a note.  The Lambs had talked to her.

And when they had talked about something that the woman had shared with them, that might be useful as leverage, he had taken a risk, and he had shared a detail.

Now he would share it with Sylvester.

“I was sick, once,” he said.  “They gave me a new body.”

“They gave me a new brain, kind of,” Sylvester quipped, as if this was the most casual conversation in the world.

“Yes,” Emmett said.  “Before they did that, they gave you a drug, to wipe away your memories.  But for me, my situation was bad.  I had to get surgery right away, or I would have died.”

There was silence, now.  No quip, no casual conversation.

Sylvester had already followed this thread to its logical conclusion.

“They gave me the drug after, but it wasn’t enough.  I remember things,” Emmett said.  “And these things relate to what the other Lambs have told me.  You, me, Mary Cobourn, the boy who was put together like a living stitched-”

“Gordon,” came the voice.

“-and Jamie, and countless others.  You asked the Baron where the children go.  It seemed to matter to you.” Emmett said.  “I was almost one of them.  I can tell you what I remember, that all the rest of you don’t.”

There was no response.

“We can negotiate,” Emmett said, to the darkness and the clouds of poison. “I’ll hear your offer.”

Sylvester didn’t make one.  Minutes passed, and the gas began to dissipate.  When it was all gone, so was the rogue Lamb.

Emmett nodded to himself.  I’ll hear your offer when you’re ready to make it.

He looked at Ashton, who stood to one side, looking intrigued at the goings-on.

He crossed to where Duncan had collapsed, still holding Lara against his chest and bearing Abby and Quinton on his shoulders and head, respectively.

Duncan’s face had been painted on with ink during the conversation.  ‘Wanker’ had been drawn across his forehead, the end of his nose was now blue, the space between nose and lips and his lips painted to make him look like a cat or a dog.

Bending down, careful not to drop those he already held, he set down Abby, and scooped up Duncan and the fallen dogs.

“Time for bed?” Abby asked.

Emmett nodded, letting Abby and Quinton lead the way to their dormitory.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.04 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.4 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Helen handed off Nora to Lacey and Lillian’s care.  She stretched, testing each and every one of her joints from fingertip to shoulder, shoulder to neck, then testing each muscle and segment all the way down her spine to her legs, legs to toes.

She felt a brief moment of bliss in the sensation of being.  The stretch was akin to giving herself a hug.  There were no sensations quite as fulfilling and thrilling as when she wrapped herself around someone and felt them fighting her, straining and stretching inside her grasp.  Stretching was like straining and stretching against herself, fighting and testing herself.  Every pop and cartilage-against-cartilage realignment of a joint went hand-in-hand with a rush of feel-good hormones.

It was like getting a hundred teeny tiny bites of tart.

The thought made her realize she was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.

Languid, smiling easily, feeling as relaxed as she ever had, she looked at Mary.  Hard Mary, rigid, eager in a very different way.  Mary was standing by the door, which was ajar, peering through the gap to the street outside.  The muscles in Mary’s arms and legs were tensed, and she was ready to move or attack at a moment’s notice, if someone’s head outside turned the wrong way, or if she saw an opportunity.

Helen approached Mary and, being careful to avoid the blade Mary held and to keep from impeding Mary’s view, slid one arm behind Mary’s neck and the other behind the small of Mary’s back, and embraced her.

She felt the prick of Mary’s blade against the side of her neck.

Just as carefully as she had embraced Mary, she backed off.  She leaned in close to give Mary a peck on the cheek.

“You’re riled up,” Mary said.  She hadn’t taken her eyes off of the gap between the door and the doorframe.

“It’s contagious,” Helen said.  “I’ve been antsy for months now, and being around you and Lillian could calm me down.  Being around Ashton could calm me down a lot.  But Ashton isn’t here, and neither of you are calm.  Mary is tense and I can smell how uncalm Lillian is-”

“Ahem,” Lillian said.

“-and I can hear her breathing as if she was breathing right in my ear, and it makes me restless and it makes me want to embrace someone.”

“I’m ready to act, but I’m calm,” Mary lied.  “As calm as anyone is while being tracked by a small army.”

Helen smiled.  “Uh huh.”

She felt the blade move fractionally.

“The adjusted drug regimen from Ibbot might be responsible for your mood,” Lillian said.  “If I could pare it down any without him catching on during your next appointment, I would.  Maybe you could tell him the truth?  That you’re lying to him about your emotional states.  If he keeps adjusting in response to falsehoods, something bad could happen.”

“I’m not lying to him,” Helen said.

“He’s lying to himself.  Yeah.  You know what I mean, Helen.”

Helen smiled softly.  “The day I tell him he’s wrong is the day he’ll decide I’m not worth the trouble.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  She sighed, looking at Nora and Lacey.

They had already had the ‘none of this gets repeated to the Academy’ conversation a few times.  At least with the details regarding Helen, Lillian felt confident letting Lacey overhear.  Lacey had no love for Ibbot.

Lillian spoke, “Do your best, and please don’t kill Sylvester, Helen.”

Helen didn’t let the smile falter.  “I’ll try not to.”

“Thank you.”

Lillian’s breathing wasn’t as hard or intense as it had been, earlier.  The mention of Sylvester normally quickened it and drew her focus, but Helen was very aware of the fact that the subject of Sylvester dying had stopped all that.  Sobering and concerning to Lillian.  It mattered.

An imaginative part of Helen’s brain conjured up the notion that if something did happen to Sylvester, then Lillian might stop breathing altogether.  Lillian liked him a lot, even now.  It would break her heart.

Helen would have to try very hard, to not break Sylvester too much and break Lillian’s heart in the process.

“Lara wants to talk,” Nora said.

“Hold on,” Lillian said.  “We’re not sure if Sylvester is listening in.  Let’s wait until-”

“He’s not listening in.  He’s over there.  Or he was,” Nora said.

Mary turned her eyes away from the crack in the door.  Lacey moved away from Nora to better see Nora’s face, her expression serious.

“Okay, honey,” Lillian said.

Helen could see the change in Lillian’s body language, she could hear the shift in breathing, and she imagined she could hear the increased speed of Lillian’s heartbeat.  Her own heartbeats increased in response.

All of this was so enjoyable and so terrifying at the same time, like the thrill of standing on a ledge.

“Abby: Duncan’s asleep.  But Quinton is okay.  The rest of us are okay too.”

“Give Quinton a hug for me,” Helen said.

“Abby: Okay.”

“Let’s keep it serious,” Lillian said,  quiet.  Then, louder, she said, “Sy was there?”

“Ashton: Duncan got gassed.  Sylvester wanted to talk.  He talked with Duncan, then with me, then with Emmett.  Emmett told Sylvester he was willing to negotiate, using what you told him to say.  Then Sylvester disappeared.”

“Oh, okay, wow,” Lillian said.  “Too many things to ask and respond to.  Is Duncan okay?  Do I need to treat him?  Do I need to treat any of you?”

“Ashton: Sylvester said he would wake up with a bad headache.  I don’t think we need you.”

“Alright,” Lillian said.

“Ashton: We wondered if we should tell you right away.  We didn’t want to distract you when you’re in trouble, and Lara said you weren’t out of trouble.”

Mary spoke, her voice low, so she wouldn’t be heard by anyone outside, “We’re not, but it was right to fill us in.  When in doubt, more information is best.”

“Ashton: I remember you saying that to Duncan.  But the reason we decided to share was because we asked a woman and she said some things about the people chasing you.  It sounds like the people Sylvester provoked and was fighting with, the really dangerous people, they work for the Devil.  He’s the leader of the biggest gang and it sounds like he’s still out there, unless Sylvester got him and the ordinary people don’t know yet.”

“Then we have a target,” Mary said.

“A distraction, not a target,” Lillian said.  “But we can discuss that.  Anything else, Ashton?”

“Ashton: No.  Except it sounds like the children who didn’t leave the city or hide in the houses of people they know might be at a place called the yard.  We were going to go in the morning.”

“Good.  Sleep.  Take care of Duncan.  Get him to drink lots when he’s awake.  We’ll touch bases and ask questions when everything is wrapped up.  But it’ll be redundant and unfair if we discuss the Sylvester situation before Duncan is conscious.”

“Ashton: Okay.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.

There was a brief pause.  No further messages from the others.

“The false Lambs accomplished what we wanted,” Lillian said.  “He’s showed himself and revealed his hand, a little.”

“But we’re tied up here,” Mary said, moving the door to peer through the gap.

“You know him better than I do,” Lacey said.  “Why did Sylvester run?  Why not take the offer and talk to Emmett?”

Helen, Mary, and Lillian all started speaking at the same time, each with their own interpretation.

Lacey held up a hand, indicating for them to be quiet, then pointed at Helen.

“He’s introducing himself,” Helen said.  “He wants to greet the little ones, show off, let them know who he really is.  He already started, leaving Quinton and the other animals for them.  But if he ends up staying and asking about what Emmett knows, then their first impression of him is about that as much as it is about anything else.”

“Disagree?” Lacey asked Mary and Lillian.

“Not wholly,” Mary said, while Lillian shook her head.

“You both look like you want to say something.  Mary?” Lacey asked.

“It’s part of it.  He exposes himself to danger, the longer he’s there.  He wants to act, leave an impact, and move on.  And we can’t forget that he has schemes in play.  We’re inside an organism of his making.  He has to tend to it, keep it fed, keep everything in alignment.  He’s probably running everywhere, trying to keep an eye on the Devil, on us, on the new Lambs, and on everyone that’s working for him.”

“Good,” Lacey said.  “Lillian.  Your thoughts.”

“It ties into what Helen said.  He’s trying to prove something.  Not just to the false Lambs, but to us.  He wants to show that he’s okay, that he’s strong.  He can’t negotiate with Emmett until he knows what Emmett wants and he he’s in a position of power.  So he’s backing off.  We put him on the back foot.  It’s a good thing.  Hopefully it’s a thing we can leverage later.”

“Predicated on dealing with the Devil.  Even knowing he’s a distraction,” Mary said.

Lillian sighed.

“Do you disagree?” Mary asked.

“No.  Can you and Helen handle it?  Or at least get us started?”

Mary glanced at Helen.

“I want to kill,” Helen said.  “I’m antsy.”

“We can handle it,” Mary said.  “The group that was following us backtracked a few minutes ago, there are a few stragglers.  If we deal with the stragglers, we can follow the others.  Maybe back to the Devil.”

“I don’t think we should go after the Devil just yet, unless it’s to gather information,” Lillian said.  “That was a lot of people he had running after us there.  We don’t know what kind of resources he has.”

“We’ll move as a group,” Mary suggested.  “You’re Sy’s most likely target, besides Duncan.  You stay close.”

Lillian nodded.

Helen hugged her arms, felt the joints stretch as she used her own strength to the point that she was almost damaging herself.  She felt the faint, tart-tasty rush at the sensation.

Too many parts of her brain were hungry for that sensation, and squeezing herself and stretching herself weren’t enough to sate that hunger.

“I’ll get set up first,” Lillian said.  She undid the clasps on the container she’d brought with her.  “Just in case.”

Helen fought back the eagerness by squeezing herself harder.  She’d been on the boundary of damaging herself, and now she crossed those bounds, squeezing enough that skin would bruise and muscle would be damaged.  She would be sore all night.

But it was important to keep the mask in place.

It was just her and Mary.  Helen felt that this was when Mary was most Mary and Helen was most Helen.

She was good at watching faces.  She was good at seeing how people moved.  Mary was a puppet guided by the hand of an expert puppeteer, one that had made her graceful and forceful in her movements, dangerous and stern to behold, held aloft by strings of razor wire.

It was with this keen eye for movement and expression that she saw a flicker of fear on Mary’s face.  Not because Mary had seen a daunting enemy.  No, Mary had looked back to see if Helen was keeping up, which was sometimes a problem.  Helen had let the mask of smiles and cheer drop away.  With no obvious targets to go after, she felt like a dog that had had its bone snatched away a few times before she could seize it.  Teased, frustrated, overeager now.

As Mary had looked back, she had seen the naked hunger on Helen’s face, and Helen, in turn, had seen Mary pick up her pace and move a little further away.

“Soon,” Mary said.

Soon.

She didn’t like running.  She wasn’t good at it.  The ones who had gotten ahead of them had ended up too far ahead.  Too hard to trace, and there weren’t enough other leads to follow.  They hadn’t been able to follow them back to the Devil.  Perhaps if Ashton and the other false Lambs hadn’t reached out, they might have left sooner.  But Helen was glad that Ashton had called.

Mary’s hand went up, gesturing.

Helen took the direction, scaling the side of a building.  Hooks at her wrists and the base of her toes helped provide the leverage.  She hugged the wall, stretching to reach higher, and reduce the number of times she had to lift her own body weight up to the next point.

The roof had a heavy overhang, and she had to reach back and up to make contact with it.  She gripped the underside of a board that pointed down to the ground, hard enough that her fingers bit into the wood, then let herself swing away from the wall.  She folded herself up and over the edge, then hugged the roof as she moved up and across it.

This… this was okay.

She looked back, and she saw Lillian, Lacey, and Nora trailing behind.  The group settled into a position just around the corner.  Lillian signaled to Helen, and Helen signaled back.

In the other direction, there were people.  Three men, a stitched, and a woman in a lab coat that was holding the leash of a medium-sized warbeast.  It looked canine or feline, sleek and built for running, and it had a mane that suggested something lion was in it, but it had the raw size of a bear, not a dog.

One of the men, the woman, the stitched and probably the warbeast were all Academy.  They were talking with the two other men, who looked rougher around the edges.  Criminals.  All three men and the woman were smoking.

The stitched looked strong.  It had a gun, four-barreled, and each barrel looked big enough that Helen could have put her fist into it.  A hand cannon?

This was better than okay.

While Mary got into position, moving around a building so she might be able to get at the chatting, smoking group from the other side, Helen watched them.  She looked at the expressions on their faces, the fact that the Academy group and the criminal group didn’t seem to entirely get along, the way they moved and looked frustrated.

Her lips parted slightly.  She watched them and drank them in.  The beautiful parts of them, the ugly parts of them, and all the warm, wet parts of them that she couldn’t see.

She shivered, and she put a smile on her face, watching through half-lidded eyes.

Piece by piece, she worked out how they were put together.  The humans were easy, but there were little clues.  One of the criminals limped.  He’d been hurt earlier.  He kept shifting position as he leaned against the wall, putting all of his weight on one leg, while trying to find a good position for the sore one.

The handler in the lab coat didn’t like the criminal who stood nearest to her, she didn’t laugh at his jokes, but her eyes were the same eyes that Gordon and Mary had had sometimes, before they would use all of the ingenuity and cleverness that they had learned from the Lambs to slip away from everyone’s sight.

There was an intercourse in the way those two looked at each other.  It was a given that they would enjoy each other’s company.

The stitched was harder.  He was built Bruno big, sturdy, and strong, so that he could use that cannon without falling over.  Reinforced all over.  Taking him apart and breaking him down would be a puzzle.

And the Warbeast.  She had to study the way the light from nearby streetlamps struck its muscle, showing where the muscles were and how it moved.  Where did the muscles begin and where did they end?

She suspected it was hungry.  It had been running earlier.  A faint sheen of sweat had collected on its fur and made its mane clump in strands.

Helen watched, and she felt at peace.  She studied them, and she found herself becoming intensely fond of them.  She wanted them.  She wanted to feel the way their clothes rubbed against sweaty skin, the way that that fur felt, with the sweat on it, and how, when she crushed it, it rubbed across hard, Academy-designed muscle.

Next to actually sating the instincts and impulses she had been created to have, being this close and imagining it was fine.

Mary was in position, standing inside a house, not four feet from the warbeast, with a wall and window separating them.  None too soon.  Helen might have gone in herself, if she’d had to wait any longer.

Mary signaled.  Helen signaled back.

Within a few moments, they were both making long series of gestures, reading what the other was gesturing at the same time they gestured themselves.

A negotiation.

They stopped.  Helen checked the coast was clear.

Then she let herself fall from the roof.

She knew how her own body moved.  She knew how she was put together.  She’d been awake and alert enough times as she was taken apart and examined from the inside out.

Heavy impacts could make her bleed, but it was hard for one to deliver lasting damage.  She landed on the street, letting joints dislocate with the impact, and pushing her jaw to dislocate as well.  Cartilaginous bones flexed rather than break.

She landed as a crumpled mess, twitched violently, and then went still, one eye open and staring, her jaw dislocated on the one side.

“Good Lords!” came the response.  Then, after a moment, less surprised and more shocked, “Good fucking lords.”

“That’s one of the ones we were chasing.  Where the hell did she come from?”  Criminal, by the roughness of his voice.

“Doesn’t matter, I don’t think,” the man from the Academy said.

Helen remained where she was.  She constricted muscles around one of her hearts and forced it to stop.  She let the other one slow.

“It matters.  It’s fucking weird.  Dead little girls don’t just appear out of nowhere.  The hells?”

“Language, my man,” the Academy man said.

“What do we do with it?”

“Feed it to the warbeast.  Maybe leave some pieces around for proof?  Can you do that?”

The woman spoke, “I could.

“You don’t sound pleased at the idea.”

“No.  I’m not, really,” the woman said.

Helen waited, patient.  Mary was waiting too.

After a moment, the warbeast began pacing closer.  the woman walked a short distance behind it.

Its head drew nearer.  Beautiful, lovely creature.  It sniffed.  Helen longed to bury her face in its body.  It was engineered life, fine tuned, like the intricate pieces of a watch, but it was about killing and violence, not time.  Killing and violence had brought it into this world and killing and violence would take it out, and it would be beautiful and it would become art as the circle closed.

She ached for it.

But for this, for this moment, she could put the eagerness away and be dead.  She could delay the gratification.

An idle part of her wondered if Ibbot ached.  If he experienced this.

She was his Galatea.  The woman carved according to his design.  She was to be the woman that would serve him and be his, in a way that an ordinary woman could never be.  Child and wife and partner and yet neither.  Impermanent.  He delayed his gratification by nearly twenty years.  She would become the woman he had wanted, and she would die a few years later.

She hated him and loved him, for that, as she lay dead on the street.  The warbeast opened its jaws, used massive canines to lift her arm, and then to drop it.  It fell limp to the ground.

“What the hell is wrong?  Order it to eat her.”

“I did,” the handler said.  “But we created the hunter warbeasts to hunt.  They get a diet of living prey.  They don’t eat carrion.”

Helen’s eye didn’t move as she stared at the warbeast, but she gazed on that beautiful chimera with adoration, with her own satisfaction brimming over at the knowledge that she had acted out her death sufficiently to fool the creature, and with the full knowledge she was about to destroy this creature that she loved a little.

The handler whistled, and the warbeast turned to go.

Helen moved, relying on locked muscles to hold limbs rigid where joints were dislocated.  She stroked the creature’s mane.

It jumped as if she’d stabbed it, startled now that the carrion was alive.  Her fist closed on the mane, and she hauled herself to a standing position.  One side of her jaw still dislocated, she bent over the thing, kissing it between the eyes.

It tried to bite her, turning its head, and she moved with it, hand going to the other side of its mane, her body contorting to stay out of the way of its jaws.

Her legs went around its neck, and as it moved, trying again to bite her, she shifted her grip up its head, embracing its muzzle, clamping its jaws shut with one hand.

Near her, the Academy man died, his throat slashed.

Mary appeared in the midst of the collected group, her attention on the stitched.  She moved an arm and pulled on razor wire, pulling a gun from the hand of one of the criminals.  She’d picked the right one.  Helen was glad.  She was worried the gestures hadn’t been exact enough, what with their different perspectives.

The chimera shook its head, trying to dislodge Helen, and with each movement, she shifted her grip.  Fingertips pushed past fur and into muscle and bone, finding holds there.  It turned its head, trying to pull back and away, and she forced its head to remain turned.

“Shhh,” Helen whispered, as the creature tried shaking its head to get it back into a more normal position, and she used that to turn it even further the opposite way.  She peeled off a shoe and twisted her foot around to pinch the creature’s carotid artery between her toes and the ball of her foot.

Once the artery was pinched, it didn’t take long.  It weakened swiftly, and as it stopped fighting her, she was able to adjust her hold, leveraging most of the muscles in her body to twist its head further, until the connection between the skull and the spine could no longer be maintained.

She rose to her feet, making sure to do it in a way that might unnerve those who remained.

There were only two.  The handler was working to undo the coil of chain that she had wound around her own wrist, so she wouldn’t have to hold the leash with her hand.  The second was one of the criminals, now lying on the ground, a bola around his ankles.

“You said you wanted these two.  I’m not about to question how your mind works.”

“It feels like cheating, this way,” Helen said.

“Don’t complain.  I could have killed them while you were kissing that creature.  This is me being nice.  You asked for these two, they’re yours.”

“You’re lovely,” Helen said.  She reached for the warbeast’s leash, pulling herself herself along it hand after fist as she followed it to the other end.  She looked at the handler.  “You’re lovely too.”

The handler released herself from the chain and stumbled back, while Helen lunged forward.  As if unsure that Helen would catch her quarry, Mary drew an arm back, as if to throw something.

But Helen’s fingertips caught at cloth.  She pulled that cloth into her fist, and seized it.  She had her target.  There was nothing the woman could do, now.  She could pull back and tear the cloth, but even if she did, Helen would draw forward more than she drew herself away.

Helen hauled herself closer, wrapping an arm around, and dug fingertips into the small of the woman’s back.  She drew herself close, her temple pressing against the handler’s cheek.

“Hello,” Helen greeted the handler.  “You’re going to come with me and answer questions, and then I’ll make this fast, okay?  You won’t take any more than five minutes to die.  But only if you listen.”

“What the fuck?” the woman asked.

“I want to hear you say ‘yes’,” Helen said.

The woman reached to her waist.  Again, Mary moved like she was going to throw something.  Helen moved herself into the way and grabbed the woman’s wrist before she could fully draw the knife.

“You said they were mine,” Helen said, pouting.  “Stop acting like you’re going to interfere.”

“Alright,” Mary said.  She put her weapon away and raised her hands, surrendering.

“As for you-” Helen said.  “I thought we had a compromise.”

She squeezed the wrist of the hand that held the knife until she felt things start to break under her grip.  At the same time, pressing her body against the woman’s front, she ground her fingers into the small of the handler’s back, digging into flesh in the same way she might work them into hard clay.  Blood welled out.

“He’s going to get away,” Mary observed, hands still lifted in surrender.  “You have about a minute.”

The woman’s clutching hand did nothing to break Helen’s grip.  That failed, she dug fingernails into Helen’s face.  When they didn’t penetrate, she scratched, hard.

The damage was mild at best.

Helen had been been made to do this.  Ibbot wasn’t a stupid man.  He knew victims would scratch.  They would gouge at eyes and search out weak points, try to strangle her or beat her until she was forced to let go.

He had made her so that the damage she dealt would far outpace what little damage they could do to her in turn.

Her fingers dug in deep enough that she could wrap her hand around the column of the woman’s spine, with all of the related systems and bundles.  Somewhere in the midst of all of this, the handler had fallen to the ground.

“Crawl,” Helen said.  “To him.”

The handler became the handled, as Helen walked, bent over, gripping the woman by a handle that the woman dare not break or test.  She used mostly hands, not legs, to move toward the Devil’s man, who was only just getting free of the bola.

Too slow, too slow.

“Grab him.  Hold him,” Helen said.

There was hesitation.  She adjusted her grip, tightened.

Reluctantly, the handler obeyed.

“Forward, climb further up.  That’s good,” Helen said, once the handler was lying across the man’s legs.

They’d been looking at each other, making silent promises they would be together later.

Now they were together.  There was beauty and art in that.  Both had lost the use of their legs, by bondage or by breakage.  Whether it was sympathy, reflection, balance, or whatever it was, it made sense to her.

She made sure to break one of his wrists, before seizing the other.  She held it firmly as she twisted his arm, then used her legs and other arm to bind herself around the two of them at once.  She adjusted the screaming woman’s position.

“This can end quickly,” she said.  “But you’ll want to stop screaming and start talking.  Tell us about the Devil.  Where he is, where you were supposed to go after you were done here.”

His face a mere handspan from the handler’s, the criminal blustered out a blunt, “Fuck you!”

Spittle flew from his mouth as he said it.

“If you’re okay here, I’ll make sure the others know where we are.”

“Okay,” Helen said.

She turned her attention to the man, hand flat against his belly.

She spoke, her voice soft enough it was almost drowned out by his constant cussing.  “I’m very very excited, because I get to see a friend I haven’t seen in a long time, soon.  And when I get excited I want to break people.  Usually I start from the outside in.  I break the fingers, then the hands, and then the arms.  Today, as excited as I am, I want to try something different.  I’ll reach inside of you, work past muscle and fat, and I’ll grab your organs, one by one.  I’ll start with less important ones, and I’ll crush them in my hands.  Then I’ll grab vital ones, to see what they feel like while they’re alive in my hand, and I’ll do that for a little while, until all the damage that I did in getting to them adds up and you expire.”

He’d stopped cussing and started listening.

Her fingernails made the initial dig into the flesh of his belly.

“I’ll talk!  I’ll talk!  Lords of the fucking Crown Kingdom, I’ll talk, just- please don’t.”

Her hand trembled there, against his stomach.

“I’m not very well,” she confided to him, her voice a whisper.  “And the people who would usually settle me down are preoccupied.”

“What?” he asked, bewildered.

“Nothing.  Never mind me,” she said, smiling.  “I’m going to try to be nice tonight.  You can talk, and I do my best to hold off and not squeeze bits of you into pulp.  But do try to be thorough.”

She reached up with a bloody hand to brush at his cheek, leaving a streak there.

She shifted position, still holding the woman tight against her back, and laid her head across the criminal’s chest.  It was as if he was her bed and pillow, and the handler was her blanket.  Flesh and blood and pain and warmth all together in an artificial womb she had pulled in around herself.

He spoke, telling her about the Devil, and she listened.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.05 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.5 (Lamb)

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Ashton held his hand up near the window.  Morning dew had accumulated over the past two hours, and as he held his hand up, the dew changed to a dusky rose color.  The drops with the dew were heavier and left pink streaks on the painted window frame and sill.

The sun filtered through bushes just beyond the window, striking some drops while leaving others in shadow.  There were gray droplets, gray-pink droplets and there were pink-gray droplets and pink droplets and rosy droplets.  Some were cold and some were warm.

There was a world beyond the droplets of dew and the window and the bush.  Buildings, a street where people were emerging and starting their day.  There were regular patrols on the street, and when Ashton saw one he made sure to write the time on the windowsill.  The movement of the pencil inevitably drew lines through some of the moisture that had collected there.  He very much looked forward to when he next had an excuse to make the next marking, especially now that there was more moisture.

The sun was just rising, it was humid out, and it was already very warm.  It was going to be a very hot day, even with the clouds on the horizon.

“You scared me,” Lara said.

Ashton turned his head.  Duncan had sat up in bed.  Lara was in one corner, curled up in a chair with her arms around her legs, a blanket draped over her.  Her hood was down and her hair was tousled.  One of her eyes was very red and watery, the eyelid inflamed.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” Duncan said.  He rubbed at his eye.

“It’s okay,” Lara said.

“Is Ashton keeping you company?”

“My sister is.  Ashton is quiet.”

“I’ve said we can talk if you want to talk,” Ashton said.

“It’s okay,” Lara said, again.  “I didn’t want to make noise and bother anybody.”

“Alright,” Ashton said.  He smiled using smile three from the books.  “I’m always happy to practice talking.”

Social niceties were important, and Ashton knew his doctors would be happy if he got more practice, so he had been doing it as much as he could.  It would be good if he got back and they oohed and ahhed over how much he had progressed.  It would reflect well on Duncan and Lillian and the other Lambs that they had done a good job with him.

All his life, his creators and the people around him had talked about who and what he should be.  It was a big responsibility.

“How is your head?  Sylvester said you would have a hangover,” Ashton said.

“I have a hangover,” Duncan said.  “Not too bad, all considered.”

He swung his feet out over the side of the bed, then stood.  He swayed on the spot.  “Amend that.”

“Amended,” Ashton said, turning to look out the window.

“I can’t help but notice I’m not wearing pants,” Duncan observed.

“Abby thought you would be uncomfortable sleeping with all of your clothes on, so we took your shoes and pants.”

“Uh huh,” Duncan said.  He rubbed at his face.  “And my skin is dry.”

“Sylvester painted your face to make fun of you,” Ashton said.  “I thought that was rude, so I insisted we clean your face before we put you to bed.”

“Thank you, Ashton,” Duncan said.

“You’re welcome, Duncan.”

“Lara?  Cover your eyes.  Just until I find my pants.”

Lara obeyed, raising her hands to her eyes.  She spoke at the same time Ashton did.  “End of the bed.”  “We hung them- yeah, the bed.”

“You’ll want to know what Sylvester said,” Ashton added.

“No,” Duncan said.  “Let me wake up first, see if I can’t clear my head.  I’ve got one headache already, I don’t need a second on top of it. Any word from the others?”

“Some,” Ashton said.  “But they’ve stopped for now.  They know where the man who is hunting them is.  He’s called the Devil.  They spent the night hunting down the Devil’s people.  They know where he is now, but they want to rest, organize, and make sure we’re all awake and well just in case they need us, before they act.”

“Good.  Has everyone eaten?”

“No,” Ashton said.  He looked at his watch, then checked one of his notes on the windowsill.  “The sun rose half an hour ago.  We don’t usually eat until seven or eight.”

“I’m going to arrange breakfast now so we can get an early start,” Duncan said.  “Stay put, be good.  Let the others sleep in.  When I get back, you can fill me in and we’ll decide where we go next.”

“Okay,” Ashton said.  He looked back and saw Duncan looking at the beds where Emmett and Abby were sleeping.  Abby was curled up with the lamb, Quinton.

Duncan pointed at Abby.

Ashton stared, not sure what to do.  He’d figured out pointing, but he couldn’t connect the point to any thought.  It would have been easier if Duncan said something.

“How’d she sleep?”

“No fits tonight,” Ashton said.  “I don’t think she had nightmares.”

Duncan nodded.  Ashton thought that he was nodding more to himself than to him.  It made more sense: Duncan was a problem solver.  He did best with organizational problems, like where things should be and how people should act.  He was good at telling Ashton how to act, and Ashton thought he would do a good job telling the others how to act.

Abby was one of the problems that Duncan was trying to solve.

“Progress,” Duncan said, before leaving the room.  He shut the door with extra care as he left.

Ashton’s mind was very busy, keeping track of the multicolored raindrops, trying to figure out ways to organize them and keep track of them as the colors changed.  He liked color.  Another part of his brain was busy exploring the bush just beyond the window.

He worked the part of his mind that focused on spatial things.  He had an intuitive sense of where the bush was and where the street was and where the buildings were, but he could distort that sense like he could unfocus his eyes and imagine different geometries that would make that same environment possible.  A landscape of cobblestone wall and askew buildings with misshapen blobs of liquid.  He could piece together a mental image of the landscape as if it was actually a mix of grays and gray-pinks and pink-grays and pink.

His creators called it meditation, but it wasn’t like that.  His brain was organized into what his creators called shelves, described as being like fungal growths or a coral, and in his early development each shelf had been given over to a different task, like the lobes in a human brain.  Sometimes it could be hard to get one of the less-used shelves working.  As he started his day, he pushed every part of his ‘brain’.

Even as he sat very still, standing with his arms folded on the windowsill, staring out at the world beyond, his mind was very, very active.

“Ashton?” Lara spoke.

“Yes?” Ashton said.

“Nora fell asleep.  I don’t like the quiet.  Can we talk?”

“Okay.”

There was a long pause.  Ashton estimated about a minute’s time passing.  In the meantime, he began to pull the surroundings apart in his mind, imagining it all as if everything was made of meat and vegetation.  As he mentally dismantled buildings, blood leaked from the gaps, touched the stretched beads of gray and pink dew and expanded into clouds as it diffused into the liquid.

He liked how the blood looked when it diffused.  He began painting his view of the city with clouds, while concentrating the way he sent his spores out into the air so it would concentrate in some beads more than others.

“Can you think of something to talk about?” Lara asked.

“Okay,” Ashton said.  He pulled back from his imagined paintings so he could think about what to talk about.  “After we’re done here, whether we get Sylvester or not, we’ll be going back to Radham.”

“The idea is scary,” Lara said.

“I like Radham.  It’s home.”

“It’s not my home.  It’s a strange place to me.”

“It will become home eventually.  There will be more labs for you and your sister and all of the ones who come after.  You’ll have your own room, though you might have to share it with Nora.”

“I share this room with Nora,” Lara said.  “I described every part of it to her.  She described every part of where she is to me.  It feels safer to imagine myself over there than it feels to be here.  Nora said it was the other way around for her.”

“That makes sense,” Ashton said.

“I was talking to her about how I like that you’re the same height as me, and Abby is too.  And we’re three.  I’m part of a group.  But Nora isn’t.  She’s with the others and she looks up to them.  They’re more like teachers and they’re something she’s working hard to try to be like?”

“That’s good.”

“That’s bad,” Lara said.  “We’re becoming different.  We were the same and now we’re different.”

“Different is good.  Look at how the Lambs work.  They are stronger because they’re all different.  Everyone has things they’re good at and things they’re bad at and we make up for each other’s weaknesses.”

“My project is strongest when we’re the same.  We have to be able to understand each other.”

“You will,” Ashton said.  He gave her smile number three again.  It was small and it was meant to be reassuring.

“You don’t understand,” Lara said, and she said it in a way that made Ashton quickly remove the smile.  She was frustrated.

“Okay,” Ashton said.  He drew in a breath, then devoted more of his thoughts to the conversation.  “Then I’ll try to understand.”

“There were six of us.  All in a row.  Each in a vat.  We could talk, sometimes, but it was hard because we were all in fluid.  I was the second.  Nora was the sixth.”

“I was all alone,” Ashton said.  “I grew in a node, which grew in a plant-like structure.”

“I’m talking about me and Nora,” Lara said.  She wasn’t upset or frustrated, but she wasn’t pleased either.  It was a reminder, the kind of reminder that made Ashton think of when he was little and understood conversations less.  After a few more of those patient reminders she would get upset and bothered, or she might stop talking.

He knew that if she did any of those things, she would probably be unhappy or bothered for the rest of the day.  That wasn’t a good thing.

“Okay,” Ashton said.

“And don’t… don’t use your spores on me?  Not while I’m talking about this.”

Ashton wasn’t one to get frustrated, usually.  It wasn’t really something in his emotional makeup.  He could keep trying at a task until he was told to stop, he didn’t get tired, and he didn’t hit limits in the same way other people did, after repeated tries.

If he did get frustrated, he reasoned to himself, then he would be very frustrated that people kept asking him not to use his spores to calm them down when they seemed to need it most.

He took the thought and put it away for thinking about later.  His ability to reason, feel, experience, and learn tended to come in spurts, coinciding with his bouts of physical growth.  His appointments helped, giving him massive injections of nutrients that would allow such.  Maybe he could gain something if he figured out frustration and made it a focus the next time he was growing in a new shelf.

He could talk about it with his creators.  They had said each new shelf that he grew would be smaller and have less impact than the last.  He would have to carefully choose what he would make each shelf do.

Lara had stopped talking.  Ashton had stopped talking.

He looked out the window and began painting the landscape with his imagination again.  The heat was starting to take away the moisture in the air, even with the humidity and light drizzle of rain.  The droplets were shrinking and evaporating.

“You were number two and she was number six?” he asked.

“Yes.  There were four more, but they died before the rest of us could think and communicate.  The girl in the fifth vat didn’t grow good claws, so she got recycled.  Her body was taken out of the vat.  They took her to pieces, mashed her up and fed her to the rest of us as nutrients.”

Ashton nodded.  This made sense.

“The one in the first vat was next to go.  She- he- not a boy and not a girl.  Just a mishmash.  I don’t know why it mattered, but the one in the first vat died because of that and was fed to the four of us that were still there.  We were small and young enough we didn’t understand or mind, even if we remember.”

“Yes,” Ashton said.  “This is what the Academy will do, sometimes.  It’s how Mauer’s people made the primordials, Lillian said.  I’m not the first Ashton.  They fail a project and they recycle it and try again.”

“How old are you?” Lara asked.

“I’m not very old.  I’ve only really been out of the vat for two and a half years.”

“I’ve been out for seven,” Lara said.  “But I haven’t been out of the lab much.”

Ashton started to speak, then stopped, before admitting, “I’m having a hard time following this conversation.  I’m not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about.”

“Okay,” Lara said.  “I’m older.  Even if you’re senior, here.  Yes?”

“Yes,” Ashton said.  “That is a very good way of explaining it.”

“I started off from a human base, like Abby did, except she had a lot more human to start with, and she isn’t going to change as she grows.  But you’re very different.  You were made from new.  And you’re finding your way to acting like a person.”

“Yes,” Ashton agreed, with confidence.  He paused, connecting thoughts.  “Am I doing a bad job of acting like a person?”

“Yes,” Lara said.  “I don’t care if it makes sense or if it’s how the Academy does things.  I had sisters and now I don’t.  The people who made me took away four of my sisters because they were too different.  Now Nora and I are becoming different.”

“And you’re scared.”

“I’m scared of everything,” Lara said, shrinking down into her bundle of blanket, until only her eyes and the top of her head were visible over her knees.  “But I’m very scared of this in particular.”

“Because you’re worried it’s the same as when they were making you?”

“Yes,” Lara said.

“I’m not very good at being human, so I’m not going to be good at helping with that.  I’m not very good at giving advice about being scared, either, because I don’t get very scared very much,” Ashton said.

“I don’t want help or advice.  I just want you to listen, like Nora listens.”

“I’m not very good at listening either, I don’t think,” Ashton said.

“No you aren’t,” Lara said.  “I think I’m more upset than I was before we started talking about this.”

“But,” Ashton said.  He had to put his brain to work for a few seconds.  “I think being different might be good, now that you’re this grown up.  And I think the Lambs have gotten away with things they shouldn’t have, because they do very good work.  If you do good work then there are people who are going to want you to keep doing good work.  If you and Nora do good work then they won’t treat you like they treated your sisters.  I think.”

“You’re thinking a lot,” Lara said.  “You keep using that word.”

“I’m not very good at this, so I’m working extra hard to try and figure it out.  Even if I’m not very good at figuring out answers, I do want to help.  Because I want to do good work for you too, so you’ll want me to keep doing good work.  Like I just talked about.”

“I think I understand,” Lara said.  “What you said makes sense, and it does make me feel better.  If we do a good enough job?”

“Yes,” Ashton said.  He saw another patrol walk by, checked his watch, and marked down the time.  Duncan was there too, with bags in his arms.  He had to stop to let the patrol by.

“Thank you,” Lara said.

“You’re welcome,” Ashton said, automatically.

“You’re awake, Abby?” Lara asked.

“Sorry,” Abby said.

Abby sat up in bed.  As her movements rustled it, the lamb bleated.  Her braid was messy and residual dirt from Quinton had transferred over to the front of her very simple ankle-length nightgown, leaving cloudy markings on the bleached white fabric.

Not for the first time, Ashton thought that Abby was like Sable, from Good Simon Says.  She was supposed to be better than Sable, able to understand things about humans as well as animals, but she wasn’t all the way there, and she wasn’t as good with animals as she was supposed to be.  That part of her brain had never really developed, and the added systems for communication had never really developed.  She was the least talented of all of them.

“Quinton will need to make water and make a deposit,” Abby said, scooping the lamb up in her arms.

“Deposit?  Water?” Ashton asked.

“It’s what they said at Sous Reine, to be polite,” Abby said.  “Should I go outside?  Would one of you come with me?”

“Oh.  Put it out the window,” Ashton said.  “It’s at ground level.”

Abby smiled.  “Good idea.”

He helped Abby get the leash on and open the window.  They placed the lamb outside, holding the leash, and let it explore the bushes.

“Were you listening?” Lara asked.

“Sorry,” Abby said.

“It’s okay,” Lara said.  “It’s okay if you know.”

Abby smiled.  She held the leash and watched Quinton play in the bushes.  Ashton didn’t need to work very hard to work out just how happy she was.  It didn’t take much.  She just needed something to take care of.

There was a knock on the door.  With Lara bundled up and Abby holding the leash, Ashton took it on himself to respond, peering through the keyhole before opening the door.

“You were fast,” Ashton commented.

Duncan answered, “I called in advance, to make sure they’d have our specific breakfasts ready.  I’d have been faster, but I took a detour.”

“Would you want me to take a bag?” Ashton asked, as Duncan made his way through the door.

“Thank you, Good Simon,” Duncan said.  “Take this one.”

“My name is Ashton.”

“Thank you, Ashton,” Duncan corrected.

“That’s better,” Ashton said.  He could smell the food.

There was a table in the corner of the room.  The table was likely meant to serve as a desk, but countless rings from teacups and water glasses marked it as a frequent dining table in the dormitory here.

“Bread,” Duncan said, putting his own bag down and fishing through the one he had given Ashton.  “A pat of butter, jam, some sausage from the cafeteria, some chop, some fruit, and some mystery food that the local Academy grew.  No promises on the mystery food, but enough others were snatching it up that it can’t be that bad.  Should do for Emmett and me, and anyone else who wants to partake.  I know Ashton likes jam.  Ashton, would you wake Emmett?”

Ashton walked over to Emmett’s bed and laid an arm on Emmett’s arm.  It didn’t take much.  Emmett’s eyes opened, and he was out of bed shortly after.  He trudged over to the table to eat.

Without a word, Duncan handed Ashton a plate with a cloth tied in a knot over the top.

“Thank you,” Ashton said, automatically.  He found a seat at the table and undid the knot.  Various fruits, vegetables, and meats were organized into a kaleidoscopic pattern of colors and shapes.

Ashton dutifully set about taking apart the kaleidoscope from the inside out.

“Abby,” Duncan said.  “I sent a letter well before we even arrived, after talking to your doctors, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to track all the particulars of your diet.”

Duncan trailed off.  Ashton watched as Duncan uncovered what looked like a heaping bowl of uninteresting shades of brown.

“Mashed nut, shredded mushroom, raisins, onion.”

“I can eat normal food,” Abby said, protesting even though she looked very happy with the boring bowl of food.

“But your doctors said you don’t like it, because your palate is different,” Duncan said.  “So long as your needs are met, there’s no use in making you eat something you don’t want to.  Especially when you might dislike it enough that you have fits.  You had a good night’s sleep, you’ll have a meal of the foods you like, and we’ll start the day off with the right foot.”

“Thank you,” Abby said.

“It just makes sense,” Duncan said.

“You’re supposed to say you’re welcome when someone says thank you.  It’s impolite if you don’t.”

“Be quiet and eat,” Duncan said.

“That’s not very polite either.”

“It’s not polite to hound someone who is nursing a hangover from a tranquilizer gas,” Duncan said.  “Take a note of that, and leave me be, alright?  I’m allowed to be grumpy.”

Ashton turned his attention back to the colorful plate.  He made sure to do as Duncan had asked and make a note about not bothering grumpy people.

“And Lara… protein,” Duncan said.  He handed over a jar.  “Have some of the mystery meat and sausage.  Doctor’s orders.  Your stomach gets sensitive if you don’t vary things any.”

Lara nodded.  She opened the jar and worked at fishing out her prey.

“Lastly, well, just about lastly,” Duncan said, fishing in the second paper bag for the first time.  “Quinton.”

He retrieved a cloth sack and a bowl, and set the bowl on the ground, before pouring out a small share of beans from the sack.

Abby threw herself at Duncan, wrapping her arms around his middle, which nearly made him drop the sack.

Duncan remained frozen, as if not sure how to handle it, then relaxed a bit.  “Go on.  If you’re happy, show it to me by eating quickly and listening to me.  We’re all here to do a job.”

Abby obeyed, making sure that Quinton was eating before serving herself.

“This is good,” Ashton said, as Duncan retrieved a jug of what looked to be tea from the same bag that had held Quinton’s food.  “The breakfast.  You did well.  I don’t think anyone is unhappy.”

Nobody seemed to disagree.  Lara didn’t look particularly enthused as she choked down her still-wiggling meal, but she didn’t look too upset either.  Mealtime wasn’t a pleasure for her.  It wasn’t a big pleasure for Ashton either, but he did like the colors.

“I have to, don’t I?  I have to do well,” Duncan asked.  “I want to run an Academy or be a noble’s doctor one day.  If I can’t manage the breakfast of four experiments and one animal at seventeen, can I really expect to manage a whole Academy at thirty?  Can I expect to get away unscathed if I make a mistake with a noble’s meal plan?”

“No,” Ashton said.

“Exactly.  You’re a trial run.  You’re one step out of many,” Duncan said.  He set down a cup of tea in front of Emmett, then poured out one for Abby.  His response had left a bit of a silence, as everyone ate.  He served Ashton, then himself, then rummaged in his bag for a small jar and popped it out, before doling out the large, yellow pills.  Only when he’d ensured that everyone had had theirs did he sit down to eat.

Not that he really ate.  He rubbed at his eyes some, and grimaced with pain, before setting one elbow on the table and resting the bridge of his nose against the heel of his hand.  His head hurt, probably.

“Now tell me what I missed last night,” Duncan said.

Everyone had dressed, and they had dressed in the lightest clothes they had.  All of the boys and Abby were wearing their shoes without socks, just to have less fabric to trap the heat in.  Lara still wore her shroud to keep the sun off, but the fabric was thin and she wasn’t wearing anything to cover her feet, letting the cloth of the shroud hide the claws there, while the air circulated around them.  The edges of the cloth was getting dirty as it traced along the damp road.

Emmett had his shirt open, while Duncan and Ashton had the first few buttons undone.  Abby wore a gingham dress and walked with Quinton on a leash beside her.  The fabric of her dress flapped against her legs as the wind picked up.

It was warm.  Ashton liked the heat more than the cold.  He liked being in the light.  He liked the drizzle.

The yard was a field, with tracts of dirt with painted markings on them, worn by the weather and the rain to the point that the lines were faint and ragged, now.  There was grass here and there, normally kept short, which had grown long.

There were also, by the largest field, two long, squat buildings.  One was more open, a roof and three walls with benches sitting within.  The other was enclosed with a door, maybe it served as a place for changing clothes.

The open building was empty.  They walked by it slowly, looking over every detail.

“Nobody’s been here,” Duncan observed.  “No signs of food, clothing, no blankets…”

“Nobody,” Abby agreed.

They approached the other building.  Duncan hauled open the door, and froze where he was.  Ashton joined Abby in peering under Duncan’s right arm, while Lara peeked past his left.  Emmett looked over Duncan’s shoulder.

A boy and a girl, kissing, lying astride a bench.  They’d stopped as the door opened, lips still touching, their eyes going to the door.

“I’d like to have a word with you,” Duncan said.

The boy on the bench slid his hand up the girl’s side, while she lay very still, glaring.

“Please,” Duncan said.

The boy on the bench stood in a very fluid motion.  In the process, he raised his arm, very fluidly pointing the gun he’d just picked up at Duncan.

Ashton and Abby moved quickly away from the door, to get out of the line of fire.  On the other side, Emmett and Lara backed away.  Duncan was too squarely in the gun’s sights to join them in taking cover.

“Damn it,” Duncan said.

“Okay,” the boy in the building said.  “My name is Maurice.  The girl with me is Noreen.  I’m going to need you to listen very carefully.  All four of you are going to back away very slowly.  I want to see you standing as a group, about twenty feet behind… Duncan?”

Ashton could see Duncan sag a little at the mention of his name.

“I want you where I can see you, far enough away I don’t have to worry too much about you,” Maurice declared.  “Especially the red haired one.”

“He got to you,” Duncan said.

“Sylvester?  He did.  Get moving, all of you.  Come on now.  Unless you don’t care about his welfare.”

Abby and Ashton moved back, following the instructions.  Lara followed their cue.

Emmett remained where he was.

“Emmett,” Ashton said.

Emmett didn’t budge.

“Please,” Abby said.

“Bleehh,” Quinton added.

Reluctantly, Emmett backed off.  They formed a group, standing a distance behind Duncan.

Duncan backed away a few steps as Maurice and Noreen left the building and came to stand in the doorway.  Noreen stared them down as she buttoned up her blouse.  Maurice continued to point the gun.

“What happens next?” Duncan asked.

“I detain you,” Maurice said.  “I inconvenience you as much as possible.  I’m allowed to shoot to wound.  I’m quite a good shot.”

“Lying,” Abby said, loud enough to be heard.

“Let’s not antagonize them,” Duncan said.  “Please.”

Maurice smiled.  “Alright.  I admit, I’m a terrible shot.  That should worry you more than me being very precise.”

“It does, frankly,” Duncan said.

Behind his back, Duncan gestured.

Move.  Gas.  Move.

Ashton wasn’t very good with the gestures.  Sometimes his brain wasn’t very good at putting things together that the others were very good with.  Things like this, where move and gas and move had so many meanings and combinations, it confused him.

Slowly, he was able to piece together a likely interpretation.

The trick was how to do it.  If he simply walked over, it would be a problem.

“I want to do something, but I don’t want any of us to get shot” Ashton said, quiet.

“He’ll shoot,” Abby said.  “But only if he really, really has to.  Can’t you see?”

“I’m not very good at understanding expressions,” Ashton said.  “Especially from this far away.”

“I am,” Abby said.  “I don’t think he’s going to shoot.”

Ashton reached for Lara’s sleeve, and gripped it, holding the end of her claw up, closer to shoulder height.

He pushed out spores.

“Seems like a bad idea,” Duncan said, “Staying here, when there are roving bands of criminals out looking for children.”

“Children with nowhere else to go get pointed here.  We send them somewhere more secure.  Most roving bands of criminals aren’t out and about this early in the day.  We thought we had time to…” Maurice trailed off, looking at Noreen.  “Wake ourselves up from our morning nap.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Duncan said.

“No you aren’t,” Noreen cut in.

Lara’s hand shook.  She started to pull away, and Ashton held on, still pushing out.

“This isn’t the group we were told to expect.  Not all of it,” Maurice observed.

“No,” Duncan said.

“That’s irritating.”

“Sorry,” Duncan said.  He seemed to notice something, “Are you Academy students?

Noreen scoffed.

“Does it matter?”

“Kind of.”

“Best thing you can do for yourself is to forget you saw us and listen carefully.  I’m going to take a step to the side.  You’re going to walk past me, and into this building, understand?  You’ll be going inside one by one.”

“I understand, Duncan said.

Lara’s trembling intensified.

All at once, she hauled her hand away, slicing at Ashton’s hand and some of her sleeve.  She threw herself to one side.

“Woah!”  Maurice called out.

He fired a warning shot.  Lara threw herself to the ground.

While she huddled there, spikes and scythes of bone protruded from her shoulder and sleeve.

“No moving,” Maurice said.  He didn’t seem to have anything to say about the weapons that Lara was displaying.

Ashton hurried to Lara’s side.

“No moving!” Maurice called out.

“She’s scared,” Ashton said, as the one who had used his spores to create the anxiety.

“No moving!” Maurice called out again.

Ashton huddled down, close to Lara, and pushed out calming spores.

“I’m very sorry I did that,” he said.

She remained where she was, hunched over, facing the ground.  Her mangled feet with some clawed toes were sticking out behind her.  Ashton adjusted the cloth to cover them so they wouldn’t be damaged by the sun.  The wind nearly blew the cloth back out of place.  He pressed it down with one hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She nodded.  He was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been nodding if he hadn’t been trying to calm her.

As best as he could tell, based on the direction of the wind, the calming effect was being carried by the wind, to Duncan, Noreen, and Maurice.

“What’s wrong with her?” Maurice asked.

“She’s not very good with conflict.”

“That seems like a monumentally bad thing, given what you lot seem to get up to,” Maurice commented.

“It’s not the best,” Duncan said.

“Lords.  You almost make me feel guilty,” Maurice said.  He glanced at Noreen.  “I’m getting too soft.”

“Get over it,” Noreen said, voice hard.

“We came to ask about Sylvester.  We’re not here to hurt him.  We just want to talk, make sure he isn’t up to trouble.”

“I don’t like you,” Noreen said.

“I see,” Duncan said.  He sounded somewhat dejected as he said it.  “I shouldn’t be surprised, given you two are pointing a gun at us, but it hurts to hear it said outright.”

“How do you do it?” Maurice asked.  “You Lambs, if you’re even Lambs.”

“Not quite,” Duncan said.  “Do what?”

“The intensity?  The danger?  I like a little bit of a thrill now and then.  I mean, hell, I like her, you know?  She’s threatened to kill me more times than anyone I know.  But danger and chaos seem to draw in you kids like flowers do bees.”

“Some of us excel at it.  I don’t think anyone in this group does,” Duncan said.  “Most of them are new.  We’re a distraction, sent to spring some of Sylvester’s traps and try to complicate his plots.  Except we may have underestimated how many traps and plots there are.”

“I’ve spent a few days with him,” Maurice commented.  “I can virtually guarantee that you did.”

“Fuck,” Duncan said.

Maurice shook his head.  In the midst of the discussion, he had lowered the gun a fraction.  Now it lowered again.  “He was a bad enough headache for us, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be his target.”

“It’s bad,” Duncan said.

“Give me the gun,” Noreen said.

Maurice arched an eyebrow.  “What?”

“Something’s wrong.  Give me the gun.”

“Will you promise me you won’t shoot them unnecessarily.”

“I promise.  Now hand it over,” Noreen said.

“What’s going on?” Duncan asked.

“You’re doing something,” Noreen said.  “I’m going to shoot you before you can do something more.”

Maurice gave Noreen a sidelong glance.  “You just contradicted yourself.”

“I didn’t.  This is necessary.  I feel strange.  My emotions are stirred up.  I feel tired.”

“We just woke up.”

“And I don’t normally feel emotions like this,” Noreen said.  “It’s the red haired one.  Give me the gun.”

Ashton closed his eyes, and he pushed out a heavy release of aggression, of spores that wound agitate and drive others to action.

“No,” Maurice said.  “It’s fine.  Just stop and-“

Noreen lunged for the gun.  Maurice pulled it away and used one hand to push her to the ground.

His attention divided between Duncan and Noreen, he didn’t see that Emmett was barreling toward him until it was too late.

In a moment, both Noreen and Maurice were pinned against the ground.  The gun lay several feet away.

Duncan walked over to the gun to pick it up.  He stuck it into his belt.  “Thank you, Ashton, Emmett.  I do believe that’s the first time that we’ve worked as a group.”

“You’re welcome,” Ashton said.  “Abby and Lara helped too.”

“Thank you two too, then,” Duncan said.

Noreen seemed to be reserving glares for everyone present, Maurice included.  Duncan opted to talk to Maurice instead.

“Where’s Sylvester?”

Ashton pushed out spores to loosen Maurice’s inhibitions and tongue.

It didn’t take long to get an answer.

“His orphanage,” Maurice finally confessed.

His orphanage?” Ashton asked.  “Lambsbridge?”

“No.  It’s here, in this city,” Maurice said.  “He’s collected every child with no place to go.  Has a staff.”

“Soldiers,” Duncan concluded.

“And traps?” Lara asked.

“Naturally,” Maurice said.

“Naturally,” Duncan said, sounding very tired.

Ashton wished he could give Duncan a little bit of a boost in mood, but Duncan was taking drugs to counteract him.  But the others seemed to be thrilled with their very first success, so he made sure to give them a little puff of happiness.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.06 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.6 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Every moment she was out in the open was a moment of restrained terror.  Only her allies were to be trusted, and they were outnumbered by a hundred thousand to one.

People milled through the streets.  The old were potentially demented.  Other adults were healthy and strong enough to pose a danger to her, all potentially criminal.

Facts had been ingrained into her understanding and perception on a raw, structural level.  Anything bigger than her was scary.  Anything that moved quickly was cause for alarm.  Color oft suggested poison.  Prey had eyes spaced further apart, while predators had eyes placed closer together, on the fronts of their heads.

There were so very many people in this city, and almost all of them were bigger.  They moved briskly this way and that, unpredictable, and Helen and Mary and Lillian and Lacey all navigated that unpredictable current with ease, while she jumped and relied on them to create a path for her to walk.  Sometimes one of them would place a hand on her back or her shoulder, to help guide her.  Each time, she would have to keep from jumping and unsheathing the weapons stored in her back and shoulders to retaliate.

And this milling crowd of people were sometimes dressed in bright colors, dyed sleeves and bright decorations moving quickly past her, as if they were going to swoop into her mouth or brush past her.  They had eyes on the fronts of their heads, close together.  Predator eyes.  If she didn’t keep her gaze on the ground, then she was bombarded with the aggressive stares of the crowd.

It was easiest and best to keep her head down.  Be small.  Let Helen lead her, holding one of her sleeves.

Scared, she buzzed out the word, using structures in her head, chest, and the largest bones of her body.  The signal went out, and she could hear the distorted reverberation as it bounced off of large objects and made its way back to her, faint.

She felt the signals in her scalp like she felt sounds in her ears.  She couldn’t help but process the signals as words.  Not like an echo, it came faster, from all directions, her own voice bombarding and taunting her.

Scared scared scared scared scared…

One word was enough to help draw Lara’s attention.  Now she could expand on the thought.  Crowds are bad, just woke up, the sun is too bright, feels like we’re walking into danger.

Again, the signal came back to her, but the signals came back at different intervals, some faint, some strong.

Crowds just sun are woke walking so into bad…

-We’re close– Lara replied.  -Not too close, but close.  The people with you are the strongest Lambs.-

Scariest Lambs.

-Strongest Lambs.  We almost got shot.  Now everyone acts like everything is normal.  The sun is too bright.  I want more clouds more rain.-

Nora felt reassured.  This was something they did.  They would echo each other’s thoughts and build on them.  The sun was too bright, shining through an inconsistent mix of clouds.  It was hot, and the parts of her that were human were sticking to her shroud of clothing.

The sun is too bright.  I want more clouds.  More rain.  I feel sticky.

-Better than being sticky with blood.

Hate blood.  -Hate blood.-

Their messages nearly coincided.  They both communicated amusement to each other.

Sweat stinks.

Lara’s voice was quieter.  They were positioned badly.  It sounded like she was shouting, which only made the next message better.  -You stink.-

Well, I never!

More mutual amusement.

Helen tugged on her arm, pulling her to one side.  Nora felt fear seize her.  The fear redoubled when she saw why Helen had pulled on her arm.  A man had a dog on a leash, and it passed within a few feet of Nora, her fear only seeming to make it more interested.

Then it was gone, moving in the other direction, well behind her.  She scowled at the place it had just vacated.

“Hate dogs,” Hate dogs.

-Nasty.  Filthy.  Aggressive.-

“Cats too,” she said, under her breath.

“I know,” Helen said.  She adjusted her hold on the cloth to give a reassuring squeeze to Nora’s largest claw.  “But it’s rare a dog will hurt you.”

“Rare,” Nora said.  She hunched her shoulders forward.  “That means it’s just often enough to catch me off guard.”

Helen stroked her head.  She heard jumbled noise at all the contact there, false positives on signals and sound, but at the same time, she didn’t mind it.  The contact appealed to the part of her that was more human.

Would that part go away at some point in the future?  One day she would transition to become less human and become something of a warbeast, albeit one meant more for communication purposes than for outright combat.

She would lose her skin and her diet would change.  She would become far larger.  She faced the possibility of losing her voice, in whole or in part, and her doctors were busying themselves with figuring out how to handle it if that happened, because that would invalidate her purpose.

Lara was going on a tangent about cats that Nora couldn’t follow.  She had to focus to catch it.

-hiss and spit.  Little lambs are better.-

You hiss and spit, Nora sent the message.

-Do not.  Smelly Nora.  Telling lies.  You only have three claws on your two feet.  Inferior sister!-

Slimy Lara.  You secretly lick cat butts.  Detestable creature!

They communicated mutual amusement, a babbling fluctuation that could be interpreted like laughter, if she really tried.  But she didn’t really need to try.  This was how they laughed.

I just screamed to this city about your secret and nobody hears.  Tales of your furtive lickings reach past person and building and nobody understands, Nora communicated, along with a titter of amusement.

But the only reply was a mere, Gone.-

Then, just like that, there was no noise but the faint echo of her own laughter finding its way back to her.

Lara had something to focus on, so she had ended the conversation there.  Nora no longer had her distractions from the bustle of the crowd, the countless small and large terrors.

“I think this is the building,” Lillian said.

“It looks like it,” Mary said.

They moved off to one side of the street, where they had some limited cover but could still lean over to take a look at the building.  It was tall, four floors, and situated on a corner.  The intersection wasn’t right angles, however, so the building was more triangular than square in shape.  Like most of the buildings in this city, it was all pale stone, more yellow than gray, with plants crawling up it.  The windows were decorated.

“Plan of approach?  Do you want to get involved, Lillian?” Mary asked.

“I’ll participate some.  When we checked last night, it looked like nine, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” Mary said.

“And we can expect there to be more, if they’re bolstering their numbers after their losses last night.”

“Yes.  Twelve, fifteen, twenty.  Anything more would feel like too many, unless there’s more to this particular building than it being only a gathering place.”

Lillian nodded.  “Your comfort level is twelve, I remember.”

“More or less, depending on how many there are in a room.  Helen can take six.  She can also take on the most dangerous threats,” Mary said.  “But after last night-”

“Last night was lovely,” Helen said.  “I needed last night.”

“You’re running out of clean outfits to wear,” Mary said.  “You need to stop tearing them apart.  Leave the inside parts of them inside them.  For the sake of your wardrobe.”

Nora watched as Helen pouted.

“I like my wardrobe – I’ll miss the dress with the blue trim and the ruffly straps.  But I also like inside bits.”

Mary covered her mouth, “We know where Sylvester is-”

She dropped her hand, then continued, “Given time constraints, if you come, we can’t be waiting ten minutes for Lacey to go and buy something else for you to wear.  And we can’t be walking down the street in broad daylight with you dripping blood.  You need to stay clean and tidy.”

Another pout, “You’re making me fight with both hands tied behind my back.”

Lillian dryly commented, “I saw you kill someone last night with just your legs.  I know for a fact you can very literally kill people with both hands tied behind your back.”

“My fingers weren’t behind my back, they were in the other man’s eye sockets, silly.  That’s leverage for twisting around and moving!”

“It’s true,” Mary said.

“Don’t.  No, enough of that,” Lillian cut in.  “When you two gang up on me, bad things happen.”

Nora felt out of place.  The Lambs were made for this.  Ashton and Helen and Lillian and Sylvester and even Mary had been made to do these things.  But Nora and Lara and the others had been made to avoid trouble.  They had been made fearful by nature so they would stay alive and be available to send messages if they were needed.  They had been made dangerous and given weapons so they could protect themselves if cornered, not so they could pursue and chase and attack.

Lillian spoke with some authority.  “Consensus, then, is that you’re lead, Mary, I come as a just-in-case, maybe I take out one or two or make a distraction, Helen comes and doesn’t get her clothes dirty, and Lacey stays with Nora?”

“Yes,” Mary said.

“I’m coming under protest,” Helen said.  “I’m not even that fond of this dress.  Ibbot bought it.  Now I think about things he said every time I wear it.”

“You only have two other dresses,” Mary said.  “And for all we know, we might have to get on a train to keep up with Sylvester.  We might not have time to shop for clothes.”

“I’ll make do,” Helen said, firmly.

Lillian looked at Lacey and rolled her eyes.

“You’re okay here?” Lillian asked Nora and the older woman, as she bent down to access her case.

“I think we’ll manage,” Lacey said.

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “Give me a hand?”

Nora watched as Lacey helped Lillian put on the sleeves.  They were arms, much like the ones that might belong to a brutish stitched, but there was little fat to them, only skin and muscle, with supporting structures.  Lillian winced a bit as she pushed her hands inside.  She flexed the meaty hands on the ends.

She then moved her hands, flexing them as far back as they could, until the wrists stuck out further forward than the fingers, and syringe needles sprouted from the center of each palm.

Nora managed to keep from jumping.

Lillian moved one needle to her upper arm, and injected herself.  She closed her eyes and let her head hang, before taking a deep breath.

Lillian wasn’t even an experiment.  She was smart, she was courageous, and she knew some Academy science, but she was human.  She still chose to go into danger.

Nora wasn’t sure she’d ever understand that.  She envied it.

“We’ll be back soon,” Lillian said.  “About…”

“Ten to fifteen minutes,” Mary said.

“About that long.  Then we’ll have up-to-date information on what the Devil is doing.  His people have been doing a bit too good of a job finding us, so let’s hope we can cut that short.”

“Or cut him short,” Mary said.

Lillian winced.  “Or that.  I hate the feeling we’re playing into Sylvester’s hands by getting embroiled in this.”

“But you also hate the fact that this is a scumbag of the highest order,” Mary said.  “One that hurts kids and sells very sketchy drugs.”

“It’s not that they’re sketchy.  It’s that I know what some of those drugs are, and he shouldn’t have them, or anything close to them,” Lillian said.  “So for now, we’re on the same page.”

“Kill the Devil, then find Sy,” Helen said.  “I want dibs on the Devil.”

“We’ve already made the rules,” Mary said.  “No dibs.  It makes for ugly kinds of competition.”

“But it’s romantic,” Helen said.  “Imagine being able to say the Devil was brought down by the power of love.”

“Constriction and strangulation?  Disembowelment?  By having someone reach inside him and cause severe internal damage?” Mary asked.

“I prefer to say it’s defeat by hug,” Helen said, prim and proud, “It’s a politer, neater phrasing.”

“You’re not getting dibs,” Mary said.

The three girls walked off.

“Finally, a quiet moment,” Lacey said.

Nora wasn’t sure she was happy with the quiet moment.  She wanted to hear from Lara and know that Lara was okay.  Talking made her feel less anxious.

“Can I see your eyes?” Lacey asked.

Nora stepped into shadow and lowered her hood.  She looked up at Lacey.  She didn’t need to be prompted to move her eyes, looking up, then over, then the other direction, then down.  She pulled her lower eyelids down, then her upper eyelids up.

“Good.  The sun exposure wasn’t too much.”

“Gets easier,” Nora said.

“Filaments and hair are fine?”

Nora touched her head.  She nodded.

“Claws?”

She flexed her hands without pulling the sleeves down.  She nodded.

“Good,” Lacey said.  “I wish they were all more like you.”

“I wish I was more like them.”

“Dangerous road to go down, in more than one way,” Lacey said.  “Tough and often short life to lead.  That’s one.  Trying to be something you’re not?  I’ve seen too many people burn themselves out like that.  You have to have faith in yourself.”

“I do.  I just know what my self is.  I was made to do something, I do it.  I’m good at that.”

“I can tell you, Nora, that I’ve seen a lot of projects start out as one idea and then become something else, as the situation demands.”

“As the Academy demands.”

“Yes.  Sometimes.  Lillian’s sleeves there are one of those things, but it was her needs and demands that shaped what she was doing.”

A male voice cut in, “and I’m another example, aren’t I, Lacey?”

Nora froze, and immediately began signaling to Lara.

Sylvester!  Sylvester!  Sylvester!  Sylvester!  Sylvester!  Sylvester!

Lacey, meanwhile, reached to her hip, turning her head, looking for the source of the voice.

“Don’t draw the gun, Lacey.  Let’s not make this that kind of encounter.  I’ve got a gas grenade, and civilians would get hurt, and… I’m just here to talk.”

Sylvester!  Sylvester!  Sylvester!  Where?

Up.

Nora looked up.  She saw two feet extended somewhere above her head, owned by a figure that was sitting in the windowsill.

Sylvester!  Sylvester! 

-Coming!- Lara replied.

Lacey followed Nora’s line of sight, sighed, and put the gun back at her waistband, extending her hands to show that they were empty.

Sylvester looked down, peeking, and then hopped down from the second floor.  Nora winced at his imminent, fast approach, felt fear response mechanisms throughout her body kick into action.  He landed, pivoted, and came to a stop with his back resting against the wall in front of them.  He held up the canister.

She could attack.  She should attack.  She had the weapons.  They could run from the canister.

“You look so nice with the hood down,” Sylvester said.

Nora remained silent.  She looked at the boy, who was younger than Lillian.  He wore dark slacks tucked into summer boots, a white button up shirt with some buttons undone, and the sleeves rolled up.  A mix of sweat and oils made his black hair look wet.  It had been neat not long ago, but the loose curls were pricking up, like a dozen or two dozen black fishhooks.  His nose and chin were sharp, cheekbones noticeable, and eyebrows arched.

His eyes were penetrating and predatory in a way that exaggerated what she’d seen on some other people’s faces on the street, yet he wasn’t trying to threaten.  Just the opposite.  He avoided eye contact, turned his shoulders so he wasn’t even facing her.

He stepped away from the wall, looking as if he’d walk out of the alley and into the main street, then turned around, his back resting against the same wall that Nora was standing by.  He slouched as he came to rest there, toes off the ground, heels firmly set.  With the angle he was positioned at, his eyes were on a level with hers.

He still didn’t make eye contact.  He was the least threatening threat she’d had to handle in recent memory.

“Hello, Nora,” he said.

She remained silent.

He leaned forward, looking past Nora to the taller, red-haired woman.  “Hello Lacey.”

“I should have known,” Lacey said.  “Can’t have a quiet conversation.”

“Sorry to intrude,” he said.  “I don’t know how many opportunities I’ll have to actually check in and talk to people, so I take the opportunities that arise.”

“Are you going to treat me like you did Duncan?” Lacey asked.

“No,” Sylvester said.  He craned his head to look out of the alley and look in the direction the girls had gone.  “If anything, I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize?”

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Changing subjects, to keep me off balance?” Lacey asked.

“Maybe that’s a bad habit of mine.  But this very moment, I’m watching Mary and Lillian as they approach the building.  I was watching Helen earlier.  Their skirts and dresses, the way they move, the dance… do you know what I mean if I talk about the dance?”

“No,” Lacey said.  “I’m sure you’ll tell us.”

“What’s the dance?” Nora asked.

“When you know people and have worked with people for so very long that you know how they move, where they’ll go, what they’ll do.  You move in concert.  It’s like three people on a dance floor.  There’s a beauty in it.  Then you have three beautiful girls carrying that out…”

He craned his head some more.

“I’m kind of captivated,” he said.  He laughed, very briefly.  “I might actually be in trouble, if I get this mesmerized when they’re actually coming after me.”

“Let’s hope,” Lacey said, dryly.

Sylvester turned, abruptly, and Nora jumped, stepping back.  Lacey put hands on her upper arms, stopping her from bumping into her.

“Sorry,” Sylvester said.  “Got distracted, forgot I didn’t want to spook you, Nora.”

Nora didn’t speak or move in response.

“Okay.  Lacey.  I’m very aware of the venom in your words.  Fitting, given your field of specialty.  But I did want to say sorry.  I handled things badly.  I’ve had time to think.  We left it on a bad note.”

“Just because you’re apologizing doesn’t mean I have to forgive,” Lacey said.

“Very true.  But remember, forgiving me would be for you, not for me.  It’s about not letting things burden you or get to you.  And you can forgive me without saying that what I did was okay.  I sabotaged your career and made things very difficult for you a number of times, for my own sake, because of my own perspective.  You could have ridden the Wyvern project to a place of some prominence and instead I selfishly kicked you off it.  Now that I’m seeing things from another perspective, and I’m having to value the support I do have, instead of having support from all corners, with the Academy… I regret pushing you away.  I know you could have been one of the half-decent doctors.”

“Please don’t try to manipulate forgiveness out of me,” Lacey said, unmoved.

“That-” Sylvester started.  He stopped, then leaned against the wall.  “-Wasn’t what I was doing.  But okay.”

“Okay,” Lacey echoed him.

“I’m glad the girls are enjoying themselves, going after the Devil,” Sylvester said.  “I’m glad I get to watch as they do it.”

“You were supposed to be watching over the others,” Lacey accused.

“They’re a bit… tied up at the moment.  And I have other eyes.”

“Of course you do.”

“I’m not worried,” Sylvester said, smiling.  “I’m fascinated, though, by the fact that the girls are doing things so roundabout.  I thought they’d go right for the head of the snake, or go right for me.  But they’re doing things surgically, going after the Devil’s peripheral groups, lieutenants, and holdings.  Is that because they don’t have the numbers to barrel through, or is it Lil’s influence?”

“No comment,” Lacey said.

“Of course,” Sylvester said.

Coming coming coming.- Lara signaled.

Nora closed her eyes, as if she could avoid being here altogether.  She trembled a bit between Lacey’s reassuring hands.

“Nora,” Sylvester said.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’ve been watching pretty much all the time.  One group or the other.  Binoculars and lip reading go a long way.  I got your name, but I’m… somewhat stumped about how you and Lara work.  I thought it was a subtler sort of messenger bird?  A hive inside your body, you send her a messenger bug with encoded messages?  But it’s faster than that.”

She set her jaw.

He smiled, still not looking directly at her, but at her shoulder, at her sleeve, then the ground between them.

He dropped down to a crouch, still holding the canister.  Sitting on his ankles, he waddled closer to her, closing the distance.

She shrank back against Lacey’s side, but when Lacey didn’t budge she had nowhere to go.

Slowly, Sylvester reached out, and took hold of the very end of the sleeve.

Did he know?  That that was something her creators and Helen and Mary and Lillian did, at times, that reassured her, let her know they were there?  Did he understand that?

“I wish I got to be there when they invited you to the group.  That we could have been friends,” he said.  “Not just you, but Lara, Emmett, and Abby.  I would have liked to bring out the strong, beautiful parts of you and gotten to the point where we could have danced.”

She remained silent.

Lillian and Mary had been very firm about the fact that if she ever heard him talk, she should not believe a word he said.

But she almost believed him, even as she strained to bury his words under doubt and fear.

“But that’s the joke, isn’t it?” he asked.  “If I’m on the team, you wouldn’t be.  If Evette was on the team, I wouldn’t have been brought over.  I’d be Lacey’s stress-testing experiment for a study drug that would be discarded when they were done with me.”

“You’re on Wyvern right now,” Lacey observed.

Nora turned her head, looking up at the woman, then back at Sylvester.

“I had an ‘appointment’ shortly after I saw Duncan’s group turn up,” he said.  “I needed to make some last minute adjustments, and I wanted to be at my best.”

“Thought so,” Lacey said.

Sylvester let go of Nora’s sleeve.  He rested his arms on his knees, as he crouched on the spot, low to the ground, relatively still.

“One of the three great tragedies we all have to deal with,” he said.  “That we couldn’t all be together.  Evette, Ashton, Gordon, Jamie, Helen, Mary, the new Lambs…”

He sighed.

“My condolences about Jamie,” Lacey said.

Sylvester startled at that.  He looked at her.

“Both times.”

Nora looked up at Lacey.  For someone offering condolences, her face was very still.

“Yeah,” Sylvester said.  “Thank you.”

“Can I ask?  What are you up to, Sylvester?” Lacey asked.  “I know you won’t give me a straight answer, but a part of me hopes you’d feel you owed me an answer.”

“I might.  You mean here, right now?  In general?  In the bigger picture?”

“I’ll settle for any answers you’ll give me.”

“Right here, I’m enjoying the company of the Lambs the only way I can.  Teasing, sticking to the shadows, watching, visiting when I’m sure I won’t get a knife in the back.  I’ll let them, let you get close and then I’ll scurry away.  If it all works out, I hopefully leave you with little rewards and tidbits that will make the Lambs look good even while I escape successfully every time.”

Nora transmitted the message.

“You’re actually answering,” Lacey said.

“There’s more to it, but saying more would be telling,” he said.  He winked.  “Uh, I forgot the questions you asked.  What I’m doing right now…”

“And in general?”

“Living.  Enjoying life.  Missing people dear to me.  Trying to protect children.”

“By giving a lunatic reason to hunt them down?”

“I’m a complicated lad of complicated means,” Sylvester said.  He grinned.

Nora looked up.  Lacey wasn’t smiling.

The grin slipped off his face.  “This is a wake up call.  It reminds people that the children need protecting.  That the future needs protecting.  It’ll serve as a scare, and force certain people’s hands.  Already, the Devil’s old alliances are breaking down, people are questioning if he’s really an evil they can tolerate just because he’s the evil they know.  When and if the Lambs execute him, people in power will be more careful about what they allow to happen.  If the Lambs don’t, I might, depending.”

Nora continued transcribing.  The only real disadvantage was that while she was doing it and Lara was telling the others, there was no way for Lara to communicate to her.

Lacey spoke, “And in the big picture?  You threatened that you were doing something big.”

“I did,” Sylvester said.

“Would it be telling if you shared any hints?”

“Yes, but I’ll tell you anyway.  In the Lamb’s first meeting with Fray, she challenged me.  She asked me what drove me, what my core goal was.  It was belief.  Belief that there’s a better future.  A way out of the trap we’re in.”

For the first time, he made direct eye contact with Nora.  His eyes were very green, his eyelashes long and dark.

He continued, “And I still want that.  I still believe the Lambs might play a role.  And I actually have a way to do it.  If I fail, I intend to be the only one that goes down in flames.  If I succeed, I want to pull the Lambs up with me.”

“We’re not Lambs,” Nora said.

“Shh,” Lacey said, abrupt, as if she could shush Nora fast enough to cut her off, when the words had already left her lips.

“I know,” Sylvester says.  “I can see that, just from the way you’re put together.  Gordon, Helen and I, followed soon by Jamie, we meshed on a level almost right away.  I don’t see that.  And I caught some snippets of conversation and I put the pieces together.  Maybe you’re stronger as individuals.  Or as a pair, in you and Lara’s case, I don’t know.  But, so long as I’m given a choice, I intend to raise you newcomers up, not push you down.  And, just to ensure that you and the Lambs aren’t kept confined, I’ll let slip a detail, and you can tell the Academy you discovered it when I didn’t want you to.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” Lacey said.

“I’m a jerk like that,” Sylvester said.  “Mauer’s killing nobles.  I’ve heard rumors, some were being actively suppressed when I heard.  Now the nobles are readying for a move against Mauer.  I fully intend to get involved.”

“Could be a red herring,” Lacey said.

“Could be.  Tell them.  They’ll decide,” Sylvester said.  He straightened.  “Which reminds me.  I’ve got a nasty habit of losing track of time, and they’re due back soon.  And I can’t be sure where Duncan is, now.”

Nora transmitted the last of the transcription.

He walked past Nora and Lacey, deeper into the alley, turning so he wouldn’t have his back to either of them at any point in time.  He walked backward for the latter half of the trip, before rounding a corner.  He tossed the gas canister behind him, and the gas billowed out, protecting his retreat.

-Close.- Lara communicated.

But it was too late.

Lacey led Nora out of the now-hazardous alleyway and into the street, pulling up Nora’s hood and putting it back in place as she did so.  Nora looked in the direction that the message had come from, and saw the others approaching at a run.

I’m not as scared as I was, she communicated the thought aloud.

-Why?– the question came.  -How?  I’d be so scared, in your shoes.-

She couldn’t articulate an answer in the minute or so it took the group to run down the length of the street and reach them.

Lara, the one individual in the whole world who didn’t scare Nora at least a little, ran into her full-force, wrapping sleeve-clad arms around Nora.  Nora gripped her sister just as hard.

“What happened?” Duncan asked.  “Did he slip away?”

As Lacey began to explain, turning her head to note that the three girls were joining the greater group, Nora turned her full focus to her sister.

“You’re shorter than me, you know, you depressing little abortion,” she whispered to Lara, gripping her tighter.

“By two centimeters, you cockroach.  And you snort fresh rat poops,” Lara whispered back.

The two laughed in their own way, inaudible to the others.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.07 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Five years of preparatory schooling with tutoring twice-weekly that started when she was four, ensuring that she knew most of Wollstone’s ratios by heart before she even entered school.  Four years of preliminary Academy studies at Dame Cicely’s sister school, coinciding with work as a lab assistant so she could get lab space and work on her admissions project.  She’d left all of her acquaintances behind as they’d either failed out or gone on to Dame Cicely’s and she’d tested for and earned her place in Radham, which was more reputable.

Four rigorous years at Radham, followed by examinations and testing, the same ones that Lillian and Duncan were working their way through now.  She had created her Paddock as part of her testing, and fought viciously for sought-after lab space to make, grow, and raise the toadlike, self-destructing warbeast.  She had failed on her first attempt, and she had very nearly quit, before summoning up the scraps of her dignity and courage to push forward for one more year.

She had cried tears of very mixed emotions at the end of the second year, when Academy grunts had knocked on the door to her lab and enlisted her help in crating up Paddock and Paddock’s first litter.  The tears of sadness were because Paddock had been a constant companion for two lonely, frustrating years, and he was being shipped off on a wagon to kill and to die on a strange battlefield.  The tears of joy were because the Academy’s acceptance of her project was virtually guaranteed to be her sought after white coat.

It was.

A white coat with Radham’s coat of arms on the breast guaranteed her future.  Radham was among the top ten schools in the Crown States, its students consequently among the top ten percent of those available in the Crown States, and only a small fraction of those actually saw it through and graduated.  With that coat, she could have picked any city in the Crown States to live in and found a place there, earning the most comfortable wage that that city could afford to pay her.  She might have run her own clinic or served as a science officer in a military base, and people would have tipped their hats to her and called her ma’am out of respect for what that coat represented.

But it didn’t really work that way, did it?

There might have been people who got their white coats and didn’t care about advancing, but those students didn’t attend Radham.  They weren’t teased by rumors and by their witnessing of Radham’s greater projects and advancements.  Even as they stood among the top five percent of the doctors in the Crown States, they were made to feel small, and they were made to feel hungry.  Like all of her graduating peers, she had seen the coveted specialist’s gray coat as a stepping stone, not a goal.

She had played the political game, used what she’d learned in Kensford among the backstabbing aspirant Dames to sabotage rivals, she had worked to pay for her apartment, found a boyfriend that would complement her image, and attended special classes.  She had worked as a research assistant, studying Wyvern, and then one of the professors that had taught a specialist class had called her in to a special meeting.  She’d earned a mentor, the space, and the leeway to work on a notable project.  In doing so, she’d drawn attention and become the target of countless small and large sabotage attempts.

Nevermind that her own damn project had been sabotaging her.  That had been the breaking point.  There was more to it, but she’d seen disaster looming and had decided to cut her losses.  Professor Hayle had agreed.

From the time that she was four until the time she was twenty-seven, she’d worked so damn hard.  When she looked in the mirror, she could see faint hints of exhaustion etched around her eyes, which never went away, no matter how much she slept, how well she ate, or how many days she took to enjoy peace and quiet while working in her lab.  She was approaching thirty and her youth was behind her.

For what?  Was she a glorified babysitter?  The only reason she made it a question in her own head was that ‘glorified’ might have been too generous and lofty a descriptor.

Nora, with Lara chiming in, was giving a recap of the conversation with Sy to Lillian, Mary, and Helen.

They had moved more toward the city center and found refuge in a covered bridge.  To listen in, Sylvester would either have to crawl along the underside of the bridge and press his ear to the underside, or move along the tin roof and cook alive there.  He couldn’t approach or stand at the ends of the bridge without being spotted, and wouldn’t be in earshot there.

The shade was nice, and the space was cool in the moments the wind blew in one end and out the other, but it was stifling otherwise.

“Um, then said he’s enjoying the company of the Lambs the only way he could?  He’s teasing, lurking, watching, then shows up.”

“When he thinks he won’t get attacked,” Lara said, before adding under her breath, “Gnatwit.”

“Yeah.  That,” Nora said.  “What the runt said.  Then he said he’d let us get close and then run.  And if we play along enough, he’ll give us something we can give to the people in charge, so the Lambs look good.”

“How kind of him,” Mary said, very dry.

“And then-” Nora started, before being interrupted.

Lara put a sleeve-clad arm out, smushing her forearm against Nora’s face.  “-Then he said he wants to let people know that children need protecting.  The future needs protecting.  This situation will scare the people here.  Make them act.  He said the Devil’s old alliances are breaking down and they might not tolerate him any more.  If we don’t get the Devil, then he will.”

“You forgot a whole part!  Lacey said stuff and Sylvester said he was complicated and-”

Lara smushed up Nora’s face again, interrupting.  “That part wasn’t important.  I was trying to be brief and efficient.”

“We can leave it at that,” Lacey said.  “They summed it up.  There was more, about his bigger plans, about the Lambs, but they don’t matter for this mission.  Later, I, Nora, or Lara will fill you in on what he had to say.”

She could see Lillian and Mary practically squirm with their desire to hear just what Sylvester had had to say.  In another situation, she might have felt bad for them.  In this situation, she only felt a pit of concern in her gut.

“He’s a whirlpool,” Lacey said, doing her best to diplomatically address that concern, “The closer you get to him the greater his leverage.  Get too close and you’re no longer in control.”

“Interesting metaphor,” Duncan observed.  “I think that’s the fifth ‘Sylvester is dangerous’ metaphor I’ve heard in the last two days.  Maybe the most accurate one.”

Lacey gave him a small smile.  “Thank you.  Listen, I know I’m not in charge.  I’m here to watch, offer some counsel based on what I know about Sylvester, provide a bit more legitimacy to the group than you might otherwise have, and to dole out pills.  I’m not the leader.  But if you’re willing to take my advice, I would strongly advise that you keep your eye on the prize.  Put feelings aside.  You have a plan.  Stick to it.  Don’t get caught up in Sylvester’s pull.”

“Devil first, then Sylvester,” Mary said.  She had a hard look in her eyes again.  It hadn’t taken much to remind her to put her feelings aside.  But Mary was like that.  It might even be a programmed trait, something that Percy had done to her, much like he’d made her so very focused on training her body and her expertise with weapons.

Mary was easy.  Lillian- Lacey could look at the girl and see that she wasn’t wholly convinced.  The pit of concern remained in Lacey’s stomach.

It would, much like the girls’ desire to ask more questions, and the myriad other distractions that Sylvester would throw in their way, be something that she had to put off until later.

“Exactly,” Lacey said, before reaffirming, “Stick to the plan.”

It wasn’t wholly by accident that she met Lillian’s eyes briefly as she said the latter part.

“We know where his new headquarters are,” Mary said.  “We took down three of his new lieutenants this morning, and we put down the Skippers last night.  They won’t be reinforcing him.  The Apostle and the Witch are dead.  The Spears, I forget what they called themselves exactly, they’re still out there, but there is enough animosity and enough loyalty to other corners that I’m not sure if they’ll be confident in getting involved.  It’s time.  We hit his headquarters.”

Lillian nodded.

“What are you thinking?” Helen asked, walking around the periphery of the group, placing herself between Lara and Nora and putting an arm around each of their shoulders.

“Hm?” Lillian asked.  “I’m trying to anticipate Sylvester.  I think… Duncan and I are primary targets.  He’s made that clear enough with Duncan.  Sorry, Duncan.”

“Not your fault,” Duncan said.

“You’re thinking he’ll use our focus on the Devil to come after you?” Mary asked.

“One of us,” Lillian said.  “Probably when the task is very nearly wrapped up.  If I had to guess, he’ll turn us into a liability somehow.  I can think of several times in the past he’s disabled people with poison and then held the antidote at arm’s length.  He could use something that affects our mental faculties, something that binds us to an area…”

“He used gas to deliver a drug payload last night,” Duncan said.

“And to cover his retreat just now,” Lacey added.  Nora nodded her agreement at that.

“Turning us into a liability ensures we can never use our full strength against him, we’re constantly off balance.  And…” Lillian spread her hands.  “…I don’t know.  He’s more able to draw us into his flow in the way Lacey described.”

Lacey nodded.

“Something to watch out for,” Lillian said.

There were nods all around.

“I guess it works that we’re all together now,” Lillian said.  “How are you all?”

“My group is managing,” Duncan said.  “We had a moment of nice teamwork, with Ashton on point.  Sylvester went and found someone that could shrug off Ashton and left her and her boyfriend lying in wait with a gun.”

Ashton smiled.

“I mentioned that,” Lara said.  Nora pointed at Lara, as if to confirm.

“Not in so many words,” Mary said.  “Good job, all of you.”

“I didn’t really do anything,” Lara said.

“You communicated after the fact,” Duncan said.  “It’s what you’re made to do.”

The little experiment nodded.  Just as the nod concluded, Lacey could see a glimmer of some emotion the girl wasn’t completely hiding, as she looked toward the ground.  Disappointment?  Frustration?

A part of her wanted to respond to that.  To make a mental note to put in the effort later, to encourage the girl, explore the feeling in question, resolve the problem.

The Lacey of four years ago might have.

“They’re doing well.  We ate well, rested as well as we were able.  I’m not sure how much we can contribute, but my experiments and I will help with the Devil if we can.”

“Emmett, are you confident, giving some direct help?  I can guide you,” Mary said.

Emmett nodded.

“Good.  We stick together as a group, keep watch as we move to the Devil’s headquarters, then we split up,” Mary said.  She looked to Lillian for confirmation, and Lillian gave her a short nod.

The group moved on.  Mary, Emmett, Ashton and Helen took the lead, Mary talking to Emmett, who was mostly content to listen, and Helen clinging to Ashton, while quizzing him.

Toward the middle of the collected group, Abby walked Quinton, and Nora and Lara talked to one another, bickering.

Lacey walked with Duncan and Lillian, the three of them trailing behind the rest.  The wheels of Lillian’s case clacked as they rolled over the wooden slats of the covered footbridge.

“No injuries?” Duncan asked.

“Very minor ones.  Mary wanted to be on the hunt all night, but after she got a bad scrape, I decided we were done.  Too tired, and she’s only human.  More focused than most, but you can’t keep up that focus for hours on end without something suffering.”

“It’s good you got rest,” Duncan said.

“Agreed,” Lacey said.  She’d worried when they had had to vacate the headmaster’s house, but the Lambs knew how to secure temporary accommodations.

She liked Duncan.  He tried, he was focused, and he had a lot of promise.  There were things he needed to work on, he’d effectively been dropped into this role without seeking it out.  They shared common background in that.

“How are they?” Lacey asked.

“The little ones?  Reliable, scared, impenetrable, and sensitive.”

He didn’t even need to name them.

“I’m worried this is a test run, a prelude for something that’s in the works.  A second Lambs team?”

“It’s not,” Lacey said.  “And I say that as someone who knew about the project when it was only a concept.”

“I agree,” Lillian said.  “Can’t be.  Doesn’t work, that’s not what the Lambs are.”

“Clever, capable experiments with a partial emphasis on their mental abilities,” Duncan said.

“Operating as a group,” Lillian said.  “Built to lean on one another.”

“Right,” Duncan said.  “We had that for a moment, dealing with the two teenagers that had the gun.  If someone like me can strike the right note once while fumbling with the instruments I’ve been provided with, I feel a sustained note could be doable with practice.  With a lot of practice.  Or with someone else at the helm.”

He leaned forward to look past Lacey and give Lillian a pointed look as he said it.

“You don’t want the job?” Lillian asked.

“No.  Not at all.  Not in the long run.”

A stepping stone, Lacey thought.

She wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would Lillian talk about the merits of the job?  What she appreciated about it?

“I think I understand,” Lillian said.  “I didn’t want the role either.  Not at first.”

“Hm,” Duncan made a noise.  His expression was knit into something more thoughtful and concerned.

“Spooky to think about?” Lillian asked.

“Heh.  Very spooky,” Duncan said, smiling.

“Duncan?” Helen called back.  She beckoned for Duncan to come forward, while clutching Ashton’s head to her side.

The smile dropped off of Duncan’s face.

“Very, very spooky,” he reaffirmed.

“Helen?” Lillian asked.  “You can’t give her a prey response, or she’ll pounce on it.  It’s all in fun, either way.”

“The prey instinct is involuntary, in my case,” Duncan said.  “It’s a question of gender, and Helen developing into a weapon against my gender.  If we switched positions, I think you might find it harder than it is in your shoes.”

“Maybe, but my shoes also benefit from years of experience,” Lillian said.

Duncan held up a finger, “I could make an argument-”

“Duncan, dear,” Helen cooed.  “Sweetheart.  Ashton and I would like you to join the discussion, pretty please.”

“-And I won’t, now that I think about it.  Thank you, Helen,” Duncan said.  He raised his voice, “One second!”

“Thank you,” Helen replied, before leaning down to kiss the top of Ashton’s head, rubbing her cheek against it to muss up his tidy hair.

Duncan spoke under his breath, “Why did that request sound menacing?”

“Helen is not being menacing,” Lillian said.

“Is there a tell?  Something I can listen or watch for?”

“No.  I’m drawing on years of experience of dealing with her.  You are in no real danger.  Except maybe from Ibbot.”

Duncan huffed out a sigh, “Would you?  I don’t want to drop it when she tackles me or scares the living daylight out of me again.”

He extended the leash of his tentacle dog to Lacey.  She took it.

Free to go, Duncan then picked up his pace, catching up to Ashton and Helen.

“And I know just what argument you were about to make before she interrupted,” Lillian said, under her breath, in an uncharacteristic dark tone, “Thank you, Duncan, for not finishing the thought and making me slap you.  You’re learning.”

When Lacey didn’t venture a response, Lillian looked over and up.  “You knew what he was going to say, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t think about it,” Lacey said.

“He can be so nice to be around when he doesn’t put his foot in his mouth,” Lillian said.  “But get him caught up in an argument or put him on his back foot, and he says things that he shouldn’t.”

It took Lacey a moment to catch up.  He was going to turn the tables.  Accused of being weak in the face of Helen, was he going to say something about Lillian and Sylvester?

Yes.  It was good he’d kept his mouth shut.  Thank you Helen, indeed.

Rather than comment, Lacey said, “I’m trying to stay objective, and not get too wrapped up in things.  I made that mistake once upon a time, when Sylvester was involved.  I promised myself I wouldn’t repeat it when I agreed to come on this trip.”

“Uh huh,” Lillian said.  “So, based on what you just said, you’d tell me that earlier, when you were talking about Sylvester’s pull and the threat of getting too close, you weren’t saying it to me?”

There was a significant gap between the time that Lacey had first been involved with the team, when Lillian was brand new, and the present day.  She’d kept tabs on how her project was doing, and how the Lambs were operating, but Lillian hadn’t been part of what she asked about and looked for.

A mistake, that, and one she regretted.  Maybe she could have offered more counsel.  Maybe she would be more aware of just how canny Lillian could be, after years of keeping up with the Lambs.  Periodic sharing of Sylvester’s doses of Wyvern, too, according to the higher-ups.

“When I talked about the whirlpool, I was talking to you, yes,” Lacey said.

Lillian shook her head a little.

“I don’t want you to suffer where I’ve suffered,” Lacey said.  “I look at you and Duncan and I see a glimmer of my old self.  The Academy is cutthroat.  Radham more than most.  If you fall behind or make a mistake, it can take a long time to get back to where you were.”

“‘What was it you said?  ‘Stick to the plan?’,” Lillian asked.

“Absolutely.  Here, and in the greater scheme of it all.”

“Greater scheme.  I just now realized… when Sylvester was talking about his, you cut off the girls.  You didn’t want him to say it.  Was it because you were worried we would get caught up in his pull?  Something big, drawing our attention and drawing us closer, until we’re swept up in it?”

Lacey frowned a little, then glanced at Lillian.  She saw the look in her eyes.  “Speaking of realizations-”

“You’re deflecting, Lacey,” Lillian challenged.  “I’ve spent long enough around Sylvester that I’m not about to get distracted by something that blatant.”

“That’s fine,” Lacey said.  “But you’re more defensive and hostile than you should be.  How much of the combat drug did you inject into yourself before you went into the building?”

“I played it by ear.  The mood response to the drug depends on my mood, so I have to adjust.”

“I’m well aware of the peculiarities of different combat drugs,” Lacey said.  “I have a gen. spec. in drugs and poisons.  I know how that can sometimes be necessary.  That in mind, when your mood is far outside the usual bounds, your judgment when ‘playing something by ear’ is not always going to be optimal.  You can overshoot.”

“I don’t think I overshot,” Lillian said.

“Alright,” Lacey said, doing her best not to let her doubts creep into her tone.

“Who was the liar in the group?” Lillian asked.

“Beg pardon?”

“Sylvester was given massive doses of Wyvern from a very early stage in his life.  I know he learned from others.  He started off by building his identity as a mosaic of the people around him.  He’s very good at lying, but your response just now, I don’t think he got the lying from you.  Deflection, maybe, but not deception.  You’re too transparent.”

She’d let Lillian see or hear her doubts, then.

“I don’t think the others in my group were good liars,” Lacey said.  She paused.  “But if they were, I don’t suppose I would have realized.  Could it be the other Lambs?”

“No,” Lillian said.  “Not the other Lambs.  He resisted copying anything important from them, because it was his job to mold himself around them, around us.”

“I know that, but there were a number of redundancies,” Lacey said.  “He learned lockpicking, like many of you.  Acting and presentation, like Helen.”

“And he got it in his head to learn some of Mauer’s manipulation, and Fray’s approach, and he picked up some bloodthirstiness along the way,” Lillian agreed.  “But I’m talking about the Sylvester in the very, very beginning.  Before he started picking up those things.  I was with the group for a year and a half before he even dabbled in lockpicking again.  Redundancies came later.”

“I don’t know,” Lacey said.  “I think deception and lying are pretty endemic, in the Academy.  Rich compost to grow a schemer.”

“Maybe,” Lillian said.  “I won’t argue it.  Like you say, I could be under the lingering influence of the drug.”

There was bitterness in the sentence.

Babysitting.  How ironic, that when she’d tried to look after the child in her care, she’d pushed him away.  But when she’d resolved not to do it, she found herself stuck with the responsibility.

“I would recommend…” Lacey said, as carefully as she could, pausing to find her words.  She didn’t get the chance.

“That I don’t use the combat drug again,” Lillian said.

“Yes.  Dealing with Sylvester will be hard enough, but if you’re in an altered state, even in the mildest sense, it might be something he can use.”

“I already resolved not to, from the moment you brought it up.  I’ve been trying it to see if I couldn’t get an edge, something I could use.  We had time before we focused on Sylvester.  I thought I’d try a test run in a more serious situation.  The costs aren’t worth the gain, I couldn’t even really feel the benefits of the drug.  I hoped I could find a chemical that might cover up weaknesses, but they only ever hurt me.”

Lacey diplomatically held her tongue.

“Before,” Lillian said.  “When you stopped Lara and Nora from talking about Sylvester’s big plans.  That was on purpose.  To keep the Lambs from getting excited about it?”

“Yes,” Lacey said.  “In part.”

She didn’t let that thread of the conversation drop after allWell trained by Sylvester.

Lillian nodded, seemingly satisfied, but then asked, “Academy mandate, or your own decision?”

“Mine.”

Another satisfied nod.  Lillian switched hands, pulling her case behind her with the other.  Lacey wound up the leash around her hand, bringing the tentacle dog in closer.

Abby was watching out for Sylvester, keeping her eye on the surroundings, on ledges and rooftops.  She kept getting distracted by Quinton or by the birds that were trying to find shade from the summer sun.

Helen, Duncan, and Ashton were all having what seemed to be a civil conversation, with none of the blood or terror that Duncan had prophesied.  Ashton seemed to be leading the discussion.

Mary and Emmett and the communication experiments seemed content to talk, still.

“You’re the expert when it comes to Wyvern,” Lillian said, ending the break in the conversation.

“In a way.”

“Sylvester of the past, he was a mosaic.  Blank, mirroring people around him.  Adjusting how he learned and copying things, picking up skills and figuring out the ones to retain with his rapidly dwindling retention.  Until things leveled off, and more of his personality and nature solidified.”

“Accurate,” Lacey said.

“He picked up some things from enemies, but he mostly remained in a kind of equilibrium.  He adjusted, adapted, and focused on molding himself around the Lambs.  Sometimes he forgot things, like lockpicking, to pick up other skills.  As we lost some Lambs, he changed his approach.  Consciously or unconsciously.  Tried to fill in for Jamie.  Became far more aggressive after we lost Gordon.”

“You’d be more familiar with that era than I am.”

“That’s the Sylvester of yesterday.  But-” Lillian said, pausing.  “But what’s he like today?  What’s there, when he’s this independent?  He has help.  He has the rabbit man.  The other man, Samuel, who he collected from prison.  Did he get them to emulate them?  Who else is he copying?  Or-”

Lillian stopped there.

“Or is he not copying anyone?”  Lacy finished.

“I don’t know what to expect, and that terrifies me.  Who is this Sylvester we’re about to face?”

“I imagine he’s adapting to work well with whoever he has near him,” Lacey said.  “I would say that, based on what I know, what I’ve read of your mission files, and what you’ve said, that he tends to mirror or conform around strong figures.  Big personalities, major players, people he’s impressed by.”

“The rabbit feels more like a pawn.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.

Based on the signs she was seeing, Lacey was suspicious that Lillian’s combat drug was a variant on liquid courage.  Mood altering, with some minor benefits to coordination, to strength, stamina, and the ability to tolerate pain.  A mild drug, by most metrics, one that could be given to new soldiers and conscripted civilians to make them combat ready.  Emotional highs came with more focus and less confusion.  Flight fed fight.  All emotions did.

Still feeling the influence of the drug, Lillian was more confrontational than she might otherwise be.  That would fade fast.  But that confrontational attitude was fed by other emotions, and it wasn’t terror.

Whether she was aware of it or not, Lillian was wearing her heart well on her sleeve.  She hadn’t taken the classes on hormones and mood that Lacey had specialized in.  Lillian’s anxieties, her hopes, her broken heart that hadn’t quite mended, all were bleeding through in a single color.

It would be better to stay silent.  To discourage this relationship and game that Sylvester was trying to foster with the Lambs.  Lacey opted to speak, instead.

“In the early days, Wyvern shaped him on the most fundamental levels.  Or it helped him shape himself.  In the days you came to know him best, it helped him shape his ever-shifting role and skills, and it helped him conform and adapt to fit the team’s needs.  He focused a lot on all of you.  I would guess that he committed what he wanted to keep.  Right now, I would surmise that Wyvern is being turned to other focuses.  Whatever it takes to put his greater plan into play, he’s using Wyvern to help facilitate that.  Leadership, maybe, longer-term planning.  I don’t know.”

Lillian didn’t say anything to that.  She seemed to ruminate on it.

“Lillian,” Lacey said, even though she suspected she shouldn’t.  “He’ll have shucked off many of the traits or adaptations that he needed to be a member of a group of five or six Lambs.  Everything he needed to be a loyal agent of the Academy, for that matter.  He’ll have dropped some pretensions and he’ll have picked up others, and he might well have changed how he acts or presents himself.  Some things hold true, however.  His treatment of Duncan shows that.”

Lillian smiled a little.  “His treatment of the new boys and girls, too.”

She was looking in the direction of Abby and Quinton.

“I think, if you were to talk to him now, Lillian, you’d find he’s more Sylvester than the Sylvester you knew.  Everything he wanted to be, in part, that he’s now free to build up, and, on the other hand, all of the other parts of him that were buried by other things, and those other things are free to fade away.”

“Why do you somehow make that sound like a bad thing?” Lillian asked Lacey.

Lacey smiled, “Did I?”

“No.  Yes.  Almost.”

“I’m not sure myself.  He apologized to me, you know.”

“Did he?”

“He also said I was one of the half-decent doctors,” Lacey said.  “Damned with faint praise.”

“High praise!” Lillian countered, grasping at Lacey’s sleeve.  “Not the highest praise, but for Sylvester, that’s a kindness.  He resents just about every doctor out there, whether their coats are white, gray, or black.  Exceptions for some of the illegitimate sorts in lab coats, rogues and enemies we’ve encountered along the way, but even where he likes them as people, he dislikes them as doctors.  To call you half-decent is the sweetest thing!”

Lacey frowned.  She also noted that Lillian’s mood had visibly lifted after the mention of Sylvester being more Sylvester than before, which made her deeply regret saying anything.

“You don’t sound as if you believe me,” Lillian said.

“I believe you.  Still, I can’t wrap my head around the idea.  If I’m half-decent, and this is high praise, what in the King’s name is actually decent in his eyes?”

“Me,” Lillian said.  “Not the me of now, but the ideal me he wants me to become.  It sounds so conceited, saying that.  But it’s his conceit that I’m admitting to, not mine.”

“You don’t sound upset about it.”

“Because I’m not.  It’s flattery, much like what he said to you.  And I plan to do my ultimate best to live up to that expectation.  It’s a… shimmering outline that stands in the distance ahead of me.  Every day I study, every time I coordinate well with the Lambs, every time I’m kind, I feel like I get closer and closer to filling it.  It’s something I already wanted for myself, but it means a lot to have someone believe to that extent.”

Lacey’s smile found its way to her face, and it was a genuine smile.  But at the same time, she felt a twinge of jealousy, and a knot of despair.

The poor girl was in love, it was plain to see.

There was no way that would end well.

“Talk to me about your final project,” Lacey said.

“Another deflection?” Lillian asked.

“Blatantly.  Chances are good that he’s watching and listening in somehow.  If you keep talking about him like that, his head or his heart is going to swell up and explode, and we won’t be able to bring him in alive, like all of you are so keen to do.”

Lillian’s giggle was nice to hear, after some of the tension of the long discussion.

Their conversation mercifully turned to muscle types and arrangements, stand-ins for muscle, and structural elements.  The conversation, as such, whiled away the remainder of their walk, before Mary raised her hand to give the signal, and the group fell silent.

Lacey didn’t know the signals, but she could draw conclusions.

They were close.

“Stay close,” Lillian said, grabbing gain for Lacey’s arm.  “Abby, you too, come here.”

Duncan, too, broke away, retreating to join their group.  Mary, Emmett, Ashton, and Helen remained at the group in the lead.  At Mary’s instruction, the pair of Lara and Nora split up with one going to Mary’s group and one to Lillian’s.

Once they were organized, they moved more cautiously as a whole.  Conversation ceased, and everyone’s attention was focused on the greater danger.  Mary’s group would move up a distance, and then they would signal for Lillian’s group to catch up.

In this way, they approached to within a block of a building in construction.  The building was swaddled in cloth drapes and scaffolding, and construction had obviously been interrupted at one point or another,because branches of builder’s wood had grown and then been ignored.  Without being cut, they had continued to grow day by day and week by week, at a fraction of their original speed.  Now branches wove their way into the scaffolding.

It probably looked worse than it was.  The branches could be cut back.  Construction could be readily resumed once the budget dispute or other problems were resolved.

In the meantime, it was a fortress.  A building of stone, with men perched here and there on the scaffolding and the ledges and wall-tops that the incompleteness of the building provided them.  Taken on their own, they might be taken to be construction workers or men simply hanging out and shooting the shit.  With the knowledge that the Devil was within, however, it was more ominous.  Those men were likely armed.

They collectively shrank back into meager shadows as a group of people moved by.  There was no telling if they were threats patrolling the area or civilians going about their business.

Mary signaled.  Lillian translated.

Stay.

They stayed.  They watched, and they waited as Mary led her group toward the building at an angle they were less likely to be seen.  They found a way to cross the street in a cart’s shadow without being too exposed, then disappeared as they approached an climbed from an angle that Lacey couldn’t see.

But, in the wake of that, Helen and Mary could be seen on the scaffolding.  It was all wood, and it seemed to creak, because men turned their heads and shouted, but the girls soon found a rhythm.  Helen distracted, while Mary clung to the underside of one set of boards, and a strategic kick to break a board or a stab between the slats served to bring a man down.  For the next batch, they switched roles, and Helen could be seen climbing with uncanny ease on the underside of one shelf, while Mary drew the attention.

Helen got her hands on one man, and, with one hand clinging to her handhold, dangling, she used her other three limbs to mangle him.

“Does it bother you?” Lillian asked.

“Yes,” Lara said.  Or was it Nora?

“Yes,” Abby said.  “I don’t like violence.  But it doesn’t bother me as much as it once did.  I could get used to it.”

“Oh?” Lillian asked.  “I’m surprised at that.  It sounds like you want to get used to it.

On the scaffolding, Ashton walked along one set of planks with excruciating slowness.

“I do,” Abby said.  “I don’t want to be powerless forever.”

“There’s more ways to power than violence,” Duncan said.

“For you, and for Lacey, and for Lillian, maybe,” Abby said.

She didn’t say anything more.

Ashton remained very still, five feet below one of the men, who was keeping an eye out for Mary and Helen, both of whom had disappeared inside the building.

The man’s searches grew ever more erratic, before he recklessly stumbled in a direction, twisted around on hearing something inside, and missed his footing.

He hit a sash-like drape of of cloth that was supposed to cover a window that hadn’t yet been installed, but had been tied at the bottom to help secure scaffolding.  It might have broken his fall, but he hit it at a bad angle, and he didn’t move very much at all on landing.

In a matter of a few minutes, with Mary’s group reconvening here and there, the guards were systematically disposed of.

Mary appeared on the scaffolding, found where Lillian’s group was, and raised a hand signal.

“Let’s go,” Lillian said.  She’d finished putting on her gloves.

“Go?” Duncan asked.

“Into the building, up the scaffold.  It’s the safest place to be, I think.  Up high is usually better.”

“With no escape routes,” Duncan observed.

“There’s more to it.  Sandwiching them.  Having the vantage point.  Just trust us,” Lillian said.  “You have to trust.”

They trusted.  They made the approach, less careful than Mary had been, but there were no more people on watch.

Emmett waited by the ramp that led up to the first section of scaffold.  From there, they made their way to Ashton, who joined them as they made their way up to the upper floor.

The interior floor wasn’t entirely complete, and ladders stood in places where stairwells would later be installed.

The top floor was only struts and beams, lengths of wood knit together by builder’s wood, and incidentally reinforced by one branch from the overgrowth of wood from an outside section.  The wind blew through the missing sections of wall.

They crawled along the beams and struts.  As they did so, they could see Helen and Mary on the fourth floor, below, moving with caution, their communications experiment sticking close by them.  Through gaps here and there, other figures could be seen and heard on lower floors.

“Headmaster,” their Nora/Lara experiment whispered.  Transcribing.  “You have very little room to negotiate.  Lara says his voice is weird.”

“The Devil?” Lillian murmured.

“The Devil: The thing is, while I may not have your children, I do have the gentleman you entrusted with their care.  Under duress, he has told me he has squirreled them away.  He is the only one who knows where they are, according to him, because you foresaw this very circumstance.  You knew I’d find you and I’d want to use you.  But… now we have a conundrum, don’t we?

“The Headmaster: I don’t see why you’re focusing on this, when your people are being cut down by the score.

“The Devil: My people.  The ones that were worth keeping, I’ve kept close.  Half of the police force is mine.  A full two thirds of your office is loyal to me.  There is nobody in this city who can die, who I cannot replace.  Short of the city being leveled, I will not lose any power.  Do you understand?  I have my roots in everything that this city is.  I have been working to set those roots for longer than you’ve been in office.  All the power you think you hold is a joke I’ve let you entertain.  I can see in your eyes, your eye, rather, that you’re realizing this.

“Either your man will break and he’ll divulge where your children are, or he’ll eventually expire from this duress I’ve applied.  If he does, even you won’t know where your children are.  Your only option, the only thing you can do, is to capitulate.  You’re going to do everything I’ve told you and more, and then, when you’re done, I’m going to torture you to death.

“Headmaster: What?”

“The Devil: You crossed me.  You got in my way.  You die.  But if you capitulate, I might let your children live.  I might even be generous in making my decision if you entertain me, sir.  How much damage can a man do to himself with a knife, I wonder, before he decides his children aren’t worth it anymore?”

Lying beside Lacey so as better to see through the gaps in the floor, Abby raised her hands over her ears.  She didn’t have Quinton.  Emmett wasn’t here either.  Were they outside, where there was less chance of being heard?

Lacey put a hand on Abby’s back, her best effort at being reassuring.

“The Devil: Don’t think about using that knife on me.  I’ve taken measures.  If I do not appear to the right people at the right times, then others will act on my behalf.  Money will go to bounty hunters and bounty hunters will, given time, come for you and yours, and for all the rest of my enemies.  The man who has squirreled your children away and secured them in a cellar or vault somewhere will die, and your children may die of thirst as they wait for you to return.”

Lillian raised her head.  She reached out, and touched Lacey’s upper arm.

Lacey followed Lillian’s line of sight.

On the other side of one of the cloths was a silhouette.  A tall man with rabbit ears.

The silhouette passed with scarcely a sound.  The creak of wood could well have been the wind moving the scaffolding.

But as it passed, a figure remained.

“The Devil: Now, take a moment, because the screams from outside really should be-”

Lillian reached out, and put a hand over Nora’s mouth.

The figure reached out and pushed the cloth aside.  Sylvester.  He peeked through.

The group was lying across beams and across the meager sections of floor that had boards in.  Nobody could rise to their feet fast enough to give chase, and the situation was precarious enough that nobody would dare make noise.

His hand moved.  A series of gestures.

Then he ducked behind the curtain, so to speak, and followed the rabbit.

What did he get from me, if he didn’t get the lies?  What aspects of his personality came from me?

“I.  Help,” Lillian translated the gesture.  “Of course.  He wants to play at being a proper Lamb again.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.08 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.8 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

-He’s here.-

“He’s here,” Lara whispered, translating, her eyes wide.  Her claws were biting into the wood she was lying on with enough force to cut through her sleeves and dig notches into the surface.

She was scared, she was overwhelmed, she was looking for Ashton and Abby and Duncan and Emmett for support, especially Ashton and Abby, because those two were like her and they were almost a trio and Ashton calmed her down with his spores while Abby calmed her down by being Abby.  But they weren’t here and she was with Helen and Mary now.

She’d suggested going with Helen and Mary, because she didn’t want to diverge.  If she always went with Duncan’s group and Nora always spent time with Mary’s group, then they would become different individuals, and different could be bad.  Ashton had said it wasn’t bad, but even though she didn’t remember her first sisters dying she remembered saying goodbye to the last two.

She and Nora called the first one as Whisper, because her communication wasn’t very strong, and the second one was Tremble, because her fear response was the strongest.  She remembered how they sounded, and the brief moments of contact they had had when moving between the tanks and the metal tables where they were measured and examined.  She remembered how they tasted when they were fed to her.

Her thoughts were running away from her.

She’d decided to do this, to go with the other group.  She’d chosen this.  She wished she hadn’t, but the decision had been made and she had a job to do.

Transcribing was good.  Focusing on that helped calm her down.  Talking and listening helped calm her.

“Elwes is on the way,” a man spoke to the Devil.

“With  everyone?”

“Everyone, Mr. Colby.”

“What about the Poke?”

“Still on his way, I presume.”

“If his excuse isn’t good, he’ll pay.  Meggot?”

“No word since he turned up in town.  They might have got him when they were going after the others.”

“He was a waste of breath.  Small loss,” the Devil spoke, his voice gravelly.  There was a pause.  “Lambs!”

Lara closed her eyes as her heart leaped in her chest.

“I assume the screams I heard outside were because of you!  I know you’re here!”

“He,” Mary murmured, in Lara’s ear, making her jump.  “You said he was here.  Sylvester?”

Sylvester? she thrummed the word out with the structures in her bones.

-Yes.- came the reply, picked up by the fine filaments that ran in parallel with her hair, picked up in part by her claws and some of the finer structures in her bones.  The word danced along her skull and the skin of her head like spoken words boomed in her ears.

“Yes,” she replied.

-He’s here to help.  Lillian says he wants to play at being a proper Lamb again.

“He wants to act like a Lamb again.  He’s helping.”

“Lambs!” the Devil bellowed.

She didn’t transcribe.  The voice was loud enough that Nora would be able to hear.  She watched the Devil stalk across the third floor of the building.  There were twenty-five men down there with him.  All of the men had weapons.

“I asked about you,” the Devil spoke.  “I know what you do.  Information gatherers and assassins.  Experiments.  What a complicated relationship you seem to have with Sylvester.  Is he with you now?”

Once Lara listened beyond the hoarse voice, she could tell that the man was talking funny.  Rambling.

It made her think of her creators.  They would uncork bottles in the lab on Friday nights and drink, and they would quickly get drunk.  This was like that.

“Do you share his concern for the well-being of children?” the Devil asked.  “I have to say, it was a clever thing.  A surprising number of this city’s children disappeared.  A clever disappearing act, not so long after he laid the bait.”

“Talker,” Mary murmured.

Lara relayed Mary’s message alongside everything the Devil was saying.

“But I buy and I supply to a number of cities.  It has been roughly a day since Sylvester and I had the talk in the auditorium.  Did you really think my reach was limited to this one city?”

Lara didn’t understand right away, but she saw Mary raise her head up and away from the floor, then lower it, lightly striking the floor with her forehead.

“They’re on their way to places all around the city.  Wagons and carts of children that were for sale.  And no, they aren’t coming to me.  If you want to help them, you’ll have to find them.”

Mary raised her head to bang the floor again.  Helen put out her hand, to intercept, softening the already faint impact.

“Sylvester, damn it,” Mary murmured.

“Harm me, and scores of children will die,” the Devil pronounced.  “Unless one of you feels brave.  A duel, one of you children against me.”

Mary moved to stand up.  Helen grabbed her arm.

No,” Helen whispered.

Lara finished relaying everything, then added, Mary wants to go.

-Lillian says no.

“Lillian says no,” Lara said.

Mary relented, letting Helen pull her back down to a position on the floor.

-What are we doing?  What’s happening?  Where’s Sylvester now?  I think he was moving down your way.

I don’t know! Lara exclaimed.

-You’re useless.  If we had real parents I bet they would kill themselves out of disappointment and shame.

Better than the trio of being useless, stupid and weak.  The world is worse off for having you in it.  Skip the parent part and kill yourself out of disappointment and shame, you wretch.

Having Nora talking to her was helping her to relax and stay centered.  She still gripped the floor, claws digging into wood, but she didn’t feel like she was going to lose her mind for an hour and come back to reality to find that an hour had passed.  Not that that ever happened, but sometimes the fear got so very bad she thought she might not be able to handle it.

“No takers?” the Devil called out.  “I know you’re listening.  Let’s see.  I have this notebook.  All the locations of where the wagonfuls of children are being taken, where the nanny is, written on eight pages.”

Lara transcribed.  She heard paper ripping.

“One page.  The writing is only on the one side.  One wagonful.  Unless I get a sign, I burn it.  The people there never get the message from me, the deadline comes and goes, and the children meet their end.”

Mary dropped her head down to the floor again.

“I didn’t specify how.  But I have people I go to for tasks like these.  I trust they’ll be creative.”

Mary looked at Helen.  This time, when Mary rose to her feet, Helen didn’t stop her.  Mary didn’t go straight down, but headed toward the open wall and the scaffold.  Approaching from the outside.

Lara peered through the boards, communicating, Mary is going.

-Lillian: Damn it.  This is not a good idea.  She wanted to go anyway, this just gives her a reason.-

The Devil was a big man, veins standing out, muscles etched out, with barely any fat.  His eyes were bloodshot, his hair messy.

He scared Lara.  She was scared of most things, yes, but this man stood out to her.  She had seen warbeasts that had been made to be scary, and somehow, even those Warbeasts didn’t seem to trigger most or all of her instinctive fears the same way that this man did.  The placement of his eyes, the veins, his size, the way he moved, the way he sounded-

He scares me so much. 

Strength.-

I’m scared for Mary.

-All of us here too.  But they trust her.  You bile stain.

Helen reached over and put a hand over one of Lara’s claws.  She didn’t blink once as she stared down at the proceedings.

The Devil was turning around.  He chuckled as he saw Mary standing in a window.

“Good,” he said.  “I didn’t think it would be a bitch of a girl.”

“It isn’t,” Mary said, in that way she sometimes did, that reminded Lara of her creators, very hoity-toity, capable of delivering verbal ripostes while still sounding   eminently calm and well-mannered.  “I’m a girl, no epithet warranted.”

The Devil undid the buttons on his shirt, one by one.  The garment barely fit him, and peeled off him more than anything.  He cast the shirt aside.

“I win, I get the little book,” Mary said.  “You win… you get me.  And you can use me to bait out the others, I assume.”

“They’re all out there, are they?” the Devil asked.  He indicated the scaffolding that Mary had stepped off of.  “I’m looking forward to taking a knife to that pretty face of yours.  Peel it off, then carve and smash the muscle and bone until there’s no chance that your fancy doctors can give you a good replacement.”

“I look forward to you trying,” Mary said.

The Devil gestured.  All of the men on the floor below backed off, clearing a space.

“No weapons,” he said.  “Hands, fists, feet.  Bite if you want to.”

Lara could see him bare his teeth in a smile.  They seemed oversized, misshapen.  Or was it an illusion?

“No weapons, then.  If you insist,” Mary said.

“It ends when you cry mercy,” he said.

“That’s not going to happen.  Given that we’re left with no alternatives, the real ending will have to be a surprise,” Mary said.

The Devil had to weigh something between twenty and twenty two stone, and it was all muscle, warped and drug-fueled.  Mary was a third of that.  Athletic, but not tuned to the same degree, and not as drugged.

“Come, now,” the Devil said.  “I’ll even let you make the first move.”

Mary crouched a little, legs tense, eyeing the room.  The floor was shaky in spots, Lara noticed.  There were places that could see Mary tripping or stumbling, giving the Devil his chance.  Ten meters separated them.

Mary dashed in the Devil’s direction.

“Shoot her,” the Devil ordered, the moment she had momentum.

Lara thought her heart would stop at the words, and the movement on the part of the men at the edges of the room, as they reached for guns.

Behind the Devil, a window shattered.  Lara couldn’t see what it was, through the gaps in the floorboards.  But it was a distraction.  Perhaps it bought Mary a fraction of a second.

Mary changed direction.  Too far into the room to reverse course and go for the window, she turned, running, and she leaped like a cat might, one hand going out, then down, as her legs rose.  The other hand flicked in the direction of the Devil, throwing out a knife.

Lara watched as Mary put a hand on the floor, gripped it, and hauled herself through one of the shakier patches of flooring to the floor below.  The notebook, pierced with a knife, was hauled in after her.

She spoke in a hushed whisper at the same time she communicated to Nora, “She’s okay!  I think!  She dove through the floor!  Sylvester threw something in there.”

“Gas,” Helen said.

Gas.

Nora’s noise of amusement and happiness was less bubbly than their laughing sound.

“Come on,” Helen said, standing carefully, giving Lara a hand in standing.

In that same moment, the Devil called out, “Spread out!  Move upstairs, downstairs.  Tear down the scaffold while you’re at it!”

-Lacey: I didn’t want to go up.  Now we’re cut off.

-Lillian: Don’t worry.  The Lambs like high places.  Rooftops, tall buildings.  We’ve got experience with this sort of thing.-

The gas that Sylvester had tossed in was spreading.  The men were vacating the floor below, and the Devil strode toward the ladder, heading downstairs.  He didn’t look upset.  If the book was important and he’d lost the book, why wasn’t he upset?

“The book was a fake, maybe.”

There was a brief pause before Nora reported, -Lillian: Probably.-

“Come on,” Helen said, giving Lara’s hand a squeeze.  “People are coming.  Let’s get you mostly hidden.  If I get excited, I don’t want you anywhere near me.  I might hurt you.”

“What?” Lara asked.

Helen reached over and pinched Lara’s cheek.  “Kidding.”

Helen led her over to one end of the room, where a cloth had been pinned up to keep the wind from blowing through too much.  Helen pulled the cloth down so it covered Lara.

“White drape, white Lara,” Helen said, plucking at Lara’s clothing.  “You’re almost camouflaged.”

Lara nodded.

There were people coming up the scaffolding, and some people climbing the ladders up to the fourth floor.

What if they came behind her?  What if they came up in front?  She couldn’t watch both sides without moving, but moving meant being more visible and obvious.

Swaddling herself further, she craned her head, looking up at the darker top floor, which was mostly beams and branches.  She couldn’t really make out the others, until Nora moved her head.

-What are you doing?  You’re a crime against all living things, natural and Academy made, you’re so pathetic.  Report.  What do you see?  What do you hear?  Be useful.

Was Nora really getting more mature, spending time around the other Lambs, gettng to talk to Sylvester like she did?  Lara was so spooked at what was going on she could barely think straight.  Nora was thinking about the right things.

Noises on the scaffolding to my left, you cretin.  People at the ladder to my left,   you imbecile.  They’re muttering to each other, so there’s more than one.  Maybe three.  Helen went to my right.  She might be climbing down and trying to catch them off guard.

-You forgot to keep insulting me.  You must have acknowledged that I’m the better sister.-

The dangerous people were so close.

Still, Lara had to spare an effort.  When they decided who made the cut, they should have terminated you and kept the sister with missing organs.  At least she might have been worth something for a few minutes before expiring.

There was a long pause.  A head crested the top of the ladder simultaneously as the matching arm and the hand that gripped a pistol.  The thug looked around, pointing the gun this way and that.

-Too much.- Nora communicated, and Nora’s words were as terrifying as the gun.

Am sorry.

-Too much.  You wrong our sister’s memories!– Nora stressed.

Am sorry.  Am scared.  Not thinking well.

If anyone should have been terminated, it is you, you sad little spasm of vat-meat.  Our sister with missing organs, at least, didn’t fancy a romance with cow plops.-

Nora’s titter of amusement was both reassuring and one-sided.  Lara’s attention was now consumed by the gunman, enough that she couldn’t reply.

The man with the gun was cautious as he got both feet on the floor.  The gun pointed this way and that as he edged his way around the empty floor.  He even pointed it up at one point, and Lara was certain he would see the others.

But the gun moved down, aiming at eye level.

As he edged around to one end of the room, to peek at the scaffolding, Helen seized him.  He disappeared around the edge of the broken wall.

The other man was just now coming up the ladder.  He saw the first get snatched by Helen, stiffened, then pointed his gun.  Not that it would have accomplished much.

The projectile dropped from above.  A knife, blade pointed downward.  It remained straight as it fell straight down on top of his head, penetrating the crown.  His grip on the ladder faltered, and he fell.  From the complaints, he fell on the people below.

Lara closed her eyes, and she could hear the grinding, meaty noises as Helen went to work.  She startled at the sound of footsteps, and then realized they were the footsteps of the others.  Lillian, Lacey, Abby, Ashton, Duncan, and Nora.

“Helen?” Lillian asked.

Lara poked her head out from her hiding place and pointed in the right direction.

Just about everyone fixated their attention on Helen, but Nora and Abby made a beeline straight for Lara.  Nora hugged her, tight.  Painful hug, when their ribs stuck out all knobby-like and touched each other, but it was a good hug too.  She felt her scalp tingle as her hair-like filaments touched some of Nora’s.

“Are you okay?” Abby asked.

Lara nodded.  After a moment, she broke the hug, then hugged Abby.  Because Abby cared and understood that even if there was no super-immediate danger, it was possible to be not-okay.

“I wanted to do something interesting with it,” Helen said.  She had some rope and was using it to help drag the first gunman’s body behind her, leaving a trail of blood and other bodily fluids.  Lillian was helping her, holding one part of the rope.  The man’s skin had been pulled at hard enough that it had torn free in places, his head, limbs, and body all twisted around until front and back were almost synonymous.  He was strangely rigid, for how broken he was.  Arms and legs had been broken and turned around until shattered bone found a hold in torn muscle and flesh, holding it in place.

Abby looked away from the sight.

Lacey said, “That begs the question… why?”

“Because.  I want them to see,” Helen said.  “We need to go help Mary.  She went down there, and they’re collapsing in on her.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “I’m still not connecting the thoughts.”

Helen worked with the rope, binding the body.  It was bloody enough that the rope was soon soaked through.  She handed the extra length of rope to Lacey and Duncan.  “Distraction.  Dangle it when Nora says.”

Which meant Lara was coming with, Lara realized.  She grit her teeth, and pulled away from Abby and Nora.

As she passed by Ashton, she felt a swelling of emotion, not bad, not fear or anything, and not quite calming.  Determination?

Maybe this was a bit of what courage felt like.

“Scaffolding,” Lara said, quiet, pointing across the floor to the other end from where Helen had been with her captive.  “People, I think.  Be careful.”

“Will do,” Duncan said, simply.

Hopefully bad people wouldn’t climb the outside of the tower and appear behind Duncan, Lacey, Abby, Ashton, and Nora.  Hopefully.

She hated ‘hope’.  Hope was so easily twisted by fear.  Hope was what fear ate, and she had so much fear to feed.

She hoped she and Nora could be happy and peaceful one day, with only occasional work on battlefields and in scary places.  She hoped they could pupate and enter their later forms and that everything would be okay.  She hoped they wouldn’t lose the ability to talk and be deemed useless.  She hoped they wouldn’t diverge and be labeled too different to use.

There were too many routes for the enemy to use, too many enemies.  Too much danger.  The Devil scared her, even though she knew he wasn’t the worst or most dangerous experiment the Lambs had faced.  He was the worst and most horrible thing she had ever seen in her life.

She was scared of heights, as she stepped onto the shaky scaffolding.  It was a different sort of fear.  Not a built-in fear, or a fear that was supported by those built-in fears.  It was an ordinary fear that was still big.

Would she have wings when she pupated?  She had asked once, and instead of answering, her creators had talked about it and gotten into arguments and they never gave her a straight answer.

What would it be like to have wings but also to be afraid of height?

Lillian and Helen were very careful as they made their way down the scaffolding, guiding Lara as they did it.  At some points Lara had to roll up her sleeves so she would have a better grip.

They stood on the shaky footing of wood and planks and bars and rope and approached the corner.  Lara hung back.

Lillian gestured.

Seeing the gesture, Helen translated, leaning close, and only barely vocalizing, such a faint whisper that a normal human throat might not have been able to make it.

“Seven.”

Further below, there was a crashing sound.  Scaffolding fell away from the building, disconnected.

Lara felt her heartbeat pick up.  She moved closer to the exterior wall of the building, and did her best to dig her claws into the cracks and gaps between stones.  If the rest of the scaffolding fell away, she didn’t want to fall with it.

Lillian gestured.  Helen translated, “Seven is too many for you and me.  Even with a distraction.”

“I can’t,” Lara said.

“And I wouldn’t ask you to,” Helen whispered.  She looked at Lillian while talking to Lara.  “They’re staying put.  Some are taking apart scaffolding where it’s connected to the building.  After what happened to the first two to go up…  We’re stuck.  It would be easier if we had Emmett.”

-Ashton is helping, just so you know.  And you need to know lots more things if you’re ever going to catch up, you streak of rectal mucus.

If I’m a streak of rectal mucus then you’re a pile of rancid cat puke.

-Well, I never!

Titter.

“Ashton’s helping,” Lara said, as quietly as she could manage.

A shake of the scaffolding drew Lara’s eyes downward.  She saw a hand gripping one of the poles of wood, and kicked at it.  The hand moved out of the way just in time.  It was soon joined by a second.  Lara squeaked.

The scaffolding creaked as Sylvester helped himself over the edge, placing himself within a few feet of Helen and Lara.  The two of them stood between Sylvester and Lillian.

“Hi, Sylvester,” Lillian said, her whisper very breathy, easily lost in the wind that blew through and around the building.

“Hi,” Sylvester said.  He smiled.

“Do us a favor?” Lillian asked, in that same breathy voice.

“Gladly.”

“Would you throw yourself off the scaffolding?  Nose-dive for the cobblestones down there?  It could be a good distraction.”

Lara clutched closer to Helen.

Sylvester only smiled.  “I’ll do you a favor, but it won’t be that one.”

“Drat.”

“Sorry,” he whispered.  He looked down at Lara.  “You’re not the one I talked to, I don’t think.  Meaning you’re… Lara?”

Lara nodded.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Stop flirting,” Lillian said.  “Where are Mary and Emmett?”

“First floor, and just above the first floor.  I dropped some smoke bombs and gave her a few more.  I hoped the smoke would climb more, scare the people further up to give you all some elbow room, ended up having to come myself when I couldn’t.  She’s fine for a long while down there, provided she doesn’t get sloppy and the Devil doesn’t stumble on her while blind from all the smoke.”

“Fine.  Are you going to help us here, or are you just here to make fun of us?”

“Can it be both?”

There were murmurs from within the building.  Lillian bit back her retort, then gestured it instead.

“I’m insulted,” Sylvester said.

Lillian pressed a finger to her lips.

“Seven people in there,” Helen translated.  “Helen takes three, Lillian take three, Sylvester takes one, if he can.”

Lillian looked at Lara, and gestured.

Lara didn’t need to know what the gesture meant, or to have Helen translate it.  She communicated to Nora, Now.

A moment later, there was a violent rustling, curses, and a gunshot.

Lillian, Helen, and Sylvester rounded the corner, throwing themselves into the tower interior.

Lara remained where she was, clinging to the wall, eyes closed.  She could hear the violence, and she had no idea which side was winning.

-Come.-

Lara hesitated.

But then Abby and Ashton appeared at the edge of the wall, and Abby reached out for Lara’s sleeve.  Abby gave it a tug.

Lara allowed herself to be drawn into the third floor tower room.  The others were all gathered, and the seven men were dead, unconscious, or bound.  Only Mary was absent.  Even Emmett was here.  The path down to the floor below was protected by a hatch.

“Having the time of your life?” Lillian asked, sourly.

“Fantastically good time,” Sylvester said, from the far end of the room.  “Devil’s down on the first floor with twelve soldiers.  Smoke bombs weren’t toxic, sadly.  Mary is keeping tabs on him.  Book was a fake, by the way.  Obviously.”

“We need to disable him,” Helen said.  “Say, by breaking his limbs.”

“Because you messed up, Sylvester.  You underestimated him,” Lillian accused.

Sylvester backed away a step, hands raised.  “Harsh words, harsh words.”

“There are wagonloads of children en route to this city.  Because you baited a lunatic and he took the bait.”

“Would you believe me if I said a gangly white rabbit is handling that right now?” Sylvester asked.

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.  “Are you lying?”

“Pierre has already set things in motion.  A few letters will slow things down just long enough, before they get vetted and found out to be false.  There are only so many points that people can use to access the city.  Only a few of those are convenient when coming from other cities, and in an era of plagues and war, it doesn’t take much to lock down travel to and from the city.”

“You’re shutting off your own exit from the city,” Lacey said.

“Yes.  And Mary is counting down the minutes before she drops another smoke bomb.  She’ll be running out soon, then she’s in a pinch.  So… I’m going to go handle that.”

“Sylvester,” Lillian said.  She approached him.  “Listen, about Jamie-”

“Let’s not talk about Jamie,” Sylvester said.  The smile dropped off his face.

“He was close to you.  He made a big sacrifice, and then he died because of it.”

“That’s… not kind of you to say,” Sylvester said.  “And I see that you’re edging closer to me.  I’m aware of what those arms of yours are capable of.  I did just see you punch three out of the four humors clean out of a fellow.”

Lara watched the dialogue, somehow feeling very concerned about it all.

“Does this help?” Lillian asked.  She undid the parts of the meat-sleeves that connected to her shoulders, letting them dangle from the elbow instead.  “I just want to talk to you like a human being for five seconds before we get caught up in everything again.”

“Not particularly, but if you’re going to stall me and say something, then it might as well be now.”

“Jamie mattered, Sylvester.  The old one and the new one.  We shouldn’t have lost him once, let alone twice.  Gordon mattered.  And Gordon was very firm about wanting us to keep fighting for good things.  You’re acting unhinged, operating alone like this.  Putting kids at risk?  You’re getting sloppy.”

“You know for a fact that isn’t true,” Sylvester said.

Lillian, close enough now, reached out to Sylvester.

The syringe sprang from her meat-hand, and Sylvester caught it, gripping it.  She produced the second a moment later, moving her arm, but Sylvester caught that too.

Emmett started forward, but stopped when Sylvester met his eyes.  Sylvester shook his head, before returning his focus to Lillian.

“I can read you like a book, Lil.”

“Don’t call me Lil.”

“Nice try, though.  I did see your syringe earlier today, so I knew to look out for it.”

Lillian jerked her arm to try to free it.  Sylvester hung on.

“Let’s go help Mary,” he said.  “See if we can’t handle the Devil.  Then you can hurry to the gates of the city and intercept the carts full of kids before they get delivered to unsavory types, and I’ll make my merry getaway.”

“Of course you have a gameplan, and of course you’re rubbing it in our faces.”

“Of course,” he said.  He let go of the syringes, stepping back and out onto the scaffold.

Lara watched as he ran away.

-I like Sylvester.- Nora communicated.

Thinking of the Devil and the ways that he’d seemed so spooky in a way that Lara found so many things spooky, Lara felt the same thing to a lesser degree with Sylvester.

It was worse because she had been put in the ugly position where she had to either stay silent and betray herself or speak up and deviate.  Lara decided on the latter.

I don’t.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.09 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.9 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

There was discord, Duncan knew.  Too many new faces.  Too many people with stakes in things that weren’t even here, on the table.  Mary and Lillian were too focused on Sylvester.  The Twins on self preservation.  Ashton didn’t have a stake, and was very similar to Emmett in that.  Abby wasn’t here so much as she was following along and waiting until this was over and she could return to a more peaceful life.

Then there was Helen.  Because Helen could so rarely be counted in the same string of thought as the others.  Helen grabbed his attention, so often, but she was very rarely included in the same breath as others.

Helen scared him more than she had, before, and that was saying something.  The scientist in Duncan wanted to figure out why, to problem solve.  He might have wanted to hypothesize and test, but one did not test around Helen, no more than they tested around a snarling warbeast.  For now, he was content to observe, avoid giving her reasons to tease him, and keep his fingers well away from the bars of that particular cage.  Not physical bars, but ones that Ibbot had instilled, and that the Lambs had created.

He would be glad the bars were there and he wouldn’t do anything to test them.

The group descended to the second floor, where Mary was standing back from the stairway.  One of her hands held a length of metal with three threads of wire extending from the middle and each end, each thread taut as it extended down into the area below.  The other hand held a knife.

She pressed the knife to her mouth in a shushing motion.

Duncan looked at the stairs, and the thick cloud of smoke below.  Why were the Devil’s men staying down there when the stairway was clear?

As if to answer his question, a man came tearing up the stairs, through the hole in the floor.  He crested the top of the stairs, aiming his gun, and then lost his balance, a line of crimson appearing across his face.

Mary whipped her knife at him, impaling his throat just as he managed to catch his balance.  As he stopped in his tracks, dropping his gun to reach for his throat, she cast out the wire that was attached to the knife.  A bearing partway along the wire helped it move where she needed it, encircling his wrist before she gave it a tug, securing it in place.  She wrapped her end of wire around the metal bar.

The man, still standing, looked at her, then the rest of the Lambs, then gurgled.  Blood foamed around the knife that was still embedded there.

“Emmett,” Mary said.  “Would you?”

There was a sound of more footsteps.  Two more men were coming up the stairs.  Emmett charged the man at the top of the stairs, and gave him the boot.  He tumbled down the stairs, and Mary braced herself.  For all the weight that was a full grown man falling in the opposite direction, she didn’t seem to have much trouble.  And those other strings-

The wire moved as the victim or one of the people he’d collided with on his way down struggled.  Emmett hurried to Mary’s side to take over with the bar.

“Thank you, sir,” Mary said.

Lillian gestured.  Duncan caught the gesture for noise.

“Yes,” Mary said.  “We can talk.  I’ve got a few bodies piled on the stairs.  When they try to move them, I throw something at them.  After I got the first few-”

The Devil was shouting.  “Grab the bodies.  Bring them down!  Clear the way!”

“-They got less courageous about coming upstairs.  They got excited and more eager to leave the basement after someone asked what they should do if we use poison again.”

Emmett was fighting to keep his grip on the metal that had the strings attached.

“There are other strings there too.  They have to be cutting themselves to shreds,” Mary observed.  “You okay?”

Emmett gave her a nod.

Mary stepped past the top of the stairwell, throwing a knife mid-step, before stepping away.  Gunshots rang out, shooting up at an angle, hitting the ceiling.  Lara and Nora both shrieked, similar cries that were out of sync.  Even Abby was hunkering down.

“Be nice if they wasted all their bullets,” Mary said.  “But they’re pretty patient.  Not all that anxious to get out of there, even.”

“They’re biding their time?” Lillian asked.

“Devil wants to, but he doesn’t complain when his men decide to try to get up the stairs.  He seems content to wait us out,” Mary said.

Duncan frowned.  “Why doesn’t he just leave?”

“Sylvester handled that.  I saw him jump down to the fallen scaffolding.  He secured the door before heading back upstairs.  Dodged my bola the first time and the knife the second time, and had the audacity to toss me the smoke grenades.  If I wasn’t busy with this, I would have hit him.”

“You think he secured the door,” Duncan said.  “With Sylvester, we can’t know.”

“I know Sylvester, Duncan,” Mary said.  “I know how he operates.”

“Isn’t the very concept of what Sylvester is as an experiment to be someone who can alter themselves and their approach on a fluid level?”  Duncan challenged.

“Yes,” Mary said, “And a small handful of things remain constant.  He’s here, he’s playing with us, play-acting as if he were still a Lamb, and working with us.”

“The dance,” one of the twin experiments said.

“Dance, Nora?” Lillian asked.

“I told you, when Sylvester talked to Lacey and me, he said something about liking the dance, when everyone cooperates and moves like they’re part of a singular organism.  He didn’t use those words, exactly.”

“Yeah.  That’s it, exactly,” Mary said.

Duncan gave up.  Dealing with Sylvester was like being told to study one thing for a test, only to get a test sheet that covered of everything else.

There was a crash somewhere below them.  Furniture being destroyed, or something being taken to pieces.

The work at dragging Mary’s victims away from the stairs had stopped, and Emmett wasn’t fighting as hard to hold on any more.  Duncan had no idea if it had succeeded or failed, but Mary didn’t seem bothered.

Mary threw a knife at the floor, so it embedded itself in between two floorboards.  She stomped on the end, then used another knife handle to seize one of the wires that extended from Emmett’s bit of metal to the tangle of bodies that she’d piled on the stairs.  She transferred the wire to the knife on the floor.

A process of setting the wires down more permanently, so Emmett’s bit of metal didn’t have to be continually held.

Duncan had really not had many opportunities to see her in action.  Even when he had gone on his first mission, he had mostly seen the aftermath, not the action.

He’d seen some of Helen in action.

He glanced at Helen, and saw her staring at him.  She smiled, demeanor shifting, and he felt a chill.

“I think…” Mary said.  She crouched, binding a second wire to a knife she had embedded into the floor, “He’s expecting reinforcements.”

“He said something earlier, to his men,” Lillian said.  “It wasn’t about the carts and wagons full of kids?”

“Maybe the reinforcements were being handled by one of the names he mentioned.  Either way, I think we need to find a way to handle this.  There are twenty people down there with him,” Mary said.

“I can help,” Ashton said.

“No, honey,” Lillian said.  “I don’t want you standing that close to the stairs.”

“I can go down,” Ashton said.

“It’s too dangerous,” Mary said.  “I had to cut a few people who were groping around in the dark.  I don’t think you’re capable of holding your own, and they’ll likely have their noses and mouths covered.”

“The smoke,” Duncan added, thinking about the plan to mislead Sylvester into thinking that smoke and smoking were a counteragent to Ashton.

Anything that worked.

“I could still try.  There aren’t many gaps in the floor, like upstairs, but I could try.”

“Sure,” Duncan said.  “Calm them down.  Make them less likely to act.”

“Okay,” Ashton said.

Ashton sat cross-legged on the floor.

Hopefully this wouldn’t spoil the ruse, if Sylvester caught wind of it.

Where was Sylvester, anyhow?

As the question crossed his mind, he moved, almost as if he’d been pushed to.  As the others talked, Duncan walked around the perimeter of the room.  He split his attention between checking on his charges and keeping an eye out for Sylvester.

East of the building-in-construction, there was a sprawl of streets.  He could see Corinth Crown, and the various burned buildings.

“Emmett,” Abby said.  “Where is Quinton?”

“The ground level,” Emmett said.

“They knocked down the scaffolding,” Abby said.  “More things could fall down.  If Quinton is down there, he could get hurt!”

“I put a shelter up with the fallen scaffolding.”

“That’s not good enough!” Abby said.

“Abby,” Duncan said.  “Calm down.  We need to focus on the mission.”

“No,” Abby said, turning on him.  “You said.  It was a rule.  We all make it out of this okay.”

Duncan repressed his frustration.  Why did this all have to be so hard?

“We as in each of you, me, the Lambs,” Duncan said.  He was going to say more, but changed tacks as he saw Abby’s expression change, “Emmett says Quinton will be fine.  He’ll be fine.”

“He’ll be safe,” Emmett said.  “We couldn’t have him up here where there might be fighting.”

Abby tensed, head to toe.  Her features were funny, as if drawn by an artist who didn’t quite have a strong grasp of human proportions, or who had drawn every part of her face in isolation from the rest.  Normally he found himself looking past it, but when she was emotional and took on an expression he wasn’t used to, it snapped him back to reality.

The fact that she didn’t have much going on that was particularly unique or special made it all the easier to forget that she was an experiment.

“He’ll be safe,” Emmett said.

Duncan walked around to the south-facing window.  He could see the lake.  No sign of Sylvester lurking just to either side of the window, as he checked.

Sylvester would be listening in.

“Putting Quinton aside for the moment, I have poison,” Lillian said.  “It wouldn’t be hard to distribute it as a gas.”

“No,” Lacey said.

“I know it’s a no,” Lillian said, testy.  “Let me finish talking before you cut me off.  I’m brainstorming.”

Lacey remained silent.

Duncan took note of Emmett and the twins as he walked over to the east side of the building.  Emmett seemed to fit into things well, but while he was sharp and his memory had apparently given the Lambs something to use to manipulate Sylvester, Duncan worried about his long-term prospects with the group.  More than he worried about Abby’s, odd as it was.

The twins… Duncan took note of how they were standing.  Abby stood close to one.  Ashton stood close to the other.  A fair distance separated them.

Never once had he seen them together and not hand-in-hand or otherwise being close.  Each time they’d hit a city, the twins would be split between the Lambs and his group.  Every time they decided Sylvester wasn’t around and rendezvoused, the two girls would pull together as if they had magnets embedded in their chemistry.

He had been warned to avoid naming them, to avoid encouraging individualism.  Part of their language understanding was instinctive, but part of it wasn’t.  The pair of experiments were two test runs in one, which made project tracking difficult.  They were supposed to see if warbeasts couldn’t be raised with a human core and metamorphose into their combat-ready state at a later stage, to pick up more understanding of norms and niceties, more loyalty to their handlers, and more base intelligence.  That was the first test at hand.

The second was to ensure that they remained stable as a unit.  If they became independent and weren’t able to regularly communicate for long enough, then the less instinctive part of how they buzzed between one another risked becoming incoherent, one not being able to communicate to the other.

There were a lot of ways that project could fail.  Losing the ability to speak, deformations, a failed metamorphosis, breaking apart, becoming dangerous to their handlers, swinging too far one way or the other on the fear scale.  The original plan had been to raise them in complete isolation from the world.  Subsequent generations would have been eased into a wider exposure, refined in structure and development.

Closer to the stairs, Mary moved to throw a knife.  Emmett, relieved of his piece of metal, held up a hand for her to stop.  He picked up a stone from a pile of stones for construction, and hurled it down into the smokey oblivion.  From the other side of the room, Duncan could hear the impact.

“Save your knives,” Emmett said.

Mary gave him a nod.

If Duncan’s suspicions were right, the twins’ project would refined up until another war or crisis stirred, and then would be deemed ‘done’.  The experiments would be shown off to the higher-ups with a great deal of flourish and a whole unit ready to deploy to various points.

It was a good, ambitious, and very fragile project, and Hayle had made a good enough offer to convince the professors that were working on it to break from their plan.

Was this, the twins standing ten feet apart from one another, a sign of the first crack that would eventually see the crystal-fine structure shatter?

If this didn’t resolve by the mission’s end or have a simpler explanation, he would have to report it, the experiments would be sent in, and would either be secluded ad infinitum or recycled.

He didn’t like doing that, but not reporting it would be letting the project fail in another way, and that would be failing in his duties.

“If he isn’t-” Lacey said.

“I know,” Lillian retorted.  “I know.  He’s got all of Neller’s signs.  He’s a junkie.  One good hit of poison might be the push that makes his systems crumble and fail.  But it’s a tool we can use in other ways.”

“Okay.  Just don’t get those children killed because you want a swift resolution.”

“I wouldn’t,” Lillian said, firm.  “Ever.”

The discord, again.  The gaps between individual members of the group.  The original Lambs had worked so well together that it was now a detriment, something that pulled at them instead of pushed them together.  Memories.

Would he have to report this too?  Lillian wouldn’t want him to.  She would call it a betrayal.  But letting this continue… it wasn’t good as a project or enterprise.

He was in the middle of trying to think about what to do or say about it when he realized he had been staring out the west-facing window for nearly a minute without registering what he was seeing.  The window was open, to allow for air to flow into the building, or to allow the smoke to flow out.

He turned his head to the left, looking to the side of the window, and saw Sylvester leaning against the wall there, Quinton in his arms.

Sylvester turned his head to look at Duncan.

Something in Sylvester’s expression, it really bothered Duncan.  Condescension.  As if Sylvester was the most critical of teachers and Duncan was failing his class.  No lessons had been taught, no message conveyed, no syllabus outlined on a blackboard.  Yet this teacher, shorter than him, wild-haired, sneering, and surprisingly vicious when he wanted to be, was looking down on him.

I never liked you and you never liked me.

“Why don’t you come inside?”

“Mary will throw things at me.  Lillian will try to stab me.”

“You kind of deserve it,” Duncan said.

The conversation in the room had died at the sound of Duncan’s voice.  Heads had turned.  Only Mary and Emmett were fixated on the stairwell where the Devil was.

“And you have a hostage,” Duncan said.

“Mary can hit me with a knife without hitting the hostage,” Sylvester said.  “Nice try.  Also… take a look.”

Duncan followed Sylvester’s line of sight.

There was traffic.  Horses, carriages, all painted with white, blue, and gold.  Duncan didn’t need to read the words stenciled on the sides to grasp who and what they were.  The warbeasts that ran alongside the carriages, uniform in aesthetic and proportion, were pretty clear indicators on their own.

Duncan turned away from the window.  As he passed Abby, he put a hand on her shoulder, “Sylvester has Quinton.”

“Is that good?” Abby asked.  “Is that bad?”

“Good,” Mary said, her voice overlapping with Duncan’s for a moment as he launched into his speech.

“The Devil’s reinforcements are here.  It looks like a share of the Crown police.”

“He really does have everything under his thumb,” Lillian said.  She paused.  “This is what Sylvester was talking about.  The present, to better convince the Academy the Lambs are constructive even if we aren’t catching him.  The Devil, this city.  Uncovered corruption.”

“You realize,” Duncan said, “That if we let him do this, he can hold it over our heads?  That he could later tell the Academy that it was him who uncovered the situation and set this up?”

“We were the ones that cornered the Devil,” Mary said.  “Cut away his lieutenants and key assets.  Sylvester only ignited the situation and did the initial damage.”

“I’m offended!” Sylvester called out.

“Good!” Lillian retorted.

Sylvester laughed, a genuine, real sound.  Duncan could see the reactions on the faces of each of the others.  Fear, for Nora and Lara.  Suspicion, for Lacey.  Both Helen and Ashton smiled, Helen as if the moment had made her day, Ashton as if privately, to himself.  Mary and Lillian managed to look properly annoyed.  Abby- she was receptive to the moods of others.  She didn’t smile, but she looked less anxious in the moment.

In that stupid, simple exchange, two and a half words on Sylvester’s part, one word on Lillian’s, a laugh, and the changes in expressions, an idea crystallized for Duncan.  He made sense of something that he hadn’t fully wrapped his head around before.

Duncan had always prided himself on being a politician.  Around the time he’d started with the Academy, he realized the little lessons his parents had been instilling in him all along, about who to befriend, the families those people belonged to, or the connections they might open up, and he had started to talk to his parents about how to move, what to do.  Many times he saw his father, nowadays, a third to a half of what they talked about was strategy.  Sometimes his, sometimes his father recounted moves of recent days and weeks, and sometimes they talked about the family, how they could work in concert or do each other favors.

Befriending Lillian had been a move.  Being invited to this project had been a consequence of that move.  That he wasn’t sure it would work out wasn’t a good thing, but that wasn’t a fault of the move or the consequence of the move.  He’d had small and large successes buying his way into the good graces of innumerable departments and players on campus.  He’d made enemies too, but he was very, very happy with the balance of friends to enemies that he’d wrought.

Hearing Sylvester trade jibes with Lillian, seeing the way she had tried to stab him, knowing that she’d gone on dates with other boys in the time between Sylvester running and the start of their hunting him, Duncan still had little doubt she cared for him.

He didn’t want to call Sylvester his inverse.  Yes, Sylvester focused more on the short-term over Duncan’s long-term.  Yes, Sylvester was a bastard to everyone around him and somehow they liked him, while Duncan tried to help people wherever he could and seemed to fight an uphill battle.  That wasn’t it.

It wasn’t even that Duncan was investing in things that would see returns in five, ten, or twenty years, from his education to earning the goodwill of people who could well be his colleagues in the future, while Sylvester was reckless and vindictively poisoned or burned everything he touched because he didn’t have five, ten, or twenty years.

No.  He didn’t want to focus on that flipped-around perception because they were really very similar in what they did.  Duncan and Sylvester both manipulated.  They played a game.

But where Duncan played his game by reaching out, taking hold of the key piece, and moving it, tracking where everything was and what he had in stock, Sylvester was immersed in the game, standing in the midst of the board.

He was in the midst of this.

The process of grasping that idea was encapsulated in just a moment, but something clicked, and Duncan wasn’t sure how to use it, or if he even should.

“Come out of hiding, Sylvester,” Mary said.  “I don’t want to talk to you through a wall.”

“I notice that instruction didn’t come with promises you wouldn’t throw things at me.”

“I promise,” Mary said.

Sylvester stepped around the corner.  He carried Quinton, swaddled in a dark green sackcloth, the lamb’s chin resting on Sylvester’s shoulder.  He took in the room full of people.

Mary whipped her hand at him.  Sylvester didn’t flinch.  She held the knife, but she hadn’t actually thrown it.

“Ha,” he said.  “So cruel.  You almost woke Quinton, here.”

“I’m tempted,” she said.  “You shot me.”

“I do feel bad about that.”

“But for now, we need to figure out what to do about the reinforcements,” Mary said.

“Let them come,” Sylvester said.

“Play into our enemy’s hand?” Lillian asked.

Duncan didn’t know what to say.  He wasn’t a strategist on this level.  He didn’t have experience.  He’d never felt more out of his depth than in moments like this.  With his own team, it wasn’t so bad, but with the Lambs gathered, talking as if they could finish each other’s sentences, he felt paralyzed.

“We still need to get the Devil,” Mary said.  “He’s apparently happy to wait down there.  The police will arrive, they’ll come up the scaffolding that’s still intact, they’ll corner us, and that’s not a force we can overcome.”

“We could burn them out,” Helen said.

“We risk killing the Devil, at which point the hostages are doomed.  The headmaster’s children, at the very least,” Lillian said.

“He’s really very patient, for a rage-driven, drug-fueled lunatic,” Sylvester said.  “He’ll pick his moment soon.”

Emmet hurled some stones down the stairs at others who had rustled the bodies.  He ducked as men with guns opened fire.  Some wilder shots hit the underside of the floor but didn’t penetrate it.

The Devil could be heard speaking, his voice muffled.

Duncan felt detached, unable to do much.  Doing his best to wrangle that feeling, he made himself move, and approached Sylvester.

“What I’m saying is simple.  Let them come.  Destroy the reinforcements,” Sylvester said.  He stopped as Duncan drew nearer.  “Hello, Duncan.  Yes, I know you’re very happy to have me back, but the hugs will have to wait for later.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” Helen said.  Sylvester shot her a smile.

Duncan reached out, not for Sylvester but for Quinton.

“Oh.  That.  Nothing up your sleeve, Dunc?  No needles in your arms or other tricks?”

Really not in the mood for games, Duncan shook his head, unsmiling.

Sylvester helped transfer Quinton over to Duncan’s arms.  The damned animal bleated as it stirred away.   Duncan turned away, and carried the lamb over to Abby.  He had to kneel to deposit it by her.

He was used to her smile, at least.  She’d been smiling ever since the blighted creature had been left for them to collect.

“What was I saying?  Leave him with nothing.  You’ve already been working toward that, taking out his lieutenants.”

“My poison?” Lillian asked.

“That’s one way.  I was thinking… something a little more traditional.”

“You have something in mind?” Lillian asked, curt.  “Then stop bragging about how smart you are and make it happen.”

“Emmett,” Sylvester said.  “Mary, you too.  We could use Nora.  And Duncan…”

Sylvester looked at Duncan, kneeling by a smiling Abby and the Lamb.

“…Good where you are.  We’re good with just us three.  Rest of you, hold down the fort.  Almost literally, now that I think about it.”

Condescension?  Still there.  Duncan shrugged it off, and turned his focus to the stairway, which no longer had Emmett and Mary to guard it.

Lillian and Helen drew nearer.

Duncan drew the gun he had confiscated from Maurice and Noreen, and moved closer to the window, watching the approach.  They were only a block away.  Men were already getting out of the carriages, jogging alongside as the carriages slowed.

There were bystanders, and the police stopped to talk to them.  Bystanders pointed, talking, no doubt sharing how some of the scaffolding had fallen, while commenting on gunshots and the various dead bodies that now were arrayed around the scaffold and on the ground below.

Ashton approached.  He peered over the windowsill.

“What do you think?” Duncan asked.

“I’m spent,” Ashton said.

“What’s going on with Nora and Lara?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Duncan said.  “You did a good job.”

“I wouldn’t be so spent if I wasn’t helping them all the time.”

“I know.  But they need it, for now.”

“They’re getting close.”

“I know,” Duncan said.  He raised his hand to get Lillian’s attention, then signaled.

Threat.  Here.

“Ready?” Lillian asked.

“They’re not,” Lara said.

Lillian made a face, glanced up, and then looked at Duncan.  “Don’t look.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow, then turned his back to her.

“Lacey, would you give me a hand?   There.  That is not clearance to look, Duncan.”

He didn’t react.  There had to be sixty men out there, with four warbeasts.  They were just now approaching the door.

“They’re at the door.  Whatever Sylvester did to bar it, they’re about to undo that.”

“Damn it.  Okay.  You can look,” Lillian said, before turning to Lacey again.  “Near the elbow, solid, you can feel it.  It’s a pocket.  A little higher.”

Lacey had a paper packet in hand, sticking out between two fingers as she used two hands to free something from Lillian’s sleeve.  Duncan recognized the packet, in a general sense.  A measured dosage of one drug or another.  The name of it would be printed on it.

Lacey didn’t even ask.  She tore off the top of the packet, unscrewed the canister, and deposited the packet’s contents within.  She replaced the top, shook it, and then handed it back to Lillian.

“Perfect.”

Lillian went to the window, pulled a pin, and tossed the grenade in the direction of the front door.

“That buys us a minute, and not much longer.  At least it’ll make it burn to touch the door, and that will stop them.”

“No,” Ashton said, staring out the window.

Duncan peeked.

The scaffolding was shaking.

Duncan signaled.  Enemy.  Up.

He wished he knew the more nuanced signs.  He’d studied them, but the only one he’d had available to practice with was Ashton, and Ashton wasn’t that much more experienced.

A pair of individuals tried to bolt for the top of the stairs, while the distraction was occurring outside.  They didn’t make it.  When Mary had set the knives into the floor, she had done it in a way that let some of the threads cross over top of the stairway.  The men made it partway, then hit the heads, shoulders, and caught body parts on the wire.  They swore, backed off a bit, and then pointed guns, opening fire.  Helen and Lillian moved away from the opening in the floor.

Not caring so much about conserving ammunition.  The Devil knew this was the final move.

“Thirty seconds,” Lillian observed.  “That was a small canister of gas.”

“Stand back,” Ashton said.  “I’ll try to do what I can here.  Even if I’m spent.”

Duncan nodded.  He retreated from Ashton, putting himself with Lara and Abby.

“Twenty seconds,” Lillian said.  After a few moments, she said, “Fifteen.”

Another person made their way up to the top of the stairs.  He moved in a strange way, thrusting himself into the wires, arms limp at his sides.  Drugged?

They were coming up the scaffolding.  Duncan put himself closer to Lacey and Helen, ready to shoot if he had to.

“Still not a fan of going up high,” he said.  Leaves us with nowhere to go.

A man appeared on the scaffolding, visible from the window, and Duncan aimed, then fired.

He didn’t know if he hit the man or if the man had fast reflexes.  It only occurred to Duncan a moment later that the man had been wearing a uniform of the Crown Police.  This could all go so bad so quickly, if they didn’t massage the aftermath.

Duncan’s target peeked around the corner, pulled back before Duncan could pull the trigger.  He could see people on the ground, organizing, pointing.

“Get away from the walls!” Lara said.

The building shuddered, a rumble that fed into more rumbles.  Instinctively, he stepped back and away from the window.

He saw the dust and the first of the falling stones, then the cascading tumble of wood and stone.

Sylvester, Mary and Emmett had aimed the worst of it at the west side of the building, where the forces were greatest.  There had been a sixty men out there, and now there were forty or so.  The vast majority of those were close to the building, positioned just right to get caught in the urban avalanche.

With that tumble of wall and building material atop one side of the scaffolding, the vast majority of the scaffold came down, peeling away, collapsing, or tipping over.

Did Sylvester think about the fact that those police likely had families?  That some might have been forced into this, or ignorant?  When Duncan stepped closer to the window to look, he looked with an eye for how many were moving, struggling in the midst of the scattered rubble and how many were utterly still.

“Stairs,” Lara said, very quickly.

He turned back, looking.

The man who he’d seen pressing against the wire had taken things a step further.  The wire bit straight to bone, and some of the knives had come free of the floor.  There was a reason the man had been limp, a reason he had so mindlessly thrust himself into the wire.

He was already unconscious, for one, if not dead, and his body was being pushed.

The Devil shoved the body up and into the wire, and another came free.  The human shield had cleared most the way, and with a sweep of his arm and a slash of a long, heavy knife, Devil was able to clear the rest.  He stepped up into the room, near the east wall.  He tossed the human shield aside.

“The headmaster,” Lillian said.

Don’t talk to him.  Don’t draw his attention.

Helen was the one who did it instead.  She threw herself at the Devil, and he was quick to respond, slashing.  She seized the Devil’s knife arm with the hand that hadn’t been slashed.

He bodily slammed her into the wall.  Helen didn’t let go, but smiled.  She extended a leg, trying to hook it around his, and he slammed her into the wall again.

Some of the loose material from up above clattered as it dropped down.

“Let go,” he said.

That look in Helen’s eyes.  It called back to what he’d thought about how much scarier she was these days.  Would he be able to put his finger on it if he was in the midst of things, like Sylvester?

Duncan winced as the Devil bodily slammed Helen into the wall again, to keep her from getting too good a grip on him.

Lillian charged the Devil, threw a punch, right for the kidney.  But the man had seen her coming, and was already twisting.  He struck her with Helen’s swinging body, before anything could connect.  Lillian managed to scramble back before he swung a punch of his own.

Instinctively, Duncan raised his gun, pointing it at the man.

“Shoot, boy.  Risk killing me.  Kill all of those children,” the Devil said.  “Would your Sylvester forgive you?”

“I don’t give a damn about Sylvester,” Duncan said.

The Devil moved his wrist, with Helen dangling off of it.  Helen seized the opportunity to get a grip on the Devil’s forearm.  She was being held so she blocked Duncan’s shot.

“But you give a damn about her.  And about the children,” the Devil growled.  “No.  You don’t look like that confident a shot.”

Reaching behind his back, he drew a knife.

As he slashed for Helen’s wrists, she dropped away before it could cut through them.  He kicked and she stumbled back.

He kicked her, hard enough to send her flying out past the missing piece of wall at the side of the building, and over the edge.

Duncan aimed for the Devil’s leg and he fired.

The man barely flinched.  He didn’t even seem to slow down.  No, if anything, he seemed to pick up steam, moving toward the little ones, with scarcely a limp.

Toward Ashton, Abby, and Lara, who had clustered together with Quinton.

Knives appeared in the midst of his shoulders, his buttocks, and the backs of his legs, one a second.  Duncan turned to see Emmett and Mary at the top of the stairs with Sylvester.  Mary was throwing, and Sylvester looked like he’d thrown one too.

The Devil clearly didn’t feel pain, but his functioning did suffer.  He stumbled, and he lost his knives along the way, as knives struck hands and as he jerked in response to a well-placed hit at his shoulder.  He practically fell atop the trio.

One of his hands seized Lara by the face.  Lara, because she was the most afraid, and he preyed on fear.  As a large man, musclebound, monstrous, he crawled forward with an eerie tenacity, clearly aiming to go over the edge of the building, to jump down to the ground below, where the remaining Crown police would be picking themselves up off the ground.

As he crawled, he dragged Lara a few feet, then put immense weight on her face and head, almost ignoring the fact she existed.  Her sleeves turned crimson as she reached up to claw at his forearms, frantically scrabbling to do enough damage that he might let go.

Duncan didn’t trust his aim.  Mary was doing what she could, putting knives in key areas, each throw having a measurable effect, slowing him, but not quite keeping him from moving.

She put two knives in the base of his spine as he shifted position, and he sagged, the use of his legs clearly gone.  But then he hauled himself forward.

She didn’t want to kill the man.  Killing him meant others died.

But leaving him alive meant he could, fueled by drugs and fury, make it those two feet to the edge, tumble over, and take Lara with him.  They would land amid rubble and the officers still waiting outside.  If those officers were in his pocket, which they so clearly were, then they would give him care and he could do whatever he wanted to Lara.  He would win.

Ashton looked to Duncan, of all people, for answers, and Duncan didn’t have any.

He’d always gotten along with Ashton best.

Mary and Sylvester were crossing the room at a run.  Emmett was a few steps behind.

But it was Nora who moved the fastest, crossing the floor to throw herself at the Devil.  He held Lara with his left hand, and Nora attacked his right, furious, mad, with no strategy or direction except the intent to use every natural weapon available to her to lash out and do as much damage to him as possible.

The twins were supposed to have a ‘cornered rat’ reflex.  It wasn’t, however, supposed to extend to situations where the other was cornered.

The onslaught bought some time, if only partially because of the damage done, partially because of the fact that he saw more prey and instinctively reached for it, slowing his advance.

Mary appeared on his back, grabbing one of the knives that had embedded into his shoulder, and adjusting it.  He fell onto one side, narrowly missing falling atop Lara and crushing her under his mass.

What ensued wasn’t pretty, or graceful.  Two experiments clawing at the man desperately, Mary moving her knives to sever nerves while trying not to spill too much blood.

Somewhere, and there wasn’t a pretty or easily defined point in the midst of it, the Devil lost the fight.  Lara and Nora saw the opportunity and backed away, both trembling and streaked with blood, eyes wide.  Mary straddled the Devil’s chest, taking another few moments to sever key nerves and make sure he was no longer a threat.

Duncan went to his charges, to Nora and Lara first, slowing down as he approached them, in case their reflexive self-defense was still in effect.  He dropped to one knee in front of them.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

Nora shook her head.  Lara nodded, touching her face.

“Okay,” Duncan said.  He looked over his shoulder, at Emmett, who was guarding the stairs, at Ashton, and Lacey, and at Lillian, who looked almost defeated.

Lillian wasn’t meant for this.  She’d used the sleeves to fight, but she hadn’t fought monsters with them.  They were a meager substitute for being made for the task of hunting and killing monsters.

Sylvester, apparently, had found the opportunity to duck away.

Duncan gave Lara’s face a quick examination, checking that the skull was intact, checking her jaw, the rigidity of her neck.  She submitted to the exam.

“Eyes functioning?  Problems?”

“Buzzy head,” she said.  “I got the sun in my eyes.”

“Okay,” he said.  He put his hand on her head.  “Whatever your disagreement was, put it aside.  Nora, look after Lara.  Lara, look after Nora.  Checkup later, for your head.”

They both gave him blank stares, but then Nora nodded.

Helen.  Helen was so often the afterthought, the exception, the one that was hard to include in summaries.  Duncan rose to his feet, approaching the wall that Helen had been kicked off of.  He was cautious as he drew nearer.

There were officers down there, many of them dusty, some bloody.  One had a gun out, pointing in Duncan’s general direction.  Another had a hand on that man’s wrist, as if to hold him back.

The fight at the edge of the wall, it saw Mary over the Devil, the Devil’s head and shoulders at the edge, now.    The Crown Police could see him, and they could see Mary.

Gathering what little confidence he had, Duncan drew closer to the edge.  There, he could see how the rubble from the fallen wall and scaffolding had barred the front door even further.

There were bodies there.  The door had been opened and some of the Devil’s men had been making their way out.

He could also see Helen.  She dangled from the edge.  She’d grabbed the edge as she went over, and she was still there.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello, Helen,” Duncan said, still eyeing the police and the warbeasts on the ground.

“Help, pretty please?  I took a bad cut to my left hand, and it doesn’t grab things anymore.”

“Easily fixed,” Duncan said.  He crouched down, one hand on the wall, and reached down to grab the wrist of the hand that was holding the ledge.  She let go and her fingers snapped around his wrist.

She was surprisingly light as he hauled her up and back onto the second floor.

“Thank you kindly,” Helen said, before bending over to give him a kiss on the cheek.

Somehow not as threatening as usual.

Helen went straight to Lillian and Lacey for her medical care.

There was still so much dust in the air, and so much left undone. The police out there, the Devil, Sylvester…  Duncan looked over at the Devil and Mary.

“He’s not going to talk,” Mary said, “And he’s too big to move.”

“Ashton can handle it,” Duncan said.  “Emmett, come help.”

With Emmett’s help, soon joined by Lacey, who had to feel useless and dazed in this situation, Duncan dragged the Devil away from the edge and closer to the center of the room.

“Direct dose,” Duncan said, to Ashton.  “I know you’re spent, but we need something.”

Ashton nodded.  “You can always dig just a little bit deeper.”

Then he put one hand on the Devil’s chin and leaned over, face drawing closer.

“Ashton,” Lacey said.  “Do not kiss that man.  You don’t know where he’s been.”

Ashton paused.

“Nose,” Duncan said.  “And use your hand to funnel it.”

Ashton cupped his hand to form a circle, pressed it over the Devil’s nose, and then blew hard into it.

It would take a minute.

“I’m sorry we were late,” Mary said.  “We didn’t think it would get quite this bad this fast.  I thought my wires were good enough.”

“They were good.  He used a human shield,” Duncan said.  “Brute forced his way through.”

Mary frowned.  Even faced with a perfectly reasonable countermeasure, she still acted like it was a failure on her end.

“We were taking a minute to set up our escape route.  We have a way out of the building,” Mary said.  “One Sylvester has no doubt already used.”

Duncan nodded.

He stood, backing away from the scene, coming to stand by Lillian and Helen.  Abby had Quinton, which was mostly what she needed.  Nora had Lara and Lara had Nora.  Ashton had a task to do.

“Did you get hurt?” he asked Lillian.

“No.  Only my pride.”

“You did better than I did,” he said.

She didn’t argue.  She didn’t agree, either.

Instead, she approached the Devil, who was starting to slur out words in the rambling fashion that went hand in hand with having his inhibitions lowered and being beset with the compulsion to talk.

There was only Helen.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She showed him her bandaged hand.  “Only need a little bit of surgery.  Lillian can do that when we have ten minutes free.”

He nodded.

Having been through this brief, ugly, messy skirmish, he was concerned about where things stood.  He wasn’t very strong or skilled or useful in any capacity except for medicine, and Lillian and Lacey had that handled.

He didn’t want to be as disconnected.  Just moving the pieces and allocating resources.

He definitely didn’t want to be Sylvester, either.

But drawing a little closer, exposing himself to more risk, if it helped others, he could do that.

“But are you okay?” he asked, venturing, ready to be laughed at, teased, and mocked.  “You seem scarier lately.  I know Ibbot has everything handled, but…”

“He doesn’t have everything handled,” Helen said.

“Oh,” Duncan said.  He wasn’t sure what to say.  It was maybe the worst thing she could have said, and he wasn’t sure what to say that wouldn’t be trying to gainsay one of the more talented Professors in the Crown States.

“I heard you talking to the twins.  I saw what you did for Abby.  You’re doing something different.”

“I don’t know,” Duncan said.

He felt so dumb sometimes.

“Just…” he ventured.  “Bedside manner, I guess.”

“Well, thank you,” Helen said, leaning against the wall beside him, watching the ongoing struggle with the devil, hands clasped in front of her.  “Thank you for asking that.”

“Sure,” he said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.10 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.10 (Lamb)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I am a young lady of Mothmont, I am an exemplary killer.  I am a step above.

With the Lambs at my back, I can handle anything this world might throw at me.

Mary stared down into the eyes of the Devil.

I win.

“I used to be a businessman,” the Devil said.  “I used to be one of the best.  Chemicals were my stock in trade.  Chemicals and drugs.  When war happens, the demand goes up.  Both for the people on the ground and for the soldiers.  Sometimes I sold to both sides.  Sometimes one.”

His laugh bubbled out through his lips.  His eyes were unfocused.  Mary, straddling his chest, could feel his breaths.  He was slowing down.

The blood loss was catching up with him.  The laugh was delirious, and it seemed to take something out of him, because he was less as the laugh concluded.

“I thought I was ethical,” the Devil said.  He chuckled to himself.

His eyes weren’t focusing on her.  They weren’t focusing on anything much, now.  His bare chest rose and fell against her thighs.  That monstrous, tenacious strength was trickling out of him now.

The toes of each of her feet were propped against the ground, her stomach was tense.  She was very aware of where her body was, and the mental exercises she’d done outlined exactly how and where she needed to move if she needed to spring off him in any direction.

“I was a businessman,” he said.

“He’s repeating himself,” Lillian said.  “And Sylvester is putting distance between himself and us as we speak.  We got what we need.  We know where to go to rescue the hostages.”

“The escape route is upstairs,” Mary said.  “Go.  I’ll be right behind you, after I clean this up.  Show them, Emmett.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t take too long,” Lillian said.

Mary nodded.

“I was a businessman,” the Devil said.  “Then a warmonger.  I couldn’t do business without war to push it forward.  I diminished.  I made myself stronger, smarter, sharper.”

Mary stared down at him.  The others ascended the stairs to head further up the building.

The Devil rambled.  Was his life flashing before his eyes?  The individual scenes spilling out of his mouth as they flickered in his mind?

“I don’t care about any of that,” Mary said.  “But I know you’re the kind of man who likes to keep a card up his sleeve.  You’d keep a secret, another dead man’s switch that you didn’t even tell people about, to ensure that we pay in some fashion for winning.”

The Devil stopped his rambling.  His eyes rolled up into his head, then lolled over to one side.  He chuckled weakly.

“You’re thinking about it now,” Mary said.  “You can barely contain your glee.”

That prompted another weak chuckle.  As his life leaked away, this massive figure was starting to seem more like a child.

“The letters,” the Devil said.  “If I don’t send out the letters, then the house…”

He chuckled.

Mary slapped him.  He didn’t seem to feel it.

“If you don’t send the letters, then the house?”

“The house of cards.  I might lose, but nobody wins.”

Taking a cue from the Academy, are we? Mary thought.

“Those letters, those letters,” Mary said.  “Tell me about the letters.”

“I don’t want to tell you,” he said.  He almost sounded like he was regressing in age, his tone becoming more infantile.  Ashton’s influence would be part of that.  So would the drugs he’d taken.  “I want to keep it a seee-cret.”

“Such a good secret,” Mary said.  “You could rub it in my face.  You’re dying, Mr. Devil.  You’re dying, John Colby.  Soon the lights will go out.”

He blinked, as if trying to regain some measure of focus.

“You’re dying,” she hammered him with it.  She had to push herself to be less of a Lamb, more of the Lady.  It was like an old set of clothing that she was putting on after many, many months, and she was surprised it still fit, that it was still easy to move around in.  More emotion in her voice, more vulnerability showing, less… combativeness.  She leaned forward over him, her forearms resting against his chest, hands at his collarbone, her hair hanging down around his face.

He winced at the movement of the hair.  He looked up and focused enough to see her face.  The eyes that were wide and pleading, not dangerous.

“A hint,” he said.  He chuckled.  “All the letters.  They’re people I have under my thumb.  People who worked for me, some corrupt people and some people I corrupted.  I knew they wouldn’t always side with me, so I prepared to destroy each and every one of them if they tried to cross me.  Blackmail, and drugs that only I can supply, because only I know what they are.  Now I die, and the house of cards, it all comes tumbling down.”

“Oh no!” Mary said, feigning upset.

“Oh, yes!” the Devil said, indulging in his victory.  “My pawns will spread the right information if they don’t hear from me, and other people will never get the information they need.  They’ll lose their minds, if they don’t die.  Important people.”

“Unless someone finds your paperwork.”

“They won’t.  They can’t.  The letters are in a safe and the safe is in my headquarters, which the little brat burned down.”

Mary nodded.  Corrupt officials, officials that had allowed themselves to be corrupt, and people who had conceded to work with this madman.

Would it really be a loss, if their lives were utterly destroyed and they were removed from the picture?

Lillian wouldn’t want to be quite so cutthroat, but there was a reason she had suggested that Lillian leave before initiating this line of questioning.  If there was nothing that could be done, then Lillian would be upset over nothing.  If there was an option, then she could tell Lillian after, and they would find a solution.

A cold part of her, deep inside, wondered how hard she wanted to dig to see if there was an option.

That part of her identified well with Sylvester, and the very reason it was as easily felt as it was likely because Sylvester was on her mind.  When they had been in Warrick, hunting the Baron, she had known that she was influencing Sylvester, and Sylvester influencing her.  They had, how had Sylvester and Nora put it?  They had danced, and they had ruthlessly danced over a number of people along the way.

That wasn’t exclusive to Warrick or that mission, either.  He had been an influence all along.

She had paid close attention to that from the beginning.  ‘The beginning’ being the day he’d arrived in her life and had informed her that Mr. Percy held the strings that controlled her.

She had been aware when Sylvester had relinquished his control, stepping back to let the other Lambs reach out to her.

Gordon had helped her feel like less of a puppet and more like a girl.

Lillian, though.  Lillian was her friend and her heart.  As a stand-in for her own heart, she often thought about what Lillian would want and do.

“Unrecoverable,” she said.

“Un-re-coverable,” the Devil said.  Then he smiled, “Nooo.  But they would have to dig all day and all night to get it.  When the seasons change and the mess gets cleared up, long after the damage has been done, they’ll find my cellar and the papers will tell of what’s inside.  The story will be told all over again, rubbing salt in wounds, give truth to sus-sus-”

He stopped.

“Suspicion.”

“Suspicion, yes.  And the name of the drug that I used to control Robert, John, James, William and-”

“They’ll find it where?”

“My headquarters.  I liked my headquarters.  Oh, my more timid self was so upset that it burned.  Book collections, tidbits and trinkets from his travels.  He would be so sad to know he died like this.  As the monster within.”

“Where is the headquarters?”

“The winery.  It-”

He stopped as she lowered her knife to his face and started cutting.

“Oh,” he said.

Was this you, Sylvester?  Did you anticipate this part of it?  The Devil’s schemes, the countless measures we’d have to take into account?

Why?  What are you planning?  How far does this scheme go?

Since the beginning, Sylvester had manipulated her.  He was kind about it, encouraging her to grow.  A part of her had craved more, because it was what she knew.  She had, in nascent adolescence, seeing him as a boy and herself as a girl, invited him into a closet while she’d been wearing only her underclothes, because she wanted him to pull her strings.  He had refused to, in the end.

She was better for it, she knew.  But now things had turned around.  Sylvester was on the other side, and the manipulations were revolving around her in the form of Devils and children and a city turned upside-down.

She finished cutting, and she peeled the skin of the Devil’s face away.

The blood loss from that was enough that he was barely there by the time she was done.  She doubted he was capable of seeing anything, let alone focusing on anything.  With a flick of the knife, she severed the man’s jugular, then sprang to her feet.

As she made her way up the stairs, she folded the bloody mask, placed it between two pieces of paper and then put it into a small scroll case, tucking the case into a belt at her thigh.

Only a few of the Lambs were still at the top floor.  As Mary arrived, Emmett put the scrap of cloth over top of the rope and jumped, sliding over and down to the next building.

Only Lillian and Lara remained.

“Can I stay?” Lara asked.  “I can hide.  I’ll catch up with you after.  Or you can come back for me.  The police will have left.”

“No, honey,” Lillian said.  She spotted Mary, then returned her focus to Lara.  “If you stay, you’ll spend the entire time scared and upset you aren’t with us.”

Lara stood there, anxiously processing, trying to figure out a way.  Blood had soaked through much of her clothes.  Luckily, little to none of it was hers.

“There’s less fear this way,” Lillian said.  “It’s even kind of fun, but I understand if a fear of high places is one of your innate fears, but like the other innate fears, you have to fight past them sometimes.  Like when you and Nora fought back.”

“It’s not that,” Lara said.  She looked up, then winced as she got some sun in her eyes.  “It’s not one of my innate fears.  It’s a normal fear.  That’s why I don’t want to jump.  Because I might get used to it.  Then it won’t be a normal fear anymore.”

“You want to be afraid?” Lillian asked.

“Yes.  Sometimes.  To feel what others feel.”

Lillian looked at Mary, helpless.

“Go,” Mary said.  “We need to keep moving, and if the Crown police come around to look in this direction…”

She leaned over the edge.  It looked like the rubble of the fallen scaffolding had left relatively few people on the ground over here.  None were really looking up.

“Or if more come, they might see us.”

“We’ve been timing how we go over, so they’re less likely to spot us,” Lillian said.  “You’ll bring Lara?”

“Of course.”

Lillian nodded.

Mary took on the responsibility of checking to see if anyone was looking up as Lillian got her braided scrap of cloth out and put it over the top of the rope.

“Go.”

Lillian slid down and over along the rope-line.

Mary turned to Lara.  Lara flinched, backing away.

“You’re going to grab me and force me to go,” Lara said.  “Except I might claw at you.”

“I won’t,” Mary said.

Lara looked skeptical.

“Did you know, once upon a time, I hoped to become a teacher?”

“A teacher?”

“I would have trained the next generation of the puppeteer’s clones, I would have educated and instructed them, so they could be more effective tools.”

Lara nodded.  “Then you joined the Lambs.”

“I’ve been teaching Lillian things.  I’ve talked to Nora, too.”

“She told me.  She transcribed some.  But she didn’t always transcribe all of it, and I think that’s part of why she’s becoming different.”

“One day, when things are quieter, I’ll sit you both down and go over everything.  We’ll learn some self defense, we can talk about your philosophies and about mine, and I think you’ll both end up on the same page in the long run.”

Lara looked a little less unhappy at that idea.

“For now, let’s talk about fear.  You want to hold on to fear to feel more like a human?”

Lara nodded.  She was paying attention now.

“If you want to experience human fear, then you should experience overcoming it.  What it feels like after.”

“I dunno.”

“There will be more things to be afraid of in the future.  I’ll make you a promise.  Come over with me, and we’ll make it our own mutual mission to find something else that scares you.”

“I don’t know if there is one,” Lara said.

Mary bent down, and she picked up Lara, who didn’t resist.  “I guarantee there’s something.  It’s a spooky world out there.”

“Very spooky,” Lara said, and that seemed to be the admission that helped her make the leap.  She wrapped her arms and legs around Mary.  Mary could feel the claws and the spikes and blades within Lara’s shoulders that still hadn’t completely receded from her assault on the Devil.

The edges pressing against her skin, some even lightly piercing or scratching it, reminded her of her early childhood, working with Percy on her concealed carry of knives, poisons, and tools, figuring out where everything went so it would be comfortable and available.

Nostalgic.  She felt a twinge of fondness for Lara, in the wake of it.  An odd choice for a little sister.

Mary put the cloth Lillian had provided over top of the rope, checked the coast was clear, then stepped over the edge.

She dropped, hard, before the rope was taut enough, and then she moved at a diagonal, wind rushing against her face and through her hair while she felt the sensation of her stomach continuing to plummet to the ground.  They crossed the alley, then reached the rooftop on the other end.  Mary set her feet down, coming to a running stop.

She set Lara down.

“Bleeah,” Quinton greeted them.

“Yes.  Bleeaah.  Poor little Quinton,” Lara said, quiet.  She was shaking a little from the adrenaline.

“Poor Quinton?” Abby asked, sounding mildly alarmed.

“Having to spend so much time around Nora, without me near to make things better.  What a wretched few minutes that must have been.”

“The only wretched thing here is you,” Nora said.  “Look at you.  You have half the blood on your clothes that I do.  How hard did you really fight, coward weakling?”

“Hush, hush” Lillian said, intervening between the two, putting an oversized hand on each of their heads.  “Play after.  We still have to carry out our mission.”

“We’ve been talking while we wait,” Duncan told Mary. “The general feeling is that Sylvester isn’t going to have left yet.”

Mary nodded.

“We know about the orphanage.  Even if he is planning to run for it and leave this city, maybe he’ll still be getting ready to leave?”

“He’ll have packed things to be ready at any moment, if that’s the case,” Mary said.  Lillian and Helen nodded.

Duncan frowned.

“But he won’t have left yet,” Mary said.  “I think he’s still around.  He wants to tease us.  When he leaves, he’ll let us know where he’s going.”

Duncan nodded, “Alright.  Then the consensus was, if we wait too long, Sylvester is going to be too prepared.  It’s best to catch him off balance.  My group can split up, I’ll go get my dogs, we’ll each handle one of the gates, get them to call Hayle or something to give us some legitimacy, then my group will gather together after to figure out how to rescue the nanny.  Lacey can come with us, so she isn’t underfoot for you four.  The twins, Emmett, Abby, Lacey and I go, while you, Lillian, Ashton, and Helen go after Sy now.

“I can help with the nanny, I think,” Mary said.  She reached under her skirt for the scroll case and handed it over.  “Here.  A piece of the Devil.”

“A piece?” Duncan asked.  “Wait, I’m not sure I want the details… especially if it leads to me thinking about the size of that scroll case.”

“It’s recognizable,” Mary said.  “If they still balk, then tell them we know where the devil keeps his secrets and notes.  If they cooperate, secrets stay secret, and we’ll pass them the information the Devil has that they want to know.”

Duncan looked even less sure about his ability to handle things as she gave him the instructions, but he nodded.

“Ashton’s coming then,” Mary said.

“I’m mostly spent, but I’ll have one or two puffs ready soon,” Ashton said.  “And I want to see Sylvester.”

“And when Ashton says he wants something,” Duncan observed, dryly, “He really wants it quite a bit.”

Mary nodded.  The plan made a degree of sense.  They’d never really planned to use the new Lambs as anything but bait, not really.  The hope had been to flush Sylvester out of hiding and draw his interest.

“What about Emmett?” she asked.

“Emmett is new,” Lillian said.  “He doesn’t know all of the gestures, he might interrupt our flow.”

“Interrupting our flow against Sylvester is a good thing,” Mary said.  “It disrupts him too.”

“But,” Lillian said, “Remember that Sylvester could try getting the drop on Duncan or Lacey.  He might want to incapacitate us, remember?  To bog down the pursuit by making us drag someone with us.”

Mary frowned.

She liked Emmett.  Emmett did what he was supposed to, and he was disciplined on a level that extended to his whole personality.  He was the youngest, if the vat-grown weren’t counted, and yet he was amazingly mature.

She wanted to train him, to bring out the best he was capable of, and she suspected that the desire was at least partially informed by her experiences with Sylvester.  She didn’t know to what extent, or even how to draw the line between what part of it was what Percy had instilled in her in nurture and nature, and what part of it was Sylvester’s hand.

“Not Emmett, then,” Mary said.  “He can serve as a bodyguard.”

I’m not sure how effective a guard he’ll be for them.

“Ashton might throw Sy off,” Helen said.

“Ashton’s someone Sylvester got to know on some level,” Mary said.  “But I don’t want to stand around debating.  Every second we take is a second we’re giving him.”

“Good,” Lillian said.  “Let’s go.”

The groups separated.  They made their way down from the squat building to the road, and Duncan’s group headed northwards, while Mary led the group east, back toward the city center.

Just the Lambs, none of the last minute additions.  No Duncan, no Lacey.

She could still sense that general trap in operation around her.  A greater mechanism, the rows of buildings on either side of her like jaws of a blunted bear trap, waiting for her to step on the pressure plate.  People were potential landmines.  Sylvester’s allies, or manufactured enemies in service to the Devil.

She knew on a logical level that her knee had healed.  They’d given her the best doctors, and even had a few professors that hadn’t performed surgery in ages in the lab to offer counsel.  She should be as good as new, with no lasting damage, but she still felt the damage there.

We’re coming, Sylvester.

They made their way, jogging, checking constantly to make sure they wouldn’t get the attention of the local law, before Ashton pointed out a police wagon.  The back portion looked it was meant to hold warbeasts, with filthy blankets within.  The people who had manned it had no doubt headed to the tower.

Mary climbed up to the driver’s seat, while Helen and Lillian jumped on the sides.  Mary checked they had good handholds before getting the horses moving.

The cages had been covered with black cloth, and Helen and Lillian worked to drape the cloths, to better hide the ‘police’ markings that had been painted on the sides, as well as the crowns of gold and the stripes of blue that marked it as a police vehicle.

With only the black showing, the gold and blue mostly covered, it looked more funerary.  Mary intentionally took a route that would put them more out of sight, so they could lose the cages.

One by one, the cages were disconnected from the wagon, allowed to slide off the back and tumble into the street.

“Keep one,” Mary suggested.

“For Sylvester?” Lillian asked, and she laughed.

“No,” Helen said, before saying, “Careful.”

Lillian had to climb back out of the way to not be clipped by the last of the three cages.

“No need for cages,” Helen said.  “You have me.”

“We do,” Lillian said.  She fixed the cloth, then climbed over the divide to straddle the seat beside Mary.  She breathed out the words, “I have no idea what to feel right now.”

“I know what that’s like,” Ashton said.  “Try to pick a good feeling.”

“Mm,” Lillian made a sound.  “I want to slap him, as part of us summarily kicking his ass and wiping the smirk off his face.  Then call him names for about an hour.  While he’s gagged, and can’t say anything back.”

“I said a good feeling,” Ashton said.

“That is a good feeling, hon,” Lillian said.  She stroked Ashton’s head, careful not to mess with his hair.

“I want to see Jamie,” Ashton said.

“I agree,” Lillian said.  “But I can understand that you grew a great deal more attached to Jamie than any of us.”

“He was my first friend.  I wonder what he’s doing, and how Sylvester plans to use him.”

“He might not,” Helen said.  “He has to keep the act alive.”

“But he might,” Mary said.

Too many possibilities to cover.

Heads turned as the horse galloped, pulling them behind them.  The clip they were going was less sedate than was the norm, and Mary was young for a wagon driver.  Perhaps not so unusual in a city where farmer’s children might take on duties, but all put together, they were attention-grabbing, a curiosity.

That came second to the mission.  The hunt.

They were finally chasing him.  Finally, after months of looking.

And with that in mind, every set of eyes on them felt like they belonged to Sylvester, that they might, the moment the wagon had passed, somehow communicate a message, or set something in motion.

Yet, if she focused too much on them, then there was the risk that she’d miss another trap.

She had to trust herself.  That was the key.  She knew how her body functioned.  Her mental exercises and countless hours of practice had honed her ability to lay out a course of action and to carry them out, adapting at any step along the way.

“It feels like a trap waiting to be sprung,” Lillian said.

“Yes,” Mary said, validated that her friend was thinking along the same lines she was.

“He could try something at any moment.  He’ll be looking out for us.  And this… this orphanage of his, and I’m not even going to get into that because what in the King’s name is that about, but he placed it on the outskirts.  Remember how he gloated about how he knew where we’d arrive in the city, because there were only so many routes to take?  He mentioned it when we were talking about the places the Devil’s wagonfuls of children could come in.”

“I remember,” Mary said.

“As we get closer to this road out to the edge of town, we run more risk that he’ll try something.  He can set something up there…”

“But,” Helen said, “Remember, he wants to see us.  He wants us to show up.”

It wasn’t a reassuring statement.

Mary could feel her heartbeat quicken as they hit the country road.  There were no ambushes, no attacks, no tricks.

Almost, she wondered if he’d simply absconded.  If he’d bolted and left the city.

But then the building loomed, the top of it visible over a field of rust-red wheat.

Wooden cranes with crews, pallets, and counterweights were arranged around the building.  Construction material was everywhere, and the building itself was only mostly complete.  It was a manor, extensive and elaborate, with children sitting and playing in the yard out front.

“It’s a damn playground,” Lillian said.  “Those pallets, the construction work.  He damn well planned for the house to be in progress when we arrived.”

“I like it,” Ashton said.  “It’s a very interesting house.”

The fields of rust-red wheat extended around to either side of the house, in the space behind it, and in the field opposite the house, so the road effectively cut through it.  The fields offered virtually impenetrable cover, and they ensured that no matter which direction Sylvester ran, he could disappear.  He had to have been thinking about the fields when he set up the house.

“Odds on there being traps in the wheat?” Mary asked.

“Oh lords,” Lillian said.

Mary slowed the horses, then brought them to a stop out front.

There he was.  He stood in the front doorway, a cigarette in his hand, smoking, watching them.

Mary tied the reins, then hopped down.  The other Lambs were right behind her.

The squeals, laughs, and voices of the children stopped.

There were two dozen children out front.  By the time Mary, Helen, Lillian and Ashton had reached the point where the the driveway of the orphanage met the road, there was silence.

Each and every one of the children, some as young as eight, some nearly as old as Sylvester, stared, expressions blank.

Sylvester, meanwhile, only smiled, holding his cigarette.

“Cute,” Helen said.  “They’re acting.  He told them to act this way.”

“If we had some of the little ones with us, they’d be bothered by this,” Lillian observed.  “Actually, now I’m remembering Duncan’s misadventure with the two youths that pulled a gun on him, and I’m a touch bothered.”

“I don’t see what’s so strange about the way they’re acting,” Ashton said.

Behind them, one of the horses huffed, stamping the ground with her hooves.

When you want to look one way, he’ll act elsewhere.

Mary turned, reaching under her shirt to her belly.  There were two things there.  One was a knife, and one was her bola.

The man at the wagon was taller than most unmodified men, wore a button-up shirt and slacks, and had modified hands, feet, and head.  The head looked like an exceptionally poor taxidermy job of a very large rabbit.  The mouth yawned open as if it were perpetually screaming.

Sylvester’s limber assistant.

He saw her reacting and pulled away from the seat of the carriage, knife in hand.

Almost, almost, her instinct told her to respond to the image of a knife with a knife of her own.  Instead, she drew the bola.

The man twisted, turned, and bolted, while she started the bola spinning.  His sheer speed caught her off guard, as he headed for the back end of the wagon.  He’d be taking off down the road, or circling around the back of the wagon to head for the field, where he’d no doubt been waiting.

She threw, making the adjustments in the last fraction of a second to throw the bola.

It caught the rabbit man around the legs.  The summary fall looked brutal.

“Helen,” Mary said, pointing.  She followed up with gestures, hidden behind her back.

“On it,” Helen said, bouncing as she headed for the rabbit-man.

Already, Mary was striding toward the house, Lillian a step behind her.

When you want to go somewhere, he’ll upset your footing.

She deliberately stepped off of the path, nudging Lillian off the path as well.  She wasn’t positive she’d seen the playing children walking on it, and that made her suspicious.

The children stood.

Sylvester raised his arm.

One of the cranes moved in response, lowering, an empty pallet descending in the direction of the front door.

The children approached, expressions still blank, reaching for Mary and Lillian.

Mary drew her knife, and the children closest to her stopped in their tracks.

“Mary!” Lillian admonished, aghast.

Ashton pushed past them, reaching out to the crowd of children.

As the wooden pallet descended to Sylvester, Mary noted that many other cranes were using ropes, but this one was using chain.  She put away the knife.

With that, the children closest to her found courage and clutched at her clothes and her wrists.  She was stronger than even the largest of them, but there were a number of them.

“Ow,” one child said, as they grabbed at her skirt and cut themselves.  They pulled back.

She put all of her effort toward drawing closer to Ashton.

Sure enough, the grip slackened.  She found the strength to push through the crowd, and there was virtually no resistance.

Sylvester stepped onto the pallet.  Simultaneously, the thing began ascending.

Mary closed the distance at a full run, now.  She leaped, grabbing the top of a window shutter, then hauled herself up enough to get a foothold, springing over to grab the edge of the balcony over the front porch.

“You know, using Ashton is damn unfair,” Sylvester said.  “It’s practically cheating.”

She grabbed for one of the smaller posts of the balcony’s railing of the porch for a handhold, and it came free.  Only in the last moment did she manage to grab the edge of the balcony.  She dangled there for a moment before she began the arduous process of climbing up.

The post hadn’t been nailed, screwed, or otherwise fixed in place.  Loose, and no doubt intentionally so.  In frustration, she swept her hand against the remainder of the railing, knocking each and every one of the loose posts out of their housing and into the dense bushes that waited below.

“You were always the most graceful Lamb,” Sylvester taunted.

She twisted, reaching, and turned around.

When she pulled out a gun, and not a knife, the smirk dropped off of Sylvester’s face.

She didn’t shoot him.  She might have, but she didn’t have a clear line of sight to his knee.  Instead, dangling from one hand, aiming with the other, she shot at one corner of the pallet.

Mary fired six times in total, each shot hitting the mark and eliciting its screams from the crowd of children.

She didn’t wait to see the results.  She turned around, swung her legs forward, then used the momentum to raise up her upper body, shifting her grip to climb up onto the balcony.

The sound of creaking and the eventual snap as the chain tore through the damaged wood at one corner of the pallet put a grim smile on her face.

Sylvester still ascended.  The pallet was now askew, one corner very low, the other corner high, and the planks that made up the three foot by three foot wooden platform were arching a little under his weight.  He gestured up to the crane operator.

Mary focused on the climb.  Every piece of this building that she could use for climbing was suspect.  She looked at the building face with a fresh eye.  There were patches here and there that glistened in the sunlight.  There were shutters that lay there, inviting.

Stay focused.  The gap was growing.  Where was he going?

With the help of the crane operator, he could position himself wherever he wanted around the house.  He could even access the interior, through the incomplete portions.  There was cloth set up to keep the wind from blowing inside, but it was easy enough for the pallet to move adjacent and for Sylvester to climb past it.

Mary took the hard route, drawing a knife and using it as leverage for climbing, to reach the overhang above the balcony.

Helen had finished tying up the rabbit and attaching the man to the wagon, and was on her way back, and the horses – damn it, the horses were only partially attached to the wagon.  The rabbit had managed to cut some of the straps.  Ashton and Lillian were together, dealing with the children.  Ashton was handling a lot of the talking.

That was fine.  Mary gestured to Helen, and Helen ran right past Lillian and Ashton to start scaling the exterior of the house.

“It’s trapped, watch your handholds!” Mary called.

The building looked to be, going by the windows, two floors tall, with a section at the middle that was three stories tall, but the ceilings were particularly high, so it was as tall as a building with twice as many floors.

The similarities between this and the Devil’s tower didn’t escape Mary.

She climbed up onto the roof.  Below, Helen was grabbing at the slats of wood that lined the exterior of the house, grabbing each one from the underside and hauling herself up.

Sylvester was already out of reach.  There had to be a way to do this.

The speed with which the pallet had raised and fallen- he could only descend so fast.  That meant, if there was a good way to get up to him, somehow, keeping in mind that he was a solid thirty feet over her head-

“Helen!” Mary called out.  “Intercept him if he comes down!”

“Okay!” Helen said, with the musical enthusiasm of a cheery student answering a beloved teacher.

Mary ran across the roof, eye out for traps and snags.  She saw the odd patches of shingles and avoided them, running for the tower that held up the crane itself, while she reloaded her gun.

Did he not anticipate this?  There were no traps.  There was nothing complicating her climb.

Sylvester was signaling to be put down.  He didn’t look concerned as he watched her climb, but that didn’t say much.

If he wasn’t concerned, that could easily be amended.

She drew her gun, and Sylvester dropped down, holding the chain where the corner of the pallet was, low down enough that the entire pallet was between him and her.

She fired at one corner of the pallet again.  She might have chosen the one he was holding on to, but she was reasonably sure that would have killed him.

He didn’t deserve her being this nice, at this stage.

“Oh, come on!” Sylvester complained.  He shifted his weight, trying to swing the pallet from side to side, as if it were a pendulum, to make it a harder shot.  “Impolite.”

She was secretly proud of herself that all six shots landed, again.

It didn’t take any time for the corner of the pallet to fall away.  Sylvester was left standing on the edge of the pallet, as it hung down, connected at only the corners along one side.  His hands gripped the chain.

“Your aim is atrocious,” Sylvester commented, his voice ringing out.  “The Mary I knew would have managed to hit me already.  You keep on hitting the platform!”

Don’t tempt me, Mary thought, as she climbed.  The tower of the crane was well constructed, rife with handholds, and it was a quick climb.  She rose twice as fast as Sylvester was being lowered to the ground.

She reached the crane top, and scaled the underside, climbing up and over, to find her face to face with two Brunos, and a mess of winches and ropes.

“We don’t want any trouble,” the first of the Brunos said.  His hands pulled away from the mechanism.

Meaning Sylvester was trapped, suspended in mid-air.  Without the Brunos to work the winches, the crane didn’t move, and the platform remained where it was.

There was nothing below him except a very long drop to the roof or the house.  A thirty-foot drop onto the roof would have been bad enough, but it was gently sloped.  Mary doubted she could have landed it neatly and without injury, and she was more adroit than Sylvester.

She left the Brunos behind.  Running along the length of the crane to where the chain hung from, she let herself fall prematurely, reaching out to grab the chain.

In that moment, she saw Sylvester looking up at her.

If a path seems too easy, it’s a trap.

He was grinning like the duchess-fucked-cat with the canary.

He spread his arms, letting go from the chain, and leaped backward off of the platform.

“Helen!” Mary called out.

Helen, standing at the peak of the roof, was already running in Sylvester’s direction.

Mary wished dearly for a strong gust of wind to blow him off course.  It would be satisfying.  Tragic, of course, but satisfying.

As it was, he landed almost directly in the center of the cloth that covered the unfinished portion of the one wing of the house.

A blade glinted in his hand as he slashed it, allowing himself access into the house proper, while denying her the use of the same ‘net’ to drop down onto.  Helen followed him, just a few paces behind.

She was the one who was stuck.

“Lower me!” she called up to the Brunos.

They didn’t move.

She pointed the gun, which got them moving.  The chain began clicking as she was slowly lowered closer to the ground.  She climbed down to the damaged platform.

When she was fifteen feet above the sloping roof, she leaped for it.

Her feet scraped as she slid dangerously close to the gutter and the drop to the ground and bushes below.  Helen, who had disappeared behind Sylvester, was just now emerging.

“He locked doors behind him,” Helen said.  “He was heading toward the other end of the house.”

The other end of the house.

No.  That didn’t make sense.  What was there?  More mischief?

Mary turned, looking.  The front of the house was to her left.  The crowd of children was still there.  At the back were…

Two carriages, parked and waiting.

If the answer seems obvious

She headed for the front of the house at a dead run.  She let herself drop, sliding over the edge of the roof to catch the gutter, her body already contorting so she could swing herself over, passing herself over to the next gutter, the one that surrounded the overhang above the balcony.  She nearly lost her grip on the grease that Sylvester had arranged to put there, but it was an easy matter to maneuver her body and tumble onto the balcony itself.

She heard Ashton say, “Get him.  Help her.  People should treat girls nicer than that.”

Lillian.

Mary did away with all niceties, and leaped off the balcony onto the lawn below.  She grunted as she landed.

Sylvester was sitting in the doorway, an unconscious Lillian in his arms.  The children were approaching hesitantly.

If only Ashton had had a little more to go around, Sylvester’s own assets could have been dogpiling him this very moment.

“I want to point out-” Sylvester started.

Mary threw a knife.  Sylvester ducked his head – the only readily targetable part of his body.

“-I did get the drop on you after all, in a manner of speaking.”

He reached over, and hauled on a part of the doorframe.

A lever.

Mary forced herself to her feet, legs aching, and broke into a run, chasing.  There was no time to reach for a knife.

False floorboards were lifted out of place as Lillian was dragged by the hook Sylvester had attached to her clothes.  Sylvester ran alongside her, stooped over, one hand on her to help ensure she kept moving.

Mary gave chase, running, as Sylvester hopped up onto furniture.

She buried frustration with focus as every knife she threw at him hit a piece of furniture instead.  While Lillian was dragged underneath a coffee table, he kicked at a bowl, and more mechanisms kicked into motion, counterweights dropping as the walls began to fold in together, like great double doors.

Mary slipped past the first set of doors, then only barely scraped through the second, but she knew she was losing ground.  She saw the last set of doors closing, and turned, running to step onto the top of a heavy armchair, up to the staircase.  She used a knife, embedding it into wood rather than trust the rungs of the railing.

From there, she leaped over the last set of doors.

A final trap awaited.  Stretched across the open space above the doors were threads.  Not razor wire, but threads, a spiderwebbing or a loose net.  Enough to tangle her, not enough to be easily seen in the moment, with only the light shining in through the doors.

Stuck there, she watched as Sylvester disconnected the hooks from Lillian’s clothes, then dragged her out and away from the open back doors.

She cut at the threads, watching as he closed one of the back doors, sliding it over, then the other.  She could hear the sound of the lock with all the gravity of a death knell.

She disengaged herself from the threads, and dropped down to the sitting room.  She approached Ashton and Helen, who were now at the front door.

“They got Lillian,” Ashton observed.

Mary ignored him.  She ran outside, knowing full well what she’d see.

One carriage cutting through the field, taking a diagonal path until it reached the road.  From there, it headed toward the city.

The other carriage headed out to locations unknown, the same path through the field to the road, but going in the opposite direction.

“Next time,” Mary observed, “I’m going to shoot him.  No nonsense, just pull the trigger, put an end to my misery.”

“That’s no fun,” Helen said.

“Neither is this,” Mary said.  “Help me with the horses.  Can either of you ride?”

“Nothing that big,” Ashton said.  “And not without a saddle.”

“Damn it,” Mary said.  She avoided the path as she strode toward the carriage the rabbit had disabled.  As she reached the first horse, she cut at the straps and bindings that fastened it to the wagon.

The Rabbit, securely tied with one ankle handcuffed to a wheel spoke, was humming to himself.

“Look,” Ashton said.  He pointed.

There was a wagon on the road trundling down the path, a stitched beast pulling it at a good clip.

A working vehicle.

Mary hurried over, concealing her weapon.

“Problem?” the farmer asked, as she approached.  “Someone in trouble, was it?”

“Yes sir,” she said.  She revealed her knife.

“Terribly sorry,” Helen said, as she climbed up.  “But we need this.”

“I’m running an important errand!” the man said, raising his voice.  “Something of an emergency.”

“So is this,” Mary said, tense.  “Please step down.”

No,” the man said, stubborn.  “No, a child’s life may be at stake.  Your emergency might well be the same as mine, but I cannot and will not let you-”

Mary moved the knife, silencing the man.

“Your emergency is the same as ours?” Mary asked.

“I was asked to help.  A child in this very orphanage needs medicine, and that medicine is in town.”

“Sylvester,” Helen said.

He’s giving us a wagon?

She looked at the bigger picture.

The wagon, going in the direction of the city-

Did Sylvester hope they would take the easy route?  Hop on, head in the direction that was most convenient, into the city, and ignore the other wagon, because it would have meant turning a bulky wagon around on a narrow road?

“Go,” Mary said, “Ashton, Helen, go with the nice man.  Apologize to him for the knife.  Get the help we need.”

“What are you doing?” Helen asked.

“Going after the other carriage!”

Mothmont taught her useful things, and horseback riding was one of them.

She finished cutting the straps, the farmer’s wagon rolled past her as she worked, disappearing down the other end of the long, straight road.

Once the Crown’s police horse was freed, she mounted it bareback, managed the reins, and rode, as hard as she could, after the second carriage.

Helen’s and Ashton’s was liable to be empty.  But convincing the farmer to turn around would have been a waste.

This would have to do, and it had the added benefit of covering both bases.

Knives and items that she’d secured on her person were jolted and jarred by the hard ride in a way that acrobatics and most fighting didn’t manage.

Her focus was razor sharp as she first saw the dust the carriage had kicked up, and soon that dust dirtied the beads of sweat that covered her body.

Lillian was her friend, her heart.  Her most important person.

Lillian.

She willed Lillian to be in the carriage, as she caught up to it, then leaped on top of it.

A knife to the carriage driver’s throat worked to make him pull to a stop.  He remained cooperative as she climbed down to the side and hauled the door open.

Empty.

Of course it was empty.

She mounted her horse, turned it around, and rode in the opposite direction.  She didn’t go after Helen and Ashton.  She already knew what had occurred.

She made her way back to the orphanage, the around to the back field.

By the back door was a hatch.  She kicked it open, then descended the ramp down to the tunnel below.  There were multiple access points.

And one exit, heavy, reinforced, and locked.

To where?  She thought, in the same moment that she remembered, Fort city.

The place was probably riddled with the things.

She let her forehead rest against the door.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 13.11 – Twig

Black Sheep – 13.11

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The windows were all open, sheer curtains billowing and glowing with the afternoon sunlight.  It was still unbearably hot, but that made the wind that blew in one set of windows and out the other a very pleasant thing.  Stronger than a breeze, and very refreshing.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment.  The greater set of games had been played and won, and things were just about as perfect as they could get.  If I could have captured and held on to the moment to preserve it, I would have.

I opened my eyes and looked at Lillian.  Her ankles and wrists were bound, but the bindings were loose, leaving room to move while still looping behind a post that ran up to the peaked center of the room.  She could have her arms at her sides or behind her, but she wouldn’t be able to reach forward.  Right now, she knelt, slumped forward, but she would be able to stand if she wanted to.

The skin of her arms was still faintly mottled from where the external-muscle sleeves had pressed down on it.  She had had a haircut recently, but the hair was kept out of her face with a white hairband.  I didn’t miss the pearl earrings studding her earlobes.  Her uniform shirt was a light fabric, short sleeved, with a collar, with buttons running down the front.  Her skirt was pleated, leaving only her knees and upper calves bare.  Her shoes were girl’s shoes, but meant for running on streets and fields, with buckles.

For just the moment, she looked very at peace, unconscious.  There were bandages at her knees.

Looking at her was very pleasant.  I perched on my stool, feet on the upper rungs, trying to imagine how the conversation would go.

I heard footsteps, and a part of me immediately snapped to thinking about Mary, about the other Lambs and if I was followed.  I didn’t know enough about what some of the new recruits were capable of.  Abby, the twins, if Emmett had any capabilities, or if Helen had been augmented any further.  My hand reached for the gun I’d put on a tea trolley.

Jamie, not an enemy.

“Still asleep?” he asked.  He was carrying two glasses of water.  His hair was tied back, which was just about the only real accommodation he’d made to the heat.  His shirt was still buttoned all the way up, and he wore brown slacks.  No shoes, though.

Not that I was much better.  I did have the sanity to undo some of the buttons on my shirt and roll up the sleeves.  I’d changed slacks to a tidier black pair and I’d put on sandals.

“Yeah,” I said.  Then, with some fondness, I said, “She was running around so hard, and she picked a fight with me, even.  She must be exhausted.”

“I know you want to be left alone, but I was thinking back to you bustling around and I didn’t remember the tap being turned on.  You wanted water.”

“I did.  I would have gone to get it, but I didn’t want her to wake up alone,” I said.  “Thank you.  I appreciate it.”

“No trouble.”

“I appreciate all of this.  The help, the information, putting the pieces together.”

He extended the glasses my way.  I took them, and they were deliciously cold.  I set one on the trolley, before drinking from the other.

Jamie lingered.  Odd behavior for someone who knew I wanted to be left alone with Lil.  I looked at him and arched an eyebrow.

“I don’t quite know,” he said.

Then he turned and left.

The wind picked up.  I stared at the door that Jamie had passed through, trying to figure out what he’d been about to say, and I eventually gave up and smiled.  I’d get answers later.

I’d finished my glass of water before Lillian stirred awake.  She started with sounds, which didn’t surprise me.  I smiled again, thinking about the countless times she had woken up beside me.

Lillian raised her head, blinked, and then stared at me.  It took her a moment to wrap her head around the situation.  She moved her arms and tugged against her bonds.

“Ahhh,” she said, under her breath.  “Son of a bitch.”

“I’d say this is payback for trying to stick me with the syringes you hid in these sleeves, but that would be a lie.  I had this in mind from the beginning.”

Lillian bowed her head, and let out a low sound that mingled a groan with a growl.

I picked up the glass, stepped down off the stool, and approached her.  I leaned down, and spoke in her ear, “The retribution for that little stunt will have to come later.”

She tested the bonds a few times, with more intensity on each try, before she gave up.

“Come on,” I said.  “Stand up.  I’ve got some water for you.  You’ll want to stay hydrated.”

I let her make her own way to her feet.  She stood straighter, and met my eyes.  A level and very unimpressed glare, to match my smile.

I started to move the glass toward her lips, but she spoke.  “You have to keep me hydrated so I don’t pass out in the midst of our torture session, hm?”

Torture session?” I asked.

“Mm hmm,” she said.  “You’ll stand there or sit there and torment me with words, while I’m helpless to fight back.  Torture.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s a hammer and some nails lying around up here,” I said, indicating the rest of the room.  It wasn’t quite an attic, but it was being used for storage, and there were tools and boxes here and there, among various personal knick-knacks, which were mostly empty picture frames and stopped clocks.  “If you’d like, we can nix the conversation part, and I could nail your toes to the floor.”

“Would you?” Lillian asked.  “That would be preferable, please and thank you.”

She was trying to keep her expression stern, but there was a faint glimmer of amusement there.

“The new Lambs are cute,” I said.

“They’re not Lambs, you know,” Lillian said.

“Oh, I know.  But I think the odds are good that those odd goods will wind up together in some capacity.”

“I hope so,” Lillian said.  “They were all leading such lonely existences.”

“Existence is lonely,” I said.  I put the glass to her lips, and tipped it to allow her to drink.  Hydration was good.  She was beaded with miniscule little droplets of sweat.  When the sheer curtains billowed in and the light slipped through, she seemed to glitter.  I fixated on the glittering along the length of her throat as I said, “That’s what makes it so wonderful and bittersweet when we’re able to find each other and cling to each other in the midst of it all.”

Lillian, watching me looking at her, made a noise.  I moved the glass away so she wouldn’t sputter and choke.

She settled for clearing her throat, taking a moment to respond.

“You’re different, Sylvester,” she said.

“Only natural,” I said.  “I’ve been operating independently for a while now.”

“Semi-independent,” Lillian said, quiet.

“True.  But I don’t think of my relationship with Jamie as a dependency.  It might be, but I’d prefer to think of it as a partnership.”

“He’s okay?  I assume he’s the one who did these bandages,” Lillian said, lifting one leg that had a bandage at the knee.

“That was me,” I said.

“Oh.  You’ve picked up some skills, then.”

“Jamie is as good as can be expected,” I said.  “He caught the plague, whatever they were calling it.  Ravage?”

Lillian nodded.  “That’s one of the names.”

“I had to cut it out.  Caterpillar is… pretty done as a project, I’m afraid.  There’s only Jamie.  Which is still pretty darn amazing, in the grand scheme of things.  He helped me get you up here and tied up.  He’ll be around, if you need him, want him, or if you want to talk when we’re done here, which I imagine you will.”

“When we’re done what, Sylvester?”

“Ah,” I said.  “That requires explanation, and it launches us into a whole dialogue and series of options.  I was hoping to enjoy more small talk first.”

“What’s going on, Sylvester?  What am I doing here?”

“Do you want more water?” I asked, “Not deflecting.  Just asking before I put it down.”

She shook her head.  I walked over to the trolley and put it down, picked up the stool, and moved it closer to Lillian.  I perched on it again.

“Standing gets tiring, especially when you’ve been running around for several days straight.  You’re free to sit, if you want.  Or I suppose you’d have to kneel, really.”

“You’re such a gentleman, Sylvester,” she said.  She remained standing.

“Do you want me to be a gentleman, Lil?  Because I can switch gears and do that.  I can find you something to sit on.”

“I don’t want to sit, and don’t call me Lil.”

“Don’t call me Sylvester,” I retorted.

She set her jaw.  Stubborn.

“Right.  The reason you’re here is that I wanted to talk.  That’s the short answer.  The long answer is that you’re staying here for two days, two nights.  Just long enough that the others will be close to panicking, the Academy will ask questions, and they’ll ask you to come back.  There will be a minor inquisition, not as bad as the last one, I don’t think, and the Lambs will be stalled.  All in all, it gives Jamie and me a chance to get lost while you all bounce back.  I’ve given them a project for the meantime-”

Two days, Sylvester?”

“And two nights.  And then I give you back,” I said.  “About the project, the orphange is only three-quarters done, so I figured-”

“I only have enough of a leash to last me a day,” Lillian said.  “One pill.”

“Ah,” I said.  I paused, considering.  “That might be a problem.  Figures, the Academy would do something like that.”

“Very sorry to disappoint,” Lillian said, with a measure of satisfaction.

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” I said.  I was not looking forward to cutting my time with Lillian short in order to go rob the Lambs, especially not if they were anticipating me.  Cutting it short to give her back to them early was worse, because it would mean letting the Academy win.

“I’m so very angry at you, Sylvester.”

“That’s allowed, Lil.”

“You’ve put us in such a bad situation, too.  Hayle told us that-”

“Ah!” I said, “Ah, ah, ah!”

She stopped.

“None of that.  In fact, I’ll need to hammer out the ground rules, Lil.”

“Ground rules,” she said, in disbelief.

“Here’s the deal, Lil.  None of that.  No talking about what Hayle said, how he’s twisting your arms, possible punishments… if it comes to that, I’m going to gag you.  There will be no discussion between you and me.  I’ll keep you for however long I end up keeping you, then I’ll let you go, and that will be that.”

“Tempting,” Lillian said, dryly.

“Which brings me to the first key point of our discussion.  I’m going to ask you this, and I’m going to ask you again later.  I’m giving you the choice, Lil.  I can stay, and we can keep talking, or, hell, I can stay and you can be gagged if you so choose.  Or…”

Lillian didn’t take the bait.  She just stared at me.

“Or,” I continued, “I leave, and I send Jamie in.  You can talk with him about whatever.  He can give you the update on how I’m doing, how he’s doing, you can tell him about the Lambs, old and new, and he’ll fill me in after.  You can even count it as a win, Lil, Because I’ll be stewing in frustration about not getting to see you.  You follow?”

“Gee whiz, Sylvester,” Lillian said, her words at odds with the lack of playfulness in her voice, “I can stay stuck here while you talk circles around me, or I can get rid of you.  I wonder.

“For the record, Jamie will probably draw a line in the sand about you talking about Hayle and what he’s doing.”

I let the question hang.  I wasn’t wholly positive I knew what answer she would give.  A lot depended on how raw her feelings were, beneath the facade she was showing me.

I waited, thinking, while Lillian mulled over her decision.

After a minute, I ran out of patience.

“For all that you were talking just a bit ago, you don’t seem to be very quick about answering.”

“Shut up, Sylvester.”

“Harsh words.”

“Stay,” she said.  “It doesn’t really matter, and you’ll have to ungag me at some point to give me food and water.  I can talk then.  You’ll have to hear me out eventually.”

“I can get some wax to put in my ears.  We do have a bag, tubing and a needle to give you water without having to remove the gag, if need be, among other things,” I said.  “We’re not having that particular discussion, Lil.  This is where I’m going to be exceptionally unfair to you.  If you were to catch me fair and square, then I’d be the one who was tied up, and you’d be the one who was free to lecture at me.  But you didn’t.  So you aren’t.  Those are the rules.”

“Somehow I don’t remember agreeing to any terms of engagement,” Lillian said.

I shrugged.  “They’re the rules.  Take them or leave them.”

I could see her considering.

I ventured, “If I end up going back to Radham, I’m going to wither away and die.  I don’t have it in me, Lil.  I’m pretty sure they’ll kill Jamie in an effort to salvage what they can of the Caterpillar.  So please don’t bring it up.  Don’t make me feel even more like shit.  Whatever Hayle might have said, it’s not an option.  I’ve got a few years left.  Jamie’s got less than that, I think.  We have every intention of spending that time free, and I plan to do everything in my power to ensure the Lambs aren’t punished for that in the meantime.”

The consideration on her part stopped.  The wind picked up, and I closed my eyes, enjoying the present moment, while putting those thoughts momentarily out of my head.

But my brain ticked forward into other things I wanted to say, when I was sitting close enough to Lillian to smell her, to reach out and touch her.  All of the countless nights of the past half-a-year of tossing and turning and reaching out to pull her closer and finding that half of the bed empty, I wanted to make up for it right here, right now.

“Sy,” Lillian said, at the same time, I said, “If-”

In the awkward moment that followed, I got up, moved the gun and the sleeves from the trolley to the nearby table, so that only the glasses were on it, and rolled it on its squeaky wheels until it was closer.  I poured some of Lillian’s water into my glass and drank it.

“I don’t even know what I was going to say, Sy.  You go first.”

I offered her her glass again, and she shook her head.

I drew in a deep breath, then said, “If there was a way I could have stayed, Lillian, stayed with you, then I would have.  I hope you know that.”

She didn’t respond to that.  She looked very uncomfortable, more than anything.  As I looked at her, trying to decipher it, she seemed to become even more uneasy.  I looked away, staring out the window.

The silence was hard to manage.  I wasn’t sure how to move forward from this.

Help me out, I thought.

It was a well-practiced exercise at this point, to conceptualize Lillian, her appearance and mannerisms, her way of moving, her personality and patterns of behavior, and to twist them into a very fierce imagining of what Lillian might be like if the circumstances were different, if she wasn’t tied to the pillar.  If she wanted to be here.

The spectre of Lillian came to stand behind Lillian, leaning past the pillar to wrap her arms around the real Lillian’s shoulders, head tilted so it touched Lillian’s head, a gentle embrace.

“I know that you would have stayed if you could,” the spectre said.

“Yeah,” I said, in response to the silence and the imaginings.  “So that’s the rule.  If, at some point, the Lambs decide to catch me and bring me in, then it’s already a conclusion, and you can let me know just how badly inconvenienced you’ve been by my rebelliousness.  But until then, if you say anything on the subject, I’m going to have to gag you.”

More silence from Lillian.

“Don’t be too hard on me,” the spectre suggested.

“…With one of my socks, maybe, which I imagine is still very dirty and sweaty from me running around all day,” I said, smiling.

Lillian looked up.  She and the spectre were nearly in sync, asking, “Seriously, Sy?”

“Or a pair of underwear,” I said, still smiling.

“What?  How would that even work?  Your underwear or mine?” Lillian asked.

My smile became an ever-widening grin, as I watched her expression morph through several different emotions, ranging from disbelief that the question had passed through her lips, to anger at herself, then confusion, then something mingling shame with depression.

“I walked into that,” she said.

“Actually, that was very much you, Lillian, I didn’t plan for you to waltz right into it, I just brought up underwear to embarrass you and lighten the moment.”

She hung her head a little, staring at the floor.

“Wow, though.  That’s where your mind goes, is it?  It’s-”

“Sy.  Please.”

I stopped, still smiling.  I perched on the stool and leaned forward, “Okay.  In all seriousness, Lillian.  This situation, right here, you tied up and completely at my mercy?  Has it ever crossed your mind before?”

“Yes,” the spectre admitted, while Lillian struggled to get her mental footing.

“How many times?  Once?  Ten times?” I stretched it out, enjoying her squirming, the spectre’s expression and body language a representation of what Lillian was keeping hidden.  “Too many times to count?”

“Water,” Lillian said.  “I would like a drink of water.  And a change of subject, please.”

“I can give you the water,” I said, teasing. “I kind of like the current subject.”

“Change of subject,” Lillian said, more firmly.  “And I won’t bring up Hayle or his offer.”

I picked up the glass.  I weighed it in my hand.

Lillian was so beautiful in this moment, cheeks flushed, hair a little bit in disarray.  I wanted to say I knew she had already resolved not to bring up Hayle’s offer again.  I could say no, I could push.  Again, the thought of making up for all of those nights she hadn’t been lying beside me took over.  She probably wouldn’t even be that upset over it.

“Okay,” I said.  “In the interest of being a gentleman.”

I leaned forward on the stool until it might have tipped forward, offering the glass.  I tipped the contents between her lips.

“Thank you,” Lillian said.

“Your end-of-year project is going well?” I asked, looking at the sleeves.

“Yes,” Lillian said, “It is, thank you.  I could hammer home the fact that I’ve had a lot of free time to spend in my lab, studying, but I won’t.”

“Thank you,” I said.  “I’d guessed that much, for the record.  And I’m sorry for your free time.”

“It’s been nice, as a matter of fact.  Lonely, but nice.  Mary was training me in hand to hand in the downtime, and I was getting caught up in a way I haven’t for a while.”

“I thought the training might be the case after dealing with you earlier,” I said.  “You put up a fight.  I thought for a moment I wouldn’t be able to grab you.  I was actually genuinely worried for that moment.”

“And then you confiscated the syringe, which I had taken off of one of your errant orphans.”

“And stuck in your waistband,” I said.  “Yes.  And I stuck you with it.”

“When it counted, earlier, and when facing you, I didn’t quite have the courage to make myself move and to hurt people,” Lillian said.  “I’m still a scaredy cat in the end.”

“You did fine,” I said.  “Just about everyone did.  I’m not sure about Abby, but I don’t even know who or what she is, except that she loves animals of all kinds.”

“She was supposed to serve as someone who could decipher, even better than you can.  Human nature, animal nature, read body language, read tone and expression.  If she’d worked, she would be better at cracking people than you are.  As is, she’s good with animals.”

“Nothing like Evette, then.”

Lillian smiled. “We brought her because of her physical similarities to Evette.  Jamie had a picture of Evette in one of his notebooks, and described how you used to sleep on the floor by her vat.”

“Dirty,” I said, but I smiled.  “I like that she liked the lamb I left for them.  I had no plans for them to keep it.  But when they did, and they went up into the tower where I couldn’t follow or listen in, I scrambled to get everything together so there would be more animals waiting when they left the building.  I’m so pleased I was able to.”

“Duncan was bothered by the chicken.”

“I thought there was a chance they’d pick up more pets and have more dead weight if I included variety.”

“That’s what I said,” Lillian said.  “He thought it was a jab.”

I struck my forehead with the heel of my hand.  “It could have been, too!  I could have said something to him, needled him.  I feel so dumb!”

“You were hard on him as it was.”

I snorted, then looked for a change of topic.  “I still have to get the details about what Emmett knows from him.”

“You do,” Lillian said.  “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

Her disposition had improved considerably.  The flush still hadn’t entirely left her cheeks, which was important.

“Now’s a good time for what you’re thinking about,” Lillian-the-spectre murmured.

“Speaking of,” I said.

“Speaking of?” the real Lillian asked.

“Of managing.  As much as I would very much like to be able to be in this room and watching you for the duration of your stay, I don’t think I’m capable.  That means, well, I need to make sure you don’t have any tools or tricks that could deal with those bonds while I’m looking the other way.”

“What?” Lillian asked, caught off guard by the change in topic.

“I’m going to need to frisk you,” I said.

“What?” she asked, again.  “No.”

“Yes,” I said.

“No!  Sy, you little shit, that’s not-”

“-negotiable,” I said.  “Not negotiable.  But, like I said a few minutes ago, you do very much have the option of kicking me out of the room.  I can go get Jamie, he can take over, and I’m positive he’ll be an absolute gentleman for you.”

“And you won’t?”

“I’ll try,” I said.  “But I’m not very practiced.  So if you give me the signal to go ahead and we leave Jamie where he’s at, then you do so at your peril.”

I met her eyes as I said it, giving her my most serious look in the process.  I saw the flush start to return to her cheekbones.

Before she could back out, I ventured, “I highly recommend you ask for Jamie.”

“Are you that perilous?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t think so, but you’re a scaredy cat and a crybaby, and I think we’re on good terms right now.  I don’t want you getting mad at me again.  You’ll be stuck here with me for at least the whole night and part of tomorrow.”

“Scaredy cat and crybaby,” she said.

I smiled.

“You could have searched me while I was unconscious.”

“I could have,” I said.  “But that would have been rude.”

Her body language and expression told enough of a story that I knew I didn’t need to look at the spectre for clues or validation.  Not that the spectre was anything but a fun way of exercising what I already knew.

“I want to see you try and fail at being a gentleman,” she challenged.

I smiled, and stepped away from the stool, bending into a small bow.

“Good start,” she said.

“About your presumption of failure on my part?  You forget.  I’m on Wyvern.  I can be and do anything, given a chance to adjust,” I said.  “May I have one of your feet, please?”

“My feet?” Lillian asked.

She raised her leg, sticking out one shoe as much as she was able before the rope tugged taut.

I dropped down to my knees, and took hold of her ankle and foot.  I unbuckled the straps to her shoe, then took it off, setting it on the lower shelf of the tea trolley.  That done, I took hold of her sock by the top edge, and peeled it off.

I didn’t look up at Lillian, because her leg being raised like it was, me kneeling at her feet, I was in a position to look up her skirt, and that wouldn’t be gentlemanly.

Her silence in the moment spoke volumes, however.

I let go of her foot, and she offered the other.  I unbuckled and removed the other shoe.  As I peeled off the sock, taking care as I did so, I revealed the scalpel that Lillian had tucked in there.

“Taking lessons from Mary?” I asked, collecting the scalpel in one hand as I took the sock in the other.

“Not at all,” Lillian said.

“I name thee a liar!” I pronounced, picking up the second shoe.  I flicked it, hard.  The blade flicked out of the sole, coming to a stop in a position where it stuck out in front of the toe.

“Oh.  You recognized it?” Lillian asked.

“Recognized?” I asked.

“They’re Mary’s shoes.  She outgrew them and lent them to me for today.”

“No.  I recognized the thickness of the soles.  I never paid that much attention to Mary’s clothes, except to think of how fancy they were.  I paid more attention to what you wore.  I still have a vague recollection of all your different nightgowns, now that I think about it.”

“Careful, gentleman Sy.  You’re slipping.”

I set the shoes together on the trolley, and draped the socks over them.  I held on to the scalpel until I’d straightened, and placed it on the top.  I took a position in front of Lillian, our noses a few centimeters apart.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“Wh-” she started.  She stopped as my hand seized the front of her skirt, balling it up in my fist.  I pulled at it, until the waistband was a short span away from her waist.  Had I looked down, I could likely have seen everything clear from the bottom of her button up shirt to her knees, but I didn’t look down.  My eyes were locked to hers.

With my other hand, I ran my fingers along the inside of the waistband.

I could see the dilation of her eyes change, the pupils expanding.  She didn’t break eye contact any more than I did.

“What’s this?” I asked, as I found the first obstacle.  A twist of metal, which held three thin vials.

Lillian was silent.  She did all of her communicating with her eyes and the flush of her cheeks.

“Yeah,” I said.  I put the vials on top of the trolley.   I switched hands, using the tension of my finger against the waistband to hold it away from her body, touching the clothes while not touching her.  “And another.  Look at that.”

I’d discovered a syringe, pre-loaded with a half-dose of fluid.  I set it on the table.

“Excuse me,” I said, as my finger traveled along the circumference of the waistband, reaching further back.

At the last moment, before my hand would have struck the post, she pushed her pelvis out, toward me, giving me room to reach the waistband that would otherwise have been pressed between her rear end and the post she was loosely bound to.

“Just because you’re saying ‘beg your pardon’ and ‘excuse me’, doesn’t mean you’re actually being gentlemanly,” she said.

“Being polite about this is just one of the rules.  I’ll touch your clothes, because that’s necessary when searching someone like I have to search you, but I won’t touch you unless you make the first move, give your consent, or ask.”

“Is that so?” Lillian asked

“It is so,” I said. “And it is also so that you can, at any time, ask for me to go away.  I can go get Jamie, and he can wrap up.”

She didn’t respond to that.

I withdrew the rectangular cloth bag of pills that had been clipped to the underside of the waistband.  I examined the pills.

Rather than break eye contact, I held up the baggy beside her head and shook it, trusting my peripheral vision.  “There are no little yellow pills in here, sadly.  It would be nice to extend the leash some.”

She didn’t flinch or look away as I angled the bag and let the contents clatter on the trolley.

My fingers traced the inside edge of the bottom of her shirt, and again, she pushed her body out toward me to assist as I reached behind her.  Nothing.

This was a different kind of dance, but the maintained eye contact made it an intimate one.  Less two dancers separating and joining back together, as I might dance with Mary on a battlefield, more of a dance where each person held the other in their own ways, and didn’t let go from start to finish.  What we were saying, the interplay, and the things we weren’t saying helped preserve the illusion.  It would be so easy to say the wrong thing and break the spell.

If Lillian talked about Hayle.

If I drew too much attention to the fact that she was playing along.

My fingers grazed the buttons on her shirt, checking them by texture, and slipped into the spaces between to check that nothing had been placed there.

Even with the wind, I could hear her every breath, faint but real.  I was aware of the shift in light and dark as the sheer curtains moved and let more sunlight in.

I reached the top button, and moved up to check the collar of her shirt.

At the front of her collar, where the corners were, I found a pair of blades, each one like a razor, but with a solid edge along one side, no longer than a few centimeters.  I dropped them on the trolley.

At the back of her collar, there was a punching blade with a reservoir.  It was little more than a triangle of steel with a ‘T’ shaped bit of metal on the end.  I imagined it could be loaded with poison or a drug.

“That last one was actually very uncomfortable when leaning back against this post,” Lillian commented.

I was very aware of how close her lips were to mine.  I could feel her breath as she spoke.

But my gentleman’s rules were as much for me as they were for her.  I obeyed the restrictions I’d set for myself.

My fingers traced her shoulders, then her sleeves, stopping at the ends.  I reached inside, between her arm and the sleeve, and checked there.

Left sleeve, secured with a pin, a little cloth baggie, scarcely taller or wider than my thumbnail.

I held it over the trolley, removed the pin, and squeezed out the contents, while holding eye contact with Lillian.

One yellow pill.

“The leash.”

“Mm hmm,” Lillian said.

I broke eye contact, stepping away.

“I’d like your permission to check your hands,” I said.

“My hands?”

“Gut feeling,” I said.

“What if I don’t give it, hm?”

“I’ll figure it out,” I told her.  “But this will go a lot smoother if you just say yes.  I’ll only touch your hands, for now.”

“Go ahead,” she said.

I caught the thumb of her left hand between the index and middle fingers of one of my hands, and used my other hand to trap the four fingers, holding them together, lined up in a row.

I checked the thumb first, running my fingers along the length of it, firmly, until I reached the pad.  I squeezed the pad, applying pressure as if I were milking a cow.

The needle slid out from beneath the thumbnail, beading with a droplet of something.

“Yeah,” I said.  I shifted my grip around, then checked her fingers.

Index, middle, and pinky fingers of her left hand all had weapons within.

“Why not this finger?” I asked, touching the other.

“Sentiment,” Lillian said.

“Fray did this, once upon a time.  I thought about you being inspired by that.  Somehow, when I imagined you preparing to beat me, this was always just something I assumed.”

Which wasn’t entirely true, if I admitted it to myself.  But something had prompted me to check as Jamie and I had been binding her hands.  I’d cheated before conducting this little exercise.

I left her behind, crossing the room to look for one of the canvas pouches that had tools or nails in them.  The inside of the first of the two bags I found was filthy, so I made a point of turning it inside out before sliding it over Lillian’s hand, a kind of protective mitten.  The fine syringe needles likely wouldn’t pierce the canvas, and with the canvas snug and bound in place, her hands would be more or less stuck balled into fists.  Even if she were able to pierce the canvas, she wouldn’t be able to stick me or Jamie with the needles.

I returned to my position, just in front of her, smiling.

“What now?” she asked.

I reached up, and with ginger care, I took hold of the half circle of her hairband, and lifted it off of her head.  I ran my fingers along it.

“Just a hairband, Sy,” Lillian said.  I could feel her breath.  Even without the hairband, it was warm enough that her sweat-damp hair was staying where it was

I set it down on the trolley.

I reached up to her ear, and the exercise of removing the earrings was delicate enough that I had to look away, working to remove the pearl studs without touching her ear.

“Just earrings, Sy,” she said, as I removed the first.

I worked on the second, and had enough of a sense of how to remove it that I didn’t need to look for the full duration of it.

I could see the fine hairs on her neck standing on end.

I held both earrings with one hand, pearls with tiny spears of metal sticking out of them.  With the spears pinched in between finger and thumb, I used the back of my hand to move her glass, and put the pearls into the ring of condensation that the underside had left.  I stirred them in that shallow puddle, leaving white trails.

“Just earrings,” I said, as they gradually dissolved.

“Also serviceable as a mild drug, mixed into water,” Lillian said.

“Mary did more than lend you a pair of shoes and give you some instruction in hand to hand,” I said.

“We spent a lot of time together over the past few months,” Lillian said.

“The earrings were cute,” I said.  “It would be nice if you wore stuff like that more.  But they weren’t very you.”

“I thought you’d be flattered, thinking they were for your benefit, and that you’d overlook them.”

I shook my head.

“Darn,” she said, without any pathos.

“I’d like to check your hair,” I said.  “With your permission.”

“You’ll figure out something if I say no, will you?”

“Probably.”

She leaned forward, staring down at my feet, offering me her head.

I ran my fingers through her hair, combing it with my fingernails.  I did two passes to be sure, then a third to comb it into her usual style, parted to one side, tucked behind her ears.  After a moment’s consideration, I replaced the hairband.

I upended a share of her glass of water into my cupped hand, leaving it only a quarter full.  Then I picked out one of the pills.

“Sterilization, if I remember right?” I asked.

“Yes, but… what are you doing?”

I didn’t answer right away.  I dropped the pill into the water, then rubbed my hands together.  The pill dissolved into the water, and I thoroughly washed my hands like that.

I dried them on my clean handkerchief.

“You could be more sterile than that,” Lillian observed.  “What are you doing?”

“Mouth,” I said.

“Mouth?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Don’t look so surprised.  If you’ll allow me, I’m going to check the inside of your mouth.”

She didn’t protest or argue, but opened her mouth.

The spectre gnashed her teeth at me, playful.

I drew my knife, and held it in one hand, so the blade lay against my wrist, the handle extending forward.  Lillian pulled her head back as I extended it toward her mouth.

“To keep you from biting,” I said.  “Like you said, you’re still angry, right?”

Lillian relented.  I placed the handle of the knife between her molars on the one side, and ran my fingers along either side of her top and bottom teeth, then checked the wells between her cheeks and gums.  I switched sides, worked my way all the way back-

And felt something solid.

There was a catch, a fine, tiny lever, of the sort that might be tripped with the tongue.

False tooth.  I undid the catch, removed the tooth, and then removed the catch.

I set it all down on the table, removing the knife from her mouth.

“Son of a bitch,” Lillian said, as she looked down at it.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.  I wiped the saliva from my fingers on my shirt-front, drawing an ‘x’ as I did it.

Spectre Lillian smiled.  The real Lillian pretended not to notice.

I struck the false tooth with the blunt end of the knife.  It disintegrated.  I used the blade to nudge the individual pieces away from the tiny yellow pill that was nestled within.

“Two little yellow pills,” I said.

“Fancy that,” Lillian said.

“Guess you’re staying with me a little while longer,” I said.

She nodded, her expression unreadable.

The spectre, however, gave me a faltering smile.

“Was the plan to pop the tooth free, crack it between your teeth, and spit the yellow pill into my food or something?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Lillian said.

“How did I do?  Did I get all of it?”

“Do you seriously expect me to answer that?” Lillian asked.

“I’ll give you a choice,” I said.

“Another choice,” she said.

“You tell me what you hid, and I’ll remove it, or you do a very good job of sincerely telling me that you don’t have anything more, that I won, and I take you at your word…”

“You trailed off there.  What’s option three?”

“Option three is that you leave me no choice, I can’t take you at your word, and I have to assume you hid something in your undergarments, like Mary typically does.”

I saw her freeze a little with that.

“I did,” she said.

It was my turn to mentally stumble over her words.  A part of me expected her to claim it was a joke.

“In my bra.  A paper packet of poison,” she said, raising her chin a little.

A challenge.  Testing my limits as a gentleman.  Did she think it was her victory in more than one way?  That she’d hidden it successfully, and that she was going to make me balk?

The me she’d known might have, the Sylvester who had slept in her bed and taken her to dinner with her parents.

I stepped closer, one of my hands going to her top button, and I could see her shocked reaction.

“I guess you win,” I murmured in her ear, undoing the one button.

I started on the second.  I was very aware of her breathing, or the lack thereof.  She was very still.

“You can ask for Jamie at any time,” I reminded her, as I undid the second button.

“No need,” she said, in the smallest, tightest of voices.  The flush was full now.

Did she think this was a game of chicken?  That if she held firm, I would back off?

I reached inside her shirt, and I didn’t touch skin.  Wyvern coupled with weeks and months of training my hands with lockpicking and medical care and tool use and whiling away my time with playing with needles and coins and blades had left me with a great deal of confidence in my fingers and my sense of touch.

I didn’t touch skin, but I felt the fine beads of sweat that had collected on it, the fine, nearly-invisible white hairs that stood out from the skin, no doubt bristling from the goosebumps on the skin’s surface itself.  I felt the body heat, and judged my fingers’ distance from Lillian’s breast, as I moved my hand at a snail’s pace.

I had disarmed landmines with less care than I moved my hand over that tantalizing surface.  I operated with touch alone, my eyes fixed on Lillian’s.

My fingernail touched the strap of her bra, and I traced the nail along the strap’s edge, down to the bra itself, then along the edge.  It vibrated slightly and silently as the fingernail’s edge dragged along the stitching, the very edge of my finger touching the beads of sweat and fine hairs.

“Damn,” I murmured, into Lillian’s ear.  “I hoped there would be a little tag of paper sticking out I could grab.”

“Damn,” Lillian said, her voice even softer and tighter than before.  She was staring at my eyes, but in that moment, she was really staring well past me.  Her focus wasn’t on sight.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, reaching behind her with my other hand.  “With utmost sincerity.”

With one hand and a snapping motion of my fingers, I undid the clasp on her bra.  She jumped as if she’d been stabbed, and her focus returned to me, her eyes on mine.

I moved my fingers down, tracing more fine hairs and more waves of warm body heat, then crossed the void to the concave of the now loose bra cup.  With two fingers, I retrieved my prize, and maneuvered my hand out of her shirt.

I held up my prize between our faces, then flicked it through the air, letting it land on the trolley.  In the moment it smacked into place, the spell was broken, and she let out the breath she’d been holding in, shivering visibly as she did it.

Not a bad sort of shiver, either.

“If you cut me free from this post, I would pounce on you in an instant,” the spectre said.  “And get payback for all of the teasing you just put me through.”

Payback in the form of a beating, or in the form of making me follow through on every tease?

The spectre smiled.

“Can you imagine?” I asked Lillian.  “Next time, I’m going to have to assume you’ll be better with the hiding places.  I’ll have to be even more thorough.”

“What?  Next time?”

“I like you, Lillian,” I said.  “This isn’t the last time I’ll say hi.  I’ll nab you again, the next time the Lambs show.  We’ll have another conversation.  I’ll frisk you again, again, if you don’t want Jamie to handle it.”

“I don’t think it works that way, Sylvester,” Lillian said.

I’d let that ‘Sylvester’ slide.

“Naturally, you’ll do your best to work with the Lambs to counteract it, but that’s what makes it so interesting a challenge, do you see?”

“I don’t see at all,” Lillian said.

“I’ll kidnap you again, and then again.  And maybe kidnap Mary once just to say hi and make you a little jealous, even though she would scare me, if she were tied to a post in front of me.”

“Sy, no.”

“The Lambs are important to me,” I said.  “I want them in my life in some capacity or another.  And this week has been fantastic fun.  If this is the only capacity I can have you, then I’ll be damned if I’m not going to kidnap you at every opportunity.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Sy.”

“Then how does it work, Lillian?” I asked.  I stepped back, perching on the stool.  “Because the way I see it, this is utterly guiltless, for you.  You’re at my mercy.  If pressed, you can say you were innocent.  I got the upper hand.  You can even tell yourself that, if that makes it easier.  But I know you’ve enjoyed yourself in some capacity.”

Her eyes were fixed on the floor.  She responded to that last point with a faint nod, as if she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

“So you-” I started, as she said, “You’ve-”

In the moment that followed, I quietly said, “Your turn.”

She did that faint nod again.

“You’ve ruined me, Sy.”

“Hm?”

“You’ve ruined me,” she said.

“Naw,” I replied.

She spoke, still staring at the floor, as if she wasn’t talking to me any more.  “Did you know I got a boyfriend?”

I blinked.

“I had two, as a matter of fact.”

“Not Duncan,” I said.

Lillian raised her head, giving me an incredulous look, “No!”

“Oh, good,” I said.

“He’s a year above me, working on his gray coat.  Tall, smart, well put together, a little bit athletic.  All of the girls in his year go weak in the knees over him when he walks down the hall.  He and I struck up a conversation, and he asked me out.  Me and… actually, I won’t name him.  You might hunt him down.”

I might.  That ‘tall’ comment was a barb.  Even now I was only Lillian’s height.

“We dated.  I was trying to fill a void, and I used him to do it, I admit it.  So many of those girls would kill me if I said it like that.  I, he and I, we messed around.  Kissed.”

If she was trying to make me jealous, it was working.

“It didn’t- it wasn’t the same.  The kisses were… nice enough, for kisses.  But they weren’t like the ones you gave me.  It was the same for spending time with him.  You were always so attentive, you paid attention to every little thing, catalogued everything you could use and you used it and… you made me feel cherished.  You make me feel like that here, while I’m tied to this dang post.”

Her bagged hands pulled at the restraints.  Her frustration seemed to flow out into the gesture.  Her hands shook a little as she stopped pulling, as if she was clenching each fist in the bag.

“You were my first love,” she said.  “I will never… never have someone who pays close attention to me like you did.  Never someone as sharp as you, never someone who kisses like you did.  I’m ruined, don’t you see?  Romance is ruined for me, because everything that waits for me pales, compared to this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I wanted to feel something like I felt with you.  He and I went further.  I let him put his hand up my shirt, this boy I didn’t even like, in the end.  Because I wanted to feel like I did when you kiss me.  That’s… that’s how ruined I am, don’t you see?”

“I don’t think you’re ruined at all,” I said.  “Not because of that.”

“And I’m supposed to be happy with this?” she asked.  There was a note of anger in her voice.  “With being kidnapped over and over?  Waiting months for, what, one or two days?”

“You’re not supposed to do anything,” I said.  “Sorry.  It was a good solution when I put it together in my head.  If you want something else, then… let me know what it is.  I’m adaptable.”

“My choice?” Lillian asked.

“Yes.”

“Would you kiss me, please?”

I wasted no time in stepping away from the stool, putting one hand on the side of her face, and kissing her like I’d been aching to do since I’d first carried her off.

I gave her light, teasing kisses, drawing her forward, retreating, tormenting her, making her ask.

Her lips still touched mine, moved against mine, as she murmured, “Real kisses.”

Real kisses.

I gave her what she wanted.  No butterfly-light brushes of lip against lip, but full contact, forceful enough to press her head back against the post.  She pushed her body against mine, pulled her arms forward against the restraints, as if she’d forgotten I’d tied them in the moment.

I was aware of the spectre, and allowed one of my eyes to watch her as she snapped her jaw shut.

My hands went to Lillian’s throat, fingers touching the corners of her jaw.  She moaned lightly into my mouth, and then I felt the tension at the corner of her jaw, as she opened it.

I pulled back.  The skin of my teeth wasn’t quite apropos, because it was her teeth, as she moved to bite me, hard.

Her head dropped.  My hands were still on her neck and face, and I could feel her shaking.

“What was that about?” I asked.

She didn’t respond.

“Okay,” I said.  “If you want, we can-”

“Don’t,” she said, without raising her head.

It was a fierce enough utterance that my hands dropped away from her neck and face.

She was crying, now.  I could see the first tear.  The angle of her head and her hair made it hard to see anything else.

“Please don’t,” I said.  “Don’t cry.  This was all pretty nice.”

She nodded, as if in agreement, then said, “I can’t.”

“Please,” I said.  “Whatever I can do, just-”

Don’t!” she said, raising her voice, suddenly tense.

I stopped, helpless.

“Stop… stop giving me choices,” she said.

I opened my mouth to speak, and I had no idea what to say.

“Stop.  Just stop,” she said.  “I can’t do this.”

The words didn’t come to my lips.  I backed away.  It was like night and day, this and before.

I didn’t know what to do.  All of the Wyvern augmented brain, just a day after my appointment with Jamie, and I was as clueless as the dumbest dumbfuck in the Crown States.

I saw the tears, saw Lillian start sobbing, and I turned away.

“Help,” I said.  “Jamie.”

A heartbeat passed.  I raised my voice, “Jamie!”

But he was already in the doorway.

He had to be just outside the door.

How long was he there?

Didn’t matter.  Lillian was hurting and I didn’t know how to make it stop.

“I don’t know what to do,” I confessed.

Jamie didn’t meet my eyes as he crossed the room, going to Lillian’s side.

She pressed her head into his chest.

“Get him out of here,” she said.

“Step outside, Sy,” Jamie said.  “I’ll be there soon.”

“I don’t know what happened,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said.  “But step outside.”

I moved the trolley away, just to be safe, as I headed toward the door.  I paused, “She has retractable needles under her fingernails like Fray did.  Watch out.”

“I know, Sy.  I’ll be careful.  Just go.”

As I left the room, I heard Lillian’s voice, faint and small.

I don’t like the me that says yes to Sylvester.

Jamie’s reassurance was short, gentle, and I didn’t process it at all, because of how deep Lillian’s words had cut.

What was I supposed to do?

I made my way into the hallway, and ran my fingers through my hair.

I’d been honest.  I’d invited her to meet me halfway, and she’d agreed.  In the moment, she’d even seemed happy with it.  It was a bittersweet happiness, but… surely that had to be better than having nothing.  Loneliness and what Lillian had been talking about, being ruined without each other.

This was a compromise, and most compromises left both parties a little unhappy, but…

…They weren’t supposed to leave people like Lillian was right now.  Unhappy with herself.

What was I supposed to do?

Avoid Lillian?  Say goodbye for good?  Never touch her or kiss her again?

How was that better?  She herself had said it was bad.

Was I supposed to avoid the Lambs altogether?  I couldn’t see a way around things that didn’t rekindle at least a part of this hurt that I’d just seen in Lillian.

I ran my fingers through my hair, stopped halfway, and leaned against the wall.  The only sound I heard was the rustle of the sheer curtains and the indistinct murmurs of Jamie and Lillian’s voices.

“Just give me a moment?  Talk to him.  I know you want to,” Lillian said.  No longer whispering or murmuring.

“Sylvester can hold his own.  I’m worried about you.”

“No.  I need a moment to collect my thoughts.  I’m a mess, and I can’t even articulate why.”

“I think you did, and I’ll hardly judge you for being out of sorts.”

“Please?  Just a bit of quiet?  I won’t try to escape.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Thank you.”

I closed my eyes, listening as the footsteps approached.

Jamie gently closed the door behind him.

“Do you remember our conversation, back when we were dealing with the Devil’s men who had cornered the nanny and the mayor’s children?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I was worried about this sort of thing.  The weight of this sort of thing.”

Weight.  The word rang a faint and broken bell.  “I didn’t think you were talking about this.”

“I was.  I’ve alluded to it at other times.  While I was recuperating from the Ravage, then at the Brothel, twice, and back at Lambsbridge…”

I shook my head a little.

“That damn memory of yours, Sy.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“We’re all a little bit twisted, when it comes to matters of the heart,” he said.

“I remember that.  It was our first real, honest conversation.  I mean you and me, not me and the old Jamie.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  He looked in the direction of the door, cracked it open, peeking at Lillian, and then shut it.  He stayed there for a moment, his back to me, before turning around again.

“I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“You miscalculated.  You didn’t account for… how she felt.”

“Every step of the way, she gave the okay.  She wanted the kiss, she challenged me to fish for the packet.  She said I could search for the tooth, touch her hands, examine her shoes.  Her body language, all the while, right up until the end, it reinforced that.  She was happy in the moment.”

“It still wasn’t okay, Sy.”

“What is!?” I asked.  “What was I supposed to do that would make all that alright!?”

“Think beyond the moment, for once.  I know it’s not common practice for you, but think longer-term,” Jamie said.  “Think about Lillian having to go back to the Lambs, with her feelings for you rekindled and all stirred up.”

I set my jaw.

“And she has to live with the fact that she said yes, and that she was weak and romantic in the moment instead-”

“Stop,” I said, my voice firm.

Jamie stopped.  He fixed me with a level, unreadable stare.

“There’s nothing weak about Lillian.  There’s nothing bad about being romantic.”

“I agree,” Jamie said.  “But right now, she feels weak.  She wasn’t thinking straight, and let’s be entirely honest.  You aren’t exactly operating on a level playing field, are you?”

“Are you talking about the ropes?  Because-”

He stabbed his finger into my chest.  “I’m talking about you, Sy.  You.  You’re a manipulator.  Yes, she said yes.  But you led her to that answer.”

I shook my head.

“Are you saying you didn’t?”

“I’m saying- I might have.  But that’s hardly fair.”

“Existence isn’t fair, Sy.  Especially ours,” Jamie said.

“I’m me.  Manipulation is me.  I toy with people.  I toyed with her for years and she called it a lovely romance that she won’t ever be able to live up to.  Because that’s how she operates and that’s how I operate and that’s how we function as a pair.”

“There is no pair anymore, Sy.  You left her.  You can’t cling to the scraps that remain.”

“There’s more than scraps,” I said, more defensively than I might have liked.

“When you left the room, she said Hayle warned her about you, after your first kiss.  That she only just now realized why.  It’s not because you’ll cross the line.  It’s because you’re clever enough to redefine the line.  You have to realize that dragging out a half-relationship with Lillian isn’t going to make her happy in the long run.  Because I think, right there in that room, in that moment that your time with her took a turn, Lillian sure realized it.”

“What am I supposed to do, Jamie?  Because you can say ‘life isn’t fair’, but that’s a whole different ballpark from ‘Sylvester can never ever have a relationship, because that relationship will never be a level playing field’.  And that sounds pretty shitty.”

“I didn’t say that,” Jamie said.

I shook my head.

“There are people who can stand on a level playing field with you,” Jamie said.  “Experiments.”

“Mary?” I asked.  “Started down that road.  Would be even unhealthier than…” I flailed inarticulately in the direction of the door.

“It was good of you to realize that,” Jamie said, voice soft.

“I’m not about to wait for Abby or one of the twins to grow up.  I’ll be a goner before then.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“So, what, you?” I asked, a little bitter.

Jamie was silent.  He didn’t meet my eyes.

“I like girls.  You and I both know very well that I like girls, Jamie.”

“I know.”

“So what, you want me to go find some back alley doctor, see if they can mess with my head, twist things around?  Would that make you happy?”

I realized the words that were coming out of my mouth as I spoke them.  This was a dark echo to a prior conversation.  One that had played through in my head at least once a night for years now.

“No need for something that extreme,” Jamie said.  “Not least because I don’t think your Wyvern-altered brain would do very well with people carving things up in there.”

“Then-”

“Sy,” he said.  “I’ve come to know you.  I’ve made peace with that.  With who you are.  I’m okay, I think.  Your company is good as-is.”

I stopped.  Then I found the words.  Because I couldn’t let the conversation end with that.

I spoke with more bitterness than I would have liked, “So all of this.  Your counsel, telling me how to deal with Lillian.  It’s biased.  Because you like me.”

“I do.  I wouldn’t have come to find you in Tynewear like I did if I didn’t like you at least a little.  And I am biased.  So you do have to take what I say with a grain of salt, here.”

I screwed up my face, scowling, then ran my hands through my hair again.

“Sometimes there are no compromises, Sy.  Sometimes the reality is that things just don’t work out, and you have to make peace with that.”

There would be no working things out with Lillian, if Jamie was right.

“Maybe… go for a walk, Sy?” Jamie suggested.  “I’ll do what I can to smooth things over with Lillian.  We’ll get things mostly normal, then decide where to go from there, once she’s able to have a conversation with us.”

I drew in a deep breath, and then sighed.

“Okay.  Thank you.”

I headed toward the stairs, to make my way out of the building.  Jamie, at the door, stopped.

“Sy.”

I turned to look up at him.

“Just so I know, there’s one thing I don’t get, and I want to talk to Lillian while armed with all the information.”

I nodded.

“How in the world is it you’re so damned clueless and innocent about matters, and then, there, with her, you’re different?  She even noticed it, almost right off the bat.  That you were flirting, that you were interested in a way that you usually aren’t.”

“Oh,” I said.  “That.”

“You’ve missed and inadvertently stumbled on rude innuendo a hundred times in the last six months.  I just can’t reconcile that with this.”

I put two fingers to my head, then turned them, as if I were turning a key in the lock.

“What?” Jamie asked.

“Wyvern,” I said.  “You gave me my appointment just yesterday.  I was anticipating this.  This time with Lillian.  So I took those feelings and ideas out of the box.”

“The box,” Jamie said.  There was a kind of horror on his face.

“Yeah.  Compartmentalized it, buried it, locked it away.”

“Sy, you can’t- you can’t do that.”

“Why not?” I asked, offended.

“Because it’s one thing if they warp you, if this messed up existence of ours and life with the Academy twists us around and makes us strange, but it’s something else altogether if you do it to yourself!”

I shook my head.

“That’s not f-” Jamie started.  He shook his head.  “That’s not good, Sy.  Why would you even do that in the first place?”

“Because of the nights I spent with Mary.  The nights I slept with Lillian?  At first, anyhow.  I guess I did it because I didn’t want to spoil that.  Didn’t want it to get weird, didn’t want to push them away.  Those moment, frozen in time, were good enough as they were.  I didn’t want to let those feelings push me to change that and risk breaking it.  So I made myself innocent.  More innocent.”

The horror was still on his face.  I didn’t quite understand it.

“You castrated yourself.”

“I didn’t castrate myself.  I… asserted control.  I left just enough of the less-innocent parts there because they seemed to amuse you and the others.  It’s really, really not that important, Jamie.  Hell, I halfway forgot about doing it until I started thinking about spending time with Lillian again, and making the most of it.”

Jamie, always rock solid, looked anything but in the moment, “You cannot alter yourself and then forget about it, Sy!”

“Obviously I didn’t.  I caught myself in time,” I said.

“You can’t- Sy, no.  That’s not fair.”

“You almost said that a bit ago.  That this wasn’t fair.  What’s not fair about it, Jamie?”

“I was here for you, Sy.  I left everything behind, I came to help you.  And I thought- I thought hey, you had feelings, you’d weighed them, you decided there was no chance with me, and that was fine.  But you didn’t even consider it.  Your feelings were put away, tucked in some dark corner of your mind and locked away.  I never had a chance to earn a place in your heart.”

I was supposed to say something back, but that last line drove it home.  Now I was the one who felt the horror that Jamie seemed to be evidencing, because it was dawning on me just why he felt that way.

It had taken longer to get there, but in the long run, this conversation was playing out just like my last conversation with Jamie.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “But- you know I-”

I couldn’t bring myself to say it again.

“There was never a chance,” I said.  “Please trust me on that.”

“But you can’t know, can you?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know.  I’m ninety-nine point nine percent sure.”

“I would have appreciated you letting me have that point-one percent chance,” Jamie said.  “I gave a lot to be here for you, maybe even years of my existence.  I don’t regret that, even now, but it sure would have been nice if you gave me that iota of a chance, in exchange.”

I could see the hurt.  I could see the damage I’d inadvertently done.  The wedge.

I didn’t know what to say, and there was no calling out for help, asking for some other person to come in from just around the corner and rescue me from this situation.

“Just tell me,” Jamie said.  “Tell me that, in the end, my feelings or the possibility of me having feelings wasn’t a reason you walled off that part of yourself.  That you didn’t throw up that barrier in between us.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

“You did,” he said.

I nodded.

“Just go for your walk, Sy,” he said.  “I’ll talk to Lillian.  I’ll… think things through.  We’ll talk later.”

“I knew this would happen,” I said.  “Or something like it.  That’s why I put that barrier there.  That there was a chance you would get jealous, or upset, or my feelings in another direction would push you away.  I put the barrier there because I valued you.  I thought it was safe take it down for Lillian, because she was a known element, except it wasn’t, and this conversation-”

“Stop talking, Sy,” Jamie said.

I stopped talking.

“Go for your walk.”

I turned, taking the stairs.

I went for my walk.  I spent an hour wandering the city, paying only minimal attention to the possibility that the Lambs were trying to track me or find me.

My thoughts were a mess.  I tried to organize them, but so many individual things seemed impossible to recover, impossible to salvage.

I was hurt and angry and against all logic and rationale, I resented Lillian and Jamie for making this so hard.

No compromise at all?  No flexibility?  Even the compromises I’d taken upon myself years ago were coming around to bite me.

It was dark by the time I finished my walk.  I had the wherewithal to be secretive as I made my way back to the building, making sure I wasn’t followed.

Hardly mattered.

No, it really didn’t matter at all.

I made my way up the stairs to that hallway and that room.  I wasn’t surprised in the slightest as I pushed the door open, and found the room empty.

No Lillian, no Jamie.

Two glasses and two lengths of rope sat on the trolley, but nothing littered it.  All of the pills and blades, large and small, had been picked up and put where they belonged.

On the table, the sleeves had been picked up and taken with.  The gun had been left there.  I picked it up and tucked it into my waistband.

I remained there, taking in the moment, for a very long time, the wind blowing in through the windows.

Would Jamie be back?  I had no earthly idea.

Could I endure the conversation when he did get back?  The hurt looks?  I had no idea.

Just in case, I found a scrap of paper, and scrawled out a short message.

It was shitty, and it was unfair.  He deserved better.

But I couldn’t endure the thought of waiting and him not showing up.  I couldn’t endure having that conversation if he did show up, and having it end in an interminable break.

I’d had that conversation in my head so many times by now that I couldn’t bear to give it more power than it had.  The eerie echo of it we’d just had was too telling, as it was.

Those who dwell in history are doomed to relive it, I thought to myself.

I looked down at my message.

Thanks for the last six months. – Sy.

I’d have to find Emmett before Jamie and Lillian did.  Get some answers, on the promise of getting Lillian back to them.  See if I couldn’t get Pierre in the bargain, while I was at it.  If I couldn’t, then I’d be directionless.

“At least I can’t let you guys down, eh?”

The assorted Lambs and would-be Lambs, apparitions, surrounded me.  Evette, Gordon, both Jamies, Mary, Lillian, Helen, Ashton, Duncan, Emmett, Abby, Nora, and Lara.

“I was stupid,” I said.  “Tried too hard to be a Lamb.  Hold on to the past, you know?”

I could picture the individual expressions, the body language.  I appreciated the sympathy, hollow as it was.

“Let’s get out of this damn city,” I said.  “Get ourselves into some trouble.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.01 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The trains had been outfitted with more seats, to make up for the higher demand on the lines that were still active.  Less leg room, less aisle space.  The new benches had armrests placed to divide them, constraining how many people could sit on each bench, with an eye toward encouraging more people per bench.

Considering that the force that was pushing so many people to take the trains and get away from the west coast was a plague, pressing so many people in together seemed like a poor idea.

The train car had been crowded for far, far too long.  It had been the kind of crowded that spilled over, the sort of crowded that ruined everything it touched.  Children had crawled underfoot, conversations had risen to a shouting volume just so their participants could be heard.  Even with windows open, the human smell and the noise had been compounded by the enclosed space.

I’d turned to Wyvern to shut out the most obnoxious and offensive of the stimuli, curled up, and lost myself in thinking about nothing in particular.

I had just enough room to curl up in one seat with my satchel wedged in between my side and the armrest, a short barrier to block off the rest of the world.  It was warm, but I still kept my hooded raincoat draped over me.  A blanket, with the hood rolled up to be a makeshift pillow.  My legs were pulled up beneath me, my head rested against the window, my eyes tracking everything that was going on outside.

Getting on the train meant a full physical checkup.  Getting off the train meant the same.  The sole saving grace of this plague was that the physical signs were often early and obvious.  We had stopped at a station, and the exodus of passengers were currently being sorted out by gender on the station platform, being directed into separate booths and buildings.

“Excuse me,” the train’s conductor said, behind me.

It was easier not to move, to pretend to be asleep.

I watched through the window as a mother was reluctantly separated from her child.  Heat was making tempers hotter, fuses shorter.

I saw shadows move as a hand reached for me.

“Oh,” Shirley said, from her seat across from me.  The seats were arranged so that one set of three chairs faced another, and when the train was most crowded, space for knees and feet alternated between a row of seats and the row facing it.

Shirley must have been half-asleep too, given the slowness of her response.  She had a line of sight to see my face, even looked me in the eye, but she still said, “No need to wake him.  He’s with me.”

“Ah, very good.  This is Radham.  I thought, since the young gentleman had a raincoat, he might be doing what many Radham natives do and prepared his raincoat well in advance.  I wanted to ensure he didn’t sleep through his stop.”

This was Radham?

I hadn’t even recognized Radham?  The quarantine buildings were new and blocked a large share of the view, but even so, it caught me off guard.

“We aren’t getting off here, no.  Passing through.”

“Very good.  I’ll double check your ticket… you’ve come a fair way already.”

“We’ve been on the train for a day and a half, now.”

“And you’ll be on the train for a while yet, it seems.  His is the same?”

“Yes.”

“That’ll do just fine.  Are you familiar with this stretch of the journey?”

“Not at all.”

“We’ll be hitting mostly rural towns and smaller cities, and if nothing has changed from the last few weeks, we’ll bleed more passengers than we take on.  The hour is late, and it’s a quiet leg of the journey.  The next stretch of the journey should be quieter and less crowded, but you’ll notice we’ll spend as much time stopped as we spend moving.  For the stops that don’t have their own, the doctors in the first car set up our own quarantine tent for checks.”

“They have to get everything set up?  Tent, tables?”

“All of it, every time.  But I’ll be at your disposal.  We have books, if you’re a reader, and I can bring you tea and treats on request.  Blankets, too, if you want to try sleeping through the night.”

“Does everyone get such dedicated service?”

“No, not everyone does, heh.  But it’s really no trouble when the cars are as empty as they are.  I’ll be asking about tea in about half an hour, if you don’t request some any sooner, but until then I’ll be at the other end of the car, cleaning up.  We should be moving in fifteen minutes.”

“That’s all very reassuring to know, especially as I’m not a frequent traveler.  Thank you kindly, sir.”

“You’re very welcome.  But, just to let you know, there may be something of an inconvenience.  The train car, given how empty it is, might be commandeered.  If it looks like that might be the case, I’ll try to warn you in advance.  I wouldn’t want you harassed.”

“Everything is so very astir, isn’t it?” Shirley asked.

“Very much so.  Any city with an Academy is more astir than most.  You have a nice evening, ma’am, and I’ll bring the tea trolley along in a bit.”

I could hear the man’s footsteps recede.

When he was out of earshot, Shirley murmured, “I dare say that man fancies me.”

I looked away from the quarantine buildings and the sprawl of Radham and met her eyes.  She gave me a smile.

“I did that right?” she asked.  “We are continuing on?”

I nodded.

“Okay,” she said, letting out a small exhalation of relief.  “That’s good.  I don’t want to press you for answers, but I do wish I knew more about what we were doing here.”

“I know,” I said.

I looked out at the city as the train started moving.

Radham.  It hadn’t changed so much, but it was no longer a place that felt like home.  I heaved no sigh of relief as the train slowed and then stopped, knowing I was mostly free to do as I pleased for the next while.  No calibration of my thoughts to think about the times I wasn’t free, and to plot how to handle them, like my appointments, and what to say the next time I saw Hayle.

There was no adjustment of thought patterns or pace as we arrived here, anymore.  There was no fondness.  I’d said my goodbyes to it.

Not the final goodbye, I thought.  I would come back.  I’d started my journey here, and before I ended the journey, I would get answers, and I would see some injustices answered.

But not now.  Especially not when I felt so raw, and when every direction of thinking seemed to hurt.

I heard the door shut at the far end of the train car.  A group made their way down the narrow aisle.

They stopped by Shirley and I.

“We can’t all cluster here.  It would be madness.”

“That’s true.”

“Three, maybe four people?”

“Sounds right.”

“Thinking about this logically… the new recruits aren’t that talkative, because they’re that new, we don’t want to inflict Duncan on Sy, and Mary is hostile to him unless we feed her a task to accomplish.  Jamie and Lillian won’t talk to Sy.  That cuts down the options.  How many people are we using here?  Me, if there’s no objection.  Helen?”

“I’ll sit, Gordon,” Helen said.  She wore the same dress she’d been wearing as I last saw her.

Gordon crossed his arms.  He wore a white shirt with no sleeves, and heavy pants tucked into boots.  Clothes like a laborer might wear.  It showed off the seams in his body.  Sweat more than pomade or oil helped to slick his golden hair back, and his eyes were intense.

“Good.  Then who else?  Evette?  Ashton?”

“I’ll sit,” Evette said.  She’d taken on an appearance very different from Abby’s, more stable than she’d been, once upon a time.  Abby was a bit of a country girl at heart, so Evette had reached out and seized on something that seemed more ‘mad artist’.  Elbow length gloves, stockings, black shorts with suspenders, and a white blouse, with her hair cut to a length that exposed the back of her neck, while remaining long enough to cover much of her face and ears.  There was more emphasis on hiding the defects, and I wasn’t sure what had provoked her to start doing that in my mind’s eye.

She had a dark circle under her one visible eye, and her lips were thin.  She put her bag on the floor in front of her seat and sat down, using the bag as a kind of footstool to prop her feet on.

“Ashton isn’t that familiar a face,” young Jamie said.  “I’ll take the fourth seat.”

“Is that a good idea?” Gordon asked.

“I think it will be okay.”

“Alright.  Keep an ear out, Ashton?  Pay attention?”

“I can do that.”

Gordon, Helen, Evette, and Jamie sat in the seats near Shirley and me.  Ashton sat on the other side of the aisle with the other would-be Lambs: the twins, Emmett, Abby, and her pet.  Mary, the newer Jamie, Lillian, and Duncan sat at nearby seats and benches.  Mary sat so she could twist around and follow what was being said.  Duncan paid more attention to the younger crowd.

Lillian and Jamie sat with their backs to me.

“Priority number one,” Gordon said.

“And we’re straight to business,” Jamie commented.  The younger Jamie.  Softer around the edges.  Somehow more able to work with the dynamic, however it presented.

“I think the first point of order,” Helen said, gesturing while using her control over her voice to sound very imperious and ladylike.  “Would be tea.”

I saw Mary’s head turn, eyes narrowing, as if she wasn’t sure if Helen was making fun of her with the voice or not.

Jamie, meanwhile, only sat in his seat next to Shirley, curled up in a similar way to me, but facing the group.  He smiled, apparently content to watch the discourse.

The difference of Jamie’s age to the newer Jamie was startling and painful to see.  He’d been erased in the midst of the summer months, some time ago, and it was summer now.  He’d been erased, and the Lambs had been taken off duty until the subsequent spring, when we’d gone to Brechwell, and faced down Fray.  A season later, the next summer, the one year anniversary, had been damnably quiet, leaving me little to do to keep myself occupied, except to enjoy Lillian’s company and make initial overtures at getting to know Ashton and the new Jamie.

Then, at the cusp of fall and winter, it had been Lugh.  The Primordials, Mauer, and the Duke being shot.  I remembered snow had been falling as I left the Lambs behind, broke it off with Lillian, and went after the Baron.

This Spring had been Tynewear.  Now it was summer again.  That meant we were at, just past, or just approaching the two year anniversary of losing the first Jamie.

He looked so young, so insecure, hugging that book of his.  He was shorter than me, which was a feat, considering I perpetually lurked at the lowest bounds of typical height for a boy my age.  I could look at him and tell, by body language alone, that he was more introspective.

I’d left him behind at some point, and I hated that that was the case.

“There are bigger priorities than tea,” Gordon said.

“It was such a mess earlier, they can’t even fit trolleys down these aisles, the servers came in with trays of sandwiches and it was such bedlam,” Helen said.

“I know, I was as aware of what was going on as you were.  We were there in a manner of speaking,” Gordon said.  “First come, first serve.”

“And,” Helen said, holding up a finger, “the fact is that Sylvester does not always look after the essentials.  He represses the essentials.  His need for sleep, his need for food, his need for whole and physical well-being.”

“You’re not wrong,” Gordon said.  “I was more concerned about having a plan by the time we get off this train.”

“It’s a dangerous situation, and we’re not prepared for it,” Evette said.

Exactly,” Gordon said.  “Thank you, Evette.”

“I can see where Helen is coming from,” Jamie said.  “We’re sitting here and talking for a reason.”

“Hold on.  We as in all of us, or we as in us four, specifically?” Gordon asked.

“Us four,” Jamie and Helen said, at the same time.

“Why am I taking charge in this discussion if you’re just going to go and agree with Helen and be on the same page like that?  I thought I’d have to roll up my sleeves and force you all to work together.”

“Helen and I want the same thing,” Jamie said.  “We want to look after Sy.  He wants to look after himself.  Ever since he faced down Sub Rosa and truly believed he would die, he’s had a drive to live.”

Ever since I nearly saw you die at Sub Rosa’s hands, I’ve wanted to ensure that each of you live as well.  But I lost you, Jamie.  I lost you, Gordon.

“And that drive to live starts with the basics,” Helen pronounced.  She and I spoke in unison.  “Tea.”

“Hm?” Shirley asked, raising her head.

“If it’s no trouble, I’m… pretty famished.  Could I trouble you to take that fellow up on the tea?  And any snacks to go along with?”

“I’d be happy to,” Shirley said.  “I was just thinking I wanted an excuse to exercise my legs.”

“And cake,” Helen said.

“Could you get something with sugar as well?” I asked.

“That will do,” Helen said.

“Sugar?” Shirley asked.  “You mean in the tea, or-”

“Cake, or biscuits, or candy, or something sweet for that fast rush of energy.”  I tapped my head.  “I need fuel.”

She smiled, stood, and walked down the aisle.

“I like her,” Jamie said.  “I’m glad Sy brought her.”

“She’s adorable,” Helen said, “And she’s bringing tea and treats without complaint.  That gets almost anyone into my good books.”

“But she needs and wants answers that Sy isn’t giving,” Evette said.

Jamie raised a hand, pointing at Evette.  “I know we don’t want to harp on some of the most recent lessons Sy has learned, but I’d really rather not see him make the same mistake while we’re still reeling from the last ones.”

“A lack of consideration?” Gordon asked.  “Maybe.  But I remember what it was like in my doctor’s lab in the months before I died.  Or Sy remembers, because he visited now and then.  They’d go exploring, carve me open, dig through my parts, working to shore things up so they’d last a little bit longer, and while they were fixing the one thing, they’d find another two things that were wrong, and while they were fixing those-”

“A routine, minor surgery would become a day-long exercise,” Jamie finished.  “One without any actual resolution.  At a certain point, they had to cut their losses, accept that some things were bad, and they had to let things be bad.”

“I see your point,” Evette told Gordon.  “You’re worried that will happen here?”

“Let’s stay on topic,” Gordon said.  “Tea should be coming soon.  Let’s get as much figured out as we can, before they arrive with the tea and we’re distracted by eating and drinking.  Because there’s a lot to figure out.”

Evette leaned forward, “Starting with what Emmett said.”

A Day and a Half Earlier

Emmett made his way into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind him.  He stopped at the mirror, brushed at his short hair with his fingers, then set about unbuttoning the fly of his pants, standing before the toilet.

“Emmett.”

It said a lot about Emmett’s character that he didn’t jump a mile into the air.

It said more that I could hear the stream hit the water.  He wasn’t a shy lad.

I was standing on a half-inch thick wooden board that framed a part of the building exterior, just to the left of the open window, one hand gripping the sill to help hold my back and buttocks flat against the wall.

The thrill of the moment wasn’t wholly there.  The game of dealing with the Lambs had been soured, at least in the short term.

I waited for his response, and when he didn’t give it, I said, “About that tidbit of information you were offering.  I do believe I have something you guys want.”

“Mm hmm,” Emmett made a noise.

Had they trained him to be this hard to get a response out of, knowing it would infuriate me much as Rick had, or was it just his nature?

“I know you guys want Lillian back,” I said, “But I’m going to need that tidbit.  And I’m going to want Pierre freed.”

“Yep,” Emmett said.

A part of me wanted to hit him.  I was not in the mood.  The reflexive desire to strike out or react to his non-utterances was almost enough for me to fall from my perch on the wall.

“Yes, you’re agreeing to the deal, yes you acknowledge my demands, or…?”

“Yes.  I agree to the deal.”

“Just like that.”

“We thought you would do this.”

It made sense.  They knew what I wanted, and they knew what I had to offer.

“Not this soon, I imagine,” I said.

“No,” Emmett agreed.

He finished his leak, and I could hear the rustle of clothes as he did up the buttons of his pants.  The kid must have had some camel in him, to be storing up that much water.

He was surprisingly difficult to engage.  Anyone else, I could stir them up into a proper conversation, but Emmett gave me the impression of someone who decided their own pace, then met it.  I wondered if it had to do with his Bruno-level strength coupled with his young age.  Was there a story there?

No.  I had to stop myself.

It didn’t matter.  The whole thing with the Lambs was tainted.  I couldn’t blindly assume that me being involved in their lives would be for the better.

Emmett was Emmett.  I would leave that be.  I was here for answers.

I took note of the quiet on the other side.

“I took inspiration from the Devil,” I said.  “I don’t know where Lillian is, at the moment.  So if you’re thinking about shoving your fist through the window or the wall and trying to grab me, think again.”

“I wasn’t,” Emmett said.  “And I’m not that strong.”

“Okay,” I said.  I spun out a lie, “Well, getting her back requires that I give you the key right here and right now, and then I go to the right time and the right place to meet the people that have her.  Then I can send her to you.  I’ll want to see Pierre free, and I’ll need you to pony up that information.”

“That’s all very complicated.”

“Yes, well, I like complicated,” I said.  “It’s what I do.”

I wasn’t on my game.  My stride had been broken and I hadn’t yet found it again.  I wondered if he had the savvy to tell.

“It’s a deal,” Emmett said, “But it still would have been a deal if you hadn’t done the complicated things with right times and right places.”

“Really.”

“Yes.  I trust you, and I think you trust us.  You were a Lamb.”

Were.  Past tense.

If he even had a glimmer of how much of a punch to the gut that was, given recent events…

I had to bite my tongue.

Emmett, mercifully, started to explain.  “My parents gave custody of me over to the Academy to see if the Academy could save me.  They’d rather never see me again and give me a chance than me have no chance.  The Academy started to work on me right away.”

“You said that much before, essentially,” I said.

“Think they probably did the same thing to you, before giving you Wyvern.  To Jamie, before hooking him up to Caterpillar.”

I remained silent.

“They talked about things while I was in the room.  Things they thought I would forget.  They had an argument once, about how to handle my file as it pertained to the block.”

“The block,” I said, committing it to memory.  Which made me think… “Memory block, or-“

“Block, as in a place.  They were very concerned about sanctions and losing their place in the Academy.  One man wanted to send me there, just to be safe.  Another wanted to send the file there, along with a letter explaining their approach to my case.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Gomer’s Island.”

“New Amsterdam,” I said.  I closed my eyes.  It had to be just about the biggest possible single location to damn well have to search.

“Sylvester,” Emmett said.  “The drug that they gave me to try and alter my memory?  It came from the same place.”

“The Island.”

“Yes.”

That painted more of a picture.  It was like the Academies to centralize activities of a given sort.  Had they centralized the kidnapping and child-experimentation angle?  At least partially?

“Do you know why I’m telling you this?” Emmett asked.

“Lillian,” I said.  Saying her name hurt.  I kept flashing back to that look on her face, the sound of her voice as she’d said she didn’t like the person she was when she was with me.

“No,” Emmett said, his voice taking me away from that dark spiral-shaped line of thinking.

I listened, waiting.

“When I told the other Lambs what I knew, and when I heard them talking about what the Baron and you had spoken about.  They agreed.  This is important.  This should stop.  They, we were unanimous.”

I nodded, knowing he couldn’t see.

“You’re going to go there.  We know this,” Emmett said.  “And we’re going to follow you.  But if you do escape from us again, and if you do find some answers or hold bad people accountable…”

“…It’s not a bad thing?” I asked.

He was silent, on the other side of the wall.

Was it because he was naturally taciturn, and he’d already uttered the three hundred and sixty-five words he was permitted for the year, or because there was a streak of loyalty in him that kept him from finishing the thought?

“Noted,” I said.

The emotional turmoil crystallized in my gut, pushed down until it compressed into something hard-edged, heavy, and painful to bear.  I had a goal.  Something to occupy my attention.

“I’m sorry your time with Lillian didn’t go well,” Emmett said.

My head snapped around.  That jagged, black mess of emotion in my middle lurched skyward, catching my breath, my heart, and bringing everything into sharp relief.

I froze.  I willed it all to stop.  If I didn’t move, didn’t think, then it wouldn’t hurt.

Lillian is already back with them.

Just like that.

“Pierre?”

“Already free.  I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer, before.”

“And-“

“Jamie is free.  Elsewhere.”

I winced at that.

This information he was so freely giving was… what?  Pity?

No.  I somehow couldn’t imagine Emmett giving me this of his own will.  Nor would he be so condescending to poor, broken, sad Sylvester.  I didn’t get the impression that that was how he thought or acted.

Perhaps Lillian had asked this of him.  I could see that.  I could see her treating it as an apology to me, when an apology wasn’t even expected or needed.

I wanted to scream in frustration, let all the feelings out.  Instead, I let that bristling ugliness sink slowly from my chest cavity to the lowest part of my stomach.

“You’re giving me a headstart?” I asked, to break the silence.

“Yes.  We have to talk to the Academy either way.”

I processed that, thinking.

Lillian was supposed to be kept away from the Lambs for two days.  But they were giving me the headstart that that would have afforded me.  They had presumably freed Pierre, and they were giving me the info I’d wanted without a fight.

Yes.  Between Jamie and Lillian, they were extending a kind of apology.

“I keep thinking that you’re going to abruptly leave,” Emmett said.  “Will you let me know when you do?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.  “I’m not much of a talker.”

I smiled to myself.  “I know.”

I would have to leave soon.  The fear of being spotted and caught by other forces was only part of it.  Another part, knowing that Lillian was somewhere in this very building, and Jamie was somewhere outside of it, it meant I had to leave if I wanted to get away from this.

“Emmett,” I said.  “I need favors.  And I know I’m not in a position to bargain.”

I felt so far from the mighty Lamb that I’d painted myself to be, as I’d taunted them all.

“I’d have to hear the favors before agreeing.”

“Can you tell me if you told Jamie any of what you told me?  About Gomer’s Island, in New Amsterdam?”

“No.  The conversation with him was brief.  He-“

“I don’t want to know,” I said.  “Please.  No is enough.”

“That might have been the first time in years that I’ve been interrupted,” Emmett mused aloud.  “Or been told I’m talking too much.”

“Sorry.”

“Mm,” Emmett grunted.

I wanted to ask him not to tell Jamie.  To keep it a secret and to let me go.

I was aware of how monumentally unfair it was of me to do that.  To black Jamie out.

“Did it sound like he said goodbye?” I asked.  “Like he was leaving?  Or that he had plans?”

“Do you want the long answer or the short one?”

“Short,” I said, hating myself for my cowardice.

“Then yes, to all three questions.”

I nodded, and made sure my exhalation of relief was silent, and that Emmett wouldn’t hear.

“The city.  In case it wasn’t clear, two days here should be enough time to build a compelling case to bring back to Radham.  Most of it has been uprooted or disturbed enough it shouldn’t take much looking to find.  There’s a collection of files and folders you can use in the cellar of the Devil’s headquarters.  His underlings can point the way to the building.  Was the auditorium or something?  Bookstore?  My memory isn’t strong.  But once you get that, you should be able to control the city.”

“Mm.”

“The orphanage is almost done as a project.  It has two people in charge, it has some children to get started, but still needs some staff and organization.  I left it incomplete on purpose.  Put your own personal touches on it, wrap it up?  Use the control that the Devil’s papers give.  I won’t say it will only take a few days to make the orphanage operational, but they are still delivering mail, and you should be able to get it started on the right foot.  If you have to, sell it to the Academy as a way to keep tabs on me, because I’m going to be smuggling kids in need to that place and places like it soon.”

“Okay, Sylvester.  We already talked a little about that.”

I nodded.

“Because that’s related to how we got started.  Working with the mice, learning from them, teaching them.  It’s important.”

“I think they know it’s important, Sylvester.  It sounded like it.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat.

“I’m leaving now, Emmett.”

“Goodbye, Sylvester.  It was interesting to meet you.”

I hopped down from my perch to the road below, where I was joined by the host of spectres, leaving behind the warm building.

“Shirley gets us settled.  She has legitimacy, she’s not a fugitive, Sylvester gives her the money, and focuses on starting the investigation.  Probably with the mice.”

“Trouble is, you have to look at how complicated New Amsterdam is as a city,” Jamie said.  “It’s a jarring city, an anachorism.  The seat of the Academy’s power in the Crown States, and, just as an example…”

He hesitated, in that way that he used to do, trying to dredge up the information.

Evette picked up the slack.  “The very name, New Amsterdam.”

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “That.  When they won the war for the Crown States, they took a city named after an English city, and gave it its original name.  Just to show that they could, to display that control.  Even if it made the city sound less Crown and more foreign.”

Gordon spoke, “Or the fact that it’s where the Nobles and Academy elite gather, the, as you say, seat of the Academy’s power in the Crown States, and yet it’s one of the places where the Academy’s hold is weakest.  Too big, too unwieldy.”

“Too messy,” Evette said, smiling.

The door at the far end of the car arrived.

“Shirley!” Helen perked up.  “And tea!  And treats!”

Then, just as fast, she was deathly serious.  The Lambs, as a group, rose to their feet.

They were reacting to something I couldn’t see.  Prey instinct was giving me some miniscule details, something about the weight of the footsteps, the sounds or lack thereof, or that I was belatedly putting things together and realizing that Shirley should have been back by now.

“Not tea,” Helen said, as I let my feet drop to the floor and stood.

Crown Police?  Was I caught?

As I moved toward the aisle, I could see them.

Not police after all.

Just seven other passengers, going to the same place I was.

So this was what the conductor had been saying when he’d said we might have to leave the car to make room.  I’d thought military, but no.

Seven young men and women, adolescents, to look at them.  All tall, most gorgeous, and all wearing the finest and most modern fashions I’d seen, no doubt custom made to their individual forms.  They had intensity in their eyes and cold, mask-like expressions.

“Window,” Gordon said.

I bolted.  The window was open, and the train was going full-speed.  The fact that I could see the upper halves of trees and not the bottom halves suggested it was a slope, and it was a fall that was likely to kill me.

Preferable to this.

One hand on the side of the window, one hand on the bottom, I moved to launch myself out.

The hook-end of a cane caught me by the neck.  I was wrenched back, stumbling, then neatly deposited in the middle of the three seats.  The one that Jamie had been sitting in.

The young noble took a seat opposite me.  He raised a long leg and propped one foot up on the seat to my left, then moved his cane so it was the other way around, bottom end facing me.

I moved to escape, and the cane caught me again.  I froze, pinned where I was, the end of the cane pressing against my guzzler’s knot.

“Sy’s not at his best,” Helen commented, from the sidelines.

“He really, really, really isn’t,” Gordon said.

Go fuck your dead self, Gordon.

“I think…” Jamie said, weighing his words, “I think we’re on point, here.”

“Provided he and Shirley survive the remainder of this train journey,” Evette commented.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.02 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Fugitive,” the noble said.

“Ah,” Gordon said.  “That’s no good.”

I exhaled, as much as I was able, with the cane pressing against my throat.

The young man who was sitting across from me looked as though he had just had a team of hairdressers, a barber, and a tailor just finish working on him.  His black hair was slicked back, the faint messiness at the front of his hair and over his ears looked sculpted.  It was late, but his chin was clean of even the shadow of stubble.  Chin and cheekbones were sculpted, giving his face a mask-like appearance that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.  He wore a white collared shirt with ornate silver trim at the edges of the collar, a tie, vest, and a long black coat.  The silver ornamentation extended to his cufflinks, embossed buttons, the buckles of his shoes, and, now that I looked, to the irises of his eyes.

He was the biggest threat, so I fixed the whole of my attention on him.

“What a shame,” he said.  “By bringing you in, we’re denying a good citizen the ability to do the same.  There was good money placed on you, sir.  Good money the Crown was willing to part with, a sum that could have raised someone up from obscurity to aristocracy.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could kill them all?” Helen asked.  “Make a lovely bloody mess.”

“Not practical,” Gordon said.  “We need to play along for now.  We kill them later.”

“Lord Monte,” one of the two girls in the group spoke, with a posh accent that pronounced ‘Monte’ as “Mont-ay’.  I didn’t take my eyes off of ‘Monte’ as she continued, “If you talk about the citizens of the Crown in that way, they might get offended.”

She made it sound like play.  As if to set up Monte for a retort, a joke at the citizen’s expenses.

But he was more focused on me than on verbal wordplay or making light of the citizen’s feelings.

“You don’t look like much, do you?” Monte with the silver ornamentation spoke, studying me.  “But you certainly did something to deserve being worth that reward money.”

Jamie’s voice overlapped with his, “Think.  Gordon’s right, we need to play along, and we’re getting swept up in the observations without picking out the things we can use.  You used Wyvern to shut out the world, Sy, but we need you to access the world again.”

I stared into Monte’s silver eyes, and I was reminded of how I’d met Lillian’s, when she and I had been so close.  It was a painful reminder, but it was a barb that helped wake me up to reality, connect this situation to the way I’d been thinking there.

The emotional equivalent of reaching out, seizing a knife by the blade, and squeezing.

Something must have changed in my expression, because Monte said, “There you are.”

“Good evening,” I said.

“Titles!” Jamie urged.

“No titles,” Evette said.  Evette was now behind Monte’s seat, arms folded over the top of the seats.  Her chin had been resting on her forearm, but now her head was raised just enough to let her talk.  “Look at him, look at them.  They’re deferring.  The woman, the way she talked, you know He’s the leader of this pack.  Your instincts said to focus on him for a reason.”

Whatever the case, the window of opportunity had passed.

The cane moved from my guzzler’s knot to the side.  It jerked, pressing in hard, just beside my windpipe.  Had it been sharp, a thrust of that force would have gone right through my neck to the seat behind me.

He knew where nerve clusters, veins, and arteries were, I was guessing.

“Customarily,” Monte said, “One addresses a noble lord in a more appropriate manner.”

Already, my vision was suffering for the continued press of the cane.  It was crumbling to black at the edges, especially around my left eye.

“Stay strong, he won’t kill you this quickly,” Gordon said.  “Bend the knee, Sy.”

“Bend the knee,” Jamie echoed.

I looked up at Evette.  Her chin rested on her arm, now.  She only smiled.

“Ah,” I managed.

Monte let up with the cane.  I took a second to let my vision start to go back to normal, the light returning at the periphery.

“My apologies,” I said.

Monte declined his head in acknowledgement of my apology.

“Good evening to you,” I said, looking again at Evette.  “Monte.”

The cane stabbed forward before I was even done uttering the word.  Fast reflexes.  The butt end of it thrust past my teeth and into my open mouth, then stabbed at the soft flesh at the back of my throat.

My eyes went wide.  The contact there and the natural physiological reactions mandated that I gag and upchuck, but the fact that I hadn’t eaten in recent memory, giving my lunch to Shirley instead, and the fact that I’d dulled my senses and put myself into a kind of hibernation mode meant I was only barely able to repress my reaction.

My hands went out, gripping the armrests to either side of me, as he pressed hard, the back of my neck being compressed against my pillowed seat back.

He kept me like that, my breath coming in short, pained gasps, while he continued to stare me down.  The others stood on the sidelines, quiet and analytical.  Even bemused.

“I don’t think Evette gives very good advice,” Ashton commented.

“I’m inclined to agree,” Gordon said.  He gave Evette a pointed look.  “Why are you even here?

Evette spoke, “You’re all here for Sy, you’re paying attention to him, you know him.  I’m more focused on them.  You’re in lockstep, you work together, and one of us has to be a little unconventional.”

Distant, sitting back, the problems beyond.  That made a degree of sense.

Monte might have sensed that my focus was elsewhere, because he rotated the cane, still pressing it against the soft tissue at the back of my throat.  I’d already been bleeding, no doubt, but now there was actual damage.  He was grinding the tissue there much as someone might do to make absolutely sure that the bug underfoot was being extinguished.

“Ow,” Helen said.  Jamie had his face in one hand, beside her.

“I did want this to be my chance to show Sylvester what he could do if he just did things right the first time around,” Gordon commented.

Evette commented, “Which translates to you being informed by a fragment of Sy’s personality that wants to be fantastic at everything he does.”

“Well, yes, but we’re glossing over that,” Gordon said.

I started to raise my hands, intending to grab the cane.

“No, Sy,” Gordon said.  He put his arm out, between my hands and the cane.  “You’re not going to win that battle of strength, not when he has the leverage and most certainly not when you’re you.  You took Evette’s advice.  See it through, at least.”

I lowered my hands, settling them into my lap, and clasped them there, as if I’d never been more comfortable.

“Good.  Upside,” Gordon said, “Is we’ve made this a battle of wills.  There’s room to move to make that a battle of wits.”

“Monte has an image to maintain,” Evette said.  “He wants to resolve that image.  The hope is that he realizes he can’t just extinguish us without turning us into… a kind of martyr, I suppose?  Our last action would be a mad, curious kind of defiance of him, and our deaths would seal it in the memories of his peers.  That would nettle him.  More a loss than a win.”

Helen leaned over, peering along the cane and into my open mouth.  “There’s a fair amount of blood.  Even with Sy’s tolerances, he’s going to choke soon, or ingest so much of his own blood that he reflexively vomits.  He might be able to suppress that, I know, but-”

“He might not,” Gordon said.  “Damn it.  Okay.  That’s the nature of the battlefield then.  Will Monte take an out if we give it to him?”

“No guarantee,” Jamie said.

“I don’t think so,” Evette said.  “They barely even recognize us, let alone recognize us as an enemy.”

“Alright,” Gordon said.  “Damn it to hell.”

The train rattled as it bumped over some mild obstruction on the tracks.  I involuntarily winced as the cane shifted even more than it had been.

If he was going to say anything, it would be now.

He was true to form.  Monte spoke, “Shall we stay like this all the way to New Amsterdam?  My arm won’t get tired.  I can smell the blood coming from the back of your throat.  I can see your muscles moving as you hold yourself back from gagging.  If you try to vomit, you might tear your own throat open.  How many hours is it?”

“Long enough,” one of the other nobles said.  A man, wearing only a vest over a collared shirt.  His blond hair was damp from the rain of Radham.

“This is dull, Monte,” one of the other nobles said.  The second of the two young ladies.  She was the shortest of the group, with black hair, intense blue eyes, and a light fur ruff at her collar, built into her dress.  Where the fur ruff might have been too warm for summer, the fact that her hair was an ‘up’ style that exposed her neck and that her dress was open backed and mid-thigh in length made up for it.  The series of careful balances continued, as she wore just enough tasteful jewelry to make up for the minimal quantity of cloth.  She, too, had chosen silver.

The dress tied at the back, behind the neck.  The elaborate tie looked like a small set of wings.

“She called him Monte.  Is she testing him?” Jamie asked.

“There’s a greater game afoot,” Gordon said.  “That’s their interplay.”

Monte stood, and his hand slid down the length of the cane as he approached.

“And they’re related,” Helen commented.

“See, fugitive,” Monte said, his voice low.  “My sister, she can call me by my name.  But my friends and peers?  Even they know enough to call me lord.”

You,” Gordon pointed at Evette.

“You got angry at me last time.  My lips are sealed.”

“Good.  This is a power game, contest of wills.  I think… there has to be a way out of this.”

“I can think of one, but it’s a case of frying pan and fire,” Jamie said.

No,” Gordon said.  “There has to be a straightforward solution.  Helen?  Please?  Ideas?”

“Charm him?” Helen offered.

“Yes, because Sylvester is such a darling,” Evette said.

Gordon gave her a warning look and a stern point that threatened future repercussions.  Evette clapped a hand over her mouth.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Gordon said.

Nothing is going to work,” Jamie said, “Sylvester is Sylvester, we’re not him.  As a composite, we’re a mess, we’re functioning too slowly.  He’s turning to us because he just had to face the hard reality that being Sylvester often doesn’t work out.  He doesn’t want to be him, so…”

“He’s being us,” Helen said.  “And it’s like it was back in Brechwell, when he was missing you, he’s not very good at being you.  That’s why we’re stumbling.”

I suppressed a cough as I failed to swallow the blood that was making its way down the back of my throat.

“We don’t have another option,” Gordon said.  “At least not right now.  And we’re out of time.”

Prey instinct, again.

Something in Monte’s demeanor had tipped Gordon off.  The cane came free, sliding out of my mouth.

“Were you going to say something?” Monte asked.

“He knows full well that was a cough,” Helen said, indignant.

I started to speak, and felt the pain in my throat, the blood, and coughed fairly violently, turning my head and coughing into my hand.

“He’s sensitive to his sister’s boredom,” Gordon guessed.  “And we need an answer to give, now.  Jamie, the frying pan, the fire, does it buy us time before the fire?”

“Yes, it definitely does, but… the timing is wrong.  It’s a gamble as is, but it could be disastrous.”

“Damn it,” Gordon said, for the third time.  He watched as I continued coughing.  “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Cease your barking and speak, boy,” Monte said, imperious.  His hand gripped my hair and pushed my head back against the seat.  The movement of my head made my throat hurt, and the shift in angle forced blood out of the open wound, which only exacerbated the problem.

He’d known about the veins and nerve clusters.  He had to know he was demanding I speak while I was helpless to do so.

“Violence?” Gordon asked.  “Stupid question.  Threaten?  No.”

“Can’t negotiate,” Helen said.

“Can’t play them off each other,” Gordon said.

“Bargain?” Jamie suggested.

“Would be too close to begging.  And if he’s anything like I think he is, he hears begging often enough,” Gordon said.  “And we don’t know what they want.”

“No tools available,” Evette said.  “We have a knife, the packet of poison from Lillian’s bra in his pocket.  Nothing too useful.  There’s the cloak?  If we were quick, we could use the distraction and slip under the seats.  No…”

“Thank you for contributing,” Gordon said.  “And I agree, no.  We’re not that quick, and there’s nowhere to go.”

“And Shirley,” Evette pointed out.

“And that,” Gordon agreed.

I regained my breathing.  I swallowed, hard, and didn’t make myself cough any further.

I could tell that their patience had run thin.

Nothing to give me? I thought.

“Sorry,” Jamie said, his voice quiet.

Fine.

I looked up at Evette.

Don’t,” Gordon said, sounding pained.  “Don’t take cues from her.”

“I confess,” I managed, and my voice was hoarse, my throat much abused and heavy with fluid.  “If your friends and peers have the sense to call you Lord, I must be exempt from that same rule, because I am not your friend, and I am most certainly not your peer.”

Ah, I could see, the way his face changed.

He didn’t like the response.

All that remained was for him to figure out the best way to punish me.

But his sister broke into laughter.  My eyes moved, and I saw smiles spread across several faces.

“I like him,” the sister said.

“You are notorious for your horrible taste, dear sister,” Monte said.  He had to be taking note of the expressions of his peers.  His sister’s response had disarmed him.  He couldn’t take action now without seeming petty.

“And you’ve grandstanded long enough,” she said.  She moved down the aisle, gave her brother a light push, and flounced down into the first available seat, sitting across from me.  “And this is my first time meeting a notorious criminal.  Hello notorious criminal.”

“Sylvester,” I croaked.  I suppressed a cough.

“Sylvester,” the sister said.  The others were drawing nearer.  The spectres of the Lambs moved to accommodate the group.

“Monte is the leader, he gets first pickings,” Gordon commented.  “But if he doesn’t maintain that standing, the power moves to the next figure in the hierarchy.  We have hours left on this train, several stops, and they’ll keep rotating out until they find an excuse to eat us alive.”

The sister was shooing at her brother, talking, “Sit.  I don’t like it when you’re looming over me like that.”

“I’ll stand, thank you,” he said.  “And I’ll point out that insolence can’t go unanswered.”

“It won’t,” she said.  She met my eyes, “But damage to the body is one of the least meaningful ways to destroy a man in our modern era.”

“There’s a wedge,” Gordon said, quick.  The second half of the thought was mine to complete.

Divide them.

“I quite agree,” I said.  “I’m rather resistant to pain, so physical torture doesn’t work very well in the short term, either-”

“My lady,” Helen whispered in my ear.

“-My lady,” I finished, seamlessly.  I gave her a small smile.

The sister looked up at her brother, offering him a polite smile, followed by a very smug, “Hm.”

“Yes, dear sister,” Monte said.  “I know.  You catch more flies with honey.  But this involvement soils the honey.”

The sister rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be a sore loser now, Monte,” one of the other nobles said.  The blond male that had been doing most of the talking.

“Third in the hierarchy,” Jamie guessed.

“Sylvester,” the sister said, as if she was trying on the word.

“Yes, my lady,” I said.  I suppressed a cough.  With my luck, I would have spat a fine spray of blood into her face in the process.

“What did you do?” the sister asked.

“Wow her,” Gordon said.  He sounded dejected.  “Might as well.”

“I murdered the Baron, for a start,” I said.

Her mouth made a very neat, practiced ‘o’ of surprise.  I was put in mind of Helen.  “That was you.

“It was,” I said.  “I’ve done quite a bit else.  Much of it in service to the Academies, not nearly as exciting.”

Exciting is not the word I would use for murder of a noble,” Monte said.

“How curious,” the blond noble said, ignoring his friend.  “You say in service to the Academies.  Not in service to the Crown.  Is this the way it is normally said?”

“Misstep,” Jamie said.

“No,” Gordon said, “We need to wow them.  Buy time.  Try…”

When I spoke, it was in coordination with Gordon, and the response was for the sister, not for the blond noble.  I shifted my body language to match my words, to use the very same key pieces of body language I’d taught Shirley to convey attention, power, and the same sort of intensity I’d used to ensnare Lillian.

Another painful barb, that.  A firm grip on the knife blade, emotionally.

But necessary.

Gordon’s voice in my head overlapped with my words in reality, “…I might be the wrong person to ask, my lord, given I’ve just admitted to murdering one of you.”

“Are you flirting with a noble?” Helen asked, caught between incredulity and horror.  I ignored Lillian and Jamie, who had been sitting in the background, their backs to me.  Were they turning around?  Reacting?  What would I feel, if I let myself recognize that and my internal responses to it?

“That’s flirting?” Jamie asked.

Another self-inflicted barb.  The innocence, bubbling to the fore alongside thoughts of Jamie.  I missed the innocence we had in the early days.  I’d grasped for it, in a way.

The sister crossed one leg over the other, so they folded over at the knee, her hands clasped in her lap.

“You’re a hard one to get a read on,” she said.

“I’ve been told that,” I said.

“You’re more methodical than I thought you’d be, at first glance,” she said.  “You think before you say or do anything.  I even suspect you feigned coughing for longer than you needed to, to work out what you were doing.  I suppose that’s necessary for an assassin, but it feels very mechanical.  Like a stitched, albeit a clever one.”

“Because we’re handling this by committee,” Jamie said.  “Gordon.  Take over.  You call the shots.  One person at a time.”

“It’s going to be unbalanced,” Evette said.

“Shh,” Helen shushed.

“I’m an experiment, after all, my lady,” I said.  “But I can be more fluid, if that would please you.”

“We’ll see,” she said.  A non-answer.  Then, abrupt, “I’ll confess, I thought this time on the train would be a bore.  Our trip out was dreary, but it was at least broken up with stops here and there.  But one long, straight trip back?  Ghastly.  To think we’d claim a train car for ourselves, resign ourselves to drink and discussion, and find a wanted fugitive instead.”

“I’ll strive to entertain,” Gordon and I said.  Care was being taken to emphasize certain words without actually putting stress on them.  The last word or two of each sentence was key.

“I’m sure you will,” she said.  “About your traveling companion, who was getting you tea…”

“No,” Jamie said, in the background.

“Shirley,” Gordon and I said, without flinching.

“Aiding and abetting a known fugitive.  I’m thinking, for punishment, a bidding.”

“And how would that work, dear sister?” Monte cut in.  His sister gave him an annoyed look at the very calculated intrusion.

“Each member of our group here has our own doctors, who are occupying the next car and keeping miss Shirley company.  There are twenty four doctors in that train car.  Many were the top of their class in their respective years and Academies.  They can bid with ideas, from their polished, Academy-trained brains.  The doctor who can devise the most fiendish punishment for miss Shirley gets a reward.  Predicated, mind you, on their follow through after the fact.”

“I imagine,” Gordon and I said, “that if they can’t follow through, they’ll be discarded.  Or perhaps, you could offer up the reward to any of the doctors who can follow through, but using the doctor who failed as the subject, this time.”

The sister smiled, looking at her companions.  “I do like the way he thinks.”

“My lady,” Gordon and I said, “I am honored by the compliment.”

I’d very nearly said we.  I was fairly certain that would have been a disaster.

Every ‘my lady’ was a jab at Monte, a courtesy we’d refused to give him.  Gordon and I were both calculating how much we could push him before he snapped.

How did that play out?

The moment we gave any evidence that there was something we wanted or valued, he was liable to dash our hopes and take that from us.

Strengths, weaknesses, attack, defense.  That was the focus right now.

“Can we participate, my lady?” the blond asked.

“We.  In the bidding?” the sister asked.

“Yes.”

“This is bad,” Gordon observed.  I was in agreement.  If there was a way to keep the young nobles out of it, build the idea up and then deflate it, or make it too complicated to see through, or to buy time, at the very least, then there was a way out, and Shirley could be okay.

Not so, if they had a personal stake in seeing this through.

“I think so, Lord Leeds,” the sister decided.

Lord Leeds, the blond noble, smiled.

“What would you do, my lady?” I pressed.  Deny the enemy the chance to maneuver, don’t give them time.  Force them to act without enough time to reason.

“Me?” she asked.  “In this sort of game, it’s a disadvantage to go first.  I only encourage the others to top me.”

“It’s only fair that you set the bar, as the inventor of the game,” I said.  “Besides, I suspect you’re more interested in seeing the creative efforts of others.  I imagine you have an idea in mind already.”

She wanted us to be fluid, less mechanical.  Now we were responding faster, ready with answers the moment she spoke.  Throughout, we maintained the eye contact, the confident body language, the faint mirroring of her own body language here and there.

And she had to know that we were moving to force her hand.  If she said that no, she didn’t have an idea in mind already, then she looked ignorant, she forfeited power in the eyes of her peers.

Where the eye contact, the body language, and all of the word choice up to this point were important was in making this more of a tease than an attack.  It wasn’t so different from how I’d approached Lillian.  ‘I know you’re capable of handling this.’

I could handle teasing, as painful as it was to execute.

So could Gordon, for that matter.  His teasing had been a different sort.  Natural, less manipulative, and more because people had been drawn to him automatically, and all he’d had to do was step back and let them follow.

She knew what I was doing.

“We take that young lady, who was helping prepare the tea, the biscuits, and the plate of cake, and we make her a warbeast,” the sister said.  “Transplant her brain, or take her body and build up the warbeast around her, extending her nervous system.  Whatever road we take to the destination, she should be elephantine, ugly, slow, and securely confined.  One of the brood beasts, good only for rutting once a season, followed by pregnancy and the birth of a generation of warbeasts for the Crown.”

“A fair start,” Leeds said.  “I’m sure I’ll best you after I think for a moment.”

“Can’t let him,” Jamie observed.

“Shh,” Helen whispered.

“I’m sure you will, Lord Leeds,” Gordon and I said.  We turned to the sister.  “It doesn’t seem terribly fair that you have no consequences for losing the contest.  How do we decide if it can be followed through on?”

“The nice thing about maintaining the status that we do,” the sister said, “Is that when the scales are unbalanced, we’re invariably on top.”

“Existence is unfair, but it’s unfair in your favor?” Gordon and I asked.

“Exactly.  I have a team of doctors at my disposal.  The three of them can work on making my project a reality,” she said.  She gave me the same smug smile that she’d given her brother.  “I find it very telling that you jumped straight to finding objections and flaws in my design.  Are you not keen for my bidding game?”

“More like a game is more fun if there’s something at stake, my lady.  What if we said that if they couldn’t make it a reality, one of them would be executed at random?”

“Perfect,” she said.

She hadn’t hesitated a second.  Was there no loyalty to the doctors that maintained her, or was she an effective bluffer?

“It does become a charade, though,” Gordon and I said.  “A farce, to have twenty-four doctors submit their individual ideas, to be independently judged-”

“-And a long train journey to manage it,” she said, without missing a beat.  “Your reluctance is showing through, Sylvester.”

“That isn’t where I was going with my objection,” Gordon and I said.  It was so hard to avoid saying ‘we’ while still maintaining the independent schematic in my head.  Gordon was a machine of memories and ideas and impressions that required constant attention to maintain.

I paused, making use of the hanging thread of my statement to reorganize, to get everything straight, before Gordon and I said, “I’m saying that the doctors will intentionally fail.  They know full well that existence isn’t fair, as you just said, and they would throw the game rather than slight any of you.  A lot of work to tally their responses, when they won’t take your game seriously.”

“He does have a point,” Monte said.

“Oh, shush, dear brother,” the sister said, waving him off.

“The game only works with the seven of you as participants, or the twenty four doctors,” Gordon and I said.

We need them to favor the doctors, then take the joy out of the idea, focus on the work and execution of it.

“We’ll have the contest among us, then,” the sister said.

“Damn it,” Gordon said.  I kept my own mouth closed, my poker face intact.

The sister smiled.  “I just had my pick, so I think I get to choose who goes next…”

“There’s a way,” Jamie said, “I- Let me.”

“Your synergy with Sylvester is terrible,” Helen said.  “You work together as a pair only because you’re so different.”

“That was the other Jamie.”

“Do you remember Brechwell?  Do you remember how bad he was at emulating you?” Gordon asked.

“I remember,” Jamie said.  There was none of the new Jamie’s characteristic annoyance of having to reaffirm that fact.  It made me wonder if the new Jamie’s annoyance was fueled by the fact that his predecessor…

No, that was still too painful to dwell on.

Gordon ceded control.  Jamie stepped in.

I shifted my approach.

Not attack, not defense, nothing direct.  We’d gathered the materials.  We needed to draw on what we’d already established.  I already knew what we wanted to use.

Jamie and I patiently watched as the sister seemed to decide on the other girl as the next to take her turn.  The taller, blonde noblewoman, the only other girl in the group of seven.

The finger pointed, the sister enjoying her moment.  “Marcella, dear.”

“My lady,” Marcella said, curtsying in the aisle.

Patience, timing.  I leaned forward, knowing the movement would draw attention.  They were still wary of me sprinting for freedom.

Jamie and I spoke, and in it, I felt a moment of the playfulness we’d enjoyed, roughhousing, teasing each other.

Not a barb.  No fierce gripping of a knife, that made me feel pain while sharpening my focus in the moment.

Just a sad, dull ache.

“My lady Marcella,” we said.  “What’s your greatest fear?”

“I beg your pardon?” the sister asked, startled.

Beside her, Monte chuckled.

“Isn’t that the trick of the game?” Jamie and I asked.  “In devising horrific fates for others, you reach deep inside, and to recognize what others might find horrifying, you tap into what you yourself fear.  To win the game, you have to dig deeper into your mind, memories, and self.  In the doing, you reveal vulnerabilities.  Even when one wins, it’s a bittersweet victory.  That is, unless you trust your friends to keep confidence.”

Monte’s chuckle continued, picking up as I said that last part.

“I do believe you’re suggesting something unsavory about my character, now,” the sister said, to me.

Ah, this was tricky.  The diplomatic riposte.  I could say yes, and she would kill me for the insult, or I could say no, back down, and risk letting her recoup and continue forward.

Were I dancing with Gordon in the here and now, we might have said no, maintained our stance, as part of the conversation, and tried to steer things as it continued, so that that one sour note Jamie and I had seeded it with would recur, spoil things, and create divides we could use.

But I wasn’t.

Yes was an answer, so was no, but silence was the third option that remained at our disposal.

Patience.

Let one second pass, confident, accusatory.

I’d expected Monte to take the bait.  He didn’t.

It was Leeds.

“Not to worry, Moth,” the blond noble said.  “Our collective lips are sealed.”

Joining his strength to mine, to bring down the Lady.

Moth, though, was a curious appellation.

Moth, Leeds, I thought.  Then, Monte?

Nicknames.  Place names.

No.  Mothmont.  The place was named after the people.

Members of the branch of the family that the school was named after.

Nothing we could use, but a detail to file away later.

Monte’s chuckle died.  “You walked yourself into that one, dear sister, with your made up punishment.  It would be like you, to fear being grotesque, huge, and good for nothing but-”

And,” Moth said, very pointedly, “It would be crass to imply any more.”

“I don’t think you’re going to find any more takers in your game,” Monte said.

The Lady Moth pouted, the expression very calculating.  “True.  I had my try of it.”

“Shall I have my try?” the Lord Leeds asked.

“No,” she replied.  Her affront was feigned as well.  “No, that wouldn’t be fitting.  We’ve toyed around, but at the end of the day, my dear brother is the highest ranking nobleborn on this train.”

The pause was a loaded one.

She was passing the lead back to Monte.  Not everyone would get their try.

I’d insulted her, and now Monte had no reason to play, no reason to tear me down strategically before finishing me off.

“My idea about the cloak, and going under the seat?” Evette murmured.

“Won’t work,” Gordon said, his voice soft.

Fire and frying pan, I thought.

The timing was good enough, and the situation dire enough to warrant the gamble.

The first part of the gamble was plain.  If our educated guess was correct.

“Unfortunately,” Jamie and I said, “You are not the highest power in play here, Lord Monte.”

The sheer audacity of what I’d said gave him momentary pause.

“We’re on our way to New Amsterdam for a meeting with the Lord Infante,” Jamie and I said, with confidence, our voices still ragged.

The sheer audacity of that bought me another moment of life.  Then Monte said what Jamie been worried about him saying, “The Lord Infante is not in New Amsterdam, fugitive, so that meeting is unlikely and impossible.”

My eyes and the eyes of every phantasmal Lamb in the train car turned his way.

“He is,” we said.  “And I’m sure he’ll thank you for delivering us securely to him.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.03 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The young lord Leeds sat across from me, his narrow sword laying across his lap.  The other nobles were at the far end of the train car, talking among themselves.

Leeds was tall, but that wasn’t unusual.  All of the nobles but the ‘Lady Moth’ were.  His hair was immaculately slicked back, his skin lacked any sort of blemish, and he sat with such perfect stillness that I might have thought he had died on the spot.

That would have been quite the thing to deal with.

I shifted the position of my hand.  Leeds’ hand moved almost in unison, as if there were strings attached to me, and any movement on my part made for an equal and matching reaction on his.

If I moved my hand in any way that put me in a better position to grab the sword, his hand moved closer to the handle.

No other part of him moved.  No tells, no tricks.

The other Lambs sat around us, but he couldn’t see them.

“In practice,” Gordon observed, “this is working better than the discussion was.”

“Agreed,” Evette said.  She was still standing on the seat behind Leeds, arm draped over the top of it, looking down at the rest of us.  Her other arm dangled, touching Gordon’s hair.

Helen sat beside Gordon.  Jamie sat beside me.

“Sylvester is good at a number of things,” Jamie said.  I kept my mouth shut as he talked.  “Action, acrobatics, fiddly things with his hands-”

Fiddly things? I thought.

He cracked a smile.  “social manipulation, thinking fast, assessing and investigating a situation, consciously or subconsciously, making mental connections, problem solving, presentation, I could go on.  He’s clever.”

“Too clever, sometimes,” Gordon said.

“Shh, be kind,” Helen said.  “Sylvester is in a rough spot.  Don’t kick him while he’s down.”

“He’s resilient,” Gordon said.

“Point is,” Jamie said, patiently, “Right now, he’s doing what he always does.  He has the same capabilities, but they’re divided between us.  There might be a small advantage if he needs to switch from one methodology to another quickly, but we’re in a bad place when he needs something like an aggressive approach-”

Jamie indicated Gordon.

“-With some mental connections while he’s at it,” Jamie finished, indicating himself.

“Or when he needs to lean on me,” Evette said.  “We’ll be in a bad place then.”

“I think it’s best that we don’t put you front and center in Sy’s head,” Gordon said.

“Agreed,” Jamie said.  Helen nodded.

“We’ll see,” Evette said.  She turned, looking at the others at the other end of the train car, while my eyes remained on Leeds.  “They’re figuring out what to do with us.”

“So are we,” Gordon observed.  “What are we doing with us?”

Evette spoke, “Even if they finish that discussion by deciding we’re lying, they probably won’t jump straight to killing us.”

“Not much we can do if they do,” Gordon observed.  “We broke their stride just as they were handing us back to Monte for him to kill.  That was good.  Are we counting on being able to slip away?  With Shirley?”

“Shirley is a snarl,” Jamie said.

Marcella, the blonde noblelady, stepped out of the car, passing into the train car where the doctors were.

Gordon spoke, “I think we need to do something with Leeds.  If we can put some distance between ourselves and the nobles here, we can tap into other resources.”

“I think we should wait,” Helen said.  “Bide our time.”

“Really?” Gordon asked.  “We’re going to argue this?  They’re nobles.  If we bide our time, there might not be any weak points or opportunities that pop up for us to exploit.  We just end up getting closer and closer to a terminally bad situation.”

Helen twisted around to better look at Leeds.  “I think there might not be any weak points or opportunities for us to exploit in the here and now.”

“Unless we create one,” Gordon said.

“Me?” Helen asked.

“You,” Gordon said.  “If there’s no objection?”

“I’ll just wait my turn,” Evette said.

“You’re not getting a turn,” Gordon said.  “Now be quiet.”

Jamie vacated the seat next to me.  Helen collapsed into it.

I put the whole of my focus into her, letting the others become blurs in the background, vague sentiments and images.

Helen, as I brought her into sharper focus in my mind’s eye, demanded that I tax my imaginary senses.  Helen was art in life.  She was, in my estimation, more beautiful than half of the nobles present, just in how well she was put together, how easy she was to look at and how captivating she could be when she’d drawn in the eye.  Even then, she had them beat, because I was pretty sure that most of these young, attractive nobles were leaning on the exotic clothes and context.  Helen could look like a force of nature while wearing a potato sack.

She smelled good.  The sensory inputs were important.  I let my eyes close, and I tried to push my brain to create the smell of Helen.  She could naturally produce a scent that other women strove for with chemicals and bottles, and then augmented it with something more artificial and mild.

Not as forced as Ashton, but attention had been given over to everything.

In training my senses to capture her essence, I pushed more of my thought processes into getting more out of the senses I did have.  The taste in the air, of lingering sweat and humanity, and the taste and smell of the noble sitting across from me.

Helen was a paradox.  The human brain had a part to it that reacted on instinct, that pushed for the most basic needs.  Warmth, food, water, sex.  There was a primal center, and for Helen, that primal center was front and center.  Everything else was camouflage that let her draw nearer until she could take what it was she wanted.

She was driven by very simple wants and needs.  But those wants and needs were characteristically things that were wanted and needed now.  Society and civilization and social niceties kept us from snatching up all the food we could eat and stuffing our faces with them, from mashing our lips against the lips of each attractive person we saw.

But for Helen, it was different.  That same process that made her need and want also made her very capable of holding back from partaking.  The patience was built into her on the ground level.

As I constructed the illusion, trying to figure out how she would move and act in a more complex dynamic, I felt a blade touch my throat.  It scraped skin as it moved slightly.

I opened my eyes at my own leisure.

Leeds was holding the sword.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Resting my eyes,” Helen and I said, lying easily.  I continued putting the mental picture together.

“No,” he said.  “I don’t think someone would be able to rest their eyes in your shoes.”

Control of expression, control of my body.  Look at him, how he was looking at me, and decide.

No sooner did I decide that I didn’t need to put on any persona at all than I let my body and expression empty of all Sylvester.  All of the pain, all of the will, all of the character.

“Careful,” I heard Gordon say, from a far away place, and he wasn’t talking about the sword or the noble.

It wasn’t a perfect emptying.  Remnants remained.  Wyvern let me bend my brain in the directions I needed it, and this wasn’t that difficult.

The next part, the key part, was to turn my brain to its tasks.  I had to pick out the things I needed and wanted.

Food was secondary.  None of the cake or cookies Shirley had been getting, hungry as I was.

Safety.  I needed safety.  Physical safety.  Escape.

I needed mental safety.  My focus turned to the nobles at the other end of the car, who were staring at me and the sword at my throat.  It extended beyond that, to the train car next door.  To Shirley.  Without her, I was liable to unravel.

The key, I assumed, was to savor.  I was here, what I wanted was there.  The space between was tantalizing.  The time between was.  So long as I wanted it badly enough that I could taste it, the present me and the future me were so close as to be indistinguishable, and there was no contradiction in being a creature of want and being a patient creature.

And wanting something badly enough to taste it was not a stretch when I was already recreating distinct smells and sensations in my mind’s eye.

The others were talking in stern tones.  I could catch the cadence of it, in the background.  There were two sides to this argument.  The more aggressive side was winning.

“You’re the third in the hierarchy,” Helen and I said.

“You’re the one with the sword to his throat,” Leeds told me.  “I would address that first.”

Helen and I looked down at the gleaming length of the blade.

We looked up to meet his eyes.  My eyes were cold, dispassionate.  I was Helen without the mask on.

Gut feeling told me that the noble would respect this more than the act.

“I’m going to assume you found a way to give yourself a dose of one drug or another, based on the things I’m seeing,” Leeds said.  “Narrowed pupil, change in breathing.”

My breathing was slower.  I was calmer.

Monte approached, traveling down half the aisle before asking, “Is there a problem?”

“I don’t think so,” Leeds said.  “He may have found a way to dose himself with something without moving his hands or feet.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Monte said.  “Ask if you need help.  We’re just waiting on Marcella.”

Leeds didn’t say or do a thing to express just how little he wanted to do that.  I still knew.

Establish a personal relationship.

There was no good, no bad.  Reach out.

I let a slow smile creep over my otherwise blank face.

Leeds kept his face so under control that his eye didn’t even flicker a hair one way or the other.

“I’m not worried,” Helen and I said.  “I’ve let the genie out of the bottle.  I’ve mentioned the Infante.”

“You bolted when you first saw us,” Leeds said.  “Now you’re claiming you’re safe.  My peers will be saying the same thing.”

I adjusted, letting an eyebrow twitch.  I started the movement of my mouth, then forced it to stop.  Not even a twitch, there, but there would be a hint in the way my muscles shifted, a faint change in the way the light hit my cheek.

He would almost certainly read it as a touch of humor.  As if I’d found what he said funny.

It was like Helen’s reaching hand, looking to close the distance, to get a fingerhold, which could snag on clothing, and allow for the grasp.

Only in this case, I needed to inject enough small doubts to give myself an avenue out.

My eye went back to the door Marcella had gone through, I visualized Shirley on the other side.

“Look at me,” Leeds said.

The amount of time it took to look at him mattered.  I could have snapped my eyes to his, and I could have taken long seconds to do it, and both could have been confident and intimidating in their own ways.

I took the middle road, but I didn’t lock eye contact.  I gave him the once over, looking at vest, shirt, pants, shoes, at the handle of the sword, then his face.

It would be nice to be a girl.  I could try feminine wiles.

I’d had that thought before.  That conversation, with Jamie.  It had been stirred up by my interactions with him, the memory part of my crystallized impression of him, locked in a different part of my brain than the one that handled the rest of my memories.

I didn’t have feminine wiles.  I was just a little too old to play the child.  I was a ‘young man’, a ‘lad’, a ‘boy’, but never a ‘boy’ in the tone that was reserved for the small, more as an epithet.

While I was trying to figure out how to get a hook in him and create an opening, I picked up on something with instinct.  It might have been prey instinct, except I didn’t feel very prey at the moment.

He was thinking about killing me.

I could follow his thought process all the way through.  Kill me, cut my throat.  Fuck the Infante, fuck his peers.  Just be done with the problem.  He would say I tried to run.

I turned my eyes toward the others, and again, I used the smallest of expressions, a faint lowering of the eyebrows, drawing them together, a pinching together of the lips.

Concern.

Believe that they’re coming.

I saw the faint movement of the sword.  It wasn’t the attack.  It was Leeds holding himself back.

This little trick would only work until he was sure he didn’t hear them, that they weren’t looking or doing something.  He would realize I was up to something, that I was successfully manipulating him, and I would die.

The door of the train car opened.  A terrified Shirley was brought through, past the five other nobles, with Marcella and a doctor right behind her.

I saw Marcella hand Monte a large piece of folded paper.  I recognized the image on the upper half.  It was my portrait.  The wanted poster.  They must have had it in the staff car.

I couldn’t dwell on that.  My timing had been about right, stalling Leeds.  Leeds couldn’t kill me now, especially now that the others were paying attention to me.

“My lord,” Shirley said.  Fear made her voice almost nonexistent.  She strained to speak louder and more clearly, and her voice only broke.  “My lord, my lady.”

She tried to curtsy to each one while still moving forward quickly enough to appease the crowd.

It was a mercy of sorts when she was able to move ahead of the nobles, eyes like dinner plates, as she walked down the aisle to me.

“My lord,” she said, still sounding deathly afraid.  She gave Leeds a curtsy.  She didn’t curtsy for me.  “Sylvester.”

“Sit,” Monte said.  He’d finished reading over the note at the bottom end of the wanted poster and handed the paper to one of the nobles I hadn’t placed yet.

Leeds moved the sword away from my throat, raising it up and out of the way, to give Shirley room to pass to her seat.

The other six nobles were stepping out of the aisle, allowing the doctor to come through.  He stopped a distance away, beside Monte.  One of his personal attendants, it seemed.

Shirley sat next to me.  She very carefully avoided looking at me.

“Poor thing,” Helen murmured.

I looked at Shirley, I reached out, took her hand in mine, and squeezed it.

I was disconnected enough internally that I had to frame what I was trying to express.

Reassurance.

I had very low expectations that the reassurance would be warranted, but the more confident Shirley was, the less likely we were to have a disaster.

“You guessed the lord Infante was in New Amsterdam,” Monte said.  “But that’s not a difficult guess to make, if sufficiently educated.  But the idea of you being here on an errand to see the lord Infante doesn’t hold up.”

“He tried to run, earlier,” Leeds said.

Shirley’s hand moved under mine.  A reaction.

“Why did you try to run?” Monte asked.

“I’m not permitted to say,” Helen and I said.

“Really, now,” Marcella said.  She was standing next to the Lady Moth.  “We’re nobles.  If we ask, you say.”

I could see the other Lambs more distinctly, in the background.  Jamie wanted in.  He had something to say.

Gordon seized Jamie’s wrist and shook his head.

We couldn’t afford to give up the act.

Helen and I turned back to humor, instead.  That look as if, if we had far less self control, we would be laughing at this situation.  I wanted to project power, to draw on the Infante’s, and put these people on their back foot.

I saw Monte and Leeds exchange a glance.  They’d come to a conclusion, and now there was doubt.

“Do we take Helen out?” Jamie asked.  He wanted in so badly.

“I don’t know,” Gordon said.  “We have an opening, but-”

The window had passed.  There wasn’t room to discuss, to switch patterns, when things were so time sensitive.

Monte moved his hand, indicating me.

The doctor they’d brought out of the last train car approached.  He paused.  “It’s an experiment?”

“It is,” Monte said, without looking away from me.

“Will it lash out?”

“It could,” Monte said.  He stared me down.  “If it does, it dies.”

Helen and I kept my expression still and maintained a look that lacked any concern at all.

The doctor reached into his coat and withdrew a set of calipers.  He touched them to the bridge of my nose, then pinched.  He moved them to the corner of my jaw, where the flesh was soft, and pinched, noting the measurements each time.

The third measurement was of the jaw bone itself.

Wait, I’d had this examination before.

I reached for the memory and floundered.

Helen vacated the seat.  Jamie rushed into it.

The machinery of my mind began clunking, shifting directions here and there, a wet, biological sort of clock taking on its own dimensions.

The Attendant Doctor continued his work, the calipers pinching into the top and then the underside of my wrist.  The pinch was brutal enough that I thought it would puncture through and bite into my artery there.  The complex mechanical calipers had fluid and hydraulics as part of the design, so there was some give, but the doctor wasn’t forgiving in the least.

I could remember a session with Lillian giving me this same examination.  Some different body parts here and there.

“Heh,” Jamie made a noise.  It wasn’t a wholly happy noise.  There was something behind it, much like how the recollection of Lillian was bittersweet.

Not like that, I thought.  The fixation in the moment and the so-far-useless eye for openings was giving way to a slower, more careful way at looking at the bigger picture.

She had told me I needed to put on more weight.  Just after going for the thigh.

There had been a few before that.  He might not go for the thigh.  I forgot how exactly it went.  Was it better to be firmer or weaker?

I couldn’t go weaker, but if I could throw off his numbers…

I very carefully tensed my leg, well in advance of him reaching for it.  I relaxed it, then tensed it, just a little harder than before.

He poked at my stomach, then moved to the thigh with the calipers.

He frowned slightly as he recorded the number.

“I also haven’t eaten today,” I commented.

“Quiet,” Monte said.

The doctor moved over to Shirley.  I didn’t miss the slight pause as he looked her over.

I doubted Shirley did either.  Still, she submitted to his measurements.

“We’ll entertain you,” Monte said.  “And we’ll assume you are indeed in service to the Infante.  We’ll deliver you to him.  Tranquilized.  He’ll warrant a higher dose, Attendant.  He’s resistant to drugs and poisons, according to that poster.  He has a lifetime of tolerances built up from being a lab rat, injected with some very noxious chemicals.”

“I’ll account for that,” the Attendant said.  “But he’s underweight, and the lack of food in his stomach does matter.”

“I’ll trust your expertise, Attendant,” Monte said.

Damn it, I thought.

The seven nobles stared me down in relative silence as the doctor finished measuring Shirley.  He reached into a deep pocket, retrieved a syringe, and then slammed it into my chest.

I gasped, from surprise and the pain.

I could feel the contents spread out, numbing.

“There was something I was going to say,” Jamie said.  “Provide some doubt.”

I drew in a deep breath, exhaled.

I wobbled a bit.  Part of it was my recognition that I was under the influence and exaggerating a touch.

“I think…” Jamie said, very slowly, “We can talk as we go under.  Try to remember how you smirked, with Helen, but don’t hold back… not now, but soon.”

The doctor didn’t slam the needle into Shirley’s chest.  He was actually gentle, finding a vein in the arm.  Her dose was half the size of mine.

“What I’ve been piecing together, what we’ve been piecing together,” Jamie spoke to me, “Is that these nobles are very small.  They identify by their families.  The Mothmonts.  By places.  Leeds.  But they sure as hell aren’t major players in those families or places.  Monte is the one with the highest rank and he’s only a ‘lord’.  They’re small.”

Shirley squeezed my hand, looking for reassurance.

“It’ll be okay, Shirley,” Jamie and I spoke.  As if our tongue was looser than it was, maintaining confidence.  None of Helen’s act, but a person succumbing to drugs was a sloppy enough picture that it worked on its own.

Jamie spoke, launching off from the tail end of that sentence, while my lips remained shut.  “But they’re operating in a cluster.  The way they talked about the train stops, about having to return home, and the timing, they had places to be, a schedule.  They were on an errand.  Maybe for the lord Infante, and maybe it was big, maybe it was a mid-level errand and they just don’t feel the need to brag about it, but they aren’t carrying it with them.  So why are they in a group of seven?”

I could feel the drugs taking hold.  I didn’t feel like I was passing out, but I had to pretend to be.

“They’re not just small nobles.  They’re brand new nobles.  They’ve probably been raised by their families in houses like Richmond House was for the Baron.  This might be some of their first exposure to the world, their first time being expected to act.”

“They’re insecure,” Gordon observed.  “It would have been a nice realization to have in the beginning.  We could have anticipated some of the violence they directed our way, and we could have used that.  It could have been the in we needed.”

“But,” Evette said, from the seats to our far right, on the other side of the aisle, “We didn’t, we couldn’t.  No use dwelling on it.  Sylvester’s broken.  We’ll make do.”

“You’re not going to say you want to be in control?” Gordon asked.

“No,” Evette said.  She grinned.  “Well, yes.  But not now.  There isn’t a lot we can do now, and Jamie’s talking us through that.”

“Right,” Helen said.  “Shh.”

There were a long few seconds of silence.  My body was heavy with the drug.

Jamie spoke, and in the haze of the tranquilizer, his voice was very similar to the voice in my head, “They’re insecure nobles, only exposed to the proper world in the last few years, and we want to unsettle them.  So, let’s say…”

“He said,” Jamie and I spoke, mumbling, “The Mothmonts don’t face the firing squad yet.  For now he wants you alive and he wants me alive, so…”

Monte lunged forward, shouldering his attendant doctor aside.  He grabbed me by the collar, pressing a blade to skin.

“…We’re okay for now.  Not to worry, my lord,” Jamie and I said.

I slumped over, letting all of the muscles in my upper body go slack.  It wasn’t hard to manage.  They wanted to, with the tranquilizer coursing through me.

It was just on the edge of knocking me out.  I wondered if tensing my leg had done anything, or if my tolerance was higher than he had estimated.  Possibly both.

My head lolled, and Monte shook me.

There was a long pause.

“Thank you Attendant,” lord Monte said.  “I know this business is menial for a man of your talents.  See to it that they don’t die on the journey, keep quiet and don’t speculate on what you heard, and I’ll end your rotation in my service six months early.  You’ll have a year and six months to use as you see fit before I see you again.”

“You’re too kind, my lord” the Attendant spoke.  I could tell from the way he was speaking that he was bowing deeply.  “I make it routine habit to put all matters outside of science outside my head at the first opportunity.  You can count on my silence.”

“Good.  Then leave us,” Monte said.

The man’s footsteps retreated from the car.  The door at the end opened and then closed.

“What he said was trickery, lord Monte,” Leeds said.

“Trickery is very possible,” one of the others said.

“The firing squad?” The Lady Moth asked.

I had to pull myself back from the brink of actually passing out..  Their voices had almost lulled me into letting my defenses down.

“Nobles have been getting shot.  The rebellion leader with the grotesque arm.  Ex-soldier.  He made the guns that took off half of the Duke of Francis’ head, I can’t imagine what else they would be referencing,” Monte said.

“Trickery, lord Monte,” Leeds stressed.

Marcella spoke in that grating voice of hers, over-enunciating here and there and injecting an accent into her words, “His woman here didn’t know anything about where he was going or who he was seeing.  No contradictions.  He saw his friends in West Corinth and was upset after.  They’re hunting him.”

There are advantages to not telling your friends what you’re up to, I thought.

Then I thought about how some thinking in that vein had spoiled so many things so very recently, and I felt less victorious.

Moth spoke, “What he just said, pretending to be working for the Infante, being expected, and now this?  It implies collusion between the rebellion soldier with the guns and the lord Infante.”

“What you just suggested is treason enough to get us all executed, my Lady,” Leeds said.  “The lord Infante primarily operates in the capacity of magistrate and judge.  Particularly over other nobles.  He wouldn’t be shy about using the guillotine.”

“He said yet,” Monte said.  “We don’t face the firing squad yet.”

“He didn’t say it was you two, either,” Leeds said.  “Be rational, my lord.”

Monte’s voice was as strained as a noble’s voice ever was.  “A difficult thing to do, given the stakes.  I’ve been floated over the ocean to come to this place, which no self-respecting noble besides the Duke bothered with, we’ve been going to and fro trying to placate the elements of the Academy who are getting too cocky for their own good.  Now we return to New Amsterdam amid noise of rebellion and people making monsters in their basements and bathtubs, a fugitive with a story, and possible conspiracy involving a man who may very well wear the Crown in my lifetime, and I’m being asked to be rational?”

“The fact is, my lord,” Leeds said, very calmly, “If such a conspiracy exists, then there is little to nothing we can do about it.  If he wants us dead, then we die.  If he has a greater plan that he has not deigned to share with us, one that involves a supposed rebel leader who is killing nobles, then we are to smile, bow, and accept that this is our lot.”

“No,” Monte said, the word short.  “You would not be saying the same thing if it was you.”

“I would.  I promise you this, my lord.  But there is no decision we could make here that would change the course of events.  We cannot kill him.  We cannot keep him secret and keep him to ourselves.  From the moment we get off this train, eyes will be on us.  If we hesitate to bring the fugitive to the Lord Infante, then he will wonder why.  We’re being tested on our loyalty and ability as it is.  We can’t fail in something like this.”

“We ‘ave to bring him, my lord,” Marcella said.  “And this girl, hm?”

“Hm,” Monte said.

“If you might have guns to your heads in the future, my lord, my lady, we can’t give the lord Infante the excuse to use the guillotine in the here and now instead.”

“Yes,” Monte said.  “Yes, dear sister?”

“Yes,” the Lady Moth said.  She didn’t sound happy about it.

“And,” Leeds said, pointedly, “We shall keep our eyes open, our hearts loyal to the Crown, and we shall be guarded.”

The conversation moved on to other things.  I started to lose my ability to track it.

“That will have to do,” Jamie said.

“Shh,” Helen said.  “Sleep, Sylvester.  You won’t be able to stay awake the entire time.  Let it happen now.”

I wondered if the real Helen would suggest that, or if my tired and abused mind was telling me lies because it wanted so badly to sleep.  All the same, I let myself succumb to the tranquilizer, hoping I would be awake by the time we arrived in New Amsterdam.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.04 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“-more permanent measure than what we’re doing now,” Duncan said.

“I don’t agree,” Gordon said.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Duncan said, clearly exasperated.  “But, as I’ve been trying to outline for the past while-”

“This isn’t working,” Gordon said.  “There are clear weaknesses, it’s only going to break down further, and while we’re doing this, we aren’t resolving the problem, right?  That’s what you were going to say?  Again?”

“Yes.  And there’s the part where this problem may be actively getting worse as he leans on us as a crutch.  We all caught just how bad it got when we put Helen in charge.”

“Yes,” Gordon said.  “Nobody’s saying this is good or perfect.  But I’m loyal to Sy.”

“Of course you are.”

“Dunc, if you try that patronizing tone with me one more time, I will extinguish you, damage to Sy notwithstanding.”

“Be nice, Gordon,” Lillian said.

“You’re all too nice to him.  Far too nice, considering what he’s suggesting.”

“Don’t take me being quiet as me agreeing with him or tolerating him,” Jamie said, “I can’t stand him any more than Sy can.  He’s been improving, but this?  I can’t agree with this.  And I think I’m very well placed to comment on this.”

“The fact is,” Duncan said-

“Duncan,” Gordon interrupted, voice firm.  “Stop repeating yourself.  Say something different, if you’re going to say anything at all.”

“Is that your way of telling me to shut up?”

“My polite way,” Gordon said.

“Fine.  I’ll say something new.  Remember the rule?  I wasn’t there for it, but Lillian or Mary would have probably told me.  One Lamb can’t sacrifice themselves for another Lamb.  Because that’s not fair.  But one Lamb can sacrifice themselves for two or more Lambs, if the situation is dire.”

“We’re not Lambs, silly,” Helen said.  “We’re aspects of Sy, wrapped up in figments of memory.”

“And,” Jamie said, “Even if we were real, which we’re not, the rule doesn’t allow for one of the two to make the call for sacrifice on behalf of another.  If Sylvester and Mary’s lives were at stake, it would never be okay for Sylvester to decide to sacrifice me for the two of them.  I would, if there were absolutely no way out of the situation, of course, as would most of us-”

“I saw how you looked at me when you said that last bit,” Duncan said.

“Yes.  That was intentional.  I would, but it would never be okay for someone to decide to sacrifice me for their sake and the sake of someone else.”

“Okay, then,” Duncan said.  “Then I’ll rephrase.  Sylvester is self destructing.  He- Don’t get out of your seat, Gordon.  I’m not repeating myself.  I’m saying that we’re speeding haphazardly toward a situation where we all get extinguished, Sylvester included.  So maybe, maybe, it’s time to consider a more permanent solution than doing what we’re doing.”

“I half agree with you,” Evette said.  She paused.  “More than half agree.”

“You aren’t the only one, I don’t think,” Duncan said.  “Going by the eye contact I’ve had from some people, new recruits and veteran Lamb alike, I’d guess almost half of the group agree with me or are torn, and are not wanting to rock the boat by joining their voices to mine, or to yours.”

“He’s awake, you know,” Ashton said.  “He has been for two minutes, pretending to be asleep, while he gets over the effects of the tranquilizer.”

I opened my eyes.

I watched as the Lambs stirred, each one settling down, as if they’d been slouching or lying down or standing in the aisle before, but now were finding seats, ready to get down to business.  Lillian and the new Jamie, who had turned around to face the discussion, settled into their seats with their backs to me.

Duncan met my eyes for a moment, then turned to stare out the window, saying something under his breath to Ashton.

“I hope you’re rested,” Gordon said.

I blinked a few times, getting a sense of the surroundings.  We had stopped, and Leeds was once again sitting across from me, with the Lady Moth in the seat next to me, keeping me from the aisle.  The window to my left was sealed.

Jamie, Gordon, and Helen occupied the empty seats nearest me.  Evette stood on the seat behind Leeds, peering over top of it.  The window outside suggested we had arrived in New Amsterdam.  I could see the tall buildings, but from my seat, I couldn’t crane my head to see how tall they really were.

I took stock of them, the emotions, the clear distress that followed from the debate with Duncan, then looked across the aisle at Duncan once again.

“Sy,” Gordon warned.

Not that I was in a position to do anything.  My body was sluggish, and the noble was fast.  The sword point touched the hollow of my collarbone.

“You’ve somehow managed to seem concerned about something that isn’t us,” Lord Leeds said.

Jamie was already in the seat next to me.  He and I took a moment to adjust, then offered Leeds a small smile by way of response.

As I moved my head, I felt something strange.  I swallowed hard, testing.

“We fixed your throat,” he said.  “Our doctors did.”

I didn’t let my expression change any.

He didn’t react, didn’t offer me any tell.  He simply moved the sword, giving me three feather-light taps on the underside of my chin with the blade.  Bidding me to stand.

I did.

“Marcella,” Moth said, as she rose from her seat, “Watch this one.”

Indicating Shirley.

Shit flows downhill, I thought.

“Keep up,” Leeds said, as we approached the door of the train car.

The scene was akin to a dark mirror.  The nobles gathered at the end of one train car, in the covered space between cars, and in the next car, where the doctors were.  Several doctors filed through, filling the space between nobles, who spaced themselves out a fair amount.

There was a surprising degree of positioning, and the dark mirror was one that put the nobles in stark contrast to the Lambs.  Everything was deliberate, where the positioning was so fluid with the Lambs.

For us, it had always been something we naturally did.  Once we got to know each other and things became second nature, we would take up positions as the situation warranted, as comfort levels and skills in different fields dictated.

For the nobles, it felt mechanical, even as they did something very similar.  Everyone had a place they belonged, ordered by hierarchy.  They were, as far as I was aware, more similar to one another than individually specialized, and that informed how they moved, where they stood, and the order they fell into.

There were other parts.  The Lambs had never been tall.  Even when Gordon had died, he’d been approaching his later teens, he inevitably would have been tall when full grown, and he’d only been just a little shorter than the average man at that point.  That was another contrast.

The Lambs blended in.  These nobles did not.  They never would.

With a noble on either side of me, Leeds with his sword point touching me between the shoulder blades, we walked down the ramp that had been attached to the train, down to the train platform, and took our first steps into New Amsterdam.  Doctors quickly opened up tall umbrellas and stood beside their nobles, shielding them from the rain.  I was left with no umbrellas to shelter me, and the downpour soaked me through in a matter of seconds.

I turned my eyes skyward and let the water wash over me.  So many hours in the train without washing had left me dry, restless, and itchy.  In this, I felt more like myself.  The fact that it was a city of perpetual rain but not Radham made it feel more like familiar ground than I might have in Radham itself.

It was eerie to be looking up at the sky and to see the buildings spearing up in my peripheral vision.  I had seen buildings that were ten stories tall, but they were unusual things.  Brechwell had had towers, which might have been that height at their highest.  Here, it seemed like one in five buildings were about that tall, and another one in five were taller.

All of the individual spires that reached up in this manner made me think of the tines of an actual crown.  With the rain pounding down and the spires reaching upward, I felt an immense pressure, and there was something that felt like home in that, too.

The details captivated.  Everywhere I looked, I could see things.  Academy created life crawled on the outside of buildings, trimming branches and cleaning windows.  I could see buildings that were fascinating, because of the styles of architecture that I’d never seen before, because of the styles and building features that had no rightful place in the Crown Jewel of the Crown States.  Buildings that looked like they had been half demolished, and had churches rise proud out of the ruined stumps.

Churches.  I’d been warned, I’d heard tales, and seeing that anachorism in all its stone and stained glass still startled me.

I saw buildings that had biological reinforcement, which was hardly anything new, but the reinforcement was meat.  Spires of meat and stone that breathed.  Spires with bridges connecting them.  Castle features grew here and there like tumors on proud buildings, haphazardly thrown on.  I could see what I suspected were individual academies at various points in the cityscape, nearly hidden by the forest of tall buildings.

Everywhere I looked, there was crowd, but it was a messy, dark, jagged sort of crowd, the edges made ragged by the addition of countless works and experiments.

Everything about it surged, was growing, was alive, striving to break new ground.

I’d seen this before.  I’d seen the aftermath of that, too.  Drawing the analogy and then trying to wrap my head around this took my breath away.

It felt like home and it felt like an alien world, and that might have been because it had everything.

I took it all in, water running over me, and there was a stillness and a silence that made me feel even more disconnected from this city.

I looked closer, and I saw the Lambs.  Some were close.  Gordon, Helen, Evette, and Jamie.  Others were further away.

All were silent, all stared at me.

And as I realized why, as I looked for Lillian and Jamie and saw them standing beside one another, their backs to me, I lost what I’d nearly reclaimed.  The loss might have been intentional.  Self-sabotage.

I’d very nearly snapped out of the fugue that had held me for the duration of the train journey.

Jamie found his place beside me.  My focus turned to picking out the pertinent details, to assessing the situation.  Escape wasn’t possible, so I didn’t try, not yet.  Jamie was the right one to have at my side in this moment.

The doctors and the remainder of the nobles filed out.  A large stitched held Shirley in its arms.  As if we were a military regiment, everyone with their preordained places, Monte near the lead, with two doctors on each side of him, a row five people wide, two stitched carrying bags, then another row, with Moth and her three doctors, and so on, with me toward the middle, Marcella at the tail end with the overlarge stitched and Shirley.

We marched on, the sword periodically pricking me to keep me moving, and I took in all of the details I could.  There were so many.  The faces in the crowd as they bowed and curtsied en masse, when the nobles could only see the tops and backs of their heads, but I was short enough to see the faces beneath, staring, stricken with awe and fear.

People as far as a city block away moved to clear a path and bend the knee.

Ahead of me, I saw a noble peering over the crowd with a predatory eye.  He hadn’t spoken during the journey, except to add his voice to the discussion of what to do with me, out of earshot.  His hair was long and dark and flowed out from beneath a brimmed hat.  He wore a vest made out of what looked like spun gold cloth, which matched the band on his hat brim.

He walked at a leisurely pace, and he didn’t slow as he reached out.  He touched the face of someone in the crowd.  With three long fingers touching one side of a young woman’s chin, he drew her forward.  She stumbled but he didn’t let his fingers fall away.  She dropped her bag, leaving it behind, and she quickened her pace to match the casual walking speed of a man two feet taller than she was, though she was a grown woman of twenty or so.

She was beautiful, her hair pitch black, kept dry by a fashionable hat that was as wide as my arm was long.  The hand held her chin up and out, so it was raised, her back straight, her footsteps quick, as if she was being held off the ground and she had to stretch to touch the ground and propel herself forward.  Not that she was being held up.  Because I could see her in profile, I could see that her eyes were large, dark and very expressive.  The expression evidenced three different sorts of horror and terror.

If I had to guess, she had been slow to curtsy, and the noble, with a keen eye for beauty, had picked her out in advance.

It was as if those three fingertips had the same ability to find purchase as Helen’s did.  One touch was all it took, and the target was ensnared.  But the power being used here wasn’t physical power or perseverance.  It was purely one of influence and standing.

Fingers as long as my hand was from heel of the palm to fingertip reached out, and drew pins out of the young woman’s hat.  Freed where it had been pinned to her hair, the hat fell free, drifted my way, and was trampled under the feet of doctors.  The hat no longer shielded her from the rain, and water ran down her face and the neck exposed by her ‘up’ hairstyle, not so different from the Moth’s.

The fingers pulled out more pins, and the hair came free, falling out of its careful arrangement.

Finished with that, the noble settled a hand across one of her shoulders, guiding her forward.

She cast one quick glance back, over her shoulder, toward the family she’d just been pulled from, and I couldn’t see her face because of her hair and the angle.

Then she looked back over the other shoulder, into the thick of the procession, and her eye fell on me.

In the downpour, without her hat, her hair now falling free, hair stuck to her face, and her makeup ran, a streak of bold blues and black tracing down from her eyes to her chin.

It was a desperate look.  I almost saw hope in it, and that was a sad, sad thing.  She’d looked back at family, and had turned away, no doubt with the realization that there was no hope to be found there.  Her family couldn’t petition, nobody would call out and rescue her, no solace would be found.

But then she’d looked at me, and I was an unknown.  We feared the unknown because fear dwelt in the gaps, but she’d reached a point where her world had been turned upside-down in an instant, and in a world that was only fear and silent terror, the unknown potentially held saviors, just as it once potentially held monsters.

Even if the potential savior took the appearance of a rain-drenched boy four or five years her junior who walked with a sword pressed to his back.

We ignored the quarantine tents.  By the time we had put the station and the surrounding space behind us and reached the road, all traffic had stopped and parked.  People on both sides of the street bowed.

The nobles had brought a patch of stillness to this city that seemed so much like a pot that had boiled over.

A line of carriages extended down one side of the street, parked, and the crowd and other parked vehicles kept me from seeing where the line started and ended.

Six people climbed into each carriage.  With so many nobles and so many doctors, the stitched, Shirley, me, and the dark-eyed woman, the carriages filled up faster than seemed reasonable.

Every third carriage or so pulled out onto the road and started on its way with no passengers at all.

“Guards at the nearby buildings.  If they’re trying to maintain control over this city, then they’ve established this as a point to protect.  It’s likely impossible to get into any of the nearby buildings without getting past squadrons of armed men and countless checks,” Gordon observed.

“They established a routine,” Helen observed.  “This trick with the carriages is something usual for them.”

Helen speaking made me think about food, which made my stomach gurgle.

Nobody commented.

The noble in gold, the woman with the dark eyes, two Academy doctors, Leeds and I climbed into a single carriage.  I sat between Leeds and the noble in gold, facing the other three.

“You seem to be my designated jailor, my lord,” Jamie and I observed, to Leeds.

“I’ll gladly be your designated executioner,” he said.  “Quiet.”

We fell quiet.

Sitting one seat to the left and across from us, the woman with the dark eyes stared at her feet.  Tears ran down her cheeks.

“What’s your name?” the noble in gold asked, his voice soft.  The deeper speech sounds had a warm burr to them, rough in a way that evoked images of someone older than he was, or similar to the voices of those from regions of Crown Territory that had once spoken more guttural languages.  I had little doubt, hearing it, that it was a burr that had been designed, trained.

“M-mine, my lord?”

“Yes.”

“Therese, my lord.”

“Therese.  Good.  Are you of high birth, Therese?  A respected family line?” the noble asked.

“My lord, my father is a banker.  He works hard, he earns a good living, and he left me wanting for nothing, but he did so by working as hard as he did.”

“Not of a respected line, then, no.”

“No, my lord, but we routinely socialize with those who are.”

He stared at her, intent, and she was diminished in the process, like a flower might crumple and wilt as a flame drew close.

I could tell that she was doing her utmost to avoid sobbing or sheer hysteria.

“I will make you into an aristocrat,” the noble decided.

“My lord?  I don’t understand.”

“You’ll receive enough of a sum that you’ll never have to work again, and your children and your children’s children will be cared for solely on the interest that this sum generates.  You’ll need servants.  A manor.  Do you prefer older buildings or newer ones?”

“I don’t understand, my- my lords, I don’t know what’s happening-”

Her emotions were on the verge of spilling over.  She’d found a way to resign herself to her fate, and keep the emotions more or less restrained, but now that this was being offered to her, it looked very much like she might lose her mind.

“Miss Therese,” Jamie and I said, careful to address her as we might a young aristocrat.  Leeds’ sword moved closer to my throat.  We continued, acknowledging the warning and proceeding with care.  “I would recommend you play along.”

I’d nearly said ‘we’.

“Play?” she asked.  She looked at me, stunned.

Then, as if a belated thought process finished, she seemed to realize I had her best interests at heart.  She wasn’t adrift, she wasn’t isolated.  Her hope wasn’t ill-founded.

“I prefer older buildings, my lord,” she said.

“We’ll find you one that costs what someone like your father wouldn’t make in a lifetime.  The staff I provide you will counsel and follow your every whim in decorating the place.  You’ll need three charity projects at a minimum, to discuss with other aristocratic women of your standing,” the noble said.

“Yes, my lord,” she said.  Her eyes flicked back to me.

“What interests you?  Think of one, quick.  Or I shall think you’re dull.”

“You do not want him to think you’re dull,” Leeds spoke.  Following so soon after the behatted noble’s pronouncement, it was a one-two punch, something to keep her off balance.

A test of more than just quickness of the mind.

“My lord?” she said, and she stopped.  For a long instant, I thought she would stumble.  Then I saw a light in her eyes.  “The welfare of clones, my lord?”

“That is one I have never heard of before,” he said.  He smiled, his voice still warm as he instructed her, “Tell me of it.”

“My friend commented on it once, and it stuck with me,” she said.  She still looked bewildered, but talking on this topic seemed to center her.  “Clones are grown and raised to perform menial work.  Stitching carpets and clothing in factories where they sit in row and column with others like them.  The law doesn’t protect them, but says that they are not actually human, because they are not of woman born.”

“The law, in this instance, favors the corporations, which fund the city, which funds the law, you see,” the noble said.  “That sounds like a wonderful pursuit.  If you paint it as something that troubles children or child-like things, you could romanticize it.  In fact, I would see little trouble in giving you my backing for this task.  You could achieve real change, a footnote in history, but, even so, that isn’t to be understated.”

“Yes, my lord.  I would… be honored.  I still don’t understand.”

Beside me, Jamie sighed heavily.

I remained still.  The grip of the nobles was too strong.  Jamie and I working together couldn’t see any gaps, couldn’t make out any chances, weaknesses, or opportunities.

The forecast the Lambs had made in deciding whether to try for escape on the train or later seemed accurate.  These nobles weren’t about to make a silly mistake that would give me a chance to slip away.  No.

No, except maybe this farce with ‘Miss’ Therese.  Maybe there was a way there.

I wanted to believe that the city was so large, chaotic, and crowded, that if I slipped away, I could disappear into it.

I harbored doubts, all the same.  Jamie and I waited, watched, and listened carefully.

“Were you fond of horses as a child?”

“I was, my lord.  But New Amsterdam doesn’t allow much room for horses that don’t pull carriages.  Even then, it almost mandates the use of stitched ones.”

“Very true.  But I’m thinking of an estate with a stable.  We’ll get you started with three horses of a beautiful pedigree, racers, if that’s alright?  Fast as the wind, beautiful, healthy.”

“My lord, I fear it’s too much.”

As she said it, I could see the glimmer of fear on her face.  As if the more he said, the less likely it all was to happen.

“Not at all, not at all,” the noble dismissed her.  He waved her off.  “I pride myself on my generosity, you see.  Your beauty seems a rare and natural sort.  That should be rewarded with wealth and power.  I dream of putting Wallace’s law to work, of putting the beautiful together.  Survival of the powerful, but in this era, it is beauty and brilliance that offer real power, once circumstance is stripped away, yes?”

Hesitantly, she nodded.  “Yes, my lord.  I think I see.”

“Your family will be brought to you.  I saw your tearful look back at them.  The love was evident, you for them and them for you.  They’ll be treated nearly as kindly as you will be.  Yes?”

“Yes.  Thank you, my lord,” she said.  There were tears down her cheeks, now.  I didn’t judge them as tears of sadness, tears of fear, or tears of happiness.  Not one emotion alone.  The emotional cup was simply running over.

“You’ll need clothes.  I’ll have the finest tailor in the city whip a wardrobe up.  Etiquette lessons, so you don’t have to worry about any embarrassing faux pas or what fork to use.  Though you did say your father had raised you in good company.”

“Yes, my lord,” she said, smiling, still with tears streaming down her eyes.  “I would welcome refreshers, should you suggest them, but I think I could comport myself, given the need.”

“And there will be need.  But that’s good,” the noble said.  “That’s good.  We can dispense with that.  I have a good eye, yes?  I can pick them out, just like that.”

He was talking to Leeds.

“You can, Lord Bonn.”

Lord Bonn raised a finger, as if something had struck him.  “Medical care.  A doctor to look after you.  So that beauty remains fresh.  I know just the doctor.  Doctor Bath, your colleague, her name, the one from the Academy in Hanover State?  She was talented, nearly good enough to be my doctor, when I was looking for a replacement for Joseph.”

“You’re thinking of Betty, my lord,” the noble’s doctor said.

“Betty.  Just right.  Miss Therese, we’ll enlist Betty.  Head to toe care.  Tear just about everything out.  All of the fiddly organs, vitals, eyes, eardrum, inner ear, tongue, vocal chords.  We’ll get you sorted out.  Engineered replacements.  We can put Betty to task phoning and mailing around to see what the various academies have concocted.  If they have any inventive replacements for the heart or the uterus.  We’ll leave your skin intact, of course, and your brain.  Beauty and brains, so very important, yes?  We’ll find a way to do it all without leaving a blemish.”

The tears had come to a stop in the midst of the monologue.  Her mouth worked, but her voice didn’t.

“Your family will be with you every day up until you decide on a husband for yourself, I’ll have to insist on that, but it would be unfair to ask Betty to divide her attentions.  You and you alone will get to be special, as the matriach of a new aristocratic family in one of the proudest and most distinguished cities on this planet.”

She hunched forward, staring down at the floor of the carriage, leaning heavily on her knees.  I saw her rock a bit.  I met Jamie’s eyes briefly.

“Theresa,” Jamie and I said.

Manners, fugitive.  You’re addressing an aristocrat,” Lord Bonn said.

We thought that final word would be the breaking point.  It wasn’t.  She was trying so dearly to hold it together.

“I would like to hold your hair back, if I may?” Jamie and I asked.

There was no response at first.  Then a faint nod.

Leeds moved the sword out of my way as I leaned forward and to my left in my seat, reaching out and over.  My hands combed through her hair, gathering it up and pulling it out of the way.

She brought her hands to her mouth.  They couldn’t block what came any more than an arrangement of planks could bar a flood.  They tried, but what didn’t come out of the mouth came out of one nostril, and then she gave up.

The cup of emotion had run over again, but they were heavier, uglier emotions.  Nothing so clear as tears.

“I am so very fond of my dolls,” the Lord Bonn said, ignoring the snorts and coughing from his ‘doll’.

“I know, Lord Bonn,” Leeds replied.

I reached for a pocket, and a hand seized my wrist, hard.  Lord Bonn’s.

“Handkerchief,” Jamie and I said.

He held my wrist firm and searched my pocket himself.  He withdrew the handkerchief and offered it to me.

We dabbed at her nose, then one corner of her mouth.

“It would be a mercy to kill her here and now,” Evette said.

I couldn’t see her, the carriage was too crowded for the Lambs proper to fit within, but I heard her voice, and I heard the sentiment.

“Consequences be damned?” Jamie asked.  “We would die.”

“It might well be worth it,” she said.

I dabbed.  We dabbed.  The worst of it had been wiped away, but our ministration was more to offer comfort and caring than to clean, at this stage.

“I have to ask,” Jamie said, “Are you suggesting this because you care?  Stressing that you’ve never evidenced real compassion before…”

“I can’t grow?”

“Or are you suggesting,” Jamie asked, firm, “Because you want to throw us heedlessly into something reckless, something that will get Sylvester hurt or killed?”

“Ah!  You got me, clear as day, transfixed through the heart, I’m foiled!”

“Be serious.  This is serious,” Jamie said.

Evette appeared, wedged between Therese and one of the doctors, leaning forward to match Jamie’s position, where Jamie sat between me and Leeds.  She’d aged down to match Jamie.

“Doing nothing,” she said, “Waiting, and biding our time, it’s not going to get us out of this.  At the very least, give up the seat.”

“To you?”

“To anyone.”

“There’s no escape,” Jamie said  “Not from this.  Not from this many nobles.  The situation we’re going into, we need to face it armed with as much information as we can.  So what we’re going to do is we’re going to sit, we’re going to watch, listen, and gather what we can so we’re equipped to act if and when there’s a moment.”

“And if there isn’t?”

The arguing of the two overlapped with what Bonn was saying to Leeds, “…color code my dolls.  I was thinking blue, perhaps, with the black hair, but then I think of her passion, the clones that need rights and salvation.  There is so much we could do with that.  I’ll have to get out a book of flowers, and find out if there’s anything that inspires me.”

“Perhaps,” Leeds said.  He was only entertaining his peer at this point, not truly listening.

I closed my eyes, letting everything wash over me.

The sound was one of a snapping branch, the whoosh of an aborted breath, then a violent skittering sound.

All conversation stopped.  Eyes turned to the object that rolled across the floor.

A dense metal center, with spines of metal extending out in all directions.  Fine wire extended between each spine.  Altogether, it looked like the upper half of an umbrella.

The carriage came to a stop.  I heard screams outside.

Then, in short succession, two more splintering sounds.  These were regular bullets, powerful ones capable of punching past a handspan’s width of wood and still flying true enough for the bullets to embed in the floor or opposite door of the carriage.

“No,” Bonn said.

As the next barrage opened, that deep-thinking, pattern-seeking part of my brain that was currently reaching out for Jamie kept count.  I wondered if each volley would be twice as numerous as the last.  But as bullets punched into the carriage, and I tracked the sound, they added up well past four, up to six, then seven.  Two or three more struck, ambiguous in how they came at once, so the part of my brain that was keeping count tried to count the sounds, and lost track of the numbers.

Bonn threw his head to the left, violently, cracking it against the metal-reinforced doorframe.  Not intentionally, I realized.  He’d been struck, a bullet to the head.  Ruining brains and beauty both in an instant.

The bullets came from both sides.  There was no running, no escaping.  Getting low to take cover would have been mad, because the bullets were coming down at diagonals.  A doctor caught one of the expanding bullets, which had already partially opened as it plunged through the outside of the wagon, with the bladed metal sinking into his thigh before opening the rest of the way.

Jamie and I watched as Therese jumped and flinched.  She had already reached the breaking point, and this was too much.

As the hail of bullets struck at the carriage, half of the bullets getting lost in the deep wood of the carriage exterior, we calmly reached out and placed my hands over Therese’s ears.

It did nothing for the feeling of the impacts, but we saw her shut her eyes, we felt her hands press over my hands, adding her strength to mine as if she could make us press hard enough to shut out all of the noise.

An expanding bullet grazed me and opened late.

The bullets had stopped coming from the right side of the carriage.  Leeds noticed a moment after we did.  He looked at me, then reached for the door, hauling it open, stepping outside and disappearing from sight.  His doctors were right behind him.

We waited, watching, noticed a pause of sorts in the barrage, and then shifted my hands away from Therese’s ears.  We took her hand, and dragged her behind me.  She was bigger and stronger than me, but she came willingly, looking back only to stare at the body of the Lord Bonn.  We left that dark, enclosed space of the carriage, and stepped out onto the street, our backs pressed to the side of the carriage for cover.

Panic.  A crowd fled.  Authorities approached.  Doctors were out and trying to give care.  One caught a bullet as Jamie and I watched.

This wasn’t the entire convoy.  It was one segment.  Five carriages, black and otherwise nondescript, but built sturdy.  We’d been targeted, and we’d been targeted by people who knew what they were doing.

“Therese,” I said.

She looked at me.  One of her hands was clasped to her upper arm, which was bleeding badly.  A bullet had gone through and through.

We bent over, picked up one of the expanding bullets, and used it to saw at the fabric of her sleeve.

“You’re going to run.  Go find your family.  Get your father.  Leave the city.  If he works at a bank, it might be a good idea to embezzle funds.  Gather as much as you can, get everyone you want to see again, bring them and run.  Cut all ties to this life.  You have been given a second chance.”

We’d removed the sleeve and reduced it to cloth strips.  We packed up and bound her wound as best as we were able.  My experience from Tynewear was coming in handy.  My hands knew how to do this.

“Come with me,” she said.  “They called you a fugitive.”

I thought of Shirley.

“They’ll kill her out of spite,” Gordon said.  “If she wasn’t killed in the barrage.”

“I agree,” Evette said.  “It’s how they operate.”

“I can’t help but notice she’s recommending the plan, again, that brings the highest chance of you getting murdered,” Jamie said.

“Without Shirley, I don’t think Sy will last very long,” Helen said, her voice soft, nearly drowned out.  I didn’t know where she was.

The rate of shots slowed to a near stop.  I peeked around the back of the carriage.

Like a living organism, the city had produced countermeasures to that which threatened it.  They moved like wolves might, as pack animals, with loping, lunging movements, strength, and ferocity, but they did it along the sides of buildings, headless things that were simply four spindly limbs with webbings of meat and muscle connecting them.  Jamie and I counted twenty.

An automatic, pre-prepared response to the snipers.

“Can’t,” Jamie and I said.  “We- I have someone else to save.”

She hugged her arms to her body.  I saw her close her eyes, and imagined she was summoning up the courage to bolt.

“Thank you,” Therese said.  “Thank you for your gentleness, in such a trying time.”

I felt a kneejerk reaction.  I wanted to reject it, clearly, without question.  To spit at that kindness, somehow.  It was an old feeling, nostalgic in a bad way.

I was reminded of Lacey.  I thought of how I had reacted when she’d been the one to show gentleness.

Now I was in that role.

I swallowed hard, and, grasping, I blamed Jamie.  It was him who had taken the action, who had noticed and held her hair and offered the handkerchief, who had told her to escape.

“Thank you,” Jamie and I said, though if I’d been able to let him use my lips without owning any of it, I would have.  “You should go.  Run.”

I injected enough force into that last word that it gave her the impetus to act.  She ran.

The Lambs were so scattered.  It was hard to track them all.  I could look places, see the dying horse, with Abby kneeling next to it.  Emmett, standing atop a wagon, staring in the direction of the shooters.  I saw Mary, taking note of all the guns.

Jamie was right next to me, but in the chaos- I couldn’t leverage him.

I looked for Gordon, instead.  For Helen.

Gordon was standing guard near Leeds, watching the noble.

Leeds had been shot.  He’d dropped to one knee by the nose of the next carriage over.  An expanding bullet.  It had torn into his hip, burrowing into the hollow of his pelvic bone.  He was working methodically to extract it.

As he saw my approach, he reached for his sword.

“The Infante is expecting us,” I said.  I didn’t bother correcting ‘us’ to ‘me’.  “This is really very inconvenient, my lord.”

He looked at me curiously, and in his pain and agony, his expression betrayed more than it had in all our prior discussion.  Confoundment.

The word was Jamie’s suggestion.  But it was Gordon who I tapped into, as I saw that weakness.

“Get my doctors, then,” Leeds told me.

Out of pain, or perhaps concern for how close the barbs of the expanding bullet were to something vital, Leeds looked down.

We looked left, looked right, assessed the situation.  That done, Gordon and I lunged forward, kicking with all of our strength.

The core of his body weakened by the injury, the noble didn’t quite have what he needed to stay upright.  He sprawled, falling to one side, his hand embedded in his wound, forcing him to catch himself with one elbow.

“Brat!” he spat the word.  He reached for his sword with his other hand.

A bullet caught him at the base of the skull, expanding on impact, doing horrific damage in the process.  His lips peeled back as tooth, tongue, and mangled flesh unfolded in front of his mouth, in the midst of a violent and very thick spray of blood.

Gordon and I didn’t worry about staying under cover or the possibility of incoming fire.  We looked in the direction the shot had come from, and saw it being overrun by the wall-crawling pincer wolves, a pack of them plunging into a single window to attack what lay within.

Whoever it was, they’d waited, taken their time, and made their shot count.

“Is that a noble sacrifice?” Gordon asked.  He looked down at the ruined body, and shot me a mean smirk.

“Something like that,” I said, mumbling.

I checked the carriage, then skipped the next, because it was the carriage we’d been in.  I didn’t worry about getting shot.  The shooters weren’t being indiscriminate anymore.  The ones who were still there, if there were any, were doing what Leeds’ killer had done, waiting and making sure, because they knew full well what price they were paying.

I checked the third carriage, and found doctors huddled inside.  Two were holding a carriage door that had torn free up against the wall, as an added barrier.

“Would be nice if there was a way to set fire to the carriage and keep them from getting out,” Gordon observed.  “Or something in that vein.”

Would be nice, I thought.

I left the group behind.

The fourth carriage.

Marcella was there, with one of the huge stitched.  The other had been shot.  Another noble I couldn’t name was lying on the ground, dead.

Gordon and I ignored her, checking inside.

Empty.

She grabbed me by one shoulder, hauling me around.  She pressed a very pretty little pistol against my forehead.

Gordon and I didn’t flinch, and we spoke with confidence.  “The Infante is expecting us.  He won’t brook excuses.”

It’s the only way to reunite with Shirley.

“I actually almost believe you,” Marcella said.  She double checked over her shoulder, then led me away.

There were no more shots, nobody who had lasted this long and positioned themselves to put a bullet in her back.  The attack had concluded.  Three nobles dead out of four, for our little caravan.

“Let’s go,” she told us.

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================================================== 14.05 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.5

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The carriages pulled into an enclosed space, and the light that was filtering in through the windows faded.

This was another protected space.  An area of the city the nobles had carved out, where raids like the one they had just weathered wouldn’t be possible.  Guards, more thorough countermeasures, and fortifications would abound.

Climbing out of the carriage, I was surprised by the surroundings.  Calling the space a stable or a garage felt wrong.  The ceiling arched, and there was space enough for twenty carriages and their stitched horses, with a wide path that a small parade could have passed down, running through the middle.  Said path was paved with stones, and rose up in a series of stairs that led into the building proper.  To the left and right of the stairs were arches, with stairs leading down into an unlit space.

But the reinforcement of living flesh was prominent here.  The walls had flesh-like growths, complete with circulatory systems, fatty tissue, and something respiratory.  They kept time, with one pulse a second, for the parts that pulsed, but they also breathed, expanding over five seconds, then contracting.  Whatever it was, it also served to hold the stones of the walls together.  Artificial tubes as large around as my leg ran into spaces, feeding other fluids into the wall, and large arrangements of wires and metal rigging seemed to be set into the flesh, running down to the individual spaces where the stitched horses were.

Jamie and I looked back at the carriage we’d just left, and we could see how the metal rigging was being connected to the horse by stitched with heavy, insulted gloves.

“I like this place,” Helen said, admiring the walls.

“Agreed,” Evette said.

“Focus on the nobles, all of you,” Gordon urged, his voice quiet.

“There’s no hurry,” Jamie said.  “Let them mourn.  They won’t be saying anything for a little while yet.  We might as well assess our options and escape routes in the meantime.”

“There could be clues you’re missing while we’re focused on a very neat station,” Gordon said.

Station worked, as a word to describe the space.

The doctors had all piled into the third most intact carriage.  Now they were administrating stitched in handling the care of the three bodies they’d had collected before we departed.

The nobles, with Marcella joining them, were standing on the other side of the path that divided the station.  Shirley was with them.

“People saw,” Gordon said.  “In the heart of the city, people saw nobles die.  The magnitude of that… even if a hundred of Mauer’s soldiers died to pull it off?  I could see them saying it was worth it, for the sheer damage they just caused.”

Marcella didn’t explain.  The other nobles didn’t ask.  The four of them watched, expressions as still as stone, as the three bodies were placed on stretchers, the stitched carrying them.  Doctors stayed by their dead nobles as the stretchers were carried out to Monte, Moth, the other noble, and Marcella.

The four nobles looked down at the bodies.

Jamie was right.  There was silence, and nobody talked, nobody moved.

Some of the doctors turned their heads.  They dropped to their knees, and the nobles in front of us did so a moment later.  Jamie and I took their cue and set one knee on the ground.

“There goes our chance to get away,” Gordon observed.

“There was never going to be one,” Jamie said.  “The moment we failed to get through the window and jump from the train, there was never going to be any getting away.”

“Unless we’d used the ambush to abandon Shirley,” Helen said.  “Which we can’t.”

“That’s taking Duncan’s path,” Gordon said.  “We destroy Sy, and it skews things in a bad way when it comes to the rest of us.  I might have a role, but I’m imagining a scene where we’re left with Helen in full-on bloodlust, Evette, Duncan, and maybe Mary in play.  I’d be so busy managing that nightmare I wouldn’t ever get a say.”

Evette sighed.

“We need Shirley,” Jamie said.

“He needs Shirley,” Helen said.

Shirley looked so scared.  She was kneeling, trying to bow lower than the Lady Moth without being prostrate.

Shirley had her gaps in education, but she knew how to act around nobles.  I wondered if her madam had ever trained the members of the house in the nuances of how to act around nobles, knowing that Tynewear might one day play host to them.

A bird took to the air above us.  That added to what I was able to make out in my peripheral vision, allowing Jamie and I to place the new arrivals.

The first was a young man, heavy, an ogre dressed up as a prince.  He was six times as large as I was, sheer physicality, but with a beautiful face, and crisp clothing.  His pants were tucked into socks, so they crumpled and puffed at the knee.  Those socks, in turn, that came up to the top of utterly massive calves that looked like they might let him grind granite underfoot.  He wore a dress shirt with suspenders and a belt.  His hair was neatly parted to one side and slicked down.

The slender woman next to him… I didn’t like nobles, but I’d found something I liked about her when I’d first seen her.  She did what the Lady Moth seemed so intent on doing, making herself into a physical and fashionable entity without going over the top, and she managed to sell herself as a Noble without being ostentatious.  A lot of that was how she moved, and her focus.  Her hair was black, swept over to one side, and her clothes were black silk, leather belts, and a shoulder ornamentation that looked like a roost for the falcon.  her hand on that same side was clad in a stylized falconer’s glove.

The raptor that was flying around the station would be hers, then.

The pair made their way down the stairs, leaving us kneeling, and approached the stitched, who had knelt while maintaining their hold on the stretchers.

A noble said something under his breath, and the stitched all remained on the ground, one foot and one knee planted on the stone path, but they lifted the stretchers up for a better view.

“Thank you,” the Ogre said.

The Doctors stood.  Heads still bowed, they gave instructions to the stitched.  As a group, they split up to enter the tunnels on either side of the stairwell, disappearing into an apparently unlit abyss.

“Follow,” the Ogre said.

The remaining doctors, nobles, Shirley and I all followed the Falconer and the Ogre into the building proper.

Veins and flesh held panels of glass as part of a greater skylight in the main hall of the building.  I could see the layout.  A castle, sprawling, with three of the taller buildings in the city sprouting from it, spearing toward the sky.  At the top of those towers, another castle was poised, suspended between them.

“Who handles this?” Jamie asked.  “I can do it, but…”

“I could,” Evette said.

“No,” Gordon said.

“I wouldn’t be the best choice,” Helen said.  “Sylvester likes the Falconer though.  If he wants to pursue her at all, practice his wiles, I could sit in.”

No,” Gordon said, again, in a different tone.  “And I think it’s left to me.  Jamie’s too set in deep thought, introspection, and he’s not quick enough on the draw.  No offense.”

“None taken.  I might rephrase that ‘not quick on the draw’ part, though.  Not because it bothers me, but because it’s easily misunderstood.”

“You’re right.  Noted.  Alright.”

Jamie fell back, joining the other Lambs.

We were faced with six nobles, their retinues, a great swathe of unfamiliar and hostile territory, and emotions were likely running high.  Theirs and ours.  Gordon had commented earlier on the situation, on the fact that they’d been hit in the heart of their territory.

The problem was, as Gordon and I turned the situation over in my head, there weren’t any weak points we could target that weren’t also weak points for us.  The insecurity of the nobles was just as likely to backfire on us and see us put to the sword.  The presence of enemies in the city would make them more guarded, less likely to offer us a weak point.

The Falconer’s bird, perched on her shoulder, watched us.  It was half again as large as any bird of prey I’d seen, and Avis had once had some very large eagles.  The bird of prey had a head of golden feathers, and a body of black ones.  Its talons and beak were oil black, adding to the contrast.  Modified.  Possibly a chimera.

Gordon and I assessed the thing, and judged that if we had to bolt, and if we couldn’t close a door behind us, that thing would probably win in a fight.

The entire building was dark stone, lit by light from outside, and biological growth reinforcing it, all of the same fleshy nature.  When the daylight faded, they would have light by other means, yet there were no torch sconces, no artificial lights.

It went back to the biological growths, stylized stretches of flesh, running along walls.  Veins twined their way between stones.  In the castle proper, the growths were more elegant, less like tumors or unidentifiable masses of flesh, and more akin to pillars.  The networks of veins and the beads of fatty tissue formed fractal patterns and geometric arrangements.  When the lights went out, the biological growths would likely provide bioluminescence.  The veins would light up.

But the placement of them had another purpose.  There was a strategy to it.  Something that an intruding agent or group might miss, after a lifetime of acclimating to the wooden growths that supported buildings across the Crown empire.  They were positioned at key junctions, and there was little doubt that they were loaded to the brim with biological weapons and agents.

None of the nobles talked.  It was as if the hierarchy left the Ogre with all of the power, here, and it was up to him to decide if conversation was permitted.  Even if the mood had allowed for talk, we doubted he would have said much.

The place was crowded.  There were stitched servants everywhere, perhaps a third of the people we saw were stitched, but every last one of them was work on par with Fray’s stitched, whatever her name had been.  Stitched without stitches, at least not in visible places, their nature only noticeable if one knew what to look for.  They wore uniforms, and they moved with purpose, attending to tasks up until a noble came into sight, at which point they stopped, stepped to the side of the wide corridors, and bowed or curtsied, freezing in place until we were past them.

Another third were alive.  They were hard to place, more important than servants, but not in charge, either.  Facilitators, if I had to guess.  Administrators, aristocrats, suppliers.  Political grease.

The final third of the people present were doctors, and there wasn’t a white coat to be seen.  It was like an Academy, almost, but the standard student or white coat had been replaced by a grey coat specialist, and the remainder wore black coats.  Professors, top of the heap.  The best at what they did.

If they hadn’t been doing as the servants did and been stepping to one side, heads bowed, Gordon and I imagined we would have heard heated debates, strict orders, and calls to action.

There was a power in surrounding oneself with smart people.  The Lambs were an indicator of that.  This place, this building, it was where the brightest minds gathered, one of the peaks from which the greatest ideas flowed down to the rest of the Crown States.  Professors looked forward to the day they got an invitation to join a discussion here and then they burned with envy for those who got to lead the discussions.

And, in exchange, the nobles could call on this collection of minds, name a task, and expect that the task would be seen to.

We watched as lord Monte spotted one group of professors, broke from the group, and leaned close, to whisper a few words in the ear of a man who had had ten other professors trailing in his wake.

Monte caught up with our group, returning to his prior position.  The man he’d spoken to broke into a run, heading in the direction we’d just come from.  His retinue followed.

Gordon and I glanced back, and saw, halfway down the corridor, that the professor was recruiting others, and sending others running elsewhere.  All business.

All hands on deck.

Leaving that isolated storm behind us, we reached the end of the main corridor.  Large double doors were framed by an arch of stone and fleshy growths.

The Ogre pushed the doors open.  We entered the garden, where the Infante waited.  The Falconer’s bird found its roost.

The area was a space beneath a partial dome of glass that kept the rain at bay while allowing sun and wind through, all framed in growths of wood and flesh.  The paths and the walls of the architecture at the boundary of the space looked to be cut obsidian, the plant life had been cultivated to grow in shades of red, magenta and violet.  The space, all in all, took  up roughly as much property as the grounds of the Lambsbridge orphanage had.

The red plants were eerie and ominous, in light of the plague that was sweeping across the Crown States.

The Infante, with sprightly eyes and a frame that dwarfed even the Ogre, wore only a ruffled collar and a simple black outfit.

Sitting in a chair near him was the Duke of Francis.  Intact, no damage, dressed as impressively as he’d ever been.

But, as I looked, the sharpness was gone, the light absent.  He moved his hands, placing one over the other in his lap, and the movement was slow.

It hardly mattered at this stage.  The concern was the Infante.  The lie we’d told, and the danger we were in.

Gordon and I raised up taller, confident, sure in ourselves.  It had the added benefit of putting us in a slightly better position to run if we needed to run.

“Lords Jeremy, Richard, and Edmund, then,” the Infante said, looking over the group.  His voice was terribly deep, magnified by the acoustics of this open space, and it seemed even deeper because the plants and the surroundings should have dampened noise, instead of strengthening it.

“Yes, father,” the Ogre said.  The Falconer walked over to her bird.

“Are their corpses salvageable?”

“No, father.  They’ll try, the bodies are only thirty minutes cold, but the damage is extensive.  It’s the new guns.”

“Go to the labs, August.  Don’t interrupt the man, but talk to Jeremy’s lead,” the Infante said.  “He’ll be upset, already thinking about leaving, if the revival isn’t possible.  If we don’t catch him, he’ll convince himself to leave by the finish of the mandatory three tries.  We want to keep him.”

“Yes, father,” ‘August’ said.

“Tell him that the Lady Charlotte needs an attending first.  That’s a move up for him.  A fresh start.  She was only just born.”

“London, uncle?” the Falconer asked.

“My brother will owe me one,” the Infante said.

Sent off by some signal Gordon and I didn’t see, August turned, striding past us and through the doors.  We turned to look, and he gave us a nasty look with his small, dark eyes as he closed the doors behind him.

“I heard about the attack as it happened,” the Infante said.  “I had some information about who it was, but no confirmation until just now.  An unfortunate end to your first proper outing, and to theirs.”

“Yes, Lord Infante,” Monte said.

My heart pounded.  Every single one of the Lambs was present, fixated on the Infante and on the other nobles around us.  A simple choice of phrasing could utterly destroy us.

“I see you’ve brought me a present.”

Gordon and I bent low into a bow.  “Lord Infante.  It is good to see you again.”

Setting the stage as best as we could.  We were caught in a river.  All we could do now was steer as best as we could, and hope we wouldn’t be dashed on the rocks.

“A fugitive,” Monte said.

“I’m well aware of who he is.  Sylvester Lambsbridge.  One of the Lambs of Radham.  Francis, you were intimately familiar with this one, were you not?”

Not good.  We saw Monte shoot us a sidelong glance.  The lack of familiarity was telling.  The first rock, and very easily the one that might sink us.

Gordon and I watched the Duke’s eye move.  There was a delay.  As if it took willful effort to direct his eye, to fixate on us.  Whether there was recognition or a complete mental blank, the man gave no indication.

“A pity you’re not up to talking,” the Infante spoke.  “Your counsel would have been appreciated.”

A heavy hand settled on the Duke’s shoulder.

“You may leave,” the Infante said.

“I wish that meant us,” Lara said, from the sidelines.  She stood near Lillian, who was leaning against a tree, arms folded, cross, her back to me.

“Lord Infante,” Monte said, not budging from where he stood.  “Sylvester Lambsbridge told us that he was doing work for you.  That we were to bring him to you.”

“Is that so?” the Infante asked.

Monte bowed deeper, then took his leave, joined by Moth and the others.

It left the Duke, the Infante, and the Falconer in the garden with Shirley and I.

“A shame about Jeremy,” the Infante said, as if he were speaking to the Duke.  “But I do like Montgomery.  Nascent promise, there.”

The Duke, striving to put in effort, moved his eye, looking up in the general direction of the Infante.

“I see a lot of the Baron Richmond in him, as a matter of fact,” the Infante said.

“What?” Gordon asked.  My lips remained closed.

The Infante set his eyes on me.  “Richmond was clever, once upon a time.  He could have climbed a fair way up the ladder, done more with himself, and done more for the Crown.  But he learned the wrong lessons along the way.  Tragic, but all too common.  His death at your hands was just.”

Gordon and I bowed deeper, acknowledging the statement.

“Montgomery could go either way,” the Infante said.  “Straighten up.  Look at me.”

We did.

“You lied to them, telling them you worked for me.”

“I did,” Gordon and I said.

“You have your audience.  Will I now find out that your companion there is plague infected?”

“No, my lord,” we said.  Have to take the subject off of Shirley.  “My understanding of you is that you appreciate strong, bold, meaningful strokes of the brush.  Cornered, my first thought was that, instead of dying, I could make myself useful to you.”

“Had you phrased that as being useful to me again, I might have had you killed,” the Infante said.

Easy enough to see what he was thinking about.  “With all due respect, Lord Infante, I took the death of the Baron Richmond to be a neutral thing.  As much good done as bad.”

“The bad, unfortunately, being ours to bear,” the Infante placed his other hand on the Duke’s other shoulder as he said that, standing behind the man in the chair.  He made the Duke look small.

“The act of killing the Baron was the nail in the coffin, my last act as a Lamb.  I was cornered by a former ally, I had to shoot-”

“Mary Cobourn.  In one knee,” the Infante finished for me.  “I’m well aware.  Faced with a strange boy with high aspirations and two dead noble ladies already killed by his hand, I sought to inform myself.  I asked after you, and I obtained my answers.”

“Yes, Lord Infante,” Gordon and I said.  We bowed, acknowledging him.

“I’ve remained aware of you as you cut a violent and explosive swathe through Tynewear.  I read your records and I put good minds to work on analyzing data, about Wyvern and similar drugs, to project forward and to reach conclusions that your doctors wouldn’t have found until five years after you expired.”

The Falconer was watching.  Very quiet.  Her eyes matched the Infante’s.  Dark, penetrating, and suggestive of something very clever going on beneath the surface.

The Infante continued, “When word of you being on a train heading south from Tynewear reached my ears, I had investigators track down people who were on that same train.  We traced things backward, in the midst of some of the greatest chaos this continent has ever seen outside of wartime.”

Gordon and I remained silent.

“I could make threats, but what good is a threat?  You’ve lived with Wyvern’s venomed stinger for all your life, promising pain today and lost sanity before you’re twenty-one.  I could threaten the life of Shirley Pope, hold her hostage, but you grew up with your fellow Lambs and you knew you would likely live to see them die.  They’ve been hostages all your life, and they remain hostages now.  You lost your childhood friend and brother Gordon to one pull of the trigger.  Jamie, another childhood friend and brother, lost to oblivion after a throw of the switch.  Threatening you and holding things you love hostage is old hat for you.  Those things have permeated every day of your existence for a long time now.”

Jamie loomed in my peripheral vision, to my left.  Gordon loomed in my right.

I wanted to say something, and I couldn’t.  I wanted Gordon and I to say something, and he wasn’t volunteering anything.

“You left them behind,” he said.  “All of the rest of the Lambs.  One by one, you’ll hear stories.  Your Mary Cobourn already has notes in her file.  Fatty deposits under her skin, in the armpit, behind one ear.  Moles.  In a year and a half, they will be noticeable.  Within six months of that point, she’ll be slowed or crippled by it.  In three years, she’ll be dead.”

I looked over in Mary’s direction, then wished I hadn’t.  My mind jumped straight to trying to paint her with the Infante’s brush, complete with lumps and blemishes, and in the effort to erase that part of the image, I blurred the picture and lost the clarity in her.

“Duncan reported to Professor Hayle early on that your Helen was becoming emotionally disturbed.  I’ve had other sources say that Ibbot is neglecting her as a project.  He invests too much energy into the political side of things, when his talent is solely limited to the art of biology.  She’ll soon reach a point where she requires more upkeep than he is willing to provide while he is so eager to seize greater opportunities, and the idea of a custom wife, pillow companion and personal weapon that he grew in a vat will lose out in the end.”

I didn’t look at Helen.  I didn’t want that image to be blurry like Mary’s had.

But the Infante kept talking on the subject.  “She will go to his lab for a standard appointment, bubbly, smiling and laughing.  That preferred personality is in her records.  She’ll be nonetheless obedient as he asks her to lay down across the counter and opens her up to examine her organs.  And I can assure you, that spiteful, vitriolic little man will be in the midst of palpating her insides with a scalpel lying within arm’s reach, and he will find his way to the decision that frees him to pursue his politics.  That is, if she doesn’t break before then, slip up, and lead him to the conclusion herself.  Whatever the case, he will make a single small cut, deep inside her, and she will go quiet and cold.”

Shirley shot me a nervous glance.  I remained very still.

“You’ve condemned yourself to a very lonely existence, Sylvester Lambsbridge,” he said.  “You’ve put considerable distance between yourself and the people you love to avoid having to see them go.  But word of their passing will find you, no matter where you hide, and you will, with your last vestiges of sanity, wish you had been there.”

He released the Duke’s shoulders, and he approached me.

I didn’t move as he placed his hands across my cheeks, cupping my head in his hands.

“What do I do with you, child?” he asked.  “I have all the resources in the Crown States at my disposal, and you’ve confounded me.  How do I invent you a punishment fit for hell when you seem so intent on flinging yourself there first?”

He knelt before me, and the weight of him made the thick black stones under my feet shift slightly, crunching with a stone against stone sound.

He embraced me.  Even kneeling, he was far taller than me, but he hugged me to his prodigious stomach.

“Wretched child,” he said.

I looked up at Shirley.

Gordon, Jamie, and Helen didn’t volunteer anything.  The other Lambs were unreachable, indistinct, or too far away for their individual reasons.

There were ways to salvage them.  I could work my head around it.  Dig for them if I really wanted them.  But to do that, I had to acknowledge that they were as fragile as they were.  That they were smoke.

I was legitimately afraid at how easily it had crumbled.

I hadn’t anticipated the Infante doing this.  I’d expected a challenge.

A challenge, I could rise to.

This wasn’t a challenge.  This was the epitome of what I’d hated, in the very earliest days, with Lacey and the other doctors.

Acknowledgement of my reality.

“Do you want something to occupy yourself with?” the Infante asked.

“Yes,” I spoke, finding a voice.  Belated, we added, “Lord Infante.”

“Then find and kill Mauer for me.  He’s in the city.”

“As you wish,” we said.

The Infante released us from the hold.  He gave us a measured look.  “Then take your companion with you.  I have no need for hostages, I have no need for threats.  I’ll give you a general direction, pointed away from me, and we’ll see if you do more damage to the other side than to mine.”

“If I may make a request?” we asked.

“I’d thought I was being generous enough, but you may.  My resources are at your disposal, should you want them.  I certainly have enough.”

“I’d like access to a lab,” Evette and I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.06 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.6

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The cell was dark, dry, and spacious, with very nice furniture, all considered.  There was a desk and chair that would be fit for any of the more respected businessmen or politicians in Radham, a modest bed with nicer sheets than I’d ever had, a stocked bookshelf, and some basic lab equipment.

My hands moved through practiced motions, putting together smoke canisters.  We only had the materials for three, pieced together from canisters that were intended to be thrown at fires to extinguish them and from basic chemicals in the kits.

We only worked with the basics anyhow.  No education to draw from, only what Marv and Jamie had been able to impart, with a little bit of ingenuity and problem solving.

Problem solving could get us 90% of the way there.  The trick, it seemed, came down to either luck or having the right resources to tap.

We were in a very interesting place when it came to resources.

“Smoke bombs, smoke bombs,” Evette and I said.  “Smoke bomb with nerve poison, smoke bomb that suffocates, smoke bomb that nauseates, smoke bomb that suffocates, again…”

Pause.  Wait, listen.

We smiled, setting the four bombs in a line on the desk.

We reached out, and set one of the tall glass cylinders to spinning precariously on its end before snatching up a piece of paper.

“To… do,” we said, penning down the words.  “Get Mauer.  Capture.  Have a chat.  Kill or deliver him-”

We reached out and stopped the wobbling canister from toppling over and falling to the floor in the process.

“See how much damage we can do to our enemies and to ourselves in the process.  Wouldn’t be Sylvester if we didn’t get him hurt in the process, am I right?”

Only silence answered.

Wyvern had originally been intended to help with learning language and other things that were so frequently shaped in childhood and then ‘locked in’.  Academy students were often pushed by their families from a young age to learn their ratios and study texts, attend tutoring, enroll in academy prep schools, attend summer classes, and to treat every experience as a learning experience, without a spare moment to play or to draw.  They often reached the point where they could do the work, they could study well, but with all their prior experience, they hadn’t been equipped to have an original thought or idea.

When those students stumbled, if they’d curried enough favor, then that little green syringe would be dangled in front of their noses, with the promise that it would hurt more than anything the student had ever experienced, and it might give them the ability to cross the hurdle in front of them and revive parts of the brain that had atrophied in childhood.

We knew there was another use that had come up before.  Compulsive behaviors, habits, and surgeon’s jag, when those actions that someone performed a thousand times a day coupled with pressure to introduce a crippling compulsive twitch or jerk to the precise actions.  Wyvern could soften the brain to allow the person to work out the mental wrinkles and knots.

But it was a double edged sword.  Things that had worked before could so easily slide into that same domain.  Tics, new habits, forming deep grooves with very mundane actions or roles that were only temporary.  For most, it was one small dose to correct the major issue, then two or three doses more to steer back onto course, with the subject learning how to direct things and being very, very careful.

Or, in cases like mine, the doses were ongoing for long periods of time, and the risk of the wrong things crystallizing in a bad way was minimal.

Minimal wasn’t ‘nonexistent’, however.  And Evette and I had no idea if I was that much more susceptible to problems in this less stable state.

“Food,” we noted, penning it down.  “Still haven’t eaten.  Need food.”

We snuck a glance at Helen, who was in the corner.

She was Helen in the same way that a towel was a towel when it was soaking wet and wrung tight into a coil.  There was hair on the head and there was skin and a long neck and a pretty dress, there were arms and there were legs, and they were all roughly in the right positions, but even though the figure stood still, things were twisted and stretched as if she was mid-movement, everything turned around and wrinkled in action and bent straight.  Abstract, the distillation of the individual puzzle pieces that put a physical Helen together as a dream might provide in the midst of a flurry of chaotic events and impressions.

But the prison cell was quiet, the flurry had stopped.

Our Helen, silent and completely without a face.

We couldn’t let this crystallize.  We couldn’t fuss, let ourselves get upset, or give this moment any emotional resonance.  That would make it more likely to stay this way.

“Sugar.  Brain food.  Cake,” we spoke aloud, penning it down.

The hope that we might be able to snap our imaginary Helen back into being was dashed when the image didn’t respond to the prompt.

We couldn’t let ourselves be disappointed.  Disappointment could be an emotional connection, something that tied this impression of Helen to our emotions.  We had to control how we thought and felt, to avoid this broken image tainting the deep-set impressions of the Helen we knew.

The trick was to keep moving, and not dwell too long on any one point.

“We’ll need information.  Two ways we can go about that.  We’ll probably need to go after his people, see if we can’t trace them back to him.  We’ll need to get the shape of his approach.  What he’s doing, the moves he’s making, what his group structure looks like, the resources he has, the direction he’s thinking…”

“How we position in respect to that,” Gordon said.

“Yes!” Evette said.  Her glee mirrored my own relief that this was sort of working.

“And how we position in respect to that,” Evette and I said, noting it down on the paper.  The scrawled letters joined the other points that were scattered around the page, including a large, angular shape, labeled ‘the shape of his approach’.

I looked up at Gordon.

Gordon, in response, only stood there.  He wasn’t all twisted up and wrinkled into ambiguity like Helen was, but the spectre lacked a face.  There was only an irregular expanse of skin.

Nope!  Not about to dwell on that.  Couldn’t let myself worry about what happened if I lost that face in my head forever.  Were there even pictures of Gordon anywhere, to let me remind myself?  In Lambsbridge, perhaps, but that was a tricky place to get into.  A hell of a task.  In Radham Academy, in his files, perhaps.

I huffed out something that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor in the moment.  Radham academy, easy peasy place to go, if we needed a reminder.

“Focusing on the task at hand-” Evette started.

Yes.  The task at hand.

“Mauer.  We like Mauer,” she said.  “He’s fascinating, and he probably enjoys the brilliant moments where it all comes together just as much as we do.  We’ve run into him before, we know he likes the slow burn, setting everything up, then the flare.”

My hand shook as we brought the pen closer to the page.  We wrestled for a moment, working to try to get it steady enough to write something proper.

Giving up, we embraced the messiness, drew exaggerated, sketchy circles around ‘resources’ on the paper.  Then added notes.  Time, materials, people.

Multiple sketchy circles around time, then, leading to ‘moves’.

Together, we diagrammed it out, dipping the pen into the inkwell a few times to make some bolder, sloppier lines where needed.

It was likely indecipherable to anyone but us, but it was, on paper, the ‘shape’ of the problem.

“That scrawling,” Jamie’s voice came out of nowhere, “is not a good sign, Sy.  It’s worrisome.”

“Genius usually is, to a mere layperson,” Evette and I said.

“A mere layperson.  You two are lucky I’m a ghost, Sy, because I’d normally punch you in the shoulder for that.”

Evette and I grinned.

I looked for Jamie, and the spectre was there, intact as far as we could tell, but the image jittered, darting to the side, like a spot of light on my vision, remaining in my peripheral vision.

We took a deep breath.  In.  Out.

This was doable.  Disheartening, but it was progress.  We’d been thrown off balance when our guard was down, and it had hit us where we were already hurting.  The coherency had suffered.  I had built the images in the first place, and they were something we could rebuild.  But we couldn’t push, and we couldn’t let things settle in a bad way.  We would have to put off sleeping, make the most of our recent dose of Wyvern, and ideally, we would need a distraction.

It was hard to say if five seconds or a quarter hour had passed when the knock on the door sounded, but the sketched out ‘shape’ had doodled wings, courtesy of Evette, that hadn’t been there when Jamie started talking again.

“Come in,” Evette and I said.

The door was ajar, and someone pushed it open.

Doctors.  Ones with black coats; one male, one female.  Both young-ish.  Younger than thirty, which was pretty damn respectable.

“Sylvester?” the woman asked.  She wore a stylish dress beneath her lab coat, and her hair was coiffed with tight rolls down one side, the other side pinned.

“Yes,” we replied.

The man was a very staid, stoic man who looked more like a stitched than a man, with hollow cheeks, a long face, and deep-set eyes.  He was silent, frowning as he looked over the room.

“I’m Professor Bette Kinney, this is Professor Arandt.  We are apparently at your service.”

“You weren’t the doctors for any of the recently deceased nobles?”

The mention of the nobles’ deaths made Professor Kinney’s expression visibly darken.  “No.  We happened to be around.”

Evette smiled.  “You’re rolling the dice.”

“Beg pardon?”

“They had to have told you.  Full disclosure.  If you work with us, you’re putting your lives in the hands of a known enemy of the Crown.  I’m a fugitive, but the Lord Infante wants to equip us to do as much damage as possible to his enemy, to Mauer.”

My finger tapped the page that still lay on the desk.  Kinney gave it a dubious look.

“Us?” she asked.

“Yes,” Evette and I said.  “No.  Nevermind that.  You’re distracting from the point.”

“Evette was always going to be miserable at the social graces,” Gordon observed.  “That was a niche that Ashton was planned to fill.  If she made it and Ashton didn’t, I was going to be the face.  If Ashton made it and Evette didn’t, I was going to be the problem solver, but when the both of them didn’t make it…”

The pair looked uncomfortable.  Evette and I watched them as Gordon’s voice continued in the background.

“The point,” we picked up the so-called thread that had dangled, “Is that you know this is a risk, but the Infante asked if people were interested, and you said yes.  A random invite here is nice enough, but an opportunity to place yourself on a noble’s radar?  All you have to do is make it through the next few days without humiliating yourself, getting killed, or fates worse than death.”

“Essentially,” Kinney said.  “Except Professor Arandt-”

The gaunt Arandt interrupted, “I wasn’t ‘randomly’ invited.  I was coerced into helping a colleague, and I’m happy to have an unassailable excuse to fuck right off and do something else.  The risk of dying is a small price to pay for the confidence that my colleague is going to humiliate himself in front of twenty professors and five different nobles without my help.”

Kinney sighed.  “I can’t understand that mentality.  He may well die.”

“The mentality is that the asshole has reveled in being a festering cyst in my nethers for half of my life.  He placed second in the class every year I placed first, but he has enough rat bastard in him that he’s been able to reach up and snatch the positions, accolades and jobs I want most from me, take credit for my achievements,” Arandt said, his expression grim, a skeletal glower.  He didn’t smile in the slightest as he said, “This is the best day of my life.”

Evette and I, however, smiled.

“I like you,” we said, steering clear of the ‘we’.  “Let’s try to keep you alive.”

Arandt bowed slightly.

“And me?” Kinney asked.

We gave her a blank look.

“Nevermind,” she said.  “I couldn’t help but notice you were talking to yourself as we came in?”

Had I been?  I remembered pausing, noticing the doodles, but I hadn’t been talking, had I?  A blackout?

“Duncan,” Evette and I realized, aloud.  You bastard.

“Who?”

“No, I’m just thinking aloud,” I said.

We had to stop.  We drew in a deep breath, then centered ourselves.  We were erratic, all over the place, and things were spotty.  Evette was largely unstructured by design.

I had to slow us down.  Decide on a direction, lest everything we do in this state was left as messy and incoherent as the parchment we’d scrawled on.

“May I ask another, unrelated question?” Kinney asked.

“You can,” we said.

“Why the prison cell?  With the door open?”

“Because I wanted some space of my own with some quiet.  It was the Infante’s suggestion,” Evette and I said.  We paused, then added, “Eerily prescient.”

“Prescient,” Kinney said.  “I won’t ask.  We’re doing lab work with you?”

“For now, you can come with,” we said.  We clipped the canisters to my belt at my right side.

“Come with?” she asked.

“We’re investigating.  But we’re picking up my friend first,” We said.  We echoed August the Ogre as we spoke, voices firm, “Follow.”

It was fun to do that.

“Beg pardon?” Kinney asked.  “You may have the wrong idea if you think you can give me orders.”

We paused in the doorway, half-turning.

Arandt was the type to watch carefully before doing anything.  His caution might well have been why his nemesis of a coworker had been able to snatch opportunities away from him, but it earned my respect here.

Follow,” We said, with no subtlety, no grace, and no real manipulation that wasn’t granted to us by the situation alone.  “Or go and tell the Infante that you agreed to help and then decided you weren’t willing to.”

With Jamie lurking in one corner of my eye, Gordon faceless, and a wrung-out Helen, Evette and I led the way out of the cell.

The scene of the crime.

Starting from the first concrete point, and seeing where it led us.

It was the same area as the shooting.  The area had been blocked off, leaving it empty of all people, and a firm Academy presence had been set in place.  Soldiers and academy experiments filled the area.  Stitched with cleaning supplies were sloshing out buckets onto the street to help encourage the bits of bone and splinters of wood to find their way to the gutters and drains.

It was dark, with overcast skies, but there were lights here and there, even in late afternoon, and there would be witnesses who were in the buildings and watching the entire process.

It felt wasteful, this kind of presence being deployed to a place that Mauer wasn’t going to strike at again.

Shirley, Arandt, Kinney, the Lambs and I all entered one of the buildings and stepped into a lift.  After a word from Arandt, a team of stitched atop the lift began hauling on the pulley system, raising us up floor by floor.

We could smell the faint ozone wafting off of them.

“This is intimidating,” Shirley said.  “And I’m not sure I like the height, and the empty space beneath our feet.”

“You were never in the tall buildings near the theaters?” Evette and I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Heights never bothered us,” we replied.

“Are you actually using the royal we, now?” Kinney asked.

We being the Lambs,” we lied.  “I was a member of a team of experiments working for the Crown, once.”

We passed each individual floor.  Through the stylized wooden door of the elevator, which was very easy to see past, I could see the individual floors we were passing.  Each one had a different Lamb standing in the hallway, facing the elevator.

I was a member of the team.  Emphasis on was.  Once.

None of the Lambs were intact.  Intrusive images, abstraction, incompleteness, it riddled the whole package.

Evette and I watched them.  My heart rate was picking up, and it had nothing to do with what Shirley was complaining about.  Nothing to do with height.

“I’m not sure I understand what’s going on, Sylvester,” she said.

“I know,” we said.  “I owe you answers.”

We passed another two floors.  Nora and Lara, in turn.

I’d meant to ask Lillian what the inspiration for Nora’s name had been.  I knew Lara was derived from Larva.  Nora had me drawing a blank, and my mind wasn’t in the right frame to dig through and find the right connections.  I might have recruited Jamie’s perspective, but I wasn’t sure things were on a solid enough foundation.

Evette.  Just Evette, for now.

“Things made sense a few days ago,” Shirley said.

“Things were good, a few days ago,” Evette and I agreed.

“Something happened,” she said.

We didn’t volunteer a response.

“Months ago, you and I got to talking.  You helped me find a kernel of courage.  I thought, if I stayed with you, then I could repay you for that, by helping in small ways, and I knew I could learn things from you.  Because I admired you.”

The elevator passed a floor where Jamie remained out of view, peripheral.  I only barely caught Jamie saying, “Past tense.”

“I want to repay you, still,” she said.  “So long as I’m able, I’ll try to repay you.”

Arandt and Kinney were in the elevator with us.  Shirley wasn’t saying everything she wanted to say.  She knew full well that something was wrong.  Had we been alone, she no doubt would have said more.

She wanted to help.

The lift took us up to the higher floors before stopping.  We stepped out into a hallway.

These tall buildings were offputting.  These floors were too high off the ground, to the extent that it wasn’t a useful kind of height, where we could work our way downward to affect what lay below.  Things were out of reach, and it was oddly difficult to move downward, or upward, or through any of the hallways or rooms, without constant obstruction or space considerations – too much or too little.

Crown officers were waiting in the hallway.  Arandt handed one a note, and they waved us through.

“When you took this task,” Evette and I asked the pair, “Did you think you’d just have to do some lab work with a troublesome fugitive, or did you realize you’d have to go out into the field?”

“I didn’t expect it, but I can adapt,” Kinney said.

“Past experience?” Evette and I asked.

“I went on field trips,” she said.

Evette and I laughed, short, abrupt, and deeply offensive to the proud Professor.

“I didn’t care,” Arandt said.

“Didn’t care?” we asked him.

“About whether this was field work or lab work.”

Gordon spoke, “You have to appreciate the single-mindedness.”

We entered the room.

It was the scene of a battle.  The wall-crawling warbeasts had come tearing in through the windows, bringing broken glass and three-fourths of the frame into the room with them.  Each was roughly a hundred pounds, all muscle bound around four spike-like limbs, with a fanged head.  Light, mobile, and made of nothing but power and natural weaponry.

Roughly six had entered the room and summarily died as they were stabbed and shot at.  The sheer damage to the room and the wall around the windows suggested that something close to another six had been in the room at another time.  Deep gouges I could hide a hand or foot in carved through every surface and cut through furniture.  The force of the mass of muscular forms tearing through the wall had turned the windows into gaping holes.  The wind and a steady patter of rain blew into the room.  Eight to ten men had died here.

Shirley hung back, staying away from the bodies and the blood.

Four Crown officers, two doctors, and five different experiments were in the room.  The experiments wore masks with filters and heavy coverings, akin to robes, with hoods, leather boots and gloves.  They were also my height.

The officers marked down things in their books, the short experiments pawed through evidence and brought their faces down close to it, and even rubbed themselves in it.

Evette and I pointed, raising a quizzical eyebrow at our accompanying professors.

“Scratchers,” Professor Kinney said.  “Brought over from the heart of the Crown by the Infante, then replicated by his teams.  They can tell the difference between dirt from one patch of earth and dirt from a patch of earth on the other end of the same field.”

“Ah,” we said. “Enhanced senses?”

“No.  Another sense entirely.  The closest analogues would be smell or touch.”

“Enhanced hearing?”

“No,” Kinney said.

“I like this,” Evette added, “The investigation.  Taking it all in.”

It was good.  A relief.  Something to occupy the senses.

“I wish we could have seen this play out,” Helen said.  “The chaos, the looks on their faces.”

“Without being a part of it, you mean,” Jamie said.

“Do I mean?” Helen asked.

We turned my head to look at her.  She had a face now.  Her dress fit better, instead of being a choked mass of cloth.

Progress.

How long before we take another two long steps back?

We approached the guns that lay by the windows.  Destroyed.

“Intentionally destroyed,” we observed.  “By Mauer’s men?”

The Crown officer nearest me glanced in the direction of Kinney and Arandt.  He must have received a signal or a nod, because he answered, “Yes.  Built into the guns.  They twist a key and haul it out along with a band of metal, and it melts internal mechanisms.”

We looked across the floor, at broken glass, at rubble, and bits of flesh.  We picked our way carefully past the dead warbeasts.

Evette and I spotted a band of metal with a key attached lying beneath a warbeast,  and toed at it until it was out in the open.

The officer bent down and picked it up, carrying it over to the scratchers.

“You’re welcome,” Evette said, sneering.

I kept my mouth shut, but it was hard.  If I hadn’t been able to maneuver in very comfortable territory, doing something very much like I’d been doing all my life, I might have lapsed, and fallen too closely into step with the Lamb that wasn’t.

Helen chirped, “If I may say so, this is going much better than we anticipated.  Sylvester and Evette have been paired up for several hours, and nobody is dead yet.  Not even Sylvester.”

“I’m offended,” Evette said.

“You had to say it, Helen,” Gordon said.

“Doubly offended.”

“Just keep us alive, Evette,” Gordon said.

We finished picking our way over the broken bits of wall, furniture, and window frame.  We glanced through the open window at the incredible distance to the ground below, then pulled my head back.

The corner of the room we’d approached had an open door.  We stepped through, with the two professors a few paces behind us.

There was a bathroom, with a claw foot tub set at one end.

Two Academy doctors were tending to a grievously injured man who had been placed in the tub.  Bags and tubing with blood were hooked up to the man, along with more tubing and mystery fluids.

The man was muscular, his hair short, and he was missing more flesh than I could have carried in my two outstretched arms.  The wall-crawling warbeasts had done their damage.

Mauer’s man, captured alive, but not quite so well that he could be easily brought down and out of the building.

He was why we were here.

You,” he said, fixing his eyes on me.  He sounded remarkably well, all considered.  The fact that his genitals, stomach, upper thighs and some of his chest were all mangled didn’t seem to have put any waver into his voice.

“Me?” Evette and I asked.  “We’ve met?”

“You set the lab I was in on fire,” he accused.

“Ah,” we said.  That would have been in Lugh.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said.

The part of me that was Evette wondered momentarily if that was even possible on any level.  With enough work with spectres, enough disconnection from myself…

“I’d say you’re thoroughly fucked enough for the both of us,” we replied.

“I wish I could step in,” Gordon said.  “Negotiate.”

His face was back, we realized.

The relief was palpable, and put a smile on my face.

Only a moment later, we realized that the smile would seem taunting to someone we’d just accurately described as fucked.

“Fuck you,” the man said.

“You know they’ll get the answers out of you,” we told him.

“They’ll try.  They’ll find drugs and inject me, and they’ll push me, and maybe eventually I’ll slip.  But it won’t be soon.  It took them this long to get me conscious,” the man said.  “And don’t think you’ll do any better.”

“By the time someone figures out what you know, Mauer will be gone,” we said.

“He’s gone already.  But by the time someone figures out what I know, he’ll have a head start.”

A fanatic.  He would die for Mauer.

Mauer did a good job of fostering this kind of loyalty.

“Maybe,” we said.  “But you know who I am.  I’ve spent the entirety of my life getting answers.  Understand?  I’m a better torturer than some people who torture as a trade, on behalf of the Crown.  Because I grasp people.  I know how people tick, and I can find the weak point that breaks them in an instant.”

He narrowed his eyes.  It was clear he was faintly drug addled.  He’d been given chemicals to help him survive despite the damage that had filled the bathtub with enough blood to cover the less mangled bits of his unmentionables.

“Yeah,” he asked, setting his jaw.  “Some people aren’t that weak.”

“You’re a zealot,” we said.  “You believe, both in Mauer and in his cause.  A lot of the soldiers under him have been with him for a very long time.  And, to top it off, you’re winning, after getting two nobles in one day.  A task you were willing to die for.  All we have to do to break you is to target the one weak point in it all, and everything unravels.”

Evette, it seemed, like the monologues.

He was silent, forcing me to volunteer the nature of the weak point.  “Mauer.  I tell you one little thing, and you’ll know it’s true.  You’ll realize a fact that you’ve been keeping from yourself for years, and your world will crumble.”

“Try me,” he said.

We smiled, and we leaned forward, over the tub, shooing back the doctor that was working on the man.  One hand went on his shoulder for stability as we leaned close.

In his ear, we murmured, “Working on a double cross against the Crown, on Mauer’s behalf.  I want you to give me a location you know he isn’t.”

He frowned, looking up at us.

Gordon, too, was frowning, sitting on the ledge at the other end of the bathtub.  “You had to jinx us, Helen.”

We glanced back at the professors and crown officers at the other end of the bathroom.  Kinney was standing on her toes to look over and around and try to get some sense of what was going on between us.

“We’ll convince them Mauer just left.  That will give me time to take action.  I can set some things in place in the meantime.  But I need help convincing them I’m cooperating-”

“Sylvester,” Kinney interrupted.

“Look confused,” we whispered, before leaning back, turning to look at Kinney.

“What’s this?” she asked.  We saw her look between our conspirator and us.

She’d seen the mock fear.

“Give me another minute,” we said.

Leaning close, we provided some verbal instruction to the soldier on how to look properly horrified.

“Swear at me,” we urged him.

“Fuck you!” he raised his voice.  We realized a moment later it might have been genuine, because he reached for us with a good arm, seizing us and trying to drag us into the tub with his naked, bloody self.  “Fuck you!”

Hands seized me, and hauled us back and away from the tub.  The grips remained strong even after we were well away from the tub, securing me.

We stared the man down.  Willed him to cooperate.

If I were anyone else, I might have been able to manipulate it out of him.

The force of will proved fruitful.

A full minute passed, and we could see the surrender gradually take him over.

“There’s an apartment block on Thirty-first and Queensway,” he conceded.  “He won’t be there anymore, but there was enough stockpiled there that he wouldn’t have left right away either.  The tail might be warm.  Fuck him, if you’re not lying to me.”

We liked this guy, even if his loyalty wasn’t to me or to us.

We looked over at the professors.

“I guess we’re visiting the next location,” Arandt said.

“No,” we said.  We left the bathroom, stepping into the living room.  “The Crown police can go, confirm or deny.  But I’ve been thinking.  We need you in the lab.  We have ideas-”

And, we thought, We need you out of the way.

One of us can work on projects,” Arandt said.  “Depending on what it is you need.”

“Special stitched.  With gas inside.”

“It’s been done,” Arandt said.

“I need it done in a few hours,” we said.  “And we need something that can produce a disruptive sound, and we’ll need equipment.  Lockpicks, knives.”

Evette and I continued to ramble, but we were aware of the grumble of dissent.

“Turning on the Crown, just like that?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t object,” Jamie said.  “But it feels precarious.  A double-cross?”

“If this isn’t a quadruple cross by the time we’re done,” Evette and I mused, internally, “Then we’ve shamed ourselves.”

“A quadruple cross?”

“Getting everything lined up so that we can take out every major player in this city with one bullet, lined up to pass through all of the bodies,” Evette said.  “And we’ll see if we can’t find the Island with the missing children while we’re at it.”

“You’ll get us destroyed before you’ve set up half the cards,” Gordon observed.

“Probably.  But if we don’t get destroyed, it’s going to be glorious,” Evette said, clasping her hands together.

We blinked hard.  Focusing on reality.  We were standing in the room with all of the bodies, staring out the window.

The professors waited patiently by.

Another blackout?  No, this had been brief.

We turned to Shirley.  “Doing okay?”

It was the wrong question, awkward, out of place.

“Not so well.”

We reached out and took her hand.  It was infantile, but it reassured at the same time.  She smiled uncertainly at it.

“Let’s get out of here,” we said, feeling as if we’d failed, that the question and the hand holding were far, far too little, even misleading, considering what we needed in the greater scheme and solution to this puzzle.  We needed to give Shirley kindness, to reinforce the connection, lest she run away from us.

Chances were good we were going to need her to save us from ourselves.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.07 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The rain was heavy, drilling against carriage roof and street around us.  The streets were smooth, but the roads were wet and the carriage skidded with every turn and adjustment in direction, the wheels squeaking and grinding as they ran sideways across the road with every skid.  Each of the wagons had lanterns mounted on them, and it was just getting dark enough for the lanterns to be lit, making for fleeting, passing lights that illuminated the raindrops on the windows like hundreds of individual, tiny light sources.

“…going to need some warbeasts.  Can you modify them so they’re loud?” Evette and I continued what had been a long discussion.

“Theoretically, but-”

“Make them loud, then.  Mauer is a communicator.  He’s an orator, and every time I’ve seen him, he’s had a way of commanding the crowds.  People look to him for direction.  So we have to deny him that.  If we’re going to get him, we have to deny him that role.  We blitz, we steal his voice, and we steal their ears.”

Kinney shook her head, “The modifications to the warbeasts would have to be post-fact, there are drugs, there are machine augmentations, and there are likely resources we could tap into for alternate organs or physical structures, but there would need to be time in the lab, surgery-”

“You can’t?” Evette and I asked.  “I thought you guys were good, I thought we had resources.”

“We can,” Kinney said, patiently.  “But the one resource that isn’t in our hands is time.  If you assign arbitrary tasks-”

“I was asked to hunt Mauer by the Lord Infante because I know Mauer better than anyone the Infante has at his disposal.  I have spent more than half of my life, nine out of about sixteen years, hunting people like him.  When I talk about the measures we should deploy, I’m doing it for a reason.  Not to be arbitrary.”

“I have doubts,” she said, very calm, “I’m voicing them, full disclosure.”

“If you’re questioning me on this, you’re questioning your noble.”

She gave us a very unimpressed look that suggested she knew full well what we were doing, then matched the look with tone of speech as she said, “Perhaps it would be better to tell us what you’re looking to accomplish, and we can suggest the tools to accomplish those things.”

“No,” Evette and I said.  “Because I don’t have time to run everything past you.  We’re dropping me off shortly, and then you’re taking the carriage to go straight back to the lab to start getting everything ready.  Some of the things I name have reasons that aren’t just for the obvious purpose, so I want you to strive to give me what I want, not just close approximates.”

“Evette,” Gordon commented.  “You’re not making friends.”

“And you want warbeasts that make noise, of all things?” Professor Kinney said.  She looked over at Arandt, as if checking for confirmation.

He was remaining quiet, arms folded, listening while letting the younger Bette Kinney handle the negotiation.

“We want warbeasts that make enough noise to drown people out,” Evette and I said.  “Things like this-”

We tapped at the canisters that were still connected to our belt.  “Smoke that chokes, for obvious reasons, and some smoke that nauseates, to disrupt focus and, again, potentially steal their voices.  You and Professor Arandt will work on more smoke generation vehicles.  Smoke with drugs, things to cover other bases, I want them to suffer if there’s even a whiff of the drug.”

“Something effective in lower doses?” she asked.  “We could kill them in low doses.  Why hold back?”

“Anything that potent would likely kill me.  I’m going to be in the thick of things.”

“In the thick of things?” Arandt asked, his eyebrows rising.  “Against Mauer?  A trained soldier, capable combatant, religious and military leader with a small army of revolutionary soldiers at his back.”

“Because Evette,” Jamie said.  “Because her default approach is the unexpected, chancey one.”

“It’s because of the scale and nature of his forces that I’m going to be there,” Evette and I said.  “It’s part of a greater plan.”

“I note how they doesn’t even have a good reason ready to supply for why they’re going to be in the thick of it.  They just want to do it,” Gordon commented.

“Shh,” Evette  urged the spectres.

“That ‘greater plan’-” Professor Kinney started.

We interrupted.  “Stop.  Look.  Mauer expects the out-of-proportion response.  It’s how the Crown and the Academy operate.  If we kill his people, we make ourselves a bigger, more intense enemy.   If we kill him, he becomes a martyr.  That carries weight, especially with the way he positions himself.  That means taking his strengths and turning them into weaknesses.  It means giving him no room to find or keep his balance.  We break him, and we break him by being soft, ephemeral.”

“By getting you in close proximity to him, and leaving him unable to command?”

“Among other things,” we said, thinking.  I looked up.  “Is there a drug we can use to induce ringing in the ears?  What’s it called?”

Tinnire.

“Do that.  Gas form, if possible.  Enough to be uncomfortable or disruptive, without destroying.  I want a cumulative effect with that and a number of other drugs, with no contraindications.  Choking smoke, nausea, lights or sparkles in the eyes, mild pain, hallucinations, a little bit of bleeding from orifices?”

“All doable.  It’s a question of asking for the right chemicals from the right batches, keeping an eye on management, packing it into canisters like the one you have-”

“No,” we said.

“No?”

“Not canisters.  No.  I’m thinking… it needs to be stitched.  Or warbeasts, if you think you can get enough set up.  But probably stitched.  Fill them with gas.  Set them up to explode, or exhale it, or leak it when shot.  It’s about pressure, having bodies on our side that we can expend while still accomplishing our objective.  And the gas needs to be thin, easily dispersed into the air and still effective when dispersed at those concentrations.”

“You’re asking for a great deal, again, stitched would have to be modified to carry a payload.”

“And you’re worried about time, you said?” we asked.  We weren’t as good as some of the others at going on the offense, or at manipulation.  All we could do was seize on something and push for it, and run them down with quantity of words and ideas.  “Recruit more people.  I’m sure you can do that, can’t you?  Just use the Infante’s name, bring some people on board?”

“It’s in the realm of possibility,” she said.  “And you’re introducing complexity now.”

“I’m not even halfway done.  The next phase is parasites.  The worst thing that could happen is that I capture Mauer and we get to the stage where they’re on their heels, and then his very well trained and very dangerous lieutenants immediately make a counter-play.  Mauer will have plans up his sleeve, things he’s discussed with his lieutenants.  We get Mauer, they enact the most viable plan, and suddenly they have a person, place, or thing hostage.”

Gordon commented, “And they get the hostage or they take away something that hurts-”

“The nobility won’t pay ransom,” Kinney said.  “It would have to be a very valuable hostage, but it’s more likely that we don’t pay, and we lose something that hurts.”

“Very likely,” I agreed.  “Which is why we step it up.  We need longer-term problems.  Something to delay.  Parasites.  Something that’s time consuming to get rid of.”

“Fisteria,” Professor Arandt suggested.

“Would it be hurt by the smoke as proposed?” Evette and I asked.

“Most things would.”

Evette and I nodded, “Find a way to make it so they’ll stay at peak effectiveness.  Hamper Mauer’s men, don’t kill.  We want them to stop, hurt, and think, before they decide on their next move.  We’ll also need a deployment.  Something different from the stitched.”

“I have to ask,” Kinney said.  “Why aren’t we outright killing them?”

“I covered that,” Evette and I replied.

“No, you suggested roundabout reasons why killing the men and leaving Mauer alone would give him grounds for further aggression, and why taking out Mauer alone would make him a martyr.  Killing the men and killing or capturing Mauer in a massive assault would prevent both.”

Evette and I stopped.  There were reasons, but spelling it out meant having a better mental footing.  Implementation was easiest.

“Theoretically,” we said, stalling.

Gordon.  Help.

Gordon spoke, “You want a reason her approach won’t work?  Mauer’s forces are too spread out.  They won’t be concentrated in a way that can be easily attacked.”

Evette and I repeated it, virtually word for word.  We were speaking with a delay before we spoke, and our attempts to cover it with body language and manner of speaking weren’t perfect.  Far from.

“The gas and the parasites, distributed well enough, will be able to reach or inconvenience most of Mauer’s men on the fringes.  The lookouts and the groups that are waiting to flank us as we attack Mauer in the heart of his group.”

We repeated Gordon’s phrasing.

“With a distribution that wide, you’re talking about affecting civilians,” Professor Kinney said.

“Definitely,” Gordon said.  “Mauer’s men, they’ll be in tall buildings a block or two city blocks away, watching over things with those guns and some binoculars or telescopes to give them the ability to watch things unfold.  We want to catch at least the closer ones in the course of the general assault.  We’ll want fast moving troops with guns.  Expendable ones.  Limber stitched, where possible.”

We repeated for him, sentence by sentence.

“Stitched, as a general rule, emphasize durability over agility.”

“But you can,” Evette and I said.

“We can, yes.  But I happen to wonder if we should.  A lot of this makes me wonder if we should.  I’m not seeing the thrust of it, and I’m not a member of your little team of like-minded experiments.  Why should we go this far?  Explain your rationale.”

Evette and I answered, not waiting for Gordon, “You should, because you want to make an impact.  You should recruit as many people as you can under your banner for the sake of this attack, because you want to enjoy the power, however briefly, that comes with working under a noble.  That ability to say ‘jump’ and have a crowd of people obey in unison.”

“Arandt,” Gordon said, with a hint of urgency.

We wheeled on Arandt, extending a pointing finger.

He’d just opened his mouth to speak, his arms still folded as he sat in his seat in the carriage.

“Yes?” he asked.

“He was going to interject,” Gordon said.  “He’s been waiting all this time to find a point to jump in and devastate your argument.”

“You were going to interrupt us,” we said.

“I was going to add a comment,” the gaunt Professor Arandt said.

“A comment about your recklessness,” Gordon said.  “You’re painting a picture, staking everything on this plan, the drama of it, and he’s too conservative and careful to truly want to be a part of it.”

“You have your doubts,” we said, speaking over the last few words of Gordon’s commentary.  “I understand.  But there’s more to this.  Aspects I can spell out later.  What we need for now is for you to get started.  Mauer just took major action.  There’s two ways he could go from here.  He either escalates, seizing on prior advantage, or he does something to cement that advantage and burns every bridge behind him as he disappears.  One of those actions is imminent, and hitting him while he’s in the process of preparing for it may be one of the few times we catch him with his guard down.”

“I can’t help but notice the infrequent use of the royal ‘we’,” Kinney observed.

“And that last part is complete and unmitigated bullshit, Sy,” Jamie commented.

Gordon was gone, and Jamie was present.  He wasn’t lurking in my peripheral vision anymore, but I still couldn’t look directly at him without him dodging off to one side, like an afterimage from a very bright light very close to my eye.

“That isn’t how Mauer operates,” Jamie said.

“Sy doesn’t get all of the credit for the unmitigated bullshit,” Evette said.  “I helped.”

“You helped,” Jamie conceded.

Kinney had said something in the midst of the conversation between Jamie and Evette, and my observations of Jamie.  She was looking at me expectantly.

“You said something,” I said.  “What was it?  I was thinking.”

“Timing is sensitive, then,” Kinney challenged us, allowing herself a private smile at the irony.

“This is doable.  You have your black coats.  I know you’re capable of recognizing that something is achievable and making it happen,” we retorted.

Arandt dryly commented, “It’s a question of motivation, I think.  We serve the noble lord Infante, of course, and we do our utmost to produce the best work possible for him and his extended family.  But the best work possible looks very different when we truly want something ourselves, and when we are simply doing our duty.”

“There it is,” Gordon commented.

“This isn’t entirely untrue,” Kinney said.  “That motivation factor might make the difference in this being achieved.”

“Do we really want to tap vast resources and personnel and reinvent the wheel for a risky gambit that might make an impact?” Arandt asked.  “And might make us look bad if we’re deemed to have any part in its failure?”

“The best way to avoid looking bad is to do exemplary work,” we challenged him.

Arandt shook his head a little, and didn’t venture a reply.

“We will, rest assured, do our best work,” Kinney said, with an notable lack of sincerity and a look in her eye that suggested she was testing us.  The ‘best work’ she was talking about was best work that was liable to see most but not all of the required work done, with time constraints being their very real and unavoidable reality.  They wouldn’t do any more work than was necessary to meet their goal.

Leaving it like this meant that she and Arandt won the argument, and it meant that Evette and I weren’t achieving our goal of keeping them sufficiently busy and out of our hair.

“What you’re doing doesn’t make sense as an approach, Sy,” Gordon said.  “And why would Evette be clever about planning and strategy and treat social problems as if she’s bashing her face into a wall and hoping to win?”

The carriage came to a stop.  The driver knocked on the carriage roof.

We arrived.

We looked over at Shirley, who was sitting beside me, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.

“I can do this,” Gordon said.  “And criticizing you two as you’ve stumbled through this conversation has given me renewed life.  I’ll get the professors on the same page as us.  Swap out with me, Evette.  I don’t want to keep doing the thing where I talk and you two repeat after me.”

I relaxed, shifting my thoughts to allow for the swap to happen.

No,” Evette said.

The syllable rang in my head for long seconds in the midst of the uneasy pause that followed.  My skin crawled as goosebumps took over.

Evette remained sitting beside me.  When I looked, there was nobody in the space of the carriage that we had allocated to Gordon, where Jamie had appeared.  Where Helen would appear if she wasn’t so uncomfortable to look at, so unnecessary to this current situation.

With only Evette at hand, faced with prospective allies who might well be uncooperative, we had no idea how to convince them.  I reached for things and there was a distinct nothing instead of the Lamb that should have spoken up, a void in place of the part of me that should have fielded that aspect of the problem.

Stiffly, we rose out of the seat, opened the door, and stepped down onto the rail beneath the door.  We stopped there, already getting drenched in our brief exposure to the rain.  Shirley had partially risen out of her seat.

“You stay,” we said.

“What?” she asked, eyes wide.

“Stay.  With them.  If they go back to the labs and I’m out here handling things, they’ll think I’ve absconded, and they won’t work.  It’ll be my word against theirs.  If you stay, then they have reason to believe I’m coming back.”

“I’m collateral?”

“I need to be active out here, they need to be active in the lab.  My plan will work, and it will make a lot of old problems manageable.”

“I’m collateral,” Shirley said.  She stared at me, quietly horrified.  “You’re treating me like some thing you might pawn at a store to have some money, Sy?”

That’s not wholly wrong, I thought.  I felt a pang of conscience.  This was where the other Lambs were supposed to speak up.

Evette started speaking, and I moved my lips to match.  “That’s not wholly wrong, except you’re a lot more valuable than any item.  You’re priceless, because you’re that close to me-”

The only one that was close to me.  We were playing it up a little to exaggerate, but only a little.  We weren’t good manipulators like this, me and Evette.

“-and the Infante himself recognized that you had that value to me.  Which is why they won’t and can’t touch you, and why this will even work in the first place.”

She shook her head, staring at me.

“I will be back,” I said.

“Browsing the pawn stores in Tynewear, I saw a lot of people who lived beyond their means pawning treasured and sentimental items to cover debts and make bets.  All of them convinced themselves in the moment that they would get the money, they would return, and they would have what they wanted and their personal treasures too.”

“Yeah,” we replied.

“There’s a reason those pawn stores stay in business, Sylvester.  It’s not because they routinely give back those treasures they held as collateral.”

“Yeah,” we replied, our tone less confident, less proud.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“But there are still ways to make sure things work out,” we said.  “Big picture and small.  Trust me.”

We looked at the professors.

“You’ve memorized what we want?” Evette and I asked.

“Yes,” Kinney said.  She smiled, self-indulgent.  Not because of the exchange between Shirley and us.  Because she wasn’t being wholly sincere.

“I’ll be back later.  I’m most comfortable skulking around on my own, and I need to get my head around the shape of what Mauer’s doing, and what the battlefield might look like.  I’ll come back with more ideas on what we need to tackle this, and a more exact idea of what his big move might look like,” I said.

“More ideas,” Kinney said, in mild disbelief.

Evette and I smiled, and we shut the door with some force.

The chill that had come with Evette’s refusal to vacate hadn’t wholly left me, even though the evening was hot.  It was warm enough that the rain didn’t cool us down so much as it got us thoroughly drenched.

We were free, in a manner of speaking.  There was an indistinct time before we had to return for Shirley.  We would come back to find that the professors had churned out some but not all of the work.  Much of it would be the easiest tasks.  The gas, the chemicals, produced in large quantities.  The stitched would be put off.  The warbeasts too.  Perhaps they would have students recruited to do the grunt work.

It wasn’t ideal, but we were free.

“You’re building a house of cards,” Gordon said.  “You realize this?  They’ll interrogate the soldier you convinced to lie, and they’ll use drugs, the same ones they used on Lillian.”

We ignored him, walking briskly.  The numbering of the streets made navigation fairly easy.

“Putting Shirley at stake like that, it’s not good,” Gordon said.  “You would never do that.”

We continued to ignore him.

“This isn’t sustainable, Sy.  You’re going downhill, hour by hour.”

I could have pushed him away, but I didn’t want to.

I should have been able to push Evette out, but I couldn’t, even though I wanted to.  There was a part of me that refused to let go of that aspect of her.

We walked, moving through the crowd.  Even in a city where people walked with purpose and a brisk stride, we were faster, which meant having to navigate the people, the warbeasts, and the other obstacles.  A fast moving zig-zag through the forest of moving bodies nearly saw me walk into more than one stationary obstacle that I hadn’t seen until it was too late.

“Maybe, maybe this works,” Jamie said.  “Maybe you find all of the pieces you’re looking for, you arrange everyone perfectly, keeping in mind that Mauer is clever and capable, and the Infante is monumentally powerful with the wisdom to use that power at its most effective.  Maybe the stars align, and absolutely nothing goes wrong.  And maybe, just maybe, you accomplish this.”

He paused for emphasis.

Moving through the crowd, I saw a girl that looked very much like Lillian had when Lillian was young.  The same face shape, the same nose shape, enough that I thought she was a very distinct spectre.  Then I saw the blonde hair, and the features that didn’t quite fit, the fact that her upper arms were thicker, implying a different body type, and that Lillian would never dress that way, and, and, and-

And then she was gone and the image of her flew from my mind, and I was left with only annoyance at myself that I’d seen any resemblance at all.

Jamie spoke softly, in a voice I shouldn’t have heard through the hustle and bustle of it all.  “Maybe you even achieve your quadruple-cross, with all of the pieces of your and Evette’s intricately constructed setup serving their roles, playing out with grace and impact and all of the desired fallout.  In part, what you and the other Jamie were plotting during that long winter and spring in Tynewear is achieved.”

In part.

“That’s a lot of maybes, Sy.  A lot of gambles, with narrow odds.  On another day, with help, you might achieve it.  Might.  If you were at your best.”

We’d found the intersection that Mauer’s soldier had mentioned.

Jamie was gone.  Helen was there.  Twisted up, but capable of speaking, despite having no mouth half the time.  I only saw fleeting glimpses of her in the midst of the crowd.  A person would walk between us, and I’d see Helen mostly intact.  Then the next instant she disappeared from view and reappeared, blocked by intervening bodies, she would be a twisted ruin again.

She spoke in her cold, reptilian voice, the one without inflection or emotion, only delivery, “You’re not at your best, Sy.  Gordon is right.  You only slept because you were drugged.  You haven’t eaten.  You’re getting steadily worse, with more flaws in this crutch you’re employing.”

Evette and I looked at the houses.  We judged which one Mauer would prefer as a spot to camp out in, one of the places his followers had gathered, stockpiling resources while using windows to monitor goings-on.  Perched on a corner, it was a spacious house that might have been a home once, but broken down into individual apartments within.  Red brick, with branches crawling through the woodwork.

“I’m inclined to back Duncan’s mutiny,” Gordon said.  “Even knowing what it might cost.”

“It costs Sy Sy,” Jamie said.  “We oust him, and we take up residence, taking our turns as needed.  There’s not even any guarantee it works.  We might try as a subconscious craving on Sy’s part to utterly change, and leave ourselves a collective vegetable.  Or something worse.”

“Are you saying all of this to him or to me?” Evette asked.

“To both,” Helen said.  “The two of you were supposed to bring Shirley.  But you seized control, you discarded her.  We don’t want to be that person.  We need Shirley.”

Evette and I hopped the fence, in broad daylight.  We approached the side of the house, peering in through windows.  People were staring.

Who was going to act, though?

“Give us time,” Evette said.  “A few hours.”

“We won’t last a few hours,” Gordon pointed out.  “At the rate we’re crumbling, the rebellion on Duncan’s part, and now on yours, refusing to cede ground to us?  Pushing us further away?  Sy’ll be gone in one way or another before the night is half over.”

“An hour, then,” Evette said.  “Two.”

“An hour,” Gordon said.  “Then the rest of us start talking extra measures.”

“One hour, but if we’re doing okay, you extend the time,” Evette said.

“Fine.”

And, in the meantime, you help,” Evette said.

Gordon nodded.

Evette and I nodded, as we found an entrance that might have worked.  A window was slightly ajar.  The sill of that same window, we noted, had glass shards worked into it, the points sticking up and out.  Deterrence for would-be thieves.

We climbed up, careful, using other aspects of the building, and peered into the room, checking all was clear.

There was a mechanism in place, tucked into one corner of the window.

It took some doing to fiddle with the mechanism and raise the window up without cutting me on the glass shards.  We managed it, then held the mechanism firm while climbing through the window.

Gas and chemical, sorted out into containers, all arranged in a battery that was reminiscent of the Caterpillar project’s brains.  Wires and mechanisms fed from every entrance and exit of the house to the battery.

The window had been a decoy.  Shove it open and boom.  Fire and death.

Even if it were a real, unwitting thief, the explosion would distract the Crown.

We moved through the house, careful for more traps.  There were signs that many people had slept here, many people had stayed.  Beers had been imbibed in great quantities during off hours.

With Jamie helping, we identified the chair that had been Mauer’s by positioning, quality, and the damage to one of the arms.  His massive arm had rested on it, clutching at the handrest.  He had been standing by it, drawing attention, helping to form the connection.

Mauer had been here once.  Perhaps it had been a headquarters before, before he’d made a routine change of location?

Eminently believable that he would be here, all in all, but nothing useful.

“The man who led us here might have expected us to trigger the trap and die,” Gordon said.  “I’m very curious what we plan to do if he talks about you asking him to lie about Mauer’s location.”

“We can handle that,” Evette and I said, “It’s part of the quadruple-cross.  Everyone is aware of how smart they are.  They’re aware of how smart we are.  The Infante is expecting a betrayal.  We’ll give him this one, mild and enough to draw his curiosity.  Then we give him what he wants and deliver a fatal blow at the same time.”

“And Shirley?” Jamie asked.  “She’ll be okay in the midst of this?”

“The Infante doesn’t see the point in hurting her,” Gordon said.  “He didn’t see the point in using our relationship with Lillian against us, threatening her.  I still don’t like sending her back there.  I don’t like hurting her.  But… if we’re cooperating with Evette in this, I’m ninety percent confident she’s safe for now.”

“I don’t like that ten percent,” Jamie said.

Helen was silent, standing by a table.  We approached.

There were fruits, set in a bowl.  They hadn’t rotted, though they looked a touch ripe, which meant Mauer had been here somewhat recently.

Helen being there meant something.  Instinct, needs.  We reached for the fruit, sating hunger by biting into an apple.

Thick juice ran down our chin.  The apple tasted like coins and raw meat.  The texture wasn’t apple, either.

Nothing like biting into an apple and realizing it was a blood apple instead.

Proteins, all the same.

“There are clues in the situation here,” Gordon observed.  “The sheer quantity of explosives here.  It means he’s not detonating any bombs or anything in the near future.  If he’s making further moves, he has something else in mind.”

“He should,” Evette said.  “We should find out just what that is.”

“That so?” Gordon asked.  “How do you propose we do that?”

“We ask, clearly,” Evette said.

Seizing paper and a pen, we began scrawling out a message.  We found our way to a window, and we observed the surroundings before moving to another face of the house.  Once there, we found our target -a high building nearby-, and we raised the paper to the window, holding it there.  We fixed our eyes in their general direction, so that if they looked at us through any binoculars, they would see is looking more or less at them, and they would see our message.

‘Truce talk.’

Even as damaged as I was, with the various voices in my head commenting at how badly things were drifting to pieces, I felt a little bit of excitement at the prospect of talking to Mauer again.

Two long minutes passed, no doubt while they debated whether or not to shoot me.

Evette was fairly certain they wouldn’t.  It would cost too much.  The gunshot would bring countermeasures into play, things like the wall-wolves coming out of hiding to collapse in on the place the noise had come from.

On the eighth floor of a ten-floor spire, lights turned on, then turned off.

That would do.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.08 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

There was no elevator, and Mauer’s men weren’t inclined to be kind and meet me halfway.

Stairs, stairs, and more stairs.

That was the problem with these tall buildings.  They required too much effort to get from one point to another.  Humans, according to Wallace’s Law, had developed to confront the plains and the savannahs.  Large tracts of flat ground.  The reason the Lambs liked operating from high places was it positioned them to operate in a dimension their enemies didn’t.

But operating from up above was very different from getting there in the first place.

I’d used the word them to think about the Lambs.

Not us.

Was that why I couldn’t get the ghost of a person who never was to leave?

The recalcitrant Evette took the stairs with a kind of grim determination.  We worked through ideas on how to tackle Mauer.

Mauer.

My thoughts rambled, with Evette.  I didn’t have enough to hold onto, no past experiences to think back to.  I could try to organize them, but then I was fighting her.  I could embrace them, but then there was no guarantee we would find our way to a resolution.

“You’re slouching,” Helen pointed out.  “You’re making Sy slouch.”

“Shh,” Evette said.  “Thinking.”

“There are only so many times we can approach an enemy to have a face to face with them before one of them decides to be unkind,” Gordon said.

“I know this.  But we have a lot of ground to cover,” Evette said.  “Too many things to do.  Case in point.  I need the opportunity to figure out how this is all going to take shape.  Which means you all need to shut up and let me think.  The alternative is you get to shout at me, nothing changes, and we’re hobbled.  Wasn’t that the whole point of the ‘one person takes over’ thing?”

“This isn’t the way to do it,” Jamie said.  “Not in the big picture.  You’re shrugging off advice and counsel.  You’re not letting us offer our input.  Think, Evette.  Think, Sy.  What roles are the various Lambs playing here?  We’re representing parts of Sy.  And there are parts that are small and parts that are buried, that don’t get a lot of representation.  Those Lambs aren’t doing much.”

“I’m going to let you talk, but then you’re all going to have to be quiet and let me damn well think,” Evette said.

“I think that’s a deal?  It should be one, anyway.  Gordon?”

“Yes.  Fine.  Deal.  I hope you’ve got a good argument, Jamie.”

“I hope so too,” Jamie said, his voice soft.  “Helen’s obvious enough, Sy.  She’s instinct, your wants and needs.  Food, sleep, and a bit of identity, on the most basic level.  You as an organism.”

“I’d like to point out that aside from that blood apple, we haven’t eaten in a long time,” Helen said.

“Gordon’s trying to handle all the rest of us.  He focuses on the action, he makes the calls, he’s negotiating,” Jamie said.  “He’s us as the composite, understand?  All the different pieces working together.”

“I’m annoyed at that,” Gordon said.  “Doubly annoyed that I’m very clearly failing.”

“I’m about the connections, the deeper thoughts, the analysis.  I’ve always been slower than the rest of the Lambs.  I’ve always been more rational and inclined to educate myself on the details.  It says a lot that you picked me and not my successor.”

My heart was heavy at the combined weight of the thoughts of the older Jamie and the new one.  Both out of reach.

“You’re trying to put that stuff out of mind,” Jamie said.  “Jamie and Lillian.  If you actually reached out and tried communicating with them, you might tap into aspects of yourself that are more compassionate or teamwork oriented.  You might even figure out a way to get a handle on what’s going on in your own head, Sy.  Just saying.”

“He might not figure out a way,” Evette said.  “And the damage could be incalculable.”

“I won’t argue,” Jamie said.  “I don’t want this to be an argument.  But we haven’t seen Lillian or my successor since Evette really took over.  They’re very far away now, and that shows in how we handled Shirley.  I think that Lillian might represent a part of Sy that cares, in terms of compassion, and Jamie might represent a part of him that cooperates.  We haven’t needed to draw on the Lambs or any past experience for either of those things, except sort of with Shirley.  Again, stressing Shirley as a key point, here.  That’s not how Sy acts.”

“It was a calculated move,” Evette said.

“That’s the thing, though!” Jamie said.  And he sounded as agitated as I’d ever known Jamie to be.  “That’s the thing!  You called for a calculated move.  But you’re not that part of Sy!  That’s Duncan, I think, or it’s me.  You’re a different part of Sy.  At first it looked like you were the part that includes making the unconventional calls, improvising, problem solving and being inspired.”

“But?” Evette asked, sounding hostile.

“But there’s more to it,” Jamie said.  “I don’t know what it is, and I know that sounds lame and makes for a weak closing argument, but you broke pattern to be very calculating and ruthless in a key moment.  You’re the unique case.  You’re not based on anything real.”

“Allow me to make a counter-argument,” Evette said.

“Please do,” Gordon said.

“Sylvester is never more Sylvester than when he’s gloating over his victory.  When it all comes together, and he has the upper hand.  What we lack right now is Sylvester, the complete, nourished, functioning whole.  So what I’m going to do is very simple.  I’m going to take point, and I’m going to achieve a big win.  Something we need, after we had to say goodbye to everyone in Radham, dealt with wear and tear in Tynewear, and…”

“West Corinth.  Lillian and Jamie.  Yeah,” Gordon said, with a bit of resignation.

“That was supposed to be a win.  A good few days that let Sylvester be the devastating, magnificent person he needs to be, touching on every person and key point we needed to touch on.  But it wasn’t a win in the end.”

“So we’re doubling down?” Gordon asked.  “Going for broke?  Because if we gamble on this and we lose, and the odds are definitely not with us, then we’re not coming back from it in one piece, if we come back from it at all.”

“The fact is,” Evette said, “We were going to lose Shirley if we took her and walked away from all of this.  We can’t connect to her.  We can’t ask for help, cry on her shoulder, or be her shoulder to cry on.  There are deep-set problems and there aren’t easy fixes to them.  Thus, the gamble.  We take out the major players in one fell swoop.  We start enacting the plan he and Jamie were piecing together in Tynewear, during the winter and spring.  Purpose, drive, direction, and a reason to exist again.”

Gordon sighed.

“I don’t wholly disagree with the goal, even if I think it’s too much of a house of cards,” Jamie said, quiet, “But I particularly disagree with how you’re going about it.  The fact remains, we don’t entirely know what you represent, what you’re really striving for, or why you’re this prominent in Sy’s head.”

“That’s fair,” Evette said.

Gordon spoke, pointed, “But so long as you aren’t willing to vacate the spot, Sylvester will be one dimensional.  Jamie’s right.  Helen commented on posture, you’re barely even caring about how you present yourself at this point.  I’m commenting that you’re not thinking things through.  There’s not even a glance in the direction of compassion… I could go on.”

“I’m willing to hear you out, but I’m not willing to vacate,” Evette said.

“Why?” Jamie pressed.

“Because we were and are off balance.  All it took was a little push, and we crumbled.  Every time we exchange places, our perspective shifts, our goals alter, and we end up walking a zig-zagging line.  It’s contradictory, when Sylvester has to reach out to each one of you to get things done, but he doesn’t want to reach out to the Lambs or remind himself of them.  Did nobody else catch the metaphor that was running through Sylvester’s head back on the train?  Grabbing a blade and clutching it?”

“I noticed that,” Helen said.

“What we were doing wasn’t sustainable.  What I’m doing isn’t either, but at least we’ll get more done before it all goes to pieces,” Evette said.  “We’ll get more done traveling in a straight line than in a zig-zag.”

“I’m not so sure,” Gordon said.  “The moment we find ourselves in a circumstance where you can’t handle things, we lose all the ground we gained by traveling that single course.”

“Given the alternative is guaranteed lost ground, the pain of having to deal with you, being off balance with constant adjustment, and falling to pieces?” Evette asked.

“It seems you already decided,” Jamie said.  “Thank you for entertaining my argument.”

For the next two floors of the upwards ascent, it was only Evette and I.

“We left on a good note with Mauer, all considered,” Evette mused aloud.  “The good note being a truce with the Baron, a primordial, a plague, an acquaintance of ours being carted off to have all of her custom body work torn out and her body crippled head to toe…”

It was hard to know what to expect with Mauer.  Better to go into it with an idea of what to say and how to approach the discussion.  Treat it as a problem solving exercise.

What did Mauer want?  He was driven by anger, at least in part.  He was driven by pride.

We could feed his pride.

I fished the paper out of a pocket, looking it over, framing the individual strategies and the key points to hit.  Weaknesses, strengths, what he wanted and needed.

We rounded a bend in the staircase, and movement at the top of the stairs drew our eyes up and away from the paper.

We folded the paper and put it into a pocket.

Men, waiting.  They had the looks of soldiers, but were wearing civilian clothes.  Two of them had long rifles leaning against the wall by them.  One had a revolver in hand, aimed and pointed since before I’d even come up the stairs.

We raised my hands.

He gestured with the gun.  We ascended the last leg of the stairs.

There were more people beyond a doorway, all gathered in a single apartment.  The way was clear for us to pass through.

The moment we passed into the apartment, however, we felt the sharp pain and sense-rattling impact of a heavy object striking my head.  All the strategies and ideas we were holding ready, for arguments and to make the case against Mauer, all for naught, as our thoughts flew sideways and darkness took over.

Evette stirred.  She blinked, slowly, suppressing a wince at how the simple action was cause for more pain, then began to pick herself up off the ground.

Something had shifted.  She raised her hands, looking at the backs of them, before patting herself down.

Still Sylvester, in body if nothing else.

No other Lambs around.

“Fragile,” she murmured to herself.  “It would have been nice if we could have gotten off the train and taken a few weeks to ourselves, come to terms with things.  But we keep on taking our lumps, and we keep crumbling.”

The room was bright, as she allowed herself to open her eyes wider.  The artificial lights were on, glowing, with dark things swimming within, and the walls, tile, counter, and fixtures were white, with some black shapes winding through them.  A small bathroom, with the door closed, the doorknob missing.

“It looks like we’ve been taken prisoner,” she said.  She paused.  “It would be a problem if we were too late to reunite with Shirley.”

Her hand went to her waist.

The canisters were gone.

Her boots had been removed, her shirt untucked.

Subjected to a search while unconscious.

There was a part of her that was supposed to feel violated.  There was another part of her that was supposed to be reminded of Lillian and the moment of their second goodbye.  The frisky frisking.

She welcomed it.  It was something that made sense.  She was the enemy, and the enemy didn’t get the benefit of niceties.

Additionally, she reasoned, ignoring all of the jokes the Lambs had made in the past, it would have been very weird if Mauer had conducted a frisk while they were awake, if the frisk was even remotely similar to the one Sylvester had performed with Lillian.

She welcomed the pain, too.  It was a nice, neat little indicator of where things stood.  The adversarial relationship, the gravity of the situation, and he expectations of the enemy.

She looked around.  The mirror had been removed from the wall.  The components of the toilet had been removed, from the flush chain to the lid and, she suspected, the contents of the wall-mounted tank that held the water and mechanisms.

She searched the cupboards beneath the sink, and found them empty, except for a single, isolated mouse dropping.  She crossed to the other end of the small bathroom, and searched the shower.  There was soap, but the taps and the head of the shower had been removed, leaving only the pipe sticking out of the wall.

Peering closer at the drain, she saw the residue that had collected where the metal met the varnished bone.  A bug so small a less keen eye might have missed it crawled away from the residue, making its way to a crack between the tiles.

Blood.  Now that she knew to look for it, she could see more of it in the cracks between tiles.  Someone had been killed here, or they had been cut apart into a more convenient series of smaller pieces and then the pieces had been disposed of elsewhere.

She closed her eyes, halfways to anticipating the others speaking, interrupting the scene with interjected thoughts and ideas.

The silence was blissful.  Troubling, to be sure, but it was a problem that could be solved later.  For now, she was finally free to think.

She walked over to the sink, and checked out the wound to her -to Sy’s– head.  She turned on the water, slowly, so as not to make too much noise, and filled the sink.

With her sleeve, now damp, she daubed at the wound.  She bent her head low and then washed her face, immersing the upper corner of her scalp where the skin had parted and the congealed blood had formed what she suspected were the beginnings of a scab.

Trying to decide her next move, she stared down into the pink-red water, and she saw her reflection.  Sylvester’s face.

Sylvester had made her to fill a void, and then he had become a void.  He had retreated.  To then find herself being confronted with the fact that she wasn’t real- it wasn’t good.  She was the sole operating figure right now.  The lone personality.

Sylvester was hurting, and every time he got hurt any further, he retreated.  He’d given up his volition to let the individual, discrete parts of his personality and mind make the calls.  He’d retreated further and distanced himself from the Lambs, and let them become flawed, unrecognizable on a level.  Now he’d pulled far enough away that he’d pulled the Lambs out of her reach.

She focused, and she used Sylvester’s technique to build up a mental image strong enough to obscure and overcome what she was really seeing.  Now, when she looked down into the water, which was briefly distorted by a lone drip from the tap, she saw Evette’s face.

What were her options?

She took stock of the tools at hand.

Carefully, she swept her attention over the tiles, searching, checking for anything that might be loose.  They were firm enough she didn’t think she could pry anything loose.  A shame.  Whether bone or whatever it might have been, it could have been broken and turned into a shard.  A shard could serve as a weapon.

The glass from the light fixtures would be too fine to serve as a good cutting weapon.  It would crumble rather than break through tissue.  The light fixtures were mounted on the wall above the sink and the unpainted patch where the mirror had hung.  She climbed up onto the counter, swaying a little as her head throbbed, then used her dry sleeve to prod at the bulb.

Too hot to touch, much less unscrew.  The switch for the lights wasn’t in the room, either.

She pulled off her shirt, balled it up, and used the two largest wads of cloth to seize the first of the three bulbs and crush it.

The occupant fell free, grazing her knee as it fell toward the sink.  Rather than let it fall into the pool of water, which might have been inconvenient, she kicked it in the general direction of the toilet.

She shook as much of the glass particulate onto the counter as she could, before reaching up to crush the second bulb, this time being more careful of the black, worm-like thing that dwelt within.  She handled the third quickly enough, though she could smell the cloth starting to smoulder from the high temperature bulbs.

The room was dark, now.

She thought about pulling the shirt back on, but decided against it.  She shook it out as well as she could, then set it aside, using her hands to scrape up the glass dust into a small pile.

She couldn’t wear the shirt again.  That gave her another idea.

Yes, there was a way out.  She would have to think fast, improvise, and rely a touch on luck, but there was a way.

She unbuttoned her pants, then removed them, before removing her underwear.

There was a bar of soap.  With water from the sink and soap in hand, she lathered up, and rubbed her entire body down.

With cupped hands, she pooled water on the floor, and ground the bar of soap into the tile there.

The clothes were set aside, pants bundled in one hand, the crushed glass collected and kept as a reserve measure.

The trick was to keep her feet dry.  She avoided stepping in the puddle she’d made as she retreated to the tub, so she could plant a foot there, kicking off against the tub’s edge to give herself a forward push.

She crouched there, and she waited, the only light in the room being the light that came in through the door.

While she waited, she thought about her plans, her goals, and her needs.

Ironic, that when a noble had offered his full resources to her, she felt she had no resources to spare.  The problems she had to figure out, problems with Sylvester, with needing to wake him up, with the Lambs and with various enemies, weren’t problems that Academy medicine could easily solve.

When her skin started to crackle and the soap film began to flake, she dipped her hand into water and wet herself down again, reapplying soap.

If she concentrated, she could hear the noise outside.  Voices, people talking, discussing.

She heard the change in pitch as the conversation changed, and she tensed.

The key turned in the lock, and the door swung open.  What had been a muffled mumble became a voice.  “-lights are off.”

The soldier, a revolver in his hand, stared at the scene she’d created.  At the naked adolescent that was curled up in the corner by the wall and the tub.

He shut the door.  The key sounded in the lock.

“Damn,” Evette said to herself.

But she remained where she was.  She counted off numbers in her head and considered the details of that scene of the open door, the room beyond.  The light had been glaring, her memory wasn’t any better than Sylvester’s, but she’d see people in the room beyond, multiple, and the floor, and the distance to the wall, which had had windows running all alongside it.  The exterior wall of the apartment building.

Again, she heard voices change.

The door opened.  There was a different man there, this time.  Not Mauer.  And the first man was there too, standing behind him.

Faced with a tricky and questionable situation, he’d turned to a superior for counsel.

The superior drew his gun.  Evette didn’t move.

“Cuffs,” he instructed his subordinate.

She heard the jangle of the chain.

“I’m going to come in there,” the captain said.  “You’re going to give me your hand, and I’m going to cuff one of your wrists.”

Evette waited.

The man stepped into the room, set one foot on the puddle of soapy water, and sprawled.

She lunged, driving one foot into the man’s stomach as she walked on him, kicking him across the face as she entered the doorway.

The subordinate that had first opened the door was there.

She’d noted the nature of the floor earlier.  Now she dropped.  Still slick, soapy all over, she slid hard into one of his legs, toppling him.

His hand grappled for her, his fingernails scraped skin, but found no purchase.

“He’s getting away!” the man roared.  “Fuck!”

There were others in the apartment.  A man sat by the window with a long rifle.  Quick to react, rising to his feet as he drew a gun.  She figured out the way to the front door, then bolted for it, using the passage into the hallway as a way to get out of the man’s field of view.

A fourth man was in the hallway, guarding the closed front door.  A harder barrier to pass.

Still sprinting, she hurled the handful of crushed glass in the general direction of his face and eyes.  She had to bring her shoulder down low to drive it into the man’s solar plexus.  Being shorter had its advantages here.

While the man suffered, knowing the other three were about to appear behind her, she passed the pants to the other hand, which had fine glass particulate embedded in the skin and countless fine cuts across the surface, and used the other, unhurt hand to turn the key and knob.

She hauled the door open, found herself with a grown man on one side of her and a grown woman on the other.  Their hands found no purchase on her slick skin, but the attempts at grabbing her put her off balance.  She half-fell, half-slid down the short flight of stairs, caught herself, and then hurled herself downward, one hand on the rail to keep her balance as she ran down the stairs.

Soap and water had transferred from her to the stair, and one of the two that she’d just now evaded slipped, catching themselves on the railing or their comrade.  Whatever it was, she only saw a glimpse through the gaps between stairs and railings, and that glimpse suggested they’d stopped, at least for a moment.  There were others catching up now.

She flew down flights of stairs, jumping down as much as she ran.  After several flights, a glance suggesting they were a little ways behind her, she paused to catch her breath and pull on the pants.  The texture against her soaped-up legs was uncomfortable.

The other Lambs would be making comments now.  Still a concern, that.

But it could wait.  A lot of things could.

The noise of the soldiers coming down after her spurred her into action again.  She ran down the stairs, hit the landing and stumbled, then took two steps and jumped the remainder to the next landing.

There were people coming up the stairs.

Timing.

Timing was key.

She knew there were people coming down from upstairs.  There were people coming up from downstairs.

If she waited too long, then the ones from upstairs would catch up.  If she was too early, she’d throw herself into the clutches of the people below.

Timing.

She dropped down to a crouch, bracing herself, and then, on seeing a glimpse of the people below arriving at the top of the stairs below, about to round the corner and look up at her, she took a few running steps, and then threw herself down, one hand reaching for the railing.

She vaulted over, down to the stairs well below her, reaching for the railing on the far wall as something to catch and keep her from landing on the stairs and tumbling the rest of the way down.

A hand seized her by the ankle, coarse and rough enough to bite into skin and find purchase there.  With sheer strength and a twist of the man’s body for leverage, she was hauled down out of the air, onto the stairs and landing.

It was Mauer, and two of Mauer’s lieutenants.  She might have recognized one as being from Lugh.

Mauer looked tired, far older than he’d looked the first time she’d seen him.  Or had Sylvester painted a prettier picture in his mind’s eye?  Mauer’s coppery hair was longer and shaggier, his face slightly drawn, but his eyes were sharp.

“Trust you to make an entrance, Sylvester,” Mauer spoke.

That voice.  The younger jamie would have a perfect word for the sound of it.

She looked up at the man and smiled.  “Just who I wanted to see.”

“Yet you didn’t seem satisfied with staying put?” Mauer asked.

“The head wound and lack of explanation led me to assume the worst,” she said.

The men from upstairs were catching up now.

Mauer looked up at them.

“Charleston got the soap from the tub, but forgot the soap by the sink, or vice versa.  The boy might have blinded Flinn, we didn’t think about the lighting.”

Mauer pursed his lips.

“We left our last meeting on good terms,” Evette said.  “I hoped this one would go considerably better.”

“Mm,” Mauer made a sound.

For a man with such a powerful voice, he was being very quiet.

He settled his eyes on Evette.  He seemed to take a long moment to study her.

“But you aren’t the Sylvester I knew,” he said.

“Ah,” she said.  “Long story.”

Mauer drew a gun, aiming it at her.

“I can condense it.”

“My instinct and logic suggest you couldn’t get the drug you’re accustomed to taking and took something else, with a resulting change in mannerisms and manner of speech,” he said.

She almost opened her mouth to confirm that suggestion.

“But,” he continued, “things are rarely simple with you.”

“Rarely,” she said.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She thought back to the conversation with the others.  The discussion of what part of Sy they each were.

They weren’t there or listening in, as far as she could tell, and the pat answer likely wouldn’t satisfy Mauer any.

“I’m Wyvern,” she said.  “I am Sylvester’s pain.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.09 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Mauer’s men gave Evette a push, returning her to the apartment.  They nudged her with the butt ends and barrels of rifles, and manhandled her until she had been herded to the sitting room, and they had her take an armchair, before settling into position, with one behind her, another two to the sides, and the rest in front of her, staring her down.

The other soldiers filled out the rest of the room.

Mauer was one of the last to enter, followed by two doctors who went straight to the man in the bathroom, who was hunched over the sink.  The one who had had glass thrown in his eyes.

Mauer had donned his coat, which had fallen off when he had reached up to seize her out of the air, and it now hung over his shoulders, more or less hiding his monstrous arm.

She watched him carefully.  He took measure of everything in the room before finally relaxing and turning his attention to her.  Even then, however, he gave her a once-over before assessing her as a non-threat.

“Tea?” he asked.

“Please.”

He nodded, and signaled one of his men with the hand of his good arm.  “For everyone who wants any.”

One of the soldiers stepped into another room.

“Sylvester’s pain,” Mauer said.

“Yes,” Evette said.

“Shall I address you as Wyvern?  Sylvester’s pain is a mouthful, and addressing you as ‘Pain’ makes me think of the nobles with their pet projects.”

He didn’t even sound like he was humoring her.

Explaining about the Evette personality was too complicated.  “You can call me Sylvester.  It’s fine.  Names aren’t important.”

Mauer nodded.  He took a moment, thinking.  His men waited with no sign of impatience.  One or two heads turned to glance in the direction of the bathroom, but their focus was more on Mauer than anything.

The rain pattered against the window.  It was dark out.

“Sylvester,” Mauer said.  “You and I, whatever might have happened in Lugh, are far from being allies.”

He made it sound worse than being simple enemies.

Evette withheld comment.

“I know you’re a fugitive and that you’ve distanced yourself from the Crown and Academy both, but the very nature of what you are, or what Sylvester is, it means you can never be trusted.”

“I know,” Evette said.

“You’ve tried to burn me alive, and it remains very possible that all of this is a long con, with you breaking from the Lambs in an attempt to bide time and place yourself close to me or to Genevieve Fray.  It’s very possible that this is a short con, and you are indeed a fugitive, but I remain a piece in the current caper of an independent, unhinged Sylvester Lambsbridge.”

He’d seen the wanted posters then.

“You can’t be trusted,” Mauer said.  “Even this very shift in demeanor, posture, expression and manner of speech…”

Mauer gesticulated at Evette in a general way.

“…I have no way of knowing if it is reality or an elaborate act.”

“Most would operate on the assumption that it’s an act,” Evette said.  “Or would know that Sylvester is exceedingly adaptable because of the drug regimen he’s been on for most of his life.”

“Most would,” Mauer said.  “And I wouldn’t put it past him, or past you, to set up a trap with the subtlest of cues, using my own strengths against me.”

“Then why?”

“Because I don’t want that to be the focus of our conversation.  Because, if it is a ruse, I’d rather you had the slack to hang yourself with.  And because,” Mauer paused for emphasis, “if it isn’t, I have seen others with similar looks in their eye to the one you have now, and I wouldn’t want someone else to have called them a liar to their faces.”

“Ah,” Evette said.  She wished for a moment she had access to the manipulative aspects of Sylvester.  She felt like every thing she could think of to say would be too blunt or even abrasive.  Her thoughts turned over, trying to figure out a good way to guide the conversation.

Mauer beat her to it.  “How did ‘Sylvester’s Pain’ come about?  Is this a recent thing?”

“Yes.  It’s recent,” Evette said.  She was supposed to be feeling emotional turmoil.  She felt bad, but it was a static, flat kind of bad.  “Sylvester left the Lambs behind when he became a fugitive.  He abandoned them to avoid having to watch them die one by one.  Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, when you think about it.”

She expected an answer from Mauer.  The lack of an answer caught her off guard, and it was very telling, in itself.

“He didn’t want to work for the Crown or the Academy anymore.  Not after the way some of the others were treated.  He went to Tynewear, just in time for the plague.  He told himself he could maintain ties to the Lambs in some other way.  A cat and mouse game, challenges.  Because even being enemies was better than having nothing at all.  In trying, he ruined the ties he had left.”

She glanced up from her hands to Mauer.

No feedback, no indications.

“He retreated.  There was a bit of an adjustment, but I’m managing things now.  Everything extraneous is tucked away and pushed back.  I’m pursuing the mission, solving the problem at hand, until he comes back.  If he can.”

“What’s the mission?” Mauer asked.  “I have to assume I’m involved?”

“Right now?  I’m working for the Infante, but it’s a double cross.  In the end, I’m looking to help you.  Our goals align in this.”

“Do they, now?”

“Yes,” Evette said, with unvarnished earnestness.  She grinned.  “Because I’m betraying the Infante, and I can set the nobles up to get gunned down.  But it’ll be complicated, because the source I used to find you all here is going to be drugged and he’s going to crack.  He’ll reveal the lie, and I can use that to position the Infante.”

“That does sound complicated,” Mauer said.  “I don’t see a reason to play along.”

“I know what you’re doing.  You’re waging a war, slowly and steadily, choosing key moments, places, and targets every step of the way.  The soldiers who do it know they’re sacrificing themselves in the process.  Because they’re believers.  You’ve made them into zealots.”

“Zealot is oftentimes a sort of insult, Sylvester.  It would be wise to avoid ambiguous insults directed at the soldiers gathered in front of you.”

“Ah,” Evette said.  She processed that.  It was so easy to put her foot in her mouth, to focus on Mauer and forget the wider audience.  Not that she was an actor, orator, or director of any sort of play.  “I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

Mauer didn’t respond.

The slack he’s letting me hang myself with goes beyond the Evette persona, then, she realized.

How unfortunate.  Sylvester had handled adversity for a long time by escalating the risks, trusting the other Lambs to catch him when he inevitably stumbled.  None of that mapped to the other Lambs.  It didn’t map to the people Sylvester had studied as he’d developed.  It was his alone, fostered and refined by the Wyvern in his system.

It was Evette’s, now.

Now, faced with a grim sort of adversity, that risk-taking behavior was one of the few tools that Evette had at her disposal.  She had a welling bruise and a cut on her scalp from the blow she’d taken to the head earlier, her hand had been cut by the ground glass, and her throat still had some residual soreness from Monte’s abuse on the train, which was her fault.  Getting hurt in the process was a part of the gambles she took.

Now Mauer had prepped the noose for her, and she was left to wonder if the fact that it was metaphorical meant she was any less likely to inadvertently harm herself with it as she so easily hurt herself with other things.

“You’re going to run out of people, Mauer.  I know you hope to turn this into a movement with the initial victories.  That’s how you operate.  But it’s going to take time to find new people who are willing to die for the cause.  The Academy will develop countermeasures.  Even for your next attack, which I’m betting you’re already planning, I’m sure you’re calculating odds, weighing that nine or twelve or fifteen percent chance that you’ll make your play and they’ll have an answer.  Something that goes beyond the sniper-hunting, wall-crawling warbeasts.  The next mission will be riskier, as will the one after that.”

“Do you see me as a zealot?” Mauer asked.

“Huh?” she asked.  She didn’t miss that he’d used the word, so soon after criticizing her for using it.  The real, whole Sylvester would have been able to gather something from that, but she was left trying to wrap her head around the question.

“You seem to be implying I’m not as willing to die as any of my soldiers.”

“I don’t imagine you are,” she said.  “But that’s not what I’m trying to convey or accuse you of.  You’re working with Fray.  She probably has something up her sleeve.  But maybe she hasn’t told you.  Maybe you have doubts, after the primordial thing.”

“I have doubts,” Mauer said.

Her eyebrows went up.

“I’m on the verge of failure.  The Academy is a monstrous entity, as is the Crown.  You lowballed it on the chances, I imagine.  The real number is supposed to be higher, but we won’t talk about that,” Mauer said, his voice soft.

The look in his eyes was dangerous.

“Faced with all of this adversity, what am I to do?” he asked.  There was a note of concern in his voice.  “I’ve worked for years at this, lost good men.  Fray is unreliable, and I’ve spent a very, very long time in hostile territory, waging a long war.”

His voice had started to waver.  She heard a hint of panic now, she heard the exhaustion.  She saw some of Mauer’s men exchange glances.

“And you,” he said.  He extended his one good hand.  She didn’t miss the tremble in his voice.  “You, Sylvester-who-is-not-really-Sylvester, you have the answer.  You are our salvation.”

And with that final word, all of the tremor and the emotion dropped away from his voice.  The waver was gone, the insecurity banished.  The tone he gave the word was almost one of condescension.

Everything he’d said from ‘I have doubts’ onward had been solely to bait reactions, to build to that condescension.

“Create a problem,” he said.  “Then solve it.  I’ve done it myself.”

“That’s not what I was doing.”

“No?” he asked.  She could see a flash of anger in his eyes as he swept his monstrous hand out from under the cloak and extended it her way.  It trembled, as if it was a distillation of the anger that was etched into his words and face.   Muscles here and there stood out against the skin of the arm, twitching spasmodically.  “Sylvester’s pain?  That wasn’t what you were doing?  That mention of pain?”

The twitching seemed to intensify with that last word, as if he’d willed it to get worse.

“The dissent against the Crown?  The mention of lost comrades, or the hollow look in your eyes?  These weren’t elements you cobbled together to strike a chord with me and my zealots?”

“No,” Evette said.  She shook her head.  Every time Mauer used that last word, it was all the more damning.  “No, not at all.”

Had he doubted her all along?  Had he saved up the little details and clues that would have sounded so petty on their own had he called her out on them one by one, and built up a case?

This conversation was a mistake.  She wasn’t equipped for this any more than she was equipped to out-politic the Infante.

“Whatever you might be plotting, I’ll have no part of it.  I won’t put myself or my people in harm’s way at your suggestion.”

“That’s not-”

“Sylvester,” Mauer said, with gravity.

Evette stopped.

“I have complete and utter confidence in the path we are taking.  But as I said, we are far from being allies, Sylvester, and everything I know about you, from our first meeting to Genevieve Fray’s fondness for you, it tells me you’re too dangerous to leave alive.”

He reached into his coat.  Evette startled at that, immediately rising to her feet, turning, with the aim of putting the armchair between herself and Mauer.

A knife, not a gun.  Mauer’s foot went out, a leather shoe and one leg barring her way, so that she ran into his leg instead of escaping.

With his overlarge hand, he grabbed her, and he pinned her against the seat of the chair, in a way that had her lying sideways across it.

“Wait,” she said.  “Wait wait.”

He drew the blade of the knife across her throat.  Her eyes went wide at the initial leap of blood that appeared before her eyes.

She hadn’t even had a plan for what to say.

What could she say?

If not the Infante, then-

“Island,” she said, voice a squeak.

He moved his overlarge hand and embedded the knife in her chest.  The blow wasn’t remarkable on its own, but it felt like he’d used the giant hand to deliver it.  All of the wind went out of her.  Her heart strained to beat and failed the attempt.  It failed the next, and then the next.

With every failure to beat, more and more strength fled her.  The amount of strength that seemed to pour out of her was surprising.

“Gomer’s,” she managed, with a last gasp.

But Gomer’s Island didn’t mean anything unto itself.  That meant nothing to Mauer.  It gave him no reason to spare her.

Missing children,” she said.

Too late, she realized that she hadn’t actually said anything at all.  Her lips had moved, but there had been no sound.

A part of her reached out, emotionally, hoped, prayed, for Mauer to understand.  It had nothing to do with sparing herself, finding a reason to make Mauer want to keep her alive.  She simply wanted answers.  She wanted Mauer’s curiosity to be piqued.

Maybe he would choose Gomer’s Island for a place to hide out for the next stretch, and maybe, one shot in a million, he might find out something about the missing children.

Perhaps there would be resolution there, and the children would be okay.

That part of her wasn’t Evette.  It wasn’t a bundled together mass of the behaviors and reckless thinking, nor any representation or fallout of the countless sessions of agony and disorientation that Sylvester had endured to gain what Wyvern had offered him.

Hello, Sylvester, Evette thought.  Nice of you to join us.

Us.

Lambs, catch me.

“Put the book down for one damn minute, Jamie,” Sylvester said.

He had to dodge around the littler members of Lambsbridge, who were playing a violent variant on the game of tag, in order to reach the base of the tree, where Jamie sat.  The rain was lighter today, but Jamie still needed the dense leaves of the tree to protect his book from the water.

“Important bit,” a twelve year old Jamie said, scribbling something down, tongue sticking out between his lips.  “Gimme a minute.”

On the other side of the yard, Gordon roared as he lifted one of the smaller children over his head.

Mary, still reticent, not wholly used to the group, hung back, at the furthest end of the yard.  Her hands were clasped in front of her.  As a indicator of how nervous and out of her element she might have felt, the hands were minor at best.  The fact that she kept looking at Sylvester for reassurance was more telling.

Sylvester met her eyes and smiled.  She smiled back, and unclasped her hands.

Lillian was beside her.  Chattering madly about something.

Sylvester turned his attention to Jamie, and plucked the book out of Jamie’s hands mid-word.  The pen scratched against the paper in the process, no doubt drawing a long line down the page.

“Give that back,” Jamie said.

“I want to see what you’re saying,” Sylvester said.

Jamie stood, reaching for the book.  Sylvester blocked Jamie with his body, putting the book as far away as possible.

“Don’t be a dick, Sylvester,” Gordon lectured him.

Some of the other children picked up the cry  of, “don’t be a dick!”  It became a chant.

“I’m not being a dick!” Sylvester protested.  He mashed a hand into Jamie’s face, very intentionally making Jamie’s glasses sit ajar and smudging them, in an effort to keep the book away.

Helen, who had been braiding one of the older girls’ hair on the back steps of the house, handed over her work in progress to another one of the girls, stood, and carefully dusted herself off before stalking in the direction of the two boys.

“Drat and dang it,” Sylvester said, on seeing the approach.

“Whatever she does to you, you deserve it,” Jamie said.  He jabbed Sylvester in the kidney.

Sylvester, in turn, got Jamie into a headlock.  He did his best to unseat Jamie’s glasses, which forced Jamie to have to catch the glasses and use up one hand.

Jamie, with glasses and pen in the same hand, lightly stabbed Sylvester.

“Ow!  Uncalled for!”

“Called for,” Gordon judged.

“You can shut up, oaf!” Sylvester declared.

Oaf?”

Jamie hooked one leg around his, and the two of them tumbled to the ground.  With that done, Jamie tried to mash Sylvester’s face into the grass.

Extending one leg out, Sylvester found the ink pot Jamie had been dipping into.  In the midst of the struggle, face being ground into dirt, Sylvester caught the pot between two feet, and jerked it up and in Jamie’s direction.

Jamie froze, releasing Sylvester.

The ink had splattered all over Jamie’s back, the back of his head, and one shoulder.  Some had gotten on Sylvester’s clothes, but he’d gotten Jamie far, far worse.

Jamie’s jaw had dropped open.

Sylvester let a grin spread across his face.

Moving slowly, so as not to disturb the still image, he reached up and over, touching the ink at Jamie’s shoulder.

So lightly it was little more than a tap, he planted an inky handprint on Jamie’s cheek.

“What is wrong with you, you little goblin?” Lillian asked, horrified.

“Poor Jamie!” Helen protested.  “Sweet Jamie!”

The children took up the cry, much as they’d taken up the call of ‘don’t be a dick’.

Sylvester could see Mary’s expression, the awe and the horror and the confusion.

Gordon stood off to the side with one hand at his mouth, hiding the smirk.

“I won,” Sylvester said.  “You always tell me I never ever won a fight, but this is a win!  This has to be a win, that was perfect!”

Jamie hit him in the ribs, adjusting position to better pin him down, and hit him again, harder.

“I won!” Sy protested.  “Tell them, Gordon!”

Jamie pressed the heel of his hand into Sylvester’s face.

“Tell them!”

“You lost,” Gordon intoned.

“No!  No I didn’t!”

“You lost because you were a jerk to your best friend-”

“He can take it!”

“-and because you’re getting your tiny ass beat right now.”

“No!  I delivered the finishing blow!”  Sy protested, in futility.  “It was glorious.  You all saw it!”

Lillian cut in, “You’re the worst, Sylvester.”

“I’m the worst and I won!”

Jamie shoved dirt and grass at Sy’s lips.  Some slipped through, despite Sylvester’s attempts at keeping his mouth sealed shut.

Sylvester caught a glimpse of Jamie’s face and he saw the smile.

Spitting, twisting his head away, Sylvester said, “Jamie!”

“What?”

“Very sorry, good sir!”

“You should be.”

“Very sorry.  I was wonder- pff!  I was wondering if you might allow me to borrow your journal.”

“After that display?”

“Yes, kind sir.  If it would be no trouble.  You looked so happy while writing, and I was yearning, absolutely, positively yearning to know why.”

Jamie finally relented.  Sy lay on the ground, panting, while Jamie remained where he was.

Sy looked at the others.  Helen had stopped a short distance away, and was trying to ease the worries of one of the youngest children that were somehow able to see past her mask, talking about simple things, while keeping only half an eye on Sylvester and Jamie.

Gordon was talking to Mary, with Lillian close by, listening.  He held a mallet that was part of one of the lawn games in one hand.  It was very likely he was talking about the group dynamic.

But, in the midst of that, almost absentmindedly, Gordon flipped the mallet into the air, so it spun end over end three times, before catching it by the handle again.

In that show-offy little action, Gordon did far more to ease Mary’s worries about not fitting in than any number of words he might have offered.  It showed crystal clear in her expression and body language.

Gordon had won her over, just like that.  But that was the sort of thing he did, with no apparent effort.

Jamie interrupted the observations by dropping the heavy journal on the side of Sylvester’s head.

“Ow.  You sadist.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to call anyone a sadist, Sy.  Ever.  It’s just not allowed.  You’ve got that market locked up tight.”

“As if I’m worse than some of the nobles or back alley lunatic doctors out there.”

“You’re worse than all of the nobles put together,” Jamie said, climbing off of Sylvester.  “Because at least they look pretty while they do horrible things to undeserving people.  And you’re worse than the doctors, because at least they have talent.”

Sy gasped, melodramatic.

“Shut up and read while I figure out if this ink will rub off.  You’re an absolute ass, for the record.”

Sy happily sat up, scooted over to sit with his back to the stone wall that surrounded the yard, and placed the book across his lap.

He paged through it, looking at the illustrations and the key words.  Jamie was only a third of the way through this one.  It started with the Snake Charmer, and moved on to the Bad Seeds.  Then there was Mauer, their first mission with Mary…

And finally, a page with a line running down a third of it.  On that page, sketched out in thin black lines with lots of hash marks, there was a depiction of the scene in the yard.  Mary standing in the corner, hesitant, Lillian chattering at her, Helen braiding Frances’ hair, and Gordon playing with the kids.  Sylvester had a spot of his own, hanging from a branch, observing it all.

He read the words.

“Mary looks very tidy and fashionable, with lace at the edges of her clothes.  I wish I could draw well enough to represent it, but words will have to do,” Sylvester said.

“She does.”

“You don’t call a girl tidy, Jamie.  You call someone tidy if you’re trying to be polite about the fact that they’re not very pretty.”

“Do you?  Huh.”

“May I make edits?” Sylvester asked.

“I don’t see why not.  You already added a long line down the page, and more ink to my clothes.”

“Scratching out ‘very tidy’, and adding ‘rather pretty’.”

“I’m fairly certain she heard that, Sy,” Jamie said, his voice quiet.  “She jumped as if you’d pricked her.”

In an equally quiet voice, Sylvester added, “What a darn shame.  Good thing it’s the truth.  Helen is all charms, no argument there.”

He looked up at Helen, who had returned to braiding.  She was some distance away, but she still looked up and winked.  Sylvester grinned at her.

“And Lillian?” Jamie asked.

“Lillian… is doing a very serviceable job of entertaining our newest member.  She’s not a complete disappointment.”

“Don’t you dare put that in the book,” Jamie said.  “That’s not right at all.”

“Fine.”

“If you’re actually sorry at all for getting ink on me, I want you to come up with something genuinely nice to say about her.”

“What?  That’s unreasonable and over the top, compared…”

Jamie stared him down.

“To…”

Jamie continued to stare.

“Fine.  Fine.  Lillian… makes a fine pair together with Mary.  Her school uniform fits her as well as the lace does Mary, with sharp looks to match her talents as a student and medic.”

“That was… better than expected.”

“Thank you.”

“And she glanced our way as you said that.”

“Dang it.  She heard?”

“She heard.”

“Dang it.  Too late to redact?”

“Too late.”

Sylvester dutifully wrote down the bits.  “Only thing I want to add about Gordon is that he was smirking after I got you with the ink.”

“I’ll figure out where to work that in.  But don’t get things out of order.”

“Alright,” Sylvester said.  He looked over the book one more time, then handed it back.

“Thank you,” Jamie said.

Sylvester bowed.

“Don’t act like it was a great service you did me,” Jamie said.  “I’m still miffed.  And Ms. Earles is going to be too, when I go to scrub down and I turn the bathtub black.”

“Why?” Sylvester asked.

“Hm?”

“Why this scene?  You said it was an important bit.”

“It’s a good day,” Jamie said.  He found his seat again at the base of the tree, and carefully righted the ink pot, moving it aside.  “It’s worth remembering.”

“Hm,” Sylvester made a sound.

He looked at Lillian and Mary.

For the past little while, Mary had shown signs of insecurity that would fade only for a few moments, when he gave her close attention.  A glance, close proximity.  But that knot was unwinding.  She was embroiled in a three way conversation with Gordon and Lillian, and there were only faint signs of discomfort.

She would work out.  She wasn’t close to Helen in the here and now, but she slept in Helen’s room.  It would work out.

He felt a pang of fondness, looking at them as a group.

Even Lillian.  A little.  Ugh.

“Jamie?”

“Oh my lords,” Jamie said, without looking up from his book.  “You’re going to pester me all day, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Are you going to add the scene with the scrap between you and me?  With the ink?  Is that part of the good day?”

“Of course,” Jamie said.

Sylvester smiled.

“You dick.”

It was less a gasp and a lurch to step back from the darkness, and more an immense pressure, a terrible resistance, and finally pushing past a barrier, to stagger exhausted to the other side.

“There we go,” Mauer said, his voice soft.  “Gomorrah?”

Evette shook her head, opening her mouth to ask a question, and found she didn’t have the strength.

Her vision was blurry.  She could see the equipment that was strung into and out of her chest.  Sylvester’s chest.  Two of Mauer’s doctors were working on the damage.

Fought our way back.  There we go.

She felt profoundly lonely.  Sylvester was somewhere in there, but he wasn’t showing himself, and the Lambs, spectre or no, weren’t there.

“Gomer’s island,” Mauer tried.  “Also known as Gomorrah.  You mouthed two words, and it looked like missing children.”

He lipreads.

She nodded.

“I do believe I know what you’re referring to,” Mauer said.  “We’ll talk when you’re strong enough to speak.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.10 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Why me?” Mary asked.

Evette lay on the bed, working hard to breathe.  Her vision had cleared up from what it had been, but that only let her see just how extensive the damage was.  In the gloom, tubes ran in and out of Sylvester’s chest, leading to an external heart that lay on the table, pumping its mechanical rhythm.  The heart was flesh and bone, the bone shell encapsulating the upper left quarter and the bottom right.  With every beat, the corners of the two quarters clicked together faintly.

Two men were in the room, a rebellion doctor that stood by the window, smoking, and a soldier who had positioned himself by the door, so he could read by the shaft of light that came in through the crack in the door.

“You’re working on making us available to you again,” Mary said.

“Yes,” Evette murmured.

“You could have picked anyone else for this.  But you picked me.”

“The mission comes first,” Evette said.  “And you won’t lose track of that.”

Mary, faceless and distorted around the edges, standing in the dark, turned her head, taking in the room.

“Right?” Evette prompted Mary.

“Yes.”

Mary seemed angry, but Evette wasn’t willing to push it or wonder why.

Better to muster her forces.  Hours were passing, she was supposed to be checking in to rescue Shirley, and instead she was lying in a bed in a dark room with rain pattering against the window.  Men’s voices in other rooms suggested an ongoing discussion between Mauer and his men.  She couldn’t make out the words, or really distinguish Mauer’s voice from the others, but one speaker’s voice definitely set the pace for the others.  There were longer pauses following it as others considered their words, and nobody interrupted or jumped in to add their thoughts to the tail end of any statements.

As discussions went, it was serious and methodical.

Mary spoke, looking in the general direction of the group of men in the other room, “Mauer isn’t cooperating.  I’m not sure there is a mission at this point.”

Evette looked at the shadowy lump that was the mechanical heart.  It didn’t keep as steady a rhythm as she would have liked, and it made her feel particularly out of sorts as she felt her pulse maintain a different course than her thoughts and feelings did.

“All part of the plan,” she murmured.

“No it isn’t,” Mary said.

“Don’t be that way, hon.  You and I, we can learn to dance,” Evette said.  “We could have gotten along.”

“There’s something Sylvester and I share in common,” Mary said.

“Yeah.  Fine.  I get it.”

“If you’d existed, Sylvester wouldn’t have.  I wouldn’t have.”

I get it.  Lordsy.  So you’re keeping me at arm’s length.  Fine.”

“And I’m not going to let you pretend.  No lies.  No disruption.  If we do this, we’re going to do it right.  I can stand separate and do that because there was never going to be a Mary and Evette.  Gordon and Evette?  Yes.  Helen and Evette?  To be sure.  But our stories never converged.  I was a bad seed and you were the problem solver.  At best, you would have killed me.”

“No lies, no disruption.  I can try that.”

“Shirley is a priority.”

“Not that I’m arguing, but I didn’t expect that from you.  You’re not exactly the warmest or softest.”

“I have my weak points.”

“Lillian.  But Lillian isn’t here, nor is she even liable to find out.  I can’t imagine that you’re representative of any part of Sylvester that’s compassionate.  Not given who you are, where you come from, and how you operate.”

“No,” Mary said.  “But we made a promise.  We hold to that.  Sylvester did when he promised Lillian and Emily that he would kill the Baron.”

“And you’re that?” Evette asked.  “That drive?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.  “I don’t think it’s that cut and dry.  But maybe a part of me doesn’t want to be used by someone I can’t respect.”

“Percy?  No, this is his thought process too.  Him and the Academy.  You represent that too, even going back to the night he shot you in the knee.  I knew my instincts were good when I turned to you.  You won’t let us take any garbage from Mauer, either.  You don’t like being manipulated.”

“We don’t mind being manipulated if it’s someone we respect,” Mary said.

Evette cocked her head to one side.  That line bore some thought.  It was true, in a way, but at this stage, there was nobody they respected and trusted enough.  Could there ever be?  Was it part of why they didn’t want to get involved with Fray?

Did it color their interaction with Mauer?

Looking across the room, she saw the soldier with the book wasn’t reading, but was staring at her.  Was it her little head movement that had drawn his attention?

Mauer’s men were good at what they did.  Alert and effective.

He lowered his lead, facing his book, but she was pretty sure that, in the gloom, he wasn’t taking his eyes off her.  Still watching.

“We’ll need help,” Mary said.  “Work on bringing back the others.”

“Not like I can do anything else,” Evette muttered.

Helen first.  Helen was safe, predictable as an element.  Stable, and relatively unchanging over time.  Her act had become more refined, less like a mask she wore, but the monster beneath the skin was more or less the same.

That monster was angrier now, bloodier, more dangerous.  But more or less the same.  The same measures worked for winning her favor and for staying out of her clutches in the here and now as the measures and safety protocols of four or five years ago.

Jamie was next.  Jamie the younger, the one she’d seen as she had blacked out.  One of the few old memories that Sylvester held onto with any ferocity or clarity.

She was working on Gordon when the door opened.

Mauer stood there.  Two piping hot mugs of tea were in the palm of his oversized hand, which he held with his other hand to keep steady.

“You’re awake,” he observed, as he crossed the room.

“Yes,” she said.

“He’s been awake for some time,” the doctor said.  “He’s been talking to himself under his breath.  Incessantly.”

“Fever?  Infection?”

“No, and no.  Nothing physiological, I don’t think.”

Psychological.

Evette raised her head up to look at Mauer as he came to stand beside her bed.  He took care in lowering a mug of tea to the bedside table, just beside the artificial heart, before lifting the other with his good hand.

“If you would, Mackenzie, would you help him sit up?  I don’t want to speak to someone that’s lying down.”

Silent, the soldier by the door rose to his feet, put his book down, and walked around to the other side of the bed.  He put one arm under each of her armpits and raised her up, propping up pillows behind her.

“Thank you,” Mauer said.  “I’d like to speak to him alone, now.”

“Shall I guard the door?” Mackenzie asked.

“You can.  You can listen in and interrupt if you think I’m in danger.  But give us the illusion of privacy in the meantime,” Mauer said.

The soldier gave him one short nod, then left the room, closing the door behind him.

Evette reached out for the mug, but the handle was too hot to hold.  Mauer had held the cups in the one hand?  Was it supposed to be a show of strength, or did he just not care?

“You know what I’m going to ask,” Mauer said.  “You’ve been talking to yourself, so I would think long and hard before happening to lose your voice now.  I’ll end you if you try to be clever.”

Evette nodded.

“Speak,” Mauer ordered.

“I left West Corinth because I broke from the Lambs.  I came here because one of them, a new Lamb, he’d been taken as a child, and unlike many others, unlike…”

She hesitated.  Would it be see as a trick to imply she wasn’t Sylvester?

“…Me,” she decided, “he remembered details.  He was taken and he remembered what people said.  And what they said was that the children went to Gomer’s Island.  A number of them.  To something called the Block.”

Mauer nodded.

“Strip away everything else I am, everything I’ve been cultivated to be, everything I want to be, and I’m always going to look out for the children.  I’m always going to protect them, and shelter them.  I tried to set something up in West Corinth…”

The ‘I’ here was Sylvester.  Evette wasn’t so invested in it.  It made her sound, she realized, very insincere.

“I hope it works,” she said, without passion.  Maybe the fact she was relying on an artificial heart to live would explain it.

“If you’re trying to distract me-”

“No!” Evette interrupted.  Then, thinking about her position, she softened her voice.  “No.  It’s just, it was my motivation for coming here.  I was intercepted by the nobles.  Brought before the Infante.  Then things spun out.”

“I almost believe you,” Mauer said.  He lifted the tea to his mouth to drink, swallowed as a kind of punctuation, then added, “Almost.”

She reached for the mug at the bedside table.  Still too hot to touch.

“What else do you know?” Mauer asked.

“Not much at all.  It was a lead, a starting point.  I wanted to get away, to focus on something else.  In the last moments, when I thought you finished me for good, I wanted to… to communicate it.  To not let that thread go untied.”

Mauer walked around the bed, over to the window.  With the lights on inside, it would have been hard to make out the world beyond the thick, rain-streaked glass.  He stared out at the dark city, drinking his tea.

He was taking his time to answer.

“You know something about it,” she said.

Mary, Helen, and Jamie all watched the man with keen interest.

“I chased down that thread,” Mauer said.  “That winding road was what led to me meeting with Genevieve Fray in the first place.  Not so long after the mass sterilization and the chemical leash was inflicted on the public.  We found two parts of the same lead and followed it.  Oddly enough, it started with you.

“Me?” Evette asked.

“The Lambs.  You uncovered Percy’s plot to seed the upper class with sleeper agents, children who would be programmed to kill their parents, he fell into Cynthia’s clutches.  Percy found me.  Genevieve found Cynthia.”

Evette nodded.

“From there, we started discussing ideas and priorities.  It eventually led to the meeting at Brechwell.  The one you joined.”

Evette didn’t interject.  She wondered if her selection of Mary had had some prey instinct feeding into it too.  Some subconscious connections pointing to Percy being relevant, and thus Mary being key.

Mauer turned around.  He leaned against the thickest branch that supported the window, and sipped at his tea.

“You appear slated to walk this path, Sylvester Lambsbridge,” Mauer said.  “Every time the topic is raised, you appear as part of the greater picture.”

“Maybe,” Evette said.  She picked up her tea, avoiding the tubes and the beating heart, shifted position, and sipped at it.

“Maybe,” Mauer agreed.

They drank their tea, each thinking about what to say next.  Mauer seemed very relaxed, not inclined to be aggressive or counterattack.  It made her uneasy, because he had seemed agreeable before, before he had turned on her.

Maybe he knew that.

Outside, something screeched.  The screech took on a different sound as the source drew near, moving very quickly, before it flew past the window, making the entire building shudder fractionally.  The screech took on a different tone as the creature started moving away rather than moving closer.

“A small war started somewhere in this country,” Mauer observed, glancing at the window.  “Hundreds or thousands will die because of it.  People will lose loved ones.  The Crown will, if they don’t win outright, at least take an eye for an eye.”

“But you intend to fight that war?  You sacrificed soldiers to kill nobles.”

Mauer drew in a deep breath.  “You’re right.  It seems to be an undeniable reality.  They can never lose.  I thought, if they would kill one of ours for every one of theirs we killed, we could at least ensure we killed their best.  My comrades and soldiers are prepared to fight on that sort of battlefield, with those sorts of rules.  But when it came to Fray, I saw her maneuver against the Academy as a net victory for her.  Do you understand?  I thought perhaps we had a way of hurting them more than they hurt us.  She and I thought that Gomer’s Island was one of the best ways to achieve that.”

“What is it that makes the island special?” Evette asked.

“Imagine that New Amsterdam encapsulates the whole of the Crown States, if you will.  Imagine that it is representative of everything from west coast to east, arctic circle to the southern border.”

“I can do that,” Evette said.  She held her tea in both hands now.

“Gomer’s Island is the rebellion, in the midst of that expanse.  Small, isolated, an ongoing rebuke.  A condensation of the Lughs and Wickerhills, the Sudburys and the Lonshires, a place where the stubborn, the pious, and the recalcitrant reside.  A pocket of resistance.  It has taken many forms over the years, but the name should tell you what it is.  Gomorrah.  It is a heretical place.”

“I don’t understand.”

“New Amsterdam is a contradiction.  It paints itself as one thing while giving evidence to another.  In religion in particular, in a city where the Crown should have more control than anywhere else, it has the most faithful.  Gomorrah is where the faith is so often centered.  They name themselves as a place of sin and wrongness as an ongoing rebuke to the Crown and the Academies.”

“And the Crown allows it?”

“The Crown fosters it.  Gomorrah is a feast laid out for the faithful, with poisoned dishes scattered across the table.  For the starved, and the people are starved, it’s impossible to ignore.  But partaking leaves one vulnerable.”

“And the missing children find their way there?”

“Found.  Genevieve and I followed the thread to its conclusion years ago, and it was a trail that ended in Gomorrah.  I still keep an eye out for any clues that might allow us to pick it up again, any detail we might chase down.  I still hold hope that we could find another way to attack the Crown.”

“There are the children, too,” Evette said.  “The ones that are being preyed on.  That’s more important than finding a way to hurt the Crown.”

“There will be children who suffer for as long as the Crown lives and the workings of the Academies march forward.”

“There will always be a Crown and always be an Academy,” Evette said.

“And we have a circular argument,” Mauer said.  “One I’ve had with myself.  Give me a choice of saving children and hurting the Crown or the Academy, and I’ll choose the latter.  Their abuses and wrongs will cause more harm in the long run.”

There was a bitter, angry note to his voice.

He sounded spent.

Powerful, dangerous, but there was a faint ragged edge to the tail end of his words that suggested he’d talked himself raw over the past day.

“I don’t think I can agree,” Evette said.  She started to speak, then stopped herself.  She had to weigh her words before speaking again.  “Jamie and I spent the winter and some of the spring in Tynewear.”

“Jamie.  He died of plague, according to my intel.”

Evette nodded.

“My condolences.”

She smiled sadly.  The condolences stung, given how Sylvester might well have lost Jamie forever, given how things stood.  He had lost the Lambs.

“We spent our time plotting how best to hurt the Crown.  We weighed plans of attack, and decided our priorities.  Given the choice, I think Sylvester would choose to spare children before he chose to hurt the Crown and Academy.”

“You referred to yourself in the third person again.”

She closed her eyes, cursing to herself.

“Go on,” Mauer said, glossing over the misstep.

“You spared us because you thought we might give you that lead.  We haven’t.”

“You haven’t.”

“You haven’t stayed here, dug, searched, or targeted people.  You haven’t gone door to door, searching for answers.  You said it yourself.  You wrapped up things in pursuing this, and then you went to Brechwell.”

“Nothing so tidy as that, but yes,” Mauer said.

“If it’s so important, then why didn’t you keep looking?”

Mauer didn’t volunteer an answer.

“Or did you make the choice?  Leave that behind, wage your war, eye for an eye, breed your primordials, and start targeting nobles with those guns of yours?”

Mauer tippd his teacup back.  He didn’t stare at Evette, or at anything in particular.  His gaze fixated a distant point.

“Because-” Evette said, before stopping herself.  A doubt in the back of her mind told her to stop talking.  It was a hard voice to listen to.  The phantoms around her weren’t strong enough or complete enough to jump into the discussion and make her stop, either.  “Because those guns, right now, they aren’t helping you much, in the grand scheme of it all.  This is their battlefield.  The costs you’re paying are too great.  They adapt to any challenge they’re faced with.”

She expected him to argue.  To tell her something about how he could adapt too, or about the choice he’d made and the rationale for it.  He was a clever enough man to come up with good reasons, and he was talented enough to frame them in a clever argument.

Instead, however, he simply said, “I can show you.”

Mauer hadn’t joined her in this particular carriage.  The beasts that pulled the carriages were unrecognizable, reminiscent of the primordials, but stable, unchanging.  Simply ugly, irregular, vat-grown life, with the strength of ten mules and mass enough to bully their way through the streets.  Not that Mauer or his people had them do so.  The drive was quiet, dark and placid, navigating a loose tide of carriages, carts, wagons and the rare automobile.

They moved onto a bridge.  The water over the side of the bridge was only darkness, the sky’s canopy obscured by stars.  It was a bridge lit by lamps that were positioned such that they weren’t reflected in the water.  A glowing structure that seemed to cross nothing but void.

Something about the mood changed as they entered another part of the city.

People were outdoors, in the rain, gathered in groups.  The number of Academy-created monsters increased dramatically from the already dramatic totals in New Amsterdam proper, with seemingly no group going unescorted.

Familiar, that.

There were more churches here.  More religious symbols.  On the rarer occasions where a carriage or cart with a lamp mounted on it passed close to a wall, Evette could see the graffiti, and much of it was religious.

A bastion of faith in the heart of the Crown States, but it was an insecure faith.  Mauer had elaborated on it some as they had made their way down the stairs to the carriages, but had refused to provide information or influence her expectations about what was to be found there.

According to Mauer, this area was littered with hidden traps.  Academy agents posed as the faithful and found their way into groups.  There were entire groups that were Academy sponsored, that invited people in, catered to them for months and years, building trust enough to draw in others, before collapsing in on them.  The people were killed or happened to disappear.

The wider streets were brightly lit, with stores and buildings on each side, with one in five being a church.  But their destination was not on a wider street.  They went somewhere where there were few lights at all, where the streets were narrow, and where parked carriages and garbage here and there made them even harder to navigate.

Their destination was a proud looking building, with pillars and broad steps, windows that nearly reached from the floors to the ceilings, and five stories of height.  The carriage stopped.  Evette climbed out, and Mauer climbed out of a second carriage, which had been following.

There were no lights on, so they took the lanterns from the carriages and brought them with them.  Evette walked beside Mauer, the tubing and artificial heart slung over one shoulder and packed into a bookbag she wore.

Mauer’s men opened the front doors, which were unlocked.  They entered the hall proper.

A library without books.

Evette looked around, noting the dust.  It was thick, and none of the weather that had blown in through the cracks in the glass had really disturbed it, except for one hallway that had patterns like sand dunes forming in the stuff.

The shelves formed something of a maze.

“Almost weeks before we arrived, there was an event,” Mauer explained.  “A great many figures were in attendance.  If you saw the Infante and his doctors, and all the other doctors that spend time in his proximity, then you would know what they were like.  Scholarly men and women in their finest dress, many wearing stylized lab coats.  They came here.  Men and women brought trays of food and alcohol.”

Evette looked at the rows an columns of shelving, and the shelves that lay against the wall, to either side of the windows.

“Later in the evening,” Mauer said.  He reached a set of bookshelves that rested against the wall, found a catch, and then hauled on one shelf with his oversized arm, before switching to his good arm to haul on the next shelf.  They swung away, hinges screaming their rusty cries.  “The doors would open.  The partygoers would make their way to the Block.”

The Block was downstairs.  The set of stairs leading down was wider than any of the hallways at Lambsbridge orphanage had been long, leading into a basement.

Evette saw the first of the corpses, lit by the lantern.

She saw the next, all tangled together, arms and ribs interlocking, making it impossible to see where one of the skeletal remains ended and the next began.  Not because they were modified.  No, they had simply been embracing as they’d died, huddled together.  The bodies had collapsed into each other.

Behind Mauer and Evette, Mauer’s men ignited lanterns and lit candles.  Slowly, the area grew lighter.  Slowly, Evette, being sure to keep the light behind her, was able to make out the details.

Bodies littered the area.

Mauer was a man of words, very effective words, but he’d been unable to convey this scene.  It was something he’d needed to show, not tell.

The corpses had dessicated, or been devoured by bugs and by vermin.  There were so many, dropped where they’d stood, crumpled on the floor in awkward positions.

“The Block, based on what I was able to find out,” Mauer said, “Was an event held at this location once every two weeks.  We counted the bodies of at least eighty children and twenty grown adults here.  Our doctors tested the remains and it suggested they were all drugged to be complacent.  One by one, they would have their numbers and ratios rattled off, along with grades for psychology, wellness, nutrition, and more.”

We came from a place like this.  Sylvester did.  Jamie did.

“After each one had their numbers read out, the bidding would start.  They would be dragged away, very frequently to be experimented on.  Modified.  Quotas for the best, the healthiest, the brightest, all were demanded and met.  Money changed hands, and that money went to the Academies and the Crown, with a share going to procurers.  An endless supply of test subjects, fed through this engine.”

Evette looked around.  She could see the bodies, and she could easily imagine it was a hundred.

She could imagine it was more.

“You’re clever enough that I’m sure you can figure out what Genevieve and I figured out,” Mauer said.

The count was wrong, her gut told her.  Then, as she looked at some of the bodies, she realized that there were piles that were misleading.  A pile of two adults could easily look like three children.

But she saw the black fabric of a lab coat, and she moved it, looking closer at the long-decayed corpse, all bone and dried-on tatters of flesh that the mice and rats hadn’t elected to eat.

Academy people had died too?

She looked around at the bodies, and she realized what had unfolded.

“They killed them all,” she said.  “All of the children.  All of the adults.  And then they killed themselves?”

“Yes,” Mauer said.  “The bodies were still cooling when we made our way down here.”

She could look at Mauer, and because he wasn’t trying to hide it, because the pieces were all there, and because he’d hinted at it, she could see how it all came together.

“They killed all of these people, then themselves, all because you came looking?  Burning bridges before you could cross them?”

Yes,” Mauer said, sounding very tired again, even as he tried to put a kind of emphasis on that.

It was, in a word, the end of the story Mauer had been trying to tell her.  The final stroke of the picture he’d painted before her.

“No leads?  No clues?”

“Some,” Mauer said.  “We chased down what we could.  There were two, with one we intended to hold in reserve.”

“In reserve?  Then this trail isn’t cold.”

“It’s very cold, as trails go.” Mauer said.  “There were two people who knew the full story about how this worked, and just why they had a protocol like this in place.  One of the two people was the Duke of Francis.  I put a bullet in him, destroying his brain.  Word from within the Infante’s castle is that he drools and doesn’t eat unless a tube is pushed into his throat.”

“Leaving one person,” Evette concluded.  Her mind caught up, drawing connections.  Whisperings of the word ‘Noble’ found their way from Jamie’s mouth to her ear.  “Oh.”

“The Baron Richmond,” Mauer said.  He knelt, his hands moving in a gesture of supplication before he touched a child’s skull, one that had been picked clean by vermin.  He took a moment, praying silently, then stood.  “You utterly destroyed the man, and with that, you left Genevieve and I with no people to chase, and no people to interrogate.  I’d happily spared him in hopes of getting answers at a later date.  Not so.  I thought I had time to apply pressure on him.”

“Not so,” Evette echoed Mauer.  She felt a damaged, non-functional, broken heart plummet into her stomach.  The false heart in her bag continued to pump away.

Evette looked at Mary, who stared down at the bodies.

“Percy led you here.  He bought from this place, once.”

“He had a friend from the days he attended Radham, who gave him access.  It was a way for him to get the funds he needed to maintain his enterprise.  Given the chance, Genevieve hoped to slip into their ranks and observe things herself.  We never got that far.”

“Sylvester asked the Baron, once, about what happened to the children,” Evette said.

“Did he?  What did the Baron say?”

“The Baron laughed, and took this to his grave.  I think he liked the idea we’d find our way here, and we’d stumble on this scene, or one like it.  Maybe the bodies would still be warm.”

Mauer was only half listening.  One of his men had approached, and now whispered in his ear.

“I have to go,” he said.

Evette nodded.

“It would be hypocritical to blame you for your part in this when I had the other lead killed.  I believe you when you say you want to solve this particular riddle.  My only concern is that you will get in my way.  Swear to me that you won’t, and I’ll leave you here, to make your way.”

Evette couldn’t swear it.  Not without consideration.

She looked down at the sea of bodies, dropped where they stood.

“I want you to comb this place for evidence.  I want you to find what you can, Sylvester.  To share the information, or even covet it for yourself.  Search out answers elsewhere.  Whoever bought from this place years ago has found a new place to go for the purchase of test subjects.  I want you to find them, if you can.  You could do it with my blessing.  I want to let you.  But I need you to promise you won’t get in my way.”

She was being asked to make the choice.

She nodded.  “I won’t.”

“I wish you the best of luck, then.”

She remained in the graveyard, watching as Mauer and his men made their way up the steps to the library.  In a minute, they would be getting into their carriages, riding off to fight the next battle in an unwinnable war.

Evette spoke to her phantoms.  “Two different people were able to find this place, but something was important enough to keep under wraps that they had loyal Academy people kill themselves.”

“It doesn’t add up,” Jamie said.

Evette shook her head.

She moved her hand from behind her back.  Her fingers were crossed.  She uncrossed them.

She looked at each of her phantoms in turn.  She stopped by meeting Mary’s eyes.

“You don’t intend to keep your promise of leaving him alone,” Mary said.

“Not at all,” Evette said.  “Does that bother you?  I know promises are important to you.”

“Promises from the heart are important to me,” Mary said.

Evette nodded.  “Let’s go save Shirley, then.  And see if we can’t get my actual heart working again, without them asking too many questions.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.11 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We have nothing left to lose.

We always knew this time would come.

Wyvern takes a hold in the mind.  It leaves behind residue.  It collects in the body, stunting growth, taking resources away from other things, as the body heals, sequesters the toxins, and filters them.

Things are steadily lost and worn down.  With effort, with concentration, and with mindfulness, there’s a way to recover, to keep up.  Rebuild as things fall, with time and effort.  Keep the memories, the faces, the skills, the overall construction.  Practice, repetition, and care make much of it routine.

But the fact was that it was hard to rebuild faces when Sylvester didn’t want to face those same people.

Now the faces were slipping away, and it was getting harder to rebuild.

It had been in the cards from the beginning.  From the first time he had snuck a glance at his own file, he’d known what was in store for him.  He would be the last to expire, and it wouldn’t be by way of dying.

Sylvester’s memory had always been faulty, but it would get worse.  Accrued detritus would hit a critical mass in some lobe of his brain, and he would lose things.  It would be a steep drop, but it wouldn’t be a swift one.  Very different things.

He had decided, very early on, that he didn’t want his brain to be his undoing.  He’d made something of a decision around the time Mary had joined, and he’d made that a promise to himself at a later point.

It was around then that Sylvester had started to take on a different approach.  He’d always been willing to get hurt in the process of achieving goals, especially when it was something that could be readily mended.  Flesh was cheap, and experienced medical care could be bought in any back alley.  But he’d started to wrap his head around the future, the day his memories and thoughts started slipping.

He’d been eleven, around then.  Though he wasn’t wholly sure of that, anymore.  He’d never known his actual age, and, somewhere along the line, he’d started to realize the impact of Wyvern on his size, and he’d mentally adjusted his age.  He’d drawn comparisons between his behavior and thought processes off of Wyvern with that of other children he’d met, in the mice.

But he’d been in that vicinity.  Eleven.  Twelve.  Maybe thirteen.  Probably not.

Regardless, it was a young age to start thinking about how he was going to die, but he’d decided it would be in a blaze of glory.  Not a slow and lonely brain death.

He had refined a style.  He had made the moments of glory more important.  He had figured out tolerable risks and the ways to do the most damage.

On a level, during his extended winter and spring in Jamie’s company, they had been working on the task.  The blaze and the glory.

“We didn’t expect it to be this soon,” Evette said, to herself.

The borrowed shirt was far too large, and fell down around the knuckles of her hands even with the sleeves rolled up.  The weather was warm, the rain cold, and as the bag that she carried got soaked, she could feel her blood run cold.  Not because of any emotion, but because the external heart itself was getting cooler, because the tubes that ran into her body weren’t warmed by surrounding flesh.  It might have been only the difference of a degree, a degree and a half, but it could be felt in the areas where the tubes entered the body at the collarbone and beneath the ribs, much like how her hands felt cooler than the trunk of her body.

She could have caught or stolen a means of riding back to the Infante’s place, but too many things were about timing right now.  The countdown, Shirley, needing to set things up, needing to prepare herself and to prepare Sylvester…

The moment of glory was at hand.  She wouldn’t try to die, but if it happened, then it wouldn’t surprise her.

This was what she was for.

Helen, Mary, and Jamie had been recalled and were accounted for.  The edges were rough, the details unfinished, the complete pictures warped and tainted by subconscious thought and feeling, but they were there.

If she had another Lamb to

The walk gave her time to piece together others.

Gordon.  She put him together, piece by piece.  Hubris, too, not because he could contribute to any discussion or add anything particular, but for the sentiment.  He’d earned his place.

She had to work harder when it came to Lillian.  What had the others theorized?  That Lillian was Sylvester’s compassion, his ability to care?

Important, when it came to Shirley.  Even if it was only to have her there as a reminder, standing off to one side, her back forever turned.

She worked on the other Jamie, for much the same reason.  Because without him, she didn’t think about the dance, about cooperation.  Without the newer Jamie in his spectral, imagined form, she walked her path alone.

She walked alone regardless, whether she was missing Jamie as the spectre or the real Jamie.  It was only a question of degrees.

She developed Ashton, starting with the thoughts and feelings that went hand in hand with Ashton, the nascent foetus that had grown in the vat-like plant structure.  The rest of him grew and reached forth from that central point.

One by one, she collected each of the other Lambs, who she had known for such brief periods of time.

Then, all of that done in the course of an hour long walk, silent, staring only at the sidewalks and roads in front of her, her mind entirely elsewhere, rainwater soaking through cloth and flesh to the point that it felt like it saturated her bones, she had the Lambs start to talk.

Those things were all there.  The individual things that each of them represented.  They were accessible, even if the faces and fine details weren’t, even if the figures were bent in odd places or tattered or bloody.

Surrounded by her carnival of imagined Lambs, Evette had them babble, talking over one another, no one voice louder than the others.

The same tools were available, simply a little clumsier to access, slower to respond, while needing a little bit more effort before they cooperated or before any one thing could be dwelt on.

Evette let the chatter wash over her.  Her mind wandered, in a sense, but it wandered in a measured way.

“What are our priorities?” Gordon asked.

“Health,” Helen said.  “We’re literally heartbroken.  We need a doctor.”

“There’s no shortage of those in New Amsterdam,” Gordon said.

“We need an effective doctor who can treat us in time for us to get back to Shirley,” Helen said.  “That’s harder.”

“That’s harder,” Gordon said.  “Whatever happens, we’ll be expected to report to the Infante.  Harder still.”

“We can condense it,” the younger of the Jamies said.  “Turn two problems into one.  We go back, and we explain to the Infante…”

Evette navigated the crowd.  There were experiments being led around as pets.  Some were humanoid, others weren’t.  The night life was active, and the fact that she was still young, appearing as a boy no older than fourteen or fifteen, it drew odd looks.  The state of her clothes and the encrusted blood here and there probably didn’t help.

The others were still going on about the way to handle the discussion.  She paid enough attention to pick up the salient points.  As they got closer she would construct it into just enough of a plan that she knew what to do, without overdoing it to the point that she would collapse and go to pieces the moment the Infante did something unexpected.

Because that was a thing he did.

“Ashton?” Mary’s voice had a different tone, enough that it caught Evette’s ear.

Ashton, Lara, Nora, and Mary weren’t part of the ongoing conversation in any capacity.  No, they were focused on something else entirely.

There were any number of explanations as to what was going on there, but Evette had a sense of what it might be.  Detached observations, fear and concern, with an eye on the mission at hand.

She crossed the street at the next opportunity, not actively looking around, but still keeping an eye out with her peripheral vision.

Then, at that same intersection, she took another path to cross the street, still keeping something of an eye out.

“They’re experienced,” Mary said.  “Professional.  Watch the crowd.”

She didn’t watch the crowd, exactly, because looking directly at anyone would tip off the pursuer.  But she did pay attention to the directions they were looking.

The pursuer was positioned in such a way that they could watch, while using the crowd as cover.  But they weren’t invisible, and people glanced at them.

“Is it Mauer’s person, keeping an eye on you?” Lara asked.

“Is it the Infante’s spy, watching to see what we do?” Nora asked.

“Or are they going to hurt us?” Lara asked.

“Or kill us?”

“We’ll take precautions on those last two questions,” Evette said.  She turned away from the little cluster of people, so they weren’t even in her peripheral vision, and changed course.

“What about the first two questions?” Lara and Nora asked.

“I’m thinking on that,” Evette said.

“They weren’t flawless.  They didn’t blend in completely,” Mary said.  “They’d either bumped into someone, were being indiscreet about trying to look for Evette, or they were odd enough to draw the eye.  Possibly an experiment.  It’s possible they’re dangerous.  An assassin instead of a tail.”

The other Lambs commented.  Gordon, Jamie, Helen…

She took in the babble, and she started plotting, reconsidering old ideas, but now using the fact that they were being spied on and followed.

That was something they could use.

“We can make our move,” she said.

She had the attention of the assembled group.

“Let’s go back to our lab.”

There was no more room to stall, not any more.   Evette looked for a taxi carriage and flagged it down.

She had her Lambs, faceless and fading.

She had the means to lead some of her enemies around.

She only needed the tools to put everything to rest.

Evette climbed out of the cab.

“Hey!” the driver called out.  “You little bastard!”

Evette kept moving, turning to look at one of the guards near the entrance.  The man put a rifle out, blocking her path.

“I’m working for the Infante,” she said.  She glanced back at the cab driver.  “Pay the man.”

He didn’t move the rifle, but he didn’t stop her from moving it either.  She moved past the barrel, pushing it slightly out of the way, and then let herself into the building.

She was pleased that that had worked.  Pushing things a hair.  She would have to make her existence worth it for the Infante, to avoid owing any sort of debt for invoking the name.

On a level, she hoped that it would find its way back to the Infante.  That could be good.

The discussion of the others and her own trains of thought had left her with a diffuse, generalized sort of plan, less like an outline with neat arrows, and more like a pile of scraps of paper, with writing on each scrap.

Two dozen individual elements.  But she had to put it together, and it wouldn’t be a neat, seamless fit.

She made her way straight to the lab.  It was late, and there were less doctors about.  Here and there, doors were open, and doctors were sitting in groups, drinks in hand.  There wasn’t any roar of conversation – the doctors and staff had too much respect for the owner of the castle for that.  But there was a general hum of ambient noise that suggested that this place was alive – especially now that most of the doctors had headed back to individual quarters, permanent and temporary, and to sitting rooms and tea rooms.

She could smell cigarette smoke and the aroma of a few dozen open bottles and tumblers of nice whiskey and scotch.  She could hear music playing on machines, much like the machine Sylvester and Jamie had had at their place in Tynewear, all of similar types, all with the volume set low enough that it wouldn’t disturb others.

“I want to ask Sylvester what he thinks of this,” Duncan spoke.

Evette arched an eyebrow.  Duncan, of all people, was commenting.

“When Sylvester was studying drugs and poisons, we looked at some of the stimulants and narcotics out there.  The Academy-created superdrugs, remember?” Duncan asked.  “That would be your specialty, Evette.”

“I remember,” Evette murmured.

“There are drugs that give you drive.  A constant push.  They encapsulate that feeling of being captured by the moment, being on point, having all of the confidence in the world, the thrill and energy of being on the very cusp of obtaining what you want most in the world.  Stimulants, usually,” Duncan said.  “And there are the narcotics that encapsulate the feeling of being there.  Of having what you want most.  Of having stepped through the threshold, having achieved everything you want in life, of having everything you could desire.  That feeling of waking up in the morning with people you love sleeping next to you, the covers warm, the sun shining, with no worries on the horizon.  Or, at least, worries you can put out of mind.”

“Yes,” Evette said.  “And we’ve known people, we’ve known mice, who fell prey to both.”

“The Academy sells a drug to the students and doctors, in a figurative sense, don’t they?” Duncan asked.  “They create the need for the drive, and then they encourage it.  They create the need and then they’re really the only one who offer the supply for that need.”

“I don’t like that analogy,” Mary said.

“Why not?  Because it applies to you?”

“Because it applies to Lillian,” Mary said.

Exactly,” Duncan said.  “She does have that need.  None of you will argue that.  She needs her black coat.  When she achieves it, she’ll need to climb to the next rung of power.  But what happens in the long run, Evette?  Sylvester?”

“The same thing that happens to the junkies.  They hit the point where they can’t keep getting their supply, they destroy themselves, or they build up a tolerance and get dissatisfied-“

“And move on to something stronger.  Some people who use the stimulants, they really chase that feeling of being on the cusp of achieving, and then they switch over.  They want that feeling of having achieved.  Of having crossed that finish line.  I think I could be that person, easily,” Duncan said.  He gestured, and he drew in a deep breath.  “I could be here.  In the Academy’s equivalent of the narcotic.  Well past the finish line.  I could enjoy this.”

“You’re implying Lillian couldn’t.”

“Do you think she could?  Can you see her at home here?”

“There are other paths.  There are other places to go, that aren’t being at the right hand of the nobility.”

“There are,” Duncan said.  “Absolutely.”

“If you’re going to say something, then say it.”

“Lillian could run an Academy.  She could run the city that it is a part of, too.  But she’ll always want that challenge.  She’ll want to be on the brink.  It might even be a part of why she liked Sy.  The teasing.”

“That’s between her and Sylvester,” Mary said.

“Fine.  Fair.  But in terms of getting her fix, how does she carry that forward for the rest of her life?  Keep in mind, mind you,” Duncan raised a finger, while offering Evette a sad sort of smile, “that the Lambs will be gone by the time she gets that far.”

“Sylvester would say that he wanted her to become a champion.  To reach a certain point where she has her black coat, she has power, and she can start to change things.  Maybe in a small way, maybe in only a small area, but she’d have that power, and she could represent something better.”

“That’s what Sylvester would say.  How about you?” Duncan asked.

“I don’t know,” Evette said.

“She’s only one person,” Duncan said.  “That’s an awful lot of responsibility.  We have to look at where we are.  If the Academy is a living thing, then we’re not even pinpricks, we’re so small.  Lillian isn’t even as significant as a pinprick.”

“One of the first things Sylvester taught me,” Mary said, “Was that we have to trust the Lambs.  Lillian is strong.  You can’t reduce her down to being a mere junkie.”

“It’s an analogy, nothing more,” Duncan said.  “I’m pointing out that the Academy is massive and for all its rough edges and flaws, there are whole tracts of it that are damn well engineered.  The carrot dangling from the stick is as refined as it’ll ever get.”

“There’s something nice about pinpricks and carrots,” Evette said.

“What’s that?” Duncan asked.

“Used with the right poisons, they’re as good as anything at killing the recipients.”

Duncan smiled.  “That’s as good a resolution to our little conversation as any.  I’m glad we got some constructive ideas out of it.”

“Yeah,” Evette said.  “Except, I don’t think poison will necessarily work here.  Our enemies know us.  They’re watching us.”

“Ah,” Duncan said.  “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.”

She had to check the notes she’d made and kept in a pocket.  She found the lab.

Professors Arandt, Kinney, and a half-dozen gray coats were in the lab space the Infante had granted them.

Shirley was present, too, sitting on a chair in the corner, looking miserable.

Three warbeasts the size of bears were in cages at one end of the room.  Cloths had been thrown over the cages, but the coverage wasn’t complete, and the forms with shaved fur here and there were clear enough.

“You’re back,” Kinney said.  She and Arandt were working on a large metal canister, as tall as Evette was.  It looked like the kind that held gas.  More were lined up along one of the counters.  Some had tubing attached to them.

“I’m back,” Evette replied.  She took in more of the scene.  There were stitched organized at one end of the room, naked.  Given the position of the gas canister, the contents were likely reserved for the stitched.

The stitched would become vessels for the gas.

“We picked up a lot of what we need and requested assets.  It’s only a starting point.  Much of the evening was spent on getting the ratios for your gases right.”

It wasn’t enough.  Too little work done, but Evette had expected that.  Now she was in a position where she had to twist their arms.

She and the Lambs had ruminated on this to some degree.

“Shirley,” she said.

“Hi, Sylvester,” Shirley said.  Her hands were in her lap, as if they were fighting with one another to engage in nervous tics and twitches.  “I’m really glad you came back.”

“I’m sorry it took so long,” Evette said.  She wasn’t good with words.  She preferred action.  Decisive, rationalized sorts of action.  “I kind of died.”

“What!?” Shirley asked.

The exclamation made several heads turn.

“Yeah.  But it’s going to be okay, I think.  We’ll get you out of here.  I’ll try to make sure you’re okay, before anything happens.  And I owe you an explanation.  I know.”

Shirley nodded, a very concerned look on her face.

Evette wasn’t sure what else to say.  She drew in a deep breath, then exhaled.  Her throat hurt, but at least the wound had been sealed.

“Your clothes are here.  They brought them off the train.”

Evette walked over to where the luggage was.  She knelt by it, opened it, and carefully managed her bag as she removed her tattered, bloody shirt, pulling it off in a way that wouldn’t pull tubing loose or let it get caught around the bag.

“Oh my lords,” Shirley said.

Again, the statement drew attention.

“What in the world did you do to yourself, there?” Arandt asked.

“If I was capable of performing this kind of surgery on myself, I wouldn’t have asked for your talents,” Evette said.

That earned her a skeptical look from Arandt.

“What happened?  What’s going on?” Shirley asked.

“It’s fine.  Just… put the mask on when I tell you to,” Evette said.

“The mask?”

Evette nodded.

She pulled on a clean shirt, decided changing pants would have to wait, and ran her fingers through her wet hair.

Through Sylvester’s hair.

“Professors,” she said, raising her head to face the others.

“Yes, Sylvester?” Kinney asked.

“Did the Infante happen to inform you that this task was a risky one?  That you stood to get hurt?”

“You know he did,” Kinney said.  She sounded annoyed.

“Okay.  Good.  My memory isn’t that strong, and I wouldn’t want you to have to deal with this without any warning.”

“Deal with- what are you talking about?”

Gordon and Mary fell into step with Evette as she approached Kinney.  There was a valve wrench on a counter, and Evette picked it up.

“What are you doing?” Kinney asked.

Evette remained silent.  There wasn’t a need for words.  She had tried that.

Action.  Decisive.  Explosive.

Kinney and Arandt backed away from Evette as she approached, hefting the wrench.  The gray coats backed away.  One made a run for the door and the hall.

Evette let it happen.  Her focus was on the professors.

But beating them with the wrench wouldn’t do.  It wouldn’t earn her cooperation.

“We’ll check your work,” she said.

She drove the wrench into the valve that stuck out of the canister of gas.

With a full-body effort, she levered the wrench, popping off the valve.

Gas plumed out, rising to the ceiling, then spreading out from that point, before starting its slow drift downward.

“What are you doing!?” Arandt cried out, hysteria at the edges of his voice.

“You two took so long to do this and not much else, it must be good work,” Evette said.  “I want to see it in action.”

Kinney ran, making a break for one corner of the room.  But to get there, she had to get past Evette.

Evette swung the wrench, aiming low.  Before she was even halfway through the motion, something caught in her chest, and she felt a painful pressure around what was supposed to be an operational heart.

The resulting swing was weak and half hearted.  But Kinney, in trying to squeeze past, bumped hard into one of the counters.

It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t even that effective, but Evette managed to grab one of Kinney’s lab coat sleeves, hooking her fingers in there.  She’d hoped to pull the professor off balance and bring her down into the ground, but all she managed was to force Kinney to bend over, taking rapid baby steps to keep her balance.

Evette boxed one of Kinney’s ears with the flat of the wrench, and that served to knock Kinney to the ground.

Calm, casual, Evette walked over to the canister that was still geysering with pressurized gas, grabbed it with one hand, and pulled a the upper end so it would tip over.  It did, with a metal-on-wood clunk.

The geyser now spewed directly at Kinney, who was only just climbing to her feet.

Kinney didn’t even manage to scream.

Evette’s heart complained at her in the wake of that exertion.  She found it hard to breathe, and took a moment to swallow in air.

That had nothing to do with the gas.  Not yet.  It was her heart.  The replacement was no substitute for the real thing, and it was possible this moderate exercise could disrupt something and kill her.

Still struggling to breathe, she walked over to where Kinney had been striving to go, and found a box with a lid.  Lifting the lid, she found gas masks, along with other emergency countermeasures.

She tossed one to Shirley.

“Arandt!” Evette called out.

“Please,” the professor said.  “This is unreasonable.”

This is unreasonable,” Evette said.

She threw the gas mask onto the counter, then slapped at it with the wrench.

The echoes of pain weren’t quite as bad with that lighter exertion.

“Wanting work done now, for the good of the Academy, it’s the most reasonable thing in the world,” Evette said.

“You can’t ask for the world to be handed over tomorrow and be surprised if we can’t deliver.”

“I didn’t want the world, Arandt,” Evette said.

She’d approached the first of the tall, Evette-sized canisters that was lined up.  She used the wrench to tear off another of the valves, letting it fall to the floor.  Another plume speared skyward, but this one, displaced by the cloud of gas that already hung overhead, spreading and dissipating into the room below, was far faster to descend toward Evette and all the people who were nearer the floor.

“I want my countermeasures against Mauer,” she said.

“Please, no more,” Arandt said.  “Give us the rest of the masks, or let us leave until this gas clears up, but-“

He stopped talking to cough.  The cough soon became a retching gag.

Evette was only just starting to feel the most preliminary of sensations from the poisons.

She had asked for a long series of very minor chemicals, in hopes that they would be spread out, no one chemical achieving a high enough concentration in her body to really affect her.

She wrenched the valve off another of the tanks.

“No!  Stop!  Whatever you want, I’ll provide!” Arandt protested.

“I want the work to get done,” Evette said.  “You can spend all night working on this, to make up for time we lost with this little exercise.”

“Whatever it takes.  Just please-“

Another retching spell.  This one was violent enough to dislodge the contents of his stomach.

Had she broken these wild creatures, successfully domesticating them?

“And we’ll have to make up for all of this gas we’re losing,” Evette commented.  “Oh well.  We’ll manage.”

She moved the wrench toward the next canister.

“No!” Arandt said, voice sharp, his tone completely different.  “No!  That’s not poison.  It’s a component we’ve been using in small quantity-  methane.  And if you fill the room with it, we’ll have bigger issues than going blind and suffering coughing fits.”

She wondered if he was telling the truth.

She bent down to pick up the valve.

It took some doing and a turn of the wrench to get the valve back into place on the first tank she had opened.  Doing so served to stem the tide from it, so it no longer emptied out violently in Kinney’s direction.

The woman was curled up into a fetal position, her back to Evette.

It was hard to see in the gas.  She had to fish around to find the next valve, and this one went on more easily.

She collected the gas masks, and one by one, she threw them at Arandt and the gray coats.  Not that they would do a great deal of good, given the state of the room and of the men, but it was a goodwill gesture, a token effort that would set the tone.

Her heart wanted so badly to pound, but it couldn’t, and in the failure to do what it wanted to do, it tried to tear itself apart.  She felt that empty, throbbing weakness in her breast, as if her ribs were about to cave in on her from the negative pressure.

“You have our cooperation,” Arandt said, voice modified by the filter of the gas mask and by the gas he’d suffered from.  The professor went on, “But we can’t stay here like this.  Let us go.  We’ll clean up, let the gas vent for an hour, and then we’ll come back, we’ll do everything you requested, and we’ll do it well.”

“I don’t have any guarantees you’ll come back,” she said.  “Except… I know how the nobles operate.”

Arandt was quiet.  He tended to default to such.

“I know that if I tell them a way to absolutely control you, then they’ll use that.  Because they adore control.  You made a mistake, Arandt, wearing your heart on your sleeve.  You made your weakness too clear.  Your colleague, who you hate so much.”

She could only hear the raspy breathing of the gas masks.

“If you run away or fail to fulfill this promise,” she said, with all the menace she could muster, “Then I’ll tell the Infante that all he needs to do to destroy you completely and utterly would be to promote your nemesis and demote you.  And he’ll do it.”

She saw the change in Arandt’s body language.  Anger.  Fury.

Frustration.

Arandt was very clearly debating killing her.  It showed in the way he planted his feet, took stock of the room, and clenched his fists.

“Go,” she said.  “But be sure to come back.  For the next day, at least, you’re mine.  You do everything I say.  And be sure to take her with you.”

She gestured at Kinney.  Then she realized the professor couldn’t see well in the smoke.  He wouldn’t see her if she jumped on the spot and waved her arms.

But the man seemed to have gotten it, or he had guessed that the ‘her’ was Kinney.  He approached, and Evette backed off, giving him a wide berth while holding the wrench.

He collected Kinney and led the way in retreating from the room.

It left only Evette and Shirley.

“There,” Evette said.  “That’s only the first step.  I can give you the explanation you deserve, but you’ll have to bear with me.  There’s a lot to do in the meantime if I’m going to pull all of this off.”

Shirley only nodded, breath rasping through the mask.

Evette walked over to the large tanks of pressurized gas and found the one that Arandt had said was methane.

Standing in the midst of the multicolored clouds of gas, she had to fumble for a scalpel.

Using the scalpel, she began lifting the edge of the label from the canister.  It took time.  In the meantime, Shirley approached, silent but for the noise of the gas mask.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice distorted.

“Changing labels around,” Evette said.  “That canister of gas over there is going to retire.  This little gem… well, with luck, they’ll fill up some stitched with it, and we’ll have ourselves some exploding stitched.  All gathered up in Academy ranks, ready to strike out against Mauer.  And because they’re filled with the mildest, most inconvenient poisons, people won’t think to be overly careful.”

“You’re siding with the Reverend, then?” Shirley asked.

“No,” Evette said.  “No, I’m not siding with anyone.  But that’s too complicated to get into.  Too many variables.  I’m going to get my ticker fixed, I’m going to look after you, and I’m going to destroy them all.”

A blaze of glory, she thought.  One that might consume me.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.12 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

She’d cracked the whip.  Now the whipped were working the way they were supposed to.

The collected stitched were being modified, surgically outfitted with contained bladders, flesh added to encapsulate these growths and other internal structures given to allow the growths to be triggered remotely.  Arandt was handling the mental programming so that hearing the right word would prompt the bladders to burst and the pressured gas within to be released.  He was nearly done the batch of stitched, tying a purple ribbon around the arm of each stitched that was primed and ready.  Once they were filled with gas, the ribbons were replaced with other colors.

The warbeasts had already been handled.  Other gas canisters were being loaded and prepared.

The work had gone on all through the night.  But for a detour where Evette had escorted Shirley to her own quarters, lending her bed to the exhausted young woman, Evette had spent the night awake, watching, and thinking.

The chatter of the Lambs was a constant background noise.  Slowly, things had taken shape.

Mauer’s men had taken the paper that had the ‘shape’ of the man’s agenda on it.  Not too important.  Her focus over the course of the evening had been to recreate it, and figure out the general shape of the Infante’s plans.

She watched as the doctors pumped stitched full of flammable methane instead of gas.  The labels had been changed around, the canisters moved.  The trap was set and primed, just a short distance from her.

There was a knock on the door.  It didn’t surprise her in the slightest.

“Come in,” Kinney said.  She looked considerably worse for wear after her poisoning.  A little bent, a little worn around the edges, her eyes rimmed with red and then by further dark circles.  She’d showered and changed into fresh clothes and a black lab coat, but fat had been stripped from the bone, metaphorically speaking.  The makeup rinsed off, the little touches of style gone.  Only the hardness and faint hint of madness that any professor needed to make it this far, now.

Evette didn’t recognize the man in the black coat who entered the room, but she did find him a very interesting person.  He was a professor by rank, and had an emblem on his sleeve she didn’t recognize.  Between the decoration and the way he’d styled his hair and the fine clothes he wore beneath his coat, she knew he was someone with money to fritter away.

Infante, she thought.

“The Infante will be here in a moment,” the man announced.  “Please ensure that you are not busy and that there will be no interruptions during his visit.”

“Yes sir,” Kinney said.  Arandt’s voice echoed hers by only a moment.

She had anticipated the visit.  She had also wondered how it would be approached; it was folly to enter any lab without warning about one’s presence.  Some work wasn’t to be interrupted at all, and even a knock was a grave mistake that could get people killed.

Yet, at the same time, to knock was to ask permission.  Nobles did not ask permission.

To send a delegate was one of the two way she had reasoned the Infante would make his entrance.

The doors in this building were large, reinforced, and heavy.  It took some effort for the fancy man in the black lab coat to position himself where he could see down the hall and still hold the door partially open.

After several long seconds, he moved back, opening the door wider, and knelt, still holding it open.

The Infante was large enough that he almost couldn’t pass through the door.  Kinney and Arandt had already stepped away from their work, dropping into deep bows, so they were already bent low as the Infante entered.

They bowed even lower as he passed through the threshold, to the point that it had to be painful.

As the Infante turned her way, Evette was sure to bow as well, hopping down from the table, timing it so she was lowering herself into the deepest part of her bow as he set his eye on her.

“Give a man free rein, and his actions soon reveal a great deal about him,” the Infante said.

“Yes, Lord Infante,” Evette said.

“How are things progressing?”

“Quite well, Lord Infante,” she said.  “I think we’re one or two hours from being finished.”

Likely two to three hours, but it was good to crack that whip a little more.

“You were gone for some time yesterday.”

“Yes, my lord,” she said.  “I was looking for Mauer.”

She’d realized, on seeing her tail, that she was being followed.  Since leaving the Infante’s company, she had likely been followed by one of his people or experiments.  On leaving Mauer’s company, Mauer would have his own spies on her.  That was, if he hadn’t already been keeping an eye out from the moment she’d been taken off the train by the group of young nobles.

“Do tell.”

“I’m sure the others told you about my heart problem, Lord Infante,” she said.  “I tried to get closer to Mauer and dialogue with him, using our… pre-existing relationship, if you will.  It could have gone better.”

“I asked you to kill Mauer, and gave you resources to handle the task.  Yet you ‘dialogue’ with the man.”

“Yes, Lord Infante.  For my plan to work, I needed to position him.  Left alone, he’ll carry on doing what he’s been doing.  Every time the Lambs have dealt with him, he’s been careful in how he positions himself.”

“So I have seen.”

Evette nodded.  “He treats these things like a game of chess.  No piece can be taken without retaliation or consequence.  It goes for everything from the lowliest pawn to the rooks, knights, hunters, to the king and queen.  But he and I have faced off.  It goes hand in hand with his plans being disrupted.  Tell a man you have a gun pointed at his privates, and even if he knows your hands should be empty, he’ll want to be sure, because he values his privates.  He’ll betray a glance, or move to better protect his privates from this phantom bullet.  By showing myself and invading Mauer’s inner sphere, I can make him wonder at his plans.  He’ll betray some subtle clue that lets me see what he’s really doing.  And he did.”

The Infante was unreadable.  She had to fight to suppress her fears and worries.  Everything was so precarious in the here and now.  Which was exactly why the Infante was here, and why she’d been so sure he would reveal himself.

“What did you dialogue about?” the Infante finally asked.

“We didn’t, Lord Infante,” she lied.  The lie made her already precarious position feel even more so.  “I was bludgeoned in the head and imprisoned in a bathroom.  I tried to escape and was summarily impaled through the heart and neck.  But I had sources that informed me what Mauer was up to, I was able to catch his attention before I bled out.  He opted to keep me alive.  But they made the mistake of trying to drug me.  It didn’t work.  I was able to slip away.”

“How fortuitous,” the Infante said.

He doesn’t believe me?  Or is he being droll?

Evette and the Lambs had rehearsed this conversation a hundred times over the course of the night.  Various permutations, likely scenarios and points to cover.  The Infante scared her like nothing else did, because he could so easily destroy her.  Physically, taking away the things she valued, changing her circumstance, or crushing her psychologically.  Worse, he could do it all with no effort at all.

She still wasn’t sure how to handle this.  She bowed deeper, remaining silent.

“You have a sense of what Mauer is doing and where he is, then.”

“Yes, Lord Infante.”

“That is a statement that invites answer.  Do not toy with me,” the Infante said.  “You know what I expect.”

“Yes, Lord Infante, but I can’t provide the answers you want without putting myself in danger.”

Anyone else might hear what she was saying and jump to a conclusion.  That she’d betrayed him, that her dealings with Mauer were less than genuine.

How the Infante reacted would be telling.

“Then come,” the Infante said.  “This way.”

His hand was extended, ushering her forward.

She straightened, collected the satchel with the ticking heart in it, and bowed her head slightly as she moved past him.  The hand he extended to her left served to set her path for her, palm out and angled so as to indicate the door.

Out into the hallway.

The Infante must have signaled his personal professor, because the man shut the door behind them.

There were no people out in the hallway.  The fact that the Infante had come this way meant that people weren’t permitted to use the corridor.  Subordinates had no doubt limited passage and access.  The hallway was long, wide, and decorated well with fine art along the one wall, above and to either side of doors that led into individual labs.  On the other wall, there were windows that pulsed faintly in time with the movement of the fluids between them.  Each pane and fragment of glass was surrounded by vein-like growths.  Something between stained glass, a broken window, and a living thing.

Pillars were set at regular intervals along that one side of the hallway, and it was one of these pillars that Evette was pushed up against, as the Infante scooped her up off the ground and shoved her back, pinning her into place.

He didn’t give a rationale.  He didn’t explain why he was doing this.  He saw fit to crush her, and there was little she could do.

She didn’t fight.  She simply felt her much abused neck and throat constrict fraction by fraction in his grip, and she hung limp, working to meet his eyes.

“Wretched creature,” the Infante spoke.  “If you think that my pity for your circumstance will spare you, you are wrong.  If you think your audacity entertains me and that I might enjoy you too much to kill you, you are wrong.”

Evette managed a nod, despite the meaty two fingers and thumb that encircled her neck.

He dropped her, and she made something of a point of collapsing onto the floor rather than landing on her feet.  He would like, even on the smallest, most insignificant level, that she was prostrate before him.

“I hope, for your sake, that whatever it is you were afraid of speaking of is something you can tell me here, in private, and not something you’re unwilling to divulge altogether.”

“Mauer’s plans and activity, Lord Infante?”

“Indeed.”

She swallowed hard.  “He took me to Gomorrah, my lord.”

“Gomer’s Island.”

“Yes, Lord Infante.  Gomer’s Island.”

“The place is often said to be a bastion for the religious and the rebellious in the Crown States.  Mauer’s like are often at home there.”

“So it is said, my lord,” Evette said.

Her response was coded, much as the Infante’s statement had been.  Talking about something without admitting or pointing to it.

Gomer’s island was far from being a bastion.

The Infante hadn’t replied to her, and she suspected his patience was running low.  He wasn’t invested in her fate, and if she failed to justify her continued existence, he would kill her and carry on with the remainder of his day, likely not giving her a second thought.

She wasted no time in sharing, “Lord Infante, he brought me there, drugged, with the intention of finishing me off, I think.  A hidden area within Gomer’s Island.  From the way he talked to his lieutenants, and from what I was able to infer…”

Something had shifted in the mood.  She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she sensed that what she said here could see her killed for entirely different reasons.  The Crown had killed a great many people to silence whoever had been at that location and keep any secrets they held.

“…My Lord, he’s as dangerous as I’ve ever seen him.  When he was at Radham, the very first time I saw him, and he addressed the crowd, he was fire, he was intense, he was taking the first concrete steps in carrying out a greater plan, and there was no sign of anything coming to stand in his way.  The Lambs hadn’t yet made their move.  What I saw, yesterday evening, there was a similar look in his eye, but it wasn’t that newly kindled fire.”

“Dispense with the poetry,” the Infante said.

Evette stared at the noble’s feet, still on her hands and knees.  “Lord Infante, that was the beginning of what he was trying to do.  Four years ago.  My mistake in dealing with him was in thinking he wanted or needed me.  But he’s close enough to the end, or a end, that he didn’t want me around to interfere with what he’s setting in motion.”

She waited, tense in mind and stomach, while she tried to keep the tension from showing in her arms, legs, shoulders, or back.  She couldn’t give the Infante anything that might suggest she was being deceptive.

“If he truly believes he’s close to any measure of victory, then he’ll be gravely disappointed,” the Infante said.

“If you say it is so, Lord Infante, then it’s so, and I feel sorry for the man,” Evette said.

She wondered for a moment if she’d pushed it too far.  If she came across as disingenuous.

Then again, whether she came across as Evette or as Sylvester, she sounded disingenuous when she was being genuine.

“Feel sorry for him indeed.  Mauer has set himself up to fail,” the Infante said.  “Still, I’ll be happy to see him die, so long as he has the guns and the will to face down the Crown and Academy both.  Carry on with what you’re doing.  I’ll send my doctor to you in two hours, with every expectation that you’ll be ready to act.”

“Yes, Lord Infante,” Evette said.

“Stand,” the Infante said.

“As you wish, my lord.”  Evette stood.

The man’s large hand reached down, and it brushed her hair out of her face.  Sylvester’s hair out of his face, to be fair.  The act made the angle of her head change, so she looked up at him.

He stared down at her with those eyes that were far too sharp for his massive, bulky frame.  It felt like he saw straight through her.

“Hm,” he said.

With that, he turned his back to her and started walking down the hall.  Raising his voice enough to be heard, he said, “Sir Charles.”

The door opened.  The well-dressed professor stepped outside, closing the door behind him, gave Evette a glance, and then walked briskly in the direction of the Infante, who was already a fair distance down the hall.

By the time they had reached the end of the long, straight hallway, Evette had surrounded herself with Lambs.

That was interesting,” Jamie said.

“Dangerous as all hell,” Gordon said.  “That nobleman does not like being lied to, and you lied through your teeth for most of that, Evette.”

Evette was silent, watching the Infante’s back.

“But you shook him,” Gordon said.  “You got his attention.”

Evette nodded, to Gordon and to herself.

“Was he telling the truth?” Mary asked.  “About this being something so dangerous and problematic that it might hurt Mauer?  Hurt us?”

“It’s not out of the question,” Gordon said.  “It’s equally possible we spooked him, and he played it cool.  More possible even.”

“Look at how he acted in the past,” Jamie said.  “He’s always been impervious, untouchable, unmovable.  He’s powerful in a way that, when we imagine him dealing with the Duke, it’s a power difference as vast as the one between the Duke and ordinary civilians.  Maybe not quite that extreme, but…”

“He moved,” Gordon said.  “He reacted, took an extreme stance, then course corrected.”

Evette stood in the hallway, thinking, letting the Lambs talk, while she waited for her thoughts to stop racing, badly out of sync with the tick of her temporary heart, which wanted so badly to beat madly in response to her fear.

Which was as good a reminder as any.

She made her way back into the lab.

“I thought you’d died,” Kinney said.

“What a shame.  I’m still alive.  Now, we’re working with a set deadline.  The poisonous gas needs to be prepped, and then there are the parasites.  Where are we with the fisteria?”

“Another lab is handling it,” Arandt said.  “We still need to test it.”

“That’s fine.  What about the fast moving stitched?”

“Handled, and already loaded into a wagon, ready to be brought wherever we need them.”

“Excellent.  We have two hours.”

“We need three,” Kinney said.

“The Infante gave us two.”

“Because of what you said, earlier,” Kinney said.  The look in her eyes.  It was tantalizing.  Pure, utter, abject hatred for Evette.

“Figure it out.  And while you’re at it, we’ll need this heart issue sorted out.  Fix my heart, so I don’t need this ticker.”

“You’re joking.”

Evette shook her head, her expression serious.

“I’ll reach out to someone.  I know someone who is good with this sort of thing.  And you can go fuck yourself for making me take the time to do that.”

“I want you to do the surgery,” Evette said.

Kinney stared at her.  The hatred took on a new dimension.

“You little bastard,” Professor Kinney said, “Are you aware I despise you?  That I actually want to see you dead?  You’re putting your very heart into my hands?”

“I’m aware,” Evette said.  “I’m also aware that you know the stakes better than anyone.  If another doctor made a mistake, they’d be more likely to get away with it.  But a failure on the part of someone invested in all of this, letting me die, when the Infante clearly prefers me alive?  No.  He would not abide such failure.”

“Clear a space on the counter,” Kinney said.  “Lie down.  If we’re going to have to do this, we might as well start sooner than later, so I can focus on what I need to.  With luck, you’ll be sore and tired enough that I don’t have to put up with you for a solid hour to an hour and a half.”

Evette smiled.

This made for her second trip to Gomorrah in the span of a day.  She rode in a nondescript carriage, one that could have belonged to any civilian in the city, and she rode in the company of twelve stitched, arranged in rank and file, in an interior that had only two seats.

She held Shirley’s hand, unsure of what to say or do.

She recognized the colors the stitched wore.  The red and purple ribbons on their left arms were supposed to mean the gas would create ringing in people’s ears.  To Evette and her future victims, it meant ‘methane’.  Explosive.

The stitched themselves were flammable.  The other gases had trace amounts of methane in them, and, from what she had been able to reason, wouldn’t stifle the rolling explosion when the time came.

For now, they smelled like burned air and formaldehyde, and their presence made the interior of the carriage oven-like, to the point that the glass of the windows was fogging up.  The outside was wet, with pouring rain, but it was as hot a day as she had ever experienced, all the same.  It was unbearable, and she suspected this was a punishment.  Chances were good that Kinney had called in a favor, to ensure that the higher-ups that were managing the distribution of forces put Evette in with the stitched.

Other vehicles would be moving into the neighborhood by other routes, by meandering paths, all with the same location in mind.

Mauer was supposed to be here.  If he wasn’t, it would at least be a collection of his soldiers, all gathered in one place.

The moment the vehicle slowed, she reached for the door, opening it, and let herself out, pulling Shirley after her.  She had to jog, then walk briskly to keep up with it, following it to the destination.

Further down the street, another carriage door opened.  A man stepped out.  Skinny, with longer hair than was conventional, and a ragged, unkempt beard.

But Evette could tell that the man had a gun, and she suspected that any one of Mauer’s men with binoculars would be able to tell, too.

He knew his way around guns, from the way he wore his, which suggested a soldier, but he’d worn a gray lab coat when she had first been introduced to the man, which suggested a doctor.  His unkempt appearance suggested something else altogether.

She assessed him as a damaged, curious man who looked enough like someone non-Crown and non-Academy to blend in.  So he’d been promoted.  He served a role here.

Part of that role was to wrangle her.

“Sylvester?” the man asked.  “And companion?”

Evette gave him a nod.

He gave them a once-over.  Evette had left her shirt unbuttoned, so it wouldn’t rub up against the fresh scar across her chest.  The scar was ‘Y’ shaped.  Kinney had a sense of humor.  The scar drew attention.

Shirley drew more, and Evette was grateful for that.

“I’m Lou,” the man said.  “And I hope the person who did those stitches was a first year student, and not anyone with a coat.”

“Black coat.”

He frowned a little.

“I made an enemy of her,” Evette clarified.

“I suppose that’s alright then.  What are you up to, outside of that carriage?” he asked, as she drew nearer.

“I’m getting some fresh air while I look for a vantage point.  Someplace high up.”

“High up is dangerous, and makes it slow to move around.”

“Fast to move around when you fall,” Evette said, giving the man a smile.

Lou made a bit of a face, then said, “Alright.  While you’re looking, you’ll want to know what you’re keeping an eye on.  Look past my right shoulder.  You’ll see a collection of buildings with a sign on one face.”

The buildings were red brick.  The branches that grew along the side of them grew in such a way that they followed the rigid lines set out by the mortar, zig-zagging and very inorganic.  The sign, faded, had once been painted but now peeled.  It had had a woman on it, once, but now only had a blob that suggested an hourglass figure.

The faceless, blurred image struck a chord in Evette, so similar to the broken Lambs that shadowed her now.  So did the hourglass, suggesting the deadline, the time limit.

“We’re using all of the resources you suggested,” Lou said.  “All from multiple directions.  It’ll be some time before we act.  You said he might spot us before we get everything in place?”

“He might.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t.  We’ve got three nobles overseeing things, but they’re keeping their heads down.”

“Three?  Montgomery?”

“I don’t know who, exactly, except that the young First is nearby.  Be mindful.”

The First.  The Ogre.  August.

Evette nodded.  She was already soaked from the rain, and it did nothing to mitigate the heat of the outside.  It helped rinse the smell of formaldehyde from her, if nothing else.

She surveyed the area, picked a tall building, and let herself inside.

This was it.  The pieces were being put into place.  She would need to survey the arrangement before she made any calls, decided to pull the pin, and blow it all up.

“You’re playing with fire, you know,” Gordon said, as she reached the stairwell.  “You’ll go to pieces when it counts.”

She ignored him.

“We’re too slow,” Jamie said.  “You can emulate Sylvester given time to tackle things as a general problem, but it’s clunky, flawed, and when you try to handle too much and let it all pile up too much, it can be too great of a burden.  That’s when you crack at the foundation.”

It was true.  But what else was there to do?  Evette picked up the pace, moving up the steps doubletime.

“We’re all twisted up,” Helen said, hands on her hips.  “Wearing a mask.  You know you’re not Evette, you’re just Sy, burying the monster inside, and you’re not doing a very good job of hiding it, mister.”

Her heart hurt.  It had been fixed and glued together, with strips of something or other worked in there to patch it up.  It beat in time with her feelings, now, but it had been abused in the surgery, and the meds that were supposed to temper the pain weren’t as effective when Sylvester was as drug resistant as he was.

“You’re all tangled up,” Mary said.  “The Infante thinks he’s the one pulling your strings, setting you up so you hurt Mauer more than you hurt him, or you remove yourself as a problem.  Mauer thinks he’s got you on his side, working on this conspiracy with Gomorrah, that you hate the Crown and Academy more than you dislike him.  But the only sure thing here is that the weapons you’re deploying are double-edged ones.  The only guarantee is that you’ll hurt yourself.”

She couldn’t maintain the pace of taking the stairs two at a time.  She slowed, and she hated that she slowed.

She rounded the bend in the stairs, moving up, because the Lambs liked being up high, looking down, working their way from an advantageous position to a more secure, familiar one.

“Sy?” Shirley asked.

“I’m losing my mind, Shirley.  I’m not really Sylvester, anymore.  I’m sorry I dragged you with me.”

“I don’t understand.  What happened?”

“For all of my life, or the only years of my life that really counted, I’ve taken a drug, to make me adapt, to make me change.  It makes me liquid, they call it.  So that I can fit myself to a situation, learn new skills as I need them, forget skills and habits as I need to forget them.”

“I know that much,” she said.

“But in molding myself, I made myself fit to the group, to the Lambs.  I fit the void that was left when two of the Lambs that were supposed to exist ceased to be.  As the Lambs fell away, were wiped blank or killed, I spread myself thinner, to fill those gaps.  I couldn’t keep to that.  So I broke away.  Left them.  Jamie followed.”

They reached the top of the next flight of stairs.

August was there.  With a group of soldiers gathered around him.  He wore a suit jacket with long sleeves, shorts, and high socks, and he had a menacing aura to put any warbeast to shame.

Evette and Shirley bowed, before retreating further up the stairs.

“So long as I had Jamie, I could remember what the other Lambs looked like.  How they acted.  But we fell out.  A lot of things fell out.  And now there’s a kernel of doubt because I’m not sure I can remember any of the faces.”

Evette continued, with more energy now, because if she stopped, then Shirley would say something, and she didn’t want Shirley to interrupt.

“I get a glimmer, like the memory is there, the face is accurate, and then I question it.  I wonder if it’s because I want to see them all so badly that I’m filling in the gaps wrong.  I’m worried I’m going to pursue a fiction, build lies upon lies, so I pull back, and the doubt keeps getting bigger.  I’m not seeing their faces in my head anymore because I won’t let myself.  I’m not seeing my face anymore.”

“No falling out is worth this,” Shirley said.

“No,” Evette agreed.

“Then stop this?  Because you’re frightening me.  Can’t we go back?”

“If I go back, they might not be there.”

“But they might be,” Shirley said.  “Or Jamie might be.”

Evette wasn’t articulate enough to answer just why that spooked her.  She only shook her head.

Her heart hurt so badly, even with just the brisk ascent.

But if she slowed, then she might have to slow further, later.  If she slowed further, she might have to stop.

A direct answer to Shirley’s statement wasn’t possible, but she was able to say, “Things are in motion already.  The pawns set in place.  The only thing needed is a word, and then a match.  Or a spark.  Between the weapons we’re using to weaken Mauer and our makeshift bomb in the midst of the Academy’s ranks, combined with territory as neutral as any we’ll find in New Amsterdam… it should be bloody on both sides.”

“All three sides, you mean,” Shirley said.  “We’re a side, aren’t we?”

Evette smiled.

“That’s not supposed to put a smile on your face,” Shirley said.

“I’m smiling because you’re clever,” Evette said.  “I respected you in the first place because you were clever.  You just needed confidence.  I wish I’d done better by you.  I should have left you behind.”

“I’d feel glad I came along, if only because I was able to change your mind about all of this,” Shirley said.  “But I don’t know that I can?”

She’d made it a question.  Or she’d made it a plea.

Evette wasn’t sure which.

“If nothing else, let’s make sure we have a view,” Evette said.

Shirley didn’t say anything as they made their way up two more flights of stairs.

Evette stopped in her tracks as she was confronted with two more Lambs.

Jamie and Lillian, together, standing at the top of the next flight of stairs, staring her down.  Their backs weren’t turned.  Their expressions weren’t happy.

“Poison and fire,” Evette said, walking up the stairs, toward the pair.

She walked past them, and onto the roof proper.  The walk up the stairs had been enough for her to almost start to dry off.  In the downpour of warm water, she was quickly drenched again.

Shirley hung back, keeping to the shelter afforded by the doorway that led down to the stairwell and building interior.

Evette spread her arms, taking in the scene, while letting the rain soak her.  She knew she presented a good target for one of Mauer’s shooters, and that she risked tipping him off.  She suspected -or the phantom Lambs suspected, after a full night of deliberation- that Mauer wouldn’t run, and that Mauer wouldn’t shoot.

Mauer had other things to focus on.  Enemies of a less ambiguous sort.

“Sylvester,” the voice came from behind her.

She turned.  She was close enough to the ledge that she could have slipped and tipped over.

Jamie.  Jamie with a face, rain streaking his glasses.

“I thought you’d come back here at some point,” Jamie said.  “I staked out the area.  Saw the people and carriages moving in unusual ways.”

“You’ve been following me,” Evette accused.

“Of course!” Jamie said, with uncharacteristic intensity.  He drew closer, and she moved, almost to back up, except that would have meant stepping back and into the void.  She moved to the side instead, maintaining the distance between them.

“Good,” she said.  She nodded to herself.  “Good.  Take Shirley.  Then go.”

“Only if you come with.”

“I’m seeing this through.  It’s meaningless and petty if I’m not here to take action.  I have to hurt them, cripple both sides, and then step in.  Surgical strikes.”

“I know, Sy.  We talked about this for months on end.  But you know that we planned something bigger than this.  It was supposed to be more elegant.”

“I memorized the keywords.  Lipreading.  I know how to control the stitched.  The soldiers and doctors are the only concern, and I have ideas for dealing with them.  I can take August hostage.  Take the Ogre.”

“You could, I’m not denying that you’re theoretically capable.”

“It’s the same it was when we fought the Baron.  Just need to arrange things, set the tone, I can make this elegant.”

“You can.  But will you?  Will it really work out that way?  Sylvester, I want you to stop.  Take your mind off the mission for a moment.  Listen to me.”

Evette scowled.  She glanced over her shoulder, at the scene below.

Listen, damn it,” Jamie said.

He stepped closer.  Again, Evette circled around to one side.

If she just got a little closer to the stairwell, she could make a break for it.

Or to the side of the building.  She could see where Jamie had looped the rope and slid down.  He must have been on a different building, had seen her enter the building below, and moved over while she climbed the stairs.  She could use that same rope to descend.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’m just- I’m sorry.  At Corinth, I was hurt.  I handled that badly.  I gave you the wrong impressions, I asked you to live up to unfair expectations.”

She was close to being able to make a run for downstairs.  She walked slowly, measuring her steps, avoiding looking at Jamie directly.

“I knew you were hurting and lost from what had just happened with Lillian, and I pressured you.  I want you to know, when I came looking for you in Tynewear, my feelings for you weren’t a factor.  I said that because I was hurt, I wanted to make it clear that my feelings were real, so I exaggerated, I…”

He raised his hands, then let them flop to the side.

“I was running away, in my own way.  Bending the truth, to try and make things clearer, while not having to be honest.”

Evette paced.

“Give me back the Sylvester that doesn’t get innuendo.  Who pokes fun at me, and who I can poke fun at in return.  The guy who makes me tea and who I can listen to music with.  Give me back the guy I can scheme with, as we figure out how to take on the most powerful people on this side of the ocean.  We can conquer the world together.  All of the rest of it, any other feelings, they’re unimportant noise.  Give me back my friend.”

She could hear the hoarse note in his voice.

“Please,” Jamie said, for emphasis.

She reached for her belt.  She found the gas canister.

Something to cover her retreat.

She unclipped it from her belt, pulling the pin with her thumb in the same motion.

Stepping out from the doorway, reaching out, Shirley seized her by the wrist, holding that same arm firm, keeping Evette from throwing.

The canister, still firmly clasped in one hand, began spewing gas.  Evette waited patiently for the gas to force Shirley to back away, to release her.

“Drop it,” Shirley said.  “And listen to him.”

Evette didn’t move.  Jamie watched all of this, silent.

“Drop it,” Shirley said.

She pressed the sharp point of a scalpel into Evette’s back.  When Evette didn’t react, the scalpel drove in a little deeper.

The canister fell from Evette’s hand.  Shirley kicked it over the edge of the roof.

A long moment passed.

“That was silly,” Evette said.  She jerked her arm, but Shirley didn’t release it.  “Now they know where we are.  You just tipped off both sides of the conflict down there.”

“Good,” Shirley said.  “It’s better than what was going to happen.”

“If Sylvester is buried too deep,” Jamie said, as if all of this hadn’t transpired.  “Give me the chance to do what he did for me.  Give me a bit of time, to help him forge a new identity and piece himself back together…”

He paused.

“…I really hope it doesn’t come to that, though.”

Evette wrenched her arm, trying to twist it free of Shirley’s grip.  In the process, Shirley wrapped her arms around Evette’s arms and upper body, in a tight bear hug.

Evette struggled and failed to break free.

“They’re coming,” she said.  “Every second you waste here, you’re bringing the bayonets and the rifles closer to us.”

“That’s fine,” Jamie said.  “I’m here.  You’re not going to get rid of me this time.”

Evette shook her head.  “Nothing’s been fixed.  We’re just going back to the same bad situation.”

“It’s fine.  We can figure it out together, Sy.  Whether it’s the people marching up those stairs or a tricky friendship dynamic.  Just so long as neither of us run away anymore.”

“You keep doing that,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Calling me Sy.  You call yourself my friend.  But the Infante was able to figure something was up, you know.  Mauer was able to figure it out, that I wasn’t Sylvester.  But you pretend to know me, and you missed it.”

She made it a needling comment.  A jab.

“Because they’re the ones who are wrong,” Jamie said.  “Understand?  You’re you.”

She shook her head.  Smirked.

“Then look me in the eye, Sylvester.  Tell me that.  Use your devastating skills at deception, lie to my face.  Or show me you’re really not Sy and be genuinely honest.  Either way works.”

Reluctantly, she looked up at Jamie.

Sylvester’s best friend.

“The good moments,” the words came reluctantly, “The high points, they’re always met by falls.  Pain.  Loss.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “I can see that.”

“I get attached to people and then watch them die one by one.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

“So if you say that you’re here to stay, you’d better not be lying.  You stick this through.  You’re not allowed to die.  Not before me.  No going blank, no fading away.”

“I promise,” Jamie said, with no hesitation.  “You’ll have to help me figure that one out, but I promise.”

That would have to be good enough.  It warranted a nod of acknowledgment.

“The Lambs.  They don’t get to die either.  We’ll have to figure that one out too.”

“Sure, Sy.”

I nodded.

“You can let me go, Shirley,” I said.

Jamie gave her a nod, and she released me.

I looked out over the city, then over at Jamie.

“This is a mess,” I said.

“Absolutely.”

“I still want to see how much damage we can do in the midst of it,” I said.

He sighed audibly.

“Sure, Sy,” he said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.13 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The rain fell all around us, a steady drenching of the city, that had been sustained for far longer than nature should have permitted.  The entire city was shaped to accept and use the rain.  Stylized gutters, roof styles, and architecture that was exaggerated enough in places to still have some character after the rain had battered it for several years.  Plant and flesh growth as architecture could drink the water and grow more than the water beat it down.

The entire city seemed awash in the humid haze of summer rain, wherein a kind of fog that rose up over every surface that was being drummed at by the downpour.  The light of the sun fought to penetrate the rolling storm cloud cover, and the lights of the city strove to penetrate the dark haze of rain and mist.

I was wet from head to ankle.  Only precaution kept the water out of my shoes.  Evette had done that much.  The wind, twelve or so stories above the ground, proved to be brisk and vertigo-inducing, as if I was light enough to be picked up and tossed off of the top of the building.

It should have been enough to cool me down, to make up for the ambient temperature.  It wasn’t.  I knew I was sweating, adding a taste of salt to the rain.  I felt feverish, and I shivered.

“I was so busy with the Lambs and preparing for them that I barely ate,” I said.  I looked over at Jamie.

“Hm?  Yeah.  I had to push food on you.”

“And then everything happened and I hopped on the train with Shirley, and it was Wallace’s law in full effect, y’know?  Pell-mell melee, grandmothers biting small children to get that next sandwich.  Throwing money at the people bringing the food in?”

“It wasn’t nearly that severe,” Shirley said.  She looked a touch bewildered, as if she wasn’t sure what was going on.  “But he did give me the lunch instead of taking it himself.  He had a look in his eyes, like he was far away, I didn’t want to argue.  If I’d known that he was in that state, or that he hadn’t eaten-”

I shook my head.

“What are you getting at, Sy?” Jamie asked.

“I haven’t eaten anything in the past forever, except for a blood apple that was a few days overripe.”

“You know you’re not supposed to eat those raw, right?  They’re a garnish, or you use them in cooking?”

“I know.  But I was really hungry.  I-”

I had to stop myself.  I’d reflexively reached out, almost mentally withdrew, turning to a flicker of an image in the corner of my eye.  Helen.

Almost, very almost, defaulting to letting Helen say it.

“-I’m hungry,” I said.

Belatedly, after finishing the sentence, I realized that Helen had had a face, and that something had fit back into where it was supposed to be.  I smiled, too wide, at Shirley and Jamie.

“We can get you food,” Jamie said, matching my smile with unremitting calm.  His eyes were studying me, near-constantly.  Still checking, watching carefully.  He finally relaxed his investigation to walk over to the edge, before looking down.  “There were people on the ground before that aren’t, now.  I think they’re in the midst of coming up the stairs.  We should focus on surviving in the meantime.”

“Yes,” I said.  “Surviving is good.”

It took effort to set trains of thought into motion without reflexively redirecting them through the mouths of phantom Lambs.

As trains went, they felt floatier than they had, before all of this.  Freer, less heavy, less substantial.

Caught by sudden suspicion, I looked at Jamie.  “Just… to make sure everything is all right?”

“That’s not a complete question,” Jamie said.

“Because I haven’t finished it,” I said.

“You paused, waiting for a response.”

“Okay,” I said.  I frowned.  “You’re real, right?  You’re here.”

“Yes,” Jamie said, very firmly.  “I could slap you hard, if that would help.”

I frowned.  “I think it’s ok.  But why the slap?  I thought we were okay.”

“We’re okay.”

“And you apologized,” I pointed out.

“I apologized and I’m bothered at the same time, and a slap would go a long way toward helping with the second part.  I’m allowed to have complicated feelings, Sy.  Just take it in stride?  That would go a long way too.”

“You are allowed those complicated feelings.  I can do ‘in stride’,” I said.  “Shirley’s real?”

“I grabbed you,” Shirley said.  “I held your arm.  What did you think happened if I’m not real?  That you did it yourself?”

“Not wholly ruling that out,” I said.

The bewilderment became concern again.  She’d seen a lot about the way I’d acted, she’d heard what I’d said to Jamie, but this was the moment the depth of what was going on was becoming clear to her.

“Shirley is real,” Jamie said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Thank you, Shirley.  I mean that on a lot of levels.”

Shirley nodded, retreating further into the doorway, where there was some shelter from the rain, arms hugged against her stomach.

“The Lambs aren’t here, right?” I asked Jamie.  “Just you.”

“They went back to Radham.”

I exhaled.  “Probably for the best.”

“On a lot of levels,” Jamie echoed me.

I nodded.

“At the risk of sounding like Hayle as he conducts his metrics tests and scratches notes on his clipboards, on a scale of one to ten, how close to back are you?”

“Ten is I’m one-hundred percent me again?”  I asked.  At Jamie’s nod of confirmation, I stopped to think, conducting a careful self assessment.  I was still working on getting my brain up to speed, opening up my senses, and wrapping my head around the greater situation.

“Eight,” I said, without a lot of confidence.  My eyes roved until I spotted her, standing off to one side, in the shadows to one side of the little covered shed that served as an entry point to the stairway.  Evette, a short distance from Shirley.

I willed her to go away, and she remained where she was.

Go away, I thought the words at her with force, with all the will I could muster.  It felt like a feeble effort.  Not because I didn’t consider myself as someone with willpower, but it was a hard to exercise a muscle with no concrete feedback to it.

Evette remained where she was, her strange face angled so she could watch me with overlarge eyes, hair framing her face.

Other Lambs scattered the area.  I suspected they wouldn’t be any more inclined to go away than Evette was.

“Eight,” I said, more firmly.  “I don’t think a ten is possible anymore.”

I shivered.  The words sounded alien to my ears, as if I didn’t believe them, even as I knew they were true.

“Let’s work to keep you at an eight,” Jamie said.

“Sounds good,” I said.  Then, only minutes away from abandoning a crazed campaign at avoiding reality, I turned my mind away from that topic.  “Let’s not go down the stairs.  There’s a noble down there, and I think he’d be the type to tear my arms off in the same way a proper little monster of a child would tear wings off of a fly or whiskers off of a cat.  Or sit on me.”

“There aren’t many other options than down, Sy,” Jamie said.  “The nearest building is still too far to jump over to.  Do you want to go up?”

I gave him a look.  I wagged my finger at him, taking on a mock stern tone.  “Now don’t you go playing tricks on me, Jamie.  Just because I’m in dire need of a meal and I’m not as sane as I’ve ever been, don’t go thinking you can convince me we can sprout wings like some villain in one of those books you read.”

“I’m not saying we should sprout wings, Sy, I’m talking about the rope.  The one I used to get to this roof?”

I turned my head, taking in the rope.  It had been lassoed to a gargoyle in the modern style, and it was tied at the upper end, to something on the roof of the adjacent building.  Done up in the style of a court jester, face leering, nose too long and vaguely suggestive of something that wasn’t a nose.

It would take too long to climb.

“We’ll swing across,” I said.  “Get in through a window over there.”

“I’m out of rope, and we need something to pull the rope back after using it.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Not a problem.  Watch the stairwell, Shirley.  Jamie, untie the rope.”

I pulled off my shirt, drew a scalpel from my pocket, and began cutting the fabric.  It was like peeling an orange, keeping it all in one piece.  One shirt, reduced to one long ribbon.

I saw Jamie eyeing me, and raised an eyebrow.

“Your scar,” he said, as he undid the rope.

“We almost match,” I said.

“Was thinking that, and was thinking about your propensity for ending up shirtless.”

“Don’t act like you don’t like that habit of mine,” I said.

I could see the reaction that got.  The blinks, the mental skip as his brain failed to get traction.

“If that’s too far, let me know,” I said, cutting at the shirt.  “I don’t know about any of this.  I’m playing this by ear, because I have absolutely no context for how to do this.  I don’t want to touch sensitive territory, or get hopes up, or…”

I trailed off.

Shirley looked at Jamie.  “I wondered if that had anything to do with the break between you two.”

“Yeahh,” Jamie sighed out the word.

I finished shredding the shirt, watching the two carefully, trying to get a sense of the situation.

“Was I not supposed to say anything?” I asked.  “Because I figured, it’s Shirley, so…”

“It’s Shirley, and obviously Shirley would know if anyone knew.”

“Obviously,” I said.  Shirley had gotten to know us at the brothel, and between the fags there, Shirley’s comfort with them, and the curious fondness of the matron for Jamie… Shirley would know if anyone knew, and people had to have known.

“That part of it is fine,” Jamie said.  “I’m more stumped about the other thing you said.  How about I’ll let you know when I figure it out?”

“Sure.  On to other topics, like getting ourselves to safer ground,” I said.  I approached Jamie and tied the cloth ribbon to the rope.

“That’s going to break,” he said.

“You go first, then Shirley,” I said.  “I can climb down the outside of the building, find another way across, if I have to.  And if you’re gone and it’s just Shirley and me, then I can explain it.”

Jamie frowned.

“Don’t frown at me.  I’m not trying to get rid of you.  I’m-”

“I get it, I get it,” Jamie said.  “I just don’t like this process here.”

“Someone a long way down just stuck their head over to look up,” Shirley called over.

Jamie investigated the ribbon I provided.  He reached out for the scalpel, I took the rope, and Jamie started cutting at the bottom of his shirt, creating a ribbon of his own.

“How many floors down are they?” I asked.

“Five, I’m guessing,” Jamie said.

“Five sounds right,” Shirley confirmed.  “I don’t know if anyone’s higher up than the guy who peeked.”

“Based on the time I saw you and the time you showed up,” Jamie said, “Assuming no breaks along the way?”

“We walked some.  It got tiring.”

“Based on that, discounting the stitched, which would slow them down, giving them the benefit of a doubt… five seemed accurate enough.  I don’t think there will be a group that far ahead of that guy,” Jamie said.

He tied the makeshift ribbon to the existing ribbon, judged the length, then gave me a nod, handing the ribbon to me.

He gripped the rope, then stepped over the side.

I was careful to move to the edge, almost following him over, one arm extended with the ribbon firmly gripped.  I didn’t want it to end up too short and to be yanked from my grip.  That would be a disaster.

Jamie’s feet stopped him from faceplanting against the wall.  He held the rope as he walked over to the nearest open window, then climbed inside.

A moment later, after the place had been cleared, he gave me the signal.

It felt good to see the gesture.  Familiar and comfortable.

I carefully drew the ribbon back, pulling the rope back across the gap.  It was heavy, the ribbon thin by necessity, and there was a fear that the ribbon would prove too frail.

That fear grew in the instant before my hand gripped the end of the rope and pulled it over.  Holding it like this, rain-slick, while standing so close to the edge, it stirred that vertigo again.

“Shirley,” I said.  “Your turn.”

She hurried across the roof.  She balked as she approached the edge.

“Come on,” I said.

“It’s something, isn’t it?  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drop like that in my life,” she said, securing her grip on the wet rope.

“Nope,” I said.  “How close are they?”

“Close.”

“Then don’t jump yet.  Hold on.”

I grabbed the second of the three canisters from my belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it at the stairs.  Buying time.  With that done, I took the ribbon.

“Go,” I said.

She, to her credit, wasted no time.

She turned slightly away from the wall as she swung.  On impact with the wall, catching it with one foot and spinning wildly, she dropped, her grip slipping on the rope before she managed to catch herself.

She gave me a look, very wide-eyed in a ‘did you see that’ way, before she got one foot on a windowsill, found the opportunity to secure her grip, and walked over to where Jamie was leaning out of the window.

The moment she let go of the rope, I began reeling it in.

I was halfway there when a warbeast, leash still attached to its collar, lunged through the cloud of gas at the top of the stairwell.

Corinth Crown’s warbeasts had been like maned wolves.  Radham favored creatures that looked like something had taken the more aggressive aspects of a mammoth, bull, and bear and scaled the end result to elephantine proportions.

This, at least, was something else.  It was headless, and its limbs and body seemed to be a collection of the musculature of the abdomen and the arm, in how the parts intertwined and fit together in a very purposeful engineering.

An elegant structure of muscle only partially covered by chitin, with spike-like limbs.

It huffed, then shook itself, reacting to the gas.  Where its neck was supposed to be, there was only a hole, with irregular, thorn-like spikes there and on the inside walls.

It galloped toward me, and I was left with no choice but to haul back hard on the ribbon.  No care given, no worry about snapping it – I pulled the rope closer to me and threw myself closer to it, over the edge.

On an instinctive level, I knew the rope wouldn’t swing close enough to me.  I was working against gravity and it was heavy with the rainwater.

It was a feat that I wouldn’t have been able to manage thirty minutes to an hour ago.  I still held the ribbon in my left hand, and my left foot went out as I twisted in the air, the side of my shoe catching the ribbon.  I used a kick of my leg to pull the rope closer, and caught it with my right hand.

I didn’t have time to fully secure my grip or adopt the right pose.  I hugged the rope close to my body, gripping it with one hand and both thighs before I hit the face of the building.

The muscle-and-chitin warbeast wasted no time in flinging itself over the edge.

It landed a short distance below and to one side of me, with all of its claws perfectly positioned to find holds and gaps on the face of the building – where window frame met window and where there were gaps between stones.  It should have bounced off and fallen to the street below, but instead, it simply embedded itself into the wall.  A four-legged, three-hundred pound, abdomen-less spider.

In the time it took me to shift my grip and get both hands securely on the rope, it asserted its position, and with a clicking sound, began making its way up to me with alarming speed.

I pulled a pin from the sole remaining canister, leaving it where it was at my belt, and began half-climbing, half-running along the outside of the wall.

The gas that billowed from the canister drifted down to the warbeast.  It had to take a detour to get out and away from the gas, which bought me seconds to climb up further.

It had circled down and around to my left to approach me from the side the gas wasn’t falling from.  I wasn’t in a position to turn the gas on it again.  It wouldn’t buy me any meaningful amount of time, compared to what it cost me, now.

I wondered at my odds with a knife in hand, one hand on a rope, against one of the finer specimens of a warbeast I’d seen to date.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to see my odds.  A piece of furniture fell from above; a dense bedside table or a clock too large to be a mantlepiece and too small to be a grandfather clock.  It struck the warbeast, and knocked it from the wall.

I hurried to climb up to the source.  Once I reached the window, Jamie and Shirley pulled me inside more than I’d managed to climb up.  The moment I was inside, I placed the canister on the windowsill and closed the window, so the canister was sitting outside.

“Signaling where we are?” Jamie asked.

“More like I’m trying to keep more from following,” I said.  “Lose the scent trail, or muck with whatever senses they rely on.”

We backed away from the window, looking up and over.

By the time we’d reached the bedroom wall furthest from the window, there were two more of the spike warbeasts at the edge of the roof we’d just left, perched and tense, rain streaming off of them.

They leaped, and the three of us turned, exiting the bedroom, cutting through the apartment, and entering the hallway proper of the apartment building.

“Ground level?” Jamie asked.

“Think so.  Or close to.  I rigged a whole squadron of the stitched to explode, instead of producing gas.  Mauer’s out there too, of course.  He’s got the guns, but I can’t imagine he wants to fire willy-nilly.  What I’m hoping is that we can blow it up.  Do enough damage to the Crown forces that Mauer feels compelled to seize the opportunity.”

“What do we do about Mauer then?  He’s far away, and crossing that ground isn’t going to be easy.”

“Leave him,” I said.  “Original plan was to let them get each other bloody, set them against each other and then capitalize on weaknesses and opportunity.  But now we’re here, Crown isn’t too enamoured with us, if Mauer wants to go to town, I’m happy to let him.”

“We let him live?” Jamie asked.

I could hear the doubt in his voice, the question.  It matched my own.

“I’m not sure either,” I said.

The smoke canister on the windowsill had forced the warbeasts to take a detour.  They’d slipped into other rooms and apartments, and from the sounds of it, were tearing through doors and walls, were navigating rooms and hallways.  Somewhere along the line, they hadn’t found another entrance to pursue us or appear out of nowhere and chase.  No heads meant little capacity to reason or be inventive, it seemed.

They were hunters, mechanical, simple and incredible in performing the one task they were meant for, but they didn’t test boundaries or break ground on their own.

We made our way down to the third floor before stopping to rest.  We approached a window at the end of one hallway and peeked out.

Peace.  Conflict hadn’t broken out.  Stitched were parked and waiting, out of sight from the building Mauer was supposedly in.  Squadrons and soldiers were ready, and any number of vans had warbeasts waiting within.  Custom made for this task.

Shirley took a seat further down the hallway, staying clear of the window, giving us some space.

“I gave them direction on what to do to corner Mauer,” I said.  “A lot of those same tools, they won’t really slow me down.  Warbeasts that make disruptive noise, stitched that explode into clouds of poison gas, parasites, stitched that run fast…”

“What can you do about stitched that run fast?”

“Stitched that are new and heavily modified?  They won’t have the same programming or alterations that advanced stitched do.  The old weaknesses-”

“Weaknesses hold.  I get it.  Fire.”

“I don’t anticipate a problem.  That said, I didn’t expect you two to be along for the whole thing.  You’re not immune in the same ways.”

“We’re not,” Jamie said.  “I was watching everyone come and go.  I have a pretty good idea of where our enemies are.  I wish that meant I could see a good way out and away.  But they really want Mauer dead.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “That’s a thing.  I investigated about what Emmett said.  Gomorrah.  Dead end.  Then I sort of told the Infante that Mauer was also chasing the Gomorrah thing, which he was, and I sort of hinted that Mauer didn’t reach a dead end.”

“And that relates to them really wanting Mauer dead.  There’s something to this?”

“There’s a lot to this,” I said.  I exhaled.  “It’s nice to be able to talk about it, finally, work it out with a set of listening ears to help me figure it out.”

Another vehicle parked outside.  The guy driving it looked like military, and the stitched horse looked sturdier than the usual.  The vehicle probably held another squad of soldiers within.

Jamie glanced back over his shoulder at Shirley, who had her shoes off and was rubbing her feet.  “The Gomorrah thing.  I talked to Emmett about it.  The missing children.  The Academy takes them.  Auctions them off as prime material for experiments?”

I gestured to him and myself, then back again.  “Prime material.  But, there’s more to it.  Because when someone like Mauer or Fray dig too deep, then the Crown steps in, and all possible evidence gets removed.  A hundred or more people killed, Academy asset and child alike, to silence something on a scale and level that the Academy wouldn’t normally care that much about.”

“More than a hundred?” Jamie asked.

“Hard to count.  I’d like you to visit the location with me, if they don’t erase it completely.  Your brain would be admirably suited to the task of deciphering that particular mess.”

“I’d be happy to lend my brain.”

“It’s a good brain,” I said.

I wanted to get the banter going again.  I wanted to find our stride, much as we’d had it before.

When it came to the task at hand, at least, we were more or less on the same page.  It was in the easy companionship that trust had been more or less broken.

This wasn’t easy.

“I keep wanting to joke or poke fun at you,” I said, staring out of the window.

“Joking and poking fun is good.”

“Or make witty remarks, or tease, or pick on you.”

“Sure,” Jamie said.

“And when I could bind up my brain and keep things neatly boxed up and organized… that was doable.  And it felt normal and friendly.”

“What does it feel like now?”

“Less normal and friendly,” I said.  “When I want normal and friendly.  I don’t want to give the wrong ideas or trigger some bad reflex.”

“It’s fine, Sy,” Jamie said.

“No, it really isn’t.”

“We can talk about it later.  I do want to have a discussion.  Put this to rest, maybe.”

“It’s not something that lends itself to rest, because it’s not a dilemma that can be reconciled or fixed, don’t you get it?” I asked.  “And it’s not fine either.  You do realize that the first time we had a serious talk on the subject, the first Jamie went and disappeared forever?  Then the second time we had a serious talk on it, I went and almost disappeared forever?”

“I realize.”

“You’re my friend.  And I want that, it’s good and you’re a good person and… I need to find out where the lines are drawn, and so long as there’s this part of me that’s afraid of stepping too far and saying something and triggering that reflex or opening the box that should not be opened… I know I screwed up, Jamie.  You know that, right?  I’m sorry too?”

“It was mucky.  But really, it’s something to be talked about later.”

“I’m afraid of overstepping and I’m afraid of understepping.  I don’t want to be reserved and holding back, because what we need, especially here, surrounded, with so much at stake, is we need to dance.  To move in sync.”

“And there’s no sync,” Jamie said.  He sighed.

“I’m worried there isn’t, or it won’t be there when it counts,” I said.  “Gut feeling, is all.”

“Gut feelings are important, but-”

“Jamie,” I said.  I had to pause, find the phrasing.  “I put a lot of myself into figuring out how to work with the other Lambs.  You included.  Those gut feelings, there’s an awful lot of foundation they’re rooted in.  A lot more on the gut, a little less on the feeling.”

Jamie drew in a deep breath, then sighed.

“Stakes are high, situation is dangerous, there’s no easy exit with this many people packed into the area, and the fact is, we have to figure this out.  The inability to banter properly is a symptom of a larger problem.  One that will see us killed or captured within the hour if we don’t resolve it.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “That’s fair.”

“I’m just saying, if there’s talking to do, maybe we talk it out before we tackle this,” I said, gesturing at the window.

As if prompted by the gesture, a bird flew past the window.

A very large bird.

“Shit on a mad bat,” I said, stepping back from the window.  Jamie mirrored me, backing away.  “Shoes on, Shirley.”

“What was that?” Jamie asked.

“That would be the Falconer’s bird,” I said.  “A pet of one of the Infante’s charges.”

“Ah,” Jamie said.  “Shitty bat indeed.”

The bird flew past the window again.

“Confirms it, that.  She knows where we are,” I said.  “And she will be harder to slip away from than the spike beasts.”

“Noted,” Jamie said.  He was frowning.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I was thinking it would be better to run than to fight this one, but I’m not seeing a good avenue to run.”

“I came to that conclusion forever ago, way before we jumped from the rooftop,” I said.  “It’s why I said I wanted to do this.  See it through.”

Jamie had the decency to look annoyed.

“You did that because you wanted to,” he told me.  “Not because you saw a lack of options.”

“That’s a pack of lies,” I told him, trying to be lighthearted, feeling the gap between us in the process.

“Conversations and figuring out your motives back there are going to have to wait,” Jamie commented.

“Sure,” I said.  “Nobles incoming.  Probably.”

“Probably.  With that in mind, how do you feel about being bait?”

“Do I ever say no to being bait?” I asked.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.14 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.14

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Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the rain momentarily let up.  It was a trick of the weather, a shift in the already high winds that lifted the raindrops up, holding them in the air, before letting them drop.

A moment of relief in the patter, followed by a sharp rap as the rain resumed.

I flung myself out of the window, arms out to the sides, eyes wide, my open, borrowed shirt fluttering around behind me.

I landed on the top of one of the carriages, shoes sliding on the rain-slick roof of the vehicle, impact startling the horse.  I managed to avoid sliding off, even with the height and angle of my jump.

Heads were turning.  I could see the greater picture now.  Looking through the windows, we had only been able to see a narrow portion of things.

Nobody shot me or shot at me.  Not right away.  That had been a concern.

The group that Jamie had estimated would be near the front doors, was there, out of sight of the window and of Mauer’s position.  There would be the people from further upstairs moving down, some people moving up, with Shirley and Jamie caught between.

They weren’t the only group he’d been able to identify.  There were two other groups the Falconer could be leading, based on what we already knew about the nobles looking to lead the army that was forming to surround Mauer.  Jamie had anticipated where and when they would turn up, based on distance, the speed of her ‘falcon’, and the speed of the vehicles on the road.  Vehicles at the end of the road changed course as I appeared, immediately looking to park, so the occupants could get out.  Odds were good that Jamie had been fairly close to exactly right.

The first of the people here and there started to react.  The hesitation had been fed by the fact that they hadn’t wanted to reveal their positions or presence to Mauer.  Everything had to be done out of sight, often with other obfuscation, and deciding to stop was a call that had to be made by people at the top.  That meant there had to be communication, even if it was a glance on the part of the subordinate and a nod from the officer in charge.

The result was as if I’d hurled myself from that window into water in the greatest of cannon balls, but the splash was delayed by a full five seconds.  The ‘splash’ was shouts, orders, and people moving.  The group by the door broke away, moving to chase.  Vehicles got in the way of other vehicles.

I hopped down off the carriage, onto the road, and ran, feet splashing in puddles as I crossed the street.  Horses, carts, and pedestrians provided some measure of cover.

Stitched exited one of the covered wagons on the far end of the street.  The wagon was the sort meant for the transport of goods, and it had hosted ten or so stitched soldiers, all armed.

I reached to my belt and grabbed a can.

“Grenade!” I shouted, as I threw it at the group.

The stitched reacted, automatic, their instincts trained for a battlefield.  They parted, moving to take cover, leaving me more or less free to run straight at the ‘grenade’ – nothing more than a tin can with a key punched into the top.  I moved right into the group of stitched, who were settling behind cover, ducking, or jogging away as well as a muscle bound stitched could.

I could see the two in the group that weren’t reacting the same way.  They followed the group, but they weren’t reacting like it was a grenade.  Stupider, less trained, their outfits basic, with no jacket and only some of the equipment.

The commanding officer, still in the vehicle, began to shout out orders.

Each of the stitched had bands at their arm.  I had to hope Evette had guessed right and that I’d remembered right.

“Tempest to field,” I said.

I had only a momentary glimpse of the man’s eyes widening eyes before one of the two stitched bulged violently and exploded.  Meaty bits went flying this way and that, and a heavy gas cloud expanded outward.  I disappeared into the midst of it.

Passing Gordon as I made my way into the alley, I was careful to grab some of the garbage, pallets, and milk crates stacked against the wall and tip them over behind me.  It gave away my position with the racket of it, but that wasn’t too important.

Gas and obstacles behind me, my way forward mostly clear.  They wouldn’t be following.  Not easily.

Not the people.

The concern was the experiments.  The nobles.

And, as it turned out, the squad of soldiers who were gathered in the alley, safely out of sight of Mauer.  They were sitting here and there, many smoking.  A

I slowed.

“Stay right there,” one of the soldiers called out, pointing his rifle with attached bayonet at me.

I raised my hands, my mind going over the scenarios.

They were too relaxed.  Their body language suggested they were familiar with each other.  Nobody had run to them, bringing news of trouble.

I shifted my expression and body language, and I approached them with little concern apparent.  “I’m Sylvester.”

“Who?” one of the soldiers at the side asked me.

“I’m part of the reason we’re here.  I’m helping set up Mauer for the Infante.”

“The kid,” the soldier who’d spoken first said.  “Right.”

“Sure,” I said, with a bit of uncertainty.  “Something’s up.  There’s trouble brewing.  Someone used gas, and it looks like it was Mauer.  He knows we’re here.”

The soldier who was doing most of the talking looked at one or two of the others.  Lieutenants?  Seconds in command?  Friends?

“You’re supposed to head west, move around, wait for a horn.  If Mauer flanks us, they want you ready to move in.  If you’re here, you might get mistaken for Mauer’s men and shot.”

“In the briefing, same breath they mentioned you, they said to ignore you.  If we had any suspicion at all…”

He asserted his grip on his rifle, pointing it at me.

“…We’re supposed to shoot you.”

I allowed only a hint of confusion to show.  “And you’re suspicious?”

“What are you even doing here?”

“What I’m supposed to be doing?” I said, trying very much to sound like I wasn’t sure what he wasn’t understanding.  “Outmaneuvering Mauer on behalf of the High Lord Infante.”

I touched the space over my heart, declining my head in the faintest of bows.

The man did the same, moving his rifle to tap it against the badge at his breast, head lowering.  To do otherwise would be to suggest that I respected the Infante more than he did.

To shoot me, after making such a suggestion, it would say all of the wrong things about their leadership over their unit.  The military wasn’t as political as the world of professors, but there were little realities of politicking, and he would have poisoned his leadership.  Any one of his soldiers that didn’t like him could mention the slight to the Crown and it would have spread through the rumor mill.

Lillian stood to one side, watching all of this.

All of that was a series of ingrained fears and worries, patterns of behavior long established by the man’s path to being captain.  Even if it was archaic and rarely performed outside of formal circumstance, if someone showed respect to the nobility, he did the same.  To question or to hesitate meant he was doing something wrong.

He did it and I’d made him do it, and in that, I’d achieved the upper hand in a subtle, infinitesimal way.

It had the added benefit of ensuring that the gun wasn’t pointed at me anymore.

“I’m not following your order,” he said.  Showing he wasn’t a pushover, that he didn’t believe me.  He was still suspicious.  He’d lost two small battles to me in my verbal rebuke and in the bowing.  This was his defiance.

His small defiance.  It propped him up, but it made him weaker, not stronger.

I could just barely hear the noise as someone pushed crates and pallets aside behind me.  I had pursuers.

“Fine,” I said.  “Just be on your guard.  I’ve got things to do, and Mauer’s close.”

I was sure to turn and make my departure before he could make an argument, point that gun at me again, and reaffirm his leadership.  Not as graceful as I might have liked, but it would have to do.

I wasn’t sure if he’d shout after me, tell me to stop.  He didn’t.

“Your funeral,” I said, under my breath.  I pitched it to be heard by the people at the fringes of the group, and not by the captain.

I didn’t look back as I moved on, taking the first right available.

One in five odds that there would be a discussion behind me, that they would actually follow the order I’d given them, and vacate.  Anyone following wouldn’t be able to ask them which direction I’d gone in.

Others were coming down other streets and alleys.  I avoided them as best as I could.  It was midday, but it was gloomy and the rain obscured the scene.

The nobles would be coming.  Montgomery, the Falconer, Augustus.  One, two, or three of them, potentially.  I was laying odds on having to deal with Montgomery again, and having the falconer close.

For this plan to work, we had to be in the right places at the right time.  Jamie had estimated things, but it was impossible to look at the nobles, knowing so very little about their capabilities, and figure out any way to deal with them.

I was prone to forgetting complex directions, so my plan of action was a simple one.  I was to cross the street, enter the alleys, pass six buildings, turn right, pass six buildings, turn right, and so on.

If I reached the street I’d been on, I was to cross it.

Which was bound to be a nightmare.  The hardest part of this.

But I was excited.  My senses were sharp.  My thoughts were falling in line with few stumbles or catches.  The Lambs were omnipresent but they didn’t interfere, and they didn’t look incomplete or horrifying.

I had an enemy, I had a goal, I had a greater plan in the works, mysteries to solve.  But it wasn’t a desperate, dangerous scrabbling to hurt the enemy, to pursue my goals, to solve the mysteries, because stopping meant falling into a chasm.

No.  The drop wasn’t nearly so far, if someone was there.  The ground, so to speak, was only a foot below my dangling feet.

I chose my path carefully, used the terrain, used the rain and the haze of moisture that it produced, water streaming off of me, soaking me from skin to bone and back again.  I watched for soldiers and I watched the sky.

I saw the Falconer’s bird, as it flew into the alley, flapping its wings to pause, taking in the scene, and began following me.

This danged thing.

Where were you, bird?  You disappeared for a while.  Reported to your master, then came to look for us again.  Did you bother Jamie?  Did you scare Shirley?

My eyes were opened as wide as I could get them, to better take in everything, see in the gloom and the rain.  My only blinks were really the reflexive ones, in reaction to the rain.

As I reached out to a windowsill of an open window, gripping it hard to hurdle over and inside, I saw the great black bird diving for me.

I let go of the windowsill, pulling my hand back and away, falling inside the kitchen there rather than gracefully leaping through.  The talon raked the base of the window where my hand had been, and flecks of water and wood splinters flew into the air.

I heard its cry, and I imagined it was a shrill, eardrum-piercing cry of frustration.  It was certainly loud.  Even after it ended, there was a kind of echo in my ears as my ears rang from the volume.

Before it could reorient and fly into the house, I hauled the window shut, then shut a second window.

That cry – everyone within two city blocks might have heard it.  The Falconer certainly would have.

The bird arrived, flapping violently before settling on the windowsill, the far side of the glass.  It stared at me, then shrieked again, a sound so loud and sharp it made my brain hurt.

“Yeah, get plucked, bird.  You going to come through that window?” I asked, backing away.

It rapped its beak against the glass.  One motion, sharp and backed by the full physique of its dense, well engineered body, and the glass shattered wholesale.  It flapped its wings, taking off.

I reached for my waist, and I drew a gun.

Except I didn’t really have a gun.  I’d sought to fake the bird out, force an instinctive reaction, much as I had with the stitched.

The thing didn’t even give a dang.  As I turned on my toes to scramble for the nearest doorway, my brain dwelt on why.  Did it not care about me drawing a gun because it was that smart?  That perceptive?  Was it capable of figuring out that I didn’t actually have a weapon?

Or was it tough enough that a bullet wouldn’t necessarily kill it before it killed me?

There were other possibilities, but I had to consider that this was a noble’s pet.  Hubris had been a beautifully engineered piece of work, dangerous to underestimate, smarter than all get out.  There was no reason to think this was anything less.

I would assume the worst, which meant assuming this thing was the best piece of work I could imagine it as, if not better.

At least it didn’t have hands.

Before it could fly at me and tear into me with talons long enough to reach into my chest and pluck out my recently repaired heart, I passed through a doorway and slammed that door behind me.

I heard the impact as it struck the door.  It was a sound like one I’d heard countless times before.  A sharp object striking wood with confidence.

Then silence.

I ran down the hallway, making my way to the front door of the house.

My hand had only just made contact with the doorknob when the bird came through the glass of the window by the staircase, to my left.  Its wings were spread wide, making it seem far larger than it already had, and it had already been the size of a proper attack dog.

I threw myself back and away, landing on my back on the rug that ran down the hallway.  The bird was a blur, talons raking the door in passing before it flew into the living room.  The doorway to the living room was an arch, with no doors for me to slam shut.

It knew exactly where I was, and it had gotten out of the building and around in time to intercept me.  It likely hadn’t hesitated longer than an eye’s blink before tearing away from the door and heading around to intercept.

Even that attack, slashing at the door with its talons- it knew full well that I wasn’t at the front door anymore, that I’d thrown myself to the ground.  It hadn’t actually been trying to hit me.  It was a show of strength, intimidation.

It perched on the mantlepiece, staring me down, extending that show.

“I’m not a fan of you,” I informed the bird.  “You’re too big, too sharp, and too fast.”

It flapped its wings and adjusted its footing, but it looked to be a show, just exercising them, posturing.

Then it shrieked at me.

I winced.  “And you’re loud.  Does your master put up with that?”

I wanted the creature to make the first move, so I could react.

The problem was, it seemed content to wait, let me act, and then it would probably scream at me, take off, and fly right for me.  It would scalp me, slash my throat, and I would have to deal with blood loss while making a run for it, if I even got that far.

Or I could wait, and the Falconer would saunter over here and kill me.

The tight confines, the countless little objects here and there, the pieces of furniture, the doors, they were supposed to be to my advantage.  This wasn’t a space that bird was supposed to be able to maneuver in.  It couldn’t even fully spread its wings in the hallway.

Why, then, was it so damn hard to think of a good way to deal with it?

Okay.  Have to do something.  Jamie and Shirley are waiting, and timing does matter.

I didn’t climb to my feet.  By the time I did that, the bird would be on top of me.  Instead, I raised my feet up, slowly, my eye on the bird, watching carefully.

I jumped to my feet, bringing my legs down as I brought my upper body up and forward.  I had to bring a leg back to catch myself from falling backward, but I was able to lunge for the front door.

It would be locked.  It was a two-step action, to unlock it and haul it open.  Another two steps to move through the doorway and close the door behind me.

And at no point would I actually be rid of the bird.  It would exit through the window it had entered through and be on top of me in seconds.

Four steps was still too many.  Seconds was a reprieve, time to think and act when this encounter moved at double that tempo.  Every half-second mattered, every action had to flow into another.

My rolling to my feet became a lunge for the door.  That became a jump, where I set one foot on top of the doorknob, running up, twisting around, aiming to go over the Falcon, utilizing the blind spot of the archway and wall that separated the hall from the living room.

My head grazed the ceiling, and I found myself face to face with the bird, which within an armspan of me.

I’d been out-anticipated and outsmarted by an animal with a head the size of two fists pressed together.

I struck for one wing – the most vulnerable and least sharp part of the thing, and hit it, but as gravity pulled me down, the bird maintained its height.  Talons raked my scalp and caught the side of my neck.

I’d have blood running down my face and the back of my shirt, and that neck wound would bleed like an alkie’s asshole, but he hadn’t gotten anything vital.

My eye was on the prize.  I landed, shifted to face a right angle, and sprinted to the window by the stairs, diving through it.

The bird was a second behind me, but it didn’t dive for me.

I tumbled to the ground, got my feet under me, and rose from the tumble to a standing position, reaching out for the wall to steady myself.

I saw the flapping of those great black wings in the corner of my eye, and I turned to look.

The Falconer had arrived.  Tall, raven haired, dressed in a white silk shirt with black leather over it in something between armor and a corset.  Much as the shirt was constrained by the black leather, belts constrained her skirt, which was just short enough to show how tall her boots were. The boots matched the falconer’s glove she wore.  Her free hand, ungloved, held a saber.

Every piece of her was decorated, but it was subtle, not ostentatious as nobles so often were.  Etching in the leather, stitching in the silk.  It drew the eye, made that part of me that wanted to investigate want to pay attention and discern meaning, whereupon I only fell into the trap and her dangerous allure.

Her eyes resembled those of her bird.

“My lady,” I said, instinctively.  One of my hands was pressed to my neck wound.  “I must say, I am not a fan of your bird.”

She advanced, silent, while her falcon flapped its wings without taking off, shifting its footing, much as it had done on the mantlepiece.

I backed away, moving in the direction of the street where the collected soldiers and stitched were.

Even if I lured her out into the street, the angle of the street and the placement of buildings meant that Mauer’s snipers wouldn’t have a clear shot.  There could be other snipers in other buildings, but if she was here, her bird had likely searched the area, and I was betting they had other ways of clearing the buildings.

She raised her arm, and the bird took off, flying high.

Dang it.

I turned and ran, knowing that she was faster.

As I approached the street, however, I saw something glorious.

The haze of the rain was made even hazier by thick clouds of gas.  I could see the spatters of gore.  I could see people reeling, hands to their ears

Woe unto the birds.

This particular command phrase, in retrospect, was very fitting, considering who my current pursuers.

I ran straight into the fog of gas.

The Falconer leaped up onto the top of a carriage, then leaped across to the next.  Staying high, above the fog and the smoke, while still pursuing.

I saw one wagon with a slope leading down to the bench, rain-slick, and put it between myself and the Falconer.

She leaped, and I doubted she saw the slope before she was in the air.  She skidded on landing, momentum carrying her into the slope.

I watched her adjust her weight, the foot that was set lower on the roof sweeping in a sharp, focused half-circle, scraping the wet wood for maximum traction.  Not quite enough to stop her downward movement, but it slowed her enough that she could leap to the next carriage.  One that had a flatter top.

She had a gravity.  I was drawn to her, as if there was something about her that made me want to fight her, to engage in a contest.  The problem was that it was a contest I was doomed to lose.

Her expression was unreadable, her body language expressing nothing but danger and her intent to catch and murder me.  But it was the lack of anything at all that made me feel a moment’s panic, the certainty that another blade was drawing near.

I shifted my footing, switched direction, moving closer to her, ducking around another carriage, deeper into fog, and I nearly ran into the hooves of a horse that was fussing and panicking at the spreading gas and the misery it was inflicting.  Its owner had already left the scene.  Civilians were few and far between, if there were any.

The Falconer’s fell bird came down, shifting its trajectory to follow me.  I’d anticipated it, because the Falconer had been too calm, too measured in her advance even as I’d slowed down to watch her.  Anyone else with her capacity for killing would have reacted on some level, quickened her advance.

But the guillotine had already been coming down, and she had no reason to hurry.

I had to shift direction a second time, letting myself fall to the ground right next to the rearing, stomping horse, to avoid the bird’s talons.

The Falconer leaped, in perfect step with her pet, and I rolled, beneath and through the stomping hooves.  The puddling water I moved through made my already drenched clothing even heavier, pooling within it, weighing me down, pouring out and altering my balance every step of the way.

The Falconer’s saber had been buried a half-foot into the road by her plunge.  With cool confidence, she stood, pulling it free with no effort at all.

Across the street, a stitched had already emerged from a covered wagon.  One stitched, but it had taken up the whole wagon.  Ten feet tall, it carried the floor of the wagon as a shield, wood reinforced by bands of metal and bolts as fat as my arm.  It was joined by a matching stitched, a second shieldbearer.  One had long hair, the other was bald, with a beard that reached its navel.  Both wore the same robes, waterproof coverings that sheltered them from the rain, augmented with armor here and there.  Both steamed as if the water that was on them boiled on contact.  Not that it did, but such was the effect.

I had to run between them to get where I needed to be.

I was running, only running, trying to get away.  I’m a chicken that needs desperately to get to the other side.

One of the shieldbearers raised their shield high overhead, holding only the bottom end.  The other raised its shield overhead, but held it horizontally, not vertically.

August dropped down from a window much higher than the second story window I’d leaped from.  Shielded from Mauer’s gunfire by the wall the long haired giant had created, given a platform to land on by the bearded one, he landed with both hands and one foot on the ground.

As I passed between the giants, beneath August, he stood, turning to face me.  Anyone else would have been shattered from foot to hip by such a landing, but he didn’t seem to have even paused.

Streams of water and wisps of gas flowed off of me as I made my way to the sidewalk, passing into the alleyway.

August, deposited on the ground, was supported and protected by his giants, the Falconer joined by her bird, as they entered the alleyway.  August said something under his breath, and one of his giants gave the pair of nobles a protective ceiling, using the great shield that was as broad as a cargo-bearing carriage and as tall as it was long.

It sounded like a rockslide, starting at one end of the street, sweeping to the next.  A series of detonations, one after another.  The nobles stopped, looking back and over.

I kept moving away, bracing myself.

The explosion swept over the street, and it caught something.  It wasn’t the other gas, which had enough methane to keep the chain reaction alive.  No.  One or several of the wagons that had been parked along the street had borne gunpowder, or explosives, or fuel.

Stitched were capable of burning.  They were dry, combustible.  Wagons were wood.  Soldiers carried grenades.

Whatever the case, that ominous rumble as the methane caught and was consumed in a rolling flame, it was soon punctuated by the crack and the blast of real explosives going off, each with their individual shockwaves and ripple effects.

I stumbled, tripping and falling as I wrapped my head around what was happening.  The nobles, their giants and their pet bird, they were closer to the street and the nearest wagon loaded with munitions.  The shockwave hit them.  The nobles were bowled over, the giants staggered, one of their robes setting alight.  The bird went down in that same lick of flame.

The goal had been to stir the pot, to give people reason to leave or be evacuated.  It also, in the roundabout path, would mean that people who had been further away would gather here, that numbers would be more concentrated.  All of that required buying time.

It wouldn’t be a guarantee, some civilians would have been caught in the blast.

The act of buying time had also given Jamie time to get in position, to spring the methane trap with the next of the command words.

The nobles had been bowled over.  The bird and one giant had been burned.

I picked myself up, and climbed to my feet, still breathing hard from the running, shaking from exhaustion that was half due to exertion and half due to my not having wood on the fire, food in the belly.

They remained on the ground for long moments.

I waited, watching.

August was the first to move.  The Falconer stirred after that.

Not even looking up at me or at her pet, she gestured at the bird, and she made a short whistling sound.

The bird moved, shifting its stance.  Wings stretched forward, and it crawled to its master on its bladed wing-tips and talons, much as the spike warbeasts had moved on four spikes.  No longer able to fly, but entirely capable of operating as an attack beast all the same.  Just as resilient as the noble it served.

The Falconer put one hand on its back, and rose to her feet, head still hanging, hair forming a curtain in front of her face.

I’d seen all I needed to see, gotten the measure of the damage we’d managed to inflict, by way of how slowly they moved.

The nobles, I was sure, would chase, and they would be sure to make us answer this.

I ran for it.  I ran to Jamie, and with any luck, to where Mauer waited to capitalize on this opportunity.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.15 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

People could always be trusted to do the least sensible thing.  It was the middle of the day, and in response to a rollicking explosion, the people who were still at home were departing their residences, walking out into the street to get a look.

Many were women, homemakers, some were young children.

On taller buildings, many of the windows opened out and upward, forming a kind of cover overhead as people leaned out, craning their heads to see what was happening.

As I ran as fast as I was able from the source of the explosion, I drew attention.

“Run!” I called out.  Then, a few moments later, for the sake of those who hadn’t heard me “Run!”

The sentiment caught.

Good thing, too, because I could feel the impacts as the giants gave chase.

Their aim wasn’t me, however.  I crossed the street, and the first giant moved out into the street, raising his shield as a wall.

The second giant followed, offering further cover.  I couldn’t even see the nobles as the giants escorted them across the street.

Goal one was to get them in position where they were close to the street and I was far enough down the alley to be in the clear.  We hadn’t anticipated or accounted for the explosives in the other wagons, that had extended the damage.  I wasn’t sure if it was a pro or a con, though.  Hopefully there would be a point later on where I could take stock of the fallout from all of this.

I liked the mental image of standing on one of these tall buildings and looking down at what we’d wrought, while the Infante fussed.

But getting that far meant evading the nobles.  The closer I got to Mauer, the less free they would be to give chase.

That was goal three.  Getting them closer to Mauer.

Most of the traffic had stopped as a result of the explosions and then arrested further at the first appearance of the giants, but one carriage stood in their way.  With the shield in front of it, the giant didn’t even see the horse it ran into.  The carriage the horse was hitched to toppled.

The crash and the ensuing disruption might have bought me time.  The elements of the crowd that were lingering gave me some room to move.  The nobles were, by dint of the bodyguards, big.  I could thread the needle, weaving through the crowd, that was only just realizing they were in the way, and hope that the nobles would either show some conscience and avoid the worst of the crowd, or at least stumble on the bodies and wreckage left behind and slow down because of that.

I preferred the former to the latter, but I preferred living above all else.

It was telling, then, that the nobles chose to detour and slow down, and that I was able to put some distance between myself and them.

Good thing too, because for all of their injuries, they had caught up to me fast, and they would again.  I had little doubt they had more stamina than I did, too.

I rounded a corner, then crossed the street, weaving through traffic.  It wasn’t so dangerous – traffic at the end of the street close to where I had come from was stopping in reaction to the giants.  One automobile was on the street, and the thin tires squeaked on the road as it came to a wobbly stop.

I looked up and down the street, and I saw a carriage with a closed window, a cloth caught in it.

I checked over my shoulder to see that I wasn’t being watched, glanced up at the man with the heavy mustache and long whip that sat under the covered front seat, and I slipped inside.

“You made it,” Jamie said.  “I was worried.”

I flashed him and Shirley a grin as I closed the door and removed the cloth from the window.

“The bird didn’t see you?” he asked.

“No,” I said.  “It got burned.  But I think it could probably sniff us out, if the nobles can’t.  We should leave.”

Jamie nodded, stood, and opened his side door.  He leaned out the door, and said, “Get us away from here.  The faster the better.  Side streets are fine if you don’t think we’ll get bogged down, just keep us moving.”

The driver said something I couldn’t make out, and the carriage lurched.  We tilted uneasily as the wheels rode up on the curb, before we started moving briskly down an alley street, the walls of the buildings on either side precariously close to the sides of the carriage.

With nothing to look at outside the windows, Jamie focused on me.  He had to squint a bit in the gloom.  “That’s a lot of blood, Sy.”

“I’ve learned I really dislike birds.  I raised questions once upon a time about the Academy’s aversion to working on flying things.  But now I know.  Anything with wings is evil, through and through.”

“Let me look-”

I turned so he could see, and bowed my head so he could check my scalp.  “Detestable.  Probably dirty.  Can you imagine the dust that collects there?”

“They self-groom, Sy.”

That motherfucking avian doesn’t, I promise you that.  Birds eat bugs, too, don’t they?  You are what you eat, and bugs are pretty gross, y’know?”

“You’re rambling.  How much of that is you being goofy and how much is you being injured?”

“All goofy.”

“That’s fine, then.  You got cut up pretty badly there.  I’ve got some medical stuff.  Turn around there so I can work on you.”

I smiled, turning around in my seat so he could work.  He pulled out a small pocket medicine kit he’d had with him.

“I bet you brought that along in hopes of getting to put your hands on me,” I said.  “Tsk tsk.  Shameless fellow.”

Jamie sighed.

“Too far?”

“No, no.  Starting to realize why you self-censored.  You’re a horrific flirt.”

“You’re just now realizing this?  You’ve only really existed for, what, two years?  Two and a half?  And you spent most of that time seeing how I tormented Lillian.”

“I’m suddenly feeling a lot more sympathy for Lillian, and I had an abundance, before.”

“You know I used Wyvern to cultivate a mindset.  I cultivated a mindset where I prey on weakness.  It’s a reflex now, and people’s biggest weakness is that connection between their hearts and their pants.”

Jamie sighed, again.  He daubed at my neck wound.  “Put your hand there.  Fingers like… so.  So I can work, but so there’s some pressure.”

“But if it’s a problem, I can adjust.”

“I’d rather deal with you as you are, than deal with more of your adjustments,” Jamie said.

“I meant more of a normal sort of adjustment.  Learning how to keep my mouth shut and minimize the jokes.”

He pricked me with a curved needle, and threaded the first of the sutures.  “You used Wyvern to self-censor and you couldn’t stop the jokes altogether, Sy.  I think that’s a hopeless task.”

“Um,” Shirley said.

Jamie turned his head to look at her.  With my neck being worked on, I only moved my eyes.

“Self censoring?”  she asked.  “That’s the second time you mentioned it.”

“Oh,” I said.  “I used that drug I take, Wyvern, and altered how my brain worked, so I wouldn’t fuss Jamie too much.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “For the sake of Jamie’s sanity, really.  And for other reasons.”

“Now, with Sy actively working on undoing that censorship, I take it…?” Jamie trailed off, eyebrow quirked to suggest it was a question.

“Yup.”

“…He’s borderline intolerable.  There’s a balance to be struck,” Jamie said.

“That’s horrible,” Shirley said.  “The fact that the drug is a thing and that you had to do that, that you were able to do that?  That you were given the ability to do something that extreme when you’re still so young.  When I think about the ways I would have changed myself when I was your age… I’m… Is it wrong if I say I’m very sorry?” she asked.

I shrugged one shoulder in a small way, so as not to disturb Jamie’s stitching.  “We’re the product of horribleness.  The people we’ve been closest to in our lives are the product of horribleness.  The people who were chasing me are the engineers of horrible.  Or the bankrollers and aristocrats enforcing it, or… something.”

“Something,” Jamie said.

“I’m sorry you and the people you cared about have had to deal with all of that,” Shirley said, voice quiet.  “I know that sounds like very useless, petty words, compared to the magnitude of what you’re talking about.”

I knew where her words were coming from.  I knew that she’d dealt with her own, simpler sort of horrible.

“You’re good, Shirley.  Not to worry,” I said.

“Thank you, for your feelings, Shirley,” Jamie said.  “They’re appreciated.”

“Alright.  You’re welcome.”

Jamie tied off the stitches at my throat.

“I can do the ones on my own head,” I said.

“You can,” Jamie said, “I don’t know if that means you should.  Bend over.”

I snorted.

Jamie looked at Shirley.  “Help me.”

“He’s insufferable,” she said.

Exactly.”

Jamie put one hand on my shoulder and had me lean forward, so he could work on the top of my head, where the talons had scratched me.

I bit my tongue rather than make mention of the fact that I was staring into his lap, now.

“No opportunities to use the explosion?” Jamie asked.

“The blast set off other things,” I said.  “Our guess was off.  I got knocked to the ground.  I felt like if I went after them while they were down, they would jolt like a new stitched, reach out, and grab me.”

“It’s good if you go with your gut,” Jamie said.

“Done pretty well for me so far,” I said.  I sighed.  “I’m so tired of running all the time.”

“I know.”

“What I said before, about preying on weaknesses?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not sure the nobles here have any.  The pet bird didn’t have any.  The explosion roughed them up, but… they’re a step above the Baron and the Twins.  A few steps above.  Even with that, I wouldn’t say there’s a weak point to hit, or anything I can do or say that would affect them.”

“I’d offer something to help,” Jamie said, “But I don’t know much.  Augustus is close to the Infante, and is in the Infante’s neighborhood when it comes to the line of succession.  The way things unfold, he probably won’t ever wear the crown, barring incident.  Children are born, they’ll fill up the space between Augustus and the Crown, but… it’s not entirely out of the question?”

“Yeah.”

“From what I read in the news, he’s only just ventured out from noble holdings to take a hand in affecting the world.”

“Reminds me of the young nobles that I met on the train.  They were new to the world too.”

“Stems from the work they have done on them, I think.  They need time to recuperate, so they’re fully prepared and fully recovered by the first time they show their faces,” Jamie said.

“Can’t show the public the wrong face.”

“I wish I knew more about Augustus’ motivations,” Jamie said.  “But I read the newspapers, I read the books that cover modern history, and I’ve heard people talk, and… I have no idea.”

“He’s an extension of the Crown,” I said.  “I wonder if, the closer you get to the top, the less they seem like people.”

“Maybe.  The one with him, you called her the Falconer?”

“Yeah.”

“Closer to the Duke in general rankings, but kind of a youngest-daughter of the youngest-daughter thing.  Further away in the chance of getting the Crown, but maybe one day she would marry someone close to the Crown, and settle into a position of power.  It says a lot that the Infante seems to like her.”

“Where did she first appear?”

“London, or so I heard.  Her debut was here,” Jamie said.  “Same as Augustus.”

“She’s interesting,” I said.

“Interesting?” Jamie asked.

“I can’t put my finger on it.  But she draws my eye.  There was a moment, she was chasing me, and my instinct was to throw myself at her.”

“That’s… much worse than being a hopeless flirt, Sylvester.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said.

“Do tell.”

“Either she’s Helen tier in being able to manipulate people, and she puts on a cold face while beckoning them closer, raw physical attractiveness that makes even clever enemies do dumb things or a presence gives her a kind of gravity…

“Science or natural ability?”

“Both?  Neither?  Being compelling on Mauer’s level while being silent ninety-five percent of the time?  Whatever it is, if it’s that, then it would make me personally revise her chances at getting the Crown to be much, much higher than you’re suggesting.”

“Fair,” Jamie said.

“The other option is… I don’t even know.  That there’s chemistry, purely between her and me?  One way, considering her apparent desire to murder me.”

I felt Jamie’s hands stop working on the stitching of my scalp.

“Not like that,” I said.  “I don’t think?”

Jamie’s hands resumed their work.

“If we end up having to kill her, I’m going to be very annoyed at the lack of answers.”

“Noted,” Jamie said.

“But if you happened to catch sight of her, and if you caught any clues at all…”

“I’ll pass them on,” Jamie said.

“Thank you, sir.”

It took a moment for Jamie to finish up the work.  I sat up, and gingerly touched around my scalp to see that everything was intact.

“Well done,” I said.

Jamie gave me a little bit of a salute.

“Trapped some of my hair under a stitch, I feel like, or in a knot.  How does it look?”

“Wet,” Jamie said, dryly.

“Ha ha.  Shirley?  Please?”

“Your hair looks fine, Sylvester.”

“You’ll look nice if you run into the Falconer again today,” Jamie said.

“Ha ha,” I said, again.  I mentally weighed how far I could push things in poking fun at him, but I didn’t get a chance to follow through.

The carriage turned, and it was going at a high enough speed that one wheel lifted up off the ground.

I looked out the window.  We were on a major street.

“We’re close to Mauer,” Jamie said, after a glance out the window, at the skyline.  “Almost at the foot of the building he was supposed to be camped in.”

“They’d have to be crazy,” I said.

“They chased us this far?” Shirley asked.

The guy driving the carriage banged one hand against the side, hard.  The vehicle was slowing.

“That, or it’s Mauer,” I said.  “It has to be Mauer.”

With some risk to life and limb, the mustachioed man who had been driving the carriage leaped clear of the seat, in the direction my window faced, and stumbled as he landed on the road, before scrambling to run off.

The horse slowed further.

“We’re stopping,” I said.  “Driver made a run for it.  Trouble is incoming.  Shirley?  Stay here until we signal you.”

“Okay,” Shirley said.

Jamie and I glanced at each other.

“Weapons?” Jamie asked.

“Scalpels, a knife, a needle of something I’m pretty sure is poison.  Used my gas canisters.”

“Trade you,” he said.  He reached over to the seat and handed over a pistol.

“I could have used this earlier.”

“I didn’t have this earlier, you ninny,” he said.  “I grabbed it while we were looking for a carriage with a driver we could bribe.”

I sighed, took the pistol, and slid the scalpel across the seat between us.

Jamie and I opened our doors.

I saw something move, fast, out of the corner of my eye, and I slammed my door shut.  Jamie was a second behind me.

It crashed rather than explode.  A kind of artillery shell, but made of something closer to glass than to metal.

There were other impacts.  One struck the carriage itself.

Each splash of liquid from the containers billowed smoke on contact from air.

“They’re coming,” I said.  “A moment ago, I would’ve said seventy five percent chance it’s Mauer, twenty five percent chance it’s them, but-”

“Fifty-fifty?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

The smoke was expanding to the point that some of it was leaking in through gaps in the carriage.  Shirley still had the gas mask I’d given her in the lab, and she pulled it on.

I leaned over, as the gas came in through a crack in the door, and I wafted it to my nose with one hand, like I’d seen scientists do.

Slightly acrid, but I couldn’t smell much in the way of chemicals.  Nothing too medicinal.  Subtle.

I’d spent my life around labs, both hostile and questionably friendly.

I opened my door and stepped outside, breathing deeper.

Even with my emotions running high, I couldn’t sense any shifts, major or miniscule, in how my body reacted.  My capillaries didn’t suddenly draw up more blood or vent it.  My breathing was fine.  The taste on my tongue was mostly neutral.

“Safe?” Jamie asked from within the carriage.

“No idea.  But it doesn’t seem unsafe,” I said.

With the smoke and rain being what they were, the visibility had been reduced.  I could make out large details within fifteen feet or so, and the general shape of things out to thirty feet, maybe.  But beyond that, things were a blur.

Very likely the intention.

Jamie opened and closed his door, venturing outside to stand in the smoke, on the other side of the carriage.

Could we run?  Not out of the question.  The cover was as helpful to us as it was to anyone else.

I felt rather than heard the heavy footsteps of the two stitched giants.

Two nobles, new to the world, much in the same way Jamie is.

The world is your oyster.  Expectations for you both are so very high.  You were tasked with handling this situation.  You have something to prove.

I wasn’t sure if that qualified as a weakness, when they were fully capable of providing that proof in spades.  Now here they were, on the doorstep of a noble-killing rebel leader, facing down two Lambs, one of whom had killed several nobles, and they were using the cover provided by some kind of smoke weapon to deal with one enemy while ignoring the second.

I twirled the pistol in my hand, finger in the trigger-guard.  I caught it by the handle.

I made out the general shape of the giants, looming through the cloud, as visible by the rain that formed a mist as it bounced off of their heads and shoulders as they were by the silhouettes they cast.

Jamie and I moved away from the giants, circling around the carriage, until we stood almost back to back, each of us with one pistol and a blade in hand.

I put a hand back, close to the side of Jamie’s face, and, knife still in my left hand, gestured.

Empty.  Eye.  Alert.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

The giants were flanking us.  One in front of the carriage, one behind.

The empty, inviting space was one that was sure to have nobles lurking within it.

“Shirley,” I said, just loud enough to be heard.

“Yes?”

“We’ll make a run for it soon,” I said.

The Falconer stepped out of the smoke.  It flowed off and around her, as if she was eminently at home in it.  Her bird wasn’t with her.

She moved easily, with no suggestion of the injuries we’d inflicted with the rolling explosion.  Her head was angled in such a way that she could watch the both of us with one eye.  She maintained a set distance from us, walking sideways across our field of view, emerging from and disappearing into smoke.

“My lady,” I said.

I hadn’t really meant to speak.

Jamie’s hand moved, reminding me.

Empty eye.  What we couldn’t see was more dangerous.  Where we weren’t looking was more dangerous.

Giant to the front of us.  Giant to the back of us.  A Falconer without her bird to the right of us, and Augustus…

Augustus appeared, a lesser giant in his own right, very near the Falconer, to the right of us.

Leaving the left entirely open.  It would mean moving further from Mauer, but it was inviting.  Safe emptiness.

I knew who or what it was that was guarding that emptiness, laying in wait to strike at us.

“Just saying,” I murmured, “I really hate that damn bird.”

“I hear you,” Jamie said.

“And I really hope you didn’t pay that carriage driver in advance.”

“I didn’t,” Jamie said.

The Falconer kept moving, back and forth, taunting.  Augustus was very still.  Our ability to see him was entirely dependent on the vagaries of the wind.  The rain came down hard.

The giants only loomed.

Come on, Mauer.  I know you can’t see us to open fire, but even blind fire might give Jamie and I a better chance than what we had.

One of the giants moved.  Again, the glass or clay or ceramic or whatever it was broke.

Replenishing the smoke.  They’d been the source of it.

“What you plotted,” Augustus said, in his Crown accent.  “The explosion was your doing.  But did you intend for it to hurt Mauer too?”

“Not so much,” I responded.

“Father will be disappointed.”

I kept my eye out for the bird.  Even flightless, it was far too dangerous, and it was the hardest opponent to see in the thick of the smokescreen.

“He probably will,” I said.  “But I imagine that when you’re as grand a figure as the Lord Infante is, us lesser mortals are nothing but fonts of disappointment.”

“You would be surprised,” Augustus said, in that cultured accent.  “Many rise to the occasion.”

“Thing is, I’m not a riser,” I said.  “That’s not how I do things.  I wallow.  I get dirty and scraped and bloody, and I come close to drowning in the shallows of the muck.”

“So it seems,” Augustus said.  “And your dead friend?  Is he the same?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“No,” Jamie said.  “I’m not a riser.  I’m not a wallower.  But maybe, when it comes to Sy and the people close to me, I can raise them up when and where even the Infante failed.”

“I like that,” Augustus said.  “It would be nice if it was true.”

“Thank you,” Jamie said.

With where Augustus stood, and where the Falconer was pacing, it seemed like Jamie’s eye was more on the Falconer than on the fat noble.

I looked, my eyes searching the smoke for the bird.  An irregular shape, low to the ground, with even less body mass than me, but it was a body mass that was all blade, beak, and talon.

In the doing, I was looking away from the Falconer and from Augustus.  I followed the conversation with my ears.

“I don’t think it’s true, though,” Augustus said.  “Not if it ends with you both dead.”

My ears.

Right.  Without my eyes to go by…

I closed my eyes, and I stepped back, until my shoulderblades touched Jamie’s.

Let him be my eyes.  If he moved, I’d feel it, and I could move accordingly.

I pushed my brain, which was only slightly less receptive to me nudging it this way and that, with Wyvern a couple of days old, and I focused on my ears.  Listening past the rain.

There had been a time, once, when I’d almost been able to hear the Ghosts.  When Percy’s creations communicated in noises too high pitched for humans to hear, I’d caught a glimmer of something.

I was listening for the scratch of talon on road, or the first movement of the giants, or the scuff of August’s shoes as he brought his weight to bear and charged in a moment when the direction of the wind and the thickness of the cloud of smoke made him hardest to see, or as the giant lobbed the next jar to spread more smoke cover.

But, while listening for those things, placing my enemies and visualizing the battlefield, I thought perhaps I caught a glimmer of that sound.

I’d stood with my back to Jamie’s to use him as a warning system, but as I threw myself to one side, he matched my movement.

I heard rather than saw the talons scratching the wood of the back of the carriage, as the Falconer’s raptor threw itself at us and hit the carriage instead.

Jamie and I opened fire, emptying our guns at the thing, putting bullets into the back of the same carriage Shirley was inside.

Because there was no other option than to kill that thing.

It made a terrible sound as it crumpled to the ground.

“Shirley!” Jamie called out.  He and I were on exactly the same page as we ran.  Shirley burst out of the door, none of our bullets in her, thankfully, and followed us.

I was looking back at her as I saw the Falconer jump up and onto the wagon, as if she was as light as air.  Graceful.

If she cared about her beast dying or having been shot, she didn’t show it.

I fired my gun backward and in her general direction, and I saw a hint of a reaction.

I doubted it would kill her.

We had to flee from the direction of the tall hotel building Mauer was inside to seek shelter elsewhere.  It was very possibly what the nobles had intended, herding us lambs away from possible help and reinforcements.

We were able to cross the streets before they drew close.

As we did, leaving the smoke behind and entering the comparatively light alley, we saw the very reinforcements we were supposed to be getting steered away from.

Mauer was in the alley, along with a small regiment of his soldiers.  There were two rows of the men, some kneeling, others standing behind them.  The guns they held were special.  Exorcist rifles, and then the new ones.  The noble-slaying ones.  What had he called them?  Guillotines?  Something else?

With all the guns pointed our way, Jamie and I balked momentarily.  But when Mauer didn’t give the order to fire, and when the soldiers didn’t take their own initiative on the matter, we started forward again, weaving between the soldiers to reach the other side.

“Not wholly what I had in mind,” I told Mauer, “But this will do.”

His face was stone, his expression dark.

I could hear the stomps of the giant, and for an instant, I thought I knew what we would see – the giant appearing, holding his shield before him, ready to plow through our ranks like a runaway carriage.

But it was Augustus.  Only Augustus.

“Fire,” Mauer said.

The soldiers did.  One clean shot from each of them, the Exorcist rifles first.  Then the special noble-slaying rifles.  Augustus raised his arm, blocking his eyes with one forearm.

I saw the blood, and the flecks of flesh tearing away, and the explosions of gore as the special noble-killing rifles did their work.

The shots fired, the soldiers broke rank, backing away swiftly, the ones with the exorcists reloading quickly.

Augustus lowered his arm.  All over his body, in places, I could see that the damage was less than a centimeter deep.  It stopped at a layer of fat beneath the skin, and where whole chunks had been peeled away, I could see strange patterns.

“I thought those special rifles were supposed to be able to penetrate the plates of a warbeast’s armor,” I told Mauer.

Mauer was silent.

“You’ve shot him before, and it didn’t work.”

He didn’t answer me.  Instead, he said, “Flame.”

Two of the men pulled the pins out of containers, lobbing them.  They erupted with what looked like flaming oil, fiery droplets and dribblings falling as they arced in the air.

Augustus moved to one side, in the same moment it made contact with the ground, he knocked it back with the side of one foot.  Flames licked against his boot.

With the other, the noble grabbed it with one bare hand, and he cast it back and behind him.  Open flame licked his hand, front and back, and he ignored it.

Ogre indeed.

“Retreat!” Mauer called out.

He wasn’t talking to Jamie and I, but we sure as all damn listened.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.16 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.16

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Augustus charged after us, while Mauer’s contingent aimed backwards, shooting in his general direction.  One arm remained raised, protecting his face, his other arm reaching forward.

Without losing momentum, he put a hand out and pushed one of the men, a hand on the back of the man’s head.

Augustus’ weight, heft, strength and momentum were enough that when he shoved the man’s head to one side, he could grind it against the nearest building.  Brick, branch, and stone tore and chipped at the man’s face, and the man’s feet stumbled, then dragged uselessly against the ground.

Something more significant shattered as the fellow’s face was driven into a bit of trim at the outside corner of the building.

He caught up to the stragglers, seized one, and hurled him into another, before stepping more to one side, to step where the two men’s legs overlapped.

A moment later, switching the arm he covered his face with while reaching out with the other, he’d seized a fourth man.  The motion he used to toss him aside was a sharper one – one that I suspected left the victim dead before he even smashed into the nearest surface.

We passed through a wrought-iron arch and gate that was fixed to the walls on either side of the alley and a moment later, Mauer was through, standing by it, ready to close it as the stragglers came through.

Augustus caught up to some of those stragglers, grabbed one of them, a woman in a shirt and pants, not a uniform.

-And held her, without killing her outright.  He advanced, moving quickly, dragging her with him.  He knew what Mauer was doing, and he was making the decision has hard as possible.

Mauer slammed the gate, then turned the heavy key that was in the lock.

Augustus drew back, and kicked out as he drew near enough.  His foot slammed into the bars of the gate, bending them outward.

Guns cocked, aiming at the spaces between the bars.  Mauer raised his good arm, telling them to stop.

Augustus leaned forward, fingers interlocked with the horizontal and vertical grille of the wrought iron, his forearm across his forehead and eyes.  Metal creaked.

I wondered if he was strong enough to tear metal.  I really wasn’t sure.

Shirley was clutching Jamie’s hand.

“Mauer,” Augustus said, not moving.  “We finally meet.”

“First Augustus, my lord,” Mauer said, injecting a venomous sort of sarcasm into the final two words.

“I mark this as the fourth time you’ve shot at me,” Augustus said.  “Each time, I live, and people who serve you suffer…”

The woman he held screamed, scratching at his hand with her hands, kicking with her legs.  He held her lower face by one hand, arm limp at one side, and his white-knuckled fingers were pushing into her mouth.  From the looks of it, the pressure of the fingers was pushing teeth out of place or breaking them outright.

“…And die,” Augustus finished the statement.  He glanced down at the woman.  “Eventually.”

“Judging by the shield-bearing stitched you brought this time around, you seem to have some concerns.”

“Time spent getting new flesh put back on is time I’m not spending on hobbies and studies,” Augustus said.  He smiled, his cheeks dimpling.  “But I don’t think it’s worth throwing these lives away to cost me an afternoon of my time.  Not unless you hate me beyond all measure and reason.”

“No, it isn’t worth throwing away lives for that…”  Mauer said.

Liar, I thought.  I could read things into the cadence of his reply, the way he crafted his voice, and I knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth.  He was closer to that line beyond measure and reason than he might pretend to be in front of others.

“…But you protect your eyes, little noble.  I know you have some reason to worry.  And that’s reason enough to keep trying.”

“Until you exterminate us all?” Augustus asked.  “And then the others, who come to replace us?  The line of succession in coming generations will certainly be interesting, then.  I’d say you could even earn your place as a footnote in history books, but we write those.”

“The knowledge that any noble can die will linger,” Mauer said.

“I’m alive,” Augustus said.  “You’re an orator, Mauer, or so I hear.  You know that what matters most in a statement is how it begins and how it ends.  Your statement began with failure, courtesy of the youths who just recently found their way to your side-”

He looked at me and Jamie.

“-and adjustments are already underway.  Life always finds a way, and the pace of our engineering will always outpace your trinkets.  Your statement will end with the nobility proving that we cannot die, not even in the face of your special bullets.”

Mauer spoke, “All the same, any statement has to be mindful of its punctuation, or it starts to fall to pieces.  The importance of a full stop here and there shouldn’t be underestimated.”

He mimed shooting a gun with his fingers, as he articulated ‘punctuation’.  The action or the wit made Augustus laugh, loud.

Not quite as refined as the Infante.  The laugh gave him away.  But there were hints of the Infante there.  A different sort of focus.  He knew full well what he was, and he was eminently comfortable here.  He was confident.

I gestured at Jamie.  Flank.  Bird woman.  Big.

Yes, Jamie signaled, before gesturing a direction.

He was guessing where.  Was she going over rooftops?  Attacking from on high?

Mauer had to know.  He wouldn’t ignore the other enemies on this battlefield he’d prepared.  He’d had the sense to set up in a place where he knew he could retreat, where the gate was ready and waiting, to bar the noble’s path.

But… Augustus was smiling.  One dimple, a lopsided smile.

I knew, in the instant that I had that realization, that Augustus was going to try something.

“Full stop,Augustus said.

“We all die someday, even boy nobles,” Mauer said, and he made those last two words sound more contemptuous and insulting than if he’d called Augustus a pile of bird shit.

Augustus smiled.  Still one-sided.  One dimple, not two.

“You may well be right.  They talk about true immortality, and we’ve even devised some forms of it, mind you, there were rumors about some work being done in the western Crown States, but there are always rumors.  It is always a few years on.  In coming decades, we’ll see if some of the current trials pan out.  But I expect to live a very long, comfortable life, all the same.”

Don’t, I thought.  Just walk away, Mauer.

I looked over at Jamie, who was standing on the other side of Mauer, just in time to see him glancing over at me.

He had to have a bad gut feeling too.

“I plan to prove you wrong on that,” Mauer said.

“Do you?  Then take aim, reverend,” Augustus said.  He dropped his arm.  His little eyes narrowed, and he spoke through a half-smile.  “You alone, I’ll let you draw your gun, aim at me, pull the trigger.  Aim for my supposed weak point.  Punctuate that statement you’re trying so desperately to make.  One shot.”

I backed away a few steps.  I bumped up against the front of a soldier, who put his hand on my shoulder.  Off to the side, Jamie was leading Shirley back as well.

“And you won’t move?” Mauer asked, moving his coat aside to put a hand on the handle of the pistol at his waist.

“Not a-”

Mauer drew, and the crack was sharp, audible, and visceral.

The crack had nothing to do with Mauer’s gun.  No, that fired too, a fraction of a second later.

I could see the blood at Augustus’ temple, where the bullet had grazed.

The ringing aftermath of the gunshot was joined by the renewed screams of Augustus’ captive.  Her lower face in his grip, he’d snapped her jaw in the moment before Mauer had placed his bullet through one of those small, piggy eyes.

Mauer had flinched.

The moment passed, and Mauer adjusted, pulled the trigger again, four shots in rapid succession.

But Augustus was turning away, the bullets gouged flesh at the side and back of his head, and caught one ear.

Mauer changed tack, aiming at the woman Augustus held.

The whites of her eyes were visible.

His back to Mauer and the gun that was aimed at the woman’s forehead, Augustus said, “Take her.  Give her care.  I’m not without mercy.”

And he dropped her.

Mauer gestured, arm sweeping down, and the rest of his men fired.  Rifles unleashed their bullets, each aimed through the wrought iron gate.

Augustus simply walked away, the bullets punching holes into him, and tearing off their chunks of flesh.

When he was a distance away, bullets now pinging off of walls in front of and to either side of Augustus, Mauer raised his hand.

The guns stopped firing.  I watched as Augustus turned a corner.  He was circling around.  He’d find another path to us, possibly, or retreat elsewhere to heal.

I was betting on the former.

This is far from good.  Now Mauer is going to be mad.  Who is the nearest target for that anger?

“Eric,” Mauer said.  “See to the woman, bring her.  Be gentle.”

He wheeled around, and much as I’d predicted, he reached out, seizing me by one shoulder.

“Everyone else, march,” he said, to his men, while he steered me.  Now that I could see the group in whole, I could tell that only some were Mauer’s soldiers proper.  Others looked to be ragtag rebels of another stripe.  The presence and lack of uniform elements marked the two groups.

The woman that Augustus had maimed would be a part of the latter group, then.  Mauer had probably picked up the best riflemen he could find, from among his contingent and sympathetic groups hereabouts.

Worth paying attention to, that.  The possibility of a rogue element among the rebels, which both Mauer and I considered likely in a place like Gomorrah, and the fact that Mauer had help.  He’d extended his reach, included other groups.  That meant he likely had reinforcements in the wings.

I knew I could have said something to comment on the encounter with Augustus, but I suspected that would have been suicide.  I kept my tongue and waited for him to take the lead.

“You got several of my people killed,” Mauer said.

“Yes,” I said.

I could have been glib, turned to wordplay, been clever about this, but I had strong suspicion Mauer wasn’t in the mood.

“I told you that if you got in my way again, I would see you dead.”

“That explosion on the street, that was us.  They were making a move against you.”

“I was and am fully aware they were making a move against me,” he said.  He used tone to make ‘was and am’ into less of a redundancy and more into nails that fixed his argument into place, made it sound that much more definitive.

Even now, I wished I could pick his sentences to pieces in a less grim context.

Instead, I talked, “And you planned to fight it out.  I get it.  You lost a handful of people here, and I’m willing to bet they were good soldiers,” I said.  “But if you’d fought it out with their full forces, you probably would have lost a lot more.”

“Very likely,” Mauer said.

Was that it?  Did he agree?

If so, he’d likely agreed from the moment he saw us and didn’t order us gunned down.

He changed tacks.  “Jamie Lambsbridge.  You were the one who read out the names of the fallen, back in Radham.  People who turned out to be alive, as it happened.”

“I was.”

“I thought of that moment when I heard reports of your untimely end,” Mauer said.  “Reported dead, only to be proven alive.  My suspicion was correct.”

“Even if the pursuer is only suspicious it’s not the truth, it’s a good thing to be considered dead, when you’re a fugitive.”

“Mm hmm.  The fact that you were showing yourself to me, I momentarily wondered if it was you extending a measure of trust or if it was desperation.”

Trust and desperation are both things you can use, as a manipulator.  Another small facotr into why he hadn’t just had us shot.

“And the young lady?”

“Shirley, reverend,” Shirley said.

I winced.

“I’m not a reverend anymore,” Mauer said.  “These two were part of the group responsible for that.”

“Ah.  I’m sorry.”

“Who or what are you, Shirley?” Mauer asked.

“A bystander.  A colleague of theirs.”

“Mauer,” I said, interrupting, and working to take focus off of Shirley.  “There’s a third group, led by Montgomery.”

“Yes, I know this.  I’ve followed their movements.”

“And the Falconer, whatever her name is, she’s behind us, eight o’clock, on the rooftops.  Or thereabouts.”

Mauer glanced over one shoulder.

Then he stopped.

“So she is,” he said.

My eyebrows went up.  I turned to look, as Mauer motioned for his men to stop running.

She was barely visible, through the rain.  A small figure on a building six floors tall.

Her head was angled, her hair blowing across her face, her skirt flapping in the wind.  She stood at one corner of the building with one arm extended, saber in hand and pointing up and out.  It caught the light, and for that reason alone, she was visible.

Jamie and Shirley drew closer to me, looking in the Falconer’s direction.

“So that’s her,” Jamie said, under his breath.  “Wish I had a better look at this young noble that has you so fascinated, Sy.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “We might just get one.”

As if to disagree, Mauer gave his men a signal.

As one, they fell into position, the ones near the front kneeling, the rest standing behind them, the butt end of each rifle pressed against shoulder, eyes looking down sights.

“Vic,” Mauer said.  “Your feeling?”

“With the exorcists, this wind, this distance, shooting up?  Better chance of throwing a thread and getting it through the eye of a needle.”

“Then lower the exorcists.  Corey?”

“Could do,” Corey said, in a burr of an accent, “Not likely, but could do.”

What’s she even doing?  Giving direction?

To what?  The giants?

“Do,” Mauer gave the order.

The two guns fired, loud.

The Falconer, atop her perch, did not topple or react.

Both men began reloading their guns.

“Re-arm while you walk,” Mauer said.  “It was worth trying.  We’re-”

Something hit the same rooftop the Falconer was on.  A thick, dark cloud spread from the point of impact.

Those same containers the giants had been throwing before.  The ones that became massive clouds of smoke on breaking.

The Falconer stood on the roof next to the expanding cloud of smoke.

“She’s coming,” I said.

“Retreat,” Mauer said.  “And re-arm!”

We turned to go, picking up the pace as we did so.

The next two shells were flung so they landed on the street between where we were and the wrought-iron fence that had separated us from Augustus.

I saw a glimmer of the Falconer moving, pointing her blade in a slightly different direction, guiding the ongoing fire.

Then the smoke covered her, and she was gone.

“Mark?” I asked Jamie, giving him the matching gesture.

“Marked,” Jamie said.

I was so tired.  The food I hadn’t eaten was getting to me now.  Muscles were twitching in my legs, and my knees wobbled a bit mid-stride, as I put my weight down on them.  The mistake had been stopping and then starting again.  Letting the adrenaline fade, when I’d been counting on it to give me the push I needed.

“What’s this ‘mark’?” Mauer asked.

“Her position,” Jamie said.  “Where she is now.  Where she can be.  The routes open to her, given what I know about the environment.  She can travel down the building face, I assume, or jump down to the next building, detour to one side.  Go down the stairs in the building itself, if she’s hurt and doesn’t feel up to any acrobatics.”

“She wouldn’t be that high up if she wasn’t sure she could swoop down,” I said.

“Right,” Jamie said.

“I don’t get the impression she’s angry.  We killed her bird, but I feel more like she has others.  They’re tools.  Weapons.  But she’s motivated, and that’s more dangerous than her being angry.  She’ll take a more direct path.”

“Jumps down to next building, jumps down to overhang above door, then to street.  Moves along our right, catches up, flanks?” Jamie asked.

“I can see it,” I said.

“Or straight down building face, to road.  Using cover of smoke, comes right after us,” Jamie said.  “Risking getting shot at.”

I thought of how she had stalked us.  “Any paths that branch off of that one?  Flanking us?  Or descending on us?”

“Several,” Jamie said.  He gestured for me.

Mauer surveyed the area.  We’d reached an area where, in place of a block of four to six large buildings, there was an empty lot.  It had sat empty for some time.  Crushed stone littered the area that would later be the foot of a building, and a combination of grass and brick paths filled out the rest of the square.  Tall buildings surrounded us.

Mauer took us further down, to where short walls surrounded gardens in front of one stout apartment building.

“Stop here,” Mauer said.  “Point out her paths.  Where does she come from?”

Jamie pointed again.

“The shieldbearers?”

Jamie indicated one street.

“And Augustus?”

Jamie indicated one street over.

“Reinforcements.  Montgomery?  The people you didn’t kill in the explosion?”

“Reinforcements…”  Jamie turned around, pointing off to our left and behind us.  Then he went back, indicating the street the giants would be coming from.  “…And the ones we didn’t kill.”

“Then we wait,” Mauer said.  His men immediately moved to form a firing line along the wall.  “The shieldbearers, they’ll be protecting the regiment?”

“Yes,” I said.

Mauer turned his head, studying Jamie.

“Yes,” Jamie echoed me, confirming.

“You were the one I heard reports of, scouting out this area,” Mauer said.  “You’re using what you studied while you were making your way around.”

“Yes,” Jamie said.  “I thought I was more inconspicuous than that.”

“If you’d come and gone, yes.  But you stayed,” Mauer said.  His tone changed as he asked, “Were you also the one who told them where we had a headquarters?”

“No.  Absolutely not,” Jamie said.  “I followed Sylvester to the building you brought him to.  When he left, I lost track.  I decided to stay, and count on the fact that he might return.”

“The building.  Yes,” Mauer said.  His tone changed again.  Softer.  “Did you investigate?”

“Yes,” Jamie said.

“Did you find anything?”

“I found that they were careful,” Jamie said.  “That they used poison, and in two corners of the building, they made and used fires, to burn evidence.  Papers, some clothing.  When they were done, they raked through the ashes to be certain.”

“And with this powerful mind of yours, did you find anything?” Mauer asked.

“I made plans to visit again with Sylvester.  In hopes our minds together would uncover something we couldn’t find alone.”

Mauer didn’t say anything, nor did he do anything in particular, but I could sense the disappointment.

“We’ve been working through it in our heads,” I said.  “Talking it over, getting the shape of it.  This isn’t a phantom we’re chasing.”

“Let’s hope,” Mauer said.

The enemy didn’t arrive immediately.  They took their time.  Long enough for that adrenaline to fade.

I stood at the wall, next to Jamie, while Shirley sat a short distance behind us, behind cover.

“Your first taste of battle?” I asked Shirley.  Then I reconsidered.  “Sorry.  Nevermind.”

“I’ve fought,” Shirley said.  “Face to face.  Tooth and nail.  Fingernails digging into skin.”

“I should have thought twice before I said anything.  My thoughts are slippery today, getting away from me.”

She shook her head.  “I think everyone has a story.  In the midst of all of this, a nation at war, the people trying to hold on to some humanity while a great engine works and pushes things further along another track, inch by inch, foot by foot, mile by mile.  Even on the ground level, at the very base of it all, it pushes people to desperation.  We all have to fight at some point, don’t we?”

I suspected that Mauer could overhear.  Some of his soldiers could.

“Mauer would likely say that he hopes so.  That he prays for a world where we get the opportunity to keep fighting, and dreads a world where that desperate scrabbling stops.”

“And you?” Shirley asked.

“I think back at a winter and spring spent in Tynewear, with Jamie, some music playing, food in the icebox, kettle boiling for tea, and our concerns were relatively distant ones,” I said.  “Good company, needs met, with no desperation to speak of.  I want that for the people I care about.”

Jamie, hunkered down by the wall, just a short distance from me, smiled a little.

“It was awfully nice,” Jamie said, quiet.  “But you’re being disingenuous.”

“Shhh.”

“You were out every other night, robbing people, gathering information, stirring the pot…”

“Shhh,” I said, again.  “I was talking about the nicer part.  It sounded good, didn’t it?”

I thought about Mary, Helen, and Lillian.  About Ashton and the new Lambs, and the Mice of Radham.

“I want that nicer part,” I said, “for the people they care about.  And it’s annoying, but some of them care about the whole damn world.  So I guess I’m… I’m stuck.  Because I want an impossibly good outcome for too many people, and I’ve got no time to do it.  I’m bound to last as long as Jamie does, and then I’ll go mad, like I’d been doing before I was so rudely interrupted.”

Jamie gave me a sidelong glance.

“So, plan revised, I think we have to fight.  We do the best we can.  But we don’t do it so that everyone who comes after can fight for as long as the species lasts.  We do it so that the people who come after don’t have to.  Or so they have the chance to make it possible for the people after them.  But we fight because I think there’s a way.”

“Yes,” Jamie agreed.  “And that way involves killing the people at the top until the system self-adjusts, and they stop putting forth people who deserve to be killed.”

“Well, that’s part of it,” I said.

“I think I understand,” Shirley said.  “I mean, I understand, but I understand what you’re doing in the bigger picture.”

“Sorry it took as long as it did for us to get around to explaining our thoughts,” I told her.

“Jamie and I talked about it before,” she said.  “But I don’t think I understood.”

Mauer’s voice interrupted our conversation.

“It is very easy to understand when you reduce the message down to its most basic,” the man said.

“That so?” I asked.

Too insolent, perhaps.

“Yes,” Mauer said.  “Every second member of the Crown Empire and many, many people beyond it agree on this, I think.”

His eyes were focused on a point on the horizon.

They’re coming.

“That they need to be cut down,” Mauer said.  “Nobles, Professors, Doctors, and the systems they put in place.”

The horn blew.  An answering horn blew nearby, behind us and to the left.  The direction Jamie had indicated.

The fastest road Montgomery’s group could travel to reach us.

The giants provided a shield to protect the thin columns of rank and file, as they moved down the street.  Men peeled off, entering the tall buildings.

Mauer stood with his back to the tall post at the end of the wall, one of two that someone would need to walk through to access the garden and walk to the front door of the apartment complex.

He gave no signal, he said nothing, but all the same, what followed was at his doing.  At least in part.

The neighborhood erupted, turning on the organized rank and file of the Crown.  Guns, yes, but from every building came an outpouring of work.  I could see it, and I could see the elementary nature of the work that had been done.  Experiments.  Crude life, and modified life.  Stitched.  Men and women with weapons who were clearly drugged.

Yes, this was Mauer’s organization, but it was Fray’s books.  In the heart of the Crown States, in the midst of Gomorrah, where the Crown’s hold was questionable to both sides, the rebellion had stirred into a small revolution, taking what had been the Academy’s and shaping it with their own inexperienced hands.

What followed was pure chaos, and that, to be sure, was my cue to take part.

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================================================== 14.17 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.17

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It was, as battlefields went, a mire for the enemy.  An empty square without any buildings in it at the middle, four major roads leading off from it, one from each corner, with tall buildings all around.  The Academy was mobilizing from three separate directions; if the columns of soldiers were to meet in the middle, they would have formed a ‘y’, with a very narrow top two branches.

They didn’t meet in the middle, however.  The mob turned on them as they entered the square, and the mass of monsters and crude stitched formed a wall.  Countless novice experiments were gunned down as they closed the distance.  Soldiers in the front ranks backed away, leaving stitched to face the initial charge.

The giants at the head of the one group used their shields to bar the way, limiting the initial impact, but the humans in the midst of the experiments had countermeasures at hand.  They threw flammable liquids at the giants and the giants’ shields, and the ones that missed landed in the midst of the rank and file of the stitched in uniform.

The initial push was costly, but it did its work.  The stitched on the Crown side had rifles and uniforms, and they were of a reliable stature and quality.  But in the opening melee, the lesser experiments on the rebellion side had a slight advantage.  They didn’t have guns.  They had improvised weapons, sledgehammers, axes reserved for stitched labor, heavier than most ordinary people could heft, and they had picks and shovels.

It was a strange case, where the Crown stitched were meant to fight people as they kept the peace and went to war, and they were well equipped for the task, but those same guns and bayonets were bad against other stitched and experiments.  This particular subset of the rebellion stitched were inferior and equipped with the tools and weapons this rebellion could scrounge up, and in the doing, they were better matched against their enemy than the enemy was against them.

More accident than intent, I believed.

The giants, now burning with ever-growing patches of flame, began to push back, forcing the assembled mob back, and giving the Crown stitched and soldiers room to aim and fire their rifles.

I had a sense of the flow of the battle now.

I glanced back at Jamie, then signaled.

You.  Stay.

I.  Assist.  Back.

I hesitated, glancing at Shirley.

Jamie gestured, Watch woman.

Good enough.

I measured the movements of the various groups, spotted one group of stitched, all of the same make, in the same style of dress, and followed them.  Jamie followed several paces behind, Shirley keeping close to him.

One of the two giants, hit by what might have been one of Mauer’s noble-killing bullets, toppled.  As he did, his weight came down on top of a number of the breakable containers beneath the waterproof covering that draped him.  There was a pause before the smoke came rolling out as a thick wave.

As the smoke swept over a full half of the square, I watched to see who retreated, and who pushed forward.  I could see some of the crude experiments flinging themselves forward, modified hounds and vat-grown beasts.  None were large, many didn’t seem that much more effective for the alterations made to them, but they had been made aggressive and they were being pointed at the enemy.

They weren’t deterred by the smoke, and I had to lean on instinct to figure out how the lines were taking shape.

The billowing smoke obscured the still-standing giant, who held a great shield that was now almost entirely aflame.  He was clumsily working at swinging the shield in the general direction of the enemy rank and file while using one hand to try to quash the flame at one of his legs.  All he was doing was setting his sleeve on fire.  As the smoke grew thicker around him, only the orange flame remained visible, and even that was obscured into a murky glow.

Glancing back at Jamie, who I could still see fairly clearly, I saw him bending down to pick up a rifle with a bayonet, while he ushered Shirley into cover.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

He nodded as he partially disassembled the rifle he’d claimed.

Running past Gordon, I plunged into the smoke, toward the battle lines, careful to use the thicker parts of the rebel ranks as cover, careful to stay low to the ground, moving forward often with both feet and one hand on the ground.

Gordon had pointed out to me, once upon a time, that the battlefield wasn’t generally a place where rage or justice reigned.  No, it was a place of fear.  I’d mused before about how this made stitched such a powerful asset on the part of the Crown.

I could tune out what my eyes were seeing to favor my ears, much as I had when I’d been on the lookout for the Falconer’s raptor.  I could listen, use what little I’d retained in short term memory regarding the flow of the battlefield, and trust that some of those basic truisms held.

The smart enemies would retreat.  The stitched would hold firm.  The animals that could function without needing to see would attack.

Claws scratched against the road, moving fast, and I moved out of the way.  I bumped into someone, and I made a small snarling sound, moving forward quickly, to suggest I was rebellion-created, advancing toward the enemy, rather than a Crown-made threat.

The clawed thing joined the fight, and I could hear the grunts and the wordless shouts as the victim was attacked.

I could hear the shouts, the din of the battlefield, of bullets and calls to retreat and organize.

I drew near enough to the attacking warbeast that I could make out a general blur of its shape and motion.  I felt bits of something strike my face, and I identified them by smell more than by touch.  They smelled like preservatives and blood.  The finer spray of gore from the attack on the stitched.

I navigated around the stitched and the attacking beast, into enemy lines. Muzzle flashes told me where other stitched were standing and firing openly in the general direction of the enemy.  I stayed low, I used my ears, listened for the grunts, the heavy sound of boot on road, and weaved through their number, getting closer to the flailing giant.

The shouts, orders, and responses I heard were louder now.  I listened intently, moving this way and that to stay out of people’s way, safely ensconced in the thick waves of cloying smoke.

I could make out the orders that were aiming to keep morale up, and I could make out the orders that were simpler, firm, and far less emotional.  Not quite condescending, but speaking to lesser minds.

Only one of those six voices were regular generals, managing regular troops.  The others were looking after the stitched.

I was mentally modeling the battlefield, paying special mind to the way the larger groups were moving.  The enemy commanders were visualizing the battlefield as they had last seen it – a lot of dumb, brutish and crude enemies crashing against the front line.

They weren’t expecting an infiltrator in their ranks.

I moved around one cluster of soldiers who were huddled together, talking in tense tones, as much to remind each other where they were as it was to maintain sanity and share commentary on the goings-on.

I reached the first of the commanders, and found that he was atop a vehicle.  The wagon provided cover to the front and sides, while giving him a window to see out and shout out commands to the stitched.  From the smell of it, I knew it was occupied by several stitched guards.  Reinforcements or helpers.

“Hold firm!” the man called out, sounding like a schoolteacher instructing small children.  “Hold fast!  Stay forward!  Aim your rifles!  Fire!”

I saw the light of the individual rifles firing.

The wagon wasn’t moving – moving would have been silly, given the lack of visibility.  That meant I was free to climb the side of the wagon, very slowly and very carefully, so as not to scuffle or shake the thing.

High above, from a window overlooking this part of the battlefield, something fired down at the Crown forces.  Bigger than a gun, it didn’t fire a singular shot, but something scattered.  I could hear individual pellets or flechettes striking the side of the wagon, the road, and other things nearby.

I felt the sting as one caught me in the back of the head.  Another in the lower back, where it produced a feeling like a spring coming free of the mechanism, or a guitar string snapping.

Mid-climb, I tensed, freezing, holding back all cries of pain and surprise.

I reached up to the back of my head, only recently stitched up, and I felt the site of the wound.  As if I was popping a boil, I squeezed what might have been a small metal fragment free of my scalp.  It fell between my collar and my neck.

The pain belatedly followed the sting in my lower back, spreading explosively along that plane of muscle and tissue, echoing into the surrounding area.  I could compare it to being hit in the kidney;   Gordon had done that often enough in our early sparring sessions.  But where being punched in the kidney made it feel like I was venting my entire stomach’s contents out my ass in one brutal blast, except into my midsection instead, this was a simpler, more muscular kind of pain.

All around me and in the wagon I was climbing, others were cursing, swearing.  Stitched were reacting as they were supposed to react, turning to face the direction they’d been hit from.

“Hold!” the man in the wagon hollered.  “Prior facing!”

Trying to steer them back on course.  If they started turning around or reacting in the midst of this smoke, getting them all facing the right direction would be like herding cats.

The second of the cannons up in the building, aimed out of a window or up on a balcony, opened fire.  This one wasn’t aimed fully at us, but at the ranks behind.  We weren’t the focus of the blast, but we were at the stray edges of it.  I heard the sound of metal hitting the side of the wagon, wooden panels reinforced with metal strips.

“Watch for the next one.  Take aim,” the man in the wagon ordered, in that tone reserved for stitched.  “Sight them and open fire.”

“Sir,” I heard the voices reply.  The clumsy tongues of stitched soldiers.

I continued my climb, more slowly as I gripped the top edge of the wagon’s side.

The third grapeshot cannon fired down on the street, this one aimed even further back, with no chance of catching us in the midst of it.

“Sight and fire!” the man in the wagon called out.

The stitched aimed and fired up at the side of the building.  The rifles flashed with each shot, and in the gloom, it afforded me a glimpse of them and their faces.  I could see my target, within arm’s reach.

The man, middle-aged, with an impressive beard and mustache, turned away from the sound and flash of the rifles, one hand covering one ear.  In the doing, he fixed his eyes on me.  Peering through the smoke, he could no doubt see the rough appearance of an older boy’s face staring up at him.

Hooking one leg over the top of the wagon, I reached out with one hand to grab his collar, pulling him toward me while I thrust my knife out in his direction.

He wasn’t watching for an attack.  His hands went out in my direction, nothing more than a push.  My grip on his collar and the pull only helped keep me from being shoved down toward the ground.  My stab of the knife found its way to his throat.

I felt the strength go out of his arms, and I stabbed again, repeatedly, being careful not to stab my hand as I gripped his collar.

When he collapsed down onto the floor of the wagon, I landed on top of him.  I saw the shadows of a recess in the wagon, and I rolled off him and toward it, looking up at the stitched.

Their eyes were on their target as they systematically reloaded and fired in the general direction of the grapeshot cannons.

I quickly ran my hands over the man, found his pistol and slipped it into my belt, and then took to searching the wagon.

A loose crate of ammunition.

I picked it up, slipped behind the stitched who were lined up at one side of the wagon, and made my way toward the giant, who was still fighting, his shield held high as a barrier against the noble-killing bullets.

My back hurt where I’d been struck by the second pellet, and the pain was particularly pronounced as I hefted the crate.  It wasn’t large, small enough to be tucked under one arm by a larger man or stitched, but the contents were heavy and dense.

As the giant struggled, hefting its shield, Crown soldiers, wagons, and stitched had formed a line in front of it.  It was being made to stay still and given a wide berth while the smoke cleared up.  Wouldn’t do to have it trample friendlies.

Getting closer to it meant that I was more visible, the smoke around me tinted orange and red by the flames that lit up the still-burning shield, the burning fuel mingling with rainwater to dribble down and form burning puddles on the ground.  But eyes weren’t particularly on me.

I heaved the crate, letting go.  It hit the ground and slid along the road, skidding through oil-slick puddles, hopefully stopping somewhere beneath the giant’s flaming shield.  It made more noise than I’d anticipated: heads turned.  I was already moving away, running as quietly as I could toward the largest concentration of Crown forces.

There were shouts, questions, but in the din and the blind chaos, nobody singled me out.

I was halfway back to Jamie by the time the box of bullets caught fire.  The effect wasn’t pronounced – hardly a rollicking explosion, but when the fire dribbled down off of the shield and onto the box, the contents were partially gunpowder.  The bullets did ping this way and that, at a considerably lower velocity than they might have moved if they’d been pushed out the barrel of a rifle.

I’d hoped to get the giant’s handler, where possible, or disrupt the giant stitched in much the same way the scattershot had disturbed the lesser stitched.  Failing either, I’d hoped the crate of bullets would go up in flame and the resulting explosion, small or big, would draw attention.

I achieved my second goal, in spades.  The flying bullets must have struck home near the giant’s left foot, because it shifted its weight dramatically, stumbling, eliciting shouts and screams.  It brought its shield around as a kind of crutch, slamming it into the ground to the extent that I could feel it, twenty-five paces away.

Damaged by fire, the shield cracked and creaked, threatening to fold in two.

It didn’t come to that.  Distant rifles fired, and the giant toppled violently, hands letting go of the shield as the giant crumpled to the ground.

Higher up the building, the grapeshot fired again.  I could hear the commotion as a soldiers made their way into the building proper.  Fighting their way up.

The smoke wasn’t getting much thicker as a result of the second giant falling.  It looked as if it had been the one to lob most of the containers up to this point, and thus it had less to break.

Diverting forces into the building, stopping, and losing the momentum of the giant had had an impact.  The stitched I moved past on my way back to Jamie were disoriented, without the leadership of the man who’d been in the wagon.  I had little doubt someone else would recognize the need and step up, once the smoke was gone.

For now, however, it posed another obstacle for me.  The rebel stitched and beasts were pressing forward, using the gap that had been made by disorientation.  It wasn’t a particular organized attack, not clever or refined or anything like that.  Dumb stitched and dumb beast hurled themselves forward, saw a weakness, and attacked, hacking, biting, and tearing past whatever was in their way.

In the thinner smoke, here, I could make them out, large muscular stitched fighting with thinner ones with crude weapons, or wrestling with dogs that had exoskeletons, and things that looked like a cougar had been starved for two weeks with the resulting mass stretched out to twice the height and length, a spindly, clawed, fanged thing, swiping at the stitched in its way, darting back, lunging in again to swipe again.

I was in their way, and I doubted either beast nor brute could discern me as a friend, in the midst of this.

I moved closer to the building, looking for any window I could enter, in hopes of finding a shortcut around to the back of the battle lines.

A rifle fired, and the dog with the exoskeleton fell.  It fired again, and the stitched the dog had been chewing on tumbled to the ground as well.

I ran through the gap.

“Thought that was you,” Jamie said.

I grinned, panting.

“Been busy?”

“Wanted to get more of the people guiding the stitched, but… no.  Too spread out, too time consuming, too dangerous, I’m hurt.”

“You’re speaking in short fragments.  How hurt?”

I turned, lifting up my shirt.

“I can barely see,” he said.

“Grapeshot pellet.  I don’t think it hit anything vital, but it doesn’t feel good.”

“Okay.  We’ll get that looked after, after.”

I nodded.  I looked at Shirley, who was huddled in an alcove.  “How are you finding your first battlefield?”

“Terrifying,” she said.

She reminded me of Lillian in that moment, and in the moment immediately following that thought, I badly wanted to hug her.

In the moment following that, I felt mingled loss at Lillian’s absence and frustration at the way things had gone.

“You’re more terrifying like this than you were standing on that rooftop, acting like you were out of your mind, Sylvester.  Because that, at least, it was something I could almost understand.  But you seem even further away when you’re in a place where people are dying left and right and you barely even flinch.”

“I’m flinching a bit,” I said.  “I got shot a little.  I’m afraid for your well being.  For Jamie’s.  I don’t know if that makes me easier to understand.”

She didn’t have an immediate answer for me.

“Part of the reason I came back.  I was worried,” I said.

“Thank you,” Jamie said.  “It’s frustrating, being stuck like this, waiting for you.  Can’t go far, can’t do much.  But I understand it’s… you.”

“It’s me,” I said.  “Sorry.”

The smoke was clearing now.  The sources of the smoke had dried up and been washed away, and while the second giant dying had made for a renewed source of the stuff, it was no longer enough to stall the enemy lines.

It was a weakness on the part of the Crown.  That they put forth these great creations, and failed to account for what happened when one died.

But as weaknesses went, it was a small one.  Stalled, key pieces knocked down, their front ranks thrown into disarray and mauled by the initial attack and the disorganization I’d helped promote, they were still a rank and file.  The smoke rolled past some of their rows and columns of men, but I could make out the general shape of them.  Two or three companies, extending down the street.  Three or four hundred men, women, and stitched.

That didn’t count the others, the ones who had entered buildings to clear them of rebels and secure the flanks.  It didn’t count the innumerable men that had been taken out of action in the rolling explosions and detonating ammunition carts, from my methane stitched.

“How many of them are there?” I asked.  “Three, four hundred, then another three or four-”

“Six hundred, coming from the other side,” Jamie said.  “Not counting the one or two regiments waiting out in the wings.  Depends if the Infante wanted to keep one closer to home in case this was all a ploy to distract, or if he really wanted to get Mauer.”

“How many in a regiment?”

“Close to a thousand, mixed number of soldier and stitched.”

I looked at the scene, and saw how the soldiers were gathering together.  Stitched pushed mobile forms of cover, covered wagons with raised walls provided shelter for the commanding officers.

It was as if no damage had been done, no losses sustained.  The army marched on, over the bodies, and into the square, diverting fifty or more people to break into each building the greater army moved past, troops sweeping through.

An allegory for the Crown, for the seeming immunity of it.  They could be made to bleed, but the consequences… so rarely felt.  Kill fifty or a hundred men, and another fifty or a hundred advanced to take their place.  Deal with one set of nobles, and the Crown sent a smattering of young nobles, the Infante, and the Infante’s favored two young nobles overseas to handle matters.

“Mauer lost,” I said.

“As grim as it might look in the here and now, Mauer does have others in other neighborhoods and blocks.  Flanking, attacking the Crown’s battalions in the rear.  They have weapons, and some will be chemical.  There are people in the buildings with cannons and grapeshot,” Jamie said.

I looked at it all.  There were a thousand experiments and rebels in the square.  Mauer was in the midst of it all, organizing them.  His soldiers and lieutenants were managing things in much the same way the stitched overseer had been commanding the stitched.  Keeping people pointed in the right direction.

“It’s not as one sided as you’re saying,” Jamie said.

“He lost,” I said, again, “Back when he faced down Augustus.  Augustus challenged him to a contest, and he failed to place the bullet.  Lieutenants saw that, and I think it might have affected Mauer too.”

Jamie and Shirley were quiet.

The Academy forces I’d been interfering with were starting to move again.  We double checked we had sufficient cover along the sides of the street, and ducked away, leading Shirley away and around a corner.

“Maybe,” Jamie said.  A single word, as the result of a solid minute of consideration about what I’d said.

“He’ll fight, but he fights because he has no other choice.  This doesn’t end well, Jamie.”

“There’s other cards to play,” Jamie said.

But his hand moved in a gesture, negating part of what he said.

Brave words for Shirley, but he was uncertain, his feelings echoed my own.

At the far end of the square, the column was advancing, shooting and fighting their way in.

The regiment was supported by three giant stitched, much like the one I had felled.  Each carried a shield, only these shields were less wood, more metal.  Never intended to be disguised as part of a wagon.

They hurled objects, and those objects exploded on impact, in the midst of the throng -and there was no better word than throng for Mauer’s assembled army-, sending bodies of human, stitched, and beast flying from the epicenter of each blast.

Three more.

More than just Augustus’ pets, then.  Or less than.  They weren’t a rare thing, here.

One of the three stumbled, knees buckling, before it fell, dropping dead where it stood.

The explosives it carried didn’t go off like the smoke had for the other giants, sadly.

The other two raised their shields, protecting themselves while they stampeded into Mauer’s lines, scattering people and making room for the Crown to advance unimpeded.

Jamie’s head turned, and he pulled Shirley and I deeper into cover.

Leaping down from a higher vantage point, the Falconer had made her appearance.

She had a hood up, protecting her hair from the rain, wore a jacket, skirt, and high boots, and even without her raptor’s company, she wore the falconer’s glove on one hand, carried the saber in the other.

People at the fringes saw her, and people fired.

Each bullet that struck home made her move, by the sheer weight of impact, but it didn’t stop her.  She crossed the short distance to the edge of the enemy group, and then she began cutting the rebel forces down.

Bullets didn’t stop her.  At best, they carved away half of a handful of flesh.

She didn’t have as much flesh to spare as Augustus or the Infante might, but she didn’t need it.  Once she was in the midst of the rebel forces, she was shot far less.  They needed to use knives, axes, shovels, and bayonets instead, and in every case, they failed.

Every swing in her direction was deftly evaded, frequently punished by death.

She had no less than twenty fresh corpses behind her before nerve started breaking.  People saw her coming, backed away and backed into others, and they aimed and shot.  They didn’t care anymore that there were people on the far side.  That every miss was liable to kill one of their own.

They cared that a number of others before them had tried to match the young woman in melee and failed.  She was a reaper, death imminent, and they were using the most lethal means they had at their disposal to try to postpone or gamble against that death.

She was cutting a swathe through the crowd, heading for Mauer and the rest of the rebel leadership.

As heavier munitions were turned her way, she ducked low, hiding among the people she was killing.  Smoke billowed in her wake as she used canisters of gas or something like the stitched giants had been deploying.

She was getting harder and harder to track as she built up steam.

I saw, through the crowd, at a distance, only a glimpse of her face.  Through the rain and residual smoke, there was only a general sense of her expression.  Serious, grim, determined.

“Sy,” Jamie said.

I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

“I can see why you said you were captivated by her,” he said.

I nodded, trying to process.

I could see the Lambs in the crowd.  As if they were waiting for us to join them.

We had to follow, had to stop her.  Mauer had lost, in my estimation, yet there was a chance, and if this wasn’t to be a complete rout, a loss that would be another mark in the nobles’ favor, another reason for people to never ever strike out against the Crown, we had to stop this.  Scare her off, if nothing else.

Everything about the scenario demanded we move forward, yet Jamie and I remained rooted to the spot.

“Jamie,” I said.  “She-”

“You saw it too?” he asked.  His hands clutched the rifle he held in much the same way that Jamie the first used to clutch his journals to his chest.  Insecurity.  Regression of a sort.

“I think,” I said.  letting out another one of those heavy exhalations.  It was as if I’d forgotten how to breathe automatically.

“It’s my first good look at her,” Jamie said.  “Sy, if this is what-”

Shirley interrupted, breaking the spell.  “She’s going to kill Mauer!”

A belated realization.  She didn’t have the sense of the battlefield, where the key players were.  To her, this was only madness and violence.

But she’d realized, and in speaking it aloud, she gave us a push.

We ran, my hand reaching out for and pulling at Shirley’s.  We ducked low as we crossed open space to reach the fringes of the group, and we reached the trail of bodies she had left behind her.

With Shirley in tow, it was slower to weave through the crowd, chasing.  The Falconer wasn’t slow, either.  She was graceful as she killed, her economy of actions efficient.

If she killed or even hurt Mauer, then it would be a devastating blow to everyone present.  They would know that even the greatest of them, in the midst of an army, would be vulnerable.  That the enemy was that dangerous, that relentless and hard to stop.

I let go of Shirley’s hand, leaving her to Jamie as I ran ahead, accelerating my pace, dodging past people and experiments to close the distance, striving to catch up.

More bodies.  And people were retreating from her and from Mauer, to better save their own skin, which meant there were areas I was free to run forward without having to pause, without having to duck left or right or keep my head down to keep from braining myself on the butt end of a rifle someone was holding.

The increments were small, but I was gaining ground on her.

I saw snippets of her through the crowd, moving in the midst of rain and mob and sprays of blood.  Her wounds were superficial, her eyes wide, entirely the eyes of a predator and killer.  She didn’t look directly at those she killed, but, airborne in a leap, saber held high, she spared a moment’s glance at me, meeting my eyes.

As if to let me know that she had seen me.  She had seen my efforts, and the actions that followed would prove them vain.

Mauer led his army, and was yet unaware of what was tearing his way.

The moment ended.  The Falconer swooped down.  Three people died in that swing of a saber, by my estimation.

Mauer was perhaps fifty paces ahead of me.  Thirty paces ahead of her.

Black smoke billowed here and there.  The same stuff the giants had used.  I could tell by the size of the clouds how fresh they were.

I could tell, as I came across the latest, that it was only two or three seconds old.

She should have been further ahead of me.

She’d stopped.

I turned around, looking, my first thought being that she’d seen me, she’d ducked through the crowd to circle around, and she would be coming at me now, from an unexpected angle.

An unexpected angle, yes.

I looked past the people who were scattering.  I saw Jamie and Shirley, running toward me.  Confusion on Jamie’s face as he saw that I’d stopped.

The Falconer practically materialized behind them.  Stepping out of the crowd, silently killing two people as she did it.

Black haired, black garbed, with eyes like a hawk, spelling only cold death, she loomed behind them.  I saw Jamie’s expression change, as he registered my expression.

Jamie couldn’t react in time.  Let alone me.

With all of the Lambs but one standing in the crowd, watching, I cried out.

“Mary Cobourn!”

The Falconer heard me, and she hesitated.

Jamie turned, swinging his rifle, and slashed the blade of the bayonet across the Falconer’s eyes, blinding her.

She swung her saber, blind, and he held up his rifle.  Metal cut into metal, almost but not quite severing the rifle in half.

Jamie and Shirley backed away from the blinded noble, to my side.

And then, by unspoken agreement, we fled the battlefield.

This battle could be won, now, and this battle could be lost.

But what we’d just seen and given evidence to… we couldn’t die and take it to our graves.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 14.18 – Twig

Thicker than Water – 14.18

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The soldiers on the rebellion side backed away from the blinded Falconer, giving her a twenty-foot berth.  The very sound of the battlefield had shifted, with the rebellion side watching in a kind of awe, while the Crown forces pushed hard, shouting and urging the front ranks into more of a forward push.

Striving to get to their noble.  Through rain and smoke, someone had seen and passed on the word.  Now, belatedly, they were fighting to give her a place to escape to.

Jamie and I ran, with Jamie taking the lead, my hand holding Shirley’s.  I kept one eye on what was going on in front of me and one eye on the Falconer, as we circled around.

Orders were given, and experiments from the rebel side charged in from all directions.  They included several stitched, a modified hound with spines, an oversized insect, a modified human with weapons built into him, and a crude vat-grown man that was seven feet tall.  The vat-man looked like he was formed entirely of scar tissue, the details washed out.

There was some loose degree of coordination.  The stitched marched forward, more or less mindless, while the animals shied back, looking to dart in while her back was turned, while she turned this way and that reacting to sounds, her sword moving.

She must have heard the tramping footsteps of the stitched, because she lunged toward the nearest two, striking out.  One beheaded, another slashed across the lower face.  She reversed the cut, this time aiming for the throat, and beheaded that one as well.

She’d been able to figure out what she had cut, and adjust accordingly.

But as she turned on the third, the spined hound leaped for her.  Quieter than the stitched, harder to hear, it got its teeth on her.

She whirled, moving the sword, not cutting so much as she brought the blade under, sawing along the creature’s head.

The scar-man clubbed her, making her stagger a few steps, and was killed for the insult.

She fought blind, with clear mental visualizations of where her enemies were.

And, as she held the sword out, holding it so it pointed generally in the direction of a third stitched, who had stopped in its tracks after seeing others die.

Deciding on discretion over valor, she bolted, running in the general direction of the Crown forces – Montgomery’s group.

She cut a swathe, stumbling here and there as bullets were fired in her direction.

She didn’t make it out of the clearing.  The man with weapon arms flung himself at her, caught her legs, and tripped her.

Stabbing toward the man who still held her legs, she pierced him in the chest.

The Falconer -Mary Cobourn- might have been able to escape if she’d managed to start running again, cutting her way through the crowd, but it didn’t get that far.  The man with the weapon arms was still alive as someone threw something incendiary at him and the Falconer.

I saw only a glimpse of the fire that sprang into being around her and the man, and then Jamie and I were too far into the thicker part of the crowd.  I couldn’t see what unfolded from that, but I could guess well enough.

With my focus split as it was, it was Shirley, not me, who spotted another person coming through the crowd, straight for us.  I felt her hand tighten, and I looked.

Mauer.

Jamie and I stopped, and we wheeled around, facing the man, who had no doubt fought through the crowd from the moment the scene first unfolded with the Falconer.

He was tall enough to look past many of the heads in the crowd, tall enough to see the flame where the noble actively burned.  The light of that fire burned in his eyes.

But the rest of him was dark, stained with wet painted gray and black with thick smoke.  His clothes, including the heavy coat he wore over his shoulders, looked very heavy, a kind of burden.  His face was drawn, the faint lines here and there very visible.

Only points of fire still alight in those eyes, the rest of him dark and drenched… and he nonetheless was intense.  Immense in stature, and in how he conveyed himself.

As noble as the real nobles had seemed.  If they even were real.

He channeled all of that into his voice as he spoke.  One question, two words, enunciated very clearly, leaving no room for compromise.

“What happened?”

Eyes were watching us, ears were listening.  Ears had probably heard what I’d shouted to the Falconer.

It was very possible that the words would get back to Mauer, and he would realize what it was.  He knew Mary, after all.  He’d known Percy.

It was very possible those words wouldn’t.  That my voice had been one among many, among gunfire and shouts and the sound of the rain falling, in a moment when people were trying very hard to get away from the noble that had been cutting down the crowd like a scythe cut through wheat.  The voice of one person shouting, it could so easily have been misheard or slip from their minds.  Brains under stress didn’t always recollect things perfectly.

I glanced back at Jamie, and I thought about Mauer’s interaction with Augustus.

“Jamie blinded her,” I said.

Mauer was quiet and still, eyes still reflecting that fire, while the crowd moved around us, heads turning to look and to watch.  I felt Shirley grip my hand tighter.

“He did.  But you gave him the opportunity.  What did you tell her?” Mauer asked me.

“It wasn’t what I told her,” I lied to Mauer.  “It was when.  I cracked a jawbone in my hand, so to speak, and she flinched.”

I could see a muscle stand out at the corner of Mauer’s jaw.

“I mentioned the Block,” I told him.  “Her reaction confirmed her involvement.  We can find out where the Infante has been, he’s been bringing those two with him since he turned up in Warrick for the Baron’s engagement party-”

I raised my voice to be heard over the chaos around us.  So much motion and noise, and Mauer could well have been a lifelike statue.  “-We have a lead!  We’re pursuing it!”

Mauer stared me down for long moments, before he turned away.  He shouted out to a lieutenant.

I had no idea if he’d believed me or not, but he was letting this lie.

I looked at Jamie, and gave Shirley’s hand a tug.  We left the battlefield.

Our part in this was done.

Our destination was the opposite of where we’d been, in many ways, yet I could imagine that statue of Mauer standing in the midst of it, his eyes burning in a very similar way.

Bone dry, dark, and so still that it was stale.

The Block.

We descended the stairs, and I let go of Shirley’s hand as she lifted it to her mouth.

“No,” she said.

Skeletons and mummified bodies.  Ash here and there.  A layer of dust with a tint to it.  A hidden area.

We’d come here not because we hoped to find something new, but because all of it took on a new light, as a consequence of what we’d seen.  Now that we were here, it was like we could talk about it.

“The bodies,” Shirley said.  “So many of them are so small.”

I nodded.

Shirley walked around, but every few steps seemed to move her into a vantage point to see more bodies, more of the death.

Her hair had been covered by a hood, and with the hood down, her hair was the driest part of her.  Droplets of water soaked into an old footprint in the layer of dust on the floor.

Jamie’s hand gripped the elbow of his other arm.  His hair was wet and tucked behind his ears, and his spectacles were beaded with moisture, but he didn’t have anything dry enough to properly clean them.  The white button-up shirt he wore was faintly translucent from the moisture, and I could see the angry marks of scars on his upper body.

I wasn’t sure if it was the chill air of the underground area contrasted by the heat we’d brought down from up above, or if it was dust in the air, but it looked like his breath fogged momentarily as he exhaled.

A part of me was about to speak.  The voice hitched.  Awkwardness, and I’d very nearly done what I’d been doing for the last day, using a spectre to speak.

They were here.  They were prominent.  The spectre of Mary.  The spectres of Gordon and the younger Jamie.  Of Everett.

Not Helen, not Ashton, Lara, Nora, Evette, nor Abigail.

Mary, though, was front and center, taking it all in.

“You lied to Mauer,” Jamie said.

I nodded.

“You don’t trust him?”

“I don’t trust him to use it well,” I said.  “I thought about that moment back there with Augustus.  Mauer lost there, and I feel like he’s fighting, he’s just digging as deep as he can to keep the fight going, but there have been too many setbacks.  The people he was leading, they were angry at first, but then he lost their faith.  He and Fray stirred up a fresh sort of anger, they started a civil war, and when that died, they turned to primordials.  He’s fighting an enemy he can’t ever stop with the tools he has at his disposal.  If we give him this…”

I raised my hands, then let them drop.

“If we give him this?” Jamie asked.  “He fails?”

“I worry he’ll spend it.  He’ll use it to stoke those fires again, he’ll make a valiant effort, and then the nobles will know we know, they’ll be able to react and adjust, and the chance will be lost.  Maybe Mauer will ask people and find out on his own, but I’d rather it comes later.  After this fight.  He can ask around, find the people who witnessed that moment with the Falconer, and maybe the fifth remembers the name.  But if I told him, when he’s on the edge, fighting a battle that’s going to be a draw at best?  When he came here, almost a last bastion where he could find enough people that are wanting to fight?”

“He would use it, rally people.  In the midst of a situation the Academy is actively corralling and suppressing.  I think I see where you’re coming from.”

I nodded.

“You didn’t have to bring up the jawbone thing.  That was a slap in the face.”

“I did.  If he happens to put the pieces together after this, I think he’ll get it.”

“It wasn’t because he failed you on some level?” Jamie asked.

I raised an eyebrow.

“The books said you used to idolize him.”

“Still do.  A little.  I wish I could learn from him.  But the timing felt wrong, I didn’t and I don’t feel he was in the right place to hear that name and use it.  The jawbone… might have been a little personal, too.  I wish he was in the right place.  We could use help.”

Jamie seemed privately satisfied with his intuition on that front.

“We’re the only ones who know,” I said, quiet.  I looked over the bodies.  “About Mary Cobourn.”

Mary’s phantom didn’t react to the name.  Maybe because it wasn’t hers.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “Looking at her, my first instinct was, ‘oh, so this is what it feels like when you’re forgetting something’, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Shirley asked, turning around.

“As if it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite find the word.  The connection is there, but you can’t quite make it.  A face that’s familiar, that you can’t quite piece together.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Seeing her fight her way through that crowd, I realized, every time I felt myself want to go to her, to act while seeing her in action, I was wanting to dance, coordinate so I was moving in parallel, covering her weaknesses, augmenting her strengths.  Subconsciously, I recognized her.  If I hadn’t spent so much time with the phantoms lately, I might not have.”

“Percy introduced them, taught our Mary the other Mary’s mannerisms and way of speaking.  Something in that, and in the way they moved, underlying structure or habit or something else, they changed stuff on the outside, the color of her hair, the shape of her face, they changed stuff on the inside, and something still lingered.”

“They made your friend into a noble?” Shirley asked.  “A clone of her?”

“Our friend was a clone,” I said.  “And the original was… discarded.  She found her way here, or to a place like this one, or… no.  It makes more sense if she never made it this far.  Or if these people never made it that far.  Children collected from various places, using a quota system, then gathered, tested and examined.  If they met criteria…”

Jamie picked up the thread.  “Reaction times, recall, attractiveness, natural strength, endurance, flexibility, overall health, anything along those lines.”

“Yeah.  They’d be whisked away.  The rest of the children go up on an auction block for the Academies, as test subjects.  To obfuscate, explain why children are being collected and transported?  There is a demand, after all.  And then when someone gets too close, gets one or two steps away, burn it all.  I wonder how much Percy knew.  Mauer said Percy knew enough to point him and Fray in this direction.”

“Percy had her, and he… sold her?  Traded her?” Jamie asked.

“Assuming it’s the Academy proper that’s focused on meeting quotas… he traded to someone in the Academy for some lab equipment, maybe.  Or for knowledge.  Or he traded her to Cynthia, and Cynthia made the trade, looking for something similar,” I said.

“Why?” Jamie asked.  “Why does the Academy do it this way?”

“That’s a mystery we’re going to have to solve,” I said.

Jamie frowned.

“Much like the Twins,” I said.  “The Baron’s low status.  He knew something about this.  He- he laughed, when I asked where the children go.”

“I think we could benefit from studying the narrative,” Jamie said.  “The Falconer, you called her.  She was distant.  The Baron and Baronet Twins, distant, again.  Brought on board at a later age?  Explained away as distant relations?  While more effective projects, worked on from birth, are said to be direct relations.  Or they are direct relations, and the like of the Baron is… supplementary.”

“It might not be how early they were brought on board,” I said.  “It could be that he learned, he was allowed into the loop, and he took it badly.  All that ugliness in him, what if he just stewed in the knowledge that his nobility was a farce.”

“A farce,” Jamie echoed me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“This is big,” he said.  “Bigger than showing a noble can die.  It’s showing that nobles aren’t real.  The way you were talking about Mauer.  We want to be careful how we use this.”

“As careful as possible.  Like Augustus said, they write the history books.  They decide the narrative.  We could do untold damage to the Crown, but we need to make it count.  For that to work, we need more information.  We need proof, if it’s even possible to get any at this stage.”

“Might be worth moving forward with the plan we had,” Jamie said.

“Become a rebel faction?” I asked.

“Except less focused on the assassination of nobles, aristocrats, and professors.  More focused on information.”

“Okay,” I said.  “We have a time limit as it comes to that.  More than we already did.  Assume Mauer finds out.  He won’t sit on it.”

“A year?  Six months?”

“I don’t know.  We’ll figure that out.”

Jamie nodded.

Outside, muffled by the intervening ground and distance both, we could hear explosions.  Cannon fire, it sounded like.  Academy reinforcements would show up, the pressure would increase.  Mauer would possibly unveil another card he had up his sleeve, but it would still be a bitter, ugly battle.  I imagined it would end with Mauer slipping away.  The dead noble and the fact that he’d done it and lived would be cause to call it a win, or as close to a win as anyone got against the Crown.

More explosions rumbled.  It sounded like thunder, and for a moment I wondered if it was.  A summer storm?

Shirley hugged her arms to her body.

“Are you alright?” I asked her.  “We can leave.”

“I feel better down here than I felt up there,” she said.  “My heart is still pounding.”

“I owe you a lot,” I said.  “Your patience, that you followed us.  That you stuck by me.  If you wanted to leave, I’d understand.  I’d find some way to make it up to you, repay you for the help you gave.  I promised you that you wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty or face any danger, and I failed to follow through.  There would be no hard feelings.”

She shook her head.

“Alright,” I said.  I offered her a smile.  “I’ll be sure to give you a cool job title, and teach you all the sorts of things you wanted to learn.”

She smiled.  Then her eye fell on the bodies, and the smile dropped away.

“And when we make them pay for this,” I said.  “For the Block and every other thing like it, you’ll be able to say you played a part.”

“That might be nice,” she said, in a voice that sounded well divorced from those four words.

I put my hands in wet pockets as I leaned against the wall.  I wanted a cigarette, if only for the reason to stay silent, and for the opportunity to draw warmth into my lungs.  But I didn’t want to go upstairs.

We would have to inform the Lambs.  Or set something up to protect them.  Reaching out to them could be more dangerous than anything else.  We had to protect the information.  A dead man’s switch, most likely.

We would have to play this carefully, work together.  I knew we could, but the word ‘we’ felt very unsteady, as I weighed on it.

I glanced at Jamie, who was deep in his own thoughts.

In the moment, pushed together and pressured by outside circumstance, we operated well enough.  I remembered only a few hitches and hesitations here and there.  But in the quiet…

I wasn’t sure how to talk to him anymore.

The jokes I remembered telling, testing for boundaries and trying to feel out the new dynamics, they now felt out of place, jarring.  I regretted them.

I looked away.  I found myself looking at the younger of the Jamies, the ghost.  I saw the other ghostly Lambs, exclusively the ones who had no doubt passed through a place like this.  There was something reassuring in that, which was a far cry from being a good sentiment.  Bad feelings could be reassuring, and the knowledge that we shared a common root was that sort of feeling.

We would make it work, but… I wasn’t sure it would be easy or comfortable.

I’d known this would happen.  It was why I had self-censored.

What would Jamie’s response be if I asked if I could or should self-censor again?

He was looking at me, now, and I avoided meeting his eyes, because I knew that would force a conversation and I doubted either of us had the words ready.

It had been easier when I’d been riding the high that came from being Evette.  Reckless, self-destructive.  Aware of and willing to own the painful realities.

I thought of becoming Evette again and immediately dismissed the idea.

It had been hard enough to come back from the last time.

I’d paid a price, in that the ghosts didn’t come and go at my bidding anymore.

Those costly decisions dwelt in the quiet moments like this.  Being shot didn’t compare to what could follow from one bad conversation.

Jamie looked away, and I released a silent sigh of relief.

“Excuse me,” Shirley said.

Still hugging her arms against her body, she started making her way up the stairs.

“I thought you felt better down here than up there,” Jamie said.

“I’ll sit at the top of the stairs.  It’s a bit chilly down here,” she said, glancing at me.  “You two stay.  Think.  Discuss.

Mind changed, I thought.  Should have left you in that lab and fled the city.

Not really.  But the awkwardness felt all the more poignant in the wake of that last word she’d left us.  She had highlighted the silence.  Every second that stretched on as she walked up the stairs, then stretched even further as the sound of her footsteps ceased, and she settled up there, awkward agony.

I looked at the individual Lambs.

I looked at Jamie the spectre.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No need to be sorry,” the real Jamie said.

“I feel like I’ve always given you a hard time.  From a less than warm welcome to the group, to uneasiness, then I guess a perplexing winter and spring together in Tynewear, where I was self-editing, being a fool, and you were left scratching your head.”

“Don’t get down on yourself,” Jamie said.  “It was a good few months.  We might have driven each other crazy, puzzled each other, but I think it kept us sane.  It was the warmest, happiest few months of my life.  I’m optimistic about the next few.  Which is where I’m stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “I did a lot of thinking, after you left, replaying that conversation over and over in my head.”

“I know that feeling,” I said.  I thought about the Jamie that had come before.  The obsessive reading and rereading of the books.

“I thought about where I messed up.  Where I was angry, why.  The puzzle.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Familiar territory, again.”

“On the rooftop, I mentioned a compromise.  And now I’m mulling it over, but I’m afraid talking about it will spoil everything.”

I remembered my very recent thoughts on bringing up the self edit.

“We’re on the same page, believe it or not,” I said.

I was glad my hands were in my pockets.  I was nervous.

“Sy.  I want to get along with you.  I feel like there’s a great big obstacle in the middle of any interaction between us.”

I nodded.

“When my predecessor wrote in his journals, he left a code, remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Things for me, that he didn’t want the Academy reading.  That he didn’t want you reading.  Some of it was about his budding feelings for you.”

I shifted, uncomfortable.  If there was a Sylvester phantom in the room, he would have been replaying that conversation with Jamie out loud, taunting me with it.

“It went beyond that.  He knew that I was inevitable.  He wanted to brace me.  So he talked about insecurities.  The trick about being Jamie, wearing this body.  Scars and all.  So that I wouldn’t feel alone, if I found myself staring in the mirror.”

I nodded.

“But I found myself in a different place.  He talked about how the group was divided in two.  Gordon and you.  Then the girls.  Helen and Lillian.”

I frowned.

“I’m dancing around the subject.  He- My predecessor wasn’t that attached to the idea of being a boy.  But I think the decision was made for him, and then, to set a kind of balance when Mary joined, and maybe to be more your friend, he settled into it a bit more.”

“Not that attached?”

“He never wanted to be a girl, mind you, but when you were kids and being kids, boys poked fun at girls and girls joked about boys, he was always uneasy.”

I looked at the spectral Jamie, and I nodded.

I could remember the general shape of that uneasiness.  He’d be quick to question the stereotype, question, or leap to the side of the girls if there was an imbalance.  I couldn’t remember any instances, but I could remember being frustrated with it.  I’d been rather partial to drawing the divide, even relished it.

“I’m… even less attached to the idea of being a boy.  I don’t care either way.  I look at myself in the mirror and there’s no boy there.  There’s no girl.  Scars.  Ambiguity.  Missing pieces.”

I nodded.

I was terrified enough of saying the wrong thing that I kept my mouth shut.

“Does it make it easier if you think of me as being neither?” Jamie asked.

“My problem was never with you, though,” I said.  My voice sounded far away.  “Just… the idea that I was failing my best friend.  Or that the friendship was falling apart, when I really counted on it.”

“Then what if I was a girl?” Jamie asked.

“I couldn’t-” I started.  I stopped myself.

“The entirety of my existence,” Jamie said, voice quiet, “I’ve lived in his shadow.  I’ve failed to be him.  I wore his face and his name and many of his old clothes.  So don’t jump straight to ‘I couldn’t ask you to do that’.  It would be a relief.  But if the idea bothers or disconcerts you-“

I snorted.

He seemed taken aback by that.

“I spent enough time with Evette in my head, no.”

Jamie nodded.

“It might be useful,” I said.  “If rumors about ‘Jamie’ being alive persist, me being in the company of two girls could throw them off.”

“How very practical,” Jamie said, in a ‘how droll’ tone.

I smirked.

“I’m relieved I haven’t upset you,” he said.

“No,” I said.  I felt a massive weight lifting off my chest.  One that had been there for years.  “No.  Just the opposite.  You being out from the other Jamie’s shadow sounds… really nice.”

I looked up, meeting his eyes.

I closed my eyes for a moment.  Trying to alter my conception, use the Wyvern dose a little to help myself make that switch.  The framing of this Jamie, the longer hair.

Easy enough to take in a different sort of stride.

“I can’t guarantee I’ll even like-like you,” I said.  “Just saying.  I only really just said goodbye to Lillian.  That might be a process.  I don’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Ah, yeah,” she said.  She sounded disappointed.  “That’s fair.”

“I’ve really only just met you, in a sense,” I said.  I shrugged.  “But… yeah.  Let’s let it happen naturally as it happens.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“You said something about getting out from under the shadow of the name?”

She smiled.  “I was thinking Jessie.”

“Sticking with the J-name?  You’re aware Jessie can be a boy’s name?”

“I’m aware that Jamie is a unisex name too,” she said.  “Parity.”

“Okay,” I said.  Then I tried it out.  “Jessie.”

On the spot, very clearly unsure of herself, she looked very different from how she had ten minutes ago.  She smiled.

I exhaled, letting out all of the remaining tension.  That feeling of the burden lifting off of me wasn’t letting up.  I felt as light as air.  Buoyant.  A demon that had been stalking me and lurking over my shoulder for years had been put to rest, extinguished.

I spoke, “Good.  Perfect.  It was a massive pain in the ass, distinguishing between you and Jamie in my head.  Can’t even say Jamie the younger because you’re younger in terms of years you’ve been around, but he’s younger chronologically, and that’s only the beginning of the issue.”

I gestured at the stairs, and Jessie gave me a nod.  We started up in Shirley’s direction.

“I’m just glad that this puts your ‘pain in the ass’ innuendo to rest,” Jessie said.

“We’ll see,” I said.  Walking up the stairs next to her, I gave her shoulder a bump with mine.

After a moment, she returned the favor.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== Lamb (Arc 14) – Twig

Lamb (Arc 14)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Students aged seventeen to twenty gathered in the library, shuffling from one side to another, standing on tiptoes, and craning their heads to see.  A man in a white coat placed the sheet of vellum up on the board, tacking it securely in place, with three tacks to each corner.  To one side, a stitched guard with a helmet stood with arms folded.  A Radham Academy crest had been sunken into the flesh of the stitched’s chest and bicep, an ornate badge of metal surrounded by a ring of graying scar tissue.

The stitched guard was necessary.  Without it, the students might have dragged the man away from the wall or torn the parchment from his hands.  They were increasingly restless as the man took his time, the people in the front flinching as if they’d been pained when he dropped one of the tacks.

Lillian wasn’t part of the crowd.  She leaned against the wall by the front door of the library, on the very fringe of the crowd.  It was all too apparent that the man in the white coat was relishing the torment he was inflicting on the assembly, and Lillian had experienced more teasing in the last four years than most people experienced in a lifetime.  She was inured to it.  She’d learned patience.

He dropped another tack.  The stitched guard put a hand out, pushing away some of the students who pushed in a little too close.

If this joker just happened to get dragged into the crowd, lynched complete with a tarring and feathering, and then thrown into a stall of hungry, carnivorous experiments, she might have put her usual feelings about needless brutality aside and applauded along with the rest of the crowd.

She recognized faces here and there.  Frank, Raymond, Harold, Chester, Walter, and Clifford among the boys, and Beatrice, Sarah, and Jane among girls.

Duncan wasn’t here, which was a shame, but not too surprising.  Duncan often got nervous enough at these times of year that he became nauseous.  She had only found out after she had suggested his name for the Lambs project.  Had she known before, she might not have nominated him.

But that was why he wasn’t here.  He couldn’t show that weakness in front of his peers.  He would sneak in just as the bulk of the crowd dispersed, if he couldn’t catch her as she walked back to the girl’s dormitory.

The man in the white coat finished up, more because he seemed to sense he’d pushed his luck as far as it could go.  He backed away, and the crowd pushed in, while the guard continued to protect the paper.

Lillian remained where she was.  Even if she pushed, she wouldn’t see that much sooner.  Patience.  She had been tormented by a boy who had been engineered to be a right goblin, then she had made him her boyfriend and embraced the torment.

Put up your dukes, world.  I can take it, she thought.  There was a cynicism in the thought, a lack of humor.

Months of frustration and eagerness, a peak of fear and joy and pain, then… a long slump, emotionally.

She watched as the first batch of students worked their way out of the crowd.  She could read them on a basic level using tricks Sylvester had taught her, once upon a time.  It wasn’t that she was anything special when it came to reading people, but when emotions ran this high, then it was as plain as day.

Good practice, this.

Raymond looked pensive.  He usually did when he was most stressed.  He was twenty and he couldn’t stay in the Academy for much longer.

Jane looked delighted, but she had to play nice and suppress it because Sarah looked devastated.  Lillian knew it was an unhealthy friendship, prone to sabotage and undercutting.  The trio of Beatrice, Sarah and Jane were weaker together than they would be apart.

And then… Patty.

Patty wore her blonde hair in a style so short it could be mistaken for a boy’s, but where most boys parted their hair or slicked it back, Patty had parted her hair, then tightly curled the hair on both sides of the part, so it formed a single roll, and pinned it there.  The execution was so tight it looked sculpted, not styled.  She wore makeup that looked like it took some effort, too, heavy on the eyeliner and mascara.

“Lillian, hon,” Patty said.

Lillian managed a smile.  “Good morning.  How did you do?”

Patty waved her off.  “As if there was any question.  Are you putting it off?”

“I’m just waiting for the crowd to clear up,” Lillian said.  “The numbers and letters on the paper won’t change if I wait five minutes.”

“Sure, hon,” Patty said.  She reached out for Lillian’s hand, snatching it up to then hold it up and squeeze it.  “We’ve been in classes together for years.  You and I are the only two girls who skipped ahead.  The youngest girls in this crowd.  You don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not lying, Patty.  We’ve both heard the stories of the quarter-end seniors rioting.  Pulling hair to the point that scalps tear, students getting trampled…”

Patty scoffed.  “Older students tell those tales to scare the younger ones.”

Lillian was ninety-five percent sure that she’d seen one of the riots in progress, early on in her time at the Academy, but she kept her mouth shut.  Patty was being good, for the most part.

It would have been so nice if she and Patty had gotten along.  They were the same age, they’d both skipped ahead, and they both were near the top of the class.  But they had differed in seemingly every way.  Oil and water.

Patty was the oil, in that analogy.  Glossy, rich, naturally rising to the top.  In many ways, she was someone Lillian envied.  Brilliant, sharp, capable, born to a wealthy family, with countless natural connections by way of that same family, Patty had been close to the top of the class and did it while freely building up social circles, going out, gussying up, and almost effortlessly sabotaging and tearing down her rivals.

Patty had advanced ahead a year after Lillian had done so, without the leverage of being on a special projects team, and she had terrified all of the girls and many of the boys that were a year older and a year more experienced than the two of them.  Lillian had been among those students who feared this girl, but by virtue of not being at the Academy, busy working with the Lambs and getting caught up with the other students, she had flown under the radar.

Sometime into her work with the Lambs, two things had happened at once.  Lillian had caught up, leaping to the top or near-top of the class rankings, and she’d made a mental connection.  With that eye makeup she liked and the coiffed, fashionable style, Patty was an eerie, non-experiment parallel to Helen.  A cut-rate Helen.

With that, the fear had dissipated.  And an unfashionable, mousy girl who didn’t fear her and just barely managed to stay ahead of her in the rankings perplexed Patty.

Patty was the sort that attacked and blotted out what she couldn’t understand.  Most of the time, she wasn’t even in the city to fall prey to Patty’s usual methods of attack.  Lillian realized this attack was imminent too late.

“What happened this summer, hon?”

Lillian blinked.  “This summer?”

“There are rumors.  People watch you, because you’re so near the top, you’ve obviously used back-channels to build connections with the blackest coats at Radham.”

“Rumors can be wrong.  I’m not denying I’ve built connections, but we all do that.  I’m not sure what makes a connection back-channel.”

Lillian wanted to kick herself before she was even finished talking.  She was retreating, backpedaling, when she should be… what?  Deflecting?  Attacking?  Negating?  What would Sy do?

Then she wanted to kick herself for thinking about Sy first and foremost.

Duncan was a good model.  What would Duncan do?

Patty wore a condescending smile.  “We all saw your dip in zero quarter, a faltering rise for first quarter, and then the steepest dip of any student this year in the second.  Most students call it quits after a drop like that.”

Sylvester leaving in winter, a quiet spring where she focused on her project before they started after Sylvester in spring… and then summer.

Thinking the word ‘summer’ alone made her stomach sink.  She kept it from showing on her face.  “I’m not worried, Patty.”

“You should be!”  Patty said.  “You were number one, number two sometimes!  You’re my rival, hon.  You’re not supposed to be this weak.  More than half of the senior students who drop down in two of the five quarters fail.  But three?”

Patty gestured in the direction of the sheet, and her expression changed.  She squeezed Lillian’s hand hard.

Lillian’s heart skipped a beat.

She looked for my nameShe saw.

“Nobody comes back from bad marks in three quarters,” Patty said.  “They barely have time to review everyone’s work every year, so they shuffle the failures to the end, and they won’t even look at some of them.”

She could see the pained sympathy on Patty’s face.  It was too reminiscent of Jane’s expression with Sarah.

“I think that’s another myth, there,” Lillian said.

“Lillian,” Patty said, her voice dropping, becoming something urgent.  “Hon.”

“Patty,” Lillian said, dryly, refusing to be drawn into Patty’s tempo and rhythm.  But her mouth felt dry, and her heart hammered in her chest, still.

“Whatever magic you were working to do as well as you were doing before…” Patty said, “And we’ve all heard the rumors, you know.  You need to recapture that.  Find a way back into good graces.”

“You’re being silly, Patty.  The ‘magic’ is that I’m working with a special project for Headmaster Hayle.  It’s an open secret.  It was a hard summer with the project.  The headmaster and my professors know this.”

A bit of a fib, that.

“With Headmaster Hayle and Professor Ibbot,” Patty said.

Lillian sighed.  “Special projects are secret projects.”

“Ostensibly.  You’re surrounded by clever people, hon.  Don’t think we don’t see or pay attention.  We talk among ourselves and piece things together.  Ibbot spends his time in the company of his ‘daughter’, who bears no resemblance to him at all.  She’s in his lab all the time, and when she isn’t, she’s often in your company.  It used to be Lambsbridge, but not so much, lately.  Are they keeping things closer to the Academy proper, so as not to interfere with your studies?”

So this was it.  Falter just a little for just a little bit too long, and the vultures would start circling.

“You’re getting wildly off track,” Lillian said, with a calm she didn’t feel.  “I’m fine.  Truly.”

Patty glanced left, then glanced right.  A prelude to her follow-up maneuver, as if she was putting on a show for someone.  The girl let go of Lillian’s hand, then she stepped closer, hands clutching at Lillian’s sleeves, at the upper arms.  It was something Patty did a lot.  Snatching at hands or clutching at someone.  But even while Lillian could file it away as a technique one of the Lambs might try at using, she found herself falling prey to it in the moment.  She startled a little, and froze enough that she got caught up in Patty’s follow-up.

“They say Ibbot was baited to Radham with promises that he would be allowed to pursue his perversions.  That girl he created.  Having you at his beck and call.”

Lillian found herself at a loss for words.

“I don’t know if you agreed to it, thinking you could propel yourself up the class rankings, or if you were a victim.  If that bloated, narcissistic, sleazy greaseball put his narrow, slimy hands on you, or if he just used you to test out his perverted pet.  It doesn’t matter-”

“Patty,” Lillian interjected.  Were people listening?  No.  Nobody seemed to have drawn close to listen in.  The rumor mill wouldn’t be agitated by this particular scene.

Hon,” Patty jumped in, insistent.  “It’s okay!  Whether you were victim or whether you went along with it, that’s the reality of being a young lady in the Academies.  It’s not always easy.  I don’t fault you.  We don’t fault you.”

Lillian experienced a monumental sinking feeling at the realization that this was the web of rumor that Patty had been spinning while she’d been away.  Months and even years of sidelong glances suddenly made some small amount of sense.

That ominous line of thought was cut short.  Lillian could see Mary, some distance behind Patty.  It woke her up to reality, so to speak.

But Mary wasn’t jumping in to save her.  Mary walked up behind Patty, made the gesture for silent kill, then stepped back.

No, this was up to her, not Mary.

“Patty,” Lillian said, more firmly.  “You’re being silly.”

“Lillian.  Hon-”

“Calm down,” Lillian said, adopting a tone more like a teacher talking to a young student.  “You’re getting so caught up in your fantasy that you’re practically drooling.”

Now it was Patty’s turn to be at a momentary loss for words.

“Ibbot makes weapons,” Lillian said.  “This is common knowledge.  His ‘daughter’ is a weapon.  And it’s equally common knowledge to anyone in the know that the professor prefers his women like he likes his wine, matured.  Which I promise you, is just as disgusting a mental image for me as it is for you.”

She could see Patty preparing to turn the tables.  Lillian hurried to deliver the knockout first.  She took a page from Patty’s book, clapping a hand on Patty’s shoulder to startle before leaning in close to her ear.

“If you fantasize of being with Ibbot, hon, then I’ll extend you a courtesy and I won’t fault you for your utter lack of taste.  If you fantasize about Helen… maybe Ibbot would allow you to put yourself forward as a candidate for helping with any tests, when she reaches an age for those tests to start.  I doubt they would help you with marks or help your standing in anyone’s eyes.”

“You’re disgusting!” Patty exclaimed.  Heads turned.  Patty pulled back, and Lillian maintained her grip where her hand rested between the girl’s neck and shoulder, holding her firm for just a moment longer.

“Do what I do,” Lillian said, unfazed.  “Focus on the weapons, not lascivious rumors, and not the lascivious.”

Patty pulled away, spinning on the spot, and took one step before finding herself face to face with Mary, stopping in her tracks.

The girl changed direction, circling around Mary as she left the library.

Lillian’s hands shook from the agitation of that confrontation, the shock at the allegations.

“Patty, if I remember right?” Mary asked, looking over at the retreating girl’s back.

“Yes,” Lillian said.  She composed herself.  She couldn’t afford to look weak, whatever the rumors were.  “Hello.  I didn’t expect you to show up here.”

“Hayle sent me.  He knew you would be checking your results here.”

“He sent you for work?” Lillian asked, with a hint of dread.

“Work,” Mary confirmed.

Lillian wanted to ask, but the word remained at the tip of her tongue.

“Sylvester,” Mary said.

Lillian bit her tongue, instead.

“He found his way to Laureas,” Mary said.

“Where?  I don’t know that place.  Or person.”

“Place.  A smaller city, far east.  We thought he might be heading into the heart of the Crown’s territory, but he’s staying put.  We only found out he was there because he’s building up an organization, and he unwittingly invited a Crown spy into his group.”

“Knowing Sylvester, it was probably witting.”

Mary looked thoughtful.  “Perhaps.  But by all accounts… nobody who has seen him has said he’s been doing well.”

‘Then Jamie isn’t with him?”

“Apparently not,” Mary said.

Lillian nodded.

“We’re leaving soon.”

“There’s never any forewarning,” Lillian said.

“It’s why we keep bags packed,” Mary said.  “I brought yours.”

“You’re a dear.  Just… let me check?” Lillian asked.

“Of course.  And Duncan-”

“-Asked you to ask me to check.  And write it down exactly.”

“Exactly,” Mary said.

The crowd wasn’t exactly thinning.  People who had waited were losing patience and joining the crowd, keeping the size roughly even, but the initial rush and push had died down.

She weaved her way through the crowd.  Talking to Mary had centered her.  If she’d navigated this crowd with Patty’s poisonous words in her mind, this journey through the bodies would have been awful.  Doubly so if she hadn’t shooed Patty off like she did.

She suspected she would pay for that.  But that wasn’t a war she’d win anyway.  She’d long ago decided that she couldn’t fight the rumors and there were limits to what she could do about sabotage.  The only thing she could do was do the best work she could, and use what she’d learned from the Lambs.  A lot of that had involved finding a measure of emotional strength within herself.

She reached the front of the crowd, and one or two students glanced at her and recognized her.  She knew their faces, but not their names.

Following the interviews and project proposals, the ‘zero quarter’, students would start their work on their final projects to earn their white coats.  The year was divided into four quarters, and each one was graded.  Producing good results at each quarter was essential, as it dictated the resources allotted, and as Patty had said, it adjusted the expectations of the instructors for the final assessments.

But above all else, it told students where they stood.

Lillian Garey

Q0 (Winter): 12th (-11) O: 5  P: 5  E: 7

Q1 (Spring): 7th (+5) O: 6  P: 7  E: 9  Au: 2

Q2 (Summer): 28th (-21) O: 6  P: 5  E: 5  Au: 1

Q3 (Fall): 6th (+22) O: 6  P: 7  E: 10  Au: 3

Lillian sighed in relief.

Sixth place was a far cry from first, but… she’d recovered.  She’d unconsciously known she would, given how she had thrown herself into her studies after a hard summer, but a twenty-one position drop was cause to start doubting oneself.

She had picked up some financial backers over and above what the school itself would give her, and people clearly liked the quality of her work.

She checked other results.  Duncan was second.  Frank was first, and he had a commendation for his work.  She could see where the other notable students had risen and fallen.  Harold, Chester, Beatrice had placed in the top ten.  Her earlier suspicions about others were confirmed as she found their places on the rankings.

Lillian had to search to find Patty.

Patty’s block of results was on the long piece of paper, closer to the ground than to eye level.  From a rise to fourth in zero quarter, to twelfth, then sixty-second, then one hundred and thirty-third place.  No backers.  Given the scoring, the only reason she was even as high as a hundred and thirty third out of three hundred students was that she’d started out with a good position.  There was some hope that her talents would bear fruit.

Lillian knew in that moment that she would probably never see Patty again.  The girl was very likely done at Radham.  Pulling up from that steep a drop would be nigh-impossible.  No matter how many strings she had available to pull, she wouldn’t get through the next zero quarter, either.  She could prove her talents might bear fruit, but it would be at a smaller, less prestigious Academy.

Lillian dutifully wrote down Duncan’s results, then found her way back to Mary.  Her conversation with Patty lingered in her mind, taking on a new tone now that she knew the context.

She wanted to dislike the girl, but she only felt a profound sadness.

“Lillian?” Mary asked.

Lillian looked up.

“Are you okay?” Mary asked, cautious.

Lillian realized how she must have looked.  She smiled, and she laughed a little.   “I’m fantastic, and Duncan did fantastic too.”

“The look on your face-”

“I’m worrying about others.”

Mary gave her an abrupt hug.

“I’m only sixth, mind you”

“That’s not why I’m hugging you,” Mary said.  “And you can climb to a more respectable ranking in the last quarter.”

Lillian nodded, giving Mary a tight squeeze.

Mary understood.

“Only problem,” Lillian said, “Is one little goblin that acts as an ill omen when it comes to my grades.”

“Only solution,” Mary said, keeping one arm around Lillian’s shoulders as she led Lillian into a walk, “Is we shoot out both of his knees, then riddle the body with knives.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Lillian said, fully aware they were joking.  “Except knives are too merciful.”

“We should enlist Nora and Lara when we get that far,” Mary said.  “From the horrible things they come up with when they taunt and mock each other, they could come up with something interesting.”

“Perfect.  But I get dibs.”

“Of course.  I have my own axe to grind.  Literally.  But larva twin torments, axings, knives and kneecapping is all going to have to wait.”

“Wait?” Lillian asked.  She mocked horror.  “No!”

“Sylvester doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and we’ve received an invitation,” Mary said.  Her tone was changing to become decidedly more serious.

Fray?  No.  It would have come in the same breath as Hayle ordering them to move.  Which meant noble.  Which meant-

“The Infante,” Mary said, with no humor in her voice anymore.  “He wants us to stop in on our way over.”

As a group, they departed the train.  Duncan, Ashton, Mary, Helen, and Lillian made their way down to the train platform, each carrying their bags.

From the adjacent train car, Hayle and Ibbot stepped down.  They had help.  A flock of professors and gray coats followed them, independent of that help.

Ibbot almost looked in his element here, but he worked hard at dispelling that notion.  The small, balding, greasy man moved awkwardly in the midst of the group.  He would turn to talk, and get in someone’s way, and the graceful movement of the entourage they’d managed to gather would be disrupted.  Even his voice seemed jarring.  Too loud at the wrong times, as if loudness could serve in place of a sense of humor or wit.

Hayle, by contrast, conducted himself as any headmaster should.  Lillian didn’t agree with Hayle in all things, or even in most things, but she could look up to him in this.

“I still don’t see why you would feel bad,” Duncan said.

The topic had turned to Patty, a minute before they had stepped off the train.

“Solidarity?” Lillian guessed.  “Because she’s a person, and I don’t actually like other people losing or failing out, even if it means my success?”

“Because you’re a gentle soul,” Helen said.

“Gentle isn’t how I’d put it,” Lillian said.

“It’s not how I’d put it either,” Duncan volunteered.

“Pish posh,” Helen tutted.

“I think Lillian’s a gentle soul,” Ashton said.  “I think you’re a soul that’s going to get yelled at, Helen.”

“She is,” Lillian said.  Mary nodded.

Helen looked at each of them, concern clear on her face.

“You ate too many treats from the tea cart,” Ashton accused.

“Hardly!” Helen said, hand going to her mouth.

“Your stomach isn’t perfectly flat,” Ashton said.  “He’ll yell at you.”

Helen looked down.  “I’ll rearrange my insides for a while.”

She did.  She subtly contorted herself to look at her midsection from a few different angles before nodding, self-satisfied.

“Getting back to what we were talking about, I don’t like seeing others fail, either,” Duncan said.  “But if someone had to fail, I’m sort of glad it’s her?”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.

“She’s kind of really exceptionally evil?” Duncan suggested.  “Even above and beyond the usual required of an Academy student?”

“I mostly avoided her.  I was going to ask how you handled her.  You’re usually so good at navigating that strategic space.  People, politics.”

“I didn’t.  I was terrified of her.”

“Did she come after you?”

“She told me I was asking her out,” Duncan said, with the terror clear on his face.

Lillian laughed.

“It wasn’t because of interest.  It was because I was second place and she wanted information.”

“What did you do?”

“I went on the danged date.”

Really?” Helen cooed.

“And I made sure to be as boring as humanly possible, so there wouldn’t be a second one.  I gave the dullest, shortest response available to every question, and I paid her every courtesy a gentleman should, while I did it.

“Fantastic,” Lillian said.  “I’m actually impressed.”

“Some scandal or another caught her attention before she could figure out how to deal with me, and I mostly stayed out of her way after that.”

“Maybe she actually liked you,” Ashton said.

“Never ever got that feeling,” Duncan said.  He turned his head.  “Hello, headmaster.  Professor Ibbot.”

Lillian joined the girls and Ashton in giving her greetings.

As they split into groups to enter the carriages, she was sure to enter the carriage with Professor Hayle.

Ibbot, meanwhile, fussed over Helen, wanting her to be as perfect as possible for the imminent visit.

Lillian sat by Mary, across from the headmaster.

“Congratulations on the placement,” Professor Hayle said.

“Thank you, sir,” Lillian said.

“You can do better.”

“Yes sir,” she said.

The old man nodded.  “Unfair of me to criticize, perhaps.  I can do better, I suspect.”

“By all accounts, you’re the best headmaster Radham has had.”

“Tell me that when I’ve been in power for a full year.  I inherited the Academy after a tumultuous time, and the timing was fortunate.  It makes me look better than I am.”

“Just as the civil wars move out east?”

“Perhaps.  The nature of the war may well be changing.  I sensed an opportunity many years ago, when I first moved to create the Lambs.  I suspected the battlefields would look like they do today.  That the enemies wouldn’t be generals, but reverends.  Not soldiers with rifles and bayonet blades, but scientists with books.  Not unstoppable brutes, but things that lurked in shadows.”

“I’m rather partial to my guns and blades,” Mary said.

“And you’re partial to the shadows, too.  Don’t deny that,” Professor Hayle said.  “You know your poisons.  You know where to position yourself.  It wasn’t so terribly long ago that armies marched to war and stood out on the open field of battle, standing there to reload, aim, and fire as allies and friends to either side of them dropped dead.  We’ve moved well past that.  To trenches and waves of dead men, then to dark corners and more refined killers.”

Mary nodded.

“The nature of the battlefield will change again.  The paradigm is shifting once more.  I hope I’m able to suss out the coming reality as I did our current one, but only time will tell.”

“Where do we stand in this?” Lillian asked.

“When you say ‘we’, do you mean yourself and Duncan, who is enduring a carriage ride with our master of monsters, or do you mean yourself and the remainder of the Lambs?”

“Is it a mark against me if I say it’s the latter?” Lillian asked.

“I wonder,” Hayle said.  He smiled.  “Don’t worry, Lillian.  I’m fond enough of you that I’m not about to mark you, for good or for ill.”

“Thank you sir,” Lillian said.

“I would say that the Lambs are, by design, uniquely suited for the current reality.  I’m hopeful you’ll collectively determine the nature of the next reality.”

Lillian nodded, taking in the answer.

In retrospect, it made some sense of his earlier question, about whether she counted herself among the Lambs or among the students.

She wondered if she should have given a different answer.  By Hayle’s own definition, the Lambs were created for the now.  Shaping the future, yes, but with no place in it.

She had hoped to ask more questions, but the short discussion occupied her thoughts, and Hayle offered nothing more.

The warmth of Mary’s upper arm touching hers reminded Lillian that she wasn’t alone.  The fate of Patty and the standing of the other Lambs lingered in her mind.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed.

“I hate the rain,” Hayle murmured.

“Hm?” Lillian stirred.

“It’s nothing,” the man said.  “We’ve arrived.”

“Yes sir,” Lillian said.  She smoothed out her skirt, and straightened her clothing where it had gotten rustled from two stints of travel, one long and one short.

“The Infante is a dangerous man,” Hayle said.

Mary and Lillian nodded.

“I’m supposed to offer you words of encouragement,” Hayle said.  “I’ve talked to the High Noble twice, and I have no advice to give.  I can’t tell you to be wary.  There will be no warning.  I can’t tell you to be careful.  I could tell you to be perfect, but I’d expect you two more than anyone else to try at that regardless… and I fear being perfect isn’t always enough, for him.”

Lillian would have replied with a ‘yes sir’, but she worried the words would catch in her throats.

“I’ve played god,” Hayle said, as if to himself, shutting his eyes for a moment.  “Let’s face the devils bravely.”

The words sounded alien coming from Professor Hayle’s lips.

The old man opened his eyes and looked at Lillian.

“Ah,” he said.  “Bad form, for a man of science, I know.  Not faith, don’t you worry.  More of a private joke.”

“I see,” Lillian said.  She didn’t.

“I created the Lambs.  Created you, collectively, if you’ll allow me to include you in the group you identify with.  In life, in destiny, in the blood I had the Lambs shed, and in the expiration dates I knew would be handed down to all but to you, Lillian, I had a firm hand.  When the Academy and the Church went to war, the act of ‘playing god’ was hot on their lips.  They promised that our actions would have an equal and opposite reaction.  I think of that reaction as the devils coming to call on us.”

The carriage door opened.  A collection of stitched were gathered there, with Crown doctors and soldiers.

“Have they?” Lillian dared ask, with the listening ears.

“For the Academy as a whole?  It has felt overdue since I heard the words leave the lips of those men, back when I was still a student.  For me as an individual?  I felt as though they would come for me the moment I signed my name to your project and I’ve felt that sword poised over my head ever since.”

Mary spoke, “After all of that waiting, I imagine your pet viper turning on you must have felt like a relief.”

Lillian glanced at Mary.  She thought of Percy.

Percy’s devil had come calling, in the end.

Hayle, though, only chuckled.  “It almost did.  Almost.  But the sword is still there.  I might have the benefit of having a sense of where it is, yet that is balanced out by the fact that the edge is now pressed against my throat.”

Lillian might have added more, but she was deeply uncomfortable with the current topic, when there were listening ears.  Hayle seemed comfortable picking his words carefully.

Will you be disappointed if the devil doesn’t come knocking? she wondered.

But she couldn’t frame that question without insulting her benefactor, or tipping off the listening ears.

The silence that followed was welcome… and soon broken by Ibbot’s talk.

She tuned the man out as best as she could.  With gestures, she signaled to Helen, Duncan, and Ashton.

Together.

They were led as a group through winding hallways, past glass framed not with branches, but with veins.

Past living walls.  A simple pillar of flesh, but in a crisis, those pillars would prove to be vacuum tubes, vomiting out streams of Academy-produced work.  At virtually any hallway or room of the building where the flesh had been placed, a modest army could be produced, ejaculated forth and ready for battle in minutes at worst, moments at best.

In other places, it served as incubation chambers for vat-grown life that would last a very short time outside of its sac, but would do immense damage in the short term.

She could see some of the life forms, and recognized them as primordial-inspired.  Derived from tests carried out in isolated, secured locations.

Everywhere else was thick stone, branch-like growth that would be harder than steel, and, running between stones, there would be a system akin to a nervous system, allowing for almost instantaneous communication across the facility.

Into the belly of the beast, she thought.

She was glad the Lambs were with her.

The great double doors were pulled open, and the Lambs, joined by a retinue of guards, stitched, and doctors, and by Professors Hayle and Ibbot, stepped into the garden of crimson plants.

The Infante was there, with the Duke of Francis sitting next to him.  First Augustus was standing off to one side, by a casket with a lid of frosted glass.

The Lord Infante was a giant of a man, and his clothes, old fashioned, didn’t make him look any smaller.  He and the other nobles wore all black.

As one, Lamb, stitched, and professor fell to one knee.

“Good of you to come,” the Infante said.  His voice was so deep it could be felt right in the center of Lillian’s chest.  “Lambs, Professors, please stand.  Others, depart.  Augustus, you’ve made your token appearance.  Look after those affairs I told you of.”

Augustus bent his head in a small bow, then left through a side door.  Behind Lillian, the entourage of doctors, soldiers, and guards left.

“War,” the Infante said.  “The Reverend is drawing it out.  He had to win his first battle if he had to fight on any sort of even ground, and he was never going to win his first battle.  Augustus is proving his worth ten times over.  Much as you’re doing, headmaster Hayle.”

Professor Hayle bent again into a bow.  “You’re very gracious, Lord Infante.”

“And the Lambs,” the Infante said.  He spread his arms.  “Draw closer, draw closer, now.  Hayle, Ibbot, wait outside.”

As a group, the Lambs walked down the path between two fenced sections of crimson plants.

Lillian glanced back at Professor Hayle and Professor Ibbot, watching as the doors shut, leaving the Lambs with the great noble.

“I’ve met Sylvester several times now,” the Infante said.  “I had no illusions about who or what I was dealing with.  On the first meeting, someone in pain, looking to lash out.  And lash out, he did, against the Baron Richmond.  On our second meeting, it wasn’t pain, but loss.  I wanted to meet the people he lost.”

The Infante set his eyes on Lillian.

“Lillian Garey,” he said.

“Lord Infante,” she said, giving him her best curtsey, bending her upper body into a bow.

“Tell me.  How would you completely and utterly destroy him?”

She froze, head still bent.

“No answer?  That’s an answer unto itself.”

“If it were me, Lord Infante, I would tell him that he was poison to me, that I was worse off for having him in my life,” Lillian said.

“That’s hardly of any use to me,” the Infante said.

“My apologies, my lord.”

“If you were in my shoes, Ms. Garey, how would you completely and utterly destroy him?” that deep voice asked her.

Her vision swam.

There was no good answer.  She had to satisfy him, or the Lambs would be deemed useless and wiped out, but answering…

No.  She had to give him exactly the right answer.

“Lord Infante, in your shoes, I would first ask how to completely and utterly destroy each and every last one of the Lambs, and then I would see it through.”

“Then you are blacker of heart than I am, Ms. Garey.  Are you the one that he fell in love with?”

“He fell in love with all of us, Lord Infante, but he and I were close.”

“Tell me, Lillian Garey, were you the one that suggested that Professor Ibbot come?”

“No, my lord.”

“It was not Headmaster Hayle’s idea, and it was not by my request, although I allowed it when Hayle presented it.”

“I believe that suggestion was Duncan’s, Lord Infante.”

“And in the doing, the small Professor sees his Galatea as the gatekeeper to this realm, and a crisis is postponed,” the Infante said.  “Deftly done.”

“Thank you, Lord Infante,” Duncan said.

“Ms. Garey,” the Infante said.  “You desire a black coat?”

“Yes, Lord Infante.”

“With a single instruction, I could give you a coat.  Would you want to attend a noble?  An Academy?  Pursue a project?”

“Lord Infante, I would run an Academy, given a choice, but given a choice, I wouldn’t want a coat in that form.”

“Of course,” the noble said.  “But if you had it, and if I gave you command of Radham, for an example, what would you do with it?”

Her heart was hammering.  She felt nauseous.

“With the utmost of respect, Lord Infante, I don’t feel this is a fair line of questioning.  I don’t know with any certainty what I would do because I haven’t traveled there yet.  The journey there will let me see what is right and what is wrong, what needs to change and what needs to stay the same.”

“Do you wish to have power for power’s own sake, then?” the Infante asked.

“No, Lord Infante.”

“Duncan,” the Infante spoke.  “Do you wish for a black coat?”

“Yes, Lord Infante.”

“Do you want that power and position for power’s own sake?”

“I admit I do, Lord Infante.  For the access to learning, and for the chance to have a hand in history.”

Lillian was breathing harder.  It wasn’t just panic.  There was anger there too.

Some of it at Duncan.  But only some.

“Lillian,” the Infante said.  “I’m at a loss.  What did he see in you?”

For a paralyzing moment, she wasn’t sure she had an answer.

Then, glancing at the casket, she thought of Gordon.  Gordon’s words.

Gordon had described each of the Lambs in turn as being something elemental in its simplicity.  A flame that burned too bright, for too short of a time.  Capricious whimsy and stolen breath.  Etched memories and a monument.  Then Sylvester, fluid, a reflection.

But what was she?

“Lord Infante, Sylvester is fluid.  He conforms to fit those closest to him.  He reflects them.  But he doesn’t often get the chance to see himself.  He got that from Jamie, once upon a time, I think, someone who saw all of him, even though a perfect recall is harsh, sometimes.  He could leave a softer message behind, with me.  One that wouldn’t be as stark, and which would carry forward better.  And maybe, the lessons he imparted on me would matter, down the road.”

“He cares about legacy, then.  It makes sense.”

Had she betrayed Sylvester, by sharing all of this?  Had she betrayed herself and the Lambs, by sounding too fond of Sylvester?

“Yes, Lord Infante,” Lillian said, her voice sounding distant.

“Thank you, Lillian, for educating me about our mutual enemy,” the Infante said.

“Yes, Lord Infante,” she said, feeling numb and hot with anger at the same time.  Staying composed and keeping her voice level was all she could do.

“I’ve upset you,” he said.

She couldn’t find the words to respond.

“I understand.  Take a moment, gather your composure.  I’ll have a word with the headmaster and the professor.  Join us when you’re ready.”

“Yes, Lord Infante,” she said.  She only felt worse now.

The Infante strode from the room.  The doors closed behind him.

“That wasn’t what I expected,” Duncan said, his voice quiet.

Lillian frowned, staring down at the ground.

“You needed to answer his questions, which you did, and you needed to satisfy him, and you did.  I think that was a loyalty test, and-”

“It wasn’t a loyalty test,” Lillian said.  “He was sticking the knife in and twisting it.”

“Oh,” Duncan said.  “I don’t think I understand.”

“You don’t need to understand,” Ashton said, firmly.  “You need to recognize that Lillian is upset and you need to respect her feelings.”

“Thank you, Ashton,” Lillian said.

She felt arms wrap around her shoulders.  Mary.

“He invaded the relationship,” Lillian said.  “He pried.  He poisoned things with little comments and doubts.”

She felt Mary’s head move in a nod.

“He made me betray Sy, and yet I’m not even sure if I told him anything new.”

“He would have found a way to get that information,” Mary said.

“But I’ll never know, will I?  He found the good parts of that relationship, and he took it.  Or smudged it, tainted it.  And I don’t understand why.”

“To hurt Sylvester, in a roundabout way?” Mary suggested.

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.  She shrugged, and in the doing she inadvertently signaled that Mary should end the hug.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Mary said.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do like this,” Lillian said.

“Handle the now, now,” Helen said.  “Basics first.  Eat, sleep, breathe, murder, drink.  Then handle the next most essential things.”

“I think I’ve got most of the basics covered,” Lillian said.  “It’s the complex web of things that has me stuck.  Hayle asked if I was a student or a Lamb, back in the carriage.”

“You identified as a Lamb,” Mary said.

Lillian kept her voice quiet, “I identified as a Lamb.  And I think I disappointed him.  I think I disappointed Sy, when I told him I couldn’t be both.  Or that I couldn’t be his and be ours at the same time.  Or… I don’t know.  I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.”

“You are a Lamb,” Mary said.  “You are a great mind.  You’re capable of the number one spot in your year.  Don’t fall into his trap.  Just because you don’t see it now.  Just because you don’t see it right this second doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.  It’s like it is with my training and with your lesson plans.”

Mary had been pacing across the garden, before stopping to turn and talk.  She stood near the casket, staring down at the frosted glass.

She turned away, “Concrete steps.”

Lillian nodded.

Ccome,” the voice said.

Her blood ran cold.

She turned her head, and she saw.  Sitting in a chair at the other end of the garden, the Duke still sat.  So still in the evening gloom, all dressed in black, he was easy to miss.

“Did he hear?” Ashton asked.

“More concerning is did he speak?” Duncan asked.

Lillian, quickly joined by Mary, approached the Duke.

Stiff, unsure, she bent into a bow.

Lilliann,” the word came.  Uneven, not flowing as a word should, drawn out, awkward.

“My lord,” she said.  “You can speak?”

“A tthird off my mind gone.  Slow.  Unnn-befitting forr aa nobble, I know-w.  But aa-ugmmentations… cann speak iff Ii consscentrate.  Concenntrating alll my life.”

“Yes, my lord.  Does- does the Infante know?”

“Nno.  You will nott tell himm-m.”

She glanced at the others.

“Why us?” she asked.  Then, “My lord.”

“For Ssylvesster.  Yyou keep, inn your medicinne bag, W-wyvverrn?”

“Yes,” she said.  She didn’t append the ‘my lord’ this time.

“Willl hellp mme work arround damaged parrts.  Iin exchannge, I willl be ann allly.  The innfannte, more dangerrous thann you knoww.  I knoww things.  Uniite the Llambs.  I sso sswear this.”

She glanced at Mary, then at Helen, then back at Duncan.

The same question, posed again.

To do her duty, or to be a Lamb.

She reached for the pack that was attached to her belt.  Not as a decision, but to confirm that the syringe she’d been asked to keep to administer to Sylvester was still there.

Duncan caught her wrist, and she met his eyes.

“The Infante knew the Duke was here,” Duncan said.  “It’s a trap.”

“It’s not out of the question,” Mary said.

The anger was still fresh, clouding her judgment.

Hayle had been unable to brace her for the Infante.  But he’d brought up his devils.

On the flip side of things, she wanted to be the compassionate Doctor that Sy and Mary both cherished.  The one that cared even for gossip-mongers.

But the nobles were dangerous, this Duke among them.

“Is that the sentiment?” Lillian asked.

Both Duncan and Mary nodded.

She met the Duke’s eyes.

“Perhaps on a future visit, my lord?” she offered.  “It’s something the Lambs will need to discuss.”

With glacial slowness, the Duke nodded his head.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.01 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Caton’s second rule is where you have to be able to do maths quick in your head.  Intake scales.  I’m not going to read the numbers out loud, you both can read.  Gases, fuels, hydration.  Note correlation to size.  Where the science stops and the art starts is when you can adjust the scales and numbers as you grow the system, and you start seeing the organism naturally take on the necessary proportions to draw breath, digest, and, of course, hydrate.”

I nodded, looking down at the book.  It was one of Fray’s tomes, not the Academy’s, but the tables were much the same.  I commented,  “I’m not going to remember numbers like that.”

“I will,” Jessie said, sitting on the stool next to me.

I elbowed her.

“You can always refer to the books, I guess,” our tutor said.  “But if you want to be good-”

“I want to be below average, not good,” I said.  “I’m quick.  I can pick stuff up.  I’m primarily interested in getting a grounding in anything I wouldn’t be able to figure out on my own.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jessie said.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.  Speaking for myself.  You can manage on your own,” I told Jessie.

Jessie was wearing a wool dress in navy blue, with a collared shirt underneath.  Her hair was braided to one side, the short braid just barely touching the collarbone at her right shoulder, and she had the glasses set so that she was looking over them as often as not, to better complete the ‘librarian’ look.  It allowed her to give me a lot of ‘disappointed teacher’ looks.

She gave me one in response to my teasing, before turning to our tutor.  “Anything you can teach us is appreciated, Leah.  Do you think you’re up for it?”

“Mm hmm,” Leah said.  She glanced at Jessie, then me, wary.  “Possibly.”

I could understand why.

“Okay,” I said.  “I know I sound like the worst person to tutor ever.”

“You might just be,” Jessie said.

“But we can make it worth your while.  What did we suggest fundingwise, when we approached you, again?”

“Six hundred,” Jessie and Leah said, almost at the same time.

“Right,” I said.  “Six hundred crown dollars.”

I turned, opened a bag, and, blocking it with my body, I picked out some bills.   I counted them, closed up the bag, and turned around.

“One third now,” I said, counting out the bills, “One third at the halfway point.  One third at the end.  If you’re keen.”

“I’m… cautiously keen,” Leah said.

Leah didn’t look like a suspicious individual, which made her all the more perfect for the role of clandestine tutor.  She was shorter than me, fresh faced, blonde haired, and dressed in fairly nondescript clothing – a long-sleeved dress, cardigan, and stockings.  Her boots were lace-up, almost knee high, and caked with now-dry mud, marking her trip from the Academy to the crummy neighborhood that Jessie and I had set up in.

If it wasn’t for the dark circles under her eyes from late-night studying, the ink-smudges at one side of her hand where it had rested on notebooks?  The faint stains of bodily fluids that her lab coat and apron hadn’t caught and washing hadn’t entirely removed?  I wouldn’t have guessed she was an Academy student.

All the more so because she had found her way to a lantern-lit room in the ass end of town, where everything was covered in cloths and dust.  Tools and bits of building material from a job that had never finished were strewn here and there.

I finished counting out the money, then held it out.  She reached for it, then stopped short of taking it.

“Problem?” I asked.

“A couple,” she said.

“Start with the first one, then,” I told her.

“I feel like the moment my hand takes that money might be the same moment that Academy soldiers kick in the door and drag me off.”

“Absolutely,” I said.  “Because that’s how it works.  They’re waiting for you to touch the money.  The introductory lesson to show you know your stuff?  Irrelevant.  They have to follow very arbitrary rules like you taking the money after sharing the info.”

Leah frowned at me.  “I was thinking they would wait and see if I took money, so they could pose aggravated charges.”

Fair counterpoint.

“They don’t need aggravated charges, Leah,” Jessie said.  “If you’re found giving a lesson here, or if you get caught in the future, that’s enough.  They’ll expel you at best and disappear you into a dungeon or lab somewhere at worst, depending on who your parents are and how badly those parents would miss you.  If that worries you, then say so.  You can take the initial sum, and you’ll never see us again.”

“Just like that?” Leah asked.  “Two hundred dollars for showing up here, proving I know my stuff?”

“We want a tutor we can use and we’re willing to shop around.  The money buys your silence,” I said.  “I’m a terrible student.  I used to attend a preparatory school out West-”

“Very briefly,” Jessie pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter.  It was long enough that-

“Long enough?  A couple of days.”

“-Long enough for me to know I’m not meant for classes.  I’m a student of the city.”

“I’ll admit he actually is,” Jessie said.  “I know how that sounds, that it’s a phrasing that comes out of the mouth of numbskulls and thugs, but it’s actually apt here.”

“And I’m a quick learner.”

“Again, I have to confess true,” Jessie volunteered.

“Devastatingly intelligent, even,” I added, to see if Jessie would acknowledge it.

Jessie sighed instead.

“…And we have the money to pay you,” I told Leah, returning my focus to her.  “It’s just a question of whether you can endure the risk and put up with me.”

“That last point is not to be understated,” Jessie said, quiet.

“I think I could,” Leah said.  “And being able to cover next year’s tuition isn’t small potatoes.”

“Absolutely.  Potatoes of significance, these,” I said.  I flapped the money lightly.

“But my second thought is that I don’t even really need the money.  Don’t get me wrong, the money is good, but is it…”

Leah trailed off.  I let my arm drop, holding the money in my lap.

“Is it?” Jessie prodded.

“Is it questionable money?” Leah asked.

“Absolutely,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Jessie elbowed me.

“Not particularly bloody money, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said.  “Mostly stolen.”

Jessie elbowed me harder.  Then she leaned forward.  “Sorry.  Don’t pay too much mind to what he’s saying.  Why do you ask?”

“I ask because… do you know anything about Beattle Academy’s approach to students?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Jessie said.  Then, to me, she said, “I’ll explain later.”

“I’m placed fifty-fifth,” Leah said.  “I know that isn’t the best thing to be saying, when you’re considering hiring me, but-”

“But you would like to be fiftieth or higher?” Jessie asked.  “I’m starting to see what you’re getting at.”

“Can ‘later’ be now?  Fill me in?” I asked.  “Please?”

“Beattle is a school that takes in a great many students,” Jessie said.  “But filters out more than most.”

“It’s a ‘last chance’ school,” Leah said.

“I wasn’t going to say that outright, but yes,” Jessie said.  “It is the kind of school that attracts students who couldn’t succeed elsewhere, who want to try for the long shot.  Some were caught up in bad circumstance, cut down by sabotage, or they got sick at a critical time.  In a city like Laureas, the rent is cheap, the schools are… not as expensive as elsewhere, and the school accepts a lot of new students each quarter.  It draws in a large student population.”

“…And puts them to work as part of the curriculum,” I said.  “I’m starting to see.”

“Yes, but that’s not the focus here.  Leah is rank fifty five.  With five hundred students, I imagine there are accommodations meant for the top fifty.”

“There are,” Leah said.  “Lab space that isn’t rented or shared, small amounts of funds, not having to offer up as many volunteer hours.  And if you get into the top fifty, then you tend to stay there.  Because of those perks, and because the staff doesn’t really care to put in the work to make sure labs are thoroughly cleaned out and the new student is smoothly moved into the lab in question.  They’ll do what poses the least work for them.”

Sounds like a stellar institution.

“You want us to get you into the top fifty, then,” I said.  “And we pay you less?”

“I’m not sure,” Jessie said.  “Can we confer?”

Leah gave us a short nod in response.

Jessie leaned close and murmured into my ear, “We have money.  We don’t have as much time.”

I had to twist around so that I was perched on the stool next to hers, my mouth by her ear, her mouth next to mine.  “It sounds interesting.  Playing kingmaker.  Queenmaker.”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“And you get on my case about the money.  Why not save it if we can?”

“I can change it up.  Get on your case about time,” she whispered.

“Ooh, variety.  But for Leah here, I’m thinking I can make the time.  I’ve been feeling restless anyway.”

“I’m not about to argue if you think it won’t interfere,” Jessie said.  “Alright.”

We twisted around in our seats so we were both facing our would-be tutor.

“Starting after the second week of tutoring, after each week’s tutoring session, I’ll remove one of your rivals,” I said.  “We choose, not you.  That’s five rivals removed in six weeks.”

“Remove?” Leah asked.  “What do you mean?”

“This deal doesn’t include details,” I said.  “I’ll let you know if I have someone in mind as we wrap up each session, so you know I’m the one doing it.  They’ll fall in the rankings or leave school before the next session.”

Leah frowned.

“It won’t be murder,” Jessie said.

Leah frowned more, her eyes rising to meet Jessie’s.

“She wasn’t worried about murder until you mentioned it,” I told Jessie.

“Ah.”

“I’ll take the deal,” Leah said.

I stepped down off the stool, and extended my hand.  Leah shook it, then shook Jessie’s.

She picked up her bag, shouldering it.

“If my parents could only see me now,” Leah said.  She gave us a smile.  “Their good little girl, selling Academy knowledge.”

“We get in as much trouble as you do if any one of us get caught,” Jessie said, hinting.

“I won’t actually talk to my parents,” Leah said.

“Good,” Jessie said.

“Don’t come looking for us,” I said.  “We’ll find you before the next meeting, and let you know where to go.”

“Ominous,” Leah said.  She put a hand on the doorknob.  “I suppose I’m not that hard to find.  Goodbye, then?”

I gave her a mock salute.

“Goodbye, Leah.  I hope for a good working relationship,” Jessie said.

Leah nodded.  She let herself out.

Jessie and I exchanged a glance.

“You seemed to decide on her partway through,” Jessie asked.  “What do you think?”

“Good actress,” I said.  “She has a dangerous side, I’m betting.”

“She does,” Jessie said.

“Wait, you know already?”

“I did my research before we brought her on board.  She jumped ahead three years, then couldn’t catch up.  She dropped behind a year, which still puts her a respectable two years ahead, keeping in mind that it was a school that adjusted student years quite freely-”

“So not that exceptional?”

Jessie made a so-so gesture.  “Whatever the case, she took a lot of students down when she dropped that year.  Never formally caught, but… investigations coincided with that Academy deciding to drop a few more students than usual that year.”

“Never formally caught, but they decided they were best rid of her?”

“Students from wealthy and connected families were taken out of the running that year,” Jessie said.  “I suspect they didn’t have enough information to formally point the finger, but they guessed and decided to prevent the same thing from happening the next year.”

“I’m guessing it didn’t stop her.”

“No, no it didn’t.  But she got subtler.”

“Assuming I jumped in to remove five people from her way to the top fifty, does she stop?”

“I don’t think she knows how.”

“A product of a system that breeds cutthroats.  You end up with people who can’t stop cutting, I suppose.”

“What’s your gut feeling, now that you know her context?”

“That she’ll do.  Maybe I can be more creative about who I take out and how.  If the crime scenes are grisly enough, in a dramatic sense, then that could sate her bloodlust some?”

“Not actual bloodlust.  I imagine violence would bother her.”

“Probably.  But given a chance, she could get a taste for it, same as she got a taste for sabotage.  Her grades are good?”

“Better than fifty-fifth place good.”

“Right.  She’ll do quite nicely, especially if that subtlety translates to not getting us caught.  But she’ll bear watching.  Pierre?”

The tall, gangly rabbit-headed man had to stoop to enter the dusty from the dark adjacent room.

“You gave her a head start,” Pierre said.

“Only a little,” I said.  “I’m very curious where she goes from here.  I’m imagining her riding a high.  Moving straight from one excitement to another.  Her choice of where she moves to could say a lot about her character.”

Pierre nodded.  “Where do I find you when you’re done?”

“Fish hook,” I said.

Pierre cocked an ear, then gave me a salute, much as I’d done for Leah.  He let himself out the front door.

Jessie snuffed the lantern, then picked it up, while it still faintly glowed with heat-reactive bioluminescence.  Purples and blues danced and the residual light made it possible to see the outlines of the door and doorframe.

I opened the door for Jessie.  “Our rabbit is tracking down our Alice.  Sam’s due to send a letter…”

“Tomorrow.  I’ll intercept,” Jessie said.

“Good.  I’ve been wondering how our orphanage is doing.”

“We need a waypoint between here and there.  We can’t just round up kids in need of saving and then expect them to get on a train and travel all the way to the other end of the Crown States.”

“True.”

We drew attention, two youths dressed fairly sharply for a poorer part of town.  Jessie’s wool dress was fairly nondescript, but it was hand-knit, and she had a leather bag slung over one shoulder, not quite a bookbag, not quite a purse.  I had boots, slacks, and a collared shirt, with my jacket slung over the same shoulder that a bag hung from.  Too cold with the jacket off, too warm with it on, I’d settled for wearing gloves and a cap, keeping head, hands, and feet warm.  It worked well.  Jessie was doing almost the opposite.

People sitting on stairs and leaning out windows watched us.  Some of those people already knew of us.

We’d been here for a little while, working at staying out of sight to those who might be in a position to find out who we were, while staying visible and noticeable to those who weren’t.

I drew a pen from my pocket, uncapped it, and wrote on my palm.

Jessie tilted her head, looking.  I hid my hand.

“What are you up to now?” she asked.

“Curious what you think.  What happens tonight with our stray?”

“Ah.  You want to pay a visit?”

“What’s your guess?”

“My guess is you think tonight’s the night.”

“I was hoping to hear your guess on what happens, not your guess on what you think my guess is.”

“I think not tonight.”

“Alright,” I said.  “You just set yourself up so that whatever happens, you’re gonna be wrong.”

“Or I’m right.”

I rolled my eyes.

We weaved through streets of slouching, dilapidated buildings.

Laureus, named for the laurels of victory, had been the site of an early victory, after the Crown had landed on the fledgling nation’s shores.  But it wasn’t a place that lived up to its name.  The local Academy had lost stature, the city hadn’t proven itself as a pivotal cog in the machine, or something else had gone wrong, and the foundation had rotted.

It gave the sense of a place that had been abandoned.  The wooden growths that supported and reinforced local structures now played host to a new ecosystem that enjoyed close proximity to the ocean.  Algae-like slime grew on the wood, and where that slime dried out and died, it provided nutrition for weeds and saplings to find a foothold.  The lights within buildings weren’t strong, with much of it being candlelight and oil lanterns.

But people occupied this place.  There was a high concentration of back-alley doctors here, which was starting to make sense, now that I’d been told about Beattle Academy’s approach to student intake and retention.  With so little to do indoors, the early evening saw clusters of people gathering on rooftops and on front steps.  They talked, they drank spirits that smelled offensive from the other side of the street, they smoked.

No opportunists harassed us on our evening walk.  A bit of a relief, that.  On the down side, it meant we couldn’t continue to subtly establish our local mythology.  On the upside, it meant we didn’t need to make any detours or change out of bloody clothing.

A steep drop of ten feet separated the street from the beach, consisting of a stone wall.  The wall crawled with branches, and the branches were slimed with the algae.  More branches, logs, and discarded bits of wood had formed piles beneath.

Jessie and I walked to the top of the wall, which was only a foot above the street.

Waves crashed against the beach, here.  Without the light of the city to obscure anything, the stars were visible, and were periodically reflected by the black water.  The autumn wind was bitter and freezing.

To the far north and the far south, larger cities glowed brighter.

We were caught in an alley, a dark corner.

“The edge of the world,” I said.

“Hm?” Jessie inquired.

“It feels like this is the edge of the world.  No further to go.  The final stop, somehow so far away from everything that the only people who end up here are left exhausted or are outright destroyed by the journey.”

“I like that,” Jessie said.  “Poetic in that it’s where we start out, isn’t it?”

“Hoping so.”

“But wouldn’t it make more sense if the edge of the world was set to the far west?  As far from the Crown as you can get, without being in the Asiatic countries?”

“You’re ruining it, Jessie.”

“The Crown is over there,” Jessie pointed at the horizon.  Darkness.  If the size and greatness of cities was represented on the horizons like the lights of the two cities to the north and the south of us, then the empire to the east should have burned like a miniature sun.  “We’re as close to it as we’ve ever been.”

“Ruining it more.  Isn’t it kind of especially well-fitting if the edge of the world is closer to the Crown Empire than not?” I asked.

“No,” Jessie said.  “No, that’s asinine.”

You’re asinine.  It’s very nicely fitting, I think.”

“Okay.  You’re allowed to think that way.”

“So gracious of you to allow me that.”

“…Because your brain is half-scarring over and half-melting from all that Wyvern.  Mental infirmity is to be expected at some point.”

“So gracious,” I said.  “Now if you’ll please excuse me.  I’m going to descend to the beach, lose my footing because of my scarred, melted brain, and snap my neck.”

Jessie nodded, rubbing her arms for warmth.  “It was nice knowing you.”

“Appreciated.”

I hopped down to the largest branch in the pile.  It creaked and bent, but didn’t break.

Turning on my new perch, I grabbed my jacket from where I’d slung it over one shoulder, and hurled it at Jessie’s face.

She caught it.

“Thank you.”

I hopped down to the next branch that looked steady enough.

It snapped, and I fell the rest of the way to the damp sand.

“There he goes,” Jessie’s voice could be heard.  “I’ll have to invent a good lie to tell the other Lambs.  Hand to hand combat with a noble, and for once in his life, he actually put up a decent fight, but it wasn’t good enough.”

Lying on my back in the sand, I commented, “I like that.”

“You’re alive!” Jessie said, in feigned shock.

The branches rustled.  I thought for a second that Jessie was descending.

Then I recognized that the source of the rustling was lower down.

The stray and its cubs.

She had been injured, once upon a time, or she had been confined in too tight a space.  When she moved forward, it was only on the two forelimbs.  Atrophied back legs dragged through sand and the smaller branches that littered it.  It was hunchbacked, with a shell on the back, and heavy tusks on the face.  Its forelimbs had claws long enough that I was left to wonder if it was meant to dig like a mole.

It smelled bad, not that the cubs that were peering through the branches cared.

No growling, no roaring.  It didn’t charge or claw at the air.

Looking at it, I could see the ratios in head, torso, and midsection that Leah had mentioned.

“Huh,” Jessie said.  “It didn’t kill you.  That’s two near misses.”

“Not helpful,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and low, trusting the general silence of Laureus to allow it to carry up to Jessie.  I watched the stray warbeast.

I looked past it to the ‘cubs’.  The warbeast cared for them, protected them from predators.  I could see three faces of human children.  Aged eight to twelve.

There was a fourth, but they never emerged from the nest.  Others brought him or her food.

“Checking to see if I’m okay?  This is our fourth meeting, stray,” I said, keeping my voice calm.  “And the first time you haven’t chased me off.  Was that the trick?  I look wounded, and that makes you want to care for me?”

It dragged itself closer to me, then lowered a head and snorted, snuffling as it got my scent.

Moving slowly, I reached for my bag, and retrieved the hock of meat, wrapped in wax paper.  I started to unfold it, but the stray lowered its head and, as I pulled my hand back, bit into the hock, paper and all.

“First time you took my bribe, even,” I murmured.

The beast picked up the hock, and then began retreating toward the nest.  It entered at a different point than it had left, the meat clasped in its jaws.

The cubs watched me as I shifted position, staying low to the ground as I moved toward the wall, and settled into a sitting position with my back to the surface, ass in the sand.

Staying nonthreatening.

The oldest of the cubs ventured forth.  So shaggy of hair and shabby of dress that I couldn’t guess at their gender, the child approached me.

I glanced up, then extended a hand.

In the gloom, I could only barely see the motion.  I moved the hand, and caught the packet out of the air.  The child that had been inching toward me jumped as if I’d stabbed them, then fell to the ground in surprise, before crawling backward.

Sudden actions were bad.  But the theatrics had their place too.  I considered it a break-even thing.

The child had stopped just short of retreating wholly back into the nest.  They saw the packet, now.  Cylindrical.

I opened it with one hand, then used my thumb to pry the first of the biscuits out of the packet, so it stuck up, contrast of chocolate and wafer visible even in the dark.

“What do you want?” the child asked.

“Ah, you talk,” I said.  “I was worried you were all nonverbal.”

“You came here before.  I saw two times, then this time.  You said-”

“Four.  I came four times in total.  Three times before this.”

“What do you want?” the child asked, again.

“You go to the downtown area to panhandle.  Very close to Beattle Academy.  You see things.  Hear things.”

“I don’t see or hear anything,” the child said.

I could see the whites of their eyes.  Even the ones peering out of the nest.  It was easy to see that they were fixated on the biscuits.

“Fine,” I said.  “It would be nice if you could keep an eye out, but it’s not obligatory.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t trust someone who offers something for nothing.”

“Then you can give me information, and I’ll give you these.”

I moved my hand, waving the biscuits in a lazy side to side motion.  The snake charmer drawing the attention of the snake with the movement of the end of their instrument.

“What information?” the child asked.

“Have any children gone missing?”

That got me a shrug.

Shot in the dark, that.

“What are you doing for the colder parts of fall and winter?”

Another shrug.

“Okay.  I’ll give you some clothes and blankets, and let you know where you can stay if you can’t stay out here.  Money too, if you want.  But I’m going to ask you to keep an eye on some people.  You can tell me if you see them.”

The child paused, then nodded.

I extended the hand with the roll of biscuits.

The child snatched at the entire damn thing, stealing it from my hand.  Within a moment, three biscuits had been shoved into their mouth.  No offering to the others.  Taking their share first.

“You agreed faster than I thought you would,” I said.

It took the child about a minute to choke the mouthful of biscuits down.

“She trusts you,” the child said.

That said, the child turned and retreated into the nest.

I remained sitting for a little while, listening to the waves.  I might have sat for longer, but I remembered Jessie being cold.

“Thought so,” I murmured to myself.  I stood, and began walking along the base of the wall, away from the nest.

Jessie walked the walltop above me.

I held out one hand, gesturing.

A second, partially eaten roll of biscuits bounced off of the top of my head, not the palm of my hand.  I caught it out of the air before it could get all sandy.

“Unkind,” I said.

“You threw your jacket at my face,” Jessie said.  “I’m not letting you get away with stuff.  Quid pro quo.”

She was wearing my jacket, now that I looked up.

Now that we were farther along, the wall was getting closer to the beach.  After a little while, it would slope gently into the sand.

“We get the trust of the stray, and that gets us the trust of the chief cub.  As twelve year olds go, they’re the most territorial and… respected?” I said, making that last part a question.

“Respected enough.  Nobody picks fights with that one.  Doesn’t hold back in a fight.  Every last fight is a life or death one to that child, whatever it was that happened to them.”

“It makes others pay attention to them.  Showing we work with the chief cub will get us a lot of cachet with the other children downtown.  We’ll win them over in one fell swoop.  That gives us the kind of eyes that even Pierre can’t provide.”

“Let’s hope.”

“Let’s also hope the others put the kettle on.  I could do with some tea,” I said.

Jessie made a sound of agreement.

It wasn’t too long of a walk to the building we were camping out in.  It was a tall building, set on a hill, which offered an even greater view.  Three stories, but proportioned so that each floor was scarcely larger than a typical room in the average house.

It might have been a lighthouse once, or a watchtower, but refurbishment had stripped away any utility and offered very little more space in the bargain.

We let ourselves in, and saw a half-dozen faces within.  Men and women, and one rabbit-headed man.  Two of the men reached for guns as the door opened.

They recognized Jessie and I and put the guns away.

“Back already?” I asked Pierre.

“Yes,” Pierre said, meeting my eyes with his bloodshot ones.  “I’m quick like that.  I put tea on, by the way.”

“You’re too good to us,” Jessie said.

“We had some success on our end,” I said.  “The stray gave us a once-over and decided we were fine.  Now the feral children trust us.  Will make something small happen tomorrow.  Some good feelings about Leah.”

“Unless Pierre says that trust isn’t warranted,” Jessie said, going straight to the stove.  She hung up my jacket on a chair back near it, then checked the kettle.  It bubbled as she tilted it.

“She went straight to the Rank,” Pierre said.

The Rank.  A local delinquent gang, consisting of current, former, and hopeful students.

Entirely unsurprising and yet disappointing.

“A double agent, then?” I asked.

“Working with us doesn’t mean that she can’t work with the Rank,” Jessie said.

“True.”

“There was more,” Pierre said.  “A name came up, one that you said to watch out for.  Genevieve.”

“Fray.  She’s coming?”  I asked.

The rabbit head nodded.  “From Trimountaine.”

I glanced at Jessie, who was warming her hands by the fire as she waited for the kettle to finish boiling.

Our choice to camp out here at what I’d described as the cliff at the edge of the world had been a choice made with some strategy in mind.

Mauer had been shifting his footing to position himself to where the receptive ears were.  The disaffected, the frustrated, the furious.  Once he had their ear, the man could make them zealots.

Fray had other methodologies, her eye turned in the direction of things and people she could use.  The actions she could take with the widest-reaching ripples of consequence.

After assessing a variety of possibilities, we’d settled on this location, as a spot that one of the rebel leaders was likely to go.  A place where we could move effectively against the Academy.

So often, Fray was the one being chased.  This time, we would be laying in wait for her, our traps and schemes set up in advance.  Once we had her and her resources pointed in the right direction, we could use the knowledge we had and deliver the most critical blow possible to the Crown.

“Only a skeleton crew tonight,” I observed, looking at the assembled mercenaries and crooks we’d recruited.  “Spread the word to the others.  Everyone lays low.  Pay is increased for as long as nobody fucks the dog and alerts the neighborhood.  If Fray makes an invite and it sounds good enough, then accept, and report back to us.”

Turning the tables on her.  It would be interesting to see how she reacted.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.02 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“One thing that strikes me, as we make this rebel faction thing happen,” I said.

“Hm?” Jessie asked.

“It’s really difficult to find people who we want working for us, for something like this, you know?  Because you want good, helpful, quality people.  But you also don’t want to be too sad when things get hairy and people start dying.”

“Which it will, and they will,” she said.

“Yeah.  Shirley is bad enough.  I owe her.”

We owe her,” Jessie said.  Then she paused.  “I wonder how Mauer does it.  Does he have the magic touch, when it comes to finding people who are just assholish enough to not mind if they die?”

“Mauer’s magic touch is in tapping into that subset of the populations that is willing to die for the cause.  His willingness to send them to their deaths is their willingness to go down fighting, and so long as that’s true he can keep his conscience clear.”

“Is that really true, though?” Jessie asked.  “What about Lugh?”

“Two parts to that.  First off, Lugh was largely populated by people who were willing to fight the Crown.  Off his conscience.”

Jessie didn’t look like she bought it.

“Second?  Fray’s plan.  Not his burden to bear.  His focus was the guns and managing the primordials, who didn’t hurt anyone except the Crown soldiers.  Or something like that.”

“Cognitive dissonance,” she said.

“Yep,” I said.  “It’s disturbingly easy to narrow your view, shrug off that responsibility for all the people on the periphery, and let things burn.  Dumb people can do it because they don’t think, but smart people?  They can be the best at lying to themselves.”

“You’re not speaking from experience at all, I’m sure.”

“Clearly not,” I said.

“And that whole thing about having allies you like who you wouldn’t miss.  I’m totally not a part of that?”

“Jessie,” I said, throwing an arm around her shoulders.  She wore my jacket, still.  “You’re perfect.  The best balance of competence and pain-in-the-assness I could hope for.”

She gave me that look where she frowned at me over her glasses.  “You do remember that context?”

I gave her my best innocent look.

“‘You also don’t want to be too sad when things get hairy and people start dying,'” she quoted me.  “You said that.”

“Did I?  My memory is terrible, Jessie,” I said.  I gave her shoulders a squeeze.  “That scarred and melted brain of mine, you know.”

“Of course.  I’m surprised you can even walk straight.”

“I’m going to have to rely on you tonight, what with my terrible brain,” I said.  “Lots to do.”

“I’ll do my best,” Jessie said.

“Should be interesting, regardless,” I said.  “And there’s our Shirley.  Hi Shirley.”

Shirley was approaching from the other end of the street.  We walked up to her, and I removed my arm from Jessie’s shoulders.

“Pierre said you needed a coat,” Shirley said.  “I felt restless.”

“He didn’t have to do that,” Jessie said.

“Don’t sound so horribly disappointed, now,” I said.

“I don’t sound disappointed.”

“Don’t sound so defensive, now.”

“Sylvester,” Jessie said.  “If you’re concerned about your pain-in-the-assness and how okay I’d be with you biting the dust, you really don’t need to worry.  Really.  You passed the threshold ages ago.”

“Don’t sound so testy, now.”

Jessie sighed.  She shucked off my jacket and threw it at my head.

“Your fashion sense has been deplorable, at times, Miss Jessie,” I said.  “When you were Jamie, not now, I have to note-”

“I’ll take that roundabout flattery.”

“-But you never were one to be unprepared for the weather.”

“I cannot predict the weather, Sy.”

“But you make well educated guesses.  You forgot your jacket on purpose.  Or… let’s be generous and say you were on the fence and you erred toward the side that could theoretically lead to you having my jacket to wear.”

“Shirley,” Jessie said, turning her attention away from me.

“No comment?” I asked.  “No?  We’re letting this slide?  Hoping melty-brainy-Sylvester forgets?”

“We’re mobilizing,” Jessie said.  “If you’re feeling restless, we can use your help.”

“Great,” Shirley said.

I listened as I pulled on my jacket.

“You’ll need to make some stops.  Sy and I were discussing while we warmed up over tea, figuring out the next step.  We want to take pre-emptive action.  Get ahead of Fray, who is apparently in touch with the Rank.”

“The student gang.”

“Yes,” Jessie said.  “Pierre is already on his way to round up our various agents.  But we need some more people.  Select ones.  So if you could knock on some doors, apologize for bothering people late at night, and ask for some names, offer some work?  It’s ten o’clock right now.  Given their schedules, I don’t think they’ll be asleep just yet.  They shouldn’t be too disgruntled.”

“I suppose?” Shirley asked.

“It helps that it’s a beautiful woman knocking on their door out of the middle of nowhere, asking for their company and, presumably, offering money,” I said.

Jessie pulled a small notebook out of her bag, and raised a foot to pull a pen from her boot.  She opened the notebook to write things down.  “First stop.  Twelve Belvidere road.  Ask for Marvin.  Short, swarthy, a Bruno without the height.  Second stop, not far away.  Twenty-nine Belvidere.  Ask for Leo.  Then we want Stanley.  He’s at the blue house on Proctor.  For the last person, Rita, walk down toward the beach.  Two places to check.  Either the broad stairs that lead from the road down to the beach, or further down the beach, by the cliff.  She goes out for a walk to smoke at night, after she tends the bar at Fishbone John’s.  But leave the group of men behind.  She’ll interact better with you if you don’t have an odd collection of people behind you.”

I met Shirley’s eyes.  She looked uncertain.

“If you can’t find Marvin, you’ll want to find Don.  But Don drinks, so he’s not our first choice.  If you can’t find Leo, then we’ll make do with Alfred…”

Jessie murmured to herself as she scribbled down instructions.

“Are they dangerous?” Shirley asked.  “Do I need backup?”

“No,” Jessie said.  “This lot is harmless.  Marvin is loud but soft.  Leo and Stan work the general store.  You’ve probably seen them.  Gut feeling, Sy, how much money are we spending in the immediate future?”

“More than a lot, but not a ton.”

Jessie gave me that look again.

“You wanted a gut feeling!  That’s a gut feeling.  I don’t think in terms of numbers.  I think in sentiment.”

Jessie addressed Shirley, “There’s another reason you don’t want the men with you as you talk to Rita.  The men are pretty interchangeable.  If we can’t hire them, we have options.  But Rita is hard to replace.  We’d have to… ugh.  I don’t know.  Maybe ask for Marlene?”

“You’re naming all of these names and I have no idea what you’re on about at this stage,” I told Jessie.  “I get the greater plan, but you’ve lost me.”

“Marlene is Don’s niece.  The problem is that she’s younger than she looks.  Young is bad.  And young is… skewed, on your useful asshole paradigm, Sy.”

“Fair,” I said.  “Can’t have particularly young assholes.”

“Watch how you word that,” Jessie said, to me.  To Shirley, she said, “Let’s try to get Rita.”

“Which means paying more,” Jessie said.  “I’m writing down prices.  Seventy five dollars for the men.  But one-fifty for Rita, if she doesn’t bite initially.”

“What’s the job?” Shirley asked.

“A lot of waiting, a little bit of looking the other way,” I said.  “Then a bit of acting.  If they pull off the con, then we’ll double the amount.”

“Okay,” she said.  “What if I can’t get the first or the second choice?”

“Three out of four of them are men,” I said.  “You and I have talked about salesmanship.  This is that.  Even if there’s no product.”

“Same techniques,” Shirley said.

“Exactly.”

“I’m out of practice.”

“You’ve had more than you think,” I said.  “You got us our accommodations.  You negotiated for those.”

“Yeah,” Shirley said.  She didn’t sound certain.

“If you run into problems, it’s fine,” I said.  “We’ll adapt, Jessie will come up with other options.  Go easy on yourself.”

Shirley nodded.

Jessie pointed.  “Take that road.  Two streets-”

“I got it,” Shirley said.  “I know my way around.”

I saluted her as she walked away.

“Her tone at the end,” Jessie said.  “Did I talk down to her too much?”

“Mostly fine,” I said.  “Only that bit at the end.”

“Directions to the starting point?  I’m bad at figuring out how much others know or remember.”

“It’s okay,” I said.  “Shirley is cool.  She’ll get it.”

We walked, me with my hands in my jacket pockets, so they could warm up.  Giving away my jacket had left me a bit chilly.  It might not have been a problem, but getting cold while dealing with the stray, then warming up with my hands wrapped around a cup of tea while Jessie and I plotted, and then cooling off again, it had thrown my body off.  I was slower to adapt to the cold after the temperature zig-zag.

My breath fogged in the night air.

The other Lambs were keeping us company.  Situated here and there, they sat in pairs or trios, perched in places where they could watch over the area.  Evette was conspicuously absent.

She was likely plotting for what we had going on tonight.

“How long do we have?” I asked.

“Before?”

“Before Pierre rounds up the hires.”

“Not long.  The first groups are going to be meeting at the rendezvous point within a minute of us getting there.”

“Let’s slow down a tich, then.  I want to arrive as they do.”

Jessie nodded, adjusting her speed.

“The ravage hit New Amsterdam,” Jessie said.

“Really?”

“There were murmurings about it around the market this morning.  It’s the latest in a string.  The entire city is on lockdown, the bridges are blocked, and walls are being erected to keep it contained.  Ones much like the ones they had in Tynewear.”

“Because those worked so well.”

“They, at least, don’t have the issue of a master Lambsbridge tearing his way through the city as he runs from bounty hunters.”

“I like how you exclude yourself from that reporting,” I said.

Jessie smiled.  “Hard to blame the dead and gone.  The onus is on you, sir.”

“Credit’s mine too, then.”

“The worst of the plague hit in Gomorrah, Sy.”

“Hm?” I asked.  I raised an eyebrow.  “Really?  How coincidental.”

“Theoretically speaking,” Jessie said.  “What if that coincidence was on Mauer’s shoulders?”

“If he knows about the plague?” I asked.

“He picks a fight.  He breaks even at best.  But in the wake of those battles he fights?”

“Plague.  Taking a bite out of the Crown’s territory each time.  Cities they can’t run anymore, or parts of cities.  Long-term reminders that the Crown can’t fix everything.  Can’t win every fight.  There’s a stubborn plague that refuses to go down.”

“Uncharitable to Mauer.  Even or especially in light of our discussion a bit ago,” Jessie said.

“You were thinking about this while we were talking about that, weren’t you?”

“I was mulling it over,” she said.  “There have been other cases that followed Mauer’s appearances or the appearances of his lieutenants.  He’s been raising hell and striking at key locations, then disappearing.  I’m good at wrapping my head around timing, Sy.  I’m concerned that it’s too hot on his heels.  Consider the major players, the people who might be responsible for the ravage.”

“Assuming it isn’t Mauer, who was just discussed?” I asked.

“Assuming.  Suspect number one.  The Crown.”

“Unlikely.  Unless there’s something we’re missing.  The bites out of their own territory.  To make Mauer look bad?  Awfully big losses for ambiguous gain, in a fight they’re almost certain to win.  We can dismiss that one and… I’m seeing why you brought this up like you did.”

“It more or less leaves Fray and Cynthia.  One of whom we’re hoping to deal with in the immediate future.”

“Or Mauer,” I said.

“Or Mauer.  But we’re putting that aside for the moment.  Someone might be deliberately spreading this plague, choosing sites of the rebellion.  That someone is keeping a close eye on Mauer and sowing seeds in his wake.”

“And he’s working with Fray.  In some capacity.”

Jessie nodded.

“Something to talk to her about, then.  But let’s not discount another option.  Another major player in this game.”

“The Lambs?” Jessie asked.  “Us?”

“No,” I said.  I smiled.

“I’ve become immune to your dramatic flair, Sy,” Jessie said.  “I’ve been overexposed, like you with your poisons and all the natural antidotes they put in you to keep the Wyvern from killing you.  Cut right to it.”

“Perhaps the biggest, meanest player in this game.”

Jessie, appearing very unimpressed, made a gesture for me to speed it along.

“Nature.  Mother Nature being tricky with us.  I mean, let’s be honest, she has reason enough.  What if… what if Mauer is spreading it… but he’s doing it unwittingly?”

“Infected but not showing symptoms?”

“Or something he’s bringing along with is infected with the stuff.  Supplies, animals, papers…”

Jessie nodded.

“If it isn’t nature playing a nasty trick on us and planting that particular sleeper agent, then someone did it to Mauer.  Or someone’s planting the seeds.  And Fray is a likely suspect.  It’ll be interesting to talk to her.”

“Assuming we get the chance,” Jessie said.

“We will,” I said, firmly.

It wasn’t a long walk from where we were to the rendezvous point.

Pierre, as was so often the case, was already there.  The oversized head that looked like a rabbit mid-hanging had a cigarette set inside the mouth as he sat on a set of stairs.

“Any difficulties?” I asked.

“Bennie was drunk,” he said.  He gave us a one-shouldered shrug.  “I couldn’t say if he’s going to show.  They liked the sound of the money, but they didn’t look very mobile.”

“Thought so,” Jessie said.  “That’s fine.”

At the other end of the street, a group was just arriving.

“Perfect timing,” I said to them, a backhanded compliment for Jessie.  I extended a hand.  “Frederick.”

Frederick was a big fellow.  Time in the sun had served to burn his skin brown and turned blond hair near-white.  The whites of his eyes seemed very bright in the gloom.  The men with him all wore clothes fit for workers.  Round necked, long-sleeved shirts and canvas pants, or coveralls.  Half of them didn’t wear jackets, despite the chill.

Half of them carried sticks of wood with bent nails in them.  A third of the group of ten men and one woman had tattoos.

Frederick switched his stick to one hand so he could shake my hand.  The shake was cursory enough that it was clear he was only being polite.

“This is pretty last minute now,” he asked.

“Something came up.”

“I like to know about things in advance,” the man said.

“I know,” I said.  “I’ll make it up to you.”

“I’m still not sure I’m on board with this,” he said.

“This.”

He waggled his stick in the general direction of Jessie and I.

“Us?”

“You being in charge,” Frederick said.  “Yeah.”

“Give us time,” I said.  “We’re paying you to give us time, and to show up on nights like tonight.”

“Yeah,” he said.  He still didn’t sound impressed.

“Soon,” I said.  “Tonight is a first step.  It won’t necessarily make sense right away, but when you look back at the conclusion, I think you’ll be impressed.”

“That’s a problem,” Frederick said.  “I’m not the sort of man that looks back.”

He was being difficult.  I wasn’t sure what it was.  My small stature?  That he needed to be the biggest, meanest dog in front of his men?

There were others arriving, now.

“Otis,” I said.  “Archie.  Clay.”

I greeted each of the group leaders in turn.  Otis was older than the rest, at about forty.  Archie was pale with long black hair and a heavy coat.  Clay looked more like Frederick, minus the tan, his hair messy enough it looked like he had been sleeping twenty minutes ago.

Each of the others had brought their own groups.  Otis had eight.  Archie had three.  Clay had four, all of whom looked related to him.

“Sylvester,” Otis said.  He sounded very tired.  “And Frederick.  Hullo there Frederick.”

“Fuck yourself, Otis,” Frederick said.

“Oh,” Otis said.  He spoke very slowly, drawing things out.  “Oh ho.  Foul mouth Frederick.  I’d think you saved the dirty talk for when you fuck your big sister.”

There was a rumble of amusement from Otis’ group, and from just about every group that wasn’t Frederick’s.

Jessie and I had identified and recruited the various people in charge and the in-charge-ish types from here and there in Laureas, with a mind toward collecting the various thugs and troublemakers that didn’t flock to any particular banners.  The city that wasn’t all that big, people knew each other.  It was inevitable there’d be some history.

“Big talk, Otis, when I’m armed and you’re empty handed,” Frederick said.

Otis spread his hands, as if he was about to surrender, concede, or shrug with arms wide.  Then he stepped forward, swaggering a bit as he did it.

Challenging Frederick.

“If you swing that weapon at him,” I said, quiet.  “He wins, because I have to remove you from the group.  You don’t get paid, he does.”

“You’re pretending he’ll be any shape to accept pay,” Frederick said.  It was expressed to me, but the words were meant for Otis’ ears.

“If you want to duke it out, I’m going to have to insist you do it elsewhere.  For now, I’m starting the brief.”

“The what?” Clay asked.

Clay jumping into the discussion like he did was perfect.  Clay was as dumb as two stones rubbed together.  He had no idea what he was stepping into.

“The brief, Clay,” I said.  “The plan.”

“Then why not call it that?” he asked.  He chuckled, and his brothers and cousins took his cue, following suit.

Yeah.  Not exactly the cream of the crop, any of them.

Only Archie.  He’d been one of the people at the tower when Jessie and I had returned.  We’d sent him out to his group to tell them to lay low.  Then we’d discussed, set a plan, and decided to act.

Archie was the type to sit back, watch everything carefully, and then make a smart move.  He’d done it before, here and there.

For a guy as smart as he was to be this small a player in this small a place, it meant there had to be something wrong with him.  It bothered me that it hadn’t turned up just yet.

“Here’s the brief,” I said.  “I’ll be sure to keep it simple.  The Rank have a headquarters around the corner.  Tonight is two things.  We round them up, and we make a show of force.  Show them we mean business.  I want them scared, and that means more than using just sheer numbers to spook them.  It means that from the start to the end, they’re running with their tails between their legs.”

This was a language that even Clay could understand.

“We do this with positioning,” I said.  “Jessie?”

“Clay and Archie attack the north and south ends of the building.  Otis’ group will be with Sylvester and I.  Frederick circles around to the back.  Timing is key.  Frederick?  After the briefing ends, you walk down Londown and turn on Prior.  Circle back toward the building.  Walk, don’t run.”

“I don’t get it,” Frederick said.  “Why does that matter?”

“Timing,” Jessie said.

I added, “Mood and effect.  It’s the difference between you being a bunch of dangerous looking men and you being the stuff of their nightmares.”

“I don’t get it,” Frederick said.

There were more mumbles and grumbles here and there.

“It’ll all make sense in the end,” I said.  “For now, listen to Jessie.”

“They’re a group of students.  Delinquent teenagers with Academy uniforms.  Some of the drugs you’ve heard about are their work.  Mostly, though, they fly under the radar, ship stuff out of town.  Now and then, they stir up a little bit of trouble.  Most of you are aware of them but pay them little mind.”

A few isolated nods here and there.

I jumped in, “They’re working doubletime right now.  The last two drug shipments they promised someone in Trimountaine went missing.  That was us.  They’re feeling the squeeze, they don’t have the muscle to guard what they’re supposed to put together and deliver, and if the next shipment doesn’t arrive, then the person who paid in advance is going to show up.  Unhappy.”

Clay and his clan looked a little glassy-eyed at the explanation, but the rest seemed to grasp this reality.

“They’re burning the midnight oil right now.  But they’re also expecting, according to Pierre, to have some outside help.  Another Academy type is visiting.  We don’t know when, but that’s who we’re really after.  We’re going to ruin their night.  We’re going to do it without doing any more property damage than kicking in the front door.  No broken windows, no looting, no kicking up a fuss.  We want them to cooperate.”

I looked over the group.

“Go where Jessie says.  No killing.  No property damage.  Don’t let them slip away,” I said.  “Then you get paid.”

Keeping the message simple.

“Frederick,” Jessie said.  “Walk down Londown, turn right onto Prior, then turn right again, head toward the building with the lights on.  Start now.”

Frederick paused, glancing at me.

Rebellious.  Testing.

I really hoped Otis wouldn’t say something and start trouble again.  Frederick would take the bait and we would be stalled.

“This had better be good,” Frederick said.

He turned to leave.

“Come,” I said.  “Pierre?  Keep an eye out for anyone who slips the noose and runs?”

“Can do,” the rabbit said.

I led the way, Jessie following.  The three remaining contingents of thugs and hooligans trailed behind us.

We stopped as we saw the building.  It sat on a corner, and the interior lights burned bright.  A plume of smoke rose from the chimney.

“Clay,” Jessie said.  “See that big round window?”

“Yeah.”

“Count to forty, then walk toward it.  Block anyone from getting out that window or any of the windows to either side of it.”

“Forty?”

Count,” she said.

I wondered if he could.  Oh well.  We would manage.  If this executed well, then all the better.  If not, it let us weed out people we couldn’t use.

“Archie?  Go around the side of the building.  The gate barring access from the alley is unlocked.  Go there.  Grab anyone who tries to go out the window, keep them put.”

“Now?”

Now,” Jessie said.

“Don’t have to be a bitch with the orders.  Could at least be nice about it,” Otis said.

Jessie gave me a glance.

Something you didn’t have to deal with as a guy?  Being commanding as a guy is fine.  As a girl, well… rubs some people the wrong way.

Otis would learn to deal or he would have to go.

For now, I picked up the slack, gesturing at the front door.

“If it isn’t unlocked,” Jessie said, “Then kick it down.”

Otis moved ahead of us, going for the door.

“They have guns?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said.  “But they didn’t seem the type to be good with guns.  Element of surprise matters.”

“You can go in first,” he said.

“So long as you’re following,” I said.

He seized the handle, waggling it.

Locked.

The middle aged man with a jowly face leaned back, then kicked the door exactly the way it should be kicked in, right next to the handle.  The goal was to hit the door closest to the weakest part of both door and frame.  The point where the latch met the frame would be that.

Wood splintered around the handle.  He kicked again, then backed out of our way as Jessie and I approached.

We passed through the door.

Forty or so people were inside.  Students composed only a small portion of it, at a glance.  The rest looked like poorer folks who were earning a wage, stirring vats and burning materials in a stove to keep stuff boiling.

I looked over the students, and I spotted Leah.

I saw another student get his bearings.  Slow to react and process.  This might have been his introduction to violence.  He lunged for a long table.

“Lights,” Jessie said, gesturing.

I shifted direction.  I headed off to the right, Jessie to the left.

I slammed my hand down on the switch on the wall, so close to the front door, that controlled the lighting.  Conveniently placed to allow the last person to leave to shut everything off.

Conveniently placed to allow the first invader in to do the same.

The voltaic lights went dark, plunging the place into relative darkness.  Some chemistry equipment, fires, lanterns and such burned here and there, but it wasn’t much.

In the final moment we could see the scene, the lad was picking up a shotgun, and Otis was shouting, “Gun!”

The lad clearly wasn’t familiar with the weapon, or he would have already fired it.

It wasn’t pitch black in the lab, but in the sudden switch from light to darkness, it might as well have been.

I could navigate that darkness by intuition.  The afterimage of where the people were stuck in my mind’s eye.  The psychology of fear and panic told me the most logical positions for where they would be.

I ran into a young man, felt his reaction as he bumped into me, caught him, and shoved him hard in the direction of a table.  Tools clattered and crashed to the ground.

I swiftly changed direction, ducking low as the shotgun fired in the direction of the sound.

The flash of the gun firing gave me a glimpse of the scene.

There was a similar noise from Jessie’s direction.  The shotgun fired again.  Another flash of light, a glimpse of the scene.

I could see some of the people clustered in the middle of the room.  I could tell the direction they were facing.  One set of eyes on me, two on Jessie.  As the scene faded, I was left with the afterimage.  I could hear the murmurs, the shouts, and the general chaos of all of this.

For Jessie, this scene was one she had mapped out in her head.  Where things were.  Only the people were a mystery to her.  Her sense of space and timing were immaculate.  She knew exactly where she was as she navigated the darkness.

The inverse for me.  The people made sense.  The terrain was something I had to feel for.

The people made sense, and that trio worried me.

I ran a few steps, hip bumping against a table-

And slid beneath another table.  I rose to my feet, stumbled, and caught the back of the shirt of one member of the trio.

They’d decided to go after Jessie.

In any other circumstance, I would have let them, and let them learn their lesson.  But this was a case of four against one, and I wasn’t sure Jessie would anticipate them correctly.

As the man twisted, his shirt pulling in my hands, I had a sense of how he was positioned.  I brought one leg up, and stomped down on his knee, then pushed him to one side in a way that would put more weight on that knee.

He toppled.

Stepping forward, my forehead bumped into the collarbone of another person.  My hands clutched at their shoulders, and I hauled them down.  A moment later, I launched myself up, skull striking the point of their chin.

I pushed them into the third person.

Someone threw the switch.  The lights flickered as they struggled to come on.

Jessie had dispatched the one with the shotgun.  I caught another person off guard, taking out their knee again.  Their head clipped a table as I tipped them to the ground.

Otis’ people were only just entering.  They were treated to a sight of the people fleeing to the windows.  The ones trying to exit into the alley were being dragged through the window, which terrified the rest.  The ones who were trying to escape the windows into the street were running into Clay’s people.

Probably the best way to go, but given circumstance… given the fact that it was a drop of several feet, that they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves in the moments following, and that Clay looked like a mean, unhinged sort?  They elected to head for the back door.

I saw Leah among that group.  I beckoned for Otis to follow.  I walked, rather than run.  I took my time, weaving through the maze of tables and appliances.  It let Otis catch up, and it let Leah think she was getting away.

As I exited the building, I saw that Frederick wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

Leah and the other twelve or so people that were actively fleeing had a clear path down the street.

Better to trust Pierre than to run.

He could follow them, see where they gathered, and we would do this again.  Hit them at home, at an unexpected moment, with overwhelming force.

I just hated that it meant casting Frederick aside, punishing him, and losing the extra time.

No.  There.

Frederick emerged from the place I was assuming he was supposed to have departed a minute ago, his men jogging as they left the alley.

If Leah had had more sense of the fight, of the battlefield, and what she was getting into, then she could have bolted.  She could have kept the same course, getting past Frederick’s group before they could cut her off.

But she panicked.  She and the others balked.  They turned to run away from the men with nail-studded sticks, and they saw me, with Otis following a bit behind.

I kept advancing, walking.

Leah and many of the others changed direction for the second time in a matter of seconds, retreating reluctantly and uncertainly toward Frederick’s group.  The threat of them largely forgotten.

I moved at a diagonal, and she moved in kind.

It was clear that she was retreating from me.

I could see Frederick eyeing me.  Trying to figure out how that worked.  He wanted to wrap his head around what had just happened in that building that might have her so spooked of me.

Part of that was the clear realization that I was at the heart of this.  The pre-established relationship.

The glimpse of me, just before all hell had broken loose and everything had gone dark.

“Let’s have another conversation, Leah,” I said.

She nodded.

“Bring her,” I said.

Frederick obeyed.

Good.

We returned to the lab, and the various hired hands corralled the laborers and various students that had found shelter beneath tables or tried to exit the windows.

Jessie was absent.  I waited patiently as people were organized.  The group was made to kneel on the floor.

The lab smelled like chemicals, of gas flames and wood stoves.  It made me think of home.

“Impeccable,” I greeted Jessie, as she came in the front door for the second time.

She gave me a little curtsy.

Shirley was right behind her.  Shirley had our people.

I was mindful of the theatrics as I brought the four nervous people Shirley had recruited into the lab.

Each one was positioned so they stood at a specific point, facing a specific individual.

A stocky, muscular adolescent boy, swarthy, opposite someone who wasn’t so muscular, but was much the same general shape and complexion.

A tall young man with black hair slicked back and parted, opposite a near-mirror in a lab coat.

A red-haired boy with freckles, nearly a match for his friend in height, also wearing a lab coat.  The noses were different, as were the ears, but that mattered little.

Leah stood opposite the girl.  I forgot the name, but it started with an R.

Both of matching height.  Both with blonde hair.

“Chief members of the Rank?” I asked.  “Meet your replacements.  If I’m not positive you’re going to cooperate with Jessie and me on everything that follows, you’re going to disappear, and these are the people who will step into your shoes.”

And keep Fray none the wiser.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.03 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Please escort each of the students to different rooms,” I said.

“Not enough rooms,” Jessie said.

“Her,” I pointed to Leah.  I then pointed to the students we had doubles for.  “Him, him, him…”

“Two more rooms.”

“Him,” I pointed to another student that looked particularly nervous.  “And… her.”

My finger directed attention to a young woman who wasn’t in Academy clothes.

“Someone from the lower tier?” Jessie asked.

“No,” I said.  I eyed ink stains on her hands, and the freshness of her change of clothes.  “That girl is a student.”

I gestured.  Otis’ men herded the people we’d pointed out into various rooms.  I followed them, and watched through open doors, giving direction on where to put them, making sure they were bound.

Trapping someone in place with physical bonds was an interesting thing, when it came to psychology.  It made their world small.  Once the escape routes and the connections to allies were taken away and pressure was applied, the sum total of existence became the room they were in.  Their experience and ability to plan extended no further than the interaction between captor and captive.

I could see it in Leah’s eyes as she was bound to a chair: the gravity of her situation.

“Sylvester,” she said.

I approached the chair, as Otis’ man stepped away.

“Sylvester,” she said, again.  “Jessie.  I know this looks bad, but it doesn’t change what you and I talked about.  I’m not your enemy or anything.  This is a small side project.  Money and resources.”

I checked the bonds.  The knot at her wrists was laughable.  I undid and retied it, careful to leave her circulation intact.

“It’s why I didn’t care that much about the money you were offering.  I wasn’t being dishonest.  It’s the way things work around here.”

I held out my hand, then took another length of rope.  I bound her so her back was flush against the back of the chair.  This rope I made tight enough to cut into skin.

“If there’s anything you want to know, I’ll tell you,” she said, insistent.  “I’m on your side.”

I put a loop of rope around her neck, and saw how she reacted, stiffening.

I was careful in how I tied it, leaving plenty of room, making the knot overly elaborate.

“Jessie,” she said, turning her attention from me to Jessie, who stood in the doorway.

Jessie was as silent as I was.

Knot done, I grabbed the back of her chair and dragged her toward the wall.  She was petite, but the combined weight of her and the heavy wood chair made for a mingling of scrapes and screeches as the chair moved.  Wood against wood.

I took a moment, tying a knot into the middle of that same rope, and then, carefully, I tied it to the back of the chair, sure to leave a lot of slack.

The rope around her neck didn’t really connect to anything.  Not a noose, not a real binding.

But she didn’t know that.  Her head turned this way and that, eyes moving to the far right and left as she tried to see everything that was going on behind her.

Talk to me!” she said, raising her voice.

Otis’ man had crossed the room to stand at the point furthest from her.  I approached him, walking away from Leah.

“You can’t do this!” Leah shouted.

Even to her, I suspected, the words rang false.

I stopped in front of Otis’ man.  The guy was thirty or so, and had mottled marks on his cheeks and hands that suggested chemicals.  He chewed on his tongue or inner cheek for a few long moments, eyes fixed not on me, but on Leah.

She was still shouting.

“Thank you for bringing her in here,” I told the man.

Even when directly addressed, it took him a moment too long to turn his eyes to me.

“That’ll be all,” I told him.

Nothing passed over his expression.  No hints or tells.  But I suspected he was unhappy.

He turned and left the room, moving aggressively enough that Jessie had to step back out of the way

Jessie gestured.  Warn man.

Late fire emotion, I gestured back.  Resentment.  He wouldn’t be happy.  Worth keeping an eye out for.  Alternate eyes.

Jessie nodded.

“Why are you moving your hands like that?” Leah asked.  “Hey!”

I stepped out into the hallway.  I looked down at the crowd, and assessed the people within.  I pointed at someone younger.  A narrow-faced boy with a curly mop of hair that was short on the sides.  He had grown into his frame, and that frame was such that until he put on some muscle and grew a beard, he would perpetually look the gawky teenager.  I beckoned for him to come.

He had to check with his boss, Frederick, before he came.  But the fact that he did, and that he looked uncertain, it was a good sign.

“Are you okay with standing guard?” I asked, as he got close enough.

He gave me a fairly noncommittal half-shrug, glancing over his shoulder at his boss.  “Sure.”

“Perfect,” I said.  I stepped closer, and murmured, “Stand by the door.  Make sure she stays put.  Whatever you do, don’t speak a word to her.  Don’t approach her.  If something comes up… can you whistle?”

He nodded.

“Whistle.  Loud.  That’s if she gets particularly fussy, or if someone that isn’t me or Jessie here wants into the room.  Don’t wait, don’t discuss if they refuse your initial refusal, just whistle.”

He nodded again.

“Any questions?”

He shook his head, very quickly.  His eyes and eyebrows were such that he looked perpetually afraid or concerned, and they were very large.  That deceptive nervousness translated to his movements.

“Good,” I said.  I studied him.  “You’re with Frederick?”

He nodded again, with emphasis.

“I’ll talk to Frederick if he takes issue with you doing this.  I’ll pay you and him, if necessary.”

“I don’t think he’ll take issue,” the awkward fellow said.

Don’t tell people they don’t have to give you money.

“It’s a question of respect,” I said.  I indicated Frederick, sun-worn as he stood in the gloom.  “He won’t miss you?”

The fellow shook his head.

“What do you do for him?”

“Uh, stuff.  Carry packages and things.  Stand watch.  Sometimes he has me burn people.”

I glanced at Jessie.  I knew that behind my back, Leah was listening to this dialogue.

“Dead people or live people?” I asked.

“Live people,” the awkward fellow said.  “I can cut ’em too, but I prefer burning.  Mr. Rees picked me out of the group, about a year ago, handed me a hot poker and told me to get creative.  Now he says I got talent for it.  I’m sure, if you wanted, I could do it with these captives here.  He wouldn’t complain if I got the practice.”

Jessie glanced in Leah’s direction.  She’d likely reacted to that.

“For now, I want her intact,” I said.

The fellow nodded.

“In the meanwhile, watch her, and think about what you might do if I gave you the chance to practice,” I instructed.

“I will,” he said, with grave seriousness, looking down at me with eyes that looked like they were meant only meant for getting and giving sympathy.

Leah stared at me, the whites of her eyes visible, as I closed the door firmly behind me.

“He’ll be okay?” Jessie asked.

“That kid?” I asked, glossing over the fact that the ‘kid’ was older than I was.  “Not a problem.”

We checked on each of the others, making sure the bonds were tight, the accommodations secure, the guards competent.

I shut the last of the doors behind me.  When we were done, Jessie and I walked into the middle of the hallway.

One of our prisoners was screaming nonstop.  Not for any reason.  Only that he was a wimp.

“We need to know when Fray shows up,” I said, quiet, to Jessie.

Jessie nodded.

“If Fray knows them, how they do business.  Get a read on how willing they’d be to cooperate, and if they could bluff Fray.”

Jessie considered that for a moment.  “I’d rather not try.”

“I know.  But we do what we need to do in order to make this happen.  How good are you on their business as usual?”

“Watched these guys from a nearby rooftop with some binoculars in hand for a few hours.  I’m good,” she said.

“Good.  I go clockwise, you go counterclockwise?  We’ll each visit each of them.  Make Leah one of the last ones we check on.  I want her to stew.”

“I was going to say that your response back there was particularly…”

“Over the top?”

“…Motivated.  You paid particular attention to Leah there.  I’m trying to figure it out.”

“We’re interrogating,” I said.  “Putting on pressure is key.  I know Leah better, I had a better sense of how to put on pressure.”

“I have a gut feeling there’s more to it than that,” Jessie said.

I reached out, and tapped the bit of her glasses between the two lenses, so they slid further down her nose.  She swatted at my hand and pushed her glasses back up her nose.

“Let me know when you figure it out,” I said.

“I’m halfway convinced I just did,” she said.

I leaned forward, so my face was close to hers, stopping short of our noses touching, only to turn my face at the last second, so I could speak in her ear. “Do tell.”

Any of the girls I’d interacted with to date might have reacted.  I could picture Mary matching aggression with aggression, forward lean with forward lean, forcing a game of chicken.  Lillian would have backed off, likely blushed.  Shirley would have redirected, deflected, or otherwise shied off.  Lacey would have been traumatized, though I hesitated to call Lacey a girl.  Helen would have eaten me alive.

Jessie, though, didn’t flinch at all.

“I’ll mull it over,” she said.  She smiled a little.  “Let you stew.”

“That just isn’t right,” I said.  “Psychological torture, that.”

“Mm hmm,” she said.  She glanced back in the direction of the lab.  “Don’t forget our lieutenants.”

As I turned to look, Jessie ducked away, heading for the first room.

I sighed.

I approached the room, where everyone was waiting.

“That’ll be all.  I borrowed a few people to guard the rooms, I’ll need a few hands to manage this crowd, too, but I don’t expect any problems,” I said.  “Pierre will deliver your money within the hour.  Pierre?”

“Can do,” the rabbit-headed man said.

“Good.  Questions?  Concerns?”

“Not sure what exactly you’re wanting with all this,” Frederick said. “A lab?  Decoys?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.  “You’ll see soon enough.  And if you give me patience, I’ll pay you back with interest by showing you results.  Wait, see, and it should be spectacular.”

“I’m starting to see how you do things,” Frederick said.  There was a note of derision in there.  A bit of accusation.

“Uh huh,” I said, not showing that I’d recognized it.  “If you hadn’t dawdled earlier while moving to where we told you to go, you could have seen what the others did.”

“Your girl’s timing was wrong.”

“My girl‘s timing is never wrong,” I said.  “If it was, she or I would have died a dozen times over in the last year alone.”

Frederick was challenging me.  He wore an expression like he couldn’t quite believe me.

He still felt threatened by me, yet not threatened enough to be cowed.

“If you don’t want the money I’m offering, Frederick, then say so.  If you don’t think I can do the job, then say so.  If pride, greed, envy or fear happen to rule you, then say so.”

“Envy?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

How very generous of him to tell me what his issue was.  He didn’t respect me.

“Decide if you want to see what happens next unfold from within my organization or from the outside.  If you’re envious, then-”

“That was a question I asked, not a statement,” he said.  “I think you’re a little full of yourself, here.”

I nodded.  “I am.  More than a little.  But it’s deserved, I think.”

I gave Frederick my best ‘dead eyes’ look.

“Frederick,” Shirley chimed in.

I immediately made a negation gesture, hand moving side to side.

“No, no,” Frederick said.  He smiled.  “I want to hear what she has to say, that you don’t want us to hear.”

She reacted to the sheer number of eyes on her, shifting her weight.  Then I saw her using one of the little tricks I’d taught her, in how to use her eyes.  One of the first tricks, too, in how she positioned her body.

She met my eyes, and I gave her a fractional nod.

“I’ve been with him for seven months now,” she said.  “In that span of time, he’s had Crown, Academy, Rebellion, and criminal organizations come for his head, some of those very motivated, and often two or three of those groups at the same time.  He has literally had his heart ripped out of his chest, yet he’s still here.  He’s better off than he was, and he’ll be better off in another seven months.”

“A week,” I said, interrupting her.  “Maybe half that.  Maybe tonight, though I doubt it.  But before the week is over, my side will be ten times as strong as it is.”

I saw Frederick, Archie, Otis, and Clay glance at each other.

“Between all of us, counting the people we left behind… we add up to what, sixty people?”  Frederick asked.

I wished I had Jessie to give an exact number.  “Something in that neighborhood.”

“And in a matter of a week, you’ll have six hundred?”  He asked.  Again, that hint of derision.

“As a low estimate,” I said.

Shirley jumped in again, “If he says he’ll accomplish something, I believe him.  It’s why I threw my lot in with his.  I think it’s why some of the others here got on board.  They don’t have the same experience I do, but I think they sense it.”

Clay couldn’t sense the dick in his pants, probably.  Otis probably hadn’t wrapped his head around the idea of a group six hundred strong in decades.  Even in a crowd, I got the impression his focus was narrow, on allies and enemies, and getting the things he wanted.

Archie got it, I was pretty sure.  I couldn’t read him so easily, though.

“What happens when you fail?” Frederick asked.

Not if, but when.

“If you want a win-win, you’re not going to get it here.  If I win and you’re on my side, you win too.  Strength, reputation, money, leverage, and the ability to effect change.  If I lose, you’re no worse off than you were.  All you’ll have lost is a week’s time, and you’ll have a story to tell others over drinks, about the kid who thought he could raise an army.  If I fail.”

I could have given them a scenario where their time and effort would have been worth it even if I failed, but that would have spelled out a scenario where they would go for the safe bet, and help me fail.

I continued, “I think you need to decide, Frederick.  Right now.  Are you staying, or are you going?”

He considered the question for a few long moments.

Leave, I thought.  It would make things so much easier.  It would give me room to prove to the others that there were benefits to staying in and costs to going out.

“We’ll give this a shot, then,” he said.  “I’ll look forward to having a story to tell until proven otherwise.”

“I’ll look forward to proving you wrong, then,” I said.  “I have things to do.  I’ll be in touch, so keep an ear out.  Pierre will be knocking on your door.”

The assembled leaders departed, leaving only the people necessary to manage the crowd that we’d corralled in the lab.  They sat on the floor as a cluster.  They outnumbered the men that guarded them two to one, but many were hurt, they were unarmed, and the men had weapons.

“All of you, too, need to decide,” I addressed the assembled workers.  “Figure out if you’re in or if you’re out.  The Rank are done.  If you’re a problem, you’ll be escorted out.  You’ll be kept out of the way long enough that other things can get done.  If you’re cooperative, then it’s back to business as usual, but with better incentives.”

That got attention.

“I suspect a part of you knew this work wouldn’t be available forever.  When we showed up, you probably knew that time had come.  My offer to you in the here and now is to offer the same work to anyone who wants it, with better pay.  Think about it quietly.  I’ll see where you stand after I’m done talking to your prior employees.”

I could see the gears turning in their heads.  The thought process.

Confinement changed how one thought.  It made things a dialogue between captor and captive.

But they’d lived a life of confinement.  Doing work they had to in order to make ends meet.  They didn’t have freedom in the conventional sense.

They had the freedom to turn down my offer, to be sure.  They could get away from the scariness of work that saw doors kicked in and guns fired, should they so choose.  But they faced an equal, less poignant sort of scary, in having to find employment and get food.

I was offering the easier path.

I’d committed to collecting six hundred or more people under our banner.  This would be a dozen, perhaps.

I turned my attention to the group of lookalikes.

“You’re raising an army?” Rita asked.  Our Leah lookalike.  She was smoking up a storm, going by the accretion of cigarette butts on the table next to her.

“Not an army, exactly,” I said.  I fished in a pocket for a bill, and extended it toward her.  She read my mind, and provided one of her cigarettes.  I added, “Taking steps toward… recruitment of a sort.”

“Vague,” she said, lighting my cigarette.

“Yes.  And thank you.  I hope you don’t mind sticking around just a bit longer?”

“I’m not going to see any bloodshed, am I?” she asked.

“Hopefully not.  Probably nothing more than you see while tending the bar.”

“Alright.  But if I run out of cigarettes, I’m going to go home,” she said.

“Mm,” I said.  I looked at the others.  Versions of other students.  “You all good?”

I got answers ranging from the affirmative to the noncommittal.  Good enough.  I gave Shirley some direction about hiring someone to fix the mess the shotgun had made and fix the front door, then made my way out of the lab and down the hallway, taking my time, puffing at the cigarette while I started thinking about the interrogation.

The appearance of Jessie standing just inside the doorway, waiting, caught me off guard.

“You’re awful,” I told her.  “Running off and leaving me to deal with all of that.”

“I handle the timing, organization, records, and accounting.  You handle the people.

“I handle a heck of a lot more than that and you know it,” I said.  I reached out and flicked her glasses, so they slid down her nose.

“Stop that,” she said.

She flicked the cigarette free of my mouth.

“That, miss, was a token of goodwill from our Leah-replacement.”

“Rita.”

“I know.  I remembered the name.  I pay some attention.”

“Are they good?”

“I think so.  Not too bothered by current events.  That young asshole we were thinking about recruiting if Rita didn’t work would’ve been freaked, probably.”

“Probably,” Jessie said, ignoring my choice of words.  “I’ve already interrogated one.  You’re behind.”

“Thoughts?  Input?”

She shook her head.  “Go in without me coloring your views any.  We’ll talk after.”

“Speaking of… what’s that thing you were going to say before, that you held off on?”

“Oh.  That.”

“You wanted to mull over it.  Something about me and Leah.”

“Mulling,” she said.  “Continue to stew.  Interrogate.  I’ll catch you before you move on to your next customer.”

I reached up to flick her glasses again.  She caught my hand and then slapped me lightly across the side of the head, before ducking back, closing the door behind her.

I headed straight for the screamer.  The kid had been screeching like he’d been set on fire for a while, but he’d gone silent.  I anticipated a bit of blood, but if there was any, it wasn’t visible.  The guard we’d posted had had the sense to deliver the hurt where it wouldn’t be visible.

He was tall, red haired, and wore a lab coat.  His hands were bound together, behind his back, and then had been lifted up to the point that his shoulders jutted forward.  The rope extended from wrist, over a beam, and down to wrist again.

I indicated that the guard should leave the room.  I closed the door behind him.

Then I looked at the young man who stood before me, his arms held out behind him.

I untied the rope that bound him.

Small things would go a long way, in this captor-captive relationship.  I would try at being nice first, and then if it didn’t work, I would move on to the next captive, and try a harder approach.  I could riddle out how they thought and how they operated, and find the best approach to make them crack.

“Leader of the Rank,” I greeted him.

“What?  No.  We don’t have a leadership structure,” he said.  “We’re not even a proper gang.  We bake, we ship, we take in some side cash.”

“My colleague has deduced that you’re among the key individuals.  It’s why we went to the trouble of finding a body double,” I told him.  “Not being the leader isn’t a mark in your favor… what’s your name?”

“Leon.”

Red-haired Leon.  Right, then.

“Not a mark in your favor, Leon.  See, if you were leader, if you knew things about the imminent meeting with Genevieve Fray…”

I paused, letting that name hang, and I watched his expression shift in the gloom.  The light from the window cast on one side of his face.  In the dark, the little details were missing, but the contrast of brighter light and deeper shadow had little middle ground, making the shift of muscle and the movement of the hollow of his thin cheeks very pointed.

His head dropped a little.  I could hear him say, “I knew that was a mistake.”

“So you do know something after all.  Was the mistake working with Fray?” I asked.

“Yes.  Too much.  Too big.  She ordered drugs from us.  Mass quantities.”

“Which drugs?”

“Stimulants.  But-”

“Hold on.  When?”

“Over a year ago.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Go on.”

“The drugs were cheap, easy, but the quantity, it meant good money.  But Jun, he got suspicious.”

“Jun?”

“Junior, the… he’s the closest thing we have to a leader.  If we’re a business, then he’s the person who manages the sales and distribution.  If we’re a gang, well, he decides who’s in and who’s out.”

“Alright.  He got suspicious.”

“He said there wasn’t any urgency.  Started after we had to delay one shipment.  She didn’t care.  Paid us the same amount she had when we’d been on time.”

“And this has been going on for a while.  Regular payments?”

He looked uneasy, slumped on the floor.  For the moment, he seemed very preoccupied with rubbing at his wrists.

“You know I’m going to find out in talking to the others, right?”

Leon sighed.  “What happens to me?”

“It really depends on the quality of your answers, Leon.”

He nodded.  “Junior thought, thinks, she intended to bankroll us.  Get us set up.  And she did.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know.  She’s coming.  Everyone here, we know who she is.  What she is.  She’s been a part of the groups fighting the Crown for the last three years.  She works with a lot of people.  She- she apparently wants to work with us.  We’re not even that good at what we do, you know?”

“I know,” I said.  The Rank didn’t actually place among the winners of Beattle’s academy rankings.  They placed well enough to avoid being cut, but none of them were exceptional.

“And now you’re showing a lot of interest in her,” Leon said.  “Which suggests we brought this on ourselves, dealing with her.”

“If it wasn’t her, it would have been Mauer,” I said.  “And he wouldn’t have dealt with you, exactly, but the end result would have been the same.”

“End result?” Leon asked.  He still hadn’t picked himself up off the floor.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him.

I walked around the room, thinking.

He was a very mild personality.  Not too dangerous.

Either Fray would make her move, or Mauer would.  The forms those moves would take would be the same, but this town would be used.  Its occupants would be used.

“She asked you questions,” I said.  “She was curious about the city, about details, I’m sure.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mmm,” I said.  “Like you said, you’re not the leader.  So maybe you weren’t privy.  Which doesn’t help you.  But I’ll catch you up.  Fray operates in a certain way.  She likes to do things that are big, understand?  Start wars, start and spread plagues, create primordials…”

In the dark, I could see his eyes widen some at that last word.

“…And she’s not magical.  She gets her information from places.  She’s wanted and recognizable.  She needs accommodations ready, especially as she brings more people with her.  And if she doesn’t want to stay in one place for too long, then she needs to have people handle the preparations or initial phases.  In the best case scenario, that preparation is done unwittingly.”

I saw his expression change.  His head turned, not looking at me, but…

The wall.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Probably Junior or Leah.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he said.

“You didn’t have to.  Don’t worry, you haven’t betrayed your friend.  He’s been gone a lot, has he?  Handling business elsewhere?  Somewhere nearby?  Further away?”

I watched his reaction as I asked each question.

“The Academy,” I said.

That got the faintest of reactions.  Turned out the guy who started screaming the moment he was assaulted, kidnapped, and tied up in a dark room had obvious tells.

“How long until she turns up?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” he said.  “First thing.”

“Really now,” I said.  “Tell me, has she met any of you?”

“You’re thinking about the doubles,” he said, resigned.

“And I’m thinking of how cooperative each of you are,” I told him.  “If it comes down to questions, I’d rather have someone who can answer questions and sell Fray on this.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“That’s fine,” I said.  “I’ll move on.  Sounds as if Junior is the one to talk to.  Now, are you going to cooperate and let me tie you up, or should I use my knife and be done with you altogether?”

“Oh lords.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I waited patiently as he picked himself up off the ground, and positioned his hands where I could tie them.

I let myself out of the room.  Jessie was waiting.

“Junior is the one to talk to, apparently,” I said.

Jessie nodded.

“She comes tomorrow,” I observed.  I looked at the building.  “That’s a tight timeline.  A lot to handle.”

“But it’s doable,” Jessie said.

“And her big play involves the Academy.”

“We already had our suspicions about what that play would look like,” Jessie reminded me.  “This more or less confirms them.”

“Leon in there won’t be useful for us, standing across from Fray.  Leah is-”

“Dangerous,” Jessie finished for me.

“Dangerous,” I agreed.  I reached up to smudge Jessie’s glasses, and she swatted at my hand.

Leah shouted something unpleasant from within the room we’d turned into a cell.

The guard of Frederick’s that I’d stationed in there didn’t whistle.  Nothing important.

“Mulled,” Jessie said.

“Hm?”

“About the thought I couldn’t complete.  About your response to Leah.”

“Sure.”

“You’re very readable, Sy.  When you feel insecure, you push the boundaries.  Even with allies.  Especially with allies.  You mess up their glasses, for example.”

I made a noise, more to suggest than I’d heard than to negate or agree.

“Feeling insecure, Sy?”

“With you or with this situation?”

“Either or.”

“Fray is a tricky enemy.  And this won’t be easy.”

“We can back down.  Skip town, choose a different path.”

I shook my head.  We needed people.

We were sitting on a monumental secret.  But to utilize it, we needed a voice, and six hundred were far louder than two.  Six thousand were better than six hundred.

But to get those six hundred or six thousand, gambles had to be made.  Risks had to be taken.

Something big.

As I’d told Leon, Fray laid groundwork and put out feelers.  She likely had a hundred groups like this little drug laboratory at the edge of the world.  When certain stars aligned and she saw opportunity, then she leveraged them.  They gave her the in.  Groups like this let her get set up and act quickly, much as the student she was tutoring had given her access to the lab with chemicals and water supply access that would let her taint the town and surrounding region.  Dame Cicely’s.

Fray operated by performing the big actions, then leveraging the fallout.

We’d gotten out ahead of her, predicting the sort of place she would see as vulnerable and ready to be leveraged.  Now we were undermining her groundwork.

“Jessie,” I said.  “I can continue the interrogations.  I’ll talk to Jun, there.”

“You want me to coach ’em?”

“Please,” I said.  “Focus on Leah and Leon’s replacements.  If Junior decides to play ball, then that’ll make them sound a hell of a lot more like the people Fray’s been negotiating with all this time.”

Fray would turn up and go on with business as usual.

She would, through the replacements we were setting up or a lack of awareness that we were in play, set up her ‘something big’.

And we were damn well going to steal it.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.04 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.4

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This was proving to be a long night.  The last time I’d asked about the time, it had been six straight hours of talking, negotiating, planning, and instruction.  We had started at ten twenty or so, and now it was closer to dawn than it was to dusk.

There was something reassuring about being the figure in the shadows, the member of a band or pair of assassins and investigators who fit together like clockwork.  That reassurance had been turned on its head now that we were crossing the threshold.

We were no longer the unpredictable figures that were shaking the box of spiders, but now another few of the people who were making a box, choosing and gathering the spiders, and hoping that the journey that followed wouldn’t see things shaking too much.

The underlings we had recruited, a set of lieutenants who each led their own band of thugs and questionable sorts, were now gone.  They went to their homes, went about their business, they talked among themselves, and each operated with their individual motivations.  The workers from this particular lab and the people we had had as guards were all going home, with instructions to turn up at the usual time for work tomorrow.

Junior and the girl I’d picked out who had been wearing clothes similar to the laborers were now giving instructions to the stragglers about how to shut down the lab for the night.  What needed to go where, what needed to be brought down to a simmer rather than shut off entirely, and what needed to be stored with any measure of care.

Junior was tall, his black hair parted, wearing an off-white lab coat and apron.  Posie wore overalls, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a puffy hat with a brim that looked more like an overstuffed seat cushion than a proper hat, but at least served to let her keep her copious amounts of hair under it.

With the exception of Junior’s would-be replacement, who I had sent home, the impostors were watching and listening.  Rita or Marvin would periodically ask about the names of things.  It was a bit concerning that Marvin sometimes had to ask twice.

But even that task was wrapping up.  The lanterns went out at various workstations and counters.  Windows were shut and locked.

“…This counter is packing.  I put the numbskulls on it,” Junior explained to the impostors.  “Can’t screw it up, really, and this is the stage where most would try to steal product.  I prefer stupid people in that position over the smart ones who don’t get caught.  After everyone leaves, I check the quantities.

He rolled a jack so it slid into the pallet, then turned the wheel until it was lifted up.  He pointed at the jack.

“Scale built into it.  Pallets are three point six stone, these crates are six point four.  Got crates specifically made to be that weight.  Nice and tidy ten stone.  Mental calculation on quantity of product, ninety-ninety of happy-go-lucky, we’re looking for one seventy eight and a half stone… and we’re within the allowable margins.  Lid goes on…”

The girl, Posie, lifted the lid into place, then picked up a hammer in one hand and a fistful of nails in the other.  She hammered the nails in with a set motion.  A tap to set the nail in, then a swing to drive it home in one blow.

“Sealed.  Already labeled.  Ready to go out,” Junior said.

“Big crates,” Rita observed.  The crates were tall enough that she could only barely look over top of the one that sat on a pallet.  “A lot of…”

“Merchandise,” Junior said.  “That’s the language I prefer.  You can talk about merchandise in public without people raising eyebrows.”

He glanced at me, checking that I was watching.

I was watching.

“She’ll show up around the start of the workday tomorrow,” Junior said.  “So remember this.  Each of you at a different station, follow the process.”

“What was this station, again?” Marvin asked.

“Packing,” Junior said, patient.  He shot another glance my way.

Did Junior want my approval?  Or was he such a practiced sycophant that he was capable of suggesting that sentiment while he plotted to undermine me?

He was a salesman with a good mind for numbers and organization.  He wasn’t just perfectly suited for this particular enterprise, but he was a gem among coals in general.  Fray had found him, somehow, in this edge-of-the-world town.  She had identified that glimmer of well-above-average intelligence, and she had plotted to use him.

Co-opting him was a part of my plan to steal the reins from Fray and steer her greater ploy in another direction.  I didn’t know what it was for sure, but I had ideas.

“Marvin,” I said, cutting into the conversation.  “What is it that you do?”

“Do?  Nothing,” Marvin said.  He was shorter than average for a guy, but broad across the shoulders, laden with artificial muscles.  He had a beard and mustache, brown skin, and heavy eyebrows.

“You’ve done something.  A good body of work like that costs money,” I said, gesturing in the direction of his upper body.  “I’m trying to figure you out as a person.”

“I used to handle records in government.  Taxes, census,” he said.

Half of the little group expressed some measure of surprise.  I only nodded, taking that in.

“You’re a person of the written word and number?” I asked.

“Uh huh.  Lost my position four or so years ago when the new mayor was elected.  His son got the job.  They reached out a little while back because they needed help.  I was happier to see them sink.”

“Why the muscles?” Posie asked.  “Change of career?”

“My girl likes this body type,” Marvin said.  “If we break up, I’ll go back to the way I was, but things aren’t going that way, so I’m stuck this way, I think.”

Rita snorted.  Posie smiled.

I walked over to a counter, picked up a pad of paper and pen, and walked over to the group.  I handed it over to Junior.

“Write it down,” I said, as soon as the chatter over Marvin’s girlfriend had died down.  I looked at Marvin.  “You’ll remember better that way?”

Marvin seemed taken aback.  Then he seemed to gather his bearings, realized why I’d asked, and conceded the point.  He nodded.

“Great,” I said.

It took some time for Junior to figure out how to structure it.  But the guy was a student.

Not the best student.  Jessie had said that Leah beat Junior in the rankings.  Which was odd, when I compared my assessment of their natural abilities.

He wrote the essentials down.  Marvin watched over his shoulder, nodding as he went.

Rita had run out of cigarettes half an hour ago.  But she’d stayed.  She was interested.  The others looked slightly more restless.

When Junior had finished, handing the pad over to Marvin, I decided to wrap things up.  “Let’s finish here.  Go home.  Get a few hours of sleep, wash, eat.  We’ll knock and round you up in a little while.  Then payment, more payment if we succeed.”

There was palpable relief at the suggestion, from everyone but Junior.

It took a minute for the impostors to gather their coats and depart.

That made for a few more elements of a greater plan that I couldn’t wholly control or conspire with.  These ones were easier to deal with.  The ones I wanted to work with most seemed more excited and invested.  Marvin and Rita.

The place was nearly empty, now.  Junior, Posie and I were the only ones in the lab itself.  The students and guards were in the lab, and Jessie was… somewhere else in the building.  Possibly with a prisoner.

“So,” Junior said.  He leaned against a counter.  “That was impressive.”

Posie nodded.

“Which part?” I asked.

“Good question.  The bit toward the end.  Marvin being a man of text.  You had an inkling before you asked, didn’t you?”

“People learn in different ways.  The tactile, the auditory, the visual.  And in different scopes, too.  The master and the jack.”

“Master and Jack?” Junior asked.

“The man who does one thing and strives toward perfection with it, and the person who can do a dozen related things and translate knowledge from one to another.  There are other bases to cover, other elements of learning and individual kinds of intelligence and whatever else, but- yeah.”

“I see,” Junior said.

“I’m not sure I see,” Posie said.

“You’re a chemist,” I said, “Yes?”

“I was, when I was a student,” she said.

“You’re a master, by my best judgment,” I said.  “You do chemistry.  You’re a tactile person.  You work hands on.  You like to get your hands dirty.  You keep the machines running.  You learn by doing, by feeling how stuff works and applying yourself to the task, improving by the practice.  In audition and in the visual, your eyes glaze over.  You loved the work, you hated the classes, you hated the reading and the writing, and unfortunately, even Beattle doesn’t offer a curriculum that’s lab work only.”

“That about sums it up,” she said.

“And you settled here.  Foreman for a lab.  And settling is the key word that you wrestle with.  Your brain tells you that you’re selling yourself short, that you should be somewhere with a higher station, your heart might even echo your brain.  But your gut?  You know deep down that this is the sort of niche you were meant to fill.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“I get the feeling that if I cut you loose, send you to go rest, eat and groom like I did with the others, you’ll come back.  Because this lab and places like it are something like home to you.”

She glanced at Junior, then at the door.

She wrestled with that for a lot longer than I’d anticipated she would.  The silence stretched on.

“No?” I finally asked.

“If I say yes, and then come back…”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

“It means you were right about everything you just said,” she said.

But as she said it, she turned to go.

I didn’t stop her.

She would be back.

She grabbed a jacket from the peg by the door, a bag from the floor off to one side, and then closed the door behind her, looking as if a burden weighed on her.

“I consider myself a people person,” Junior said.  “I’m good at figuring them out.”

“Sure,” I said.  “Others have said you had talents in that area.  I believe them.”

“I’ve known her for nearly a year, and I didn’t guess one tenth what you just did.”

“I read people, Junior.  It’s part of what I do.  A matter of survival.”

He didn’t reply to that, but he seemed to take it in and give it some consideration.

I then said, “With that in mind, I’m asking: do I need to worry about you?”

“I’ve agreed to play along.”

“Oh, I know,” I said.  “But do I need to worry about you?”

“Well,” Junior said.  He paused very deliberately.  “The way I see it, I have three options.”

“You have far more than three options,” I said.  I held up a finger.  “Be careful.  I know the little tricks.”

“I’m simplifying.  Look, I can stop this particular enterprise, but then what?  Go back to Beattle?  I couldn’t deal with you when I had a shotgun in my hands and you wanted to keep me alive.  There’s no number of locks I could put on my dorm room door that would keep me safe.”

“That’s a fair assessment,” I said.  “Yes.  You could give up just about everything.  But you’re a clever guy.  You could start fresh and manage.”

“Would be a miserable few years,” he said.  “No.  I’ve been building something, and that something is…”

He spread his hands.

I let him flounder, searching for an ending to the statement.

“…In a period of transition,” he decided.

“I do like that,” I said.  “But keep in mind, because of what you’ve built, given the location, timing, and the resources tied into it, two people have set their sights on it, with intention of making that something into something bigger.”

“Which leaves me two options.  You or my patron.”

“You have ill-will toward me, and only goodwill for her, though.”

“But I fear you,” he said.  He chuckled.  “That counts for something.”

Yeah, I thought.  My gut feeling was right.  He was of a type that could be disarming, play nice with just about anyone, and be convincing in the process.

It was in his interests to convince me that he’d side with me over Fray.  Anything he said had to be taken with a grain of salt.

I drew in a deep breath, then sighed so he could hear it.

His expression shifted, a half-dozen tiny signs that suggested concern, a break in the easy confidence on his part, a confidence that he so easily handed over to others.

“I’ll ask you again.  Do I need to worry about you?”

“You keep asking that.”

“Because you’re not answering honestly, R.J.,” I said.  “You’re ducking around something big.”

The ease and humor in his expression faltered.

“You’re a smart guy.  But you made a cardinal mistake.  You use your own product,” I said.

I saw the realization on his face.

Educated guess.

“If it was a stimulant, like some of the study drugs out there, then I’d expect your ups to be different.  Either more up because you used recently.  Or the ceiling would be lower, because tolerances have changed, even for the natural ups.  Not a study drug to change brain structure either.  Not in any way I’ve seen.  But something.  Likely something tying to your history with the Academy.”

Tying to your low rankings in the class listing, despite you being smart enough to do better.

“Like half of the students at Beattle, I came from somewhere better,” he said.  “I came from Gallia Crown Academy.  Competition was tighter, to put it lightly.”

To put it lightly.  Like so much of New Amsterdam, the city’s universities, Gallia included, would be the top one percent.  To be at the top of the classes there meant having to be the top ten percent of the top one percent.

“I took a gamble,” he said.  “I lost.”

“What kind of gamble?”

He gave me a one-shoulder shrug.  “Changed my pattern.  The underlying structure that makes me who I am, that tells my cells how to grow, what to do.  Another student told me they’d tweaked it so they didn’t need to sleep.  They weren’t that convincing, but I felt trapped.  I wanted to believe it, so I convinced myself.”

“You let them stick you with a needle, fundamentally changed your sleeping pattern, and it all fell apart.”

“We managed to do enough damage that any fixes do more damage.  There’s no point to wrestling with the problem, because I might fix one thing and break another, and then have to adjust to the new reality.  Better to dwell on dealing with it than to risk seeing more of the foundation crumble.”

“How do things stand now?”  I asked.  I was concerned it would interfere with him, me, and Fray tomorrow.

“I lose focus, go off rails, see things, and when it gets to be too bad, I dose myself to knock myself out.  Six days of being awake, with functioning steadily dropping nearly as much as it would for anyone, then two days of drugged unconsciousness, one day of the hangover from hell.”

“You space out those doses as much as you can so you don’t build up too much tolerance.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Exactly that.  If I have to turn to something stronger, which I will someday, then it’ll come at a cost.”

“How long ago did you sleep?”

“Three days ago.  I’d say… I’m about as badly off as anyone who’d skipped one night of sleep.  Not that I have any chance of nodding off.”

“But in focus, judgment, you still suffer.”

He gave me a nod.  “It’s been this way for two years now.  Handling this?  I can do.  Being a student?”

“Not much room for three day spans of unconsciousness.  Do the others know?”

“Only Leon.”

“He didn’t betray this particular detail, even under duress,” I said.  “Which… neatly answers why I had my doubts about him and decided on using the impostor instead.”

“He should have betrayed me.  We’re not that close,” Junior said.

“Either way, it’s starting to make sense.  Why Fray picked you out in particular.”

The boy quirked an eyebrow.

“She has an in with various Academies, I’d guess.  People who can keep an eye out for special cases.  She collects the wounded and promises fixes.  Has she promised you one?”

Junior shook his head.

“She will.  Tomorrow… later today, now that I think about it, she’ll talk to you.  She’ll tell you that she knows the right people, that she was almost a professor in a respected institution once.  The only reason she wasn’t was that the position came with ties to local politics and more strenuous selection, and because she modified her own brain and it backfired.”

Junior raised his chin a fraction, taking that in.

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’ll be something like that.  And it sounds awfully good.  She understands.  She has the resources, and she has the willingness to help, which was the main thing you lacked.  If you work with her, then your dreams will come true.  You’ll be able to do this, but on a far greater scale.  She’ll promise to fix your brain.  And all of this?  It’s true.  Completely honest.  Her background, the parallels to your own experience, the promise to fix your brain.”

I watched his expression change as I painted the picture.

“You’ll be able to go back to the Academy and finish without your sleepless brain dragging you down, but as part of the deal, you’ll be a double agent.  Which suits you just fine.  You’re here, doing this.  You obviously don’t have an issue with doing shady work in the background.”

“But there’s a catch?” he asked.

“Hard to say,” I told him.  “But she made the same offer to me.  She made the offer to my friends.  We didn’t accept.”

“Why?”

“Because the circumstances weren’t right.  Other things were in play.  Some offers sound too good to be true.  Even so, if her timing had been better, we might have talked ourselves into it.”

I chose the same phrasing that Junior had given me as he’d described his self-modification.

“The thing to pay attention to,” I said, “Is the people she brings with her.  The headsman, the massive fellow that follows her, does he say more than five words at a time, if he speaks at all?  Is the stitched she keeps in her company free or happy?  Does the woman with bird wings still look haunted?”

“She doesn’t fix the problems.”

“She likely will, after she does what needs to be done.  But there will always be more to be done, R.J.”

“Jun, please,” Junior said, pronouncing it like ‘joon’.  “Or Junior.”

“As you wish,” I said.  “Point being, she’ll follow through.  She’ll be genuine on a level, and her brilliant mind will likely be interested in following through in terms of sheer problem solving.  Yet if you look at the people that have been with her the longest, who have been waiting for her to set aside the time to fix them?  They’re still waiting.  If you think for a moment, and rationalize that someone who collects the wounded as soldiers might find herself without an army if she’s too quick to mend…”

“I see what you mean,” he said.

I wasn’t being wholly genuine, but I needed to plant that seed of doubt.  I was using the trick that I’d accused Junior of using earlier.  To reduce an argument down to a narrow list of choices, and then answer those choices.

Is it A or B?  Ignore the whole rest of the alphabet while you consider your answer.

The reality was, Fray’s collection of wounded that she kept close were the deeply wounded.  The ones who would wrestle with the damage they had sustained and likely never find their way back to ‘normal’, even with the brilliant mind of a professor turned to the task.

Normal was overrated anyway.

The funny thing was, I doubted Junior had what it took to make his way into her inner circle, but for completely different reasons.

He was likely fixable.

“I’ve dealt with your like, Jun,” I said.  “I am your like.  It’s why she was willing and able to make the offer to me in the first place.  I won’t promise you the whole world and make you wait years for the delivery.  I can promise you that my world, which I’m inviting you into, is a world that would be a good fit for your strengths, and very accommodating of your weaknesses.”

I had broken through the veneer of easy congeniality.  He’d chuckled and joked about how fearing me was better, but now…

I had him.

The way he looked at me, he knew I had him.

“Go home,” I said.  “We’ll find you in a few hours, when we’re ready to get started.”

“Yeah,” he said.  He looked a little dazed.  The highs and lows.  The momentary hope, the crash of reality, followed by my offer of my reality.

So many things were out of my hands.  Arrows I’d loosed and trusted to fly straight.  Boomerangs I’d thrown and trusted to return.  But I couldn’t read all of the prevailing winds.

There was more to do.  Then nap, grooming and more.

I walked around the lab, checked on the prisoners and guards, and spent five minutes standing watch over Leon while his guard stepped out to use the loo.

It was only in the later stage of the exploration that I found Jessie.  She was sitting at the top of a flight of stairs, in the shadows, leaning against the wall.  Fast asleep.

She stirred at my appearance, hand reaching for a weapon.  Her eyes snapped open.

“Shh,” I said.  “It’s fine.”

She smiled a little.  Then, nearly as fast as she’d snapped awake, she slipped back under.

“We’re as set as we’ll ever be,” I murmured.  I walked past her up the stairs, checked around, and found a throw-blanket.  I checked it for bugs and grossness, deemed it good enough, and brought it over to Jessie.

The sleep she’d settled into was different than the one she had been in just a bit earlier.  Utterly defenseless, this.  Dead to the world, she barely stirred as I wrapped the blanket around her.  I crouched in front of her, and I lifted the glasses off her face.

Drawing a clean handkerchief from my pocket, I cleaned the glasses of smudges, wrapped the clean ‘kerchief around them, then found her bag, and slid both glasses and kerchief into a protected pocket.

I was moving her braid so it wouldn’t tug if her head moved the wrong way when I sensed movement behind me.

Shirley.

“You’re back,” I said.

She glanced at Jessie.

“Too deep asleep now,” I said.  “Nothing short of a stab wound would wake her.  Not to worry.”

“I found the carpenter.  He’ll be here within the hour.  Disgruntled at the late night call, but the money helps.”

I nodded.

“You’re not going to braid her hair into the banister, are you?”

“No,” I said.  “I’d never do something like that.”

“You do a lot of things like that,” Shirley said, teasing lightly.

My expression and tone were dead serious as I said, “Not while she’s asleep.  I made Jamie and Jessie a promise long ago.  That they would be safe while they were asleep.  I wouldn’t betray that.”

“She’s sleeping a lot,” Shirley observed.

“Twelve to fourteen hours a day.  Sometimes sixteen.  When we’re done this job, it’ll be sixteen, to catch up,” I said.  “She’s making do with less around jobs like this, so she can help me more.  But she needs the memory consolidation she gets from sleep.  She needs more than that.”

“I’m sorry,” Shirley said.

“We’ll make do,” I said.  “We lean on each other’s strengths, accommodate each other’s weaknesses.  For Jessie, that means letting her sleep for right now.”

“I talked to Pierre.  He checked, the train is on time, and we have four hours,” Shirley said.

“Plus half an hour for quarantine procedure, half an hour for travel from the junction to here.  Five hours until Fray arrives,” I said.

Shirley nodded.

Five hours for the winds to change.

“Would it be too much imposition if I asked you to watch over things, keep in touch with Pierre?  Keep an eye out for emergencies?  For four or so hours?”

“I can.  Can I ask why?”

I found a seat next to Jessie, and then moved the blanket, pulling it so it also draped over my back and shoulders.

“I see,” she said.  She smiled.  “I’ll scream if anything comes up.”

“Perfect.”

Shirley wasted no time in making her way back downstairs, giving us our space.

Still, I was nervous.  One of the guards was a question mark, Fray was a question mark.  Things could happen.

I did something I’d done thousands of times before, and I used Wyvern to adjust how my brain worked.  As I’d done hundreds of times, I adjusted how it worked in respect to sleep.  I used poisons and drugs to do something in that same realm that Junior had tampered with and suffered so much for.  As I drifted off, I calibrated myself so my sleep would be a shallow one.  The slightest thing would wake me up.

I settled in, my feet on the step below me, arms folded against my knees, head resting against my arms, blanket over top of it to keep some of the ambient light away.

Jessie moved her head, resting it against my shoulder.

Being half-asleep meant being woken up once every few minutes by creaks and noises from outside, but that was fine.  Because being fully asleep was a me thing, while drifting in and out of this shallow sleep meant being beside my friend and ally.  It was reassuring, the constant forgetting and remembering that she was here, that she had my back and I had hers.

I wouldn’t admit it out loud, but I felt insecure.

All of these pawns were in play and few were wholly in my control.  I was playing a game I was less familiar with while a master sat on the other side of the board.  My only advantage was that Fray didn’t know she was playing against me yet.  I would give up that advantage soon, and I had to hope that we came out ahead in that particular transaction.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.05 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Do you know what I miss about our place in Tynewear?” I asked.

“Do tell,” Jessie said, from the other room, through the door.  “Also, let me know when I can come in.”

“You can come in any time,” I said.  Then, as I heard her hand rattle the doorknob, I said, “But I’m naked, so be warned.”

She left the washroom door alone.

“Why do you want in?” I asked.

“I want a towel for my hair.  Can you pass one through the door?”

“Hands are gucky,” I said, as I slicked my hair back.  “So no.  Give me a second…”

I carefully picked at the towel, wrapped it around my lower body, and, not wanting to get it all gross, I pressed my hips against the cabinet below the sink to pin it in place.

“There.  Come in.  I’m covered.”

She let herself into the washroom, averting her eyes as she headed straight for the cabinet with the towels.

“What was the thing you missed about Tynewear?”

“Which?  What?  Oh.  Showers.  East coast, edge of the world-”

“You’re really sticking with that, aren’t you?” she asked, as she used the towel to squeeze water out of her hair.  She was already dressed,

“So close to the heart of the Crown Empire, and what do you know?  No showers.”

“They have some in public places, like pools and athletics clubs.”

“Point stands.  No appreciation for the shower.  Only baths.  And baths are miserable when you’ve got stuff to do.  Great if you want to stop, but terrible if you’ve a five minute window before a day full of spying, kidnapping, murder, arson-”

“Theft.  Don’t forget the rampant theft.”

“And theft?  With plans to set up a rebel enclave?  Either way.  Five minute baths are a tragedy.”

“Coming from someone who has experienced tragedy, that seems very grave.”

“It is!  Terribly grave,” I said.  I fixed my hair as best as I could, but it was already rebelling against the oil-wax blend I had used to try to pin it down.  “Especially when we have to cut corners, no tea with breakfast, no time to toast or cook anything, just grabbing some fruit and whatever as we rush out the door, going hungry all morning…”

“Sylvester,” Jessie said, in a very pointed way.

“Jessie,” I said, mimicking her tone.

“Are you hinting that you would like me to prepare breakfast while you get ready?”

“However did you get that impression?  No, no.  Just because I let you have the bath first, with hotter water, and-”

“I’ll see about your breakfast, Sy,” she said, with a sigh.  “It’s not going to be fancy, we don’t have that long.”

“I’ll take that as my hint to hurry things along.”

She hung up the damp hair-towel, grabbed a brush, and left the washroom.

I leaned in close to the mirror to check my face for any proper sign of facial hair, was disappointed, and ducked into the other room to start getting ready.

Mary was waiting for me.  Silent, she oversaw my selection of the tools and weapons as I laid them out on my bed.  Ashton sat at the window, and didn’t look up as I touched it, gauging the temperature outside.

I dressed with more warmth than was necessary.  The pants meant more for winter than for fall.  I wore a shirt under a heavier sweater.  I couldn’t remember where it came from, but it was soft and close-knit enough to be worn on its own.  Something I’d looted way back in Tynewear?  Maybe Jessie had bought it during one of our supply runs, and it had found its way into my luggage.

I grabbed a jacket but didn’t wear it.  I collected everything I’d laid out on the bed, everything with its place.  My gun disappeared into the inside pocket of the jacket, which I folded in such a way that the gun wouldn’t fall out.  Other things were put in pockets, belt, and hidden pockets based on priority and need.  I grabbed a bag and stowed the things I wouldn’t need for sure, but which would be useful to have.  These too were put away based on a kind of instinct more than proper organization.  Lockpicks in a front pocket of the bag, while a smoke canister and ammunition went into the bottom of the bag, sure to be buried by other things.

“Is this how you operate, Mary?” I asked.  “Is it a factor in how you’re put together?  When you’re really nervous about the day, you focus a little bit on grooming?  Armor yourself in fashion, arm yourself with the necessary tools, and find your center?”

“I was only nervous in the very beginning,” she said.  “Back when I didn’t know the Lambs.  Then again, when Percy came up, and when the Lambs split.”

“The very beginning.  That’s when you settled on your particular style.  Before then, we mostly saw you wearing the Mothmont uniform.”

“I started wearing lace and soft fabric, to hide the steel,” she said, smiling.  She touched my chest, over the heart.  “What’s your soft armor hiding?”

I could smell toast.  My head turned.

“Good luck with the mission,” she said.  “I look forward to hearing the results, all the way back at Radham Academy.”

I smiled, hiked the bag up over one shoulder, gathered the jacket under one arm, and joined Jessie in the kitchen, heels of my boots knocking the wood floor with each step.

“Thank you,” I told her.

“You’re welcome,” she said.  “It’s self-preservation, too.  You get cranky when you’re tired and hungry, and I’m putting up with you for a good portion of the day.”

“Did you eat?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “I’m taking some of this.  Toast, with liver spread.  Cheese.  Fruit.”

I made a face.

“Eat some fruit,” she said.

Reluctantly, I took the fruit, popping it into my mouth.

“I skipped the tea,” she said.  “We can’t drink it while we walk.”

“We could with a Dewar flask.”

“We had a Dewar flask.  We’ve had several.  You keep turning them into bombs.  Mostly poison gas bombs.”

“Do I?”

“And the glass jars with wire fasteners, and the milk bottles, which get costly, because they forced us to renew subscriptions if they couldn’t collect the used bottles-”

Behind Jessie, Helen creeped up and stole a piece of toast.  Except it was a phantom piece.  Jessie, none the wiser, picked up the real version of that same piece of toast.  Jessie bit into the toast with emphatic, not-entirely-serious anger.

“Yes,” I said.  “Take out your aggression on the toast, not on me.  Gnash it.  Gnash it good.”

Helen’s eyes crinkled with humor as she devoured her own piece.

Swallowing, Jessie stabbed the remaining bit of toast in my direction.  “It wouldn’t be so bad if you handled it, but you leave that to me, because you don’t-”

She paused.

I waited, watching, as she remained where she was, toast held in the air.  She stared at me, a faint frown crossing her features.  If it was twelve percent of a proper frown, then it creeped up a percentage point, second by second, over a good five seconds.

“Jessie?”  I asked.

“Shh,” she told me.

I frowned, glanced at Helen, who shrugged, and I eased my concerns by eating my liver toast and cheese.

“We should go,” Jessie said.  “We might have to make a detour.”

I grunted assent through a mouthful of toast, made sure I had my stuff, and hooked the strap of Jessie’s bag with my foot, lifting it up to a level where she could grab it without having to bend over.

We vacated the apartment, and I paused before locking the door, making eye contact with Helen.

“Watch the apartment,” I told her.  I got a nod, closed the door, and locked it.

When I turned around, the look of general concern on Jessie’s face had jumped a few dozen percentage points.

“Helen,” I told her, doing my best to manage the handfuls of food without getting my fingers too sticky.

“Okay,” she said.

“Where are we detouring?” I asked, as we walked down the stairs to the street.

It was dim outside, the first rays of dawn only just reaching out.  People were awake and busy, because it was seven in the morning, but the colder season was creeping in, stealing away daylight and making its approach clearly felt in the early morning.  In a few weeks, water would start freezing and the air would be dry.  For now, however, the salty air that blew in from over the ocean and into the city was cold and damp, the light faltering.

“If nothing changes in the next few minutes, we might want to head to the-”

In the distance, a train whistle screamed.

“-train station,” Jessie finished.  “Nevermind.”

“You’re aware the trains are almost never on time?” I asked.

“I’m aware there’s a deviation.  Plus eleven minutes or minus seven, at the limit, for Laureas.  When things are at that limit, about half the time, I can go down to the train station and ask.”

“You seriously ask?” I asked.

“I do,” she said.  “And most of the time, something noteworthy happened.  Enough for people at the station to talk about it with each other.  Fray just arrived with her group, and she’s a tich late.”

“I’m just imagining how you go about that.  You just walk up to the ticket booth, say ‘hello Sammy, how’s work this morning?  Oh, that’s good to hear.  Why is the train late?'”

“I’m a little more adroit than that, Sy.”

“How does one adroitly manage the topic of a late train, as someone regular who isn’t a passenger?”

“You’re dwelling on the wrong part of this.  Fray has arrived.  That she arrived late might be important.”

“Maybe you think it’s adroit, but they talk among themselves about the odd girl who gets uppity about the train being late, even though she has absolutely no stake in it.”

Sy.”

Jessie.  How can I trust an ally if she’s doing things behind the scenes that might hint at grave weaknesses or infirmity?  This could be the fulcrum point by which our partnership regains balance or careens into disaster.”

“There are a lot of locals who visit the station now and again purely out of a fondness for trains.”

“Really now?”

“Really.  Can we please refocus?”

“Little kids, I imagine.  And old men.  But seventeen year old girls?”

Jessie sighed.

“Do you like trains?  Do you pay particular attention to trains here for purely selfish, hobby-esque reasons?”

“If I say yes, you’re going to clap your hands with glee, then file that away as one of the memories you actually hold onto, so you can use it against me.  If I say no, you’re going to stubbornly stay on this like a terrier on a mousehole.”

“So… that’s a yes?” I asked.

“I don’t dislike trains.  They make a good reference point for the flow of the city, when I’m measuring it all.  When people come, when they go, the time it takes them to get from A to B, with the station itself oftentimes being one or the other-”

“You like trains!  That’s so adorable!”

“You’re making more of this than there is.”

“Okay,” I said.  I took a deep breath, and exhaled, settling myself down.  “Fair.”

Act reasonable, let the subject drop.  If there was anything to share, she would venture it, because she did want to share more of herself with me.

“Some of my fonder memories are of the Lambs together, on the train.  It’s so often a nice intermission, in the grand play of life.  The pause before things start, the pause after they conclude, where we were together, me and you or us and the Lambs as a group.  We can talk, but we’re still moving toward something.  Everything else was prone to being interrupted, be it time at the Orphanage, let alone the actual missions.”

I nodded, trying and failing to suppress the grin that crept over my face.

“I’ve given you a fully loaded weapon to use against me, haven’t I?” she asked.

“Not at all,” I said.  “Not at all.”

“That would be far more convincing if you didn’t look like the cat with the canary.”

“I don’t want to discourage you from sharing parts of yourself,” I said.  “It’s all good.  I won’t use it against you.”

“I don’t believe you.  You’ll forget you promised not to use it against me, and I’ll remember I didn’t believe you, and I’ll soothe my frustrations by telling myself I was right, when the time comes.  But can we please just focus?  Or can you do what you did back in New Amsterdam, lose your mind and let one of the ghosts take over?  Because that might be preferable.”

“Irreversible, quite possibly.”

“But preferable all the same,” she said, smiling.

“Ha ha.  Alright.  Focusing.”

“How is your lipreading?”

“I’ve been focusing on it.  We’ve known we’d probably be needing it.  I should manage pretty well.  We’ll see how it goes.”

“Let me know if you’re not picking up everything.  I’ll translate.”

“Will do,” I said.

Jessie pointed.  We changed course.

We were mostly silent as we finished eating and wiping our hands clean, making our way to where we needed to be.

One building had stairs that ran up the outside to a porch that overhung the lawn.  We borrowed use of the stairs, climbing up halfway, but without standing on the porch itself.

Jessie reached into her bag and I reached into mine, and we both pulled out binoculars.

It took about twenty seconds to find Fray.  I spotted her first.

She had toned down the lipstick and wore a hat that folded up on the one side, but she hadn’t jumped to wear any particular disguise beyond that.  The stitched girl was with her, wearing a jacket that was lighter than the morning chill called for.  The stitched girl’s boy was nowhere to be seen.  Fray’s Bruno, the headsman, Warren.

Avis, too, was with her.  Avis… didn’t look good.  I’d braced Junior to expect Avis to look haunted, but the woman appeared hollowed out.  More experiment than experimenter, gaunt, not quite able to look like a member of the crowd, even with the concealing cloak she wore.  Not that the cloak helped, draping down to cover everything from the shoulders down, but it was a sight better than openly wearing the wings that she likely never removed, now.

Still, she and Fray talked.

I turned some things around in my head, adjusted, changed focus, and let some walls down.

I imagined the voices, pulled out the stops as I focused on the act of lipreading, and put it all to work.

“…long do you need me to stay?” Avis asked.

“Not long at all.  Once we know we’re clear, I’ll signal you or openly ask you to see to other business.”

“I don’t like leaving you,” Avis said.

A vehicle momentarily blocked our view of the conversation.  My mind, primed to fill in the blanks, immediately jumped in five different directions, as to where the conversation might go, and how Fray might respond.

The horse and carriage passed, and I took a moment to get a grasp of what was being said.

Fray: “…the reason I keep you around is for the company.”

“…company to keep,” Avis said.  I missed the first word.  I could have asked Jessie about it, but I wanted to test myself, force my brain to adapt where I hadn’t been able to push it to on my own.

Fray reached out to touch Avis’ arm, which was covered by the long black cloak.  “Who else can I have good, long conversations with?”

Avis smiled.

Then the pair of them were out of sight, blocked from our line of sight by an intervening building.

We picked ourselves up, bags in one hand, binoculars in the other, and hurried to the next vantage point.

“Warren is probably coming on another train.  Too conspicuous.  Might show up with a group of Brunos he can blend in with,” I said.

“That’s quite a thing to imagine,” Jessie said.

“Indeed!  I bet you would-”

“Don’t even say it, Sy.  We only just finished the conversation where you said you wouldn’t give me a hard time.”

“About trains,” I said.  “Other things are fair game.  Why?  What did you think I was going to say?”

“I don’t even know.  But it was going to involve trains.  And I guess men, or some association between hobbies and work.  What were you going to say?”

“A bunch of hulking men, crammed together in a train car-”

“Oh, ew,” she said.

“Talking about muscles, oiling their bodies like the gladiators of old, to show-”

Stop.  Mercy.  I cry mercy.”

I stopped.

“I much prefer the image of many large, musclebound men sitting in seats too small for them, dressed to the nines and waiting for the tea cart, acting like gentlemen.”

“I see, I see,” I said.

“Because it’s amusing and funny, not because of anything your perverse mind can piece together.”

“Understood,” I said.  “So that’s where your mind goes.  I’m learning so much about you, today.”

“Whatever else you’re thinking or about to say, keep it to yourself,” she said.

There was a fence bounding a yard at the corner of one street.

“Are we clear to peek at them?”

“Assuming they’re walking at the same pace they were?  Yes.”

I gestured.  “Up?”

“Catch,” she said.  “Also, tree.”

She threw the binoculars into the air, put her hands together just in time for me to step into them, and helped boost me up.  I skipped up to the top of the fence and perched there, glancing up momentarily before reaching out to catch Jessie’s binoculars.

My view was blocked by a tree.  I raised the binoculars and peered through the branches.

We were on track.  Fray was on course to rendezvous with Junior and the other members of the Rank.

I watched their mouths, but could only see Fray, and for only part of the statement.

“…our room.  Then we’ll need you to swing by – -tul.  You know – – – to cover.  I trust you to handle it -ven your past experience.”

Avis said something a branch didn’t want me to catch.

Something-tul?

Beattle?

I hopped down before Fray and Avis could advance far enough along the street that they would see me.  We were keeping ahead of them and off to the side, and there weren’t a lot of positions where we could keep sight of their faces and also stay out of sight.  Avis should have good eyes, if she stuck with the ‘bird’ theme.

“I didn’t think you’d be able to see, what with the tree,” Jessie said.

“Wasn’t too bad.  I think Avis is visiting the local Academy.  Fray and Avis talked before about Avis leaving Fray and going off somewhere, right?”

Jessie nodded.

“That means you and I might be breaking apart, one watching Fray, the other watching Avis.  What they’re talking about right now, it looks like something they couldn’t handle during the train ride, so it’s at least somewhat sensitive.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Also, thank you.  That thing with the boost, and throwing the binoculars, and me catching them?  Thank you.  I didn’t tax your shoulder?”

Jessie shook her head.  “It’s been a bit better.  But maybe we shouldn’t do that again today?”

I nodded.

“I’m glad it tickled your fancy,” she said.

The next vantage point for us to reach was a little ways away, but it was the second-to-last.

“You’re in a good mood,” Jessie observed.

“The boost thing was a boost.”

“Beyond that.”

“Getting a good few hours of sleep was a lift, moodwise,” I said.

“Sitting on cold stairs.”

“Even so,” I said.  “I’m excited.  Fray.  Something great in the works.  Good company.”

“Including ghosts,” Jessie said.

“Them too,” I said.  “I’m less certain about the elements we have in play.  We can’t control their every move, not yet.”

“Yet?”

“Maybe one day.  But free will and sheer variance in people means there are a hundred of little things that could go wrong.  Things I used to exploit.”

We settled into our hiding spot, leaning against a wall rather than crouching, keeping an eye out for Fray.

“It’s good to be wary, Sy.”

“Maybe.”

Fray appeared, continuing her steady walk.  She had company.

A boy, roughly of an age to match Ashton, Abby and the twins’ apparent ages.

I focused on the lipreading, raising the binoculars to my eyes.

The boy was shaking his head.  He said, “No.”

“Strange creatures?  Or rumors of strange creatures?  Experiments without owners?”

“No.”

“Nobody moved into the area?  New faces?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Altercations?  Problems?”

“Last night.  There were gunshots.  A lot of people walking around.”

“Where?”

A shrug, a response I didn’t see.  A negative response.  Unsure.

“Could it have come from that area down there?”

She gestured in the general direction of the Rank’s lab.

“Guess so.”

“Interesting.  The people walking around, none were Academy?”

“No.  Locals, looked like.”

I glanced at Jessie, and we exchanged a series of gestures.

I left Jessie behind, hurrying onward.

The boy had been paying attention.  He’d likely been contacted in advance, paid, to keep an eye out.

The simplest answer was that the same person that had picked up shipments or delivered Fray’s messages had also set that up, at her request.

I ducked through the streets, zig-zagging this way and that.  I couldn’t remember the exact location, but it was an oddly positioned building, where the streets formed a very long and narrow ‘x’ rather than a perfectly square one, and the streets were wide, which meant I had to find the wide street-

I found the wide street.

And then find the intersection with another wide-but-not-as-wide street.  I found that, and spotted familiar territory.

I approached from the side, and knocked on a window.

A worker opened the window.

“Bring Junior,” I said.

My heart pounded.  Fray wasn’t that far away.  She might even pick up the pace if she sensed that there was something afoot.

Junior appeared at the window.

“I thought you weren’t going to show up this morning,” he said.

“She knows something happened last night.  Keep it simple.  Some of the locals found out you were dealing out of here, because of the comings and goings at night, and they came asking for money.  You fired the shotgun a few times, and they decided to come back another time.  Tell the others.  If they can look upset about it, that’s great.”

“Understood.  What-”

“Do it now, Jun,” I said.  “There’s not a lot of time for this last minute alteration to the script.”

I ended the conversation by pushing the window closed.

I approached the corner of the street I needed to cross, and I saw Fray making her way to the building.

I took a longer, more circuitous route.  It unfortunately meant that I would miss the opening of the dialogue between Fray and Junior.

And then some, it seemed.  I’d hoped for a passing wagon to provide some cover as I crossed the street, but there wasn’t much traffic at this hour.

Five minutes passed.  I didn’t hear any commotion, but neither Fray nor Junior were really positioned to cause any.

Finally, a carriage passed.  I used it as cover to cross the street while staying more or less out of Avis’ field of view.

I made my way to the last vantage point.  It was an apartment building across the street, low to the ground.  Jessie was already there.

“Please tell me it’s going well,” I said.

Jessie was peering out the window with binoculars.  “Well enough.  Fray hasn’t given any signs.  She’s interested in the enterprise.  Or she’s pretending to be.”

I was eager to settle in and see for myself.  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Jessie, but I trusted my own reads of people in particular.

“This is Leah,” Junior introduced Rita.

“Nice to meet you,” Rita said.

“Remind me, what do you do here?” Genevieve asked Rita.

“Leah is-” Junior started.

“I want to hear from her,” Genevieve interrupted.

I lowered my head, banging my forehead with the heel of my palm.

“Watch,” Jessie urged.

I looked up, focusing on the scene.

“…refine what we have, ideawise,” Rita said.  “New drugs.  Twists on existing ones.”

“Excellent,” Fray said.  “I hope we have a chance to discuss that at some point.  Drugs, and especially combat drugs, are something I’m hoping to make use of at a later date.”

“I’ve heard good things about your qualifications,” Rita said.  “If you could share any insights on what I’ve been mulling over, that would be fantastic, but right this second, it looks like vat three is-”

Then she turned away, hurrying to a counter.

“The heat is too high,” Fray casually observed.

“I know!” Rita said, looking over her shoulder.  “The knob gets wonky, so it’s a bit touchy where I have to eyeball it first thing in the morning, before figuring out what it’s actually set to.”

I watched the interactions continue, holding my breath, studying what I could make out of Avis and Fray’s expressions.

It was a solid minute later when I let myself breathe again.  There were no signs that Fray was suspicious.

“Yeah,” Jessie replied to the exhalation.  “I know.”

“Where did you find her?”

“Rita?  Luck that I ran into her in the first place.  Observation, that I saw something of merit in her when I ran into her.  There’s a reason I wanted to pay double what we paid for the others to get her.”

“Good find.  I want to keep her, however this turns out.”

“Might take some doing,” Jessie said.

Junior was taking the lead, handling ninety-five percent of the chat with Fray.  He was clever, and Fray… if she had any proper weaknesses at all, she enjoyed engaging with clever.  So long as they could keep talking, things were good.

If Fray started talking to Rita about the particulars of some combat drug regimen or another, then it would all fall apart, but at this stage, I trusted Junior or Rita to handle things.

Avis was visibly getting restless, moving about the lab, which made me restless.  But then Fray turned her head, and gave the signal.

“She’s going to see to some other things,” Fray explained to Junior.

“If you need anything in particular, I’m sure some people here would be happy to get a break from the usual lab work,” Junior said.

“I appreciate the offer, but this is hardly a relief from lab work.  Boring things,” Fray said.  “An awful lot of negotiation and communication with different people.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Junior said, smiling.

I watched Avis as she left the building, looked around, and then headed off, walking briskly.

I began to get my things together, watching her as she walked down the street.

“Heading toward the Academy,” I observed.  I pulled my bag over one shoulder.  “I guess I am too.  Don’t fall asleep here.”

“I don’t think I could sleep if I tried.  My nerves are shot,” Jessie said.

“Everything’s in motion,” I said.  I watched as Avis disappeared down one street.

I watched as two bystanders suddenly ended their conversation, exchanged a glance, and then turned to follow her.  They weren’t so hot on her heels that it looked like they were going to rob her.

No, that kind of distance was good for a game of chase.  Of tailing a target, with one in the lead and the other trailing behind.  They would change it up, so no one was visible and obvious for too long of a time.

Practiced tailing of a target.

“Everything, and everyone,” I amended my statement.  “Those two weren’t members of any of the gangs we collected, or any of the gangs we ignored?”

“No,” Jessie said.

“Bounty hunters?  Who are very intent on…” I trailed off, letting the sentence die.  I couldn’t find my way to an answer.

No, they were doing much the same thing we were.

Tracking Fray’s people.  Seeing what they did.

“A major player.  Cynthia’s people, or Academy,” I said.

This made matters harder.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.06 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The two men I was following were good.  I followed them as they followed Avis, and that gave me ample opportunity to study the pair.

Their choice of clothing and hairstyle were accurate enough to fool me.  If they hadn’t been actively following Avis, then I wouldn’t have given them a second look.  Overalls tucked into wading boots and a sweater for one.  Vest, shirt, and slacks for the other.  Their hair was messy, only nominally combed back or parted, and their hands.  Oh, thing of beauty, they had the calluses of hard manual labor.

Their guns, I noted, were well hidden.  I actually had to look to find them, I watched how fabric moved and judged where the weight was, and then deduced the rest.

There were other hints I was able to catch, as they alternated, one walking briskly to pass the other and get closer to Avis, while the other fell behind, staring in a store window or taking a slightly different path.  I could draw pretty darn close to them while they kept a careful eye on their partner and on the more distant Avis.  They had shaved at just about the same time, and it hadn’t been that long ago.  They had eaten the same food from the same place, and they had done so recently enough that I could smell it as I drew within a few feet of them.

They had received the call to turn up here very recently.  That pointed to two possibilities.

The first possibility was they had received word that Fray was on the train, and their hope was to do what we were doing and intercept the plan rather than intercept her, exactly.  News of Fray being due to arrive could have fit into the timeframe here.  She would’ve had to be sighted while she boarded in the middle of the night, this morning, the message delivered before the sun had risen this morning.  The timing, the distribution of the key elements, and the objective would suggest Cynthia more than anyone else.

Expert elements like this pair would have been assigned to another task in this area if they were here now, which raised questions about what they were doing, what Cynthia would have been doing.  It hinted that the task and subject they’d been assigned to were lower priority than Fray and Fray’s actions, and-

I stopped myself there.

The second was that they had been tipped off.  It would have had to occur within the last four or five hours.  The Academy moved slower, with instructions passing up the chain of command and key assets, which would mean they got the info four or five hours ago.  Cynthia would move faster and more aggressively.

More lines of thinking spiraled out from that.  Cynthia was naturally more combative and aggressive, which would likely mean that she would move forces in, which meant implications and consequences and possible war or civil war, which raised questions about Fray’s response and the tools she had at her disposal, and how she had accounted for this possibility in general.

Then there was a simpler, more chilling question of who or what had tipped them off.  Only a few likely possibilities stood out, and those proposed answers didn’t lead to many more questions, so it was an easy set of permutations to wrap my head around.  Four or five hours ago, I had been stewing over the fact that I was setting so many stray individuals free into the world, not knowing exactly what their courses would be.

At that time, I had just made my move against the Rank, my lieutenants helping.

Odds were good that we had been seen or infiltrated.

The bystanders around us were taking on a particular style, now.  They were younger, or they weren’t laborers.  People who worked with animals, carriage drivers, students in uniform and students out of uniform.

Beattle Academy didn’t convey the sense of an institution.  It clung to the city as a man might cling to a crumbling cliffside.  In many places, the buildings weren’t identifiable as Academy buildings right off.  It took a glance through windows or a glimpse of a plaque or lettering on the front face of the building, or attention to the students coming and going.

There was a ‘heart’ to Beattle, a core of the city center where nearly every building was Academy.  As one got further away from the heart, the hold on the city slipped, and the Academy dormitories, classrooms, stables and labs were more spaced apart, interrupted by businesses restaurants and apartments.

My tracking of the trio was interrupted as a student very deliberately bumped into me.

“Watch where you’re going, grub,” he said.

“Will do,” I said, walking past him.

His hand fell on my shoulder.  “Are you being flippant with me?”

I watched as Avis and the two men walked away.  The man at the very tail end turned to glance in the direction of the commotion, and I turned my back to him, stepping to one side so that the people in the crowd would block his view of me.

I knew what the three of them looked like.  That counted for something.

I met the eyes of a boy two years my senior, a solid six inches taller than me.  His hair was black, the part set too far to one side, making his hair look more like an elaborate comb-over.  An unfortunate look for an eighteen or nineteen year old.

“You’re not a student,” he said.

“Do you know that for certain?” I asked.

His hand gripped me by the collar, bunching it up around my neck.  I was forced to stand on my toe-tips to keep my shirt from being untucked and my sweater from rising up enough to reveal the weapons at my belt.

Four other students lingered nearby, all boys.  The five made a crowd, it looked like.

I momentarily debated the wisdom of simply slicing his wrist open and then using the confusion to disappear into the crowd.

Probably not worth it.

“What are you doing around here?” he asked.

“Honestly?” I asked.  “I’m here about a girl.”

Perhaps the wrong thing to say.  He hadn’t liked me on principle before.  I didn’t read like a student, and I hadn’t been trying to.  Going by his reaction, he probably hadn’t had much luck with girls in recent memory, and the idea of a non-student getting the girls when he wasn’t?  Ooh man.

I could see the venom and the calculation in his eyes.

“Even here the girls don’t have standards that low,” he said.  Contempt dripped off his tongue as he looked me up and down.

To his credit, I was a bit nettled at that.  I knew he would’ve said something like it no matter how I looked, but I was nettled.  I’d put effort into preparing for the day.  Girls liked me.  Mostly after they got to know me, but still.

Even Jamie had liked me, and he was a boy.

And if this rat-bastard was saying something bad about Lillian, Mary, and Jessie’s standards, well, I couldn’t brook that.

I glanced in the direction of Avis and the pair.

“Whoever she is, she can wait,” the student said.

“Perhaps,” I said.  “Can you tell me why she’s waiting?  I might have to explain later.”

“I think you should apologize for bumping into me and being insolent,” the student said.  “As a starter.”

I nodded.  “Or you’ll beat my face in.”

“I didn’t say it,” he told me.  He gripped my collar tighter.  “You did.”

“Here, in the street, where we have an audience to watch you do it?  Or somewhere out of the way?”

“Here’s fine,” he said.

Dang.  Really?

Here, with an audience?

“Your teachers won’t care, huh?” I asked.

“Not here,” he said.  He drew back his fist to hit me.

My jacket draped over my arm, my hand holding the gun, I jabbed the gun into his gut.

With that in mind, I was entirely surprised when he socked me across the face.  There were cheers and hoots from the crowd around us, and people began rearranging themselves to get a better vantage point.  Even the ones who hurried away looked like they were doing so reluctantly.  They had classes to get to.

I pressed the gun harder into his gut.  I saw him glance down.

“Eyes forward,” I murmured, as I cocked the gun.  I wasn’t sure if the student’s friends would hear, but I really needed to get things moving along.

They didn’t seem to hear, but a slight widening of my aggressor’s eyes suggested he had.

“You got your first lick in.  What’s say you let go of me, and you and me make this a fair fight?” I asked, glaring at him.

My cheekbone smarted.

He let go of me.

“Been in a fight before?” I asked.

“A few,” he said.

“Among students?” I asked.  I paced a little.

“Mostly.”

He was wary now.  He’d heard and felt the gun.

“I grew up on the streets.  With some mean bastards, too.  People who would shank someone or shoot them dead and then leave them bleeding on the street, slip away before authorities could step in, you know?”

“Sure,” he said.

“And even if we didn’t go that far, a lot of us were nasty and crazy enough to find the person who crossed ’em, track them to where they lived, and get ’em there.  They were the ones who taught me what I know.  You get me?”

His friends sniggered.

“Assuming you’re telling the truth, sure,” he said.

“I’m going to give you a handicap,” I said.  I put the arm with the jacket behind it behind my back, gun and hand covered by fabric.  “One hand behind my back.  I’m going to kick your ass until you cry uncle.  Which I’m betting is going to be embarrassingly soon.”

I could see him realizing what was up, measuring this situation he had instigated.

I’d prophesied a future and the gun made it so.

Unless he threw me another curveball.

“You wouldn’t be Thom, would you?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said.  “Simon.”

“You look like some of my cousins from New Amsterdam.  George, Thom, Westie?”

His tone had shifted.  He was begging for me to get it.  To let him go out with a semblance of pride.

“I know Westie,” I said.  “I guess you’d be my second cousin once removed or something like that?”

He rubbed his hand through his hair.  His head and hand moved like he was a stitched with a kink in the joints, too stiff, jerky.  Nervousness shining through.  “Shit, man.”

There was even a hint of a tremor in his voice, though I wasn’t sure others could hear it.

“I’m family and you hit me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not the type to narc on you to our relatives, but wow.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated himself.  “I’ll leave you be.”

“No,” I said.  “No, you’re coming with me, because I’ve got a date with a girl, and you’re going to explain this bruise on my face to her.  I’m not going to have you ruining my chances.  And then we can let bygones be bygones.  Alright?”

People were peeling away now.  The show had ended.

“I’ve got a class to get to,” he said.

I shook my head, and I brought my gun and jacket forward again.  I refolded the jacket with care, keeping the gun hidden.    “You can do this.  And then we’re even.  It’ll take five minutes.”

“Five minutes?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Shit,” he said.  He made a face that was particularly pained.  More like a guy doing something at gunpoint than a guy having to be late for class, odd as it was.

I jerked my head in the direction that Avis had gone.

His friends were jeering, nagging him, telling him how mad his teacher would be.

“Fuck it,” he said, and then he broke away from his friends.

The jeering got worse.

“You can tell them I held a gun on you later,” I said, as we walked away.

He nodded, face tight.

“We’re going to take longer than five minutes, though,” I told him.

He stopped in his tracks.  I caught him, one hand at his back, giving him a push to keep him going.

“What kind of guy your age carries a gun?” he asked.

“My age?” I asked, pointedly.

“I dunno,” he said.  “Sorry.”

“How old do you think I am?” I asked.

“I think… going by my luck today, if I guess, I’m going to be wrong.  Maybe you’re actually older than me.  Are you twenty?”

“Seriously.  How old do you think I am?” I asked.

“Fourteen?” he asked.

I suppressed my urge to shoot him.

“I’m looking for two men,” I said.  “And a girl, I was sort of telling the truth about that.  So we’re going to go looking.  And if we find them, then all is good.  And if we don’t, I’m going to be annoyed with you, because you’re the reason I wasn’t able to keep my eye on them.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he said.

“That’s fine,” I said.  “Just do what I tell you to do.  Okay?  Now, you need a name.”

“I have a name.”

“I’m going to call you Gordon the Second.”

Gordon, walking off to the side, gave me a nasty look.  I suppressed the urge to return the favor.

“That’s not my name.  Why am I ‘the second’?  What happened to the first?”

“Died,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, in a way that sounded like he was in the process of having his life flash before his eyes.

“It was… a loss,” I said.  “His dog died too.”

“Oh.  I don’t have a dog.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

He didn’t have a response for that, but Gordon the Second didn’t look like he agreed with me about how unfortunate his dogless life was.  Not that I’d always wanted a dog, really, but I had to admit that Hubris had turned me around some.

The fact that Hubris had been completely self sufficient had been a factor.  The fact that he’d nourished a part of Gordon that needed nourishing, supporting my friend and brother like he had… that was the real thing that had opened my eyes to why dogs were a thing.

But I couldn’t conscience owning an animal that was liable to outlive me, so that was that.

“What’s this building?” I asked.

The building was one of the bigger buildings in the area, and had a placard with only a symbol above the door.  It was the place that Avis had been heading directly toward.

“Academy office,” Gordon the Second said.

“Count me far from surprised,” I said.  “We’re going inside.  Act like you know where we’re going, second Gordon.”

Every time I said or thought the name, Gordon the first looked doubly irritated.

“What about the girl?”

“We’re trying to find her.  Keep up, second Gordon,” I told him.  “And keep talking to me.  Tell me about your family.”

“I don’t want to tell you about my family.”

“You already told me some things.  Westie and you called me Tim or something-”

“I didn’t call you Tim.”

“You called me something.  Keep talking, man, come on.  If you’re going to do one tenth as well as the original Gordon did, you need to be able to look natural while you’re nervous.”

“I know I was an asshole, but please, can we-”

“No, no, no,” I said.  “We’re getting close to people.  Make up a story about your mom and my mom.  Change the names if you have to, but talk, come on.”

“I don’t… well, I know when they were little, my mom climbed up a tree, one taller than most houses.  And she kept going higher, until she was perched on small branches.  And then she fell, clean straight to the lawn below.  Faceplant.”

“And she got up and laughed like everything was fine?  Because kids are resilient?”

“No.  She had to go to the local Academy because she was really messed up,” Gordon Two said.  “And while she was there, my Auntie Nono-”

“You have an Auntie Nono?  That sounds like some bad guy from one of the books this kid I know reads.”

“She got the nickname when we were little and it stuck,” Gordon Two said.

“That’s beautiful.  I want her to be my mom.”

“Okay,” he said.  He seemed taken aback.  “While my mom was gone, Auntie Nono assumed she was dead, didn’t shed a tear, just went into mom’s room and began taking her stuff.  Fair game, you know?”

Perfect,” I said.  “I really am my mother’s child.”

“My mom came away from the experience with a love for the Academy doctors who saved her.  She studied, but… it’s hard.  She says it was harder for a girl, back then.  But I think it’s just hard.  And maybe it helps her to have that excuse.”

I glanced over the people in the Beattle Academy office.  I didn’t see any of the people we were looking for.

“Now her son is a proud student,” I said.

“At Beattle,” Gordon Two said.

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“It’s pretty bad.  I’ve been here for four years.  I avoid getting cut but last two years I haven’t advanced either.  Now budgets are getting slashed, and everyone’s nervous.  We’re thinking they’re going to cut more of the student body.  If they do, that means I’m out.”

“There will always be a place to go,” I said.  “It’s in their interests to ensure there’s always a place.”

“It means moving.  Disappointing my family more.  If I go to Belltower or Sprung then it’s going to be even more vicious, even more competition.”

“Not out of the question,” I said.  “But they like what that vicious mentality breeds.  And now and again, someone rises up out of the desperate clawing mass bloody and dangerous and primed with the right sort of instincts, and the Academy can tell themselves that it works.  And so schools will keep closing and others will open and cities rise and fall around them, and it all keeps the farce going.”

“A farce,” Gordon Two said.  “That seems about right.  Even this, with you.  Acting like we’re getting along.”

I saw one of the men I’d been tracking walking down the hall, perpendicular to me.  His hair was combed and slicked, no longer a natural sort of messy, and he wore a white coat.

He’d transformed.

“You’re doing a marvelous job,” I said.  “And I just found one of the men I’m looking for, so I think I’m in very good shape.”

I felt a little bit of trepidation.  I had a sense of what the next steps had to be, but if these guys were this skilled at disguise then they could be dangerous in other ways.  They might have added capabilities.

“I can go, then?”

I chuckled.  “No, no.  Stick with me.  Tell me what happened to Auntie Nono.”

“She got married and had a child six months later,” Gordon Two said.  “You wouldn’t really shoot me here, would you?  Not in the middle of an Academy building.”

“Shhh,” I said.  “We’re keeping conversation nice, light and easy.  Understand?  Also, look at my right hand.”

He turned to look.  I adjusted my sweater, revealing the knife handle.

I kept my voice light and quiet, smiling throughout as I talked, “If you panic or try to signal that group of students we’re about to walk by, I’ll slip this into your vitals.  Silent.  By the time they realize what happened, I’ll have slipped away.  By the time they alert an authority, I’ll be outside.  Then I’ll be gone, and you might live, or you might forever end your mother’s dreams of adding one more good doctor to the world.”

We walked by the group of girls without incident.  Three of them had eyes for Gordon Two, giving him appraising looks, but one of them turned her attention to me, instead.  It started as a glance because of the bruise on my face, I suspected, but her eye traveled as her mind clearly wandered into the territory of wondering what my story was.

I winked, confident, and I got a surprised smile.

Low standards my ass.

“And you think I deserve that?” he asked, once we were clear, “Because I gave you a hard time?”

“I think you deserve to have a bad day more than an awful lot of others, and you had the courtesy to let me know, when I needed camouflage.”

“Camouflage.  This is for real, then.  The gun, the… camouflage.  What would you have done if you didn’t find me?”

“What the guy I’m tracking did, maybe.  Stole a uniform.  Or something.  A distraction.  I’ve got a bag full of stuff here.  We’re about to walk through a group of people.  Auntie Nono got married, huh?”

“She did.  Young, to a decorated soldier a lot older than her.  But he was upright enough to marry her when the baby was on the way.  Then they moved across the pond.  They moved so often we couldn’t keep their address straight, and then they moved to the edge of the green stripe.  That’s what they called the front line in Africa.”

I could read his tone.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I never knew her.  Barely knew my cousins.  They won the war, but the tools they used were ugly, and somehow my aunt, living in a residential area far from the actual front line of battle, she died.”

I had a sense of what Gordon the Second was doing.  Trying to humanize himself.  But I didn’t really care.

“I’ve seen some of the messes left behind,” I said.  “I’ve seen the red plague up close.  Tore it out of someone, even.  I’ve seen primordials.  I’ve seen a man with the voice of an angel turn into a monster.  And I’ve seen child and noble alike die.”

“I don’t think I believe you,” Gordon Two said, his voice soft.  “And I’m surprised at myself, because I let myself believe a lot of what you’ve said.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “That was a bad idea.  Tell me, the layout here is weird.  What’s this part of the building?”

“We’re adjunct to the library.  I think this area opens up into a part of the library that’s for the really expensive books.  Nothing restricted or Academy related, or it would be under guard, kept in classrooms and such, but… actual books.  The stairs cut past that area and go down to the ground floor.  Conversation and eating and drinking are allowed there, but as you go up to higher tiers of the library, the rules about being quiet are even harsher.”

“Thank you, Second Gordon.  But we’re not on the ground floor.  So if we go beyond the expensive books are, then we’d be…”  I trailed off.

“Second floor means conversations are fine, but laughing or raising your voice would get you frowned at or make people ask you to leave.”

“Got it,” I said.  “Let’s let ourselves into the library.”

I earned a few second glances, again, because of the mark on my face, but also because of the standards of my outfit, the fact that my hair was no doubt going to every effort to make itself a mess, and the odd pairing of me with a boy two years older than me.

He’d said I looked fourteen to him.  At my worst, I looked fifteen, and I was legitimately a year older, after accounting for my stunted growth.  Maybe two years, even.

He’d earned points in my book for volunteering the information and cooperating as much as he had, but he’d indirectly insulted Lillian, Mary, and Jessie, and he had insulted me.

So, all considered, I didn’t mind that I was about to make his bad day worse, and likely ensure he was going to be even later for class, if he attended at all.

The bookshelves in this part of the library smelled like leather and had gold lettering, the shelves very nice.  We found our way into the more usual books, with a great deal of boring nonfiction works that Jessie would have been distracted by, and, with me guiding us to move more slowly, we got close enough to see the first of the two men.

Triangulating where the guy was, listening for the sounds of conversation, I could gauge the location of Avis.  She was talking to someone in one corner of the library.  In anything but a library, I doubted he would have been able to make any of it out.

“Gordon Two,” I said.

“That’s not my name,” he said.

“I know.  But consider it a kindness that I’m not using your real name.  Because it means I’m willing to forget you exist when all of this is done.”

He nodded.  “This is serious, isn’t it?”

“If I said the fate of the Crown Empire hinges on this, would you believe me?” I asked, my voice low.

He shook his head.

“Yeah,” I whispered.  “Well, it’s still pretty serious.  So listen carefully.  I want you to walk up to that man in the white lab coat, and I want you to punch him as hard as you can in the stomach.  Solar plexus.  And then I want you to keep punching him.”

“You’re insane.”

I whispered “I’m not wholly sane, no, but I’m dead serious.  Because the alternative to you doing what I say is that I knife you right here and right now, and then I knife him, or you could run over there and warn him, and then I have to open fire, and you can be sure I’m going to aim one of the bullets at you.  And it’ll be messy and others will die in the noise and the chaos.”

“He’s going to shout or kick up a fuss after I hit him,” Gordon Two said.

“No,” I said.  “And if he does, I won’t hold it against you.  So it might even be in your best interests to hurt him enough to get a noise out of him, you know?  But don’t you make a peep, if you can help it.”

“No,” Gordon Two said.  “No, I don’t know, not at all.”

“Go on,” I said.  “I’m missing out on one really critical conversation while this is going on.”

I moved the gun.

He shook his head, but he turned, walking toward the spy in the white coat.

So very obvious.

Leaning over, I looked at Gordon the First.  “Doesn’t measure up to the original.”

“I don’t understand how your head works, Sy,” Gordon said.  “But if you’re trying to get a rise out of me, it’s working, and that says bad, bad things about how your brain is put together.”

I smiled.

Second Gordon looked as confrontational as hell as he stalked toward the man in the white coat.  I ducked out of sight as his attention drew the man’s attention.

The scuffle was so quiet as to be almost inaudible.  I could hear Avis and her conversation partner more than I could hear the struggle.  I doubted any proper punches were even landing.

Eyes closed, I put my hand against a bookshelf.  I felt for the vibrations of footsteps as much as I listened for them.

With one spy no doubt watching his partner, who listened to Avis, he was no doubt watching the scene unfold with Gordon Two.

His partner had it handled, but the job wasn’t getting done in the meantime.

It was obvious for a distraction, so he wasn’t acting on it.  He waited, observed…

Then he moved.  I felt the dull sensation of boots on floorboards, on the other side of the wood-backed bookshelf.

I moved around a bookshelf so that if he checked his rear, which he would, he wouldn’t see me.

One grunt, then a gasp.

Then another set of footsteps, moving away from me.

Moving back around and then tracing the path to follow the man through the maze, my own footsteps were light and silent.  My strides were long, my feet fell in places where the feet of the heavy bookshelves already pressed floorboards down, so they wouldn’t creak.

His partner was pinning Gordon Two down, and he himself was focused on the flanks, the rear no doubt just checked and confirmed clear.  He wore a black coat.

I moved right up behind him before he realized I was there.  My knife cut across his hamstrings, and then I reversed the knife and plunged it into his chest as he toppled.

The spy in the white coat watched his partner -the fellow he’d shaved and eaten with that morning- drop dead, while I threw my body between the man and the ground, to keep his impact with the ground from being too heavy.  It slowed me down, tangled me up, perhaps a bit more than I’d anticipated.

He moved to rise, while Gordon Two was lying with his back on the ground, staring up and back at me in what would have looked like an upside-down murder scene.

I let the body fall the rest of the way to the ground, and he and I started toward each other, each breaking free of our respective opponents.

Me against a grown man that had at least some inkling of how to fight.

Ambush, surprise attacks, attacking inconvenienced enemies, I could do that.  But my talents in fighting were limited to avoiding the fights where I wasn’t at an overwhelming advantage and capitalizing on the ones where I was.

My opponent stopped short as Gordon Two grabbed at his leg, hugging it.  He turned, looking down and over, and as I moved, realized his mistake.

I threw my knife at the man while he wasn’t able to freely move around.  It sank into his chest, placed well enough that I could see the defeat in the man’s eyes.

“Uuuuuughuuuh,” he groaned, an inarticulate, long, loud cry that seemed to be his dying rebellion, striving to draw attention to me or warn our mutual prey.

If that was what it was, then he was good.

If it wasn’t, then that was allowed, because dying had to suck.

Elsewhere in the library, well hidden by the rows and columns and corridors of bookshelves, a woman shushed the man who’d groaned so loudly.

I waited, listening and watching, my hand on a bookshelf so I might feel some residual footsteps, and nothing came of it.

I crossed to where the man in the white coat had been standing.  I wished I’d been able to interrogate him, but I couldn’t imagine a scenario where he would have cooperated.

Matter of fact was, I was surprised that Gordon Two had acted to help like he had.  Until I heard what Avis was saying and realized he’d heard a part of the same conversation.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.07 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“You’re asking for a lot, and you’re giving me very little,” the man said.  “You’re taking my Academy from me.”

“There’s room to negotiate,” Avis said.  “In another place, at another time.  Not here.  Not in neutral ground.  Keep in mind, if anyone overheard you talking like that, it would leave you less room to negotiate, not more.”

“You’ve delayed me three times, now.  I’ve played along, I’ve helped keep the pot stirred, I’ve lined up the targets for you to shoot down, but I’m running out of patience.  Don’t think I don’t see the direction the winds are blowing, I know what it means that you’re here and things are happening.”

“We never doubted your political sense, Albert.”

“You want my cooperation?  You have it.  But I won’t be delayed, not when I know that you’re in the final stages, and you won’t necessarily have a place for me when all is said and done.  If I wait too long to make sure I get what I need, you’ll move forward and I’ll be left in the lurch with nothing and no leverage to negotiate with.”

“Fine.  Shall we move to your office?”

“My office is the last place this conversation should be had.  My quarters aside, it’s the one room in this academy where I should feel like I have a modicum of privacy, so it stands to reason I have none at all.  We’ll talk in generalities.”

“Or we won’t talk at all?” Avis asked.  There was a pause, a non-verbal response.  She responded with a quiet, “Very well.  What do you want?”

Gordon Two shifted position, slowly moving into a sitting position with his back to the bookshelf that separated us from Avis and her conversation partner.  He stared into space like someone who was only beginning to comprehend the great mysteries of the universe: awed, horrified, and confused.

“I want to run my Academy, but I won’t have that, will I?”

“Generalities,” Avis gently reminded him.

“I want money enough to live comfortably for the rest of my life.”

“We’re not equipped to supply that, especially not up front, and I doubt you’d take a promised future amount any more than you’d accept delaying this conversation.”

“Quite right.”

The man I’d thrown a knife at gurgled a death rattle, gases and fluids warring for a place in his throat.  It seemed to scare the living daylights out of Gordon the Second.

“I assume you’ll keep asking for the moon, knowing we can’t or won’t deliver.”

“Mmm,” he said.

Avis lowered her voice, and I had to strain my ears and tilt my brain toward the task of hearing her.  “I’ll tell you what we can deliver.   We’ll move forward with this, you already have some idea of what’s at play, and we’ll cut some individuals out.  We know that the stables are… crowded.   As the flood occurs, the horse and the pig will be caught out in the cold.”

“The horse and the pig?  Oh.  Oh, that does tickle my shriveled black heart,” the man said, without speaking any quieter than he had been.  He sounded louder, if anything.

“We agreed to pay you a sum that we haven’t and won’t pay them, and we’ll pay you the remainder before anything else happens.  It will see you through the next year or two, we hope.  Enough time to get back on your feet and find another stable elsewhere.  You know my credentials, professor.”

“I do.”

“I’ve seen people rise and fall, represented in pins on a map as well as the addresses and titles on pieces of mail.  The number of birds that fly to and from them.  While the earthy beasts figure out what’s happening and turn their attention toward finding shelter and surviving the cold winter, you’ll be secure enough to focus on getting ahead.”

“The only reason I’m talking to you is that I know I won’t be getting ahead, dear.  I won’t get another, ah, stable.  Don’t lie to me and pretend I will.  The stable was built on floodlands.  It flooded.  I’ll be a stablehand elsewhere, not an owner.”

“Somewhere starting with an S, or a W.”

“Thereabouts.”

“Look at me, professor,” she said, lowering her voice even further, to the point that her voice distorted.  I leaned closer to the corner to hear better.  She went on, “Imagine that I’m a vulture that flies in circles over the dead and dying.  Those two places are among them.  A morbidly ill beast and another stable of creatures built on floodlands, respectively.”

“You have me so very excited for these prospects, my dear,” the older man said, lacing his words with sarcasm and even more venom.

“We will be in your neighborhood in the future, professor.  And in a way that isn’t traceable, a way that isn’t easy to connect to you, we will see that you have a stable of your own to run again.  If it is S, that ill beast, then you shall keep it, and we shall nourish it, because it suits your ends, and it suits ours.”

“A small war to bring some life to a warbeast with no purpose?”

“Something of the sort.  If you find yourself placed at W, then perhaps we’ll see if we can’t make it a repeat of what you’ll see happen here.  Acknowledging that two points make a line, and that line points at you, we’ll furnish you with a more comprehensive exit strategy.”

“No generalities,” the old man said.

“Money enough to make you comfortable for the rest of your life, professor.  At that point we’ll be prepared to provide it up front.”

“If that comes to pass.  But tempting me with imagined gnashing of teeth on the part of my enemies isn’t changing matters now, is it?  You’re still telling me to have faith that you’ll deliver on your promises.”

“Then I’ll give you something concrete.  You know what I’m asking.  We’ll both set this in motion, and in the earliest stages, you’ll be free to steer it or reverse course.  Your ability to do that is why we’re talking to you.  We need you to let this unfold.  Take the first step, ignore the first mutterings.  And you’ll have the horse kicking at your door, clearly upset about this.”

“A nice thought, but hardly enough to make me feel secure about this.”

“I’m not done, professor.  You’ll take the second step.  People will inquire, trying to find the validity of the rumor.  They’ll find it started at the horse’s stall.  He’ll be at your door again, angry.  He’ll wheel, he’ll deal, but it will be Sisyphean at that stage.  And all you’ll have to do to break him is wait until he’s on the brink of saving himself, the stone nearly hauled to the top of the mountain, and you give it one small push, to send it and him down with it.”

The old man chuckled.

Gordon Two was shaking his head.  I placed my hand on his shoulder, and he startled, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“I think we might have a deal,” the old man said.  “If I get to see the horse’s back broken and the pig…”

“Crushed in the stampede, I assure you.”

“And all it takes is that I have to hasten a flooding that will inevitably happen?  Yes.  Worth it to see that happen, if nothing else.”

“You’ll watch it happen as you help us, I assure you, and we will follow through.  Even if the damage can’t wholly be stopped at that point, you’ll be placed to rake over some messes and allow certain others.  We want you to feel motivated to do that.”

“We have a deal.”

“Allow me to talk to some others.  We can ensure the horse is blamed for the break in the floodgates, so to speak.  I’ll send someone to you, and you’ll know it’s time.  In the meantime, get your house in order.  Not too orderly, but know that people will be looking at you.”

“Of course.  I’m an old hand at this.”

“It’s why we’re talking to you, professor.”

“How do I reach out, if I need to talk to you?”

“You can use the messenger we send you.  I’ll be checking in myself, to fine tune things as they play out.  If not me, then my employer will.  You know her.”

“I do.”

“Then until our next conversation about stables, floods, and drowned horses, professor.”

“Until our next conversation, my dear.”

I tensed, readying for Avis to come in our direction and find the bodies.  I held my gun and my knife ready.

She wasn’t pumped full of combat drugs, and the modifications to her body that let her fly also made her frail.  I’d have the opportunity afforded by surprise.

If I could do it without giving her a chance to scream, then I could make it look as though they’d died in a mutual struggle.  I could remove Avis from the picture, cause a stir, and use the paranoia of  the Academy, Academy staff, and Fray to eke out an advantage.

No, there were a lot of ways this could be done to my advantage.

I met Gordon the First’s eyes.

But the footsteps moved in other directions.

The tension slipped away.  I stood, and then I stretched.

I stuck the toe of my boot into the side of the body beside me.

“Come on, Gordon Two,” I said.  “We have a lot to do.”

He looked up at me as if I was speaking in tongues.

“The stable is about to flood,” I told him.  “I want a good vantage point when it does.”

“It’s not a stable,” he said.  “It’s the Academy.  What they said before they started talking about stables, the Academy is closing.  They didn’t even talk about the students.  That bit at the very beginning.  We’re a resource to them.”

“You predicted it would.”

“But they’re hurrying it along!” Gordon Two hissed at me.  “Do you know what that does to me?  To my friends?”

“Yes, absolutely,” I said.

“If it was a slow death, then they’d cut us in stages.  Maybe I’d get dropped, I’d be able to go to Sprung, but I’d have a chance.  If they cut us all at once?  That’s a few thousand students who’re looking for a place elsewhere.”

“Oh, I know,” I said.  “And I know who and I know why.”

He looked at the body.  “I helped you-!”

“Shhh!” the voice on the other side of the library shushed him.

“This day started so ordinary, and now I actually helped someone die, and I’m about to lose everything.”

“Gordon Two-”

“That’s not my name.”

“You were training to become an Academy doctor.  You likely had dreams of becoming a black coat, working with a noble, or-”

He was shaking his head.

“Running an Academy?  Did you have some creation you were eager to put out there?”

He continued shaking his head.

“Make mom proud?” I tried.

He shook his head.

“I give up,” I said.

“I just… wanted to work in a hospital.  Academy hospital, actual hospital.  I gave up on the other things a long time ago.  White coat.  Maybe grey.  Surgeries, clinics.  Cute nurses.  Maybe there would be one cute nurse I could date and eventually marry.”

He looked up at me like a small child who’d seen his favorite toy break.

“Oh man,” I said.

“If I got lucky, she could be a redhead,” he said.  “I had a chance.  Now I don’t.”

“You have a chance,” I said.  “Far slimmer chance, but still a chance.  However, it depends on you not getting caught here with two dead bodies.”

He lowered his eyes to the body.

“Yeah?” I prompted him.

“I really killed someone.”

“Don’t get too ahead of yourself,” I said.  “I’m actually sort of really proud I delivered both killing blows there.  Don’t take that from me.”

Again, that look, as if I was speaking in tongues.

I changed tacks.  “This can be salvaged, in a way.  But you need to keep moving.  You need to follow my lead.  Because what that woman said was right.  If this gets underway, there won’t be any stopping it.  But we can steer it.  Understand?  We need to move, Second Gordon.  Think about your mom.”

He turned his eyes back to the body.

I reached down, grabbed his arm, and tugged.

Reluctantly, he rose to his feet in response to the tugging.

Once I had him standing, I was sure to keep him moving.  I didn’t bother with the gun, and I didn’t really have to.  He seemed to have forgotten that I’d led him at gunpoint until now, and the sight of those men dying seemed to have left an indelible impression in him.

“You would have seen patients die at some point,” I said.

We navigated the library, walking until we reached a railing that overlooked the floor below.  The open space between us and the people below was bridged with a clear membrane.  There was a little bit of dust on the membrane, and the faint lines of blue veins webbing it, but it made for a remarkably clear picture of what was going on below, while absorbing a remarkable amount of the chatter and noise.  There were tables, groups gathered, and students drinking tea while sitting in chairs with books.  The levels above us were separated by more membranes, making for increasingly blurry views of each floor above.

It was, as scenes went, actually a lot nicer than nearly everything I’d seen at Radham.  The only part of Radham that had struck me as being as cozy and nice as this was the girl’s dormitory.  Most of my time in there had been with Lillian and sometimes Mary in nightgowns, Lillian and I or the three of us just sleeping together in Lillian’s bed.

That wasn’t the fairest of comparisons.

I spotted Avis at one of the doors.  She attracted a few sidelong glances as she walked past students, but nobody stopped her or commented.

“Stairs?” I asked.

Gordon Two pointed.

I walked briskly, bringing him with, hoping to catch up to Avis.

“Did you ever spend time here?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“Tea, books?”

“Getting caught up on homework with my friends.  We’d nudge each other when a good looking girl walked in.”

“I don’t understand that mentality, but alright.  I know it all seems hopeless, but it’s not.  There will be days and moments like that again.  If you focus.  You wanted to be a doctor?  Today’s when you reach that crisis point when you have a dying person on your table, and you need to show that you have what it takes.  It’s just coming a little earlier.  Got it?”

“I had a dying person in front of me because I helped kill him.”

“Put that out of mind.  We’re talking hypotheticals.”

We passed other students, the counter where tea was being made and served, exchanged for money, and we exited into the chill outdoors.

No longer the warm interior, but amid the barnacles clinging to the rock.  Cold, damp, and briny.

“We just left those bodies there,” he said.

“Yep.”

“Someone’s going to find them.”

“Absolutely.  Can’t be avoided.  Unless you have really deep pockets or something, stow a body inside.  I’m not strong enough to drag a body that big, and there aren’t exactly any good hiding places there.  I think the conversation happened there because it isn’t a part of the library that gets used much, so it might be a little while.”

“It’s really sinking in,” he said.  “They’ll find the bodies, and then… things will happen, and the school will close.”

“Those two things aren’t linked.”

“But it’ll change things, won’t it?” he asked.

“Change happens.  This way,” I told Gordon Two, leading him off to one side.

“I thought we were following her?”

“We are,” I said.  “But she’s going between those buildings.  Not many others are.  If we follow, then there’s no place to go.  If she looks back over her shoulder, and she will, she’ll see us.  This is a case where we have to think a few steps ahead.”

We took another route, one that gave us glimpses of Avis as she walked with purpose, deeper into Beattle’s scattered topography.

There was a path with garden to either side, winding between buildings.  The building it led to was all glass and wood, surrounded by an expanse of grass and only a few low bushes.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The Greenhouse.  There are a few, but that’s the Greenhouse.”

“And she arranged to meet someone there, clearly,” I said.  “The horse?  The pig?”

“The horse is pretty obviously Professor Horsfall.  I think the pig has to be Sir Mondy.”

“Sir?”

“Aristocrat.  He has a stake in the Academy.  Professor Horsfall was a wartime doctor.  Made warbeasts, earned an appointment, and he got stuck here.  Professor Horsfall, Sir Mondy and Professor Yates are the three people who manage Beattle.  Yates must have been the man who was talking to the woman you’re after?”

“Good.  This is useful,” I said.

“But Professor Horsfall and Sir Mondy wouldn’t be here.  Sir Mondy lives in the city.  North end.  He comes down twice a week, but otherwise doesn’t do much except lay down the law.  All the professors and instructors hate him.  Horsfall… would look out of place here.  He’s proud.”

“Who would look less out of place here?”

“I don’t know.  Some instructors.  But most times, it’s where one student group meets.”

“A student group.  Who?”

“Most just call them the Greenhouse Gang.”

“How imaginative.”

“They’re not really a gang.  They’re mostly top students who work together to stay top students.  Some are attractive or popular, so they bring other attractive and popular students in.  Very exclusive.  It’s the warmest place where there’s any privacy in the winter, and so long as they’re there and watching each other’s backs, it’s hard to mess with them.”

“If I asked you about the Rank, would that mean anything to you?”

“You mean junior’s gang?” he asked.  “Because they’re not like the Greenhouse Gang.  They’re actually a gang.  Sort of dangerous.”

“They’re a three out of ten on the danger scale,” I said.  “Barely worth rating.”

“What?  Junior’s group?”

“Yeah.  Nevermind.  Stay with me here.  Where is the horse’s stable?”

“The horse’s- Horsfall?”

He wasn’t very mentally adroit, as in shock as he was.  I couldn’t ask him to make those mental leaps of logic.

“Yeah.  Him.  I’ve got him figured out as a horse in my head thanks to that analogy.  It’s going to take a bit to break.  Where is professor Horsfall?”

“Back the direction we came from.”

I surveyed the scene.

Had the two men been Academy?  Cynthia’s?  Where would the old headmaster go from here?  How would they react to the bodies?  How would Avis react?

“Simon?” Gordon Two asked.

“One moment,” I said.

The bodies would be found.  People would inform those at the top.  The old headmaster, Yates or Yancy or whatever his name was, he would put two and two together, most likely, and he would strive to inform Avis.  She was recognizable enough that he could put someone on the task, or have trusted lieutenants ask questions.  Professor Horse would be clueless, more focused on the crime, while Professor Yancy navigated the greater picture.

If we went to Professor Horse, then everything else could unfold while my back was turned and my attention elsewhere.  The bodies could be found, Yancy alerted, and Avis clued in that something else was afoot.

If we stayed, then we lost ground.  I could maybe steer people away from Avis.  She could leave, and then what?  Where did she go?

Fray and Avis were already touching base with the Rank, with the headmaster, and now with the Greenhouse Gang.

I ventured, “The Greenhouse Gang.  The Rank.  What other student groups are there?”

“What?”

“Distinct student groups.  Who else?  Gangs, clubs?  Even individual, notable students who have followings.”

“The student council.  They’re mostly other top students, but don’t mesh much with the Greenhouse Gang.”

“Good.  Who else?”

“Um.”

“Athletics?”

He snorted.

“Girls?” I prompted.

“Some girl’s groups.  Um.  One, I don’t know their name, but they spend time on the roof of the dorm when it’s warmer.  I don’t know how to put it nicely.”

“They know they’re going to fail out.  So they enjoy their last moments of freedom.”

“That’s exactly how I would have wanted to put it nicely, yeah.”  He sounded surprised.

I’d seen the type at Dame Cicely’s.

“And there are the girls who aren’t failing out, who stick together because they’re girls, I guess?  But not super keen girls like you have in the Greenhouse or student council.”

“I’m getting the picture.”

I was starting to see the pieces on the board, the key locations.

“They’re going to leak the news about the school getting closed down,” I said.  “The student body will react just like you did, except their friends are going to be close by.  The riot is controlled, because these cliques and gangs already know.  They’ve been braced for it, and they’ve been told their options.  The smart ones might have opportunities elsewhere-”

“Doubt it,” Gordon Two said, sounding miserable.  “Being the top of Beattle isn’t much better than being in the bottom two rungs at a decent school.”

“Some are here because of circumstance,” I said.

“Oh, everyone is, if you ask everyone,” Gordon Two said.  “And prisoners in jail will all tell you they’re innocent.”

“Fair point,” I said.  “So even the top students don’t have much in the way of options.  They can give up on this and go home… or they can rebel.”

“Rebel?”

“As in join the rebellion.”

Gordon Two’s eyes widened.

“Would you?” I asked him.  “Ditch the uniform?  Disappoint mom?”

A frown creased his features.

I put my hand on his arm, steering him.  I turned him so he could see the nearest attractive girl.

“If she went?  What if everyone from student council and Greenhouse Gang to the Rank and the girls on the rooftop was leaving?  They say something like they know people who know people.  You’ll get money, you’ll get lodging.  You just… grab your stuff and go.  And there are none of the Academy rules.  No restrictions.  You can room with girls.  You can be angry, drink, and tell the world to fuck off.”

“Except it’s all manipulation,” he said.

“Well, you know that.  Pretend you didn’t.  Pretend that your alternative would be to stay.  To do nothing except accept that you’d failed.  You would have to tell your mom that you did so badly, collectively, that the school was shut down.  Would you go?”

“I don’t know,” he said.  “But I don’t think I would.”

“No,” I said.  “But some would.  Enough would.”

“Yeah.  Probably.  That’s what’s happening?”

“That’s how I think it plays out.  And a crop of students get work tutoring the civilians who’ve received these mass-produced books with Academy knowledge, or they produce weapons, or they act as guerilla agents.  There’s a lot that could be done with all of this.  And it draws attention.  It takes a bite out of the Academy and it’s hard for the Academy to bite back.”

Gordon Two nodded.

“We’ll get you your cute nurse,” I said.  “We’ll get you your redhead, even.  It probably won’t be exactly as you imagined it, but we’ll see what we can do.  For that, I need your help.  Because I can’t cover enough bases on my lonesome, and my other allies are watching other people and getting stuff done elsewhere.”

“What do you need?” Gordon Two asked.

“You’re going to take a message to Professor Horse,” I said.  “Tell him that you’re a messenger, but… his fellow professor was going to betray Beattle Academy, and we were going to work with him to do it.”

“Us?  We us?  You and me?”

“Me more than you.  You’re just a messenger.”

Gordon Two frowned.

“Okay?  Are you with me so far?  Because we’re just getting started.  Professor Yancy-”

“Yates?”

Whoever.  He hired someone to fuck with us.  A bird lady.  He killed two of ours in the library, and Yatesy plans to pin it on the Horse.  So we’re extending the offer to the Horse now.”

Gordon Two nodded.

“Repeat it back to me.”

He did.

“Bring him to the library.  Show him the bodies.  People may have found the bodies already.  If so, you should tell them you’re a concerned student.  Once he realizes the gravity of the situation, bring him to me here.  I might be there at the library, depending on what happens out here and where Avis goes.  I might be gone.  If so, wait a little while.  I won’t be more than ten minutes.”

Gordon the Second nodded again.

“Repeat it back to me, with the last bit included.”

He did.

“Go,” I told him.

He made it two steps before he stopped.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Who were those two men?”

“Wrinkles,” I said.  Two of quite a number that could get in the way of this unfolding the way I hope it will.  Like Fray, or the fact that the Horse wasn’t Fray’s first pick for conspirator for a reason, the student groups, the informants, and the other top-quality agents who were no doubt waiting in the wings, watching proceedings.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.08 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I approached a group of girls, hands in my pockets.

“No,” the lead girl said, the moment she spotted me.

“You didn’t even hear what I have to say.”

“Cheesy pickup line.  You look like the type to think he can get away with being a little sleazy and think it’s funny.”

“Wow,” I said.  I pressed my hands to my heart.  “Wow.”

I looked over the group of girls.  There were about nine of them, and they moved as a loose crowd, each with a unique style.  I saw a few body modifications here and there, some unconventional hair styles, and very loose interpretations of Beattle’s dress code.  Skirts were hiked or rolled up to show more leg even while they wore jackets and coats that looked like the sort of jackets Mauer’s soldiers would wear in cooler months – oversized and prone to drooping over hands, even when they were rolled up two or three times over.

Makeup was often heavy, often chosen to accent the body mods.  One girl had a lone deer antler at the corner of her scalp, and makeup had been staggered so it seemed to blend into her brown skin.  Another girl with goat eyes lined heavily with eyeliner was staring me down.

The leader wasn’t modded so heavily, but she’d foregone the academy jacket entirely to wear a black sweater with a layered collar beneath a double layer of jacket and military jacket.  I’d thought about clothing as armor as I got ready in the morning, but the fashion choice there was akin to plate mail where it covered her, and there wasn’t much beneath.  Her top three buttons were undone and her skirt was hiked up higher than any of the girls.  Chance more than choice that I couldn’t see anything worth seeing.

But her attitude, I’d seen it on some drunks and some fighters.  She was spoiling.  For a fight, for trouble, for… anything.  She was the queen of her clique here, and the crowd at her sides and back were more armor, on top of the layers she wore.  It let her expose more throat and belly, metaphorically.  Baiting others in even as she looked for a morsel to bite at herself.

“You’re not worth my time,” she said.

“You’re the rooftop girls,” I said.

“And you’re a kid who thinks that because he’s heard the rumors, he just needs to say the word, snap his fingers, and I’m yours?  Go away.”

“Are you sure you want me to go away?” I asked her.  “We had a meeting planned for later.”

She stopped in her tracks.

“You?” she asked.

“I saw your group walking across the campus, I figured out who you were at a glance.  I’m currently waiting for a few people, some things are going on, but I thought I’d say hi.”

She gave me a look, top to bottom.  “Hi.”

No apologies, no excuses.  I could appreciate that.

“I’m quite glad I was able to spot you.  It makes things easier.  Two people just died,” I told her.  “It happened in the library.  They know, they’re after us, and things are moving ahead of schedule, with different times and places.  Which is why you’re dealing with me, specifically.”

“Died?” another girl asked.

“Who are ‘they’?” the lead girl asked.

I waved her off.  “Our mess.  Our problem to clean up.  Two key players got greedy and went rogue.  The problem with doing as much as we’ve been doing long-distance is that it’s hard to assess who we’re dealing with.  But it’s a problem that can be handled.  Which it will be, in a matter of minutes.”

I gave her time to digest that, and looked in the direction of the greenhouse.  Avis was still there.

I turned and looked in the direction of the library.  No Gordon Two and no Horse.

“Minutes?” she asked.

“If you want to watch, you can,” I told her.  “If you wanted to leave and get us started, that’s even better, and would earn you a little drawn medal on this particular assignment.”

“A medal on my homework?” she asked.  “Please don’t treat me like a child.”

And in saying that, you make me think of you as more of a child than if you’d remained silent.

“As you wish,” I said.  “But you should decide now if you’re still in.  Everything is starting into motion now, and it’s up to you if you want to be one of the ones who go or one of the ones who stay behind.”

“Mm,” she made a sound.

The girl with the goat eyes was still staring at me.  The rectangular irises made for an interesting effect.  I quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Sylvester,” she said.

“Hm?” I asked.  “Yeah.”

“I’ve met him,” goat-eyes said, to the lead girl.

“Have you?” I asked.  “My memory isn’t the best.”

“I was one of the people sitting in the background while you were talking with Ronnie?  Before everything turned topsy-turvy?”

I shook my head.  “You have me at a loss.  I can think of ten things off the top of my head that that could apply to.”

“The start of the civil war?”

“Again, that’s like, three major events in my very shoddy recollection.”

“Dame Cicely’s?”

I snapped my fingers, “Got it.  Yes.”

She turned to the lead girl.  “When we first talked about this.  You brought up the rebellion head?  Genevieve?  And then I said I’d met her, and I shared my take?”

The lead girl nodded.

“He was there when it all happened.  He was there before it happened, even.”

“I often am,” I said.  “It’s a quality of mine.”

“And,” she said.  “He was hunting Genevieve.”

“Yep,” I said.

The lead girl gave me a look.  “Now you’re working for her?”

With her,” I said.  “Not under her.  I see it more as a partnership.”

“Really now?  How did that come about?” goat-eyes asked.

“It makes a lot more sense if you think about the two of us being siblings,” I said.  “Even when we were on opposite sides, we got along pretty well.  Then I left the Academy, and here I stand.”

The girls had relaxed considerably in the talk with me, which was interesting.  A clique who were very at home with the idea of imminent change.  They were in, committed to this path that Fray had outlined for them.

“Looks like whatever you anticipated happening is happening,” the lead girl said.

I turned to look.

On the back stairs of the library, a group of men flanked by stitched had emerged.  There were about twenty in all, some with weapons.  I could make out the man in the center of the group – average height, but good looking by most metrics.  His hair was parted to one side and grown long, and he had a rakish mustache.  He wore a lab coat of a very old fashioned style worn by people on the battlefield, old enough that I imagined it had been his father’s style more than his own.

“The Horse,” I said.  “Subtlety really isn’t his strong suit, is it?”

That got a nervous titter of amusement from the rank and file of the rooftop girls.

“Are you staying or are you going?” I asked.

“I’m watching,” the lead girl said.

“And are you staying or are you going?” I asked, again.

She gave me a curious look.  Then she deflated a little.

“No other choice,” she said.  “I’m in.  I’ll do my part when it all starts.”

“Good,” I said.  “If I have to run off and we don’t get a chance to talk after this, go downtown.  Uhhh…”

I fished in a pocket.  I found my notes.

“…Oxham and Haigsbow.  Meet us there when you’ve done what needs to be done and you’re not sure where to go anymore.  Because the dorms aren’t safe anymore, and Beattle is about to have a very interesting day.”

She nodded.

“This should be dramatic, and it’ll help leave people uneasy,” I said.

Leaving the girls with those parting words, I approached Gordon Two and the Horse.

The stitched were in uniform, and were warm enough I could see the heat of their bodies in contrast to the cool air around them.  They and the men who worked with them all wore Academy design and Academy badges.  They were Beattle’s security team.  The people who rounded up escaped experiments and broke up fights between students.

“I saw the bodies,” the Horse told me.

“Gordon,” I said, turning away from the horse professor.  “Do me a favor?  Keep an eye on the Greenhouse.  Let us know if she departs?”

Gordon nodded.

I turned my attention to the Horse.

“A word in private?” I asked him.

“Hm?  What do you need to say to me that you can’t say in front of these men?”

The Horse was proud, arrogant.  Good looking for those who liked men, I supposed.  I could see why Yancy hated him already.

“Because it has to do with certain… indiscretions on the part of one of your-” I cleared my throat.  “Partners.”

“Does it now?” the Horse asked.

I nodded.

He pointed, and put a hand on my shoulder, leading me off to one side and out of earshot.

I was really hoping Avis wouldn’t round the corner and see the gathered soldiers.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Would it surprise you to know that at the same time that those men were slaughtered in your library,” I said, careful to make it his library, “That a colleague of yours was there?”

“A colleague.  You’ll have to be more specific,” the Horse said.

I smiled, but internally, I was scrambling.  I couldn’t remember Yancy’s real name.

Yorkie?  Did it start with a Y or a Y-sound?  Eustace?  No, it probably started with a Y.

“I don’t want to name names.  Let’s call him… Professor Y,” I said.

“Professor Y,” the Horse said.

“Do me a favor?  Can you move your soldiers out of sight?”

“Paulson!” the Horse called out.  “All of you step inside.  Keep an ear out.”

One of the soldiers nodded.

Good.

“The Academy is closing down,” I said.

“Within a few years,” the Horse said.

“You’d think,” I said.  “But no.  Today.  Functionally, anyhow, if Professor Y would have his way.  But it gets a little more complicated than that.”

“I see,” the man said.  “I can handle complicated.”

“Good.  The professor intends to leak information suggesting Beattle will close before the semester’s end.  The student body locked out of the classrooms, no credits, partial refunds.”

“That would mean a great many angry students,” the Horse said.

“That was the end goal.  There are rebellion forces in the area,” I said.  I cleared my throat.  “Ones that might like to recruit from among such a large body of Academy trained individuals.”

The Horse’s jaw hardened.  “Do you, young man with uncanny knowledge of current events, happen to be one of them?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

He nodded, frowning.

And, a few moments after that, I saw his hand move out of his pocket, thumb hooked into one corner of his pocket.  Nonchalant.  I couldn’t see it or see the bulge, because of the nature of the coat he wore, but I was willing to bet that it was a very easy maneuver to flick his coat aside and reach for a weapon at his hip.

So that was how it was.  Military background, perhaps, and a dislike of the rebels and insurgent groups.

I’d captured the rooftop girls.  Fray had Professor Y and the Greenhouse Gang.  If this went sour, then I’d lose ground, while Avis would be free to continue recruiting, gathering forces.

There was a critical mass at play that, should either of us achieve it, would mean that we could flip the stragglers and the questionable types.  It was a race to that scale and mass.  And if I could remove Avis from play, then I could grow our forces while Fray tried to figure out what was happening.

But doing that required winning over the Horse.

“We thought at first about bringing all three of you on board.  But the… dynamic made it very clear that it wouldn’t work.  That you were too noble for the task,” I said.  “That approach twisted around and bit us.  As it turns out, Professor Y is a greedy and black-hearted man.”

“I believe that of him,” the Horse said.

I nodded.  “He wanted to keep it to just him because it meant more money and more power for him, it meant he could make you the scapegoat of all of this.  And he wanted to keep things small and wholly under his control so he could turn the table on us.  Are you seeing where this is going?”

“Oh, I understand,” the Horse said.  His jaw set once again, but the steel in his gaze wasn’t meant for me.

“He hired someone, a monster who murdered our two men in the library.  Now he’s working with students to turn them against us and against you.  He wants a monopoly on the hearts and minds of the students here, and he’s frankly not capable of achieving either.”

I wanted to see a trace of bitter satisfaction at hearing about the failure of Professor Y.  Except I didn’t, and he wasn’t someone with a good poker face.  That satisfaction wasn’t there.  He hated the man, I was fairly sure, but… no joy at seeing the man fail.

Had I just made the mistake of trying at a clandestine deal with someone that was actually a decent person?  Someone who wanted his enemies to be better people?

“I know you don’t like us or our type,” I said.  “But Professor Y brought a monster among your students.  She’s there now, my agent there is watching out for her.  If we don’t handle this, then there may be more bodies.  Things are underway.  The riots are going to happen, and I think you and I both want this to be as bloodless as possible.”

The Horse stared off in the direction Gordon Two had gone.

“You said the two men in the library were yours?” he asked.

Something in his tone set off bells, tripwires and other trouble in my head.

He knew something.

“I said they were ours,” I said.  “Our mutual problem.  Just as the students are.  Just as the rioting that’s about to start is.”

I was doing my utmost to drag his focus away from that line of thinking, picking apart my wording and being pointed about the nature of those two men.

“Your riot.  To your ends.”

I shook my head.  “We were going to be gentler about it.  We planned for it to unfold some time from now, and we laid the groundwork.  Until things were underway, we wanted to milk the teat.  Collect the stragglers… see those girls over there?”

I indicated the rooftop girls more clearly.

“I see them.  I know the type.  Belligerent.  The ones at the bottom of the rankings.”

“They alter their bodies and distance themselves from authority like you because they want to be as far away from home as possible.  Some go back and they try to make lives for themselves.  Others… we wanted to milk that teat.”

“You’ve said that twice.  That implies things when you’re talking about young ladies like that,” the Horse said, stiff.

I blinked, put the pieces together, then reversed course swiftly.  “Oh, no!  No!  Not at all-”

-unless they were keen and Jessie was okay with it-

“-and never.  Rest assured.  I was building up to a greater metaphor, is all.  We aimed to collect the ones who weren’t going home.  Boy and girl.  Give them a focus and a place.  Apprentice them to back alley doctors who tend to those that can’t afford what the Crown asks, perhaps.  And we would keep our thumb on the pulse for when Beattle closed, and when there was a greater crop of the disaffected, frustrated, and aimless… a profit.”

“Interesting to see how the other side thinks,” the Horse said.

“Well, I’ll give you an insight as to how Professor Y thinks.  He wants to slaughter this cow early rather than milk it.  That’s the metaphor.  Bloody, messy, violent, and amateurish.  He started early, thinking we were too far away and too preoccupied with other things to notice him doing it.”

“He brought a monster into our midst to safeguard himself while he did it?”

“And he started already.  The rumors are out there.  The ball is rolling downhill.  Stop me if you want.  Arrest me, turn me in, take action.  But call the remainder of your security forces.  You’ll need all of them to stop this woman, or this will end badly, understand?”

“That was my security force,” the Horse told me.  “They’re waiting inside the library right now.”

I blinked.

“You have others, don’t you?  Stitched?”

He shook his head.  “Not for combat.”

“Warbeasts?”

“None combat ready.  Priscilla and Scythe, but they’re low with litters.  Spike is out to stud in another city.”

I blinked a few times.

Slight miscalculation.  I’d co-opted the Academy forces and found them wanting.

“My men are good at what they do,” the Horse said.

“I’m not questioning that.  I’m questioning their welfare if we don’t handle this well.  Do you have more?  Anyone watching the bodies?”

“Two men keeping students from wandering in on the scene,” he said.

“Anything else?  Containment specialists who can hold a pointed stick?  Any particularly fit teaching staff?  Secretaries you don’t particularly like?”

“Some of the men from the stable double as handlers when a student project gets ornery.”

“Get them.  Get nets, because this is a monster that flies.”

“Just how dangerous is this creature?” he asked, as he started walking toward the library and his waiting men.

That is a very good question.

Avis exited the Greenhouse alone.  She held herself differently now than she had.  She was calmer, a little more confident, and a little less worn around the edges.

She’d been Academy once.  Intelligent conversation, tea, and time with students had to be a balm for the soul.  She was a head and shoulders, and an obscure draping of a black cloak covering the form below.  All of my senses that I’d trained to keep an eye out for patterns that went with a concealed weapon were twitching instinctively at the sight of bulges here and there beneath her cloak.

She headed straight for what Gordon Two had suggested might be her next meeting place.  Students gathered sometimes at the bend near the river, and the student council office wasn’t far away.

I would have liked to go ahead and beat her to the punch, then see her expression when they weren’t waiting there for her, but removing her from the picture now was too important.

“Wings don’t leave much room for other things,” the Horse commented.

The Horse, Gordon Two and I were gathered indoors, looking through a window at Avis.  The rooftop girls were nearby.  I’d told them to watch and wait at a nearby vantage point where they wouldn’t look too unnatural.

We’d rounded out our numbers, at my urging.

Fifteen soldiers, twenty stitched, some noncombat but capable of obeying orders.  Two men with nets and ropes who were used to dealing with unruly warbeasts.  One student project.

Five soldiers and ten stitched walked in a group down the left side of the path, toward Avis.  They left the way clear for her, and even through the window I could hear them talking and laughing.

I wondered how genuine they sounded.

“Overwhelming force, huh?” Gordon Two asked.  “Hitting her before she knows what’s happened?”

“This is going to end one of three ways,” I said.  “The best case scenario is that it’s over in an instant.  Everyone does what they’re supposed to, and they break her wings and legs in the initial hit.”

The group of soldiers and stitched were twenty paces from Avis.

If they tipped her off…

“What are the other two ways?” Gordon Two asked.

“She could fly away.  Then everything unfolds with the leak, Beattle falling to pieces, bloody riots, and she’s there behind the scenes, working against us.”

The Horse nodded.

“And the third result is that she wins.”

“Wins?” Gordon Two asked.

“She fought the Duke of Francis face to face,” I said.

I saw Gordon Two’s eyes widen.

“She didn’t win, but she fought him.  She did pretty well too, and that counts for a lot.”

“We were within five paces of someone crazy enough to fight a noble!?”

You’re within two paces of someone crazy enough to fight a noble and win, I thought.

Instead, I just said, “Yeah.”

My biggest hope here was that she wasn’t expecting trouble.  There were no warning signs.  Her thoughts would be on what came later.  The plan coming to fruition.  She had little reason to watch her back.

So as the soldiers drew within ten paces, and then five, I was chewing the side of my tongue, hoping that she wouldn’t.  The buildings on this part of the street connected above the street forming an archway or tunnel that foot traffic had to pass beneath.  It was the place where the soldiers would pass by Avis.

I heard the shout as the order was given.  The group that was now walking just to her left turned at a right angle to simultaneously face her.

In that same instant, she turned, backing away a few steps, her wings spreading wide, cloak cast behind her where it had encircled her before.  In the doing, she loosed her friends.

Her wings had been folded around her body, a perpetual self-hug.  Rigging and exoskeleton framework supported her body while staying light enough to allow her to fly.  And, it seemed, in addition to all of that, she’d had birds with her.  Perched on her wings.  perched on the exoskeleton.  Perched on her arms and settled on her clothing.

They had been bred to attack.

Lords-suckling mother-cunting birds! I thought, as I ran past Gordon Two and out the door.

She heard or saw me as I left the building and ventured out onto the street.

She turned to face me, and I could see the telltale signs of drugs at work.  Veins and coloration, the nature of her eyes, and the way she held herself as she breathed.

The drug was only just kicking in.  She hadn’t taken it overtly, which meant it was an implant she could activate with a muscle, or something contained within a tooth.  Nothing acted quite that fast, which meant she’d likely taken it when she saw the Academy security approaching.

“You,” she said.

I drew my gun.  I didn’t fire it as I pointed it at her.  Good thing, too, because she was quick, ducking low to the ground, wings flapping to cast her forward at an angle her legs weren’t suggesting.

I adjusted, aimed, and loosed a shot I knew would miss.

Men were leaving the building behind her.  One had a net.

With her back to me, I couldn’t see what she was doing.  I was only aware that one of the two men dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot.  He collapsed on top of the net he held.

She leaped, beating her wings twice while in midair to increase the distance at which she moved.  She kicked the second man in the face with a bare foot, and she managed to slash his face open as she did it.

No doubt anticipating that I might fire again, she performed an acrobatic maneuver in the air.  A flap of wings, a kick and a twist, to change direction while still airborne, hurling herself down and toward the ground, where she could land in a crouch.

I’d expected something like it, but I’d expected her to go the other way, where she had more room to move.

It only took a small adjustment.  I shifted my aim and I pulled the trigger.

It hit wing, which wasn’t hard to do given the sheer span of her wings, and it produced little more than a mist of blood and a puff of feathers in response.

The remainder of the men exited the building, collapsing in on her from every direction.

“Stitched only!” I shouted.  “Humans stay back!”

It didn’t look like they were listening, until the Horse called out from behind me.

“Obey the boy!”

But Avis heard me too.  She shrugged out of the cloak, and she got to work.  She hurled herself forward, caught one truncheon-wielding fist in her talon, and stepped on the same stitched’s shoulder.  A flap of her wings, just barely high enough to be out of reach of a swatting club, and she was able to move forward without kicking off or really using her legs.  It caught the man in front of her off guard, and she slashed his throat with a talon.

Every swing of a truncheon in her direction was a miss.  Considering that her wings together might’ve spanned a modest barn door, that said a lot.  She moved as if the stitched and humans around her were underwater and she wasn’t.  Twitchy, fast, with minimal resistance from the environment around her.

High kicks, strong considering how slender she was, wings tucked in close, then a swift unfurling of the wings and a flap to reposition herself, so she was never surrounded.

I saw the man I’d told to wait on the rooftop creeping forward, as she engaged in a fighting retreat, retreating directly toward him.  Slowly, quietly, he unfurled the net, readying it to throw.

And, in the moment I was recognizing that, I saw her pause in the midst of reorienting herself.  Wings around her, spinning in place, one leg in the air and the other down, as she prepared to bolt for it and find a vantage point from which she might take flight, her eye lingered a little too long on me.  I looked from the man on the rooftop to her.

And she looked from me to the man on the rooftop, twisting around to see him behind her.

I saw the muscles in her shoulder and neck convulse.

A dark mark appeared on the chest of the man on the rooftop.  A wound.

The birds, done with their initial prey, extended their attention to the rest of us.  Pecking, tiny talons scratching at eyes and hands.

Stitched and man alike flailed ineffectually at the birds, and Avis turned to run.  She’d fought her way clear of the tunnel and the soldiers that had surrounded her, and she was very probably faster than any of us.

I drew a deep breath, and I aimed my gun while a small black bird dug into the back of my hand with talons, doing its level best to get a grip on the tendons that extended to my fingers.

I aimed while a bird pulled at my lower eyelid with a beak as sharp as any knife.

I put pain out of mind and out of body, so it wouldn’t affect my shot, aimed, and fired, emptying my gun.

Somewhere in the midst of the shooting, she jabbed the point of her left wing far to her right, bent forward, and fell face-down onto the road.

I holstered my gun, and I strode toward Avis.

Drawing my knife, I grabbed the first bird, ignored the pain as it gnashed and clawed at my hand, and I cut its head off.

I killed a second, and then the remainder flew off.

They were trained to fly back to Avis, and they did.

She struggled to crawl forward, bit by bit, while birds settled on her back, head, and shoulders.

Then, hearing my footsteps, she struggled to turn herself over with the wings obstructing her movements.

I leaped forward to stand on her back, stepped on two birds I could reach without losing my footing, and waited.

“You’re an omen of bad things, Sylvester,” Avis said.

“Are you reading the entrails of birds for these omens and portents?” I asked.

“You could have talked to us,” she said.  “Genie would have been delighted.”

“We’ll talk later,” I said.  “Not to worry.  I don’t intend to leave you with the Academy or the Crown.  Not long-term.”

“She described you as having your own special rules.  Lines you wouldn’t cross and don’t allow crossing in others.  You had Percy killed for harming children.”

“Not quite me, but close enough, sure.”

“We didn’t cross those lines.  We’re working against the same forces you are.”

“Wrong line of argument, Avis,” I said.  “It’s because your plans are so in line with what I want to do that I’m here.”

She was silent at that.  I knew she was thinking it through, figuring me out.

I’d been on that side of things.  On the back foot, against an enemy who had been anticipating me far longer than I had been anticipating them.

A bird nipped a coin-sized chunk out of my leg.  I kicked at it, then aimed and fired at it, reducing it to a mess on the road.  Avis jumped visibly.

“I’m just better equipped to see this particular plan through to the end.”

“You think so?” she asked.  Then she spat, and then she coughed violently.

“Which reminds me,” I said.

I pulled off my jacket, wrung it up into a thick rope, and tied it around her lower face.  She hadn’t been able to aim at me with her face aimed at the ground, but I wasn’t ruling out the possibility for later.

“Not taking any chances,” I said.

She only glared at me out of the corner of her eye.

The Horse caught up, having checked on his security people, and he brought a few men with him.  Together, they worked to hold down a veiny Avis with a bullet in one thigh.  They secured a chain in place where I had the jacket, and moved on to other measures I didn’t particularly care about at this stage.  I was free to step off of her and away, and to walk away.

“I’m thankful for your help,” the Horse said.  “But where do you think you’re going?”

I heard the gun cock.

Yes.  There was definitely good cause for why Fray hadn’t worked with this sop.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.09 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“That’s a fine way to treat someone that’s helping you out,” I said.  “Pointing a gun at them.”

“You’re an admitted part of the rebellion, and you’re a big part of why trouble is unfolding here,” the Horse said.

I turned around, facing professor Horse.  I wiped at my lower eyelid, and my finger came away with an unbroken line of blood on it.

“The actual fault lies elsewhere.  Mainly with your professor Y.  Now before emotions take over, I want to point out that you’ve got men bleeding over there, professor Y is preparing to run, and the riot is unfolding behind the scenes.  There are priorities here, and effective management of time is key.”

It wasn’t, but I was certainly hoping to move it along.

Horse glanced back at the injured men, who were being tended to.  He didn’t look very happy as he looked back at me.  The gun didn’t waver either.

“Now, speaking for myself, I’m very, very interested in learning who our captive here was talking to in the greenhouse.  So if you’ll let me go, give me an escort to march me along if it makes you feel more secure, I’ll go do that, you can tend to your people and our captive, and in a matter of minutes, we’ll converge to go together and get professor Y before he can disappear on  us.”

“You’re implying he’s not already gone.”

“He won’t be.  Not until he hears about the bodies.  I’m assuming that when you investigated, you didn’t send anyone to him to keep him in the loop?”

The Horse didn’t answer me, but his expression told me that he hadn’t.

He might have wanted our Professor Y to be a better person, but he wasn’t about to stick his neck out for the man to cut.

“He’s attached to his position.  He’d do an awful lot to get an even firmer grip on it, including removing you.  If he left without a dang good reason, it would run contrary to just about everything I understand about his character.”

“You really have been talking to the man,” the Horse said.

Lying on the ground, I heard a sound from Avis.

I realized that it was her laughing to herself, her voice muffled by the fabric and chain that encircled the lower half of her face, locked at the back of the neck with a simple padlock.

“Seems like she might know more than we do,” I said.  “Which is reason enough to move faster.”

I put a touch of emphasis on those last two words.

The Horse looked at two of his men, and indicated that they should go with me.

“Great,” I said.

“Shackle him,” the Horse said.  “And take his gun.”

I rolled my eyes as one security officer reached for my gun, and used finger and thumb to lift up my shirt to make it more visible.  No use making life harder and risking that they frisk me and find everything else.  The other officer pulled out a pair of cuffs.  They were a modern sort, which was doubly annoying – ‘u’ shaped bands of metal that both fit into bars.  The bar was ratcheted up to my wrist, then the key withdrawn.  Just tight enough that I could feel my pulse throbbing against the bar.

The security officer put the other shackle on his own wrist.

“I’ll find you,” the Horse said.

“Here?  There’s nothing to see here.  Keep eyes on things closer to the heart of the Academy, watch the exits of the offices, keep an eye on the crowds and see if there’s any stirring, anything being passed around,” I said.  “We’ll meet you at the library, and we’ll move on Professor Y together.  With luck, he won’t have any other hirelings, and this is all the bleeding I have to do today.”

Avis twisted around on the ground.  Veins still stood out, and her eyes were bloodshot.  Her expression, intense, one brow arched, was the body language equivalent of screaming, “I know you’re up to something!”

I remained calm, even as she struggled with the stitched who held her.  She was gagged with chain included as part of the gag.  Her hands were bound behind her, and a chain encircled her body, trapping her wings against it.  More binding secured her legs and the feet with talons built into them.

I would have liked to encourage professor Horse to keep Avis under lock and key, but I worried that it would have the opposite effect.

Besides, it didn’t matter too much.  The man was fairly firm in his convictions, and he actually seemed to care about the people who served under him.  The damage done and the deaths seemed to have left their mark on him, because he was distracted.

I wasn’t planning on sticking around, either.

“To the greenhouse, escorts!” I proclaimed.

The two men looked less than impressed.

But the Horse nodded, and I was led off.

Alright then.

This wasn’t a sustainable series of events, really.  Being shackled was bad, because it meant I had little chance of escaping the chain of events that would see me in Academy custody.

I could play along for a while, but I didn’t get the impression that I could change the Horse’s mind on things.

“He really doesn’t like me, huh?” I asked.

“You’re a rebel, he said,” said the soldier I was cuffed to.  The man was young, prematurely balding, and his short hair didn’t help hide it.  He had a nasty talon-wound on his forehead, but it had already had something applied to it – a quick daubing of some styptic.

“I’m just surprised at the depth of the Horse’s dislike, really,” I said.  Testing.

“Professor Horsfall fought them down south,” the officer said.

Not taking up the nickname, but jumping straight to professor Horsfall.  He was respected, then.

I could use that.

“So I gather he manages security and he’s the one the students like and go to, professor Y is part of things because he’s smart and opportunistic with some good manipulation skills, and the fat cat aristocrat has the final say when it comes to the purse strings.  Strength, cunning, and money, in three different corners of the power triangle?”

“Sure,” the guy said.

Laconic, this guy.

His right hand was cuffed to my left, and the soldier walking to my right was free, just keeping a mild eye on me while he walked, glancing around him.

I began playing up my limp, where my leg was already bleeding.

“Makes it hard for me.  See, I became a rebel because every professor I ran into was of Professor Y’s ilk.  I can’t stand the Crown because every person with any power that isn’t Academy is like that aristocrat guy who manages the Academy.  So I’m kind of really floored that I’ve run into someone who seems decent.”

“You talk a lot, huh?” Mr. Laconic asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Mostly when I’m nervous.  Or to think through problems.  Also, talking helps distract from the fact that I’m bleeding in twenty places and it kind of hurts.”

“We all are,” Mr. Laconic said.

“I’m just glad we were able to stop her,” I said.  “I’m not good for much else, but I can deal with that type alright.  I’m assuming Horsfall will be fair to her?”

“Fair as she deserves,” Mr. Laconic said.

“He’ll be fair,” the other officer countered.

I played up my limp more, and eyed a paving stone that lay slightly ajar on the path ahead.  If I kicked it with enough strength mid-stride, I could manage a pretty convincing trip and fall.  I wouldn’t fall all the way, but still, it would be a step.

I’d need another step to complete the maneuver.

“Yeah.  I got the impression he wasn’t the kind to abuse a prisoner,” I said.

Build rapport, reinforce ideas, us versus them, don’t hurt prisoners, we’re on the same page about Horsfall being a good guy.

The officer to my right lit up a cigarette.

Scratch that.  I might not need another step to my plan after all.

“May I?” I asked.

The man gave me a sidelong glance.

Then he tapped out another cigarette, handing it to me, before striking a match and holding a flame to the cigarette.

“Thank you,” I said.  “Goes a ways toward calming my nerves.”

“Yeah,” the man said.

He offered one to his friend.

Take it, I thought.  Take it.  You know you want it.

He reached out, taking the cigarette.  Because one of his hands was occupied with the shackle and my hand, his buddy leaned across me to provide the lit match.

I moved closer to the man I was shackled to to make room, reached across my lower ribs with my free hand, and paused, waiting a moment.

“Steady,” the other officer said, as they tried to coordinate.

In that moment, while their focus was elsewhere, I lifted Mr. Laconic’s gun free of its holster.  I held it by the handle, the chamber against my wrist, the barrel against my lower arm, in as casual a position as I could manage, and readjusted the strap of my bag on my left shoulder

Moving my arm back, I slid the gun between my bag and my back.  The bag was heavy enough and had enough stuff toward the bottom end that the gun was held in place.

Just fine, this.  Had I not had the opportunity afforded by the match, I could have kicked the stone and lifted the gun in the midst of tripping and climbing up the man to find my balance.  It might have required more of a distraction or a redirection of attention to my leg if I wanted to move the gun across me and into a temporary hiding spot.  Maybe to my injured leg.  Maybe I could have bumped into a wound.  Maybe I could have used exhaled smoke to cloud the movement.

Had that not been an opportunity I might have drawn a knife and timed it to knife one of the men as we entered the greenhouse.

But there was little use dwelling on it.  It was done.  I had one of two guns.  My gun had been handed off.

“You don’t suppose the Horse would go easy on me, since I’ve been cooperative, and since he seems like an alright guy?”

“Dunno,” the officer that had provided the cigarettes said.  “Most we’ve had to deal with is students poisoning each other, getting between two guys in a fistfight or two cats in a claw-fight, or having to shoot a project that gets too excited at being outdoors.”

“I hear you,” I said.  But what I took away from it was the distinct impression that these men weren’t experienced.  I’d suspected such from the fact that they hadn’t searched me, but now the sentiment had been reaffirmed.

We walked down the path to the greenhouse.   I saw one of the occupants at the glass, peering through to look at us.  The whites of his eyes were visible as they widened.

Cigarette-man opened the door to the greenhouse, and he led the way inside.

I drew the gun, and I pressed it between the man’s shoulderblades.

“Stop right there,” I said.

He did.

I felt my shackled arm go taut, and glanced back over my shoulder at Mr. Laconic, who was in the process of realizing he’d lost his gun.

“Don’t try anything funny,” I told him.  “I shot her, I can shoot you two.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Cigarette man,” I said.  “Very slowly, with two fingers, pull your gun from the holster.  Toss it into the soil bed over there.”

He did as I asked.

“Now lie down on the floor, right here, arms out to your sides.”

He did.  In the process, he stopped blocking my view of the students of the Greenhouse Gang.

They looked more like Lillian’s crowd.  Some were attractive, but I didn’t get the impression that attractiveness was a priority.  They were tidy looking, in a school where a lot of students weren’t.  No major alterations had been made to their uniforms.   There was a roughly even balance of boys to girls, eight and seven.

“Good morning,” I told them.

“Good morning,” a few of them mumbled, as if I was a homeroom teacher at too-dang-early-o’clock in the morning.  They looked spooked and confused at this scene.

“I’m with Fray.  You might have heard the gunshots a bit ago.  We’ve run into a small snag,” I said.  I turned to Mr. Laconic.  “Lie down on top of him.  This arm behind your back, here.”

“You going to shoot us?” he asked.

“Not if I can help it,” I said.  “But you’ve got one of my wrists.  Let’s see about getting me free.  Lie down.”

Reluctantly, slowly, he lay down on top of the smoking man.  I twisted the arm I was shackled to behind him, so the chain extended up to me and gave me some freedom of movement.

“You,” I spoke to a boy who looked like the leader of this particular group.  He was heavyset to an extent that his cheeks pushed his eyes were slits, with a round face and glasses.  “Would you do me a favor and be an extra set of hands?”

He approached.

“Bag here,” I said, shrugging one shoulder out of the bag.  “Watch for the blades and syringes I have in there, the points and edges shouldn’t be exposed, but let’s not test our luck.  Dig deep for a jar.  Ridged exterior.”

He gave me a long, searching look, his face unreadable, and then did as I asked, lifting up the flap at the top and rummaging inside while the one strap dangled from the crook of my elbow.

He retrieved a jar of fluid.

“Would you grab my cigarette, and these men’s cigarettes?  That stuff might theoretically be flammable, and I’ve got friends who can’t know that I did something stupid and burned myself alive.  That’s good.  Thank you.  And step back, all of you get to the other end of the greenhouse…”

I waited while the crowd of students obliged.

“And throw that at the ground in front of us, hard enough to break it.”

“Oy!” the soldier on the bottom called out.

The boy threw the jar, and it shattered.  Bits of glass might have hit the face of the uniformed men I was shackled to.

This gas had a chemical odor, but it was invisible.  I saw doubt on the expressions of the Greenhouse Gang, before the soldiers began reacting.  They coughed, to start, and then they groaned.  The groaning was soon interrupted by coughing, and then the two things blended together into a unpleasant barking retching noise.

I was resistant to poisons, and even I coughed.  I realized where the groans were coming from as I felt every single one of my exposed wounds draw tight and then burn as if hot pokers were being pressed into them.

I could handle pain, but this was still bad.

Teeth clenched, I sat down hard on the second man, who was squirming.  Tendons and muscles all over my body tensed as I weathered the worst of it.

When the struggles of the two men stopped, I moved a hand, fingers twitching, to my bag, fished in the front pocket, and found my lockpicks.

The gas was a paralytic, with a little bit of added extra to keep it from paralyzing cardiac and respiratory systems, and it had had a small effect on me, making the lockpicking an interesting endeavor.  It didn’t help that the lock was more modern than some I’d fiddled with.

I started to speak, and coughed.

“How was your discussion with Avis?” I asked, when I was done coughing.

“Was fine,” the boy with the glasses said.  “Is she alright?”

“Nope,” I said, internally cursing the fact that my thumb had no strength in it.  “I tried to help her, but things got hairy.  I’m more of a problem solver than a fighter.  We’re accelerating the timetable a hair, here, and I might stumble a few times along the way since I only know part of it, but this is doable.  Are you ready to go?”

“Oh, I’m not going,” Glasses said.  “But I’m willing to help things along if it means less students going from here to Sprung, Wheelock, or Belltower.”

“Perfect,” I said.  I worked my jaw a bit and worked out the oddity in my lip I’d felt as I’d made the ‘r’ sound.

They’re going,” he indicated the rest of the gang.

“Even more perfect,” I said.  I freed my wrist, moved the shackle over to the other paralyzed fellow, and locked it to his wrist.  I stood and stretched, experiencing all sorts of funny things as a result of the mild nerve gas.  My rectum in particular was clenching as if it was trying to communicate in tap-code, and I had some concerns that it would stop dotting and start dashing.

Maybe I’d avoid dosing myself with this particular gas in the future.  I was very careful as I bent over to check the pulses at the throat of each of the men.  Grabbing the one on top, I rolled him off of his friend.

“You’ll be okay,” I said.  I said it to the men, but I addressed it to the Greenhouse Gang.

“Excuse me,” I said.  I put the gun away, and moved out of the area.  I couldn’t tell how far the gas reached, but the other students weren’t coughing.  “We’ll use the other door.”

The group joined me, and we left the greenhouse.

“Goodbye, greenhouse,” one of the boys said.  “I think this might be the last time we see you.  You treated us well.”

“I didn’t think about that,” one of the younger girls said.

“I know the feeling,” I said.  We walked around the greenhouse and headed in the general direction of Beattle’s library and main office.  “Leaving behind that familiar place.  I did it last winter, almost a year ago.”

“Yeah?” the younger girl said.

“But there were bad feelings tied to that place.  It was where I grew up, and I didn’t realize that as familiar as it was, there was an oppressive feeling whenever I was there.  The dark cloud that pressed down from above.  Happy memories, don’t get me wrong.  It was my family, my friends, my best friend, the girls I liked and a lot of good feelings.  But the bad that you don’t even realize was there…”

I drew in a breath.

“…You get away from it all.  You find a new place, and you bring the best of the good people with you, or you find new good people, and you get settled somewhere that’s good, without nearly as much of the bad.”

“Lambsbridge?” a girl asked me.  “The place?  It was the orphanage?”

I turned my head.  “Don’t tell me I’ve met you too.”

She shook her head.  “No sir.”

I’m a sir, I thought.

“My father is a sheriff,” she said.  “He’s a mean son of a gun.  And strict, makes me write home twice a week, or he comes over here and cusses me out at the entrance to the dorm.  I’m a compulsive reader, and I have a good memory, so I saw your wanted posters there when i went to drop off mail, and at my dad’s work when I went home for summer holiday, on the wall with all the rest, an’ I remembered them.  I saw them change it up now and then.  It was interesting to see how some of the descriptions changed as the seasons passed.”

“I’m quite impressed,” I said.  “Top student indeed.”

“Thank you,” she said, with none of the change in expression that I might have expected in response to praise.  She looked sadder if anything.

“Who is he?” the round-faced boy with the glasses asked.

“Sylvester Lambsbridge,” I said.

“Traitor to the Crown,” she said.  “Which usually means you were once in league with them.”

“More Academy than Crown, but yes.”

“Wanted dead or alive.  Killer, problem solver, devastatingly intelligent.”

I grinned.  “You remembered that?  Dang, I like you.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear, not making eye contact.  The tuck was a nervous thing, I suspected, not a flirty thing.  Or it was both.

“A killer?” the boy who’d lamented the loss of the greenhouse asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Was part of my responsibilities, once.”

I had to duck my head a little and use the cover of a few taller boys in the group to keep from being stared at by a cluster of students.  The peck marks and scratches would be bad, I imagined.

“Blood on your hands,” glasses said.  “Avis was a pacifist.”

I had to resist the urge to snort at that.  This was something that mattered to them.  They didn’t want ugliness and violence.  I wondered what the story was with that proclamation.

Instead, I nodded, and I put a sympathetic expression on my face.  “If we could leave Avis in charge of you and let her manage this, we would.  I’ll make freeing her a problem I solve at a later stage, not to worry.  Because if I can’t, then I’ve got to take over this project for Fray.”

“She isn’t in charge?” glasses asked.

“She wanted to be,” I said.  “But… snags.”

There were doubts.  The group looked anxious.  Enough so that I wondered if they would all be here if I left and came back.

“Part of the reason I’m here is I share common ground with you guys.  I came from a place not so different from here.  I had my own greenhouse.  I had my own Greenhouse Gang.  The most important thing?  More than the mission?  It’s going to be ensuring you all are free.  Nothing tying you down.  No dark cloud bearing down on you, no feeling like your best isn’t a guarantee.”

The people who had doubts still looked like they had doubts, but there was a little bit more light in the eyes of the others.  The sheriff’s daughter was among them.

“Tea, talking, sleeping in, music playing on a machine.  Resources to pursue passion projects.  Associating only with the people you want to associate with.”

“What’s next?” glasses asked.

I have no blinking idea, I thought.

“Where were you at with Avis when you left off?  From what I gathered, she was just rounding you up and making sure you were on board.”

Glasses nodded.  “We know which students we’re talking to and where.  We start the rumor about this being something that was in the works from last year.  We have the credibility.”

“Perfect,” I said.  “Okay.  I’ve checked on the rooftop girls-”

I didn’t miss the faint look of distaste on one or two faces.

“-And you lot.  Next is student council.  They meet in the office?”

“No.  Most of them handle things elsewhere.  Liasion with staff.  Only the president and vice president of the student council really spend time there regularly.  When they meet, they usually do it by the water,” glasses said.  He pointed.

“Ralph was a member of student council, once upon a time,” the sheriff’s daughter said.  “He quit to keep his grades up.”

Ralph the round-faced glasses wearer pushed his glasses up his nose, and folded his arms.  Defensive actions on both fronts.

That’s not why you left, I thought to myself, with a sing-song lilt.

“I want to walk around to the far side of the office,” I said.  “I’m suspicious they’re lying in wait.”

“This way, then,” one of the others said.

We took a right, then a left, and walked down a street.  The students and I watched to our left as we crossed the street.

We could see the library at the south end of the Beattle Academy office, and we could see the Horse’s men gathered on the back stairs.  Something was wrong.

The Horse had told me that the security forces he’d brought to Avis were the extent of Beattle’s resources.

Then why had those numbers tripled, even accounting for the losses to Avis’ talons?  Why were there suddenly sixty or more serious-looking men and women with uniform jackets and frames that looked like they exercised?

I thought of the two men who had died in the library.

Were these the rest of that particular group?

“Be prepared,” I told the Greenhouse Gang.  “We’re starting.”

“We’re starting?”

“They’re trying to stop the flood.  They won’t succeed,” I said.  I reached into a pocket, sorted through my notes, and said, “Oxham and Haigsbow.  Do what you need to do, we all rendezvous there.  Stay discreet in the meantime.  They’re looking for me and they’re looking for students like you, who are working with me.  Soon it won’t be possible to find either.”

The students nodded.

“Stay the course,” I said.  “I’ll make sure the system is rigged for you, not against you.”

The nods were slightly more enthusiastic.

Even among the ones who’d seemed most uncertain and most uneasy about the fact that Avis was out of the picture and that I was a killer.

I broke away from the group.  More free agents, cast out, while I was left to trust that they’d find their way back to me, that there wouldn’t be any disasters.

I found another entrance to the office, and I began navigating it.

There was no easy way to judge where things were, and my memory wasn’t good enough to know off the back of my head.  I would have really liked having Jessie around so she could tell me.  I had to judge by the colors of coats and the styles people wore, all the while looking out for the uniform jackets that suggested Academy security.

It was perhaps a stroke of providence that I stumbled on the little trick to identifying where I needed to be.  There were Academy security officers in the main office, and I steered well clear of them, taking the stairs, ducking into side hallways, even pausing inside an empty office at one point to let them pass.

And as I found the areas where the officers weren’t, I realized that they’d been told to stay away from Professor Y.

Which meant that in the course of avoiding them, veering more toward the places with more black coats, I found him.

I opened his office door and let myself inside.

Professor Y was within, sitting at his desk.  He jumped at my arrival, and looked very concerned as he took another look at me.

He was an old man, his back so stooped that the curve of it could graph to one of Wollstone’s ratios.  His hair was neatly groomed, but the fact remained that the top of his head was level with his shoulderblades.  The lines of his face were deep, his eyes deep set and very blue, his cheekbones rosy, which was really the only part of him that didn’t jive with my mental image of him.

“Who are you?”

I ignored him, rummaging for another gas canister.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I saw his right arm move very slowly.  He was opening a desk drawer.

I hurled the jar at him, and hurled myself forward in that same motion, putting myself against the base of the desk.

I listened, felt, and waited for the man to stop grunting, gagging, and jerking in his chair.

Once I was done, I investigated his desk.

Four letters and one document.  Each one with ‘Professor Horsfall’ on it somewhere.  The ones that were purportedly written by the man had forged signatures on them, clearly copied from the document that the old man had collected.

I checked the old man’s pulse, and found it weak.

I never brought more than one of the same kind of poison when I could help it.  It was easier on my system and tested my tolerances less if I spread stuff out.

Couldn’t remember off the top of my head what this one was.

“I wonder what Fray saw in you,” I said.  “Opportunity?”

Only his eyes moved.  Drool was already leaking out of his mouth.

I had limited time.  Horsfall would soon lose patience and decide they had enough in the way of forces to storm the place without me.

Still, I took the time to pen out a note.

Whatever else he was, whatever I was trying to do, the man seemed decent.  I’d meant what I’d said to his soldiers when I said I wasn’t sure how to handle him.  He was what I wanted to promote in the Academy.

For you, Professor Horsfall.  You may be my opponent in this but you’re not my enemy.  You earned my respect through your common decency and leadership.  I would have killed the man, but I sensed you wouldn’t want me to.

-Sylvester

I placed the note in front of the old man on the desk, so he could read it, and pushed his chair in with him in it.

Then, carefully, I rewrote the first of the notes, but changed names around.  I tore Professor Y’s copy into quarters, and I left it beside my note to Horsfall.

I made my exit, avoiding the uniforms.

I could hear the tramp of boots on floor as the massed uniforms started to make their way to Professor Y.  Other uniforms were gravitating that way too.

I made my way to the bulletin board, trying to stay mostly out of sight, knowing I looked a mess, and I put the first letter up.

Heads turned, looking at me and at the paper.

I touched one arm of the most curious looking of curious onlookers, pointing at the note, and that gave the person permission to take a look-see.  Others gravitated in that direction.

Ready.  Set.  Go.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.10 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Stop!  Stop!  Give me a chance to speak!”

His voice was nearly drowned out by the crowd.

“I’m as angry as you are!”

I wasn’t sure that was possible or likely.  The mass of students who had gathered in the street between the dormitories and the classrooms were pretty upset.

This was a special kind of hurt, to take someone’s hopes and dreams, already tested a number of times over, stretched out over years, dash them to the rocks.  That special sort of pain and loss demanded to be expressed, yet the very fact that it was being experienced by everyone here made it impossible to do so.

How could someone turn to a friend for support when that friend was in the exact same position?  How did one shout to vent their anger when they went unheard with so many other shouting voices around them?  How did they find release in tears when their tears were but drops in a bucket?

It was a situation that would have left countless students floundering and frustrated to begin with, and rather than feed into the anger, the crowd was feeding into that frustration.  It was an important and interesting distinction.

I wondered what Mauer would think or do here.

The student council vice president was standing off to one side, while the treasurer took the ‘stage’ – a set of stairs by one of the dormitories.  She was a very feminine and demure looking girl with straight black hair.  The sidelong glance she gave me said a lot, however, about the thought processes going on in her head.

She knew this wasn’t working, but she wasn’t getting flustered.

“Listen!” the student council treasurer belted out the word, pushing his voice to its limit.  But the body of students already had some who were shouting at that volume or close to it.

Not a proper unified body, but a collection of individuals.  The school had made it so, pitting them against one another.

I beckoned the vice president.

I was around a corner, so only a small few students saw as she came to stand a short distance from me.

“You either have a great deal of trust in me,” I told her, “Or you still feel you can seize control of this situation.”

With the clamor, I doubted she heard everything I said.  She seemed to infer my meaning well enough.

She had to lean in close to my ear to make herself heard, “About fifteen percent the first, eighty-five the second.”

I pulled out the letters, took a mostly blank paper and tore off enough that there was no writing on the paper that was left.  I scribbled a note on it, folded it in three, and showed her before leaning in closer to tell her, “Take over.  Tell them this to get their attention.  Say what I told the treasurer to say.  Then direct them.”

Speaking into her ear, I could see over her shoulder.  The student council president was standing by the stairs, watching us very intently.  He was a skinny guy, but with immaculate attention to his appearance.  Anyone else might have looked a little stiff with their brown hair so neatly parted and their academy so crisp, face like stone, but he managed to look regal.

Recruiting the student council had been easy as pie.  I’d headed over to the stretch of lawn by the water, told them things had started, and they had been mine.

Things were never all that easy, however.  I’d talked to Ralph from the Greenhouse Gang, who had once been a part of the student council, and things left unsaid had left a loose thread of thought untied in my head, drifting this way and that, grazing against everything I saw and everyone I met, looking for a conclusion.  Now I suspected I’d found it.

The groups of this particular Academy fell on a spectrum, and the student council was on the opposite end from the Rank.  The rooftop girls were close to the Rank in disposition and attitude toward the school, yes, but when Gordon Two had said that the student council and the Greenhouse Gang didn’t mingle much, there was likely more to it.

There was a gulf, and this petite, beautiful young lady of good grooming was likely the culprit.

“When you go up,” I said, “Bring the student council president with you.”

“United front?” she asked.

“Something like that,” I said.  “Take the paper.  Hold it, but don’t show them and don’t say there’s proof because that’s going to be letter number three.  But it’ll be something the crowd can fixate on.  Don’t swear, don’t incite them too much, and try not to point fingers.  They’re incited enough.”

She took the letter.  “I don’t cuss.”

“You might be tempted to in an effort to win over the crowd.  But it’ll be the whipcrack that sets the horse running, and you might get dragged down into that stampede.”

She gave me a nod, then walked off, still giving no evidence of the agitation that seemed to have struck everyone else.  For anyone else it might have looked curious that she could be so calm.  For her, it was part of her mystique.  I watched carefully as she put her hand lightly on the student council president’s arm, and he was brought along as if she was a giant with an iron grip.  His eyes, however, were on me.

Calculating, suspicious.

The vice president of the student council was a breaker of hearts, it seemed.  I could piece together where things stood.  Ralph, the heavyset, glasses-wearing member of the Greenhouse Gang was number two in the student rankings and the student council president there was number one, while this young lady was number four or five, and yet they were subordinate to her when it came to their hearts and her ability to toy with them.  Perhaps Ralph had escaped.  Perhaps he’d put some distance between himself and her because he knew he hadn’t.

The crowd drew a little quieter as the pair joined the treasurer at the top of the stairs.  They were joined by the secretary, boy’s rep and girl’s rep.

The vice president held up the paper I’d given her, pinching one corner of it so it stood up and out from her hand.  She waited patiently.

The shouting boiled down.

“Thank you,” she said.  She gave the paper a little shake.  A few hundred eyes watched it move, curious.  “The Academy knew what was happening and they prepared for it.  They invited security from other Academies to come here because they knew we would be upset.  Some of us have already seen a lot of unfamiliar faces wearing security uniforms and moving in large groups.  There were going to be more a month from now.”

The crowd was hers.  The scenario she was painting was clear in their minds.  The fact that she knew meant she had answers they wanted.  She could have told them the Academy planned to murder them all, and they might have believed her for a long moment.

She remained seemingly at ease as she laid out the facts.  “In the meantime, they planned to deal with any students who they thought might cause any particular trouble, lock down the labs so we couldn’t access our experiments.  They would have broken the news to us in a way that they could manage.  I can tell you this because we knew.  We put the letter up on the bulletin board, by way of a colleague.”

Murmurs and concern swept over the crowd.

Before it could take hold, before the crowd could direct that pent up frustration at the student council, the student council president took a half step forward, raising his hands.  The murmuring died down.

“We heard whispers before the semester even started, we found out for certain only a month ago.  We’ve been debating this for a long time and when we came to a decision, we decided to do it this way.  So you could all know and you could make your decisions instead of the Academy making it for you.”

It was so nice to work with people who were good at what they did.  Both student council president and vice president were people who had talked to crowds before.  They’d been filled in before this, and they adapted to new information and necessities easily.

Not on Mauer’s level, obviously, but I really liked how the vice president had worked the mention of the experiments being locked away in the middle of that one statement, then moved away from it.  I’d written it down to get her to drop that seed, but she had actually done it gracefully enough that she had to have known what it was I was intending.

“Our focus has always been you students,” the student council vice president said.  She raised her voice where I imagined Mauer might have lowered it to sound more intimate.  She clenched a fist and it seemed somewhat ineffectual.  But there was honesty in her not being perfect.  “I know that sounds sappy and lame, and a lot of you won’t believe me.  We have spent hours and hours down on the knoll where we meet, debating what we can do for you.  For a lot of you, we’re the only people who have rooted for you that aren’t your families, and we’ll be the only ones who root for you until you build a family for yourselves.  We wanted this school to be a good school for all of us.”

I winced a bit at that last segment.  Family wasn’t what we needed people to be focusing on when we were trying to get them to do the reckless thing and run away with Sylvester’s rebellion.

“With that in mind,” she said, speaking louder, “please take what I say with the deathly seriousness I mean it!  Stay together!  Be safe, but don’t take ‘safe’ to mean you have to be happy about this!  Believe me, your student council certainly isn’t!”

And with that, the crowd started shouting again.  More of a group than a series of individuals.

I saluted the student council and let them continue to reassure the students, drawing them together into a unit while shaping the frustration with the Academy and the nature of the danger.  The Treasurer started speaking again, talking about what to do in case of gas, if things went that far.

Things would go that far.

There was more to do, but it had to wait.  In the meantime, I moved through the outskirts of the crowd.

One fellow stood off to one side, arms folded, eyes on the ground, while he leaned against a wall.  A matter of three or four feet separated him from the rest of the crowd, but from his body language, it might as well have been a mile.

He was a muscular guy with a many-times broken nose that had flattened out at the bridge.  Those two things put together might have explained the distance and disconnection as people avoided the tough guy.  But if it did, then those people weren’t really paying attention.  The look on his face was painful to see.

He wasn’t seeing or hearing any of this.

The student council was breaking up, mingling at the front of the crowd instead of holding the stage.  The throng had leadership.  People were taking up a chant, and the student council let them.

Broken-nose pulled away from the wall as if he’d been stuck there with something tacky and he needed some force to do it.  I had to jog to catch up to him, at which point I started walking alongside him.  He was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice me right away.  When he did, he looked almost animal, and it was a kicked animal at the end of its tether.  One that was liable to bite.

“Want a job?” I asked him, raising my voice to be heard.

The bite didn’t happen.  Confusion crossed his features.

I shrugged.  “Making an offer.”

“Fuck you on about?” he asked.  A few heads turned to glance our way, he was so loud.

“I’m giving you an option.  I’m offering you work.  Do you have anything left to lose by giving it a shot?”

“What the fuck do you know about me?”

“I’m good at reading people!” I said, taking the foul language in stride.  I did my best to look disarming.

“Not thinking about that right now,” he said.  “Got family to go back to.”

I saw that look again.  He wasn’t staring blindly into empty space anymore, but the darkness was there.

“Fuck family,” I said.  “Look after yourself first.”

“Fuck family?” he asked, bristling.  “You don’t get to tell me that.  I’ve got a sister I care about.”

“With your parents?  Or is she alone?  Because we could look after her too.”

“With my mom and da.  They’re going to be ashamed of me for all this, even if it’sn’t my fault,” he said.  Then he came to, and went on the offensive, “What the fuck are you on my case about?”

“Trying to help,” I said.  “Fuck your mom and da.  You look after you.  Come on.  Put off going home.  Work for me, get some experience, you can leave at any time.  Travel some, spend some time with people your age.  Then when you feel like you can face down your da and your mom like a proper man, you go and you see your sister again.”

“Nah,” he said.  He shook his head like there was something clinging to it that he wanted to get loose.  “Nah, it’s not that simple.”

“It’s not!” I said.  I had to raise my voice to be heard over the crowd.  “How’s about you work for me for today only?  Just until it’s time to sleep?  Twenty crown dollars for a day’s work.  You can use some of that for yourself, some for a present for your sister, and have lots left over.  If you want more, you can stick around, keep working for me.”

He shook his head.

So much was happening, time was tight, and I couldn’t spend too much time on tasks like this…

Lillian would have wanted me to look after others.

I was patient.  I waited, thumbs hooked into my pockets.

“Twenty?”

“Twenty,” I said.  “You just have to put up with me for today.”

“Where’s someone your age come up with that much money?”

I reached into a pocket, and fished out my wallet.  I picked out the money in dollars and half-dollar bills, and showed him.  Then I split the twenty in half and pushed it into his pocket.

“Ten to start.  Ten when you finish for the day.”

“That’s a lot more than twenty in your wallet there.”

I grinned again, content that I’d changed his mind.  “What’s your name?”

“Rudy.”

“I’m Sylvester.  You work until we finish tonight, then give me your answer tomorrow about whether you want to keep working for me, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Say it.  So I know you heard!” I said, raising my voice again.

“I work until tonight.  Tell you tomorrow,” he said.

I indicated Rudy should follow, and started through the crowd again.

He followed.

I searched the crowd.  The shape of things made for a kind of geographic correlation to mental states and approaches.  The people nearer the front of the crowd were a very different type than the people at the back.  Some people banded together in groups, others stood apart, and others moved through the crowd, and all of that said something about psychology.

I moved around the outer fringes.  Among people who were invested enough to be here but disengaged.  They came in a number of varieties.  The witnesses who were here because something was happening, the skeptical, and those who came as part of a group and were seeing their friends go in a very different direction.  There were others.

Among those others was a narrower selection.  Those who’d come looking for an answer.  They remained on the very periphery because they hadn’t found it.  Rudy was one of them.  I walked around the entire left flank of the crowd, the rear side, and almost the entire length of the right side before I saw another.

A girl was fighting with a friend.  Her friend was frustrated with her, pulling at her arm while she was bent over as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders.

With the crowd being what it was, Rudy and I were able to draw within arm’s reach of them without them paying any attention to us.

“You’re being so lame.”

“Just leave me alone.  Go!  You want to go so bad, go.”

“I’m trying to be a friend.”

“Just go!  Please!  I’m okay.”

“Look me in the eye.  I want to see you’re okay..”

She looked up and moist but tearless eyes met her friend’s.  They were far from okay.

“You’re sure?” her friend asked.

The reluctant girl gave a one-shoulder shrug that hitched a little, as if she was so tense that there was a kink in the works.  “I’ll manage.”

“Really really sure?”

“Go.  Lust after your boy.  Be happy, be angry.  Do whatever.  I’ll manage.  But I don’t feel like getting lost in a crowd.”

“I’ll find you after, okay?”

“Okay,” the reluctant girl said.  She flashed a smile.

Her friend disappeared into the mob.

I gestured for Rudy to wait, and approached the reluctant girl, positioning myself to get her attention.

Her hands kept rubbing at a runny nose or grabbing at a strand of her long hair, oftentimes two hands at once.  It took her a second to see me, and she flashed a polite smile my way when she did.

“You don’t have to smile for me,” I said, leaning in to speak into her ear and be heard.

She gave me a look, as if she’d misheard or misunderstood me.

I leaned in again.  “It’s not right.  It sucks.”

As I leaned away, both of her hands were already at her hair, pulling one lock into strands as if she was going to braid it, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t devote the attention to the task.  She nodded and sniffed.

I leaned in once more, and as gently as I could, I asked, “Do you need a shoulder to cry on?”

She reacted as if I’d slapped her.

The tears followed soon after.

I didn’t want to offer my arms and spook her, so soon after tearing down the only layer of defense she’d had, even if it had been as fragile as wet paper.  I looked over my shoulder, looking for her friend.  I might have to send Rudy.

Then she lurched forward, one mini-step that crossed half the distance between us, before she bounced away, hesitant.

I put my arms out and wrapped her in a tight hug.

Odd, to offer such a thing.  Odd, for someone to accept the offer.  As the saying went, any port in a storm.

The storm was raging right now.

“S’alright,” I murmured.

Rudy stood off to one side, looking very puzzled.  I gestured for him to wait.  The crowd looked like it was moving, heading in the direction of the Academy’s main buildings.  If something happened, that was fine.  So long as the key elements remained in play.  They could lynch Yates for all I cared.  The Horse would probably avoid such a fate.

The rooftop girls and some delinquent groups would steer the destruction and keep things from getting too out of control, because they were the out-of-control element.

This was fine.

It took a couple of minutes for the girl to stop crying into my shoulder.  She’d noticed the mob leaving.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” I said.  “How do you feel?”

“My friend left.”

I nodded.  “Everyone’s preoccupied.  I wouldn’t blame her too much.”

“Except you,” she said.  “Who are you?”

“Sylvester,” I said.  “My buddy here is Ru…dy?”

“Rudy, yeah,” Rudy said.

The big, tough looking guy seemed to put her less at ease rather than more at ease.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.  “I’ll leave you alone.  Thank you for the shoulder.  I’m just going to go back to my dorm room and think.”

“The shoulder was freely offered, no need for thanks,” I told her.  “Listen, I’m walking in the same direction the crowd is.  How’s about I walk with you, and we go find your friend?  We’ll reunite you two, I’ll give her a smack upside the head, and she can give you that shoulder to cry on for a longer-term basis.”

The crying girl gave me a wary look.

“I’ve got a complicated situation going on and I’m not looking to pester girls, and Rudy here is more concerned about his sister than about the ladies, honest.”

“The way you say that makes me sound like I’ve got dishonest intentions about my sister,” Rudy said.

“No idea what you mean,” I told him.

“Who are you?” the girl asked, giving me a more serious look.

“A bystander,” I said.  “I heard you tell your friend you were alright, and it was a really, really bad lie, okay?  I’m good at sussing out truth from lie, and that one was child’s play.  I don’t think you should go back to your dorm room and be not-alright all on your lonesome there.”

She took that in, digested it, and then gave me a small nod.

“I’m Sylvester,” I reminded her.

“Helen,” she said.

“Oh, that’s going to confuse me,” I said.  “I know a Helen.  Do you have any nicknames?”

“Kind of?  Friends at my last school called me Possum.”

Possum?” I asked.

“It’s a long story, and we knew each other from prep.  We were immature kids and there were lots of long stories, and this one stuck.  I know it’s a bad nickname, but it was the first thing that came to mind.”

“See, now I want to get to know you, so I can hear that story,” I said.  “It’s not bad at all as nicknames go.  In my humble opinion, anyone worth knowing would agree on that.”

I could see something faint change in the region of her eyes as I said that.

“You couldn’t get it to catch on with your friends here, huh?” I asked.

“No,” she said.  “I didn’t say anything about that, though.”

“You didn’t need to,” I said.

“He’s good at reading people,” Rudy said.

“And the fact of the matter is,” I said, “Teenagers are dumb.  Really really dumb.  I and many scars I have and haven’t had removed can testify on that front.  And some, even some who might well be very good friends, can be really, really dumb and fail to see what a great nickname Possum is.  Right, Rudy?  Back me up here.”

“It’s alright,” Rudy said.

“Thank you.”

“My friend aren’t that good.  They’re sort of…”

“Boy crazy?  Distractable?  Oblivious?”

“Preoccupied, like you said before,” Possum volunteered.  “I think that’s the generous way of saying it.”

“Listen, would your friend-”  I paused pausing to interrupt myself, “One sec, would you walk with me, miss Possum?”

I offered my elbow.  She took my arm, latching on with both arms, much as she’d clung to me to cry on my shoulder.

We walked, with Rudy trailing a step behind.

“If I outright told your friend you needed a proper hug and cry, would she be a friend?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Possum said.  Then, quieter, shy, she added, “But I’d be embarrassed.”

“We’ll see about it either way,” I said.

With her clinging to me, I was able to set the pace, and I set a pace where we were able to catch up to the crowd.  Already, there were a few signs of broken windows on buildings with lettering marking them as being Academy.

Broken windows were fine.

“How do you do that?” Rudy asked.

“Do what?”

“Back when you said ‘you couldn’t get your friends to like the nickname’ or whatever,” Rudy said.

“What about it?”

“You did it with her.  Found her in the crowd, knew exactly what to say.”

“I’m just paying attention,” I said.  “That’s all.”

“You did it with me.  You didn’t offer me a shoulder to cry on.  But what you said, it’s like you read my mind.”

“Nah,” I said.  “The way you hold yourself.  Are your arms or hands up?  Probably guarded.  Hunched over or looking down?  Then there’s the way your expression changes, both the major parts and how they go together, and the small-scale changes.  A twitch here, a movement there, or tension in another place.  It communicates a lot.  Tone, word choice, context, and what your face is doing while you talk, there’s obviously a lot there.”

“I can’t tell if you’re an angel or a devil,” Rudy said.

I smiled.

“You don’t hear much talk like that nowadays,” Possum said.

“I grew up in a town so small we joke the Crown didn’t see us when it took over,” Rudy said.  “Some churching, still.”

“That’s marvelous,” Possum said.  “And so is being able to study all of those things.”

I smiled at her again.

It was a lie, though.  Yes, those things factored in.  Yes, they were something I’d seen in retrospect.  But I really hadn’t had to look that hard.  There had been something dark at play in their eyes.  I imagined Death was there.

There wasn’t much talk of that particular horseman these days either.  Jessie’s influence more than anything.  Or Jamie’s.  One of the books they’d been talking about at some point, though that one had had a different horseman as the focus.

There were more students walking in the opposite direction of us now.

“Greater concentration of students,” I said, indicating.  “Can you hear it?  A shift in the sound of the mob?”

“No,” Rudy said.  Possum shook her head, agreeing with Rudy.

“Look at the way those students are moving.  They keep looking back.  They keep their hands up, but it’s fleeting.  Reach up to tug at the uniform jacket, there.  Hand on head there.  Defensive, but not a steady defense.  They’re not sure what to do with themselves,” I said.

“Why?” Rudy asked.

“Something’s happening.  Thinking about context, that something is probably that the Academy is responding to the riot.”

“You say that, but we’re still walking in that direction,” Rudy said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Is that a problem?”

“Nah,” he said.  “Just making sure.”

Possum clutched my arm tighter.

My suspicions were correct.  The Academy was in play, and much as I’d observed outside of the library, there were more forces present than what Beattle should have been able to provide on its own.  The crowd was maintaining its own momentum.  It shed some of its people, yes, but others were joining in from elsewhere, trickling in from different places in this scattered Academy to vent their frustrations.  Things would change when student and Academy both brought their experiments to the table.

The Academy would have the upper hand then.  I’d need to turn the tables more decisively before then.  I was suspicious the student rebellion wouldn’t be quashed entirely, but we’d lose far too many people this way.

“Come on,” I said.  “We’ll find your friend, and then I’ve got work to do.”

“Work,” Rudy said.

“If you’re not keen on doing something like this in particular, it’s fine,” I told him.  “Take the ten dollars.  Buy your sister something nice, make that what you do tomorrow.”

“Nah,” he said.

“Nah,” I echoed him.

“I’m with you if you need me,” he said.

“Good answer,” I said.

And an answer I’m glad to have, I thought, as I disengaged from Possum and stepped up onto a short wall to get a better vantage point to see over the crowd.

The Academy security forces were in the process of dragging the student council into a carriage, while others held the students back.

“The student council went and got themselves captured,” I said, hopping down from the wall.  “We’ll track ’em back to wherever they’re holding people.  There’s someone else there I want to see to, while I’m at it.  Two people, if I’m lucky.  I went and recruited another person with the same name as an old friend of mine, and I left him behind.  With some luck he’ll be found there.”

“You want to break into a jail?” Rudy asked.

“Is it an actual jail-jail?” I asked.

“I imagine so.  Falls within the outer reaches of the Academy sprawl,” Rudy said.

I puffed out my cheeks for a moment, then nodded.  “I’ll manage.”

I spotted one of the rooftop girls in the crowd and signaled her.

I’d told them to keep an eye out.  They would have already touched base with a lot of the delinquents and questionable sorts the Rank hadn’t messed with.

The ball is rolling.  It’s going to take far, far more than this to stop it, I thought.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.11 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I took notes in a notebook I had borrowed while I watched people come and go from the local jail.

We were a twenty minute walk from the Academy center and I could hear the noise the students were generating.  Smoke was rising from one point, and the riot was in full swing.  Only a few thousand students, all in all, but they weren’t happy.

The people I’d gathered for this particular task looked restless.  They wanted and expected to be out there, working alongside the rioters.

These were the delinquents, along with Rudy and Possum.  I’d given Rudy the task of finding Possum’s friend and told him to meet up with me later, and he’d ended up bringing her with.  The friend hadn’t been found, and she had decided to stick around.

I wasn’t sure I agreed with her being a part of this, but I could only do so much at one time.

A carriage pulled up.  Two security officers strongarmed someone who looked like they’d taken a combat drug.  They weren’t the first, and they wouldn’t be the last.  Combat drugs were cost effective for a small Academy like this one.

I made a note, circled the description and drawing of the guard driving the carriage, and drew lines connecting it to other mentions.  I drew a cross-hatch and made a line connect it to the cheek of his drawn face.

Looking around, I saw Rudy standing close by.  I moved his arm, checked his watch, and then went back to my notebook to add a note about the time.  Two o’clock shadow.

Rudy, looking over my shoulder, commented, “When I first saw you taking notes, I thought it was a good thing.  Then I looked and I saw what you were actually doing, and I lost all of the confidence I’d gained in you and then some.”

I looked down at my notebook.  There were drawn faces with key features for distinguishing the guards, with nicknames attached.  Text was organized into blocks, and shapes, symbols such as circles, diamonds and triangles served as shorthand.  Lines connected ideas, with some thinner, some thicker or reinforced, and some unintentionally sketchy.  More shorthand shapes surrounded or were drawn to intersect different parts of what I’d laid out.  It was a very crowded page.

I turned the page over, tilting my head to look at the image on the backside.  Lines extended to the edge of the page and wrapped around to refer to text and the sketched out image of the jail itself.

“It’s not that bad,” I said.  “My memory is a weak point, and sometimes when I’m juggling something bigger I’ll do this so I don’t need to devote as much brainspace to doing what I’m doing.  A representation of my thinking.”

“You have very disorganized thinking,” Rudy commented.

“It’s actually very organized,” I said.  “Look, see, this shape-”

“Upside-down ‘L’ shape?”

“A gun, come on,” I said, annoyed.  “See the trigger?”

“It’s very sketchy, so it’s hard to tell.”

“It’s sketchy because I’m not sure if the gun exists.  But the way the scowling man carries himself and wears his jacket, I’m reasonably sure, so it gets a mention.  So there’s a gun, and it’s drawn with a line connecting it to the block of text about his behavior.  He’s aggressive.  We’ve seen him three times.  Always the first one to the carriage, right?  He’s like a stitched fresh from the wire, despite the scruff on his cheeks suggesting he got up early this morning.  And the line passes through this text-”

“Which makes the text hard to read, I have to say.”

“Exactly!  On purpose!  Because that’s text about his buddy, and I put the text there in advance so I could sort of cross it out if I wanted to, which I suspected I might do.  Now look how it also touches the down-triangle.”

Rudy screwed his eyes into a fierce squint.

“Okay, so the down triangle is weakness.  Just like up triangles are strengths and diamonds are resources and so on.  All very logical when you think about it.”

Rudy stared at it, his eye searching the page.  I turned the page to show him how it connected to the back.

“Nah,” he decided.

“Yah!” I countered, emulating his tone.  “Now look, here’s the neat part.  Draw a curve, imagine a line, a course of action that touches on all these shapes in a row.  Down triangle, down triangle, down triangle, down triangle… all of it clustered around things that relate to this side of the building.  See where I’m going with this?”

“Nah.”

“This is how we break them.  The up arrows, their advantages, like gun, like this carriage tends to have a lot of uniforms, they flow this way.  It crosses here-”

“I think,” Rudy interrupted me, “That the longer you try to explain it to me, the less I”ll understand it or believe in you.”

I frowned at him.

“I think,” he said, very firmly, as if he wanted to soften the blow.

“I need you to concede that it’s actually a brilliant piece of work.  Then I’ll leave you alone,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said.  “I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt.”

“Okay,” I said.  I paused.  “Tell me it’s really quite sophisticated.”

“That might be stretching the truth.”

“Lie to me if you have to.  I just want to hear it.”

“It’s not a lie either,” he said.  “But fine.  It’s really quite sophisticated.”

I grinned.

I glanced at my delinquents, then turned a few pages in the notebook, looking over my notes for them.  A list of faces, names, nicknames, and some names underlined where I’d remembered them long enough to write them down.  Rudy was one.

“Why does someone as smart of you need a cheat sheet for the people working under him?”

“Like I said, my memory isn’t great,” I said.  I glanced at the delinquent king and the top rooftop girl, then checked the sheet.

“I have down triangles around my head.”

“Yep,” I said.  I moved my hand so my thumb blocked the associated text.  “You have up triangles too.”

“You don’t need to block the words.  I can’t read your handwriting,” Rudy said.

I snapped my head around to look at him.  “Hey.  Just struck me, how’s our Possum doing?”

“She’s good.”

“Why don’t you check on her?” I asked.

“If you want me to go away, I’ll go away,” Rudy said.

“No, no,” I said, lying.  “But why don’t you go check on her?  Help her keep watch.  I don’t want her to be alone for any long stretches.”

“Arright,” Rudy said.

“Glad to have you with,” I said, as he walked away.  “Really.  Thanks.”

His reply was unintelligible.

I looked down at the notebook, then made a note by Rudy’s face.

Honest.  Calls me on my shit.

I spent longer than I would have liked to admit when it came to deciding what kind of triangle to draw.  I ended up drawing two overlapping ones.

The delinquent king was Neck.  He made a pair with Bea, the top rooftop girl.  They were, by the whisperings I’d caught and a number of observations I’d made, a troublesome pair when put together, and hard to put apart.  From the moment that we’d gotten this show on the road, they’d been a pair.  Old colleagues, friend rather than fancy, and each one prone to making the other behave badly.

Bea was the top girl because the others were scared of her when she was alone.  She was far scarier when paired with Neck.  She had been over the top angry long before this whole thing unfolded, I suspected, and Neck was fuel on the fire.  She validated him and I suspected she knew him better than anyone and she remained fond of him, which had to matter a lot to him, when he was an odd sort.

When just about anyone he knew talked to him, they used a different nickname, with only Neck really coming up more than once or twice.  Neck, Cake, Ethel, Nook, Nookie, and one I hadn’t quite heard straight that might have been ‘Vamp’ or Van or Vam.  The ‘Neck’ nick was more to do with the slang for kiss than for being a thick-necked Bruno.  He was as skinny as I was, just as well dressed, but he was also tall and good looking.

I’d seen some of his type in Tynewear.  Unusual and he carried a knife to defend his unusualness.

Which was enough said.

“Neck,” I said.  “Bea.  How would you like to set some fires today?”

Bea smiled in response, eyes glittering.

“Or throw a can of gas and place it exactly where we need it?”

“My throwing arm is better than his,” Bea said.

“My girl is a chronic liar,” Neck said, putting an arm around Bea’s shoulders, closer to a headlock than a gesture of affection, pulling her off balance.  “I’ll do the throwing.”

“I was on a sports team, once upon a time,” Bea said, hand on Neck’s chest.

They could only easily and comfortably do the one-arm headlock and hug and the hand on the chest because there was no attraction between them.

“Once upon a time,” Neck ruminated on the words.  “I hate to break it to you, Bea knees, but you’re the furthest thing from a fairy tale princess, and I’m still better at throwing.”

“If you mess this up, I’ll never let you live this down,” she threatened him.

I retrieved the last of my gas canisters, a mason jar and a bottle, and handed them over.

“The jar goes at the base of that window there.  Throw it hard enough that it breaks.  Hold on to the bottle.  If they come in with horses, hm..”

I paused, looking over my notes.  I held the book so others couldn’t see it.

“What about the horses?” Neck asked.

“Okay, hold on to it for the second batch of horses.  I need you to go find a carriage with a stitched horse.  Pay the owner…”

I trailed off, grabbing my wallet, and I handed over a wad of bills.

“…And then wait.  When they pull up with a horse and carriage, that’s when we start.  You throw the jar, I’ll do my thing, and then we wait.  When we’re reasonably sure they’ve mustered their forces, you take the carriage you bought, and you get that horse riding straight for the carriage they parked out front.  Are you with me so far?  Collision course.”

“Doable.  We just set it going and hop off?”

“Yep.  Set it on fire at some point before it arrives.  It’ll be more dramatic.  Then scram, get that head start.  If they come after you with another carriage and horses, throw down the bottle.  It’ll muck them up.”

“Got it,” Bea said.

“I need some bodies stationed on rooftops.  Pick out your capable people, get them to figure out which ones they can access.  Spread them out.  The rooftops need to be ones where they can actually climb up, yeah, but also where they can hide until later or where they can easily un-access.  It kind of defeats the purpose of a jail breakout if half of us end up getting caught and imprisoned.  You get caught here, the odds aren’t good… not that they’re liable to keep anyone or everyone either way.  I don’t think they can afford to, with the hit they’re about to take.”

“You want the rooftop girls on the rooftops?” Bea asked, with a smile.

I blinked.  “I didn’t even make the connection.  Yes.  Absolutely.  Three major hand signs, like this, this, and this.  For danger, caution, and clear.”

“I’ll pass it on,” Bea said.

“Excellent.  We’ll make rebels out of you yet.”

Neck said, “We’re already rebels.  But if you make us rebellion and don’t make us regret it, then that’s perfect.”

“Perfect,” I said.  “I told you where to meet when all is said and done, if anyone gets split up, or when you’ve burned one horse carriage and smoked any pursuers?”

“This would be the third time you’ve asked,” Bea said.  “We got it.”

“Good,” I said.  I looked around.  “Get to it.  I’ll see you there.”

Rudy and Possum were together, approaching.

“A task for you, Rudy,” I said.  “I need you to go to this address.  Check the coast is clear, that you can go there without any fuss.  We’re going to start gravitating in that direction over time.  If there are any problems, then, hm…”

Rudy waited patiently.

I got my bag, rummaged in it, and got chalk.

“Big, bold, white letters on an easy to see surface.  Write ‘I love rabbits.'”

“Rabbits?” Possum asked.

“Absolutely.  Then just hang out around there.  The rabbit will find you.  Tell him what’s going on, and he’ll let everyone important know, myself included.”

Rudy gave me a long, critical look.

“The rabbit is real,” I said.  “I promise.”

“Okay,” he said.

“But don’t call him a rabbit.  I mean, he’s clearly a rabbit, but don’t call him a rabbit.”

Rudy returned to the long, critical look.

I avoided the look by turning my attention to Possum.  “How are you managing?”

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” she said.  Then she amended it to, “Really overwhelmed.”

“Don’t be,” I said.  “I won’t promise I won’t put you in the line of fire, because every time I say that, I do the opposite.  So just rest assured I have no plans to put anyone in danger that doesn’t want to be in danger.”

“Plans,” Rudy said.

I glanced at him, then back to Possum.  “I’ll have you know that I showed my plans to Rudy, and he said they were downright sophisticated.

“I did,” Rudy said, with zero enthusiasm.

Possum nodded.

“Want to be on watch?” I asked her.  “Or I can send you somewhere further away.”

“Can I go with him?” Possum asked.

I looked at her, then at Rudy.

Was there a line extending between them?  Was it sketchy or bold or both?

“I want to see the rabbit you’re talking about,” she said.  “Who gets very easily offended.  I’m imagining something adorable.”

I thought of Pierre.  Adorable wasn’t what came to mind.  The head that looked like a badly taxidermied rabbit head, expression that of a rabbit mid-stroke, eyes bugging out, the sheer height of him, and how it all made him an eerie figure…

“He’s a good friend and an excellent messenger…” I said, trailing off.  I tried to think of a way to put it politely.  Pierre was a friend, but he was a queer one, and I didn’t like to talk poorly of friends, in case it got around to them.  Especially when it came to dealing with more sensitive recruits, who would hear me say something negative about one person and then imagine me saying things about them behind their backs.

So, how to say that Pierre was a bit disconcerting, without calling him disconcerting?  How did I outright reject the notion that he was ‘cute’?

“Sylvester,” Bea said.

“Hm?” I asked.

“I gave the instructions to the girls.  They’re going to the rooftops now.  Neck is looking for the carriage.”

“Good,” I said.  “Other groups are in place?  Ready to cause a stir?”

She nodded.

“That should be my cue to get going.  I don’t want to let things get ahead of me.  Do buy the carriage, don’t steal it and pocket the money.  I’ll know.”

She gave one pocket of her coat a pat.  “There’s a reason I have the money.  I know Neck.  I’ll do things as instructed.  You’ve already stressed how important that is.”

I nodded.

I turned my attention to Rudy and Possum.  “Go on.  No need to hang around on my account.  Be good, be safe.  No need to be adventurous.”

Rudy nodded.  I watched them go, and saw how he talked with Possum.

That was nice.  They were probably talking about me, but that was nice.

I turned my attention to the jail, and looked down at my notebook.

I missed Jessie.  Jessie would have been useful here.  Timing, layout, it was the key element missing from my notes.  I could write things down and I could intuit, but I couldn’t do what Jessie did.  I couldn’t even approximate what Jessie did.

Jessie recalled things and was slow to adjust.

I was quick at adjustment, but I didn’t recall.

Let’s do this fast, do it well, and impress the new recruits.

I chose my angle carefully as I approached the station.  I crossed the street using a path that would let only barred windows see me.  The people on the other side would be the jailed rather than the jailers.  I then walked so my arm brushed against the side of the building, casually and calmly, too close to the ground to be easily seen from any of the windows overhead.

Grabbing the edge of a planter, I dragged it ten feet and moved it further from the building.  It made noise, but that was a minor thing.  It held a shrub, but the cold weather had stripped it of half its leaves.  The remainder littered the planter itself.

I did the same for the next planter, then another.

Through the wall and window, I heard the screech of a chair on floor and I ducked back and hugged the wall.  I moved on quickly, no doubt while curious eyes scanned the area and tried to figure out what the sound had been.

Delinquents and rooftop girls huddled on rooftops and standing in alleys across the street watched, puzzled.

I circled around to the other side of the building, and I found the side building of the jail where carriages were often parked.  There was only space for two carriages and their horses.  It was empty, the door to outside open, the door to inside secured.

I’d hoped that some of the horses here would be living ones, and that there would be hay and other things.  But the spaces where the horses would stand were unsecured, the floor hayless, and the wall set up with the wires and connectors required to provide a voltaic charge to the systems of a stitched.

I had to climb up a bit to get to a good vantage point to reach the wires.  I then started hauling them free of the wall.  They were secured into place with wooden pegs, which were nailed to the wall in turn, but the nails and the pegs were designed to bear the weight of the wire, not the weight of an adolescent male pulling in a complete other direction.

The peg popped out of the wall.  My weight dropping to the ground helped pull another two down.

From there, I had enough slack to free the remainder of the wire.  A bit of twisting, unwinding, pulling, and general abuse got the length of wire free.  It thrummed in my hand, sometimes even feeling uncomfortably thrummy, depending on where I touched the wire.

Awkward, awful stopgap technologies.

I went to work, rigging one coil of wire to the door handle, my heart pumping as I worked.  I wrapped the insulated part around first, then, working carefully, touching only the insulated parts, I guided the exposed end through to knot it, and into the gap between knob and door fixture.

The other set of wire, I worked to pin against the floor, using tools and other stray items.  I made sure that it was sufficiently exposed.

Then I emptied the buckets of chemicals for the stitched onto the floor of the stable, backing away swiftly as the puddle grew.

As the puddle reached the wire on the ground, there was a violent crackle, fizzle, and pop.  It continued making all sorts of little violent noises as I backed swiftly away, moving on.

Stepping out, I could see girls on the rooftops here and there.  They had arms out, and they were gesturing.

The carriages were coming.

I moved quickly.

The one proper exit that wasn’t through the front door had been booby trapped.  Next were the planters.  I piled up the leaves I scavenged from piles on the ground, containing them in the planters.  The dry fall leaves and the wood made for fine tinder.  The near-dead shrubs themselves would burn, hopefully.

The repositioned planters produced smoke, and the smoke blew near and in front of windows.  It made for a more dramatic effect.

I moved on.  Past the stable, circling around to the back of the building.

I could hear the curses and swears.  There were shouts.

The jar had been thrown.

I scaled the wall while the attention of the jail’s staff was on the front of the building and the smoke to the side.

There were only a few windows without any bars over them.  One was high up.  It was locked, but I could handle locks.

I had relied on intuition here, spotting the window and reasoning where it might lead, and intuition had served me well.  The office was nice, spacious, and had windows on two sides.  The door was heavy and fortified.  There were filing cabinets along the wall, and there was a great deal of paperwork across the desk, which had two different lamps on it.

I looted the drawers, found nothing, and moved on, unlocking and opening the door just enough to peer outside, before opening it wide.

With everything going on, the same people who would be staffing the jail would be handling the riot or getting the last few batches of people that had been put into custody.  Even with all hands now on deck, the staff being stretched thin and the distraction at the front and side meant that I had a clear path.

I walked through the staff area with no trouble.  I checked desks and the coats that were on pegs until I found a keyring.  With this many keys, I knew what it was for.

Outside, I heard the crash as the burning carriage collided with the other carriage.  I heard running footsteps, and stepped behind a filing cabinet as three men in uniform ran past.

Three men, I made a mental note.

I found the area with the cells.

Half of the occupants wore school uniforms.  Rioters.  Delinquents.

Some voices raised as they saw me, and I raised a hand, shushing them.  Too late.

“Shut up!” a guard called out.  He hadn’t left with his friends.  “Who’s there!?”

The ones inside were armed with sticks, not guns.  I stayed where I was, facing the man.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.  “Did you get out of your cell?”

I stretched a bit, rolling my shoulders, giving him my darkest stare.

He reached for his belt, and he drew his truncheon.

The student council president and vice president were standing at the bars of their cell, watching.  There were two members of the Greenhouse Gang that had been spreading the word, and there were others who looked more like delinquents.  Ones we’d had stirring the pot.

They’d done a good job to work against what we were trying to do.

“If I don’t get a good answer out of you, I’m going to have to take measures,” the guard said.  He smacked the truncheon into one palm, then, stone faced, stern, he added, “Don’t make me take measures, kid.  It’s been a shitty enough day already, I don’t want some kid with the teeth smashed out of his face on my conscience.

There was a progression.  Two access points to the building.  The disaster happened at the front.  The prison’s carriages were parked out front so that prisoners had the shortest possible walk to the front door.  The collision, with luck, would make accessing the door hard.  Fire had a way of scaring people.

They would realize what was up.  That this was a distraction, all arranged.  They would pass around the side, possibly running into others, who were investigating the burning shrubs, too far away from the building for the fire to actually set the building itself aflame.  The carriage out front might, but there would be enough people out there that they’d probably handle it before it got too bad.

They would reach the side of the building, and they would see the water, the wires, the crackling.

As a trap, it was mild.  But in terms of getting the result and effect I wanted…

I spread my arms, dramatic.

“What’s this?” he asked.

I waited, patient.

“Final warning, boyo.”

He took a step toward me, and when I didn’t scare, he took another.

Eight seconds had passed from when I’d raised my arms.

If this went on for too much longer, I was going to look so dumb.

The power went out, the lights dying abruptly, with nary a flicker.  Disabling the booby trap and freeing them to enter the building.

“There we go,” I said.  I chuckled, loud, mocking, and the prisoners picked up the sound, laughing as well, cheering.

The sound covered my running footsteps as I moved to one side of the man, using darkness and gloom to make myself hard to track.

He wasn’t looking at me.  His eye was on the walls of prisoners.

I stuck my elbow out, hand braced at my shoulder, and drove myself full force into his lower stomach.  He crashed into the bars of the nearest cell.

Hands reached out and grabbed him, pulling at uniform, seizing his arms.

“Hold him.  Keep him safe.  We’re going to want to use our hostages carefully.  Student council, if you’d take these?”

I threw the keys to the student council’s cell.  Then I got another ring of keys from the guard we’d secured.

By the time the three men returned to the cells with the rest of the group with them, half of the cells had emptied and more were in the works.

Standing with only the light from a scant few windows illuminating us, I gave the signal, and it got a response from both sides.  The guards ran, and the prisoners charged.

I tucked my notebook in between the waist of my slacks and my side, fixed my jacket to cover it, drew my weapon, and led the exodus from the jail.

A few more recruits, now.

The student council fell in step with me.

Time to check on Jessie and Fray.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.12 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The pent-up aggression of the students was clear, and not helped by their brief incarceration.

They had listened to me as I’d outlined where to go and what to do.  The uniforms had come in, and the students had swept in.  Out of hiding places, out from around corners, and cutting off escape routes.

The guards had truncheons, the students and other prisoners had improvised weapons and sheer numbers at their disposal.

“Take them to the cells,” I said.  “Strip ’em, lock them in.”

“Strip them?” the student council president asked.

I indicated the adult prisoners, who hadn’t been part of the riot.  “You guys are free to get lost, but if you want some money or a position with the rebellion, I can provide that.  Get you lot off to a better start than you’d have on your own.”

I watched as they exchanged looks between them.  Some looks were more wary than others.  I measured them in length and intensity, making a mental note.

“I’ll pay you right now to drag the bodies.  You can decide where you go from there,” I said.

They took a moment to decide.  While they did so, I withdrew my wallet and nudged one injured guard with the toe of my boot.  “Five dollars each.  You and you.”

The men I’d pointed to bent down and started dragging the body back toward the cells.

“Then these two.  You look like big fellas.  Eight dollars to each of you, but each of you drags one person.  Gently.

They took about as long to decide as the first two guys had, but they started dragging the fallen guards.  A student who’d checked on one of the unconscious guards backed off as a prisoner started dragging the man, while the other guard had been only mildly injured.  He was stiff necked and tense as he was taken back to the cells.

In this way, I set most of the adult prisoners to work.

“Hey,” Gordon Two said.  He’d been in one of the back cells.

“Hey,” I said, not taking my eyes off the men doing the carrying.  “Glad to have you with.  It would have been a pain if I had to go find you.”

“Sure thing,” he said.  “The other students were talking about you, you know.  While they were in the cells.”

“Probably,” I said.  I watched as one prisoner ran his fingers through the hair of an unconscious guard, fixing it, as a parent might do for a sleeping child or a child might do for a doll.  “We’ll talk about it later?  I’ll explain then?  Unless you’re going to tell me I have a problem.”

As I said the last bit, I focused on Gordon Two, staring him down.

A problem, in this case, would be him saying that things didn’t add up.  Even calling me out in front of the others.

“If I’m part of this, I want a raise,” he said.

Ah.  Not a problem, exactly.  He wasn’t going to out me as someone independent of Fray.

“We’ll talk about that when I explain everything later, Second Gordon,” I said.  I smiled.  “But that might be something we can arrange.  You’ve been vital.”

He nodded, and he stepped back out of my way as I stepped forward.

I followed the prisoners back in the direction of the cells, while they dragged guards that were varying degrees of beaten, unconscious, and surly.

I took in the scene, watched a few of the jailed men stripping down the uniformed guards.

I drew my gun.

Reaching out, I slammed a jail door shut.  The adult prisoners jumped at the sound, heads turning.

I wheeled around and aimed at another one of them, the prisoner from before, now busy using a bit of cloth to dab at the blood on the unconscious guard’s face.

The lot of them froze.  Students at the door at the end of the hall stared.

“Gut feeling about the two of you is pretty bad,” I said.  “Now I’m asking the other people who’ve been here longer than a day… how right is my gut?  How happy or unhappy would you be to work with the guy I just locked in and the guy I’m holding at gunpoint?”

The reply wasn’t immediate.  Being a narc wasn’t a good thing, even in a jail that wasn’t a proper prison.

“Unhappy,” one man said.  He was the youngest of the non-students.

“Unhappy,” I repeated.

“You can go fuck yourself,” the man who’d been cleaning the guard’s face said.

“There was a reason Hagan was alone in his cell,” Mr. Unhappy said, as if emboldened by the cussing.  “And why the guards handled him in threes and fours.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I looked at Hagan.

Hagan turned, staring me down.

“Yeah, I believe that,” I elaborated.

The look in his eyes was one I tried to dig for when I was making myself look scary.  The cold, dead look, not so far from the look that had been in Rudy and Possum’s eyes.  A look where Death was present.

Except Death wasn’t alone, here, and Death was facing a different direction.

I pulled the trigger.  There were shouts and screams, more shouts from the prisoners, screams from the students at the end of the hall.  Hagan fell over, hollering about the hole in his foot.

“Twenty dollars each to the two men willing to go in that cell and drag the guard out.  Shut the door behind you,” I said.

Good money was good money.  The young guy who’d volunteered the information was quick to jump to the task.  Another guy from another cell joined in.

Hagan swiped at one, and then tried to grab at the body.  As they hauled the uniform back, with Hagan dragged as part of the process, I took hold of the door.

When just Hagan’s hand was sticking out of the door, I swung the door shut.  Hagan pulled his hand back just in the nick of time.

“And this guy?” I asked, indicating the cell with the hangdog-looking prisoner that I’d locked within.  He wasn’t putting up a fight.

“Him?” Mr. Unhappy asked.  “He’s just an asshole.”

Other prisoners and even a number of the students who couldn’t have been in the jail for an hour nodded.  Hangdog continued looking hangdog.  Hagan cussed and swore about the hole in his foot.

I looked over the other prisoners and even gave a glance to a few students.  Nobody stood out.  There were no wary glances that were too long, nor were there any wide berths or odd gaps where people gave others too much space.

“Good enough,” I said.  I turned to go, and the men fell in step behind me.  I watched the students in front of me for reactions, rather than look overly nervous by trying to keep an eye on the prisoners I’d released.

There would be problems with others, some problems that would come up later, but I could count this as another ten recruits, on top of the students I was looking at bringing on board.

I paged through bills and handed out the appropriate amounts to each of the men who’d done the transporting of the guards.  Half of them had pulled on uniforms, others had uniforms with them.

“Stay put,” I said.  “There’re deeper cells, right?”

There were a few nods.  Someone pointed.

“Yeah.  Stay where you are.  The next wagon of officers and rioters bound for jail won’t arrive for a short while, and we can deal with them if they do,” I said.

I took the stairs, descended part of the way, and reached a locked door.  I had to fumble with the keys for a little while before I could make my way through.

A few creatures snarled at me.  Others remained where they were.  The area was built into the foundation, with thick stone walls as long as my arm was from shoulder to fingertip.  The grates at the front of the cells were woven like a basket might be, with one span of space between them for every five spans of metal.  I could stick a finger through, but nothing more.  Each gate had a stack of paper hanging from the wall next to it.  Two different handwriting styles across all of the various stacks, but each detailed the exact nature of the prisoner within.

I found Avis, and I read the notes carefully.

I found the right key and let myself within.

She was bound, still, wings and arms to her body, a metal mask on her face.  Chains attached her to the wall.  She couldn’t even lie down.

She looked up at me.

I sorted through the keyring for one of the smaller keys, the one for handcuffs, and used it on the mask at her face.

The tangle of machinery came free.

“The paper said you had the device removed from your neck,” I commented.

“Yes,” she said, her voice strangled.

“Do you want out, Avis?”

She took in a deep breath, then exhaled.

“If you don’t, I can just leave.  If I was a real asshole, I would, too.  But I didn’t wholly forget how things were when the Duke had you in the cell in Radham.”

Darkness crossed her face.  She shrunk into herself, as much as one could be expected to with the bonds that secured her.

“I would like out,” she said, eyes fixed on some point between my feet, her expression tight.  “Please.”

“I don’t want this to be a continuation of our last encounter.  I don’t want to fight, and I believe you’re capable of it.  That you might have other things or trick secreted away.”

“I don’t remember our last encounter,” she said, staring into space, through my chest.

“I’m talking about at Beattle.”

“So am I.  The combat drug,” she said.  “I take it so I can fool myself into believing I’m still a pacifist in some form.  I become someone else.”

“And you aren’t responsible,” I said.

“So I tell myself.”

I sighed.  Avis did much the same.

“I’m willing to let you out,” I said.  “But I want concessions.  I won’t ask you to betray Fray, but I need you to help me a little.”

“I’ll betray Fray.  She knows I would, in this same circumstance.  But don’t drag this out,” Avis said.  “Don’t waste so much time talking to me that you get us both caught down here.”

“I have a small army upstairs,” I said.  “But fine.  All I need from you is this: you’re going to put your mask back on, and you’re going to play along.  I’ll get you out of here, assign you guards, and…”

I paused, trying to figure out how things unfolded from there.

Avis watched me expectantly, warily.

“…You can escape at that point if you must.  But it would be appreciated if you didn’t.  When Fray and I have exchanged words, I’ll point her in your direction.  You’ll be free to go, and you can carry on doing what you’re doing.”

“That sounds deceptively simple.”

I spread my arms.  “I’m your enemy today, but not in the grand scheme of it all.  We might be allies tomorrow.”

“That sounds deceptively optimistic, incredibly manipulative, and far too philosophical given how very material matters at hand are.”

“I’m cursed to always sound dishonest when I’m telling the truth,” I told her.  “But if you want material, how about I just say this.  I’ll get you out if you play along for now.”

“Please.  I’ll be in your debt.”

“That’s not a condition,” I said, exasperated.

I’ll be in your debt,” Avis said, with an emphasis that strained her already strangled voice.  “You don’t know what it is like to fall into their hands.  To be one of their enemies.  I hope you never do.”

“I’m not long for this world, Avis.  I’ll lose my mind regardless, whatever they end up doing to me.  There’s a mercy in that, maybe.  Or maybe it’s that I’ve been in their hands, and that was bad enough, that’s why I’m not long for this world.  I’ve been their enemy, too, and I’ve just been lucky enough to avoid both being true at the same time.”

“Luck runs out, Sylvester.  Don’t lean on it.”

“I’ll try,” I said.  “I’m going to put your mask back on.  Anything to say or ask before I do?”

She shook her head.  “I’m just glad it’s not a living gag.”

I took the gag and I slipped it back into place.  It had a system for pouring water into so the wearer could be hydrated, but that meant tubes and an arrangement of things to have in place.  I figured it out and locked it.

Freeing her from the wall, I helped her into a standing position.  Then I led her down the hallway to the stairs.  I was careful to support her so she wouldn’t trip with the leg restraints and tumble down the stairs.

Eyes widened as we approached the group of students.

“I need two able-bodied men,” I said.

Two volunteers stepped forward.

“Support her.  Be ready in case she has a fit and starts struggling,” I said.

“What happened to Avis?” the student council president asked.

“She took a combat drug,” I said.  “She, by her own admission, should stay in restraints for at least another few hours.”

I glanced back at Avis, who had a look of faint surprise in her eyes.  Then she nodded.

“That’s a long-lasting drug,” a student remarked.

“None of us do things by halves,” I said.

I indicated that we should walk, and we started making our way toward the exit.

“You two with Avis, and… four students.  You, you, you and you.  You’ll all get a wagon and you’ll head off to… this address,” I said, scribbling on a back page in my notebook and tearing it off.  “Sit with her, wait.  I’ll send a rabbit your way with further notes and instructions.  Keep her in restraints, be patient, you’ll be rewarded for your time.”

I got wary nods in response.

The men didn’t look too eager or happy at the prospect of babysitting her, so I figured we were safe.  The combat drug would likely spook them as well.

“The rest of you prisoners will go to the Academy.  Some of the students here will go with you.  The… six students here.” I said, indicating a group.  “Act like you belong.  Go where the rest of the people in uniform are.  They’ll be holed up in a building somewhere.  Probably with a lot of papers and higher-ups.  Start a fire there.  Stables with stitched horses and Academy or Crown wagons?  Start a fire.  If you think you can get away with it, start talking about being from another group of men who were leveled with gas and parasites.  You’re passing on a warning.  If they get any large batches of students arrested and start heading back to the prison, maybe hitch a ride, saying your wagon burned.  So long as you act like you believe it, keep your gaze steady and your head tall, and keep moving like you’re going someplace and you’re concerned about everything, you’ll be fine.”

“Who is this kid?” one of the prisoners asked, gesturing at me.

“This guy,” I said, “Is Sylvester Lambsbridge.”

“He has wanted posters up in post offices and police stations across the Crown States,” the girl from the Greenhouse Gang said.

“He does,” I said.  “He’s also had to deal with hired mercenaries, hitmen, and experiments when he was out in Tynewear, over in the west coast of the Crown States.  Now, I won’t say that he’s responsible for the fact that Tynewear wasn’t really standing when he left, but I won’t say he’s not responsible either.  Rest assured that he’s a fellow that earned that wanted poster.”

“He also seems to talk about himself in third person,” one student said.

There was a titter of nervous laughter there.  I turned my head to give the student a nod of acknowledgment , smiling.

“Greenhouse Gang,” I said, still walking.  “Where are you?”

Some students stepped forward in the midst of the herd, or they raised hands where they couldn’t find a path to navigate amid the walking group.

“Ralph around?”

“No,” was the reply.

I looked for the sheriff’s daughter and found her.  Brown haired, with hair tucked behind one ear.  “Your name?”

“Mabel.”

“Mabel.  Can I trust you with a task?”

“You can,” she said, and she said it very quickly too.

I drew the second envelope out of my jacket and handed it to her.  “Read it, spread the info, show the envelope for proof if you have to.  It’s time the other students know what’s really going on.”

She nodded, not opening the envelope but tucking it away.  She glanced down at the ground, then up at me.  Before her eyes dropped again, I saw a quick wink.

For all my ability to read people, I couldn’t tell if that was an interest wink or if it was a ‘I know we’re fabricating this whole thing against the Academy’ wink.

I would think about it later.  Whichever it was, I could trust her to do the job well.

“Counting on you,” I said.

That got me a smile, and any further read on her was obstructed as someone inadvertently moved into just the position required to block my view of her.  I had to fight back the instincts fostered by my annoyance, that made me start analyzing that student as a potential enemy.

I was too keyed up.

We stepped outside, and I sent the adult prisoners off to get changed and to infiltrate the officers on the Crown side of the rioting.

I also sent Avis off with the contingent I’d assigned to watch her, being sure to do so before the rooftop girls came.

Hopefully there wouldn’t be too many questions there.

All that done, I gestured, beckoning for others to come.  Slowly, the rooftop girls and other delinquents made their way to us, joining my small army.

“When the officers went rushing in, we thought maybe we should go in after them and help,” Bea said.  “I had to discourage the others, bring up the fact that you said you used the gas for the Greenhouse group, you gave me some, and you might be using more in there.”

I smiled.  “Discouraging them was right.”

“You really did it,” she said, as if she didn’t wholly believe it.  She looked curious, “You even got her.”

Avis.

“If you’re loose about definitions about prisons, this isn’t even my third prison break at this point,” I said.  Then I looked to distract.  “In the interest of keeping things moving, can I give you something to handle?”

The queen of the rooftop girls shrugged.  “I’ll do whatever.”

A boy  made a comment amid the group of students behind me.  There was a half-hearted series of amused chuckles through the group.

“Someone hit that boy upside the head,” I said, without looking back.

I heard the smack.

“Someone else, do it harder.”

I heard the second smack, followed by cussing.  I wasn’t sure if it was harder, by the sound of it.

I glanced back, and I caught a glimpse of one student rubbing the back of his head.  He looked young.

“We’re all on the same side,” I said, turning around.

My voice was hard, and there was no room for ambiguity.  “Get that into your heads.  Alright?  Our success and failure from here on out is our collective success or failure.  If we do this right and we don’t start doing stupid things for stupid reasons, it’ll be a success.  But if you get greedy for yourself instead of greedy for the all-of-us, or if you start thinking small then we start failing.  Get over whatever ideas you had about how you or any of the rest of us are divided.”

I was gauging things as best I could, trying to figure out how much I had them, and how much I could push them before I lost them.  These people had seen me at near peak performance, but showing them Sylvester Lambsbridge at his darkest would be the fastest way to lose things.

I dropped the stern appearance, smiled, relaxed, and then turned back to Bea.  I held up another envelope.  “Third letter.  Courtesy of the student council.”

Bea gave the student council a glance.  “Should I wait?”

I shook my head.  “Tell your people first, let them disseminate the full package.  Because this?  This is something to get angry about.  The student council had this, they already talked about it.  The measures taken against students, the security forces, the campaign against the student’s reputations, it’s something that has to be factored in.”

She nodded.

“Also, be warned, there are experiments in play.  You saw me dealing with one.  The Academy will have a few.  If anyone starts asking questions and they aren’t a student, make sure people know they aren’t to get the time of day, or they should be lied to.  When you slip away to the meeting place, you do it discreetly.”

“Alright,” she said.  She took the letter.

I asked a question I already knew the answer to, “Where’s Neck?”

She indicated a direction, then got Neck’s attention.

I walked with Bea in Neck’s direction, away from the group.

“Spread it slowly from a different direction than Mabel did.  Far end of the school,” I said, murmuring.

“Alright,” she said.  “Thought there would be something like that.  How hostile should we be when reacting to anyone asking questions?”

“Don’t be.  That’ll get them riled up.  Spread false information.  None of the major groups are around, so give them false locations.  Have others give false information.”

She nodded.

“Good luck,” I told her.  “Stay out of trouble.  If I have to break people  out of prison again, it gets harder.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow.  Neck looked surprised too.

“For standing up for me.”

“Ah.  Cracks are going to show sooner or later.  Students here were set against each other from the first attendance.  I’m glad to have a chance to start telling people how dangerous that is now.”

She smiled a little.

“And you’re welcome,” I said.  “Bring everyone you can when you’re done.  I gave you the meeting place?”

She looked like she was going to say something, then smiled and nodded.  “Yes.”

“Good,” I said.  “I’ll see you later.”

She turned back toward the group.  “Roof girls, troublemakers, delinquents, with me!”

I turned to face those who remained.  The student council, some members of the greenhouse gang, and some of the angrier protesters who’d gotten themselves arrested.

I opened my notebook, and I made some notes.  One for Bea.  One for… what had her name been?  Mildred?  Maple?  Mable.  I drew her head, with the straight hair down one side of her face, tucked behind her ear on the other side.  Sheriff’s daughter.  Happy triangle above her head.  She was sharp, and she was sharp in a way I liked.

I put a circle with a happy triangle in one corner above her head, then put a question mark there.

I checked my destination, and was happy to see I’d included notes on how to get there, with a few sketched landmarks.

I looked up at the group, closed the book with a slap, and then used it to point the way.

Pierre fell into lockstep with me as we made the final approach to the building.  The thirty students in my entourage seemed a little taken aback by it.

“I found your students,” the rabbit-headed man said.  “Was the most curious thing, their choice in graffiti.”

“Oh?”

“Something about rabbits.  Then when I approached to ask them about it, they said they were waiting for me.”  He scratched his head, between the ears.

“I was thinking we could have that be a signal from here on out.”

“Signals only work if they’ve been communicated to the person receiving them, Sylvester,” Pierre said.  “Or if they at least make some degree of sense.”

“Well, it’s been communicated now.”

“I’ll never understand how your head works, boss.  Jessie’s at the rendezvous spot, for the record.  Fray has run into some trouble.”

One side of his mouth moved in what might be intended as a smile, but looked more like the twitch of a dying muscle on a severed rabbit’s head.

I raised a hand, two fingers extending, interrupting Pierre before he could say anything more.  “I assume she’s still managing?”

Pierre didn’t miss a beat.  It helped that his face betrayed zero tells for those who hadn’t known him for a few weeks already.  “She’s managing.  Trouble with the Academy.  Jessie can tell you more.  But I should run- I’m running interference, keeping our foes from the prize for just a little while.”

Our foe being Fray.  Perfect.

“Thank you, Pierre.  You’re a gent.”

He swept into a bow, taking his initial steps backward.  A moment later, he was running at a speed that could rival a speeding carriage.

We approached the rendezvous point.  It was an old, magnificent building, set at the intersection of two major roads near the edge of town.  Not that we lacked for a good exit.  The town sprawled around a bay, and was surrounded by dense forest and mountains.  There were regular ships coming and going, mostly fishing vessels and some cargo boats.

I pulled on the board, and the door opened outward, the boards not actually nailed into anything.

The building was an old hotel.  The ugliest bits of furniture had been removed, the rest of it, mostly wood, had been left within.

The Rank and the stray’s children were present within.  The Rank were strewn here and there, lounging, while the children were clustered around the bar in the corner where some initial amount of food had been laid out.  Rudy and Possum were closer to the children than to the Rank.  All watched as I entered, the rest of the students behind me.

“Sylvester,” Junior said.  “And the student council.”

“Be good.  Look after them.  Don’t say anything we’ll all regret.”

Junior leaned back, smiling.  “I’d be more worried about their reaction to the Rank than the Rank’s reaction to them.  Last I heard, there were sore feelings.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the treasurer said.  “We don’t devote that much energy to thinking about you.”

I looked between the groups, and I said, “Do I need to separate you all?”

The answer was a unanimous silence, with only a few shaking heads.

“Ignore each other.  Please,” I instructed.

The students settled into their places.  The Rank had the center of the room, while the student council took a point off to one side, between the bar and the front desk of the hotel, where a battered old grand piano still sat.  There was a bench, and there were a number of stacked chairs off to the side.  They began pulling down the chairs and arranging them into a loose circle.

Other students found other points nearby.  Some gravitated toward the children, others toward the Rank, and others toward the student council.

Factions would form, inevitably.  I was just hoping we’d get that far.  The balancing act continued.

Gordon Two lingered closer to me, not sure what he should do.  Rudy and Possum approached, too.

“Where’s Jessie?” I asked the room.

“Upstairs,” Rudy said.  “We talked briefly.”

I nodded.

“This is bigger than I thought it would be,” he said.

“Cold feet?” I asked, wondering just how big he thought it was.

He shook his head.

“The children okay?”

“They keep taking food and stowing it in their pockets,” Possum said, voice a hush.  “Jessie sends them out in groups, and the group that was leaving when we showed up just came back.  They emptied their pockets while they were gone, and now they’re loading up again.”

“Let them,” I said.  “If they end up staying while we leave, they’ll be happy to have it, either to keep or trade.  If they stay with us, then it’ll take a while for them to realize that the food won’t run out.”

“That’s so sad,” Possum said.

“I’ll catch up with you all in a minute,” I said.  “Touching base with Jessie first.  Be nice to each other.  Talk.”

I looked back over the room, looking for any signs that things might boil over while I was gone, then jogged up the stairs.

I found Jessie at the end of the hallway.  I’d been worried she had drifted off.  She was only staring off into space.

“Hallo there,” I greeted her.

“You took your time,” she said, turning.  She smiled.  “Productive?”

“Very.”

“Good,” she said.  She feigned sternness.  “Because every minute of peace that you had to do your thing was hard earned.  Keeping Fray corralled and stalling her has been a heck of a task.”

I snorted.  “Watch your language.”

“She’s not stupid.  She started realizing that something was up when she turned around and the Rank had disappeared on her.  Shortly after that, I had to tip off the police.  The men we saw are Crown, by the way.”

“I’m already aware,” I said, smiling.

“I’ve been interfering with them, too.  We intercepted one group and got ahead of their messages.  I had to lead a raid on the post office.”

“Well look at you,” I said.

“It was a narrow scrape, but we were able to find someone she was communicating with and point people in her direction.  I assumed you didn’t want her outright captured.”

“Nope.”

“It was a delicate operation, keeping her under pressure and steering her away, without getting her caught.  Undertaken on a hunch, no less,” she said.  “I did beautifully, if I may say so myself.”

“You may.  Don’t let me stop you.”

“You went incommunicado for just long enough that I had to worry.  I heard some noise about the Academy and assumed it was you.”

“Extending trust, as a Lambsbridge orphan ought to do,” I said. I leaned against the wall on the other end of the window.  “I’ll have you know that I have co-opted the vast majority of her plan.  That army of six hundred I promised?  I predict we’ll be half or two-thirds of that amount by the day’s end.  We’re seventy-five or eighty percent of the way to being done already.  We just need to deal with Fray and actually mobilize, and we’re set.”

“That’ll do,” Jessie said.

“And I had to deal with Avis, who took a combat drug and murdered a few people.  Actually landed my shot, brought her down without killing her.”

“Good.”

And I saved a few lives that Fray would’ve probably missed as collateral damage in her plan.”

“Rudy did mention, in a roundabout way.”

And I orchestrated a prison break, and even broke Avis out in the process.  Work of art, really.”

“I expect nothing less,” she said.

“And of course there’s a noble in town.  Not even a lesser one, and I faced him down.  I had to fight dirty but I won.  I think I might have figured out the fighting thing.  Crossed a threshold.  There’s another noble out there, but I’m wholly confident I can duel her and win.”

“Excellent,” Jessie said.

“The noble had a primordial pet, can you believe it?  And I fought it hand to hand.  With tooth and fingernail, while it had fangs an armspan long and talons that could have cut a horse in half.  I had to use a combat vial I got from Avis and gnaw my way through the thing until I got to a vital structure.  It tasted horrible.”

“I can imagine.”

“But I had an epiphany, and I think I came up with a seventeenth Wollstone ratio-”

“There are fifteen.”

“I discovered the sixteenth too, Jessie, but that’s from one of the more minor adventures of the last couple of hours, and I’m covering the broad strokes here, don’t you see?  I came up with a seventeenth Wollstone ratio, divined the fundamental pattern of the primordial, and gnawed my way into the key parts to disconnect the greater whole, and thus killed an unkillable thing, all while fighting to keep the talons and fangs from eviscerating me.  Those moments of brilliance were with combat drugs fuzzing my brain, mind you.”

“That must be where these scratches came from,” Jessie said, reaching out to touch my lower eyelid.

“A very astute observation,” I said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“So, all in all, I think I win, but I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Well, you have some reason you’re hiding up here instead of staying down there.  I half expected to come up here and find you asleep again.”

“No,” she said.  “Not sleep.  Just thinking.”

“Thinking is important, when we’re doing what we’re doing,” I said.  “But you’ll have to share particulars, or I’ll be claiming victory in our game of one-upmanship here.  Killing a primordial and a noble a matter of minutes apart from each other is kind of hard to top.”

“You didn’t say it was a matter of minutes,” she said.  “That’s amazing.”

I bowed a little.

“But I can top it,” she said.  She said it in a way that made my heart sink.  I had an idea what she was going to say.  “I dropped a memory.”

I placed my forehead against the window.

“In his writing, Jamie described it.  This same experience.  The first one was a portrait.  He dropped three in total before…”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I remember the portrait during the Sub Rosa thing.  I don’t remember everything that clearly, but that really scared me when it happened, so I remembered it.”

“It scares me too.”

“I don’t remember the others, but I read about them enough times in Jamie’s journals.”

“I feel like it’s a countdown.  As if just like him, I’ll be allowed two more, over the next three or six months, and then time’s up, just a week or a few days after that.”

I swallowed, and it was a hard, awkward sort of swallow.

“Hey, Sy?” she asked.

“Hey, Jessie,” I said.  I managed to sound normal.

“I don’t have a lot of time.  I don’t want to kick up a fuss.  I don’t want to pressure, or force things, or ask things of you, and I definitely don’t want anything that happens between us to be an act on your part.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Except, I’m really wondering.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And I’m sorry I have to wonder.”

“Don’t be,” I said.  I drew in a deep breath.  “I don’t know.  But there’s a jumble to sort through in my already unusually jumbled head.  Can we tackle this?  This big thing with Fray?”

Jessie nodded.

“And I’ll think about it harder and more clearly when I’m not thinking about Fray and how to stay on top of all of this.  Because I’ve told different things to a half-dozen groups and three of them are downstairs.  But I’ll give you your answer.  I promise.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Jessie was so often my rock.  Reliable, someone I could go back to.  My anchor in the storm that was ever active in my head and my immediate surroundings.

But she looked like she needed a rock, and I was happy to oblige.

“C’mere,” I said.  “C’mon.”

I wrapped her in a hug.  Not the first I’d given in the last day, but certainly the most important.

“Am I supposed to play along with the story and tell you you smell like primordial bile?” she asked.

“It was more stomach acid than bile,” I said.

She nodded, her head rubbing against my shoulder.  “Terrible.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.13 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jessie and I made our way up to the halfway point on the stairs so we could look down at the crowd.  We took in the scene.

Two hundred students, with more arriving by the minute.

The leaders of each of the individual groups were all present, by our request.  Pierre had told them to gather.  As such, we had Ralph and Mabel for the Greenhouse Gang; Davis and Valentina for the student council; Junior, Rita and Posie for the Rank; Bea and Neck for the rooftop girls and delinquents.

There were others.  Clay’s men, Otis’, Archie’s, and Frederick’s.  The prisoners hung near them.  Some of the recently released prisoners were affiliated with one group or the other.

Rudy and Possum stood off to one side, near the Stray children, while Gordon Two stood near Pierre and Shirley.

I used my notebook to help keep track as I indicated each of the people and giving Jessie the names she hadn’t already been told.

“…that’s Rudy and Possum over there.  Possum’s a nickname.  I think we’ll be able to count on them.  Then Gordon Two.”

“Gordon Two?” she asked, archly.

“Also Gordon the Second, if you want to go that way.  Felt fitting.”

“We only just got over the new Jamie-old Jamie confusion, and you start this?”

“Don’t get all fussy now.”

“You tend to bring fussiness out in people, in the same way that being an arsonist brings out the ‘fire is bad’ attitude in others.”

“I’m an arsonist too,” I pointed out.

“Yes you are,” she said, sighing a little.  “We should get this under control.”

I nodded.

We were out of earshot of the assembled students as we had our conversation, but we had their full attention.  Ears were strained.  Eyes were on us.  The buzz of conversation was minimal at best.  They were agitated.

I could look at the crowd, fuzz out my vision, and focus on movement and spacing, and I could intuit, to a degree, the restlessness and degree of motion.  I could see where people remained turned toward friends, looking at Jessie and me over or along their shoulders.  They appeared in clusters, in places where groups mingled.  The Greenhouse Gang was among them.  The patterns and shapes made by those clusters looked like cracks and fissures running through the collected mass of students.  Suspicion, dissent, and the vast pool of anger and frustration threatening to turn toward Jessie and me.

I could imagine that some had talked and already found out that my story didn’t add up, or that I’d told different stories to different individuals.  Had I been in their midst as it happened, I could have steered it.

But I’d been tending to Jessie, because Jessie was more important than this small army I was building.

Those veins of dissent running through this body of people would make this next bit hard.

Better to address this on a smaller-scale level.

I indicated each of the people I’d named, and indicated for them to come upstairs.  The leaders of the student groups, the people I’d singled out, and then Mr. Unhappy from the group of prisoners I’d released.

We gathered ourselves in one of the hotel rooms.  The leaders of the student groups, the gang leaders, our assistants and helpers.

Many of them found seats around the room.  Jessie and I did too, turning two chairs around.  Shirley stood in the corner behind us, while Rudy and Possum stood off to one side.  The gang leaders took standing positions at various points around the room.

A decent crowd unto itself, this.

“Introductions are in order,” I said.  “My name is Sylvester Lambsbridge, this is Jessie Ewesmont, and the most important thing to get out of the way is that we have no association with Genevieve Fray at all.”

I saw mixed reactions, across the board, mostly among the students.  Junior was smiling.  He’d known.  Others looked more confused, including Rudy and Possum.  The student council looked shocked, and the Greenhouse Gang looked resentful.  Ralph in particular, the round, glasses-wearing head of the Greenhouse Gang, looked angry.

“You lied to us,” he said.  He’d known before I’d even announced it.  There was no shock or processing period that absorbed the initial impact of my admission.

“Absolutely,” I said.  “I’m sorry I had to.”

“You lied,” he said, getting angrier.  “We’ve been misled all this time, first by the Academies, ultimately this, the school shutting down, and now by you?

He took a short step forward, pointing a finger.

As he did, Otis and Frederick moved, as if to intercept him.  Ralph’s scowl deepened as he retreated that same step.  He very dramatically flung his pointed finger down and out of the way, as if discarding it, the anger and accusations by no means gone.

“The fact of the matter is,” I said, “Fray dropped the ball.  We picked it up.  We intend to keep every promise she made.  The plan stands.  It’s just a plan with different leadership.”

“It’s a fucking lot different!” Ralph said.  His face was red now.  I could see the student council picking up on his energy.  The anger was spilling over and they were absorbing it.  Given a moment, they would join their objections to Ralph’s.

“You didn’t even want to go with the students,” Jessie said.

“I didn’t and I don’t, especially not now!” Ralph said.  “But these students you’re preying on, they’re students I care about!  Students I tried to help!  I joined the student council to help them, and even after I dropped out of the council, I committed!  I stuck my neck out to ensure the best and brightest wouldn’t get sabotaged or cut down with interference and petty politics!  So they wouldn’t get used!”

“You actually care about your fellow students?” Junior cut in.  “No wonder you ended up on a bottom-rung Academy like Beattle.”

“Talk to me about success and failure when you’re in the top ten of students here, R.J.,” Ralph said.  “Until then, shut up and stay out of this.”

“Ow.  But I’ll concede the point,” Junior said.

“Ralph,” I said.

Ralph turned his attention to me.

“Genevieve Fray is very good at sounding like she cares.  Even through intermediaries.  I don’t know exactly what she said to you, but I imagine it something along the lines of how she plans to save the world, and I know she tells every individual soul along the way that she’ll save them, making promises to each and every one about how she’ll solve their medical issues, save their lives, save their minds, or cure them of everything that ails them.”

I glanced at Junior as I said that.  He nodded, and the motion got glances from others.

I continued, “…But as brilliant as she is, she’s only human.  She can’t grant every wish.”

“And you can?” Ralph asked.  It was a question meant as something retaliatory or accusatory.

“No, no I can’t, and Jessie can’t either,” I said.  “But there’s a reason you’re in this room with Jessie and me and not Fray and her people.  We’re paying attention.”

I paused, letting that sink in.

It didn’t quench or answer Ralph’s wrath, but it didn’t stoke it either.  It seemed to be reason enough for the student council to hold their tongues, when they were ready to join Ralph in cussing us out.

“She’s working in other cities,” I said.  “She’s making promises to others.  She’s spreading herself thin, with too many pokers in too many fires, and some are being forgotten, others neglected.  She’s not so different from the Academy in this respect.”

“She was here today,” Ralph said.

“Her messenger was,” I said.  “But we were here weeks and months ago, planning and watching.”

I indicated the gang leaders.

“Who are you, then?” Davis, the student council president asked.  “Who are you really?”

“I’ve spent more time working for the Crown and the Academy than many of you have been in school.  I’ve killed on behalf of the Crown while working for them, and I’ve killed members of the Crown nobility since leaving that role behind.  I’ve witnessed the start of wars and I’ve personally ended them.  So trust me when I say it’s no mistake that I’m standing here in front of you now.”

I paused for effect.

“Jessie is nearly as experienced as I am, and far more capable in a number of areas.  She’s also harder to explain, because she lurks more in the background, as a planner and coordinator.  That’s who we are.  For every day you’ve spent studying, we’ve spent a day immersed in the darker, bloodier side of the Crown’s and Academy’s dealings.  Today, our individual worlds have collided.  The students need the kind of help we can provide in navigating that dark underbelly of Crown and Academy.  We need the knowledge, the influence, and the voice the students have.”

Jessie spoke, “You can turn us down, say that you’re not interested in what we have to offer.  But know that you’re our first priority, and you’ll have our full attention.”

“The plan stands,” I said.

Bea’s leg jiggled up and down.  The student council president and vice president were rigid, upset.  Ralph still had red in his face.  Only Junior looked calm, but none of this was news to him.

“What’s next?” Mabel asked.

Ralph looked at her, aghast.

“We don’t have other options, do we?” she asked, in response to his look of outrage.  “What do you think we’re supposed to do, Ralph?  Go out there and tell the students that they shouldn’t hear Sylvester out, that this was all a bad idea and there really isn’t anyplace to go?  They’d tear us to pieces.  Then they’ll leave.  Go home or go elsewhere, or try to make their way on their own.  And that doesn’t help anyone.”

“If he hadn’t interfered, then the students could have gone with Fray.  Someone we know,” Ralph said.

“No,” I said.  “Because the Academy is already here.  Fray was too slow.  There were agents in place, eavesdropping, already moving against her.  Gordon-”

Jessie put a hand over my mouth.  She turned to Gordon Two.  “What’s your real name?”

“Nicholas.”

Jessie removed her hand from my mouth.  She gave me a pointed look.

I cleared my throat.  “He can testify.  We had a run-in with two of the agents.”

“We did,” Gordon the Second said.  “Sylvester killed the both of them.  I heard the bird woman talking to the headmaster.  I didn’t exactly go running off after her to join up with her side when I heard it, either.  It didn’t really sound like the students were a factor.”

“Naturally,” Ralph said.  “She was talking to the headmaster.  She’ll say different things depending on who she’s talking to.”

“Including us?” Mabel asked him.  “Come on, Ralph.  Don’t pretend it’s any different.”

“She was a student once.  She sounded genuine when she talked about that period in her life.”

“She was a bureaucrat too,” I said.  “One who helped orchestrate the trafficking and recycling of children into experiments, working with a rebel group.  I was there when she was brought into custody.”

“And we’re just supposed to believe you?” Ralph asked.  “You’ve already admitted you’re a liar.”

I believe him,” Mabel said.  “Maybe it’s silly or I’m being misled because I’ve actually looked into his eyes and talked to him while Fray only sent a representative, but I feel better about working with Sy than I felt when we were talking to Avis.  Something about her unnerved me.”

“I don’t think you’re processing this with your head, Mabel,” Ralph said.

“You think I’m going with my heart?”

“Parts below the belt, Mabel,” Ralph said.

She struck him, open palm, across the face.  He rose out of his seat, and she did the same.

The two of them stopped short of an outright scuffle when Frederick moved closer to them, ready to break it up.  Both breathed hard, incensed.

Ralph abruptly turned away, striding toward the door.

Otis blocked his way, keeping him from exiting.  The middle aged, grizzled gang leader glanced at me, and I gave him a gesture, telling him to stay where he was.

“I was never going to stay,” Ralph said.  He didn’t look at anyone as he said it.  “So I don’t have to stick around for the rest of this discussion, right?”

“It’s a problem if you leave and say the wrong things,” I said.

“Mabel said it, didn’t she?” Ralph asked.  “If I tell the students down there what really happened, they’ll riot again.  Then… there’s nothing.  Nowhere for them to go.  It doesn’t benefit anyone.  But I certainly don’t have to stand there and say this is a good idea.  I won’t lie to them either.  I’ll use the back door.”

“Alright, Ralph,” I said.  “Good luck in your future studies.”

“Keep your ‘good luck’ and go fuck whatever pit you crawled out of, Lambsbridge,” he said.

“We’ll have to give you an escort to make sure you don’t cause a stir,” I said.

“On it,” Clay said.

“Nah,” I said.  I had to do a bit of guesswork on this one.  The funny thing was, Clay would have been my choice if he hadn’t spoken up. “Otis?  Pick out one of your men and send him with?”

Otis opened the door for Ralph, gesturing at a lieutenant of his.  He closed the door once the two had left.

Mabel remained standing.  Her hand went to her hair, tucking it behind one ear.  I could see the tremor in her fingertips.  She probably didn’t like confrontation.

“You can sit down, Mabel,” I said, quiet.

She didn’t sit down.  She didn’t meet my eyes, either.  She did meet Jessie’s briefly.  It took a moment before she shook her head.

“Listen,” she said.  “Ralph and I, and all the rest of the Greenhouse Gang, we talked to Avis.  She talked about where she came from, she talked about being part of the Academy, and she was good at that, she had good stories, she made us laugh.  And she talked about what she does while working for Genevieve Fray, the sorts of things Fray is doing, and she made it sound good, hopeful, and exciting.  But she looked hollowed out, like she hadn’t slept enough over a long time.”

I touched my cut eyelid, “I’m not sure I look much better.”

“It’s more than just that.  She talked about her birds, and even brought one outside of that cloak she wrapped herself in, keeping one hand over its head like it was a bird of prey, and she didn’t talk much about anyone except Fray.  Like the lady who only has her cats and one friend that sometimes visits.”

“She didn’t seem healthy?” I volunteered.

“She really didn’t,” Mabel said.

“She really isn’t,” I said.  “After the incident with the children that I mentioned, she was taken into a dungeon and tortured for three-quarters of a year.  She’ll likely never be well again.”

“Did Fray promise her a fix, like she promised me?” Junior asked.

“You need a fix?” Neck asked.

Junior only shrugged.

“I don’t know what Fray promised,” I said.  “I wouldn’t be surprised.  But I think Avis knows it’s not entirely possible to fix what’s wrong with her now.  Maybe Fray wouldn’t have wanted to insult her intelligence.”

There were a few nods here and there.

“I just-” Mabel started.  She glanced up, met my eyes for a fleeting moment.  “I just wanted to make sure you all knew that I reasoned my way to my current position.  It had nothing to do with what Ralph said was going on below my belt.”

“I can’t think of a diplomatic way to say this,” Valentina said, “Except that I think what Ralph said had more to do with what was going on below his belt than yours.  It wouldn’t be the first time, in his case.”

“So you knew why he joined the student council?” Mabel asked.  “And why he left?”

“I figured it out very quickly.”

Mabel nodded.  Then she took her seat very quickly, as if she was very uncomfortable continuing to stand and be the center of attention.

“I should have joined the Academy, by the sounds of things,” Frederick commented.  “Young romance, girls in pleated skirts, more going on below the belt than I got to enjoy before I was eighteen…”

“You’re not helping matters, Frederick,” I said.

The pale-haired, brown-skinned laborer and gang leader only smiled, showing off the white of his teeth.

“Bea.  You’ve been sitting there and bouncing your knee for a while now,” I said.

“I always said I cared more about actions than words,” she said.  “Your actions stack up.”

“Okay,” I said.  I suspected that wasn’t the end of it.

“At my first school, I was told to do this, do that.  I tried.  I ended up worse off than I was before.  I took advice from older students, and I picked a professor and I did the best work I could for him.  That… didn’t work out.  I found another professor willing to be my mentor, a woman, and she promised she would back me.  When it counted, she didn’t follow through.  I came here, because people said it would be better, and it wasn’t.  I faced dropping out, and one more person came along, promising a fix.  I told them I wasn’t prepared to just believe someone anymore.  They told me to wait until today, see for myself.  I did.”

I waited, giving her time to sort out her thoughts.

“I’m stuck, now.  Because in all my life, only two people have ever said they’ll do something and actually followed through.”

“I’m one,” Neck said, to the room and not to her.

“And Fray isn’t the other,” she said.  “But now this thing I’ve always said, when I was helping talk other girls through tough times and relationship troubles, that actions matter more than words?  That guys and professors and parents can say whatever they like, but it’s what they show you that counts?  I’m feeling like I have to stick by it, because you’ve been dishonest, Sylvester, but you showed your stuff when it mattered, with the prison especially.  I’m not happy about feeling like I should stick by my old stance, and I’m not sure what I should do.”

“Give me a chance,” I said.  “I’ll ensure you’re happy with this course.”

“Tall order, promising me any kind of lasting happiness,” she said.

“The prison break was a tall order too,” I said.

“Point,” she said.  She glanced at Neck.

“I’m with you, love,” he said.  There was no love in the word, only loyalty.

She nodded at that.  Then she looked at me, nodded, and dropped her eyes.

“Student council?”  I asked.  “Davis?  Valentina?”

I’d left them to last, in hopes that influencing them would influence the student council along the way.

The reality was that my read on the student council was by far the most lacking.

“What I find myself asking,” Davis said, running his fingers through his brown hair, “is what would have happened if you hadn’t turned up today.”

“Avis would have showed.  The letters would have been written and distributed, the headmaster wins out, the Horse-”

“Horsfall,” Jessie supplied.

“-loses, badly, despite being much liked by a large share of the student body.  The riot unfolds, and Avis and Fray stand by, letting it happen.  Things are carefully orchestrated, people are swept up in it all, and by the time matters settle, the students are whisked away on Fray’s errand.  The casualties are easily forgotten or lost in the shuffle.”

“Casualties?” Davis asked.

I avoided looking at Rudy and Possum.  “The students who couldn’t bear the reality she’d rushed to conclusion.  The students sequestered in jail.”

“You don’t think a woman as smart as Fray had a plan in mind?”

I started to answer.  Jessie beat me to it.

“We’ve been following Fray since the start of her career.  We were there when she started her rebellion.  I know Sylvester had a private chat with her once, while we were pursuing her.  She wanted to recruit us, once upon a time.  Her focus was always on humanity.  Preserving humanity.  But as time goes on, she’s slipping more.  She’s finding it easier to overlook the small losses, to win a skirmish that involves moderate stakes.  Overlooking moderate losses to win a battle that involves major stakes.  Then overlooking major losses to win a battle that involves national stakes.”

“Releasing the primordials,” I said.  “Then the red plague.”

“Primordials?” Mabel asked.  “Released?”

The questions seemed to be reflected in the faces of everyone present that was wearing an academy uniform.

“This is a bigger concern than the fact that you’re saying she created the red plague?” Neck asked.

“It’s a bigger concern,” Bea said.

“And both are a long story,” I said.  “I’m actually not so sure on the plague, but things add up, and it feels like her, which should say it all.”

“Listen,” Jessie said.  “For what it’s worth, as much as Fray slides down that slippery slope, and whether she stops there or she decides that she’s willing to stake a nation to win a contest with global stakes, Sylvester is scaling up that same slope, going the opposite way.”

I tilted my head, giving Jessie a surprised look.

She said, “He wasn’t always the gentle soul you see before you now.  There was a time when it was just him and his fellow experiments, myself included, and the rest of the world didn’t matter.  That’s changed.  Fray says she wants to protect humanity, but it feels like she’s forgotten the individual humans along the way.  Sylvester’s found them, in the meantime.”

“I can testify that that’s the case,” Shirley said, from the back corner of the room.

“Yeah,” Rudy said.  Possum nodded beside him.

“Beautifully put,” I murmured to Jessie, teasing.

“Shut up,” she said.  She pushed my shoulder.

But, among this crowd of very individual humans, it seemed to be what they needed to hear.  It seemed to have won over Bea, who had been less than wholly enthusiastic, and it seemed to have gotten the attention of the student council leaders.

“Then I’ll echo Mabel’s question from earlier,” Valentina said.  “What’s next?”

“Next, we address the two hundred or so students that are down in the lobby.  Because they want and deserve answers,” I explained.

“Without Ralph,” Valentina said.

“The Greenhouse Gang knew that he was leaving.  He made no secret about it,” Mabel said.  “It should be fine.”

“Good,” I said.  “Great.  Any final comments?  Dissent?  Questions?”

There were none.  It seemed we had them on board, more or less.

I stood, and they stood from their seats alongside me.

Our collected allies backing us, we headed for the stairs.  We walked halfway down.

“Three hundred and twenty students,” Jessie said, leaning in closer to my ear.

The tone of the hubbub and chatter changed as more caught sight of us.  The change in the sound of the room drew more attention, and more people came in from outside.

“Three hundred and sixty students,” Jessie amended her statement.  “And…”

“I see her too,” I said.

At the back of the room, filtering in among the students, was Genevieve Fray.  Black hair fashionably styled, crimson lipstick, black coat, and heeled boots.

She folded her arms and settled in, seemingly to watch the proceedings.

I drew in a deep breath.

“Students of Beattle!” I addressed the room, raising my voice to cut through the chatter.  “I see several citizens of Laureas here, and other esteemed guests.”

The room was silent, as I paused, assessing the tone of things.

“My name is Sylvester Lambsbridge.  Behind me stand several key members of Beattle’s student body.  Student council, disciplined academics, troublemakers, and free spirit alike.  Several of the men you see are local gang leaders.  Others are my partners, employees, and assistants.  We stand together in this, and if you’re willing, we’d have you stand with us.”

Fray was silent, watching with a steady eye.  Her body language was hard to read.

“Many or most of you students of Beattle don’t want to go home.  Not now, maybe not ever.  Many don’t want to let your academic dreams die here.  Many of you don’t want to turn in papers, books, and uniform and sit down for that speech or assembly, where they tell you that you cannot continue your studies or use any of what you spent the last several years learning.”

The cracks I’d seen in the ranks weren’t as bad, now.  The agitation wasn’t there.  The people standing clearly askance had clearly relaxed, their backs or shoulders no longer turned away or to one side, their gazes less suspicious or antagonistic.  Having the student groups clearly behind me helped.  Many of these students were ones that were recognized and known among the student body.

“I’m offering you work, using the knowledge you have.  I’m offering you the freedom to find your own way, on the side opposite that which promised you an education and snatched it away at the last minute.  If you’re angry at them, then I can give you a role which will let you vent that anger.  And if you just want to find your own way, I can position you to do that.”

I glanced at Jessie, then back at the students and assembled men, women, and rabbits behind me.

Then I addressed the crowd again.  “There’s a lot to be said for being done with the uniform.  There’s more to be said for being unified.  No longer being rank forty or rank sixty or rank one hundred, looking at fellow students as opposition.  No more fancying a girl or fancying a boy and wondering how courting them would affect your grades, or calculating how it might affect theirs.

“We’ve seen civil war across the Crown States in recent years.  We’re going to see more.  I suspect it may be perpetual, lasting as long as the Crown does.  I just explained to the students behind me that I want your voices and your talents, and I’ll pay you for those things, in actual payment, but also in helping you to navigate the world that exists beyond the Academy…”

I explained, the crowd listened, and Fray remained where she was, unreadable.

I walked through the crowd with purpose.  People talked to me as I did so, reached for my hand, and commented, and I tried to recognize each of them.

I forged through to Fray, who didn’t make her way to me, but who didn’t retreat either.

I gestured to students to stay back as I approached her.  We walked outside, standing a short distance outside.

“Hello, Genevieve,” I said.

“Hello, Sylvester,” she replied.  She uncrossed her arms and put her hands in her pockets.  She sighed.  “I was just telling Dolores that I’ve had the most surreal day.”

“Oh, you’ve got her there with you?”

“Of course.  She’s getting old, yet she remains a good listener.”

“Surreal day, you said?”

“My day started as expected, but somewhere along the way, the Academy found me with unerring accuracy, multiple events coincided to keep me from making my way to the Academy, the gang of youths I’d conscripted outright disappeared while my back was turned, and when I finally made it to the Academy, neither my messenger nor any of the student groups I’d planned to meet were there.  Every student I talked to either had no interest in what was happening or they outright lied to my face, trying to lead me on wild goose chases.”

“I suppose I should apologize.”

“It was almost amusing when I realized what was happening and who the culprit was.  Almost,” she said.  She didn’t smile.  “We should talk.”

“Shall we go upstairs?” I offered.

“I don’t feel like braving that crowd,” she said.  “Will you walk with me?”

“No tricks?  No ambush?” I asked.

“That’s how you operate, Sylvester,” she said.  She allowed me one small smile, this time.  “I talked to Mauer.  I’m worried you’re on a dangerous path.”

I glanced back at the body of students.

“Not them.  Not this.  It’s about what you found back in New Amsterdam.”

I read her expression, listened to her tone, and concluded, “Either you don’t know and you want to know, which is a bit of a shot in the dark, possibly with a fair amount of generous bargaining, which I’d be willing to entertain, or you do know.”

I could see it on her face as I said those last three words.

“You do know,” I repeated myself.

“I’ve known from the beginning.  Some of it was deduction, using what I learned as I was offered the position of esteemed professorship.  Not just any professorship, but the sort afforded to professors of note, when they were trying to decide if I’d walk a path where I’d soon run an Academy of my own, or if I’d tend to a noble.  It’s part of why they’re so bent on finding and killing me, which, in turn, is why I’ve had to devote so much mental architecture to being elusive with the Academy’s dogs on my heels.  Yourself included, once.”

That same elusiveness doesn’t help if your enemy deduces your path and lies in wait on the path ahead of you.

“So you’ve known all this time, and you haven’t used it?  What was that thing with Mauer then?”

“Walk with me,” Fray said.  “There’s a great deal to cover, and some will be unpleasant.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.14 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.14

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We walked a distance away from the building, and as Fray indicated a direction, I didn’t object.

“Terms and expectations,” she said.  She walked with her hands in her pockets.  Her jacket was buttoned up to the point that the collar touched her chin.  Her bearing was confident enough that it didn’t seem to bother her, where others might have found it got in the way.

“Terms and expectations?”

“For our discussion here,” she said.

“Ah,” I said.  I paused.  “Do we need those?”

“First of all, I’m not leading you into a trap as we speak.  I have no intention of harming you, misleading you, taking action against your… burgeoning faction, or allowing others to do so.  That’s not how I operate,” she said.

“I’ve gathered as much.”

“And I would appreciate if you didn’t wrap up your business here by severely inconveniencing me.”

“Ah,” I said.  “For someone as secure as you are, I’m surprised you’re that worried.”

“The Lambs are on their way, Sylvester.  They’ll be in the city before the day is out.  They’ll likely be mired in your business and mine before midnight, given the chance.”

I blinked, then began working things through in my head.  Jessie would have a better idea of timing, train schedules.  Then there were permutations: how the Lambs interacted with the wounded and dying Beattle Academy and the Horse that led it, the vectors by which they would trace their way to Jessie and me, their methods, the likelihood of attack, their interactions with local gangs, the stray children, the students, the truths and lies they could tell those same students and stray children…

And Fray, with their interactions with her, and everything that could unfold from that.

“I’m still surprised you’re that concerned.  Were we really such a nuisance for you before?”

“The Lambs were more predictable before, and one is right here, walking and talking with me, less predictable than he once was.  Obviously, given how today went.  What’s the old adage?  You don’t have to outrun the bear…”

“You have to outrun the slowest member of your camping troupe.  You’re afraid I’ll hamstring you and leave you as a nice, tied-up present for the Lambs, to better cover my retreat.

“And to better their circumstance,” she said.

Before she’d even brought up the bear analogy, I’d had the mental image of Fray in a locked room lingering in one corner of my brain.  She’d been banging on the door, while I said something witty and watched the Lambs approach at a run through the window.  I hadn’t decided on the witty thing to say, so the thought had been unfinished, a scattered image waiting to be rounded out.

Reluctantly, I banished the thought from my head.

“I’ll play along,” I said.  “No using you as bait for the bear.  Assuming you’re playing fair too.”

“I’ll play fair and try to make the concession worth your while,” she said.  She blew into her hands and rubbed them together.

My thoughts were on the Lambs, now.  It took some effort to compartmentalize them, and to keep thoughts from sprawling out from those individual points.  Too tempting, too complicated, too distracting.

Fray was my focus now.

I glanced at her hands as she rubbed them together.

She caught me looking.  “Syringes built into my fingers.  It affected my circulation and my extremities run a hair colder than normal.”

“Well maybe you shouldn’t hide syringes in your fingers, then.”

A part of me wanted to get a rise out of her, to see if she could be made flustered, and if any insights could be gleaned.

“I was pleased to see Jamie,” she said.

I gave her a sidelong glance.

“Whatever his or her name is now.”

“Her,” I said.  “Jessie.”

“I was pleased,” she repeated herself, affirming the fact.  “I really believed it when I read that Jamie had died.”

“That was the intention,” I said.

“Of course,” she said.  Then, abrupt, she said, “You’ve grown.”

This was a side of her I’d forgotten, as Fray had devolved into a greater series of schemes.  Of plots and things I had to account for, a lifeform that had been stitched together in the background, extending its reach and producing plague here and primordials there, nudging rebel groups into life.

I’d nearly forgotten I could talk to her and she could put me off balance so adroitly.  Possibly without even meaning to.

“Was a tense moment, back there,” I said.  “Thought I might not grow at all, but it happened.  I’m still short for my age.”

“You’ve grown in other ways,” she said.  “How you function, how you approach the world.”

“And you haven’t?” I asked.

“The last few years have felt like a blur.  I’ve been working on things, I’m still setting the stage for what I want to do in the future, and the weeks melt into the months, and months melt into seasons.  Time passes quickly.  I’m not sure how much I’ve changed in the meantime.”

“I’m not sure either,” I said.  “I saw a glimpse of something ugly during our first meeting, and I’m not sure if that brute of a woman that sterilized twenty-five million Crown citizens and hooked them on the water supply is the same that made the primordials or started the spread of the plague of ravage.”

“That wasn’t me,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow.  “Which?”

“The ravage.  Red plague, reminiscence, whatever you want to call it.  I wasn’t responsible.”

I stopped in my tracks.  She progressed a few more steps, stopped, and turned to face me.

“Really,” she said.

I studied her, looking for any clues in body language.  She wasn’t a proficient liar, but she was guarded.  Some of it had to do with how she kept a part of herself at bay, a weapon hidden beneath the clothes, that wasn’t a blue ringed octopus named Dolores.

“Talk to me about it,” I told her.

“I studied the plague.  Because I did think I might be able to use it, find the source, or disable it and leverage the cure for my agenda.  It’s elegant.  Elegant enough that we probably already know the name of the culprit.  ‘We’ being the doctors and scientists of the Academy.  He’ll be one of the geniuses, on par with Helen’s creator, Professor Ibbot.  I would actually like to find him, because I think he has an agenda.”

“An agenda?”

“The plague has spread far, far further than they’re willing to admit, Sylvester,” Fray said.  “There’s a part and parcel of it that remains dormant for nine to seventeen days.  The plague has erupted in Mauer’s wake and Cynthia’s wake for some time.  After violent confrontations, including the one you witnessed in New Amsterdam, we see outbreaks.  It looked like human agents, trying to make a point, pin something on Mauer.”

“Looked like?  But it isn’t.  It’s part of the design.”

“It’s punitive.  Rebels appear and fight for a city, and in the aftermath, hours, days, or two weeks later, the plague hits.  It likes the taste of battlefields, fresh or old, it flourishes, and it spreads like a wildfire, carpeting the area.”

“People are going to catch on, and when they do… the rebellion will become something they fear.  Is this the Crown?”

“I don’t know,” Fray said.  “But I’m keeping my lips sealed.  I’m waiting for the Crown to find someone to fight with that isn’t the rebellion.  Because if a cure emerges… or if the flowers don’t bloom in the wake of their battles, then it was likely them.”

“What if it isn’t the Crown?”

“If the Crown wages the war and the cure doesn’t emerge, if the plague is indiscriminate and follows them, then it’s someone else’s play.  Someone that might hold a high rank who also has an agenda of aggressive peace, even if that peace means that countless millions die or are succumbed to quarantine.  If every war means plague follows, with everyone losing the city they fought for, war loses its flavor, even for the Crown.  Things settle into an ugly stasis, with nobody making more ground, and the plague still erupts now and again as people accidentally activate the necessary trigger elements.  We get regular reminders that it exists, until such a time that it’s cured and eliminated.”

My mind ticked over the permutations, the ways it might have unfolded, with this new information.

“If that person with that agenda exists, I need to find them.”

“What if that’s not the agenda?” I asked her.  “What if we don’t settle down into a kind of peace?  What if we’re not capable?”

“Then it’s all the more punitive, isn’t it?  It might be a punishment that takes decades or centuries to recover from, if we ever recover fully from it,” Fray said.  “It would be all the more important that I find the person responsible, because he won’t stop here.  We need the answers he can provide, whatever his motivations.”

“What if they aren’t around anymore?  What if he fled to other parts of the world?”

“I don’t know, Sylvester.”

“Is this the part where you ask me to help you?  You’ve outlined the stakes, something we should all be concerned about, and now’s the part where you say that the best and brightest are Crown and Academy, that they’re people you can’t access, and you need me to infiltrate and help you access and figure out who it might be?”

“No, Sylvester.  I wouldn’t know the first place to start looking.  Keep your eyes open.  Communicate with me.  Communicate with everyone, frankly, short of telling people that this is a plague that primes itself on blood, ash, and burnt gunpowder, among other things.  Because telling them-”

“-Will kill any and all rebellions.  Including mine.  I can’t use my shiny new rebellion for anything bloody, or it’ll spread plague?  Fine.  I don’t plan to kill more than a handful of people anyway.”

“Sylvester,” Fray said.  “This is only one thing at play.  It’s a minor thing, but it’s significant.  I wanted to talk to you about what you found in New Amsterdam.  The Block.”

Which you supposedly knew about from the beginning.

“Out with it, then,” I said.

“Can we walk?” she asked.  She sounded exasperated.  “It’s chilly, and we’re standing in the middle of the street, talking at each other.  At least if we’re walking, there’s a semblance of camaraderie.”

“No traps?  You’re not trying to get me away from my people so the Lambs or the Academy can raid them?”

She sounded even more exasperated.  “Your short-term memory shouldn’t be that bad, Sylvester.  No.  I pledge that to you.  I wanted to turn the students of Beattle into a force for a reason.  If they’re yours, then it’s a distant second to what I hoped for, but it’s still preferable to them being captured or destroyed.  Really.”

I stared her down, trying to find the angle.

“What did you hope to use them for?”

“That would be telling, Sylvester.”

“More than just taking a bite out of the Academy.  You had a plan.  Was it more primordials?”

“The student body knows full well what that involves, and they would buck and rebel if I pushed for it.  I wanted to loosen the Crown’s hold.  An underground Academy that could then disseminate a greater number of back-alley doctors across the Crown states.  I was going to equip them with the truth as I understand it.”

“What you were looking for with Mauer?” I asked.  “What you supposedly knew all along?”

She gestured, indicating that we should walk.

I reluctantly started walking.  She walked beside me, rubbing her hands for a moment before sticking them into her pocket.

“I put the pieces together very early on.  Where students go, the rise of nobles, where other professors go, and where I was slated to go, should I want to work in service to nobles.  The investigation into my background, the teams of doctors poring over my work, to my Wyvern-altered mind, there were systems behind the systems.  I think they knew I knew, they felt I was too clever for what they wanted.  I happened to be looking at the Lambs and what was happening behind the scenes when someone higher up turned their attention to me.  Before I knew it, I was no longer a consideration.  The Wyvern business came out soon after.”

I studied her.  “There’s more to it, isn’t there?”

“Indiscretions,” she said.  “I was not perfect, and Wyvern was the sanitized, widely-recognized part of it.  But every student gets involved in the politics to some degree, the backstabbing, the behind-the-scenes dealings.  All of that is beside the point.  The point is that you’ve stumbled on what I stumbled onto.”

“That the nobles aren’t anything more than glorified experiments.”

“Yes,” Fray said.  She said it in such a way that I knew there was no surprise.  She had known.

“If the word gets out, the myth will be shattered.  People will be disgusted with them.  It will taint everything the nobles touch.  Legitimacy, their seeming immortality, their grace, their power and control.”

“Absolutely,” Fray said.

“Yet you decided not to use that information.  And it wasn’t because the timing was wrong.”

We walked, and we crossed from empty street to a busier one with some crowd.  Fray indicated a turn, looping back in the direction we’d come.  I obliged.

“Did you think they wouldn’t cover their weakness, Sylvester?  I put other pieces together.  I was uniquely positioned to see the greater chessboard.  My grave concern is that you are the most dangerous element possible.  Smart enough to see the truth, yet not informed enough to see that for any piece we could take, the cost is far, far too great, and reckless enough that you might take that piece regardless.”

“Flattering,” I said.  “Uniformed Sylvester.”

“You’re focusing on the wrong aspect of this.”

“Then please, inform me,” I said.

“You’re already informed, Sylvester.  This is where the recklessness comes into play.  You know exactly what the reality is.  It’s a common saying among anyone from families at dinner tables to rebellion leaders to members of the Academy.  The Crown does not lose.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“This wouldn’t be the first time, Sylvester.  I’m sure this has happened.  Other people, groups, and nations have devised the means by which to deliver fatal blows, in times where the Crown was younger and more vulnerable, when events conspired against it.  It isn’t easy to grow an empire, so soon after the upheaval required for the Crown to become what it is now, so soon after the rise of the Academies and everything they meant.  There have been other opportunities.”

“Yet the Crown doesn’t lose?” I asked.

“It feels wrong, doesn’t it?  Or when you consider the sheer power of the biological science and the military at the Crown’s disposal, yet pay mind to the fact that the Crown has only seized a quarter of the world?”

“They move slowly, establish their Academies, secure every region before moving on.”

“Absolutely, they do.  But Sylvester, there’s more to it.  There are regions, places I’ve borne witness to, which are sealed off.  They use things like the same cloud seeding we see at Radham, only to ensure death rather than parcel out leashes.  They use grown walls like you no doubt saw at Tynewear, only far taller, and they flood the areas on the other side with biological agents, parasites, and weapons.  They tell people that these were the places where disasters happened.  That this is why only the Academy can be trusted with the knowledge the Academy disseminates.”

I looked over at Fray.  She seemed somber.

“The Academy is the sorest of losers, Sylvester.  They suggested to us that the places they showed us were several of a handful.  I have reason to believe they number in the hundreds.  Places where primordials were loosed, where academies were reclaimed, knowledge disseminated, weapons turned against the Crown and Academy…”

“Places where people spoke of secrets that could cause irreparable harm to the Academy.”

“Yes, Sylvester.”

I fell silent.

“They have laid waste to continents, in whole or in part.  If they can’t win, then they ensure nobody can.  If they rule a world that they’ve reduced to a half the normal size, they still rule.  Given science and sufficient time, they can fix what they leveled.  When they do, the world will be theirs.  Unopposed.  The Infante, the Judge, is someone who oftentimes handles these sorts of decisions.  Even nobles like the Duke are rightly terrified of what he might decide.”

“Just like that,” I said.

“You can’t ever speak of what you’ve learned, Sylvester.  The revelations might outpace the wrath and ruin, but only to the coasts.  You will see exactly the kinds of results you desire, a breaking of the nobility’s back, and then they will use countermeasures.”

I stared off into the distance.

I looked off to the side, at the other Lambs, who were gathered around us.  For an instant, I wasn’t sure if they were my hallucinations.  Even as I looked at Evette, I wasn’t wholly sure.

I ran my fingers through my hair.

“I’m sorry,” Fray said.  “But this is the nature of the enemy I’m trying to fight.  They’re a threat which can’t be dealt too heavy a blow.  They must be battered until cracks become visible, and only then can wedges be set into place.  Then the wedges are tapped.  From the global scale they look down on things at, the taps seem comparatively minor.  You and I know the end result of that.  I even read something in your case files, about the use of makeshift wedges to topple a bookshelf and give your doctors a headache.”

I shook my head.

She sounded like she was coaxing me.  Trying to sell me on this plan.  Inviting me in, making it sound familiar.

It sounded more manipulative than anything I’d known her to do, and that was a manipulation that might have stemmed from genuine fear.

“I suppose you wouldn’t remember,” she said.  “It stuck with me.  I felt as if I got to know you when I read that in the file.  I thought at the time about having tea with you.  Something I’m still hoping for, to be honest.  I would like to be on the same side, to have tea with you before you go, before the Lambs arrive.  With Jessie too.  We could talk about more minor things.  If you knew of a cafe nearby, I would enjoy the chance to warm up these hands of mine and get to know you two better.”

I looked at her, dumbfounded.  I felt like I was in the middle of the sea, drowning, momentarily not sure which way was up.  Who was this person I was talking to?  I still couldn’t keep my footing while talking to her, and I still wasn’t wholly sure if she was this guileless by design or by intent.

“No,” I said.  Too blunt.  I softened it with a, “No thank you.  I should be getting back to my nascent rebellion.  I have students to look after.”

“I understand,” she said.  She rubbed her hands together, blowing on them, then worked one of the hands, as if the fingers were stiff.  “Could I walk back with you?”

I weighed the option.  I badly wanted to think, and I suspected I wouldn’t get another chance between leaving Fray and getting my rebellion settled.

But she’d been fair, and there were still points to cover.

“Alright,” I said.

The countless thoughts that were thrumming through my head redoubled, as I tried to juggle particulars of the rebellion with my processing of what Fray had told me.

“This is a battle we can win, Sylvester.  If you even wanted to stay with me for a little while, I could help you get your rebellion situated, introduce you to some people, show you some things.  I wouldn’t interfere.  You could do with them as you wished.  But let me show you where to best create the cracks.”

I didn’t want to give an answer, tempting as it was, when I wasn’t sure what to do.  I didn’t want to not answer either, because that showed insecurity and weakness, and I didn’t want to bare my neck to Fray on that level.

“Give me a way of contacting you,” I said.  “I’ll get back to you on that.”

Fray extended a hand, holding a card she’d pulled from one coat pocket.  I hesitated before taking it, and she shifted her grip, holding one corner between two knuckles, so no theoretical syringes could snap out and drug me.  She took hold of her sleeve and twisted it so Dolores couldn’t reach through.

I casually swiped the card out of the air, checked it, and pocketed it.

Jessie and I had found out how to gravely injure the Crown.  We had a gun pointed to their heads.  The problem was that the report of the gunshot would bring an avalanche or rockslide down on our head, or the spark would ignite the gas that thickened the air here.

Fray and I kept on walking, back toward the hotel where my rebellion was set up.  My thoughts grew more agitated as I considered the situation.  I reached for a pocket and withdrew a half-collapsed box of cigarettes.  “Want one?  Warm up some?”

She shook her head.  “No.  But it’s curious seeing you smoke like that.  A part of me still imagines you as a boy years younger, standing by the snow-dusted railing, looking out over the water.”

“You said something back then.  You asked me if I was a slave.”

“I talked to you about several things.  Your enslavement to the Academy was one.  Your beliefs were another.  When I said you had grown, I meant it.  You’ve found your way forward.”

Have I though?  I can’t pull the trigger.  I’m still cowed by the Academy and Crown.  My beliefs…

“Thank you for saying so,” I said, with false congeniality, gesturing with a cigarette between my fingers.

“There are more pleasant habits, however,” she said.  “Healthier ones.”

I shrugged and lit one with a match.  “I figure I don’t have that long on this world anyway.  My brain will reach its limit with the drugs I’ve injected into myself, and something will give.  A bit more poison doesn’t hurt.  If you have an expiration date anything like mine, then the same philosophy should extend to you.”

“Yes, I’ll pay the price for taking Wyvern eventually, but I have a lot to do, and giving up even one percent of my time feels like a shame.”

I mulled that over, thinking about what my future looked like.  I’d glimpsed it back at New Amsterdam, when Evette had taken the reins.

My mind caught on one word in what she’d said.

I glanced at her, quirking an eyebrow.  “Eventually?

“The deployment of Wyvern on you was different from my own deployment, Sylvester.  Mine was more focused, partially because of my age, partially by my design.  The benefits and consequences more narrowly defined.”

I drew a deep breath of smoke, not quite sure what to say to that.

“Does that bother you?” she asked.  “There are tradeoffs.  I’m not capable of the same improvisation you are.  I may dig deeper into other areas.  I get less benefit than you do, I suspect.”

“That’s not why it bothers me, exactly.  I thought we were more similar than that,” I said.  “That you started from near the same point I did and you walked to a different destination.”

“Does it really matter?”

‘There’s an experiment I talked to once.  They talked about how lonely it was, being the only one.  The divide that separates the likes of them or the likes of me from the ordinary Jacks and Jills.  So there was this thought, always lingering, that, hey, at least Genevieve Fray is out there.  There are commonalities.  We’re not related by blood, but at least we inject the same agony-inducing poisons into our brains on a regular basis.  Common ground, ahoy!”

I’d raised my voice a little at the end there, jogging my arm for emphasis.

“I never really thought of myself as an experiment, Sylvester.  The woman who faced me in the mirror was always a doctor, first and foremost.”

I nodded.  I drew in a breath, then said, “Maybe I see myself as an experiment because I was started young.  It’s always been my identity.”

“I would think the Lambs were your identity,” she said.

“I knew about our expiration dates within a few months of being old and learned enough to obtain and read my own file.  It’s all intermingled.  Part and parcel.  I sat there in that lab with the file in front of me, and I wrote down the words that were too long to understand.  Then I went, and I looked them up, or I asked Jamie.  Then I’d piece it together, or I’d remember the definitions and go back to the files and I’d try to decipher it all.”

I puffed for a second.  Fray didn’t speak, so I went on, “I grew up around the orphans.  I know for a fact that when ordinary kids were the age I was then, they’re still capable of being convinced that eating dirt is a good idea, or they’ll maybe sometimes once in a blue moon still pee their pants.  Or maybe that’s just orphans with their issues.”

“I imagine the point still stands.”

Point is,” I said, picking up the word and the general thrust of her statement and making it mine, “I was young as dangit when I sat on the floor of that lab and read my file by candlelight and tried desperately to figure out if there was any other possible way to read it, that didn’t say that by the time I was nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one, I was bound to be stark raving mad.  Trying really hard not to imagine my older self, unable to distinguish reality from fiction, nonverbal, whimpering at the darkness.  Unable to remember anything moment to moment, except maybe that he once had people close to him and that they’re gone.”

“I read your file before fleeing the Academy, Sylvester.  It didn’t go into quite that much depth on the last point.”

“I was nine!”  I raised my voice.  I’d surprised myself as much as I had surprised her.

Under Fray’s coat sleeve, Dolores stirred at the disturbance.  Tentacles reached out, wrapping at her fingers.

I composed myself while she calmed the octopus that lurked under her clothing.

“I might have been seven or eight, even,” I said, calm again, no hint of the anger, “It’s hard to tell, with my growth stunted as it was.  But I’m not stupid, and I’ve had time to mull it over.  It was pretty dang formative, Genevieve.”

“Of course.”

“Twenty years, Genevieve, give or take, with seven to nine of those years already spent.  Twenty years, and then as the months go by, you start thinking… well, ho, taking Wyvern once every month?  I’m out of commission for nearly a week, aren’t I?  Sometimes less, sometimes more, but it averages out that way, especially when you account for time spent in the labs, getting blood drawn.  Time doing the tests or interviewing with my disgruntled doctors or the too-nice redhead who smiles and acts nice to make up for the fact that she’s read the same dang file I have and she wants to downplay those same things that keeps ten year old me staring up at the ceiling at night.  Ten year old me grows to resent them, even damn well hating them for what they represent.”

I was gesticulating a little too much, cigarette between my fingers.  I put it back.

“A quarter of your time lost to the labs and the injections.”

“Exactly!  Ten year old me goes through the weeks and the months and he isn’t exactly one for mental accounting of numbers, but that deadline is there, always looming, and he can’t help but feel like he has only so much time, and he’s losing some of it.  And somewhere along the way, it clicks.  You get what I’m saying?”

“Best you finish your thought.”

“This ten year old, his mind runs on multiple tracks, he’s good at juggling a few lines of thought at once, and there’s been this persistent one that’s been ticking around in the back, that he can’t quite riddle out.  How can they do this?  How can they fucking justify it?  And despite not being a mental calculation type, two thoughts connect.  Twenty years, minus twenty five percent, give or take, and you have fifteen.  That’s thought one.  Then he thinks back to how they’ll handle the tormented, lonely young man who talks to his hallucinations, and he imagines sedation, a last batch of experiments on him, to squeeze out the last bit of usefulness, and then one final dose, before they give him merciful oblivion.  What am I describing, Fray?  Gets fifteen years if lucky, then a mercy killing?”

“A dog.”

A dog!  I’m treated no fucking better than a dog, not given any more years, kept on a leash.  I realized that pretty early on too, eh Fray?  Are you starting to get it?  How this plays out?  How I arrived to the conclusion that no, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scoundrel, I’m not a charlatan or a child genius or a protector of mice or any of that.  At the start and end of the day, I’m an experiment.  So I’m glad for you, Fray, if you’re free to see yourself as a doctor.  How good for you, there.  Do tell me the difference, with you getting the care of a talented wyvern-augmented professor to help you along every step of the way, while I got students working on a side project.  Let me know what this means for you.  How many years do you really have left?”

“I talked of cracks and wedges before, Sylvester.  You’re asking me to place the wedge between us.”

“That’s an answer unto itself, you know.”

“It is,” she admitted.  “If you must know, I’ll see another five to seven years.”

“No, no, there’s a rule, isn’t there?” I asked.  “With diagnoses.  Terminal ones.  They marked it out on the charts for the Lambs with the expiration dates, so this was a lesson I learned pretty damn early.  Part of a formative memory here, and I try to hold on to those.  Given predictions on Academy advancement, for every seven tenths of a year you last, you get more time.  It inflates the expiration dates.  Your ticker due to go in three years?  Now it’s four, because medicine advances that fast.  Now, the dates the Lambs got already account for that.  But you?  I feel like you’re being disingenuous.”

“Five.  A heart due to fail in three conventional years with non-Academy medical aid can last five with the Academy’s help.  There are diminishing returns, but it folds into itself too if you reach certain benchmarks.  There are other factors, advancements I’m keeping my eye on.  My estimation is that I’ll suffer the true effects of Wyvern in eight to eleven years.”

I chuckled.  “Listen to that.  If you started a new kid on Wyvern, same regimen I got, he might expire at the same time you do.  A whole ‘nother lifetime.”

“Sylvester-”

“No,” I said.  I extended my finger.  “No.  Fuck you, Fray.  You don’t get to claim the rights and wisdom of being doctor and experiment both.  You don’t get to be the savior.  You’re as bad as any of them, because if the cards had fallen down differently, if you hadn’t been caught looking too hard at things they wanted to keep secret, you’d be one of them.  And you probably would have gotten your damn tea party with the Lambsbridge Orphans, and I probably would have enjoyed it!  Hell, it might have been everything I needed for me to stay with the Lambs and stay at the Academy, having a like mind, Helen getting that tea party you seem so set on, and if you could work half the miracles you seem set on promising, you could have saved Jamie and Gordon.  Perfect!  Hunky dory!”

“Sylvester, that’s not-”

Don’t,” I said, sharp enough to cut her off.  “Don’t talk.”

She fell silent.

My eye stung where tears had welled out to touch the slice at my lower eyelid.

“You don’t get to tell me to heel, Fray,” I said.  “You’re no different from the ones who made me and the ones who condoned me, so you don’t get any more say than they do.  Now, I’m going to consider matters.  I’ll think about this threat of retaliation, but I’ll make the decision, and I’ll probably make a decision you won’t be happy with.  You’ll put up with it, because I’m a reality no different than the primordial you created and put out there.  The only difference is that I slipped the leash.”

She clenched a fist.  I could see that her hand really was stiff.

She could deal.  She had another decade to deal with it and a thousand other minor inconveniences that naturally came about during the spans of sanity, life, and companionship.

“I can make better use of your army of students than you can, Fray.  I’ve got no time left to be scared, for myself or for others.  I’ve got no time to be stonewalled or told no by people who have no right to say boo to me.  You call the Crown a sore loser?”

I spread my arms, chuckling.  I gestured at myself.

“Sylvester,” she said.  “No.”

“They say a dog resembles its master.”

“I’ll bargain with you,” she said.

“You’ll try.  I’m not backing down on this.”

“The accommodations for your new army.  I was going to arrange for you to have them from the time  asked you to go on this walk with me.  I’ll give you what you need to take care of them.  Because I meant what I said.”

“Gracious of you,” I said.

“As for the actual bargain, the Lambs are coming within the hour.  They’ll arrive before the vehicle you’ll want to take to leave Laureas does.  Give me time to get affairs in order-”

“Time to work against me?” I asked.

“I have no bloody idea,” she said.  “I don’t know what to do with you.  I hardly know what to say, because I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing and make you more upset.  But give me a few months, tend to your new rebellion faction.  I’ll give you Warren and all of the resources I planned to use to safely and discreetly make my exit from this city with hundreds of students in tow, just for the day.”

I thought about it.

I shook my head.

“What do you want, then?  I can give you attention.  Buy you a few months, maybe years.”

“No,” I said.  “Could you revive the caterpillar project from scratch?”

I watched her eyes move.

“That’s a no, then?”

“Sylvester,” she said.  “You were going to look after the Beattle rebellion regardless.  You’d be trading a few words and a restriction on schedule for everything you need.”

“Nah,” I said.  I looked past Fray at the Lambs who were witnessing the scene.  I extended an arm, gesturing at them.  “I’ve got to look after them, don’t I?”

Fray turned her head.

“There’s nobody there.”

“The Lambs, Fray.  They’re there.  If you’re going to start making concessions to me, for the way you and others have treated me, you owe the rest of the Lambs something too, don’t you?”

“You said-”

“I said I wouldn’t render you bait for the bear.  I’m not.  I’m telling you to make a damn sacrifice for once.  Show me you can actually follow through for once, when it counts.  Voluntarily hand yourself over.  It’ll be a nice checkmark in their files.  Something that pacifies the higher-ups, keeps the Lambs project running smoothly.”

She was silent.  I finally got to see her flustered, agitated.

“It’s your choice, Fray.  Only you, me, and Jessie will know you made it.  You stated the stakes yourself.  You can go, turn yourself in, let them lock the restraints on.  Tell them whatever you want, tell the Academy that I know things, and use that information to stave off whatever treatment they have planned for you.  That’s fine, but you’ll be theirs.  Or don’t go, and spend every day dreading that everything and everyone you like and care about might be taken from you by a force beyond your control.”

“You have no idea what you’re really doing,” she said.

“You wanted time, Fray?  You really believe in this threat?  Convince me.  These are the terms.  The accommodations for my army of students, Warren’s help, and you, waiting politely on that platform when the Lambs emerge from their train.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.15 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jessie was waiting outside of the hotel.  Students were scattering, leaving the building and walking through the streets.  I walked down the street, holding my cigarette and not really puffing on it.  My thoughts tumbled over one another.

That was fine.  They needed to get themselves ready.  Clothes and personal belongings needed to be gathered.  They would come back with luggage.

She told me, “I sent for some carriages.  We’re going to need to assist, because the Academy is going to have recovered and they’ll react to a mass exodus.”

I nodded.  I leaned against the wall beside Jessie and puffed, still thinking.

She gave me a curious look.  “It didn’t go well?”

I had to think before I answered that question.

“Depends how you look at it.  Am I that easy to read?”

“You’re smoking.”

“That’s not a tell,” I said.

“You don’t usually smoke more than one or two cigarettes a day.”

“I smell?”

“You smell like you had more than one, yeah.”

I wrinkled my nose, then bit my lip.

“If the outcome of the meeting depends on how I look at it, share some perspectives,” Jessie told me.

Some of the students walked out of the hotel.  A group.  There was a bit of excitement in the air.  They were taking a massive leap of faith.  For some of them, it was the first time in their lives that they had really moved beyond their pre-set paths.

“She touched a nerve,” I said.  “One I didn’t realize was there.”

“If this were a ‘there’s good news and bad news’ explanation, that’s the bad news, then.”

“No,” I said.  “Because it isn’t that kind of explanation.  It’s muddled.  Lots of gray area.”

“I see,” she said.

“She wasn’t who I wanted her to be, and I saw that, and a lot of accumulated stresses and disappointments came out,” I said.  I pulled back on the cigarette.  A pair of male students walked past, one gave me a nod, and I gave him a nod in turn.

“You look a little scary, for the record,” Jessie said.

“Noted,” I said.

“What’s the gray area?”

“Being able to see that Fray wasn’t who I wanted her to be meant I got more of a glimpse of her, I think.  I was able to stop myself, but… chose not to.  Because I saw an in.”

“Past the facade?  You once described Fray as a demon wearing an angel’s mask.”

“Did I?”

“To Jamie, once upon a time.”

“Huh.  I like that.  Good for me.”

“I’d point out that you said it once, forgot about it, and then said it again later like it was the first time, and then you did it again but it was the matron and the ogre, but you seem like you’re not in the mood for any playful jabs,” Jessie said.

“Thank you for not pointing it out, then,” I said.  I smiled a little, then I puffed thoughtfully.  What had I been saying?  It was hard to recall particulars when my thoughts were this scattered and the things I was considering were this big.

“You saw an in,” Jessie reminded me.

“Yes,” I said.  “Thank you.  I didn’t penetrate past the angel to the devil inside, though.  I think I glimpsed the human.”

“Something exploitable?”

“We’ll find out in less than forty-five minutes, I think.”

“What an interesting timeframe.”

“The Lambs are coming,” I said.  “In forty-five minutes.”

“Ah,” Jessie said.  She pushed her glasses up her nose.

I nodded.

“That’s bad.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said.  “Gray areas, remember?”

“Of course I remember, Sy,” Jessie said, clearly annoyed.  “Why is this gray?”

“Because I’m suspicious that when the train pulls up and the Lambs get off, Fray is going to be standing there, ready to turn herself in.”

“I see.  This goes back to what you were saying about your valiant fight against the primordial, does it?  It’s really my facade you’re trying to crack.”

“Jessie-”

“Do you expect to find an angel, a demon, or a human when you chip away my mask?  I assume that’s why you’re chipping away at my reason and sens-”

I flicked my fingers, striking the arm of her glasses with a fingernail, interrupting her.  “Chip.”

She gave me a sidelong glance.

I did it again.  “Chip.”

“I’m armed, Sylvester.”

“And I’m being honest.  Really.  The Lambs are due.  Sixty-forty odds that Fray will be there.”

“That must have been a fascinating conversation.  If I hadn’t seen you walk off with Fray, I might have thought you were losing your mind again.”

“Maybe I did, just a bit.  But I’m pretty sure on this one,” I said.  I reached into a pocket, and I withdrew a piece of paper.  I handed it over.  “Warren Howell arrived with the last train-”

“-Twelve minutes ago.”

“Twelve minutes ago.  Fray will be talking to him.  He’ll cover us from the Lambs and he’ll cooperate, as will the rest of the people he brings for help.  That paper has the addresses of our first contacts.  Fray was kind enough to supply the next part of her plan.  We’ll be able to room and board our army while we get the next pieces of our plan underway.”

“I’m usually content to let you do your thing, and I keep up, but I’m going to need more information on this one.”

“The dark cloud that’s hanging over all of this and making it look a lot grayer is that our standing plan may not work.  Fray thinks others have tried, or others have done similar things.  She knew and she didn’t try.  The Crown is a sore loser, Jessie.  She believes that if we move forward and spread the word, the Crown will sooner erase the Crown States from the map than allow the mask to be pulled off.”

Jessie nodded, taking that in.

Even irritated, with me flicking at her face, she was calm and sure.  It was a panacea of sorts.  It made the sentiments Fray had stirred easier to handle.

I continued, “In my ire, I convinced her that if she doesn’t turn herself in and show that she really does take this that seriously, I might move ahead with the plan regardless.  That I’m a sore loser too.”

“How much of that was truth?”

I smiled.

She reached out and flicked my nose.

“That’s annoying,” I commented.

“Oh, is it now?”

“You’re terribly immature,” I told her.

“I am.  And I’m curious, too.  This fear that you think will put her on the train platform, was it the glimmer of human you saw in her?”

“Sixty percent chance she stands on that platform, mind you,” I said.  “Completely made up number, but it’s approximately where my feelings are on it.  And only to a degree.  Both the devil in Fray and the angel are practical monsters.  If she extends the same arithmetic to  the hunting of us, practically speaking…

“Practically speaking, it’s not out of the question that she ends up on that platform.”

“But that’s only a small part of that.  If it was that alone, it would account for perhaps five percent of the chance.  It was two things that stood out to me in particular,” I said.  “Two things that make me see Fray in a different light than I did before today.  The first, really, is when and how the crack appeared in her shell.  It was when I got angry.  When I accused her, arbitrarily, she started listening to me.  I accused her again, still angry, of being responsible, and she got angry.  I made unreasonable demands, and she bargained.”

“The crack in the facade.”

I finished my cigarette, mashed it against the wall, joining other dark spots from other days and nights Jessie and I had both stood here outside our hotel, plotting what came next.

“She actually felt guilty,” I said.

“Despite no direct involvement?”

“Indirect involvement.  She took Wyvern, which was tested on me and others like me.  She ran from us very effectively for a very long few months before she let us catch her.  She probably had moles, and she didn’t give any tells, but she didn’t actually ask any questions or raise eyebrows about to my repeated references to Lacey, and I’m wondering if she would have if there was nothing going on there.”

“Indirect involvement, then.  Maybe.  Your interpretation of Lacey was very different from Jamie’s.”

I nodded.

“Guilty,” Jessie ruminated on the word.

“A bit of fear, a bit of genuine guilt, as I let my facade down and pulled a bit of hers down in the process, some practicality, and, maybe a bit of it had to do with her being spooked.”

“Spooked?  This is different from her being scared?”

“Flustered.  Put on her heels.  In all of that, my ranting and railing against her, I went with my instincts.  In the midst of it all, I asked her to make a sacrifice for once.  I think it hit home.  Prey instinct, gut feeling, and a bit of the raw on my side to break past the civil veneer.  We should run after these students.  Talk while we walk.”

I put my hand on Jessie’s shoulder, bringing her with.  She had to bend down to grab our bags, which meant my hand slipped away.

“You’re going to need to elaborate on that last point,” Jessie said.

“Of course,” I said.  I took my bag from Jessie.  I glanced back at the hotel.

“If you wait and try to make me impatient, it won’t work,” Jessie said.  “I’ll remember, and you’ll forget, and you’ll be more annoyed and inconvenienced in the end than I am.”

“You’re my foil,” I said.  “It’s why we get along so well.”

“Of course,” she said.  “Is this a new realization?  Stemming from the fact that Fray turned out not to be who you thought she was?”

“No,” I said.  “Hardly.  I’ve known you and Jamie were natural fits for me for a long while.  Fray was… something else.  When I called on her to make the sacrifice for once, she was flustered.  I was musing on it while I walked back here, and I’m left thinking, you know, the Crown, awfully sore losers.  Destroy a continent to hide the fact they actually lost once.”

“You’re going to need to elaborate on that, too.”

“So needy!” I waved my hands at Jessie, as if shooing a pesky fly or an annoying small child.  She pulled my hands down.

“I’m a sore loser.  How sore a loser remains to be seen, of course.  It depends on Fray, on you, on my mental health, and a few other factors.”

“A lot of that going around.”

“Oh, but see, it goes further.  Mary, oh our Mary was holding a grudge.  Lillian too.  Didn’t take too kindly to my betrayal.  There were heavy feelings there.  Not happy about the gunshot to the knee, or the way the breakup went.”

“I’m not sure I’d call that being a sore loser.  Especially in Mary’s case.”

I shooed Jessie again.

“You get very immature when your emotional defenses are down,” she remarked.

I fought with her for a moment, as I continued shooing her, while she pulled and swatted my hands down.

I was feeling better than I had.

“Cynthia.  I don’t think I need to say more.”

“I’m seeing where you’re going with this.”

“Mauer?  What do you think, Jessie?”

“He wears an agony-inducing symbol of his grudge against the Academy.  I think he qualifies in your pattern.”

“So… We all put our chips in, paid the price of admission.  And I’m left wondering about Fray.”

“She lost her career.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “She has a restricted schedule.  Not as restricted as mine, damn her, but she has a limited timeframe to work with.  And I have to wonder, where’s the grudge?  Why doesn’t she care that we just spoiled Beattle for her, when this is supposed to be all she has?  Why is she such a cool customer when she’s working with limited time and we just cost her cumulative weeks or months of work that she’s been doing in the background?  And no, I don’t think it’s Wyvern.  I think it’s that she doesn’t have stakes in this.  Not here, not this particular job or what follows, or maybe not even what in comes before.  I called her on it, asked her about the sacrifices and in that moment… ”

I didn’t need to finish.  I’d already spelled it out.  Jessie had all of the pieces.

“She’s playing another game.”

“I think so,” I said.

“Fifty fifty chance she ends up on that train platform, totally made up number, tilting slightly one way for reasons you’ve already elaborated on.  Fear, maybe guilt, the fact that the Crown States might hinge on it, depending on how sore of a loser you are.”

I nodded.

“But the real reason it would go one way or the other…” Jessie mused, as we walked.  “Is the scheme she’s working on in the background.  Does it need her?”

My step bounced a little with excitement.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see if she turns up there.”

I threw one arm around Jessie’s shoulders, making her stumble a bit.  I hugged her with that arm.  “We’re on the same page, there.”

The assembled gang leaders joined Jessie and I in watching the students moving out of the dorms.  There were Academy uniforms nearby, but a scattered few, mostly interested in trying to figure out what was happening and where the students were going.  They had sent for help, and help would arrive.

They mustered their forces, and we mustered ours.

“You really kicked up a fuss, huh kid?” Frederick asked.

“You’re still doing that condescension thing,” I pointed out.  “I think the rest of us moved on past that a long time ago.  It only makes you look bad.”

“I look fine,” Frederick said.

“Frederick gets all of the girls,” Clay said.

I gave the man a curious look.

I wasn’t sure he ‘got it’.  But Clay didn’t seem to get much of anything.

“Key thing is to get the kids back to the hotel,” I said.  “We blitz the uniforms.  They don’t have guns, only clubs.  Which of you have guns?”

Archie raised his hand.

Right.

“I have the shotgun we got from the punk kid at the lab,” Otis said, showing me.

“Take the ammo out,” I told him.  “I don’t want you shooting my kids.”

The middle aged, grizzled gang member stared me down.

Finally, he relented.  He tossed the thing at me, and reached out in the direction of one of his many subordinates.  They passed him a stick.

“I’d rather have a weapon I can use over one I can’t.”

“Good enough,” I said.

I indicated the places to occupy and lay in wait, with Jessie consulting.

Students began to drift away, my de-facto lieutenants lurking here and there.

Jessie and I moved through the area, checking on students here and there.  The ones who looked like they might be having second thoughts, the ones who were having trouble.  Here and there, we paired up students, told older ones who looked responsible to look after younger ones.  Most were over fifteen, but a few weren’t.  The younger ones would bear looking after.

“I feel like we might lose some.  Ones who want to follow, but who get caught up in things.  It’s an awful thought.  Like, if I’d been stopped and dragged back to the Academy just when I’d committed to leaving?”

“I know what you mean,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I spotted Rudy and flagged him down.

“We’ve blocked off the streets you said.  If they come after us in carriages and wagons, it’ll slow them down.  There were a few gates and bridges, like the big one over Spider street.  We blocked those off.”

“Good,” I said.  “Where’s Possum?”

“With the Strays.  I don’t think they’re coming with, are they?”

I shook my head.  “Only a few.  Is Possum going to stay with them?”

“Nah.  She’s with us.  She wants to be a part of this.” Rudy said.  He was a bruiser of a fella, but there was meaningful concern on his face.  “She’s going to hate leaving them.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Was just thinking about something along those lines.  Maybe if you pull her away?  Ask her to help you hunt down any students who might otherwise get left behind?  Pull up the rear, and be mindful, because the gangsters and the uniforms might start scrapping soon.”

He nodded.

“Good man,” I said, as he hurried off to find Possum.

I took it all in.

We were mobilizing, getting ready to leave.  I’d planned to take a boat, but Fray’s evacuation plan was the train.

There was a fuzzy area, however, between now and then.

“How long until the Lambs arrive?”

“Thirty minutes.  It’s going to take us ten to get to the train station.”

“We have to do this fast, then,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jessie said.  “But our people are capable.  Most of these uniforms are security officers for the Academies, doing night patrols and breaking up a few scuffles a month.  I don’t think they want to cause a stir.”

“But there are some, like those ones over there, who have more experience.  Sharper, more up to date uniforms, even though they don’t wear the uniforms that often.  I think they wear something fancier.”

“Yeah,” Jessie said.  “Like the ones who were hunting Avis.”

“How long until our guest shows?”

“No idea how fast he moves, but going by my measure of the walk from here to the train station taking ten minutes… he should have turned up three minutes ago.”

I frowned.

“We can run,” Jessie suggested.  “Do more here, then run there.”

“We can.  I don’t want to.  Running attracts attention.”

She nodded.

“And you’re slow,” I added.

She punched my arm.

We continued encouraging and helping students for another few minutes, before Jessie touched my arm.

Warren, and Warren had help.  I was disappointed that Dog and Catcher weren’t among the help.

It felt like Warren had grown.  He was a proper Bruno, but he was an exemplar among them.  A living statue, carved rather than grown, but he had been grown.  The muscle was real, standing out against the fabric of his clothes, with grooves running deep between the individual muscles.  He didn’t wear a jacket.  I suspected his body was such an efficient engine that he didn’t truly need one.

Fray did good work, really.

The lack of proportion between his head and the rest of him was odd to see.  His hair was slicked back, and he had muttonchops.  The color of his eyes was particularly intense as he stared me down.  I probably weighed as much as one of his legs did.

Just his approach and arrival seemed to bother the uniforms.  They talked among themselves.

Warren’s help included various other experiments and ex-soldiers.  Mauer’s discards possibly, and back-alley doctors.  There was a trend to the clothes they wore, with jackets in a military cut that rarely touched on the colors of the Crown or the Crown’s favored style.  Blue and silver rather than gold and red, or black and silver.  It wasn’t an absolute trend, but I had the sentiment that this group of people had spent enough time among one another to start becoming a group.

I had questions and I was curious, but I didn’t want to pry.

“No Wendy?” I asked.

Warren shook his head.

“You’re cooperating?” I asked him.

He didn’t nod or shake his head.  I watched him work one fist, as if rolling the knuckles, testing the joints and the strength of his hand.

Finally, he nodded.

“I need someone that’s willing to help me handle an errand.  Any eager beavers, looking to stretch their legs or limbs after a long train ride?”

The group of doctors and experiments and grizzled normals exchanged looks.

It seemed they deferred to Warren, here.

A leader that wouldn’t talk.

“Warren, then?”

Again, that long pause, and then the reluctant nod.

“Great.”

Jessie and I led him around the back of one building.

“Just around the corner,” I said.  “Group of men.  You’re going after the leader.  Tall, blond hair.  He’ll have a weapon, but no gun.  We need to catch him off guard, grab him.  We’ll want him for information.”

Warren gave me a dispassionate look.

“We’re working on a schedule.  If you waste time, then Fray suffers and we suffer, and Avis suffers.  Students might even get hurt.  Let’s just… accept you’re doing this under protest and move on.  Fray asked you to because she thinks it matters.”

Warren frowned, then turned away.  He flexed his fists again.

“Capture, don’t kill or harm,” I said.

He sighed without looking at me.

Then he charged.  One hand gripped the corner of the building to help him swing in, as he ran from the back of one building, around the corner, and into the alley.

I heard the shouts of surprise and alarm.  I heard the swears, the grunts.

Jessie and I moved in sync, without even needing to signal one another.  We knew the moment.

Warren stood in the midst of Frederick’s group.  One hand held Frederick’s weapon arm.  The other gripped Frederick by the face, fingers wrapped around Frederick’s head as someone of a normal scale might hold a cricket ball.

“I want to see his face,” I said.

The hand moved from Frederick’s face to his neck.  He was already beet red, which stood out marvelously with his blond hair.

“Ah, false positive,” I said, with a bit of levity.  “I thought you were the informant who tipped off the Academy about us.  But I don’t see it in your eyes.”

“You knew darn well that I wasn’t,” Frederick said.

“I’m really glad I told him not to kill.  Dust yourself off.  If you’re still in, then get ready, plan goes forward as intended shortly.  Just one quick thing to take care of first.”

“Otis?” Frederick asked.

I smiled.  “Afraid not.”

Their rivalry wouldn’t die here.  Otis wasn’t the snitch.  He’d been at this for too long.

“Archie?” Jessie asked, quietly.

I gestured for Warren.

He looked even more disgruntled than before.

“Need to find the informant before any fighting starts, or important people get offed, and the other side gets too much information,” I explained to Warren.

“Next alley,” Jessie said.

“This time… just level them.  There are less of them this time,” I said.  “No students, if any students happen to be with them, but there shouldn’t be any.”

He wasted no time.  Frustration might have been an element.  He swung around into the alley, and from the sound of it, he picked something up and threw it.  I heard the sound of a bone breaking.

We rounded the corner, me slightly in the lead this time.

Clay’s men lay on the ground, broken.

“You were too eager to go run our errand, earlier,” I said.  “The one I ended up sending Otis on.  It would have been a prime opportunity to pass information to the Academy.  What I don’t get is how someone as thick as you are managed this.  Are you that good an actor?”

Clay coughed blood.

“Come on now,” I told him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.  His teeth were stained red.  He looked up at Warren.

“If it wasn’t for just how dumb you are, and the fact that you and your buddies here are all brothers, or look like brothers, I would have immediately pegged you, based on how new you are to the city.  Some background, but only inasmuch as it can be faked.”

“Please,” he said.

“I’m going to kill all three of you shortly, whatever happens,” I told him.  “So… it’s really just a question of sating my curiosity.”

“Don’t,” he said, his eyes widening.  “Please.  Not like this, not now.”

“Not now?”

“They give us a drug.  Alderbenzarine.”

“Memory drug,” Jessie said.

“They give it to old people.  Kick in the ass, gets you going, and helps with memory retention.  But it makes you foggy, less good judgement.  I take a lot.  Helps to be dumb, people say things around dumb folks.  Then I go to my bosses, I go off the drug, and tell them particulars.”

“You found us awfully quick.”

“We’re so close to New Amsterdam and Lincolnshire and other places.  They tap cities like this for people if they need bodies for a gang or somethin’.  We hang here, keep a thumb on the pulse, wait to get recruited, and report in.”

“Just have to put on a show, be dumb, be available, and you draw your wage, huh?”

“It’s a good wage, but,” he said, and he paused to close his eyes, wincing at the pain he was already feeling from being soundly smashed.  “There are risks.  I don’t want to die while I’m dumb.  Please.”

His still-conscious brother nodded.

I stared down at him, aware of the gun at my side.

“Some students who heard your speech will decide not to follow along,” Jessie said.  “He can’t share that much more than them.”

“Fair bit more,” I said.  “But point taken.  What if I take your tongue and your hands, Clay?”

He nodded eagerly.  He tried to make a pleading gesture, but one of his wrists was already fairly messed up.  “Please.”

I drew my knife.

“Warren, you want to go back to your buddies?  Tell them they’re hitting the group by the blue-painted wagon with the horses.  Wait one minute, then attack.  From there, you can go…”

I fished a piece of paper from my pocket.

“…here.  Avis will be brought to you.”

He took the paper, then stomped off.

I knelt before a broken Clay, knife in hand.

“I know what it is to not want to go out with your brain in the wrong place,” I said.

He nodded.  Then he stuck out his tongue and his hands – one bent at an odd angle, and he screwed his eyes shut.

We could hear the far off train whistle as we approached our hiding place.

“Enter the Lambs,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” I said.  My eyes scanned the platform.

“Do you want to see them?  I’m sure we could contrive a way.  A brief visit, an exchange of words.”

I shook my head.

“It might not even be all of them.”

“I can’t imagine Lillian or Mary not coming,” I said.  “Helen wouldn’t miss this unless she had another job.”

“So we just let them come?  Get a glimpse, see what happens with Fray, and then leave?  Just like that?”

“Each parting gets harder,” I said.  “If I have to deal with that, I want it to be worth it.  I’d just be talking to them to talk to them.  If you wanted to do different, I think they’d let you go.  You could tell them things, get them up to date.”

Jessie looked down at the train station from over the top of the wall.  Jessie’s camaraderie with the station employees had earned us access to a prime vantage point, the wall that framed the ticket booth.

Again, the train hooted.  Far closer this time.  She shook her head.

“No?” I asked.

“Nothing new to share.  I guess we’re on the same page.  I feel like if I shared anything, it would be negative.  The positives aren’t things we want them to know right off the bat.”

I nodded.

Jessie looked at the crowds of people on the train station.

She walked up the slight slope to the actual platform.  She was utterly still as people milled this way and that, making room for the people who would depart and eagerly forming lines and queues with their luggage next to them, ready to board.

Fray stood alone in the middle of the two groups, stiff necked, hands clasped in front of her.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” I asked, under my breath.

The train hooted one more time, and the tracks rattled as it pulled into the station.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 15.16 – Twig

Bitter Pill – 15.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Fray actually came,” Jessie said.

I raised my binoculars and peered through them.  I could focus my magnified view on Fray’s hands, then her feet, move the view up to look at the lines of her body and posture, before moving up to her face and expression.

“I thought you were full of it,” she said.

“Never,” I said.

“Never?  Sylvester, I could list the times you’ve been full of it in the past year, in chronological order.”

“Each and every one of those instances had a rationale and explanation, I guarantee you,” I said.

“Yeah.  You wanted to get my goat,” she said.

“When you say it like that, it sounds like a reference to something dirty.”

“That’s less to do with how I’m saying it and more to do with how your twisted brain hears it,” she said.

Steam hissed and metal clanked as the train settled in at the station.  Academy quarantine officers lined up at the doors.

I focused the binoculars briefly on the windows.  I could see the Lambs within, talking to one another.  From their tone, they were talking strategy.  Helen, Mary, Lillian, Duncan, and Ashton.

The doctors boarded the train.  My focus turned back to Fray, my binoculars-augmented view of her provided details that nobody in the crowd was paying sufficient attention to catch.  The way that she shifted her weight from one foot to another.  The fact that she was sticking closer to those ready to board, but was one of the only people in that particular crowd who didn’t have some luggage with her.

She was trying to act like she was calm.  The agitation still shone through in parts.

“See what I meant, about the human side of her?”

“I’m not looking at her.  I’m focused on the quarantine team.  They’re barely stopping as they move through the train car.  This train stops only once between Radham and Laureas.  There have been no reports of outbreaks, I don’t think they’re too fussed.”

“If Fray is right, things are a little trickier than that.  The plague is spreading even now.  It just needs a battle before it finds its roots.  She said it reacts to blood, gunpowder, ash.  Something punitive, vengeful,” I said.

“Speaking of,” Jessie said.  She finally turned in Fray’s direction, looking over her glasses at our adversary and benefactor of the day.  “More agitated.  I haven’t seen Fray at the top of her game yet, so it’s hard to compare.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You wanted to be here to know her decision and possibly interfere in it.  You weren’t sure if you wanted to go through on what you threatened her about.”

“I’m not sure about her feeling,” I said.  “I’m wondering if even Fray is sure about her feeling.”

Her feet were planted like she might turn and leave at a moment’s notice.  More than once, she had looked at her escape routes, ones that included a break for the exit and a run through the crowd.  There was a dimension to this where she couldn’t be sure the Lambs would step off the train and simply bring her into custody.  There was a risk that Mary would hurl a knife, or that Crown soldiers would recognize her, point a gun at her and pull the trigger.

What happened then?  What did she do?  What did I do?

“Sy,” Jessie said.  “We talked once about allying with Fray.  As peers, not enemies.  We don’t have an abundance of allies, and she’s probably the most capable one that qualifies.  I’m not saying you should save her, but if you’re going to make a decision, it’ll have to be soon.  People are getting up to get their luggage.  The Lambs won’t be the last out, either.”

“When we aren’t talking long-term plans, you defer to me a lot,” I said.  “You say this is my decision.  Don’t you get a say?  We’re peers, you twit.”

Jessie turned her binoculars toward Fray.

I continued, “I covered a lot of the key points.  She’s not responsible for the plague.  She is responsible for primordials.  She’s got something else going on, a grander plan.  She might be a potential ally, but she told me she identifies as an Academy Doctor.  She didn’t say it outright, but I know that she takes substantial pride in the fact that she was nearly a professor and would have qualified if it weren’t for the fact that she knew too much.”

“I don’t think fast in crisis situations,” Jessie said.  “It’s why I usually defer.  I can trust you to make a call I can understand and mostly agree with, outside of the times and occasions when you’ve lost your mind entirely.”

“One time,” I said.

“I help set the broad strokes for the next stage of things.  I coordinate and counsel.”

“Well quit it.  Tell me, what do we do about Fray?  I’m not asking you to make the decision, but you get half of the say.”

“What happens in the event of a tie?” Jessie asked.

The quarantine team stepped off of the train.  They signaled the all-clear, and the first passengers made their way down the steps carefully, lest the weight and awkwardness of their luggage pull them off balance.

“We should get rid of her,” Jessie said.  “She’s inscrutable, and she’s inscrutable to the both of us.  She keeps escalating.  She’s a danger to us and a danger to the Lambs, and she’s a danger we can’t properly solve.”

I listened to Jessie while I watched Fray with my binoculars.  Fray shifted her weight again.

“The problem is,” Jessie told me, “She has answers we don’t.  She opens doors.  There’s going to come a time when we need to know something, and Genevieve Fray might be the only proper resource we have.  More than any other factor, that might be key.  You said she feels a measure of guilt, and that has to count for something.  Room for something better, like you saw in Lillian.”

“Nothing like what I saw in Lillian,” I said.  I turned my attention to the window.  I only caught the briefest glimpse of Lillian before she was too far forward in the car to see.  She would be amid the luggage racks, possibly with the conductor or another employee helping her with her medical bag and luggage.

“A chance that Academy science might be used for sincere good?” Jessie asked.

“I wonder,” I said.  “And I have a hard time visualizing a scene where her greater plan unfolds, and I say yes, those primordials, those sterilized people, that chemical leash, the casualties, the wars, they were all worth it, Fray was undeniably a force for good in the world.”

“Then instead of good, what about a force for change?” Jessie asked.  “If I had to decide, I would say to save her, because we might not succeed, Sy.  We might need someone to carry on, if we can’t make something happen in the next year or so.”

What does Genevieve Fray’s change matter, if she’s willing to ask everyone but herself to make the necessary sacrifices?

That, more than anything, had been at the heart of why I’d been so angry with her.  Why I still was angry, even.  Because it felt like it was no different from Crown or Academy.

I put my binoculars down.  I watched the scene from afar instead of taking in the narrow view.  The Lambs stepped off the train, talking among one another.  Still talking together, the Lambs moved through the initial cluster of families eagerly waiting for departing husbands and daughters.

The amusing thing was, they weren’t looking at the train platform.  Mary’s eyes scanned the buildings along one side of the station.  Helen’s scanned buildings on the other side.  All while they were trying to look casual.

I was preparing for Mary’s searching eye to move more in my direction, having covered the most likely spots for me to be lurking, and I saw Fray shift position again.

The tension flowed out of her.  The footing had gone flat, no longer poised to pivot at a moment’s notice.  Her chin dropped a fraction.  Fray had seen the Lambs, and she was poising herself not to run, but to surrender.

I reached out for Jessie, and I pulled her down and away, tumbling to the ground.

Raising my fingers to my mouth, I whistled.

Lambs all across the rooftop hesitated, and Helen said the word, “Sylvester.”

Mary looked at Lillian, then off in Fray’s direction.  She said the word firmly, making a decision for the group.  “Fray.”

They moved as a unit.  Even the new Lambs who hadn’t been on the train followed – Abbie, Emmett, Nora, and Lara.

Phantom images that vanished as they passed the threshold of the roof.

“What if they come for us?” Jessie asked, quiet.

I shook my head, a tight gesture.  I was tense, listening, my ears straining.

I heard shouts in the street, and I relaxed some.

“They’re gone,” Jessie said.

I nodded.

“They might catch her,” Jessie said.

“So be it,” I said.  Then I thought for a moment.  “She had a bit of a head start.”

“The Lambs have Mary.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I tried to think about what Fray might do, the path she might take, the ways she might fight.  She had said that she focused a lot of her attention on being elusive.  I wondered what that entailed and the realms it touched on.  What solutions would she devise?

So many of my thoughts had been wrapped up in Fray that it didn’t surprise me in the least when I glanced up and saw Evette still on the rooftop, with another figure standing behind her.

It wasn’t a complete image, and it resembled things that Evette had seen in the depths of her breakdown.  Painted with broad, incoherent strokes, it was a perfect image of Fray, but it fell to pieces in the emulation, in the dance, the movements, and the other things.

I had nowhere near the connection to Fray that I had in the Lambs.  Any of the other Lambs, I could have danced with them, in the natural and instinctive understanding of how they moved, how they thought, and what they might do in any instant.

I didn’t have any of that with Fray, and so the image of her that stood before me was a contrary one.  Three complete Frays packed into one image no larger than Fray actually was, each one running contrary to the others.

“No,” I spoke to the image.  “Away with you.”

She didn’t listen.

“Sylvester,” Jessie said.

Her breath was hot on my cheek, and that realization should have been enough to stir me from this nightmare image.  The realization that in pushing her down, we’d landed in a heap, and we’d remained that way while I interpreted the situation.

Go,” I whispered, my voice nonetheless firm.

Evette turned, and she reached for the Amalgam-Fray’s hand.  Simultaneously gripping fingers, hand, and sleeve of the different Frays at once, Evette led Fray away.  Off to the side, or into the background, but not gone.

As this Fray walked away, the different faces turned.  In one instant, all three found alignment.  One Fray, blurry around the edges, a satisfied smile on her face.

Having seen it here, I might as well have seen it in the instant she fled the station.  Satisfaction, as if that moment of surrender had been an act, calculated in timing and detail.

Jessie exhaled, and it was very controlled.  I had the sense she had been holding her breath, and having reached her limit, she chose to still maintain control, so as not to disturb.

“Are you back?” she asked.

I nodded.

“In my role of counsel and long-term strategy, I should remind you that we should get back to the hotel, make sure everything is square, and make sure Warren and his group are prepared to help us make our way here.”

I nodded again.

She continued, “He’ll be willing to help if we say we let Genevieve Fray go, but we have to assume the Lambs will either catch her or lose her trail.  They might come back here.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“This feels like a one-sided conversation,” she said.  “And you’re not moving.”

I raised myself up, checked, and saw that the Lambs were gone.  Duncan was still there, watching the luggage, while looking in the direction Fray and the Lambs had gone.

Jessie, thinking I was getting up, started to raise herself up as well.

I dropped back down, and Jessie’s head bumped against the roof of the train station’s ticket booth.

“Ow.”

“I’m supposed to give you your answer about you and me, aren’t I?” I asked.  “If I wait, then we’ll have the crowd of students to think about, the train, accommodations, we’ll be tired, other things might come up.  It has to be now, doesn’t it?”

“While you’re on top of me, almost pinning me down?”

“I’m stuck, Jessie.”

“Unless something else has gone wrong with that brain of yours, I think you’re capable of moving,” she said.

“I’m stuck because I like you a lot.  You’re the most important person to me.  I look at you and I think hey, Jessie looks nice today, just about every day.”

“Two and a half out of five days, you even say so,” she said.  “Somewhat platonically, but you say so.”

“At your worst, you’re on my case, you’re critical, you’re stubborn and you’re slow.  It probably says a lot that I’d miss all of those things if you got fed up with me and left tomorrow.”

She nodded.

“I think it would be easy, being with you.  I feel like we could be close, I feel like we could be friends at the same time.  I know what makes you tick.  I know your strengths and weaknesses and all of that’s fine.  And it would be really nice to have another Lamb close to me again.  Like, actually close.”

“There’s something tripping you up.”

“I hope you don’t mind if I compare to others.”

“Inevitable.”

“With Mary, if there was anything, it would be that there was the dance.  We worked well together and a lot of the barriers just weren’t there.  I’m a manipulator and she’s a puppet, and she wanted someone to pull her strings.  I could have gotten away with anything.  In another world where neither of us were Lambs and nothing made us special, yet our personalities were the same?  I could have been the boyfriend that hits his girl and she might have been the girl who wouldn’t immediately leave.”

“I don’t think that’s-

I hurried to beat Jessie to the punch.  “Not that I would ever, and not that she would stay forever, but for all her strength and determination, she didn’t have those walls up, and would need to learn to put them up before she told me to fuck off.”

“Okay,” Jessie said.

“Lillian wouldn’t take it.  Didn’t.  She liked it, to an extent, if I was a bastard to her.  But there was a boundary, a line, and with the way things are now and the way things are going to stay, it involves her sacrificing too much to even test it.”

“I heard all that.”

“But I could get away with a lot.  I stalled myself, using Wyvern on my brain to tweak some things, and kept things in stasis, but it all made sense to me on an intrinsic level.  On my personally warped level.  Push, pull, manipulator, manipulated.”

Jessie nodded.  She reached up to fix her glasses, and her hand brushed my chest.  She shied away from the contact a little, as if recognizing that it might make me move away, or break the spell, or whatever it was that was going on.

If she had an idea, I hoped she’d tell me later, because I wasn’t entirely sure, for once.

“I’m sorry if talking about them makes you jealous.”

Jessie shook her head.

“No?”

“No.  Keep talking.  Let’s get this over with.  We have things to do.”

I snorted, smiling.  Jessie smiled, too.

“And,” she added, her voice dropping, “I’m scared you’re going to tell me to take my feelings and shut them away again, because I will, and I’ll replay this conversation in my head over and over, and I’d really rather it wasn’t very long.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Can’t have that.”

She nodded.

I paused, thinking, and in the doing, I seemed to take too long, because she used one hand and lightly punched me in the gut.

I grunted.

“Next time will hurt more,” she said.  “Talk.

“I’m not very good at manipulating you, Jessie.  I mean, yes, there are some ways.  I understand you, I can do stuff to tease you, but in the romantic sense of boundaries and intimacy and getting close?  I’m not sure what the tricks are.  I want to say or do something to you to open the doors and I don’t know how to sweep you up in my spell or dance past the boundaries.  You call me on my bull.  It’s completely unfamiliar territory, and it’s territory I can’t cover using Wyvern because there’s no way to practice it.”

“You hesitate.”

“Yes.”

“You’re nervous.”

“Admittedly.  I don’t want to wreck our dynamic.  I’m not sure how to get closer.  I’m only this close right now by accident, and the reason I haven’t moved away and gotten off you is I’m afraid if I do, I won’t be able to get closer again.”

Jessie nodded.

“Something’s not working,” I said.  “Gordon said I was fluid and you were solid.  I’ve thought that some of the Lambs had natural affinities for one another, and some had natural conflicts.  Gordon was never going to fully understand me, and I was never going to fully get him, Mary and Helen struggle to find that natural dynamic, and you and I-”

“Sy,” Jessie said, interrupting.

“I’m babbling.”

“Sy, what you’re talking about isn’t it.  I’m afraid it’s worse.”

I read her expression and tone, and I poised myself.

“This is going to be a groaner, isn’t it?” I asked.

“It’s almost as if you’re a sixteen year old boy, and I’m a seventeen year old girl, and so long as I’m on the alert for your tricks, you’re feeling and facing most of the same sorts of worries that most boys your age do in the opening stages of a relationship.”

I bowed my head, eyes screwed shut, and I made sure to groan before I said, “Oh lords, no.  That’s worse than everything else I thought put together.”

“If it makes you feel better, I’ve been bottling up a lot of those same anxieties and worries for months now.  That’s on top of an entirely different sort that I’ve been bottling up for years.

“You poor creature,” I said.

“Entirely my fault for falling for the most unpredictable sixteen year old in the Crown States,” she said.

“Numbskull,” I said.

She punched me lightly in the stomach, again.

“A liar, too.  You said the next one would hurt more.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she said.

“See, I’m not sure if I should tempt you or not.  I don’t have a proper roadmap, here.  I’m lost!  I’m still stuck!”

“You said you’re stuck because you’re afraid if you move away you won’t be able to move closer again.  So…”

Jessie raised herself up, and she moved her face closer to mine.

She gave me a peck on the cheek.

“On the cheek?” I asked.

“Shut up,” she said.

“You’re so lame!” I accused her.

“Let me up.  We have work to do,” she said.

“Just like that,” I said.  “Waving the white flag?”

Teasing aside, I did climb off of Jessie.  The two of us stood, glancing back in the direction of the station platform, where Duncan was talking to quarantine officers, still guarding the bags.

“Your move next,” Jessie said, not making eye contact.

“Oh, is that how we’re doing this?  Back and forth?  A game of one-upmanship?”

Jessie sighed.  We made our way down from the roof to the ticket booth proper.

I asked, “One of us makes a move, the other has to work up the courage and top it, or she gets made the subject of merciless teasing?”

She?

“Well I’m not going to lose, Little Miss Ewesmont.  I’m frankly interested to see where this goes.  Unless you cry uncle, I’m imagining this escalating to the extent of a Fray-esque web of goings-on involving a trapeze, an Academy-engineered spider monkey that has actual spider in its makeup, a choir, and an actual uncle to cry out to.  It’s an elegant lose-lose situation you’re walking into here.”

“It really, really is,” Jessie said.  She’d lifted up her glasses to rub at her eyes, as if I was already giving her a headache.  I knew the truth.  She was trying to hide that she was laughing.    She found her composure.  “For a moment, I entertained the fantasy that we might have something resembling an ordinary little romance.”

I shifted position as I walked, giving her shoulder a bump with mine.  “We’ll find a middle ground.”

“That would be nice,” she smiled at me.

“Can that count as my turn?  A heartwarming bit of compromise?”

“No, Sy.”

But she pulled the same maneuver and she bumped my shoulder with hers.  I took the opportunity to throw my arm around her shoulders, giving her a one armed hug.

I could feel the tension fall away from her shoulders with my arm there.

“How about this?” I asked.  “Does this count?”

Oh, look at that.  The tension came back, just like that.

“I’ll take that as a no,” I said.

“It doesn’t count if you were doing it before today.”

“That puts me at a natural disadvantage, my memory being what it is.”

“And here I thought you weren’t going to lose,” she teased.

“Oh, I won’t.  But if I win despite it not being terribly fair, I’m totally going to rub it in.”

“That’s allowed,” Jessie said.

We made our way to the hotel.  The outside was devoid of students, the doors boarded up, the area nondescript.  After checking the coast was clear, we let ourselves in.

The students were there, waiting and ready, virtually all with luggage in arm’s reach.  The gang leaders were there.  Virtually all of the strays were absent.

I looked for and found all of my major players.  Rudy and Possum were off to one side with Second Gordon.  They’d collected Jessie’s and my luggage for us.  My Lambs were present, as was Fray.  Fray, distorted, stood next to Warren.

Something had changed in Frederick’s eyes.  I wondered if it was newfound respect or resentment.

I glanced at the musclebound Warren, who stood off to one side with his collection of Fray’s hirelings, Wendy, and Avis.

“We gave her a signal,” I told him.  “She’s on the run from the Lambs.  She’ll probably want help.  Keep them busy, give us a chance to board our train, you’ll get no further interference from us, and we’ll be on good terms the next time we meet.”

I saw his expression twist, and he momentarily looked as if he’d stomp toward me and smash me into the ground.

Avis touched his arm, and he stopped.

“We should help her,” Avis said.

They hurried to leave.

The door slammed behind them, in a way that only a bruno of a man like Warren could slam doors.

Perhaps we won’t be on good terms the next time we meet, then, I thought.

I looked at the room, and I could see that the nervousness had set in.  This was the hardest step to take, the last chance to turn back.

“Are you ready to go!?” I called out.

I got a cheer in response.

“To make a name for yourselves!?”

Another cheer.  Not louder, but more unified.

“Ready to cut loose for once in your lives!?”

This response was louder.

“Say a very special fuck you to all the students, people, and parents who looked down on you!?”

Even the ones who’d been holding back joined in for this one.  Gang members, even.

“Then let’s go!”

It was the loudest outcry yet.

Out the hotel, around the corner to the stable with waiting carriages, where we stowed the heaviest bags, the strays that had decided to come, and two students who would move slower.

The rest followed behind.

It was momentum now, keeping them moving.  I broke away from Jessie, moved through the group.  I encouraged students, made sure stronger ones carried heavier bags, and touched base with each of the group leaders.

We didn’t go to the train station, but to the outskirts of town.  The train tracks cut north to south, and we found the tracks at the northwest edge of town, as they emerged from the mountain.

Jessie touched the track and sensed the vibration.  She looked at me.

“Right on time,” she said.

“Perfect,” I said.

The train emerged from the tunnel, already braking.

It didn’t stop at the station, but here, waiting for us.  A cargo train, meant to hold timber, grain, and meat.

At a nod from the driver of the train and a signal from me, the students began boarding the train, piling into the enclosed compartments.  I followed up the rear, taking an uncomfortable non-seat on the floor of the compartment, sitting across from Mabel the sheriff’s daughter, Possum, and Rudy.

Jessie plopped herself down next to me.

We left the door of the train car open.  It hardly mattered, and there was something freeing about it that the students in our car seemed to like.

With that as our vantage point, as we crested the hill, I could take in Laureas from a distance.  The city sprawled, not a lot of it attractive.  A port at the north end, ships coming to and fro, with dilapidated slums where we’d found the strays and set up our headquarters.  A ferry crossed back and forth across the bay itself.

I thought about the Lambs.  I wished I could talk to them, even as I knew it was the worst idea.

I said a silent goodbye to city and the Lambs both.

Next time, I thought, for the Lambs.

We won’t sacrifice you before we sacrifice ourselves, I thought for the city, and all the other ones like it.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== Lamb (Arc 15) – Twig

Lamb (Arc 15)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I wonder how the mayor is going to handle this,” Mabel said.  “Or how the Academy is going to handle it.  Most of the students rioted, then disappeared.”

Jessie, tired, closed her eyes, to better reduce the burden of information.  In the back of her mind, she anchored the three segments of phrase.  Key anchors were mayor, Academy, student.  Orderly threads connected these anchors to the current date and time, to prior conversation, putting each idea in a line.

Two days after his one year anniversary with the Lambs, Jamie had used the first available set of quiet days and post-appointment adjustment period to re-catalogue all of his memories, going through every last one in turn.  The one year anniversary was a massive anchor unto itself, and in lieu of a system prescribed by his doctors, Jamie had shifted to a more symbolic series of subcategories.  The hand signals used by the Lambs.  They had started off simple, covering a variety of bases, and in Jamie’s mind, every last one had had a color, a general shape, and a lot of the vocabulary, spacings and timings of events were similar within a color or key gesture.

The old system of his own doctor’s design had been thrown out, the new system implemented.  It was something Jamie had done several times.  Jessie had hoped that by adopting Jamie’s system and holding to it instead of revising it, she might extend her own life.

Not so.

Wonder was inspiration, which fell into the mind gesture.  Mind was three fingers together.  Mind became different things depending on context, the rigidity of fingers changed.  Three fingers up tall, all touching, was hard thinking, maths, Academy science, logic, cold analysis.  Bring the fingers down and it became soft, abstract thinking, which often became one of two different things if the thumb was in front or behind the three fingers.  Interpersonal thinking for the former, inspired or artistic thinking for the latter.

Of the most basic signs, each one flowed into the other.  Each one assigned a color, it allowed colors to blur or mix, for categorizations to find shades of color alongside the general shape of the signs, for easy identification.

Mayor was the anchor, marked turquoise-wonder at the outset, yellow-manipulation at the end.  Within, words fell into place, transcribed exactly, as music notes might be, with sound and emphasis.  Each of those details had emphasis of their own.

She collected every detail she needed to be able to recall the statement in exacting detail.  She did it with the next segment, a fainter turquoise echo of the prior statement with less emphasis marks and strong connection to the prior segment, as if the statement was an extended punctuation mark trailing on after the previous statement, a different anchor set two fifths of the way into it.  The third statement was tinted red.  The closed fist, aggression and violence, force and impetus.

All three segments were sorted in this meticulous detail.  Three cards on a vast bookshelf.  Records extended back to the day that she had woken up in the stone throne, connected to the caterpillar system, set in place with a card with a tab that indicated Mabel.

Other parts of Jessie’s mind in her skull, shoulders, and along her spine were muted so long as her eyes were shut.  The parts that would track Mabel’s facial expressions and keep things in parallel with the transcription of words, environment, and Jessie’s ongoing awareness of her own physical state.

Threads interconnected it all, stitching it together into a cohesive thing.  Up and down and left and right were chronological elements as she explored her own catalogue, forward and back were her own focus, with one or two things taking priority while other things were pushed further back on a given shelf.

If her mind was a painstaking record system, the threads were cobwebs that sprawled across it, divorced from the chronological and the focal.  Three individual lobes and sub-systems tracked ongoing events in detail – it should have been four, but one had been damaged when Sylvester cut too close to her spine while removing the plague.  Five more systems managed the threads.  Without these, she would record the memories but be left unable to access them.  Again, it should have been six threading areas of her brain, but Sylvester’s efforts had left her gutted in a way.

She wouldn’t ever tell him, because that would be gutting him, and it wouldn’t help anything.  The reason she emphasized timing so much as of late was because she was using the implanted lobe that maintained pacing as a crutch for systems that had been grievously wounded.

“They’ll start with damage control,” Sylvester said.  “They’ll paint you all as villains, as best they can.  It won’t work very well.  All the students who stayed are voices the Academy will need to suppress.  Parents and family members will come, wondering where their children are, some will find their children stayed, and others will find that their children ran off with the circus.  Efforts to stir the pot will be complicated by the rumors that I’ve kidnapped a great many of you.”

Eleven cards were sorted in the span of eleven eyeblinks, faster than Sylvester could talk.  She opened her eyes to watch Rudy, Possum, and Mabel.  Other parts of her brain snapped into operation, tracking the visual details.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Rudy said.

Threads connected the transcribed statement to Rudy’s expression.  The underlying, natural operation was likely as sophisticated as Sylvester’s was, but actually using that knowledge was harder than that.  It required her to stop and analyze, and it required her to know what to analyze in the first place.

The cobwebs clarified rather than obscured.  She could see things by the way the cobwebs sprawled, and she could peer through the cobwebs to see the anchors they were tied to.

In this, in how her brain worked, she created a kind of sentiment.

She could look back at Mabel’s words and connect it to things Mabel had said before.  She could see the densities of threads, the zig-zagging shapes they made as they touched on things elsewhere, where those zig-zagging shapes dipped low or high, or seemed more scattered.  A glance at an unusual pattern highlighted the anchors, highlighted key expressions at the time, still images of Mabel’s face at the time the statements were made.  Jessie could look closer and see the exact transcript, the placements of light and shadow, temperature and her own posture at the moments in question.

“It makes sense to do it,” Sylvester said.  “The fact is that not all of us are going to stay.  The initial gleam will wear off.  If I burned the bridge, the people who no longer had a reason to be here but were forced to stay would be resentful.  It hurts more than it helps.”

The other students in the car nodded at that.

“We’ll let them go that easy?” Rudy asked.  “You know they’ll just go and report on our locations and activities, right?”

“We’ll be moving a few times,” Sylvester said.  “If we’re going to lose people, we should lose them during the moves.  I suppose Jessie and I won’t be very open about where we’re going, just to protect all of us.”

Jessie could cross check her records.  This was something she had seen a few times while they were recruiting the gang leaders, Pierre, Samuel, and Shirley.  He was always so mindful of the exit routes.  When someone joined, he was careful to leave them a way out, to always remind them they could go.

He sent them on their way with prosperity, where he could.  The ones who betrayed, he gutted.

This all tied back to Sylvester’s own experience with the Lambs.

“You might be being a little cynical,” Jessie said.  She found a number of memories where Sylvester had followed this pattern.  “More than a little, when it comes to recruits and extending trust.”

“I’m fine extending trust, I’m also fine covering our bases.”

“You know what I mean,” Jessie said.  “You’re being uncharacteristically wary.”

“I’m always wary.  I’m being uncharacteristically conservative, though.  Are you saying we shouldn’t extend trust?  Or are you saying we shouldn’t cover our bases?”

“I think you might be being a little cynical,” Jessie said, not letting herself be caught by this particular trap.  “Past experience coloring your present opinions when it comes to recruitment.”

“You’re thinking of Clay.”

“I’m not thinking of Clay,” Jessie said.  “I’m thinking of you.”

Sylvester leaned back.  He exhaled slowly.  “Fair.  I didn’t think about that.”

“Yep.”

“Now I’m bummed out.”

Jessie ignored that.  “We recruited an army.  If you try to micromanage it, you’ll end up too caught up keeping things in working order to properly plot.”

Sylvester rubbed his chin, then ventured, “We might extend it to a trusted few, so there’s less reason for others to worry we’re playing things too close to the vest.”

“Trusted few?” Mabel asked.

“You three, barring any surprises in the next little while,” Sylvester said.  “But I think my assessment of you three is pretty good.  Things are going to change, as we get underway.  People who found their way to leadership of student groups might be replaced by others.  Neck has his talents, but I don’t know if he’ll stay top delinquent boy.  Ralph is gone, and you’re liable to be the new leader of the Greenhouse Gang.”

“You say it just like that?” Mabel asked.  “I didn’t hold any special position in the group.  There are people who spent more time there than I did.”

“I’m good at reading people,” Sylvester said.  “I like the read I get on you.  I have no reason to think you won’t naturally find your place at the head of that particular contingent.”

“I’m not as sure as you are,” Mabel said.  “I know the Greenhouse Gang better than you do.”

“Maybe,” Sylvester said.  The way he said it suggested he was framing his thoughts.  He looked like he was enjoying himself.

Threads.  Jessie checked past records, taking it all in, searching out cases where the threads zig-zagged in a similar way to this one.  She took note of his face, thinking in the background to compare his expression now to similar cases.  That was background.  Her focus was on the pattern.

His analytical ability challenged, he brought it to the fore.

Sylvester talking to the gang leaders in late fall, three days into their stay in Laureas.  Picking someone, seemingly at random, coming up with a dozen details.

Sylvester at the herbalist’s in Tynewear.  The man had been condescending, pricking Sylvester’s pride.  Sylvester had gone on the attack, showing just how much of the herbalist’s trade that he understood.

Sylvester talking to Lillian.  An early memory for Jessie, in the grand scheme of things.  One week after the Brechwell incident, Fray and her contingent of rebellion leaders, which Jamie hadn’t participated in, she had gone with Ashton for their proper introduction to the Lambs.  In the period of time following, Lillian had been low, a teacher uncooperative with allowing her to do a lab project she had missed.  He had given her less time than he had given others, and she had done worse as a consequence.  Sylvester had reassured to encourage.

There were two other examples that Jessie found and quickly touched on to verify another trend she had noticed.  In all but one of the examples, Sylvester followed a similar pattern.  Jessie had no idea if it was instinctive or calculated.  He started with the blunt details.  Visual things, clues he’d spotted and could point to.  He moved on to weaker arguments that were hard to shoot down, then finished strong, with deep, powerful insights into things he had no right to know.

“You’ve got a good attention to details,” he said.  “You knew my name and background, knew out who I was, and only one other person managed that today, and she was in the background during one of my other jobs.  You knew how devastating I’m purported to be.”

Jessie groaned slightly to herself, both because her suspicion was wrong and because of the ‘devastating’ malarkey.

“Jessie knows too, obviously,” Sylvester said.

Jessie asked, “You are aware that the ‘devastating’ thing was bait?  A signal to you from the Lambs?  They were trying to get a response out of you, and you fell for it hook, line, and sinker.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Not a definitive one,” Jessie said.  She looked over her glasses at him, to better see him clearly, without the filter that blurred the most minor details out of the world while lowering the burden on her memory.  “But I wanted to rain on your parade a little, before you got too much of a parade going.”

“How sweet, looking after me, pruning my ego.”

“Someone has to,” Jessie said.  She poked him.  He played up his response to the poke in his side, acting as if it had been harder than it was.

“I didn’t buy it for a second.  You’re going to have to step up your game if you’re going to start pruning me.”

“I’ll have to outsource and make sure every single one of our new recruits know not to take you seriously.”

Sylvester turned his attention to Mabel.  “Ignore Jessie, please.  Except don’t actually, because she’s as key a member of this team as I am.  For now, let’s focus on why I think you’re so critical for the Greenhouse gang.”

Sylvester ducked his head down.  His arms rested on his knees as he sat beside Lillian, close enough he could have reached across her right shoulder to tap her left shoulder if he could.

“I want you to forget about all that for a moment, okay?  Forget Professor Moron.  Listen to me.  When you joined the team, I wasn’t that happy about it.  For reasons.  Because we had a good dynamic going without you.  You successfully changed my mind.  That’s not to be understated.”

“I feel a tad self conscious about this,” Mabel said.  There were others in the train car.  Most were engaged in their own conversations, but they were keeping an ear out for what Sylvester was saying.

“Be self conscious in a good way.  The Greenhouse Gang is full of very dedicated, clever students, who have a good eye for watching their backs.  When you stood up to Ralph, you naturally secured your position, understand?  You made sure you communicated unambiguously.  That’s going to go a long, long way with that small group of students and with all the others like them.  You need to trust me on this.  I’m not the type to lie about this sort of thing.”

“I’m under the impression, from what the posters said, from what you’ve said, and what you’ve demonstrated, that you’re something of a charlatan and a liar.  Proudly so.”

“I’m a good reader of people.  You still managed to surprise me.  That puts you in a special class of people who I really want to keep close at hand.”

“You change your mind like other people change clothes, you dunce.  That’s the point of Wyvern,” Lillian said.

“It is, but how many people affect a serious, lasting, meaningful change in my brain?  Who gets to take up that limited real estate and memory capacity?  You earned your dang place on the team, despite every single one of my doubts about you, understand?”

Lillian didn’t have a ready answer to that.

Mabel fell silent, thinking over the words.

Sylvester lowered his voice.  “You helped me out last night.  It might have made all the difference, giving me the strength to tackle a situation I was dreading.  If I’d been more tired?  More irritable?  Things might have played out differently.”

Lillian nodded.

“I want to surround myself with smart people.  Because I really like smart, capable people.  Especially those who surprise me and those who are going to back me up when it counts.”

“If you wanted capable people, Beattle might be the wrong place to look,” another student commented.

Bullshit,” Sylvester said.  “I’m over the dang moon with some of the people that grabbed my attention earlier today.  They’ve been lifesavers already.”

He moved his hand in what could have been interpreted as a gesture in the direction of Mabel, Rudy, and Possum.

“They made today easier.  That counts for something.”

The parallels were there.  The way Sylvester talked to Lillian, the way he talked to Mabel.

Jessie could think back, pick from an ocean-vast collection of Sylvester expressions, covering a range.  From there, it was a process of cutting it down.  Every expression had a shorthand code to help with the recording and retrieval.  She could simply think ‘is it more intense an expression than this midrange one or is it less’, and prune half of the list.  After a few discards, she was in a set range.

It was the original Jamie’s system.  He’d written about it in books, along with mnemonics from the early days.  Sylvester’s lopsided smile was ‘sinew’.  Eschewing vowels, it had the letters to indicate strong-neutral-weak in intensity, for left corner, lips themselves, and right corner.

There was too much for Jessie to find her way through her own overcrowded mind without some shorthand.

If the extrapolation to Jamie’s written records was correct, Sylvester might already be interested in Mabel to the same extent he was interested in Lillian, once.  The timing would be the last available book that the original Jamie had written in.  Not the last available entry, but an entry eight days prior.

Sylvester had finished talking to Lillian.  He had reaffirmed her place in the world.  Said in as many words that she should pay less attention to the outside world, inviting her to listen to him and give his words a special weight.  He had rewarded the confidence in him by giving her the chance to refute a small point of argument, then strengthened his argument and built her up as a hero of the moment.

Jamie saw how Lillian’s body language had changed.  She had relaxed quite a bit.

They sat together, backs to the front of the couch, not actually sitting on the couch itself.  It was half-littered with children’s things.

“Are you going back to your dorm tonight?”

“Why is that even a question?  Where else am I supposed to go?”

“Mary’s got an appointment, she might sleep over in the lab or get in really late.  Jamie’s going back for checkups.”

“Oh, I get it,” Lillian said.

“From your tone, I’m not sure you do.”

“I can see right through you, you know,” Lillian said.

“Oh, can you now?”

“If I-” Lillian started.  Then she lowered her voice.  “If I assume what happened that night in Brechwell happens tonight-“

Jamie, reading a book in the other room, barely overhearing but putting the pieces together all the same, felt a lurch of surprise.  Something not in the books, something that confounded his understanding of the Lambs and where things stood.

“-you’ll laugh at me and say you meant I should stay in Mary’s bed and wait for her.  And if I assume Mary’s bed, you’ll-“

He wondered if he should get up and leave, or make his presence more known.

“I’ll what?” Sylvester asked.

“Call me dumb and tease me for missing the point,” she said.  “I don’t know.”

“Seems like you put a whole lot more attention into the first thought, climbing into my bed, than you put into the second thought, staying over with Mary.”

“You’re horrible!”

“And you’re wrong, Lil.  Very wrong.  Because you called yourself dumb, for one thing, and because you thought for a second that I would use that night against you.  Never.  You’re not my enemy.  Not since you saved Mary.  I can be a jerk, but I will not go after you when you’ve had a bad day and you’re lonely.  I will not punish you-“

Then he dropped his voice.

Jamie only caught the sound of his name.  Not his own name, but Sylvester had said ‘Jamie’.

Analysis of this memory fragment had suggested Sylvester had said something akin to, ‘if you need closeness while you’re missing Jamie.’

Jamie, at mention of his name, stirred.  He caught a glimpse of Sylvester touching Lillian’s cheek, wiping away one tear.

He felt like an intruder.  He passed out of the dining room and into the kitchen, past Frances, who was picking through a plate of crackers, probably while -intentionally- eavesdropping on Sylvester and Lillian.  She wouldn’t have caught all or even some of it.

“Jamie,” Sylvester called out, from the other room.

Jamie approached the sitting room again.

“I’m sorry if we disturbed your reading by talking,” Lillian said.

A comparison of memories suggested her cheeks had been wiped dry.  A comparison of other memories suggested Sylvester had had his handkerchief in another pocket before he’d sat down with Lillian to talk about Professor Morehen.

“You didn’t disturb me any,” Jamie said.

“I was wondering what you were planning for the rest of the night.”

“Oh,” Jamie said.  He recalled the conversation.  He chose his answer carefully.  “I’m procrastinating on going back for my appointment.  I was going to make sure Ashton is getting settled, and then maybe have tea before leaving at the last possible minute.”

Jamie recalled dorm schedules and times, then quickly added,  “Ten thirty?  I could walk you back if you’d like, Lillian.  Or if you really wanted, I could walk you back sooner than that.”

His heart pounded in his chest.  His skin felt tight around his connection scars.

He wanted to do the right thing, he wasn’t sure what the right thing was.  He wanted to leave the door open for Lillian to choose what she wanted.  If there was any bias, he wanted her to be closer to Sylvester.

There was no reason for her to feel lonely or feel like the interloper among the tighter-knit Lambs.  Not in the way Jamie so poignantly felt now.

“That’s late,” Lillian said.  “I think I’ll stay the night, I’ll wait for Mary or something.”

“Or something,” Sylvester said.

Lillian turned a little pink at that.  Rather than give Sylvester more fuel, she turned, “I’m going to go steal something of Mary’s to wear.”

She went upstairs.

Left there with only Jamie, Sylvester looked as uncomfortable and disconnected from things as he’d looked comfortable with Lillian.

Sylvester rubbed the back of his neck, and he didn’t make eye contact.

“Thank you,” Sylvester said.  The pause was a little too long before he said, “For looking after Ashton, for being helpful.”

It felt like there was a chasm between them.

How was Jamie supposed to say he was thankful too, for the call out, the chance to close the gap just a fraction?

“Thank you,” he said.  He injected a pause of similar length.  “For taking care of our medic.”

“Yeah,” Sylvester said.

To compare memories, snapshots of images, Sylvester earlier, Sylvester while talking to Lillian, Sylvester now, it was akin to the diagrams and disease progression photos in books about poison and disease.  It was as if every moment in Jamie’s company was a half percentage point or so of Sylvester diminishing, the joy leaking out of him, the grief welling up.

“I’m going to go see to my tea.  Would you want some?  Would Lillian?”

“J- hey,” Sylvester said, abrupt.

Jamie stopped mid-step.

“You could blow off your appointment.  Stay over, like Lillian is.  Kids might make some noise, first thing, but…”

Sylvester couldn’t even meet Jamie’s eyes as he said it.  It cost more than half of a percentage point of Sylvester to even voice the offer and entertain the idea of it.

“No,” Jamie said, even as it killed him to put it into words.  “Focus on Lillian for now.  She had a bad day.”

It killed him just a little more to see Sylvester’s relief at that.

It was a lonely, sad, beautiful memory.  Jessie, in reliving it, sorting things out in her head, had started to drift off.

The conversation was ongoing.  She could tell where she had started to nod off and where she’d been more lucid by how much she had transcribed to memory.

“-goes back to what I was saying about surrounding myself with capable, intelligent people,” Sylvester was saying.  “We get you lot an education.  That means finding capable back-alley doctors and ex-professors to teach you.”

“The problem,” Jessie said, “Is that the kind of capable, back-alley professor who would work with rebellion have been snapped up by various rebellion factions and are working elsewhere.”

“That is an eminently solvable dilemma,” Sylvester said.  “Also, you’re awake.  Lift your rear end up.”

“My rear end?” Jessie asked.

But she did as she’d been instructed.

Sylvester slid a heavy coat underneath her.  The coat, pulled from nearby luggage, was suede trimmed with fur.  For colder weather.

“Turns out an uninsulated train car is cold at this time of year,” Sylvester said.  As Jessie straightened out her legs, Sylvester folded the coat around them.  He got another bit of clothing out and set it behind Jessie, giving her a cushion.  He draped a third, lighter coat over her as a blanket of sorts.  “Sleep if you need to sleep.  It’s been a long day.”

Jessie nodded.  The contrast to the memory was a stark one that left her a little speechless.

Sylvester turned to Rudy, Possum, and Mabel, as if nothing had happened.  “If you want it, if you’re less interested in the learning and more interested in the doing, that can be arranged too.  Be a part of the inner circle, kind of.”

Ah, so this was where they were in the current pattern.  The bargain, the negotiation past boundaries with an offer of greater intimacy.  An invite to bed, an invitation to the inner circle.

Then… the next step in the pattern would be for Sylvester to physically test those boundaries.  Would he get up soon?  His foot wasn’t far from Mabel’s.  A light kick?  A tap?

Watching, she settled down, sitting less and lying down more, the padding behind her serving as a pillow.  More memories threatened to rise up and pull her into a deep sleep, nothing like what the machine could do, in organizing and strengthening the threads, making the connections shorter, and keeping the worst tangles of threads from getting too weighty and potentially pulling material down with them.

When and if that happened, it would be like that memory on the second of February in Tynewear, when she had taken an alternate route after buying food.  In that memory, there was a building face, and the details of that building face were absent where they had once been recorded in detail

Dropped at some point in the last week, while she had been distracted with the imminent plan to steal Fray’s plan.

Jessie waited to see if Sylvester would continue his game of almost-flirting to the extent of physical back and forth with Mabel.  A physical intimacy, even if it was boot tapping boot, gauging how much she might let him in.

Jessie had never really known jealousy, not until that day Lillian had been captured and brought to the top of the tower.  She didn’t experience it now.  This, with Sylvester making her warm, was nice and welcome.

“I want to learn and be a part of any decision making, especially if I’m looking after the Greenhousers.  If that’s possible, that is.”

“Well, Mabel, if you try that and manage it, you’ll redouble my belief that you’re the kind of smart, capable person I want near me.”

Mabel wasn’t one to blush, but she did look pleased at the prospect.

Not quite a physical and minute extension of intimacy, but in his easy verbal jousts, he’d inched closer.  No surprise there.  Even the fact that he seemed oblivious to the fact that he was saying exactly what he needed to say to win Mabel over wasn’t so surprising.  He could be so dense sometimes.

No, the real surprise was Sylvester’s hand reaching down and taking Jessie’s.  He kept talking, as if nothing had happened.

“I want the strong students to make the weakest better.  No more competition,” Sylvester said.  “We’re all in this together.  You teach each other what you know, and Jessie and I are going to get all of you some teachers.  Some here and there will stand out from the rest.  Jessie and I can be teachers to them.  That’s the beginning.”

“What’s the middle?” Rudy asked.

“Taking on nobles.  Not picking fights like we’ve been doing, not the reckless, mad attacks.  I want to take them on on our playing field.  Lambsbridge and Ewesmont playing field.  I want to know what makes them tick, and then I want to take them apart.  The Beattle students are what shape the playing field.  Coordinated work.”

Sylvester was so excited at the prospects.  He looked happy.

She could cross check.  She could find similar expressions.

Sylvester sat in the window in their apartment in Tynewear.  He had a mug of a favorite tea and a plate of favorite cookies with him.  The tea was only available every few weeks and in short supply, while the cookies were often sold out.  A new piece of music played on the music machine.  Sylvester had had a good night with his stealing and fencing, and he had spent nearly all of it on luxuries and small amenities.

Music ticked over to a new piece, and as it got underway, he twisted in his seat, nearly spilling his tea.  He looked at Jamie and, smiling wide, excited, he indicated the music player, not speaking for fear of disturbing this sound he liked so much.

No.  At the root of that moment was being at peace, not being truly happy.

Sylvester and Lillian, together in the morning in Lugh.  Before Gordon had died.

No.  Animal comforts, but not joy.

There were other moments, but as Jessie followed the threads and looked for patterns in this hard to capture emotion, one that couldn’t be taken as a set of facial expressions and broken down into a ‘minnow’ or a ‘sussex’, she had a feeling about where that pattern pointed.

Sylvester could barely contain himself.

“Do it, do it, do it,” Sylvester chanted.

“Do not do it!” Gordon roared.

Children of the orphanage dogpiled Gordon, fighting to drag him to the ground.  An eight year old boy with a mischievous gleam in his eye to match Sylvester’s danced on the spot.

“Grab his leg.  Push on the back of his knee,” Sylvester said.  “Tickle him!”

“Do not give them advice!  I will murder you, Sylvester!  I know of ways to dispose of bodies!”

It was ten children aged five to twelve against one Gordon.  Gordon was winning.

Sylvester stepped forward.  “Gordon.  For too long, you’ve made fun of my fighting skills.  I challenge you.”

“Not the time!”

“It has to be now.  En garde, sir!”

“Drop dead, Sylvester!  Jamie, help me!”

“Don’t help him,” Sylvester said.  “I’ll give you my dessert tonight.”

“Tempting.  I might just take you up on that.”

“Mary!”

“I don’t think I’d normally interfere on a fair fight, but this doesn’t look fair,” Mary said.

“I’ve been plotting this duel for too long,” Sylvester declared, raising his voice to be heard over shouting children.  “Mary, I will tell them about the hearts.”

“Perhaps the fight is fair after all,” Mary decided.

“You are the worst girlfriend!” Gordon said.

Sylvester added his strength to the group of children.  Slowly, Gordon was pushed to the ground.

“Helen.  Back me up.  I will buy you cake.”

“I don’t think Sylvester would forgive me if I interfered,” Helen said.

“I won’t forgive you if you don’t interfere!”

“I’ll buy you more cake,” Sylvester said.

“He’ll buy me more cake.”

“Lillian,” Gordon tried.  A last ditch effort.

“Why am I the last person you ask?”

“Please.”

It was Lillian who jumped to the rescue.  Sylvester, holding Gordon down, stuck out a foot to interfere, trying to stall her.

The mischievous younger boy approached Gordon, dropped trou, and began to lower his bare rear end toward Gordon’s face.

In a last ditch effort, a desperation move, Gordon raised his body up, and he nipped at the younger boy’s butt cheek.

To no avail.  The boy jumped five feet in the air, yes, but the fart was provoked by the bite, not prevented.

The successful assault and the combined imagery of a little boy farting and shooting straight up in the air at the same time saw the entire room collapse into laughter.  Only Gordon stood tall, all fury and intimidation, which made others laugh all the harder.

The moment at the end there, that was the closest match to Sylvester’s expression now.

Considering that he didn’t have the Lambs and might not ever have them again, it was every bit the success Jessie had hoped for.

“And the final stage,” Sylvester said, “much like the middle stage and the late-middle stage, and the late-late middle stage, is the very careful but monumental toppling of a King.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.01 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.1

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I banged the door, hard enough to disturb the neighbors.  I glanced around, but nobody was opening any windows or stepping outside to cuss at me.

We had tried to occupy places where there weren’t too many people to bother, but it wasn’t always easy.  We wanted space too, and this particular town had sprung up as a localized bed of industry.  The layout of this town was such that lumber mills and slaughterhouses had cropped up here and there with dormitories and cottages set up around them.  Using the old mills and slaughterhouses meant having neighbors.

It meant having neighbors who were of the type to want to avoid the cities or avoid people.  Some had some stake in the aforementioned slaughterhouses and mills and were willing to endure our presence in exchange for some money for the use of the premises.

The snow that fell was a wet, rainy sort, melting as soon as it hit the ground.  The town was one of peeling paint on cabins and roads that were losing ground to dirt and weeds.

The residents of this particular building were taking their sweet time in getting to the door.  I pulled out my picks, and began working on the lock.  It wasn’t an easy job – I’d picked up some good locks on the last trip into the city, enough so that I was a little slow in working through them.

I didn’t rush the job, but I didn’t go slow either.

I was four-fifths of the way done when I heard the noise on the other side.

I pulled my lockpicks out as the latch turned on the other side.  I held them up as the door opened.

The boy who opened the door wore a sleep-shirt and pants with the suspenders hanging down near his knees.  He looked rumpled, tired, and rather alarmed as he saw me.  He glanced back over his shoulder.

“If you’d taken longer than I did to open the door, I would have docked your pay,” I told him.  “You were just in time.”

“Oh,” he said.  He blinked, a little blearily.  “Can you tell the others that?”

“Remind me,” I said, as I let myself in, slipping past him.  “Are you all getting up to trouble?”

“No,” the boy said.

“You’re doing something wrong then,” I said.  “You should be rebelling a little.”

He closed the door behind me, cutting off the flow of cold, wet air, and he rubbed at his arms.

“We were playing cards until late,” he said.

“That’s a little bit better,” I said.  “A start, anyway.”

I walked over to the wood stove in the one corner, used the tongs to move the screen and open the stove, and grabbed a log to chuck onto the embers.

“Fire went out,” I commented.  “You all staying warm up there?”

With the tongs, I pointed in the direction of the stairs to the second floor.

He didn’t respond, instead giving me a smile, much like I’d imagine an insecure kid half his age wearing if they were standing at the front of the class with a picture they were proud of.

“I’ll take that as a yes?”

The silly-happy smile got wider.  “Yes.  We have a stove up there we use sometimes, more for light than heat.  But we’re warm.”

“Good,” I said.  “I need everyone downstairs within the next few minutes or I will dock pay.  There were stipulations if you wanted to stay in one of the main labs.”

He nodded quickly, then he ran off, taking stairs two at a time.

I could hear the commotion upstairs.  I ignored it, carrying on with finding the kettle, sloshing the contents and sniffing it to make sure it was only water.  I put more water inside and put it on the stove.

Upstairs, there was a commotion.  Things moved, ex-students chattered in a rushed tone, and bottles clinked and rolled across the floor.  I washed teacups at the lab sink and listened as they roused.

If I finished these mugs before they came down the stairs…

I didn’t.  Again, they ducked just under the wire.  I could appreciate that.  Six boys and four girls came down the stairs, wearing expressions that alternated from the vaguely ashamed to the mischievous.  One plump girl that looked a little younger than me was grinning, her hair sticking up on one side, eyes sparkling, a bounce in her step.

I didn’t recognize her enough to know her by name, but I’d seen her around.  She was cute, and I appreciated the devilish but happy gleam in her eyes.  It suggested I was doing something right.

“Hands out in front of you, like you’re going to shake my hand,” I said.

The ten students did as I’d asked.

I carried on washing the cups, watching them with my peripheral vision.  One of the boys at the tail end of the group dropped his hand within a few seconds of holding it out.  A tall fellow with dark circles under his eyes and a mop of hair he peeked through.

“Keep your hand there,” I told him.

He put his hand out, held it there for a second, then moved it to smooth out his clothing before sticking it back in place.

“Hands down,” I said.  I turned to face them, my attention going to one of the girls first.

“You’re drunk,” I told her.  “You’re swaying.”

Her eyes dropped, giving me a mumbled, abbreviated, “S’ry.”

I filled a cup with cold water and handed it to her.  “Drink.”

“Something in it?” she asked.

I shook my head.  “It’s water.  Drink it.”

Ten sets of eyes were on her as she emptied the cup.

“Go upstairs.  Sleep, stay hydrated,” I said.  “I’m docking your pay by half.  If I have to do it again, you move out of this lab and into one of the other buildings.  You get free lodging if you’re here in this building or one of the other main labs, but the deal is you’re ready to work in the mornings.”

She nodded.

“Have fun, enjoy being free, but I’ve brought you on board to do something, right?”

She nodded again, quick, “I’m actually really sorry.  I know my numbers and ratios, I knew, but I got sloppy as I drank and made a bad call.”

“Go.  Sleep it off.  I’ll only be upset if it becomes a thing.  You’ve learned your lesson and they’ve hopefully learned the same lesson.”

She ducked out, heading back upstairs.

I turned to the fidgety guy.  “You take some drug?”

He nodded.

“Did you use stuff bought with my and Jessie’s money to get yourself high?”

He shook his head.  He and another two boys jumped in all at once, talking over each other.

“Stop stop stop,” I said.  When they did, I indicated one of the boys.

“We made sure he didn’t,” the boy said.

“Okay.  Same deal as whatshername drinking,” I told him.  “I need you sober and in full possession of your faculties when you wake up.  Outside of that, unless it’s becoming too regular a thing, I don’t care.”

“I’m in possession,” he said, a little belligerent.  “I’m sober.”

“You’re shaky and you can’t stand still,” I told him.  “You might fog a centrifuge or give a lab rat motion sickness or something.”

“Those aren’t things,” the boy who had opened the door said.  He’d pulled on a shirt and sweater.

“They are things in my head and that’s what matters,” I said.  “And you were supposed to remind me of something.”

“If I hadn’t opened the door when I did, everyone’s pay would have been docked.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “Everyone, thank him.”

In unsteady unison, almost sing-song, they said some variations on, “Thank you, Dustin.”

“Perfect,” I said.  “And Dustin gets a bonus.  Because I do incentives, not just punishments.  He’ll get the money that whatshername and shaky here are getting docked.  Because he’s doing what he’s supposed to do.”

“They pushed me out of bed and made me get the door,” Dustin said.

“And you won the prize!  Funny how that works, isn’t it?” I asked him.  “You decide if they deserve any of it.  Maybe as a starting point, you distribute a quarter of it to the other seven who aren’t getting docked, and take the rest?”

“Uh,” he said.  “Maybe I take half?  And I share the other half with the rest of the group, including Cole and John?”

“Perfect!” I said, pleased that he’d caught on.  I’d lowballed my suggestion, giving him room to adjust and look generous for his circle of friends.   “As for the boy I assume is John, meet mr. cup of water.  Drink it.”

He took the teacup and he drank.  He looked surly throughout.

“All is well,” I told him.  “But you all are my hands, my eyes, my ears, and my academy-educated brains.  I’m paying you to work toward my purposes, and for that, I need you to be reasonably predictable.  Which means not being on anything while you’re on duty.”

“Uh huh,” he said.  He didn’t smile or even really look me in the eye.  “Can I go?”

“Sure,” I said.

He left.  I drew a notebook out of my pocket and made notes.  Then I turned back a few pages, and I tore out three.  I slapped them down on the desk.  “Those of you who are on proper, paying duty, read.”

The remaining five boys and three girls approached, clustering at the table to read.  I got the kettle and poured out the cups.

“Pheromone gland,” I said, giving the basic points of what was on the paper.  “Lab one is already working on something that can detect pheromones.  We had it in mind for another purpose, but something came up and we want to use it now.  Get up to speed, get something going.  It’s going in a modified stitched and all we need is for it to leave a scent trail.  I asked other students if it’s doable in three days and they said it might be doable in two.  What do you say?”

There was a bit of hesitation.

I gestured, urging a response.

“Um, I could maybe do it, the others can help” one of the girls said.  “I’m thinking a modified anal gland.  Maybe we should have someone else who knows the particulars better.  Mabel from team Green?”

The Greenhouse Gang had become Team Green as the winter had progressed.  Sometimes they were just the Green.

“Mabel’s busy,” I said.  “But talk to her.  She’s in lab one.  She can probably tell you other students who know anything about this.  Grab two at most for this team, give them space upstairs if they need or want it, try to get along.”

“You make that sound like we’re not going to,” one of the boys said.

“There’s always friction,” I said.  “Try to get along, that’s all I’m asking.  If I’m wrong and there are no problems, then that’s great.”

There were some mumbles of acknowledgement, with an overenthusiastic, “Yessir!” from the girl with the blonde pillow hair.

“Try not to look so happy,” I told her, as I prepared the tea.  “You’re supposed to be hung over.”

“Every part of me hurts,” she said.  “The sound of the spoon clinking against the side of the cup is making me see stars.”

“Then stop smiling,” I told her.  “You’re too bright to look at.”

“We played cards, I won most of the chips.”

“Yeah?  Maybe I’ll invite you to Sylvester’s weekly card game with me, Jessie, and the other top players of the Beattle rebels.”

“Do you have the red chips and blue chips?” she asked.

The girl next to her elbowed her.

“Just the one kind of chips, five dollar buy-in,” I said.  “I pay triple for any hands I lose, and Jessie pays double.”

“Really?  Really makes me wish you used the blue chips too,” she asked.  She looked very merry at the notion.  The girl next to her elbowed her again.

I almost wanted to reveal that my paying triple was a stingy play on my part, not a generous one, but I kept my mouth shut.  I settled for wagging my finger at her.

“I’ll be good,” she said, looking very much like she wouldn’t.

“You’re in the wrong place if you’re going to do that.  Just keep it to a controlled, not-interfering-with-lab-work kind of bad and I’ll be rooting for you,” I said.  “In the meantime, before the idea completely disappears from my mind, are the anal glands absolutely necessary?”

“They’re the best deployment for pheromones and scents that I know of,” was the answer from the girl who’d volunteered to lead.

“Reconsider,” I told her.

“But-”

“Or don’t.  But don’t complain later.  And, on a natural departure from the subject of anal glands, do you all want breakfast?”

One hundred percent affirmative, including a noise from upstairs.

“Have your tea, start organizing, prepare to work I’ll send someone with breakfast,” I said.  “You have until noon to figure out if you need anything ordered.  That’s a good place to start.”

I collected my cup of tea, found the milk, and added it, before carrying it and a cup of black tea toward the door.

“You’re stealing our teacups?” the blonde girl asked.

“I’m nefarious,” I said.  “And they keep my hands warmer.”

I let myself outside, and winced as I stepped out into the cold and the wet.  I hunched over the cups, letting the steam warm my face, and hurried over to the largest of the old slaughterhouses.

It was a rural town, lost in the wilderness.  Where so many cities were an organism, settling near a body of water and then organically growing, with all of the myriad cells, organs, and systems to thrive, this town was a parasite, a tick of a city that was simple, defenseless, once nourished on a narrow selection of resources, swelling rapidly up until the food source was cut off.

A parasite was apparently responsible for the mass-death of the Academy-designed groves of trees.  From there, it had mutated to eat into the greater, more varied forest.    The slaughterhouses had maintained course for a while, but the town of Sedge had died a rapid death all the same, half of its reason for being gone.  Now the tick was an empty husk.

We were the parasites now, in our own way.

The largest of the slaughterhouses, ‘the big house’, was our headquarters.  The smell, which had soaked into chemically-treated flooring was faintly unpleasant, but it was spacious enough to serve as our mess hall, have some room for our largest lab, and still have some space off in the adjunct building for sitting, talking, and planning.  Many of the benches in the mess hall were halved tree trunks with the bark stripped off and legs nailed into them, and tables weren’t much fancier.

There were fifty or so students who were milling about, waiting for, eating, or just having finished breakfast, or going to and from lab one.  A table was set with fruit and some other things for quick snacking, in case anyone didn’t want to wait in line.  I cut in line and collected some biscuits.

“Possum!” I called out to the kitchen, juggling two teacups and three biscuits.

“Hi, Sy!”

“Lab two, ten breakfasts, sans poison.”

“Stop saying it like that!” she chided me from across the floor.  “It makes people uneasy!”

“They already have tea to start them off.”

“We’re running low on food,” she said.

“I know we’re running low on food,” I said.  “Run into town later today.”

A dozen different students perked up at that.  Some dropped what they were doing to turn my way and start to approach.

“Before anyone asks, no runs into town until later this week, all seats on today’s carriage are spoken for,” I announced to the room.  “We’re keeping a low profile.  If you want something, leave the wishlist and the money with Rudy.  We’ll see if we can cheat something in the month or week before we move elsewhere.”

In the spring, I thought.

That announcement was enough to forestall the cluster of ex-students who would have tried to bother me.

The building adjunct to the big ‘house had a neat aesthetic.  The far wall was all grown wood, and it had grown in rough, like a forest with trees nesting in so close to one another that there were no gaps between them.  Skulls from beasts that had been hunted, animals from the slaughterhouse, feral wolves and dogs, and one battle-scarred skull of a warbeast hung along one wall.  Furniture, admittedly scarce throughout the town, had been collected from various buildings and gathered here, so there was one room at least that was functional.  The second and third floors were only half-floors, with railings overlooking the meeting room and the wall of skulls ranging from fist-sized to the one-hundred-and-fifty-pound warbeast skull.

Jessie was on the second floor, sitting in an armchair by the window and the fire, with a blanket around her.

I set my cup of tea down, adjusted the blanket, posed one cup in her lap, and used my free hand to put her hands around it.

She stirred awake at the warmth.  Her eyes went straight to the clock on the wall.  It was next to a wall-mounted fish that had suffered badly for the years of neglect since Sedge’s occupants had left and we had arrived.  There was none of the false life that a good taxidermist managed.  This was a very clearly dead, dessicated fish corpse, once nice and now horrifying, mounted on a plaque and set on the wall.

“Crummy day to go into the city,” I commented.  “You and Bubbles have the right idea.”

“The credit goes to Bubbles,” Jessie said, curling up more.

I sat on the arm of the armchair and Jessie leaned against my leg.

Stacking the biscuits on one side of my knee, I freed my hand to open my notebook.  “Lab one is underway, they already have their list of things to buy.  Lab two will get us the list before noon.  We can grab lunch to go and head into the city.  Touch base with Pierre and our delinquents there-”

“Interview our doctor.  We need a second doctor.”

I scribbled that down.

“Try not to scare this next one away, Sy.”

“I’ll scare him away if I have to,” I said.  “The last one was a little too bright eyed and eager when I suggested that there were a number of rebellious fourteen to eighteen year old boys and girls here for him, with emphasis on boys and girls.”

“Maybe he was just eager to teach.  Some people just want to disseminate knowledge.”

“He wanted to ‘seminate something,” I said, very pleased with myself.  Sitting on the arm of the armchair, I had to crane my neck to see Jessie’s face.  She was smiling, but the type of smile…  I paused.  “We’ve had this conversation before.  I’ve made that joke before.”

“Five times,” Jessie said.  “I give you the setup because you enjoy it so much.”

I reached over to mess up her hair a little.

“It does get inconvenient, disposing of the ones we reject, after you’ve given them critical details,” Jessie pointed out.

“I handle most disposals, so I don’t know why you’re the one complaining about inconvenience here.”

“You could prevent the problem by assessing them more thoroughly without actually revealing anything critical.”

“I have a very recognizable face, and wanted posters all over the place.  Best to be thorough.”

“I think you’re motivated by the need to brag.  You want to monologue at people, show off, boast about your rebellion faction.”

“It’s a faction that warrants bragging about.  Full of rebellious fourteen to eighteen year olds, some of whom are very attractive.”

“Yes Sy.  I’m aware.”

“Did you see what I did there?  Because I linked back to what we were saying…” I trailed off as I was rewarded with a very dramatic eye roll from Jessie.

“On the topic of rebellions, we should see what news we can glean about the other rebel factions,” Jessie said.  “We haven’t made such a detour from Fray’s plan that she couldn’t find us, we don’t know what Cynthia is doing, Mauer is oddly silent and quiet, and there are some other groups making noise.”

“There’s always going to be new groups making noise.  The trick is figuring out which ones are worth listening and paying attention to.”

“Yeah,” Jessie said.  She settled in deeper into her nest of blankets, legs tucked in beside her, and took a bite of biscuit, followed by a bit of tea.  “For example, there’s this one rebellion leader who has a thing for poison and setting things on fire.”

“Sounds like a swell guy.”

“Skirts, too.  Fire, poison, skirts, and repeating the same jokes over and over again.  He’s one of those faction leaders that’s best ignored.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

“He might steal away one of the girls that’s interested in you.  Once you get past the fact that he’s only about as tall as a typical girl his age, he’s pretty good looking.”

“Bubbles is on my side.  We’ll go and kick his ass.  I bet I can take him in a fight.”

“Anyone can, unless he gets the drop on them,” Jessie said.

“Good.  He won’t see me coming.”

“I genuinely believe you on that score,” Jessie said.

The interplay of the moment was broken by a movement of the flames and by Mauer crossing the room to stand by the window.  He was looking out at my rebel faction.  That was his favored activity, ever since he had arrived.  Watching over operations.

The only thing I really disliked about the appearance of Mauer and Fray were the ways they interacted with the Lambs.  When Mauer showed up, the Lambs went away.  I could look for them and spot them in the crowd, but they were never close.  The appearances of Lambs was very natural and unassuming, while the arrival of Mauer was often something that made my heart jump a bit with alarm.  I’d’ve rather have had the former than the latter.

The appearances of Fray were rather different.  The Lambs liked her.  Evette was a common one, but each of the Lambs could be seen with Fray now and then.  Every time, it felt ominous and unpleasant.  Helen’s eyes were cold and dead, only the monster and not my monster.  Gordon looked angry in Fray’s company, with dark looks in his eye, the brute rather than the golden boy.  Jamie could so often be seen sitting very still, hugging his book, while Mary and Lillian listened attentively to Fray.  Mary paced while she listened, with no grace at all, and Lillian resembled the girl I’d seen with a fresh dose of Wyvern in her.

Rather than dwell too much on Mauer or the thought of Fray, for fear Mauer might stay longer or Fray might come to visit with a Lamb in tow, I turned my attention to the flames in front of Jessie and I.

“I’m envious of your cocoon, little caterpillar,” I said, indicating the blankets Jessie had swaddled herself in as she sat in the armchair.

“It took some doing, but I’m willing to undo it if you want in.  A bit of a squeeze.”

“Another time.  There’s a lot to do,” I said.  “I’m getting underway as soon as the tea and biscuit are done.”

“I’ll come,” Jessie said.  “I should get moving, keep exercising.  I’m worried about what happens if I sleep to much and move too little.  Atrophy is a thing.”

“We have an entire collection of ex-students to use and abuse if you want to work out solutions to atrophy,” I said.  “Stay comfortable.  Do what you need to do.”

“I need to do what I can on my own.  If and when I go blank-slate again, I don’t want to regret that the last few months were all about me sleeping.”

“Arright,” I said, drawling the word.

Footsteps on the stairs drew my attention.

Jessie pulled away from the blankets to get a better view, while I swiveled in my seat, catching a falling biscuit between two fingers.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Jessie said.

Pierre nodded.

The fact that he didn’t respond right away was telling.

Shirley, and our gang leaders, stationed in the city.

“How bad?” I asked.

The fact that he didn’t respond was telling.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.02 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.2

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The carriage wheels cut through snow with a thick ice crust, a faint steam rolling off of the backs of the stitched horses pulling the vehicle.  The steam fogged the exterior of the carriage, and the fog froze into patterns.

There were fields to the left and right of us.  Even covered in layers of snow, the different textures of different kinds of field made the individual sections stand out.  A patchwork quilt in white, with bits of brown and black where shrubs or other plants poked through.  The road was only visible by the faint indentation in the snow where there were ditches on either side, and by the lines of trees and fence that ran on either side.

In the distance, a warbeast passed between two trees.

He was a big fellow, with more sheer mass than our carriage, two sturdy stitched horses, and all six of the carriage’s occupants.  Black furred, glowering, his head heavy with a fanged maw that was no doubt capable of biting a horse in two, he limped forward.  His mass helped drive clawed feet deep into snow, and when he brought them up, they flung clumps of snow, dirt, and grass into the air.

The movement of his frontmost right claw was weak, disturbing less of the ground beneath him.

It was preoccupied, too.  In another circumstance, it might have noticed us as it limped in our general direction.  The haze of wet snow or hard rain obscured vision, and the warbeast was focused more on putting one leg in front of the other than on its namesake duty.

I silently gestured for Rudy to stop.  Rudy passed the instruction on to the horses.

I had climbed up onto the bench with Rudy not that long ago.  I’d wiped it as dry as I could using a towel, then folded and sat on the towel, and the seat of my pants was still getting damp.

Rudy and I waited, sitting very still, as the warbeast loped forward.  Its one leg hampered, it moved less in a straight line and more in a gradual curve, entering the east side of the field and gradually turning north.

It took several minutes to make the quarter-circle journey across the field.

It was only when it was walking directly away from us that a flash of color signified what was wrong.  At the great black warbeast’s right shoulder, red flowers had already set root and started the slow crawl over its body, no doubt burrowing into the creature’s flesh.  The beast wasn’t howling in agony or rampaging, which suggested it had been made to ignore pain.

“Git,” Rudy instructed the stitched horses.

“Wait,” I murmured.

Just as soon as they’d started moving, Rudy brought them to a halt.

Another full minute passed.  The wet and snow gathered around us, and the chilled air seemed to grow colder.  The trees set ten feet apart from one another by the sides of the road weren’t much help when it came to the wind.  The fields hereabouts were broad and flat enough to let the wind pick up a lot of speed before it reached us.

I thought fondly of the fire and Jessie’s armchair and cocoon.  Bubbles had it good, sitting there on the wall as the fire dwindled hour by hour, heat leeching out of the fireplace.  Then again, Bubbles had had it rough, sitting there for years without any company or creature comforts.

Ten males, probably Stitched with a handler, emerged from the same spot the black warbeast had.  We watched from our vantage point as they followed the same course the warbeast had, rifles at the ready.

“They’re going to have a huck of a time mercy killing that’n,” Rudy commented.

“I’m willing to bet they are, Rudy,” I said.  “But they can’t have it spreading plague around.”

“It’s not a good sign that there are already soldiers around.”

“Nope,” I said.  I hunched over, pulling a blanket tighter against my body so the wind wouldn’t slip between me and it.

“It hurts to breathe,” Rudy said.  “You can go inside the carriage if you want.”

“We’re close, I think.  I want to watch out for trouble.”

“Yeah?” Rudy asked.  “Can I go inside the carriage?”

I shot him a look.  I saw how ice was forming at his eyebrows, even with his hat and hood pulled down, and at his eyelashes.

“Go on,” I told him.

He started to budge from his seat, then hesitated.

“We might have to walk back,” he remarked.

“Hm?”

He indicated the stitched horses.

The steam still rose off of them.  They were breathing hard, trying to maintain a necessary temperature.  Hot, moist breath carried through the air and rolled past me and Rudy.

“Maybe,” I said.  “I really hope we don’t.”

Rudy nodded.  He still didn’t stand from the seat at the right end of the bench.  “Not really earning my pay, am I?”

“You’re fine.  Go.”

He handed over the reins.  Clusters of ice that had bonded him to the seat crackled as he rose up, and more fell away from his overcoat as he turned to climb down then let himself into the carriage proper.

I had my own slough of ice as I shifted over, centering myself in the seat, and set the horses in motion again.  It took some doing before the carriage was rolling enough to start properly rolling through the snow again.

I had to remind myself not to shut off the discomfort and the pain.  The cold was seductive and sneaky.  Drugs, alcohols, innate abilities, they all lulled one into a false sense of security when it came to bitter weather like this.

“Someone keep me company,” I said.

It took a moment, and for that full moment, I was legitimately spooked at the notion that it might not be a Lamb who took a seat next to me.

Ice crunched as he took his seat.

“Remember when we had the cold spell in Radham, and Nutsy kicked the Gibson family out?”

Gordon.  I relaxed.

“They weren’t the Gibson family, were they?”

“No, but I don’t even remember their actual name, and you definitely don’t.  It wasn’t Nutsy either, but it was a stupid, stupid name.”

“Sure,” I said, hunching over.  “Yeah, I vaguely recall.  Nutsy was that slumlord, freakishly tall-”

“Normal tall.  Everyone’s freakishly tall when you’re short.”

“-and handsome?  All the old women gushed over him,” I commented, trying to ignore the ‘short’ comment.  I was conserving heat and energy.

“Women of all ages.  Yeah, that’s the one.  Remember why we hated the name?  Because they’d all coo ‘Nawwwtsyyyy‘ in that saccharine tone, each one trying to outdo the others.”

“The ladies of Radham didn’t have any taste until Lillian and Mary,” I said.  “It might actually be just Lillian and Mary.  Something in the water, maybe?”

“If you were after looks only, he was alright, I imagine.  Had a bit of German to him, square jaw, cleft chin, different enough in fashion to catch the eye.  And he kicked a family out in the dead of a pretty awful winter.  Because a pair of his friends wanted that apartment.  Barely any warning, not giving the Gibsons a chance to get anything else lined up.  The Gibsons had kids, the kids knew the mice, the mice knew us…”

“I remember,” I said, as it all fell into place.  “You took him apart.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said.  He turned his face skyward.  He didn’t care about the dense, wet snow that collected on his face.  He didn’t blink as it touched his eyes and eyelids.  “I remember standing there while he lay on the floor, whimpering.  It seemed like a forever passed while I tried to figure out how to hurt him so badly that they couldn’t make him pretty again without killing him in the process.”

“I gave advice, once I realized why you weren’t doing anything.  I remember trying to be careful about it, because it was your show.”

“Why was it my show, again?” Gordon asked.

I had to think for a long moment.

“I was so young, then,” Gordon said.  “Really inexperienced.  I’d killed before, but he was the first person I killed that I wasn’t ordered to kill.  It was-”

“Personal,” I finished.

“The Gibson daughter.  But it wasn’t like that.  I was at the bakery once with you and Helen, and I was fishing through my pockets for change, and Gwen Gibson slapped some money down.  It was a nice gesture, for no reason.  That was the first part of it.  I might never have paid attention to them otherwise.”

“She wasn’t even sweet on you, I don’t think,” I said.  “She thought you were funny and she felt bad because you were an orphan.”

“Yeah.  They got kicked out, and they spent three days in the church before the law said they had to move on.”

“Can’t have people becoming dependent on the church.”

“The injustice of it infuriated me,” Gordon said.  “That they could be kicked out like that, with that timing, that the Crown wasn’t on their side.  Even the mice wouldn’t make space for them because Gwen Gibson and her brother still had their parents.”

“It was personal,” I said again.

“On a cosmic level, if personal vendettas can be cosmic.  I found him, you helped.  But it was my show, like you said.  I used a hammer to do most of it, because I didn’t want to pause to change tools once I got underway.  Shattered his teeth, his nose, cheekbones, the orbital ridges.  Whack, whack, whack, all steady-like, kept up the same rhythm from start to finish.  A part of my brain… I had one brain chosen from one person for one reason, and another part of a brain chosen for another.  I think around the time I turned that metronome-steady destruction toward his hands, keeping the time while he flopped them around, moving them as much as he could with his shoulders demolished,  I tapped into traces of personalities that I wasn’t supposed to be able to.  Edges and trimmings that still remained.”

“You told me, a while later.”

“He died before I fully came back from thinking all black and scarred-like.  I was so inexperienced, so young,” Gordon said.

“You were.  We didn’t even have Lillian yet.  Our balls hadn’t dropped.”

“This cold reminds me of that,” Gordon said.  “That day, that moment.  The unfairness of it.”

“Trying to correct things and making a bigger mess,” I commented.

“Now you’re seeing what I spent so long getting at,” Gordon said.  “All while we’re riding a carriage down memory lane.”

“Country road twenty-one, I think,” I said.

Gordon smiled.

“What I don’t get, and this is sort of annoying me at this stage, but why the hell do I remember all of that, minus a few names, while I can’t remember for sure who’s in the carriage and I have to do mental acrobatics to remind myself that it was Rudy up on this bench a little while ago?”

“Because,” Gordon said, “Remembering me as perfectly as you do means remembering the look on my face as I brought that hammer down, once a second, never missing, even as he flinched and tried to move out of the way.”

I exhaled, and raised a cold hand to my face to rub at it, wet but still lukewarm.

“There’s going to come a time, and it won’t be too long, but you’ll need the real estate, Sy.  You’ll need to lose faces, like Evette was doing, to make better room for other memories.  Otherwise you won’t stay functional.”

“If I do that, I can’t break my suspension of disbelief and stop thinking of the Lambs as phantoms.”

“You’re aware that’s a horrible idea, right Sy?  This whole process will go more smoothly if you try to forestall the crazy.  Don’t throw yourself down that slope and try to meet the rockiest, roughest bit with your face.”

“It’s nicer this way.”

“I’ll remind you that you said that,” Gordon said.  “If I get the chance.”

I blew on my hands, rubbing them.  “I wish I’d gotten to see more of the other Gordon.  The fragments of personality.”

“They didn’t add up to a gestalt.  They just… functioned.  Barely.”

“I know, I know,” I said.  “But he was so much less naggy.”

Gordon shot me a level glare.

“Yeah,” I said.  “There’s our friendliest rabbit again.  Why don’t you get lost?”

It seemed to be the rule now that the Lambs, Fray, and Mauer didn’t leave if I asked them to leave.  Gordon stayed.

Pierre was approaching from the other end of the road.  He’d made the hour-long trip down the country roads from the city to Sedge, then back out to the city, and now he was meeting me here, with no signs that he was any worse for wear.

One of his eyes squinted a touch where fur around it had frozen.  His breath fogged, suggesting he’d been running moments before he’d slowed to a walk and strolled into view.

“Any word?” I asked.

Pierre shook his head.

“Dang it,” I said.

The carriage door opened.  Jessie leaned out, saw Pierre, and then climbed up the side of the carriage, taking a seat beside me.

“It sounded like Sy was having a whole conversation up here,” Jessie said.  “Glad it was you, Pierre.”

Pierre glanced at me, then looked at Jessie and gave her a bow.  “They’re focused on the train.”

“Is it really salvageable?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Pierre said.  “I don’t know about trains.  But when they realized they couldn’t evacuate, they drew closer into the center of the city.  A contingent is holding the train hostage.”

“It has to do with the rail system layout,” Jessie said.  “So long as the train is there and train and tracks are all held hostage, trains can’t pass through.  They can detour, but it sets a bad precedent, shifts weight of responsibility, denies them easy access from one port to the next.  Supplying the east coast becomes a snarl.  All because of this one roadblock, a city of two hundred thousand situated by the coast.”

I put a hand up by my mouth, whispering to Pierre, “She likes trains.”

“I’m aware,” Pierre said.

“Are you cold, Pierre?  We’ve had you running here and there, and the weather is awful.”

“I’m mostly fine.  Won’t complain if we find a fire to warm our feet by soon, but I won’t lose a finger or toe to the cold anytime soon.  Even my face is pretty toasty,” he said.  He gave his rabbit cheeks a pat.

“Good man,” I said.

“I’m worried about Shirley,” he said.

“We’ll help Shirley,” I said.

The wagon slowed as it ascended a hill.  The heat rising off of our stitched horses had intensified, the steam picking up.

Rudy might be right.  They might not last for the return trip.

As we crested the hill, we could see the scene.

The city wasn’t too large, as cities went, but it was a healthy one, organic in how things were laid out, all the components present and accounted for.  It had a purpose it was built for, a port that could defend itself, and it had lived up to that purpose last night.  It was surrounded by a wall.  Two sections of the city looked quite well-to-do, with fancy, cathedral-esque architecture, and there was no sign of things being run down in the sprawls that extended out from the nicer areas.

“That side of the city,” Pierre said, pointing, “Is where the rebels attacked first.  They set fires and fired guns at quarantine officers.  When the city guards moved over to respond, another group of rebels attacked the opposite side, which was only lightly defended.  I went to check on Shirley and the others before reporting to you.  Plague hit like a lightning bolt.  South end, north end, running through everything in between, cases cropping up everywhere.”

“Reminiscence,” I said.

From a distance, the collected Academy forces were clearly visible.  It wasn’t a perimeter.

The others had climbed out of the carriage.  Rudy, Second, Bea, Fang, and the Treasurer whose name I could never remember.

“You can see the traces of red,” Rudy said  “A tracery of crimson-pink.”

Jessie and I glanced at the Treasurer.

His hair straddling the line between orange and blond, his build very stocky and appearing all the more so for the sweater-neck that extended up to his chin and the many layers he wore.  He wore his gun comfortably and carried two knives, one of which had been his, the other won in a bet.  He looked uneasy.

“Someone deliberately spread it?” he asked.

“It seems so,” Jessie replied.

The Treasurer had been planning to study epidemics and work in quarantine.  He had been studying under a gray-coat specialist on the subject when his mentor had been caught fraternizing with non-human experiments in the lab.  His parents had made him change schools to avoid the ensuing scandal.  He had ended up at Beattle.  From Beattle, he had made his way to us.

While others were drinking and enjoying each other’s company, our Treasurer was diving into his work.  He bore a deep, simmering resentment against Academy, Crown and parents, and had been likely since his parents had insisted he change schools.

“They’re playing with fire, which means they’re stretched thin,” he decided.  “Barely any soldiers or groups covering some tertiary roads, unless I’m missing something.  Were there any rumors of strange monsters, Pierre?”

“Some,” Pierre said.

“Experimental measures to experimental measures,” the Treasurer said.

I quirked an eyebrow.

“It’s… a bad joke my boss once liked.  They’re delivering experiment agents as one measure.  Which suggests a mindset where they’re wanting or willing to try things that they aren’t certain will work… experimental measures.”

“They think they have nothing left to lose.  Everyone in that city is likely dead.”

“Yes,” the Treasurer said.  He looked out over the city, and there was the faintest glimmer in his eye of what I’d seen in Lillian while she was on Wyvern, a glimmer when I saw her passion for her work at work.  “We’re going to lose the city.  You might want to plan accordingly.”

“We’re planning on rescuing Shirley and our gang leaders,” Jessie said.

“Agreed,” I said.

Someone had attacked the city.  They’d lost, according to Pierre.  Violence provoked plague, plague had snapped through the city in a way that suggested the losing side might have decided to play dirty when they’d realized the direction things were going, and now we were going to lose Shirley, a city we needed to keep our camp running, and a painful amount of time and resources.

Our pheromone trick wouldn’t work if things remained as they were.  We at least needed to be able to hitch a train.

“Cold weather should inhibit the spread of disease,” the Treasurer said.

“It didn’t,” I remarked.

“No,” he said.  His face was perpetually sour, as if someone had just insulted his mother, but his eyes were aglitter.  “It’s curious.”

“Poison?” I asked.  “In the food?  Water?”

“I don’t know where the fresh water supplies are,” the Treasurer said.

“I do,” Jessie said.

Then Jessie began running through it for the Treasurer, pointing out key details for the city proper.

While the Treasurer tried to plot the spread using that information, Jessie suggested, “It could have been set up in advance, except-”

“People are diffuse,” the Treasurer said.  “Especially when it runs through one key area in town like this.  It was too quick, too contained, if it was a line just like that, north to south, along some of the major roads.”

“Horse dung?  Steam from a stitched horse?” I asked.  “Something that actually uses the road?”

“Perhaps.  I’m thinking it would be a food.”

“That’s pretty god-damn premeditated,” Second said.

His foul language went unremarked on.  We were musing on the personality and attitude of someone who could spread a plague this ugly and do it intentionally.

“It might not be.  Something this virulent?” the Treasurer asked.

“What are we doing?” Bea cut in.  I did like how she was straight to business.

I glanced at Jessie, “Tell me if I’m forgetting something.”

“You’re forgetting everything, Sy,” she said.

I rolled my eyes a little.

“We rescue Shirley,” I said.  “We rescue the gang leaders.  If there’s a way to get this under control, we do that.”

“Where was she?” the Treasurer asked.

Jessie pointed, “By the large tree.”

“They’ll pick a large, roomy space with good lighting,” the Treasurer said.  “Set up quarantine, screen a base population of people, while keeping others in their homes, then try to stay ahead of it.”

“They won’t,” I said, thinking of Tynewear.  “This is a stalemate.  The train held hostage, the Crown holding position at key points in the city.  It’s a stalemate that won’t hold.  If the plague spreads too far, if countermeasures don’t work, and experiments can’t kill people faster than they get infected, the Crown will erase the city from the map and rebuild the railroad.”

“How are we splitting up for this one?” Jessie asked.

“You stay outside-”

“Try again, Sy,” she said.

“You stay outside,” I tried again.

“No, Sy.  You function better alongside me, and I know the city layout.  If I get sick again-”

“Keeping in mind you’re prone to Ravage and Reminiscence.”

“-If I get sick again, I know you can handle it, you have a scalpel” Jessie said.  “It’s cold, we’re covered up, and we have our suspicion that the plague is presently being spread by food.  We don’t eat while we’re there.”

“They’ll close the borders of the city soon, as soon as reinforcements arrive,” the Treasurer said.  “Getting in right now should be fine, but getting out is troublesome.  You’ll want to go to some building in the nicer district there.  One with room, possibly a jail, with cells.”

“The Little Castle,” Jessie said.

We looked at her.

“It’s the stone building with the tree growing out of one corner that looks like it was on fire not long ago.  It’s not.  I’d call it a hotel, but it’s not.  It’s the sort of place that a lesser noble might stay in while traveling across the country.  Aristocrats, visiting allies of the Crown, it’s a place they like.”

Pierre shifted his weight, antsy.  His ears moved.

“If you’re cold at all, Pierre,” I said, “The inside of the carriage has a heatlamp.”

“I don’t like confined spaces,” Pierre said.

“I know,” I said, “But if you’re that uncomfortable-”

The ears moved slightly again.  His shoulders moved back, chin raising.

“Please,” I said, very firmly.  “Let me know.  It matters.”

“Shirley is a good friend of yours and mine,” Pierre said.  “I would like to see her safe and sound.  I know for a fact you worked hard to recruit those men and women from the gangs of Laureas, and they aren’t insignificant.  If we can save them too-”

“Pierre,” I said, firm.

What aren’t you saying?

Our lanky rabbit man fell silent, glancing off in the direction of the city.

“I’m not sure what’s going on,” Second said.

“Secrets,” Bea said.  She leaned against the side of the carriage, next to Fang, her boyfriend of the now.

In the city itself, Warbeasts were being used to keep a crowd at bay.  They roared, and even miles away, we could hear the echo of it.

They were working to seize control, leaning heavily on experimental measures, which meant things like Dog and Catcher, likely with some resistance or immunity to plague.  The net would slowly close, reinforcements arrive, and the city faced bombardment, gassing, or cleansing by fire.

“Pierre.  Trust us,” I said.  “Trust that we value Shirley.  That whatever it is, it won’t distract from that.”

He bent his head.  “If she’s there, she’s in the same place as him.  A man who meets the criteria you set when you had us stake out the area, looking for new arrivals and anyone important, passing through.”

“A noble?” I asked.

“No,” Pierre said.  “But close.  A noble’s doctor, one left recently without work.  This is a man who served the Duke of Francis.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.03 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jessie led the horses off.  We’d unhitched them from the wagon, but the yoke that connected one horse to the other remained in place, as did the bridles and reins.  She had a rifle slung over one shoulder, the rest of her well bundled up, with hat, hood, scarf, and coat, all black with blonde hair pinned against her neck by the scarf, only the ends sticking out.

The others clustered around me, helping me retrieve our things from the back of the carriage.  Rudy took one of the bags, slinging it over his shoulders and belting it in place.  The other piece of equipment I’d packed was heavier, and took a few sets of hands.  Second Gordon and Rudy both helped me haul it out.

The launcher was mounted to a metal plate, builder’s wood framing a shaft and tube, with two cranks and several dials fixed to different points.

I collected canisters and clipped them to my belt, while everyone else retrieved the clothing, bags, and packs we’d put in around the launcher to pad it and keep any structural elements or dials from being jarred or broken.

Pierre had outlined the situation, and I’d told people what to bring, giving them a little bit of leeway in deciding for themselves.  My hope was that they could learn for themselves, develop their individual styles and talents, and round themselves out with some Academy know-how.

For now, Rudy was carrying the heavy stuff, Gordon Two had the tools and extraneous medical supplies, Bea and Fang had expressed some willingness to dip into combat drugs if absolutely required, and were thus equipped for a brawl, with truncheons, knives, and the same guns that I’d given the rest of the group, Pierre excepted.

Pierre had provided particulars about what and where after we’d arrived, and now we’d see if the Beattle rebels could adapt and keep their heads and hands working in a crisis.

The Treasurer was donning his lab equipment.  It was of a more custom uniform, the bottom of the coat hanging lower, the collar high enough to touch his lips.  He had a Beattle crest on the chest and sleeve, with the academy’ s navy blue, gold, and white braided trim.

He attached a hood of the same materials and colors , clipping it on, pulled on thicker gloves over his winter gloves, and then pulled on a mask, the edges of the mask pressing the fabric of the hood and collar tight against his face.  It was hard metal with built-in goggles, tinted blue.  A tube ran down to a leather bag of air that he attached to his belt.

Rudy, Second and I set up the gun.  We found a stump by the side of the road, set it down, and worked the built-in screws in, to fix the plate to the stump.  Jessie disappeared out of sight, and the Treasurer wrapped adhesive ribbon around his collar and hood, then where his gloves met his special lab coat.  His breath hissed as it inflated and deflated the bladder of air.

“High quality bit of work there,” Bea commented.  “Custom buy?”

The Treasurer nodded.

“Get any use out of it?” Rudy asked.

Again, the Treasurer nodded.

Then the air bladder hissed, he moved a loop of metal by the hose, and spoke, sounding as if he came from the end of a deep tunnel that was pointing in a direction that wasn’t ours, “I’ll have to burn this after today.  I’ve heard bad things about this red plague and don’t want to take chances.  I’m going to miss this suit.”

“You could bag it and drown it,” Bea suggested.  “Freeze it, then bake it.”

The Treasurer paused, as if considering, then ventured, “I’m not sure.  Better to be safe.”

“If the plague can survive all four of those treatments, humanity might be done for.”

“Not done for,” the Treasurer said.  “Cats and cockroaches.”

“If you’re having to invoke cats and cockroaches,” I said.  I had a screwdriver sticking through the metal loop, and used it for leverage as I screwed the gun in deeper.  “Then the worst has happened and you aren’t talking about the happiest of endings.  Just the opposite.”

“Won’t deny that,” the Treasurer said, his voice still hollow.  “I might argue about unhappy endings.  The most important thing is that we survive.  Even if it’s only the cats and cockroaches among us.”

“I’m not so sure,” Rudy commented.  “I think life is hard for the cats.  Lamed, broken, nowhere to go, surviving without dignity.  Having purpose is important.  Survival alone isn’t enough.”

Rudy was speaking from experience.  To him, losing Beattle had been an event on par with the destruction of civilization.  The loss of everything he’d worked toward and wanted.

“I’m inclined to agree with Rudy,” I said.  I tightened the screws, tried moving the gun to see if it was loose, and judged it secure.  I worked the crank, rotating the gun, and checked the dials for angle.  I spoke without taking my eye off the machine.  “I’ve tried survival alone.  It’s doable, but your personality atrophies and dies if that’s all you have.”

“Perhaps,” the Treasurer said, still applying the green ribbon, sealing himself off from the world.  “I think you can live in hope that good things will happen someday.  If that’s not possible, then you can live on with the intent of destroying your enemy.  If that’s not possible, you create an opening, so the people who follow in your footsteps have a chance of good things or destroying your enemy.  So long as you survive, you can find your way to those things.  There is always a path.”

“In that order?” I asked.  “Hope, destruction, helping others?”

“I think so,” the Treasurer said.

“Alright,” I said.  “I’ll keep that in mind.  I don’t agree, but if it works for you, I won’t gainsay that.”

He nodded, air hissing as he breathed.

In the distance, a whole dozen guns could be heard firing, each one emptying their clips.  Too far away to be Jessie or any of ours.  A squad of soldiers maintaining the quarantine, perhaps firing at a crowd.

“Sounds bitter to me,” Gordon Two said.  I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the gunfire or the Treasurer, but I suspected the latter.

The Treasurer’s head shook as much as it was able to shake with the hood, mask, and collar all taped into a sealed configuration.  “Not bitter.  Most mornings, I get up on my own, because I know what I want to do, I care about it, and I think it’s important.  Some mornings, hope or the will to help others gets me up.  Some mornings, the desire to ruin my enemies is why I keep working.”

“I’d prefer to have good reasons every morning,” Gordon Two said.  “Not angry ones.”

“If you meet any of the people in the city there, after the plague has hit, you ask them if they want to try searching for the good reason tomorrow morning or if they want justice.”

A fine line between justice and revenge, I thought, but I didn’t comment.

I heard a distant whistle.  I raised my binoculars, and I scanned the surroundings until I saw the target.  The Crown soldiers were set up by the wagon, a fire burning a few feet away, while they crouched around it, watching the roads out of the city that the hill overlooked.

The horses, abandoned by Jessie, were rushing in their direction.  They heard and turned.

I turned and looked at the others – Rudy, Gordon the Second, Bea, Fang, the Treasurer and Pierre.

“Cover your ears,” I said.

I slid one canister of gas into the gun.  I cranked it, adjusting for wind, gauged distance, and waited, looking through the binoculars.

The stitched horses Jessie had sent their way crashed against the side of the soldier’s cart.  The soldiers stood, startled, backing away from the scene.  They found their courage and approached- just in time to see the gas billowing out.  Jessie’s set timer had expired, and the canister we’d placed in the yoke between the two horses was now releasing its contents.  Gas blew in the general direction of the soldiers.

I watched how they moved in the initial moments, then cranked hard, adjusting, before kicking the priming pin into place, hauling back on the crank, and then stomping on the trigger, my hands going to my ears.

It woofed rather than anything else, a low, flat, dull sound that wanted to knock me on my ass and only barely failed to do so.  The canister, meanwhile, sailed skyward.

Seeing its initial trajectory, I began cranking, adjusting, and then placed another canister inside the tube.

Beattle was a poor school, an Academy that accepted the bottom-rung students.  It hadn’t been a place for innovation, and the course work of students had been, in part, an effort to pay the school’s dues.  Drugs had been one thing, and the Rank had gone to some effort to learn that lesson and take it elsewhere.  Stitched had been another thing, a mass-produced export.  Munitions like the one I was using were yet another.

I hadn’t had to ask too many people or go to any great effort to figure out what we needed to produce gas canisters and then get teams in place to make it a reality.  The canister launcher required a few more questions and a bit more searching before I found students ready and able to make one.

I kicked the primer pin into place again, hauled back on the crank, and fired the second shot.

My first shot landed, and wind carried smoke in the general direction of the squadron of soldiers.  Only traces reached them, but it gave them pause, enough to keep them from running in our general direction.  I could see their confusion, and judge that they weren’t even positive about the direction the canister had come from.  The benefit of a high arc.

Delayed, the second shot landed closer to them.  The impact of it striking road was enough to startle their horses and disturb the normally resilient stitched horses.  The soldier’s horses reared a little, snorting, while the stitched horses moved forward.

Aside from the dull sound of the canister launcher, which the snow would dampen, it was a quiet weapon.  There were some distant shouts, but no explosions, no ear-splitting cracks or sounds of metal and wood tearing apart.

I loaded another canister, adjusted, and fired.

“Pierre,” I said.  I didn’t wait to see where the canister had landed.  “Go report to the students back in Sedge.  They should pack up, be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.  We don’t know how many people will come to reinforce, or which direction they’ll come from.  Everyone arms up.  Wait there, eat, rest.  We might need you in the future.”

“You get Shirley,” he said.  “Not that doctor.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

The rabbit-headed man nodded, turned, and sprinted off.

“Follow a ways behind,” I told the others.  The shot I’d fired from the canister was still in the air.

I ran in the opposite direction Pierre had, away from the country road, toward the wagon I’d just bombarded.

I raised my binoculars.  I could see the squad of soldiers pulling on the masks with tubes leading down to air bladders.

All but one.  One of them, a woman, reached for a trumpet on the side of the wagon, one arm covering her lower face.

My head and binoculars bobbing as I ran, I missed the instant that Jessie acted.  The sound of the rifle shot reached me in the moment after the bullet made contact, piercing the base of the soldier’s hand.  It looked like a graze of a hit, but it gave her reason to rethink using the trumpet and signaling other camps of soldiers.

The third canister had landed, and between the gas from the canister placed with the horses, the one I’d placed between myself and them, my test shot that had erred on the side of landing too close to me, and the other two canisters I’d planted around them, the gas that was being pumped out flowed all around them.  They’d pulled on gas masks with attached ox bladders, but they’d had to pass through smoke to do it.  I could see how they moved as if debilitated.

Blind, coughing.  The one who’d been shot in the hand had no mask, and she’d inhaled something while gasping in pain.  Now she was doubled over, coughing.

Jessie had a clear shot for the entire group from her vantage point, and Jessie didn’t shoot.

I closed the distance, found cover by a short fence, and closed my eyes as the smoke wafted over me, so it wouldn’t blind me.

“Throw your weapons down!” I called out.  “Get down on the ground, hands up in the air behind you!”

I heard a voice cussing.

Someone shot in my general direction.  The bullet pinged off of something metal.

I heard Jessie’s gunshot and I heard the body hit the ground.  The sound was out of sync, the answering cries and curses of the soldiers, all muffled by gas masks and interrupted by coughing fits.  It was an eerie thing.

I waited.  There were no more gunshots from Jessie, and the only sounds I heard were swears.  I peeked over the fence.

They were down.

I quickly hurdled the fence, drawing my pistol to point it at different soldiers as I moved among them, collecting the guns.

I signaled for the others to wait as they showed up, brought the guns over to them, and collected the canisters, throwing them down the hill.

“Talk,” I told the one unmasked soldier.

She opened her mouth to speak and choked on her words, coughing.  Her eyes and nose were blood red, her eyes damp with irritation.

“We’re taking you prisoner.  You’ll get medical care for that hand and a little bit of warmth, but only if you cooperate.  If you don’t cooperate, we put bullets in you and carry on.”

I looked very pointedly at the one Jessie had dispatched.

“Robbie… had a child,” she said.

Robbie was the one who’d died?

“How many children are in Dorchester here?  You’re just corralling them and waiting for the plague to get them.”

“They’re already as good as dead,” she said, her voice hoarse, barely above a whisper.  She coughed.  “One more body doesn’t change that.”

“We’ll see,” I said.  “Stand.”

She stood, arms out to the side.

One by one, I got them to stand.  The others used the soldiers’ rifles and bayonets to keep them in line, as we marched them single file back to the carriage we’d used.

“Strip,” I told the lead officer.

He turned his face, gas mask and all, toward me.

I waved the bayonet blade in his direction, and he obliged.  Gas mask off, Academy uniform off.  Academy-white slacks off, the boots they’d issued the soldiers came off.

He hurried into the carriage, hands still raised, wearing only an undershirt and underwear.

By the time Jessie had caught up with us, only two soldiers remained.  Rudy, Gordon Two and Fang had changed into the discarded uniforms, pulling on the gas masks.  Crown colors.  Jessie started doing the same.

Bea was tending to the woman soldier’s hand, bandaging it.  As she finished, I asked, “You want to come with us, or stay in the carriage with your buddies?”

“It’s a choice?” the soldier asked.

“It’s a choice,” I said.  “If you’re in the carriage, you’ll be found soon.  If you’re with us, you won’t need to worry.”

“I don’t need to worry,” she said, firm.  “I’ve been with these fellows a long time.  I was with Robbie a long time.”

“Lose the uniform, then.  Use the heat lamp,” I said.  “Huddle with the blankets.”

She was slow to oblige, what with the injured hand, and it made the process difficult.  I trusted Bea and Jessie to watch her and had the others stand guard off to the side, to afford some limited privacy.

We didn’t need the last guy to disrobe, what with the Treasurer having his own outfit, but I had him do it all the same.  We ushered him into the vehicle while Bea pulled on the female soldier’s gear over her own winter clothing.

Doors closed.  I got a chain from the back, encircled the carriage, pinning the doors closed, and then looped it around again, so it made it harder to get out of the windows.

Would they be able to break the windows and slip free?  Yes.  But getting past shards of glass and squeezing past chain, venturing out into the cold, leaving others with wind blowing into the window and then running through puddles, ice, and wet snow to get to their friends?  I doubted they’d feel that brave.

The Treasurer supplied the loops of adhesive ribbon to everyone, sealing the outfits so they were quarantine-safe.  White gas masks with tinted lenses, heavy coats with maximum coverage, all able to be sealed shut, heavy gloves with the gaps taped, slacks taped to the inner uniform coat, the gaps at the top of each boot taped against the leg.

Showing his expertise, the Treasurer spelled out everything about the process of sealing things, asked about any escaping puffs of air as he patted people down, and outlined the process for removing the quarantine outfits, if he wasn’t alive or conscious to walk them through the process.

He was a dark fellow, the Treasurer.  Angry, morbid.  The fact that he might die didn’t seem to bother him enough, yet he’d gone on about surviving.

I wanted to have tea with him and play poker with him.

“You’re not immune,” Jessie reminded me, her voice modified by the gas mask.  I’d elected not to wear the uniform.

“I can move faster without the bulky layers.  I’d rather move faster and carve any growths out than move too slow.”

“Someone has to pore over your naked body to search for signs of those growths, remember?”

“Reliable sources suggest I’m not bad to look at.  I have no doubt I could find several interested young ladies among our recruits.”

Jessie punched me, right where my heart was.  The protective, padded glove made for a light hit.

Then, with her other hand, she handed me her glasses.

“You sure?”

“The mask serves the same purpose.”

I nodded, folded up the glasses, and slipped them into a front pocket.

I stepped back and looked at my Academy soldiers, with their student in tow.  All matching, all in white, with coats of arms at the chest and upper sleeve, some embroidery here and there on their slacks and hoods to evoke some consistency.  The tinted lenses were unreadable.

“Kevin won’t stand out like this?” Rudy asked.

Jessie shook her head.

“I’ve walked other quarantine zones,” the Treasurer said.  “Only at my last school and Beattle, on Academy grounds, when a student fucked up.  I went around with soldiers, told them about protocols.  If Jessie doesn’t want to, and we run into someone, I’ll take point.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Jessie said.  She looked at me.

“I’ll be out and about, staying out of sight,” I said.  “You all know the hand signals?”

They nodded.  Fang looked less certain than the others.  He wasn’t really a part of the inner circle.  More an accompaniment for Bea, our queen Rooftop Girl who had made a habit of collecting and civilizing some of the troublemakers and delinquents in camp.

I signaled, and they set off.  Right from the get-go, I took a different path as they tromped their way down the hill in heavy boots.

The windows and walls near the ground level were riddled with bullet holes.  Scorch marks and bloodstains marked where there had been fighting.  Falling snow and rain worked to erase what it could, but signs remained here and there.

I thought of what Fray had said, about the red plague being something that looked for this kind of violence.

The initial violence and the officers at the perimeter had scared people further toward the town center.  Nature was working to cover up what had happened here, with snow and rain, the muting effect of heavy snow and the sound-obscuring patter of rain.

Periodically, I could hear a gunshot, which likely sounded further away than it was.

A ghost town, this, in a very different way than Sedge was.  Sedge had been sapped of life, a husk, and repopulated, only the exoskeleton intact.  This was a living town, the outer shell frostbitten and dead while the flesh lived, stagnating.

Inside these buildings, people were huddled, panicking.  The plague crawled among the people, taking root.

The journey was quiet, the streets largely empty.  I kept my distance, navigating between and over buildings while keeping one eye on the Beattle students in soldier uniforms and masks.

They moved past a series of lumps in the road, and they didn’t realize what the lumps were until Bea kicked one by accident.  The covering of snow on one stiff arm was knocked away, the frozen hand exposed.

It was one of the boys that reacted the worst to that.  Second Gordon, I was fairly sure.  He didn’t scream, cry, or get upset, but it took some doing before he would look away from the sight.

A worse one awaited.

It looked like bloodstains, but on closer inspection, it proved to be the flowers.  They reached out for moisture, and the snow was nothing but.  They colored it red, reaching out and across, and they died, or went dormant.

The bodies here in the center were worse.  Carriages had stopped in their tracks.  People had clustered, particularly around building entrances.  Some had tried to break in, seeking refuge from cold and plague.  In the mere hours since Pierre had witnessed the initial scene and we had made our trip to the city, this particular scene had unfolded and then been sealed.  The flowers were already spreading, reaching out over the bodies, connecting one to the next, and crawling up building faces, searching for more victims.

They picked their way through, and I could see the change in body language.  The stiffness, the fact that they were trying not to look.

Only Jessie seemed matter of fact about it.  Only Jessie saw the others approach.

Two men and two women in red clothing.  I had the feeling the red was chosen so it wouldn’t match the red flowers.  Their clothing could almost be mistaken for quarantine outfits, but the coats weren’t long coats, and they wore no masks.

They weren’t good looking people.  Their features were exaggerated, even as they were dressed up in what looked like fine clothing in matching colors.  A man in a red peacoat with a black scarf, with a jutting chin and neanderthal brow, his hair immaculately styled, his ears protected by red earmuffs.  A woman with wavy black hair tied up into a ponytail, her smile perpetual and literally ear to ear, her teeth white and lips painted crimson.  The other woman was similar, but her hair straight, her face too long, her prim nature exaggerated, with pursed lips, a long nose.

Experiments, all four.

They made a beeline for Jessie and the others, and my hand went straight to my waist for my pistol.

The people in red talked to Jessie and the others, and it was the Treasurer who took the lead.

Crouching in the snow, I took aim, waiting and ready for an excuse.

The conversation finished quickly enough.  Jessie and the others moved on with their course, crossing this stripe of plague that had swiped across the town.  The people in red walked along it, as if it was a path for them to travel.  They moved from body to body, checking.

The smiling woman drew a hatchet from her coat – a well hidden weapon, considering I hadn’t seen it.  She raised it overhead, then brought it down on one corpse’s neck.

I couldn’t follow Jessie and the others without crossing these people in red, so I let them go ahead.

Ducking further into cover, raising my binoculars, I watched Jessie.

Her hands moved in the gestures.

Gentle-sugar, gentle-kill.

My head turned over the connected words.  I tried to figure out the meaning, and wished there was a faster way for Jessie to spell the letters out.  The system we had worked out wasn’t great for the task.

She gestured more words.

More red.  Many many.  Careful Sylvester.

There were more than just the four.  Considerably more.

I watched as they moved among the bodies, checking, eyes alert.  They searched every single one on the street before they gathered, approaching a doorway.

The man with the jutting chin kicked the door in, drawing twin cleavers from his pocket.  I knew right away that the people he was using the cleavers on weren’t the frozen bodies.

I almost, almost gave chase, closing the distance, seeing if I couldn’t dispatch them and save the people in the house.

But I saw two flashes of red, and I saw more people walking down the street.  I wouldn’t be able to approach unobserved.

What were the alternate meanings for gentle in the gestures?  Kind?  Soft touch?  Emotionally careful?

What was the alternate meaning for sugar?  I thought of Helen.  My mind stumbled across possible meanings.  Sweet.  Gentle-sweet?  Gentle-sweet gentle-kill?  Murder?  Execution? 

The ones in red called themselves the Tender Mercies.

I hoped Shirley hadn’t faced any such Mercy thus far, as I looked for my opportunity to cross the street and catch up with the others.  I hoped they wouldn’t find Tender Mercy either.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.04 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

This was Jessie’s show, at least for now.

Adjustments had to be made.  My memory was worse than it had been a year ago, and a good memory was a necessary element in a good set of lies and falsehoods.  I could act, and I could manipulate others, but there was a certain point where forgetting a key detail would derail a good deceptive play.

I was in an awkward position when it came to classifying Jessie.

Helen was the best actor among the Lambs, but she had trouble on several fronts.  By most standards, she was among the most attractive young ladies that anyone she met would have met.  She faced an uphill struggle when it came to blending in or avoiding attention.

Gordon and I were perhaps the best actors, by dint of our ability to appear as young gentlemen, urchins, students, or our ability to blend into a crowd.  He was a little bigger than average, I was a little smaller, but we did well.

Had done well, I corrected myself.  He had been a little bigger.  Gordon had been, changing to past tense yet again, roughly matched with me in terms of acting ability and flexibility.  I glanced at Gordon, who was keeping me company, and reminded myself that he wasn’t really present, that he’d been gone for a while now.

That thought lingering in my mind, I paused as I ascended the slope of a rooftop.  I was by the chimney, and I could use the hot air and smoke emanating from it to warm up while I watched Jessie and the others trudge through the snow from a distance.  I wished I could stick my head over it and warm my face, but doing that for any extended period of time struck me as a very good way to pass out, fall down a chimney, and surprise a family that was hiding out from plague somewhere below me.

Helen was only one half-step behind us, and could do leaps and bounds better than us in the right situations.  Could I say Jessie was the worst of the Lambs when it came to acting?  No, because I considered Lillian to be a Lamb, and I likely could have picked five random ex-students from among the Beattle rebels and found one or two who were better than Lillian at playing a part.

I was fond of Lillian, I respected her wholeheartedly, but she had her strengths, she had her weaknesses, and deception wasn’t foremost among her strengths, or even in the top five of them.

I had to consider Ashton, too.  Ashton was about as good at acting as any of the logs burning down in the fireplace below me.  Myself, Gordon, and Helen at the front of the pack, Lillian and Ashton at the rear, and Mary and Jamie somewhere toward the middle.  Mary was good, and I could have searched and tested the entire Beattle group and found one or two students among hundreds on Mary’s level.  She had no particular weaknesses, and she had a number of strengths.

Jessie was like Helen in that she had some marvelous strengths, but she also had weaknesses.  In her case, her weakness was a slower reaction speed, difficulty in adapting to changing situations and crises.  It wasn’t much slower, but one to three seconds she needed to find an answer or detail was enough time for someone to second guess her act.

She was playing to her strengths right now.

I was feeling the cold, which was the reason for my stop at the chimney, while the others were taking their time navigating the city.  Were I the one in uniform, I might have avoided anyone who wasn’t integral to what I needed, but Jessie allowed meetings to happen.  I’d been following them for close to twenty minutes now, and she had already talked to two groups of Tender Mercies, two civilians who’d been looking for shelter and one squad of quarantine soldiers.

She looked confident and unbothered as yet another group of Tender Mercies approached, three men this time.  It seemed like the Tender Mercies wore virtually every shade of red but the one that matched the red flowers.

The man who led this group of Tender Mercies looked like the human equivalent of a wrinkly dog from the East Crown nations I’d seen once in Tynewear, all folds of skin, his features lost amid it all.  He wore his hair in a black ponytail, much like Jamie had worn, once.

I raised my binoculars, and watched as Jessie talked to them.

The man’s face made lipreading next to impossible.  Jessie, however, moved her hands, gesturing as she talked.  The thick gloves made nuance difficult, but through some combination of her gestures and the wrinkled man’s mouth movements, I was able to get the main thrust of the dialogue.

How long?   Time gesture from Jessie, as the wrinkled man spoke.

Head shake from Jessie, a negation hand sign.  No updates, no idea.  Change tacks, casual, easy.  Just want this to be over.

A sort of smile from the wrinkled man, real smiles the other Tenders with him.  We were made for this.

I filled in blanks with guesswork and cues from Jessie’s hand signs.  Is this your first outing?

No, the Wrinkled man said.  I caught that one.  Jessie was nodding, as if this wasn’t surprising.

There was a brief discussion.  Jessie didn’t really translate much of it.  Places, I suspected.  A brief history on this particular trio of Tenders.

The Tenders said something more, and it was the Treasurer who responded.  Jessie followed.  Knowledge-expert.   The Treasurer got his chance to show his stuff, and in the doing, gave the group some legitimacy.  I could see how that translated to trust and back-and-forth with the Tenders.

Any problems?  Jessie asked.

The wrinkled man gestured toward the train station, said something.  Jessie gestured, negation.  The equivalent of a short head shake, a so-so.  Nothing new there.

Then he said something else.  I waited for the gestures.  Jessie wasn’t moving her hand, though.  I wondered if one of the three Tenders had glanced at her hand in a curious way.  I was disappointed in myself if I had missed something like that, binoculars and bad weather or no.

I hadn’t.  Jessie resumed gesturing, as if she was using her hands to make up for the lack of expression on her face while she wore the mask.  Slowly, she caught me up, filling me in.  I used what I’d managed to pick up from the wrinkled man earlier to fill in the blanks now.

Stalemate-stalemate.  The Tender Mercies are waiting to receive orders.  Here for a reason.  Rabbit’s doctor.  Noble doctor.

Jessie and her squad started to move, even as she said some parting words to the Tenders.

Good luck, dog.

She hadn’t actually said dog, but I knew what she meant.  She’d been a little patronizing, adopting the same tone Duncan had taken when talking to us lesser creations of the Academy.

The three Tenders seemed to take it in stride.  If anything, I suspected Jessie had made a good impression on them.

Jessie, meanwhile, seemed to be standing a little straighter, taking a little more authority with the rest of her group.  The hand signals in the meanwhile were for me.

Castle.  Noble Doctor.  Shirley.  Go.

I checked the coast was clear, moved away from the chimney, slid down the slope of the roof, and dropped the fifteen feet to the road below.

I kept my distance so I wouldn’t compromise them, navigated between bloody bodies, and ducked into alleys.

I was in the process of looking for a way up to higher ground when I heard a sharp knocking sound, a rifle against a wall.

I changed direction, and I walked toward the others.

Jessie’s group met me in the alley.

“You catch all of that?” Jessie asked.

“Most of it,” I said.

I drew my handkerchief out of my pocket, and used it to wipe the lenses of Jessie’s mask free of the wet snow and moisture.  With her thick gloves, I knew she couldn’t do a proper clean.  She hated smudged glasses, which was why I tried to smudge them as much as possible when I sought to annoy her.  Easy reflex to hammer at.

Plus it made it seem all the nicer when I reversed course and did the opposite.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Do me?” Bea asked.

I started cleaning more lenses, starting with Bea.  “Why is this noble professor so important?”

“You caught all that?” Fang asked.

“You stop being surprised at these things after a little while,” Rudy said.

“They aren’t saying why they are so interested in the professor,” Jessie said, ignoring the gallery.  “More because I don’t think they have any idea, not because they’re being evasive.  But the Crown is deploying the Mercies with specific orders about the professor, so keep that in mind.”

“It makes sense they don’t know.  They’re low level,” I said.  “We might have to tap another source, or go straight to the doctor.  Hopefully finding him might mean finding Shirley.  At this level, we’re just getting dogs following orders.”

“Dogs?  I can’t tell if you’re being unkind,” Gordon le Deux said.

“I’d be being unkind if I said they were cats,” I pointed out.

“He’s echoing me,” Jessie said.  “I used the word ‘dog’ first, when I was using my hand to communicate with Sylvester.”

I tilted my head, wiping at Rudy’s lenses.  “What was the dog line?  ‘You experiments be safe?'”

Jessie made an amused sound.  “Close.  ‘Don’t tarry too long, experiments.'”

“Eerie,” Fang said.

“Again,” Rudy said, “This is not surprising.  They’re good with the hand signs.”

“I’m more bothered by the conspicuous lack of ‘dog’ in that exchange,” Bea said.

“This is not surprising either,” Second Gordon said, mimicking Rudy’s tone and speech.  “These two are hard to keep up with.”

Rudy’s masked face turned in Second’s direction.  I suspected he was smirking.  The two were getting along to some degree.

“It was nuance,” Jessie explained, patiently, “the word dog implying the tone.”

I added, “A condescending sort of ‘you are lesser than I, but I like you’ entitlement.  Believe me, we got that all the time when we were with the Academy.  Once you start hearing it, you won’t miss it.”

“Oh, there’s tone, too?  How do you have tones in hand signals?” Fang asked, looking down at his hand.  “Fuckin’ hell.  I only know four of these hand gestures and you’re speaking a whole ‘nother language.”

“You’re supposed to know six hand signals,” Jessie said.

“Well, I learned five, and I get the eyes, perception sign mixed up with the knowledge, patience sign.”

“Which means you only really know three,” Bea said.  “Don’t go and make me look bad after I invited you along.”

Fang snorted.  “That’s the entirety of who I am, Bea-baby, ruining reputations of pretty girls.”

Bea made an amused sound at that.

“Watch,” I said.  I held up my hand to show him, three fingers splayed, pinky and thumb tucked in.  Then I put the three fingers together for, “Learn.”

“Fingers apart for watch,” Second said.  “Looks kind of like a ‘w’.”

“That’s good,” Fang said.  “That’s the kind of thing I can remember.”

“Three fingers together for a tower,” Jessie said.  “Ivory tower, place of learning.”

“That’s just going to make me think of a watchtower or something, that only confuses me more,” Fang said.

Jessie huffed out a sigh, and her mask made it sound odd.

“Jessie,” I said.

I got her attention, which distracted her from her failure to counsel Fang.

“You knocked on the wall to bring me over here.  Did you need anything particular?”

“I wanted to ask, how are you holding up?” she asked.  “Cold?”

“Cold,” I said.  “I wouldn’t mind getting indoors soon.  The Castle place?”

Jessie nodded.  “The Little Castle.  We’ll head straight there.  There’s a regiment of soldiers out on the streets.  If they poke their heads around the corner here, you make yourself scarce.  One of us can make noises about being a little nauseous about the bodies.  Treasurer, maybe?”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re a student,” I said.  “You can get away with being a wimp.”

“But I’m not,” the Treasurer said.  “I’m less of a wimp than anyone here except you two.  I’ve seen bodies.  I’ve dissected victims of lesser plagues and sci-weapons.”

“I wouldn’t have used the word ‘wimp’,” Jessie said, aiming that at me.

The Treasurer was a proud person, it seemed.  Maybe he feared that after today, after he burned his suit, he wouldn’t be able to have another day like today, where he got to shine.

“I wouldn’t either,” I said.  “Bad word choice.  I saw how you talked to the Tenders, it worked well.  If you conveyed yourself as the expert on deck, then admitted you were having trouble dealing, it attaches the lie to the truth, explains away why you’re all talking in an alley, and gives them no reason to doubt.”

“Hmph,” the Treasurer made a sound.  The ‘m’ sound of the utterance was caught by the tube, making a low sound like one might get by blowing over the top of a bottle.

“I wouldn’t mind getting somewhere warm too,” Bea said.  “Somewhere with privacy.  I’m wearing pants that don’t fit over ones that do and they’re both-”

I raised my hand, quick, gesturing.

Alert.

I caught a shuffling sound.  I glanced at Jessie, and I saw her nod a little.

I stepped away from the street, deeper into the alley, before I heard the moan.  I changed direction, a moment too late.

She hadn’t made much noise because she was barefoot, walking on ice and on ground without snow.  She barely wore anything more than rags in the cold and she walked in a staggering sort of way.  She was hunched over, moving almost blindly, and was clearly in an incredible amount of pain.  Her hands wrapped around her body as if she were wearing a straightjacket, and blood ran down her arms, dripping and streaming from the elbows.

I realized, as she moved the hand at one side down, fingertips leading the way, that she was digging her fingers under the skin.  Sheer tenacity let her carry on the downward process, separating connective tissue by using nails, fingertips, and hands as a wedge.  The movement was jerky as she found an in, broke a key piece of tissue, and tore skin, only to hit another stopping point.

In this manner, the one hand traveled down toward her hip, as she tore her own skin away.  I could, even with her standing fifty feet away, see the way her hand trembled, the skin stretched thin and tight against the knuckles and splayed fingers.

The Treasurer raised his gun, aiming at her.

I gestured, and Jessie was quick to say, “No.”

“No?” the Treasurer asked.

At the sound of the voices, the young lady looked up.  Her hair was in disarray, and most of her face was hidden, only one eye positioned to peer through the messy, blood-slick hair.  She’d used fingernails to tear off part of her own face.

“It would be a mercy,” the Treasurer said.

“It is a Mercy,” Jessie said.

She’d realized after I’d signaled for her to wait.

I was subtly changing up my expression and stance to look more horrified, less capable.  I made myself smaller, and I retreated a bit.

Jessie, meanwhile, stood tall, and advanced toward the Mercy.  It was the youngest we’d seen yet.  Likely inexperienced, too.

The Mercy, breathing hard and whimpering a little with each breath, shifted her stance, then tilted her body some, back twisting a little.  I couldn’t tell if she was trying to curtsy or bow or if she was trying to stand straight without losing any of the ground she’d gained in tearing off her own skin.

“Hello captain,” the Mercy said, lowering her head a little.  When she looked up again, it was still one bloodshot eye peering through messy hair.

“Hello, experiment.  You seem to be in a bind,” Jessie said.

The Mercy laughed at that, a surprisingly human sound, perfectly fitting to the moment, for someone who was in a bind but who did find the word choice amusing.  I wondered if she’d been human once.

“Do you want help?” Jessie asked.

The Mercy nodded.  “Please, sir.  Or ma’am.”

Jessie reached for her boot, where she’d tucked a knife into the strap that cinched the boot tight against the leg.  She held it out by the handle.

The Mercy took the knife, and proceeded to use one hand and the knife to flense the skin off her body.

“Where’s the rest of your unit, experiment?”

“They left me behind,” the Mercy said.  “I’m a little slower than some.”

“Where are your clothes, then?  And your weapon?”

“The clothes got blood on them,” the Mercy said.  “The blood started to smell.  I lost my weapon along the way.”

“When you say smell, you mean it smelled like plague?”

The Mercy nodded.  “I think it likes how I taste.”

“Could be you’re in the wrong place for it,” the Treasurer said, from the sidelines.

“Could be,” the Mercy said.  She flashed the Treasurer a smile, which was fairly dramatic.  She only had scraps of flesh on her head where it met her hairline.  I wasn’t sure, and I was trying to look afraid, which meant averting my eyes and looking less closely at her, but her scalp might have been something that wasn’t skin.  Artificial.

She tore off the skin over her breasts, and then with the help of the knife to cut connective tissue, removed almost a third of the skin from her upper body and her previously untouched right leg.

From there, it was an easy process to get the rest.  Skin at the feet, skin at the arms.  She stood there, shaking from cold and from pain, the one eye we could see lacking eyelids.  Flayed.

Slowly but surely, however, things were filling in.  The blood flow was stopping, the darker grooves between muscles and muscle fibers smoothing out.

No, probably not human at any point.  Just very high quality work.

Work with biological processes that fast meant biological demands.

I gestured at Jessie with a hand the experiment couldn’t see.  Food.  Man.  Eat.

As if reading my mind, her eye fell on me.

“He’s not for eating,” Jessie said, firm.

“He’s supposed to die,” the Mercy said.  “They all are.”

“It’s not your place to contravene my orders, experiment,” Jessie said.

He’s supposed to die,” the Mercy said, more firmly, insistent, as if she could will Jessie to agree with her.  “I need food, and I need clothes, and he has both.  I’m hardy, but not that hardy.”

“He has information,” Jessie said, still firm.  “He knows something about the standoff at the Little Castle.”

“I see,” the Mercy said.  “Captain, ma’am-”

I liked that Jessie in stern librarian mode was coming across as a ‘ma’am’, even as covered up as she was.

“-You know one of my roles is getting information,” the Mercy finished.  Her skin was almost starting to look like skin.  More in some areas than others.

The way she said it, I knew she meant torture.

Find the cats and cockroaches who could become long-term carriers, check for information, eat them.  A tightly contained, efficient process cycle.  The torturing for information and the eating could even be folded into one another.

“We need his ongoing assistance,”  Jessie said.  “Emphasis on ongoing.  I’d prefer it’s enthusiastic assistance.”

“It’s very enthusiastic assistance now,” I said.  I feigned fear and concern for my own hide, though I knew full well that the others had guns.  “I very much appreciate you not feeding me to her.”

“Make yourself useful when the time comes,” Jessie told me, still sounding as authoritarian as she ever did.

The Mercy curtsied, which looked strange given she was stark naked, new skin beaded with wet snow.

Then, rather than march off to go find her next mean, she sagged, leaning hard against the nearest wall.  Her breathing was getting less heavy, but she looked very tired.  She had maybe half of her skin now.  The rest of it looked more like the result of a moderate scald than a fresh flaying.

She was an efficient little machine, from what I could tell.  Strong enough to tear her own skin off, the particulars of her physiology and metabolism finely tuned and balanced.

It made me rethink how to approach the rest of the Mercies.

“I’m put in mind of the adage about the scorpion and the frog,” Jessie murmured.

“Hm?” I asked.  I drew the connection.  “No.  It’s fine.”

“I know for a fact that you like girls, Sylvester.”

“This is not untrue,” I said.

She moved closer, talking quieter, “I know you like unusual people, you feel an affinity for experiments, and the Tender Mercy right there is both.   Your desire to take care of others is proportionate to your age, and she’s close enough to our age I can imagine you likening her to the other Lambs.”

“I hadn’t actually,” I said.

I’d come close, but I hadn’t.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t help her, but I am saying that I’m thinking of the scorpion and the frog.”

“She could be useful,” I said.

“She could be.  So could a lot of people.  There are a lot of people in this city who need help.  We can’t save all of them.  We might not be able to save her.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “But-”

But I didn’t have a good argument.

Jessie was patient, giving me time.

The Mercy was crouching down now.  She used water from a shallow puddle and cleaned herself as a racoon or rodent might, wetting her hands and wiping her new skin.  Wetting hands and wiping.  She bent her head down and used the same method to get the blood out of her hair.

“I just worry that if I leave her behind like this, it’s going to be one of those nagging memories that sticks in my head, taking up valuable real estate.”

“Why?” Rudy asked.  “She’s a killer.”

“So am I.  So are a lot of the people I grew up with,” I said.

“You actually want to bring her with us?” Bea asked, sounding alarmed.

“Temporarily,” Jessie said.  “Only temporarily.”

The Mercy, hair mostly clean, looked up at us.  She’d caught that.  The skin around one eye had grown in too thick, pinching it shut, and from the way she kept her hair, covering half of her face, only the one eye showing, I suspected it was intentional.  She kept washing and fixing her hair with her hands as she watched us.

“We don’t have to,” I told Jessie.

“Valuable memory space,” Jessie said.  “You said it yourself.”

The Mercy’s fingers worked furtively.  She set her now-wet hair, and it moved in a way that suggested it had to be close to frozen.  Hair on the one half of her face hung down, covering her one eye.  The hair on the other side was tied back, braided or knotted without the help of cord or pin.

“We’ll find you some clothes,” Jessie said, “And we’ll find you some food.”

The Mercy nodded, a quick motion.  She moved away from the wall, and she stumbled a little as she walked.  She held Jessie’s knife, and she didn’t give it back.

Hardy, yes, but the cold did get to her.  She joined our group, looking at each of us.  She watched me as if affronted by my existence.

I pulled off my coat, and held it out.

She didn’t take it.

“Is there a reason you’re refusing his offer?” Jessie asked.

“No, captain.”

“You wanted to kill him to take his clothes before, but you won’t now?”

I could understand what Jessie was doing, maintaining her fiction.  Still, it was disappointing.

Doubly so, that even after taking the coat, which only barely long enough to cover everything that needed covering, she looked at me as the young man who shouldn’t be alive.

She turned her attention to Jessie, bowing her head a little.  “Thank you, captain, for your kindness.”

“Will you warm up if we get you more clothes?  You’ll need to give that coat back.”

“I think so, captain.  I can resume hunting.”

Jessie glanced at me.

Resuming hunting wasn’t great.

“You’d need to eat on a regular basis?” Bea asked.

“Every two hours at a minimum while I’m active and using skin like this,” the Mercy said.  “Hourly is recommended but I don’t think anyone does.  It takes time.”

“Were you made in New Amsterdam or Trimountaine?” I asked.

“Winthrop Academy in Trimountaine,” the Mercy said.  She gave me a surprised look.  “How did you-”

“Like I said, he has information,” Jessie said.  “And it’s not that hard of a guess.  High quality work.”

The Mercy seemed bewildered by that.  “Thank you, captain.”

“How accurate is your ability to smell plague?”

“Not very, captain.  Only when it’s active.  But it helps.”

Rudy offered her one arm for support.  It made for an odd picture.

I was careful to walk behind and to one side of her.  If I’d walked directly behind her, she couldn’t have looked at me while maintaining her stride.  Instead, I was able to gauge just how much of her attention was on me.

I was disappointed that it was as much as it was.  That the look on her face didn’t change.

Too single minded.  Too efficient an encapsulated system, perhaps.

I looked across the street, not meeting this Mercy’s gaze.  I saw Fray, and I thought of what Fray had told me about.  It had lurked in my mind.

The places the Crown destroyed, the cats and cockroaches.  Continents laid to waste.  I imagined a future where this plague had taken the Crown States.  Fields of red flowers, with vein-like vines constricting the trees to death, crawling over stones in varying thicknesses.  I imagined the landscape devoid of humans, but for a few survivors.

Would the Tender Mercies survive?  Foraging for food, interacting, breeding more Tender Mercies?

It was a grim, quiet sort of picture.  I wasn’t sure how to place it.

We found more bodies, killed in the street, then dragged off to one side to be piled on the welcome mat of one house.

The Mercy cast off my coat, letting it fall in the snow, and hurried over to the bodies.

I could see her excitement as she found a red and white checked dress.

“I wonder,” I said.  I picked up my coat, shook it off, and pulled it back on.

“At what?” Jessie asked.

“I wonder at the timing.  The Tender Mercies are a… novel answer for this particular plague.”

“Too fast a development?”

“Too… easy to imagine where it goes.  Remember when we first discussed the plague?  It’s too clear that it was designed, and designed by a talented hand.  Which makes me think two things.  What if the person who created the plague created the Mercies?  I mean, that’s a fairly obvious conclusion, right?”

“Intuitive enough,” Jessie said.

“But I had a second thought, and I’m just putting it out there… what if they didn’t?  Beattle rebels, feel free to chime in, correct me, but there seems to be a lot of variance in the project.  The man with the very thick skin Jessie talked to, the one with the heavy brow and chin, then this one… it’s the early stages of things, when an established project of this kind of quality should have nailed down those ratios.”

“You’re not wrong,” the Treasurer said.

“They started down one path, then made an abrupt turn, to put things on a different course and answer a need,” Gordon Two concluded.

“Reminds me of someone,” Jessie said, looking at me.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah.  That’s what I’m thinking.  But this is a lot of effort and a small population of a very resilient, loyal set of people that they clearly invested a lot into.  Whether you imagine they were made to answer the red plague or they were made to answer something else, maybe something else that the Academy might have released in the same vein as the plague, isn’t it really easy to imagine creatures like this adapting to the new environment, keeping things mostly operational in the meantime, and then handing things back over to the Crown in a few decades or a century?  Doesn’t that seem like a much better use for what these Tender Mercies seem to be?”

The others were silent.  Our eyes were on the Mercy, who was pulling on boots over stockinged feet.

“A bit fanciful,” Jessie said.  But she gestured maybe.

I gestured the rest of my thought at Jessie while I worked through the idea.  Fray had suggested the Crown was prepared to wipe whole regions off the map, given the chance.  Now I was wondering if they weren’t already preparing to do so?  Were things proving too hard to pin down?  A nation too spread out, with too many active rebellions and too many dead nobles?

The Tender Mercy approached us.  She’d donned a red and white dress under a black coat, with red stockings and black boots.

The look she gave me was an ugly one.

“If it weren’t for him, we would have left you there,” Bea said.

The look didn’t change, but there was more confusion.

She wasn’t human, in the end.  But she didn’t own the wrongs she committed and the ugliness that drove her.

It was hard to convince myself not to shoot her, or to justify having helped her.

I felt like I understood something I hadn’t, about what the Mercies might be, or how they functioned, but I felt like this was a lose-lose situation.  Saving her, letting her die.

“You’re under strict orders,” Jessie said, “To spare the civilians.”

Why?

“There might be a cure among them,” Jessie said.  “It’s why we want the professor.”

The Mercy narrowed her eyes.

“Pass on word.  Gather any others you see,” Jessie said.  She reached to her belt, and fumbled at a paper that stuck out.

I moved closer and picked it out.  There were several.  I caught a glimpse of each.

Letters.  Penned out in various handwriting styles.  Each signed with different names.  Official orders, forged using details from memory.

Jessie picked one and handed it to the Mercy.

“I can’t read,” she said.

“I’m one of several who have letters like this.  We’re here to get it to the higher-ups at the other end of the city.  I’m passing that responsibility onto you.  Show that letter around.”

She frowned, looked at the paper, and then looked at me.

No fondness, no understanding.  Only confusion at my existence.

I might have agreed with her, if the timing were different.

The small Mercy strode off.

“The Little Castle is there,” Jessie pointed.  Two streets down and two streets over.  Easy to miss amid the peaking, snow-covered roofs.  “We’re close.”

She was trying to distract me from the subject of the Mercy.  A creature I’d wanted to identify with.

I bent my brain to the task of helping Shirley, and pushed the thought of the experiment ninety percent of the way out of my head.

In the moment before I succeeded, I saw Fray.

Fray alone.  Fray without rhyme or reason, still indistinct.

It meant something.  I wasn’t sure what.  Did it have to do with the Mercy?  A runt of an experiment, feeling lost without her people, caught up in things bigger than her?

Leaving things as unresolved as they were nagged at me, and I suspected my limited space for memories might well be more occupied thinking about her, despite our attempts to prevent that very thing from happening.

Or did Fray’s appearance have to do with the bigger things?  My suspicions about the Crown, the measures they might take?  Or was it about the dawning feeling that Pierre’s intuition had been right, in that this noble-employed professor was an important factor in answering these questions, and that ignoring him in favor of Shirley might not be the easy answer we’d hoped for?

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.05 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Stalemate.

For the most part, the Academy forces had formed a perimeter around the city.  There were two places we were aware of that they were busily gathering their forces.  Two points of contention.  The first was the train station, where a train was being held hostage.  The second was the Little Castle.

It was a nice building, looking much as if a doctor had somehow taken a manor and a castle and blended the two into an appealing sort of building-chimera.  This architectural chimera was wounded, scarred and scorched by flame, with holes in the walls where something had exploded, bringing down wood and stone.  The rebels had invaded it, making their way inside, and if they’d planned to accomplish something and then get out, they’d only completed the first objective, if they’d even gotten that far.

Now there were rebels in the windows with guns and there were Crown soldiers parked by barricades all around the building.  The soldiers were all wearing the quarantine outfits, and were accompanied by what I assume were very disposable stitched and warbeasts, as well as a scattered few Tender Mercies.

Jessie had written letters while in the carriage, presumably during the handful of periods that we’d stopped, much as we had with the warbeast.  She and the Beattle rebels approached the Crown forces, and she handed over one letter.

I watched through binoculars as a man in a quarantine suit with decoration on his lapel fumbled with the letter, working to unfold it.  He took his time reading it, and then he handed it back.

The wind whistled as it blew down the otherwise quiet street.

Jessie didn’t move, waiting dutifully.  The others mostly took her cue, but someone I was fairly sure was Fang was antsy.  He moved his weight from foot to foot.

It took a kind of courage to wear the mask with confidence, knowing what the scores of people around you would do if they could see beyond it.  Fang didn’t have that kind of courage.  There were people among the Beattle rebels who had their talents, and I was enjoying seeing those talents emerge.  Bea drew people in, particularly strong people, if not the most capable.  Important distinction.  Davis knew parts of the textbooks by heart and was good at both execution and teaching, and his role as student council president suggested he was a strong leader.  Valentina had a good hand for surgery and a keen eye for relationships, which had secured her the vice presidency.

Mabel, now leading the green students, was a keen observer of details, with a good eye for traps, deception, any unrest or resentment, and she was good with biochemistry and pheromones.  It was a large part of why the current background project of the Beattle group involved the stuff.  That, and Junior was a good hand with the chemistry and biochemistry, owing to his experience producing the drugs as head of the Rank.

Rudy, Rita and Posie took on different focuses.  Rudy was driven, less of a master of one field and more a capable student in many, with a good background in things ranging from the mechanical to farming, and handyman work, and I suspected I could point him in a direction and see him draw it all together to be well above average while still maintaining some breadth.  Rita was a listener with a good eye for those who needed listening to, and she was able to adapt and react with the snap of a finger, so to speak.  Posie was a mechanic, and she enjoyed building.  She was the one supplying our furniture in the main lodge, both the basic log benches and the more refined work.

I could see myself, were I given a good year to do it, nurturing them all into individual forces.  I wanted to bring out their strengths and make them sharp.  But in the doing, I had to accept that there were some cases where achieving that was an uphill battle.  Gordon Two was good in his particular fields of interest, but only good.  I kept him close because he was a good barometer for me when it came to other students, and I used him because I’d kept him close for long enough that I could trust him to do as I needed him to do.

Possum, in much the same vein, wasn’t an exceptional student, and she didn’t have any particular skills, but I valued her all the same.  She was loyal, and nobody seemed to actively dislike her, while a number liked her.  My approach to her was more in the realm that I wanted her to come away from all of this happy, not as someone devastating.

My take on Fang was that he was likely good in a fight and likely bad at a great many things.  I wouldn’t tell Bea not to use him, but I didn’t want to give him a great deal of my attention.

I was constantly watching, looking for signs that any one student should be prioritized or set aside.  I took notes now and again, but Jessie was the real repository of the particulars and my sum thoughts.  The rest of it was something I played by ear, trusting that each student in a position of any power was someone I’d put there for a good reason.

Mauer, standing on another rooftop, watching me, the others, and the rebel army in the Little Castle, seemed intent on lingering there, reminding me that it was a house of cards that could and would collapse.

Or perhaps that was just me, filling in the blanks with thoughts that were lingering just beneath the surface.

The leader of the contingent of Crown soldiers finished speaking with his subordinates.  He gave some final orders, and they signaled their men.

Of the two hundred soldiers I could see from my vantage point on a rooftop, approximately seventy-five peeled off, moving at a brisk pace as they headed toward another part of the city.  Someone who the general had talked to was running off in a perpendicular direction to the main group.  I suspected he’d round up more from battle lines I couldn’t see.

Maybe a hundred soldiers removed from the picture.  As part of that, there were holes to fill, people spread thinner, and groups had to be moved.

Jessie’s group received their new orders.  I watched as they obeyed.

No, not obeying.  From the ground, it was hard to see particulars.  Even the general was only in a position to see a mere half of the people and barricades within a hundred yards of him, and that was a special case, a location chosen for that much awareness.  Others weren’t so fortunate.  They could see one or two of the groups to their flanks.

Such was the nature of the urban battlefield.  Buildings, streets, fences, and the same barricades that protected obstructed fields of vision.

Jessie had clearly used information gleaned from conversations with other groups to sell herself and her squad as a proper member of the local forces.  The general then trusted her enough to assign her group a space to fill, and I could see as she walked right past that space.

She moved along the perimeter, and I shadowed her, as she traveled a half circle around the Little Castle.

She finally found a good vantage point.  She spoke to a squad of soldiers, and sent them off on patrol with something that sounded official.  Her squad relieved theirs, settling in.

Her hand signals consisted of long, right, short, right, long.

I moved along the rooftop, watching as they traveled a very careful route on their way out, with a clear destination in mind.  A straight line on their way out, then a right turn…

They took the prescribed route, and I signaled confirmation.

As quickly as they’d settled in, Jessie’s group picked up and moved on.

Wet snow continued to fall around us.  I had to descend to the ground to get to the next building I could climb on top of.  By the time I’d arrived, Jessie had already relieved a second unit and was looking skyward as if she was expecting me to show up exactly as I did.

She signaled, and I glanced back before confirming.

She had a letter in hand and was tucking it away.  I suspected it was a very similar picture to the one she’d painted for the commander.  All of this was us sending more and more soldiers to reinforce a location that likely had nothing of substance going on.

I looked over from the rooftop in the direction the soldiers were going.

They were moving out in the direction of the water.  I wondered if she’d painted a picture of rebels coming from the end of the river with intent to land and attack from the sea.  It would be a beautiful way to leave a hundred or two hundred Crown soldiers sitting in the cold at the harbor, watching and waiting for people to show up.

She moved on to a third group.  I worried that she was pushing our collective luck, that this group would make for too many soldiers in total sent to the harbor.  I was right on one front.

These soldiers were skeptical.  I could catch the tone of argument, and see Jessie’s hand signal as she requested possible assistance.  I was only partway to them when things escalated.  In a moment, Jessie and the other Beattle rebels had pulled their weapons on the soldiers at the barricade.  Fang and Rudy knocked two people to the ground, Fang hooking a bayonet blade against the one soldier’s air hose, Rudy pressing his bayonet blade against a soldier’s neck.

Jessie took weapons from each of the soldiers.

I finished my approach.

“Sorry,” Jessie said.

“Sorry?”

“I didn’t leave any for you,” she said.

“Well, it’s the thought that counts,” I said.

“Coast should be clear.  Nobody’s watching this corner of the building now.  Group further down won’t see because of barricade, groups further down the road can’t see because of the faint bend in the road or because of how they’re positioned.”

“I’m wondering if they realize,” I said.  I glanced at the windows.  “If they’re discreet about it, they can just leave.”

“They should realize,” Jessie said.

“Then they have a reason for staying,” I said.  I sighed.

“A reason?” Gordon Two asked.

“Stalemates within stalemates,” I said.  “They’re stuck.  They should have been in and out, but something kept them from making a hasty exit.  The ones at the window look pretty calm, all things considered, so it’s not a hostile party.”

“A stubborn one,” Rudy said.

“Crown can’t attack because the rebels have a hostage.  Rebels can’t exit because… they have a hostage,” I said.  “One that’s proving difficult, I imagine.”

“I don’t get a feeling of urgency from them,” Jessie said.  “The general was waiting out the clock.  Then he gets to leave, the city burns, and his men don’t die.  He’d rather this didn’t go anywhere.  This is about continuing the testing of the Tender Mercy project and putting in a token effort.  He’s wanting to reach out and try to open negotiations, but there’s a swathe of no man’s land between Crown forces and the Little Castle.  Nobody wants to cross it.”

“Which leads back to playing it safe,” I said.

“The clock is running out.  We don’t have a lot of time.  People are going to notice that logistics are off and positions aren’t defended,” Jessie said.

“Noted,” I said.  “I don’t suppose any of you are particularly keen to lose the suits and come with?”

Nobody was particularly keen.  Jessie raised her hand.

“Not you.  I don’t want to cut the plague out of you a second time.  The rest of you cover my back,” I said.  “I’ll go in alone, then.  Where is the bag with the suit?”

Rudy pulled off his bag.  The bag with the suit and mask inside was strapped to the top, a separate bag.  He unstrapped it, then handed it to me.  I slung it over my shoulder, wearing it as I might a satchel.

“Do you want to take more suits?” Jessie asked.

I glanced down at the soldiers that were lying face down on the ground, hands on heads.

“Don’t want to burden myself too much,” I said.

What was the best way to do this?

Murder was the easiest, but…

“Crown soldiers,” I said, and I lowered my voice rather than raise it, to seem more dangerous, and to ensure they were listening.  “I’m going to give you two options.  That gives you three, because the third option is one you’re already aware of and debating.  You can fight us, struggle, try to make noise, and we’ll execute you all in very painful ways.  I have traps, and the people you’ve alerted will trip them.  They’ll die in painful ways.  People will notice.  All hell will break loose, the Crown will start fighting, the Rebels will start fighting, people will die, and far too many people don’t get to go home to their families tonight.”

“That would be option one,” Rudy supplied, in a voice that was very good at sounding dangerous.  He was a big, scary fellow when he wanted to be and oftentimes when he didn’t.  He pulled it off effortlessly.

“Option one, yes, well, the option you’re currently debating.  The options I’m providing are simple ones.  We can execute you all quietly, and you can all go out with as little pain as anyone can hope for.  If you believe in something after death, however much the Crown tries to suppress those beliefs, then you can look forward to that.  Otherwise, it’s quiet oblivion.  I want to see some nodding heads, to be sure you all understand me.”

I saw some nodding heads.

“Option three is that you’re all going to give me your masks.  We’ll stick you somewhere the air is very still, the risk of transmission at its minimum, you all stay quiet and we’ll give the masks back soon after that.”

“You want us to break quarantine?” one of the soldiers asked.

I took a rifle from Jessie and put a bayonet blade to the soldier’s neck.

“A possible horrible death or a sure clean death,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

His gloved hands moved behind his head, fumbling with straps.

“Let’s move you somewhere out of the way, where the air isn’t moving as much,” I told him.

He nodded, hands moving away.

We put him in the dark recess beneath a tall set of wooden stairs, by a stack of firewood beneath one house.  Stairs and firewood provided some shelter from the wind.

He pulled the mask off, disconnected the hose, and pressed the hose against his lower face, breathing through it.

The seven others followed his lead, moving to spaces next to him, but only one other brought the hose to his mouth.

I collected the masks, walked over to the barricade that they’d erected, and half-climbed the barricade.

I stuck the mask over, past the spikes that lined the top of the barricade, and braced myself for a possible gunshot hitting the thing.

None came.

I moved the mask as a puppeteer might move a puppet, bobbing it as if it was walking, over, over, over, then stopping at my leftmost corner of the wall.

I did much the same with the second mask, hanging it by the strap to one spike, next to the first, and carried on.

Once all eight masks were mounted, I dared to peek out around the side, raising my binoculars to search the windows.

The windows with gunmen were fairly easy to see.  Most were cracked open so the shooters would have a clear shot.  The one that caught my eye was open, but with cloth wedged in the two sides.  Enough room for the gun’s nozzle to move a little, but the cloth would keep the cold from flowing indoors.

The gunman was talking to buddies, who were peering out the window, looking at my display.

I ventured out a little further.  Nobody shot me.

Arms spread, I crossed out into the street.  I watched out to either side as I did, verifying that Jessie’s observations had been correct.  There weren’t any other Crown soldiers situated near us who could really see me and take a clear shot at me.

As I approached the door, I heard it unlatch.  It opened.

Guns were already pointed at me as I passed through the doorway and stepped inside.  A dozen soldiers in one room, so cramped I doubt any single soldier had a clear shot that wouldn’t potentially put a friendly at risk.  They were all young, none older than twenty-five, and all men.  Their clothing looked more rural, and many of them wore long jackets with a military cut that were made with substandard leather with coarse stitching.

Rebels, but they’d all come from a place very like Sedge, where we were camped, if I was guessing right.

“Sylvester Lambsbridge,” one of them said.

“My reputation precedes me,” I said.

“Not so much.  You have a friend upstairs,” he said.

I nodded.  Shirley?

“She’s a pretty girl,” he said.

“That she is,” I said, staying calm.  Shirley.

I wasn’t sure what the statement meant.  He was probing me, but I wasn’t sure what for or why.  Was it interest in Shirley, or was it an implication?

Either way, staying cool and calm in the moment was what was important.

He looked past me and out the door, his pistol still pointed at me.  “You just walked over.  How?”

“Take me to my friend,” I said.  “I’ll explain.”

“Bag,” he said.

I handed over the bag with the extra quarantine suit.

He motioned with the gun.  I brushed past several people as I made my way through the overcrowded room.  I could have done something clever like pilfer something from a pocket, but I didn’t want to try my luck, and Shirley had informed them of who I was.

The place was nice, but it had more of a lodge feel than a palace feel.  The walls were stone up to the halfway point and then oiled wood up to the ceiling.  Pictures hung on walls, with family crests and portraits of nobles and important people.  Each hallway had a strip of carpet running down it.

The bulk of the rebels were here.  In this room, more of them were older, tending toward the thirty to thirty-five range.  There was a hierarchy, and the older ones wore more facial hair, beards and muttonchops, while sitting a little more comfortably.  They led because they were elders.  The younger ones were doing the legwork.

I spotted Shirley in the crowd.  Four men stood next to her, two had weapons drawn, and one of those two was holding her wrist in an iron grip.

I saw Otis and his men off to one side, sitting against the wall, wrists bound and resting on a knee or in laps.  Otis held a bloody rag to his face.  Archie stood in a corner with some of his men, wrists similarly bound, though he didn’t sit.

The man I’d talked to tossed the bag to a man I presumed to be the one in charge.  I couldn’t tell if he was blond with a shock of dark hair running through it or dark haired and going prematurely gray.  He slouched in a chair.

The man opened the bag and pulled the contents free.  He didn’t react any as he saw what it was, and simply let the mask and outfit fall so it draped across his lap and the arm of his chair.  He looked me up and down.

“Shorter than they made you out to be,” the leader drawled.

“They talked about my height?” I asked.

“No, but they talked about you like you were capable of moving mountains, boy,” the leader said.  “And you look a little small to be pulling any of that off.”

There was a look in his eyes that made me think that he was a very dangerous man.  Something approximating the weariness I’d seen in Mauer, or the lack of light I’d seen in Avis’ eyes when I’d seen her in the dungeon, but I suspected the light had died in him long ago, if it had ever been kindled.  Dark eyes, heavily lined by fatigue, and a kind of casual resignation in posture and expression that suggested that I could draw a gun, open fire on the room, and he wouldn’t care.

He wouldn’t care, but he would draw and do his level best to gun me down.  Then, if I happened to lie bleeding on the floor after, he wouldn’t act much different than if our positions were reversed.

This was the leader of this particular group of rebels.  A man who had given up long ago, who expected nothing but a battle that he’d inevitably lose.

“He walked across no man’s land.  Not a whisper, no gunshots, no nonsense,” the one who’d met me downstairs said.

“Did he now?”

I didn’t answer or justify.  Better to let him take away what he wanted to take away from it.

“Do we have a way out?” the leader asked his subordinate.

“Depends on a lot of things,” I answered, as if he’d asked me directly.

“Like?”

“I know Shirley over there is a particularly dangerous one.  Four young, able bodied men restraining  her like that.  Did they treat you well, Shirley?  No trouble?”

I gestured as I asked.  Question.

Two of the men stepped a little away from Shirley as I addressed her.

They weren’t focusing this much on Shirley because she was dangerous, of course.  They were focused on her because she was pretty, and as far as I could tell, this band of merry men were all men.

To her credit, she was standing tall.  She was using tricks I’d taught her to look confident.  The tilt of her head, the look in her eyes, and the faint look of frustration was a look I’d had her practice in the mirror.  Neck drawn out longer, breathing deep, I’d told her to imagine a feral cat.

“They treated me as well as can be reasonably expected,” she said, and she said it as well as I could’ve hoped.  Her hand jerked where one man was gripping her wrist, before he reasserted his hold, leaving finger marks where his fingers had been.  The gesture that went with her hand movement was a ‘no.

A lie.

“That’s good,” I lied.  “Sorry about all of this.  We’ll see about getting you out of here.”

“Thank you, Sylvester,” she said.  She closed her eyes a moment.  “Thank you for coming.  Did Pierre make it out alright?”

“He made it out of the city without a problem.  No signs of plague just yet, but it’s unpredictable.”

“I know.  I remember Tynewear.”

I nodded.  I turned the other way and said.  “Otis?  Sporting a bloody nose there, friend.”

“I don’t do well with being confined,” the man said.  He was the oldest one present, by roughly ten years, but his life had been one of hard living, and he looked and sounded more like he had fifteen or twenty years of seniority.

“Is it going to be forgivable if we make our way out of this city and we take these guys with?”

Otis shot me a look, like he really didn’t want to say yes.

“Say yes,” I told him.

“Sure,” he said.  “World’s gonna keep turning if you let ’em go.”

I nodded.  “Archie?”

Archie, tall, long-haired, with the brown skin of an indian, was uninjured, but he looked a little angrier than Otis had, strangely enough.

“You want the honest answer or do you want the lie?” he asked.

Alright, he was a lot angrier than Otis had been.

“Lie,” the leader that was slouching in the chair said.

“Lie,” I said.

“All’s well,” Archie said, in the most unconvincing manner possible.

He gestured as he spoke.  He’d picked up the vocabulary, but that was maybe a bad thing.  As he carefully chose the words, he moved his hands in a deliberate, mechanical way.

Enemies.  Hurt.  Girl.

They’d hurt Shirley.  But I’d known that already, in a general sense.

One of the other rebels standing near him reached out, seizing Archie’s hand, gripping it hard enough to bend fingers the wrong way.

“You casting a spell or something?” the man asked.

“What’s this?” the leader asked.  He rose out of his seat a little, twisting around and resting one arm on his knee.  “Spell?”

“Don’t know what he was doing.  He was moving his fingers all creepy-like.”

“Nervous habit,” Archie said, sounding far more convincing than he had.

“Yeah, you weren’t nervous up until now, red?” the fellow that held Archie’s fingers asked.

No,” Archie said, and he made it an insult or an epithet.

I sighed a little to myself.

“You know what that’s all about, boy?” the rebel leader asked.

“Communication,” I said.  I held up my hand, gesturing.  “Time.  Short.  Escape.  Window.  Closing.”

The corresponding gestures really meant, Enemy rebels here die today.

“Talking with your fingers?” someone asked.  “That’s bullshit.”

“Fucking trickery,” the soldier who’d held Archie’s fingers said.

He hit Archie hard across the face.

The man in charge of him didn’t seem to care.  No, the rebel leader was more interested in my reaction.

I mimicked him, copying some of his mannerisms, including his eerie coldness.  I made it appear like I didn’t care much.

“I came here with the expectation of giving you all a deal,” I said.  “These are my terms.  You’ll give that suit to Shirley.  I promised someone I’d give it to her and get her safely out of the city.  You don’t hurt any of my people.  In exchange, I get you all clear of this city.  If anyone catches the plague, I can try my hand at cutting it out.  I’ve done it before.  I’ll get you all clear of trouble.”

“No can do,” the leader said.

“No can do?” I asked.

I’d offered an out, he’d refused, and his men didn’t look as dismayed as they should.

“Does your reasoning have to do with the good Professor?” I asked.

“The words ‘good’ and ‘Professor’ don’t go hand in hand,” the leader said.  “That’s a man who needs to die.”

Even if it means the rest of you die?  I thought.

“I’ll get him, but I want to bring him with.  I’ll question him, then hand him over to you before midnight.  If you judge that he needs to die, then you can handle it.  We’ll part ways then,” I said.

“You’ll get him?  Just like that?”

“I can move mountains, apparently.  I can do this,” I said.

I was cognizant of the time limit.

He rose to his feet.  “Then let’s see you move mountains, boy.”

We had to pass up two flights of stairs.  Each floor, it seemed, was arranged so that the stairway rose up through the middle, an ornate cage separating it from the hallway.  The first floor had been facilities like the dining hall.  The second floor was twelve or so apartments, the third floor was six.  The fourth floor had four apartments, one in each cardinal direction.  From what I could see as I glanced upward, the top floor was a penthouse suite, fit only for the uppermost of visiting nobles.

But we didn’t go that far.  We exited the stairwell into the fourth floor.  There were more of the rebel soldiers here.

The heavy door and the walls to either side of it had bullet holes in it.  They’d fired indiscriminately.  It didn’t look like most shots had had the power to penetrate wood, thick wall, and exit the other side.  Some had, however.  I could peer through some holes and see light on the other side.

“Stand back,” I said.  I cracked my knuckles.

Amazingly enough, some did.

“Door’s barricaded on the other side,” one of the rebel soldiers said.

“I figured that much out,” I said.

I crackled my knuckles again for emphasis, and then I rolled my shoulders, before drawing in a deep breath.

“Professor,” I called out.  “It’s Sylvester Lambsbridge.”

There was a pause.

“I believe we’ve met?” I tried.

“We’ve met,” came the voice on the other side.  “Sylvester.  Didn’t think I’d meet you here.  Wrong coast, for one thing.”

“Well, being where you’re not expected to be is part of being a fugitive of the Crown.”

“Been taking your Wyvern, I assume?” he asked.

“Regularly enough,” I said.  I wondered why he’d asked.  “You’ll have to remind me of your name.  There are a few professors you could be.”

“Professor Berger.”

I had no idea who that was.

“Yeah,” I said.  “You know how these things go, and you know me.  I have a vested interest in getting you out of here alive, getting some answers from you.  Dots I need to connect.  You know what it means if you stay.  You’ve seen more quarantines than I’ve seen years on this planet.”

“I can see out the window.  There’s an army on our doorstep.”

“They don’t care about whether you live or die.  You were the Duke’s attendant.  You’ve seen battlefields aplenty.  Does that army look particularly motivated?  Or are they planning to wait until they can just say you probably died to plague, they tried their hardest, but there was no saving you?”

“I think they’re motivated enough, Sylvester,” Berger said.

“Professor,” I said, exasperated.  “You’re a smart man.  You know how things are, I know how things are.  Let’s accept that.  Let’s not lie to each other about the simple things.”

“The building is reinforced,” he said.  “It might last the fire.”

“If that’s true, I’ll let you stay here,” I said.  “But I don’t think it’s true.  Or it might last the fire, only for them to unleash other measures to be sure the plague is gone, and you’d be caught by that.  Open the door, professor.  Come out.  I’ll take you hostage, ask you some questions you won’t particularly mind answering, no need for torture.  You’ll be alive.”

“And then?” he asked.

I’d known he was going to ask that, but I left the ‘then’ out to prompt the question, getting him to buy into the narrative a bit, to wonder on the future and be on the same page as me for one moment.

“Then… I’m not sure.  It’s up for negotiation,” I said.  Another way of getting you to buy in.  “Ransom you to the Crown, perhaps.”

“I’d need more assurances.”

“It’s about project Caterpillar,” I said.  “Expiry date is fast approaching.  The Duke showed interest in Caterpillar.  Several times.  I’m thinking you’ve at least read up on it.”

I thought of the Duke standing in the room when I’d first lost Jamie.

“I’ve read up on it.”

“I need you alive if there’s any chance you can provide some answers on that.  Right now, I think I’m the only person who needs you alive.”

“No,” he said.  “No, not the only person.”

But the door latch clicked.

I knew the rebel leader was about to execute the professor the moment he saw him.  He had no reason to do otherwise.

I knew the professor that was cooped up in that room was being very incautious, considering that the rebels here had opened fire on the door.  Why hadn’t he asked about them?

He’d asked about my Wyvern formula?

He hadn’t asked about them because they weren’t a consideration.

I pushed the door open, and I stepped clear out of the way.

They sprung forward like grasshoppers, or pellets from a slingshot.  Too fast to follow with the eye, each one the size of a human hand.

Two of them latched onto me, leaving bloody marks as hook-like feet caught on the skin of my arm for footing while they launched forward to their next vantage point.

They went for the spine, one crawling beneath coat, sweater and shirt to find the small of my back, the other finding the nape of my neck.

They bit, and I felt all sensation leave everything from the shoulders down.  I fell to the ground, my entire body paralyzed.

Long seconds passed, and the mandibles came free.

Sensation came back in a pins and needles fashion.

Berger stood over me as I found my way to my feet.  He watched with cold eyes.  He was an older man, approaching fifty, his hair shorn short, a bit of stubble on his chin.  His eyebrows were the longest hairs I could see on his head.  He had lips twisted into an expression I couldn’t read, possibly disgust, and eyes that naturally glared.

I looked at the rest of the Little Castle rebels who had been in the hall.  They lay sprawled on the carpet, massive bugs latched onto their spines, mandibles and limbs latched in.  Half of them were actively pissing and shitting themselves.

He approached one rebel and bent down.  Fingers hooked on ring-like growths on the back of one of the bugs.  He pulled back, and there were silken strands between ring and bug.

Moving one, he made one of the young rebel’s arms move.  Moving another, he moved a leg.

The man grunted.

“Cooperate,” he instructed the fallen rebel.  “Stand.”

He moved the strings.  The rebel flopped like a fish on dry land.

“Cooperate,” Professor Berger told the fallen rebel, once more.

Again, he moved the strings.

He apparently didn’t like the result, because he pulled back on another ring with silken strand attached.  The rebel made choked, strangled sounds as his body contorted to the point I thought things would break or dislocate.  Within two seconds, the rebel’s face was red, veins standing out, spittle frothing as he pushed it out between clenched teeth.

The Professor eased back on the string, and the man relaxed correspondingly.  His breathing returned to what seemed to be an overly regular pattern, but the recent stress gave those regular breaths a whiny, panting note.

“Cooperate,” the professor said, moving strings.

The man still flopped like a fish on dry land, but the professor seemed to appreciate his efforts more, because there was no punishment this time.

“In case the implication isn’t clear,” the professor said, “we’re not working alongside these rebels.”

“I had no plans to.  On that note, it might be better to do something with the rebel leader,” I said.  I indicated the man in question.

Berger looked over, then came to a decision.  He pulled back on the string, forcing the convulsions, and then pried the bug off.

The bandit he’d been working on seized, the process not stopping, as Berger knelt by the bandit leader.

“This should do,” he said.

“Sure,” I said.  I was still recovering, myself.

“You’ll get us out of here.  I’ll supply what you need for Caterpillar.  You’ll let us go, rather than ransom us.”

“Us?” I asked.

He turned his head.  I looked.

Standing in the doorway, watching, were two small children.  Eleven or so.  One boy, one girl, roughly the same age.

“Yours?”

“My daughter and nephew,” he said.  “You’ll save them or you won’t get my cooperation on any front.”

“There are others to save,” I said. “I have comrades downstairs.  They’re captive, and watched by a crowd.”

“If I thought I could deal with all of the rebels I’d seen before retreating to safety up here, I’d have done it myself.  We’re not equipped to deal with a small army.  Reconsider,” the Professor said.

I wondered if Pierre had caught wind of the children.  It was no secret I tried to protect children when given the chance.  If he’d told me, combined it with the knowledge that this was an Academy professor with valuable information…

I was disappointed he hadn’t told me.

“We’ll save everyone we can,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I was.

“As you wish,” Professor Berger said.

“I don’t suppose you can make him say what we need him to say?”

Professor Berger shook his head.

Then, while his daughter and nephew watched, he pulled on a string and gave the instruction, “Cooperate.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.06 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Cooperate,” the professor murmured.

He pulled the strings of the rebel leader, and the leader found his way to his feet, moving like a stitched might.  I could see his expression now that he wasn’t face down on the ground anymore.  His face contorted and his head leaned over to one side, the side of his face grinding hard into one shoulder.

“Good,” professor Berger said.  It was the first thing he’d said that wasn’t ‘cooperate’ for several minutes now.

I was getting rather sick of standing here, and the smell of it was getting to me.  I had endured foul places, and had even made my way through sewer drains, but shit was shit, and far too many of these men had shit and pissed in their pants

“Good?” I asked.  “What are our limitations here?”

“Limitations?”

“What’s he good for?”

“He walks and moves at my allowance.  Each string controls a limb.  Feedback on my end in the form of tension and vibration suggests just how he is moving that limb, and I can stop him.  He either elects not to move at all, or he moves the way I want him to.”

“Can you make him point?” I asked.

“I can.  The act of pointing to something specific is trickier but doable.”

I studied the bearded rebel leader, rubbing my chin.  “Can you get him to stop doing that thing with his head?”

Strings were manipulated.  The leader tensed up, face turning red for a moment, and then he relaxed.  He started to move his head in that direction, his shoulders tightened, and he stopped.

“Good,” I said.  “We should get two more.  Then I think we can crack this.  Will it take long?”

“Not long,” Berger said.  “Charles, come here.”

The Berger’s nephew approached.  The boy was small, with large eyes that made him look younger than he was, black hair neatly parted.  He wore a crisp, thoroughly-starched shirt with a sweater vest and wore slacks with shoes, not boots, despite the weather outside.

At his uncle’s instruction, he reached overhead and took the strings.

“If you relax them, he’ll collapse.  If you pull back on them, he’ll have more range of movement.  Given a choice between the two, if your arm gets tired, make him collapse.  Understand?”

Charles nodded, solemn.

“If he fights you, or if you feel the strings moving because he’s trying to move, if he starts making noise, often a squeal, or if there’s any other trouble at all, you pull back on the middle one.  Everything connected to his nervous system will seize.  By all reports, it is indescribably painful.  At that stage, we can let him die or I can take over again.”

“What if I can’t?” Charles asked.  “What if I can’t pull?”

Berger reached over, and he ran his fingers through the front of Charles’ hair, as if to fix the part, when it needed no fixing.  He said, “I would be immensely proud of you if you could, Charles.  So would your father, were he with us.  If the need arises and you cannot manage your patient, I’m sure Sylvester would keep him from getting too far.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll see about our second patient, then.  Would you keep an eye out for trouble while keeping an eye on Charles and his patient?”

“I can,” I said.

Berger knelt by another ‘patient’, and he started work.

I turned to Charles.  “Spending time with your uncle?”

Berger was the one who answered.  “My duties being what they are, I don’t often have time to look after the children.  My extended family steps in and does what they can, but I’m between appointments, and I saw an opportunity.  They’re old enough to start thinking about which Academies they will attend, and I needed to see some people in various Academies.  We’re on our way back from the Cape of Flowers.”

“With a bunch of body-controlling bugs on hand,” I said.  “Which is curious.”

Berger stopped what he was doing, looked up, and met my eyes.  “I’m not your enemy today, Sylvester.  There’s no need to analyze me or pick me to pieces.”

“Oh, not to worry.  I pick even my friends to pieces, and while you aren’t my enemy, you’re not my friend.”

“All the same, perhaps you should focus on our mutual enemy?”

“The benefit of Wyvern and my particular mental architecture is that I’m very good at maintaining several trains of thought at once.  I can pester you and think about how to deal with the enemy at the same time.  It’s even constructive, since things in our conversation here might inspire me.”

“The time and energy I spend in responding to you is time and energy I’m not focusing on this,” professor Berger said.

“Bullcrap,” I said.  I leaned back against the bars that encircled the stairs and looked down, making sure nobody was coming up.  “All you’re doing there is playing a patience game.  Waiting for the ‘patient’ there to figure out how he’s supposed to move while you’re pulling his strings.  I’m sure that we can have a conversation.”

Charles was watching me very closely.  He glanced at his uncle, and I saw momentary concern as Berger pressed his lips together and didn’t fire back a response.

Is that the first time you’ve seen someone talk back to your uncle?  I thought.

I didn’t have the full picture yet.  Was Berger the equivalent of someone who had a bad day on the street, came home, and beat his wife?  Would he take what I was dishing out now and turn around to take it out on the children?

I only asked because he seemed like a peculiar individual.  Controlling, uncompromising, and so lacking in empathy that he seemed to think less of Charles for having some.  The closest thing I’d seen to kindness from Berger, the touching of his nephew’s hair, had been so calculated that Charles had to have seen through it.

I wasn’t about to say it was the case, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Berger was the sort of man who only really expressed kindness by wearing a particularly thick glove when hitting the children.

“Did you have a favorite stop?” I asked Charles.

Mute, Charles glanced back at his uncle.

“You can answer,” Berger said.

“I liked Peachtree,” Charles said.

“How come?” I asked him.  Again, I checked the stairs to make sure the coast was clear.

“I made some friends there.  I got their addresses.  We’re going to exchange letters,” Charles said.

His arm moved a little, and the rebel leader stiffened.  Charles adjusted, and the man relaxed.  I thought about offering to take over, but I had suspicions about how that would play out.  Not yet, not now.

“Atlantica Academy is ranked eighth in the Crown States,” Berger said.  “I’d rather Charles attend something more prestigious, but we’ve discussed it.  If he keeps up with his studies, I may allow him to go there for Academy prep.”

Academy prep, like Mothmont in Radham.

“I find that language interesting,” I said.  “You may allow him.  I mean, you’re not even committing to a proper Academy, just the prep school, and you can’t even make it a promise?”

“I don’t like promises,” Berger said.  “And I don’t like guaranteeing anything for much the same reason.  I find they mean very little to people if kept, and they cost you a great deal if they’re broken.  Exceptions for present company, of course, you and I are in a life and death circumstance.”

“Sure,” I said.  “It warrants, hm, being political?”

“In that vein,” Berger said.

“Yet by choosing not to promise like that, you’re really playing at politics with family, aren’t you?”

“Sylvester,” professor Berger said.  “Please do not question how I raise the children in my care.”

I started to respond, and then I saw Charles and the girl staring at me.

I smiled.  “As you wish, professor.”

Berger took that at face value, turning his attention to his patient and completely missed the wink I shot Charles in the meantime.  The professor tapped one of his patient’s arms and told the young man,  “Right arm now.”

“What about you, miss…?” I asked.

“Florence,” Berger volunteered.

Florence’s hair was black, much like Charles’.  My experience in watching Helen suggested that it likely took a two-person team and an hour’s time to properly set up the hair and the light makeup, everything in place, with just a bit of ornamentation.

She looked like a doll, hair carefully coiffed, a dress that looked more decorative than functional, with embroidery from shoulder to hem, and fine lace at the edges.

“Hello, Flo,” I said.

“Florence,” she said.

“Florence, sure,” I said.  “Your favorite stop on your trip with dad?”

“I call him father,” she told me.

“I stand corrected,” I said.  “What was your favorite stop on your trip with father?”

“If I had to choose, I quite liked Haverhill Academy,” she said.

“Setting your sights high,” I said.

“But if I got to choose anywhere, I would choose one of the Academies in New Amsterdam, or Crown Capitol in London.”

“Setting your sights at the very top.”

“Naturally,” she said.

She didn’t even glance at her father.  I wondered if-

“She’s a strong student, and my name has some pull.  She can achieve it if she works hard,” professor Berger said.

She’d looked his way as he started talking.  My wondering was cut short.  Too quick to look, betraying the fact that she’d been acting aloof and avoiding looking to see if she’d earned the approval she was shooting for until she had an excuse.

Berger didn’t seem to catch it, or didn’t seem to care if he had.

“I like the name Peachtree.  Sounds warm,” I said.  Turning my attention back to Charles.

“It wasn’t when we went,” Charles said.  “It was wet and cold.”

“Wet and cold.  It must have something going for it.  Girls?”

Charles made a face.

“Give it time, Charles.  Something else that’s neat, then?”

“They have tunnels and trenches and orchards everywhere, and the city boys and the town boys go to war over it all.”

“Ah,” I said.

“The city boys didn’t like me much at first, but I proved myself.  It was muddy in the trenches, so I got bits of pig that were being slaughtered for parts, paid for the bits with my allowance, and I made a stitched pig.”

“It was clever,” Berger said.  Then, because he had to temper any compliment, he added, “Simple, but clever.”

Charles, subdued a little, said, “We let it loose in the downhill part of the tunnels.  Scared the wits out of the townies.”

“Something they’ll tell tales of for months to come.”

“Herman Anthony, he was the leader of the city boys, he told me I was proper legendary, those are the two words he used, and he considered it a point of honor to be a fast friend with me.  He’s one of the boys I’m going to write when I get back home.”

Charles was talking, and I was doing my best to look attentive, but in the background, Berger had finished with the second man.  He beckoned Florence, and carefully passed management of the strings over to her.

The instructions were the same as the ones he’d given to Charles.  I could tell already that she’d heard the prior instructions.  She looked attentive, eyes on her father, but the way her eyes moved suggested she wasn’t really listening.  She was studying the man.

I double checked for anyone coming up the stairs, then moved away from the stairs, closer to Charles and the rebel leader.

“She’s going to pull the string,” I whispered to Charles.

“What?” he asked.

“If he gets too stubborn, or if he starts pulling away from the controls, which might happen if there are old injuries or if you get a patient with exceptional willpower, then you pull-”

She pulled the string before the sentence was done.

The young rebel toppled forward, sprawling on the ground, every part of him clenching, straining, or bending.  His eyes rolled up into his head, and his mouth jerked open and closed, like a particularly crude stitched trying to chomp at a large apple.

In the midst of that chomping, the young rebel vomited, then choked on the vomit, coughing some of it out.

Berger was swift to drop to the man’s side, taking control of the strings that had pulled free from Florence’s fingers.  He made the young rebel stop seizing, then reached into the man’s mouth to clear the throat, before ensuring that the man did not asphyxiate.

Once the man was breathing again, Berger stood.

“Berger,” I said, raising my voice.

Florence didn’t flinch as she squared off against her father.  She raised her chin, and Berger slapped her full across the face.

“Professor!” I raised my voice, sharpening it.

“Save your commentary, Sylvester,” the professor said.  He shook the hand he’d used to slap his daughter, and flecks of the mess he’d scooped out of the young rebel’s mouth and throat fell free.  “It’s not your place.”

“You set her up to fail,” I said.  “That, or you’re oblivious.”

“Its not your place, Sylvester.  Let it be.  You lack context, and any further argument from you is going to be painful to listen to.”

“I can guess at the context.  This isn’t a first time.  Which goes back to you setting her up to fail.”

“There’s such a thing as ineptitude, Sylvester,” he said, his voice hard.  “And there’s such a thing as malicious ineptitude.  Ineptitude can be amended with counsel and careful instruction.  Malicious ineptitude is amended with the rod.”

“Or the open palm,” I said.

“Leave it be,” the professor said.

Florence hadn’t even moved since she’d been slapped.  Her head had turned with the force of the blow, and flecks of another man’s vomit still clung to her face and hair, and she had remained like that, chin set, eyes fixed on some distant point of ground.  Her cheek was red, and I could see the general oval of the handprint.

Her father took her hand, and as if she were a statue or a doll, he posed her hand above her head, hooked the rings over each finger, and left it like that.

“Does your wife speak out on the subject?  Who gainsays you, if not the fugitive experiment you’re working with out of necessity?”

Berger sighed heavily, and seemed to be resolved to ignoring me.  He knelt by the third rebel.  He was choosing ones that hadn’t defecated in or pissed their pants.

“I see you’re not about to answer.  Can I help your daughter clean her face, at least?  If you’re all going to be keeping me company, I could do without the lingering smell of vomit on top of the general aroma of piss and shit.”

“Use that marvelous Wyvern treated brain of yours and turn off your sense of smell, if you’re so particular,” the man said.

He sounded snippy.  Maybe I’d gotten to him a little.

“Oh, I forgot I could do that,” I said, lying while needling the man just a little more.

I waited, patient, walking back to the cage that encircled the staircase, looking for any incoming parties.  If anything brought them up to the fourth floor, it would be the smell of shit wafting down to them.

“I suppose we have to endure the smell.  If you’re sure nobody’s coming, then please do clean her face.”

I approached Florence.  She’d shifted position to be more comfortable, but as something resembling a point of pride, she hadn’t cleaned off her face.  She stared me down as I approached.

I drew a handkerchief square from a coat pocket with a bit of a flourish.  “Clean ‘kerchief.  Want?”

She gave me a small nod.

I handed it over.

She wiped at the one side of her face, which streaked the makeup a small amount.

I spoke, my voice low, just for her.  “That’s kind of an admirable skill to have.  A big bad professor for a father, one of the foremost professors in the Crown States before the latest contingent of nobles arrived with the Infante, clearly very clever with the Academy science and on the political front.  And you figure out the strings to pull.  Crude at first, maybe, but you’ve got his measure.  Given time, you figure out what gets what response, and you get more nuanced.  Something you can apply to all the men in your life?”

“Maybe I didn’t put that much thought into it,” she said.

She handed back the handkerchief.

I mimed a motion toward her face.  She nodded, and she raised her chin.  I got some of the bits that had escaped her.

“Maybe didn’t put that much conscious thought into it, but I think family is often an arena of sorts for our testing of boundaries and the various games we play with peer and enemy alike.  You were testing, as anyone does, but you were testing in a very interesting way, that got to a man like him.  I sure tested the people closest to me for a long time.  Still do.”

“You said something about them before.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Some are downstairs.”

“What happens,” she asked, while I was focused on getting a bit of food out of her hair, “If I pull the wrong string down there, and they die?”

“Then you don’t make it out of this building alive,” I said.  “Your father and cousin either.”

She seemed to take a moment to process that.

It was boundary pushing, figuring out how a given action altered the world around her.  This was unfamiliar territory, and here she was, trying to figure out what this particular nervous system looked like, or which direction the blood flowed.  Having heard her phrase that question and direct it at me, I was almost certain she’d been intentionally testing her father, trying to wrap her mind around him and how he worked, even if it meant enduring a little bit of pain in the now.

There was something else at play, but voicing it aloud wouldn’t help me worm my way into her confidence.  Elaborately dressed up, hair and clothing perfect, but for a trace amount of mess that I couldn’t get with the handkerchief, she was a bird in a cage.  She craved some measure of control over her environment.

Control and power.  The cornerstones of the Academies.  When someone lacked either or both, they would often hurt themselves to grab for something that sufficed.

I could offer her both, however, and I was willing to bet she’d bite.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said.  “Not because I’m scared you’ll pull the wrong string downstairs, mind you, but because I think the results would be interesting.”

“I think you’re a very dangerous person,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said.  “If all goes well, I’m a dangerous person that’s going to drag you guys with me, and together we’re going to reach a crisis point, with a lot of parallels to you and this man here.  Much like you hold this man’s strings, I’m going to hold yours, or I’ll hold Charles’.  You’ll have the ability of holding your ground and being stubborn, or cooperating.”

I’d gone by instinct, measuring Professor Berger’s pace, and I was pretty sure he was counting to a set number between each uttered ‘Cooperate’.  Within a second or two of my saying the word, he echoed me.

Florence glanced at her father and then back at me.

I leaned a bit closer, and I said, “Cooperate, and I promise you’ll come to no harm, you’ll lose nothing, and you’ll learn more about your father in five minutes than you could learn about him in five more years of experimenting and getting slapped in the face.”

“How do I cooperate if you hold my cousin’s strings?” she asked.

I winked at her, and then walked away, back to the railing.

Berger was watching me.  He hadn’t overheard any of the conversation, but he had to have known that was a longer talk than wiping someone’s face or hair required.

Why don’t you care? I wondered.

Something up your sleeve?

“Charles,” I said.  “What makes a town boy a town boy and a city boy a city boy?”

“Hm?”

“In Peachtree.”

“Money, I think.  Class.  There’s more town boys, but they’re not as up to snuff and they’re not as organized.  And the city boys control the tunnels at the top of the hill and near downtown.  The best tunnels.  Not much wet, close to food and water and toilets, and they go to a lot of places, so we can mount good attacks on them all.  Their tunnels and trenches flood a lot.”

“You control it because of the fact that you’re all closer?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m afraid I’d be a town boy,” I told him.

“I won’t hold it against you,” Charles said, very diplomatically, and with the utmost seriousness.

“Ever see any marks sketched out in the dirt or carved into the wood?” I asked.

“Hm?” he asked.

I fished in a pocket for paper, then dug out a pen.  I scrawled out some basic symbols that were fairly consistent across locations.  The etchings of ‘mice’.

“Something like this?” I asked, showing him.

“Maybe.”

“It’s a code,” I told him.  “Secret.  ‘Townie’ people all over the Crown States and probably the Crown Cities use this code or one like it.  This one means ‘the vulnerable will be protected’.  Usually townie kids.  This one means protector.  Sometimes they change.  I know in some places it’ll be a rabbit instead of a mouse for this one, or a wolf instead of a fox.”

“What’s the difference between a wolf or a fox when you’re drawing it?”

I sketched it out.  “Straight lines, for when you’re carving it into wood, right?  I know some places have a distinction.  The fox is generally a bad person, but the wolf is drawn so he looks one way.  Up, down, left, right.  Each one means different things.”

“What do they mean?”

“I think the wolf that looks right looks deceptively friendly, the one that looks left is scary or especially mean.  I forget what up and down mean.  Might be position of authority or has friends for looking up, and then ‘is sneaky’ for looking down?  Or was there something else?  Maybe there were eight directions to look.  They didn’t use the wolf in my hometown.”

“Uh huh,” Charles said, sounding lost.

“But if you want to win points with the top city boy, the guy who called you legendary?”

He nodded at that.  He wanted to.

“Grab a townie boy, take him hostage or something.  Ask him what the signs mean.  If nothing else, it’ll give the city boys a better idea of how things work in Peachtree.”

Charles seemed intrigued by the idea.

I left out that maybe, just maybe, it would afford the city boys a kind of empathy for the town boys, once they realized what the town boys went through.

Maybe I could hammer that in a bit.

“In fact, if you wanted to win points and if you wanted to give him a clue into how to look really cool in front of the townies, you could tell him that he could offer help with one of the foxes-” I pointed.  “-or one of the wolves.  But he’d have to make sure those were signs the boys in Peachtree used.”

“Huh,” Charles said.  “Why would we want to help out townies?”

“In war, there is always room for negotiation.  What if they captured the top city boy?  Or his sister?  You need something to offer, don’t you?”

“You’re a lot better at this than I am,” he said.

“I’ve played the game all my life,” I said, smiling.  “I’m playing it now, with you.”

“What?” Charles asked.  He was suddenly very confused.

Professor Berger brought the third of the rebels to a standing position.

“All done?” I called out to the man.

“We can move on, so long as you’ve found time to come up with a plan while corrupting the children in my care,” Berger said.

“Fantastic,” I said.  “I came up with a plan before you even started, but I could do with another five minutes of corruption, if that’s alright?  I could hold the strings of that fellow while you used the lavatory, maybe?”

“Best we get underway,” the man said, dryly.

“Fair enough,” I said.  I walked past Charles.  I approached him, and as I passed him, I turned around, walking backwards as I continued talking in a low voice, “See?  Your uncle knows I’m playing townie against city, working my townie wiles on you and your cousin.  But he doesn’t care.  Soon I’ll find out why.”

“But we weren’t playing,” Charles said.

“People like your uncle and I are always playing this game,” I said.

Charles’ eyes widened, and I could see things falling into place.

Perhaps, in that moment, his world expanded, and the world beyond his immediate experience made more sense.  Or less sense.

At the professor’s behest, I took ownership of the third rebel, one of the young ones, while he took the rebel leader.  Charles approached me and took the strings.  Once that was done, he began instructing the two children in how to puppeteer the men and make them walk.  Freeing one leg at a time while being sure not to paralyze a given leg.

I approached all of the men we weren’t using, and, going one by one, I stabbed them in the backs, carefully avoiding the bugs that had latched onto their spines.  Charles watched me while I did it, with a quiet and subtle kind of alarm.

He still had a goodness to him, it seemed.  His cousin had put that goodness away to seize some influence over her surroundings, and his uncle lacked any.  In this, Charles was mostly alone.  He wasn’t merciful.

Slowly, they each practiced walking.  Professor Berger was a practiced hand with puppeteering, but the puppets and the children weren’t so experienced.  It took some doing.

“If they don’t cooperate, let them fall flat on their faces,” Berger said.

“Nosebleeds get in the way of my plan,” I said.

“I can stop nosebleeds,” he said.

“Can you stop them from looking like they’re all trying to push a full-sized tree branch through their arseholes?”

“Push-” Berger started.  He gave me a look, as if I was one of his children and I’d disappointed him.  “There are children present.”

I looked at him for a moment, then over at the dead bodies.  My eye traveled over the blood, piss, vomit, shit, the bugs, the puppets, the children being used to control them, and finally back to Berger.

“Of course,” I said.

“They look strained, you’re right,” Berger said.  He withdrew syringes from his pocket.  One was spent, the others weren’t.

Reaching forward, he stuck one syringe into the face of the gang leader, moved around to the other side of the face, and injected other locations.

“All of this stuff you’re packing, I can’t hep but notice a big focus on movement, expression, controlling a useless body, making it do what you want,” I said.  “I wonder if your colleagues are on a similar page, or if they’re studying brains.  Say, a brain riddled with bullets?”

Berger gave me an unimpressed look.

“I had to ask,” I said.

He gave the others the same treatment with a second syringe.

“Watch the stairs, Charles, Florence.  They’ll find it tricky, and bodies rolling down the stairs draw notice,” Berger said.  To me, he said.  “Let me have my turn.  A question for you.”

“No objection.”

“Your plan?”

“Ah.  The plan is that the rebel leader steps into the doorway, and he points at the people I indicate,” I said.  “Easy.  We have… two floors to lead our plodding guests down.  We can work out a quick system.”

“We need more than that,” Berger said.

“The rest is positioning, knowing the enemy.  Look.  You apparently know me well enough to know I can probably get you out of this situation.  Trust me to see it through.  Alright?”

“All I lose if I’m wrong is my life, my daughter’s life, and my nephew’s life.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “But if you don’t take this leap of faith, then you lose those anyway, so buck up.  You’ll want the rebel leader beside me, and then, cornering you, we have the other two, the ones Charles and Florence are controlling.  As if they’ve got you.  Maybe if one had a hand on your shoulder?”

“Third string, the one I hooked onto your ring finger, Florence,” Berger said.

It was clumsy, halting, but the hand fell into place.

“The system we’ll use is that he’ll extend his arm.  You make him stop when he gets far enough.  Or you can paralyze the arm and let it fall.  We pick three or four, depending on how smooth we’ve got it.  I’ll signal you when you’re pointing at the right person.”

I gave the signal behind the rebel leader’s back.

“As for you, Mr. rebel leader,” I said.  “I fully plan to leave you alive.  I’m going to make the offer to bring you guys on board with my rebel faction.  It’s a good setup, I think.  Better than what you’ve got.  So decide if you’ll join, if you’ll go your separate way when we’re done here, barely any hard feelings on my end and a little bit of trauma on yours, or if you want to Professor Berger there to pull the middle string and remove the bug, and let you die in incredible kinds of pain.  The little details, the little kinds of help you give us, they go a long way.”

The dark eyes of the rebel leader looked down at me.  His face was slack now.  Almost too relaxed, a little tired looking, but the tension was utterly gone.  The drugs had done their job.

The syringes had been applied to the faces of the other two as well.  One was a little more slack than the other.

All together, we approached the second floor.

My heart sank as I saw some hanging out at the base of the stairs.  They were in our way.

I signaled behind the rebel leader’s back.

The man raised his hand, and made a sweeping motion.

The rebel soldiers further down the stairs picked themselves up.  They glanced up at us, curious, before heading into the wider space where Shirley and the others were.  I, the professor, the children and our hostages made our way down.

All together, we stood in the doorway.

The rebel boss raised his arm, pointing.

Putting me in the situation where I had to pick the key players.  In a moment, I had to read the room, spot the people who others looked to when they were confused.  I had to spot the lynchpins, the elders and the ones who led individual squads.

I’d already forgotten some particulars and some faces, and matters weren’t helped by the fact that some had moved, left, or changed from standing to sitting positions and vice-versa.

I picked out four.

When the finger found one, I signaled.  The finger stopped.

He pointed out two more.

With the fourth, we ran into a snag.  The man pointed to himself, as if for confirmation.

Berger’s hand touched the back of the rebel boss’s head.

No string to pull, but the rebel boss nodded slowly.

Before the men in question could come through the doorway, I motioned for Berger and the others to move away.

“You got the professor,” the first one we’d pointed out said, as he drew near.  “You can move mountains after all.”

“Nothing so fancy,” I said.  “I just asked.”

“Didn’t shoot him, though,” the older rebel said.

“Like I said, we need him.  And it was a term of the asking.  He lives, for now.”

Talking to the man drew his attention, and it bought Berger a moment to walk up a few stairs and turn around, the bugs securely out of sight instead of just halfways out of sight.

“What’s this about?” another of the four men asked.

“Making sure we have a plan, rounding up all the ones with guns in the windows,” I said.

“Could just give the signal.”

“Nah,” I said.  “We want to play this careful.  There are still people in the building, and the Crown has resources.”

He made a face.

The four men we’d picked out found positions on lower stairs, looking up at the rebel boss.

The nature of the stairs and my short stature posed a problem.  I had to reach over to the railing to find a good vantage point, which occupied a hand, and limited what I could do.

Still, I was silent as I did it, and the men simply waited restlessly for their mute boss to speak.

I knifed the first and the second quickly, choosing to target much the same points the bugs had, slamming my knife between one vertebrae, hauling it out, then slamming it into the next man.  He turned as I swung, and then fell in a way that trapped the knife blade between the bones I was aiming between.

It cost me seconds, as I had to haul out another knife.  The third and fourth man heard the sound of the first rebel hitting the floor, and turned on me.

The rebel boss, controlled by Berger, reached out and grabbed one of his comrades around the neck.  Charles’ rebel might have been trying to do much the same thing, but he wasn’t as well-controlled.  His arms went out, and one clubbed the last rebel across the face.

Smacked, grunting loud enough to be heard below, the man tumbled down the stairs.  I sprung on top of him, and I buried my spare knife in his chest.

People appeared in the door.  Rebels with weapons.

They looked up at us.

Their eyes fell on the boss, who wore a dead expression and had his hands wrapped around another man’s neck.  He’d placed his hands right, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the strength he was displaying was enhanced by the control being exerted on him, pushing him past pain tolerances and normal limits.  His eyes were even darker than before.  To him, he’d just had to kill a friend.  But to these witnesses…

I double checked the children were safely hidden behind the men they were controlling.

“Traitors,” I said.  I picked myself up, cleaning my knife.  I made myself the picture of calm, as if the ones in the door posed no risk at all.  “They gave you guys up.  Why do you think the professor here was able to slip away?  He knew in advance.  Or the Academy surrounded you all so fast?”

That wasn’t why the professor had slipped away.  The Academy hadn’t surrounded them that fast – they’d just been slow to exit.

But for these rebels who were looking up at this scene, they wanted to be spoon-fed a story they could believe.  They wanted something easy, in an already uncertain situation.

“Come on,” I said.  “Let’s leave the man alone for a second.”

Behind me, the rebel leader let go of the man he’d just strangled to death.  The body tumbled hard onto the stairs.

The rebel leader nodded.

The bugs only controlled him from the neck down.  This was of his own volition.

I wondered if he would fight back.

“Let’s leave him alone,” I said, again, to drive the point home.  My heart hammered.  If this became a question of one group of hostages against the other, well, I was pretty sure we had the upper hand, but I really didn’t want to test it.

The men retreated back into the room.  There was some commotion there.  Things took on a different tone when I passed through the door.

“Traitors,” I said, again.  “There might be more.  Be wary.  But for the time being, before any groups reinforce the perimeter, we’re going to want to get out of here.  The soldiers at the barricade are friendlies, except for the ones who are being held hostage, but more on that later.  We-”

I saw the room change.  Alarm, on the faces of everyone from young rebel to old, Shirley to Otis.

Behind me, the rebel boss had stepped into the doorway.  He had a look in his eyes, like a mother who had just watched her child die, or a man who had lost not just a battle, but a war.

Berger was right behind him, the other puppet-rebels behind Berger.

“We move across as one group.  No stopping, no shenanigans.  Don’t shoot, you’ll only draw attention to yourselves and draw answering fire.  We do this quick, and we do this discreet.  And give up my friends already.  I’ve delivered, now it’s your turn.”

The rebel boss exhaled, and it was a long, shuddering, ugly sound.

I looked past him at Berger, and I saw the professor’s expression.  Tension.  He was prepared for disaster.

I had the situation well in hand, I thought.  You didn’t have to roll the dice.

The rebel leader, his chest and lungs freed enough for him to speak, gave his order.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.07 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Kill-” the rebel boss started, and the word, though forceful, was mumbled, as if he’d had a stroke.  I might’ve taken it to be ‘hill’ or ‘fill’ if I’d not known better.  He stopped.

I waited as he stayed where he was, frozen.  I was tense but doing my best not to show it.  The people in the room were watching me as much as him.  I was aware that they were stirring, the harsh word having gotten their attention, and my relative calm and a simple raised eyebrow from me were the only cues they had to go on.

Slowly, haltingly, the rebel boss’s hand raised, finding its way to his face.

“Eric?” one of the other men in the room asked.  He was one I’d considered as being one of the leaders – I’d picked out people who looked like they had some leadership ability, to better cull the population of the room and leave them more open to outside influence.  I would have picked him, just based on how he held himself and how others looked at him, but I’d been unsure about my ability to get Berger to make the rebel boss point at him, given where he sat and the people in the way.

The rebel boss, Eric, opened his mouth again, and managed only an abrupt, “Ugh.”

He drew in a breath, then exhaled.

I saw an opening.  I could read Berger’s thought process here.  A hand raised to his face to muffle him, to buy a second to think.  Now I suspected Berger was thinking about freeing Eric’s voice again, because that was all he could really do.

But we didn’t control his voice.  We controlled his movements.

I motioned, indicating the arm that was closer to his face.  I motioned for him to lower it, two fingers curled in the direction of the arm, twitching down.

His hand dropped.  I gestured for Berger to stop and the arm halted midway.  Eric looked momentarily surprised when it did.

Shirley was gesturing.  Question.  She wanted to know what was going on.  With Archie having gotten caught gesturing to me, I was reluctant to do with forty or fifty sets of eyes watching me.

We could parcel out control in very limited quantities.  With luck, Berger could sense some of the hesitation on Eric’s part.

Slowly, the rebel leader’s arm moved, until it pointed at the one who’d called out and named him.  Eric’s expression was blank, his eyes filled with emotion.  The other man’s face was anything but, on both counts.

“The hell?  Eric, you’ve got it wrong.  They’ve-”

The people near the man in question grabbed him.  There was a momentary scuffle, and the man was thrown to the ground, then held down.

“Eric!” the man called out.  “You’ve-”

One side of his face knocked against the ground as someone threw their weight onto his back.  The men who now grappled with their former boss or friend didn’t look like they enjoyed what they were having to do.  It wouldn’t take much to make them stop.

“You’re being manipulated!  I haven’t talked to anyone!  We’re friends, you morbid bastard!”

Eric the rebel boss stood in the doorway, his hand falling to his side.  He turned his head and glanced down at me.  I tried to read the expression and body language of a man with a partially paralyzed face and no control over his own body.  Just behind him, in the large man’s shadow, I could see Berger, the faintest sheen of sweat on his face.

Berger hadn’t trusted me to see the situation through on my own, he’d given the rebel boss the chance to speak, thinking he’d cowed the man, and he’d been wrong.  Had the boss’s face not been paralyzed by the syringe to relax his features, he might have gotten a fuller sentence out, clearly and unambiguously.

But he hadn’t.  We walked a tightrope now.

There were two ways to go, now.  I could try to wrangle things myself, and I could probably fail, in light of the current situation, or I could roll the dice myself.

I stared at him for as long as I could without looking suspicious, then looked away.  I surveyed the room.

“We’ve had enough killing already,” I said.  “Tie that guy’s hands, take him with.  We’ll quiz him about what else he talked to the Academy about, and if he’s not up to something, then he’ll live-”

“You’re all insane!”

“-but for right now, we need to get moving.  That’s the biggest priority.  We get out with our lives, and we resolve questions of loyalty later.  Head downstairs.  Gather near the double doors, be ready to file out two by two.”

Then, positive that this was the point where things came together or shattered to pieces, I signaled Berger, moving my hand as if it were a duck’s bill, four fingers for the upper bill, thumb for the lower one, opening and closing it, miming ‘talking’.

The rebel boss grunted, drew in a breath, and freed to speak for a second time, he said, “Do as the boy says.”

I made sure not to show my relief.  People spoke up, commenting, but I could see whole tracts who looked concerned, introspective, or lost in the chaos.  People who might otherwise have been able to turn to the people who had led them weren’t able to.  I’d removed those leaders from the picture.

“Go,” I said.

The rebel leader nodded, raised a hand and pointed.

It took a moment, but the room got itself sorted out.  Rebels started making their way to the stairs and down to the front hallway.

I turned to Berger and the leader, and I began talking.

“We’re going to need to cross the street.  Obviously we’ll follow up the rear.  My allies won’t shoot at any of us here.  If there’s trouble, we may have to run for it.  How many people are elsewhere in the building?”

“My people or people like him?” the boss asked me.  His entire body was taut with tension.

“Either or.  Trying to figure out what needs to be done, if more hostages need to be taken.”

“Some gunmen at the windows.”

I made sure that bystanders heard me as I said, “We’ll have them follow up last.  When they leave the window their absence will draw attention, and the enemy forces will move.”

“Mm,” he grunted.

I suspected he knew that the gunmen in the windows wouldn’t follow up.  It didn’t make sense to go find them and have more of his men with guns around us.

“We’ll send someone up?  You, with the little boy.  Can you do it?”

I asked the question, and standing as close as I was to Eric the puppet, I was free to move a hand without people in the larger lobby seeing.  I gestured for Charles and his rebel puppet to move off to one side, out of sight.

“That’s that,” I said.

The conversation was key, to give us a reason to be lingering behind, to keep others from approaching and joining in.  The scary look on Eric’s face was a help in that.  To their perception, he’d been willing to order the killing of a former lieutenant, pointing out the man.  I’d been the merciful one.

The bulk of the people left.  The clusters remained at different points in the room.

“What do you want us to do with the hostages?” a man called out.  He didn’t look like one of the brighter individuals, which made sense, given his bravery in calling out to his boss when the man looked so unhinged.

Eric looked down at me.

“Let them go,” I said, as if suggesting it.  “You made a deal with me.”

“Let them go,” he said, volume high, the syllables still a little slushy.

The men turned to the task.

“Changed your mind?” Berger asked, his voice barely audible.

No, I thought.  No, Eric hadn’t exactly changed his mind.  Yes, he’d been ready to give the order to have us killed, likely knowing he would die.  Berger’s ability to wrest control of the situation and my own actions following it, they made it clear that we held the cards.

I’d picked up on his disposition fairly early on.  Death held a different meaning for him.  They’d been trapped here and he’d been lackadaisical about it, slouching in his seat.  His priorities had sat in a different way, more intent on murdering or capturing Berger than on finding a way out.  I suspected the men who followed him knew that, and his willingness to kill traitors here fit into a kind of acceptance of death and willingness to kill perceived enemies.

I’d chosen to read the look in his eyes or the fact that he’d chosen to look down at me in particular to be an effort at negotiation.  Where he’d instinctively clutched for freedom the moment he’d been given his voice, we’d made it clear that the choice wasn’t so cut and dry.  There were people he valued more, it seemed.  Four had died in the stairwell, more had died upstairs, and even if he spoke now, it was no protection against further death.

Eric hadn’t changed his mind, really.  Given the choice to take an unambiguous win, I suspected he would still do so, without exception.  The situation had changed, I had clouded the waters with Berger’s help, and the rebel leader was playing along.  He cooperated, as Berger had ordered him to do three hundred times in ten minutes.

My hostages were freed.  The people who had freed them backed off, growing more outnumbered as more of their allies made their way down to the first floor.

Only a few lingered, glancing back at their boss.

“Go,” he said.  “I need to have words with the boy.”

His words carried weight.  They took their time doing it, but they made their way downstairs, glancing back.

He didn’t have their confidence.  They no doubt felt something was up, I knew that.  At the same time, to speak up or raise those dim and inarticulate suspicions was difficult.  They had no real rudders, they were being told the same things by multiple sources, including an authority they trusted, and they were being told to take this course of action to live, which was something they wanted.

Given time, they would find a time and place to voice those doubts.  In the now, they would go with the flow.

Shirley hugged the quarantine suit that I’d brought along to give her, not yet having put it on.  She gave Eric a nervous look.

“I don’t know how you managed that,” she said.  “But thank you.”

“Wasn’t entirely me,” I said.  “They hurt you?”

She pursed her lips, then said, “Yes.”

“How?  Why?”

She didn’t look eager to say.  It was Archie who spoke up.

“We gathered together with Pierre to figure out what we were doing.  We knew we couldn’t get out of the city, but Pierre might.  One of the younger rebels from this group saw it unfold.  When we turned up here with some of the other evacuees, they collapsed in on us.”

“And they knew about Shirley’s involvement with you from that?” I asked.

“They thought she was Otis’ girl.  They grilled him for information,” Archie said.  “He didn’t give much up, until he got talkative and started mocking them.”

“They threw me to the ground with my hands tied and kicked me,” Otis said.  “As these things go, it wasn’t even that bad.”

“Watch your words,” Archie said.  His voice wasn’t sharp, the rebuke not that heavy as such things went, but it seemed like such a strange thing to say.

Until I saw Shirley’s face.  She didn’t make eye contact with me or even anyone else.

I stepped forward and took her hands in mine.  She flinched a little.  I led her a little ways away from everyone else.  Otis and Archie followed at a partial distance, glancing back at the rebel leader and Berger.  They remained just at the edge of earshot.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m trying to be tougher than I once was,” she said.  Her shoulders went up, like she was shrugging but not shrugging.  A shrug aborted.  Defensive.

“I’m sorry,” I said, again, with just a little bit more emphasis.  “I’ll make this up to you.”

“I don’t blame you at all,” she said.  She finally made eye contact with me, which she hadn’t done since she’d approached and spoken to me.  “Really.  And I don’t want people to get hurt or die because of this.  This is how things are, and things just really-”

Her voice went high at the end there, and she broke off talking.

I gave her hands a squeeze.

“Really suck sometimes,” she said, with more composure.

I kissed the back of her hands.

“Can I ask Archie or Otis what happened, after?  I need to get the measure of these guys.”

“It looked like you have their measure already,” Shirley said.  Then her shoulders went up again, in a kind of shrug, as if she were unsure.  “I can tell you.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Some of the younger ones and one of the people you called into the stairwell, one of the traitors?”

“Not traitors.  People I needed to remove.”

She nodded, as if that made all the sense in the world.

“They threw me to the ground and they kicked me.  Because I think they thought they could get to Otis by doing that.”

Shirley’s hand pulled out of mine, and touched points all along her ribs and stomach, then moved her hair, so I could see where blood had run down into the basin of her ear, just by the canal.

“Okay,” I said.

“They said I needed to be searched for signs of plague.  It meant disrobing some.  Where everyone can see.  They didn’t search Otis or Archie or any of our people.  I’m not modest-”

She offered a one-note laugh at her own words.

“-but it was meant to humiliate.  And to get to Otis.”

I was going to say something to reassure, but Otis spoke up in his characteristic rough-edged voice, a voice belonging to an old man, used by a middle-aged one.  “Shirley toughed it out, glared daggers at them.  Came out looking fierce.”

I wondered if he was trying to reassure in his own way.

“I talked,” Otis said, very casually.  “Told them what they wanted to know, so they’d leave her alone before taking it any further.  They were curious where our rabbit ran off to, I said we had a camp outside the city.  That he’d get reinforcements.  I said we were led by a boy less than half my age.  I said we were making weapons.”

“I told them about you,” Shirley said.  “Jessie some, but you mostly.  I said if Pierre got out of the city, that you’d come.  They didn’t think our reinforcements were worth much, and I said more.  Talked you up.  That’s where they got the ‘moving mountains’ part.  I even- I used the word devastating, because I thought it would help you forgive me for costing you the element of surprise.”

“No, Shirley, that’s-”

She talked over me, as if she just needed to say it, “I just needed the courage right then, so I rambled.”

“It’s fine!” I raised my voice, to be sure to interrupt her before the justifications could keep coming.  “You’re worrying over nothing there.  I wouldn’t have had the element of surprise anyway, having to approach like I did.  I didn’t have a chance of getting into the building without them knowing about it.  They would have had questions, and the unknown is cause for fear.  You talking me up put me in their heads, made me into a possible solution for them, a reality they wanted to see and understand.  Above all else, it took away what would’ve been a reactive fear.  If I’d been an unknown, strange boy who just showed up at their door, I might’ve gotten shot.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” Shirley said.

“I’m not lying.  I might have been fine for the start of it, whichever way it had gone, whatever you’d said, but your instincts were right.  The odds were better.  This way was better.”

She didn’t look like she believed me.

I took her other hand, which she’d pulled out of my grip to indicate where the injuries were, and I moved her hands together, enfolding them in mine, best as I was able.  I squeezed them, looking into her eyes with utmost sincerity and directness, and I said, “This way was better.”

“You come across as more believable when you’re casually lying,” she said.

“I’ve warned you in advance about this,” I said.

She smiled, and I could see moisture in her eyes.  “My first time seeing it happen.”

Then she stepped closer and she gave me a kiss on the forehead.

“Then you believe me?” I asked.  “Because I am honestly telling you the truth here.”

“I’m working on it,” she said.  She touched my hair.  “You have other things to focus on.”

“One of those things is my promise to Pierre.  Get the quarantine suit on,” I said.  I wagged a finger at her.  She smiled some, and I was free to turn away, checking on Otis and Archie, as well as the other thugs they had in tow.  “All good?”

“I wouldn’t mind getting out of this fucking city,” Otis said.  “See some of your kid doctors.”

“I thought the beating wasn’t anything special?” Archie asked.

“It’s still a beating, indian,” Otis said.  “And painkillers are nice.  We recruited a few hundred kid doctors, why can’t we use ’em when we’re sore?”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “We’ll get right on that.  For now, watch Shirley, watch my back, and clean that blood off.  The plague likes blood.”

Otis rubbed at the space beneath his bloody nose, pulled out a handkerchief, and began cleaning off his face.  He nearly dropped it when he saw how Berger was controlling Eric.

Berger had emerged from the hallway, Eric ahead of him and the children in tow, each controlling their respective puppets.

“How many others are in the building?” I asked.  “Non-soldiers?”

“Sixty or so,” Archie said, his voice soft.  “It’s a guess, don’t take it as gospel.”

“They’re holed up at the third floor,” Berger said.  “We went higher because higher ground is better, and I had the key for the door.”

“Keep the kids out of the way,” I said.  “Berger, with me.  Bring Eric, or else we should stow him out of sight for a minute.  The others will make sure nobody sees.  We’ll get the other civilians in the meantime.”

“I thought time was of the essence,” he said.  “You wanted to save your allies.  Fine.  But now you’re adding others to it?”

“This is integral,” I lied.

“Then we’ll do it fast,” he said.

I turned to Otis and Archie.  “Get people started on crossing the street in two single-file lines.  The Crown soldiers at the barricade should be ours.  One of you go first if the others are reluctant.  One of you stay behind to help, keep some of your guys with.”

That got me some nods in response.

Berger and I moved into the stairwell, and he pulled the strings necessary to paralyze Eric.  The bug remained in place, the rebel leader was laid face down across the stairs, and with the strings removed, he was unable to do anything but breathe.  I collected my knife, and we took the stairs two at a time to get up to the next floor.  I knocked on the first door after I’d exited the open stairwell.

“Evacuation,” Berger called out.

I heard muffled voices.  They didn’t respond.

“Give me your badge, or some official papers or something,” I said.

Berger stopped just short of rolling his eyes, reached into a coat pocket, produced a paper with a crest on it, and handed it over.

I slid the paper beneath the door.

The lock clicked.  A man in nice clothes, his family standing further back in the room, too nervous to sit down on the bed or chair within.

“Evacuating,” I said.  “Get yourselves downstairs.  Stick with the people guarding the door at the second floor.”

I moved on to the next door, repeating the process.  Three families in one room.  Not aristocrats, not well-to-do folks.  They’d retreated here because it was the largest, sturdiest building, much as Shirley, Otis and Archie had.  I gave similar instructions.

At the third door, they responded to the knock, before I got to the part with the paper.  I was greeted by a man with a revolver in hand.  I caught his wrist and punched a knife into his upper stomach.  He grunted, and I stuck him two more times.

He hadn’t even collapsed all the way to the ground before I crossed the length of the little apartment’s hallway.  I saw the shadow across the floor before I saw any sign of him, and was already swinging the knife at his general neck level before he even stepped into view.  He spun, collapsing hard onto the floor, and blood bubbled at his neck as oxygen escaped his windpipe and forced its way through the mess that was spilling out of the wound.

I’d suspected the first one wouldn’t be in the room alone.  People kept each other attentive and sane.

His hand gripped my wrist, and blood ran down from the knife to the heel of his hand to my arm.  I walked forward, pushing the knife deeper, and he staggered back.  I forcibly sat him down in the chair by the window, so anyone looking through binoculars might see him.

I cleared the remainder of the rooms on the third floor.  I realized after the second conflict with rebel soldiers that they’d been stationed in the corner rooms and didn’t interfere there.  I was quieter in respect to the rooms neighboring those, shushing the people within as they opened the doors.

We headed back down.  A good thing too, as it seemed Berger was looking increasingly impatient.

“One thing, before we go any further,” I said.

“If this is about me letting the rebel speak to the room-”

“No,” I said.  “No.  That’s a separate issue, and what’s done is done.”

“Then what is it?”

“One of the syringes you had was empty.”

“And?  A mild stimulant, to keep myself alert.  It allows me faster reactions, calm in a time of crisis.”

The last group of people we’d ushered out of their rooms had reached the crowd at the base of the stairs now.  We followed them, and we started to make our way through the gathered crowd.  They saw Berger and parted a way for him.

“I’m very good at telling when people are lying to me, Professor.  You’re lying to me.”

“Perhaps,” he said.  He knelt by Eric and began manipulating the strings.  “I’ll tell you this.  During my tenure as a student, I learned that most fellow students lied to me in some capacity.  Most treated me as a hostile entity.  Had I fought them on every last point, I would have exhausted myself.  I had to pick my battles.  You have to decide.  Is this battle worth fighting?”

People muttered as he raised Eric to his feet.

“I asked,” I said.  “I clearly think it’s a point worth addressing.  Doubly so now that you’re being evasive.”

“Then are you going to use that Wyvern-washed brain of yours and find a line of questioning that makes me talk about the syringe?  Torture me and my children?”

He was surrounded by citizens and aristocrats that saw him as someone friendly and someone to be respected.  That had to play a part in his power play here.  His confidence level hadn’t changed, but it seemed innate.  I might almost believe that a drug had given him that confidence level, but I’d met too many other professors over the years.

Could I shake him?  Possibly.  Could I worm my way into his head and get what I needed out of him?  Yes, given time.

He knew I didn’t want to spare the time.

“You know who and what I am, professor.  You’ve read my file.”

“I do.  I have.”

“Then let’s leave it at that,” I said.  “You know enough to know the consequences.”

He didn’t flinch.  He only pulled his strings and commanded his puppet.

I turned away, my mind whirling, working out all the possibilities.  I had friends nearby, I had more friends on the other side of that open space of no man’s land.  He had only a few key opportunities for attack.  Had he given himself the contents of the syringe?  Eric?  One of the children?

Was it a bluff?

I turned toward the crowd, and I raised my voice as I spoke to them.  “There are more rebels downstairs.  You all stick near me, don’t speak of anything relating to the professor, and this all goes smoothly.  Let’s head down to the first floor.”

The people were a buffer.  They put bodies between me and the lesser rebels, they blocked vision, and, I was suspicious, they were ostensibly on my side rather than the rebel’s.

Shirley and Otis drew nearer to me, and our reduced collection of thugs followed.  More security.  More of a buffer.  I was given pause when I saw that Shirley wasn’t wearing the quarantine outfit.

Florence was.  She was small enough that it bunched up all around her.  It wasn’t even a complete outfit, because she’d left one glove off, freeing her hand to manipulate strings.  She wore a leather glove, tight against her small hand, and some of the adhesive wrap blocked off the gap, but it wasn’t the same thing.

“Pierre is going to be mad at me,” I said.  “I made him promises.”

“He’ll understand if you explain.”

“He’ll understand, but he’ll be mad,” I said.

“Please?” she asked.

I looked over at Florence.

“She reminds me of myself as a child,” Shirley said.

“Having actually talked to her for a short while, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t find anyone more different,” I said.  “In looks, yeah, she has a lot going for her, she’ll grow up to be a beauty, but-”

Shirley swatted my shoulder lightly.

“-I don’t see any of my favorite parts of you in her.  Okay, maybe the cleverness, but-”

“You’re a relentless flirt, Sy,” she said.

Doctor bad, I gestured.  Children bad.  Betrayal soon.  “I don’t see that as flirting.  You should see me when I really flex that angle.”

Yes, was her only gesture.  She didn’t have a lot of vocabulary.  She got most gestures when I communicated to her, but it didn’t go the other way, from her to me.  She’d picked up my message.

“I’m still not wearing that suit,” she said.

I drew in a breath, then nodded.

We made our way down the stairs, at the tail end of the group.

I was careful to position people between myself and the professor.  He had Eric in tow, and I made sure that the professor and Eric couldn’t lunge for me.

I met the eyes of Charles, who looked very concerned for entirely normal reasons that had to do with venturing into the cold, plague ridden, conflict-torn outside.

I looked for Florence and I saw her near Berger.  She wore the suit, and her head was aimed more toward the ground, one leather-gloved hand on the strings, the other hand in a thicker glove, on the man’s back, giving her balance as she focused on descending the stairs while wearing a quarantine mask with virtually no visibility.

The lowered head was indicative of something else, too.  The nearer she was to Berger, the more submissive she appeared, her head bent low, as if expecting him to strike her at any moment.  I wondered the degree to which that was true, the degree to which it was meat to manipulate him, and the degree to which it was meant to manipulate me.

I would’ve liked to see more of her face and body to read her for cues, given the difficulty in reading an accomplished liar and politician like Berger, but I wasn’t so lucky.

The stream of people flowed out the door with almost no hiccups.  Some mismatches of people got wedged in the double doors, too large or trying to go in three-across instead of two-across.  Others stumbled or slipped as they transitioned from hard floor to a street covered in wet snow that had been trampled by a hundred people ahead of them.

Jessie and her squad waited on the other side.  I saw their postures change noticeably as they spotted Shirley and I.  Perking up, taking notice.

Berger slowed to a noticeable degree.  Lagging.

I expected him to draw a gun, perhaps, or to pull the bug free and release the rebel leader with some prearranged agreement to attack me, augmented by drugs.  I expected a gas canister.  The position I’d chosen in this careful stampede of my own design was meant to account for all of that.  So was the position I’d chosen for Shirley.  Tall thugs from Otis’ group.

He didn’t go high.  He didn’t try to go through.  He didn’t even do anything overt.

It had to amount to reaching into a part of his voluminous lab coat and simply dropping it to the ground.

The bug leaped from a point on the wet ground, passing through a narrow gap between two of Otis’ people, and lunged straight for me.  I was primed and on the alert, and my hand went out, grabbing for it.  Hook-like limb-ends caught on my arm, found purchase in the flesh of my forearm, and like the hammer of a gun firing, it fired forward in another explosive leap, going for my neck this time.

Straight for me, of all the possible targets.

I’d stood too close to him as I’d worked my shenanigans on the roomful of people.  He’d given it a thorough sniff of me.

“Go,” I said, in the same moment I realized I couldn’t tear it free without the risk of the hook-limb tearing at something vital in my neck.  “Leave me!”

It moved of its own accord, crawling around the side of my neck to my spine.

Whatever he’d dosed it with, it seemed more or less immune to my poisonous taste.

I landed face down on the road, paralyzed from the neck down, and I didn’t see anything else of what followed.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.08 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The insect that had latched onto my spine rocked back and forth in a rhythmic way.  With it, my lungs kept operating, breathing in, breathing out.  The control wasn’t mine.  I felt a cold sensation, as if winter-chilled water was trickling into the back of my neck to my throat, spine, and pooling in my actual body and extremities.  Venom of a sort, from the mouthpiece of the insect.  I opened my mouth, and that numb cold kept me from properly speaking.  I could make only a few, limited sounds that consisted of the regular exhalations and some mouth shapes.  Not proper speech.

It didn’t help that one side of my face pressed against the ground.

I heard commotion, the tromp of footsteps, and then a hand seized me by the neck.  I was lifted up, my face no longer on cold wet road.  I had no idea what the rest of my body was doing.

“What do you think you’ll accomplish?” Berger asked.

I couldn’t answer, and the question wasn’t directed at me anyway.

“I wouldn’t be doing it alone,” a man I didn’t recognize said.  One of Otis’ thugs.  “I’m thinking we can make you let go of him, then we get around to tearing the giblets out of you.”

“Sylvester said to go,” I heard Shirley.  “He had a reason, I imagine.”

My mind was flying through possibilities, which was just as well, considering it was the only part of me that was working. Shirley was right.  I did have a reason.  Berger was the sort who wouldn’t pull something like this unless he was sure he could see it through.  So, rather than risk good people, I’d jumped straight to letting Berger see things through, which bypassed the question of how entirely.

Had I had more time, I would have double-guessed him.  I would have accounted for the possibility that he was thinking I’d think this way, and perhaps urged everyone present to turn on him.  Perhaps.  He was a control freak, and-

“Fuck this,” Otis’ thug said.

“Don’t-” Shirley started.

I was dropped on my face again.  I heard what followed, and I deliberately put it out of mind, keeping myself from connecting to who was where and what was happening so I could think more clearly about what I needed to think about.

I could move my eyes and I could blink.  This was all I had at my disposal.  Eye movements weren’t worth a lot, unless I wanted to look at someone in particular.  I was left with blinks.  The tap code worked for blinks, but only Jessie knew it.

What was Berger going to do?  He was going to retreat to safety.  No man’s land was his land.  So long as he had Eric and me with him, his black coat in full display, there weren’t really any people who would open fire on him.  He could retreat, find sanctuary amid the Crown forces, and move on from there.

Someone fell to the ground near me.  A large hand smacked my rear end before sliding off, coming to rest beside my leg.

“Stop, just stop-” Shirley started.  Then, more fiercely, she called out, “Back off!  Everyone back!”

“Do as she says!” Otis barked.

A hand seized me again, wrapping around to the front of my throat.

I was held by the rebel leader, who was puppeteered by Berger in turn.  He raised me up, holding me by the throat, facing outward, so I could see the small crowd in front of us.  Two of our thugs lay on the ground.

Berger was a control freak, and he wasn’t about to put things in strange hands.  He had the tools necessary to seize control of the situation, dispatch anyone who tried to rescue me, and now he dragged me a little distance back, venturing away from the barricade and a few strides back down the street that constituted the no man’s land around the Little Castle.

I looked past Shirley, past the thugs that were still standing, and to the barricade.

Jessie.

The tap code was the same mechanism as the hand signs, in a broad sense.  When we had to be even more subtle, we could communicate a code by touch using two variations.  Short and long, hard and soft.  It worked with sound, light, anything we could translate into time and two separate notes.  We’d really only worked out the basic signs.  The six or seven basic ones we’d used with gestures and a couple of others.

I needed to communicate something to Jessie.  I did what I could to work out the message to be conveyed.  I settled on ‘You distract Berger, I free myself.’

You.  I indicated the crowd, eyes moving to all the key players I could see, with repetition and regular blinks for emphasis.  Otis, Jessie, Shirley, Jessie, Archie, Jessie.

“You’re sure we can’t negotiate?” Jessie called out.  She signaled yes.

Berger backed up a little more.  “I don’t see what you have that I want.”

Jessie paused.  Then she gestured.  Certain.  Question.

Was I sure?  How confident was I in my plan?

Fifty five percent?

Did that count as sure?

Probably not.  But the alternative was that Jessie and the others would mount an effort to free me, in a territory stricken by plague.  It meant time and effort, and every second spent exposed to this air was a risk.

I blinked once for ‘yes’, then dropped my head as much as I was able.

“What if we have something you don’t want?” Jessie said.

“What is this?  A game?” Berger asked.

I felt my blood run cold.

I’m not that sure, Jessie!

Whatever.  I had to work extra hard now.  Distract.  Two quick blinks for no, then a glance away.  I returned my gaze to Jessie, realized someone was beside her that hadn’t been when I’d looked away-

And I experienced a feeling much like Jessie must have when she’d dropped a memory back in Laureas.  I stared into oblivion as I reached for something I knew had to be there, and found nothing.

“While investigating, we crossed paths with a Mr. and Mrs. Block, Professor.  They were integral to tutoring young nobles, before they were even out to the public.  We found them in New Amsterdam, and we’ve secreted them away.”

No, no, no no.

Yes, this would normally be something I could leverage, but not when I wasn’t prepared to follow through.  No, no, no.

Now the cat was out of the bag.  I couldn’t even tell Jessie to stop, because then the cat would be out of the bag and we wouldn’t have leverage.

I’d always held onto the Lambs.  I’d always held onto the cardinal and core skills.  The gestures, the carved mouse-signs, the dances that went hand in hand with being in near-perfect coordination with someone.

The tap code wasn’t at that level of importance, but it had been important.  It had been related to something integral.

I reached for the interpretation of distract.  No and then focus, then Berger.  It should have been simple.  I still knew the gesture for focus, for learn, memorize, study.  I just couldn’t translate it to tap-code.  It eluded me.

Evette stood shoulder to shoulder with Jessie, and she shook her head, because she was fully aware.  I’d had it, and now it was gone.  A memory and thing I’d been very intent with practicing and keeping.

“That’s knowledge that hurts you more than it hurts me,” Berger said.  He’d stopped dragging me back away from the others.

“You’ve got roots in the Crown States, Professor Berger.  Family, friends, your children.  I researched you once upon a time.  I know the particulars, and I know that you’re immersed in the politics on this side of the pond, you know what’s at play.  Yes, it hurts all of us if this gets out, but you lose everything but your education and what you manage to take with you when you travel overseas.  Assuming you get the chance.”

Not distract then.  Occupy?  I could play off the tap-code for manipulate, operate, use, control, turn it into a negative.  I could tell Jessie to keep the professor’s hands full.

Evette shook her head.

Blank.  The void in front of me yawned open even wider.  If I could have even tapped on the side of my leg, the tactile aspect of it could have helped me access it.  I couldn’t.  There was only oblivion.  The Wyvern had eaten a piece of me without my being aware of it.

Berger, too, stood blindfolded before a chasm.  He could hope there was a bridge, or he could buckle, and submit to the people who had driven him to this point.

I knew which way he would move, though.

Berger stepped back, moving me with him, setting foot on the bridge.  “I’ll take my chances and trust you’re smart enough to leave Mr. and Mrs. Block where they are.”

“The problem with that,” Jessie said, her voice modulated by the gas mask she wore, “is that you all created a collection of little Lambs with absolutely nothing to lose.  We don’t have any more than a few years.  You’ve read our files, no doubt.  If you’re threatening to set our world on fire, that’s fine.  Do it.  We’ll do as much damage to you as we can in the meantime.”

I’d already signaled no.  That left me the negations of the other core signs, the other tap codes we’d worked out.

No aggression?  Leave Berger alone?  Just the opposite of what I wanted.  I needed a window.

No support?  No protection?  Again, I wanted the opposite, I needed help.  and the negations of that one were too muddled.

No cooperation?  No.

“The problem with that, little Lamb, is that just ten minutes ago, your friend Sylvester here went to great lengths to save Miss Shirley over there, and it was abundantly clear just how much he cares about her.  I’m going to call that a bluff.”

Seeing Shirley react to being used against us in that capacity almost sucked as much as anything.

A lot of this sucked.  I might have felt gorge in my throat if I’d been able to feel my throat.  I might have felt my heart hammer and felt the need to control my breathing to avoid showing signs of panic, but I was a head with no connection to its body.

Other options.

‘No go’?  Don’t approach Berger?  It amounted to a sacrifice.  It meant to stay away.  Trust me.  It meant implying to Jessie that I could handle this.  There were a dozen possibilities that unfolded from that command, and if I were Jessie and using a memory database of Sylvester to simulate what I might do in that circumstance, it could imply a bomb going off, a lot of chaos that I needed her and the others to steer clear of.  Except I didn’t.  I’d get dragged away, Jessie would hopefully get out of this city and retreat to the Sedge camp, and she’d wait for me until it became clear I wasn’t going to make it back to her.

It was the best way to keep her clear of this.  As far as the various commands went, it was the only good option so far.

“Berger,” Jessie said.  “You know it’s not that simple.  We could tie you up in it.  Make you culpable.”

Berger chuckled.  A motion in my peripheral vision suggested he’d gestured, or the rebel leader had.  A way of the finger.

Jessie was trying to buy time.  I needed to finish communicating.

Except for the part where it would tear her up, see her putting pieces together in the wrong way.

The only sign left was watch, alert, attention.  Fundamental, one of the first we’d learned, that we’d taught Catcher, that we’d taught Mary.  Negated, it could be implied to mean blinding him.  Confounding his senses.  It could also be implied to mean that Jessie should ignore Berger.  The problem was that the first sign I’d forgotten would’ve implied distract, and the overlap was heavy enough that Jessie might connect the dots all wrong, and assume the ‘ignore’ interpretation.  Because why would I say confound if I could have said distract?

It was the interpretation I would’ve made.

“I have a long history with the Academies and Crown.  If I would’ve been culpable in anything, I had a lot more opportunities before, Lamb.”

“It’s precisely because you don’t have opportunities that you’re at risk now, Professor Berger,” Jessie said.  “You had a noble to look after and now he’s gone.”

Was I supposed to tell Jessie to blind him, and risk that she’d think I told her to ignore this, and contradict me to throw herself headlong into the problem, or tell her to go, to trust me when I was at my least trustworthy and least capable?

No.  Blink.  Eyes closed for one second.  Eyes open.  Eyes closed for another second.

No watch.  Blind.

I looked over to my peripheral vision, at Berger.

“He’s gone, and maybe you’re hedging your bets.” Jessie said.  She gestured.  Yes.

I blinked, quickly, no.  Then I repeated.  Blink, eyes closed-

“I’m very much hedging my bets,” Berger said.  “You can be sure I’ll have words with others about this.  I would be very careful about how you move forward, now.  You might already have gravely misstepped.”

– eyes closed again.  Then reafirrmed Jessie, then Berger.

Please understand me.

I looked down, stuck out my tongue, so I was looking at it.  A silly face to be making, and nobody smiled.  I was trying to indicate me, when I couldn’t even move to provide a part of myself to look at.

My last message had been a no.  Now I blinked, followed by closing my eyes for a second.  That-

My world lurched.  As I opened my eyes, I saw that I no longer faced Jessie.  They used the rebels as shields, and retreated down the street, dragging me with.  My heel dragging on the ground, friction had dragged one of my boots off.  I couldn’t even feel the wet or the cold.

“Grab his ankle, Charles,” Berger said.

Charles’ rebel reached down, fumbled for my numb leg, and seized it.  I was carried by one ankle and a hold around my upper body, and we moved collectively away from the congregation of strange rebels, Shirley, Jessie, Otis, Archie, Beattle thugs and our Beattle rebels.

“Who were the Blocks, father?”  Florence’s voice was muffled by the mask she wore, much as Jessie’s had been.

“If you ever find out, Florence, you’ll either be wearing a black coat and serving at one of the highest stations the Academy has, or your world will be nothing but gas, plague, famine, and fire.”

“I gathered the latter from how the Lamb in the quarantine suit talked.”

“That would have to have been Jamie Lambsbridge, who was reported dead.  But yes.  He figured out something he shouldn’t have.”

“And it has to do with these people?  Mr. and Mrs. Block?  Who have information this vital but who aren’t protected?”

“If you want to know more, then earn a black coat, and then earn your station.  Don’t abuse leverage for childish curiosity like you did when you pulled the string in the little castle or strangled the animal in Haverhill.”

“Sylvester noticed,” she said.

“What?” Berger asked.

“He noticed.  He knows why I pulled the string.  He knows why I suffocated the animal in Haverhill and cut the girl’s hair in the Cape of Flowers-”

“That was you?” Berger asked, his voice raising.  “She was the daughter of-”

Father.

I could hear the huff of Berger breathing hard through his nostrils, anger barely held back.

“What did Sylvester notice?” he asked.  “Rest assured, if it’s not a good answer, I’ll use a piece of wire to whip your rear end and the backs of your thighs into ribbons, have a doctor piece you together again, and whip it into ribbons once more.”

There was a pause, and I could imagine Florence hesitating, actually taken aback.

“Father,” she said, in a very measured way.  “I was pulling strings.  All my life, I’ve been raised to be proper, to know which fork to use, how to dress, how to do up my face.  I’ve been given an education.  I’ve been given class and status.”

“Cutting off all of the hair of the daughter of a headmaster of a prominent school could be said to be an abuse of those gifts you’ve been given by station and birth.”

“All my life, I’ve been given so much, but what I want and need is to know what happens in times of crisis.  I engineered the crisis so I could see how the great minds and talented politicians handled the matter.  I know I frittered away goodwill and made myself the obvious cause for those crises, but- but I do believe I’m just young enough that I’ll be forgiven it, by dint of my being as young as I am.”

Florence had insinuated to me that she hadn’t entirely known what she was doing.

Either she’d lied to my face and she’d done it well enough for me to not read it as an outright falsehood, or she’d figured out this particular argument and excuse for her behavior in retrospect, and she was now pitching it to her father as a kind of currency.

Both were rather amazing.

“I suppose this is a backhanded compliment?  I was the only person there when you pulled the string and made the rebel seize up.  Great minds and talented politicians.  Or were your eyes on Sylvester?”

“Both of you, father.”

“Hm,” Berger said.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m eager, father.  I want to learn more, even if it means you striking me in the face or holding me face down in the trough.  And I want to know more about Mr. and Mrs. Block.”

“Eager is good,” Professor Berger said.  “What I wouldn’t give for this kind of determination from Charles.”

There was silence from the children.  Berger steered Eric and me around so we faced the children.  We were a ways down the street, Jessie and the Beattle rebels no longer in sight, and we were in the shadow of a larger building.  I could see the Little Castle a ways down the road, the stone edifice towering over the surrounding buildings.  Wet snow fell all around us.

“But trust is hard earned and easily lost.  Perhaps I’m overly wary after having so recently dealt with Sylvester, left second guessing things I wouldn’t, like the fact that you’re wearing the quarantine suit provided by one of his people, but I only half believe you.”

Dressed in the quarantine suit, Florence still visibly rocked back at that.

“With that in mind, half of the punishment I stated.  The one whipping, followed by immediate treatment.”

Charles looked over at Florence.  Florence, meanwhile, only bowed her head a little and curtsied.  “Yes, father.”

I caught Charles’ eye.  In the moment, I widened my eyes a bit, then gave him a wink.

“Uncle,” Charles said, as if he had to push himself to say it.  He was pre-emptively flinching, and he’d only said one word.

“Charles.  What is it?”

“Sylvester knew she was going to pull the string before she even do it.  He told me, and then it happened.”

“Hardly a miracle, Charles.  I suspected she might do something in that vein.  Granted, I had the benefit of the strangulation of the beast in the stables in Haverhill in my recent memory, but it wasn’t the leap you’re making it out to be.”

“I believe Florence when she says what she’s saying,” Charles said.

I believe that you want to save your cousin from her whipping,” Professor Berger said.  He sighed.  “The two of you have so much potential.  But you’re too soft and Florence is too vicious.  Come.  Let’s get to safety first.  You’ll each get your punishments tonight.”

“I’m being punished?” Charles asked, alarmed.

“You’ll split the punishment between you,” Berger said.  “Come.”

“Uncle!” Charles said, and there was emotion in his voice.

“No complaining now.  You can guess how that will end up.”

“Sylvester said-  he said, just when he was getting up to go to you, that the game I played with the city boys and town boys, he’s played it all his life.  That it was the same game he and you were playing.”

“Most games originated as a way to learn skills, Charles.”

“He said- I didn’t want to say this, but he said that if you ever hauled your own head out of your ass, you might see that Florence was learning to play the game too.”

I hadn’t actually said that.  But a very stern Charles had set his jaw and told the baldfaced lie.

Berger moved, passing around to Eric’s side, one hand still reaching back to manipulate strings.  The movement did move some strings, making the rebel boss lurch a bit and tighten his hold.

From his new position, Berger reached out and took hold of my face.  He turned it around and up so I was looking up at him.

“The games we play, hm?” he asked.

I smiled a little.

“Considering that I was busy preparing the bug you’re now wearing, I think I made the better move,” he said.  He smiled and let go of my face, leaving my head to loll, though he remained in my field of vision.

My smile remained fixed in place.  I didn’t quite feel like smiling, though.

I kind of agreed with him.

“Ready to move on?” Berger asked his children.

“Father.  While we’re stopped, can you help me switch hands?  Holding one hand over my head is growing troublesome,” Florence said.

“Leave him.  We can make do with the two.”

“I can let go of the strings?”

“Do.”

Florence moved her arm, and the man she was controlling dropped limp to the ground.  She removed the bug and cradled it in her arms.

“How are you managing, Charles?”

“Sore, but if it’s not far, I’ll carry on like this.”

“Good, Charles, good,” Berger said.  He paused.  “Florence.”

“Father?”

“All further games?  You won’t play them with me.”

“Yes, father.”

“And I expect more… art.  Subtlety.  You should come across well whether you’re caught or not.  The brutish way you did what you did, you looked poorly whether you were found out or if you got off scot-free.”

Florence paused, then curtsied again, still cradling the bug as if it were a doll.  “I will, father.”

“Then we’ll forget the whipping so long as you remember this lesson.”

“Yes, father.  Charles won’t be whipped either?”

“No, no he won’t.  But if we don’t hurry, tonight will be bloody all the same.  We’re exposed, and we’ll be exposed for a while yet.  The infection will happen, and when it does, the plague will need to be cut out.  Let’s go to the people best able to treat us.”

“Yes sir,” Florence and Charles said, in near-unison.

Turning, moving back around to his position behind Eric, Professor Berger shot me a final look.  I suspected it was to communicate something, as if he was making it known that he had this situation in hand, and that the manipulation of the children in his care had been effectively turned to his own ends, rather than mine.

I also suspected that he was too busy working with the strings and getting Eric turned around to see that, just off to our side, then behind his back as he, Eric and I led the way, Florence and Charles had reached out for each other’s hands.

They were very different children, but they had achieved a victory here.  Now they celebrated it, clasping hands, squeezing.  Maybe they even walked hand in hand for the moment.

My foot was collected.  Again, I was suspended, held by both Charles’ rebel and the rebel boss, limp as a rag doll.

In this manner, we walked.

“Florence, you wanted to know about Mr. and Mrs. Block,” Berger said.

“Yes, father.”

“I can only speak in generalities.  No particulars.”

“I understand.”

“If Mr. and Mrs. Block were found, it was their bodies.  Maybe written record, but even there, we are careful.  If they or anyone like them were in a position to be found, they would be killed pre-emptively.  I’ve had my turn, once, ensuring this was done.  With luck, you will too.”

The two were silent.

“Nobles represent our best work, our best people.  Yet you know that some of them, despite our best efforts, despite breeding going back to before the Crown Empire was an Empire, and was only one island country in the middle of a place we called Europe… some nobles disappoint.  I know the both of you have met the Baron Richmond.  He would be an example of such a disappointment.”

“Yes father,” was one response.

“Yes uncle,” was another, softer response.

“The Blocks… you could say they’re responsible for the nobles being as noble as they are.  Much like how Florence talked about dressing one way, putting on makeup, learning manners, Mr. and Mrs. Block were among those responsible for one stage in the noble’s development.  They are in a unique position to know just how many disappointing individuals there are that the public never sees, do you understand?  The faces and natures of nobles who never properly become nobles in the public eye.”

The two children remained quiet, clearly taken aback with the gravity of what was being said.

“Pride, reputation, and status are things that build on each other, and we have built very tall towers in the last century.  At the top, the towers are supported by people like my wife.  Her family, and families like hers.  At the bottom, the towers are supported by a firm foundation, given food and stone and all the resources they need by a people who look up and respect the height and fortitude of those constructions.  But when an empire grows to a certain measure of strength, it cannot be torn down by guns, weapons, or warbeasts.  Only by division from within, a severe crisis of faith.

I felt Eric’s hand tighten on my throat, only by a little.  The regular breath my body was providing became insufficient.

“This would be such a crisis, Father?”

I hadn’t been taking very deep breaths before, so the strangulation was going further than it might otherwise.  I couldn’t even defend myself.

“Who can say?  But I think the Crown Empire would rather risk a thousand wars over one test of that faith and pride.  Because they can win a thousand wars, but one such test?  We don’t know.”

My vision was going dark.

“As you grow older, and as you progress in the Academies… and you will progress to places of status in some of the best Academies, because you will have no other choice now that you know what I’ve told you… some of the details I’ve shared will take on new light.  You’ll keep silent throughout, even to each other.  If you must speak of it, you’ll speak of it only to me.  I will be keeping a closer eye on you as you grow up, and at the slightest hint that you’ve abused this knowledge I’ve just given you, it won’t be a whipping.  It’ll be your throats.”

With that, the hand tightened.

“I understand, father,” Florence said.

“Yes, uncle,” Charles said.

He’d told them for a reason, I knew.

This wasn’t too much confidence, given to the children.  He’d recognized what was at play.  I’d worked my way into their confidence, I’d taken one side on the divide they felt between them and their father figure.  I’d posed it as a game.

He’d made this real, and he’d disarmed me in the process.

I’d had a plan, and he was countering it.  He might have countered it outright.

The hand relaxed its grip on my throat.  It shifted, though I wasn’t sure how, but it must’ve been holding a different part of me, like my collarbone or shoulder.

But my breaths were too regular.  I couldn’t gasp for more, and so the regular mouthfuls were insufficient.  Blood pounded in my head, hard, throbbing in my eye sockets and ears.

Even though I was no longer being strangled, the aftermath of it wasn’t much better.  Rather than try to conserve the oxygen that remained, my brain and body seemed to give up.  Everything went all light and fluttery.

I need to be awake and aware in case Jessie helps, I thought.

If Jessie helps.

I could see the street out of one corner of my eye.  I could see the red slash of plague across snow, not all that far away.  With each pulse of blood in my eyes and ears, the plague seemed to lunge outward by ten strides, then by twenty.  I closed my eyes and the darkness of it hurt, the fluttery nature of things threatened to sweep me off into sleep.  I opened my eyes again.

Even with Wyvern giving me some control over the reins, I was fighting an uphill battle.

I saw Mary, standing in the shadows with a lacy red dress and a black jacket, and I felt a pang of empathy.  She watched without any emotion as I was carried off.

I knew why I was thinking of Mary.  She’d been a victim of the puppeteer, before we’d called him Mr. Percy.  Now I was the one with his strings cut.

Was this the way it went?  I’d brought her into the fold, and it had been my first true free act as a member of the Lambs.

Stories often ended as a reflection of how they began.  To start as a baby that shit itself, to become a child, a man, an old man, and then an invalid who shit himself.

Freeing a puppet at the start, becoming one at the end.

I almost wanted to faint, I realized, rather than to be left alone with my thoughts.  There wasn’t much I could do to help it along.  The darkness that had crept in receded, as did the bright spots.  I was left only with a tuning-fork hum in one ear and a pounding headache.

“Don’t shoot!” Berger called out.  “Professor approaching.”

“Professor Berger?” was the answer.  I could hear the surprise.

“The one and the same,” Berger said.  “I brought a fugitive and the leader of the rebel faction, wouldn’t you believe?  Hopefully it’ll do something to make up for the trouble I’ve caused the Crown.”

Things hadn’t been supposed to get this far.  We couldn’t let Berger know we knew, and then give him the chance to talk to others.  Jessie was supposed to intervene along the way.  To blind Berger.

“This way,” the soldier said.  I wished it was a voice I recognized, but it wasn’t.

They carried me past the barricade, and deeper into the camp.  I wished it was a trick, part of Jessie’s ruse.  It was a real Academy fortification, one with hundreds of soldiers.  People reacted to Berger with surprise and pleasure.  They hadn’t expected to get the man they’d been sent in to retrieve, not really.

The grip on me shifted.  Berger warned soldiers about the bug as they took custody of me.

“Chain him up,” Berger said.  “Again, watch the bug on his back.  The shackles will be redundant with the paralysis, but we can’t be too sure.”

“Where?” a soldier asked.

“Where we can keep an eye on everything,” Berger said.  He indicated a seat at a table in the middle of the camp.  “I have matters to discuss with the men in charge.  If you can escort me?”

Mute, unable to move, I was seated on the bench in question.  Shackles bound me to the bench, and I imagined they would have been cold if I could have felt them.  A box was placed next to me so I wouldn’t simply tip over, and I heard orders given to some rookies, who found seats nearby to watch me.

In that manner, a puppet with my strings abandoned, I sat, staring out into the distance at the red slash in the distance, and perhaps with the help of delusion and the powerful imagination Wyvern had gifted me, I imagined I watched it swell and grow visibly over the minutes or the timeless hour I sat there, breathing my regular breaths.

I had company at least.  Mary, Lillian, Evette, Mauer, Gordon, Fray, Helen, Duncan, Ashton.  All took their seats next to me.  Even the new Lambs.  Some sat for longer, some for shorter.  Some talked about nothing in particular, to take my mind off the tuning-fork whistle where the near-unconsciousness had hurt my hearing, and others were silent.

Mary sat at the beginning, and she sat at the end.  She didn’t do any talking, but I pushed my imagination to its limit, and I could imagine that I could feel her hand as she held mine in her lap, her palm and lap warm and the lace of the black dress she wore was soft.

Together, we imagined we watched the plague spread so fast it swept over the city, and we waited.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.09 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I was coming to discover that after two hours or so of exploration, I could find the ends of the tracks that my trains of thought traveled down.  It was possible to continue down those tracks, but things quickly turned into a smoking wreckage if I did.  Past a certain point, there were too many variables to account for, and I started to second guess things I knew I otherwise wouldn’t.

There were animals that needed to keep swimming to keep breathing.  I was in the process of discovering that with my body gone and my mind active, my brain couldn’t breathe, so to speak.

I’d always thought it would be the other way around: my brain failing, my body remaining behind.

I couldn’t turn to studying my environment, because I was trying to maintain too many things at once, and my confidence in my memory was shaken.  Yes, I could make shallow observations about soldiers and doctors who passed through my field of view, but I didn’t want to go into more depth on nobodies and risk that it would push more pertinent information out of my head.  Doubly so when even differentiating the various people in quarantine suits from one another was a task unto itself.  I had identified only a few targets to study, and they were only in my field of view for fleeting moments.

The cup spilleth over.

Left with my mind idling, my imagination had painted the world I could see.  Plague spread, and it knit together into trees.  The city became wilderness, but it was a wilderness of red leaves, of vines that resembled veins, where bodies were cocooned in plague, moving only periodically.  The entire cast of characters in my head was present, quietly watching as the world was swallowed up.

The wind was constant, strong, and, I’d realized, it blew constantly toward the plague.  We were upwind of it, which was likely why this particular site had been chosen.  Weather, geography, and safety from disease.

I was pretty sure my clothes were soaked through.  Even though they were weather resistant, resistance didn’t mean immunity.  I wasn’t entirely sure if it was the cold or the bug that clung to me that made my breathing more laborious than it had been.  When my breathing wasn’t in my control and it was all I had to measure time by, I’d become acutely aware of the gradual decline.

My throat, too, was slowly unfreezing.  It was a different thing altogether from the change in breathing, but the sum total was that my hope was diminishing, not growing.

It was in this state that Berger found me.  He wore a quarantine suit, now, as did the children in his company.  Berger’s suit was black, it fit his body better, and had a kind of coat built in, as if to convey the same sort of silhouette that he might’ve had on any other day.

He was also covered in the vein-like growths that came with plague having matured.  It crawled over top of him, and it crawled beneath his suit, the growths digging beneath an eyelid and into an eye socket, threatening to dislodge the orb.

I blinked, very carefully, and the image disappeared – Berger was plague free.  I blinked again, and the imagined plague returned.

I was careful to keep the plague situated where it was most effective.  It dug into the spots on his suit nearest the vitals, nearest gaps and other weak points.  The breathing tube and bladder were bad cases.  A way to track the places I would strike at, given the chance.

Eric was gone, I noted.  I discarded a plan.

“Well, don’t you look miserable?” Berger said.

I looked up at him, gazed past the lenses of his mask and at his plague-afflicted face, and I wore the best smile I was able.

He set his plague-afflicted medical bag on the bench next to me, leaving it closed and instead reaching for a front compartment, rummaging.

“No need to put on a brave face, Sylvester, I know you aren’t happy,” he said.  “As high as my expectations are for Charles and Florence, my wife, staff and peers, for you, even, I do have some desire to minimize suffering.”

I glanced at his children.  I tried to read the eyes behind the tinted lenses of the quarantine suits.

“Now, I’m going to check you’re doing alright.  I know you have limited movement of your head and neck.  You might be tempted to use that limited movement to hurt yourself and try to eke out an advantage,” Berger said.

He pulled his hand from the bag, revealing a thermometer, long and narrow.

“If you do aim to hurt yourself, rest assured that you’ll perforate your eardrum.  You’ll bleed.  The blood will travel down your eustachean tube and down your throat to your stomach.  On ingesting enough blood, the stomach will rebel.  You’ll vomit, or try to, and you’ll promptly aspirate your own stomach contents, given the paralysis.”

I looked at the thermometer.

“So please don’t impale yourself on my thermometer.  I won’t do a thing to keep you alive, and the eventual death will be an ignoble one.  If your friends are watching from a distance, then they’ll feel the need to come save you, and that will be bad for them.”

I moved my head, and I made my ear more available to him.  He placed the thermometer in the canal.

“I’m left in a puzzling spot,” Berger said.  “What to do when handling a child experiment who has been made as devious as is possible, and what to do with his friends?  I have every reason to suspect that if we were to take the fastest route out of the city, we would be intercepted or interrupted.  If we strike out at them, we’ll be flanked.  I’ve spent a significant portion of the last two hours arguing with the generals in charge about why we shouldn’t take pre-emptive action.”

He made a small amused sound.

“Now I find myself confiding in you, Sylvester, as you’re one of the rare few who would truly understand this tactical dilemma I find myself facing.”

I raised one eyebrow.

“Mm hmm,” Berger said.  “It’s ironic.  I’ve explained to Charles and Florence, continuing their education, but while the idea no doubt found its way to their heads, I’m not sure they’ve digested it.  I wouldn’t say they don’t trust me when I say it-”

I might, I thought.

“-but I do think some lessons have to be taught through hands-on experience.  If the two generals lose patience and insist on an exit or a pre-emptive strike, then I suspect we’d see it unfold to your benefit, Sylvester.  We’d act, only to be confounded, interrupted, hamstrung, while a valiant effort to rescue you would no doubt occur.  Florence and Charles would get a lesson.”

“There’s no need for the lesson, uncle,” Charles said.  “I believe you.”

“I’m glad for that,” Berger said.  “But I worry it’s a superficial belief, Charles.  Seeing the victory or the loss would make it that much easier for you to imagine and conceptualize similar situations for yourself.  What does a win for our side look like?  A defeat?  What does it feel like in the pit of your stomach?  You two could easily take away something from watching people die and experiencing the weight of those deaths, enemy or friendly.”

I already knew Berger wasn’t terribly concerned about the deaths of others in a humanitarian sense.  I imagined a bit of plague growing over his his heart and dying for a lack of anything to eat.

He went on, “If it comes to that, Sylvester, I expect the losses to be lopsided, on your side or mine.”

I gave him my best nod.

“Let’s see that temperature.  A body temperature of twenty-five degrees.  That won’t do.  Let’s feel your ears…”

He touched the flat of my ear.

“…nose, and extremities.”

His fingers momentarily laid across the end of my nose, and I didn’t feel anything as he manipulated my fingertips.

“We’ll need to warm you up.  Charles, if you’d go to the medical tent and fetch some blankets?  We’ll cover him.  One of the heaters, too.  Recruit someone with my say-so if you don’t think you can bring it all.”

“Yes, uncle.”

Charles hurried off, clomping around in a quarantine suit that was too large for him.

Berger mused for a second, and then he said, “I’m not a strategist or tactician, but the man I serve was an ardent one, and I am someone who craves learning.  I made use of the opportunity to absorb and observe, and now I’m forced to put the ideas into practice.  As for this situation…”

“He who makes the first move loses, father?” Florence asked.

“Something like that, something like that,” Berger said.  “In practice, it’s rarely that simple.  Think in terms of oblique angles and feints.  Sylvester’s friends will start with attacks that cannot be sourced, to begin with.  They’ll aim to frustrate, deny, and distract.  Their hope is that by the time they do something more overt, the generals and soldiers will be restless enough that they snap at the bait.”

He made a ‘tsk’ sound, then he bent down, and he brought his face level to mine.

I could control my expression.  I could use my eyes, I could move my lips.  That left me the conundrum, what face did I pose to Berger?  I could allow myself to break, to betray doubt and fear, and I could do the opposite, and pose a brave expression that looked supremely confident in the status quo.

I deemed that it was the latter that would get me the results I wanted.  I wore an expression of easy confidence, impervious and unbothered.  As if I still expected to win.

“Your breathing…” Berger observed.  He frowned a little, and then he reached back behind me.  The head of the bug moved against my neck, and sensations shot down the trunk of my body and down my limbs as its grip momentarily loosened.

He kept his hand there for several seconds before removing it.

Then he pressed the back of a gloved hand to my throat, hard enough to press the knot at the front of my throat back into my windpipe.

He kept his hand there, and for a long while, I thought he was going to strangle me to near-unconsciousness as he’d done before.

“You might have bought yourself an advantage if you’d studied the Academy science,” Berger said.  “You would’ve known that I would know what to look for, here.  Even with your natural resistances and immunities, you shouldn’t be recovering this quickly.  You’ve gained the ability to speak, haven’t you?”

I didn’t respond, staying mute.  I had regained my voice, I was pretty sure, but my ability to study my immediate surroundings was a limited one.  I couldn’t have been sure that there wasn’t anyone in earshot, standing a few feet behind me when I tried my hand at vocalizing.

“That tells us, Florence, that he’s hiding things,” Berger said.

“It’s only fair,” she said.  “He called it a game, when he was talking to Charles.  By the rules of this game, he’s allowed to do what he needs to do to come out ahead.”

“He is, but a better play would have been to reveal he could’ve spoken.  He could have eked out a small advantage, surprised me, said something before I thought to shut him up.”

I opened my mouth.  Berger clapped a gloved hand over it.

“The right words could have piqued my curiosity, nettled me, or achieved something with you.  Past tense.  The moment has passed, Sylvester.”

Berger shifted position.  He reached back with the other hand and touched the bug.

With that position, he couldn’t see my face.  I glanced at Florence and rolled my eyes.

Berger spoke, “You shouldn’t have had this effect on the parasite riding you.  Not this quickly.  Your Wyvern formula must be different from the standard… or it’s an older, harsher formulation.”

“Effect?” Florence asked.

“He’s killing it.  It’s latched onto his neck here, see?  And its digits are inserted here, on either side of the gap between the second and third rungs of the spine?  Trace chemicals in his sweat, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid are finding its way into the air passages and stomach of the pupa ludibrius.  It’s dying as we speak, and as it does, it’s losing its grip on his breathing.”

“What happens then?”

“It dies, and it takes him with it.”

Florence turned her masked face toward me.  She watched me.  I rolled my eyes again, raising them skyward and rocking them back and forth, as if bored.

I was nervous, though.  There weren’t many openings or opportunities.

“Here Charles is,” Berger observed.

Charles arrived, carrying a stack of folded blankets.  They were heavy, military issue, and they smelled like horse.

Berger took the blankets, and he unfurled them, before placing them over me, so the corners fell over my shoulders.  He leaned me forward, then placed another behind me.

“Ah,” I started, aiming for an ‘I’.

Berger caught my face with one hand, and pushed me to one side.  I was sitting on a bench set by a table, and my face was shoved off to one side, striking the surface of the table.

He held me there, face in snow and wet, blankets slipping off of me, for several long seconds.

“Quiet,” Berger said.

I would have liked to sigh, but I couldn’t.

He released me, and I didn’t try to speak again.

Opening his medical bag, he withdrew another bug.  Eric’s, I supposed.  He moved around behind me, leaving my face still pressed against the bench, and began, I presumed, removing the first bug.

“This will have to do until we’re out of the city,” he said.  “It might be that I can revive the first pupa ludabris or devise another method of rendering you more or less harmless.”

The paralysis no longer gripped me.  I had nothing below the neck but a morass of pins and needles I couldn’t even make out as a human shape.  But I’d planned for this.  I’d primed my brain while I sat here in the wet and cold.  I’d drawn up an image of my body, complete with muscle memory, and now I went to great lengths to map the strange prickling sensations to the movements of my body.

I jerked, and then moved an arm beneath the blanket.

“Hold him,” Berger instructed.

Charles and Florence approached.

Desperate, I moved what I could.  It felt less like the movement of a limb, and more as if I were splashing the surface of water, the pinpricks traveling on the tops of waves.  The movements of fingers were painful, but still I tried to make sense of the movements.

The two children seized my arms, pinning them against my sides.  In only the last second, I was able to move my right hand.  I couldn’t be sure, but I was left to believe that it wound up folded against the pelvic hollow, between where my leg met my hip and my groin, just at my beltline.

Every sensation was a thousand pinpricks, sharp and alarming.  Given just a bit of time, it dwindled to a mere hundred isolated pricks.

My lockpicks were clipped to my belt, slipped between my pants and my underwear.  Slowly, I went for them, working my fingers, to make my hand crawl.

A layer of blankets protected me, as did the thick gloves my captors wore.  It minimized sensation.

I found my lockpicks, and I set them on my lap.  I began opening the little wallet that held the individual picks-

And my nostrils flared a fraction.

I could smell it.  Smoke.

Berger continued his work for a moment behind my back, caught up in what he was doing.

He would notice.  It was designed to draw notice.  That put me in an awkward spot.

While I still had some marginal control over my hands, I moved my fingers.  My middle finger found itself into a pocket where my rake-bar sat.  A slender and flat bit of metal that formed a zig-zag.  Used to trip the pins of a lock, it was something I’d move back and forth, until the zigs knocked the pins up.  Against cheap locks it was the fastest way to open things, and one of the noiser ones too.

I couldn’t hold onto the picks, and I didn’t want to drop it if the shackles would be a factor.  With that in mind-

I pushed my finger into the pocket, felt the stab of pain and then localized agony as I drove the wiggle-shaped bit of metal into the space between fingernail and finger, as deep as I could get it in the moment.

While my attention was occupied, my focus on keeping my expression straight, Charles noticed the smoke.

“Uncle?” Charles ventured.

Berger stepped around the table, into my field of view.  He held the bug, with a syringe embedded in its back.  “A bad time to distract me, Charles.”

“Smoke.  The soldiers are noticing too.”

Berger looked up, then looked around.  The plague growth on him pulsed, reacting to the movement.

I could only see a small share of the soldiers in the camp, but it was true.  They were looking around, alarmed.  They were also looking upwind.

The camp was placed so the slash of plague through the middle of the city was downwind, and any particles, spores, or whatever else might help the ravage spread wouldn’t be carried this way.  But with the smoke being as pervasive as it was, growing stronger by the moment, it had to have a source further up the road, somewhere behind me.

“Like I said,” Berger observed, “The initial strike is one we can’t trace back to them.  A feint, of sorts, trying to draw away resources and force our hands.  Smoke and fire alarm.  They meet a primal need.”

“What do we do?” Florence asked.

“We carry on,” Berger said.

The smoke was growing thicker by the moment, to the extent that it was becoming clear that the source was not small.  Not by any means.  A building had been set to burn.

“Professor!” a soldier called out.

“I’m busy,” Berger snapped the word.

“Professor, we’re being urged to leave.  We have to vacate the area.”

“As soon as I’m done.  They want to force our hands, and they might well have timed the fire to interrupt this very procedure I’m doing.”

“It could well be, sir, they started the fire using oil.  It went up quickly – we had men guarding the building and we didn’t even see them come or go.”

“Of course,” Berger said.  “We’ll go as soon as I’m done.  Anything else will play into their hands.”

“If you insist, sir, but-”

“Hold on,” Berger interrupted.  “Our men were guarding the building?”

“Yes sir.”

“The grocery store?”

“Uh, yes sir.”

“With the bodies still piled within?”

“Yes sir.  That’s why we were thinking we should vacate.”

Berger stopped, remaining where he was.  Then, decision made, he turned to the man, “I agree.  Evacuate.  I’ll see to the last of this and be with you in a matter of heartbeats.”

The soldier nodded, then hurried off at a run.  Everywhere, officers were ordering their men, and everything moved in its logical manner.

“Why?” Florence asked.  “Why evacuate?”

“The attack on the train station and the rebellion’s earlier attempt at seizing it saw casualties.  Some were afflicted with ravage.  They stacked the bodies, afflicted and not, within the grocery store.  As efficient as our masks are, they have their limitations.  Burning the ravage spreads it.  Smoke carries it.  If we remain too long, the masks will fail.  Our enemy knows this.”

“Then-” Charles started.  He didn’t know what to say.  The smoke was getting thicker, filling the street.

“We leave,” Berger said.  “And, as I haven’t been given the time to finish with Sylvester, I’m afraid we’re forced to cut our losses.  We’ll make do without our bait to set out in front of the enemy’s nose.”

I felt the claws of the bug latch onto my back, a sharp sensation among the latest wave of pins and needles.

I felt all sensation drop away from my body.  Pins and needles, pain, cold.  My body ceased to be.  No warmth, no cold.  Only oblivion.

His hands tampered with the bug.  I felt, I was pretty sure, the fingers finding the little rings with the silken strings attached.

“Berger,” I said.

Again, his hand covered my mouth.  Gloved fingers dug into my cheek, hard and fierce.

Standing as close as he was to me, he was able to murmur in my ears.  “With luck, your allies are watching you, and my lesson will find its way to them.  With better luck, they’ll try to save you, and they’ll find it’s impossible.”

He pulled the middle string.

The rush of cold that the mandibles had been pumping into my neck became something else, a vomit of heat.  The sensation of nothing became everything.  Every nerve ending flared to life, and then burned hotter.  Heat and burning was the first sensation, followed by a wrenching.  My entire body contorted as some materials did on an open fire, twisting up, straining and crumpling.  Every joint bent to an extreme, too open or too closed.

Parts of me popped, like water mingling with oil in a pot, and each pop was followed with an icy coldness, running alongside the searing heat.  Every part of me was impaled with a hot poker or an icicle of impossible coldness.  I felt parts of me tear open.  I couldn’t tell if the wet sensation was blood from skin tearing itself apart or if it was simply an illusion.

Pain and I were old, old friends.  Few knew pain to the extent I’d come to know her during my appointments.  All the same, we’d never been so intimately acquainted.

I was able to pull away from it.  I’d always been able to, to some extent.  It was an artificial construction, to disassociate from the pain.  It never made the pain less, exactly.  It did help to make the thought process clearer in the midst of it.

I’d never quite felt like the journey back would be so difficult as it felt it might be now.

Berger removed the bug, so what was done couldn’t be undone.

“You’ll feel compelled to try to eke in small breaths,” he told me, as he stood over me.  “You could potentially stay alive for some time by doing that.  Don’t do that to yourself.”

There was a long pause.  I twitched and convulsed, sweat rolling off the side of my head and into my eye socket, which was already wet with involuntary tears.

“I did say I have some desire to minimize suffering,” Berger said.  I could see him now, as he walked out in front of me.  Smoke rolled past him, and with every trace of smoke that touched him, the plague on him grew, until he was little more than a tower of the ravage.

The tower turned away, and led its children in the direction of the evacuating soldiers.  He called out orders, and men answered in voices hollowed out by the masks and breathing apparatuses they wore.

Movement wasn’t possible, nor was speech.

One by one, the Lambs joined me.  Mary, Lillian, Helen, Jamie, Jessie, Gordon, Hubris.  All of the little Lambs hung back.  Fray, Evette, and Mauer had the decency to stay away.  All were dressed in dark colors.  Mary in a black dress with black lace, ribbons in her hair.  Lillian in a black coat, purely by accident.

I wanted to round my thoughts together and come up with a parting message, if only to phantoms, but I couldn’t.  I could disassociate, but I couldn’t operate on that level.  I was left with only sentiment.

The Professor was right.  Without the bug taking over, I could manage a degree of breathing.  It was a torturous process, straining as if I was lifting my own body weight, but to simply make my airway stay open, straining just as hard to draw in or push out a breath, making sure my jaw wasn’t clenched and my mouth screwed shut.  When I failed on that last part, I snorted mucus out of my nose, or, worse, I snorted it back, and then the next few attempts were made more difficult by faint choking.

My old friend and I made a game of it.  To make it happen one more time.  One breath in, one breath out.

A series of herculean efforts to draw in a breath, to release it, and I made a game of it, betting against her, against this personification of pain that sat just out of sight, betting on myself, then betting against myself, predicting if a convulsion elsewhere would trip me up and complicate this particular round.

Manage it five more times, I told myself, and I’d exert the effort and focus necessary to imagine Mary stroking my hair.

Five times after that, the sound of Helen laughing.

After that, and I was sure to order it so a lot of the better things came later, I chose the feeling of Lillian lying close to me, clinging to me.

I continued the bets.  I did the math with the chips to further distance myself from it all, even as every attempt got harder.  As the chip count grew, I pushed thoughts out of my head, as to whether intentionally failing would be a reward for myself or the cost of losing my last chip.

Fluids were accumulating.  Mucus.  Spittle I wasn’t swallowing or forcing out through my teeth.  I was drenched in sweat.

Five successful rounds of breathing, and this time it was Gordon’s voice.  I couldn’t gather the words, but I imagined him cussing me out.  Being infuriating, like he could sometimes be.  Because it pissed me off, and I needed to be pissed off to push forward, just as I needed small moments of warmth to grope for.

Five more breaths and… and then Jamie, sitting on his bed, mentioning details of the day that I’d forgotten as he scribbled in that notebook of his.

Then Jessie, after that.

I wasn’t sure what to ask Jessie for.  I wasn’t even sure I was keeping count properly anymore.  I might have been cheating myself.

I willed the question, and a voice answered.

“Florence.”

Not Jessie.

“It’s dangerous here, Florence.  The smoke.”

“Yeah.”

I closed my eyes.  That had been five breaths.  Jamie, sitting on his bed.  While I pieced the scene together, I focused on doing what I needed my body to do, to breathe the next set of breaths, and I knew that I was focusing more on properly imagining Jamie than I was on the breathing.

“Why are you back here?”

I know, I thought.

Not that I could do or say anything to that effect in the here and now.

“I don’t know,” Florence said.

“That’s not a very good reason,” Charles said.

“He… Sylvester whispered something to me, earlier.  He said that he could pull a trick, with our cooperation, and I’d learn more about father in five minutes than I’d learn about him in five years.  I almost got my hopes up.”

“He’s good at playing that game.  Sylvester is, I mean.  Dad too, but it’s different.  Stricter.”

I was no longer lying in the cold street.  I was on the floor in my room, a twelve year old Jamie sitting on his bed, taking notes on the conversation.

He’d never been the most emotive little fellow, but I’d always felt like he’d really loved those times after lights-out, when he wrote by candlelight and it was just the two of us.  They might have been his favorite times.

It was hard to juggle the things I needed to juggle.  Breathing, plotting what I would do with Jessie when her turn came up, in three more breaths.  Paying attention to the two children.

In.  Out.

Two more breaths.

Jamie’s pen scritched on paper.  He’d never been so fond of pencils, but he’d use them when he had to.  He preferred permanence.

In.  Out.

One more breath.

“I want to know,” Florence said.

“Uncle would never forgive you.”

“I need to know,” Florence said.

My vision was disturbed as my head moved.  The pain flared anew, as if each individual kind of pain took on a new and fresh flavor in wake of the movement.

Claws latched onto my spine.  Florence held a bug, and she set it in place.

From the timing of the breath, I suspected it was the drugged, poison-resistant bug I’d been given, discarded and retrieved by her.  I imagined her carrying it about, cradling it as if it were a small dog, as she’d done with one of the others.

The pain stopped, and the relief was so profound it dashed all of the individual illusions and sounds I’d nested around myself to pieces.

“You had something in mind, didn’t you, Sylvester?” Florence asked.

My blood rushed in my ears.  The relief was so profound that I felt transcendant.

“I’ll pull the string,” she said.  “I don’t have a lot of patience.  What were you going to do, before my father beat you?”

I managed a short laugh, as I gasped for breath and tried to center myself.  I could barely see.  I was low to the ground, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but the smoke was making my eyes water.

“Okay, I’m going to pull the string again now,” she said.

“Florence,” I said.  “The plan I had in mind when I told you all that… it’s still in place.”

“Hm?” she made a sound, her voice hollow from behind her mask, echoing down the long air-tube.

“Still in place.  I told you, a time would come.  I’d hold the strings.  I’d need your cooperation, and I’d give you what you want most in the world.”

“You told me you’d tell me more about my father in five minutes than-”

“-than-” I started, only to cough.  I might have aspirated something.  My voice was rough as I finished, “Than you’d get in five years.  Absolutely.  I stand corrected.  All the cooperation I need… is just for you to remove the bug from my neck and give me forty-five seconds.  I’ll guarantee you the answer you desire.”

“And if I don’t?” she asked, imperious.

I saw Mary standing behind her, all dressed in black.

I only gave Florence a small smile, and I waited.  I enjoyed the transcendant relief, and I gathered my thoughts.

“You have thirty seconds,” she said.  “And that includes the time it takes to get control of your body back.”

“I know,” I said, as the bug came free of my neck.  Sensation flooded back into my body, in an inarticulate tide of stabbing and prickling sensations.  “Charles?”

The lockpick set had been attached to my hand, one pick having been driven under one fingernail.  In my convulsions, it had come free, the fingernail pried off.  Barely in control of my hand, I reached between my body and the road.

“What is it?” Charles asked, wary.

“Would you please do us a favor and start counting aloud for us?” I asked him.

“Ah.  Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

I’d asked him and chosen a wordy way of asking the question to buy myself seconds.  I found the lockpick set, and found a pick.  I moved, convulsing, and fumbled to draw the picks free.

I’d maintained something of a grip on the ability to move despite the pins-and-needles distorted sensations of body, through everything.  Now I worked those same feelings with numb hands to manipulate the picks.

I had to trust these shackles were like ones I’d seen before.  Standard issue.

I coughed at the smoke and the fluids that had gone down the wrong way.

“Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…”

The Lambs in black watched as I worked.  Gordon, who had taught me the lockpicking techniques and then retaught them as I’d allowed myself to forget them, was watching, his expression stern.

“There’s a simple answer about Berger that’s been eluding you,” I said.  “One that I’m prepared to answer in a moment.  Do keep count, Charles.”

“You’re stalling,” Florence said.

“Twelve, eleven…”

“If I were stalling, I wouldn’t be giving you the answer you want well before count’s up,” I said.

I rose to my feet, staggering a little as I did so.

Then, still staggering, only intentionally this time, I lurched a little in her direction.

The smoke wafted toward us, a cloud thicker than many of the others we’d endured.  I lunged.  I connected the shackle I’d undone to Florence’s air hose.

For a moment, it looked like she’d release the bug she held.  It would leap onto me.  It would paralyze me, and it would all be over.

That moment passed.  Frozen, Florence held the bug firm.  She’d realized very quickly that if I tumbled to the ground, paralyzed, my shackled arm would fall, and it would take her air hose with it.  We were in the midst of smoke and plague.  It would doom her.

“Florence,” Charles said, only belatedly realizing what had happened.

“Just a stupid little ruse?  Taking me hostage?” she asked.  “I’m disappointed.”

“Not at all,” I said.  I drew closer to her, and I wound the chain loosely around her neck, so I stood with her in front of me, the chain binding us together.  “All is still going exactly as promised.  Give me the bug, now.”

She hesitated.

“Give me the bug,” I said, firmly.

She passed it to me, and I gripped it firm.  As my shaking hand seized it, it clutched at me, hook-limbs digging into my flesh.

I held it in both hands, and as if I were tearing into one of the bugs or sea-bugs they sold in the markets as dinners for the poor, I twisted it in half.

“Now we’re going to see how much your father loves you,” I said, my voice soft.

Florence stiffened.

I looked over at Charles, obscured in smoke.  The fire had spread to a good ten buildings further down the street.

“Is that a threat?” Charles asked.

“No, Charles,” I said.  “It’s the fulfillment of my promise.  In the span of five minutes, we’re most definitely going to answer that question.”

It had, in fact, been the plan from the moment I’d proposed the deal to Florence.  I would find a way to take one or the other hostage, and by taking them, I would secure Berger, in the short term or the long.

Getting Florence’s cooperation in freeing me from paralysis had been… a somewhat fitting interpretation of the deal as poised.  In reality, I’d simply hoped for cooperative hostages.

I waited, the smoke flowing around us, wet droplets still finding their way from the sky, drenching us.  My hands shook, my entire body ached as if I’d been wrung out and beaten, and yet my mind felt crystal clear.  I made it be crystal clear.

“Then let’s go,” Florence said.  She said it to Charles as much as she said it to me.

Charles nodded.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.10 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I didn’t have to walk for long before I found the others.  They had been watching from a distance, so I picked a safe direction to move in, the general direction that the fire and smoke were coming from, and I anticipated Jessie and the others moving to meet me there.  It helped that I was slow, by dint of my exhaustion, how cold I was, and the fact that I was managing a hostage.  Two, technically, but only one was actually in chains.

“You had me worried,” Jessie said, as she stepped out from around the corner.  We were close to the train tracks, which were close to the water, in turn.  The burning building was two blocks to our west.

“I had me worried,” I remarked.

Jessie approached me, navigated around my hostage, and wrapped her arms around me.

I returned the hug with my one available arm, wobbled, and found myself leaning heavily on her.  Florence pulled away a bit, unwinding the chain I’d put around her neck, and moved as far away as she was able, to the momentary protests of the broader crowd.

They quieted down when they realized she was still shackled.

“I forgot the signal for ‘distract’.  I’m glad you pieced it together,” I murmured.

“I had to talk it through with the group and play-act it before it clicked.  The conversation was as if you’d said ‘you ignore him’, I said ‘yes’, and then you said ‘no.  you ignore him.'”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m glad you pieced it together.”

She squeezed me harder, then pulled back, her hands supporting me so I wouldn’t tip over.

I ran stiff fingers through my hair.  My fingers weren’t moving well.  I lowered my hands, then examined the backs of them.  “I’ll need help cutting out the plague later.”

“Possibly,” Jessie said, “But not because of the smoke from that building.”

“Hm?” I asked.

“Jessie tricked some people in quarantine suits into moving the bodies out,” Gordon Two said.  “Then we got rid of them and set the building on fire.”

“There’s still a risk,” the Treasurer said.  “But it isn’t nearly as high.”

I nodded.  Berger would put the pieces together soon.

“Are you okay to stand?” Jessie asked.

I checked my balance, then nodded.  I felt like I could move properly or I could think, but not both at once.  The cold and wet had lanced right through every part of me.

As if she’d read my mind, Jessie said, “I brought you dry, clean clothes.  What’s your thought on timing and priorities?”

“We need to get out of here, for one.  I made a promise to my hostages here, to get them to agree to be hostages.  We’ll have to make that the next big thing we do.  After that, we exit.”

“That’s not the whole reason we’re here.  You also have my air hose shackled,” Florence said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “That’s a factor in the hostage-ness, too.  Either way, the noble professor is liable to take action.  We either want to catch him now, or try to wait things out and see if the resources he’d draw on leave.  I prefer the ‘now’.”

“I do too,” Florence said.   “You said you’d give us the answer in five minutes, and we’ve waited long enough.”

“I said I’d give you the answer in the span of five minutes.  I didn’t say it immediately followed your capitulation,” I pointed out.

That didn’t win me any points with her.  I shouldn’t try to be so clever when I was this tired.

“Here.  Give me your shackle, Sy,” Jessie said.  She took my hand and began picking at the lock.  “When I’m done, you can step around the corner.  There will be water, but it’s cold, so don’t go overboard.  Get changed, get cleaned up-”

“Please,” Fang cut in.

Bea jabbed him.

“-and meet back with us,” Jessie said.  “We’ll figure out what we do next after we get that far.”

I nodded.  “I wouldn’t mind warming up.  I’ve moved well past the point where my teeth are chattering and I’m shivering.  I don’t think I have the energy to chatter or shiver.  I’m groggy, too.  Stringing words together is taking mental focus.”

Jessie pressed a thick-gloved hand to my forehead.  I couldn’t feel the warmth of her hand, so I wondered if she could feel how cool I was.

Shirley pushed her way through the crowd and put a hand out.  She wasn’t covered up, still, so the contact was warm.

“Uncle said he was twenty-something degrees,” Charles said.  He was still standing off to one side.

The alarm on the faces of both Shirley and the academy-trained students in our retinue was concerning.  My first instinct was to use it to poke fun at them or tease them, but I didn’t have the energy.

“I don’t freeze to death,” I said.  “I just hibernate, like a reptile.  Because I’m project Wyvern, right?  And wyverns are reptiles.”

“No, not right,” the Treasurer said.

“I’m pretty sure they are,” I said, toying with him.  “But my point stands-”

“It doesn’t,” he said.

“-I’m just sleepy because I’m going into hibernation mode.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s you working your way toward freezing to death,” the Treasurer said.  “You probably shouldn’t be conscious.  Or verbal.”

Jessie seemed unfazed.  “Rudy?  The lamp?”

“I can use Wyvern, alter my mind, force myself to stay awake,” I said.  “Too much to do.”

“It really doesn’t work that way,” the Treasurer said.

“Don’t underestimate the power of the mind,” I said.

“Or the other drugs and treatments we’ve been subjected to,” Jessie said.  “Or faulty thermometers.”

Rudy had fetched us what looked more like a hand-held stove than a lamp.  He handed it to me.

I touched the cast iron exterior, and on verifying the outside was warm but not dangerous to touch, I wrapped my arms around it, hugging it to my body.  Warmth passed into my arms and upper body.

Jessie got the stack of clothes from Gordon Two, then stacked it on top of the stove-lamp.  I pressed it down with my chin to keep it in place.

I swayed in place, feeling the heat radiate from the stove to my chest, while Jessie took my lockpicks and undid my shackle.  She took custody of Florence.

I wasn’t sure it mattered so much.  Florence wasn’t going anywhere, given how things stood.  She’d invested too much, and she wouldn’t get away.

Still, I could read the two children, and even with my thoughts somewhat slushy around the edges, I was aware of how out of their element they were.  I slid all my chips across the table, so to speak, into the area I’d sectioned off for manipulating and influencing people.

For most of their life, their lives had revolved around the expectations of family, with their father and uncle being a major part of that.  It was a lopsided deal.  The expectations went one way.  When push came to shove, Berger never really had to answer to them.  Florence, in her desperate attempt to make sense of this environment, had taken to pushing buttons and pulling strings, rebelling in ways that made human and animal suffer, while offending her father’s sensibilities.

It was a way to get a reaction.  In figuring out what to do to get her to do what I’d needed to do, I’d proven myself, and then made the promise that I could give her a far better reaction.

I didn’t look at anyone in particular as I spoke, “What comes next is that we pose Berger with a choice.  He can have Charles and Florence at the cost of helping us for a little while, or he can walk away and try to get them at a later date.”

“What kind of parent is going to walk away?” the Treasurer asked.

“A lot of us here have parents who would, and I bet a lot of people back at headquarters would say the same,” Rudy said.  “All of us ran off to join the circus because we didn’t have much tying us down.”

There was a pause.  I saw Florence and Charles glancing at each other.  I wasn’t the only one that noticed.

Florence ventured, “I don’t think my father will stay.”

“Right,” I said.  The little mini-stove was helping.  “Listen.  The answer isn’t black and white.  It isn’t ‘does he care about you or not’.  It’s a question of degrees.  But that five minute conversation?  It’s going to be telling, even accounting for his bluffs.”

“I don’t know why I agreed to this,” Florence said.

“You’ll see,” I told her.  “We’ll make this work.”

Florence pursed her lips.  Charles looked like he wanted to say something.

The moment passed, and he remained mute.

“We still need to make that conversation happen,” I said.  “With Berger, ideally alone.”

“We can work that out,” Jessie said.  “I’ve done quite a bit simply by being dressed up like an Academy soldier and handing off the right sort of forged letters.”

I nodded.

I tried thinking through the other key points.  There wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait.  I turned around, then tried to think of how to gracefully break away.

“Do you want any help?” Jessie asked.  She indicated Shirley and herself.

“No.  I’m just going to take a couple of minutes,” I said.

“We’ll be here, or we’ll be close,” she said.

I walked away.

I rounded the corner and found the area that Jessie had no doubt intended for me.  The house had an enclosure off to the side that might have been a stable once, but had been retrofitted to have a stitched horse within.  The horse was still present.

I made my way inside, and walked to the center of the room before setting the clothes and the stove-lamp down.  I put the clothes against the lamp, so they would be warm.

Leaning forward, I rested my arms on the wall, and buried my face against them.

I was so tired.  The missing fingernail smarted.  Breathing hurt, because of cold and smoke.  My skin didn’t feel like my own and the numb cold and disassociation of earlier were big contributors to that.  The brain fog combined with the sheer disconnection from the pain of earlier to make me feel like I was in a dream.

Simply relaxing for a moment made my eyes well up with tears.

I allowed myself one minute like that, getting centered, letting myself feel what I needed to feel.  Twenty or so seconds into that minute, I realized I’d left the door open.  I stood straight, wiped my face, ran my hands through my hair, and went to address that.

As I closed the door, I saw Fray, Ashton, and Helen standing on the other side.  Helen smiled as she saw me.  There was a dangerous edge to Helen, as there always was when she showed up with Fray.  Ashton… well, he was always hard to read, but now he wore more of an expression than I’d ever seen on him.  It was less of an emotionless mask and more of a casual resting expression.

“Hi,” I said.  “Changed out of the black clothes?  What does that represent?”

Helen cocked her head to one side, a less human movement, as if by turning her head one way, she could see me by the right angle and interpret me.  She always liked swaying.  As she did, her pink dress swished back and forth, accenting the curves of her body and the grace of movements that came with a keen and exact awareness of the space she occupied in the world.  Ashton, by contrast, was very still.

“You don’t understand what’s going on in your own head anymore,” Fray said.

“Right this moment, I’m just trying to get through the next few hours.  I’m really looking forward to a warm bed, except dealing with a certain professor has to come first.  I’m just… I’m gonna get changed while I talk to you.”

“Okay,” Helen said.

I disrobed, pulling off the wet jacket, shirt, and pants, before shucking off my underwear.  I raised my pants to my face and sniffed, trying to judge if I’d relieved myself while paralyzed.  They were so sodden I couldn’t even be sure.

I mostly smelled smoke.  I dropped the clothes on the floor, and returned my hands to the stove-lamp, walking around the water barrel in the corner.

“While I sat out there, I realized just how badly I missed you all,” I said.  I reached into the water barrel and hauled out the layer of ice that sat on top of it.  I let it crash to the floor.  “Hearing your laugh helped me out there, more than I could really explain here.”

“Good,” Helen said.  “I’m glad.”

“Are you?  You don’t feel emotion, exactly.  You’re more of a representation of instinct.”

“I am glad,” she said, again, as if to reaffirm her answer.  “And I’m a representation of instinct, I suppose.”

I dipped my hands into freezing water, and used them to wash myself, periodically touching them to the stove to warm them, and touching them to cold spots on my body to fix any parts that felt too cold.

I was straddling a line.  Sanity-wise, and in the care of my body.  I didn’t want to argue with phantasms.

“I don’t think even Jessie knows how close I came to not making it there, and Jessie knows almost everything,” I remarked.

“You should tell her,” Ashton said.

“Thank you, Mr. Stating-the-Obvious,” I said.  “But not now.  Not in earshot of the others.  There are appearances to be maintained.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.

“Appearances.  Clearly,” Fray said, with a raised eyebrow.

Still nude, I performed an elaborate bow, the flourish of my hand just so happening to highlight that which was on full display.

“It’s such a shame that your appointments stunted your growth,” Helen said.  She held her hands behind her back, clearly amused.

“Ha ha so funny,” I said.  “I’m fine, and I’ve still got a few years.  They worried I wouldn’t have any more growth spurts, and look at me now.  I was right.”

“You didn’t grow.  And as I remember it, you were the one who worried you wouldn’t grow.  They were the ones who were closer to right.”

“Semantics,” I said.  I ran wet, freezing hands through my hair, fixing it, and washed my face.  The water droplets that fell to the floor were tinted grey.

“You’re still short for your age,” Ashton said.  “I might even catch up soon, and I’m a lot younger than you.”

“Enough of that,” I said, waving dismissively at them.  I dried off as best as I could with my handkerchief, which amounted to very little, and then pulled on some underwear.  “What was I saying before?”

“I don’t even remember,” Helen said.

More by just touching on the thoughts nearest the surface, I found my way back to the prior topic.  “I couldn’t come up with what I wanted from Jessie, when I was trying to find my way through.  I’m worried that if it had come up and if I hadn’t had a good answer, that would have been it.  I wouldn’t have been able to bring myself to breathe, and… downhill from there, on a very steep slope.”

“You really should keep breathing,” Ashton said.

“Planning to,” I said.  I pulled on the undershirt, then warmed my hands a moment.  “It’s just sometimes things get in the way.”

“Do something nice for Jessie at another time,” Helen said.  “What about a pastry?”

“Ha,” I said.  “Maybe.”

“You know the Lambs miss you too, don’t you?” Helen said.  “It goes both ways.”

“I know,” I said.  “I don’t need the reminders, believe me.  As fond as I am of all of you, it’s really become a bittersweet fondness since I left.  Missing you all, knowing you all probably have mixed feelings where you halfway miss me and halfway just feel really relieved I’m not around pestering you.”

“You never pestered me,” Helen said.  “Not really.”

“Because you terrified me.  I still found ways to get your goat.  Meticulously describing desserts.”

“That wasn’t punishment.  The anticipation is as tasty as the meal.”

“…Conceded,” I said.  “Hm.”

“You never pestered me either,” Ashton said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I regret I wasn’t more on the ball about that, Ash.  For you and the new Lambs both.  I was preoccupied and then I was gone.”

“You did what you had to do,” he said, very diplomatically.

“Still doing it,” I said.  I put on the rest of the clothes, with the jacket being last.

As soon as I had the jacket on, I flipped up the hood, gathered up the stove-lamp and wrapped the jacket around it, so the heat was trapped in the jacket with me.  I stayed like that for a moment, trying to will my body warm.  The cold in my toes was a lot more stubborn, and I wasn’t sure how to amend that, short of standing with my feet on either side of the stove-lamp.

When I opened my eyes and looked up, all three figments were standing in the way of the door.  I felt a kind of danger from them.  Fray was a big part of that.

“So, this is what you were leading up to.  You catch me on a bad day when my mind, heart and body are tapped out, and you just… what?  Promise horrible things if I don’t kowtow to you?”

“A beautiful horrible,” Fray said, touching Helen’s hair, possessive.

“A Helen kind of horrible,” Helen said, amending the statement.

“You’re doing just what Evette did.  You all want your turns, and since you’re the figments of my brain that represent instinct and… I don’t know, common sense?  The senses?  And Fray here represents… absolutely everything going wrong, or conspiracy, or… whatever.  I don’t have the energy to do this.  You’re staging your mutiny, working to push me out?  A very complicated way of my self-preservation instincts saying ‘no more’?”

“Something like that,” Fray said.

“Well, you can go fuck a fistful of nails, Fray!  And you two-”

Helen and Ashton stared me down, unflinching.

“Don’t do the nail thing.  But do leave me alone.  I’m doing too many important things.  Go away.”

“What if I say no?” Helen asked.

“Don’t.  No.  You’re not allowed.  Not today.  I have things I need to square away.”

“Like Jessie.”

“Like a lot of things!  This is just inconvenient.  So scram.  I banish thee, and I refuse to accept you’re going to pull an Evette and say no.  You two will stand aside.  I will it so.  Just this once.”

They exchanged a look.  Helen gestured to Ashton, and then the two of them parted, giving me clear access to the door.  I passed through it.

They didn’t follow me, only watching from the door.

The world was too grey, the plague-vines that crawled across it too bright.  Smoke and rain blurred the edges of the city around me.  It looked like a painting, and the thin layer of ice at the water on the other side of the tracks really helped with that image.  The crust had picked up a coating of rain which hadn’t quite frozen, so it looked liquid, but it also looked very still.

The buildings further down the street were still burning.

The others were taking shelter from the wind, not far from where they’d been.

“Are you alright?” Fang asked.  “Because that-”

Bea elbowed him.

“Stop doing that!” Fang said.  “Your elbow is sharp.  You’ll penetrate my suit, and then I’ll die.”

“Warm?” Jessie asked, speaking over Bea’s response, as if the pair weren’t bickering.

“I used the little stove thing to warm the clothes.  The fresh clothes were a nice thought.  Thank you.”

“I wish I could have done more,” she murmured.

I shook my head.  I reached out, and I gave her hand a squeeze before dropping it.  Then I turned to the others.

The shackle had been undone from Florence’s air hose.  Otis now had Charles by one shoulder, and Archie had Florence.

I gestured to Jessie, outlining the plan.

She nodded.

We started walking, and the others followed, very naturally, our ‘muscle’ managing the hostages.

It was good to walk, to be with my people, my collection of rogues and scoundrels.  We retraced our steps, moving carefully to the fringes of places we’d already been.  The rain pattered down, and the light was fading.

We moved around the circumference of the street where I’d sat for so long.  There weren’t any signs of people.

As we moved back toward the hotel, we spotted the group.  Six squads of soldiers and Berger, with several stitched in tow.  It looked like someone high ranking was with Berger.

“He cares enough to recruit a small army to look for you,” I told Florence.

“He cares about his reputation,” she said.

“Mm,” I said.  “Five minutes haven’t started yet.  You guys want to head down the street?  Get a head start.”

“Head start?” Rudy asked.

“Trust me,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Can do.”

I did like Rudy.  Good fellow.  I wanted to do right by him.  I wanted to do right by a lot of people.

“You should go too,” Jessie said.

“Hm?”

“You’re tired, you’re slow.  Let me.”

“You’re slow in general,” I said.

“Today, you’re slower.  But you did good,” she said.  “Lean on me.  For the next little while, we take care of each other, right?”

I took that in.  Then I exhaled.  I nodded.

I gestured at the others, and I led them a ways away.

As plans went, it was a simple one.

Jessie whistled, loud, and I belatedly realized she’d have had to have removed her mask to do it.  We summoned Berger, and we fled, drawing him out, forcing him and his army to approach the signal.

When he rounded the corner with an army at his back, we weren’t there.  Jessie signaled again.

We repeated the process again.

It’s like training a dog, I thought, with a kind of grim satisfaction.  Want the treat?  Want it?  No, you’re doing it wrong, figure it out!

Seeing Helen and Ashton might have put me in a bit of a mood, like that of a cat playing with its food.  Not that I liked comparing myself to a cat.  Dogs were better.  Other things were even better than dogs.  Birds were bottom-rung, of course.

After we’d gotten settled, seen Berger with his army following, and finished getting our next head start, Jessie waiting behind to be in Berger’s earshot, I found a moment to touch Florence’s shoulder.

“How many times do we do this before he can turn around and go home?  If it’s just that he’s protecting his reputation, couldn’t he just leave, say we were luring him into a clear trap?”

“He might,” she said, as if she really hoped he would.

“Charles?” I asked.

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Sure,” I said.

In the distance, Jessie whistled.

She gestured as she ran to us.  The enemy had split up, to better head us off.

I gestured back.  Silence.

She nodded.

We found a hiding place, perhaps a little too close to the slash of red across the city.  Then we waited.

With Jessie having handled the worst of the running, I volunteered to do the spying.  I climbed a building and edged across the roof until I could see them.  I kept the stove-lamp with me and held it close.

It took perhaps fifteen minutes, but the two army segments convened.  I signaled Jessie, and Jessie whistled.

This time, they didn’t come running after us.

This is the moment of truth.

I kept one eye on Berger’s route back.  He didn’t take it.  No, this time, Berger approached alone.  He walked rather than jogging, rain running down his black quarantine suit with its long coat built in.  I remained where I was so I could watch and see if the army came.  If they did, I could signal the others and escape.

They didn’t come.  I made my way to the ground.  I wanted to be present for this.

Berger approached the group, who had the children hostage.

“Father,” Florence said.  “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said.  “Not when I’m this angry.  It will taint every apology I hear from you in the future.”

She barely seemed mollified, as far as I could tell with the quarantine suit.  Was she happy now?  Was his appearance a show of love that she hadn’t expected?

I walked up behind him.

“Berger,” I said.

“Sylvester,” he said.  With the group in front of him and me to one side, he half-turned and then backed up a ways, so he could keep both me and the group in his field of view.  “She let you go.”

“No,” Jessie said.  “We took her hostage, bug and all.  We watched everything.”

“Somehow, I’m not inclined to believe you.  The simplest answer is often the right one.”

“Then know that every time you doubt her instead of believing the truth, you’ll lose standing in her eyes,” I said.

“Hm,” Berger said.  He sighed.  “So.  I suppose you’ll be wanting the first deal you proposed?  You take me into custody?  I provide what you want, and we go on from there?”

“It gets a little more complicated, because you played that stunt,” I told him.

He spread his arms.  “How complicated?”

“Hey, Rudy,” I said.  “There’s a body in the snow there, isn’t there?”

Rudy looked over at a human-shaped lump of wet snow on the ground.  “Sure.”

“Turn it over so we can see it?” I asked.

He used one foot to pry it off the ground, then kicked it so it lay face-up.

“Sorry, mister,” he told the body.

“You die,” I told Berger.  “And you get your kids.”

“I die?”

I pointed at the corpse.  “That’s you.  Or they’ll think it is.  You give up title, name, reputation, the black coat, the status, dignity, pride, everything.  I get to do what I want with you.  In exchange, the two children are safe.  You can keep them close, or you can let them go.  They’ll go back with the army over there.”

“You’re making my uncle a slave?” Charles asked.  “This is the deal we worked for!?”

“Shush,” I said.  “I’m negotiating.”

“No need to intervene, Charles,” Berger said.  He was holding himself differently now.  It was as if he could feel the weight of all those things I’d talked about, the years leading up to this point in his life, and he was taller for it.

“The alternative,” I said, “Is-”

He raised his hand, silencing me.

I fell silent.

“There are things I can’t betray.  What you talked about, with Mr. and Mrs. Block-”

“It won’t go that far.  But you will betray Crown and Academy, obviously.  We’ll be discreet enough it doesn’t go back to the children.”

He nodded.

“You don’t want to hear the alternative?” I pressed.

“No need,” he said.  “Send them to the soldiers.”

“Father,” Florence said.  “You-”

Go,” he said.  “Tell them I’m dead, as ordered, or I presume these Lambs might actually kill me, to give the Crown less reason to pursue.”

“You presume right,” Jessie said.

“We won’t see you?” Florence asked.

“You would have been at school anyway,” he said.  “And this isn’t up for discussion.  Go.  Attend your schools.  Do me proud, in case I’m allowed to return, because you certainly didn’t make me proud today.”

That seemed to take the wind out of Florence’s sails.  Charles was a little less crestfallen, going by his posture.

I looked at them.  They had their answer.  Their father and uncle was willing to sacrifice himself and his everything for them.

He was still a jerk, but I couldn’t make water into wine.  I spread my arms a little.

The two children left, rather reluctantly.  I, meanwhile, took my heater and cracked it open.  I doused the body in oil.  Rudy had more in his bag.

I reached up and tugged off Berger’s mask, and I put it on the body.  He took it one step further, and he removed his jacket from his quarantine uniform.  We turned the body face-down and laid the jacket over its back, before putting more oil on it.

I lit a match and tossed it.

Jessie drew her pistol and fired it.  Berger’s ‘execution’, and our excuse to get the hell out of this city, which had intentionally been afflicted with plague by sources I still hadn’t riddled out.

We had our tutor, doctor, a shot at project Caterpillar, and a way to refine the plan to use the information about the Block.  We had Shirley and our gang leaders.

Our fortunes in getting out of the city and a full night of cutting away plague would tell if the cost was too high.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.11 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We made our way across the least-bad patch of plague, as the Treasurer and Berger gauged it.  Here, the  shadows of the buildings and the collection of things on the streets contributed to an accumulation of wet snow. The plague crept through the water, tinting it red, and it crept beneath the snow.

Where our boots pressed the snow down and crushed tendrils of the ravage underfoot, we left crimson footprints, no different from any footprints I’d ever made after wading in blood.

“Professor Berger,” the Treasurer spoke.

“Yes?”

“You wrote the articles on radical, division-free in vivo pattern editing, if I remember right?”

“I wrote four out of the five.  I had my hands full when the fifth deadline was approaching, so I had a subordinate write it.  I demoted him and sent him to Alyeska when he missed the point.”

“The point, professor?”

I wanted to slap the Treasurer upside the back of the head for using the title and being all polite.

“What do you think the point was?” Berger countered.

“Being able to inject someone with a pattern change and have it take immediate, drastic effect, without overloading the system or having to load the system and wait for the cells to divide.”

“I’m asking you the point.  Not a summary of the article’s title.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Professor,” the Treasurer said.

“I see.  You brought up the articles for a reason.  Maybe you’ll impress me by saying something interesting about them?”

The Treasurer was silent.

“Or you won’t?” Berger asked, almost imperious.

“I thought it was an interesting, unconventional article.  When things are advancing as concretely as they are these days, we don’t see much theory.  Especially from people with strong reputations.  I thought it was commendable.”

“It wasn’t,” Berger said, sounding exasperated.  “As a matter of fact, I regret writing it, because it was a failed project that has seen endless streams of sycophants and brown-nosers approach me and fail to demonstrate how clever they are.  ”

“Hey now,” I said.

“It’s fine, Sylvester,” the Treasurer said.  I could tell from his tone that it wasn’t.  “I want to hear this.”

“If you’re sure,” I said.  I turned to Berger.  “You’re really not interested in making friends while you’re here, are you?”

“I wouldn’t mind, but I’m selective about who I call a friend,” Berger said.  He exhaled.  “I’ll ask you this-”

I jumped in.  I was sure to match Berger’s tone and even his hand gestures, speaking in sync as he asked, “Why did I write it?”

I got a few glances from the others.  Jessie looked over my way and gave me an annoyed look.  Berger looked even more displeased, which was even better.

“Are you taunting me now?” Berger asked me.

“Predicting you,” I said, “Not taunting.”

“Sylvester did that for a month or two, a few years back, when he was showing off to Mary, who had just joined the Lambs,” Jessie said.  “It was, by all accounts, obscenely annoying.”

“Did I?” I asked.

“You did.”

“Well, it’s not meant to taunt.  Look, Treasurer-”

“I have a name,” the Treasurer said.

“Let it slide,” Gordon Two said.  “Take my word for it, just let it slide.”

I ignored the both of them.  “I’ll explain, so you don’t have to put up with Berger picking at you and tearing you down.  How’s that?  Either you guess what our hostage is driving at and he feels vindicated, or you get it wrong and he gets to condescend to you as he pontificates on his true intent.  So let’s skip all of that, and we’ll approach this discussion from a constructive angle.”

“Really, now,” Berger said.

“Deny the man his fun.  Look, here’s how it goes,” I said.  I cleared my throat, and I did my best to mimic Berger’s speaking style.  I moved my hand, using my finger as a conductor might work with an orchestra, while I explained, “I wrote that paper with a particular intent.  It was an exercise, a riddle I posed to the Academies across the Crown states.  I don’t believe in theory, and I hoped students would challenge me on my points and suggestions and dare to tear my idea to shreds.  I put several clues in the work to get them started.  I hoped and even still hope that a bright mind might appear before me and do just that.  The disappointment is part of why I stopped after writing five of the six-”

“Four of the five,” Jessie corrected.

“-papers,” I finished.  I paused for effect.

“Not wholly wrong,” Berger said.  “I’m frankly pleased you assessed it as a test without even knowing what it is.”

“I assessed you, not the article-whatsit,” I said, before jumping back into Berger-voice, “But wait!  I’m not quite done.  See, the student I demoted was the perfect patsy, he allowed me to avoid facing my own mistakes.  I failed to realize that a riddle that nobody gets isn’t a good riddle, it’s a failure of the teacher, not the student.  I didn’t even have the confidence to see it all through.  Every time a student approaches me about it, it reminds me of my own failings.”

“This is getting more than a little childish,” the professor said.

“For those of you on team Sylvester and Jessie who haven’t had the benefit of dealing with the upper class, that’s polite-talk for ‘I just lost the argument, but fuck you’,” I remarked.

Berger didn’t deign to respond to that.

In retrospect, I might have played it off a little better if I hadn’t had a note of venom in my voice.  I’d been too harsh in tone, too angry.  I was tired.

Snow fell, and the sun was going down, casting the world in shades of pink and gray.  The sun combined with the stones of the street radiating heat were why we were trekking through slushy puddles and not light snow.  On the edges and in the shadows, the snow had settled.  With nighttime, I suspected the city would get a light layering of white.

Glancing back, I could see our steps into the paper-thin layer of white snow were still leaving congealing, crimson footprints.

The plague had found root here and there.  A dead horse was a basis for one outcropping to really flourish, spreading to the nearby tree and houses, a morass of crimson vines.  In another place, bodies had fallen as a group, no doubt shot en masse.  The actual nature of the heap could only be inferred, as snow and vines made what lay beneath hard to identify.

“We should cut back,” Berger said, “Take a detour.  It’s too thick here.”

I looked at the Treasurer- not because I didn’t believe Berger, but I did want to ensure that Berger hadn’t torn down the Treasurer too much.  Showing I cared about his interpretation might be what he needed.

“I agree,” he said.

“Past a certain point, it gets tricky to navigate,” Jessie said.  “I’m trying to think about which streets would be better or worse.”

“Based on what?” Berger asked.

“When I looked over the city from a distance, I could see how it was laid out, just going by rooftop.  I’m thinking about chimneys, which had smoke, which rooftops looked more residential, how narrow the streets were, wind direction…”

She went on.  The Treasurer chimed in, and I didn’t hear him.  My eyes were fixed on one heap of bodies.

With the way the vines and growths flexed and adjusted as they grew, it was hard to tell, but had that been movement?

I broke away from the group, striding forward.

I had to cut away growths to dig for it.

Yeah.  I had seen a small movement that hadn’t been a vine.

Lying beside a stitched horse, vines knitting the horse’s body to hers, was a woman, twenty-five or so.  Her hair had been done in an ‘up’ do and the vines had worked their way into it and pulled it down.  Fine tendrils crawled out of her mouth, nose, and one tear duct, covering much of her face.  If I unfocused my vision, it might have looked like a bad burn.  It was worse.

The small movement hadn’t been her, but was a baby, one that hadn’t been on this earth for a year.  The arm stuck out near her face.  Tendrils had already seized it.  The mother looked up at me.  One eyeball didn’t move, too firmly seized by tendrils, the other tracked me.

She made small pained sounds, then looked in the direction of the baby.

It wasn’t crying.  That was a bad sign.

“Can you talk?” I asked.

Breathing laboriously, she managed a, “Yes.”

“How is the pain?”

“It stops being agony.  Becomes… like I imagine a heart attack to feel… every part of me.  On the brink of death, never given it.  Have to watch her.”

“I saw her hand move,” I said.  I moved more of the tendrils of plague.

“Don’t touch.”

“I’m resistant,” I assured her.

“He is.  Let him help,” Berger said, from behind me.

I cut and moved several more tendrils.  The way they reached out from inside her but didn’t burst forth, it suggested the plague had found an entry point elsewhere.  The plague tended to grow along the skin and outer surfaces of the body, finding their way inside later.

I wanted to think the entry point was the ear closer to the ground.

“Then please,” the woman said.  “Take her.  Take her away from me.  Tell me you can save her, even if it’s a lie.  Let me believe.”

“I don’t even need to lie,” I said.  The man standing behind me?  He’s a professor of the highest caliber.  He has medals and students fawning over his papers, and he’s worked with nobles.  The crowd of younger people you can hear in the background?  Most of them are students of the Academy.  And speaking for myself, I don’t want to boast, but I’ve cut the plague out of dozens of people.”

Her eyes welled up with tears.  The eye with tendrils reaching through the tear duct produced a pink tear, the other eye was clear.

“I don’t think your kid could find better hands,” I said.

She tried to nod and failed – her head was too firmly rooted into place.

“Please,” she said.

Cutting the infant free was a task.  The mother had pressed down on top of the child, her arms under it, her body shielding it from the weather.  In a sense, the mother was the cave and shelter for the child, but the shelter was now the problem, a kind of inverse-womb that we had to extricate the child from.

“Not many people alive on this street,” I said.

“People got scared, they didn’t listen to orders…  I was on the sidelines, and I thought I was safe.  Rebels, Crown, and my neighbors all got caught up…  I’m not even sure who was shooting at who or if it was all sides shooting at each other.  My horse got shot and fell on my leg.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It manifested in and around the wound?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it does,” Berger said, behind me.  “It blooms in and around blood that’s exposed to air.”

“I don’t think you can save me,” the woman said.

“No,” Berger said.  “I’m very talented, and I can’t save you.  I doubt Sylvester can either.”

She seemed to take that as fact.  She’d come to terms with her death already.

“I can give you a shot,” Berger said.  “You’ll drift to sleep.  For a moment before you do, you’ll be aware, but you won’t feel any pain.”

“Help her first…  Save your medicines for her and people like her.”

I kept cutting, doing what I could to get the child free.  I was now at the process where I needed to extricate her without harming her, and that wasn’t easy, given the way she’d been half-crushed beneath her mother.

“We don’t need medication for her.  Only time, patience, and a steady hand with the scalpel.  She’ll have scars, but she’ll live,” Berger said.

Retrieving the child, I handed her off to Berger.

“What’s her name?” I asked the woman.

“You name her,” the woman said.  “I can’t- I-”

She winced.  Old pain had come rushing back, or the cutting I’d done was making the vines move, which was being felt throughout her body.

“It wouldn’t be right,” I said.  “I’m an orphan, and I can assure you, it’ll make a world of difference if there’s something of yours that she can carry with her.”

“Name her,” the woman insisted, with a dogged air that only the dying and doomed could manage.  “Put something of yourself into her… and I can believe you’ll try harder… like any parent learns to do, digging deep into themselves for that last… last reserve of strength.”

“I’ll have you know I’ve fought monsters and I’ve been tortured, and I’ve endured a long winter in the company of the plague, on the other end of the Crown States.  If I wasn’t capable of giving my all and a little more, I wouldn’t be here in front of you.  It’s fine,” I said.  “The child can keep the name you gave it.”

“It’s my dying wish,” the woman said.

“Too bad,” I said.  “Tell me her real name.”

The woman stared at me, stubborn, and for a second, I thought she’d refuse.

She took another tack, glancing up at Berger.  “He called you… her name is Sylvia.”

“I think your opponent wins this time around,” Berger said, from behind me.

I didn’t have an answer to that.  More to the point, the woman looked almost at peace, and I couldn’t bring myself to disturb that.

He touched my shoulder, and I flinched.

It was the syringe.

I slipped it into the woman’s neck, and I pressed the plunger down and in.

The woman spoke, and her voice was inaudible.  It was soft because she knew what was happening, not because the drug was already taking effect, I was almost positive.  I only made out the latter three-quarters.  “…the Lord King of the Crown Empire, for arming you with knowledge and talents and putting you in front of me and Sylvia…”

This time, as her lips moved, the words weren’t there.

There was no moment of lucidity.  The whole-body relief came after the spark was extinguished, and the tendrils immediately set to pulling at the body, drawing it further in.  The effort she’d put into staying in place and trying not to move no longer held.

“Tell me the Crown didn’t make this plague,” I said.

“The Crown didn’t do this,” Berger said.

“Would they?  Have they ever?”

“Very few things in this world are quite so bad as this,” Berger said.

“But there have been some?”

“There have.  There have been accidents that were as bad or worse, but they were just that.  Accidents.  We don’t know what this is.”

“Do you know who spread it?” I asked.  “Here?  It looked like it came about artificially this time.  Something that was encouraged to happen.  Do you know?”

“That is a very easy question to ask, and it is very difficult to answer.”

“That’s a yes?”

“I have suspicions.  And when we are free and clear of this, we can have a discussion and you can entertain those same suspicions.  But it’s far more complicated than just saying one or several names.  Things have to be explained.”

“Alright,” I said.

“The systemic petechiae… this child is beyond saving, Sylvester.”

I continued kneeling by the woman, my back to Berger and Sylvia.  “I know.  I’ve seen a lot of plague victims.  You know that.  More than most.  Give Sylvia her syringe.”

“Already done.  It’ll just be one moment.”

“Good,” I said.

A moment passed.  Berger gave no signal.  I wasn’t too worried.  My team was just a short distance away, and Berger had nowhere to run that wasn’t deeper into the plague.

“In another world, if we had been able to save Sylvia there, if my allegiances lay elsewhere, would she be a candidate for the Block?”

“One as young as this?  No.  We only collected the very young from the best breeding stock, for the ones we needed to work with the most.  We usually tapped the aristocracy in those cases.”

“Right,” I said.

“You don’t seem to know very much about it, yet you aren’t asking many questions.”

“I’m trying to lull you into a false sense of security,” I said.  “I am curious just what things really look like at the top.”

“The Lord King?”

“I’m insinuating that he’s not at the top, Professor.  It’s the Academies, isn’t it?”

“It’s a delicate balancing act.  The true monsters and the men who made them.  We pull the strings, if you’ll excuse my using the term, and they obey, but…”

“There’s always a risk of mutual destruction, should you push them too far?”

“It helps that only a handful of them have really figured out that the very best of the men in black coats are calling most of the shots in the end.”

“And if this story gets out, then the altercation is forced.”

“Perhaps,” Berger said.  “Probably.  There are other problems, like the ones I spelled out for Florence and Charles.”

I nodded.

Berger’s vague shadow moved, and I rose to my feet, turning as I did so, to better act if he tried something.

He wasn’t.  He held a still Sylvia in his hands, and he rather unceremoniously dropped her onto the morass of plague above where her mother and the horse lay.

“Show some respect,” I said.

“You’re too fixated on the wrong concepts, Sylvester,” Berger said, and he sounded irritated.  “Respect?  I’m here without a mask on.  I gave them and I gave you my time, knowing that I’ll likely have red marks appear on my face before the end of the night, and I’ll have to take a scalpel to them.  I’ll do it, and if recent history is a good enough lesson on the subject, I don’t think I’ll regret it, even as I cut.  That’s respect, Sylvester.”

His irritation had given way to anger.

“Much like how you respect your daughter and nephew, Berger?” I asked.  “I think you fail to realize that you can act the gentleman for a straight decade, but people are going to remember you for the one time you shit your pants in public.  Or, in this case, we’ll remember you dropping the dead baby.”

“It’s a body, not an infant,” Berger said.  “And you can rest assured, I know better than you about the needs and demands of public perception.  For now, be content I’m answering your questions without argument and playing your game.”

I didn’t answer him immediately.  I looked over in the direction of the others.  Most had departed, moving on.  Jessie was lingering behind with some of the others in quarantine suits.

I hadn’t realized how dark it had gotten.

“Alright,” I said.  “I guess we won’t get along famously then.”

“I didn’t think we would,” Berger said.

“Thank you for the gentler deaths you gave them,” I said.

“I told you before, I don’t believe in gratuitous suffering.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I remember how that went.”

We walked back to Jessie.  She wasted no time in getting us moving, even going so far as to give me little pushes to urge me to hurry.

I cast one backward glance at the heap that had swallowed up the baby.

I’ll give you this one, mom, I thought.  Your play with the name was fit for a Lamb.  By accident or design, you gave her the name I’m least likely to forget.

We approached the perimeter of the city.  The sun had set, and the sky was growing dark.  The streetlights hadn’t been lit, and only some buildings had lights on inside.

The plague took on a new cast, now that it didn’t stand in such stark contrast to the rest of the city.  It was hard to tell the plague-ridden buildings apart from ones that had been reinforced with grown wood.

It was Bea who noticed one tangle of plague-growth in an alley, then pointed out another in the next alley.

“I have good eyes and I have poisons in my brain helping me turn my focus toward making sense of what I’m seeing in the gloom, and even I’m not seeing that as clearly as you are,” I commented.

“Modifications,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” Bea said.  “We’ve talked about this.  When the other rooftop girls were getting modded out, I’d go with, make sure they were safe while they were under, sometimes, or just oversee what was being done, so I could give better advice to the next girl.  There were a few times I got some changes.  Seeing in the dark is useful if you need to sneak out a lot.”

“Not that the Beattle staff seemed to care,” Fang said.

“No, not that they seemed to care,” Bea said.  Then, to Jessie and I, she asked, “You never got changes?”

“I’m packed to the gills with modifications as it is,” Jessie said.  “And Sylvester’s unique cocktail of chemicals doesn’t do well with implants or pattern changes.  Every time he had to get replacement skin, it would triple or quintuple the healing time.”

“That’s a shame,” Bea said.  “I think-”

She stopped.

“You think?”

“The Tender Mercies.  They’re close.  These growths in the alleys, they’re discarded skin.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Probably.  When the professor was found, all soldiers and stitched started pulling toward the edges.”

“You’ll want to give me a proper mask,” Berger said.  “If they see me, they’ll report back, and my ‘death’ will be over already.”

Before I could formulate a reply, Rudy pulled off his mask.

“Rudy,” I said, “No.”

“Too late anyway,” he said.  “It’s already off.  I’m done bickering, I’m done with all of this.  There’s too many bodies and I feel sorry for all of them.  Can we just get out of here?  Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said, mimicking his country accent.  “But I’m docking your pay for being problematic like this.  I’ll dock more if you get sick.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “I’ll agree with that.”

Berger, now masked, walked at the tail end of our group.  Otis and Archie walked behind and to either side of him.

“Weapons out,” I said.

“I’m nervous,” Shirley said.

“Allowable,” I said.

“And weaponless,” she pointed out.

“You’ve got capable people with you,” I said, “And with luck, we won’t have to fight very hard or very long.”

“What if we don’t have luck?” she asked.

“Then we weren’t going to get out of this city in the first place,” I said.  “And we’ve been fortunate to get this far.”

“Grim,” Gordon Two said.

The movement of phantom Lambs here and there kept drawing my attention, as I pushed my brain to be more alert for things moving in the growing darkness and shadow.  It was hard when I had to be mindful of footing.  Where the plague was thickest, the tendrils reached across the ground like tree roots.  I wasn’t sure if I was stumbling over arms and legs, tendrils, loose stones or other things that lay in puddles and snow.

As the buildings thinned out, I spotted the lights of fires, torches, and lanterns.  A scattering of orange lights in darkness, giving only a vague sense of how many men and soldiers there were maintaining the perimeter.

I saw the orange lights move en masse.  A reaction, with more activity closer to us than it was further away.

“Something alerted them,” I said.

“Warbeasts,” Berger said.  “The wind is blowing upwind, so the sniffers wouldn’t have caught us, but the heeds would’ve noticed a group walking about.”

“Heeds?” I asked.

“Bat-ears,” Gordon Two supplied.  “Keen ears.”

“The Mercies are going to surround us any moment,” I said.  “Jessie?”

Jessie withdrew a whistle from the belt that still had letters and notes tucked into it.  She handed it to me.

It didn’t make a sound when I blew on it, but it did evoke a reaction.  Warbeasts started barking and howling, the heeds reacting to a sharp sound.

More satisfying was the distant report, the hollow punching sounds of weapons firing.

Little orange lights marked the placement of torches, wagons, and lanterns.  Bright orange flares marked the explosions as some canisters exploded on impact.

They were only a very small fraction of the shells being fired.  There were no truly satisfying explosions to mark the vast majority of the other canisters.  They exploded and provided gas.

We would have to wait a moment before we ventured in.  When we’d sent Pierre back to the camp with orders to get the students organized and to get students to put our shopping list together, we’d asked him to make sure we got the countermeasures for quarantine suits.  We’d put in the request when he’d first told us about the plague and Shirley being in the city, and hopefully we’d see the results.

The hope was that it would clog the filters, people would have to back off, and enemy ranks would break.  We wanted it slow, because the alternative was exposing people unnecessarily to plague, and it would have been vile to do that.

I could do bastardly things, but I wouldn’t do vile, no.

The rabbit-whistle was the signal for our army to strike, and with luck, a gap would open.

Punching sounds marked the mortars firing, no doubt from the cover of the woods.  Different locations every time.  Warbeasts would attack, but our students had guns and weapons.  With luck, our Beattle rebels would attack and then retreat, without too many injuries or casualties.

Our rebels.  Our villains.  I was hopeful about this outcome.

The mortars I’d just heard hit.  Some exploded, again.  More flares of orange light.

This time we could see the Mercies, standing in the street near us.

“Do you think you could give the order to stand down if things get hairy?” I asked Berger.

“Could I?  Yes.  Do I think they’d listen?  Having seen this project in action elsewhere, with no reason to believe they’ve made adjustments?  I would have another backup plan in mind, in addition to that particular shot in the dark.”

A hundred and fifty paces to the treeline, past wagons, campfires, and any soldiers who weren’t fleeing from the gas.

“Be prepared to run faster than you ever have,” I said.

“Is that the backup to the backup plan?” Gordon Two asked.

“It’s not not the backup to the backup plan,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.12 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Periodic explosions provided sufficient light to see the silhouettes of the Mercies.  The light got muddier as the smoke, dust, and gas spread around the perimeter.

“Don’t be crazy!” Jessie called out.  “We’re friendlies!  Academy uniforms!”

The Mercies made their approach, and I saw the blades.  Several were drawing their weapons.  I didn’t see any putting weapons away in light of Jessie’s statement.

“I think that card is played out,” I said.

“That would be my fault,” Berger said.  “I spread the word about your little ruse twice, after I brought Sylvester to them and when we went looking for Florence and Charles.”

One of the Mercies whooped, as if he was amping himself up, working up the courage to come after us.

“As soon as the smoke clears, we’ll make a break for the gap,” I said.  I wanted to provide a kind of direction.  I’d been on the opposite side of too many squadrons and armies, sowing discord.  In war and in simple skirmishes, it was too easy for the seeds of doubt to find root.  The counter was simple instructions, clear goals, and trust.  “We deal with the Mercies in the short term, by fighting if we have to, but with running and maneuvering as the better options.”

“Stick together,” Jessie said.  “For what it’s worth, the ones with more skin and more deformed facial features are slower.”

“Are they?” I asked.

“It seems to be the case, going by what I’ve seen.  I don’t think anyone but you and me really have the ability or experience to properly leverage that, but knowing might make the difference for someone else.  I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I watched the silhouettes approaching.  They ranged from children to thirty or so, but the odd folds and wrinkles made some look older.  “They’re strong, so try not to fight them.  You have to be able to tear off your own skin.”

“They tear off their own skin?” Shirley asked, behind me.

Maybe it was a mistake to bring that up, giving our side more reason to be afraid.

“I’ll tear off your skin!” one of the Mercies called out.  It was a man, tall, and I could only see glimpses of him when the flares in the background provided light.  His skull or his skin were misshapen, leading to a too-pronounced brow, cheekbones, and chin.   He was close enough to hear us and be heard.

“We’ve gotten good at it!” another man jumped in.  His voice had a tremulous note to it.  Unhinged.  Something about his tone of voice was almost childish.  “We’re really, really good at tearing skin!”

Others picked up the calls.  I could hear one woman apologizing in the group.

The unrest of my friends, allies, and Berger was very apparent.  They were retreating a bit, now.

I lowered my voice, aware that I was almost being drowned out by the taunting and shouts of the Mercies, “If you have any experience in a fight or spat, move up to the front of the group.  If it comes down to it, go down.  Drop to the ground.  Let the people behind you step in or take a shot.  People behind?  Your reaction to fear and surprise should be to pull the damn trigger, swing whatever you’re holding.  Conventional instincts do not apply, except for the part where you’re not supposed to shoot friendlies.”

“Maybe not the best advice, Sy,” Jessie said.

“It’s great advice,” I said.  “The worst thing that can happen at this point is one of us panicking and things spiraling out of control, or a moment of hesitation becoming a minute of hesitation or outright nonaction.  If you can’t stand firm, fall, and then get right back up again.  If you have someone else’s back, protect that back.

“Can I just say that I don’t think the worst thing that happen is panic?” Gordon Two said.  “I feel like getting my skin torn off by those guys might be the worst thing.”

There were a couple of murmurs of agreement.

“Then don’t wimp out when it counts.  Panic, wimp out, and that skin thing might happen.  Otis, Archie, back me up?  And, assuming you can see my hand, Rudy…

I gestured.  Simple gestures, ending in me pointing at Berger.

Rudy didn’t hesitate, reaching out and seizing Berger by the upper arm.

“What’s this?” Berger asked.

Jessie was already bringing out the chain.  Berger only resisted a little as she slapped the shackle onto his wrist.  After a moment of hesitation, she affixed the other end of the shackle onto Shirley’s offered wrist.

“I’m not good in a fight, so it might as well be me,” Shirley said.

“That’s good thinking,” I said, my eyes not leaving the Mercies that were drawing nearer.  I gestured for Rudy to come, and made room for him at the front of the group.

The smoke was still so thick.  We’d told our junior rebels to fire only a few rounds and then be sure to let the smoke clear.  The problem was that they were taking their time between rounds, and the smoke was taking its time in dispersing, too.

We had some guns, and it looked like the Mercies only had cutting tools; mostly knives.  There were a few swords in the mix, and one or two axes.

On the other hand, they outnumbered us three to one, they were fitter, and they weren’t nearly so bothered about the growths of plague here and there on the street and nearby houses.

“I’m terribly sorry about what’s about to happen,” one of the lady Mercies said, her voice easy to pick out amid other hollers and taunts because of the melancholy tone.  “If we got to you sooner, then you wouldn’t have to suffer now.”

“You’re gonna suffer,” another Mercy said, her voice barely holding anything back.

“They’re acting weird,” I said, my voice low.

“That would be the combat drugs,” Berger said.  “It’s hard to get even a half day of work out of the Mercies without giving them something.  High click rate, for those of you who’ve done work with chimeras and genesis projects.”

“Metabolism, for lack of a better word,” Gordon Two supplied.  “They eat fast, heal fast, get tired fast.”

“See, he gets it.  Easy explanation.  Are you trying to sound pretentious, doc?” Otis asked.

“Professor,” Berger said.  “I’m not going to expect much, but call me by the title I earned.”

“Will do, doc,” Otis said.

A few of Otis’ thugs snorted in amusement and laughed.

A fresh set of explosions hit.  Not the same place.  It looked like most of what was going on was off to the side.  Our people were drawing them off to a point, which made the perimeter here a little thinner.

The problem was wind direction.  Tinted smoke was blowing across our escape route.

“I see that Sylvester surrounds himself with top quality hires,” Berger said, unimpressed.

“A little less bickering?” Jessie asked.  “Focus.”

“I like bickering,” I said.  “Bickering means we’re aware the rest of the group exists.  You don’t focus on the enemy, break ranks, or lose sight of where your allies are when you’re busy calling those allies fatheads.”

“You seem determined to be contrary tonight,” Jessie said.  “What happened to you and I being on the same page?”

That’s the bickering spirit I was talking about,” I said.

“Just wait a second, Sy,” Jessie said.  “I need to change position so I can shoot by instinct and ‘accidentally’ put a bullet in your ass.”

“Now you’re just being lewd,” I said.  “And you’re not changing position, either.  You’re lacking in follow-through.”

“How can you guys joke around in a situation like this?” Fang asked.

“I’m not so sure I’m joking,” Jessie said.

“Back up,” I said.  “Back up a bit.  They’re grouping up.”

“We want to get closer to the perimeter,” Otis said.

“There’s an alley,” Jessie said.  “Fifteen paces back.  If we can get back there, we can potentially cut around and maybe come out behind them.  There’s a chance it’s blocked, and there’s a chance it’s blocked with plague in particular, but with wind direction, the trends of the plague…”

“You’re doing that a lot,” I said.  “Extrapolating.”

“I’m trying,” Jessie said.  “Let’s not comment too much on it and we can just hope I’m right.”

“Right,” I said.  “Alley then.”

We backed up rather than turn around and do anything.  I kept my revolver trained on the largest collections of Mercies to give them reason to hang back, while holding a knife in my other hand.

“Gonna put my hands under your skin!” one of the Mercies crooned, drawing out the words.  “Reach all the way inside you!”

“I used to hang out with someone who talked like that over tea!” I called back.  “It’s not that creepy!”

“It’s a lot creepy,” Gordon Two said.

“Shh,” I said.

“Appearing strong is key here,” Jessie said, her voice quiet.  “Confidence.  I’m going to be generous and say that was probably what Sy had in mind when he played up the banter.”

“Sure,” I said.  “We can go with that.”

Shirley and Berger led the way into the alleyway, with the offensive front line leading the way.  Jessie and I were closer to the leftmost and rightmost flanks of the more offensive group of Otis, Archie, Fang, Rudy and a number of Otis and Archie’s thugs, while other thugs, Bea, and Gordon Two formed a kind of protective semi circle around Berger and Shirley.  As we filtered in, Jessie and I were closer to the front.

What followed looked, sounded, and felt like a half-ton of bricks falling on the central group.  Being closer to the front, Jessie, Otis and I weren’t in the line of fire.  Everyone else, it seemed, was caught in the collapse.

I couldn’t be sure what had actually happened, but I heard Mercies jeering and calling out from the rooftop, I was aware that people that had been standing behind me were amid a mess of wood, stone, and trash in an unrecognizable, shadowy heap, and with the trap sprung and our group reduced to a fifth of what it should be, the Mercies in front of us now felt brave enough to attack.

They’d attacked from the roof.  Dropped something on us.  It might have been a chimney, tipped over.  That didn’t explain the trash I smelled.

“Focus!” Jessie urged me.

I focused.  One was already running straight at me with scissors in each hand.  I aimed and fired.

My first instinct was that they were being smart about this.  Three of them were approaching Otis at once.  They used teamwork, they were wary of the guns, and they wanted to catch us off guard.  Lying in wait on the rooftop was the sort of thing the Lambs liked to do.

Standing at the entrance to the alleyway, I turned, aiming at an attacker I hadn’t yet heard or seen.  She approached with her right arm brushing the wall, ducking low, to present a small profile, and she carried a knife so large it might as well have been a sword.

As I saw her, she lunged, closing the rest of the distance at a sprint.  It was smart, in a way.  She had nowhere to go if she ran off to the side or away from me.  I would have had a clear shot.  As it was, I shot, the report of my gun enough to break my focus, and she stumbled but kept running at me.   I shot twice more, and she staggered into me, both hands on the knife, which she held overhead.  She tried to bring the knife down on my neck or shoulder as she collapsed against me.

I swung the knife, driving it into the side of her neck, while my gun-arm went up, blocking her forearms as I struggled to keep the knife from coming down.

The weight of her collapsing against me made me fall.  The entirety of my focus went into keeping my arm out, firmly bent, and keeping that knife from hitting anything vital.  Her skin was loose, making the sensation of her pressing against me disorienting, my sense of her body and where she was badly distorted in the chaos of the moment.

She had the wherewithal to bite my chest where her face had smushed up against it, teeth digging past sweater and shirt.  Had I zipped up my jacket to the chin, I might have been safe, but I hadn’t.

I had a muddy or slushy puddle under me, and a loose-skinned woman above me.  She had been shot three times and stabbed in the neck, but drugs gave her zeal.  She was badly injured, couldn’t weigh much more than I did, and she was still slowly winning the struggle to bring that knife down and into my face.

Two more silhouettes were briefly lit up by explosions elsewhere.

In the moment, a train of thought went to the gap we needed to break for, the hope that our allies weren’t shooting there again, making us have to endure for even longer before we found our way through.

At a glimpse of Gordon, golden haired and dressed in black jacket and slacks, looking very grim, I returned my focus to the death-and-death struggle of the woman that was on top of me, and the man with the wood axe who was approaching the two of us, drawing his weapon back with clear intent to bring it down on my head with both hands.

Otis stepped in to rescue me, kicking the woman hard where her neck met the shoulder.  Whether by accident or design, it drove her further into the knife that was embedded in the other side of her neck.  I lost my grip on my weapon as she rolled off of me.

Otis swung his club as the axe man brought his weapon down toward me.  The club met the axeman’s forearms as they were brought down.  The wood axe came free of the man’s hands, and I had a momentary visualization of the weapon flying free, end over end, to embed itself in me.

It bounced off of the wall above me and the blunt part of the weapon’s head punched me in the stomach, the thing landing practically in my hands, albeit the wrong end.

Otis outright turned his back on the man he’d just disarmed to help Jessie.  It was a scene of me on the ground, the Mercy hunched there hollering as he held his arms almost straight out in front of him, in clear agony at what might have been two fractured forearms, and one more Mercy making his approach, somewhat more warily than the axeman Mercy had.

“Get up!” Gordon shouted.

I was already getting up as Otis echoed Gordon, “Up, you fool!”

I scrambled to my feet, shifting my grip so I had a one-handed hold on the axe.  It really needed two hands, and I would’ve preferred using my right hand if I had to use any one hand, but I had reasons.  I’d trained my brain to use my left hand almost as well as my right, and if I was going to use my right hand for anything, I liked using it to shoot.

As I aimed my gun, the wary Mercy turned skittish, eyes widening as he changed direction.

I missed with my first shot, and caught him with the second.  I aimed at the axeman with the fractured arms, and he stepped back, stumbled, and fell on his ass.  Going by instinct or pure reaction, he put his arms back to catch himself as he fell.  His face contorted in what looked like it should have been a scream, but only a strangled screech came out of his mouth, his back arching and one leg kicking.

I immediately turned and focused on the others.  Jessie and Otis were overwhelmed, Jessie with blood running down one arm and off of her elbow.  Two of them and three Mercies.

I aimed and fired at the only available target – the one Otis was fighting.  The Mercy had a sword, and the sword was biting into and through Otis’ club- a sports bat for a sport I’d never seen, or a long, heavy truncheon.

The bullet gave Otis the chance to win the struggle.  He forced his opponent to the ground and snatched up the sword and summarily held it like someone who had never used a sword before.  It was a cavalry saber, and he held it like it was a heavier weapon.  He swung it like it was a heavier weapon, too.  I could see the blade turn up on impact – not a straight cut.

“Focus!” Gordon barked.

I focused.  I scanned the Mercies nearest us, and I shot twice, targeting the ones that struck me as most dangerous, going only off instinct.

The summary reaction suggested my instincts were right, because making one of the two collapse and making the other stop in his tracks seemed to give the rest pause.

If I’d had breath and if I wasn’t worried it would distract Jessie in the moment, I would have used that moment to crow about how I’d been right about the importance of trusting instinct.  But nooo, she’d been so bent on the notion of friendly fire.

“How in the goddamn hell do you not know how to fight?” Otis asked.  Veins were standing out in his forehead, and his teeth were bared as he panted, eyes wide.  “You killed people for a living!”

“I do fine,” I said.  “If they don’t see me coming.”

“Figure out how to do it when they see you and figure it fast!” Otis said.

“I keep figuring,” I said.  “And I keep forgetting.”

“Fucking hell,” Otis said.

We closed ranks, weapons at the ready.  I glanced at Jessie at the same time she glanced at me.  She was struggling to reload with one hand not cooperating as well as it should.  It didn’t help that she wore the quarantine suit, with its thick fabric gloves.  Blood still trickled in a steady stream out of the elbow of the suit.

I wished I could have seen her face and body language, to get a better sense.  I was dancing in the dark here, when it came to her.

I should have reloaded, but the gun I held wasn’t one I’d brought with me, the pants I wore weren’t the ones I’d worn into the quarantine zone, so I didn’t even have ammunition, and I didn’t want to give up my grip on the wood axe.  The threat of the gun would have to do.

Looking back at the rest of the group, I could see some movement.  It was agonizingly slow, and it involved pushing debris off of them.  I wasn’t sure that everyone involved was moving.

“Otis,” I said.  “Quick, give me the sword.”

It took him half a second to snap to what I wanted, but he did, taking the wood axe while he passed the saber to me, handle-first.

“You know how to use that?” he asked.  “That’s something at least.”

I didn’t, but I knew enough about things to know that he’d break the saber or get himself killed if he kept using it the way he had been.  The wood axe seemed more his style.

I wasn’t sure if I was seeing better in the dark or if my imagination was filling in blanks.  I imagined I could see the faint reflections of fires in the eyes of the Mercies closest to me.

I imagined I recognized one of them.

“Hello again,” I said.

“Hello,” the Small Mercy said, from the darkness.  The runt of her litter.

“I don’t suppose we can all go our separate ways?” I suggested.  “You’ve done what you’re supposed to.  You tried to stop us.  The dead and wounded will speak to that.”

I saw her head move.  The imagining of her eyes and that glimmer of light didn’t quite match the movement.  She was looking at the ones who had already fallen.

“They give us drugs,” she said.

“I know all about the drugs,” I replied.

“The drugs make us… eager.  Angry.  Hungry.  I want to eat you as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.”

“But you don’t want a bullet in your head,” I said.  I cocked the hammer of my little revolver with my thumb.

She didn’t reply to that.

“You have better, safer chances of a meal if you run off to that battlefield over there and go looking for the dead, or ask politely for your dinner.  You know they’ll have something prepared.”

“When I shuck off my skin, I get a release.  There’s pain, but there’s a rush…”

“Sure,” I said.

“Satisfaction, as sure as anything.”

“I believe it,” I said.  I barely knew what I was saying.  I was only speaking because I worried that if I didn’t keep this up as an interplay, me and her, she would monologue and convince herself to attack.

“When I go after someone else, when I hurt other people, I get a rush like that.  The drugs make me so restless.  Maybe if I take your skin off, with my teeth and my fingernails, it’ll be that kind of satisfying.  I won’t feel so restless anymore, I think.”

“Counterpoint: You won’t feel restless anymore because you’ll have a bullet in your skull,” I said.

“I’ll have to break your arms and legs before I start,” she said, her head turning as she looked in the general direction of the one Otis had disarmed.

She wasn’t listening to me.  She was convincing herself.

“Hey, Small Mercy,” I said.  I clacked the end of my sword against the wall.  “Hey!  Hey, listen, listen.  Pay attention.”

She turned her head back to me.

“Look at your dress,” I said.  “Look down, look at it.”

She did.

“We helped you get that dress,” I said.  “We-”

“Fucken’ die!” one of the other Mercies called out.  “I’ll fucken’ eat your skin!”

“Shut up!” I called back, pointing my gun at him.  I was glad that he listened.  I turned back to the Small Mercy.  “We got you that dress, didn’t we?”

“Doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” the Small Mercy said.

“But it’s something that happened, isn’t it?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a part of your story.  The story of you.  You started off weak, runt of the litter, and that makes you special.  You were left behind.  That makes you special too.  You need a story, or you’re just one face in the crowd.  You don’t eat the characters in your stories.”

“I don’t care about any of that,” the Small Mercy said.

“Well you’ve got to do something different than you’re doing.  Otherwise you’re going to get left behind again.  You need to remember how you got there so you can’t let it happen again.  You need to remember how you fixed it.  We’re how you fixed it.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes we are,” I said.

“I’m saying I don’t care about that,” she said.  She took a step closer to us, brandishing her knife.  Others stirred, pacing.  Some moved closer, others moved from left to right or right to left.

My heart sank.  I’d failed.  I’d hoped to find a crack and wriggle my way into it before tearing it open wider.

She went on, “If I go, you’re just going to get torn up by the others.”

I hadn’t failed.

“I’ll do worse than tear ’em up,” one of the woman Mercies taunted.

“You can walk away, or you can run at us and get a bullet in your skull for good measure.  It probably won’t kill you right away.  It’ll just hurt, and you’ll feel horribly, horribly restless while you die.  This feeling you’re experiencing now?  Like you’re supposed to do something?  Imagine that feeling, larger than anything, yawning wide open inside you, as your life ends and you realize you had more to do.”

The Small Mercy shook her head.

Another edged closer.  I moved my gun, aiming at him.  He stopped.

The others were getting restless.

I’d found my crack.  I knew the language they spoke, the sensations that dominated their lives.  “That’s what it’s like.  All the worst restlessness you’ve ever felt, with no ability to do anything about it.  Haven’t you ever heard about your life flashing behind your eyes?  It’s because the moment stretches out as the brain dies.  Imagine that moment, imagine that horrible restlessness you feel right now, going on for a whole lifetime.”

She shook her head again.

Others were looking restless now.

“If you go, you can go eat.  You can tear off your own skin and feel that rush, and you can do it many, many more times.”

“No,” she said.

She didn’t have the articulation or presence of mind to really argue against me.  The range of emotions I’d seen from the others suggested that they tended toward hostility, but other emotions were present, and those other emotions were heightened too.  I remembered the apologetic one.

“Which do you want?  The horrible restless yearning for a whole lifetime, or do you want to go, eat, and live the rest of your life, with all the good feelings you’ve got waiting for you?”

She raised her head, looking up, probably glaring at me.  I could only just barely make up her shoulders rising and falling.

I was dimly aware that the explosions in the background were less frequent than before.

I had no way of verifying the feeling, but somehow it felt like the rebels were pacing out the remainder of their shells and shots.  I imagined them anxiously waiting, wondering why we hadn’t yet turned up.

The Small Mercy started toward me.

“You want that horrible restlessness?” I asked.

“No,” she said.  This time it was an answer to my question, not a frustrated rejection of a negative thought process.

“No you don’t,” I said.  “Go.  There’s food waiting for you, safer prey.”

“If I go, the others will eat you.”

“If you go, others will follow you,” I said.  I left out the ‘I hope’ at the tail end of that statement.  “You’ll think about this a lot.  You might even see me again, and you can try to eat me then.”

“It feels like such a long way to walk, back to the camp,” she said.

“If it starts to feel like too long a walk, then run,” I said.  “But I’m going to tell you this.  If you try to walk or run to me?  You’re going to get a bullet in your head.”

“Might not,” another Tender Mercy called out.

Great.  Disturbing my two-path process here.

“Fine.  Let’s pretend you won’t get shot.  What happens?  You think all the others near here are just going to sit back and let you have your fun?  They’ll tear into us too.  You’ll get a morsel.  You’ll feel more frustrated.  More restless.  You’ll be angry at each other.  That’s no good.”

I could see heads turn.  The Mercies considering one another.

“But if you go?  Food waiting for you.  They’ll be all ready to feed you.  They have to be, if they’re using you as guards like this.”

“They are,” the Small Mercy said.  “They said it when I got my shot.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” I asked, trying to sound as incredulous as possible.  “That sounds great.  A lot better than a bullet in the brain.  If you go now, you might even be one of the first.  More food.”

She shifted position, moving her feet, hesitant.

Then she strode off, looking over her shoulder at others.

Other Tender Mercies that had been listening moved in her direction.  Not enough.  Not enthusiastically enough.  I felt as though the ones that were remaining still had more gravity than the Small Mercy did alone.

Jessie fired her gun at the closest Tender Mercy.  It was, as far as I could tell, a perfectly placed bullet in the brain.  As arguments went, it was a good complement to my own.

Others started to back off.  The remainder tensed, as if waiting for Jessie to move again or fire a second shot.  I suspected they would rush us en-masse.

I watched, breathing shallowly, waiting to see what might follow.  They were a bloodthirsty kind of species, and the fear of death hadn’t been set all that deep in them.  I’d tried to taint this seemingly easy meal with other fears and bad sentiments, but…

No.  Too many weren’t budging, still.  They had a kind of gravity.

“There’s no meal for you here,” I said.  “The others are going to snatch up everything.”

“I’m big,” a heavyset, woman Mercy said.  I could see the bright red of her coat in the gloom.  “I’m strong.  I’ll get enough.”

“You’ll get a bullet in your skull,” I said, driving the point home.  “No matter how big or strong you are, you’re going to die.  Slow.  Even if it takes only a moment to die, you’ll live a restless lifetime in that moment.”

The Small Mercy watched from the fringes, clearly antsy, fidgeting.

The Matron Mercy didn’t budge.  She hesitated, weighing her options, and it was clear that restlessness was winning.

Twin explosions sounded in the background, off in the distance.

“It’s not worth it,” I said.  “It doesn’t make sense.”

I desperately wanted the others behind me to pick themselves up and come to stand beside me, tall, intact, and proud.  To make the odds look worse.  It was why I was so desperately stalling.  I needed something.

I hated the sinking-gut feeling that came with the others not stepping forward or adding their numbers to ours.  It meant the others were hurt.  Or, worse, they were dead.

“No,” the Matron Mercy said.  “It doesn’t make sense.”

I could tell from her tone that she was planning to attack.  She was planning on being nonsensical, letting hunger and restless, drug-induced bloodlust win over sense and rationality.  I could tell from the fact that Jessie wasn’t shooting that Jessie was probably out of bullets, or the injury to Jessie’s arm was keeping her from aiming and firing again.

In the distance, a horn sounded.  Collectively, the Mercies turned their heads.  Light from burning wagons at the perimeter of the city caught a half-dozen faces, highlighting the imperfections, extra skin and thick skin at key places.

I stood a little straighter.  I waited, holding my sword in one hand and the gun in the other, and I looked confident.

She turned, and she left.  With her leading, the rest followed.

I remained where I was, looking confident, not turning my back, as the last stragglers followed.  The one with the broken arms.  One Jessie might have shot, who limped.

I waited and watched for the ones on the rooftop, and there was no sign of them.  They might have dropped something on us and hurried to the ground for their meal.  Maybe the Small Mercy had been one of them.

While I waited, checking to see that the coast was really clear, I asked.

“How’s your arm, Jessie?”

“I’ll live.”

“You did good.  You too, Otis.”

“You did terrible,” Otis said.  “Up until you started talking.  Then you did good.”

“It was stalling and shooting in the dark,” I said.  “And a bit of knowing how experiments like them think.”

“Well alright then,” Otis said, in his rough voice.  “You did terrible.  Then you did mediocre.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Now free to check, I hurried to the sides of the others.

A few thugs, hurt, were working with the others.  The debris had been a pair of crates loaded down with garbage.  They’d shattered and scattered their contents in our midst as they’d landed.

A few had only been clipped by the crates, or by flying debris.  One thug sat with his hand over his eyes,  blood trickling down one cheek.  Blinded or partially by something.  Archie had an injured leg and a head wound, but he wasn’t complaining.  Others demanded more attention.

Fang and Gordon Two were mostly alright.  Bea was hurt but sitting off to one side.  The Treasurer was coming to.  Rudy was still out cold, if he wasn’t dead.

At the far end of the alley, Shirley and Berger stood beside two dead Mercies.  Berger still held his improvised weapon – one of the fallen pieces of trash, it looked like, a curtain rod or pole with a ragged end.  They’d been far enough down the alley that they hadn’t been hit by the debris.

I knelt beside Rudy.

“Mercies on the roof above us dropped it on us.  Two came down, I don’t know what the rest did,” Bea said, from where she sat.

“Rudy?” I asked.  Not asking Bea in particular.

“Fang said half of Rudy’s ribcage is shattered,” Bea said.  “He’s not waking up.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got a lot of talented doctors,” I said.  “We’ll improvise a stretcher.  And we’ve got to hurry.  The place we need to run through is going to close, if it isn’t already.”

“Sy,” Bea said.  “It’s bad enough we should maybe leave him behind.”

“Improvise.  Berger’s pole there will work for one half of the stretcher.  We can use some jackets.”

“Sy, I like Rudy too, he’s a good fellow, he’s loyal to you, but-”

“Improvise!” I said, raising my voice.

“Improvise,” Jessie said.  “We’re here because we don’t leave our own behind.  It goes for Rudy too.”

“Okay,” Bea said.

I walked over to Berger, extending a hand for the pole.

He hesitated a moment, then handed it over.

“I’m surprised you didn’t take her hostage and run,” I said.

“Miss Shirley said she wouldn’t allow it,” Berger said.

In the meager light we had, I could only see the light and shadow of one side of Shirley’s face.  I imagined her jaw was set firm.

“And,” Berger said, “I was concerned the Tender Mercies would have eaten me alive.”

“Of course,” I said, turning my back on him.  I set to work helping with the stretcher.

It was a shoddy contraption, pieced together in two minutes.  Simply holding it was a chore, given the size of the piece of wood we’d used for the one side.  I was fortunate that I was deemed too tired and weak to do the heavy work.

Otis took one end.  A thug took the other.  We exited the alley, using the street now that it was clear, and we hurried toward the perimeter.

Already, the gap was closing.  Soldiers were taking position, returning from conflicts elsewhere on the perimeter.  Only a trickling, but it was a trickling of a score or so of soldiers with guns and defensive positions behind sandbags and atop wagons.  They had stitched, they had a scattered few Tender Mercies with them, and they had warbeasts.

We weren’t moving all that fast, all considered, and our momentum fell even more as we realized the nature of the wall ahead of us.

The warbeasts started barking and howling, picking up.

I looked at Jessie, and I saw Jessie blowing on the rabbit whistle, hard.  She took a deep breath, then blew again.  The process repeated until I thought she would pass out.

The answer wasn’t immediate, but it did come.

The distant warbeasts barked and howled, and they nearly drowned out the distant punching sound of mortars firing.

The soldiers at the perimeter turned to answer the threat, preparing to scatter as explosions and gas erupted around them-

But there was no gas, there were no explosions.  There was only gunfire and a concentrated attack as our people mounted an outright, direct attack on this isolated part of the perimeter.

We rushed the perimeter, moving into and through the enemy.  We transitioned from gloom and darkness into lanterns and movement and the occasional person, in plain, detailed, clear view.  It was dazzling and dreamlike and alarming.

This was the kind of fighting I could do.  Springing the attack, attacking from the flanks and the rear.

We fought past what might have been eight or ten people, catching them from behind, stabbing, shooting only a couple of times, and claiming weapons as we went.  Archie, I think it was, kicked over a lantern, setting a fire behind us.

The fighting was happening all the way to our left.  All heads were turned, all attention elsewhere.  Soldiers fired into the trees and innumerable gunshots sounded in return.  I had no idea if our people were even aiming into enemy ranks, or if they were shooting just to draw attention.

We moved past the erected defense, six people working to move the stretcher with.  From there, it was a nerve-wracking run across lantern-lit dirt road.  Darkness was safer – and the cover of trees, a dozen paces away, was safer still.  I lagged behind, making sure the group was managing.  Too many of us were limping.  We were hurt, tired, and frazzled.

I was the last one to disappear into the trees, home free.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.13 – Twig

Head over Heels – 16.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Home sweet home, I thought.

It had taken a little bit of doing to properly quarantine ourselves as we arrived back at Sedge.  Measures had been instated by the students awaiting our arrival, and our Treasurer had pushed hard for some last minute changes and some firm rules.  As much as I’d wanted to curl up with some blankets and company by the fire, we’d had to stand around while others ran around on our behalf.  ‘Barracks Two’ was emptied out, the residents gathering their things, and we had marched inside, each one of us to a room.

The team that had gone into the city with me had mostly worn quarantine suits, but the Treasurer wanted to be careful, and I wasn’t about to complain.  Jessie, the Treasurer, Fang, Bea, and Gordon Two all went to their quarantine rooms.  Rudy, meanwhile, went to our makeshift operating theater.

The wagon that had picked us up was now on its way back to our retreating troops.  They would walk back as far as they could, with people picked up by priority each time the wagons and carriages made a trip.  Not ideal, but it would have to do.  I worried about the Academy following, but multiple people had assured me that they had planned for that even before they’d worked out the measure to fight the Academy.  They had made mention of bear traps and some tricks to mess with the warbeasts, lookouts, a system of warnings, and other things that had sounded pretty good.

Jessie had been more alert and focused than I, and seemed to think it was sound, so I was willing to leave it at that.  I was almost too tired to care.

The room had a small wood stove – I didn’t believe that all of them did, only the ones further from the kitchen.  The door was open and the screen set in place, the light from within the only source of light in the room for the time being.

I took my time disrobing.  Parts of me were sore.  I only had my jacket, sweater and shirt off when I heard the knock at the door.

“Sylvester?”

“Hi Mabel,” I said.

“We’re working on finding people who are able and willing to do the examinations for plague.  Not a lot are enthusiastic.  The chance of catching the plague if the makeshift quarantine suits we’re making don’t hold up is only part of it.  They’re more shy about having to carve it out if any red spots show, and I think they’re shy about working on the boss, which is why I haven’t found any volunteers to check on you.”

“Alright,” I said.  You’d think a bunch of Academy students would have a few people eager to be hurly burly with the scalpel.  Alas.

“I offered to look Jessie over.  She said you would handle it later.  Is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” I said.  “How’s Rudy?”

“Not good,” Mabel said.  “He-”

She stopped there.

“He?”

“His injuries gave the plague some footholds.  It’s turning an already difficult surgery into a worse one.”

I hung my head.  “Noted.”

“If this goes badly…” she said, and she said it with a lack of confidence that suggested the ‘if’ was more like a ‘when’.  “Do you have any orders?  Requests?”

“Possum will want to know.”

“Helen is outside the door, fretting.”

“I’m glad she’s there, even if I’m not glad about the reason for it.  Can you round up one or two of her friends to keep her company?  She worked in the kitchen, so if you can’t think of any names right off, you might want to check there.”

“I can do that.”

“Thanks.  She was abandoned during her last crisis, I don’t want it to happen again.  And while I’m making requests… Berger.”

“He’s locked in his room.  Davis is going to work with him.”

“Davis?  Remind me?”

“Student council president.”

I nodded.  “Have someone outside the door.  If it’s Davis, Valentina might be game.  Give her a slate and some chalk.  She eavesdrops, makes sure Berger doesn’t get sly, and she makes absolutely sure that every piece of every bit of equipment that goes in the room comes out.”

“I’ll set that up.  Do you want to talk to Rudy if he’s conscious when we realize we’re past the point of no return?”

There was the if/when confusion again.  Back to Rudy.  I stared into the fire.

“Yeah, just let me know.  If they get in too deep and start panicking, let me know.”

“Panicking?”

“Past a certain point, it starts looking like a lot of wet red mess.  Veins and vines, spots and blood splatters.  The victim squirms because the drugs don’t work as well on plague victims and you don’t want them unconscious anyway, because they can feel the plague moving through their body, you want a heads up if they’ve got pain in one extremity or another.  Even if your focus is on point and you’re doing okay discerning the patient from what you’re trying to cut away, they jump or contort once and you lose your place, or the scalpel slips.”

“Oh.”

Even through the closed door, I could tell that reality had just hit home for her.

“When you go and check on them, maybe tell them I ordered one person to be on standby, resting while the others work, making sure people are staying sane and focused.  Rotate out.  They’ll probably say it’s not necessary.  Insist.  Because things will get hairier and they’ll need to step back and take a subjective look at how things are going.”

“Alright, Sylvester.  I might scrub up and get suited to help them.”

“Actually…” I said.  “I could really do with some freedom of movement.  Get to Jessie, talk to Berger, make sure everything’s going smoothly.  You said you were willing to check up on Jessie?  Are you willing to check on me?”

“Oh.  I was trying to pair boy students with boy patients and girl students with girl patients.”

“If you’re not comfortable with it-”

“It’s fine!” Mabel said.  Too loud in contrast to her earlier volume, too fast a response.

“Or if I scared you off by talk of the nightmare the cutting poses-”

“It’s fine!” she said, a little more authoritative and assertive.  “It’s good.  I’ll be fine.  I’m going to go get someone to stay with Helen, check on Rudy, station someone with Davis and Berger, and get scrubbed up.”

I listened as her footsteps retreated down the hall.  I stared at the door until I could no longer distinguish the sound from other ambient background noises.  The fire crackled, and a log resettled violently, sending sparks flying at the screen.

The kicking feet raised my attention to Evette, who sat directly on the little cast iron stove, which was only large enough for the one log at a time.  She wore a charcoal black sweater and dress, and she was smiling.

Fray, still incoherent and abstract, stood in the shadows in the corner, watching, wearing her professor’s coat.

“You’re a bastard, asking little miss Greenhouse Gang to check on you when you know she likes you,” Evette said.  “Or is that why you asked her to do it?  Are you corrupting the sheriff’s daughter?”

“If you have to ask,” I said, “then I don’t know the answer.  But I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I’m impatient.”

“You’re lonely,” Evette said.  “You’re doing worse and worse with being alone.  Events like sitting in the cold with only the bug for company aren’t helping, either.”

“Won’t disagree,” I said.  I stood and I finished disrobing, undoing my belt and the button of my pants and then sitting on the bed.  I tried draping myself along the bed, flicking the top sheet to only barely cover myself for modesty, gave the door my best sultry look, and then decided against it.  Anyone else, and I might have tried to break the tension of the moment that way.  Not with Mabel, when she’d been so good and sweet thus far.

I sat back up, moved the sheet to cover myself more than was necessary, and stuck my feet straight out in front of me so they were closer to the fire.

“You have a professor, who will be a great source of knowledge if he makes it through the night.  You have a small army of students and they’re getting to the point where they’re almost on your wavelength.  A poor substitute for Lambs, but they’ll do, won’t they?”

Evette held a scalpel now.  She bent down by my leg, sticking the scalpel closer to it.

I felt a prick.

“Is that me, or is it one of the red spots?” she asked.

“Or is it phantom sensations coupled with skin constricting from the heat of the fire and the power of suggestion?” I asked.

She scraped the flat of the scalpel against the skin of my calf, pressing hard enough that it broke skin.  Focusing on the area, I could feel the pain there, now.  I could contort my mind, and I was left eighty percent sure it wasn’t a phantom sensation.

“You’re the Wyvern,” I said.  “The delirious, dangerous part of me that wants to fling myself into danger.  A part of me that doesn’t mesh well with the Lambs so much as it hopes the Lambs will mesh with it.”

She moved the scalpel down, away from the leg, then slashed at the bit of my ankle joint that jutted out at the side.  I felt the stab of pain there too.

“If you can feel the pain of the plague, that means it’s already starting to crawl through you,” Evette said.

She moved the scalpel, my leg jumped, and I moved it.  I looked at the site she’d cut, and I saw the damage.  It wasn’t plague, but a scrape.  I’d fallen hard against the road when the Mercy had jumped on top of me.  The skin had been shredded at the side of my calf and at the ankle.

“Why do you hate me?” I asked, continuing my earlier line of statements.

Evette wasn’t beside me anymore.  I glanced back over my shoulder at her just in time for the scalpel to come down.

I felt the stab of pain.  She repeated the gesture, hauling the scalpel out, pricking, or outright impaling, once every ten seconds or so.

“I don’t hate you, Sy,” Evette said.

“Then can you stop stabbing me?” I asked.

She moved away from me, showing me the scalpel.  The pricks and stabs of pain continued.

“Helen represents instinct, Ashton represents sense, sometimes common sense, but given the way your head works, neither really represent reality, do they?” Evette asked.  “None of the Lambs do.  You understand them, you want them close to you, but me?”

“I dunno,” I said.  “I could’ve gotten along with the real Evette.  I mean, I managed something with Duncan, and he manages to look like he just sucked a lemon and look smug at the same time, all the time.”

Evette spoke, “But Evette was never going to be someone you got along with, because we can’t exist in the same space.  If her project lived, yours died.  You only became a Lamb because she aborted.  We’re too similar and too different at the same time, so I don’t know that we would have fit together well.  All that in mind, it’s only fitting that you use her to wrap your mind around things you don’t want to think about.  Less cuddly things like the deadline looming over your head, the poison in your brain, your morbid and self destructive plans of action.  The plague that’s crawling across your back right now.”

The skin across my back prickled.  The power of suggestion again?

I resisted the urge to twist around and check.  “Yeah.”

“You can check.  There’s no use acting brave with me and Fray over there.  We know.”

“Mabel is going to be here soon,” I said.  “If it’s there, she’ll see.  Doesn’t change anything if I know in advance or not.”

“Uh huh,” Evette said.

“I know I said I wanted today free and clear of insanity and mutiny.  You’re probably edging in closer so you’re first in line if and when that door opens.  I suppose it’s inevitable.”

“I don’t care about that,” Evette said.  “She might.”

I looked over at Fray, a figure like the one that might appear in a dream, impossible to pin down or look directly at, the features still right, the positioning and attitude ambiguous.

“Who knows what she’s thinking?” Evette said.

“I wonder,” I said, studying Fray.

My wondering was interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I said.

I heard the door click and open.

Wearing a rather ad-hoc quarantine outfit, Mabel let herself into the room.  her mask and air supply were the only things that weren’t improvised.  The rest involved rain clothing and copious amounts of tape.  She set a medical bag and a bright lantern on the desk by the door.

“You were talking to yourself?” Mabel asked.

I pointed.  “Evette, there.  And Fray.”

“I see,” Mabel said, faint changes in tone betraying concern.  She closed the door, took stock, and then said, “And you’re naked.”

“You’ve got to examine me, right?”

She didn’t respond to that.  I had the feeling that if blushes could radiate past filtration masks and goggles, she would be too bright to look at.

Or maybe I was projecting Lillian onto Mabel.  Mabel had a different sort of grounding.  A different set of emotional strengths and weaknesses.

She moved the lantern to the bedside table.

“Am I supposed to greet your… friends?” Mabel asked.

“They’re not friends,” I said.  “Evette was stabbing me repeatedly, just before you came in.”

“Oh.  Oh dear.”

“They’re figments.  I think… they started out as something different, but lately, they’re representing something else.  I have so many trains of thought chugging along through my brain, they… encapsulate important ideas or lines of thought.  It’s easier to bring one out and think along certain lines, sometimes.”

“Certain lines?”

“Thinking in terms of strategy, or investigating, or cooperating with others in a crisis.  Sometimes instinct, or acting, or simplifying my thinking.  Each one is a… very complex sort of set of ideas, functioning independently.  Sometimes in ways that I don’t want them to.”

“I think I sort of get it.”

“And lately, they’ve been shoring up my weaknesses, I think.  Or they’re becoming weaknesses, if there’s even a difference between using imaginary people as crutches or just leaving the weak points exposed.”

“I think there’s a difference.”

“Yeah.  Probably.  Most recently, they’ve been representing my subconscious, when I’m being a little too conscious and tunnel-visioned.  They’ll appear and remind me of something, or tell me to think along certain patterns.  Except I don’t always know what pattern they’re supposed to represent.”

“Didn’t you create them?”

“I let the garden happen.  I didn’t control what grew where.  The current, big enigma is miss Genevieve Fray, imaginary version.  I don’t know what she represents.  She’s one of the biggest question marks, in my head and out of it.”

“I’m reminded of the trick with memory they used to give us, with putting all of our memories in a different room or places in a room.  A study trick for students.”

“Jessie was a pretty literal interpretation of that trick, once upon a time.  Except the rooms were real, and they weren’t rooms so much as actual compartments in the real world.  But perhaps talking about the deeper points isn’t fair to her, if she doesn’t have a say.  I want to respect her privacy.”

In a nod to privacy, I adjusted the sheet that was draped across my lap.  Mabel glanced down, then glanced up.

“Ready?” I asked, as if I hadn’t noticed.

“Let’s get this done, then,” she said.

I nodded.

She checked my hands first, which wasn’t necessary, then my face, which was.  She got out a comb and started working her way through my hair, checking my scalp.

“Shirley has spots,” she told me.

I clenched my fist.

“It looks like it’s in the early stages.  It should be doable.”

“She has a good doctor?  Someone with a steady hand and a good eye?”

“I think so.  The others only had good things to say about him.”

I nodded.

“Otis and two of Otis’ men have them too.  Mostly on the hands.  The students working on them sounded optimistic.”

“Who else?”

“Professor Berger.”

“It’s important that Professor Berger live,” I said.  “We need someone good working on him, if at all possible.”

“We need good people working on everyone,” Mabel said.  “That’s the worst part of it, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“If it means anything, we have pretty good hands working on the Professor.  Or at least, I think they’re good.  He got pretty irate and insisted he would do the work himself.”

“He’s cutting himself open?  Without drugs?”

“He insisted.  We have two students on standby.  The spots are mostly on his face and hands.  He said he wants to work on his face in front of the mirror and do his left hand.  He’ll defer to us for his right hand at the end.”

“I really want to hear if he managed it or not.  I’m not saying I’d think less of him if he gave up, but if he actually just managed to sit down and carve himself open.  I did it countless times, while Tynewear was caught in the plague.  It’s an infernal thing, the plague.  I know bias colors my view here, but it feels like most of the time, it always demanded too much.  It set its roots too deep.”

Mabel didn’t respond.  She continued working.

I could read a lot from the feeling of her gloved fingers on my head, the movement of the comb, and the movements of the lantern.

“How’s Rudy?”

“Rudy isn’t good,” Mabel said.  “I think it wouldn’t be good even if he was free of the plague.”

I nodded.

“He was delirious.  Raving about needles and plants.  I don’t think he was even making sense of what was going on.”

“He’s tough,” I said.  “So long as he has a goal in sight, he’s a bit of a juggernaut.  He’ll just plow onward.”

“I just worry he can’t see very far, and he’s seeing less and less,” Mabel said.

Ah, so was this it?  She wanted reassurance.

I wasn’t sure I had much to give.

Perhaps in my own efforts to egg myself forward and gather the courage for this next part, I’d put too great a weight on her shoulders.

“I know about the spots on my shoulder,” I said.  “I know you’re staying quiet about it.  If you don’t feel confident, you can go track down someone who is.”

“You knew?  You saw?”

“Evette told me,” I said.

“Evette again.  I think I can do this.  Rather than disturb it, I’m going to finish checking you over first.”

I nodded.

At her direction, I stood up.

“Already checked the front bits, and if there was any plague there, I’d probably just ask you to take the scalpel to my throat instead,” I said.  “But you can check my skinny behind.”

She didn’t have a response to that.  There was no cue that she was that ruffled, either.  Maybe she wasn’t the blushing type.  Maybe her feelings had been directed elsewhere.

“It looks like it’s the back of the neck, shoulder, and the one side of your back,” she said.

I grimaced.

“Any tips before I get started?”

“No special ones, only the pointers I gave to everyone else.  Look for the spots where the tendrils are reaching into or out of veins and arteries or where the bruising surrounds places the plague set in a deeper kind of root.  Those are key areas that you want to start at and work away from.  If you’re partway through one part and you get interrupted or lose your place, go looking for another starting place, don’t get too fixated on searching.”

She was getting her things out of the medical kit as I talked.  I saw her hold a scalpel, her hand shaking a little.

“Use your hands.  It’s not a hard rule, but feel for the tendrils, they’re harder than veins and arteries, especially when they run inside veins and arteries.  If it bleeds, it might still be a tendril, don’t let that make you second guess yourself, but if it’s easy to cut, it’s probably not one.”

“I feel like all of this is just leading up to me butchering you.”

“It’s going to happen to some degree,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mabel said.  “Let’s get started, then.  Do you want drugs?  I know they aren’t as effective when the plague sets in, but they’ll help some.”

“I’m resistant to drugs,” I said.  “It’s not worth you having to keep pumping me with enough for them to work while trying to avoid killing me, when they won’t even last as long.”

“You’re sure?”

“Pain and I are old acquaintances,” I said, glancing up at Evette.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in, if you don’t mind your boys half-clothed,” I said.

Every bit of focus I could spare was going toward staying still, my fingers gripping my knees.  Blood and sweat ran down my back, and despite Mabel’s efforts to keep on top of it, the fluids had found their way into my butt crack, making me profoundly uncomfortable.  I fixed the sheets as best as I could without disturbing Mabel’s work.

The doorknob rattled for a little while before opening.

Otis stood in the doorway, head lowered.  Bloody bandages covered most of his arms and hands.  Blood had soaked through most of the bandages, and his hands trembled visibly, even with the heavy wrapping.

“Going for a walk,” he said.  “Pain’s getting to me.  Having a bit of a smoke.”

“I’d ask if you have one to spare, but I don’t think Mabel would want me smoking when it’s hard enough to see everything.”

“Please don’t,” Mabel said, lost in what she was doing.  The fingertips of one hand were buried cuticle-deep in and around my shoulder muscles, rooting for what needed to be rooted for.

Otis approached, and with his heavily bandaged hands, he fumbled for the carton, fingers barely moving like they were supposed to, as if he had doll hands and he was trying to function.  He found a  cigarette and placed it between my lips.

“For later,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.  I jerked as Mabel hit a nerve, quite literally.

“Says a lot that they dug some graves in advance, yeah?” Otis asked, in his rough voice.

“Hopefully we won’t need too many of them,” I said.

“Hopefully, Sylvester,” Otis said.  He paused, hands tremoring more than before.  “Gonna see if I can’t finish the carton.  Pain’s pretty bad though.  Might have to get down to it before long.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Look after my guys?” he asked.

Mabel’s hands stopped working as she realized what the conversation was about.

“Yeah,” I said.  I wished I could say more, but I was a little distracted.

“They’re dumb as sticks and rocks, but they’re strong, and they never complained too much.”

“I’ll look after them, Otis.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice rougher than usual.  “Thanks.”

“You were pretty badass today,” I said.  “Fighting the Mercies like that.  Was impressive.”

He nodded, winced in pain, and then silently turned and left the room.  It took him two tries to close the door with the bandaged hands.

There wasn’t much for me to watch besides the fires, Evette, Fray, and the dark view out the window.  I was able to see, after five or so minutes, Otis lurching his way through the snow, disappearing into the treeline, a dot of orange marking his lit cigarette.

It was forty minutes later that I heard the gunshot, from that same direction.  Mabel’s hands jumped at the sound.

When I go, I don’t want to go alone like that, I thought.

“I lost my place,” Mabel said.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “It’ll come back up for air, so to speak, or you’ll find it by accident while working elsewhere.  Just make a mental note of it and move on.”

What felt like hours stretched on, and Otis’ gunshot wasn’t the only one heard that night.

Mabel’s scalpel clattered against the desk.

“Done?”

“I don’t even know for sure,” she said.  “I can’t tell anymore.”

“You have good eyes and a good memory,” I said.  “One of the first things I noticed about you.”

She looked my way and smiled.

They really were quite different.  Lillian and Mabel.  Somehow I felt like Lillian, in this same situation, would look a bit like the wild, Wyvern-touched Lillian I’d seen in Lugh.  More alive, not worn to the nub.

“Let’s get you cleaned up and see this more clearly,” she said.  She washed her gloves in chemical, then collected a bowl from the top of the now-dim wood stove.

She daubed at my back, wiping skin clean.

“You have no shortage of students available to grow you some new skin,” she said.

“That’s good,” I said.  “This isn’t my first rodeo.  You know that story about the man who has his axe head and handle replaced several times over?  I’ve gotten myself injured so many times I’ve lost track of what’s still original.  I don’t even think my own mother would recognize me.”

“You have a mother?”

“Might.  I don’t think she’d recognize me anyhow,” I said.  I blinked hard.  Sweat running down my face had pooled in my eyes.

“I miss my mother,” Mabel said.

“Write her a letter, then.”

“Not exactly that simple, Sy.”

Somewhere over the course of the night, she had transitioned from the formal Sylvester to ‘Sy’.

“Write it anyway.  You don’t have to send it.”

“Maybe,” she said.  “Possibly.”

She began wrapping me with bandages.  I rocked back and forth with the regular, easy pace of it.  Periodically she placed cool things against my wounded back, which felt marvelous, and then set it in place with the bandage and gauze.

“When I was getting the bowl of water for cleanup, I asked about Rudy and the others.  Rudy was in bad shape to begin with.”

“It didn’t go well,” I said.  “I guessed.”

She continued applying the bandage for a moment, then ventured, “Your imaginary friends told you?”

“Just regular old me told me,” I said, my heart heavy.  “I’ll address it tomorrow.”

She nodded, eyes downcast.  “Can you stand?”

I stood, holding the sheet.  It turned out there was very little reason to.  The sheer amount of blood on the sheet made it stick to my legs and buttocks.

“Steady?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

“We’ll get you cleaned up,” Mabel said.  “Berger finished carving away the growths on his face and made it most of the way through his left hand before he had to defer to outside help.  Last I heard, he’s managing.”

I nodded.

“Shirley is mostly fine.  She’ll be better when we get her seamlessly patched up.”

“She’s had a hard day,” I said.  “Does she have anyone with her?”

“A few people.”

“I owe her a lot,” I said.  “Can’t have anything happening to her.”

Mabel nodded.

Then she reached out and touched my cheek.

I moved, and she jumped as though I’d run a voltaic wire through her and thrown the switch.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “It’s a little more odd that you’d do it while I’m bloody like this, but-“

Her eyes were wrenched shut behind the mask.  “Please stop talking, please stop talking.”

“It’s fine,” I said, more firmly.

“It’s not.  You have Jessie, and I wasn’t thinking, and now I’m embarrassed.  Can we just pretend this never happened?”

“We could,” I said.  “I owe you for tonight.  I want to keep you around.”

“Thank you,” she said.  She looked properly mortified, even covered by the suit.

“I’ll clean myself up and get dressed, and I’ll spend the night here, if you deem me clear?”

She nodded very emphatically.  “I had a good sense of it by the end, and it didn’t grow in you nearly as quickly as it did in Rudy or any of the others.”

“It never did.  I don’t think I was contagious either, or I would’ve spread it to a lot more people while doing the rounds in Tynewear.”

“You’re clear enough to see to Jessie,” Mabel said.  The mention of Jessie made the mortification set in once more.

I nodded.

She fled the room, and I used the bowl to clean myself up as well as I was able, scrubbing away where blood had congealed and getting myself as clean as possible.  Rather stiffly, wobbling, I put another log on the fire, and I walked over to the window, to look out in the direction of the graves.

I cleaned up, got dressed, and opened the door.  Now out of her quarantine suit, Mabel offered me her arm, and we walked to Jessie’s room.  I glanced at each room with an open door that we passed, and saw reams of bloody sheets, towels, and tools scattered about.

We reached the room at the end of the hall, above the kitchen.  It was the master bedroom, and Jessie was within, sleeping.  Someone had kept the fire going.

I brushed fingers through Jessie’s hair.  She woke.

“Hi,” she said.  “You’re alive.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

Jessie smiled, “Not disappointed.”

“I’ll give you a once-over, but since Mabel and I took a while and you’re not writhing in pain, it looks pretty good.”

Jessie nodded.  “Thank you for your work, Mabel.”

The sheriff’s daughter tucked her hair behind the one ear and avoided eye contact.

Jessie’s hand moved in a ‘question’ gesture.

“Mabel got affectionate,” I said, “Now she’s embarrassed.”

If the moment earlier had been like activating a voltaic current, this was like a slick of oil being lit on fire.  Slow at first, as it set in and built up steam, with an explosive finale.

“You said you wouldn’t-!”

“I said we could pretend it never happened.  But we aren’t going to.  That’d just be a festering seed of badness that spoiled things on some front.  Better to have it in the open.”

“That’s not your decision to make!” Mabel said, incensed and alarmed.  “It’s not the time for it!  People died tonight!”

“And all of that is negativity that gets tied up in the badness,” I said.  “No.  It’s-“

Jessie put her hand on my face, shushing me.

“Don’t run away, Mabel,” Jessie said.

“I just touched his face.  I-“

“Stay,” Jessie said.  “I don’t mind, whatever it was.  I might feel left out if it kept going and Sy ignored me, but I don’t mind for now.  Sy’s right, it would be ugly if you left and spent the night agonizing over it.  Stay and talk.”

“Talk?”

“Keep us company tonight.  You have to check on Sy regularly throughout the night, don’t you?”

Mabel, as if looking for a way out, said, “You could-“

“Theoretically,” Jessie said, “But while I’m happy for Sy to work on me, I couldn’t do it for him.  That’s not a memory I want in my head.”

“It’s why I asked you,” I told Mabel.

Mabel looked defeated.

“Just look away while he checks on me.  That’s all I ask.”

“Sit,” I instructed.  “End of the bed there.  Tell us about the pheromone project.”

Mabel sat, looking far from comfortable, as if she’d bolt at any second.

Mabel snored.  Her face pressed in between my shoulder and the pillow, seeking refuge from the light of morning that had streamed into the room some time ago.  She’d pulled off the bits of clothing that were uncomfortable to sleep in and settled in beneath the covers, pressed against me.

Jessie was on the other side of me, fast asleep in that Jessie way.  Dead to the world.  I’d wondered for some time how she would sleep.  Mary had always slept with her back to me, or on her back, one arm against mine.  Rigid, but there.  Girly to every sense, from the flowery smell of her to the rough lace and just how nice she’d looked with her head on the pillow.  Lillian had clung to me like I was the only thing keeping her from drowning, warmer than anything.

Jessie seemed very content to be touching me.  One hand outstretched, fingers intertwined with mine.  She would wake up now and then, check, and reach out for me if we’d broken away at some point in the night.  I was a light enough sleeper that I was aware every time it happened.

Looking at her sleep, I knew there wasn’t anyone or anything I wanted to protect quite so much.

It was a warm, pleasant now that couldn’t last.

I felt a chill and stirred, which made both girls stir on either side of me.

Fray was there, in her abstract glory, wearing her black lab coat.  Standing behind her were the Lambs.  I might have summoned them by thinking of them like I had.  Though I hadn’t been thinking of Duncan and Ashton.  They were joined by Mary, Helen, and Lillian.

None of them are wearing black today, I thought, except for Fray.  Still trying to figure out that pattern.

Mary stepped forward a little.  Lillian wouldn’t look at me.  A return to the days after I’d just left.

“I’ve got to ask, what’s with the color of the dresses?” I asked.

“That’s really not what you should be focusing on,” Mary said.

“It means something,” I said.  “Like for one thing, you seem a lot more pleasant sometimes.”

Mary reached into her jacket and pulled out a pistol.

“A lot more pleasant,” I said.  “I guess this is where I pay for that time I asked for yesterday?  Another mutiny?  A little more painful than the last?”

“Something like that,” Mary said.

“Thank you for the help earlier,” I said.  “I did appreciate it.”

“You noticed?” Duncan asked.

“Huh?” I asked, back.

Mabel stirred beside me.

“Shh,” I said, giving Mabel’s head a pat.  “I think Mary and the other Lambs just wants to go for a ride on the Sylvester train.”

Mabel made a curious sound.  She opened her eyes just in time to see Mary aiming for my kneecap.  I, meanwhile, was wondering why Fray had disappeared from the group.

Mabel realized what she was looking at, startled and cried out in alarm, which startled me, and I moved just in time to avoid having the bullet strike home.  Feathers flew everywhere.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 16.x (Lamb) – Twig

Lamb (Arc 16)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Done hunting Sylvester?” Abby asked.

“No,” Ashton said.  He sat beneath a tree, half of him facing the local Academy, half of him facing wilderness.  “Sylvester is still ‘at large’, as they say it.”

Abby nodded.  She shifted Quinton around so the arm that had been taking most of the weight wasn’t, anymore.  She wore a green and white dress and a short jacket that had fur trim on the hood and down the front.

The Lambs had been tracking both Sylvester and Fray, moving to key locations, with the younger Lambs remaining behind as a kind of bait and stalling tactic.  When the area was vetted, the younger Lambs would catch up, they’d be in the same place for a little under a week, and then the Lambs would be off again.

“What were you doing?” Abby asked.

“Thinking,” Ashton said.  He hadn’t been, exactly, but he had learned that if he said the truth it often bothered or confused people.  He had been disassembling, looking at the world and dividing it into its constituent elements, decided by color.

He had also been disassembling people.  That was a more intensive process that took up more of his brain.  He’d taken the clothes off, with his head, and left them walking and standing around, then tried to determine what people looked like with no clothes at all.  He worked out what they looked like beneath the clothes, disassembled those things, and turned every one of the dozens of people he could see into an organized row, with the clothes at one end and the lymphatic system at the other.  He imagined doing things like stabbing people in various places and then worked out the effects that followed, along each of the layers, from bloodstains on the clothes and underclothes to nervous signals and disruption to the lymphatic system.  He imagined burns and how they would work, and he imagined his pheromones and tried to figure out how the body would react.

Talking about disassembling people wasn’t good conversation, he’d learned.  Most others were bothered.  Even Abby usually didn’t really want to talk about it.

“You spend a lot of time sitting and thinking,” Abby said.

“I’m good at it,” Ashton said.

Quinton bleated, walking forward and tugging against the leash that Abby held, drawing nearer to Ashton.  Ashton released a puff of good feeling and gave Quinton pats.

“What were you thinking about?” Abby asked.

Ashton had already worked out an answer for this kind of question.  Telling the truth was rarely good, so he supplied something else.  “My creators told me I needed to practice abstract thinking instead of using the building blocks I’ve been given.  They asked me what Good Simon book I would write if I had to write one.  I’m supposed to think of things that I had trouble with and then figure out how to write it.”

“Did you figure it out?” Abby asked.

“I don’t think so.  I think my problem is that I’m not bad at anything.”

“You’re bad at a lot of things, Ashton,” Abby said.

“Okay.  You’re allowed to say so.  But to me, I was very good at everything I needed to be good at from the beginning.  Sleeping, eating, drinking, walking, even talking.  Talking was hard.”

“You’re setting the bar rather low there, Ashton,” Abby said.

She took a seat beside Ashton.  He was sitting beneath the largest tree on the campus, a blanket laid out beneath him as if for a picnic, another blanket on his lap.

“The bar wasn’t even set when I started.  The Ashton before me didn’t even live.  You started out with a good bit of human.  I started from the very beginning and I think I’m pretty happy having made it this far.”

“I’m glad you lived too, but that’s not the point.”

“Most of the time now people will think I’m a very strange boy, instead of wondering if I’m an experiment, and that’s without me pushing them to feel one thing or another.  Sometimes they even think I’m normal.”

Abby busied herself with stealing some of Ashton’s blanket, settling in beside him.  Quinton the lamb found a space between their legs and settled in.  She figured out what she wanted to say and told him, “You’re not very normal.”

“But that’s what I’m saying.  I’m a xyloenterate-calceoenterate hybrid mass with a very thin approximation of human pattern to help me find the right shape only.  I can mostly defend myself, I can get food, I can find warm places to sit.  I can understand the greater world.  I can read, even if I sometimes hit snags and stall on some sentences until I ask for help.  Considering I just had to survive to make people happy, I think I’m doing very well.”

“One second,” Abby said, working to get comfortable without disturbing Quinton too much.

Ashton waited patiently.

“There’s more to it, Ashton.”

“Is there?”

“Didn’t you tell Lara and Nora that we need to do a good job?  That our survival and success depends on proving our worth to our superiors?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t see how you’re missing the point?”

“No, I don’t.”

He had to interpret the look that Abby gave him.  That was annoyance.  Frustration and annoyance.  Anyone else would have known immediately, but he did need to figure it out some.  He also needed to figure out why she was frustrated and annoyed.  He thought through the conversation-

“You’re sort of proving yourself wrong on the ‘I’m good at sitting and thinking’ thing.”

“I am not.”

“And the good at everything thing.”

“I am not,” Ashton said.

“But you can’t just say you eat and you’re warm and you mostly look human so you’re happy.”

“But I am.  Good Simon says-”

“Oh lords,” Abby said.

“He says your feelings are your feelings and you’re the only person who gets to know and decide what you feel.  He was talking about grief over the death of a pet in that book, but I think it applies to happiness too.”

“How about this?  I’ll speak your language.  Good Simon, book six.”

“Good Simon and the Small War.”

“Sadie gets mean, and what’s the lesson at the end of the book?”

“That you need to weigh your wants, needs, and feelings and make sure that they aren’t keeping your betters from doing their jobs.”

“It’s supposed to be that you have to watch that your wants and feelings don’t infringe on the needs, wants and feelings of others.”

“But in the story, the new teacher that Sadie is mostly being mean to is supposed to be allegorical,” Ashton said.  “She represents the hard working and well-intentioned leadership we have in the Crown and the Academy and the story is really about how we need to listen to them and then everything is better.”

Abby leaned back against the tree.  She stroked Quinton, fixing some of the blanket so that Quinton was better covered.  The lamb was falling asleep now.

“You’re not supposed to recognize the hidden influences and meanings and take them as fact, Ashton.”

“I grew up with the books, and when the world and the people around me seemed very strange, I thought about the books.  I think it would be strange to rely on them that much and miss something like that.”

“My point is,” Abby said, a little more agitated than before, “You can’t just say you’re happy and leave it at that.  You can’t set the simple things as your end goal.”

“A lot of people are unhappy because they don’t have the simple things like food and shelter.  Quinton is very happy because you take care of him, because he has those things.  Why am I not supposed to be happy for that same reason?”

“Because, just like Sadie failed to pay attention to the feelings of the teacher because she was focused on her own feelings, your acceptance of basic happiness might mean you don’t try hard enough and then one of the Lambs or Lara or Nora or Emmett or me get hurt or die, because we do dangerous things.”

“What have I done that’s wrong on our past jobs?”

“Nothing major, but sometimes you’re… clumsy.  And I know I sound hypocritical, saying that,” Abby said.

“Okay.”

“And I worry when you’re clumsy with words or doing things.”

“Okay.  I’ll try harder with those things.”

“Thank you,” Abby said.

“You could have just asked me to do that from the beginning.”

“It’s about something more, Ashton.  I want you to have the right reasons.  If you have a greater goal or a… I don’t even know.  A drive, those things make it different.”

“There’s a difference?” Ashton asked.

“One pulls at you, and the other pushes you,” Abby said.  “But either one, they make it so you don’t have to be told or taught.  You start doing things and growing without needing to be urged to, every part of you starts working toward it, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ones.  It refines you.”

Ashton mused on that for a little bit.  Then, just to keep the conversation moving, he asked, “What’s your goal?”

“I want to grow up,” Abby said.  “I want to get all the way to as old as I can be before I expire.  I want to stay out of danger so I can live as long as I can, and I want to live a peaceful life with animals all around me.  I’d like it if some of you were there with me.  I was thinking maybe it could be a place for warbeasts to go when they’re done fighting, but a farm would do too.  A place like Sous Reine.”

Ashton’s mind whirled, piecing together the scenario from constitutent elements.

“I can see that,” Ashton said.  “I can take all the pictures I have of you in my head and it’s very easy to put together scenes of you doing that and being there.”

“It’s nice of you to say so,” Abby replied.  She smiled.

“I try to be nice, but I wasn’t trying there.  I was just saying the truth,” Ashton said.

Abby only smiled.  “I’ve missed these talks.”

“It’s good I didn’t frustrate you so much that you had another fit,” Ashton said.

“Almost,” Abby said.  “I asked you to wait a moment a few times to let it go away.”

She raised her knees up and hugged them.  The movement of the blanket didn’t seem to disturb Quinton.  He remained fast asleep.

“My new doctors are having people teach me to fight and use guns,” Abby said.  “I don’t think I’m going to get my goal.  I think I’m going to fight sometimes, and then I’m going to have some times when I get to do what I want.”

“I’m sorry,” Ashton said.  That was what people were supposed to say in situations like this.

“I’m sorry too,” Abby said.  “I don’t like it.”

“Was that why you came to sit with me?  Do you want to talk about it more?”

“No, and no, I don’t want to think about it too much,” Abby said.

“Oh, okay,” Ashton said.  He decided to politely ignore the fact that it did sound an awful lot like she wanted to talk about it.  He reached down to give Quinton a scratch.

“I came to find you because I wanted to ask if you wanted to meet my new friend,” she said.

“A new friend?”

“Come on,” Abby said, a little more excited and upbeat.  “Come see.”

“You just spent all that time settling down, and now you’re getting up?” Ashton said.  “That doesn’t make sense.”

Abby took Ashton’s hand, and she used every muscle in her body to help haul him to his feet, while he didn’t cooperate at all.  She scooped up a protesting, bleating Quinton and then stood there, looking satisfied, her odd features set with a smile while she huffed a little.  A moment later, she was tugging him away from his spot.

Ashton cast a forlorn glance backward at the nest of blankets he’d made.  It hadn’t been as nice as being inside and near the fire, but inside was noisy, all students and new people and they kept on pestering him and complimenting him on his hair.  The tree had thick cover that meant only a few droplets fell on him, and his jacket and hood protected him from those.  He liked the unpredictable tapping of droplets on his head.

Caldwell was a small Academy, set deep in the woods.  It looked like a castle, and it was about as cold as one.  Ashton joined Abby in passing beneath a statue that had long turned green-black, depicting a doctor working with a stitched on a table, crowing his victory with arms outspread.  The lightning from the voltaic systems around him was done up in silver, for contrast.

The students here were a grim sort, the kind that wanted to work with stitched.  Others worked on projects that needed to be kept away from civilization, but permissions for that sort of work were doled out sparingly.  Pale, dressed in dark uniforms with student’s lab coats, damp with the freezing rain, they walked in something that would’ve been a single file march if it wasn’t for the periodic clusters of friends or lab partners talking, keeping pace with those behind and in front of them.

Some in the single file march reached out.  They put coins atop what had become towers of coins at the foot of the statue.  They couldn’t stop without being jostled by students behind them, so they had to move quick, place the coins, and not disturb the towers that had come into being in front or to either side.  Some of the lower parts of towers closer to the feet of the scientist had been there through enough seasons to have become a single unit, fusing together through heat, cold, and the chemicals in the rain and snow.

Coins in the wishing well, payment to the shrine, but it was enough of a departure from prayer and close enough to being a token of tribute to the Academy and Crown that it was permitted.

Abby, Quinton, and Ashton paid little mind to the lines or the marching orders, and they had no tribute to give.  Abby led the way in a kind of determined way, heading for the gaps, steering through, dragging Ashton behind.

Some students cussed, and Quinton bleated out an equally rude reply.

“This way,” Abby said.

The castle-like Academy was perched on a hill, and the hill had a number of rocky outcroppings.  Abby led the way to the edge of the campus, where the buildings ended and there were only intermittent cliffs, rocks, and bits of grass that were stubbornly persisting through winter.

Abby hopped down, and she skidded a little ways down the cliff.

“Come on!” she urged Ashton.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Come on!” she said.

He hopped down.  Abby caught him.

“I was walking Quinton, I wanted him to get exercise, so I brought him down this hill.  We were exploring together, and we found this.”

Abby drew Ashton’s attention to a hole in the ground.  Two rocks had parted, and a shaft extended all the way down into pitch darkness.  Humid steam rose from the space.

Ashton liked the humid steam.  It was warm, when everything else was a wet sort of cold, even indoors.  He was rather less sure of the black abyss that Abby was now crawling into.

“Abby,” he said.

Abby disappeared, bringing Quinton with her.

“Abby,” Ashton said, at the same volume.  “You’re supposed to respond when someone talks.”

There was no response.

Ashton puffed out a cloud of annoyance, then descended into the pitch darkness.  The stone was wet and slick, the spaces small enough an adult couldn’t have climbed through, and, the further he descended, the more branches he ran into.  He’d taken them for roots first, but they had a rigidity he was very familiar with.  Builder’s wood.

He heard the rasp of a match, and he saw the flicker of flame.

A moment later, bioluminescence kicked in, the walls of the long corridor responding to the light of the flame with a dull yellow light of their own.  It was a horizontal shaft, the ceiling arching overhead, builder’s wood supporting the shaft all the way down.

The entire tunnel smelled like the fluids they used in a stitched.

“It responds to touch too,” she said.  “That’s how I found out about it at first.  Quinton stuck his nose into it and it glowed.”

She touched her hand to the wall.  The handprint glowed.

Ashton tried it.  The wall was clammy, the residual glow left by touch a bright, warm color.  He liked the contrast of the two things.  He traced fingers along the wall, and watched patterns emerge.

“Ashton,” Abby said.

“I like this,” he said.

“I wanted to show you something.  This wasn’t it.”

“This could be it.  This is nice,” Ashton said.  “This is good enough.”

She took hold of his arm, and she set about dragging him, to the best of her ability.  One of her arms held Quinton, however, and Ashton was as committed to staying put as he had been to anything.

“What I want to show you is neater,” she said.

“I think we’re in an area we’re not supposed to be in,” Ashton said.  “Or an area that they forgot about or wanted to forget about, or an area that they tried to seal like they seal the bowels in Radham, and they missed one crack in the wall.  It’s probably better to stay where we are.”

“Please?” Abby asked.  “Leave that wall alone, and come with me?”

“You keep taking me away from warm spots and pretty things,” he said, but he allowed her to lead him.

They walked down the length of the corridor, and they passed down a flight of stairs.  The bioluminescent algae didn’t creep along the stairwell, so their descent was a dark one.

At the bottom of the stairwell, Abby lit another match.  The cavern was larger, the glowing surfaces well out of reach, a cavern roof twenty feet over their heads.  The moisture had collected in areas, and the cave looked like the night sky.  The cavern itself was rocky, with an uneven floor littered with pebbles.

Abby whistled, a low sound, very well done, and then repeated the process, this time more of an insect sound.  “Here girl.  Let’s see you.  Say hello to Ashton.”

An outcropping halfway across the cavern floor parted.  Three eyelids on one eye moved back, and they had a distance to move.  The eye’s surface itself, flat and not rounded, would have taken twenty paces to cross.  A cloudy membrane covered the eye, a three-piece protective membrane.

“I call her Princesca,” Abby said.  “She probably has another name, but I don’t know it.”

“Hello Princesca,” Ashton said, dutifully.  He waited several moments, and then decided, “I don’t think she can understand me or respond.”

“She’s half-asleep, poor dear,” Abby said.  She bent down and she gave the ‘floor’ a rub.  “Buried under everything in a cold and wet place like this.  I think most of her body sprawls under Caldwell.”

“I don’t think we should be down here,” Ashton said.

“I know,” Abby said.  “But when you all go off and hunt Sylvester, and it’s just Emmett and me and Nora and Lara, I miss you and the other Lambs.  Emmett tries to listen to me and he does a very good job, but I don’t want to bother him too much and sometimes I need to talk about things I don’t want to bother him with.  Princesca is a good listener too.”

“I think it might be better to bother Emmett than to bother Princesca,” Ashton said.

“I’m good with animals.  When she looks at me, I can see her pupil.  If you walk a few minutes down through the tunnels you can find another eye that’s even clearer.  The tension of her skin relaxes after a little while of me talking.”

Abby rubbed the floor, both elbow and hand touching it, the rub using the whole length of her forearm, clad in her jacket.

“She likes you?”

“I think so,” Abby said.  “I have to talk in a particular sort of voice and I need to spend a little while here to make it work, but she likes me.”

“That’s good,” Ashton said.

“I think she’s bored, and she’s lonely, and she’s very tired.  Whatever it is they’re using to keep her docile and sleepy is… not easy, or not pleasant.  I felt bad for her, and that’s when I started thinking about what I wanted.  Not in the now, but in the future.”

“Ah,” Ashton said.  “You’re going to need a bigger stable if this is the kind of warbeast you want to take care of.”

Abby laughed.

With the faint and distant light, Ashton could see Abby’s face change, and with every moment that he thought he might have grasped what that particular combination of brow, eye, cheek and mouth expression was supposed to mean, it had changed, moving from one thing to another.

The laughing face was distant and she didn’t sound very happy as she said, “Between you, me, Quinton, and Princesca, I feel like all the things I want are very far away.”

“I’ll help you get there,” Ashton said.  “I’m good, I have what I want, I can help you with what you want.  I’ll help Emmett and Nora and Lara too, and the Lambs as well.”

“Bleaah,” Quinton said.

“Quinton will help too,” Ashton said.  “He’s soft, and he can listen.”

“I know,” Abby said.  “Until he gets too big, and then we get Quinton the Fourth.”

“Or a girl Quinton,” Ashton said.

“Or a girl Quinton,” Abby said.

Slowly, Princesca’s eyelids drifted closed.  Fluid bubbled and oozed out of the cracks between them as they sealed shut.

“Shh,” Abby said, giving the floor another rub.

“You seem sad,” Ashton said.

“I miss home.  I miss Sous Reine and people who spoke German, English, and French.  I miss the stables and the squirrels.  The people who worked with me there loved me, even if they weren’t there for me.  Here, you’re all there for me… until you aren’t.  People keep coming and going.”

“Don’t get too upset,” Ashton said.  “You’ll have another fit.”

Abby nodded emphatically, before rubbing at her nose and then her eye with the back of her hand.

“You’re scared of having to learn to use guns and weapons?” he asked.

“It feels like a big step I don’t want to take.”

Ashton nodded.

He had to think for a little while to decide how to answer.  It helped that Abby had fallen silent, one hand on Quinton, another arm rubbing Princesca.

“Before, I said I would help you,” Ashton said.

Abby nodded, looking up at him.

“And I said I would help Nora and Lara and Emmett and the Lambs.”

She nodded again.

“If you need me to, I’ll help just you for now.  I can talk to Duncan when he gets back, and he can figure out how to talk to others about the weapons.  He’s good at that, he’s good at negotiating and politics, and he does care about you.”

“It’s not that,” Abby said.

“What is it?”

“If I have to keep doing this, I want to learn how to fight.  But I don’t want to learn how to fight.  I don’t want to fight five days of the week so I can have the life I want on the other two.  I don’t want to fight two days a week so I can have the life I want for the other five.  I just want a peaceful life with my animals…”

She sniffled, and her arm moved funny as she brought it to her eye.

“Stop,” Ashton said, uselessly, urgently puffing out calm.

“And I’m really worried-”

He did his best to catch her before she toppled to the floor.  He sank to the floor with her, holding her twitching body while Quinton bleated.

Through the floor, he could feel the low course of fluids through Princesca’s body.  He could feel the warmth of her and he could see why Abby had been drawn here.

While he waited for Abby to calm down, the bioluminescence faded, the cavern went dark, and he had some time to sit and think.

He wished he had a Good Simon book that was more about how to help friends in trouble.  He would have made it the topic of the book he’d been asked to write, but he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do in this kind of situation.

“So this is what you were leading up to,” Sylvester said.  “You catch me on a bad day when my mind, heart, and body are tapped out, and you just… what?  Promise horrible things if I don’t kowtow to you?”

Helen touched her hair and smiled.  “A Helen kind of horrible.”

Sylvester ran his fingers through his hair, pacing.  “You’re doing just what Evette did.  You all want your turns, and since you’re the figments of my imagination that represent instinct and… I don’t know, common sense?  The senses?  And Fray here represents… absolutely everything going wrong, or conspiracy, or… whatever.  I don’t have the energy to do this.  You’re staging your mutiny, working to push me out?  A very complicated way of my self-preservation instincts saying ‘no more’?”

He wheeled around.  His voice was almost ragged, “Well, you can go fuck a fistful of nails, Fray!  And you two-”

Ashton watched Sylvester.  He was preoccupied with watching Sylvester’s emotions, trying to piece it all together.

Sylvester’s voice softened.  “Don’t do the nail thing.  But do leave me alone.  I’m doing too many important things.  Go away.”

Ashton gave Helen a sidelong glance.

“What if I say no?” Helen asked.

“Don’t.  No.  You’re not allowed.  Not today.  I have things I need to square away.”

“Like Jessie,” Helen said.

“Like a lot of things!  This is just inconvenient.  So scram.  I banish thee, and I refuse to accept you’re going to pull an Evette and say no.  You two will stand aside.  I will it so.  Just this once.”

He was gesticulating wildly, and in this, he used his hands as if to part the waters, to will them to move aside.

Ashton looked at Helen for guidance.  Wouldn’t taking Sylvester be better?  They could get him help.

But she gestured, go, and she stepped back.

Ashton mirrored her movement, stepping away from her and from the door.

Without a word, Sylvester walked through.

Sylvester trudged off, casting one or two backward glances.  He looked so hurt, so tired, so cold.

“He asked,” Helen said, answering a question Ashton hadn’t voiced.  “He didn’t ask nicely, but he asked.”

“Abby wants to leave,” Ashton said.  “She said so, a few days ago, before we came here.”

Helen approached him, wrapping her arms around him from behind, and buried her face in his damp hair, mussing it up.  He tolerated the messy hair and he puffed happiness at her.

“You can’t tell.  It’s a secret,” Ashton said, stopping with the puffs so he could be sure she listened.  It was like the period at the end of a sentence, a stab of the finger.

“I know, and I won’t,” Helen said, and she wouldn’t because she was like that.

“I was looking at Sylvester just now and I was thinking what if that was Abby standing there instead?  Sylvester didn’t look very happy.”

“There’s a difference,” Helen said.  “They’re different.”

“I know that,” Ashton said.  He puffed out disgust and irritation and agitation.  He could feel Helen snort into his hair.  “I just wish I understood better.  I really could only think of two ways she might end up happy, and this was supposed to be one.”

“They’re different.  Keep that in mind,” Helen said.  “What’s the other way?”

“I thought of asking Duncan to send her back to Sous Reine.  I thought maybe we or I could chip in money and they could give her a job in the stables or somewhere and she could save money or something.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot.”

“Ask her before you do that,” Helen said.

“Why?”

“Because she might not be as happy doing that as you think she might,” Helen said.  “And that’s if it works, if they let her go and if Sous Reine would take her.”

Ashton nodded.

“If you need help with any of that, little mushroom brother, you can ask me,” Helen said.  “I’ll do what I can.  But if you’re going to ask me for anything, sooner is better, I think.”

“Why?”

“Sooner is better,” she restated it.

Why?” he tried again.

She bit into his scalp, far harder than was necessary, and then she let go of him.

How are they different?  Ashton asked, using his head instead of his mouth.  He worried Helen would bite him again if he pressed her.

He remained quiet, thinking, as they exited the little stable.

It was a minute before he deemed it safe enough to say, “Mary is going to be so mad at us.”

“Yes she is, little brother,” Helen said, smiling merrily.  “Yes she is.”

Mary fired the gun.  It was an intentional miss, Ashton judged, but it did a good job of making Sylvester jump a good few feet off the bed.  The girl in the bed and Jessie looked spooked too.

Sylvester scrambled to use the bed for cover, as Jessie did.  The girl in the bed was furthest from that end of the bed, and simply froze.

“Come here, honey,” Helen said.  “Out of the way.”

The girl in the bed brought a sheet with her to cover herself up, ducking down swiftly to pick up her skirt and socks from the floor.

Still using the bed as defensive cover, Sylvester chuckled.  The chuckle became a laugh.

Ashton couldn’t see Sylvester, so he watched the other Lambs.  Mary was calm, cool.  Lillian had one hand on her face.

Duncan looked… concerned.

Helen was Helen.

He tried to judge if he should use something or another on Mary.  Mary was immune, but if he tried really, really hard and emptied his reserve, he might have been able to do something.

Sylvester continued laughing.  He raised his hands over his head.  When Mary didn’t put a hole in either hand, Sylvester stood, and rounded the end of the bed, wearing only his pyjama bottoms.  His back and shoulder were bandaged, and he had dark circles under his eyes that had nothing to do with how much or how little sleep he’d gotten.

He approached, and when Mary didn’t shoot him, he threw his arms around her, hugging her.

She pressed the gun to his head.

“You got me,” he said, still hugging her.

As he pulled away, turning toward Lillian, Mary seized his wrist, twisted his arm behind his back, and shoved him into the ground.

Further twisting of his arm made him drop the knife of Mary’s that he’d palmed.

“You got me,” he said, again.

“We came for the Professor,” Duncan volunteered.  “You were accidental.”

“Well, you got him too,” Sylvester said, smiling.

They were different, Helen had said.  Abby and Sylvester.

For a moment, Ashton thought he realized how.  Abby had said something about it once.  That some people were pulled, and some people were pushed.

Abby was pulled toward that dream of hers.  Of a simple life, of animals, and hopefully having friends near her.  And it looked like Sylvester was pushed.

It was a very tidy, satisfying answer, until Mary hauled Sylvester up off the ground.  For a fleeting moment, as Sylvester took in the group, Ashton could read his expression.

He’d looked like this as he rested between Jessie and the girl on the bed.  Now, captive, gun aimed at him, his plans awry, he looked very much like he’d found his farm, his animals, and all of his friends.

“You got me,” Sylvester said, not for the first time.  “Sorry Jessie.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.01 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“You got me,” I told the Lambs.  My face was pressed against the ground.  “I’m sorry, Jessie.”

Jessie had sat up in bed when the gun had fired.  In the enclosed space, the sound had reverberated off of the walls.  The sound of the shot rang in my ears, and feathers continued to fall all around us.

“Don’t be sorry,” Jessie said.  She remained where she was.  She’d reached over and picked up her glasses, but she hadn’t budged from her spot.

I was sorry, though.  That I wasn’t able to put up more of a fight, that I was glad about this reunion, even if the long term wasn’t something I wanted to think about.  Even considering the idea of being taken back, facing Hayle and my old doctors-

I moved, and Mary asserted her grip, making me wince.

“Please be gentle with him,” Mabel said.  “His shoulder-”

“I know about the shoulder,” Mary said.  “If he wants me to be gentle with it, he should stop trying to be clever with knives.”

“No more cleverness here,” I said.  “I’m rather too tired for cleverness.”

“Let’s hope,” Mary said.  “It’s a long trip back to civilization, and I’m not in any mood for games.  If you push me, I’ll hurt you, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

My eyes fell on a large feather that had fallen to the floor a short distance from my nose.  I puffed out a breath and blew it a little distance across the floor.

“No interest in hurting me at all, huh?  That shot at my knee suggests otherwise,” I said.  I was trying to keep my tone light.

“That was different,” Mary said.  “Call it a warning shot, a reminder that I remember.”

“An intentional miss?” I asked.  “Good excuse, that.”

She pressed the gun against the back of my head.  “Don’t tempt me to shoot you, Sylvester.  I’m the one holding the gun because it would probably bother me the least.”

“Right,” I said.  I smiled.

I didn’t push my luck any further.  Waking up, my senses had been jumbled.  Now that I’d had a bit of time to get my thoughts all orderly, I was able to shift my head into a better mode for analysis and strategy.

I knew who I was up against.  Foolhardy as it was, given my recent misinterpretation of reality, I drew on the phantoms, bringing forth images of Lillian, Helen, Mary, and Duncan.  The shadows mirrored the Lambs, sticking close to them, looking over shoulders, or sitting on nearby surfaces, looking over the Lambs’ heads.

I looked for Fray and Mauer and I didn’t see them.  Evette was conspicuously absent, too.

Damn Fray, damn her for toying with me like this.

“You’re going by Jessie now?” Lillian asked.

“Yes,” Jessie said.  “I wanted to put some distance between myself and the original Jamie.”

“And you’re pretending to be a girl now?” Lillian asked.

“If I am, I was pretending to be a boy before too,” Jessie said.  “I wouldn’t disagree with that.”

“What’s this?” Mabel asked, sounding uncertain.

This wasn’t how I’d wanted to have the conversation.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to have the conversation at all.  Jessie seemed willing to field this, but I just wished it wasn’t in the midst of a crowd.

“Jam- Jessie is-” Duncan started.

I really wished it wasn’t Duncan supplying any answers.

“I’m an experiment,” Jessie said, before Duncan could go further.  “Nothing either way except scars.  The only thing that really made me a ‘boy’ before was that it was in the Academy’s paperwork and files, and they weren’t even that committed to it.”

It was hard for me to read Lillian’s expressions from my position on the ground.

“I’m just saying, my doctors referred to me as Project Caterpillar four hundred and sixty eight times in my recollection and Jamie’s written records, while only referring to Jamie seventy one times.  They referred to me as ‘it’ two hundred times and ‘he’ two hundred and thirty times.  I don’t think they cared that much.  So what’s tying me down?”

“I thought you were a wonderful boy,” Lillian said.  “Gentle, sensitive, thoughtful.”

“Thank you,” Jessie said.

“It meant a lot to me, growing up, that I had one or two boys around me that I could contrast with my dad and with Sy.  If it was just my dad, Sy, and Gordon, and maybe a little bit of Professor Hayle, I might have gotten a warped idea of what boys were about.  I appreciated that you were part of the mix, and now that’s gone.  I don’t think it’s fair to say you had no ties to it and you could just throw it away like that, when we spent so much time together being bookworms together, and figuring out our way through things, talking about things…”

“But how much of that was me and how much was my predecessor?”

“You and I had conversations, Jessie.  We hung out.  I visited you regularly, between my classes, I participated in the rehabilitation and life skills, speech training and everything else.  I tried to brace you about Sy not being over the loss of the first Jamie.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Jessie said.  “But that doesn’t answer my question.  Can you really draw a fine line between the time you spent with my predecessor and time you spent with me?”

Yes,” Lillian said, and it was clear she was upset.  “It was really very emotional, mourning Jamie while getting to know you in those early days.  My memory might not be perfect, but when it comes to sorting the before and after, it felt different.  You two were different.  Yes, again, I can draw a fine line.”

“Okay,” Jessie said, looking a little caught off guard.

“And I’m annoyed and hurt that you’re ignoring my points.”

“I’m sorry,” Jessie said.  “But we have to continue to grow and change while we aren’t together.”

Lillian made a face.  She met my eyes for only an instant and then flinched away.

Jessie continued, “That dark cloud that hung over things was another part of it.  Something I want to stay away from.  Every interaction for too long was tainted by association.  There weren’t many clothes I liked that weren’t also his style.  I needed a clean break.”

“I understand, I really do get it,” Lillian said.  “It makes a lot of sense, and as much as it makes sense I think it kind of sucks that I’m here and I barely recognize you.  I wasn’t a part of the conversation or the change, and neither were any of the other Lambs.  It sucks-”

She paused, looking at me, then looking at Mabel.

“This sucks on a lot of levels,” she said.  “We didn’t plan on cornering you like this, we didn’t even plan on meeting you, and then you guys forced our hand by getting to Berger before we did.”

“I know,” Jessie said.

“It doesn’t feel like a good day,” Duncan said.  “It’s a win in our column, for what very little it’s worth, but it doesn’t feel good.”

“Well said, Duncan,” Lillian said.

“For what it’s worth,” I said.  I tried to stand up, but Mary was sitting on me, and I didn’t have much strength in my shoulder.  “I can’t say the situation is good, but any day I get to see all of you is a good one.”

“He’s being sappy,” Mary said.

“He’s up to something,” Lillian concluded.

“No, really,” I said.

“You come across as far less sincere when there’s a knife lying on the floor about two feet from your hand,” Duncan said.  “Which you took off of Mary and presumably intended to use on one of us.”

“Okay, hi there Duncan, how’s it?” I said.  “And the knife was more because this would all be terribly sad and pathetic if I didn’t put up some sort of fight.  Lamb cred.  I’m sure you understand.”

“Who were you going to take hostage?” Lillian asked.

“Alright, wait,” I said.  I’d just woken up, my eyes were bleary, my shoulder hurt from the damage done with the scalpel and the way that my twisted arm was pulling at the wound, and I needed to focus, with no time to get my brain organized.  “Wait, let’s do this in order, so it all makes sense.  I’ll have you know that hugging Mary was because I was genuinely happy to see you guys and it was politically difficult to choose who to hug.  You and I have bad blood, Helen might hug me back in her Helen sort of way, I don’t know what Ashton’s got going on these days, and given the choice between Mary and Duncan, I’m going to choose Mary, even if she’s got me in an armlock with a gun pointed at me.”

“I’ll try not to take it personally,” Duncan said.

“Ha ha,” I said, with a more genuine smile on my face, to downplay the dismissal.  I was trying to keep up the patter and the good mood.  In this tense atmosphere, anything I could do to be the light in the darkness would go a long, long way.  It could win over hearts and cement my position.

And besides, I didn’t want this reunion to suck in the same sorts of ways the last one had.

“If you’re feeling lonely, I’m always available to practice hugging,” Helen said.

“Ha ha,” Duncan imitated me a bit.  He sounded a lot less dry and more flustered.

My focus was more on Helen in the instant.  When I’d seen her as a phantom, I’d imagined her as being influenced by Fray, darker, with more latent hostility, the predator side of her active and ready.  But the Fray had been a trick of my mind working against itself, the Helen had been real, and so had the aura of bloodlust.

What was going on there?

I resumed talking to the group, the worry lingering, “As for the knife you so carefully pointed out, sir, the knife was more of a ‘how are you doing’ from one master to another, a test of skill that I wouldn’t pull if I didn’t have utmost respect for Mary’s skill-”

“You are so full of shit,” Mary said.

“And, to answer the question,” I said, carrying on, “I would have taken you hostage, Lillian.  If, by some miracle, I got that far.”

“Lovely.”

“It would have been with the full knowledge that you have countermeasures.  Needles in your fingers, like Fray had, and whatever else.  You turn the tables, strut your stuff, and it breaks the ice.  Get past any awkwardness by putting you at my mercy and then adroitly putting myself at your utter mercy.  Mary’s happy shooting at me and kicking my rear end.  We’ve got more of a gap to bridge, but I can’t imagine a bit of a spar would hurt any.”

“I see, I see,” Lillian said, “Very clever.  A good analysis of the situation.”

“You sound like you’re humoring me.”

“Hi,” Lillian said, turning to Mabel.  “What’s your name?”

Ah, I see what you’re doing there, I thought.  Then I registered implications and cursed to myself.

“Mabel,” Mabel said.

I sighed.

Mary adjusted her grip and pressed the gun to my head.

I know, Mary, I know, I thought.  You want to protect Lillian and now we’ve got this going on.

“Sorry about all of this, Mabel,” Lillian said.

“Oh, no need to apologize,” Mabel said.  “Whatever you’re thinking this is, me being here, it’s not.  I did the surgery on Sylvester last night.  I was dog tired, I needed to check on him and change his bandages throughout the night.  We talked, I fell asleep.”

“Don’t worry, Mabel.  There’s nothing between Sylvester and I.”

Ouch.

“There’s nothing between him and I either, not really.  Nothing happened,” Mabel insisted.

“You’re from Beattle?”

“Yes,” Mabel said.  “I was year five.”

“What were you studying?”

“Pheromones.”

“There was a project in the other building, when we came through.  Ashton and Duncan said it looked like pheromones.”

Mabel glanced at me.

“Cat’s out of the bag, our noses are to the knifepoints.  You can share.”

“Yeah,” Mabel said.  “I’m project leader for that.  It’s going to be a warbeast with a pheromone trail.  Sylvester wanted to operate with impunity in the cities without worrying about his scent trail.”

“Can I stand up now?” I asked.  “My shoulder really is getting quite sore like this.”

There was a moment of silent communication among Lambs, a quick search of the surroundings, and the phantoms around the Lambs let me know that the Lambs were checking that letting me stand wouldn’t give me any opportunities, ways to escape, or weapons.

Mary shifted off of me and hauled me to my feet.  She didn’t have the full-body strength to hold me up, but I got my feet under me and after only a moment of wobbling knees, I found the strength to stand.

Duncan and Mabel were saying something about Pheromones.  Ashton was standing between Helen and Duncan, staring at me intently.

Helen still worried me.  I wished she was more involved in the dialogue.

Just as it had been in the stable, his expression was good.  Less dead.

“People will have heard the gunshot,” Mary said.  “We’re going to be taking you two hostage.  We already touched base with Professor Berger.”

“Noted,” I said.

“I’ll need to get dressed,” Jessie said.  “I have clothes here but I’d like privacy.”

“Helen and Lillian, if you’d escort Jessie into another room?” Mary asked.

Helen acted as cuffs of a sort for Jessie, locking her hands onto Jessie’s wrists, while Lillian carried the clothes.

I toed at the shirt I’d left in the corner, with the reams of discarded bandages.  Using my foot, I flicked it into the air.  Mary caught it, still holding me at gunpoint, and checked it with one hand before passing it to me.

Once I was more or less dressed, Mary used something to tie my hands behind my back.  I tested the bonds, and I was left fairly sure they were razor wire with ribbon or cloth strips to keep the wire from digging into flesh.  I couldn’t find the knot with my fingers.

It was just Mary, Ashton, and Duncan, now, with Mabel in the corner.

Mary gestured, watch, window.  Duncan walked over to the window to look.

“People on their way,” he said.

“Good,” Mary said.

“Listen,” I said.  “Mary.  There are things we need to talk about.  In private.”

“In private as in Helen and Duncan step out of the room, or private in the sense that you want Mabel to leave?”

“Mabel leaves.  Let me tell her to go to the others.  She can tell them not to attack.  There’s no rush, no demand on time.  We can talk things through, I can outline the things Jessie and I found out, the things that have been going on, you all decide what happens with the information.”

“How does that conversation end, Sylvester?” Mary asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do we capitulate?  Set you free?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I said.  “If I had to guess, I think… Lillian is left conflicted.  If there’s a reason we haven’t shared this information with you guys in full, it’s that it puts Lillian between a rock and a hard place.  You’re loyal to Lillian and the group, Mary, but you might be concerned with Percy being in the picture.”

Mary didn’t flinch.  The phantom that shadowed her did.

“Helen… I’m visualizing Helen not caring much.  Ashton too.  Just the way it goes.  So I’m left pretty on the fence here.”

“And me?” Duncan asked.  “What about me?”

I’d almost dismissed him out of hand.  He was diehard loyal, by my mental picture.  I drew in a breath, studied my Duncan-phantom and studied Duncan at the same time, and I surprised myself with the conclusion I came to.

“I think… you might be the most likely to want to defect.”

His eyes widened.

“Shame on you Duncan,” Helen said.

“I didn’t do anything.  Defect?” Duncan asked.  “You jumped straight from Mary talking about us setting you free to defection, specifically?”

“You’re a rebel, Duncan,” Helen said.

Mary spoke, “Did this piece of material you’re using to get Duncan to defect-”

“I’m not defecting.”

“-Play a part in your recruitment of the Beattle students?  Assuming it’s real?”

“Absolutely not,” I said.  “It did play a part in why I wanted to recruit them in the first place.”

“I see,” Mary said.

She led me to the window, and she glanced outside.

It looked like three dozen people, all of whom had taken defensive positions.  It was about a tenth of our number.  That left two hundred and forty or so assorted recruits elsewhere.  They had two stitched with them, laborers we’d pieced together with components from the city, used for hauling and janitorial work.  It looked like the night’s rain had pooled on the ground and frozen.

I wondered if the missing rebels were laying the false trail or fighting off the crown.  I wished I’d paid more attention to the game plan, but I’d been so tired.

“I want to negotiate here,” I said.  “Send Mabel.  Nonaggression pact.  No need to fight, you don’t hurt my people, We have a frank, serious conversation without eavesdroppers, we eat, Jessie and I stay bound.  Then if you decide it’s not worth it, and if you let my rebels go, I’ll come with you with no complaints.”

“We won’t hurt your army too badly, Sylvester,” Mary said.  “But we’re leaving straight away.  No compromise on that.”

“Cover your ears, Mabel.  I’ll-”

“If you cover your ears, I will put bullets in Sylvester until you lower your hands,” Mary said, and in her imperious tone she was fully the Mothmont lady, the teacher and instructor who had aspired to train and lead a sea of clones in beheading the monarchy.

Mabel, leader of the green team, formerly the Greenhouse Gang, daughter of some sheriff somewhere, didn’t cover her ears.

I thought we were on the same side, even if we weren’t on the same teams,” I said.  “Or is it the other way around?”

“You shot me, Sylvester,” she said.  “Six years ago, you took my hand and you asked me to trust you.  I had absolutely nothing except the ability to kill and the conviction to do so.  Then you lied to me, you manipulated me, and I was content to accept it, because I trusted you, in a way deeper than the lies and manipulations could touch.  Part of that is who and what I am, what Percy made me into.”

I looked away.

“Look at me,” Mary said.

That hawk-fierce glare was waiting for me when I did.

“I loved Gordon, Sylvester.  That was for him and I to share, separate from the Lambs.  I love Lillian.  I love Helen and Ashton in different ways.  But I trusted you.  Because I am what I am, that reaches deeper than love.  You took that trust and you shot me.  You left me to crawl back to the others, through hostile territory.”

“Would it help to know that pretty much from the point I pulled that trigger is when I really started to lose it?” I asked.

“Marginally,” Mary said.  “Except you were seeing things from the moment we set foot in Warrick, or even sooner.”

“Seeing things doesn’t and didn’t mean I was losing my mind,” I said.  “Listening to the voices and letting them destroy me or hurt me or convince me to sit out in the cold endlessly by keeping me company… that’s when I’m losing it.”

Marginal, Sylvester.  It was your own doing, in the end.  I didn’t get to choose that outcome.  You hit me where it hurt most, tore down a pillar.  I had to give my broken trust to someone.”

“Lillian,” I said.

“Or the Crown,” Mary said.  “The Academy.  I’m a Mothmont girl, after all.”

I met the real Mothmont girl, I thought.

I stopped just short of saying it.

It was too important a card to play.  If I put it out there now, then there was a risk it wouldn’t matter, that Mary might harden her heart even more, and there wouldn’t be an in.

Right now, when she was angriest, I wasn’t willing to fritter that away.

Even if the chasm between the Lambs and I seemed this wide.

I was left silent, thinking, glancing periodically at Mabel, who had dressed beneath the sheet, who was looking at me in a new, less kind light.

Jessie, Helen, and Lillian returned.  Jessie was dressed and wearing her jacket, her hands tied in front of her.

“Did you tell them?” I asked Jessie.

“I thought you wouldn’t want to tell Lillian until you were sure of the outcome,” Jessie said.  “I thought it was better to wait.”

“What’s this all about?” Lillian asked.

“It’s something Mabel can’t hear.  Anyone that isn’t a Lamb can’t hear it,” I said. I was getting more concerned now.  “Send Mabel away, have her tell the Beattle rebels to hold back.  We’ll have a discussion.  Nothing lost, we all move forward with eyes open.  I’ll trust your judgment.”

Jessie shook her head.  “They baited the Beattle rebels out.  It’s a skeleton staff in Sedge right now, less than fifty rebels.  If they take too long here, then the rebels start filtering back, our side outnumbers them.”

“And they have a plan,” I said.  “Tricks and tools.”

“We do,” Mary said.

I grit my teeth.

“Is it so important to keep me out of the loop?” Mabel asked.

I wasn’t so sure.  Did I trust her?  Mostly.  Did I know her like I knew the back of my hand?  No.  It was a tenuous thing to bid the life of the Crown States on.

“Gesture,” Duncan suggested.

“Mabel’s been learning signs.  Most of the team leaders and staff here have,” I said.  “I could write it down.  Or Jessie could.”

“We’ll discuss it after,” Mary said.  She looked at Lillian.  “Right?”

“Right,” Lillian said.

At the bottom of the stairs, Mary passed me over to Helen, gesturing.  Helen held my wrist, and she walked me to the door.

I stood in the doorway, facing the street.  The morning sun shone and the ground was coated in ice.

Thirty or forty of the Beattle rebels were out there in cover.

“Run!” I called out.  “They win.  Leave, get together with the main group, then flee.  Find work where you’re using your brains, not your trigger fingers!  But get going!  Get lost!”

It was painful to do, to discard them.

I could only hope we’d be able to find them again, if we weren’t being brought straight to the Crown and the jails.

“Run!” I called out again.  I gestured.

I looked for faces I recognized and I found too few.  Some of them were leading people away, sprinting on the ice.

A gunshot rang out to my right.  It had been a pistol fired from the window.  Mary.

The Lambs, moving through the night, had set up a trap.  A barrel in one of the labs, placed against the glass.  As the bullet shattered the glass, the barrel was free to tip, crashing against ice and spilling out its contents.  Whatever it was, and it had been ours so I should have known, it reacted on contact with the wet, frozen ground.

Steam and smoke billowed out, and the students as a whole were blinded.

From the chemical smell, there would no doubt be other effects.

“Run!” I called out, yet again, and this time my followers listened.

The Lambs marched us into the cloud, and someone put a coat over my shoulders to help me stay warm, the hood flipped up.  It would help to make me a less recognizable target in the midst of this smoke.

“Before you start,” Lillian said, cutting me off before I could launch into my monologue and explain about the Blocks, “We come with a message from the Duke.  Berger can tell us more.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.02 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“What’s this?  The Duke?” I asked.  “Also, gas?  Do I need to worry about Mabel?”

“Not unless we linger,” Lillian said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Back to prior questions: What’s this?  The Duke?”

“Not a discussion for strange company,” Mary said.  “We can discuss in more depth when we’re clear of your little town here and Mabel’s not here and we won’t be overheard.”

“I feel as if I’m in the way,” Mabel said.

“More like some things that need discussion are so big that anyone could be standing a hundred paces off to the side and they’d risk being in the way,” I said.  “Even if you weren’t here, it might not be a good idea to discuss certain things, because there might be eavesdroppers.”

“My hearing is very good,” Helen said.  “I think I’d know if we had listeners.”

“I’m trying to encourage Mabel here,” I said.  “You know, convince her that she isn’t in the way, that it’s fine and she won’t be hurt before you all inevitably release her?  I understand the desire to boast and be happy that your creator gave you better ears, but play along with the narrative here.”

“Narrative?” Mabel asked.

“Oh,” Helen said.  “It’s not a narrative, really.  We would be quiet, even if you weren’t here.  We don’t know what things you and the other students have made.  We’ve had enough bad experiences that we’re very careful.  The gestures are a part of that.”

“Oh,” Mabel said.  “That’s actually reassuring.  I actually believe you.”

“I like the double-use of ‘actually’ in there,” I said.  “As if you really want to emphasize I’m not that believable, even beyond your surprise that the attractive young lady that’s holding you hostage is.”

“You actually sound happy about that,” Jessie said.

I grinned.

“Had to give you that one,” Jessie said.  “And I wasn’t sure anyone was going to jump to do it.”

“It might be better if we didn’t encourage Sylvester,” Lillian said.  “I’d feel a lot better if our most unruly hostage didn’t look quite so comfortable in the role.”

“It’s because I’m home,” I said.  “I might not actually be welcome home, the baby shit its crib, the wife is yelling at me, and said yelling has nothing to do with the fact that the cat is on fire, screeching and running around in circles.  It’s still home, dangit.  I’m trying to enjoy the good side of it.”

“Can I be the cat?” Helen asked.

“No,” I said, dead serious.  “The cat is Ashton.”

“Why?” Ashton asked, and there was something resembling a plaintive emotion in the word.  “I haven’t said or done much of anything since Mary shot at you.  I don’t see why I should have to be on fire.”

“You’re the most pet-like of all of us,” Helen said.

“No,” Ashton said.  Helen wrapped her arms around him, picking him up and continuing with walking while his legs dangled for just one moment.  She nuzzled the back of his head, and he looked so entirely fine with that reality that it negated his ‘no’.  She dropped him and stepped aside so she wouldn’t walk into him as he found his stride again.

Ashton turned to me, “Is it because of my red hair?  Is that why you set me on fire?”

“Don’t try to make sense of it,” Mary said.  “He’s trying to get inside your head.”

“He’s not getting inside my head.  He’s just being wrong, which is annoying,” Ashton said.

“I’m suddenly reminded of meeting Ralph’s family,” Mabel said.  Then she seemed to remember the larger group and clarified, “Ralph was The leader of the student group I was a part of, and am still sort of a part of, even though we aren’t students.  He was always very peculiar and very particular, with a kind of buried intensity.  I wondered about it.  Then I met his family.  Sy suddenly makes a kind of sense, now that I’ve met-”

Helen snapped her fingers twice.  Then she gestured.

“-his.” Mabel finished.

“Shh,” Mary said.

In a moment, the group steered itself and us hostages into cover, all crammed between a wall and what I guessed was a tractor-truck.  I wasn’t so sure about the naming convention, and my shoddy memory might have played a part in that.

From our hiding spot, we could see a group of Beattle students run past.  They looked like Bea’s crew.  Heading to reinforce the others.

“Your troop discipline is lacking,” Mary commented, after they were gone.

“They’re teenagers,” I said.

“Fundamentals are sound, patrol routes, communication between squads, the lack of easy paths to key buildings with cover and flanking positions… all fine,” Mary said.

“‘Fine’, she says.  Dinged with faint praise, Jessie,” I said.

“You were responsible for a lot of it,” Jessie said.

“Was I?”

“You took great pleasure in giving the unruly students busywork, moving detritus, blocking off alleys, then moving it again.”

“That does sound like me.”

“And then when they got fed up with it, you ran an exercise, you carried a lantern in the dead of night and you snuck up on them while they were on guard, using the cover you asked them to dismantle.  You got to gloat about it, and you got to make yourself look just a little bit more impressive.”

“I think I might almost remember that,” I said.  “Huh.”

“But,” Mary said, sounding a little bit like a lady aristocrat deigning to talk to commoners, “Good patrol routes and guards don’t mean a lot when they get caught up talking to one another, or if they take a smoke break.  There was an in.”

“Clearly,” I said.  “At this point, I’m just going to point out that, again, they’re teenagers.”

“So are we,” Lillian said.

“They’re more ordinary teenagers.  Also?  Skeleton crew.  Most of our guys were off fending off the Academy and laying traps.  Five sixths of our total army here isn’t here, so guard duty is going to suffer.”

“Full rotation, actually,” Jessie said.  “Same guard duty that we have most nights, for what it’s worth.”

“Whose side are you on?” I asked.  “Shh.  Enough out of you.  Thirdly, Mary, if they had been more on the ball, and if they’d been a proper deterrent, that would’ve just meant that you’d brain them, knock them unconscious, or deploy some kind of drug like you did with Lillian’s thing.  Maybe you couldn’t have done what you did if we had three hundred students out there, or even one hundred and fifty, but still… that’s an exaggeration.  You would’ve found a way.”

“Probably,” Mary said.  “It’s the principle of it.”

“The principle we were operating on is that if an enemy got this far, we were probably out of luck.  This was a practice run, working on the assumption that one day we’d be out in some city or another and we’d want people who had some idea of what to do while on watch.”

“Don’t let your teenage soldiers develop bad habits early on if you’re practicing,” Mary said.

“Are you factoring in that last night was a special circumstance?  They’re looking for reassurance and camaraderie on a night that they and their buddies were in armed conflict with the Crown.”

“Are you just bullshitting until I drop the subject?” Mary asked.  “Because you know I won’t.”

“You won’t,” I said.  I frowned, then conceded, “There are asses that need kicking in my ranks.”

We moved in fits and starts, increasingly so as the patrols moved outward, in five or six groups of ten students, with a couple of Archie’s people in the mix.  Could the Lambs deal with that many teenagers with relatively little combat experience?  Yes.  But the size of the groups and the fact that there wasn’t anything guaranteed in combat made Mary and Lillian rethink leading the group into an outright attack on any of the groups.  We waited for one group to pass, and when it had, Mary would peek ahead and then stop because another group was appearing at the end of the road.

It wasn’t a big town, and most of the residential buildings were dormitories with apartments rather than houses.

The target building was what we’d termed Barracks D.  Jessie and I had purchased space in the building with the idea that if we made this a more permanent base or if we found a big opportunity to recruit in the city, we could stick people there.  We hadn’t done either, so it had been left as a set of mattress-less beds for Otis and Archie’s groups and a place to stick any kid that got drunk off of lab-brewed booze and puked on himself, had an experiment screw up, or otherwise got into a state where they weren’t worthy of sleeping in the same building as other living humans.

That last bit had led to the building getting nicknames, and I was gravely disappointed I couldn’t remember any of them off the top of my head.

“Inside,” Mary ordered.

The door was never locked.  The hallway was rarely lit by anything but light from the outside.  A wood stove sat in an alcove just to the left of the door, while a matching alcove to the right was meant to hold shoes and coats.  The stove didn’t burn, and there weren’t any shoes or coats in the alcove to the right.  Boots had tracked in snow not all that long ago, and there were still traces of wet on the ground.

Mary, entering just behind Jessie and I, put a hand on our shoulders, making us stop where we were.  When I turned to look, she was pressing a finger to her lips.

I was careful to put my mind to work with the Lambs that lurked in my head.  Mary walked up ahead, gesturing, and Helen skipped to catch up.  One set of each of them on either side of the hallway.  The Helens moved in an almost playful way, hands clasped in front of them, not walking slowly, but taking exaggerated steps that made her zig-zag left and right.  Mary was moving slowly, and the two kept perfect time with one another in their own coordinated ways.

Twin lambs matched them, not entirely matched to them.  I paid attention to the little things that deviated.  Helen’s legs were longer than the legs of the Helen in black, it affected her stride, made the steps even more exaggerated.  Her head was lower as she slouched just slightly.  the eyes didn’t match up.  My Helen’s eyes were wider, more artful, less dangerous.  The clothes were the obvious difference, as well.  My Lambs favored black.

It was a spot the difference game like any I might’ve found in the very back of one of Jamie’s dime store novels, alongside puzzles and word games.

Mary, meanwhile, hadn’t drawn a knife with her left hand, even though my Mary had.  That was curious.

“Too much wet.  People came through here,” my Mary said.

I imagined giving a signal, shouting, whistling, and I could see the steps as things played out, my Mary making me regret it.  The other Mary would do virtually the same.

I waited a moment, let them make their way down the hallway some, checking doors, and then worked out what might happen if I gave a signal or alert.

Again, I had the very strong, clear mental image of my Mary hurling a knife so it caught me somewhere non-vital.  If I was annoying about the signal, she threw two simultaneously.

I waited another few moments, and then I whistled, in a loud, shrill tone that I knew would grate Mary’s nerves just a little bit more.

She hurled a knife in my direction.  I remained still as the knife embedded itself into the wall just a handspan from my face.

The look she gave me was sharp and annoyed, but it was fleeting too.  She and Helen made a run for it.

I looked at the knife that was buried into the wall.  I wanted it.  But my hands were tied behind my back with a coat draped over them.  Taking it would require me to open my mouth, bite into that handle, and tear it free, and what did I do then?

Lillian and Duncan nudged me to move on.  I gave the knife a forlorn glance, watching as Duncan hauled it out of the wall with both hands and then tucked it into his belt.

We were pushed to follow Mary and Helen, and we did.  The element of surprise was gone, and Lillian, Duncan, and Ashton wanted to assist where needed without losing track of Jessie, Mabel and I.

At the end of the long winding hallway with small rooms on either side, we reached the kitchen in the back corner.  It wasn’t fully equipped, but it had a sink, a kettle, and another stove.  Archie, Davis, Valentina and Berger were present.

There were people who were intelligent or with very keen natural talents, and I counted Mabel as such, and there were people who worked hard and picked up a wealth of abilities, like Rudy.  Archie was someone who had a high native ability and had worked hard to build up a gang and hold a good amount of a small city with a very small gang.  I liked him a lot.  Valentina and Davis had been top students at Beattle and they’d earned their places as the vice president and president of the student council.

I supposed Berger was likely in good company, given what I’d seen of him and the station he’d managed to reach.  Which wasn’t to say that station equated intelligence, but I had no reason to think this man wasn’t intelligent.

That said, Berger knelt before them, arm shackled to the pipes of the sink with the same shackle he had used on me.  His face was mostly crimson bandages, soaked through with dark red blood.  Archie crouched behind him, the needle of a syringe at the side of Berger’s neck.

Davis and Valentina were standing off to one side, tense.  Davis had a knife, but they were otherwise unarmed.

“Let him go,” Mary said.

“Can’t do,” Davis said.  He glanced at me.  “Shackled.  Don’t have the key.”

“Not an issue,” Mary said.

“Might be,” Davis said.

“Builder’s wood,” Valentina said.  “Poured it into the lock the minute we had worked that it was an internal threat and not the Crown marching in on our camp.”

Mary absently toyed with her knife, moving it so it rolled over the back of her hand before catching it.

Berger watched everything, more or less silent.  When he talked, it was slurred.  “I meant to ask.  How did your year-end project go, Lillian.”

“There’s no need to ingratiate yourself with us, Professor,” Lillian said.  “We’re invested in getting you back where you belong, with the Crown, Duke, and Lord Infante in New Amsterdam.”

“Well,” the man with a face of bandage and blood spoke, “Those are nice words to hear.  You will have to tell me about your year-end project after things have progressed some.  You as well, Duncan.”

“I’d be willing to graft wings on, shave off seventy percent of my body weight and flap my arms to Radham if it meant hearing my results sooner,” Duncan said.

“I still remember the day I got the mail that told me I’d earned my white coat,” the Professor said.  He hung his head.  “It hurts to talk.  Please excuse my silence.”

“Of course, Professor,” Lillian said.

“I hope us going through with this wasn’t an inconvenience, Sylvester,” Davis said, from the far end of the kitchen.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.  “The main thing is that I don’t want you three to get hurt.  Not after we lost Otis and some of his men last night.  I think the thing to do is to stand down.”

“Right,” Davis said.  “Just like that, the plan is done?  We lose you, we lose everything?  Our last ditch effort here doesn’t count for anything?  Just dumb luck and we’re done here?”

“You’re still free to go,” I said.  “Presumably.  Go, survive, be free.”

“I agree with Sylvester, for the record.  Run away,” Jessie said.

“Kudos, though,” I said.  “In most other circumstances, this would have been the thing to do, you three.  It’s only because of bad luck, long associations and a bit of crazy crossed with exhaustion that it didn’t go that way.”

“That’s appreciated, Sy,” Davis said.  “But let’s focus on doing what we need to, here.  You guys went to a lot of trouble to get this professor out of there.  You had plans, we talked about those plans.  Things get tricky if those people there want to use the man.”

“Let them get tricky.  It’s better that you guys leave unharmed than get clever about what happens with Berger.  There are more professors out in the world.  The Beattle rebels can still theoretically run off and drink, kick ass, be awkwardly teenager with each other, and maybe change the world just a little, you get me?”

“I get you,” Davis said.

Which was good, because I wasn’t sure I believed what I was saying.  Getting another professor of Berger’s caliber would be a herculean effort, our chances of getting away from this weren’t strong, and I worried the massive disappointment of my being captured would fracture our little faction here.  They’d been betrayed by authority once.  My capture would be a betrayal of their trust in me.

Archie spoke, “I’m interpreting your instructions from last night.”

“I gave instructions last night?” I asked.

“Yes,” Archie said, at the same time Jessie did.

“About this hypothetical?” I asked.

“Yes,” Jessie said.  Archie, meanwhile, only gave me a curt nod.  Jessie elaborated, “About what should happened if the Academy came through or if things went sideways overnight, while everyone was fighting.”

“Past-Sylvester is really kicking rear,” I said.  “Sometimes in ways that get in the way of present-Sylvester.  You three are getting in the way now, just a little.  Let’s not make the hostage situation any more tenuous.”

“You wanted us to stall the enemy, should enemy appear when you two aren’t here,” Archie said.  “You’ll need a hacksaw and twenty Crown minutes to get through the chain.  Or a saw and five Crown minutes to get through the arm, but I don’t see you taking a surgeon’s hand off.  I’d call that a good stall, assuming they want the man.”

“We do want him,” Lillian said.

Archie smiled.

“What’s the needle?” Mary asked.

“Another stall.  None of you look strong enough to drag a tall man any distance without getting tired.  I’d be worried about you using Jessie or Sylvester there for slave labor, but they’re looking peaked.  Sylvester especially.”

Jessie spoke, “I’ll note that last night, when Sylvester was giving you instructions, we said that it mattered only up until we arrived,” Jessie said.

“I’m gonna take a liberal interpretation here and now,” Archie said, making the last three words sound like one.  “I’m gonna give these two kids a chance to run for it, unless you object, and I’ll square off and delay by threatening to poke the Professor here.  We can talk, and if you two convince me you’re good with how things stand, maybe I let the Professor go without objection.”

“I’m not leaving,” Davis said.  “I spent half the night commanding the Beattle Rebels and organizing misdirection, traps, and retreats, and that’s something I’m never going to do again.  I lost two years of my life from the stress of having that many lives in my hands.  I’m invested now.  On the chance it counts for anything, I’m staying here.”

“Yes,” Valentina said.  Not ‘yeah’ or ‘yup’ or anything like that.  Only a careful ‘yes’ in a polite and resigned voice.  There was a bit of steel in her.

“They say that clever individuals surround themselves with clever people,” Duncan said.  “I’m not too shocked to find out that the biggest human pain-in-the-corkhole in the Crown States has surrounded himself with pain-in-the-corkhole recruits.”

“I love you too, Duncan,” I said.

“Sure, Sy,” Duncan said.

“Really, though.  I’m seeing things these days.  Not a big secret.  Imagining got away from me, and I imagine the Lambs an awful lot, to keep me company.”

“Yeah, Sy,” Duncan said.

“So, for what it’s worth, that roster of Lambs includes you.”

Standing off to one side, his eyebrows raised.

“Probably your mental punching bag,” he said.

“Nah,” I said.  “The voice of politics and social engineering, I think.”

“Better to pick Hayle, I think,” he said.  I had the feeling it was a kneejerk reaction.

“Nah,” I said.  “See, they don’t always go away when I tell them to.  Mostly they show up when they decide, these days, instead of when I piece them together.  I loathe Hayle because of what he did.  To me, to most of you.  We might not get along famously, but you place pretty well on my list of people I’m willing to have up there, tracking mud through my brain as they wander.  You were one of seven and a half I was actively willing to invite in.”

Duncan frowned.  I could see a lot going on in his eyes.  They weren’t watering, but there was emotion latent, picking apart what I was saying for the manipulation.  Maybe a large part of it was me talking frankly about losing my mind and the role that the other Duncan had on that particular stage.

“Gotta say, that plays into my decision,” Archie said.  “Deciding if you’re compromised and telling me to walk away while under duress-”

“Nope,” I said, voice firm.

“If I need to make moving this guy clear of this city as irritating as I can, so you have more time to escape or for something to happen-”

“No,” I said.

“And, personally speaking, if it means I get to jab this smug blackcoat with a needle, I’m not so sure I mind.”

“Ah,” I said.  I realized I couldn’t do much about it.  I looked at Mary.  “Don’t kill him, please.”

Archie began depressing the plunger, much of his head and body hidden by his hostage.  Mary threw one arm out, and she tossed a knife, more in Valentina’s direction than in Archie’s.

The knife was attached to string.  Her other hand flicked the string, moving it, and the projectile’s course changed, flicking out to the side.

The needle, only partially depressed, was struck out of Archie’s hand.

I saw it dawn on Valentina and Davis that they’d bitten off a bit too much, here.  They backed away a bit, Davis holding his borrowed kitchen knife.

Archie rose to his feet, blood was streaming from a cut on one gloved finger where the blade had clipped him as it had divested him of the syringe.  Hunched over his wounded hand, he used the other to draw a large knife from his belt, approached, and stopped short when Mary threw two knives into his thighs, just above the knees.

Mary’s free knife, still with the cord attached, was flicked.  Archie seemed to sense that the attack would follow, and moved back and clear out of the way.  Then he moved forward with staggering steps, knife held up and out, clearly intent on using his longer reach and the blade to win the fight.

Mary didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver – the Lambs and us hostages were mostly behind her, the room here wasn’t large, and the tricks with string and knives needed room to flail around.

“Go down, you bastard,” I told Archie.  “You’ll only get hurt more.”

“Nng,” he grunted, hunching over more.

The hunch was a feint.  I knew that, Mary knew that.  He broke out of the supposed weakness and pain by stepping forward, lunging, cutting with that oversized knife of his.

But that attack in itself was a feint too.  He stood straight, unfolding, no longer hunched in pain, and he had a pistol in his more injured hand.

Mary’s leg went out as the hand aimed.  He didn’t extend his arm – he kept it close to the chest, aiming from there.  The very tip of Mary’s toe caught the bottom of the gun and kicked it skyward.

He brought the hand down, aiming, and Mary already had two blades drawn, crossed like a pair of scissors, catching the lower part of his gun hand in the crux.

With a grace and fluidity that wouldn’t have been out of place if this was one more attack in a series of attacks, the final reveal after a long chain of feints, he let the gun dangle from one finger in the trigger guard, his other hand going up.

He dropped to his knees, hands raised.

The very instant she had caught his gun hand between the two blades, he’d realized he was outmatched and surrendered.

“Face down on the ground,” Mary ordered.

Archie complied.

“Helen?” Mary asked.

Helen took over guarding Archie.  Mary, meanwhile, walked over to Berger.  Lillian hurried to Berger’s side.

“Tranquilizer,” Davis said.

“Not a full dose, judging by the fluid on the ground.  How are you, professor?” Lillian asked.

“I feel as if my mind dropped to the bottom of a very deep well.  I’m feeling vertigo from the fall, it’s dark, and it’s a long way to the surface,” Berger said.  “On the upside, the pain of not having skin on half of my face is rather muted.”

“You’re mushing up your words more,” I pointed out.

“Thank you, Sylvester.  You’ll have to excuse that I’m missing part of my lips and tongue.”

Mary checked the shackle.  She checked the lock, and then the links, and worked her way down to where it connected to the sink-pipe.  She checked the end attached to the pipe.

“Lock is wooded here, too.  Pipe is cast iron,” Mary observed, of the pipe.  “Nothing to unscrew.  It’s all one solid piece, welded together.  We could tear apart the cabinet the sink is on and try to throw this sink to the ground, destroying the pipe, but…”

“Cast iron,” Duncan observed, finishing the sentence.  “Buildings like this?  I’ve seen the pictures of the houses after fires, after bombings, after other disasters, where the house is ruined, but the bones of it stand.  Sometimes you see the piping just sticking up there like a skeletal tree, outlasting the rest of the house.”

“Helen,” Mary said.  “Can you?  Twisting the chain?  Can you brute-force it?”

Helen took the chain, testing the weight of it in her hands.  She gathered up a short length of it, and she proceeded to wring it.

Very faintly, I could hear the protest of the metal.

“Progress,” Mary said.

“Slow,” Duncan observed.  “Probably not faster than a hacksaw.”

Mary stood up, wiping hands she’d dirtied touching the pipe on a towelcloth.  She took in the scene.

“It’s a draw,” Lillian said.

Mary frowned.

“We take Sy, we take Jessie.  They keep Berger for now.  We make a…”

“Trade?” I asked.

“No,” Lillian said.  “Not a trade.  We can’t not bring you in, and we can’t leave Berger either.  You can’t let us leave without Berger.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound like a very good exchange,” I said.  “Giving up Berger for nothing.  The way I see it, I gotta keep Berger, and I gotta stay free.  Only way this works is if both sides leave unhappy.  Bonus points if we’re amicable.”

“We’ll see,” Lillian said.  She looked at Mary.  “What do you think?”

“We’ll take Mabel and this man with us,” Mary said.  “We rendezvous in an hour, due west of here.  There should be a crossroad.  We meet there, we discuss, we figure something out.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.03 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

A hike into the wet, cold woods was the last thing I wanted after the day I’d had yesterday.  Worse, we weren’t taking the path, but we were moving through thick brush and collections of branches.  The Lambs ahead of me had collected the bags they had hidden away in the spot where they had been observing our little city from.  They took care to avoid breaking branches as they walked through thicker areas, and stepped where there wasn’t too much mud or snow.  All to avoid leaving a clear path as to where we had gone.

Meanwhile, I made sure to walk into or onto every branch, every patch of snow, break every iced over puddle…

There wasn’t really a logic behind it.  There wasn’t a deeper scheme, it wasn’t step one out of however many to turn this situation around.  It was just satisfying to do, and I felt more than a little bit contrarian.

None of the Lambs had stayed behind.  We were together, and besides the addition of Mabel and Archie as hostages, we were only the Lambs, together again.  Good company, bad circumstance, worse weather.

“We can set up camp here,” Mary said.  “Chemical stove, no fire.”

“I think I have the tank for the chemical stove in my bag,” Duncan said.  “It’s heavy enough that it feels that way, anyhow.  Someone else has the stove part.”

“I do,” Mary said.

We settled in a ditch.  It wasn’t the right word, but I wasn’t feeling charitable enough to think about what word would work.  In the midst of the trees, the ground had formed a dip here, a bowl deep enough that I could stand within and I couldn’t quite look out and past the top.  Water had pooled at the bottom of this depression, and now that it had frozen over, that ice formed half of the floor.  Downed trees and large branches occupied most of the space.

We found seats on the drier parts of the fallen trees, using them as benches.  Duncan placed the little tank in the center, and Mary pulled the top piece and base of the little stove out of her bag, screwing them on.

It was half the size of a breadbox, a portable stove that I was mostly familiar with as something our team medics packed for the sake of boiling water in the field.  Lillian had the foldable pot, stowed in her bag partially folded with the less-used medical equipment packed within.

Tea, apparently, was the first priority.  In a moment, the stove was hissing and sputtering, periodic orange flames reaching out to lick at the underside or side of the pot.  The smoke was clean – nothing that would attract attention.

Trekking through inhospitable terrain wasn’t a comfortable thing.  Given the time of year, we didn’t have bugs, but all the same, just about every member of the group had a bit of branch to dig out of the space where their sock met their leg, clothing adjustments to make, weight to redistribute in bags for easier carrying later or frozen mud caked into the treads of their boots.  Tea was in the works, and now the Lambs cared for the small things, getting organized and comfortable.

“Cake?” Helen asked.

“Limited backpack space, and you brought cake,” Jessie said.

“You’re surprised?” Helen asked.  “It’s not confectionery, that would be a mess, but it’s still cake.”

“I would love a slice,” Jessie said.

“Me too,” I said.

Other Lambs agreed.

As resting spots went, it was good.  The walls of the ditch provided some protection from wind, and the tree cover kept the precipitation away.  The Lambs’ presence combined with that of my particular cast of Lambs to make the little spot very cozy.

I suspected Berger was more cozy, beyond the discomfort as he waited for the shackle to be removed from his wrist.

“Duncan?” Lillian asked.  “Can you check on Sy?  He’s looking a little pale.”

I frowned at that, and Lillian pretended not to notice.

“Jessie,” Lillian said.  “Are you okay?  No injuries?  You’re not too cold?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” Jessie said.

“Good, I’m glad.  Mabel?  No, you’re as well as can be expected?”

“I’m alright,” Mabel said.  “I’m actually a little bit more comfortable than I was, now that I’m out here.  I know that sounds odd, but it makes me think of camping with my brother.”

“Do you need anything to be comfortable?” Lillian asked.

“My legs are a touch cold,” Mabel said.  She was wearing a skirt, and her knees were bare.  Helen supplied a blanket, one of several from the tightly folded and belted sleeping bag arrangement, and given that Mabel’s hands were tied behind her back, Helen took it upon herself to get the blanket arranged.

“And…” Helen turned to Archie.

“I’m fine,” Archie said.

The water on the little stove was already starting to form bubbles.  Even the initial steam was dramatic in the cold.

“In just a short while, we’ll go rendezvous with Sylvester’s rebels,” Mary said.  “They have Berger, we have Sylvester and Jessie.  If we have to, we’ll trade the pair away to get him.  I’d rather go back to our original plan and have the extraction be our mission.”

“Agreed,” Lillian said.

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  “They’re Sylvester-trained, they’ll be pains in the ass, but I’d rather deal with a hundred lesser Sylvester headaches than one effective, concrete Sylvester headache.”

“Three hundred,” I said.  “Minus any casualties from last night.  I’d really rather you didn’t hurt them.  I know you’re capable, but at no stage in this have I really fought you guys-”

I saw several Lambs open their mouths to protest.  I jumped straight in to say, “Unless you’re going to take issue with my playing with knives when I borrowed one of Mary’s and pretended like I was going to take one of you hostage.”

“Might,” Mary said.

I was pretending,” I said, insistent.  “Either way, my point stands.  I was willing to tell my guys to surrender so you wouldn’t have to fight.  I want everyone here to survive.  I need you all to want this too.”

Duncan checked my temperature, then measured my heartbeat.

Helen hummed as she served the tea.  With as many people as we had, there weren’t many containers to drink from, and the water from the pot of boiling water went quickly.  As was proper, Helen served us first before preparing a fresh pot of water for the little heat source.

“I want us all to be on the same page,” I said, “And that’s something that’s a lot easier to say than to accomplish.  I’d really like to think there’s a way through this.”

“We’re very different people,” Lillian said.

“Don’t say that as if it’s bad!” I said, aghast.  “Different is good!”

“Yes,” Ashton said.  It would have been easy for us to talk over him, but he’d found a moment where he could be heard.  He added, “I said something very similar to the new Lambs before.”

I jumped in, “We embrace each other and our peculiarities.  Sometimes literally.”

“Please leave my peculiarity un-embraced,” Duncan said, adjusting his belt in a way that drew attention to his groin.

There was a titter of amusement from the group.  I allowed him a smile.  Had to.  Take Archie and Mabel out of the equation, and Duncan was in a group with Mary, Lillian, Jessie and myself.  He wasn’t taking himself too seriously, he was willing to be the butt of a joke for the benefit of the group, and I wanted to reward him for that.  Leaving him hanging out to dry with his naughty implication and three girls in the area wouldn’t have been a reward.

“Seriously though,” Duncan said.  “Yes, different is good.”

Duncan continued his ministrations and care, checking I was okay.  He began peeling back the bandage at my shoulder.  I winced, but I was glad I didn’t feel the telltale agony of the plague crawling through me.

“A group of very disparate members needs several things to stay strong,” Mary was saying.  “Love, respect, honesty, caring, sharing, communication, and trust.”

Back to that.

“Yeah,” I said, simply.  “And… I forgot how this thread of conversation started.”

“We’re all very different people, everyone being on the same page,” Jessie supplied.

“Right.  Thank you, yes.  I think this is doable.  Mary touched on how.  Communication.  We need to put everything out on the table.”

“We have hostages in earshot,” Lillian said.

“Then Duncan and Lillian can dig into their kits and gather some earplugs.  Or wax, or something.  If any of you have a keypress, there’s soft wax in there, you know, the little boxes that you stick keys into to figure out the shape of them.  Dig out the wax, jam it in Mabel’s ear.”

Mabel looked a touch annoyed at that.

“That was an example,” I clarified.

“Why do I feel like this is a trap?” Mary asked.  “The moment we plug up the ears of the hostages, you’ll reveal you have a warbeast inside you, and it starts screeching or singing, and you simply clean up in the aftermath?”

I sighed.

Duncan was poking and prodding me, Helen was serving out tea in the caps from the various dewar bottles the group had brought with them.  She had cake as well, and in absence of plates, she was depositing the cake directly into hands.  It looked like new-citrus and poppyseed.

“I’ll get dirty and sticky,” Ashton complained.

“Lick your fingers clean,” Helen instructed him.

“That won’t be enough,” Ashton said, sounding as annoyed as he ever got.  Not that he got annoyed.

“Then lick better,” Helen instructed him.

Ashton proceeded to eat his slice of cake with all of the enthusiasm of a prisoner on death row walking to the gallows.

Helen, meanwhile, sat down across from Jessie, Mabel, Archie and myself.  She didn’t blink, watching each of us,

I’d proposed things, only to discover there was no trust.  No sharing, no communication, no honesty about true feelings and allegiances, no respect, no love.  This wasn’t anything that would properly stand under any real scrutiny.

Archie and Mabel were listening, more or less quiet, listening in.

Could I afford to risk it?

“We met the real Mary Cobourn,” I said.

Tea-sippers stopped mid-sip.  Cake eaters coughed with crumbs in their mouths.

Only Archie and Mabel remained blissfully unaware.

“It was a thing,” I said, simply.

“It was,” Jessie said.

I could see Mary’s phantom cluing me into Mary’s thought process as she composed herself.  She was even angry at this stage.

“Too targeted toward my weak points, too convenient in timing,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m always less believable when I’m telling the truth.”

I glanced down at my tea.  Helen, still unblinking, took it, and she dutifully gave me a drink from the cup she’d placed beside me, tipping back a small amount of the contents.  I looked at the cake, and she gave me cake.

“That’s a fiction, Sylvester,” Mary said.  “I think you once made yourself appear to be bad at that, so you could introduce ambiguity, and it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Easily possible,” I said.

“Mary Cobourn?” Lillian asked.  “The last we heard of her was-”

“She was sent off by Percy,” I said.

“The last proper mention of her was in Percy’s notes in the Lamb’s adventure journals from the tenth day of the fifth month of nineteen twenty-one,” Jessie said.

“I can’t get away from that man,” Lillian said.

“He’s still dead.  He doesn’t have any power,” I said.  “But anyone, everyone leaves a ripple of effect and consequence when they do something.  Percy’s still rippling.  So is Mary Cobourn.  I don’t think those ripples have a lot of influence.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Block,” Archie spoke, interrupting the flow of conversation.

Dang it.

“Archie,” I said.

“You said something about those people back in the city.”

“Archie,” I said.  “No.  Ignore those people.  Trust me when I say you really shouldn’t want to know any of this.  All those times I told our people to just run, to surrender, to let things happen?  Doesn’t sound good, but I was really trying to protect them.  I’m really trying to protect you now.”

“Oh my lords,” Lillian said, her eyes widening.  “The Block.”

“Well, cat’s out of the bag now,” I commented, glancing at Jessie.

“Had to find its way out sometime,” Jessie said.

“Sometimes you can just tie it really, really tight,” I said.  “Sometimes you need that cat secured.  Sometimes there’s not really another choice.”

“You followed the lead Emmett gave you to the Block,” Lillian said.  “You found the real Mary Cobourn.  He was dealing with the Academy in a very illicit capacity.  Corruption?”

“In a way,” I said.  Off to the side, Helen was supplying Jessie with tea.  Ashton now held a cup for Mabel.  Archie had declined taking anything.

“That explains why you said Duncan would theoretically react worse to this news than I would.  He isn’t as inured to that side of things.  He holds the upper rungs of the Academy in higher regard than I do.”

“I’m not as fragile as you’re making me out to be,” Duncan said.

Lillian shook her head.  “I’m not trying to make you out to be fragile, I’m interpreting things through Sylvester’s very warped perspective-”

“Hey!”

“-and trying to work backwards to work this out.  Corruption of a deeper scale could matter,” Lillian said.  She looked to Mary for confirmation.

Mary, who had taken a seat on a branch, looked lost in thought.

“Sylvester said you were liable to defect,” Ashton pointed out, for Duncan.

“Can we please stop entertaining Sylvester’s delusion as if it’s fact?” Duncan asked.

The group continued talking.  I turned my attention toward getting more tea and cake from Helen.  If I didn’t eat something resembling breakfast now, I’d be useless later in the day.

“Thank you,” I told Helen.

“Mm hmm,” she said.

I met her eyes, taking a look at her, trying to see if anything about the current discussion resounded with her.  I didn’t find anything resounding, and that wasn’t too much of a surprise.  What I did notice was that one of her fingers was moving.  It was like an involuntary muscle twitch at one ring finger, the finger moving so little that it was barely noticeable.  Had it been a pencil instead of a finger, that small range of movements might have sufficed for a single small punctuation mark.

Helen could control her body on a fine level in order to perform her acts, that was ordinary enough.  She had masterful control over every single part of her body, over tension of skin and how open her pores were.  Her circulatory system could deliberately slow down or speed up.  To better serve her when she was the beast rather than the beauty, she was able to fall still.

On the flip side, however, being too still and perfect posed a danger if it broke her cover and made her look less human.  She was too good for that.  In most other circumstances, I might have explained that tremor away as an affectation on someone who was almost entirely affectation.

But it was so small and isolated it shouldn’t have mattered.  Why only that part?  And it was here, in the company of the Lambs, where she could be more herself, insofar as she was ever herself.

I looked up at Helen.  I studied her, in contrast to the phantom that lurked just behind her shoulder.

A dozen deviations and odd elements added up.  They lined up like a constellation-

“Sylvester,” Lillian said.

I turned my attention away from Helen.  I hated that Lillian was using my full name like that.

“Yes, Lillian?” I asked.

“I’ll bite.  If there’s a deeper explanation, now’s the time.”

“Bit of a rabbit hole,” I told her.  Putting it mildly.

“Sure, Sylvester,” Lillian said.

“I think the thing to do, then,” I said, checking again with Jessie for confirmation.  “Would be for two intrepid volunteers, perhaps Helen and Ashton, to block the ears of our two guests, ensuring they don’t hear anything.”

Helen got up from her seat, wordless.  I visualized all of the details and factors, the fact that her nails were worn down, when they were supposed to be pristine, the way she was hovering near me, when there were others deserving of cake and tea.  Yes, she gave Jessie some.  But she gave me her attention.

“See me?” I heard Helen, but Helen hadn’t spoken.

I turned my head.

She was dressed in charcoal grey-black.  Helen, hands clasped behind her, her expression dead in a way she rarely wore anymore.  She wore a slip of a dress in a strange rendition of the flapper style, with hose that was patterned in a fancy way.  More importantly, however, the Helen I was looking at was only eleven years old, if I had to guess.

Fray stood just behind her, one hand on each of Helen’s shoulders.

“Save me,” the dark, childish Helen said.

What am I supposed to do?

I could look at her, and I knew that she was a figment of my imagination.  Countless underlying elements, snippets of conversation recalled as only the sentiment, broad-strokes memory becoming intuition becoming a sense of cadence, approach, and muscle memory toward her and those things relating to her.

She was familiar to me on a level words couldn’t fully articulate.  I’d molded myself around the Lambs, to better assist them, to move in lockstep with them.  I had made mention of the keypress before, of the wax imprint that a keymaker would take into his workshop.  Then that same keymaker would file away at the real block of metal until it fit the imprint and matched the key.

I’d filed away at parts of myself since I could remember, to better work with them.  I had adapted and worked hard, and I’d attended classes, and scarcely five minutes ever went by where the Lambs didn’t cross my memory.

“It’s not confectionery,” the little Helen said.

I looked away from her to Fray.

Why are you here?  I asked.  Why again, Fray?  Is it the rule that when you show up, things go ass-backwards in short order?  Last time you were trying to tell me about the Lambs being in town, signaling the dress colors.  Or you were interfering and distracting, clouding matters.  But whether you were helping or hurting, I can’t see why you’re here, when it’s clear the little Helen is already trying to communicate a message.

“Sy?”

Another prod from Jessie.  Another jerk back to reality, taking my focus off of Helen.

They were waiting, expectant, even looking a little concerned.  Helen and Ashton were ready to cover the ears.

“I would have given the okay, but you usually like to handle this,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Yeah.  Go ahead.”

The hands went up, blocking the ears of our hostages.

“Mary Cobourn, as we saw her, was the Falconer, a young noble in the charge of the Lord Infante, modified heavily.”

“What?” Lillian asked.

“Not unique to her.  It’s the case for all nobles.  Selected from the crop that’s sent to the Block, modified, indoctrinated.  There is no family tree, they get allocated to locations with histories made up based on how high quality they end up.  There is no Crown, really, because the Academy controls the process.  Many of the nobles don’t know, and if they were to find out, it’s not out of the question that it could spark an internecine conflict between Crown and Academy as they cease working together with the top dogs each feeling smugly superior of the other.”

“Sylvester, wait, stop, let me interrupt you.”

“You’re not interrupting.  I was more or less done.”

“You can’t- no, Sy,” Lillian said.  Then she corrected it, “Sylvester.”

“That’s it?” I asked.  “No?  Alright then.  That’s that.  Helen and Ashton can put their hands down now.”

“Sy, be fair,” Jessie told me.

“It’s not done,” Lillian said.  “You’re just not making sense.  It comes across like a headgame.”

I knew that if I argued, Lillian would push back.  There was a wall between us and too many things threatened to make it taller and wider.

I focused on the others.

Mary was lost in thought, and to all appearances, it was a deep well of thought.  I tended to think of Mary as being a wild animal barely tamed.  The hawk was a common parallel, but I could also think of her as a cat, or a wild horse brushed and beautiful.  Movement, power, danger, and nobility were all inherent in those interpretations.  She wore an adult woman’s winter coat and a violet dress, her dark brown hair done up with a brooch and ribbon at the back, her makeup was light but effective.

If she had a failing in how she portrayed herself, it was that she could be rigid if she wasn’t mindful of it.  She could act, given a push to do so, and she was fair at it, but she wasn’t emotive, and she didn’t betray much when she fixated on the job.

But I could remember Mary sleeping beside me, her face almost completely different, or the look on her face back in the day when she’d changed while I was in the room, the lines of her mouth and neck and shoulders all relaxing in a way nobody else got to see.  I could look at her now, and I could see the facade breaking, but there wasn’t a smile on the other side.

This time, on the face of someone who killed without a second thought, a kind of recognition of death?

Mary had always yearned for family.  More than I did, in a way, because what I sought wasn’t family, exactly.  She had been a member of the Bad Seeds and that hadn’t hit the mark.  She’d sought out the Lambs, and she might have found something there, except Gordon had left her, then Jamie, then me.

I was put in mind of the very young girl who had been in tears as she sought consolation from her puppeteer.  He had said a command phrase to induce something – Hayle’s interpretation of it had been a kind of mini-seizure, interrupting the processes and trains of thought at work.  I remembered how she’d reached out for my hand.  How very lost she’d been.

That was still there, beneath the surface.  It was perhaps the fuel that kept her particular furnace burning.

“I was taken with her from the beginning,” I told Mary, fully aware I was giving clues to our hostages.  “It took me a while to figure out why.”

Mary looked away, her expression one of concern.  Then concern became faint upset, and she turned her back, hands straightening her clothes, as she ostensibly made sure nobody was drawing close.

“You’d wanted to dance with her,” Jessie said.

“I did.”

I gestured.  Lillian, attention pointed to Mary, hurried to her best friend’s side, putting an arm around her, another hand taking Mary’s in her own.  When she spoke, it was into Mary’s ear, in serious whispers.

I could have eavesdropped or pried, tried to lipread, fine-tuned my hearing.  I didn’t.

I looked at Duncan.

“I’m not going to defect,” Duncan said.

“I’m not even pushing you to,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said.  “Thank you.”

Briefly, his expression was the closest thing I’d seen to a natural, not-smug smile from him in the time I’d known him.

It didn’t seem like a happy smile.  Maybe that was why it looked more natural?  If so, what did that say about me?

His eyes, too.  I watched as they moved left and right, as if he was taking it all in.  Not the things most pertinent to him, but the greater picture.

And then there was Helen and Ashton.  I wanted so badly to go to Helen, to hold her hand, and to try to figure out what I’d been caught up in earlier, when my thoughts had run away from me.  Unfortunately, I was tied up, quite literally.  Ambiguously figuratively.

As for Ashton…

“This is a secret, by the way, Ashton.”

Ashton nodded.

“Feeling very out of the loop,” Mabel said.  Her ears had been uncovered.  “I know the least here.”

“I know,” I said.  “I’ll see what I can do to gently fill you in later.”

“It’s dangerous knowledge to have,” Jessie said, stressing that for the Lambs in earshot.

“For now, though, I’m kind of hoping the Lambs understand where you and I are coming from, Jessie.  When it comes to Berger, we need him.  We need him for project Caterpillar.”

Jessie took that in, looking very concerned in the moment.

“I never asked for that.”

“But we need it,” I said.  “And we need him to get leverage and have access to the tools we need.  We have a faction, information, and a game plan we’ve been working on for a year, that’s ninety percent complete.  I want to make a better future.  We don’t get that with the Crown being what it is.”

“Okay,” Lillian said  It didn’t look like Mary wanted to talk.  Lillian considered for a moment, then said, “I don’t want to speak for the others, but I’m reasonably confident in this.  We need Berger more.”

“This issue you referred to earlier?” Jessie asked.

“The Infante is declaring parts of the Crown States unsalvageable,” Lillian said.  “Whole regions, because they have plague, or they’re close to places with plague.  Or cities with high rebel populations, out of concern that they’re deliberately spreading the illness.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.  “It doesn’t feel rebel.  Timelines don’t match up.”

“They don’t, and it doesn’t,” Lillian said.  “At least, we don’t think so.  We talked to the Duke, insofar as he can talk.  He told us he was concerned the Infante wouldn’t stop until he had all of the Crown States.  Sealed and burned to the ground.”

I looked at Jessie.  We’d heard something like that.

“The Duke told us the Infante might loose every single last one of the superweapons in the Crown States.”

My heart dropped out of my chest at that.  Every city and every town within a short distance of the Academies themselves has one.

That wasn’t what we’d heard before.

“If we can get Berger to the Duke of Francis, he can revive him, and there’ll be an effective voice of dissent in play,” Mary said.  “The Duke is of a lower station but not so low he can be ignored.  He has resources, and if the Infante wants to preserve any appearance of propriety, he’ll have to stop or wait.  That’s the mission.”

“I think we get dibs,” Duncan said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.04 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We walked, Helen keeping one hand on me and one hand on Jessie, guiding us.  Instead of disappearing into the thickest part of the woods, we were working our way into more open space.  It meant I was walking face-first into less branches, but it also meant the snow was a little bit deeper.  Not that it was deep, but my hands remained tied behind my back, the ground was wet and fairly soft, and it took only one misstep for me self to slip and fall.

“You’re really going to fight us on this?” Lillian asked.

“I’m not fighting,” I said.  “I’m stressing that it’s not as cut and dry as you’re saying.  Berger is a commodity at this point.  His knowledge, his expertise, his access.”

“He may be the only person who can help the Duke, and we need the Duke to sway the Infante,” Lillian said.

I had to watch my footing.  From an exhaustion standpoint, I was at a stage where everything felt deceptively light and airy.

May be, I said, “sway.  No guarantees.  You don’t sound certain.”

“Listen, I understand that you want to help Jessie,” Lillian said.

“Which is something he didn’t actually discuss with me in advance,” Jessie pointed out.

“Either way, you can’t equate trying to stop the Infante from going crazy and leveling half of the Crown States to… whatever scheme you had in play.”

“I can,” I said.  “I can even favorably compare the two ideas.  The Duke is a lunatic.  He might be the most sane lunatic of the bunch, but you won’t get more control over the situation by throwing him into the mix.”

“What would you propose?” Lillian asked.  She didn’t ask it in a way that sounded like she was very receptive to anything I might suggest.

“I’m proposing that you have a sit-down with Professor Berger.  Get the details on how to help the Duke, pass it on if you absolutely have to, and let other doctors put it into practice.  We keep the Professor, and maybe Jessie and I escape your custody and bring Berger with us.”

“There are so many things wrong with that,” Lillian started.  She paused.  “Even the question of how much it would hurt the Lambs to have you slip away again, during such a sensitive time, put that aside, what about the fact that they probably wouldn’t even let us near a doctor or let those doctors near the Duke?”

“Do you think they’ll let Berger near the Duke?  If the man could be fixed, they would have fixed him already.  They’re keeping him sick and brain-dead for a reason.  Because the Infante wants free reign.  Giving you Berger so you can hand Berger over to the Infante would threaten the man, if he can even be threatened.  It would introduce a complication and a hassle he’d sooner remove from the picture.”

“That’s a lot of self-serving assumptions on your part,” Lillian said.

“May-” Jessie started, at the same time I said, “I’m-”

We both stopped, and we looked at each other.

“Floor is yours,” I said.

“Thank you,” Jessie said.  “I’d like to interject and ask for the discussion to stop and cool down.  It’s been the two of you going back and forth for a little while now.  We all know there are feelings in the background that are playing a role here.”

“That’s unfair,” Lillian said.  But she said it too quickly, emotion in her voice, and she seemed to realize that her denial had only proved the point, given how it was posed.  She made a face and fell silent.

“Take a minute.  We’ll discuss before we get Berger, or even after, and I’d very much like to do it as Lambs, if Lillian, Mary, Helen, Ashton and Duncan are okay with that.  As a singular group.”

“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Mary said.

“If it’s not, then I understand,” Jessie said.  “But I’d like to give it an honest shot.  After we’ve cooled off.”

Jessie’s calm was of a very different sort than Helen’s or Mary’s.  Helen’s calm was that of a predator, settling in before it struck out for its prey.  Mary’s calm was colder, borne of restraint, discipline, and confidence.

Even back with the first Jamie, there’d always been this sentiment that whatever else happened, he was the rock I could cling to in stormy seas.  A constant in uncertain water.  At least, he had been until he’d been the rock I’d broken myself against.

Jamie and now Jessie had alternated between being the rock to cling to and the rock I was flung against, with a tendency toward the ‘cling’ part in recent weeks and months.  Jessie’s calm was, as I saw it, borne of experience and careful assessment with all of the facts in hand.  It was a calm that was very easy to share with others.

Lillian and I put our debate aside for the moment.  We walked, each of us on different sides of the group.

I looked back at where Duncan and Ashton were managing Archie and Mabel, keeping an eye on them while keeping them out of earshot.

Duncan looked so down.  Poor guy.

I was sincere in thinking it, but it still felt weird, because it was Duncan.  He was a Lamb, but he was still a pain in the ass.

Was this how the others thought of me?

While Lillian and I cooled off, so to speak, Helen spoke, “I like your clothes, Jessie.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re very well put together.  Very stylish.  You look smart.”

“I try,” Jessie said.  “I’m a little rumpled right now.”

“You’re fine.  Tell me, where did you get your style?”

“Where?  I’m not sure I understand.”

“When I was young, Ibbot hired people to dress me and do my hair.  Then he told me to learn.  I was introduced to beautiful women.  The wives of aristocrats, models, actresses, singers.  I was supposed to study them, their mannerisms, what they wore, how they did their makeup.”

“Jamie wrote about that.”

“I imagine he did,” Helen said.  She smiled.  “I wish he was here.  I would have liked to see him grow up.”

“I wish I could have met him in person, myself,” Jessie said.

“I can’t remember if I ever told him, but up until a certain point, I was only copying.  I think I got some things wrong.  I didn’t quite have an eye for beauty.  And then I did.  It was around the time we lost Jamie, as a matter of fact.”

“When you were burned?”

“Yes.  We were fighting Avis and I was burned, and I spent some time in bed, with Professor Ibbot looking after me.  He was very upset about the burns, and he showed me my own face in a mirror.  I remember thinking about the things I’d need to do if I needed to hide or conceal the burns, I thought about all of the people I was copying, and in the middle of it, I understood it.  I started to become me.  I was secretly excited about it, and then I was troubled by Jamie being gone, and others were troubled, and I couldn’t talk about it.”

See me, I thought.

A lot went on with Helen, and we didn’t see it because she was so self-sufficient, so capable on her own.  She didn’t cling to us or reach out to others like many of us reached out for each other, but…

“You reportedly acted out in the early days.  To be funnier or more accommodating, be warmer, to help the other Lambs,” Jessie said.

“Yes.  I paid a lot of attention to them, too.  And now I’m paying attention to you.  I’m wondering, Jessie dear, are you copying, using that marvelous brain of yours, or are you you?”

“I’m more me than I was, I think,” Jessie said.  “I was a bad copy of Jamie before.”

“Not so bad,” I said, quiet.

Jessie smiled.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Helen said.

“I’m copying,” Jessie said.  “But I think most people do.  Fashion and style are an art and only a few people are artists.  You became the artist that Ibbot wanted you to be.  I have a ways to go, and I likely won’t ever get there.”

“Who was your inspiration?”

“Women I used to notice and admire,” Jessie said.  “I would see them around Radham and notice them.  Often it was because they were reading books when I saw them, and I would think it would be nice to talk about books with them.  Sometimes they looked educated or intelligent.  Nine women I’ve noticed who fit that same general category, that I’ve seen over the years.  I would run into some several times and I’d remember them, and I could track how their style and how they changed.  I took the parts I liked most of each.”

“It’s a little bit too adult, but I do think it works for you,” Helen said.  “Did you fancy them?”

“Fancy?” Jessie asked.  She looked surprised.  “I don’t know.  I don’t think so.  Not like I fancy and fancied Sy.”

Lillian reacted a little bit to that, and she tried to hide her reaction.  She was momentarily very interested in the trees all around us.

“Of course you didn’t fancy those women like you fancy Sy,” Helen said.  “He’s Sy.  He’s someone you know, and he’s someone you’re fond of.  Just like Lillian knows Sy and is fond of Sy and fancies him so very much.”

“Helen,” Lillian said.  “Let’s let that lie.”

“And Sy knows Lillian and is fond of Lillian, and he fancies Lillian.  He clearly knows you and is fond of you and fancies you, Jessie.”

“I’d like to think so,” Jessie said.  “Sometimes I think Sy fancies anyone wearing a skirt.”

“I’m a little more discerning than that,” I said.

Jessie, though, was smiling.  Teasing.

“Sy most definitely does turn his head for virtually anyone who wears a skirt…” Helen said.

“Again, I’d like to stress that I’m a little discerning.”

“…But he holds a special place in his heart for us.  He’s fond of you two and he’s fond of me but I think any fancy for me is balanced by him being scared of me.  He fancies Mary and I don’t know why he doesn’t follow that fancy, but I think it might be because he’s scared of her or he’s scared of himself.”

“I’m not scared of nuffing,” I said.

I was joking, but I could see what Helen was doing.  In the midst of a group dynamic where there were definite rifts in the group, old feelings having long broken things apart, our wagon of goods in shambles behind us, Helen was reaching out and trying to bridge the divides.

Humor would help ease the worst of the tensions, I hoped.

“Even if Lillian gets frustrated and hurt, or if Mary shoots Sy, or if Sy runs away from you, we’re still all very close,” Helen said.  “Whatever Sy does, he does for reasons, and he most certainly cares.”

“He lost his mind a few times.  Usually when it came to saying goodbyes,” Jessie said.

“I’ll have you know I didn’t lose it.  I knew exactly where I put it.  I just didn’t want to bother with it and all of the stuff that was going on, so I let it do its own demented thing.  Except maybe the hill I set it down on was a little too steep, and so when it got rolling, it rolled a little too hard, too far.”

“Sure, Sy,” Jessie said.

“And you might never meet someone you can be sweet on as much as you’re sweet for each other, and I might never have a tart quite so good as the one I enjoyed in the tall man’s shop in New Amsterdam.  Ashton might always think fondly about the morning on the third day of the sixth month of this year, when the pollen from the flower fields and the rain from the night before mixed and the trees and the grass were painted blue because of it, and the temperature was just perfect.  Duncan dreams of me and he thinks about the girl with the large chest in his Higher Design class-”

“Ugh,” Lillian said.

“Did I hear you say my name?” Duncan called out, from the tail end of the group.

“And he thinks of you, Lillian, just a bit, because of admiration and because he spends time with you.  We’re all tied down and tied to the things around us and we want to protect those things, I think.  And even though we’re not supposed to, I think a lot of us would give our lives for others in the group, as a one-for-one trade.  So when you’re talking about what to do with Berger, I think it’s important to keep this in mind.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

“It’s simpler than you’re making it out to be.”

“There’s a reason I turned Mary away, way back when, and there’s a reason it didn’t work out with Lillian.  I’m a liar and a manipulator, I’m someone who pushes boundaries, targets weak points.  It’s not terribly healthy.”

“You can still get along.  When you get upset, you stop, you step back, and you think of happier times before you try again.”

“It’s not that easy,” Lillian said.

“I think it can be.  You close your eyes, you think of the other person, and of skin, and bodily fluids-”

We started protesting.  The words almost drowned her out.

“-and teeth, and squeezing, and less common bodily fluids-”

The protests became sufficiently loud and unified to mask the sound of Helen’s voice.

She gestured, several times, and it seemed she was willing to stop there.  The protests died down.

“No more about bodily fluids,” Helen said.  “I understand.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  She was blushing pink.

“I feel like we missed something,” Duncan said.

“Caught up?” Jessie asked.

“You all slowed down while you were shouting at each other,” Duncan said.  “It didn’t look like serious discussion.”

“It wasn’t,” Lillian said.  “Helen was being rude.”

“And wrong,” I said.

“My point is-”

“Helen, no,” I said.

“Love each other like I love pastry.  Enjoy being together like I enjoy an éclair.  Savor the moments.”

“Now you’re just going ahead and being naughty again,” I said.

“She is?” Mabel asked.

There were murmurs of agreement among the Lambs.

“She really likes cake and confectionery,” Duncan said.  “Just… take my word for it.”

Helen started talking again, and we jumped straight into drowning her out and protesting.  At this stage, it was mostly for fun.

Funner still to see Mabel’s eyes widen some as she caught Helen talking, and when Helen’s tongue extended a foot out of her mouth-

Still engaged, we passed through a cluster of trees and reached the field where the Beattle rebels were waiting.  Our protests dropped away, which meant Helen was the last one to fall silent, leaving us only with, “-all of the cream filling.  Every last bit.  And then I nibble.”

She was good at speaking with her tongue extended like that.  She made a show of drawing it back into her mouth.

Lillian was flushed red, which was nice to see, and as it turned out, Mabel wasn’t a blusher, but she apparently was one to freeze.  One of the three universal reactions, out of fight, flight, and freeze.

A hundred feet separated the Lambs from the Beattle rebels.  They were on guard.

We were, as a result of a much easier conversation than the one we’d been having, quite relaxed.

“Can we negotiate this after?” Lillian asked.  “No tricks?  No shenanigans?”

“I’ll keep them to a minimum,” I said.

“No hidden ploys?” Lillian asked.  “Nothing long-term either?”

“No,” Jessie said.

“I want to be able to trust you two,” Lillian said.

Mary reacted to that.  She was still very quiet, all in all.  She’d spoken up to shout Helen down, but she seemed caught up in her own thought processes, still.

Only fair, but I did have to wonder.

“A good show of trust would be to undo our restraints,” Jessie said.

“I think it has been a marvelous show of trust to not gag you two,” Lillian said.

“I’ll remind you there was strategy there,” Mary said.

“That too,” Lillian said.

“Strategy?” I asked.

Lillian explained, “So long as you’re talking, you’re much less likely to get up to trouble.  If we tied you up and gagged you by shoving a- I don’t know-

You know, I thought, looking at Lillian and the phantom that mirrored her.

“A sock into your mouth, and then tying it in place, then you’d turn all your focus toward turning your pocket lint into something to cut your bonds with.”

“I’m not magic,” I said.

“No,” Mary said.  “But you’re a talker.”

“Lies,” I said.  “Lies, balderdash and fuckery.  I’ll give you a ninety minute speech right here and right now, off the cuff, to tell you why it’s wrong.”

“Ha ha,” Lillian said.

“I think Helen broke his mind with the discussion of how she’d remove the cream filling from the pastry,” Jessie said.  “He’s farther gone than I’ve ever seen him.  He actually thinks he’s being funny right now.”

The group laughed, Mabel included.  Even Archie wore a faint smile.

I smiled as I turned my focus toward the Beattle rebels.

Mauer stood at the head of the crowd with Davis and Valentina.  Bea was there, as was Gordon the Second.  There had to be a hundred students present.  With everyone bundled up against the cold, the individual factions and tribes were hard to pick out.  I had to look at boots and pants, at the style of scarf and hat, and extrapolate from there.  Bea wore a red scarf with pins in it, and stood next to a girl with antlers.  I could suss out a fair number of the rooftop girls and delinquent boys from that crowd.

I was immensely glad to see Rudy at one edge of the crowd.  He was with Possum, and he sat in a chair.  It was clear from the bandages that they had carved away far too much, but somewhere along the line they had gotten ahead of the plague.  Entire muscle groups were absent now.  It was the kind of comprehensive work that virtually guaranteed that, even with high quality care, he wouldn’t ever be himself again.  It would be years before any replacement parts stopped feeling alien, and years more before it felt natural to use those replacement parts.

With lower or even moderate quality care, it stood to be much like Mauer’s experience.  Chronic pain, phantom sensations, replacement parts that were ugly or inelegant in execution.

It didn’t look like he was shedding any tears.  Rudy looked dead serious, and Possum looked divided between focusing on him and focusing on the rest of us.  One of her friends from the kitchen was with her.

“Cut me loose?  It’ll come across better,” I said.

Mary and Lillian exchanged glances.

“Come on, I’m not going to run,” I said.  “I’ve still got to redeem myself after Jessie’s last barb.”

“More of a jab than a barb,” Jessie said.

“It was slander.  And I need my hands free or those guys are going to be militant.  The president cut his teeth on military tactics last night.”

“He hated it,” Mabel said.  “He told me.”

“He might have hated it, but he did fine, by all reports.  Better than fine.”

“He did,” Mabel said.

“And people told him he did fine.  He might have hated it, but he’s a clever lad, and there isn’t anyone, guy or girl, who can lead an army, keep most of his people alive and get the job done, and not feel accomplished about it.  There’s a kind of power that comes with realizing your capability with something like that.  Like the first time you get mugged and walk away with the mugger’s wallet.”

“That’s not normal,” Lillian said.

“I’m actually kind of surprised you managed that.  You struggle a lot when caught off guard without superior weapons on hand,” Jessie said.  “Did you have a gun?”

“It’s not important,” I said.  “Point is, he’s going to be in a mood.  Not a bad one, either.  A decisive one.”

“Come here,” Mary said.

I provided her my hands.  She cut away the razor wire and ribbon.

I flexed my hands for a moment, testing them to make sure there had been no circulation problems, and then raised a hand.

I signaled the president, and beckoned him to come closer.

We approached as a group, meeting in no man’s land between the two sides, and the president brought his own retinue.  Valentina, the Treasurer, Gordon Two, Bea, and two delinquents.  Some of Archie’s people were in tow as well, but they hung further back.

“Where’s Berger?” Mary asked.

“We hid him,” Davis said.  “I think we did a pretty good job.  I know you’re all infiltrators, you’re investigators, and you’re assassins.  It’s going to take you time, all the same.”

“Davis,” I said.  “I know you’re proud of whatever system or hiding place you worked out, but we don’t need it.  We reached a deal.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said.

“Be sure.  Or, better yet, just accept that I’m the boss.”

“You looked happy out there.  Too happy.  Laughing.”

“That’s the unfortunate effect of being around old friends,” I said.  “Who just so happen to be on the wrong side now.”

“Let’s agree to disagree about which side is right or wrong,” Duncan chimed in.

“My concern,” Davis said, and he spoke in a very measured way, “Is… the little red-haired one.”

I looked back at Ashton.

“When we started the pheromone project, you mentioned him.”

“I also mentioned I’m immune.”

“You’re acting out of character,” Davis said.  “It’s impossible to ever know what the Academy has up its sleeve, I may have to assume malfeasance.”

“We are the malfeasance.  It’s what we’re all about.  It’s why we’re rebels.”

“Sy,” Jessie said.  “Be nice.  You know what he means.”

“I’m being nice.  Davis.  Let it be.  We’re fine.  We’ve come to an equilibrium.”

“We have?” Ashton asked.

One of the Lambs shushed him.

“For the time being, take Mabel and Archie.  Get Berger.  Bring him to the dining hall.  We’ll walk there with you.  No hostilities, no threats.”

“You told us all to assume traps, to trust our gut.  You outlined specific procedures in case of hostages, if we’re doing patrols and we see someone suspicious, you outlined what we do if supply chains are broken.”

“Yes,” I said.  “I forget exactly what I said, but I’m confident past-Sylvester did it with the best of intentions.  But I know, even if I forget the particulars, that I would’ve said that if all else fails, pass it up the ladder.  And up the ladder from you is, well, Jessie and I.”

Bea cut in, “If you’re that vital and if you’re the last line of defense, you really shouldn’t get captured.”

“Thank you, Bea.  We will keep that in mind going forward.  For now, gather everyone.  You can sit around the perimeter of the dining hall in the main building, you can keep guns pointed at us every step of the way and you can shoot us if anything untoward happens.”

He frowned.

He had only just gotten to get a taste of leadership.  It hadn’t been a flavor he’d liked, conflict and military, but the leadership itself… I imagined he was keen on it.  Now I was asking him to disregard it and set aside basic common sense.

“We’ll do it,” Valentina said.

The student council vice president.  The heartbreaker.  More emotion-driven than logic driven.  The deciding factor.

The Treasurer was nodding along, and nobody was disagreeing with her.  Davis, the student council president, was standing tall, trying to hide his indignation.

He’d tried to take a stand as leader and he’d been cut down by committee.

If Jessie and I stayed with this group, that would have to be something we balanced.

“Come on then,” Davis said.  “We’ll fetch the Professor.”

“Pass a message ahead for someone to rush to the kitchen?” I asked.  “Get the kettles going, ovens burning.  We’ll need a proper breakfast… and some pastries.”

“Yeah,” Davis said.  “I’ll pass it on.”

His group turned around and rejoined the mob, our small army of Beattle rebels.

“He’s disappointed,” Jessie said.  “He almost resembles you, Sy, when you were newer to this, less mature.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“He had a plan, and it kills him that he doesn’t get to execute it.  He’s relegated to being a messenger boy.  I remember you being disappointed on several occasions you didn’t get the spotlight you wanted.”

“Ah,” I said.  “Yeah.”

“Something to watch out for.”

“To be sure,” I said.  “Remind me.”

We started walking to the tail end of the group.  They looked pretty damn suspicious, collectively.

“You’re acting as if there’s an easy answer to this,” Lillian said, after he was out of earshot.  “But it isn’t.  There isn’t.  We can’t split Berger down the middle.  If you keep him, we’re powerless to stop the Infante.  If we keep him, you’re powerless to help Jessie.”

“We’ll figure something out,” I said.

“If you’re sure,” Lillian said.

I’m not sure, I thought.

Jessie’s countdown was ticking down, and it wasn’t the only thing I was worried about.

Mary was giving me a curious look, now.

“You have something in mind, don’t you?” Mary asked.

“Yes.  But not a scheme,” I said.  “And not an easy answer.”

“Hm,” she said.

She was still so quiet.  Not that she had ever been a chatterbox.  She had perhaps learned that lesson the night I’d met her, when she had interrogated me.  Stitched lips betrayed no weaknesses.

It was something of a relief to pass through the outskirts of Sedge and into the central area where our buildings were clustered.  Bystanders and old hunters and curmudgeons watched through windows as we trailed behind the small Beattle army.

Berger was already waiting at the main table.  Students were crowded within, and voices bounced off of the walls.

The shackle had been cut off, I noted, but someone with a bayonet stood behind him, keeping him secure.  There were a few hundred students in the vicinity watching him, which didn’t help matters either.

Rudy had been brought over to the kitchen, and he was situated where he could see and talk to Possum while still having a view of the rest of the room.  One of his arms was missing at the elbow.  The other was missing half of its muscles, looking as scrawny as the arm of a child half Rudy’s age.  His legs weren’t much better, and if I had to guess, neither was his body.  Two students kept on checking on him.

“Possum,” I called out.

“Tea?” she asked me.  She looked nervous.

“Please.  And a pastry, and some breakfast.  I’m famished.”

She looked increasingly nervous at that.

Why so nervous?  Had Davis told her to do something?

Jessie elbowed me.  I looked down at her, and then I looked up, before the thoughts clicked.

It was so easy to forget the little things in the midst of chaos and a broken routine.

“And hold the poison,” I told Possum.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, more to herself than to me.

I found my seat beside Jessie, across from Mary and Lillian.  Helen sat at my side, and the smaller Helen phantom sat just a little further down.  Duncan and Ashton were sitting by Mary at the other end of the table.

I was reminded of Lambsbridge orphanage.  The clamor in the morning, the crowd, being shoulder to shoulder.

“And here we are,” Berger said.  He sounded like he’d taken some drugs for pain.  His face was still entirely made up of bloody bandages.  “Finally ready to negotiate?”

“In a way,” I said.  “We needed to hash some things out, and I think my people won’t be entirely easy with how this has played out until we get something more concrete.  Measurable.”

“Here it comes,” Mary said.

“You get Berger.  You do what you need to do,” I said.

Lillian set her lips.

“In exchange, I’d like to make a deal with you.”

“A deal.”

“Two Lambs,” I said.  “Two of you, gone.  Blame it on the plague.  They help Jessie and I out.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.05 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Oh no,” Jessie said, moving her glasses up before putting her face in her hands.

“Two Lambs,” I said, repeating myself for good measure.  I made sure to look each and every one of the Lambs in the eye.  It took me a second to recall that some of the ones I was looking at weren’t alive or in the city.

“Now I’m wishing I hadn’t intentionally missed, earlier,” Mary said.

“No, Sylvester,” Lillian said.

“Yes, Lil,” I said.  “Things need to be done, we’re making a massive sacrifice to enable you to try to wrangle Berger and the Duke, and frankly, I’m wanting to prioritize the little time I have left, so I don’t want to take any big steps backward.  If I’m giving this up, I want something equitable.”

“You’re our captives,” Mary said.

“Will someone tell me what I’m missing?” Berger asked.  He looked and sounded as though he was down to one last nerve, and we were doing a good job of provoking it.  His face was still heavily bandaged, his words still mangled.

“A number of crises demand attention,” Duncan said.  “A very real crisis at home, and Sy’s… ongoing existence as the architect of crises.”

“I would argue, but I can’t quite disagree,” I said.

“What’s the crisis at home?” Berger asked.

Lillian leaned forward.  “The plague is spreading.  In the last several days, several cities have been written off.  The Infante may be looking to write off the Crown States.”

I was careful to watch Berger.  I saw him drum his fingertips on the table.

“It seems you’re not very surprised,” Jessie said.

Dang it.  I would have liked to see how Berger played it without the prompt.

“I’m not so surprised,” Berger admitted.

Lillian spoke, her voice low, “It’s the hope of the Lambs that we can take you off of Sylvester’s hands and that you’d be able to help the Duke find his voice again.  With luck, perhaps he could convince the Infante?”

Berger made a sound that might have been a laugh or a snort.  Given the state of his face, the line between the two was ambiguous.

I could see how crestfallen Lillian was at that noise.  Laugh or snort, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“The Infante does what the Infante wants,” Berger said.  “As far as he’s concerned, the good Duke of Francis is as far below him as the Baron was below the Duke.  The noble of higher standing might allow the lesser noble to speak, but chances are good they’ve already made up their mind.  To be approached by a noble and receive unasked-for advice?  I wouldn’t say it never happens, but it’s rare.  Rarer still that the advice in question would be listened to.”

Lillian diminished just a little bit further at that.

“There has to be something we can do,” she said.

“There is,” Berger said.  “But it won’t be as direct as you’re imagining.  The Duke of Francis knows people, and if his interests align with yours, which I think they do, he’ll do just that.  But things are rarely simple.  I’ll need assistance to get close enough to him to try fixing him, and you’ll be that assistance.  We’ll need to cooperate to get the right words to the right people, and again, you’ll play a part.  This is not impossible.”

“Improbable,” Lillian said.

“The Duke of Francis can talk,” Duncan said.  “He asked for Wyvern, and we provided it.  He seems better every time we see him… not that the Infante knows.”

“Ah,” Berger said.

“Is that a problem?” Duncan asked.

“No.  But it was a risk.  There was a chance it would have exacerbated the damage to his brain.  He chose to make the gamble when he asked you.  A gamble on two fronts, as it was something the Infante might have figured out, on top of being something that could have cost him the remainder of his life or faculties.”

“He outlined the danger the Infante posed,” Duncan said.  “He wanted to wait until you were back before making a play, we were looking for Sylvester, and we were just in the next town over when word came down of the quarantine here.”

“I expect that everything that the Duke of Francis told you is material he tried to communicate to me, in the limited times we were together and unobserved,” Berger said.  “Since that discussion, I’ve come to believe that the Infante may have had a hand in the sudden and abrupt spread of plague here.”

“He was responsible for this?” Jessie asked.  “What we saw in the city?”

“I’m not sure.  But this disaster was manufactured in a manner that none of the others I’ve seen were.”

“All down the main street,” I said.  “As if they were fed it?”

“Are the rebel groups capable?  Marginally,” Berger said.  “Are they willing or wanting?  I don’t believe so.  I’d be more certain if I knew what the news was in other cities.  For now, I’m only willing to say that it looks like someone powerful, with resources and desire.  I do believe you’ve struck on the topic of his aim and desire.”

“I want this to be another one of Sylvester’s bad jokes,” Duncan said.

“No joking,” I said.

Berger spoke, “There’s too much we don’t know.  I don’t believe the Duke of Francis wants to grievously harm the Crown States.  If anything, he relishes the challenges the rebels pose.  For now, I’ll content myself with hurrying to the side of my noble, provided you Lambs can get on the same page about that.”

“Alright.  I’ve already outlined what I want.  Two Lambs,” I said.  “Mary and Ashton.”

What?” Lillian asked.

Mary looked like she might kill me.  Duncan looked aghast.

“What’s the reasoning, Sy?” Jessie asked, sounding exasperated.

“Thank you very much for asking, Jessie-”

“Please don’t thank me,” she said.  “The other Lambs aren’t liable to forgive me if you draw too much attention to it.”

“It’s the most painful and organic-looking loss, because it’s unlikely,” I said.  “We can explain away the deaths by saying the plague got ’em.  The Lambs are going to be under suspicion, whatever happens, but the clear debilitation of losing key talent and abilities will diminish that suspicion.”

“Oh, I see,” Lillian said, sounding very unimpressed.  “It’s for our benefit.”

“For the most part,” I said.  “You guys pick up the new, younger Lambs to round out your group in the meantime, and the fact that you won’t have key combat and problem solving talent makes it likely you’re taken off the front lines in the immediate future.  That gives you more time near the Infante and near the Duke.  More leeway.”

“I don’t think it’s nearly so elegant as you’re painting it,” Mary said.

“Oh, it’s crude and brutal,” I said.  “Feelings get hurt, it’s raw, it’s an ugly break that forces everyone involved to adapt and cope emotionally.  But you’ll have eyes on you.  People will see that raw ugliness and they’ll believe the pain and the deaths are real, you follow?”

Helen spoke, “Referring to a young lady’s raw ugliness is not going to win you friends.”

“True,” I said.  “But I wasn’t referring to external beauty.  I was referring to the inside stuff.  The thoughts and feelings.”

“Ah,” Helen said, “I don’t pay much mind to that.  These days, I mostly have one big hairy, bloody sugary messy feeling I try to cram inside and ignore unless I’m eating or killing.”

“That’s another thing,” I said.

I didn’t get to finish, as Lillian had something to say.

“You’re talking about taking the most loyal members of the group and making them defect,” Lillian said.  “Are you trying to manipulate us with this deal, Sy?  Because trying to slide something past us or using shady negotiation tactics to try to get your way would be a supremely shitty thing to do to friends.”

“I’m a manipulator by nature, but no, that’s not what I’m doing.  I’m making a genuine offer in terms of what should be most tactically sound.  They won’t expect the two most Crown-loyal, capable Lambs to drop dead or defect.”

“You want me to abandon my best friend?” Mary asked.

“They know you’re her best friend, that you’re close.  The person who manages the dormitory reports to higher-ups when you sleep over at the dorm.  Ms. Earles reports to the higher ups whenever Lillian stays over with you at the Orphanage.  They know what’s going on, they know the relationships between you all.  We need something that makes them think that the situation really did go crossways.”

Any marginal goodwill I’d earned with Lambs was quickly fading.  Lillian looked upset, Mary was angry, Duncan seemed offended.

“If anything,” I said, measuring my words, “I recognize that there’s a clique.  You and Mary get along famously and that’s a liability.”

Jessie, face in hands, shook her head.

“Liability how?” Lillian asked, sounding just about as dangerous as Mary looked now.

“You get along and you do your things.  Duncan and Ashton get along well, and their attention is sucked up by the new Lambs.  Your attention is sucked up by schoolwork and the major project.  And for half the time I’ve been around Helen today, and I get the feeling there’s something desperately wrong.”

All eyes turned to Helen.  Some turned back to me.

“We know,” Lillian said.

“Do you?” I asked.  I looked at Helen.  “Do they?”

“I’m desperately in need of breakfast sweets,” Helen said, looking forlornly over in the direction of the kitchen.

“We’ve discussed things over the past several months,” Duncan said.  “In some ways, our hands are tied.”

“I refuse to believe that,” I said.

“Which part?” he asked.  “That we discussed it, or that our hands are tied?”

I frowned, glancing again at Helen, then back at Jessie.  The Helen that lived in my head was so insistent, asking for very different things.

“Call it intuition,” I said.  “Call it a quirk of my brain, but I’m really concerned that Helen has fallen by the wayside.  The strong bonds between the rest of you have left her mostly out in the cold.”

“I’m fine in the cold,” Helen said.  “I like the warmth too, but in the cold, I can hug someone and break them and feel their body heat, and it is delicious.

“Helen is managing as best as she’s able,” Duncan said.  “I don’t think our involvement will change anything.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t want to argue.

“Why not take Helen?” Lillian asked.

“Do you want me to?  Are you suggesting it?” I asked.

“No, and yes.  I’m wondering at your thought process.  Again, taking two of our most capable.”

“I do like being considered a proper Lamb,” Duncan explained.  “But I’m stung that I’m not considered one of the more capable, loyal Lambs.  I’ll cede capability, but you keep calling my loyalty into question as though you were bringing a battering ram to the gate.  You can’t keep saying it and make it true.”

“I’m talking about the condensed, unique package of loyalty with inhuman capability,” I said.

“Mm,” Duncan said.

“I don’t think this is going to work, Sylvester,” Lillian said.

“Then you may find that the Beattle rebels aren’t keen to let all of you leave,” I said.

“We knew what we were getting into when we came in here,” Mary said.  “I’m reasonably confident I could beat your small army and carve a way out.  Taking you hostage might even make us friends among your ranks, going by your habit of worming your way into the confidence of half the people you meet and making bitter enemies of the other half.”

“I’m wounded.  I’ve actually been a good leader, I think.  You were complimenting my troop movements earlier.”

“It’s a risk,” Mary said, “But I think I’d rather try fighting my way out of this dining hall than join you and fight my way out of a dozen more dining halls or similar places while you arrange your plan.  I’m not interested.  I am Lillian’s, and Lillian is mine.”

“Alright,” I said, a little bewildered by that.  “Not sure on the possessiveness, but… alright.”

Mary’s phantom, as I’d put it together, was only able to give me a shrug.  I’d need to think on things and try on ideas before letting it all coalesce and put that into context.

“I’m friends with Abby, Nora, Lara, and Emmett,” Ashton said.  “I’m important because I keep that team and this team connected.”

“I believe that’s one of my official responsibilities,” Duncan said.

“You’re not very good at it,” Ashton said.  “You do a very good job of taking care of them and being their doctor, but I’m better at being a friend and making sure they’re heard.  I think they would be very sad and disappointed if I weren’t there anymore, especially if I faked my death and they thought I had died in a horrible way.”

“The other Lambs would tell them what had happened,” I said.

“Even so,” Ashton said.  “I think they would be very sad and disappointed if I weren’t there anymore.”

“It’s because of your role and responsibilities that this works, Ashton,” I said.  “They know you’d be missed, that you wouldn’t want to leave without a goodbye.  This creates a dynamic, where they go looking for the goodbye, they watch for messengers and messages, and they listen for whispers.  They’ll wait and watch and listen for your message to the others, and when it doesn’t come, your death will be that much more believable.”

“It’s insane,” Lillian said.

“That’s unfair and at this particular moment, it’s unwarranted,” I said.

Nevermind the phantoms, or Mauer standing on the other end of the room, or my growing concern over what Fray was doing in my head.  Even Evette was watching the proceedings.

Lillian spoke, shaking her head, “I don’t want to put you in a bad position, but you have to see that this is too much.  You’re asking for too much.”

“No.  It’s just enough.  I have to believe it’s enough.”

The conversation seemed to die with that.  People on the fringes of the room, well out of earshot, were shuffling around, some getting up to get fruit or bowls of oatmeal from the kitchen.

Rudy still sat in the corner like a doll that had had its limbs and face smashed against the rocks, slightly slouched, enduring what had to be agony and frustration.  His gaze was fixed and serious.

Couldn’t disappoint him.  We’d spent so much to get to where we had Berger.  I wasn’t going to give him up like this.

I could see the student council, and I reminded myself that Davis was put out by the fact that I’d stolen his moment and his leadership out from under him, when he had been trying to negotiate with the Lambs.

I could fall from grace just as easily.

Bea was with the delinquents, normally the loudest bunch of students, and she’d managed to get the table quiet, so their din wouldn’t disturb our conversation.

The disturbance might have been welcome, frankly.

“If I may?” Berger asked.

“Please,” Lillian said.

“I can’t help but notice I’m sitting at this table while you discuss this.  Among you all, discussion of loyalty, of action against the Crown…”

He trailed off, but the tone of his voice was an ominous one.

I spoke, “You know what’s at stake.  You know we’re reasonably reasonable.  If you step in to provide any interim surgery or alterations to help the Lambs, then we’d be literally putting our lives in your hands.  We need to get to the point where the nation isn’t at risk.”

“I could turn you in the moment I’m out of your custody.”

“But you won’t,” I said.  “We need you on the same page as us.”

Berger didn’t respond to that, his face a mask.

“If you had to take someone, and I’m not saying this is a solution or an answer, I’d tell you to take Helen,” Lillian said.

“Helen needs care.  She’s asking for advanced care in every way except saying it outright, and knowing her, I’m not convinced she hasn’t asked and been ignored.  I’m suggesting that she stay behind because I don’t know if we can give her that care.  Given time, it becomes a time sink.  Finding professors to work with who can even begin to understand her.  Getting surgeries done, evading authorities after the fact.”

“Are we even really entertaining this?” Duncan asked.  “No offense, Sy, no offense Jessie.”

Possum and the retinue of kitchen workers were venturing out of the kitchen now, with mugs and plates.

“I’d like to think we’re entertaining it, but I’m biased,” I said.

“I don’t like it as an idea,” Duncan said.  “But I like the Lambs being together, and I… I suppose I respect you not being part of the core group, even if I don’t like it.”

And with that statement to punctuate things, breakfast was served.  People milled about, providing this and that, there was light, polite conversation, and some posturing by Mary and the other Lambs, as foreign, hostile agents in this strange, isolated little world that Jessie and I had hewn together.

“I need fresh air,” I said.

I left my plate half-touched, and I accepted assistance from Bea, who stood behind my seat.

“Ashton, guard him?”

“I’m being guarded by Ashton?

Ashton collected what looked to be the most colorful assortment of food items he could find, and gathered them up together in one fist so he could move chairs and open doors.  Countless eyes were on him and me when we made our way to the front door.

We settled off to the right of the door.  I leaned against the wall, being ginger and careful with the wound that seemed to have taken my entire back, and I fished for and found a cigarette.

Ashton provided the match.

The noise inside had crept up in volume since my exit.  People were discussing, no doubt keeping an eye on the interlopers, trying to reason out relationships and patterns.

“I have phantoms in my head representing most of the Lambs,” I said.  “My Ashton-phantom isn’t the strongest.  I don’t think I know you as well as I could.”

“I’m not very complicated,” Ashton said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “That’s an outright lie.”

“It’s rude to call someone a liar,” Ashton said.

“What if it’s a compliment in disguise as a lie?” I asked.

“I think that’s silly.  If you’re going to compliment, then compliment.  White lies are alright, but that’s something else.”

“Black lies too,” I pointed out.

“Those aren’t a thing.”

“And green lies.  And yellow lies.”

“I don’t think those are things, Sylvester.”

I puffed on my cigarette, thinking.

“Thank you for not messing up my hair,” Ashton said.  “You’ve done it most of the times you’ve spent alone with me.”

“Yeah, Ash,” I said.  “To be honest, I sorta had this feeling that I’d made a promise, but couldn’t remember, so I avoided it to stay safe.”

“Oh,” he said.  He turned his focus toward the camp.  “Yes, you did.  You promised me, the second to last time you saw me.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“You also pledged to be more like Good Simon and to read the books.  And you said you’d do your best to act like Sadie and I got very frustrated and you wouldn’t listen.  Now I know you were teasing me, but I didn’t realize it at the time.”

I narrowed my eyes even further.

“I’m telling a lie,” Ashton said.

“So I gathered,” I said.  “That was good.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m having a very hard time resisting messing up your hair,” I told him.

He smiled, looking for all the world like he didn’t care.  If I hadn’t known better, I might have accused him of being intentionally smug, simply to rub it in deeper.

“Sylvester,” Ashton said.

“Yes, Ashton?”

“Some people have goals, and some people have drives and mostly everyone everywhere is pushed or pulled by something.  I’ve been thinking for a long time about this, and I’m thinking very hard about you in particular.”

“Sure, Ash.”

“I thought at first you were one, and then I thought you were the other, and now it feels like you’re both.  Except it’s all in different directions.  Are you trying to move in two directions at once by recruiting one of the Lambs?  Or is this the whole goal, and are you hoping that by bringing two Lambs with you you’ll eventually have us all?”

“That last one isn’t the goal, Ashton.  I just like being around the Lambs.  It feels like home.  I care about them and want to take care of them.  I worry when I can’t see you guys.  I worry when I can, like with Helen or with Mary being as angry as she is.”

“That’s just when you’re around or when we’re hunting you,” Ashton said.

Blunt, authentic honesty.  Painful, but appreciated nonetheless.

“I’d like to fix that,” I said.  “I’d like to make sure Helen gets the attention she needs.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.

“You disagree?”

“No.  I was just thinking that we’re the only ones of a very small number who pay enough attention to Helen.  And you know enough to do something about it.  I can tell Duncan but I don’t think it comes across right, once the idea has gone from one shelf of my brain to another to my mouth and then to him and his understanding.”

“I wish I could have taught you stuff,” I told Ashton.

“Well,” Ashton said, sounding put-off, “It would help if you answered the important questions I ask you.”

“What’s my goal?”

“What’s your direction?”

“Fray asked me that question a long, long time ago, when I was the same size you are now,” I told Ashton.

“What did you say?”

“Faith,” I told him.  “I was pushing forward out of faith that the Lambs could be what we needed.  That Lillian could.”

“Oh.”

“That feeling is still there.  I want this to be true and good, but I’m not sure I trust myself.  Only around Jessie- Jessie is resilient and patient, Ashton.  She doesn’t put up with my guff.  Everything else around me that isn’t resilient, I just break or taint.”

“But you’ve been making all of this happen,” he said.

“I’ve been trying.  I was hoping to do something big with it.  I have a powerful piece of information, I have hundreds of people working on my behalf, and once the message gets out, I think that number will swell.  I have protection for my people and for friends… and I have very little time.”

“None of us do.  Mary keeps having to get surgery, but she doesn’t like to talk about it.  Lillian and Duncan might get their white coats, which might mean they have other things to do that isn’t being a Lamb, or they might not get their white coats and that might mean they stop being Lambs.  Helen isn’t doing well and Ibbot isn’t treating her well.  He keeps on isolating her and keeping her in the lab with him.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.  I was trying to keep my tone casual, despite the fact that none of this was pleasant to hear.

“But you’re mostly okay, except for the seeing things, and Jessie’s okay, so it could be worse,” Ashton said.

I’m not okay.  Neither is Jessie.

“If you want to do this ‘something big’, then you should do it while there’s time,” Ashton said.

“But,” I said, taking a puff on the cigarette.  “Being expedient would mean snatching you up.  Having Mary helps with any follow-up.”

“I think maybe the others aren’t so happy with that idea,” Ashton said.

“Mary isn’t interested,” I said.  “It’s asking too much.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The disappointment was poignant.

“Lillian is out.”

“I think kidnapping Lillian again would be a very bad idea,” Ashton said.

“Yeah,” I said.  My heart was heavy at the thought.  “I won’t get much use from Duncan that I don’t already get.”

“Yes,” Ashton said.

“Leaving Helen, with all the associated warts and time-consuming hassles.”

“It’s possible,” Ashton said.

I shifted position, giving Ashton a more careful glance.  He wore very tidy clothes, his pants tucked into his boots, shirt buttoned up with suspenders and a pocketwatch, his hair burnished red.

“What?” he asked.

“Just thinking… I have vague recollections of sleeping on the floor in your lab, sleeping odd hours, trying to gauge the time, hiding when people came in to check on your predecessor, and then walking over to the notepad to see what they wrote down, usually with the time.”

“Okay,” Ashton said.

“Would you be willing to give me a hand?  Maybe a bit more?  I’m thinking I know a way to make this work a little more tidily.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.  “That’s good.”

“Come on,” I said.

I led him back inside.

I was very aware that conversations that were in full swing died as my bootheels tromped on the floor.  I approached the table in the center of the room where the Lambs were eating.

“Final offer,” I said.

Jessie put her face in her hands again.

“This is a good one,” I said.  “Helen, with us.  We get her attention and care, as best as we’re available.  We get a little… flexibility in terms of how we operate.”

“Why do I have a bad feeling?” Lillian asked.

And, downgrading my previous offer,” I said.  “Instead of asking for two Lambs, I’ll ask for one and a half.”

“Half?” Jessie asked, without moving her face.  “Are you speaking of the new Lambs, who aren’t fully inducted?”

“Not in the slightest.  I’m talking about a literal half of Ashton.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.  “When you talked about me giving you a hand- you are a worse person than Sadie is, Sylvester, and Sadie is a caricature.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Mary said.

Helen wasn’t an easy creature to read.  Her expressions didn’t betray much, she didn’t have body language so much as she deliberately posed at a given moment, but all the same, the phantom that lingered near her seemed calmer, the agitation of the finger or the eye movement that twitched where it shouldn’t.

But with me offering to bring her onboard, with the interplay, and most likely with a dozen other factors I wasn’t yet aware of, I sensed that she was calmer and better than before.

“You’re a bad person, Sylvester,” Ashton said.

“But you’re not saying no,” I said.

A half-dozen Lambs seated at the table jumped in to protest on Ashton’s behalf.

“If you must,” Ashton said, very stoic.  “But don’t chop too much of me off.  I have people I want to help too.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.06 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Alright,” I said.  “How about this?  Right hand, two-foot section of his stomach, skin, of course, and a section of his face and-or scalp.”

“Why are we back to the midsection?” Lillian asked.

“I like my face and-or scalp,” Ashton said.

“We’re back to the midsection because you’re vetoing the drus nodes.”

“The nodes are too blatant,” Duncan said, sounding very tired.

“I like my face and-or scalp,” Ashton said, with emphasis.

I leaned forward.  “I hear you, Ashton.”

“Good.  Because my creators worked very hard and I needed some extra luck to get a good face.  I like my hair too and I’m worried if you take any of my scalp then it will be like messing up my hair but for good.  I’m cute.”

“He is cute,” Helen said.

“Exactly,” Ashton said.  “Being cute means Helen and girls like Helen like to hug me, and hugs are warm, safe, and strategically important.  I don’t want to not be cute because you’re a bad person.”

Berger leaned back.  “Strategically important.”

“It means his spores are working,” Jessie said.

“That was less of a question,” Berger said, “And more of a realization, far too early in the morning, that I’m sitting where I’m sitting.”

“Where else would you be sitting?” Ashton asked.

“Hold on, we’re getting off track,” I said.  “How big of a danger is it really, that this hurts Ashton long-term?”

“Minimal to negligible,” Duncan said.  “He’s got good bones, so to speak.  There would be a recovery period, but after that he would be fine.”

“I would still like to veto,” Ashton said.  “Sylvester has been messing with my hair too much.  I’d like to nominate my heart for the cutting board, instead.”

“I’m fifty percent sure that would kill you, Ashton,” Lillian said.  She looked to Duncan, “You’re the Ashton expert.  The mucus membrane only had a point-eight translation rate, didn’t it?”

“Did,” Duncan said.  “It’s point-eight-two now, they substituted in the gland from one of the failed alternate projects because it had a higher rate.  Downside is Ashton complains about dry skin a lot more than he did.”

“They got around to that, then.  Point eight-two, three or more days of travel, would be… survivable but exceedingly uncomfortable for those three or more days.”

“He doesn’t particularly care,” Duncan said.

“I don’t particularly care,” Ashton echoed.  “I prefer this.  This is my suggestion.”

I spoke, “I suggested the face and scalp because it would be visible and hard to ignore.  Carving out the kid’s heart would do a good job, except it doesn’t really help with actually doing what I’m shooting for here.”

“I suggested it because I thought it would be nice and visible and Sylvester cares about the visible,” Ashton said.

“I would rather not,” Lillian said.  “Not the heart, not if something could go wrong while we’re traveling back home, delaying us.  There are too many things going on in this country and in this region.”

“You’re vetoing a perfectly good heart, Ashton’s not letting me have a bit of his face or scalp, you’re saying taking the drus nodes would be too obvious.  So we’re back to a limb or two-”

“One limb,” Lillian said.

“I’m getting one limb, and you’re wondering why I keep going back to a nice ten or so pounds of what Ashton’s got in his middle?”

“Hold on one second,” Lillian said.  “Ten pounds?”

“Work with me here,” I said.

“You’re wanting to butcher a Lamb like he’s sitting on the chopping block.  Some resistance is to be expected,” Lillian said.

“I’m just saying, I started off this argument very reasonably asking for a whole Ashton and a whole Mary.  You’re the ones that are raising the stakes here in a very weird and bizarre way.”

“Yes,” Mary said, dry, “We’re the ones being weird and bizarre.”

“You are!  I mean, it’s not often that I try to bargain with someone and they’re changing the terms in ever more disfavorable ways for themselves.”

“Disfavorable as a word hurts me,” Jessie said.

“It’s fine, I’m sure it’s a legitimate word,” I told her.

“You’re the one that started us on the topic of cutting Ashton up,” Lillian said.

“Yes, and I started off with a very reasonable suggestion of one whole limb, one partial limb, and forty percent of his skin.  We can leave his face alone.  I’m not an Academy-trained student or doctor or anything-”

“As evidenced by the fact that the Crown States aren’t a blighted crater,” Mary said.

“-As evidenced, yes, but even without training, I have a pretty good idea of how the jigsaw that is Ashton is put together.  Lobes and nodes and clusters and polyps.  He needs food, he’s got a good system there.  He needs water, he gets some through skin in moist climates, drinks the rest.  Needs carbon dioxide, well, that gets more complicated, but his heart does half the job, treating his entire body as a lung, and his skin sucks in the rest by way of mucus membrane.  Breaks it down and then just distributes it by osmosis.  Loads up his mucus with it and it gradually makes its way where it needs to be.  Yes?”

“Yes,” Duncan said.

“Cut out his heart, his skin can carry the worst of the burden, cut off his skin, and the heart will carry the remainder of the burden.”

“With difficulty,” Lillian stressed.

“Can we just accept the fact that this isn’t going to be easy peasy?” I asked.  “I’m asking for Helen, and I’m asking for a piece of Ashton.  Now you guys keep talking yourselves into giving me bigger and bigger pieces.  I think you’re being contrary.”

“Oh yes, we’re the contrary, problematic ones,” Lillian said.

“I feel the need to remark that you and Mary are sounding very alike these days,” I said.

“Let’s stay on track,” Jessie said, before anything could erupt.  But then, I’d suspected she would step in.

I spread my arms, I took a deep breath, and then lowered my arms.  Calling for a stop, an intermission, while letting people spend a moment gathering their thoughts.

I tried to assume a calm, collected demeanor.  It wasn’t that I hadn’t been calm before.  I had.  I’d even been enjoying myself.  But I had also been in he throes of trying to solve a problem, trying to divine the reality that saw Jessie and I and Lillian’s group all happy and healthy.

It was a balancing act, sending the Lambs back home, but there wasn’t another option, short of kidnapping Lillian.  Kidnapping Lillian when she was anxiously waiting to go home and check to see if she had earned her white coat would be an evil I could never dream of.

No, she still had ties to the Academy, she had dreams, and there was no way for her to walk my path.  Duncan was much the same.

“Remind me again why we can’t just take Ashton’s skin?” I asked.  “Non-face, non-scalp skin.”

“It’s too interlinked with the rest of him,” Duncan said.  “Which isn’t very interlinked on its own.  Carries hormones, blood, carbon dioxide.  The rest of the structures of his body, shelves of his brain, the individual organ clusters and the rest of him are dependent on a very narrow assortment of vehicles.  Skin is a good, healthy way for him to move things from one part of his body to another.”

“It’s fine,” Ashton said.  “I’m okay with it.  Skin and a hand.”

Lillian spoke, “Please don’t blindly agree with Sylvester or get caught up in his pace.”

“I’m not blind, and I’m not caught up.  I think if Sylvester is trading the professor to us he needs something in exchange and if that something is a piece of me then I’m happy to help.  If I could give more of me to not have to give up Helen then I would.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” Helen said.

Mary drummed her fingers on the table.

There was a faint murmur of conversation elsewhere in the room.  The kitchen staff were bringing food out, with some helpful students carting food back and forth.  Everyone was keeping one eye on our discussion, and all of the students present had the sense to either sit at the edges of the room or wait.  The tables surrounding ours were unoccupied.

“Do you want to go with Sy and Jessie, Helen?” Lillian asked.

“I think Ibbot would be very upset,” Helen said.

“That’s not a downside,” I said.

“Shh,” Lillian said.  “Don’t interfere.”

I sighed and sat back.

“I quite like being whole, and Professor Ibbot keeps me whole,” Helen said.  “He made me and I love him and I don’t like him very much.”

“I don’t want to be undiplomatic,” Duncan replied, “But I don’t think I’m treading new ground if I suggest that he’s a very hard man to like.”

Duncan was being so mindful of things with Professor Berger here.  Nevermind that Berger was already privy to damaging information.  Perhaps Duncan would be mindful of the sensitive and undiplomatic if the sky was falling.

“I like my professor less than anyone, I think,” Helen said.  “I’ve spent too many hours in his lab with him.  Smiling when told to smile.  Sometimes he works on other things, but sometimes he only works on me.”

“There’s only so much work that can be done,” Jessie said.

“Oh no,” Helen said.  “It’s really very endless, the work being done.  But he doesn’t see me as a person and he doesn’t let me tell him when he’s wrong, or say no, or let me insist that he shouldn’t tamper with parts of me.  Even when I’m with him, he’s alone for all intents and purposes.  A man who only has himself to answer to, only himself for company, with me as a prop on the side.  It makes for a skewed perspective.  I would like a vacation.  Even knowing the consequences.”

“Even knowing it might be a permanent vacation?” Mary asked.

“Even knowing,” Helen said.  “I expect I’ll be liberally bribed with sweets and goodness by Sylvester and Jessie.”

“Liberally,” I said.  “I think the kitchen is preparing something over there.”

Helen craned her head to see, investigating.

“So that’s that,” Lillian said.  “A Lamb and a pound of flesh.”

“You get the professor, and a good chance to stay in the good graces of the Academy,” I said.  “Graduate with your coat.  Look after Mary, Ashton, and the little Lambs.  Maybe even save the world from the Infante.”

“Don’t put it like that,” she said.  “As if we’re balancing the scales or a married couple breaking apart and deciding which assets go where.”

“I like how the chance to save the world is an asset,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said.  “Don’t joke.  Don’t-”

She stopped.

“You’re being very strict with me,” I pointed out.  “Don’t do this, be quiet, stop, no, please lords…”

“I did not say half of those things,” Lillian said.

“But you are being strict,” I pointed out.

“I’m not going to say I’m not,” Lillian said.  “And that makes me think… Duncan, would you like to handle the removal of the necessary pieces of Ashton?  I’d like to have a word with Sylvester.”

“We’re having a word with him now,” Duncan said.

“No, Duncan,” Ashton said.

“Personally,” Lillian said.  “Privately.”

“That might be a bad idea,” Duncan said.

“It’s fine,” Mary said.  “If Sylvester is willing?”

“Willing enough, I suppose.”

“Then I’ll guard you, Lillian,” Mary said.

We sat on makeshift chairs and sections of tree trunk that hadn’t yet been reduced into constituent elements, instead serving as makeshift stools.  All of the legs and sawed ends of tree trunk scraped against the floor as the Lambs found their way to their feet.

My back ached as I stood.  Half of it was more bandage than skin.  I’d sat still for too long, gotten chilly and then warm again.

I looked at Jessie.  “Any objection?”

“To?”

“Me talking to Lillian.”

Jessie smiled.  “Go ahead.”

“You don’t mind?  We’re getting along, you and I.  That’s important to me.”

“Go,” she said.  “We all reconvene here.  If you’re going somewhere, tell me where you’re going.  If you’re looking for someone, come to me.  I don’t think the Lambs are going to get lost.”

With that, the group scattered.  Berger, much like I would’ve preferred to do, remained at the table.  His wounds clearly hurt, as mine did, and this was far too much activity for first thing in the morning.

My lieutenants were looking on.

On my way to the door, walking in the company of Mary and Lillian, I spoke to them, “Get everyone packed and ready.  By day’s end.  Anyone who straggles will have to catch up.  Big projects… leave them for now if we really can’t move them.”

There was so much to juggle.  Professors and interpersonal relationships and Lambs and Mabel and Jessie and Lillian and Mary and the plot to end the Crown and stop what the Infante was very possibly plotting.

We stepped outside, and I lit myself a cigarette, offering to Mary and Lillian.  Both refused.

Once we’d settled at a spot across the street, me leaning into a very old-fashioned lamppost, Mary broke away.

She kept an eye on things, but remained out of earshot.

“So what’s with that?” I asked.

“That?”

“The… possessiveness.”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.  “Well, I do know, but I don’t know how to word it.”

“That doesn’t help me any,” I said.

“If you’d stuck around, you’d know more,” Lillian said.  “About Mary’s psychology, about how we’ve bonded and broken away and gotten frustrated with each other.  About a lot of things.  But you left.”

“Out of necessity.”

“You won’t come back.”

“Not without Jessie, and they’d dissect Jessie.  Not without me being stuck in a cell in the worst, deepest floors of the dungeon so I wouldn’t pose a threat to the Crown.”

Lillian nodded.

Nothing surprising in any of that.

“What’s your aim here?” Lillian asked me.

I raised my eyebrow.  “Here?  I’m not about to divulge greater plans, you know.  We’re nemeses.”

“Not that.  What’s your concern with the Lambs?  What are you driving for?  Why take two on?  It has to go deeper than what you’ve said.”

“Deeper,” I said, ruminating on that.  “I suppose.  It’s really not all that fancy an answer.”

“But it’s something you’ve spent the last hour and a bit working on.  Clearly putting brain power toward devising solutions.  Going the extra mile.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s curious.”

“I’m a curious sort.”

Lillian folded her arms.  No nonsense, but not in the stern librarian way.

“I’ll tell you,” I said.  “But on one condition.”

“I’m not sure I’m in the mood for conditions, Sylvester.”

“When we part ways this time, let’s do it favorably.  I go do what I need to do.  You guys do what you need to do.  But I’ll wish you a sincere good luck, and you do the same for me.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.  Only that I want to end this without tears.  The tears nearly destroyed me last time.  Let’s… yeah.  That’s my term.  If you agree to follow it, then I’ll tell you what I’m shooting for.”

“I find that deals with you are never wholly happy, Sylvester.”

“We once had a long-standing deal of the oldest sort, one that existed before any institution or tribe.  Boy and girl,” I said.  “I think you were happy for a stretch.”

“A frustrated sort of happy,” Lillian said.

“You liked being frustrated,” I pointed out.

Wrong thing to say.  The folded arms became more of a self-hug.  The conversation paused.

Why did this have to be so hard?

“I’ll take your deal, Sylvester.”

“Then I’ll give you your answer,” I said.  “Fray.”

“Fray?”

“She’s always there,” I said, lowering my voice.  “When the Lambs appear, she’s there, clutching at them.  She lurks close to them and brings out bad qualities.”

“Sy, is this the real Fray, or-”

“The one I can never directly look at, because she’s pieced together from fragments and I really don’t know her well, but she’s Fray.”

“Sy, no.  That’s not even funny to joke about.”

“It really isn’t,” I said.  “She’s ominous.  She threw me off to give you guys a shot at me, and now she’s up to something else.  There’s a level of intuition at play with all of this, and everything’s importance.  Every Lamb represents something.  Mauer and Fray represent things.  Mr. Bubbles represents something.  The trick is seeing the pattern, trusting the Lambs, and trusting the prey instinct.  If Fray is clutching at you in my head, I want to get you out of her reach in reality.”

“There’s a lot more to just about everything you said than that,” she said.  “You’re punching at shadows here.”

“Or,” I said, “my intuition is saying that this is worth paying attention to and being wary about.  Taking on Helen lets Jessie and I see what changes, lets us access some people, and gives us a bit of an edge we lacked in confrontations.”

“While depriving us of the same,” Lillian pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said.

“So that’s it, then?  Duncan is putting the scalpel to Ashton in some makeshift lab because you had a feeling about a hallucination you’re seeing?”

“It’s part of it,” I said.  “Or maybe it’s better to say that ‘it’ involves some longer-term thinking.  Because I don’t want to go out alone.  I want… I’ll see you before the year is up, wherever you end up.  I’ll bring Helen back.”

“You’ll come back?  To say goodbye?”

“Because I’ll be watching all of you.  I’ll be keeping an ear out, and I’ll be thinking about everything that needs thinking about.  Just like I did this time, I’ll have information and answers when we cross paths.  And I’m really hopeful that when we get that far, we can join forces.”

“It’s so sad,” Lillian said.  “This.  Mary.  Helen.  Even poor Ashton in there.”

“Duncan,” I said.

“Duncan too.”

I puffed on my cigarette.  Snow collected on and around us.

Mary, off to one side, was throwing knives at trees while keeping an eye on us.  The implication was that she could hit me with a knife if I did anything she didn’t approve of.

It was hard to figure out what to say, when my thoughts were very much elsewhere.

“I’m glad we ran into each other, even in this circumstance,” I said.  “Even with recent differences.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.  “But maybe next time we run into each other, it would be nice if I didn’t come in from the cold and the dark and nearly six months of only having Mary and my books for company and find you nicely snuggled in between Jessie and some girl.”

“Ah, yeah,” I said.

“Not that I have any claim or anything on you or what you do-”

“No, no.  I get it.”

“But the shock and surprise… I was unkind to Jessie, I was so caught off guard.”

“I get it,” I said.  I drew in a deep breath.  “Next time, I will strive to be in the midst of something even more shocking and disarming when you burst into the room to surprise me.  Something even, I dare say, disturbing.  What would you say to activities involving a funnel and large spiders?”

Lillian punched my arm, and in that moment, the world was a little bit more right than it had been a minute ago.

Helen held Ashton’s arms while Duncan cut.  She talked into his ear.

Duncan  made a fresh incision, and Ashton screamed, blood-curdling, scaring the daylights out of poor Duncan.

“I think I just had a heart attack,” Duncan said.

“Helen told me to do that.”

“You’re not helping, Helen,” Duncan said.

“Sorry,” Helen said.

He cut again.  Ashton screamed, blood-curdling, once more.

“Ha ha,” Duncan said.

“She told me to do that too.”

All around us, the students were getting packed up.  The kitchen supplies were being hauled to a wagon and cart, the students’ belongings were being moved down, and everything was being sorted out to maximize space.  Jessie was overseeing a fair bit of it.

At Duncan’s insistence, Helen gave up on holding Ashton and backed off.  Lillian took over.

I was still smoking, now on my second cigarette.  I stayed away from the murder scene in progress, and I kept an eye out for Lieutenants.

“Gordon Two,” I said.

“Gordon what?” Lillian asked from the other end of the room.

“Nobody’s trying to gather my or Jessie’s stuff?”

“Your rooms are untouched,” Gordon Two said.

“Where are Pierre and Shirley?”

“Overseeing the carriages.  It’s going to be tricky, getting everyone in.  I think two-thirds of us are walking.”

I wasn’t surprised.  We’d been under-stocked even before wagons had gotten damaged in the evening of conflict.

I kept my mouth shut, and I watched, giving occasional pointers as Duncan carved at Ashton.  He had a good sense of what he was doing, but I’d spent more time than most with the red plague.  My tips and suggestions for Duncan were of an aesthetic sort, to better make it look like the plague had done the damage to Ashton.

Seeing a cross section of Ashton proved distracting for innumerable students who were passing into and through the dining hall.

“We’ll need more wagons,” I said, absently.

Ashton was no longer screaming, but he seemed uncomfortable.  It was only natural.  He was losing a hand.  After this, he would be partially flayed.  He was a stoic little fellow.  Particular, but stoic.

When the arm came off, severed at the elbow, Helen was quick to latch onto it, the most reluctant to hand it back.  Mabel had a container waiting, and the arm went straight into safety.

“Painful,” Mabel said.  She looked at me.  “Why?”

“The thing about the Lambs is that they’re top quality work,” I said.  “One of the better projects from one of the better Academies in the Crown States.”

“And you want to replicate it?”

“No,” I said.  “No, I want to learn from it.  Jessie knows the key ratios, don’t you Jessie?”

“Absolutely,” Jessie said.

“Memorized the tables, charts, formulas?”

“Yes.”

“And we now have one piece of a pheromone-driven experiment for reference, while we’re in the midst of preparing our own such experiment.  That speeds us up?”

“Considerably,” Jessie said.

I spread my hands for Mabel.

She nodded.  I watched her watch the Lambs, and I wondered what was going through her head.

Was she, in her own perception, intruder or intruded-on?  Bystander, outsider, or someone at home?  I didn’t have enough experience with her to say one way or another.

Heads turned away as Ashton was cut into.

Ashton’s eyes settled on mine.

“You’re aware I could make this entire building implode on you?”

“Yeah, Ashton.  I’m aware.”

“Good,” he said.

Which was all.  The little man was changing.  He’d set his sights on something, said something about drives and goals, and he’d said other things I would have to ask Jessie for in order to get reminders, but he was changing, and that was a very good, positive thing.

Lillian and Jessie hugged.  Then Jessie and Mary hugged while I faced Lillian down.

I was rescued by Helen, who threw her arms around my shoulders and Lillian’s, hugging us both, while advertently putting us in closer proximity to one another.  My forehead knocked lightly against Lillian’s, and then came to rest against it.

“No spider funnel, please.  I don’t need to see that,” Lillian said.

“Noted.  Centipedes and a good stuffing stick.”

“Better.”

I had to pinch Helen to make her let go of us, which was a bit of a shame.  When I raised my head, forehead no longer pressing against Lillian’s with the strength of Helen’s grip, I let my lips graze Lillian’s forehead.

Mary hugged me, which was weird.  I didn’t take any of her weapons and she didn’t hold anything sharp or pointy to my throat.

Ashton settled for a backwards handshake, using his non-dominant hand.  Duncan took an ordinary, almost-adult handshake instead.

“Don’t die, don’t let Fray make decisions for you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Jessie spoke, “Take care of that professor.  He was hard to retrieve.  We all suffered for it.  Sy more than most.”

I thought of the torture, of the bug latched onto my back.  The day felt a little less bright than it had.

“We’ll see him out safely,” Mary said.  “You’ll look after our Helen?”

‘Our’ Helen.

“Absolutely,” I said.  I looked at Helen.  “Yes?”

“I’ll be fine,” Helen said.

“Perfect,” Mary said.

There was an antsy caravan behind us, ex-students looking to get moving on what was liable to be a full day of travel.  They had little stake in what happened here.  The Lambs wanted to go for much the same reason.  The overall anxiety was compounded by the presence of the ‘enemy’, so to speak.

We had every reason to go, to get moving.

I looked at these Lambs, at a damaged Ashton and a stern Mary, at Lillian who I would have dearly loved to sit by a campfire with, and at Duncan, who… wasn’t disappointing me anymore, and who was impressing me now and then.

Unless that was a trick of memory.

Every reason to go… and without coming up with an excuse or voicing it, both sides were reluctant to be the first to turn away and put distance between us.

One way or another, if only half of the Lambs make it, we reunite.  We band together.  We find a way through, I thought.  We don’t end this separated.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.07 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The departure of the Lambs was our cue to start packing up and getting ready to go.

We had three hundred students, fifty other individuals we’d picked up along the way, and thirty gang members that included the new and the old; adults that were willing to take orders.  Of all the gang leaders we’d started with, only Archie remained.

We couldn’t stay, and so we were left with the unenviable task of getting four hundred people ready to leave.  Most of them had been up for half the night as active agents in attacking the quarantine site and then distracting Academy forces, leading them into traps.  The average age was roughly seventeen, and being ex-students, they were a spoiled sort of seventeen that weren’t busy working to help their families put food on the tables.

Thanks for helping us get out of the quarantine zone, kids!  Hope you enjoyed your breakfasts, because we’re going to spend the rest of the day trudging through cold wet backroads.

If they had been motivated by any degree of excitement or a legitimate fear for their own lives, it still would have been a slow process.  If it had been both exciting with mortal fear driving it, maybe things might have moved along a little better.

“Limited wagons,” Jessie observed.  “We can save seven seats, including the driver’s seat.  Rudy gets one, of course.  Then Doris, Marie, Bernard, Clara, Ann, and Edwin.  Doris can drive the wagon for a stretch, but we’ll want to ensure she’s snug and comfortable.”

“Why her in particular?”

It was Helen who chimed in, “Because it’s gentlemanly, Sy.  Don’t tell me that you’ve become a degenerate in the last year.”

“It’s because she’s pregnant, Sy.  You’ve seen her around.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Conception was our fault, arguably.  The early days after we left Beattle.”

“There’s a dozen kinds of ways to avoid that,” I said.

“I’m fond of not having a uterus,” Helen said.  “Very convenient.”

“It probably is,” Jessie told Helen.  To me, she said, “They slipped the net.  You threatened Doris’ boyfriend and said you’d stitch his dick to his forehead if he didn’t step up.”

“Did I?” I asked.

“Why are you asking me?  Do you think I’m going to be wrong about something?” Jessie asked.  “Or that I forgot?”

“No, no, nothing like that.  It’s just, dang, I’m really disappointed I didn’t remember the forehead-dick-stitching.  I really like that.  I’m sort of in awe of my past self.”

“Again,” Jessie chimed in.

“He’s a bold and adventurous lad, with uncommon intelligence,” I said.  “And with a mischievous streak that may include attaching members to foreheads., without removal of either forehead or member.”

“It was inspired,” Jessie said.  “You were angry.”

“Did I have cause to try putting the inspiration to practice?” I asked.  “I’m sort of wondering at the logistics of the act, now.”

“He stepped up, you didn’t have cause.  You could say he was inspired by the lingering threat,” Jessie said.

“Well, good for him,” I said.  “Also, drat.”

“For all of his early reluctance, I think he’s more likely to be a proper parent than Doris,” Jessie said.  “Not that we’re going to say anything of the sort in earshot of Doris.”

“I’ll forget you said it before the hour is out,” I said.

“I’ll be good,” Helen said.  “And if you ever want to test those logistics on someone, Sylvester, do let me know.  I’ll be happy to help.”

“How gracious of you, madam.  Do remind me if we have any particularly annoying enemies deserving of the fate.”

Helen offered me a little curtsy, “Of course, sir.”

“You two are just going to be a right horror show, aren’t you?” Jessie asked.

“Given a chance,” I said.

“Just keep me in the loop,” Jessie said.

“Can do,” I said.

Students were making their way outside.  The ground was wet with snow, and they were reluctant to put their bags down where they would get soaked.  There weren’t many surfaces available, either, and the bags were heavy, leaving them in an awkward position.  Students were doing their best to take bags and load up the carriages and wagons, but it was quickly becoming apparent that there just wasn’t much space.

“Are we going to have to reduce the number of bags we’re bringing?” I asked.

“Probably,” Jessie said.  “Since we arrived, we’ve gathered lab equipment, materials, projects, new people, and we’ve lost wagons and carriages as of last night.”

I frowned.

“We’ll manage.  Maybe if we get students to share the load, each one carries one bag for a short leg of the journey, passes it on?”

“Or we could devise a quick hitch.  If we tore off a door and fix wheels to it from somewhere, we could add more bags,” I said.

“More load for the horses,” Jessie said.  “You’re not wrong, but let’s not overstate it.”

“Right.”

Jessie waved over one student.  “Get Charlie Cullough and Alvin Munder.  Get tools from under the stairs of the unoccupied dormitory, tear away the sliding door of the enclosed pen.  Then get the big treaded wheelbarrow wheels and axle from the rusty wheelbarrow sitting inside the mill.  Beside the brick stack.  See what you can put together.  We need something we can hitch to a carriage and pull behind, to hold bags.”

“Yeah?” the boy asked.  He glanced at us three, with Helen getting the majority of the attention.

“Make it sturdy,” Jessie said.  “We have a long trip ahead of us, and we really don’t want to stop halfway to fix it.

“Yes ma’am,” the boy said, sounding unconvinced.

“There’s a pay bonus in it for you three if you get it done fast and it lasts the entire trip,” I said.  “Be inventive.”

“Show us what you’re made of,” Helen said.  Her tone was such that I couldn’t help but think that she was actually thinking about constituent, fleshy elements when she talked about what he was made of.

Still, it did the trick.  He hurried off to do the task with zest and pep.

“That will help,” Jessie said.  “I’m just trying to put the mental building blocks together.  Quantity of cargo, the amount of space…”

“We could tell everyone to dig through their bags and throw away five items.”

“We could,” Jessie said.  “Fast way to breed resentment.”

“You’re not wrong,” I said.  “But the Academy catching up to us or us making our rebels carry two stone worth of luggage is going to see us collectively dead and dealt with or it’s going to breed even more resentment.”

“Yeah,” Jessie said.  She looked down at her notebook and began making notes, one eye on incoming refugees and the bags they were carrying.  She wrote something down.

“Why the notes?” I asked.

“Calculations, and I may have to delegate.  There’s a lot to do.”

“Got it,” I said.  “What can I do?”

“Find Shirley and Pierre?”

“On it,” I said.

“And take Helen?  Boys are stopping to stare at the new girl and it’s slowing down traffic in a logistically key place.”

“If it would help, I can drink and redistribute water across my body,” Helen said.  “Change my proportions to be less stare-worthy.”

“No,” I said.  “Not if you’re walking long distances.”

“I can expel it,” she said.

“Means stopping repeatedly.”

“I can expel it through the mouth.”

“Let’s just not,” I said.  “Come with.  We’ll get out of sight and out of mind, and maybe the hope that they get to gawk at you in the future motivates them to get going.”

“Alright,” Helen said.

“Don’t be too long!” Jessie called out.  Helen and I were already a little distance away.  “We should leave soon.”

“Got it!” I called back.

Shirley and Pierre were in the dining hall.  The room was one of the largest areas with open space, access from multiple directions and a lot of surfaces to set bags and things on.  Some of our people were packing up on tables, others pausing to rest after lugging heavy bags a distance.

Shirley’s hair had grown in a bit longer, but it remained a pixie cut of black hair.  The heavy application of product to her lashes and the makeup surrounding her eyes made her eyes look even larger.  In any other circumstance, she might have looked like an attractive cross of the seductress and the innocent, new to adulthood.  She was coordinating and giving advice.

She looked worn out.  She hadn’t had much more sleep than I had, to look at her, and her brain wasn’t so adaptable.  She was doing an admirable job, and she was doing it after being hit by plague.  Bloody bandages wrapped her forearms and hands.

Pierre hung back, looking bedraggled.  I doubted he’d slept nearly enough.

“Sylvester!” Shirley greeted me.

Which was sufficient to turn the vast majority of the crowd’s attention my way.

In moments, I was being bombarded with questions from the mundane to the serious.  How many bags could they bring?  So-and-so had been given multiple major adjustments and physical changes by some amateur surgeons, there was some concern about risk if they were to exert themselves or travel on the road.  Someone wasn’t leaving their room and there was some concern they would stay behind on a more permanent basis.

I raised a hand to suppress the rising tide of voices, and I talked to Shirley.  “Where do we stand?”

“Snags,” she said.  “This was abrupt.”

“I warned people to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, to keep a bag packed, whatever else they needed.  Hopefully this becomes something they start doing by default.”

“Most are doing fine.  But there are outliers, Sylvester.”

“How many are you stumped on?”

“Three or four,” she said.

I put a hand on her shoulder, leading her away from the crowd.  Pierre and Helen followed as we found our way to a place that was less overwhelmed with students and problems.  “Who?  Which?”

“Four students are in an ongoing dispute about… everything.  They’re fighting over everything.”

“Everything?” I asked.

“Room assignments, politics, who gets the credit for what work.  They’re entangled, enmeshed, and they aren’t congealing into a working unit.”

“A minor issue, but I’m not seeing if it really demands attention.  We have other priorities.”

“They’re refusing to budge until someone higher up steps in to decide.  Others have taken bets, which means they’re reluctant to get a move on.”

“And it’s not an easy solve, when it comes to winners and losers and hurt feelings whichever you decide,” Shirley said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Who else?”

“Student sealed herself in her room.  Scared of plague.  Doesn’t want to leave today, so soon after the scare yesterday.”

“You can’t talk her down?”

“I could, given time and one hundred percent of my focus, but there’s so much to keep track of,” Shirley said.  She looked a little bit on edge for a moment, and then she pulled herself back together.  She took in a deep breath.

“It’s never quite so bad as it seems,” Helen said.

I added, “And, it’s worth saying, there’s nothing at this stage you can do to disappoint.  You’re doing more than enough.  It pains me to see you this wound up.”

“You’re right,” Shirley said.  “But I do feel like a dunce, not being able to handle enough of this.”

“You’re fine,” I said.  “Really.  Take my word for it.”

“I do.  I will.”

“Good,” I said.  I took in a deep breath, myself.  “By the by, I’m not sure if you’ve had formal introductions.  Shirley, this is Helen.”

“We met, in very brief passing.”

“Did we?” Helen asked.

“When you broke into Sylvester’s orphanage.  You came down through the roof and charged right past me.”

“Oh,” Helen said.  “That was a fun day.”

Up until the end of it, at which point it was one of the more miserable days of my life, I thought.

“I heard she was staying.  You traded away the professor for her.”

“In a sense,” I said.  “I didn’t plan for it from the outset, but here we are.”

“She uses the same body language techniques you tried to teach me.”

Taught you,” I said.  “Didn’t try.  Please don’t malign my abilities.  And I’ll tell you this.  Those techniques?  The framing of the body, posing, balance and clothing?  Hers.”

“Mine,” Helen said.

“It’s what she does,” I said.  “Except very natural.  Spend time with her if you can.  Study Helen.  You can learn an awful lot, even if it’s hard to put into proper words.  I studied her and figured out some tricks and techniques, but she’s a natural.”

“I’m the furthest thing from natural,” Helen said.  “You’re all made up of meat and vegetables, and here I am, sweet as spun sugar.”

She’s in a poetic mood,” I whispered to Shirley.

Shirley nodded.

“Getting back to the introductions, Helen, this is Shirley someone I owe a tremendous amount to.  More than I can say.  I owe her my sanity, which she really went to great personal risk to escort safely to the brink and walk back to reality with.  With that in mind, we treat her as nicely as we would anyone.  Please.”

“I treat everyone nicely,” Helen said.

“…Yeah,” I said.  “Treat Shirley the right kind of nice.  The non-hurting kind of hugs, if you hug her at all.”

“Of course,” Helen said.  Her expression was perfect.  Entirely convincing.

Which wasn’t convincing at all, in its perfection.

“Alright,” I said.  “One student won’t leave, four students are at war, what else?”

“The youngest boy of Otis’ group.  He’s holding a grudge over a girl.  It’s not explicitly stonewalling anything, but people are nervous.  A lot of people are nervous.  Otis didn’t survive the night, his men are uneasy and frustrated, some are posturing.  I think ten or twelve students have mentioned it in passing, all with the impression that someone might come looking for revenge, or try to take command of the thugs.”

“Alright,” I said.

Shirley nodded, apparently emboldened by my lack of concern.  “Last of all, three students are having second thoughts.  They’re wondering if, if they were to leave, they could just make their way back to Beattle and lie about being kidnapped.”

“If they have to,” I said.  “Tell them to come with.  I don’t like the idea of three students wandering off in the cold because they aren’t a picture of the group.”

Shirley nodded.

“We can tackle this,” I said.  “This is all doable.”

Shirley smiled.

“How are you getting by, Pierre?” I asked.

“Doing just fine,” Pierre said.  “Tired.”

“I thought you didn’t get tired.”

“It was a lot of running yesterday, I’m sore,” he said.

I nodded.

“But I’m glad to be moving,” he said.  “Most of my favorite people survived.”

“Good,” I said.  “Good, that’s excellent.”

Four things to tackle, then.

“Shall we demonstrate our charms and wiles?” I asked Helen.

“Yes sir,” she said, giving me a crisp salute.

“We’ll start with the biggest group first,” I said.  “The group surrounding this Otis follower.”

Helen smiled.

Rather than ask for a location from Shirley I asked students to point me in the direction we had last seen the guy.  A crude method, but the people in our camp paid attention, they gathered notes and they shared information between them.  Even the normally sealed family bonds of a greater faction could be undermined by one follower with doubts.

“Want to bet?” Helen asked me.

Bet?

“On who can accomplish the most.”

“Well aren’t you feeling as lively as a figged pony today, miss Helen.”

Helen smiled.

“What’s at stake with the bet?” I asked.

“If you win,” Helen said, “then…”

She trailed off.  I noticed the shift in her posture.  There was swagger, a pronounced and cocky addition of sway.

“I’m not that easy to manipulate,” I said.  “I’m not Duncan.”

“Oh?” Helen asked, teasing.  “But I was going to say that if you won, you could do anything.  I would be your obedient slave.”

“Ha ha,” I said.  “No thanks.”

“And if I win…” she said.

“My ‘no’ doesn’t count for anything then?” I asked.  “What?”

“If I win, I get one favor,” Helen said.

“One favor?”

“One deal.  It won’t be anything you couldn’t do on your own.”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “You’d have to run that by Jessie.  She’s paranoid I’ll make a promise to do a favor and someone will take advantage of my lack of memory to get me to deliver on the favor over and over again.  You’re trustworthy, but…”

“Promises to Jessie must be kept.  That should be fine,” Helen said.  “You get me as a slave if you win, I get a favor if I win.”

“Again, I don’t want a slave,” I said.  “I have too many people to risk throwing too much away for a meager advantage.  I’m trying to dissuade them of that kind of thinking.  I want healthy thought processes and motivations in all of this.”

“It’s fine,” Helen said, still swaying and sashaying.

“Is it?”

“I won’t lose,” she said.

Oh, the figgy little miss is cocky?

“The twiggy-thin runt of the litter is complacent, I think,” Helen said.

I whistled, low and long.

Helen wasn’t actually competitive.  This wasn’t a deeper facet of Helen, I knew.  The enthusiasm, the excitement.  No, if anything, this was a reflection of how very trepiditious she was in this new environment.  Camouflage, hiding places, but it was emotional, a facade.  Blending in with the enemy ranks and then carrying out the Lamb tradition of undermining the enemy from within.

This was a mask, one purely for my benefit, to cheer and encourage.  To make bets I might well lose, to get hooks in deeper, to distract.

“Sure,” I said.  “I’ll try my hand at this bet of yours.”

Helen smiled.  The she reached out, putting a hand on a boy’s arm as we passed him.

Helen named our quarry, Hank Miller, and we were pointed out to the chicken coop.  I recognized the thug.  Twenty years old, wearing Otis’ style of dress, with laborer’s clothes and a fair bit of excess dirt, his ears bent down at the sides where his flat cap pressed them down.

“Miller,” I greeted Hank.

“And the boss comes calling,” Hank said.

“You expected me,” I said.

“You and the secretary,” he said.

“You’re aware that the ‘secretary’ can kick your ass?” I asked.

Hank smirked.

“Alright Hank,” I said.  “Let’s talk business and let’s talk reality, because I’m getting the impression you’re lacking both of those things.”

Hank glanced at Helen while I was talking.  I followed his gaze, saw he was staring down her chest, and I paused, very diplomatically and dramatically, in hopes of breaking the spell.

Helen was posing, and while she wore a winter coat, the ‘v’ of the collar and front of the coat was such that her cleavage was on display.

“Hank,” I said.

Hank didn’t listen up until Helen opened her mouth.  He’d gotten into trouble for the sake of a dispute over a girl, and Helen was subtituting for that same girl.  His attention had been moved off of her.

Helen’s smile as she looked at me appeared wholly, perfectly genuine, which made it all the more suspicious when I had to look past it and work out the shape glee and excitement took in her character.

You win this one, Helen, I thought.

“Why, though?” I asked.  “Something drew you three here in the first place.  You had a reason to stay.  If it was the fighting, I can assure you that isn’t going to be a regular thing.”

The three would-be defectors exchanged glances.

“If there’s something you’re looking for, I think there’s a very good chance you’ll find it or something like it if you stick with us a bit longer.  New places, new interactions, new people…”

“It’s not like that,” the sole girl in the group of four spoke.

“Okay,” I said.

“Being new, I think I can see where they’re coming from,” Helen said.

You can go get bent, Helen, I thought.  She was butting in.  I had strong suspicions about what was going to happen.  I avoided looking at the phantoms to spoil the result.

“It’s lonely,” Helen said.  “Creature comforts are a once a day thing.  Even for those of us who don’t get along with our parents, home often means treats when we want treats, tea when we want tea, hugs, sometimes, or a listening ear.”

A few heads were nodding.

I abandoned this track of strategy, deeming myself too tired for it, and I focused on the next two tasks.  I was not about to let Helen sweep me and claim four out of four victories because my focus was suffering for my mental exhaustion.

“Shirley said-“

“Shirley needs a break,” I said.  “She’s got her hands full.  Now, the four of you are in an ongoing dispute.  If I’m understanding matters right, Adams and group A here are driven by the idea.  Their idea to begin with.  Julie and Jim are driven by money.”

The pair started to protest.

“Stop fussing about,” I told them.  “It’s  the money, even if you’re pretending it’s not.  Let’s cut through the B.S.  Something about that tells me you’ll respect me talking straight to you.”

“I want respect,” Jim said.

I started to open my mouth to counter him, but he went on to continue.

“I want respect, and money is how respect is demonstrated,” Jim said.

“Great,” I told him.  “Let’s move forward like that.  You two want the lion’s share of profit if we turn around and sell your work on venomous parasites and when we decide if you sell any bonuses.  Then there’s Gerald, who wants the group to stay together and avoid burning bridges, and Christoff, who is happy to burn the bridges and force our collective hand instead.”

Helen sat back, apparently content to let me do my thing and concede the win.

Two victories for Helen, one for me.

Our little bet of manipulation, acting, and negotiation ended here, on the other side of this door.

I knocked, and the reply was muffled, unenthusiastic.  I knocked again, and the reply was the same.  Finding the door locked, I reached inside my pocket for my picks.  I started work on the lock.

Opening the door wasn’t hard.  The locks were flimsy.

The sense of victory, however, was small and short-lived.

The young lady who had been afraid to leave her room sat in the center of the room.  She’d taken a chair and moved it into position, and now she sat there.  The plague blistered on her skin, and thin vines had erupted from her skin.

Her mouth was open, vines finding lodging in, on, and around teeth, through her nose and sinuses and down her throat, and vice-versa.  She was paralyzed, her breathing limited to the shallow.

Too far gone.  I knew it immediately.

“The plague is so nice to look at,” Helen said, “But it isn’t nice to people.”

“I agree with the latter half,” I said.  “Only maybe a little bit of the former.”

Helen nodded.

She didn’t really have cause or an emotional basis to truly care, but she still was respectful and quiet as I approached the girl in the chair.

“Sorry,” I told the girl.

Plaintive eyes looked up at me.

I drew my knife, and I held it where she could see.

She couldn’t nod, but there was a peace in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before.  Hope.  Possible relief.

“We’ll look after you,” I said.

She nodded.

We’ll need medication, so she goes easy, I thought.  I joined Helen where she lurked at the door.

“This will be a fair incentive to others to move a little faster to get us all out of here,” I said.

“I think it might,” Helen said.

Plague nipping at our heels.

Helen’s bet had been a way to engage me, to get me paying attention.  Helen’s demeanor was meant to play off of me.  In a way, we were very similar in this.  Helen could conform, but there was very little beyond the primal needs at the very center.  I conformed by my nature and by the nature of Wyvern, often to my detriment.

In this, we played off each other.  The bet was minor in the grand scheme of things, but it made it easy to calibrate.

There were other motivations, I was sure.

“What were you going to do if I’d won the bet?” I asked Helen.

“Whatever you wanted.  I’m happy so long as we’re moving forward.”

“And,” I said, “Assuming that we don’t count this last one, you’re the winner of the bet, and you get to make a request.”

“I do,” Helen said, and she smiled.

“Are you going to keep me in suspense?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “No.  I think I can guess where you and Jessie want to go.  You have certain places in mind.”

“To a degree,” I said.

“I have a suggestion I’d like you both to entertain, but I want you to consider it fairly,” Helen said.

We stepped into the outside, and I winced at the cold.  I spotted students who looked older, and I flagged them down.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Ibbot has friends,” Helen said.

“A terrible and insulting lie,” I replied.  “Marring the reputation of humanity as a whole with the implication any of us could get along with that man.”

“He has friends,” Helen said.  “He once built superweapons, remember?  He built some of the ones in use today, some of the ones the Infante wants to deploy.”

I paused, taking that in.

I looked at Helen, and I pushed my attention to her deeper, and I was aware of the wilder, more reckless edge to her.  A part of her that was less patient.

I knew it was the kind of impatience that came when one knew their time was running out.  I knew because it was the same kind I’d felt for far too long now.  Another way in which she and I were similar.

“You want to steal a superweapon?”

“I thought we might steal a professor who manages a superweapon,” Helen said.  “And what follows from that follows.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.08 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I waited, my back to the doorframe, listening.

A question from Mabel.  A muted response.

I counted ninety long seconds before I heard Mabel’s boots scrape and shuffle.

She exited the room, wearing another improvised quarantine suit.

“Alright?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure if I was asking if she was alright or if the situation was.

“I don’t think I want to do that ever again,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Sorry.”

She shook her head.  The makeshift quarantine suit was all raincoat fabric and tape, and it didn’t move as her head did.  “It needed to be done.  It was the nicest way to end her pain, and I don’t mind that it was me.  But between last night and this, this morning, I’m almost as emotionally exhausted as I’ve ever been.”

“We’ll have to see what we can do about fixing that,” I said.  “How do you normally shore things up when they’re crumbling?”

“Hm?” she asked.

“What?” I asked.

“No, just… weird wording.  I think I usually wait.  Rest.  Or I just push forward until I get to a good stopping point.  End of a shitty day of class, or the next weekend where I don’t have a lot to do, or the end of a tough semester.”

“How well does that work for you?” I asked.

“Well enough, I think,” she said.  “I don’t know.  I think this is going to sit with me for a long time.”

I invited her into the hallway, glanced within, and then closed the door.  I picked up my tools, and I started removing the doorknob.

“It’s allowed, letting it sit with you for a while.”

“Uh huh,” Mabel said.

“It’s a way of respecting her,” I said.  “You carry that with you.  It’s good if someone passes and life gets a little harder, if there’s a weight and a ripple that extends outward.”

I pulled the doorknob out.  I put it in the toolbox.

“You’ve been involved in a lot of lost lives,” she said.

I looked down the hall.  They hadn’t been there before I started looking, but they were there by the time my head finished moving and my eyes found the shadows to either side of the window.  Jamie, Gordon, and Hubris.

“I carry them with me in other ways,” I said.  I collected a hammer and a few long nails from the toolbox.

“Oh, you mean the phantoms,” Mabel said.  “I was thinking of other deaths.”

I looked her way.

“In your tenure as a Lamb?”

Oh.  The people I’d killed.

That was a thing too.

“I carry them too, I suppose,” I said.

“Sorry if I made things queer, bringing attention to that.”

I shook my head.  “I’m a queer fellow.  I hear you talk about things like how you unwind from emotional exhaustion, and I don’t know what to say.”

“No?” she asked.

I drove the nail into the door at an angle, so it penetrated both one edge of the door and the frame itself.  With the amount of my back and shoulder that had been carved away, it was a bit of a task to drive the nail home.

“I don’t know that I get emotionally exhausted.  I get emotional, I get exhausted, but when push comes to shove, and my feelings are tested and fail the test, it’s my brain that breaks more than my heart.”

“I think that’s a reflection of heartbreak, Sy.”

“You might think differently if you were there,” I said.  “It might be what happens when you have the right tools-”

I paused to made sure I drove the next nail in straight.

“-to dodge the worst of the heartbreak and go down another path.  I have lots of fun tools like that.”

“I see.”

“Rest and time don’t do much for me, either.  Time heals all wounds, but you have to let it, and I’m not willing to let it.  If you’re a Sylvester with a brain like clay under running water, you can shape that brain, sure, but you’ve got to make the choice.  That painful memory of that person you cherish, do you let it go?  Or do you make the effort to keep that memory clear and safe from being washed away?  Do you keep etching it in and reinforcing it?”

“You etch.”

“Yeah.  I etch,” I said.  Still holding the hammer, I grabbed a small paint can, pried off the lid, and stuck my fingers inside.  I finger-painted letters on the door.  “As best I can.”

Plague, my letters wrote.

I made a mark below the warning, using fingerprints and smears to form something akin to a leaf with a curling line beside it, then crouched a bit before finger-painting another message.

Edna-Joan Eccles.

“How did it go?” I asked.  “That quote that Edna’s friend from the animal team said?”

“I was busy getting my suit taped up.  I barely heard what you were all talking about, and the girls were crying.  I thought you would remember.”

“You’re putting far too much stock in my brain.  Something beastly?”

“Um.  Wasn’t it something like, ‘roar, my beast friend?'”

“Sure,” I said.  “Beast?”

“I think it’s a play on best friend, and because she liked animals and warbeasts?  She was really excited about the pheromone warbeast we were going to be working on, even though she wasn’t project lead.”

I was already painting the letters before Mabel had finished talking.  “It’s an especially large shame then.  I like people who are passionate about what they do.”

Mabel nodded, but she didn’t verbally respond.

It took a while to write even the short sentence, one stroke at a time.

“There,” I said, when I was done.  I set the can of paint down without closing it, and abandoned the tools where they were.  An oily rug helped me get most of the paint off of my hand.  I didn’t fuss too much over getting perfectly clean.

“I wish I could take her somewhere she could be properly buried,” Mabel said.  “Shit.  I never used to be sentimental.”

“She was fused to the chair and floor,” I said.  “It’s not worth the risk to you.”

Mabel nodded.  Again, her quarantine suit obscured the motion.

“Burial is a funny thing, too, the more I think about it, but I think that’s mostly personal perception.  Come on, let’s get out of here.”

I discarded the rag with paint.  My hand had the oily residue and traces of paint in the cracks, the wear and tear and the lines emphasized.  Scratches new and old, abrasions and calluses all stood out with the paint highlighting them.  My fingers stuck to each other.

“What makes burial a funny thing?” Mabel asked.

“It’s a little odd to imagine a burial for someone like me, but that’s me, not for someone like her,” I said.  “Otis and some others got buried and if we had more people with quarantine suits and a clear way to get her out of here and out to a new burial plot, I’d be all for it.”

“You don’t want to be buried?  You’re dancing around the subject.”

“My memory is bad, but I feel like I’ve never really sat down and imagined myself being lowered into a burial plot, never imagined myself getting a funeral.  It’s kind of absurd, isn’t it?  I’ve thought about dying and I’ve known I was going to die for a long time, but the scene probably never struck me.”

“I don’t think it’s absurd at all,” she said.  “You’re… a victim of queer circumstance.”

“Sure,” I said.  “We can go with that.”

“If not a burial plot, then how does it end?”

“Violent ends.  Get myself into trouble I can’t get out of.  Fed to warbeasts, beheaded, shot…” I said.  I looked for and found Gordon in the crowd, sticking near Jessie and Helen.  “Cremation would be a nice way to go, but suffocation or drowning are up there.”

“You’re being morbid,” Mabel said.

“Uh huh.  Trying to scare you off at this point,” I said.

“My dad was unbalanced, spiteful, and self-involved.  He lost one wife after another, and after that, he had no forgiveness in his heart for anyone.  Especially not me.  It still took losing my last shot at the Academy for me to walk away.  You’re going to have to try harder if you want to scare me off.”

There were things I could say about that, but I had a feeling they would end in bitter words.

I took hold of her elbow as we made our way down the stairs to the ground floor.  With oversized boots and the alternating constriction and abundance of room that came with the makeshift quarantine suit, she was a little wobbly.  She fared well enough that I doubted she needed me, but she wasn’t complaining at the gesture, either.

As we ventured outside, we could see the rank and file of the Beattle rebels, the additions we’d picked up in our travels, and the older gang members.  They’d gathered, and the carriages and wagons were all loaded down with supplies and bags.  Some of our people were still lashing bags and containers down.

Jessie raised an arm, waving.  I waved back.

She gestured a question, and I gave the go-ahead.

The signal was given, the wagons started off, and with a few words from Jessie, the leaders of individual groups got their contingents moving.

I drew a knife from my back pocket and set about cutting the tape and peeling Mabel out of the quarantine suit.

The damage and bandages at my back limited my range of movement, particularly with my right arm, while Mabel was limited by the fact that she had taped herself into the suit and it was hard to untape herself with gloves on.

“Sorry if I made things awkward,” she said.

She hadn’t been wearing the quarantine suit for long.  A five minute walk between buildings, time inside the dormitory, walking up a flight of stairs and down the hall, seeing to Edna Joan, and then exiting the building.  But the outfit wasn’t one that breathed, by design.  She practically steamed with the body heat that had been contained within.

No, ‘awkward’ was helping Mabel out of her outfit while her team of chemists and greenhouse gangers watched her and the collection of Pierre, Shirley, Jessie and Helen watched me.  Moisture beaded her skin, made her hair stick to her neck.  She wasn’t wearing heavy clothes with the quarantine suit, her clothing choice barely different from underclothes, and the clothes she was wearing were sticking to her.

She was standing with an orientation that meant the onlookers couldn’t really see her face.  She had been crying, but with the mask and suit on, she hadn’t been able to wipe away the tears.  The moment her arms were free, the upper half of the suit hanging from her waist, she brought her hands to her face, wiping sweat, tears, and hair back and away.

I was very aware that her back arched a little with that, and that her chest stuck out unconsciously in my direction.  But I was also aware that people were watching me and her and wanted to see if I would look, and I played at being the gentleman.

I moved around behind her, very conscious of how the sweat caught the light, or how one tiny rivulet of sweat traced the line of her shoulderblade.  I pulled off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

“You don’t need to do that,” she said.

“You’ll get cold,” I said.

You’ll get cold, and you’re recovering from surgery.”

“You’ll get cold, and you’re drenched.  It’ll cut through you in a moment if the wind blows the wrong way.  Wear the jacket until you have your own.  If you start off a long hike by freezing yourself to the bone, someone is going to have to give up a much-needed seat.”

“Alright,” Mabel said.  “I’ve learned better than to argue with you.”

“Good,” I said.

“But your jacket is going to stink,” she said.  “I haven’t had a chance to shower today, I was roasting in that quarantine suit, I’m drenched, as you put it.”

“Oh, the horror.  No.  Girl sweat is a good smell.”

Mabel made a face.  “Gross.”

“It’s the way it goes,” I told her.  “Left leg.”

She lifted her left leg, and I helped cut where the waders were taped to the boots.  I repeated the process for the right leg.

She put her hands on my shoulders for balance as she kicked off the waders.

Together, we got her to the members of the greenhouse gang, who had her actual boots, winter jacket and clothing in custody.  One of them already had a towel ready to hand to her, which immediately went to her damp hair.

“Walk with us?” she asked.

“I need to catch up with Jessie and Helen,” I said.  “Strategy and grander plans.  I want you and some of the others to join in the discussion, but let us cut through some of the initial gristle and grit first.  We’ll tackle some stuff first, then make it a wider discussion.”

“Okay,” Mabel said.  I could hear the disappointment.

“It really is more stuff you don’t want to hear.  In the meantime, you guys should talk while you walk.  Discuss the possibilities of the arm and skin I’m gifting you.  How you’ll figure out what you can use, tests you can run, whichever else.  Tap other groups if it keeps them busy and if you don’t fall too far behind.  But see what you can do?”

“We’ll try,” Mabel said.  “We don’t have a lab, so I can’t make promises.”

“And keeping in mind you’ve been running around and helping on my behalf for the better part of the day, I’ll see what I can do to thank you by arranging a warm bath for you after we get to our destination.”

I subtly gestured midway through saying it, making sure the other Lambs didn’t see.  Mabel didn’t give any indication she’d seen.

“Warm bath?” one of Mabel’s Greenhouse Gang kids asked, eager.

“You peasants get to fight over the tubs only after the inner circle are through with them,” I said.  I gestured again as I said, “Mabel gets first go.”

“No need to spoil me,” she said.

“There’s no need, but I’m liable to do it anyway,” I told her.  “You did good work.  I’m hoping for more.  But either way, discuss, plan, plot.  Then you and I-”

I gestured again, striving to drive the point home.

“-will discuss what your group figured out and is proposing.”

I was pretty sure she saw that last gesture.  I was also pretty sure she didn’t understand the meaning.

“I’ll be tired tonight, and I think you’re underestimating how tired you’ll be.  A surgery like the one you had last night will take a lot out of you.”

I gestured.

“We’ll see how it goes, then,” I said.  “No commitments.  But I think you’d be surprised at my stamina.”

“I think waiting and seeing is the best approach,” she said.  “And I’m sure you’re very capable.”

I smiled, gesturing subtly at the same time.

“…And I’m suddenly remembering that you’re the person to trust when it comes to this sort of thing,” she said.  “And I’m reconsidering.  If you think you’ll be up for it.”

“I definitely think I’ll be up for it,” I said.

No blushing, barely any betrayal that she’d realized what I was really going for.

Her eyes were one of the first things I had noticed about her, the attention to detail and memory.  I wondered how many times she’d seen the gestures before making the connection.

“I’ll look forward to it, then,” she told me.

I gave her a mock salute, collected my coat, and made my way to the others.  I could tell they were rearing to go before they fell behind the pack.

I’d told Mabel that I needed to get some things sorted out before I invited her to chat with us.  I was about to deal with those things.

“So adorable,” Helen said.

I rolled my eyes.

“Your pupils are dilated,” Jessie said.  “Your breathing is different.”

I rolled my eyes more emphatically, moving my head in a little circle for added emphasis.

“It was very gentlemanly of you to give her your jacket,” Shirley said.

“Not you, Shir,” I said.  “Don’t you join in.”

“It’s hard to resist,” Shirley said, offering me a pouty little moue that used the best of her pixie face and build and her large eyes.  Helen mirrored her movements.

“Helen is already a bad influence on you,” I remarked.

The mass migration was underway.  The light teasing continued, and we made our way out of Sedge and onto the back country roads.

There were enough people in our rank and file that it posed logistical issues.  The tromp of boots on wet dirt road meant that by the time the stragglers reached the same point, the ground was a mire.  Wagons churned up ground that should have been solid and hard with the cold.

The jokes and jabs stopped after a bit.  The carriages were loaded down enough that when they did reach softer ground, weight pulled them into the mud.  People started to appear at the sides of the road, as if to offer help, but our numbers discouraged a straightforward approach.

Bandits.  I wanted to talk to some, but the way things were demanded constant and careful attention.

They lingered, ominous, and I made sure to talk to the group leaders, ensuring we conveyed the right message, that we didn’t have any weak points.

Mentally, I could see the bandits making the mental decision to attack us in the late evening, after most of us had gone to bed.

The show of strength was enough for the time being.

I took Jessie’s hand, and I did it for reasons entirely unrelated to the bandits who wanted to attack us and divest us of our gathered possessions.

As all of this went, it was good.  The people, the task at hand, the possibilities, and that dim possibility that Helen had floated of something inspiring and devastating to our enemies.

I liked that in particular.

If I had quizzed Jessie for information before making promises to Mabel, I might have been told that even if we were brisk, it would take twelve hours to reach our destination by way of walking.  I might have been discouraged.

We didn’t walk.  Halfway through the afternoon, just as the sun was starting to set, we had happened across a farm.  The farmer had been willing to accept well over twice the value of his horses, carriages and spare wood in exchange for his cooperation.

Spirits were considerably higher now that anyone walking could get a turn sitting on the back of one carriage.

Helen found her way back from a conversation with Pierre.

“Helen,” I said.  “Question, Jessie and I were discussing.”

“Mm?”

“Did you ever envision a casket funeral for yourself?”

“I think if I would be in a position to get one, I’ll get taken to pieces in autopsy for my creator,” she said.  “So no.”

I nodded.  I was aware that Helen was preparing her breakfast as though she had no imagination at all.  Route and routine.

“What about a casket funeral for me?” I asked.

It was Jessie who answered.  “If you somehow earn a casket funeral for yourself, Sy, for one thing, I’m going to be ticked, because that’s not allowed.  We don’t die if we can help it.”

“Fair,” Helen said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No throwing yourself suicidally into madcap situations with only half formulated plans,” Jessie said.  “If you can promise me that, I’ll play along with the mad plan.  I’ll help you execute it with precision.”

“Deal,” I said.

It might have been poetic for that moment to be the one where we crested the hill and found ourselves faced with the next scene, a fresh image of the Crown states.

Instead, it took another ten minutes of trudging, every part of my lower body and some parts of my upper body hurting from the exercise, before we reached the hill, so to speak.  The trees overhead knit into arches above our heads.  The arches blocked our view.

But we made it beyond the arches.  We had a clear view of the sky.

“Oh my gosh,” Helen said.  “He’s not supposed to be here!”

‘He’ was a man, as it happened.  He was naked, leathery of skin, with ragged hair and mustache.

“Don’t tell me,” I said.

“Well, I could listen and not tell you, which is boring and anxiety-inducing,” Helen said.  “Or I could break the news, and then we can discuss what to do about this.”

“What news?” Davis asked, as he happened to draw closer to us, the walking rear guard of the caravan now catching up to us on the cliff-edge, looking across the city.

Looking at the naked man.

His face contorted with emotion, his body moved as if he wasn’t familiar with it, and he acted groggy.

One of the superweapons.  He stood taller than the tallest skyscrapers in the city sprawl, and the city held close to eighty-thousand people.  Taller than a building ten stories tall.  He moved among most buildings like someone my size might have walked amid scattered books in my living room.  His joints were overlarge, he was brutish, crude, and ugly, with some resemblance to a neanderthal, and yet, somehow, he was art.  Beauty in audacity.

“He was a project that stretched the upper bounds of size limits, ratios, and weight distribution.  He’s one of the three largest non-waterborne creations on the planet,” Helen said.  “And he’s Ibbot’s work.  My half brother.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.09 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.9

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The assembled Beattle rebels pulled together, a crowd forming at the hilltop to stare at the spectacle.  Jessie, Helen and I stood off to one side, away from crowd and the babble of conversation.

Helen’s older brother moved slowly, as if in a daze, his head hanging, jaw slack, raising one foot, moving it a fair ways down the length of the street before bringing it down again.  With the movement of the leg, smaller objects were obliterated, wagons or booths or other things of similar scale kicked to splinters.  Overhanging architecture was scraped away, snow and moisture sprayed.  The footfall made snow and water flow off of every rooftop near the giant, momentarily blurring the sharper edges and lines of the structures.

His arms limp at his side, he remained where he was, having just completed one lunging step, one leg bent at the knee, the other extended behind him.

“Why did Ibbot give him a…?” Jessie started.  She didn’t finish the sentence, leaving things more implied.

“Figures that you’d fixate on that,” I said.

“Why does it figure?” Jessie asked.

“It sort of figures.  I mean, if it was a she-giant and it had she-bits and a chest, you’d be poking fun at me.”

“Entirely true, but that’s because you’re a lech,” Jessie said.

I gasped in mock horror.

“Just because he’s equipped with a…”

“Tackle?” Helen supplied.

“Was looking for something more polite.  But fine.  Just because he’s equipped with a tackle that could very easily be used to knock a house down, it doesn’t mean I’m interested.  That’s not how it works.”

“Isn’t it?” I asked.

“It really isn’t.  And can I just stop and bemoan the fact I’m now enduring the company of the two most easily distracted Lambs?  Nobody answered why he’s even…”

Jessie had trailed off again.

“So bestowed?” Helen offered.

“Bestowed to begin with,” Jessie said.

“Aesthetic?” I asked.

Jessie made a face.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s not aesthetic,” Jessie said.

“Excuse me?” Helen asked.

“Wait one second,” I said.  “Wait wait wait.  If I step in here and say that technically there’s nothing wrong with the picture being presented, beyond the house-destroying potential, is that a point in my favor against the lech allegations, in that I can be fair to both genders-”

“You’re still a lech,” Jessie said.

I mock-gasped again.

“I’ll remind you two that that is my brother you’re talking about and disparaging,” Helen said.  “And I think he’s aesthetically sound.”

“Can’t argue that point,” I said.

Jessie made a face, then asked, “Will my memory be indelibly tainted if I ask just how many-”

“Homewreckers?” I jumped in.

“-homewreckers you’ve been exposed to?”

“It very likely will,” Helen said.  “But in the interest of not injuring your brain-”

“Thank you.”

“-I’ll just say that I’ve seen babies, and stitched, and warbeasts, as some of the less brain-injuring examples.  My big brother’s slumbering dragon-”

Jessie snorted.

No, Jessie,” I jumped in.  “You’re supposed to be the deadpan, serious one.”

“-Is fine!” Helen protested.  “You two interrupt each other and me constantly.  It’s rude.”

In the distance, Helen’s big brother dragged his back foot forward.  He balanced poorly on it as he set it down and to fix his balance he immediately followed with a movement of the other foot, finally stabilizing by planting his two feet far apart.

It looked like he was trying to avoid treading on and through buildings.  I wasn’t wholly sure, but it didn’t look like he had been entirely successful.

“Perhaps we’re too fixated on this,” Jessie said.

“You’re just upset because Helen and I are on the same page, while you’re on the other side of the aisle, disparaging her brother’s slumbering dragon.”

Jessie tried and failed to avoid laughing again.  She moved her glasses up and pressed one hand to her face.

“So rude,” Helen chided Jessie.  “It’s certainly nothing to laugh about.”

“It’s really nothing to laugh about,” I said.

“It’s so inefficient!” Jessie protested.  “Why even tack it on?”

“You have no reason to believe it’s inefficient,” Helen said, stern.  “You haven’t seen it in use.”

That was Jessie’s cue to raise her hands to her ears, fleeing the scene.  I jumped forward, throwing my arms around her and catching her in a hug from behind, keeping her from absconding.

“Let me go!  No!  She says things and I get mental pictures and they never go away!”

“They’ll go away in a few months when your slate is erased and you functionally die, alright?” I asked.

Jessie ceased struggling.

“But it’s torture in the meantime,” Jessie said, still with the lilt of a joke in her voice.  I hadn’t killed the mood with my own joke in poor taste.

“Well suck it up,” I told her.  I settled my chin on her shoulder, the side of my face pressed against her ear.  One of my eyes was closed because her braid was in my face.  We were both looking at the scene.  “Actually, don’t suck-”

Don’t,” Jessie interrupted me.

“Fine.”

“Let’s drop this topic before the two of you find new and fun ways to mentally scar me.”

“Alright,” Helen said.

“I’d just like to point out,” I said.

“No poin-”

My arms still around her, I gave Jessie a squeeze.

“-ting,” she said, with less enthusiasm.  “Dang it.  You’re going to insist on tormenting me with this one, aren’t you?”

“I’m just going to say that it’s winter.  This particular slumbering dragon is probably more than halfway inside its cave, as slumbering dragons are wont to do when it’s cold.”

“Okay, Sy.  I get it.”

“This isn’t even the full magnitude of the dragon,” I said.  Helen nodded in solemn agreement.

“I get it, Sy.”

I started to pull back, ready to get serious, and Jessie reached up to hold my arms in place.  My arms still encircling her, I gave her a squeeze, and I continued to watch.  If she wanted to stop for a moment, I wasn’t about to complain.

“Armpits,” I said, as we watched Helen’s big brother get his bearings, sway, and then take another step, careful to tread only on roads.

“Armpits?”

“Lift up your arms,” I said.

Jessie did.  I moved my hands, and as she lowered her arms, my hands were tucked beneath them, sandwiched between arm and body.

“Thank you,” I said.

“If my hands get cold, I’m going to borrow your body parts.”

“Do,” I said, into her ear.

With my arms where they were, I could feel where the blood was pumping through the brachial arteries and into her arm.  I could feel the change of her heartbeat, the change in her breathing.

I liked that I got a reaction that way.

The giant slowly turned, until his back was to us.

I could hear the others react, a general murmur of complaint across the assembled Beattle students.

As I looked around, I could see that Pierre and Shirley were hanging close by.  Shirley was giving me an amused sort of look.

She was close enough to have heard a lot of the interplay and teasing.

All the while, Helen’s brother was still moving ponderously.  He brought his hand down.

Up to this point, we hadn’t seen him do much more than damage property and scatter wood here and there where it had been in his way.  Accident more than design.

This was design, intent, a blatant attack.  The hand came down, and it plunged through a roof and into the interior of a building.

Pulling his hand free, Helen’s brother checked it, found it empty, and plunged it into the building again.  This time, he simply tore the hand through stone and wood.  It didn’t look easy, and even with his immense size, he had to shift his weight and ensure his feet were braced right before he pushed his hand the rest of the way through the structure, up until the point that the building no longer held together.  Dust and debris rose up in a cloud as the building came down.

The commentary, gasps and other feedback had mostly died out at this point.  We watched from a considerable distance away as Helen’s brother scraped fingers through wreckage, stirring up more mess and debris.  He raised his hand, investigating the contents, and I could see the bodies there.

He cast them away, sending them flying as if they’d been launched by a trebuchet, and then resumed rummaging.

Joking was over.  The deaths were real, there were stakes, now.  I pulled away from Jessie and took a second to ensure I was ready to act the moment I was done talking.

“Heads up!” I called out.  I had the attention of the Beattle rebels now.  “If you’re down to help, hands up, step forward.  The goal here is to see what we can do about him, trying to steer him or use him.  If we can even steal him, get him away from here, we force them to react.  They won’t let a weapon fall into our hands.  It’s a diversion of resources.  Either it’s something we can capitalize on here, or we move fast and we move hard, and it’s something we capitalize on elsewhere.  But it starts with this.”

There were a few nods here and there.  Not as many as I might have hoped for, but Ibbot’s creation was intimidating, to put it lightly.

“The ones who aren’t helping, you set up shop at the fringes.  Find a location for us to camp out and get supplies, shouldn’t be too hard if they’ve recently evacuated.   Station guards, make sure you’re able to get clear if the giant starts marching in your direction.  We need a location to fall back to, and depending on how this big guy works, we might have to flee a bit, regroup, flee again.”

There were more nods at that.  It seemed most of our people were looking at the giant and doubting their ability to tackle him.

“All together for the time being,” I said.  “We’ll split up shortly.”

There was shuffling as bags that had been set on the frozen roadtop were collected.  Students with hats had removed them because they were perspiring so much, while others were putting on hats, because their ears were cold.  Things had to be hurriedly retrieved or stashed away before straps were hauled up to shoulders, backpacks lifted and positioned with straps criss-crossing the chest, and medical bags rattling with their individual pill counts.  Not everyone had bags, but the ones who did looked particularly miserable.

Looking back at the path, the wagons were following.  They’d be with the second group, while we took our initial stab at things.

We set down the hill, and for a mob of students with tired legs and heavy bags, the faint slope down was precarious.  The ground was compacted, hard, and frozen over, the people traveling over it not as sure footed as they ought to have been.  Some fell, and they fell hard.  It became a collaborative effort to make the way down the slope and into the city.

“Helen,” Jessie said.  I was holding Jessie’s hand to stabilize her.  My own collaborative contribution.

“Yes?”

“Can you tell us about your brother?  You’ve met him?”

“Once, a long time ago.  When I was new and he wasn’t that old.  I was half as tall as I am now, and he was half as big as he is now.  Because I was new, Professor Ibbot brought me everywhere, socializing me as we went.  He checked on his projects and on the people maintaining them, and I got to come see and come say hi.”

“Does he know you?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so.  But then again, he isn’t awake much.  He sleeps in an embryonic sac in Lake Southwold, just a ways from New Amsterdam.  He was awake when I saw him, but I think he was feverish, which was why we were there.”

“History is good, but we need constructive answers,” I said.  “Strengths?  Abilities?  Weaknesses?”

“Oh.  He’s big.”

“Be serious, Helen,” I said.

“His project name is Nephilim One.  If you look at his stomach, he has a bit of a belly.  That’s a hidden compartment.”

“Control compartment?” I asked.  “Is it where the people guiding him are?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,”

“Okay,” I said.

“His vision and hearing aren’t every good.  There are a lot of pieces of him that you or I would think are weak, but Professor Ibbot knows all about the weak points of the body.  He knows any would-be giant slayers will want to blind the giant, hamstring them, target the ankle or catch them when they are asleep.  But there are things under the surface that make this harder.  Sub-dermal armor, reinforcement.  The senses are a lie.”

“Lie?” Jessie asked.

“He’s covered in body hair.  He uses the hair to taste the environment.  He’s a bloodhound.  A very big bloodhound.  They give him a scent or something else to go on.  Then he hunts.  He walks and stops to sniff, then walks more.  When he finds someone, he smooshes them.”

“Smooshes?” Jessie asked.

“Like a bug, guts spilling out, but they’re important people, not bugs.”

“That’s a problem then,” I said.

“It’s a massive problem,” Davis said.  The student council president was following behind us.  He was joined by other notables and project leaders.  Bea, Fang, Mable, Valentina, and Pierre.  “I don’t want to get crushed.”

“Smooshed,” Helen corrected, very firmly.

“That’s not why it’s a problem,” I said.  “It’s a problem because if this is true, if the big guy, Project Nephilim is a bloodhound, like Helen remembers, then he’s more or less under his own control.  I’m assuming he’s not down for conversation?”

“No,” Helen said.

“He won’t follow gestures or codes or signals?  There’s no good way to communicate a new order or get him to stop?”

“They use chemicals,” Helen said.  “That gets him to a place, usually a place where he can get his face close to the ground and smell it.  Bedrooms, bloodbaths, piles of dirty laundry.  He takes a deep breath and he can smell those things like a shark smells blood in the water.”

“He’s after someone now,” I said.

“I think so,” Helen said.  “Either that, or he’s acting very strange.”

“Okay.  Streets are empty.  Why?”

“Giant stomping around,” Jessie said.

“But he’s stomping around over here.  Why aren’t people on the other end of this city running?”

“Hard to say.”

“Then that’s what we’re looking for.  We split into groups.  We scout, investigate, and see if we can’t find something critical.  If they have a way of communicating with the entire city, maybe they’re using it to communicate with Nephilim One.”

“I don’t think so,” Helen said.  “That’s not how Neph works.”

“The Crown, as a rule, wants control.  Would they really do something like this, where they release something this big and give up all control?”

“Neph isn’t the Crown,” Helen said.  “Neph is Ibbot.  The same creator as me.  Think, Sy.”

I pressed my lips together at that.

She wasn’t wrong.  If Neph came from the same roots, the end result could be the same.  A being with the same kind of fundamental logic, a basic system of understanding the world, built-in loyalty, and questionable attachments.

We’d reached the base of the hill, the outer periphery of the city.  It wasn’t too large a city, which made the presence of ‘Neph’ that much more startling.  If I had to guess, the population was three or four hundred thousand.  It wasn’t small, it certainly wasn’t a mere town, but it lacked the trappings of some larger cities I’d seen, and I couldn’t see anything of sufficient stature to suggest a local academy, large or small.

There were more hotels and apartment buildings than actual houses, all done up in stone or brick with builder’s wood.  The taller buildings themselves used builder’s wood liberally and in unique styles, creating architecture that twisted as it rose skyward.  These precarious constructions were what made every movement of Helen’s brother a tense thing, movements of the lumbering giant too close to a building that was twisted enough that it looked like a broken arm, heavy footfalls around buildings that didn’t seem wholly balanced.

It was too clean a city in my estimation.  The signs of industry and agriculture, of glitz, glamour, of purpose were painfully absent.  I could see businesses, but they didn’t stand out.  There were elements of the military by way of sturdy buildings at the harbor and here and at strategic locations, but the military wasn’t active in this crisis, which dampened that particular flavor.

It made me think that this was a city that dealt primarily with the business of business.  With bookkeeping and records and hiring and firing, with whole apartment buildings of people very possibly treating this city like a waypoint before they moved to fill gaps or responsibilities elsewhere.

There was more to it, I was sure.  Getting deeper into the city would reveal more.  I wasn’t sure, however, if it mattered.

I was more concerned with Helen’s big brother.

‘Neph’ was standing straight, his hands full of rubble and bodies.  He held it up as if barely aware of it all, and he stared at some fixed point deeper into the city.

Something had caught his attention, and he addressed that something by hurling the fistfuls of rubble and detritus and bodies at that something.

Again, the notion of the trebuchet came to mind.  The throwing motion of an arm with that range and that kind of power built into it was something to behold.

‘Neph’ leaned back, swaying, and then lunged forward.  He pounced as if he were pretending to be a cat or as if he were diving into deep water, both hands moving forward and together to meet at the same point, the target he wanted to utterly destroy.  We weren’t in a position to see the result, so there was only the mental image, and what I could see was the way he effectively body-flopped onto the city, arms stretched out in front of him.  Whatever had been beneath or in front of his hands was likely gone now.

“We spread out,” I said.  “Groups of two or three.  Fan through the streets.  Most of you should know the signals by now, for relaying alerts and warnings.  If you don’t know, pair with someone who does.”

It sounded easy, but the logistics were harder.  Jessie had been able to pick up some idea of how the city was laid out, and the trick was to have everyone move in rough parallel, while avoiding the streets which would merge into others, creating wasted effort if one group was forced to merge into another or fall well behind.

Jessie, Helen and I took the central path.  It was arguably the safest when it came to being surprised or targeted from the flanks, but it also gave us the chance to react fastest if one of the others reported something.

Pierre had come along, and that was our saving grace in this.  He was a man who could outrun a horse on a good day, and while the winter had slowed him down a hair, both in leaving him slightly more out of shape and in making the environment more dangerous for running on two feet, it was still speed that counted for a lot.

We moved as four core groups, with Pierre a free agent that checked on each group before looping out ahead.

We made it a good way down the road before we saw Pierre hiding, his back to a wall, a finger pressed to his mouth.

He gestured, and it served to let us know that the others had already been alerted.

He gestured for us to come, and we went to his side.

“Remain within your homes!” the voice boomed.  It was loud and oppressive.  If Helen’s brother had been a third of the size and inclined to speaking with an aristocrat’s fine articulation and nuance, this might have been the volume I expected.  “Those seen running about may be shot or they may draw the attention of the Nephilim Project!”

There was the control I’d been looking for.

“Be patient!  All will return to normal soon!”

Back to normal, but for the massive property damage and the loss of lives, it seemed.  Still, it made a degree of sense.  There was a degree of manipulation in that people naturally gravitated toward what they knew and understood.  People wanted to go back to normal.  I’d offered normalcy as a bargaining chip when attempting to get people to cooperate.  Some were even very willing to do abnormal things if ‘normal’ was in the cards for the future.

We joined Pierre, and we crept forward to investigate the source of the booming voice.

The source, as it turned out, was an experiment.  He wore a stylized suit and a wig, and his facial features were clearly altered.  He was rotund to the point that it had to be design, a sphere or near-sphere literally encased within him.

“Praise be to the Crown!” the experiment boomed out.  He was moving away.

Beside us, Pierre relaxed a bit.  He glanced around, then said, “I’ll check with the others.  A moment.”

He was gone a second or three later.

Praise be to the Crown, I thought, trying on the words the experiment had used.  I didn’t believe them in the slightest.

“This is workable,” I said.  “The announcer experiment got his marching orders from someone.”

“He did,” Jessie said.

“I can hear another one,” Helen confided.  “Maybe two.  I think one of the two is a woman.”

Multiple announcers, then, addressing multiple parts of the city.

This wasn’t accidental.  The whole setup was premeditated.  The task had been carried out with a goal in mind.

“We can trace him back to the Academy people who ordered him to come here, we can co-opt or beat them, and through that we might be able to stall, stop, capture, or redirect big brother Neph.”

“He’s not much older than me.  If we could train him properly, we could make him an honorary Lamb,” Helen said, smiling.

“A project for another time,” I said.  “at this point, I just want to get through today.  I think we should track the announcer.  Let’s see where he goes in the meantime.”

The others nodded.

We moved to follow, tracing the announcer’s steps, and as we did so, we were careful to fan out, moving from cover to cover while also staying out of sight of Neph, lest he decide to throw something at us or chase us down.

He stopped to preach the importance of staying indoors and out of sight.

“We still don’t know what he’s pregnant with,” Helen said.

“Pregnant?” I askd.

“His potbelly.  He’s storing something.  Sometimes it’s food and water and vitamins, but sometimes it’s a weapon.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jessie said.  “Thoughts later.  For now, we should see if this guy is going deeper afield or if he’s retreating to headquarters.”

“Agreed,” I said.

It seemed we wouldn’t get our answer.  As we waited for him to finish his loud rant, a lone gunshot rang out.

What followed was chaos.  Our lead to the Crown forces had been taken from us, and as if to add insult to injury, more deafening gunshots sounded, targeting us.

We shrank behind cover, and my mind was going a mile a minute.

‘Neph’ had been set against an enemy.  It wasn’t Fray, and that left two possibilities.

Only one was really this hostile to us.

It’s been a long, long time, dear Cynthia, I thought, without much love in my heart.  Cynthia had been the de-facto leader of the rebel coalition for a stretch, before Mauer had gotten his claws in and strife had divided the groups.  She had been the angriest and most bitter of them, and, most critical when it came to our current issue, the least willing to cooperate with anyone, let alone Lambs.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.10 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.10

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A few things were immediately clear.  We were outgunned, outnumbered, and out of immediate options.  They knew exactly where we were, and we knew where the gunshots were coming from, generally speaking.

I’d reflexively moved for the nearest piece of cover when the first gunshots fired, dragging Jessie and Helen with me.  That cover consisted of a propped up  sign, grown wood rather than carpentry, painted with a leaf, signifying some kind of herbalist or floral shop.  The good thing was the sign itself was solid enough that bullets hit it dead on and didn’t punch through, or passed through one panel and struck the panel we were leaning against.  It worked fairly well as cover went.

The first downside to come to mind was that the sign, by dint of its construction, was composed of two panels with a hinge at the top end.  As solid and heavy as the special wood was, I couldn’t help but imagine that enough impacts would make the other panel inch closer to us, feet scraping on the road, until the sign folded and tipped over, leaving us exposed.  Was it likely?  The sign was broad enough the three of us could cluster behind it with only one of our shoulders sticking out the side, the wood was thick.  One of those inching losses of ground might require two rifle shots to hit at the same time or in quick succession.

Which sounded fine until I went back to considering just how many shooters there were and just how outgunned we were.  They weren’t chancing anything, and the sheer vehemence of the response added up to another mental tickmark in the ‘Cynthia’ box.  She and her people weren’t fond of Lambs.

So that was a thing.  Our cover was sturdy, as signs went, but it was still a sign that wasn’t anchored to the ground.  Then there was the fact that the sign was on legs.  The gap was such that someone would have to lie on the ground to aim for the space, but it didn’t preclude a chance ricochet hitting the cobblestone road and bouncing up to catch one of us in the rump or lower spine.

Then there was the fact that not every hit was dead center or to the most solid part of the sign.  The bullets caught the edges and the edges splintered, which meant our cover was being whittled away, which in turn meant-

“Sy!”

I winced at the sharp sound of a bullet catching the sign an inch from my ear.  My ear rang from the sound, my vision going funny in one eye.  I had to concentrate to bring my senses back under control and to put the ringing out of mind.  “Yes, Jessie.  Hello.  Why are you greeting me at a time like this?”

“You’re acting-”

Jessie was momentarily drowned out by the din of gunfire and the noise of bullets bouncing off of cobblestone and building faces.

“-lost in your own head,” she finished.  “Focus.

I focused.  “Ten gunmen?  Twelve?”

“Do you know or are you guessing?” Jessie asked.  “You sound like you’re guessing.”

“Same thing, these days,” I said.

Conversation was momentarily interrupted by a series of shots.  Some sounded different than others, and I felt the signboard move behind me.

“That’s not true,” Jessie said.  “But we’ll talk about that after.”

“They’re flanking us,” Helen said.  She pointed.  “Running footsteps.”

They were coming around to our right.  If they got into position there, they’d be able to shoot at us and we wouldn’t have the benefit of cover.

Most would be happy to have us pinned down, our cover being shredded.  But these guys are taking advantage of the fact we can’t move to take another position where they can shoot us.

The sign sat at the edge of the footpath.  Three long strides would get us to safety, but there were too many bullets flying, and taking those kinds of strides meant standing up first.  With three of us, the chance that we’d make it there was simply too small.

“-seconds,” Helen said.  Gunshots had drowned out the first sound.

She held up her fingers in the gesture-language countdown.  Five, four-

And then the enemy would be in cover.

I drew my knife, and I slammed it into the sign, my fingers wrapping around the edge of the sign to keep the sign in place.  Wouldn’t do to let it fold and fall down at this critical juncture.

A bullet caught the board just where I was holding it.  My hand flew away, splinters and blood, and I twisted away.  I might have lost my balance and gone from a crouch to a face-down sprawl on the street if Jessie hadn’t caught me.

“-Two,” Helen said.  “One-”

Jessie’s fingers tightened on my shoulder and arm.

With my damaged hand, no idea how bad it was, I reached out and grabbed the knife.

Funny thing was, the use of the knife was supposed to keep me from having to reach out with my hand.  Embedded as best as I could get it into the dense wood, it served as a handle, a point of leverage.  I drew my pistol and rather than use it, held the barrel and hooked the handle around the edge.

“Go!”  I called out.

I hauled, pulling on the gun and knife to drag the sign.  Helen managed to reach down and grab the lower leg and help while maintaining a near-run.  We moved our cover.

I saw Helen’s head start to turn, her hand going up.  I reacted before she was even finished the initial movement- I’d been waiting for the signal from her.

The flanking gunmen had reached their position, according to Helen’s ears.  I moved the gun, catching the other lower leg with the hook of the handle, and threw myself across Jessie, pulling the sign so it came around to protect us from the flankers.  We’d covered enough ground that there was only a minimal gap between us and the nearest wall.

The flanking soldiers opened fire.  The vibrations of the bullets hitting the sign made it hard for me to hold onto the knife.  A crack formed, reaching from the halfway point of the sign to the hinge, and I could see daylight through it.  From the lean of the sign, one of the legs had broken away.

We retreated as best as we could, until we reached what I’d thought was an alleyway.  In reality, it was an alcove, a recess in the building face for trash to be piled up for carting away later.  There were reams of wet paper that smelled like damp earth and likely had a gritty texture reminiscent of it.

There was an access door, but there was only room for one person to get in there.

“Go,” I told Jessie.  “Get the door open.”

She made a pained face, then nodded.

When she lurched for cover, then made her way to her feet, I could see the gouge in one of her legs.  One bullet had gone under the sign after all.

If I’d known she had caught a grazing hit from a bullet, I wouldn’t have told her to do it.  But Helen couldn’t pick locks, to the best of my knowledge, and that meant it had to be one of the two of us.  I wasn’t sure about myself.  I investigated my hand.

The bullet had hit the signboard where I was grabbing it.  It had passed between two fingers of my right hand, catching both, shattering both fingernails, exposing the white of the bone of the knuckle of my middle and ring fingers, and doing a degree of damage to flesh that I couldn’t really judge, given the blood that was pouring out of the wound.

I kept my back to the sign, which continued to rock with intermittent gunfire, and I wrapped a handkerchief around my injured fingers, wadding it in between the fingers before tightly binding them.

The patter of gunfire changed.  I frowned.

“They’re coming,” Helen said.  “The group that opened fire first.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “The others just got the message.  They’re shooting to keep us pinned down, but they don’t want to hit friendlies.”

“We’re open,” Jessie said, before disappearing through the door.

Helen ducked through, and I was the last one to exit, tearing my knife free before I did so.  We closed and locked the heavy braced door behind us.

“They’re coming,” Helen said.  “They have ghosts.”

Ghosts.  The clones of Percy’s design, using aspects of the cannibalized ‘Whiskers’ experiment.  Echolocation and coordination.  They had been mass-produced for a short period, and then a steady extermination campaign on the Academy’s part had coupled with Percy’s death to bring the project to an end.  Now the remaining Ghosts were scattered among rebel factions, the vast majority of the ghosts favoring Cynthia’s.  Given their talents, I had to imagine they were serving as scouts and listening ears for whichever squad or team they served with.

I wondered if there was a story as to why they kept appearing alone when they’d been pack creatures on our first encounter with them.  Was it a natural fact of their developing individuality?  They ceased to synchronize with their kin?

“Sound disrupts them,” Jessie said.  “Confuses their echolocation and spatial senses.”

“For a short time,” I said.  I looked at our environment.

The store sold plants and flowers, all potted and of a sort that made it look more like the flowers were strictly for gardens, not for gifts.  The shop itself was closed, with artificial tubing reaching from a water tank to the innumerable pots, providing water to them in quantities that depended on the thickness of the tubing.

With the shop closed, curtains had been pulled across the windows, allowing only a dull, filtered light to pass through. Metal fences of a sort had been pulled across the door and display windows.  It didn’t look like the metal fences were there to stay- they only existed to keep thieves out.

It also served to limit our access to the display windows at the front of the store.  We couldn’t use that glass to disturb the ghosts.

“…For now, we should focus on get somewhere safe,” I said.  “How’s your leg?”

“I can’t run.”

“Got it.  Can I see?”

“They’re here,” Helen said.  “They’re surrounding the building.”

I didn’t wait for a response from Jessie.  I dropped to one knee, and I checked the wound.  The bullet had caught the calf muscle, passing right through.

I used a pair of shears from the shop and a bit of my sleeve to create a quick makeshift bandage.  I tied it in place as best as I could.

“Hm?” Jessie asked.  “We need to go, Sy.”

I straightened, holding my hand up.  I’d collected what I could of the blood that had run down from the injury to her foot and into her boot.

Rather than try to squeeze blood from my fist, I flicked my hand in the direction of the back door.  Flecks of blood were scattered in that direction.

“Up?” Helen asked.

“Up,” I confirmed.

“Rooftops don’t lend themselves to an exit that way,” Jessie said.  “And I think they’re keeping an eye out.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We needed hiding spots.

We needed to deal with the ghosts, and there was a distinct lack of glass available.

The second floor was residential, the apartment of the people who ran the shop.  It was all made up of bedrooms and bathrooms, with a staircase at the far end of the hall leading up to a third floor.

I checked the doors and found some locked.  Finding one open bedroom, I hauled the door open.  I saw the window, and started toward it.

Helen caught my arm.

“Lemme go,” I said.

“There are soldiers on the ground,” she said.

“Lemme go,” I said, again.

She let go of me.  I headed into the bedroom, collected the nearest heavy object, a hand-brush with metal backing, and hurled it through the window.

Gunshots fired.  Soldiers and rebels on the ground that had been waiting to coordinate or something kicked the doors and windows in, storming into the building.

The cages at the door and windows on the first floor rattled.  They were meant to deter theft, however, and not to stop an all-out siege.

Others would be coming through the side door we’d used.  The door was heavy enough it would resist a good kicking, but they were determined, and they no doubt had resources.

I kept my head down, grabbed two pieces of glass, and used one to jam the door shut as I closed it, working it into the doorframe.  I handed the other to Jessie.

She began scratching, and, with luck, we were no longer in the sights of the ghosts.  They wouldn’t hear us and their handlers, hopefully, would hang back.

Downstairs, the barriers came crashing down, and the soldiers stormed the building.  I could hear other damage and destruction as they pushed things aside and crowded their way through the building.

We headed upstairs.  The third floor, in a weird transposition of normal building layouts, housed the kitchen and living room.  There were windows, large enough to let light in, but they were high up.  A wooden beam ran from one end of the building to the next.

Helen gestured, and I provided the boost, cupping my hands so the injured fingers wouldn’t be a problem.  Or so I thought.  As Helen set her foot down, her weight coming down on my hands, the pain flared, and my knees buckled.

I set my teeth, adrenaline helping, and then nodded for her to try again.

This time, I was able to boost her up the wall to a handhold.  From the handhold, she was able to climb up to the beam.

Helen was a strong climber, her grip indefatiguable and tenacious.  Once she was on the beam, she was able to use her feet to grip it and flip herself upside down.  Her skirt reversed direction, flopping down, but the circumstance was tight enough that none of us cared.

Jessie had trouble jumping up to grab Helen’s hand, and we needed to minimize how much time we were spending not scratching glass, so I helped her up, hands on her hips, launching her up.  She climbed Helen rather mercilessly until she had a vantage point to stand, one hand on the beam and one foot on the side of Helen’s neck.  She pulled the glass free of her belt and began scratching it again.

There was a poetry to the scene, I observed.  Helen with her skirt upside down, Jessie in a compromising position skirtwise with me directly beneath her… I would’ve liked to joke about it.  Alas, no time.  Another day, with luck.

I jumped up and grabbed Helen’s hand with my good hand.

Rather than have me climb her, Helen maneuvered and contorted her way to raise me up to the beam and help me onto it.

We had an exit, presumably.  I wasn’t sure I trusted it.

“There are still soldiers outside?” I murmured.

“Yes,” Helen said.  “I can hear footsteps and murmuring.  There’s one ghost in the building and one outside.  I can hear them too.  They’re noisy.”

A  Lara-Nora dynamic, possibly.  Coordination between groups.

“Would they have a clear shot at us?” I whispered

“Not clear.  But they would get shots,” Helen whispered back.  “But it’s better than staying here.”

I bit my lip.  I wasn’t so sure.  I didn’t want to press our luck.

“Layout of buildings isn’t good,” Jessie whispered.  “We don’t have a lot of maneuverability out there.”

Helen shook her head, golden curls thwapping back and forth across her face.  “I looked before we went inside.  We can jump over to the house with the cute chimney, climb that roof and then we can run along the house with the cock’s comb.”

“Cock’s what?” I murmured.  “No, not important.”

Jessie was more on point.  “We don’t have anywhere to run after that, Helen.  I’ve pieced together the layout.  It doesn’t go anywhere.”

“The other option is staying here,” Helen retorted.  “If we do that then we die.  I like my plan better.  There are ways.”

The soldiers had planned this, to an extent.  It wasn’t a comprehensive plan, done hours in advance.  No.  If I had the gist of this right, then they had shot the Crown’s speaker, the experiment that was shouting for people to stay indoors.  Seeing people move from cover to cover like we had been doing wouldn’t be wholly unbelievable for civilians, but I had to wonder if our reaction to the sound of the gun had been cause for them to realize we were a threat.

At which point they’d realized we were Lambs.

I missed the days we were a clandestine project.

“We stay,” I said.

“What?” Jessie asked.

“They expect us to leave, so we stay.  There isn’t much light.  We’re in the shadows up here.  Use the glass, Jessie.  Helen, you and I, we attack.”

Jessie started scratching the glass.  Helen and I shifted position, and Helen took partial custody of Jessie, wrapping one arm around her.

They would come up the stairs.  They would look up.

I tried to wrap my head around the scene, then stabbed my knife into the beam at an angle.

Damaged, bandaged fingers gripped the beam, my other hand gripped the knife handle while I prayed the blade wouldn’t break and the tip wouldn’t pry free.  I bought good knives, but…

My body stretched out along the length of the beam, hugging it, but I didn’t perch on top of it, because doing so would mean being in plain view of anyone coming up the stairs.  Instead, I clung to the side, my calf, foot and knee hugging the surface.  I was hugging the side as much as I could without anything dangling or being visible beneath.

Helen mimed me and did much the same, but she used her hands and feet, and she supported Jessie, helping to hold Jessie up, while Jessie scratched the glass.

My throbbing fingertips and the damage to my back made themselves felt within seconds.  I could hear the tromping footsteps, and I was aware of the first people making their way up, checking.

“There’s a window,” one said.  “Did they leave?”

“They can’t have gone far.  Carm and Daisy are still having fits like they do when we use the sharpening wheel.”

I was trembling now.  It wasn’t a lack of fitness.  It was that pain and damage I’d sustained was forcing parts of me to work in ways and degrees they hadn’t before to compensate for what would’ve been a decent amount of strain on any other day.

More boots.  They were gathering below.  Checking, chattering.

“Where’s the boss?”

“He’s with Carm.”

“What do we do?  Tear this place apart?  Look for their hiding places?”

“Sounds like a start.”

Oh, they were staying for a bit, then.

Problem was, it wasn’t a question of if I was going to slip and fall.  It was a question of when.  I didn’t have it in me.

I looked at Helen, then at Jessie, who was doing a fine job of etching the glass without making audible noise.  I looked the other way, at Mauer, who stood on the beam I was hanging onto.

It was as if he was standing on my hand, grinding down on the injured fingers, intensifying the pain beyond what I would’ve felt if he wasn’t participating.

There were three people directly below me.  I wondered if I could set up my landing so I could stab one and cut another two before they realized what was happening.

I was pretty sure I couldn’t.  Not with my back being injured.  Not with my fingertips ruined.

The knife moved a hair, and the pressure on my fingertips increased.

I looked over at the others, ready to signal them.  What I saw, however, was that Jessie was no longer scratching the glass.

She wasn’t scratching the glass, meaning the ghosts were in the know.  Ghosts being in the know meant they’d alert the people who needed to know, which meant-

A long shot.  Throwing a rope to thread an anchor.

“Heads up!” a voice called out.

I peeked, and I only did so because every eye turned away from where we might be.  The man who came up the stairs was wearing a military coat.  It wasn’t in the long style favored by Academy military, but short enough the belt was visible, double-breasted, with four large buttons.  He was young, as his sort went, thirty or so, but had the wear and tear of a man twice his age, in scarring and pockmarks and old burns, with a bit of hair at one side of his head that parted funny, as if it had grown in different around an old wound.  He had a beard that mingled blond hair with a chestnut brown, making him look as though he was prematurely greying, and it wasn’t a good beard, more the kind grown out of happenstance and necessity than out of the fact that his face produced good hair.  Scraggly on the cheeks and thicker at the chin.

He had a clone on his arm.  One of the ghosts of the redheaded variety.  ‘Carm’, I presumed.

In moving my head down to look around the post, I’d put too much pressure on my hands and back.  I tried to move back to a comfortable position and I found myself lacking the strength or the robust, uninjured muscle.

I dropped.  I landed on my feet, took a half-second to get my bearings, and then put a knife to the throat of the most important looking man in arm’s reach.

I wasn’t sure, on seeing all the people stare my way, that his importance ranked even among the top five or ten of the fifteen men and one woman present.

I could have sworn.

But I’d served as the distraction.  Helen had found her perch, leaving Jessie where she was, and now Helen jumped.

Not a pounce.  A jump, almost lazy, skirt flapping, hair freeing itself of the close curls and pins Helen had used.

The ghost reacted, and being a ghost, she reacted fast.  It was only in the last second that the ghost winced, head turning away, and Helen was free to crash into both Carm and the man in charge.

They went down in a heap, all three together, and with Helen in the mix, I knew before I even saw the outcome that she had this in hand.

Guns were pointed at Helen, and blades were drawn.  More blades and guns were pointed at me.

But Helen had their leader by the jugular, her legs holding the ghost by the throat.

“Sylvester Lambsbridge here.  That would be Helen G. Ibbot embracing you right now.”

“Good afternoon,” Helen said.

“I’m Franz,” the man with the beard said.

“Can we talk, or are you going to follow Cynthia and refuse all negotiation?” I asked, my voice carrying through the open space and past the crowd of thugs and soldiers.

“I’m tempted to refuse,” Franz said.

“Even if you die?” I asked.

“That’s why I said I’m tempted.  I’d like to be the leader who holds to his word.”

I made a point of not looking at Jessie.  She was a good card to hold in reserve.

“Where’s Cynthia?” I asked.

“Dead,” the man said.

“Dead?”

“The giant has her scent.  She ordered us to leave her while she deals with it.  It tracks her wherever she goes, and it can move faster than a horse runs by walking.  If we can’t find a way to kill it, she’s gone.  If she isn’t gone already.  We haven’t been able to find a way.  If we get too close, it reacts to the lingering scent of her on us.”

“Designed to rip out the power structure in entirety,” Helen observed.

“What if I was willing to offer my help in saving her, in exchange for our freedom and safety?” I asked.

“You could,” the man said.

Cagey.  Why, when I was offering something essential?

Did they not like Cynthia?  Was an accidental death a good end that wouldn’t tear their organization apart?  Or was there something more at play?

“You made a move,” I said.  A vague statement that opened doors and made me sound smart a hell of a lot more than it made me sound stupid.  In this kind of game, assuming someone was up to something was simply a fact of life.

“Yeah,” Franz said.  “I made a move.  We found the rest of your little army.  Our people are in the process of marching and tracking down your people, while they’re busy unpacking their things and getting settled.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.11 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The fact that Cynthia’s people knew where the others were and what they were up to was a pretty good sign that Franz here was telling the truth.

I’d grown too attached to that crowd.  The idea of them being on the bad end of a group like Cynthia’s was unpleasant, to say the least.  They served as my surrogate Lambs in many ways, and the idea of bad things happening to Lambs was always something that concerned me as much or more than any risk to myself.  That was very much why there had been multiple rules and many a reminder about who could sacrifice themselves and when.

“That’s all very unfortunate,” I said.  “I hope your people end up alright at the end of it.”

“Sure,” Franz said, sounding like he wasn’t buying the bluff at all.

Helen tightened her grip on Franz a fraction.  Her legs were folded tight around the red-haired clone’s neck.  They constricted, tightening on the young woman’s neck.  Helen’s voice was calm as the clone’s eyes widened, one hand going up to Helen’s leg, “Carm, honey, stop talking.  I can hear you.”

There were people outside.  If the clone had communicated anything, then the enemies we were dealing with now might have reinforcements.

We’d walked right into the hornet’s nest, and now we didn’t even have the queen hostage.  We only had one of her top soldiers.

“Let’s talk cooperation,” I said.

“I think if I cooperated, then Cynthia would have my head,” Franz said.

“If you don’t cooperate, then Helen would have yours.”

“Could be,” Franz said.  He looked eerily relaxed, considering his situation.  I was willing to bet that it was fifty percent bluffing and fifty percent that he wasn’t wholly there, emotionally.  He added, “Worse ways to go than being embraced by a pretty girl.”

“What if I told you I wasn’t a girl?” Helen asked.  “I’m not even human.”

She extended her tongue as she finished the sentence.  People with guns tensed.

“You’ve got-” Franz started.  He stopped as he saw the end of Helen’s tongue in his field of vision, when her head was beside and a little bit behind his own.  “Tits.  You smell like a girl.”

“Mm,” Helen murmured.  She arched her back a little bit.

I couldn’t wholly see, but I could guess, by the way she was moving.  She had flexed her ribs, opening up her ribcage, and now the points were likely digging into Franz’s back and side.  I could see at one point where a rib was digging into his ribs, starting and halting as it tried and failed to find purchase.

He was in a position where he couldn’t even look and see what was happening, exactly.  It made him less certain than he’d been, with strange appendages prodding and grabbing at him while he tried to focus on me.

“You okay, sir?” one of the bystanders asked.

“I’m just fine,” Franz said.

Helen’s tongue moved closer to his face, draping itself along cheekbone.

“I think that’s up for debate,” I said.  “As is Helen being a good way to go.  But let’s put that aside.  Cynthia is running.  Consider her out of the picture until things settle down.  If we take you out of the picture and you retaliate and kill us, or vice versa, what happens to your soldiers here?  I know you guys probably have a chain of command, but I somehow don’t see your guys doing well and keeping to the mission.  There’s a reason so many rebel groups hinge around personalities.  They disintegrate if they don’t have a face.”

“We’re a little-” Franz started.

Helen’s tongue moved, the tip shifting up to his eye, then abruptly slipping past eyelid and between eyelid and socket.

He twisted his head as much as he was able to with Helen’s hand and arm around his neck.  He didn’t escape the tongue.

“Stop that!” one soldier called out, raising his gun.

Helen mumbled something, then turned her eyes toward me.  She shifted her grip, so she was holding Franz with one hand and one arm, the other hand free, and gestured.

“She can’t stop,” I said.  “It’s a liability of sorts.  She backs off, or she takes her prey.  So… this is how this goes.  We should move this along.  You were saying, Franz?”

“We’re more tenacious than… that,” Franz said.

The tongue was moving in the space of his eye socket.  Helen made a small choking sound, and freed up a little bit more of her tongue, extending it further into the socket.

It was putting him off his game.

“Here’s the deal,” I said.  “We have a mutual enemy in the Crown.  I’m as ready to take them on as any of you are, and we’ve been building up our numbers to mount a proper attack.  I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, past murder attempts and threats can be left by the wayside where they belong, provided Cynthia is willing to.  You guys can call off your buddies, Helen and I go rescue Cynthia, and we collaborate.”

“We tried the collaboration thing.  It’s not-”

Franz stopped.

“Sir?” the soldier from before asked.

“Eyeballs can be replaced,” Franz said.  He looked at me with the one eye that wasn’t fixed in place.

“I don’t understand,” the soldier said.

“She has leverage on my eye.  If she wants to tear it out, let her.  I’ll live.  I’ll find a replacement.”

I saw the micro-movements of Helen’s hand as she tensed her grip.  Her fingers were digging into the side of Franz’s neck, gripping it for purchase.  There was an artery there, and she wasn’t wholly stopping all flow, but I had reason to believe she was constricting it.  It wasn’t quite enough constriction to cause symptoms like numbness and a drooping face, but it had a good chance of impairing him, making it harder to put words together and string together thoughts.

“You can cooperate with us,” I said.  I could transition this argument into the kind of course I might take with less intelligent opposition.  Hammering in facts, expecting they couldn’t refute.

“I’d sooner order you be-”

Using her tongue, Helen pulled out his eye.  It wasn’t a quick jerk, a sudden hauling of the eye and connected detritus free of the socket.  The eye bulged as the widest point found its way past the lids themselves, and then seemed to grow larger still as pressure was put on it from behind, the eye pulling free.

It was slow, excruciating, and Franz grit his teeth, lips contorting against teeth and gums in the same way a hand might scrabble against a wall in vain hope of finding purchase, finding a place to grab on that would allow escape or relief.

“He said don’t shoot,” one soldier told another.

“But-”

“But he’s tenacious,” I said.  “Don’t you see?”

My own hostage moved slightly.  I pricked his neck with the knife to remind him I was paying sufficient attention.

Franz, meanwhile, endured the slow, tearing disconnection of eye from head, individual components stretching out to their limits and then snapping or rending apart.  Fluids flowed out of the socket, vitreous and crimson.

Franz was a veteran.  He’d likely dealt with horrible things before.  He might even have been tortured, once.  He was a tough one, and I was now getting the impression that it was a toughness he had to prove.  Not to the room, but to himself.  It was the kind of trait that drove a good student to study harder, because being a student was so ingrained in their personality that going against it would have meant a blow to their very being.

The flip side of that observation, however, was that for the student who put so much of themselves into that identity, if the identity was taken away, the person usually crumbled.  The top students who had a bad semester quickly became rooftop girls or delinquents, looking to experience everything they had been missing.

Could the defenses of an emotionally numb soldier and leader be penetrated?  Would the dam breach, the emotion flooding out?  Would he snap?

Helen claimed the eyeball and almost a foot of extraneous material that trailed behind it.  She drew it into her mouth, and she bit down, very intentionally making a wet sound in the man’s ear.

“You can just buy a new eye as a replacement.  I’ve been there,” I said.

His hand shook a fraction as he held it against the eye socket.

“Indeed,” he managed, after a momentary delay.  He’d needed a second to gather composure.

Behind him, standing in the crowd, I could see Mauer.

What did the crowd want?  They wanted to be validated.  They looked up to their leaders, the faces of their faction, and they wouldn’t intervene so long as Franz here had a chance to show his muster.

This was a balancing act.  It was a standoff shooting, and pulling the trigger first meant getting shot, barring exceptional circumstance.  Manipulation was key here, and the power remained almost entirely with the rest of the people in the room.

People were coming up the stairs.  The stairwell itself was already packed with people, so the incursion more or less stopped there.

“There’s the reinforcements,” Franz said.  He was hunched over as much as Helen would let him hunch over, one hand to his eye.  He raised his voice.  “Ho, reinforcements!”

This was bad.  I’d been aware I was working with a time limit, but there hadn’t been much I could do.

“Seems like they’re tied up,” I said, when the discussion carried on in the stairwell with no response for Franz.

“Seems,” he said.

“Work with us,” I stressed.  Hammering in the same point, ignoring the fact that he’d tried to refute it.  Helen was carefully listening for every one of his objections, refusals, and any sign that he was about to say or do something like order his men to shoot us.  The treatment of his eye had been one step among several in an effort to interrupt him and throw him off his game.

There was a secondary hand being played here by our Helen.  I wasn’t sure it was the best hand to play, all considered, but it was one that suited her.  Most living creatures, if reprimanded with enough consistency and effect, would develop an aversion to whatever it was they were doing. Most parents didn’t get the opportunity to be perfectly consistent, and other parents didn’t have a clue, so many children slipped the leash.

Embraced by what he’d described as a very attractive girl, Franz was being sternly reprimanded in the form of losing his eye and being clawed at by Helen’s ribs.  It took willpower to press on when each attempt was punished so, and future attempts promised to escalate.

I could see it in how he was taking his time to formulate a response.

Finally, he spoke.  “We’ve tried the cooperation thing before.  Didn’t work out.  I don’t think we’re interested in trying again.”

Returning stubbornly to the same track as before.  That was a peril when it came to limiting the blood flow to the man’s brain.  If we made him stupider with the application of pressure, then there was a chance he might not be smart enough to see the merit in what I was saying.

“Really now?” I asked.  “What’s your alternative?  They have their sights on Cynthia.  This is only going to be one of several major projects they employ to handle your rebellion here.”

“We’ve dealt with worse.”

“Than that?  Giant project miff or whatever he’s called?  No.  We were supposed to be among the old ‘worse’ you dealt with, and we pretty successfully killed Cynthia’s favorite scientists and set her on fire.  Everything she was building, everything she was, being the classy lady at an event with aristocrats, clandestine meetings with other rebel leaders, whatever, she was tops at what she was doing, and after the horrendous burns she became a… I don’t know.”

“Vengeful,” Franz said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Vengeful.  And that’s a tricky quality in a leader.  Leaders need to be passionate, yeah, but they also need to form connections, establish trust, be honest, show respect for their subordinates and respect the enemy, and they need to put something of themselves into the cause.  I’m worried Cynthia misses enough of those marks that it’s problematic for you all.”

“She’s never done us wrong,” Franz said, stubborn, looking more focused in the moment than he’d looked earlier.

“I’m arguing she’s doing you wrong at this very moment, if she’s urging you all to self-immolate instead of cooperating and building something.”

“Sy,” Helen said.  She had retracted her tongue.

“Helen?”

“I think we’re running into a problem we’ve run into before.  One you’ve run into before.  It sounds very familiar.  Rick.”

“No codes,” a rebel soldier said.

“It’s not a code,” Helen said.  “I’m talking about someone we used to know.”

“I don’t remember a Rick,” I said.

I could see Helen react with mild surprise at that.

“No codes!”

The soldier sounded ticked enough that I really believed he would shoot us if we pushed it.

Not that there was any code I was aware of.  No, I suspected this was, going by Helen’s reaction, something that was supposed to be fairly blatant.

I wracked my brain for ideas on who Rick might be.  Past opposition, people we had crossed paths with during jobs, the mice in Radham, the other orphans, the doctors who worked with us, the politicians in Radham.  It had to be someone Helen and I were both in a position to know, which was why I kept going back to Radham.

There was no Rick, no emotional reaction to Rick, good or bad.  A nonentity in the Sylvester brainscape.

“None of that,” Franz said.  His words weren’t as crisp as before.  He didn’t sound as confident, either, but I wasn’t sure if that was a direct relation to he pressure Helen was putting on him or an indirect one.  He was slower to pick up and release sentences, too.

I needed to change course, assuming that Helen was warning me.  The problem was, I wasn’t sure what course to take.  I’d been so sure I would be able to hammer him down, especially as we taxed his faculties, but now Helen was saying no?

Jessie was gone at least.  That was promising.

Fine, I’d change tacks, and knowing that these guys were aggressive and militant, I could try to paint the right picture.

“Listen,” I said, my voice firmer.  I’d continue to press, to make use of the emotional and mental battery.  “I was Academy, once, but they took my friends from me.  They took my freedom, and they took most of the years of my life from me.  I’m not going to say I have more right to be pissed at them, but I’m pretty pissed.  We do have common ground there.  I want to rescue Cynthia and free you guys to work against Crown and Academy, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re not letting me.”

“Sy-” Helen started.

“I’m not letting you,” Franz said, and he drawled a bit, “Because we’re not nice people.  We don’t turn the other cheek we don’t forgive.  You crossed us once, and so we’re going to remove you.  Tha world keeps turning, and people shout and they cry out for justice, and it gets drowned out in the wave of news about this new transplant or that new surgery, about wonder drugs and warbeasts, and about wars overseas and twisted tales about rebellions here, only as told by the Crown.  D’you unnerstand what I’m saying?”

Helen was looking at me, as if waiting for my signal to distract the man or debilitate him.

I worried that if we pushed things too much further, we might get shot.

I worried that whoever this ‘Rick’ was that I was supposed to avoid, I’d bumped right into him, and if any dam had breached with waters flooding out, then it wasn’t helpful.

I gestured for Helen to ease up on the guy’s throat.  I didn’t need him delirious from having his oxygen supply intermittently limited.

“It’s about having a voice?” I asked.  If I couldn’t dissuade him, if he wanted a voice, then I would give him one, lead him on, buy time.  It wasn’t great, it wasn’t perfect, but it gave Jessie an opportunity.  “Making a statement?”

“It’s about having a damn impact for once,” he said.  “We all get caught up in their flow.  The games they play.  Do you know what the most important things are?  The thing that drives them and that drives all of us?”

“Power,” I said.  “Control.  And everything that those two things aren’t.  Not giving up power, not letting others dictate our paths.  Having an agenda, a belief system.  Being free enough to have control of our own destinies.”

“No,” he said.  “No, all of that sounds pretty.  But it’s not what it is.  I think, we think, that it comes down to history.  Deciding it, writing it.  Power and control might give them the ability to hold the pen to the history books and ensure nobody else gets their hands on pen or book, but that’s not the important thing.  It’s having a legacy.  Having made a manifest difference.”

“And in a vain, desperate attempt to try and shout loud enough to get words printed in a book nobody will read, you’re-”

More people appeared in the doorway.  Too much attention was on them, not on me.

“They’re all Ricks,” Helen said, her voice soft.

“You need to switch to a reference I remember and understand when I clearly don’t get it,” I told her.

The focus was on the door, the people were chattering, and Franz was in Helen’s grip, his attention focused on everything that was going on over there.

There weren’t many guns pointed at us.  I thought about making a break for it.

The crowd parted.

“She escaped into the storm sewers,” the man at the door said.  He warily eyed Helen, myself, and the various hostages we’d collected.  “The monster is tearing up the ground and trying to dig out the pipes wherever she’s going, and she’s crawling for most of it, most of that crawling through or over ice water, but she’s alive and in better shape than she was.  Thought you’d want to know, sir.”

Franz smiled a little, and seemed to relax a touch.  “I did.  I’m glad.”

I glanced at Helen.  There weren’t many escape routes.  Several required reaching the beam that extended across the room and I wasn’t sure we could manage that.

“Should I be saying goodbye, sir?” the man at the door asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Franz said.  “But probably.  Where’s Macuff?”

“The captain is outside.  He’s looking after Daisy.  They’re doing something that’s making her head spin.  To do with sound.  Captain Macuff says that means they’re probably close.”

Jessie.

“Which means there’s another one,” Franz said.  “At least.”

His eyes widened, and I could see the expression beyond them, the realization, and the decision.

“Shoot-” he started.

Helen snapped Franz’s neck and killed the ghost, and in the doing, she managed to move Franz so he formed a limited human shield, protecting her, her arms going to her head.

I cut my hostage’s throat, dimly aware that we were surrounded by at least thirty armed men with combat expertise.  In the same motion I’d flicked the knife through vitals, I swung my arm out and put it in the back of the nearest thug.  I threw it at a third thug, to only moderate effect, and dove for the gun of the first man I’d killed, who was still in the process of dying, blood flooding out of his brain, which was giving him dopamine spark dreams of white and peace, to ease him into oblivion.

I knew how it was so very little, so very late.  I knew that Helen was the bigger target.  Even before I could reach for the gun I wanted to retrieve, people were stepping forward and making the choice to shoot.

Even among thugs of this caliber, so desperate for a voice and an impact, most were reluctant to actually pull the trigger and kill a child, even one so monstrous as Helen.  She wore an innocent, scared expression well.

It would haunt me for a long time, I imagined, that it was an expression she was wearing when they pulled triggers and started putting bullets in her, penetrating her heart, stomach, arm, both legs, and face.

Whoever Rick was, I hoped he wasn’t the type to laugh or rub my nose in this.

The other Lambs emerged in full force, Evette included.  Fray and Mauer stood on either side of me, Mauer nearer the crowd, and Fray nearer the Lambs.

They would help steer me through the muderous rage.

I opened my mouth to roar my defiance, and the building summarily split in two, and this was right and just.  I didn’t care how it happened, only that it reflected the feeling in my heart, the pain of a few stray gunshots that caught me and only grazed me.  As fire and smoke tore through the air around me, I was already hurling myself in the direction of the enemy.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.12 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.12

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I was sitting down and surrounded with ruin and smoke, and I couldn’t remember exactly how I’d arrived in that position.  My memory wasn’t that bad; the mental image of Helen being shot was clear enough that I knew it hadn’t disappeared outright.

I couldn’t focus my eyes on any individual point, which was another sign that something was wrong.  It was a kind of double vision that closing one eye didn’t help, the world coloring outside lines.  Parts of me that were safely nestled inside me hurt.

But the thing that helped me put two and two together was the fact that my ears were ringing and sounds were distorted, I could hear a voice clearly.  Mauer, speaking like Mauer tended to speak, and he sounded clear as a bell.

The Mauer that kept me company didn’t tend to speak.

“…bring into justice both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed…”

I had heard the man rally people, but I had only ever really heard one of his sermons, and that had been years ago.  I wasn’t picking this up strictly from that.  Other memories, other details.  This wasn’t Mauer any more than Evette was the real Evette.

“…take revenge, my dear friends…” Mauer proclaimed.

My eyes widened.  I couldn’t yet wrangle my vision and thoughts enough to make sense of the battlefield, but I could see a solid kind of movement that wasn’t smoke, people, and I could move toward them.

Something had detonated, and it had detonated closer to the far end of the room.  The fire, the smoke, the pain, it was all fallout from that single event.  Jessie.

“…leave room for wrath, for it is written: it is yours to avenge, and you will repay!”

Eyes still wide, staying wide even with the stinging touch of smoke,  I put the pain out of mind.  I made my body move, and this was a thing I had done before, a thing I would do one last time.  I crawled and I felt the creak of floorboards beneath my hands, where they were supported only at one end.  My weight made them threaten to break in half dumping me into whatever lay below.

It was cold, for all the smoke.  Cold, despite the red glow of fire.  The winter air was blowing in, a wind stirred by the difference of hot air within and cold air without, trying to find reconciliation.

“All of us growl like bears, and moan sadly like doves,” Mauer said, his voice dropping lower, for gravity.  He was a very clear image in a distorted, senseless world, and the mention of doves made me aware of Fray.

Fray was harder to see in the smoke, especially as she wore black, but I could see Helen from the shoulders down, and I had to look a distance over to see where Fray stood, because Fray never appeared alone.  Copious amounts of blood dripped down to stain Helen’s simple white dress.  I could have looked up to see Helen’s face.  I didn’t.

“…we hope for justice, but there is none.  For salvation, but it is far from us,” Mauer intoned.

There were others nearby, and most of them were reeling as much or more than I was.  I didn’t have my knife, but the first person I happened across was suffering more than I was.  He had a gun, and he didn’t have the strength to keep me from taking it from him, an act that took two fumbling tries.

“Whuh,” the man spoke, and he sounded very far away.  “We need to get out.”

“Give me your hands,” I said.

“What?” he asked, voice drowned out by other sounds that I realized were figments of auditory trauma, ringing and a sound like a perpetual avalanche.

“Hands,” I said.

He didn’t fight me as I reached for one of his arms, hauled it across his chest, and then took the other hand, raising it up.  He cooperated, even, to bring them up, as I took hold of them, entangling his fingers in my own.  I tugged on them, and he took that as encouragement.  Struggling to even gather his senses, it was an anchoring point, something to help him get centered and work toward.  He managed to sit up, and moved his legs around to where he could maybe prepare to stand.

“…For man is born for trouble, and sparks fly upward,” Mauer said.

I used my foot to block his legs from moving the full way around.  Then, forcing my brain to focus, using all of the practice I’d had over the years to seize control of my brain and put it to the one task of dealing with the current confusion, I lined up the gun, and I fired it so it penetrated both of the man’s wrists with one shot.

If I hadn’t already been nearly deaf, my own gunshot would have

I had to drop to one knee, falling on top of his legs, to keep him from kicking me or getting away from me as he screamed, arms flying back and away, flinging blood and gore into the air in an arc.

I had to work far harder to line up a shot to destroy his ankles.  I wasn’t sure, but I might have only damaged one ankle.

“I’ll do to them as they have done to me,” Mauer said, right in my ear.

“I get it,” I said.

“I’ll pay them back for what they did,” he said, his monstrous arm settling on my shoulder, fingers digging into flesh.

“I get it,” I said, again.  “Enough.”

One of his wrists shattered by a bullet, the man on the floor in front of me clubbed me across the face with one arm.  With the state of the arm, I imagined it hurt him more than it hurt me.  He certainly screamed like it.

Breathing hurt.  I wasn’t sure if it was the sudden, bitter influx of cold air, the smoke, emotion, or something else, but it made for a bitter sort of intake of breath.

The screaming was drawing attention of the others.  Someone fired a gun, more a warning shot, or something meant to provoke a response.

I brought the pistol to the man’s face, pointing it at his jaw.  I could take that too.

“Count your bullets,” Mauer said.  “Plan.”

I counted.  Four bullets remained.

Rather than shoot, I brought the handle of the gun down on the man’s mouth.  I heard and felt teeth break.  The screaming quieted, but the moans of pain and alarm were almost as loud.  I brought the gun down again, smashing one lip and several already broken teeth.  He tried to turn his head, to spit out the first taste of blood and the pieces of broken teeth that had fallen back into his mouth, and I grabbed his jaw with one hand, wresting it back so it faced up, facing me.  The wrapped-up fingers at the end of that hand protesting from the fierceness of my grip, and they protested again from the secondary vibration as I hit the man’s face again, splitting his upper lip to the nostril.

He raised his arms, shielding his face with the parts that weren’t damaged, and I swung.  The pistol’s grip struck the parts of his arm that the earlier bullet had already ruined, and he pretty quickly abandoned that line of defense.

My perception of the world veered in a direction, and I toppled onto the floorboards, eliciting a protest.  He had flipped over, and my balance wasn’t entirely there.  I was gaining more focus, I’d been able to aim, but I wasn’t at my best.  It took me a second of staring at the four limbs and one head in front of me to figure out how it was put together as a person.

Another second to figure out how I wanted to take it apart as a person.

I reached for hair, gripped it, and pulled it back, before smashing it into the floorboards.  It didn’t knock the man out, but a combination of the blow and the earlier smacks with the butt end of the gun served to reduce nose and mouth to a bloody ruin.  He lay there, eyes open and staring, bleeding, unable to use two arms and one leg, and I was able to convince myself that even if I wasn’t satisfied, I was ready to move on.

I swayed as I rose to my feet.  My lack of balance threatened to topple me, and so I made myself fall strategically.

With every second that passed, I was gaining control of my faculties.  The problem was that the opposition was also recovering.

Two men had fallen in a pile.  I reached for weapons first, grabbing one gun, clumsily pushing a knife out of reach of either of them.  The clumsy part was that I’d put it out of my own reach too.

The more alert of the two men said something, but between Mauer’s ramblings in the background, the noises in my ears and the creaky-crackle of wood declaring a dangerous lack of structural integrity, I would have only really been able to understand the man if I’d been listening and focusing.

I wasn’t listening.  The time for that had come and gone.  I could remember the looks on their faces as I’d talked to Franz.  The stubbornness.  I’d underestimated it.  Was I supposed to believe it was gone now?  That only now, confronted with a tangible danger, they were willing to compromise?

I aimed my gun and fired, putting a bullet through the soft flesh of stomach of one man, so it would exit and penetrate the soft stomach of the one he was lying on top of.

He fought, using the time where pain brought clarity but shock prevented the pain from immediately debilitating him.  He fumbled for and reached for the knife, failed to get it at first grasp, and then, laying on his side, he kicked out at me.

With one bent arm, I protected myself.  Then I struck out, a pistol gripped in each hand.  One hand went for the bullet wound, the other went for whatever was vulnerable.  A punch aiming and failing to get beneath the leg to go for the genitals, a punch for the wound, a punch at the soft side of his stomach.

In the midst of the scuffle that followed, him bigger and stronger, me capitalizing on his existing injury and every further weak point I was able to create, I climbed on top of him, using my body to keep him from reaching down, and endured a brief battering of his hands clubbing my back before getting in position to drive my knee into the wound, hard.

He curled up around my legs, possibly in an attempt to stop me, possibly in an attempt to protect the wound.

He went still, very possibly taking an opportunity to breathe, to find respite, to think.

I took that opportunity for myself, using the stillness and the fact that he wasn’t rocking me this way or that to point the gun at where his spine was.  I was fairly sure that the placement wouldn’t stop his heart and breathing, but would end the use of his lower body.

The one he’d been lying on top of had been knocked senseless in more ways than just the one.  While the man behind me hollered in stark horror, I climbed on top of the third man and made sure the senselessness was permanent in at least one regard.  I smashed his face with the butt-end of the empty pistol, aiming for the eye socket.

By the fifth blow, my hand was going numb from the secondary impact of the shock.  I switched hands.

He didn’t even fully rouse as I made sure that his eyes were unrecoverable, that he’d need top of the line surgery before he even got that far.

There weren’t any others on this part of the floor that were moving.  I moved between the prone and supine bodies, shooting to paralyze.

The smoke was thicker, the sounds of people around me were clearer, and it was getting easier to move and balance.

I knew that fire was burning somewhere, but it wasn’t spreading with enthusiasm.   The smoke would be a better danger.  The explosion had destroyed part of one exterior wall, and as the wall had come down, the floor had split.  Now the vast majority of the others, Helen included, were down on the first floor, along with the part of the floor that had collapsed.

Periodically, however, one of them would fire a gun.  They weren’t leaving, and that told me something.

The floor had folded, half of it now forming a steep incline.  Where floorboards had broken, some broken boards stuck up like fangs, forming a kind of uneven barrier toward the middle of the room – one that was hard to use as cover to wage a war on those below, because it would’ve been cover that consisted of parts of the surrounding floor.  Trying to get too close threatened to see me tumbling through broken floorboards.

But I took hold of one of my victims, the smallest paralyzed one, and despite his very limited struggles, I was able to drag him a part of the way across the floor.

The smoke was bad now.  Every breath felt like I was drawing in salt, letting that salt settle on wounds.

I didn’t want to get in the way of any gunfire from below, so I got the man as far as I could, then lay down on the floor, kicking him and pushing with my feet.

He teetered over the edge, then rolled down the slope.

I could hear the people below.  There were a few more gunshots, flying up to strike ceiling and roof above.  Many of the bullets created tiny circles of daylight that illuminated broad shafts of smoke, disappearing and reappearing as heavier plumes of smoke appeared across them.

“Lamb!” one of them called out.

I remained silent.

“You should answer,” Mauer said.  “I would.”

That’s where you and I are different.

“I know you’re up there!” the soldier cried out.  “Lamb!”

I took hold of a piece of floorboard that looked as though it had splintered in the middle, and tore it free.  There were nails still in it, of a more old-fashioned type, not the kind that stitched would put together; they were more like long, narrow wedges.

“Lamb, the smoke might attract the giant, if it doesn’t get other attention.  Crown soldiers, whatever else they’ve got up their sleeves.  It’s done.  You win.  We’ll cooperate.  Whatever you want.  But that gun you’ve got up there.  Put it away.”

Again, I remained silent.

Silence had its uses, and I didn’t trust myself to speak.

I knelt, wavering a little, my ears still a cacophony of nonexistent sound, and checked my gun was out of ammunition.  I then disassembled it in part, tossed the chamber across the room, and then tossed the remains of the gun down.

“Are we going to pretend there’s no other guns up there?” he called out.

I didn’t respond.

Smoke continued to pour forth.  People down there were coughing, and I was suppressing my own coughs.  The orange light of flames was dying out, not growing, but the side effect of that was that the chill was eating into me.

My back was to a little table that served as a kind of storage chest and a table for the armchair that had been there.  That same armchair now rested uneasily on broken floorboards that speared out horizontally.

The people I’d broken and dismantled were still gasping, making pained noises, and struggling to escape, when the closest thing to a real way out was a window none of us could easily reach, followed by a drop resembling one from a third story building, probably onto jagged rubble.  The lot of them were paralyzed from the waist down or with all four limbs disabled.  Some weren’t moving at all.

“I’m going to guess,” the man below called out, “That you throwing Brian down here was meant to be a message.  You don’t want to talk for whatever reason.  Right ho.  But don’t go thinking that Franz spoke for all of us, or that we thought he was just.  He was in charge, we obeyed.   You know Cynthia, you saw Franz.  Crossing them would end us.  We have to obey, yeah?”

“If you don’t respond,” Mauer said, “they’re going to be pushed to desperation.”

Good.

“Your funeral,” Mauer said.  He settled into a more comfortable position, sitting across from me.  Fray still stood off to the side, hugging Helen.

The men down below were chatting.  A tense discussion about possibilities, threat, and about the screams they’d heard.

“Are you feeling biblical, Sylvester?” Mauer asked.  He wasn’t a complete image like the Lambs were.  He wasn’t someone I could coordinate with.  When it came to the Lambs, I could finish their sentences.  I could write their sentences, figure out how they would act and operate, even when they weren’t there.

“Biblical,” I murmured the word.

“You heard those fragments of verse from somewhere, for me to dredge up and parrot back to you,” Mauer said.  “Interesting, what sticks with you.  You know you’ve made other reference before, scant as it was.”

I could hear rocks being moved down below.  Part of the stairwell had collapsed, their path to the exit was clearly blocked, and so they wanted up and out.

They simply had to get past the gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper wasn’t feeling particularly merciful.

I could hear boards creak and protest.  I could hear the scuff as boots sought traction on flooring that now acted more like a wall, a steep uphill slope.

Emerging from my safer spot, I looked for and saw the first of the hands reaching up, over, and out for a handhold.

There were four of them, all climbing in concert, at separate points.

I brought the plank down, swinging, stabbing the first hand with the nails at the end and affixing to the floor.

The remainder, I simply opened fire on, targeting hands and arms, or in the rare case I was able to move close to the collapsed portion without risking being shot at, I aimed at feet.  I disabled rather than kill, with one possible exception for the young soldier in an oversized military coat that brought his head down and forward as I was squeezing the trigger.  It might have been a graze and it might have been something that shattered his forehead and leaked some of the contents of his skull out over his face.  I only saw the spatter of blood and I saw him fall.

“You lunatic!” the soldier from before called out.

Not wholly wrong.  I’m seeing things.

“Hearing things,” Mauer amended.

The one I’d nailed to the floor was struggling for a handhold.  He wanted to reach a point where he could reach over and pull the plank free.

My back and shoulder were aching and my shirt was sticking there in a way that suggested frank blood.  The bandage had slipped, the sealing broken, no doubt.  The cloth tatters that protected my two ruined fingers were already slipping loose.

With that in mind, I was slow and careful as I got my hands on the chest-cum-teatable.  I opened the door on the side and let the bottles tumble out, and then I hefted it.

The guy at the edge where the floor was broken was scrabbling for a better grip or a foothold.  He found it in the same moment I hefted the little three-foot-by-two-foot-by-three foot table.  It landed atop the nails.  One or two would have been knocked aside, twisting in his hand.  The others would likely have been driven deeper.

Whatever footing he’d had, he lost it.  His body weight tore at the nails, to the point that I thought his hand would rip free, tears forming between the nails and the spaces between his fingers.  From the looks of it, the flesh caught and bundled up, forming something more tenacious and hard to tear as it gathered.

“What do you want!?” the one below called out.

“What do you want?” Fray asked me, from behind me, where she stood in smoke and shadows, near one of the places the smoke was pouring out from damaged roof.  “What are you fighting for, Sylvester?”

You asked me that in the beginning.  I don’t remember everything, and I forget a lot, but I remember that.

“What do you want?” the de-facto leader hollered, voice ragged.  He broke down into fits of coughing.

Smoke settled, to an extent.  Yes, it rose, it was getting steadily worse, there weren’t enough holes in the roof and walls to let it escape.  Breathing was a chore.  But they weren’t having a jolly time of it down there.

“If you do this, we all die!  You included, Lamb!”

“I don’t think that’s what you want,” Fray said.

“You need us as much as we need you!”

No, I thought.

There was a long pause.

“Do you want the girl?”

I remained silent.  I kept my eyes fixed on Mauer, my gun in hand.  I watched the soldiers I’d dispatched crawl and struggle on the floor.  One was still nailed to the floor, the rest of him dangling from that ruined hand.

A little snippet of hell, this.  Not quite hellish enough, but I’d have to decide on some ways to patch that up.

“If you want the girl, we can bring the girl.  Just give us a ceasefire.  Give us something.”

I considered for long moments.  I stared Mauer down.

Reaching out with the pistol, I used the butt end to rap the floor.  Knock.  Knock.

“That a yes?” the man called out.

I knocked again.  I didn’t want to talk, my voice strangled with smoke and emotion.  I didn’t want to talk anymore for the time being.

There was more discussion.  I had the impression that smoke and circumstance was the driving force in their decision to accept.

I could hear the order.  The command to dig, to ‘find her’.

Then the change in tone of conversation.

“We got the body,” the leader said.

I knocked once.

“Coming on up,” he said.

Helen’s hands had been tied, and it seemed very fitting that even now, unbreathing, she embraced one of the enemy.

I ignored her, and stooped over the new leader of Cynthia’s soldiers here, and I checked him thoroughly before allowing him to climb the rest of the way up.

He was followed by several others.  Three men, each of whom I patted down, each of whom coughed and looked around at the work I’d done, at blood and fragments on the floor.  One made a move toward the man I’d nailed to the floor, and I moved to get in his path, standing ten feet apart from him.

“Leave them for now,” the de-facto leader said.  He wore a helmet that covered much of his face.

I suspected it would be back to business as normal as soon as I was dealt with.  They could do that at any time.  The only things I had going for me was a familiar with dark, smoky places, and an ability to endure pain and get moving faster.  I’d already spent the second coin.

“There’s more down there,” the leader said.  He looked up.  “We’ll have to use the window up there.  We get your friend’s body up and out and you’re satisfied, yeah?”

I nodded once.

It took his friends to help him.  I watched, cold, as the leader was lifted up to the beam that now hung, connected at only one end.  It made for an uneasy tightrope walk of sorts to the window Jessie had escaped through.

They’d get in my way.  I couldn’t just ask to be helped up like their new squadron leader had.  I couldn’t even try gun, because the climb up required both hands.

No.  Something simpler.  I would get their help without asking.

One used the boost provided by the other two to reach for the beam.  The other two glanced momentarily at me.

I ran, and it wasn’t a pretty run, or a fast one.  The smoke meant I wasn’t taking in enough oxygen.  I was distracted, and my balance was still a little off.  The effect of the bomb blast or whatever it had been made every part of me hurt.  My shoulder was bleeding through whatever cracks had formed in the seal and gaps in bandage.

But I ran, choosing to run through plumes of smoke, to better surprise.  I ran, setting foot where I was pretty sure the support struts ran under floorboards, marking the breaking point where long floorboards had broken in two.  The action meant I made less sound.

By the time they realized I was making my move, I was in close.  I ran along the back of one and up to the back and shoulders of the other, who was busy climbing up.

His instincts were good.  The moment something was wrong, a sudden weight on his back, he let go of the beam,dropping.

But in moving my feet to try and find footing to climb up the rest of the way, I’d set foot on the side of his face and his shoulder.  I was able to launch myself skyward and catch the beam.

The men on the ground immediately set to looking for weapons.  One ran to the edge and shouted for a gun to be thrown up.

I could have aimed and shot at them to buy myself time, but I didn’t trust my balance at this time.  No.

I ran along the beam the soldier with Helen was still walking unsteadily on.

He turned, and he held Helen draped over one shoulder so she served as a partial shield.  I could see the blood.  Too much blood.

“Not going to let you pass,” he said.

A figure moved behind him.  Sensing her or feeling the movement along the beam, he lashed out, smacking her across the face, and then grabbed her.  It was a clumsy maneuver, but there wasn’t much space between Jessie and the window.  She had to reach out to catch the side of the window.

“Do you want to lose another?”

“No,” I said.  “I don’t want to lose any more.”

My eyes were downcast.  I could see Fray and Mauer in the midst of black smoke.  Helen stood a distance away.

“Jump down,” he said.  “Jump down, I’ll toss this one down onto the floor down there instead of out the window.  They’ll decide what to do with all of you.”

“I think I burned that bridge,” I said.  “Besides, you’re missing the most important part of this.”

“Fuck you, Lamb,” the soldier said.

Not quite the ask and answer I’d hoped for.  Still…

“You hurt my friend,” I said.  “In terms of me, that means your friends down there suffer.  I have no more patience for any of this.  It means you suffer.  You don’t get to go easy.  Understand?”

“Fuck yourself,” he said.  He looked down at his buddies, who had guns now.

Guns and half-decent shots at me, but with a risk of collateral damage to their buddy here.  Smoke didn’t help, nor would it help if they were feeling as unsteady as I had been.

“That’s in terms of me.  Suffering.  Justice.  But in terms of her…

He turned his head, looking more at Jessie.

“Other her,” I said.

Helen, head still lolling, slipped her arms free of the restraints and wrapped her arms around his head and neck.

Panicking, the man reached up, and he tore her arm away from his neck.

He’d broken her grip.

Helen’s grip.

What followed was frantic.  Helen slipped and nearly fell, grabbing the beam instead.  Jessie helped catch Helen before she could lose her grip on the beam too, and I charged forward.

Between the two of them, each with some form of hold on the soldier, we bulled him off of the beam.  My sole contribution was to stumble into the two of them, getting them and myself out of the window.

The window swung outward.  Jessie held it and Helen, Helen held Jessie, and I held onto both.  We collided, all three of us, with the wall as the window swung out.  My shoulder flared with pain, Helen looked like she was slipping, and Jessie had the burden of the two of us.

But Jessie had her own kind of tenacity.  She didn’t lose her grip, and her grip was what was essential.  That and the structural integrity of the round window.  Slowly, surely, she transferred the two of us to handholds.

It was glacially slow for us to climb down.  Jessie, meanwhile, took care of the latter part of the revenge.  A bit of alcohol, a match, and the beam that served as the lifeline was set on fire.  She quickly made her way down.

Once that was done, we all collapsed in a heap at the foot of the building, which in itself had collapsed from a cube into a kind of triangular cylinder.

“Helen,” I said.

Helen, hair draped across her ruined face, sticking where there was blood, managed to produce a bubbling of blood and spittle at her mouth, the bubbling expanding, then collapsing.  She didn’t have the strength to even lift her head.

“Sorry I forgot Rick and dropped the ball there.”

She spat, a ‘pff’ of blood and drool.  Dismissive.

“It was what it was,” Jessie said.  “There was no negotiating our way out of that.  You could’ve done everything right and still failed.  Cynthia occupies that kind of space.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“I did what I could with the fertilizer bomb.  Things weren’t labeled, I had to guess, assume the two of you hadn’t moved from where you were.”

“We hadn’t,” I said.

Helen formed another expanding froth of bloody bubbles at her lips, participating in the conversation.

“Having fun there?” I asked.

I thought I saw something that might have once been a smile, in that bloody mess that was her face.

“She never occupied quite so much of our collective attention as Fray or Mauer,” Jessie said, quiet.  She reached out and stroked Helen’s head.  “But she’s not to be underestimated.  She has her own kind of strength and leverage.”

“Fuck her,” I said.  “She needed to be put down a long time ago.  I hope Helen’s brother wins.”

Helen bubbled some more.

“Yeah.  For now, we get Helen some help.  Let’s go look after our people.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.13 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I had gone to a lot of trouble to build my first phase of an army, all individuals with reasonably respectable backgrounds and some degree of know-how.  It had required planning, subverting the gangs of a small city, subverting Fray’s plans, and then weeks and months of acclimatizing the students to life beyond the academy.  Months more work still remained to do.

“I can’t believe they lost,” I said.

“Surrendered,” Jessie said.

“I’m so disappointed,” I said.

I surveyed the situation.  The area we’d left our people in had seen some sparse gunfire and some fires that had already petered out.  We were in the process of creeping up on a row of apartments where our guys’ carriages were still parked outside, only half of the bags still mounted on them.

“Against a tenth their number,” I said.

“There’s no evidence of that,” Jessie said.  “There’s no telling what their numbers are.”

Our guys were inside and we could only see glimpses.  Their guys were mostly inside, with a few standing guard.

Helen draped over Jessie, who was helping her to walk.  Helen wasn’t lifting her head, and our improvised medical care had her wrapped up awkwardly in several places, but she was an oddity, a creature that only a very select few could really work on.  That was what made me worry.

Halfway across the city, her brother was hunched over, only his shoulders and part of his back visible over the skyline.  Now and then he moved, producing a horrendous crashing sound.

“I wonder if he’s having fun,” I asked.

Helen smiled through the curtain of blood-stained hair that covered her face, moving her head to try and look up at her brother.  She couldn’t seem to see him with the way she slouched forward and then let her head droop, conserving energy.

Her resilience in the face of multiple gunshots was giving me a newfound respect for what her brother must be like.

“Does he enjoy things?  Does he have good days?  Imagine the Lambs with him in tow.  There’s Evette, there’s Jessie, then you’ve got Ashton, Gordon, Helen, Lillian, and-”

“You’re leaving yourself out?  And including me as a girl?”

“Just imagining hypotheticals.  So you’ve got the core group, and the dice fell down differently and so there’s no Sylvester, maybe throw Hubris in there from an earlier point of view, because I like the idea that the real Evette would come up with something like that as part of her problem solving mindset, and so Gordon gets Hubris as a puppy that grows with him.  Because I really think he took to that dog and other-Gordon deserves to have him for longer.”

“That’s a nice thought, Sy,” Jessie said.  Helen nodded.

“And then you just stick Neph in the group.  Subtlety out the window.  Gordon’s got Hubris and sends him to go attack the bad guy.  Nope!  Neph strikes, attacking with his sleeping dragon.”

“And the nice glowy what-if is ruined,” Jessie said.

“They could totally have a rivalry, even.  Because Gordon would need to have one with someone to be happy and healthy.”

“Okay, Sy,” Jessie said.  “You’re getting off track.”

“It makes for interesting thoughts on which lines the group breaks on.  Is it the unconventional thinkers, with the Ibbot siblings and Evette on one side, and the rational, serious types with Gordon, Ashton, Jessie and Lillian-”

Jessie covered my mouth with her hand.

“You’re always a little fuzzy around the edges when you come back from the brink, Sy,” she said.

“Mmph,” I said.  Then I gestured.  Lies.

“It’s true,” she said.  “You get a little bit wobbly.  Minor blood loss and exhaustion might be helping to keep you wobbly.  But those are our people in there.  We made pledges to them.”

I nodded, Jessie’s hand clamped against my lower face.

“Of the last forty-five times we’ve been in a situation like this, me asking you to be serious, with good reason to be serious, you’ve only listened half the time.  It’s actually very close to fifty percent, which… really says a lot.  Are you actually going to be serious?”

I stuck my tongue out, and as slowly as I was able, I licked the palm of the hand that was clamped over my mouth.

I did get the faint break in composure I was looking for.  A flash, too brief for my battered senses to even fully assess before they were gone, then a glance away, as if she was disappointed in herself for giving me that.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, her hand dropping away.

“It was either that, or I was going to gesture something like ‘big sleep dragon’.”

“We don’t really have a gesture for dragon.  Lizard-beast?”

I gestured.  Man.  Meat.

Her composure broke for real.  She was so caught off guard that she snorted a little.  She pushed her glasses up to cover her face with her hands.

“It sounds quiet,” I said, getting serious.  “No sound from inside, except maybe the patter of talking.  We’ll know more as we get close.  The gunfire was brief, it really does look like a surrender, like you said.  What can see through windows suggests that they’re calm, not agitated.”

“We should still focus,” Jessie said.

“I don’t know about you, blushing and thinking about Helen’s brother’s pendulum, but it’s an established fact that I can think about multiple things at once and it’s usually pretty good thinking.”

“Yeah?  Then regale us with your brilliant idea, sir.”

“I don’t have the slightest of clues how to tackle this.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“This is your turn to step up, say you know the building layout and we’ve got this.”

“In a strange city, with no prior experience?”

“That’s where you say that you recognize the building design, it’s by so-and-so an architect, he builds things certain ways, and so we know there’s going to be an access point here and here and there.”

“I don’t have anything.  But I’m going to read up on architects, if I get a chance.  There can only be so many tall building designers.”

Helen reached out, waving a hand in front of us.

Her hands moved, and I could see the concerted effort she was making to get shaking fingers into specific shapes.  The more effort she put in, the more her fingers seemed to shake, until they locked up.

She remained like that for a long moment, hands in claws, head bowed and face covered by hair, before I reached out to take her hands.  Her head moved, resting so it lay sideways on Jessie’s shoulder.

“You want to say something?” I asked.

Helen nodded, her head still sideways.

The phantom Helen, intact, stepped to the fore, Fray’s arms around her shoulders, a possessive embrace.

Think like Helen thinks.  I can finish the sentences of any of the Lambs.  The other Lambs have changed some, but I can figure her out like this, can’t I?

Her hand pulled free of mine, and as if it were heavy, she lifted it, indicating a direction.

As if answering, her brother tore up the next part of the street.  I could hear the distant avalanche of falling construction as he let it all settle.

“Okay,” I said.

She indicated the building that Cynthia’s soldiers and our rebels were gathered in.

“Right.”

Then, with uncooperative hands, she reached for the side of her skirt.  There was a pocket hidden among pleats, and a small weight in the pocket.

My mind skipped along possibilities.  Both Mary and Helen often kept some money in the same leather fold that had the badge we’d been given ages ago, that bore the Radham crest and the short message and signature that gave us a degree of access.

Had given.

The intact Helen held up the badge, indicating the emblem.

“Radham,” I said.  Helen nodded.  I then eyed the other Helen, who beat bloody Helen in touching her throat.  “Buildings and cities are lifeforms.  They need air, water, food of a sort, they need a spine.”

Helen was nodding with as much energy as I’d seen from her since she got shot.

“The building has its own veins and arteries, airways.  You want to use the airways?”

Helen nodded.

“I’ll have you know that those airways are almost always half-filled with dust, they have nails sticking through everywhere, and half of them have ecosystems to keep them clear of rodents and pests.”

“But it’s a way of accessing them,” Jessie said.

Helen made a clumsy gesture.

“And Helen thinks it’ll be a healthier, more robust system, because it’s a taller building,” I said.

“I’m halfway convinced that you’re just making this nonsense up and saying Helen said it because I trust her sincerity more than I trust yours,” Jessie said.

I made my best ‘innocent’ face.

Jessie brushed at my face with her hand.  “Don’t do that.  Put that away.  It’s creepy.”

I smiled and looked up at the building.  It was tall, it wasn’t especially pretty, and it didn’t look like it did a fantastic job of being utilitarian either.

“Our kids deserve some sacrifice, huh?” I asked.

“They gave up their old lives,” Jessie said.  “They deserve more than just some.”

“How long do you think we have to wait until the next shift comes to relieve the guys standing outside?” I asked.

“I couldn’t begin to guess,” Jessie said.

“Guess,” I said.  “And come on.  We want to be ready when they do.”

“It’s already been a while, but it wouldn’t be too trivial a length of time.  I’d have to guess ten minutes.  Fifteen at most.”

“I bet it’s one,” I said.  “Want to bet who’s more right?”

We crossed the street from a point they couldn’t easily see us, and then we made our way closer to the building.  I mentally counted the seconds, and gestured clearly as the time limit hit.

I was off by twenty seconds.  We spotted the soldiers guarding the side door of the apartment building, and the relief guard stepped out to greet them as we took stock of their number.

I’d figured a minute because I had seen soldiers checking their watches with increasing frequency, because they weren’t lighting up new cigarettes, and because they were increasingly antsy, as if they were only feeling the cold now that there was a very short time before they could go inside.

Three soldiers to a door.  Their job was less to shoot and more to keep watch and make sufficient noise to alert the rest if trouble came up.  That posed us the task of going through them to get inside.

“You should wait here,” I told Helen.

She shook her head.

“I know you aren’t going to.  But you should,” I told her.

She made her hands into claws, scratching them in the general direction of the soldiers.  I wondered if that was perhaps a little overly optimistic.  She barely had it in her to stand straight, let alone fight.

Three was doable, in a specific set of circumstances.  We needed the drop on them, we needed them to be unarmed, or we needed them to be out of earshot of any reinforcements.  Preferably two of the three.

“Helen,” I said.  “Can you give me a cat noise?”

She barely moved, but my version of Helen gave me a theatrical-quality unimpressed look.

“Fine.  Can you give me a dying cat noise?” I asked.  “Those are the best ones.”

Helen opened her mouth, and she managed to produce a sound that resembled an old cat in a screw press; it was tortured, ragged, and yowly.

I motioned for her to stop, and I listened, waiting.

As predicted, the soldiers commented on the sound.  They were concerned, they didn’t want to leave their post, but a sound like that bore investigating.

I wanted to draw them out, to create a window where they could be ambushed or where we could slip past.

Then I heard one of them say it.  “Get some of the others from inside.”

I sighed.  This wouldn’t be easy.

All in all, it had taken us far too long to find a chink in the defenses, prodding and testing the waters at three different entry points.  At the last one, the side door at the opposite end of the building to the one we had tried first, we ended up waiting until one of them was distracted before making our move.  When one had stepped off to the side to take a leak, we got the attention of the remaining two.  One had stepped inside, and Jessie and I had each taken one of the other two before the three of us slipped inside, just ahead of the incoming group of reinforcements.

They were careful, organized, and they had patrols throughout the ground floor of the building.  But Jessie had enough of a sense of how these places were designed that she’d been able to lead us to the utility closet with access to the access door.

The access door featured a hatch in the floor that would lead down to whatever beast in the cellar was providing the voltaic power to keep the building lit, probably.  The hatch in the ceiling led to the air ducts, which kept heat and airflow available in the various large apartments.  There were few enough doors that I suspected that one apartment had nearly the same footprint as any small, one-level house.

Valentina was talking.  The student council vice president, she was good at talking, at the emotional appeal, the marketing end of things.  It sounded like she and her former superior on the student council disagreed on something important.

Davis sounded as heated as I’d ever heard him as he responded, “Is this how we’re supposed to forge a path ahead, now?  We abandon anything that doesn’t show the slightest sign of working out?”

Yes,” Valentina said.  “Yes, absolutely yes.  What do you expect, Davis?  Sylvester and Jessie are brilliant, but they were never people I expected to be working with in five or ten years.  This is a stepping stone.  Just like time in the Academy was.”

“You see us with them in five years?”

“Maybe!  Listen, Davis- no, Davis, listen to me, don’t turn your back.  Listen.  The seas are stormy out there.  We’re individual ships without a port to call home.  If our current employers aren’t up for keeping us fed, sheltered, safe, and giving us an opportunity to grow and learn, then we go someplace with someone who can.”

“That’s disingenuous.  You’re arguing to your audience, not me.”

“Explain,” the Treasurer cut in.

“She buried the appeal to safety in there.  All of you are feeling pretty darn unsafe right now. That’s alright, that’s natural.  But what we’re doing, going rebel, it was never going to be safe.  Now that’s finally hitting home, and I’ll be first to admit it’s lousy, but this was the deal with the devil I and every single one of you happened to sign.  We knew this day would come.  Anyone who pretended different was lying to themselves.”

“I have heard Sylvester admit a half dozen times that he doesn’t expect to live another two or three years.  The deal with the devil was that we would make ourselves available to Sylvester and Jessie so long as they made themselves useful enough to deserve us.  It was always going to be transient.”

“Can I break your confidence?” Davis asked.

“About?”

There was a pause.  I began to crawl further along the wooden ventilation shaft, feeling my way to avoid the nails and carcasses.

The pause, I realized, was Valentina and Davis having a brief whispered conversation.

“Enough of that,” I heard a man say.

“It wasn’t meat to be in confidence,” Valentina said, at normal speaking volume.

“It was a private conversation, I wanted to be sure,” Davis said.  “You told me you fell in love with Sedge and what it represented.  That you felt happy.  Our bosses provided that.  That’s worth something.  It’s worth us not turning around and immediately jumping ship.”

“They have guns.  I don’t want to get shot at, I don’t want anyone that I’ve gotten to know to get shot at.  I fell in love with Sedge because of the people who occupied it, because of the freedom it represented.  I’m grateful to our employers for giving us that venue and giving us some direction, but what made Sedge Sedge wasn’t that.  We did it.  Collectively.”

“You’re pulling a ‘queen and all her subjects’ on me.”

“What’s this?” another student asked.

“Appealing to loyalties of the crowd,” the Treasurer said.

“Ah.”

It looked like our students were defecting, or enough were defecting that it was impacting how the enemy was handling them.  Cynthia’s soldiers had to have seen us enter the city.  They had adjusted and moved their forces, and moved against our people as we were getting sorted out.  But the forces here were now holding position, which meant they expected company to arrive.

“A gun to my head counts for a lot.  I don’t know about you,” Valentina said.  “But if they’re willing to give us work and shelter and do what Sylvester and Jessie were willing to, I’m willing to accept the gun as a motivator and do what I might be willing to do otherwise.”

“That rebel group that’s sitting in the other room is ninety-nine percent male.  Beattle, by virtue of association with all-girl’s schools, has a disproportionate fifty-fifty balance.  Do the math, Valentina.  They won’t necessarily want you for your brains.”

“That can be taken two ways, Davis.  Both are unflattering.”

“Hold up,” the Treasurer said, talking over Davis’s response.  “Stop.”

“I phrased that poorly,” Davis said.

“You did,” Valentina said.

“Why don’t we give someone else a chance to raise their voices?”

The discussion continued, with Mabel taking the floor.  I moved on, with Jessie and Helen following behind.  I could guess how most of the conversation would unfold, who would go where, and how things might flow from that point.

The surrender hadn’t been enticing enough.  The prospect of recruiting several hundred students had been.  I wasn’t sure who had fought for it or against it, but they had made the offer and now all bets were off.  Valentina and Davis were debating things with students as an audience.

But they weren’t the voices I wanted or needed to listen to.  The real danger was the rebel group that inhabited the building.  They were the ones who were holding our people hostage.

The trick was to navigate the vents until we found a point where we could overhear the rebels.  It made for a lot of crawling through ducts, two fingers on one of my hands in bad shape, my shoulder protesting at my being bent over.

I’d offered Helen a chance to sit out, and she hadn’t.  I could most certainly do my share while she was struggling.

We found a spot where acoustics brought noise into the vents, a crossroads between multiple vents, with the next best thing to an open space in the middle of the chosen sector.   A ladder extending up was especially useful, because it provided headroom.  Helen, Jessie and I sat there, Jessie in the middle.  Helen clung to her and draped over her, and Jessie turned away from Helen to fixate on my shoulder, undoing sodden bandages.

I called out, using those same acoustics to speak out to this entire part of the building.

“Cynthia is dead or dying.  The woman crawls desperately through the drains, and the giant is tearing up the street as fast or faster than she can move.  She will make a mistake.  She will get tired.  Your leader will die, if she isn’t dead already.”

All chatter had died down.

Someone in the enemy ranks shouted out, “Where are you?”

I was tempted to give a joke answer, but then Jessie pre-emptively elbowed me.

I elbowed her back.

“Cynthia is your lowest priority,” I spoke.  “There’s a group of your people due east of here.  They sent you ahead, or you reported to them.  Franz led that particular group.”

I let the words hang.

There was more shouting and there were more attempts to provoke a direct response from me.  Some even called out for me to show myself.

That could come later, if they were especially uncooperative.

“Franz is dead,” I announced.  I paused, to give that reality some gravity.  “The others… paralyzed.  Eyes lost from sockets.  It was messy and wholly deserved.  I focused on disabling them.  Smoke inhalation will have helped.  The building is made of treated wood, so it wasn’t burning well, last we saw.  There are two places you could be, and they aren’t here.”

There were more shouts, more threats.  There were several gunshots, aimed at the ceiling.  From our vantage point, we could see down the length of most of the ducts.  None of the shots seemed to penetrate the ducts themselves.

They could come in after us, was the big threat, but that was a tricky proposition for all involved.

“I’ve told you what I did to the others.  That was for hurting a friend of mine.  Use your imagination to figure out what I’ll do to you if you kill anyone important to me.”

I heard more gunshots, and the timing was such that I was pretty sure that it was a response to my threat.

Jessie pointed, however, and I could see the faint light that was coming into one of the long ducts near us, a faint shaft of light spearing up.

Shooting at us, not at the kids.

It was too difficult, with what went into sturdy buildings like this one.  I could hear the frustration in the words they exchanged, even if they had been closer or louder so I could make sense of it.

“Cynthia is desperate, a giant on her heels, and she’s resorted to crawling through ice cold water in the drains.  Franz’s group burns.  Every second counts.  You can go if you let us slip the noose.

“Never forgive,” I heard a voice.  One of Cynthia’s diehards.

“Then try forgetting, not forgiving.  This whole embarrassing rebel-on-rebel episode has to stop.”

There were more responses, more shouts, many vulgar.

I could sense the change in tone though.  I could hear the conversation between groups.

“Killing me gets you small fame and a small bounty,” I said.  “Then because you chose this, you chose to tie my hands and force me to act, you’re left  leaderless.  No Franz, no Cynthia.”

It was, in a way, a turning of tables.  They had been exploiting much this situation with our own rebels.

All that said and done, the best thing to do was to be quiet.  Opposing discussions continued and intermingled in a way that mirrored the debates I’d heard between Davis and Valentina.  They started talking about the people who should go, if anyone went.  Following that, the if disappeared, they started talking about more people going.

I closed my eyes, my role done, and rested my head Jessie’s shoulder, my hand on her leg.

We gave them time, and they used it to make their decision.  They’d known something was wrong, I suspected.  The communication and coordination was too great.

When I emerged, I found the area empty.  They’d left our people alone and vacated the area.  A mutual truce.

They were soldiers, but they were soldiers of a stripe that needed someone to follow.  Threatening the loss of Cynthia gave them pause.  Taking Franz would take away more security.  With the first and second in command out of the picture, there wasn’t much to be said and done.

The congregation of Beattle rebels emerged from the rooms they had been sequestered in.

I met Valentina’s eyes, and she looked away.

“It was good,” I told her.  “Good bluff.”

“That was a bluff?” Mabel asked.

It wasn’t a bluff, but I wasn’t about to say it.  If she was going to stick around after making a vehement case against going, I needed to give her the chance to save face.

She smiled, and it wasn’t a sure smile, and I smiled back, with roughly the same confidence.

Something would have to be done longer-term.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.14 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.14

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Helen’s brother stood straight for the first time in a while, finally visible over the shorter buildings.  His mouth was slack, his eyes wide enough to reveal the whites even from a good ways away.  He arched his back so his belly stuck out, his arms down and away from his body, and he began writhing, rocking his upper body left and right.

“What’s that about?” Jessie asked.

Helen was sitting in a chair, with three of our student doctors tending to her.  Her back was to the wall next to the window, but the window was in arm’s reach.  She raised a hand and tapped the window clumsily.

“Hey Helen,” I said. “Want me to interpret?”

She moved her hands in an abstract way, as if trying to reassure me.  I was reminded of the doctors at the Academies who worked with clay to figure out the shape and ratios needed for a new creation.

One of her eyes looked up at me to double check I was paying attention, then tapped her collarbone with one fist, only barely missing the young lady who was investigating one of the bullet holes through her ribcage.

“You want to be clear… no.  You’re clear, you’re sure?”

She made a low, pleased gurgling sound in her throat, then, hands in stiff claws, she swiped the window.

“You’re positive that he’s… scratching.”

She pointed her hands up.

“Scratching the sky.”

She paused, looked down at her body, then looked up at me and reached for my chest.  The other, intact Helen that only I could see was doing much the same from the other direction.  I could follow the trajectories and figure out the destinations.

“Nipple,” I said, quickly, before she could get a grip on me.  Even if she was weakened, I wasn’t about to let Helen of all people flip my nip.

I was really glad I had the translation thing down as well as I did, because her hand dropped away, leaving me intact and pain free.  Bullet dodged.

“Oh, I see.  Have to say it with the right tone of voice.  Ahem,” I said.  I adopted a prim, Helen tone of voice, like she liked to do when she was being ridiculous.  “It’s really quite obvious.  In my expert opinion, he’s trying to scratch the sky with his nipples.

Helen moved her arms carefully so as not to interfere with the multiple ex-students working on her, and she managed a light applause.

“Yes,” Jessie said.  “Absolutely, that’s what he’s trying to do.”

“He’s stiff,” I said. “He was hunched over and working hard, tearing up the road, and he just stood up and ooh, ouch, it hurts, but oh, not used to being mobile and active, he wonders how he’s supposed to deal with this?  Not socially conscious or used to his own body at all, so…”

I spread my hands.

“…So he tries to scratch the sky with his nipples,” Jessie said.

I smiled.

Helen’s brother remained where he was, bending over backward, barely balanced, his arms dangling behind him, facing skyward.  He wriggled for a moment more without righting himself, and then made a noise that carried over the city.  A moan.

Helen reached out.  I caught her hand and squeezed it.  “He’s just grumbling.”

She gave me a weaker squeeze back.

The ex-student who was working on Helen’s stomach sat back in the chair.  He rubbed at his damp forehead with his forearm, his hands bloody to the wrists.  I handed him a damp cloth from the bowl.

“Thank you,” he said.  Helen was sitting in the chair, her sweater cut off and her blouse unbuttoned, though the shirt hung so it covered her breasts.

“Thoughts?” I asked him.

“Terrifying,” he said.

Helen gurgled.

“That’s one thought,” I reminded him.  “Without a second or third, it’s hard to mark out the points, draw a line and figure out where the thought is going.”

“Uh, yeah,” he said.  He looked at the other two students, both girls, who were working on the side of Helen’s face and her leg, respectively.

Jessie spoke, “Terrifying because you’re not confident, because Helen is a marvel of science, because…”

“All of the above?  I had my doubts when you asked for the the best neogenesis students in the room, but that call was right on the mark.  I’m pretty good with this stuff, I worked in a lab with graduate doctors putting together life from scratch.  Soups, vats, artificial uteri, blends, picks, mashes, top-downs, bottom-ups, display pieces.  Hell, I even got to watch over shoulders from the beginning as the G.D.s did a human lookalike from scratch.  He couldn’t do anything except sit in a chair and look pretty, but it gave me a sense of what goes into this.”

“Narcissus?” the ex-student who was digging bullet fragments out of Helen’s leg asked.

“Narcissus two.”

“I never heard about the second one,” she said.

“Yeah, well, it was less groundbreaking.”

“We need you to piece her together enough that she’s stabilized,” I said.  “Just long enough that we can find someone with the skills to do a more comprehensive fix.  Can you do that for us?”

The student had a look in his eyes that reminded me of Lillian.  I’d seen it when she was focused on her external muscle project.  I’d probably worn it myself countless times.  His thoughts were on the work, the science, the ratios and chemical names and the obscure names for components of a nonhuman body flying through his head.

“All those things I mentioned?  The soups, the containers, the top-down, bottom-up, take this working piece from this project and graft it to that one?”

“All those things,” I said, echoing him.

“All of the above,” he said.  “It’s all in play.  It’s like… I’m trying to think of how to explain this to ignoramuses.”

Excuse me?” I asked.

Mr. All-of-the-Above startled at the tone.  “Oh!  No, no, I didn’t mean that as an insult, only that you don’t know Academy science.  You’re ignorant in that you don’t know.”

“Quit while you’re behind,” the girl who was working on Helen’s face said.

“Okay,” he said.  “Sorry, Sylvester.  Sorry Jessie.”

“It’s fine,” I said, making a hand gesture that he should keep going.  “Explain it to the ignoramus.”

He was flustered enough he couldn’t quite seem to gather the thoughts necessary to make a good analogy.

“If I had to take a stab at it,” the girl working on Helen’s face said, “If you gave me a maths problem, I could do it.  I’m pretty good at maths.  But there’s enough at work here that it’s like asking us to go through a maths textbook, front to back, there are a few curveballs slipped in here and there that might even qualify as end-of-term projects, and you’re asking us to hurry through it.”

I pursed my lips.

“We might need equipment,” Leg-girl said.  “There’s something in the hip I’d have to grow a replacement for if it’s even replaceable.  I think its an endpoint for one of three distinct systems that control how it moves.”

“She,” Jessie said, voice firm.

“She.  Sorry.”

“We’re being particular and sensitive because we’re tense,” I said.  “Helen needs to come out of this okay.”

“Three systems, you said?” Mr. All-of-the-above asked.  “Hydraulic, pneumatic…”

“And voltaic, I think,” Face-girl said.

“Yeah,” Leg-girl confirmed.  “The hip thing, I think it’s a hydraulic sub-system.  Fluid-driven, with fluid being drawn to key points or released, to tense or relax other parts or exert strength.  If one key point fails, others take up the slack in the hydraulic system.  If the hydraulic system fails due to damage to too many key points, then the pneumatic and voltaic systems take over.”

“Except too many systems have taken too much damage,” Face-girl said.

Off in the distance, Helen’s brother had righted himself.  He was being less careful about the city now, it seemed.  He gripped a clocktower and was in the process of toppling it.  It was sturdy in construction, but the only horizontal pressure it was supposed to endure was a stiff wind, not one of the world’s largest humanoids pushing on it.

“Is she running purely off of voltaic strength?” All-of-the-above asked.

Helen shook her head.

The clocktower toppled.  The resulting crash was most likely audible to just about everyone in the city.  The building rumbled as though Big Neph had showed up and was shaking it.

Each of the three young doctors stopped what they were doing, eyes wide.

“It’s fine,” I said.  Helen was tapping her chest, where a gaping hole stood out over her heart.  “Helen is saying the heart-driven system is in working order.”

“What?”  All-of-the-above asked.  “No, honey.  You have a few heart-like structures and supporting structures, but the hydraulic system is most definitely not working.”

Helen made a ‘ptah’ noise, then looked up at me, rolling the one eye I could see through the blood-sticky hair.

“Be good,” I told her.

She looked at Jessie.

“You might as well show them,” Jessie said.  “So long as it won’t kill you.”

“Oh, is that how this works now?” I asked.  “You ask dad and he says no, and so you ask mom?  And since when am  the reasonable, conservative one in this pair, Jess-”

Helen went limp, head lolling back, and blood began pouring out of her wounds anew, with one or two arterial spurts in places where there shouldn’t be arteries.

The overlapping shouts and cries of distress of the ex-students drew attention from elsewhere, or perhaps they’d heard the crash of the falling building and were coming to alert Jessie and I.  Four or so of them crowded at the door and on seeing Helen, they panicked.

She stopped the bleeding on her own and began the process of pulling herself together, righting her head and sitting up straighter.

It took a moment for the ex-students to gather themselves.  The one at Helen’s leg spoke first, in a very quiet voice.  “I would recommend not doing that again.  You know yourself better than we do, apparently, but that put a lot of stress on an already stressed hydro.”

“Oh,” Mr. All-of-the-above said.  “Oh lords.  Wait, if that’s the hydraulic setup doubling as cardiac while being entirely capable of functioning at standstill, is the pneumatic-”

Helen gurgled, already nodding.

“And voltaic?” he asked, indicating his head with one bloody finger.

Helen nodded.

He made a face like he was in pain.  The other two ex-students didn’t look very happy either.

“Thoughts?” I tried again.

“Bad news is I don’t think I’ve ever been this out of my depth, and I’ve sat an exam for a course I hadn’t actually attended the lectures for.”

“You can bullshit exams,” I said.  “We need a liberal application of bullshit here.  Just enough to postpone the final results.”

“No,” he said.  “No.  I failed that exam.  I ended up at Beattle, remember?”

“Okay, but this isn’t an exam,” I said.  “This is-”

“-Worse,” Mr. All-of-the-above said.

“I can barely wrap my head around how she works,” Face-girl said.

Mr. All-of-the-Above wiped at his hands anew with another wet cloth.  “But, in the interest of being positive, there’s good news.”

“Do tell,” I said.  “Please.”

“It looks like she knows something about how she works.”

Helen nodded.

Mr. All-of-the-above smiled, “Even a nod here and there can help.  She might be the equivalent of next year’s maths textbook when we haven’t even finished this year’s, but she can let us know if we’re going the right direction.  That’s good thing number one.”

I liked his positivity.  I didn’t want to admit it out loud, but it was positivity I was sorely in need of.

“Good thing number two?  She’s sturdy.  Hot beans, is she sturdy.”

“Ptah,” Helen made the sound.  “Tch.  Tch.”

“Helen says you shouldn’t call a young lady sturdy, sir,” I translated.

Helen clapped her hands again, and Jessie rolled her eyes.

“I think I can pull this off with her help,” Mr. All-of-the-Above said.  He paused.  “Maybe.”

“Yeah?” I asked.  I looked at the other ex-students.  The two girls looked a little less positive, but they felt able to give me confirmation.

Jessie visibly sagged with relief.  I took a deep breath for what felt like the first time since morning.

“But if we don’t get some more knowledgeable attention trained her way soon, this is going to be a lot less pretty,” Mr. All-of-the-Above said.

“Yeah,” I said.  I moved closer to the window, one side of my body touching one side of Jessie’s.  Feeling the stiffness in my back as I positioned my head, I rested my chin on her shoulder, reached up, and placed her blonde braid so it laid on top of my head.

We looked out at Big Neph, who was treading heavily through the rubble he had created with the toppling of the clocktower.

“At least we have an idea of where to look,” Jessie said.

“Mm hmm,” I murmured.

“We should wrangle our people,” she said.

“Already thinking about how,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

I lowered my voice so only Jessie could hear me.  “That said, I want nothing more right now than to get Helen fixed, then to crawl into the biggest, fluffiest bed with the heaviest covers with you right next to me, and stay there for longer than necessary.”

“That sounds nice,” she said.  She made her voice very small, so we wouldn’t be overheard.  “Just to sleep, though?”

“We’d have to talk, of course,” I said.

She twisted around, so my chin no longer rested on her shoulder, and she gave me the over-the-glasses librarian look.

I was already grinning, mocking her with my expression, making it clear I wasn’t being serious.

She extended her arm, and hooked my elbow with hers.  I caught on right away, and we walked to the door of the room together.

“You do have obligations,” she said.

“Rebel group to coordinate, Crown States to save, Infante to topple…”

“You owe Mabel a bath,” Jessie said.  We were out of earshot of the others.  “You promised and you’re overdue.”

“Ah, right,” I said.  Then I raised an eyebrow.

“She and I talk,” Jessie said, before I could even ask the question.  “She doesn’t want to overstep or get in the way, so she comes to me and asks.”

“That’s good.  I like her.”

“I know you like her.  I like her because she’s honest, forthright, and sharp enough to not completely fall behind.  She took good care of you when you had the plague crawling across you, and that earns a lot of points in my book, because you’re important to me,” Jessie said.

I reached up and picked up the braid that normally draped over one of Jessie’s skinny shoulders, and fixed its position.  I let my finger brush her neck.

I liked how put together Jessie was.  The glasses, the hair, the clothing, it was all done with deliberation.  She smelled like the hair products and soaps girls used, faintly floral, and I knew the smell had been carefully chosen, after an analysis of all the scents she’d come across in her lifetime as Jamie the second and then as Jessie.

She took her time responding, letting me focus on her for the moment.  When she finally spoke, she said, “So give her her bath, because she deserves it.  Invite her to sleep in the ridiculously fluffy bed with the heavy covers with you and me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jessie said, reaching up to put a hand on either side of my neck.  “Because you only ever sleep well if you sleep in a puppy pile.  You were content in Tynewear, you were at ease, sitting on that windowsill with our music playing and tea beside you, but you didn’t truly relax.  You don’t stop unless you have a collection of people relaxed and in close proximity to you.  That’s just your warped psychology.”

“Probably,” I said.  I let my forehead rest against hers.

“Now put that psychology to work, Sy,” Jessie said.  “Tend your flock.  I remember some things Ibbot said about Helen, and I remember bits and pieces about Lillian’s work on her.  I’ll try to provide guidance.  If we need you, I’ll come get you.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

We broke away from each other, and I glanced back at Helen before heading down the hall.

We hadn’t settled in the apartments, in the end.  The concern was that Cynthia’s people would backtrack and find us.  I wasn’t sure the fear was especially valid, but we had a few hundred ex-students and scattered gang members with their individual fears and concerns.  A token effort to move a few streets down went a long way.

Students had settled in various rooms of the building.  The buildings at the periphery of the city had been evacuated, many people had taken their most prized possessions with them, and it was relatively easy to move ourselves in, simply to borrow beds, couches, loveseats and cots.  In the effort to be conscientious, we’d tried to occupy only the empty apartments and the ones where people had clearly moved out, but having three hundred bodies made that impossible to fully guarantee.

The various group leaders were supposed to be keeping tabs on their people and keeping their individual groups to set areas, but the lines had blurred over the last several months; it was hard to truly say who belonged where.

To get any sense of where three hundred people in two separate buildings were, I needed to find people like Bea, Davis, Gordon Two and Mabel.  I had been distracted by my own need for medical attention and Helen’s situation, so I’d dropped the ball, and needed to figure out where it had rolled off to.  I looked for open apartment doors and listened for conversation, hoping that a combination of the two would mean finding some students who were willing and able to point me toward one of my lieutenants.

“…not saying the perks are bad or that I regret going, but how old is he?  Fifteen?  Sixteen?”

“Thereabouts.”

Eighteen, actually, I thought.

Students were talking, and I’d found myself eavesdropping.

“Listen, I know I don’t know everything.  But I think about the people I saw in the three different Academies I attended at, and there were some damn smart kids there.  Whip smart, enough it scared me.”

“Your point being?”

“That they were still kids.  I’m not saying he doesn’t pull some good stunts.  I’m not saying Jessie doesn’t have her moments either.  I’m just saying that they’re not quite adults.”

“Sedge was good.  I liked Sedge.  It was better living than I thought it would be.  Would have liked more time in the city, but I totally got that there were logistics issues with that.”

“Okay, not denying that.  But Sedge felt like something they stumbled on and took credit for.”

“I don’t agree.”

“You don’t?”

“No.  There have been a lot of things you could say that about.  Things I know you have said things about.  But I think it’s far more likely that they know how to stumble.  They know where to look.”

“Maybe.  Maybe.  Really stressing the maybe here.  Except even if that was true, is that what we want?”

“I’m happy to wait until we see the results of the big play.”

“I was happy to wait, but I heard Valentina’s pitch, I got a good look at how Cynthia’s Spears operate, I can’t help but think that if Valentina was on the level and the Spears were open to new recruits, I wouldn’t mind something more directed.”

“Directed?”

“They know what they want.  They have drive, passion, they’re angry.  They give me the impression they surgically target, they do the job well, and they come back in one piece with their enemies heads in a bag.  Sylvester and Jessie-”

“Won.  They came out ahead.”

“They say they did.  And I probably believe them.  But there’s always the question mark, isn’t there?  How much is our leader telling the truth?  How much is he pulling our strings?  There’s not as much direction there.  There’s not a lot of definition.  He has some old ties to the Academy and knows his stuff, okay.  He has ties to the kids we saw-”

“Same thing.”

“Kind of.  Vagueness, right?  Ambiguity.  He’s got ties to Fray that people talked about at first and now nobody really wants to say anything straight out about it, Sylvester and Jessie are running the show and people are mostly fine with it, but… it feels like they operate on instinct, in grey areas, making a lot of moves that are supposed to make sense later.”

“They have a good track record, don’t they?  Or is this going to be another ‘they say’ thing?”

“I don’t know.  But when they came limping back and started a conversation with those Spears that Davis and Valentina had us surrendering to, well, they were limping and bleeding.  They run on instinct and if you gave me the choice between the two things, maybe I’d rather not be limping and bloody because instinct didn’t go far enough.”

“You want to be a soldier?”

“I joined because fuck the Academy.  Fuck the Crown.  Fuck them.  Fuck them for making me disappoint my mom and aunt and sister.  Fuck them for not handling the plague properly, fuck them for the constant wars.  All that fucking, it needs some thrust.  Point me at some moving bodies and let me make them stop moving.  I want that, and all I’m saying is that if the offer was given to me right now, I might think about joining the Spears.”

“Yeah, maybe.  You make a decent case.  Why only ‘might’?”

“Well, the Spears look like they have an awful lot of spears and not enough spear-holders, if you know what I mean?  We’ve got more skirts over here, and some of them are even school uniform skirts, which are the best ones.”

“Ah huh.”

“What?  I’m a guy!  I’m supposed to indulge.  You’re supposed to indulge.”

The conversation continued, but it quickly veered into the topic of ‘indulging’, and the biologically improbable interpretations of the act, as told by two people who had never indulged.

My thoughts lingered on the criticisms, with the lingering being deep enough that I was unaware that Pierre had been standing at the other end of the hallway for some time.

I passed in front of the open door, not glancing within, and I could hear the pause in conversation as they glimpsed me.  I ignored them and joined Pierre.

“Point me to my lieutenants?” I asked.

“Can do,” he said.  “How is miss Helen?”

“Odds are better than expected, so long as we can get some prompt access to a black coat with the right qualifications,” I said.

“Good,” Pierre said.  We descended the stairs to the lower floors of the building.

“Did you catch that conversation?” I asked.

“Some,” he said.  “I think it’s the nature of young men and women to wonder who they are and where they belong.  I would blame that basic nature before anything else.”

“Maybe,” I said.  A few of the criticisms still felt a touch too on point.  “How widespread is this sentiment?”

A lot of other people might have waffled, asked clarifying questions.  Pierre didn’t.

“One in ten or one in fifteen, if I had to guess,” he said.  “Valentina is one of them.  I would be more worried about the fact that they’re finding listening ears.”

“Alright,” I said.  “We’ll find something for them to do soon.”

“I think a lot of people had complaints, but during the honeymoon phase, they kept them in check,” Pierre said.  “I saw this happen with previous employers.  Gangs.  One bad event gives a lot of people permission to voice doubts they had been keeping to themselves.  This scare was that.”

“I just don’t like the fact that the doubts exist, and I don’t like the idea that they’d rather be with Cynthia,” I said.

“Only a small and vocal few, mind you.”

“Even so.”

“Even so, yes.  These things often blow over, Sy,” my talking rabbit said.

“But not always,” I said.

“No, and rarely in a tidy fashion,” Pierre said.

“We’ll find something for them to do soon,” I said, again.  “As soon as Helen is in at least partial working order, we move.”

“She’s coming?” Pierre asked.

I looked at Helen, who was walking down the stairs with us, not a drop of blood on her, her smile sunny.  “You coming?”

“Yes,” Helen said.

“She’s coming,” I said.  “She wouldn’t want to be left out in circumstances like this.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.15 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“You’re not coming,” I said.

“Am too,” Helen said.

I had my jacket off and was wearing only my shirt, which was unbuttoned.  The sink in the apartment was the small oyster-shell variety, with only a thin lip around the edge, and in the process of performing my own maintenance, washing up and medical care, I’d balanced roughly thirty objects on the edges.  Moving and getting the things I needed was a bit of an exercise, but the exercise helped keep me sharp, as did the pain.

The bullet I’d taken to my fingers had split the right side of my ring finger and the left side of my middle finger, shattering and dislodging the nails.  The fact that it had split meant it could be knit together.

“I’m coming,” Helen said.  She sat on the toilet, which had the lid down, while Gordon Two worked on final touches.  “I’m restless and I didn’t get to do much of anything before getting shot.”

Which was my fault.  She didn’t sound accusatory, but then, Helen only sounded accusatory if it served her ends.  She was being sweet now, which was a dangerous pairing with her feeling restless.  I wasn’t sure how to communicate that to Gordon Two, or to the other student who’d followed the pair in, a young lady who was sticking to one corner.  She had likely been invited to help Helen with things that a male attendant couldn’t, but that role had to wait.

I wasn’t going to ask.  I’d retreated into the bathroom and taken to my own medical care to sort out my thoughts, and partway through they had found me, started to quiz me, and now there was a whole discussion happening.

I’d joked with Jessie about being like parents, and in this, not getting ten straight minutes of peace ever, we’d definitely hit the mark.

It had been more than ten minutes, between a rinse of my face and hair, looking after my back and shoulder as best as I could, scrubbing off blood, smoke, and dirt, and then finally tending to my hands.  Doing them any earlier would have meant risking getting the bandages on the fingers wet or dirty.  They’d get that way anyhow, but…

Well, I didn’t have a good answer to that.

“Syyyyyy,” Helen cooed.

“I’m thinking,” I said.

“You’re thinking too much,” she said.

“You’re weak,” I said.  “A small dog could beat you in a fight.”

“You’re weak too, Sy, and you’ve always been weak.  Even though you’re better than you were.  But you’re hurting too.”

I gestured for her to ease up.  I didn’t want bystanders to focus too much on my failings.  She gestured agreement.

“All other things aside, you want me to come.  I want to come.  This is easy.”

“That’s an awful lot of things we’re putting aside,” I said.

“But there’s a lot of things to not put aside, like if you leave me behind, then you have to worry about me.”

“Do I?”

“Do we?” Gordon Two asked. “Wait, why do we have to worry about her?”

“I’m trying to be good,” she said.  I could see part of her expression in the mirror.  She was wearing a very dangerous, sultry expression.  “But a young lady has needs, Sy.”

“Uh,” Gordon Two said.  He took his hands off of her.  “Uncomfortable.”

“You’re fine, hon,” Helen said.

“Are you threatening me?” I asked.  “Us?”

“No,” Helen said.  Perfunctory, simple.  “Needs.  The difference between needs and wants is that wants are optional.  Needs can be postponed but never wholly denied.  Ignoring them wounds the body, mind, or spirit.”

“Yes, yes,” I said.  “And you need to murder people, or your spirit will wither.”

“What?” Gordon Two asked.

“Hmm.  It might be more complicated than that,” she said.

“Mind?” I asked.  “Body?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “The lines get blurry.”

“Well,” I said.  “In the interest of nourishing body, mind and spirit, I could try swaying you with promises of sweets.  It might take some doing to detour and stop at the right place, but- no?”

I’d read the expression on her face as I glanced up from my sutures in progress.

“No,” she said, firm.

“But sweets are equivalent to murder,” I said.  “They go in the same bucket.  A bloody, sexy bucket.”

“What?” Gordon Two asked. “Wait.  Slow down.  What?

“If you’re confused and wary right now, then asking questions isn’t going to help,” I said.  I raised my eyebrow as I checked with Helen, peering through the mirror.  “I’m right about the sexy sweet blood bucket?”

Maybe I’d gone too far.  I’d been teasing Gordon Two as part of the discussion, but the girl in the corner had eyes as wide as saucers.  I needed to find a way to bring things to ground and keep them from crawling away from me.

Then Helen spoke.  “They substitute for each other, but they aren’t the same thing.  I can give you a cube of sugar and you can let it melt on your tongue, but it’s not going to be anything like a full meal, is it?”

The act of juggling thoughts about the conversation with Helen, figuring out how to pull things back to avoid scarring the girl in the corner, keeping at least one part of my brain focused on the greater game plan with the professors that were managing Helen’s brother and simultaneously suturing my fingers all ran together.  The trains of thought found themselves on a collision course, and I consequently managed to jab myself with the suturing hook, sticking it right into a part of my finger where I was trying to avoid adding to the nerve damage.

Something off, something wrong, then the pain of stabbing myself, and I wheeled around, no longer viewing the room through the mirror.  I only barely managed to keep from toppling the castle of medical supplies and toiletries I’d erected on the sink’s edge.

The room was empty.

No Helen, no Gordon Two, no girl in the corner.

The pain of the hook in my hand was making my hand shake, which played off of my confusion and alarm by almost emulating a kind of physical reaction.  I’d mastered my poker face long ago, learned to hide erratic breathing and shaking hands, and the artificial imposition of the same effect formed an emotional tunnel, past walls and defenses long established.

I was bothered and my hand shaking made me far less able to take it in stride.  I pushed the hook through, my eyes still scanning the small bathroom, and finished up my finger.

Think.  Get centeredEvaluate reality.

The number of faces and individuals lurking in my head was growing.  Secondary people and people I couldn’t even name, if they existed at all.

I had- what had I done before stepping into the bathroom?  I was bothered by the dissent.  I’d put on a cool face, tried to be reassuring, and assured everyone, from lieutenants to Jessie to Pierre and Shirley that we needed to be patient.  Patience, and we’d have an in.  Patience even though Helen wasn’t well.

Then I had stepped away, on the pretense that I wanted to wash and get tidied up.  I’d wanted space.  As much as I clung to the Lambs and the idea of the puppy pile, I’d woken up to gunshots and Lambs, then immediately moved to maneuvering that scenario, maneuvering among my people, settling Helen, ensuring that we made camp alright, that fears and worries were being assuaged and hopes fostered.  Little things, like how I’d spotted Rudy and Possum in the crowd.

The day had been a storm of that, and the night before had been surgery and torture.  I’d needed a moment, and I hadn’t even gotten it, because my brain hadn’t allowed me it.

I was worn thin.  New faces were using the opportunity to creep in.

They were getting better at catching me off guard.

I finished up my fingers, then pulled on gloves, enduring the pain and the pressure.  I met my own eyes in the mirror, and then fixed my hair, insofar as it could be fixed.

Helen and I had talked about the mind, body, and spirit.  I could look after the body and hope it helped on the other two fronts.  I made sure to drink some water, then double checked I’d washed away the blood and bandaged the wounds, reducing the appearance of scrapes and sorted out my appearance.

This was a show.  I had to represent myself well to my people, because a strong image would help forestall dissent.

I’d finished tending to hair, skin, and what lay beneath, as best as I was able.  Clothes were next.  I took off my shirt, throwing it out, and wore only my jacket and slacks, so my wounds would be better covered up.

I’d expected to have to walk to my room and collect some clothes from my luggage.  Jessie, however, was at the end of the hall, a fresh set of clothes in her hands.

“Good timing,” I said.

She smiled.

I snapped my fingers, adding, “But if you’d walked with a brisker step, you could have peeked.”

“Get dressed,” she said.  “I’m already anxious about delaying this much.”

“Is Helen doing that badly?”

“Helen appears to be stable,” Jessie said.

“Stable is good,” I said.

“Helen is capable of bleeding and not bleeding at her whim, she can projectile vomit blood if she so chooses, and she can use muscle strength to hold many of her wounds closed.  She is a consummate actor.  She might look stable, but she decides her appearance at a whim.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Alright.  Give me a second.”

I took the clothes and got dressed.  It was interesting to see what Jessie had picked out.  The clothes were crisper, the shirt had a cut with a more pronounced collar, the vest was meant to be worn with a suit jacket, but had been collected independently.  She had also included one of my other jackets, a fresh pair of black slacks, and clean socks.

She offered me a steadying hand as I got changed.  I pulled my boots back on, straightened, and swept my hands down my front.  Green shirt, black vest, black slacks and shined black boots.

“I feel like a magician.”

“Good,” Jessie said.

“Is that your thing?  Should I add it to your list of things?  Magicians on trains and sleeping dragons that can knock buildings down?”

She reached up and pressed a lock of hair down where I’d tried to oil it back.  “You’re joking a lot.  Is that Helen’s influence or is it anxiety?”

“You talked to Pierre.”

“He did mention something, but that’s a very small fraction of what I’m asking.”

I shrugged, glancing back at the corners of the bathroom.  “Nah.  Things are getting crowded in the ol’ noggin.”

“New ones?”

I shrugged.  “We can talk about it later.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Yeah.  What’s big Neph doing?”

“Bleeding.”

My eyebrows went up.  “Do tell.”

“Cannons, it sounded like.”

“I missed that!  Okay, that’s what we were waiting for,” I said.  I pulled on the jacket.  It did make for a flattering cut with the vest and shirt.  “Everyone’s ready that’s coming?”

“Should be.”

I suspected that Jessie had been trying to get me into a different frame of mind with the outfit.  To perform.  To show off.  I made the mental adjustments, paying attention to how I stood and how I acted as I descended the stairs rapid-fire, taking her hand in my own.

It was eerie to see Gordon Two and Helen together, talking.  Rudy and Possum were near Shirley.  Multiple eyes were on Jessie and I as we entered the room.

“Big Neph is hurting,” I said.  “That’s our opening.  It shakes the bug box.”

“I’ve stopped trying to keep up with the terms,” Gordon Two said.

“Okay, I’ll simplify,” I said.  I felt energized now.  These were people I liked.  Helen looked as lively as she had since being shot, but from what I could gather, she remained mute.  This was alright as a fresh starting point.  “Cynthia turned her attention to the biggest target.”

“Cynthia, to the best of our knowledge, is still underground, while the giant is trying to dig her up,” Jessie said.

“Cynthia, Cynthia’s people.  They’re coordinated enough they can be considered an organism,” I said.

“Interesting phrasing,” Davis said.

“Point being,” I said, “Is that she and her people are preoccupied with Neph.  Neph is preoccupied with them.”

Helen raised a hand, then indicated me, pointing.

“And as Helen so kindly points out, yes.  Neph was sent here for a reason.  He has Cynthia’s scent.  There’s nothing saying he doesn’t have mine or Jessie’s.  But mostly mine, since Jessie doesn’t officially exist and her alter-ego is dead.”

“Both of them, even,” Jessie said, quiet.

“Helen did not just communicate all that,” the Treasurer said.

Helen moved her hands, nodding emphatically while indicating me.

“She says I’m right,” I said.  Helen nodded.  Jessie’s eye-roll was dramatic enough that my mind supplied an imagined grating sound of eyeball on eye socket.

“I keep telling you guys,” Gordon Two said, “Best thing you can do is roll with it.”

“So let’s see,” I said.  “Gordeux, you’re in?”

“That’s not actually my name, but yes,” Gordon Two said.

“Treasurer?” I asked the square-faced young man.  He had lines of acne at the edges of his face that marked where skin oils had collected around masks.  There was a name for that look that I hadn’t quite placed.  I had teased Lillian about it before.  His hair had been cut recently, and had been cut rather short for the winter.

He dipped his head in assent.

“Who else?  Davis?  You’re here because…”

“I’m coming.  Please.”

“Even a please?  You’re sure?”

“Yes,” he said, with no room for doubt.

“Alright,” I said.  I floundered for a moment.  It would have been nice to have him stay and keep arguing against dissolution, but my focus for the moment was on the performance.  We’d collected Professor Berger and we’d given up that trophy in exchange for Helen.

We needed another concrete win.  A trophy, and a step forward in progress.  We needed a professor, one who could patch Helen up.

“And…”

“Wad,” one of the thugs said.

“And Wad.  I like the name,” I said.  “Good to have some muscle.  That leaves… well, Helen’s coming, I take it.”

“What?” Jessie asked.  “No.”

“Yes,” I said.  Helen nodded yes, emphatically.

“You’re going to have to explain this one to me,” Jessie said.

“We had a long discussion about it,” I said.

“No you didn’t,” Gordon Two said.

“We did.  She was stubborn, but she won me over,” I said.  Helen paused, then nodded.

That got the two of us suspicious looks from several people present.

“I’m not sure about this,” Jessie said.  “On several levels.”

“She didn’t join us to be relegated to the sidelines.  We’re better unified.”

Jessie bit her lip.

“We’re better unified,” I said, again.

“We magnify each other’s strengths, but we magnify weaknesses and character flaws too,” Jessie said.  “You’ve only really improved with the fighting since breaking away from the Lambs.”

“I’m…”  I’m still fairly abysmal on a level playing field, I thought.  “Yeah.  True.  But short of Ibbot, who knows her as well as I do?  And he only focuses on the meat.  Which I admittedly have no clue about.  I get her.  I get that she needs this.  We unify, we cover each other’s weaknesses and magnify each other’s strengths.  It’s better with her out there.”

Helen stood.  She wasn’t in proper working order, but she had been tidied up, and some careful arrangement of hair and fresh clothes had done a lot to make her look better.  She didn’t look strong.

She wrapped me in a hug.

“See?” I asked.

“I see that the two most manipulative members of the Lambs are teaming up against me,” Jessie said, “Playing things up for sympathy and making it so I look like the bad one if I insist she stays.”

Helen and I both nodded with a great deal of force.  We hadn’t coordinated, but we did the exact same thing in near-perfect synchronization.

“Alright,” Jessie said.

I nodded.

As a group, we entered the apartment building’s lobby.

This… it marked a kind of important divide.  The students waited as a congregation, with Mauer standing by, watching.  Not all of the three hundred students were present.  Some had no doubt done the heavy lifting to get bags inside, some would be sleeping after not having slept the night before, they would be taking baths.

But others were staying away because their faith had been broken or bent.  I noted Valentina’s absence.

Even in this crowd, there were people at the fringes who weren’t ours.  They were rebels, which put them in our camp, but they weren’t yet ready to make the sacrifices and take the risks.

I couldn’t really recognize faces, but I could recognize them by sentiment.  Without pinning any particular example to any particular students, I could say that the students on the fringes who looked less enthusiastic were the ones who had done the least amount of work possible, who’d taken to drinking or figuring out how to brew drinks, who had made party drugs and pushed the line with our few rules enough that they had mandated attention and warnings.  I saw a fair number of delinquents and rooftop girls.  I saw some lower-ranking members of the student council too.  They included all types.

A dozen, maybe two dozen?

They counted the easygoing among them, and the easygoing often made friends easily.  They counted the strongly opinionated among them, and the opinionated were rallying points for those with like feelings.

Mabel sat off to one side.  As students rose to feet or made their way toward us, our army of sorts, she remained sitting.

Her smile looked like she was trying to reassure me, saying that she would stay behind, she would wrangle people.

But with a full hundred students joining us and migrating outside, we were leaving a fractured group behind.  I worried Mabel would be outnumbered.

I gave her a brief wave as we left, and a salute to the rest of the room.

Stepping out of the dark hallway and into the street was a shock.  From darkness to sunlight reflecting off of scattered white surfaces and puddles, from a muted warmth to a bitter cold.  Cramped confines to the open city.

We were far enough away from Neph that the view of the giant’s movements and the sounds of what was going on were disconnected.  I could see the puff of explosions on his naked chest, the smoke rolling away from him.  The muted sound of explosions were like the clap of thunder following a lightning strike, though with far less reverberation, far less reach and volume.  It was only now that we were outside that I was truly aware of it.

There were gunshots too.  I knew that the various rebel factions had equipped themselves with some specialized arms.  Cynthia had favored exorcist rifles at one point.  I wasn’t sure they would do much damage to Neph, but the guns I was hearing were powerful enough to be heard at a considerable distance.

There were crowds out in the street, as we got out of the more secluded neighborhood.  People had vacated buildings, feeling as though things were far enough away that they could make a getaway to the outer parts of the city.  It meant traffic and it meant groups of people trying to load essential provisions onto carriages and carts.

Neph wasn’t putting up a very dramatic fight, but he was large enough that even an explosive cannon round caused only a moderate amount of damage.  I couldn’t see the individual wounds, but I could see discoloration where wounds were grouped and where fluids drooled out of wounds.

If Helen could take several bullets and stay standing, I wasn’t sure this would be that successful.  He’d been built for warzones, probably for targeting enemy leaders and destroying them in an unignorable manner that could demoralize whole armies, and his toughness would be designed.

Except that the damage kept targeting the same areas.

This wasn’t Cynthia’s first go-around when it came to giant-slaying.  To use weapons of a sufficient magnitude, scrambling clear of an enemy that could cross a street in a single awkward stride, setting up position in the right areas to fire another battery, it took skill, effort, and a good strategic brain.

“Who’s winning?” the Treasurer asked.  He was hanging further back, with the group, Davis beside him.

“Would be nice if both sides killed or crippled one another,” I said.

Helen gasped.

“Well, it would be ideal if the big guy over there smashed Cynthia’s group to a fine paste and then fucked right off instead of coming for us.  As is, we’ll plan for the worst and if the ideal happens then we can celebrate.  How’s that?”

She sniffed, then reached out to pinch my arm.  Her grip wasn’t sufficient to penetrate my coat.

I wondered how much stamina she really had.

“Keep an ear out,” I told her.  “We’re looking for the speakers, the experiments who were shouting instructions to people on the street.”

She nodded.

“And while we’re talking,” I said, my voice quiet, “If you were to use a metaphor where you talked about me eating sugar as being a hollow, artificial, unfulfilling substitute for eating a real meal, I’d be right to think something was wrong, yeah?”

She paused, giving me an odd look with an ordinary eye and a bloodshot one.  Then she nodded.

“Yeah.  Would have to be a mental safety net, my brain telling me something was off.”

Again, she digested that.  After a long moment of just walking, the arm she’d used to pinch me now resting on my shoulder as she periodically drew on me for balance and support, she gave me another nod.  It was as if she’d thought hard about it and decided I was on the mark.

She pointed, and I moved my hand, gesturing.

Behind me, Gordon Two, Davis and the Treasurer all relayed instructions, making sure that the crowd of a hundred bodies kept up and were paying attention.

Jessie was the one to gesture, and this time, it was the sign for weapon.

Of the small army we had flocking behind us, one in eight or so had guns.  Others had knives.

In the distance Neph toppled another building, waging his war against Cynthia’s people.  His success and failure were our clock.  One way or another, if Cynthia lost or was routed, there was a chance he would gravitate toward us, which would be bad, or he would return to his handlers, which would make taking action a thousand times more difficult.  If Cynthia won, well, we had to worry about her going back to the last place she’d seen us, and that would put her in close enough proximity to our people that moving hundreds would be risky.

There was commotion nearby.  We inched closer, me gesturing for quiet, for our army to stay back.

Civilians.  Angry civilians.  They had gathered, throwing one of the round ‘speakers’ to the ground, and they were beating the everloving snot out of the fellow.  Some were using hand-held weapons.

“Stop!” I hollered.  Some smoke inhalation from earlier in the day gave my voice a rougher edge.

They were angry, they were scared, and in the heat of the moment, they stopped what they were doing, leaving the experiment to bleed.

They turned their hostility toward me.

Jessie gestured, and I knew what the gesture was.

“We need him,” Jessie said, very diplomatically.

I could see those words rile the crowd.  But as our rebel army formed at our back, the rising anger was given pause.  It made it easier to speak, and it made it easier to speak with weight.

“We’re going after the people who caused all this,” I said.  “He’s going to lead us to them.”

Helen moved closer to me.  She posed a little, smiling, looking dangerous in posture and expression.

Ah, she wanted to play it that way?

“Want in?” I tried.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.16 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

It took a group of grown adults some concerted effort to drag the speaker off to one side.  They collectively propped him up so he lay across several stairs.  One of his eyes was already hurt enough it couldn’t open, his nose had been smashed and the blood that had flowed from it painted a thick stripe down his lower face, and every breath he took in made his hand clench as he bore the pain.  He looked as though he weighed at least twenty stone, where I weighed seven.

“Alright, I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m listening,” one of the members of the crowd said.

I might’ve hoped that someone else would have spoken up.  This guy looked like he was sturdily built and worn around the edges by mid-level manual work, drinking, and smoking.  The distribution of dust and faint stains on his clothing suggested he wore an apron much of the time.  A baker, butcher, or the like.  I could see why he spoke first among this crowd, if he was a face that a lot of people had run into and interacted with.

That wasn’t what had me concerned.  It was that I’d seen a glimpse of the crowd stomping on, kicking, and using improvised weapons to thrash the speaker.  My impression of this man was very heavily shadowed by the expression on his face.  It had been red where his trimmed black beard hadn’t covered it, contorted, and gleeful.

I waited, giving weight to things, leaving room for others to speak up.  I didn’t want to have this dialogue with the mad baker.

“You said you needed him,” an older man said.  He wasn’t an old man, but he’d passed his middle years a few years back, and his hair was touched with a thick daubing of grey.

“I did,” I said, seizing on the second speaker.  I made sure to devote a share of attention to the mad baker so I didn’t effectively ignore him.  “That giant over there is fighting with a group of rebels.  If one side wins, then the window of opportunity is most likely going to close.  We want and need to find the people who are managing the reins.  That fellow you were beating up a minute ago is our best bet for finding them.”

“And who are you?” the mad baker asked.

“He’s Sylvester Lambsbridge,” Jessie said.  “I’m Jessie Ewesmont.  Sylvester’s claim to fame is assassinating the Baron Richmond of Warrick.”

That got a few raised eyebrows.  I saw a smile creep across the mad baker’s face.

“I don’t like how this is being handled,” the older man said.  “These… monsters, shouting at us to stay put, stay inside, while the giant knocks over buildings that we know have people inside.  I can understand why others are upset-”

“Pissed,” the mad baker said, his voice dangerous.  “Don’t mince it.”

“Pissed,” the older man said, in a way that suggested he didn’t like the foul language.  “But I don’t know if I agree with or can condone the murder of a noble.”

“You might change your tune if you saw what life was like for those in Warrick,” I said.

“I might,” he said, “But I didn’t.”

Well, he was what I’d looked for.  Someone more level-headed in the midst of the mob.  He was dissenting, and others were looking more restless, the mad baker included.

“That’s entirely fair,” I said.  The key was to sound calm, reasonable.  I had a small army at my back, and this guy had been standing off to one side in the midst of a mob, angry enough to be standing here, not so angry he was stomping a helpless experiment to death.  “For the record, I don’t want to have a long discussion.  That giant’s probably going to come looking for us, if the rebels don’t win and follow up felling the giant and start burning the city to the ground.  If at any point you make up your mind, let us know, we’ll move along.”

“Uh huh,” the man said.

“I don’t mind the noble killing,” the mad baker said.  “It’s been a long time coming, and the Baron was always a nut.”

“He was,” I said.  “But that wasn’t wholly the reason I went after him.”

“What was the reason?” another man asked.  He looked more like a banker.

Another level head.

“He threatened Sylvester’s family,” Jessie said.

“That doesn’t sound like a strong reason.  The deaths of nobles has caused a lot of grief,” the older man said.  “This could be part of it.”

“That’s bullshit,” the mad baker said.

“The nobility exists for a reason.  Nothing stands on its own,” the older man said.  “One pillar has been shaken, not even destroyed, and we’re seeing the ramifications.  Lunatics coming out of the woodwork, crime, plague, civil war.”

“Whole tracts of the middle and western Crown states being sterilized,” the mad baker said, sounding angry again.  “Let’s not forget how this started.”

“I’m not here to have a long discussion,” I said.

“The sterilization was a mistake stemming from miscommunication,” the older man said.  “One caused by initial stirrings of war.  The Red Shepherd.  Who later went on to kill the Duke, someone we counted on to keep us safe.”

“You’re talking about Mauer,” I said.

“That’s the name.”

“Listen,” I said.  If this discussion continued, the mad baker would steer the conversation, argue the failings of the Crown, and the discussion would be dragged down into the mud.  My route to success lay in arguing with the people I disagreed with here.  “All the stuff you’re talking about, I’ve been there.  I’ve had long conversations with Mauer, with Fray, I’ve had Cynthia of the Spears pull a gun on me.  I’m here for this.  I’m offering you a chance to make it end.  Give that experiment to me, I’ll find the people who turned that giant on this city, and then I’ll do my damndest to make it go away.  Or I’ll stop the people who want to burn the city down.”

“We only want to save lives,” Jessie said.

“It’s what I was doing when I went after the Baron,” I said.  “I saved a lot of lives when I ended his reign over Warrick.  They would’ve lived long, productive lives in that city, but those existences were condemned ones.  Waking nightmares, shadowed by waking monsters custom-designed to each family.  Trust me when I say that those long lives would’ve been worse than short lives ending in grisly death.  That was a herculean task.  This, right here, is absolutely something I and my people can do.  If you need justification or proof, you can follow us, you can listen in, and you can leave or intervene at any time.  If you need to find an outlet for your anger, my opening offer stands.  You can join us.”

“No, I don’t think I’ll join you,” the older man said.

As expected.

“I might,” the mad baker said.

Also as expected, unfortunately.

“Joining isn’t the important thing.  Do you want to ride along?  Do you want to see things with your own two eyes?” I asked the older man.  I glanced at the banker, then glanced at the mad baker.  “If you have any doubt about my abilities, if you want to second guess me and the Crown’s role…”

“If it matters,” Gordon Two spoke up, “I can say that all of us standing by Jessie and Sy are doing it for a reason, because he’s good at this and we believe in what he’s doing.”

Not all, I thought.  The dissent in the ranks.  And that’s not the question at hand.  It’s whether they have the courage.

“If we step aside and give you this monster so you can try to use him to go after his makers, what’s to say you and those youths behind you won’t just ignore me?  What can I do against… however many of you there are?”

“Eighty to a hundred,” the banker said.

“Collateral,” I said.  “Pick any one of us.  They’ll be your hostage.  We move in two groups, each in sight of the other.  You can watch from a distance.  The person you pick can comment and explain, or you can send someone over or beckon someone to you, and we’ll send someone to make sense of things.  Anything hinky happens, you can exercise your best judgment.”

The older man frowned, looking us over.

I spread my hands.  “If you’re not comfortable with the idea, say the word.  We’ll find another one of these guys and leave you to it.”

The distant fighting was disjointed.  There was a flare of dust and smoke that rose in a sudden plume over the skyline.  The sound of it followed two seconds later.  After the sound and several long moments, the wind blew.  Not the shockwave or the ripple of the impact, but a reaction to a large-scale change in environment and air pressures.  A building or giant had fallen.

“I’m insane if I say yes to this.”

“You were a bystander in a mob of angry civilians,” I told the older man.  “This is more sane, more focused.  It’s a surgical strike that solves the problem.”

“The anger was a more organic thing,” the older man said.  “Talking to each other, one thing leading to another.  Didn’t feel wrong.  Premeditation makes it worse somehow.  Doing this in the shadow of talking about murdering nobles?  Feels a lot worse.”

“Alright,” I said.  I gestured, turning to go.  It took a little bit of time for the gesture to translate into orders, lieutenants calling instructions down the line.  I wondered if Cynthia did drills or if she faced the same delay between decision and action when coordinating her people.  Mauer had some delay, but I suspected his communication was effective enough that he could shout jump and people would jump because he was that convincing.

Fray didn’t manage armies so much.  She… preferred to put pieces in place and create an engine, or a greater organism.

I’d hoped to do that.  But I wasn’t Fray.  I was something else.

The mad baker, as I’d termed him, was moving like he was joining us.  I didn’t want him, not really.

“Hold on,” the older man called out.

I held on, gesturing.  The Beattle rebels stopped.

“I’ll come.  I can’t speak for everyone, but if I stay here, I don’t change anything.  If I come, at least there’s a chance I can have a say, right?”

“That’s the idea,” I said.

“He doesn’t represent me,” a woman said.  “But I’ll come too.”

Slowly and surely, the group began to form, people stepping forward.

As they peeled away, a path of sorts emerged, a way to the speaker.  I gestured, and Jessie turned to indicate some people.  Bea’s people.  Some of our stronger ones, and the thug, who looked like he’d been one of Otis’.

As one, they worked to haul the speaker to his feet.

He was beaten, battered, bruised, and he looked surly.  His hair had been immaculately styled in a look that was most often worn as a wig, not as an actual hairstyle, curled into a roll at the brow, he had a baby face, and he had a lot of mass, which mostly amounted to being loaded to bear with special organs and then given a frame that could carry it all.  His clothing had a weave that became a checked pattern when the light hit it, all fine clothing, but durable.  I wished I could have taken some of it for myself, but it was hardly going to fit.  Jessie, Mabel, Gordon Two and I could all have crammed together into his outfit.

“Get somewhere safe,” I told the people who were lingering.  “Keep an eye on things.  They’re only going to get uglier, and when they do, it’s going to happen fast.  That giant will cross half the city before you can get out of your house with the bare essentials.  The rebels will… I don’t even know, but it could be fire, it could be forced conscription.  Trust your instincts.”

The banker was among the group who were staying behind.  I could see his expression change, hardening at the thought of each of the scenarios.

“Good luck,” I told them.

“I’d wish you luck, but I’m not sure you deserve it,” the banker said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It took only a short time to sort things out.  The older man and the woman who had been second to join discussed briefly among themselves before nominating both Jessie and Davis as their hostages.  Interesting that they’d chosen two of the most put-together members of our group, the tidiest, neatest ones.  Jessie was the ironed blouse and skirt pleats, the stockings, the jacket with crisp lines, her hair in one braid.  Davis was neatly parted hair and a suit shirt and slacks combination that would have been a decent Academy uniform if it had only had more white. 

The mad baker was an outlier in this city, I suspected, someone who was only here because certain menial service and labor jobs were necessary to keep things running and attend to the life that existed beyond what I was growing to think was a backbone of business, international banking, and information.  The more level-headed members of this particular mob, the ones that represented the local color, they’d identified best with Jessie and Davis, saw them as the most valuable hostages to take.

That group crossed the street, and I could see Jessie talking to the group, explaining, outlining.  She was moving her hands as she talked, and as she did, she was gesturing.  It was perfect, because it meant we could maintain an ongoing dialogue.

There was something magical about being on the same page as someone, to have thoughts and ideas and not even having to say or do something specific to have other people act as an extension of those thoughts.

With four able-bodied men supporting the speaker and keeping him moving, the speaker stumbled ahead.

“Careful,” I said, as I watched him.  “We don’t know if he has anything up his sleeve.”

He was focused for the moment on putting one foot in front of the other, being wrestled and jabbed this way and that.  He wasn’t a fighter, and for the moment, he looked confused.

I could vaguely recall an encounter some years ago, when the Lambs had all been together.  Mary had been there.  We’d preyed on the relative innocence and gullibility of another experiment’s mind.

Had it been Fray’s stitched?

The speaker tripped, and only the support of the people who were holding him keeping him from outright falling flat on his face.  He sagged, and we had to pause while they righted him.

He glanced at me, and I saw something sharper than I would have ever seen on Fray’s face.  Not a cunning, human sharpness, but the look of an animal that was weighing its options.

“Heads up!” I called out.  I clapped my hands to my ears, backing swiftly away.

There were three venues of attack here.  One was self-destruction, another was noise, and a third was a combination thereof.

A moment later, the speaker opened his mouth.

He made the first real sound I’d heard from him, a noise like the horn of a large ship or cry of a train, loud enough to make the ears hurt, to disorient, and unending, a lone note held indefinitely.

With that noise, he made a hundred people stagger, and the remainder of two hundred hands that hadn’t followed my cue went to protect ears.  I had no idea how many knees buckled.

I saw Otis’ thug draw a gun, and I lunged, reaching out to stop him from aiming it at the speaker.

I could adapt to the noise better than some, because adapting was part of what I did.  Helen barely seemed to care about it, holding only one hand to one ear, more in the sense that she didn’t want both ears to adapt to the sound.

Someone near me reacted badly enough to the volume of the speaker that they began to dry heave.

Sensory destruction.

The people who had been supporting him backed away, and the speaker dropped to his hands and knees.  He had to know that doing this would see him shot or disposed of.  But he would do a degree of damage to us before he went.

Helen moved, approaching him.  I met her eyes, and we communicated in that instance.

The coordination, the magic of thinking and having others act as an extension of that thought with barely any communication, it wasn’t limited to me being at the center.  Helen wanted to act, and I could follow her line of thinking to the conclusion.

I gestured, urging others to back away, to get clear of the worst of the sound.

Leaving Helen and the speaker alone together.  A full city block away, Jessie was gesturing.  I could only barely make out the signs.

She didn’t want me to leave Helen like that.  Helen was weak.  Helen couldn’t communicate.

With nobody holding him and the rest of us stumbling a solid fifty paces away, many with eyes screwed shut and hands at ears, the speaker was free to lurch, trying to get to his feet.  He had to expect someone would find the wherewithal to shoot him in the back.  But he would act in service to the Academy that had created him and the Crown he’d been a voice for, and he would do it in the simplest manner possible.

His attempt to move from being on hands and knees to a standing position was interrupted when Helen walked into him.  Her mass was a fraction of his, but the timing was effective.  He bowled her over, dropping again to hands and knees, while she landed on her rear end, her face a short distance from his.

He was still making that infernal noise.

Jessie gestured, suggesting a course of action.  I could try disabling him.  Like Helen, he had organ clusters.  Jessie’s suggestion was the kidney area, and I suspected there was some trace of Academy science she had picked up that was informing the decision.

It wasn’t a bad suggestion, but Helen had dibs on this one.  I gave her a minute.

Too generous by forty seconds.

Twenty seconds or so passed, and the noise stopped.

While the rest of our people were recovering, some still staggering as though their middle ears were in tatters, I found my feet.  The mental adjustments were much the same as the ones I’d made in the wake of Jessie’s fertilizer explosion at the ground floor of the flower place, so they were fresh in my mind.

As I approached, I could see Helen holding one hand to the side of the speaker’s feet.

“And him?” the speaker asked.  His voice was deep, and it sounded alien amid the cacophony of noise that had erupted in the silence after his one-note noise.  A chaotic storm of phantom sounds to offset the lone sound he’d produced.

Helen nodded, smiling.

I watched the speaker process, juggling complicated emotions as he lay there, Helen just in front of him, and me off to one side.

“So be it.  I am sorry.”

Helen shook her head, glancing at me, and I picked up the slack where she was unable to speak.  “You did exactly what you were supposed to.”

“What do I do now?” he asked.

“You cooperate,” I said.  “But don’t look too happy about it.”

Others were only just starting to recover.  Some were creeping cautiously closer, wary of the noise starting again.

“How?” Gordon Two asked, his voice too loud.  I motioned for him to keep it down.

“That’s going to draw attention,” the Treasurer said.  He winced, working his jaw.  “I think I have hearing damage.”

“That can be fixed,” I said.

“My own voice sounds like it’s far away,” he said.  “Fuck.”

“And you’re right.  That’s a concern, drawing attention,” I said.  I turned to the speaker.  “Will it?  Will they come for you?”

“I don’t know,” the speaker said.  There was a deliberate disconnect between is tone and the expression he decided to put on his face.  He wasn’t very good at frowning.  “I don’t think so.  They might if they’re close, or if the mission changed.”

“How?” Gordon Two asked, for the second time.  “I keep telling myself I’m not going to be caught off guard, I won’t be surprised, you guys do things I’d normally think are impossible, but… how?”

“Magic,” I said.  “Helen magic.”

I offered Helen a hand, and even though I wasn’t in the best shape myself, I did have it in me to help her to her feet.  She offered me a brief curtsy of thanks in exchange, before clinging to me for balance.

“That’s really not an answer to my question,” Gordon Two said.  “That’s not a thing.”

“But it absolutely is, isn’t it?” I asked.  “The magic… it’s important.  We had Berger, we traded him for a Helen.  Look.

They looked.  I was indicating the crowd of students behind us.  The ones who had retreated and fallen, who had felt the impact of that noise the speaker had produced.  Their ears hurt and their senses had been rattled, and now all was fixed.  The speaker was under our thumb.  As several of our strongest recruits moved up and helped haul the speaker to his feet, he pulled away from their grip some, but he didn’t have a lot of fight in him.  Again, he wore that weird trying-too-hard scowl.

He’d been made and trained to smile and dispense warnings, not to frown and express proper displeasure.

So recently touched by the event, they now watched as we got the situation in hand once again.  I gestured for us to move, and the lieutenants passed on orders.

They would wonder.  Gordon Two was a good barometer for what the greater collective was thinking.

Wondering and wonder were two sides of the same coin.

I gave Helen a squeeze, and I signaled the go-ahead.

Reluctantly, cautiously, the speaker began to give us direction.  This way, that way.  Then he would need to stop to think or use a keen ear.

With his restrained cooperation, now, we were able to head straight for what we were after.  The wind blew cold, boots tromped without rhythm on the ground, and distant explosions and crumbling buildings marked the ongoing conflict halfway across this odd, prim, artificial little city.

“How are your injuries, speaker?” I asked.

“Speaker?”

“Do you have another title or name?”

“A letter and a number.  The ones who made us sometimes like to dress us up and give us masks and titles if we earn them.”

“Alright,” I said.  “Would it be bad if I offered you something?  We need you for a little bit longer.  We can’t have your injuries or the elements causing any problems down the line.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.  “Gordon Two-”

“That’s not my name, but alright.”

“There’s some people from Davis’ group that have supplies.  Some are medical, but there should be blankets and jackets for in case we ran into anyone who needed it while we were running around, if they didn’t decide to pack light.  I need you to grab some stuff, if possible.  We’ll get this guy warm.  Can you double check if we have anything we can use?”

“Sure,” Gordon Two said, giving me a curious look.  “I’ll ask.”

“I’m fine,” the speaker said.  “I’m built to endure.”

Helen reached up, and laid a hand on his upper arm.  He looked down at her, confused.

“Consider this us giving you your own mask and title.  To me, you’re speaker.  You need a token of your time with us.”

He looked concerned, but with Helen’s hand still on his arm, he seemed willing to let it lie.  “Alright.”

I gestured, to make sure that Gordon Two knew.

“Speaking of titles, do you want one?” I asked the speaker.

“No.  I don’t not want one either.  I do my job.  I keep the Crown’s good citizens safe.  I serve, and I am satisfied.  I belong to a unit, and we march in step.  If I die in pursuit of my duty, I know it is right.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I think maybe that’s not so different from my own experience, way back when.  My experience was more nuanced, don’t get me wrong, but not so different in the end.”

He gave me a curious look.  I opted not to elaborate.

“We’re close,” he said.

And we were.

Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like what the speaker had called marching in step.  It looked as though they had scraped the bottom of the test tubes and disposed of the detritus here.  I could see a horde of stitched, and a host of men and women who looked surly, all of whom had been augmented or modified.  All guarded the perimeter, sitting out in the cold, the bundling against the cold weather serving to hide the full extent of their modifications.

Men and women with broken veins from head to toe, with hands modified to blend flesh and technology to give them massive claws.  They would have more technology beneath the sleeves of their coats and shawls, to give them the strength to use those claws.

There were women with whips built into their arms, with digits at the end, thorny in a way that looked like they attached to flesh.

Men and women who were bloated, with what looked like organs externally attached to their bodies.  The connection to the body looked tenuous, to the point that I wondered if the organs could be detached and thrown, or if they were meant to be broken.

The stitched weren’t all military issue, either.

It was chaotic, the assortment.  Every time I looked, I saw more things that needed attention and watching out for.  They were collectively on guard, protecting a building.

We came to a halt, pausing to figure out how to approach this next part.  Gordon Two arrived, and he arranged the coats and blankets across the speaker’s shoulders and back.  Draping coats in place, he began buttoning the buttons of one coat through the slits of the next, so they formed a blanket of their own.

It was ingenious, and it even seemed to please the speaker.  He seemed content in this limbo, while our own people peeked, and rumors were passed back, ideas and sentiment finding whispered voices in the midst of all of this.

Many of the Beattle rebels were armed, but they weren’t eager to fight, and fighting this looked to be a mess.

“What now?” the speaker asked, under his breath.  I imagined he thought he was being subtle.

It didn’t particularly matter, but it helped if he thought he was being subtle.

I glanced a ways back, watching Jessie and our audience watch us.

She was gesturing, asking if I wanted help.

I signaled a no.

“What now?” I asked.  “We’re letting you go.  And you’re going to pass on a message.”

“You’re letting me go?”

“You’ll go back to your people,” I said.  “All you have to tell them is that the battle is over, it’s been decided.”

“It’s not my job, to pass on messages like that, not internally,” the speaker said.

“It’s fine,” I said.  “In fact, it makes more sense if you’re the one that delivers the message.”

“I should give your coats back,” he said.

“No,” I said.  I moved past Helen, who drew closer to him, and I adjusted his regalia of coats, fixing the pockets where they were supposed to be buttoned, fixing the lines.  “No, keep them.  But you should hurry.  Go to your people before my people get restless.  Pass on the message.”

He frowned, and this time the frown was real, because he wasn’t trying.

But he rose to his feet, and glancing back at Helen and I for a moment, he then picked up speed, jogging back toward the others.

“So,” Gordon Two said.  “Are you going to explain Helen’s magic?  Is this a thing she does?”

“She simply told the truth,” I said.

“She can’t talk,” he pointed out.

Helen stuck out her tongue at him.

“Yeah, well, In the meantime…” I said.  I indicated the speaker.

“I know how this magic works,” he said.

The speaker had been stopped by the guards at the perimeter.  That was what was supposed to happen in these cases.

“Sixty second fuses?” Gordon Two asked.

“Or as close as you could get,” I said.

I might have felt ashamed at exploiting our temporary recruit, but the canisters loaded into his pockets were of a less lethal variety, and he’d been meant to endure.  Gas billowed from around him, and in his confusion, he span around, which only helped distribute the stuff.  He might have cried out loud in his alarm, but the gas choked him, which also served to silence that voice.

His unique clothing had been custom made to fit him.  The odd weights in the pockets and the bulky nature of the raiment went unnoticed for an experiment that was unused to such things.  He was large enough he wouldn’t reach behind his back.

All that had remained was to pop the canisters and set the timers going.  Helen and I had both done it between us.

The cloud expanded, and in the midst of it all, the core group of the experiments and stitched guards that had gathered to meet this unexpected visitor were disabled, left reeling.

I got the attention of my people with a raised hand, paused for dramatic effect, and then I gestured.

Attack.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.17 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.17

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The students Jessie and I had recruited weren’t soldiers.  They weren’t fighters, and for some this was their first altercation.  It showed.

I wasn’t a fighter, myself.  I knew how to hold a knife, I knew how to shoot a gun.  I knew how and where to hit people where it hurt.  But I wasn’t a fighter.  I was an opportunist, and I’d learned to parlay that into the knife holding, gun shooting, hurty-hitting.  That put me in an odd spot when I was now having to find and create opportunity while managing my people.

The gas cloud had spread to a point and stopped, forming a haze ten long paces wide.  Three fifths of the non-stitched enemies present had been affected in some way, coughing, sputtering, hands at burning eyes and orifices.  Another fifth, perhaps, had caught whiffs, but the effects stopped at one eye being closed, or a bit of coughing.

The stitched were backing away from the gas, and from the fear in many of their eyes, I could tell that a good share of them weren’t military grade.  Others were remaining stock still, or kept their reactions mostly in check.

That left me with a rough guess of there being a dozen experiments that weren’t incapacitated, a dozen combat-ready stitched and another thirty or forty general-use stitched.  We had them outnumbered, but only by about forty individuals.  That would change as the gas and its symptoms cleared up.

This wasn’t an easy assault, exactly.  They had undertaken some preparation before settling in.  There were places at the corners and ends of the street where fences had been knocked down, where something that might have been a shack had been pulled down, and a square of snow-less road that might have had a carriage perched over it when the real snow had fallen.  They had taken efforts to remove potential cover that anyone might use to mount an attack on them.

Had we been a matter of five people, we could have used the cover that remained, but as a mob of a hundred?

This was more Gordon’s bailiwick.  I missed that doofus.  All I could do was execute things as he would, and hope I didn’t futz it up too badly.

“Everyone with guns, fire on the group to the right!” I called out.  “Shoot!  Doesn’t matter if you hit, just-”

Someone fired.

“Just shoot!” I called out.

But with the exception of the one shot, the gunfire was delayed, hesitant.

I knew that was the way it was going to be from the moment it had opened.

“Keep shooting!” I called out, drawing my own pistol.  I’d stowed it on the opposite side of my body as usual, so the movement felt unnatural.  My damaged fingertips lacked full sensation, not helped by a layer of bandage and gloves pulled on over that, so that didn’t help either.  I aimed and I fired in the general direction of the people I’d indicated, who were stranded for the moment on the far right of the gas cloud.  The gun kicked in my hand, and as I continued running forward, I could smell the gunpowder and smoke of my own gun, and the traces of gas on the wind.

The group to the right was smaller than the group on the left, which I was leading the others in charging.  The group on the left was struggling more as the wind blew gas in their direction, but that wasn’t why I wasn’t prioritizing them.

The key in this, my lopsided approach, was directing the bulk of our initial fire on the less threatening group.  The rationale was that they were cut off from the others in volume and in sight.  To them, they were being attacked, the gas blocked off their view of friendlies, and they were already demoralized.  My hope was to turn that into a surrender.

“Bea!” I called out.  “You and delinquents, roof girls, Otis’ men, go right!  Force a surrender!  Don’t get too close!”

That left six experiments of varying types and a squadron of stitched.  The experiments didn’t have guns, but the stitched did.

Stitched typically had handlers, and the handlers weren’t present, that I could see.

An odd, ragtag defensive force, this.  My eye was on the door and windows, expecting someone to come tearing out to shout out an order to shoot.  There wasn’t one.

I was watching for an experiment to show leadership skills and turn out to be the leader for this group.  None did.  They were separate and independent, rough-looking men and women who had been through the wringer a few times before they had been experimented on and made into weapons.  They didn’t listen for orders, and didn’t even band together, not really.  Women with whips attached to their arms pulled the whips in, holding them in hands, ready to fling them out.  Men with fluid-filled sacs across their bodies shrugged out of coats, to have better access.  I saw men with heavy muscles and bodies covered in thick hair longer than some women had on their heads.

No leaders in their number.

But the stitched that weren’t looking entirely out of sorts changed their grip on their rifles, shifting their stances.  They didn’t look lost or leaderless.

I watched as one or two stitched turned, glancing at one of their number, who was coughing, drawing in a deeper breath.

Aiming, I fired the last two shots of my pistol at him.  The second of the two shots hit.

The handler had been a stitched.  Maybe high quality, a dead handler quickly revived so that his skills could be preserved, or an actual living handler dressed up like a reanimated dead man.

As his head rocked back, knocking against the wall behind him, face and wall now painted in fresh crimson, his stitched looked more alarmed.  Some of the soldier-stitched started moving of their own volition, making the call to aim at us.

“Shoot!” I called out.

I got two bullets fired at the stitched for my trouble.  It was an unenthusiastic response from my side, but that was, again, to be expected.  The nature of the mob was likely a problem, the shooters not having a clear shot because of friendlies in their way.

The stitched responded, a mere four of the forty-ish stitched shooting.  Of those four, some couldn’t see well because of the gas and its effects.

But it was bound to happen, that with our mob being dense, the stitched having some ability to aim, students to the right and left of me stumbled and went down.

That seemed to give the rest of the hesitant shooters permission to open fire.  The most soldier-like of the stitched were now the subject of our retaliatory, defensive fire.  The less soldier-like lacked leadership.

I hated the moment, the nature of those few passing heartbeats, the lingering image of the shot students tipping over before my forward movement and the rest of the crowd to either side of me blocked off my view.

It left me with a terrible, sick, angry feeling.  A lot of it was directed at myself.  The calculation, the fact that I was rationalizing that oh, only some would hit.  That I rationalized that chance of a shot being immediately lethal was low, even if internal damage might be massive with the way Academy-designed guns had bullets that were designed to bounce around their victims.  I rationalized that we were largely an army of the Academy educated.

I was rolling dice and playing with numbers and justifying, and even if I considered that the chances of an immediate, unavoidable death were in the single-digits, I was still making that call.  I felt like I could taste all of the poison of Wyvern on my tongue as I swallowed that.

But I had an army and there was no way to keep my hands entirely clean forever if I was going to use it as such, Helen needed help, and we needed someone with a black coat if we were going to accomplish what we needed to accomplish.  Failure here when morale was low would see students breaking away, looking to find their own way, which would be disastrous as the Academy cracked down, or they would join Cynthia and Mauer and face far worse numbers.

We crossed the rest of no man’s land, and the charge petered out.  Students shouted, brandishing rifles and weapons, and wary experiments backed up, whip-hands and meaty Bruno hands with long hair draping from them ready in case it became a melee brawl.

Both sides made movements as if they would throw themselves at the other, but lacked the courage to follow through.

“Surrender!” I called out.

A woman with a fifteen-foot tendril extending from her palm snapped her arm out in my direction.  It moved far faster and farther than expected, cracking the air where my head had been.  I was already moving, leaning out of the way, with the lean becoming a tilt, then a run.

I broke away from the front of my army, and threw myself into the gas cloud.

I couldn’t see in the thick gas, so I didn’t try.  My eyes were screwed closed, my breath held, and I moved through the clustered experiments blindly, shoulder bumping into one, then the other as I rebounded through them like a billiards ball.

Somewhere in the midst of it, I decided to be proactive and drew my knife.  I stuck people here and there, making more precise cuts when and where I was able to identify the shape of someone.

I brushed up against one of the long-haired individuals, and was unpleasantly surprised to find that the hair wasn’t hair at all.  It stuck to me and my clothes like briars, and it rasped as it pulled away.  Gas stung a patch of my cheek and temple in the wake of one such collision.

Another experiment was one with the external organs.  On collision, the organ popped, and the fluid drenched one of my sleeves.

I shucked off my jacket, a process that was complicated by my not wanting to drop my gun or knife, and by the presence of some kind of wriggling worms that had escaped the fluid sac when it had popped.  In my rush, occupied as I was, I bumped headlong into another long-haired bruno.  The collision was with what was likely the middle of his back, which was covered by a clothing, but I felt hair hook and pull on my sleeve and hair as an arm swiped in my direction.

In the rough center of the area, I found the speaker.  He had fallen to the ground and had only managed to rid himself of one half of the coat setup with grenades in the pockets.

I jabbed my gun into my waistband with enough force that the barrel likely gouged flesh, grabbed the coat, and pulled.  What didn’t immediately give, I slashed at.

I squinted, using light and shadow to try and make out the world, my eyes burning and tearing up, and I oriented myself to make my exit.  With some vague sense of where people were, I was able to move faster, departing.

The gas was already thinning out, but as I wrangled the remains of the coat setup that I’d collected, I was able to feel that one side was heavier than the other.

Not all of the canisters had deployed.  Between Helen and I, we hadn’t achieved full coverage in finding and activating all of the canisters.  I pulled the remaining pins, and I threw the coat into the midst of the enemy.  The still-active canisters didn’t have a lot of oomph driving the output, but it made for an expanding haze of fog, disorganization in their ranks as they tried to stay clear while maintaining battle lines.

I also managed to get some attention for myself.  I was content to step back into the smoke and move off to the side, while tentacles snapped out.  Not whip cracks this time, but lunging, reaching grabs.  One swiped across my shoulder, and I grabbed it, cutting it with my knife.

Now their attention was divided three ways.  Gas in their midst, however weak, me, and the army bearing down on them.

While I’d been absent, they had pushed forward.  Some of the tentacle women had grabbed some students and were dragging them closer by increments.  Four students were using bayonets to fend off a Bruno.

But those skirmishes were isolated.  Both sides were made up of people who wanted to live, with an exception of the stitched, who were trying to follow orders and losing ground to the chaos of the moment and the lack of their handler.  That desire to survive made for a more cowardly kind of engagement.  There was shouting, posturing, there were threats, and very few individuals were really stepping forward to act.

On the far left of the enemy group, well beyond my reach, some experiments went lunging for the guns of the fallen stitched soldiers.  A contingent of the Beattle rebels pushed forward, and it became a melee instead of a shootout.

I pitched my voice to make sure I’d be heard amid the guttural threats and low cries.  I tried to sound imperious.  “The next gas grenades go off in thirty seconds!  Surrender, kneel, and you don’t get gassed!”

Just as all but a few experiments were reluctant to truly throw themselves into the fray and risk their lives, there was an equal and opposite reluctance to give up the fight.

It had to feel horrible, to be caught in the middle, where there was so much uncertainty in surrender and mortal peril in fighting to win.

One of the tentacle women, as far as I could tell while half-blind, was being particularly persistent in trying to sweep the cloud of gas to find me.  She might have been one of the ones I’d cut.

I timed my exit so that I could duck under one of the sweeps and emerge right in front of her before she could pull her tendrils in and assault me.

My knife-tip, by intent, hit her sternum, hard.  I held it there, between her breasts, not far from her heart, and intoned the word, “Surrender.”

She brought her arms in, hands seizing me, tentacles following, reaching around my head.

I brought my arms up, pushing the knife with both hands, the blade scratching sternum and clothing, sliding up, and finally finding the soft flesh of neck.  The thrust parted flesh from the hollow of her throat to the point where her chin met her neck.  The tail end of the thrust might have severed a major vein.

I watched, wary, studying those nearby as the woman tumbled to the ground.  One of the tendrils caught on my vest and my injured shoulder as it pulled away, and I was able to keep my face still as it did so, but I wasn’t able to avoid my leg buckling and my grip on the knife faltering.  I only barely managed to keep from dropping it.

The experiments closest to me hadn’t lunged to attack at the show of weakness.  I fixed my grip, and the bloated fluid-sac experiment I was looking at at the time backed away a step.

I took one hand off the knife, and gestured at him, motioning him down.

He sat down with force, plopping himself down on the road.

People wanted to live.

The one effective surrender was cause for a domino effect.  Just as one person pulling the trigger gave others permission to shoot, one surrender gave way to another, and then another.

The experiments that were most hostile and dangerous pulled away, forming a separate group, and they drifted closer to the retreating non-soldier stitched, the laborers and filler, the dumb muscle.

That was it.  I hurried over to the coats and grenades, and, grabbing them, I hurled them in the direction of the hostiles.

The first canisters were only just running out, as new ones were flaring to life.  They backed away from the expanding cloud of gas, and then retreated wholesale, running away.

“Don’t hurt the ones who surrendered,” I said.  It wasn’t an order meant for the ears of my people, but for the ones who had given up the fight.  “Tend to the injured.  Greens, I want you to surround the building, make sure our professors aren’t running away.  Don’t chase or engage, but give us a shout if there’s a problem.”

I watched as Mabel’s group, minus Mabel, went to do as I’d bid.

Some of our people had been hurt.  I looked over our group.

“Who’s hurt?” I asked.

I heard a smattering of names, none of whom I recognized.  I heard a litany of injuries.  Shot, head injury, some medical slang that was probably ex-students retreating into comfortable, easy terminology.

“Nobody died?” I asked.

There was a pause.

“Marcus isn’t doing well, but he should pull through,” I heard.  “Some of the others are fighting over who gets to work on him.  Davis took over.”

“Good,” I said.  “You did good.”

They had, in a way.  Not perfect, a lot of hesitation, a lot of fear, but…

“You showed guts,” I said, as if talking to myself.  “That was good.”

I saw a smile on one injured person, head injury, and before I could take in more, Jessie and some of the locals were approaching.

“That was bloodier than I thought it would be,” the older man said.  He’d gone a little white, while I was probably the opposite.

“There are a lot of answers to that statement,” I said.  “But short answer is yes, it was unexpectedly bad.  Longer answer is they forced it to be, by how they laid things out.  The only approach was one that saw us collide with the defensive force they had in place.”

“You could have chosen not to fight,” he said.

“I think…” I said, and I paused, coughing, blinking, taking a moment to endure the lingering effects of the gas on me.  My skin burned with every brush of the air.  I was fairly covered up, but my face felt flushed, my skin hurt, and I was probably as red as a robin’s breast.  I stopped coughing and stayed where I was, thinking.

“No answer?” he asked.

“More that I’m trying to politely word this, knowing you still have some faith about the Academy and the Crown,” I said.

He stiffened a little at that.

The students around me were watching the exchange.  Some of them hadn’t heard the opening conversation between me and the man.

“How about this?” I asked him.  “Come inside.  Join me for a conversation with the professors who set that giant on your city.  Don’t tell them who you are.  Just listen in.”

“Why?” he asked.

Jessie spoke up, “Because if you hear what they say when they’re not talking to the public, you might well change your mind about us having to fight.”

The gas behind me was clearing up.  I could see Bea’s group, and I could see the experiments.  They had largely been pacified, the fight gone out of them as they struggled to see, breathe, and endure the pain of their skin burning.

“Alright,” the man said.  “If it means answers, I’ll listen.”

“It doesn’t mean answers,” I said.  “In the seventeen years I’ve been on this earth, I’ve spent more than half of them looking for answers to questions.  At first it was in the Academy’s service, then it was against the Academy.  I have more questions than when I started.  I don’t want you to not come, but I don’t want to lie to you either.”

“You’ll get answers to this question, maybe,” Jessie said.  “About why they acted here.”

“I’ll listen in and decide for myself,” he said.

I pointed at some people.  Helen was among them, hanging back in the midst of the group.

Helen wasn’t supposed to be alive, at this juncture, so it was risky to have her with us, but I knew she’d be upset, insofar as she got ‘upset’ in the conventional sense, if she didn’t get an opportunity to participate.  The minor play with the speaker and the Radham badge wouldn’t satisfy, I suspected.

She had her hood up, and she allowed me a small smile as she approached.

I’d picked the able bodied, rather than faces I knew.  And I’d picked Helen.  Jessie came too, as a matter of course.

I still had the bitter taste in my mouth, and gas was only a part of it.  I didn’t like this situation, this city, this attack on the Academy’s part, or this confrontation with Cynthia on one side of it.  I didn’t like the tone of it, or the way they had positioned themselves.

I didn’t like that there were a few things that weren’t connecting.

Our rebels kept an eye on the experiments while we entered the building.  It was Jessie, Helen and I who led the way, Jessie on the right, Helen on the left, and me at the lead.

The building was square, four rooms each taking up an equal share of space.  Stairs led up to the second floor.  Once we’d checked that nobody was situated on the ground floor, we made our way up the stairs.

The older man trailed behind in the company of our rebels.  He seemed to buy that we could do what we’d talked about doing, and that we could make effective use of the speaker, and I suspected Jessie had built up something of a rapport while in his company.

Helen reached out and stopped us while we were only partway up the stairs.

“What is it?” Jessie whispered.

She reached out and touched our throats.  Her hands, still suffering for the damage to her body, twitched.

It took me only a second to realize that she was intending for me to feel the twitch.

“H-h-h-h-h-h-” I made the sound, whisper quiet.

She exhaled, mirroring me.  A shuddering exhalation.  Then she inhaled.

Odd breathing.

“How many?” Jessie asked.

Helen raised her hand, then knocked it against my arm.  She was presumably doing something similar for Jessie.  Tap-tap, pause, tap-tap.

“I, uh, don’t have the tap code anymore,” I murmured.  “Or if I do, I’m not remembering the numbers these days.”

“Three,” Jessie said.  “Three people.”

Helen nodded.

I wasn’t jealous, exactly, but a part of me felt deeply disappointed that I couldn’t claim to be someone who understood Helen when all other communication failed.

We crept up, this new information in mind.  Making our way down the hallway, we reached the master room on the second floor.  The rooms lacked furniture, but for this one, which had a table and a loveseat, set a distance apart from each other, as if purely an afterthought.  There were papers on the table, and there were three individuals in the room.  Two stood, slouching, and the third sat on the arm of the loveseat.

All three wore coats.  Two grey, a man and a woman, and a man in a black coat.

I could hear their breathing now, and I could read their stances, postures, and expressions.  The agitation with seemingly no outlet or momentum to it, the spittle flecking lips, the way they stared off into space.  One held a fireplace poker and periodically let it swing left and right, like a pendulum, as if to remind himself of the heft of it.

I gestured.  Fight.  Drug.

Combat drugs.  They had dosed themselves.

Not looking to run, only to fight.

They had to make this difficult, didn’t they?

I gestured, communicating.

Jessie would take one, I would take one, and Helen and the rest could take the third.

Helen knocked my hand aside as I articulated the last bit.

Helen.  Group.  Together.

She knocked my hand aside, then she gripped it.

I still really didn’t like how weak her grip was.

She took Jessie’s hand too.  She held our hands up, and squeezed again, with far too little strength.

I could piece it together, at least.  She was using tap code as she squeezed, and Jessie and I let our eyes meet.

Trust.  Lambs.  I knew what Helen was saying.

I nodded, somewhat reluctantly.

If I’d been able to speak without our whispers potentially drawing the attention of the three people in the other room, then I might have said that trusting the Lambs to perform was one side of the equation.  The other side was that we each knew each other’s strengths and limitations, and we covered for them.

She was going to get hurt, and I wasn’t sure how much she had in her, at this stage.

Painstakingly, I communicated everything to the rest, with pen and scrap paper that Jessie supplied.

I would be the bait.  It was a role I was comfortable in.

Positioning myself at the top stair, making sure that everyone was ready, stationed in rooms off to either side of the main hallway, I whistled.

“No, no, no, no…” the man in the other room spoke.  “No!  You’re not taking me alive!  You’re not carving me up and making me a stitched, no!”

He appeared in the doorway.  “No!  I’m a professor, damn it!  I’m a professor!”

His voice reached a fever pitch.

“You’re going to have to kill me!” he screeched.

He wheeled around, and he opened fire, shooting into the room Helen was in.

Trust, I thought.

I whistled again.

He shot, this time at me.  His reaction times were amped up, and he wasn’t a bad shot either.

Come closer.

He kept firing, and with quick, deft motions, he reloaded.  I could see his shadow as he crept closer.  A sword in one hand, held close to his leg, a pistol in the other.

“Not making me a stitched!  Mommy and daddy said that I’d be made a stitched if I was bad, but I’m a professor now!  They said so!”

I was worried the others would panic.  That they would attack him, or react in fear of him shooting into their rooms.

Come closer.

He made it halfway down the hallway before I saw a glimpse of him, and he saw a glimpse of me, perched on the stairs below.  I’d anticipated it, and he still had the reaction times to nearly clip me.

“I’ve got a pretty black coat, and no matter how much blood gets on it, it never shows,” he said.  “Never shows, no, no, no.”

At least the local we’d brought along was getting an earful.

The other two entered the hallway.  The grey coats.

They were as quiet as the one in the lead was quiet.

“Mauer burns you at the stake, Fray will drown you, and Cynthia shoves her spear up your ass until it comes out the mouth,” the man in the black coat said.  “And all the lesser rebels have their special little torments.  Not for me, no, no.  If I die, we die together, that’s how the Crown does it.”

The two in the grey coats moved far enough along the hallway for the trap to spring.

The maneuver was coordinated.  The extras I’d brought along, people I’d known were brave enough on the battlefield to pull triggers or actually get involved in a fight, well, I hadn’t been able to assign them to Helen alone, so I’d told them to support all three of us as much as they could without getting in the way.

Jessie struck with surgical precision, going after the woman in the grey coat with the fireplace poker.  Her movements were remembered rather than practiced, deft, keeping her low to the ground, and the knife she planted in her target’s midsection served to catch her right at the core of the body.  The grey-coated woman was in the midst of bringing the poker around to hit Jessie, using the end closest to her two hands rather than the hooked tip, and the injury and impact together took the strength out of the hit.  Jessie was able to roll with the hit; maybe she would bruise, but it was far better than a cracked skull.

Helen, for her part, was almost the inverse.  She found a good moment to act, but the action was clumsy.  She threw herself at the man at the tail end, and she landed low, tangling herself up in his legs.

She lacked the strength to stay firm while tripping him up, but she didn’t utilize strength.  She positioned herself, so that her seven stone body was in places the man’s legs wanted to be.

He sprawled, and a knife slid away from his hand as he did so.  Helen crawled toward his upper body as he lay on his back, reaching up and over for the weapon.

Meanwhile, I simply rushed the man with the gun.  He turned to pay attention to what was happening behind him, and as he did so, I threw myself up the stairs with both hands and feet, and I pulled him back onto the stairs and onto me.  He landed partially across my good shoulder and back, and I helped him in a tumble down the stairs, grabbing his collar as I did so so I could control his fall.

Just like that, it was more or less over.  Combat drugs, yes, combatant, no.

It would make them inconvenient to deal with in the coming hour or two, however.

I just wished I had a better feeling about this whole scenario.

I made sure to collect the gun and others followed me down the stairs.

Passing custody of him to the rebels I’d brought along, I hurried up the stairs.

Helen sat astride the man’s collarbone and on top of one of his arms.  Her back bent in an impossible way, so her face was very close to his, and her tongue had stabbed into his mouth and down his throat, while he made gagging sounds.  He was trying not to vomit as she used her tongue to provoke his gag reflex.

Her arms were limp at her sides, her legs folded at either side of his shoulders.  It was only weight and a low center of gravity that she used.    He moved his hand, pulling at her, reaching for the tongue, and she interfered, batting at his hand with hers, until he finally managed a grip.

Her counter was to let him grab her tongue, hauling nearly a foot of it out of his mouth, and meanwhile, she deployed her next attack.  She heaved, vomiting what seemed like a bucket of blood on his face, nose, and into his open mouth.

His struggles took on a different tone.  He clutched at her, tried to push her off, and tried to turn his head so he could spit out the blood.  Her knees and inner thighs hugged either side of his face.  His breath formed bubbles in the pool of blood.  I heard a gasp as he managed to somehow find a way to breathe with a long length of tongue and a bucket of blood on his face.

Helen, for her part, simply heaved again.  It was bile, this time.

His hand reached for his waistband.

“Knife!” I called out.

He grabbed the knife that was at his waist and under his shirt, and he drew it.  The others near Helen weren’t fast enough to grab it before the man stabbed her.

He coughed or gagged, and there was a spurt of air exploding through the thick fluids.

Helen took the stabbing in stride, arching her body up and away so the knife pulled free of the man’s hand.  She left the knife embedded in her side, and grabbed it with one hand.

He fumbled blindly for the knife, and found only her hand.  He grabbed her wrist, trying to pull it away, and she let him, moving her body to control the positioning of everything while being quick to grab the knife handle before he could.

“I told you you’d get hurt,” I told her.

I saw her visibly sigh.

“Satisfied?” I asked.

She didn’t immediately respond.

I had one eye on the man we’d brought along, who watched the scene in abject horror.

“Jessie, Mister Bystander.  We should have a word with the professor.”

“The stab wound?” one of our rebels asked.

I’d wanted to go, and now we’d have a short discussion, and we wouldn’t go.  Slightly annoying.

“She made sure it was placed so it was almost exactly where she got shot earlier,” Jessie said.  “Presumably under the assumption that the damage is already done.”

Helen, her tongue still buried in the pool of blood and bile, and in the man’s face, nodded.

The man in the grey coat coughed again, and then the amount of fluid increased, bubbling up.  Vomit.

The fight slowly went out of him, and I could watch Helen’s back as she visibly relaxed, a weight lifted off of her shoulders, something proven, a fear resolved or a problem solved.

She had needed this, I supposed.

She turned to look at me over one shoulder, through the curtain of hair, as she slurped her tongue back into her mouth.  She spat the fluids onto the floor to the side of the man’s head.

“Satisfied,” I said, making it a statement this time.

She gave me a nod.

We left her behind as we descended the stairs.

The students had moved the professor away from the stairs and against the wall.  He still struggled with the strength of someone on combat drugs, but there were three of them, and it looked like one of his hands was injured.

I wanted to say something pithy, show off a little, and ensure that the bystander’s mind could be taken off of the scene upstairs.

But I looked down at the professor, and I felt that deep unease that had been sitting with me for a little while now.

I stooped down, reaching forward, and my injured shoulder with the flesh carved away seized up.  It took me a second attempt to grab the man’s chin.  I moved my fingers over his mouth before he could spit on me, and dug my fingers in there for leverage, staring.

“What is it?” Jessie asked.

“Look at him,” I told her.  “What do you see?”

She bent down so she was on my level.  She tilted her head one way, and then the other.

“Symmetrical.”

“Is that what I’m seeing?” I asked.

She moved her hand, holding it up so it was flat, dividing his face to the left and right sides.

Then, abrupt, she moved forward and pulled his head down, so his chin touched his collarbone, and ran her fingers through his hair.

“No real part,” she said.  “No whorl.”

“I don’t understand,” the bystander said.

“He’s not a professor,” I said, straightening.  “He’s an experiment.  Clone, vat baby, they dressed him up as a professor, gave him pretensions of being one, and gave him a supply of combat drugs to cloud the picture.  The soldiers outside…”

“An odd bunch,” Jessie said.

“United only in that they were expendable,” I said.  “It’s a trap.  The entire thing.  Neph, the giant… he’s too big a target to pass up.  He finds them or they find him.  The city… it’s entirely unimportant, it’s expendable too.”

“They want him to lose the fight against Cynthia,” Jessie said.

“Or against us, or Mauer, or Fray,” I said.  I looked at the bystander.  “We need to evacuate the city.  Now.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.18 – Twig

Gut Feeling – 17.18

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Alright,” I said, the second I was outside, addressing the crowd.  “They’re planning on blowing up the city.  Or something.”

That caused an uproar.  Alarm, fear, concern.  Anything else I would have said was drowned out in the ensuing reaction, not all of it from our side.  A small handful of the experiments and combatants we’d taken hostage were being just as loud or louder.

But I’d known that would be the case.  Had to break the news somehow, and delivering it like this meant that there was a moment to digest while the others extricated themselves from the house.

The next thing I did was to check on the situation with Helen’s big brother.

When we had first come across him, he had been navigating the city with a degree of delicacy.  He had avoided stepping on things, moving with deliberation.  If Helen’s indications about him sniffing out his prey were right, he would have been pausing as often as he did to get a sense of where they were.

He wasn’t doing that anymore.  Not the caution, not the deliberation.  He was building up steam, burning up every abstract resource that he had been conserving.  Twisting his face to one side, he swung his arm out wide, slapping the face of one building, to catastrophic effect.  The thunderous crack followed, as did the rumble of a good quarter of the roof tumbling to the ground some eight stories below.

His next action, flowing less than gracefully from that, was to lunge for the opposite side of the street. The skyline prevented me from seeing exactly what was going on, but I could see his head and shoulders, and I could make out the general idea of it.  He didn’t stumble to the building so much as he stumbled into the building, his chest and belly colliding with the building face.  His arms reached up and over, sweeping everything and everyone off of that rooftop. He was more cautious with one arm, protecting one wrist.

That duty done, he pushed himself away from the building so he could stumble into the next target, doing some significant damage to the structure in the process.  All of this took only a few moments.  There was no real point where he stopped moving now, and every action caused some significant damage to his surroundings, almost purely by accident.

My small army was halfway watching the scene and halfway to watching me.  They wanted my verdict, not just on the success of the mission, but on all of this.

I, for my part, turned to look as Jessie and the others emerged from the building.  They were bringing the ‘professor’.  Helen trailed behind, sticking at the rear of the group.  It looked like she’d cleaned herself up a tad.

“Where do we stand?” Jessie asked.

“Credit where credit’s due, Cynthia’s men are putting up a good fight.  I can even imagine how.”

“How?” Gordon Two asked.

“He’s dumb-” I said.  I paused momentarily as I heard the spitting sound from the rear of the group, the declaration of indignation.  “-and they’re exploiting that fact.  They figured out the amount of resources they need to commit to draw his attention, and they’re forcing him to zig-zag.  Group one finds a place to set up with an escape route, draws his attention with sustained fire, noise, targeting sensitive areas, whatever, and flees the moment that he starts toward them.  Meanwhile, groups two and three are doing the same.  They probably have a lot of groups.  Some are probably setting up traps.”

“What kind of traps work for something like that?” the Treasurer asked.

“Wagon full of something that will go up in flames, or something that might damage his feet,” I said.  “If a building looks like it can come down, maybe try to get it to fall on him.  Not that felling a building is easy, but it’s what I would look to do.”

Helen was shaking her head.

“…I have it on good authority that his feet aren’t that vulnerable, though,” I said.  “But it’s looking more and more like Cynthia’s side is going to extricate a win, and that’s a problem.”

“The blowing up?” Gordon Two asked.

“The blowing up,” I said.  I indicated the big guy.  “That swollen belly is filled with something that’s going to remove this entire city as a consideration.”

“Very probably,” Jessie said, quiet.

“Very very probably,” I said.

I turned to the older man we’d brought along as a tag-along.  “That’s why they don’t give a damn about the buildings being knocked down, it’s why you were being told to stay in your homes, it’s why these guys, these experiments and stitched, are all of the expendable sort.”

“Which might not be something our rebel army or the locals will grasp,” Jessie said.  “It only makes sense if you’ve done the tour of duty a few times.”

“No,” one of the experiments that was sitting on the ground spoke up.  He had a country drawl.  “We were.  Never had them drop us off, tell us to stay put and keep them safe, and leave.”

He was indicating the false professor.

I wasn’t sure the bystander we’d brought along was entirely sold.  He probably thought something was fishy, but was reluctant to buy into the idea that the Crown would do something like this.  Which was entirely fair, because I had a hard time reconciling the long-term strategy and play involved in this.

“We should split up and rendezvous,” Jessie said.

“Agreed,” I said.  “West of the hotels?”

Jessie nodded.

“We’re going to do our damndest to evacuate this city!” I called out.  I looked over my shoulder at the giant.  “We have…”

“Twenty minutes,” Jessie supplied.  “Maybe thirty.”

“Twenty minutes!” I called out.  “Get ten minutes out, knock on doors, shout, ring fire bells, spread the word.  You’re going to lie.  Tell them whatever you have to.  The rebels have a bioweapon.  No- Just say bioweapon enough times that it sticks.  Say science stuff.  Tell others to pass it on.  Then get as far away from the giant as you can.  We all meet again at the hill overlooking the city, where we all saw the giant.”

“What about the hostages?” one asked.

I looked down at the experiments who were sitting on the ground, many with hands on their heads.  There were some of the women with tendrils on their arms who had the tendrils gripped behind them.

“Evacuation is a priority,” I said.  “Hostages… I’ll offer you a deal.”

The one who’d spoken a short while ago looked up at me.  Fluid-filled sacs hung off of his face like a beard, with more at one eye socket and arm.  Others had already burst, doing mild damage to his own skin.

“I’ve got a good eye for trouble,” I said. “If you’re willing, I’ll pick out the troublemakers, and let the rest of you go.  If you need a place to go, we’ll offer you one.  Food, clothes, work.”

Behind me, Jessie was starting to urge some of the rebels to hurry and start with the evacuation.  The bystander we’d brought along ran across the street to talk to the other bystanders, who still had Davis.

The experiment grit his teeth, looking down at the ground.

He would say yes, but it would take a precious minute.

This was another kind of transaction.  I’d rolled the metaphorical dice with the lives of the people who worked for me, weighing gain against risk to life.  Now I was doing much the same.  I could stand here and negotiate, and it meant I wasn’t elsewhere, mitigating risk, talking to people, convincing them to evacuate.

I could reduce it down to a simple gain of a half-dozen experiments, assuming only a few would actually stay, at a risk to what, forty to a hundred people, depending on how I communicated and how many people were in nearby buildings?

A guttural voice cut in.  One of the long-haired Brunos.  “What if you eye trouble?”

“If I think you’re going to be a problem?” I asked.

Long hair draped from the man’s head, chin, and spilled out of the ‘v’ of his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves.  It was all blond and very fine, curling at the ends, where the weight of the rest of it didn’t pull it straight.  His eyes were dark, given how pale and blond the rest of him was.

“Yeah.  If you think we might be trouble,” he said, and he looked like trouble indeed, going by the look in his eyes.

Simply saying ‘a bullet in the head’ didn’t really resolve anything and caused possible ruckus.  Better to leave that for later, when I’d played my game of duck duck goose and could quickly eliminate the geese without all the ducks thinking they might be done for.

I wasn’t sure I liked the analogy.  I didn’t like birds in general, and I could prejudice myself by thinking of my potential recruits as ducks.

It wasn’t Jessie or I that gave an answer, however.  It was Helen, who had stalked along the back lines of the group, who sidled up behind the big guy.  She reached out to him.

“Don’t touch the hair,” I said.

Confused, unaware there was anyone reaching out to do any touching, the big guy twisted around to look, and then startled, flipping around a hundred and eighty degrees before sprawling on his back, hands behind him.

Helen had paused, meanwhile, to look at me.  She gave me a roll of the eye, where I could see a sliver of her eye through the hair.

“I’m just saying,” I told her.

She continued moving, reaching out with a shaking hand, and she touched fingers to the hairy guy’s cheekbone.

“She smells like blood and death,” the hairy guy said.

“Yeah,” was all I said.

Helen smiled, and her hair hid a lot of the smile.  She bared a lot of teeth, and it looked very alarming.

“He’s your responsibility if we’re keeping him,” I told her.

She looked up at me, and the smile was one intended more for humans than for… I wasn’t even sure what label to slap the big guy with.  I almost wanted to say gladiators.  Fighters, scrappers, people who had been taken from bad and hurled into worse, and who had somehow worked out that the only way to keep going was to fling themselves into worse things still.  People who had a vicious edge that might never be tempered.

I looked back in the direction of the giant.  Where Cynthia was, if she hadn’t already been killed.

Cynthia was one of them.  Not an experiment, but someone who had started out in violence and who would conclude in violence.

“You’re fine,” I told the hairy guy.  “But stick close to her.”

He nodded.

Jessie was quickly sending away the remainder of our army, leaving me with only the bare minimum needed to keep these guys in check.  “You guys, stand up, leave, or come stand behind me.  You’re all fine.  He’s dangerous, but he’s too hurt to do anything with…”

Then a cluster of dangerous ones.  I didn’t want to go left to right as I sorted or they would know what I was doing as I skipped them.  I looked to Jessie, “How are we doing for time?”

“Seventeen minutes.”

“Right,” I said.  I chose a different section to pick through.  “You, you, you, you, stand up.  Get out of the city or stick with us.”

As the group got smaller, I began picking out the remainder.  The relief of the ones who got up gave hope to the people that were going to be troublesome, the violent ones, the more monstrous ones.

Not that monstrous necessarily meant being altered more than the next guy.

“You, you, you,” I pointed out some more.  I gestured.

Three.

“And you,” I said.

Two.  One.

Jessie drew her gun as I gave the signal.  I saw the remaining five stiffen.  Some moved, lunging, in very calculated attacks – a tendril lashing out for the nearest rebel guard we had, another looking to run, hurling himself back toward the door.

Jessie picked them off, a series of shots.  Five shots, five dead or dying enough that it didn’t matter anymore.

“I don’t like that,” Gordon Two said.  “Shooting prisoners.”

“If Sy says so, they were going to make themselves a problem,” Jessie said.

“I think I like that sentiment even less than shooting prisoners,” Gordon Two said.  “If you say so.  That’s a lot of trust to put in you two.”

“Weren’t you just saying that you should trust me more?”

“On capability, not necessarily morality,” Gordon Two said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “That’s fair.”

In the distance, a building was toppled.  When I looked, Neph was using one hand on a building to try to push himself to his feet.  It looked laborious.  I wasn’t sure how much of it was because he was hurt, and how much was because he’d been built to be big in a way that tested a lot of rules and demanded a lot, and he wasn’t so readily equipped to go from a near horizontal position to a vertical one.  Everything he had was meant to keep him more or less upright.

“Sy,” Jessie said.  “You and I, we have a place to go, for the evacuation.”

“Do we?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I was going to follow behind, make sure the other experiments we scared off aren’t going to double back and harass our guys.”

“Bea?” Jessie asked.  “Davis?  Protect the others, troubleshoot?  This bit is something Helen, Sy and I need to do.  It’ll be five minutes, which will give us time to catch you all as you start heading back.”

“Sure,” Davis said.

I gave Jessie a curious look, but she gestured, and I was willing to take her cue.

“Me alone, I don’t think they’d listen,” she said.  “I’m a girl, and I have the wrong image.”

“They?”

She touched a wall as we ran past it.  I caught a glimpse.

“Ah.”

If it hadn’t been for that, I might have realized when I heard a crow’s caw.  Convincing enough to have been a real crow, but most real birds had fled for wilderness when the whole city started rumbling with Neph’s activity.

It took only a minute of running before we got into the thick of it.  It looked like a neighborhood that had started construction and abruptly stopped.  Materials needed elsewhere, funding dropped, health scare when they found a graveyard under land plots… I’d heard any number of reasons for places like this.

We approached the center of the undeveloped area, and I brought my fingers to my lips.  I whistled.

It took a moment, but they popped out of the woodwork.  The caw had told them to go into hiding, and the whistle had drawn attention.  A half dozen youths.

Jessie reached out, pressing something into my hand.  Behind us, Helen and Hairy were only just now catching up.

The item in my hand was chalk.

“Briarjack works,” Jessie said.

On the wall, large enough to be seen at a distance, I drew three lines that crossed in the center.  The briar, or the ‘jack’ from jumping jacks, and very rarely the caltrop.  A dangerous place.  I circled it dramatically and then underlined it for emphasis.

I heard the shouts and the orders.  I saw scared kids two or three years younger than me acting as bosses, ordering younger ones.

There were a good number of mice.  More than I might have expected for a city this size.  Street urchins who had no doubt been huddled around stoves and heat lamps inside, enduring the winter.

“We’re evacuating,” I told the first of the elder children to approach.  “Entire city is going to go.  You’ve got a bed and food as long as you’re with us, and if you need, we should be able to ship you off to somewhere longer-term.”

“Where you from?” an older sister asked.

“Radham,” Jessie volunteered.

“Don’t know Radham.”

“Foxes and mice,” Jesse said.

“I traveled for a little while on the railcar.  Trying to get as far away from home as I could get,” the sister said.  “Foxes and mice were closer to home.”

“Northwest,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” the sister said.  “You’ve got food?”

“Might be shitty food in the immediate future, but it’s food,” I said.  “And we need to leave now.”

“Let’s go!” she called out, and her vote of confidence was enough to get the others moving.  “Hurry hurry!”

Helen and Hairy pointed to give direction, and Jessie and I followed.

“I’m glad you didn’t forget the briarjack,” Jessie said.

“So am I,” I replied, watching the children hurry.  But I’m trying and I can’t even remember the name of the gentle smuggler we put in charge of the orphanage back in West Corinth.

I didn’t even think of the mice when I was thinking of people we ought to save.  I would have looked for schools, or for orphanages, and the mice escaped me.

I didn’t want to be the person who would leave them behind, and I was worried I might end up becoming one, when push came to shove.

I fussed over the numbers and transactions for good reason, because sooner or later, I was going to have to start making more calls, as my brain gave me less and less room.

I studiously ignored Mauer as I shouted, gave direction, and tried to steer the group.  It was better to focus on better things, like the fact that fleeing children drew attention from adults, almost giving them permission to be scared about what was going on.

This wasn’t everyone, and it wasn’t close to everyone, but I had to accept what I got, whether it was in my head or in reality.

Neph was fighting well beyond the point that a human with equivalent injuries would have.  Somewhere along the line, somehow, Cynthia’s people had found a way to set him on fire twice.  One of the fires had been an explosion, the other something closer to a boat filled with chemicals.

Had he wanted, he could have stumbled over to the harbor and thrown himself in the water.  Given the chemicals, that might not have fully extinguished the fire, but it would have cooled him down.  The heating was more an issue than the damage the fire at his shins and feet was doing.

He steamed, and his mouth worked open and closed like a nutcracker working a stubborn nut.  He moved even more recklessly than before, with less accuracy and efficiency, almost as if he was blind, though his eyes were intact.

I gave Helen’s hand a squeeze.  She didn’t squeeze back.

“We’ll get you someone,” I told her.  “Or we could send you back.  You could sell them on you being shot and crawling back.”

“Pulling a Mary,” Jessie said.

I jabbed her.  She jabbed me back.

Helen was shaking her head.

“No?” I asked.  “Because Ibbot?”

She nodded.

“There’s a chance we may run into him,” Jessie said.  “Is that going to be a problem?  Do we have another Mary parallel?”

Helen didn’t respond.

I volunteered, “I think it doesn’t matter.”

Helen nodded.

“We need to give Helen a working voice again, or you two are going to drive me crazy,” Jessie said.

“You should know by now,” I said.  “If you tell me that there’s a blatant way to get your goat, that’s an incentive.  I move that we leave Helen voiceless for the indefinite future.”

Helen, standing beside me, simply shrugged.

No strong feelings, one way or the other.

“But if she can’t speak, she can’t articulate if she wants Possum and the kitchen crew to make carrot cake, sugar cookies, or red velvet cake,” Jessie said.

Helen made an almost inaudible gasping sound, with a rough hitch in it, as if a very different creature was trying to gasp, and the sounds overlapped.

“Dirty pool,” I said.

Jessie smiled.  Helen, meanwhile, started tapping my shoulder, pointing at her mouth when I looked her way.

“We’ll get you fixed as best we’re able,” I said.  “I’m just worried the patch-up job we do now is going to hurt you in the long run.”

She indicated her mouth.

“First priority, we fix your mouth,” I promised.  “Even though I’d rather we had someone good work on your face.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied.

Neph had slowed down enough that he was no longer zig-zagging between groups.  He staggered toward one group, which I imagined would head around a corner, and then Neph would start getting shot from behind.  I saw cannons mounted on carts in places.  I couldn’t imagine that was sustainable with the way the cannon fire would rock the carts and startle the horses, but it was a good approach for staying mobile.

There was an explosion from a source I didn’t see, and Neph fell, collapsing against a building.

“We should go,” Jessie said.  “Make absolutely sure everyone’s clear.”

“It’s been forty minutes since we said it might be twenty minutes.  If we don’t get results, if we don’t see for sure that that’s what the Academy was doing, then people will be disgruntled.  They’ll start saying I made it all up.”

“If it turns out to be a bioweapon meant to level a city, it could reach us.  Airborne parasites, another plague, biting insects with a taste for humans and very lethal poisons, any gas that’s effective at one part per million with a short lifespan…”

I bit my lip, watching.

“Or you can hem, haw, and delay on leaving, and the decision will be made for us.”

“I think I need to see for myself.  Nevermind everyone else’s opinions, dissent in the ranks… I need to know what they’re doing, how badly they want to deal with us.  If my feeling is right on this, if they’re willing to sacrifice a city to eliminate one Cynthia, one Sylvester, or one Fray, how badly do they want it?  How far are they willing to go?”

“You need it to put the fine touches on the versions of our enemies that are living in your head,” she said.

“Something like that,” I said.  “But I don’t think the Infante is going to be one of those enemies.”

“You don’t?”

Neph tore away a part of a building and hurled it, trying to make up for his inability to catch up to Cynthia’s spears with a form of ranged attack.  The chunk of building disintegrated as he threw it, with more landing on Neph’s own head than atop the group.

“No,” I said.  “I don’t think that’s how it works…”

The spears responded to the thrown building chunk with a coordinated battery of cannon fire.

“…There are rules at play, even if they’re twisted Sylvester rules.  If the Infante ever starts talking to me and he’s not actually there, I think that’s it.  That’s as far as it goes.  Put me down.”

“Sure, Sy.  I can do that,” Jessie said.  She rested her head on my shoulder, holding my injured hand in her own with a delicate touch.

We watched Neph find his feet again, then fall within seconds.

I tilted my own head, and I knocked it into Jessie’s.  I did it again, then again.

“Trust you to ruin a nice moment,” she said, lifting her head from my shoulder.

I leaned over and kissed her.

When she broke the kiss, her lips were only just far enough that they grazed mine as she spoke, “Trust you to ruin a nice moment twice over.”

“That was a nice kiss!” I protested, pulling back.  “It was a good one!  I’m good enough at it that it’s caused problems in the past!”

“That was a nice kiss bookended with a headbutt on one end and…” she indicated the city, the dying giant.  “That on the other.  Soon.  The death of a Lamb’s half sibling and innumerable people we weren’t able to reach.”

“You’re so critical,” I said.

“And you’ve got terrible timing,” she said.  “But it was nice.”

“There we go,” I said.

We remained like that for nearly another minute, neither of us speaking, Jessie resting her head on my shoulder again.  I felt Helen’s hand clench faintly in reaction to some of the explosions, as if she was feeling something like sympathetic pain.

Finally, in the distance, Neph ruptured.  His belly split from crotch to sternum, as if sliced open, and an oily black spray poured out.  It caught in the air, liquid becoming gas.  Gas unfolded further, becoming a fog.  It seemed largely limited to the lower areas of the city, closer to the water level.

My instincts were right.  I wonder what the students who thought they’d run off and join Cynthia are thinking now.

There was a lot of the fluid, and with the way it seemed to multiply into a hundred times the amount of gas as it caught the air, Neph and the specks that were the spears were lost in the growing black cloud.

Some of the braver members of our army and collection of bystanders were venturing up the hill, finding places where they could stand and watch.

It wasn’t going to reach us.  It barely looked like it reached the place where we’d run into the professor and the expendable experiments.

Helen raised a hand, waving goodbye to her half-brother.

“Why was he a half-brother, by the by?” I asked.

She looked at me, moved her hand side to side, as if drawing out the arc of a rainbow, then turned back to look at her brother.

“Makes a ton of sense,” I said.

Jessie elbowed me.

“Goodbye Neph.  You were kind of one of us, in a roundabout way,” I said.

Helen nodded.

Jessie, meanwhile, moved away from me to wave over some students.  Gordon Two, Bea, Davis, and the girl from the bathroom.  Shirley followed after a short delay.

“What is it?” I asked.  “Plague vector?  Gas?”

“If I had to guess,” the Treasurer said, “It’s one of the quarantine measures.”

“Quarantine measure?” I asked.

“Black wood,” the Treasurer said.  He sounded as if he was in awe.

“No,” Davis said.  “Is it?”

“I’d think, but I don’t like how it’s not as reactive to the water.  Could be the cold, could be a diluted sample, but…”

“What’s black wood?” I asked.

“Builder’s wood,” the Treasurer said.  “But it’s meant to contain and disrupt something like a self-propagating lifeform.  Wall ’em in, and when the builder’s wood reaches maturation, it sends out spores.  Existing wood, non-meat food supplies.  Turns it into more black wood, provided the raw material is there and there’s any moisture.  A lot of builder’s wood structures crumble, I think, integrity gone.”

“We’re surrounded by forest,” I pointed out.

“Yep,” he said.  “But it’s going to take time.  Pneumonia-like symptoms for everyone in the city that breathes it in, enough to keep them put.  Minor complications with diet and eating.  Wood grows in at the usual rate, you could  give it a few days to a week before it gets as far as the city periphery.  Keeps going until a gust of wind can’t carry a spore to the next bit of green.  They’ll probably burn  a circle to control its progress.”

“And if they don’t?” I asked.

“They will.  They have to,” he said.

We’d never really fully discussed the extent the Infante might be willing to go to.  The consequences he might put into action to silence a dissenting voice.

“It would work on plague, wouldn’t it?” I asked.  “The vinelike, veinlike growths?  Turn ’em black.   Starve out the population.”

The Treasurer’s face was marked by a kind of frustrated horror, as if he desperately wanted to articulate a rebuttal and couldn’t.

“There are better ways to quarantine something like this,” he said.  “They have procedures.  There are other methods.  Ones that wouldn’t turn a large portion of the Crown States into a wasteland of charcoal-black woods.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I watched as the black fog settled, thinning out.  The snow that had been white before was now faintly grey.

“There are better ways,” the Treasurer said, as if he couldn’t comprehend this.

There are better ways, but they’re willing to give up the Crown States of today, contentious as they are, for a diminished, plague-free Crown States of tomorrow that is entirely under their control.

This won’t be the only seeding of the black wood or things like it, I thought.

I looked over at Jessie, then at Helen.

“Our hand’s been forced,” I said.  “No choice.  We accelerate the timetable.  Skip steps D, E, F, and G.”

“We didn’t label the steps,” Jessie said.

“But you know what I’m talking about,” I said.  I nudged her.

“Regrettably.  We go straight to the top.”

I turned my back on the scene.  I looked at the crowd of evacuated locals, of mice and grown men, of scattered thugs and of ex-students.  I saw an abstract, vague Fray standing among Lambs old and young, and the assorted accompanying figures, like Hubris, Quinton, and Shipman.  I saw Mauer and I saw young rebels gathered around him, and I wasn’t wholly sure if they were real or in my head.

A dozen individual trains of thought all found their home.  The things I needed to do, the things I wanted to do.

There was a way forward.

“I have a plan,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 17.x (Lambs) – Twig

Lamb (Arc 17)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“…You’ve each grown and taken on a fortitude that goes well beyond what your teachers and textbooks were able to impart.  Wallace called it a preservation of the favored, and you favored students sit here now, having faced the gauntlet of testing, examinations, projects, and screens.”

Lillian didn’t want to fidget and betray her anxiety, but she did dig one nail of her thumb into the underside of the other thumb’s nail.

“You are what we sought to preserve.  Recognize and be proud of the strength you have no doubt found deep within yourself, the courage, the commitment, and the willpower.  Each of you have provided a long series of minor projects and two major projects to the Academy and Crown, strengthening it, much as Crown and Academy have strengthened you.”

At the stage, Hayle stood at the podium.  Radham’s professors, the mayor, two people Lillian didn’t recognize, and one minor noble Lady she had never seen all stood or sat behind Hayle.  A man in a white coat stood by a long table.

“Civil war, rebellion, religious mobs, betrayal of the Academy by its own members, and a plague that may well be covered in textbooks your children’s children read… it paints a bleak picture, doesn’t it?” Hayle asked.  The grey-haired man stood to one side of the podium, not behind it, one of his hands behind his back, the other resting on the edge of the podium, periodically pointing.  The deep-etched lines of his face were cut darker by the lighting.  He might have resembled a fencer, given his stance, but if he was one, he was the old master.

“But I’m optimistic, and I’m optimistic in large part because of you.  You’ve witnessed and endured a great deal in the past five years.  I believe our future is in capable hands.  I trust each of you in that.  Some of you will be commended for your efforts in these trying times, others will receive accolades.  But each of you, by dint of the fact that you’ve earned your seats here, are remarkable.  Some of you will go on to manage clinics or work in labs, others will join the military to offer your services.  Others will push themselves even further, to earn your grey coats, or even your black coats.”

He smiled.  Lillian hadn’t ever seen Hayle try to be genial.  She wasn’t sure he was very good at it.

“Life, as each and every one of you know, is a remarkable thing.  Your lives, dear students, especially so.  You are better, and this is only the first leg of the journey for many of you.  Now prove yourselves even better still, whether it’s in the face of life’s winding course, or if it’s in pursuit of greater academia and the best that Crown and Academy can provide you.”

Lillian’s thumbnail dug deeper into the flesh.  It would have been nice if Duncan had been able to sit by her, but he was a row ahead of her and way off to the left.  Her second thought was Mary, but Mary would be in the audience at the very edges of the room.

“I’ll stop torturing you all now,” Hayle said.  The look on his face was especially dark as he smiled.  “You want to hear your names spoken.  I’ll cut right to it.  Owen Barr!”

The entire front row stood.  Owen strode to the stage.  Lillian watched as he hurried up the short series of steps and approached the table.  Owen must not have slept a wink the night prior, because he had dark circles under his eyes.  Had he not wanted to use medication to remove them?

Owen accepted the white coat handed to him by the man at the table, shucked off his student’s jacket, and donned the coat of a doctor.

He shook Hayle’s hand, then jumped a foot in the air as Hayle called out the next name the second his back was turned.

“William Bray!”

William ascended the stairs as Owen reached the lady noble at the far end of the stage.  He bowed, and the noble lady inclined her head in acknowledgement, smiling.

The audience at the edges of the room included powerful locals.  Radham was a good academy, and by virtue of being what it was, it spawned a vibrant ecosystem of schools, businesses, industries, and military arms.  The headmaster of Mothmont would be there, looking for young recruits to teach classes and tutor.  He wasn’t the person that had been in charge of the preparatory school when the Lambs had attended or when the Bad Seeds had struck.  That woman had been replaced.  Edward Scullion was also present, a local businessman who ran a local plant and who often contracted with Radham to use the Academy’s facilities to handle especially big orders.  His plant made psuedo-embryonic fluid for vat-grown life, custom-ordered by each given client.

“Scotty Becksie!”

Even now, they were being examined.  The unwitting might not have picked up on that, but very few got this far in their studies while also being unwitting.  Eyes were on them.  People like Scullion had come with names in mind, and they would approach the new Doctors with offers ready.  The people he picked would make more in a month than the average citizen made in a year, and if they could also earn Scullion’s favor, which was apparently not too difficult so long as they could handle their drink after hours, they would often be paired up with a local and attractive young aristocrat.

Stumble on the stairs on the way up or show fear like Owen had when Hayle had shouted, and that possible future could easily be retracted.  It was easy to make a mistake when nerves were this bad.

“I’m pleased to announce,” Professor Hayle said, “Travis Birch, with commendation.”

Lillian’s gaze was sharp as she watched a smiling Travis ascend the stairs.  Rather than don his coat himself, he was give his coat by one of the professors from Claret Hall.  After he approached Hayle, shaking the headmaster’s hand, Hayle affixed a little silver elaboration to the Academy crest just over Travis’ heart.  It was small, a little silver bar with a stylized leaf at one end.

But that was a decoration that Travis could wear for the rest of his career.  Every person who wore a lab coat knew what it meant, that he had placed himself head and shoulders above.  Sometimes they were politicized, sometimes they were downplayed, or someone might comment that a given professor handed them out freely to good looking students or any student with a nose sufficiently caked in brown… but there wasn’t a student in the auditorium that didn’t want to hear the headmaster announce them with commendation.

It opened doors, it fast tracked them along certain paths, giving them an automatic in where others would be questioned, tested, or second-guessed.  It afforded a measure of authority, all else being equal.

It, to be cynical, kept the students hungry, even after they knew they had a right to walk up on stage and claim their white coats.

She joined in with the applause, she smiled politely.  She felt the hunger, and it gnawed at her in a way; her thumbnail bit deeper into the quick of her other thumb as she clasped her hands on her lap once again.

More names.  Nicholas Booth.  Sidney Brown.  Luther Cockwill.

It wasn’t until the last names had passed into the realm of ‘D’ and two more boys had had their names called that the first girl got to walk up and claim her coat.  Jean Dahl.  Lillian had tutored her for a little while.  She hoped Jean found some measure of success.

Bruce Dearly.  D.J. Derrick.  Wesley Dillon.

“And I find I have to pause here,” Professor Hayle said.  “Because this next name deserves special mention, above and beyond even commendations.”

Lillian’s heart jumped in her chest.  Was Duncan there, at the front of the line?

“For exemplary service to Academy and Crown, for showing capability, intelligence, and skill that did the Academy proud, the collective faculty of Radham Academy is unanimous in wanting to recognize Max Fortin.”

Lillian joined the crowd in applause, watching as professors stood from their chairs, all applauding.  The noble lady, too, stepped forward.

Hayle spoke, as multiple professors, the mayor, and even the noble gave their congratulations to Max.  “As a student, now a Doctor, Max Fortin joined three members of our senior faculty in the labs, and it was his keen eyes that helped us identify two individual infection vectors for the carmine plague.”

There was no saying that someone like Max got lucky, that he had brown nosed his way into this, that he had cheated, or that he had slept with the right old pervert.  Commendations and accolades.  It was the result of committee, heated debate between staff members with favorites, with agendas, and, among people with black coats, very often people who wanted to protect the reputation of the accolades they had received, once upon a time.  They wouldn’t tarnish the elaborate decorations on the badges they wore for formal occasions.

Lillian’s disappointment staggered her.  For Duncan and for herself.  Commendations were something that were parceled out, often with each professor handing out one at most.  Accolades were a once-a-year thing.  There were tales of years with two, and a single year with three, but Lillian had long suspected that those years had been calculated, that they were dealt out primarily to give hope whose names had yet to be called.

And she did hope.  It was a bad year, wasn’t it?  It would be a good year to be generous.

“With my own commendation, Duncan Foster,” Hayle announced.

Lillian watched as Duncan ascended the stairs.  If he felt any of the same disappointment she did, he did a marvelous job at not showing it.  He smiled, extending a hand in a wave for someone at the back of the crowd, and beamed as he met Hayle at the table, shaking the headmaster’s hand before allowing Hayle to help him don the white coat.

Students to the left and right of Lillian were standing.  Lillian joined them.  She was suddenly so close to the stage.

“Alexander Fox,” Hayle announced.

Alexander ascended the stairs.  Lillian moved forward.  One student between herself and the stairs.

She could see some of the crowd at the side and back of the room now.  She saw Mary in the crowd, smiling, and was struck by the memory of Mary lying on a street that was only a twenty minute walk away from the auditorium.  Her own hands had been slick with Mary’s blood from fingertip to wrist as she had performed field surgery on her friend, Jamie’s voice calm as it spoke in her ear, helping to guide her.

She saw Ashton, still so young in appearance, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine the others, as they had once appeared.

“Tom Gabriel,” Hayle spoke.

Tom ascended the stairs, and Lillian felt the air move in his wake.  Nothing between her and the stage now.

So many years ago now, Hayle had spoken to her in his office.  She had been terrified of him then, much as Oliver had, earlier.  He had spelled out that he needed a field medic for a project, and that the medic had to be young.  He hadn’t been headmaster then, but he had been a professor.  He talked about time away from the Academy, and how she would be compensated with allowances and some help from him and other members of the administration.  He’d spoken her praises, going over her grades from Academy prep and her introductory tests.  Was she interested?

She had almost said no, purely out of fear.  She had been such a scaredy cat.

But her fear of upsetting this terrifying man and dooming her career before she had even had her first midterm had won out.  She’d been afraid of what her parents would think or say if it somehow got back to them that she had been singled out as special and she’d said no.

Fear on one hand and fear on the other.

Seeing Mary reminded her that there was more to that story.  She had interacted with the Lambs, one particular Lamb for all of twenty minutes before she had gone straight back to Hayle to ask him to take her off the project.  He had talked her back into it.

“And I’m pleased and proud to now announce a student that I’ve followed since the beginning of her studies here.  This exceptional young lady has consistently been top of the class or close to it, and she maintained that academic standing while traveling to war zones and cities under siege at my order.  Lillian Garey, with commendations.”

Commendations.

Lillian’s eyes dropped for a second.  The fingernail of her index finger bit into the quick of her thumb for a second as she felt all of the doubts and fears she’d been keeping at bay wash over her.  The true nature of that noble on the stage, what she’d heard about Hayle’s lies and the conspiracy to keep her black coat from her, one she wasn’t entirely sure she had averted.

Getting no accolades felt like another play when it came to that conspiracy.

For an instant, she thought she might turn and walk away.

But what good did that do?  What good did it do to run, when she’d found the guts to stay in this all this time?

She could face down this particular monster.

She could put a smile on her face, ascending the stairs, acknowledging the applause.  She moved with a confidence that she hadn’t been given by her parents, in genetics or in upbringing, and she met Headmaster Hayle at the end of the table with the coats and scrolls.

The applause continued, polite applause from students and meaningful applause from others.  Mary was clapping, smiling.

Hayle bent down a fraction, speaking in her ear.  “I know.  I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, still smiling.  She had fought so hard to get here, and even being on this stage was something special, a vindication of too many moments of terror, too many times that she had bled and times that she had made others bleed.  Countless nights studying until her eyes could no longer track words on the page.

“Thank you for your help in putting me here, headmaster,” she said.

“The vast majority of it was you,” he said.  “Trust me.  Come to my office later tonight.  We’ll talk.”

“Alright,” she said.  The applause was dying down.  He offered his hand and she shook it.  She turned, allowing him to slip the lab coat into place.

Her back to the rest of the stage, her eyes passed over the crowd, her smile wistful.

She saw her parents, but she didn’t acknowledge them, she didn’t let her eyes stop for a fraction of a second as her gaze swept past them.

She searched for specific, more important faces and she didn’t see them.  It would have been insanity to expect those faces to appear here, of all places, but insanity played a fair part in defining at least one of those individuals.

I did it, Lambs, she thought.  Her hands tugged at the lapels of the coat.  It wasn’t one of the generic white coats.  This one had been made to fit her.  A special touch by Hayle, no doubt.

She turned to face him, so he could pin the commendation in place, and felt the shock of the unexpected, a hand at her arm, as he steered her, so that her turn completed without a stumble or a moment of confusion.

The noble lady stood before her.  Pale, white-haired, with oil-black lashes on her eyes and a slender, graceful frame and a gossamer-thin dress, the woman was young as nobles went, no older than twenty-five.  The noble lady’s fingers were long, the painted, pointed fingernails like a brandishing of daggers that fenced Lillian off from being able to reach out and take the commendation that lay in the cup of the palm.

No move was made to pin it on Lillian’s breast.

Automatically, Lillian curtsied.  She drew on everything she had, and she maintained her composure.

“My lady,” she said, her voice soft, almost inaudible in the dwindling applause.

The noble didn’t move, and the noble didn’t speak.

Lillian stayed still, confident, her head held high.  She was dimly aware of Mary in the background, and of Duncan, who wore a troubled expression.  She kept her eyes on the noble, though lowered in deference, and she tried very hard not to think about what the rogue Lambs had said about the nobility.

The Lady leaned close.  Lillian did her best not to flinch.

“You’ve been witness to the death of a noble,” the Lady whispered.  “And you’ve talked to so many who brought such things to pass.”

Lillian declined her head.  She was aware that five hundred eyes were watching the exchange, curious about the words being spoken.  “To my regret, my Lady.”

“Indeed,” the Lady replied.  She took hold of the commendation, rolling it in her fingers.  She exposed the point of the pin.

Poison?

No, it didn’t even have to be poison.  It only needed to make her bleed.

It took everything Lillian could summon up to hold firm as the Lady pinned the commendation in place.  The pin didn’t penetrate flesh.  No damage was done.  Lillian turned away in the same instant the noble Lady did, and she measured her steps with care so she couldn’t be perceived to be fleeing the stage.

“Chris Gateman,” Hayle announced the next name.

“You okay?” Duncan whispered, as Lillian found him in the group of students that had already stepped off the stage.

She managed to put a false smile on her face and nod, and she turned to look up at the stage.

She wasn’t okay, but she would have been hard pressed to articulate just why.  She was angry, at Hayle and at her parents and especially at the noble, this moment she had worked for tainted.

But she could look at the noble, and in a way, she had to wonder if the woman had acted as she had because of fear.

Was that creature, supposedly once a human, now simultaneously one of the most powerful people in the world and one of the most pitiable?

“Charles Gateman,” Hayle spoke.

Claret Hall was busy, as countless students were joined by parents and loved ones, gathering in the lobby and at the dining halls.  There were local business owners, politicians, teachers and other powerful figures now courting new Doctors, meeting here and there, making pitches and hearing students sell themselves.

Owing largely to the special attention from Hayle, a noble, and to the dramatic, just-long-enough pause before the commendation was pinned in place, Lillian received more than the usual share of glances and stares.

She ascended the stairs, and even on the second floor, there was a lot going on.  It wasn’t the crowd that was on the floor below, but the wide hallways and the open spaces were dotted with clusters and groups, each spaced out so they were just barely out of earshot of one another.

The top floor, however, was far quieter.  She passed one pairing of grey-coated man and new Doctor as she walked down two hallways.  She reached Professor Hayle’s office and knocked.

“Come in,” the Headmaster said.

Lillian did, closing the door behind her.

“Congratulations, Doctor,” Hayle said.  His smile seemed more natural than it had on stage.

“Thank you,” she said.  She put her hands into the pockets of her coat, enjoying the pull of it against her shoulders and neck.

“Have you had a chance to talk with your parents?”

“No,” she said.  Then she realized how it might sound.  “Perhaps after.”

“Perhaps after,” he said, nodding, digesting that.

He was standing behind his desk.  He had taken off and hung up his black coat, and his sleeves were rolled up.  Someone had brought him a tray of tea, which sat on the desk.  One cup had already been filled and sat steaming in arm’s length of his chair.

“Am I here for good news or bad news, headmaster?” she asked.

“Neither, I think,” Hayle said.  “It depends what you want to hear from me.  Again, I’m sorry for what happened on stage.  Lady Gloria invited herself.  I think she sought you out.”

“Why?”

“You likely know more than I do.  The politics of the Crown are a storm and I try to keep this ship on course in the midst of it.”

Lillian took in that statement, and turned it around in her head in light of what she’d learned about the nobles and the Block.

Was Hayle lying to her?  Did he know?

That did a lot to set the underlying tone of this conversation.

“May I?” she asked, indicating the tray of tea.

“Please do.  Help yourself to the cookies.  I’d rather not partake than deal with the heartburn or the remedy for the heartburn.”

Lillian poured herself a cup, and she tried to formulate a response while she did so.  “Would I sound petulant if I said I deserved accolades, Headmaster?”

“No,” Hayle said.  He settled into his chair, and he took hold of his cup of tea in both hands.  He didn’t elaborate.  He seemed to leave it at that.

“Was it her interference?  Or more politics that you couldn’t handle?”

“You didn’t capture Sylvester Lambsbridge, doctor,” Hayle said.  “You were put in charge of a project, with the idea of keeping the team intact, and not a single one of the original members remain.”

“I think that’s unfair,” she said.

“Gordon is dead, Helen is dead, Jamie was rumored dead, and even if that rumor was false, there’s some reason to think he was caught in one of the black wood traps with his partner in crime.  A casualty of the chaos other rebels created, if they weren’t the cause of the disasters in the first place.  No word of the pair in months.  How could I argue that case to a jury of professors?”

“Did you try?”

“No,” Hayle said.  He leaned back, holding his tea.  “As much as I’ve valued what you brought to the table, it wasn’t a sensible use of political capital.”

“I deserved for you to try,” Lillian said, not meeting his eyes.  She pursed her lips for a second, and then ventured, quiet.

“Perhaps,” Hayle said.  “I’ll see about making it up to you.”

Lillian wasn’t sure how to respond.  She already felt too entitled for pressing things this far.  She sipped the tea, testing the temperature, then took a more confident drink.  The cookies were shortbread, and they were perfect.

“I brought you here to discuss transition, change, not good or bad news,” Hayle said.  “In the interest of making things up to you… Mary is yours.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Take that in both senses it can be interpreted.  Her loyalty belongs to you already.  I am now formally handing you custody.  The doctors I tasked with her care will remain at your disposal should you ask, but whatever path you take from here, so long as you’re with the Academy, she is a project under your name, not my own.”

Lillian opened her mouth, trying to think of what to say, and then closed it.

“As for Ashton, I’ve him to Duncan’s custody.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” she said.  “And at the same time, I’m not sure if I should feel sorry for one of them, the other, both of them, or if it’s perfect.”

“A lot will depend on where he goes.”

“And my situation and Mary’s depend on where we go.”

“Yes.  No changes in her health?”

“Growths.  Largely benign, lower back and thighs mostly, some on the face and neck.  Manageable so far.”

“Good,” Hayle said, nodding.  “Good.  I’m glad.”

“But to backtrack- you said paths?” Lillian asked.  “What- I have paths?  What happened to the current path?”

The old professor nodded.  He leaned forward, elbows on the table, tea still clasped in both hands.  “The Lambs project is… in ambiguous territory.  You, Mary, and Ashton, you can be given a mission and I have confidence you could do a satisfactory job.  But it scarcely resembles what I was aiming to accomplish in the beginning.  There are the others that we used as bait…  I pay for their upkeep and I plan to do so for the indefinite future, but again, in function and form they would scarcely resemble what I hoped to create.”

“You wanted a gestalt.”

“You could say that, yes,” Hayle said.  He shook his head.  “I won’t say the project is finished or that it was a failure, but I think tying you to it in its current state is a crueler thing than failing to give you accolades.  I don’t foresee a resounding success that will launch your career forward.”

Lillian’s gaze dropped.  She helped herself to more shortbread.

“There are paths,” Hayle said.  “Right now you’re wearing that white coat with a student uniform, but that’s… a conceit for the evening, nothing more.  Tomorrow you’ll wear civilian clothes with your coat.  You might move on to work, interviews, or sign on for further study with the Academy.  Many of your fellow Doctors are in talks this very moment, deciding where they go.”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

“I’m held in some esteem, and you’re held in some esteem by me.  Some have floated interest in you for this reason.  Others have floated interest in you purely because of your own merits.”

The professor reached over, and he pushed a stack of letters and papers toward her.  Some were files, some were letters, and some were papers folded in threes and bound with cord.

“If you’d indulge me, I’d like to discuss the offers, and share my own perspective,” he said.

She put the shortbread down on the edge of her saucer and reached for the stack, sliding it closer to her.

“The letter that is on top… I put it there for a reason.  I think you should read it first, after you leave.  Calibrate expectations, digest it, be offended and insulted.  But read it and use it as a barometer to measure the others.”

“What is it?” she asked.  She lifted it up to better view it by the flickering voltaic lights.  “Sir Cory Llend?  I feel like I’ve heard that name.”

“A local aristocrat.  One of notorious stature.  He’s a boor and a pervert, he’s bad with the money he got by birthright, not effort.  More to the point, it’s not even a secret that he has an abiding fondness for intelligent, stern women.  Someone let slip that you were to be the sole female student to receive commendations at Radham this year.  He wrote to me with a message to be passed on to you.  He goes on at great length about the work Academy doctors have done on him, and his consequential… abilities.”

Lillian looked down at the letter and experienced a deep, almost existential kind of horror.

“Are my expectations being set this low?  A love letter from an embarrassment of a man?”

“No.  That wasn’t my aim in suggesting this,” Hayle said.  “But… it’s a kind of offer you should think about.  There are other letters in the pile that are from aristocratic fathers and mothers looking for respectable ladies for their sons.  I know you’ve talked about running your own Academy.  Having backing would shortcut the process, and it would make a great many things possible.”

“No, professor,” Lillian said.  “Headmaster.  I’m sorry.”

“Give it some consideration,” he insisted.  “As your mentor and advisor, I’m warning you that it’s exceptionally easy for a male doctor to miss out on the opportunity to forge a family and home and to fall into the trap that the Academy represents.  For a young lady, who only has so many years to bear children-“

Headmaster,” Lillian said, more firmly, shutting her eyes.

He fell silent.

She took a moment, waiting to see if he would say anything more, before she opened her eyes.

“It seems you’re not open to counsel on the topic,” Hayle said.  “I understand.”

Lillian felt the warmth of the cup of tea in her hands.  Her thumbnail throbbed.  She turned the sentence over in her head several times before she decided she was safe to say, “I let you dictate my childhood and adolescence, headmaster.  My relationships… I’d like to avoid that topic, past or future.  Leave them untainted.”

The man nodded, but his words betrayed the nod.  “I’m concerned I’ve already thoroughly damaged that part of you, throwing you to the wolves as I did, or to the wolf.  I’d hoped to mend that damage with some guidance tonight.”

Lillian’s mouth was dry, and she’d already downed most of the tea.  “I… if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think that’s for you to do.”

He could have taken it much harder than he did, but he hardly seemed to mind.  He took a moment to think, finishing his tea before standing to pour himself a fresh cup.

Lillian reached out, picking through the letters.

“The first few are overtures of a similar if less lewd nature,” Hayle said.  “The first one you might be interested in is from Professor Berger.”

Berger.  She tried not to betray interest or excitement and searched for it, making her way down the stack.

It was an envelope, sealed with wax.

“I didn’t read that one,” Hayle said, “as it was sealed with the Duke of Francis’ mark.”

Lillian nodded, and she opened the envelope.  Within were two bits of metal.

Commendations.  Pins with leaves at the end.  The leaves were marked with crowns.

“I reached out to him,” Hayle said.  “I didn’t ask for this, specifically, I merely thought he could be a resource for you as you started out, opening paths.”

Before even examining the commendations in full or reading the contents of the letter, her eye scanned the letter itself.  She saw the frayed marks at the edges of the paper.  Two, then one, then three.

She put that aside for later, and she read the contents, which were relatively brief.

“One for me, and one for Duncan.  A thank-you for his rescue.”

“He struck me as the kind of man who would do that.”

“He mentions Helen, and he talks about some things that he and I discussed while we traveled back to the city.”

“Excellent.  If he’s your ally, that’s an immensely good ally to have.”

Lillian nodded, folding up the letter.

“The remainder are job offers.  I put the one you might be most interested in at the top, near Professor Berger’s.”

The one she might be most interested in.  She picked it up, holding it for a clearer view.  The office wasn’t brightly lit, between the soft voltaic lights and the lamps on the desk, and the lines of the ink were spiderweb-fine.

“Professor Ferres?  Is this Viola Ferres?”

“I do not know of any other professors by that last name,” Hayle said.  He was smiling.

“She’s- I’ve gone on two trips just to hear her speak.  She’s an excellent mind, but she’s also one of the most capable female professors in the Crown States, she runs Hackthorn Academy.  She’s the only female professor that isn’t running an all-girl’s school.”

She almost crumpled the pages in her hurry to unfold them.

“Miss Lillian Garey, I’m writing to you because I’ve made a point of keeping my eye on the most exceptional young ladies in the Academies, and I can remember our brief but enthusiastic conversation in the summer of the year nineteen twenty-three.  I know the tales they tell about me, they call me the Hag of Hackthorn, and it would be remiss of me to neglect a rare young lady like yourself that once put a smile on the face of a hag like me.  I don’t remember making her smile.”

“If you did, you were the first person in decades to do it, by all reports,” Hayle said.  “She’s not often described as being kind or easy to get along with.”

Bewildered, Lillian read on, “I put myself in direct competition with your Professor Hayle in reaching out and attempting to recruit your mind and your services.  I want you for my Academy, Lillian Garey, to pursue a project that closely mirrors your Professor Hayle’s.  I…”

Lillian read on.

The delight faded from her features.

“She wants to start her own version of the Lambs,” Lillian said.  “She wants to take children, separate experiments, and to raise them as a unit.”

“Yes,” Hayle said.  “On one level, the Lambs left their mark.  Professor Ferres is the type to look at what others did poorly and attempt to do it better.  I harbor concerns she dwells on the cosmetic and neglects the personal, but that’s entirely beside the point.”

“What is the point?” Lillian asked.  She looked up at Hayle.  “The- I’m not trying to sound weak or upset in a way I’m not, but this bothers me and I can’t articulate why.”

For reasons that went well beyond the fact that Hayle was the one listening to the articulation.

“Because you invested a lot of yourself into the Lambs, and it could be that this kind of project is something you’ll forever take personally.  Someone who started out raising warbeasts from cub to weapon of war might forever have a soft spot for the things.  Especially if they were eleven or twelve when they started.”

Lillian frowned.

“There are others,” Hayle said.

“Others?  Others wanting to create Lambs of their own?”

“In varying ways and directions.  I thought Professor Ferres would be most interesting to you.”

Almost, almost, Lillian had considered the offer.  But the meeting with the noble on the stage weighed on her in a way she would likely be digesting for weeks to come, and then to hear that there were others?  It was one thing to step in and have a hand in things from the beginning, she could see herself doing that, acting and taking a firmer hand, illustrating the key problems, but when this was only one drop in a bucket?

“There are other factors to consider,” Hayle said.  “Come around to my side of the desk.”

Lillian did, bringing her tea with her.

Hayle moved papers and books aside.  On his desk, held down against wood by a sheet of glass, there was a map of the Crown States.  It was white parchment, of the kind an artist used, and the map had been drawn by a hand in a forceful, sketched out style that Lillian was almost certain was that of a stitched, a kind that drew reproductions.

That paper, stained slightly by age, had been painted with watercolor, possibly Hayle’s own hand.

There was red, and there was blue.  She could infer from the placement of things what the colors represented.

“Very few people truly see the current state of things in the Crown States, Doctor Garey,” Hayle said.

Her fingers touched the glass, tracing it.  The red watercolor started from the northeastern states and struck out, touching all of the dots and marring names that hadn’t been struck out with bold lines of Hayle’s pen.  A full third of the Crown States were painted with the crimson of plague.

The blue, conversely, it took another form.  It appeared almost at random, at the southwestern states, at the eastern coast, and in the English and French-speaking north.  A compass and possibly a thin brush been used to draw out circles, going by the regularity and thickness of the lines.  Some of the circles had a succession of other circles or other more irregular shapes drawn out near them.

Black wood.  It covered far more ground than she had been led to believe.  Multiple states, in some cases.

“Multiple weapons of the Crown released and unleashed on the world.  The black wood activated in seven locations.  Pre-emptive burn circles-”

Hayle tapped one of the circles drawn with the compass.

“-failed on several occasions, leading to further attempts at controlling the spread.  We think it was Fray.  A play for power that failed, a greater gambit, I couldn’t guess what unfolded.  But the rebels haven’t made a move or even shown their faces in months now.  Only Mauer is still fighting his fight after having sustained heavy losses.”

Lillian stared down at the image, committing it to memory as best as she was able.

She would need to communicate this to Professor Berger, in case he didn’t know.

Again, by Hayle’s rhetoric and his easy lies, she was reminded of how precarious this was.  That Hayle could look her in the eye and speculate about who was responsble, when Professor Berger and the Duke of Francis had confided that it was the Infante?

Either Hayle was keeping the truth from her in pursuit of the Crown’s agenda, or he was dangerously incompetent, and Hayle was not a man who lent himself to incompetence.

He continued, “Hackthorn, right here.  They’re isolated by the black wood, and you’ll want to factor that into your decision.  Getting in and out is difficult and dangerous, for a multitude of reasons.”

“I’m not going to Hackthorn,” she said.

Hayle nodded, as if this made an abundance of sense.  “I won’t steer you too firmly, given our conversation earlier.  There are other offers.  Doors are open to you.  Ask me if you need anything, if you’re curious about a name or an Academy.”

“And if I stay?” she asked.  With the Lambs, here?

“Then you’ll be eminently welcome, and you’ll have a seat in any class you wish to take,” he said.

“I’ll- it’s a great deal to think about,” she said.  “I’d like to take some time.”

“Please do.  If you still seek your black coat-”

Absolutely.

“-there are many paths that can carry you there.  I know tonight was a disappointment in some ways, doctor, but you have allies, you have a way forward.”

Almost, she turned to leave.

But too many things were weighing on her.  She wanted to be sure.

“Half of the Crown States are gone to plague or black wood, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Close to.”

“And more damage has been done by war and by the consequences of war, wood, and plague?  We’re even further diminished?”

“You may well have the sense of it.  But we will endure.  We have that capability.”

“Yes, headmaster,” she said.  She finished gathering up the letters, and she clasped them as a bundle in her hands.  “Thank you for your time, headmaster.”

“Thank you for yours, doctor,” he said.

She let herself out of Hayle’s office, closing the door.

Exhaling slowly, she took a moment to compose herself, moving papers between hands so she could tug on her lapels and get a feel for her coat, and then she set off down the hallway.  It was after hours, and only every other light was lit.

In the transition from darkness to light, Mary moved in complete silence, falling in step beside her.

“I’m yours,” Mary said.

Eavesdropping.

“I don’t like the ownership that implies,” Lillian said.

“I trust you.”

“Thank you.  I trust you too.”

“We’ll get you your accolades to go with your grey coat,” Mary said.

Lillian smiled.  She picked through the papers and then handed over the letter.  “A message from the Duke, among many other things.”

“I’ll decode it by the end of the night,” Mary said.  “What’s your plan for the evening?”

“Family,” Lillian said.

“They’ll be curious about the letters,” Mary said.

“Naturally,” Lillian said.  Being with Mary, being away from the auditorium, away from the office, it was a relief.  She could enjoy the coat, and she could put the rest behind her.

Holding Mary’s hand, she steered the way past crowds, through the doors to the outside.  With papers in her one hand and Mary’s hand in the other, she couldn’t flip her hood up to shield against the rain.  Without being signaled or asked, Mary reached up and over and flicked her hood up for her, before doing the same for herself.

There was only a moment’s confusion where they bumped shoulders before Mary realized where Lillian was going.  Then they were on the same page, heading away from the thick crowd and off to the right hand, the field office.  The stables.

“Don’t listen to her,” the voice reached them from the other end of the stable.  “I’ve seen miscarriages that expressed more sense in the five seconds they were alive than she’s expressed in her whole wretched life.”

“Terrible sister!  Pitiful sister.  You speak of sense and you’re the only thing on this living, diverse earth that could be made smarter by being made a stitched.”

“Yes,” Ashton said.  “But you- you two like to fling insults, but you’re both so mean you could make skeletons cry.”

“Terrible!” one of the twins said.

“Awful!” the other echoed.

“I never wanted to play this game,” Ashton protested.

“For good reason!  You’re so dull you enjoy watching paint dry.”

“So boring you actually derive pleasure from watching grass grow.”

“I’m fun,” Ashton said.  “See?  Whee.  Good feelings.  Whaa.”

“Let’s not drug our teammates,” Duncan chastized Ashton.

“It’s not drugs, it’s spores, Doctor Foster.”

“Don’t call me that, geez.  How many times do I have to tell you?  I’m still Duncan.”

“You have to tell him lots.  He has a brain like a cow plop.”

“Or the smelly gunk that you get from a lanced abscess.”

“Whooo.  Waaa.”

Lillian and Mary approached the end of the stable, seeing where the Lambs were gathered at the end of the stable.  Abby was asleep with an absolutely filthy blanket draped over her, nestled into the crook between a warbeast’s leg and its chest.  Nora, Lara, and Ashton sat on a hay bale, while Duncan and Emmett were standing on either side of another, a plate of food between them.

“Any word?” Duncan asked, his voice dropping.

“From the Duke of Francis?  Yes.  Mary will decode for us soon,” Lillian said.

“Excellent.”

“As for our…”

Opposition?  Errant ally?

Labels didn’t really suffice.

“…As for Sy, we’ll be ready when he pokes his head up.  Whatever he’s doing, it’s liable to be pretty big.”

“I’m kind of worried about big,” Duncan said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.01 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Before

I peered past my hand of cards to study the cards arrayed in a partial five-by-five grid on the stump.  The second column had a three, two, and a king down the middle with empty spaces at the top and bottom, and my hand had a three and two, among other things.  Two of a kind.

The chip count was good too.  I liked my numbers stacked at the top of the column.

I laid down the two, and then I laid down a nine.

“Pair,” I said.  My voice was muffled by my mask.

“You should have a three in your hand,” Jessie said, her voice similarly muffled.

She wore a quarantine mask, a tube running to a tank which rested on the log beside her.  Every breath was a hiss, but it was barely audible with the way the wind blew.  She had donned a kind of robe for her quarantine outfit, everything strapped in and then taped.  Her hair peeked out of her hood, and it was already stained black on one side.

“Helen has the three,” I lied.  I indicated Helen.

“Helen has the joker,” Jessie said, indicating with one gloved hand.  Helen wore a similar quarantine outfit.  She had painted hers with what might have been a clown face, though black dust had erased most of that, and she had also attached a hook to each glove and foot.

“Then call her a joker and be done with it,” I said.

Jessie sighed audibly, the noise carrying with the wind.  The sheet we had erected to help keep the wind from blowing away the cards was flapping violently.

Jessie put down a full house using the top right and to left corners, using my two.  She put down her chit.  She indicated Helen, hand extended, “Joker.”

Helen laid down the joker and a nine.  “Naught,” she said.

Jessie sighed audibly again.

“I get to make a rule,” Helen said.

Jessie’s hand remained extended toward Helen as she looked at me.

“What’s the rule?” I asked.

“Ummm,” she said, her voice picking up a burr as the filter of her mask caught the lower register of the ‘mmm’.

“You don’t need to pretend,” Jessie said.  She put her face in her hands, as much as the mask would let her.

“I get Sy’s dessert,” Helen said.

“No, no,” I said.  “You’re supposed to make a rule that benefits me as a bribe to later get my dessert.”

“Low hands win, then,” Helen said.

Jessie shook her head, mask still resting in gloved hands.

“Low two, two pair, and low five,” I said.  I collected the chits I had bet on the rows and columns.

The quarantine setup muffled noise, but there was no muffling the noise of the forest around us.  Trees rocked back and forth in the wind, branches scraping against branch.  The wind hissed as it carried flecks and particles of black, rolling clouds of the stuff that made seeing anything difficult beyond our wind-proofed area.  Branches of a hundred trees all around us cracked and snapped as if they were being systematically broken by a small army and yet more branches knocked and clacked together with a deep, hollow clatter.

The leaves had fallen from the trees and formed a thorny carpet on the ground, the living wood crumpling leaves as it sought leverage, before growing out into briar-like clusters of reaching branches and twigs.  The trees themselves had been sucked dry of every nutrient as the wood grew on them, the existing branches breaking as the wood twisted and pulled on them mid-growth.  In appearance, they best resembled trees mummified in black leather and caked in black dust.

Jessie was shuffling the cards as best as she was able with the gloves on.

“We could mix it up with the next rule change,” I said.

“I think I’m done with cards for a long, long while,” Jessie’s voice was hollow as it came through the filter.

The wind changed direction, and we collectively tensed, my hands moving toward the stump, which had no cards on it.  The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow the chits away, but it was strong enough to carry a cloud of black dust into our campsite.  Tents flapped and the ridges of the stump’s rings caught the dust, infinitesimally small details marked out in stark clarity by the fine powder.

All around us, black builder’s wood encased trees and then twisted them into pieces within the black shell as it grew thicker.  The splintered wood became another in for the invader, and it crept in before expanding again, causing once-straight trunks to twist even further.  Only the relative strength of the black wood kept the entire forest from toppling.

But gaps between trees and between branches grew slimmer, the charcoal-black forest floor and the trees absorbed the light that managed to filter through the clouds.  It felt increasingly claustrophobic.

“It’s only been three days for you,” I finally said.  “I kind of wanted to keep you for longer.”

Jessie sighed again.

“If you want, we could go into the tent,” I said.  “Get out of the suits, I could give you a hand washing your hair.”

Jessie shook her head.

“Sure,” I said.  I would’ve been lying if I said I wasn’t a little put out by that.

“I mean, it sounds nice, really nice,” Jessie said, pausing in the calculated shuffling to look up at me.  “But…”

She trailed off.

“It’s fine.  All good, Jessie,” I said.

She nodded, and she resumed shuffling.

“The other Helen baked me a treat,” Helen said.  “I told myself I would wait until tea time, but the anticipation is delicious.  I might actually be drooling and-”

She jerked, wriggling in her seat.

“-getting my arm through the sleeve and up to my face-”

She wriggled more, then relaxed.  “-is hard.  There.  Not much drool.”

“You’ll get some of my dessert too,” I said.

“Stop!  Gee whiz fuck, Sy, you’ll get me going again.  I think I’m going to keep my hand here for the time being.”

“We’ll see what we can do soon,” I said.  “Get your face fixed up proper this time around.”

Another professor, another two steps forward, one step back. 

“Soonish,” I said.  Soon.

Gordon and Fray moved through the trees.  As if to remind me of the deadlines.  It was a minute before we could put cards down, and I tried not to focus too much on the figures in the trees.

The wind settled down, and Jessie leaned forward.  She laid out the cards in a three-by-three, then dealt out the rest of the cards.

“Opening gambits,” she said.

We stacked our chips at different points on the perimeter.  Mine were green, Helen’s red, and Jessie’s blue.

I looked at my hand of cards, and saw how grimy they were.  Every movement of branch against branch produced some, every twist and grind grated it, producing air-light flakes ranging from leaf-sized to the finest of specks.

I held my fanned-out hand so that the faces of the cards caught more of the dust, picked out two, and laid them out.

“Helen’s rule still stands.  Before that was Sy’s rule about the king of hearts, Sy’s rule about the king of diamonds, Sy’s ‘old maid’ rule, and my lunch rule, and Sy’s rule of three winners,” Jessie said.

Jessie made her play, Helen made her play, and then Jessie announced, “Add to your gambits or make new ones.”

I stacked more chits on the thing.  Looking down at my cards, finding them sufficiently dusty, I began using the edge of one card to scrape dust, moving it.  I tried to look very interested in the state of the board to take focus off of what I was doing, then placed down two more cards.

The round continued, with Jessie getting the much-coveted royals setup.

“Flush,” I said, as I got my next turn.  I slapped down my cards.

Jessie turned a black-dusted mask toward me.  Her expression was hidden, which was a damn shame, but I could very easily guess what that expression was.

“Have you been keeping that up your sleeve the whole time?” Helen asked.  “Why are there two aces of spades?  Did you have another deck?  I’m confused!”

Jessie reached down and touched my ace of spades.  The spade smudged, revealing the club beneath.

The wind hissed, the trees cracked and audibly splintered within their black casings, and branch knocked against branch with heavy, hollow knockings.  Jessie stood from her seat, and the wood cracked and snapped as it broke away from the seat of her robe-like quarantine suit.

“Sorry,” I said.

She shook her head, standing there.

“I can’t see your face, so it’s hard to calibrate.  I thought you’d smile and call me something unkind.”

“I’m about to do something uncharacteristic and stupid,” Jessie said.

“Please don’t,” I said.

“But I hate this place.  I hate this forest,” she said.  She hung her head.  “I hate the lack of color, I hate the lack of anything.  I hate that I can smell the stale death of every living thing that died here.  I hate the waiting, I hate the fact that I can’t breathe, I hate the quarantine suits, I hate constantly changing the filters, I hate this place so much I could cry.”

“Crying can be good,” Helen said.

“Crying can be good, but you shouldn’t inflict this situation on yourself if it makes you that miserable,” I said.  “I hate the idea of you crying if it’s not because of me.”

Jessie hiccuped a laugh at that.

“Come on,” I said.  “Back to the tent with you.  Hair wash and sponge down, I can massage and tend to any places the quarantine suit is pressing at you.”

“I’m spending more and more time in the tent.  It’s only been three days and six hours.  I’m already sleeping three-quarters of every day.  At this rate, by tomorrow I’ll be in the tent all the time, sleeping for five-sixths of the time, and then what’s the point?”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.  “Read, rest, keep the tent nice, then when I get back in through the airlock I can be all, ‘honey, I’m home!’ and stuff.”

Jessie looked skyward.

“Gee,” I said.  “I’m really not hitting the mark today, am I?”

Still looking skyward, Jessie said, “You can’t see my face right now, Sy, but I want you to imagine my most disapproving look, and then up it by a factor of two.”

I bit back my witty banter and teasing.  It wasn’t the time, and I wasn’t hitting the mark.

“Are you going back, Jessie?” Helen asked.

I leaned forward, “You do a good job watching over our guys.  I’d be sorry to see you go, but I’d really be happy knowing you were watching over things, keeping the peace.  There’s nobody I trust more than you.  I might even trust you more than I trust myself.”

“If I go back then I miss you guys,” Jessie said.  “And I end up worrying, because the last time I checked on you, Sy, Helen was taking a break to see if she could hunt deer at the edge of the black wood while wearing a quarantine suit-”

“Which I can,” Helen said, waving the hook she’d attached to her quarantine suit.

“-and you were having long, intensive conversations with Mauer.  You didn’t even recognize me.”

“I recognized you,” I said.  “I wouldn’t not recognize you.  But maybe I didn’t think you were real.  Sometimes they get crafty.”

“Sometimes they get crafty.  Yeah.  That makes me feel a lot better about leaving you on your own.”

“I’m managing,” I said.

“Are you?” Jessie asked.  She paused, very deliberately.  “How sure are you that I’m real?  Right now?”

“Right now?  Geez.  Well, you and Helen come as a package deal, because you’re interacting and they aren’t quite that canny.  Sometimes they wedge themselves into ongoing conversations, like Fray did back in Sedge, but honestly-”

“How sure?” Jessie asked, no-nonsense.

“Mostly?” I asked, sounding less than mostly sure.

Jessie looked to Helen.  “Help me out.  Please?  Give me something to work with.”

“I’ll watch him more carefully,” Helen said.  “I promise.”

“You’ve been here for eleven days, you two.  I can barely tolerate it for three.  Most of the others can’t even do a full day before their nerves start fraying.  I’m worried about you two.”

“Helen’s as happy as a clam,” I said.  “And I’m staying because I have to stay.  If I’m not available when this all comes together then there’s no point.  So I keep going because if I stop then it makes all the suffering that led up to it worthless.”

“I am as happy as a clam,” Helen said.  “I caught a deer, I have cake, I have you two.”

“I’ll rephrase.  I’m worried about you, Sy.  I hate not being able to talk to you, I hate these woods, I hate the black dust-”

In the workings of my head, something clicked.  Transference.  She was accusing me of losing my mind when…

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“-the-  what?”  she asked.  Then she startled  a bit, before clenching her fists, “Because I was hiding it from you, you dolt.”

Helen was looking at me.  I spoke before she asked the question, “Dropped a memory.”

“And I know three is a completely arbitrary number, but I feel like three is it,” she said.

“You could have told me,” I said.  “Us.  You could have told us and you should have told us.  So don’t call me a dolt, you nubmunch.”

“I- heh,” Jessie started.  “Stop trying to make me laugh when I’m working myself into a state here.”

“You should have told me, nubmunch.”

“I would have, but I don’t want to give you added stress when you’re doing this.”

“Well, it hardly helps if you’re just wrestling with it on your own and I suddenly can’t figure you out, between all the distractions and you acting funny.  You end up suppressing everything until you snap.  Stop bottling.”

“Okay,” she said.  And then she stopped talking.  A moment passed.  She added, “We’re sitting here, waiting for the perfect timing, and I’m trying not to think about the mail Jamie read that crossed General Ames’ desk that talked about travel being suspended for certain locations, or additional countermeasures, or the fact that if they’re doing this textbook, we don’t have very long before they start releasing Academy-grown monsters into these woods.  I worry that this all goes wrong in a second, or worse, that this is how we while away the little time we have.”

“We’ll manage,” I said.  “Helen would probably even get a kick out of us being attacked by Academy experiments.  Might do to see if we can’t set up traps, now that I think about it.  Something to occupy ourselves with.”

“Helen’s only at seventy-five percent,” Jessie said.  Her posture changed slightly.  I imagined she closed her eyes, and now that I had connected to the fact that she had dropped a second memory, my mental model of her was making a lot more sense, with less surprises.  I’d thought it was me, after being out here too long.

“Seventy-five percent of a Helen is still pretty gosh-darn amazing,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“It is,” Jessie said.  “But…”

She stopped talking, and I saw her hand shake a little as she balled the gloved hands into fists.

Ah, here we went.

Well, what were the odds it would be a problem?  It wasn’t like we’d seen another living thing that wasn’t one of us for the last week and a half.

Jessie screamed, top of her lungs.

The scream reached through the forest, and it was oddly muted, even without accounting for the mask, the hose, or the filter.  In an ordinary forest, the hard surfaces of trees would have bounced back the sound, but the sheer amount of dust caked on every surface and the thickness of the dust in the air dampened the sound.

I wanted so badly to hug Jessie, tight as possible, to speak into her ear, to say something reassuring and intimate and make it better.  I ached to do it.

I could see Lillian, and I knew that on a level she represented compassion, but a part of me still ached for Lillian’s absence.  I could see Ashton.  It was almost as if the scream was bringing the others out.

All I could do was stand, wood breaking away where it had been striving to attach me to my seat, leaving jagged spikes and splinters where it had broken.  I walked over to Jessie with the branches snapping and breaking beneath my boots, and took her hand.

The forehead of my mask clacked against hers.

She stopped screaming.  No longer taking the background to Jessie’s anger and frustration, the hissing wind and pained creaking and breaking of trees resumed.

“I hate this,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“If it turns out that my scream screwed all of this up, gave us away, then they’ll probably mutiny.”

“Probably,” I said.  “But you needed to scream.”

“I don’t like being weak.  I don’t like being this frustrated.”

“You’re too damn stoic all the time,” I said.  I made the masks clack against each other again.

In the distance, a tree branch broke and fell.

“Incoming,” Helen said.

It took a minute for ‘incoming’ to reach us.  Two of our rebels, all in quarantine suits.

“All good!” I called out.  “Don’t shoot us!”

They stopped running.

“Sorry,” Jessie said.  “Losing my mind in here.”

“How’s the watch shift?” I asked the two rebels.

“Mind-numbing,” the larger of the two said.  “Already looking forward to whoever’s coming to relieve us.  I dropped my watch in the dust and branch bits beneath the perch and it took me fifteen minutes to find.”

I scuffed the ground with a boot. I couldn’t even see dirt beneath the detritus I’d kicked aside.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Tell you what.  You two walk Jessie back.  I’ll take watch with Helen.”

“Yeah?” the smaller one asked.

“Yeah,” I said, emulating his accent a touch.  “Go on.”

Jessie hesitated.

I pushed her arm, “Go on.  We’ll be fine.”

“I’ll send some people to keep you company,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “And we’ll talk after.  Get caught up.  Cover all the bases.”

She nodded.

I wanted to give her more support than I could here.

Helen and I left the cards behind and we began the trudge to the perch.

We climbed the tree we had nailed rungs to, and we took our seats in a thicker cluster of branches.

It wasn’t until we were settled that I noticed one of Helen’s sleeves was still floppy, no arm in it.  The hook swung like a pendulum.

“Are you stuck?” I asked.

“Noo,” Helen said, implying she was.  “But no, really, I’m fine.  Thank you, sir.”

“You’re very welcome, madam.”

A solid fifteen minutes passed in relative silence.  Helen started humming, playing with how her filter was making her voice buzz a bit around the edges, and I joined in with my own variation.  Somewhere along the line, I started playing with my hand over the end of the air hose, near the filter, which I probably shouldn’t have been doing, but it allowed for some interesting stop-starts.

I could track the time by way of the watch that had been hung from a tiny spike of wood near my head.  Fifty minutes passed, as we went back and forth, elaborating.  Then we both trailed off.

Five minutes passed before Helen spoke.

“I spy with my little eye… something black and dusty.”

I pointed.  “Funny shaped branch over there.”

“Yes.  Then… I spy with my little eye, something black with only a little bit of dust.”

I pointed.  “I think it’s a dead thing in a tree that had leaves fall on it and made it crispy-ish.”

“How long before you get one wrong?” Helen asked.

“I can see about three more interesting things.  So… until you pick something boring.”

“Oh?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well then,” she said.  “I hear, with my little ear-”

“-a particularly crackly bit of wood?”

“Something creaky that isn’t a tree,” she said.  “That’s pulled by a warbeast.”

I perked up.  “Really?”

“No,” she said.

I deflated.

“But yes,” she teased.  “Really.”

I perked up again.  “Well peel my cat and call me a bastard.  How far away?”

“Not far,” Helen said.

“Well dang,” I said.  “Just one?  If it’s more, I’m going to need to see how fast I can catch up to the others and if we can get back in time, maybe further down the road.”

“Just one,” Helen said.

“You’re sure.”

“Positive,” she said.

“I actually feel bad,” I said.  “And I don’t feel bad about much.  Jessie’s going to be so annoyed she missed this.”

We climbed down from the tree, and we lowered ourselves into the shrubbery.

Helen’s gestures, partially masked by the gloves, gave me a good indication of when to expect them.

The wagon appeared, a rhino-like warbeast with two horns bigger than I was on its head and a chin-spike below trampled the fallen leaves and branches that buried the road, and it pulled a heavy wagon behind it.  Industrial strength everything, from the heavy duty wagon itself, almost a rolling vault, with heavy wheels.  The thing was meant to plow on.  If it broke down, then the lone driver wouldn’t be able to fix it.

As it rolled past us, we pounced.  I latched onto the side, and Helen grabbed on next to me, before tumbling down, disappearing beneath the front of the wagon.  Any scratching or scrabbling on her part was drowned out by the noise the wagon made as it rolled over innumerable branches, leaves, and the fragile carpet of builder’s wood that knit them together.

Five.  Four.  Three.

The man screamed.

Right then.  My models of Helen weren’t that great either.

I tried to make up for the time differential by moving faster, a little more haphazardly, gloves and boots slipping on the dust-caked surface.  The worst that could happen was that I might slip, fall, and roll under the wheel.

I managed to avoid that, grabbed the seat, and hauled myself over.

Helen had pierced his hand with her hook, latching on, and had grabbed him with one hand.  He was using his free hand to fumble for a gun that was positioned in a spot which was really meant to be reached for with the hand that Helen currently held.

I threw myself forward, stomach skidding on the dusty seat, and reached him just as he pulled the gun free.

I batted the gun out of his hand before he could get a grip on it.  It was lost, off to the side, in a sea of branches and dust.  I might have said that people two thousand years in the future might find it, but I somehow couldn’t picture it.  Not the people part of it.

The resulting scuffle was short.  Helen asserted her grip and adjusted the hook, and I seized his other arm in one of my own, and once we had him secure, the fight mostly went out of him.

His breath wheezed through the air filter.

“You have options, Mr. Driver,” I said.  “Most of them are pretty good.”

I could see him taking that in.

“This gets a lot more pleasant if you cooperate,” I said.  “There isn’t a friendly face for a hundred miles around.  All you need to do is talk to me.”

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“They expecting you on time?”

“Give or take an hour,” he said.  “Horny Anne here is very regular, but the road isn’t.  We sink into the soft spots.”

“Good,” I said.  “Good, that’s just the kind of answer we need.  Do you have a horn?  Anything that would make a lot of noise?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Trumpet.  It fits onto my air filter.”

He fumbled at the side of the wagon.  Helen took one hand off of him to grab the trumpet, showing me.  She pressed it between her body and the side of the wagon and began fumbling with her air filter.

“Good,” I said.  “Perfect.  Is there anyone further back down the road?”

“No,” he said.  “Like you said, not a friendly face for quite a distance.”

He sounded a little bit depressed about it.

Good.  Perfect.

“If you’re lying, then we do something terrible, you know that right?”  I asked.  The rush of the capture, after so much dang waiting, it was making me heady, and that translated into me sounding almost excited at the prospect of doing something terrible, which was great.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I know it.”

I nodded.

“Now let’s talk security measures.  Anything I need to know before we borrow your wagon and take it to its destination?”

“Ah,” he said.  He paused.

“Ah?”

“I’m telling you this in good faith,” he said.  “Pay isn’t good enough, I love my Crown and country, but I like living too.  So I want you to know I could’ve stayed quiet and you mightn’t’ve noticed.”

I would have noticed, I thought.

“Out with it,” I said.

“It’s in my forearm.  Metal, grafted to the bone.  They have seahorse-eye things that look through my arms and read the numbers.  Has to be the right metal too.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “That sounds about right.”

“This was my last trip,” he said.  “Ever since this black shit started springing up everywhere, it’s misery distilled.  Of course something like this happens when I tell myself it’s my last trip before I find another way to make money.  Of course.”

“You’re fine,” I told him.  “We’ll try to minimize the damage.”

“Tooting,” Helen said.

I raised my eyebrows behind my mask, and then winced as she raised one hand, trumpet attached to the end of her hose, and blew.

It wasn’t a lips-on-trumpet noise, but something more artificial, a braying note that changed as she adjusted the keys.

The sound carried.

Helen took her time before stopping.

“Dam-”

Helen made a smaller ‘bwat’ sound.

“Damage?” the driver asked.

“Well,” I said.  “Can’t trust you to take me where I want to be without saying anything, so… best way to go about this would be to borrow your arm.”

“Uh.”

“Then we can keep you for a while, we’ll reunite you and your arm as fast as we can, and then you’re sort of complicit, or we let you go and you can go home, and maybe you get pity points, but you also have to scrounge up to get a replacement arm, and that’s a whole mess, and there’s a third option where you kick up a stink and we put you down.”

“Uh,” he said.  “I’d kind of like my arm back sooner than later.”

“Perfect!” I said.  I was still fairly excited at the victory.  “Perfect, good.  That even means I can share the dirty details on what we’re up to, and I can ask you questions without having to mask what I’m asking.  Let’s talk about your cargo, and what they tend to do with it when you arrive.”

“Are you going to hurt people with this?” he asked.  “Is it going to be another one of these black wood bombs?  Inside the city?”

“No,” I said.  “And if you want, you can watch what we do.  We’re just going to take a barrel we’ve got stashed away somewhere not too far away, and it’s got a label on it that’s of the type that makes people want to keep it sealed-”

“Stow it somewhere dark with a lot of ventilation,” Helen added.

“-and I can tell you, it’s going to be me, her, and one other person in that barrel,” I said.  “We just want into the city, Mr. Driver, and they’re being rather ridiculously paranoid about letting people in or out.”

“You want in the city,” he said.  “What does that matter?  What’s that going to do?  Who’s that going to hurt?”

Present

I woke, and my arm was numb.  It spawned a dozen small moments of terror as I wondered if Wyvern had prematurely started to physically affect me.  There was a pressure on my chest, too.  The numb left arm and the pressure coupled with an almost nauseous twist of my stomach made me think heart attack.

But it wasn’t.  It was Jessie, lying beside me with her head on my shoulder.  The covers were thick, down-filled, and heavy, and the two of us were relatively small given the massive size of the four-poster bed.

I almost hated to get up when I had this.  This was entirely new.  I knew part of it stemmed from insecurity, but having Jessie this close wasn’t so usual.

Her hair was so messy, and I was just about the only person who got to see it like that.  She had dents on her nose where her spectacles usually sat, and she had scars reaching around her neck and at her chest where her nightgown didn’t wholly cover her, and I knew that again, I was one of the rare few that got to see it.

Moving glacially slowly, I began to extricate myself, moving the pillow, trying to get it so her head transitioned to the pillow.  She was a fairly light sleeper, all considered, so it took extra caution and carefulness.

I didn’t manage it.  Jessie stirred and woke up.

She smiled, and that smile was nice to see.

“Tried not to wake you,” I said.

“You did a terrible job,” Jessie said, yawning.  She stretched.

I reached over, grabbing her stretching hands, and stretched myself, waving her arms one way and the other, while she collapsed back on the pillow, rolling her eyes at me.

“Come on,” I said.  I tugged on her hands.  “Up.  We’ve got so much to do.”

“All day, every day,” Jessie said.

I let go of her hands, and we both rolled off of opposite ends of the bed.

There was a folded towel on the dresser, and I grabbed it, slinging it over one shoulder before pausing at Helen, who had curled up in an armchair, contorting herself.  Her face was only partially fixed.  I nudged the chair, being careful.

I trusted Helen when she was awake and in full control of her faculties.  I didn’t trust sleeping Helen.  Sleeping Helen had broken my hand two weeks ago.

Helen didn’t wake so much as she transitioned smoothly from rest to animation.  She uncurled and stepped off the chair, heading straight for the little kitchen in the corner of the room, to prepare tea and likely to raid the pantry for breakfast cookies.

All good.  There was a lingering feeling of dread at this point, of Jessie waking up blank, or Helen being even more troublesome on being woken, even pouncing from the chair, but this?  This was perfect.

I walked into the adjunct bathroom, which was far too white for my liking.  I walked past the woman in the tub, moved a bowl beneath the sink, washed my face, and fixed my hair as best as I could without wax or oils.

I took a minute or two to preen while the washbasin filled up, before I turned my full attention to the woman beside me.

Her eyes were wide enough to show the whites, and they looked in different directions, which was a nice touch, I thought.  Her mouth was ajar, her breathing shallow, and she sat there like a broken doll.  Her hair was in disarray, normally short and carefully curled, a natural brunette, and her nightgown was soiled at the lower parts.  She had relieved herself in both senses at some point in the night, and it left a runny trail that painted a line in the direction of the drain, but hadn’t actually made it all the way down.

Collecting the bowl of water, which proved heavy, I carried it over to the tub, and I splashed it into the tub.  It got all of the urine and only some of the other mess.

“Good morning,” I told her.

She didn’t respond.

“This can end at any time,” I said.  I put the bowl back under the sink and set it to fill again.  Grabbing a spare towel, I threw it over the woman’s head, and then began relieving myself in the toilet.  “You don’t get anything by being stubborn.”

I finished up, pulled the chain to flush, and used the bowl of water to wash the rest of the mess down the drain of the tub.

Opening the medicine cabinet, I got the small case of syringes out.  There were three.

“I know the spinal injection goes in the spine, but I get the rest confused.  Muscle relaxant, it goes in the muscle of the leg or buttock, antidote, it goes in the bloodstream.  Or is it the other way around?” I asked.

“You say that every morning, Sy,” Jessie said, from the other room.

Every morning,” Helen echoed.

“You guys are no fun.  I’m doing it for effect.”

“I think you’re the only one that appreciates that effect,” Jessie said.

I made sure there was no air in the syringe, then jammed the muscle relaxant in the woman’s throat.  I depressed the syringe.  I left it there while I stuck the other syringe into her leg.

“You get to live another day,” I said, leaving the second of the syringes in place.

The syringe that went into the base of her skull, however, needed more caution.  I inserted it as gently as it warranted.

“There,” I told her.  I plucked the syringes out, and I cranked the tub on.  “Now get yourself cleaned up.”

I stepped out of the bathroom, and I joined the others as they prepared breakfast.

Tea, and bacon, and eggs, and mystery meat.  I used a hot ring to toast bread directly.

“That’s a fire hazard,” Jessie pointed out.

“Yes, but I really like toast,” I said.  “Do we have butter?”

“I remembered the butter,” Jessie said.  “Give me some credit.”

We carried on, and Jessie stepped away to get our clothes sorted out.  I was letting her pick my outfits, which she seemed to like, and it seemed today was a waistcoat.

A knock at the door made us all freeze.

“Mail!” the voice on the other end called out.  “Leaving it outside!”

Jessie signaled.  High Building Girl Queen.

Rooftop girl queen.  Bea.

Checking first on the woman in the tub, making sure she hadn’t gone and drowned on me, I saw that she had enough wherewithal to sit up straighter and grip the sides of the tub.  I closed that door, then quietly slipped out into the hallway.  Jessie and Helen made more noise in the kitchen to cover me.

I moved quickly and quietly as I hurried to catch up with Bea.  She startled as I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Sy,” she said.

“Bea,” I said.  “Everything going smoothly?”

“Smoothly enough.  There’s some mutterings, people wondering about new faces, but… better than I thought.”

“Good,” I said, smiling.

She gave me a soft, one-note chuckle.  “They were talking to me about it.  As if I’ve been here for longer than I have.  They were complaining about newcomers.”

“Mailroom is invisible, and it implies status and trust,” I said.  “None of this is accidental.”

Bea nodded.

“Keep things on the down-low, don’t try to push people to tell you anything, but do listen.  We’ll meet later and I’ll tell you how to get people to want to confide in you.”

“Okay,” Bea said.

“And while we’re at it?  Tomorrow, if there’s any mail that looks official-ish, you can knock and insist she sign for it.  There’s probably something that looks like it should be signed in the mailroom, but make an excuse to see her face to face and show her your face.”

“Okay.  Why?”

“You’re going to build up trust.  At a later date, if things go smoothly, which they probably won’t, we’ll want to give her opportunities to try and get a message out.  You’ll be that opportunity.”

Bea nodded.

“Happy mailing,” I said.

She rolled her eyes.  “Really what I wanted to do with my Academy know-how.”

I scooped up the mail on my way back into the room, and very carefully closed the door behind me.  Helen and Jessie were conversing at the stove.  I listened, and I could hear the splashing of the tub.

I picked through the mail and found what I was looking for.

“Here we go,” I said.  “Took its time.”

Both of the others turned to me, expectant.

“And she said no.  Politely, but it’s a no.”

Both looked a touch crestfallen.

“It might have been a hard sell, pushing the Lambs thing,” Jessie said.

“Might’ve,” I said.  “I thought my read of Lillian was that she’d say yes, even or especially with that in mind.  I wonder if things went badly somehow, or if she got another offer, or…”

“There could have been a hundred different factors,” Jessie said.

“Dang it,” I said.

I sighed.

“Sorry,” Jessie said.

“Probably wouldn’t have worked out that neatly anyway,” I said.  I put the stack of Professor Ferres’ mail to one side.  “Now.  What are the priorities for our Academy today?”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.02 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“The professor is ambulatory,” Helen commented, as Professor Ferres emerged from the bathroom.

The woman wore a towel and a black silk bathrobe.  She looked thirty, though I would have pegged her as being sixty or so, and she moved as though she was ninety, with shuffling steps and clear pain.  She had done up her hair in rollers and put on makeup, but it was an incomplete portrait.

“Did you sleep well?” I asked.

The professor ignored me.  Clutching the front of her bathrobe with one hand, she used the other to help her ease down into a kneeling position.  She pulled the drawer open, and she stopped, staring down.

“We moved in for the long term,” I said.  “It made more sense to have our clothes in the dresser.”

“I see,” she said.  She was quiet for a moment.  “Where are my clothes?”

“Linen cupboard,” I said.  “I did dust before I put them away, we can’t have you looking out of sorts.”

“Yes,” she said.  She looked like she was going to say something, and then defaulted to, “Can’t have that.”

She was slow in raising herself to a standing position.

“Your day starts at eight sharp,” Jessie said.  “Most students get their first glimpse of you by eight o’five.  You should hurry, or you’ll be behind schedule.”

“Noted,” the professor said.

She failed her first attempt at standing up, and fell to her knees, hunched over.

“If you’re shooting for pity, you won’t find any here,” I said.

“I’ve been sleeping in the bathtub night after night.  If any part of me presses too hard into a part of the bathtub, I bruise, I get sores.”

“Helen turns you,” I said.  “She should be, anyhow.”

“Every two hours,” Helen said.  “I give her a push or change her position.  I slosh water on her if she’s messy.”

I gestured, indicating Helen for the Professor’s benefit.

“Yes.  Less sores, but as you might imagine, the sleep quality leaves much to be desired.”

“Tell us what we need to know about the Academy and it’s operations and we’ll get you a cot.  You’ll get three square meals a day, and the only injections you’ll get will be the antidotes,” I said.

She turned her head, an she gave me a venomous look.  I gave her my best one back.

“I’ll endure,” she said.

“Then endure,” I said.  “And do it fast.  The clock is ticking, and if you don’t at least look like you’re in full control of your faculties and maintain business as usual, then we have to escalate.”

“As you’ve told me, again and again,” she said.  “Is this the same as what you were saying earlier?  Are you repeating yourself to try and batter down my mental defenses with repeated blows to the same points?  Are you like the Reverend Mauer or the Crooks of yesteryear?  Will you threaten me with your best attempts at hell on Earth?  Every day almost exactly the same but for the fact that it’s a little worse, hope just out of reach?”

Reaching up, she gripped the knobs of the drawers and she hauled herself halfway to her feet.  She panted.

“I don’t know the Crooks,” I told Jessie.

The professor hauled herself the rest of the way to a standing position and made her way to the cupboard with the bedsheets and towels.

Jessie supplied the answer, “Crooks as in shepherd’s crooks.  Young, clandestine religious group.  Mostly farmers.  The parents passed on religious knowledge in secret, very fervent in portraying the Academy and its doings as wrong and vile, much like the actual church in its last days.  They were found out, the parents were imprisoned, three of the worst offenders were executed.  The youths fled, spent a year staging covert strikes on the aristocracy.  They made a point of torturing anyone they got.”

“They were quite creative,” Helen said.

“They only lasted a year?”  I asked.

“Academy intervened, the Crooks made a move and failed in the face of overwhelming opposition.  The captured gave up the rest.”

“Ah,” I said.  “That’s a shame.”

“I wouldn’t say that.  They were a closer analogue to Cynthia than to Mauer.  Mauer has a mission, but the Crooks and Cynthia devolved.  No cooperation, not building anything, no beliefs.  Only wrath, rape, torture, drawing blood by any means necessary.  Even if innocents got caught in the crossfire.”

“They made pretty displays with the corpses and biblical passages,” Helen said.  “I wish I could have seen them.”

“Pretty displays or no, it sounds like it’s still a dang shame, just a shame on a different front.”

“Yes,” Jessie said.  “They were organized, they were capable, but pressing forward when you’re facing a force this daunting means having to dig deep inside yourself for more strength, more reserves.  They dug up something that was awfully ugly and in pain.”

“Why does that sound so familiar?” the professor asked.  She had found the clothes for the day in the linen cupboard.  “On an entirely unrelated topic, should I dress myself here, in plain view, so you can degrade me further, or should I step into the washroom so you don’t have to see the bedsores and bruises?”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Professor Ferres,” I said.

“If you intended to bait me with irony and force me to keep quiet as yet another form of pressure, then so be it.  I can endure that as well.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.  I waved her off.  “Helen, will you watch her?  Jessie and I will get ready.”

Helen nodded.

Jessie and I retired to the washroom.  We washed up quickly at the sink, scrubbing our faces and wetting our hair.  I dried my hair and then turned, hip resting against the sink as I faced Jessie.  My fingers combed through her wet hair and broke it into three plaits, which I set to braiding.  She, meanwhile, set to work with my hair, reaching over to a jar without looking and then setting everything in place.

It took more than a little coordination, but it was nice to bond, my fingers were quick with the braiding and my hair tended to stay in place better when Jessie did it.

“Remind me about her schedule for today,” I said.

“You should remember that much.”

“Except I don’t.”

“Do you not remember because I’m serving as your memory?” she asked.  “You shouldn’t lean on me that heavily.”

“It’s temporary.  I need to focus my brain on other things.  There’s a lot to coordinate.”

“There is.  I just worry.”

“I’m remembering.  I’m just remembering peripheral details.  I’m trying to stage the entirety of Hackthorn Academy in my head for the day everything goes to pieces.  I’m putting the main thrust of things aside, for you.”

“I’m going to have a bad day sooner or later, Sy.  You can’t go to pieces then.  You keep moving.  See things through.”

“I’ll try,” I said.  I reached up and scraped a bit of gunk that lingered in the corner of one of her eyes.

“Trying isn’t good enough.”

My hands still up near her face, I put my palms on her cheeks, holding her face, then kissed her.

Helen and the professor were talking in the other room, I noticed, now that our own conversation wasn’t overlapping them.

I paused mid-kiss, holding the edge of Jessie’s lower lip between my own, and turned my head a fraction toward the door.

Jessie pulled her lip free, then murmured, “Ferres said that the thing that bothered her most about this situation was that it was very possible she’d die at the hands of one of that cretin’s creations.  Ibbot’s.  Helen took offense.”

“Ah,” I murmured.  “How nice to know I have your full attention.”

“Speak for yourself, Sylvester.  I pick up on all of the background details.”

“Most, not all,” I said.  My fingers dropped from her face, and my hand went straight back up to find a loose thread on her nightgown.  I gave it an exploratory tug, and she batted my hand aside.  “Now I’ve got to ask, did you tell me the schedule and I completely forgot about it already, or did you forget?”

Jessie used scissors she had picked up from the shelf above the sink to snip the loose thread.  “She’s checking in with her pet students and bringing them as a cohort while looking after the master’s birthday party, then she’s meeting with a group of would-be grey coats about their ongoing projects, all followed by lunch, if there’s time.”

“We haven’t seeded the grey coats.”

“No we haven’t,” Jessie said.

“What’s the location?”

“Her office.  Which is actually quite inconvenient, because there’s traffic all around it.”

“Hiding under the desk?” I asked.

“Wrong kind of desk for that.”

“What if it was Helen?”

“Not even Helen.”

“We haven’t had many situations come up where we couldn’t seed, spy on proceedings, or verify everything was sufficiently crooked in our favor after she’d passed through.”

“Not any so far.  We talked about having her cancel a few days ago.”

“Did we?”

Jessie sighed.

I sighed in the same way she had, mocking her.

“Yes, we did.  Your instinct at the time was that things are too precarious for her to break pattern, graduate students are too invested in their projects to suddenly be ignored by the headmistress, she can’t delegate, and people would grumble.”

“And six abstract units of grumbling becomes one abstract unit of difficult questions.  My instincts sound about right, so I’ll trust them.”

“Any bright ideas?” she asked.  “And did you actually tie my hair in a knot to secure the braid?”

“It’s fancy,” I said, waving the end of the braid in her face.  “And pretty.”

“You’re the one that’s untying the thing.”

“Naturally.  And yes, I have bright ideas.  Not all are applicable to this situation, but give me my due.”

“If she passes on one message by way of the grey coat prospects, all of this falls apart.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I would have liked to have more control over this situation than we had.  There was a chance we could come out ahead if we happened to lose control, but I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to go there.  Blood would be shed, not all of it theirs.

“What are you thinking?” Jessie asked.  “You’ve got this tiny frown line between your eyebrows.”

“I’m thinking… I need to break her down more.  If she’s our puppet, I don’t want her pulling against the strings.”

“Break her down how?”

“I might scare her.”

“Whatever you need to do.  And the prospective grays?”

“We could take cards we aimed to play later and play them now, audaciously.”

“Is this a normal person’s take on audacious, or is it the take of a certain black haired, shorter-than-average gentleman who has normalized audacious, who is then calling this particular play audacious?”

“Shorter than average?”

“Don’t get hung up on labels.”

“It’s just heartless of you to make a point of it.  You called me a gentleman?”

“Don’t get hung up on words.  And focus.  If you lose track then I have to start this conversation over from the beginning.”

“You don’t ever have to do that.  Exaggerator.”

Focus.

“It’s something even I would call audacious, when I’m very comfortable with things the average person would call audacious.”

“Right.  If someone was to sketch out all of your thoughts as they were right this moment, how large a share of those thoughts are trying to find other solutions?”

“Um.  I think the share is the size of a large cat.”

Jessie gave me the look.

“They’re thoughts.  I’m not going to assign a number or percentage to thoughts.  They get away from me and then I sound wrong.  I don’t want to set myself up for failure.”

“Fine.  How large a share is already devoted to finding a way to make the audacious happen?”

“Take your pick of any animal large enough to sit on the medium sized cat and kill it in the process.”

Jessie sighed.

“Come on,” I said.

We stepped into the other room, and I headed straight for my pile of clothing.  Helen and the professor were still talking.

“-numbness?”

“No.  But the gnawing muscle makes a T-shape connection to the biting muscle and the T feels weak, and there’s an ‘x’ connection between the grimace muscle and the snake-mouth muscle group that’s pulling more than it should.”

“You need to make more sense, dear,” the professor said.

“You’re a terrible influence on her,” Jessie whispered in my ear.  Helen had turned her head.  She pushed her hair aside and drew lines on her cheek, illustrating.

The professor had done good work so far.  Helen looked almost like she always had.  Her face was intact, no damage apparent, no scars.  The only problem was that her expressions weren’t there.  Our perfect actress was struggling to act.  Her only face was the dead-eyed one from yesteryear.

“You two, take the bathroom while Jessie and I get dressed,” I instructed.  “Leave the door open.  I want to talk to you, Helen.”

“What about?” Helen asked, as the pair stepped into the bathroom.

“How is my father doing?”

“Your father is… coming together,” Helen said.

“I kind of want him today.”

“Your father would decline any invitations today,” Helen said.

“I kind of really want him today,” I said.  “What if he was drunk?”

“Your drunk father would possibly show his face for a short time, not staying for too long out of fear of embarrassing himself,” Helen said.

“That’ll do,” I said.  “Maybe he could be morose drunk.”

“Shall I fetch him when we’re done here?” Helen asked.

“Dab some whiskey behind his ears.”

“He’s a scotch man,” Helen said.

We dressed, with Jessie donning a uniform while I dressed up in the clothes she had set aside.  She made sure my hair was fixed, then gave me a peck on the lips.

The professor emerged from the washroom, donning her black lab coat.  She looked well put together, and except for some small issues in how she moved, nothing looked amiss.  Helen practically flew out of the Professor’s apartment.

“My dad was probably enjoying the good life, sleeping in,” I said.

“Probably,” Jessie said.

“He’s in for a rude awakening.”

The professor was quiet.  I saw her eyeing the stove.  Only scraps and scrapings remained.

“What time is it?” I asked Jessie.

“Seven fifty eight.”

“Two minutes to eat,” I told the professor.

There was no hesitation.  No grace, either, even for a woman who was normally immaculate.  She paid no mind to the fact that some fruit had bites taken out of it or that the pieces of meat too small to be worth picking out now sat in seas of congealing grease.

It was the eye of a surgeon in a moment of crisis, now turned to picking out the least bad pieces of food.  Her steady hand focused now on keeping any mess from dripping on her clothes, stripping meat from a length of bone.  She did what she could and then turned to the largest offerings.  A hunk of bread end-piece that I’d burned and left aside after toasting my bread, a glass of milk that had been mostly finished.  She alternated the two to get the bread down.

She didn’t finish either before Jessie cleared her throat.

Ferres hesitated, and for a moment, I wondered if her composure would break, if she would snap at us, or if she would abandon sense and go for the food.

Instead, she drew a handkerchief from her pocket, and she gathered herself together.  A lady in the non-noble sense, as if composure in the present could erase the desperation of moments ago.

She was in the midst of daubing at her face when her body rebelled.  She gagged, bending over, and froze, holding that position.

Twice more, she gagged, but managed to keep from retching.

Not the food so much as the gorging, if that could even be called gorging.

She straightened, resuming her act as the lady, and she gave us a nod.

We left the room as a trio.  It was a short trip down the hallway, and then we passed through a set of doors.

Spring air blew in our faces, but it was a mixed thing.  A breath of fresh air, but with a bad aftertaste.  Flowers and dewy grass and bitter death on the wind.

Hackthorn had been constructed with a particular aesthetic, because it was an Academy very focused on the aesthetic.  A project from many years past had been placed as the centerpiece of Hackthorn, and if it had ever been truly alive, it would have been a half woman, half spiderweb counterpart for Helen’s brother.  As tall as any building I’d seen, she was a connection of strands and shelves that supported one another, some shelves vertical and others horizontal, akin to a bookshelf, but always with the outer form in mind, and the outer form was that of a woman.  Akin to builder’s wood, but no external walls had been put up to guide the growth.  The story was that it had all been calculated in advance.

It was her crowning achievement, her master stroke.  She had pitched it as her specialist project and they had allowed it with the expectation she would fail.  Instead, she had stepped up the scale.  A work so impressive they had no choice but to give her a professorship, despite the fact that she was a woman.  To say no at that point would have risked her walking away and leaving the edifice to fall to pieces.

It hadn’t been her only play over the years.

Care had been given to the face, which turned skyward, and it looked like a pale woman’s face, eyes closed.  The shelves were now beds for plant life and growth, or walls had been put in place at the exterior, allowing for them to be used as pens or prison cells.  Bristling plant growth and walls formed her exterior skin, while trees that grew down formed her hair.  She draped back, with the buildings of the Academy itself as her recliner, and we walked along the bridge that was one of her arms, reaching out to the main Academy office and the apartments of headmistress and visiting dignitaries.

Even from a distance, I could see students and staff already at work with tending to this and that.

Green and thriving, against a backdrop of cliffs and ocean.

But looking in the other direction was something else entirely.  The walls of hackthorn, and then wasteland, out to the horizon.  Once forest, burned and then patrolled by beasts grown just for this purpose, who found everything that the blaze hadn’t utterly destroyed.

The black woods were only just barely visible in the distance, unable to reach Hackthorn with the wasteland of ash between us and it.

We were isolated, and entry to Hackthorn meant traveling through the woods and wasteland or it meant visiting by boat and ascending the cliffs to access Hackthorn by way of the reclining woman’s backside.

I’d gotten a good laugh out of Jessie the first time I had pointed that out.

The headmistress of Hackthorn smiled at students, and she greeted some by name.  That in itself wouldn’t have been surprising, as the students on this bridge were both early risers and notable students.  I could see the light in her eyes, and while I could see a weariness that hadn’t been there when we had first appeared in her bedroom, I believed that she was doing a good job of playing it off.

Students liked her.  They respected her.  They knew her in the sense that they could greet her.  We hadn’t stopped long enough for her to do it yet, but I knew she was willing and able to make small talk with them.  Each of those things was to her credit on its own and surprising when taken in tandem with one of the others.

But oh, that wasn’t what I was watching for.

No, it was when we stepped indoors again, off the bridge and into the armpit.  The labs.  Students were waiting.  Professor Viola Ferres’ select.  Her favored students, taken under her wing.

They were the closest to her, they were sharp, and they were very unhappy with our existence.

“First thing this morning, we make sure all is on track for the young master Baugh’s birthday celebration,” Viola Ferres said.  “First lab.”

She indicated with her hand, and the gaggle of students formed a herd around her.  Jessie and I walked side by side, joining them.  I could see her talking to the students.  More important than any of the students’ views or reactions to the professor was the professor’s reaction to her students.

She was built for this.  However much we ground her down and applied pressure, so long as she had this, I wasn’t sure I could truly break down her defenses.  We were positioned, we had laid out the groundwork for a move on the largest scale, but we lacked information, and so we groped in the dark.

Helen had taken too long.  We descended the stairs to the first lab.  It lay at the heart of the complex.  Students who ascended and descended the stairs to reach any other part of the facility passed by the lab, and in the doing, they passed by branch-framed panes of glass that looked at the work in progress.

Fairy tale monsters and monsters of fantasy done to scale.  The sea serpent and the maiden, the big bad wolf and red riding hood.  The larger members of the cast remained in the vast, open-concept laboratory with its arched ceiling.  The big bad wolf rested with the half-goat, half-fish of the zodiac.  A horse as large as any I’d ever seen stood with spine bared, burn scars on either side of the bloody schism where its mane was supposed to be.  Its bone of  tail flicked left and right as it ate from its feedbag.  A giant -hardly giant in comparison to Helen’s brother- slumped against the wall, using his long-fingered hands to shovel mountains of loose, dry cereals into a wide mouth.

Playthings.  Toys.

I didn’t mind those ones, not in particular.

I wandered, and I heard one of the members of the group comment at my wandering, though I didn’t catch the words, as my focus was elsewhere.  For all its fairy tale nature, all I could smell were sweat, blood, and offal.

“Leave him be,” Ferres said.

“I don’t see why he’s even here.  No offense, miss Montague.”

“I’ve heard all the complaints a hundred times already,” Jessie said.  She ignored the implicit meaning in his statement that he didn’t see why she was there either.

“I have as well,” Professor Ferres said.  “I’ll hear no more of it, unless you have other projects you’d like to be working on.”

“I- no,” the student said.

“It’s politics, Damian.  And forcing a superior to justify her politics is not good politics on your part.”

I didn’t listen to the rest.  Most of the members of the group had commented in some fashion already.  If everything was the way that it was supposed to be, she might even have welcomed the questions and challenges.  She was unconventional in a variety of ways, and her treatment of subordinates was one of them.

Even now, she was turning the topic around, talking about the delegation of tasks, and posing challenges to Jessie and her favored students.

I passed around a wall that blocked part of the lab off from view of the stairs.  Hidden in plain sight, a thousand students would walk by and look through the windows with excitement and wonder, but actual access to the lab was more limited.

Actual access to this area was rarer.  I had the keys to unlock the doors.

I passed by the cells.  They hadn’t all had cots before Jessie and I had arrived.  At our insistence, Professor Ferres had ordered them to protect her investment and work.

I passed by red riding hood, who would have been at home among any mouse of Radham or West Corinth.  No older than twelve, her face had been altered into something to resemble a deer or a rabbit.  An attempt at contrasting to the wolf.  Something had been done to her arms and legs.  To better enable her to run when and if the scene called for it, I supposed.

I walked past goldilocks, who was closer to my age, who had locks of actual gold.  Rapunzel reached out to touch the bars of her cell with one hand and a lock of hair.  Past Jack and past ones I couldn’t put names to.

We had sought her out because of her tie to Ibbot, and because Lillian had been taken with her.  A part of me had hoped the woman would vindicate Lillian’s opinion of her.  In some respects, she had.

In others, the complete opposite.  As bad as Ibbot, as bad as Hayle.  She was a major purveyor of the Block, an artist who worked with children.

Now playthings.  Toys.

I looked up and saw Helen standing in the shadows.  If she was here, so was my ‘father’.

I turned my eyes to the people in the cells.

“Soon,” I said, and even though my voice was soft, no less than thirty pairs of ears listened.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.03 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“If you want it, you have to tell me.  Water,” I said.  I moved my hand, three fingers extended, in a horizontal direction.

Poll Parrot looked down at his wings.  No hands to gesture with.  I waited, expectant, as he moved his wings.

Finally, he extended a wing, twisted so only three of the pinion feathers at the tip extended.  He swiped it sideways.

I smiled, and he smiled back in a nervous way.  I gave him a little salute and backed away from the bars, saying, “Give me a moment.”

There was a sink at the far end of the little alley of cells.  I headed to it, glancing and paying attention to each of the experiments along the way.  Little Bo Peep got my attention, palm out, hand toward me.

She did the gesture for water, then touched her mouth.  Her facial construction was different, with a pronounced groove of the philtrum at her upper lip, a faint darker coloration there and at her upper lip.  Her hair was a shaggy growth of wool.

“Coming right up,” I said.

I rinsed and filled two cups.  Helen was just off to my right, reaching through the bars and playing some finger game with one of the smaller ones.

Bo Peep took her cup, then paused before gesturing.  Aggression.  Then she pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead, wincing.

“Headache?” I asked.

Bo Peep managed to nod at me while drinking from her cup.  Then she moved her hand.  Three fingers together, pointed up, she waggled her hand as she shook the tower to pieces.

It wasn’t the way a Lamb would’ve done it, but I quite liked it.

Given a chance, people were damned good at finding ways to communicate.

“Thinking, thought, brains.  Gone to ruin.  You can’t think clearly?”

She nodded.  She raised three fingers, separate this time.

“Can’t see clearly?  Senses fuzzy?”

She nodded.

“That’ll be the drugs.  Just like the ones they used to keep you from speaking or making noise.  When they stop experimenting on you and start getting you to practice, they’ll cut back on the drugs.  They might give you others, if they need you to be able to speak so you can act or sing, or to make you more compliant.”

She made the gesture for thinking, except she pointed it down, reversing it, and she made a confused face.

“What confused you?”  She couldn’t answer, so I tried the scattershot approach.  “Did I get something wrong?  Was it the mention of practice?  The drugs?  Do you want to know what the other drugs are?  The singing?  Making you compliant-”

At that last bit, she gestured again.  She used the other hand to drink more, greedily gulping water down, one eye watching me.

“Compliant.  It means obedient, doing what they want.”

The reversed ‘tower’ of three fingers flipped up.  Understood.

I reached through the bars and gave the three fingers a squeeze.  “Need anything else?”

She shook her head.  The mop of white wool flew left and right.

“Alright,” I said.  “Give me the glass back, or people will wonder how you got it.

She gave me the glass.  As I turned away, she reached for and grabbed my sleeve.

“Hm?”

She gestured.  Alert.  You.  Body.  Mind.  Alert.

The look in her eyes was dead serious.

I reached through the bars and brushed my hand down the bangs of her mop of hair and the front of her face.  “Stop fussing.  I’ll be fine.”

Fingers brushed down my sleeve and fingers as I withdrew my arm.  Prolonging contact.

Not because of any attraction, I was pretty sure.

Just a desire for a friendly face to stay a little bit longer.

I headed for Poll with his glass of water.  Mentally, I made a note that I would have to be careful, lest I develop a fondness or soft spot for any of them.  Bo Peep was a frontrunner, and the stylistic tie didn’t help.  I’d already run into that snag with Mary.

I put my hand and the other cup through the bars for Poll Parrot, and tipped the cup back for him so he could drink.

He snorted, and I moved the cup away.

Hand made a blade, I held it up at my sternum.  “Means I’ve heard you, I recognize you, I understand, or thank you.”

He did his best with his wing-arms.  He was like Avis in her outfit, but without the ability to lose the outfit, no hands hidden in the rigging of his wings.  Better to have him do his best and if all went according to plan, perhaps there would be an opportunity to teach him tap code later.

“Good lad,” I said.  I turned, showing others in earshot the gesture.

I heard Helen speak, and I saw her making the same gesture.  Passing it on to others who couldn’t see me, closer to the end of the hall.

He curled his wing, setting his jaw.  It was hard to track what I’d taught them, but I knew that I had taught them the core gestures that the Lambs had used to generate all of the rest.  It was fairly simple to work out what gesture he was attempting by process of elimination.

“That might not be so clear to the others.  Try your foot,” I said.

He shifted his weight to one foot.  He clenched his talon in a particular way.  Aggression, pain, force.

“Soon,” I said, echoing my statement earlier.  “And honestly?  I don’t plan to use you guys to fight.  I don’t want a battle in that sense.  Even in the best case scenario, if I had ninety percent control over the situation, I don’t know if you’ll be in cages, drugged, fresh from surgeries, or whatever else.  Okay?”

He didn’t look happy at that.  He clenched his talon again.  He struck at his chest with the leading edge of his wing, what I might otherwise have called his forearm.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.  “Believe me, I know.”

He had been altered to be beautiful, and he was.  The ruby red and indigo feathers only accentuated the image.  He was twelve and he was very much an idealization of a boy his age.  If Lillian and Jamie had found something attractive in me when I was younger, then it was present in Poll.  He was fine boned and athletic, and could have been a ballet dancer in another course of events, and all of that stood in stark contrast to how very angry he was.

If I hadn’t grown up with equal parts beauty and bloodthirst, I might have been given pause by the image.

There was a stirring at the end of the hall closest to the entryway.  Rustling of arms against bars, movement, scuffs and light bangs.

“Want to help?” I asked Poll.

He nodded.

“Can I throw water at you?” I asked, showing him the cup.

He paused, then nodded.

I smiled, and I allowed my entire bearing to change.  I raised my chin, and I made the aggression gesture, hard, before throwing the water in his face.

Then I laughed, and it was a mocking, hard laughter.

I saw the shock on his face as he backed away, there was confusion and momentary hurt that hurt me in equal measure just for seeing it.  Then his eyes moved to my hand, which was still gesturing.

Feathers rustled, and he threw himself forward, kicking the bars, hard.

I’d pulled away just in time.  I continued laughing.

Now that I’d changed my position, I could see the approaching person the other prisoners had been reacting to.  One of Ferres’ favored students.  Betty, the girl of Ferres’ group, or she had been before Jessie turned up.  I turned to her with a smile on my face.

She wore a boy’s haircut, her hair considerably shorter than my own, combed in a part, but she wore makeup and white pearl earrings to match her Academy blazer and skirt.  Bold, modern, attractive, and very, very dangerous.

Poll backed away, then repeated the attack, hurling himself forward, kicking the bars with one taloned foot.

“Stop!” Betty barked out an order to Poll.  “You’re accomplishing nothing, and you’ll only hurt yourself.”

Poll stood there, and the anger I’d seen moments before was out in full force.  He panted, glaring, lines standing out in his neck, feathers bristling.  One of his talons clenched, the talon-tips digging at the floor of his cell.  His face dripped.

On seeing the young lady, Poll’s face contorted in what should have been a scream.  I could only barely hear the strangled squeak from his throat.

“Stop now, Poll,” the student said.  “You know the consequences.”

Poll stopped, still heaving for breath.  He coughed, having hurt himself in his attempt to scream, and he turned away, sitting down very forcefully on the floor of his cell.

“What are you even doing here?” Betty addressed me.

“I wanted to see how the sausage gets made,” I said, smirking.  “Call it morbid curiosity.”

“You’ve agitated them,” Betty.

“Only having a little fun,” I said.

“If your interference leads to problems with training them, it’s going to cause problems for everyone,” she said.  “It’s why access is supposed to be restricted.”

“If they’re cranky then give them more drugs,” I said.

“It’s not that simple.  We’re weaning them off for training in the coming week.”

“You’re clever,” I said.  I sauntered a bit as I approached Betty.  I gave her the most patronizing pat on the cheek as I could manage, “You’ll figure it out.”

She reached up to seize my wrist.

My condescending smile didn’t budge.

“You’re not that big,” she said.

“I’m big enough that I’m over here and the Hag of Hackthorn isn’t dragging me out herself,” I said.  “Like she said, politics.”

Her hand had tightened on my wrist when I said ‘hag’.  She was wholly in the professor’s corner.

“I can play that card too,” she said.  “My father is Harry Washburn.”

I moved my face closer to hers.  “I.  Don’t.  Care.”

“You should,” she said.  She was steeling herself now that I was invading her personal space again.  Her rebuttal didn’t have as much force behind it as it should have.

“Do you not know how to deal with someone who doesn’t shit their pants when you mention daddy, Bets?  Because that name drop might end a conversation with some commoner student, but I’m willing to carry that conversation to a proper conclusion.”

“There’s no conversation to be had,” she said.  She let go of my wrist, pushing my hand away.  “And there’s no conclusion.”

“You’ve been queen of every clique, you’re the top student type.  So tell me, why aren’t you attending one of the better schools, hm?”

“I chose this school.”

“Ah, so you felt inadequate elsewhere?  Did you have a scare somewhere along the line?”

The faintest of flinches.

I smiled.  “Better to be big fish of a medium-sized pond rather than risk attending at the Capitol proper and not measuring up.”

“You’re an embarrassment to the aristocracy,” she said.

There’s an insight into how your mind works,” I said.  “I say ‘not measuring up’ and you jump straight to embarrassment.  Is daddy embarrassed of you?  Come on, Bets.  Do you really think he’d put any effort in at all if he got a nice pleading letter from you?  How likely is it really that he makes the three day trip, hops on a boat and passes through the asshole of the reclining lady of Hackthorn?”

That might have struck too close to home, right there.  It was a cheap shot, really.  The vast majority of youths who were away from home and out of contact with mom and dad weren’t one hundred percent sure of their parents’ love.  Betty didn’t give me the impression of someone in the minority.

But there was a problem with the cheap shot that hit close to home.  Home was home, a place someone lived.  It was the familiar, and very often people were comfortable there, even if it wasn’t pretty or tidy.

“Listen,” she said, asserting herself in spite of everything I’d said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

Returning to the central argument.  She had the sense to do that, and avoid letting me drive things further away.  “And you’re here to escort me out.”

“No,” she said.  “No, you shouldn’t be here, in this Academy, in Professor Ferres’ classes, watching over your fiancee to make sure your family’s money is being well spent, throwing your weight around.”

Ah.

“If you stick to that mindset, you’ll find yourself floundering when you leave the Academy, if you don’t already struggle in that world, Betty.  The constraints of should limit only those who allow themselves to be limited by them.”

I paced as I talked, and in the doing, I was able to look down the length of the row of cells.  Helen was no longer at the end of the hall.  The door there was too obvious for her to have used.

“Tradition exists for a reason,” Betty said.

Helen’s absence was concerning.  Had she not been real?  If she wasn’t real, that meant I needed to get things in order for the grey coats.  It meant other things, but I didn’t want to touch on them.

“Hypocritical, that,” I said, absently, my mind not wholly on the argument.

“Hyp- what?”

“People are happy to push for tradition and forget what came before.  It was once traditional for violence to be the be-all and end-all.  It was once tradition for slavery to be commonplace, and for every man to face the possibility of being shackled.  It was once tradition, my dear hypocrite, for women to bow their heads and listen to the men, and if you wanted to stick to the shoulds and shouldn’ts, then women shouldn’t wear coats, be they white, grey, or black.”

Betty rolled her eyes.

“When it’s convenient, then?” I asked her.

“I don’t think I’ve ever hated someone as much as I hate you,” she said.  “You’re being reductionist.”

“And you’re being a hypocrite.  But by all means, cling to ‘should be’ when it serves you, and ignore it when it doesn’t.”

“The distinction is that tradition and establishment serve as a backbone.  We hold to them when they make us stronger as a whole.”

“When it’s convenient,” I said.  I extended an arm.  “Hey.  Look at this.  It used to be established that communities looked after their children, but hey, it’s convenient to imprison them, drug them, alter them.”

Them?” Betty asked, incredulous, indicating the cells.

“Hey, look at me,” I said.  I spread my hands.  “Not complaining.”

“You’re twisting things around,” Betty said.  “They volunteered.  The drugs mean they’ll forget all of this.  At worst, they’ll walk away richer with vague recollections of a fairy tale fantasy and the best party of their lives.  Everyone benefits.”

“Come on now,” I said.  “And the cells?”

“Expedience.  We can’t have children running around, especially with the drugs we pumped into them for surgery and to keep them compliant.”

“Is that what Professor Ferres tells you, or did you conjure up that particular shade of horseshit yourself?”

“It’s fact,” she said.  “Any operation looks ugly when you sneak a peek at the proceedings halfway through.  There’s no reason to expect this is any different.”

I shook my head.

“I can’t believe I’m missing time I could be spending with Professor Ferres to talk to you,” she said.  She looked at the youths in the cells, then shook her head.  “Don’t interfere with them.  Let them be.”

With that, she strode off, back to the central area of Lab One.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice softening.  I let the aristocratic bearing slip away, lowering the chin I’d been holding a notch too high.  I hoped the transition was obvious enough to the eyes watching to let on that I’d been acting.  I turned, looking at each of the prisoners I could see.  My voice was soft as I spoke, “I’m going to get you guys out of here soon.”

Three of the five prisoners nearest me made the gesture I’d shown to Poll Parrot.

Glasses still in hand, I walked over to the sink, putting them away, and I used the mirror over that sink to check my hair was fine.

I looked over at the cell where Helen had been playing with the children.

She was inside the cell.  The three smaller children were lying down, two with heads in Helen’s lap.

“Are you real?” I asked Helen.

“Yes,” Helen said.

“Wouldn’t you say that if you weren’t?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.  I’m very honest,” Helen said.

“You are, aren’t you?” I asked.  “Okay.  How did you get in there?”

“Squeezed through the bars.”

“Of course,” I said.  The bars that kept children who looked to be eight within their cell.

“I would have liked to be the aristocrat,” Helen said.  “I would have been better at it.”

“I’m really good at being a shitty person, though,” I said.

“Shhh,” Helen said.  “Let’s not talk like that around them.  They’ve been through so much.”

She ran her hand through the hair of one of the children with his head in her lap.  His eyes were open – he wasn’t sleeping.  Somehow I thought he wouldn’t sleep, that he might drink this up.

“You’ll be okay?” I asked Helen.

“I’ll visit everyone who’s hard to visit, and Jessie asked me to scout the armory.  She also asked me not to kill for fun, because people are getting concerned.”

“What things?”

“Stitched.  Experiments that make satisfying crunches when I squeeze them.”

“When I tell these kids soon, I mean it.  Can you hold back long enough if you know there’s something bigger coming up?”

“I can,” Helen said.

“Good.  Good.  And visit these guys when you’re free?  They’ll need a friendly face.”

Helen turned her cold expression my way.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

It didn’t look like she was going to get started with her day right this second, the children positioned where they were.

I turned around, gathered myself up into a more aristocratic bearing, and strode for Lab One.

I heard bone crunch and snap behind me.  Stopping in my tracks, I turned.

Blood sprayed, painting the wall of Helen’s cell.

I remained where I was, listening to the continued crunch, grind, snap of popping bone and gristle.  Here and there, there was another spatter of blood.  Some reached into the hallway by the sink and mirror.

I closed my eyes, holding my breath.

I couldn’t close my ears so easily.  I heard the wet noises, the dry noises, and the rustling, and my very agile mind filled in the blanks.

I pressed my hands to my ears, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen.  I wanted the sound to be all in my head and for the noises to continue with my hands over my ears at the same time I didn’t want to hear any of it at all.

But the sounds stopped.

I exhaled, and my breath hitched.  I opened my eyes at the same moment I pulled my hands from my ears.

Crunch.  A trickle of blood seeped into the hallway.

I blinked, and the blood was gone.  The noises stopped, replaced by Helen’s whisper-soft humming.

The children in the cells who weren’t looking at me were looking in Helen’s direction, listening.

My hands trembled, so I put them in my pockets.  I made sure my pose and posture were right, and I shot a smile at the nearest prisoners, reassuring them as best as I could.

Evette smirked at me as I walked past her.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said to her.

I left the cells behind, stepping out into Lab One.  Jessie had joined other students in working on the horse with the mane of nothing, set in a bed of scars.  When it was active and alive, the black horse’s mane and hooves would be alight with fire, its eyes glowing red.

Entirely impractical, but this was art.

“Is your curiosity sated, Simon?” Professor Ferres asked me.

Never,” I said.

“A shame you aren’t one of my students,” she said.

I smiled wider.  Careful there.

“I was about to leave to look after my prospective grey coats.  I was under the impression you wanted to join me?”

“I did,” I said.  “In fact, there was something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“You’re always particularly… engaged, after studying my work in progress,” she said.

“An operation halfway through,” I said.  That got me a glance from Betty, who had donned a mask and scrubs.

I looked over at Jessie.  “I’ll catch you later, hon?”

“When later?”

“After class,” I said.

“I’ll look forward to it,” she said.

I left her to it.  I joined the professor in heading upstairs.

“You’re tense,” I commented, once we’d reached a point in the flight of stairs where we weren’t in earshot of anyone.

“Somewhat,” the professor said.

“You’re thinking that you’re due for a meeting in your office with the prospective greys, and I would seem particularly out of place there.”

“You’re out of place here no matter the office or corridor, Sylvester,” the professor said.

“But see, I’m borrowing your power.  You could make the sky crimson over Hackthorn, and if you said it was fine, it would be accepted as fine.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

She gave a nod and a smile to a student who was descending the stairs.  Conversation paused for a moment, and then more students appeared, and the conversation came to an outright halt.

In those students, I saw a pair of mine.  They didn’t act like anything was amiss as they walked past me, but one did glance my way.

Ferres and I made our way up to the top floor.  As we reached it, I saw her bearing change, much in the same way mine had.

She was a little taller than me, and so she had been afforded a better view of the people on the top floor a moment before I had.  That, and I’d been watching her more than I’d been watching others.

The smile was gone, the geniality she’d offered her students stripped away.  She went cold in a way that wasn’t so distant from how Helen did it.  Because she was in the company of more common students, and because a heavyset man with fine clothes was there.

“Ibbot knew you once, didn’t he?” I asked.

“You know this.”

“Just asking.”

“He studied some of my ideas and even asked for my thoughts at one point while creating your friend with the injured face.  He didn’t use my thoughts, which would be helpful in the here and now, but that’s beside the point.  Yes, we’ve interacted,” Ferres said.  She sounded annoyed at the distraction.

“Yeah,” I said.

Seeing her go cold, adopting a crisper, administrator’s bearing, it was a good reminder that she was someone with deeper reserves.  She’d drawn something from less than a half hour’s time in the company of her favorite students, steeling herself, growing stronger.  She’d reached this position through merit and calculation, and none of that was gone.

I needed things from her.

We approached the aristocrat, and Ferres extended a hand.

He took it and kissed it.  I wanted to wince at that, but I would let it slide.

“Professor,” the aristocrat said.

“Good Sir,” she said, with no warmth at all.  “What brings you here?”

I could smell the touch of whiskey.

“He’s my father,” I said.

Ferres’ expression didn’t falter in the slightest.

“Son,” Otis’ sole surviving thug said, with the paternal warmth of a dissected frog.

I could smell more of the whiskey now.  I was suspicious he’d actually had some.  A method actor, it seemed.

“I see.  And what’s the reason for him being here?”

“He’s going to come along.  He’s drunk enough to barge in and both notable and eccentric enough to get away with it,” I said.

“I find myself wondering about this.”

“Say it with me, professor.  The sky is crimson.”

“The sky is crimson,” she said.

“Exactly,” I said.  Then to my very confused father, I said, “Don’t worry about it.  You’ll watch her?”

“I’ll watch her,” he said.

“Is this the latest in the series of indignities you’re bestowing on me?” Ferres asked.  “Students will automatically link an old maid like myself with any man of roughly my age who I keep company with.”

“The horror,” I said.

“Is that the threat, then?  He’ll be my paramour, and my reputation is ruined, or you kill me?”

“Oh no, professor,” I said.  My eye moved through the crowd.  I saw more of mine seeded throughout.  Beattle students in Hackthorn uniforms.  The fact that students were giving the professor a respectful berth meant I could talk without too much worry of being overheard.  “Death is too merciful, isn’t it?  Father, you’re under strict instruction not to kill her, mind you.”

“Noted.  Son.”

He needed more acting lessons with Helen.

I looked up at Professor Ferres.  “If you cross me, I’ll give you Wyvern, professor.  It’s painful, you know.”

“Quite,” she said.

“But that won’t be the end of it.  I will make your mind malleable, and I will batter it with words.  I will play on your fears and your hopes, I will find your weak points, and I will create some.  Then I’ll give you a week to recover before doing it again, and again, and again.  I don’t have very long before I lose my mind entirely, and so this is my last real gambit.  If this plan fails, then I’ll spend all the time I have left ensuring you lose your mind too.”

Her expression was hard to read, but as she glanced away, she moved her shoulder, one of the sore ones from the long night in the hard tub, with minimal movement on her part.

“I will make you stupid, professor.  I will make your thoughts run in circles endlessly.  I will tear you down until you’re a whimpering child in a sixty year old woman’s body.  Pass on a message to the right person somehow, somehow avoid everything I’ve been putting into place for the past days and weeks, and I’ll still manage it.  And you’ll let me do it, with scarcely any resistance at all.”

“I’ll let you?” she asked.  Her curiosity sounded more intellectual than anything else.

“Because if I find you too hard to crack, on one particular night?  I’ll turn my attention to your co-conspirators.  To students and teachers you respect and admire.  And you’re too proud of what you’ve built here to allow me to do that for your benefit.”

She nodded, absorbing that.

“You’re going to not only tell me what I want to know about Crown and Academy, but you’re going to help me do it.”

“Perhaps,” she said.  “And I do see my prospective grey coats.  Do I have your leave to join them, Sylvester?”

I almost wanted to retort ‘perhaps’, but it was because the word had caught on my brain.

I waved her off, and she offered her arm to my father, who took it, walking with her to the grey coats.

It wasn’t a hallucination like the one I’d had near the cells, but I had a distinct mental picture of the students I’d seeded into the student body in an out-and-out war with the other students.  We were badly outnumbered, but the element of surprise was ours, our students were far more prepared to fight, and we were in the process of ensuring that the scales of that fight would be tipped in our favor, the weapons in our hands.

I really wanted that conflict to be at a time that suited us, not because someone had made a mistake or because the other side had gotten clever.

“Pierre wants to see you downstairs,” Davis said.  He’d approached me from the flanks.

I glanced at the student council president.  The student council president of Beattle, rather.  He wore a white coat.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Countless small problems.  I don’t know what exactly he wants you for.”

“Alright,” I said.  “Davis.”

“David.  Yes, what?”

“Are you free tonight?”

“Potentially.  Why?”

Because we need an in, and there’s not nearly enough time.

“I think the professor is about to have one of her favored students storm off and disappear on the next boat out.”

“I’ll gather some extra sets of hands,” he said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.04 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I missed the rain.  Springtime in Radham had always been when the rain came down hardest, and there was something about letting it wash over me, over face and through hair, that really appealed to me.  It was almost the inverse of Wyvern, reaching inside of me to the very core of me and polluting me in a way that was as artificial as rain was natural.

Well, most rain.

A strong, cold wind blew past the dormitory window, only a portion of it actually passing inside.  I stood off to one side, using one eye to watch the students who were huddled in the dim dormitory hallway as I kept another eye on the window itself.  The wind that blew past my cigarette made the smoke roll off it in a thin horizontal line, everything beyond was pitch darkness.  It wasn’t overcast, but there was no moon.  I could hear the waves crashing against the cliffs far below.  I could smell the ocean.

Mabel approached me.

I tapped my box of cigarettes against my leg and held it out toward her.

“No thank you,” she said.

I changed the angle and tapped the box with a finger to have the cigarette disappear back inside.  “Want to share this one?”

“My dad would kill me if he knew,” she said.

Which was a yes.  I handed it over, turning my head toward the window to exhale.

She took one draw and handed it back.

“Not your usual brand,” she said.

“They make this one in-house.  Artsy fartsy students, spending all day dressed in white uniforms while following strict rules about sterility, maintenance, schedule, authority.  Some fit that, but others need to… breathe something that isn’t Academy air.”

“I’ve seen that group.  They dress civilian when they’re off the clock, listen to music, congregate in the area of the dormitories?”

I nodded.  I offered her the cigarette again.  Her arms were folded, and she raised a hand a little, refusing me.

“Are they like Bea’s group?” Mabel asked.

“No,” I said.  “They’re rule-followers more than rule-breakers.  I think they just evolved as an adaptation to the Academy.  Some people can go all-in on the Academy thing, and that’s their identity.  Others form a kind of two-headed identity, one face for Academy and the other for themselves.  Their self-identity doesn’t take away from their Academy identity.”

“Hm.  I think I was pretty all-in.  I don’t know if I would have stayed that way.  I didn’t know what to do with life except work harder,” Mabel said.  “Life would get in the way, and then I’d crumble.  I’d piece myself together in time for the next semester.  It got easier when I had an excuse to not go home for the mid-year and end-year breaks.”

“After you got to Beattle, I assume.”

“Yeah,” Mabel said.  “I could say I only had a week and a half off for each of the breaks, it took two days to travel out, two days to travel back.  It didn’t leave a lot of time.  Thankfully.”

“Did he visit?” I asked.  The sheriff.  Mabel’s dad.

“Some,” she said.  She looked down at my cigarette.  “Gim- me.”

I was already passing it over.

“Reading my mind,” she said.

“Not so much,” I said.

“You’re a step ahead of everyone.”

“Again, not so much,” I said.  “With Jessie, Helen, sure.  I know how they think.  The other Lambs, who you met briefly?  Same sort of thing.  More Mary and Lillian than Ashton, mind you.  But Ashton isn’t hard to figure out.”

“And me?”

“I know the key points.  My memory isn’t good- you know my memory isn’t good.  I forget things, as much as I don’t want to.  But I hold on to some things.  I don’t have enough of you to hold on to.”

I’d planned to add ‘yet’ to that last sentence, much as I’d planned the innuendo with the idea of holding onto her.  Seeing her stare out the window into the darkness, I decided against the ‘yet’, let the innuendo be on its own, without emphasis or a careful eye movement.

I continued, filling the silence, “Not analyzing you on that level.  Just paying attention.  I’m on edge, ready to pull a gun if I have to, so it shouldn’t be odd I can move a second faster to pass it to you.”

I’d left the statement open for further input, a chance for her to rebut, or to build on what I’d said.

She wasn’t responding, and she was taking her time with my cigarette.  Lost in thought.

“Want to come over tonight?” I asked.  “It’s gotta be about three in the morning right now.  Your choice if we just make it high quality sleep, all together, or if we just do without sleep altogether.”

“I’m not so comfortable doing that,” she said.

“If it’s about the old woman in the bathtub,” I said.  “We could put her to sleep with an injection, throw a sheet over her or something.”

I didn’t miss that she went straight to another puff on the cigarette after I dropped that thought.  There had been a pattern to how long she’d waited before drawing in a breath, too small a sample size to be perfect, but noticeable to anyone who paid enough attention to her.  That pattern picked up.

“Bad joke,” I said.  “Sorry.”

Now you’re reading my mind.”

“You’re clever, Mabel, you’ve got a fine eye for detail, but when it comes to flipping things around, I think anybody could tell what you’re thinking.”

“You might have too high an estimation of ‘anybody’, Sy,” Mabel said.  “It’s more about coming and going, I worry I’ll blow our cover.”

“I’m adaptable,” I said.  “As for the coming, we’d be making the most noise in the dead of night, I don’t think we’d be overheard, especially with the quality of the construction over there.  As for the going, Jessie, Helen and I have done fine.  Only person to see you go is the Hag of Hackthorn, and she’s not in a position to complain.”

“All the same,” Mabel said.

Someone in the cluster of students raised a hand.  I pointed, and Mabel handed me what remained of the cigarette before hurrying over.

I needed to teach my people to walk more quietly in spaces like this.  The dormitory building was grown, all builder’s wood, and the floor wasn’t planks, but a controlled outgrowth.  It was hard to make noise when there was something approximating a bisected tree trunk underfoot, as opposed to planks that bowed under a person’s weight, and Mabel still managed to scuff the floor with her shoes.

It went back to what I’d been thinking before.  As a pair of eyes, a lookout, an investigator, a reader, she was good.  Put her to task, she did good work.  Just about tops.  But as the person watched, as the investigated, the read, the person being worked on?  Room for growth.

I wondered if I was just thinking along those lines because I wanted to find fault.

She’d left me with barely anything of my cigarette.  I took one last pull to finish it off, then spat it out the window.

As a point of pride, I moved across the floor without a sound, being sure to position myself so I wouldn’t interfere too much with the amount of light in the hallway.  The human eye was sensitive, and even the slightest of changes in light level could trip prey instincts.

One of the people gathered at the door was a young male student, one of Mabel’s from the Green Team, or whatever they were calling themselves this week.  He’d started out as one of Bea’s, and against all odds, he’d become more of a proper and dedicated student now that he’d left the Academy than he’d been when he’d been part of it.

I was pretty sure he was sweet on Mabel, too.  Entirely fair.  She was neat.

That had absolutely nothing to do with the perverse pleasure I felt when my silent appearance made him jump.

There were five of them gathered.  Jessie sat with her back to the wall, sleeping in the middle of a mission.  The three students who were kneeling at the door were wearing quarantine masks.  One held a hose and a bladder that he palpated, another held something to the gap beneath the door while making sure the hose stayed in place, and the third was the fellow I’d just spooked.  He was mixing a chemical that was feeding into a ‘Y’ shaped join in the hose, bladder, feed assembly.  Mabel checked the levels, taking a drop of the mixture into a vial, which she shook before checking the color as best as she could by the dim light.

She gestured for the go-ahead.  Her subordinate turned the key that connected the fluid hose to the bladder.

At that same moment, a doorknob rattled down the hall, the door cracking open.  The cluster of students all froze, and I moved.

I crossed the hallway, darting to the door, staying low to the ground.  As the person within stepped out, I pressed a knife to their throat.

I took stock of them.  Him.  He looked to be a rather rough-edged young man, gangly, his hair long enough that oil and wax didn’t serve to keep it all in order.  He wore an undershirt and slacks, and had a proper shirt slung over one shoulder.  His eyes went wide as he realized what the knife was.

“I-”

I moved the knife, fast, the blade pressing against his lips.

Moving slowly, I reached over and closed the door as quietly as I could.

“Uh,” he whispered.

“Shhh,” I said.  “Quiet now.  You just had a bit of bad luck, is all.”

“Uh.”

I pressed the knife against his lips, harder, until I sensed that any further pressure would break skin.

“It’s okay,” I said.  “You’ll come for a walk with me, while these guys do what they’re doing.  Then you’ll disappear.  Maybe for a little while, maybe for good.  It depends how much you cooperate.  How quiet you are.  Understand?”

I gave him my best reassuring smile.

Unwilling to nod and slice his lips open, unwilling to make a sound, he closed his eyes very deliberately, and then he opened them.

“Good,” I said.  I moved the knife to his throat.  “No noise now.  Come-”

“Sy,” I heard the whisper behind me.

Mabel.

“He’s one of ours.”

“Is he?” I whispered back.  I looked at the guy.

“Think so.  One of Bea’s?”

The flat of the knife point rested against his throat.  My grip on the knife was light, so I could swap hands or shift my hold at a moment’s notice, and I could feel the vibrations of his pulse making the knife move.

Slowly, he nodded.

I pulled the knife away.

“We’ve talked,” he said.

“Have we?”

“I went out with Bea after Fang did?  And we played cards in the big tent while on watch in the middle of the black woods?  I did the second shift?  Day two?”

“There were a lot of days, a lot of faces playing cards,” I said.  “Uh, did we talk about girls?”

“No.”

“Oh.  Well… that was a less than stellar guess.  Shucks.  Now I feel like a heel.”

“I… really don’t know what to say to that,” he whispered.

“Come on,” I said.

We joined the others.  The palpating of the bladder had resumed, and a little mixer or fan whirred at the ‘Y’-shaped connector.

“What were you doing here anyway?” I asked.  “It’s the girl’s dormitory.”

The young fellow looked startled at the question.  Then, slowly, a smile spread across his face.

“Right,” I said.  “Good night?”

His smile widened.  He had the decency to look sheepish.

“Almost ready,” Mabel said.  “I’m going to get clear.  Unless you want to let Jessie keep sleeping.”

“We need her,” I said.

“Then I’ll get clear.  Come on, Happy.”

Happy.  Right.

We’d brought a blanket and several canvas bags, and I’d draped the blanket over Jessie while everything got underway.  Supplies had been left on and around her.

I reached over and touched the underside of her chin, lifting it.

“If you were anyone but Sy, I’d have stuck you with a knife by now,” she said, as she woke.

I put the gas mask on her face for her, fixing everything in place.

“I can get away with a lot,” I said.  I set the blanket aside, then took her hands.  I hauled her to her feet.  Right at the last second, I pulled her off balance, making like I was going to drop her.

I caught her, hand at the small of her back, and flourished, the pair of us every bit the ballroom dancers.

Jessie drew her knife and made like she was going to stab me.  She stopped just shy of actually doing it.  “Not that much.  Not when I’ve just woken up.”

I grinned.

Mabel glanced back at us, as did Happy.  The others were pulling equipment aside.  The wadding at the base of the door was pulled away, and I could see the wisps of vapor.

I popped the door lock, which was of the mass-manufactured sort that assembly lines of stitched worked on, so easy to break that it really was there for show and propriety.

There were two students to a room.  Betty had divided the room up with a black-skinned girl who slept in a bed on the far side of the room, and from the looks of it, it really was more of a division than a sharing of the space.  There wasn’t a line of chalk or paint drawn down the center of the room, but it was absolutely clear which side of the room was Betty’s.  The gas was pea-soup thick, one student pulled a towel down from where it hung on the back of the door to keep more vapor from leaking into the hallway, and the other two looked to me for an a-okay for permission to illuminate the room.

“The gas isn’t flammable, right?” I asked.

“It’ll dampen the flames, but won’t put them out.”

I nodded.

The three students in the quarantine suits gathered the blanket, and they worked on rolling up Betty in the thing.  Jessie and I gathered the canvas bags and began methodically working through Betty’s space.  I packed up the clothes, three Academy uniforms with seven smocks, five days worth of non-Academy clothing that I suspected she hadn’t worn much, a seemingly disproportionately large number of underthings, and an even more disproportionate number of socks.  I swept all the jewelry into the bag.

Jessie worked through the bookcase.  She picked the books with cracked spines and wear and left the more pristine ones.  We worked swiftly to ensure the bags were neatly packed.  It was only enough possessions to fill half of a room and one small closet.

In the thick fog, it was the little personal touches that were easiest to miss.  A doodle from a notebook stuck between wall and windowframe, so it was close to the pillow while she slept.  Similar ones along her closet door, running from top to bottom.  Quotes of the motivational sort, drawings, cryptic research thoughts that had probably struck late at night and needed to be written down lest they be forgotten.

As her bundled form was carried out of the room, I moved my attention to the bed.

Betty here was a vague and flowery narrative in a number of senses.  She’d told herself stories about how the work she was doing was justified, but there were themes running through all of this.  A fantasy in the notes she wrote to herself.  ‘Create beauty’.  The fact that three out of four doodles were of fairies.

I lifted up the mattress, searching.  I reached into spaces between bed and bookshelf, searched under the bed, and then pulled out drawers, checking that nothing was stuck beneath and that there were no secret compartments.

“Sy,” Jessie said.  She held up the diary I’d been looking for.  Sitting on the bookshelf, within the folds of a larger book sleeve with no book.

If that had been found, it would have raised questions.

We erased the existence of Betty as much as we could.  I did a final sweep while Jessie stood at the desk, using Betty’s stationary, pen, and handwriting to pen out a letter.

“Going down to the city, don’t look for me?”

“No,” Jessie said.  “A post-boat leaves tonight.  She’s hitching a ride.”

“I worry about that,” I said.  “There’s a reason we didn’t boat in.  There’s security.  Oversight.”

“And Betty is determined and well connected.  We point the direction, people won’t know where she is, and they’ll have to assume she left by boat.”

I winced.

“You don’t think it’ll work?”

“It might.  I just worry about…”

I used my hands to gesture.  I tried to sketch out a shape.

“Diamond with a wizard hat?”

“There’s too many edges, too many angles others can come at it from.”

“There aren’t many places for her to go, Sy.  The boat timing works.  Anything else and they might look for her and realize she isn’t anywhere to be found.  It’s not like she’s going to hike the wasteland and black woods.”

“They won’t be able to verify with the boat?”

“No,” Jessie said.  “Not quickly enough to matter.”

“Then what’s the motivation?”

“Us.  You and me.  She doesn’t like what this has become, she’s mad at the professor.  She’s questioning the sheer number of rural folk and strangers who’ve been escorted through the black wood and allowed to take refuge at the foot of Hackthorn.”

“It’s going to draw attention to us.”

“We’re close,” Jessie said.  “Things are coming together.”

I cracked the window open so the gas could escape.  I checked the room one more time, walked over to Betty’s roommate, and checked the girl’s breathing and pulse.

Sleeping.

“You’re in a rush, Jessie,” I said.

“Yeah, Sy.  I worry about how much time we have.”

She means to say she worries how much time she has.

Or maybe she really does mean to say how much time we have.  As a pair.

“I just don’t want to cut corners and have things fall through at the last moment.”

“Yeah,” she said.

A smile touched my face, and I heard a sound from Jessie, through her mask.  A short laugh.

The same thought had hit us both at the same moment.  The role reversal.  Jessie being reckless, me being the rational one.

We bent down, and we collected the bags that hadn’t already been carried out by the others.

“And Betty’s gone,” I whispered, closing the door.

There was a larger group waiting for us outside.  We passed the heavy bags of books and clothes to others.

“Back to our rooms?” the Treasurer asked.  Even in the gloom, I could see that he was doing better.  He’d been solid, stoic, a reliable member of the team with a good head on his shoulders, especially when it came to his field of specialty, but seeing him now?  He’d filled out, he stood taller, and he looked more ready to take on the world.

Davis had perhaps gone in the other direction, but it wasn’t wholly bad.  He’d always been a pair with Valentina, and Valentina had moved on, alongside a small handful of others.  The showing and the whole situation with Neph and the black wood had done a lot to earn the faith of our people.  The change to Davis resembled someone who had gone through hard work and come out of it without an ounce of fat on him, but on a spiritual level.

Mabel had left with the others.

I’d wanted to finish my conversation with her.

“Not back to our rooms, I’m thinking,” Davis said.  “Not when everyone’s active and around.”

“No,” I agreed.  “There are things to do.”

I let Jessie do the gesture, and I watched as our people moved in response.  A dozen of our guys and gals who weren’t already seeded throughout the Academy.

The buildings of Hackthorn were like the fingers of a hand that held the great reclining woman up.  In the moonless night, she scintillated, countless labs and chambers with lamps and candles within now glowing orange, the light scattered among leaves and foliage that bristled along her skin.

At the base of that hand, however, the landscape was uneven.  The place wanted to be a city, but no two buildings were really seated on the same section of flat earth.  Even some buildings were staggered, the foundation split across two to four levels.

It did its darndest to be a proper settlement, but it was an individual, separate beast.  It served more as a spot of ugliness to offset the beauty and art of Hackthorn’s buildings and reclining woman than it did any other purpose.

All the roads were winding, stores remained open late, and it seemed like every other building was a place for students to meet for drink or food.  Like the smoking students, it was a way for students to breathe and escape the pressure.  It wasn’t a thing that a lot of Academies had.

It was presently late enough that half of those buildings had closed or were in the process of closing.  We walked past several places where windows were being shuttered and containers rinsed out outside, and we scarcely got a second glance.

The cafe we stopped at was closed.  I approached the door and knocked.

Shirley, Pierre, and a bulk of the refugees from the city where Neph had died were gathered within.  They sat at benches and tables and formed a cluster, and most of the light within came from the fires burning in the kitchen and at the other end of the building, at the end of the cafe’s dining area.

“You grace us with your presence,” a fat man said, with a fair bit of irony to the use of ‘grace’.

“Few are more graceful than we,” I said, holding Jessie’s hand, holding it up.

“How are we doing on the ground level?” Jessie asked.

Straight to business.

“We’re doing quite well,” Pierre said.  With the abundance of focus on the cosmetic, someone had tended to his head, and he looked far better.  Still ghoulish, but better.

“Are we seeded?” I asked.

“We’re seeded on the ground,” Pierre said.

I rummaged through the things I still had with me, and I found a small bag.

“Talk to me about distribution,” Jessie said.  “Military?”

“They wanted more bodies, what with things on the horizon,” the fat man said.  “We weren’t able to get many in, but we got some in.  Not going to have a regiment under your control if something goes south, but you could get information, or keys to the right locked door.”

“That might give us the control over weapons we need,” I said.  “Given timing and everything else.”

I brought the bag to Shirley, who stood in the threshhold between the dining area of the cafe and the kitchen.

“Politics?” Jessie asked.

“The groundskeeper’s stitched had an unfortunate accident, went to pieces,” the fat man said.  “He was forced to hire someone.  Pretty young lady who is entirely loyal to us.”

The groundskeeper, because having an actual mayor didn’t make sense, given the local dynamic.

“That’s thin, as seeds go,” I said.  Shirley had undone the bag.  It was a bit redundant, given that she was running this cafe, but I’d included some pastries, a trinket, and a little bottle of non-alcoholic blackberry cider that Jessie had said Shirley adored.

Shirley gave me a kiss on the forehead for that one.

Not that a little gesture like this was anything close to what I owed her.

“It’s thin, but they aren’t happy about all of us moving in and taking up space.  They don’t want to give us work.  I’m proud of that one,” the fat man said.

He had a tone of belligerence that suggested he was drunk, when he actually wasn’t drunk at all.  He was just loud and perhaps a little wanting when it came to inhibitions and delicacy.

“Factories, labor?” Jessie asked.

“We’ve got a lot going on.  They were happy to have the extra hands.  They stored a lot of lumber in advance of the black wood coming in.  Now they’re processing it.”

“Good,” Jessie said.  “Then, in case this boils down to a siege, we should talk food.”

“We’ve got tabs on the food,” Pierre said, speaking softly.  He clasped his hands in front of him.  “We made that a priority.”

“Good man,” I said, voice soft.  Pierre shot me a salute.

“If we can control that and not lose it when push comes to shove, we can win in the long run,” Jessie said.  “I’d rather not have it come to the long run, but I do like having that security.”

She was so focused on time.  It pained me a little.

“Then,” I said.  “Let’s talk about food in a different sense.  Let’s say there was an event.  Let’s say important people came.  Festival, celebration, a need to please.  If the high cuisine came in, needing to be stored, would we have a stranglehold on that as well?”

“I think we would,” Pierre said.

“Good,” I said.  “Then I think we’re moving forward nicely.”

“Are you thinking of the young master’s celebration?” Jessie asked.

“No,” I said.  I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment.  “No, I’m thinking of bigger fish.”

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================================================== 18.05 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.5

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Professor Ferres was a fantastic actress.  In some ways we had lucked out in picking her.  In other ways, that sword had two edges, and it made for some dangerous handling.  We’d hit her where it hurt, and the metaphorical sword was being drawn out now.

She acted like nothing was wrong as her favored students started their work in lab one.  Her favored students minus one, of course.

It was a beautiful thing, from a certain perspective.  I’d grown up around Helen, and I was strongly suspicious that Ibbot had been inspired by Professor Ferres when he had designed our winsome, woesome Lamb.  Long exposure to Helen, years of my own earnest attempts at acting and being up against some of the best around gave me a deep appreciation for Ferres’ act.  The face that betrayed nothing, the fact that she could smile and act as though nothing was wrong when she was battered, bruised, and tired?

Even if I hadn’t had an agenda, it might’ve been worth doing this just to see how someone capable approached the problem.

That, and I did have reservations about targeting a youth.  Betty was almost our age, but there were groups of mice that might have taken her in, had her circumstances of birth been different.  Pressure and the fact that I really didn’t like Betty had helped me cross my personal line in the sand and break my own rules on this.

Ferres didn’t miss a beat as she gave instructions, “The grafts for Itsy Bitsy are in the cold room.  Alvin, would you prepare to take Betty’s position in the surgical theater in case she doesn’t turn up?  I’ll send someone to check on her the moment I’m free.”

Not one glance toward Jessie or me.  It was good, considering that she had to suspect.

Jessie was talking numbers, rattling off equations as the others talked.  For all that Betty had complained that I didn’t belong here, there were no loud complaints about Jessie.  She hadn’t earned her place in the way that Betty, Alvin, Leland, Wilbert, and the other favored students had.  She’d dealt with no grueling tests, she hadn’t had to prove herself, but she was holding up her end now that we were here.  Everything she did was strictly by the book.  Literally.

Ferres continued to give instructions.  I was focusing almost the entirety of my attention on her while she was working to ignore Jessie and I.  I was noticing the tics and the tells, the little catches.  It had been day after day of being drugged overnight, of paralyzing chemicals, tense muscles, bedsores or tubsores, fatigue, and insufficient food.  Pressure, tension, dehumanization and likely a fair amount of fear as well.  All while doing an eerily good job of acting as if nothing was wrong.

“Leland, Wilbert, you’ve been mulling over the nightmare for two days now.  I’ve tried to be patient, but I need you two to step it up.”

“Yes, Professor, of course.”

“If you haven’t found a working solution by the end of the day, I’ll be taking you off that project and doing it myself, and I won’t be happy about it,” Ferres said.

Jessie started gesturing as she talked, punctuating reams of ratios and ten-syllable compound names with hand movements.

I’d already noticed what Jessie was tipping me off to.  Ferres was speaking faster, more aggressively.

It was minor, hard to pin down, but when it came to a formidable character like Ferres’, I was willing to take any cue I could.  With a grain of salt.

“We’ve been weighing a few ideas.  We could rush it, but you said you’d rather it was done well than fast.”

“I did say that,” Ferres said.  She paused, and her demeanor shifted slightly.  “What’s troubling you?  Carbon chain boundary?”

“I think we’re covered on that front.  It’s the fuel injection.  Leland thinks if we provide the fuel by way of channels in the shoulder and let it flow back, scar tissue and other buildup will block it.  I was suggesting a stronger scapular floor for fiercer contractions, push through the buildup, but Leland worries it would be too spurty.”

“I think you’re both right,” the Professor said.  “It wouldn’t do to have our antagonist spray flaming ejaculate all over our juvenile audience, and it could be quite the spurt if we tried to counteract the full buildup.”

“I, uh, yes Professor.  We agree.”

“How long would it perform?”

“Ten to fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll need twice that if we’re to hold to the script.  Two-line regimen of G.H.I., increase its diet, standing guard in case it becomes hostile.  Excise the upper portions of the ventral serratus if you have to to make room.”

“Room for?” Wilbert asked.

“You tell me,” Ferres said.  “Go for a walk, find Betty, figure out how she’s doing, and have three good ideas in mind by the time you’re back.”

Wilbert straightened.  “The girl’s dormitory?  But-”

“If anyone asks, I sent you.  Now don’t tarry.”

Wilbert nodded.  His departure fell just short of a proper run from the premises.  Academy students were sometimes like pigeons.  When one student scrammed, others would take off too out of herd mentality.  Looking silly for running on a thousand occasions was a fair tradeoff for the one time it meant getting a headstart against an ominous, onrushing cloud of gas or cloud of insects loaded to bear with fun drugs.  It was a rule in periods of peace to avoid running wherever possible.

Professor Ferres continued to assign tasks and lay out everything that needed to be done, keeping tabs on the various projects and suggesting adjustments.  Jessie gestured again, and I took note of the gesture.  Jessie was keeping time, marking the fact that Ferres was much quicker to do this than she had been on previous days and weeks.  Ferres was rushing, because she wanted to move on to other things.  To me and to her favored student, little miss Betty.

I walked over to the table at the far side of the circular room.  There were four exits to the room, with two being staircases on either side, one being access to the cells and storage rooms, and the last one being the access to the operating theater.

The table was closest to the operating theater, and I could see Alvin laying spider-limbs as long as my arms out on one table.  One of the children in the cells would be put under and go under the knife.  Lillian stood by the table, and her stare was accusatory.

I looked away from her and turned my attention to the papers on the table.  Each set of papers was bundled together into contained booklets, titles inked out on the front pages.  Names of the experiments.  Bo Peep, Itsy Bitsy, Poll Parrot.  There were others I hadn’t recognized right off.  The three youngest children that Helen had been snuggling with would be the three blind mice, after their surgeries were done.  One young lady would become the unicorn.

The books had terminology, codes, and shorthand throughout, and I could only deduce some of it.  Instilled instinct, compulsion, chemical triggers, training.  The individual lines, passages and behaviors were ranked by importance, reinforced by various factors.

If it was wholly up to the experiments doing what they were supposed to in order to enact their play, then making them stitched would have been enough.  But there were other factors.  These weren’t actors meant to play out a series of shows and stories the audience had seen countless times before.

They were toys.  The audience would interact, step in, and change the course of events.  Ferres was designing the various characters to appeal to a swathe of tastes and age groups.  That meant countless bases needed to be covered.  If the young master’s cousin found Bo Peep to their liking and wanted to play at tea with the girl, then Bo Peep was to oblige.

“You’ve taken my student, I gather?” Ferres asked.

I paged through Bo Peep’s file, not looking up.  Red pen had been used to label and mark out pages.  The section was simply titled ‘Story 3b.2: The Wolf Wins’.  The notes were scattered in intent, written by Ferres for Ferres, referencing people she had met and what she knew about the young master’s family.

“If you take all of them, then people will wonder.  It hurts you more than it hurts me,” the Professor said.

If there was a lull in the night’s entertainment, then the Big Bad Wolf would rouse and stalk its prey.  Red Riding Hood would be stalked by the wolf, which would speak and taunt her while staying out of sight.   Children in attendance could decide the outcome, by intervening, by cheering for one side.  The needed verbal cues, tones, and situational cues were marked out clearly, mapping out how this would come to pass.

If the young lads cheered for it, then there would be violence.  The Wolf would be emboldened, would close in, and Red Riding Hood would die a theatrical, gruesome, and very real death.  Then, depending on the collective response to that, other antagonists would step in while the wolf retreated to the background, having raised the stakes for the evening and kindled imagination, or the wolf would even take center stage, picking off characters one by one.  Bo Peep was number two to die, if the young boy at the center of the party willed it.

Red Riding Hood’s emotions would be very real in the midst of it all.  So would Bo Peep’s, if the party took that particular course.

Ferres wasn’t willing to discount that possibility, and she was putting considerable effort into planning for it, making sure the Big Bad Wolf was something that could be ridden.

I’d sat back and watched things for some time now, the idle bystander while Jessie and the other students worked on this project.  I’d read these scripts enough to have a general sense of the web of interactions and narratives that played out across them.  There were stories for grand violence, stories for intrigue, stories for heroism and valor, for being the gentleman that saved damsels in distress.  Ferres’ focus was to ensure that the young man at the center of the party received his highlight moment, whatever he chose to do.

“Are you ignoring me to get a rise out of me?” Ferres asked.

“No,” I said.  “I’m ignoring you because my attention is elsewhere.  The thing about having a shoddy memory is that I can put a book down and pick it up later and read it as if I’d never read it before.  Every time I read through these, I pick up something new.”

“I revise them regularly.  That might play a part.”

“It might,” I agreed.  I put the booklet down, letting it fall to the table with a slap of paper on wood.

Now that my attention was fully on her, Ferres seemed oddly composed.

She really wanted to push me on this, to ask about Betty, but she didn’t want to give up the appearance of power by asking a question she knew full well I wasn’t going to answer.  It would be groveling.

Still, I’d expected to see more weakness in her, a glimmer of something.

Why the rush through morning preparations then?  Why hurry through her tasks with other students if she wasn’t hurrying to any place in particular?  I’d expected a more heated confrontation, one where she might even have raised her voice at me.

“It started as something far smaller,” Ferres said.  “One scene, a speaking lion for a young girl who loved lions.  Child’s play, in both senses of the word.  But every prominent aristocrat wanted to top the last, grander displays, more involvement.  I received funding for my Academies and I was able to pursue the kind of work I wanted to do most.”

“At the expense of children,” I said, my voice low, “And let’s not pretend all of the children you bought off the Block were volunteers, whatever you told your students.”

“Very few were, I imagine.”

“Means to an end?”

“If the young master and his friends are bloodthirsty or if their military fathers egg them on, then they might call for blood and be applauded for it, and that will be the evening.  But it’s by no means a sure thing.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Sure, whatever.”

“You don’t have to listen to me.  If you don’t like my answer, you’re in a position of power over me.  You could tell me to change my stance, you could threaten me or hurt me for saying something you disagree with.  Whatever you imagine.”

“I’m hardly going to do that,” I said.

“You’ve done it countless times over the past several weeks,” she said.

“Indirect hurt,” I said.  “I feel like actively slapping you or putting you in screws is a little bit too brutish for me.”

“Such a gentleman,” she said, and there was enough venom in those three words that some people on the other end of the room caught it and glanced our way.

“All of this can end, all you have to do is tell Jessie and I how to contact certain prominent professors and nobles, and help us keep abreast of any changes or developments in the big picture.  We’ll handle the rest.”

“Oh, I’ve little doubt you will, young sir,” she said.  “But the moment I tell you that, then I cease being useful to you.  You’ll infect my Academy with black wood and ships won’t even come to port if they think their hulls might suffer.  I’ll be one step among a dozen that see you do grievous damage to the Academy.”

“You’ll fall on the sword, suffer for the good of Academy and Crown?”

“I’ll endure,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.  “You keep saying that.”

She smiled.

Again, that look.  The calm in the face of the storm, from someone with very little to reach out and grab hold of.  I’d pushed her and I’d taken away a vital handhold, very possibly her favorite student of the now, and as weary as she was, her emotions frayed, she wasn’t faltering.

She should have been given more pause by this.  It was concerning, because she should have come across as more unsteady.  But something about her demeanor in this moment made me think that yes, I’d been right that she was fond of her student Betty.  Yes, this had bothered her.  Yet I harbored a suspicion that if I made her entire Academy and every soul in it disappear, she would still hold fast.

I was beginning to grow suspicious of why, now.

“Itsy Bitsy Spider needs his grafts,” she said.  “If you wanted, you could exert your power, twist my arm, and spare him the procedure.”

“I do want,” I said.

“But?” she asked.

“No but,” I said.  “Spare him.  Postpone it.”

Again, she smiled slightly.

Why was this a win in her book?  People would wonder, and wondering with the right voices finding the right ear would unspool everything for Jessie and I.  It was Jessie and I making a play against her and seeing her refuse to budge, while she made a miniscule power play and she made me concede ground.

A small price if it helped Itsy Bitsy.  I’d have to let others slide.  I knew that.  It would blow our cover and the whole ruse if we refused all operations and activities on Ferres’ part.

But right now I wanted to focus on Ferres and the current dilemma.

“Did someone mess up drug doses?” I heard the question from the far end of the room.

It was Leland.

“Why do you ask?” Ferres asked, stepping away from me and the table with the scripts.

“The cast members are dead quiet,” Leland said.  “I thought they had actually died, but they’re awake, they’re at the cell doors, and they’re just watching while I get them water.”

“Leave it be,” I said, under my breath.

I didn’t miss the fractional pause before Ferres replied to Leland, saying, “Leave it be.  I’ll check on them shortly.”

“It’s creepy,” Leland said.

“Focus on the nightmare, Leland,” Ferres said.  “I expect more, better answers from you than from your partner in crime, who should be coming back with at least three ideas.”

“Yes, Professor.”

Betty’s kidnapping had barely made Ferres miss a step.

Ferres grew distracted with the activities of the others, who were working on the nightmare and the giant.  She was in the middle of the room and in Jessie’s earshot, so I deemed the situation calm enough to exchange words with Jessie.

“She’s got something,” I said.

“Something?” Jessie asked.

“Ferres.  She’s got a card up her sleeve.  It’s the only thing I can think of that accounts for just how hard she is to crack.  I’m trying to play her as if she’s got only a few handholds left and she’s acting like she’s fine.”

“She could be very good at lying.”

“Or she’s got a card,” I said.  “Both are equally worrying.”

“What card could she possibly have that she wouldn’t have already played?” Jessie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But if you’ll have a look-see…”

I turned to look through the glass at the stairs.  I’d noticed the people and the general commotion.

“…our card is playing out now.”

It was Wilbert, returning from his excursion to the girl’s dormitory.

Jessie and I hung at the periphery of the group as they approached.  Wilbert’s expression was severe.

“She left,” Wilbert said.  “She drugged her roommate to avoid any commotion, packed her things, and left in the dead of night.”

“Into the wasteland?” Ferres asked.

“By one of the postal ships,” Wilbert said.  “We don’t know how she got on, but she seemed confident she could if she needed to, going by the letter.”

“Do you have it?” Ferres asked.

Wilbert handed it over.

“What a shame,” the Professor said.  “A damn shame, with the worst possible timing.”

The effect was more profound on the other favored students than it was on Ferres.  Jessie and I stood close to one another, and we watched as she spoke, we watched her move, and we even saw her eyes grow moist.  Ferres as the warm individual.  Unlike Helen, I fully expected that the warm, living, emotional face was the real one, the cold persona the mask.

But emotions weren’t a weakness, not always.  Ferres wasn’t budging at all, and it was proving to be her best asset.

“They want to talk to you in the post area,” Wilbert said.

There we go, I thought.

“I’ll see to that.  Talk with Leland, get your plan straight.  I expect a thought out plan by the time I’m back.”

“I’ll come,” I decided.  My speaking drew several glares of the hostile ‘we didn’t ask’ variety.  I returned them with a smug smile.

The stairwell was full as students hurried to their morning classes.  I spotted Evette, and I saw Lillian again.  I saw a glimpse of Mauer, and I saw a multitude of friendly faces.  Students and workers seeded here and there.

“You’ve taken over the post system?” the professor asked.  “Is the plan to send poisoned envelopes to major figures?”

I remained silent, walking with her.

We were in the central building of the Academy, the core of the reclining woman’s torso.  The Academy’s post office was a short trip.

Getting service once we were there, even with one half of ‘we’ being the Professor, well, that was a different story.  We had to wait for the last of the mail to be hauled up by stitched crews and the one post worker on duty.

Rather than shove paper forms and the like for Professor Ferres to sign, the post worker simply opened the side gate and let us into the back.  The benefits of access.

I closed the door behind me as I stood in the entryway to the mail room.  Parcels and stacks of mail were already partially sorted, and stitched workers picked through mail before deciding where it was supposed to go.

It was a tableau of sorts, a scene where laborers worked and gave the illusion that they were doing something that they had been doing five minutes ago and would be doing every five minutes for years to come, if they were given a chance.  They sorted mail, questioned obstacles, and played it safe.

Sitting in one corner was the cage.  A young lady slept a drugged dream within it, her face a touch swollen.

“Is that supposed to be Betty?” the headmistress asked.

“We changed her hair and face,” I said.  “It wouldn’t do if the others recognized her.”

“Others?” Ferres asked.

“Your favored students.  Betty’s old colleagues,” I said.  “You had a fit of inspiration, didn’t you?  You’ll tell them you’re adding a new character to your performance.”

I wasn’t wholly sure, but I saw the first real crack in Ferres’ performance at that.  She covered it up well, but doing so necessitated looking away from me, hiding her expression for a moment.

“She likes fairies,” I said.  “Possible prey for the nightmare or the wolf, do you think?  Or for a smashing by a giant, for a visceral impact.”

I saw Ferres shake her head slightly.

“Don’t worry, Professor,” I said.  “Remember what you said.  The audience might call for blood, but that’s by no means a sure thing.  She could be fine.”

The crack ran deeper.

I saw the defeat reach her shoulders, as the strength in them subsided.  I wasn’t sure if she had properly let her guard down or surrendered a stray thought while she’d been our captive.  The momentary slump marked an occasion where I knew I had her.

Why then did I still feel she had a strategy to play?  One that she was so determined to hold back that she would surrender before she would use it?  An ominous backdrop for our ploy coming together.

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================================================== 18.06 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.6

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“You changed her face,” Ferres said.

We were outside, standing on a patio where many students lunched.  It wasn’t the lunch hour, however, which meant that the only students who would be out here at this hour would be conspirators and students looking for a space to discuss a project.  The wind was brisk enough that none of them were near.

Our vantage point to see the scenery was fairly stellar.  The scenery itself wasn’t.  Wasteland and black woods as far as the eye could see to one side, and fog-shrouded ocean to the other.

“Implants, just under the skin,” I said.  “Quick, easy.”

“If I’d moved forward and called your bluff, then the implants would be found fairly quickly.”

“Probably,” I said.  “But you’re quick enough to see what happens if you don’t play along.  Your other students come under fire.”

I watched her, and even though I couldn’t read her expression well, I was wondering if she was calculating whether it was worth it to take that risk.

“Not just your favored students.  All of your students.  If I wasn’t in the room and you were free to act from the second Jessie or I gave the go-ahead to watching eyes or listening ears, you still wouldn’t be able to get ahead of what we have staged.”

“So you say.”

I smiled, tapped a cigarette out of the box, and hunched over, hand cupped, to light it in the brisk wind.  When I was done, I leaned on the railing, looking out at the wasteland.  Ferres remained close to her Academy, arms folded, back to the exterior wall.  The reclining woman of Hackthorn’s breasts jutted out overhead.  In judging their size, I realized that Ferres had modeled the breasts on her own, probably.  On her younger self’s, anyhow.

I looked away, watching dark clouds roll in.  It looked like a storm was on the way.

“Tell me,” I said.  “When you first thought you were going to join the Academy, did you tell yourself, hey, you’d cut open kids and use them to make art pieces for some aristocratic brat to play with?”

“A little reductionist, that.  That work allows me to fund and support research that does actual good.”

“If you want to play that game, the reductionist sword cuts both ways.”

“The children were doomed to begin with.  They’re better off.  They can choose if they get restored to normal by the junior students of my Academy or if they wear those modifications to their own advantage.  Others from the Block face far worse.”

“You Academy types love to focus on the physical and gloss over the emotional and mental.”

“I don’t know what an Academy type who focused on the emotional or mental would look like.”

“Mm,” I made a sound.  “Which is still sidestepping the point.”

“I do good work,” Ferres said.  “Be it with those children or in my research.  I know you grew up with close ties to a young lady that was also an Academy student.  Without me to help pave the way, she might not have found her place by your side.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“I don’t want to sound as if I’m bragging, but do look at the big picture.”

“I try,” I said.  “And in that big picture, honestly, I think both I and the young lady might be in agreement that my side was a pretty crummy place to be.  You might not have done any favors, putting her there.  I’m kind of a bastard.”

“Ah.”

“I’m being facetious.  I do think you could have paved the way without, you know, so very many casualties.”

“How many casualties have you racked up, Sylvester Lambsbridge?”

“Eighty-three, directly,” I said.  “Nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one.  By the time I’m done with your Academy, I’ll likely have racked up an even ten thousand.”

“Ah.”

“I didn’t really keep count.  I just wanted to get the last word in.”

The door opened.  Jessie and Helen.  Jessie closed the door behind her and joined me at the railing, leaning with her back against it, her arm touching mine.  Helen remained closer to Ferres.

“Ferres was about to tell us things,” I said.

“I suppose I was.  What do you want to know?” Ferres asked.  “Eerie to suppose that my voicing that question aloud completely and utterly ends my career.”

“Don’t be silly,” Helen said.  “Your career was over the moment we ambushed you in your bedroom.”

I turned around, leaning against the railing beside Jessie.  I turned my head a bit so my smoke didn’t blow in her face.

Ferres frowned.  She made an odd mirror to Helen.  Older, not as natural a beauty, or not as unnatural a beauty, depending on the lens one viewed Helen through, but there were superficial similarities in how they held themselves.

I spoke.  “There’s a code you use when communicating with other professors, Academies, and nobles.  A higher level of security.”

“Is there?” Ferres asked.

I raised my eyebrow.

She sighed.  “There is.  For all that your abilities are vaunted, you Lambs haven’t been able to crack it, hm?”

“We know where the numbers are.  Stop gloating and just tell us what the numbers mean.”

“Implants.  Mine is under my left thumbnail.  It looks like blood but isn’t, it’s an agent with a specific chemical balance.  It takes two minutes with the lab in my office to extract and find out the current percentage.  They’ll check the date and time of any messages I send against the number in the margins, match it against the same chemical they have in their offices.”

“No bruising?” Jessie asked.  “I haven’t seen any physical markers.”

“That would defeat the purpose,” Ferres said.

“It’s all very complicated,” I said.

“They pushed for higher security after the infiltration of the communications office in Radham.  We did have measures before, but we had to change them when she went rogue.”

I elbowed Jessie.  “Home sweet home.”

“Was more a home for you two than for me,” Jessie said.

“Suppose so,” I said.  “You spent… what, less than half your current life there?”

“I think of Tynewear when I think of home,” Jessie murmured.  “Or of Sedge.  Home moves from place to place.”

With me, as it happened.  I leaned over to give her a kiss on the shoulder.

Professor Ferres’ tone was bitter enough to serve as a reversal in tone from the moment with Jessie.  “If I didn’t already wince at the mention of Radham because it’s where that cretin Ibbot works, I’d be doing it now.  Nothing but misery stems from there.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said.  “There’s plenty of misery everywhere.  All Radham got was a few little Lambs to help bring it to the surface.”

Ferres’ smile was thin and humorless as I looked back at her.  She said, “You Lambs, the rogue Mavis, Fray and the Red Shepherd.”

“True, that.  Cynthia too,” I said.

“She came from elsewhere,” Ferres said.

“She popped up in a few places, as did her colleagues,” Jessie said.  “It might be worth thinking about why they stopped in Radham when they did, for as long as they did, but I think we’re getting sidetracked.”

“We’ve dealt with our share of rebels rising and falling on the eastern half of the Crown States, especially in the wake of Fray’s stunt with the water supply, but the ones from your region have proven tenacious and especially irritable.”

“Whole tracts of the population being sterilized will act that way.  Being told you need a prescription to leave the region doesn’t help,” I said.

They were freely undoing the sterilization,  which would work for the current generation, and by the time the next generation cared, it would be normalized.

“All the same,” Ferres said.  “Especially irritable.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Blame the constant rain over there.”

“And tenacious,” Ferres said.

“Blame Fray for that.  She organized them.  For a little while, anyway.”

“I find myself wanting to express blame at a number of parties.  I could talk for days on the subject.  I won’t.  Reality is what it is, and I count the fact that I haven’t had to set foot in Radham as one of the very few mercies I’ve been afforded.  If the spread of the red plague has forced your lot into my corner of the Crown States, your collective leashes artificially extended by the Crown’s attempts to keep its population alive, then that’s something more I’ll have to endure.”

“You keep saying that,” I said, while making a mental note to see if there was any way I could get all of us or even just Ferres into Radham at a later point.  “Endure.  Endure.  Endure.”

“Well, I suppose I’ve reached my limit.  You’ve broken me, targeting Betty and my children.  I throw myself on your mercy.”

Why did she not sound wholly sincere as she said that?

The trump card again?

“You won’t get much mercy,” I said.  “You’ll get a bed, proper food, whatever else it takes.  Your children will be left alone.  That’s what you get for talking freely to us.  You know what happens if we catch you in a lie or half-truth.”

“I do,” Ferres said.  “Several possibilities played through my mind once I realized you had her.  I tend to look forward.  You would have made me decide.”

“Yes.”

“What to do to her, when.  To keep up the ruse.  More of my students would disappear?”

“If I had to, I would have let the drugs wear off.  Freed up her vocal chords.  Given you time for conversation with her.  If you proved particularly stubborn, I might have had you spend the night in the cell with her.”

“That would have sufficed,” Ferres said.

The wind picked up.  To my right, Mary’s skirt, ribbons, and hair blew in the wind, brushing up against my face and leg.

Helen’s body language was as expressive as her facial expression was cold.

Ferres was taking a moment to digest the idea, and I was working through just what needed to be hammered out.  Radham was sticking in my mind.

“Your file said you were gentle with children.”

I looked over at Ferres.  “Still caught up on that?”

“I’m fatigued, and I’ve surrendered.  Do me this small courtesy and sate my curiosity.”

“Sure, yeah.  I’m gentle with kids.  Is that gentle enough, given circumstances?  If there’s a two in three chance that I’m bluffing, you still can’t bring yourself to call that bluff.”

“I put it at a much higher chance than two in three, but you’re right,” Ferres said.  “Five in six chance, perhaps?”

I shrugged.  I didn’t want to betray that if I’d had to guess at my own willingness to cross a line, I might have given exactly that number.  There was a reason Lillian hadn’t looked at me all day.

“But you’re desperate.  All three of you are expiring,” Ferres said.  She paused, then sighed.  “It complicates what would otherwise be simple.  I’m at your disposal.”

“Good,” I said.  “Then we’ll need you to write several letters.”

“To professors and nobles throughout the Crown states?”

“Exactly,” I said.  I looked at Jessie.  “What’s the word?”

“Emily, Chance, and Lainie are willing to help if we need it,” Jessie said.

I gave Ferres a long look, trying to figure out the way forward for this.

“If you’re looking to me for answers or input, those are all names I don’t recognize,” Ferres said.

“The Baron Richmond’s fiancee,” I said.  “And her two traveling companions.”

“The import of this is lost on me, except that the Baron was closely associated with places where the plague originated.”

“An aristocrat’s daughter,” I said.  “Should be immortal, or close enough to it that it drew the Baron’s attention and wasn’t entirely refuted by his doctors.  Yes.  She lived in Lugh before leaving in the Baron’s company.”

“Immortal.  This is the carrot you’re dangling before them all, to draw them here?  I’ve acquired the Baron’s fiancee and through her I’ve stumbled on true immortality?”

“To draw them wherever,” I said.  “It’s a carrot we’re considering.  But there’s a flaw with that particular carrot.  Two, really.”

“Too connected to us?” Helen asked.

“Yep.  That’s the second flaw,” I said.

“And not enough people know the story about what Emily is and why the Baron was interested in her,” Jessie said.

“And there’s the first,” I said.

“Well, we’ve discussed this,” Jessie said.  “I already knew the answer.”

“Psh.”

“There are other possible discoveries, other than immortality,” Jessie said.  “Stable, controlled primordial life?”

“A discovery of the century, if a bit of an oxymoron, plausible.  As much as they might celebrate the discovery, however, my seeking it out would be sufficient excuse for them to execute me and erase my name from history.”

“A new ratio to complement Wollstone’s set?”  I asked.

Ferres snorted.  “If the people you were attempting to bait in were first year Academy students, perhaps.  The rest know better.”

“Revival of the dead with regenerated memories?” Jessie asked.

“Possible, but the road to that particular discovery is a long and narrow one.  True immortality is something that could be uncovered from a number of directions.  True revival would require dedicated focus, and that’s far removed from anything I’ve really dealt with.  A hard sell to claim I’ve done it.”

“Then… hm,” Jessie said.  She frowned.

“Shapeshifting?” Helen jumped in.  “Or deciding one’s own pattern?”

“If you mean a new discovery that’s noteworthy enough to draw attention, then we’re fifty years to a century away from that.  Anything else would be too mundane.  There’s a gap in our abilities and tools, and claiming I crossed that gap would be far fetched at best.”

“But not inconceivable?” I asked.

“Not inconceivable,” she said.

“Then we’ll put a bookmark by that page,” I said.  “And come back around to immortality, unless someone has a better idea.”

“For immortality, I’ve dabbled in such things,” Ferres said.  “Not extensively, but others know I’ve dabbled in it.”

“We know you’ve dabbled in it,” Jessie said.  “It’s why it came up in the first place as an idea.  We thought of Emily, formerly Candida Anne Gage, and the possibility of tying things together.  If we could assign some credence to your claim by saying she had fallen into your hands or willingly turned to you, and you were able to use her incomplete immortality to devise true immortality…”

“Then you draw in the important individuals you seek, for your nefarious purposes,” Ferres said.

“Which brings us to what we needed to get you onboard for.  The letters will need to be personal.  There will need to be a strategy as if you’re making a bid for power.  I don’t want to trip anyone’s prey instincts because you’re acting funny.”

“Prey instincts,” Ferres said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “So there’s a narrative we’re going to need to discuss and outline.  And in that narrative, I’m going to want you to draw the attention of certain notable individuals.”

“The Infante.”

“Him among many,” I said, smiling.

“I wouldn’t underestimate him,” Ferres said.

“You’ll tell me what I need to know about him, or where I can get information about him, using the bait of immortality.”

“Still with the two big flaws,” Jessie said.

“Maybe,” I said, I smiled, “Maybe…”

I rubbed my chin.

“You don’t need to drag this out,” Jessie said.  “You knew how to end that sentence from the moment you suggested we put a bookmark by pattern determinism.”

I dropped my hand from my face, and gave Jessie my best frown.

“Out with it, skipper.”

“You’re really no fun,” I said.  “I wanted to do the brilliant reveal, pace it out.”

She poked me in the stomach.

We don’t try to assign claim by trying to pretend Ferres got her hands on Emily Gage and figured it out from there.  We let someone else do it.”

“Someone else in the other Lambs sense?” Jessie asked.

“You did have Candy come visit us to let us know what was going on,” Helen said.

“Emily,” Jessie corrected.  “It was a name she chose, we should respect it.”

“Should we?” Helen asked.  “Should we really?”

“You respected mine.”

“Yes,” Helen said.  “But, and this is my counterpoint, Candy is the best name.  Because candy.”

Jessie shook her head.

“Involving the other Lambs makes people wonder if we’re involved,” I said.

Jessie and Helen nodded at that.

“Raises suspicions,” I elaborated.

“You’re thinking of someone,” Jessie said.  “Only other survivors of that scene that really matter are-”

“Mauer,” I said, jumping in before Jessie could finish the sentence and cut me off, because I wanted that reveal at the very least.

“You want to work with Mauer?” Jessie asked.  And in this, she was very much on the same page with Ferres.

“See?  That incredulity?  That’s why the Crown won’t immediately jump to thinking of us.”

“The Red Shepherd has been dangerously quiet lately,” Professor Ferres said.  “Or dead.”

Jessie glanced at me, “Not many places for him to hide.  The Crown States are being overwhelmed with black wood, red plague, and the cities that haven’t fallen are either under hard security with condensed forces and manpower from all of the evacuated Academies, or they’re remote, like Hackthorn.”

“Hackthorn is also filled to the gills with condensed manpower,” Helen said.  Her tone didn’t match her dead facial expression.  “The extra manpower is actually our rebels, though.”

Our hostage and the headmistress of said Academy didn’t look particularly impressed with that.

“Ferres,” I said.

“I prefer Professor Ferres, or my actual name, but yes?”

All doctors, specialists and professors were picky about that.  Always a good way to needle them.

“You get regular reports on the troublemakers, don’t you?”

“Twice a month at the minimum, with further reports as fast as the mail can reach me, any time there’s a significant update.”

“Mauer won’t be there, but I’m interested to know what measures the Academy is using to try and find him and deal with him.  We have an idea of where he should be, but given our isolation, he may have moved.  I’d like to minimize the running around…”

I trailed off.

Professor Ferres wore the face and body of a woman half her age, but as the conversation had continued and her reality had sunk in, it was as if the years were tracing themselves on her.  In posture, in expression, the way the light hit her face, her coat billowing out as if her body had no shape at all to it, she might as well have aged twelve years since stepping out onto the outdoor patio.  When the wind blew past her, she grimaced a little and looked another five or so years older as she bore the brunt of it, hair pushed out of order, her arms folded.

Like a witch out of the story books.  The pretty ones dressed themselves up like crones, and the crones dressed themselves up like maidens.

Not that sixty was a crone, exactly, but still.

She finally ventured an answer.  “I’ll show you the papers.  What’s mine is yours, it seems.”

“Very cooperative of you.  Helen, would you shadow her and ensure she gets there without incident?  I want a word with Jessie.”

“Of course,” Helen said.  She curtsied.

“We can have a conversation about your face once there,” Ferres said.  “I assume you don’t want to be seen interacting directly with me, so I suppose I’ll see you there.”

“Yes,” Helen said.  “Wonderful.”

Ferres turned to the door, still braced against the strong wind, and let herself back inside.

Helen moved to follow, hand on the door handle.  She paused.

“Problem?” Jessie asked.

“People are talking,” Helen said.  “I’ve been keeping an ear out.”

“I’ve heard some of it.  We’ll be careful,” Jessie said.

Helen nodded.  Then she was gone, keeping an eye on our Professor.

The dark clouds were getting darker.  At the very horizon, they were near-black, and the lines of where burned wasteland met dark wood and where dark wood met sky were nearly indistinguishable.  It was as if black treacle stretched in goopy lines from sky to ground, smearing the definition out of nearly everything.

Gordon was watching it all, with Hubris standing with paws up on the railing.  Mary had moved over to stand next to him.  The little Lambs were at the garden at the far end of the patio, Ashton included, while Evette said words I couldn’t make out and tapped her fingers on a branch with the tap code I’d gone and forgotten.

Lillian stood off to one side, in Fray’s firm grasp.  Keeping warm, I supposed.

I took that cue and put my arm around Jessie’s shoulders.  From there, I drew her into a hug.  She didn’t resist much as I pulled her to me.  She was warm, slender, and starchy, the last bit being the fault of the crisp Academy uniform she wore.

I had mixed feelings about the uniform.  Clothing of choice for my first love, third heartbreak.

“You wanted to talk to me alone?” Jessie asked.

“Yeah.”

“You know I’ve read her mail, I know more than she does, probably.”

“Probably.  But before we get into that, is the gig up?” I asked.  “What with what Helen was saying?”

“No,” Jessie said.  “But people are noticing that things aren’t making enough sense.  It’s bound to happen when you stick three hundred and twenty students in an Academy and expect them to keep a story straight.  I’ve overheard whispers from more suspicious Hackthorn students and seen too many people stop talking when one of ours enter a room.”

“How bad?”

“It’s inevitable that they’ll start talking and they’ll put the pieces together, if they don’t revolt entirely.  But that’s not going to be today or even tomorrow.”

“We could pull the trigger now.”

Jessie shook her head.  “Soon.”

“Soon, then,” I said.  “Alright.”

Her breath was warm against my shoulder.

Fray wasn’t embracing Lillian the way I was embracing Jessie.  It was stiffer, Fray upright, looking out into the distance.  Lillian stared at me.

“Cold,” Jessie said.

I hugged her tighter.  I could feel the warmth of her, but that warmth wasn’t what made me feel properly nourished.

“No.  I’m thinking about weather long term,” Jessie said.

“I’m thinking this moment with you is awfully nice, for the record,” I said.

“Well, I can’t think about multiple things at once quite as gracefully as you do, Sy, and there’s a lot to think about.”

I ‘tsk’ed with my tongue.

“We’ll get our ‘us’ time tonight.”

“Is that a promise?” I asked.  I made a pleased sound.

“We have time constraints.  The coming storm may limit our movements.”

I made a displeased sound.  Then I asked, “Which?  Are you thinking we’ll need to catch a boat?”

“Possibly.  Do we have the means of finding Mauer without getting on a boat?” Jessie asked.

“The man doesn’t want to be found.  But I don’t think he’s one to sit still and keep quiet, either.”

“Rumblings?”

“Something closer to what he tried in Radham, perhaps,” I said.  “Still moving steadily toward a goal.”

“Ferres’ papers suggest some noise, but it’s almost the inverse of ours.  To the Academy, Fray has all but disappeared.  No word, no rumblings, no suggestion of activity.  They’re nervous about it.  Mauer, meanwhile, has disappeared, and there are rumblings, but they’re having trouble pinning them down.  They’ve got experiments passing through every settlement, and there isn’t a single whiff of Mauer to be had.”

“And meanwhile, for us…”

“The animals Mable created and loosed before we reached Hackthorn are traveling this way and that, confounding the sniffers.  They’re dispersing our scent as well as some other pheromones usually reserved for when Academies want to control their warbeasts.”

I nodded, smiling a little.

“It might be better to do this with the shapeshifting,” Jessie said.  “Because if you want to push the immortality thing, involve Mauer…”

“…We might have to split up,” I said.  “Too many bases to cover to do it as a trio.”

“Sy,” Jessie said.  “I don’t think any of us are in a position to do terribly well on our own.  If any one of us have a bad day, on top of dealing with dangerous situations like Hackthorn being on the brink of erupting, or Mauer-”

“Or everyone else perking their ears up when a few of the most powerful Nobles and Professors start paying attention to something in little ol’ Hackthorn?” I asked.

“Or any of it.”

“Dang it, Lillian, not taking our offer,” I said.  “Would’ve made life easier if we had a few more Lambs.”

“We’re at the stage where we could reach out, but…”

“More splitting up,” I said.  “Not just a two-one split, but a three way split.  One set of eyes on Hackthorn, one on Mauer, and one voice reaching out to the Lambs.”

“We should go before those dark clouds hit, make sure our rebels know what they’re doing, fill Helen in,” Jessie said.  “Else it might be troublesome to get clear.”

Her arms were around me, my arms around her, her breath warm against my shoulder.  We didn’t hurry, much as we should.

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================================================== 18.07 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.7

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The rain was starting to come down.  With it came an awareness that the reclining lady of Hackthorn had some very minor design issues.  Aesthetically, she was pleasing, structurally she was sound.  But the curves, valleys, the windows and jutting walls did not amount to a wholly ideal flow of water.  It was a stark contrast to Radham, which had been bent beneath the rain for decades, where the attempts to control and redirect the flow of water were somewhat haphazard and forced.  Eaves and the placement of gardens did an incomplete job of keeping bridges and balconies dry.

I walked over to one edge of the balcony, where a deluge of water streamed off of a shelf high overhead, forming a sharp spray as it glanced off of the wall to one side.  The eaves overhead didn’t block all of the rain, not at the far left corner, if I stood up against the railing.

I turned my face skyward, spray and rain drenching me.  The combined downpour was enough to make it difficult for me to raise my arms.

We’d spent what felt like forever in the black wood, and it had been two weeks with minimal rain, and it had been a minimal rain I hadn’t been able to properly experience.  Then we’d had a dry spell for our stay in Hackthorn.

Being able to actually stand in the downpour helped me get centered and feel cleansed in a way that no bath could accomplish.  Even if some of it was gutter overflow.

I waited until I grew cold enough to start feeling numb before stepping back under the eaves.  The others were gathered as I turned around.  Other Lambs, crowding the balcony.  Mauer, Fray, and people who felt painfully familiar, who I felt I should have recognized.

I opened the glass doors, stepped through, and closed them behind me.

“Sy!  If we’re going somewhere, I want to come,” Helen said.  “I didn’t come with you guys to be all alone.”

“It won’t be for too long,” I said.

“Any long is too long,” Helen said.  She turned to look at me, half of her face hanging off, long pins sticking out from between eyeball and socket, more pins wedged between muscle groups that were pulled so tight that the metal fixtures were bowing and bending.

“Stop moving,” Ferres said.  “Stop talking.”

“There are things to discuss,” Helen said, firmly.  “And there’s not a lot of time.”

I didn’t want to agree with Ferres, but I couldn’t shake the mental picture of Helen’s facial muscles moving, constricting, and the metal pins snapping in explosive and sequential fashion, each snap leading to two more, leaving her face a mangled ruin of torn muscle and broken pins.

There was a lot of power in those muscles.

“I want to invite Professor Crawford,” Jessie said.  She was standing at a table, penning out a letter.

“Him?” Ferres asked, turning.

“Justify it.”

The professor frowned.

“Crawford’s the brain brain, isn’t he?” I asked.

“Yeah.  Pioneer in neurophysical design.  And you’re dripping,” Jessie said.  She reached over to a chair, and threw a towel at me.  I caught it, and draped it over my shoulders, before starting to dry my hair.

I volunteered a justification.  “Emily’s immortality was one that came with consequences, mentally.  Ferres knows this, she volunteers that information, and says she’s sure enough of her work here that she’ll allow her work to be checked by one of the best people in the Crown States when it comes to brains.”

“Good,” Jessie said.  She looked at Ferres.  “What do I need to know about you and him?”

“Politically,” Ferres said, “He and I had drinks… it must have been eleven years ago.”

“Romantic drinks?” Helen asked.

“We sat at the same bar, after attending a speech.  We talked.  It’s hard to articulate just why my reaching out to him now would draw concern.  We had zero interest in one another.  No common ground.  If our conversation were a… I don’t know, a battlefield?  A sparring match?  It was one that saw both of us deciding the other was a non-threat.”

“Aggressive non-interest?” I asked.  “Enough that it’s a problem?”

“I’ve never had to say it aloud or give words to explain the social phenomenon among Professors,” Ferres said, as she worked on Helen’s face, setting another pin in place.  “Scar tissue blocking the pneumatic channel in the second complex levator anguli oris.  Remember that for me.”

“Noted,” Jessie said.  She had been writing when I stepped out onto the balcony, and was still writing now.  While working out what to write in the letter to Crawford, it looked like she was writing form answers and incomplete letters to others, with details to be filled in.

Ferres continued, “Rising through the ranks is a struggle.  It’s a crab bucket, and any attempt to climb out sees others dragging you down.  You learn to assess people efficiently to better find your way to the top of the bucket.  I sat with Crawford, and it was the briefest of jousts.  We talked about what we were working on, and in the doing, I sought to find out if he was a rival, or if he was useful, his knowledge a possible way of advancing my own work.  He wasn’t either.  We talked about who we each knew, and cross-checked each other against the web of interactions, key individuals, political gains and political threats.  He hinted at the romantic, in case we could partner up and work as a pair, but I already had no interest in that and turned him down.  So it went.”

Jessie spoke, “You believe you came to an agreement, based on your non-involvement with one another.  Asking for his company now would make him wonder why.”

“Exactly.  If he were more of a rival or an ally, my invitation would make more sense.”

“Don’t explain it?” I suggested.  “Leave him wondering?”

“He would ask questions,” Jessie said.  “He’s cautious, deliberate, he runs a lab with an aristocratic sponsor, he’s able to operate with relatively few power games.”

“The only solution would be to invite everyone,” Ferres said.  “That would be hard to justify.”

I leaned against the wall, towel in one hand while I rubbed my chin with the other.

“No,” Jessie said, to me more than to Ferres, as if she could read my thoughts.  “What if you’re trying to make this as explicitly unpolitical as possible?”

“I’m always political,” Ferres said.

“What if you’re retiring?  Stepping down from your position, leaving only this finding as a final legacy?”

“I don’t leave obligations unfinished, and I have commitments for the next two years.”

“Well,” I said.  “What if you don’t trust your hands any longer?  Or your eyes?  A motivation to seek out immortality and eternal youth.”

“Justification, but thin, and a long road to travel to draw this particular man in,” Ferres said.  “I might suggest instead reaching out to Professor Brad Austin.  He and I are rivals, he’s a close second to Professor Crawford in the field, and it’s far less of a reach.  He would come.  He wouldn’t ask why.  He would hope I was wrong and that I would make a fool of myself, while fearing I was right and that I would surpass him in every way.”

I glanced at Jessie.

Jessie nodded, and set to writing a fresh letter.  “How do you reach out?”

“No nonsense, no flowery language, except where necessary.  He is cordially invited to see my name placed in the annals of history.  It would delight me, put a little flourish on the penmanship of delight, if he would be present.  He’ll be present.”

“Noted,” Jessie said.  “Then the aristocrat John Loft?”

“Same as I would have addressed Professor Corder.  Pleasant, genial-”

“I remember,” Jessie said.  “Pess?”

“Pleasant will do.”

Jessie continued to rattle through names, making mental note.

The storm was picking up.  As the wind changed direction, rain hammered the glass doors I’d recently passed through.

“Does that free up the other side of your face?  Can you smile with just that side?” Ferres asked.

Helen smiled.  I could see a kind of light in her eyes as she did.

“I think we found the source of the lock, then,” Ferres said.  “I can restore your face.  It will take the entire night, but then we should be done.”

We didn’t have the entire night.  Not if we wanted to get ahead of the worst of the storm.  It was looking to be the kind of dark and stormy where crossing the wastes or the dark wood would be next to impossible.  Wading through a soup of black mud while trying to keep a lantern in hand, unable to see farther than the light could reach…

“We need to figure out what we’re doing tonight,” I said.  “Who goes where.  I was thinking I might go for a walk.”

As I said that, I gestured.  School.  Attack.

“Now? I thought you were putting that off,” Jessie said.  Her voice was very calm, curious, and unbothered.  The look in her eyes was focused.  She didn’t gesture, as her hands were full with writing implements and paper.

“Storm isn’t going to get any better.”  Time.  We had a deadline.

“You’re already dripping wet.  It’ll raise eyebrows.”

“I don’t think it matters,” I said.  Prepare.  Helen stay.

If Helen was staying, the best thing to do would be to ensure that at least the initial stages of the takeover went to plan.

Helen go, Helen gestured.

“Stop fidgeting,” Ferres said.  “If I slip with this incision the work tonight will take another hour.”

Helen stay with rebels.  With professor.  Medical, I gestured.  Jessie continued to write, her eyes moving between Helen and me.

Helen go, Helen gestured again.  I heard the Professor hiss with irritation.

There were three bases to cover and three of us.  It wasn’t the easiest thing to wrangle.  We could change the division, have one Lamb handle two tasks, but it made for a wobblier path.

One Lamb to reunite the flock, one Lamb to the Shepherd, and one Lamb to remain behind.

“I’m so restless,” Helen mused aloud.

“Is this another form of torture?” Ferres asked.  “Meticulous work with an unruly, talkative patient?”

“I’m so restless I could kill something,” Helen said, expanding on the thought.

Ferres’ work with the scalpel stopped.

“You’re being uncooperative, Helen,” Jessie said.

She managed her half-smile, using the part of her face that didn’t have skin and fatty tissues pared away and needles wedged into what remained.  “I’m in an uncooperative mood these days.  You know that.  It’s why Sy wanted to keep me with you.”

Ah, the latent threat.

“We’re all wrestling with our individual issues,” Jessie said.  “We push through.”

Helen rolled her eye, the other one held in place by the pins.

I wanted to say that this was Helen’s belated adolescence, but Helen had been and might remain a creature of countless adolescences.  Countless small shifts, leaps, rebellions and adjustments.

Helen might-

She reached up, pulled a pin out of her face, and while Ferres wasn’t looking directly at her, plunged it into Ferres’ eye.

-do something like that.

The professor dropped, screaming, hand at her eye.  The needle was already so slick with fluid that she couldn’t pull it out.

“I go,” Helen said, firmly.

“You go,” I said.

Jessie’s eyes were wide and her expression concerned as she looked at me.  She’d stopped writing.

Ferres’ screams continued.

“I go?” Helen asked, happy.

I looked back at Helen.  The screams continued in my ears even as Ferres remained where she was, standing by Helen, working on Helen’s face.

Just a very realistic simulation, when and where imagined Helen and real Helen had overlapped.

A very realistic depiction of how the scene might play out.  Not directly, but in the long run.

To Jessie, I’d jumped to a conclusion.  Jessie didn’t have the benefit of being able to see how Helen might act if left to her own devices here.

She’d said it outright, she’d laid out her boundaries.  I didn’t need a hallucination to tell me that Helen was a danger.  But I did need it to remind me of what the consequences could be, and how devastating a mistake could be.

“You go, I suppose.  You have to,” I said.

“I don’t like how you got when you were alone with Helen in the black woods,” Jessie said.  “She doesn’t keep you thinking straight.”

“It’s a bad riddle, isn’t it?” I asked.  “Like the sort that Hayle used to give us.  Scorpion, centipede, butterfly, all need to get from A to B, but leave one alone…”

“Am I the butterfly?” Jessie asked.  “Or am I the centipede?”

“Let’s not overanalyze it,” I said.

“Alright,” Jessie said.

Her eyes were downcast.  She fidgeted in a way that had nothing to do with gestures or signs, as she became very aware of the pen in her hands.

“I’ll be with Helen for most of it,” I said.

Jessie nodded.

“We’d go together through the black woods.  We’d part ways when she hunted Mauer and while I rounded up the Lambs, or vice versa, and whoever finished first would help the other.  A few days apart, if we were lucky.”

“While I stay here, managing things,” Jessie said.  Her voice was a notch quieter than before.  She fixed the volume as she said, “It makes the most sense.”

She didn’t want to stay.  She didn’t want to be alone.  She was trying to be brave, and I really wondered if she would break into tears right here and right now.

The rain found another direction, and it ceased drumming on the window.  The spray hissed as it hit the balcony outside, instead.

“Or we stay together,” I said.

Jessie spoke, “This is the crossroads we’re at, isn’t it?  We stay together, and we keep each other company while accomplishing nothing, or we enact our plan, but we’re separate.  There’s a very real chance that we part ways and it’s a forever goodbye.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I know I’m strong.  I hold up pretty well, most of the time.  But I didn’t do well while you were in the black woods.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Jessie had lost memories, but she had always lost them when alone.  It wasn’t a definitive thing that it had to do with her being isolated, but it was an indicator, a bad premonition.

It reminded me of Jamie, and Jamie’s experience along those same lines.

None of us wanted to be the one to remain behind.  Whoever remained behind might break.

That was what we were, now.

“What if…” Jessie started.

I knew how that question ended.

“…Three Lambs afield, leaving the pen empty?” I asked.

Jessie nodded.

“No sure way of knowing if the wolf will be laying in wait when we return,” I said.

“You’ve trained very nice, very capable rebels,” Helen said.

“We have,” Jessie said.  “But there’s a lot they can’t do.  We’d be asking five hundred people to maintain control over a population of fifteen thousand, give or take.  If they lost control, I don’t think we’d be able to regain that same control over a wary enemy.”

“And it wouldn’t be fair to them,” I said.

Jessie nodded.

There was no good way to handle it.

Mauer was standing by the door, attention keenly on the situation, eyes bright.  Evette was sitting on the bed, smirking.

Fray stood with Ashton, one hand on his head, messing up his hair, while he stared at us with a blank expression.

Ferres, meanwhile, was very, very still, as she listened.  The Hag of Hackthorn was terrified.  As terrified as she had ever allowed me to see, even.  She was hearing us talk, hearing things come to a head, and her Academy was at stake.

“Leave me behind,” I said.

“Alone?” Jessie asked.

“Not quite alone,” I said.  “The rebels are almost another Lamb, collectively.”

Jessie stared at me.

“And… you’ll be there,” I said.

“That’s what concerns me,” Jessie said.

“In a different sense.  Just… let me believe that you’re coming back.  That you’ll be back with the Lambs.  I can look forward to that.  It’s not something that leaves me empty and hollow.  It can keep me going.  I can tough it out.”

Jessie shook her head.

“Helen wants to be out and about, and if she’s in your company for most of it, she’ll be okay, right?”

Helen nodded.  Jessie looked more dubious.

“You’ve listened and watched with one eye as Ferres worked on Helen, haven’t you?  You can do further repairs for the other half of her face.”

“Possibly,” Jessie said.

“It’s not the worst thing if it’s not possible.  I’ll manage.  You two should go,” I said.  “I’ll entertain myself.”

“That’s another thing I’m worried about,” Jessie said.  “You being entertained.”

“It’s the best way forward,” I said.

Jessie nodded.

Helen’s hand snapped up, seizing Ferres wrist, where Ferres held the scalpel.  She smiled that half smile.

“You don’t need a scalpel to put my face back together,” Helen said.  “I’m leaving soon.  So please, if you would…”

Professor Ferres stared, still frozen.  Slowly, she let the scalpel tumble from her fingers and fall to the floor.  She reached over with her free hand, reaching into her kit to get the chemicals and tools needed to seamlessly close up Helen’s face.  Helen released her other hand, still smiling.

“I’ll get us started,” I said, standing.

Jessie nodded.  Her smile was a sad one.

I was still quite damp as I exited the apartment and ventured into the hallway.  Two of Bea’s people were standing guard.  I gestured at them, and they fell in step with me.

The torso of the reclining woman was the center of the university, the point from which all other elements flowed.  Core labs and exhibition halls made up much of the center portions, set so that other areas could look through windows or down from raised areas to view the ongoing proceedings.

Many students were gathered at tables and seats throughout one of the exhibition halls, which was in the process of being set for the young master’s birthday party, later in the month.  Stage decorations were partially grown and partially built.  In the meantime, until faculty came marching through at eleven thirty to midnight, it was where boys met with girls, where student workers and staff took off their shoes and talked.  Friends gathered and talked about work and about fanciful ideas and dreams.

The various leaders of my groups all met here too, passing messages between them.  Each and every last one of them was gathered here.  Shirley was sitting at one table, where she had been talking to Possum and Rudy.  Rudy was doing tons better, but he still needed crutches to get around, and the crutches rested against the table next to him.

The fact that I was drenched, still periodically dripping, it drew attention.  I appreciated that among my people, there were some that kept talking, conversing without much break in stride.  It might have been problematic if my arrival had been followed by utter silence.

My hand moved subtly, and a score of eyes watched it.

The movement of my hand gave the signal that they had collectively been waiting for for weeks now.

School.  Two fingers held high, hand in a fist.  Very close to the sign for ‘mind’.

Fall.  Pinky and thumb extended, swept down.

I watched as the Rank stood as a group.  They marched off.  They’d been content to hang in the background, mingling with Bea’s group.  But they’d been the Rank before they’d been hanging out with the Rooftop Girls, and as the Rank they’d brewed chemicals as a collective, for sale elsewhere.  Drugs chief among them.

Getting them placed right had been about ensuring that they had lab space, little oversight, and access to key parts of the Academy.  Posie in particular had been focused on the mechanical aspect of it.

Gas.  It would sweep through whole sections of the Academy.  It would take time.  That was a part of it that had to start sooner than later.

I gestured for the others to hold on, then took a seat at the table, moving a chair and spinning it around so I sat backwards in the seat.

“I suppose I’ll get us started,” Mabel said.  She sat at the next table over, with many members of her Green Team.

I really didn’t like that she stood just as I sat down.

“I’ll come with,” Shirley said.  Mabel nodded.  I could see that Shirley looked at ease, that she wasn’t running from, but running to.

I valued that a hell of a lot, when it felt like everyone was drifting away or moving away from me and that I had to fight to keep them close.

I still owed Shirley so much.

Mabel’s Green Team would be focused on Hackthorn’s right hip and leg.  The leg was the path down into the small town below Hackthorn, the passage to the cliffs.  Controlling it would be essential not only because it was a key chokepoint, but because it was a key place where food was stored, where the stables were.  Measures were already in place to ensure that there would be no warbeasts available to anyone who tried to hold Hackthorn against us.

Shirley was traveling in that same direction, but she would carry all the way down the leg, where she would talk to Pierre and our gang members, minus Archie, who was still posing as my father, an aristocrat of note.  The people who had evacuated the city when Neph had spread black wood over it were in Shirley’s company now.  The mad baker was somewhere among them, as was the old man.

“There was a good number of students in the labs the last I checked,” the Treasurer said.  He stood, and he gave me a two-finger salute.

The labs were easy.  A small team would see it quarantined.  It was a process that took time and careful attention to reverse, however.  I was reminded of the Bowels, of being locked within with Sub Rosa.

The Treasurer’s group would need to be reinforced.  Davis was meant to be second in command, in charge of that aspect of things when I wasn’t present.  I knew from his expression that he was fully aware that my absence meant he was being forced into a position of leadership again.

Every group had a place.  There were things to look after.

Bea was dressed in an Academy uniform with no jacket and an apron instead of a coat, was representative of the students who worked at helping keep things running.  Some were assistants to faculty.  Others delivered mail or ran errands.

Bea smiled, and she almost looked as if she enjoyed this on a level nobody else had indicated, except for me.

The Rooftop Girls had been rebels before they had been rebels.  At Bea’s behest, they would act within the next thirty minutes, turning on the faculty they had been working for.  A small share of that faculty would be sequestered away and imprisoned.

Cut the head off the dragon.

We’d marked out the reclining woman as someone else might dissect a body or quarter livestock.

Gordeux would be working as a liason between Davis and the Treasurer.  He’d overseen a handful of projects.  Warbeasts, chemicals.  They would be our attack dogs, watching bridges.  For a time, we would keep students confined to the dormitories, and the projects would help with that.

Other students in the exhibition hall were looking restless.  Too many of our people were marching off with a mission.  There was nervousness apparent throughout, and that nervousness communicated itself in little ways to the bystanders.

“You’ll need to control the room,” I told Davis.  “They’re getting anxious.”

Davis nodded.  He was hesitating.

But he gathered his courage, and he turned to one of his subordinates, who sat next to him.  A junior member of the student council, young.  In another world, if Beattle hadn’t fallen, the boy might have eventually succeeded Davis as student council president and gone on to lead the student council of Beattle, a nice little note in his record that would give him a leg up.

The boy ran off, to spread the word to the able bodied Beattle students and the other rebels we’d collected who were confident with guns.

I really hoped we wouldn’t have to use them.

Davis remained seated, thinking.  He wasn’t fond of the role, even if he was good at it, and for the time being, he was introspective, preparing himself for what would come later in the evening.  His job wasn’t pretty, and I was already planning to shoulder the bulk of the burden.  At our behest, Ferres had made sure that the Academy’s native security forces were at the perimeter, facing outward, in a manner of speaking.  Watching the wastes and the water, while trouble brewed within the heart of Hackthorn.

Davis’ group would see bloodshed before the night was out, handling that side of things, reinforcing groups as the native population of students fought in defense of their Academy and, for some, their homes.

The weather outside was whipping itself up.

Rudy had his hand over Possum’s.  Possum would be running the kitchen.  We had twelve thousand students in the school.  There were more people in the city below, running the essential services, the shops and more, but in keeping students sequestered and the situation under control here, keeping the masses fed would be a task.  Possum would tackle it, with Rudy encouraging and reassuring.

But that came later.  Possum’s job for the now was to wait.

“That’ll do,” I said.  “I’ll be back in two minutes.  Running an errand.”

Davis nodded, still introspecting.  I suspected he even knew where I was going.

A quick skip down stairs.  Past students who stared or looked concerned.  One even tried to call out, asking me why a dozen students had been hurrying downstairs.  I didn’t answer.

Lab One was lit by lanterns, the voltaic lights off.  Most of the lanterns were set up in one area.

Alvin was burning the midnight oil, it seemed, looking over notes and scripts.  He didn’t notice me as I approached.

I was tempted to slit his throat, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play violent when my hallucinations were already trending that way.  Not when Jessie and Helen were leaving me alone.

I pressed the knife to his throat instead.

“What?” he asked.  He turned his head just enough so he could look back and see my face in the gloom.  “Oh no.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I knew there was something off about you,” he said.

“I get that a lot,” I said.

“Stealing projects?  Spying on Ferres?” he asked.

“No,” I said.  “Oh no, no.  Alvin, sir, you’re about to realize this is far, far worse.”

We were well ensconsced within the Academy, with staircases and hallways separating us from the exterior walls.  But the wind blew, and with it, the reclining lady shifted position.  The building creaked.

“I believe you,” he said.

“Walk with me,” I said.

With Alvin at knifepoint, I walked to the cells.  The children within the cells reacted to the light.  Faces appeared at the bars.

“Thank you for your patience,” I said.

Reaching into Alvin’s pocket, I produced the key.  I stuck it through one lock, opening it.

Goldilocks took the key I pressed into her hands, and went to the next cell.

“They’re supposed to be drugged,” Alvin said.

“They are,” I said.

“The drugs were in their systems.”

“Switched the usual drugs with sugar pills.  I gave them evening doses instead of the morning doses.  Haven’t gotten around to tonight’s.”

Alvin grew more and more tense as the number of youths and experiments around him grew thicker and thicker.  Some were irate.  Intense, hostile.

I could sense the anger, and I knew that Alvin could tell as well.  That this was a mob that had been sleeping a few moments ago, that was quickly stirring itself up.

Before anything could happen, I flung Alvin into a cell.  I slammed the door.

Poll Parrot looked even more dangerous in the gloom, his feathers crimson, his eyes a glare that suggested killing intent.  Others had more mixed emotion.  Faces that had tracks of tears on them, before they turned away or tried to hide their expressions.

Bo Peep flung herself at me, wrapping arms around me, soft wool pressing into my neck as she buried her head in my chest.

Others looked more lost and unhappy than they had been when they’d been resigned to their fates.

“Come on,” I said, barely sparing a glance for Alvin.  “Everyone stay together for now.”

Jessie and Helen were in Lab One when I emerged from among the cells.  I’d almost missed them, making sure that the littlest ones were being watched.  The three blind mice chief among them.

Jessie navigated the mob of children.

She gave me a kiss, and in the distance, I could hear the alarm bells going off.  The quarantine, the alerts that the academy was under attack.  Different parts of our hostile group would hear the sounds and use them as a cue to mobilize.

My hands went up, to hold Jessie, to draw her close and keep her for a little while.  Her hands went up too, fending me off.  She broke the kiss.

“If you hug me, I don’t think I’ll be able to let go of you,” she said.

I didn’t speak.

“Be sane when I get back?” she asked.

“I’ll try,” I said.  “I’ve got these guys to keep me company.  A box of bugs that’s been nicely shaken.  I’ll endure.”

Jessie nodded.  I thought I saw the glint of a tear in one eye.  With the lights off and the lanterns in the background, it was hard to tell.

“You have to do your part too,” I said.  “Be Jessie.”

“I’ll try.”

She stepped back, and as she pulled away, our inter-knit fingers pulled apart.  My arm fell to my side.

“Be good, Helen,” I said.  Though Helen had already faded into the gloom, following Jessie.

“Be good, Sy,” she echoed me.

I stood there, my hands tingling with what might be my last contact with Jessie.

Small hands found their way to my hands, clasping them, gripping them.  Other hands touched my forearms, and clutched at my shirt.

The Crown had made the Crown States small, so the nation was easier to control.  They had isolated, so it was easier to exert power over populations.  We’d simply taken advantage of that.  Now we did much the same, dividing and conquering that which had already been separated and left vulnerable.

We had turned Academy against Academy.  Students stolen and set against other students.  Faculty stolen, used against her own kind.

The nobility would be next on the chopping block.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.08 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Anger keeps you going,” Mauer said.  He kept his voice quiet and seductive.  “Sometimes it’s all you’ve got left to give.”

The very upper floors of the Academy building were burning now.  The inhabitants were stubbornly staying put.  The fire wasn’t really making its way down, but it still took a stern spine to remain in a burning building.

A stern spine or a degree of determination.

This was a problem.

“I think,” and I said the words carefully.  “I don’t have a problem going.  If I’m going to run into problems, it’s going to be stopping.”

I stood at the top of the stairs.  At the upper level of the Lady of Hackthorn’s torso, this staircase led to the head, which was a higher security storage area for materials.  Incidentally the place where I’d been deposited after being brought into the Academy.  I had a view of the upper floor of the torso, and windows and openings in the architecture also let me see along the length of her arms and where the one dormitory burned.

Mauer, Mary, Evette, and a few nondescript characters kept me company.

Below me, rebel forces moved at a run.  Hand gestures were commonplace with leaders and subordinate.  It was a good thing, because a lot of people were shouting.  The fire was a universal concern at this point.  One of the lady of Hackthorn’s arms was reaching out to touch the dormitory building.  If the fire spread, then that bridge could burn.  It made accessing the dormitory difficult to impossible.

If the dormitory couldn’t be accessed, that would be another kind of problem altogether.  We needed that fire put out.

We’d sequestered students in the dormitories, among other areas, knowing they might try something.  We’d searched them and searched their rooms, anything that might be used in biological or chemical warfare chief in our minds.

They’d gone for something more basic.  They’d lit a signal fire.

“There’s an obvious solution here,” Mauer said.

“Speaking of my having trouble stopping,” I said.  “Yeah, that’s the entire wrong line of thinking.  It’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Put that brain of yours to good use,” Mauer said.  “Consider all the options.”

“Killing an entire dormitory of kids is a sharp, jagged rock I’m supposed to hit way further on in my tumble down this mountainside,” I said.

“I guarantee you that this particular strategy is being driven by a few key actors,” Mauer said.  “Turn things around.  Think of how the Lambs interact.  One Lamb suggests the reckless plan-”

“Me,” I said.

“-and pushes for it to become reality.  You put your meat where your mouth is and take the associated risks yourself.”

“Only natural,” I said.

“Less than you’d think,” Mauer said.  “I’ve known generals and leaders who choose the dangerous road and make others take the risk, and I’ve known berserkers and monsters who take that path because it’s the only one they’ve been given, as a rule.  For you… and I would say for the students leading the rebellion in that particular dormitory, there’s a greater sense of what’s in play.  The plan takes on a special importance.  You and they put themselves into the plan, stake something personal in it.  Taking the lead is a way to force the hands of allies.”

“Manipulative,” Mary said, looking up from the blades she was sharpening.

“If you made someone else take the lead, they could abandon the plan or balk.  You know you won’t.  The students who came up with the fire there know they won’t.  That’s one side of the coin,” Mauer said.  “The other side draws on unity of the group.  They reluctantly accept the need for the plan, their comrade or comrades take the lead, and now they’re forced forward.  To hesitate is to let their ally charge in and die without support.”

“Like I said, manipulative,” Mary said.

“Which is all a roundabout way of saying…” I said.  I left the statement open for Mauer to finish.

“…You’ll only need to kill a small handful to wrest control of the situation back from the students there.”

I laughed at the audacity of it, loud and abrupt.  Rebels on the floor that weren’t actively in the middle of doing something stopped to look up at me.  I’d been sitting in the mostly unlit stairway, taking in the situation.  Now I had an audience, and this was more of a stage.

“Damn it, Mauer,” I said.  I smiled.  “Forcing my hand.”

“Entirely you, Sylvester,” he said.

Mary looked up.  “Are we doing something now?”

“Suppose,” I said.  I made my way down the stairs, fully aware that people would expect me to arrive with a plan in mind.  Having a deadline, even one that was a matter of seconds from now, it really helped me get my thoughts moving.

Evette stuck with me, but she was like glue at this point and was liable to be until the Lambs returned.  She was keeping her mouth shut, at least.  Mauer remained in the shadows of the staircase, happy to have planted a thought in my head.

“Sylvester,” Davis said.  “This is a problem.”

“Mail boat arrived and left without incident,” I said.  “I think they wanted to set the fire so the boat would see it while leaving, but it took too long with the rain.  I don’t think we have any boats due anytime soon.  There’s no need to panic.”

“I’m pretty close to panicking, Sy,” Davis admitted, at a volume that was just for me.  “The mail boat isn’t the only boat that comes.”

“We very rarely get a boat in the evening,” I said.

“Sometimes we do,” he said.

He was pretty close to panicking.  There was a point in fear, anxiety, depression, all of the negative emotions, where the person afflicted was almost captivated by the emotion, and argued with any attempt to pull them out of that state.

“Listen,” I said.  I put a hand on his shoulder.  “We have boats.  See if you can get anyone who can sail, Pierre will know if any of the people we picked up in Neph’s city have the know-how.  Get boats out there.  If we can get the word out there first, then we control the story, change expectations.  Tell them we’re smoking out a very intractable warbeast we were making into a fairy tale monster.”

Davis didn’t look very happy with that.

“If the boats’ searchlights are turned in the direction of Hackthorn, as if they’re keeping an eye out for the monster on the cliffside, it’ll sell better than most of the other explanations we give.  Quarantine raises questions and doesn’t wholly explain the fire.  Telling any degree of the truth is the sort of thing that gets reported to aristocrats, nobles, and other Academies.”

“Yeah,” Davis said.  He shoved his hands into his pockets, but the moment he did so, his foot started tapping, as if he couldn’t keep still.  He was frowning.

“Want me to take over?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I sort of expected you to jump at that and say yes.  It’s been three days of maintaining the siege from within, three days since Jessie and Helen left.  You’re giving me every impression you’re needing a relief.”

“I am.  I’ve had some people take over, but it’s during the quiet periods, and I’m not sleeping a lot.  I’m constantly worried something’s going to happen when I’m not looking.  Like this.

“Then take my offer.  Take a minute where you can put this whole thing in good hands.”

“I’m just-” he started.

“He’s not able to relax if it’s you,” Mary spoke in my ear.

“Alright,” I said, jumping in as she finished talking, so that I wouldn’t do the thing where I was pausing too long while listening to others.  I barely had time to feel stung by Davis’ opinion of me.  “Alright.  How about this, instead?  Let me take lead.  You back me up, since you know people and you can be the level head to balance me out.”

He still looked reluctant.

I glanced at Mary.  “You’re a perfectionist.  I get it.  It’s hard to give up control once you’ve invested yourself into this.”

“It’s not me, it’s you,” he said, again in a volume that was chosen so only I would hear.

Again, that stung a bit, even if I knew it was the case.  “I was in the middle of dancing around that particular reality, as a matter of fact.”

“You’re talking to yourself an awful lot,” he said.  “Your eyes track things that aren’t there.  I knew it happened sometimes, but it seems like most of the time now.”

“And it doesn’t inspire confidence,” I said.

“I’m in charge here because of a whole succession of times when I was forced to take the role, and a whole succession of other times where I volunteered to take it.  I’ve fallen into this role.  I know an awful lot of faces there, people I’d be putting at risk.  I feel a responsibility.”

“And that’s fine.  That’s good.  It’s a large part of why I respect you as much as I do,” I said.  “And nothing I want to do is going to contradict that.”

“Alright,” Davis said.  He sighed.  The near-panic wasn’t the only thing he was clinging to, it seemed.  He had to work to let go of his stance here.  A deeper-seated insecurity was in play here.

I could address that later.

“I need a bit of explosive,  a way to make smoke, some shackles, and I need you to get your people ready for me.  If and when there’s an opening, you’ll be able to take advantage and get that fire under control.  I’ll handle the rest.  No risk to your own.”

“Easy enough,” he said.

I walked over to the stairs that led further down into the body of Hackthorn, while Davis went to go get everything else in order.  From where I was at, I could see the bridge and the northern face of the dormitory.  Lights were on throughout, and students within were watching proceedings.

This wasn’t a duel with a great mind like Fray’s.  It wasn’t a contest where one side took the upper hand and felt secure.  There was tension on both sides.  A hundred boys and girls on both sides of things were close to crying, or to pissing or shitting themselves, they were so scared.  Scared about what was happening, what the future held.

It was a fight with the Academy, after all.  With the Crown, in a roundabout way.

“You’re keeping the army back.  Is it because of what I said before, about the ways different leaders handle reckless plans?”

Mauer was back, it seemed.

“Maybe this isn’t so reckless,” I said.  “In fact, this might be a nice way to stretch my legs, a casual way to keep my skills honed and stay active.”

“Maybe,” Mauer said.  He used his voice to give the word the perfect sort of emphasis, mocking but not mocking, but also emphasizing it in a way that highlighted how maybe that maybe was.

Then he was gone.

I wanted to smoke, but I doubted I had time, and the actual cigarette would be dangerous when handling explosives and when trying to be covert.  I didn’t like sitting still.  Smoking kept my hands busy and made me feel like I was more in this world.  It made me aware of the smoke in my lungs and the acrid smells, the sensations of touch.  The smoke that obscured my vision helped my eyes slide off the things I was seeing.

And all the other excuses.

“There you are,” Davis said.

“Here I am.”

“How much explosive do you need?” he asked.  He held a small wooden box so the edge of the box rested on his beltline.

“Not a ton.  Lemme eyeball it,” I said.  I peered over the edge of the box, and I claimed several sticks of dynamite.  I stuck them down the front of my pants, so they stuck up and out, then pulled my shirt down over it.

He handed me a canister.  I hooked it to my belt.  He provided the shackles.

“I’ll whistle,” I said.  “Keep an ear out.”

“I will,” Davis said.

“And if you want to make a commotion over at the other arm, move a lot of lanterns and lights over that way, even turn on lights in that direction, that might help,” I said.

I pulled off my shoes and socks, and popped the window open.

Going by the company, Helen, Mary and Evette were joining me on this excursion.

The wind was utterly merciless, and I was still indoors.  The rain wasn’t great either, but I at least had the benefit of the armpit and other structures above.  They’d avoided any outgrowth, garden or other things that might have given the illusion of armpit hair for the Lady of Hackthorn, but there were eaves and shelves that jutted out.  The water wasn’t so bad.  Not here.

It would be worse in other places.

I climbed outside, finding handholds and footholds as I went.  It took almost a full minute for me to make the transition from windowsill to being fully outside and situated on the wall outside the window.

“Are you going to be alright?” Davis asked.

I would have spoken, but my body was pressed tight against the wall, and I really did believe that speaking might involve motion and an expansion of my chest that would cost me my perch.  I gave him a smile instead.

It was slow going, and the clouds were heavy.  I could taste the smoke in the air from the fire blazing at the top of the nearby dormitory, and the water that ran down over me was cold.

As I made my way further under the armpit, I found one of the places where the water ran in a near-continuous stream down the wall.  A miniature waterfall.  The downward pressure of the water was one thing, threatening to wash me off and down.  But today was not the first or tenth time it had rained.  It had rained hundreds of times since Hackthorn had been erected, the water had found its way down this same path in varying intensities, and cracks that might have served as normal handholds had been eroded down to smoothed out indents.

“Keep your hips against the wall,” Helen said.  “It’s easy to overthink hands and feet and forget about the hips.”

In the gloom, barely visible, perched on another part of the wall, she swished her hips back and forth, water streaming off of her wet skirt.  Had she been anyone but Helen, it might have been tantalizing.

I drew my knife, and I stabbed it into one of the handholds that had been washed out.  I repeated the process, stabbing through the waterfall, and even with one arm in the downpour, the force of the water was enough that it almost tore me down and away.

After a few more stabs, I reached over, and dug my fingers into the gap I’d hacked into the dense, smooth wood-like material that formed so much of the Lady of Hackthorn.  The water was washing away the loose splinters, but there were less loose splinters.

I decided that splinters were fine because they were grip, and I pushed the pain out of my mind.

I hung from that notch I’d hacked out, stomach pressed against the wall, and swung around so I was most of the way through the waterfall, my back against the wall.  I made sure to follow Helen’s advice and keep my hips against the wall throughout.

Back against the wall, hanging by one hand, water pounding down on me, a good six hundred feet of empty air beneath me, I swayed for a minute, waiting for the wind to stop pulling at my feet and changing the direction of the water.

Once things seemed mostly settled, I very carefully transitioned the knife from my mouth to my free hand, and stabbed out blindly, aiming for the same general area.

It took a minute before I managed to land enough strikes in the same general area that I felt like I could get any fingertips into the notch.

It was a relief to get out from under the water.  I climbed up into the armpit, happy to find handholds now and again.

Any passage over the bridge would be noticed.  Under the bridge, I was entirely out of the light from the fire above.

The wood had cracks, knots, and seams.  They were growing pains.  On other parts of the Academy, they’d been places for scattered seeds to take root, and make the Lady of Hackthorn a little more green.  They served as places for ivy to find a hold.  Sometimes small birds nested in the spaces.

Now I moved along the underside of the bridge-arm, and the handholds I’d made use of earlier were still here, but the process of using them was different.  I needed to exert more strength, periodically needed to wedge fingers in.

Mary and Helen climbed with me, and in an abstract way, they were likely serving as a way for my brain to remind me how to climb, a way for me to track the handholds and footholds.  Where my head and hands went, I needed to note places for my toes to wedge in later, places for my feet and toes to press or hook in so my weight wasn’t hanging entirely by my hands and arms.

Mary climbed ahead of me, and from my vantage point, I could see more of her legs than I normally might.  Her clothes were wet and clung to her.  All practiced strength, grace and concise movement,  she was perfect Mary in that moment, and it was an utterly fantastic image that hit me in a rush.

I had a thought, imagining a situation where too much appreciation of Mary’s form might push my hips a prince’s span away from the surface I was clinging to.  The thought of me falling into the wind and darkness with a full fledged appreciation for Mary at the ready made me laugh out loud.

The moment gave me strength.  I moved with more confidence.

What could have been two or ten minutes later, in a timespan punctuated only by a hammering heart that wouldn’t slow down and a course of adrenaline, my feet slipped.

I dangled from my fingertips, my arms trembling with strain.  My midsection protested with what I was asking for it as I arched my body, bringing my feet back up to the surface above.

I was going to feel that tomorrow.

I continued my climb.  As the angle of the arm changed, I had a slightly less horizontal surface, one that was still dark and fairly dry.

I reached the dormitory.  A vertical surface.  The next best thing to a horizontal surface that was actually under my feet instead of over my head.

“What now?” Helen asked.

“Now, you might want to look away,” I said.  I shifted my hold on the wall, and I undid my fly.

“Sy!” Mary admonished me.

“Well, if you’re going to protest, you can look if you want,” I said.  “It’s cold though, so there’s less to look at than usual.”

“What are you even doing?” she asked, turning her head away.

“Being very, very relieved,” I said.  “Felt like I was going to piss myself a few times back there.  Might as well celebrate my victory over that particular feeling, yeah?”

Why?” Mary asked.

“Well, for one thing, I just haven’t had a chance to go in the past while, and now that the adrenaline isn’t suppressing normal urges to relieve myself, I really had to go,” I said.  I cleared my throat.  “For another thing, keeping in mind I’m halfway done-”

“Gross,” she said.

“-Or three quarters done.  Here we go.  One second.”

“I don’t need the moment by moment updates, Sy,” Mary said.

I zipped up.  “Yep.  That’s probably the most exhilarating leak I’ve ever taken.  Highly recommended.”

She made a sound I couldn’t make out.  I glanced at Helen, who hadn’t looked away or complained, who simply gave me a smile and one-shoulder shrug.

“I don’t understand how your mind works sometimes, Sy.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Well, few people can.  It’s an advantage,” I said.

“Getting back on track…” Mary prompted me.  “Why are we even here?”

“Well, for this, I wanted to thank Mauer for getting me to think about how the opposition here thinks.  They’re insecure leaders.”

“He compared you to these leaders, for the record,” Mary said.

“Shush,” I said.  “Come on now.  Don’t be peevy with me now.  They’re insecure leaders.  They’re worried that if they don’t control the situation, take charge, and take the lead, then their people might lose momentum or surrender.”

“Right,” Mary said.

“So… natural conclusion of that.  They’re managing the fire.”

“I can hear the chopping of wood,” Helen said.

I could, too.  It was distant, but the ‘thok, thok, thok’ noise could be heard past the bluster of wind, patter of rain and the hiss of water pouring down the side of the dormitory.

“Taking furniture apart,” I said.  “Or they’ll start taking parts of the dormitory building apart.  Most likely, the wood of the floors and walls are fire resistant, not fireproof.  But that’s not something that they need to control.  Their focus is on us.  They’re terrified of what unfolds if we attack, or if we deploy something.  They saw us use the gas in other parts of the Academy before we shuffled them over to the dormitory buildings.  So if they’re the type that has to lead from the front…”

I climbed.

I’d chosen the under-the-bridge route to keep out of sight, because they would have a hundred eyes watching the bridge to look out for potential attack, because it was sensible and because they were scared and emotion dictated the same.

Now my approach brought me up around the side of the bridge.  Unless they were outside or actively leaning out the window, which they wouldn’t be in this gloom, they wouldn’t see me standing right at the door.

I pressed my hand against the wall, visualizing.

If they were the type to lead from the front, putting themselves between ally and enemy, so their allies wouldn’t flee or surrender, then they would be by the door.  Standing guard not just against potential incursion, but against potential excursion.

I set a stick of dynamite into the wall above the door.  Then I took a moment to judge the construction, and decided against using the second stick.  Mauer’s urgings to kill were in the back of my mind, and I was happier with playing it safer.  I hung my jacket over the stick to keep it mostly dry, and lit the wick, which was now sheltered from the downpour.

Swiftly, I ducked down under the side of the bridge.  I clung to the exterior wall, with the idea of putting the thick and sturdy bridge and the fingers of the Lady of Hackthorn between myself and the imminent blast.  I was glad that the nature of the growth of the arm and bridge and its interconnection with the dormitory building gave me sturdy handholds.

The blast was more intense than I’d anticipated.  It wasn’t intense enough to send me flying, but it did knock me for a loop, my thoughts and senses rattled.

I gathered myself together as quickly as I could, and rose, climbing.  The blast had affected the ones sitting in chairs a short distance from the door, damaging thick exterior walls with the shockwave knocking them out of their seats and sending them sprawling.  They’d been hit worse than any of the others, and now some of those others had already rushed to the defense and aid of the two stunned individuals.

They didn’t even see me.  They’d taken it for a cannon shot or mortar rather than anything else, as far as I could tell, and the idea that an enemy might be right outside the door, on a cracked bridge, it didn’t even occur to them.

I threw the smoke canister, throwing myself into the room a moment later.

I disabled, rather than hurt or maim.  It was a fight in smoke and gloom, only a few moments after an unexpected explosion.  Nobody was about to open fire on what might include friendlies, and I suspected that even the students that were hurrying into the dormitory lobby to see what was going on were still unaware that there was even a person present.

I pushed away the helpful bystanders, grabbed the ones who had been sitting by the door, and hauled the first and most active of them back.

He didn’t have a sense of balance, and getting him to move where I wanted required only a few timely pushes and shoves.  He tumbled to the ground, and I used the shackles Davis had given me to connect him to the railing that ran along the bridge.

“There’s someone there!  They’re attacking!” A girl called out.

“There weren’t any alerts!”

“There’s one hundred percent someone there!  They got Eric and Neil!”

Feet tromped on floorboards.

I screamed, and I made it the scream of someone who was being hurt.  A gargly tortured person scream, or the scream of a person who’d just been stabbed.

“Neil!” the girl who’d spoken before shouted.

Guess I knew who she was sweet on.  Poor Eric.

The scream had given hesitation to people who had been relying on this pair for their forward momentum.

I grabbed the second of the pair and hauled them back.  They weren’t as responsive and they weren’t trying to climb to their feet, so I couldn’t direct their movement.  I had to drag, and I wasn’t strong enough to drag someone.  I got him a few feet, and then I noticed the smoke was clearing up.

“Where’s Tommyboy?”

“Tommy’s upstairs.”

That was another problem.  Small in the grand scheme of things.  I tugged again on the heavy lad, dragging him closer to the door, then finally got him close enough to his buddy’s ankle.

I wasted no time in immediately heading to the wall.  Every part of my fingers and feet protested, my stomach clenched into a knot as I made yet another climb.

Tommyboy or Tommy was the very first person they thought of when their leadership disappeared.

They were a trio, very likely.  They might have thought along the same lines we were thinking, in choosing to take shifts, to conserve strength, and play the longer game.  Tommy had rested so he’d be more alert later.

He’d have heard the explosion.  What had I seen inside?  I tried to think of the lobby and its layout, and to correlate that to what I knew was outside.

Damn my short memory.

I made my way to the first window.  It was shuttered, and the latch for the shutters were inside, but that was easy enough to fix.  A swipe of my knife through the gap lifted the latch.  I had a chance to peek through.

I saw Tommy run by, flanked by a small crowd of students.  The lobby was an open room with stairs running along one side, leading further up into the building.  Tommy made his way down to the lobby, and stood well back from the door as he stared at the scene – a destroyed door and slightly damaged frame and exterior wall, the other two shackled to the bridge outside.  It wasn’t no man’s land, but it wasn’t safe either.  To help them they needed to step outside, expose themselves to gunfire or other dangers.

There was a girl in an Academy uniform talking to Tommy, telling him about me, no doubt.  That something had been there in the wake of the explosion, pushing her away.

Their focus was on the outside.

I simply needed to be where they didn’t think I would be.

I drew my gun, mindful of what Mauer had said and taunted me of, shifted my position, and then broke the window with the gun handle.

Before they could react, I had my gun trained on Tommy, pointing at him through the window.

Slowly, he raised his hands in surrender.

“You’re going to put out the fire.  Whatever you can’t put out, you let die.”

I could feel the tension, see the people exchange looks.  So very many eyes were looking to Tommy for guidance.  It said a lot that his hands were already up.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice carrying to me.

Taking out these individuals was the lynchpin here.  Tommy raised his hands in surrender, and without the forward impetus of their leadership, everything in flux, the rest lost heart.

I signaled for Davis, with my best sharp whistle.  We had ears that would catch it.

“Some of the ships are staying out there,” Pierre said.  “I thought about being more stern about coming back, but I don’t do well with confrontation.  It feels unpleasant.  I don’t like being the one that’s staying put while others are moving.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Not the part about you being uncomfortable, but if that’s what they want to do, it’s good.”

“It’s a lot of resources we have to put in, to ensuring they have food, that they’re not overtired out there,” he said.  “It feels very spread thin.”

“It’s really fine,” I said.  “It’s about control, isn’t it?”

“You usually use that word as if it’s an epithet,” he pointed out.

“Well, look who’s paying attention.  But it’s really fine.  They want to play their part, have a role in this.  They’re keeping an eye turned outward, for external threat.  If it reassures them, let them.”

Pierre nodded.

We sat at the dining area above Lab One, below the top floor where I’d had a view of the fire and Davis’ efforts to organize his rebel soldiers.  This was the heart, a fantastic place to see just about all of the movement here and there through the center of the Academy.

Paul, formerly Poll Parrot, was sitting with other kids, eating.  He’d had too many surgeries in the last few days, and he looked drawn out, not enough body fat, but he was smiling, laughing.  He ate with one hand.  Even with good students and doctors turned to the task, we’d only salvaged one arm.  The other was a stump, and we would fix that soon.

He sat with Mauer, which was my own affectation, a younger parallel.  He ate with soldiers, which was his own affectation, a good indicator of his mindset, that the anger was still there, and the possible direction he might take from here.

There were others gathered.  Many of Ferres’ experiments had been glad to get their modifcations removed and undone.  Some of the more extensive ones had been harder to fix, put off until later, or until we had the resources.  We didn’t have a spare human face for Red Riding Hood.  No arm for Paul.

“Do you think I should go under the knife?” Pierre asked.

“Not my decision to make,” I said.

“Might be that I’m thinking about it,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It had been so long that I’d known him, that I hadn’t asked.  I’d felt like I couldn’t.  That it would be crossing a boundary.

“If you told me to, I probably would, and I’d probably be happier for it,” he said.

“Maybe I like you the way you are.  Maybe you like you the way you are.”

“That’s true,” he said.

I saw some students come down the stairs.  It wasn’t an outright defection, but some of the students from the dormitory had changed their minds about things.  They were working for us in a limited capacity, with a strong guard.  Fearing for their security more than they likely ever had in their lives, they’d taken the security we offered over the security they had as prisoners.

“An Academy can’t run like this, you know,” Lillian said, from further down the table.  She’d seen me looking.  “With only a few hundred, when it needs more.  Even this small defection, it’s not enough.”

I agreed, but I didn’t want to go and talk to Lillian when I was sitting and eating with Pierre.  That would look curious, give others more reason to worry.

There was so much more to do.  Power and control.  The students we’d herded elsewhere were elsewhere as a group.  The were banding together, becoming factions unto themselves.  The fire at the top of the one dormitory was one thing.  There was another dormitory that was actively trying to fight back.  We had access to the Academy’s guns and arsenal, we had barricades and the warbeasts, chemicals for gas and more.  They had sheer numbers, and weapons of a medieval sort, improvised and fashioned using resources they’d had in the dorm.  Curtain rod spears, pokers, knives and clubs made from bedposts.

The others had wanted to gas them, but I was hoping that we could get them to expend their strength and stamina.  We needed to turn some of them.  Everything was about appearances here.

On the topic of appearances…  I watched Mabel hurry down the stairs, taking them two at a time, one hand on the railing so she wouldn’t take a spill.  She gave me a glance and a smile.

“She’s going to avoid me,” I said.

“Did things sour?” Pierre asked.

“No, not sour, exactly,” I said.  Mabel saw me and gave me a little salute.

I gestured.  Come.  Sit.

Brain work.  Mabel signaled.  Hands.

Research she couldn’t leave alone?

She didn’t glance back at me before hurrying on her way.

“Maybe I shouldn’t push it.  Just bothers me sometimes,” I said.  “People avoiding me.”

“I’ve experienced that too,” Pierre said.  “Sometimes it’s the way things are.”

I nodded.

Someone settled onto the bench next to me.

Bo Peep.  Twelve or so, dressed in borrowed clothes that were too large for her.

Reaching up and over, she took hold of my arm, hugging it.

“Hey critter,” I said.

Her head rested against my shoulder.

I shifted my position, and I hugged her closer.

“Still haven’t gone under the knife, huh?”

She shook her head.

“S’alright,” I said.  “Another time maybe.”

She shook her head again.

“No?”

“No,” she said.  Her voice had a bit of a croak to it.  Newly fixed vocal chords.  “No more surgeries.”

I looked over at Pierre.  His expression was unreadable, but his ears had an angle that made me think of worry.

Well, she wasn’t the only one who had expressed the sentiment.

“Well, would it bother you if I said that at least you have the best head of hair in the world, so if you’re going to keep it, it’s a pretty neat thing to keep?”

She shook her head, then said, “But it’s a head of wool.”

“I stand corrected,” I said.  She nodded in response, her head rubbing against my shoulder.

I wasn’t sure it counted for a lot, that she said she wasn’t bothered.  I could have told her pretty much anything, and she would’ve bought it.  I’d rescued them, and that counted for an awful lot.

I wasn’t sure that was a good thing, that I had their absolute trust.

“Did you just need a hug?” I asked her.  “Always an option.”

She shook her head, then seemed to remember that she had a voice, and that she wasn’t largely limited to head movements and gestures.  She stated a simple, “No.”

“No?  Not always an option?  Or you didn’t need a hug?”

“I wanted to say,” she said, and then she hesitated.  She pulled back a bit and looked up at me anxious.  “Can you stop talking?”

“Stop talking?” I asked.  My head went through all of the paradigms, trying to figure out the angle I was supposed to interpret that.  Did she want the hug, without words attached?  She was five or so years my junior and that wasn’t really a thing.  It was-

“Stop talking to them,” she interrupted my thoughts.  “People who aren’t there?”

I opened my mouth to respond, then stopped.  It hadn’t been an angle I’d considered.

No Lillian at the table.  That much I’d known.  But no Pierre either.

“It makes me uneasy.  It makes others uneasy too, and I don’t like them being uneasy with you.”

“It’s okay, Peep,” I said, jumping in before she could say any more.  “I get it.  I get it.  I’m sorry.”

She nodded, and then she hugged me tighter.

I gave her mop of wool a tentative, reassuring pat, and she nodded again, as if this was good.

Setting one elbow on the table, fingers pressed against my mouth, I used my other hand to stroke her hair while she sat next to me, clinging to me.

Sitting next to Paul, Mauer looked my way.

I thought of the conversation, about moving forward and about stopping.

I don’t think I can stop, I thought.  Let’s at least hope the others are moving forward.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.09 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I wasn’t good at being alone.

I tossed and turned.  I hadn’t slept for a few days, and I was at the point where I was looking to sleep and I couldn’t.  Somewhere along the line, I had tried to force a mental image of one of the Lambs into the bed beside me, only for my scattered thoughts to turn to the fighting and violence.

I was really, really hoping that the blood that soaked the sheets next to me was an imagining that wouldn’t go away and not something real that I couldn’t remember the source of.

“Ferres,” I spoke, my voice feeling very small in the professor’s expansive bedroom.

“What is it?” I heard the voice.

Well, she sounded snippy.

“Well, you sound snippy,” I said, voicing the thought.

“Can I help you with something, Sylvester?” she asked.  Less curt than before.  She sounded tired.

“Did you go into this with dream of doing good?  Was it always about the art?”

“Oh, so it’s the personal questions now?”

“I could ask you other questions, but I think you’re one of the people that’s furthest from my comprehension.”

“It was both, but the art was a constant throughout.  From my first days in Academy prep, I would trace the diagrams and sketches in the textbooks.  The diagrams inspired by Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, only with the Wollstone ratios applied, the anatomy sketches, the sketches of chimerical work, the dog variations with different second and third ratios.”

I could visualize each of them, even if I had little experience with those things.

“When you apply to the Academy, it isn’t invite-only, but they ask you to prove your knowledge, and you don’t get that knowledge without having practical exercise first.  The Academy prep schools help, but it’s not an absolute.  Especially for a young lady, at the time I was seeking entry.”

I closed my eyes.  “A steeper hill to climb.”

“It’s the very start of a long series of small political games.  You need someone to help, and either you prove yourself as a cut above, or you put yourself in that individual’s debt.  The latter is often better than the former.”

“Is it?” I asked.  I was trying not to think, to let my thoughts ease down, and listening helped.  The question was automatic, just keeping things going, more than anything I analyzed.

“If you’re a cut above, others will look to cut you down.  If you’re in someone’s debt, then that someone is motivated to help you move on to better things.  I was both, but I hid my strengths.  I paid attention to the local professors, and I gifted some sketches to the one I liked most.  Art based on an article of his I didn’t even understand at the time.  That was my in.  My inspiration was always my way in, always something I had in play for each turning point in my life.”

“What part of it was about doing good?”

“I put a smile on that man’s face.  I created things that made people smile and marvel at the wonder of our world.”

“You created those things at a cost.  Each smile paid for with someone else’s tears.  For self aggrandizement.”

“Ah, and now we move on to the verbal abuse.”

“Are you deflecting?”

“No,” she said, and she sounded that much more tired than before.  “No, Sylvester.  By all means.  Castigate me.  Attack me with words.”

I was silent.  Something about her tone…

I opened my eyes, and in the doing, I realized I had company beside me on the bed.  I wished I recognized them.  There was a boy, his sandy blond hair parted to one side, wearing a long raincoat of the sort that students liked, long enough to touch the top of his shoes.  The style served to emulate the flutter and majesty of a proper white coat.  He sat on the bloodstain, hugging his knees.

A girl lay beside him, sprawled on the bed, graceless, arms and legs bent at odd angles.  Her red hair was slicked close to her head, wet, and she wore very plain, basic clothes in far too many layers, an undershirt worn over a slip, worn over a dress.  Her throat had a choker at the neck, a collar held close to the neck by a ribbon, a buttoned uniform collar around that, and a looser collar around that, low enough it might have shown decolletage if she hadn’t been so ensconced, and if was old enough to have any.  Her legs were nearly lost in the folds of a slip, a plain dress, and a pleated skirt.

She was more modest than many of the random girls that appeared to me.

The room was lit only by the light of the moon coming in through the window, but the red of the blood on the other side of the bed was very clear.  As I shifted position, the girl on the bed raised her head a fraction, and I could see the blood on the one side of it, both dry flakes transferred from sheet to skin, and the still-to-dry damp of it.  Some of it had found its way into the corner of one of her eyes, diluting through the moisture there to color the one eye red.  If she’d blinked, she might have blinked it away, but she didn’t.  She only stared at me.

“Ferres,” I said, to distract myself.

There was a pause.

“What can I do for you, Sylvester?”

Well, she sounded snippy.

“Why don’t you seem to care if I call you out on your amorality?”

“Pot and kettle, isn’t it, Sylvester?” she asked.  I heard her yawn.

“Is it?” I asked.

“They don’t have names when they come to me, Sylvester.  They don’t have histories.”

I reached out for the hand of the girl in the layered clothes.  She wore fingerless gloves over regular gloves over elbow length ones.  It took me a second to trace my finger down the long gloves until I touched her upper arm.

She was ice cold.

I felt a stab of fear, pushed harder, as if to push through, and she pulled away, slipping from my finger as wet soap might.  I followed, lunging across the bed, and was immediately put in mind of a comical scene of me trying to grab soap, it slipping from my hands to pop into the air, my second grab doing the same, my third grab repeating the effort.

That image made me think of the Lambs laughing, gave me a fleeting memory of the Lambs all together, no Ashton but Gordon and Mary definitely there.  All of us in the sun, somewhere away from Radham, stripped down to underwear for the boys and slips for the girls, while we were washing ourselves and our clothes at the edge of a river.  I’d done it on purpose, for laughs.

The memory was too short lived, too incomplete.

The laughter didn’t echo in my head as I thought of it.  The Lambs didn’t appear.  There was only the  boy and the girl I didn’t recognize, the boy hugging his knees while looking at me with narrow eyes.  The girl had fled my touch and was now curled up at the corner of the bed furthest from me, leaning against the foodboard, watching me half the time, spending the remainder of the time glancing down at Ferres, who slept in the cot at the end of the bed.

“A bit of a reach to say they don’t have anything to them, Ferres,” I said, after I remembered the conversation I’d left trailing.

I heard Ferres shift position.

“What’s done to the children on the Block is done long before I get involved.”

And if you weren’t dipping into that particular stock, others would, and nothing would change.  If enough people stopped, it would raise questions and would break the unique life cycle of the nobles…

I frowned.

Those weren’t my thoughts, but they were conclusions that were in my head, and they were conclusions in my head because we’d had this conversation before.

“You know, Ferres,” I said.  “If you want this to let up, maybe you could start thinking more about your answers.  Then I won’t have to hammer you with the questions.”

“The answers are honest, Sylvester.  Keeping me up for hours with lines of questioning won’t mystically make the truth any different than it is.”

Hours?

I reached out for the boy with the narrow eyes, then thought twice about it.

“Maybe I’m trying to wear you down,” I said.

“If you are, you’re doing an exceptional job at it,” she said.  “I have to ask, to what ends?  What do you want from me?  Because I’ll supply it.  If you’ll stop waking me up every five to fifteen minutes, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“I want to know what you’re keeping up your sleeve,” I said.

“Oh,” she said.  “Of course.”

The springs on the cot creaked as she shifted position again.

It was an odd answer.  Of course.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Of course.”

Blood had transferred to my hand sometime around the point I’d reached out for the girl in the layered clothing.  I wiped it on the sheets, and then stared down at the trace streaks of blood.

Restless, I swung my legs off the bed and stood.

“And now for the pacing,” Ferres said.

Wanting to prove her wrong, I didn’t pace, but instead strode across the dark room and into the washroom.

I stopped in the doorway.  Ferres was in the tub, wide awake, staring at me.  She wasn’t drugged, either.  There were three children huddled under the sink, whispering together, two boys and a girl.  Another girl perched in the window, swaddled in a blanket.

I pushed forward, driven by a desire to avoid being seen hesitating, a desire to look confident and strong.  Whether it was Ferres in the other room watching me from the cot, or this Ferres watching me from the tub, I wanted to look as though it was business as usual.  I headed straight for the sink, bent down and washed my hands, the moonlight streaming in through the open window striking white tile behind, which helped illuminate the pale bowl of the sink.  It made for contrast with the pink ribbons that streamed from my hand to the drain as the blood washed off.

I washed my face, then straightened up, leaning heavily on the sink.

My eye traveled to the chain by the toilet, where a number of tools dangled, stuck through the spokes.  Scalpels, a small hand saw, a pen, a tin kit that would contain a needle and thread.  More littered the side of the tub and the floor around it, sitting in spatters of blood and unspooled coils of bandage.

It would have been dangerous to leave Ferres unmedicated with so many tools within arm’s reach, yet this wasn’t dangerous at all.  Ferres wasn’t sitting up in the tub.  She lay within it, eyes only barely capable of peering over the edge.  Both of her arms and one of her legs had been surgically removed.  Streaks, smears, droplets and aterial sprays of blood painted the porcelain and tile near her.

The whispering of the children beneath the sink continued, as a constant refrain.

“What does it take to get you to talk, I wonder?”  I asked the Ferres in the tub.

She closed her eyes, and it was a timid, trembling close, as if she couldn’t quite bring the two eyelids together, because every impulse in her body was keeping her in fight or flight mode and she couldn’t quite bring herself to let her guard down and actually close them tight.

Then again, a moment later, as her teeth chattered, hard, she screwed her eyes shut, flinching in reaction to something I couldn’t see.  The room was warm, not cold.

It was the Ferres in the other room that answered my question.  “What if I’ve already talked?  What if I’ve told you and you’re simply forgetting, and we go in this dark, miserable, sleepless circle over and over again?”

I bent down, touching my hand to a bloody handprint on the tub.  It matched my own.

The bloody fingerprints on a scalpel that had fallen and come to rest beside one of the tub’s clawed feet were my own, as well.

“I’m pretty good at figuring things out,” I said, to both of them.

“You are.  Your memory might not be that far gone, Sylvester,” the Ferres in the other room said.  “But there are things you want to forget, things you hold on to and things you let slip away.  Perhaps this is a thing you’re willing or wanting to let slip away.”

I shifted position, turning around and sitting on the bathtub’s edge.  The Ferres in the tub flinched as my hand moved toward her face, stopping at the tub’s edge before gripping it harder than was necessary.  The flinch had been as dramatic as if I’d swung a club directly at her, not casually moving my hand within a foot of her head.

The girl in the window had company, scratching and scraping while making high-pitched noises.  It fled under the swaddling blanket as I glanced up at her.  Not so dissimilar from the grabbing-soap touch, only it was sight.

I glanced toward the door, beyond which the Ferres in the cot lay, supposedly shackled to the foot of the bed.  I looked the other way, at the Ferres in the tub, who shrunk back from my gaze like a small child that had shirked their homework, only far more grave.

I looked between the two, smelled the blood in the air, and heard the scritch-scratching of the thing in the window, listened to the three that were huddled under and around the pedestal sink.

I heard the chattering of teeth beside me, and changed the angle of my head slightly.

“Please,” the Ferres in the tub whispered, as if she’d read something into the angle of my head.

I still held the scalpel with the bloody fingerprints on it.  I changed its angle so it caught the scant moonlight from the window.

“Please,” she said, more insistence.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“In exchange for my card?  One I might have already tried giving you, only for you to refuse it?” Ferres asked, at the same time she spoke in the reediest whisper, “Please don’t take my other leg.  You’ve already taken my hands.”

I paused, closing my eyes, trying to stop, to take it all in isolation.  Which had spoken first?  One of them had spoken to fill the silence around when the other had.  One had had natural timing in response to my question, the other had been squeezed around it, and I knew I had the ability to decipher that.

“Could I convince you to let me and my favored students go free?”  “Even if they replace the arms, there’s no guarantee they would fix the nerves.  I’d have to relearn how to use my hands.  Relearn how to create, practice medicine, relearn how to draw, if it’s even possible.”

“Stop talking,” I said, irritated that they had interrupted my train of thought.  “No.”

They stopped.  The whispering had stopped, as had the scratching and the high pitched sounds.

I wanted to bury my face in my arms.  I felt profound loss, and it had been especially pointed since I’d thought about the Lambs at the riverbank, since a little while before it, when I’d imagined someone singing me to sleep and failed to recall who it was.

I stood, reached for the door, and felt how slick the doorknob was.

Carefully, I toweled it clean.  I washed my hands and the towel at the same time.  More pink water down the drain.  A slick doorknob and pink water and a bloodstained bed I couldn’t pin down as real or not.

I remained stone faced, using all the tricks to keep my expression straight.  I took deep breaths and as I washed hands and towel-cloth together, I was careful to use measured, controlled motions, so neither of my hands was ever just there, not touching something.  So long as I had my hands on my hands, the towel, or the sink, I could use those things to steady them.  Ferres, wherever she was, was watching, and I couldn’t give up my upper hand there, if I had it.

The little girl that was stroking her pet while she sat in the window, the three whispering children by the sink, the boy with the raincoat, and the girl with too many clothes were all watching and they felt hostile.

I wasn’t sure anything would or could happen with that hostility, but I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t or couldn’t, either.  I’d already dealt with one loss of control, and I didn’t like the idea of what might happen if these ones found their way to the driver’s seat.  It didn’t feel like they liked me very much at all.

It was well beyond the point of being very much ready for the Lambs to get back and greet me in their individual ways.  I would have settled for one of the Lambs in my head paying a visit.  I would have settled for them coming when called, except the last time-

I thought back.

The last three or four times I’d tried, I’d had small disasters.  Other things instead.  Things that bothered me and left me unsure enough that I didn’t want to push any further.  The bloodstain on the bed was one of them.  If it was one of them.

I took a deep breath, and it was hard to get the breath around the lump in my throat.  I hung up the towel, then dried my hands, before stepping back into the bedroom.  I got myself dressed.

The whispering and scratching in the other room was getting more intense.

I looked at the two on the bed.  The girl with the layers of clothing smiled at me, and it was oddly motherly, and the feeling that she was dangerous wasn’t any less intense.

Ferres said something as I headed out the door of the room.  I wasn’t sure which one it was, and I didn’t particularly care.  I slammed the door shut behind me, as if somehow that could keep the new visitors where they were.

The slam had drawn attention.  Students on the bridge, now coming down the hallway at a run.

What to say to that?

“Problem?” the one in the lead asked.

He was flanked by three others.  He was one of ours, I knew.  Rebel.  Two of the others with him looked like they were Hackthorn students.  Defectors, ones who thought it was better to stick with us than to be prisoners.  The fourth wore a uniform I didn’t recognize, like a military cadet.

I smiled, shook my head, and tried to figure out how to respond.  “No problem.  Underestimated the weight of the door.”

“I’ve done that myself now and again,” he said.  Very light, very easy.  “What’s going on?”

What to say, when I wasn’t sure what the scene inside was?

Best to be vague.

“Could you handle the professor while I take a walk?  I need her tidied up and in one piece.  You can send for help if you’re not comfortable with it.”

“Yessir,” he said.

“No need to call me sir,” I said.  I gave him a half smile.

“Yessir,” he said, clearly joking.  That got a proper smile from me.

I clapped a hand on his shoulder as I passed him.

I realized only as I passed by that the young man in the military uniform was closer to being like the three children under the sink or the girl in the window than to being one of my rebels or any of the Hackthorn defectors.

There were others here and there.  They stood on the bridge, a lot of them children in cadet’s uniforms, a lot of them urchins who could’ve been mice, given the chance.

Each sighting and each face I couldn’t recognize was another weight on my chest.

It almost made me tear up when I saw Evette, standing at the archway at the edge of the bridge.  She smiled as she saw me.

The feeling that welled up in my chest was one of fondness, of familiarity.  Another Lamb.

That was her trap, perhaps, to stage things so I had nobody I cared about close at hand, only for me to bump into her and be caught by surprise.  It very nearly worked.  I’d almost let my guard down.  Almost.

The surge in my chest became all the more hollow as I walked past her without glancing her way.

I wasn’t sure of the time, but it was late at night.  I was summarily surprised to see my rebels gathered.  All of the team leaders, plus one or two more that had taken up leadership positions as our numbers had swelled with defectors.  None of the defectors carried weapons, but it was an uneasy thing all the same.

There was someone else present.  Another face I didn’t recognize.  He was larger than anyone present, though very clearly younger than anyone else here, and he was very much like Evette in how he was put together, only to a whole other level.  Evette was unattractive by conventional standards, even ugly, to be unkind.  At the same time, something about her was alluring, if one could step away from human standards.

This fellow who sat across from me was that many times over.  It was hard to look at him and awkward not to look at him, given his size and presence.  When I sat at one end of the long set of tables that had been pushed together, I was effectively sitting opposite him.

“Sylvester,” Davis greeted me, as I pulled my chair in.

Was there something in his tone?  Had I somehow caught him off guard?

Mutiny?  No.  I didn’t get that vibe.  Not exactly.

“Handling things?” I asked.

“You’d like how much progress we made,” Mabel chimed in.

“Yeah, we’re handling things,” Davis said.

I smiled to myself, even if I didn’t feel a whole lot like smiling.  They’d met and were moving forward and they were doing it without me.  Because they didn’t trust me.

I couldn’t even respond to Mabel with certainty because I wasn’t sure she was actually present.  What would it look like if I answered someone who wasn’t there, in front of everyone?

“Need me for anything?” I asked.

“Don’t think so,” he said.  “The people in the south Dorm are making noise like they might play ball.  One of them is suggesting we poison them.”

I had to be so careful about how I talked and who I talked to.  Was I absolutely positive he had said that last line?

“That sounds positive,” I said.  I made my expression a little amused.

“The line of thinking is that if we poison them, something mild that will definitively be in their system, they’ll be loyal, and if things go sour and we lose in what unfolds next, they’ve at least got an excuse for having defected.”

“When what they want is better food and not worrying about being raided,” Bea said.

I nodded at that.

“They’re willing to cooperate under that condition, and Junior thinks we can balance it so it works,” Davis said.

“South dormitory is mixed boys and girls?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Davis said.  “They’re pretty reasonable and haven’t been much trouble.”

“Good,” I said.  “That’s really good.  That should be enough bodies to put on a good show?”

“Should be,” Davis said.  “We’re just talking about how we want to tackle the negotiations.”

Without me.

Negotiations were something I was fairly good at.  Was the idea that I would scare them away?

But Davis was putting on a show, so I wouldn’t look bad to the people who didn’t know I was being kept out of the loop, and I didn’t gain anything by getting in his way.

“Sounds good,” I said.  “Who’s handling it?”

“Davis and me,” Mabel said.

“Perfect,” I said.

To Davis’ credit, the discussion moved on, and he looked entirely natural with me sitting in.  It was almost enough for me to wonder if I’d had the wrong impression on sitting down.  Then I saw the wary look, as he glanced my way.

The people at the other end of the table were talking, while the young boy with the strange features steadily ate from his plate.  While the collective focus was elsewhere, Davis leaned closer to me.

“I’m sorry.”

I shook my head and smiled, even though I didn’t want to.

“I’m saying this with full knowledge of how it sounds, but there is something that probably only you can handle.”

“Ah, I’m being asked to leave?”

“No,” he said, very quickly.  “No.  Not at all.  But in lab one?”

“Got it,” I said.

“It’s just a little out of hand.”

“I got it,” I said.  “All fine.”

Heads turned as I pushed my chair back, the Beattle rebels glancing my way.  I made it look as if nothing was wrong, and gave them a mock salute.  “Keep up the good work.”

Most of the smiles I got back were genuine ones.

The large boy watched me as I headed to the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Madness reigned.  The inmates were in charge of the asylum.  The natural order overturned, with the most troublesome faculty and students in the cages, and the experiments in the hall between them.  I could hear the shouts and banging on bars well before I entered the hall.

Red and Paul were somewhere near the head of this storm.  There were students present too, and not all of them were Beattle students, either.  A small handful looked like they had been Hackthorn students.

Taking the leap and ending in too deep?  It was easy to do, when they felt the need to prove themselves.

There were others too.  Ones who didn’t feel comfortable with the students upstairs, who didn’t feel safe enough to retreat to their beds at this late hour, and couldn’t quite bring themselves to join this collection of fifty or so.  Bo Peep was among them.

There were shouts as I was recognized, even cheers, and it was a warm thing.  Dangerously so.

I touched Bo Peep’s head as I passed her.  I snapped my fingers in the tap code I could remember for the three blind mice.

Red wore the face of an undefined prey animal, with the eyes of someone that might be alright with killing, and she threw her arms around me, burying her face in my neck.  I could smell alcohol.  The tighter she squeezed me, the more I felt like I could breathe.  She was laughing for reasons I couldn’t decipher, and it was like I was underwater and she was supplying me with much needed air, only it was good humor, transferred from chest to chest.

Holding me close, rather than shying away.

As she spun me, as if to pull me into the dizzy, spiraling, crazed festivity of prisoners turned captor, I could see a glimpse of Bo Peep.  She’d been paying as much attention as anyone and I could see the concern in her eyes.

I put hands on Red’s shoulders and I moved her away.  I gave her a brief kiss on the forehead to let her know I wasn’t mad, because I didn’t trust myself to speak.

Goldilocks was at one of the more packed cells, and she held a broom.  She was jabbing it through the bars, aiming for bellies, for sides and armpits and groins.

Someone inside the cage grabbed onto the broom, and immediately, it became a tug of war.  Two or three people inside grabbed at the broom, and one of the delinquent Beattle students joined Goldilocks in wrestling for the broom, to pull it back out.

I approached, and I grabbed the broom at the middle.

I turned my attention to the people within.  Two faculty members.

“Let go,” I ordered.

Their grip already slipping away, they did.  As the broom came free, pulled by Goldilocks and the student, I gripped the end.  We stopped, now me on one end of the broom and the two of them on the other.

The picture made everyone more or less stop what they were doing.

“You’re scaring the little ones,” I said.

The likes of Goldilocks and Red had the decency to look ashamed.  I wasn’t sure about Paul, or about all of the students.  The pair let go of the broom, letting me take it into my grip.

Just needed a little sanity.

“I gotta ask you to leave them alone,” I said.  I looked into the cells.  I could see where some were soaking wet.  Some were bleeding, if only a little.  “We need them, and in an ideal world for everyone involved, they’ll be cooperating.  This doesn’t encourage that sort of thing.”

I could see Paul’s feathers ruffling.  So to speak.

I thought of the little mutiny upstairs as I paced.  I approached Bo Peep and she rose to her feet.  She hugged me from the side, and I set my hand on her head.

How did it go?  So many of us exited the world in a way similar to how we came into it?  Teetering this way and that on unsteady feet, shitting ourselves, not fully at grips with the world?

I wasn’t about to exit this world the same way I’d come into it.  Not as a pet experiment of Academy people who thought they got to make the calls.  I wasn’t sure that was the direction this was going, but I didn’t want to take it lying down if it happened, either.

“I need to know I can trust you if I need you,” I said.  Bo Peep clutched me tighter in response to that.

The words were heavy on my heart, sitting right beside my desperate, unspoken desire.  I needed the Lambs back sooner than later, to save me from the forces that were aligning against me, whether it be the ones in my head or the rebellion I’d drawn together.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.10 – Twig

Dog Eat Dog – 18.10

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“Sylvester,” the voice was firm, and the speaker was both male and young.  “Wake up.  We have a lot to do.”

I draped my arm over my face, so I could shut out the light and block the world.  My eyes were damp, as if I’d been crying, yet I’d been firmly asleep.

“Sylvester.”

I almost spoke, responding, before I shut my mouth.  Speaking was dangerous now.  At any point, it could spell disaster, talking to someone who wasn’t there.  I had allies I needed to preserve and other allies who could very easily become adversaries if they lost any more faith in me.

I let my arm fall from my face, and blinked my eyes dry as I could get them.  An arm draped across my neck, making breathing and sitting up more difficult than they had to be.  I slept in a pile with a number of others, and I couldn’t name very many of them.

If the hallucinations and twists of the mind were always bad, always hostile, it might have been easier.  I could have steeled myself, turned my brain to the task, and found a way forward.  I wanted to believe that.  But they weren’t always bad or hostile.  They supported me, they kept me company, and they kept me warm when I felt cold.

The sensations were largely imagined, I knew.  The touch, the feel of clothing on skin and skin on clothing, of breathing into someone else’s hair.

I’d slept, at least.  Going by the light, it was dawn.  That meant… three hours.  A step forward from no sleep in the two days prior.  We were sleeping in a barn, apparently, in a pile of old blankets draped over a haystack.

Red Riding Hood lay on one side of me, her breath sour with last night’s alcohol.  The girl with the layers of clothes spooned me, her arm the one that had been making it hard to breathe and to rise.  There was a redheaded girl and a girl from the Eastern Crown States that I couldn’t place or name, a boy who slept with his back to me, and two delinquents, one of whom had done the body modification thing, with two sets of horns and some scarification of the forehead.

There were bottles and some food on the ground.  I could only remember parts.  A whirl of hallucination and dancing, of the Hackthorn experiments and delinquents.  I’d wanted to ingratiate myself, to ensure I didn’t burn bridges with the ones most likely to hear me out and not fall back into Academy ways of thinking.  I’d had something to drink, but the effects were somewhat muted.  It had been a dizzy spiral down into sleep and rest.

“All we want is a voice,” the boy at the doorway said.  He’d been the one to urge me awake.

A voice?

The hallucinations wanted a chance to speak?

He shrugged with one shoulder.  He looked angry but didn’t have a seeming target for that anger.  The night’s festivities had left him with dark circles under his eyes.  He was the one I’d seen on the bed in Ferres’ room, with the yellow raincoat that vaguely resembled a lab coat, like aspiring Doctors sought.  He wore an apron beneath it, and I didn’t miss that he’d stashed a knife in that apron.  He looked at me, “That’s the plan?  You don’t get shut out of things, we get a voice.”

“And us woebegone fairy tales get our chance to be on top for once,” Red Riding Hood said.  She sat up and stretched.  “Get some catharsis.  Get some revenge.”

“Yeah, if that’s what it comes to,” the boy in yellow said.  “Not that I care, but I’m willing to do what’s necessary to get where we need to be.”

“Try to sound less like a jerk,” Red said.  She looked at me.  “The sleeping hero awakes.  Good morning.”

I looked between the two, blinking, trying to sort out the conversation.  Was she not-?

“Hm?” I grunted, quizzical.

“I said I slept surprisingly well considering this blanket smells like wet dog and old cow.  Good morning, sleepy hero.”

I didn’t want to respond, to get caught up in things.  It would be too easy to ask a question and be offered another statement that begged yet another question.  These hallucinations were a product of my mind and I was one hundred percent aware that my mind was very good when it came to that sort of thing.

I almost didn’t want to move.  I was surrounded by mostly girls, I was cozy, and I worried that once I started moving I wouldn’t be able to stop.

The decision was almost made for me.  Our conversation had stirred others.

“It’s too early,” one of the delinquents said.

“If Sy wants to get up, we get up,” Red responded.

“Fuck Sy up the bumpipe with a lumpy branch,” the delinquent said.

I cleared my throat.

“…With a not-lumpy branch, then.”

“You’re quiet,” Red said.  “Are you mad?  Did I bother you, last night?”

I barely remembered her role in last night.  I shook my head.

“Not up to talking?” she asked.  “You’re in pretty good company then.”

Beside me, the girl with the layers of clothing reached up, using her fingers to tidy my hair.

I shook my head a little, running my fingers through my hair to fix it, and then stood up, extricating myself from her.

“We’re up!” Red said, full of good cheer, and that same cheer played into the groans her voice was eliciting.

I walked straight for the open door to the barn, where a rain barrel was set beside the boy in the raincoat.  I saw Bo Peep on a bench by the door.  She watched me, eyes large, and drew her feet up from the ground to the edge of the bench, so her knees were tight up against her chest.

I gave her a wave, even though I didn’t want to gesture, even mundane gestures, for much the same reason I didn’t want to speak.  After a moment, she waved back.

Red reached out for her, as if to muss up that woolly head of hair, and Bo Peep swatted at the hand, far more forcefully than necessary.

Had I done something?  Had Red?  Was Peep jealous?

There were so many questions and I wasn’t sure I had the resources at my disposal to answer them.  I felt rested, I was only a little hungry, and yet I’d been awake for a few minutes at most, and I had already faced a number of challenges.  The energy and focus I had were things I’d need to ration for the day ahead of me.

I’d need to save up a number in case I faced a larger crisis.  Mutiny, combat, an uprising from the Academy we were holding hostage, another downturn in my mental health, or if the accumulated positive elements of my mental landscape turned on me… if the Lambs appeared, real or not, and if they weren’t friendly or kind, it was something that could leave me in shambles if I wasn’t prepared.  I needed to be ready, whatever the day brought.

The irony was that devoting time and attention to conserving mental and emotional resources was in itself draining those resources.

The boy in the yellow coat stood at the rain barrel with his hand out, letting the water run off the gutter and into his open hand.  I watched as he clenched that fist, squeezing out the water.  Beyond him, the sky was mottled with clouds just thin enough to take the blue out of the sky and thicker clouds that looked almost black.  The sun had risen just enough that the light came from one direction but didn’t color the sky pink.

“We can’t let them ignore us, Sylvester,” he said.  “It’s what they do.  They marginalize, they set up a system, and then they twist it to their favor.  Power and control.”

I plunged my head and shoulders into the water of the rain barrel.

Cold.  I kept my head there, where the rest of the world couldn’t bother me, gripping the edge of the barrel with more and more intensity as the cold crushed in on my head and stabbed through skin to make my skull hurt.

I withdrew my head and straightened.

The moment my eyes opened, the boy in the yellow coat was rushing me.  I stepped back, and in the doing, I cracked the back of my head against the edge of the door.  He grabbed me by the collar.

“You little shit!  You think you can ignore me?  Right when I was saying we get a voice!?”

I raised my hand to grab him, to pull him off me, and in the doing I brought it up to where the rain barrel pressed against the exterior wall of the barn.   How to get my hand around that simple obstacle was a thought process that eluded me in the moment.  Realizing I had another hand I could use took me a full second.

As I raised it, Red brushed against my arm, approaching the rain barrel.  She put her hands in and flinched.  “Lords and ladies, that’s cold!  You put your head in?”

I shrugged.  I realized I had one hand raised halfway up, and I’d left it hanging there.  The phantom in question was no longer there, no longer grabbing my collar.  The snarl in thought process that had made getting my right hand up and out of the space between me and the rain barrel was gone.

She bent her head down and splashed it, yelping as she came in contact with the water.  She had been modified to have facial features reminiscent of a deer, rabbit, or another prey animal, the fur was soft and so fine that the places where fur started and ended weren’t clear, brown-gray fur blending into brown skin with the fine and sparse hairs that all people had.  Her eyes were larger than normal, more expressive, and they had almost natural makeup with black skin at the edges of the eyes, the dramatic highlighting of the furrow by the tear duct, and long black eyelashes.

She’d wanted to go under the knife and she likely would, but she wanted to have an actual, normal face, and working out that particular puzzle out was a task that would take more than a week, if scars were to be avoided and all features were to look normal.

She smiled as she stepped away from the rain barrel, face beaded with moisture, and she ran her wet hands through mostly dry hair.  “Are people going to wonder where you’ve been, hero?”

I almost kept silent, but I worried my silence would be just as worrisome as my speaking here.

“Hero?”

My question coincided with the bulk of the group exiting the barn.  Bo Peep and the girl with the layers of clothing among them.  I saw the triplets, who I’d first seen under the sink, whispering to one another.  Paul was present too, and from the straw stuck to him and to Goldilocks, I was guessing they’d found a secluded corner of the barn to bunk down in.

I watched a boy of fifteen or so twirl a stick with his fingers.  He looked a little more worse for wear, as if he’d had more to drink and a few other things beside and he’d woken up with the worst hangover, for the past one hundred days.  He contrasted that with very posh clothes and blond hair that he’d slicked back, close to his head.  He spooked me a little.  He was closer to the whispering triplets than to any of the others, and he set my instincts in overdrive.

That might have been his role.  Putting me on edge, representing something alarming without actually clarifying that something.

“You saved us,” Red said, smiling.

“You did,” Paul said.  “We owe you a lot.”

“Mm,” I grunted.  I stood back while others took their turn with the water barrel.

“He’s not talking much,” Red said.

“Alright,” Paul said, firmly.  “Well, we’ve got a few like that.  We’ll manage.”

He seemed to make it a statement, meant for the group, as if to ensure that I wouldn’t be looked down on, or so I wouldn’t run into trouble.  Maybe it was self serving on his part, ensuring his group was fine.  Maybe it was that he was actually an alright person.

“We’ll manage, yes, as we get done with all that we need to get done,” spoke the boy in the yellow raincoat.

“Speaking of, where are we going?” Goldilocks asked.  “What’s next on the agenda?”

“I want to stay,” Bo Peep said.

“Stay?” Paul asked.  “Laze around in a musty barn all day?”

“We can’t stay,” the boy in the raincoat said.  “There’s an agenda.”

“There’s stuff to do,” I said.  I didn’t want to be accused of ignoring the boy in yellow again.

“There are things that need doing that only we can do,” one of the triplets said, almost echoing the boy in yellow.  His voice sounded as though he had a cold, in contrast to the indistinct whispers.  “We’re talented.  We have to put those talents to use.”

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m hungry,” Red said.

“I’m alright with being hungry,” Bo Peep said, more insistent.  “Let’s stay where we are.  It’s safe.”

“The Academy is ours, Peep!” Red said, smiling.

“It’s theirs,” the boy in yellow said.  “Don’t lose sight of that fact.”

“Don’t be silly, it’s as safe as it’ll get.  We’re as safe as we’ll ever be,” Red said.

I’d been awake for only a few minutes and I was wondering if I had the grit needed to get to noon.  This was too much, and it wasn’t enough.  It was worse because I couldn’t be sure if people were saying things to others or if I was making mental revisions to make it seem like they were.

“I’ll keep you safe,” Paul said.  “Whatever it takes, Little Bo.  I’ll be your personal bodyguard.”

Yeah, that was a large part of why Red and Goldilocks and so many others were fawning over Paul.  It wasn’t so much that he was devastatingly beautiful, and ‘devastating’ wasn’t a word I was about to use lightly, but he had a good heart beneath that righteous anger of his.

“I don’t care,” Bo Peep said.  “Not about me.  I care about Sylvester.  I know it’ll bother him if I say it, but I think it’ll be worse if I don’t say it.  He’s not well.  He wasn’t well last night.  I want to stay here with him and not do anything.  We just have to wait until his friends come back.  So long as we stay put and we don’t do anything, nothing can go wrong.”

Twenty sets of eyes turned my way.

“You’re not well, Sylvester?” Paul asked.

I felt like admitting it out loud would’ve said something, and I couldn’t bring myself to deny it.  I shrugged yet again.  It felt like I was trying to buck the weight on my shoulders that was accruing there over time.

“We’ve all got our quirks,” Paul said.  “Neuroses.  Sylvester exemplifies that.  But we’re capable, we’re strong.  Some of us even got changes that made us better than we would’ve been.  I say we move forward.  We’ve got little ones to feed.”

“You guys can go.  I’ll stay with Sylvester.  We can talk, and you can bring food back to us,” Bo Peep said.  Her hands clutched at her skirt.  With so many eyes on her, her small voice pushing against a very large group, she couldn’t quite keep her head raised.  “Please?”

“That sounds like a bother,” Red said.

“Please?” Bo Peep asked.  “Please, I’ll never ask for anything again.  I’ll be good, I’ll do one favor for everyone here, I’ll do chores, or I’ll knit something for everyone, if you’ll give me time, or…”

She seemed to sense that she wasn’t making much headway with the group.  She took a half-step toward me, then hesitated.

I dropped to my knee, so I was more on her level.  At that, she threw herself at me, her arms around my neck.  I returned the hug, and I felt her heart beating like she’d just run a mile.

“Please,” she said.  “I’ll do anything and everything you want.  I’ll go away forever, or I’ll stay right next to you forever.  But can’t we please just stay here?  We can talk, and you can tell me or tell all of us stories of you and your friends?”

That sounds nice, I thought.  Soothing, almost.  I could almost frame it in a way that taught lessons, gave tips on how to be an effective investigator or infiltrator, how to act in the acting sense, and how to manipulate.

So long as I was addressing a group, even, I could even talk freely.  The fact that I couldn’t talk to anyone without knowing for sure if I was just speaking to open air was paralyzing, a weight on my throat that coincided with a lump there that wasn’t going away.

“You said things last night that scared me, when you were talking to others that weren’t there,” she said, and the words were so quiet that she couldn’t form all of the sounds.  I’d had to fill in the gaps and reason out many of the words.  She went on in much the same fashion  “And Red Riding Hood caught wind of it and she egged you on, and Paul liked the way you sounded when you scared me most, and now I don’t like them anymore.”

“Stories?” I asked.  I was warming to the idea.  I wasn’t sure I liked having my guard down, doing nothing while things happened elsewhere, but I wasn’t sure I liked having my guard up, either.

“When you all were young.  The good days.  And I know your memory isn’t good but you could make up stories and I bet they’d still be good.  Helen was telling us that before, you would imagine things so very well that it felt real to you and now it’s hard for you to tell the difference between what’s real and made up… but if- maybe just telling stories and not worrying about any of it would be nice?”

“That could be really nice,” I said.

“I couldn’t sleep all night because I was worried about the things I heard you all saying, so I watched over you and I thought hard about it and I came up with the stories as a thing we could do,” she said.  She sounded even more desperate now that I’d indicated I was interested.  “It made sense.”

The boy with the stick approached me.  I knew he wasn’t real, but something about him made me worry.  It was less the latent danger he posed, less the anxiety that surrounded him, and more that… I wasn’t even sure how to word it.  I would have described it as a mousetrap, waiting to be sprung, everything straining, packed with potential energy.  A collapse waiting to happen.

To keep Peep away from him, I stood, still holding her tight in my arms, effectively picking her up.  I kept my back to the boy, and I saw the girl with the layered clothes and the boy with the raincoat standing with his hand in his deep coat pocket.  Something alive was in there.

There were many others, I realized, now that I took in the crowd as a whole.  The number had been twenty earlier but now it had doubled in size.  Too many were made up of boys and the rare girl in uniform.  Girls who wore only the stripped-down Academy uniform pieces, no jacket, just the white blouse and dress.  They were easy to overlook because many students were doing that now, to cut down on the laundry they had to do.

I turned as much as I was able, while the boy with the stick paced around me.

“I-”  I started.

As he spoke from a position behind me, the boy’s voice didn’t match his haggard appearance and it didn’t match his dapper clothing.  It was too deep, too ragged.  It reached into the deepest parts of me and shook me.

If you don’t get moving, we’ll make you kill that girl in the worst way possible.

Bo Peep’s heart continued to beat its relentless pace, my own now caught up to it, matching it in tempo.

“-wish I could,” I said.  I set her down, with a bit of effort to pull her free of me.  “I really do.”

She flinched at the words, then she nodded.

I didn’t miss the way she hung her head, or that her hands went to her eyes.

“Let’s go eat.  I know a good place,” I said.  Then, as a concession to the boy in yellow and the stick boy, I added, “Then we’ll see about getting down to business.”

I had to double check to make sure Bo Peep was with.

The spot was only a little distance away.  I wondered if I’d chosen it subconsciously.  The mob followed behind, the rough-edged, the altered, the recently repaired.  The building was quaint, and that quaintness was contrasted by a heavy regiment of stitched guards.

While I figured out what the best way past that regiment might be, a face appeared in the window.  Shirley unlocked and opened the door.

“Sy,” she said.  She smiled.

“Any chance of breakfast?” I asked.  It still felt strange, talking, but at least in this, I felt like I was pretty safe.  It was a known location, and the door had been unlocked and opened.  Absent Shirley, it wouldn’t have made sense.  “I don’t have my wallet, but I figure maybe you’d extend me a tab?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Shirley said.

“I know I’m a bit of a liar and a troublemaker, but I wouldn’t say it’s ridiculous, given our history,” I said.

“Of course you can eat here, Sy.  For free.  Come on in.  Your friends too.  I’ve got some oatmeal on the stove and a batch of cinnamon twists in the oven that we were going to send up to the dorms.  We’ll give you guys the twists and send the next batch up to the dorms.  How’s that?”

“That sounds pretty amazingly close to perfect.”

There were some whoops and cheers as the crowd filed in.  It was positive, good.

Bo Peep was a contrast to that.  I felt a pang.

Feeling like I could trust Shirley and that the world made sense was a big deal.  I liked feeling like I was trending closer to sanity, some scares aside.  I felt like I owed that to Bo Peep, to the three hours of sleep I’d got, and the feeling of having some company as I slept.

That was the good.  The bad was… harder to pin down.  It felt like it was still there, still growing, and I was having trouble grasping it.  It was less like the negativity wasn’t there or looming and more like I simply couldn’t see it.

It was soon chaos within the cafe that Shirley was managing.  This was our meeting hall in the city itself, and Shirley was apparently continuing her cover in keeping it running, even though the cafe part of the cafe was no longer necessary.  She could have stacked up the tables and chairs and ignored them, only ensuring that employees kept the kitchen going so the students in dormitories could be supplied with food, treats, and other necessities.

Shirley looked happy.

There were others present.  The large child from the previous night’s meeting was sitting at one table, gorging himself.  I found myself staring for a long time at another set of individuals.  Two girls and a boy that was slightly older, all with long blond hair.

Was it a code?  I’d trained myself to look for patterns.  How had they appeared?  Boy in yellow, girl with the clothes, triplets, girl in the window.  One, one, three, one… did I read anything into the fact that the boy in yellow and the girl in the window had had pets?

Who had come after?  The large child.  Yes,then the boy with the stick.  Now this set of three.  There was the plethora of boys in uniform and girls in white, but I hadn’t kept count and if I was entirely honest, the cues my hallucinations tended to give me tended to be cues of a sort that I knew and appreciated.  I wouldn’t have set myself a task better suited to Jessie or Mary.

No, I wasn’t sure if my brain would have posed a riddle to me in terms of math or science, not that kind of pattern.

Pierre, meanwhile, was wearing checked pyjamas, sitting on the end of the bench closest to the kitchen.

“Wasn’t expecting guests,” he said.  “I’m barely decent.”

I smiled, took Bo Peep’s hand, and led her to Pierre’s side.  “Come on.  Have a seat.”

She sat, head still bowed.

“I’ll look after her,” Pierre said.

“Thank you,” I murmured, “She’s quickly catching up to you, Shirley, and the Lambs when it comes to my list of people I really owe.  Getting support, backup, and smart support-backup is… pretty invaluable when I find I’m low.”

“I’ll definitely look after her, then,” Pierre said.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I got food for myself and for Bo Peep, and I brought it over to her.  I separated myself from the larger storm of discussion and sat with her.

“We’re sitting here on our lonesome over here, talking about fav0rite animals,” Pierre said.

“Well, clearly, Lambs are the best,” I said.

“Lambs grow up, and then they aren’t Lambs anymore,” Bo Peep said.

I felt a stab of something horrifying at that thought.  It wasn’t that the sentence was so poignant, but… I wondered if it cast a shadow of doubt on Bo Peep, a thought that didn’t match her.

Not that I knew her that well.

“I think we can all hold on to the best parts as we grow up.  It’s part of what growing up is,” I said.

“I really want to think that,” she said.

“You’re a good one, Peep,” I said.  “Please don’t let anyone, me especially, convince you that you aren’t.”

More people kept filing in.  I was well aware that many were my hallucinations.  I was aware that there was a lingering sentiment of hostility, and that the boy with the stick had threatened to do something to Bo Peep if I didn’t keep moving.

But this was nice, and it was essential.  I needed to make it up to Peep, get my ducks in order, and figure out what I was doing.

Peep finished her breakfast and moved on to the threat that accompanied it, the cinnamon twist.  Dough, sugar, cinnamon, more sugar, at a guess.

“No word from the Lambs,” Pierre said.  “We checked all avenues of communication.  It’s going to be a few days more at a minimum.”

They were painful words to hear, when I felt like getting to noon was going to be hard.  That feeling faded into the background when I saw how much Peep was enjoying her cinnamon twist.  She was smiling again, after I’d disappointed her.

“I could see if there’s another,” I suggested.

“I was supposed to get one,” Pierre said.

“I would’ve brought it to you if I’d-” I started.

He was waving me off.  “Give her mine.”

“I’ll grab it,” I said.

Too many hostile eyes watched me as I stood and headed to the kitchen.  Too many eyes that were filled with expectation watched me, waiting for me to disappoint them.  It was the eyes of the most insightful people here that I tried to stay most cognizant of.  Shirley, Pierre, Bo Peep.  It felt like they saw the real me, or had at least spent long enough with me to see through any veneer of bullshit I put up.

I was still in the kitchen when I saw the latest batch of arrivals turn up.  I recognized one of them as Bea.  She made a beeline straight to Shirley, giving some hard looks to some of the delinquents who’d been out with us the night prior.

I remained in the kitchen, hanging back.  Shirley looked in the direction of Bo Peep, pointing, but she didn’t spot me.  She’d thought I was still sitting there.

I watched Bea’s face and I translated what she was saying by watching her lips.

“Headmistress… s bad.  We don’t know what we’re doing.  Sylvester-”

Someone moved between me and her.  I missed the latter part of that sentence.

“…in the bathtub.  It’s going to take work to get her standing again by the time the Infante turns up.”

Shirleys hands went to her mouth, also happening to block my view of her lips.  After a few moments, she lowered her hands, still speaking.  “-His reasons?”

Bea’s expression hardened.  Whatever it was she said, it had a question mark as part of it.  ‘Who knows’, possibly.

I collected the twist, and I tried to figure out the best way forward.  That ominous feeling was starting to take shape, now, and feel less vague or indistinct.

Bea was just now gathering others, giving them instructions and complicating the already complicated situation.  Paul said something, challenging Bea.

In another time and place, they might have gotten along famously, but this wasn’t that time or place.  Bea was transforming, day by day, week by week.  She had more to lose, and she wanted to be a leader, not a ringleader.

Paul, meanwhile, was balking hard at the continued presence of the Academy as an interfering factor in his life.

I navigated a crowd saturated with opposition, with more added every few seconds as Bea gave orders.  I watched as Paul and his backers formed a line, pressing back against the agents Bea had sent at us.

So long as I remained, I was a catalyst for trouble.

I delivered the treat to Bo Peep, gave her another silent wave, and then I ducked into the areas of the crowd where it didn’t look like trouble waited.  I made my way back to the kitchen.

There was a door there that had no exterior handle, necessitating that travel be either from the inside out, and that anyone who made the mistake of letting the door closed would have to walk around the building perimeter to get back to the front door.

I was glad I was traveling from the inside out.

I stepped out into the light drizzle, and I moved quickly, aiming to put as much distance between myself and them as possible.

It was all accumulating, and Bo Peep was entirely right in that I needed to move as little as possible.

Except doing nothing at all would exacerbate problems.  I would need to find a niche I could fit into.  I could hammer out some key points, identify weak points in security at the periphery of Hackthorn, and stay out of the way.

I hoped I could.

I’d keep my hands and head busy and try to see my way through to noon, then I’d adjust, and I’d figure out what it took to get me through the afternoon.  I wanted more time in the company of the others, but they were too difficult to wrangle when outnumbered and packed into a cafe like sardines.

I felt better than I had the last few nights.

That feeling was caught in my chest as though I’d been grabbed, as I rounded a corner and saw a pair of figures.  Two, for this part of any pattern, if they’re hallucinations, I thought.

One was a boy, fat.  The other-

“Mary,” I called out, despite myself.

She turned.

Not Mary.  Young, yes, but far from being Mary.  The clothing was wrong, the eyes showed no familiarity with me, and there was something separate about the way she moved.

In that sighting, it dawned on me just who and what the countless new hallucinations represented.  Past and present caught up to me in an instant and dashed all hopes that I had of feeling better off.

No, this was so much worse.

I could work backward from this moment of recognition.  I could assign names to the boy and his sisters, because I knew just about all of them.  I could assign names to most of the non-soldier ones.  I’d deciphered the pattern and it had nothing to do with numbers, it only had to do with the fact that they were so often something constructed or engineered.  Manufactured in sets.

Just as the Lambs were.

I fled that scene of the pair, putting distance between myself and them and myself and the cafe.  The ominous, hollow feeling I’d had was coming full circle, my eyes widening.  This was so much worse, even if it just stopped at this.

It wouldn’t.

I knew full well the course this took.  That was why this was as bad as it was.  I was slipping away, violence was happening without my being aware of it, and as I slipped, dangerous players were trying to control me.  It wasn’t just horror in retrospect or horror in the moment.

It was horror because I knew who waited for me, just steps down this particular road.  I’d told the others to kill me if I fell that far, and they weren’t here to execute that particular standard.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.a (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy I (Arc 18)

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He walked slowly, taking in the scene.

He hadn’t walked slowly in a very long time.  It wasn’t how he operated.  It wasn’t what he was.  He always had a mission, if not several, and that mandated that he constantly be in motion, or that he be set in place, doing what the Crown needed him to do.

His memory was exceptional, his brains the best brains the Crown could provide.  When he turned those brains and that memory to the task of thinking back, trying to picture the last time he’d strolled, as one might stroll in a garden, he only found scenes he’d staged, scenes where he was conveying an image.  In those moments, his brains had been set to the task of focusing on the individual or individuals that he was strolling for, so it was never truly an opportunity to stop and smell the roses, so to speak.

But it was important to convey that he was unruffled, whether to an ally who needed reassurance or an enemy who needed to know their enemy was invincible.

As he dug through his memories, he had to reach back to childhood to find a time and place where he’d truly focused on the moment and not the destination.  He’d been confined to a chair, legs missing, his upper body as much a series of containers and vessels for organ systems and ongoing work as it was actual body.  He’d pushed himself, while his team of doctors followed behind.

He couldn’t remember the why of that moment.  He’d been upset, angry at a relative, and he had wanted to think, so he had pushed himself out into the garden, and nobody had stopped him or wrested control of the chair from him.  It was curious, because it must have been a justifiable anger, but when he’d found himself in the garden, the anger had faded, and he’d been free to witness the moment.  Even now, he wasn’t sure what it had been about.

It was a very different sort of garden that the Infante found himself in now.

One hand raised, he held it up, and he watched as red petals blew in the wind, brushing his hand and fingers.  His fingers traced the growths that sprawled across the city.  A system of water absorption and transfer drew water from the coast and fed the plague growth that smothered the city.  At the water’s edge, tendrils like the ones that had snared the plague victims floated on the water’s surface, a film that was alternately pink and brown, depending on how the light caught it.  It might gain ground on that front if the ocean currents started to push a great deal of seaweed or other material toward the coast.

The ocean here didn’t smell like ocean, the city didn’t smell like city, and the countless dead who scattered the streets, buried under the carpets and tangles of red vines.  Here and there, dessicated bodies lay, mummified by the environment, faces pulled into mocking smiles by the retreat of skin and the pull of the vines that were still hooked into them.

Everywhere, red flowers carpeted surfaces.  From a distance, it looked like the buildings and streets were drenched in fresh blood.  From as little as ten paces away, they looked like flowers.  When he reached out to tear one free of the vine and held it before its face, the makeup of it looked more like a chimerical hybrid of a starfish and a snowflake.

No weeds grew, no birds roosted, no rodents or insects crawled through this very alive place, that whistled with the wind and gurgled with the movement of fluids.

Only his Professors kept him company, and they kept their distance, hanging back.  They wore quarantine suits and were accompanied by gargantuan stitched servants in shrouds, with modified quarantine masks.  The stitched were ten feet tall, and they shambled, bent over by the burdens they bore, laboratories packed into five hundred pound boxes.  They were wearing robes that trailed on the ground behind them, and their expressions were limited to what the sculpted masks.

The Infante walked with his hands clasped behind him, drawing in a deep breath.  His throat and lungs prickled with plague and the responses of the implanted countermeasures fighting it off.

His professors were the only souls around for a considerable distance around.  The plague ensured that no others were near to see or to study him as he moved through streets and past war-torn buildings without particular pattern.

They might wonder at what he was doing, but they would never voice any of it.

After investigating a series of alleyways, a narrow market street, and a winding street with empty crates stacked on either side, threatening to lose the professors that followed behind him, he stepped out onto one of the wider streets, stood in the middle, and stopped.

It gave him a chance to let them find him and catch up, and it gave him a chance to stop.  He could see the whole shape of this red-stained city, which hadn’t been a place of much worth before the plague had found root in it.

At one edge of the city, an Academy creation had crawled onto land and summarily died.  There was sufficient bacteria, algae, or other material clinging to it for the plague to have crawled up onto it, embracing it.  A great seaborne warbeast’s skull, returned to its original function as an anchor for a greater system of living material.

His deep breaths were mechanically powerful, forceful enough that if someone had clapped their hand over his mouth, he could have pulled the hand into his mouth with the power of the draw and even broken fingers in the process.

This was a principle that applied to every part of him.  It applied to his legs as his professors emerged, finding him, and he started forward once again.

A part of him felt like a child unfettered.  He breathed this air in the same way a child ate candy.  It was prescribed as bad for him by the people who looked after his well being, but so long as there weren’t too many watching he would indulge himself.  He felt it in his hands, and he felt it on his skin, countless spores trying to find root in his flesh.

He liked to understand his enemy.

He went where the ‘petals’ were thickest, and where the spores were heavy enough to appear as a fine red mist, that beaded on surfaces.  There were many red herrings, misleading areas where the plague had found root in burned buildings and where bodies of plague victims had been stacked three high by the unwitting.

His stroll came to an end after he had made his way from these dense areas and macabre scenes for nearly a hour.  He’d found what he’d come looking for.

In some places, the bodies were embraced by the red vines, a papery, dry skin drawn tight around bones and the networks of vines that stretched beneath skin.  In other areas, there had been bones, some pulled away from the bodies by the pull and spread of the plague growth.  In this particular garden, he had seen child and parent, a man and his dog, he had seen rodents aplenty.

But this was something else.  It wasn’t anything natural to the Crown’s earth or derived of its denizens.  The formation that peeked through a gap in a wall that the weather had cracked hadn’t even been fabricated, really, by any man.  It had fabricated itself.

The Infante had to reach out and pull down a wall that was newer and more sturdily built than many of the ramshackle constructions in the area.

The bones were marked, as if a thousand deep cuts had been made into each bone, some at angles from one another.  To do it by hand would have required wire to get into the crevices, and it would have required a hundred years.  There was no flesh to draw tight against these bones, for it had been burned thoroughly.  Quarantine chemicals had been thrown over it and catalyzed.  If anything had remained alive and functional, trapped within char and gristle, it had been sealed away from the world by the clear crystalline growths that had resulted.  A bug trapped in amber.

At least Mauer was thorough in his handling of this.

He looked back at his team of professors, and he raised one hand, bidding them to remain still.  He ventured into the space.

The thing was headless, but its central column had something akin to ribs, which would have supported other parts.  He thought of it as a rack, almost, with a play on words as he thought of the familiar torture device, and of ‘wrack’ and its root words in middle low german.  To stretch, to reach.

It yawned open and apart, the individual spires, growths, and complex geometries of the rack like teeth in a wide open screaming mouth, a man’s ribcage opened up and splaying apart when he was being serviced in surgery or being tortured in inventive ways.

A crown lying on its side, its tines spearing in the Infante’s direction.

“I would like to name you, but it’s not my place,” the Infante spoke.

“My antithesis,” the Infante spoke.

Much as it had been a long time since he had taken a walk to enjoy the journey, rather than to position himself at his destination, the Infante hadn’t spoken for a long time without a proper audience, without modulating his powerful voice and keying it to optimal effect.

“They made you a tool to prop up the desperate multitudes.  I was made and given the duty of constraining and punishing the few at the top who warrant it.  You destroy, you lash out blindly, and you salt the earth.  I create, I order, and I make the world fertile for future generations.”

He reached up, touching the encasement.

“You were temporary.  A stroke of lightning.  Your desperate action had ramifications that may well be felt for a thousand years or more.  Your plague is stubborn.  I will live for a century and exercise a power you never had, and yet I’m only one piece of a greater system, performing a role that history will forget.”

For an instant, he had the urge to reach up and turn his prodigious strength to tearing down the quarantine encasement, breaking one of those bones so that whatever lay within them could be exposed to the world again.  It would be a foolish action, and one that might well kill him, either at the hands of primordial parasites or by the swift reprisal of the Crown.  It would also be an action that was entirely his own.  It would be a legacy, even if it was a grim one.

Red flakes of the plague’s flower-like growths were collecting all around the Infante, obscuring what lay beneath them.

“If you thought to hurt us, know that you only made us stronger.  You’ve given us an excuse to shutter the windows, lock the doors, to burn it all down, and step away with intent to return to a clean canvas in the future.  In challenging us and trying to claim your own portion of this nation, you’ve been our greatest ally.”

He walked around the formation, touching different parts of it, studying the art of a creature that had painted itself.

“Not a reality uncommon for a nemesis or antithesis, I find, that paths run in parallel…” he said.

He trailed off.

He remained where he was, hands clasped behind him, and he contemplated the writing on the wall, very literally.

The creation had been injured enough that it could be made to stay still while it burned.  The burning had been followed with chemicals, which formed a solid and clear binding chemical.  After the binding chemical, walls had been erected with the creature at the center.

All Mauer’s work.  To do anything less would have been tempting fate.

But there was one wall that had been part of the adjoining building, and that wall had a message inscribed on it.  He had to push down part of the roof and exterior wall to allow sufficient light into the dark, enclosed space.  Once he had, he could reread the message and be sure he’d read it right the first time.

It named itself God.

The Infante had taken all of this for an indulgence, a step away from the normal routines and responsibilities.  His desire to know his enemies had brought him here, so he might find the source of the plague and look it in the eye.

Mauer likely hadn’t seen the connection between primordial and plague clearly, or hadn’t wanted to.  Few others knew enough of the full details while also knowing that a primordial could even do something like this.

The epitaph scrawled on the wall had taken all satisfaction out of the study of his enemy, and it had taken the pleasure out of the indulgence, leaving only the bitter aftertaste.

His conversation partner had kept a secret from him.

He turned away from the primordial’s corpse, walking in the direction of his professors.

“Have your stitched seal it in securely, with all measures we have.  Repair the walls and seal those as well,” he said, without stopping.

He walked with purpose once more, ruffled in a manner he couldn’t quite put a finger on.

The train whistled as it vented pressure.  Lugh sat on the horizon, stained red.  Tynewear was at another place on the horizon.  Where Lugh looked like diced chunks of raw flesh scattered in a pool of blood, the spires of Tynewear and the damaged walls of living wood that riddled the city made for an image more like blood-spattered stakes or knives gathered in a cluster.

They had paused at a crossroad.  At the point where the tracks turned sharply away from Lugh and toward Tynewear, as if repelled by the sprawling rebel city, Academy had set up a waypoint, and buildings had started to appear in the vicinity, complementing the Academy institutions and forces.  The intent had been that scientists working the plague cities could fall back here, a safe distance away.

Other cities had fallen to plague, and this stop was little used.

“I suspect we’ll have to take you apart, Lord Infante,” his chief professor decided.

The Infante turned his head to stare down the man.

“To be absolutely sure, My Lord.”

“I am hyperaware of my own function,” the Infante said.  “I can turn my mind’s eye inward and I’m aware of every component, of temperature and nutrition levels.  I am intimately aware of every weapon stored within me.  I am very much aware that the plague has not found root in me.”

“The exposure level you just endured was unprecedented, Lord Infante.”

“Others have faced the same,” the Infante said.

“If you mean the ones who now lie dead, then I have to protest, My Lord.”

“I will take that under advisement,” the Infante said.

Sensing something was amiss, the professor bowed and retreated, finding his own seat elsewhere on the train.

Another professor stepped onto the train and made his way through security.  He approached the Infante, bowing, and handed over a stack of letters and papers.

“Any news?” the Infante asked.

“Nothing of note, my lord,” the professor said.

The letters were important.  Plague and black wood had served to squeeze all who lived in the Crown States.  Refugees from plague-ridden areas flooded every city that hadn’t been caught by plague.  Black wood strangled the smaller towns and the hiding places, and it ensured that the Academy’s food supply was the only food supply.

Black wood would soon be employed without quarantine measures or acreages of burned land to suppress it.  The rebel factions would be blamed.

Plague, as was its penchant, would carry on.

He had done this before, in a half-dozen variations.  He did it efficiently and he did it ruthlessly.

The letters, for the most part, were the responses from professors and aristocrats, from lesser nobles of the lowest tier.  What was normally easy in practice was difficult here.  The chemical leashes had been given to a large share of the population, and some members of the upper class were strictly leashed in place.  The Crown had spread the necessary chemicals needed to keep the leashed alive throughout the Crown States, but putting that same thing into practice on the other side of the ocean was a far more difficult task.

There was very little elbow room in the Crown Capitol.  To bring thousands of individuals and maintain the leashes, putting all the necessary labs into motion to produce the right chemicals, it invited negative attention and potential disaster.

It posed a dilemma.  To rescue all people of note and invite problems from the capitol, or to leave them behind.  Leaving them behind meant potentially losing good people, or worse, it meant that if and when the Crown returned in the future, that there might be survivors angry enough to point the finger and ask why they hadn’t been invited to leave.

Killing them all was another sort of problem.

In this, he was the figurehead.  The Crown would take the blame if anything went wrong, when leash, chemicals, mass sterilization and the treatment of the vast public were really the province of the Academy.

Men in black coats bowed and scraped before him, and obsequiously they addressed him with honorifics and careful mind to his tastes.  But at the end of the day, when all else was said and done, the Academy ruled.

A farce really.  It was a farce he entertained and played a supporting role in, but a farce nonetheless.  Maddening.

The Baron Richmond had learned of the farce and had gone properly mad.  The Duke of Francis hadn’t.  It had played a role in the Baron being demoted to a lesser noble, the Duke taking a firm hand in broader procedure and operations on the Crown’s end of things.  Most others fared somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum.

He sorted through the mail, skimming each letter.  Chemicals in one side of his throat allowed him to track and remember the numbers used with the security measures on mail.  With each such letter with a number in the margins, he was able to verify that the sender had used the appropriate codes.

If resources would be expended to keep the right individuals on the other side of the ocean, then he had to be careful no to accept too many.  The letters contained refusals and carefully worded pleas.  Others were entirely oblivious to the true and imminent dangers of plague and wood, their attention rarely extending beyond their labs or homes.

He reached a letter from Professor Hayle.

A clever man, Professor Hayle, but one without a great deal of clout.

The nation was a sinking ship, and the rats were clamoring for a chance to exit safely.  It was an exit only the Crown was equipped to provide, a roundabout way of saying that it was an exit only the Academy could provide.

Professor Hayle, for all of his forward thinking, was electing to stay where he was.  He wanted to continue to run Radham.

With thought of Hayle came other thoughts.  The Infante continued his search through the mail.  A day of travel into Lugh and a day of travel out had allowed the mail to accumulate.

There was a possible breakthrough, by the woman professor of Hackthorn.  He would attend that.

And there was a letter with a black resin seal.

The message within was printed with a machine, and the Infante, again, had the means of deciphering it built into his neck.

The Duke of Francis communicates, but only to the Lambs.  They conspire.

The Infante leaned back in his seat, custom made to his frame and weight.  The source was a trusted one, a spy who kept and maintained a pet experiment, a crawler in walls.  The thing was blind, with an ear keener than most, and the spy was competent enough to cover the other bases and double check everything pertinent.  The message would have been next to impossible to forge when the forger had no idea of how it was deciphered.

There was merit to this accusation.  This was sound.

There was no need for a proper court or deliberation.  The Lambs had made themselves dangerous.  He would see to that before he saw to Hackthorn.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.b (Lamb) – Twig

Lamb I (Arc 18)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Mary stood atop the wall.  There were people on the other side, keeping their distance from the Academy’s vat beasts, which paced back and forth, shoulders brushing against the walls.

The beasts, by contrast, had been replaced recently.  They appeared similar to naked mole rats, but they had teeth, claws, and bone hooks at their joints that would have done any predator proud.  They were somewhat lopsided, and they had muscle to spare beneath their pink flesh.  They had sunburns, even though the rain from Radham reached the town.  Not technically warbeasts, they were mass produced in vats, expendable, entirely instinct rather than training.  They patrolled where there were scent markers, attacking anything that came too near, and they left a scent marker.  Once the first batch had been walked along the patrol route, they were collectively good to guard that route.

The haggard and dirty people didn’t look particularly scared of the beasts, which meant they had been there for some time.  They’d had time to get used to the things and learn how they behaved.

They’d also had time, Mary suspected, to get desperate.  Enough so that they’d started flirting with the idea of fighting the beasts.  There were many who were gathering poles for more tent construction, each pole sharpened on each end so they could be planted in the ground.

That’s the lie, anyway, Mary thought.

That lie was what kept the peace for the moment.  Refugee and Academy both pretended the sticks weren’t spears being stockpiled for future incident.  Both sides hoped for a resolution that didn’t have one.

The patrol of the vat beasts had turned grass at the base of the wooden wall to a thick soup of mud.  A hundred feet of grass separated the band of mud and the beasts from the refugees.  Trees had been chopped down and pieced together into haphazard shelters, and some material had been used to erect tents, but the omnipresent rain and the sheer number of refugees posed their own problems.  Tens of thousands of people were out there, Mary guessed.  Tens of thousands of people had to walk, they had to eat, and they had to go to the bathroom.  The ground level of the refugee camp was quickly becoming a sty, any ground not covered already by some form of shelter quickly becoming a stew of mud, shit and piss.

On the other side of the wall, Lillian was hanging back while a group of doctors talked with the town’s city council and prominent citizens.  The ground there was a wicker-basket weave of grown wood filling the plaza.  There wasn’t much mud at all, and the rain had washed away most of the dirt that had been tracked in when others had entered or exited through the gate.

Vats sat by the wall, as did the wagons that had brought them there, and the stockpiles of food and chemicals to sustain them.  More vat beasts were within, and yet more creatures sat near those.  A circus show of monsters and beasts lurking near where the food was handed out and where the overhang of the wall’s edge helped keep the rain off them.  They included all types, from the aquatic to the reptilian to mammals.  Most were hairless and mostly unclothed, and most were bipedal, drawing inspiration from their creators.

Mary’s thoughts touched briefly on what Sylvester and Jessie had said about the Block.  Her thoughts touched briefly on the vague image of this noble that supposedly shared blood and history with her, and the glass coffin the noble had laid within.

How many of those monsters had been human once?  How many others had been pieced together from components that were obtained from human donors?  Any one of them could have benefited from root cells, muscle transplants, or sections of brains, if not whole brains then molded with drug regimens.

Lillian was watching the beasts while the conversation played out next to her.

Mary wished Lillian wasn’t being so quiet.  She could see what Lillian was doing, but it wasn’t actively serving their purpose here.

Glancing up, Lillian met Mary’s eyes.  Her hand moved in a gesture.  I.  Eyes.

Then before she could communicate anything more, someone in the group said something to Lillian, taking up her full attention.

It didn’t seem urgent, whatever it was Lillian had been conveying.

Looking back in the direction of the refugee camp, she saw that one of the bystanders closest to her had his pants down.  He was actively jerking his hand back and forth, furiously enough that she thought he might hurt himself.

He pulled his hands away in a very dramatic way, raising them with middle fingers raised at her, and shouted.  The distance made his words inarticulate, but she could guess what he’d said.  He’d illustrated, in a way, with a forward thrust of his hips coinciding with each word.

He screamed over and over like a small child having a tantrum, rage and desperation boiling over.  When she didn’t react or move, he added variation.  She could almost read his lips, and pair that read with the distant cry.  Screw you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you all, screw yourselves…

Trying to get to her, to bother her, hurt her like he was hurting, even if it was through a kind of self abuse and humiliation.

She could be clinically empathetic, but she couldn’t quite bring that empathy home and feel it.  Things were the way they were.  She couldn’t do anything for him.

She would support Lillian, trusting that Lillian would make things better.

She fixed the hood of her raincoat, turned away, and walked down the stairs that led from the wall-top to the plaza below.  As she made her way down, she could see the full assortment of the Academy’s monsters.  Most existed for utility purposes, it looked like.  A solution for every problem.

The council was already starting to depart when Mary reached them.

“The general was saying we have a few days to figure things out,” the mayor said, his voice lowered a bit, so the rest of the city council wouldn’t hear as they walked away.  “He thinks the vagrants outside the wall are going to stir themselves up and try another attack, so we don’t have much longer than that.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” the lead doctor said.

“If they have a way into the city, we need to know about it,” the mayor said, insistent.  “There’s rumors that some out there are sick.  Not the red plague, but any sickness is bad when we’re already pressed in.”

“Rest assured, we have the situation in hand,” the lead doctor said.

The mayor didn’t look convinced.  “Let us know if you need anything.”

With those parting words, the man struck the wood-woven street with his cane and limped away.

It was telling that the group of Academy doctors were silent as the town’s council left the area.  They didn’t want to be heard.

Lillian glanced at Mary.  Mary moved her hand.  I see-know.

Lillian signaled.  We agree.

They’d both figured out the answer.

Speak, Mary urged.

Wait, was the response.

Mary pursed her lips.

“The Infante should be by before nightfall,” the lead doctor said, checking his watch.  “No more than two hours.  There are rumors that other populations have been crossing the burned acreages to reach black woods and collect the wood for use against the Crown.  He thinks, if there’s a trend, that it might occur here, close to Radham.  Don’t make me look bad.”

Mary and Lillian exchanged glances.

“We’ll check the vat beasts for drugs,” the lead doctor decided.  “If the vagrants are getting in, they have to be getting by the vat beasts somehow.  I can only imagine a rebel group with access to medicine using darts or drugging food for the beasts and slipping by.”

“Yes sir,” was the muttered reply.  Mary didn’t feel compelled to respond.

“Station some scratchers on the wall.  Turn their ears toward the vagrant mob.  See if they can’t hear and scratch out anything suspicious.”

“We’ll need to set up something to keep the rain off of them and their papers,” another doctor said.

Mary looked at the scratchers, which were sitting in the rain.  Their heads and ears seemed to make up half of their bodies, the rest of them spindly.  They resembled hairless cats  minus the tails, or hairless bats without wings.  They looked less fond of the rain than anything present, human faces on bestial bodies with long fingers, sulking as they sat slouching in puddles.

“Do it.  Recruit help if you have to, to get the materials or building done.  Requisition the writing supplies if we don’t have enough.  Volume of material is better than anything else, and if the mayor says we can ask if we need anything, we might as well see if he’s telling the truth.”

“I’ll handle that,” one doctor supplied.

The lead doctor nodded, folding his arms.  He drew in a breath, and in the process he managed to puff himself up a bit.  Finally, he relented and asked, “Any other ideas?”

Speak, Mary gestured, again.

Wait, Lillian gestured, before asking, “Can any of the experiments at the wall talk?”

“Some, I’m sure, if only barely,” the lead doctor said.  “Why?”

“If we haven’t asked if they’ve seen anything, I don’t think it’ll hurt.”

The lead doctor looked fairly unimpressed, but that wasn’t anything new.  “You’re here to lend your particular expertise, as Professor Hayle touts it.  I was hoping you’d impress me with something more concrete, miss.”

We know what the answer is, Mary thought, before gesturing again.  Speak.

“I’m confident in my abilities, doctor,” Lillian said.  She’d emphasized ‘doctor’ a touch, as if to make a note that she was using his title while he insisted on calling her ‘miss’.

He didn’t respond to that.  Instead, he looked at Mary.  “You have a guest, girl.”

Mary was surprised at that.  “Do I?”

“Your parent.  They’re at the north gate.  I was called away from other duties to receive the message and carry it to you.  They’re waiting for you now.”

“I see,” Mary said.  She saw the expression on the doctor’s face, put on her act as a young lady of Mothmont, and curtsied.  “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“I already think very little of you two being here.  It’s dangerous, the vagrants could reach their tipping points and attack any day now, and you girls seem more interested in sightseeing, playing about, and apparently visiting with family.”

“Again, I’m sorry for the trouble,” Mary said.  She curtsied, and this time she kept her head down.

After a moment, the doctor sniffed.  “Get going.”

Mary turned to Lillian.  “If I may?”

“I’ll look into some things and meet up with you later,” Lillian said, as her hand moved.  Think.  Think.  Water.  Sleep.

Agree, Mary gestured.  Lillian would work on this some more, wash, and then nap.  They’d traveled overnight to get here.  It was overdue.

It still frustrated Mary, that Lillian was keeping quiet on something essential.  They’d come here to accomplish a mission, and it was an easy mission.  The refugees were being collectively driven out of town and city by the spread of black wood and plague.  This was one of many locations where the refugees had traveled in hopes of finding a new home, only to find a barrier.  Some refugees were slipping past, despite a population of vat-grown beasts that were supposed to be on watch, with senses that allowed them to feel the vibrations in the earth from tunneling.

Hayle had volunteered them, and they’d been happy to accept, really.  They had skills in investigation and infiltration.  Investigating infiltrators was second nature.  They had their mission.

The broader, larger mission was to build up Lillian’s reputation.  Getting her grey coat would require sponsorship and funding.  Each Academy had only so many labs, and an overabundance of specialists.  Lillian was positioned to get lab space, and even to use her ties to Hayle to have her own exclusive lab, but after some discussions over tea with Hayle, they’d decided that taking advantage of that connection in the now would potentially leave them short of political capital later.

Lillian needed to prove her worth in a way that gave her a history she could clearly point to.  References, completed missions and being a cog in the war machine that had won.

Both of them knew that the refugees were tunneling after all.  Lillian had seen something within the city that had helped her realize it.  Mary had seen from the wall how the refugees were setting up the spears, yes, but also that they were camouflaging the hole they were digging, while simultaneously guiding the flow of rainwater to better flood areas.

The tunnels would be waterlogged as a consequence, but the actual movement of earth and footfalls underground would be muffled.

Lillian knew and was staying quiet, when they could have challenged the annoying doctor’s perception, proven their worth, and finished the mission in record time.  If they could do that enough times, Lillian could make her name as a problem solver.

Mary was annoyed, frustrated, and a small part of that had to do with the condescension.

It was a bad tone as she found her ‘father’ by the north gate.  She found him at the gatehouse, talking to a military officer.  On seeing her, he broke away from the conversation, raising and opening an umbrella in the same motion.

He was a man who dressed well.  He liked the tailored suit jacket, the tie, and the triangle of a kerchief in the pocket of his suit, color matching that of the tie, though it was plain while the tie was patterned.  He wore round glasses with gold frames and kept his hair oiled and parted.  The look was old fashioned at the same time as the glasses, tie, and kerchief were bold decoration.

“Father,” she said.  “It’s a surprise to see you here.”

He reached her, and with the umbrella in one hand, he embraced her briefly with the other arm.  She allowed it, maneuvering so he wouldn’t feel the press of blades or weapons.

When the hug broke, he remained close enough that they could share his umbrella.  Mary lowered her hood.

“We made plans,” he said.

“I know.  I was called away.”

“As you often are,” he said.

She didn’t have a response for that.  It wasn’t that she was speechless or troubled.  It was that he was right and she didn’t really see the issue with that reality.

He sighed.  “We only ask for your company three or four times a year or so.  In recent years it’s been only twice a year.  Last year it was once.”

Mary thought again of the noble girl who shared her blood.  This man’s real daughter.

She had only maintained limited contact with her supposed parents, for appearances, at Hayle’s request.  They had maintained a concern that embedded programming would make her turn on them and on herself in a violent way, and it had taken some time to ensure that wasn’t the case, with the help of pictures and incidental exposure while she remained restrained.

It had been necessary to be sure, even after learning the truth about her trigger phrase and Percy’s intentions.

But she hadn’t gone to any lengths to do more than the bare minimum in seeing them.  It was an inconvenience.  Their depth of feeling for her made her lack of feeling for them an uncomfortable lack.

“The messenger brought your note, and I hurried to see if I couldn’t see you at the train station before you left.”

“We didn’t take the train,” Mary said.

“I know.  I found that out.  I went asking, and I heard you were here.  I heard… worrying things.”

“Things?” Mary asked.

He liked to be clean-shaven, without any facial hair, and even with the overcast weather and the shade the umbrella provided, she could see a muscle stand out as the corner of his jaw as he glanced away.

“If you asked girls at the dormitory, you should know they’re catty, they like their webs of rumor and deceit, to cut down the other girls.  Whatever it is they said.”

“I asked at the orphanage,” he said.  “Where you stayed so you could be closer to the school.  Are the webs of deceit cast by girls of the Academy that insidious, that someone at the orphanage a ten minute walk from the Academy’s doors would say the same things?”

“You were apparently busy.”

“I was,” he said, and that was very nearly a sentence on its own, but he continued, “…wanting to know my daughter.”

Mary glanced away.  She wondered what the noble lady had properly looked like.

She wondered if there was something she could say that would make this man stop trying to cling to her.

As she looked up at him, he held himself stiff, chin firm.

Her own chin was raised, held steady, so she could meet his eyes without wavering.

“I sent you to Mothmont because I believed it would provide you with opportunity,” he said.  “Because I work every day with wealthy and powerful men and I can see that there’s a divide, a chasm between me and them.  I am good at managing money, but I could do my best work every single day of my life and I wouldn’t ever be their peer.  I wanted Mothmont and the connections it gave you to at least give you the possibility of being great.”

“I know.”

“Things happened, unfortunate ones.  But in the midst of them you found a direction.  I trusted you to walk that path you chose.”

“Trusted.  Past tense.”

“I never fully understood what you were doing, and any questions were met by your insistence it was classified.  I’ve wrung my hands over it, talked with your mother.  We decided each time to trust you.”

“Have I betrayed that trust?”

“Have you?” he asked, not turning it around, but making it a genuine question.

“I think I would need to know the accusations before I can answer that question.”

“You and Lillian.  Spending too much time in each other’s company.”

“Mild, as accusations go,” Mary said.

His expression changed, hardening a bit, looking more wounded, making it more clear what he was meaning to say.

“No, father.  She has a boy she likes.  Gordon- you met Gordon.”

“He died some time ago, Mare,” her father said, his voice softening.  “And I could almost understand, almost, if it was your heart being tender after a loss, but…”

Mary held firm, remaining silent.

“…It’s been some time, and I haven’t known you to be tender for quite some time.”

“It’s something I’m not terribly good at,” Mary said.

“I wondered about you, but I trusted you,” he said.  “I want you to know that.  But I’ve heard things and stewed over them for the entire trip here.  I don’t know you and I’m unsure about the path you’re walking.  Girls and boys from multiple places remarked on you.  Saying that you share her bed.  That you’re her servant, following her around like a dog.  There was speculation you take combat drugs, that you’ve been experimented on-”

“That’s only venom from a nest of vipers, father.”

Convince me,” he said.  His knuckles were white as he gripped the umbrella.  The umbrella’s waver betrayed his.  “Please.”

It’s all because I’m not the girl you’re looking for.  Percy was my father more than anyone.

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say,” she said.  “I can protest all day, but you’ll wonder all the same.”

“I don’t know where you’re going, I don’t know where you are.  I don’t know how you got this way,” he said.  He sounded oddly less plaintive, even as he pleaded.  “I don’t know you.”

She reached up, fixing her hair.  It was damp from some of the spatter of rain, and she pushed it up and away from her forehead.

“It’s classified,” she said.

“I-”

“-so I’m expecting you to be discreet.”

He shut his mouth.

“There was the incident in Mothmont.  I… was homesick.  I fell in with a bad group.”

That muscle at the corner of his jaw worked again.

“Should I continue?” Mary asked.  “If I carry on, I’ll upset you.”

“If you don’t, I’ll be more upset.”

Are you sure? she thought.  She spoke, “I partook in the mass poisoning.”

She studied his reaction.  She watched the thought process, as he tried to put it all together while still not having enough information.

“They’re the reason I’m… not tender.  Them but especially the man who led them.”

She thought about elaborating.  Calling that man a father figure.  The twist of the knife that would ensure she was never inconvenienced by this man again.

Lillian wouldn’t have wanted her to.

“My stay at the Academy was to watch over me, ensure I wasn’t a danger.  It’s why they didn’t let you visit.  Lillian is one of the few who know where I came from.”

“But the rest of it?  The classified jobs?”

“I was asked to accompany them because they were keeping an eye on the reverend Mauer.  Who you introduced me to.  Who was revealed as a secret rebel.”

Again, that muscle at the jaw.

“I knew enough that the Academy didn’t to be useful.  I’ve learned skills.  The only things they’ve done to me are to ensure I’m alright, even if I’m not tender and haven’t been for a long time.”

“So that’s what happened.  That’s where you were, all this time.”

“Yes.”

He looked, to a degree, as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“As to where I’m going, what lies at the end of this path?”

For an instant, she floundered.  Giving an answer that tied her too closely to Lillian was problematic.

“I want to teach,” she said.

“Teach?”  He sounded surprised at that.

When she answered, she spoke the words and knew they were true at the same time.  “I want to train a proper army, and I have for a long time.  The path I’m walking, I think I can get there.  I’m enough of a perfectionist that I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less.”

“So you are my daughter after all.  The perfectionist.”

She felt uncomfortable at the idea, but she kept her mouth shut.

“I have more questions,” he said.  “About what happened at Mothmont.  Just what you’ve been up to.”

“They may have to wait.  If I can even answer them at all.”

He nodded.

“But for now?  I really do have a job to do.  And speed is of the essence.  I’m going to go.”

“If I stayed in town, could I see you again?”

“If you’re in town when the Infante arrives, you may find that the roads are closed and security redoubled,” Mary said.  “You should go soon.  I’ll see you later this year.”

He somehow didn’t seem very hurt by the bluntness.  It could have been that he valued being taken into confidence.  It could have been that he had largely come to terms with the distance between them.

Clinically, she could tell that his eyes were sad, his smile genuine at the same time.

“I don’t need to worry about you and Lillian?”

“She’ll run the Academy, and I’ll handle the military arm,” Mary said.  “She has that boy she likes, and I… just need time.”

Time being the integral component.  This dream might have been feasible, if only barely, but time was the thing she needed most, with more time giving her more room to accomplish it.  She would expire, sooner or later.

“It’s not what I envisioned, when I held you in my arms,” he said.

Again, Mary didn’t have a response for that.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice soft.

They did need help.  They needed contacts and resources.  Maybe all of the discomfort and distraction involved with maintaining this family would prove useful.  Maybe.

“Hood up,” he said.  “Don’t get too wet.  Unless you want my umbrella?”

She shook her head, reaching up to lift her hood back into place.

They parted ways.

You deserve a better daughter, Mary thought.  Not a ghostNot an offshoot.

The line of thought about the teaching and training soldiers stuck with her.  It kept her company alongside less comfortable, easy thoughts that lingered from the conversation.

She had been happy to exist, to keep people she valued close.  She honed her skills and proved her worth and she was content in that.

At the same time, she had avoided thinking of the future, until pressed to paint one for her father.

It all would have been easier if she had ignored the man.  She might have, if the image of her counterpart didn’t nag at her, if her original self was dead five years ago, reduced to nothing and boiled away in a vat, instead of mere months ago, keeping company with nobles.

She valued how she was evaluated, liked being the best Mary she could be.  Seemingly effortlessly, someone else had surpassed her in that.

Yet talking to her father was supposed to fix that?  She didn’t like the way that idea rested in her head.

Lillian was supposed to be back at their temporary accommodations, stealing a nap before the Infante came.  There were things to be discussed and considered before then.  Mary would get the answer as to why Lillian wanted to wait instead of seizing the most political capital possible.

She felt restless.

The building was quiet, its other occupants out for the day, or at least entertaining themselves with books rather than music boxes and conversation.  Many refugees of higher standing had been allowed into the town, and many places were crowded, but this building had avoided the worst of it.

She unlocked the door and let herself in, looked at Lillian sleeping on the bed with a towel around her head.  Mary used every trick at her disposal to minimize noise.

The bathwater was still lukewarm, so she made use of it.

She wanted sleep more than she wanted anything else, so she was efficient.  She peeled off her clothes, damp even though she had been adequately protected by her raincoat.

Her fingers brushed over a hundred tiny scars, a dozen less tiny ones, and a half-dozen clusters or longer scars where she had been opened up.  Brown and black smudges grew here and there, or formed hard nodules.

She was a copy of another person, and she had spent the first few years of her life in a vat.  She had hit the ground running, growth-wise, development-wise, and even as her growth had been stopped, her body maintained a different clock, and her development had taken a fresh direction, with an overwhelming and eager focus on her training.

But cells copied themselves over and over again, and the combination of that reality and the odd clock she kept, with the copying of copying, it meant things were running aground, flaws finding reality.

There were times and places where her hands didn’t move quite the way she wanted, or where muscles caught.  She was careful to tell Lillian about each of them, and with Lillian’s care she was allowed to pursue her perfection again.

Lillian’s soap and toiletries rested on the bath’s edge.  On impulse, she left them alone, choosing the coarse lye soap instead.  She scrubbed herself until her skin was pink and tingling, then rinsed herself off.

She dressed light, so she wouldn’t rumple her clothes.  She would want to look good when the Infante arrived.

Lillian looked so tired, even in sleep.

The black coat remained the goal, it had to be.  But this job and jobs like it, they felt like small steps.  They needed to accomplish something more.

They needed to not wait when they had answers others wanted.  Not when time was so elusive.

Mary took a moment to tie her hair back with her ribbons, then climbed onto the bed.  She remained there, poised, on her hands and knees above Lillian.

Gently, she lifted Lillian’s hands, moving them out of the way.  Then she leaned down, touching her lips to her friend’s.

Soft, almost imperceptible.

Lillian reacted, exhaling softly, and Mary moved the towel to cover Lillian’s eyes as she made the kiss more perceptible, momentary touches instead of feather light ones.

Lillian, more awake, raised her head up, reaching, and Mary met that response with something substantial, then a touch of tongue.

It was about drawing it out.  A quarter of the way, each time.  Then as Lillian responded more, halfway each time.

Lillian arched her back, reaching up with her whole body, while her wrists were held down.

The progression, logically, meant the next step was a three-quarter one.  Body to body.  Instead of this, Mary moved her knee, placing it on the bed between Lillian’s legs, firmly, insistently pressing.  She could feel Lillian change the angle of her hips.

A part of her liked getting this right.  Like managing the perfect maneuver with the knife and wire, precise acrobatics.  It made her think of being in lockstep with Gordon, Helen, or Sylvester.

Lillian made the most delicate of moans, and that response merited another three-quarter-of-the-way-there response.  A kiss, a tightening of her grip on Lillian’s wrists.

In the midst of it all, the moment passed.  A change in the responses that each action got.  In the immersion she was maintaining.

Mary let go, and sat back.

Lillian reached up, taking hold of the damp towel that had been draped over her upper face, and pulled it down, clutching it to her chest.

“What gave me away this time?” Mary asked.

Lillian shook her head.  She was breathing hard, and she didn’t speak immediately.

Mary let herself topple over, lying on the bed to one side.  While she lay there, Lillian took her hand, fingers traveling over Mary’s fingers.  Fingertips traced calluses.  From handling knives and razor wire.

“They’re not his hand,” Lillian said.  Her voice was soft enough it crackled a little bit.  She sounded sad.

“Ah,” Mary said.  “I can do something about that.”

As she looked over at Lillian, however, she could see that her friend’s eyes were sad.

“Unless you want me to stop.”

Lillian shook her head, but she didn’t look sure.

“You look so sad, after,” Mary said.

“It’s nice to believe it, just for a few moments,” Lillian said.  “I don’t know if that’s a good thing.  Maybe I’m not letting it be a clean break.”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

“I’m so twisted,” Lillian said.  “The Lambs are all twisted around, aren’t they?”

“I’m not the one to answer that, one way or the other,” Mary said.  “It’s more or less all I’ve ever known.”

Still holding Mary’s hand, Lillian knit the fingers of their hand together, staring at the hands, which were held up as they lay there.

They remained like that for several minutes.

“I don’t want to bore you,” Lillian finally said.  “Or for you to think less of me.”

“I’d never think less of you, not for something like this.  And I like the challenge.  Seeing how close I can get,” Mary said.  “But if you want to talk about irritating me… why did we wait?”

“I knew you were going to ask.”

Mary sat up, abrupt.  “I want us to progress.

“This is progress,” Lillian said.  “This is choosing our time to make a move with some wisdom.”

“You’re cautious,” Mary pointed out.  “You need to make bold moves.”

“It’s not that.  I knew almost right away that I’d need to wait a measured time.  I saw dirt patterns almost right away too, but still, no, if we act too soon, it’ll seem uppity, like we’re showing them up.”

“They don’t like you, or us,” Mary said.  “However you do it, they won’t like it.  All we’re doing by waiting is giving them the chance to find out the answer first.”

“With the track they’re on?” Lillian asked.  She shook her head.  “No, no.  This is right.  They won’t admit they’re impressed, but it gets us the most traction.  It’ll count for something.”

“I’d rather finish sooner,” Mary said.  “Move on to something more meaningful.”

Lillian huffed out a sigh.  There was some residual frustration in that huff.

“What?” Mary asked.

“And a part of me doesn’t want to say no, to people who want someplace safe to go,” Lillian admitted.  “I don’t want to be that kind of doctor.  I want to offer a better solution.”

Mary nodded.  She let herself fall back down, collapsing onto the pillow.

“I know, logically, it makes more sense to gain power so I can help people… but I wonder how many tell themselves that,” Lillian said.

“I was thinking about that, as a matter of fact,” Mary said.  “About where we’re going.  What we might do, if there’s time.”

Lillian turned her head.

Before she could respond, however, a knock rapped at the door.  Lillian jumped as she heard it, then sat up partway up as she recognized the pattern.

Tap code.

Lamb.

Mary reached over to the bedside table, and she drew her gun.  She had one knife under a pillow, and as she reached for that, Lillian slapped at her hand.

She would make do with the gun.

“Come in,” Mary said.

The door opened.  Jessie.  She wore a raincoat and a long skirt, and she’d chosen not to wear her glasses.  It wasn’t until she lowered her hood and moved her braid into place at one shoulder that she looked more like herself.  She drew glasses from her pocket and set them in place.

“Did something happen?” Lillian asked.  Mary didn’t miss seeing how Lillian unconsciously clutched at the sheets as she asked.

Jessie shook her head.

Then, with an entirely different kind of tension and fear, Lillian asked, “Did you hear?”

“Not so much.  I… surmised,” Jessie said.

While Lillian flushed, Mary stepped in to rescue her.  “Why are you here?”

“We want to gather the Lambs,” Jessie said.  “We’re pulling everyone together.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

Something about the look in Jessie’s eye was answer enough.

The desperation, the anger.  Mary had seen that on too many faces recently.  Jessie, at least, wasn’t re-enacting the desperation and anger that the man standing outside the wall had.

“The situation outside the gates is most of the answer, isn’t it?” Jessie asked.  “You know who’s really behind it.  We need to answer that.  Someone does.”

“There’s a lot of people responsible,” Lillian said.  “It’s too big a problem to tackle.”

“We’re in the middle of something big.  And we’re drawing a lot of people in,” Jessie said.

Lillian pursed her lips.

“And you won’t tell us more in case we don’t say yes,” Mary said.

Jessie shook her head.  “You didn’t become a Doctor to be complicit in that, Lillian.  I don’t think you became a Lamb to be complicit in it.  You wouldn’t have killed Percy one of the first times I met you, if you were willing to let this slide.  And don’t tell me if we’re patient that this will get better.  Because it isn’t getting better.”

Jessie’s tone was changing as she spoke.  That anger was there again.  It wasn’t really borne of empathy, though if Jessie resembled Jamie at all, she did have her share of empathy to spare.

No, it was an anger borne of a refrain.  Not enough time.  Repeated endlessly with periodic variation, as if enough insistence and the occasional variation could somehow break through and achieve the desired effect.

Mary had experienced some of that.  Something like it had spurred her to act and reach out to Lillian.

“I don’t-” Lillian started.  “Sy couldn’t come himself?”

“It didn’t work out that way,” Jessie said.  “Logistically.  We thought staying behind and keeping an eye on things would be hard… and he wanted to endure it himself.”

“Because he’s a moron,” Lillian said.

“There really was no good way to do this.  There’s no good way to move forward with our plan unless we have the Lambs all together.”

Lillian started to say something, and then she stopped.

Mary felt a sense of dread.  The current situation, the stall in the forward momentum, as they made the leap from getting Lillian’s white coat to getting the harder to define grey one.  The refugees outside the wall.  The Infante, and the problems there.

Missing Sylvester.  Missing the Lambs being together.

Lillian couldn’t give a firm answer because she didn’t have one.  If anything, Lillian was giving it serious thought.

Mary’s thoughts touched on her supposed father, inexplicably.  They touched on the idea he had helped her conjure up, of teaching soldiers.  Of wanting time, which the Academy could provide more than anyone else.

“What if I say no?” Mary asked.

Lillian looked at her, and Mary knew in the moment that they stood on different sides of the decision.

“Or if I need time to think about it?” Mary amended.

“There’s no time,” Jessie said.  “The Infante is coming.  You said it yourself, when you were talking to Mr. Cobourn, security will increase, roads will be closed.”

“We’ll manage,” Mary said.  “But don’t pull the oldest trick in the con artist’s book, and choose to have this meeting here, now, when there’s a time limit, and force a decision.”

“That’s not how I operate.  It just happened that way,” Jessie said.

“I agree with Mary,” Lillian said.  “I need time, too.  You’re asking me to put so many things behind me.  You know how hard I worked for my white coat.”

“I know,” Jessie said.  “But if we wait for the Infante, the city will lock down.  It means we aren’t meeting with Sy for a few more days, at a minimum, and that’s a lot to ask.  It means added danger.  At the very least, come out of the city with me.  We won’t be here, and that’s easier to explain away if you decide not to go.”

Lillian clutched the sheets again.  “No, Jessie.  Whatever you and Sy and Helen are brewing, you can’t just not be in touch for months on end and then suddenly show up and expect us to leave everything behind.”

“We were in touch.  We sent you a letter from Hackthorn.”

Lillian stopped in her tracks at that.

“Ah,” she said.  “I wondered about someone like her wanting to make Lambs.  I thought it would be a mockery, all appearances.”

Jessie shook her head.

“We’re in touch with the Duke,” Lillian said.  “We’re situating ourselves to help him stop what’s going on.  We’d be leaving him stranded.”

“We’ll rope him in too,” Jessie said.

“No,” Lillian said.  “It’s not that easy.  There’s Ashton and Duncan, and they’re complicated too.  I’m just worried if we do this badly, it’ll divide the Lambs again.”

“It sounds like you’re trying to find a reason to say no and it doesn’t sound like you’re convinced by any of them,” Jessie said.

“I have a thousand not-entirely-convincing reasons!” Lillian said, raising her voice.  “Everything I’ve done here has been not very convincing.  But it’s not like Sylvester offers better.  What you’re describing sounds terrifying.”

“What we need is terrifying,” Jessie said, and she said it in the calmest voice.  One that suggested that the anger and fear and the need for time were all answered in those five words.

And those five words spoke to something in Lillian too.  As much as she’d managed to fling herself into the ‘no’ side of things, she found herself straddling the fence.

Mary, not quite straddling that fence, moved her hand, situating the gun on her knee.

Jessie met her eye.

“We’ll need time to discuss,” Mary said.  “Go.  Please.  We’ll find you.”

“And if I don’t move?” Jessie asked.

Will I find that passion and strength and desperation, as my body gives up on me?  Mary wondered.  Maybe we’ll see.

She pulled the trigger, and as the room rang with the sound of the handgun firing, Jessie dropped to the floor, blood painting the door beside her.  Lillian’s yelp and her voice shouting into the midst of the ringing didn’t help matters.

Before Lillian was out of bed and all the way to her, however, Jessie was standing, one hand at the graze on her thigh.

“Give us just a little bit of time,” Mary said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.c (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy II (Arc 18)

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“I wonder sometimes, sir, at the darkness and the quiet.”

It was anything but dark or quiet, Mauer observed.  The wind had picked up, the rain came down as the faintest of drizzles, and the dogs were barking.  Three of the four other people present were seated around a tall fire that had been given far too much wood.  Isaiah, Wil, and Limps.  Dalton stood with his arms folded, but would soon resume pacing, his face illuminated by the blazing fire.

But Isaiah wasn’t talking about the darkness and the silence here.  Not in the physical, tangible way.

“I don’t think He’s silent,” Mauer said.

“I didn’t mean to insinuate-” Isaiah started.  He stopped as Mauer raised a hand.

“Let me continue.  I don’t want to imply you’re wrong to say this, and it’s a good point of discussion.  Let me think of how to gracefully word this.”

It was important to choose words carefully with Isaiah.  The man was a competent soldier, a remarkable shot, and if told to march he would march until he was physically unable, and from that point the man would crawl.

It was possible that if the Academies were to conduct their tests, that they would find something wrong with Isaiah’s head.  Mauer himself had spent some time trying to decipher the young man, after discovering how very sensitive he was.  Isaiah would kill without remorse, but would sulk for weeks after a stern verbal rebuke.  He was one of the more common people to show up when Mauer sat himself by the campfire, perhaps too eager to ask for guidance and too unlikely to seek his own.

Mauer had met Isaiah’s mother once upon a time.  He would have liked to have her counted among his flock, as she was a woman from one of the countries to the south who had participated in the fight against the Crown.  She had sought out the meeting, and much of it had been to evaluate Mauer.  In exchange, while Mauer hadn’t outright asked, he had been able to verify that Isaiah had been this way since he was small.

Isaiah was nearly thirty, but he looked very much a boy, here, leaning forward, waiting for his answer like a boy wanting his forty pence in allowance.  Though Isaiah’s deep brown skin, very green eyes and chin with a deep-set dimple had any number of young women cooing over him, Mauer knew Isaiah was entirely innocent.  He was a peculiar lad.

“Whether He makes himself heard relates to whether we listen.  Again, this isn’t to say you’re wrong, and I know you read your passages, I would never say you don’t try.”

Isaiah nodded.

“But hearing Him is a skill.  It takes time and practice to learn that you hear him not with your ears, but with your heart,” Mauer said.  He touched the fingers of his good hand to the respective body parts.  As if to remind him of its presence, his other arm almost vibrated with restless pain.  “All of you four have already come that far.  Where it gets harder is when we lose sight of how open we are, or if other things stand in the way.”

The others were listening.  Limps was an old man, an infrequent visitor to the campfire since Mauer had picked up the habit, one who rarely talked without being addressed first, and didn’t seem to need much more than a friendly voice late in the evenings.  Limps was the hardest to speak to, because he gave so little feedback, outside of a nod.  Best to leave him be.

“Fear.  Doubt,” he said.  The words were meant for Isaiah.  He said them as if he spoke of fear and doubt that might be experienced by the smallest child in the deepest darkness.  The next word was for Dalton, spoken to address a man, though Dalton was but an adolescent.  “A desire for revenge.”

Dalton, by contrast, had only been visiting in the last week, six visits in the last seven days, after years of being content to follow orders and keep mostly to himself.  He was a teenager, and when the Academy had wrought its mass sterilization, Dalton’s mother had spontaneously aborted the child she was carrying.  Dalton had spoken of it to Mauer once, when he had first joined, had shed no tears when describing the blood and the two funerals that had followed.  Mauer had his doubts the miscarriage and the death of the mother had to do with the drug, but he wasn’t about to argue that a good soldier’s reasons for joining the war were wrong.  He wouldn’t take that belief away from Dalton when Dalton had nothing else.

The boy had no family but the other soldiers now.  He kept company with a few soldiers and camp folk his age and with a fury of a different brand than Mauer knew.  The boy didn’t sit, but mostly paced, periodically leaving, only to return and throw something more on the fire.  He wanted badly to confess something, Mauer surmised, or to seek advice, but it had been a week and he hadn’t voiced it, whatever it was.  Dalton’s anxiety was the reason the fire had been made as large as it had.

“Other needs and wants,” Mauer continued, and he said it as if it was to nobody in particular, but it was a statement meant to come to rest between two particular ears.

He didn’t look at her, but he somehow doubted Wil had received the message as intended.

“Even I feel I need to look inward and double-check myself,” he said.  “Think twice about what I’m doing and why, and if I’m serving God.”

“Yes sir,” Isaiah replied.

“Would you like some tea, reverend?” Wil asked.  The timing of the request and her blithe tone suggested she wasn’t taking his hint.  She didn’t want to take his hint.

He deigned to nod.  “Just bring me the hot water.  And please, again, I must insist you not call me that.”

“Yes, o’course,” she said, in a way that suggested it had gone in one ear and out the other.  She went around the group, offering tea.  Only Limps accepted the offer.

She dressed like a soldier, she followed orders, she knew her guns, and she called herself Wil rather than Wilma.  Mauer didn’t welcome vulgar talk in his immediate vicinity, but he knew soldiers were soldiers and he had overheard men talking about willing cunts and wet holes, trying to bait something out of Wil, and they had been effectively silenced when she had gone on at length about twitching rods with eager dew at the tips, about hardness meeting softness and, turning their words back on them, her own ‘wet cunt’.  He’d had words with her after that, about how she was conveying herself, how he expected more of her, yet as effective as his words usually were in giving guidance and direction, he worried she heard only what she wanted to hear.

It was almost as if she wanted to be dressed down, as if her insolence begged it, because it was attention.  In the midst of it she took his words and gave them an entirely new tone and order, taking away their power.

Wants and needs.

What was more, she straddled a line of propriety and masculinity with very clear distinctions that likely made sense only to her.  She played at a male vernacular, but when she spoke her voice was soft wherever she could get away with soft, and whether soft or delivered as an order or insult, she spoke with an especially country Crown accent of a sort normally heard an ocean away.  She normally wore her uniform clothes, but given a chance she would flaunt a dress, often flaunting at him in particular.

He tried to let her be, to not feed her the attention, but she often appeared at these campfires, at an hour when many had gone to bed.  The pain of his arm often kept him awake, and rather than lie awake, staring at the walls of his tent, he came out here, to listen to those who needed listening to, to offer prayer and reassuring words.  Wil turned up almost as often as Isaiah did.

She was gone for the moment, but she would soon be back with the tea.

Isaiah spoke up, “Is it possible that, given where we stand, it’s harder to hear Him than it was?”

“Where do you think we stand, Isaiah?” Mauer asked.

“I worry about the plague, and this blighting, which is almost a plague unto itself, sir.  I feel as though we’ve meddled too much in His creation, played at being God, and He’s pulled away from us.”

“No, Isaiah,” Mauer spoke.  “Not so.  It is them who meddled, them who played at being God.  You and I, Dalton, Limps, all of us, we’re fighting.  We’re fighting on His behalf.”

The words felt hollow on his own lips, but he could see the effect that they had for Dalton and for Isaiah: Dalton’s anxiety eased and Isaiah seemed to find strength and direction in that.

He could paint a clearer picture, he knew, outline a way forward, and they would follow that path, but he didn’t.  For the time being, they had retreated to an island in the midst of a lake, more or less outside of the reach of the blight.  If he gave them a goal and inflamed their passions, it would do even more to ease Dalton’s restlessness and erase Isaiah’s doubts, but it would only backfire if and when he didn’t carry it through.  No use giving them motivation with no power or allowance to enact it.  It would only frustrate.

He could hear the dogs barking.

Wil returned, holding a kettle and three teacups, two of which were full.  She handed one to Limps and set one down on her seat before bringing the remaining cup and kettle to Mauer.

He took the cup first.  With his good hand, he handled the teacup in one hand, running his fingers along interior, edge, and handle, his eyes turned to the surface of the cup as the firelight lit it.  He could feel the warmth at the handle where Wil had been holding it.

“You have the oddest rituals, reverend,” Wil said.

“Please, Wil.  I’m not taking that role at present.”

“You’ve done a fine job the last few nights, if I may say so,” she said.

“Even tonight,” Isaiah said.

Mauer shook his head.  He balanced the teacup on his knee.  He held out his hand for the kettle and asked, “Who boiled the water?”

“Lieutenant John Coumb,” Wil said, handing him the kettle. “I can hold that cup for you, if you’d like.”

“No,” he said, before she could.

“You have the oddest rituals about tea that I’ve seen,” she said, her voice soft.  “About your meals too.”

“About many things.  Many were lessons I was taught when men didn’t take precautions,” he said.  Coumb was a known factor.  But the barking of the dogs and the fact that he didn’t wholly understand how Wil operated, it was cause for him to be cautious.

He shrugged one shoulder, letting his coat slip from where it was perched on his shoulder and draped over his bad arm.  The act revealed his arm, and he knew that all present were looking.

He held his bad hand out, and he poured steaming water into the cupped palm.

“Reverend!” Wil exclaimed, eyes wide.

It hurt, as boiling water poured directly onto flesh should.  His flesh was callous thick, yet it would blister and burn.  Growths ran through it, resembling a fungus or plant, but they would crack and bleed as any flesh did.

He had grown used to pain.  The arm always hurt, from shoulder to each of the blunt, crude fingers.

The water escaped through the gaps between fingers, burning as it trickled through.  He closed his eye, feeling the agony of it, while trying to show very little of that pain.  He tried to focus on the other sensations, to feel for grit, for the weight of the water, and how it moved.

With one eye, he watched Wil and her reaction.  She seemed horrified, broken out of the spell that swept over her when she was around him.  He felt sufficiently satisfied that nothing was amiss, no parasite or particulate was present, and that she wasn’t putting on a show.

He moved his bad hand, and the corner of his mouth pulled back with a twitch as a physiological reaction to renewed pain touched his expression.  He took the modest cup in a large, burned hand that could have closed fully around the kettle, and set the kettle down on the bench beside him before drawing a leather pouch from his coat pocket.  He kept the teabags on his person, in the pouch with a small spoon.

Mauer prepared his tea with care.  Teabag in, a set number of turns of the spoon, at a pace he had rehearsed many times.  He turned the spoon over and rested it at a set angle, and he eyed the small bubbles on the surface of the liquid that continued to swirl after the spoon had ceased moving, doing so with a mind to amount and to pattern.

It was quiet.  There wasn’t a sound except for the stir of wind and the distant lapping of water on the shore.

“It seems most have retired for the night,” he said.  He took a sip of his tea.  “Dalton, you pass by the supply tent and makeshift watch tower on the way to your tent, don’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Tell them to wake all of the patrols.  They’re to tell the patrols to do a sweep, be watchful.  They’re to be more careful than kind.  Wake others up if they must, but let’s ensure we don’t have any trouble.  Anything remotely suspicious gets reported.  We’ll pick up and move to another location tomorrow.”

Limps spoke for the first time since asking for his tea.  “I heard the Crown was close to finding us.  Sniffers.  Are you thinking they might have found us already?”

“They’ve been drawing closer,” Mauer said.  “If it were that alone, I wouldn’t want to take such precautions.”

“If it’s not that alone, what else is there?” Dalton asked.

Mauer took a sip of his tea, “The dogs were barking.”

“Past tense,” Limps spoke, realizing.

Everyone present, Mauer excepted, reacted, hands touching pistols at their waists, their attention extending beyond the circle of light at the campfire.

“Check the dogs are alright while you’re at it, Dalton?” Mauer asked.

“I’ll go now, if that’s alright, sir?”

“Please do,” Mauer said.

He liked the way they responded.  The questions they asked.

They were good men and women, overall.  They were believers, even if some were believers in him and some were believers in God.

“Where are we going?” Wil asked.  She’d seated herself on the edge of the bench Mauer sat on.

“I don’t reveal destinations to anyone but my key personnel,” Mauer said.

“Well, I’m only going to say, sir, I might’ve got family in these parts.”

“We’ll see,” he said.  He finished his tea, handed his cup to Wil, and then he stood, collecting his coat and draping it over his shoulders.  “I’m going to retire.  Limps, will you look after the fire, or find someone who will?  Dalfton built it, so if he returns, you can tell him I asked him to mind it.”

“I can, sir,” Limps said.

“If he’s left to his own devices, he might leave us with no wood and a signal fire that they can see from New Amsterdam,” Wil said, joking.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Mauer said.  He drew in a bit of a breath, then addressed the trio with more assertion, “Goodnight.  I’ll be awake for a little while yet, in case there’s a problem, but I’m not to be disturbed otherwise.”

“Yes sir,” repeated an overlapping three times.

He didn’t like that he had to specify that.

“God be with you,” he said.

“God be with you,” was the echo from the other three mouths.

The camp was dark in contrast to the fire.  There were tents throughout, and he was very aware of the numbers, that his army was presently very small.  There were boats propped up, used as a roof or one side of a more structured tent, supplemented with tentcloth and all lashed up with rope and careful knotwork.  His own accommodations were similar, only they came close to being an actual home.  The boat had taken nearly everyone to move away from the water and turn over, with boards, railings and other furnishings coming away to serve as benches and other furnishings.

God be with you.  His own words echoed in his head.

He was very tired, and he’d been getting more tired as of late.  Whenever he ruminated on that growing feeling of exhaustion, it was always the same image and sound that sprung to mind.

One of his primordials had spoken.  It had named itself.

God.

It was a voice and a sight that had tainted every mention of Him since.  He couldn’t even call it a device of the Crown, calibrated to sow unease in his mind.  His God had been pieced together by his effort and by Genevieve Fray’s.

He lit candles, and as he did, he checked the papers that were stacked and scattered throughout his quarters.  An Academy in the West had fallen to plague and Fray had braved that area to acquire a map.  That she was willing to brave that kind of environment suggested she might have been hiding in the midst of plague as he hid in the midst of water and blight.

The map showed the spread of disaster.  It showed which of the Academy’s weapons had been released, and the paths they had taken or been given.

There was not much ground left for the staging of a fight.  The reported movements of nobles and higher-ups was suggesting that they would vacate, only a skeleton crew of Academy professors left behind to administrate.  Experiments created to brave the plague and blight would stay behind, policing a smothered continent.

The fingers of his good hand traced over the images, drawing out imagined paths for Academy, refugee, rebel and Crown.

He wanted to stay up to keep an ear out for trouble, and he busied his hand with the tidying up of papers, he kept his eyes active by glancing over letters and messages, correspondence from members of his flock.

The alertness granted him by the tea gradually faded, and he heard no commotion.  After what might have been an hour, he hung up his coat, then unbuttoned his shirt at the shoulder and side before pulling it off.  Disrobing was a painstaking process when he had only one hand and he had his bad arm to work around, but he was careful to fold shirt and pants.

His monstrous hand quenched candles, pinching away the flames.

He retired, laying on his back, head on pillow, arm heavy enough at his side that it meant he slept on a faintly angled surface.  He draped the crook of his good elbow over his upper face, shutting away the faint light and the light of the blazing fire that seeped between the wood of his accommodations and the ground.

It took a lot of focus to take his mind off of the throbbing of his bad arm.  It felt as though it had been flayed alive, every inch of it hurting.  The burn in the palm and fingers was of a different sort, more focused, reacting to every change in the air.  It was something to focus on, a change from prior sleepless nights where the pain had trained him to remain awake until he fell into sleep with no progression or process that could be interrupted.

He didn’t dream, but he did sleep, and he did wake.  It was as though he was laying in bed one minute, feeling cool, and in the next moment he was snapping to alertness, the temperature different, the feel of the thin stuffed mattress and sheets different.

His revolver was tucked between mattress and wall.  He collected it, cocked it, and aimed it into the gloom with the same motion of his arm and hand.

He waited, and he waited for a considerable amount of time, aiming at only darkness, letting his eyes adjust to the light level.  The fire deeper in the camp had shrunk by a fair margin.  It would be close to five in the morning, if he had to guess.

Mauer waited, all of his instincts from the battlefield primed.

He shifted position on the bed, and in the doing, he used the thumb of his monstrous hand to flick a knife from under his pillow down the bed, closer to his waist.

Easing down, he pretended to relax, even as he took up the knife between two fingers of his monstrous hand.  He set the revolver down.  All of this was something he had done one to ten times a night for years.  Being ready, being hyperalert, as if every night’s sleep was something stolen in the midst of an ongoing fight.  The dogs barking and then settling down had him on edge more than usual.

In many ways it was.  This long period of dormancy was one of the longer breaks he’d had from the fighting since he had been setting the stage in Radham.

It was different this time, though.  That had been more of a beginning, and this felt like the approach to the end.  He was tired, and he hadn’t been before.

He used the same techniques to fall asleep, dwelling on the pain of the burn, controlling his breathing, relaxing various muscles.  Again, he fell into sleep rather than fading or slipping into it.  Consciousness dropped away, and seemingly a moment later, he felt the movement of air across his burn.

His hand lifted, knife caught between two meaty fingers, and he backhanded his assailant.  He struck the figure down, pinning them against the luggage container that served as a bedside table with the back of his hand and the blade of the knife on opposing sides of their throat.

“Oh,” the voice said.  Female.

He remained silent, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

“Sorry,” she said, with her Crown accent.  “I don’t know what came over me, that I found myself here like this.”

“Not wise, Wil,” Mauer said.

“No,” she breathed.  “Apparently not.”

“Did something come up?” he asked.  He hadn’t released her.

“I… was hoping to contrive for something to come up,” she said.

Was that it?  It wouldn’t be the first, fifth, or even tenth time that Mauer had drawn that kind of interest.  Twice it had been insinuations from men, even.  He’d never reciprocated.  It was an unfortunate consequence of his ability to draw people in; sometimes he drew them in too close.  People who were looking for something often found that something in him.

“I’m a man of God,” he said.  Again, the image of his primordial flitted through his mind’s eye.

“But you’re a man, aren’t you, Reverend?” she asked.  And she sounded less sure of herself than he’d ever heard her.

“Don’t- I’ve told you time and again, don’t call me that.”

He released her, moving the knife away.  There was the revolver to fall back on, just in case-

He felt the movement of air, and then her weight was on top of him.  He brought the revolver around, and fingers closed around his.  He was strong enough, fitter than the vast majority, and yet he was matched or beaten in physical strength here.

Her fingers tightened on his, and he felt the pain of cartilage grinding and flesh giving way as the vise closed his hand around the hardest parts of the revolver.  He grit his teeth, and swung his bad arm up and at the weight on his chest.

It was two legs that caught his bad arm, toes finding holds in the gaps and hollows near his hand and wrist, the strongest part of her legs and hips stressing the weakest parts and angles of his shoulder and elbow.

He knew what she was, too late.

“Lambs,” he said.

She giggled.  It didn’t sound like Wil anymore.

Two of her arms caught his good arm, one of her hands over his, the other on his forearm.  The weight of her body rested across his, and her legs had his other arm.  She was astride him.

“How many of mine have you killed?”

“None,” Helen said.

“The dogs?”

“I’ve left the dogs alone.”

“Will you leave them alone as you make your exit?” he asked.

“It depends on how this conversation goes,” she said.

“A conversation.”

“Mm hmm,” she said.

She laid her head on his chest.  The angle of it was wrong, her head positioned too far down.  She shouldn’t have been able to place her ear over his heart.

She wasn’t wearing much.  A nightgown, perhaps, or just a slip.  For the ruse of pretending to be Wil?  She would have had to hear Wil speak, or even overheard their interaction, which meant she had been close for some time.

“I remember,” she said, and she moved his destroyed hand with the revolver.  The flat of it rested against the back of her head, on her hair.  “Our first real meeting.  You pressed a gun to my head.”

“I do recall something like that.”

“You’ve been in my thoughts ever since.  I could have approached you another way, but Sylvester did say that you shot him on sight.”

“Sylvester,” he said.  “Are the Lambs still coordinating as a whole, or-”

“I defected.  I’m officially dead, but that won’t hold up for very long.”

“Mm,” he said.  “If you talked to Sylvester you know he and I parted on… not the worst of terms.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, her voice a whisper.  She shifted position, and in the doing, she made the harder part of her ribs grate against his.  “But I just-”

He took the opportunity and moved his gun-hand, and made it only inches before something in her seized up, reflexive, the hold on his arm becoming a stranglehold, as tight as his movement had been quick.

As he relaxed, so did she.

“I just really wanted very badly to hunt you, sir,” she whispered “To see if I could.  To be here, like this.”

“Is that so important?” he asked.

“It’s my everything.”

He knew about inflection, about emphasis.  The way she had said it, he absolutely believed it.  That she’d gone as still as she had after uttering those words, not even breathing, her heartbeat barely perceptible as his own heart drummed its war beat, it drew out that statement, begging him to dwell on it.

“You have lines in your face you didn’t have when you pulled the gun on me, Reverend,” she said.

“It’s been many years.”

“Hasn’t it?”

“You’ve changed considerably from that small child.”

“I have,” she said.  “I used to be softer.”

As she said it, she changed position.  The cushions of hip and chest rested heavily on him.

“Now I’m…” she moved one leg away from his arm, bringing it up so it rested across his lower body, bent.  “…Hm.  I had innuendo in mind, but you’re not cooperating.”

“Humor is often lost on me.”

Amusement is, apparently.”

He wondered at his ability to use his arm, with all of its composite mass and muscle, warring with the strength of her one leg.  He was stronger, he suspected, but she had the all-important leverage.  The question was whether he could do sufficient damage before she ended him.

There was a similar problem if he raised his legs up, then brought them down to generate the momentum to stand and try to topple her from where she rested on top of him.  She still had her grip on him.

“It’d be my first time, doing this with an emotional connection,” she whispered.  “You were on my shortlist.  So was Fray, and many of the Lambs.  I wanted it to be special.”

He tensed.

“I’ve had my dalliances, but they were purely physical,” she said.  “Flesh and flesh, with very little meaning.  But this…”

“I think you’re losing sight of what you came here for.”

“…This,” she whispered.  “This would be the sort of instance where I could give someone a happy ending.”

“Except you came here to have a conversation with me, you said.  You’re talking in woulds and coulds.”

She laid her head down across his chest, and she pulled his arm down and in front of her, so the length of his forearm was parallel to her body, hugged close to her, his wrist between her breasts.  The revolver was close to her chin, but his hand was too mangled to do anything particular with it and the angle of the shot was such that it put his own head in the line of fire.

“My passions are reserved for God and for justice,” he said.  “For seeing this greater battle through.  I’d say I’m sorry to disappoint, but in this instance I’m really quite glad.”

“I’m interested in the battle too,” she said.  “Hot blood pumping, muscles tense, the blood, the screaming.  It’s all very lively and interesting.”

Again, inflection and emphasis.  She wasn’t talking about seduction, she hadn’t been from the start, aside from the teases.  That left him to wonder what she meant by ‘first time’, when he had little doubt she meant violence.

Execution with an emotional component?

“Again,” he said.  “We’re getting distracted from what you came here for.  A conversation?”

“A conversation,” she said.  “We would like your assistance.  We’re staging something.”

“What are you staging?”

“If I told you, you’d interfere.  We might welcome some of your involvement and interference, but not at this stage of things.  For now, we want to get their attention.  We have to be indirect.  We want you to allow one of your own to get captured and it’ll need to be someone they know you’d miss.”

“To what end?”

“They’ll confess that you knew about a girl that had attained immortality in Lugh.  That the Baron took her with the intent of marrying her and obtaining her secret, and she fled when the Baron died.”

These things were truth.  He had paid attention to that whole proceeding.  He just couldn’t see where it all led.

“What do I get out of this?”

“A victory.  A true, honest to goodness victory, Reverend.  And it will be one that has implications for the world.”

“A hollow victory, if it’s one I can’t even see the shape of.”

“It’s a victory, and whether it’s hollow or not doesn’t matter.  Unless you’re about to tell me that self-aggrandizement or pride take higher priority than besting them?”

“No.  I won’t say that.”

“We’re prepared to leave you the secret of the Block,” she said.  “As an incentive.”

To say that she now had his full attention would have been disingenuous, as she’d already had it as part and parcel of having his arms in her deathgrip.  Still, he hadn’t expected this.

This was everything he wanted, vague and unfulfilled as it was.

“I could be convinced,” he admitted.

“Yeah?” she asked, raising her head.  In that instance, she sounded very much like the little girl again, and not the young lady of eighteen to twenty years of age.

“Tell me what I need to do, exactly.”

“You sacrifice your pawn, someone you can trust to endure under pressure.  Someone who will experience torture and drugs and will convey only what we need you to convey, either because they’re that capable or because you can manipulate them to that degree.  They’ll tell the Crown that you, the Baron, and others were interested in a miss Candida Gage, who was an imperfect immortal.  She’s in Brichton.  They’ll look there and they’ll follow the trail elsewhere, finding their way into our trap.”

“They’re not gullible.”

“But this will be very convincing,” Helen said.

He considered.  He weighed the merits.

“I’ll want to be in touch.”

“We’ll arrange that,” she said.

He had plans in the works, but they were hollow ones.  Gathered students, projects, wars on multiple fronts, targeted assassinations and kidnappings.  The problem was that so much of the Academy had condensed.  There were more resources in a smaller area, and it made doing the things he wanted to do that much harder.

It was a choice between this vague errand or a hopeless series of battles before his army crumbled in entirety.  The sacrifice of one of his people versus committing the entirety of them to a losing fight.

“Alright,” he said.

“It can’t be you that you send, you know.  They’d be suspicious, and you’d draw more scrutiny than the message did.”

“I know,” he said.

“Good,” she said.  “Perfect.”

That statement uttered, she remained where she was.

Somewhere outside in the camp, someone was rising early.  Likely one of the cooks.  They scuffed the dirt with their footsteps.

“However,” Helen said.  “We might have run into a difficulty.”

“If you’re concerned I’ll stab or shoot you the moment you let go, then we’re starting this arrangement on a bad foot.  There needs to be a modicum of trust,” he said.  He was careful not to point out his injured hand.

“No,” Helen said.  “I’m having trouble letting go.”

“What brand of trouble?”

“My mind accepts that I need to,” she said.  “My body doesn’t agree.”

Her breathing had changed.

“I’m afraid I may break you, despite everything,” she said.  “I was worried about this.”

“This seems like an oversight,” Mauer observed, though he was more nervous than he had been since the beginning.  Was this everything coming full circle from where it had started in Radham?

“It wasn’t an oversight.  It was very sighted,” Helen said.  “We knew I might have this difficulty.”

“A grave mistake then,” Mauer said.

“There were no good answers.  Had it been Sylvester you wouldn’t have heard him out.  Had it been Jessie, you-”

“Who?”

“Jamie.  Had it been Jamie, there would have been difficulty communicating.  You occupy different wavelengths.”

Ah, the one who had read off the list of the supposed dead, to destabilize his hold on the mob in Radham.

“And putting Jamie-Jessie here raises its own questions, because then it’s either Sylvester visiting the others, and that isn’t about to go well, or it’s me visiting them, and I’m not so sure I’m equipped to visit them and then leave again, or to say everything that needs saying.  And if any of us stayed behind-”

“You’re rambling.  Not that I particularly mind knowing just what you’re all up to, but I’d rather address this crisis of yours.”

She flinched.  “Please choose your words carefully.  The way you said crisis, it almost made me snap.”

Words?

“What words are a problem?”

“The word problem is.  So is crisis.  Strong words, words that mean trouble or bad things.  Threats and provocations.”

Were his words, a gift that God had given him, going to now be his end?

He fell silent, waiting.  She was breathing very rapidly now.

“I’m trying to be still,” she said, her voice soft.  “I’m trying to be easy, to be quiet, when every inch of me is wanting culmination, in its bloody, bent glory.”

Mauer waited, tense.  He wasn’t sure those last three words were the sort of words she should be saying.  Challenging her might have ended up being the provocation that made her ‘snap’.

“Mr. Reverend Mauer,” Helen whispered.

“That might be one too many titles,” he said.

“I need you to do something for me,” she said.

“I should be able to oblige,” he said, picking words to sound nonthreatening.  It wasn’t as if he was in a position to refuse.

He was very cognizant of the fact that not long after the cooks were awake, others would check on him, or would expect him to be up and about.  He didn’t sleep much by habit, and his staying in bed would make others worry.  It would make them knock, and intrusion was entirely something that might provoke this Lamb.

“As I ease down, I need you to be still,” she said.  “I’m going to let go of you, and I need you not to do anything.  Don’t flex a muscle, don’t move too quickly, don’t move slowly.  If you do anything, I might react reflexively, and then you’re broken up into useless little bits, or we’re at the very least right back where we started.”

“You need me to be still?”

“I need you to relax, utterly, so I can follow your lead.  I need you to stop fighting.”

Stop fighting.

He hadn’t done that in a very, very long time now.

“I don’t know if I’m capable,” he said, modulating his tone to sound nonthreatening.

“Your life may depend on it, sir,” she said.

“If I was capable of it, I would have done so at some point in the last decade, and I would have… given up entirely,” he said.  He was still trying to avoid aggressive words, like fighting, war, and ‘died’.  “I wouldn’t be here before you now.”

“That does pose a problem,” she said.  “I’m very terribly sorry.”

Her hands were trembling as she held him.

“We’ll try,” he decided, knowing that it was a task they were bound to fail together.

“Trying,” she said.

It was a glacial process, and one that was hard to measure, as she didn’t relax progressively or in a particular order.  It was more as if she was holding steady, trying not to act, and gradually, muscle by muscle, she released her hold.

The moment he had a meaningful chance, he would act.  He wasn’t capable of proper surrender, not like this.

He would act.

She relaxed gradually, and the only sound was his own breathing and hers.  She panted, and the pants grew further in between.

If she took her weight off of him, he would act.  If she let go of an arm, he would act.

“I’m having difficulty moving further,” she said.

And others were waking up throughout the camp.  Was it closer to six now?  Six thirty?

How long before a loud sound spooked his foe here and drove her to act, explosively constricting around him, twisting his limbs out of sockets or snapping his neck?

She’d stopped, and she was frozen now, so unwilling to move a muscle that she wasn’t willing to breathe.

He still had the pistol in his ruined hand.  What had been his good hand, something absolutely vital to him.  His index finger was near the trigger, but the cartilage at the knuckle had been torn to shreds, and the finger might have been broken in one or two places.  It wasn’t mechanically possible to pull that trigger.

His other hand was empty, and she had covered that base too thoroughly.

“Can I move my good arm?” he asked.  “Just a small amount?  It’s cramping.”

He watched her eyes move.  He watched her eyes stop short of looking directly at hand or gun.

If he said gun, she would act, he suspected.  If she looked at a gun, it might be the threat that activated her.

“Yes,” she said.

She knew about the gun.  She knew what he had in play.

His arm moved.  He made it a few inches before she tensed up in multiple places.

“Just a small amount more?” he asked.

“A small amount.”

Again, she tensed.  He sensed the threat of it, read it in her.

She couldn’t bring herself to let go, and he couldn’t move any further, nor could he surrender to help her in letting go.

They remained like that for what might have been a minute.

“Move your shoulder,” she said.

“My shoulder?”

“Yeah,” she said.

Like that, he brought his shoulder forward a fraction, drawing it inward.  It was a movement on his part, and it drew a reaction from her, instinctive, when she was a small fraction of reason in a larger sea of something more dangerous.

She moved her hands, seizing his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

She’d let go of his arm, and he was free to aim the revolver.  He didn’t.

Instead, Mauer moved the revolver as if he was throwing a punch.  He struck her in the shoulder, the angle of the strike meant to catch his own ruined finger to drag it against her bare skin, to pull at the trigger, to shoot.

In the wooden hut formed from an overturned ship hull, the sound was impossibly loud.  The pain of his finger was mild compared to what he was used to, but it distracted, took his mind out of the moment.

He’d caught her across collarbone and upper arm with the bullet, and she’d released her grip on his other arm.  He used the strength it afforded to reach out and grab her- and when she didn’t let go he aimed and used the revolver again, in much the same fashion, grabbing and pulling on the broken finger with his bad hand.

She tumbled to the dirt floor of his quarters around the same time his people arrived en masse, having heard the shots.

He stood, shaky, as they entered.  His lieutenants, his best soldiers, all armed.  The real Wil, and Dalton, and Isaiah and Limps.

“Put the guns away,” he said.

“I’m really not enjoying getting shot so much,” Helen said, from where she lay on the ground.  She had a bullet through one wrist and another bullet through collarbone and upper arm.

Mauer remained silent.

It would be so easy to order her death.  It would have been so safe.

“Can you make your way back on your own?”

“I can,” Helen said.  Slowly, she picked herself up.  She had to do it without much use of her arms.

“Let her pass,” he instructed his people, and he made sure through tone that there was no room for argument.

The crowd parted.

He watched as she walked away.

God had spoken to him through the mouth of a primordial, so to speak.

It said something that his prayers were answered by a monster with the appearance of an angel, this time.  It said something that he was being asked to sacrifice one of his own.

He wasn’t sure it was something positive, but he wasn’t about to quibble.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.d (Lamb) – Twig

Lamb II (Arc 18)

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Lillian stood from the bed, putting the bulk of it between her and Mary.  She approached Jessie, only for Jessie to raise one hand, motioning for her to stop.

Stopping, heart pounding, she turned to Mary.  “What’s wrong with you!?”

A part of her actually, honestly wondered if Mary would turn that gun on her.  Mary had started out as an enemy agent, had then changed hands to the Academy for several months, as she was vetted and leashed, and she’d never really moved to the same tune as the other Lambs when it came to doubting their employers.

It was a fleeting thought, one that ran in contradiction to the ‘we need more time’ line, but as it crossed her mind, she felt her heart as though it was a zoataoan life form, all frantically grasping limbs that simultaneously around the idea and recoiled from it.  What if Mary was always on their side?

No.  But just as fleeting, just as heart-wrenching in its desperate, wild way, was the idea that Mary might have been genuine all along, but still be a trap, with a passcode phrase made to work in the event that the right criteria were met.

Neither was right or fair… but neither was shooting Jessie.

Jessie stood, leaning against the doorframe, one hand to the gouge in her leg.  Lillian imagined the vascularity indexes, the blood maps and tried to use the shorthand to calculate Jessie’s height and body weight.

“Let me bandage it,” she said.  “You’re not in danger, but-”

Jessie was already shaking her head.  “No time.”

“Exactly,” Mary said.  She was still sitting on the bed, still had the gun in hand.

“I’ll be around,” Jessie said.  “There’s blood in the water, so I guess I’ll be dodging the sniffers.”

“There are three,” Lillian volunteered.  “Sniffers, I mean.  I saw two of them getting fed, and usually it’s-”

“Two at home and one on the hunt,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

“Lillian, I know I’m the odd Lamb out in a lot of ways,” Jessie said.  “You could argue I’ve spent less time with the Lambs as a group than anyone.  If people wanted to argue my attachment to the group isn’t as cemented in stone as it should be, I don’t think I could argue it.  But you visited me a lot when I was…”

Jessie floundered at that.

“Blank and relearning?” Lillian offered.

“Yes,” Jessie said.  “I’d like to think we got along.  We talked a lot.”

“We did.  Yes on both counts.”

“You brought me books and articles and things to proofread-”

Jessie paused as Mary stood from the bed, still holding the gun.  One hand still to her bleeding leg, Jessie glanced over her shoulder to check the coast was clear.

“…I’m in a weird place,” Jessie said.  “I want so badly to say that I was cheering for you as much as anyone when it came to you getting your white and black coats, but I’m against unfair competition.  Sy, Mary.”

Lillian nodded.

“I think back to that period when I was empty, blank, and lost, when I try to imagine you possibly giving up almost everything that makes you you.  I empathize, I really do.  I know it’s an idea that deserves a lot of time.  But that’s time I don’t think we have.  I don’t want to guilt you, but…”

Lillian could finish the thought.  “Sy.”

“If you think back and think of Sylvester when he was struggling the most,” Jessie said, “I want to tell you that his good days these days are like that.”

Lillian swallowed.  “Yeah.”

“Except I’d be lying,” Jessie said.  “Because even on a good day today, he’s even worse than any bad day a year or two ago.”

“I don’t think you saw him after he lost Jamie, Jessie,” Lillian ventured.

“I saw him when he lost you,” Jessie said.

Then Jessie looked over her shoulder and stepped backward through the door, before moving out of sight.

That’s not fair, Lillian thought.

None of this is fair.

Mary looked as though she wasn’t even bothered.  Seeing how very cold her best friend was in this moment, Lillian was spooked.  Mary was getting dressed, her movements precise and practiced as she used ribbon and razor wire to position the knives she hid on her person, the ribbon protecting her body from the wire.

We’re all so far apart right nowI don’t think we come back together so much as we crash together in a heap.  Some of us might not even walk away.

“They’re coming in through the building,” Mary said, as she placed a knife in the midst of her hair.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.  She reached out and touched the wall with her hand.  The building creaked, and the impact of footfalls traveled.

“I’ll need help with this, if it’s no trouble,” Mary said.

“You shot Jessie!”

“Yes,” Mary said.  She donned what might have been called a necklace of razor wire, ribbon, and knives.  She must have pulled it off as one interconnected piece before her bath.  “Can you hold this ribbon?”

“You do realize I’m mad at you?  I’m- I’m not even mad.  I’m appalled!”

“That’s allowed,” Mary said.  “But I would still appreciate help.  What I was saying, what Jessie was saying, is there’s no time.  They’re coming upstairs as we speak.  Save me some time and hold the ribbon.  Please.”

“I don’t like this side of you,” Lillian said.  She took the ribbon.

“Jessie is stubborn,” Mary said.  With the one ribbon secure in Lillian’s hands, she was free to weave threads and more ribbons into it, “It doesn’t shine through very often because she’s also soft spoken and she doesn’t tend to take center stage.  It takes unreasonable amounts of force to make her change her mind.  It’s why she can weather Sy as well as she does.  What breaks another person only chips away at Jessie.”

Breaks.  Lillian weighed the word in her mind.  She didn’t like how it sat.

“But by that same token, if she says she’s not going to leave, she won’t leave,” Mary said, “Hold this knife?  Careful, there’s wire attached to it.”

“I know she’s stubborn.  I know who she is.  Who Jamie was, anyway.  I still don’t understand any of that Jessie-Jamie thing, except maybe wanting to leave it behind.  But you shot her.

“Her mind is like a fortress.  Carefully constructed, and very hard to change,” Mary said.  She said it very patiently, but she managed to avoid sounding condescending.  “Unless the foundation is shaken.”

You shot her,” Lillian repeated for emphasis.

Mary sighed.  “I can handle the rest myself.  Get ready, and bring your gun.”

Lillian let go of the knife, letting it fall between Mary’s shoulder blades.

She turned her back.  Getting herself ready was as simple as gathering the clothes and kit she had set aside and getting everything on.  Socks, waterproof boots, hairband, belt pouch…

She hesitated as she held her lab coat up.

Mary gestured.  Incoming.

“Yeah,” Lillian said, still looking at her coat.

She still jumped a little as a knock came at the door.

“We’re getting dressed!” Mary called out.

Soldiers pushed the door open, as if that was more invitation than deterrent.  Mary was buttoning up her shirt, her back to the door.  She had no boots on, and her jacket was closer to the door than to her.

“Ma’am,” the lead soldier said.  He was only a few years older than Lillian and Mary.  He looked at Lillian, and appraised her as she pulled her coat on.  “Doctor, ma’am.”

“‘We’re getting dressed’ is not an invitation to enter,” Lillian said.  She wanted to project authority.  “We could have spoken through the door.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.  “What was the gunshot?  There’s blood on the door.”

“That was me,” Mary said.  “We had an intruder.  An acquaintance.  She’ll be on the run, and she’s bleeding.  I’d follow the blood trail now, because she’ll staunch it or she’ll disappear into the rain, and then you won’t be able to find her.  You’ll want to signal the sniffers as well.”

He took stock of that, then glanced at Lillian.

“Please do as she asks,” Lillian said.

That was as good as an order.  He turned about-face, and he and his men jogged off, following an apparently distinct blood trail.

Lillian gave Mary an unimpressed look.

“If the Infante is coming, we need to look like we’re doing our job,” Mary said.

“I just wish that we could look a little less like we’re doing our job when nobody’s looking,” Lillian said.  “They- you- the Lambs as a whole, if I discount myself, you have so much to deal with, I don’t want us to make that road harder for each other.”

Mary picked up Lillian’s bag and handed it to her.  “You should count yourself among us.  You’ve earned that place.”

Lillian wanted to say something to that, but she wasn’t sure what.

“And while you’re doing that, remember that we’re strong, we’re capable.  Be proud of your strength, Doctor.  Recognize our strengths.  I can make Jessie bleed and set the dogs on her and trust she’ll manage.”

“And that’s different from Sylvester putting a bullet in your knee?”

“Only barely,” Mary said.  “We should walk.”

Lillian held her medical bag, the strap not yet over her shoulder.

“What are you thinking?” Mary prompted.

“That you made the decision without me.”

“Postponed it.”

“And that something happened to make you change direction like this.  What are you thinking?  What even happened Mr. Gage?”

Mary smiled.  She gestured, and Lillian nodded, slinging her bag over her shoulder.  They exited the apartment, and Lillian locked it behind her before placing the key in one of her countless pockets within the lab coat, buckling it before withdrawing her hand.

“I don’t know.  We had a nice conversation,” Mary said.  “I told him some of the truth, and some lies.  I think I put his heart at ease.”

“There are only a few times I’ve seen you this…” Lillian floundered for a word.  She felt flustered, sleep deprived and anxious, too unprepared to tackle everything that was being thrown at her in the here and now.

“Unpleasant?”  Mary asked.

“No.  Yes, but that’s subjective.  I’d almost say cold, but that’s wrong.  You’re this… hard.”

“To think I was saying much the same about Jessie.”

“You’re alike, you two.  You don’t budge.  You set something in place and you hold fast to it.  Except for you it’s something felt, it’s practice and routine and execution.  It’s something constructed, like you say, when it comes to Jessie.”

Mary thought about that.  Before she could say anything, more soldiers appeared.  Mary pointed down the hall, in the opposite direction she and Lillian were traveling, and the soldiers hesitated.  Lillian, for her part, was already drawing her badge from her pocket.  She flashed it to the group.  The Radham crest and a paper with signatures, both in a tidy little leather package.

The soldiers marched off.

Lillian continued, “Where things are flipped around is that it’s normally you on the offense, trying to achieve the goals, while Jamie was always the one on the defensive, being careful, one eye on the clock and on all of the little details.”

“You said Jamie,” Mary pointed out.

“I meant Jamie.  I can’t be definitive about Jessie, because I can’t say where Jamie ends and she starts.  But I know that when they were acting the way I remember them acting, they were Jamie.”

Mary nodded.

More soldiers approached.  The fact that others had no doubt come this way was enough of a point in Lillian and Mary’s favor that they barely glanced at the badge.  There was a lot to be said for image, for the white coat and the medical bag.

“I’m not good at this, for the record.  Wrapping my head around whatever that is.  Jessie’s business.”

“You’re doing fine, I think.”

Lillian was still upset about the way Mary had handled things, about the hardness, that her reflexive impulse was to say something negative back, to snap about being condescended to, maybe.  She bit it back.

She hated being upset with Mary as much as she hated the reasons for being upset.

“If I had to give you an answer, then in talking to my dad, I was thinking about what I wanted.  Something beyond wanting to support you,” Mary said.

“If it’s something I can help you find-” Lillian started.

“You leading an Academy, me training the soldiers there.  Making them elite.  Something honed, that gets the respect of other Academies and imparts some of it on you.  I like to imagine you’re kind, you’d lead an Academy that would do good things, and I could offset that.”

“By being-” Lillian started.  She almost said unkind.  “-hard?”

“It’s not like that.  That’s not the road I want to take to get there.  But I’ve only barely started putting the idea together.  Then Jessie showed up and she asked us to abandon everything.”

“You reacted.”

“No.  Not like that,” Mary said.  “But I don’t like the idea of not getting to think about it and then regretting it.”

The exact opposite for me, Lillian thought.  I’ve sat with this idea in my head since I could write.  I’ve worked at this so hard, built it step by step, assignment after assignment, terrifying day after terrifying day working with the Lambs, bleeding to make headway, my heart breaking to make headway, hurting and helping to kill people to make just another few steps of progress.

Her fingers reached for and clutched the front of her white coat.

They stepped out the front doors of the building, and they stopped there.  Others were approaching.

“What happened?” the Head Doctor asked.  Lillian’s de-facto superior for this whole exercise with the refugees.

“Someone else got in,” Lillian said.  “Someone we might know.”

The Head Doctor’s face transformed as he took that in.  It looked like he was going to say something.

“We told the soldiers to track our intruder, to rouse the sniffers and put them on the trail.  Half the city’s going to be active and looking shortly, especially with the Infante’s arrival imminent.”

“You should have come to me first,” the Head Doctor said.

“Time was of the essence,” Lillian said.  “The kind of intruder this is, the trail goes cold in less than a minute.  A handful of seconds, even.  We specialized in dealing with this kind of threat for a long time.”

The Doctor frowned.

He was a proud man, but he wasn’t an unreasonable one, she hoped.  Which won out?  She had a sense of how others like Helen or Sy handled these things, and confidence was often key.  Showing no hesitation, driving forward.

“The problem with those who specialize is they often miss the big picture,” the Doctor said.

“If your socket-graft patient is facing a cardiac ejaculation and you have a heart and a graft specialist offering you assistance, it would not reflect well on you if you turned them down,” Lillian said.

She was happy that she’d found the word choice mid-sentence, focusing on how things would reflect on the Head Doctor.

“Carry on then,” he said, and he almost sounded like Mary as he said it.  Mary when Mary was being much too focused and intense.

She departed in a way that made it look like she wasn’t fleeing the scene.  She executed a half-dozen little tricks that the Lambs had painstakingly taught her, that she had turned into something natural, and now almost did without thinking.  Quirks of body language, of pacing out her movements.  Mary matched her, and the matching of character and intention without overtly observing Lillian was something exceptional Lillian couldn’t have learned if she had another ten years with the Lambs.

“He wasn’t happy about that,” Mary observed, once they were out of earshot  “You’ll have to end that particular fight later.”

“We know how,” Lillian said.  “We know about the refugees.”

“The value of biding our time with that particular chip, then?”

Lillian smiled.

Things were picking up.  More people, more de-facto guards, soldiers, and military.  Everyone who had a uniform to put on to join the local forces was outfitted or getting there, a gun in hand.  Preparation for the Infante on one hand, not to mention that the local forces had already been on high alert from a few scattered individuals making their way into the town and stirring up trouble or trying to secure accommodations.  There had been fire and sabotage, and now a gunshot from one of the buildings.

“The net is closing,” Mary said.

“I know,” Lillian said.

“I don’t want to go with Jessie,” Mary said.

“I know.  You made that very clear.”

“I wanted time to think.”

“You seem very decided.”

“No,” Mary said.  She sounded exasperated.  “Don’t let me decide.  I can go where you go.  What are you thinking?  You and Jessie were talking about Sy.”

“I don’t want to go to him if it’s just to see how very bad he is on a bad day.  I-” Lillian started to speak, then paused to take note of where she was.  “It’s complicated.”

Her hand moved in a series of gestures.  Reflecting status, then the basic sign for emotion and socialization, all followed by a series of descriptors.  High heart small poison man.

I love him, she thought, translating it.

Add high heart cutting metal dancer, Lillian added.  I love you as well.

Mary reached out, taking Lillian’s hand in her own, giving it a squeeze.

“I don’t know what to do,” Lillian said, whispering.  “I can’t make a decision like this on short notice.”

“No,” Mary agreed.  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?  But this isn’t a short notice decision either, is it?”

Thoughts whirled through Lillian’s mind.  She felt as scared as she had felt when she was new to the Lambs, when Sylvester had been so very nasty, and when the monsters had been so much more incomprehensible.  That had changed over time, seeing some monsters on operating tables and others lying dead on battlefields.  They were still scary, but she understood them now.

She didn’t understand this.

The rain was pattering down, and the water traveled in tiny contained rivers, between the folds and slats of wood throughout the city.

Soldiers were everywhere, patrolling, scouting areas for possible trouble, hunting for Jessie, or hunting for any refugees that might have gotten in.  Others had collected near the gate, with a bulk of them being stitched forces, massed in case the refugees beyond the gates used the opening of those gates to rush within.

There was a barking sound, then a bark of gunfire further down the street.  Lillian felt her blood run cold.  It ran colder still when she saw the soldiers in question.  They’d raised and fired their rifles, almost casually, tagging their target.  The barking – a sniffer?

Jessie?

She did her best to hide her emotion, to bury the tells and walk like nothing was particularly wrong.

The target was one of the refugees, it looked like.  They had been dashing down the street, going by how the blood splatters were spaced out, as if they’d continued to run for another five strides, with a bullet hitting them each time their foot touched ground.  Now they lay in a heap, bleeding.

She wanted to help them.  She wanted to do something so badly.

“It all feels so far away,” Lillian reminded herself of what they’d been talking about.  “I want to be there, at the destination, but I’m so very sick of this journey.  I’m… I know I could do it, but I don’t know how much longer you’ll be with me.  The others too.  It becomes me and Duncan and Ashton, with the new Lambs.  It’s so much mud to wade through to get to the end.  So much looking past the bad, telling myself I’ll be able to fix things when I get to the end.”

“You’re worried you’ll change before the end.”

“I’m worried a part of me already has,” Lillian said.  “I’m worried I won’t have anyone with me by the time I get there, and then who keeps me on the straight and narrow?  Who keeps me sane?”

“You’re looking to the Lambs for sanity?” Mary asked.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

The gate at the north end of the city cracked open.  There was shouting from beyond the gate, of refugees.

But the Infante was making his entrance in style.  Along his trip to this town on Radham’s very periphery, the noble had picked up an entourage.

The entourage had been changed to be uniform.  Lillian recognized the work, and connected it to what she had seen written about in articles as theory, only months ago.  The Chrysomallon.  Drawn from an effect seen very rarely in nature, they ate rust and they absorbed the metal into their bodies.

In practice, they were quadruped warbeasts and biped soldiers.  All were large and muscled, though the muscle wasn’t always symmetric.  Shells formed around heads, making the soldiers resemble gladiators, the warbeasts appearing to be great reptiles with heads encased in helmets.  All of them had shells crusting their bodies elsewhere, a mingling of actual iron, mollusc shell, and keratin, like that of the fingernail.  The metal was black, the keratin pale, and the combined effect something like a translucent marble.

They walked in procession, and almost effortlessly beat back or struck down any refugees or other troublemaker who ventured too close.  It gave them a kind of aura, where people backed away from their presence.

Out of time.

It’s not possible to make this decision, is it?  There’s no magic answer.

“I haven’t seen my father,” Mary remarked.  “It would be nice if he got out alright.”

Lillian glanced at her friend.

“If only because he’s a contact we could use,” Mary said.

“I suppose,” Lillian said.  “He’s been kind, all considered.”

“He has,” Mary said.

The parade was making its way into the city, and the Infante’s carriage appeared.  It was drawn by the largest of the warbeasts, one twice the size as the other reptilian hulks with its helmet and patches of grown-in plate mail.

Lillian turned away before the Infante was so far into the city that she would be obligated to bow and to stay bowing until he gave the go-ahead to stand.  She didn’t want this to be the deadline.  She wanted more time and she wasn’t sure if she could even come any closer to an answer if she had it.

The Infante was as evil a man as she’d ever come across, if it was true that he was leveraging plague and black wood to grind away at the Crown States, so it could be left to go fallow for future generations, if he was complicit in the Block.

She felt almost nauseous, her heart hammering, as if she was facing down any of the worst monsters, and its sights just so happened to be set on her.  Except it wasn’t any monster, she was fairly sure.  It was the decision.  Every passing minute made it worse.  Striding away from the street with Mary in tow made it worse still.

She remembered a desperate Sy calling to Jessie for help, and for an instant, she considered doing that.

In that, at least, she found a glimmer of an idea.  It wasn’t an answer, or even a path to an idea, but it beat doing nothing.  She gestured, indicating a building.

It was, as it turned out, a mostly empty building, guarded only by a skeleton crew.  It was government, a local politician’s office, and she didn’t even need to flash her badge to get in.  The white coat fluttered around her legs, and it counted for a great deal.

There was that, at least.

“It’s early afternoon?” she asked.  “Hard to tell with the weather and my nap.”

“Early afternoon,” Mary said.

Lillian nodded.

She made her way through the empty office until she stood at a desk.  A telephone sat there.

Picking up, she pressed the button.

“Operator speaking,” the voice came across fuzzy, in and out from half second to half second, waxing and waning in time with the cumulative heartbeats of a school of organisms somewhere along the line.  “How may I connect you?”

I want to speak to my father, Lillian thought.

She set the earpiece down on the hook, and then stared at the phone.

She couldn’t even say it aloud.

Everything about her just felt like a morass of things she thought she wanted, sitting in the way of things she wanted but couldn’t wrap her head around.

She thought through all of the thoughts she had tried to articulate as they’d left the apartment.  The difficulty in deciding.  The fact that she’d be disappointed in herself and she would be disappointing people like Sy and Mary who had given so very much to help her find her way, if she didn’t carry forward to get her black coat.

But she would be disappointed if she didn’t go.

It all contributed to her feeling trapped, panicking as the walls closed in and none offered anything good.

What would she have said to her father?  What would he have said?

That he was upset that she hadn’t reached out in months.  Their relationship had foundered ever since she had learned they had tried to delay her from getting her black coat.  If they’d had their way she wouldn’t even have her white coat now.

“I remember when Sylvester left.  He said goodbye to me, and then he grabbed you and left to  go fight the Baron.”

“Yes,” Mary said.

“I remember he said, if I couldn’t get my black coat, it would kill me,” Lillian said, and her voice was quiet.  “I can’t even remember how I worded my response, if I even verbalized it, but I know I wanted so badly to say no.  That he was wrong.  I wanted to say it and I saw the look on his face and I told him yes instead.”

“You do, I think,” Mary said.  “You want the black coat.”

“Did, maybe,” Lillian said.  “I think I wish I’d gone with him.  I wish more of us had gone with him.  Maybe we could have done more about the plague, or stopping the black wood.  We could have done something about the Duke.”

“We all did what we thought was right at the time.”

That was it, wasn’t it?  It was the complete wrong answer and it was the complete right answer at the same time.

What had the Head Doctor said?  That she hadn’t looked at the big picture.  She’d tunnel-visioned in.

She’d failed to keep the key points in mind, the most important lessons she’d learned.

Trusting the other Lambs was one.

She wanted to go.  She might even be able to convince Mary.  The questions, the doubts, even if Sylvester was as bad as Jessie said, Sy, Jessie, Helen, Duncan, Ashton, Mary, they could all help find the answer.

They were so capable when they were together.

But how to even communicate that to Mary?

She felt relief and new fear in conjunction, and she knew it was close to what Mary had felt on deciding her direction only to have it threatened.  The sick, nauseous, trapped, zoatoan feeling hadn’t left Lillian’s breast since Jessie had been shot, and it was only now abating.

Which made it feel almost ten times worse as the front door to the building opened wide.  Hinges creaked and groaned in the opening, because the hand that pushed the door moved the door at an odd angle, bent the metal and tugged at the screws and nails.  The door would deform from the action.

The Infante was capable of gentleness, and he’d chosen to damage the door.

He spread his arms, as if to welcome himself more than to greet them, magnanimous.

“Lambs,” he said, and his voice reverberated through the empty space.

Automatically, Lillian dropped to her knees.  She could feel the floor of the building shake with each heavy footstep of the noble.  As she stared at the ground, her eyes were wide.

“I believe you’ve heard,” the Infante spoke.  “This town has fallen to plague and blight.”

It was a set of statements that played into each other, and they implied two very bad things.

That the Infante knew about the Duke, for one, and that they’d been communicating with the man.

And that he’d condemned this town.

“A tragedy, to be sure.  A great loss for the Academy.  Every single resident has been lost, slain by circumstance, you Lambs included.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.e (Lamb) – Twig

Lamb III (Arc 18)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Jessie peered through the binoculars.  Her vision was hampered by the fact that her view was through windows and that those windows had branches dividing panes of glass.

The Infante had cornered Lillian and Mary.  His soldiers were gathering in the area surrounding the building.  The Helmed, Jessie termed them.  Beast and biped, they were moving out through the city, alongside soldiers and doctors leading teams of warbeast and stitched.  They moved with a mission, securing major points, the gates to the city, the intersections of major roads, and the larger institutional buildings, like the hospital, the schoolhouse, and the merchant’s hall.

They were securing the city.  The fact that the city was surrounded by refugees complicated matters.  If the populace realized what was going on and fought back, they would have to contend with a fight within their city and enemies outside the gates.  Jessie had seen this play out in too many permutations to have any illusions about what was really happening.

The Infante intended to squash this city, and from his body language, he intended to do much the same to Lillian and Mary.

Jessie would need to help.

Her mind was architecture, every memory a brick set in place.  She thought of her memories as ‘cards’, coded in placement and color and in terms of what they were, but the mental construction wasn’t a house of cards – it was far more stable.

Taking stock of everything she had collected since visiting the city, touching on all points of reference, she reoriented her memories as if they were a pop-up book coming to life, the individual rows and columns taking a geographical position in her head.

She could, at the speed of thought, move through the city, analyzing the details she had catalogued.  She had noted details about houses and what she had seen when looking through windows, and she could cross reference that to make educated guesses about which houses might have guns on display or in places she could access.  She could think of four places where munitions or things she could turn into munitions were stored.  There were places she could set fires, if she wanted to alert the populace and change the tone of things.  There were places where civilians would be gathered, and she could go there to make an appeal.  In rural areas, the Crown had a different image.

She thought of Jamie’s writings about Mauer and his rhetoric, about Sylvester’s rhetoric, and she had some tenuous ideas on what she might try to say.

Her recent failure to get Lillian and Mary on board sat heavy with her, casting doubt on her ability to actually execute those ideas.

None of those things were likely to stop the Infante.

Enemy forces were drawing too near.  The Infante had stopped, only periodically taking a step forward.  He was talking.

Jessie focused on his mouth.

-control

The Infante spoke the word as the last utterance of a longer line, and then he smiled.  He held up his hand as if he had something in it, but it was empty.

Eighty feet away, at the other end of the expansive office, Mary kept one hand on Lillian’s shoulder and held a knife in the other.  The Infante didn’t even seem to recognize the knife as a weapon.

Jessie stood straight, drew her gun, and aimed high.  Her brain worked through countless similar cases, times when she had aimed high, aimed low, the various wind conditions, and the places the bullets had struck home.

She aimed, and she fired, wincing at the sound, binoculars still held in place.

She didn’t see the bullet strike home so much as she saw the white dot appear on the building’s surface, a short distance to the left of the window.

She aimed again, adjusting, then fired twice in quick succession, before dropping the binoculars.  Soldiers in other areas were turning their heads at the sound of gunfire.  They hadn’t seen her, but she was concealed, tucked into the shadows between a window that jutted out of a rooftop and the rooftop itself.

In the distance, the window shattered.  She might have hit the Infante but she doubted she’d accomplished anything.

It would have to do – a distraction, and a signal to the other Lambs that she was here.  There were two ways to read the tap code, depending on if they’d heard the initial shot or just the two follow-up shots.  If it was just the two follow-up shots, the code was ‘no’.  No, she wasn’t here, no she wasn’t able to help just yet, no they couldn’t rely on her.

If it was the first shot, then two in close succession, it was the same meaning as the sixth gesture, the flat hand with fingers curled in, a sign that meant to hold position, patience, to wait, to guard something.

Protect yourselves.  Hold on.  I’ll try to help, just give me time.

Jessie moved from her hiding place at the side of a window on a rooftop to the ground, and then wove her way through the streets.  She hadn’t decided on a destination or answer yet, but she had a sense of where the greatest number were.  It was a path that took her directly away from the other Lambs.

“Hello,” Lillian’s voice was hesitant.

He wasn’t confident enough in his speech to give a proper answer.  The memories and instructions in his head were sparse, lessons learned over the past several days, and he was inexperienced in bringing them to bear.  It was slow going, ensuring everything was organized in ways that wouldn’t get in his way later, slower going to reflexively tap that information.  He knew the words, but bringing tone into things was complicated.  Even thinking about gestures, the simple act of raising his hand in greeting, it was hard.

“Yeah,” she said, and her voice broke just a little bit.  She was sad.  “Hi there, Jamie.  I thought I’d stop in.”

She wasn’t the only one that was sad.  Jamie was miserable and lonely, and the way the doctors talked past him without actually talking to him had made it far worse.

“I’m guessing you’re overloaded,” Lillian said.  “You’ve had too many lessons today, and you don’t need me putting anything more on your plate?”

He wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Lillian kept talking, “I have homework.  I thought I’d sit, keep you company.  I- I brought candy, from this shop downtown.  You liked it, before, and it makes good medical sense, sugar for the brain, and…”

She held a small paper bag, raising it like she was going to hand it out, but then she stopped short, hesitating.

She broke through whatever was holding her back, pushing herself, and handed him the bag.

“Don’t- don’t chew it,” she said.  “You’ll break your teeth.”

He nodded, reaching into the bag, retrieving a hard candy, and putting it in his mouth.

Lillian took a seat at the desk, moving papers aside, getting her bag, and taking books out.  She rubbed at one eye and swore under her breath.

“I told myself I wouldn’t cry.  Except, as Sy keeps saying, I’m a bit of crybaby.  I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

Jamie would have gestured, but Lillian was sitting so Jamie was to her left and behind her.  Instead, Jamie ventured a, “No.”

“Jamie was a good friend.  He was gentle, well read, patient, and all around lovely.  We all miss him terribly.  I didn’t want my visit to be all tears, you know.  It’s why I waited just a little while.  Turns out I’m crying some anyway.”

“It’s okay,” Jamie said.

“I’m sure you’ll be lovely too,” Lillian said.  She managed a smile.

“I hope so,” Jamie said.  His overtaxed mind was working hard to catalogue all of the things about Lillian’s words and movements, the little details about her, the taste of the hard candy, even the ambient changes in the room.  It was too much stimuli, but Lillian’s presence in the room helped on other fronts.

Jamie stood from the bed that had been placed next to his ‘throne’, the edifice that connected him to the greater Caterpillar.  He approached Lillian, watching over her shoulder as she penned out her homework.

She looked up at him, and she smiled again.  She raised one hand, and rubbed his upper arm.  Warm, kind, unsure.

If this was what the Lambs were, then things might be okay after all.

She hated leaving Lillian and Mary.

Jessie might as well have put her foot through a tripwire as she rounded the corner.  She’d tracked the movement of the soldiers throughout the city, watched as they mobilized, and she had a sense of how fast they moved, ideas on where they could go.  It was, for example, very unlikely that they would backtrack.  It was unlikely they would take winding courses through narrower alleys and roads.  They would move along main roads unless the narrower paths took them to a place of interest.

From there, it was simply a question of keeping track of timing, adjusting the cards and knowing the most likely positions of the enemy.  People were predictable.

The tripwire, so to speak, wasn’t a person.  Jessie had chosen speed over silence as she ran, shoes tapping the road, and something had heard.  She recognized the snort, not from this creature, but one very like it, and she recognized the snuffling, the drum of paw on road.

Sniffers.  The warbeasts were canine, large, and covered in rolling locks of white fur, their eyes large and unblinking, their noses like something sculpted, highlighting wide nostrils with ridges of tissue and flesh.

They had gone to great lengths, working with Mabel and the rest of the Green team to produce a countermeasure to these warbeasts and things like them.  They had released their own warbeasts, ones that carried scents almost indistinguishable from their own, and on sending children to West Corinth and other locations, they had had the children release the countermeasures.

Jessie’s leg hurt where she had been shot.  It had been a graze, barely an injury at all, but now that she was running it was worse.  Worse still when she was running with renewed intensity.  The warbeast was faster than her.

Her mind’s eye still held the likely positions of everyone present, blurrier in parts where their objectives or paths were less sensible.

She made a beeline for a covered wagon she had seen two minutes ago, trusting it would be present.  She would be able to reach it before the warbeast reached her, but what happened when she got that far was a bigger question.

She could remember the construction of the wagon, and drew correlations to wagons like it.  She’d seen the exteriors and interiors.  She’d seen the wagon-driver’s bench, and the steps leading up to it.

Even before it came into view, she was mentally reciting the steps she would need to take.  She rounded the corner, coming face to face with the wagon and the stitched horses that drove it.  She saw the driver, who was craning his neck to try and peer past obstacles and see what was going on elsewhere in the city, with soldiers and the Helmed fanning out.

She’d very nearly been run over in crossing paths with the wagon that in dodging the trotting horses her shoulder brushed with one of theirs.

“Get down!” she shouted, as she leaped, setting foot on steps at the side of the wagon that she’d barely had time to verify were indeed there.  As the sniffer shied away from the horses, she stepped up to the bench, climbing over the driver.  She stepped onto the bench, the back of the seat, then the covered part of the wagon.

It would have been easy to set foot on cloth and have her foot go through it, but wooden bracing kept the cover in place, giving it a nice arch shape.  She carefully set foot on the places where the bracing was likely to be strongest, hidden beneath the canvas cloth, and hopped over to the low-hanging roof.

The sniffer, in hot pursuit, crashed into the side of the wagon, demolishing a share of it where the steps were.  The driver had thrown himself down into the groove where his feet and bags normally rested, sheltered by the overhanging bench.  He yelled as the sniffer clawed and clambered up, an awkward vertical climb onto a moving vehicle on the sniffer’s part.  Four hundred pounds of warbeast managed to climb up so it was partially astride the seat and bench, lunged to follow Jessie’s route, and collapsed into a heap of canvas cloth, shattered wooden bracing, and whatever supplies the wagon had been carrying within.

“Go!” the driver shouted, “Git!”

The instructions coincided with him hurling himself off the side of the wagon.  The horses galloped, carrying their cargo away – the cargo being a warbeast that was fighting to free itself of cloth, netting, and uneven footing.

It would get free and it would be back.  It was what the sniffers did.

She wished she was brave enough to follow it as it collapsed onto the wagon, to fight it there, while it struggled, and to put a blade through a vital spot, but that wasn’t her strength.  Sy might.  Mary would.  Gordon could’ve.

She would have to do something bold to answer the Infante.  She was of little use in a direct confrontation and getting involved would potentially risk Mary and Lillian.  It wouldn’t do to step in in their defense only to find out that they were negotiating, downplaying their involvement with her and Sylvester, or taking another course.

A gun wouldn’t work, and neither would a knife.

There were other options.

The city had been aware and prepared for war against the refugees beyond the gates for some time now.  That meant they’d needed soldiers, guns, weapons and stockpiles for a potential siege.  There would be banks of stitched waiting and charging in case they were needed, and there would be chemical weapons of war.

Wiring systems had connected the banks of stitched and the biovoltaic generators in nearby buildings, and Jessie had seen those wires, noting them.  Buildings that housed the soldiers who were on call for confrontation at any time were located in specific areas, with certain required dimensions.  There were regulations, and Jessie could think back, go over the books and papers she had read, and recite them by heart.

From there, it wasn’t terribly difficult to work out which buildings held other stockpiles.  Close to the gate, certain building sizes, reinforcement, set with a certain distance from other critical buildings and infrastructure, in case of accidental or intentional detonation…

Her enemy here was watching for trouble from the refugees beyond the gate and focused on a potential war with people within the city.  They milled throughout the area surrounding the gate, but it wasn’t with an eye for danger.

She found the lock, and she recognized the make and model.  She didn’t pick it – settling for jamming her knife into the lock itself.

Once within, she immediately went to the mortars, collecting one, and a strapped-together stack of rounds in tidy wooden boxes.  Both the mortar and the strapped-together crates were arranged so they had wheels on one end and handles on the other, so they could be pulled along.  Checking the coast was clear, she hauled them behind her.

Minutes passed as she got from the gate to a point close enough to the government office that Mary, Lillian, and the Infante were in.  Forty precious seconds were wasted, waiting for a patrol of ten men to jog down the street.  She could have chanced thirty, but there was a risk they would have heard the wheels of the mortars clicking and clattering over the wooden road.

She kept an eye out for the sniffer as she got to where she needed to be.  She climbed a fence to stand on it, looking clear of shrubbery and short trees.

Her heart pounded, and it wasn’t because of the exertion of hauling a ninety-one-point-seven pound contraption and the rounds behind her.

I’m too used to working with Sy, trusting he’ll scrape on by, find answers, and manage while I’m getting things organized.

She almost didn’t want to look.  There was no architecture, tag, or system of threads that really touched on why she had such a bad feeling.

Only her knowledge of the threat the nobles posed.

The Infante had barely moved from where he stood, but his forces had closed around the building.  Mary was holding one side of her face, moving unsteadily.  She had tried something and been struck, at a glance.

Two men stood on either side of the Infante.  They looked like soldiers, but they weren’t officers.  Both stood in ways that made them lopsided, as if they couldn’t hold themselves entirely upright.  Both were coughing, or doing something like coughing, with whole-body jerks.  As unsteady as they were, their upper bodies almost flopped around with each of the jerky little motions.

Lillian looked so very scared.  She had a pistol in hand, not pointing it at anything.

The Infante spoke, his lips moving.  “Obedience in action alone is worth nothing to us.”

Mary responded.  “Obedience has to be earned.”

The Infante smiled, arms wide.  “Obedience is taken, clearly.”

Lillian shook her head.  Then, as she mouthed the word ‘no’, she put the barrel of the gun to her temple.

It said a great deal that Mary didn’t stop her.

Shock gripping her, her senses shaken to the point she could barely track her own breathing and heartbeat, Jessie hopped down from the fence.  The mortars were in an older style, but she was happier with that, knowing they were similar to the ones that their rebels had been devising.  She had a larger catalogue of memories when it came to those, to trajectories and patterns of fire, and they weren’t so old that the barrels weren’t rifled.

It was fast to set up the mortars, to deploy them.  She hadn’t actually performed the task herself, but she had seen it done, knew the motions.  Only once or twice did she run into snarls, moments where her shaking hands didn’t cooperate.

She cut a strap, tore open the wooden box with its lone shell within, and loaded the mortar.

She couldn’t see the Infante from this angle, couldn’t peer through the window.  But she could extrapolate, imagine where he would be if he’d advanced at his typical slow pace, she could place him if he’d remained where he was.

He wasn’t one to step back.  He wasn’t one to meander.  It was a narrow range of possibilities, and she chose an angle that aimed to put the mortar in the middle of that range.

She held her arm to one side of her head, the hand at the end of that arm clapped over her ear, and she fired.  The blast of the mortar took the breath she’d been holding and shook it loose.

Teeth grit, she slapped the wooden box away from the top of the stack, tore away the lid, and retrieved the next shot.  The metal of the mortar was hot to the touch as she loaded the next round-

She heard the distant gunshot, followed soon after by another.  Again, she hopped onto the fence.

The sniffer could be on her trail any second.  Nearby soldiers might have heard the origin or seen the mortar start on its course.  She had no time.  No time.

The idea echoed Mary’s words.

If only they’d come.

She looked through the binoculars, to see where the shot had landed, to see how the scene had played out in the wake of it.

The two soldiers that had been flanking the Infante were on the ground.  The side of the building had been torn open, the blast taking out much of the structure.  The devastation and fragments of ruined building were scattered around the Infante, even some splinters and dust on him.  It hadn’t penetrated the side of the building, hadn’t actually hurt him, where it should have at least bowled him over with the shockwave.  His head was turned in her direction.

Mary and Lillian ran for it, taking the opportunity to go for the doors.  Both fired their guns at the Infante as they ran.

Again.  Another shot, with no time to waste.  Jessie hopped down, dragging the mortar to one side, changing the angle.

She fired again, hoping to time it to catch the Infante as he followed them out of the building.

A third shot.  The last of the ones she’d been able to bring with her.  Again, she loaded it so she could fire as quickly as possible after glancing at the scene.  She worried she wouldn’t have a view of the scene, that intervening buildings would block her.  It would mean shooting with a higher risk of hitting Mary as she engaged the noble lord.

She had prepared the shot and was ready to open fire when she heard the sound behind her.

Her memory had perfectly transcribed a dozen individual snorts and snuffles like it.

Barely looking, she hauled the mortar around, hitting the catch that kept it anchored at a set angle.  It collapsed, the barrel dropping.

She didn’t have time to protect her ears as she saw the sniffer dash toward her.  It was mid-air when she hauled back on the trigger.

As such things went, the explosion was such that she was only barely out of the worst of it.  The second-worst of it was bad enough to knock her over, to send her glasses flying from her face.

Overkill, to shoot a warbeast with a mortar and turn it into bloody ruins.  It only stood a chance of being sufficient harm for the Infante.

She didn’t even look for her glasses.  Her first three steps saw her traveling in a steep arc, one step north, one step northwest, one step west.  She bounced off of a wall.  Her vision didn’t focus and her ears rang and the Lambs were in danger.

Danger enough that Lillian believed it right to shoot herself rather than let the Infante do what he’d planned to do to her.

Jessie didn’t find her bearings, but fought for them, clawed them forth.  She searched her memories for tricks and found little.  Similar instances were still too different from this to be any kind of resource.

This was new ground, such as it was.  A desperate road.

The second shot hadn’t hit the Infante.  She wasn’t too surprised.  He would have delayed, anticipated it, or listened for the distant sound of the mortar firing before its projectile reached him.

He was faster than he looked.  All power, all force.  Jessie was far enough away she couldn’t reasonably feel it, but she imagined the ground shaking with every footfall.  He was heavy, and he had no difficulty at all in moving that mass.

Mary ran and she dragged Lillian behind.  It meant that when the Infante reached them, it was Lillian he grabbed.

Jessie could hear the scream.  It was a sound she’d never wanted to hear from her friend, her romantic rival, her fellow bookworm, though she’d never been the bookworm Jamie had been.

“Taken,” the Infante pronounced.  “It is time you all realize you exist at our mercy.”

Mary aimed her gun, and she opened fire, putting bullets in the Infante’s head, emptying the gun.  He had to close his eyes and twist his head to one side, but he barely reacted outside of that.

“Please,” Mary said.  “Please.  I’ll lead you to Sylvester.”

“If you do, it will be because I will it,” the Infante said.  “Not in any exchange.  I brook no disloyalty to the Crown.”

Lillian thrashed, fought to escape the one-handed grip on her neck and shoulder.  The struggles increased as the Infante lifted her, bringing her to a position where her back was to his chest.  His hand moved to cover her nose and mouth.

“Lord Infante!” Jessie screamed.

“Jamie Lambsbridge,” the Infante said.  He turned slightly, to better face the two girls.  “So to speak.”

“I know-” she started.  The words trailed off.

The angle the Infante stood at gave her a view of Lillian.  She could see Lillian’s continued struggle, and she could see Lillian’s eyes roll back in her head.  Lillian’s throat distended, then distended more, until it threatened to split down the middle, as if an ordinary-sized man was shoving his full arm down her windpipe.  Her body arched, hands clawing at the Infante’s, then at open air.

“Stop,” Jessie said.

“I’m most sure that you know how to properly address nobles,” the Infante said.

Mary took that opportunity to attack, approaching at a run.  The Infante’s hand warded her off, at first, but two swift kicks with blades revealed from her boots allowed her to dig the knives in, and use those footholds as points to leap forward.  She lunged for his face.

Treating Lillian as if she weighed nothing at all, he used the hand that held the Lamb’s medic to swat Mary out of the air.  She landed on her feet, ready to renew her assault, and stopped short as the Infante let Lillian go.

Lillian dropped to the ground, still writhing, coughing and gagging in an attempt to dislodge that which had found its way into her throat.  Two tendrils like that of an octopus, one large, one small, both encrusted with hornlike growths, were thrashing out of her mouth.  The longer one groped at her nostril, looking for a way in and finding it.

“Lil-” Jessie started.

The tendrils contorted, becoming squat, rather than long, and in the doing, produced spikes.  Sharp points penetrated Lillian’s nostril, cheek, and three points at her throat that Jessie could see.  Lillian spasmed in one moment, then went limp and still in the next.

The recent disorientation of the nearby explosion coupled with the disorientation of this to all catch up with Jessie, dropping her to her knees.

“Stand up,” Mary said.

Jessie’s hands shook.

“Stand up, Jessie,” Mary said.  “I know we’ve had recent differences, but this is where we need to be together.”

The Infante almost ignored them.  He held up one hand, and one tendril like that of the horror he’d just unleashed on Lillian was slurping its way back into a slit in his heavy palm.  As it disappeared within, the slit closed, indistinguishable from a line in the noble’s hand.

“Stand up,” Mary said, as if it was a refrain.

Jessie did.

“A weapon of war, this,” the Infante spoke.  “I keep an assortment, change it out, to remind myself.  These ones, like many of the ones I carry, are the sort we rain down on battlefields and unleash on places under siege-”

“Shut up,” Mary said.

“-to terrorize, destabilize, and to create openings.  Marvelously elegant and nuanced, believe it or not-”

Shut up!

“-and only one of five weapons I bear with me today.”

“Shut up, you malignant child!”  Mary roared the words.  A single tear touched her cheek.

“Why would I do as you say?” the Infante asked.  “What purpose does it serve?  What do I gain?  I will not stop speaking.  I will let you know exactly what happens next.  You will try to destroy me, and you will fail.  I will make you an example much as I did her.”

Jessie breathed hard.  What were the options?  What chance was there?

“Shall I make you bear the plague, Mary Cobourn?  It’s a burden, to carry this one.  For every hour I leave it unattended, I must spend an hour under the knife, ensuring it doesn’t get a grip on me.  Would you like it if I put you up for display?   I could do it so that as it crawls over you, it makes you a diorama.  A centerpiece to the greater scene, as Mauer’s God is in Lugh.”

Mary straightened.  She held a knife in one hand, the other hand empty and behind her.  A fencer with a foil, but her ‘foil’ was only nine point seven inches long.

Mary took a step back, adjusting her footing as she did so.  As angry as she was, she moved in a measured, practiced way.  Jessie had seen the practice.

“This isn’t a strength of mine.”

“I know.  But I also know you have the capability,” Mary said.

“I’m not him,” Jamie said.  “I’m not my predecessor.”

“Again, I know that.  But there’s no reason to think you couldn’t do it if you wanted to.  Let’s try it again.”

Jamie almost said no.  Every part of him hurt, and it was a hurt deep enough that he couldn’t tell if it was the bones or the muscle protesting.  His legs had been strained until they were columns of throbbing, and his breath hurt in a ragged way, as if he was breathing in the coldest air – and it wasn’t that cold out.

But he could see Mary’s expression.

They’d just lost Gordon, there was a void yawning in the midst of them, and for Mary, this was how she dealt with loss.  It was the relentless, mad way she dealt with everything.  Working harder, pressing on.

He was so worried about how Sylvester was doing, about Sylvester’s conversation earlier in the day, a hint to Duncan that he wasn’t satisfied with the status quo.

There was a rift, a schism, and it looked like the group would split at any moment.

Better to give Mary what she needed and try to bind them all just a bit closer together, than to help that schism open any further.

“You can’t expect it to be like it is with Sylvester,” Jamie said.

“I don’t.  It won’t be.  But I know that if and when you learn it, you’ll remember it.  So let’s learn it.”

“I’ll need a weapon.  Another weapon, anyway,” Jamie said, holding out his hand, as he took a step back, then to the right, matching Mary’s movements.

Jessie took a step back and to the right.  She held out one hand, and saw the flash of the knife moving through the air.  She didn’t look up or away from the Infante.  She trusted.

The knife almost bounced out of her hand, the blade nicking the webbing between finger and thumb, but it landed, and she was able to close her fingers around it.

Mary lunged, and it was the kind of lunge that was meant to do terminal damage.  No nonsense, no question.  They had rehearsed the steps, but it wasn’t rote.  There were paces to go through, but it wasn’t the same attack every time.  There were trends but no rules.  What was a stab one time would be throwing a knife the next, reeling it back in with a pull on razor wire.

It was about attack and movement.  Never defense, never pausing.  Jamie knew to move only because Mary was first to attack.  She was more comfortable attacking, deciding that first move and dictating what would follow.

Jessie moved, trying to maintain a position that would keep the Infante perfectly between them, unable to look at the two of them at the same time.  It was a distraction, something that begged a moment’s thought from the opponent while Mary moved in.

Again, Mary used the boot-knives to penetrate flesh, to scale the Infante as if he were a mountain to be hurdled, positioning herself to attack the face and head-

He reacted quickly, slapping Mary down before she even got that far.

Mary would only redouble the assault if Jessie didn’t seize the scant opportunity afforded her.  It wasn’t much of an opportunity.  A half-second, while Mary was adjusting her footing.  Failure to capitalize on this meant only misery, a break in the exercise, a return to the beginning steps, where Mary was on the offensive.

Jessie attacked.  Slashes, cuts.  A man this large needed support, and every cut was at the knee, with one chance swipe at the ankle as the Infante raised one foot.

It was brief, the initial foray meant to only let the Infante know she was present.  All to grab attention, to seize it.  Almost without having stopped after being struck at, Mary returned to the fray, going low this time, tumbling down into a roll, before striking up, at the Infante’s inner thighs and genitals.

The memories merged with reality.  This was where Jamie grabbed Mary, to put her off balance.

Jessie grabbed Mary, hauled her to her feet, pulling her up and away as the Infante shifted his footing, kicking and only grazing Mary.  As adroit as she was, Mary wouldn’t have successfully gotten out of the way.

Jamie matched strikes with Mary, again, never pausing, never defending, always either moving or attacking.  Jessie did the same.  In this, they attacked in concert, two sets of attacks from two directions.  The Infante moved to deal with Mary, who was no doubt cutting more effectively, and Jessie redoubled her attack, gripping the knife handle with both hands to add more strength to the cuts.

It was meditative, it might even have been calming, if the circumstances were different.  Pain and fear and desperation flattened out, the frenzied immobility of shock meeting the peaks and valleys of highest and lowest emotion and finding something in between.  It was easier to stick to the recitation, the dance they had worked through, Mary’s therapy.

The problem, then and now, was that Jessie wasn’t a fighter.  In this, she was much like Sylvester, dependent on another.  The Infante changed tacks, choosing to go after the weaker of the two interlinked individuals, his sights falling on her.

The moment he turned on her, Mary was on his back, dealing as much damage as she could with her blades.  She produced loops of razor wire, and they moved almost impossibly slowly through the air as they approached the Infante’s head, threatening to wrap around his face.

He struck at Mary, then swiped at the wire, brushing it out of the air and lacerating the back of his hand with the force of the movement and the sharpness of the wire.

He was strong, and Mary wasn’t invincible.  But her technique and skill was such that she could move with the blows.  Razor wire connected elsewhere allowed her to haul with one arm, and pull herself slightly out of position.  Knives jutting out of the toes of her shoes stabbed into belly and back and allowed her to kick out, move up or step down.  In this way, as much as he hurt her, he didn’t remove her from the fight with any one strike.

Mary hit the ground, rebounded, and was on the offense again, while Jessie focused on movement, on not being in a position where she could be grabbed or struck down.  She wasn’t so adroit.

She maintained her end of the dance, as best as she could.

His reaching hand was surrounded by loops of razor wire.  They tightened around his fingers and palm, and the wire didn’t penetrate the thick skin.  He hauled his arm forward, and Mary skidded, skipped, and fought to get her balance.

That alone wouldn’t have been so bad.  But as Jessie maneuvered, pushing herself to move just a little bit further, a little bit faster, a hand gripped her.

Lillian stood, her body lopsided, as if one side of it was heavier than the other.  Her mouth was open, and she coughed, gagged, groping with hands, to seize, scratch with nails.

Not Lillian’s actions, but the parasite’s.

It was all the Infante needed.  He stepped in, reaching, and Jessie didn’t have the opportunity to slip away before the noble seized her.

Jessie was lifted clean off the ground.  The Infante swatted at Mary again, then held out one hand, palm out, as if one hand was all he needed to keep her at bay, now.  He glanced down at Lillian, then touched her cheek with two fingers, turning her head by force, so she looked at Mary.

Lillian took three staggering steps in Mary’s direction, making guttural sounds.

“Shall I use spiders that stitch you into a cocoon of your own flesh?” the Infante asked.  Slits and folds in his arm yawned open as if reflexively answering that question.  “No.  You wouldn’t remember that one.  It wouldn’t hold the same meaning.”

He shifted his grip, and pressed his hand over Jessie’s nose and mouth.

The first of the tendrils slithered into her mouth, like a long, wet tongue.  It was covered in hard growths, like warts, ulcers, or small horns, and each periodically stabbed and pricked, producing the spikes it would use to no doubt impale her spinal column and get near-permanent leverage in her throat.  They struck out at nerves, numbing and paralyzing when and where they made contact, un-numbing and freeing the part as they withdrew.  A wet member slithered into her nose, then scraped against her upper lip as the rest of the thing hauled itself deeper into her throat.

Her throat distended.  She couldn’t breathe.  It sucked at the air in her lungs and took it against her will, in one end, out the other.

It angled the spikes to better its grip, to ensure that any ground it gained going in and down was ground it didn’t give up.  It numbed and paralyzed to close the throat to coughs, to keep the gag reflex there but unsuccessful.

She hurtled this way and that as the Infante moved, addressing Mary.  She closed her eyes, remembered the dance, the steps taken-

Jamie set his foot down and exhaustion won out.  He staggered.

Mary, anticipating something else, had to fall on top of him to avoid hurting him.

In that, Jamie thought of Sylvester, smiled, and moved his own knife toward Mary’s throat.

She caught his wrist and rolled her eyes.

The sacrifice play.  No- the reaction, allowing the injury to happen.  The Sylvester play.

Jessie remembered what she’d seen Lillian do.  The spasm, the stillness.

She emulated it, body arching, a whole-body flinch.  Then-

She didn’t even have to go any further.  The Infante looked her way, curious.  In that instant, standing five feet behind him, Mary lashed out.

Two knives attached to razor wire flashed out, each traveling in a half-circle in each direction.  The blades struck home, each one slicing the Infante across one eye.

Superficial damage.  Not complete blindness, but partial blindness at the least.

But she repeated the strike.  Flicking knives on wire, one after another.  Each one furthered the damage.  When he raised one hand to cover his eyes, she opened other wounds.

He dropped Jessie, and she collapsed.  The horror still lurked in her throat, tendrils reaching down past epiglottis, toward lungs and stomach both.  Her fingers found little purchase on the thing’s skin, and even the hornlike growths weren’t enough.

Tendrils wrapped around her face and neck, trying to secure the thing’s position.

“You know my reinforcements are approaching even now,” the Infante said.

“I know,” Mary said.

“You won’t win.”

“I know,” Mary said.

Jessie stabbed at the thing, the blade sticking through a cluster of tendrils and biting into the wood of the road.  The struggle that followed was a hellish thing, because it mandated she take the hardest road and threatened to end her if she hesitated for a second while walking it.  She dragged the thing free of her sinuses, throat and mouth, inch by inch, and it made sure that every inch felt like she was hauling knives and fishhooks out, the points facing in the worst directions.

It felt like it was grabbing the inside of her chest.  It closed its airways and tried to starve its host of oxygen so she might relent.  A tentacle touched her eye, and threatened to find a gap to disappear inside and unfurl hooks in there.

“Let us go,” Mary said.  “You know we’ll cross paths again, if you understand me at all.  You won’t be seen fighting and doing anything less than your best against the likes of us, you won’t be seen bleeding, not like that, and we…”

“Get to live another day,” the Infante said.

Jessie hauled the thing free, then stabbed it, and stabbed it again, and again, and again-

“Is that a yes?” Mary asked.

“It’s a yes, with a promise that I’ll have far worse in store for you on our next meeting.”

Jessie finished stabbing the horror to death.  She looked up, panting.

The experience of the thing lingered in her head.  It was a card of the wrong shape and size, one that threatened to scatter the others if she placed it wrong.  She could remember every detail of it, and she did remember every detail, as it lingered in her mind’s eye, not yet positioned or sorted out.

She looked at Lillian, then hopped to her feet.  She rushed Lillian, throwing herself at her friend, and was clawed at in return.  The parasite ruled here, the parasite decided the order of action, lashing out at movement or at faces.

Jessie endured the scratches and injuries, reached into Lillian’s belt pocket, and retrieved a syringe.  She plunged it into Lillian’s throat.  Tranquilizer.

She didn’t deploy all of it.  Some of it she reserved.

Pulling the needle free, she stabbed the horror, depressing the plunger.

She kept it there, ducking her head down, burying it against Lillian’s shoulder, so the scratches wouldn’t do too much damage to her face.  She endured, waiting, until something jostled them.

Mary.

Lillian’s strength was dwindling as the tranquilizer took hold.  The horror increased the intensity at which it fought, but the tranquilizer had its effect there too.  The spikes began to retract, and the horror’s movements grew more sluggish.

“We need to go,” Mary said. “I know a way out.”

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================================================== 18.f (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy III (Arc 18)

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Genevieve Fray was very still as she sat on the wall that overlooked the gates.  Warren sat with his back to it, facing the city, while Avis stood on the battlements, facing the sea, a blanket wrapped around her and her wings.  Wendy was with Warren, chattering incessantly and brightly, the stitched’s finger pointing at things that drew her attention, while Warren solemnly looked on.

The Academy city sprawled out before them, and from a certain perspective it appeared almost frozen in time.  The birds were active, as were the rats, stray dogs and cats.  The clouds flew across the sky as if time was passing at twice the speed it was, while nearly everything else looked like a very realistic painting.

Efforts to control the city had the bulk of the population quarantined.  The only groups that moved now were the rebel’s and the necessary few who were relocated from one place to another.  Squadrons of stitched guarded areas, weapons in hand, all wearing raincoats that hid all but the lower half of their faces.  The faint steam that rose off of each cluster was all that really moved, while the stitched themselves remained as still as the dead.

“The Lambs still aren’t here,” Avis said.

Genevieve Fray nodded.  The only Lamb in Hackthorn was Sylvester.

“I see a thing!” Wendy said.  She pointed.  “Look.  It looks like it’s half rat and half cat, it’s on the peak of a roof over there.  Why would they mix a rat and a cat?  What do we even call it?  They both end with -at.”

Warren set one overlarge hand on Wendy’s head.

“It had a bow in its fur,” Wendy pointed out.  “Someone must have loved it, or they love it.  I like that.”

Warren nodded.

The last of the boats had come and gone for the time being.  Barring surprises, no more boats would arrive today.  There was always the chance of a boat arriving outside of schedule, but there was a chance of many things happening.  The odds were good that the Lambs wouldn’t turn up tonight.  It was a two day trip from Radham to Hackthorn, and it had been six days in total since Jessie and Helen had left Sylvester.

She was here to communicate a message to Sylvester.   That would be her role in this.

He was stopping to rest.  He had barely eaten, and though he was hydrated he had gone at least twelve hours at one point without drinking the water that managed his chemical leash.  The fact that it had been some time since his leash had last been reinforced meant the consequences hadn’t been dire.  The modified molecular chains had been shed as they were replaced, cast off with replacement cells, but the leash nonetheless demanded its due.  The most sensitive parts of the body would be rebelling, eyes sensitive to light, ears ringing, stomach turning, the brain throbbing with a headache.  The muscles and bones wouldn’t shed the leash so easily, and would feel it more.

Even sitting still, caught up in his thoughts, he fidgeted and shifted restlessly, trying to balance the fact that muscles twitched and cramped when still and both muscle and bone ached when he moved.

He stared off into space, lost in the moment, his body almost operating by a different apparatus than his brain.  He seemed almost oblivious, even though he was surrounded by his people.

“It’s now or never,” Avis said.  “It would be better if the Lambs were here, but…”

But indeed.  Sylvester was arguing with himself and losing.  What started out as a single incidence that he barely registered quickly became the new normal, the parts of his brain he could negotiate with Wyvern became non-negotiable, and he was quickly approaching the point where he lashed out at others like he had done with Professor Ferres.

Fray stood and she approached Sylvester.  All around her, children turned to follow her approach.

Sylvester’s eyes were flat as he looked at her.  He had been aware of her for some time, but he hadn’t acted on it.  Even now, he almost looked through her.

Fray laid a hand on one of the children’s heads.  The child looked up at her.  Evette.

“It would help if you actually spoke,” Sylvester said.

Fray remained silent.

“Yeah,” Sylvester said.  “Right.  That would defeat the point.  Every one of you represents something, and you in particular represent me not having a danged clue.”

Fray broke into the abstract.  Different faces looked in different directions.  One of those faces looked at Sylvester with sympathy.  She reached out for Sylvester, reached out to take him in her arms-

He flinched away.  “Yeah, enough of that.  If you want to help, how about you get lost?  I know you guys don’t actually listen when I tell you, but it’d help.  My thoughts are so scattered they’ve actually grown legs and are walking around, they’re talking over each other.  Can you just… not be one of those things I’ve got to deal with?”

Fray let her hand fall.

“Please,” he said, without much emotional affect.  His eyes remained devoid of focus as he looked at everything and nothing at the same time.  Sylvester’s thoughts turned to other things, and Genevieve Fray ceased to exist as a more concrete entity.

“We need to keep moving,” the boy in the yellow raincoat spoke.

Sylvester acted on that without argument.  He stood, wincing at the muscle aches.  As his eye traveled, his mind moved by the same measure.  Figures in the crowd became defined as Sylvester’s thoughts did, and to him the concrete manifestations of ideas and thoughts were indistinguishable from reality.  In the moment, feeling the pain, his mind’s eye drew images of Academy Doctors in the guises of children, drew an image of the fat Fishmonger as a child, of a child noble with black hair and a cane, who whispered of pain and punishment while a sickly boy with his own stick nodded.

It was the boy in yellow who walked beside Sylvester, now.

They were joined by a retinue.  The boy in yellow looked unkempt and wild beside his friend, but his friend was so very put together that he might have made anyone look less, wearing dapper clothes that included a coat that clung to him.  The boy in the yellow raincoat was rough around the edges, his outfit improvised to serve a functional purpose, with a butcher’s apron instead of a medical one, a raincoat instead of a lab coat.

In this, he was a stark contrast to his friend.  His friend’s clothing served a more ideological, psychological purpose, almost assuming the role of Doctor without claiming it.

Sylvester had deciphered them and named them appropriately.  It wasn’t that hard, even, especially after he realized that the boy in the neat clothing paid particular attention to a young lady who resembled Mary Cobourn.

The boy in yellow was the Snake Charmer, the immaculate boy was Mary’s creator, Mister Percy, the pair, like so many others, writ in youth.

“This is doable,” the Snake Charmer said.  “It’s all going to pieces, and it has been for a while.  It’s corrupt, it’s poisoned, and it’s doomed.  If it’s crumbling, then we recognize it and work with it.  Capitalize on it.  That’s what you do.  It’s what you’ve always done.”

“Are you talking about my mind or society?” Sylvester asked.  “It’s unclear.”

“I’m talking about everything,” the Snake Charmer said, with a note of anger.  “We’re going to need to improvise.  We work with broken pieces and fill in the blanks.”

The Devil spoke, the sickly boy with his cane, speaking with the guttural voice of a monster, “Cut down those who get in the way.  Hurt them badly enough that others think twice before doing the same.”

Sylvester shook his head a little, trying not to listen.

There was a system in place.  Sylvester had once switched perspectives and skillsets with ease.  He had been able to calibrate his brain and take on any role.  In the constant reorganization, these things had been lost in the shuffle, partially overwritten, remnants drawn out, filled in, and then shuffled back in, over days, weeks, months and years.  The slate, however, had never truly been wiped blank, only set out of reach.

Comparisons could be made to the gestures.  Broad ideas encapsulated into something that could be used.

Sylvester, scattered, almost didn’t exist anymore.  Each idea and thought process existed in the form of a figure that accompanied him.  The Devil was such a thing, speaking of things that Sylvester had always feared lay beneath the veneer of his humanity and civility.  In his existence as a sickly boy with an unholy voice, he would bring those things to pass if given a greater role.

The Snake Charmer would help that to come to be if it meant achieving the necessary goals.

“Keep the plan in mind,” Percy said, adding his voice to the conversation.  “We wanted to get the attention of the people at the top?  We maintain that course.  It is something we can very much do.”

“You’re contradicting each other,” Sylvester said.

“No,” Percy said, at the same time the Snake Charmer shook his head.

“One of you is saying to let it go, use what I can, find a new direction.  One of you is  saying to keep the plan in mind.”

“Keep the end in mind,” Percy said.  “But stop focusing so much on maintaining the same steps, the same prerequisite steps to fulfilling it.  Use resources at hand, use what’s easiest and most freely available.  Capitalize on any and all vulnerabilities, use any and all footholds.”

Sylvester reached a crossroads.  He paused, looking down each street.  The streets were largely empty, but there were stitched further down the road.

The girl in the layered clothing, ever silent, rested her hands on Sylvester’s shoulders, and he flinched at the contact.  Damp from the rain, her red hair stuck to her head, her clothes flattened out with colors bleeding between the damp and transparent fabric.  The clothing looked less like cloth now.  Lines of floral patterns became vein-like in the right light.

She hugged Sylvester from behind.  Her hand formed a gesture, and the line between the crowd around Sylvester and his Lambs blurred further.

Wait.

He waited where he was, eyes closed.

“Any and all vulnerabilities, any and all footholds,” Sylvester repeated Percy’s line from moments ago.

“Absolutely,” Percy said.

“In your original interpretation, that included exploiting and stepping over the bodies of children.  Repeatedly.”

“It did.  Many of your rebels aren’t fully grown adults, Sylvester,” Percy said.  “You’ve always been fond of your mice, of your Lambs and Bo Peeps.”

Sylvester didn’t have a response to that.  In the moment, voices overlapped, ideas becoming words that became noise, a constant static of shouts, threats, violence and whispers, with very little that was comforting.

“The idea was always to achieve big things,” Percy said.

Sylvester nodded.

He could question, challenge, and he could keep his guard up, not quite letting any one figure take the reins, but he was physically and mentally exhausted, and he conserved his strength carefully, in vain hope that he would be able to correct his course or stop things if a moment called for it.

In this, he didn’t question and he didn’t fight.  Percy got his points, working his way in deeper.

Still hugging Sylvester from behind, Sub Rosa gestured as a small group of rebels approached the stitched.

Go.

Sylvester crossed the street.

Stitched reacted to the sighting of him, but they were a hair slower than humans were.  The students who were addressing and examining them had their backs to Sylvester, and as they turned they would only see a glimpse of Sylvester.

“Move fast,” the Snake Charmer said.  “They’ll ask questions, and they might realize it was you.  We want to be gone by then.”

Sylvester nodded.

The Snake Charmer indicated the way.  Between buildings.  Sylvester saw another cat-rat hybrid, but this one didn’t have a bow in its fur.  They weren’t too uncommon.  He wondered if he could catch and cook it, if he had to.

“We’ll get proper food.  Priority number one is to get ourselves sorted out,” the Snake Charmer said.  “Clothes, food, allies.”

“We get things laid out so we can get back to the mission,” Percy added.

“You guys keep contradicting each other,” Sylvester said.

“No,” Percy and the Snake Charmer said, at the same time.  Percy deferred and the Snake Charmer spoke, “The world and the system they’ve established don’t give us any advantages.  It’s up to us to take them.  There are rebels, delinquents, and freed experiments who only want to see us put something great into action.  They’re talking amongst themselves about the fact that we carved Ferres up and they believe it’s right, or they’re sitting in the background, believing it without the opportunity to say it.”

“Clothes make the man,” Percy said.  “Style and grace matter.  You can pull that off, even while you’re hurting like you are.  Food… well, that was more S.C.’s purview, getting the meals sorted out.”

“So you’re agreeing,” Sylvester said.

He stopped in his tracks as he reached the end of one alley, and saw where the course had taken him.

He was back at the foot of Hackthorn Academy.  The reclining lady of Hackthorn stood high above him, back arched, one arm folded beneath her, the other outstretched.

“And you led me here,” he said.  He turned, and his eye swept over the crowd that surrounded him.  Every face was one he should recognize but needed interpretation at the same time.  All had been translated into an age appropriate for Lambs, for sympathetic reasons, out of his desire for companionship.  They included countless slain and maimed soldiers and Ghosts, the plague men and the stitched.  They included experiments, great warbeasts now looked like boys and girls with body modifications.

Sub Rosa stroked his hair with one hand.

“We’re all in agreement,” the Snake Charmer said.

“That’s worse,” Sylvester said.

Sub Rosa pointed, directing his attention.

There were guards.  Not many, but enough that getting in would be difficult.  Three teenage boys and one stitched that kept them company, a very large man who wore no shirt, the namesake stitches crossing his chest and forming the ‘Y’ shaped intersection at the chest, flesh of the torso and neck bulging where hardware had been stowed within.  He was made to be strong, not to be pretty, clever, or effective.

Sub Rosa stroked Sylvester’s hair, her hand moving in gestures.

Sylvester closed his eyes, feeling the sensation of the hand moving through hair, and he could remember one of the Lambs doing the same.  Had it been Lillian?  Something tender, occupying long minutes between other moments, where she might kiss his eyelids, his forehead.

Had it been Helen?  She had always liked hair, combing it, the beauty of it, the aesthetic, young Helen being gentle one moment and chewing on his scalp or ear the next.

Younger Gordon, in the earliest days, after his appointments when the pain was still a thing he hadn’t gotten used to, back when girls had been ick and Gordon had been a pal he confided in and trusted in moments of weakness.

The opposite end of things, timeline-wise.  Jessie?  Fingers combing through his hair as if she could make it make sense, only for it to spring back up, wild and uncooperative?  The intimacy between them had always been a thing they were constantly figuring out.  He’d had relationships and flirtations with others, and yet the one with Jessie had felt the most like a real one, finding a faltering, eager, quiet way forward, not teasing but clutching for someone with need, when the rest of the world wasn’t looking.

Had it been Mary, consoling him?  The feel of fingernails against his scalp was a thing that suited her, like knives or crisp lace against tender skin.

It might have been her, as he tried to place the sensation.  She had been with him when he had lost Jamie.

Jamie.  There was a sharp pang at the fact that he was surrounded by people he had killed or played a role in killing but that Jamie wasn’t present.

It felt so very unfair, especially given it was the one that mattered most.

The sensation of moving from the line of thinking of the Lambs to his present circumstance resembled stepping from a doze in a warm bed onto a cold floor, from soft vagueness to reality.

He wasn’t standing where he had been.  He’d followed one of the guards.  The teenager had walked a distance away from his friends, and was unzipping his pants.

“Almost, Sub Rosa,” the Snake Charmer said.  “Almost got in.  But that’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?”

Sylvester felt cold, empty.  Loneliness gripped him.

It would be so easy to act automatically.  Dredging up and making up memories would be some consolation.  He could live in fragmented sensations and ideas.  Sub Rosa could give him that.

She was security and insecurity, he knew.

The guard was watering the weeds, at the point where the reclining lady’s leg merged into the earth.  He sang.

“We know what you’re doing, Liam!” another of the guards called out.  “Don’t have to sing to cover up the sound!”

The guard sang louder in response, prompting some laughs from the others.

Sylvester was very still, random muscles cramping and twitching spasmodically, his bones aching where he rested his weight on them.

The crowd around him had fallen silent, but for the Ghosts, who were free to communicate, unheard and encoded so only the other Ghosts heard them.  It was a choir of girls who existed in odd sets, like bouquets of flowers, each with one redhead, one blonde, one Eastern girl, and so on, all wearing white dresses.  They sang in a harmony of cricket and cicada chirps, nail-on-blackboard scratches and knife-on-plate squeals.

The sound was unpleasant, and even though the day was nice enough, Sylvester was weary enough that the damp of the periodic drizzling rain and the wind combined to made him outright cold.  The only Warmth was Sub Rosa’s body pressed against his back, with all its ridges and folds.  The sensation of a hand running through his hair was almost hypnotic.

“Go,” the Snake Charmer hissed.  Sub Rosa gestured the same.  Pushed forward and away, Sylvester followed the instruction.

Sylvester was aware that the Falconer and the Devil flanked him.  He knew the pain and danger they posed.  Lethality on one hand, torture and agony on the other.

He couldn’t stop without getting caught, and he couldn’t get caught, but in moving forward, he couldn’t sort out his thoughts enough to decide on a plan of action that wasn’t doing what the Falconer and the Devil wanted him to do.

He thought back.  The Snake Charmer.  Sub Rosa.  They wanted clothes, goals, security.

It was Sub Rosa’s methodology that was in his mind as he approached his target.  He reached for the back of the boy’s head and hesitated.

“…and she drank, she drank, her wonderful compound, and now she joins in on all the gaaaaames!”

At the next pause, Sylvester grabbed the back of Liam-the-guard’s head, using the forward momentum of his approach in conjunction with an arm-thrust to drive the young man’s face into the wall in front of him.

The Ghosts changed their tune.  Sylvester matched it, raising his voice, mimicking the boys’ accent, with something of a drunken drawl, to help mask things and play things up.  “And old Sterling, he thought he was a king!”

He smashed Liam’s face into the wall once again.

“There are places that verse’ll get you killed, Liam!” one of the other guards called out.

He ratcheted up the volume, “and so they’d help him home from town!”

Liam reached up, fumbling for his arm.  He struck Liam’s face against the wall again for good measure. He tried to keep Liam from slumping down into a puddle of his own piss.  “He drank, he drank, her wonderful compound…”

“Your singing needs work, my man!  You’re getting worse by the line!”

“…and now he wears the Crowwwwn!”  Sylvester finished.

He dropped to squat on his heels, and the Devil dropped to a position mirroring his.

“Clothes, like the Snake Charmer said,” Sylvester said.  Nobody liked to be ignored, but so long as he was doing what one of the others said, the Devil could hardly complain.

He helped Liam out of his makeshift uniform jacket.  All of the guards were wearing dark jackets and dark slacks with caps, some with Beattle crests at their breast, scavenged from uniforms hardly anyone wore anymore.  He already wore slacks like Liam’s.  The boots didn’t match, but boots didn’t matter.

Sylvester donned the jacket.

“You finally done making our ears bleed with that singing?” one of the others asked.

Straightening, he put the cap on, pulling it on down low.

Liam had a rifle propped up against the wall, and Sylvester borrowed it.

He walked with a cocky swagger as he headed in the direction of the others.

“You’re terrible, man,” the others said, as he rounded the corner, joking.  “I’d listen to the sound of you pissing for the next week straight if it meant not having to listen to you for another minute.”

“Maybe you like the sound, Matty.”

They were smoking, barely paying attention to their friend as he returned.

The clothes and the mundane nature of the moment meant that Sylvester had the freedom to draw just another two or three paces closer than he might have otherwise.

He reversed the grip on the rifle and swung it by the barrel.  The stock met one boy’s face on the first swing, sending a cigarette flying, and met the next boy’s throat.

The stitched perked up at the violence.  Slow to react, slow to move, it was big, it was strong, and it was dangerous.  It shifted its stance.

He hadn’t hit the one in the face very hard, all considered.  Had that one reached out or tried to stop him, it might have complicated things.  But he’d landed one blow to the other’s windpipe, and in the moment, his friend felt the need to tend to that.

Sub Rosa was already standing by the gate.

The Stitched lunged.

Fast, strong, athletic.  It wasn’t one to tire, and it wasn’t one to move with care for how it hurt itself in the course of its offense.  Legs twisted in odd ways, and it had an odd grace in that, twisting on one leg and over-stressing one knee as it hurled itself at Sylvester, following him as he tried to duck around.

Sylvester threw himself back against the wall.

“Stitched!” Sylvester barked the order.  “Obey me!  The codeword is Gallows!”

The stitched ignored him.  He had to spin and throw himself out of the way as the thing threw a heavy punch.

He caught a glimpse of Sub Rosa gesturing.

“I know,” he said.  “It was worth a try.”

The damage to his body and his weariness made this simple encounter that much more dangerous.

“They changed the words,” Percy observed.

“I know!

The spark of anger and irritation fed into his next movement, driving him a hair further.  The great bludgeon of dead flesh that flew past his head might have clipped him, had he not moved that extra hair.

The stitched grunted, then adjusted its footing, getting ready to charge once again.

“Stick to the plan,” the Snake Charmer said.  Behind him, others were already heading up and into the Academy through the now-unguarded gates

Sylvester did.  He changed direction, and ran for the gate.

Changes in behavior and pattern went a long way.  The stitched hesitated.

“Go after him!” one of the guards shouted.

Too late.  Sylvester passed through the gate and threw himself against a heavy door, hauling it closed.  The gate was wide enough for a carriage to pass through, and the gates were large enough that they were meant to stop a runaway carriage that rolled down the sloping path to the Academy.

The stitched brute slammed into it, and Sylvester bounced away from the door, sprawling on the ground.

But the impact had been such that the gate was thrown back, rebounded off of the wall with a loud crack, and now swung shut again.  Sylvester found his footing and helped it along.  This time it hit the stitched and made it stagger back.

He closed the gate fully and placed the rifle through the handles, buying himself time to get the actual lock lowered into place.

Sub Rosa was waiting in one of the side tunnels to an area that smelled like a stable.  He took that direction.

“They’re not going to like that,” Percy said.

“They won’t like much about what we do,” a young girl with sharp teeth said.  The girl from the whispering triplets.  Melancholy.  “We’re not one of them.  You knew it the moment you realized about the mutiny, Sylvester.  We’re different, we’re a solution for their problems on one day and a problem for them to fix on another.  It’s a sad fact that when humans divide things into us and them, we don’t end up part of the ‘us’.”

Sylvester shook his head.  “If any of you guys are going to earn the coveted spots in my head that I normally keep reserved for the Lambs, I really need you to be more constructive.  A lot more constructive.”

“I am being constructive,” Melancholy said.  “Paul Parrot would agree with what I’m saying.  Red might too.  We have allies, and there’s a lot we can do with them.  Capitalizing on that means recognizing that we aren’t a person.  The Beattle rebels certainly don’t see you as a person.  We let the Sylvester mask slip and now we’re a monster to them, a thing that wears the mask of a young man.  We’re a thing to be pitied, a murderer, a strategic force of nature, chaos incarnate, a manipulator, a hero, a villain, or a target, and the label in question depends on who’s being asked.  We will never, ever, ever truly win out over the label.  We will never truly sell them on the full Sylvester package.”

“We don’t have the resources to maintain the full Sylvester package,” Percy observed.

“Not sold on the reductionist approach,” Sylvester said.  “Seems sorta convenient for all of you and terrible for me.  Food, clothes, getting into a better position?  Sure.  I’ll do that.  I’ll bully my way into that.  But I’m not about to buy your pitch.”

“There’s a benefit to it,” Cynthia said.  She was a little girl now, half of her face burned.  She had been one of the last to show up that he could name.

“Oh, Cynthia, how grand,” Sylvester said, sarcastic.  “Yes, I’m going to take advice from someone who managed to start out as a major figure in a thriving, widespread clandestine organization and managed to whittle herself down into a shadow of her former self.  Let’s see, let me think, you’re all about rage, a need to attack anyone, even those who could be allies, and desperation.  Do tell me all about the benefits of this course of action.”

She fell in step beside him.  They weren’t on the main road that led through the interior of the Academy to the ground floor of the main building, but they were moving in parallel to it, stables and kennels on one side, the periodic warbeast snorting and huffing in response to their presence.

Cynthia’s hand grasped his shirt.  He hunched over, hauled forward, as she brought her face closer to him, her cheekbone brushing his.  All he could see of her was the burned part.

She murmured in his ear, “You can’t do what you want to do alone.  You’re not functional without.”

“No kidding,” Sylvester said.

“And when you’re you, Sylvester, what the hell happens, do you remember?  Jamie the first?  Lillian?  Multiple times?  Jamie the second, in West Corinth?  Mabel?”

Sylvester’s retort died in his throat.

His head dropped a fraction more.  “Touché.”

“When you walk your unique walk, you either end up alone or you end up in the company of a desperate few.  That’s what I know.  That’s the unique fucking perspective I can offer.”

Sylvester nodded.

“Cynthia had her soldiers,” Percy said.  “We have your experiments.  We know what to say to get them on our side.”

“We recruit them, in service of goals writ large and small,” the Snake Charmer said.  “Melancholy was right.  Paul Parrot would remove anyone we named.  If we wanted a girl to hold close, Red would oblige.  There are rebels, delinquents, and freed experiments who only want to see us put something great into action.  They’re talking about the fact that we carved Ferres up and they believe it’s right, or they’re sitting in the background, believing it without the opportunity to say it.”

“Hold on a second,” Sylvester said.  He was listening to them, but he didn’t have the resources to pick everything apart, to challenge.

They didn’t hold on.  Voices overlapped.

“I’m tired,” Sylvester said, and his voice was nearly drowned out.

The quiet of the building was interrupted by the noise of tromping boots.

“This would be so much easier if you guys were disagreeing more with each other,” Sylvester said.

“They’ve been patrolling to find us, and even with our talents they’re getting close,” the Snake Charmer said.  “We haven’t been able to sleep, we’re hungry, our mind is tired because you’re keeping your guard up, keeping us from practicing what we preach.  As our resources dwindle, theirs consolidate.  We know full well that we have two options.  The first is to surrender right now, become an experiment under the thumb of people in lab coats.  They’ll have good reasons, we harbor reasons to surrender.  But all the same, if you were really willing to settle for that, you wouldn’t have left the Academy in the first place.”

“You can’t surrender any more than I could,” Mauer’s voice broke through the noise.  He had always been good when it came to making himself heard.

Sylvester nodded, numb.

“Any more than any of us could,” Mauer said.  “Very few of the people you’ve encountered were the type to give up.  Life struggles on.  It persists, it adapts, and it gets dragged down into God’s Hell fighting every step of the way.”

Sylvester was dimly aware of the technique.  To hammer the enemy repeatedly with strong arguments alternating with the weak, and to save the key argument for the last.

Mauer, naturally, was the key argument.

Fight, Sylvester.  You’re trying so desperately hard to convince yourself not to, and you’re not finding good reasons.”

Sylvester didn’t have a response.  His eyes returned to looking at everything and nothing.

“If you wait, if you don’t do it of your own volition, then you’ll end up in a corner, we’ll take action on our own out of necessity by rule of fight or flight, and nobody will like the end result of that,” Mauer said.

Sylvester nodded.

He knew what he had to do.

He moved through the Academy by the back hallways, by ladders and stairwells reserved for faculty and other employees.  There were people he ran into here and there, and he tried not to focus too much on the fact that he didn’t remember how he’d dealt with them, only minutes after he had run into them.

There wasn’t much traffic on the arm, that led from the shoulder of the academy to the administration quarters.  But he was a distinctive silhouette, even wearing the guard’s improvised uniform.

“They’re coming,” Cynthia said.  “Don’t go giving up now.”

“He isn’t,” the Snake Charmer said.  “We aren’t.”

Sylvester went to his own room, and washed off the worst of the blood.  He collected clothes at Percy’s instruction, discarding the guard’s jacket at Cynthia’s, and exited the room while still buttoning up his shirt.

A squad of soldiers waited on the bridge as he made his return trip.

Davis was among them.

“Sylvester.”

“Sorry for the mess,” Sylvester said.

“Jessie said to be prepared and to keep an eye on you,” Davis said.  “I could’ve done better on both counts.”

“I don’t think you can be blamed,” Sylvester said, as Sub Rosa stroked his hair.

“I’m blaming myself,” Davis said.

I didn’t even expect things to fall apart this badly,” Sylvester said, “If I can’t anticipate it, how could you?”

“Right,” Davis said.

“Not saying you didn’t help it along, what with the whole mutiny and all…”

“Wait, mutiny?

“You might say you don’t like being in charge, but it’s a power trip, isn’t it?  And it’s familiar, the Academy running the show-”

“Sylvester, no.  That wasn’t it at all.”

“-screen mad old Sylvester out, take charge?”

“You asked me to.  You asked me to lie to you and pretend that everything was quiet and calm, and keep the exciting stuff off your radar, so you wouldn’t undertake any risky stunts.”

“Maybe,” Sylvester said.  “Maybe you know that’s exactly what to say to make me doubt myself.”

“Sylvester,” Gordon Two cut in.

“Hi Gordeux,” Sylvester said.

“That’s not my name, but yeah, sure, hi.  Listen, speaking as a guy who really didn’t join to wage a war against any outside enemy, let alone an inside one… can we take it easy?  The Lambs will be back any time.”

“Will they?”

“Boat could arrive whenever.”

“We know the schedule for the usual boats,” the Devil countered.  “It’s unlikely they’ll come at dusk in a borrowed boat, when the sky is overcast, the way in unlit.”

“Could be an hour,” Gordeux said.  “Could be three.  Or five.  But that’s not too long to wait.”

“He’s lying,” the Devil said.

“It’s an eternity,” Sylvester said.  “If you could spend one of those hours in my head, you wouldn’t be saying that.”

Gordeux was silent.  Pity marked his expression.  Sylvester thought of Cynthia’s words, of the labels.

“And it’s not going to be one hour, or three, or five.  It’s going to be closer to eight, or twelve, or twenty-two,” Sylvester said.

“What do you want, Sylvester?” Davis asked.  “You’ve hurt your own people.  You carved up a key piece of your plan and left her in the bathtub.  Not that we know the entirety of your plan, despite everything we’ve put into this, but…”

“She’s alive, isn’t she?” Sylvester asked.

“She’s alive.  We’re getting her new arms and legs.  She’s cooperating, but-”

“If she’s cooperating, then that’s all that’s important.”

Why, Sy?” Davis asked.  “She was horrendous, but she didn’t deserve that.”

“I was raised to be a monster and to hunt monsters.”

“I think you’re more than that,” Shirley said, speaking up from within the crowd.

She pushed her way forward.  Pierre was beside her.

Sylvester frowned.

“If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have helped me like you did.”

“You wouldn’t believe the tally I’ve got going on in my head.  Especially since I don’t have the memory to keep a proper tally, so it’s more of this impossible, incalculable thing, like a mountain that grows two leagues taller for every league I ascend,” Sylvester said.  “But I owe you so much more than you owe me.”

“It’s not about owing!” Shirley said.  “It’s about… just being there.  Helping when help is due.  And I think you did that for me.”

“I calculated it.  I calculate everything.  Every social interaction is manipulation, molding people like putty around me.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“The very first thing I said to you was a tip on how to manipulate people,” he said.  “I don’t remember what it was, but I remember that.”

“It’s not about what was said,” she said.  “More how and why.  You had no reason to help me.”

“You were useful.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” she said, even though her body language suggested she very much worried it was.  She sounded almost scared as she asked, “Why are you pushing us away?”

“Sy,” Gordeux said, before he could respond.  “Listen.  Come eat.  Come into the dining hall.  We can talk over food.  Helen- Possum made some with Rudy.  We’ve got some of the defectors from Hackthorn with us.  We’ve actually talked to them and we might’ve sold them on being on our side, and not just because they’re scared.  The whole black forest and plague thing is really a good starting point, they have their doubts about the Crown.  You might get something out of the discussions.”

“Throwing me into the mix might not be the best idea, if it’s at all tenuous,” Sylvester said.  “As a matter of fact, any of this might be a bad idea.  Squadron of soldiers, me, this whole thing.  Seems like it ends badly.”

“Badly?” Davis asked.

“We- I don’t want to hurt you guys too badly.  I sort of took down a few of our own in the course of getting here.  I’m not sure I can stop.”

“Sylvester- do I have to force you to come eat and talk with us on threat of being shot?” Davis asked.

Sylvester considered.

“Go,” Percy said.

Sylvester nodded.  “I’ll come with.”

Davis looked relieved.  He really shouldn’t have.

With twenty students with guns pointing their weapons at Sylvester, they guided him down the remainder of the bridge, into the main building.

“We spent days looking for you.  We didn’t think you left the Academy at first,” Davis said.  “Those students you sent into the room to clean up, they came to get me, I immediately set to looking for you.  Bea quizzed the Professor as soon as she was lucid, trying to figure out if she’d said anything.”

“If she did, it might be better not to mention it.  I’ve got this sticking thought that she told me some secret of hers under duress, and I didn’t like it, going by the blood.  Not sure though, since I don’t remember any of it.”

“She wouldn’t say what it was,” Davis said.

“Yeah,” Sylvester said.

They made their way into the dining hall proper, above Lab One.  It was teeming, filled with defecting Hackthorn students, with Beattle rebels and the whole group of the Hackthorn fairy tale experiments, minus the actual monsters who were no doubt in Lab One.

The large boy stood at one end of the crowd.

As Cynthia had suggested, they weren’t all people.  The line, at least, was blurred.  Every time Sylvester had seen him, the large boy had been busily eating, always eating, a monolithic thing.  Now, even though there were tables with food laid out on them, the boy ate without partaking, chewing meat when the only meat in arm’s reach was the population of the crowd.

The armed guard of soldiers drew attention to him.  He had to remind himself that the remainder of the crowd around him wasn’t actually there, even if it almost felt more real than the remainder of this scene, with its fairy tales and more teenagers and children.

He took his seat at the same table as the Primordial, the eating child.

He belatedly realized the company he kept.  The nobles had appeared before, but they had been conspicuously absent for some time, with the exception of the Falconer, who had been something of a special case.  Mustering strength.

Immediately, his eyes dropped to the table itself, so he wouldn’t look at them, wouldn’t see them.  So he wouldn’t see the most dangerous of the nobles he’d met, the one he’d told himself would mean he’d lost himself entirely.  He tried to rise out of his seat, and a hand pushed him down.

“Stay put, please,” Davis said.  “Please.  Let’s just talk.  Talk’s safe.  Talk kills time, and we just need to buy enough time for your friends to get back, right?”

“Right,” Sylvester said.  He heard laughter, and recognized it as the Baron’s.

He knew when the Baron had laughed like this, too.  It had been close to the time Sylvester had poisoned his brain with Wyvern.

He knew why the Baron had laughed.

The Baron had known.

He assessed the room, and he saw the others gathered around.  His trains of thought, interwoven with the crowd.  They were ready for conflict, ready for the calm to be broken, for defector to become doubter, for the harmless fairy tale children to erupt into anger.  Many of the guns trained on him would turn elsewhere.  He could see it, in abstract, by how the countless dead and lost were woven among the living.

“Yeah.  Talk is safe,” Sylvester said, before sharing the most dangerous words he knew.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.g (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy IV (Arc 18)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Yeah.  Talk is safe,” Sylvester said.  He paused.  “Shall we talk about how the entire balance of power is a lie?”

Davis tensed at that.  “Some of your friends from Lab One said you were saying something like that.  I get it.  You don’t remember telling me you wanted to be cut out of the proceedings, that you didn’t trust yourself.  You’re upset that we’re in charge.”

Sylvester’s eye was roving across the nobles that were seated along his table, while Davis spoke.  He looked at the Doctors who stood by, ones with the full training and reputation like Fray and Avis, and the rogue ones like the Snake Charmer and Percy.

“Not you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that’s not the balance of power I’m concerned about.  I’m talking about the Crown.  About the Academy.  How every part of it is as much a fairy tale as the ones that inspired a parrot boy, a red-hooded messenger, and a golden-haired troublemaker.  In fact, the link between them and the nobility is closer than you think.”

“Really,” Davis said.  His tone was skeptical, and Sylvester was very aware that Davis was trying to weigh the degree to which he could be believed against what he might have heard.  He was aware because his friends at and around the table were aware.  They were changing posture.  Ready, keenly interested, and many had dangerous looks in their eyes.  The ones who didn’t have those looks looked cold, instead.  Detached.

Paul the parrot-feathered wasn’t a nemesis, he wasn’t someone Sylvester had plotted against, but there was something very much about him that suggested he was on the same page as the doctors and professors, the back-alley docs, the experiments, the monsters, and the madmen who kept Sylvester company.  He had the predatory look, seeing something valuable that he might be able to capitalize on.

Like greed, avarice, hunger, but it wasn’t gold or food so much as the promise of someone else being made to bleed

The effect on Paul was enough that it drew the attention of the others near Paul.  They had been rounded up to be questioned, it looked like, and they were being kept somewhat removed from one another, with students sitting around them, one or two Beattle rebels between each of the Lab One experiments, some students removed to nearby benches.

All the same, Paul’s change in how he sat and the look in his eyes was something noticed by those closest to him, which was noticed by others they had associated with.  There was an elegance to it.  As Paul’s hair was red and gold to go with the feathers he’d once had flowing with his hair, it was Red and Goldilocks who noticed that he was paying keen attention, and they became more ready, more wary, anticipating what came next.  They got along more with the various delinquents, including one of the girls who had spent more time herding the younger fairy tales, and so those delinquents absorbed the sentiment and passed it down.

By the time it reached the very last members of the group, including Bo Peep, the effect was less like anticipation and more like fear.  It was around then that the ones guarding the group seemed to sense something was amiss.

“Sylvester?” Davis asked, patient.  “I’m curious where you’re going with this.  Like, I could understand if you think you’ve found a weak point to hammer at, or if you’re just musing aloud-”

“No,” Sylvester said.

“No?”

“No, this is a known fact, Davis.  Jessie and I have been sitting on it for a while now.  The nobility is an outright lie.”

Davis’ attention piqued at that.  There were a few murmurs.

Paul was stock still, though.  Waiting, sensing there was more to it.  A lot of the older fairy tales, young nobles, and delinquents in that circle were.  Like a skulk of foxes who had sighted food, they were holding still so they wouldn’t disturb their quarry.

Sylvester was their quarry, in a way.  Or his words were.

“Sylvester,” Shirley said.  “Maybe we should leave this topic alone.”

“You don’t want to hear it?” Davis asked.  “Or is there something I don’t know?”

“I’ve been with Sylvester and Jessie for the last year, I know more than most.  Sy, you were working hard to keep this secret for a reason.  It’s dangerous knowledge.”

Davis ran his hand over his head, where his hair had been smoothed down into a part.  “Darn it.”

“I know it sounds tantalizing, but I’ve seen Sylvester like this before…” Shirley said.  She trailed off to look at him.

Sylvester watched Shirley by equal measure, quiet.

“…where he’s not himself, exactly, but he isn’t much diminished in terms of his ability to… I don’t even know.  Hurt people.  Cause havoc.”

“I know, you, Sy and Jessie explained that to us lieutenants before,” Davis said.

“She’s not explaining for your benefit, Davis,” a voice whispered beside Sylvester’s ear.  Mauer.  “She’s talking to the room.  We taught her well, didn’t we, Sylvester?”

Sylvester remained silent, content to let the conversation continue for now.

“This seems like him sowing havoc.  We should change topics.  Revisit it at a later date, if Jessie and the others agree it makes sense.”

“Don’t we deserve to know?” a delinquent asked.  He was one of the ones who would have partied with the Lab One fairy tales and other more rebellious rebels.

“Enough, Fang,” Bea spoke.  She was sitting on a table with her feet on a bench.

“The cat’s mostly out of the bag already, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I imagine there’s a lot more going on,” she said.  “Please, let us handle this.  You’ve trusted us this far.”

“Thank you, Bea,” Davis said.

“I don’t know about you, Davis,” Paul said, from a distant table, his voice carrying, “But I have a personal stake in this.  They carved me up.  Carved up some of the girls and little ones here.  And apparently what happened to us has something to do with the nobles?”

“Paul, please.”

“Please don’t, Paul,” a small voice said.  Bo Peep.

“My imagination is afire, sir,” Paul said.  The look in his eyes had only intensified.

“I want to chime in,” Gordeux said.  “If I may, Davis?”

“I trust you.  Feel welcome.”

“Thank you.  I haven’t been with Sy for as long as Shirley, but I’ve seen him work, and I was one of the first people in Beattle he reached out to, I think.  Besides Junior’s group.”

Sylvester looked at Junior’s group.  Was that bloody avarice in their eyes too?

Gordeux went on, “If my opinion as a near-veteran of the group counts for much of anything, I think we should leave this alone.  I think we should drop this, eat breakfast, talk about things in general, introduce ourselves to the people who’ve crossed the bridge from the Hackthorn dorms.  Treat them to the good side of the rebel life, without faculty and rules over our heads.  I think Helen and Rudy did a good job in the kitchens.  Is there dessert?”

“Hot frosted buns,” Possum said.

“Good food, weather’s not too bad, it’s quiet, there’s more serious stuff we can discuss over the course of today and tomorrow while we wait for Jessie and the Lambs to turn up, but we can do that at our leisure.  Team leaders know what we need to hammer out if you want to stay busy, and…”

Gordeux spread his hands, he chuckled a bit.

“…if you don’t want to play a part in bringing meaningful change to the world, well, I don’t want to get into details, but there’s a wine cellar with enough wine to keep all of us tipsy through to the end of next year, and we’re not exactly separating dorms by gender, if you know what I mean.”

There was some general amusement at that, and some confusion from the younger years and experiments.

“Frosted buns, red wine, good company, sunshine, and maybe some hope for the future.  With the rest of the nation reeling with plague and the black wood, I gotta say I’m pretty happy with that status quo.  Everything else can wait for tomorrow, and speaking as someone who’s seen some fighting and rebellion already, we’ll be darn fucking glad we had the time to rest before we got properly underway.”

“Ya know, I have some buns I know I’d like to get my frosting on,” someone at one table joked.

“Oh fuck you and fuck your joke!  We’re better than that!” one of his friends said, raising his voice to be heard over the laughter.  It was an insult made in good fun, one friend to another, and it only made others laugh louder at the dumb joke.

Only the ones who looked hungriest for blood looked like they weren’t swayed or amused by any of this.  Paul, Red, Goldi, Fang.  They composed a small fraction of the people gathered.  One in fifty.  One in thirty if Sylvester didn’t count the people he was fairly sure only he could see.

Sylvester watched as Davis clapped a hand on Gordeux’s shoulder, leaning in close to whisper in his ear.

“So many of them have learned from you,” Mauer said.

Sylvester nodded.

Shirley was approaching him.  Others were glancing his way.  Thinking, trying to figure out how to manage him, rein him in, how to use him.  The ones with red lights in their eyes were looking at him from another angle, too hungry to think straight.  It wasn’t quite bloodlust – they wanted answers, they wanted vindication and revenge in a way that didn’t necessarily have to do with blood.

“You know what to say,” the Snake Charmer said.  “You know what to give them.”

Sylvester nodded.

All around him, others were talking.  Beattle rebel, the occasional experiment, students getting up to get first dibs on dessert, talking, laughing.  It was good amusement in a way that was almost more boisterous and exaggerated because the students were pushing against the doubts, pulling friends away from the glances in Sylvester’s direction, and trying very hard not to think about the big questions, doubts, and fears that loomed.

“But for a different roll of the dice, you might have been a beautiful noble lord, Paul,” Sylvester said.  His voice was more or less drowned out by the conversation, by the laughter, and the noise of people moving.

But others were listening, paying attention, or keeping an eye on him, and some were close enough to hear.  Paul was one of them.  So were Red, Shirley, Davis, and Junior.

Again, it was like something voltaic, a current like a horrific accident in one of the labs where stitched were mass produced, the excess charge ripping over every available surface, dancing across the path of least resistance, before diffusing out into the grounded objects.

Slowly, step by step, from one group to the next, or from one member of a group to the rest of that group, people fell silent, or noticed that others had fallen silent.

The amusement and good nature faded more swiftly than it had set in.

The Baron, sitting near the Primordial, laughed in the silence.  Sylvester smiled.

Paul had stood up, and his one hand was planted on the table in front of him as he leaned forward, his eyes wide.  Had they not been modified, the whites would have been clearly visible.  As it was, they had no whites, but the colors made the pupils very clear.

Bo Peep’s mouth formed the word ‘no’.  Shirley actually said something similar out loud.  “Don’t.”

“It’s done,” Sylvester said.  “They heard.”

“Heard what?” Fang asked.

“Sylvester said, that if the dice roll had been different, I could have been a lord?” Paul asked.

Murmurs passed over the crowd.

“Sylvester’s in a weird place,” Davis said.  “We shouldn’t put too much stock into-”

Explain,” Paul said, interrupting, ignoring Davis.  His voice was hard.

“Isn’t it amusing, in a dark way?” Sylvester asked.  “They’re a fabrication.  As much as you are, Paul.  It’s the big secret.  It’s one they’ve killed to protect, countless times.  They wipe out entire continents and blame it on war and plague, to hide it.  They’re in the middle of doing it to this one.  Wipe everything out, clean the slate, and then rebuild with complete and total control and nobody else to say different when they rewrite history and tell a different story.”

“I don’t see how that’s funny,” Fang said.

“Don’t you?” Sylvester asked.  “I mean, how many of you are named John, or Charles, or Duncan, or Philip or Mark or Timothy, because they’re names of prominent nobles and it’s a nice look for the parents?  How many of you have siblings with those names?  Mary or Elizabeth or Malcolm or Montgomery?”

He could see people here and there frown as their names were spoken.

“The street names of houses we grew up on, or schools we attended, or cities we lived in, how many of those had names inspired by nobles?  How many of you actually aspired to work with nobles, or achieve a status where you might dine with one?  Who among you felt true awe for the first time at one of their parades or ceremonies?”

“That’s enough, Sylvester,” Davis said.

“Is it?  Weren’t you really damn proud that you got a commendation pinned on your chest for your academic performance and service to the crown, Davis?  Who was it that pinned that bit of silver to your chest and made you feel more grand than you’d ever felt?  Was it a noble?”

“No,” Davis said, but he still looked like that one had struck home.

“Did it bother you it wasn’t a noble?” Sylvester asked.  He already knew the answer.

Davis had no answer to that question.

The nobles no longer sat at the table.  When he hadn’t been looking, they had stood, scattering themselves throughout the room, making themselves felt.  It was the Snake Charmer and Percy who were close to him now, buoying him forward.  Sub Rosa and Melancholy.  The Fishmonger, the Devil, Cynthia, Mauer, Fray, Avis, the Headsman Warren Howell, Wendy, Dog and Catcher.  The Primordial.

Shirley wasn’t approaching anymore.  She wasn’t even reacting.  She seemed to understand there wasn’t a real chance to stop him.  The bottle had been unstoppered.

“Can any of you name one meaningful part of your lives that wasn’t affected in some way by this farce of theirs?  A friend group or family without that one person who was loyal to the King or, flipping it around, maybe that one person who had lost someone close to them in the name of the Crown?  A major event in your lives that wasn’t influenced by them, by the flags they have us wave, the words they have us say, or the beats they have us march to?”

“We get the point, Sylvester,” Davis said.

The warm humor of just moments ago was gone, replaced by cold restlessness.  People shifted position or looked uncomfortable, without any place to go.

“What does that have to do with what they did to us?  To the experiments?” Red asked.

“Same as they did to me and the Lambs,” Sylvester said.  “They snatch up children or they offer children with no other options a choice to go with them.  To get healthy and to have shelter.  They round us all up in a place like New Amsterdam, test us to see who’s the fittest, strongest, best looking, smartest.  The best of us get to be Noble.  They get the best the Academy has to offer, they get invented histories, or they get slotted into a waiting space on the family tree.”

“And the rest of us are fodder for experiments,” Red said.

“Not just fodder for experiments.  Fodder for them.  They have to be effective, and for that, you have weapons like the Lambs that act as trial runs before a noble gets the modification.  They have to be pretty, and for that, artists like Ferres needs their practice.”

Red flinched at that.  Paul, meanwhile, only stared.

“History, the role of the Academy, politics, the wars, the disasters, it’s all wrapped up in this.  I told Paul that if the dice had fallen down differently, if he’d been a little taller, or a little fitter, that he might have been a Lord.”

Montgomery twirled his cane.  The Twins prowled through the crowd, gravitating towards the agitated, the angry.

Sylvester knew he could use that.

“How many of you are wearing Academy uniforms?  Think about this: they were testing you too, rolling dice, playing games behind the scenes.  If you aspired to be a black-coat Professor, then they were keeping all of this in mind when they decided if you deserved that coat.  Nothing to do with how hard you worked or how good you were.  But whether they thought you might play along, if you could be trusted to possibly pull the strings one day, and keep the farce alive.  For each one of you, that was the reality: either you are the sort of monster who would exploit children to succeed, and I don’t think many of you are… or they were never really going to give you a chance.”

Virtually every voice that was likely to speak for sanity and calm was too affected to speak, or they were familiar enough with Sylvester to know that there was little reason to do otherwise.

“Do you have proof?” Mabel asked, speaking for the first time.  She hung her head a little, clearly shaken.  She was standing by the stairs that led down deeper into the building.

Sylvester smiled.

“We have proof,” the Fishmonger said.

But even in the silence, nobody heard the fat boy with the nasty expression.

Sylvester waited.  Like the Fishmonger had said, there was an answer to Mabel’s question.  It was better to let them find their way to that answer on their own.

It only took a moment more before Davis looked at Sy, alarm on his face.  He was quick and clever enough to jump to that conclusion.  Mabel was almost right on his back, connecting to what Sylvester had said.

But as quick as they were to realize the conclusion, they weren’t equipped to get ahead of it, to actually deal with it.

“Ferres,” Junior said.

“She’s in surgery,” Davis said.  “And we actually need her.”

“But she can provide answers,” Fang said.

“She’s in surgery,” Davis said, more firmly.  “She’s going to be around tomorrow, there’s no reason to rush this.  You got your answers-”

Paul moved, crossing the dining area.  Davis called out, almost inarticulate in his haste to get his people moving.  Students who were acting as soldiers scrambled to get up from their benches, to get between the thirty or so students and experiments in Paul’s entourage.  More in Paul’s periphery than there had been before this discussion.

“We deserve answers!” Goldilocks called out.  People were shouting now.  Finding themselves divided, one side against another.  Sanity and concern against outrage.

“You’ll get answers!” Davis called back.  “Tomorrow!”

As quickly as the larger group had come to a halt when faced with Davis’ improvised formation of junior soldiers, they pulled back.  Junior was near the rear, and he was calling for another route.  There was another staircase down on the other side of the dining hall.

Soldiers rushed to get between the group and the stairs, and they didn’t quite make it.  With Cynthia standing and watching, the soldiers instead collided with the front left corner of the group of students, trying to block them physically, bodies pressing against bodies.

Junior and Paul’s group pushed them away.  Then, when the rows and columns of soldiers made it impossible to push the junior soldiers back and away, the press of bodies behind them making it nearly impossible, hands went up to protect faces, elbows stuck out, and somewhere along the line it became punches being thrown.

The frailer, more nimble members of the group dodged around the knot of melee, going for the stairs, heading down in the direction of Lab One.

Davis called out, ordering soldiers who were still blocking the first stairwell to hurry down, to try to intercept.  It looked like he was about to go himself, though he was unsure of the swell of violence on the other end of the room.  Mabel signaled and then headed down, leaving Davis to manage things upstairs.

Sylvester watched it all unfold.  Mauer stood beside him and it was partially with Mauer’s eyes that Sylvester analyzed the crowd, trying to decide if he needed to say anything more.

The restlessness was bleeding out.  People were picking sides but not yet finding an outlet.  Some were moving to help the soldiers.  More were hanging back, still digesting what they’d heard.

“Why?” Davis asked.  He was asking Sylvester.

Sylvester glanced at the Snake Charmer.  He looked at Sub Rosa.

“It’s a way forward.  It ensures we don’t fall into the rut.”

“A rut!?  Do you even understand what you’re saying!?”

“I think the fact that my words were able to get this kind of effect is a pretty good indicator I know what I’m saying.”

“No.  Lords, no, you don’t have a bloody clue,” Davis said.  “Valentina was absolutely right.”

Then Davis turned his attention elsewhere.

“Valentina.  The vice president of the Beattle student council,” the Snake Charmer said.

“She believed in the nobility, in a twisted way,” Melancholy said.  “You were supposed to be a surrogate, Sylvester.  That was the label she desperately wanted to apply to you.  She wanted you to be someone who could lead, who wouldn’t bleed or stumble when push came to shove.  It’s ironic, because what you said here just now would have shattered that perspective of hers.”

Fray was standing so close by, holding Evette.  Fray looked solemn while Evette smiled.

“She thought you were weak,” Percy said.  “I think, in service to what we’re striving for in the long run, you should step in now.  Instigating this was one thing, but you won’t win over the likes of Davis until you show that you have control.  That you have that power.”

Sylvester nodded, mostly to himself.

He raised a hand, standing from his seat at the dining table.  People turned to look.  They saw as Davis grabbed his wrist.

“Whatever you’re doing, just stop, please.”

“Davis,” the Treasurer said, a few steps behind his old student council president.

“Don’t tell me you’re on Sylvester’s side,” Davis said.

The Treasurer was quiet.

“Please.  Don’t make things harder for me.  I’ve tried to be a good friend.”

“I want answers,” the Treasurer said.

“I know.  But…”

“I’ll wait for them.  I won’t get in your way.”

Davis nodded.  He turned back toward Sylvester.

Sylvester simply spoke to the room, “There are some faculty members in the administration housing building.  They might know.”

Davis let go of his arm as if he was poisonous to the touch.  He called out an order, but it was too late.  Students who had been lingering in earshot now turned to hurry off to the bridge, for the same building that Sylvester, Jessie, Helen, and Ferres had been sleeping in.  There was no way for Davis’ relatively modest group of soldiers, already preoccupied, to get from one of the two south corners of the room to the northeast one.

Some of the students who lingered, looking like they might have followed Paul’s group or the group that was going to the administration building, but who were holding back, they looked like defectors.  Hackthorn students from one of the dorms.

“There are faculty members in the other dorms, aren’t there?” Sylvester said.  “Go.  Hands in the air if you’re worried about getting shot at.  They’ll see your uniforms and let you approach.  Go.  Go ask, grill them.  Tell the students in the dorm.”

Davis didn’t even try calling out an order this time.

It was a small group, all considered, but as prodded, they took the suggestion.

There was noise from elsewhere, shouting, banging, and the periodic sound of breaking glass, but the dining hall had largely cleared up.  The student body had been divided and much of it had marched off.

Davis staggered back a few steps and fell into a sitting position on a bench.

“There’s no reason for this,” Davis said.

“They want answers,” Sylvester said.

“There’s no reason to press things like this, to stir it up.  To tell them in the way you told them.”

“Avoiding the rut.  You don’t even realize you’re doing it, talking down to the experiments, marginalizing them.  Academy on top, the useful experiments a rung below.  We can’t do that.  We don’t want that to be how we approach this final stage of things.”

“When you say ‘we’,” Shirley said, speaking up for the first time since Sylvester had started talking, “Do you mean all of us here, you and the Beattle rebels, or do you mean you and the voices in your head?”

“They’re not just voices,” Sylvester said.  “They’re people.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

Sylvester nodded.

He didn’t answer her question.

Across the room, Possum was hugging Bo Peep.  Rudy stood off to one side.

Sylvester was glad that Bo Peep had someone, at least.

The soldiers who had headed down toward Lab One were now making their way up.  Before they had even found the breath to speak, Sylvester started walking toward them, walking away from Peep and Possum.

“Downstairs.  It’s bad,” the soldier told Davis.

Sylvester continued walking.  Shirley, Davis, the Treasurer and most of those who remained headed downstairs at a near-run.  They passed him.

From the look on Davis’ face, it was likely that some consideration was given to some form of incarceration or binding.  Or maybe a gag.

But that would have been slipping into the rut.  Whether Davis had processed the thought or whether his instincts had told him to do otherwise, it would have been a mistake.  Sylvester had acted to keep from being put under the thumb of the others.  The host of personalities, perspectives, and ideas in his head would have found a way to show how much of a bad idea it was to imprison him or put him in chains.

The situation was almost in his control.

Lab One was only one floor down.  The main area was still occupied by a few experiments who didn’t have cells or stables to be stowed in, but it was mostly tables, desks, and a lot of open space that was now filled with two opposing factions of students.

Sylvester stood at the very back of the crowd.

Barred from the actual surgery hall by the soldiers, Paul and his group had taken another route.  They’d accessed the hallway on the other side of the room, opening cells and dragging prisoners out.  Faculty members, favored students.

Betty was kneeling, sobbing, while Paul held her by the hair.

“She knew,” Paul said.

“If you do this, Paul,” Mabel said, “They win.  They’ve made you ugly.  They’ve taken your humanity.”

“She knew.  She knew where we came from.  She was exactly what Sylvester talked about.  The students who were tested and who succeeded.  Who they thought could be useful and support the real Academy.  Isn’t that right, Sylvester?”

“It’s exactly right,” Sylvester said.

He began making his way through the crowd.  Davis could have stopped him, but didn’t.

There were no magic words.  There was nothing Davis could do that wasn’t ordering an outright conflict.

“She knew about the- what was it even called?”

“The Block,” Sylvester said.

With that, Betty’s eyes went wider.

“And she had her justifications and they were… very tidy.  I’m clever with people and I’m not even sure if she believed them herself, or if she was just that evil.  But there’s a truth, and she didn’t serve that truth.”

He made his way out of the front of the crowd.  He passed others.  Cynthia.  The Devil.

“Then what happens next?” Mabel asked.

“Aren’t you angry?” Sylvester asked.  “Aren’t you upset?”

“Of course I am,” Mabel said.  “But I was already angry and upset.  This isn’t a big change for me.  It’s an eye opener, if it’s true, but I was already willing to leave the Academy.  I was already willing to fight for something better.”

“Yeah.  You’re a good one, Mabel,” Sylvester said.  It was getting harder to find the softer, calmer types in the crowd.  It was all the likes of the Fishmonger, the Devil, the monsters.

“Are you going to do to Betty what you did to Ferres?”

Sylvester looked down, meeting Betty’s eyes.

“That might be up to the others,” he said.  “To Paul, and Red, and I.B. Spider, if he’s recuperated enough.”

“I think your word matters,” Mabel said.  “You get a say, and they’ll listen.”

Red spoke, “She’s as ugly as Ferres where it counts, inside, and she doesn’t even have the excuse of being older.  I think she would have been worse, if she’d grown up to earn a black coat.”

“I don’t disagree,” Sylvester said.

“Sylvester, with one word, you could stop this,” Mabel said.

Sylvester turned, looking at her.

He had a lot of complicated feelings about the girl he’d flirted with, who had seen something and backed away.  Melancholy and Cynthia had positioned themselves to stand on either side of the Sheriff’s daughter.

“With one word, I could make it clear that we’re in charge,” Sylvester said.

“Nobody’s disputing that,” Mabel said.  “It’s clear.  But you could make it very clear in the here and now that you deserve that responsibility.  That you haven’t let them make you into the monster they wanted you to be.”

“That’s a really tired argument,” Sylvester said.  “One I’ve read in books.  Or my bookworm friend said they were in books.  I’m not a super avid reader.”

“As arguments go, I think it stands,” Mabel said.

“I hate this girl so much,” Red said, from the other side of the room.  “She acted sweet, like it mattered, while she was so brutal and unkind when it counted.  She just did it to look better, not because she ever cared.  When nobody was looking, she was lazy, rough, more inhuman than anything we have in the stables.  I want her to look as ugly on the outside as she is on the inside.”

“There’s justice in that,” Sylvester said.

“I don’t agree,” Davis said, “and that’s beside the point, either way.  We need her.  At this stage, we could get her to cooperate, I think.  We can do what we need to do for the greater plan.”

“And you, Betty?  What say you?  Favored student of Professor Ferres, on the fast track to your black coat, and you probably would have gotten it.  You were complicit in the block, you told me it was… well, I don’t remember the particulars of what you told me.”

“The children asked for it.  I mean- I mean,” Betty stuttered.  “They gave permission.  They knew what it involved.”

Sylvester looked at Red and Paul.  “Convinced?”

“No,” Paul said.

“It’s the way things have been going for decades.  Since Professor Ferres’ was my age, and since her mentor was my age.”

“That’s even less convincing,” Sylvester said.

“Yeah,” Goldilocks said.

“If you’re going to do the kind of work the Academy wants to do, it involves children.  It allows you to do more, it opens doors, it saves lives indirectly.”

“I think you’re just flicking ink at the paper and hoping it makes a sensible argument,” Sylvester said.

“Please,” Betty said.  “It’s the way things were, and the pressure was high.  There was never a moment where I could stop and take stock, because I was always rushing forward.  It was only ever little steps toward-”

“Toward this?” Sylvester asked.  “Being at the mercy of your creations?”

“She took my face,” Red said.  “I’m thinking I take hers.”

Her knife went to Betty’s nostril, the point sticking within.  As the knife moved, Betty craned her head, trying to avoid being cut.

Eventually, unable to keep raising her head to move in concert with the knife, Betty was left to grimace, then wail, as the knife pressed against the skin.  In the moment the skin reached its limit, the knife flicked out, and Betty collapsed, blood dribbling to the floor.

The voices of dissent weren’t dissenting.  Mabel, Davis, Gordeux, Shirley…

Sylvester held the floor.  It was up to him.  Hackthorn was his, as were the people who resided within it.

Red was looking at him, wanting approval and guidance.

“I think we need to invent something suitably horrible to do to her,” the Fishmonger said.  “A parasite, or we make her a parasite.”

“Or we execute her and put her on display.  A grisly scene,” the Devil said, in his monstrous voice.

Sylvester could imagine.  He could get away with it too.  The dissenting voices were quiet, and he was fairly certain his faction overwhelmed the Beattle Rebels now.  Defectors turned rebel now turned… horrified.  Disheartened.

Betty could so easily be made into something less than human.  It was an Academy tactic, the horrible fates that only a scalpel could bring, one she had wrought in an indirect way.

His eye fell on Fray, who stood off to one side.

With Evette, for a third time.  Still as solemn as Evette was smiling.

He wished he had the other Lambs here.

We can stop here, he thought.  The Lambs would want me to, wouldn’t they?

He asked the question of himself and he wasn’t positive of the answer.  No figure stood in the crowd that he could turn to and figure it out.  Fray, maybe, but Fray was silent and cryptic.  Evette, but he didn’t want to give Evette an in.

“Sylvester,” a voice came from the crowd.

It wasn’t one of his rebels.  It wasn’t one of the experiments, like Itsy Bitsy or Bo Peep.  Not someone like Shirley or Pierre.

She was just out of surgery, and even like that, she was partially confined and held firmly by two students.

Ferres.

“Was this a plan?” Sylvester asked Davis.

“Plan?” Davis asked.

“To bring her here.  To challenge me with her.”

“Kind of.  She said she had something vital to tell you.”

“Oh, I know what she wants to tell me.  It was a mistake to bring her this far.”

“Mistake?”

“The last time I heard what she had to say, I took her to pieces.  This time-”

This time I’m the person everyone’s listening to.

“Cover her mouth,” Davis called out.

The student did.  A moment later, he whipped his hand back, blood spraying.

Surgical enhancements.  Ones made long ago.  The blades had been inserted into cheeks, and now sprouted, like mandibles.  No longer held by one of the students, Ferres sprawled.

“Sylvester!” she called out, her voice shrill, wild in way that only a doctor who’d had her hands taken from her could sound.

A hag or a harpy incarnate.  As students fell on her, trying to manhandle her, she arched her body, forehead on the ground, limbs shielding her head and mouth, fighting for the chance to speak.  Her voice took on an eerie, fevered pitch, “You could have saved them!  If you’d only realized, you could have saved your friends, all those years ago!”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 18.h (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy V (Arc 18)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“If I offer you tea, will you resist?”

“Resist?” Sylvester asked.  “You could have said refuse.”

“I could have, I didn’t.”

“No tea,” Sylvester said.

“Having watched you for the last few years, I’d like to think I know you.”

Sylvester nodded.

“You’re loyal to the others.  When you broke in and searched through records, you looked at theirs, too.  Maybe you looked for theirs specifically.”

Sylvester frowned.

“You’ve been subtly fighting me every step of the way since.  You’re upset and angry and you don’t have a direction to point that sentiment.  It’s why I chose the word resist.”

“We never had this conversation.”

“We’re having it right now,” he said.

“I never sat in…” Sylvester looked around.  He parsed the space as an office, the window with its branch-framed glass looking out on Radham.  “Here.  You never offered tea.  This subject never came up.”

“Your memory isn’t that strong, Sylvester.”

“I can’t remember things, but I feel like if we’d had this conversation, I would have done something with it.”

“Maybe you did, Sylvester.  Maybe you ran away.  Maybe you resisted in ways that went beyond refusing tea or not telling me things about your companions.”

“And?”

The question went unanswered.  In the unlit space, the impossibly dark shadows on the other side of the desk were now unoccupied.  The question was swallowed up.

Sylvester would have turned his thoughts to the task, but they were scattered.  This place was one room in Radham, and all of his lines of thinking were in Hackthorn, stalled, or poised and waiting to be allowed to act, like bullets in the chambers of rifles.

He, too, remained where he was, poised, while the once-fine machinery of his mind operated by accident more than design.  A windmill in a windless valley, turning slightly because too many birds had gathered to roost on one blade.

He could have acted or brought things to resolution, but he didn’t trust any of his trains of thought.  Mauer’s voice was too persuasive, and Sylvester lacked the resources to really sort out the words that sounded right from the ones that were right.  Cynthia was too angry, too wounded.  The Snake Charmer was too short-term in thinking, Percy too long-term.

All of the ones he understood were problematic, by dint of what they were.  Others were problematic because of the great and terrible unknowns they represented.  Fray.  The devouring child.

Sylvester stood in the room, watching as the light moved across it.  Noticing a change in details, he turned to face the window.

Evette leaned against the wall, the curtain to one side of the window wreathing her.

Being noticed was the prompt for her to move.

She set down a syringe of Wyvern.  The usual dose, far higher than most managed.  More than even Fray took.

Then she set down another, a short distance away.

With a snapping motion of her fingers, she set the heavy syringe to spinning on the table.  She did the same with the first.

Sylvester already knew how this turned out.

And.

The syringes came to a rest, the points aimed at Sylvester.

And even though this isn’t an accurate memory of long ago, because I have no accurate memories of long ago, I know how it turned out.

I connected dots and I showed my hand.  He realized, and the next time I had an appointment…

Sylvester turned, touching the door handle.  The room was locked.

When he turned back toward the desk, Evette was gone.  The room was empty, the windows open and curtain billowing.  The syringes were depleted.

If I hadn’t revealed my hand, if I had escaped the room, if I hadn’t let them poison my brain with more Wyvern, hold me in captivity, mold my brain and brainwash me, if I’d somehow remembered or found a way to leave a message to myself…

Ferres’ voice echoed in his ears.

If I only connected the dots again.  If I let myself connect the dots…

It was at a time like this that Sylvester badly wanted to see the Lambs, to recognize their faces, to have them as concrete points he could arrange in this visualized space he was using to construct- to reconstruct the thought process.

The expiration dates for the Lambs never made sense. 

Why raise Gordon up to be someone who would be exceptional?  What had Gordon said, toward the end?  He never got to shine?  Never got to…

Sylvester groped for it, and all he could think of was how hard it had been to hear Gordon ask for his dog and be unable to give him that in the moment.

He turned his thoughts toward other things.  To Gordon thinking about defecting to Fray, the way he’d started saying ‘god’ and ‘damn’ more, if only to swear.  All around the time that he had started to dwindle.

Helen was created and raised by one of the best Professors in the Crown States, yet would never truly grow up to be of an age to use those talents.  She was created to be a wife, a companion to a narcissist Professor.

The only Lambs where expiration made any degree of sense were Mary and Sylvester himself.  Sylvester because he imbibed poison, and Mary because she had been grown fast, and she would burn out fast.  The irony was that neither of the two had originally been part of the plan.

The expiration dates weren’t an unhappy coincidence.  They were there by design.  A hand tilted the scales, as loyalty came into question.  That same hand had been on Lillian’s scales, in a different way.

Was that the reason for the appointments?  To adjust what needed adjusting, to ensure that a leash of a different sort was maintained?  Or was it all part of the same leash, that constrained them?  To keep them in one area, geographically, and to manage lifespans, so a rebellious creation would be limited in the damage it could do?

If I’d only realized, I could have done something about it.

Gordon could have lived.  Jamie could have lived.

Maybe whatever is happening to us now could have been averted before it started.

Sylvester stared into the darkness at the opposite side of the large desk.

“It’s all about control in the end,” he said.

“Sylvester.”

Sylvester opened his eyes.

“Whatever you’re thinking about doing-” Davis said.

Sylvester shook his head.

Ferres was on the ground, struggling.  They were using cloth to bind her mouth shut.  Her face was blossoming like a flower – the blades at either side of her mouth had only been the first stage.  Now everything unfolded endlessly from a central point in waves of skin, bone, small organs, and jagged metal points.  She whipped it this way and that, to make the act of getting the gag in place as difficult as possible.  The noises she made were alternately muffled and screeching, but she formed no more complete words.

She’d said as much as she needed to say, really.

The effect carried to the exposed skin of her arms, her exposed calves, and her feet.  She was a primordial in fast motion, the subject of a powerful and dangerous drug.

Sylvester turned, to look more in Davis’ direction.  He became aware that the primordial was there, standing right behind him, almost touching him, looming in a way that meant Sylvester stood in its shadow.

The Primordial was poised, like so many of the others, bullets in rifle chambers.  He held limbs and parts that looked like pieces of other primordials that actually looked like primordials.  One was held out, as if proffered to Sylvester, and it twitched and kicked.

He wanted to eat.

He wanted to eat with Sylvester.

Jamie, Gordon, Helen, Mary, Lillian, Ashton, Duncan, and all the little ones.  Lara, Nora, Abby, Emmett…

The ones who weren’t dead or broken enough to be headed there would die sooner than later.

There were two ways to handle that.  The first was to face his own culpability, in a time and place where he had no tools to manage that.

The second was to turn his attention to the culprits.

“Sylvester,” Davis said.

Sylvester turned to Davis.

The student council president had been so handsome, once.  A fine pair when put together with Valentina, who wasn’t here anymore.  But days of fighting had injured him.  A scar covered part of his face, marring one eye.  Combat drugs he’d taken to improve his focus and coordination were likely responsible for the exaggerated vascularity on the other side of his face.

“You’re in control, the Academy is yours.  You’re right.  All of this is… much worse than I’d thought.  The nobility, the role of the professors, the way the system is rigged, the lies we were told…”

“Davis,” Sylvester said.  “It doesn’t feel good, does it?”

“No,” Mabel was the one who responded.  “But that’s no reason to-”

Sylvester didn’t miss Davis’ hand motion, telling Mabel to stop.

“It doesn’t feel good,” Davis said.

So that was it.  Manipulation.  Currying favor.

Sylvester was very aware of the Primordial’s proximity.  He was increasingly aware that wherever he looked in the crowd of young Academy students, there were modifications, scars, injuries, and stitches.

Ferres was akin to a lamprey with its rings of teeth, but instead of teeth they were modifications, alterations, weapons, and poison.  Weapons of the Academy spilling forth as from a fountain.  They welled out in a constant, endless wave, and as they flowed out, they tainted other things.  They marked students, they colored the building.

Hurt sat in the base of Sylvester’s throat as he saw it, he knew it was whatever the Primordial represented in his own head, going to work.  Recognizing the enemy, seizing emotion and pain and helping him to adapt, to grapple with things.

Ferres didn’t have retractable mouth-parts.  She’d simply bitten the hand that had tried to silence her.  Davis didn’t have a scar.  Mabel didn’t have modified eyes to help her already exceptional perception.

A defense mechanism?  A last-gasp mental shift with Wyvern?

The premise was simple.  If the students weren’t people anymore, if they were only tools, ugliness, and extensions of the same engine that had hurt him for the entirety of his life, bringing Sylvester and the people closest to him to their lowest points, to points they didn’t always surface from, then it would be so much easier to hurt them.

“It’s horrendous,” Davis said.

“I’m going to pretend you’re not trying to manipulate me as you say that,” Sylvester said.

“I am, for the record.  I’m worried about what you’re going to do in the next couple of minutes.  A lot of people are.  So I’m trying to manipulate you into not doing whatever we’re worried about.  But that doesn’t mean I’m lying.  For a very long time, even until today, you were someone I couldn’t ever really understand.  But I think I understand you more than I did, even if I’m also really not sure about what you’re planning.”

As he spoke, the veins crawling across his face grew darker, bursting.  Sylvester looked away.

“Everything you’re feeling, betrayal, feeling like a part of your life was spent in service to the Crown, feeling like people close to you were betrayed, I’m- not to belittle what you’re feeling-”

Sylvester paused.

“I get it,” Gordeux said.  Sylvester was… relatively sure it was Gordeux.  “I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I wouldn’t say what I’ve experienced and felt really compares.  A lot of us got the short end of the stick, and you got a shorter one than most.”

It was the Devil who spoke in Sylvester’s ear.  “A short joke.  Kill him for it.”

Sylvester’s hand twitched and he had to fight the impulse that followed.  He shoved it into his pocket, hunching over a bit to ensure it was really crammed in there.

Problem was he had a folded blade in there.  He’d forgotten that.  He’d accidentally gone and armed himself, now.

“I’m with you,” The thing that had been Davis said.  He was speaking very carefully now.  “I’m on your side.”

Sylvester nodded, numb.

“What do you need from me?” the thing asked.

“Ferres,” Sylvester said. “Did – damn it.  I took her hand.  We needed it.”

“We found the hand and reattached it,” the thing said.

Sylvester nodded.  “Good.  She’s not going to cooperate in the way we need her to cooperate.  Preserve her brain, keep her alive in a way that we can get information we need from her, keep the hand there for now.  Take whatever else you need to make us a Ferres-alike.  We just need to fool them for a little while.”

He could feel the hesitation from the things that had been his lieutenants and friends just days ago as if it was a tangible thing.  He was trying hard not to look at anything in particular, because it only made it worse when he focused on something and instinctively demolished the meaning of that thing, to make that thing easier to destroy in the coming future.

“Sure,” The festering thing that had been Junior said.  “Unless someone else wants to object or argue the point, I know some other students I can ask, we’ll wrangle something.”

Sylvester thought of saying goodbye to Lillian, both times.  He thought of how she had cried.

The lump in his throat wasn’t going away.  The anger- it felt muted, but only because it was being redirected, painting everything in sight, twisting it.

He thought of shooting Mary, because there had been no good way to keep her from pursuing him.

Sylvester spoke as the idea was formulated and provided by the ones who stood nearby.  Cynthia, the Sub Rosa.  An unusual pairing.  “Bring some food and supplies, plan to be there for a short while.  I think there’s running water in there.”

“Food and supplies?” The Junior-thing asked.  Then, likely in response to some signal, he switched stances, “Sure.  Can do.”

“Alright,” The Davis-thing said.  “Ominous.  Do the rest of us need to take measures?”

“They run,” Cynthia said.  Burned though she was, she was more person than the things that populated the crowd.

“The rest?  They run,” Sylvester said, meeting Cynthia’s eyes.

“Sylvester-” one of the things reached out, touching Sylvester’s arm.

Sylvester lashed out, slapping it away, taking a step back and away.

He stood there, arm extended, blade in hand, watching the individual’s hand bleed, and he eyed the crowd.

“Alright,” the thing that had been Davis said, clutching its wrist.  “Junior’s got that handled.  What else do you need?”

“He’ll need to barricade the lab.”

“Sure thing.”

“And we run.  Alright.  Can you explain why, or- or just tell me why you were so dead set on taking control over the Academy and now it looks like you’re dismantling that?”

“You control sixty percent of the rebels, perhaps, sixty percent that are angry enough to listen to you,” Mauer said.  “You have enough sway to control the rest of the rebels, and by extension, you can keep your enemies pinned down in the dormitories.  But you don’t truly control this Academy.”

“No explanation needed, because I’m not giving up that control,” Sylvester said.  “I’m cementing it.”

“If Sylvester says to run,” the Shirley-thing said, “Then I think we should all go.  To rooms, or to labs where you can do work.  Grab food on the way, barricade.”

Sylvester nodded.  “I’d hurry.”

Some hurried.  Others paused.  Half of the shapes and figures that remained were hesitant, wondering if they could hurt him.  The other half, maybe a third, were the truly loyal.  Paul and Red would be among them.  They were waiting because they weren’t sure if they needed to protect him.

“I’ll walk away if you do,” a thing with a bird’s skull for a head said.  Something indistinct throbbed behind the eye sockets.

“You guys take the other staircase,” the Davis figure said.  “We watch each other through the glass.”

The bird skull nodded.  “What should we do with this one?”

Sylvester looked at the shape that knelt beside the bird skulled boy.  It bled from a face wound, hugging itself within a corset of its own flesh.

“You’ve killed worse monsters with less hesitation,” Melancholy said.

“I’ll handle it,” Sylvester said.

“If you’re sure,” the bird skull said.

In that, they started to retreat, the Davis-thing’s group matching the other.  Only a few lingered.  Shirley, Bo Peep.  Pierre.

“Would the others want you to take this course of action?”

Sylvester, unable to definitively picture the Lambs’ faces, could only imagine the way Gordon’s voice had broken in that final exchange of words, Hubris’ sigh, the movement of Jamie’s hands as he’d sat on that stone throne with technology threaded through it, the way Lillian had covered her eyes while crying.

So much pain and anger.

“Yes,” he said.

Even with all that his mind was doing to make the people he was looking at less sympathetic, he was very aware of the look of disappointment on Shirley’s face.

She left, and Sylvester remained where he was.

He was left alone in the broader Lab One area, waiting, aware of the fact that he wasn’t even positive of his environment anymore.  Stepping into that elaborate office in Radham had been the crossing of a line that made the rest of it so easy to lose.

Junior’s group came back down the stairs, still escorting a bound and gagged Ferres.  They had crates of food.

“Wish us luck,” the thing that had been Junior said.

Sylvester didn’t trust himself to speak.

He waited, listening, as the doors to the surgery theater were shut, locked, and furniture scraped against the ground.

He walked, and he walked with only the company of his enemies, his regrets, and his disembodied thoughts.

Anger, in early childhood, could so easily be conveyed with a punch to a pillow.  A sharper, less sensible anger could lead to punching a wall, breaking something. Despair, pain, loneliness, they warranted tears.  More severe despair warranted wails.  Screams.

More severe action, like the notion that he could have intervened with the expiration of two of his brothers?  There was no physical dimension for that kind of expression.

He wasn’t sure the version of events or the train of logic was correct.  He wasn’t sure how Lillian had been convinced, when she had access to their records.  He could assign some blame to the fact that a clever architect and the fact that Lillian had been raised with this broader expectation, and the fact that so many experiments were also set up to destroy themselves sooner than later, to protect the Academy’s control over things.

But he knew and believed that Ferres had started acting like she had something she could use around the time the topic of expirations and the looming deadlines had come up.

She likely thought he would cave, that she could bargain, make a promise to postpone or avert this calculated extinction of Lambkind.  Very possibly a lie or a half truth.

He doubted it had really been him that had done that damage to her, on his recognition of that blatant attempt at manipulation.

It would be him that acted on this instance of learning Ferres’ truth.

“Come,” he spoke, grabbing the back of a neck that belonged to the thing with the bleeding face.  It made high pitched sounds as it stumbled, trying to keep up with him.

Lab One was an expansive area, with its open space, tables, cabinets, and space for the larger experiments.  Some of those experiments were more visible now that the crowd had left.  They watched the proceedings with lazy, drugged expressions.

There were five ways out of Lab One.  Two sets of stairs, one on each side, a north door to the surgical area, and then two paths that folded around, leading to places onlookers couldn’t readily see.

One of those places was where this thing with the bleeding face had come from.  The Betty-thing.  The rows of cells that had once held fairy tales.

The other was where the beasts were.

“The Big Bad Wolf,” Sylvester said.  “It hunts Red.  Why?”

“What?  Please.  Don’t hurt me.”

“Cooperate and I won’t.  Tell me how they work.  Pheromones?”

“Keywords, for most.”

“Like Mary,” Percy said.  “Hopefully these keywords work better.”

Sylvester spoke, his voice low, “There were storylines.  Ones for if the birthday boy wanted adventure, one for if they wanted slaughter.  It wasn’t ruled out that they might want to set the wolf on the innocent.  On other experiments.”

“Please-” Betty said.

Was it?

“It’s in the books,” was her reluctant answer.

Sylvester shoved the Betty-thing toward the collected volumes.  “Find it.  Cooperate and you live through this.”

Glass windows blinked.  Branches that encased them throbbed.  The Lady of Hackthorn was very much alive.  She might even have felt the anticipation and barely restrained emotion that Sylvester himself felt.

“Here.”

The book had been opened to the right page.

“Like uttering a spell, isn’t it?” the Snake Charmer asked.

Sylvester held the book, looking at the wolf.  “How dark it is, inside the wolf.”

The wolf turned its attention to him.  Whatever haze of drugs had gripped it fell away in moments.

“Raise your muzzle, blackest of wolves, howl, and we shall howl with you.  Hunt, and we shall hunt with you.  Bloody those claws and fill that belly, and we shall draw blood and feast alongside you.  All…”

Sylvester touched the great black wolf’s snout, moving it to ensure the Wolf had a good look at all of the other experiments present.

“…who you see, all bear the pelts of wolves.  The rest are yours to take.”

In an instant, the great black wolf moved, leaving the stable area, claws scratching floor.

“How dark it is, inside the wolf,” Sylvester said to himself.  He tore out a page and stuck it into a pocket.

“Do you realize what you just did?  It’s going to kill everything it can find,” Betty said.

Rather than ask her to point out the words, knowing what he was looking for.

Sub Rosa stood by and watched as he found the entry for the nightmare.

This would only be the beginning.  Below were smaller labs.  Ones with weapons meant to be more practical.

“A king of your own court,” the Baron said.  “The subjects cowed  with fear.”

Sylvester sat at the highest point he could that also gave him a view of the rest of the Academy.  It was a point he had found earlier, at the stairs that overlooked the dining area, the bridges to the various buildings, and the dormitories.

He was the king of his own court, but it was a lonely one.  Here and there, his vassals would appear.  The Red Bull, the Black Wolf, the Rat Mother, the Poison Apple, the Hag, the Giant, or a host of scurrying parasites.  They would naturally pass through in the course of going from one place to the next.

The thing that had once been Betty sat on a stair below him, her head near his knee.  The more time went on, the less she talked.

One bridge burned.  The fires were a way to keep things from entering the administration building.

“The lie built the Crown up to be something grand.  Some learned the truth, but they twisted the lie so they could keep it close to their hearts.  The Duke of Francis was one of them,” the Baron said.

The Rat Mother’s children dragged a morsel across the floor of the dining hall, to a dark place where they could devour it.  To Sylvester’s eye it was more monster than the Rat Mother’s children.  But by its size, it was a child – a boy.  The child extended a hand toward Sylvester.  One of the three blind mice, perhaps?

“For others, for us, one way or another, we let the truth destroy what the lie had built.  It destroyed something in us.  We ended up very similar, you and I, didn’t we?”

The Baron laughed that laugh again.  It hadn’t been the first time in the last hour, nor the fifth, nor the tenth.

Sylvester told himself the child the Rat Mother’s children had been dragging was a hallucination.  The last few had.

He remained where he was, holding his court hostage, every one of his muscles tense.

The Academy was absolutely under control, now.

“This is too lonely an existence, isn’t it?” Percy asked.  “It’s wretched.”

Sylvester sat.  Rain drummed against the glass ceiling.  It was doing a number on the protective fires.  Some of the experiments were out there in the gloom – the muffet spider’s eyes glowed in the dark as it scaled the outside wall of the dormitory, looking for its way in, periodically breaking a window.

“Didn’t you see the books?” Percy asked.  “Yes, there were books for the bigger monsters.  There were scripts and scenarios, a play waiting for the young master to arrive on his birthday, as central actor and director both.  But there were books for the others.”

Sylvester had lost track of time.  The overcast sky and storm didn’t help, as they made it so dark that the sun wouldn’t penetrate if it had risen.

It felt like it had been a long time.  Ships should have come, but the storm might have been postponing them.

“Key phrases.  Drugs.  Pheromones.  With Ferres being who she is, there’s no way she would allow a circumstance where she would have to say no.  No way to allow a reality where she would tell the young master or his family no, we can’t do that.”

Percy walked up stairs and down them, a narrow boy in tidy clothes, hair slicked back.

“The young master being a young boy, the experiments being attractive and of an age with him… some of them with you, too, you know the means exists to… suggest they comply.”

Sylvester flinched.

“She wanted to make him a small god.  You’ve stolen that, and now you are that small god, aren’t you?  You have those means.”

“I wanted Ferres to suffer for a number of reasons,” Sylvester said.  “That was one of them.”

“And he talks,” Percy said.  He leaned in close.  “The resolve weakens, and I make some headway.  Now listen, and I’ll make more.”

Sylvester leaned forward, sitting so his hands were over his ears.  It made Betty stir awake with a jolt.  She made frightened sounds as she realized where she was, said something that Sylvester didn’t hear because Percy was talking.

Percy’s voice filtered through, as if the fingers weren’t there at all.  “You don’t have to be ungentlemanly as you go about it, Sylvester.  You’re fond of the little girl with the woolen hair, aren’t you?  A friendly face, gentle, and well meaning.  We can bring her here, and with a few words or the right syringe, we can make her feel absolutely safe, when she might otherwise feel frightened.”

Sylvester shook his head, leaving the hands where they were.

“She can stroke your back, or sleep with her head in your lap, or she can sing, because they can all sing, and you’ll be able to rest, and you’ll sleep, which you desperately need to do.”

Frantic screams from the direction that the rats had dragged the blind mouse made Sylvester nearly jump from his seat.

Betty hadn’t moved, he realized in the last moment.  She was still restless.  She flinched at the sight of any of the other experiments, large or small.  Keywords protected her from the former.  The pheromones Sylvester had dabbed on himself would help for most of the latter, while forcing her to keep close so she benefited from the same chemical triggers and protections.  She kept moving her head, looking around, jumping at sounds.

Sylvester was silent.  He wanted to touch Betty, to say something, anything to urge her to relax, because her anxiety so easily communicated to him.

“Is she supposed to help you?” Percy asked.  “If we’re going to get you moving and resolving things, then we’ll have to start with her, then.”

Sylvester sat draped across steps, the stone and wood digging into his back in places.  He avoided looking at the fire that consumed one of the dormitories, shut his ears to the distant shouts.

Cynthia sat nearby, a knife whittling away at a piece of wood, not to create anything, but to reduce it to nothing.

Betty lay on the steps below, her limbs bent at odd angles, her face distorted by the way the weight of her body pushed it down into tile.  She bled from a throat wound.

Sylvester avoided looking at that too.

Mounting anxiety and self-doubt warred within him, at stark odds to the view he had of the clouds overhead, moon peeking through them.  The rain had slowed, becoming a mere drizzle, and the raindrops were like stars against the void, each one of them catching the light from the burning dormitory.

A lot of the time, the things he saw were relatively fleeting.  People came and went.  Images came and went.

But Betty remained dead.  The fires slowly crept over the dormitory building, and anyone who tried to take action to put them out was picked off by warbeasts and things that hunted.

In this, Cynthia was patient.  She would outlast him, because she was his ugly desire to survive, to dig past the pain and crawl forward on wounded limbs, and that would endure long after his mind did.

It would endure, at this rate, well beyond the Beattle and Hackthorn rebels.

“Sylvester,” Jessie said.

Sylvester flinched.

He didn’t want to look up.

“Sy.”

He didn’t want to respond.

“We’re back to this, huh?  Like it was in Tynewear, after I caught up to you?”

He swallowed hard.

“I’m sorry I had to come back alone.  They did too much damage.  Mary and Lillian had to stay back.  Duncan didn’t want to come if the others weren’t coming.  We might see him later – he couldn’t stay at the Academy with the threat the Infante posed.  Helen went after Mauer and didn’t come back.”

Sylvester gripped the edge of the stair with his hands, eyes fixed on the ground.

“But I came back.  I will always come back, okay?”

Jessie advanced another few steps, the sound of shoe scuffs loud in the empty dining hall.

“And what we were doing, we can give it an honest try.  Us against the most powerful people in the world.  How does that sound?”

Sylvester’s eye moved to Betty’s body, still there.

“Not that good?  Can- can you please give me a bit of a response, Sy?  Let me know there’s something of you still in there?”

There was uncharacteristic emotion in Jessie’s voice.

“Will you let me come up to you?  Can I give you a hug?  A kiss?  I’ve sort of missed you.”

Sylvester listened to the footsteps.

“You numbskull,” she said, voice soft.

He lashed out, swiping at her with the knife, still not looking.

It was only after a long paralyzing minute where he wondered if he would look up and see Jessie bleeding from a throat wound that he finally allowed himself to look.

No Jessie.  Nothing there.

Sylvester moved the knife back to his lap.  He looked at his hand, where a bruise drew a line across the palm, black, purple and green.

He brought the hand back down to the stair, the line meeting the edge of the stair.  Firmly in position, and he gripped it hard.

“I know you just had an appointment,” Mrs. Earles said.  “I know you’re usually surly.”

“It was a bad one,” Sylvester said.  “I can’t even think straight.  Can’t remember things.”

Her hand brushed through his hair, stroking his head.

“Enjoy the moment.  Spend time with your friends.”

While I can.

The thought came unbidden.

The door to the kitchen was open, and the sun was shining.  Now and then the orphans went in and out of the kitchen, grabbing glasses from the edge of the table to drink them as fast as possible before hurrying outside again, as if every bit of summer possible had to be used to best effect.

Sylvester drew a foot up onto the bench he sat on, knee against his chest.  His hands hurt, bruises crossing them.

“Mary’s doing what I told her not to, and she’s tying up her dress so it won’t get in the way while she climbs the tree.  For such a young lady, she’s such a tomboy sometimes.”

Sylvester nodded.

“Someone should tell Lillian that if she follows suit and breaks something, it could get in the way of her studies.  Gordon’s helping her.”

“She’d accuse me of looking up her skirt or something.”

“If you’re concerned about that, you should stop looking up her skirt.”

He allowed himself a snort of a laugh.

“Sylvesterrrrr!” a voice called out.  Helen’s.  “Jamie’s going to draw us!  Come sit on the branch with us!”

Sylvester fixed his eyes on the table.  Mrs. Earles continued stroking his hair.

“If you wanted to sit and be quiet, I don’t think Jamie would mind the company,” she said.

Sylvester shook his head, even though there wasn’t anything else in the world he wanted as much as that.

He remained where he was.

He heard the footsteps.  There were no voices.

His hand found the knife.

He raised his head just enough to see the feet, the shoes.

Before he could finish counting, one of those sets of feet broke into a run.

One, two, three, four, five, six…

He finished the count just in time.  There were enough of them.

The knife fell from his hand, and danced down the steps.  He let his guard down, and he welcomed the embrace, fully aware that if this was a trick, if this was the ploy that his own head pulled on him, then he was done with, the last remnant of him would be gone.

It was a painfully tight hug, and it made the bruises where his lower back met the stairs flare in agony as the weight of her pressed against his front.

Lillian still smelled like Lillian.  She still felt like Lillian.

“Move aside, Betty,” Jessie said.  “Stay close, but let me by, here.”

Betty, still sitting next to Sylvester, got out of the way.  Jessie hugged Sylvester as well, and she kissed the side of his face.  He turned his head and she kissed him properly, before resting her forehead against his.

His bruised hand trembled a little from exhaustion as he fixed the position of her glasses.

“I tried to stay put,” he said.

“Shh.  It’s fine.”

“I wanted to minimize the damage I could do.”

Duncan, standing very close by, gave a short laugh.

“Shush, Duncan,” Lillian said, her face still buried in Sylvester’s front.  “Don’t even say anything.”

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  He wasn’t one to join the hug, but he reached out, taking Sylvester’s hand.  Almost shaking it, almost holding it.  “Sorry.”

Sylvester shook his head.  There was no need for apologies.  He squeezed his friend’s hand.

Helen joined the hug-pile, and she was very good at fitting herself into it.  Ashton followed her.

Even Mary, hesitant, joined in.

All together.

He’d told himself that he would trust in the Lambs, that nothing else would do for letting his guard down, for letting them close, or for listening to them.

“The Infante isn’t coming,” Jessie said.  “None of the important ones are.  The Infante clued into the Duke, he attacked, and now they’re getting defenses in order.”

“It’s fine,” Sylvester said.  “It’s fine.”

They were together.

“Betty’s alive.  I didn’t kill her.”

“Yes, Sy,” Jessie confirmed.

That vision of her had laid there for what might have been a night and a day, convincing him she was dead.

“The dormitory building, did it burn?”

“No, Sy.”

“Is there- is there a blood trail there, where the rats dragged one of the children away?”

“No, Sy.”

“Is- did Bo Peep die?”

“Not as far as I’m aware, Sy.”

“Did Shirley?  Pierre?”

“No sign of anything happening to Shirley, Sy.  Pierre’s off helping with getting children to the West Corinth orphanage.  He doesn’t like staying in one place, remember?”

Sylvester nodded.  “Don’t lie to me.”

“No lies.  I promise.”

“Did I kill Davis?  His body would be on the stairs.”

“No, Sy,” Jessie said.

Lillian made a small sound.

“Okay,” he said, his voice soft.  “I’ll stop asking the questions.”

“You should ask as many as you need to,” Lillian said.

“No,” he said.  “After.  And maybe for a while yet.”

“Okay,” she said.  “If that’s how it is.”

“It is,” Ashton chimed in, finally.

They were together.  All back together, finally.

He had had more than enough time to think, in a roundabout, not-really-thinking way.  That line of thinking, coupled with the swelling feeling in his chest, it made him feel like conquering the world wasn’t out of the question.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.01 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Everything hurt.  Mind, body, more of my body.  I had organs that hurt and I wasn’t sure exactly why that would be the case.  I was in bed, and my first attempt to sit up failed, in part because the bed I was in was too soft, giving too much when I was looking for leverage.

I was in one of the guest bedrooms, reserved for visiting nobles.  The bed was large enough for five people to sleep in without touching one another, sporting a canopy draped with embroidered silk.  The furniture was grown wood with gold elaboration that had no doubt been worked into it as it grew.

The only people in the room, at first glance, were Percy and the Snake charmer, sitting at the table at the window, with a chessboard and cups of tea between them.  The chessboard itself wasn’t set up, the pieces absent.

Sub Rosa stood by the door.

My eyes took too long to find Ashton, sitting on the footboard of the bed, the red silk canopy that extended down the pillar of the canopy bed partially obscured him as he sat there, staring at me.

I remained where I was, staring at him.  For his part, he was utterly still, unblinking, as he fixed his attention on me.

It was good to see his face.  I was pretty sure it was his face, anyhow.  A Lamb, a brother I hadn’t had nearly enough time to get to know, a friend, a briefly lived nemesis.

“Are you real?” I asked.

“I hope so,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “We’re on the same page there.”

“Jessie said to tell you she wished she could have slept in with you, but she had things to do.  Mary didn’t want to, and Lillian would have, but she has surgery.”

“Surgery?” I asked.  “Because of me?”

Ashton thought for a long, agonizing moment, before he said, “Yes.”

I winced, looking away.

“But not very because of you.  Distantly because of you.  You got her talking to the Duke and the Infante learned about the Duke, and he punished them by hurting Lillian.  That’s part of why it took so long for us to get back.”

I tried getting up again, rolling myself into a sitting-up position instead of relying on anything abdominal.  I grimaced, found my bearings, and then slipped off the edge of the bed, easing myself down until my feet were on the cold wood floor.

Ashton hopped down and helped to support me.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’m not sure if you’re calling me sir to be ironic, when I’m not a sir or an adult you might call sir.  It’s not polite if you are.”

“I used to, a bit, and then it became a genuine token of respect,” I said.  “The joke became reality.”

“Okay then.”

We walked past Sub Rosa, who guarded the door.  She smiled at me with lips that had been sewn shut, doing nothing while Ashton reached past her to open the door.

It was something of a relief to see the door open.  A part of me had worried I was in a room like the one from Radham, a spatial representation of things, which kept my thinking in a particularly constrained space, instead of my thinking being so far-ranging that it became ambulatory, vocal, and argumentative.  The hallway was empty, almost normal, but for a tear in the carpet that ran down the length of it, a gouge in one of the doors, and some bullet casings.

I felt my stomach clench with tension, which only reminded me of the pain in my midsection.

“Ashton, why does my side feel like I was kicked a few times by wild horses?”

“Because you sat on stairs for a really long time and you didn’t go to the bathroom.  They said you hurt your kidney and bladder, doing that.”

“Kidney, singular?”

Ashton gave me a shrug, his narrow shoulders moving beneath my arm.  “It’s what they said.”

I might’ve lost it in an injury I couldn’t recall.

“I guess I thought my head was just trying to trick me into moving, so I suppressed it.”

“Yes.  And you hurt yourself.  You’ll get better.  We have lots of doctors.”

Lots of doctors.  My thoughts turned to the others- to the Academy-trained Beattle rebels, the Hackthorn rebels who we’d barely had a handle on, to the Lamb Doctors, and everyone else who had suffered because of the storm of chaos.  I’d know it would be bad, but… it sat uncomfortably, thinking about just how far I’d sunk.

I wasn’t wholly sure I’d surfaced, either.  I wasn’t in a room in my head, I was pretty sure, but the dangerous figures were still there, waiting.

“This way,” he said.

‘This way’ wasn’t toward the dining hall.  Maybe for the best.  It was down the length of the hall, in the opposite direction, and then up the stairs.

It wasn’t a place I’d really explored, past my initial perusal of Hackthorn.  On the days I’d been inclined to visit, the weather had been poor.  A rooftop garden with a patio, all sorts of unusual plants arranged on several levels, so that five individual groups could sit with enough of a barrier between them to be private, and so people could take their time walking around the garden, if they walked slowly.

Lillian was there, sitting, with a cup of tea on a saucer set beside her.

Part of the reason I hadn’t spent much time up here was that there wasn’t a particularly amazing view.  We were high up enough that the water was only really water, without much in the way of waves, and even if we’d been on ground level, the landscape wouldn’t have been much to look at.  Black wood and scorched earth.

There was only so long that one could sit and look at the clouds.  Especially when there was a great deal to be done.  It was a place to read on nice days, and Jessie had come to do that several times, but I suspected that she ended up spending more time napping in the sunlight than actually reading.

Lillian noticed our approach.  She looked fine, if weary, but her posture was odd and I could see traces of orange-pink at the collar of her shirt.  Disinfectant, some of which was on her neck.

“You’re out of surgery already,” Ashton said.

Lillian nodded.

She patted the bench next to her.

“Can you talk?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice soft.

I took my seat.  I had to calculate and assess the appropriate and graceful amount of physical distance that a tense ex-relationship, hurt feelings and my own plunge into madness required.  The presence of the obstacle that was the cup and saucer factored into it.  I sat at a distance that meant I could have just barely touched her shoulder with a fingertip if I was of a mind to.

She picked up the cup and saucer as I settled with Ashton’s help.

“Okay?” Ashton asked me.

“Very okay,” I said.

“Do you want anything?” he asked me.

I thought of eating and drinking and the torture it would be for my strained body.  “No thank you.  Not just yet.”

“Oh, Lillian told me to tell you you need to urinate regularly.  You might want to use a bush.”

“I’m right here, Ashton,” Lillian said, still speaking at half her usual volume.

“I know, but you said to say it and I’m remembering now that I see you, so I’m saying it.”

“Thank you, Ashton,” Lillian said.

“You’re welcome, Lillian,” Ashton said.  Then he shifted his footing, “I’m going to go and tell the others Sylvester’s awake.  We should be along in a little while, but it’s going to take a little while and I’m not going to run.”

“Thank you, Ashton.”

“You’re welcome,” Ashton said.  “For the record I’m taking my time because you two should have some time to talk and get things worked some, I’m not taking my time because I’m slow or bad at running.”

Thank you, Ashton,” Lillian said, with emphasis.  She winced a little at the pain that small degree of effort caused.

“You’re welcome.  I know you’re saying it that way because you want me to go.  I understand, I can take hints.”

“You’ve been getting better,” Lillian said, touching her throat.  I saw how the disinfectant transferred to her fingertips and checked my pockets for a handkerchief.  I handed it to her.

“You hurt yourself.  Try not to yell at Sylvester,” Ashton said.  “You’ll hurt yourself more.”

“If you stay any longer, Ashton, I’m going to throw something at you,” Lillian said.

“Try not to throw things,” Ashton said, “You might hurt yourself if you exert yourself too much.”

Lillian twisted around, searching her immediate surroundings, no doubt for something in the order of a pinecone or small rock.

“Try not to make her upset, Sylvester,” Ashton said, ignoring the fact that he was needling her, inadvertently or no.

“I’ll try not to,” I said, my voice quiet.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

He turned to leave, and I watched him go, my eyes narrowed.

Had he just pulled a clever line on me, or was that Ashton being Ashton?

“I’m fond of him,” Lillian said.  “I haven’t gotten to see Ashton enough as of late.”

“He’s a good egg.”

“I’ve missed everyone,” she said, looking at me.  Then, by some leap of logic, she jumped straight to, “I’m sorry I didn’t get my black coat, Sy.”

“What?  No.  Don’t do that, or I’ll think you’re somehow crazier than me.”

“I think that would be a feat,” she said.

“Are you alright?” I asked her.  I touched my throat, to indicate.  “Ashton said it was the Infante?”

“I’m not very alright,” she said.  “It scared me more than almost anything.  I’m fairly sure he let us go and I’m worried about why… But sitting is nice.  Seeing you almost normal is nice.”

I had my doubts about that, but I didn’t voice them.  I wanted her to have ‘nice’.

I had other doubts, that she was holding back on her true feelings, because she didn’t want to stress me out.

She went on, “I performed some of the surgery on myself, Jessie did some more, and I had more this morning, cosmetic, and to ensure I could speak without pain.  Some of it affected the spine… I’ve still got some pain from that.  It’s mild, but…”

She rubbed her arm, heel of her wrist digging in, as if she needed to press deep enough to make it felt bone-deep.

“Is it fixable?”

She nodded.  “I’ll need another surgery.  I’ll get it before we leave.”

Leave.  That was a thing.

The intention had been for this to be a final stage, I’d hoped to prepare it, to make this the arena, as much to our favor as possible, and that had fallen through.

We would have to leave, fight our enemy on their turf.

“I’m drinking tea because I need fluids but I can’t drink too much too fast before I’m all healed up.  The heat of it slows me down, and then when it’s cold I won’t want to drink it, because who drinks cold tea?”

I really liked the sound of her voice, even if it was quiet, or especially because it was quiet because that was a voice that had once been used when we slept in the same bed in her dormitory and didn’t want to be overheard.  I liked the shape of her face and the way her hair had grown just a bit longer and framed that face.  I wished I could stare at it more and hurry up my reconstitution of Lillian in my head, without actually staring at her and being creepy.

I tried to split my attention between looking at her and looking at the heavy clouds.

“How are you?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I think I really needed to see your faces.  But I also think I shouldn’t feel as quiet as I do.  I’m worried that they’re just mustering their forces.”

“They?”

“The Snake Charmer, Percy, Sub Rosa, the Humors, Avis, Fray, Warren, Wendy… and so on.  Dead soldiers, doctors, and ghosts.  The Brechwell Beast pretending to be a girl, the Primordial pretending to be a boy…”

“It was a girl, I think, in retrospect,” Lillian said.

“There you go,” I said.

“What happens when they’re mustered?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t know.  I think, even at their worst, they wanted to protect me.  Or to keep me… intact, physically.  Even if it meant carving through everything in my way.  Maybe they’ll step in again if they think I’m in danger.  Or if there’s an opening, or if I get jostled like a box of bugs, or after I’ve gathered my strength and they think I’m in good shape to do what they need me to do.”

“I see,” Lillian said.

“I feel very dangerously fragile, I hope that isn’t too unmanly a thing to say.”

Lillian shook her head, then winced again, touching her neck.  She wiped at her fingers with the handkerchief.  “No.”

“How bad is the aftermath?” I asked.

“It’s not good.  But I think people are turning to your lieutenants for guidance, informing their own reactions based on how those lieutenants react.  Helen, and Duncan are doing a lot of the talking right now.  We’ll have to wait and see what they say, but I think if the people you put in charge stay, a lot of the others will stay.  They might not trust you to be leader, though.”

“I don’t trust myself to be leader,” I said.

“Some will leave,” she said.  “We had a brief conversation about that, before I went to get patched up.  I had to communicate through gestures.  I think nobody really wanted to, but we had to acknowledge that it might be tactically better to not let others leave.”

“Burn the bridge behind us, force cooperation?” I asked.

“We decided it didn’t make a lot of sense,” Lillian said.  “That might change, depending on how the conversation goes.”

I winced.

“Jessie and Mary are hunting down the experiments you freed.  Jessie memorized the key phrases to bring them back in line, but they have to get in earshot to do it.”

“Not all of them have key phrases.”

“From what we were able to tell, you released four varieties of parasite, the flay stalkers, the shrieking ninnies, the rats-in-perpetuity, and the spiders of silence.”

“Shrieking ninnies?”

“Naked, tall, underweight people with oversized heads, nimble and fast enough to stay out of danger,” Lillian said.

“Oh, I might remember them.”

“They’re loud, and they use that loudness to make sounds like shrieking babies, keyed to be as anxiety inducing and irritating to humans as is possible.”

“They’re pretty funny, yeah,” I said.

“Ferres’ big projects went after them when they couldn’t get at the students or faculty,” Lillian said.  “Along with the rats-in-perpetuity, the spiders of silence, and all the others.”

“Those names.  Rats-in-perpetuity, spiders of silence?  Really?”

“They had pretentious names for the parasites, too, but I’m not remembering them off the top of my head,” Lillian said.  “It’s a school of students with an artistic bent.  You picked it as your target.”

“We wanted to fix Helen,” I said.  “I wanted to fix Jessie.  I-”

Jamie’s face flickered through my mind’s eye, incomplete, the memory fuzzed around the edges.

“Jamie,” I said, a thought as incomplete as the image.

“Are you seeing him?”

I shook my head.  “I wish.”

“What are you thinking, Sylvester?  Where did Jamie come from?”

“I… I went to pieces.  Everything fell away, my thoughts mutinied against my critical thinking, and I think I realized things.  About Jamie.  About everyone, except maybe you.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just your head playing tricks on you?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” I said.  “That least of all.  I really don’t feel as if I should be as lucid as I am and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I’m not even positive you’re here right now.”

The cup and saucer clattered slightly as Lillian placed them on the bench, to one side, so they weren’t between her and I.   She scooted over, until her shoulder was pressed against mine, and then she lifted my arm and carefully set it over her shoulders.

“There,” she said.  “Does that help?”

“Yes,” I said.  I was fairly sure I was lying.

She still had one of her hands on mine, from where she’d moved my arm.  “You’re cold.”

“A little,” I said.

“Let me know if you get too cold, we can go inside,” she said.

I don’t ever want to move or think, and I almost don’t want to say anything because I’m afraid I’ll break everything all over again.  I’m afraid I’ll dispel the hallucination and I’ll be sitting on those stairs in the dark while rain falls on the glass overhead, my hands all bruised and hurting, my kidney and bladder failing because I’m afraid that having to go to the bathroom is just another head game.

I don’t want this to change or stop in any way, except…

…Except to have others here.  To have Jessie, Helen, or Mary, or to have Ashton back and being odd, or even Duncan if it had to be him.

But this was good, even if I wasn’t sure what it meant or what it was supposed to be, besides skinship.

“What do you think you realized?”

“That the expiration dates are a lie,” I said.

With the physical contact, I could tell that she’d started a bit.

“That’s heavy,” she said.  “But you remember that Gordon expired, don’t you, Sy?”

She asked it like it was really a possibility that I could have forgotten.  I couldn’t blame her either.

“It’s not that we don’t expire, but… more that we expire because they want us to, we’re rigged to fail and then they postpone it if we’re useful.  Or they hurry it up if we become a concern.  It’s control.  It’s power over us.  The fact it happens all around the same timeframe, only a few years apart, that experiments like Helen and Gordon are all about building up to a mature stage and then that gets cut short?”

“The idea was that they would be pilot programs, and if they were viable then the Academy might try again.”

“With Ibbot?  Why not just have him get it right the first time?  He’s good enough.”

“He’s good enough but he doesn’t care.  He can show it can work and leave enough in the way of notes for others to replicate for a second stage.”

“Or he cares,” I said.  “Everyone and their mother knows he created her with the idea she would be a partner for him, a toy for him to use if he wanted to get his snail wet.”

“Ew, ew, no, ew.  ” Lillian said.  She physically squirmed under my arm.  I squeezed her shoulders, and she drew in closer to me, her shoulder driving into my armpit as she shook her head.  “I don’t want to think about Ibbot’s snail.”

“As an idea, it answers more questions than it begs,” I said.

“So that’s what Ferres was at,” Lillian said.  “We heard fragments of it.”

“Yeah.”

“I feel like, once upon a time, when I first learned about the set end date for the project, not the expiration dates but that things would only last until around the time I graduated, I wondered why.  And then we got busy with the baby-things and then the singing doctor, and the spider-things, and the Snake Charmer, and… I was new and emotionally exhausted.  I didn’t think about things for a while.”

“But the expiration dates did come up.”

She shifted slightly, her shoulder still digging into my armpit as she nestled closer, “I don’t know, Sy.  I didn’t think about it much.  I thought the Professors knew enough, and I didn’t want to question them.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I think it was around the time I ran away, that I realized.  I’d read the files, the first time, and I realized, and I tipped them off, and that was around the time I left.  And then… I can’t remember exactly it, but I let myself get caught, because I missed the Lambs and I missed Wyvern.  They gave me a double dose.  I think they molded my brain, to forget and to not think about it too much.  Then they brought me back, and I looked for and found the expiration dates again, and that time I didn’t think about it, and…”

I trailed off.

“Maybe,” Lillian said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “It’s a pretty terrible maybe.  If it’s true then Ferres is right and I missed something important.  I could have kept them from hurting Jamie or killing Gordon, or I could have taken us to Fray, or we could have worked something out and organized as a team, or…”

“You can’t blame yourself.”

“If I learned then and I ran away, then I was stupid and I let fear take over, I left the Lambs instead of telling them, and I couldn’t ever forgive myself if that’s true.”

If it’s true, Sy,” Lillian said.  “We don’t know.  We can’t know.  You can’t condemn yourself for something that’s as in doubt as this is.”

“Wanna bet?” I asked her.

She took my hand, her arm resting alongside mine.

I could feel the tremor, the twitch.  I knew it was the pain from whatever the Infante had done to her spine.

“Hurts?” I asked.

“It’ll be fixed soon,” she said.

With my other hand, reaching over, I rubbed at her forearm, massaging it through her shirt.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, her voice even quieter than before.

“I’ve missed you more,” I replied.

“Wanna bet?” she asked.  Her voice was quieter each time she spoke.  There was something in the question and I chose not to hear it.  It felt like she was fading away, and I was afraid of pushing her that one little bit further away.

But I used my one hand to massage her arm, and I listened to her words and I smelled her and I felt the warmth of her all along one side of me.

“You have the best hands,” she said.  Her head leaned against my shoulder.

“It helps?” I asked.

“It helps,” she said.

We sat like that for a little while longer.  Birds roosted on the railing a little ways in front of us.  The clouds remained boring but I could have looked at them for days if it meant sitting with Lillian or Jessie or the others like this.  Except maybe Duncan.  Snuggling with Duncan would have been weird.

“I could do with massages in other places,” Lillian said.

“Is that so?” I asked, not sure what to say.

“Maybe you should stop, Sylvester,” she said.  I stopped, keeping my hands where they were, one hand entwined with hers, the other on her forearm.  “If you keep going I might pounce on you and I don’t know what I’d do.”

Her hand squeezed mine, hard.

“I’ve got to be fair to Jessie,” I said.

“I know.”

“I think I know what her answer would be if I asked, but I’m not sure of much of anything right now.”

“I know.  You said.  It’s okay.  Do you want to let go of me, then, and we’ll figure it out later, if we figure it out?” she asked.

I didn’t want to let go of her for anything.  My hands remained where they were, our arms entangled.

We were like that, silent and unwilling to move further away, when the others arrived.

“We arrive, we’re here,” Helen called out.  “We bring snacks, tea, good company, and agendas.”

Bright and warm and very Helen.  My hands released Lillian’s hand and arm.

When she turned up, rounding the corner, she was smiling, very much Helen, intact.

“My dears,” she said.  She set a tray down on a nearby table.

“You’re in a good mood,” I said.

“I hunted, and it wasn’t perfect but it was good, and I’m sated for the now.  I’ve got snacks made by our Possum-Helen, and I’ve got the Lambs,” she said, bright and warm.  “What more could I want?”

Her hands touched the sides of my head, her fingers running through my hair.  She kissed my forehead.

As Ashton approached with Lara and Nora, the two twins now asymmetrical, Helen pounced on Ashton, throwing her arms around him and lifting him bodily off the ground.  The twins flinched away.

One of the two had had a growth spurt, and was a foot taller than her sister.  The shroud of clothing that covered her now covered her lower face, her overlong neck, and the two long forelimbs that now stretched from shoulder to toe.  The dangling claws scuffed the ground and the edge of stairs as she walked down the path to where we were in the garden.

“I brought them,” Ashton said, belaboring the obvious.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Where do we sit?” the smaller of the twins asked.

“Find a compost heap and sit in it,” the larger twin said.  “Then you might grow some, and you’ll smell better.”

The smaller twin gasped.

“Be nice, Nora,” Lillian said.

“I am being nice, I’m giving her advice that’s sorely needed.”

“She’s just bitter because she’s a piteous miscreation of science,” Lara said.  “It’s why we left the Academy, because they were going to put her down for being so grotesque and disappointing to look at.”

“Says the runt who hasn’t grown yet.”

“I will say so, thank you very much,” Lara said, before turning to me.  “There’s really no justice in this world if the Academy goes unpunished for bringing her into existence.”

“You think so, huh?” I asked.

“It’s one of the great crimes against humanity, edging out the red plague and the genocide out east.”

Nora lunged, falling to all four limbs, face thrust at Lara’s.  Her voice was a growl.  “I could eviscerate you.  You’d be prettier.”

Lara tittered with a laugh.  It took me long seconds to read past the hostility in Nora’s body language and see that she was laughing too.

Lara threw her arms around her big sister’s long neck, hugging her, and rocked left to right.

Mary approached with Abby and Quinton, and broke away from Abby to go straight to Lillian, sitting at the edge of the bench, her focus on Lillian’s recently mended throat.  They exchanged murmured words.

“Did we interrupt?” Abby asked me.

“Hm?”

Her eyes moved between Lillian and me.

“No,” I said.  “All good.”

“Good,” she said.

So it was.  Jessie, Emmett,  and Duncan were the last to arrive.

I stood from my seat with some difficulty, and wrapped Jessie in a hug with less difficulty.

“Brought them,” she said.  “I missed you.”

I nodded.  The moment, having everyone here, it made words catch in my throat.

“I worried so much,” she said.

I nodded again.  Me too.

It wasn’t just that I’d worried for my sake.  I’d seen things.  My head had turned against me and it had subjected me to things, doubts given life, mind games.  In the midst of it, Jessie had died far too many times.  She’d died more than any of the others.  She had suffered implied fates that would have made death a kindness.

She’d been the one they had repeatedly used to try to convince me that the Lambs were back, that I could let my guard down.

The others were getting settled, Lara settling in Nora’s lap, Abby sitting on the short wall that bounded the soil of the garden to one side of us, Helen at the table, arranging tea and snacks.  Jessie sat next to me.

“A lot of them want to leave,” Duncan finally said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Shh,” Jessie said.  She gave my hand a squeeze.  “It’s okay.”

“The question came up, there’s no place to go.  The Crown has a stranglehold on the Crown States, there aren’t many options.  Some of the Hackthorn students think they could backtrack on their betrayal of the Crown, but… it’s hard.  They have fellow students who remember them defecting.  There’s some thinking along the lines that the ones who remained loyal might stay silent on that if they’re allowed to go, but… that’s a lot of mouths that could talk.”

“Which brings us to our next point,” Jessie said.  “They know.  About the block, about the nobles.  And we’ve made it clear to them, well, Sylvester made it clear but we made sure it was crystal, that if one mouth talks, the Crown might erase the problem.  So like it or not, they’re cooperating.  It’s reluctant assistance, but it’s assistance.”

Others approached.  Shirley, with Bo Peep.  Davis.  Bea, the Treasurer, Mabel, Junior, and Gordeux.

“Just catching them up,” Duncan said.  “People are mostly willing to go along with us?”

“Looks like,” Davis said.  He turned his attention to me.  “You alright?”

“Oddly so,” I said.

Jessie spoke, “We gave you a half-dose of Wyvern, in the hopes it might help you get your mental house in order, while you were unconscious.  Duncan’s idea.”

I shivered at the notion.  I liked being in control… but I wasn’t sure if I would’ve made the right decisions, being like I was, either.

“I didn’t know that,” Lillian said.  She glanced at me, wary.  “I don’t know if I would have recommended it.”

“It’s done,” Duncan said.  “I don’t know if I would have recommended it in the light of day, either.  But I didn’t like seeing you like you were.  You just kept endlessly asking about what you’d done or hadn’t done, who was alive or dead, who had been tortured to death or not.  You’d stop for a bit and then start.  We drugged you to knock you out because you got so anxious, and it took three tries to get the dosage right, even with your native resistances.  I thought… if sleep helps us reorganize our memories and feelings from the day prior… well, maybe Wyvern might help for a bigger endeavor on that front.”

“It doesn’t quite work like that,” Lillian said.  “But it’s not wholly wrong either.”

“Okay,” I said, still uncomfortable with the idea.  It overlapped too much with my thoughts of the double dose and the brainwashing, even if it had been a half-dose outside of the usual schedule, by people who meant well.

“The Infante isn’t coming.  Almost none of the people we really were invested in getting into Hackthorn are,” Jessie said.  “But some are.  Professors from smaller Academies.  From what I was able to pick up and listen in on, we’re approaching the final days.”

“Final days?” Abby asked.

Lillian spoke, “Some Academies will continue running, to look after the Tender Mercies and various other creations who are designed to survive and patrol the wasteland that the Crown States is going to become.  They’ll maintain control and look after things.  A skeleton crew.  Hayle is going to be one, looking after Radham.  But everyone else is going to leave.  They’re interested enough in the rumor and lies we’re spreading that they’re making this one of the last ports of call.  They’ll go from here to Trimountaine or vice versa and then make their way over to London.”

Bo Peep was watching Quinton, tuning out almost half of the discussion.  At a nudge from Shirley, she crossed the little section of garden, giving a wide berth to Lara and Nora, before settling next to Abby and Quinton.  Abby picked Quinton up and scooted over to sit with her thigh touching Bo Peep’s, and set Quinton down so he was lying across their laps.  Bo Peep’s hands hovered in the air, as if she couldn’t bring them down without touching Quinton, but she was too overwhelmed to make even incidental contact with the lamb.

“I’ve left us in bad shape to do what we planned on doing,” I said.  I watched as Abby took Bo Peep’s hand and brought it down to touch Quinton’s neck.

“We’ll manage,” Mary said.  “We have to.  There’s no other choice.”

We have to.  We didn’t have much more of a path forward than the students here did.

“They have to cross dangerous ground to get here,” Duncan said.  “Bandits, the desperate, rebels like Mauer.  So even if it’s not the targets we want, it’s going to be a scary number of lesser nobles, professors, and all of the forces and top-tier creations they see fit to bring with them as they aim to get safely over here and then cross the pond.”

“And the Infante?” I asked.  I saw a flicker out of the corner of my eye and glanced over.  “The Duke?  The top-tier Professors?”

“We’ll figure something out,” Duncan said.  “But that comes after.  For now we need to pull together, get a plan in motion, and survive the next week.”

“We’ll manage,” Mary said, once again.

I almost agreed.  Almost.  Before I could indicate or speak something to that effect, I saw the shape out of the corner of my eye once again.

I hadn’t seen many of the hallucinations.  The people around me were no longer monsters, the Academy looked almost normal.  The dose of Wyvern and the unconscious reconstruction of things had no doubt gone a ways toward that.  It had helped me piece my mind partially back together, and seeing and coming into contact with the Lambs had helped me piece my heart most of the way back together.

But it had come at costs.  A lowering of defenses, doors opened I’d meant to keep shut.  I no longer faced a legion of devils that nobody else could see.  I faced a singular entity.

The Infante stood at another section of the garden, watching the clouds, his hands clasped behind him, silent.

I should tell the others.

I can’t tell the others and destroy this small happiness we’ve found here.

“We should talk plans,” Jessie said, giving my hand a squeeze.  “There’s a lot to do.  A lot of things to repair, some literal, after the warbeasts and experiments stalked the halls.  There are scripts to put in place, to borrow something from Ferres, we need tools, we need organization.”

I remained where I was, frozen, trying not to look at him even as he drew my attention with the smallest of movements.

Mary spoke, “Lillian can coordinate the science angle, the tools, the experiments we’ll need.  She knows enough about a variety of things to know what’s up.  Right?  And you can coordinate with the Beattle rebels?  You know how Lambs think and you’ll have a sense of how they think.”

“Right,” Lillian said.

“I can do the same with the soldiers, train people to fight, how to think in a skirmish or a battle,” Mary said.  She looked more at ease than I’d seen her in a while.  She looked excited at the prospect.  “If there’s no objection?”

“None,” Bea said, Davis’s utterance only a hair’s breadth from matching hers.

Movement in front of me made me flinch.

Helen.  With a cup of tea on a saucer, cookies arranged in a half-circle around the rim.

“It’s medical tea,” she said.  “It’ll help your kidneys stop hurting.  The cookies aren’t medical, but they’re important too.”

I took it wordlessly.  She gave me a lingering, almost concerned look before turning her attention to higher priorities – to more tea and cookies.

I tried to shake off any look of terror, to control my breathing and consequently my heartbeat, so I wouldn’t give others reason for concern.  Only Abby might notice, with her eye to body language, and Bo Peep and Quinton had her full attention.  I hadn’t seen much of her, but I’d never seen her more in her element than I saw her in this moment.  It had been too long, by that same measure, since I’d seen a smile on Bo Peep’s face.

I looked in the direction of the Infante, and he was gone from his spot.

I nearly dropped my tea and the carefully arranged cookies when I saw him, standing by the railing, only a short distance from the others, his back to me.  He’d moved closer.

Not trusting myself to speak, in case I betrayed my fear and betrayed this moment, I ate my cookies slowly.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.02 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

They looked at me differently.  Students, whether they wore Beattle uniforms or Hackthorn ones, or whether they’d lapsed into civilian clothes, all turned their heads to follow me as I walked down the hall with Duncan.

I’d nearly brought everything tumbling down.  I’d put them at mortal risk, and I remained unpredictable.  They had been making forward progress, something that approximated hope and direction, and because of me, in large part, they had seen it all in jeopardy.  It went a step beyond that, because I represented something to them.

They’d lived ordinary lives, before.  Beattle students struggling to find a way forward, getting their second chance with knowledge that they were in the clear with a future ahead of them, that they were doomed, their goals falling to pieces, or that they were in limbo, and only hard work could see them through.  Professor Ferres’ students weren’t facing the gauntlet in the same way, they were students with a slight artistic lean, but they were strong students and Hackthorn was mostly an Academy where everyone who attended had reasons for attending.  The Hackthorn students had been secure.

My appearance, for all of them, had thrown things into disarray.  To the Beattle students, I’d been the first recognizable face to the new reality, that the Academy was closing and that they didn’t have a chance.  To the Hackthorn students, I was the invader, the leader of the rebels that had taken over.  We’d said the right things to some, and fear or hope for a better tomorrow had brought them into our camp.  Others were reluctant, only with us because the alternative was being a prisoner.  I was the face of the person in charge, alongside Jessie, and I was the one who talked the most and acted the most overtly.

When they needed to put a face or a voice to the idea of what their future might hold, my face and voice were liable to be what popped up.

I couldn’t really blame them, either.  I wasn’t sure I trusted myself.  I didn’t trust my senses or my judgment.  I sure as heck didn’t trust the Infante, who was walking behind us, his every footfall heavy enough to drum through my trains of thought.

“You’re quiet,” Duncan said.

“Yeah.”

“I know we didn’t spend that much time together, but you normally focused a great deal on the others.  Spend time with Jamie- Jessie now, with Lillian, or with Helen sometimes.  You’d hang out with Ashton if you got the chance, but I wasn’t exactly a focus.”

“Yeah.  Sorry if that was crummy of me.”

“Nah.  That part was fine.  Lonely sometimes, but I pushed through.  I took it as another political test, if I couldn’t tackle being on the outside of a tight-knit group, I didn’t deserve to be a professor, right?”

“Sure,” I said.  I privately thought that the stance explained a fair bit about why he’d been a bit insufferable, if he’d been taking it as a challenge.

“But you had a pattern, kind of.  Somewhere along the way, if we were interacting, you’d get on me.”

“Get on you?”

“Undercut me, passive remarks, find ways to contrive for me to sound like I didn’t know what I was talking about.  I’m… pretty sure on that last one, by the way.  I wasn’t at the time, but I’ve chewed that particular cud for a bit and I can remember times when I’d say something about the Academy or Academy Science and you’d be in earshot, and then a little while later it would come up and I’d be wrong.  At least in that particular instance.”

“You chewed that cud right,” I said.  “Yeah.  Even if I don’t remember any specific examples, that sounds about right.”

“It’s just odd, because this is the first time we’ve had a proper conversation and you haven’t done that.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“More or less.”

I nodded.  I wasn’t really sure what to say to that.  It was what it was.

There was a group of students who were gathered around a section of carpet, where the carpet stretched down the length of the hall.  The carpet had been torn, and efforts to address it were complicated by the fact that there was blood soaking the area around the tear.

They looked wary as they watched me approach and pass.  Duncan stopped and so I did too.

“Stuck?” Duncan asked.

The student was a young man, eighteen or so, and he’d taken off the uniform shirt and tied it around his waist, wearing slacks and an undershirt.  He was covered in fibers and dust, and the stuff stuck to his oiled hair.  He sighed and asked, “How bad would it look if we tore it all out?  If we left it bare?”

“Bad,” Duncan said.  “Every hallway has a runner like this.  People might not notice specifically that the hallway is without, but they’d feel like something was off, at the very least, and that would make them suspicious.  Besides, the building here went up fifteen years ago, the carpets have been here at least that long, and I guarantee you, if you tear it up, it’s going to leave a patch that’s a different color than the rest of the floor.  It’ll show, and this is a trafficked hallway.”

“We can’t sew it up, so we’re thinking silkworms.  There’s some stuff in the lab where one of the student groups was producing quality textiles for fashion.  Worm silk.  It would take some jiggering, but we might be able to squeeze it into the schedule.”

“Maybe,” Duncan said.  “I think, for now, tear it up, but don’t leave it bare.  Get one of the runners from the top floor, bring it down.  Leave it bare up there for now, see what you can do on the patch job, hopefully we can manage things so the upstairs don’t see too much traffic.”

He glanced at me.  “What do you think?”

“It’ll do,” I said.  I wondered at the wisdom of asking me for advice.  “It’s maybe a silly suggestion, but maybe instead of engineering silkworms to patch it together again, you could check with the staff and see if they have any spare runners in storage?”

That earned me some long looks.

“You might have to grill some more uncooperative staff members we’re holding prisoner, but you might be able to negotiate something.  You can tell the jailer I said it’s okay.  Or that Duncan okayed them getting privileges or treats.”

The dusty fellow finally said, “I’ll go do that.  You guys roll this one up, and if I’m not back, clean the floors?”

The others nodded.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, with a funny note in his voice.  It was, as best as I could figure it out, rooted in the fact that he wasn’t a fan of taking counsel from me.  The troublemaker.

The Infante watched me as Duncan and I resumed our brisk walk.

The students and a number of non-students were up, about, and active, getting things done.  Supplies and construction materials were being carted this way and that.  Other things were more mundane.  Multiple wheeled carts piled high with school uniforms to be laundered were being eased down the staircase by teams of four.  They’d been cooped up for two days and a hundred scared people produced a lot of sweaty clothing.

I wondered if it had been the fact that they’d been cooped up and now were free.  There was a time limit, and as reluctant as some were, the Beattle rebel leaders and Lambs had managed to convey that we needed to do this right.  There was no room for error.  If we screwed up here, students would die, very possibly by way of marching single file to take their turns at a set of nooses or guillotines.

It was a grim and very motivating image, that.

Then, as if to stand in stark contrast, Bo Peep and Abby turned up, alongside Lara.  One of them had dropped the leash, and Quinton was getting away.  He was more spry and adventurous than the first Quinton I’d met, and he ducked in and through the legs of furniture as he crossed the top floor of the main body of Hackthorn.  The main dining hall.  The stairwell I’d sat on and watched proceedings from was now occupied with students.  My ‘throne’.

Abby threw herself beneath a bench, sliding on the recently mopped floor.  Quinton evaded her hands, leaped up onto the bench, then onto the table.

The table next to him had another table on top of it, legs sticking up in the air.  Quinton leaped onto the struts that connected the legs.  Bo Peep made an inarticulate sound of alarm.

Picking herself up, Abby stood at the nearby table, planting hands on her hips.

“Bleahhhh,” Quinton said.

“Bleahhh,” Abby said, sticking out her tongue.  “I’m glad you’re having fun.  But if you keep going that way then you’re going to get that leash tangled up in the struts and you’ll hang yourself when you jump down.”

“No!” Lara said, alarmed.

“Bleh-heh,” Quinton said.

“You know he can’t understand you, right?” I said.

Abby glanced over her shoulder at me, then turned her full attention to Quinton.  “Play time’s over.  Come here.”

She put her arms out in front of her.

Quinton jumped down to the table and then leaped through the air, throwing himself into Abby’s waiting arms.

Bo Peep practically bounced with joy on her way to Abby and Quinton’s side.  Lara wasn’t far behind.

“Well,” I said.  “I think it’s going to take a crowbar to separate Abby and Peep, now.”

“Yup,” Duncan said.

“They’re okay?”

Duncan smiled.  “They’re good.  They’re a positive influence on Ashton.”

“Does he need positive influences?  He’s such a little goody-two-shoes he probably folds his clothes before he puts them in the dirty clothes hamper.”

“No comment.  No, really, they help him be more human.  It’s an uphill climb sometimes.”

“Just wait until one of them ends up sweet on him.”

Duncan made a face.

“One of them’s already got a burgeoning crush?”

“No comment,” he said.

So many of the students in the area were watching the children interact, and smiles found most of those faces.

“We can do this,” Duncan said, his tone changing.  He was reacting to the expression on my face.  I wasn’t really trying to keep tells at bay.  I was conserving energy.

“You think?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said.  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

I nodded at that.  “Sorry I was a shit to you all that time.  You very thoroughly proved me wrong.”

“Good,” he said.  “That’s satisfying to hear.”

“Thank you for looking after them.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.  “I wish I’d been able to keep better tabs on Mary and Lillian.  We got our coats and we went our separate ways.  I should have done more, but my head wasn’t there.  I was wrestling with what you’d said about the nobles, the Crown being a lie.  I saw my family, I worked in a few places that Hayle connected me to, looked after Helen for a stretch while Ibbot was away, and I couldn’t get over it.”

“No?”

“No.  Somewhere along the line, I realized I couldn’t envision a world where I kept working for my black coat, where I went on to work for nobles in the highest capacity.  I crossed paths with Lillian a few times.  I think, odd as it sounds, it was harder for her to come to terms with.”

“She wanted to run an Academy like Ferres runs Hackthorn, but something better-intentioned, more focused on the people on the ground, helping those in need.  It’s not as clean a break, for her.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Duncan said.  “I’m giving up a lot, and I’m lying in bed at night, trying to go to sleep, and I worry so much that they’re retaliating against me by going after my family.  But Helen came, she laid it out, and I thought of those guys.”

Bo Peep was stooped over, trying to stay still and not lose her passenger as Quinton perched on her shoulders, but that proved difficult as he adjusted his footing, hard hooves biting into her.

“You’re a good guy, Duncan.”

“I used to think so,” Duncan said.

He was about to say something else when Lara turned around, craning her head.  “Duncan!”

“What?” Duncan called out.

“Nora says there’s a problem.  Urgent.  They’re at the gate.”

“Right,” Duncan said.  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Grab Lillian while you go?  She should be near the bridge there.  She was talking to the men in charge of soldiers.”

“On it.”

“And!” Lara called out, flinching as people turned to look.  “Is Jessie still napping?”

“In the admin building,” I said.

“They want Jessie too.”

Asking for people by name, and I’m not among them.

I got it.  It hurt, it sucked, but I got it.

It was the cost of losing my mind, even as I’d tried to lose it as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Duncan spoke, “You guys go get her.  I’ll head straight to the gate, you guys go wake Jessie.  You want to go with them, Sy?”

Yep.  He got it.  I wasn’t supposed to go to the gate.

Bo Peep flinched as I looked in her direction.  Wary.

“Best if they go on their own.  I’m bruised, I’ll slow them down,” I said.

It sucked to see the relief on Bo Peep’s face, even as she tried to hide it.

“If you’re sure,” Duncan said.  “You want to stay here?”

Did I want to stay here?  In the dining hall, where I’d spent far too much time over the last week?  With only the Infante and a few hundred students that didn’t like me for company?

The Infante was staring at me.

“No,” I said, averting my eyes.  “Not-”

I hesitated.

“-Not alone,” I said, quiet.

“Then come,” he said, without the moment of hesitation or the look of pity I’d worried about.  “We’ll do what we can.”

I wasn’t sure what the rules were, if there were rules for personified mental breakdowns and weaknesses.  The Infante was quiet, he stood off to the side, sometimes with company, often nobles, but he was omnipresent.  The more attention I paid him the more attention he paid me, but at the same time, he worked to catch me off guard, keep me on edge, and exert his presence.

So far, being in the company of the Lambs was good.  It kept my attention constructively elsewhere.  It shored me up in other ways.

It was equally possible that the rigid definition of the rules that might keep this abstract force at bay would be the avenue he used to get me, to trap me and crush me, to return to saying those same devastating words he’d used in New Amsterdam, and this time he would have the advantage of having access to the entirety of my mind.

I’d told the others to kill me if the Infante started appearing and having an influence over me.  I’d wanted to articulate that he was the end of the road.  The greatest threat.  He wanted to bring about an ending, both in my head and in reality.  But Jessie hadn’t cared.  She understood.

A part of me wished I could run off and be the one to wake her up.  To have that sleeping beauty moment.

“I’m going to find Lillian,” he said.  “Mary’s just over there.”

I looked.  ‘Just over there’ was down a short stretch of hallway, twenty paces.  I could see where the door was open and the mottled sunlight reached past the open door and into the hallway.

“Or do you want me to come with?” Duncan asked.

He’d developed compassion of a surprising degree, if he realized that being alone for even that long was something that worried me.

“No,” I said.  “They said it’s urgent.  Go find Lillian.”

“Alright.”

I ignored the Infante and Percy as I walked down the hall.  There had been reconstruction work, recently, where apparently one of the spider things I’d released had started to lay eggs.  Sections of wall had been cut down and boards had been sawn to measure and set into place.  Sawdust was piled high at points, and the boards with the eggs clustering them like barnacles were piled at other points.

I held out my arm, running it along the wall, letting the sawdust accumulate in my cupped hand as I walked.

I came to an early halt as I saw that Montgomery and the Moth were standing by the door.  The Mothmont nobles from the train.  I had to think for a second, deciding if I wanted to walk through them or around them.

The hesitation created a moment where I inadvertently eavesdropped.  I shifted rightaways into intentionally eavesdropping.

“-scarily competent,” Mary said.  “He brought this entire Academy to its knees, and one of those times he more or less did it on his own.”

Talking about me.

“That’s not a good thing,” a male voice said.

“We have a mission,” Mary said.  “Maybe the most important we’ll ever have.  Because I don’t think humanity or the experiments get many more shots.  I won’t say this is the end if we fail, but it might be decades before someone else is positioned like we’re positioned, understand?  And if we fail or if we decide not to fight them on this, then the next people will find it that much harder.  The nobility will be that much more secure, the Academy more advanced.  We must do this.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m more scared than passionate.  All of you aren’t going to think less of me for admitting that, but it’s the nobles.  It’s the Academy of the Crown States.  We’re not well positioned at all.”

Another voice, not as deep, said, “We’re in an even worse position if we have to worry about him going crazy and setting us back weeks again.”

I raised my hand to my face

“He killed the Baron of Richmond in Warrick,” Mary said.  “He assisted me in killing one of the Baron’s bastard sisters.  He assisted another Lamb in killing another.  More to the point-

Mary said that last word hard, and I imagined her gesturing with a blade as she said it.

“-he wasn’t even at his best when he paralyzed Hackthorn, understand?”

‘That much was clear,” the gruff voice said.

“No,” Mary said.  “Not that part of it.  He was alone.  You understand?  He did it single-handedly, but he’s one piece of a greater system.  The Lambs.  He might have brought a school as grand as this to its knees, and that’s something he can clearly do, but it’s Jessie who clarifies the when, the what, the who.  It’s Helen who twists their arms and whispers in their ear, breaking them.  It’s me that slits their throat when necessary.”

“What about Lillian and Duncan?  They keep you in working order?”

There was a note of derision in that.

As if it was very clear that they saw Mary as the experiment, not the woman.  Or that Lillian wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping the likes of me in good working order.

“They cover what comes after the giant is made to kneel, the body broken, the throat slit,” Mary said.  “They piece things back together.”

“Listen, you seem like a nice girl,” the voice said.  “You’re good with a blade, I won’t deny you that.  If you killed a minor noble, that’s amazing.  Credit to the Lambs.  But this is something else entirely.  It’s bigger.  Almost as big as it gets.  I saw a glimpse of Sylvester when it was bad, here.  You didn’t.  I don’t think this is doable.”

“Any commentary, Sylvester?” Mary asked.

I raised my head, my hand dropping to my side.

The Mothmont twins weren’t at the door anymore.  Percy and the Infante were still there.

I stepped into the room.

“Sylvester,” the soldier said.  He looked like someone who had been a soldier before we’d come to Hackthorn, rather than one of Davis’ conscripts who was acting in the capacity of a soldier for us.

No, there were twenty or so people who fit that latter label.

“I want to find the best way forward.  Nothing personal intended.”

I shook my head.  He started as I raised my hand, one hand moving closer to his weapon.  I clasped one of his shoulders with a dusty hand in passing, as I approached Mary.

“We’re taking a break from sparring,” Mary said.

“She beat Carson with a knife, when he had a saber,” one of the bystanders remarked.

“She did,” Carson said.  The true soldier, my critic.  “Credit where it’s due.”

I held up a hand.

Mary didn’t toss the knife so much as she threw it at me.  I trusted her throw, let my fingers close around the handle as it slapped against my hand.

“Spar?” she asked.

I was already moving before the word was finished and pitched as a question.  A thrust, which she parried.  I followed up with a short swing, drawing a sharp angle as I cut back in the direction of the knee of her leg, closest to me.

There was a psychological reason to it, and it was the most obvious target.  I did see a flash of emotion in her eyes, all the same.

She cut for my face, and I pulled it out of the way.

There was no phantom to inform me.  I had no phantom Lambs anymore, as far as I could tell.  Only the actual Lambs.  But I knew Mary, for the most part.  I trusted the way she moved.

Her hand motioned in a signal.  Left.

Her foot followed, blade at the toe of her shoe.  I stepped back and struck it with my own blade as it passed me, sending the blade back the way it had come, into the slot at the side of the sole.

From the noises of the crowd, she hadn’t revealed that particular trick yet.

Left thin long, she signaled.

Her hand flicked out, a knife slash, fast, hard, and seriously capable of injuring me if I was slow to react, but I was stepping in close.  The knife wasn’t the threat.  Another knife emerged from her sleeve, razor wire attached to it.  It flew in a tight arc.  Being in close was the only place that the blade and wire wouldn’t reach.

My chest pressed against hers, and as she took a step back, I matched her.  She brought her head back- an imminent headbutt, and I brought my head forward, the top of it moving in the direction of her face, not to headbutt her, but to deny her the room to rear back and smash forward.  She turned her head instead.

Without looking and without her giving me hints, I put a hand out, catching the wrist of her other hand before she could bring a blade around to stick it in my side.

My right hand tried to do the same to her.  The back of her knife hand caught the crook of my elbow.

We broke away in the next instant.  Mary’s knife cut my sleeve.  My hand slipped under her shirt and came away with another blade.

One, two, she gestured.

What was that?

We stood there, pausing for the moment.  Neither of us panted, but I wanted to.  All of my aches and pains were coming to life.

But this was important.

You, left, she gestured.

I swung my right arm, instead.

Her fingers moved in a curious way, one I might have taken as a gesture.  But then I saw the metal.  Between finger and fingernail, tiny grooves of pale metal, notches for the wire to sit in.  I pulled my hand back, and the loop of wire that was enclosing it caught only the blade I held, pulling it out of my grip.  I passed the blade I’d swiped from beneath her clothes to my right hand.

Three, she gestured.  Then, left.

She kicked, left leg, short and sharp, for my leg.  I only barely caught the gesture of four before she followed up with a swing.

That led into a brief and intense series of movements.  It wasn’t quite a clash of blade on blade or arm on arm, but it might as well have been.  Knives were scary, knives were dangerous, and there wasn’t a movement that couldn’t have seriously hurt the other if we’d been a little slower or a little less on our guard.

My injuries were starting to complain all the more.  I wasn’t sure of my grip on my knife, and my back hurt more than letting her cut me would’ve.

But I was on the outs with Mary, and I needed to fix that.  I’d wounded her in a way I could never properly apologize for.

She backed off, tossing a blade into the air.  The hand made the gesture nine before the blade landed in it once more.

Oh.  Was that what she was doing?  She was counting all the times she rightfully should’ve and would’ve killed me already?

I hoped that if I made a mistake important enough for the audience to notice, that she would act on it.  It wouldn’t do if our ‘dance’ here made this look like a routine or farce.  It was, in a way, but we wanted me to look good, and I wanted to close the distance between Mary and I.

I stepped in, aiming to move unpredictably, and moved into her personal space.

She retaliated, as she should’ve, and I fended her off, but I did see a fleeting eye roll from her in the process.

I remained close, my hand passing beneath her skirt, brushing her thigh, touching another blade handle.  She moved her leg before I could take it.  The angle had been wrong.

“It’s been years since you pulled that one, Sy,” she said.  “You were a child then, you can’t get away-”

I exhaled.

By all rights, she should’ve remembered this one.

The sawdust in my mouth blew out as a fine cloud, catching her in the mouth and eyes.

Immediately, her actions were sharp, dangerous.  She was blind in the moment, and acting definitively was the only way of responding that didn’t leave her vulnerable for any longer.  I barely managed to keep her from cutting me.

I stepped well back out of range, glanced at the surroundings – a classroom with almost no furniture in it, the rest cleared out or in use elsewhere.  I tossed my knife in Mary’s direction.

The sawdust wouldn’t bother her for long, but she coughed.  She was very aware of the sound of steel striking the ground, the ringing of it.  Steel was her song.

Hefting a wooden chair, I approached.  She heard my footstep and stepped to one side before swinging.  She struck the chair, and paused, off guard in the moment and wholly unaware of what she’d just collided with.

I kicked one of her legs out from under her, butted at her with the chair when that didn’t actually make her fall, and then planted the chair on the ground, the legs of it on either side of her body.  I planted my foot on it, pinning her.  I didn’t really feel safe pinning her otherwise.  Having a nice solid piece of wood and a few feet of distance

Mary lay there, blinking hard, coughing once or twice.  I turned my head and spat, the sawdust that had soaked with my saliva forming clumps.

“Fifteen,” she said, when she’d decided she could speak.

“How did we get from thirteen to fifteen?” I asked.

“What’s this?” Carson asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Mary gestured.  Left.

Left?

The knife came at me out of nowhere.  My movement to react suffered for the odd angle of the trajectory and the fact it was a touch slower than a normal thrown knife.  I swatted it out of the air, and cut the back of my hand in the process.  Wire.

“You don’t need to show me,” I said.  “I do believe you.  Also, ow.”

“I cut the Infante with that trick.  Knives that don’t fly straight.”

I nodded.  I was very aware now of the Infante, standing off to one side.

Moving my foot, I pulled the chair back.  I offered Mary a hand in standing, my back protesting at the momentary pull of her weight.

That, I was assuming, would be both the last exertion I would manage today and all in all, this was something I’d be feeling for two full days.

She segued straight from rising to a standing position to a hug.

“Dance with me?” I asked.  “Fight alongside me?”

“You’ll need to catch up.  You were terrible.”

“I was fine.  I won.”

She gave me a look, eyes dangerous.  I could read her mind.  Fifteen.

I smiled.  “I won, still.  I did catch you off guard.”

“You won’t catch them.  Not consistently.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I gave her a squeeze.

She was so Mary to hug.  I could feel the weapons in sleeves and at the trunk of her body.  Her collar was stiff in a way that told me there was something hidden in it.  But she was a girl and it was a nice hug all the same.

I broke the hug, wishing I didn’t have to.

“You need practice.”

“I need to heal first,” I said.

“You do,” she said.

We were both very much ignoring the other faces in the room.  It was… an intimate moment, in its own way.  Not because we were so very close, even when hugging, but because we had been very far away.  We’d moved closer together in a very personal way that only we really understood.

I was very cognizant of the fact that not all of this would parse.  I knew I had critics and this display wouldn’t change it.

There was so much repair work to be done.  Not all of it would be sawdust and fixed carpets.

The faith of the people we were leading into battle against an unstoppable enemy was perhaps more important and far, far harder to fix.

“I missed you,” I said, putting those other people in the background for just another moment longer.

“I missed you too,” she said, and she said it very casually, with less than half of the emotion I’d used.  She sheathed her weapons, slipping each blade into its place.  When she was done, she met my eyes.  Her hand gestured.

Hurt Lamb I destroy you.

I responded with only a, please.

She nodded.

With that, I might not have been forgiven, but I knew we could move past it.  I remained very glad that she hadn’t turned one of those counts of coup into an actual wound.  The Mary of a year or two ago might have.

“Mary!” a voice called out.

It was Nora, as tall as me and shrouded in white cloth.

We stepped out into the hallway.  Nora peered past the shawl to stare at me with multiple alien eyes and a face with narrow slices of chitin biting through and peeling away from raw, red flesh, almost like terminal hangnails.

“You’re here,” Nora said.  As dangerous as she might have looked, she shied back a hair as Carson stepped into the doorway as well.  “The others want you… and Sylvester as well.”

“You paused,” I said.

“I had to ask,” she said.  “We have guests.”

Guests?” I asked.

“An Academy Headmaster.  He’s arrived early, we think he wanted to check that the coast is clear.”

“The coast is the furthest thing from clear,” I said.

“It’s-” Nora started.  She paused.  “Jessie says we know him.”

“We know him?”

“Jessie says he was the headmaster of Dame Cicely’s, and might still be,” Nora said.  “Jamie wrote about him.  She says you said, then, that the headmaster was, quote, ‘in cahoots’ with Geneveive Fray.”

“Fray’s announcing herself,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.03 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Mary, Nora, and I reached the Lambs just in time to see the ship pulling into the harbor.

The Lambs, Emmett, Bea, and the Treasurer were all at the tower that stood over the gate.  A zig-zag path led from the harbor, up the cliffs and into to the backside of Hackthorn.

“He was on the deck, I’ve seen his portrait and Jamie wrote about him,” Jessie said.  “Edmund Foss.”

“Can we bar the doors?  Pretend not to notice him?” Lillian asked, her voice still soft.  It was as if she was trying to whisper so as not to be heard by a guy who was a speck to anyone that wasn’t holding binoculars.

“We could,” Jessie said.  “They’d go back and tell others.”

“Can we work with that?” Lillian asked.  “Isn’t it easier to work with a little bit of negative opinion of one man, compared to… whatever happens if he comes inside?”

I spoke, “They’d say that Ferres is rude, she has something to hide, the report of a discovery of true immortality is the dying effort of an older Professor to be relevant again as the Crown States ceases to be.  Everyone turns their attention to other things, with only a few intrepid, irrelevant individuals and second-in-commands investigating.  Some of the most pivotal players have already backed out, this threatens to take all of the meat out of the plan.”

“Nora passed on that Edmund was with Fray, back in the day?” Jessie asked.

“She did,” Mary said.  “What does that mean for us?”

Jessie spoke, “We don’t know to what degree they might’ve been collaborating, if it was self-serving in the moment or something bigger, but you Lambs discussed it then and came to the conclusion he was a Fray plant.  There might be an ongoing relationship even today.”

“We have to assume he’s not,” I said.  “If we act buddy-buddy and we’re wrong, it’s the end.  We’re forced to capture him, others get suspicious, we don’t get any advantage worth talking about, and the Infante might even clue into what we’re doing.  We observe from a distance and if we find out something about Fray then that’s great, but for now we take this as an early check-in from the Academy.”

“If we take it as that, we’re definitely not ready,” Duncan said.  “We’re not close to being able to invite someone in and talk to them.  Half the place is in ruins, the other half is a mess, we’ve got prisoners everywhere.”

“Not everywhere,” Ashton said.

“Not the time for pedantry, Ashton,” Duncan said.

“We invite him in,” I said.  “Which is going to be… what, ten minutes from now?”

“Sixteen minutes,” Jessie said.  “We can stall and make it twenty.  But twenty isn’t a lot.”

“Twenty has to do,” I said.  “We can do this.”

“You have ideas?” Jessie asked.

“Absolutely,” I said.  I’d thought for the time it took me to run to the tower.  Now I was figuring out which thoughts to tie up and which needed more attention.  It was a question of priorities.  “Duncan, you, Bea, Ashton, Emmett, Lara, and the Treasurer-”

“I have a name,” the Treasurer said.  He looked far more unhappy than he should have for the misplacement of a name.  I suspected he was holding onto hard feelings from the prior week’s events.

“You guys stay.  We’ll communicate via. Nora.  Everyone else with me.”

“Are you sure?” Lillian asked.

“Why the doubt?” I asked.

She didn’t have an immediate answer for me.  I wondered if she didn’t trust me, if she was trying to articulate that she hadn’t seen me in good form for a while.

“I’ll say why I doubt,” Bea said.  “You told me once you cause as much havoc as you can and then you have the benefit of being better at handling the consequences and better at knowing what’s going on when it comes to working out a resolution.”

“That sounds like something I’d say,” I said.  I looked down at the boat.  How much time was this going to cost us?

“It’s pretty much the context I met you in.  The problem is this is something where we need to build something,” she said.  “Not to tear it all down.”

Mary glanced at me.  “She’s not wrong.  You really think we can do this?  Twenty minutes to transform the Academy into something respectable, that passes muster with someone like Edmund Foss?”

“No,” I said.  “Twenty minutes to transform the Academy into a place that’s in the midst of preparation for a major event.”

“It’s less than twenty minutes,” Jessie said.

“Which is all the more reason to move,” I said.  “Unless someone else has a better idea?”

I could see it.  The Treasurer was about to voice an objection, the objection would need to be answered, and we’d lose half of a minute.

“Go,” Duncan cut in.

I went, the others following.  I wasn’t fast, and my recent spar with Mary had done a number on me.  Jessie appeared beside me, taking my hand.  She wasn’t holding me up, but she was providing me some support.  I was sure if I needed it, she’d help support me in a more practical way.

I was aware that Lillian and Mary were with us.  A part of me wanted to analyze them and their reactions.  I couldn’t afford to.  There was too much to do.

The act of moving away from this scene where I could watch my opponents and analyze them felt like I was stepping through one of the windows and falling onto the cliffs.  I didn’t have a good read on Edmund, I didn’t know why he was here, what he wanted, and what would satisfy or compel him.

I was so focused on what was happening outside and what was happening fifteen minutes from now that I wasn’t focused at all on the present.  We turned a corner, and I saw the Infante, squarely in front of me, back to me.

I hesitated.

Jessie’s hand tugging mine gave me the impetus to get moving again, where I might very well have remained in paralyzed silence for a full minute.

I needed to distract myself.

“Nora, pass this on?” I asked.

“Alright,” Nora said.  She oddly seemed more at ease when moving than when standing still.  It was as if she were built to be perpetually in motion, moving with the support of her arms and claws, back arched slightly, head sticking out more forward than up.

“Tasks, roles, responsibilities.  Duncan, you’re taking point.  He’s never met you and I don’t think the Lambs have been gone long enough for word to get out about you.  Based on what we’ve seen cross Ferres’ desk, there might not be wanted posters either.  Get yourself into a Hackthorn Academy uniform.  Bea?  Pass on word, all guards and soldiers in the city need to hide, while still holding the peace.  Talk to Shirley.”

“Got it.”

“Treasurer and Davis need to gather everyone who’s trustworthy, who’s educated and who’s proper.  Get Davis, he’ll look good and he’ll make a good complement to Duncan.”

“Why?” Nora asked.  “Treasurer asks.”

“That’s going to be the crowd we put in directly in front of him.  He’ll like that, being from Cicely’s.  Girls are especially good.  Ashton?  I asked you to stay back because this guy’s never met you.  He’s going to meet you in passing, and he’s going to get a whiff of you.  Not enough of anything to make him look back and wonder about anything-”

Nora was making noise.  I paused.

“Ashton is trying to interrupt you,” she said.  “He says he’ll do just fine.  He doesn’t tell you how to be a jerk, you shouldn’t tell him how to do his thing.”

I wondered how much of that was Nora’s license and how much of it was Ashton.  If it was the latter, who or where had he got that from?

Whatever.

“Great,” I said.  “Slow our target down, treat him well, get him to talk about his Academy and how much better it is.  Get him to the tea room or the dining hall in the main building, slow him down.  He spent the last while traveling, and sitting in carriages and boats makes people want to sit around.  Ironically.”

“What do we say?” Lillian asked.  “He’s going to ask for particulars.”

“We be coy, Duncan says,” Nora said.  “Why would Ferres give away the show?  It’s her big moment, the kind all Professors hope to have.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “Even beyond that, Ferres is a showman, she likes her art.  We need to put that in front of Edmund’s face.  Art.  The quality.  Lillian and Jessie are headed to the labs.  Lillian identifies everything of top quality that the Academy can boast.  We parade that in front of him.  Jessie knows the keywords to control the warbeasts.  Those were top notch, the control, the theatrics of having a giant wolf or spider in our complete control, more than the Academy usually strives for.”

Helen spoke for the first time.  “She’s a showman, but what happens when she doesn’t show?”

“We’ll figure that out,” I said.  “I’ll look into the Hackthorn children.  It’d be asking a lot, but I think even after the fiasco of the other night, they’ll listen to me.”

“The girl is talking, Bea,” Nora said, as if Lara had supplied the name.  She adjusted her voice to match the person speaking.  “It’s unfortunate, but those kids are loyal to you, Sylvester.  But it’s going to take time to round them up, we split them up because they had too much of an influence on each other, and a lot of that is your secondary influence.”

Doubt, suspicion, concern, lingering feelings.  Bea and the Treasurer both.  It was only going to get worse.

“We’ll handle that when the time comes,” I said.  “For now, we need to dwell on this.  Helen and Mary here are going to need to keep an eye out in the meantime.  Details.  Things that need immediate attention.  Where possible, we get students to move things into place.  Furniture, stacks of boxes, it’s all about hiding the damage, focusing on presentation, we make it look like we’re mid-renovation, not mid-reconstruction.  It’s a fine line.”

“One of the dormitories has fire damage,” Nora said.  “A bridge does.  The plant life on the bridge is all burned.  There are a lot of places around the Academy where that’s going to be visible.”

“We’ll deal,” I said, with little idea how.  “It’s a question of directing their attention.  We bring people and things out at key times.  Hand signals are going to play a big part.  Mary and Helen will round up students when we get back to the main building, liason with the lieutenants.  Again, hand signals.  Once we make Mr. Professor Edmund Foss stop for tea, hopefully, we’ll redirect attention to areas depending on which ones he’ll see next.  We paint the damn walls five minutes before he arrives in the room in question, if we have to.”

“Paint needs time to dry,” Nora said, in an ‘Ashton’ voice.  “He likes watching paint dry.  Duncan is saying Ashton is being pedantic again.”

I continued, ignoring the interplay between the other guy Lambs.  “I’m thinking we station students in even numbered groups in doorways to mark no-go side routes, hallways, stairways.”

“Got it,” Nora said.  “Duncan.  Duncan’s getting a uniform now.  Bea is going to spread word and get people on board.”

“We need to hide any and all Beattle uniforms,” I said.  “And we need to maximize the number of Hackthorn uniforms around them.  Spreading word is a good thing.”

We weren’t far from the main building now.  I saw a portrait of a noble, the Infante standing next to it, staring at it.

“We’ll need everyone’s attention,” I said, hoping that didn’t echo the Infante’s noble lines of thinking and somehow wake him.  I felt anxious and bothered in a way I hadn’t for some time.

Helen perked up at that.

I could tell, even before we were done crossing the bridge, that the students were reacting to the word.  The boat had been seen, it bore Academy colors, and it wasn’t out of the question that students with binoculars had seen enough to draw conclusions about who it was.  They were talking, worried, unsure about what was going to happen.  I watched through windows and saw the anxiety.

Some among them could even be considering rebelling against the rebels, being subversive, or passing on a message.

“Let me take point?” Jessie asked.

“Sure,” I said.  “As soon as we have their attention.”

I’d thought not long ago about the role I took in their hearts and minds.  That I was the face that the students and rebels linked to the fall of their respective Academies; Hackthorn had fallen twice and the second fall had been grim.  I’d been the one to get involved in interpersonal rivalries, in compromise, when a group butted heads with others on a distribution of resources and labor, or when someone struggled with another member of their team.  Compromise left both sides unhappy, and that unhappiness was something that touched me, coloring opinions of me.

So long as I did everything right and supplied peace, hope for a better future and freedom from the constraints of their old life, I’d remained in their good graces, and that association hadn’t held me back.

But I’d broken that trust on all three counts.

Jessie was stability.  She was organization, the liason.  She was inoffensive, rarely linked to conflict, more to measured, calculated responses.

We were a team for a reason.  I gave her hand a squeeze before letting go of it.  Association with me would taint their image of her.  It made sense, it would be only a small taint, but everything counted in the here and now.

Helen whistled, using her particular control of vocalizations and intonation to simply produce something loud.  It wasn’t the worst she could do, but it did get the attention of the hundreds of students in the open space.

Helen half-flounced, half-flourished, all theatrics, as she moved to one side, indicating Jessie.

“We’re making the school presentable in the next ten minutes.  Vernon, you take twenty students with you.  There’s construction material at the ground floor and near the stables, stacked in the hall.  Carry it away, stack it anywhere there’s damage, missing portraits.  Grab carpets from upstairs.  Take them down.  Hurry.”

“Clive found extra carpets-” The guy who was supposedly named Vernon started speaking.

“If you found some, use them, but go,” Jessie said.

Vernon went.

Jessie pointed, “Eddie, you and ten students, more materials from that space.  Do the same thing, second floor.  Martin, ten students, third floor.  Alvin, ten students, fourth floor.  Be mindful of the damage to the ceiling, there’s a short ladder in the library on the fourth floor, grab it on the way, see what you can do to plaster the ceiling in the next ten minutes.  Jim, ten students, fifth floor.  Herman, ten students and sixth.  Darlene, eight students, left stairwell.  It should be mostly clear, be mindful of the railing.”

Students were mobilizing now.

“…Go to the dormitory,” Jessie said.  “Pass on word, recruit more helpers.  Harvey, ten students, just block the right stairwell, make it look like you’re doing work.”

“Flip it around,” I said, looking around.  “If they come upstairs from the left stairwell, they’ll be able to see through the glass exterior of the dining room, they’ll see the burned dorm, clear as day.”

Misdirection, control where their eye looks.

“Change that around!” Jessie called out.  Darlene was already leaving.  “Darlene, right stairwell, Harvey to the left.  Those are the key areas to start with.  Others, listen to the Lambs, be ready to act.  We do this actively!”

“Uniforms!” Mary called out, her voice almost overlapping with Jessie’s.  “If you’re wearing a Beattle uniform, then you’re going to make yourself scarce, but don’t leave just yet.  Listen to what we have to say, then make it your job to inform everyone else you meet as you disappear.  Check to see if they know what to do, tell them if they don’t.  Hide your weapons, take them and soldiers to the west and south Dormitory buildings, make sure they don’t make a fuss.  Carry trash with you.”

“This is a rehearsal of a really big play,” Helen said.  “We really want to get this right, but it’s a test, and how we act is part of it.  Don’t worry too much about looking like you’re trying not to look at them.  If you’re worried you look suspicious or worried, then what you want to do is look like you’re doing something.  You have a place to go, a thing to do, even if it’s getting food from the cafeteria, going somewhere, or finding someone else that looks uneasy and talking to them like they’re a friend.”

She was reading the room, sensing how tense and unsure they were, and reassuring, ensuring that they would reassure each other.  She was good at reading people.  It was a key part of acting.

Mary picked up in an instant.  There was scarcely a breath between the two of them, but by going back and forth, they were able to organize their thoughts on what needed to be done.  It was information overload to the audience, switching from one thing to the next, but… well, there was something to be said for being attentive.

Lillian was already heading downstairs to Lab One.  I turned to Jessie, who gave me a nod.

“We need people,” I said.  “Reliable, strong, good with weapons.”

“Jerome!” Jessie called out.  “You and your friends.  Patrick, Stefan, Curtis!”

“They’ll need guns.”

“They have guns,” Jessie said.

I smiled.  “You read my mind.”

“Yeah,” she said.  We took the stairs alongside Lillian.

Lab One.

“Warbeasts and less human experiments,” Lillian said.  “Here?”

“There,” Jessie pointed.  “I’ll be with you in a second.”

“I’ll check them for gunshot wounds and injuries first,” Lillian said.

“Be wary of Miss Muffet’s spider, she’s got a taste for humans now that she’s eaten and she’s entered her next birthing cycle,” Jessie said.

Lillian made a face, but she headed into the Lab One stables without further complaint.

As our contingent of soldiers arrived, Jessie began directing them to the other cells.  The cells held Betty, key members of the faculty, and other students I’d deemed too clever and competent to be left among the other students being kept prisoner in the dormitories.

Was it possible to keep them penned up here while everything else was going on?  Yes.  Was it likely that Professor Edmund Foss would appear and insist on exploring the lab in full?  No.  But this was harder to explain than some bullet wounds on a giant, a bayonet wound on a great black wolf, or an acid stain on a wall.

I walked away from them, moving into the surgery theater.

Junior was there, alongside members of his team – not the Rank, but a team of volunteers and assistants he’d accumulated, mid-crisis and in the aftermath.  Paul was here, too.  He sat on a countertop, staring down Ferres.

Too much anger, too much bitterness.

Ferres was on the table.  She had one leg, one arm that ended in a stump, and one arm that had a recently reattached hand that was now strapped down.  Tubes ran through, in, and out of her body.  Needles penetrated various points on her face and torso, with pen marks on the skin, with numbers and ratios.

A table beside her had what appeared to be two fifths of a human being, lacking skin, mouth agape.

“Junior,” I said, looking down at Ferres.  “How drugged is she?”

“She should be fairly lucid, if you need to ask her something,” he said.  He grimaced.  “The project is a mess right now.  We’re trying three methods of mapping her out in a way we can translate to another vehicle, we’re just figuring out what we want final implementation to look like.  If you came tomorrow, I might be able to say we’d be on track and half-done.  This isn’t my field.  I’m just managing.  David?  Thoughts?”

“About right,” one of the others said.

“It’s fine,” I said.  I would have been happier if there were results, but that would have been greedy.  “Jessie and Lillian are outside.  Talk to them, they’ll fill you in.  Stay if possible, but if they say to do different, do that.”

“Sure thing,” Junior said.  He gave me a sidelong glance as he walked by, assessing me.

Junior, at the very least, had experienced being my enemy.  I’d earned his respect, and he was someone who had been a rebel long before

I didn’t want the events outside this lab to reach Professor Ferres.  I walked slowly across the lab, noting that Paul was still sitting on that counter.

“Paul?  You too.”

“Are you hiding things from me now?” he asked.

“No,” I said.  “I’m hiding things from her.”

He considered that.

“I backed you,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ll back you again.”

“Thank you,” I said.  “Back me in this, alright?”

I’m not putting you away, I’m not trying to diminish you.

Paul left.

I was aware of the shape of the Infante looming in the corner of one eye.

“Keep the doors open,” I called out.

Paul did.

The surgical theater was fairly well lit, but it had a dark atmosphere.  The time I’d spent in and around this particular room had been some of the hardest, when it came to making it look like Jessie and I were simply aristocrats who’d wormed their way into Ferres’ inner circle.  I had watched children go under the knife for the sake of a show.

Now all of that darkness and negativity seemed to have been distilled in Ferres’ current state.

I reached into her mouth and took hold of the tube.  I began pulling it out, hand over hand, while she coughed and gagged.

It felt like a full minute before the end of the tube finally came free.

I walked over to a cabinet, while letting her recover from the coughing, and found the little porcelain bottles.  I peered through them, opening some that sounded right, before I found something that looked like what I needed.  A compacted disc of medication, almost the shape of a large coin, if a little thicker, red.

I walked over to Ferres and placed it in her mouth.  She could have bitten me, had she felt recalcitrant, but she didn’t.

“You were-” she started, before pausing to suppress a cough, “-paying attention.”

“Mm hmm.”

“You have early arrivals, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Power plays.  There are some I sized up who I left alone, and others I maintain rivalries with.  I can think of a few it might be.  Showing up early, throwing others off of their rhythm, it’s a minor play.  Someone from one of the small Academies, I’m thinking.  There might be one or two more.  More of a coordination, ensuring there’s no time to prepare, no time to get everything right.  They might even bring complications.  If I were actually making this announcement, I’d have already contacted allies elsewhere to counter and react.”

I took my seat where Paul had been.

“You need me,” she said.  “And by your own order, I’m in dire shape.  They’re going to take my skin and a portion of my fatty tissues and make them into a full-body mask.  They want to steal my voice.  It’s macabre, isn’t it?”

“Wholly deserved.”

“And it might even work,” she said.  She closed her eyes, moving the lozenge around her mouth.

I was aware that our guest was just now arriving at the gate.  There would be stalling, organization, asking for paperwork.  While Lillian had been investigating monsters and hunting people, Duncan had spent far more time elbow deep in the Academy, his eye always on the ultimate political prize.  He would have a good sense of what to say and do to buy us those extra minutes.

I was aware, too, that this conversation and what followed might take a little while yet.  That our target would make his way up the stairs while the Lambs secretly collaborated and organized students to prepare areas and make them as pristine as possible.

We would arrive fashionably late.

If ‘we’ arrived at all.  Ferres was unhinged.  She was dangerous in the way that someone with nothing left to lose could be.  She’d demonstrated that, taunting me, attacking me,

“You sound remarkably at ease with this,” I said.

“All stories have a bad ending,” she said.  “The oldest, most powerful of the fairy tales see the heroines turned to sea foam, slain by the wolves, their only legacy a moral lesson for children, if there’s anything at all.”

“No,” I said.  “Not all stories end badly.”

“At best we grow old and die,” Ferres said  “The Academy can postpone it, we endeavor against this bleak fact, but we won’t conquer it and change it for at least a little while.  At best, we lead a bright life with good stories, and we get our bittersweet ending with a positive legacy left behind.  At best.

“There are good endings,” I said.  “To fairy tales or reality.”

“What ending is there that is unambiguously good?  The noble sacrifice?  The celebrated death?”

“Not all endings are deaths.”

“Not strictly, but close enough.  You’ve known about your ending for some time.  I’ve enjoyed the journey and focused on the brightness I could bring to others and the art I could bring to existence, I’ve tried to walk the path that only I could walk, a personal one.  You, I think, are so focused on the endings that you forgot to pay attention to the middle.”

“If there was an opportunity to lay money on the chances I’d have a very violent, ugly end, I wouldn’t take that opportunity.  It’s very possible,” I said.  “But as bad as my ending is, I don’t think I’m going to end up flayed so someone else can make a skin puppet mockery of me.  You talk about your legacy, but I somehow think you’ve managed to be far more hated than I.  Even your Academy is turning on you.”

“I’ve had many, many more decades on this planet than you have, Sylvester,” Ferres said.  “It’s a lot more time to earn people’s hatred.”

She closed her eyes again.  Still very relaxed.

“How are the drugs?” I asked.

“Quite satisfactory.  To make me calm, rather than to help with the pain.  I expect that will end when they no longer need to keep me stable.  The hand will go then too, I’m sure.  It’s fine.”

“Is it really?”

“Several long weeks of misery for a life lived doing what I’m passionate about.  I know my last few weeks have been as awful as you could make them, I know what comes next might well be more awful, but I expected cancers or dementia, and those are horrible in their own way.  I mentally took note of every last thing, and I came to peace with the idea.  I’m at peace with the fact that I lived to my passions, and I didn’t let minor things get in my way.  I broke new ground, in Academy science, in making it possible for girls and women to make more headway, and in creating stories and works that would open minds.  What are you passionate about, Sylvester?”

My first thought was of Lillian, of Jessie.  Mary.  Helen in a different way.

“Something in mind?  You could have spent your time doing that, getting immersed in that, indulging in that-”

The thought made me snort.

“…and you’ve spent it desperately, madly struggling forward in vain against a reality you cannot change,” Ferres said.  “It’s the saddest thing about you.”

My thoughts of the girls were moving on in the background, my brain turning to thoughts of Lambs, then to the mice.  From that, though it was something unwieldy I hadn’t devoted enough attention to, the thoughts of a greater, more abstract world.

“There are a hell of a lot of things that are sadder than that,” I said.

“Not from my perspective, as someone who did the inverse.”

The inverse.

“You walked a dark path, your eye always on the end.  Your own, the friends you neglected to save.  You’ve allowed it to taint the rest of your life.”

I thought of the times I had.  They weren’t accurate memories so much as they were impressions and blurry scenes that were more imagination than actual hard memory.  The Lambsbridge backyard.  Being in Lillian’s arms when she clung to me while she slept.  Mary sleeping with her back to me, or turning over and her face relaxing in a way so few got to see.  Being with Jamie while music played in our room in Tynewear.  Sitting with Jamie and Gordon while interacting with mice in the… whatever that neighborhood had been called in Radham.  Having tea with Helen while she made our ears and brains want to turn inside out from her elaborate descriptions of horrible scenes.  Figuring out Ashton as we had a conversation in the orphanage dining room.  Sitting with Jessie in an armchair only big enough for one person, me holding the tea for both of us, the two of us talking about the fish mounted on the wall.  Talking to Jessie while she cooked, or vice versa.  Eating with Jessie after the cooking.

“I think I’ve had a pretty good journey, with enough good moments along the way,” I said.  “I made pretty good time with the people I had with me, and I think what I’m gunning for doesn’t take away from that.  No.  I think your impression of me is wrong on that score.”

Ferres nodded, leaning her head back.  “Well, I don’t imagine you have long to wait and see just what awaits you.”

With those words, I was made very aware of the Infante, standing off to the side.  That made me want to check that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t letting my guard down.

Junior, Lillian, and Jessie were standing at the doorway.  The others would be nearby.

Jessie signaled.  Edmund Foss was here.  Upstairs.

He wanted to see Ferres, and she was here, doped up, in pieces, with tubes running through her.

“Junior,” I said.  “Lillian.  Let’s get Professor Ferres as put together as we can get her.”

“You’re not even going to ask if I’m going to cooperate?” Ferres asked.  “I have nothing left to lose.  You took my hands, gave one back, and you’ll take it away.  You took my Academy and perverted it, and you took my students.  You’ve condemned them, telling them something that will justify them being utterly and completely destroyed the moment those words touch the wrong ear.  A series of bad endings will befall everyone here, far, far sooner than they otherwise might have.  That’s on your head.  And you expect me to play along?”

We don’t have a choice, I thought.

“You’ll get to demonstrate a little bit of that fairy tale play of yours,” I said.  “The only thing worse than a bad ending is a story that doesn’t get one.”

I watched as she took that in.

“Isn’t it funny, then, that you’re taunting them with immortality, of all things?” she asked.

“Maybe.  But you’ll see this through, just to demonstrate you can.”

She moved the stump of an arm that wasn’t restrained.  “Then your doctors should get to work, shouldn’t they?”

They were already moving into the room, making way to the tools, talking under their breath about the measures that would need to be taken, things that would need to be scrounged up.

Ferres, facing her impending journey on the surgical table, only looked at me and smiled.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.04 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.4

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Red had her arms crossed.

“If you decided you were up for it, it would make all the difference.”

She shrugged.

“If this was a week ago, I think I’d be handling this differently,” I said.

She didn’t speak, but she made fleeting eye contact.

I’d lost my mind and threatened to raze Hackthorn to the ground, and she hadn’t been that wary of me then.

“As little as a week ago, I’d be manipulating you, I think.  This would be easier.  I could empower you, make you feel like it was almost your idea.  You’d be happier, really.  Most of the time, when I manipulated people for their benefit, they were happier.  But, uh, I think right now it would be too hypocritical.  I’m not sure enough of anything to really feel like I could plot out your course of action and guarantee you’d be better off for it.  So I’m just asking.  If you decide no, that’s fine.”

“I’ll think about it,” Red said.

I nodded.

She was the only one I was willing to work with at this stage, who I even dared to broach the subject to.

“Thank you,” I told her.

She shrugged, noncommital, and I left things like that.

The sheer number of students heading up  and down the stairs throughout both stairwells was impressive and shocking – from the looks of it, and from what I could see looking past the glass walls of Lab One and through the windows, students and rebels were heading down to the ground, crossing the city below, and making their way into the buildings on the very ground level, to climb up.

All to minimize the foot traffic moving through the space that served as the dining hall.

Mary watched all of this unfold, standing with her back to the door, so she could keep an eye on Lillian and another eye on me.  When I passed her and stepped into the surgical theater, directly beneath the dining hall and the tables where our ‘guest’ was currently being entertained, Mary followed me in.  The door swung closed.

I’d almost expected Ferres to complain.  She didn’t.  I’d had more expectations that she would comment, needle and nettle.  She remained quiet, aside from the occasional sound, as she was supplied with parts.  It was a quick and dirty job, and I watched as Lillian worked with Junior’s team, laying the groundwork for voltaic limbs and extremities, hooking up a voltaic organ to power them.  Tubes were pulled free, blood and sweat wiped away, a spare hand attached in stages before being drawn together.

The fact that she remained silent against my expectations bothered me.  I would very much have preferred it if I had a keen sense of what she would do.

I might have tilted my brain in one direction or another, to better anticipate Ferres, but I was cognizant of the Infante’s presence, as he stood in the shadows, his face illuminated by the spotlight of voltaic lighting that allowed the doctors and students to clearly see what they were working on.

If I pushed myself to focus hard on body language, or on analyzing Ferres’ word choice, or even choosing words that would prickle her and slip through her defenses, then that might well be the action that prompted the Infante’s reaction, the flame to the fat, the spark to the tinder, meat for the carnivore.

Instead, I moved gently, thought carefully, and focused on observing.

It was, I imagined, very much as if Ferres was being remodeled on the fly in the same fashion that Hackthorn was.  Triage, but for the individual and her institution.

Well, it was our institution now.

Mary arrived with the clothes we’d sent her to get.  She had an eye for style, I knew, and I trusted her to slip past the dining area to access the administration’s quarters.

“What’s going on upstairs?” I asked.

“They’re gathered.  They’re having their tea.  It won’t be long before Headmaster Foss starts getting antsy.  For now he’s occupying himself with idle observations of the school.”

“Any crises?”

“Mabel’s group handled the burned building.  He was already at the landing of the stairs when they got the last of it in place.  They tore up the gardens and draped the greenery over the burned areas of the building.  The burned bridge was the opposite.  They dropped the plant-based portion of it completely, let it fall to the city below.  Shirley’s people were at the ground and had it cleaned up before anyone glanced outside.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“He’s getting antsy.  I wouldn’t say he suspects anything, but he’s making comments and I’m worried his prey instinct is up.  There not being enough members of faculty is playing a role.  Your, ah, father?  He’s there, and he’s making some conversation.”

I smiled.

“Move your arm,” Lillian instructed, still speaking softly.

Ferres did.

“With your fingers, touch-”

“I know the procedures,” Ferres said.  She touched thumb to fingertips, one after another, back and forth.  “Eight out of ten, if I had to gauge the response.”

One of the other young Doctors fiddled with the voltaic organ, a rectangular block of meat contained within a metal frame that outlined only the edges and corners.  I saw Ferres’ arm jump, and saw her wince with the pain.

It must have hurt a lot.  The ongoing surgery had barely elicited a reaction from her.  She had broken a sweat, occasionally reacting reflexively, but some things couldn’t be suppressed.

“Again,” Lillian said.

I thought for a moment that the doctor with the organ would jolt her again, but it was an instruction meant for Ferres.  She repeated the hand motion.

“Nine,” Ferres said.  “No need to adjust further.  I’ll manage, and the brain will adapt to my benefit.”

“Any pain?” Lillian asked.

“Pain is fine,” I said.  “We just need her functional.”

“Minimal pain,” Ferres said.  “I imagine it’s all exactly what I should expect for surgery of this nature and for a voltaic transplant.  A thrum of pain, sitting at a two, something between a three and a four for the surgical sites.”

“Does anything feel especially out of place?” Lillian asked.  “Does it feel square?”

“Square,” Ferres said.  She laughed, and it was the kind of laugh someone with broken ribs managed.  Her ribs weren’t broken, but she limited herself to the gentlest, lightest of sounds of amusement, as if anything else would level her.

Lillian didn’t flinch and didn’t comment on the laughter.

“At least hereabouts, when we’re teaching the very young children about Academy work, and we check the numbers or check their stitching we ask if it’s square,” Ferres said.  “That does take me back to when I first learned, and when I taught the youngest students.”

“How do you make that leap from being a child, working with children, to carving them up for the amusement of others.”

“Stand,” Junior instructed, before Ferres replied.  He held the sheet that was draped over Ferres to protect the woman’s modesty, his fingers holding the corners at a point between her shoulderblades, the top of the sheet passing under her armpits and just over the tops of breasts that should not belong to a woman of Ferres’ age.

Ferres dropped her feet to the tiled floor and stood, first with support, and then without.  “Was that what you were doing, Doctor Garey?  You set up that target for me to take my shot at?”

“Something like that,” Lillian said.

“Right knee, it doesn’t feel steady when I put my weight on it,” Ferres said.  As she said it, one of our Doctors who had been working with Junior and Lillian made a face, alarm and guilt.  His work, then.

“Brace it,” Lillian said.

“Brace?” Junior asked.

“There’s no time for more surgery,” Lillian said.

She had less of an idea where things were, so she remained by the table with Ferres and I while everyone else found what was needed.  Mary and I stood near the door, keeping an eye out.

Junior held the sheet, periodically switching the hand he held it with, as his arm grew tired.  Ferres could have taken the sheet from him had she wanted, but she was declining to.  She was more the experiment than the doctor, barely clothed, freshly worked on, still with smears of antiseptics and blood here and there.

“There weren’t many young ladies in the Academy when I joined,” Ferres said.  “We were few and far between.  Many of us corresponded, simply to reach out to others that, we hoped, would understand the trials and tribulations.”

“Are you trying to draw common ground, Professor Ferres?” Lillian asked.  “Because I’ve seen and talked to some of the children you experimented on.  Some of them are so disturbed at what they experienced beneath your scalpel that they don’t want to get surgery to fix it.”

“I could say something in response to that about how good art persists,” Ferres said.

“Careful,” I spoke, jumping in.

It served to break up the conversation.  Both Lillian and Ferres looked at me.

“Is that directed at me or her?” Lillian asked.

“Both of you.  I’m saying it to Ferres because she’s baiting you, and I’m saying it to you because she’s baiting you.”

“It’s fine,” Lillian said.  “Like I said, you want to find common ground, Professor?  It’s a long, long way to travel if you want me to reach that point.”

“No,” Ferres said.  “I wouldn’t presume common ground.  You and I don’t have much in common.  I would say-”

“Careful,” I cut in, almost reflexively.

Ferres stopped.

“She didn’t say anything,” Junior said.

Lillian, meanwhile, was quiet.

“Her body language,” I said.  “She might as well have been drawing her fist back, ready to sock Lillian, for all of her tells.  Except it wasn’t a fist.  It was words.”

“I was only going to say that Lillian shares a great deal in common with you and your Lambs, Sylvester,” Ferres said.

You were going to put it in much worse words than that, and you probably planned to draw parallels between Lillian’s lack of concern for your comfort and my treatment of you.

The other young doctors and students arrived with the straps, rods, and screws that formed the brace.   Ferres moved the sheet away from her one leg so they had room to work, and Lillian backed off, joining Mary and me.

“Hitting home?” I asked.

“What?” Lillian asked.

“You reacted to Ferres.  I could see it in how you approached the work.  You were gentler at the start, but you got more… ruthlessly efficient as the work continued.”

I left out the part where I really liked seeing Lillian working efficiently, lost in her work.  Probably more than was healthy, as a matter of fact.

“There’s a time limit,” Lillian said.  “I felt the pressure of the clock.”

“Okay,” I said.  You’re still not the best of liars.

She looked my way, and then sighed.

“She could’ve done so much good with her status and position,” Lillian said.

“Yup,” I said.

“And I can’t help but wonder, if I didn’t have the Lambs, would that have happened?  I walked a different path than most students.  I- I saw more of the end result, really.  I think Duncan was on that path.  The climb, reaching that point where you’ve climbed the mountain, you look down, and… everyone that gave you the reasons at the beginning is very distant and very small.”

“I think you have a good heart,” Mary said.  Her gaze was fixated on Ferres.  The brace was in place, supporting the knee, keeping everything aligned, and the screws were being tightened, with Ferres only grimacing slightly at the tightness of it.  A strap around the lower thigh, one around the upper calf, and rods and hinges held everything in place.  “I don’t think you would have become like her.”

“I appreciate that thought,” Lillian said.  She didn’t sound wholly convinced.

“Makes me think about Fray,” I said.  “Who might have sent our guest upstairs.  Did her fall mean that she was forced to come to terms with the people at the foot of the mountain?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” Lillian asked.

“Not in the slightest,” I said.  “Fray’s always been a tricky person for me to wrap my head around.  In my head-”

I stopped.

“In your head?” Lillian prodded.  She touched my upper arm.  “I don’t want to pry, but I want to know what’s going on.”

“She never made sense to me.  It was as if I couldn’t see her from the right angle, she was always fractured and I couldn’t pull it together, exactly.  She was meant to communicate something.”

“I’m not sure I can picture it,” she said.

“For what it’s worth,” Mary said, “I didn’t get the impression Fray was humbled.”

I nodded.

The word ‘humbled’ struck a chord in me.  Maybe it was my recent experience, maybe it was that we were having this quiet conversation while Ferres stood with only a sheet protecting her modesty, her body stained, students wiping the stains away, with attention primarily given to the extremities and the parts clothing wouldn’t cover.  Her chin was high, and for all I could tell, she hadn’t been properly humbled, not by shitting herself in a bathtub or losing her hands, not by words she had heard or spoken.

Broken, yes.  I could remember her writhing on the floor, screaming the words that she might have thought would provoke me to finish her off.  I could see the look on her face even now, the look of someone only a few strides from… how had she put it?  The end of her story.

But not humbled.

“It’s a good word, humbled,” I said.  “And I think I agree.”

“She was a person with a mission,” Mary said.  “I understood that.  I didn’t understand what the mission was, but I understood that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sums it up well.”

Ferres was being dressed now.  The male doctors and students looked very out of their element in the process, Ferres wasn’t contributing much, with her hands being newly mended and her body somewhat inflexible.  That left much of the task to the only young lady present who wasn’t a Lamb.  Junior was at least rigging the voltaic organ to a series of straps.  Ferres’ dress was voluminous enough to hide it, so long as it hung to one side or behind her buttocks, and would also serve to hide the brace at her knee.

Lillian seemed to decide something, and broke away, going to help dress the Headmistress of Hackthorn.

I watched Ferres, trying to study her.  I knew she was dangerous.  She’d been broken, and we were piecing her together, and every step seemed to give her twice the strength she’d had.  I knew we had leverage in the form of Betty, but that had been called sharply into question when Ferres had provoked me, screaming those words at me as she struggled, with Betty in plain view.

“She and Percy would have made a good pair,” Mary said.

“Fray or our headmistress here?”

“The headmistress.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I felt a little validated that Mary had been analyzing our enemy as well.  Eyes on her from another angle.

“Do me a favor?” I asked.  “Come with?”

“I was going to stay with Lillian, in case the Professor here tried something,” Mary said.

My eyes moved across the room.  I found the Infante amid the small crowd.  Lillian was giving orders now, instructing doctors in that quiet, damaged voice of hers, much as she’d done during the surgery.

Like the surgery, and much like the practice was in field medicine, Lillian was figuring out what took the highest priority.  She had things to learn in bending the small team of doctors to her will, but it wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle, by the looks of it.  She knew how to work with a team.  It was a question of adapting that knowledge to a new team.

The Infante stood in the midst of it.  As if it was all at his behest.  He claimed the scene and he took my attention.  He placed himself close to Lillian, and in that, he indirectly threatened her.

“I don’t trust myself alone,” I said.  “But I trust Lillian.  Ferres isn’t in a position to do anything that isn’t very subtle, and Lillian has some experience with subtle.”

Mary frowned.  Anyone else might have chewed a lip, tapped a finger or a foot.  Mary, instead, remained very still, her fingers moving idly around a blade without a handle.

“If that’s a problem, maybe you could step out and find Jessie?  I’ll wait here with Lillian in the meantime.”

“I’ll come with,” Mary said.

“Thank you,” I said.

We gestured at Lillian as we made our exit.

A quick check confirmed that Emmett was the one keeping an eye on upstairs.

For all the darkness and the quiet of the surgery theater, the expressions, gestures, instructions both unspoken and uttered in near-whispers by way of Lillian’s lips, the sunlight streamed through the windows and illuminated everything.  Footsteps and conversations made everything feel alive, buzzing with activity and controlled chaos.

I walked up the stairs and peeked, looking past where Emmett was staying more out of sight, watching proceedings.

It was a stark contrast to the rest of the Academy.  There were crowds of students, but they were seated, eating.  The foot traffic was minimal, everything was posed.  The guests stood apart, mostly women and young ladies in uniforms different from the Hackthorn standard, but with a few elderly gentlemen among them.

The young lady who was sitting near the man I took to be the Headmaster of Dame Cicely’s was familiar, but I couldn’t place her.  If others hadn’t alerted me then it wasn’t too important, probably.

Probably.

I tried to think back to that series of events.  The headmaster, Edmund Frost, had his name been?  I hadn’t been reminded recently enough.  Who had he been tied to?

“Going okay?” I asked Emmett.

He gave me a one-shoulder shrug.

“Yeah,” I said.

Professor Edmund had come with an escort.  The creations stood, lined up against the wall.  Men, all of them, their skin a shiny black, their faces lost in a morass of chitin.  Each stood lopsided, and they matched one another in the slants of their bodies, each of them pulled to one side by a matching growth of bone, great scythes that served as their weapons.  Silver had been inlaid into each scythe, decorating them.  They wore pants and no boots.

When one reacted to a stimulus, they all reacted.  Someone moved too close, and a head turned, jerking to face the trespassing student, and fourteen other heads turned a half-second later.

I could very easily imagine that squadron killing a hundred or two hundred of our rebels and students before being put down.  All it would take was an order.

But they were still, Edmund Frost was at his table with his tea, sitting in one of the comfortable seats that had been brought from elsewhere.  He leaned forward, both hands around his cup of tea, talking earnestly with Duncan.  His voice didn’t reach me at the top of the stairwell.

My ‘father’ was a distance away, talking to others, though they seemed disinterested.

Ashton sat a short distance away, on a bench at another table just a few feet from Duncan, his back to Duncan’s.  He was hard to recognize, as his hair had been painted black.  Shoe polish, if I had to guess, or something Duncan carried with him.

Frost looked to be engaged enough.  The wheels had been greased, and he had Duncan’s full attention.

My concern lay with Frost’s companions.  The young lady looked restless, the faculty, friends, and senior students who had joined Frost for this journey appeared much the same.  I worried my ‘father’ was doing more harm than good, at this stage.  By being there, he was doing something to draw attention to the fact that faculty were very much absent.

There was only so much Ashton could do.  Frost might be more complacent, his thoughts occupied and his defenses down, but the thoughts of his entourage weren’t being occupied.  Some, I noted, a very small few, had migrated to different points in the hall, possibly to get away from my ‘father’, the boorish drunk aristocrat.

Some, I realized, might already have wandered off to visit other parts of the Academy.  Our work in hiding damage and setting the stage elsewhere would be tested, if that were the case.

Even if there was nothing blatant, if we let Frost go and the people who’d accompanied him collected their thoughts enough to articulate just what had felt hollow or wrong about Hackthorn, then he might report to others elsewhere.

“Walk with me,” I said, taking Mary’s hand.

The moment she realized where I was taking her, she reached up.  Her ribbons came undone, and a moment later, her hair was in a different sort of order, not quite tied up.

We walked onto the floor of the dining hall, perpendicular to the table with Frost and the others.

“Gesturing,” I said, speaking as much to make it look like we were an organic part of things as much as to communicate to Mary.  My free hand moved, giving instructions to others.  First to Duncan, then to Ashton, and to my ‘father’.

In order: Raise the stage slow, soon; loosen the hold; go away.

Nobody shouted.  We made our way to the staircase on the opposite end of the dining hall, and I led us in a wider circle, just so we could glance back the way we’d come.

Nobody else at that table was staring or looking concerned.

For that to happen, they would have had to see our faces, made a connection.  Ashton, I hoped, was dulling the edges of their focus.

But Ashton would let up.  My ‘father’ would leave.  For the next few minutes, Duncan would scale up the talk and talk big.

If we played this wrong, then it would backfire.  I’d just asked the heat to be turned up, this pot would boil, and given a chance, it would boil over.

But the tension and restlessness concerned me.  We were out of time.

We headed back down the stairs.  Back to Lab One.

This was the moment.  Ferres had her stage.

Ferres and Lillian were making their way out of the surgical theater.  Ferres was dressed, her makeup done.  She wore a long dress that billowed a little at the waist, and a long, exaggerated, fashionable lab coat, the kind worn to special events where a lab coat wouldn’t do but where her status had to be established.  I could imagine she might’ve worn it to a wedding for an aristocrat in her area, perhaps.

Her hair was perhaps underdone, but there wasn’t much to be done about that.

Simpler would be better.

Jessie emerged from the stables.  She had the Wolf with her.  The Big Bad Wolf, the Black Wolf, the wolf that was a theme through a hundred tales, almost elephantine in size, its fur not wholly fur, but instead something sculpted, to twist and curl in aesthetically pleasing ways.

“Just the Wolf?” I asked.

“Everything else is injured.  The Wolf is too, but the fur hides it.”

I nodded.

The situation was so precariously balanced.  Frost, the students, the veneer of the Academy.

Ferres held all of the power.

I was acting on the premise that her pride in her art was greater than her pride, and seeing her be pieced together and find her composure as quickly as she had was concerning me.  She stood tall in a way that I wasn’t sure she’d managed since I’d first captured her.

Sure, she’d stood at her normal height and posture and she’d managed to appear normal to her students while acting out her ordinary days, but it wasn’t about that.

I turned my attention to Red.

Half deer, half rabbit, all prey, but she’d reversed that role.  I’d done everything I could to reverse the role.  For just the briefest span, she’d been one of the chief figures in power.  She’d had all she could ask for, not that she’d asked for more than companionship, drink, and revenge.

Past tense.

I watched her turn her head, looking at the Wolf.

Her attention shifted.  Her eyes were empty of light and passion as she looked at Ferres, as if she could kill the woman right then and there, with scarcely a blink.

“She can feel pain?” Red asked.

“Yes,” Lillian said.

Red nodded, digesting that.

The Lambs present were glancing at me.  Waiting for me to step in.  This was a dimension of the dance, the social interplay, the roles.  When I was able to imagine the Lambs, I could finish their sentences.  I knew who would jump in to speak on a subject, and the kinds of things they would say.

They expected me to fill this void.  Lab One was in suspension, at the same time we were surrounded by the movement of the students who were using the stairwells.

Red bent down, and she picked up her wood axe.  She hefted the weight of it in her hands, then gave it a small practice swing, with no strength behind it.

“When I’m done, I’m going to put this in the bitch professor,” Red said.

“I’m not sure-” Jessie started.

“That’s my condition.  I’m going to hatchet her.  Maybe I’ll take her hand.  Maybe I’ll give her a few whacks.  You can patch her up later.  But she doesn’t get to experience this without some fear.”

The problem with that, I thought, is that the threat gives Ferres even less reason to press forwardShe has more reason to take us down with her, match our violence and brutality with her own.

We needed Ferres’ cooperation, and we needed Red’s.  She was the only one old enough that still had her modifications, who I also trusted to cooperate and listen to me on some level.  We really only had the Wolf, and that left us few options in who else we could put on the stage.

“Okay,” I said.  “If nobody disagrees, then okay.”

Ferres didn’t speak up.  The Lambs that were present didn’t either.

“Then… let the actors take the stage.”

I saw tension at Red’s jaw as she turned at a right angle, striding for the stairs.

Jessie spoke, her voice barely audible, and the wolf turned as well.  It loped, its movements seemingly far slower than Red’s, though it covered a roughly equivalent distance with each movement.

It was as though they had practiced it a hundred times.

With Jessie’s memory, I might have remembered the exact count.  Wolf and prey had been calibrated on a biological level, much as the clockwork Punch and Judy emerged from the fancy clocks as the hour hit, to carry out their mechanical choreography.

The Lambs divided into two groups.  Half followed Red, me among them.  The other half followed the Wolf.  Students further up and below us on the staircases fell silent and still, and it was a change in volume and movement that communicated to students standing near the stairs.  Heads turned to see why, then fell silent in turn.

I took up a spot where I could peer through gaps in the crowd, sitting on one of the stairs near the top, opposite Emmett.  Jessie stood beside me, slouching against the railing, head bent low to peer through the gaps with me.  For our faces to be recognized, our targets would have to ignore Red, focus on the crowd instead, and see our faces in the background there.

It was a question of what drew the eye.  Virtually every student present wore the pristine white uniforms.  Red wore, well, red.

Students saw the wood axe she carried, and some of them remembered her as one of my agents of chaos and violence.  It played a part in them falling silent, the fear that added just a little bit more tension to the scene.

Professor Edmund had turned, his eye on Red as she let the wood axe dangle from one hand, her head bent.  Murmurs and cries of alarm marked the arrival of the Wolf, in a place I couldn’t see for several long moments.

Even more than Red, the Wolf had been a real and visible danger to many students present.

Red’s hand shook as she gripped the wood axe.

We need to do this.  We need to sell Edmund on this.  We need Ferres to not sell us up the river.

The Wolf moved.  Red moved perpendicular to it, into the sea of tables and benches, students and faculty.

Students cleared out of the way, scrambling, as Red went up, over, and under both table and bench, each step placed carefully.

The Wolf got close enough that it looked like it might stampede through the students.  At the last second, Red changed direction, and the Wolf responded by batting at a table with one paw, sending it tumbling in Red’s direction.

It collided with a wall, and for just an instant, for just about everyone present, it looked as though the deciding blow had been delivered, quick and undeniable.

Red emerged from the small gap where the table wasn’t flush with the portion of wall near the ground.  She dashed, and the Wolf was already moving to intercept her.  It collided with her, snapping its teeth, and only the fact that the length of the axe bounced off of a tooth kept Red’s arm from being caught.

For the next several moments, it was all snapping teeth, broken benches, and Red staying a hair’s breadth away from danger.

I hadn’t imagined it would be this narrow, this very precise.

It was a dance, and it wasn’t so different from the ones I’d enjoyed with any of the Lambs.  Improvisation played a role, the stages we danced on changed, and only the fact that we knew each other remained a constant.

This was a dark dance.  Ferres was the choreographer.

Ferres had yet to step in.

And Edmund… well, he’d been alarmed enough at one juncture to stand in his seat.  His lady companion gripped his arm, tense.

The scene continued, and I looked away as the Wolf struck Red, sending her stumbling hard into the corner of a table.  She dropped her wood axe, and scrambled to pick it up again before the Wolf could close the distance.

Unwilling to be an onlooker and trust that this would play out as I hoped, I walked away.  I took stairs two at a time, and Jessie followed.

I heard a hard collision from upstairs before I was even halfway across Lab One.  I heard the massed intake of breath.

“Betty,” I spoke, before I was even around the corner.

“Further down,” Jessie said.

They were gathered in the stable, all at the end, where snapping and snarling beasts could discourage visitors from poking their nose in too deep.  Caged.

Betty was among the elite students and faculty members who stood and sat on bare wood and sparse hay.

She flinched as she saw me.

She was the Lillian that Lillian had worried about becoming.  The mountain climber, who’d lost sight of ground.

“Ferres is up there.  When Red and the Wolf are done, Ferres is going to speak.  She’s going to let slip that the Academy is in danger, she’s going to rally allies, and in the process, she’s going to spark a fight that’s going to see hundreds dead.”

Betty barely reacted.

“Ferres will die, I guarantee this.  The visitors will die.  So will my people.  So I’m going to ask you… are you willing to step in?”

“You want me to stop Ferres?  When she might stop you?”

“There are a small few individuals in the Crown States who are equipped to stop the Lambs right now,” I said.  “Ferres isn’t one of them.”

Sylvester is one, I thought.

“We could slow you down, couldn’t we?” A faculty member asked.

“You’d all set us back, don’t get me wrong.  All the same, giving up your life, Ferres’ life, the other students’ lives just to set us back is a pretty grim proposition, isn’t it?”

Somewhere up on the floor above, a piece of glass broke.

I wouldn’t have asked Red if I’d known it would be this grim.

I should have known.

“You used me as a pawn to get Ferres to listen to you before,” Betty said.

“Yes.”

“You changed my face, you cut my nose, you… you took me.  You held me there, kept me prisoner while the warbeasts and experiments roamed loose, and you held me like that for days.”

“I did,” I said.

“You- when are you going to stop asking things of me?” Betty asked, her voice hollow.  “When are you going to stop taking?”

I wanted to answer, to cut through the question and to challenge her, but I could see how frail she was.

I knew that every moment we delayed, Red was either battling the Wolf, or if the fight had concluded, then Ferres would be getting her chance to speak.

But, even with that knowledge, I was prepared to wait.  I wasn’t pushing my brain to the limits to do it, but I thought I could see something in how Betty was acting.

“Don’t go,” a faculty member in the cage said.  “Don’t give them anything they want.”

“You’re trying to make a point,” Betty said.  To me, not the faculty member.  He didn’t have his position and he didn’t have authority to make her listen.  Betty went on, “But… it’s not like that.”

“What’s not like that?” Jessie asked, from behind me.

“It’s not equivalent, how you’re treating us, and how we treated you.

I swallowed hard.

“I’ll go,” she said.  “I’ll talk to Ferres.”

“Just go.  Stand by her,” I said.

Betty nodded.

“I’ll go too, if it counts for anything,” one of the boys said.

“Just two of you,” I said.

Jessie unlocked the cage.  I held a knife and a gun to keep the rest from surging out of the broad cage.

Betty and the boy joined Jessie and I in jogging in the direction of the stairs.

I didn’t see the final moments.  A few seconds faster, and we might have.

Red was on the ground, bleeding from various scrapes and contusions.  She had fallen, and in the process, she’d lost her weapon.  I hadn’t seen how that played out, how Wolf and prey had positioned themselves to have it go this way, specifically.

The weapon, falling to the ground, had skidded across the floor and come to a rest not far from Professor Edward Frost, or whatever his name was.

He bent down to pick it up.  He was frozen in time, caught between three decisions.  One was to fight off the monster and save the girl.  To become part of the story.  Another was to retreat.  The third option…

Well, to his credit, I didn’t take him to be the type to make Red experience the nightmare ending that had been scripted for her from the beginning of her stay at Hackthorn.

it seemed like that was the moment the spell was broken and he recalled where he was.

The second that happened, the Wolf lunged for him.  He flinched, and jaws closed around him.

The bottom end of the axe caught in lower teeth, the head of the axe between fangs at the upper row.  The Wolf strained its jaws, aiming to close them, and the handle of the axe threatened to splinter and break.

“Alright, Ferres, it was a good show!” Frost called out.  “Enough of this!”

The headmistress of Hackthorn didn’t make her appearance.  She was supposed to be at the other stairwell.

“Ferres!” he called out, with a little more alarm in his voice.

He turned his head, and I knew that he was about to give the order for the entourage of scythe experiments to move in.  The only thing that stopped him was perhaps the danger of escalating things when he was within arm’s reach of being bitten in half.

“Welcome to Hackthorn, Headmaster Foss,” Ferres spoke.  She finally made her appearance.  “I believe this is your first proper visit?”

“What’s your game!?” he called out.

I gave Betty the smallest of nudges.  She strode toward Ferres.  The boy was only a step behind.

I saw Ferres notice them.  I saw them come to stand beside her.  They were a little unkempt, not the best picture we could have put forward.

But Ferres unrestrained wasn’t a good picture either.

I saw Ferres turn briefly in our direction, as if looking for meaning or cue, but Jessie and I were safely hidden in the crowd.

“No game,” she said.  “Only a story for you to tell, so close to reality that it’s almost indistinguishable from it.”

She snapped her fingers.  The Wolf backed off, leaving Foss to sag a little.

It was Duncan that started the applause, a fierce clapping that was picked up by Ashton, and by others.

It swept over the hall.  Only the guests didn’t clap.

I could see from Foss’ expression that he would’ve liked to call her out, to insult her, or question her sanity.

But to do so would be to admit he was unnerved, to draw attention to his weakness in the moment.  To play along…

I watched as Professor Edmund Foss started clapping.  The rest of his people joined in.

It almost seemed to get louder, with the accord of it, the fact that everyone present, be they enemy or ally, was on the same page in their relief, if for different reasons, that the show had struck home for everyone here, again, if for different reasons.

Applause shook the main hall of Hackthorn.  Student, Doctor, Professor, soldier and experiment.

Applause shook the main hall of Hackthorn.  Lesser nobles, Doctors, Professors, students, soldiers, experiments, and more.  More still filed into the space, each bringing their entourage, each bringing their own protection.

Lillian’s hand found mine, clutching it tight.  Just beyond the window, an experiment perched on the wall, big enough to eat the Wolf in one swallow.

Nobles were taking a break from talking among one another.  Aristocrats were gathered in their periphery.  Lesser professors and professors without their own individual responsibilities were gathered for Ferres’ show and big reveal.  Food spread out across the tables, the best we could provide.

One of the Academies hadn’t even brought a boat, instead arriving on the back of a sea creature with a castle on its back.

It was everyone we didn’t want.  Too many, with too many combined resources among them.  We were already outnumbered, and there were still boats on the water, waiting for an opportunity to unload their passengers.

I gripped Lillian’s hand just as hard as she gripped mine.

Helen’s head turned.  She nudged Jessie, and with the pair standing in front and to the side of me, I could see the motion of it.  I could follow the angles of their heads and see why.  Ibbot was here.

Frost was, too.

The applause died down, and with it, the Lambs ducked our heads down, turned away, and set to work.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.05 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.5

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

No sign of Fray.  Mauer played his part.  The Infante and the major players are absent.

Well, the Infante was present.  He waited for me in the stairwell, not moving from his spot, his stare penetrating.  He kept the company of the Primordial Child.

The Lambs had split up, as moving from building to building was a laborious process.  There were three ways to get from building to building.  The first was to take one of the two arms or the leg that held up bridges, which necessitated passing through the main building, the body of the reclining woman, and walking past ninety percent of the guests.  For obvious reasons, we had to rule that option out.

The second option was to use the walltop road that formed the three-quarter circle connecting the Academy buildings around the perimeter.  Most of them were dormitories, and getting from, say, the boy’s first dormitory to the girl’s dormitory meant taking a curved road through two other buildings, one of which was the administration building, until reaching the destination.  What should be ten minutes of walking to get from boy to girl proved to be twenty or thirty in practice, notwithstanding obstacles, having to move out of the way if any carts were using the path, or trouble accessing the buildings, like when the administration building closed for the night.

The last option was making our way down to the ground, walking to the foot of whichever building one wanted to access, and then walking up.

Not a single option worked in the long-term, when the Academy was as occupied as it was.  We had access to the ground for the time being, but as the aristocrats and lesser professors started getting settled and got luggage put away, the city below us would teem with low level threats.

The layout was meant to hold up to siege and invasion, and the limited, easily controlled paths played a part in that, with the heart of the University being able to produce an endless tide of warbeasts, stitched, parasites, or the like, should an enemy try to hold a given point.

We rounded a corner, and the Infante was there again.  This time he kept the company of Dog and Catcher.  They weren’t children anymore, but were full size, with Dog being large enough to make the hallway cramped.

The pair fell into stride with us.

“Do you get that jump of emotion in your chest, when you’re on the verge of closing the deal?” Catcher asked.

I was silent.  Dog made a garbled sound of agreement.

“Dog and I were made to feel it.  Helen as well.  It was something they gave the Academy students, you know.”

I know.

“The kick.  For experiment and student both, they joined drug with reinforcement in reality.  The students were all given access to Wyvern in small amounts, enough to make them susceptible, just in time for the first of the most critical examinations.  We were given dosages of drugs for our first hunt.  Success?  The desire for it was etched into us.  Failure?  Etched in with Wyvern for the students, the weaker students not only weeded out but made into failures in every fucking sense of the word.  For us, it was withdrawal from the drugs and a lack of maintenance if we failed.  They ingrained us with the sense that if we could not be useful, we’d be left to rot, with no team to care for us.”

“I know,” I said.

“You know that they did the same to you, don’t you?  Except what they did with you was deny you access to your fellow Lambs.  In your explanations and stories, do you even realize that you tell the same story twice, but you’ll change it around?” Catcher asked.

I was silent.  It was my paradox, wasn’t it?  I was the liar, but liars needed a good memory to keep track of their deceptions.

Dog grunted.

“I don’t mean to get on your case, Sy,” Catcher said, in his grizzled burr.  “But you’ll tell a story about yourself and you’ll say you did what you did because of Wyvern, while you privately tell yourself you did it for the Lambs.  You’ll tell that same story a few months later, and you’ll say you did it for the Lambs, while you privately tell yourself you did it for the drug.  I’m telling you what you always knew.  I’m not trying to trick you or get at you, that’s not how I do things.”

Dog growled.

“Not how we do things.  Dog and I, we set our eye on something, and we see it through.  We’re straightforward.  I’m telling you straight, Sy, it’s one and the same.  Your Lambs, your addiction.  It’s never going to be good for you or them, and it was never going to go anywhere but a few broken hearts.  The only difference between us is that Dog and I are ugly, we came to terms with things early.  I never believed I could have a woman, or even a friend that wasn’t a proper experiment-”

I startled a bit as we turned a corner and the Infante was there.  He stared into my eyes.

Jessie touched my arm.  “It’s okay.”

I nodded.

“-And your Lillian doesn’t count as a proper experiment, Sy.  As much as you want her to, and as much as she wants to.  You have the unfortunate reality of looking human,” Catcher said.  “They got you young, and they got their hooks in deep.  There’s no getting those hooks out without a lot of blood.”

He was fiddling with a weird piece of metal, and I couldn’t figure out what the metal was supposed to be for.  It was barbed, at least.

If there’s going to be blood, I’ll be the one shedding it, at least, I thought.

“Goodbye, Sylvester,” Catcher said.

I felt a minor shock run through me at those words.

Goodbye?

“I don’t think we’ll talk again,” the gravelly voice said.

Dog, for his part, said his own farewell, almost incomprehensible.  And with that, they stopped walking.  Jessie and I left them behind.

I wanted to stop, to go back, and to ask, as stupid as it was.  I felt a loss even though they’d beleaguered me and targeted my weaknesses.  They were familiar and among all of the old enemies that were living in my head and making their appearances around or alongside the Infante, Dog and Catcher were some of the less bad ones.  Straightforward, not seductive, not too scary, not too dangerous to others.

Were they gone because there wasn’t time, or were they gone because I was going to soon find myself in a state where I couldn’t function in the same way?

I glanced at the Infante.  He remained still, biding his time.  He hadn’t made his move, yet his every appearance managed to make my heart jump, it felt like he was a great hammer, and he was chipping at me with his every appearance, that he had been for a long while.

At what stage did the chips become a crack and a crack become a breach in the wall?

“Sy?” Jessie asked.  “Who is it?”

Who was it?  I couldn’t bring myself to say.  Naming him might give him power.

“Dog and Catcher,” I said.  “Was I that obvious?”

“Not that obvious, but something was going on,” she said.

I nodded.

“Dog and Catcher aren’t too bad, are they?  Even at their worst, when they were hunting us, it wasn’t horrible.  We ate and drank with them.”

I blew air out of my nose hard.  “I forgot about that.”

“It’s one of the ones I hold on to, when you look like you need a refresher on a good memory,” Jessie said.

I reached out for her hand.

“Dog and Catcher aren’t bad.  They might even be one of the better ones.  But Catcher calls me Sy and it sounds so friendly it worms its way into my head, and between his gravelly voice and Dog’s size, it’s really hard to ignore them, so it wears at me.”

“Think about other things, then.”

We passed by a window.  I could see outside.  There was something there, and for all I could tell, it was a jellyfish sans jelly, a specter to rival nearly anything I’d ever seen before, all wisp and tendril, blowing in the wind.  Millions of gossamer spiderwebs organized by a great pattern might have achieved the effect.

It was like the ghost of a great warbeast I couldn’t remember, something of a scale that dwarfed Helen’s little brother, but so light it was a fraction of the mass.

“Okay.  Other things.  Is that real?” I asked, pointing.

“It’s real, Sy,” Jessie said.  She didn’t need to look; she’d seen it earlier.

“That’s good,” I said.  “Isn’t it?”

“It’s a theoretical exercise by Moraga Academy in the Californias.  While we were watching the gate, Lillian, Duncan, Mary and I were talking about what we could possibly do about it and we don’t really have any good ideas,” Jessie said.

“What Academy’s in the Californias?”

Jessie made a so-so gesture.  “Not so much a proper Academy.  Test ground, somewhere that something like that can be trialed without too much risk to Crown population.”

I waited until we passed another window to glance at the thing.

“It’s not bright.  Brain the size of your fist.  We don’t know what that brain perceives, or how it follows orders.  But those loose fibers?”

“The gossamer?”

“Gossamer is a good word for it.  It turns them hard.  There are fibers that’re nearly as long as Hackthorn is tall, and it makes them into a spear, leveraging the rest of the body to plunge that spear through a building.  Through exterior wall, interior walls, floor, and out the other exterior wall.”

I nodded.  We passed by labs with open doors.  I saw a dismembered Academy student that stared at us as we walked by.  A girl lay on a table, strapped down, while a team placed needles in her eyes.

“As far as we can figure, it’s just one more thing we have to take account of, and it’s going to stay in play,” Jessie said.

“We can’t burn it?  Chop it?”

“At best, we can penetrate its brain, and its brain is…”

“…way up there.  I see.  Fill me in on what you know at the next good opportunity,” I said.  “We’ll figure it out.”

“There are a lot of things that need figuring out, Sy.”

“Just throw them at me later, we’ll see what we can do,” I said.  “After.”

After.  There wasn’t a lot more time.  We’d arrived at our destination.

Lab One was too hazardous, so we’d made use of other labs, further down.  Now we walked among experiments, modified youths and children.  A young man was being strapped together, a symbiote or parasite embracing him as a kind of external suit that made him look morbidly obese. His fine clothes were folded beside him.  He was made up to look like an aristocrat’s brat.

A girl was topless and seemed not to care in the slightest about it.  Her makeup was being touched up, and the open wound at her chest was being smeared with something medical.  She looked my way and smiled.  The gaping hole where her heart was supposed to be, large enough for me to reach my hand through, was in plain view.

Was I supposed to know her?  I gave her a smile in response.  The ‘I know a secret’ kind of smile.

Jessie elbowed me.

“What?”

She elbowed me again.

What?  Not many of the students smile at me these days.  Wouldn’t do to lose friends.”

“Yes, yes, friends,” Jessie said.  “That’s what you were looking for.”

“You’re really going to dwell on this sort of thing now?” I asked.  “Are we going to bicker in front of everyone, on the literal eve of… everything going down?”

“It’s afternoon, not any kind of eve,” Jessie said.

“Alright, it seems we’re bickering today.”

“Please don’t,” Bea said, from the room at the end.

We looked at her, and she stood up, waving off the student who had been doing her makeup.  Bioluminescence etched her eyes, making them glow like coals, and lines of the same traced their way from her fingers to her elbow, crimson and bright, with her fingers the brightest, the skin around the edges of the crack painted dark to bring them out by way of contrast.  Her hair wasn’t her own.

She placed one hand at the doorframe, and it was a gesture.  Come.

We went.  Bea partially closed the door.

“We’re not really bickering,” I said.  “Just so it’s clear.  It’s just how we communicate.”

“Believe it or not, I’m very aware.  I don’t know how you two can do that,” she said.  “Or how most of the Lambs can.”

“Have to,” Jessie said.  “It’s either laugh or cry, and sometimes there’s no opportunity to laugh, sometimes there’s no opportunity to cry.  So you take what you can get, or you push for more of one than the other to prepare for later drought.”

“Do you really think there’s only going to be tears later?”

“I think,” Jessie said.  “If this doesn’t work out, we won’t be laughing.”

Bea nodded at that.

Her eye fell on me.  It was hard, critical.  She’d been there through the worst patch.

“I’m good,” I said.  “I’ve got them with me.

“You had them when you were whispering to yourself about needing to make Little Bo Peep bleed,” Bea said.

I winced.  I hadn’t, but I wasn’t about to argue the point.

“It wasn’t really us,” Jessie said.

Bea didn’t respond.  I didn’t either.  I suspected we were both thinking but not articulating the idea that there really wasn’t a difference between the people who were real and the people who weren’t, when I really lost it.

“Right,” Jessie said.  Perhaps she was thinking the same.  Her expression changed slightly, “Are you ready?”

“I always liked fire,” Bea said.  “Watching it, playing with it.  I’m either going to have the best, most terrifying time, or it’s going to be only the terrifying part.”

“Good luck,” I said.

Her response was a tight smile, and an opening of the door.

From the way some people looked away, we’d had eavesdroppers.  That was fine.

“They’re done with the first act.,” Jessie said.  “Final preparations, cover-ups, and get moving, just as you rehearsed.  Apple should start soon.  From there it’s all about the order you die in.”

Bea used a dropper to put drops in her eyes, temporarily clearing away the bioluminescence, checked the makeup was set, and then pulled long gloves on over her arms.  The fabric was supposed to go up in flame in an instant.

The boy with the parasite was getting help in putting on a heavy coat.  The moment it was done up, he spun in a circle, got thumbs ups, and then swiped an apple from a nearby basket before legging it up the stairs.  Bea urged another girl up the stairs, then followed.

Most of these people were student volunteers.  We hadn’t been able to conscience sending all of the other experiments to the ‘stage’.  Some had had their alterations reversed, making it impossible, and more were simply unwilling to put themselves through that.  It wasn’t acting, but reality played out to a razor’s edge, with the sharpest control that Professor Ferres’ science could enact.

The work we had applied to Bea had been meant for the nightmare, but with everything that had gone on, the original team of doctors had never been able to spare the time and effort to riddle out just how to make a horse burn the way they needed the nightmare to burn, and yet not die in the process.

Jessie had been able to dig up enough obscure, dark fairy tales for us to put something together.  Several of this batch were part of a series of cautionary tales, and we’d strung it out into a reinterpretation, wherein the old cautionary tales related to lab safety and the hazards of Academy life.  Bea was one of twenty-six actors who were going to die in improbable, grisly, and convincing manners.  She was ‘C’ for ‘Combustible’.

Ashton had wanted ‘C’ to be ‘choke’ and for Bea to take over ‘Fire’ or ‘Burn’, but in the shuffling of letters and an effort to use more Academy terms, and in small part because of Duncan’s insistence, we had moved that one over to ‘K’, for ‘Knock’.

And this, as they said, was the curtains rising.  The actors left as a group.

All of this was in the name of running out the clock, selling the idea that Ferres was involved, and in guiding the emotions of our audience.  It would be alarming at first, but one oddity or unusual thing would be followed by another, and with luck we could desensitize them.  Maybe, in a moment that counted, they would think for just a second that it was a joke.

Maybe.

The place was a flurry of actors getting dressed and artists doing final touches, of causes of death being hidden and primed.

 

This was only part of things.  There were a lot of reasons to do it and a lot of things that could go wrong.  As the Infante and I watched them make their way up the stairs, I was very aware that any one of them could choke.  Not just them, but any student in this school who we hadn’t sequestered away and put to sleep.  One short sentence could turn the tables.

We had measures in place, but the more I saw of the guests and the weapons and tools they’d brought to show off with and to protect themselves with, the more tenuous they felt.

“What are you thinking?” Jessie asked.

“That I can’t believe we thought we were going to pull this off with major players present.  The Infante, Hayle, the brain doc Ferres mentioned…”

“I think if they were planning to be here, they’d be scary, yes, but the others wouldn’t be so prickly.”

“Prickly?” I asked.  I thought about it.  “Yeah.  Their hackles are up.  They’re among peers, there’s no reason to bow or keep their swords sheathed.  They hold their swords up and they wave them around and if anyone flinches, it’s a win for the sword-waver.”

“You losing your mind again, Sy?  Because you’re incoherent.”

I elbowed her and she smiled.  We were watching everyone, Jessie looking out for details, while I was keeping an idle eye out for trouble, dissent, for people who were paying too little or too much attention to Jessie and me.

A student lagged behind.  She was younger.  Fourteen or so.  Lillian hadn’t been much younger when I’d been teasing her mercilessly and when she’d first faced down the monsters.

“It’s okay to be afraid,” Jessie said.

“We’re near the bottom floors and they’re at the top, and I can hear them,” she said.

I listened.  The clamor was indeed audible, albeit faint.  People on the stairs, things moving about, and the whisper-faint noise of the most recent round of applause.

Young ears.

“Stage fright is normal,” Jessie said.

“The trick,” I said, jumping in, “Is to realize that there’s two kinds of fear.”

“There’s a lot of kinds of fear,” she said.  “We studied the areas of the brain-”

“Not like that,” I said.  “Listen, there’s fear that makes you stand still, and there’s fear that makes you move.  The standing still fear is what you use when a warbeast is there, tense, and you’re not sure if it’s seen you.  You take the moment.  But the moving fear?  That’s what you use when the warbeast is running at you.”

Jessie gave me a look.

“It’s really, really easy to make your brain switch to the other track, understand?  Just… lift yourself up on your toes, like this, then drop down to the ground.  Bam.  The warbeast is chasing you, and you’re going.  And eventually, you get yourself to the point where you’re doing that without needing the jolt.  Where it’s always the moving kind of fear.  Because we don’t ever need that standing still fear in modern society.  Just give yourself that jolt, that push.  You’ll be fine.”

“I’ll try,” she said.

“Good.  We’re going to pull off something amazing, and this is only the beginning.”

“You should go,” Jessie said.

The girl went.  Another girl was waiting for her and took her hand, going up with her.

“We should go up too, to play our part and check on the others to make sure they’re playing their part,” Jessie said.

I nodded.

We rounded up a group of students who felt up to leaving the lab alone, and we moved as part of the group.

We didn’t even make it to the end of the long winding hallway that cut through the now-empty or mostly empty labs before we ran into trouble.

We’d tried to sequester off one of the stairwells, but the problem with trying that was that we were dealing with an awful lot of guests who were used to getting their way.

It was young aristocrats, with their entourages of stitched.

“I was asked to play tonight by Ferres herself!” one of them called out.

They were in our way.

“I understand, sir,” the Doctor in front of them said.  “But please, use the other stairwell.  We have some dangerous and fragile experiments going up and down this particular staircase.”

“Hold them back, clear the way,” the musician aristocrat said, in a tone that implied he couldn’t even fathom that she hadn’t already done it.

“If there was any possible way we could minimize the hassle to you, the Professors, and the Nobles, glory to the Crown, I would, sir.”

There were cries of dismay and alarm, with a few shrieks.

“A,” Jessie said.

There were two points where we needed to act.  Two points where, in an ideal world, we would need to walk among our targets and take action.  We’d left ourselves five windows among the twenty six letters of the alphabet, where they would be blinded or distracted enough that we felt at ease walking among them with minimal disguise.

‘F’ was the first one.

I tugged on Jessie’s hand as the young aristocrat went on a tirade.  Not listening, only asserting his power and how very impossible it was that he would have to go down to a lower floor, find his way to the other staircase, and then head back up.

We ducked into the first lab that still had students inside.  One of them had cracked open a bottle of something alcoholic that I could smell from across the room.  The students had been about to celebrate getting their child with springloaded eyeball needles or pre-prepared disembowelment out on schedule.

“Uh,” they said, as they saw us.

“Sorry,” I said.  “I know you did your part, you should be done, but we need help.”

“Fuck,” the one with the drink said.  “Is it bad?”

“It’s minor, but it’s the kind of problem that adds up.  We can’t get up the stairs without going through some people.  We can’t go to the other stairwell because that’s the one designated for all the people we want to avoid.”

“It’s throwing some crucial timing,” Jessie said.

“Do you have body bags?” I asked.  “Or a stretcher?”

“We can get them,” the young doctor said, already out of his chair, signaling the others.

“C,” Jessie said.  “Bea just had her turn, assuming timing’s right.”

I nodded.

We could have killed the aristocrats, but that was another sort of problem that swelled up and became a larger issue.  Especially if the man was scheduled to play music.

“D,” Jessie said, while the Doctors were still gone.

I frowned.

They arrived with the stretchers and body bags.  Jessie and I climbed in.

“If there’s a question or any small problem, just wink,” I said.  “If there’s a larger problem or if the wink doesn’t work, then take us to the nearest safe place.  Otherwise, our best destination is Lab One.”

“Lab One, got it.”

I lay down on the stretcher, arms at my side, and let them do up the front of the bag, sealing me in.

I closed my eyes and counted the steps.  I hadn’t counted the steps from the staircase to the small lab, but I had a sense of it.  Generally speaking, my instincts were good.

Pride goeth before the fall,” the voice was deep, but it wasn’t the sheer bass of it that made me shake so much as it was the clenching of my teeth, my desire to stay still, when we had to be within a few paces of the young aristocrat.

I’d been dreading the voice.

“Where are you going with those?” I heard the aristocrat asking.

There was silence.

“I… see,” he said.  “Carry on.”

Carry on, I thought.  Carry on.  Move forward, don’t dwell, the dwelling is the dangerous part.

Carry on, the most pretentious, desperate way to sound as though one was in control of the situation, when said like the musician aristocrat had said it.

I couldn’t gauge how much ground we were covering as we were carried up the stairs.  The footsteps on stairs were too much of a jumble, the pace weird.

I was very aware, however, when we stopped moving, and we didn’t start again.

The crash of glass and the thud of a body striking the ground near us marked ‘F’.

I could hear the initial nervous titter of laughter, maybe a panic response, followed by a more natural laughter.  They’d clued in.  Sooner than expected, but that wasn’t a bad thing.  The sooner they fell into the stride of this, the sooner they would get used to the violence.

That was the good.  The bad was that we’d missed our first window.

I could hear the whispers.  The doctors that held us were communicating.

This would be the worst time for a betrayal, I thought.  I could imagine them simply carrying us up to the main hall, where the vast majority of our guests had already assembled, and revealing us.

“This is macabre,” the musician said, very close by.  He’d followed us up.  “How am I supposed to play anything in the wake of this?

“You would have to ask Professor Ferres, sir,” a Doctor who was carrying us said.

“I might just.  Excuse me,” the musician said, saying those last two words in the least polite way possible.

“We can talk,” one of the Doctors whispered.  “Very quietly.”

“What’s happening?” Jessie asked.

“Professor Ferres is in Lab One, entertaining some people.  The aristocrat is talking to her now.  She doesn’t look pleased to be interrupted.”

“Listen,” I said.  “On I, the big cloud, you let us out, alright?”

“On I?  Got it.”

“Sy, we can go out, we can plant the hook, but if we can’t get back-”

Planting the hook.  We had invited certain people.  Whatever I’d done in… wherever the second orphanage had been, where Pierre and Charles or whoever were keeping our rescued mice safe, we were doing it here.  A hidden hook and rope.  I’d snagged Lillian like a fisherman.  The people we’d invited were supposed to be located at key seats, but there were no guarantees.

The trick, the key, was using one window of opportunity to place hooks as close to key targets as possible, sinking them into spaces in the floor.  The next window of opportunity, combined with clamor, noise, and distraction, would let us steal them away.  With luck, people would be out of their seats, the crowd would be a jumble, and these individuals wouldn’t be missed.

If we couldn’t do it flawlessly, we wouldn’t.  If we could, we’d remove some key players and, ideally, we’d turn some of the defenses and measures they’d brought to use against us against them, by co-opting the people in charge.

These were the preliminary moves.

I waited, tense.

G, H, and then I.  It was the countdown.  Jessie was better with timing, but I couldn’t look her way for cues.

“Your headmistress certainly brooks no nonsense,” the musician said.

I didn’t like that he was back.

I liked it even less that Jessie spoke, despite the fact that she was supposed to be a body in a bag.  Her voice was soft.  “Take us back.”

“Did you say something?” the musician asked.

“No,” the Doctor said.  “If she’s in a bad mood, we won’t get in her way.  Excuse me, sir.”

“Excused.”

We weren’t even all that far down the stairs before Jessie whispered again, “Out.”

They laid us down on the stairs and freed us.  Jessie stood, and gave me a hand, as I was on less even footing.

“The timing is screwed up,” she said.  “We need eyes on this.”

I looked at the Doctors.  “Is the musician alone?”

“They sent his entourage down the other way,” the Doctor said.

“Then go up the stairs, make a small crowd, blocking Ferres’ view of the musician.

“You’re sure?” the Doctor asked.

“Please,” Jessie said, with a rare note of urgency in her voice.

We followed our group up again, coordinating with signs, the stretchers and body bags behind and below us.  The moment the group had blocked the view of the musician, Jessie and I knifed him.

We pulled him to the ground, my hand finding his mouth at the first opportunity, and we stuck him with knives repeatedly.

I could hear the conversation, though I couldn’t quite make out words, and my heart sank.

This wasn’t when people were supposed to be having hushed, intense conversations in the midst of hundreds of Nobles, aristocrats, Professors and Doctors.

We edged closer until we could peer over the stairs at the scene.

It was a man in a black lab coat, his beard was long, full, and more appropriate to a wizard of myth than a man of science.  He was stooped over, his hands out to cup the face of one of our actors.  One of the early letters.

I could see the family resemblance, the expression on the older man’s face, the alarm and fear on the face of the student.

We’d asked each and every last one of them twice, thrice, and then a fourth time, if there was the slightest chance that anyone might be in attendance who might recognize them.

Blood always runs through,” the Infante murmured in my ear, his voice deep.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.06 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Your boy?”

It was a noble lady who had spoken, addressing the Professor with the long beard, who was so emotional, his face contorted in anger, that his head shook.

He’s my blood, m’lady,” the Professor spoke, and the act of speaking despite the clenched muscles and the tension in his face made each word something he produced with flecks of spittle.  His son flinched at each utterance.  “He is not my boy.”

Blood.  The word echoed the Infante’s to the extent I worried that this might be the moment where the monstrous figure next to me would cross the gap to the extent that he overlapped with me, and I would cease to be.

I worried he would say something more, and it would also reverberate and resound, finding echoes in the world around me, and so would the next thing, and the next, and the next.

Jessie took my hand, squeezing it.

Doctors and Professors I took to be the bearded Professor’s companions stood from their seats.

“My lady, Worrel’s son turned rebel last year,” one of the companions said.

There were murmurs throughout the hall.  I could see the tension on just about every student present.  Many of the ‘dead’ were standing now, Bea among them.  The crowd was eyeing them.  It wasn’t hard to draw conclusions.

“That boy?” the noble lady asked.

“I do believe so, my lady.”

“I was- was!  But only for a short time!” the boy called out.  His father had shifted his grip, the cradling of his son’s face becoming something closer to strangulation, and in response to his son’s words, he shook him with enough force to rattle his brain.  “I- please, my lady!  Father-”

“I am not your father!”

“I was a rebel, but only briefly!  They forced us to go with them, I left as soon as I was able!”

Good, I thought.  This is a good approach.

I leaned close to one of the doctors who had accompanied us, and murmured in his ear, “Go to Ferres.  Tell her there’s an incident.  She should send in the great wolf.  See if we can’t use it to fake-kill the kid, if warranted.”

The doctor nodded, hurrying off.

“I tried to reach out and let you know, but-”

He stopped as his father shook him again.  He was thrown to the ground, sprawling as he landed.  His father kicked him, hard, before he had even stopped reeling.

Not a single Professor, Noble, or aristocrat present spoke against this.

The kid was left coughing, and his first attempt at getting onto his hands and knees failed.  He remained on his side.

“I-”

More coughs.

Jessie was just as tense as I was.

“I talked to Ferres.  I told her about the rebels.  She didn’t think-”

He looked up at his father as he tried to get to his hands and feet again, and something about the way he’d moved made him start coughing again.

“-She didn’t think it would lead to anything.”

It was good, the direction he was taking, using the information he had, making the pitch, leaving things open ended.

The only problem was that he’d named Ferres, specifically.  Better to leave it more open, to refer to other Doctors and Professors.  If he could’ve named ones who we knew weren’t in attendance, better still.

That might have been asking too much, especially when I couldn’t have done it.  He was doing well, all considered, with everything on the line.  I would’ve liked to know his name, to do better by him if we came out of this alright.

I allowed myself to peek into Lab One, and saw a glimpse of Ferres making her way up the stairs.

“That doesn’t absolve you, you imbecile.  You’ve betrayed the Crown.  A hanging is the kindest justice you can hope for, and I’ll tell you this… I won’t be advocating for a hanging.”

“I served the Crown loyally, father, I-”

Professor Worrel kicked him again.  His voice was barely audible, more intended for his son than the audience.  “I shouldn’t have to correct you more than once.”

The kick hadn’t been the sort to incite coughing by hitting the ribs or diaphragm or whatever the first kick had done, but the movement in reaction to the kick did.  The boy took a second, then tried again.  “I served the Crown loyally, Professor.

“You left with them.  Others managed to run, others were left wounded and nearly dead because they fought and resisted.  They served the Crown loyally.  Your schooling, your upbringing, your tutors, all paid for by me, your learning and shelter for the past thirteen years was provided by the Academy and Crown.  You have not come close to paying back what you received, you have not come close to reaching the point where you can claim proper loyalty and service!”

Worrel was back to spitting with each word, now.  The student couldn’t maintain eye contact, and stared at the ground, looking galled.

“If I may?” Ferres asked.  She’d arrived at the top of the stairs, and she had the Wolf with her.

I could see her posture, the way she held herself.

It was the summation of what I’d seen a week ago, when she’d been in the lab, given her new arms and leg.

I squeezed Jessie’s hand harder.  “We might’ve lost her.”

“Ferres?”

I nodded, quickly, my thoughts turning to what we needed to do to cut our losses.

“I need a mirror,” Jessie said.  “Anything really reflective.”

I patted down my pockets, one eye on peering through the gaps in the screen of our entourage, who stood further up the stairs.

“Allow me to settle this for you,” Ferres said.  “That young man and I had no such conversation.”

If the room had been tense before, it was something worse now.  There were murmurs of conversation, a handful more people standing from benches and chairs.  The boy was tense now.  His father moved toward him, as if to kick him again, and he scrambled back and out of the way.  I couldn’t see him, but I knew he practically collided with the railing, from the way it reverberated.  His father didn’t pursue to lash out again, instead remaining where he was, glowering.  He had bushy eyebrows to go with the beard, and it made for a damned menacing glare.

I could hear rather than see Ferres walking, with the people in the way and my angle of view on the scene.

I could only hope that Ferres would at least hold to the ruse.  She had reasons to obey us – if she hadn’t, we wouldn’t have put her up there, but she had reasons to turn the tables on us too.  She wouldn’t ever be in a better position than this.

One of the doctors pulled a head-mounted reflector from a pocket, holding it out for Jessie.  She let go of my hand to take it, but she didn’t use it for anything.

“Tell me if it’s unsalvageable,” she whispered.

“I think we’ll know when it’s unsalvageable,” I whispered back.

One of the doctors who’d carried us up in the stretcher gave me a look over his shoulder, very clearly alarmed.

Which was entirely appropriate.

The murmur of conversation was dying down.

“A sword, anyone?” Ferres asked.  “Is anyone able to oblige me?”

“One second, Professor,” a young voice said.

Jessie met my eyes, then changed the angle of the mirror, catching a ray of light from the outside.  She set to angling it, aiming into one part of the crowd.

“We should question him first,” another voice from the crowd said.  “Find out who his friends are.”

“I know exactly who his friends are,” Ferres said.  “He has quite a few.”

I bit my lower lip.  Whatever Jessie was doing, she’d need it to work fast.

The boy ran, sprinting away, closer to us.  Ferres whistled, and, following two more strikes of shoe on floor from the running boy, the Wolf rammed into him.

This would have been a good time for Ferres to use the trick.  One of the stunts the Wolf had been taught was to seize someone and shake them violently, like a dog did a toy.  The trick was that the Wolf’s mouth was large, and with the right grip on a target, the shake would only break and dislocate limbs.  For the ‘actors’ Ferres had created to go up against the Wolf, the limbs were strong enough to withstand breakage, and so it was only a relatively painless dislocation.

I was sure our target would be happy to have his limbs broken and to be summarily unconscious than the alternatives Ferres was presenting.

“Did you have any idea, Ferres?”

“I entertained the idea.  We received a swathe of students from other Academies earlier in the season, and with the black wood claiming much of the region around us, verifying details was difficult.  My failure.”

“You said he had friends?” someone asked.  “Should we be concerned?”

“Yes,” Ferres said.  “You came with others, didn’t you?  Why don’t you tell our audience?”

Our audience.  That was the death knell, as much as her not using the Wolf to fake his murder.  This, as much as anything, was Ferres on her stage, indulging in her show.

“I came alone,” the student said.

I could hear the sword coming free of the sheath.  I saw a glimpse of Ferres, stalking toward the boy and Wolf.  The Wolf moved its paws, and I saw the boy, partially pinned down by a paw that rested on the length of his lab coat.

“No,” Ferres said.  “You didn’t.”

She put the sword through him.

My heart sank.

Jessie was holding a hand up, palm out.  She had dropped the hand with the mirror.

The room was relatively quiet, with rustling.  I could see the tension of students throughout, the avid disinterest of many of the Nobles at the main table, and the irritation and restlessness of the more prominent Professors.

There would be no ruse, no saving him.  Not with dozens upon dozens of eyes on the scene, fully aware of the particulars of anatomy.  Not with the Wolf being a better and more convincing alternative to sell the kill.

“You keep a messy house, Professor Ferres,” one of the other Professors spoke.

“With plague and black wood sweeping over the Crown States, refugees and other Academies clamoring for a place in my institution, mess is inevitable,” Ferres said.

“How many?”

“A dozen,” Ferres said.

A dozen.

“We all know who the Beattle traitors worked for,” Ferres said.

Jessie moved her hand, signalling.

This was Ferres’ play, her gambit.  She would claim she only wanted a dozen conspirators.  It was, to all Lamb-aligned rebels in earshot, an offer.  Play along, and she would only go after us.  Maybe our lieutenants.  She was offering the out, the escape from a situation that was clearly out of control.

“The Lambs are here!?  That’s not a messy house, you stupid bitch, that’s-”

A student at the edge of the room dropped her tray of tea.  It crashed into a counter filled with things that one of the guests had brought to keep their experiment companions in working order.  Or so the setup had been.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorr-”

The chemicals, tools, and machinery reacted to the hot liquid, and the entire setup billowed with noxious smoke.  It got worse before it got better, multiplying as it reached the table.

Someone had a gun drawn and started opening fire into the smoke, targeting the student.

That was going to be how it was, was it?  Too many smart, intelligent people in the room, who were too suspicious with the Lambs so recently mentioned.  They were willing to shoot at a student who might’ve simply made a mistake or an error in judgment, where others might have hesitated.

Still, the gunfire stopped as the roomful of people started to move to get clear of the smoke.  Not all did.  Some drew weapons, following scattered students who backed into the smoke rather than gravitate closer to nobles.

Jessie and I launched ourselves into the smoke at the same time, the moment it was close enough to us that we could slip in without necessarily being seen.

Jessie tugged on my arm.  I was to her left, closer to the larger expanse of the room but she tugged me to the right.  I went with the movement, and felt her give me more of a push to the right.

She was taking point here.  I was, going by my trajectory, heading for the source of the smoke.

The table with the assorted chemicals and pieces of now-noisily chugging machinery was in front of me.  I was slapped with the length of something as I drew near to it.  A belt, torn or loosened by a stray bullet.

What had Jessie wanted me to do here?

I heard the whimper and realized what Jessie had in mind.

The girl who’d dropped the tray was one of ours.  Jessie had signaled her with a flash of light from the reflected mirror, then used a hand sign to give the order.  She was supposed to have been one of the windows we’d had, who would’ve also bought time for others to arrive and set up the necessary props.

Blind, I bent low, fumbling for her.  I touched her face, then, dropping my hand deliberately to her shoulder next, so I wouldn’t grope her chest in a fumbling attempt to find her arm or hand, I put my hand over hers, where she was gripping her upper arm.  I felt the warmth of blood.

“I got you,” I said.  “How bad?”

“Grazed,” she said, “It all went wrong.”

“It’s okay,” I said.  It really wasn’t.

She put her head against my shoulder, shaking it hard.

“You did good,” I said.  She really had.

I pulled her to her feet and led her through the smoke, very aware we only had a minute before the smoke started to clear.  We’d opted to push the very boundaries of what we could get away with, in terms of how long we could keep a roomful of people under a cover of smoke and not have them get frustrated.

I headed for the railing that bounded the room, where ornate rails kept students from stumbling headlong into the glass walls and windows that framed the ‘shoulder’ of the reclining lady and allowed sunlight into the main hall.  I kept one arm around the girl as I counted the posts.

The fourth post had the hook.  I grabbed it, pulling it free, and braced myself against the natural pull of it.  It was all I could do to keep my feet on the ground.

Figures appeared out of the smoke.  I drew my knife, ready.

Students.  Ours.  Three, unless I was missing something with the smoke obscuring the details.

Another figure loomed, and it was something entirely different.  It was large enough that even with the diffuse light that illuminated the clouds of smoke, it still managed to form a pillar of shadow.  Ten feet tall.

If I’d been Jessie, I could have recalled everything that had been in the hall earlier, and I could have accounted for that.  I wasn’t.  I drew my knife, ready.

It moved in a lopsided kind of way.  It seemed to sense me before it saw me, and reacted, raising its arms.  If it didn’t have weapons, it had something like weapons as part of its design.

I backed up as it swiped through smoke, and I could smell the thing over the cloying burned grease smell of the cloud that now filled three quarters of the great hall.  It smelled of perfume.  As large and menacing as it was, it smelled nice, inviting.

On my second retreat, I bumped into the students that had clustered behind me.  It meant I didn’t move far enough back.  The swipe caught me across the face.

As the girl had said, a graze, but enough to alarm.

I hauled back on the rope and hook, and I felt the catch, the moment the mechanism had reached its limit, the switch flipped.  It began reeling me in, hard.

I went straight after the thing in the shadows, knees at my chest, ready to kick down and out at the arms if they swiped again, hoping at least to keep the damage localized to my feet and away from my vitals.

The hook was about as large as my head, and as I drew close to the thing, I got a glimpse of what I’d just thrown myself into combat with.

An attractive, feminine creature, its hair long and pale, its eyes without detail, with makeup heavy around the eyes.  The clawed, armored part of it was almost another creature it was plugged into, like Lillian’s meatsuit.

She was limping, already injured from a brief encounter with Jessie in the smoke, I realized.  I pushed the realization aside, my focus needed elsewhere – I almost smashed my face into hers in my rope-aided ascent.  From the glimpse of the many fangs I saw between her slightly parted lips, I was glad I hadn’t.

I used my body to crush the hook in closer to the thing’s body, guiding the hook at what I’d hoped would be her heart.  I caught the collarbone instead, impaling her, and bodily lifting the creature up with me.

It was a floating, loose movement, buoyed by the pull of the rope.  Vague and dreamlike as that moment was, a slow-motion movement through air, my passenger something beautiful and dangerous looking, it was a stark contrast to the grate of the metal hook on bone, the crack, crunch, and the summary break in that collarbone, marked a spray of blood.   She made a terrible sound, as if to further the stark contrast, and her mouth yawned open, a bear-trap mouth of fangs exposed, ready to tear my face open.

The hook slipped free, up, and, with the help of a frantic slap of my hand to better position it, my hands letting go of the hook to seize her shoulders instead, it buried deep in the underside of the creature’s chin.  She toppled back, crashing to the ground, and pulled me and the hook down with it.

It had lodged in around the jaw, and for now it was staying put, weighed down by a creature who was several feet taller and far more dense than I.  The slam of the hook into her jaw and the clack of her mouth closing as forcefully as it had had knocked her out, if the point of the hook through the roof of her mouth hadn’t outright killed her.

“Come,” I whispered.  “Come on.”

There were more people rushing toward us.  Some yelped as they realized the monster was there.

“Come on,” I said.  I reached for hands, guiding them in place.  “Hold tight.  Make sure you have grips.”

I was still arranging them, keeping an eye out for more trouble, very aware the smoke was clearing, and we were losing ground.  Another minute or two-

I heard gunshots.  The sound was different from before.  It still sounded far too loud in the enclosed space, as large as it was, but guns had a different sound when they weren’t fired at me.  There were other targets.  We had support.

Jessie arrived, dragging a body.  She had more students with her, and they were helping with the drag.  She had the hook but was being careful not to tug it too hard.

Professor Edmund Foss.

“One student here,” Jessie said.

“You guys are going to have to help,” I said.  “Kick, grab for handholds, but keep us moving.”

I could see, as the smoke thinned, the sheer number of forces that were massing at the edge of the smoke.  Nobles, experiments.

I directed one student to Jessie.  She made sure the boy had a grip on the rope there, set the hook in place around Foss’ belt, then gave it a firm haul back.

The rope reeled in, tugging Jessie up.  Her feet and the feet of students with her touched the branches that framed windows, seeking more traction.

I had already set the knife in place.  I kicked down, driving the knife into one side of the beautiful creature’s jaw.  It drove deep, cut something, but didn’t sever everything.  I kicked down again, aware of the shadows closing in, driving the heel of my foot between top and bottom row of teeth, exacerbating the damage done by the knife, kicked again-

The hook continued its pull against the jaw, and the end of the jaw came loose.  The hook tore through flesh, the jaw pulling free and away, before the hook slipped past the damaged end.  We rose into the air, no longer weighed down by the giant creature.

We rose faster than Jessie, who had one less student but one more full grown man pulling down on the rope.  Her hostage wasn’t helping either, not kicking at the wall or reaching out for branches to pull at.

My crew of four students and I reached the top before Jessie’s three students and one passenger did.  I clambered off, fumbling for the beam, and proceeded to help students let go of the rope and seize other parts of the beam structure above and over the dining hall.

It was havoc down there.  The smoke was clearing but wasn’t entirely gone, and it was immediately clear that Jessie had bid other students to activate their lettered experiments.  We’d had an entire play of surprise deaths, from A to Z, and many of them had been intended to cause comedic havoc.  Now they were weapons.  Pests among the enemy, a stitched that was arcing with voltaic power that was supposed to be limited to the nearby railing, but was instead flashing across the silverware and candlesticks on the tables nearest it.  There were others.

Our students were backing off.  Many, including Bea, had fled for one of the bridges.  They were shutting the gate, and the people below us were just now realizing it.  In places below, students and rebels were slipping away, setting up roadblocks and other obstacles.  It would buy them time to reach secure points, to run to the lowest-floor doors of dormitories and the admin building.

For all that this had gone bell-end, the casualties didn’t look too terribly bad.  Some had been shot, others were stuck, having made the mistake in judgment of sticking closer to the Nobles, Professors, and aristocrat guests.

This wasn’t what we’d been shooting for.  Our time to attack had been when the festivities here were over and people started retiring for the evening.

With people going to separate places to retire for the night, quarters of differing quality for different guests, we’d hoped to split them up and deal with them on a case-by-case basis.

I hauled on the rope, helping Jessie.  I hoped those below wouldn’t look up- people below were looking up.

But, at the very least, they were preoccupied.  They were aristocrats, and they had Nobles to serve, or they were Professors, and they’d brought weapons to show off, and now they were loosing the weapons on the attacking rebels.

People hiding in the rafters would have been the sort of suspicious activity that would’ve been more easily explained as something the magicians with their show had up their sleeve, had we been able to do this like we wanted.

Ibbot was still down there, somewhere.

“I’m good,” Jessie said, as I grabbed her armpit and helped her get to a position to climb up onto the broader ledge.  “Go rain hell on ’em.”

I nodded.  I turned away, ducking low so I wouldn’t bump my head on a part of the ceiling or stick it through a pane of glass, and hurried to where we’d stowed other countermeasures.

I was glad we had very little that was outright lethal.  I tipped over buckets, letting them fall.  I had four on their way to the ground before the first struck the floor.

They were very much like the smoke from the machine, but they were a little more noxious.

As the gas spread, people jumping onto tables to buy themselves seconds more before the gas smothered them, a handful drew pistols and fired blind.  One or two fired with targets in mind.

The bullets that didn’t hit wood hit the glass that encased the dining hall.  Glass broke, and it rained down in large shards and fragments.  It broke explosively on contact with the floor, furniture, and guests below us.

“Stop!” someone called out.  They spoke with a noble’s voice.  “No shooting until we can see!”

“To the stairs!”

I wasn’t positive if it was one of our own or not.  I remembered something planned in that vein, but I was lost on the particulars.

We made our way through the same hole that ‘F’ had fallen through.  A ‘student’ in our act had been designated to showcase the perils of breeding flying creatures, and had come in through one treated pane of glass, smacking hard into the floor, a dramatic faceplant.  Now we climbed through, working in threes and fours to move the unconscious body of Edmund Foss.

From the outside, I could see the various weapons and the massed armies of the Academy and Crown.  There were groups on the ground, and in the chaos, the students of ours that were fleeing were able to direct them indoors.  They would carry on like that until they met the first of the aristocrats or whoever was able to slip past the barricades, the stitched we’d turned to our side, and the experiments we’d put in place to scare and impede.  Then they would be informed that the fleeing students weren’t friendlies.

I could see the gossamer thing, and it was drawing close.  Whatever controlled it, it hadn’t received the order to attack.  Which was good, because it was not the sort of thing I wanted to be on the bad side of.

We moved carefully across branches and struts of the head of the Lady of Hackthorn.  There were more ropes and hooks waiting on the outside edge of the building.

“We’d planned to do this with just Sylvester and I,” Jessie said.  “The extra weight won’t be a problem, but that’s not really the concern.”

“What’s the concern?” the girl with the injured shoulder asked.

Jessie put the hook through Edmund Foss’ belt, once more.  “Grab on.  Twice as tight as you did in the dining hall.”

“Don’t look down,” I said.

I saw eyes widen.  Jessie elbowed me.

“Really don’t,” I said.  “But grab on, because if you stay, it’s going to be even scarier, I guarantee you.”

“And don’t grab where it’s knotted up there,” Jessie said.

They grabbed on.  Jessie and I freed the hooks from where we’d attached them to the exterior wall.

I drew in a deep breath and then stepped off the edge, pulling the others with me.

The rope was attached to the wall at set intervals.  The attachment wasn’t secure in the slightest.  With our weight pulling it down, it came free in jerks and starts, each one making my heart leap out of my chest, and I was a friend of high places, my natural and sensible dislike of birds aside.

I felt sorry for our passengers.

The rope kept coming undone, and, for two long, heart-pounding seconds, there was slack in it.  We were in freefall.

There were no more attachments to the exterior of the main building- only to the bridge that connected it to the admin building.

We swung from there, with a solid seventy-five paces of open space between us and any wall, our feet dangling above people who were so far away they were specks.  A ring with a rope attached to it slipped down from high above, looped around our rope, and it stopped at a knot just above my hands.  Had I been holding onto that knot, it would have struck my hands with enough force to break fingers.

The enemy was attacking the gate now, setting something strong and powerful at the door.  I could hear the crunches, the bangs, and the chops that were like axes on wood.  I could hear glass break, and knew that there were things that weren’t human that would be crawling out through the broken windows and onto the exterior, out toward the bridge, giving chase.

The swinging ceased.  The students at the window were hauling on the other rope the ring was fixed to – pulling us in.  Others provided gradual slack to our other rope.  In the process, we were eased in closer to the admin building.

“Just in time,” Davis said, meeting us at a waiting window.  “They’re coming over the bridge now.  There’s a lot more of them than we anticipated.”

“More is good,” I said.

Davis nodded.

We climbed in through the window.  One of the fellows with us had not enjoyed his ride.  Any gardens way down below had received fertilizer and watering.  He shuffled off.

“You’ve put up with a lot, being with us,” I told Davis.

“I really, really have,” he said.

“Would you do the honors?” I asked.

“Honors,” he said.  “People are going to die.”

But he reached for a leather cord at his neck, and he raised a whistle to his lips.

It wasn’t silent.  It didn’t matter who heard.

The bridge detonated, a rolling explosion that caught first at one end, then the middle, and finally at the end closest to the main building.  Wood, stone, the garden baskets that had lined either side, bits of metal and a portion of the enemy’s front-line capable troops tumbled through the open air.  I hoped there were some young nobles among them.

We’d wanted them divided into clear categories and groups before we dealt with them.  We’d wanted to be absolutely sure that most of our own were in the clear.

This would be… messier than we’d hoped.

“What was his name?” I asked.

“Bobby,” Jessie said, without needing to ask.

“Bobby Worrel, then?”

“Yeah,” Jessie said.  “I’m surprised you remembered the last name.”

“I’m going to forget it promptly, and he deserves a better last name, too, but I held it in my head to be sure I didn’t forget that.  We’ll deal with his dad.”

“Yeah,” one of the students with us said.

Bits of burning stone and wood were still falling.  I could see up and through the window to the dining hall, where trails of smoke were still filtering out to the open air.  A creature had reached the edge and managed to cling to it, but was too badly burned to do anything further.  I watched as it surrendered to its fate and fell.

I looked down at the unconscious Professor Foss.  I briefly met the Infante’s eyes.

This is our Academy, and it’s time you all learned that, I thought.  And that’s only the beginning.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.07 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Your timing is off,” Ashton said.  “Jessie, your timing is supposed to be good.”

“Not our fault,” I said.  “A guest recognized one of our actors.  Ferres thought she saw an opportunity.”

Jessie and I had reached the gate that was supposed to lead to the bridge and to the main hall.  Now it was only a short section of bridge that ended in splinters and rubble, the midsection gone.  The attachment points for the ropes were gone too.  I could vaguely map out the course we’d taken, the staggered descent to a point where we could safely swing beneath the bridge to the admin building, at which point we’d been towed in to the window.

Ashton was with this group, more because he knew the hand signals than anything.  He didn’t have a proper role at this point in time.  The Infante was near because, well, it was what he did, apparently.

Across the bridge, there was a crowd gathered near the window.  Professors, aristocrats, and those without combat experience.  I couldn’t make out much with the distance being what it was, but I could tell that they were agitated, and they were talking.  Unless they pulled out guns and started shooting, they weren’t a concern.  Even if they did, I wouldn’t mind too much.  It would take a rifle to get a bullet this far and the shots wouldn’t be accurate.  If they got lucky and hit one of us, it wouldn’t be good, but the chances were slim.

I kept one eye out all the same.  The Academy could produce all sorts.

But if they wanted to waste bullets, that wasn’t too bad either.

They weren’t the focus.  For now they were organizing, putting great minds to the problem.

I turned my attention to more crucial areas.  There were people on the ground, which meant they’d managed to get past the obstacles we’d set in their way and exit the gate of the main building.  They were moving in loose regiments as they stormed through the streets.  Much of the attention was on the ground level entrances to the main buildings.  That was a mistake – common logic would dictate that if we planned this, we’d know they would try.

I started paying more attention to the nature of the movements, tracking the patterns in this kicked anthill.  I began taking in a general sense of where the leaders were, and who the followers were.  I tried to pay attention to where the followers hesitated, as if that could highlight where the leadership was weaker.

There were some that were starting to break into homes and businesses on the ground level.

“They’re raiding the buildings,” I observed.

“Looks like,” Jessie said.  She lifted up her glasses to look down with clearer vision.

“One group,” I said.

“No,” Jessie said.  “Lots are doing it.  They’re clearing their flanks, making sure we don’t have experiments or soldiers waiting in the houses and alleys.”

“Mostly from the one group, I mean,” I said.  I moved closer to her, my arm resting against hers, and pointed.

“Okay, I see who you mean.”

We watched the little black dot that was the leader of that particular group.  It was taller than average, moving with leisure, and it was watching what the rest of the groups were doing at the main gate.  People slowed as they drew closer to him.

Tall dot was a noble, I was fairly sure.

“It’s… interesting that he’s taking that course of action.  It’s not flank clearing.”

“No,” Jessie said.

“What is it?” Ashton asked.  He dropped down onto his belly, crawling forward to look down over the edge of the crumbled, broken bridge.

“Well, the whole storming the gates or going on the offense is the most obvious path they could take, and one of the more pointless,” I said.  “What he’s doing isn’t obvious, and it’s… rather more pointful.  It’s maybe on the top five paths they could take that hurt us.  Third most pointful thing.”

“Please stop saying pointful,” Jessie said, her eyes still on the scene below.  “With my memory, I have to remember each and every butchery of Stateside English you commit.”

I snickered, and she elbowed me.

“He’s checking the surroundings, gathering information,” Jessie said.  “He’s going to find out very quickly that we’ve been through each and every one of those houses.”

“Ahhh,” Ashton said.

“Some of the nobles on the bridge we just blew up are climbing out of the rubble,” she observed.

“Really?” I asked.  “That’s pretty impressive.  Pick one out, make him or her our measuring stick?”

“I need binoculars,” she said.

Binoculars were offered by members of the larger group that had gathered at the open doors here.  Someone handed some to me.

Things had been tense for a while, the rebels not really trusting me, and this was perhaps the most unambiguous that they’d been in helping me out and giving me that benefit of a doubt.  The bridge explosion and the coordination thus far had apparently counted for something.

I focused on the rubble, and saw two nobles.  A young Lord had already emerged, and a young Lady was in the process of moving rubble to free her legs.  Both were dirty and both were bleeding in places.

The Lord began stripping down.  He stood there almost completely naked for a short time while he picked through the various dead in the wreckage, shaking their less tattered clothes free of dust before donning them.

The Lady was more hurt.  She crawled forth, made her way to the nearest piece of rubble she could sit on, and began tending to her injuries, including a smashed leg.  I couldn’t see much of what she was doing, given the angle and the distance.

They would look after themselves to the point they could show their faces without too much shame, and then they would rejoin the proceedings.

I glanced at the Infante.  He wasn’t standing as still anymore, and he’d been standing still for a week now.  He paced, and for all the world, it felt like he was going to turn to me any moment, make eye contact, and start talking at length, as if he’d bottled it all up inside, waiting for this moment.

I looked away.  Other focuses.

Tall dot was a tall young noble with a red jacket that he’d taken off and slung over one shoulder.  He had a blond beard that came to a sharp point, his hair was short but for a flourish of wavy hair that extended in front of his face, and he stood there with a battle axe resting on the ground.

He picked up the weapon as if it weighed nothing and used it to point at a side street.  Soldiers and the stitched that accompanied them moved down the street.

Then his head turned, and he looked up in our general direction.  I wondered if his eyesight was keen enough to see us without binoculars, or if he was simply taking in the bridge.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Lord Carling,” Jessie said.

“We know they know, now,” I said.  “The general thrust of what we’re doing, they found how we prepped the buildings.  Lord Carling’s going to pass on word soon.”

“It should take him about ten minutes to get from the bottom floor to the main hall, and then they’ll start moving with more purpose and direction,” Jessie said.  “I’ll feel a lot better about what we’re doing if we hear from Helen sooner than later.”

“She’s reliable,” I said.  Lord Carling was moving again, entering the front hallway of the building closest to him, one that had already been cleared out.  He emerged and walked straight for the gate leading to the main building.

Ten minutes, according to Jessie.

More students from downstairs were joining us now.  They peeked out and around the edges of the door, more wary of stray bullets than Jessie, Ashton and I were, and they took in the scene before retreating or making space for others to indulge their curiosity.

“Jessie?” one of them ventured.

“I’m guessing you’re going to tell me something about Professor Foss?” Jessie asked.

“He’s secured.  We have him in room six-oh-six.  Some of ours are examining him.”

“It seems to be in fashion to keep things under fingernails,” I said.  “We’ll want to be absolutely careful.”

“We put his feet in a bucket of cold casting gel, and we did the same for his hands, put them behind him and stuck them in a bucket that’s sitting on another chair.”

“Perfect,” I said.

Jessie stuck her toe into Ashton’s foot.  “You want to go babysit Professor Foss?  See if you can’t loosen his tongue if he wakes up?  We’ll be along in a short while, as soon as we can be mostly sure things have settled.”

“Alright.  If you need me I’ll be there,” Ashton said.  He rose to his feet, and stood there, rather precariously on the edge of the broken bridge.  My hand moved, ready to reach out and grab him if he tipped over the edge.  I kept it there while he stretched, and hoped that with people being suspicious of me, that it didn’t look as though I was preparing to push him off rather than save him.

“I like watching the dust settle,” Ashton said.

“Me too, Ashton, me too,” I said.

He smiled up at me, then left.  He hadn’t tipped over the edge, but I wasn’t ruling anything out.  His situational awareness could do with some work.

An unusual brain, that one.

Almost every set of eyes in the group watched him as he walked downstairs.  Something about the fumes he was putting off had their attention.

I’d trust him to know what he was doing.

On the ground, the armies at the gates were starting to make some headway.  Warbeasts that had been brought out of the stable were tearing through the wood for one of the dormitories, and stitched-managed battering rams slammed at others.

“Girl’s dormitory would be… Mary?”

“Mary, yes.”

Mary had set up the obstacles and carried out the sprinting retreat from the lower levels of the Academy.  She was most able to defend herself if something quick happened to leap from a window or dodge the experiments and the growing barricades that had been set in its path.

Mary now managed the defense at that point.  Stitched hammered at the gate, and the beam they collectively held was gradually punching holes in the wood rather than actually opening the gate.  They’d make a hole big enough to crawl through soon.

Jessie watched, very intent on what was going on.  The girl’s dormitory hadn’t been built to weather an attack.  Jessie’s speculation was that it had been a later addition, more Ferres’ slant on things than part of the original construction.

“You’re paying a lot of attention there,” I remarked to Jessie, my voice a murmur.

“If the defense fails there, it puts us in a bad spot,” Jessie said.

“And it has nothing to do with the imagery of the big, strong beam sinking in deep, the steady rhythm-”

“I will push you over the edge, Sy.”

She was threatening to kill me, sure, but she was smiling.

The team at the girl’s dormitory upended vats and buckets through windows, down onto the soldiers and stitched below them.

Some stitched stopped outright, dropping to hands and knees or kneeling at the street outside the dormitory.  Others backed away, with a scattered few failing or going still after they’d made it a few paces.  The non-stitched backed away.

The texture of the road and the sides of the building beneath the windows began to change.

Duncan’s group opened fire with rifles, targeting the shaggy warbeast that was clawing at the doors.  An explosive was tossed down from high above and exploded on contact with the ground, only a short distance from the warbeast.  It didn’t tear the creature to shreds, but the warbeast fell to its side and didn’t get back up.

We had half a dozen to a dozen individual tricks and tools prepared for each of the points we needed to defend.  Most of the major bridges were intact, still, but that could change if we needed it to, and the enemy no doubt knew it.

It was very likely they would try to cross the bridges after dark, which was only a few hours away.  They would wait until we got complacent.

They had their own tricks.  Things that could crawl up walls and the faces of buildings, the gossamer thing, warbeasts with other tools, people with machinery in them and machines with biology in them.

I glanced at the Infante.

“How many nobles?” I asked.

“Twelve arrived.  Five tried to cross the bridge here and only two climbed out, for what it’s worth.”

“Nine nobles, then,” I said, quiet.  “Lesser ones.”

Nine nobles, then.  If they came up with any plans, then the nobles would be the ones to carry them out, and they’d carry them out well.  This initial chaos was where we held the advantage, our ‘guests’ now realizing the shape of the situation around them.  That would change over the course of this engagement.

“Really wish we could get a signal from Helen on this one,” Jessie said.

“Do you want to go help her?  It’s not like Professor Moss is going anywhere.”

“Foss, Sy.”

“Sure.”

“And I don’t want to abandon our post here.  With Ashton downstairs, we’re the Lambs’ eyes and ears on this situation.”

I nodded.  “We’ll stay.  They’ll want to act.”

“Based on?” Jessie asked.

“It simply feels like it.  The way they’re moving in there, the way there were more people talking before and now there’s less, like some voices are starting to get more traction.  They’re winding toward a conclusion.”

“I don’t know how you do that, Sy.  I prefer the measurable things.”

“It’s why we work so well together,” I said.  I touched the underside of her chin and turned her head so I could kiss her.

She stopped kissing me back, but didn’t pull her lips away.  They brushed against mine as she said, “You’re provoking them.”

I chuckled, gave her a peck on the lips, and then turned.

On the other side of the broken bridge, the door was opening again.  The glass panes on the doors had broken when the bridge had, and now two people walked over the broken glass shards and wood splinters.

One was a professor.  He looked underweight and rather grim in demeanor, the kind of guy who became dour, intense, and who buried his feelings deeper as they got worse, when a crisis arose.  With the light filtering through clouds and the angle of the sun, the blond hair, and the glossy sheen of whatever had been used to put his hair back, he looked hairless.  Pale pate, pale skin, contrasted with dark clothing and coat.  Skeletal.

With the wind blowing, the black lab coat he wore fluttered, hard.  The rest of him was still as he glowered at us.  He stooped over a little.

He was joined by a woman a foot taller than him, and he wasn’t short.  Her hair was white, her lashes black and almost overly long, in a way that would have looked ridiculous had she not been so very well put together in every other respect.  Her nails were like daggers, and she held a fan.

“Guns out,” Jessie gave the order.  “Pass on word.  Don’t waste bullets, but open fire on him, now.”

“Guns?” I asked.  Students bumped into me in their hurry to get into position.  “We’re trying to go soft.”

I watched as the noble spoke to the Professor beside her.  Jessie and I stood back and out of the way as the students in the hallway organized, the group in front dropping to their knees.

Almost immediately, the rifles sounded.  I saw a glimpse of the Professor raising one hand before the Lady stepped in front of him, a body shield.

“Aim high!  Account for gravity!” I called out, raising my voice to be heard over the battery of gunshots.  “Like you practiced!”

The shots hit windows, the bridge, and they hit the Lady.  She felt the impact of them, but she didn’t step back or stagger.  They didn’t draw blood, either.

“That would be Lady Gloria,” Jessie said.

“And the Professor?”

“For lack of a better name?  Professor Gossamer,” Jessie said.

Ah.  That explains the shooting.

With the man’s hand gesture, the gossamer thing was drifting in our direction.  It set tendrils down at sections of the main building and on the perimeter wall.

“Stop shooting!” Jessie called out.  Gunfire stopped.  Jessie spoke in a lower voice, “Hold fire, be ready for orders to resume shooting at a designated target or to run, as need be.”

The gossamer thing was planting its strands at key points along the wall and the Hackthorn central building.  Directly below it, strands were weaving into a long, conical spike.

“Damn it,” I said.

It took effort to raise that spike, and the thing attached tendrils to places until it had the leverage.  The spike rose until it was parallel to the ground, aimed directly at us.

“Move!” Jessie called out.  “Scatter!”

A few more strands found places to grab, some of them on our building, and then it speared at us, pushing by going rigid and pulling by hauling in.

It targeted the hallway and doorway we’d been occupying, spearing into a point a dozen feet to the left of us, through much of the length of the hallway, and then a length of the wall to the side of us as we ran away.

Its forward momentum burned out, it unfurled the spike.  Behind us, strands as light as air made nail-on-slate sounds as they brushed stone and wall decoration.  They periodically went rigid, flexing, as they touched things, and that made the strands move more.

I saw places where the long rug that ran down the length of the hallway and the paper of paintings on the wall were sliced where the gossamer ran past them at the right angle, with sufficient duration of contact.

It was getting a grip, seizing wall and floor, slicing deep where it could and then going rigid to spear in at odd angles, fixing itself in places.

It was going to spear at us again.

The first stab had demolished twenty solid feet of exterior wall on the left side of the hallway and thirty-some feet of interior wall, along the right side of the hallway.  I wasn’t sure if anyone had been hurt, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Can we burn it?” I asked.

“No,” Jessie said.

“Climb it?  No.  Slice ourselves up.”

“Right.”

“Shoot the head?  All the way up there?”

“The rifles fire eight hundred yards, but they’re not accurate at that distance.  As you saw.”

I looked back.  The strands were tensing.

“Heads up!” I roared the words.

The spike came in at a point that ran through the ceiling.  It was more direct, impaling with an eye of penetrating deeper into the building.  It had to have been halfway through the piercing motion before the fatter base of the cone-shaped spike was at a point where it might have made contact with any of us.

That was the good.  The bad was that wood and stone were breaking away.  Furniture from upstairs was falling through the damaged floors and ceiling.  The damage was at a point where it was causing more damage.  That was made all the worse by the unfurling of the cone, the strands making contact with loose rubble and stray items.  They cut some, attached to others, and did some combination of the two for others still.

The spike had separated the head of our group, mostly our riflemen, from the rear, more riflemen, Jessie, myself, and some scattered doctors.

“If we kill Professor Gossamer?” I asked.

“He has subordinates,” Jessie said.  “They’ll have some control, I think.”

“Then we need the control,” I said.

“We do,” she said.  She took a step back, grabbing my sleeve to haul me out of the way.  Strands were drawing close, and as they reached through the hallway, scraping against the edges of the hole in the wall, they were forcing our group to move away from the group further down the hall.  We were being separated.  Even if the gossamer withdrew entirely from the hallway, the floor had been sliced and littered with rubble, with more stones and pieces of wood clattering down to the ground every couple of seconds.  It was precarious footing, slow going, and there was a good chance of a large chair or a chunk of wood braining either of us as we made our way across.

I’d almost have been willing to take the risk, but the gossamer thing was nearby.

I moved closer to a window to look.

It was retreating?

“Sy,” Jessie said.  “Helen acted.”

From where we stood, it was hard to see much – especially with the hole being placed as high as it had been.  We ended up ducking into a side hallway, and taking a long way around, accessing the east-facing side of the admin building.

The gossamer thing was being directed to the cliffs.  In the water below, ships had crashed into one another.  Helen’s delay had no doubt been caused by the sea serpent that the one Academy had brought, and that creature looked wounded or dead as it remained still, lying in the surface waters.

Fires burned, boat crews scattered or dropped to the water.  Even with binoculars, the figures on the boats were as gnats and fleas.  Stitched would be boarding where they could board and fighting who they could fight.

Hackthorn, like all Academy institutions, had stitched to handle menial duties.  They cleaned, they did construction, they manufactured things, and they acted as soldiers.

With Hackthorn under our control, we’d given the stitched new directives.  We’d arranged the boats we did have out on the water, loaded the ones we could with volatile chemicals and crewed them with stitched.

There was no exit by water, now.  The gossamer thing was drifting to the water, very likely on orders to combat the enemy, but there was no specific enemy to fight.  For now, we had a reprieve.

Lord Carling would be telling the others by now.  He would be outlining what he’d found on the ground, in the houses and businesses.

Every house had been stripped of food.  Everything we’d deemed theoretically useful to the enemy had been relocated.  Citizens had been gathered in the dorms and admin buildings, drugged, and now rested in long slumber.

In the main building, labs were locked, the most essential items and ingredients put away.  Everything had been made to look proper and nice, but it was a hollow thing, the substance… not removed, but transplanted.

Helen had given the signal to close the harbor.  She could climb up the exterior wall to reach us again, when she was done, but she wouldn’t be done for at least the rest of the day and for the next night.  She would first hunt for key persons who swam for shore – captains and any guests who hadn’t wanted to join the party just yet.  Then she would sail the water, looking out for any late arrivals or chance visitors.

It served to keep her away from Ibbot and it gave her something she enjoyed doing.

The plan at this stage was simple.  The Lambs as a group excelled when it came to besieging an enemy, so we had orchestrated a siege, in a roundabout way, and we had rigged it against our opponents, preparing the battlefield in advance.

It was such a damn shame we couldn’t have gotten each major group to different sleeping areas and targeted them one by one.  Nobles, aristocrats, Professors and experiments all complemented each other in a dangerous way.

The trap had closed, and we were engaged in a mutual siege.  We had control over the key bridges, gates, and waypoints, and we had the food.  The poison gas in the buckets I’d knocked down would taint the feast we’d prepared for the guests.  They’d find nothing of substance in the houses.  We’d squirreled away things for enhanced noses to find, but we’d poisoned most in advance.

Much as we’d maintained a few windows in the alphabet-based series of ‘deaths’ for our actors, there would be a few pivotal moments in the minutes, hours, and even days that followed.  Their ability to handle the negativity that old rivalries and being under siege brought about would be one such pivoting moment.  Our ability to hold them off once we’d spent all of our accumulated tricks and special measures would be another.

The gossamer thing was drifting back toward us, and my instincts told me that there would be others -Noble or experiment- who would coordinate to take advantage of the distraction.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.08 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

It was like trying to fight a tidal wave with a sword and trying not to get wet in the process.  Students with improvised armor joined Jessie and I in trying to fend off the attack.  The gossamer had already made four more strikes, punching and tearing through walls, snagging on rubble it could pull down and cutting at the contents of the hallway, living or otherwise.

The gossamer strands didn’t follow consistent logic in how they moved once they went from rigid to soft.  Parts remained rigid, and the resulting kinks in the strands made the flow of it just a touch less predictable.  That lack of predictability combined with the stress and hurry of the moment made it easy to slip up.  We only had ten seconds to a minute to get from wherever we were to where it had impaled the building, then, if we arrived in time, only about that long to do any substantial damage.  After that, most of the strands would pull out, with only the anchoring points remaining.

We’d had only one good go of it, and three more where we’d arrived just late enough that there were only the anchoring strands remaining.  Cutting at the anchoring points slowed it down, and forced it to set down anchors elsewhere.

A dozen of us were assembled, armed with swords and axes.  Six of us were on one floor, and six more were on the floor below.  Damage to the wall and floor meant that the hallway on my floor was missing half of its width, the rest having tumbled through the gaping hole in the exterior wall.  The hole was wide enough to ride two carriages through abreast, and through it, I could see the sky and the fading, overcast daylight, the sheer drop to the ground far below, and a great deal of the gossamer creature, as it settled into position.

It was preparing for a fifth strike in this set of attacks.

I could see clear to the floor below, where Jessie was speaking to the others.  She was encouraging, giving advice, and describing things to watch out for.  I suspected a lot of it had to do with keeping mood up, keeping people focused, and not letting people dwell on the futility of what we were doing.

I remained silent.  I didn’t have the currency to really sell my group on anything.  They knew what to do, and any words from my lips would rankle, and we didn’t need any more negativity.

The students were nervous.  There had been almost twenty of us when we’d started defending against this attack.  Seven students had tried to fight off the gossamer creature and had suffered grave injuries for their trouble.  I secretly believed that one was probably a goner, based on the severity of the wounds.  Another one had returned to help, but most of them had taped and bandaged books around their extremities, hardcovers torn off, and the fellow who’d just returned had blood soaking through pages of one book at his arm, dripping from the gouge the strand had made in it.  The improvised armor was more the sort of thing to shield against momentary contact at best.

I gave my axe a test swing through the air.  It was one of the ones that was stowed for dealing with fires and defending against rogue experiments.

The gossamer thing was setting down more anchors, now.  Jessie’s encouraging words trailed off.

I wasn’t with her, we were hardly ‘dancing’, but I imagined we were very much on the same page.

For ten seconds, the only sound was the building creaking, the places where structural integrity had suffered groaning their agony.  The damaged floor I stood on was part of it, and I could feel the vibrations and protests of the building through my feet and legs.

The spike speared forth, and I was moving before it had made contact, running down the hallway.

This was a tricky thing to balance, wanting to be close enough to strike out, but not so close I was caught by the hazard.

I’d grown up with the Academy, trained as a Lamb to out-think the enemy and to keep up with the boys and girls I worked with.  I’d adapted to each of them, matched my footing to theirs, and then helped the enemies stumble and the allies step true.

This was an enemy I couldn’t out-think.  It had no brain.

It punched through the building, with a downward slant, very possibly striking through the tenth floor and exiting through the seventh, the hole in the wall facing the burned and black wood wastelands.

If it had penetrated the exterior wall of Hackthorn Academy, then we could well be exposed to the black wood, in the small but not infinitesimal chance that the wind blew the right particles across the wasteland and through the gap.

Something to address later.

By the time I’d reached the spike of gossamer, it was already unfurling.  Anchors were pulling at damaged sections of floor, dragging them away and down.  Jessie wouldn’t be able to do much, below.   The entire structure rumbled, rubble falling and furniture cascading.  It was the kind of damage that multiplied itself, one cascade of falling rubble leading to another.

I swung the axe, striking for the point where the hard section of the spike had started to unfurl.  If I struck at something as soft and light, it simply gave, going with the swing.  Strike at the hard part of the shaft, and it barely took any damage at all.

At the midway point between the two, the strands were soft enough to feel the axe, but were held in place by the firmer part elsewhere.

The blade of the axe crunched deep.  Strands peeled off on either side of the cut and immediately started fanning out through the air.

They were, going by the ones I’d seen and examined, much like Mary’s razor wire, but far finer.  Each strand was as thin as a hair, lighter, and took a serrated shape on three sides, sawing through everything it touched.  Seen from a distance, it seemed to cut through all it ran against with the same ease as fine, sharp knives might.  Here and there, it moved with enough force to scuff and score even stone and metal.

I moved back and away from the strands that were fanning out around me, and almost stumbled over the rug.  Long and narrow, it had ran down the middle of the hallway.  Now strands pulled at it, lifting it up and toward me.  A knee-high barrier to hamper my movements.  Purely accidental on the gossamer creature’s part, I knew, but it cost me a precious second.

My retreat was performed with even more care than usual, as I navigated the strands that continued to fill the space around me, each one so thin I could miss them in the wrong light or angle.  In the moment, my focus was wholly consumed by the need to watch each grouping of strands, to make sure I didn’t just have a way out that was clear, but that I had a way out when I got there.

I swung again, this time at a different grouping of strands.  A strand swiped against the handle, just a finger’s width away from my hand, and it dragged through the wood, carving a shallow groove into it, while threatening to pull the weapon from my hands.

But the blade of the axe caught the strands and slammed into the wooden interior wall, which helped to sever them.  I had to use my whole body to haul it free.

Others were joining in.  The floor was collapsing in the middle of the hallway, and I could see motion below.  More students, not from Jessie’s group, because they were on the other side of the spike.  They were using a visible gas.

It withdrew, and the motion caused the strands all around us to flail about and take to the air.

I backed well away.  Light streamed into the otherwise dark hallway through the hole in the outside wall.  Dust billowed through the hole in the inside wall, and I knew that if I waited for the cloud of dust to dissipate, braved the strands that littered the area, and stood at the edge of that hole, there was a chance I could see clean through the building.  Small chunks of stone and wood were still dropping here and there.

I brought the head of my axe to my hand, idly brushing my thumb along the length of the blade.  It was ragged, notched, and a little triangle of metal came free as my thumb touched it.

Outside, the gossamer thing was disconnecting all anchors, pulling back to go back to the main building.  I was a little out of breath, and my thinking was strange.  I was in an overly observant state, from my attention to the creature and its state, and I wanted to move slowly and gently as I adjusted my head.

Professor Gossamer was waiting.  He didn’t flinch as the thing settled, embracing the reclining lady of Hackthorn.  It was only there for a few seconds before he finished communicating his directives.  It departed in the direction he’d extended a finger, moving out toward the water.

It was only now that it had moved completely away from the building that I could see what we’d managed to do at the cost of one life, however many injuries, and some seriously concerning structural damage.  Some strands were clumping together in an unusual way – the gas had chilled or glued them together, and others had been cut short.  We’d maybe cut or hampered five percent of the strands, and even then we’d only cut them in half, or we’d glued them up temporarily at best.

If this continued, we’d be out of soldiers to throw at the thing before we reached the fifteen percent mark, and the building would crumble before we had pruned away a third of it.  None of which covered the actual danger of disposing of the strands we had cut.

It was gone, though.  We did have a reprieve.

“Everyone okay?” I asked.

“Two cuts,” one student reported.  “Nothing serious.”

“Good,” I said.

I left it at that.  Short and sweet.  Striding away from the scene, tossing my axe to the side, I took the hallway that had been reduced to a half of the width and jumped down to the next floor.  I reunited with Jessie.

“Two cuts,” I said.

“I heard,” Jessie said.  “Three injuries here.  Some stone came down from above and it made the strands billow out.  We didn’t all move fast enough.”

Students were using weapons and stray bits of wood to poke and prod strands, moving them over the edge where possible.  I could see the group of students further down the hallway, collecting the containers they’d used to produce the glue gas.

“Good work, guys,” I said.

I got a few curt nods and one salute before they went on their way, resupplying for another attempt, maybe planning something else.

Jessie and I maneuvered to a safe spot, where we could see the main building, watch the gossamer thing head out to the water, and still be free of any falling stones, pieces of wood, or free strands.

It also gave us the benefit of privacy.  I hesitated for a second, and then hugged Jessie.

Decompressing.  Easing down.  It felt good to hug and be hugged, to feel a head resting against my neck.

I didn’t want to taint the hug, so I broke away and took a second to take stock before speaking.

“It’s a living thing,” I said.

“It is,” Jessie said.  She was smiling a little.  “What’s your line of thinking?”

“I’m thinking it’s been sent to the water because it needs to eat and drink.  It doesn’t seem very active, but it has to consume some energy when it attacks.  If it has an inefficient body, it might have a hard time getting nutrients from the root of one strand to the end.”

“Going by what I’ve read, it probably uses salts to communicate.  Ocean water would give it most of what it needs.  It might fish while it’s there.”

“It’s not going to need to grab a huge hunk of meat or something and haul it to its mouth, then?”

“No,” Jessie said.  “I can’t imagine it would.”

“Does it need to rest?  Like actually stop, sleep, take it easy?”

“If I had to compare to other, similar things, most of which are aquatic, I’d say yes.  It’ll hunker down when it gets dark.  I’m just going by what I’ve read,” she said.

I watched as the thing made its slow retreat.  The wind blew from the water to the Academy, and the creature mostly moved by letting the wind blow it, waiting until strands blew in the direction it wanted to go, and anchored to the most solid objects in that direction.

“It grabs things.  Can we… give it something to grab and make it hold on?  I’m envisioning having it grab a pipe and then we roll up the pipe, get a bit of strand with it.”

“It would probably cut through pipe as it tugged on it,” Jessie said.

“Something else?  Thicker than pipe?”

“If it was anchored enough to hold the thing down, we might end up giving it leverage to tear down a good section of building.”

I nodded, trying to wrap my head around the problem from different angles and not seeing much.  I’d barely thought through the idea as I pitched it to Jessie, and I didn’t really disagree with her assessment.

I was tired, mentally and physically.  I wasn’t the only one who was, either.  It had been an intense twenty minutes.

This was bad, and it was bad in a way that went well beyond the fact that I didn’t have any good answers.  It was bad because it was taking up our time, energy, and resources, and it wasn’t occupying much of the enemy’s.  I’d hoped the inverse would be true, and that we could harass and pressure them.

We hadn’t left them much in the way of resources, but there were a lot of brains there, and they did have what they had brought with them.  In the stables, staircases, and in the main hall, there had been scattered cases of luggage and collections of medical supplies for the upkeep of nobles and experiments.

“Across that broken bridge, they’re getting organized,” I said.  “Establishing a chain of command, organizing, taking stock, and figuring out what we have planned.  They’ll be sorting through the medical supplies and searching through the building to find what we left behind.”

“We left traps,” Jessie said.

“We did,” I said.  “But once they finish searching the labs, they’ll get a sense of what they have available, and they’ll start acting.  A set number of supplies for the care of nobles.  The rest set aside to gamble with.”

“I suppose it is a gamble,” she said.  “Deciding what they can afford to lose, taking their shot with it, the best they can put together, after observing us…”

“Depending on who takes charge over there, it’s going to be a very effective, targeted attack, or they’re going to play it conservative.”

“Conservative would be bad,” Jessie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I wished I had the binoculars.  Instead, I looked over the chasm between our building and the main building of Hackthorn.

“You’re focused a lot on the people in that building and not on the thing that’s putting holes in our headquarters.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Where’s your head at, Sy?”

Where was it?  If I’d been dwelling in situational awareness, my thinking in this moment was likely a bit of a swing too far into another kind of thinking.

“Trying to analyze what we’re up against.  Thinking, maybe, that if we can deal with them, somehow, we can behead the snake, leave the gossamer whatsit without anyone to give it commands.”

“Might be a tall order, Sy.”

“Yeah,” I said.  It was.  My dwelling on them was a little bit to do with me just wanting something I could figure out, a little bit to do with me veering too far into the problem solving part of my brain, as I moved away from situational awareness.  “How are you managing?”

“I’m tired, Sy.  I need and want to sleep, but it’s not the time for it.”

“This is going to take a while to play out.  It might be better to rest sooner than later.”

“That goes for you too, you know.  You’re worn out.”

I couldn’t deny that.

We stayed there, thinking, me idly tracing my fingers up and down Jessie’s forearm, then down to her fingers, my mind half with her and half with the problems before us.

“The good thing,” I said.  “We’ve turned the tables.”

“We’ve turned the tables in a lot of ways, Sy.  Turning their students against them is a big one.  Turning their Academy against them is another.  Which way are you thinking?”

“Well, the way I see it, we either win this one, or we drag them into a tie.”

Jessie considered that one for a moment.  She was about to respond when we heard a shout.

“Sy!  Jessie!”

“Here!” Jessie called out.

We made our way down the hall until we reached a part with a hole in the ceiling.  A student stood on the edge.

“A message from the girl’s dormitory,” the student said.  “You said to keep track of the lights?”

“That’d be Mary,” Jessie said to me.

“I remember that much.  Lillian’s there too, y’know.”

“Lillian’s going to be managing the countermeasures,” Jessie said.

“I remember that too.”

We met the student at the stairwell, and the guy handed Jessie a folded piece of paper.  The flashes were marked out in a pattern of dashes.  It mapped to our tap code, and to our system of gestures.  I couldn’t remember enough of it to translate it, but Jessie was able to go over the entire thing with a glance, then provide the translation.

“Mary wants to come over.  She thinks she can help.”

I glanced at Jessie.  It wouldn’t do to talk over her and get caught arguing when things were this tense, so I gestured.  Jessie just so happened to gesture at the same time.

Both of us wanted the other to go.  I supposed we were going to disagree regardless.

“Lillian’s over there, you can wind down, catch up with her, and you can make good use of the countermeasures, in case they try something.  You’ll get a chance to think,” Jessie said, quiet.  “If something springs to mind, you can have Lillian or someone pass a message using the code.”

“You need to rest,” I said.  “I work well with Mary.  We’re not going to get many chances to rest, and we’ll need your brain later, as we keep track of them all.”

Jessie set her lips in a firm line.

“I have some ideas,” I said.  I wasn’t wholly sure if I was lying.  “Not an actual plan, but the general shape of what we might end up doing, in my head.  It depends on a lot, like where the thing goes to sleep, if it goes to sleep, but it’d help if you were over there.”

“And you think you’d be more effective over here?”

“In the center.  Not the center-center, not the main building, but closer to where I can communicate with the other buildings and more of our people.”

Jessie nodded slowly.  “Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll swap places with Mary.”

“Be safe,” I said.

Jessie blew air out of her nose, hard.  “Says you.”

“You’re supposed to say something endearing,” I said, “But no, you say that in a tone like you were going to call me numbnuts or a whackadoodle or something.”

“And a hundred other things,” she said.  “You’re going to be okay?”

“I’ll manage,” I said.

She put a hand behind my neck and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.  Then she sprinted off, leaving me standing in the hallway.

I swallowed hard, my attention turning to the nearest window.  I could see the main building, and the dark shapes that were the people and experiments at the windows.

We can do this, I thought.  The Academy is ours, we have the resources.  We just need to deal with an overly ambitious spiderweb and whatever else they come up with to throw at us.

“You’re a child of the Academy, Sylvester.”

The voice was deep.  I’d completely forgotten he was there.  I’d forgotten to keep an eye out for him and to keep my eyes and attention one step removed from him.  In my fatigue, my thoughts completely elsewhere, I might well have provided the crack he needed to worm his way into my skull.

I set my jaw.

“You,” I said, to the doctor who had brought the message.  “Ashton and Professor F.  Where?”

“I’ll show you the way,” he said.

I would have liked to have a moment to myself, to think, digest, and see what I could do standalone.  I didn’t have it.  We walked briskly.

“Tell me what’s going on upstairs.  Distract me.”

“It’s not much.  My squad is background work.  Carting things around, taking turns keeping an eye on the girl’s dorm, in case they flash a message, writing it down.  We don’t want to stay too stable or let something slip past us, so we take turns going for walks, checking on all the people we’ve got stowed in the rooms here.”

The people in the rooms.  We’d gathered up all the students, faculty, and anyone else in Hackthorn who might not be cooperative, and we’d put them to sleep, collecting them in rooms.

“Sylvester,” the Infante spoke, standing in the doorway of a room with an open door.  The buckling of the structure around us had made the door pop open like a cork popped from a wine bottle.  The gossamer whatsit had struck the building somewhere upstairs, by the way the ceiling curved.

“What’s the mood like?” I asked the student.

“Not great.” he said.

He didn’t elaborate, and I wanted him to.  I wanted his words in my ears and my brain, so the Infante’s would have less room to work.

“Just keep talking.  It’s actually more helpful if you make less sense, or say more troublesome things, so go for it.”

“Huh?” he asked.

I waited, hoping he would take the prompt.

“I don’t know what to say.  It’s not far,” he said.

He had to be the laconic sort.

You’re a child of the Academy, Sylvester.  You’re ours.  You served us, once upon a time, and your heart was in it.  That is still a part of you.  The better times.  When you believed.

The damage to the building was so extensive.

“Did you see any attacks on the girl’s dormitory?  Any sign that they were using the distraction of the gossamer whichwhat to slip something past the radar?”

“Mostly quiet.  Only movement on the ground, and even then, not a lot.  Carting bodies to the main building.”

“Good,” I said.  “Anything else?”

“No.”

I couldn’t even articulate it.  That I really wanted him to keep going, to keep talking, because I felt like I was on a precipice.  Silly of me, to simply forget my circumstances because the Infante had been holding back and lurking in the depths of my brain.  Jessie had asked me if I was going to be okay, and I’d said yes, and there was a good chance I was going to be wrong on that count.

Ashton could engage my brain, keep that wheel turning.  Waiting for Mary and finding her would take too long.

You believed in what we could bring about in the future, Sylvester.  Because you recognized that the future is what concerns us most of all.  It is, after all, why we so often use children.  Our relationship to the future is complicated, and so is how we deal with the most vulnerable of humanity, who have so much potential.

You know you see that.  You’ve abused that yourself.

The voice was starting to sound less like the Infante and more like the voice in my own head.

“Oh, fuck,” the student said.

The damage done to the hallway was extensive.  This was where the spike had come through, and it was where the strands were worst.  Ones I’d cut, that were still anchored at points.  The wind blew in through the hole in the wall, making them dance this way and that.  Sword slashes minus the sword – just cuts in the air.

“Do you have a gun?” I asked the student.

“Huh?  No.  I don’t know how to use one.  Look, I don’t know what you’re on about, but we’ll have to take the long way around.”

Fatigue and pressure had worn me down.  I’d had the Infante with me for a week and change.  I’d grown accustomed to that tension and threat that he posed, and both of those things had ramped up just often enough to keep me on that edge.  I’d let my guard slip when other things claimed my attention.

I turned to speak to the student, intent on using every iota of body language and tone to convey just how serious I was, so I might tell him that he needed to take certain measures.

I came face to face with the Infante, instead.

His massive hand reached for my face.  He seized my head, and all went dark.

Dark.

I came to, and I hurt all over.  I felt warm and cold at the same time.  The ambient temperature was different, but I had company close enough that body heat transferred to me.

I was kneeling on the hard ground, and a knee rested against my windpipe.  A hand stroked my hair, and a blade touched my cheek.

Mary was sitting on a chair, the seat of which pressed against my shoulderblade.  Her leg was resting against my body and throat  to keep me upright, her foot in my lap.  The blade ensured I wasn’t a threat.  The hair thing-

Well, I’d add that to the one hundred things I didn’t know.

“How bad was it?” I asked.

“Your timing could have been better,” Mary said.  “You stabbed Ashton.”

I winced.  “Is he okay?”

“Gravely offended, but he’ll mend.  You let Professor Foss go.”

I winced.

“I caught him.  He’s in the next room.”

“Thank you.”

“You set fires, Sy.  Scared a lot of our people in the process.  Because they were at risk, and so were the people we stowed away.”

I nodded.

“You scared me, Sy.  Because you said an awful lot of things.  Except it wasn’t really you, was it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  My voice was a hush.  “What did I say?”

“That our fates were foregone conclusions.  That we were as good as dead, with the expiration dates nigh.  There were other things.  A lot of pain, a lot of rage and sadness.  Except we were the enemy, and the actual enemy, you were saying they were the answer.”

I nodded.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I was so ashamed I wanted to curl up until I was so bound up in myself I could cease functioning.

I’d believed it once, a long time ago.  A part of me wanted to believe it again, to abandon the pain and hurt and embrace that time when things had been clearer, simpler, and when the Lambs had been near.

Mary’s fingers combed through my hair.

“I did get the drop on you after all,” she said, her voice light, an attempt at levity.

“Hah,” I said, with no humor at all.

“Is this a thing we’re going to have to be concerned about?  That one of our own, with no warning, could flip and do the most destructive, damaging things possible?”

“Looks like.”

“Is this where we lose you, Sy?”

“Could be.”

“How long did it take you to get this bad?”

“A week or so?  It’s not like I’ve been good for a few years now.”

“Alright then,” Mary said.  The knife moved so it was no longer pressing against one side of my face.  “We’ll work around it.”

I turned my head, trying to get a better look at her.

“I should have told you.”

“You do a lot of things you shouldn’t,” Mary said.  “I’ve stopped being so surprised.”

“Why aren’t you angrier?” I asked.  “You’ve been so angry for so long.”

“We look after each other,” Mary said.  “Right?  It’s always been how the Lambs were, right from the day I joined.  There was always the assumption that we had our weaknesses, and we accepted those.  I came to terms with this a long time ago.  Shooting me and making me crawl back to the Academy, after you left?  That surprised me.  It pushed me away.  But as long as you’re here, and it’s you being entirely you?  I accept that.”

“Me not being me is me being me?” I asked.

“We support and love each other, warts and all,” Mary said, stroking my hair.

“This is a pretty big wart,” I said.

She didn’t respond to that.  Her fingers continued moving through my hair, sometimes taking different courses, and it did a lot to calm my thoughts, even as the guilty feeling swelled in my upper chest.

“Come on,” she said.  “Stand.”

She stood from the chair, then grabbed me by one armpit, helping me to stand.  My hands were bound behind my back.

She didn’t free them, but she didn’t walk me with one hand firmly on my shackles like a Crown officer might walk a convict, either.

It was dark out.  Hours had passed.  Lights were on throughout our part of the Academy.  The exterior buildings, the perimeter wall.

There weren’t many lights on in the main building.

“The gossamer horror?”

“My knives and threads helped, but it only made three strikes before retreating.  It settled in for the night.”

“Where?”

Mary pointed into the darkness.  Down, in the midst of the city.

“It settled on the main building first, but then lost its hold and drifted down to the ground.  It’s guarded now,” she said.  “They devoted considerable resources to the task.”

There was an opportunity, I thought.  When they were moving to a position where they could guard it, we had a shot.  I missed itI occupied our resources.  The Infante did.

“Look at the enemy, Sy,” Mary said, moving her finger to point.

I looked at the main building.

There weren’t many lights on.  It was something of a surprise that there were any at all.

We hadn’t left them many candles.  We hadn’t left them much of anything.  Even the candles on the dining tables had been cut short, the truncated nature of them hidden in waxed paper stems.  They were either burning the little candlelight they had, or they’d devised another means, which consumed limited resources.

“Is it working?”  I asked.

“The siege is underway,” she said.  “Gossamer weapon aside, they’re holding back.  Not attacking. They’re waiting for a window of opportunity, if I had to guess.”

“Not ideal,” I observed, despite the lump in my throat.  “Any idea what they’re doing for food?”

“I think they’re using the supplies they brought with them.  Special feed for experiments going to nobles and Professors instead.  Lillian thinks they might be setting up protein farms and ways to get nutrients.”

I nodded.

Our enemy was being conservative, then.  It was the safer and more dangerous route of the two Jessie and I had discussed.  They’d recognized what we were doing, the noble Starling or whatever his name had been letting them know about the houses.  They were counteracting our plan to win by attrition by consolidating and producing resources.  It would come down to who broke first, or to who could outlast the other, rather than us trying to fend off their attacks while they withered away.

“We had signals from within.  Students lingered behind, and the enemy doesn’t have enough of the story to realize they’re ours.  Ferres is wounded.  There’s a schism in their ranks, as they try to decide what to do.  They tried to use chemicals from the lower labs, but Jessie and Junior swapped labels and containers.”

“Yeah.  My suggestion,” I said.

“It injured quite a few and ate through their good resources.”

“Yeah,” I said.  This was what we’d wanted.  I knew why Mary was showing and telling me this.

This was working.  What I’d helped to set in motion was working.  I just hoped I was here to see the resolution.

We took their students.  We took their Professor, and then their Academy.  We’re within arm’s reach of taking every Goddamned thing else there is left to take.

“First, we deal with the Gossamer thing,” I said.  “Then we shake them up a bit.”

Mary’s hand stroked my hair.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.09 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The moon was out, but it didn’t do much to help illuminate Hackthorn.  Bridges, overhangs, greenery, tall buildings and walls cast most of the Academy city into a shadow that triumphed over even the moonlight.  The light that did touch the buildings, bridges, and the houses down below was deceptive.  The large glass panes of the main building made the light filter and refract, creating suggestions of things that weren’t there.  The trees and hanging gardens, a factor yet again, moved in reaction to the wind, creating a shifting interplay of light and shadow below.

Some had gone to sleep.  Others were burning the midnight oil.

Not that it was actual midnight oil, really.  I could see who was awake because lights were on, and our people had kept track of where we’d seen them go, when & where they’d left the main building to venture into houses and other buildings in the city below.  Some of those buildings had fireplaces burning or lights on.  We’d taken the oil, firewood and candles where possible, so they would have had to throw books or pieces of broken furniture into the fireplaces.

I was standing in a room with a view, a balcony framed in glass.  Ashton was with me, and Professor Foss had a seat which positioned him to see everything that was unfolding.  His hands had been placed into buckets filled with a creamy bone white material.

The Infante stood near the Professor.

It was all about the pressure, leaning on them, making them work for even creature comforts.  It was summer and the nights were short, but darkness had a primal power.  Making them go the extra mile to stave off the dark had its merits.  They were in enemy territory – a city under siege.

Making them work to find places to sleep was another point of pressure.  The main building didn’t have so many.  We’d planned to divide and isolate them by group, our forces consolidated in a few points.  We would have targeted the aristocrats and the Nobles by separate measures.  As a consequence, there had always been an expectation that we would send some to the boy’s dorm and others to the guest building, where beds awaited them.

It would also have meant that things like the gossamer creature would have been tricky to use without risking harm to one of the other groups.

There were a lot of things that would have been convenient about things going according to plan, there.

Our primary targets, though, were the top-ranked professors, nobles, and aristocrats present.  Our hope had been to delay them, on the premise of Ferres wanting to discuss the impact of her immortality procedure, then to blow up the bridges.

It would have been twenty people at most gathered in the largest building, with empty houses and buildings at the foot of Hackthorn below.  Isolating, disorienting, with a lot of dark corners and hallways for a relatively small group to keep an eye on.

Instead, there were more than a thousand guests in that building, alongside some of ours.  We couldn’t attack effectively without risking hurting our own, and we had to temper our approach on the attrition front for much the same reason.  If we lost their loyalty now, then they might share information.

A thousand individuals needed to sleep.  Counters and surgical tables in the labs were only so comfortable.  Benches and tables in the main hall and the broader sets of stairs overlooking that area had much the same issue, and the added issue of being less private.  Clothing from luggage cases could be draped over the hard surfaces, but it was meager at best, and not everyone had access to their personal things.

Add the parasites and other creatures we’d released as we went, the light dusting of irritants and gas I’d released when we’d made our escape, and it made for uneasy rest.

They were venturing out to where there were beds.  No doubt the more levelheaded among them had noted the danger inherent in that.  But we’d known we were fighting an enemy that was proud, above all else.

All along the perimeter wall, I watched the little orange lights appear, then multiply.

“I rather like this part,” Ashton said, beside me.  The little orange lights glittered in his eyes.

“Me too, little man, me too.”

The larger of the orange lights were braziers.  The smaller were the heads of the arrows.  Little time was wasted in ensuring that the arrows were fired promptly.  Targets had already been decided in advance.

The first volley was in the air by the time the people in the main building managed to sound any kind of alarm.  They used horns, and the bass drone of the collected instruments filled the air.

Buildings had been treated to resist fire, and our removal of the stacks of firewood and the like meant there was a little less in the way of combustible targets.  But there were bales of hay for the feed of horses, stacks of crates and barrels, arrows sailed into buildings and found curtains, floorboards, and pieces of furniture.  Even with the wood being treated, there were places arrows could sink in and burn away with enough intensity that they would eventually start burning.

The flaming arrows weren’t solely targeted at the buildings they’d chosen to sleep in, but at the buildings that had the infrastructure for stitched servants to recharge, and at the outdoor buildings where warbeasts and other animals were being stabled.

The flames were starting to spread.  People were fleeing now, and some were releasing the animals from the stables.  There was an effort to get the stitched out of the burning building, hampered by the agitated stitched themselves.

“We should have set fire to the tall building down there,” Ashton said.

“The steeple?”

“Yeah,” Ashton said.

“We considered it, if I’m remembering right.  Given how your head works, I’m thinking your reasons are different from the rest of us.”

“It would be more symmetrical,” Ashton said.  “And it would flow better.  As it is now, it’s like a sentence that starts, pauses in the middle, and starts again.”

He used his hand, gesturing, to sort of illustrate what he meant.

“I can’t tell if you’re a genius or if it’s pure coincidence, but flow was my line of thinking too,” I said.  “More to do with the flow of people, creating the right balance of chaos.”

“Call it genius then,” Ashton said.

One of the buildings blew up.  The initial flare of the explosion illuminated the scattered figures on the street.  It was the middle of the night, they’d been stirred from their beds, there were freed horses and warbeasts here and there, and stitched had been released from one building, agitated from the fire.  In a strange city at the dead of night, even the ones with their wits about them didn’t necessarily know which way to run.

“More explosions would be nice too,” Ashton said.

“Agreed,” I said.  “Looks like the voltaic system that houses stitched just blew up.”

“Maybe,” Ashton said.

A new flash of light appeared at the girl’s dormitory.  A very bright point of white that sailed skyward.  It detonated in the sky, so bright it left a spark on my field of vision.  The brilliant, flickering flash quickly died out as the projectile sailed toward the ground.

The smoke and the deep shadows made it hard to track what was going on, but I saw Miss Muffet’s spider make its appearance.  Other experiments were venturing into the fray, more recognizable for the fact that they were very focused on what they were doing, and the enemy was more jumbled, trying to organize, forming into ranks or hurrying toward safer territory.  Fires lower to the ground helped cast long shadows for creatures that already had long limbs.  The poison apple, Miss Muffet’s spider, the giant, the nightmare that didn’t burn, the crimson bull…

“Jessie and Lil have done their part,” I said.  “Let’s walk.”

Ashton grabbed Professor Foss’ arm, striving to haul him to his feet.  I would have helped, but my hands remained bound.

“Stand up,” Ashton ordered.

The Professor remained in his seat, not cooperating.

“Ashton.”

Ashton turned his head.  He turned it away as another distant explosion occurred.  He sighed, as if he was very bothered he hadn’t seen.  He looked back in my direction.

“Do you have a knife?” I asked him.

That got me a nod.

I stuck out a foot, sticking Professor Foss in the upper thigh with the toe of my shoe.  “You can stick it there, and it won’t do too much harm.”

The Professor stood in the same moment Ashton drew the knife.

He stood there like that, glaring at me, then at Ashton, as if he could somehow maintain the veneer that he had some ability to resist.  I saw the eye contact break and his posture slip a fraction, as Ashton worked his magic or the Professor’s ability to lie to himself faltered.

“Come on,” Ashton said.  He tugged on the Professor’s arm.  I followed alongside, as we headed into the room, through it, and into the hallway.  Students were standing guard.

Probably more for me than for the Professor.

“Please come with us,” Ashton ordered them.  “Hold on to the professor for me while you’re at it, please.”

We made our way out of the building, and onto the perimeter wall.  We didn’t bring lights with us.  The fires were the focus, as were the gunshots, now, the warbeasts on both sides, and the soldiers fighting on the ground.  We had them running, we weren’t really pressing them, and we weren’t committing a terribly large amount of our forces.  We wanted to test them and to strain their resources.

But I kept an eye on the shadows, as best as I could.  While we acted in the dark, it was very possible that a clever Noble or Professor might try to do the same.

“Talk to me about Fray,” I said.

“Haven’t seen her in years,” the Professor said.

“You’re aware that if that’s true, you’re really not that useful to us?” I asked.

“Then I’m not useful to you,” he said.  “Are you going to throw me off the wall?”

There was something about the way he’d said that, that made me think he was too confident.

“Do you really want to tempt me?” I asked.  “Ashton here doesn’t give a damn, and I’m in restraints for a reason.  I’m sure a smart man like you has noticed.”

“I give a bit of a damn,” Ashton said.  His pale face changed as he squinted at me in the dark, arching his neck back to get a better look at my hands as I gestured.  He added, “I’d like to drop him from the wall into a place where there’s some light.”

“Some light, huh?”

“I want to see the stains and splatters he makes.  Oh!  Or we could cut his knees and elbows and drop him onto a roof.  We’ll make him crawl like that, and see the smears and stains he makes as he goes.  It’ll be so nice to look at.”

“Head games,” the Professor said.

“I said I was a genius earlier, but I’m not,” Ashton said.  “I’m a vehicle for pheromone discharges.  I have a scaffolded brain with a low H.S.-like-value, high mimickry and high liquidity.  I think someone like you might know what that means.”

“I have some ideas,” the Professor said, sounding very tired.

“I like the pretty patterns and colors, Professor,” Ashton said.  “And I’m not very adaptable in late stage growth, and I’m well past early stage, so you can do the math.  Eventually I won’t adapt at all, and I’ll turn inwards.  I’ll be stuck in an endless loop.  But for now I’m not, and I’m staying comfortable and doing what makes me happy.  And making you into interesting patterns would make me happy.”

“I’m not a vat grown shelf-head, and I honestly wouldn’t mind,” I said.

“These students you two have escorting me might disagree.”

“We were told to follow their orders.  If the two of them disagree, we follow Ashton over Sylvester.”

“Uh huh,” the Professor said.  The sound came out guttural, as much a groan as words.

“Fray,” I reminded him.

“You’re pretending there’s another answer.”

“I’m pretending that you’re acting like you’re untouchable when you really shouldn’t be that confident.”

“Shouldn’t I be?” he asked.

Professor Foss was older, his hair grown in white, curled at the edges in a mimicry of the wigs of old, which had been powdered to keep the bugs out.  He looked haggard, worn out by just the afternoon and evening in our company.

But there was something beyond that.  Even being on edge, with one escape and recapture, even with all the stressors and the need to focus and keep control of his faculties while Ashton worked on him, he was still fighting.

I couldn’t remember much of him, but I could draw on context and I could read him.  Being a Headmaster necessitated being a politician, as well as a Professor.  He struck me as the kind of politician who obstructed, and I knew that he hadn’t volunteered much on Fray, despite our suspicion of his involvement with her.

He was delaying and obstructing now.  The rhetorical questions, the way he steeled himself.

He would break, and I suspected he knew he would break, but he was determined to stall as much as possible.

“Lady whatshername,” I said.  “The one you gave into Fray’s care.”

“Claire,” Ashton supplied.

“Lady Claire.  She helped Fray and you backed her, you let Fray slip under the radar, even at the expense of the Academy.  You played your part, Professor.  Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but Lady Claire is here.  She’s over there in that building.”

“She was,” Ashton said.  “She was over there in that building.”

Our walk along the perimeter wall had brought us to a point that was very close to where the wall met the slope of the main building.  The doors and path down the cliffside to the harbor were all very near.  Students had clustered in the shadows here.  Mary was among them.

They were using ropes to lower barrels down the face of the wall.

“She-” Professor Foss started.  He stopped.

“She?” I asked.

He set his jaw.  He hadn’t meant to speak.  Ashton’s influence.

My focus shifted.  I wanted to pay attention to the nearby shadows.  It wasn’t good that I had to remain bound, but I was concerned that each hit from the Infante would be worse than the last, and I wasn’t positive that the Lambs being nearby would be a guarantee.

How long before I forgot them, or before I needed two Lambs with me at all times?

“She was pretty,” Ashton said.

“Was she?” I asked.  I wanted to fill the void, to keep up the patter.  Ashton had softened the wall, and now we needed to hammer at it.

“She looked nice.  Very asymmetrical,” Ashton said.  “But in a good way.  Clothes and hair asymmetrical.  I think I’d like to… what’s it called?  When you’re cooking meat and you cut it down the middle and open it up?”

“Butterflying,” Mary said, her voice soft.

“I’d like to butterfly the pretty Lady Claire,” Ashton said.  “Or it would be better if someone else could, and I could watch.”

“I could,” Mary and I said at the same time.

“Stop,” the Professor said.

I stopped.  We all waited.

“I know full well what you’re doing,” the man said.  “I know.  Let’s not play games.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, Professor,” I said.  “Let’s talk properly.  We know you will eventually.”

“And if I don’t, you’ll weaken my resistances, break down my willpower, and make me unable to keep the vivid imagery of one of the people I love most in the world being brutalized from my mind?”

“Not brutalized,” Ashton said.  “We could be gentle about it.  She could even be asleep, so she didn’t move too much while we carved bits out.”

Even in the dark, I could see the tension in the Professor’s neck.

“I’ve been in touch with Genevieve Fray,” he said.  “I don’t have much to say.  She’s not very active, she hasn’t been moving much, in part because there aren’t many places to go.”

“No idea what she’s planning, then?” I asked.

The Professor stared at me for a long moment.  “Whatever she’s doing, it’s near Radham, and if she’s wrapping it up, she’s intent on doing it where she got her start.  I thought at first that she was planning on doing what you seem to be doing here, getting her pieces arranged, being more patient about it, but I’m less sure about that as time goes on.”

I glanced at Mary.  “Radham was one of our planned stops, if we get out of here okay.”

“Who’s in the admin building?” she asked.

“Students, soldiers.  They’ll toot a horn if there’s trouble.  But nobody’s going to attack the main building,” I said.

Mary didn’t respond immediately.

“Ninety percent sure,” I said.  “We left a clear path to there when we decided not to burn the spire-”

“Steeple,” Ashton corrected.

“-And they’ll think it’s a trap.  I’m… eighty-five percent sure.”

Mary didn’t look impressed.

“What are you doing here, Sy?” she asked.

“I thought we’d stand guard while you work,” I said.

“You, the least combat capable member of the Lambs, with your hands tied behind your back, no less?” she asked, her tone wry.  “And Ashton, the second least combat capable Lamb?”

Ashton and I voiced very different protests at the same time.

“I’ve gotten better,” I said, when there was a moment.  “It’s predicated on opportunism, ambush, and debilitating the enemy, but still.”

“And I’m not the worst or second worst, even if I’m slow,” Ashton said.  “I’m good with guns.  Abby isn’t good at anything.”

“Weapons-wise,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ashton said.

Mary looked between us.  Something about her looked far gentler and less… difficult, than I’d seen in a long time.

It worried me, more than anything.  That Mary would let the hardness go any.  I wasn’t wholly sure what had predicated it.

The ending being in sight, perhaps.  Or an ending.  Mine being one such possibility.

“Keep us safe, then,” she said, still with that wry tone.  Sarcasm without the bite.

“I’ll try,” Ashton said, matching the wry tone with earnestness.

Mary grabbed the rope, then slid down it, over the other side of the wall.

I could only barely make out the pale blob that was Helen.  The two of them disappeared down the cliff, Helen so close to Mary that it looked like they’d get in each other’s way, get caught up in each other and drop off the cliff face to the rocks below.

Here and there, students in dark clothes were working with ropes, to lower down barrels and cases.

“Where does this go?” the Professor asked.

“We break you,” I said.

“Me specifically, or…”

“You, collectively.”

He nodded, as if there was no surprise in that.

“You break us,” he said.  “You could have poisoned the vast majority of us at the outset, if you had a mind to.  You could have made the gas you filled the dining hall with into something that killed.  You didn’t.”

“Some of ours in the enemy ranks,” I said.

“There were roads available to you that you didn’t take.  Now here we are.  I can see much of what’s ahead, but not all of it.”

“Your peers will get hungry,” I said.  “You’ll eat some of the warbeasts.  You’ll make what you can and use chemicals and experiments to come after us.  But we’ve left you all with very little, the numbers favor us, really, even if your strength is disproportionately higher on the face of things.  You’ll get desperate.”

On the one side of the wall, the enemy was retreating into the main building.  The lowest ranked students, doctors, aristocrats and experiments had taken up roost there, in hopes of some comfort or refuge, and they’d been denied it.  If we couldn’t divide them up, we’d force them to cram in together in the main building.  Maybe it would drive friction.

On the other side of the wall, I couldn’t see it, but Mary, Helen, and the team that had crawled down were carting off barrels and containers.  They would float them out to set points and they would release the chemicals, hopefully without exposing themselves to the stuff.

“The Academy and the Crown are proud, above all else.  You put a lot of stock in your ability to hold your heads high.  So the first stage of this?  We make you lower your heads.”

“All the better to chop at them with the headsman’s axe?” the Professor said, with the tone of someone who didn’t think that was a real possibility.  “To humiliate them?”

I was silent, watching the shadows.  Was that someone I saw, or a thick cloud of smoke?

“Or to collar them?” the Professor asked.

It was a person.  A figure.

The noble I’d seen before, who’d worn the red jacket.  He wasn’t wearing the jacket now – only a black silk shirt and pants tucked into boots.  He was watching the walltop.

“There are two types of control, you know,” the Professor said, behind me.  “The first is to rise up, so that when you act, you need only to reach down.  The effort is minimal, the cost of acting small compared to the impact earned.”

It was eerie that he said that as I looked at a Noble.  What had the man’s name been?  Carling?

“The other, the path I took at Kensford, in dealing with Genevieve Fray, was to bring the others down.  To allow ruin to befall other Academies while I kept the footing of Dame Cicely’s intact.  We were quick to develop countermeasures, to free key individuals from the leash.  Genevieve Fray promised, and it came to pass.”

Carling paused, and in that pause, I wondered if he’d made eye contact with me.  I couldn’t see well enough in the dark to tell.

Ashton, beside me, was looking in the same direction.  He didn’t seem too concerned, but the things that concerned him were a little different than the norm.

“Are you lowering others to your level, Lambs, or are you raising yourselves up?” the Professor asked.

Carling turned, and he strode into the smoke and darkness.  If he was making a play, it wouldn’t be immediate.

Carling, the pale Lady Gloria, Professor Gossamer.  There were others.  The smarter enemies that were watching and acting decisively rather than milling about.  They were coordinating, and I felt as though they were keeping pace with us so far.  The rest- not so much.  If anything, I felt like the minor struggles, the disorganization and the silly little things like aristocrats finding common beds to sleep in in the city itself were gambits.

“Remains to be seen,” I said.  “A lot depends on what your side ends up doing here.  But I think it’s key to note something.”

I was glad I’d come, so I could see the enemy, almost look them in the eyes.

The gossamer thing would drink the water we’d polluted, unless it was somehow able to take commands extensive enough to guide it away from water that might be poisoned, somewhere further down the coast, where it still had anchors.  It would attack once or twice more, and then it would drink, and it would die.

They’re going to make a play within a few hours, before their side is too weak from hunger.  It wasn’t an idea I had that was wholly based in logic or anything specific I’d noted.  But instinct suggested it was right.  It made the most sense, and it was the most inconvenient thing they could do.  It would coincide with the next, last attack from the Gossamer thing, before the thing had a chance to be poisoned or counteracted.  It would be decisive, one way or the other.

“It’s key to note something?” the Professor asked.

“Half of the Lambs are broken, dead, or dying,” I said.  “So if we bring you all down to our level, it’s not going to be pretty.”

“It’s not a pretty thing either, to raise yourself up to a better position, if you’re starting from a point marked by the dead, dying, and broken,” he said.

“I’m going to guess you’re not one for prayer,” I said.  “Being loyal to the Crown and all.”

“More than some,” he said.  “The school I run used to be a religious one, before the title changed.”

My voice was hard, and I was very cognizant of the Infante in the corner of my vision, intently staring through the gloom.  “Well, maybe say some words, then.  Because that ugliness, whichever way the plan goes, is going to include you, your Claire, and everything else you hold dear.”

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================================================== 19.10 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.10

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I’d expected them to strike before dawn, when the city was still dark.  They didn’t.

I was left to wonder if they had delayed because of internal strife or if it was because they wanted to run counter to expectations.

The sun was rising but the sky was overcast.  Warbeasts and experiments had been led out of the main building and tunnels, and our opposition had gathered every last man they could spare.  Some of our own were in their number, pressed into service, trying to be helpful, or actually turning tail and joining the enemy.

“Who’s the one in red again?” Helen asked.

“Lord Carling,” Jessie said.

“He caught my eye too,” I said.

Helen made an amused sound.

The enemy maintained formations as they made their way through the morass of burned buildings and the detritus from the night’s skirmishes.  The gossamer thing still stuck close to the main building, holding back while the small army advanced.  Lesser creatures were charging forward – squads of very mobile stitched, beasts, and things that looked halfway between man and beast.

Here and there, they ran into trouble.  Miss Muffet’s spider, injured already from combat earlier in the evening, was uncovered as it lurked in darkness.    Soldiers and stitched raised weapons, on alert, but the six nobles that were taking point didn’t flinch or even glance in that direction.

As if they’d already grasped the situation and decided how it would conclude.  Or as if they just didn’t care.  As if a spider that could swallow a man whole and then start chowing down on another man without swallowing was a thing that could be ignored.

Beasts and brutish experiments threw themselves at the spider.  Webbing and spider spawn laid in the midst of the rubble caught the first of them, snaring and biting at legs and feet.  The surge of the Academy’s forces was such that men with the heads of flayed beasts and beasts were able to trample over and on the backs of their kin, to bypass the snares and spawn.  They mobbed the great spider, and they dragged it down to the ground.

There were others.  People afflicted with parasites, people bloated with gas to the point they threatened to rupture, stitched who’d lost their minds and were fighting anything that drew close, regardless of allegiance…

The Lambs had gathered, and we watched the enemy make their approach.  Jessie, Lillian, Helen, Duncan, Mary, Ashton, and Nora were all present.  We stood as a group.

“They’re carrying barrels,” Jessie observed, holding binoculars to her eyes.  “They might be trying to smoke us out, if they aren’t releasing something custom-made.”

“Do you think they ate?” I asked.

“Ate?” Duncan asked.

“I’m just trying to gauge their mental states, see if I can’t figure out the angle they’ll take.  It hasn’t been so long that they’d really feel like the hunger was making them weaker, but it’d make them irritable.  Irritable would be good.”

“I don’t imagine hunger is a factor,” Jessie said.  “We guessed they might butcher warbeasts for rations.  One large warbeast feeds a lot of people.”

“Probably,” I said.  “So my next question is, when they decided they’d slaughter one warbeast and serve it as food, did they save the food for the attacking party?  Are the people up in the main building going without, feeling the initial pangs of hunger and fatigue as they watch?”

“At this stage, I feel like I have to point out it doesn’t seem like the number one priority,” Duncan said.  “But I know I’m leaving myself open to someone telling me how very wrong I am.”

“Nah,” I said.  I was very intently peering over the unfolding scene.  In a few minutes, the enemy would be at the doors below.  “At this stage, it’s not the top priority.  But I don’t think we can do much more planning or strategy.  I’m thinking ahead a little bit.”

“You’re making me nervous, going on the tangent,” Lillian said.  Her hand gripped the chains that shackled me, and I felt a shift in the chains that suggested she was gripping them tighter or pulling them closer to her.  “Let’s stay focused.”

“Alright,” I said.

By the looks of it, Carling was leading this particular expedition.  Gloria wasn’t far behind him.  The other nobles looked to be lesser.

We were near the middle floors of the admin building, peering through a hole in the wall.  We were closer to the ground floor floor of the building than to the roof, which meant  I had to crane my neck to look up and see the higher floors of the lady of Hackthorn.  Countless people were gathered at the windows, peering through to watch proceedings.

I could see the subtle shift in shade where the professors were gathering en masse.

The advancing group’s pace slowed as they drew nearer.

“I see Lambs,” Jessie said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Carling,” she said.  “He says he doesn’t see many of our people at the windows.”

Lipreading.

“He’s been given remarkably keen eyes,” I said.  “And keener intuition.  He had a pretty good sense of where we’d be last night.  He didn’t use that knowledge, but he was watching us.”

Mary gave me a sidelong glance, clearly unimpressed.

“He was looking in the first place.  If we hadn’t been there, he would’ve been able to follow you or cut off your return to Hackthorn.”

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.  “Carling’s intel is probably why they haven’t sent the gossamer thing to go get another drink.  They figured out what we were doing.”

It’s not the first time he’s positioned himself well to collect information and be right on top of what we were doing.  He realized the houses had been stripped within the first quarter-hour of our attack beginning.

“End result’s the same, isn’t it?” Mary asked.  “It only gets a few more attacks in before wearing down.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said.

Carling’s group stopped in their tracks, a short distance from the admin building.  Stray warbeasts and experiments caught up with their group, many bloodied from the encounter with the spider and other stray experiments.

“What would you say, then?” Mary asked.  She sounded nettled.

“That the journey is the same, or the progression is.  But it’s their move, their decision on the end result.”

She nodded.

“Cryptic,” Duncan said.

Mary was the one who spoke, “What Sy is saying is if it died like we wanted it to die, it’d spend the last of its strength without them fully realizing what had happened.  Panic, paranoia, wondering about gasses that affect sensitive systems, parasites, they’d wonder about the resources at our disposal.  That’s no longer the case.  If they had any ideas about preserving the thing for the future, they’re gone now.  They’re free to use every last bit of strength it can bring to bear, destroying it in the process.”

“Carling is remarking to the others that this feels a great deal like a trap.  That we’re baiting him.”

“We are,” Ashton said.  “Obviously we are.”

“Shh,” I said.  “Let’s not discount the possibility that the noble huntsman there can also read lips.”

What do you have up your sleeves, there?

The Lady Gloria was observing the stitched who were hauling the barrels.  They were made of sturdy material that wasn’t metal.  Possibly bone, possibly painted or coated wood.  The barrels were being gathered, stacked in piles.

“They’re standing a set distance away,” Jessie said.  “Look at that.  Just beyond the point our fire arrows reached.  It’s calculated.”

“A man after your own heart, Jess?” I asked.

Jessie tilted her head my way and rolled her eyes.

“We have guns, they have to know we have guns.”

“Guns are inaccurate at a tenth this distance, even if the range on modern rifles might be superior” Jessie said.  “Unless we’re talking Mauer’s special guns, and we don’t have any of those.”

“I could have got some if you’d reminded me,” Helen said.

“Lessons learned,” I said.  I studied them for a moment, then added, “They’re plotting their first move.”

“Is this one of those situations where the person who makes the first move loses the initiative?” Duncan asked.  “Because I gotta say, we’ve got cards to play.  Holding them back because we’re concerned about the counter-play might mean we don’t ever get to play ’em.”

“I agree,” Mary said.

“You guys are bores,” I remarked.

“Nora?  Would you?” Mary asked.

“Which?” Nora asked.

“Emmett’s station.”

The words were barely out of Mary’s mouth when the crash occurred at the leftmost end of the admin building.  Every head on the ground turned to look.

What we’d set up overnight to look like boards shoring up a hole in the wall was… akin to a dam.  Emmett had just breached it.

No water fell, no billowing smoke.  There was no rain of spiders or parasites.

“Hoy!” I raised my voice, bellowing.

I wanted their attention.  Some of the nobles could hear me, but they were halfway occupied with surveying the scene, trying to get a better idea of what was happening.

To all appearances, we’d shattered a wall of wooden planks.  Keen eyes would see that the space beyond was simply more wood, an empty box.

“Carling!” I called out, pushing my voice to its limits.  My throat was raw from shouting I didn’t remember doing.  “Gloria!  It’s a joke!”

“It’s not a joke,” Jessie said, translating what seemed to be Lady Gloria’s words.  She was backing up swiftly, barking out orders.  She flung her hands to either side of her as she gestured with the same efficacy that another person might swing a sword.  She was likely as dangerous, not that the elaborate white dress and elbow-length gloves conveyed that impression.  “Get back.  Get back.  Get to higher ground.”

Jessie didn’t normally speak in a monotone, but she did here, and it made for a curious juxtaposition with the scene.

They were retreating, backing off.  They moved to rooftops and the skeletal remains of burned buildings, but some soldiers, some beasts, and some stitched were slow to move.

A small few of that ‘some’ reacted with pain.  They stopped, dropped, and thrashed.

“Don’t fall,” Jessie translated Gloria’s words.

We’d released a volume of gas coupled with a few treats we’d suspended in the mixture.  Naked to the eye, the gas hung close to the ground, pulled by gravity and displacing air.

Junior had led the team that had come up with this, but the idea belonged to a grey coat that had lost their standing and ability to keep progressing when they’d been deemed too tame, too averse to combat.  They’d been a specialist in sterilization methods.

This was the specialist’s answer.  A rebuke of the people that had stopped them from getting their black coat.  It was sterilization, microscopic fibrils floating through the gas, binding to cell walls, be it bacteria, skin, or eye.

They quickly induced cell death.

The idea had been to eradicate bacteria, then remove lingering fibrils.  They’d never gotten that far.

Now, well, we could remove fibrils, but for now it hurt like nothing else, and it made flesh break out in rashes, ruptured veins, and then the flesh would turn black and wither away.

Some of the warbeasts were succumbing.  Some were already bleeding from more sensitive tissues, like the nose, ears, eyes, and softer flesh on the arms and legs.

It didn’t look like we’d caught any of ours.  They hadn’t thought to bring hostages or anything like it, if the students who’d stayed behind in the main hall were even suitable as such.

All six nobles had found places to roost.  They stood on chimneys and sat on rooftops.  Gloria had chosen to stand on a pillar of wood from a burned building.

Even the army and beasts that accompanied the nobles had mostly found places to go.

Carling turned, then raised a hand high overhead.  He dropped it until it was pointed our way.

There was scarcely a delay before the gossamer creature pulled away from the main building.  It was only a fraction slower than we’d seen it before, but that fraction applied to all of the strands.  With the way it moved, attaching, anchoring, and reeling in to the point closest to its destination, it began to take on an image of a small animal on ice, trying and failing to get traction.  Not all of the tendrils that should’ve been forming anchors were doing so.

“Aww,” Helen said.  “It’s hurting.”

“I can’t begin to imagine it has anything resembling nerves,” Duncan said.

“But it’s hurting,” Helen said.

“Let’s not anthropomorphize it,” Duncan said.  “Are we just taking this hit?”

“Probably,” Jessie said.

“If it was a person it would be limping,” Ashton said.

“Please stop sympathizing with the superweapon,” Duncan said.

“Abby’s saying that it’s suffering,” Nora said.

Duncan sighed.

It needs to eat, drink, and rest.  We disturbed its rest, we denied it the opportunity to rehydrate, and now it’s slower.

It was still terrifying.  Powerful, hard to wrap my head around.

The thing drew closer, beginning to form its spike.

Carling was standing there on a chimney, watching us.

What’s your move?

We had a series of traps arranged.  A dozen countermeasures, lined up and ready.  They wanted to reach a window or a door, they wanted to get inside, and then they could start doing untold damage.

He was playing a game with us, trying to stay a step ahead, to anticipate.  He knew that the countermeasures wouldn’t stop with the gas.

Come on, I thought.  Come on.

Carling spoke, dropping to one knee, and his position atop the chimney would have been precarious if it wasn’t for his physical prowess.  His hands worked on his slacks.  Tucking them into his boots.

“He said to stay.  He’s acting alone,” Jessie translated.

The noble cinched the straps on his boots tight.  The gossamer thing drew nearer.  It was already setting anchors in place.

I wondered if it had the mental faculties to remember its prior attacks.  It felt faster on the uptake than it had been before, even as it struggled to anchor itself here and there.

“Gloria’s saying-” Jessie started.  “The hazard is…”

“Is?” Nora asked.

But there was no telling.  Lady Gloria had raised a hand to her mouth.  No more lipreading was possible until she moved it.

“The hazard is already clearing up,” I guessed.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

The statement meant that Lord Carling was more or less free to move.  He dropped from the chimney, and moved with surprising speed as he headed toward the barrels they’d brought.

“Release the stray warbeasts,” Mary said.  “Yes?  Even with the gas-”

“Yes,” Jessie said.

“Told them,” Nora said.

Carling reached the barrels, seizing the upper rim in his hands.

Stepping forward, he twisted his upper body around, then swung the barrel.  He released it three-quarters of the way through the swing, and the barrel sailed our way.

I didn’t see where it hit, but I heard glass break, just a couple of floors down.  It had penetrated a window.

“We’re going to find out what that is, I suppose,” I said.

“Bastard of ten bitches.  That had to be a sixth story window,” Duncan said.

He managed to hurl another before our second play came into effect.  Warbeasts.  They were minor, all things considered, scarcely more than attack dogs with extra mass and ruffs of quills and spines extending down their backs, cresting at the shoulders.

There were no special tricks, no poisons on the quills, no hidden benefits to using the dogs.  They’d been something we’d been able to prepare in the short time we’d had, and they now unwittingly attacked a target that they had virtually no chance against.

They were, in this moment, little more than obstacles that made Carling take just a little bit longer before he could throw another barrel.

Mary broke away from the group, running.  Knives fell from Mary’s sleeves, dangling on wire.  She began spinning them around, wire and knife forming a circular blur.  She turned on her heel, “Nora!”

Helen went with her, not looking even half as dangerous.

We collectively worked without needing to communicate in too much detail.  We were at the pivoting point.  We’d scarcely communicated who would do what, but we knew each other well enough to know who should handle what.

Duncan ran, one hand on Ashton’s shoulder, steering him.  Jessie followed behind, lagging, her eye on what was going on outside.

Lillian pulled slightly on the chain.  She wanted to go in the direction Mary had.

Carling was using the barrel to bludgeon the spike-dogs.  They bit for him and he was quicker.  They bit for the barrel, and with its weight, it was slower.

He unslung his axe from behind him, then in short order cut down the full pack of spike-dogs, one hand still on a barrel that was being jerked and tugged by the two hundred pound lesser warbeast.

Slamming the weapon down into the body of a spike dog that lay in arm’s reach, he returned to a two handed grip on the barrel.  He heaved it around and threw it.

A different corner of the building this time, again punching through a window.

This time, it coincided almost perfectly with the terrible noise of the spike grinding and scraping its way through the building, crushing wood and cleaving through stone, impaling the building.

Like Jessie was for Duncan and Ashton, Lillian and I were support for Mary and Helen.  We weren’t in fighting shape, there wasn’t much for us to do, with me having my hands behind my back and Lillian being not fantastically equipped for a fight.

The spike dissolved into strands, and Mary cut, throwing knives and having them cut through the air, using the razor wire here and there to control the movements of the strands more than to cut or harm them.

Helen was simply reaching up and batting at strands with her hands, moving in jerky, offbeat ways that let her move through the worst of the clouds.

Here and there, the strands of the great gossamer creature would cut at Helen’s hair or at some extraneous bit of lace or ribbon on Mary’s dress.

Helen wasn’t immune to being cut, but she had some protections.  She gathered the strands into clusters.

Carling attacked yet again.  Another broken window.

He was spacing them out.  The last one had been close to the middle of the building, which was also very close to where we were.  Had he seen us with that keen eyesight, Carling would have known that a good offensive measure would be best placed hereabouts.

“Let’s go see what that is,” I said.

Lillian nodded.

“We’ll be close!” I called out.

It wasn’t far.  Lillian gripped the chain, as if she thought I was going to snap and run away.  I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t about to – that I was sixty percent sure that my inner Infante wouldn’t act if he didn’t think he could do something.

But there was something equitable in that I was bound and at Lillian’s mercy, at least in part.

Lillian pushed a set of doors open, and I saw the scant light moving over the shards of glass from the broken window.  The barrel had come to rest here too; both the top and bottom ends had been designed to come off on impact.

One gaunt figure had already come forth and stood, where he or she had been contorted within.  Another was crawling out.  They were crimson, their flesh more like something coagulated and hardened, blood clots in crude humanoid form, and they barely looked ambulatory.

But they were crusted with growths.  More of the growths crusted the inner walls of the barrel.

It looked like a hive, and a swarm of insects as red as the blood clot ambulatory hosts were spreading through the air.  They crawled in and out of the hives and crevices in the hosts.

Lillian and I stared at the scene, then reversed course.  We slammed the door shut behind us.

“Okay, no,” Lillian said.  “Nothing we can do about that for now.”

“No gas?  No drugs or countermeasures?”

“Not like this,” she said.

We headed back to the others.  Lillian’s hand slid down from the chain to my hand, clutching it.

I squeezed back, for reassurance, for whatever else.

The spike plunged into the building again.  Somewhere close.  Lillian and I had to stop while the building rumbled, settling in the aftermath of the architectural violence.

Okay, I thought.

We hurried in the direction of the attack.  We found Mary and Helen there, still cutting, still collecting.  Collected strands were gathered together with curtains torn from hangers, bundled together like sheafs of grain.  Helen heaved one over her shoulder, backing away as Mary redoubled her efforts, damaging the creature as much as possible while it withdrew.

“Bugs,” I said.  “Probably parasites.”

“They know Sy’s here, so if they’re using parasites, it’s probably something nasty he’s not going to be so resistant to,” Lillian said.

“Telling them,” Nora said.

Mary and I glanced out the window at the same time.  Her eye was on the gossamer creature.  Mine was with a mind for Carling, who was retreating some while the other nobles and experiments advanced.

He was gone.

We were caught up enough in watching out for the enemy that the other Lambs caught up with us more than we caught up with them.  They’d collected the young ones.  Abby, Bo Peep, Lara, and Emmett.

“Ready?” Jessie asked.

Duncan already had the first cloth tunnel, and he knew how to mount it at the window.  Ashton, inexplicably, also knew.  I wondered if he’d read all of the safety manuals.  It seemed like his thing, since he had a way of reveling in what others found interminably boring.

The tunnel was placed at the window, then allowed to unfurl.  It extended down to the ground.

“Feet out to the sides,” Ashton said.  “Use them to slow yourself down.”

One by one, Lamb and neo-Lamb made their way down.

As strategies went, it wasn’t intuitive, but it wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been a touch unintuitive.  We abandoned the admin building and those who still remained within.

We placed ourselves on the ground level of the city, against the best this crop of lesser nobles could provide.

Helen was one of the last to descend, and she didn’t use the inside of the tube, instead sliding along the outside.  She gestured firmly for us to go.

This came down to strategy and head games, anticipating what Gloria or Carling might try, and getting ahead of that.  It had been a part of the plan since we’d needed to come up with a new way of doing things, after Ferres had spoiled the timing.

Carling had seen all of the Lambs together, he’d seen how and where we’d staged attacks and he’d inferred where we were setting up and taking action.  Faced with that information, he’d elected to do the cowardly thing; he was organizing his troops into attacking a different section of the academy.  The Girls’ dorm, the Boys’ dorm, restoring peace at the harbor-

This was the real danger, the point where our most vulnerable were at the most risk, faced with the enemy’s most dangerous.

It mandated special attention, personal involvement.

The shackles clanked and bounced behind me as I ran, the Lambs all around me.

Behind us, Helen triggered the traps, securing the admin building in a way that would bar the enemy, slow them down.  Strands of the creature filled the air all around her, glistening dangerously in the rays of light that cut through the overcast atmosphere.  A distant rumbling sound got quieter and quieter still, and only because we were moving away from it.  Had we been close, we might have been able to shape some of it.

Instead, the builder’s wood began to raise an almost inverse portcullis, ground to sky.

Would that man with the keen eyesight see it?  Would paranoia win out on his side?  Would he attack one of the dormitories and do grievous harm to the rebels within?

There were other nobles, any of which could have struck out on their own or broken from pattern.

“Enemies are close,” Helen murmured.

Everyone present drew their weapons, with the exception of the little ones, Lillian and myself.

By retreating, they’d wanted to bait us out.  They’d succeeded.  We were out of the building.

Jessie had led us up a gentle slope, and now that we were there, we had a better view of everything around us.  Hands went up, gesturing, marking the forces that were surrounding us.

Other gestures were to draw attention to the admin building.  Our departure point, we’d barred the path by littering the area with Helen’s rain of cutting strands, we’d sealed gates, trapped the scattered few within inside.

Carling was circling back now.  He’d drawn us out, and now sought to claim a critical territory, the admin building we’d taken special measures for.  He wanted the supplies, medical resources, accommodations, everything they might want or need in order to weather this siege.  He moved faster than us, and it seemed to be a foregone conclusion.

When the smallest of us were entirely out of breath and those of us who could carry could carry them no longer, we stopped.

There wasn’t a full minute’s respite before there was another message.

Explosions, one after another.

The remaining bridges fell much as the one between the main building and the admin building had.

The explosions continued to rattle the city, which wasn’t large.  An explosion on one side of the city made windows rattle in their frames until they cracked, on the other side.

It seemed to go on for an hour, when it might have only been five minutes.

The face of the admin building was damaged, but already, the damage was repairing.  Further up, the edge of the roof was cracked, and material was flowing out, down the face of the building.

It was the cosmetic side of Hackthorn, weaponized.  The builder’s wood and the seeds with accelerated growth for the hanging gardens now cascaded down the front of the building, caught by flowerbeds and windowsills, settling between shingles and in gutters.

Even the creatures that surrounded us were pausing to take it all in, to watch the wood grow moment by moment, curling, twisting, and forming elaborate shapes.

The trap had been sprung.  Assuming they’d been caught, in whole or in part, and that they hadn’t sprung it prematurely out of sheer guile, they would still get free eventually.  But if we’d captured some, most, or all, then we had them.  The siege was a few steps from being won.

But the biggest part, the part that satisfied so thoroughly, was that, barring a terminal wrinkle in this plan, our targets having wholly slipped the net, we were right back to what we’d originally planned – our enemy divided.

As for the conquered part of that…

I glanced at the Infante.

We were pretty sure the Lambs were ready.

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================================================== 19.11 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.11

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In the distance, on the far side of Hackthorn, barely visible with the main building and the other constructions barring the view some, a gargantuan warbeast climbed up the face of the boy’s dormitory.  It was vaguely apelike, but with a long crimson mane and no mouth on its face.  It was quick, acting with jerky moments and deceptive speed for something its size.  Its feet kicked in through windows on the third floor while oversized hands gripped windowsills on the fifth.

The gossamer thing floated a distance behind it.  The two had been taking turns, not because they were that incredibly coordinated, but because the ape was scared shitless of the gossamer thing, but was compelled to attack, so it moved in whenever the gossamer thing backed off.

Between them, they were doing a fair amount of damage.  The gossamer thing had slowed down considerably in recent hours, but the boy’s dormitory wasn’t quite as formidable as the admin building.  I worried.

It found a grip on another window, and it started to make its ascent, tearing down architecture by accident more than by purpose.

No sooner was its grip settled than a flash of light and fire flared around the hand.  The sound of the explosion reached us a second later.  They’d anticipated where it might grab and timed explosives to go off when the hand appeared.

One of its paws now a bloody ruin, the silent ape tumbled to the ground below, landing in what had to have been an awkward position, given my last glimpse of it before it dropped out of sight behind the intervening buildings.  It didn’t rise to its feet or crawl anywhere, instead thrashing on the spot, an occasional leg, foot, or arm sticking up to where we could see from our vantage point.

The blind and deaf apes were still in reserve, but I wasn’t overly concerned.  By all reports, they were designed to be big, but they didn’t have a great deal going for them otherwise.  They were a mediocre project from one of the smallest Academies.

For now, it looked like the gossamer thing didn’t have much left in it.

“I’m trying to figure out how I feel about all this,” Helen said.

“You’re not one for agonizing and self doubt,” I observed.  “Or even for doubting the rest of us.”

Helen stirred restlessly in her seat.  She’d taken a nice window seat, padded with cushions on either side, and curled up in it.  The way she’d positioned herself was just so, when it came to Helen.  In more ways than one, she was too curled up, too able to move her head to view what was happening in the world beyond, given the way she was oriented.

Lillian was standing just a short distance away, hands in her coat pockets, tense and analytical as she watched proceedings in… very possibly the absolute opposite perspective that Helen was.

I sat sideways in a heavy chimera-leather and wrought iron chair, watching them more than I watched anything else.  My left arm dangled, the manacle heavy.  The other end was connected to the frame of the chair.  My right ankle was connected by the same kind of measure.

“I like part of this,” Helen said.  “I like that we’re strangling them.”

“In more ways than one,” Lillian said.

Helen craned her head around to look at Lillian, then twisted around, reorienting so her feet were where her head was and vice versa, without really standing or adjusting her profile.  She took on a more easy, languid position as she draped herself along the window seat, and reached up, taking Lillian’s hand in two of hers.

“You’re in a mood,” I remarked.

Helen nodded.  “I’m restless.”

Restless was an adjective that paired badly when it was part of a trifecta that was put together with Helen and with the fact that she was holding on to someone I care about.

“Is that the flip side of what you were talking about?”

“I want to be the one strangling.  This is… odd.”

“Vicarious?” I asked.

Helen smiled.  She moved Lillian’s hand and held it against one side of her face.  “Good word choice.”

“It’s something I do,” I said.  “And you do strangles, getting a hold on the enemy and then breaking them.  This… all of this, it’s really an abstract expression of you.”

“It feels unfulfilling,” Helen said.  “I like anticipation, and I like waiting for my prey, but that’s usually when I know I’m going to, hm.  I’m not sure how to put it into words.”

Helen was set enough in her ways and specialized enough in what she did that her mental framework wasn’t often tested or forced to adjust.  She’d evolved some as she dealt with the breakdown of parts of her design, but she hadn’t often been challenged.

I didn’t press or supply the ideas.

“It’s like it’s all drawing circles, and circles are good and beautiful and strong in so many ways, except it’s embraces, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said.

“And here we’re drawing circles, but we have so many that are three-quarters of the way drawn and they’re big and they’re beautiful and I want so very badly to draw that last quarter-circle and wrap all of this neatly in a way that lets me put a bow on top.  But that’s not how this finishes, is it?”

“Not quite.”

“Not physically,” she said.  “Not with hands on long, slender parts of long slender people and cushy, soft parts of cushy soft people.”

“No,” I said. “Not physically.  Not with hands on crooked, twirly bits of crooked, twirly people.”

Helen turned her head, giving me a look, like a mother chiding a child.

“Silly,” she said.

“You’re the silly one,” I said.  “I don’t believe you’ve ever truly been teased, have you?”

Lillian glanced my way, taking notice of the word.

“Not left wanting.  You’re dangerous enough you get most prey that’s gettable, and you don’t often not get prey.”

“Sometimes I don’t,” Helen said.  “But the ones I’ve waited the longest for are ones I think I might get eventually.”

“Like Fray and Mauer?” Lillian asked.

“And others, yes.  It’s been years and all of that’s okay.  I got close to Mauer and I almost closed that circle in a very inconvenient way.  But that’s fine.  That’s something else.  There are others I wanted and then they went and died for reasons that weren’t me, and I’m very good at being very disappointed for a very short time and then putting that disappointment behind me.  But this is something else.”

“Take your time with it,” I said.  “Digest the feeling, decide what you want to do with it.”

“And let me know if you need anything in the way of fine tuning, to help you wrestle with it,” Lillian said.

“I will,” Helen said.  She moved Lillian’s hand closer to her head and gave it a kiss, still holding it in her own.

Lillian barely reacted to Helen’s strangeness, instead glancing my way.  “Speaking of comfort and needs, do you want me to move your chair, Sy?  I could cuff you over here.”

“I’m comfortable,” I said.  “I’ll have to move again when it’s time to eat, I think, and I can sort of see what’s going on.”

Lillian folded her arms.  Her reaction didn’t quite strike me as her wanting me closer and being disappointed when I stayed put.  I took note of it but decided that I couldn’t do much about it without more information.

For now, staying put and easing forward felt like the way to go about it.  Rash and reckless movements would do more harm than good.

The admin building had always been the trap meant for the Nobles, and we’d prepped it well in advance.  The last minute changes had been mandated because of the damage the gossamer thing had done, but we’d developed our workaround.

The trap had taken hold.  The building was being enclosed in builder’s wood and greenery, windows and doors blocked.  We’d planted builder’s wood around the holes they’d created with the gossamer thing, and we’d destroyed the bridges that provided easy access to the rest of Hackthorn.

We’d baited them in with the premise that we had people within, easy victims and leverage that we were desperately trying to protect, and we’d buried them.  Just as we’d planned from the beginning, before Ferres interfered.

But wood took time to grow, even if it was Academy made, vines and branches took time to grow, and so the danger had been that the nobles could break out of the building before the trap was fully in place.

With that in mind, we’d considered a great many improvised measures, and we’d thrown out each and every last one of them.  Nobles couldn’t be underestimated.

No.  Instead of trying to stop them, we’d let them.

Now a pale gas sat within the enclosed walls of Hackthorn, stubbornly refusing to dissipate fully.  The houses on the ground were unable to be seen given the thick vapors, and the Nobles who had broken free of the admin building were… well, they’d escaped the building, only for their way back in to close up behind them.

From my perspective, slouching in my seat with my chained arm and chained leg dangling over different arms of the chair, I could see out the window to where the white gas lapped against the outside of the admin building and the perimeter wall of Hackthorn Academy.  I could see the admin building itself, more a gnarled twist of wood and vines than a proper building now.  I could see the distant silhouettes of the nobles who stood or sat on the roof and the branches that were reaching over it.

They barely moved.  Almost anyone else would have gotten impatient, paced, or given some indication that they were talking among themselves.

I wondered how much of their decision to stay as still as they were staying was because they were trying to conserve their energy and strength, how much was because they knew they were being watched and they were trying to unnerve us, and how much had to do with the fact that they had left their humanity long behind.

“What are you thinking, Lil?”

Lillian turned to look at me over one shoulder.  It was a stern look.

“Hush, ignore him,” Helen said.  “He’s cranky because we’re waiting for food.”

“What makes you think he’s bothering me any?” Lillian asked.

“I can hear your blood,” Helen said.  “It creaks as it runs through you.  Also, it takes a moment, but if you’re close, I can smell irritation.”

She still didn’t like the ‘Lil’ thing.  Still, it gave me a way to gauge where she and I stood.

I cleared my throat, being careful to keep my tone light as I said, “Why am I the cranky one here?  I asked a simple question.”

Lillian gave me a look that was almost rolling her eyes, then asked, “Are you sure you don’t want me to move you?”

“Am I missing something?  You’ve asked me three times.”

“Twice,” Lillian said.

“Three times, if I count you asking me if I’m comfortable and okay with where I’m at, when you first chained me here.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.  “I guess you’re right.  And I guess I don’t like that I can’t watch what’s going on out there and watch you at the same time, Sy.  I feel like I’m going to turn around to check on you and that chair will be empty, and you’ll be up to something that leaves everyone in tears.”

“Ahhh,” I said.

“Sorry.”

“No, no.  It makes sense.  This is our present reality.”

“Yeah, Sy.  I suppose it is,” Lillian said.  The lines of tension were still standing out in her body language, but now… I saw a hint of sadness as well.

“Well,” I said.  “I think there’s an easy answer to that one.  How about you unchain me, to start off?”

“Uh huh,” Lillian said, without humor.  “Perfect solution.”

“Well, that’s only the beginning, dummy.”

Lillian arched an eyebrow at ‘dummy’.

“See, you unchain me, bring me over to the window, like you’ve been wanting to do, and just huck me through it.”

Lillian snorted.

I was glad to see a smile on her face, cutting past the prior tension.

“Or you could dangle me by the chain.”

Lillian’s smile widened, and she allowed herself a chuckle, pausing to glance back at the gas that saturated the lower grounds of Hackthorn.

As Lillian watched, I saw her pause, gathering her composure, getting ready to say something more serious, then giggle to herself, so brief and quiet I might have missed it if I hadn’t been studying her.

“I imagine Helen idly swinging me back and forth.”

“I could,” Helen said.  “Or I could climb down to say hi.”

“Ah, that’d be nice.  Are you keeping me company?”

“Absolutely, Sy,” Helen said.  “And I could torment you for bribes while I do it.”

“I’m probably overdue for that torment,” I said.  “When I think of torments, I’m imagining something like you adjusting my shirt so it covers my head and arms, and tying it into a knot at the end, while I’m dangling from my ankle there.  Me, upper body bare to the world, everything from the armpits up bagged and tied.”

Lillian’s focus was on the window, and I could only see a bit of her face, but I could tell from that bit that a grin had spread across her face.

“Maybe do me a favor and undo my fly just in case I have to go?”

“I promise that if you ever find yourself in those dire straits, I’ll arrange you appropriately,” Helen said.

“Sy,” Lillian said.  “You’re aware that just wouldn’t work, logistically?  If you relieved yourself while dangling from your ankle, you’d be sure to get some on you.  To the most tragic degree.”

“I’m the one with the appropriate equipment, thank you,” I said, in my best indignant voice.  “I’ll have you know it’s a question of maximizing how much I push and minimizing how much I dribble.  I have a Wyvern-equipped brain, so I’m sure I can optimize.  Or wiggle my tied-up head and arms to move them out of the way.”

Lillian’s giggles were nonstop now, as much as she was trying to suppress them.

She managed in the midst of the giggle fit to pause, do her best to gather her composure.  In the midst of it, as if purely by accident, she shot me a look of such pure, unadulterated warmth that it nearly knocked me out of my seat.

Which served to make me mentally stumble, my next few lines dashed from my mind.

“Ah,” I said.

Now Helen smiled like there was a joke that only she got.

“Shush, you,” I told her.

“I didn’t say a word,” Helen said, letting go of Lillian’s hand, arching her back in a stretch, before turning, so she was facing the window, her back and side to us and to the room.

I found my words.  “So there I hang, dangling in more than one sense of the word-”

“Sy,” Lillian said, between giggles.  “Puns?  You’re better than that.”

“-and while I’m doing my best to water the grass far below and not to waterboard myself, all of the humorless black coats and aristocrats are no doubt peering through the window watching, not quite able to convince themselves it’s not a part of our devious plan that they should be very concerned about.”

Helen twisted in the moment and caught Lillian as Lillian sagged into the window seat, the stress of a very long few days, if not weeks, months, and years finding giggly release in irredeemable childishness.

I left it at that.

I was pretty content to watch Lillian smiling, with the occasional glance spared for the Nobles, who had shifted their position a little as the overall footing had changed.  Three of them had gathered together to talk.  I was content to bask, too, enjoying that memory of Lillian looking at me in a meaningful way that everyone wanted to be looked at.

That it had happened while I went on at length about my being tormented said something, but I wasn’t about to second guess the weirdness of my fellow Lambs.

Things eased down from there.  We watched the enemy through the window, as the gas and circumstance strangled them.

Two students entered the room, carrying a tray of tea and a tray of fruit slices, breads, cheeses and nuts.

“Are there treats to go with the tea?” Helen asked, sitting up, her hands in her lap.

“After,” the student said.  “Kitchens are packed with preparations for lunch.  We’re aiming to have something for tea in the early afternoon.”

“Alright, thank you,” Helen said.

The students departed, leaving the four of us alone in the room.

“I think I’m being tormented,” Helen said.

“Yeah,” I said.  “But it’s the kind of anticipation and torment you can bear.”

“It is,” Helen said.

Lillian glanced at me.  “Do you want tea now, Sy?  I know Helen waits until there’s something to have with it.”

“Not now, thank you,” I said.

“Alright.  You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m good, all things considered,” I said.  I waggled my foot, the chain rattling slightly.

Lillian made a small snorting sound, hiding her face.

“Don’t tell me you’re still on that?” I asked.

“Shush,” Lillian said.

“Come on, Lil, there’s gotta be rules about how long you’re allowed to laugh at something, when it’s behind us.”

Lillian let her head loll back, and she groaned.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

Lillian rose from the seat, giving Helen a pat on the leg, so Helen would move her leg and free her to walk away.  “Sy.”

“Lil,” I said, pressing it.

She stalked her way to the chair I sat in.  I remained in place, staring her down.

“Watch your head,” she said.

Then she heaved, tipping the chair backward.  It struck the ground with the impact that only a chair with a heavy framework of wrought iron could do.  The dense padding in the leather didn’t help with the weight.

For my part, if it wasn’t for the cuffs that bound me to my seat, I would have bounced clean out of the seat and sprawled on the floor.  Instead, the chains jerked.

“I’ve told you countless times, don’t call me Lil.”

I closed my eyes.  “Did you?  My memory is terrible.”

“Ha ha,” she said.

I remained where I was, assessing my situation.  The chair was such that I doubted my ability to lift it into an upright position again, which would be harder than tipping it back would be, especially with the irregular shape.  I’d humiliate myself trying.  That left me to figure out where I was going.  I could sit on the front edge of my chair, but it was hardly comfortable for the long term.  I could ask to relocate, as Lillian had recommended I do two or three times now, but that meant asking.

Instead, as I lay there, I tried to be very still.  My face changed, starting at a neutral position, but a grimace tugged at the edges, made my features contort.  The grimace became a look of anguish.

“Sy?” Lillian asked.  “You’re a charlatan.  Don’t think I believe you for a second.”

I measured my breathing, letting it grow tighter by the second.

Even Helen had perked her head up, curious or concerned.

Lillian drew near, bending down to kneel at my side.  I wrapped the excess chain around her neck, toppled her, and pulled her to the ground.

She reached out, and I matched her.  My palm met hers, and I gripped her hand hard, fingers between each of hers, my grip firm.

Wait.  Wrong hand.

I switched, moving to snatch her other hand, doing much the same thing.  I was just in time to catch it as the syringes sprung forth from beneath her fingernails.  With my fingers where they were, I could keep her from bringing the syringes down to catch me.  I matched her attempts to move her arms with resistance.  One of my legs helped to keep her from moving her lower body too much.

“You’re such a butt, Sy,” Lillian said.

“Very mature,” I said.

“Such a butt.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What are you gunning for, Sy?”

“Gunning?”

“The goal here?  With this.”

“Making you wish you hadn’t tipped over my chair, for one thing.”

“Achieved,” she said.

I was studying her expression, trying to find the hints of discomfort, the imminent break I’d seen back in… wherever that city had been.

“You’re aware Helen’s watching?” Lillian murmured.

I moved my head, looking across the room.  Helen was still there, lying across the window seat, one hand dangling, fingers touching the floor.  She was staring at us.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’m being taunted,” Helen said, mournfully.

“Are you, now?” I asked.

“My only joys are the vicarious and postponed,” she said.

“Helen,” Lillian said.  “Please.”

“If you two had any grace at all, you’d close the circle.  Honestly.”

“Helen,” I said.

“I know,” shes aid.  “I understand.  I know these things.”

Then she stood, and she strode from the room.

“I have to ask,” I said.

“Do you have to?”

“At the risk of opening up old wounds…”

Her voice was barely above a whisper, “I don’t know, Sy.  That’s a… horribly complicated thing, and a part of me worries I’ll feel fine and good up until I don’t, and that scares me.”

“Scares me too,” I said.

“But,” she said, and her voice was quieter still.  “I think I don’t feel two steps behind, when it comes to where we stand, respective to each other.  I got… a coat, even if it wasn’t the color I wanted.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not putting me in a bad place, where I’m having to straddle two sides.”

“I kind of hauled you violently over to this side, into a place where we’re holding the hoity toity of the Crown States captive.”

“You did.  But it’s steadier footing.  I’m not divided anymore.  And I’m not sure that fixes everything or even half of everything, but…”

She moved her head, and she let it rest on my chest.

The first night she’d shared a bed with me, she’d done much the same.  She’d clung to me more, and maybe she would have here, if I wasn’t holding her hands to keep the syringes at bay, in case turnabout was fair play.

The weight of her head on my chest made a weight lift from me, in its odd, paradoxical way.

I felt her sigh, and I felt even more of that weight lift.  I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I saw the Infante standing where Helen had been, and I became very aware of how he might use this situation.

Ah no.

I postponed closing my eyes again for as long as I could.  Eventually, I blinked, and the Infante was gone.

I heard his voice, as if from another room.  “You were made to destroy, Sylvester.  You were baptized in poison.

I didn’t dare move or speak, in case that tipped this ever so delicate situation to his care.

I shouldn’t have done this.  But if I shouldn’t have, then I couldn’t necessarily trust myself to do it again.

I couldn’t ever have this?  I’d been given a taste of it with Lillian, then with Jessie, and now with nobody at all?  Was that how it went?

Moisture in my eyes didn’t help with my attempt to keep from blinking.  I failed, and I saw the Infante had moved closer, crossing half the distance from where he’d been.

My hand still holding Lillian’s, my fingers interknit with hers, so she couldn’t curl them in and use the syringes on me, I moved our hands so I could run the back of my hand along Lillian’s hair at the side of her head.

I found myself having to blink again.  The Infante was gone.

If he closed the distance again-

You have known hard, undeniable truths since you were capable of looking for them.  Death takes us all.  Some sooner than later,” the Infante said.

He sounded as if he was in the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice soft.

“For?”

“Everything,” I said.

“Don’t be,” Lillian said.  “Life’s too short for regrets, isn’t it?”

I screwed my eyes shut.

I gave her a peck on the lips.

Every time I let my guard down?  I lose something?

She moved her hand a fraction, and moved my hand in the process.  I was very conscious of the chain pulling across her throat.

It felt like seconds and it felt like hours, that I was suspended in that state of tension, striving not to move, to give him anything.

I’d pulled that chain tight, and in my stillness, I’d already done what I’d feared I would do in the future.  My hands felt hot now, compared to how cold hers were.

I knew she was already dead.

I opened my eyes to see one of the things I’d hoped never to see – the lifeless face of the Lamb who was supposed to live, at my hands.  Instead I saw the Infante’s face, so broad and so close that it consumed my field of vision.

An illusion.  Past and present and future hopes and fears getting confused.  I vaguely recalled something about the syringe fingers hampering circulation and temperature.  Too late to matter.  I’d let him in.

My mind refused to see, hear, to communicate, to feel.

I felt hot fluids run down my fingers.

“Careful, Sy.”

It took a concerted effort to surface, to figure which way was up and to bring myself there, out of the recesses.  It was harder than the last time.

A saucer was in my hand.  Tea sat on the saucer.

I felt disoriented as I looked first at Jessie, who knelt beside me.

I looked at Lillian, very much alive.  She had her head on my chest, and she looked half asleep.

“What-”

“I arrived and asked Lillian if she needed a hand.  She said she needed an edge for if you woke up and it came down to another brawl, something to surprise even the likes of you,” Jessie said.  “I thought I’d give you a cup of tea to hold and see how you handled yourself, but she drifted off by the time I was finished stirring the milk.”

The tea?  The hot liquid?

“Jessie- can-”

Jessie reached down and brushed hair from near my eyes with her fingers.

“No games?  No shenanigans?” I asked.  “Can you- can we talk?”

She took the tea, and she disappeared from my field of vision.

She returned, and she brought a cushion from the window seat.  We extricated me and put the pillow beneath Lillian’s head.  She hugged it tight as soon as I was no longer in her reach.  She had the key to undo my shackles from the chair, and with the length of the chain, we wound it around my midsection before attaching it to my other wrist.

We stepped into the hallway, walking past the tea trolley with the tea, Lillian, Helen’s and my meals, and the little platter of biscuits, berries, and cream.

“I lost a bit of me again,” I said.  “I don’t know- did I do anything?  Say anything?”

“No.”

“How long ago did Helen leave the room?” I asked.  “How long ago did the tea arrive?  That’s the same tea?  Lunch tea?”

“Less than a minute ago, and it’s the same tea.”

I shivered.

“Are you going to be okay?” Jessie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  Had Jessie disturbed me from my spell of madness within moments of it starting?

Jessie took my arm, hooking hers through it.

“The thing with Lillian,” I said.

“It’s fine, Sylvester.  Mostly fine.”

“Mostly fine isn’t perfectly fine and it doesn’t feel fine, Jessie.  I’m losing my mind, I’m a danger to her and to you, I’m a danger to me and to everything we’re trying to do.”

“And I’ve dropped three memories, Sy, and it’s hard to shake the notion that I have a few days or weeks left.  Helen’s on edge and Duncan pulled emergency measures to mellow her out in the short term, but her hormones are going to zig-zag.  Mary appears fine, but she tends to keep the dangerous things under wraps.”

I pressed my lips together.  I wanted to say things and I didn’t, because it was pointless.  It would only distract.

“Sy.  We move forward as best we can.  We move forward without sabotaging ourselves and each other with doubts.  The others have already agreed we do this with you in chains if we have to.  But we’re going to do this.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s not.  But honestly, Sy, if you think we need to watch you better, we will, and if you have other concerns, voice them, but don’t- don’t let the concerns become the concern.”

“I don’t want to push anyone away,” I said.

“I told you a while back, you’ll have a hard time getting rid of me.  I’m not going anywhere as long as I can help it.”

“I don’t want you to tolerate that Lillian and I…”

“Sy-”

“I feel like a cad, Jessie.  You deserve better than a cad.”

“You were a cad when Jamie took to you, and you were a cad when I did.  I’m probably genetically predisposed to like you, and if and when we exact revenge on the Academies, we can exact revenge on them for that.”

“Ha ha,” I said, dry.  “I’m being serious.”

“So am I.  You’re not paying attention, Sy.”

“I’m paying enough attention to know you’re tolerating stuff when you say you’re okay with it.”

“Sy-”

“Jess.”

She drew in a breath, hugged my arm against her side, and kept her eyes straight ahead as she spoke.  “You know what I am.”

“I know.”

“Connect the dots, then.  Realize what I am.  I never forget.  The memories are… right there.  Neatly categorized, all in order.  You talk about you and Lillian like… I don’t even know.  Like you want me to be bothered by it.”

“That’s not it.”

“It’s almost like it.  But you’re missing the key detail.  To me… you were with her five minutes ago.  The memory is fresh in my mind.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

Ah.

“To me, you came down the stairs from the bedroom, and Lillian had a skip in her step and you looked more relaxed than I’ve seen you in a long time.  It might as well have been five minutes ago, and the memory is fresh in my mind.”

I nodded, with emphasis.

“It might as well have been that I just saw you sneaking a kiss, sitting with her on the back steps of the orphanage.  I just saw you tuck a bit of her hair behind her ear and lean in close and whisper words of encouragement.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“If it was going to bother me or break my heart it would have done it a long time ago, because there are an awful lot of small moments anyone would be envious of.”

“I don’t have many of those moments,” I said.  “I don’t- those memories aren’t there.”

“I know, Sy.  But listen, okay?  I don’t feel diminished, because I remember my moments.  I remember you buying me the same nice pen from that store in Tynewear twice, because you forgot you’d done it the first time.  I remember you making me tea and sitting with me, and we had the conversation with Mr. Bubbles.  I have the moments I overheard you talking to Shirley and saying the nicest things about me.  Our little game of one-upmanship, to ease into things, fumble our way forward in a facsimile of a real first relationship, awkwardness and all, and I remember the various fumblings of yours and of mine, and it’s especially nice.”

“You’ll have to tell me those stories,” I said.  “I’d love a refresher sometime.”

“Anytime.  Any time there’s not anything more pressing, I’ll tell you stories.  I’ll be your memory.  I’ll refresh you on the seventh time we slept in the same bed after becoming a pair and you kissed my scars – all of them, as numerous as they are, and-”

As steadfast as she was, Jessie rarely got choked up, but she’d gotten choked up here.

“It mattered an awful lot,” she said.  “And I wouldn’t trade my moments for Lillian’s any day.”

I turned to her, and my forehead pressed against hers.  I would have held her, if it wasn’t for the chains.

“Well,” I said.  “Anytime there’s not anything more pressing, if you need a refresher…”

She brushed the side of my face with her hand.

“If I reach for that memory, I can almost relive it, it’s so clear.  I relive an awful lot of moments with you an awful lot,” she said.

“Apparently pretty awful,” I said.

“If we get to the point where we need to figure things out, we’ll figure them out.  And if you or Lillian decide one way or the other, I’ll step back, still at your side, and I’ll be pretty happy with the memories.”

“Yeah, no,” I said.  “That’s just not going to work, you damn martyr.  You’re too willing to retreat, on the surface of it, but the emotions always shine through.”

Jessie smiled.

Then she lifted her head.

I followed her line of sight.  Looking through the window toward the rest of the Academy, I could see it was the gossamer thing, making its slow approach to our building.  It moved with few anchors, and the wind pulled at it, hard.

It advanced, and it reached out, attaching its anchors.  It didn’t mount an attack.

Instead, as if the great thing had sighed and something had left it in the process, it billowed in response to the wind, and then it began to collapse, draping itself over the girl’s dormitory, and the bridges to either side of it.

Its descent and the movement of the creature against the exterior of the building made a rasping noise.  Here and there, windows were slashed and broke.  Things outside fell, pulled down by strands that anchored reflexively.

As final moves went, the thing had managed its final attack well.

Its well poisoned, the thing had needed food and water from an outside source.  Our opposition hadn’t had a lot to spare, nor had they had the ability to send it to other sources of water, given how we were bordered by polluted ocean to the east and a wasteland to the west.

We’d weathered the attacks.  The nobles redirected and captured, they didn’t have much.  Now they didn’t have the gossamer thing.

By unspoken agreement, Jessie and I went to collect Lillian and find the others.  Duncan, Mary, and Ashton were in the other dormitory, coordinating defenses.  After the enemy’s initial focus on the admin building had proven useless or even detrimental, they’d turned their full focus to the other dormitory.  No alarms had been sounded and no tap-code messages communicated.  We had to assume they were alright.

Lillian stirred awake with a gentle shake of the shoulder.

“Did you get him, Jess?”

“She got me,” I said.

“Sorry I missed it,” Lillian said.

She took my hand and stood.  Jessie looked her way, and Lillian avoided the eye contact.

I remembered the cold horror the Infante had brought me.  It made me uneasy, being around her.

Before we were halfway to the penthouse garden that served as the girl’s dormitory headquarters, students from the garden found us.

“Hi Leah,” Jessie said.  “Where do we stand?”

“Access to the garden is limited.  We’re using the small library.”

“Good enough.  Show us the way.”

The library was actually a narrow space, only two paces across, separated into three levels.  It had the odd effect of being shaped like a space for a book to fit into, and as we used it for a meeting place, many students gathered on the ledges above that overlooked the central area of the library.

Many, many of our rebels were gathered at the window.  Most had binoculars or spyglasses.

When we went to investigate, instead of providing answers, one of them simply handed a pair of binoculars to Jessie.  Lillian got the next set, while I, chopped liver that I was, was the last to get a view.

There was a group standing where the bridge joined the building.  The tallest among them was waving a kerchief.  The flag of surrender.  It looked like they were mostly  aristocrats.  No Nobles, no Doctors.  Not the ones we were really interested in going after.

Were all of the aristocrats surrendering?  No.  But it was the first crack in the facade.  They’d lost most of their big weapons, and others were being stripped away.  They were hungry and feeling that hunger, and many would be thirsty.

It wasn’t wholly out of the question that they would surrender in this moment.  They were of the higher class.  They had pride.  Starvation and destitution threatened that.

Supposedly.

“We’re not going over to talk to them,” I said.  “If they want to talk, they can come to us.  They know the bridges are rigged with bombs, they haven’t dared to cross one since the first was blown.  If they’re serious, they’ll take the risk that crossing that bridge entails, and they’ll negotiate on our turf.”

“Makes sense,” Jessie said.

We had our people make their exit and wave our would-be recruits over.  It turned out they were proud.  It turned out they were serious.

They crossed the bridge, and negotiations got underway.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.12 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.12

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“Check them for weapons at the door, confiscate any you find,” I instructed the group of rebels.  “Offer them nothing.  When you’re done and they’re settled, stand at the edges of the room.”

“Spaced out, or…?”

“Spaced out, sure.  Then keep quiet.  If you make eye contact with them, don’t be the person to break it.  If they say anything, ignore them.  They’re going to react, they’ll push, they’ll say things, and they’ll threaten you.  But you’re the ones with power, alright?”

That got me a series of nods from the rebel soldiers.

“If you absolutely have to say something, keep it short, firm, along the lines of ‘I’m going to need you to be quiet’, and make sure they can see your weapon in its holster.  If you’re losing your nerve, if you can’t stay firm, or if anything comes up, I want you to use gestures, alright?  Two fingers extended while your hands are in front of you, as if to cover your watch, like so.  We’ll be watching from around the corner and we’ll call you out of the room.”

I didn’t miss the fact that they glanced in Jessie’s direction to confirm that it was okay to listen to me.

“If they’re not cooperating, then show them the door.  If they don’t cooperate there, then, hm, one of them should hang back so they can run to us, shouldn’t they?”

The question was aimed at me.

“Yeah,” I said.  “The chances there are a problem are slim.  You’ll be fine.”

Jessie gave the confirmation, and the students headed to the door.

Lillian and Helen caught up with us around the time that we were hearing the commotion at the door.  One loud voice with crisp enunciation stood out from the rest.

“Duncan, Ashton, Mary and the younger Lambs are on their way, and your lieutenants are heading over there to replace them.  Nora is hanging back there so we know if anything happens.”

“Our lieutenants.”

“Sure, Sy,” Lillian said.

“You can give them orders and they’ll listen.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“Well, I mean, you’ve always wanted to run an Academy, and Jessie and I worked hard to get to this point.  Mary’s taking to this and she’s enjoying having soldiers to order around, I think.”

“She is.”

“And this is something we should share and do together,” I said.  “I get if this is bittersweet, but it’s not an entirely bad thing and-”

Lillian reached up and covered my mouth.

“Is this usual?” Lillian asked Jessie, as Helen stalked around me, giving off all of the ‘danger’ vibes, her eyes on me.  She reached out and fixed my hair.

“I think he’s agitated because he’s happy,” Jessie said.

“Nuh, inf urhrifahd,” I mumbled into Lillian’s hand.

“Or he’s agitated because he’s terrified.”

“Ihm affy oo, hoh”

“Sy sounds like this man I knew once,” Helen said.  “It was a long time ago, I don’t know if Jamie took notes on it, so I’m not sure if you know about it, Jessie.  It was a man with a beard.  I sucked his tongue out of his mouth, it took some doing, but it came off at the root.”

“I had the notes.  MacPaul.”

“Macpaul!  Yes!  The deserter.  Yes, he was lovely.”

“Ohfleh?”

“And he sounded like Sy?” Jessie asked.

“Well, I had my hand over his mouth after I pulled my head away, and there was a lot of snorting and gurgling because of the blood, but yes.  I’m feeling nostalgic now.  It’s making me even more restless now.”

“If this discussion goes badly, we’ll give you a chance to work out that restlessness,” Jessie said.

The group was entering the sitting room.  Lillian dropped her hand from my mouth and we stepped out of the way while they got settled.

The sitting room was a middle-point in between three separate areas for the girl’s dormitories, separated roughly into the younger years, the middle years, and the senior students, at the south, west, and north walls of the building, respectively.  The room was divided into stages, with roughly the same intended hierarchy, scattered chairs, seats, tables, and bookshelves serving to make the space comfortable.

I peeked and confirmed there were ten aristocrats present, but many of them paired off in husband wife pairs, and I had the impression the men would mostly do the talking.  Tradition took more of a hold when moving into the upper ranks of society.

The position of the chairs gave some indication of the hierarchy of those present.  They didn’t all sit as a cluster – we’d arranged chairs on the upper level so they could, but if they’d taken that bait then they would have been huddled.  It implied weakness.

Still, they didn’t space themselves across the whole room.  Had they been nobles, I could imagine they might, confident enough to protect themselves without the benefit of their herd.

They did, I noted, avoid sitting down, with the exception of several of the wives.  They stood by chairs, claiming them, but they weren’t letting their guard down.

“They’re not even here to greet us, hm?” one man spoke.  He had dark hair and a prominent chin that might have owed to Academy science.  He looked athletic.  He wore a suit and bore a tidy pencil mustache, and he was one of only two men present who didn’t have a wife with him.  “You’re not going to respond to me?”

There was only silence.

“Burner, you know how these games are played,” said one of the husbands.  A near-peer of the man who’d taken the lead and the best seat in the room?  He talked to the other with a familiar tone.

“I know, believe me, but there’s a certain decorum to be expected.  There’s absolutely no need or benefit in disrespecting people after they’ve waved the white flag.”

“I feel the same way, but we gain nothing by allowing them to agitate us.”

“I’m far from agitated.  If I was agitated, blood would have been shed already.”

“You’ll put us all at risk if you keep that up, Burner,” a lady spoke.  Interesting, that she spoke and her husband was silent, almost deferential.  I noted a harsher note to her voice.  A rebuke.

The conversation continued, shifting to milder observations of the space, and a few attempts at getting responses from the guards we’d assigned.

“When are they coming?”

Silence.

“What did they offer to get you to betray your King and country?  I’m curious what a young man’s patriotism is worth.”

Silence.

That she’d come or been sent… I wondered if she represented a different faction.

As far as expendable messengers went, those connected to the rest by paper or by blood would cost too much to lose.  The celebritas wouldn’t be sent nor would they be willing to go.  Government, military, or commerce, then.

There were four players worth paying attention to, now that I was reading the room.  Sir Burner Lisburn was the loud, brusque one.  His friend, apparently, was a John Salford.  Government and military in some proportion there, between the two of them.

The young lady was Mrs. Derby.  Burner and John were friends, but Derby wasn’t a friend of theirs.  She belonged to a different faction and occupied a different space in the greater structure of it all.  Money, if I had to guess.

The fourth was a fat man.  He didn’t speak, he wasn’t named, and the sole reason he caught my eye was that the others kept a distance from him, and he seemed content to sit in the lowest tier of the room’s stepped floor.

He was harder to peg.  I had my suspicions, all the same.

A rebel approached us, leaning close to Jessie’s ear, then to Lillian’s.

Not that it was wholly necessary.  By the time the sentence was fully uttered, Jessie’s hand was moving, gesturing, explaining.

Duncan and Mary were back.  There was a number, and Jessie had already drawn and retrieved a lady’s pocketwatch.

She gestured the start of the countdown, then abandoned the task, leaving us to count in our heads as she saw to my cuffs.  I was free.  I was fairly sure that even with my mind intentionally turned to the task, I couldn’t do an abundance of damage.

Fairly sure.

Jessie resumed the countdown without glancing at the watch.

As a unit, we stepped into the sitting room, interrupting our guests mid-conversation.  Duncan and Mary’s group entered from the opposite side, coordinated.  The little ones weren’t present.

“And here they are.  The Lambs.  I must say, the Gages had a great deal to say about some of you,” Burner said.

“They’re not among our guests, as I recall,” Jessie said.

“We’ve heard the stories.  There was other talk when we were cooped up in that building over there.  You’re a known element.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, being sure to smile.

We’d finished crossing the room.  I stood between Jessie and Lillian, Mary stood next to Lillian.  On the other side, Ashton, Helen, and Duncan formed a trio.

“Well,” John Salford said.  “I hope this can be a civil discussion.”

“Barring incident, I do believe the plan is to have a discussion and send you back, to report to your betters,” Duncan said.  He glanced at Jessie and I.  I saw Jessie’s hand move in confirmation.

Burner was the first to take his seat.  It was positioned so he could look down on the rest of the room.  “Then here we are.  I recommend everyone who’s going to take a seat should do so.  This is liable to take a while.”

“Not too long,” Jessie said.  “This will take a little while to digest, so we’ll send you back and discuss the minutiae in a bit.”

“I’m just going to interrupt before we get too far underway,” I said.  I turned my head, looking at the nearest guard.  “Would you go to the kitchen?  Get tea?  Food?  Something hearty.  Sausage, perhaps, and that fried onion mince.”

I moved my hand as I spoke, on the pretense of fixing the button at the front of my vest.

“Yes sir,” the guard said.  “Understood.”

John Salford smiled.  “And to think you were said to be the least civil of the Lambs.  Sylvester, was it?”

I smiled.  “Yes.”

“You’re the ringleader of this…”

“I’d call it a maneuver,” Mary said.  “He and Jessie spearheaded it.”

“So that one’s Jessie?” the man asked.  He seemed to digest that.  “Curious, but I can already see my friend here getting riled up.  Shall we tack up?”

“We can move to the business at hand,” I said.

“Then I won’t waste time.  You’re a few steps away from wrapping this up neatly, Lambs.  There was discussion and it was decided that the most adventurous of us would step up and approach all of you, so we could start negotiations.”

“The most adventurous?” I asked.  “You mean the most expendable?”

I saw them bristle.  Burner was the most bristly in the moment.

“Semantics, Sylvester,” Mary said.  “As they say in the warzones, first into the breach.  The brave are often the easiest to discard.”

“Perhaps,” I said.  “But we’re getting sidetracked.  I wouldn’t say the conclusion is even questionable at this stage.  It’s close to being wrapped up.  The Nobles aren’t going anywhere, you all know your circumstances now.  Things aren’t liable to change.”

“If that’s the case, then after this afternoon’s discussion, we’ll return to the other building, and we’ll see how the current situation plays out.  If it’s already wrapped up as you say, then there’s nothing lost.  If we still have a way to put up a fight, as the massed collection of Professors and some of the most well-to-dos of the Crown States believe we do, then we’ll prove that the case, and you’ll have missed your chance.”

“So this isn’t even a serious discussion, you’re still clinging to illusions,” I said.

“We’re opening dialogue.  I think we can agree it’ll be helpful, whatever direction things take.”

“Ah,” I said.  “Well then, as the ones to call the truce, I think we’ll hear you out?  No complaints, Lambs?”

There were no complaints.

“As of right now, the situation could go either way, Lambs.  The Nobles are out there, and you can’t hold them at bay forever.  You will run out of materials for gas and you’ll lose that advantage.”

“We might not have infinite materials for gas, sir,” Duncan spoke, “But you’re even shorter on supplies when it comes to food, water, and medicine.  We’re equipped to keep going for some time.  You’re going to perish before we do.”

“We have other weapons and tools in reserve.  We’ve got things in the works for ensuring we can get by.  Don’t underestimate what the great minds of the Academy can put into motion.”

“Oh, believe me, we know full well what the Academy can do.  It’s why we’re here,” I said.

“In more than one sense,” Jessie said.

“We’ll fend for ourselves for a while yet, Lambs,” Burner said, his voice low.

“Bravado,” Mrs. Derby said, addressing him.

“Watch yourself,” Burner said.

“You can tell the others I didn’t put up a strong front when we’re back, Burner.  But we’re licked.  They know we have resources and our ability to turn our warbeast stock into waste recycling and a food supply is only going to go so far.”

The aristocrats didn’t have a response for that, and the Lambs didn’t volunteer anything.

She was a willowy woman with straight black hair and long lashes, and she moved with a kind of precision as she folded her hands in her lap.  Her husband reached over to put his hand over hers.

When she looked up, I could tell that she wasn’t bluffing.  A measure of fear shone through.

“How does this maneuver of yours conclude?” she asked.

There was a subtle effect that played over the assembled group of ten.  I might have said they were steeling themselves, but not all of them were steel.  An internal furnace was stoked in Burner’s case, finding a vented release in the movements of his fingers.  John Salford almost did the opposite, going still.  He was the introvert of the pair.

I spoke, “When all of this began, for the Lambs, we were plucked from bad circumstance.  We were put to work in service to the Crown.  We were exposed to a lot of ugliness, we dealt with many forces that operate in places where ordinary citizens don’t get or want to look.”

“We lost several of our own,” Lillian said.

“You want revenge?” Burner asked, interrupting.  He sounded galled.

“No,” Jessie said.  “Nothing so crude as that.”

When we’d discussed this, we hadn’t arranged who would say what or when, we hadn’t rehearsed.  But we’d talked it out, we’d decided what we needed to do, and in the course of that discussion, each of us had found certain points that resonated with them.  More by instinct than by plan, we would take our turns speaking, voicing those points from the heart, or speaking when our individual voices reflected the tone and sentiment that we wanted to strike.  Jessie was the gentlest of us, in a lot of ways.

When the others weren’t jumping in, I’d say what needed to be said, because I liked to talk.

“We lost our own,” Lillian said.  “We saw tragic circumstances for a lot of other experiments, for children, and for child experiments.”

“Every one of those realities, I’d be willing to bet, served a purpose.  Call it evil, but it wasn’t wholly wrong,” Burner said.

“Maybe not,” Lillian said.  She paused.  “That’s meant to be a distant maybe.  But we stand where we stand because of how we were made to serve a purpose.  The skills we learned, the things we took away from the monsters and Doctors we hunted.  And now you sit where you sit because of all of those same things too.”

Our rebel students entered the room, carrying trays of tea, as well as plates of breakfast.  I hadn’t specifically requested greens, but steamed greens sat on one side of the plate.  Likely Possum doing her utmost to keep us in good health.

For all their breeding and all of the games they’d played, the aristocrats weren’t used to doing without.  Their eyes followed the food as the food came to us, was placed on small tables, the lids pulled off of trays to reveal the feasts within.

It was the gravest of wrongs, in the highest society and at the very bottom rungs of it, to refuse hospitality.

But that refusal, in part, was a point we aimed to drive home.

The Lambs ate, standing by the tables, working their way through their meals, serving the tea, cutting sausage, aromas filling the room.

“No civility after all,” Burner said, when it became clear that we weren’t providing them a bite to eat.

“No, I suppose not,” I said.

“I’ll guess we’re not here for your justice either,” Salford said.

“It’s likely,” Lillian said.  She dabbed at her mouth with a kerchief, her fork in her other hand.  “But it would be as a bittersweet accident, not the goal.”

“The path we walked,” I said.  “Jessie and I walked it as a pair for a time, while the others did what they needed to do.  We besieged a prison and we claimed your prisoners, bringing them under our banner.”

“We discussed that event with others before we came to speak with you.”

“They were only a few of the exceptional friends that joined us.  Last year, we acted against Beattle, and we absconded with the student population, turning them rebel.”

“And you put them to effective work here, it seems,” John Salford said.

“We got our ducks in a row, developed resources, and we came here, yes,” I said.  “We claimed Hackthorn and its headmistress.”

“Claim,” Mrs. Derby said.  She hung her head a little.  “You’ve made it a refrain.  I see where this thread of conversation goes, now.”

“You’ve claimed us,” John Salford said.

“That’s a part of it,” Mary said.  “We’ll have to execute some of you.  But some of you will work for us, yes.”

“You can’t imagine we’ll turn coat,” Burner growled.

“You’ll serve us for however long you serve us at gunpoint,” Mary said.  “Or knifepoint.  It might involve poisons in your veins that we hold the antidotes for, or parasites living in you that sleep for only as long as we supply you the right treatments.”

“But you’re wanting to bring us under your control?” Mrs. Derby asked.  “You’re collecting us?”

“The Crown States are being swallowed by plague and black wood,” I said.  “The Infante is preparing to leave, and when he does, he won’t be looking back.  We’ll send a ship ahead with a message saying that all parties who’ve gathered and who were preparing to leave as a group are holding back while a possible incidence of plague in their number is being investigated.  You- and I do mean all of you who are present here, you become question marks.  All considered, especially given they don’t plan to return until much later, and given no communication is really extending outside of this little patch of oblivion… I don’t think they’ll investigate the question mark.  You’ll be dead without being dead.”

That statement filled the air.  They were tense now.  The facades were breaking down, for all but the fat man in the corner.

The room was very quiet.  In the distance, we could hear gunshots.  They might have been trying something at the other dormitory.  We had enough good people and resources there to stall – if something had happened, it was better to look unconcerned and in control than to strive to respond to it.

Posturing mattered here.  It was why we’d concerned ourselves with the layout of the chairs.

Jessie spoke, “We’ve been steadily advancing what we’re doing, but the pattern is the same.  We took your prisoners.  We took your students.  We took your Academy and Professor.  What comes next follows from there.”

Ms. Derby spoke, “The next step is that you’re taking-”

“-The Crown States,” Jessie said.

“You’re mad,” John Salford said, without a moment’s pause.  It was a statement I might have expected from Burner, for its vitriol and emotion, when Salford had been so collected before now.  The man’s eyes were wide.  As loud as Burner had been at the beginning, he’d fallen silent.

The patter of gunshots in the distance had stopped.  Either it had been nothing serious and there was no reason to shoot, or it had been very serious, and the shooters were dead.

“Mad?  More than a little,” I said, my voice soft.

Ashton spoke up for the first time.  “I read in books once that we were supposed to treat others how we wanted to be treated.  Isn’t it only fair?”

“You’re enslaving us,” John Salford said.  “You’re trying to build something here?  In plague-ridden wastelands?  With who?  How?”

“You mean the who of you that we’re not forcing to stay behind?  The who would be anyone who wants to stay,” Helen said.  “Anyone who would rather take the risk of dying to plague, if it means being free until then, instead of being safe but shackled.”

“As for how,” Lillian said.  “We have some brilliant minds and people available to devote to the task.  I think we’ll manage some headway against the problems of plague and black wood.”

“I’d say you were arrogant, holding yourselves in that kind of esteem,” Mr. Salford said.  “But you’re not talking about you and your rebels.  You’re talking about us.  We’re supposed to be your great minds.”

“All those people in the admin building?  Brilliant.  Capable hands, educated, driven.  With the right incentives, the guns to heads, poisons and parasites, they’ll do what we need of them,” Duncan said.  “The nine of you will contribute as well, unless you’d prefer grisly ends.”

“There are ten of us,” Salford said, quiet.

“There are nine of you,” I said.  “And whatever else you want, whatever else you’re pushing for, you’re not quite at the point where you’ll want to use him.”

Burner rose from his seat.  He placed his hands on the quarter-circle of railing that bounded the upper stage of the tiered room.

He looked at the heavyset man, who sat with his hands folded, fingers of one hand drumming on the back of the other.

“He’s insurance, isn’t he?  A way to guarantee that if we had plans to shoot you messengers, you could at least take some of us down with you.  They might even have asked you to consider eliminating all of us in one shot if you could.  If you’re loyal enough to the Crown and what it means.”

Burner set his very defined jaw.

“You’re not that loyal,” I said.  “You have ways forward.  You have doors open to you, even when faced with life under our thumbs, rather than the Crown’s.  You have hope, still, that there’s a way to break our siege and return to your old lives.  Unless you’re going to admit that Mrs. Derby was right, and you have no chance at all?”

He was considering it.  Giving the order that would bring their Trojan horse into play.

I turned my head, taking in the Lambs.  All stood straight, and all wore their individual variations on expressions of grim satisfaction.  I kept my eye out for hand signals, and saw one.

“You can give him the order if you want,” I said.  “Just know what it costs you.  If we bring this to a close, we’re going to be the most powerful people on the Western hemisphere.  Do you really want to be on our bad side?”

Burner tensed, and then he turned.  He strode from the room so suddenly that the rest of the group that had accompanied him had no time to react, no sycophants keeping stride with him or supporting him as he made his exit.  They hurried to catch up.

Our soldiers hurried to accompany and escort them.

It was Salford who indicated the fat man.  “Cross.  Come.”

The man in the corner didn’t respond.

Cross.

The fat man reacted, sluggish.

Come.

Ashton’s hand signal had indicated the experiment that was dressed up in an aristocrat’s skin was reacting to him.  They’d dosed the aristocrats who were going to be in our company, but they hadn’t been able to effectively dose him, or whatever they’d used had been of limited effect, and Ashton had overwhelmed that effect.

The man trudged off, joining the rest of the aristocrats who were leaving, preparing to convey this reality we’d proposed to the rest of the people in the main building.

It was Mrs. Derby and her husband who lingered behind.  She waved her husband on, bidding him to leave her alone with us.

She might have had enough character that she could meet our eyes and both think and talk clearly in the midst of all of this, but she wasn’t fearless.  Far from it.  She looked even more scared now.

“They won’t agree so easily,” she said.

“But you agree?” Lillian asked.

“Saying I did would… I can’t just voice my surrender so simply,” she said.  “But I haven’t been left many choices, have I?”

“They’re riled up and the others will be too,” Jessie said.  “They’ll try something, the nobles will coordinate with them, one final attempt.  You could hitch your cart to that wagon.”

“Would you?” Mrs. Derby asked.

Jessie shook her head slowly.

“I may be willing to offer my cooperation.  I assume it would position me and my family better, when the dust has settled?”

“You can assume,” I said.

She nodded.

“You seem to be taking this in stride,” Duncan said.

Mrs. Derby opened her mouth, as if to respond, then closed it, giving us a single nod.  She paused before speaking, “Out with the old, and in with the new?  Isn’t that what they say?”

“It is,” Duncan said.

“No difference between the two,” she said.  She glanced down, fixing her dress, before clasping her hands before her.  “I’ll adapt.”

She curtsied slightly, and she left the room.

No difference between the two.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.13 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The Nobles stood on the rooftop, amid the bodies of scattered warbeasts and experiments.  Ribcages had been torn apart so they spiked skyward from otherwise unrecognizable piles of meat and gristle.  Skulls had been bifurcated, some so neatly that it seemed inconceivable that it had been done in combat, while others had been divided in a messy way, skull fragments sticking through torn flesh and scale.

It was getting late, and we’d decided that they were too relaxed up there.  We’d taken care to ensure the warbeasts didn’t suit as food.  The ones who scattered the rooftop and hung from the branches that had grown across it were only a small share.  Some had been bloated, filled with gas or parasites.  Junior and Poppy- Persephone?  Prissy?  I wasn’t sure of her name.  Whoever she’d been, she and Junior had made sure that many of the warbeasts, when slain, had smelled as pungent as possible.

My sampling of the smell had revealed it to be something like faeces mixed with perfume.  I’d prepared myself in advance of the sample by liberally coating every inch of my body, hair, and clothing in powder, inside and out, changing out of the clothes in question right after.

Even with that, only Ashton had been willing to keep me company for the twelve hours that followed.

The Nobles were holding up remarkably well.  One or two had been lightly injured by the second wave of warbeasts we’d sent their way.  When they’d realized the traps hidden within the beasts, they’d changed their tactics, parrying tooth or claw while physically throwing the beasts off the rooftop.  It was harder and more hazardous, when most of the beasts were several hundred pounds.  Most beasts had accelerated reflexes and enhanced strength.  Some had barbs in their fur to make letting go that much harder.

Junior had been one of the more dangerous, devious, and ruthless of Beattle’s students, leading the Rank.  We’d told him, Prissy and Gordeux to go all out, and this had been the result.  Spite, traps and overall nastiness blended together with snarling warbeasts we’d mostly inured to the gas.

The Lady Gloria was one of the injured.  She had torn off her sleeves and used them to wrap the wound at her middle, and she was the only noble who wasn’t standing, seating herself on one corner of the roof, her head turned our way, the wind periodically blowing her hair this way or that.

The rest stood, pretending to be impervious to the elements.  They had been up there since dawn, and now the sun was going down.  The light was fading, and the Nobles on the rooftop were getting harder and harder to make out.

“Soon,” Mary said.

I lowered the binoculars and rubbed my eyes, my shackles rattling.  I turned my back to the window, resting against the wall to the side of it.  The room had a series of beds in it, but only one of the beds was occupied.  Nora had arranged her overlarge body so she curled up in the corner, her shoulders and head against the headboard, her back and legs against the wall that the bed had been set against.  Three pillows had been propped up around her, in use by four different people, with Abby and Bo Peep sharing the one by her knees.  Ashton used another, and Lara rested directly against her sister’s upper body, hugging a pillow instead of using it to rest her head.  Quinton did without, just enjoying the proximity of the others as he lay on his side.  Two blankets were haphazardly shared by the group in a way that seemed entirely sub-optimal, but I doubted I could have fixed it, and I knew I would’ve woken at least one of them by trying.

Emmett, pretending to be too mature for the sleep pile, had seated himself by the foot of the bed.  But he was still young and there was only a certain extent to which he could act the adult.  He’d dozed off, and because of Quinton’s hoof jutting over the bed, had unconsciously tilted his head to one side, into a very uncomfortable position, so he wouldn’t get repeatedly kicked in the head as Quinton had his running and jumping dreams.

Lara was awake and all but unable to move, nestled in as she was.  Her eyes were open, and she was humming, accenting the hums with a vibrating distortion.

Her eyes watched me.  The two main eyes were red-rimmed in a way that might’ve made my eyes water sympathetically, were I not used to them.  Her eyelids themselves looked like she’d screwed them shut and endured having someone rub glass dust and salt into the lids until she had two black eyes and the eyelids themselves were raw and shredded.  The orbs weren’t much better.  The structure of the space around the eyes was mid-transition.  Lesser eyes, even more damaged looking, were peering out, socketed in spaces where skull had dissolved into socket and the surrounding flesh was pushing out latent infection and skull fragments in painful looking clusters.

Bone fragments and eyes.

The arms that hugged the pillow appeared overlong, but it was just her claws.

“We should be positioned.  They’re going to try something, and this time they’re going to be desperate,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I raised the binoculars.  The Nobles were still there.  One of the Nobles I hadn’t put a name to was talking to Lady Gloria.  The distance and the lighting meant I couldn’t make out the lip movements.

“Are you going to come?” Mary asked.

“Might as well,” I said.  “We going to bring Ashton?”

“He might be useful,” she said.  “Even if the enemy is counteracting him.”

“If we can tax their resources by forcing them to prepare Ashton countermeasures, that’s a good thing,” I said.

The humming died down.  I lowered the binoculars and glanced at Lara.

She looked very concerned.  Her eyes blinked, the ordinary ones out of sync with the others.  Some of the others didn’t have enough eyelid to blink fully.

“We’ll make sure he’s safe,” I said, my volume quieter than normal, as if I was saying it to Mary, though I met Lara’s eyes.

“Don’t stop,” Ashton mumbled.  His hand reached up and patted clumsily at Lara’s face.

“They want you,” she said.

“Mmm,” Ashton said.  His eyes snapped open.

He’d somehow wound up at the center of the mob, with a pillow against his belly while Peep and Abby rested on it.  He managed to extricate himself without disturbing them too much, stepped off the bed, and where another person might have stretched, he remained poised, like a stitched that had burned through a wire, hunched over with arms slightly raised, knees slightly bent.

His hands went to his belt, and he drew a comb.  He immediately set to fixing his hair, his eyes fixed on the ground a few feet head of him.  Done entirely from memory.

I glanced out the windows.  Lady Gloria was no longer talking to the others.  They’d taken their former perches, spaced out on the roof and surrounding branches.  The residual gas drifted across the Academy.

We headed for the door, and Ashton moved to follow, glancing back at the others.  His attention was on his clothes now, fixing wrinkles.

“They’re not going to care, Ashton,” I said.

I care,” he said.

We stepped out into the hallway, and I gently eased the door shut behind us, as quietly as I was able when chained.  I was very aware of Lara’s penetrating stare as the gap narrowed and the door finally closed.

“I’m trying to decide if we should unchain you,” Mary said.  “On the one hand, you’d be faster, and you could help more.  On the other, when all is said and done, I think I’d be more effective if I wasn’t having to keep as much of an eye on you.”

“Best to play it safe,” I said.

“Chains on, then.”

We passed a window.  I peered through, raising my binoculars.  The light was worse, but I could make out the Nobles.

We passed the next window, and the combination of light and angle made it next to impossible to tell if the Nobles were there.  I met Mary’s eyes.  “They’re gone.”

“I saw,” she said.

Our pace picked up.  We headed down one set of stairs, then another, and by the time we entered the hallway, we were running.

Lillian, Duncan, and Jessie were by the doors.

“They’re moving,” I said.

Duncan twisted around, raising a hand.

The gate cracked open.  Cages creaked as doors were opened.  Experiments flooded out, moving in a stream.  All pack animals, all a cross between simian and canine, with faces defined by long, slanted eyes and the long canine teeth that jutted more forward than up or down.

Duncan hauled open another cage.  His Grabber pawed its way forward, tentacles lashing this way and that as it felt its way, exploring the world beyond its cage.  It was the size of a horse, but its body was lighter and its legs longer and stronger.  The thing’s children were closer to large dogs in size.  All headless, all with tentacles framing the stumps where the necks should have begun.

Lillian wasn’t wearing the suit she’d designed.  The Treasurer was, buried within what looked like muscle layered over muscle, with no skin to cover it.  Only the mask wasn’t organic, his breath hissing through the filters.  Even with the added mass and extra foot and a half of height, he looked burdened with the casks and the cages he carried.  The lifeforms within the cages were similar to the canine-simian chimeras, but they were smaller.  Less baboon-wolf and more chimpanzee-puppy.

Lillian only had a rifle and her white coat.  She had a quarantine mask, but she didn’t wear it over her face, instead leaving it hanging around her throat, like a second face.

Helen was smiling, swaying on the spot as if to music only she could hear.

“Go,” I said to Helen, as I stopped walking, coming to a halt beside Jessie.

Helen was right on the heels of the slowest of the attack beasts we’d unleashed.

“Drop ropes down,” I reminded the students who stood off to the side.  “Two tugs, a pause, and two more tugs, means it’s us.  Or you can just cut the ropes and leave us out there.  Would be a tidy way to get rid of us.”

“He’s joking,” Jessie said.  Like Lillian, she had a mask.  “Don’t do that.  Really.”

With that, we stepped through the morass of builder’s wood that had been cleaved and pulled down out of the way, freeing the doors to open, and we passed through the gap and into the city proper.  There was a haze, but the word from our Doctors was that it was supposed to be inert, now.  The moisture was still heavy in the air, but the chemicals wouldn’t be active.  Ominous, to see ambient clouds of what had been corrosive gas, but not hazardous.

“Nervous, Sy?” Lillian asked.  Her voice was hushed, and it sounded eerie, given the landscape.

“Hm?  Never.”

“Never, right, yeah,” she said.  “You always poke fun when you’re uneasy.”

“Uneasy?  Here?  Naw,” I said.  My eyes scanned the area.  There wouldn’t be any Nobles, not here, not this far in this fast.  I still felt the need.  “We’re sticking our necks out, there’s no danger.”

“We spread out as soon as we’re into the street,” Jessie said.  “Duncan, Lillian, Ashton, you’re the fulcrum points.  Mary-”

“I’ll fulcrum,” I said.

“You’re chained up.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “Let me be the bait.”

“Let him,” Mary said.

“Alright,” Jessie said, her voice soft.  “Mary, Duncan’s beasts, Treasurer, Helen, and I are floating.  Ashton, stay close to the middle, support whoever needs supporting, which will probably be Sy or me.  I’ll take the west, since that puts me further from the side with the Nobles.”

“The objective isn’t to kill,” Mary said.  “We don’t need to win.”

I might have made a joke about Mary needing to convince herself of that.  I didn’t.  I’d just been called out on poking fun, for one thing, and I knew the words weren’t meant for Mary, but for Helen, who was already roaming, staying just in earshot.

The sound of a distant thud drew our collective attention.

The thud was soon followed by a sound like a sturdy iron rake across cobblestone, and then a wet, gurgling scream.

The pack of warbeasts had found the nobles, or vice versa.

We moved as a unit, fanning out.  The Treasurer was a weak point, he didn’t know the dynamics, and in an odd way that completely went against the language Jessie had been using, he became the fulcrum point.  He was the fixed point which the rest of us revolved around, as we found positions, chose vantage points, and kept an eye on those closer to us.

“Blasted things!” a voice called out.  It was augmented.  Noble.

“Calm, Clifford,” a voice replied, further away.  It was only the sheer silence that hung over the city that allowed me to catch it.  “Calm.  They want us agitated.  It wouldn’t do to give them what they want without something in return.”

Something told me it was Carling.

“We’re not alone anymore,” a woman said.  “And it isn’t the beasts.  Not entirely.”

I paused, remaining where I was, chains gathered up in my hands and twisted around so they wouldn’t rattle more than was necessary.  Jessie was just a little further up ahead.  Lillian was a distance to my right.

Jessie signaled.  Three-three.

I passed on the signal to Lillian.  Lillian gestured to someone I couldn’t make out.  I knew it was the Treasurer, or it was someone who could access the Treasurer.

“Ho!” Carling called out.  “Fine evening, isn’t it?  Fine weather, not too warm for a summer evening.”

We all remained silent.

“Something just scurried across the rooftops, my Lord,” a Lady said.

“I know,” Carling said.

“It was smaller than the others, but larger than a housecat.  My Lord, cats and cockroaches aside, nothing should have survived the gas.”

“It was theirs.  They uncaged it just now.  I heard the hinges.  Just be on guard.  I imagine the blasted things have poison or they go for the eyes.  Whatever they do, they-”

The explosion cut him off.  A flare of orange struggled to penetrate the fog, and only served to bring a spot of warmth to it before fading, replaced with rolling black smoke.  Masonry crumbled to the ground in a steady patter.

“Ho ho!  That was an improbably big detonation for a small package!  Everyone alright!?” Carling called out.

I didn’t hear the responses.  The fog was thinning out, though.  The fire had burned away a lot of it, and much of the fog we had was rolling in to occupy the area around the explosion site.

Carling was talking an awful lot, taking an optimistic, lighthearted stance.  I suspected it wasn’t really for his fellow Nobles.

“You could have sustained the siege, couldn’t you?” Carling asked.  “You could have held back, remained secure at the perimeter, while letting us reunite with the others.  You’re done with your white gas, so you would have had to.  But you saw the need to venture out here yourselves.  I can hear two of you whispering.  A girl and a boy.  You’re worried.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong.  The skew of the worry might have been slightly different than he’d expected, though.

I glanced over at Jessie, who stood with her back to the corner of one house.  The house had taken some damage in the earlier fires.  I gestured as best as I was able to, without releasing my chains.

They flank.

Carling was communicating by some unnatural means, like subvocalizations, directing another noble to circle around.  That was very likely what Helen and Duncan or Helen and Ashton were discussing.

“You’re worried we’re going to stand firm.  We’re proud, and rightfully so.  Crown and Academy will hold out to the last.  The people in that building can do it in part because we represent something.  The Nobility matters to them.  You’re thusly compelled to act against us.  You Lambs need to take a piece out of us, for symbolic reasons.  And you’ll stake a great deal on it.  You put yourselves on the line.”

I met Jessie’s eyes, and I signaled, pointing.

Jessie raised her hand skyward, gesturing.  One-four.

I changed where I was pointing, hand moving to gauge distance.

Jessie changed the signal.  Three-four.

“You’re confident,” Carling said.  “And rightly so.  I’ve never actually experienced anything of the like.  This is… fascinating.”

The chimp-puppy popped out of the fog, somewhere between Jessie and I.  With the way the fog clung to the ground, it had been largely obscured.  Its eyes glowed bioluminescent through the mist as it assessed me, then it headed off at a diagonal.  Taking the long way round me.

“Am I going to be the only one talking?” Carling asked.

“I can respond,” I called out, gripping the chains tighter.  I was revealing my location.

“Excellent.  I’ll assume, based on discussions I’ve had with others, that you’d be Sylvester?”

“You assume right.”

“That leaves me to figure out what I need to ask you.  I won’t ask what your grand plan is.  You’ve likely told the others, and if we reach them, then we’ll hear the same.  If I asked-”

The second of the explosions was more intense than before, but I was closer to it this time.  It was only a few houses down from where I was.  I backed away from the source of the detonation, eyes on the shadows around the rooftops.  The fog and smoke made it appear as if things were there when they weren’t.

But I did have some experience with seeing things that weren’t there.  I wasn’t too unnerved.

Gut feeling had suggested they’d be close.  They’d be approaching from the most inconvenient, most unexpected angle, and that meant they’d circled the long way around.  Jessie had echoed my sentiment if she’d agreed to give the signal and open that cage.

The chimp-pups were akin to homing pigeons in some regards, except home was out the charges and canisters we’d laid out well in advance.  They pulled pins and levers and then scampered off to a second ‘home’ site.  By releasing them, we could activate explosives, gas canisters and traps at a dozen locations.

The original plan had been to use it to uproot the enemy if they decided to lay a counter-siege and try to access the boys’ or girls’ dormitories, but this worked too.

“These noisy interruptions are rather uncalled for,” Carling said.

“Already set in motion,” I said.  “Nothing I can do about them for the time being.”

“So I see.  I was hoping to have a civil discussion.”

“Ah,” I said.  “Well, you might be disappointed.  Civility isn’t ranked high on our list of priorities, these days.”

I heard Carling’s voice.  Not directed at me, this time.  “Where’s Lord Willoughby?”

There was a pause.

In the distance, there was a softer explosion, less sharp.

That last one was likely our safeguard to hold enemy reinforcements at bay.  They’d want to send people and experiments out to answer the explosions and help their nobles.  A fresh cloud of gas would buy us a little bit of time.

“Gas, that time?  You’ve injured a Lady and, unrelated to the gas, you’ve made Lord Willoughby disappear.”

With the heat burning away the fog, the figures in the distance were becoming clearer.  There was a distant glow of fire.

“I can hear the rattle of your chains, Sylvester.  Why are you chained up?  Are you that far gone?”

He was pacing.  I could track his voice as the silhouette moved through the fog.

“We thought we’d give you a handicap,” I said.

I heard the sound, low, building.  A chuckle.  It became a laugh.

I matched him in pacing, venturing further from the building I’d been hunkering down beside.

“What a shame that we had to be enemies,” Carling said.  “I would have liked to have you work for me.”

“I think the problem is that you still see yourselves as superior to us,” I said.  “And not as peers.”

“Is that the problem?” Carling asked.  His tone was light.  “I thought it was your blatant and grotesque lack of respect for the Crown and what it represents.”

His voice had turned harder with that second statement.

It was also a mask, something meant to grab my attention, and distract from the reality that one of the figures in the smoke had gone very still.  An illusion, or a hollow Noble like the sisters had been, or- I had no idea what.  But I saw the silhouette of one of the Nobles standing in the fog and smoke, and in the next moment, he was also charging forward, a mere five paces from me.

A rifle shot caught him.  He barely stumbled, but he did stumble a little.

One of Duncan’s larger tentacle-hounds caught the noble.

Even with tentacles catching at his leg and both hands, he managed to lift the thing up, then dash it to a bloody ruin on the ground.  The time it cost him and the limited mobility meant he caught two more rifle shots.  Lillian and Jessie.

“Hold, Wharton,” Carling said.

Wharton, the attacking noble, moved forward a few steps, then stopped.  Whatever rifles had been aimed his way fired again, but they didn’t seem to catch him.  He was practically unbothered by the fact he was being repeatedly shot.

I backed away a few steps.

“Come to me.  Leave them.”

“My lord, you just ordered-”

“I know what I just ordered.  But I’m swiftly changing my mind.  If you’d killed him as planned, I’d be happy to let you continue, but you didn’t, and I now suspect you won’t.”

“The gas is spreading, my lord,” a female voice said.  “Multiple colors, more than one taste in the air.”

“Which only furthers my point,” Carling said.

Wharton stayed where he was for an instant longer, then turned, stalking back toward the others.

“If we stay, we only play into their hands,” Carling said, as if to reassure Wharton that he was doing the right thing.  Yet he’d already indicated he could communicate to them in ways we couldn’t hear.  The words were partially meant for me and the other Lambs.  “They want us to come after them.”

“You realize that if you leave us alive, you also play into our hands?” I asked.  “How many people are looking down at this, watching the explosions and the gas clouds?  How do they respond when you retreat, fewer in number than when you ventured toward the main building, without a single dead Lamb to your names?”

Carling chuckled.

I heard the female voice again.  Gloria, I suspected.  I didn’t hear the exact words.

“No,” Carling said.  I caught that much.  He said something else I didn’t hear.

“I insist.  I know I should defer to you, on several levels, but-”

Jessie was donning her filtration mask.

“They wouldn’t have done this if they weren’t nearly certain they could hold their own or come out ahead.  They got two of ours,” Carling said.  “Let’s leave it at that.”

There was a long, tense pause.

“Ah,” Carling said.

The heels clicked on the road.

Lady Gloria emerged from smoke and fog, her chin held high.  She’d been the noble with Professor Gossamer.  Lillian had had some things to say about her too.  She was pale of hair, skin, and eye, with only black lining at the eyelashes and as a small part of her clothing.  She radiated with intensity.

She also used the wrapping of her sleeves to try and hide a stomach wound.  Blood around the wound had already dried, the damage done hours ago.

She stared me down.

“Is it that you want to act, you can’t let yourself back down?” I asked.  “You should act then.  Is it that you want to talk?  I recommend you talk.  Or if you just want to look your enemy in the eye… take your fill.”

“I’ll ask,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

“The gas is spreading, Gloria.  And I do know you heard the scampering things finding their way to more traps and explosives.”

“I heard,” she said, absently.  “Is Lord Willoughby dead?”

“Probably,” I said.

“You know, we’ve given so much.  Our entire lives are in service to the Crown Empire.”

“I know,” I said.  “But where we differ is in that you see the Crown Empire as a force for good, and we don’t.”

“Not good,” she said.  “But I think the alternative is far worse.”

“We disagree on that too,” I said.

“You’d kill me, but only because I’m Noble-born.  I’ve never harmed my subjects, I’ve been gentle, and I’ve devoted time to ensure they’re looked after.  I’ve always been gentle, and it’s a task, sometimes.  I host lessons and tutor the gifted, and I host events, even for middling families.  Balls to give them a taste of what they could have if they worked hard, welcoming young ladies into their bachelorette years, giving them a chance to be beautiful.  I’ve shared my wealth out, not hoarding it.  Whatever you represent, whatever you fight for, I can’t imagine you’re my enemy.”

“Perhaps your doctors could contrive to give you a better imagination, then.  If they survive all of this.  I’m afraid you’re our enemy, whatever illusions you hold.”

“If we’re to talk-”

“We really shouldn’t,” Lord Carling said.  “They’re delaying us, so the gas can creep nearer.  Best to go to the main building, rendezvous with the others.”

“Forgive me, my Lord.  I’ll try to be brief.  If we’re to talk, Sylvester, can I ask that you use honorifics, and refer to me as a Lady?”

“You can ask,” I said.  “But I’m liable to tell you to go fuck the spikiest warbeast you can find.”

“I see.”

There was a pause.  I could imagine Carling being very impatient.  I could see more of him, as the smoke nearer to us cleared.  The gas off to either side and ahead of us was piling up taller, into high plumes.

“Why do you hate us so, Lambs?  Have we hurt you?”

“If you mean directly, then I could point out the Baron pointed out my eye.”

“The Baron doesn’t count.  He was mad and pathetic.  I feel like I can say that much without betraying the Crown.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lady Gloria.  It’s not- you’re not the focus, here.  The nobility isn’t as important as you think it is.  The Crown, the King, the stations, it’s really… nothing.”

“I see.  Base insults?  Attempting to get a rise out of me?”

“No, Lady Gloria.  No.  You’re really truly nothing.  You’re a farce.  The nobility is, in entirety, or next to.  Just children stolen from streets, from mothers, from breeding stock, whatever.  The cream of the crop, gathered up, sorted among families, and made into Nobles.”

Wind whistled through burned husks of buildings and the gaps growths of builder’s wood.

“You really believe that?” Lady Gloria asked.  “It’s tragic, that you’ve convinced yourself of such-”

“We know,” I said.  “We found out in New Amsterdam.  Others have found out too.  We told students and it was enough to change minds, convince them to turn rebel.  Haven’t you wondered why the Infante wants to scrub the Crown States from existence?  He wants to use plague and black wood to kill and choke the truth from our lips, and to strangle the spread of that base truth.”

“Nonsense,” Carling said.

It was curious that the Lady Gloria was silent.

“The Baron found out.  It’s what drove him mad, made him wretched.  The Duke knew too, but… I think he persevered through it.  Above all else, though, the Professors at the top know.  I imagine that if you went back to that building and hinted at it, you’d see alarm on a select few faces.  Ferres among them.”

There was a long pause.  Lady Gloria was unreadable.

“Isn’t a beautiful farce better than an ugly truth?” she asked.

Ah.

So we were already at that point.  Had she been ready on some level to accept this already?  Suspicions?  Questions without answers, that had all settled at once?

“I think you underestimate the ugliness behind your farce,” I said.

Lady Gloria didn’t seem to have an answer for that.  She looked sad, standing there, thinking about it.

“No,” Carling said.

He stepped forward, becoming less of a silhouette and more of a man.  As he approached, Lady Gloria turned her back to me, and raised a hand, clapping it to the front of Carling’s shoulder, halting him.

“No,” he said.  “That’s madness, and it’s an insult I can’t-”

“Lord Carling,” Lady Gloria said.  Her voice was soft.  “You were concerned about the gas.  You said we couldn’t attack without playing into their hands.”

“He’s saying-” Carling started.  He didn’t finish.  He glared, expression shifting three different ways across two moments.  “No.”

“I know, Lord.”

“We’re better than that.  We have a long history, family lines.  Even the least of us in the present hold status on par with-”

Another explosion over in the direction of the main building’s gate suggested that we’d made our second attempt at stalling the reinforcements.  We’d have to back off soon – an explosion would delay them less than gas would.

“It’s a lie,” Lord Carling said.  In the doing, he sounded more like his old self.  He chuckled, raising a hand, and waggling a finger at me.  “They said you were devious, that you’d find weak points to capitalize on.”

I remained where I was, my hands bound behind my back.  I didn’t flinch, didn’t change my expression.

“It’s a lie,” Lord Carling said.  He turned to Lady Gloria.  “Yes?  I’m not some-”

“Sick child,” I said.  “Orphan.  Street beggar-”

“Stop,” he said.  He was stern, finger held out.

“-or a jail birth.”

He reached for his axe, and Lady Gloria stopped him.  His face was suddenly etched with anger.  “Why are you stopping me?  Why aren’t you with me in this?  Why aren’t you speaking out?”

Lady Gloria didn’t answer.

“Lady Gloria,” he said.  “Daughter of Alex Kinloss.  I order you to answer him, firmly and clearly, and dismiss his lies for what they are.”

Somehow, the words lacked authority.

Lady Gloria seemed to think the same, because she didn’t answer immediately.  She didn’t turn my way.  Instead, when she did speak, it was to him, and her voice was gentle.  “I’ve seen things that made me wonder.  I believe-”

“Enough.  Or I’ll cut you down where you stand,” he said.  Tension strained his voice.

The smoke and gas had cleared enough that I could see the other two nobles in the back.  I could see Lillian, a ways off to the side, a rifle in her hands, aimed but not fired.  I saw Duncan’s dogs gathered, alongside three of the baboon-wolf warbeasts, all poised and ready for the excuse.

I suspected he could deal with them, and the rifles besides.  It would buy me time to run, however.  I’d have to move fast.

He jerked, as if he’d come after me.  Lady Gloria stopped him.

“Let’s leave it at this,” she said, barely audible.

“Now that I’ve told you-” I started.

“Sylvester,” Lady Gloria said.  “Let’s leave it at this.”

“It’s important.  If you speak a word of this to the wrong person-”

“I know.  I can work it out.  I’ll tell him and make sure the others know.  We’ll move carefully.”

I nodded.

She started to lead Lord Carling off, and then stopped.

“Should I send some people to you?  You can outline your terms for our surrender.”

“That would be appreciated,” I said.  “Ensure Professor Ibbot is with them, please.”

I saw Jessie move, hand shifting to a different position on her rifle, fingers taking a different configuration.

“Amend that.  We’ll let you know who we want.”

“I’ll go to the others and see if I can’t prepare them,” Lady Gloria said.

“Mrs. Darby is already there.  Talk to her for a start.”

“I’ll do that,” Lady Gloria said.

“You’re talking about surrender,” Lord Carling said to her, barely audible.  He spoke as if gently reminding her of a simple truth.  “We don’t lose.”

“The Academy doesn’t lose, Lord Carling,” Jessie said, adding her voice to the conversation.  “But this Academy has been ours since well before you arrived.”

For a moment, he looked as if he was going to lash out, drawing that weapon after all.  The moment passed, and he turned away.

With more Academies, States, and Crown to follow, I thought.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.14 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.14

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We’d extinguished the fire, but the coals still burned.  Pride had a way of keeping them from admitting defeat for as long as there was an ember or a spark.

There was something about nights like this that exerted a kind of pressure.  It was dark, and that strained the senses, but that was the smallest part of it.  Every sound was a potential attack.  The air was thick with the taste of smoke and the residual chemicals and pollutants of the various weapons we’d deployed, from gunpowder to withering gases and airborne poisons.  I could smell the faint traces of old blood, shit, and death in the wind, even at the walltop.

The decorative crenellations at the edges of the path helped keep us out of sight.  Where smoke had taken to the air, it had come down and settled into the fine cracks and grooves in the wood and stone, making the grooves darker, while the ridges, rises, and bumps stood out in contrast.  My hands and the undersides of my shoes were vaguely greasy with the stuff.

We had three positions that we held, now, of the four major buildings around the perimeter.  The fourth was the admin building that was now out of order, swallowed up by builder’s wood and seed growth.  The issue and the challenge, however, was that any communication between the boys’ and girls’ dormitory buildings had to be done with the flash code or by messengers who made the long walk around the perimeter wall.  Too much use of the flash code meant that they could potentially decipher it.

We couldn’t give those embers of resistance a breath of air.  If we gave them anything, any kind of ground that they could use to convince themselves and each other that they could do something about their circumstance, then it could mean another day or two of dealing with them while they held out.

But the alternative was using messengers, and there was a risk that they could intercept any birds or beasts.  Small, but there.

We would change up the tap code enough to throw them for a loop.  The others in the girl’s dorm would have written records to go by.  We had Jessie.

“Hold on,” Lillian said.

Jessie and I dropped to a sitting position, our backs to the short wall that bounded the walltop path.  My shackles clinked as I settled.  Lillian took a seat to Jessie’s left.

“Back’s sore, stooping over, while carrying this bag.”

“I could take it the rest of the way,” I said.

“It would be awkward, with the chains,” Lillian said.

“Here,” Jessie said.  She dragged the bag to her side, then pulled the strap over her head, the bag resting against the side of her backpack.  “I’ve got it.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  “Give me a second.  I’ll need to take something later or I won’t be able to get up out of bed tomorrow.  For now, I just need a moment to rest.”

“You do know there are labs over there you can use,” I said.  “You don’t need to pack a small lab into a satchel.”

“I have my own equipment that I like,” Lillian said.  “Mary got me onto knife sharpening, and now I can’t use anyone else’s scalpels.  There are a lot of things like that.  It’s easier to bring my things with me.”

“I’ve got some books and a change of clothes,” Jessie said.  “Either this ends soon, or I’ll be able to unwind with you two.”

“Will you share your books?” Lillian asked.  “We can talk about them.”

“It would make my day,” Jessie said.

“I’ll look forward to it then,” Lillian said.

I wanted to join in, poking fun or making comments, but ambient sounds make me pause.  I nearly missed it, but there was a sound in the background, that I would never have given a second thought to if we were in a living city.  A flap of cloth, as the wind turned, and one sound I couldn’t decipher: gritty, grating and very brief.

I reached out, touching Jessie’s arm.  Jessie nodded, shrugging out of the strap of the bag, drawing two guns.  Lillian eased down to almost a lying position, drawing her own revolver.

We remained like that, tense, while several seconds passed.  There weren’t any more noises.  Jessie had heard just as well as I had, and I wasn’t sure if she’d been processing it or if she’d needed my nudge to go back and actually pay attention to the memory she’d filed away, but she knew what was up.  Lillian was taking our cues, and I very much appreciated that she was as willing to go with the flow, barely a second’s hesitation in picking up what we were putting forth.

“Did you manage to find new books?” I asked, casual.

“There’s plenty around the dormitory,” Jessie said.  “And there was a shelf where they collected books that students had left behind when they vacated the dorm.  I picked up a few.”

“Back when I read Jamie’s books,” Lillian said, “I had the hardest time keeping up with the dime store novels.  He would go through them so fast, I had to ask him to keep an eye out for the ones that continued long-running series or filled in gaps.  He was so good about that.  I still don’t know what happened between ‘The Golden Child and the Queen’ and the ‘The Destroyer’ one.  There was that fantasy book that aborted early because it didn’t get readers, too.”

She was barely letting her nervousness show.  I was strongly suspicious that if our enemy was someone on Fray or Mauer’s level, they would have realized that Lillian was reacting to their presence, but we had no reason to think our enemy here was that good at reading people.

“I have some of those,” Jessie offered.

“I’ve… probably forgotten everything pertinent,” Lillian said.

“Easily handled,” Jessie said.  “We’ll recap.”

“Before we get that far, we actually need to get where we’re going,” I said.  “How’s your back, Lil?”

“I’m a little shaky, I wish I knew what I was in for ,” she said, “But I’ll manage.”

I’d caught the double-meaning implicit in her reply there.  I’m so very fond of that girl.

“Alright.  We’ll get moving,” I said, shaking my head slowly.  I shifted position, my chains rattling, and leaned forward so my hands were visible.  I gestured lie.

Jessie gestured stay with her hand on the grip of one of her revolvers, and I gave her a short nod.  She passed it on to Lillian with a gesture.

Extending my foot out as far as it would go, I scuffed the ground with my heel.

They appeared almost out of nowhere, dressed in dark clothes, graceful, with limbs twice as long as they ought to have been.  Scarves and hoods masked most of their faces, and the rest was a morass of tubing and metal.  If there were any eyeholes or metal, there wasn’t enough light to make them apparent.

There were four of them.  As the one nearest me appeared on the wall, I threw myself onto my back, sticking my foot out.  I hooked their ankle with my foot, and very nearly tipped them backward over the tall wall they’d just scaled, for a very long drop.  One of their companions caught them.

The scene froze.  The warm wind that tasted of smoke and had far too little moisture to it was making their cloaks and clothing billow and flap, but they were very still.  Lillian had the one nearest her at gunpoint.  Jessie had one gun trained on the two who held each other and another on the one nearest her.

“Watch where you step,” I said.  “We’ve known you were there for a bit, now, and we set out caltrops and a snare.”

I saw several of their heads turn, examining their environment.

“They’re new,” Jessie said.  “I didn’t see anything like them, unless they were contorted into luggage somewhere.”

“Yeah, no, they weren’t,” I said.  “You guys are new, aren’t you?”

They had blades, but the blades were made of opaque glass or ceramic.  The clothes, the more I was able to catch the details as the faint moonlight shifted, were closer to rags, multiple garments put together.  The sleeves and pants were multiple pieces of dark clothing torn to rags and then sewn together in a way that hugged the long limbs.

“Skewed proportions,” Lillian said.  “I’m guessing they didn’t have any alterations made to their heart or lungs, going by the way they’re breathing.  They’re not meant to last much lon-”

Stop,” the one closest to Jessie said.  Its voice was a hiss, and the ‘p’ sound at the end had a vibration to it as a tube sucked at fluid in the experiment’s mouth and gave it a dry staccato ‘pop’. Like a death rattle.

We stood there, and the wind blew harder, kicking up trace smoke dust from the crenellations.  The same wind made the wasteland out to my left swell with black clouds of dust that could have smothered a house.

“Three ways this goes,” I said.

None of them moved.  The one who’d saved the other from tipping over the wall wasn’t hugging its companion anymore, and the two stood together, hips touching, one hunched over slightly, as if to keep from falling over if the wind blew too strong in the wrong direction.

“The first way is that you work up the courage, and you attack.  You get shot, and you do some damage, but it’s far less than you’re thinking it’s going to be, and we both limp away in retreat, if you four don’t die outright.”

The one who’d spoken before raised its head slightly.

“It’s just the way it is,” I lied.  I mixed the lie with truth, “You’re not even used to those bodies.  So maybe you lose your nerve.  You go away just like you came, climbing down this wall, go back to the others with your heads down like whipped dogs.  It’s… well, I imagine nothing gets better and you’ve just got to wrestle with a lot of worse.”

“Modified bodies, bodies not meant to endure the loads and stresses those frames would put on them, they’ll need more food and nutrients to self-repair,” Lillian said.

“But it’s not going to go that way, because they’ll send you right back out, if some scary Professor doesn’t have some way to punish you,” I said.

I could see them react to that.  Could I read resignation in that body language of theirs?  It was hard, given the flowing coverings and their unusual postures.  I kept reading tension in them, but it might have been what Lillian was saying, that they had legs that were twice as long and trying to maintain balance like normal length legs did.  The arms weren’t in a position to grab anything and find support there, unless they wanted to drop to all fours, and they weren’t about to do that.

“You’ve got a third option,” I said.  I worked my way to a standing position.  “You’re going to take those weapons, and you’re going to throw them over the edge.  No games, no tricks, nothing underhanded.  Jessie’s going to undo these shackles on me, and we’ll shackle you four instead.  We walk you over to the boys’ dormitory over there, and we’ll take you prisoner.  Our doctors will look after you, start figuring out how to undo what was done to you, and you’ll be supplied hot, good food.  Water, wine, ale.  Baths.”

The looming figure ahead of me slouched forward a bit.  After a moment, it dropped, sitting on its heels, one hand on the crenellated wall.

“Beds to sleep in,” I said.  “I can’t imagine you slept well over there, with the higher-ups taking the few good sleeping spots.  But I’m going to go back to properly cooked food and tea here.”

Reaching out, it touched the blade at its waist, holding it by the pommel with thumb and one fingertip.

“Slowly,” I said.

It took its time drawing the long sliver of glass from the loop of its belt, and the moment the tip of the weapon was no longer in contact with the belt, it dropped, falling free of the fingers that held the pommel, into the city below.

The experiment divested itself of two more weapons this way.  One clipped the wall as it fell, shattering with the contact.

The others disarmed themselves.

“Walk along the wall until you’ve walked five paces, then step down onto the path,” I said.  “Hands in front of you, we’ll get the shackles ready.”

While they took the positions I’d ordered, Jessie undid the shackles at my arms and ankles.  She navigated caltrops and traps that weren’t there, and she shackled the enemy.

A part of me wondered if they hadn’t been modified to see in the dark, if they knew the caltrops weren’t there, and they were playing along because they wanted to eat that badly, because their current existence offered no hope, even if they did as they’d been ordered.

“Let’s get you something to eat,” I said.

There was no resistance.  They walked with bowed heads.

There hadn’t been much in the way of servants.  I wasn’t sure there’d been any that weren’t stitched that could be left behind.  Other experiments had been pressed into service, where possible, and these guys didn’t feel like experiments who’d been modified to fresh purpose.

That led me to the conclusion that with a scarcity of resources, these experiments had been made with materials drawn from the most available pool.  The aristocrats.  Possibly the most easily discarded, possibly the sons and daughters being called on to repay the Crown for the good lives they’d led up to this point, with dim promises that if they saw this through and served the Crown well, that they would be restored to normal.

It didn’t matter.  Their appearance marked just another scattered few burning embers from an extinguished fire.

I glanced over at the main building, fully aware that some keen eyes were watching us, trying to make out what was happening.  They would figure it out.  This wouldn’t be the last time they pushed back, but this effort had involved a lot of work on their part, and it had crumbled easily.  The next would crumble more easily still.

I stared at them without seeing them, knowing they were staring back and there was a chance they’d see me, and they’d get my point.

There was a crowd of rebels to welcome us at the door to the boys’ dormitory.  Davis, Bea, Red, Junior, Prissy, and several more besides.  They gave the aristocrats-turned-experiment some wary looks.

“Can you bring some hot food?” I asked.  “I’m imagining that they’ve had enough meat, since the only thing in rich supply would be warbeast meat, so maybe hold off on the bacon, sausage, or meatfruit, and have the kitchen staff put together something that’ll stick to their insides?  Oatmeal, fruit, veggies, tea?”

“Does that sound good?” Jessie asked.

Yes,” the smallest of the four experiments said.  “Please.

“Secure them somewhere, if possible,” I said.

“The small labs,” Davis said, still looking very wary.

“Somewhere with a bed?” I asked.

“…The overnight labs, that the students were using to nap in while keeping an eye on projects,” Mabel said.

“Sounds good,” Davis said.  To us, he said, “We converted some bedrooms, the beds are nice enough, if that’s what you’re going for.”

“It is,” I said.

The group of students at the door began to dissolve, and an armed escort saw the experiments off to their destination.

Davis hung back with some of the other lieutenants, waiting for the experiments to leave.

“You sure about this?” Davis asked.

“They’re surrendering.  They’re doing exactly what we want them to do, they get rewarded,” I said.

“Yeah,” Davis said.  “Maybe.”

“It’s good,” I reassured him.

“Yeah,” Davis said.  He sounded tired.

“Is there a lab I can drop my things off in?” Lillian asked.

“Go with the others, use one close to those four you just brought in,” Davis said.  “There’re a few spaces you could use.”

“Thank you,” Lillian said.  She looked at Jessie and I, “You two will be okay?”

“Yeah,” Jessie said.

“I’ll putter around on my own for a bit, then I’ll catch up with you two.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“It’s fine.  If this really is things winding down, then I’m content to take a few minutes, get sorted out and have my thoughts in order, and be ready for leaving Hackthorn.”

“That’s just a little ways off,” I said.

“It is, but can you promise me I’m going to get another few hours of peace and quiet after tonight?” she asked.

“No,” I said.  “No, I guess not.”

She smiled.  “I’ll catch up after.”

She took the bag from Jessie and departed in the direction that the four experiments and the armed escort had gone.

Jessie and I joined Davis in heading up to the building’s sitting room, a mirror to the one in the girls’ dormitory.  We settled into seats.  I chose one with a view through the window between bookshelves, where I could see a sliver of the main building.  The enemy.

“What’s the current take on things?” Jessie asked.  “There’s no wrong answer, I’m just curious.”

“Broad question,” Davis said.

“In conflict and casualty?” I asked.

“Doing okay.  The injured have been patched up.  Two dead, but…” he sighed.  “…their fault, mostly?”

“Their fault?” I asked.

“Say what you will, but a bulk of the student body is young.  Two sixteen year old boys, no prior experience with war, violence, sieges, plague, or any of that, they were put on guard duty, they slacked off, went for a walk.  Around the time the fog was lifting and the nobles left, they were out for a smoke or to, uh, enjoy a degree of privacy you don’t get with a couple hundred students in one building.  They didn’t make it back.”

“That’s a damn shame,” I said.

“Ammo’s good, we’ve still got a small few experiments in reserve to throw at any attackers, if we need to buy time to get organized.  Things were stressful for a bit, back there, but I think we sense that we’re through the worst of it.”

“Everyone’s working together?  No dissent at the bottom?”

“Might be a nice thing about being actively at war with a common enemy,” Davis said.  “Keeps us focused and working together.  No dissent at the bottom.”

“Red and I do what we can about the troublemakers, ensure they’re busy and content,” Bea said.  “There’s some minor drugs going around, made in the labs, but so long as it doesn’t impair anyone or get in the way of things being done…”

“Sure,” I said.

“Going by the rounds of questions you’ve asked before, you’re going to ask about resources.  Our overall supplies are good,” Mabel said.  “We’re fairly well stocked.  Not enough to create an army or brew another batch of the fog you used to limit access to the city below, but food, feed, water, medical supplies, a variety of supplies that would let us do one-off experiments, we’re good.”

“Good,” I said, a little unnerved that Mabel had paid that much attention to me.  “Ongoing projects?”

“Some gas, some warbeasts, some stitched, more than a few parasites.  More to keep us busy than to turn the tides,” Junior said.  “A lot of it translates to the next phase of things.”

“Good,” I said.  “Non-Academy projects?”

“We dug up schematics for boats.  Two weeks to make our first departure, once we’re good to go.  That’s assuming nothing more burns down, the stitched are available, and the schematics hold up.”

“Then we’re good?” I asked.  “Questions?  Needs, desires?”

“I’d be a little more at ease if we didn’t have enemies under our roof, but I’ll manage,” Davis said.  “I have to ask.  Are you good, Sy?”

“I’m… managing,” I said.  My hand went to my wrist, where the shackle had been removed.  I rubbed my one wrist with one hand, then switched to do the same with the other.  “Can you guys dig up some cuffs or shackles?  I think we’ll all feel a bit better if we limit the damage I can do.”

“I’ll get right on that,” he said.  “Where do you two want to set up shop?”

I looked at Jessie, then at Davis.  “Here?”

“Sure, Sylvester,” he said.

I remained with Jessie, dropping my bag of clothes beside hers.  Together, we approached the window.  There was a chair set next to it, with someone else’s old cup of tea resting on the sill, a half-inch of tea sitting in the bottom, gone bad.

Together, we sank into the chair, Jessie sitting on me as if to pin me down in place, to make up for the lack of chains.

“I’m glad you’re connecting with Lil,” I said.

“So am I,” Jessie said.

Her attention turned to the world beyond the window.  The main building had a great many lights on within.  The light and shadow suggested that they were all gathered at the long tables.

Late-night debates, hashing out the terms by which they would surrender.

“It’s been almost a day and a night since we faced off against their nobles.  I can’t tell if I’m surprised or very much not surprised that they’re being this stubborn,” I remarked.

“I’m not surprised,” Jessie said.  “But if I went by gut feeling-”

“You don’t really do gut feeling much.  You do precedent, miss Jessie.”

“If I did, just this one time,” she said, snuggling in closer to me, nestling into the gap between my shoulder and arm and where the back of the armchair curved in around us, “I would say that they’ll decide before dawn.”

“So their humiliation isn’t as visible as it’d be in stark daylight,” I said.

“Somehow I don’t think that’s where my gut feeling was founded,” Jessie said.

“It’s where mine is, you dingus,” I said.

“You’re the dingus, doofus.”

“You’re the doofus…” I said.  I trailed off.  We had company.

One of Davis’ subordinates, with chains and manacles.  I rested my head on Jessie’s shoulder while she directed the fellow in how to arrange it.  My left ankle and my left wrist were shackled.  The shackles were attached to the iron grille that framed the window, bolted securely into the stone of the wall.

“D’you need anything else?” the fellow asked.

“Blanket?” Jessie asked.

It was less than a minute before he returned with the blanket.

When he left, Jessie and I were left alone in the room, sharing a seat with a view, a blanket draped over our laps.

It seemed almost as if the black wood and plague had consumed Hackthorn after all.  The wind blew and it stirred clouds of dust and settled smoke like it would have stirred up the aftermath of black wood.  The city below was empty, without any lights on.

“It’s beautiful, in a desolate kind of way,” I said.

“I have to admit, I don’t get much out of the sights,” Jessie said.  “I’ve spent far too much time looking out windows for the past couple of days.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I should have grabbed a book before getting comfortable,” she said.  Rather than pull away, she curled up against me, her head settling against the back of the chair, her nose brushing my shoulder.

“I’d like to think I’m more interesting than a book,” I said.

“You’re very much more interesting than a book,” she said.  “Enough so that it can be tiring, I admit.  I might have to conserve my strength.”

“Well gee whiz, sorry,” I said.

I felt rather than heard her soft laughter.

“What if I don’t say anything?  Does that make me less exhausting to be around?” I asked.

“Then I’ll be bored,” she said.  “I’ll be left to dig through old memories, sort out more recent ones to make sure I didn’t miss connections, and anticipate tomorrow.  A night of mental filing.”

“Well, just proposing an alternative…” I said.

The arm that encircled her middle shifted position, my hand tugging on the side of her blouse.  It pulled her collar away from her neck, revealing one of the scars from the caterpillar implant.  This one formed a line from the nape of her neck and extended just a little ways over her shoulder.

I kissed it.

She kissed the side of my face.

My free hand moved, and my free hand didn’t need to roam, explore, or find their place to find what they were looking for.  My memory was shot, and there were countless things I didn’t remember like I was supposed to, but I knew where Jessie’s scars were beneath her clothes, and my fingers traced the scars.  At the stomach, in two places, at the chest.  Fingers brushed against fine fabric, tracing the lines.

Her hand moved up and down the left side of my body, before reaching up to my shoulder and finding a place there.

Distant footsteps approached, drawing closer.  We didn’t move to hide what we were doing, but the positions we held weren’t such that anyone would raise an eyebrow, unless they saw us in motion.  We were still, while a group of students with guns passed through the sitting room of the boys’ dorm.

“You alright?” one asked.

“Very good, thank you,” I said, smiling.

They moved on, heading into another hallway, carrying out the rest of their patrol.

Jessie’s fingers touched my lips.  “Nice smile.”

“You’ve seen it often enough.”

“Not like this,” she said.  “Not so devastating.”

“You keep using that word.  Are you being flattering for once?”

“I flatter you plenty, but with that damaged, devastating brain of yours, it’s in one ear and out the other,” she said, her voice soft.

“Hmm.  I think you’re trying to get a lie past me with distracting words in the middle of the statement, there.”

“Maybe.”

She kissed the side of my face.  I turned my head to face her and kissed her properly.

My fingers traced the lines, until her hand found mine and held it.

I broke the kiss.

“So that’s the famous, devastating Sylvester kissing, is it?” she asked.

“I’ve kissed you before.  Also, don’t think I don’t notice you pushing that button over and over again, because you know I like it.”

“It’s our word,” she whispered in my ear.  “Our wanted poster, our inside joke.”

I squeezed her hand.

“Kiss me again,” she said.

I did.

“I’d forgotten just what that was like,” she said.

The wind whistled outside.  The voltaic lights overhead buzzed as the structure flexed and the wiring was jostled.

My blood ran cold.

“Jessie,” I said.

She squeezed my hand, not making eye contact.  “It’s nice, forgetting and being reminded.”

“Jessie, what’s going on?  Did you drop a fourth memory?”

“Shh,” she said.  Fingers touched my lips.

I knew Jessie as well as I knew anyone.  I could see it, hear it, feel it in the way she pressed against me.

“More than four.”

“Shh, Sy.  Please.”

“More than ten?”

She moved her fingers and kissed me again.

I only went with it because I needed to get my thoughts in order.  I could feel my heartbeat thudding like it was trying to break free, and I could feel hers doing much the same.

As she broke the kiss, she moved her head, so it was beside mine.  Not facing me, not facing the question.

Words caught in my throat as I tried to organize them.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Hmm,” she made a noise, as if she was mulling it over.

I waited for the response, and she didn’t provide it.

“Jessie, I know I probably deserve it, I know I’ve teased you and everyone else that matters more than I’ll ever be teased in return, but don’t leave me hanging on this one.  Can you just explain?”

She was silent.

My heart pounding, my throat a lump more than it was an airway, I shifted position.

Jessie had fallen asleep.

“That’s not fair,” I said.  My voice broke with the sentence.  “And I know I more than deserve that too.”

I shook her.  It didn’t rouse her.  I slapped her lightly, then a little harder.

I raised a hand to hold it near her nose and mouth, so I could feel if she was breathing.

I waited.

The lump in my throat swelled, and I had to cough to keep from choking on it.

“Jessie,” I said.

I felt the breath on the back of my hand, and I barely felt better at that.

My voice was barely audible to myself, “Jessie, I refuse to let you pull this fast one on me, okay?  You’re not going to leave me hanging for hours now, waiting to see if you wake up as you.  You don’t get to do that.  Not when we’re so close to everything we’re trying to do.”

“It was always a war of attrition.”

I closed my eyes, wincing.

“You’re operating with little time, holding the position of power.  They’re operating with very little power, but they have time on their side.  It might not feel like it to them, as they starve, as they want for water and proper rest, but as pride compels them to negotiate their surrender among themselves before they extend it to you, they’ve been whittling down a clock with your collective deadlines on it.”

“Infante,” I said.

The figure loomed before me.  A pillar of a man.  A monolithic entity.  He stared down at Jessie and I.  He wasn’t wholly the Infante, and he wasn’t wholly me either.

“Not now,” I said.

“These things are never convenient,” he said.  “The most important moments of clarity and decision come when you’re most pressed by circumstance.”

“Not now,” I said, quieter.  Then, abruptly, realizing that I was losing ground, I writhed my way free of the chair and of Jessie, pushing her back into the seat to keep her from tumbling to the ground.  I stood, and my wrist and ankles jerked with the chain that connected me to the wall.  I roared the words, “Someone!  Anyone!”

He stared at me.

“Lillian!” I called out.

He turned his attention to Jessie.

If I lost ground here, if I snapped like I had before, and if I ended up working against everything I’d been trying to do…  If, somehow, in a warped perspective, I found myself justifying horrible things and the greatest of betrayals, what would I do, when only Jessie was in arm’s reach?

If Jessie was still there.

“No,” I said.

“The only way you don’t have to see her eyes open and not recognize you, is if they don’t open,” the Infante said.

“That’s- no, that’s bad logic.  That’s not sensible at all.”

“You’ve seen a lot of death without even blinking, but one blank look with nothing behind it nearly destroyed you the first time.  It would be a question of self preservation.”

“Anyone!” I screamed the words.  “Help!”

How were there no patrols close enough?

“Can you really endure it?” he asked.

“I have to,” I said.  “Clearly.  I- whatever you’re representing right now, whatever thought processes and fears… I’ll concede the battle here.  You can have this win.  I’ll compromise, I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“Oh, Sylvester,” the apparition spoke, reverberating to the core of my being in a way that nothing in reality ever had.  I now knew that the countless nightmares and fragments of madness, the dozens of figures, the visions of the world breaking down had never stopped- they had only found a singular, indomitable form that would stampede through my being in a way I couldn’t ever stop.

“There was never going to be an ending where you didn’t,” he said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.15 – Twig

Root and Branch – 19.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Multiple guns cocked, the sound stirring me out of the deep well of darkness and poisonous thoughts.

You’re going to need to open your eyes now, the voice said.  It wasn’t the Infante’s voice anymore.

I kept my eyes closed.

“Please put the guns down,” I heard Lillian.  Then, more insistently, “Please.”

“You shouldn’t go near him, Doctor.  Not when he’s like this.”

“It’s okay,” Lillian said.  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or the others.  “It’s okay.”

I waited, tense.  I felt like I needed to vomit, and the smell of blood was rich in the air.

“Can you look up at me?  Is this Sy I’m looking at right now?”

I nodded, then realized I’d meant to answer the second question.  Maybe the fact that I hadn’t looked up at her made it the right answer by process of elimination.

It didn’t make much sense, but very little made sense anyway.

“Open your eyes, Sy.  Look at me,” she said.

I didn’t want to.

Open your eyes, the voice said.

I opened my eyes.  Twelve students with guns were gathered in the sitting room.  Fray stood in the background, her arms around Ashton.  Gordon was close by, half-turned away, with Hubris next to him.  Jamie was there too, in a chair by a bookshelf, his arms around a book so large it hid him from belly to the tip of his nose.

He was so small.  He was so thoughtful, so funny when he stepped out of his usual space, and that was something mostly reserved for me.

I knew part of the reason he hid was that I couldn’t remember him, and there wouldn’t be anything to see if the book was moved.  It was the same for Gordon.  They were too far behind us.  Too many months and years separated him and where he was from where we were now.

Lillian was just a few feet away from me.  I was avoiding looking at her, postponing reality.

Look at her, the voice instructed.

I looked at her, then looked away just as fast.

“What happened?” Lillian asked.  Her voice caught midway between ‘happened’.

Answer her.

“Jessie-” I started.  My voice caught.  I raised my hand to my throat, saw it drenched in blood, and dropped it away and out of sight, as surely as if I’d just raised a blazing torch to my face.

“Sy,” she said, and it sounded like she might burst into tears, just by the way she’d said it.  “You said that if you were with one of us that you’d be okay.”

“Jessie fell asleep,” I said.  My voice was hollow.  “Then I wasn’t with any of the Lambs.”

Lillian looked so damn sad, as she took that in.  I couldn’t meet her eyes.  I didn’t want to look at any of the rebel soldiers with guns, either.  My eyes kept moving from face to face in the crowd of figures that occupied the sitting room.  The Snake Charmer and Percy were watching intently.

I was cold.  It was summer and I was cold.  I wasn’t wearing a shirt, I realized.  I glanced around to see if I couldn’t spot it.  I saw Jessie lying very still in the armchair.  I saw streaks of blood on her and the chair and averted my gaze.

“Sy,” Lillian said, her voice very quiet.

I could tell from her tone.  Whatever she was going to say, it was going to be a hard one.  The silence had a heaviness to it.

“Should I give the order for them to shoot you?”

Alright then.  Not the hardest question she could have asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe.”

“Did-” she started.  She stopped, clenching her jaw very intensely for a second, almost as if she was trying not to vomit.  She turned her head and used the heel of her hand to wipe at one eye.

“I don’t know,” I answered her, pre-emptively.

“You don’t know if you killed Jessie?”

I opened my mouth and closed it.

That would be one of the hard ones.

“Was it- maybe it wasn’t you?” she asked, as if begging an answer.  “Can we at least say that you weren’t yourself, that it was a quirk in your head, another personality?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and I hated myself for not telling her what she wanted to hear.  At least I’d given her an answer that wasn’t ‘I don’t know’.  “I don’t think that distinction really exists.”

Soldiers with guns shifted their feet uncomfortably.  They weren’t pointing the guns directly at me, but they were close.  When I met the eyes of one fellow, he looked away.

When I let my eye roam, trying to go anywhere that wasn’t where I was standing, just a few feet from Jessie, I saw just how many Nobles were present in the room.  They moved, pacing, and as they did so, the others moved out of their way.  In this place, in this visual representation of where my thoughts dwelt, the Nobles held sway.

Lillian blinked hard, then blinked a few times in quick succession.  She looked skyward, and the tears started.

I wanted to tell her not to do that, but how could I?

“For all that you guys tried to teach me a good poker face, huh?” she asked, her voice too high, as if it was on a precipice.

“Yeah,” I managed.

“What I keep going back to is-” she stopped abruptly, blinking more.  “I know it’s stupid, but it’s just about the only thing I can cling to right now.  The Lambs accept each other’s foibles, big and small.  There’s a part of me that wants to do that.  Sylvester is what he is.  From the earliest days, when you convinced me that certain rude words were normal conversation among adults and I used them in class, or when you put that egg in my mouth while I was sleeping, or when you looked up my skirt or relentlessly made fun of me, well beyond the point it was funny and when it made me want to quit… not just the Lambs but the Academy altogether, give up on my dream because you were that vicious?”

“Lillian,” I  said.  I didn’t really have a follow up.

“You were a horrible little shit sometimes, Sy.  And this- this is… whatever this is, seeing you like this, deranged at one moment and lost the next, covered in blood?  It’s-”

She stopped.

“Bad,” I said, swallowing.

“But I knew that Wyvern hurt you.  I knew you came from a bad place if you’d go from that to the Academy labs.  I knew- not at the very beginning, but I figured it out quick, that Wyvern was going to do your head in.”

I nodded.

“So what I’m clinging to is this silly, little-girl idea that this is normal.  Of motherfucking course you’re standing there like that and I’m standing here with a bunch of soldiers with guns.  Of course when the others leave you alone to talk to Mauer and to get me, we all come to reunite with you and find you’re lost to the world, so nonfunctional your organs are suffering for it, and you’ve turned an entire Academy upside-down.  Of course, Doctor Lillian.  Business as usual.

Her voice was getting even higher at the end there.

“And that part of me really doesn’t want to blame you.  It was what was done to you.  It really, really, really-”  She stopped there, raising her hands up, as if to put a wall between us, or to ward me off from speaking, and pushing her in any way.

I was silent.

“-really,” she continued, once she had her composure.  “I want to be able to tell myself that I’m a proper Lamb, and I can forgive the experiment parts of you, because that’s how we operate.”

“It doesn’t make you any less of a Lamb if you aren’t okay with this,” I said.

“Don’t tell me that,” she said.  “Because it’s all I have, Sy.  Jessie is- was- Jessie’s one of my favorite people I never got to know enough.  It sounds so dumb, but I was really looking forward to reading books with her.”

“She said she was losing her memories,” I said.  “A lot of them.”

“She told me.  We didn’t want to tell you because you were fragile,” Lillian said.

I clenched my fists.  My hand hurt, a lot.

I wasn’t clenching them because I was angry or anything like it.  I needed to remind myself I was present.

“That makes some sense, then,” she said.  “It makes this scene make more sense.  Thank you.”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond.

“Can I check on her?” Lillian asked.  “Or should I wait?  The others were signaled.  They’ll be on their way.”

“You can check on her,” I said.

“No abrupt movements, Sy.  And don’t go anywhere, okay?  Let’s be mindful of the soldiers you recruited who have guns.  Let’s respect their feelings on this too.”

“Don’t go anywhere?  I-”

I turned to check.

The shackle on my arm was gone.  The hand at the end of that arm-

Skin had torn wholesale.  From the midpoint on the back of my hand and palm to the second knuckle, I’d managed to strip off the flesh, so it bundled around the ends of my finger.  It was still bleeding profusely, enough that I’d not been able to see where the torn skin had gathered in the initial glance.

“Get me my medical kit,” Lillian said.  “Hurry!”

I could look more freely without having to look at Jessie, because Lillian’s body blocked my view.  I looked to the ground.

The chain that led to my ankle was bundled up.  My shirt was bound around it, with the leg of a tea table thrust through the cloth.  It was soaked with blood and something else, and it had been twisted up and around several times.

It was a trick that served to bend steel bars and, in the right circumstances, to apply force to something like a human head or chain, when cloth would otherwise tear and wood wouldn’t have the leverage.  Twist up the cloth, soak it, bind it around, and then use the stick to twist it up further, until the cloth crushed that which was between it.  Bars would bend to be closer to one another, a skull would crack, and chain links could theoretically bend or break.

The chain that was attached to my ankle was in bad enough shape that I could have broken it.  I could break it even now, with enough of a kick of my leg.

I’d almost been free, before they’d come in with the guns, before Lillian had arrived.

I’d almost… what?

A soldier had brought Lillian’s bag.  She was digging through it.

That she was doing something, doing anything at all, it should have filled me with hope.  It didn’t.

I couldn’t communicate it to Lillian.  I couldn’t articulate that, and if I could’ve, I wouldn’t have wanted to say it and make Lillian’s heart hurt the way mine did.

“Lillian.”

It was Mary.

Lillian stopped what she was doing.  Simply the arrival of Mary was enough to draw out more tears on her part.  Mary flew to her side.

“I can’t stay for long,” Mary said.

“I can’t make the call myself, Mary,” Lillian whispered.

Mary looked my way.

“Jessie’s alive?” Mary asked.

I saw Lillian nod.

“Then why?” Mary asked.  One of her arms encircled Lillian, hugging her.

“Because Sylvester was talking before… before he came to.  Because-”

“I could have,” I said.  “I would have, if…”

I trailed off.

“Yeah,” Lillian said.  “That.”

For all of her hardness before, Mary’s look now was pure sympathy.

I’d seen that eerie sympathy when she’d stroked my hair, before.  The tenderness that Mary didn’t offer up very often at all.  It was what Lillian had been talking about.  She was able to accept and look past the parts of me that were experiment, and be kind to the other side, and it was so clear a divide in her that it had seemed entirely out of place.

“I need to go.  I can’t leave the others, but someone had to come, and I thought that if it really was an emergency, I’d have to be the one to fight off whoever or whatever it was.  But it’s a thing there too.  We got intercepted on our way here.”

“Take me with you,” I said.

I saw the looks on both of their faces.

“Take me with you,” I said, again.  “Whatever say I have, whatever weight my word still carries, whatever favors I can still rightfully call in, you need to take me there.  It’s important.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Because.  Because I can’t do anything else.  I can’t stay here and look at this and I can’t be there if and when Jessie wakes up.  I need to keep moving.  If I stop moving forward I won’t be able to start again.  This, this whole plan, it’s me, and I need to see it through.”

“It might be better,” Lillian said.

“Do we have shackles?” Mary asked.  “Cuffs, anyone?”

“Not here, but I can go,” one soldier said.

“No time,” I said.  “If something untoward happens, Mary can kill me.  She wins in a fight.”

“I’m not worried about a fight,” Mary said.  “I’m worried about circumstances where I don’t even get a chance to fight back.  You tend to create those.”

“I think-” I said.

Tell her you’ll be good, the voice said.  Convince her.

“I think I’ll be okay.  I think I know where all of this is going.  The rules this operates by.  I’m okay if I have Lambs close.  It didn’t work here because Jessie wasn’t there with me.  I can do this.  And it doesn’t make it easier or right, but I can’t spend the rest of the time I’ve got hobbled.  I need to act decisively, while I’ve got a chance.”

Mary glanced at Lillian.

“Do it,” Lillian said.

“You think?” Mary asked.

“If we don’t have Sylvester and we don’t have Jessie, then we might not be able to see this through,” Lillian said.  Her voice was pitched to a volume meant for Mary and I alone, or just for Mary, with me overhearing by accident.  “And if we can’t trust Sylvester, if he’s this far gone in the here and now, then we definitely can’t see it through.”

Mary stood.  Wavy brown hair, ribbons, and a dress with tasteful amounts of lace all remained aloft for a fraction longer than it took her to move.  Many of those same things settled with a weight that only a trained eye might have caught.

“Are your pockets empty?” Mary asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

She stood, approaching me.  With deft movements of her hands, she frisked me.

“You’ll need a shirt,” she said.  She turned to one of the rebel soldiers nearby.  “You.  Give us your shirt.”

The hesitation was clear.

Now.  Everything we’ve been doing for the last few weeks and months hinges on this.”

He pulled off his shirt.  It was a button-up shirt, and he had an undershirt on underneath, even though it was summer.

She handed it to me, and then bent down to address the chain at my ankle.  I started pulling on the shirt, working gingerly with my damaged hand.

The moment my shackle was off, she gripped the upper arm I’d already set into the sleeve, and steered me in a hurried march, out of the room and toward the exit that would lead onto the walltop.

I did what I could to get buttoned up.  I might’ve been taking too long, because with scarcely a glance, Mary reached over with one hand and began doing up others.

“Jessie’s gone, or she’s going,” I said, quiet.

“I know.”

“Helen’s…”

“Yes.  I have my difficulties, but it’s a few months to a year off.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I just wanted to know where we stood.”

She tore at some of the lace that encircled her waist.  Seizing my wrist, she began moving the loose skin back into place.  Her grip was stern as I reflexively jerked and pulled.

The Baron stood in the stairwell, watching us as we made our way down to the door.

“I’d normally use Wyvern to convince my body to stay still,” I said.  “I think it has its hands full.”

“I know,” Mary said.  “It’s fine.”

There were guards at the door.  They gave us some wary looks, but at Mary’s gesture, they unblocked the door and hauled it open.

“Keep your hands in your pockets unless you absolutely have to move them, and if you do, try to signal me and keep them in view,” Mary said.  “The pressure from the edge of the pocket will help, but you need more attention to that hand than I can give you here.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

It took some doing to get my damaged hand wedged into a pocket.  I worried the blood would seep out and run down my pant leg, but it was dark, still.

The others had gathered at one end of the bridge.  Some of our lieutenants were with them.  Davis, Mabel, Junior.

Of the assembled group on the other side, just a few paces from the Lambs, I could recognize Professor Ibbot, Professor Gossamer, the noble Lady Gloria, and the aristocrat, Mrs. Deb?  Darby.  Mrs. Darby.  I couldn’t remember the name of the well-spoken man who’d been at the same meeting Mrs. Darby had.  There were another six who hung back a bit, less familiar to and with us.

“Everything okay?” Duncan asked.

“We’ll manage,” Mary said.  “I don’t think we need to do further introductions, do we?  You’re all aware of who Sylvester Lambsbridge is.  I’m Mary Cobourn the Second.”

“Is that an attempt at humor?” Ibbot asked.

“I hope it is,” Helen said.  “With the state of things, we need more reasons to laugh.  You’ve done a poor enough job that a great many people have reason to cry.”

“Watch your tone, Helen,” Ibbot said.  “A proper lady should be deferential.”

Helen laughed at that.  Outright disrespect.  I could see how it prickled Ibbot.

It prickled me too, in a different way.  I heard the laugh and I knew that Helen was far from being in a good place, too.  Having Ibbot near just brought it into focus.  A stressor of its own right.

“We saw the flashes of light,” Mrs. Darby said.  “Your pattern to date suggests that you often flicker the lights on and off to communicate just before you attack.  We thought we would get ahead of that and open dialogue.”

They will submit, the voice said.

“Kneel,” I said.

I saw the shock hit them.

“That’s not-”

Kneel,” I said, louder, firmer.  I let some of the emotion and raw energy from earlier into my voice, the anger at everything and at myself.  I turned it against the people who were supposed to be responsible for everything.  Who were symbolically responsible for me being what I was.

“We should go,” Professor Gossamer said.

“If you leave,” I said, “We will blow up that bridge with you on it.”

I could see the alarm on Duncan’s face.  Ashton frowned slightly.

Mary, at least, seemed to be neutral to this, or she was sufficiently good at appearing neutral.

Helen looked intrigued, for her part, but Helen was a difficult read in the here and now.

“You’d lose any and all chance you had of getting the others to listen or cooperate,” Professor Gossamer said.

“Probably.  I’d give them their chance to kneel, and if they didn’t listen, I’d wipe them out too,” I said.  I was very aware of how many nobles were arranged around us.  Mine, not theirs.  “Your time is up, the sands have all found their way to the bottom of this hourglass.  The point’s been made.  You know and we know how this ends.  No more pretending, no more niceties.”

“Niceties are important,” Lady Gloria said.  “You can achieve our cooperation without humiliating us.  Trying to humiliate us will only make us balk.  We may well die before we kneel to someone who isn’t our Lord King.”

“Then you might as well die,” I said.  “Because if you want to see this as humiliation, you’d face a lot more of it.  We had our turn as the bottom rung, doing the Academy’s bidding.  Now it’s the same, but the positions reversed.  You’ll be our slaves in all but name.  You will bow, you’ll scrape, and you’ll choose the right words.  How fast you bow and scrape will determine if we treat you with something resembling kindness, as we’ve treated the experiments we took into the dormitory over there, or if we treat you as things to be used and discarded.”

“That’s it, then?” Mrs. Darby asked.  “I’ve already given you my personal concession, I’ve told the others I’m already willing to surrender.  I don’t know how much my circumstances will change, and I’m scared at the ideas of what might happen, but you’ll hold us hostage here?  You’re making me reconsider my decision.”

“You can kneel, knowing just how many of them are watching this through the window, you can come with us, you can try to walk away, and we’ll take the bridge out from under your feet, or you can be taken prisoner.  You don’t want to be taken prisoner.”

“We’d be agreeing to be prisoners in the long term,” Lady Gloria said.  “I know where I stand in relation to you.  I know it’s not as wide a gap as some would like to pretend.”

I shook my head, slow.

“Yet I must insist that you could make this easier,” she said.

“That decision is entirely in your hands,” I said.  “It rests on how quickly you admit your decision in totality.”

Her face was hard as she stared me down.  I didn’t flinch.

Time was not a currency I was willing to spend any more of.  No.  We held power, and I had every intention of using that power to hoard that very currency.  I would give everything for more of it.  I would tread over any number of corpses until I could get more of it.  I would take it by any means.

Mrs. Darby shifted her footing.  Multiple eyes turned to her as she reached out for the railing to the bridge she stood on, and started to work her way to her knees.

Ibbot seized her arm, stopping her.

Her eyes on the ground, Mrs. Darby said, “I would have it be known I’m bending the knee, or I would if I wasn’t being manhandled by a notorious boor.”

“He’s pressing the issue because he’s in crisis,” Ibbot said.  “The Lambs have expiration dates.  Someone’s run short.  Jamie, was it?  Or have Lillian’s dalliances in study drugs caught up with her?”

“You don’t know anything,” Mary said.

“No,” I said.  “He’s right.  It’s a big part of why time’s up.  There’s so very little left to lose, now.  You can be sure I’m putting a high price on that little.  You do not want to pay for it in blood.  You do not want to see me get creative.”

“As you did with Ferres?” Professor Gossamer asked.

“Compared to where I am now, I was in a good mood when I addressed Ferres,” I said.  “And I didnt have the benefit of the other Lambs to focus me.  I can promise you, they’ll all have something to contribute, if it comes down to it.”

Mrs. Darby yanked her arm from Ibbot’s grip.  She dropped to her knee, head low.

“Thank you, Mrs. Darby,” Duncan said.

“I’m a pragmatist.  I’m going to believe my being first to bend the knee counts for something.  Please don’t dissuade me from that belief.”

“It does count for something,” Duncan said.  He glanced at me, and I nodded.

Others started to kneel.  Low-level aristocrats that had attended that trailed the group.

They were most used to bending the knee, perhaps.  They had the least to lose.

“I’d like assurances of food, proper accommodations,” Gloria said.

“This isn’t a negotiation, Gloria,” I said.  “That boat sailed so long ago it’s already reached the other side of the King’s Ocean.  When you bend the knee, it’s an acknowledgement that you are wholly and totally at our mercy.  You are wholly and collectively fucked.  You’ve wholly and collectively fucked the population, the landscape, the governing, the economy, the past, present, and future, and the time has come for it all to catch up with you.  If servitude is all you face, then that is a ludicrous kindness.”

“I’m not even ‘Lady Gloria’ anymore, then.  Two of my three Professors are sick with dehydration and hunger.  Their care of me has floundered,” she said.  “Being atop that building over there for a day and night hasn’t helped matters.”

“That was the intent,” Mary said.  “We might not be able to defeat Nobles, but we can drive home just how dependent you are on them.

“One among many of a series of realities I’ve suspected but never had to face,” Gloria said.  She paused, and then swept into a curtsy that became a kneeling position.  I wondered if it was a motion practiced and reserved solely for the likes of the King or perhaps the Infante.

With her submission, others followed suit.  Professor Gossamer, Doctors, and some holdouts among aristocrats.

Ibbot was a holdout.

“I will not bow to a life I brought into this world.”

Helen picked her way through the assembled group.  She found her way to him.

He held himself high, chin raised, refusing to even back away.

She reached over to brush a hand down one side of his face.  She was taller than him, helped mostly by the fact that he wasn’t tall for a man.  It had been some time since I’d seen them together, and somehow I was left with the impression she hadn’t stood nearly so tall in past cases.  Diminished by association with him.

“Miserable, miserable man,” she said.  “I’d pity you, but it’s not something I’m very good at doing.  I’d hate you, but I can’t, as much as you deserve it.”

“This is where you break me, then?” he asked.

“If I took hold of you to break you, I’d kill you,” she said.  “A bit of a snag in the way you put me together.”

“You’re that far gone, then,” he said.

“I’m that far gone,” she said.  She stepped closer to him.  Her hand ran along the top of his head, to the back of his neck.  “I have to wonder.  You made me, clearly with intentions that everyone suspected and nobody of note spoke aloud.  You didn’t care that they laughed at you behind your back.”

“They respect me,” Ibbot said.  “And I won’t betray that respect by kneeling here.  I’d sooner have my own experiment crush me.  There’s something to be said for closing that circle.”

“They respect your work,” she said.  She moved closer to him.  Her hand traced up his body.  When she spoke, it was into his ear.  “They have zero respect for you.  Everybody weighs the odds, is he so maladept and socially incompetent that he doesn’t realize what it looks like?  Or is he one of the disgusting sorts that seizes the reins of life itself, forging thinking, breathing existence from next to nothing, only so he can stick his cock in it?”

She breathed those last words.

“Have the Lambs warped you so much, that you’re this ruined?” he asked.

“Have they indeed?” Helen asked.  She giggled.  “No, Professor.  Without them, there wouldn’t be anything of worth in me.”

She seized his ear, twisting it.  His knees buckled, and he gripped the railing of the bridge to keep from falling to the ground, from kneeling even accidentally.

But that wasn’t her intent.  She twisted his head by twisting his ear, and she made him turn a quarter-circle.

“Show them, Professor.  Show them the sum total of what you are.”

He scowled, struggling more.  But he knew as well as anyone, very literally, just how futile that really was.

“How did Jessie put it, Sylvester?  We talked about it when discussing my brother.”

I winced at the mention of Jessie.  I felt a pang.

Still, my eye dropped to the lower half of Ibbot.

“The sleeping dragon,” I said.  “Except we’re not talking sleeping dragons in this case.”

Ibbot’s face was visibly red, even in the gloom.  With the angle of his body in regard to the main building, all of the faces in the window could no doubt see, as they watched Noble, Doctor, Professor and aristocrat kneel, while Ibbot… stood up.

“So easy,” Helen said.  “So easy to show them how small a man you really are.”

“Not that small,” Ashton said.

“Shhh,” Duncan said.  “Metaphor.”

“Oh.”

Ibbot picked up his struggle.  In the midst of it, I couldn’t tell if it was because he was struggling so hard or if it was Helen’s strength, but he pulled away from his creation, and he left his ear behind, firmly in her grip.  He snarled and gasped as he dropped to the ground.

He was on all fours, but he was on his knees too.

“Don’t kid yourself, Professor,” I said.  “Nobody thought you were the last holdout, nobody believed you were the strongest here.”

“They’d be embarrassed to think you were,” Mary said.

“Go back.  Talk to the others.  Make the stakes clear.  We’ll be approaching you with your assignments shortly.  Trust me when I say that you really, really want to have everyone on the same page by the time we get to you, and I’m talking an hour or two at most, understand?”

“There’ll be holdouts,” Gloria said.

“Address them,” I said, my voice hard.  “Consider that your first collective assignment.  Go.”

They rose to their feet.  I could see the unhappy looks on many faces, at taking these orders, at this circumstance.  They walked back over the bridge.

They’d tell themselves that it was only a matter of time, that the Infante would find out or they’d have a chance to get a message out.  That we were expiring.  There would be heated debate, but they’d concede.  They were too hungry and tired to do otherwise.

As the group departed, they left Ibbot behind.  Only a few disgusted looks were cast back his way.  He still huddled on the ground, head buried in arms, back arched, knees tucked under him, like a turtle drawn into his shell.  One of his hands struggled to stem the tide of blood from his ear.

My hand hurt in much the same measure.  The limited bandage wouldn’t be enough.

I wished my hand wasn’t as hurt as it was.  It would have been nice to have an excuse to postpone things.

“Come along, Professor,” Duncan said.  “You might as well come with us, as you’re not going back to them.”

“Pheromones,” Ibbot said.  “She was near the boy.  She drew them into her lungs, she breathed them on me.”

“You took drugs to ward off Ashton,” Duncan said.  “But if that’s the story you want to tell us, you can do that.  If you really believe it’s true, you can go back to them and tell them.  They’ll take any excuse to believe it, I think.”

Mary gestured at me.  Her eye dropped to my hand.

“Or you can stay here and bleed,” I said.  “Lambs, lieutenants, we’re going back.”

We started walking.  Behind us, without looking at anyone, and without even an armed escort, Ibbot picked himself up.  He trudged behind, head hanging.

“How bad was it?” I heard Duncan ask Mary.  “When you went to check on Sy, Jessie, and Lillian?”

“Far from good.  As to how bad, we’re going to have to see.”

A weight seemed to settle over the Lambs as we made our way back.

Lillian sat on one arm of the chair.  Jessie sat in the chair, bundled up in a blanket.  Much of the blood had been cleaned up.  Jessie was awake.

She smiled when she saw me.

I approached her, and I kissed her on the forehead.

“I appreciate you not killing me,” she said.

That doesn’t make this easier, I thought.

“You’ll want to look at Sy’s hand, Lillian,” Mary said.

“How are things?” Jessie asked.  “Is it resolved?”

“Something essential just broke in them.  The underpinnings that let them hold onto their pride.  The rest will crumble,” I said.

“Then there’s a chance I’ll get to see the conclusion,” Jessie said.  “Or the start of it.”

“No,” I said.

Lillian, already taking my hand to examine it and peel away bandage, stopped, tense.

“Sy,” Jessie said.  “This is not the time for you to get nutty on us.”

“We should put you to sleep, Jessie.”

She swallowed.  I saw a look of fear sweep over her expression before she pushed it away.  She reached up for my hand and took it.  “No, Sy.”

“We have a wealth of resources at our disposal,” I said.  “We’ll soon make our play to have the Crown States under our thumb.  But with the people we’ve brought here, we can start on the first leg of it.  Ibbot will work on Helen again, but as an exclusive project, with a dozen keen eyes and minds looking over his every last piece of work, to look for traps.   He will keep Helen from expiring, on pain of death.”

Eyes moved to Ibbot, who hung back at the rear of the group.  He scowled, but he didn’t have it in him to reply.

A good thing too, or I might’ve hurt him.

“We have Professors and Doctors to take over Mary’s project.  Minds that would have otherwise been turned to prolonging life are going to turn to prolonging yours, improving your quality of life.”

“Sy, we talked about this, but it wasn’t a primary focus-”

“It’s absolutely my primary focus now,” I said, tense.  “I will not, under any circumstance, see another Lamb die.  I will not lose another one of you.  The rule of longevity isn’t that you have to unlock a hundred extra years of life.  You unlock five, or ten, or twenty, and that buys you time to find another five, ten, or twenty.  They will find answers.”

“They’ll find some, but they’ll have failures.  There will be five or twenty year droughts,” Duncan said.  “Droughts that are long enough.”

“Then we put more on it,” I said.  “But I’m not taking no for an answer here.  Every single one of us, even the New Lambs, are getting focused, expert attention.  Entire Academies worth of people, if need be.  We’ll take control, we’ll have the power, and we’ll do all the things we said we would, we’ll-”

No, the voice said.

I changed the conclusion of my statement, “We’ll do this first.  Everything else follows from it.”

“This is the forward movement you were talking about?” Lillian asked.

“Absolutely.”

“So long as we do this, you think you’ll be able to cooperate and stay on track?”

You will not tell her about the compromise.

“As long as this is the route?  I’ll see things, I’ll have odd moments, but… I’ll manage.”

“And what if I don’t agree?” Jessie asked.

I met her eyes.

I was pretty sure I’d never seen her angrier.

“Tough.”

“It’s my choice,” she said.  “And I decided a long time ago that if we’re going to lose our minds, if we’re going to slip away, then it’d be on our terms.  I’d do it with you, I’d enjoy the moments, I’d make the most of the time we had, and we’d accomplish what we could before passing the reins for others or the others to see it through to the conclusion.  We agreed.  That was the deal we had.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You asshole,” she said, “You don’t get to change the terms of the deal.”

“Jessie does get a say,” Duncan said.

“I get the say!  It’s my brain!” Jessie said.  “And it’s crumbling and I can tell I’m losing memories by the hour, and it’s picking up speed, but I have a few days, maybe a couple of weeks.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I got the sense of that from our last conversation.”

“I’ve put up with so much shit from so many people.  I’ve worked hard to get us here.  Not just the plan, but you and me, with the people around us, with the Lambs here.  I’ve made compromises and sacrifices.  So I get this.  Even if it’s hard!”

“You should,” I said.

“If you put me to sleep to slow the damage until you find some answer, you do know what happens, don’t you?” she asked.

“I know.  Believe me.”

“I go to sleep, and it takes time to fix.  Time the rest of you don’t have.  Look at how far you’ve slipped in the last month, Sy.  If it takes another year?  If Mary and Helen continue down the roads they’re on?”

“We’ll stall, we’ll put things in motion,” I said.  “Just like I talked about.”

“That’s no guarantee.  You’re asking me to go to sleep, possibly for years, with no guarantee anybody but Duncan or Lillian is there when and if I wake up.  If I wake up.  If you don’t find an answer-”

“We’ll find something,” I said.

Jessie pushed the tea table I’d already damaged by tearing the leg off.  She rose out of her seat.  “I’m deciding I stay.  I’d sooner live out my last days with you than go to sleep, miss out, and live a longer life.  This was the damn deal!”

I’d already told Mary and Lillian the reality.

Jessie was so indignant.  It was rare.  She was usually so calm.  The rock to my storm.

She wanted this as badly as I did.

“You can’t,” I said.  “Because we don’t get that.  You and I can’t spend our last few days alone together.  I need a Lamb close by, or I’ll lose my mind.”

“I’ll be beside you,” she said.

“You’ll fall asleep.  You’ll drift off, because you sleep sixteen to twenty hours a day to stay at your best, and you won’t be beside me anymore,” I said.  “Because if you’re asleep, you’re not next to me.  You’re as good as gone.”

“That’s not-” she started.  “No.”

“Just a short step away from convincing myself you’re never waking up, the darkest parts of me saying it’s better to kill you than to see the look in your eyes when you’re completely gone.  Anything else, any compromise we might try to make, it’s going to feel hollow, reminding us of the issue, and I don’t want our last days to be a compromise.  Not like that.”

She shook her head.

“You’ll go to sleep, we’ll give you the drugs to keep you under.  We’ll be there when you wake up.”

She started to shake her head.

Then I saw her expression change.  Before anyone saw, I wrapped her in a hug.  She buried her face in my shoulder, hugging me tight.  I felt the borrowed shirt become damp, and I looked at each of the other Lambs, who would soon say their goodbyes.

It was some time before she nodded her head against my shoulder.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 19.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 19)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

He’d wanted to run the Academy for so long, now.  He’d ascended to the rank of second in command, and now he was to burn it all down.

Men, women, and children gathered around the water’s edge.  The canal served as a moat to separate Chedglow Academy from the supporting city.  Boats lined the canal, each with ramps extending down.  Teams of vat-grown labored to load luggage, crates, and cases onto the individual ships.

The people on the far shore were clearly restless.  There was an excitement that would be fitting for people at the street’s edge during a parade or mass hanging, but there were less smiles than a parade would have, and less fervor than an execution might stir up.  The sentiment was there, but they didn’t dare to reveal it to those around them.  The little he could make out of expressions -of brow and the play of light and shadow on each face- indicated solemn and blank expressions.

“Are the three widows still around?” Hector asked the room, without looking.

His assistant replied, “They are.  I believe they’re hosting guests and reassuring the, ah…”

“The populace?”

“No, Professor.  The gentler sorts among the upper class.”

The interim headmaster nodded.  The soft.  The idealists.

The doctors and students alike were packing up.  Some students had gone ahead or traveled to meet family that would give them more comfortable accommodations aboard nicer ships.  Others had already been sequestered away with special projects, to keep them out of the way until they could be informed of what was underway.

The people standing on that far shore were very much like the students who had been gathered together under the guise of learning manners and decorum.  Of the five hundred students at Chedglow, eighty-five had been from poorer families, ones without backers, patrons, or standing sufficient to earn them a way over the King’s Ocean.  Rather than catching up to their peers, as they hoped to do, they would be left behind.  There was a dim possibility that they would be killed outright, to minimize complications once all people of good standing had fled for safer territories.

The people realized something was wrong.  The key would be to reassure them, to tell them that war was underway.  There would need to be an illusion, somehow, that there was still a governing body above them, and that keen minds remained in Chedglow.  The widows would have an idea of what to say.

But things were moving neatly.

He swept his black lab coat around him as he turned his back to the window and the people he could see from it.  His assistants hurried to gather papers and notes, slotting each into folders, collecting folders into stacks, and follow behind him.  Others stayed behind, closing the office.

The libraries and records would be set to burn.  Everything worth preserving had to be preserved now.

There were guards in the hallway.  Each wore red in varying shades, and each was immaculately groomed.  For most, the skin growth had been artificially stalled.  Fuller pins with loads of succinylcholine were slotted into the edges of faces and running down their necks – small, subtle needles set in place much like pins might be used by a tailor.  Some had three radiating from the corner of their jaw, others had them as ear ornaments, and one had such a pin through the base of their noses.  They might have looked like native savages if their clothes and hair hadn’t been done up to crisp perfection.

With a single hand motion, he bid the full arrangement of Tender Mercies to follow him.

“You’ll have the run of the place in a matter of hours,” he said, to the nearest one.

“Yes, Professor Hector.”

“What are your thoughts on that, hm?  You were made for a world of desolation and plague.  That world dawns soon.”

“Not so soon, Professor.  It may be days or weeks before either black wood or plague find their way to Chedglow,” the Mercy said.

“All the same.  There’s no telling if the years and the desolation will wear on you, when the hunting is done,” Hector said.  “We’ve tried to prime you for that kind of environment and mentality, but we could hardly test it, and minds are funny things, aren’t they?”

“I feel like the world is too bright, busy, and loud now.  If the world is quiet and sick, it might be the kind of peace I’m meant to enjoy.”

There were murmurs of assent from other Mercies.

“The busyness might be that we’re trying to wrap up.  Still, I hope you’re right.  It’s certainly our intention that you’re comfortable as you lapse into your roles as custodians and hunters of our cats and cockroaches.”

“Yes, Professor.  I’m eager.  We’re still trying to figure out how we might organize ourselves.  I’m caught, myself.”

“Caught?”

“Two of my brothers are staking out the rural territories until those territories are no more.  Hunting for strays in the woods, the fields, and the mountains.  My other two siblings, my dear sister and eldest brother, they’re looking to remain here.  They want to repurpose your quarters and those of the other well-to-do.  I hope that’s not an issue.”

“Not at all.  A strange feeling, really, but I’m strangely glad my apartments will be put to use.  How are you caught, then?”

“We all have our, ah, proclivities.”

“We tried to nurture a variety of talents, so you might cover a number of bases.”

“Exactly.  My brothers like the crossbow and impalements, respectively.  My dear sister likes pretending to be human, luring prey close, and then using great whaling hooks she hides on her person, and my brother likes large swords an ordinary human couldn’t use.  I like mechanisms, triggers.”

“Guns, then?”

“Traps, Professor.  Bear and fox traps, tripwires, small explosives, deadfalls…”

“How enterprising,” Hector said, amused.

“Yes, professor.  I’d like to think so.  But I’m still not very good, and I’m very much aware that as much as the cities suit me more and that I’m closer to my sister and elder brother, my weapon of choice would work far better in the wilderness.  I’d be a contact between city and the rural reaches, but that’s a position in high demand.”

“I trust you won’t fight among one another.”

“No, Professor.  Even when we have cause to disagree, we’re loyal in drawing the line and keeping to our purpose.”

“Good to hear,” Hector said.  “Now, I do believe I hear voices.”

 

The Mercies took that as their cue to fall back a few steps, more a following than a group that was keeping him company.  His assistants hurried forward, almost synchronized in how they each put stacks of folders under one arm and opened the way for him with their freed hands.

Aristocrat, Doctor, Specialist and Professor alike were gathered in front of the building.  He looked for and found the three widows toward the center.  They were dowagers of sixty to eighty years of age, but they had the kind of money that bought apparent youth; they looked half or less than half their age.

“We sent some students to find you in the labs, Hector,” one Doctor said.  Arthur, one of Hector’s favorites.  “We were concerned when you didn’t come.”

“I was in my office, not the labs.  Has something happened?”

“Hackthorn was sieged.  The Headmaster was there.”

“Ferres’ Academy?  When, and how?”

“The information we have is spotty.  Two birds reached Franklinton, and they dispatched copies of the messages to us.  Not all of the message reached us intact.”

“Show me.”

He was aware of the attention of everyone present as he approached the center of the throng.  At a possible time of crisis, he was the one making the final decisions.  He stood straighter, and felt his heart swell, even as all of the usual and proper emotions reached him.  The loss of their own, even a radical like Ferres, it was a tragedy.

But there was more to it.  Ferres had been throwing an event.  Her supposed immortality.

He took the messages, shook them, and held them with both hands to straighten them out as they sought to return to the form they’d been folded in.

“A late arrival saw wrecks at the water… Academy superweapons deployed and attacking Hackthorn.  A day and night passed before the message was sent, with only gunfire and explosions as signs of life from within.  More message birds to follow, but the sending requires us to abandon our observation post.”

“Flight times for the message birds suggest-”

Hector interrupted.  “Events should be a day delayed.  The third message was sent later than the first?”

“Yes, Professor.”

He read the second of the two notes.  It was a third letter, the second lost in transit, the bird scooped up by a passing hawk or its message fallen from its leg.  “All present are believed dead or captured, given the stillness and silence during the most recent hours of our observations.  The Infante has been informed, and we should leave post-haste, with an emphasis on combat readiness to deal with the culprits.  A massed attack against rebel parties.  Convene in Franklinton.”

It had been nearly three weeks.  Depending on weather and how travel had proceeded, Hector’s superior could have been under siege at Hackthorn for as much as two weeks, for as little as one.

It was firm, the wording was right, and-

He reached for his belt.  Vials were lined up in a row there.  He drew one out, uncorked it, and tipped it, to place a drop of bioluminescent trace on his fingertips.  He rubbed fingertip against thumb, then swept his fingers over the lower third of the page.

On the second swipe, he saw the dark stain start to spread.  The glow emerged shortly after.  The sender had used the coded droplet of fluids.  He wasn’t in his office with the necessary equipment to check the code against senders, which meant it wasn’t verification that the sender was who they said they were.  Still, the sender was Franklinton, so that mattered very little.  They would have done the verification that it was Ferres.

“War?” one of the widows asked.  Mrs. Rue.  Her husband had been military, once.

“Not a war.  Ferres was having an event, and it worked neatly with the schedule for leaving the Crown States.  Many were guests there.  If they attacked Hackthorn when so many of ours were gathered there, and if we haven’t heard word since, it might well have been successful.  It’s something other than war.  The rebels have been quiet, and they might have been biding their time for this particular strike.”

“What do you need?” the widow asked.

What a question.  The three widows weren’t in official positions of power.  They didn’t have their thumbs on the local government, the economy, the military forces, or anything of the sort.   But by dint of who their husbands had been, their social finesse and the passage of years, they had enmeshed themselves in everything, acting as intermediaries, the ones who knew everyone worth knowing, even outside of the city, and who somehow had half of the city’s bourgeois owing them favors, while they owed few in return.

In other circumstances, having one of them make such an open ended offer of help was the sort of thing that could have helped him a considerable ways on his dream of becoming a permanently interred headmaster, earned him a coveted bachelorette for a wife, or removed an enemy from his path.  They were limited in what they could do with the Academy, specifically, but they could help, in a way that few outside of the Academy could.  That was a powerful tool when his enemies were so often playing with the same tools he was.  A card up his sleeve that they couldn’t account for or wholly counteract.

But there was no room for selfishness here.  He spoke, “The people.  We need them not to panic.”

“We’ve already been smoothing things over.  Are you stirring the pot, Professor?  Enough of a stir that we’ll need to smooth more?”

“We’ll need to gather our forces.  It won’t be a subtle departure.  Yes, absolutely, it will be a stir.”

“There’s a man in your service named Captain Carr.  He’s well liked and trusted, and he hasn’t ever lied to the people of the town.  He and his father were from here, his father an officer before him, and the family is known to attend town halls.  They trust him.  If we could borrow him…”

“You’d have him lie?”

“He won’t be here after today, Professor,” the widow Rue said.  “What does it matter?”

“He should be keeping the peace as the ships are loaded up, at the canal’s edge.”

“He is.  With your leave, Professor?”

“Please, and thank you, Mrs. Rue.”

The woman smiled and left.

He stood a little straighter.  “Gather our forces.  We’ll bring a share of the Mercies with us.  If the trains keep running, we can send them back after.  Halve drug rations for any warbeasts we’re tranquilizing, make sure we have ammunition as well as weapons.”

He was surprising himself, with the ease that he found the words and identified the priorities, and also the ease with which others listened to them.  The entire Academy was soon moving on a new set of priorities.

Was it Mauer?  Fray?  There had been some activity from the Radham brats, and there were others popping up here and there, as refugees were driven toward population centers by plague and black wood.  Worse, civilians were starting to realize that things were reaching an untenable point.  They were starting to worry, which was bad, and they were starting to wonder, and that was the most problematic of all.

A full hour passed, his forces moving.  He oversaw what he could, addressed the issues, and stopped to watch as Captain Carr talked to the people.  Lying to them, for the first and last time.

His thoughts were constantly on the enemy.  Whoever the opposition was, it required different kinds of thinking.  Mauer was one to inflame the hearts of the people, and there were a great many people who might listen.  Fray was the type to make grand plays.  Burlap soldiers terrorized, the Lambs subverted, the Witches drew on a core of back-alley doctors and a willingness to die if it meant hurting the aristocracy.

He was midway through overseeing the removal of one set of supplies from a boat to make room for Mercies when the meal bell rang.  It was normally meant to bring in all of the students and Doctors who might be managing the shipping of experiments and Academy goods to the rest of the Crown States, but the hour was wrong.  Too early for dinner, too late for a midday meal.

He picked up the pace.

Whatever had happened to Hackthorn.  Was it happening here?

He didn’t expect the sight that greeted him at the gates of Chedglow.  Headmaster Ensbury.  His predecessor and superior.  The others stood nearby, looking uneasy.  It was a circle of the most elite of Chedglow, from the widows to the aristocracy and Hector’s- Ensbury’s top faculty members.

“Did the siege break?  You would have had to be right on the backs of those messenger birds,” Hector said.

“The siege didn’t break,” Headmaster Ensbury said.

“We sent everyone away, given Ensbury’s disposition,” the eldest of the three widows said.  “If you’d like, we can leave as well.”

“Please stay,” Hector said.  “I imagine it’s quite alright.  Headmaster Ensbury, can you explain?”

“I’ve been drugged,” Ensbury said, his voice quiet.  “Poisoned, if you want to use the crass terminology.  I’m very much compromised.  By speaking to you, I’m condemning myself, but you know I’m a patriot.”

Hector clenched his jaw.  He nodded.  He would have made Ensbury one of the enemies he had the widows help him remove, if they’d afforded him a chance, but that didn’t mean he demonized the man.  Ensbury had his merits, and patriotism was very much one of those.  He was a man of the Academy and the Crown, through and through.

“Who?” Hector asked.

“The Lambs.  Noble, Doctor, Professor, aristocrat, student.  They’ve seized us, one and all.  Now they’re using us.  Half of the cities and Academies that haven’t been claimed by the wasting of the Crown States are being targeted today, Hector.”

For all his assurance earlier, Hector found himself at a loss for words.

He found himself echoing the widow, and in the moment, he wondered if she’d experienced what he was experiencing now, only to hide it under a facade.  He asked, “What do you need?”

“Take me prisoner.  When I start to expire, I’ll start exhaling poisonous gas, and it will kill the people around me on its way to killing me, account for that when you lock me away.”

“We can take the precautions,” Hector said.

“You’ll need to act against them.  Once today is over with, the Lambs will move on targets of a secondary priority.  That will occur before the week is over.  I talked to others, while we were discussing the surrender, and they’ve agreed that they will give their lives to spread the word.  A third of the key locations being targeted today will still be the Crown’s.  We’ll fight back.”

“How?” one of the military men asked.  “This is… well beyond the pale.”

“Take me to my cell.  There’s so much to cover, and I don’t have much time.  You’ll need to arrange a bird too.  I’m to write them to let them know if I’ve succeeded.  The counter-agent will come with one of their subordinates if I do, and more of their forces will come if I’ve failed.”

“That gives us options,” Hector said.

“It does,” Ensbury said.  “I might have to defer to you on that, Headmaster.”

Hector paused.

“Too soon for that,” he said.

“Write me off, Hector.  It’ll be easier for all of us if you do.”

The eldest of the widows even looked a touch teary-eyed at that.

“No tears,” Ensbury said.  “We coordinate, understand?  We get one shot at this.  The Crown States may be in more danger than it’s ever been.”

Hector glanced away, his heart pounding.  He saw students and Doctors gathered a distance away, far enough away to be well beyond earshot, but they were lingering, trying to read the situation.  He motioned for them to go, and they started walking.

“The quarantine cells?” he asked.

“It makes the most sense,” Ensbury said.  “Did you pack up the remainder of my belongings?”

“We did.  But it should be accessible.  I had the boxes arranged so they would be the first off the boat, so you wouldn’t have to wait to furnish your new home.”

“You’re a good man, Hector.  Ambitious, but not in a way I dislike.  You’ll do me proud.”

“I’ll try,” Hector said.

“Would you have some students bring me the boxes with my drinks and my photos?  We’ll need to discuss, but I’m in possession of some fine scotches I’ve been saving for the future, and I’ll damned well indulge in them before I die.”

Hector nodded.  He looked at one of his doctors, motioning one hand.

Ensbury hadn’t made mention of the photos, but asking would be crass.

It was so easy, in the midst of the games, the struggles, the political plays, and the efforts to outdo his superior, to simply forget that Ensbury was a man.  He had a history, a family, lost loves and loves he’d found.

They started the walk toward the labs.

Ensbury asked, “Any word on the other rebels?”

Hector spoke, “Mauer was mobilizing, but not in our direction.”

“The others?  There were some calling themselves the Four Nails?”

“Gone.  Broken in two, one of the two groups became the Burlap soldiers, just in the past week.  Inconsequential in large part, but any rebel group is most dangerous when it’s newly forged, its spirit not yet broken.”

Ensbury nodded.  His expression was grave.

“This is manageable.  The Infante-”

“Isn’t coming.  The letters were faked.”

“Faked?” Hector asked.  “That’s madness.”

“It’s how they operate,” Ensbury said.  The closer they drew to the quarantine area, the darker his expression became.  “It makes no sense and appears reckless from a distance, but there’s a logic behind it we cannot grasp.  Yet.  When we know, it will be too late.  It’s how it was at Hackthorn.”

They entered the building.  The widows looked a little alarmed at how stark and heavy-handed the measures were in the building.  Vat-grown guards were posted throughout- Ensbury had never liked the stitched, and Hector himself had to admit he was glad for their absence.  The vat-grown weren’t perfect, but they at least didn’t smell like old death, preservation chemicals and ozone.

“You make it sound hopeless,” Hector said.

“It isn’t.  But we’ll have to be careful,” Ensbury said.  “Lords, I could do with that drink.  This is how my legacy ends, is it?”

“We can preserve your legacy, spread the story of what you helped us do,” one widow said.

“Hmm,” Ensbury grunted.  “Forgive me.  It rings hollow.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Was it that they wanted us to think the Infante was going to reach out and guide us as the chaos unfolded, to leave us reeling when he didn’t?” Hector asked.

“I don’t know,” Ensbury said.

The closer they’d drawn to the sealed cell, the more Ensbury had drawn into himself.  Hector had taken it to be a resignation to his fate, but-

He reached out, seizing Ensbury’s shoulder.  He spun the man around, thrusting him against the wall.

He saw the terrible sadness in his old superior’s eyes.

“No,” Hector said.  “What is this?”

“I’m so sorry,” Ensbury said.

The questions and the reactions of the others in their group were drowned out as cell doors opened down the length of the hall.

We’ve already been infiltrated.

For infiltration at this level, Ensbury would have had to cooperate.  To share the layout of the building, the security measures.  He would have had to urge the vat-grown to allow enemies through without issue.

All of this would have had to be done before the letter even arrived.

“Don’t touch those guns,” a voice said.

The owner of the voice stepped into view.  His hair and eyes were wild, in a way that reminded Hector of when he’d seen the homeless urchins who’d been up for sale on his visits to the auction blocks in New Amsterdam, Crown London, and Elbitz.  The ones who hadn’t been socialized enough by humans, or who’d been socialized once and then seen that learning stripped away by dark experience.  The lad wore fine clothes, a vest over a buttoned shirt, slacks, and boots.  He was no older than eighteen, to look at him, but his green eyes looked far older.

“I think it might be better to do as Ensbury should have done,” Hector said.  “And given my life out of patriotism.”

“Maybe if it were life that was on the table.  But it’s not, Hector,” the lad said.  “You should know as well as anyone that the Academy can inflict far worse punishments.”

“Oh lords,” one of the widows whispered.  Hector reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.

“You are not the Academy,” Hector said.

“You might be confused.  It was certainly the plan.  The letter, the crisis, all intended to get the wheels in your head spinning in one direction.  I’ll explain.  Chedglow is ours, Professor.  Like Hackthorn is.  Like Peachtree and Atlantica.  Like the city of Wetwood and the town of Tyessex.”

Hector felt his entire perception of the world shift as the names were rattled off, as if he’d missed a stair on his way down, and now teetered on a brink.  Too many.  He found his bearings at the same time he gathered his courage.  His hand went to his gun.  If he removed one of them-

Pain lanced through his hand and fingers as they tried to close on the grip of his weapon, then redoubled as whatever adder or scorpion had stung him repeated its assault.  Blood wept from his fingers as he pulled them away, trying to see what it was that had struck him.  A solid, deep impact to the back of his knee knocked his leg out from under him, and his initial effort to bend his knee and go with the impact only brought him pain.  He teetered and ended up falling sideways into one of the widows, his leg going straight to avoid repeating that pain.

A knife.  One had slashed at his fingers even though nobody stood near him.  Another had appeared in the back of one of his knees, going deep.

He cried out in pain.

“You’ve bought yourself an ugly fate, Professor Hector,” a girl said, from behind him.  “I wouldn’t try anything else, or you might buy something equally grim for these people you have with you.”

He stole glances at the widows, at the Doctors who had served him so well, the Professors who no doubt hoped they would run an Academy one day.  Ones very much like he had been not very long ago at all.

He looked at Ensbury, who stood with downcast eyes, looking like a man who’d died inside.

“Now,” the boy with the dark hair spoke.  “My name is Sylvester.  And I’m going to explain how things are going to work now…”

“…The letter?  You’re going to play along.  As far as we’re concerned, the warning is real.”

“Play along?” Sir Warthon asked.  He stood a little straighter.  “Listen here-”

“You’re going to play along, professor,” Helen said, very gently.  “Your family will be in our custody, and we’re going to take measures with you, specifically.”

Warthon scowled.

“You’ll muster an army.  You’ll gather your forces, and you’ll lead them.  You have doctors in your employ.  You’ll put them to work.  Your little fort town may end up a point other armies have to fall back to.  We’ll need to be ready for them.”

“You’re mad,” he said.

“I don’t get mad,” Helen said, smiling.

“You have to know you’re calling the King’s attention down on you.”

“If we happen to upset him, you’ll be caught in the devastation that follows,” Helen said.  “Something worse than black wood and red plague.  I really do think you should cooperate.”

Warthon clenched his fists.

“Let’s outline the particulars first, sir, and then you can decide how much you want to object, and I’ll answer your objections.”

“Not with words, I imagine,” Warthon said.

Helen tittered, her eyes alight with fey mischief.  “I do hope you object.  If you do, will it be an objection to-”

“-calling a state of emergency,” Duncan said.

“I don’t have the authority,” the debutante said.  “It’s not my city, it’s my father’s, and he’s away.”

“You can call the state of emergency.  You saw what unfolded when the local government reacted to the letters.  Without your father here, with communication between cities being so spotty, they’re adrift in a storm.  You’ll take authority.”

“We’ll help you,” Ashton said.  He sat beside the young lady.  She wore an ankle-length dress, who had a wisp-light scarf around her neck, while her hair was so short and so oiled down it looked sculpted to her head.  As casual as the scene and her posture might have been, something in her eyes betrayed a trace of the alarm she should have been feeling in the moment.  Ashton added, “We’ll tell you what to do.”

She nodded, even as the vague impression of alarm grew more poignant.  Slowly, it eased away, but then the alarm became apparent in how her hands moved.  Ashton reached up and took one of her hands, holding it.

“You’ll coordinate with the others.  Your father’s company supplies raw chemicals to Academies.  You’ll propose joining the effort at Franklinton.

“You’ll want to do that,” Ashton said.

“We’re not soldiers.”

“But you can supply a war effort.  There’ll be debate and discussion on what to do.  When and if you have a voice, you’re going to spread information for us.”

“Information?”

“Just one clue,” Ashton said.  He stroked her hand.  “You’ll give them one clue, won’t that be easy?”

She nodded, numb.  Her feelings were all over the place, she’d never experienced a crisis like this before, and she couldn’t gather her thoughts enough to know how she should act.  It was always her father who’d made the hard decisions.

It was so much easier to sit, to listen, and hear Ashton’s soft, pleasant voice telling her what to do.  It made the anxieties slip away, gave her assurance.

“One clue,” she said.

“It will have to do with the movements of rebels, and the odd patterns of birds,” Duncan said.  “That will-”

“-be your cue,” Lillian said.

Emily and the two aristocrats Lainie and Chance were Lillian’s support as she faced the rest of the room.  She had lieutenants, but it was so hard to shake the notion that the rebel soldiers were Sy’s.  Something being Sy’s was always a cause for a sort of anxiety.  Emmett was with her too, but Emmett had his hands full with Gustav, a local aristocrat who’d augmented himself.

Her soldiers encircled her, standing on the ground while she stood on a table.  Their guns were raised, while the ten guests at the evening dinner were sitting stock still, frightened for their lives.  Plates still steamed in front of them.  The dishes had been lightly poisoned, enough to take the fight out of them.

Lillian found some comfort in that touchstone, that it reminded her of meeting Mary, of the bad seeds poisoning the cafeteria.  There was too much to do, so she hadn’t had any Lambs come with her.  Ashton had needed a babysitter and was most familiar with Duncan.  Sylvester had needed someone to watch him and Mary was most able.  Helen was content to operate alone.

It was nice that Mary was with her on some level, even if it was a reminder of a poisoning half a decade ago.

“You’ll provide the second clue, and others will connect the dots.  The movements of rebels tie to a series of events in nearby towns.  You’ll name the Lambs, and you’ll name the towns, and I’ll provide the particular details shortly, but the key element is that Radham comes up,” she said.

“Radham?”

“Radham,” Davis said.  “And all you have to do, Professor, is speak out on just how much trouble has come out of Radham.  The Lambs, Mauer, and Fray.  You’ll be sure to mention that last name.”

“Fray?” the Professor asked.  He eyed the young rebels who stood in his bedroom.

“You just mention that name,” the Treasurer said.

“I don’t suppose I have much of a choice, do I?” the Professor asked.

“If you think you have any choice at all,” Bea said.  “You’re gravely mistaken.”

Red paced at the back of the room, watching, her trusty hatchet in hand.  She gave it a lazy swing through the air, as if to demonstrate what the Professor might be in for.

Sylvester closed his eyes.  The wind was strong, and it seemed like no matter where he went, the air smelled like charcoal ash or death.  Plague and blight.

Pierre approached him, coming to stand beside him.

“All good?”

“Define ‘good’,” Pierre said.

“The others are alright, I hope?”

“Messages from the others indicate they’re on track.  Duncan’s group was slowed by an incidence of plague in their ranks.”

“You don’t seem alarmed in a way that suggests they’re dead and gone.”

“They say they’ll heal, but it will mean recovery time, and it will slow them down.”

“We’ll make do, I suppose,” Sylvester said.

“And the ones who didn’t want to participate in the battle are on their way to Sternwick.”

“Sternwick?”

“We’ve talked about this.  West Corinth had to evacuate.  The orphanage has expanded beyond its considerable frame, we control a share of that city, with accommodations for everyone that’s presently headed there.  They should be reasonably safe and out of the way there.”

Sylvester nodded, taking that in.  He vaguely recalled something along those lines.

“Our contacts are saying there’s a hint of movement from others,” Pierre said.

“A hint, you say?” Sylvester asked.  “It wouldn’t be Mauer.  Fray?”

“Genevieve Fray’s colleague Warren Howell and her stitched Wendy were spotted in the company of a creature that matches Dog’s description.”

Sylvester smiled.  “Too big to stick to the shadows very well, it seems.  She had to have caught wind of what we’re doing.  She’ll know her name came up.”

“The reports came late.  Communication is hard, when even the phones and wires are affected by the black wood, and the waypoints beset by plague.  But, difficulties aside, the forces you’ve recruited are making their way here.  All seems to be reasonably on track.”

Here.

Sylvester stood on the balcony.  The sun was setting, and the sky was on fire.  Franklinton carried on its business, unawares of the role it would soon play as a staging ground.  On the horizon, a city sprawled.  Plumes of smoke rose from buildings and cast out a gentle spiral of clouds that each rained endlessly on the city below.

“Good news, then, Duncan’s group excepted.”

“Not all so good.  The upper nobility might have a sense of what’s going on.”

Sylvester nodded slowly.  “Did the Infante leave?”

“We don’t know.”

“Communications, again?” Sylvester asked.

“It seems so.”

“Well, that might be more problematic.  Thank you for all of this, Pierre.”

“You’re welcome, Sylvester.  I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So do I.  So do I,” Sylvester said.  He didn’t admit to such doubts with many people.

He leaned against the railing.  He watched the city, as people started to retire for the night, packing up shops, loading up carts and carriages, and taking to the streets.  A group of children ran along the street with an Academy-created doll, flesh bound in a case like porcelain and fancy clothing.  It had an ungainly, floppy run that made it look as if it might collapse and smash itself to pieces at any step.  The girls took hold of its arms to support it and bring it along.

He looked away from that and looked at the sky.  It was turning from orange to red.

“Jessie,” Sylvester said.

He heard footsteps behind him.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Pierre gave him a sidelong glance.  He ignored it.

He ignored the three young women who were in the room that backed the balcony.  Shirley sat with Mary and Helen.

His focus was on Lillian’s muscle-suit, which empowered a stitched with the frame to comfortably and perpetually carry a reclining young lady.  Jessie was propped up, half-sitting, while the ten foot tall figure held her in its arms.

“Look, see?  Radham,” Sylvester said, his voice soft.

Pierre retreated.

He brushed his fingers through her hair, watching her more than he watched anything else.

She slept on.  An endless dream, sorting through memories.

He hoped he’d given her enough good ones.

“We’re back,” he said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.01 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.1

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I spread my arms to embrace the rain.

Radham wasn’t home.  I barely recognized the view of it as I looked at it from afar, frankly.  That wasn’t that my memory was slipping, but the fact that it had changed to adapt to plague and the press of war.  Where the Academy had once had tall fortifications surrounding it, now the city was ringed with them.  One tall wall lanced out into the distance, blocking off the view.  Fields, orchards, and grazing areas, secluded from the rest of the world.

So very strange to see walls of stone and mortar on that scale without the wood interlaced through it.

The rain ran through my hair, down the back of my neck, and soaked into my shirt.

Helen, walking a few paces behind me, was humming to herself.  I changed my pace, took one grand step back, and swept up her hand with mine, turning myself around to wrap her arm around my shoulder.  In the doing, I pulled her a little away from Shirley.

“Careful now,” she said.  “I don’t know if I trust myself to let things go nowadays.”

“Wouldn’t that be a way to go.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she said.  “Play nice, and I’ll hold back.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

She squeezed my shoulder with her arm, walking with me.

I glanced over at Shirley, who was putting her hood up, covering her short hair.  “How are you getting on?”

“I’m mostly marveling at Helen,” she said.

“That would be justifiable, given how I’m a marvel worth marveling at.  I’m sublime, even.  The professor I keep chained to the desk and cot in my room ensures it.”

Shirley looked like she needed a second to get her bearings, her conversational stride broken on a few levels by Helen.

“Anything in particular?” I asked.

“The lessons you taught me are very evident in a very natural way for Helen.  Poise, framing.”

“Entirely learned,” Helen said.  “But I learned it early on.  One of the first things I learned, I’ll have you know.”

I let the conversation continue, as Helen and Shirley had their talk.

Radham loomed in the distance.  It was enshrined in walls and soaked in a perpetual rain.  We were getting a trace of that rain, or perhaps we were getting the rain that Radham would’ve been due if it wasn’t generating its own.  It really wasn’t home.  We’d grown up and away from it.  But it was where we had set our roots.  Some of our brightest, most genuine, and saddest moments were founded there.

It was fitting, then, that we made it the first of the surviving major cities that we would seize.  It would, all going well, be our base of operations.

This was our staging ground.  The city was choked with soldiers and the creations that needed to be housed indoors.  They were trying to keep on the down-low, with primarily officers, major divisions and key experiments stored in the city, but it was still a lot of people.  People were gathered in the streets where there wasn’t enough room indoors, and while fires had been prohibited, the distribution of food and leash-free water was an ongoing process.

The manors atop the hill were the nicest in the town, and they were where we had settled.  They were where the officers, top Professors, and our other key ‘converts’ were staying.  The only people to come and go were our other converts.

Well, them and the scattered few enemies who made my heart jump in my chest, before I realized there was no conceivable reality where they could be here.  The Primordial Child.  Ferres outfitted in the suit that had enabled her to walk and use her hands again.  Sub Rosa, as both the child and the adult.

The Snake Charmer was staring at us, sitting with a girl I didn’t recognize.

I ran my fingers through my hair, palm hard against my head, squeezing the water out and back.  The streets were full enough that carts and carriages had a hard time passing through.  There was a variant Crown States flag on a pole by one of them, waving slightly.  It was one of many, signaling for gates and checkpoints to let the carriage through, but the key difference, with the crimson background to the flag, was that it was meant for us.

One of ours, coming back.  We’d meet them at the road that led from the city to the hill manors.

Helen and Shirley’s conversation was winding down, it seemed.

“…would be a waste if you didn’t,” Helen said.

“I’d like all of us to get to a place where I didn’t have to do anything like that with people we didn’t like, let alone carry a garotte with them,” Shirley said.  “If I had any dream or goal beyond situating myself well and rising from my current station, it would be seeing everyone get there.”

“Speaking of goals…” Mary said.  “I wouldn’t mind discussing that.”

“If you’re asking me I know what my goals are,” Helen said.

“I was thinking Sy should chime in,” Mary said.

I looked skyward, letting the rain patter against my face.

“We know what we’re doing in the big picture.  Claiming the Crown States.  I know Jessie was clear on that.  Jessie and Sy had that as a defined plan.  And… you’re doing what you do, Sylvester.  Now that something’s firmed up, you’re revolving and spiraling around it.”

Helen lifted my hand up.  I dutifully spun her around, as if we were dancing.  She smiled brilliantly, before raising a hand to her face, pushing wet hair out of the way and tucking it behind her ear.

“I understand if you want to keep quiet, if keeping quiet is one of the things that’s helping you to stay balanced, somehow,” Mary said.  “Even if I don’t understand how that works in the slightest.”

I shook my head.

“Three major hurdles to overcome,” I said.

“More than three, I’d imagine,” Helen said.

“Big hurdles.  Three gods to slay,” I said.  “Three gods to overcome.”

“Gods?  Do I need to be worried about where you’re at after all, Sy?” Mary asked.

I twisted around in Helen’s firm grip to glance back at Mary.  I gave her a smile.  “I’m fine.”

Mary had a parasol, and wore a very nice red dress with crimson lace, a ribbon at one side of her head.  Beside her, the flesh-suit giant walked with Jessie in its arms, one of its hands holding a similar parasol to shield Jessie’s upper body from the rain.  A raincoat was draped over her legs to waterproof them.  Jessie looked so small.

“You were saying something about gods?” Helen asked me.

“Yes.  Gods, my dear Helen G. Ibbot and Miss Mary Cobourn.  Great, unknowable, and potentially very intelligent forces who could yet tear us to pieces, even now.  Especially now.”

“Can I tear them to pieces?” Helen asked.  “Or twist them up?”

“One or two of them, I think, given opportunity.”

“I’ll look forward to that, then,” she said.  “You look to giving me those opportunities.”

“Why ‘gods’, Sylvester?” Mary asked.

“Because they’re not people, they’re not something we can stick a knife in or remove from the picture with carefully worded letters.  They’re timeless in a way, they were there before we came into this world, they’ve been there all along, they’ll be there when we leave.”

“Are these real things or, again, do I need to consider putting a knife through the back of your knee?” Mary asked.

“Stop saying that!  When I end up getting knifed or shot, it’s going to be because of a conversation that starts with ‘I’m very worried about Sylvester.'”

“Most of our conversations start that way,” Helen observed.

“I know,” I said.  “But I’d really like to focus on killing and subjugating god, not on the sad, slow decline of Sylvester.  Let’s hammer this out.”

“Alright,” Mary said.  “I can do focus.”

“Thank you.”

“Your ‘gods’.  You’re not being abstract?”

“Real, concrete things.  Problems, enemies in broad but very definable senses.”

“Okay, so if I had to guess, going by the things you tend to natter about-”

“Natter?  Natter?”  I asked.  I twisted around.  “Jessie, they’re being mean to me.  Make them stop.”

Jessie slept on.

Mary’s eyes tracked mine very carefully.  I saw a fractional shift in how her lips pressed together.

I know she’s asleep,” I whispered.

Mary snapped her fingers.  “Power.”

“Power is absolutely one,” I said.

“And control?”

“Not at all,” I said.  I smiled.  “We just spent the last year working on bringing that particular god to heel, didn’t we?”

“I suppose we did,” Mary said.

“Think on it,” I said.  “There’s no rush, no time limit except the one we’ve had since the early days, and of course if the god ends up dead before you name ’em, you miss your window.”

“You’re appealing to my competitive side,” Mary said.

“I suppose I am.”

“And you’re appealing to Helen by giving her gods to embrace.”

“Please,” Helen said.

“Maybe,” I said.  “Maybe.  But maybe I also did bring it up as a way to tempt.”

“I’m rusty,” Mary said.  “Figuring you out, trying to keep up, thinking outside of the box so I might keep up with you.  I’m starting to feel like this is more familiar.  It’s nice.”

“I’m rusty too,” I said.  “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I want to work with the Lambs on this.  What comes next could be very hard.  If I’m doing a good job of pulling your strings and Helen’s tongue, appealing to your best parts in the process, I’m glad.”

Mary nodded.

“Helen’s tongue?” Shirley asked.

“Her… Helen-ness.  Her appetite, in all the things that tongues can be used for.”

“I do like that,” Helen said.  “Do keep using your own tongue in clever ways with me, Sylvester.  It’s fun.”

Getting Shirley’s attention with a movement of my head, I gestured at Helen for effect.  “See?  Helen’s tongue.  It works.”

“Dangerously well,” Mary observed.

“I see,” Shirley said.

“And Sylvester, sir,” Helen said, and she smiled, “let me know if you need any advice on pulling on Duncan and Ashton’s somethings.  I’ve spent a lot of time with them over the past few years.”

Shirley cleared her throat.

“I’ll let you know, Hel,” I said.  “I’m pretty sure I know how they operate from a mechanical standpoint.  I can figure out the rest.”

She laid her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her.

We hadn’t made mention of Lillian.  Somehow all of us knew that it wouldn’t have gone good places.  Not with things where they stood, and not with Jessie’s role in the conversation.

The flag-bearer moved the flag, pointing it.

They were indicating which carriages it was, and the little caravan wasn’t on the main road.

I changed position.  My hand was still tender, and it nearly seized up as I scaled the side of a house and climbed onto the roof, settling onto a perch at one corner.

“Ah,” I said.

“Not the Lambs,” Mary said, beside me.  I’d barely heard her ascend.

The carriages took the road normally reserved for the denizens of the hill.  Men opened the door and climbed up onto the sides, hanging off of them.  They kept watchful eyes out.

They stopped on the road.  Making us come to them, perhaps.

Or they didn’t want to venture too close.  Like this, they could at least attempt a haphazard getaway.

Mary and I descended to the road.  We signaled and broke into a jog.

They had all climbed out of the carriages by the time we arrived.  We slowed down before stepping into view, walking as a group with an easy, natural formation.  Shirley hung back.

Mauer stood in a congregation of his rebel soldiers.  He was in the heart of the Crown States, near one of its remaining major cities, with half or two-thirds of the nation’s armed forces gathered in the surrounding region.  He was one word from having the entirety of that turned on him.

It would have been one thing if he’d been in that situation and he’d remained calm.  That was a thing.

But he was here, and he was pissed.

“Mauer,” Helen greeted him.  “I would call you reverend, but you don’t like that, I remember.”

“Calling me Mauer is fine,” he said.

“When we told our soldiers to let you through, we didn’t anticipate you showing up at the foot of our warcamp,” Mary said.

Mauer’s voice carried across the distance, “Something tells me that if I were to find a convenient clearing and send a message, you’d be too occupied with other matters to respond.  What would I do then?  Find my way to you through your assembled forces?  Would I try to steer your course?  I told them to take me to you.  You gave them permission to bring me here.”

“We actually anticipated Fray doing the bold arrival in the enemy’s midst when we left that instruction,” I said.  “This works too, mind.”

“I sent a soldier to be captured and leak information about Ferres acquiring an immortal,” Mauer said.  “As was requested.”

“Thank you,” Helen said.

“I did not expect this,” Mauer said.

I spread my arms.  “You don’t like the notion of turning the Crown against their own, as they tried to turn us against each other?”

He turned his body, as if he needed the right posture to move his arm, and hauled his monstrous arm free of the coat that covered it.  The mangled, distorted, oversized arm raised one index finger.

When he spoke, it was with a very dangerous tone.  His people were reacting to the tone, shifting their stances.  “I would very much like that notion, if I thought it was leading to justice and right.  Something tells me it isn’t.”

“What would be just and right, Mauer?” Mary asked.

“Mary Cobourn,” Mauer said.  “I knew someone with your face and name when she was a child.  But you’re Percy’s creation, aren’t you?”

Mary nodded.

“He also wronged you.  He did you an injustice.”

“I see what you’re saying, but it was the injustices he did to others that I acted on.  On behalf of people close to me who mind those things.”

I wanted to comment or indicate something, to let Mary know that that lie was old, that I and everyone else should already know that she had more heart than she pretended.  I didn’t, however, want to give any sign of weakness to Mauer.  I didn’t take my eyes off of the man.

“Remind all of us, please, just how you addressed that wrong of his.”

“I executed him.”

“Tell me, then.  Between you, you seem hold the assembled forces of the Crown States and its lesser Academies in your hands.  You give orders and speeches here and there, and the enemy’s armies move for you.  You forge letters, and you make them act for you.  You have them utterly at your mercy.”

“We do,” I said.

“Will you cast them down, Lambs?” Mauer asked.  “Will you tell me my instinct is wrong, and that you will set one of them against the other with the intent of destroying both, or in hopes of leaving one of the two weak and vulnerable to a knife in the back?”

“There are better things we can do,” I said.

“They are a festering thing, Lambs,” Mauer said.  He clenched his monstrous fist, still holding it before him.  “They are overgrown and twisted to the point that they barely serve the purpose they were intended for.  They are a system corrupted, that inflicts needless damage and stress on itself for reasons that have been forgotten.  They are a cancer, Lambs.  Cut them free.  Be ruthless, and excise the surrounding tissue.”

“You’d have us set them up to wipe them out?” Mary asked.

“You hold their vitals in your hands, Lambs.  Not the heart, not the brain, but enoughCrush those vitals.”

The look in his eyes was murderous.

“You would advocate mass murder, Mauer?” I asked.

“The Crown doesn’t lose,” Mauer said.  “That’s the saying.”

“That’s not the whole saying,” I said.  “Because they do lose here and there.  You know that.  You’ve had your small victories.”

That anger was still etched on his features as he acknowledged me.

“It’s that if and when it looks like they’re losing, they’re so big they drag you down with them.  They make it a draw, if they can’t make you regret trying.”

Lambs,” Mauer said.  He sounded so menacing that I thought one of his younger soldiers might take initiative and act on that anger, shooting us as a kind of punctuation.  His face was etched with deep lines.  “You should be aware of how many rebel groups have come and gone.  You’ve seen people who struggled alone or as part of armies against the Crown.  You’ve seen people use sword, knife, gun, bare hand, pen, word, and every other tool they can bring to bear against this enemy.”

“We’ve been thoroughly introduced to those people.  We count many of them among our number,” I said.

Behind me, there was noise.  I worried it would be the very people Mauer was wanting to crucify.  It was the other Lambs.  They were roughly on schedule.  Lillian, Duncan, and Ashton.  Behind them, I saw the aristocrats Chance, Lainie, and more glorious and monstrous than any of Ferres’ fairy tale creations, a thoroughly modified Emily Gage, with sweeping horns and flesh that included decorative scaling in amazingly intricate patterns.  Her eyes were missing from the sockets, and each of her hands ended in two sets of claws.

I smiled.  I turned back to Mauer as Lillian, Duncan and Ashton joined us.  All three had their hoods up, protecting them from the steady, easy rainfall.

Something about being interrupted when he’d been making his speech seemed to push him into another dimension of anger.

“Hundreds of millions have fought against this force that Wollstone armed and brought into being,” Mauer said, and his tone was lower.  “It’s not beyond the realm of imagination to suggest it could be a full billion or more human beings who were raised from the womb into the world, who fought the Crown desperately and went to meet their creator.”

“Not beyond the realm of imagination, no sir,” I said, my own voice pitched to match his.

“How many of them had their chance at this?  At a true, honest, undeniable victory?  A chance to gut them, and wrest a continent from their grip.”

He was gesturing with his monstrous hand again, clenching his fist and turning it in the air as if to tear something forth from reality.

“And what is it you intend?” he growled.  “Because something that gravely concerns me, gravely concerns me…”

His voice was at the point where it almost wasn’t a word as he uttered ‘gravely’ the second time.

“…As I take this in and as I find you here, of all places, is that it very much seems that you aren’t looking for that victory, Lambs.  You asked for my cooperation and promised me satisfaction, and yet I’m left to believe you aren’t going to take this justice that we have at hand.”

I remained silent, watching him.

“Tell me I’m wrong, Sylvester.  Any of you.  Raise your voices, and give me my satisfaction!”

I’d heard him speak, and I’d heard him raise his voice to be heard by a crowd, exclaiming, but I couldn’t remember hearing him speak at this volume, with this degree of rage.

“Tell me you aren’t going to take this and deliver a mere slap in their face.  Tell me you aren’t going to give them a draw!”

“You want satisfaction,” I said.  I tried to let my own voice carry.

He set his jaw.

“The reason we sent Helen to you was that we thought she would understand you best.  You’re both impossible to satisfy.  You will always want more blood, more satiation.  If you were a glutton you’d eat until your stomach split.  But you want to somehow… what is it?  See them pay for their cumulative sins of the last century in the span of a few short years?  That’s not possible.”

“I’ll settle for what’s possible,” Mauer said.

“And that might have been the first lie you’ve ever told us,” I said.  “What would you do once you’ve settled?  Would you retire?”

I paused.  I watched him.

“…Or would you resume your crusade?”

I watched him bow his head, as if in prayer, but his face was contorted.

“We need doctors and soldiers to keep plague at bay, and to act in the event that the Crown realizes something is amiss and brings a fresh war from over the ocean.  We need a lot of things, and if we did what you wanted, we might get that justice you describe, but it would come at the expense of our lives, on several fronts.”

He clenched his fist.

“You know this, Mauer.  You’ve always known this.  Even in the most peaceful period of the Crown States’ history under Empire rule, there was never going to be a reality where you could see your rhetoric come to bloody fruition.”

He turned his head, speaking to his lieutenant.  I could read his lips.  ‘We’ll leave soon.  Before they surround us or call reinforcements.  One more question.’

I continued, “You just don’t care.  You’ve always been willing to destroy yourself in pursuit of this end.  You’d ask everyone to follow you in that martyred pursuit of revenge.”

He closed his eyes.  His hand fell to his side.  I watched as he composed himself, relaxing, surrendering.

“Reverend,” Lillian spoke.

Oh, she’d missed that part.

He raised his human hand, holding it up.  Whatever approach Lillian had been planning to make, she held back.

He spoke, and he spoke calmly, as if none of the anger was there anymore.  “You made me another promise.”

“We did,” I said.

“You told me that you would reveal the truth of the Block.”

“I did,” Helen said.

“Then tell me,” he said.  “And I’ll take this knowledge, and… if I don’t stay, to wage my part in what’s about to unfold here, I’ll leave for other shores.  I’ll wage my war there, in places that aren’t quite so vast.  I’ll gather my flock.”

He sounded so eerily calm.

The voice, too was calm.  Only I heard it.

Do not tell him about the BlockLie to him where necessary.

My hand hurt as I clenched it into a fist.  The skin was new, as were some of the connective tissues that held the skin in place.

“There are no other shores,” I said.

That look in his eyes grew darker.

“Refugees, Mauer.  There were too many children and not nearly enough supply.  That was the secret, and finding the right refugees, before the Academy got to them, that was the source of the knowledge we wanted.”

Helen, beside me, was nodding slightly.  She was so sincere it helped to sell my lie.

“You are not the first, or the tenth, or the hundredth, in that billion or billions of people, to have a glimpse of victory.  The Lambs and the Beattle Rebels, our fairy tales and our soldiers, our ‘cooperating’ Nobles, aristocrats, doctors and civilians, none of us are the first to stand where we stand on this road, on the brink of victory.  In the last century, this conversation has played out before.  Not exactly the same, the players are different, but it’s happened.  Humanity has been here.”

One of his soldiers looked uneasy.  Mauer spared the young woman enough attention to deliver a sharp hand gesture, one that hinted at emotions he was trying to keep from us.

“You want this to be a victory, but it’s not.  Trying to make it so will only see them destroy all of this, in ways we can’t stop or deflect.  Anywhere else you could go, they have control, they’re as close as God-damn to seizing it, or they’ve already razed it all to the ground.  This, here, it’s the staging ground they’ve chosen for the present day.  They’ve been waging war for a long, long time, almost incessantly.”

“The plague, the black wood,” Mauer said.  He sounded further away, now.  “They’ve cultivated it?  To help the razing along?”

“They’ll let this place be buried, have Tender Mercies stalk the alien wilderness and hunt down any stragglers, and revisit it in some distant future when the plague has subsided and the black wood extinguished itself, old vegetation regrown.”

Mauer nodded.

It seemed to take him a long time to digest it.  His lieutenants and soldiers seemed far more affected by it.

I’d painted a grim picture for them, one where Mauer and the rest of us weren’t special.  Where victory was not achievable in the end.

He spoke, calmer still, “And you?”

There were so many answers to that.  So many answers that could have drawn him in.  To talk about beliefs, about the nature of the war we were fighting, about anger.  They were things I could seize on and play with and twist around with my tongue.

I waited for the voice to tell me what to do.

The voice was silent.  The non-answer stretched out, until I thought he might get angry again.

Feelings, anger, belief.  It was what drove him.  He was not rational, and he had long ago condemned himself to hurl himself into a wall until he’d dashed himself to pieces, in hopes of making some difference to it.

I could bring him on board, even subjugate him in a sense, when he had so little else.  It would be the first step, but it was not a hard course of action to draw him in.  All I had to do was extend a hand, speak his language.  Something heartfelt, basic, clear.

“We’re re-evaluating the assumptions at hand,” I said.

I let that sentence linger, I let him take it in, and turn it over in his head.

I saw it.  The anger that crept across his face, in the incremental, moment by moment changes of one line, of one angle of the corner of his lip, the movement of his eyelids.  By hair’s breadths, as if the mask was cracking.  Rainwater ran down his face.

“And we’re killing gods,” I said, because so long as I was extending him a mercy, I might as well slap his hand away to be more merciful still.   He wouldn’t thrive or even survive under our thumb, and what we were doing wouldn’t survive if he outlived us and took over.  He hadn’t quite reached out to offer his assistance, but by rejecting it, rejecting him, I could give him that push he needed to resume moving in the ways and directions he had been moving for some time.

At least for a short while longer.

“I see,” Mauer said.

I nodded.

“Nothing to lose then, is there?” he asked.

“I suppose not,” I told him.

He stood there for a few seconds, and then adjusted his coat, covering his arm.  He turned, and he walked back to the carriage.

He stopped there.  Without looking at me, he said, “You said you thought Genevieve Fray might accept your invitation and come here.”

“She somehow always manages to turn up when it matters,” I said.

“She won’t turn up.  She was going elsewhere.”

I didn’t ask.  If I’d asked, he wouldn’t give me the answer.  Because of spite, or because I’d just rebuked him and it would be his chance too rebuke me.

Mauer turned his head to look in the direction of Radham.

I’d guessed as much.

The door slammed behind him, the stitched horses grunted rather than whinny, and they turned back to the main road.  We remained where we were, largely silent, as we watched them go, picking up speed as they got to flatter ground.

I turned my back to Mauer’s wagons, and my focus on Jessie, where she’d slept through it all.

“I know,” I told her.  “I know what you’d say.”

“We couldn’t use him?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The Lambs were folding in together, the group focused on the group.  Lillian and Mary reunited, talking.  Helen hugging Ashton, talking to Duncan.  There was the tentative approach of Lanie and Chance, too, with Emily trailing behind.

“You look unwell, Sy,” Emily said.

“You’re the one without eyes,” I said.

She smiled softly.

“It’s cosmetic?” I asked.  “After what the Baron did to you?”

She held her smaller set of claws to her face, and pried her eyelids apart.  Within the recessed sockets, raw and bloody in appearance, there were orbs set into the back, small and beady.  She smiled a little more.  “I thought that instead of facing my fears, I’d become them.  My peripheral vision is garbage, but it came with other perks.”

“That’s amazing,” I said.

The conversations carried on.  Plans, strategy, small words of affection, teasing.  Ashton mentioning Abby.  The conversation turned to Jessie, and all three of our young aristocrats seemed genuinely upset at the sight, even as Jessie was unfamiliar to them, in large part.

“You had her here, while talking to him?” Lillian asked.

“She got us this far.  She gets to be part of the rest,” I said.

“She’s asleep, Sy,” Lillian said.  “Don’t start thinking otherwise.”

“Maybe words or sounds filter through into the dreams.”

“That’s you starting to think otherwise, Sy.  I know how you work.”

I smiled, and I was happy to stand next to Lillian, not tugging or pulling on any part of her, be it a string, tongue, or a bit of her clothing.  Having her here was good enough.  We each played only the smallest roles in the ongoing conversations and planning.

Somewhere in the midst of it, I glimpsed Mauer, standing off to one side.  His arms were spread.  He was speaking, orating, and there was no sound.

The rain pattered down around us, lightning flashed, and there was no thunder.

The voice spoke, hushed.

Listen.

With that, I ceased to hear the other Lambs, our friends and allies.

I heard the rain on the ground, running out of gutters.  I heard the city.  Minutes passed, and Lillian drew closer, asking if I was alright.  I didn’t even hear myself respond, my ears attuned to the sounds of the world around us.

When I heard it, my head turning, the others noticed, and they looked too.

A lingering orange light, a plume of smoke.  Futile, given the wall was what it was, but he hadn’t been trying to do damage so much as he’d been trying to make a statement.  A bomb, a mortar, something else.  It didn’t matter.  A detonation near the exterior walls of Radham, not far from the gate.

Our entire city shifted, packed to the gills as it was with soldiers and commanders, with suppliers and with weapons.

It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t even good in any respect.  Both Radham and our side were fully in the know, now.  It would make both sides suspicious.

But it was somehow right.

The war was on.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.02 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Nearly thirty Professors and military leaders, two nobles, and another twenty assorted major players were in the room.  Taken as a group, they looked worse for wear.  They hadn’t slept as well as they might have if they were happy and secure of their futures.  Diets had been affected by parasites, and the lingering effects of toxins in blood and muscles taxed others.

An innocent bystander who stepped into the room and saw this sorry lot might have thought something was amiss, even without the cue of expressions and glares.  Heck, I could smell it, when they were all in one space.  The sweat, the fear, the pollution of their bodies.

I wondered if Mauer might have described the crowd as having lost their souls.  Broken, their dreams and stations taken from them.  Maybe he would have wanted to hold onto his idea of the soul, that it was something more sacrosanct.  Or perhaps he would have wanted to say that they’d lost their souls long, long ago.

The important thing, however, was that they were at least holding up appearances when seen alone or in small groups.  They looked tired and perhaps a bit unwell, but not to a degree that would shake anyone or stir too much in the way of suspicion.

Their lieutenants were now organizing the arrangement of the forces.  I stared through the window, and I watched as squads tore up train tracks that led into and out of Radham.  Rank and file of soldiers covered the landscape, the masses of men spiky with the long rifles they held, and more continued to file in, existing groups firming up into tighter ranks.

Running like rivers through the blocks and columns were the other things.  Many were warbeasts, organized and held at bay.  Others were vats and other machinery, that produced gas or held lifeforms that couldn’t quite be called ‘warbeast’.  Many blocks had a different consistency, because they were made up of larger individuals, or because the individuals had the natural stillness of a war-ready stitched.

I was letting the silence stretch on, as our audience settled.  The Lambs were gathered around me, as were our lieutenants.  All of my allies were waiting patiently, as I’d suggested they do.

I wanted it to be a relief when I spoke, when I gave clarity and the full picture to the people who we’d only given fragments to.  I wanted them to listen, and I didn’t want to give them a lot of time to start being clever, so they got the full picture now.

I spoke.  “There is incontrovertible evidence that Professor Hayle has been acting as part of a conspiracy to work against the Crown States.”

I turned to face the room again, and I could see that I had their ears.

“He produced the Lambs project and eventually took on a role as headmaster of one of the Academies most renowned for its research, development, and its special projects.  We have reason to believe he’s responsible for the poisoning of the water, so to speak, where countless citizens were sterilized and leashed.  At a later date, he had several experiments, Lambs included, pretend to go Rogue while they continued to work for him and arranged the killing of several nobles.”

I paused for emphasis, then continued, “Many of your soldiers, followers, families and friends have been dragged here, and of them, many don’t know we’re here, or that we’re having this conversation.  They still believe that all is well, and they’ll have no clue that we’re framing Professor Hayle for our own purposes.”

“Why?” one man asked.  “Petty revenge?”

“I would strongly recommend not interrupting,” Mary said.

The man shut his mouth, scowling.

“He knows too much,” I said.  “And he’s always been invested in keeping tabs on things.  Creating projects like us, supporting other projects that could gather information.  If he uncovers any of you, or if he gets ahead of any of this, then we’re done.  And we’re taking you down with us.  We’ve given a full third of those soldiers out there, most of you, and a lot of your people that we left behind a taste of our leash.  Extricating yourselves of that leash is going to require removing us and time, and if Hayle acts, if we get revealed, or if we die, you only get half of what you need, and there’s an unhappy ending here.”

“Hayle lives,” Duncan said.  “Your underlings may want to know what this is, especially as the stakes escalate.  If you feel the need to tell them, you make it clear.  Hayle betrayed the Crown in an unprecedented way, and he has set other things in motion.  He will live because you need his knowledge to stop his plots.  Understand?”

They seemed to understand, reluctant as they were to admit it.

“Go,” I said.  “Be good.  Don’t try to be clever.  Through the gates.  Seize the city step by step, until we can get to the Academy itself.”

They rose from chairs, and the ones who’d already been standing started to exit the room or held the doors for their betters.

It was curious, that they acted like that, still holding to old hierarchies.  Curious that some degree of civility and culture still drove them, even when they’d all been brought low.

Some lingered.

“Speak,” I addressed the one in the front, specifically choosing one who looked to be of lower station than the others.  A woman who might’ve been an aristocrat’s wife.

“The parasites you put in me, my husband, and these others,” she said.  She indicated the group.  She started to speak, then stopped, changing her mind about what she was going to say.  “They’re taking too much.  I’ve lost four fingernails.  I feel unwell.”

She showed us the fingers in question.  The fingernails weren’t entirely gone- they’d broken lengthwise, individual fragments and slivers sticking out of the hangnail bed, the flesh beneath red and raw.

I might have felt bad about putting those people into that circumstance, but we’d wanted to mix up what we used on people, to make it hard for them to find a single fix and turn the tables on us, and we’d wanted overlap, so some key figures were both poisoned and under other coercion.

We’d known some of the methods we used would be uglier and more uncomfortable, and we’d turned those things toward some of the less pleasant members of Radham’s Academies and governance.

I couldn’t remember who this woman was, but I knew that some of the aristocrats we’d targeted had earned harsher constraints because of their demonstrated amorality.  The culling of adults over a certain age, forced breeding programs, the leadership that had supported some places like the Baron’s Warrick, with the forced inclusions of monsters in families, and the members of one Academy that had incorporated around a reserve of natives and turned the whole tribe into experiment stock.

Whichever one this woman was, well, tearing off her fingernails in an indirect way wasn’t about to prickle consciences.  Mine, least of all, lenient as it was.

“Well, that shouldn’t be happening.  I’ll look after it,” Lillian said.  She looked over at me.  “Can I have Mary?  In case this is a ploy?”

“You can,” I said.  “I want her back for our opening play, though.”

I want to be there for your opening play,” Lillian said.  “You aren’t leaving me behind.  We won’t be long.”

“Got it,” I said.

While Lillian and Mary went with the parasite-infested, I did what I could to get Jessie ready.  I bundled her up, making sure she was comfortable, and then covered her up further, with the same sack-cloths used for sandbags.

“Okay?” I whispered.  I had to reach beneath the covering to run fingers through her hair.  “It would make all the sense in the world if you stayed behind, but I don’t always make a lot of sense these days, y’know?”

Jessie slept on.

“But maybe if you’re dreaming there, if your sleeping mind is putting things gently in place, where things can be put in place without doing damage, and if it’s holding firm where we need it to hold firm, and if you’re actually touching on those memories, maybe it’ll be good if you hear my voice and you have some nice memories of me, or if you hear me when I’m being devastating and it calls some other good moments to mind.”

I realized that Lillian and Mary had stopped in the doorway that led to the adjunct building, our makeshift labs.  Listening.  Duncan, Helen, and Ashton were at the front door, ready to venture outside.  They watched.

“And maybe,” I murmured, my voice lowered, just for her.  “Maybe you’ll wake up one day, and- and I know there’s a chance I won’t be there, because that’s the way I’m going.  There’s a chance others won’t, because it’s not out of the question.  And I know there’s a pretty good chance that no matter what we try to set in place, plugging you into a new, hacked-together project caterpillar every night, letting you sleep all the time so you don’t lose more, you might still wake up and not be Jessie.  So it’s not like I’m really staking a lot of hopes on this, for the record.  Just saying…”

Was it imagination when she exhaled a little harder than she had been, in the rhythmic breathing of deep sleep?

“…But maybe, maybe there’s a chance that you wake up, and I’ll be there, and I’ll be able to tell you that you were with us.  I’ll tell you what happened and because you heard the voices when you were sleeping, you’ll be able to say it almost sounds familiar.  And then I’ll be able to tell you that you heard it while you were sleeping and something soft and fuzzy stuck in that rigid, not-fuzzy brain-structure of yours.  And you can yell at me for bringing me with, maybe.  Or you’ll be secretly happy you were part of this.”

I wanted to stay.

Go, the voice said.

I obeyed.  There weren’t any more of the hard exhalations, so I simply adjusted the bags and coverings to make sure she was comfortable, not too hot or too cold, that she’d be dry and that nobody would see her, and then signaled the stitched to bring her.

Mary and Lillian didn’t start moving until I was at the front door with Duncan, Ashton, and Helen.

We stepped outdoors.  As much as I’d enjoyed the rain earlier, it was heavy enough now that I flipped up the hood of the military jacket I wore.  My sleeve had the badge of a messenger.  The others had a degree of camouflage as well.  Helen and Duncan as soldiers, and Ashton as a student.  We would stay out of sight and hopefully we wouldn’t draw too much notice if we were seen.

We separated.  When we moved around the periphery of the warcamp, it was a kind of weaving motion, different members of our group taking a turn at the fore or moving through the actual crowd while the rest of us moved along other tracks, by way of alley or by ducking around the back of crowds.  It meant we were harder to pick apart as a group of Lambs, a blonde young lady, a red-haired boy, a young man with dark curls stubbornly sticking to his forehead.  Duncan was harder to pin down, but we ran too much risk of appearing to be a unit.

Especially, I noted, if we kept Jessie with us.

We took our turns walking alongside her, as well.  One at the left, one at center-front, one at the right, and one walking with Jessie and the stitched that carried her.

It was our habit to move this way if we were trying to search for something, and in the doing, I ended up looking over the crowd, for Mauer’s men, for rebels, and for the people we’d captured and coerced, who might be getting adventurous.

I saw a lot of our Beattle rebels.  I saw the Hackthorn defectors.

I saw Montgomery and the Moth.  The nobles from the train.  I was pretty sure those were their names.

I saw the Primordial Child, fatter and larger than I’d ever seen him, and I wondered what I’d fed him to make him so monstrous.  I wondered if he’d continue growing until he consumed everything, or if he’d burst, and if that spelled something horrible.

The fight was mounting.  A rainstorm drummed against the landscape, but the clouds that spiraled out from around Radham weren’t consistent.  The low hills and flat plains of the landscape was marked in scythe-shaped swathes of darkness, where the clouds were thick enough to block out the sun, with something very near to sunlight, where the clouds were thin, if there even were any.  Where the light touched the ground, it shone with the droplets of the rainfall that had touched it before.

Radham itself was drowned in shadow.  The explosions of artillery shells drumming the walls didn’t seem as bright or fierce as they should have been.  Rain between us and the detonations and the darkness of the clouds overhead tempered it.

The walls had no doubt been started when the full reality of plague had made itself known.

“I wonder what Hayle is thinking,” I mused.  I gestured as I spoke, so the others who weren’t nearby could follow.

Duncan was the only one in earshot.  “You know what I’m thinking?”

“The Duncan-ghost has been missing for a while,” I said.  “I’m not as on the ball with figuring you guys out as I was when I had images of you all keeping me company and giving me hints.”

“Duncan-ghost, huh?  That’s ominous.”

“It really was, but not for the reasons you’re thinking.  What are you thinking, sir?”

“I’m thinking yeah, the Academy’s gone up against enemies who had back-alley doctors supporting them.  They’ve gone up against enemies who had a handful of defectors, who tried their hand at targeted strikes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The army was approaching the gates, now.  We were on the fringes of the town and making our way along the expanse between it and Radham.  Barricades had been hastily erected, carriages parked, and crates and supplies were already being dropped off by teams who put them down and hurried back to the wagons they could unload from.

There was every expectation this would be an all-out war.

“This is a war,” I echoed my thought.

“Yeah.  But more to the point, it’s maybe unprecedented.  As far as I know, we’ve never had a war or even a proper battle where it was the full force of what the Academy and Crown could bring to bear… against the full force of what the Academy and Crown could bring to bear.”  He gestured as he spoke.

“Yeah, Duncan,” I said, signaling ‘agree’.

We took different paths through the barricades and collected things ahead.

“I’m not good at understanding people,” Ashton said, falling in step beside me, gesturing as he spoke.  “I try, and sometimes I’m right, but sometimes I’m wrong.  Even when it comes to silly things.  I was very confused for a while that one of my doctors shaved his beard, and every day for a few months after that I was wondering if people would have their heads shaved the next time I saw them.”

Duncan, off in the distance, gestured something along the lines of ‘Very confused’.

Smokey-heart-stump think, I gestured, the signs segueing into one another.  I asked, “Where are you going with this, Ash?”

“Ashton,” he said, emphasizing the latter half.  “I’m going and gone thinking that I don’t know what to expect next.  I’d be anxious but you’re mostly calm so I’m making myself be calm.”

“I don’t know where it’s going either, Ashton.  But I don’t see Hayle surrendering.  Not when faced with this.  Maybe if we’d made contact in a different way, if Mauer hadn’t forced our hands.  But not like this.  So we see his opening salvo.  From a distance.  We shouldn’t get much closer.”

Ashton nodded, clearly thinking.  I gave him a nudge, and he broke away from me.

I ducked between a carriage and a fence, and popped a cigarette into my mouth, lighting it, during the moment’s reprieve where I couldn’t see much of the proceedings and couldn’t see the others.

“From a distance,” Helen said, walking beside me as soon as I was clear of the parked row of carriages.

“Yup,” I said, still walking.

“I don’t like distance,” she said.

“I’m something like sixty percent sure distance is a good thing here,” I said.

I stopped in my tracks, standing by a barricade.  I shifted the bag at my shoulder and let my thumb brush against my weapon.  Soldiers rushed past us, hurrying toward the front line.  I scanned the various camps and emplacements.  Need to find leader.  Ours.

Duncan gestured.  I see.  Action?

I gave my response.  Tell him.  WarningPull people back.

“I feel like your percentages are always lower, these days,” Helen said.  She touched my arm.  “You used to be more confident.”

“I did.”

“Are you scared?” she asked.

Bravado was the name of this game.  I was Sylvester.  I was fearless, even reckless in the face of danger.

“I’m terrified,” I said.

“You know I don’t feel fear like you, Duncan, Lillian and Mary do,” she said.

“Don’t let Mary hear you say she gets scared.  She’ll deny it.”

“I won’t.”

“What were you saying?”

“I don’t feel proper fear, but my thoughts have been going in circles lately.  My team has been trying to rein in my hunger, I’m having my appointments again, and Duncan is making sure Ibbot is doing it more right than he was, but I think the damage was done.”

“Yeah.”

“I think a lot about that.  My thoughts circle around it but don’t ever land.  Like tired birds.”

“Of course.  Tired bird thoughts,” I said.

What?  Duncan signed, in response to my gestured transcription.  He was talking to an officer -one of the people who’d been in the meeting- and keeping an eye on us.

Helen spoke, “My thoughts do a lot of those circles.  I think this is what fear is like.  Except…”

“You don’t feel fear like we do.  It’s… an abstract non-approximation.”

What? Duncan gestured again.

I explain after, I gestured.  Warn man.

“I’d feel a lot better if I wasn’t so distant from the worst of it,” Helen said.  “I want my fingers digging into meat, touching bone, feeling the blood pumping out.  I want to hear the sounds they make.”

“Soon,” I said.

“How soon?” Helen asked.

I didn’t give my response right away.

My eyes moved over the crowd, over the distant scene at the gates of Radham.

A horn blew.  The man Duncan had been talking to.

The forces nearest the gate began to back away.  Only the group of stitched working on the gate itself remained, potentially their handlers as well.

I watched it, glanced at the general who Duncan had informed, and then looked over the young men and scattered few women in uniform.  Helen had talked about fear, and these people were afraid.

I looked past them and saw Sub Rosa, in the crowd near us.

“Very soon.  A matter of a minute or two before we’re properly underway.  Sub Rosa says the gates are opening.”

“Does she now?” Helen asked.

“She pays attention to these things.  We should split up for a moment.”

“Distance,” Helen said.

I started to say something, but she only smiled, winked, and parted ways.  Heads turned to look at her as she sashayed into the crowd, hood low, even though she was just one more person in uniform.

The heavy doors of Radham’s gates were hauled open, smoke billowing around the point that a targeted explosion had occurred.

No sooner had the doors opened than a thick gas poured out.  Silhouette became merely blurry shadows in the midst of gas.  Men toppled.

The ones who didn’t fall immediately were savaged by things that operated from within the cloud.  Experiments, spindly and clawed, which moved quickly enough that virtually all of the gunfire that was directed at them was scattered, aimless gunfire.

It took me a second to spot Helen, at one barricade, one soldier among many.  She had a gun out, and her hand moved in gestures.

I really wanted it to be door-open tentacles?

She really wanted the doors to open and giant tentacles to reach out.

Another time, perhaps.

The gas served to push our forces back.  It bought them time, and it bought them elbow room.  From the volume of it, it was different from what we’d deployed in Hackthorn.  It was continuous, the product of buildings and emplacements, much as the rain was something created by a perpetual production of seeded smoke and steam.

Radham lurched.  The walls remained where they were, but the rest of the city shifted, as if something had given way and something else had surged upward.  Not a great deal- ten feet, twenty.  But enough that everyone present reacted.

As if that initial burst of growth had broken ground or started something, the Academy began to shift.  It rose up, and staggered sections of the city rose as well.  Areas slowly rotated, whatever was happening beneath them, as if there was a great corkscrew beneath.

The tunnels beneath the Academy.  The interconnected infrastructure, the layout.

Jessie would want to be woken up for this.  To explain it, to paint the way forward.  She knew Radham better than I knew the back of my hand.

The smoke that streamed skyward from countless chimneys and vents in Radham was darkening by the moment.  The gas now flowed over the top of the wall, not through the gate.  The wall at one side of the Academy was cracking, even being as thick as it was.

Not all of this had been in place when we were young.  Not all of it had been in place when I’d left, even.  We’d known Radham harbored its superweapon and countless other weapons and resources besides, but the actual nature of it had been a closely guarded secret.

Had I ever had even an inkling that I might’ve been going to war with Radham, I might have pried at that secret.  As it was, it was just one thing among countless others that I hadn’t known and assumed I would never have cause to know.

The upward progress was glacial, but it was progress.  The Academy and to a lesser degree the city were rising up and out of reach.  The gas and the creatures within the gas were meant to keep trouble at bay until the process was done.  It was exceedingly possible that there would be more to it.

Helen had returned, finding a place by my side.  Duncan and Ashton appeared.

The stitched and its great flesh suit held Jessie, standing just a little ways back.

We couldn’t move just yet.  There wasn’t much to be done, no orders to give to the people in charge, no answers or questions.

Hayle would be in his tower, maybe, or he’d be at a high vantage point.  He’d be looking down on us, while his Academy flexed muscles it hadn’t ever had cause to use, unsheathing claws, or releasing things that had been sleeping much, much longer than they’d ever been awake.

A gas mask slapped against the sandbag and wood-spike barricade I stood by.

Lillian, with Mary in tow.

“I can’t help but feel the gas is Hayle saying something like ‘hi, Sylvester.  Isn’t this inviting?  It’s entirely your thing, with poisons and gasses not affecting you.  It’s totally not a trap.'”

“Or,” Duncan said.  “It’s a poison gas that serves as a very effective countermeasure against invaders.”

“Maybe,” I said.  I was aware that whole regiments were rushing toward the battlefront, even as others retreated.  Masks like the one Lillian had in hand were in place, uniforms were taped up, and weapons were at the ready.

“If we don’t make a move now, it’ll only get harder,” Mary said.

The Academy still rose.  It had yet to reveal all of its tricks.

I pulled on the mask.  I turned, ready to help Jessie with hers, but Lillian was already on task.

Rather than speak, my voice muffled by the mask, I gestured.

We go.  Clear the way for the army.  This wasn’t something we’d manage on our own.  It was never going to be, even before Mauer had alerted Radham that something was wrong.  There were too many checkpoints, too much security.  Radham was too mindful.

I gestured again.

We face down the second of the three gods.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.03 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.3

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Soldiers in gas masks aimed guns at us as we approached at a run.  They were wary, doubly so with the tide of experiments and stitched that were marching out of Radham.

Duncan raised his arm, signaling.

“Let them pass!” the leader of the squad called out, his voice muffled.

I was only able to steal a glance at the man.  His face was hidden by a mask, a tube running to a bladder at his side, his coat long and heavy enough that it hid most of the little tells of his posture and form.  I could see his eyes, however.  I could see the glare.

Complete and utter hatred.

I heard the questions.  I heard the concern, too, amid the grinding of stone on stone, wood on wood.  But what I was particularly cognizant of was a deeper, more distant sound.  It was a sound that carried beneath everything else, the dull volcanic roar of organic processes, something fitting for the flow of fluids through an impossibly large tree, the creak of massive muscles hauling themselves into motion, or air moving through great tunnels.

The soldiers were of little consequence.  The leader who we’d poisoned, blackmailed or otherwise forced to serve us could hate us all he wanted.  I’d repressed enough anger and spite for them and their like over the years that they’d have to work for a few months or years more before they’d drawn equal.

We left them to try and break into a sub tunnel that had been revealed by the collapse of the wall and the fact that the city was showing hints of its guts as it rose.  They were ordering stitched to batter at the locked grate that secured it.

Our path was up the wall.  It had crumbled in a spot, helped by the shifting city dragging and pressing against the one side of it, and the ragged sides of the damaged portion formed a vaguely staircase-shaped ascent, albeit one of crumbling stone and splinters of wood as long as I was tall.

Water ran down the sides of the wall and the foot of the city that was ever-rising upward.  Gas flowed down through the crack in the wall, and it combined with the moisture and the lenses we wore to make visibility miserable.

We started climbing.

Each meter we climbed was another meter of steep fall that plunged to our left.  Meanwhile, there was a steep wall to our right, the earth that had been subterranean before it had started rising.  As we climbed, the wall to our right did too, slower to rise than we were, even as we were slowed by tricky bits in the ascent.  Water poured over us and ran down the side of the wall to our right and over the broken bits underfoot, threatening to wash us over the side.

I heard a crunch.  I turned to look, and saw that Lillian had drawn a knife, stabbing the wall to our right.

It cracked like an eggshell, but the fragments that broke away from it were reminiscent of seashell, dark and earthlike on the one side, pearlescent on the inside.  The earth on the other side spilled forth from the crack, dry and bound together with fibrous root structures.  Then the water hit it, and it wasn’t dry anymore.  The wound bled mud, thick and sludgy.

“Theory confirmed?”

I had to look to check who the speaker was, with our masks muffling the sound.  Mary.

Lillian replied, “I think so.  It looked like calcium carbonate, but I was wondering at its thickness.”

“Why?” Ashton asked.

“Well, this isn’t sturdy.  That tells me things.  It’s not meant to do much more than separate the part of soil that’s going up from the soil and material that isn’t,” Lillian said.  “This isn’t meant to go back to the way it was.”

A more permanent state of affairs?

Far below us, I could hear screaming.  The entire group paused, listening, as two sides went to war.

We had a full-fledged army, but only a segment of it was equipped to operate where the air was toxic.  We had the advantage of being on the offensive, Hayle on his heels, but all put together, the forces were fairly evenly matched.

I was in the lead.  I pushed at a bit of rubble that wobbled at my touch and sent it careening over the edge.  We were ten or so meters above the ground.  Thirty feet.  Five turns of head over heel before we crunched hard and wet against the grass and hard earth below.  There was still a ways to go, going by the building tops I could see above us.

“It’s also not about to hold much weight, standalone  There might be some infrastructure that helps hold everything together, but this isn’t Radham as a… I don’t know.  Think of Besserham.”

“I don’t know Besserham,” I said.

“We’ve been to Besserham, Sy,” Lillian said.  “During the hunt for Fray?”

“Drawing a blank.”

“The Academy itself, which I’ll stress was really very small, was situated on the back of a giant turtle-crab-squid chimera,” Mary said.  “It’s kind of memorable.”

“Still blank.”

“Point is,” Lillian said, “Radham isn’t going anywhere.  It’s not a giant crab.”

“Good to know,” I said, relieved we weren’t dwelling on my memories anymore.  “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah,” Lillian said.

“It’s too bad on a lot of levels,” I mused aloud.  I had to stop as I pondered a part of the crumbled wall that was tricky to climb.  I looked up at the rising wall to my right, and judged it was too problematic to try and hold onto it and let it carry me up.  I saw Mary squeeze past Ashton and Lillian.

At the rear of the group, Helen was electing to scale the wall on her own.  At the very rear, Jessie’s stitched was ambling very slowly along what was a very narrow path for a large creature.  Duncan’s attention was on giving it direction.

I knew why Mary was approaching.  She’d seen this part coming up, and she knew how we operated.

“It might collapse,” I said.  “So be careful.”

“I know,” Mary said.

I moved without needing to check that Mary was in position, or that she was doing what I wanted her to do.  I knew.  Mary was Mary, and when the phantoms were gone and the Lambs just a touch more of a mystery to me, I could still trust things like this.  Steps in the dance.

I started the climb up a jagged rise that sloped more up and toward me than up and away.  Mary supplied a boost, and then she stuck her hand up for my foot to rest on as I shifted my handhold for the most troublesome spot.  I climbed over the lip.  Mary followed me up, then turned to help the others.

The shelf of city continued its slow, groaning rise.

We were only partway up the wall, but here, at least, I could walk up the rest of the crumbled slope of wall and step onto the street of the city proper.  Helen joined me, standing beside me.

Three gods to slay, the voice reminded me.

Houses had windows shuttered and doors locked.  Water streamed down around us, into and overflowing from gutters.  Where the ground sloped, the water ran in that direction.  Areas were flooding.

Now that we weren’t climbing, I could feel the slow shift of the ground beneath us.  I could hear the dull organic creak, the distant screams and gunfire as a battle unfolded on the ground, and now and again, I could hear the distant movements of things in the gas and the downpour.

Sub Rosa sat on a wagon at the end of the street, the rain soaking her.  She was the young lady with too many clothes when I looked away, but when my eyes were on her, she was the monster.

This was very much her realm, it seemed.

I could see the Primordial.  I could see Dog and Catcher, and Percy, and I could see the Snake Charmer.

“It’s nostalgic, isn’t it?” Helen asked.

I turned my head, giving her my best curious look.  She wouldn’t be referring to the old denizens of Radham, I was reasonably sure.

“Home,” she said.  “Except it’s not warm home, it’s not orphanage, sitting-by-the-fire home, while Fran and the other orphans huddle close and lean in close to tell me they managed to sneak another biscuit for the evening tea.”

“It’s cold, wet, angry appointment-time home?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Helen said.  “It’s middle-of-an-investigation, people-are-screaming home.  Like the old days, when we worked more closely with the Academy and did less roaming.”

“I stopped thinking of Radham as home a long time ago,” I said.

“That’s because you’re adaptable,” Duncan said, with his air of authority, as he and the others joined us.  “Wyvern makes it easy for you to transition between lines of thought and perspective.  You can leave this behind with ease.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said.  I glanced in Lillian’s direction, then turned my head to make sure Jessie was still with us.

“There were a lot of good things here, Sy,” Lillian said.  “Good, warm moments.”

“I know,” I said.  “It’s still hard to twist even my perceptions around into something that can call this place home, and I’m trying to be gentle with my brain.  I’m standing here, watching this city twist itself into something else, I see Jessie like that, and I feel like the Lambs as a whole are never going to have those moments again.  I’ve wanted them so badly, but they might well be gone.”

“Let’s not rule anything out,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” I said.  I might’ve argued, but I didn’t want to lose an argument when I felt this heartsick, and I definitely didn’t want to win this argument either.  “Yeah, alright.”

“The Academy felt like home to me,” Lillian said.  “The Orphanage too, in a way.  But that’s more because you all were there.”

“Now that’s a sentiment I can get behind,” I said.

“I agree,” Mary said.

“But my point is,” Helen said, with emphasis, “This is still nostalgic.  It makes me think of the old days, when we were smaller, the monsters all seemed bigger and harder to figure out…”

“I can get behind that sentiment too,” I said.

“Very much so,” Lillian said.

“Not me,” Ashton said.  “I wasn’t born or grown yet.”

“Not me either, bud,” Duncan said.  “But it makes me think of that fall, back in the day.  The moment with all the blood-”

“Hee,” Helen made a sound.

“-when I very quickly went from thinking I’d lucked out, getting invited to the Lambs, to realizing just how out of my depth I was.  Mary and Helen doing their individual things very, very well.”

“Lonely days, being without the others,” Mary said.  “But I always wanted to be a teacher, and it was fun to… educate him?”

“Bring him up to speed,” Helen offered.

“Yeah.”

“Bringing me up to speed?  Only insofar as hanging someone at the gallows is letting them down easy,” Duncan said.

Helen made another amused sound, giving Duncan a pat on the side of his mask, where his cheek would be.

Mary started to say something, then interrupted herself, reacting to something I hadn’t seen, raising a gun and firing into the mist.  The gunshot echoed through the empty city streets.

The echo took a while to die.  I could hear the other gunshots far below us over the war-drum beat of rain and the groaning of the city.  I wondered if they’d heard our gunshot and if they were thinking what was happening up here in the same way I was about how they were faring.

“Did you miss?” Ashton asked.

“Shush,” Mary said.  “I’m… fifty percent sure I saw something there.”

“I’m almost one hundred percent sure you missed it if it was there, and you definitely missed it if it wasn’t there,” Ashton said.

“Good Simon wouldn’t dwell on the failures of others,” Mary said, sounding more like herself as she hardened her voice.

“I wouldn’t be embarrassed, Mary,” I said.

“Drop dead, Sy.”

“No really, it’s fine.  If there had been something there and you’d killed it, it would have been inspired.  Just beautiful.  It was worth the gamble.”

“I’m not you, Sy.  I’m not satisfied if I pull off five reckless plans and one works out magnificently.”

I chuckled.  I heard her cock her revolver again, and I made myself stop.

“Um,” Ashton said.

“Oh, I brought up Good Simon, so now I get lectured,” Mary said.

“He does dwell on failures in book fifteen, he learns how mistakes teach us lessons, and there’s also a bit where he learns how the weak get culled, but that’s Academy propaganda again,” Ashton said.  “But please, Mary.  I’m old enough that I’ve grown out of those books now.”

“Oh, are you now?” Mary asked.  She held her gun out, her focus on the interplay of light and shadow in the gas.

“No, not really, I suppose,” Ashton said.  “I go back to them when I don’t know what else to do with my evenings.  But a little bit.”

“Telling lies isn’t what Good Simon would do, Ashton,” I said.

“Pot and kettle, Sy,” Ashton said.

There were noises from further down the street.

“Has everyone caught their breath?” I asked.  “You have your sea legs?”

“Sea legs?” Duncan asked.

As if to answer him, the landscape shifted, the dull organic sound yawning loud in its intensity, before easing again.  The rainwater on the streets shifted, now flowing from northwest to southeast, instead of east to west.

Mary wanted to tease me about timing and taking those gambles.  But it was moments like this, where I made someone walk into a moment like that, which made it entirely worth it.

“Ah, sea legs,” Duncan said.  “Yes, I’ve caught my breath.”

There were more murmurs of agreement.

“How about you, Jessie?” I asked.  “You’re awfully quiet.”

Silence.

“Good,” I said.  “Let’s go.”

I drew my pistol and my knife.  Lillian and Duncan had their rifles that they wore from being dressed as soldiers, slung over their shoulders.  Those rifles were locked and loaded, bayonets had covers removed, were flipped forward, and locked into place.

For a minute, we hurried down the roads without event.

With the shadows, gas, and rain being what they were, there was no way to tell just what rounded the corner.  Low to the ground, almost fluid, it surged toward us.  Black and wet.

The only sound was Duncan’s bark to the stitched that carried Jessie.  We ran.  The streets were almost familiar, but it was a familiarity in sentiment for me, a familiarity in the feel of the city, even though it was now a city shattered like a mirror was broken, each individual piece at a different height from its neighbors.

The attacker was attackers, plural.  A swarm, united and gathered together.  I saw hints in their form that suggested something like black beetles, something like rats, and something like eels.  They crashed into a wagon that had been parked by the side of the street once, and perhaps a quarter of their number remained behind, clinging to it.

The rest came after us.

My thoughts were on finding a good, fast way to get to higher ground when we rounded a corner and came face to face with a warbeast.  It was reptilian and slick, covered in mucous.

We barely slowed down, emptying our guns into the thing as we ran in its direction.  It was still crumpling to the ground as we reached it and ran past it.

Mary used the fallen lizard as a stepping stone, leaping from the peak of its shoulders to a rooftop a few feet away.  One by one, with me lingering behind, providing the occasional boost or supporting hand as crates or wagons were used as points to climb, with Mary seizing hands and hauling people up, we ascended to higher ground while keeping our distance.

The stitched was second to last.  It was strong enough to do it on its own, but it needed guidance.

It was only after I was up that I deemed myself free to look.  The swarm approached and flowed past us.  It moved with an eerie care; at no point did it venture within a handspan of any of the houses.  It was as if there was an invisible wall keeping it from venturing too close to any of the residences.

Shutters to close out the gas, doors sealed, and there would be cloths to be taped up within the building interiors and around the doors, to better secure the seals.

A wagon far behind us was hauled down by the tide of swarming things.

“Harvesters,” Duncan said.  Lillian nodded.

“Lillian mentioned those once,” Mary said.

“Old project, revived in an attempt to see if they would counteract the Ravage,” Lillian said.  “Eat the red flowers and vines.  Didn’t work.”

The swarm we’d crossed paths with wasn’t the only one.  As we used the rooftops to navigate the city, we saw several sweeps of the things.  Horses had toppled to the ground and lay with ribs spearing skyward, the flesh eaten and bones in the process of being devoured.

Trees were forbidden in the same way buildings were, as were crops, but gardens and lawns were devoured, the swarms sloshing and stirring up froth in mud that was more water than dirt.

The color in Radham was slowly leeched away.  Painted signs set in front of stores were open game, crumpling to the ground as they were devoured feet first, the stores left alone.  A cat yowled in the distance as the swarm surrounded and caught it.

“This isn’t the superweapon, is it?” I asked.  “The swarm?”

“The harvesters are one minor project among many,” Lillian said.  “One that apparently got loose.”

The section of city shifted, sloping to one side as one end of it rose higher than the other.

Zig-zagging across the city, minimizing contact with the ground, gunning down any threats, we reached one of the key buildings we’d been hunting for, easier to find because of how obscured it was, hidden in the thick soup of gas.

Round, stone, and reinforced, it had a row of squat chimneys along one side.  It wasn’t plumes of seeding chemicals for the clouds overhead that flowed from it, but the thick clouds of gas that made visibility so limited.

Gunshots sounded from the midst of the gas production building.  Some of the soldiers of Radham were congregating around it.  Perhaps a hundred, but exact estimates were harder than usual with the gas cloud being what it was.  Their attitude and loose organization suggested they were preparing more than they were fighting, as if they harbored the expectation that their time to fight would be in a little while.

More of the wall had crumbled, I saw.  Some soldiers were perched at the edge, near where the wall wasn’t barring their view, and they were taking potshots with rifles.

They weren’t anticipating trouble, so it wasn’t too hard to find the holes in their perimeter.  Getting in was easy.

Getting in, stopping that facility from producing the gas that was keeping eighty or ninety percent of our army from approaching this end of the battlefield, and getting out… well, that was the problem.

I could see the figures in the mist.  Sub Rosa- she reveled in this environment.  I saw the snake charmer, and I saw Fray’s bird-lady helper, Avis.  All wore gas masks.  The gas rose and fell as the chimneys dumped noxious chemicals into the air, so each figure was alternately silhouette, there in desaturated grey and black, and gone, disappearing from view as gas obscured them, then appearing elsewhere.

Briefly wondering what they were intent on communicating to me, I shifted my focus.  I wasn’t alone with Jessie and the phantoms.  I wasn’t aimless, I wasn’t hollow.

I was as close to ‘home’ as I would be for a while.  I had the Lambs with me.

I could think something, I could gesture with one hand, and they would support me.

Even if it was moral support, like Jessie’s.

I stay, Lillian gestured.  She indicated Jessie.

I nodded.

The rest of us navigated the gap in the defenses.  I eased the door open, then slipped inside.

“Hm?” was the questioning sound from within.

A team of six humanoids was managing the mixture of chemicals for the steady production of gas.  Lenses like those of quarantine masks were set directly into their eye sockets, rimmed with scar tissue, and their lower faces were was sunken and chinless.  Fleshy ruins with four evenly spaced tubes running into them.  The tubes looked more for oxygen than anything else.  They were shirtless, but had jackets tied around their waists, and four of them were managing one large bucket, tipping the contents into a small opening in a large glass vat.

The room was hot, and it was humid in the worst way.  It was hard to breathe through the filtration masks like this.  My bladder, largely quiet up to now, was starting to wheeze just being in here.

They made sucking sounds as they drank in air, staring at us with the tinted lens eyes.

“You’re done,” Duncan said, his voice firm.  “No more catalyst.”

I worried people outside would hear.  Nervous, I looked around.  I saw the Devil and I startled at the sight of him.  I reminded myself he wasn’t real, and tried to focus.

I gestured, indicating the chimneys.  They worked as an escape route.

Mary gestured.  Three teams.  Far.

Three squads of soldiers on the other side.  Mary began outlining where, suggested the one closest to the building might circle around to the front door or south window of the building.

From chimney to roof?  I gestured.  Then down?

The four with the bucket, having considered Duncan’s order, ceased tipping the contents out.

“Get the counteragent,” Duncan said, authoritative.  “Pour it in.  That should stop the reaction, which means no more gas.  Then take the catalyst, and pour it out onto the floor.  All of it.  Understand?”

There was a long pause.

Then nods.  They set the bucket down on the catwalk above the vats.

It was done.  With the gas gone, brute force would serve for retaking the south end.  The sticks, the scattered warehouses and storerooms.  It was the furthest point from the Academy, but it was a staging ground, an in.

Hayle was going to realize this facility wasn’t producing gas.  He’d act.  Whatever Radham was doing or transitioning into, Hayle would pull out the stops on realizing the danger.

Duncan and I set to closing the chutes that fed the gas from the boiling vat to the chimneys.  I climbed inside and climbed through and out, Mary right behind me.  It was a squeeze to get past the rain-cover on the chimney.

Everything was so dark.  The clouds overhead, the pouring rain, the gas absorbing the little light that remained.

I drew my lockpick tools from my pocket and set to working on the rain-cover.

Helen was next to slither out, doing so as I removed the last bit of the rain cover.  Ashton followed.  Duncan was last.  Removing the cover had been largely for him.

Sabotage done, Duncan signaled.  And thank you.

I gave him a singular nod.

The gas would start thinning sooner or later.  When it did, visibility would increase, and if we weren’t gone and away by the time it did, we’d be surrounded by enemies.

As it was, we perched on the rooftop, in the shadows and obfuscation the chimneys and gas still provided.  When Mary, Helen and I moved, we went in opposite directions, covering different corners, checking the lay of the land.

I heard a scuffing sound, and I drew my knife, turning.

Avis.  She wore a gas mask like a Doctor’s, beaked, and a robe that concealed her wings when they were furled.  She was trying to scare me like the Devil had.

Whatever message you have for me, you might as well spit it out.  That’s your role in my head, isn’t it?

But you won’t, because my head doesn’t always cooperate with me.

I heard the faint cocking of a gun at the same time I felt the metal at my throat.

Raising my hands, I turned slowly, still on my knees.

Avis stood on one foot, a talon at my throat.

The remainder of the Lambs were scattered around the rooftop.  Mary had her gun drawn.  Helen looked ready to pounce, but was too far away to do it in any effective way.

Avis was real.

Fray had to be here.  In Radham.

The moment stretched on.  The gas was gradually getting thinner.

“Can we talk?” I asked.  “Can we do this properly?”

She was silent, grim.

“I know you don’t want to get blood on your… talons, without the benefit of a drug to cloud your head and divest you of responsibility,” I murmured, very aware of how many soldiers were nearby.  “Can we do without the play acting?”

She nodded slowly.

“Appreciated,” I whispered.

Slowly, she lowered her foot.  She backed away a few steps.  Mary lowered her gun.

The Lambs and I occupied three-quarters of the rooftop.  She dropped to a crouch in the quarter-rooftop she’d taken as her territory here.  Rain streamed off of her as if she’d waterproofed herself.  Perhaps she had, to keep water from weighing her down when she needed to fly.

“I’d like to talk,” I whispered.

Avis shook her head.

“Please.  That army down there is ours.  One way or another, they’ll seize Radham.  It’s just a question of how many casualties there are in the end.  If Fray is here, I’d like to strike a compromise.  Talk.”

Avis’ voice was barely audible.  Without the mask, she would have been clearer, without the whisper I would’ve likely been able to puzzle it out, but with the combination of beaked mask and whisper, it took me a second.

“You’d get in her way,” Avis said.

I barely had a half-second to turn the statement around in my head before she acted.  She took off, shucking off the shawl and robe-like clothing she’d worn, wings beating air.  As the outer covering of clothing was thrown off, her flock of birds flew out and at us.

But the telling moment, the raised-middle-pinion-feather to us, was that her talons scuffed the roof’s edge, clipping the gutter.  Metal on metal.

The screech of metal, the flapping of fifty small wings and two large ones, the fact she’d said it and not whispered it, it drew the attention of the soldiers all around us, while Avis made her way skyward, both jumping and flapping hard to get herself fifteen or twenty feet into the air, then gliding silently and with scarcely a sign into the thickest patch of gas.

Fray.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.04 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.4

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Rain streamed down around us, as violent as any storm, but the thunder was the tromp of boots, shouts, the sound of things being thrown or tossed to the ground, a door being thrown open, and a squadron of stitched groaning as they were urged to action.

Not quite thunder, really, but enough activity to be something more than its constituent parts.

We threw ourselves to the roof.  The building was round, squat, and only roughly ten long strides from one end to the other, it had a faint lip, and it had the row of chimneys along the side closest to the wall.

The shouted orders were marking our location.

“Something landed on the roof.  Something big.  Check inside.  Berry, you’re with me.”

Nothing landed on the roof.

Mary gestured.  Signaling orders.

Duncan, Ashton and I took one corner of the roof, our bellies on textured wooden slats.  Helen took another side, near the chimneys, and Mary perched at the far side.  The gas and the rain made for enough haze that we could barely make out Mary.  Only the loosest, most general hand shapes were visible.

The first face appeared out of the gloom, within my arm’s reach.  I seized the hose of their mask and tore it away from their face and hood, exposing their face.  Before they could get their gun up and aimed at me, I slashed them across the eyes.  I caught one eye, but the knife clipped over the bridge of their nose, not quite hitting the other.

Eye wide, face contorting as they realized they were exposed to the gas, he lashed out, swinging his rifle one-handed at me.

Duncan, acting mostly in the soldier’s blind spot, caught the rifle by the barrel.

I followed up by thrusting my knife at the soldier’s other eye.  He turned his head, and all I saw was that I caught his lower eyelid.  No telling if I’d actually hit the eye or blinded him.

Duncan wrested the rifle free, hauling it onto our side, while the soldier fell.  There were shouts and exclamations from the guys on the ground.

I didn’t miss the fact that the building we were on was wooden.  We’re stuck up a tree.  Mary had been paying attention to the points they could use to climb up, and positioning us to defend ourselves.

Someone screamed at Mary’s end of the roof.

“My eyes!”

“We can fix the eyes.  What is it?  What’s up there?”

“Group of them,” the blinded one groaned aloud.  “Soldiers with masks like ours.  I breathed the gas when I got stabbed.  He got me in the eyes.”

“People?  How did they get up there?”

“The flying things must have dropped them off.”

I shifted position, easing down, one side of my body hugging one edge of the roof.

They’d gone quiet.  I rolled my eyes, and wished for the moment I wasn’t wearing the gas mask, so the others could see.

You have a war to win, the voice told me.

“You’ve been reasonable thus far,” I whispered, keeping my voice to a bare whisper.  “I’m doing what you need me to do.”

“Sy?” Duncan asked.

I shook my head.  I gestured at the enemy, then gestured a warning.

Three soldiers came over the edge at once, with a force that suggested they had been boosted up by others or that they’d vaulted up by virtue of combat drugs or enhanced physiology.  One stepped right over me, turning his head toward Duncan and Ashton.

I thrust up, sticking my knife through the thick quarantine uniform, the blade sinking in where his thigh met his pelvis.  Blood fountained down around and on top of me as he toppled.

With my free hand, I grabbed at the butt-end of the next guy’s rifle, keeping him from drawing aim.

It was enough to simply deny him the ability to thrust, swing, or shoot.  That, in itself, gave Ashton room to stick him several times with his bayonet.

Ashton and Duncan together finished with the last guy.  Duncan had used his bayonet to strike at the soldiers’, and they’d been mid-struggle before Ashton broke the tie in strength.  The man was stabbed twice and then shoved over the roof’s edge.  I busied myself with putting my bayonet blade to the neck of the first one, with the fountain of blood pouring down from the thigh-wound.

I could hear soldiers below.  “Fuck me and fuck this.  This should not be this hard.  Get the- get Renaut’s squad.”

“Renaut?  He doesn’t-  Right.”

That would be the stitched, I was guessing.

Your army is going to march on Radham.

“I know,” I murmured.  I knew Ashton and Duncan could hear me talking to myself.  With the mask and hose and the circumstances, however, I doubted they could make out the words.

The Lambs’ role in the present is to clear the way.  Knock down the facilities, remove the largest obstacles.  Put an army on Professor Hayle’s doorstep and take him into custody.

“I know,” I whispered.

It was hard to go anywhere when we were thoroughly surrounded by a committed and alerted enemy.

“Sy,” Duncan said.

I looked at him.

“Do I need to worry?”

I looked at him, then at Ashton.  Percy sat on the edge of the roof with the Snake Charmer, keeping Mary company.  A girl with the tattoos, ritual scarification and horns sat with Sub Rosa, the Devil, and Helen.

“Nothing we can do about it,” I said.

“I haven’t had all that much occasion to fight alongside you,” he said.

“Please don’t criticize how I fight.  Everyone does it.  It doesn’t change anything.”

“Why go for the eyes?” he asked.  “You could have gone for the throat.”

I could have said something about how I wanted to scare them, but that wasn’t true.  I could have said the throat was a hard target to reach, with the quarantine uniforms involving a fair amount of fabric at that part of the neck, where hood met uniform body with double reinforcement.  That wasn’t wholly true either.

“Instinct,” I said.

“Maybe think more and instinct less,” Duncan said.  “At least until we’re through this.”

“Your instincts in combat aren’t great,” Ashton said.

I nodded.  In combat, not great.  They were better in an ambush, as someone in a metaphorical tree, trying to keep anyone else from climbing up high enough to get at us.

I divested the dying man of his equipment.  No explosives.  He had the rifle he’d been carrying, a pistol, and some boxes of ammunition, both the bullets for the pistol and the cartridges for the rifle.  A few pieces of a ration kit were stowed in his coat.  There was a hip flask of something strong at one breast pocket and a metal case for cigarettes at the other, balancing it out.

Old cigarettes, going by the aroma.  Not a smoker, then, or he hadn’t worn this jacket often enough to remove the cigarettes since his last stint with the local forces.

I pocketed the hip flask and cigarettes, and I gathered up the ammunition, moving the guns into arm’s reach.

There was a scuffing sound.  Our heads turned.  Mary was on her hands and knees.  She’d fallen to the ground.

Ashton scampered over to her, moving on all fours to keep from being shot by anyone enterprising on the ground.

“Stitched,” I murmured to Duncan.

“Sounded like it.”

“Lillian’s out there with Jessie.  Our army is on the approach.  These are good.  Fray’s here.  This is… neutral.”

“Neutral?”

“Neutral.  Bad is we’re losing our smoke cover, we’re surrounded, and they’re likely to be reinforced before we are.  But our most immediate problem is them.”

I pointed with my knife.

The wall loomed to one side of us.  We were creeping upward as the ground shifted, and that drove us closer to the men who were perched on the walltop.  If and when we moved close enough or the gas cleared, they’d have the upper ground against us.  Men with rifles.

Duncan nodded.

Ashton rejoined us, crossing the rooftop on all fours.  “I offered help and Mary didn’t want it.  She killed three just now, one of them grazed her.  She says she’s pretty sure they’re arranging the stitched.  They’re giving the orders and organizing the stitched out of sight.  They’re going to attack us on several sides if the attack us.”

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  “We heard a bit of that plan over here.”

Avis had well and truly fucked us.

I handled the box of cigarettes, weighing it in my hands.  I really wished I could have taken the mask off and smoked one.  Instead, it was a taunt, and it was a tool in my toolbox, as I tried to wrap my head around the situation.

I was aware of how many phantoms were around.  I was aware the voice was telling me to act and I wasn’t obeying, and that was a very fragile dynamic I didn’t want to tamper with.

In any other situation, I would have treated my mind gently.  I wasn’t sure I could afford to here.

Mary moved her arm, getting our attention.  She clacked her rifle against the roof’s edge in tap code.  She was sticking to the basic codes.  Not a number, which meant…

Aggression.  Warning.

They were coming.

I had to go by sound, and I was wearing a mask that muffled sound to a small degree.  The footsteps had weight, and they were joined by the sounds of creaking wheels, by the creak of wood, and a number of other sounds.

I took the gamble, pushing my brain to interpret, to hear the sounds, to draw up a mental picture, and to be ready to adjust that picture as new information came in.

I could see Helen stand.  Flanked on one side by the chimneys, she was protected from incoming fire, but it was an eerie thing to see.  Her eyes were wide.

I was very aware that with Brechwell’s beast, the Devil, and Sub Rosa nearby, my every instinct was telling me she was in a precarious, dangerous position.  Killers that had been repressed, unleashed in ways that had hurt even their allies, keepers, and subordinates.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

A wagon crashed into the side of the building, and several things clattered as they were piled on top of it.  One thing among several being piled up against the building so they might have a better platform to get up and get at us in greater numbers.

They began the climb.  I could hear the orders, not too far away, directing the stitched who had yet to begin climbing.

“Ladder, ladder, wagon, ladder,” I said, tapping parts of the wall with the end of the rifle I’d grabbed.

With the appearance of the first stitched, I stabbed it in the throat with the bayonet, then pushed.  I wanted to topple it, and it hadn’t sounded like much of a commotion below.  I was hoping it wasn’t supported by a team of the stitched.

He ignored the blade in his throat and grabbed my weapon.

I pushed harder, forcing him off balance so he’d tip to one side.  When he grabbed the wall for leverage, to stop himself from sliding to the one side, I pulled the trigger, firing the bullet into his throat.

He fell, and I let the rifle go with him, because I doubted my ability to hold into it.

I saw the group coming over the wall.  Four stitched.

I used the two pistols, and I opened fire, shooting into the densest part of the group.

The guns were of the conventional variety, the bullets being low speed, the kind meant to bounce around in the internals of the enemy.  They did some measure of structural damage to the stitched, made one or two falter, but it was very little, all considered.

What followed was like a bad dream.  It wasn’t that things went particularly south, but more that we struggled to affect change.  I’d had dreams like this where I tried to shelve Jamie’s old diaries after reading them, but each attempt to do so knocked more from the shelf, ad infinitum.  I’d had dreams where one of the mice from Radham was a Lamb.  Chuck or Ched or Carl or whoever it had been, the one in charge.  He’d been insistent on a plan of action, I’d say something, and he’d hold fast.  I’d try to step in or take the role, and he’d somehow end up still on track to pursue a suicidal mission.

Then he would die and I would wake up.

We shot them, and they barely slowed down.  We stabbed and we struck at them and we tried to topple them, and we had only varied degrees of success.   The one I’d sent sprawling to the ground twelve or fifteen feet below the roof’s edge returned to the fight, barely the worse for wear.

One stitched had a rifle in both hands, and Ashton had thrown himself against the middle part of it, sticking a knife repeatedly into the stitched while trying to keep the rifle from being twisted around to an angle where it could be fired at any of us.  By dint of sheer strength and an utter lack of concern for the knife that was being stuck into its upper thighs and stomach, the stitched won the struggle and shoved Ashton away.  He aimed his rifle and pulled the trigger, and Ashton crumpled to the rooftop.

They just needed a crack and they had an opening.  The stitched stepped onto the roof and swung at Duncan with the rifle.  Preoccupied with another fight, Duncan was cut down, bleeding from a deeper cut at one side of his face.

I kicked at one knee of the one I was trying to deal with, and knocked his footing out from him where it rested on the top rung of the re-erected ladder.  He tried to claw at me and pull me down with him, but I was slippery.

The one Ashton had wounded before being shot was fairly injured.  I tried to capitalize on that, aware I was dancing around it, playing safe when I had no support at my flanks.  One was coming up the ladder, injured with multiple gunshots from earlier, and the one that Duncan had been dealing with was climbing up onto the roof.

“Helen!” I heard Mary’s voice.

Helen was dealing with the ones who were climbing up the chimney exteriors.  It was an awkward climb, and that afforded her a lot of opportunity.  But she’d gone after one, tackling it to the ground, embracing it, and she seemed oblivious to the fact that another one had climbed up the chimney furthest from her, and it was going after Mary.

Losing this skirmish is unacceptable, the voice told me.

Mary redoubled her efforts.  She was dealing with the same kind of effort we were at our end of the roof, multiple ladders, stacked boxes and wagons providing a kind of siege tower access.  Knives flew, razor wire entangled the enemy, and she was ducking and weaving to try and avoid swung sabres, bayonets, and any rifle shots that might get too close to pointing at her.

In a lot of places, especially when the enemies were clad in quarantine suits, when they were stitched who could take a small caliber bullet without undue complaint or inconvenience, the knives weren’t quite enough.  Not for effectively dealing with each one stitched in one blow.  She found the opportunity to disarm the stitched of its pistol with razor wire, then to slice it twice.  Then more immediate threats and dangers loomed at the roof’s edge.

Like how in the worst dreams, there was a threat that nothing could slow or stop.

The stitched were Death, and being Death, they could only be forestalled, not quite stopped.

I saw an opportunity, and I lunged at the one in front of me.

I’d hoped to shove him off the building’s edge.  I didn’t.

Looming above me, while my shoulder rested against his steaming, injured midsection, he drove his elbow down into my back, knocking me down onto the roof.

It raised a foot, ready to stomp on me, and I raised myself up, meeting the foot with my back.  In the doing, I put it off balance.  It stomped the foot down to one side, and I repeated my attempt from earlier, shoving myself into the thing’s stomach, pushing it back.

It fell back at an angle, and it landed on the ladder the stitched to the right of it had used.  I could hear the wood splinter at the collision.

“Kill it and move on, Hel!” I called out.  “We need you!”

We really need you.

Duncan was rousing, but it was slow, and he was forced to scramble back as the stitched approached him.  The stitched had lost its gun at one point, and now it was using a backup weapon.  Duncan couldn’t rise to his feet without putting himself in harm’s way, but the more he backed up, the more ground we ceded.

A knife appeared in the stitched’s eye.  Mary’s throw.

Duncan and I together engaged it, me signaling with one hand while holding a spare rifle in the other.  I used the blade to fend off the sword, and Duncan went on the offense.

Helen moved on to another target.  Mary waged her war on the far end of the roof.

A gunshot drew my attention.  Not one close to us, but-

Lillian and Jessie.

I looked just in time to see Avis taking to the sky.

She’d found them.  She was drawing attention to them, and the enemy was obliging.  A share of the soldiers we weren’t fighting were splintering off, giving chase.

There was nothing I could do but surrender to circumstance and have faith that they would fend for themselves.

The rain poured down around us.  As a group, we hunkered down near the chimneys, our backs to the brick, stone, and wooden branches.  We sat so we could each keep an eye on one side of the roof.

Duncan’s wound that ran from above his temple to his cheek had been glued shut, but it was a haphazard gluing, and it had dried clear.  The effect was as though he’d frozen the wound in time, raw, red as though it was about to start bleeding, but never quite crossing that threshold.

Mary was hurt, but she was pretending she wasn’t.  Helen was quiet.

Rather than talk to me, Duncan lifted up and moved my hand to where he needed pressure or a hold.  He pressed my fingers down, as if to tell me to press down harder.  I obliged.

The surgery on Ashton continued.  Duncan’s hands made wet, sucking sounds as he dug for the next bullet.

The gas had dissipated enough that we didn’t have the gas to mask our location anymore.  We’d piled bodies six high on one side, and Mary was propping up the pile with her back.  Soldiers had climbed onto a rooftop further down the street, where they had a good angle to shoot at us from.  The bodies were our pile of sandbags.  The chimneys protected us from the people on the walltop.

We repaired our Ashton.  They repaired the stitched who weren’t composing our sandbag wall.

Sub Rosa stood on the roof’s edge, in plain view of anyone who might shoot her.

It was the nature of the stitched that, given opportunity, they would win the war of attrition.

“Okay,” Duncan murmured.  “Thank you, Sy.”

I pulled my hands back.  Duncan began wrapping it up.

“What are you thinking?” Mary asked.

“I’m thinking of cigarettes,” I said.  “And how Avis and Fray might steal this plan from us like we stole Beattle.”

“We won’t let that happen,” Mary said.

I grabbed the little case of cigarettes.  I weighed it in my hand.

“And you can’t smoke,” she added.

“Creature comforts,” Helen said.  Her voice was soft.

“Gas,” Mary said.  “Sy is resistant to a lot of things, but we agreed a while back that when it comes to Hayle, we should assume our usual strengths may not apply.”

“We could,” I said.

I found the flask.  I opened the tin cigarette case, and I emptied the flask’s contents into it, careful of the angle.  I didn’t want to soak the entire cigarette.  Just eighty percent or so.  I began soaking some of Duncan’s spare bandage, and wrapping it around.

“Yes, go ahead, you can use that,” Duncan muttered.

He wasn’t one to let things get to him to the degree he was so morose.  I was less likely to blame the situation, more likely to blame the fact that Ashton had been hurt.

“Good to hear.  I need thread.  Not surgical thread either,” I said.

“Thread or wire?” Mary responded, as if it was the natural assumption that she’d be the one to supply it.

“Thread.  Thread-thread.”

“Give me a minute.”

As Mary began to supply the thread pulled from her own clothing, I began to wind it around the bases of the rifle cartridges.  Gunpowder primers, then propellant, then the bullet itself, in that order.  The primers were arranged to sit against the cigarette.

I pulled off my gloves to work more accurately, trusting that the gas wouldn’t affect my exposed skin too badly.  Once I got going, I was fairly quick with it.  Mary joined me, but she kept her gloves on.

The resulting ornaments looked like pinecones.

Mary handed me matches, taken from one of the bodies.

“You’re going to set yourself on fire or blow yourself up,” Duncan said.

“Let’s hope not,” I said.

I set them aside, taking up my rifle.

“Not using them?” Duncan asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Alright then,” he said.  He gave Ashton a light slap on the face.  “Ashton, wake up.  I need room to work.”

Ashton remained still.

Duncan stared down at Ashton for a long moment, then gave the boy a hard strike on the sternum.

“Nnf,” Ashton made a sound.

“How are you doing?” Duncan asked.

“Less good, after getting thumped.”

“Percussive maintenance.  I need you to move aside.  And stay out of the way of bullets.  Stick close,” Duncan said.

Ashton crawled over to the space between Duncan and Helen.  I expected Helen to wrap her arms around him, and she didn’t.  He sat with his arm pressing against hers, and he rested his head on her shoulder.  She smiled.

Duncan spoke, “Mary, can you pull that one stitched down?  I’ll help.”

“Up here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The two of them hauled one stitched down from the makeshift wall of bodies.

As the gas cleared, we could see where certain areas of the city were still shrouded, other gas-production buildings spilling forth, protecting them.  We could see where the denizens of Radham were doing their work.  Webbing cocooned areas and formed bridges between higher tiers of the city and lower ones.

The swarms of things were doing their own work.  The Harvesters.  What they collected in organic matter, they spun out into constructions, reinforcing and connecting, following a biological program that had been set for them.

This was only one small part of it.  The longer we took to pick this fight, the more time Radham had to adapt.  To transform itself.

Distant gunfire was as much of the background noise as the downpour, the groaning of the city.  That distant gunfire changed in tenor.

We’d waited.  It sucked to wait, but we’d waited.  We couldn’t operate wholly alone in this.

Now our army was invading the southern end of the city, confident that the gas was dissipating and the rest of our forces could follow behind.  They moved through the streets, and the soldiers who had us surrounded were the ones caught by circumstance.

Avis had cost us precious time.  She’d put us in a corner, and we had no idea what had become of Lillian and Jessie, but she’d primarily cost us time.

Two choices, I thought.  Two things the enemy could do.  They weren’t ready to storm the rooftop again.  They would need to keep soldiers back to guard us.  It would need to be enough to keep an eye on all sides of the building.  The greater war and advance of an army demanded their full attention.

I’d tuned my ears to pay attention to surroundings, and aside from a brief distraction with the cartridge-and-cigarette pinecones, I hadn’t stopped tuning.

I could hear the orders, and I could hear orders with a vague note of condescension and strained patience.

I picked up my pinecone, and I lit the end of the cigarette that didn’t have alcohol soaking it.  It began to burn down.

Mary grabbed one, igniting it, while I whirled mine.  Sparks and droplets of ignited accelerant wicked off of it, landing in puddles across the roof, while I built up speed.

I launched it in the direction of the voice.  I immediately picked up the second of the three pinecones.  Mary threw hers while I lit it.  I could hear the shouts as it ignited mid-air.

I stood to throw my last one, my ears trained on the shouts and voices.  A hail of bullets fired from the wall behind us, and many chipped at the chimneys or flew between them to take chunks out of the roof.  I let the third and last pinecone loose, aiming more for distance and the general area of the target.  A collection of rifle bullets arranged with the ends against the fuel source.

The third one went off right when it would’ve been hitting the ground.  A series of bullets popping all in quick succession.

I waited, listening for the reaction.  Alarm, more shouts.

“What?” Duncan asked, interrupting my listen.  He was still wrist deep in the dead stitched.

“Hm?” I asked, not quite sure if I didn’t want to prompt more of a reaction from him, lest I miss the critical detail.

“That shouldn’t have worked at all,” he said.  “I was digging into this guy to see if we couldn’t use a voltaic node for the same effect.”

“Sorry you didn’t get your moment of cool,” I said.  Then, before he could respond, I held up a finger.

The shouts were taking on a different tenor now.

Frustration.  A moment of argument.

There hadn’t been many voices ordering the stitched about.  I’d aimed for where they were congregating.  The bullets wouldn’t fly as fast and sure as if they’d been fired from a rifle, but there had been a fair number of bullets in the one pinecone that did go off.

Enough to debilitate?  To disable the leadership of the squad of stitched soldiers?

The orders were called out, too far away to be distinct.  I could hear the tromp of boots.

The call had been made.  They were retreating.  I peeked and I saw the ones on the wall running along the walltop.  Soldiers made a break away from the end of the city where our side was finally invading.

The stitched soldiers were staying.  They were all gathered near the front of the building.  Too much effort to wrangle, without the wranglers?

Bloodied, several of us injured, we checked the coast was clear and scaled down the chimneys, our feet touching road.

Fray was in the mix.  She was here, and she was throwing her wrenches into the works of a plan so vast it threatened to collapse under its own weight.

Fray- well, we had no idea what she wanted.  But she was dangerous, she was devastating in her own right, and the moves she made were such that there was almost always collateral damage.  To things, to people, and especially to plans.

The plans she had set into motion, that we hadn’t seen the end of.  They would continue to grow and reach out and by petty measures and by vast scales, they would throw us into disarray, much like Avis had so casually done.  It was what qualified her as architect of the second of my three gods to slay.  Conspiracy.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.05 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.5

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We had set ourselves up between a rock and a hard place.  The plan had been to navigate the space between the two, but Avis had cost us the time we needed, and the gap had closed.  Radham’s forces were on the one side, fortified and using the ever-changing environment to their advantage.  The army we’d recruited was on the other side, flooding into the southmost end of the city by way of the once-subterranean gates.

This area had once been the sticks.  It was where the mice had lived, the orphans and the children who might as well have been orphans.  It was the place so disorganized and poor that Percy’s ghosts had been able to get a foothold, stealing children and brewing them in vats to create the coordinated regiments of hyperaware clones.

It was part of where Mauer had found his voice.  Where the people weren’t quite in the Academy’s shadow, they didn’t receive the benefits of the Academy, but they also didn’t feel the pressures of it.  People here had whispered and spoken of the divine, had worn faith on their sleeves, and they’d found something in that that outweighed the social costs elsewhere.  Not so small a following or faith that it would wither on its own, not so large that it warranted stamping out.

Again, that middle ground, the area between the rock that would crush and the hard place that would wear them down by attrition.

The contrast might have been flawed.

“Better to think we’re caught between a rock and a bigger rock,” I murmured.

“Agreed,” Helen said.

“I’m confused,” Duncan said.  “More than usual.”

“I’m talking to myself,” I said.  “It wasn’t supposed to make sense to any of you.”

“But it does,” Helen said.  She sounded more ethereal than she had in a long time, even accounting for the mask and breathing apparatus she wore.  The way she moved even while wearing a soaking wet cadet’s uniform was telling.  “We’re stuck between the rocks, and Lillian is stuck more than any of us.”

“You’re a soldier, remember.  We want to be able to pass if someone glances at us,” I said, my voice soft.

Helen took a second or two to take in that thought.  The sound of her footsteps changed.  The movement of her arms became tighter, and she moved more like someone with a wet uniform and pack, gun and breathing apparatus.  Not like… I couldn’t even append a proper description to her.  I thought again of Percy’s ghosts, which we’d called ghosts for reasons that went beyond their propensity to disappear.

I was fairly sure that if I could remember that far back, I’d be able to connect a memory of the early days to the current Helen.  Before she had fully adopted her ‘human’ act, when she was wild and wide-eyed, agile, flimsy and uninhibited.

“Better?” she asked.

She’d never asked, as far as I could remember.

“Yes.  What’s going on?  Ibbot was supposed to get you closer to working order.”

“He did,” Duncan was the one who answered.

I glanced at Helen.  She clutched her rifle, her mask on securely, looking very unlike Helen.

I almost wished I hadn’t reminded her to act.

The rain poured around us.  We had to climb to higher ground as a swarm of harvesters approached us from behind.  They had bones and the remains of clothing and weaponry tangled in their mass, like heavy waves turning over a beachside graveyard.

Now that the gas was clearing and we were moving through the city, I was able to see more of what was happening.  The city was rising up, different sections at different heights, each on shelves of land with shell-like enclosures and likely with other infrastructure to keep them firm and contained.  Roots, bones, whatever.  It hardly mattered.  The real trick, or part of it, was what was being exposed.

The Academy and the city had tunnels and sewers running through it.  We’d seen some of it when we’d been dealing with Sub Rosa, we’d seen and debated some of it around the time… it would have had to be Avis, both when she seized Claret Hall and around the time she’d escaped.  The tunnels and the escape routes, the Bowels, and the other infrastructure, it all ran beneath and through Radham.  Ostensibly to allow more maneuverability in wartime.

But this was wartime on an unprecedented level.  This was Hayle pulling out all the stops.  He’d revealed the trick Radham had up its sleeve.  As the different levels rose up, the tunnels were exposed, and things from underground labs and vaults were being loosed.  The Harvesters were only part of it.  The spider-things I could see on rooftops were only part of it.

Those things were defensive.  Even though they were Radham’s dogs of war let loose, the monsters unleashed, they were reactive, building and shoring up, laying infrastructure for what came next.  The tunnels loomed open and dark in the sides of the shelves of land that rose higher than the others, and harvester, spider, and the other things were taking actions that Academy scientists had no doubt outlined and hammered down decades ago.

They were building funnels to help get something or some things into the tunnel openings.  They were building embankments and railings to keep that something or things from careening over the points of higher ground.  Guides.  When those things were done, they reinforced buildings to keep the residents within safe from the next phase.

Mary was leading the group, straying a good distance ahead and zig-zagging through the streets to check likely and typical hiding places.

Duncan, Helen, Ashton and I were huddled together, rifles at hand.  All of us, Mary included, were hurt or hurting.  I was especially worried for Jessie and Lillian.

Whatever treatment or programming had been done to keep the harvesters from dismantling homes hadn’t extended to one of the old churches.  It wasn’t Mauer’s old church, I was fairly sure, but it was one like it, worn by the elements and halfway to being reclaimed by nature.  Weeds, saplings and moss had found root in crevice and dust.

The Academy hadn’t wanted to expend that extra dusting of pheromone or that extra measure of programming to save the church, and now the harvesters were erasing the structure.  They’d started with the easier to reach branches, weeds, and whatnot, and were already moving onto the remainder.  The treated wood and the wood that had grown into and around stone would be the last to go.

The building was surrounded with soldiers, and I didn’t realize they weren’t truly there until I saw Mary ignore them.

I clacked the barrel of my gun against a wall as I passed it, to get Mary’s attention.

She caught up with us just as we entered the area.  Smaller pieces of wood fell from the ceiling above as the harvesters did their work.  Ratlike in how they gnawed, eel-like in how they moved among one another, and roach-like in their density and the sound of their massed number.

Already occupied with their current meal, most didn’t give us much mind.  Bayonets and a few kicks served to keep the worst of them at bay.

Ashton was moving slowly.  One crawled up his leg, up his back, and started to find its footing on his shoulder, aiming for his neck, and he didn’t seem to notice.  I swiped at the thing.

“You put that blade a little too close to my throat, Sy,” Ashton said, voice muffled by his mask.

“Better than the alternative,” I said.  “Unless I imagined that thing.”

“Keep an eye out, Ashton,” Duncan warned.  “Maybe put something out there too, if you can.”

“Alright,” Ashton said.  He reached for the bladder at his side and began manually venting it, compressing it as he depressed the vent-flap at the bottom.

Where the ceiling dissolved above us, splinters came down in a rain.  Animals had built nests here and the nests of interwoven branches and tattered cloth came down in streams and tumbles all over the place.

I touched walls, tracing them with my fingers.  The walls and floors were intact, at least.  The building wouldn’t topple.  But the apertures were more open and gnawed at around the edges, everything loose was giving the creatures a foothold to get their teeth and claws in, and the fallen, easy-to-break pieces were being turned into something like worked clay, the color eaten, the remainder sodden, featureless, and lacking in hard edges.

We passed countless soldiers without masks, their eyes missing, throats slashed, wounds bleeding at armpit, thigh, crotch and knee.  They stood or leaned against surfaces, their heads moving to watch us.

The top floor was more an attic than anything, accessed by a ladder rather than a stairwell, leading to a space that was open to the sky, only a partial roof on either side.  The ladder-access was part of why the harvesters hadn’t reached high enough.

The harvesters slid away from us as they fell within Ashton’s area of influence, choosing other targets.

Lillian, Jessie, and the stitched escort were there.  A statue had toppled, the floor bowing beneath its weight, and only the breadth of it really kept it from plunging through.  Lillian and the stitched had perched on the statue’s base and a fallen section of wall.  She was keeping the stone beneath her.

Jessie was draped out in front of her.  Lillian was bandaging wounds and holes in Jessie’s quarantine suit.

“Avis came after me,” Lillian said.

“You’re okay?” I asked.

Lillian nodded.

“How bad?” I asked, indicating Jessie.

“Not that bad,” Lillian said, quiet.  “It was my fault.  I was running for safer ground, keeping an eye out for the soldiers and for Avis, and I didn’t realize a harvester had climbed up to gnaw on her.”

“And these soldiers?” Mary asked.  She indicated with a rifle.

I looked around.  I realized that some of the soldiers present were real.  They lay on the ground, shot, cut, or pulverized.

“The stitched helped,” Lillian said.  She laughed briefly, humorlessly.  “My project was good for something after all.  I wanted it to help people, you know.  Search and rescue, carry supplies, a vessel for the wounded.”

“I remember,” I said.

“We fought the ones who got up this far.  Then I realized Jessie was hurt, I put something together and lobbed it down the stairs to buy myself some time.  Gas, to clog up the filters and obscure the lenses.  I don’t know how effective it was, or if they got spooked by the harvesters, but they didn’t press the attack.”

“It worked,” Mary said.  “It obscured the lenses, choked them.”

“How many?”

“Eleven bodies on the next floor down.”

Lillian nodded.  There was a pause.  “I knew there would be casualties.”

“It’s war,” Mary said.

Helen approached Lillian.  A hand settled on Lillian’s head.

“I’m glad you got here just now,” Lillian said, sounding oddly muted.  “I was going to have the stitched carry Jessie and I and climb over to the next building, but I couldn’t imagine it doing that and us being able to stop and wait anytime soon.  We’d have to keep moving, without knowing who was nearby.  It would be hard to find you again.”

“All the same, I know it might sound bad, but it’s good you didn’t come with,” Duncan said.  “We ended up in a pinch.  There was barely enough cover to hunker behind.”

Lillian nodded.

“I’ll ask again,” I said.  “You okay?”

Lillian snapped her fingers for the stitched, and transitioned Jessie into the broad, muscular arms.  She worked her way to her feet, as if sore.  Helen gave her a hand.

“I really want to have a conversation with Hayle,” Lillian said, with a firm voice.  “I’m so done with all of this.”

“That can be arranged,” I said.

“Fray too,” Lillian said.  “After that stunt Avis pulled- do we know why?”

“Beattle,” I said.  “Probably.  And Fray, if I had to say.”

“Fray?”

“She didn’t say anything, but… when all’s said and done, Avis was a very different person, once upon a time.  She talked more, she was in charge of communications, she coordinated, she was managing logistics, even for Beattle.  But…”

“She’s become something else under Fray?” Mary asked.

I spread my arms.  I couldn’t say Avis was something less, but I definitely wouldn’t have said she was anything more.  At the same time, I struggled to remember enough particulars about the woman I’d seen to articulate what she might have started as and what she might be becoming.

The ground rumbled and shifted, and with that shift, every piece of the church that was on the precipice of crumbling decided to do so.  The overarching structure was sound enough that we weren’t in immediate danger, but it was clear that there was a future where that wouldn’t be the case.

By unanimous, unspoken agreement, we left the church.  The stitched reached out over the edge, providing a bridge.  We climbed up with its help, using it as a bridge.

I was the last to climb over, or at least, the last besides Jessie, who kept the stitched company.  I touched her mask briefly mid-climb, pausing, then climbed the rest of the way.

The others were perched on the peak of the rooftop next to the church.  They stared out into the distance.

Rain poured over the city and in the gloom it might as well have been oil.  The forces of the Crown army we’d gathered were at the southern edge of the city, and the defending forces weren’t even fighting back- they opened fire, scattered tens and dozens of dots of light as rifles fired.  The army was bright on its own, holding covered torches and bioluminescent lights, the former orange, the latter a pale blue.  Their guns fired as regiments were given the order, thirty to a hundred guns firing within the span of a second of each other, followed by a pause long enough to let the echo ring over the city.

On the far side, there was only darkness, the rolling cloud of fog with a tint that was only visible at the cloud’s edge, mustard yellow and green.  The opposite of a silver lining.

Our focus, however, was on the other guy.

It was a ship to rival any naval vessel, with a structure much the same, grey and tall, with a jutting prow and lights illuminating its portholes and windows.  It moved with a steady pace, though there was no sea to sail, and no sails for that matter.

“Ah,” Ashton said.  “That’s a handsome sight.  I like it.”

“I don’t.  It’s more than a little ominous,” Lillian said.

“The army isn’t far away.  It’s our army, but they’re going to realize we’re an odd sight, unless we can find a good hiding spot and integrate into their ranks,” Mary said.

“We can’t,” I said.

“It’s an option,” she said.

“We need to be mobile, to answer problems and stay ahead of things.  To get ahead of and capture Fray, mainly,” I said.

Mary nodded.

“That… thing, the crawling monolith, ship, craft, whatever it is,” I said, gesturing in the direction of the massive thing, “It’s coming toward us.  Collision course.”

“It has to be the Crown,” Duncan said.  “We knew it was a possibility.  We just thought they’d come by train.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “So my line of thinking right now… I’ve been watching what Radham is doing.  The tunnels that are being exposed, the changes being made, the sum total of this, and where it seems to be leading, it’s a preparation, right?  Things held in reserve, even in the city.”

“Harvesters, spiders, whatever else they’ve got closer to the Academy,” Lillian said.

“They’ve probably emptied the bowels,” I said.  “Everything they can.”

“Scary to think about,” Duncan said.  “I spent a bit of time down there after getting my coat.”

“The type of leash Radham uses means they can clean up if they have to,” Helen said.  “Everything in the Academy is leashed.  The new leash for some.  Ibbot had a lot to do with making sure it was managed for the bigger projects.”

“Alright,” I said.  “You guys remember those projects any?”

Helen and Duncan nodded.

“Anything like a big capstone?  A thing that would use those funnels or tunnels like they’ve been set up?”

“Not like that,” Duncan said.

“I don’t think so,” Helen said.  “Yes, some could, but… this feels like it’s not it.  Too much preparation going into things that wouldn’t feel like they’d be that important.”

I nodded.

Helen was clenching her hands, first one, then the other.  I could hear her joints popping.

Ashton reached out for her hand.  She made herself go still.

“Okay,” I said.  “Hayle’s cornered.  He’s going to see what we’re seeing, and he’s going to want to defend himself.  That means whatever he’s holding in reserve… he’s going to let it loose.”

“Something more than what he has in the bowels,” Duncan concluded.

The gunfire was drawing nearer.  So was the craft.

“We need to choose our target,” Mary said.  “Or the targets are all going to find us.  Maybe multiple targets finding us all at once, like Avis pulling her stunt.”

“Three rocks,” Helen said.

“Are you catching what Sylvester’s got?” Lillian asked.

Helen made an amused sound.

“Between a rock and a hard place, but not,” I said.  “I was thinking, we’re navigating this gap between the two forces.  And Fray has to be too.  She’s around here.  We can try to track her down.  As the gap closes, she’ll have less freedom and elbow room to avoid us.”

“She knows the Academy,” Duncan said.  “And I don’t have the impression her memory is nearly as bad as yours.”

“She made other sacrifices,” I said.  I felt a tinge of bitterness.  “Less sacrifices.”

“We’ll find her,” Mary said.

She shifted her footing, and slid down the length of the rooftop.  I dropped down to use one hand to balance myself, and followed.  The others made their way down, more or less the way I did.  Jessie’s stitched climbed down the one face of the building.

Harvesters approached us as we landed on the street.  Ashton’s arrival, however, produced a puff of something that disturbed them, scattering them.

“Don’t use yourself up,” Duncan admonished.

“I know what I’m doing,” Ashton said, sighing.

As the army was staying close together and the defending forces were retreating to the safety of the fog, the streets were empty.  The only signs of life were the homes with shuttered windows with slices of muted light shining through cracks.  They’d have barriers up, special cloth, paper, or something more protective, to keep the gas out, but it was thin enough to allow the lanternlight or voltaic lights within to shine through.

The city continued to groan, like a singular joint easing itself into motion after a century of inactivity, or a tree creaking as it tried and failed to topple over.  It sounded like muscles felt when extended to their limit.

I gestured, walking alongside Mary as we set off, putting distance between ourselves and the army that was already halfway through the southern quarter of the city.  I directed Mary to keep an eye to the sky.  Duncan and Ashton watched one flank.  Helen watched another.  Lillian covered our rear, with Jessie to keep her company.

“Where are you, Fray?” I murmured.

It was hard to cover sufficient ground, but there were only so many ways through the city.  With the city’s layout having changed, the open nature of the city was now a winding labyrinth.  The main street was interrupted by a cliff five and a half meters tall, wet, slick seashell-like surface.  Another path that might have existed was blocked because the building face was flush with a shelf of raised earth.

The attack would be slowed, I knew, by the fact that the army we’d gathered didn’t want to kill the locals.  People would be in homes or cellars, sealed in with stockpiles of food, if they didn’t have access to tunnels- and I was fairly sure I would’ve known about tunnels if they’d existed.  Explosives would be off limits, and even more reckless warbeasts would be a problem.  Breaking window shutters, knocking in a door, or knocking down a wall would almost certainly kill the family or families that lived in the building in question.

I glanced again in the direction of the Crown’s crawling monolith.  It showed no signs of slowing.

Mary moved her hand, and for an instant, I thought she’d spotted Avis.  It was a path- a shortcut.  A sloping rooftop formed a path we could use to get to a higher shelf of ground.

We climbed up, double checking that we weren’t exposing ourselves to gunfire.

On the way up, no.

As we peeked our heads over, however- we saw silhouettes and shapes, and we ducked our heads down just in time to avoid the battery of fire from the entrenched defenders.  There had been quite a few of them, all hunkered down in the entrance to one tunnel.

They’d known their battlefield well enough to know to watch this spot.  Their fingers had been on the triggers.

The ambient light of the approaching army illuminated the southern area of Radham.  They weren’t too far away.

“The rain,” Helen said.

“What about it?” Duncan asked.

“It sounds different now.  It’s faint, but it’s less of a pssssh, and it’s more of a fsssssh.”

My back to the cliff that protected us from being shot at by the defenders, I joined Mary in looking skyward.

The plumes of cloudstuff that the infrastructure of Radham was sending skyward had been dark for a while now.

I was aware of the specters of the dead and broken civilians, the thugs who wouldn’t have been out of place in the sticks of Radham, but who had lived and died in cities far away.  West Corinth, Tynewear, Beattle.

I saw Evette.  I saw Percy.

“Let’s get out of the rain,” I said.

Getting out of the rain wasn’t hard.  Every structure in Radham was made to withstand the rain, to shoulder that burden and accommodate the people who didn’t want to be drenched to the bone whenever they were outside.  The eaves, awnings, gutters, and other protections were all over the place.

Where it got tricky was situating ourselves so we actually had a place to go, after.  We could hide in the shelter of any building, but whatever came next, we’d be exposed and we’d be hard pressed to get to the next place without getting wet.

“It’s more fsssh than before,” Helen said.

“Good to know,” I said.  Was there no other choice than to confront a line of gunmen at the top of the cliff?  They were hunkering down, defining a battle line, and the city being what it was didn’t make it any easier to slip by them.  They were very much aware the gas was dissipating on the southern end of the city, and they weren’t about to let their guard down when the attacking army was so close.

I saw Sub Rosa, standing on a rooftop.  Her arms were turned skyward, as she let the rain pour over her.  She lowered her eyes, looking at me.

Once upon a time, I’d been on the same page as the phantom Lambs.  They were gone.

“There,” Helen said.

‘There’ was a tunnel that had only partially emerged.  There was only a foot and a half of clearance.

“If we’re halfway through it and the ground shifts, we’ll be scissored in half,” Duncan observed.

“If you and Lillian don’t go through at the same time, then whoever survives can patch the other up,” Ashton suggested.

“I love that you have faith in our ability like that, but I know I’m not that good a doctor,” Duncan said.

“It looks different,” Mary said, her eyes roving over the surroundings, looking over nearby buildings.

“The rain?” I asked.

I looked, and I could see.  There was a natural haze that appeared where rainfall was heaviest, as droplets struck hard surfaces and fractured, bouncing in a variety of directions.  Localized clouds of mist.

The mist had changed.  Lower to the ground or nonexistent.  The rivulets of rainwater were thicker.  The light-

I rubbed at the lens of my mask.  It remained clouded.

“Acid rain,” I said.  “It’s getting into our uniforms.  Go, go go!”

One by one, the others began squeezing through the gap, entering the tunnel.

It wasn’t sulphuric acid.  It wasn’t like stomach acids I’d seen, nor digestive enzymes.  It was bleaching cloth, eating at the natural waterproofing of our uniform coats and masks, and it was very faintly scarring the glass of the lenses of our masks.

It might not have eaten through the material of our uniforms in an hour, as things stood.  But things would change.  The rain could get more intense.  Even like this, if it wore at the seam, while bags or movement pulled at those same seams, then the seams would split, providing an in.

Mary, Ashton, Jessie, and Duncan were on the other side when the ground shifted.  Lillian hauled her arm out of the way before the top of the tunnel could come down on her arm.

We shrank back into cover.  The army had approached faster than expected.  A running march.

I set my jaw, and I reached out for Lillian’s hand.   Jessie’s stitched, now without its cargo, sat unmoving at the base of the cliff.  The rest of us were beneath the eaves of a business, lurking in shadow.

Helen was closer to the street than us, tense.

Someone had pulled off their mask.  Their skin was visibly red, blistering, and as they brought their hands to their head, they left streaks of scalp where whole clumps of hair had pulled away from flesh.

“Briggs,” Lillian said.

I looked at her.

“The old headmaster.  Pre-Hayle.  Red-tinted lenses on his glasses?  Brute force approach to problem solving and ferreting out weakness.  He served as a Professor for the military before he took over at Radham.  This was his black coat project.  I researched it- researched all of them so I knew what drove the important people.”

“Acid rain?”

Lillian shook her head.  “No.  That’s only half of it.”

She had that quiet, horrified tone in her voice again.  The Lillian who might have faltered in the face of that horror might have been gone, but this Lillian could steel herself and be horrified at the same time.

There were others who were struggling now too.  Most had the sense to keep the masks on.

A man with a covered torch swiped it in the direction of one cluster of harvesters.  One of the black oily critters leaped into the air, then jolted off to one side, as if it had been struck out of the air.

It had spat, with considerable recoil, sending its empty exterior husk flying to one side.

It wasn’t the only one.  There were some in the nearby tree, aiming down, and there were some creeping toward Helen, Lillian and I.  Some trace of Ashton kept them momentarily at bay, but the heavy rain would wash that away at any moment.

They crawled over the afflicted like leeches, but they didn’t stop to suck blood.  The harvesters collected resources, and the harvesters built.  Their oil-black shells with teeth and claws cast off, they looked to be gorging on broken blisters, melting and softened flesh, and weeping fluids, spinning those proteins into something solid.

The eaves weren’t keeping all of the rain off of us.  I was aware of how it pattered against my glove and sleeve, despite my best efforts to hug the wall.

“Helen,” Lillian whispered.

Helen tensed.

“Don’t.  You’ll hurt yourself,” Lillian said.

The Fishmonger and the Devil were standing in the rain, watching keenly as these post-harvesters continued their work.  The efforts to fight them off were hampered by the incredible pain the most drenched were in.  Too many had been given gas masks but no hoods, raincoats, or full-body quarantine suits.

Our people were supposed to be hanging back, keeping an eye on things from afar, keeping the leadership in line.  Hopefully there wouldn’t be too many of them in the line of fire here.  Some would be.

Lillian hunkered down, hood up, hunched over, and stepped out into the rain to go to the stitched.

I reached out, gingerly, and seized Helen’s wrist.  She tensed further.

“Don’t,” I said.

“You know how Ashton likes his patterns?” Helen asked.

There were people reaching out blind, grasping each other.  A tangle of limbs, bodies, of blood, and gasping moans of soldiers who could no longer make noise.

“I know, Helen,” I said.

A full two minutes passed.  Half of the group that had gotten this far had succumbed, the other half was still under shelter, fighting off the harvesters, both the whole ones and the ones who had shed.

A tangle stood.  It was only two soldiers, but they were knit together by the protein chains of the harvesters that crawled over them.  One’s mouth yawned open, while the other spoke inarticulate protests.

It stumbled, lurched, and groped in our general direction.  One mouth made angry sounds, the other started pleading as it realized we were there.

I hauled back, pulling Helen off balance.  In the moment, I saw her eyes lock onto mine, and I thought she would pounce on me.

Lillian’s stitched with its overlarge meat suit surged forward, pushing Helen and I aside very deliberately.  It slammed one fist into the tangle, then bowled the tangle over.  It began tearing into them- tearing them apart.

Others saw, and they surged forward.  They weren’t acting like soldiers anymore.  They fought like something mindless.

Helen hauled her wrist free of my grip.

“Helen,” I said.

She straightened.

“Helen.  As swan songs go… they aren’t aware enough to feel it.  It wouldn’t hurt, they wouldn’t react.  It’s a sad way to go about it, if you insist on going that way.”

Helen remained very still.

The Crown’s monolith crashed into the side of the city.  Everything from the harvester slugs to the soldiers to us, even Lillian’s stitched, was knocked to one side.  I flinched, turning my face away from the rain.  Helen remained on the ground on all fours.

If Helen had been considering going, then the howling and roars of the creatures who were stepping off and away from the monolith and into the city were a counterpoint to that consideration.

“The way’s open,” Lillian said.

The collision had helped the way to open again, the cliff surging a few feet skyward, or the level we were on dropping by that same measure.

Helen stared at me, her eyes visible through the lenses.  Dead, emotionless.

“Come on,” I said.

She stared.

Was she gone?  So utterly?

No, not when we were so close.

“Please.  I promise you.  It’ll be worth it.”

She nodded.

We left Lillian and Jessie’s stitched behind to continue its futile struggle against the tangle of soldiers, and ducked into the dark bowels of Radham.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.06 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.6

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The tunnel was dark, the only illumination being the light from the gap we’d just crawled through and a tracery of bioluminescent something-or-other running along the tunnel walls at eye level.

“Can I remove my mask?” I asked.  “Is it safe?”

“Nothing’s safe at this point,” Duncan said.

“Okay, well…” I undid the clasps and buckles, and I worked the mask off, then pulled the hood back.  I took an experimental breath, and I didn’t die.  “The acid rain screwed up the lenses a bit, and I’m worried about what it’s doing to the outfit.”

I worked my way free of the quarantine suit, then rescued all of the tools, weapons, and various essential bits and pieces from it.

“Easier to see in this lighting without the lenses,” I said, blinking.  “Lungs aren’t burning.  I think we’re clear here.”

“I imagine we’d have to be, if the tunnels are used by defending forces,” Duncan said.

The others began removing their masks.  It was dark enough here that when I looked at Helen, she was a pale blob that took a second or two to figure out the orientation for.  Lillian was easier, a narrow band of pale face visible between the lengths of straight brown hair on either side of it.  She fiddled for a moment and then broke the mask portion free, raising it to her lower face and strapping it there, covering only her nose and mouth.

They were easier to make out like this.  Ashton had shucked off the entire suit, which had hampered his abilities.  Duncan remained almost entirely suited up.

I knelt by Jessie, then removed the quarantine setup, peeling it off, to reduce her weight.  It was a process to get her behind me.  Helen offered some assistance.

I could almost hear the unspoken condemnations, the questions as to why we’d brought her.  The stitched had helped, and we might not have brought the stitched if not for her.  The pace and the group splitting that had risen from the fact she was with us had been to our benefit, I felt.  But that was a minor thing, almost an excuse.  It was true, but it would ring hollow if I tried to voice it aloud, were someone to challenge me.

They didn’t challenge me.

I got Jessie behind me, and I was in the process of trying to figure out how to bind her hands together without cutting off circulation, so I could carry her piggyback, when she simply hugged me tight.

“Hold-” I murmured.

“Sy,” she spoke in my ear, barely audible.

I went still.  I waited, tense, while the others rustled, apparently unaware.  I listened, wanted the utterance to be the start of a thought.  I wanted there to somehow be a world where Jessie would both communicate with me and remain safe from the great and terrible caterpillar.  It was a cruel and monstrous thing that had eaten her predecessor’s mind and now it skulked near her, waiting for a waking thought to gnaw at.

I wanted Jessie, and I wanted Jessie to be safe.

I willed for something, anything.

As if responding to that will, she hugged me tighter.  I could feel her body pressing against me, expanding as she drew in a deep breath, her face nestled against my neck.

“Yeah,” I murmured.  “It’s nice to have you close too.  Hold on tight.”

I pretended she’d heard and gripped me tighter at that instruction, and straightened.  She wasn’t too heavy, compared to the weight of the wet uniform and pack I’d been carrying.

“Ready,” Mary said.  By the shape of her, she’d discarded the entire uniform, as I had, and wore only the clothes she’d had on beneath.  Her hair was wavy, and if I might have mistaken her for Lillian in the gloom, the streak of the pale ribbon at the sides and back of her head made it easier.

“Ready,” Lillian said.  She’d undone the top portion of her uniform, and tied it around her waist.  She had a medical bag and the rifle, and the tube from the mask still extended to the air bladder.

There was something to be said for the degrees to which we’d discarded the burdens and protections of the uniform, and where each of us stood in regards to our individual… hm.  Mortalities was the wrong word.

Our fated endings?  The barbed and poisonous wyvern, the great and inexorable caterpillar, the puppet bound in her strings?  Ashton had his metaphorical tree seizing his mind and limbs, and it would inevitably trap him.  Lillian and Duncan had set out on a path that threatened to either claim them or destroy them.

Helen in particular seemed to have done away with all propriety.  Her arms and shoulders were bare, she wore a camisole and a coquette’s skirt, her legs and feet free of any socks or shoes.  Her hair was messy and damp from being covered with the uniform, hood, and mask.

She had been named Galatea, and she had been named Helen, after the face that had launched a thousand ships.  There were two paths painted there, and she’d just been about to make a final decision, favoring the latter, to pursue the thing she was most passionate about, which would ultimately destroy her.

The ‘Galatea’ path wasn’t any better.  To be wed to her creator.  If even this limited degree of freedom wasn’t enough for him to keep her calibrated and well, would she be limited to only the briefest excursions from him and his lab?  Forever at his side?

There were the little ones too.  Nora, Lara, Abby, Emmett, and Bo Peep.  Their endings were a ways away now, but there was a time they’d come due.  There would be tears and frustration, the broken relationships and painful loss-

“I’m ready,” Helen said.  Her voice bounced around the tunnel, eerie.  She rolled her shoulders.

“Okay,” I said.  I shifted Jessie’s position on my back.  “Let’s go.”

“These tunnels are bad for my style of fighting,” Mary said.  “I’d recommend using the guns, but gunshots will be heard.”

She led the way, the acoustics of the tunnel making even the smaller scuffs of feet on the ground that much louder.  The sounds of the fighting, of distant explosions and crumbling fixtures, it was equally distorted, made into something hollow that had echoed too many times, like a thing that wasn’t really happening.

The footing was even, if sometimes lacking in traction, but the real hazards were the hatches and doorways.  Basket weaves of iron and thick strands of something wet that might have been muscle framed doorways or hatches that had been closed and now were open.  It was too easy to lose track of where I was in the tunnel, to move too fast or too far on one side and kick one or run headlong into it.  Some of the hatches and doors had been drawn deeper into the ground, and they formed tripping hazards.

I didn’t want to hurt Jessie by falling or allowing her hand or arm to get caught between my body and a doorframe.

Here and there, there were puddles.  We avoided those with even more care than we avoided the partial barriers.

It was disorienting, with no clear illumination.  I tried to keep an eye out for each of the Lambs, calming my mind by trying to read them, reassure myself that they were there, and I saw others instead.

Pale forms flashing by me and teasing, all in various shapes and forms.  It was as if I wasn’t joined by just the Lambs and the enemies we’d pursued and destroyed, but by the hunts.  The enemies as they’d been conceptualized when I hadn’t had a face, form or name to put to the deeds we were hunting them for.  These glimpses resembled the foes we’d had nipping at our heels when a target grew savvy enough to hire help or send others after us, when they had attacked, chased, and hurt us but were only blurs.

There was no measuring the distance with counted seconds, because it was hard to think.  No measuring it by the number of footsteps, when footsteps echoed and kept no time as we alternately slowed, stopped, and started again, navigating the hazards.  We couldn’t even keep track with the noises of the city beyond and the shape of the oncoming war, because all of it was muffled and diffuse.

Mary held up a hand, and the hand was pale in the gloom.  It moved, gesturing, and we slowed.  As a group, we ceased making noise, but for the faintest rustle of clothing on clothing, or the wheeze of the air bladders that Duncan and Lillian still used.

The phantom noises grew both louder and more distorted, massive sounds that reached us through multiple walls and floors, then bounced off of the curved sides of the tunnel.  A rumbling, a roar, then a battery of gunshots.

Shouting.

I saw why Mary had signaled for quiet and caution.  The bioluminescence only reached a certain distance along the wall.  It stopped where a great pane of glass started, bottle green and crude, mottled in a way that suggested it was poor quality, and that it had relaxed from its original form in the many years since it had been installed.  It was caked in dust.

I ran my fingers through the dust, clearing a section so it was easier to peer through.

A seemingly endless stream of soldiers were charging through the space on the other side, illuminated by old voltaic lights that were dark more than they were on, more of an orange ember glow than the usual jaundiced yellow.  The soldiers ran past tables, sealed containers of supplies or emergency provisions, and past medical equipment with cobwebs on it.

Their shouts were muffled by the barrier between us.  The sounds reached a pitch, urgent, imminent, and then soldiers I couldn’t see opened fire.  The gunfire was answered by more of the same.

They charged further down the hallway on the other side, and soldiers at the rear of the group began to slow.  Tables were cleared with sweeps of arms, and wounded were hauled into place.  Men and women with melting flesh.  Uniforms were cut away to reveal the harvesters that were crawling beneath clothing, both shelled and leechlike.

The scene was like a play without words or musical accompaniment.  Mouths moved in shouts and cries of alarm, but any sounds were so muffled that I couldn’t tell them apart from phantom sounds my mind was conjuring up.  One soldier with a lieutenant’s uniform had harvesters jutting from now-empty eye sockets like tongues from an open mouth, and his face was reduced to burns and blood, features melting in together.  He was fighting those who would help him every step of the way, and yet it looked like the people on the other side really wanted to save him.

Closer to Mary, there was a thump.  A bang against thick glass.  She backed away from the spot, and I ventured closer to see.

A man wiped at the glass, clearing away the film of dust on his side.  He peered through, face and presumably eyes pointed in Mary’s direction.

No cry of alarm, no reaction.  The interior of our half of things was too dark.

Dual tunnels, for dual purposes.  Their side was the side for the Academy, for the humans who maintained and ran things.  Through that underground hallway, food or the means to acquire food would be delivered to homes and houses throughout Radham, so the citizens could endure while the enemy was rained on and made into monsters.

On the far side of Mary, I saw the phantom sights, the pale blotches that were the hunts and the hunted, the unknown enemies of no particular time or place.  These ones looked like children.  On the other side of the glass, as clear as anything, Sub Rosa was pacing among the soldiers, like a valkyrie ready to claim the dead.

The man who was peering into the glass startled, and as a collective, our hands reached for pistols and knives.

The man on the other side was reacting to something else.  It surged forward from further down the hallway, and in the doing, it drove a tide of bodies ahead of it, like a plow-wagon with a snow removal scoop mounted ahead of the oxen or stitched-beasts.  Lights on the ceiling of the hallway shattered as it charged into them, casting us into a deeper darkness.

It stopped and shied away from contact with the glass.  Lights from ahead of it in the hallway illuminated its pale form.

Pale because of the pallid flesh, drained in the same way my face might drain if the worst had come to pass.  Pale because the people who made up the bulk of the mass were soldiers, in white Academy uniforms and soldier’s uniforms that had been bleached to varying degrees by the rain.  Where they weren’t pale, they were crimson, because they were bleeding and flesh was breaking down with the rain that had fallen no them.  People, gathered together by the protein chains and strands and pulled into a crude machine of harvester and human-made-puppet.  Bodies, arms, and legs strove to work together by jerky, mechanical movements, to allow the greater mass to function as a completed whole.

It moved as if its ‘head’ was a blunt fist that sensed things by bludgeoning them, and it smashed tables, and it found the wounded from earlier- the lieutenant that medics had been trying to help.  It raised a leg, revealing a foot made up of two or three mangled individuals that had been crushed and broken by the weight of those above and the repeated impacts with the ground, and it pawed at the wounded, bringing them nearer.

The lieutenant, seeing by way of the harvesters that stuck from his eye sockets, moved with more purpose, crawling in jerky motions that resembled a baby’s initial attempts to across a floor.  He climbed and embraced the smaller of the greater tangle’s forelegs, before he was swarmed, being integrated into the whole.

The others weren’t so lucky, if there was such a thing.  They were paralyzed with pain, blinded by acid or harvesters, and they were helpless as the foot came down on them, harvesters working to make them part of a new ‘foot’, one that would no doubt flex and push against the ground before the muscles tore and bodies were smashed to constituent pieces by the impacts.  It looked as if it would take several minutes for the process to finish, if not considerably longer.  Whatever connections would allow the greater tangle to function as a whole would need to be forged between it and the new additions.

I turned away from the scene, and hesitated as I saw the blotches that were the hunted children.

Go, the voice said.

I steeled myself and marched past the vague shapes.  The others followed.

A pair of bullets hit the glass just behind us.  Each took out large chunks of the thick pane.  Cracks spiderwebbed across it, bright with the light from the distant old voltaic lights that the tangle hadn’t yet destroyed.

We moved faster.

The fighting was spreading over the top of Radham, and it was spreading through the guts of the city.  Deaths by the hundreds and thousands, which would only grow more numerous as everything escalated, and the kinds of horrors that could be perpetrated by an Academy with decades of prior preparation and nothing left to lose.

“I feel the need to say this,” Duncan said.

“No need,” I said.

Behind us, more bullets struck the glass.  A beam of light shone through a hole that resulted.  The sounds that came through and echoed toward us were the clearest non-Lamb noises we’d heard for ten or more minutes.  The tangle of bodies on the other side of the glass was groaning and making keening noises.

“It’s a need, not a want.  I don’t want to say this.”

“We’re all smart people, Duncan,” I said.  “We know it.  It doesn’t need to be said and made real.”

“I’m not smart,” Ashton said.  “I’m good at what I do, and I’m useful, and I’m good at thinking about things from unusual angles, because I don’t have a brain, but I’m not smart enough to know what you’re talking about.”

“We’re in a tunnel reserved for experiments, things that are freed to access the city as the city raises itself up,” Duncan said.  “All the while, the city is being transformed into a hive for those… abominations.”

“Tangles,” I said.

“Tangles, sure.  Which raises a question.”

“That question is, what’s supposed to come out of this tunnel?” Lillian asked.

“We’ll find out,” Helen said, her voice light.  “We’re running toward it.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.

The keening increased in intensity.  I wondered if the sound was louder because the opening was larger.

We reached another section with a glass pane at one side.  The pane was newer, less green, less mottled, and cleaner.  Blood smeared across a fair portion of it, having sprayed from wounds and then run down the surface.  Further down, someone bleeding had slumped against it before falling to the ground, depositing a large volume of blood on the surface.  Bodies littered the ground, furniture had been propped up to serve as limited cover, and it didn’t appear to have done the slightest bit of good.

We stopped there for a moment.  I crouched, easing against the side of the tunnel, so I wasn’t bearing Jessie’s whole weight.

The Devil was on the other side of the glass, standing among the bodies and smoking a cigarette.  I was really disliking how often he was turning up, now.  Sub Rosa too, but she was at least… not unrepentant in her evil.

Mary touched a break in the glass.

“We could go through,” she said.  “Not that it’s much better.”

I looked back in the direction of the tangle, then at the bodies.  I looked at the devil, and then the void that lay ahead of us.

Detour into the thick of things with any number of guns and limited cover, or go ahead to a near-certain threat?

“Okay,” I said.  I met the Devil’s eyes.

“What does it accomplish?” Duncan asked.

“Whatever we face out there, we at least have a chance of killing it,” I said.  “And we have a chance of surviving it.  And at least the hallways branch over there.  For what it’s worth, there’s occasionally directions that go beyond ‘forward’ and ‘backward’.

“Sy,” Lillian said.  “I hate to say it…”

I tensed.

“…and here I thought you’d urge me not to say it,” she said.  “You’d say you know what I’m going to say and you’d say it, to spare me from being the villain here.”

“You’re far from being a villain, Lil,” I said.  “And I know what you’re going to say, and I’ll say it.  Jessie would be useful.  It would make a lot of sense, especially if she could help us figure out where we are in the city, and where there might be places we can go up.”

Lillian nodded, and at the same time, Jessie squeezed my shoulders.

“Under,” she whispered.  “Under the orphanage.”

Under the orphanage.  Was there a way to come up through Lambsbridge?

“You’re farther away, Sy.  I’m trying to play along, but…”

Jessie’s voice devolved into mumbles.

“Did you guys catch that?” I asked.  “Because I didn’t.”

“Catch what?” Ashton asked.

“Jessie spoke.  Unless my head is playing tricks on me,” I said.  “Under the orphanage?  Helen?”

Helen stirred, looking at me.  She’d been staring down at the bodies.

“Please?” I asked.  “Did you hear?”

“I wasn’t listening,” she said.

I opened my mouth, then shut it.

I felt so alone, like this.  It was the situation, and the war, and Jessie being so close but so hard to communicate with.  It was Helen being lost and nearly gone, and Lillian wasn’t communicating like she should.  It was that I couldn’t see them, so much of the time, in the gloom.

My heart hurt, being like this.

It would be so easy to just say yes, that Lillian was right, and we needed direction and sense.

It would kill or ruin Jessie, but it would be a gasp of air, when we were in this claustrophobic space.  Light in so much darkness.

I hung my head.

Stand, the voice said.

I remained sitting.  I felt Jessie’s breathing against my neck.

Under the orphanage.  It wasn’t advice, and it wasn’t a deep, relevant memory for the situation at hand.  Talk of tunnels had stirred her recollection of West Corinth, of me kidnapping Lillian and taking her to the tower.

I didn’t want to give her bad dreams.

Forward and backward, retreats into darkness, death and horror was in arm’s reach but not in a way I could do anything about.  We’d created this situation, Jessie and I, the others, and it was my responsibility to see it through.

Even if that course was even darker and grislier than the obvious and maybe unavoidable ones ahead of us.  The path the voice was urging me to pursue.  I’d made a compromise to give it what it wanted.  In return, it wasn’t making me destroy the others.

Stand.

“This is doable, Sy,” Mary said.

“I’m just gathering my strength and taking a second to think.  Please.  Both of you.  Please,” I said.  My voice was a hush.

She didn’t say ‘okay’, or anything like it.  Lillian walked over to Mary, and I could hear the murmurs as they conversed.  Helen was stock still, looking into the glass and using fingers to comb at her hair, her head tilting to odd angles.

I felt a hand on my head.

Ashton.

“You don’t work on me,” I murmured.

“I know,” he said.  He gave me a pat.  “Not in the usual way.  But I can give you a pat on the head.  I can tell you that we’re strong, and it’s only because everything in Radham is hurting right now that things seem bad.”

I nodded.

“If that’s how it is, all of Radham hurting, then we should treat it like a surgery,” Lillian said.  “We cut and we use harsh drugs, but we do it with the aim of making things better in the end.”

Our plan of action isn’t so selfless, the voice reminded me.

“Sy,” Lillian said, responding to something in my posture or expression.  “When’s the last time you had Wyvern?”

“While back,” I said.  “Back when you gave it to me while I was asleep, to help me put all the evils of mankind in the box again.”

“You remain exceptional, Sy, I don’t think you realize just how keen your brain is, even off of Wyvern.  But you feel limited and you make it a self fulfilling prophecy.  Right now, you’re simply more locked in a direction than you’re used to.”

“That’s the problem,” I said.  “Forward and back, back isn’t even an option, and forward seems like inevitable disaster.”

“You can’t get too down on yourself,” she said.

“No,” I said.  “Not down on myself.  Just thinking, like I said.  A lot of what we’ve been trying to do is to forge a new path.”

“A new path?”

“Yeah.  I’m just trying to figure it out with a brain that’s wrestling through an awful lot of burdens right now.  I want to break from the inevitable.”

“Humanity’s been trying to do that at least since the ancient alchemists sought out immortality, if you believe the myths,” Duncan said.

“Death will have to wait,” I said.  “That’s a god for another time, if we make it through this and kill the gods ahead of us.”

Ashton’s hand was still patting my head.  I gave the hand a pat of my own, then worked my way to a standing position, bringing Jessie with me.

A new path.  That was the objective.

“Let’s get over to the hallway, at least for the short term,” I said, feeling more sure of myself.

“Alright,” Mary said.  She began working on the glass, seizing the largest shards around the opening and prying them free and away.

“What’s the line of thinking?” Duncan asked.

“Right now?  I don’t want to be on this side of the glass.  It’s messing with my head.”

“Okay,” Lillian said.  “Reason enough.”

Mary opened the aperture enough for us to carefully work our way through.

“And,” I said, as Mary climbed through, then gave Lillian a hand, so Lillian wouldn’t slip and impale herself on the glass that remained.  “And… this next part might require a little luck.”

We made our way through, except for Helen, who lingered, and for Jessie and me.  I passed Jessie through, then turned to Helen.  I touched her arm, and she flinched away.

She was lost, as I so recently had been.  As I had been in my own way for a long time.

“Hold onto the good things,” I said.  “From the past, and the things that await in the future.  There’s so many good things ahead of you.  The you that you are now isn’t the you that you’re doomed to be.”

“Do you think so?” Helen asked.

“I’m staking my everything on it,” I whispered to her.  “I know what I’m doing, and if you don’t believe me when I say that, I’ll point out that Lillian just said I’m smart, even without a recent Wyvern dose.  You should believe her, because nobody here’s going to deny she’s brilliant.”

“She is,” Helen said.  She smiled.

“Now, speaking of good memories… I need you to dredge one up.”

“No dredging needed,” Helen said.  “My memories aren’t as bad as yours.  It’s not my brain that’s being uncooperative and refusing to do things when it used to perform so precisely.”

“Yeah, that’d be mine,” I said.

“What am I remembering, Sy?”

“Remember your first friend.  You grew up in a place not so different and not so far from here.  I need you to call out to him.”

Helen smiled more.  “He might not be friendly.”

“Let’s ask,” I said.

Helen nodded.

“Come on, let’s get clear, just in case.”

She followed me out through the gap in the glass.  I felt like I could breathe better, in the hallway, surrounded by human dead.  I could see, now that I was on this side, how the light on the glass and the dust made the glass reflective, not quite reaching through to fully penetrate the shadows on the other side.

Then she called, making a sound of a pitch that went far and beyond that which humans could make.  In the hallway and the tunnel, it echoed without end, returning to us, a haunting sound.

She called again, then again.

He came, crawling down the tunnel.  He was bloodied, injured, and veins marked one side of his face.  Great and beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with human standards, a magnificent creature.

He slowed, approaching the aperture.  He watched us with bugged-out eyes, the pupils barely visible, the edges bloodshot.  His lips were thick, his mouth wide.  He was naked and he was bloody from whatever he’d been doing before we’d called.

“Gorger,” I said.  “Sorry to call you away from your duties.”

He was silent, staring.

“We need help, getting where we’re going.”

“Please,” Helen said.

Those bugged-out eyes roved over our group.  Then they moved to Mary again, and then the floor.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.  “I don’t want to leverage it, because I don’t want to manipulate you.”

“I don’t know what he’s thinking,” Ashton said.

“Shh,” Duncan said.

Mary offered the answer for Ashton.  “Gordon and Gorger got along awfully well.”

There was a pause.  Gorger stared down at the ground.

“We need to get to any major building where the gas isn’t too thick,” I said.

He raised those eyes and met mine.  Then he nodded.

Gorger pressed against glass, twisting around.  He showed us far too much of himself in the process, as he reoriented himself within a tunnel where he scraped both sides, floor, and ceiling with his mass simply by being there.

He pointed.

We took his instruction.  I had to adjust Jessie, I felt her grip me tighter, and the others followed as Gorger crawled through the neighboring tunnel.  An escort and guide.

“Thank you,” I said.

Gorger shook his head, still crawling.

No?

‘Don’t thank me’?

I swallowed, drawing my weapon.  I heard the noises of other Lambs taking my cue.

The paths branched.  Gorger pointed us in one direction, away from him.  We took it.

Moments later, we reached another crossroad.  The floor of the tunnel was a series of metal grilles, and Gorger slithered beneath them, making them buck and rattle.  He pointed again.

We took the path he’d indicated.

Thank you, Gordon, I thought.  For helping to convince Gorger.

We reached another crossroad, Y-shaped, and we stopped.  There was a ladder stretching up, and there weren’t any good venues for Gorger to appear.

I adjusted my grip on Jessie, then drew my knife.  I tapped it against the ladder.

The grunt was distant, but affirmative.

Mary approached the ladder.  Lillian stopped her, gesturing.

There was a brief interaction between the two.  Mary eventually conceded to take Lillian’s mask and bladder, before ascending the ladder.  She eased the hatch open, peering through the gap.

After a moment, she eased it closed.

She remained there, still and silent, for a moment.  Then she pulled off the mask and bladder, tossing it down to Lillian.

No gas, she gestured.  Gas factory.

Another of the gas-production facilities.

Destroy, she gestured.  Soldiers.  Tall monsters.  Superweapon.  Crown gold.  Crown tall.  

The gas production facility had already been destroyed.  The army had reached this point without our help.  Soldiers were here, and so were monsters of the highest quality.

They had a superweapon at hand, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.

Crown gold was our shorthand for the Duke.  He was present.

Crown tall was our shorthand for the Infante.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.07 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.7

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Our efforts to find a way up was hampered by the chaos above.  The hatch Gorger had pointed us to was too close to the center of the enemy.  Further down the tunnel, another hatch opened into the corner of the same building, but there was a fight unfolding right on top of it, bullets flying from guns, violence, shouting and death all included in the chaos.

Further down the same tunnel, in an area where the tunnel served to channel rainwater, a wooden grate was sunken into the street, positioned to lead up to the exterior of the building.   Unusable, because so many bodies or one very large body had been left to die atop it.  Bodily fluids poured down like molasses from a spoon, collecting on the wood of a grate on the floor of the tunnel we occupied, congealing just enough that it didn’t fully filter through.  Blood and clear fluids formed different proportions of the thick stream from moment to moment.

Dim light struggled to move past the holes in the wooden grate, different parts of it blocked at different moments by the soup of flesh.

We had to navigate carefully to avoid wading in the acidic runoff.

I narrowed my eyes, adjusting to the fact there was light to see by.  I turned my head to hear better.  The noise of the ongoing fight above us was incessant, pure chaos.

I tuned into that chaos, listening to it, parsing it.

Kill them, the voice said.

“So naggy,” I muttered.

“What?” Lillian asked.

“Murder, murder, kill kill, telling me to do things I’m not in a position to do.”

“Do we need to shackle you?” she asked.

“I’m mostly here,” I said.  I turned my head around, trying to listen to the sound of the battle and piece it together.

“That’s a non-sequitur,” she said.

“It’s an answer.  Mary can stab me if something happens.”

“Unless something happens to Mary,” Helen said.

“Shh,” Mary said.  “Bad omen to say it out loud.”

“If something happens to Mary then you can do something, Helen,” I said.  “Or Lillian can do something.  If not her, then Duncan and Ashton.”

“I’m noting that Ashton and I are last,” Duncan said.

“Well, yeah,” I said.  “And if you two kick the bucket or go out of commission, and none of the others are left, then, well, what does it matter?”

“I think it matters a lot,” Lillian said.  “There’s an awful lot of others you can hurt.”

“The rebels might be able to fend for themselves.  Who knows?” I said.

“Let’s not let it come to that,” Lillian said.

I was starting to get a sense for the sounds I was hearing through the grate and tunnel.  Bullets going one way had a slightly different sound than the ones which weren’t.  The tromp of boots had a dull sound to them when they were numerous enough to be heard together, people moving in formation.

Exact location wasn’t possible to discern in many cases, so I didn’t try.  I held them all in my head as separate entities, and I pieced it together.  The fact that one regiment of a certain size existed, that another regiment was either nearer or larger by their volume.  I could know that a group was firing one way by the sound of the shots, and I could gauge their general number by the volume.

I could gauge affiliation by the fact that some had their backs to the Infante.

Kill them or the Lambs die.

I set my jaw.

“The Duke is on our side,” Lillian said.  “That’s something we could use, if we can separate him from the Infante.”

“We presume he’s on our side,” I said.

Mary spoke, “He was in communication with us for a long time.  Coded messages that put him at grave risk.  The Infante coming after us suggests that he found out.  He had no reason otherwise.”

“He could have a lot of reasons,” I said.

“He could, but let’s be honest, Sy,” Mary said.  “Sometimes the answer is the simple one.”

Nothing about this seemed simple.  We traveled down the tunnel, avoiding the areas where the rainwater ran thickest.

Something cracked nearby.  Dust and debris plunged down from the roof of the tunnel further down, pouring into the space, with a few scattered body parts.

Shadows flickered.  I checked my mental map, trying to think of who it might be.

“The Infante’s people,” I whispered.  I thought about the layout we’d observed, where the enemy was, and gestured.

We moved into the side tunnels and the shadows, close to the grate where there was light.  The light would be deceptive, giving the illusion that if there was anything close by, they’d be able to see it.

I peered around the corner.  They were a squadron of soldiers.  Crown soldiers, dressed in black, with quarantine masks, the hoses worked into the masks, armored and protected from gunfire as the hose parted and disappeared over their shoulders, behind their backs.  Glass glinted in the light at their shoulders, tinted fluids within the tubes in question.  Shoulder-mounted drug injections.

I gestured for the others, filling them in.  I found a dry spot and eased Jessie down, placing her at one side of the tunnel, then returned to my vantage point.

Their boots tromped, sloshing through the acid water.

They ran past us, within a foot of me.  They were dark enough and the tunnel was dark enough that I was only aware of them by the movement of air on my face.  I saw the glint of what might have been a bayonet.

One man passed me, and in the next instant, Helen was there, on top of him.  She crashed into him, banging into the wall, then went down with him into the water.  Into the acid.  Harvesters rose up from the liquid, crawling over the both of them.

My eyes went wide.  I jumped forward, stepping on the back of the soldier’s head, driving it into the acid while using it as a stepping stone to keep my foot from plunging into the liquid.

I windmilled my arm, no wall in reach to lean against, and the walls were moist with rainwater that flowed down from the cracks in the street above, anyhow.

Mary caught my hand, giving me something to brace against.

The dance.

The weight of two people on him, his hands scraping against the slick floor of the drainage tunnel, served to keep him put.  Water that already churned as it ran down the tunnel was bubbling as- yes, partially exhalations from his mask, but also that Helen’s toe was keeping the air bladder beneath the water.

She was poised, perched on the man’s back, only barely keeping her limbs and face out of the drainage.  It wasn’t a hold, not a grab, but something else, her toe keeping him from breathing, her other toe on his buttocks, her hands either propping him up or darting out to slap at his elbows, if it looked like he was getting them at the angle necessary to haul himself out of the water.

Mary, still holding my hand, kicked the soldier a few times in the side.

Her foot came away, held in the air, and I could see the blade that protruded from the toe, now caked in blood.

We pulled away, retreating to the sides of the tunnel.  Lillian, Duncan, and Ashton were all holding rifles, aiming them at the group that seemed oblivious to us.  The group was moving slowly, navigating a zig-zagging path of detritus that was making the water level higher.  We’d decided not to go that way.

The harvesters were starting to crawl out of the water, trying to find ways in through the suit.  Some were at the side, where Mary had kicked the man.

I stared down at the scene.

I touched Mary’s shoulder, then indicated Ashton.  I gestured.

Change.

She took over for Ashton, taking his rifle.

Ashton, for his part, took up Mary’s position.

I gestured.  Gas.

I indicated the harvesters.

Then I gestured at the group that had left.  I used the… well, Jessie would’ve known the history of it.

But it was the second or third sign we’d settled on, when we’d started using the gestures.

Meager light and ample shadow were dancing further down the tunnel.  It wasn’t impossible that we’d have company.  It would put us in a bad position.

Ashton reached down and cupped one of the harvesters in his hands.  He flinched and dropped it.

Be careful,” I whispered.

I dropped to my hands and knees.  I tried to keep my hands away, bringing my knife to the soldier’s side.  The harvesters moved toward me.  Ashton waved his hands at them, and they moved away.

I cut the holes wider.  The harvesters slithered in.

“Why?” Ashton asked.

“As a distraction,” I said.  “Assuming you can keep it from coming after us?”

“I think so.”

I nodded.

I stared at it for a long time.

I thought of where the enemy was, all the noises I was learning to make sense of, as if chaos was a language, and I was teaching it to myself, step by step, word by word.

The focus and the shift in my thoughts came at a price.  The voice was speaking.  It said dangerous things and it made demands, for impossible things and ugly things.

This time I was equipped to listen.

Five soldiers sloshed through the water of the tunnel.  Some still had guns in hand.  Others were empty-handed.  Most were wounded.

We shrank back into the shadows, listening to the noise of boots in water.  Where the lesser and standard-issue quarantine gear seemed to dissolve and break down in the face of the acid rain, this gear seemed to be top quality.  They waded in dangerous waters that churned with acid and parasites as if it was of no concern.

The Crown’s elite soldiers.  I wondered how they got there.  Was it an alternate promotion path?  Be leader of a squad, or remain a foot soldier in a squad of higher esteem?  Were they picked from the cream of the crop of the aristocracy?

They were men and women.  They had families.  They had hopes and dreams and they probably hated this war as much as any of us.  They served the Crown and they were loyal and patriotic.  It was a virtue, even if the side they served wasn’t mine.

I felt nothing.  I could have called it coldness, a contrast to the warmth of Jessie, who clung to my back and breathed into the back of my neck, to Lillian, whose arm pressed against mine.  Lillian held her breath, because she didn’t want to make a sound.

Coldness was the wrong idea.  Cold made me think of hate, a contrast to the feeling that welled in me when the Lambs were close.  Cold made me think of staring the enemy down and feeling a change sweep over me as I internally came to new, more unpleasant terms with them.

They were room temperature.  They were more noises in chaos.

They reached a point further down the tunnel, and they spotted the enemy.  They picked up the pace, insofar as their injuries allowed them to.

The enemy was Crown.  Elite soldiers.  They wore uniforms of the topmost quality, in the same black material.  The enemy had the gas masks that protected the hoses and tubes with armor.

The defending side was slow to act.  It made me think of a group of men staring into a mirror, realizing too late that they weren’t staring at their own reflection.

The reality wasn’t so neat and tidy.  There was no mirror.  There was only the assumption that men and women who were alive and well who wore the same uniforms were friendly.

That, if they weren’t friendly, that they wouldn’t be suicidal enough to throw themselves at a larger, better-armed group.

A squad of five collided with a squad of ten.  The front ranks were dragged to the ground, and here, the tunnel was dry enough that they wouldn’t be soaked in the drainage water.

The ones who still stood started to pull the attackers off, sticking them with bayonets, when there was no armor or defending soldier getting in the way.  One gun fired from the attacking five, an accidental trigger pull, not something intentional.  It made them balk.

Mary gestured.  The Lambs stepped out of shadow, moving quickly and soundlessly.

Where the defending ten had held the upper hand, they were now outnumbered.  Helen pounced on one.  Mary attacked another two.  I seized a third, burdened as I was with Jessie, and Lillian helped me.  Duncan and Ashton went after the last one who wasn’t preoccupied.

For an instant, it seemed we had the upper hand.  We’d caught them unawares, they were preoccupied, and we’d seized them, knocked them down, or we’d disarmed them.

Then they began using the combat drugs.  They surged in strength.  They threw us off.

Mary cut them more.  I dropped Jessie rather unceremoniously, then joined Mary in disabling them, kicking at one kneecap.  My foot slid across the ground to kick at the side of one foot, which just so happened to be resting on ground that looked particularly slimy.  It slid, the owner’s balance went with it, and Duncan was able to kick at the spot on the man’s arm where the vials were mounted.

The ones who had been dosed were too strong, getting stronger, and so we killed them.

We regained the upper hand.  We broke more of the vials before they could use whatever mechanism it was that dumped combat drugs into their systems.

Each enemy was summarily disabled but not killed, the attacking five with their masks set ajar, pacified by Ashton, pinning the remaining defenders.

“Help!” one defender screamed.

His voice echoed in the tunnel, reaching far.  It was drowned out by the sound of walls falling, by the sound of countless guns firing, the sounds alternately far enough away to ring across the surroundings, or so close that the listeners would be left hearing only silence for seconds after.  Explosions occurred, things screamed.  People somewhere out there were crying for their mothers.

These soldiers were quiet.

We’d pit them against each other.  Crown elite against Crown elite.  All it had taken was letting the harvesters in, weakening them.

The simple harvesters were easy for Ashton to direct.

“If I told you to go to the Infante and lie for our benefit, to draw him into the position we wanted him in, would you listen?” I asked.

“You’re mad,” one shouted.  It was a woman.  I’d pulled off her mask.

“It’s a choice of life as a traitor or death of the worst kind,” I told her.  “Life is always better, isn’t it?”

“I’d rather die,” she said.

I reached down, and I undid the clasps on her outfit, revealing the zipper.

I pulled it off of her.  A jacket.  She fought.

The quarantine pants came off next.  She was left in a soldier’s uniform, summer-weight, but sweaty and damp.  Her hair was in disarray.

“Please,” Lillian said.  “Cooperate.”

“I have given every year of my life to the Crown since I was old enough to write.”

“I did the same,” Lillian said.  “My life for the Academy.”

“You don’t understand, traitor.  Every hour, every day, every week.  Every day I studied or worked, it was for them.”

“I understand that very well,” Lillian said.

“On my days off, I socialized with others who served the Crown.”

“The difference between us is my friends served the Crown, but one by one, they died-”

“You think I haven’t seen death?” the woman asked.

“And they turned away from the Crown.  We learned things.  What the world really looks like.  Who’s really at the top.”

The woman lay there, on her back, Mary stepping on one of her hands.  Her discarded costume rested to one side.

The harvesters scurried here and there, but they gave Ashton a wide berth.

She’s seen many of the same things,” I murmured under my breath.  “She might even know the most pertinent details.”

“Mm,” Helen made a sound, though I hadn’t been talking to her.

“She believes, even with all she’s privy to,” I said.  “I don’t know how, but it makes it easier to do this.

I grabbed the woman.  Mary helped.  Each of us had an arm, and we dragged her closer to the area where the drainage water was collecting, running in a stream.  The harvesters were thicker here, the ones who might have been near where Ashton was were gathering in greater number at the periphery.

We held her so her body tilted forward, head only a foot above the water, her arms to either side, where even if we let go, she wouldn’t get them in front of her before her face was submerged.  Mary’s foot was on the ground, propped up with a heel on the tunnel’s floor, the blade extended and poking at the top of the soldier’s thigh.  The soldier couldn’t bring it forward without impaling it.  Her other leg was injured.

“This is a bad way to go,” I said.  “Acid.  Parasites.  Becoming a monster, maybe even one that’s aware of what’s happening to it.”

In the background, Lillian was looking away.

Harder, when she’d remarked on parallels between herself and this woman.

The only difference being what?  Crown instead of Academy?  Soldier instead of scholar?  Negligible.  That I’d turned traitor and walked away?  But for one friend walking away, the others following in time, Lillian might have been in this position.

“You can live.  You can find love, you can find family, money, legacy.  All we need is for you to go to the Infante and speak one sentence.  An innocuous sentence.  Harmless.  He won’t even know your role.”

“No,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t you even just lie?” I asked.  “Say you’ll tell him what we want you to tell him.  Then get away?”

“I wouldn’t let any pledge of betrayal pass through my lips,” she said.  “Even as a lie.”

“I felt like that once, too,” Mary said.  “Everything was abso-”

The woman hauled her arm free of Mary’s grip.  One side of her plunged into the drainage water.  She tore her hand free of my grip.

Had that been intentional?

The acid rain was thick here, but the effects not instantaneous.  She hauled herself free of the water, twisting around to face her direction, but I could see hints of her face in the gloom.  I could see the way she moved her head.

She gasped, making small pained sounds, and her head turned to scan the surroundings.  Her eyes saw nothing.  She flinched as harvesters crawled on her, flung arms around, and Mary and I were forced to step back lest we be splashed.

Guards for the nobles, for the top professors.  Gloria, Foss.  Hayle might’ve had some.

It seemed so wasteful.

The irony being that they were ours.  These were the ones we’d arranged to send into the city, to go to war with Hayle.  The Infante hadn’t brought any humans of his own.  He’d only brought monsters.  He’d gathered them around him by being a Noble of one of the highest ranks, stealing their obedience and service from us with just words, gestures, and presence.

They’d already betrayed the Crown on behalf of the enemy.  I’d only asked for a slightly more informed betrayal.  It mattered so little, and yet the consequences were so vast.

We backed away, as she twitched, making more agonized sounds as her skin blistered and the harvesters crawled into the orifices of her face and head.

She charged us, and we let her.  Mary kicked her to one side at the last moment, and the soldier sprawled onto the ground.

Two charges followed, and Mary kicked her each time.

After the third fall, the woman remained where she was.  The tension in her relaxed, harvesters continued their work.

Lillian stared down at the woman.  Her expression was hard to read, the filter covering her nose and mouth.

Mary gestured.  I responded.  We had a back and forth.  Duncan joined in.  I had to squint at him to see in the gloom.

A brief conversation.

“You,” I said, nudging the next soldier with my toe.  “Will you cooperate?”

He looked at the woman.  Flesh was sloughing from her now, her hair half gone.  Her eyes were being devoured, as harvesters settled into the sockets, wriggling like pitch black tongues.

“I’d sooner do what she did, in hopes that you make a mistake, misstep, and I get to kill you,” he said.

“We won’t,” Mary said.  She glanced at me.  “I won’t.  And I won’t let him misstep to the point it matters.”

“Thanks, Mary,” I said, very unimpressed.

But the soldier refused to cooperate.

Mary had gestured, asking me a question.  I’d responded.  In our back and forth, she and even Duncan had doubted me.

But I’d said it straight.  The fact that the leader of this squad reminded me of Lillian had softened me to a degree, as room-temperature as this particular group was for me, emotionally speaking.  I didn’t feel any fondness, hate or frustration.  I could still come to terms with what she was and where she stood.  With how it related to what I and what the voice wanted.

What if she cooperated?  Mary had gestured, though the sentence had been butchered by the lack of words like ‘if’, the ‘what’ being only a question.  Closer to: question she obey question.

I’d tie her up.  Leave her to get free later, I’d responded.

Duncan had wanted to know if I would have sent her to the Infante.  But no.  We didn’t want to tip her hands.

If they listened, I was willing to spare them.  We were striving for something, and if all was said and done and the three gods slain, then I wanted there to be people left who could adapt, adjust.

There was no point otherwise.

The second soldier wasn’t going to cooperate.  I could see that the third soldier was already even more stubborn than any of the first two.

I looked at the remainder, and hoped that they’d come around by the time I got to them.

Three.  Three had cooperated.

Not three in ten, but three in thirty.

Three squads.

I felt exceedingly room temperature.  The voice spoke in my ear.  It was content with this direction.  For the moment, it and I were on the same page.

The Lambs were grim.

“We should thank Abby for this,” Ashton said.

“Why’s that?” Lillian asked.

“I spent a lot of time around non-human things because of Abby, and I got a lot of practice,” he said.  “And that practice mattered today.”

“It’s night,” Helen said.

“It’s important to thank people,” Ashton said.

“We’ll thank Abby,” I said.  “And in the interest of thanking people… thank you, Lambs.  Thank you Jessie, Lillian, Mary, Helen, Ashton, and Duncan.”

“I’m noticing the order again,” Duncan said.

“You’re second place for me, Duncan,” Helen said.

“That’s almost more terrifying than reassuring, but thank you,” Duncan said.

“Thank you, Sy,” Lillian said.

“Just me?”

“It’s a bittersweet thank-you, I think,” she said.

“Well, I’m pretty bittersweet as a person.”

“That’s not wrong,” she said.  “Thank you for… opening my eyes.”

“I was thinking about that earlier, y’know,” I said.

“A lot of us were, I think,” Lillian said.

“I’m not going to thank anyone,” Mary said.  “I’m not going to close that circle or provide any next iteration in some cosmic ratio set.  We’ll leave it at this.”

“Perfect,” I said.

Ashton reached out to touch the tangle’s face.

Our tangle, caught and built by our hands, formed of twenty-seven individuals we’d hunted as they tried to use the underground to reposition in the battle.

Ashton backed away swiftly, as the tangle grew more active.  Nearly a minute passed as it started to move more, flexing itself, figuring out how it was configured.  It twitched and flexed.

It surged upward, hands reaching for and fumbling at rungs in a ladder.  It rose more by dint of accidentally hooking on or resting on the rungs as more of itself gathered beneath it, flexing it to strive skyward.

It nearly buckled, bending at the middle and turning to go another way.  Ashton hurried to one side, blocking it, emanating something.

It continued skyward.  It surged out through the hatch we’d identified.

The Infante wasn’t still here, going by Mary’s recent peek through the hatch, but he was close by.  This thing was still rising in the enemy’s midst.  It was big and dangerous enough to warrant attention.

The battle lines at the other hatch shifted.  We had an opening, a way in.

We climbed up.  We entered the building.  The air wasn’t stale, but it stung the nostrils, and it smelled like war, only bad smells, only oppressive ones.

It was a warehouse, but fortified.  At another time, in proper wartime, it might have housed munitions, in addition to a share of the city’s defensive munitions.  The munitions weren’t present.  There were no manned turrets, no warbeasts chained up and held at bay.  There were only squads, the detritus of war, both in corpses and in discarded articles, and those squads were preoccupied, fighting either the tangle or the enemy beyond the door.

The Tangle bludgeoned its way through a squad of soldiers.

I spotted the Infante just quickly enough to see him turning our way, his eyes wide, before the Tangle moved between him and us.  He was just past the front doors of the building.

Where was the Duke?  My doubts aside, he was one of our best options.

The Infante had disabled the gas for us, at least.  I was glad to see it.  I discarded the mask I’d scavenged from the soldiers’ we’d collected, letting it hang over one of my shoulders.

I heard the Infante’s voice boom.  Orders.  Ones aimed at the relatively few people and the monsters outside, who were holding off the defending forces.  He stepped through the doorway, into the building.

Even at a glimpse, going by what I could see beyond the door, the Infante had a lot of monsters with him.

He spoke again, louder now that he was inside, and the Tangle responded to it.

It charged him, and he moved clear out of the way.

It charged past him, and it collided with the wall.  The building began to collapse, rubble falling around the Infante, around the battle lines closest to the noble, around the monsters the Infante had gathered around him.

Acid water streamed into the building.  Dust rose and was beaten down by rain.  Harvesters churned.

The Infante pulled his hand away from the Tangle, which was trying to figure out how to move again, with much of the rubble still resting atop it.  It stirred, and the Infante walked away from it, putting distance between himself and it.

“My best creatures are diving into the tunnel,” he said, speaking to the room.  “The building is fortified.  There’s one exit, and the chemicals in the water would blind you in seconds and melt you in minutes.  I find it irritating, but hardly that limiting.”

“Nowhere to run,” I said.

“Succinctly put,” the Infante said.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t come here to run,” I said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.08 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.8

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Acid rain poured down where the roof dipped, streaming down in a broken curtain around the damaged section of the building.  The Tangle was surging to life, a short distance away from the Infante, the harvesters swarming it, joined by more of their kin.  The acid rain gave them more to work with.  Others were gathering at the broken edges of the building and surging into the building by using the Tangle as a bridge to pass whatever restrictions kept them from approaching the walls.

Ashton ran, darting for the left side of the building, where containers and vats of chemicals stood, where he’d be hidden by a labyrinth of pipes and tubes starting at the containers and stretching up the wall to the ceiling.  Duncan was a few steps behind him.

Mary flung a knife, running forward and to the right.  She was ducking into the management office, by the looks of it.  Half of the building served to vent gas in a time of crisis, the chemicals near where Ashton had gone feeding through tubes and making their way to the end of the building furthest from the Infante, where the largest vats, containers, and the chimney systems were.  The other half was warehouse, and the office would be to manage the goings-on there.

Helen disappeared into the stacks and piles of crates.  Lillian backed away, moving into the cover of the pallets closer to me.

I merely stepped back, bearing Jessie on my back, a revolver in my hand.

The Infante barely seemed to care about the Tangle that was starting to gather itself around him.  Its ‘head’ turned in his direction.

“Lambs,” he intoned.  He walked further into the room, casually, unhurried.  “The bulk of the group hiding at my flanks while the boy with the heaviest burden and smallest ability to defend himself stands in the distance?  I’ll assume you didn’t discuss your strategy ahead of time.  You’re running on instinct.”

“You’re waddling in our direction, noble,” I said.  “You barely seem to be realizing you’re doing it.  See a threat, face it head on and crush it.  Aren’t you running on instinct here too?”

“I consider everything, Sylvester,” the Infante said.  “Position, strength, costs, advantages.  There are thousands of individuals now fighting in this pointless war of yours.  I’m very mindful of them.  You seem content to use them to put together this thing of Professor Brigg’s conception.”

With the sharp and booming emphasis he put in the word ‘thing’, it was as if he’d seized the creature’s attention on purpose.  It reacted, and it lunged.

He struck at it with one hand as it closed the distance.  It dwarfed him, but it still reacted to the impact, the direction of its charge turned by five degrees, maybe as much as ten.  His hand remained in place, skidding along the wet, acid-slick surface of the creature’s head and neck, while the weight and force of the tangle’s lunge drove him back, his feet sliding on the floor of the building.

The tangle collapsed, belly-flopping onto the ground.  The Infante remained standing.  In the next moment, he turned, raising a leg.  His robes billowed as he kicked a stack of crates that had been lashed together.  Wood splintered and broke, contents spraying into the air, but the pallet moved with the impact, slamming into the adjacent stack of barrels.

He backhanded the damage he’d done, sending the fragments of wood and wood splinters into the air- just as Mary had stepped up onto a stack of barrels behind him.  She raised her arms, shielding her face from the spray.  Caught off guard- defenseless.

“No,” the Infante said, reaching to his left, while Mary was behind him and to his right.

In the doing, he blocked and caught a knife attached to a wire, that Mary had sent flying at him, while pretending to be on the defensive.

He gripped the knife in his hand, the knife disappeared in the midst of it.  He hauled his closed fist back, and Mary raised her leg- the wire was still attached to her shoe, and by pulling on the wire, the Infante divested her of the shoe.

She dropped out of sight, gesturing.

Hurt.

She’d gestured in a direction.  I already suspected.  The initial kick at the pallet.  Helen had entered the collection of barrels and crates at a point further from the Infante than Mary had, but in the interest of deceiving the enemy, she’d moved to a point well beyond Mary’s position, trying to circle around to the back and side of the Infante.  The Infante had heard or guessed.

“I’m not reeling from any artillery shells, and I don’t make the same mistakes twice.  Your pet here doesn’t equalize the odds,” the Infante said.  “And I have few soldiers here for you to try and use against me- none I’m interested in keeping alive.  They were idiotic enough to obey your orders.  At best, now, I’ll let them remain on this continent, in a city I’ll allow to be claimed by plague.  They’ll be erased and forgotten by history.  You have no leverage, Lambs.  You have no advantages on this battlefield.”

“You sure like to talk,” I said.

“When I talk, others listen.  Even my enemies listen, regardless of whether they want to hear.  I have seen you at your lowest points, Sylvester Lambsbridge.  I have seen you retreat from reality because for all that you have no compunctions about taking lives, you cannot bear to have lives taken from you.”

He was advancing.  As I backed up, retreating, I saw Lillian’s shadow off to one side.

“For all you like to tear others down, what do you really have, big guy?” I asked.  “Who really cares about you and not about the power you wield?”

“I am the power I wield, Sylvester,” he said.

He reached out with one hand, and he raised a barrel into the air.  It was full of liquid, by the sound of it as he lifted it into the air.  One-armed, he threw it in the general direction Duncan and Ashton had gone, not far from the Tangle, which was preparing for another strike.

His eyes didn’t leave mine.

“That’s their power, isn’t it?” I asked.  “Not yours.  If you are that power, then you’re admitting you’re theirs.”

“Ah,” he said.  “Is that the slant of your argument?  Is that where we’re going?”

“I’m clarifying your statements,” I said.

“One does not look at an isolated hand and call it a slave of the body.  I’m one piece in a greater organism.  If power is given to me to handle, much as one hand might pass a knife to the other, or as one might use the mouth to order another person to give that knife to the waiting hand, then I’m not lesser for seizing or using the blade.”

“I could tell you things about the ways I’ve abused my hand,” I said.  “You’re not flattering yourself with the comparison.”

“Being vulgar, Lamb?” he asked.  “Changing your approach, trying to evoke disgust or attention from me, so I don’t pay attention to what’s happening behind me.”

He’d hit the nail on the head there.

The Tangle rose up behind him.  He leaped aside as it charged through crates, planks that had been tied together, and into one pillar that was helping to hold the roof up.  The pillar didn’t fall, but it bent, and with it, the roof shifted.  Hundreds of gallons of water that had collected on areas of the roof that were more or less level poured down onto the broken wall and rubble on the far end of the building.

I raised my gun, firing as Helen and Mary attacked in concert, moving out of the space between vat and pallet, and from the damaged stack of crates behind the man.  My bullets struck the side of his head, his ear, his temple, distracting him while Mary threw knives.  Helen leaped onto his back, grabbing one knife that had lodged in his shoulder, using it as a handhold to climb up.

Mary’s next thrown knife was a soft toss, arcing through the air more than it followed a straight line.  The Infante seemed to recognize what was happening with it, and moved away from it.  Helen stuck out a bare foot, tried to catch the knife with her toes, and caught the thread that trailed behind it instead.

Her next movements were as fast as a mousetrap snapping shut, knife passed to hand, the provided thread pulled against the Infante’s throat.

He hurled himself at the pillar, to sandwich Helen between himself and it.  She jumped clear, still holdng the thread so it pulled taut, and -while Mary and I both emptied our guns into the side and back of his head- kicked Helen.

One Lamb down, I thought, with a cold, sick feeling.

Helen wasn’t getting back up.  If she remained there, then she would be vulnerable to any enemy charging through.

More water was pouring from the sloping roof, as the pillar had been struck again.  Less than before, but it was still a curtain.  There were shapes on the far side.  Creatures, warbeasts, groups of people.

The Tangle was backing away, its head still aimed at the Infante.  It reacted to something behind it, and shied away from the ruined corner of the building, which meant it shied toward the Infante.

It bristled, gathering itself up and reconfiguring to mount a better attack.

Ashton’s purpose in this was to keep the Tangle managed.  If and when enemies came charging in, the cloud of aversion and negative emotion might slow them down or hamper them enough for us to react properly.  Duncan’s purpose was to keep Ashton intact.  Ashton’s sense around a battlefield wasn’t wholly there.

The pillar wasn’t about to break.  The roof wouldn’t collapse, and it wouldn’t collapse in a way that helped us.  There were vats of chemical and the chimneys at the end of the room behind me, vats I was steadily retreating toward, but I had no reason to think they would be useful against the Infante.

Against ‘power’, the first god.

“You ordered your agents to watch the Nobles, aristocrats, generals and Doctors you coerced,” the Infante said.

“This is where you say you found them, and they’re suffering right now.”

“Not right now, Sylvester, not right now.  I could lie and say I rooted them out.  I could say that, yes, but you’re too clever to position them where they could be overturned with a single move.  They’re scattered through the camps and armies.  They watch, they communicate, and they operate in discrete cells.  I know this.”

“Sure,” I said.

“The Lady Gloria bowed before me, and I knew she was broken or gone.  I infected her.  The plague will take her.  It will take those near her.  It will take the ones you have watching her, the ones they communicate with, and countless others,” the Infante said.  “Not right now.  Not even soon.  But you cannot get from here to there in the next few hours.  Not easily, with things being what they are.  Even if I and the army standing outside this building were to stand down, letting you do as you pleased, you would be hard-pressed to communicate what you’d need to communicate to your assembled army.”

Mary was at Helen’s side now.  The Infante looked at her.  He didn’t move a muscle, only pulling the razor wire away from the bloody ruin at his neck.  There wasn’t enough blood to matter.

“The red plague seizes battlefields, and this is a battlefield of a scale to rival all but three in the history of this nation.  What have you accomplished, Lambs?  Even if you were to somehow kill me, which you’re far from doing, what change have you wrought in the world?”

“If we removed you, people will wonder.  The myth of the Crown being unassailable will be tested in small ways.”

The Infante shook his head.  “Unassailable?  Sylvester Lambsbridge, the Crown is all there is.  You know this.  There’s only the Crown, places the Crown will assuredly claim in the coming decade, and ruin.”

“I don’t think it’s as assured as you pretend,” I said.

I reloaded my gun, placing the bullets in the cylinder with care.

As I backed away, I could see others in the stacks.

The Baron.

The Twins.

Cynthia.

I tried not to give them too much attention.

“And I don’t think, Sylvester, that you arranged this particular war to kill me.  Not as the primary goal.  You aimed to set something in motion, to gather your components for a chimera of a mission, pieced and patched together for later construction.”

“Killing you was always something I figured we might have to do,” I said.  “You’re one of three gods to be slain.”

“The reality, Sylvester, is I’m not a noble that can be toppled unless it’s the sole, all-consuming focus of my enemies.”

“Maybe not,” I said.  “And I suppose it’s to your side’s advantage, that if it is the sole, all-consuming focus of your enemies, then your enemies are thinking too small to be a threat.”

“Perhaps so,” the Infante said.  He looked back in the direction of Mary and Helen, and at the Tangle.

He charged at me.

He was fast, and it felt as though each of his feet struck the ground with such an impact that it made it harder for me to keep my own feet under me.  With my burden, I felt glacial compared to the speed and ease with which the Noble moved.

I’d resisted calling him a Noble, choosing appellations to nettle, but he was a Noble.  One of the best of them.  He was the god I’d painted him as, him and the forces that were currently being held back by the worst of the rain and by the pressures of the forces of Radham.

I couldn’t run, so I didn’t try.  I couldn’t defend myself, maneuver, be clever and do anything else at the same time.  I sucked at fighting, if it wasn’t an ambush.  I didn’t try anything fancy.

I aimed and shot, standing my ground, with zero thought to self-preservation.

If this is the way we go, Jessie-

Jars shattered, contents splashing out onto the ground between the Infante and I.  Thrown from the flanks.

The Infante, large as he was, had a lot of momentum.  He couldn’t stop outright, even with his prodigious strength, but he could drop one knee and both hands to the ground.

He slid on the slick of wet ground.  Had he been running, he might have sprawled.  He came to a stop, fifteen long strides away from me.

Soap or scented oil, by the smell of it.

Thanks Lil.

“That’s better,” I said.  I raised my hands.  “Kneel before us, brute.”

The Infante raised his head.  He stared at me.  I smiled.

I turned to walk into the shelves and collections of medical equipment to my left.  With my steady, slow retreat and the Infante’s implacable advance, we were far enough back now we were in the midst of the gas-production facility.  I looked at the various boxes and containers and saw little I could use.  Worse, it seemed to repeat ad nauseum.  Vast quantities of the same products, with no variation, no creativity, no different tools.

I wasn’t going to find anything.

More glass shattered.  The Infante reached for something nearby and hurled it in Lillian’s direction, two-handed.  Whatever it had been had been dense.  From the splinters and fragments that were cast into the air, and going by the sound, I had reason to suspect it had torn a whole swathe through the cover Lillian had taken.

Creatures!” the Infante called out.

“I know you are, but-” I started.

Attack!,” the Infante ordered.

Those stationed outside had no choice but to obey.  They came in through the far end of the building.  Some charged through the artificial waterfall of acid rain.  Others seemed to have trouble with the footing on the rubble.

The tangle, directed by Ashton, charged into the mass of encroaching soldiers.

Another asset down, I thought.

The Infante went on the offense.  He moved with the same speed he’d used to charge after me, but this time he went after Lillian, wading through crates and vats, sending chemicals spilling around him.  Mary hurdled onto the highest ground available- the top of a set of shelves, and gestured in my direction.

I was to look after Helen.  Mary would help Lillian.

There were things that might have been birds and might have been large insects gathering in a cloud around the Infante.  Another experiment, contained within his body.  Mary’s initial attempt at stopping him was quickly aborted.  She emptied a gun as she backed off.

He didn’t slow, he didn’t stop.  Nothing we did seemed to do much damage.

Mary threw a knife, and it glanced off of his eye, as if she’d struck steel with steel.

He hurled a metal cover from a vat, and he clipped Mary.

“You were faster once, Mary Cobourn,” he boomed.  “At least one of the Twin Sisters of Richmond were slain by your hand.  I have reason to suspect this.  To slay her you would have needed to be better than this.  How does it feel, puppet, to take such pride in your abilities, but to know you’re slower and weaker than ever before?”

I found Helen.  She was lying on the ground, breathing shallowly.  I was afraid to touch her, for fear she would hurt me, or for fear I would prod something on the brink of complete and total collapse.

Her head turned slightly as I crouched near her.

“I’m here,” I whispered.

“Hi,” she whispered back.

I moved to where I could peer around the corner of the shelving unit.

The superweapon I’d glimpsed earlier was at the other end of the building.  The Infante’s personal superweapon, by the looks of it.  It was a tower of throbbing flesh that made me think of a beating heart, but scarred flesh.  It bore a horned head of gold with two faces, had three breasts, two arms, and three legs.

It warred with the Tangle, turning with surprising speed while lashing out, tearing with surgical precision.  It was winning.

The swarm the Infante had unleashed was spreading through the area.  One of the things swooped at me.  It took a chunk out of my shoulder, and a piece out of Jessie’s arm.

Insect-bird hybrid, to look at it.  Locust-crow.

“Tomorrow, if you were to live, you would be weaker still,” the Infante’s voice boomed.  “Not just your Mary Cobourn.  All of you.”

There were more crashes.  Each disturbance seemed to bring more of the swarming things into the air.  It seemed they could smell my blood, and they could smell Helen’s.

I wrestled with Jessie’s hands, and I made her let go, depositing her near Helen.  I drew a knife.

One locust-crow swooped, flitting one way, then the other.  I shot with the gun and swiped with my knife, to hopefully hit it if the bullet missed.  The bullet missed, and it darted back out of the way of the knife.

In the background, Mary leaped into the air, working wire.  Something that might have been tentacles snapped up in her direction, seizing her out of the air.  She was hurled, thrown down at the ground, with a strength that left me little doubt the Infante was the source of those things.

We weren’t winning.  Just the opposite.  It was very possible Mary was down and out, like this.

“We have our beginning, we have our middle, and we have an end,” I said, letting my voice carry.  I saw Mauer amid the pallets, crates, and barrels.  “We have our high points, our entanglements and attachments.  We rise, we have our moments of excellence, and we have our failures, our moments of weaknesses.”

“More the latter than the former, Lamb.”

“We’re works of art.  We were created, us Lambs.  We were forged for a purpose, I know that.  And hey, we’ve had our high notes and low ones, moments of high volume and low ones.  Times when we made an awful lot of noise, and times of silence, to give that noise more weight and meaning.  We wove in and among one another.  That’s how you make music.”

“From what you’ve left in your wake, I think you’re flawed pieces,” the Infante said.  He was closer.  He was approaching me, Helen, and Jessie, now.

“And what are you, you glorified Bruno?  You’re a single note, stretching on for far too long.  No variation, nothing to complement it, no highs, no lows.  If you were art, you’d be a canvas of red and only red.  A big canvas, a rich red, maybe, but as much as your Professors might take pride in how you were pieced together… you’re not art.  We’re flawed, but you’re boring.”

His voice was very near.  On the other side of the set of shelves.  Paces away from me.  “Your analogy is missing something.”

I was very still, waiting.  I didn’t want to give him any more cues on my location.

The locust-crows were circling.

“If you were art, you’d be art nobody would ever know existed,” the Infante said, and he was near enough that I could feel his voice, not just hear it.  “No legacy, no meaning, no future.  One more thing left forgotten in the smouldering ashes of a once proud nation.”

Two swooped at once.  I sliced one.  The other caught the back of my neck, and latched on, apparently intent on digging in the direction of my spine.  I dropped my gun and grabbed it, slicing its head off.  The gun clattered to the ground.

The Infante backhanded the shelving unit, toppling it.  He stood before me.  We’d taken chunks out of him with the bullets we’d fired his way, we’d sliced his throat, though the blood flow had outright ceased.  He had knives sticking out of one shoulder, where Mary had tried to arrest the movement of that arm.  He barely seemed to care.

Helen, lying on the ground behind me, screeched.

The Infante turned his head.  His hand went up to catch one of the experiments that launched at him.  It was like a primate, black, and matured, and as it clutched at his arm and hand, tendrils snapped out of its fingertips and toes, taking curious geometric patterns as they seized him.  They flayed flesh and dug in as they went.  More leaped on.

“This on its own won’t stop me,” the Infante said, simply bearing the burden of the pack of flesh-flaying primates that was tearing into him.

“Probably not,” I said.

“You’re so misguided,” he said.

“Probably,” I said.

“You are far from being art,” he said.

“For all your wealth compared to mine, for all your power and my lack thereof, for all the shit I’ve had to deal with because the Academy can’t run the world worth a damn, I’ve lived a better, richer, more meaningful life than you ever will,” I said.  “Keep that in mind.”

I could barely see, given the angle of his face respective to the light sources mounted on the ceiling, but I liked to think his expression changed, a frown crossing his features.

I liked to think it was the distraction that counted.

Gorger loomed behind him, massive, bug-eyed, naked and pale.

Gorger bit down on the Infante’s head.

A hole opened in the Infante’s right hand, and tentacles reached out, seizing Gorger.  His other hand twitched, another hole opening and he grabbed one of Gorger’s arms.

“You finally showed,” I addressed Gorger.

Helen’s friends seemed to know Gorger.  They cooperated with him.

I joined them, leaping onto the Infante, fully aware one swing of an arm could destroy me.  I stabbed, over and over.

The locust-crows swooped and tore at me, and I fell.  Gorger’s arm was blistering around where the Infante grabbed it, and I recognized the nature of that particular rash as the red plague getting a foothold, though his skin was durable and virtually a quarantine suit unto itself.

Mary had appeared, limping, one arm draped at her side.  With her other, she began shooting the locust-crows out of the air.  Lillian was right behind her, throwing something that produced a gas.

That helped.

Duncan and Ashton appeared, as well.  With their appearance, the crows moved away, and Duncan and Lillian could check on Helen and Jessie.

We all formed a loose circle around the Infante, who wasn’t losing the struggle, but who was taking his time winning.  None of us were strong or effective enough to truly capitalize on what Gorger was doing for us.

“We’ll be cornered if we take too long here,” Duncan said.  “The others are coming.  Infante’s forces, the primordial spawn.”

“Primordial what?” I asked.

“Spawn.  The gold-helmed thing.  Derived of primordial, by the looks of it.”

Gorger strained against the tentacles and hand that gripped his hand.  He turned his head back in the direction he’d come.  The main hatch that led back underground.

“Yeah, we need to go,” I said, hushed.

Our enemy was now on his knees, arms occupied.  His belly was exposed.

Yet he was too strong for us to really stop.  We didn’t have any blades that cut deep enough, nor any guns that would penetrate far enough.  He was too big, too solid.  Had Mary been in fighting shape, maybe.  If the Tangle had been intact, we could have consumed him.

If we’d been willing to give our complete and total attention to destroying the Infante, we could.  Probably.  But we weren’t and we couldn’t.  It would mean giving up the rest of what we needed to accomplish and do.

“Slow him down,” I said.  “Then we run.  We go for his weak point.”

“The Professors?” Duncan asked.

“Or the Duke,” Lillian said.

I nodded.

Lillian reached for her bag.  Mary drew her knife.  I already had my weapons in hand.

We descended as a pack, doing as much damage as we could, with the time we had remaining.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.09 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.9

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

My arms were drenched in blood, fingertip to elbow.

The rain pounded down on the rooftop, it formed a waterfall at the edge of the building that was damaged.  Wood creaked and groaned as the building shifted.  All around us, the city itself stretched itself skyward, stone grating on stone, distant muscles as large as any street no doubt working to lift sections of the city up and away from the plains that had surrounded it.

We made no sound.  The Infante, too, was silent, but not because he was dead.

You don’t like it when others see you bleedIt disturbs the illusion.

His clothes had burned and melted away from the upper body, and it was clear where lifeforms squirmed and writhed within him, visible in and near the gouges and holes we had made in him.

He could have used them, to slow us down, to distract, even to attack.  He was holding back his strength.

He was a pillar of strength, in many ways, tall, stout, indomitable.  We could wound him, but killing him seemed almost impossible.  Even serious attempts to disable were questionable at best.

The noble’s blood streamed from my elbows to my fingertips, and the thick fluid formed tendrils that stretched from my fingertips to the ground.

It felt like more time had passed than in reality.

I reached into one of my pockets, aware I was getting it filthy with blood.  I gestured- nothing fancy.  It was a gesture anyone would have understood.

Mary tugged on Gorger’s arm, hauling him back and away.  His mouth yawned open, a second kind of mouth that was a wormlike, muscle-laden esophagus relaxed, loosening its hold on the Infante’s head.

For an instant, it looked like the Infante wasn’t going to let Gorger go, even though Gorger had released him.  His arms were extended to either side- an eruption of tentacles reaching from one palm to Gorger’s hand, arm, and shoulder.  The other held Gorger’s wrist, with red veins spiderwebbing out and around from the point of contact.

The Infante looked like he was crucified, one knee on the ground, arms out to either side, his head bowed.  Wounds marked him.

But he wasn’t a man.  Like this, close up, clothes done away with, his inhumanity had been laid bare.  The flesh, the fat, the muscle, the monstrous things that peeked out of his wounds before he flexed the muscle, flexing the wound closed a fraction, it marked him as something else.

“Ask for help,” I said.  “Beg.  Call your underlings.”

He raised his head.  It was here that he would have seen the match.

“I’m just making a suggestion.  But I know you’re too cowardly to do it.”

“Cowardly,” the Infante said.  His voice was quieter than usual.  His allies were close enough that anything else could have been construed as him doing as I’d suggested, seeking their assistance.  “Begging?  Pleading?  Calling for assistance?”

I smiled.

“You’d be well advised to listen,” Lillian said, her voice distorted by her breathing mask. “Concede this battle, bow your head, admit defeat.  Walk away, lick your wounds.”

“Physician, you would do well to partake of your own prescription,” the Infante said, his voice low.  “Can you conceive of any possible reality where I do as you suggest?”

“No,” Lillian said.

“Even if you did want to listen, we wouldn’t let you,” I said.

“I thought I’d suggest it, and assuage my conscience, harming the helpless, using all of my Academic knowledge to try and disable your knees and hips,” Lillian said.

“I can smell the chemicals,” the Infante said.  “I can smell the pinewood and sulphur in your hand, Sylvester.  I won’t bow, you won’t show mercy.  Let’s be done with this discourse.”

My hand was still so covered in blood that I could barely see any skin, beyond some of the knuckles and where it had scraped away from beside my thumb, when I’d reached into my pocket.  I opened it, then thumbed open the matchbox.

The others backed away, Gorger retreating toward the hatch, growls and other sounds suggesting that the Infante’s minions had seen him.

I struck the match and threw it as a single motion.

The chemical ignited with a whoosh, rolling into the air up and around the Infante in a way that suggested some of it was airborne, before it had caught the flame.

The Infante, midway to working his way to a full standing position, burned.  Things from further down the warehouse took notice of the light and sound.  The primordial-spawn superweapon would be among them.

I allowed myself a second to take in the scene, the Infante as a silhouette, surrounded and framed by flames.  He didn’t scream or flinch.

Then, collecting Jessie, Duncan and Ashton helping to get her into position, I turned to go.

Only minutes had passed.  We’d moved in waves, as coordinated a dance as any battlefield we’d navigated, but we’d been moving in and out of a space not much larger than a lady aristocrat’s walk-in-closet, some of us stepping back as others had stepped in.

The ones who hadn’t been actively getting their hands dirty had been preparing for their own activities or checking the surroundings.  I’d been checking.

There was a path out.  It wasn’t perfect, but it served.  We went up, climbing one set of pipes and the framework that held one chimney to the wall, to reach a shattered window.

Hoods up and jackets overhead, we went out the window, into the acid rain.

Duncan was the last out.  Not even a full second after he’d slipped past the spears and blades of glass, the first warbeast lunged after him, snapping.  A weasel, writ large, with jaws like a bear trap of bone and muscle, the flesh peeled back and away, so grafts and augments could be added or modified to keep the jaws at their most effective.

Duncan dropped down, and we caught him.  The weasel-warbeast was scraping its neck and belly against glass as it fought its way out of the window, eviscerating itself.  One of its kin was climbing on it to get through the window, but rear limbs had lost their grip, and it held on with foreclaws alone.

Another lunged out, leaping onto the rooftop we occupied.  Mary, one hand in her pocket, stabbed it with a short blade that she held in the other hand, before it could fully recover from the landing.

There was noise at the side of the building, suggesting creatures were making their way outside.  I could see only hints of it – some weren’t acid-proof, and they shied away from the rainwater, getting in the way of any that were.

A weaker Tangle was draped across the street far below us, long, thin, not quite integrated, its pale silhouette being that of a snake.  It was trying to fold itself together into something functional and strong, but it had been damaged, and its attempts to knit itself together were trying and failing to turn gaping wounds into something functional.  Lying as it was in the puddles, the effect of the rain was far outweighing the harvesters’ ability to piece it together or make it functional.  It looked like the flesh would slough from the bone soon enough.

There were soldiers and experiments here and there, but the battle lines had shifted, moving to points further away, Radham’s forces retreating closer to the Academy, while the Infante’s forces had followed.  The ones who remained were the ones who were hunkering down in places that were still dry and intact, licking their wounds and shooting the occasional Tangle that limped or crawled too close.

None looked up enough to see us.

We leaped over to the next rooftop, Mary first to land there, with Lillian close behind.  They were there to reach out for me, keeping me steady.  I appreciated it- not because my balance was bad, but because I had Jessie on my back and I didn’t want the coat I’d draped over Jessie and I to fall away, exposing us to rain.

We circled around the building, pursuing the Infante’s soldiers and forces, which had pressed their advantage as Radham had retreated.

I was all too aware of the rain, of the long seconds which seemed to pass in slow motion as we stepped out from under eaves and away from the sides of buildings that blocked the downpour when the wind blew it in the right directions.

The building we’d met the Infante in was still in plain view.  The chemical fire we’d started was blazing, catching on wood.  The orange light of the flame was visible through the windows, even if the flames themselves weren’t.

“How’s Helen?” I asked.

“I haven’t had time to check,” Duncan said.  “It looked like she got hit hard.  She’s durable, but-”

But.

“Mary?”

“Lillian put my arm back, but I don’t feel like I can use it for fighting.”

A Jessie who can’t voice her memories.  A Mary who can’t fight.  Ashton is limited in what he can do since half our enemies are wearing quarantine suits with masks.   Helen can’t get a grip on herself, let alone anyone else.

Then there’s you, the voice said.

How fitting, then, that we would find ourselves here, I thought.

The Duke was standing in the rain, wearing a hooded cloak, the point of a sword sticking out from one side, the hand that gripped it shrouded.  The rainwater ran down onto the cloak and around him, pooling on the ground.  The front line of the battle was ahead of him.

His doctors stood to the side, where they were out of the rain.

I dropped to the street, dancing out of the way of harvesters that were writhing through the water.  I ducked under the same eaves the doctors were hiding under, where they were safe from stray gunfire and the rain.

One of them drew a weapon.  He relaxed slightly when he recognized me, my face peeking out from beneath the jacket that covered my head, shoulders, and Jessie.

A whisper I hadn’t caught, a subtle signal or enhanced senses let the Duke know we were here.  The Lambs collected behind me, and we collectively shrank back into the shadows and the gloom.  Still facing more or less forward, the Duke half-turned to glance our way, looking at us out of the corner of one eye.

Were a distant observer to take in the scene, it was a coin toss if they would notice us.

Berger pulled off his mask.  He blinked a few times, then winced.  He turned his attention to us.

“Professor,” I said.  “We meet again.”

Our last meeting had been when we had turned him over to the other Lambs.  He had been our hostage, and Lillian had wanted him as a bridge to contact the Duke with.

We’d hoped to stop the Infante from seizing the Crown States.

“He lives?” Berger asked.

“The Infante lives,” I said.  “But he bleeds.  He burns.”

Berger’s expression shifted.  He seemed grimly satisfied with that.

“The Golden Calf?”

“The primordial spawn is out there,” Duncan said.  “Either it’s giving chase, or it’s waiting for its masters orders.”

Berger nodded.  He glanced at the Duke.

“Will you come with us?” Lillian asked.  “We… the Lambs helped as much as we were able.  Sylvester and Jessie made sacrifices, trying to help us help you.  If you’re ever going to help us, we need the help now.”

“If I may, my lord,” Berger said, bowing his head.  “We’ve discussed this thoroughly.  I’ll speak for you if you allow it, and you can correct me if I’ve misinterpreted your stance.”

The Duke dipped his head into a slow nod.  It was an eerily placid, calm gesture in the midst of a battlefield, where smoke was still thick in the air, the gas thankfully having dissipated, the rain pouring down, the soldiers firing their guns and shouting just fifty paces away.

“Speaking for myself, the Infante has my loved ones,” Berger said.  “Speaking for my Lord, I know that everything and everyone he’s invested his life into is held ransom.  We’ve been asked to bow our heads, to sacrifice ourselves on this altar, and we’ve been assured they’ll be treated fairly.”

“You really think they’ll be allowed to live?” I asked.

Berger glanced at me.  There was a dark expression on his face.

“Stupid question.”

“If he gets a prompt, quiet death, I’ll consider that fair,” Berger said.  “I’ll consider it possible that he could live, shuffled off to live with a Doctor, a Professor, or an Aristocrat, to carry on something resembling an ordinary, modestly wealthy life.  Possible but not likely.”

“This is a fulcrum point,” Mary said.  “Things teeter on a blade’s edge.”

“To what ends?” Berger asked.  “Do you want to stop the Infante?  Salvage things?  Our communications were discovered.  The Crown States are doomed, written off.  In a century or five, they’ll dust off the maps and the books, they’ll return to the Crown States, and they’ll reclaim it.  Purged of all enemies and threats, free to be populated by the loyal.”

“The loyal,” Lillian said.

“Yes.”

“The loyal won’t be created by manipulation or craft,” Lillian said.  “They won’t be made by propaganda, misinformation, rewritten history or a steady removal of the Academy’s enemies.  They’ll be engineered.  They’ll be grown in vats and pieced together from the dead.”

“Most likely,” Berger said.

“I don’t want that future,” Duncan said.

“Are you offering an alternative?” Berger asked.

I met the Duke’s eye.  I saw him staring, rigid, his jaw set, water streaming off of his hood.  His hair was disintegrating into sodden clumps where it tumbled out of the hood and over one shoulder, the rain dissolving it.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do we have a place in this alternative?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re asking me, asking us to sacrifice ourselves, to give up everything we’ve worked toward, and allow it to be done away with in entirety, in the worst ways possible, even.  You’re asking us to do it and to get nothing in return?”

“Your son, the boy,” I said.  “I don’t remember his name.  But he might have a place.”

“The Lord Duke took pride in the Crown States.”

“There is no more Crown States,” I said.  “Only plague and black wood.”

“You’re asking for what little we have left.  You’re offering nothing in return.”

Mary spoke, “Sy’s offering you a chance to fight.  A chance to take one last defiant action.  A shot at removing the most dangerous man in the Crown States from the world.”

“For chances and shots, I’m to condemn the boy?” Berger asked.  “We’d try, we’d fail, and we’d be consigned to the Crown Capitol’s pits, with every person who we’ve worked with since coming to the Crown States, every family member, every loyal servant, and every other person we’ve stayed in touch with over the years.”

“What makes them special?” I asked.

“What makes your Lambs special?” Berger asked, his voice rising.

The Duke shifted his cloak.  Moving with slow carefulness, he reached out, hand slipping out from beneath the folds.  It settled on Berger’s shoulder.

The rain continued to pour down on top of us.  Someone from the battle lines was turning back, calling out.  Berger looked in the man’s direction.

The battle was ongoing.  The distant battlefield was eerie looking, almost a painting in the broad, vague strokes that painted it, the streets having blurred as harvesters had drawn out the materials, the hard shapes and openings of buildings smoothed out into funnels by the harvester’s work.  Radham seemed to have the means to direct Tangles in small part, and they were using them to delay and hamper the attacking forces.  I wondered if it was similar to Ashton’s mechanisms.

“Nothing,” I said.  “Well, a great deal makes them special, but that’s not what you’re asking.”

“Why should I lose everything and everyone I hold dear, when you won’t?”

I was very aware of the Lambs who were arranged behind me.  I was aware of the state of them.

You’re losing them, the voice said.  They’re slipping away as you speak.  And if you let them go, then I’ll have no reason to hold backOur deal will have ended.

I blinked, slow.

“Because, if you’re honest with yourself, if you step away and look at what this world is and what it’s becoming… we’re really not far from a reality where everyone is condemned to the pits.  Everyone is lost.  Maybe not this generation.  Maybe not the next.  But surely, somehow, if you cherish anyone, anything, any legacy at all, you can’t let them win, destroy it all, and erect some… mockery in its place.  Rewritten history, modified, subjugated, and broken people.”

“You might well be giving me too much credit,” Berger said.

“If that’s so, then I’m really sorry I spared you, way back then,” I said.

The fires were rising from the building where we’d left the Infante.

A hollow, eerie bellow sounded, extending over the city.

“That would be the golden calf, I presume?” Duncan asked.

“Yes,” the Professor next to Berger said.

“The Infante is coming.  He’ll have his pet with him,” Berger said.

“And you’ve given your answer?” I asked.  “You won’t help?  You’re speaking for the Duke in that?”

“Almost,” Berger said.

“Almost?”

“I can’t speak for the Lord I serve, but in speaking for myself, I don’t believe you’ll bring about a better world.”

I tilted my head to one side, watching Berger.

“We treated you pretty fairly, all considered,” I said.

Berger didn’t reply.  Beside me, Mary placed bullets in her gun.  She exchanged guns with Lillian and loaded the other, too.  Duncan and Ashton were kneeling by Helen.

“Fine,” I said.  “Point taken.  But you’ve worked with Lillian.  You’ve seen Duncan.  You’ve communicated with them, tried to fight for a better future alongside them, steering the Infante away from trouble.”

“Insofar as that’s possible,” one of the Professors said.

“You’re… you’ve lost, you’re faltering.  You seem resigned to your fates.  But pass the baton.  If Lillian and Duncan aren’t the kind of Doctor you want to succeed you, then I don’t know who else would serve.”

The Golden Calf howled yet again.

“I’ve met some doctors I could recommend,” Ashton said.  “But that’s not the point.”

“Hush,” Duncan said.

Berger glanced at the Duke.

The Duke lowered his head, reaching down to Berger’s belt.  He retrieved a handful of vials.

“That’s a yes?” I asked.

“Shh, Sy,” Lillian said.  “Don’t go and say something that changes anyone’s mind, if they’re leaning toward helping.”

“I’m not going to change anyone’s mind,” I said.

“You could,” Ashton said.

I shut my mouth.

Berger held the vials that the Duke had retrieved and put in his hands.

“Combat drugs?” Lillian asked.

The Duke turned, facing the burning building.

He’d left one arm extended.

“In your condition-” Lillian started.

Duncan touched her arm.

The rain continued to pour down.  Berger extracted the drug with a syringe, and he placed the syringe point into the Duke’s arm.

“We’ll have to get past the Infante to reach the ship,” Mary said.  “Are your people on board?”

“Guarded,” Berger said.  “They’ll be shot before we get close enough.”

“Get us to the Infante’s ship.  We’ll get close enough.”

Berger nodded.

“We’ll have to find a way to stop the Infante,” I said.  “Are there drugs?  Any mechanisms?  Chemicals we could use?”

“No.”

“If we take out his Professors, what happens?”

“He’ll recruit others.  They’ll be worse at maintaining the delicate balances and keeping the plagues and weapons within him from harming him, but he’ll survive.  He’d be able to get himself restored to peak condition, if only because they’d keep him alive and well until he made it back to the Crown Capitol.”

The fighting was picking up.  We weren’t terribly far from the Academy itself, with its high walls, at the highest elevated point on the city that had raised itself in stages.  I had a feeling harvesters had warped the exterior walls, elaborating them, smoothing them out and reinforcing the bases, but it was hard to see in particular.

The Tangles had united into a few greater forms, comprehensive enough to be able to climb from the ground at the base of the walls to the tops of the wall.  Much of the artillery fire and gunfire was aimed at them.

Duncan picked Helen.

“How is she?” I asked.

“There’s damage to her brain or spine, going by how nonresponsive she is.  I’d need to perform exploratory surgery to tell, and this isn’t a good surgical theater.”

I set my jaw.

I shifted my grip on Jessie.  The others pulled coverings into place, protecting them from the rain we were about to venture into.  I was very aware that the fabric would start to give way if we subjected ourselves to too much of it.

I heard the sounds of the Golden Calf, and I could visualize the Infante, not far from it.  Three Infantes, as possible positions, possible stances.  I could imagine him in a range of conditions.

The Lambs have to destroy him.

The Duke, beside us, stretched.

“Donn’t,” the Duke said.  His voice was rich, the words crude, as painful to listen to as they must have been to utter.

I turned to look at him.

“Donn’t… disappoint me,” the Duke spoke.

Thunder rumbled, and we we ran, ducking our heads down, jackets and hoods pulled up.  The Duke almost resembled his old self, but his expression was a stricken one.  One I recognized, in a morbid way, the expression mirroring sentiments I’d harbored in my heart in my darkest moments.

The Duke of Francis was going to die, for the burst of vigor and focus he was demonstrating now.

He kept his head down, his movements efficient, not graceful but not graceless either.  I knew that kind of movement too: it was the mechanical movement of someone who had to keep putting one foot in front of the other because there was no guarantee they would be able to resume moving if their rhythm broke or if they stopped.

A Tangle rose up, striking out from an alley.  It wasn’t large, composed of four people, but it was relatively intact.

The Duke ignored it, even as it found its footing, moving to strike at him.

I lunged, moving clumsily with Jessie at my back.  I cut more to slow it a fraction than to stop it.  It clubbed at me and hit Jessie.

Mary threw knives.  With the wires attached and the knives embedded in flesh, she hauled to one side, pulling it off balance and toppling it.

The Duke had barely budged or reacted.  He couldn’t spare the strength or effort for anything that wasn’t our primary enemy in this.

But, as we ran, he held his sword arm out, his hooded cloak stretching down the length of his very long arms.  It had been black once, but it was mottled, the color bleeding out of it, the parts where the fabric was tight against shoulder and head were outright bleached.

The length of cloak he’d extended and the sweep of his arm provided a canopy, sufficient to shelter Lillian, Jessie and I.

The shattered city was staring to slow in its growth, the rumble quieting.  The sound of war on the ground, across the city, and at the foot of Radham Academy itself seemed to increase in volume, as the dull sounds of the city’s shifting ceased to mask it all.

I saw the Infante, standing in the street.  He let the rain wash over him.  His flesh was bleaching and mottling less than the high quality fabric of the Duke of Francis’ cloak.

I saw the Golden Calf.  The two-faced helmet had been unclasped, but its face wasn’t visible.  It hunched over a tangle, it ate, the helm blocking our view of its face and process of eating.  Its back and body were bulging, larger for the mass it had taken into its body.  Its arms were longer, stouter at the shoulders.

We slowed our pace.  The Duke, not wanting to stop, continued moving, circling around to one side.

The Infante was scorched, flesh peeling from body in black, twisted clusters rimmed by red, damaged flesh, fluids streaking him as they flowed from open wounds.  He didn’t look weaker, for the damage that had been done.  He didn’t hang his head any lower, he didn’t bow down.  He didn’t look less, wearing his battle wounds rather than his highest-quality robes.

The Lambs were glancing around us.  I looked around us, and I recognized many of the storefronts, though display windows were thoroughly barred and shuttered.  I recognized the shape of the street.  I didn’t remember, but it was a place close enough to my heart that I couldn’t forget it entirely.

We were very close to the orphanage.

The Golden Calf reached up, closing its helmet, doing up the clasp.

I saw the Primordial Child, standing in the background, watching.

“How dangerous is it?” Duncan asked.

“They create primordials in the Crown Capitol, in the most controlled of environments.  They cut and pruned until they came to a conclusion.  Few of the resulting creations were truly capable of anything,” Berger said, his voice muffled by the mask he’d returned to wearing.  “Even of those few, most are only fodder for research and advancing Academy knowledge, primordial-derived advancements that greater minds than mine may spend a decade or more reverse-engineering.”

The Duke moved, lunging for the Infante, blade in one hand.

The Calf, as far from its master as the Duke had been before the attack was initiated, was fast enough interpose itself between Infante and Duke before the Duke could strike.  It parried the blade with a backhand swipe of a claw.

The Infante hadn’t so much as flinched or glanced the Duke’s way.

His focus was on us.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.10 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.10

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The Infante glowered, his veneer of humanity pulling away.  He was burned, but the burns hadn’t penetrated far past the surface, his skin almost seeming to grow tougher where the fire had seared it.  He remained unfazed by the life and death fight between the Duke and the Golden Calf that was moving back and forth around him, the two combatants within his arm’s reach at times.

Had the Duke been able to find an advantage, he could have used the closing of the distance to attack.

I could see the Infante’s craft, impaling the wall that framed this section of the city.  Like a great pirate’s ship ramming a smaller craft, biting into railing and deck, it had cut into the city.  It was guarded by a section of his army, and by a scattered assortment of his experiments.  The weasel warbeasts with the augmented jaws, humanoids with helmets, and others I couldn’t make out through the rain.

Lillian handed a jar to Mary.  Duncan and Ashton paced backward and to the side.  They wanted to find an avenue to act.  I could draw the connection, imagine what they wanted to do.  I could picture how this might play out, if they succeeded.  I could picture the moves as if they were moves on one of Hayle’s chessboards, during those early days where he’d made us compete with one another.  Counting moves ahead of time, figuring out where we wanted to be, how to cheat effectively…

I pushed myself.  I tried to take in the situation, to see where the others might position themselves, how the enemy might respond.  The Golden Calf was a whirling dervish of destruction that had a way of appearing at every point, devastating every contingency.  I held every image in my head, tried to account for the Infante, and found him easier to predict, harder to deal with.

The Calf might have been stronger in a sense, but it was feral.  The Infante was only feral when it was inconvenient.

The more I focused, the more I felt everything slip.

The Lambs must slay this god, the voice said.

I put it out of mind.  It wasn’t helpful, it didn’t help me process this situation.  It was… simply an unpleasant, dark noise in my head.  I couldn’t even be sure if it was articulating noises anymore, or if it was meeting my brain halfway, like writing and speech in a dream, that made no sense in retrospect.

“No room for failure, Sy.”

That was a more reassuring voice, helping me center myself and figure this out.  I looked over a battlefield and saw a dozen instances of each Lamb, fifty instances of the Calf, and five- six instances of the Infante.  All frozen in position, at places where they would make their key moves.  I could look at any of them, and visualize where everyone else might be in relation to them.

“Yeah,” I said, under my breath.  The Infante was staring me down.

“No room for sucking, because that monster will tear all of us apart.  And you’ve got Jessie with you.  So no sacrificing yourself.  It’s not an option.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The rain pattered down on my coat.  I was standing under the eaves of a building, but it still was getting at my shoes.  I worried about what would happen if it was left to do its work, eroding at the treated leather.

“I wish I’d gotten to know Jessie.”

“I do too, Gordon,” I said.  “I do too.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

Duncan and Ashton ascended to a sloped rooftop.  Duncan carried Helen.

The Infante reached in the direction of a pile of rubble.

“Duncan!” I shouted.  “Down!”

Boneless limbs reaching from the Infante’s hand to the rubble, seizing it.  Duncan dropped, pulling Ashton down with him, and the Infante adjusted the throw as all three tumbled off the roof to the street.

Stone pulverized stone and wood.  Scattered fragments of the rubble that had broken away as it was hurled forth chipped at the ground and wall near Duncan.  Duncan and Ashton covered their faces and heads.

The worst of the rubble had struck the wall above them.  Some shattered pieces landed around them, or bounced off of the three Lambs.

The Infante turned his attention to me.

I could imagine his thoughts.  You’re going to make me destroy you first, are you?

My imagining of the voice sounded dangerously close to the voice in my head.

He strode forward, one step, then two, and then was running by the third step.

I turned, moving perpendicular to him, closer to Lillian and Mary.

Mary threw the jar, sending it arcing high into the air.  She drew her pistol with the same hand, aiming it-

The Infante reached up to catch the jar out of the air with the same boneless limbs that had gripped the rubble.  Mary, for her part, turned on the spot, bringing one foot up, kicking out at the air- at thread.

Wound around the jar-top, the thread was pulled taut.  Held firmly in the grip of the Infante’s coiling symbiote, the bottle broke.  The contents showered down on one side of his face, his shoulders, and into the mess of tentacles and the hand that was almost hidden among them.  It was powdery, and it clung to him where the rainwater soaked his skin.

I wondered what Lillian had in her kit that she thought might serve against the Infante.

Momentarily blinded in one eye, hand and the associated tentacles coated in the powder, he continued charging at us.  I skipped up on top of a rain barrel that was rigged to divert some water into a garden that was protected by an overhang.  From there, I stepped up onto the arm of a diagonal gutter that fed into the barrel, and made the hop to get to the roof of the one-story building.

My legs were tired.  The combined weight of Jessie and I and the running we’d done to this point was adding up, and I didn’t get my feet onto the roof.  I hit the edge of the roof with my stomach.

“Damn it, Sy.”

A moment later, something jabbed me hard in between the ass cheeks.  It was Mary- driving her shoulder into my butt, as she’d hopped up right behind and beneath me, she was using the force of her entire body to force me up.

“Perilously close to the droopier vitals, Mary!” I called out, as I clambered onto the roof.

The Infante swung his arm at us, the various tentacles that extended from his hand and arm forming a singular, club-like entity.  Mary leaped up and away, Lillian dove for the ground.  The rain barrel and gutter were demolished.

“You’re broken,” the Infante said.  “Half of you dead or dying, the other half incapable of accomplishing anything.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

“I am not diminished,” the Infante said.  “You… you remind me of what humanity was, before.”

“Before.”

“How many years did man walk this Earth, so sick and crippled that his cities and nations only barely subsisted, let alone progressed?  You… all of you barely subsist, like this.”

“It’s better than the alternative,” I said.

“When you’ve spent your remaining time in the pits of the Crown Capitol, you’ll change your mind about that.  When you’re spent, well past the point of keeping alive, crumbling as you are, I’ll ensure you see each and every loyal soldier and ally of yours that the plague doesn’t claim, being marched in to suffer the same fates.”

In the background, I could see Ashton edging closer to the fight between the Duke and the Calf.

If he could gain any influence over it-

“Your Ashton won’t affect it,” the Infante said.  “It doesn’t have senses as you and I do.  It doesn’t have muscles in the same sense, nor the bones you might expect.  Its shape is… accident, but not unintentional.”

Had he seen me looking at it, or did he anticipate me?

I glanced at the ship.

“I thought you weren’t planning to run, Lambs?” the Infante asked.

Lillian started to move right, and the Infante moved, ready to lunge to cut her off.  His limb struck the cobblestone street, again as a singular limb, hitting with a strength sufficient to crack the stone.

She started to move the other direction, and he struck the ground over there, cutting her off.

I stood on the rooftop above her, but I didn’t have the means of reaching down to her.  Or if I did- it was a task.

The rain was pouring down on top of me, every second I was up here.  The long jacket I had draped over Jessie and I was insufficient to cover everything.  The rain was touching my ankles.

In the background, Berger was hunkered down, not moving.  The other doctors were with him.

I dearly wished they would do something.

The Infante struck at the building near Lillian.  He shattered stone and he upset my footing.  I dropped to all fours.  Jessie’s grip threatened to slip, and I reached up to grab her, securing her, made her hold on tighter.

The white powder had created a milky texture on the Infante’s face and arm. He barely seemed to care that Duncan and Helen were gingerly picking themselves up, or that Mary was flanking him, moving into position.

He repeated the action, striking the building.  Lillian ducked low.  No shriek, no wail, no tears that I could see.  Grim silence.

Those impacts- the tentacles that sprouted from his hand weren’t indestructible.  Stone was… well, it was hard.  He was doing more damage to himself than to Lillian.

I realized why, seeing the white stuff, seeing the pattern, that he kept on using the arm like a club.

Glue.  It was glue, or something that became like glue, when exposed to the water.  It bound the tentacles together, it hampered his movement, and it blinded him in one eye.  Mary’s movements to flank were taking advantage of the fact that he had a limited field of view.

“You could go, Sylvester,” he said.  “Run.  Go after my doctors, after the people on that ship you think you could leverage.”

“And miss seeing you go to pieces?” I asked.

“It would mean you didn’t have to watch her die,” he said, indicating Lillian.

I glanced down at Lillian.

I saw her, and I saw the Lillian of years ago.  Wide-eyed, terrified of everything and still somehow finding the courage to plunge into it.  Guileless in so many ways, with countless openings for me to exploit.

He approached, footsteps plodding.  I tensed.

He swung, once again, and Lillian once again leaped clear of it.  The limb had bent in the air, it hit her or something she was wearing and made her stagger, left her defenseless to the follow-up.  In that same strike, however, the Infante had managed to kill the symbiote that was clinging to him.  It slithered out of his hand and the wounds in his arm, a morass of worms that were glued together at one end, a hydra’s mane of worms at the other, groping and grasping.

Lillian made a break for it.  The Infante, arm still extended from the swing, simply kept walking in her direction.  Things fluttered out of the opening in his hand.

Mary lashed out, closing in, cutting, using thread, trying to hamper his hand by hurling a knife and having the attached razor wire encircle the hand and opening several times.

It wasn’t enough.  Slices and cuts didn’t mean anything when the Infante had been meant to weather bullets and wrestle warbeasts to the ground with his hands.  She had stemmed the flow of the Infante’s creatures from his hand, but they were gnashing at the wire, and there wasn’t any leverage keeping it in place- it was falling away from his hand, if I went by the dangling knife that drooped closer and closer to the ground.

I rose up, shifting my footing.

Lillian had run to the left, away from the direction we wanted to go.  The Infante had his right eye glued shut.

The eye closest to me was glued shut.

I gestured in the same instant I jumped.

My jump up to the rooftop had been weak, faltering.  Now I jumped from the peak of a bungalow house, with the Infante as my landing point.  One of my feet touched his shoulder, where the powder had settled, and it stuck enough I worried I’d lose my shoe.

My hand reached for the noble’s head, knife stabbing in, seeking a grip.  The other hand reached up, striking at Jessie’s hands.

I divested myself of Jessie and the coat that protected me, and let her fall.

Mary caught her, both her and Jessie falling to the ground in the process.

The Infante ignored me, turning toward Mary and Jessie, the pair crouched down on the ground.

“Trust the Lambs,” I murmured.  I ignored them.  I ignored everything, trying to secure my footing, perching on the Infante’s shoulders, my knife at his head.

His eye was apparently made of something that wouldn’t be touched by blade or bullet.  It was possible the eyes in the sockets weren’t even real.  Eyes elsewhere on the face, where the glue still covered some?  At the shoulder?  The hands?

No, blinding him wouldn’t work, in any event.

I cut his scalp, dragging the knife along it, adding to wounds we’d already made.  His flesh was hard to cut, requiring that I drag the knife through it with both hands, even for the thin skin that sat next to skull.

The Infante raised the hand that hadn’t gotten glue on it, the one that hadn’t had the tentacles, or the swarm.  I saw him form a fist.

Veins bulged along his arm.  The veins turned dark, then broke, blistering.  The vine-veins that were so characteristic of the plague were visible there.

He was going to infect the pair.  Jessie and Mary both.

Scales of burns mingled with the eruption of the plague that his body had been keeping contained, all red and angry.  I liked to imagine it was all of the pent up anger from within him finding its way out.

I wanted to think we were the cause of that anger.

The rain was soaking my clothing, touching my flesh.  If I looked skyward, I risked getting it in my eyes.  Lillian had said that if any of us got the water in our eyes, our vision would go foggy and wouldn’t get better until the eyes were replaced outright.

She’d backed away as the Infante turned his focus to Mary and Jessie.

I dragged the knife toward the base of the Infante’s skull, where it met his spine.  The skin became thicker as I reached that point.

“Nuisances, nothing more,” he said.

He swiped a hand at me.  I had to grab his head to keep from falling.  I put the point of my knife near his ear and kicked it, hard with my heel, kicking myself away from the Infante and toward the road below as I did it.

I screwed my eyes shut, twisting my face away from the rain.

It was a bad moment.  A moment where I realized I’d been focused on what I had to do moment to moment, but I’d allowed myself to be cornered, thinking too shallowly, only about the current move, then the current move again.  I’d spared too much thought for the instant and for the ten-minutes-from-now.

Trust the Lambs, I thought.

A whistle.  From Lillian’s direction.

Only a distraction- and not an effective one.  It was one of the tools that Academy Doctors carried with them for directing Stitched on the battlefield.  I could see why she had it.

I could see why the Infante could ignore it, his focus on Mary and Jessie.

Duncan fired his rifle, aiming for the Infante.  He was kneeling by Helen and Ashton was near them.  He fired again, then again.

It might as well have been the shrill whistle.

It wasn’t a Lamb that stepped to the fore.  The Duke pulled away from his fight with the Golden Calf.  With long strides, he charged at the Infante, sword leveled for the higher noble’s throat.

The Infante grabbed for the sword, and the blade dipped, danced around, then returned to course, aimed for the jugular.

With a quarter-turn away, the Infante had shoulder and arm catch the blade instead.  His flesh suffered what looked to be a shallow cut as he turned his back to our Duke of Francis.

He swung his fist in a backhand, not even looking at his attacker.  The Duke stepped back and away, turning and bringing his sword up to catch the Calf’s claw.  He was disarmed.

“Syylvester,” the Duke said, his vowel hitching, as if he was a stitched with a faulty wire, movements replicating.

In the next moment, the Calf had gouged him three times, digging deep furrows into his chest and stomach.  I could have laid my arm into those furrows and covered them with skin, with no bulge to be seen.  From the look of the slices of black, there were dark gaps hinting at cavities beneath.

It was a modest distraction, but the attack had bought us a chance to retreat.  Mary had found her feet, dragging Jessie with her.  I climbed to my own feet and backed away, stepping into the shelter of a shop.  Duncan and Ashton dragged Helen into shadow.

“You’re mad,” the Duke said, drawing a pair of blades to defend himself with- scaled down to my size, they might have been daggers, but the Duke was tall and his idea of a ‘dagger’ would have been a short sword in my hands.

“You say that like you’re surprised,” I said.  “You know this, you know what I am.”

“Nno,” the Duke said.

The Calf attacked again.  It was fast, it was strong, and it sat askew in my mind’s eye, too hard to calculate and predict.  It didn’t stop to breathe, it didn’t slow, it only seemed to stop to think, to work out how best to dismantle its enemy.  The Duke stopped both claws from striking him by parrying with his blades.  The Calf headbutted him.

The Duke of Francis’ head was a weak point.  He tried to adopt a fighting stance, and the blade fell from his right hand.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Wanted-” the Duke said.  He looked at the Infante.

I filled in the gap.  I wanted to stop him.

“We will,” I said.  Somehow.

Lillian approached me, throwing an arm over me, her hand gripping the armpit of the sleeve as she shared her coat with me.   Berger and the other doctors following her.  We were all at either side of the street now, with the Duke, Infante and the Calf in the center of the road.

The Calf moved to finish off the Duke.  The Infante stopped it.

“Was it-  worth it?” the Duke asked.

“None of you survive the day,” the Infante said.  “‘Worth’ is irrelevant.”

“Absolutely worth it,” I said.

The Infante reached out for the Duke, using his plague-ridden hand to seize the man by the face.  There was almost surrender on the Duke’s face as he was seized.  No fight, no effort to defend himself.  He’d spent all he had.

No.  Not quite.  He reached out and grabbed the Infante’s arm, brought a leg around and hooked the Infante’s.  He was holding on, burdening the High Noble, hampering him so we could run.

That didn’t stop the Infante for telling the Calf to come after us.  It barely hampered the Infante from turning, walking as if there was barely any obstruction.

But he wasn’t running.  That counted for something.

Duncan couldn’t throw anything while he held Helen, so he handed off what he could to Ashton.  Lillian threw what she could as I held her bag and kept the coat in place over us.  it was three to five seconds of rummaging for every second she spent deploying a pouch of something she could empty into the air behind her.

It was Berger and the other Professors that served the most effective role.  Berger had his puppeteer-insects, hidden within his coat.  Others had canisters and pistols.  They’d been ordered to this battlefield and they’d come with some ability to fight.

The puppeteer bugs latched on, trying to find some physiology they understood.  One or two paralyzed an arm or a leg for a second or two as the Calf raced forward on all fours, making it stumble or veer to one side.  It shook its head violently for a moment as it charged into a cloud of powder Lillian had tossed into the rain.

It barely slowed.

We were charging straight into a morass of experiments and soldiers.

We needed-

The Calf caught us.  It tore into Berger and one of his colleagues with enough violence that the collateral violence sent Duncan and Ashton sprawling, Helen with them.

“Clear the way!” the remaining Professor shouted.  “The Calf has gone mad and attacked the Infante!”

There was commotion.  How much had they seen of the fight?  Enough to know we’d been fighting the Infante?

The Infante was approaching, marching through the rain.

Could they see?

Obey!” the Professor shouted.

The soldiers obeyed.  The Doctors gave orders to warbeasts.

“Stop it!” the Professor said, leading the way into the enemy ranks.  “Leave the children be!”

There was hesitation at that.

In less than a minute, the Infante would be close enough to give his own orders.  He would reverse these instructions, and we would be among the enemy.

I tried to hurry, getting ahead and away from the bulk of these defending forces.  I glanced over the ship, looking for and failing to see any guns.  It looked like the ones that would have worked had been removed and carried to the front lines, where they could act as turrets.

Lillian and I stopped at the railing, taking in the scene.  Mary caught up with us a second later.  The warbeasts and experiments were attacking the Calf, now.  Rain streamed down on parts of the deck.  Other parts were covered by tiled canopy.  The ramp itself had some canopy too, no doubt to protect individuals getting off the ship from gunfire.

And Duncan- Ashton?  They were still on the street, at the edge of the group of soldiers that stood amid the rubble where the prow of this land-ship had crashed through the exterior wall.

Duncan moved his hand away from Helen’s throat.  His head hung.  He turned to look at the Infante, then at me.

Ashton didn’t budge until Duncan tugged him a second time, practically dragging Ashton after him.

Lillian clutched my hand, hard.

As a group, while Duncan and Ashton ascended the rubble and the ramp to the deck of the ship, we retreated into the cover of the roof that protected the rooms and structures above the deck.

Guns cocked, to greet us.

“The Duke is dead,” the Professor with us said.  “Berger, Adams.”

The others were professors.  I recognized the decoration.

The Infante’s men.

“He’s mad,” the Duke’s Professor said.

“And you’re a traitor.”

“He’s mad,” the Duke’s Professor said.  “He’ll never come back from this.  He’s tasted… this.”

“Abandon,” Mary said.  “He’s tasted total abandon.”

“We’ll manage,” the Infante’s Professor said.

“Lawrence-”

“We’ll manage.  We have to.”

“You can’t steer him any longer,” the Duke’s Professor said.  “Not even in the small ways.  We’ll say the plague took him.”

The Infante approached the crowd.  He’d torn the glue away from his eye, taking flesh and eyelids with it.  He didn’t seem to care that he bled anymore.

I heard Lawrence sigh.  “Nothing we could do, if we wanted to.”

“Harpoon gun?” I asked.

“Harpoon gun?”

“Or anything sufficient for catching a rogue warbeast.”

“That’s what it’s come down to, is it?” Lawrence asked.

I looked at the Lambs.  Mary had Jessie, and the burden seemed unduly heavy.  Lillian looked harrowed, her breath fogging around the mask at her lower face, her eyes wide.  Duncan held Ashton like Helen had, before.

The Infante looked up at us.  His expression was one of grim satisfaction.

With a few words, he had the crowd turn.

But he would lead this army.

“Harpoon gun, or anything,” I said.  “Now.

“It’d be suicide.  You’ll fail, and he’d punish us.  He’d take everything we care about,” Lawrence said.  He still held a gun, raised and aimed at us.

“He’s power,” I said.  “Devoid of control.  Him and his pet both.  We orchestrated this siege, and we did it because the Academy is control, devoid of power.”

“I think you’re underestimating our resources,” Lawrence said.

“I think the fact that we’re all standing here and facing down this reality suggests we have a very good idea of what your resources are and what’s going on.”

“What’s going on?”

I felt my heart pound as the Infante worked his way through the crowd, getting past the rubble to the ramp.  His pet was devouring bodies, mask parted.  He called it, and it leaped to the side of the ship, crawling up to the railing, stopping there.

Decorum had to be observed apparently.  It wouldn’t go ahead of its master any more than a properly trained dog by a shepherd’s side, or one of the organic pieces of art that ladies of quality liked to have trotting at their sides.

“He’s slipped the leash, you know,” I said.  “The break in the balance of power and control, it started with the Duke being shot, the Baron’s weakness.  You failed to account for the missing component, the glue that holds it all together.”

“The people.”

“Their faith.  Their belief in the order of things.  It elevates the Infante and his ilk.  Change that elevation, reverse it even, the nobles get insecure and the balance-not truly a balance, “It goes askew, and everything falls apart.”

Lawrence spoke, watching the Infante, “What would upset or reverse this supposed faith?  Hm?  Not mere deaths in wartime.  Not when the Duke lived, to continue to make appearances.  Not when we covered things up as we did for the Baron’s death.”

I let the silence hang, sinking in.

Let his question become rhetorical.

“Harpoon,” I said.  “Please.

He hesitated, then glanced at his peers.

He seemed to come to a decision, and ran for the stairs.

The Infante slowed.  The rain pattered against the deck, the sounds of battle were distant, less persistent than they had been.  The battles had largely been decided, now.  There were a few final doors to batter down, but…

But I needed to focus.

I watched as the Infante’s expression shifted.  He turned , looking over one shoulder at the crowd.

Murmurs?  Shouts.

He raised one hand, touching the back of his head.

I’d made him bleed.  He was always self conscious about that.

I’d made him bleed a lot.  He would be more self conscious about that.

His expression was unmoved as he returned his focus to me.

I smiled, spreading my arms.

There were more noises from the crowd.

“Proud of your small victories?” the Infante asked.

Devastatingly proud, tits.”

His expression shifted.  “What?”

“I said I’m devastatingly proud, tits,” I told him.  “Did that knife I jammed in your ear actually do something to your hearing?”

“Tits,” the Infante said.

I touched the back of my head.

It was then that he seemed to realize.

“Juvenile,” the Infante said.

I glanced at Gordon, who seemed inordinately pleased.  Gordon wasn’t any older than he had been in Lugh.

“It’s what we are,” I said.  “It’s what I am.”

“You said that to the Duke,” Lillian said.  Mask or no, I could hear the incredulity.  “Sy- you sacrificed the Duke’s life to-”

“It worked,” I said, with intensity.  I pointed at the crowd behind the Infante.

The Infante turned to look.  As he did, the back of his head was plain to view.  I’d carved the four letters into the back of his head.

The crowd behind him looked stricken, not sure what to do.  Laugh, cry…

That harpoon was a little late in coming.  This would have been when I would’ve liked to fire the shot, and try to unite Lamb and Professor in dragging that bastard off the ramp.

The saving grace wasn’t any harpoon.  It was a creature from the crowd, bloody and hard to make out, as it tore past the people nearest the Infante, stepped onto the railing, and pounced onto the Infante’s face.

Helen.

Her arm was broken, but she still used her hand, flinging her body around to the side to get her hand to where it could hold on.  Her other hand clutched.  Her one good leg scrabbled for purchase.

“Harpoon!” I shouted, looking for the professor that had run off.

He emerged from the stairs, looked at the scene, and threw the oversized crossbow.

To me.  The idiot.  I caught it in a bear hug, reversed it in my grip, and gave it to Mary.  I knew her arm was hurt from our first skirmish with the Infante, so I held the front end, ducking low, while I let Mary do the aiming.

The plague-ridden hand struck Helen, pulling her back and away.  The harpoon caught the hand before another blow could be delivered.  I, Duncan, Ashton, Lillian, and Mary all seized the rope, pulling it to one side.

The Infante’s attempt at smashing Helen away from his face was thrown off as we pulled him slightly off balance.  He caught himself.

The High Noble made a hand gesture at the Golden Calf.

It hung on the railing, perching on the side of the ship, and with the gesture, it hopped the railing, landing on the deck.

Lawrence whistled.  He made another gesture.  The Golden Calf sat down where it was.

The rope from the harpoon was secured, tied down.  As one, we made the Infante’s sole remaining arm our target.  Fluids were oozing from it, and he slapped Helen’s back, smearing the fluids onto her clothing.  He grabbed her, trying to pull her away.

Mary’s razor wire and a rifle that several of us could grab provided some leverage on that hand.  Duncan poured something on the deck, and the Infante lost his footing, dropping to his knees.  I threw a coat over the Infante’s face and over Helen, to keep the rain off of her.  It wouldn’t do for her to dissolve while trying to do this.

There was an echo to earlier.  This time, instead of Gorger taking the Infante’s head, we had Helen.

It wasn’t fast.  But Helen had the ability to finish this.  Broken as she was, ribs fractured, limbs more fluid, relying on musculature, she crammed herself into the Infante’s mouth.

Soldiers on the ground started to approach.

“Stand down!” Lawrence called out.

“Sir-”

Stand down!”

No, Professor!”

Several guns raised- not all of them.  They aimed at the Professors.

I nearly lost my own footing on the slick of fluids Duncan had placed beneath the Infante.

Lawrence stood at the top of the ramp, facing down the crowd.  The Duke’s professor stood at his side.

“Look at him,” Lawrence said.  “The plague took him.  That much is clear to see.  He’s mad, he’s broken.  He lost.”

The guns didn’t waver.

“He lost, and the Crown doesn’t lose.  Therefore, he’s not Crown.”

I could have laughed at the circular reasoning- I might have, if the guns hadn’t actually drooped a little.

I dropped away from the struggle to hamper the Infante’s one arm that wasn’t harpooned.  It took some doing, but I needed to sway the crowd.

Lillian’s coat over me, I climbed up the Infante’s arm to where Helen was.

Helen, our beautiful Helen.  She was a monster in disguise, but above all else, her role in the team had always been the actress.

Our glorious actress, from the point that she’d been kicked and injured, had played dead.  She’d played out her part, to the point it convinced us, because the Infante had needed to believe it to let his guard down.  No longer able to play effectively at being human, she had played her role perfectly when it came to being broken.

“Turn his head thirty degrees to the right,” I said.

I heard an exasperated sigh from her.  She was using her body to stifle him, to deny him air and keep him from effectively closing his jaw.  It yawned open now, to the point even one of the weasel-thing’s jaws might have dislocated.

But she had some leverage on the outside of his head, which she was using to make him face skyward, the coat covering the both of them.  She managed to get him to turn his head slightly.  Not thirty degrees, but enough to give them a glimpse.

Of ‘TITS’ – carved on the back of the noble’s head.

It wasn’t much, but in hurting the soldier’s faith…

The guns they’d lowered a fraction didn’t raise.

They needed to believe the Infante could win, or that he could win on his own, but we’d taken chunks out of the noble, and now we had him at our mercy.

Helen’s arm reached into the Infante’s mouth and up, likely finding a grip on the uvula or on the ledge that would lead up to the sinuses.  If the Infante was one to reflexively gag, he would have thrown up then.

As it was, it was purchase for her to go contortionist, to draw herself inches in deeper, a young lady making the giant of a man swallow her.

Minutes passed.  The harpoon gun was used twice more, lashing the Infante down further, so both arms were pinned down.  It meant the others could back off and get out of the rain.

I draped another coat over Helen, then backed off.

It took what I estimated to be nine minutes, all in all.  Struggles, two attempts at hauling hands and arms free of the barbed harpoons.  We fired more that had been brought from belowdecks.  The Infante slowly went limp, sagging to the ground.

Our actress remained where she was, making absolutely sure.

The audience was very still and very quiet, their eyes averted.

No applause to be had.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.11 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.11

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We wore coats that had been provided by the Professors.  Mine was too big for me.  The others wore coats that fit them- even Jessie had a coat draped over her, in addition to the one I’d put on her.

As a group, hunkered down against the rain, we worked on extracting Helen.

The soldiers who had been stationed around the base of the ramp were advancing, many of them gathering at the railing, watching, staring at the noble.  They watched us, and I was very aware that they were holding onto their guns, not putting the weapons away.

The flesh-melting rain pattered down around us.  Already, the clothes that the coats and coverings I’d been using were bleached or eroding away.  My skin hurt at the ankles and wrists when I stretched or pulled against it.  I worried that sooner or later, I would bend a wrist and the skin would split, welling blood and other fluids.

But I worried about Helen more.

She slid fully out of the Infante’s mouth, and we wrapped her in a cocoon of the multiple coats we’d arranged, using the momentum of her sliding down to the deck to keep her sliding along the wet wood.  We moved her to where the cabin encircled the ship’s navigation, and the overhanging bit of cover that we’d all been standing beneath.  ‘We’ being the Professors, the Lambs, and myself, when we hadn’t been actively helping.

As a unit, we unwrapped her as much as we’d already wrapped her.  Ashton lifted up her arm and side so Duncan could put the dry part of the coat beneath her, providing some protection from the water on the deck.  Not much had reached the area under the shelter.

“Help,” Duncan said.

He unbuttoned her top.  I moved to block the view of the soldiers behind us, while holding her head.

“Duncan,” Helen said.  “Manhandling me?  You cad.”

“I hope you’re satisfied,” I said.  “You got what you’ve been wanting for a while.”

“Reasonably satisfied,” Helen said, her voice soft.  “But now the bar’s been raised, whatever will I do next?”

“You could be content with this,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’m insatiable,” she said.  “I always want them bigger, stronger, harder… to beat.”

She was delirious.  Or worse, she was drunk on whatever hormones or whatever there was churning in her system, stoking her appetites for bloodshed, crushed bones, and asphyxiation.

The Devil of West Corinth lurked nearby.  They were out in force, prowling in the shadows, adding their forces to the soldiers who had us surrounded.

Lillian provided some light, a bright little bioluminescent flask, and Ashton held it.  Helen was visible in a stark blue-green and black.

“Plague,” Duncan observed.  “We’ve got the pinprick signs.”

“Surgery?” Lillian asked.

“How fun,” Helen said, barely audible.  She sounded like it was fun.

“Do you want to take point?” he asked.

“No.  You know Helen’s physiology better than I do.”

“I’m also rather fond of her.  It’s hard to be objective.”

“I operated on Mary, once upon a time.  It’s best if you do it.  We’ll split up the work, or I’ll keep you on track.”

“Got it,” Duncan said.

One of the Professors broke away from our group, approaching the soldiers.  They were a restless lot, moving this way and that, not wanting to stay in the rain, but not wanting to leave the scene either.  They paced around the deck, looking for safer ground, one or two choosing to stand where posts and gun mounts blocked some of the rain, others looking for overhangs.

They knew who we were.  They’d seen the Infante on edge, bristling with ugliness, the emperor sans his clothes, and they’d… not intervened.  No.  They’d hesitated.

Not quite letting it happen, and more than a momentary hesitation- nine minutes.  But it was the best way I could think of to parse it.

Duncan was using a gloved hand to explore where the plague was setting in.  He tapped at one spot near Helen’s armpit, and gave Lillian a severe look.  “He got you good.”

“I got him better,” Helen said.  Her smile was hitching again.

“You did,” Mary said.  “That was good.”

Helen worked out how to give a better smile.

Cynthia paced nearby, angry.

I was angry, I realized.  This was very explicitly everything I’d been striving to avoid.

“I’m going to have to cut away an awful lot of skin,” Duncan said.  “We’ll have to explore when we’re that far, and see how deep we end up going.”

“You know just what to say to a girl,” Helen said.  “You’ve come so far, Doctor Duncan Foster.”

Lillian handed Duncan the scalpel.

“No snapping,” I said.  “I know you’ll be tempted to jump one of us-”

Helen giggled.

“-But hold it back if you can.”

Mary was already tying Helen’s legs, using wire to bind her boots together.

“Oh,” Helen said.  “I’m not sure it’s worth bothering about.  I don’t think I’m very dangerous to anyone like this.”

“Ha ha,” I said the words, rather than actually laughing.  “Be serious now, so our doctors can do their work.”

“I’m being serious, Sy.”

I glanced at the others.  Was there a chance, any chance, that she was engaged in another ruse?  That she needed to convince us so we could convince the Professors and the small army that was surrounding us?

Duncan was removing her skin, peeling it away with tongs, while Lillian raised Helen’s arm to view it better in the light.

I set my jaw.

That was serious, then.

“Oh, you should know I have a stab wound from the fight on the rooftop, in my side.  Something bitey squirmed its way inside of me, through that entry point.  I pinned it down, squeezing it with surrounding muscles.  If you get close to it, it might come unpinned, depending.”

“Something bitey?” Ashton asked.

“It got a few nips at my insides before I squeezed its head shut,” Helen said.  “Nothing too bad, I don’t think, but I wouldn’t want you sliding your hand inside of me and coming out with a stump.”

“Thank you, Helen,” Duncan said, unfazed.  “That’s appreciated.”

His voice was tense.

For the time being, his focus was so overwhelmingly on his work that it looked like he was completely unaware of what the others around us were doing.

Saving Helen first.  Other concerns came secondary.

I wasn’t doing much, but I couldn’t see myself leaving her side.  I tried to think about the imminent situation with these soldiers who had no reason to let us go, and it was hard.

A different kind of hard than it had been back when I’d run away the first time, and my Wyvern had run out.

“I might need to take your left arm entirely,” Duncan told Helen.

“Okay.  That’s my fault.  I needed to grab his shoulder for leverage.  The contact was direct, that’s why it progressed as much as it did.”

“I’ll handle the arm,” Lillian said.

“If we get out of this okay, I’ve got my creator on a leash to put me back together, right?” Helen asked.

Duncan and Lillian seemed too preoccupied to answer.

“That’d be the plan,” I said.

“It’s good that we captured him, then,” Helen said.  She closed her eyes, and for a moment I worried she wouldn’t open them again.  “Good job, Lambs.”

Duncan continued to strip away flesh.  He applied powder as he went, to keep infection and the flow of blood down.

“Crown and Lords, there’s so much interconnection,” he muttered under his breath.  “You’re a complicated person to work on, Helen.”

“I’m special that way.”

He continued working.  Here and there, he cut away sections of muscle.  The commentary seemed to stop for a daunting length of time.

He’d turned to using gestures instead, communicating with Lillian.  Helen couldn’t move her head enough to see.  I couldn’t see very well, either.

“You can say it,” she said.  “I’m not going to be upset.  It’s interesting, being taken apart, the feelings of cold wet air between skin and the rest of me.  I dare say it’s fun.”

“You’re not the one I’m concerned about,” he said.

Helen sighed dramatically.

“Do you need me to go?” I asked.

“No,” Lillian said.

“Just offering,” I said.

“No,” she said.  “Worrying about what you’d be getting up to would be more distracting than the inconvenience of having you here.”

“I can feel the affection, how many years in the making?” I asked.

“I adore you, you lunatic,” Lillian said.  She severed the last major connecting piece attaching Helen’s arm to the shoulder.  “If you have any doubt about that, then I urge you to be mindful of the fact that it’s dark, we’re in a warzone of your devising, the amount of rain is ludicrous, and I’m saying that as someone who spent most of her life living in a city where it doesn’t ever stop raining-”

“Fair,” I said.

“Except today’s forecast isn’t just heavy, it’s capable of melting flesh,” she said, pointing at me with Helen’s arm, before sweeping it around to indicate our surroundings, “we’re surrounded by soldiers-”

Duncan paused in his work, glancing around.  He returned his attention to the excisions.

“-and I could go on,” Lillian said.  “You’re not the whole reason I’m here, but you’re some of it, and I certainly wouldn’t be in this particular situation if I wasn’t attached to you on some level.  You complete and utter loon.”

“There’s no need for name calling,” I said, under my breath.

“Was there really a need to carve a puerile insult into the back of the Infante’s head?”

“No,” I said.

“Did it make a difference?”

I glanced at the others.  The Professors weren’t in earshot, the soldiers were keeping a wider berth, as focused on the infante as they were on us.  They were keeping their distance from the Noble’s body, even though he was clearly deceased.  Concern for the plague, or was the man’s presence so daunting that he cowed others even in death?

Mary leaned forward, kneeling on Helen’s arm, “Duncan.  I’ll take over here.  I’ve watched long enough and I have a fairly good hand.”

Duncan handed her a scalpel.

“Did it make a difference?” Lillian hissed at me.

“Some, small, but not in a major way.  But there was more reasoning behind it.”

“Really,” Lillian said.

“Okay, not reasoning, but…”

Lillian arched an eyebrow, looking at me.

“Comprehensive instinct,” I said.  “If we lost… where would he go?  Here.  He’d be mindful of what his soldiers saw, so he’d want to stop them.  It diverts his focus.  Maybe we get a chance to signal our people,” I said, my voice quiet.  “Maybe we don’t.  Either way, while he’s preoccupied limiting any danger to his pride, they have more of a chance to get away.”

“It’s juvenile.”

“I pricked him earlier, when I said he never got to live a real life, I think.  He never had a childhood.  Juvenile… it made sense in the moment.”

“Everything makes sense to you in the moment,” Mary said.

I laughed, a contrast to what I was feeling as I saw Duncan and Mary work together to remove a handful of flesh from Helen’s side.

“Getting close to my little buddy,” Helen murmured.

“Noted,” Duncan said.  “Mary?  Stab it if it shows up.”

“An awful lot of things make no sense to me, and it’s getting worse over time,” I said.  “Nobody can see the back of their head.  If he had people see, it would always be a niggling doubt in the back of his mind, a desire to check.  For someone that untouchable, if he were to stomp us out, but have to live with that small doubt?  It’s minor, but I’m willing to aim for that as a final fuck-you from the Lambs.  It served multiple purposes.  More were for if we were defeated.”

“Alright,” Lillian said.  “I can just imagine the letter being written to my parents.”

The grisly work continued.  Duncan gestured, then swapped places with Lillian.

“Darn it,” Duncan murmured.  “It progressed.  I wanted to come back to see if it would.  Helen?  I’m going to have to take your left breast.”

“Mm,” Helen made a sound.  “That’s a shame.  I liked her.  She’s prehensile, you know.”

“You do not have a prehensile bosom,” Duncan said.

“I gave them names, a long, long time ago.  Do you remember the names, Jamie-Jessie?”

I glanced over at where Jessie lay slumped against the wall.  I didn’t like that she was so far away, so vulnerable, the rest of us with our hands full.  I ran my fingers through Helen’s hair, her head in my lap.

“She can’t hear you,” I said.

“Found your little buddy,” Lillian said.

“Speaking of names, we should give it a name,” Helen said.  “Tell me about it.”

“We’re going to kill it,” Mary said.

“All the more reason to give it a name,” Helen said.  “It came from somewhere, it has feelings, even if those feelings are ‘destroy this pretty girl’s insides’ and ‘squirm’.

“Those aren’t feelings,” I said.  “Those are instincts.”

“I would have you know, Sylvester Lamsbridge, you loon,” Helen said, “That not only are those feelings, but they’re feelings I’ve held close to my heart at times.”

“Alright,” I said.

“Red,” Lillian said.  “It’s red.”

“Rosie?” Helen jumped in.  “No, too close to Sub Rosa.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s plague-affected,” Lillian elaborated.  “Duncan, best if you drop what you’re doing.  The Infante laced the creature with plague before sending it after Helen.”

“That would explain why the plague is spreading from smaller bite wounds,” Duncan said.

“It was such a novel experience, being inside someone while something was inside me.  I very nearly almost let more of them into me, to feel them squirm.  I’m glad I didn’t, now.”

“I’m glad too,” I said.

“I wasn’t in my right mind,” Helen said.  “I’m not in my right mind either now, but I can pretend to be, and I almost sound normal, don’t I?”

“You do,” I said.

“Letting the one in was enough,” Lillian said, almost to herself.  “Duncan-”

“I see it,” Duncan said, curt.  “I need a bigger blade.”

Mary drew and passed him a bigger blade.

With the three hunched over the site, I could only hear the work being done.

“I’m being rummaged in,” Helen said.

“You are,” I said.

“It’s a novel sensation.”

“It might be a while before you get that sensation again,” Duncan said.

“Controls,” Lillian muttered.  “If we excise-”

“I know,” he said.  “Listen, Helen…”

“You keep telling me what you’re having to do, as if you expect me to be upset.  I’ll keep being fine with it.  Chop at me, cut into me, rip me up and truncate me, and I’ll manage.”

“We’re going to have to take pretty much everything in your stomach, ribs to pelvis.”

Helen craned her head around, trying to see.  Mary and Lillian weren’t saying anything.

In the background, the Professors, soldiers, doctors, and other major staff were still discussing what to do about this situation.  The death of the Infante posed a problem, and they were working out how to deal with it.  We posed a problem, and they were working out how to deal with us.

“…I’ll amend my statement,” Helen admitted.  “I’m not entirely fine with that.  I need my middle to hold the sweets I’ve eaten.”

“You’re going to have to do without,” Duncan said.  “It might have reached into your upper chest cavity, by the looks of it.”

“Shoot,” Helen said.  “But that’s preferable to my middle.  I’m afraid I’m not strong enough at the moment to open my ribcage for you.”

“We’ll handle that,” he said.

I did my part, holding her down while the others worked to pry the ribs up and away.  They opened like the legs of an insect.

The silence as the others looked at it was telling enough.

“We can get away with taking half of it.  Better to take too much at this stage.”

“Limiters,” Lillian said, insistent.

“I know.  We don’t really have a choice,” Duncan said.

“All of my middle and half of my upper torso?” Helen asked.  “I didn’t know you were the type to be rough and selfish when you had a pretty girl on her back.”

“Trust me,” Duncan said, “I really don’t want to be doing this.  Nothing selfish about this.”

“Greedy, then, not selfish.”

“I always saved you an extra portion of dessert,” Duncan said.

“Yes.  You’re a dear like that.  You’re right.  I don’t know what to call you then.”

“Call me Doctor,” he said.  He surveyed the damage thus far.  “Lords.”

“Doctor Lords?  I do believe that’s not allowed.  Crown Law.”

Duncan plunged in, a large knife in his hand.

“We’re going to have to take everything below the ribcage,” Lillian said.  “No preserving spine, no more legs.”

“I knew you were a fan of nice legs,” Helen said.  “Sylvester has them, running around like a loon all the time.”

“Stop calling me a loon, please.  I’m good at running, too.  The way you make me sound, I’m flailing my arms around as I make my two-legged gallops from point A to point B.”

Helen laughed.  Heads all around the deck turned at the sound.

Lillian took a large knife from Mary and, two hands on the flat back of the blade rather than the handle, pressed her weight down.  I could hear the sound as the blade crunched its way between bone.  Severing the spine.

“Something serrated?” Lillian asked.  “I can’t get through everything in here.”

“I’ll do it,” Mary said.  “Help Duncan.  He needs it.”

Duncan’s expression had changed.  He wasn’t speaking anymore, only working grimly.

“For your information, my dear doctors,” Helen said, closing her eyes.  “I’m feeling a touch lightheaded.”

“We can deal with that,” Lillian said.  “But that might be a good excuse to have a discussion sooner than later.”

I swallowed.  The discussion further along the prow was continuing.  No argument, no shouting.  Purely organizational.  Everyone there knew their place in the scheme of things, and it would take a great deal to shake them from it.

“So,” Lillian said.

“You’re so lovely, Lillian,” Helen said.  “I hope you know that.”

“Shush now, we need to explain and speak, and you’re only going to make it harder,” Lillian said.

I ran my fingers through Helen’s hair.

Lillian drew in a deep breath, then said, “There may be a way forward.  I think Duncan and I are on the same page.  Sylvester might call it Duncan and I dancing, but I don’t think that’s it.  More that we’re getting to the point where it becomes relatively easy to make choices, because there really aren’t many good ones.”

“I’m glad there’s a way forward,” Helen said.

“Maybe,” Lillian said.  “Part of it is dependent on that committee over there deciding not to shoot us.”

“I’m thinking on that one,” I said.  “I’m a little distracted by all this, but I’m thinking.”

Thinking might not have been the right word.  I was trying to read the crowd, trying to feel my way toward any direction I might go in if I had to improvise something.

Still, I didn’t want to give them less reason to be confident.

“Good to know,” Lillian said, without missing a beat.  “You’ve got your head, Helen.  You have your essential vitals.  We’ll see what we can do.  You won’t be mobile, mind you.  You won’t be much of anything.”

“Not so different from Jessie, then.  You’re putting me away.”

I winced at that.

“You won’t be dreaming, Helen,” Lillian said.  “Maybe after, if we can figure out a drug cocktail, but if we can strike this delicate balance, we might not want to upset it.  At least for a while, until we can get to a place where we can start putting a Helen back together.”

“Cloning?” Mary asked.

“Something in that department,” Lillian said.

“I’m patient,” Helen said.  “It’s one of my better qualities.”

“One you’ve been lacking in lately,” I said.

“I had an epiphany, while seeing to the Infante,” Helen said.  “I’ll manage just fine, I think.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” I said.

“I’ll have you know I’m one of the best liars among the Lambs.  Maybe even better than you.”

“You won’t have the limiters in place,” Lillian said.  “Nothing to restrict, nothing to restrain.”

“Ah,” Helen said.  “Well, that’s unkind.  I’m starting to be much less fine with this.”

“There’s nothing salvageable in that department,” Lillian said.  “While you’re all bound up-”

“I won’t be very restful or calm,” Helen said.  “That’s alright.  I know what you’re going to say.  None of that.”

“You’re sure?” Lillian asked.  “You want to do this?”

“I am very sure.  I’ll have you know, my appetite is an appetite for life.  I will not die to avoid an unpleasant-”

“Hellish,” Lillian corrected.  “Wanting but unable to have, restless but unable to move.  Probably wanting and feeling restless to degrees that none of the rest of us could imagine.”

“Fine.  I will not die to avoid even a hellish… how long?”

“Months.  A year and a half.  Two years or more wouldn’t be completely out of the question, depending on how motivated Ibbot was in helping us,” Lillian said.  The emotion had drained from her voice.

I wanted to hug her and hold her.

“Even for that long,” Helen said, earnestly.  “Because it means I get to see you and Duncan again.  I’ll get to see Ashton, too.”

She hadn’t made mention of Mary, Jessie, or me.

“I do hope to see you too, Sylvester,” Helen said, as if she’d read my mind.  “And Mary, and Jessie.  We went to all that trouble to recruit Doctors and Professors who could look after our projects.  Let’s see if we can stick it out that long.  It’s not like I can lose my mind, can I?  It’ll take some doing, but you can change the balances and re-establish limiters.”

“We don’t know that you can’t lose your mind,” Lillian said.  “Your brain is different, but that doesn’t make you immune.  You could be irrevocably changed.”

“We’ve had other Lambs do that.  That’s fine,” Helen said.

“If this even works,” Lillian said.  “You could die when we cut you down to the minimum necessary.”

“I’ll try my hardest,” Helen said, her voice firm.  “You two try hard too.”

Duncan nodded, face turned down.  He was still cutting away from the contents of her upper chest.

As fond as I’d grown of Jessie in the time I’d spent with her, I supposed Duncan had spent nearly as much time with Helen.

I glanced at Ashton.  He seemed fine.

The little blockhead.

“Would you like to speak to some of us alone?” Lillian asked.

“I would not,” Helen said.  “I’ll just say my just-in-case goodbye.”

Her eyes moved around, looking at each of us in turn.

Her eyes met mine.  I nodded.

“If I don’t see you again, then goodbye, you lovely creatures,” Helen said.  “If I do see you again, I expect to be welcomed with a working midsection and a whole table covered in tasty things.”

“That can be arranged,” I said.

Ashton, still holding the light for the doctors, had to maneuver in an awkward way to not deny Duncan his light, while getting up closer to Helen’s head.

“Avoid the right cheek,” I said.  Helen had a vein of plague standing out on the right cheek.

Ashton gave her a kiss on the left cheek instead.

“You’re my favorite,” Helen said, to Ashton.

“I know,” he said.  “You’re mine.”

The Professor we’d talked to earlier, Lawrence, had approached us while we were preoccupied.  He wanted to address us, talking to us.

“Let us finish?” I asked.

“That’s fine,” he said.  “Once you’re done, we’ll be taking you into custody belowdecks.  We’ll deliver you to the Crown Capitol.”

“No,” I said.  “There’s too much to be done here.  We have no plans to go to the Crown Capitol.”

“That’s not an option,” he said.

“It’s very much an option,” I said, my voice hard.  “But it’s in your hands.  Weigh your choices, Professor Lawrence.  We killed the Infante.  Do you really consider yourselves beyond reach?  You’re choosing to take us and trying to return to the way things were?”

“What option would you pose?”

“The other choice is that you walk away, you all tell a story where the Infante was seized by plague, and the Crown States were overtaken by plague and black wood, with no survivors.”

“You’d stay?”

Just beside me, Lillian cut into Helen’s face.

I ran my hand along the back of Lillian’s head, letting it run down her hair to her shoulder.  I gently rubbed her back while she worked, not so hard as to disturb what she was doing.

“Look at us,” I said.  “We’re not long for this world, are we?  We helped you clean up what could have been a rather embarrassing situation with a Noble gone berserk.  Don’t take our freedom in our last days and weeks together.”

“You’ll have days and weeks together in your cell, as we travel back,” he said.  “The decision was made, and you’re in no position to change it.”

“Are you in a position to leave?” I asked.  This was the direction I’d been pondering.  “The Infante intentionally spread plague.  He walked through that crowd of soldiers over there, and some of them are already going to be showing signs of it.  He affected others, I’m sure.  Quarantine procedures must be adhered to.”

“I’m well aware,” Lawrence said.  “We won’t need to adhere too much.  It’s going to be a… rather small number of crew and passengers.”

They were simply going to slaughter and burn all who could potentially be infected.

“As soon as they’re done,” Lawrence addressed soldiers that had approached.  “Take them to the cells belowdecks.  The quarantine ones, meant for the warbeast.”

The ship moved, hull grinding as it pulled away from the walls of Radham that it had breached, from Fray, and from Hayle.

Here in the cell, at least, we were out of the rain.

“We’re moving away,” Duncan said.  “Back toward the town where we assembled our forces.  Probably to pick up some secondary forces, or to ensure they’ve tied up all loose ends.  Black wood isn’t out of the question.”

I sat on a table and watched out the window, seeing Radham slide further away.

“Does she like being stroked, do you think?” Ashton asked.

“I can’t imagine it hurts,” Lillian said.

“Alright then,” Ashton said.

This war is not yet done.  The Crown Capitol is not part of the plan.  Not like this.  You will escape.

“Patience,” I said, under my breath.

“Talking to Jessie?” Lillian asked.

Jessie was propped up beside me, her head on my shoulder.  Still sleeping.

“No,” I said.  “More to the voice in my head.”

“Singular?”

I nodded.

Lillian approached me, standing by the table, and she hugged the arm that Jessie wasn’t leaning against.

“I always wanted to see the Crown Capitol one day,” she said.

“We’re not going to the Crown Capitol,” I said.

“Oh?  You have a plan?”

“Do you still have the bioluminescent lantern?”

“Duncan has a fresh one in his bag.”

“Shine it out the window.  Flash code.  We’ll see if anyone’s looking.  Our options will depend on that.”

Lillian gave me a peck on the shoulder, then crossed the room.

Duncan was sitting against the wall opposite me.  Ashton was beside him, and the two of them held Helen.  She was, in rough dimensions and in size, about the same as a two-stone bag of flour.  She was encased in the organ tissues they’d been able to salvage, which had been wrapped thoroughly in bandages.  Blood was seeping through the bandage, so they had a raincoat between her and their laps.  Ashton stroked her.

“Can she hear us?” Ashton asked.

“I tried to preserve the pilifer rings.  It’s a question of how well the connection between the rings and the brain structures lasted.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.

“But I’ve been talking to her on the assumption she can hear,” Duncan said.

“Okay,” Ashton said.

When Lillian returned, she came with Mary.

Mary handled the flash code.

I turned my head, watching out the window.

“We got a response,” Mary said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.12 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.12

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Avis sat in the indent around the window, watching in silence.  Ashton stood next to her, cradling Helen in his arms, his focus on the events beyond the window.

Mary had removed her coat, blouse, and skirt.  She was wearing only her underthings, her weapons in plain view where they had hung beneath her clothes.  Where rainwater had splashed or otherwise found its way to bare skin, it had left red tracks, raw, the skin swollen and pink on either side of it.  Beads of water had formed round marks.  Lillian was rubbing a salve in place.  Mary flinched every time Lillian daubed some salve near one of the tracks.

Only a quarter of the blades were still there, the rest of her stock depleted.

The room was metal, floor to ceiling, which was rare, because wood was more versatile and often almost as strong.  Sheets and panes of steel were bolted to one another.  Beams had been sunken into the walls, reinforcing the plates while making it impossible to even find a good edge to pry at.  The door was metal, too, big enough to drive a wagon through, with a single round window.  Were the glass to be removed, one of us could have put an arm through it, but that was it.  Even Helen at her best or a current Helen that was somehow ambulatory wouldn’t have fit through it.

The room hadn’t been scrubbed well enough after housing its prior occupant.  It didn’t smell, not exactly, but the air was stale, and the ground was browner and more corroded than any of the other surfaces.

Not that there was anything we could use.

“We’re slowing down,” Ashton said.  He had his shirt off.  Duncan was going over his hair with a fine metal comb.  The window he peered through wasn’t any bigger than the one in the door.  From the exterior, the vaguely rounded bulge with the circle set in the middle might have looked like the orb of an eye, with an unmoving pupil.

It was structurally unsound, as the bends and curves in metal were easier to tear and damage than the flat expanses.  It was no doubt meant to be that way.  If the ship were prepared for war, then munitions sufficient to damage it would open up this space, and the denizen, no doubt a large warbeast or other experiment, would be unleashed, set to go after whoever had opened fire.

I would have liked to think that was a feature we could exploit, but our side didn’t have those kinds of munitions, we didn’t have the means to breach our way out using that same weakpoint.

Our captors were smart.  They knew their experiments, and all but two of us were experiments.  They’d contained us effectively, and we were making our peace with the fact.  Duncan and Lillian had doled out medicine, they’d looked after Helen briefly, the rest of us had done our best to signal the people on the outside, and now we were dealing with the secondary things.  Checking for plague, resting, gathering our strength, and thinking.

I worried it would be our last gasp for air before we took the plunge.

“I miss having Jessie to keep track of timing,” I said.  My fingers were intertwined with Jessie’s, and she lay beside me, her head in my lap.  I raised her hand and kissed the back of it.  Was it my imagination, if her expression softened in the direction of a smile, at that?  “How far away is the town where the attacking army holed up?”

“Still a little far.  It’ll be five or ten minutes,” Ashton said.  “The streets are empty.  There were soldiers there and now there aren’t.  Others have moved far enough back that they aren’t in the acid rain.”

“Good to know,” I said.  I visualized it.  I didn’t want to move far from Jessie, and I didn’t want to spend unnecessary energy.  My right leg was twitching in protest of what I’d subjected it to.  I’d pushed myself so hard already.  “The army probably didn’t vacate in entirety.  They would’ve gone inside the houses and other buildings.”

“There are Tangles,” Ashton said.  “They aren’t too big though.  That might keep them inside.”

“Not so many Harvesters,” Duncan said.  He raised his head to look out the window.  “Don’t squeeze her too tight, Ashton.”

“I’m not,” Ashton said, adjusting his grip on Helen.

“Alright,” Duncan said.  “Almost done.”

“I’m checking Mary’s back.  Keep your backs turned, boys,” Lillian said.  She slipped the straps of Mary’s camisole from her shoulders.  I turned my head away.  Ashton turned his head, probably to see why he was supposed to have his back turned, and I reached out to touch his chin, averting his gaze.  Duncan shifted position, blocking Ashton’s view.

“I don’t mind,” Mary said.  “Everyone here has seen me undressed or given me surgery.”

“I like how you mention surgery,” I said.

“I don’t think there’s anything more intimate or invasive than touching muscle directly or knitting a wound together.  Well, creating the wounds in the first place is pretty intimate and personal.”

“You’re so weird,” I said.

“You’re one to talk,” Mary said, at the same time Lillian said, “Says you.”

I sighed.

“No plague, acid burns aren’t too bad here, nothing close to the spine.  If we can actually get out of here and get through what comes next, I’ll check you over tonight,” Lillian said.  She gave Mary a pat on the shoulder.

Mary stood and began pulling her clothes back on.

“Be gentle, Ashton,” Duncan said.

Duncan,” Ashton said, exasperated.  “I’m being very gentle.”

“The work we did is delicate.  There are a few square pegs attached to triangular holes there, and they’re one ripped stitch from being unattached.  I’d like to get to an actual lab to put more permanent things in place.  Ports, artificial tubing, inject some fluids to top her up.  Maybe some regulatory measures.  We’ll have to do it sooner or later, to inject some proteins to the pyloric sac.  Get the cloning of organs and tissues started, of course.”

“Of course,” Ashton said.

“After that, you’ll be able to hug her as tight as you want.  But for now, be gentle.”

“Oh,” Ashton said, “I remember back at the Academy, one of the doctors made a pet for her little sister back home.  It was like a puppy, but it didn’t have fur, and it didn’t have bones, and you could squeeze it and its eyes would pop out.  We could do that, when we make her more huggable.  Not that she has eyes, but we could give her some.”

“We’re not going to do that to Helen, Ashton,” Duncan said.

“But she’d like it.  You could squeeze one of the eyeballs while it was bugged out and the other one would double in size, when it was already big.  You could squeeze one of the little legs and move all the fluids and stuff to the foot, to make the foot so huge.”

“We’re not going to do that to Helen.”

“It could move too.  She’d like to be able to move again, I think.  The puppy thing flopped around.  I’m no expert, but I think the mechanism was very simple.  I’d say it had one point of articulation, like a pillow with a hinge in the middle, but more squishy.”

“What’s going on outside?” I interrupted.  “I’d check, but Jessie’s leaning on my shoulder, and I’m trying to conserve my energy.”

Ashton turned, peering past Avis’ feet to look out the window.

Duncan gestured at me.  Thanks.

“We should check each other over, Duncan,” Lillian said.  She was helping Mary keep wires in place as she pulled her clothes on.

“Alright,” Duncan said.  He started unbuttoning his shirt.  “Who does who first?”

My mind was still keyed toward visualization, from the fight with the Infante and his pet.  I could visualize Lillian and Duncan checking each other over.

“Checking for plague and scars?” I asked.  “Nothing more?”

“And any signs of stray parasites, damage from exposure to gas, um, the borrowed quarantine suits rubbed skin raw in places, and those places would be vulnerable to anything invasive, chemicals, or even some gases.”

“Come,” I said.  “I’ve got experience with this, from… that city where Jamie and I lived for a while, after leaving Radham.  Before Jessie.  I check you, you check Duncan.  Primate style grooming.”

Lillian glanced at Duncan, who shrugged.  She approached me, unbuttoning her top, and I averted my eyes.  I wasn’t sure why.  She stood in front of the table I was sitting on, and I turned her around, leaning her against the table’s edge, my knees on either side of her hips, holding her in place there.

“Any more flashes?” I asked.  I helped Lillian pull off her top.

“No,” Ashton said.

“Probably not many, then.  They’ll be trying to organize,” I said.  I examined Lillian’s back by the windowlight.  The light illuminated the fine little hairs and the the texture of the skin, goosebumps and all.

The plague tended to start with the smallest markings.  A red circle, no bigger than a goosebump, with a darker spot of red in the middle.

Duncan settled in in front of Lillian.

“Are we getting out of this?” Lillian asked.

“It’s far from impossible,” I said.  “We have a lot of assets out there, in a variety of types.  It could be as simple as an explosive, to take the head of whatever creature it is that drags this ship.  Put it well in front of the ship while we’re parked here, detonate it when it gets far enough along, and it stops.  Dead in the metaphorical water.”

I slipped my finger under Lillian’s brassiere strap, moving it to a different point on her shoulder.  She shivered.

Mary was in the background, sitting against a table by the door out.  I could look over Lillian’s shoulder and see her, staring me down.

I used my fingers, touching points on either side of the faint red mark the strap had made, pressing against the skin of her shoulder and shoulder blade.  I moved the fingers apart, making the skin between them whiten with the tension.

“I’m not sure that’s what I meant,” Lillian said.  She began looking after Duncan.  Duncan had his back to her, while she had her back to me.

“What did you mean?” I asked.

“Are we all walking away from this?”

“Helen isn’t,” I said.  “Walking, I mean.  She’s missing something like fifty parts necessary for that.”

Sy,” Duncan said.  “Come on.”

“Jessie isn’t walking either.  I give the rest of us fifty-fifty odds.”

I saw Lillian draw in a deep breath.  Her sigh was heavy.

I checked beneath the other strap.  The water had soaked into her clothing, and the places where seams met and rubbed against skin were more susceptible than some.  Here, the prolonged contact of damp cloth had made the skin red, and where it was red, it was starting to look… threadbare, for lack of a better word.  The skin looked like it could tear and start bleeding if I stretched or stressed it too much.

“Salve?”

Lillian passed me the salve without turning around.  I applied the salve, then took the offered bandage, setting it in place and letting the strap rest against the padding, pressing it down against the minor wound.

I undid her brassiere at the back, and I checked beneath it, in much the same fashion.  The goosebumps were more pronounced, now.  The fine hairs stood on end.  My hand moved along the expanse of her back, me measuring my way, remembering what I’d covered and examined already.

“I don’t see anything resembling normal ahead of us,” she said.

“Normal was never the point,” I said.  “Two more gods to slay.  We bring about a change.  Because the way things worked and the destiny that was set forth before?  They weren’t workable.  Not tolerable.”

“I don’t disagree,” she said.

I brushed her hair to one side, exposing the nape of her neck.  I examined it.

“I need a scalpel,” she said.

“Damn it,” Duncan said.  He reached over her shoulder, passing one to her.

“Looks like a carnacari.  Not so bad,” Lillian said.  “But I wouldn’t want to rule out it passing the plague from person to person.  We’ll remove it.”

“Please,” Duncan said.

She cut away a small ‘o’ of flesh near his armpit.

“I need a comb,” I said.

Ashton handed me the comb that Duncan had used on him.  I pored my way over Lillian’s scalp.

“I don’t disagree, that we had to change things from the intolerable, unworkable state they were in,” Lillian said.  As I swept the comb through her hair, her head lolled a touch with it.  As if I was the snake charmer, moving my flute, captivating her with the steady, fluid movement.  “But.  I don’t know if I see a tolerable, workable future ahead of us, here.  Losing Helen hurts.”

“It sucks,” I said, combing, searching.  “But you two will piece her together again.”

“Describe it to me, Sy,” Lillian said.  “What happens next?”

“I don’t know what happens next.”

“Come on, Sy,” she said.

“We’re in the shadow of the first god, we’re enduring his death rattles, and the fact that someone who stands that tall takes a long time to fall and he falls hard.  There are ramifications and we’ll ride this wave as best we can.  Hopefully we ride it back in that direction.  Two gods more stand between us and where we want to go.  So I can’t tell you, because I don’t know what Fray’s done.  She always stays her hand, she holds back, and then she overturns everything.  The landscape could be very different once she makes her play.”

“Hayle is the third god, then?”

“Kind of,” I said, daubing salve on some acid burns behind her ear.  I couldn’t search the top of her scalp without standing over her or having her bend over with the top of her head facing me.  Which was a fun position to imagine, but not practical when she was still looking after Duncan.

I undid Lillian’s skirt at the side.  She paused in her work.

I could see the way she’d stopped breathing, I could see the vague definition of muscle against skin, at her back, and it wasn’t shifting as she breathed.  She resumed working, then resumed breathing a moment later.

Ashton turned his head to look, and I stuck my finger out, poking his chin, and turned his face back toward the window again.  I said, “I’m not worried about what Hayle might do to the landscape.”

“To you?” Lillian asked.

“Maybe,” I said.  I folded the band of her skirt down, then turned my attention to the band of the underclothing beneath.  I started checking it much as I had the straps of her brassiere.

“To all of us?”

“To a degree,” I said.  I continued my examination.  My thumb brushed against the hard bone of pelvis, above her right leg, and her hand dropped down, laying over mine, stopping me from progressing further.

Lillian was focused on another excision.  That one looked like plague, but she wasn’t saying as much.  It looked early and isolated, from what I could see over her shoulder.

“He set our expiration dates.  Very deliberately,” I said, my voice soft.  “He was going to set yours, in a way, when he denied you your black coat and laid the groundwork to keep you from ever getting it.  He asserted a degree of control.”

“You said control wasn’t it.”

“It wasn’t,” I said.  “The shadow Hayle is casting, that makes it hard to see what lies on the other side… it’s like he was there when we all got our start.  Duncan excepted, to a degree.  He set our ending.”

“Beginnings and endings?  The journey?” Duncan asked.

I was slightly annoyed that he was chiming in, while I sat behind Lillian, my knees pressing against her hips, my hand laying against that bone, my fingertips tracing the skin of her stomach, feeling her breathe in and out.  It spoiled the moment a bit.

Perhaps unfair.  He hadn’t really chosen this venue or circumstance.

“Maybe one way of putting it,” I said.  “It was actually what I first thought of, when I was trying to wrap my head around the obstacles ahead of us.  But not quite.”

“You don’t need to check me below the waist,” Lillian said.  “I was careful to minimize exposure.  I took off the top half and tied it down, but I secured the waist tight before I did so, and I followed quarantine protocol.”

“That’s good,” I said, keeping my voice neutral.

She could have told me that minutes ago, before I’d undone the side of her skirt.

I shifted my hand, and she let me pull it away.  I fixed her skirt at the side, then gathered up her uniform shirt.

I waited, watching the muscles move beneath skin, hair sliding from where I’d moved it over one shoulder to view her neck, tracing tickling lines against her.

Suppressing a sigh, I drew back, relaxing.  My hand lowered, resting on Jessie’s cheek.

I wished Jessie was awake.  I wanted to wake her up- I had to keep myself from forming and prioritizing a list of questions.  It was too easy to start thinking about what I might ask, in what order, if I could wake her up for two minutes, get two minutes of answers.

Too easy for that ‘what I might ask’ to become ‘what I would ask’, while I left the if in place.  Then it would, somewhere along the line, cease being in place.

She had wanted to be here, if I was remembering right.  No guarantees on that.  She’d wanted to keep me from sacrificing myself, to keep me sane, and to ensure that I had a Lamb with me at all times, even in part.

“I’m done, Duncan,” Lillian said.

“I’ll assume you haven’t had a chance to put your shirt back on,” Duncan said.  “I’ll keep my back turned.”

“It hardly matters, when you’re a Doctor,” Lillian said.

“I’m your friend, too.  It’s not as if I only ever see you during clinic hours at the Hedge.”

He walked away, buttoning up his shirt.

“You sound like Mary, being all cavalier like that” I said, in Lillian’s ear.  “And Mary sounds a bit like Helen.  Duncan sounds like he’s picking up some of the best traits of all of us.”

“And me?” Ashton asked, brightly, from a few feet to my left.

“I’m momentarily pretending you don’t exist,” I said.

“You’re so rude, Sy,” Ashton said.  “Rude people don’t make friends.”

“I’ve got better people than mere friends,” I said.  “I’ve got Lambs.  Now keep watching out that window, but cover your ears, please, and give us a moment of privacy.”

Ashton set Helen down on the table next to me, then raised his hands, covering his ears.  He shifted position, so his back was to us, but his body pressed against the table.  Presumably he was providing a barrier so that Helen wouldn’t fall or get knocked off somehow.

“As for you, Doctor, give me your hands,” I told Lillian.

She put her arms back, and I slid the her uniform shirt over her hands, helping her into it.  My hands on the front of the shirt, I brought it forward and around her upper body, until I was hugging her from behind.

“Whatever happens,” I murmured.  “I have believed that you were one of the good ones since I believed that good ones existed at all.  I have thoroughly believed, since a short while after that, that you had it in you to bring about a better future.  I might not know what Hayle is doing, I might be seriously concerned about the cards Fray is holding up her sleeve, but I trust in the Lambs.  I have faith in you.  All of you, but you and Jessie in particular.  It’s why I can trust you when I don’t trust myself.”

Lillian nodded.  She pulled at my arms, making the hug tighter.  “You should have faith in yourself, Sy.”

“Too dangerous,” I said.

“You should,” she said, quiet, her voice firm.

Across the room, Mary’s head turned.  A face had appeared in the window.

I didn’t let go of Lillian.  I watched them.

I really wished they’d open the door to check on us or say something.  It would have given us an out.  But they weren’t that stupid.  They wouldn’t.

There were few things I hated more than being contained.  Being kept.  I could remember some incidents after my appointments, where the pain had been too great, the confinement too awful.  I’d rebelled against my surroundings.

“Sy,” Lillian said.  “I feel like you’re preparing to sacrifice yourself.  That this is the last hug, the last time we really speak, and you’re going to hurl yourself out into whatever reality Hayle and Fray have painted for us.”

“Avis is sitting in the bowl of the window, next to Ashton,” I said.

“Is she?”

“She is.  She’s always been the messenger.  So that’s what I’m doing, saying what I need to say.  Conveying the message.”

Ashton lowered his hands from his ears.  “Sorry, but something’s happening out there.”

I released Lillian from the hug.  I glanced at Duncan and Mary, who were talking at the other end of the room.

Lillian moved away.  I had to extricate myself, with Helen against one leg and Jessie leaning against my one shoulder.  I placed Helen in Jessie’s arms, and hopped down from the table.

The town was being segregated.  The people were hard to make out, but they were being forced out of the houses, out into the rain.  Others were being gathered.  Where the one group was being pushed out, unformed ranks and casual citizens in no organization whatsoever, moved further from the ship, the ones who were being allowed to gather closer to the ship were organizing themselves into rank and file.

Quarantine, or the premise of quarantine.

I wasn’t sure it was her, but Lady Gloria appeared to be one of the figures being sent out with the teeming masses.  The sick, the ones without quarantine suits and requisite rank.

Depending on the degree to which that was a thing, it could utterly disarm us.  The vulnerable would be our rebels, the key figures the Infante had no doubt run into, Gloria included, who we’d been using to steer things.  They were the biggest fish of the small lakes and ponds, but the Infante’s Professors trumped even then.

I’d expected this to a degree.  I hadn’t expected it to be nearly this severe.

I’d expected them to use guns and fire.  We’d seen something like it in… I grasped for the city’s name.

Lugh.  In Lugh.  Where Gordon had died.  There, the cordon had closed, and everything within it destroyed.

Here, it was almost more awful.  The houses and homes were emptied, explosives shook the town where the inhabitants might not have opened the doors quickly enough or willingly left.  People were sent out and left to stumble their way through the streets, trying to cover their heads.

The battalion of soldiers lowered their weapons in unison, and then they began firing.  Those who didn’t move fast enough were gunned down.  Those who did move fast enough were forced into the open fields, beyond the town, where the rain could pour on them, where the scattered few harvesters might lurk in the taller grass or the irrigated rows of crops.

I worried some of those might be ours.

While everyone fled, it was the tall woman who moved in the opposite direction.  Against the flow.

The tall woman, who marched against the tide, charging at the Infante’s Professors and the elite soldiers they were retaining for the voyage home.  She endured the hail of bullets until she was three-quarters of the way to them.  She stumbled for the first time, found her feet, and only made it another two steps before stumbling again.  Then she fell.

This was grim.  More of the horrors of war, more of a reminder why I wanted to fight where we were fighting.

I took a step away.  I moved Helen aside, and I gathered Jessie up, preparing to lift her.

My knees wobbled.  I stopped.  I’d tired myself out.

“I’ll take her,” Lillian said.

I hesitated.

“I’ll take care of her.  Don’t worry.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Lillian gathered Jessie up.  “She’s light.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t say no, you know,” Lillian said.  She pulled Jessie closer to her, and secured Jessie’s grip.   “When I guessed you were planning on sacrificing yourself.”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said.  “I know you’re thinking about it, I suspect you’re faking being tired, so I take her, and you no longer have that burden that keeps you from throwing yourself into danger.”

“I’m not thinking about it,” I said.  The scenes outside were very clear in my mind.  The Infante.  The soldiers on the deck.  “I won’t.”

“You said that so easily,” she said.  She sounded sad as she said it.

She moved away, joining the others by the door.  They were getting prepared, pulling boots back on, gathering their equipment.

“Ashton,” I said.  “Do you have the light?”

He raised the light to the window.

“Are they there?”

Ashton flashed.  The pattern was right for ‘question’.  I remembered that much.

Standing just behind him, I could see the response.

Yes.

The response was visible from within the rank and file of elite soldiers.

“Remind me,” I said.

“No.  Aggress,” Ashton said, moving his free hand in the pattern.  “Aggress.  They said it twice.”

“We used to do that,” Mary said.  “Blanks.  They got our initial message.  They knew the quarantine measures were coming.  They’re firing blanks.”

Good.  That was good.

We had soldiers among the crew that would board this ship.  They would come to us.  We had troops among the ‘fallen’, if they weren’t entirely ours.  I hoped they had protected themselves against the acid rain, or that the rain had thinned out enough, this far from the city, that it wouldn’t hurt them too much.

All we needed was for the Infante’s Professors to let their guards down.  They could torch the town and walk away, seeing it as a job well done, and they could leave all of this behind… let their guards down, at least to some degree, and we could turn the tables.

I almost felt like this was workable.  Almost.

Then Fray made her move.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.13 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.13

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Too much forethought to be Mauer, especially with the resources that were apparent.  Too counterintuitive to be the Crown.  Hayle was pinned down and didn’t have the means, the resources, position or forewarning to pull this off.

A Tangle was emerging from the town.  Its overall shape was different; it almost had a color scheme, because the bodies that formed it were all wearing Crown uniforms, and it had something resembling a head, though the angle of our view from the window meant that all I could make out was a singular dark shape.  In terms of size, it was as large as the largest Tangle we’d seen in the city itself- large enough to touch the ground and the top of the tallest wall around the Academy itself.

The Tangle wasn’t the entirety of it.  There were people from the town marching alongside with the thing.  They had flanked the rank and file of the elite soldiers and the Infante’s professors.  Now the Tangle was charging in.

Our people were in that mess.  People we were counting on to get us out of this cell.

Something like this had taken planning.  It had taken premeditation, and it had taken a keen mind.

Fray.

I slammed one fist against the window, my jaw set.

“What happened?” Mary asked.

I turned to face her.  “Some specialized Tangle is being directed, working with a small rebel group.  It just attacked the soldiers.  It might be going after the Professors.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.  “Oh, that’s not the plan.”

I turned back around.

The ‘dead’ were starting to rise, now that many of the guns were being trained on the Tangle.  The ‘dead’ that had feigned death after being shot at with empty cartridges turned on the army, with improvised weapons and guns of their own.

It wasn’t enough.  Too few of them compared to the soldiers that had been selected to get a ride home.  They were taking the action of the Tangle here to be some kind of cue from us, the sign that they should move in, catch the main army by surprise, and we would crush them.

The problem being that our rebels and double agents were still in there.

“Can you concoct anything to get us out of here?  An acid, an explosive?”

“They confiscated everything we could theoretically use,” Lillian said.  “I have some packets of poison in my bra and some pills and small blades hidden in my clothing, but that’s not going to do anything.”

“Fingertip syringes?” I asked.

“One.  They’re too much of a pain to maintain, and it affects circulation,” Lillian said, sounding a little defeated.  “It’s nothing we can use.”

“I used everything I had on that rooftop,” Duncan said.

I nodded.

Ashton, holding the light, began flashing the signal for ‘help’.  It was a good thought.  I wasn’t sure the people positioned to offer that help were close enough to give it.

There wasn’t much to be done except to watch.  The army tried to defend its position, making a fighting retreat into the ship, and the Tangle attacked the ramp.  The Professors at the rear lines were among a scant few who made it into the ship before the ramp went to pieces.  I could feel the heavy doors below slamming shut.  The impact reverberated through the ship.

“And that would be the doors to the boarding ramp,” I said.

The others shared looks.  Duncan dropped his bag to the floor.

I punched the metal-reinforced wall.  The impact didn’t even reverberate across the wall in question.

The sound of the rain against the side of the ship had changed.  The gunfire had petered out, replaced by a periodic dull thud.  Twice, we had been hit in a way that had made the entire ship shift, something integral giving way.

A hand on my head made me stir.  I lay on the table, my chest to Jessie’s back.  Lillian stood beside me, one eye on the window, one hand on my head.

“I’m not going to do that, Ashton,” Duncan was saying.  I’d missed the lead-up to that conversation.

“If you don’t remember everything, I could help you brainstorm.  You have paper in your bag.”

“First of all, no,” Duncan said.

“Yes!  If it’s a chance!”

“It’s not.  Believe me.  I have spent months of my life poring over the texts, records, and paperwork pertaining to your project.”

I moved my head, looking up at Lillian.  “What’s this?”

“Ashton being Ashton,” she said.

I nodded, lowering my head, so it rested on my folded arm again.

“Get creative, then,” Ashton said.

“You’re not made of sturdy enough stuff.  Also, there’s no guarantee you’re going to go back to the same configuration.”

“I don’t care.”

“You care.  You get fussy when your hair gets messed up.  You want me to dismantle you?  Take you apart into your constituent pieces, and put something together that can break down a door?”

“Yes.”

“No.  It’s made to handle Warbeasts headbutting it.  It’s not going to work, Ashton.”

“Then get creative,” Ashton said, exasperated.  “Maybe instead of beating it down you can do the opposite.”

“Pull it down?”

“Or suck it down!  I remember my doctors saying there’s great power in vacuum.  It’s part of how my pheromone dispensary works.  Or you could make me into something small enough to fit through that window.  I could use the handle and get us out.”

“It really doesn’t work that way, Ashton, and we’d need to break that thick glass first, which might be doable if we rigged you to generate suction, which would probably take a fancy lab to manage, mind you.”

“Improvise,” Ashton said.

“No,” Duncan said.  “And if we generated you to do that, we could hardly then change your function unilaterally to get you through the window to the handle.”

Ashton huffed in annoyance.

“It’s locked anyway,” Mary said.  “I paid attention to it as they brought us in here.”

Duncan extended his hands in Mary’s direction.

“Sy has lockpicks, at the very least,” Ashton said.  “So we’re talking about two minor surgeries and a teeny tiny bit of improvisation to go with it, and I’ll take Sy’s lockpicks with me when I go through the window.”

“Ashton,” Duncan said.

“Yes, Duncan?”

“You know you’re one of my favorite people?”

“I didn’t, but it’s nice to hear.  Thank you, Duncan.  You’re my number two favorite person after Helen.”

“Okay.  Well, keep in mind, if you keep this line of argument up the entire time we’re on our way to the Crown Capitol, I’m probably going to strangle you dead by the time we arrive, favorite person or no.”

“Fine,” Ashton said.  “I think that makes you mentally disturbed to a worrisome level, but fine.  It’s not like I don’t have experience dealing with that type.”

I cleared my throat.

“Oh, Sy woke up,” Ashton said.  “I thought you were asleep.”

“I’m awake-ish,” I said.  “Conserving strength, in case we get an opportunity to do anything.”

“I was just talking about you, you know,” Ashton said.

“I know,” I said.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I think I trust Duncan.  I think they have to open the door at some point, and there’s a good chance it’ll be soon, if nobody has claimed ownership of that Tangle.  They might assume it’s ours.”

“That’s true,” Mary said.

“We’re also overdue for food and water.  If they don’t plan to let us expire, then they’ll have to open the door to give us something.  That’s our opportunity.  Barring exceptional circumstances, though, we’ll hear the locks on that door turn, it’ll open, and we’ll get a chance.  We’ll have to capitalize on that chance.”

“They’ve been careful so far,” Mary said.

“We’ll-”

The door handle squeaked, the locks grinding as the tumblers turned.

“-figure it out,” I said.

I climbed down from the table.  Mary positioned herself to be behind the door as it swung open.  The rest of us moved toward the doorway.

The door swung wide enough that it banged against the wall.  Mary evaded it, then leaped up, climbing the side of the one heavy metal door until she was perched on top of it, weapon in hand.

It was Emmett, with Nora standing behind him.

I gestured, and Mary hopped down.

“Fray?” I asked.

Emmett nodded.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

“We thought you might need it,” Nora said.  She shifted position, and her claws scraped against the floor of the tunnel.  “You were gone for a while.  We tried to take captives to interrogate, but we’re not very good at that.”

“We played to other strengths,” Abby said, peering around the door, into the room.  “Hi Ashton.”

“Hi.”

“Where’s Helen?” Abby asked.

“She’s here,” Ashton said.  He pointed in my direction.

Abby looked our way, her expression concerned.  “I don’t see her.”

“Ashton,” Duncan said.  “Why don’t you go to Abby right now?  Keep her calm, as all of this must be very stressful, and Abby doesn’t deal well with stress.”

“I’m not dumb,” Abby said.  “What’s going on?  Why does Ashton need to keep me so calm?”

She stepped further into the room.  Ashton approached her.

Then she saw Helen.  Her hands went to her mouth, her eyes moved in different directions, and she tipped over.  Emmett caught her.

“Yeah,” Duncan said, quiet.

Nora looked very alarmed, peering into the room.  She tensed at a sound from further down the hall.

We collected ourselves and our invalids, acting before our rescuers became too distressed.  I helped Lillian get a grip on Jessie, and took her bag to ease the burden.  It was too light, too much of it confiscated or spent.

The hallway was largely empty.

“What happened to Helen?” Nora asked.

“She got sick.  We cut her down to the healthy bits.  Duncan is confident that he, Lillian, and Professor Ibbot can put her back the way she was.”

Nora, her face barely visible beneath the shroud she wore, was nonetheless clearly displeased at that.

“Fill us in,” I said.

“The Crown forces are at the top deck and the doors.  Everything else is a mess,” Nora said.  “Both sides retreated to their corners.  It’s scary, the way things are right now.”

Everything’s scary to you, I thought.  “Define these ‘corners’.”

“I can’t even tell.  Lara can’t either, she says.  Both sides are shooting and fighting each other, but it’s all a jumble.  This ship isn’t going anywhere, the city is filled with fighting but there are no clear battle lines we can make out.  We’re trying to communicate with our people, but some of the ones who were relaying messages got hurt in the fighting.  Some might be dead.”

Her voice changed with that last statement.

Abby was starting to recover.  Ashton eased her down until she was walking.  They fell behind the rest of the group as Ashton got Abby to start moving again.  He spoke to her in a low, calm voice.

“There’s a chance Fray just wanted to make this conflict as even as possible – let both sides hurt each other until they could be destroyed.  Toss out big plays to help one side, even things out, knowing that neither side can afford to back down.”

“Is that what Avis was doing at the roof?” Lillian asked.  “Taking us down to the point we were on an even keel with the others, so we’d be as hurt as they were at the end?  Or was it to keep us from tilting the scales in way she couldn’t predict?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Both make sense.”

“What’s her end goal?” Mary asked.

“I’d love to know that,” I said.

Footsteps tromped down the hall.  The acoustics made it very audible.

Mary and Emmett picked up their pace, pulling ahead of the group.

We reached a T-junction in the ship’s labyrinthine interior, and Mary and Emmett caught up with the soldiers as they hurried down the hallway.  They hadn’t expected trouble, their guns weren’t even in their hands, let alone raised.

Emmett, for all his strength, wasn’t graceless.  He didn’t waste many movements, and he almost seemed gentle, in a weird way.  He seemed willing to smash someone’s head against the wall with less force than necessary, leaving them stunned but otherwise conscious and alive, and he’d move on to the next, returning to the stunned individual before they had fully recovered.

Mary, for her part, was very efficient in ending lives.  She finished with the second half of the squad of eight, then started on Emmett’s leftovers.

Ashton reached up to pat Nora’s long neck.  She’d turned her face away from the violence.

The fallen soldiers were a chance for us to restock.  Ammo, rifles, knives.  I found a keyring on the captain’s belt and brought it with me.

“I’m going to need something,” Mary said.

“From them?” Ashton asked.

“No,” Mary said.  “Lillian or Duncan.  If you have it, I might need a combat drug.”

“You usually shy away from those,” Lillian said.

“Usually,” Mary said.

She left it at that.  I kept an eye out and listened, but I kept my mouth shut as the conversation played out.  I found a revolver and checked it had bullets in the cylinder, closing it back up again before Lillian uttered a response.

“This will do, then.  Take it a minute before a fight.  Or during the fight, if you’re willing to wait a minute for it to kick in.”

“I will,” Mary said.

It would have been silent, if not for Abby and Ashton’s conversation in the background, inaudible.

“Do we need jackets for the rain?” I asked, to break the quiet.

“It doesn’t burn the skin anymore,” Nora said.

“Good,” I said.  “No other signs or symptoms?”

“Not that I saw.  Lara says it’s safe enough some Crown soldiers have their hoods down out there.”

“Good,” I said.  “Assuming we wanted out, which way do we go?”

Emmett pointed.

“Thanks.”

‘Out’, in our case, involved taking an odd route.  We headed down and to the front of the ship.  The tunnels all narrowed, feeding into a main hallway.  There were several security doors, not unlike the ones we’d had at the entrance to our cells.  These ones, at least, had locks on either side.  We could open locks.

The crew of the ship were concentrated into key areas, and the result was that many of the hallways and side rooms were dark and empty.  They’d been planning on keeping a small army in here, with others included, and the army hadn’t had a chance to board before the ramp had been destroyed, the doors sealed.

“Lara says there’s trouble,” Nora said.  “She’s with Bo Peep, Quinton, Red, and Fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy?” Duncan asked.

“Abby’s.  He helped us get in.  They’re at the front of the ship.  They’re hiding, but there’s a patrol of soldiers there,” Nora said.  “They’re going to find them in a minute.”

Her body language and voice reflected her fear.

“Are we going to get there in time?” Lillian asked.  “Are we close?”

Emmett glanced over his shoulder, shaking his head.

“Okay,” I said.  “Listen, tell Lara they need to act relaxed.  Calm down.  They shouldn’t be bothered if any Crown soldiers see them.  Have them say they’re companions and pets for aristocrats that are supposed to get on board.”

“Lara doesn’t act calm,” Ashton said.  Abby nodded.

“That’s fine.  Just… if they ask, Lara’s master likes them weird.  And scared.”

Nora nodded.  She didn’t speak, and she didn’t reply.  She was relaying the message.

“Have Red and Bo Peep take point, if possible.”

They were actually supposed to be companions and pets for aristocrat brats.  For one event, at least.

We reached yet another security door.  I heard Nora make a small sound of protest as we reached it.  Anxious.  Wanting to get through this.

I already had the key out, but the heavy lock needed several rotations.

My hand hurt from punching the metal wall of the ship.

“I didn’t get the full set of instructions to them, about Red and Bo Peep,” Nora said.  “The soldiers are talking to them now.”

The door opened.  Emmett raised a finger to his lips, and gestured the signal for caution.

We had to walk down the rest of the hallway.  It took a minute, and by the time we reached the end, we could hear the voices.

“…here, of all places?” a soldier asked.

“It’s where they feed those things, and Lara needs a specialized diet,” Red said.  “We were told to come here and wait if anything came up.  They weren’t sure where their quarters would be.”

“Why are you armed?”

The hallway continued, but it became a kind of bridge, stabbing out into the center of a massive cargo hold, twenty feet above the floor of the hold, the walls another twenty feet away in each direction.  Glass cases with metal bands and great metal pillars reinforcing them held fleshy masses, which extended a solid thirty feet from the floor to the ceiling.  The things that made this entire thing ambulatory.  More glass and metal reinforcement sheltered the parts of each ‘leg’ that sprawled across the floor below.  It let the mouths be near one another for feeding.  A port in the floor presumably allowed supplies to be easily moved in, as the ship lowered down over top of them, or it provided a way for the lifeforms to drink.

The bridge forked into two sets of stairs, leading left and right, and the soldiers were gathered on the stairs.  Lara, Red, Bo Peep, Quinton and ‘Fuzzy’ were all together, on the ground floor.  One of the glass cases was cracked.  They’d come in through one of the openings the legs stuck out of.

The soldiers were facing forward.  There was no reason they should have been worried about what was behind them, especially with the security doors they’d locked behind them every step of the way.

Perhaps it was a fear of someone or something coming up from the side or underside of the bridge that made one of the soldiers turn to look.

Mary threw a pair of knives.  One sank into his heart, the other into his throat.

He gurgled, but that sound alone wasn’t quite enough to draw attention.  She hauled on the strings, trying to keep him upright as he started to tip, ready to collapse down the stairs.

It bought us the seconds we needed.

I threw myself at the man Mary had thrown the knives at, knocking him down the stairs, so he bowled into the soldiers below him, knocking them over.  I was already running and stumbling on top of them when Emmett went after the men on the other staircase.

I ran over the fallen and went after the captain at the head of the group, leaping.

A fair share of the pent up frustration from our incarceration was unleashed on the soldiers.  Nora, Emmett, and Red offered their contributions, with Nora appearing from the staircase, and Red bringing her wood axe around in a swing.

‘Fuzzy’, as it turned out, was a Crown warbeast of the canine variety.  A reptile-wolf with horns, not much bigger than a proper wolf.  Once Abby was in sight, she was able to give it an order.  It barked, rather than attacking.

If that was intentional, it worked just fine.  It distracted, drawing attention, without jumping into the skirmish and biting at what might have been one of us.

“Helen’s gone,” Abby said, her voice rather flat.

The fact that she’d spoken was what clued me into the fact that we’d wrapped things up.  None of the enemies stood.

“Not gone,” Ashton said.  “Put away in a very tidy way.”

Abby made a face, glancing at Duncan, who held Helen.

Lara hugged her body with her claws.  Bo Peep, too, looked distressed.

Helen was popular with the little ones.

Even Emmett, if I was reading our taciturn bruno right, was looking tense.

“She’s fine,” Ashton said.  “Really.  We’ll put her back to normal.”

He wasn’t terribly convincing.

It was Red who spoke up, before anyone else.  “I believe you.”

“Why do you say that like not believing me is an option?” Ashton asked.  “I’ve always been honest, unless I had to lie for a mission.”

“It’s not you,” Lillian said.  “It’s not, Ashton.  It’s… Helen looks bad.  That’s a scary way to see someone you care about.  It’s like seeing Sy when he’s not at his best.  Or Nora or Lara mid-molt.  They’re reacting to the sight of it.”

“I saw a lot, in Ferres’ labs,” Red said.  “I saw people… pruned down.  So things could be added, or so work could be done on parts of them before they were put back.  Ferres disgusted me.  She was reprehensible.  But she made them beautiful, in a twisted way.  I can believe you’ll get your Helen back, beautiful in her twisted way, too.”

“I saw some of those too,” Bo Peep said.  “I was one of them, I think.”

“You were,” Red said.

Bo Peep still wasn’t looking up or at any of us.

Abby went to her side, picking up Quinton with one hand before taking one of Peep’s hands in her own.

“Thank you for coming,” I addressed the group.

“We’ll need another way out,” Nora said.  “We used Fuzzy to relay us up.  The legs are dangerous to touch, but Fuzzy can do it.  But he can’t take all of us.”

I pointed at the door in the floor, “Help me with that, then.”

Fray’s little maneuver had upended everything.  The Tangle was still there, working its way down streets, searching for bodies to add to its mass.  Its head was, to look at it, a great insectile warbeast.

We’d observed it from the window, once we’d resigned ourselves to the fact that the rebels and converts we’d signaled weren’t in a position to help us.  We’d tracked where it had come from and where it was going.

It took time for everyone to get to the ground.  We had to descend by chain, and there were only two chains long enough.  Fuzzy, Abby, and Bo Peep descended by way of one of the legs that was curled out.

To all appearances, the leg-things had been poisoned or killed.

The war had settled.  The front lines were being held by the Crown, but there wasn’t any meaningful leadership.  The Infante was supposed to be that leadership, but he was dead.  The Professors were leadership of another sort, and they were here, a distance from the city.

There wasn’t enough infrastructure surrounding all of this for people to get the orders they were waiting for.

The ground was sodden.  A vast carpet of grass and clover was dying where it had survived so many years, bred to thrive in the rain-soaked region around Radham.  The acid was responsible for that, no doubt.

The landscape was a patchwork of crops, but those crops sagging and dying.  Many of the dead had been left where they were.  Buildings were damaged, and as dark as things were, no lights were on within any of the buildings I could see.  No, the lights were in streets, where various soldiers and groups of soldiers had gathered, ready to defend their positions.

Crown and rebel.  Locals and outsiders.

We had to navigate dangerous territory.  There were streets now flooding because the bodies piled along one side formed a kind of barrier, keeping the water from draining into the soil.  That floodwater would be capable of melting flesh.  The soldiers and defensive lines were prepared to shoot at the first signs of trouble.

It wasn’t a big town, either.  I could have walked across it in three-quarters of an hour, even accounting for the winding streets that were apparently designed for meandering.

Mary raised her rifle.  I followed the line of the rifle.

Avis.

“I could hit her,” she said.  “Not saying I will or would, but I could.  Theoretically.”

“No need,” I said.

She saw us, we saw her.

No surprises.  It left things open.

No surprises, too, that they sent their envoy.

“I remember you,” the stitched girl said.  “Some of you.  You’re a lot older than last time.”

“Hello, Wendy,” Lillian said.

“You won’t hurt my colleagues?” Wendy asked.

Colleagues.  A weird word.  Not friends, not master or masters.

“Depends on a lot of things,” I said.

“I’m not very good at figuring those things out,” Wendy said.  “A simple answer might be better.”

It was Lillian who stepped forward, still carrying Jessie.  “We won’t hurt them if they don’t hurt us.”

“Then please come with me,” Wendy said.

We followed her.  Stacks of wood with covers over them and rings of rubble hemming them in burned, casting orange light here and there.  I wondered if there was another purpose for it.

In the distance, the Tangle smashed itself against the hull of the ship.  A drum with a beat so slow that the last beat was nearly forgotten by the time the next arrived.  A stark contrast to the endless patter of rain.

As we entered the corner of the city that Fray had taken for herself, we passed innumerable alleyways and buildings with people within.  It wasn’t a high density of people.  One or two to an alleyway.  One in a window.  But they were armed, and they had grim expressions.  The expressions of people who had lost everything.

They hadn’t come with either army.

I had my suspicion about what was at play.  I wished my memory was better, that Jessie was around for me to ask, to clarify it, and frame the upcoming discussion.

Warren and Avis greeted us, standing to one side of a fountain in the center of a broad intersection of two streets.  The area might have served as a farmer’s market, or a place for festivals to be held.

Warren was tall, a monster of a man, muscle taken to extremes.  His expression… there was a darkness in it that changed him.  He had been human once, his head and brain were ordinary, a stark contrast to the pounds of muscle he wore and his overall frame, but he’d seen or experienced something and the humanity was gone, or it was close to being gone.  He wore a white button-up shirt, suspenders, and black trousers.  His boots were large enough for me to stick my head in.

He reached out to put a hand on Wendy’s back as she came to stand beside him.

Avis’ expression was dark.  She hunched over, a heavy coat covering her body and wings.  She looked like she was aging in fast motion, compared to the actual years that had passed.  She’d been a young lady when I’d first seen her, as my shoddy memory went.  She’d aged, suffering the Duke’s punishment.  She’d aged more, in Fray’s company, when I’d seen her in Beattle.  She looked like a crone now, hunched over the way she was, her wings gathered up behind her.

I looked at some of the people who stood off to one side.  A man and a woman.  Another woman.  I noted the resemblance to Warren.

This particular event had struck a little close to home, hm?

“Fray isn’t here?” I asked.

Warren shook his head, slowly.  I saw the darkness in his expression.

“She finally revealed what she’s all about, huh?” I asked.

The scowl deepened.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.14 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.14

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

I took a step forward.  I saw Warren react, lowering his head a fraction.  Avis, however, stiffened, taking a step forward.

I stopped where I was.  If I went any further, Avis was going to act.

“When I first heard of Fray, I thought of her as a sister,” I said.

“Don’t,” Avis said.

“Don’t?” I asked.

“Don’t try to relate to us, don’t try to form a connection.  We know who you are, we’ve kept an eye on you all for a long time.  We were there for Brechwell, where the various rebel factions met, we saw what unfolded during and after.  Whatever you’re going to say… don’t.”

“Considering you tried to kill us earlier today, I think the fact that I’m talking to you and not actively ambushing you is darn magnanimous,” I said.

Warren turned his head, looking at Avis.  I didn’t have the best recollection of him, but I did have the impression that was to some degree his usual expression.  I tried to formulate an impression of what he was expressing, with the baseline being a barely suppressed fury.

Even with all of that in mind, he looked bothered by what I’d said.

Warren and Avis weren’t on the same page, it seemed.

“There was also the events that led to you being imprisoned, before you found your way to Fray,” Mary said.

“The tried and true tactic of driving in a wedge,” Avis said.

She spoke like someone with a broken spirit, as if she was farther away than she was.

“I don’t think it’s driving in a wedge to remark on the fact that you assisted in the kidnapping of hundreds of children, so they could be used to create Percy’s army.”

Avis nodded slowly.  Warren’s eyes still bored into her.

She took a few steps to the side, then slumped down, sitting on the edge of the fountain.

“No answer?” I asked.

“You acted against us, alerting the Crown before we could get properly underway,” Avis said.  “If Percy had succeeded, if I hadn’t been caught, you wouldn’t be standing there, I wouldn’t be sitting here, and the sun wouldn’t be setting on the Crown States.  Maybe in that situation, I could have argued it was necessary.”

“Maybe,” Mary said.  “Maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” Avis said.

“Would you do it again?” Lillian asked.

Avis didn’t move.

Lillian went on, “I’m asking because I’m standing here, I left the Crown behind, I’ve taken one side in a war, and we sent soldiers into… this.  We attacked them.  Guns, knives, acid, parasites.  Worse things.  You have your Tangle there.  We had ours.  They were soldiers fighting for what I feel is the wrong side, but they’re people.  I’m wondering what the distance is between you and me.”

“You’re nothing like her,” I said.

Lillian pursed her lips.

“It’s not about right and wrong,” Avis said.

“It is,” Duncan said. “It has to be.”

“That war was fought and lost long before you were born, Lambs,” Avis said.  “You’re-”

She stopped.

“What?” I asked.  “What are we?”

“You’re children,” Avis said.  “If you’re even thinking in those terms, it’s because it’s something the Crown hasn’t fully stamped out of the storybooks and the children’s games.  We leave it behind as we become adults.  Most of us.  They stamped out good and evil as concepts.  They’ve left it so far beyond them that it’s almost forgotten.  There’s only their truth and those who reject it, now.  If we try to drag right and wrong into it, good and evil, then we’re already lost.  That’s why Mauer lost.”

To her right, our left, Warren shook his head.

As for me…

She’s not wrong.  This ceased being about that a long time ago.

The voice had a different tenor to it, now.  A different sound.

We were free.  We were so close.  We’d slain one god.  I felt like I was almost in a position to give that voice what it had bargained for.  I could give it what it wanted, and… and maybe, just maybe, I could get what I’d asked for.

“Fray surprised you, didn’t she?”  I asked.

“Please, none of this prattle,” Avis said.  “The head games, the machinations.  You’re right, I’m wrong.  I fought for what I believed, and I’ve been defeated.  The only fight I had in me was purchased with drugs and a heavy toll on my mind and body.  I haven’t realized what it was costing me until today.  That she asked me to pay that price, without ever asking.”

“She does that,” I said.  “I think, anyway.”

“Do you think?” Avis asked.  There was an almost sarcastic, condescending tone to her voice.  “Really?”

“I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary.”

“Ever since we met, I’ve been trying to convey to you that you’re blind, that you’re children.  That you don’t realize your place in things.  Nothing you’ve done has changed my mind.”

“Let me show you.  Today.  Give me a chance.”

She shook her head.  “I’m not the one to give you that.  Whatever you’re going to say, there’s no need for it.”

“You could walk away, if you don’t want to hear me out,” I said.  “You could fly away, if you had anywhere to go.  You don’t.”

She was silent and still.

I turned my focus to Warren.  “Fray led you this far and… whatever happened, she’s dropped you.  Surprise!  You’ve clearly got family here, big guy, but… where do you take them?  The Crown States are nearly gone.  Wherever you were hiding before, it’s probably been swallowed up by the devastation and decay that’s eating this nation, now that you’re not there.  Where are you going to go?”

He glared at me with very blue eyes.

I was aware of the eyes that were watching.  They’d mounted an attack.  Then what had happened?  Fray had moved on to the next step of her plan.

Where was she?

When he spoke, his voice was deep, though not as deep as I might have expected it to be.  He almost resembled the man he must’ve been, once upon a time.

“With you?” he asked.

I spread my arms.

“No,” he said.

I let my arms fall to my sides.

“No,” Avis said.

“Okay,” I said.  “That’s regrettable.”

“Is that a threat?” Avis asked.

“No,” I said.  “It’s just… regrettable.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

Duncan put a hand on my shoulder.  He cleared his throat.  “What can you tell us about Fray?  Where is she?”

“She’s off saving humanity,” Avis said.

“Saving humanity?” Lillian asked.

“It’s what she said, when I met her on the hill outside this city.  That hill, off in the distance,” Avis said.  She raised one arm, so it extended outside of the covering she wore, pointing.  “Now she acts.”

“What’s she doing?” Lillian asked.

“Destroying everything else,” Avis said, the words nearly drowned out by the sound of the rain.

There was no surprise on Warren’s face, which only drove the statement home.  The other Lambs were silent, the bystanders weren’t close enough to have heard.  Avis had said the words with a volume that hadn’t been meant to reach any ears that weren’t ours.

“How?” I asked.  “Where is she?”

Avis shook her head.

Lillian stepped forward, raising her voice, “If there’s any part of you that feels guilty for what you were complicit in-!”

Avis shook her head again.

Lillian clenched her hands.  She still held Jessie.  Mary stepped forward, taking one of those clenched hands in her own.

Avis seemed oblivious to it all.  Oblivious to everything.

“When you acted against us,” I said.  “When you drew the attention of the soldiers, and tried to get us killed.  Had Fray already abandoned you then?”

There was no response.  She seemed to be getting more and more stubborn, not less.  There were no chinks in the armor because the armor was gone, destroyed.

I suspected I was right.

“What was it Avis said back at the roof?” I asked.

“We’d only get in Genevieve Fray’s way,” Ashton volunteered.

I nodded to myself.

“She was talking about what Fray is doing now.  She wants this, on some level, or she’s not opposed to it.  She’s a lost cause,” I said.  “And she’s lost.”

Avis didn’t move or respond.

“Warren,” I said, with a tone and urgency that betrayed renewed enthusiasm and desperation both.  Changing targets.  “You can’t want this.  You’ve got family there.  Whatever this is, you’ve seen the plague, you know these things are never neat and tidy.”

“You don’t know who I am,” Warren said.

“You’re a person who didn’t deserve what happened to him,” I said.  “In a world where an awful lot of things happen to people who don’t deserve those things.  Tell me I’m wrong about that.”

He hesitated.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” I said, cutting into his thoughts.

“You’re not,” he said.

“If you’re both telling the truth about this, it’s going to be horrendous.  Are you going to help those things happen?  Wrongs, meted out to people who don’t deserve it?”

He took his time responding again.  It was as if he was so unused to talking that it took him time to find the words.  “I was born into the wrong world.  I studied cars, not horses.  But the horses won before I even started studying.  Living horses, dead horses, horses in name only.  This world chewed me up and spat me out.”

This world, he’d said.  He had the power to tell us what we needed to know about Fray.  Faced with the question of whether he was willing to stop her from destroying ‘everything else’, he was caught in an existential mire.  The world hadn’t been kind to him.  He hadn’t seen enough of it that he wanted to preserve.

“Avis and I are very different people.  But I think we’re similar in one thing,” Warren said.

I didn’t want to ask.  I didn’t want to help him down this course.  I asked anyway, because I suspected the answer, and I knew he’d need to get it out of his system if he was going to ever listen to us.  “What’s that?”

“We were hurt.  We suffered beyond imagining, and we had almost nothing left to lose.”

I wished I could remember more about Avis’ fate.  The memory had been so close to the memories of Jamie that they were complicated to handle.  I’d let them atrophy.

They were too far away, in too many senses.

What had I said, before?  When I first heard of Fray, I thought of her as a sister?

I’d seen a commonality there.  Now… now, I felt as though I was facing down these people.  Fray had picked up two of the most unlikely, ill-suited people to join her.  She wanted to save humanity and she’d collected a man who lost his connection to humanity, and a woman who’d been tested and found that humanity wanting.

Now they were looking at me, and I wondered if they saw Fray.  If my words could never reach them because Fray had burned that bridge.

I turned away from Warren.  There might have been something in my expression that the others saw, because their expressions shifted in kind.

Well, not Ashton’s.  Not Jessie’s.  Looking at Jessie was my reminder about what I wanted to preserve in the now, what I selfishly wanted to have with me in the present moment.  Lillian was what I wanted to fight for, divorced from what the voice was pushing for.

Some of my warmest moments with Mary were in the past.  That I ‘danced’ so well with her was because of that background, the steps and patterns that I’d engraved into a brain that held far less permanence than most.

We were the people we surrounded ourselves with.  Maybe that was why I had such a hard time understanding Fray, when these people seemed to reflect so little on who she was and what she seemed to be striving for.  When I saw her like I saw the Snake Charmer, Cynthia, or the Primordial Child, I hallucinated a fractured face, looking in multiple directions, where nothing pulled together.

“Sy,” Lillian said.  There was urgency in her voice.

My eyes stopped roving over the group.

“It’s okay,” I said.

I stepped past Ashton, mussing up his hair on the way.

I took two hands, met another set of eyes, and jerked my head in a direction.

It was Bo Peep and Red, who I presented to Warren and Avis.  Red stopped when Avis tensed, while Bo Peep made it several steps deeper into that open territory.

Abby, Ashton, and Emmett joined the pair.  Abby stood closer to Bo Peep.  Emmett, Nora and Lara hung further back, closer to Red.

“I was hurt too,” Bo Peep said.

“It’s different, I’m sure,” Avis said, with emotion.  “They ripped out my sense of time.  I experienced eternity.  The Lambs would like to say I’ve done wrong, but I’ve repaid that wrong by experiencing hell.”

“I don’t really know what that is,” Bo Peep said.  “I don’t understand.  I’m sorry.”

“Then shut up,” Avis said.  “Go away.”

“I can’t.  Not when… you’re talking about someone destroying everything?”

“Almost everything.  Yes.”

“Then I can’t.”

Avis looked away from Bo Peep, meeting my eyes.  “If this is an attempt to elicit sympathy-”

I started to shake my head.  Bo Peep beat me to it with a, “No.”

“You don’t understand,” Avis said.  “There’s no point discussing.”

“There is a point,” Bo Peep said.  “They’re going to hurt everything that isn’t humanity?  It would hurt me.  I haven’t done anything.  I want to live.”

Avis shook her head.

“I want to live,” Peep said.  “Please.”

“Ask Warren.  He actually cares.”

“Please,” Bo Peep said.

Warren was staring Emmett down.

They were something of a pair.  A difference mainly in ages.  Two taciturn Brunos.

“Please,” Bo Peep said again.  “Warren?”

I wondered what was going through Warren’s head, as he looked at his counterpart.

Ashton took a step forward.

“Don’t,” Avis said.  “Don’t try.  I have weapons.  Hurting you will take the last ounce of strength I have, but I’ll do it.  I’ll signal our forces and they’ll shoot from the flanks.”

“Okay,” Ashton said.

He shifted his grip, then held Helen up and out.  Arms straight, Helen held so that the bottom end of her was just above Ashton’s head.

The rain poured down, soaking Ashton, running down his arms, soaking Helen, running down blood-stained bandage.  We’d changed the bandages not long ago.

Warren stared at Ashton and Helen.  There was still so much anger in his eyes.

It was Avis who asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s my favorite person in the world,” Ashton said.  “This is her, now.”

A frown creased the space between Avis’ eyebrows.

Warren looked away.  Avis didn’t.

“What am I supposed to take away from that?” Avis asked.

“She’s my favorite person,” Ashton said.  “I don’t think she would want to be left out.”

Avis stared at Helen.

Helen was just heavy enough that Ashton’s arms were already starting to tremble with the strain of holding her aloft.

“Please,” Bo Peep said.

Abby took her hand.  Quinton stood between the two, moving his head so the top if it was beneath the edge of her skirt, as if it was a hat.  Keeping the rain off.

“You keep saying that,” Avis said.  “You can’t even articulate an argument?”

“I’m not good at arguing.  All I know is that I want to live.”

“State demands at least, so I can make you go away.”

“Three things,” I said.  I made sure my voice carried.  Many of the younger Lambs turned their heads to look at me.  “Whatever the means of controlling that Tangle is… we need it.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Avis said.

“Everything matters at this stage.”

“It won’t be any good for you.  It uses scent markers.  We designed a warbeast to draw the attention of the… you called them Tangles.  It takes over.  You’d need to fly to leave the right trails.”

“We’ll manage,” I said.

“Three things,” she said.

She’d made no move to give us the first.  I wondered if this depended on us naming the right things.

“We’ll need some way to communicate with your other forces in this city.  The attack on Radham has served its purpose.  There’s no need for more people to die.”

“That’s one of the least important things you need to concern yourself with right now.”

“All the same,” I said.

“And the third thing?”

“If you won’t outline what Fray’s plan is, then give us Wendy,” I told her.  “Wendy’s been there from the beginning.  I presume she remembers some of it.”

“Wendy?” Avis asked.  She turned her head.

“Oh, yes, hello,” Wendy said, in response.  “I would offer you tea, but things are messy right now.”

Her head surveyed the devastation around us.  A town that had been overturned to serve as a military outpost, shaken by infighting, scattered with dead and doused in acid and parasites.  There wasn’t a single surface or expanse that was unaffected.  No rooftop, no wall, no window.

“That’s alright,” Ashton said.  He’d lowered Helen, and now cradled her against his chest.  “It’s understandable.  Thank you all the same.”

“You’re welcome,” Wendy said.

I glanced at the city, hearing the rain and the steady beat of the Tangle against the ship’s exterior.

“She hid it from us.  That was the betrayal,” Avis said.

I nodded.  The offer to abandon the Crown.  The offer Gordon had almost taken.

“It was a plan with layers.  Failsafes.  You’re about to find out what was which.  Everything served two purposes.  The leashing and sterilization?”

Everything else.

I heard the voice, and I made the connection.

“Inoculation?” I asked.

Avis glanced at Warren, then shrugged.  “Groundwork.”

There was a defeat in the statement.  I’d thought of her as a crone before, but she withered a touch more, even admitting that much.

“Go with them, Wendy,” Warren said.  “Tell them what they need.  Help them if they ask for it.”

“Are you sure?” Wendy asked.

“I’m sure.”

Wendy looked momentarily concerned.

“Go,” Warren said.  “Be brave.”

“Yes, sir.  I’ll try.”

Wendy approached the younger Lambs, because they were closer.  Abby took her hand.

“Protect her from the dark,” Warren said.  “No dark rooms.  No closed spaces.”

“Alright,” I said.  I immediately recognized what he was saying for what it was.

“She likes music.  In all the years I’ve spent with Genevieve, I’ve been trying to help her find a song.”

I looked at Jessie, who rode piggyback on Lillian’s back, fast asleep.  I reached out and beneath her hood to touch her hair.

“I was already thinking about a scrollphone for the music,” I said.

“The machine?” Warren asked.

“The machine,” I said.

Something in Warren seemed to ease.  A burden off his shoulders, a thing long lost come to roost, perhaps, or a circle finally closing.  The anger seemed to fade.

“That will do, thank you,” he said.  He twisted around, beckoning.

Soldiers from the fringes approached.

“Go.  Round up the other groups.  Ceasefire all around.”

“You’re sure?” the soldier asked.

Warren nodded.

“You could come yourself,” Mary said.  “It would make more sense.”

“No,” Warren said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because,” Warren said, drawing in a breath.  He looked in the direction of his family.  “A long time ago, I pledged revenge.  I need to put that to rest.”

“You pledged revenge against your family?” Lillian asked.

“No,” he said.  “But I think I wanted it more than anything.  If I walk away now, I won’t return.  I won’t heal what made that wanting possible.”

Avis moved her coat, and revealed a long bandoleer of vials.  She unclasped it, and pulled it free, so it was a strap, rather than a band.  She swung it to one side, and I worried the tail end of it would smash against the fountain’s edge.

“Then… last question,” I said.  “Where is she?”

“You know where,” Avis said.  She swung the belt of vials the other way and released it, so it would fly through the air.

Duncan was the one who jumped forward to catch it in both arms.  I would have, but I was fairly sure my legs were too tired, and I trusted the others to handle it.

I was standing close enough to him that when everyone had looked Duncan’s way, they could see me raise my arm.

I gestured.

We left the two people sitting by the fountain.  Wendy walked with us.

The soldiers that had been sent with us weren’t ours, but they served our purposes.  They knew roughly where their people had retreated to – the residents of this city.  Lost, confused, they had been rallied by Warren’s relations, and they had fought for their well being.

Once they were taken care of, made to stand down, a scattered few joining us, we could find the others.

Pierre, Shirley.  Junior, Davis and the Treasurer, Bea, Fang, Rudy, Possum, Gordeux, Mabel.

Some were in smaller groups.  Some were being held prisoner.  Some held others prisoner.

Too many of them were hurt.  Acid burns, excision marks from scalpels.  Davis was out of the fight, which was a damn shame.  Possum hadn’t been in it from the beginning, a non-fighter.  Rudy hadn’t been in it since the plague had gotten him.

There would be more Rudys before the day was over.  I worried, looking at the work done to carve away the plague, throughout our soldiers’ ranks, that there were already another twenty or thirty, in varying degrees of intensity.

We only had a few hundred people here.

I wanted to make all of this worth what they had put into it.

“You did a good job,” Ashton said, his voice quiet.  He was talking to Helen.  “Good negotiating.  Your finest performance yet.”

“In another light, that could be construed as insulting,” Duncan said.

“I think it’s very positive,” Wendy said.  “Compliments are nice.”

“I like her,” Ashton said.

“Of course you do,” Duncan said.  Wendy beamed at him, oblivious.

I stepped away, joining the others.

Mabel was taking point on the dispersal of Avis’ chemical markers.  We didn’t have a means of flight, but we did have access to a scattered few warbeasts.

The Treasurer had been acting as Davis’ second in command for a while now, and Davis had been acting as our de-facto general, when Jessie and I were otherwise occupied, which we so often were.

Not in the rude way.  Not always.  We had other nefarious things that occupied us, being Lambs and all.

The Treasurer organized our troops, so to speak.

When I raised my hand, gesturing, and swept it down as though I was bringing the executioner’s axe down on a stretched out neck, it was the Treasurer who started shouting the orders.

The chemicals drew Fray’s Tangle away.  Our army stormed the doors and other access points.  We had already opened the one hatch in the front of the ship.  Our chains were still dangling there.  The defending forces were light.

What remained was to take every length of chain and rope we could acquire from the city, and enact a means of getting our army up and inside.

Lillian came to stand beside me.  She hugged my arm.  She didn’t have Jessie with her anymore.  A task delegated to a stitched, again.

We stood there, watching.  Mary passed us, limping, and shot us a brief smile.  Not a happy one, but… she had always wanted her army to command.

Ashton was saying goodbye to his peers.

I was left with the impression that Lillian was enjoying a moment with me that didn’t have Jessie in it.  She might even have engineered it.  I wasn’t about to comment either way.  Her head rested on my shoulder, even though we were roughly of a height with one another.

“You know what Fray is doing,” she said.

“I think I’ve known for a while,” I said.  “A few of the threads, at least.”

“Can we stop her?” Lillian asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

But we aren’t going to, the voice rejoined.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.15 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.15

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“Did she use the word primordial?”

“Yes.”

“Recently?”

“What does that mean?”

“Did she say it the last time you talked to her?”

“Say what?”

“Did she say the word primordial in the last few conversations you had with her?”

“I don’t know.”

I bit my lip.

“Did she use the word plague, when she didn’t mean the red plague?”

“I don’t know.  I wasn’t paying attention to that kind of thing.”

“Did she say the word superweapon a lot?”

“Some.  But she says a lot of things some.”

I gripped the railing ahead of me.  “Right.”

Wendy turned to look starboard.

“Listen,” I said.  “Um.  Did she use the words ‘Radham superweapon’?”

“Some,” Wendy said, looking back at me.

“Some,” I said.  “Was she talking about wild, uncontrolled?  Or controlled chaos, or…”

Wendy looked at me, lost.

“Okay.  Was she being exceedingly careful?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Wendy said.  “No more than usual.”

That rules out some grim possibilities, I thought.  At the same time, it left me at a loss.

Our initial attempt at getting moving had failed.  The craft had started to move, then faltered when some of the legs proved too damaged to drag us forward.

I stood at the railing and watched as teams lashed Fray’s pet Tangle to the front.  Wendy stood beside me, holding an umbrella to keep the worst of the rain from soaking her.

Our means of locomotion was macabre, but it gave us a way forward.  Some of the warbeasts were being gathered nearby, a share of our rebels were wrapping up a discussion about them.  I couldn’t see nearly well enough to read much more than broader body language, the simplest gestures, like a pointing finger, and who was speaking, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out.

They divided the warbeasts up, one group more injured, another not, and led the injured within range of the Tangle.  Chains and ropes were distributed, so the beasts were lashed to the same rigging that was attaching the Tangle to the front of the Infante’s ship.

When the crews had tied everything down and retreated far enough away from the warbeasts, orders were called out.  The warbeasts were lunging, pulling at the rigging while the greater Tangle remained still.  They didn’t like their proximity to this strange thing, especially when they were hurt and tired.

They liked it even less when chemicals were cast out over them.

It was an indication for the Tangle to go on the offense.  It reached out for the warbeasts, gripped the rigging and the beasts themselves, and then set to work attaching them to itself, while harvesters swarmed down its limbs to do the stitching work.  The beasts fought a futile tooth and nail battle against the attacker.

I was a considerable distance above the ground, standing at the very highest point of the ship, and I could still hear the sounds they made.

“The Lady Gloria is dead,” Duncan said.

“Oh no,” Wendy said.  “What a shame.  Who is she?”

“She’s a noble.”

“Was she a good noble?” Wendy asked.

“She wasn’t one of the worst,” I said.

“Oh no,” Wendy said, again.

“Alright,” I said.

He approached from behind and came to stand beside me at the railing.

Pawing at the ground where some of the chemical had landed, the Tangle tugged on the restraints that bound it.  The crew of rebels hurried to get out of the way in case it made any headway.

“You really see a way forward?” Duncan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

The people who were still in view below were looking up, trying to see me through the rain.  I waved my arm, the motion exaggerated, then extended my arm forward.

A horn blew.  I recognized the pattern as the de-facto call for retreat.  Ironic, when we weren’t running.

“I’m in a weird place in the Lambs,” Duncan said.  “I’m the newest member, in a way, discounting the pseudo-Lambs.  I actually have outside attachments.”

“Having doubts?” I asked.

“No.  No, there isn’t much room for doubt, is there?”

I shook my head.  I looked at the devastated terrain and the shattered city before us.

“I know Lillian and you do your thing, you negotiate.  You and she figure out where you’re at.”

“We do.”

“And I don’t mean to disparage her at all when I say that she’s emotionally entangled.”

I looked over at him.  His hood was down, his hair wet.  Water streamed down his face and into his collar.  It was that kind of day, though.  We’d been out and active in the rain for so long that being drenched was something we’d resigned ourselves to.

The Tangle hauled forward, hard, making us stumble into the railing.  One of our rebels had taken off on a warbeast, the others presumably onboard or soon to be onboard.  The rider had something held aloft, and gas was streaming from it, tinted so it was clearly visible.

The Tangle was trying to chase, clearly interested in the gas.

“Just the way it is,” Duncan continued.  “You’ve all known each other for a long time.  You were introduced early on.  Lillian aside, you’ll probably die in each other’s arms.”

“Oh no,” Wendy said.

“Dark thoughts,” I said.

“But not wrong, am I?”

“No,” I said.

The intact legs of the ship began clawing at the ground.  They were strong, and they provided the initial forward momentum.  The Tangle compensated, providing power the weaker legs couldn’t.

We started moving.

“The Lambs have their roles.  You were conceived of as a gestalt.  It’s part of the whole plan, y’know?  And I’m not part of that.”

“You’ve found a place.”

“As a secondary Doctor.  As oversight for the little ones.  Lillian fields you, Jessie, and Mary in large part.  I’ve immersed myself in the workings behind the vat-grown ones.  There’s a division of labor.”

“Sure,” I said.

“As attached as I am to Ashton and Helen, I wouldn’t say I’m as tied into things.  I hope I don’t sound arrogant or too forward if I say maybe I have another role.  I’m… about as objective as you guys are going to get, without actually being an outsider.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “And outsiders don’t get it.”

“They don’t,” Duncan said.

“What’s the objective take?” I asked.

“Not a take.  A question.”

“Sure.”

We were picking up speed now.  Once something was in motion, it was easy to keep in motion.  We had momentum.  We charged toward Radham.

“How worried do I need to be?”

“That depends on Fray,” I said.

More people were ascending to the upper deck.  The windows below didn’t afford the same view of things.  The Lambs were among the people ascending.  A stitched carried Jessie, and Lillian and Mary walked on either side of it.  The stream of people was disrupted with a pause – people had given a wide berth to the younger Lambs, in large part because of Nora.

“But you’re not asking about Fray,” I said.

“No.”

“I could tell you the same thing I told Mary,” I said.  “That when push comes to shove… just about any of you could beat me in a fight.”

“You could tell me that,” Duncan said.  “It doesn’t really answer the question.  You picking a fight is a non-concern.  You have a wealth of ways to do damage.”

I remained silent, watching the city.

“Yeah,” Duncan said.

He reached out, both hands.  One hand shielded the other, so rain wouldn’t fall on what it held.

A single pill.

He closed his hand around the pill.

“Ah,” I said.  “You’re that suspicious.”

“I would appreciate it if you took this.  Right here.  In the time before the others get here.”

The pull of the Tangle and the fact that the legs were stronger on one side made the craft tilt slightly.  The Tangle corrected to stay on course, and we tilted the other way.  Everyone on the deck that wasn’t holding the railing slid or stumbled on the wet deck.  It was wood textured to make slipping a little harder, but the acid rain had done a number on that texture, and the degraded wood had a way of filling in the gaps and making everything a little more slick.

It slowed them down a fraction, but not enough time to really let me dwell on the topic.

Duncan might have intended that, to give him some credit.

“What is it?”

“Reassurance,” he said, without hesitation.  He’d anticipated the question.

“Vague,” I said.  I held out a hand.

He closed his mouth into a grim line, clearly not intent on saying any more.

Saying more would have given me a chance to divine what he was up to.  He was intending to keep this a secret.  It could be a leash, something to ensure I wouldn’t last very long after going rogue, or it could be a placebo, something that would have a minor or obvious effect like turning my mouth blue, which would reassure him that I was cooperating enough to take the pill instead of palming it.

Or both.  I couldn’t rule out both.

Or, the voice echoed.  The most distant, least connected Lamb could be a traitor.  A poison pill at the pivotal confrontation.

I held out my hand.  Duncan gave me the pill.

The others were close enough to see, now.  I popped the pill into my mouth, then held it in my teeth so Duncan could see.

“It’s a suppository,” Duncan said, dry.

“Ha ha,” I said, pill still held in my teeth.  I winced as I sucked it back, snorting.  I stuck out my tongue, waggling it to show my mouth was empty.  “You’re a funny guy, Duncan.  You don’t get enough credit for that.”

“And you’re a charmer.  Believe it or not, I was considered one of the best jokers of the year.”

“What’s this?” Lillian asked, as she joined us.

“Duncan says people thought he was the funniest guy around.”

“That says as much about the the classmates we had as it does about Duncan,” Lillian said.

“Ow, my pride,” Duncan said.

“You were and are quick-witted and fast with a retort.  Especially when you’re in your element.  It’s part of the reason I nominated you.  And there’s something to be said for the fact that just about everyone else was struggling to get to the top of the class rankings, and didn’t have it in them to crack a joke.  You were doing well enough in your classes that you could joke around.”

“Feels like a horrifyingly long time ago,” Duncan said.  “I can’t remember the last time I made a joke.”

“I’m supposed to be the one with the memory problem.  You made one about a minute ago, you know.”

“Ha ha,” he said, without humor.

The Lambs had gathered all around.  It was nice, having them close.  Even if Helen was in dire shape and Jessie was sleeping through this.  They were near, they weren’t all touching me, but I could feel the warmth of them.  I was familiar with them, the smells, the ways they thought, many of the ways they moved.

It was more like being home than returning to Radham was.

I took in the scene.  Fray was one of my gods to slay for a reason.  She was so hard to predict.

I couldn’t ask what I’d do, because she operated on a different level, for reasons I didn’t know.  I had inklings, but I didn’t know how to use those inklings, and I wasn’t wholly sure I could trust them.

“Hi Wendy,” Ashton said.

“Hi.”

“Are you well?”

“Yes.  I’m enjoying a very strange view.”

“Yes,” Ashton said, sounding very pleased.  “I’m going to commit it to memory and describe it to Helen later.  She doesn’t have eyes right now.”

“How nice of you.”

Some of the rest of us exchanged glances.

“We should get away from the foredeck before we make impact,” Mary said.

“We’ve got a little ways to go before we do,” I said, staring at the scene.

“Did Wendy have any ideas about what Fray is doing?”

“Nothing concrete.  Superweapon, maybe.  As much as I keep thinking it has to be something really wild and uncontrolled, that the Crown can’t control or get a handle on, much like the plague, nothing Wendy says suggests that’s the case.”

“Primordials?” Lillian asked.

“They might have factored in.  She used the word.  It’s a casualty of Wendy being Wendy, as exceptional as she is for a stitched.”

“Thank you,” Wendy said.  “But I don’t really have stitches.  I’m sealed together properly.”

“All the same,” I said.  “We can pick up on sentiment, but if she was capable of divulging anything too concrete, I suspect Fray wouldn’t have…”

I gestured to finish the statement.  Left her behind.

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  “Maybe.”

“It’s not as wild a thing as I thought it might be, but she might still be using the calamities as a kind of reverse effort to turn Radham and other strategic areas into an oasis in the midst of a desert storm,” I said.

“You might be thinking she should be using chaos and storms because that’s how you work,” Mary said.

“Might,” I admitted.

“We’re close,” she said.  “We should start preparing.”

“On that note, Lillian, Duncan, if you had to, could you quickly, cleanly kill that Tangle down there?”

“Kill?” Lillian asked.

“It’s ours,” Ashton said.

“No,” I said.  “It’s Fray’s.  We just happen to be using it.  So I have to ask, could you kill it?”

“No,” Duncan said.

“I could pull something together if you gave me an hour.”

“Okay, that wouldn’t be fast enough,” I said.  I turned around, and I made my way through the Lambs, leaving them at the very front of the ship.  I faced the group that had come up to the top deck.  “Beattle Rebels and other Academy-educated types!”

My voice carried.  I immediately had everyone’s attention.

“I need a quick answer!  Who can devise a solution to kill the Tangle down there before we actually get to Radham?”

A few people looked bewildered.

“Blow it up?” somone asked.  One of our soldiers, but not Academy-educated.  He’d been a thug, once.  We’d rounded out his training with guns, explosives, and other things.  He would be one of the last of Archie’s people, maybe?

“Wouldn’t work unless we had a big enough explosive,” I said.  “Anyone else?”

I saw a hand go up.

Junior.  Head of the Rank, our master poisoner.

“Good man.  Get to it, get what you need,” I said.

He rounded up his people, and they hurried below deck.

I was getting strange looks.  Including from the Lambs.

“It’ll be good to have if we need it,” I told them.

Nobody answered.

The crowd was filled with our past enemies.  There were enough I couldn’t recognize that it confused my senses.  Bea’s followers were into self-modifications, and it didn’t help matters when the physical alterations were often my first cue that someone was a spectre.  Horns?  Could have been the Brechwell beast, and it could have been someone who’d wanted to look intimidating.

We were drawing nearer.  The rider who was painting the trail was at the base of the wall, and was working on scaling it.  They’d chosen a warbeast rather than a horse because warbeasts could climb.

The problem was that climbing was slow, even with a warbeast that was good at it.

Mary gestured, and we backed away from the front of the ship.  Others retreated as well.  I felt some trepidation as I eased my way past Avis and Warren, past the Snake Charmer and Percy.  Past Sub Rosa, the Humors, Cynthia, ghosts and soldiers, the Fishmonger, Devil, Primordial Child, and scattered nobles.

At the edge of the Academy closest to us, there was a flash of light.  The sound reached us a moment later.

“Brace!” Mary hollered.

The artillery shell hit the side of the ship.  Our course shifted, then self corrected as the creatures hauled us forward.

When we’d talked about how we needed to use the craft to assault the city, we’d outlined a path that would place us closer to the Academy.  It was closer than the point where the Infante had landed, and now it was becoming clear why he hadn’t chosen to assault the Academy and the walls around it.  The Academy had defenses beyond the creatures that guarded it.

At a tower further away, another artillery emplacement fired.

The shot hit somewhere near the prow, detonating on impact.  That one would’ve hit one of the metaphorical horses of our metaphorical chariot.

We were damn close now, but every fraction of a mile that we plunged forward put us further into harm’s way.  Those who’d ascended to see Radham as we drew nearer were ducking below deck.  We were the last in line to descend, because we’d been the furthest forward.

Two more shots came our way.  One drifted, hitting field off to the starboard side.  Another struck low.  Aimed more at the Tangle.

The Lambs started to head below.  I clung to the railing, glanced back, and then put one finger to my nostril, blowing out the pill I’d snorted up into my sinus cavity.

The next round included a more distant tower, which apparently saw fit to open fire now that we were closer.  Three shots in all.

We were belowdeck before they hit home.

Narrow windows near the front of the ship provided a view of the scene.  One of the explosives ripped a hole in the hull, opening a space around where the window had been.  Smoke and the seemingly endless rain of water and debris obscured our vision.

We were slowing.  The explosions had damaged the rigging the Tangle used to haul us forward, and it had pulled away, only partially attached to us, the leash extended.  It clambered up the wall to the best of its ability, after the rider with the smoke.  It ascended far faster than the rider did.

The Infante’s craft, however, still had some forward momentum.  We slammed into the wall and rode up against the topmost edge.  Rubble and sections of wall crumbled down around the deck and around us.

The fluids and blood that flowed down the wall, over the intact window and across the damaged hole suggested we’d collided with the Tangle.

Well.  That complicated things.

More artillery fire struck us.

Problematic, that we were close enough for them to shoot at us.

“They’re hitting the rear.  I don’t think they have an angle,” Mary said.

More artillery shells struck us.  Tail end, again.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Unless they’ve got incredibly clever and coordinated people manning the artillery turrets on top of those towers, tricking us into poking our heads out before they obliterate us.”

“I wouldn’t put it past Hayle,” Lillian said.  “But I don’t think Hayle would be on those towers.”

We headed for the stairs leading back up to the deck.  Junior met us at the base of the stairs, and tossed me a canister.

“Look after Wendy,” I told him.  “Or find someone who can and follow.”

“Got it,” he replied.

There was no need for a ramp, with the way the wall had come down.  The rubble formed its own access point.  The Tangle had divided in two, and the ‘head’ was climbing up onto the top of the wall.

The lower half was groping its way up the wall, toward the hole we wanted to use to pass into the city.  The gap between the prow of the ship and the wall was forming a wedge it couldn’t quite force itself past, and it didn’t have the complete senses to figure out a way.  It groped blindly, pawing with a limb made of a warbeast and a dozen soldiers.

We passed beneath the groping claw, into the city.

I knew what the others were looking at as we stopped and got our bearings.

We were standing at the edge of a field.  A bridge stood a distance ahead of us.  Not the bridge, but familiar nonetheless.  We were on the same tier of land that Lambsbridge occupied.  The road between the Academy and the Orphanage was a little ways ahead of us, stretching from our right to our left, and we were about a third of the way down it.

Artillery fire struck near the Tangle at the walltop.  Stone and wood crumbled in equal measure, and the Tangle fell.  Behind us, the other Tangle was climbing up.

I pulled the pin and threw the canister at it.

Gas erupted around it.  There was a dull moaning sound, as if each of the bodies was making a small sound, and it began to lose strength.

The rebels took the opportunity to come over the deck, where they hadn’t had the confidence to come past the thing.  I spotted Junior.

“We need another!” I shouted.

He stopped, made a face, and then reversed direction.

“Was smart,” Lillian said.

“Hm?” I asked, trying to take in the surroundings.

“I was thinking we had to kill it.  He was thinking he needed to take it down ten percent, across the entire body, weakening the protein bonds that tie one body to another.  That’s all it takes.”

“Wonderful!” I said, not even really paying attention.   “Good job, Junior.”

“He’s not here,” Ashton said.

This was deceptively familiar ground.  It was a scene I’d seen countless times in my life, enough that it had solidified among my more durable memories, but it was set askew, painted over.  The terrain was tilted, and the movements of Tangles and the damage to Tangles had littered the area with a number of bodies that seemed almost ludicrous.  Some of those bodies writhed and moved as Harvesters ate or tried puppeteering them.  The lower ground and ditches were congealing with bodily fluids, rain, and the plant matter that had disintegrated in the acid rain, forming a black slurry of mud.

We started forward, picking a path that would take us closer to the gates.  They were open, too damaged to be closed.

There was more artillery fire, aimed at the Tangle we’d brought with us.  It hit the wall or sailed over it.

We were wet, dressed in dark uniforms, crossing a field of blighted crops, blood, and bodies; it meant we were almost camouflaged.  We moved with more purpose than the twitching bodies did, however, and we were a more concentrated mass.

The camouflage got us partway to our destination before they took notice.

A tower near the gate fired a shell, the sound echoing.

Aimed at us.

“Right!” Mary shouted.  There was a momentary resistance.  The way the plume of smoke that pointed skyward looked to be angled, they might have thought she was pushing us into the way of the shot.  She spoke with more venom.  “Go right!”

The rebels with us moved.  I was already weaving through the ones who weren’t moving fast enough.

It hit ground to our left.  Wind had carried it a considerable distance.  It wasn’t close enough to clip any of us, but loud enough that I lost the ability to hear with my left ear, and the shock of it took the legs out from several people.

“Go, go!” I shouted, leading the way through the ankle-deep soup of acid water, dead organic matter and mud.  Each step sucked at my boots.

Broken and dying Tangles roused as they took notice of us.  Leeches that protruded from orifices reached yearningly in our direction, and the bodies clumsily followed after.  Our rebels shot the ones who were close enough to be dangerous, stabbed at a few who were too feeble to be more than an inconvenience, and ignored the remainder.

There was another shot.  Mary called out the direction.  We moved to avoid it.

It was a different kind of shot, this time.  Three explosions landed near us, and more shrapnel or debris followed, kicking up sprays of mud and dirt everywhere between us and the tower it had originated from.

One of those explosions hit two of our stragglers.  Another six near them fell over, the shock of the nearby impact enough to knock them out or kill them.

The shrapnel knocked down one long-legged fellow to my left.

Jessie’s stitched, holding Jessie with one hand, gathered up three of the fallen, slinging all them almost carelessly over one shoulder.

We pushed forward, moving forward because anything else would have meant remaining a target indefinitely.

The tower that had been firing on us changed targets.  An order had been communicated.  I looked to see why, and I saw that the Tangle we’d brought was moving along the walltop, approaching the walls and towers of Radham.  It had its sights on the tower above the Hedge, the training hospital that served the civilians of Radham.

We were clear to make it the last third of the way to Radham itself.  We approached the gates, Mary motioning for our squads to hang back.  The wall provided cover from the cannons it supported.  I gestured for people to keep an eye up.

There were no soldiers guarding the gates.  A Tangle crept through the landing area where the checkpoints had been in wartime, ignoring some bodies and absorbing others.  Acid water formed pools around and beneath it, diluted enough to only sear and blister the flesh that was being repeatedly smashed into puddle after puddle.

The coast was clear?

Mary moved to push forward.  I grabbed her arm, stopping her.

The tangle flopped.  It clawed its way past apparent civilians and wounded, and absorbed a Crown soldier.  It splashed again in the water.

My prey instinct screamed.

High above us, artillery fired on Fray’s tangle.  Even bisected, it was large enough to be a threat.

I gestured for the others to wait.

“Why?” Mary hissed.  “If they have any acid they could dump on us from the wall-”

“Wait,” I said.  “Because I think what’s waiting for us in there is worse.”

“Worse?” Lillian asked.

“The water’s wrong,” I said.  “Ask Helen.”

“Helen isn’t communicative,” Ashton said.

“Well, if she could speak, she’d say it sounds off,” I murmured, hoping I wasn’t losing my mind.

I gestured for them to wait again, then ventured forward.

I passed through the gates we’d been lurking by, and crept closer, mindful of the smaller Tangle that could so very easily turn on me.  They wouldn’t be easy to kill, and Junior hadn’t caught up to us.

There was an open area that served as a place for visitors to stop and for checkpoints to set up, spacious enough for pallets of supplies or boxes of ammunition to be left to one side while multiple wagons could move freely through the area.  Roads branched off from the gate plaza to the rest of Radham.  Each fixture was reminiscent of a body part.  The tower for the brain, Claret hall for the heart, the dormitories for the ribs, Bowels for the… bowels.

This was the left hand.  The roads were the fingers, reaching out and around.

On the other side of the left hand, I could see Fray, standing on a covered bridge that extended between two guard-houses.

Not broken-reflection Fray, not a fractured image.  The real Fray, raven haired lipstick red, wearing a coat that wasn’t a Professor’s coat, but might as well have been.

Seeing her like this, odd as it was, solidified the story the phantom images had been telling me for a long, long time.  I was almost entirely certain of it.

“Lambs,” I said.

The Lambs advanced.  They came to stand behind and to either side of me.

“When the images in my head were trying to communicate something, I didn’t connect the thoughts.”

“Sy?” Lillian asked.

“It took some digesting.  Thinking of things from different angles.”

“From the time Avis was freed by an insider, we thought she might be working with Hayle,” Mary said.  “We talked about that.”

“Yeah,” I said.  I stared at Genevieve Fray.  “That’s… definitely possible.  More and more likely, the more we see and find out.  I’d give it ninety-ten odds at this point.  The only other option is that she went rogue late in the game.”

“But it’s not what you’re talking about,” Lillian said.

“Whenever I saw Fray, pictured her in my head, I couldn’t see her face without seeing it broken.  But one thing was consistent, almost always.”

“The images don’t mean anything, Sy,” Duncan said.

“She always had Lambs with her,” I said.  “She had you with her.  Or Evette.  She embraced them, she seemed… fond of them.  Possessive.”

“They don’t mean anything,” Duncan repeated himself.

“They’re just me holding ideas in my head I’m not sure how to parse or connect, yet.  The Lambs are Fray’s project.  Not Hayle’s.  We were always the primary or a primary focus of what she was doing.”

“Why?” Ashton asked.

I bit my tongue.

I answered a different question, that hadn’t been asked.  “She probably did multiple things at a time, every step of the way.  She extended our leash when she leashed everyone.  It’s why she was so happy to see us, so eager to talk to me.  It’s why she was so willing to let us have the Beattle recruits.”

And it’s why we’re not going to stop her, not in every respect.  Many of our goals align.

“Fray!” I called out.  “Let’s parley!”

She said something.  Her voice didn’t reach us over the distance.

What I wouldn’t give for Helen’s ears, now.

She pointed.  I couldn’t tell if she was giving direction to one of her pets or if she was warning us.

Whatever it was, it didn’t change our circumstance.  Artillery struck, and the Tangle we’d brought with us fell, crashing to the ground below.

It stirred the water, which began to move of its own accord.  A low-to-the-ground, camouflaged jellyfish, masquerading as puddles.  I’d felt like the ripples were wrong, the sound of the rain against water oddly muted.  This would be why.

Fray turned to retreat as two superweapons clashed between her and us.  Heading toward Hayle.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.16 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.16

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The clash of the two crude forces of nature made crossing the Academy grounds impossible.  The Tangle might’ve had a brain, if I counted the modified warbeast that served as its head, but destroying that brain wouldn’t stop the Tangle.  It would only render it impossible to control.

The jellyfish seemed so heavy it had difficulty moving without making its gelatinous self ripple and roll in a direction, but it had the advantage of being big.  It rocked itself back and forth, building up momentum, and rolled into the Tangle, gripping it and pulling it down onto its side.  The sound and the ‘splash’ were muffled.

I could see it start to build up strength, and to use similar mechanisms to get itself moving, now that it was agitated.  All of the water within the Academy and much of the water beneath our feet, extending into the ditches and onto the roads leading down from the Academy was an extension of the creature.

“How?” I asked, turning around.

Mary turned.  “Rifle!”

Bea tossed her a rifle.

With the bayonet, Mary sliced it across a puddle.  The gap widened as the larger mass pulled one part through the gate and toward its fumbling struggle with the Tangle.  The remainder was pulling together into a mass outside of the gates.

“Hag Nerve,” Duncan said.

“I don’t know that one,” Lillian said.

“Superweapon,” Duncan said.  “Mucin glands, they spin out collagen-axon chains-”

“The nerve in the hag nerve,” Lillian said.

“-And filament chains.  To form skeins that catch the water.”

“It’s actually made of water?” I asked.

“Ninety nine percent,” Duncan said.  “Water, filaments like spider web, and the translucent organs that make the webs.  It’s a blob of the slime you’d get if you dumped enough spider web into the water to keep it all collected into one mass.”

The Tangle went on the offensive.  It struck out, trying to sandwich the hag nerve blob between itself and the wall, and it slammed its body into the damaged gate, just a short distance from us.  Harvesters were knocked loose, many thrown into our general direction.

Mary moved to the rear of our group, tossing a rifle our way so it remained more or less upright, bayonet pointed skyward.  There was no intended recipient, she simply trusted that one of us would catch it.

I caught it, and used the weapon to stab a harvester that was getting too curious about us.

The things were swarmers, though.  They were gathering together into a mass.  That would be uglier, if they veered our way instead of heading back to the Tangle Prime.

Lillian opened a paper packet, pulled it over the top of a vial, and shook it, before tossing it at the swarm.

It exploded in a small, five-foot diameter puff of dust, encompassing the building swarm.  The cloud of dust was quickly beaten down by the rain.

It seemed to keep the swarm from building.  They didn’t dissipate, but it was something.

“More problematic-” Duncan said.

“The Hag Nerve thing is big,” I said.

Duncan gripped his rifle, then said, “It’s spreading.”

The Tangle waded through the Hag Nerve, and it was as though it was wading through gloopy slime.  Over the course of several steps it went from being immersed to what amounted to its ankles to being immersed to its knees.

The Hag Nerve began sloshing.  It rocked, building momentum with each movement, and the Tangle’s feet were dragged across the slimy cobblestones, left, then right, until it fell over.

In the course of its rocking, it rolled up against the side of one house, striking the gutter.  The water that spilled out over the surface of the blob slowed and congealed as it rolled, not even spilling out and over to the sides.

“Will explosives work?” Mary asked.

“Some,” Duncan said.  “But I don’t know if it would be worth it.”

It’s just water, I thought.

“We need to get around it,” I said.  “Unless there’s a way to stop it?”

“Horrendous amounts of digestive enzymes?” Duncan suggested. “Probably how they clean it up.”

“Can we get access to their cleanup method?  Wherever they went to get the acid rain going?”

“It’s probably one of the most guarded locations.”

“Given the protein focus, salt would work,” Lillian said.  “Ion chains.”

“Yeah,” Duncan said.  Then he perked up.  “Proteins!  That gas Sy had Junior make would work nicely.”

“I really didn’t want to use it so soon,” I said.  “Really didn’t.”

“He’s not back yet,” Mary said.  “And I don’t think we want to wait.”

“Salt then,” Lillian said.

“We’re a long way from the ocean,” I added.

Our rebels were apparently in position now.

“Explosives out!” Mary called out.  “Ready!  Stand clear!”

We were between two blobs.  The one in the plaza was large – and I was seeing what Duncan meant about how it was spreading.

Every body of water in the Academy grounds, some of the bodies of water beyond.  All were interconnected now.  All were part of this particular, deceptively simple weapon.

“I hate enemies without brains,” I said.  “I can never outsmart them.”

“There’s something to be said about that, Sy,” Mary said.

“Probably,” I said, my attention on the path before us.  I could see the water recede, in its way, leaving the stones of the road through the gate almost dry.  “Probably.”

The Tangle was being smothered.

“First throw!” Mary called out, pointing with a fresh rifle she’d borrowed.

Someone threw a grenade.  It detonated and didn’t fully divide the blob.  As if time had frozen, the mass of water with dust, sticks, small stones and countless splinters stuck in it split, splashing out, and then stopped, the edges blurring and slumping into one another.

“Second throw!”

Each detonation made me jump, my teeth rattling enough I worried I’d bite my tongue.  The tower-top artillery hadn’t been shooting.  Too many of us were too close to the base of the wall to be aimed at, and nobody, Junior included, seemed to be comfortable approaching.

“Hurry!”

With the blob divided, our rebels made a break for it.  There were eight of them, and two slipped on the slime.

I jumped forward, reversing the rifle in my hands.  Holding the barrel just behind where the bayonet blade was attached to it, I extended the rifle-butt their way.  They grabbed it, and I hauled the first one out.  The second was grabbed by the people who were mostly clear.

The Hag Nerve’s slime didn’t pull away so much as it simply stretched out, hampering their movement even once they were free.  The girl I’d helped fell as she came more or less free.  She hissed as she turned around, so she was sitting instead of lying down.

“You alright?” I asked.

She moved her leg around, raising one of her pants legs to expose her calf.  Red.

“Plague?” I asked.  I was aware of the change in expressions.

She shook her head.  “Acid.  It’s mild.  Diluted, but the Hag Nerve grips you.  Like an indian burn with something caustic on your hands.”

“Good to know,” I said.  I tried to wrap my head around that, what it meant for us.  “How is it to walk on?”

The Hag Nerve around us was shifting.  The divided portion was trying to reconnect, outside the gates and we still had soldiers on the far side of it.

The Tangle, fighting to find a way to escape, moved at the other side of the gate, dragging itself against the damaged door.  The door swung in, and slammed against the frame, hard.  More harvesters and a few scattered harvester-riddled bodies were shed, landing around the partially closed set of doors.

Of the large set of double doors, only half of one of the two doors was now held closed, but it was enough to narrow our exit into the Academy itself.  The path beyond- I could see the Primordial Child standing in the puddles and the runoff from gutters.  The drains that were supposed to vent out the rain were clogged with Hag-stuff.

Duncan, Lillian, and Ashton stepped forward to deal with the harvesters and their hosts.  Ashton had only a knife, but he did his part, presumably, with his innate abilities.

Neither of the threats could easily be stopped.  Most attempts to wound or stop them would only divide them.

“Next round, third throw!” Mary called out.  Nobody was close enough to get caught in any blast.

I braced myself.  The detonation wasn’t as bad as the two prior ones.  A bad throw- the road was raised with ditches on either side, and the explosive had landed on the far slope of the road.  If anything, it blew a portion of the blob in our direction.

But it slipped away, the two halves sliding into the ditches on either side of the road.  The rest of our small army was free to follow.

The Tangle bludgeoned the same partially intact gate door it had struck before, threatening to batter it free of the hinges.

“The Hag Nerve is neat to look at,” Ashton said, looking back.  “That’s nice, at least.”

“It’s massively inconvenient,” I said.  “Can you get the Tangle to move away from the door?”

“It’s trying and it can’t.  It’s all Hagged up,” Ashton said.  “Try harder, Tangle!  I’m cheering for you!”

I looked at Mary, “Do you see Junior?”

“No sign,” Mary said.

“I’d hate for him to get cut off,” I said.  “Some people should stay behind, keep an eye out for him.  I think we can get partway to where we need to be, but this would be a lot easier if we had a good answer.”

“I’ll handle it, I’ll stay, make sure he has a route.  You get as far as you can,” Mary said.

“I don’t like leaving you behind,” Lillian said.

“It’s the best way,” Mary responded.  “Bea, you and yours with me.  That’s- fifteen?”

“Fifteen,” Bea said.  She made a face.  “Marcus didn’t make it, Fang couldn’t come.  Plague.”

“Everyone else, with the Lambs,” Mary said.

“You’ll catch up?” I asked.

“I’ll catch up,” she said.

I gave her a lingering look.

“Look after each other,” Mary said.

Radham was a city of perpetual rain.  Everything was wet, and the Hag Nerve operated by extending itself through that interconnected wet.  There was no safe route to take except the high ground, and I knew Radham well enough to know that there wouldn’t be a good way to get from the walls to the places we wanted to be.

My mental picture of Radham Academy was shifting.  A mire, a bog, every step being one we had to fight for.

“Sy?” Lillian asked.

“It’s not a very Lamb sort of problem, is it?” I asked, taking in the scene.  The Tangle was still close to the door.  “It’s… a pretty perfect way to tie our hands.  Slow us down, keep us rooted.  It would mess with Mauer, too, but it really messes with us.”

“It’s not great,” Lillian said.

“Kind of drives home that we’re dealing with Fray and Hayle, who know us,” I said.

“Kind of,” Duncan said.

I turned around.

Mary had her contingent keeping the Hag at bay.  They worked to keep it from lapping its way up the slopes that led up to the main road.  But there was a large group, otherwise.  Our rebels, our soldiers.

“You guys have weapons, you have tools,” I said.  “Our goal is to get up through the Hedge-”

“The hospital,” Lillian clarified.  “We’re actually smack dab in the middle of it.  It’s the building to either side and above us, integrated into the wall.”

“And to the tower,” I said.

“High ground?” Ashton asked.

“Yeah, but not for reasons you’re thinking,” I said.

“The Hedge is going to be defended,” Mary said.  She was a distance away, but listening in.

“Yeah,” I said.  “But first, we’ve got to get to the door.”

“That’s our job?” the Treasurer asked.

“Please,” I said.

“Which way is the door?” he asked.

Lillian pointed.  “About a hundred paces.”

“I think the Tangle won’t come after us,” Ashton said.  “But it can’t move further away either.”

“Grenades first, then,” the Treasurer said.  “We’ll need to clear a way, we move in a tight group.”

“There’ll be enemies on the other side of the door,” I said.  “You need to be able to hold out while we work.”

“Fire?” the Treasurer asked.

“It’s made of water,” Duncan said.

“A ring of ignited oil?”

“I don’t know if we have enough, but yes,” Duncan said.

“Then it’ll have to do,” I said.

“Once we move,” Duncan said, “There’ll be no safe ground, no place we can stop where we won’t be fighting.”

“We get to the Hedge.  Then-”

Then what?

Claret Hall or the Tower?

Which would Hayle go to?  Claret Hall was technically the headmaster’s office.  It was where he could go to coordinate with the rest of his people.

As Mary had done, the Treasurer was arranging the soldiers into a relay of grenade tosses.  We’d stagger them out.

“Then the Tower,” I said.

“What are you thinking?” Lillian asked.

“A message,” I said.

I punctuated the statement with my signal to the Treasurer.

“We’ll only have a couple of minutes of oil at best,” Duncan said, as the Treasurer called out.  He and Lillian had their bags out.  They were examining their stock.

The first grenade was thrown.

“Maybe less,” Duncan said.  “Whatever you’re going to do, you’ll need to be fast.”

“I’ll do my be-”

The explosive detonated.  To pass through the gate, we had to pass beneath the nose of the Tangle, which had reared back from the noise and light.  We had to move within range of a claw swipe.

Ashton lingered, while we moved forward as a group.  Lillian, Duncan, myself.  Jessie and her stitched, the Treasurer, and one rebel with the next grenade.  We went around the corner, stepping into the Academy grounds, and I could see the distant door.

The plan was to move along the wall.  A hundred paces.  I gauged the amount of space we’d carved out with the first throw.

Twenty paces.  But as hard as we pushed, it was already pushing back.  Faster, initially, then slower.

Those twenty paces shrank to fifteen by the time we were in position.  After a minute or five, it might shrink to five or ten.

We moved fast.  Another throw.  The rebel who’d thrown didn’t move ahead with us, instead standing with their back tight against the wall.

It wasn’t the best way to move forward.  The explosions drew attention, we carved out little space, we couldn’t stand close to the detonations, and the Hag Nerve was retaking ground.

There was a window nearby.  I had dim recollections, of being on the other side of those windows.  When I had my appointments at a young age, before Lillian felt equipped to see to them, I’d had them in the Hedge.  In offices and doctor’s rooms.  I would be without any Lambs, in pain I didn’t yet know how to deal with, staring out through the bars of my cage.

The others would make their way forward.  They’d buy themselves time with oil and fire.

I’d get a headstart on my own role in things.

“Jessie,” I said.  “Come with.”

Lillian and Duncan looked at me with surprise.

Ashton was Ashton, like Helen had always been Helen.

“I love you all,” I said.  “Make sure Mary doesn’t use Junior’s gas unless she absolutely has to.”

“What-” Lillian started.

I grabbed the bars, and I started climbing.

“Oh.  Be safe, Sy.”

The rain poured down around us, onto the Hag Nerve, onto the Tangle of dead bodies.  It drenched an Academy that had gone quiet, making my every move a precarious one, where a finger or the toe of a boot could slip from wet metal.

Jessie’s stitched followed, after brief direction from Duncan.  It was large enough to reach where I had to jump.  It managed its slow, inexorable climb, Jessie on its back, piggy-backing it.  My climb was more precarious, and I was in a hurry.

A nice climb was one where I had three points of contact with the wall, two feet and one hand, or both hands and one foot.  I could reach with the free limb.  This wasn’t a nice climb.  There weren’t two points of contact here.  There oftentimes wasn’t even one.

There were gaps between windows large enough that I had to make little jumps, where I touched nothing but air and rain, before reaching out to grab at another set of bars.

One set would be rusty.  Another would rattle as I grabbed it.  Another leap had a loose stone in the sill.

The group below used the weapons we’d brought with us from the ship to carve a way forward.  They were just at the door now.

I spotted what I was looking for.  The branches reinforced the wall higher up, grown into the architecture, supporting parts that had started to crumble.  Those same branches provided a wealth of handholds and security that stone alone didn’t.

As multiple sets had overlapped, they made it harder to set up the bars.

I’d hoped to find a place where Jessie’s stitched could help rip the bars away.  I found better.  The bars had been done away with entirely on one of the upper floors, where the branches almost completely enclosed one window.

I worked the window open, slipping a knife through the gap to flip the latch, and I climbed within.

Patients were arranged on beds.  Two were asleep or in too dire a shape to move.  Five more were awake.  An old woman, one with a long face and her hair curled, glasses making her eyes hard to make out.  Two injured men who might have been soldiers.  A woman who might have been a mother, sitting in the bed with her child.

This would be long-term care.

Water dripped from me as I walked down the row between the beds.  “How many doctors on the floor?”

“Two nurses, they rotate.  One is always a shout away,” the old woman said.  “Doctors are two shouts away, if something happens.”

“Hey,” a soldier said.  “Quiet now.”

“He has a knife,” the old woman said.  “I’ve come this far.  I’d like to live.”

“The fighting’s over,” I said.  I glanced out the window, then leaned out a bit further, waving my arm so the stitched could see.

“Is it?  I hear explosions,” a soldier said.

“Cutting through the mess,” I said.  “The fighting is over, but the outcome hasn’t been decided.”

“You’re here to influence that outcome?”

“I’m here to decide,” I said.

Jessie’s stitched ripped away the branches.  I put one hand on Jessie’s arm, holding it, so she wasn’t scraped free & left to fall to the ground far below as the stitched climbed through the window.

“I’m a soldier,” one of the patients said.  He moved like he was going to get out of bed, and I could see the pain on his face.

I drew my gun.  Not for him.

A nurse came to respond to the sound Jessie’s stitched had made.  I pointed the gun at her.

“The Infante is dead.  The armies on all sides have been devastated,” I said.  I motioned for the stitched to follow.  “The people who got us to this point, myself included, need to get some things out of the way.  Either it’s me against them, or all three of us have different opinions on how this should go.  Now… where is the man in charge?”

“Headmaster Hayle?  I imagine he’d be at Claret Hall,” the old woman said.

“The man in charge of the Hedge.”

“He’s downstairs,” the nurse said.

I glanced out the window.  They were just setting up the ring of fire now.  The fire would keep the Hag Nerve from creeping in around them, at least for a bit.  The water would seep in, but the Hag part of things wouldn’t come with it.  They presumably had a way to manage the water lapping in around them.

Duncan had said there would only be a few minutes of reprieve.

“She’ll be safe as long as you don’t kick up a fuss,” I told the patients.  I approached the nurse, gun still pointed at her, and motioned for the stitched to follow.

“Whatever you’re doing this for,” the old woman said.  “Surely it isn’t a world where you’d hurt someone like her, who treats us kindly?”

“I think everyone who has a say would say the world they’re fighting for is the best one,” I said.  “That they’d want to preserve the good people.  The innocents.  But want as we might, we don’t always get a chance.  Don’t make me shoot her.”

“It’s your choice,” she said, to my back.  I was already out in the hallway.

It was dark.  The lights dimmed, at an hour when patients were supposed to be asleep.  But the city was under siege, and anxiety ran high.

We all say we’d want to preserve the good innocents, the voice said.  Reflecting on my statement a moment ago.  There isn’t single one of us who wouldn’t put a bullet in an innocent to bring their ideal world one step to fruition.

This is the world you live in, Sylvester. 

You are the embodiment of that sentiment, that world.

I kept the gun out of sight.  The Nurse walked with me.  Jessie followed, a short distance behind.  The stitched carried her properly in its arms, now that it was done climbing.

The Nurse led me down the stairs.

The others were outside.  How much time had passed?

But I couldn’t rush.  Not at this stage.  I had to appear calm.

She indicated the door.

I looked down the length of the long, empty hallway.

“Grab her,” I said.

The stitched caught the nurse, clapping a hand over her mouth, holding her against the wall.

“Thanks Jessie.  Stay put for now.”

I opened the door, letting myself into the room.  A patient’s room, luxury, but the person who lay on the cot with an arm draped over their eyes was a Professor.

I put the knife to their throat.  They stiffened in alarm.

I used my hand to move the arm.  He was relatively young.  Thirty-something.  He hadn’t shaved recently, but he was well-groomed, even to the eyebrows.

“I expected a knock at the door.  Someone saying we’d lost.  Ever since I saw that vessel out there,” he said.

I heard detonations.  Was that my signal?

“You guys are dragging out the loss.  It’s going to hurt all sides,” I said.  “Let’s expedite things.”

He considered that.

“Every second counts.  The patients and refugees in this hospital, the soldiers near to the ground floor, defending the entrance, the staff.  If you want them to live, make this easy.”

“What if I make it hard?” he asked.  “I’m not saying I will, but knowing might make the decision that much easier for me.”

“The artillery up above.  The shells and explosives they’re raining down on the attackers are stored somewhere.  I’d head to a tower, not too close to here, and I’d blow it up, and myself with it.  I want to give them a way through, that doesn’t mean they’re wading through the Hag Nerve.  I’ll sacrifice myself if it means giving them that.”

“It’s that bad already?”

“Yes.  And I want through.  Either you give us and them a way through, or I’ll take myself and everyone in the Hedge out to pave a way for my colleagues.  Decide fast.  You do not want to see what happens if they don’t make it.”

It wasn’t my voice that had made that warning.

He met my eyes.  It was gloomy, the only light from an oil lamp turned to its lowest settings.

He seemed to read something in my expression.

I’d always been bad at being sincere when it counted.  I came across as dishonest.

“Alright,” he said.  “What do you need?”

He seemed to believe this, when I was as honest about what I was willing to do as I’d ever been.

“Announce the surrender.  Say Hayle sent the message and he’s spreading it around.  The people outside the door get to come in.  They pass without incident.  All weapons get put away.”

He stood from the bed, swinging his legs down.

“What happens after?” he asked.

“Go,” I said.  “After all of this is over, we talk.  And that’s only if all of them out there are fine and healthy.  Hurry.”

He left.  He seemed bewildered, as he stopped in the hallway and saw Jessie, and more bewildered still when I didn’t follow to ensure he was doing what I wanted him to do.

I stood in the small, luxury patient’s office, and I had a sensation that I’d been cooped up in here, once upon a time.

I touched the window, looking at the bars of metal and the wood that wound its way across.  I could see the water that ran down the glass and the flame reflected in the individual droplets.

“Let her go,” I told Jessie.

The nurse was released.  She stumbled a few steps away, and it looked like she was about to run.  She didn’t.

“Did you hear?” I asked.

“We lost,” she said.  “I don’t know who won.”

“Nobody,” I said.  “That’s not how this plays out.”

I moved at a more leisurely pace.  The stress from carrying Jessie around had worn out my legs, and I was only now feeling it.  The climb had only exacerbated the stress and exhaustion.

“Can I- are you letting me go?”

“Don’t cause trouble,” I said.  “We still have to see how the dust settles, and who is left when it does.  If you stay quiet, you’ll be fine whatever happens.  If you stir things up and the wrong set of things occur, it only hurts you and others.”

“I came here tonight with only the plans to look after my patients.”

“Do that,” I said.

She fled.  Going back upstairs.

“How was that, Jessie?” I asked.

Jessie was silent.

“Yeah,” I said.

We moved briskly toward the stairs.  I had to trust the Lambs were doing their best.

I made my way up, Jessie following, I opened the door just enough to peek, then stepped back, staying in the stairwell with Jessie.

The Lambs appeared.  Lillian and Duncan supported Mary.

“You took too long,” Mary said.  She sounded different.

“The fire went out,” Ashton said.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

She looked up at me.  One of her ribbons had come loose, and her hair had fallen down on the one side.

“She pushed herself too hard,” Lillian said.  “Fighting back a rising tide with knives and wire.”

“And drugs,” Duncan said.

“Not much.  A burst of movement when I needed it,” Mary said.

But she’d needed it.  I wanted to say something and I couldn’t.

The others were coming.  Rebels.  They ascended the stairs.

“We should hurry,” Mary said.  “People recognized us.  Not everyone is keen with us just walking through, our guns raised while theirs were lowered.”

“I imagine it’s hard for them to process.  Most haven’t considered being in a situation like this, even in wartime,” Duncan said.

Mary continued, “The dissenters will find those of like mind, and they’ll follow.  Or they’ll do something to work against us.”

“I puffed at them to get them to hold back, but that won’t account for much,” Ashton said.

“Everything helps,” Duncan said.

“We’ll have to act before they pull themselves together,” I said.  More of our rebels were collecting.  Junior was with them, I saw.  He held up a canister.

Let’s give them a message, drive reality home.

I gestured.

Our rebels mounted the attack.  They moved through the doorway at the top of the stairs.  They stepped onto the rooftop, rifles bristling.

The artillery team was on the roof.  The great cannon was set in place, the crates of artillery were stacked neatly nearby, and the soldiers were divided.  Half were keeping watch while holding onto their tea and hip flasks.  The other half manned the cannon, many with binoculars in hand.

Our side fired first.  They fired back, but it was scattered.

I could see lanterns flaring to life on neighboring rooftops.  Concerned.  Their focus seemed to be on the ground, a concern of an attack from across the fields, or from within Radham.

Mary pulled away from Lillian and Duncan, and she stumbled a little before dropping to her knees, moving her rifle around from where it hand dangled at her back.  Her focus was on the nearby towers.

Our cannon was loaded.  Our team was able to reorient it.

“Attack the other tower,” she said.  “I need rifles here, fast!”

The cannon turned, slow and heavy, aiming at the tower to our north.

Mary’s group aimed a battery of rifle fire at the tower to our south.

They opened fire before we did, this time.  Rifle shots.  We ducked behind cover, crouching, as our cannon fired at the other tower.

The towertop exploded, violent, a flare of orange flame and heavy smoke.  All of the ammunition they had been carrying went up with them, and the towertop began to crumble.

It was an attack from within that they hadn’t been fully equipped to deal with.  They’d clued in, but it had been late.

If Mary’s rifle battery hadn’t killed most or everyone at the other tower, it had cowed the survivors enough that they weren’t poking their heads up.

That was fine.  If they were being crafty or if they were running in anticipation of the cannon being turned their way, that would be alright.

“Remind me which corner of Claret Hall had the especially fancy staff room?” I asked.

The Lambs turned to stare at me.

“We might as well,” I said.  “Like I said, delivering a message.”

I didn’t need to give the order.  Our rebels began working as a team to slowly rotate the artillery turret.  It stopped partway, the structure of it not allowing it to fully turn inward.

It was our mechanically inclined girl from Junior’s group, coupled with the muscle of Jessie’s stitched, that helped us get it turned the way we wanted it, infrastructure pulled away, safeguards pulled out, mounts loosened.

It was a slow process.  We got the cannon aimed at the heart of Radham Academy.

The team worked to fix its housing so it wouldn’t go flying off the tower, taking several of us with it, with the recoil of its shot.

“What if Hayle is there?” Lillian asked.

“He isn’t,” I said.

“You can’t know for sure.”

“I know the direction Fray ran, and she’d run to him.  I know that our prior headmaster-”

“Briggs,” Duncan said.

“-him.  He would’ve gone to the nice staff room with the nice curtains and rugs and gold-inlaid furniture, and he would’ve had his tea or his brandy there, talking with his fellow black coats.  Hayle wouldn’t.”

“You can’t know,” Lillian said.  “Not for certain.”

“As badly as you want your confrontation,” I said.  “I want my answers.  I wouldn’t do this if I thought there was any chance we’d miss out.”

“Alright,” Lillian said.

“He’s the third god, he wouldn’t make it that easy.”

“All good to go,” our mechanic said.

“Thanks, Posie,” Duncan said.

“Would you like to do the honors?” I asked Lillian.  “Considering what happened with your black coat?”

“I wouldn’t,” she said.  “I’ll do what I have to do in wartime, but… not like this.”

Not like this.

“Alright,” I said.

I gestured.

Posie and the Treasurer managed the firing.

The staff room of Radham was obliterated.  A hole through the wall, a shockwave followed, tearing through that enclosed space.  The windows blew out in rolling fire.

It was a shame that it had to happen, but we needed to break their backs.  To make it clear to those who remained that this was over.

Removing some of their leadership.  Some of their superiors and mentors.

There.

“We hold a position here, use the artillery cannon to open a way?” Mary asked.

“No,” I said.  “We leave nobody behind.”

“You’re sure?  You said you wanted to reach the tower.”

“We will,” I said.  “Shoot down the walls.”

I pointed.

Break their backs, then scar them.  Make it clear, above all else, that they’re no longer safe, whoever they are.

The cannon was loaded, and it fired once more.

One shot, to the base of one of the walls that surrounded Radham.

It mostly held up.

With the second shot, however, that section of wall collapsed.  It broke free, it twisted, unpinned, and it dumped half of the resulting rubble on the outside of the Academy, half on the inside.

Our rebels secured the door from those below as we made shot after shot, targeting the walls.

Tear it down.  Give them nothing.  If they would drown the battlefield, tear down their walls and walk over the rubble.

Lillian approached me.  She took my hand.  Speaking was impossible with the deafening boom after deafening boom.

We watched, hand in hand, as the cannon fired, tearing down the Academy that had given birth to me, to her, to Jessie, Duncan, Ashton, Jamie, Gordon, and even Mary, in a roundabout way.

When the ammunition ran out, we waited.  We let the dust settle and the rain wash that dust away.

Our retreat covered, we started on our walk to the distant Tower, where Hayle and Fray no doubt awaited us.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.17 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.17

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The fallen structures still smoked.  People, the majority of them students, were doing their best to make their way across toward Claret Hall, where one fire had started.

Soldiers were setting up a perimeter, rolling or having stitched carry barrels of salt.  Other members of the teams were either helping to get the salt flowing freely, sticking trowels and shovels into the barrels, or they were using brooms to mix the salt with the slime, so the Hag Nerve on their side of the salt was thoroughly killed.

We picked our way over the rubble.  Many of the others from the ship had come running when the walls had come down.  They’d run into the Hag Nerve and they’d found their own way through, helped by the rubble that had cascaded down onto the fields.

There were enough of us that we couldn’t take one path without stretching ourselves out too thin.  Our forces fanned out, to the extent we could with the Hag Nerve around us, many of us armed.

The groups that flanked us approached the defending forces, the soldiers and Doctors that were moving away from the wreckage and devastation.  Many of the defending forces and Academy natives were shell-shocked, rattled by the devastation around them, and they didn’t put up a fight.

Off to our left, there was some gunfire, suggesting it wasn’t all that easy.

Claret Hall would be harder, even beheaded as it was, but Claret Hall could come later.

We made our way to the tower, stepping from slab to slab, chunk to chunk, and along areas where the slime had been parted by the force of falling masonry and that same masonry then dammed it off.  Everything was wet; the moss that had grown on parts of the wall and slime that had splashed up now made footing precarious.  I had to stop several times, because even with my legs tired from carrying Jessie and from the climb, I was still better at it than some.

The Wyvern had stunted me.  It had inhibited my growth – I was only as tall as Lillian, and Lillian wasn’t tall for a woman.  Jessie hadn’t grown in the usual way because Jessie lacked some of the hormones for puberty, and she was still taller than me.

I looked back at her, and saw her asleep.  Lillian was directly behind Mary, helping Mary to limp along – the two of them had hands gripping the stitched’s belt.  I really hoped it wouldn’t tip over and send all three girls spiraling onto the slimy, smoking fragments of wall.

I’d been stunted in other ways.  I was still the boy.  In personality and in other ways, I hadn’t grown up.  It was ironic that the Wyvern that made the acquisition and loss of skills so rapid left me with the ability to climb and walk tightrope-narrow walltops and bridges as young boys did.  It wasn’t because I was better at it, but because the fears and hesitation that held so many others back were muted in me.  One had to learn fear and caution as they learned any skill.

I’d seen Mabel somewhere, I was pretty sure.  I could watch Lillian and Jessie picking their way through the ruins, and I could follow that thought to its conclusion.  I hadn’t grown in the ways I needed to, in order to maintain a proper relationship with a girl.  One had to learn to navigate relationships.

In contrast, however, I had grown in a way that let me see this through.  It wasn’t my childhood home, not quite, but it was my childhood, and I’d left it in shambles.  The army behind us watched for my hand to move, saw me gesture, and they hurried to catch up.

“Yes?”

“Is Junior with us?”

“He was talking to Duncan, last I saw.”

“Can you bring him?”

“Yes sir.”

Sir.  A title for a man.

We were one of the most powerful people in the Crown States when we took Hackthorn hostage.

We supplanted others and raised our standing when we took the lesser aristocrats, the lowest of the visiting Nobles, and the various small Academies.  We became a power on par with any but the Infante when we gathered our army.

We beat the Infante.

“Everything okay, Sy?” Lillian asked.

“The path gets a little less clear here,” I said.  I pointed.

“In more ways than one?” she suggested.

“No,” I said.

We were just past the dormitories now.  The tower was on a raised area of land, but there was a dip before then, and that dip was flooded.  A slash of overly still water, twenty feet across, cutting through the road.

The tower itself was illuminated here and there.  I didn’t see anyone in the windows, but I did see the orange and yellow lights shift as people moved this way and that.

“No,” I said again, hammering it in.

“I know your memory is bad,” she said.  “I’m going to say it again.”

“There’s no need,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

Junior reached us, with Ashton, Duncan, and Helen in his company.

“You have the stuff?” I asked.

“I recruited help and made extra, just in case, because I did not want to run back a third time,” Junior said.  “You can thank the rest of the old gang.”

Three canisters.  Each was as large as a single dewar flask, like the ones many Doctors used for long-term chemical storage, or as many civilians used to stow a kettle’s worth of tea or a multiple-person serving of hot stew.  Too large to really serve well as a grenade.

“Alright,” I said.  I pointed.  “We’ll need to get through.  It should kill the Hag Nerve, shouldn’t it?”

“Should,” Duncan said.  “There’s a risk of it multiplying back into the body of water, but that water will be tainted.  I doubt it’ll be mobile, even if it’s soupy.”

“I’m glad Abby isn’t here,” Ashton said.  “She’d be so sad.”

“It doesn’t have a brain,” I said.

“Neither do I.  Neither does Wendy.  I’m not sure about Abby.”

“It doesn’t have anything brain-like,” I said.

“Neither do you,” Lillian said.

I reached out to pinch at her cheek, and she caught my hand.

Junior got to work, flipping a switch on the flask before uncapping it.  The gas began billowing from it, rolling out before us.

The fact that the wall had come down and was now at our backs allowed the wind through.  It rolled out and brought the gas with it, carrying it over the Hag that covered the ground and filled the moat.

“How are you doing, Mary?” I asked.

“I don’t know how soldiers can use those things with any regularity.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I used to always like this spot,” Mary said.  “In the very beginning, when I was in Hayle’s custody, after you recruited me, Lillian would come visit me.   Then it flipped around.  I would walk Lillian to her office, or go to see her, or I’d visit the dorms here.  I used to be hereabouts, past the thick of the buildings, only a few students around, rain falling, and I’d get a happy, anticipatory feeling.”

“And now?”

“Dread.”

Duncan drew in a deep breath.

“Duncan?”

“I felt like I could stand a little taller, while going to see Professor Hayle.  I was recognized by one of the best students in class and one of the top Professors locally.  Huzzah for you, Mr. Foster.  Stand here, look forward and…” Duncan swept his arm out, fully extended, palm forward, as if wiping his hand along a picture, “…you can see that black coat.  You can see your way forward, that has you on an even footing with major aristocrats, below only the Nobles.”

“It always terrified me,” Lillian said.  “For different reasons.  By the time I got used to it, we’d lost Jamie.”

I looked back at Jessie.  I reached back and adjusted her hood, and let the back of my hand rest on her temple.

Lillian let go of the hand she’d been holding since I’d reached back to pinch her cheek.

“Two gods to slay, hm?” Lillian asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

The sound of the rain changed.  I tilted my head, listening to it.

“I think I had an inkling that one of your big abstract gods was lurking here even from the beginning,” Lillian said.

“I think you might’ve,” I said.

“I think that was why I found it all so intimidating,” she said.

“I think-”

She put fingers to my mouth.

I drew in a deep breath, then nodded.

“My first memories are here,” I said, after she lowered her fingers. I drew my hand away from Jessie.  “Being terrified, needles up my nose and around the sides of my eyes, to reach the brain, poisoning my brain, pain that seemed like it was so incredible that it wiped everything away.  I was scared too, once upon a time.  Then I figured out how to put that fear in a box and promptly lost it.  It was only the fear for others that was left, and fear of what I might do to those others.”

“Us?” Lillian asked.

“You.  Lambsbridge.  The… group from the sticks.  Radham.  The world.  But I forgot a lot of the familiar faces.  I’m only really good at remembering the people I see regularly.”

The change in the rainfall suggested the Hag had relaxed.  The rainfall on the bodies of water sounded more like rainfall was supposed to.  The appearance of the water, too, had changed, rippling and splashing more with the heavier raindrops or collections of droplets.

I gestured.  I was the first to set foot on the path below the scattered rubble, layered by an inch of water.

It wasn’t overly slimy.  Slick, yes, but it served.

Our soldiers charged forward, sloshing through the water.  I carried on walking, as they ran past.  Faces appeared in the windows, staring at the scene.

“Be on your guard,” I said.

The Treasurer, running past me as I spoke, called out the same words, “Be on your guard!”

The scattered few stitched we had were first through the door, at the instructions of the Treasurer and Bea.  The students in quarantine outfits were next.  Once the calls came back from the people inside, a large portion of our soldiers stormed the tower.

They hadn’t ever been here, it struck me.

So odd, when the place was a staple in my memory.

“I always hated this place.  Hated the doctors,” I said.  An extension of my earlier comments.

“Don’t let your hate color your actions,” Lillian said.

Walking, limping, or otherwise waiting for the others, the Lambs reached the door.  We passed within.  I could see our soldiers heading up the stairwells.  Some were hanging back, getting lanterns out.  Others were going down the hallway, investigating the various rooms and labs on the ground floor.  Students and Doctors were hauled out of rooms, threatened with guns, made to kneel.

I knew where I was going.

Sub Rosa stood by the door.  She looked mournful.  I’d seen her wear an expression like that, once.

I stepped through that door to Jamie’s old lab.

“Sy?” Lillian asked.

His Professors were there.  Soldiers I didn’t know were making them kneel.  The throne was there, like a tombstone, and there were the glowing tanks with the cloths thrown over them.  The walls were lined with bookshelves, and the bookshelves were lined with diaries.

I let my fingers trace the books as I took my time circling the room.

I didn’t recognize the Professors, but the stark fear on their faces suggested they knew me.  That was good enough.

“Is Fray around?” I asked.  I had to ask.  It would be silly and dangerous not to.

There were shakes of heads.

“Starting this out by lying to me is not a good idea.”

“We haven’t seen her.  We weren’t looking out until the wall came down, but- we’d have noticed.”

I nodded.  I took in the room, where Jamie and his successor had spent so much time.

“I’m thinking of a specific time and place,” I said.  “I’m really hoping you’re all thinking of that same time and place.  I think it should go without saying.”

The Professors were silent.  Jamie had had so many.  An incredible team.  There were specialists too, and Doctors.

“I remember how little you all seemed to care,” I said.  “You looked right past me.  You stepped over me.  I found a scalpel and came after you, and one of my friends stopped me.  You barely seemed to care.  You just wanted to get back to work.”

I saw old men clench their jaws.

“Did you keep working, after he left?  Are the brains working?”

“You did so much damage, taking him away,” a woman said.

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

The man who responded was the oldest one present, enough that even the Academy measures he’d used to restore his vitality were only partial at best.  It gave him a ghoulish appearance, almost a caricature.  His hair was overly dry and unkempt.  “They work.  Loss should be minimal.  Our work has been interrupted as different members of our team were pulled away for other projects, but we kept in communication.  At Headmaster Hayle’s urging, we committed to stay when the Crown States were abandoned.  Discussion to date has been where to take the project next, and we’ve been laying groundwork and outlining what we’ll need over this past week.  We were thinking about a vat-grown body.  Transplanting what we have to an empty vessel.”

I looked at the throne, then at the vats and the various tubes and cords that connected them.  Spines and brains in jars, tubes of fluid, a living thing interrupted, like a carcass.

Transplating what they had.  An empty vessel.

I didn’t dare let myself hope.

“Would that bring him back?  The Jamie who put those memories there in the first place?”

“What?” the old man asked.  He sounded indignant.  He almost spat the word, “No.

One of his colleagues, a middle-aged man with spectacles, reached out to touch the older Professor’s arm, urging him to be calmer.

I hadn’t wanted to let myself hope, but it was still painful to hear.

I could have killed that old man for that.

“It’s muddied,” the middle aged man said.  “It wouldn’t have been possible if we’d had a vat-grown body ready the moment we lost the original Caterpillar, because so much depends on original brain structure.  Beyond that, the brains are a stew of the original Caterpillar’s catalogued memory and the memories from eighteen appointments the second Caterpillar had.  There’s reduplication, meshing, the sorting mechanisms…”

He trailed off, as I gestured, beckoning.

Jessie came to stand beside me.

One of the younger ones, a grey coat, spoke up with his eyes wide, “That’s the Caterpillar?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “She’s in stasis, until we can get her to a point where she isn’t losing the memories anymore.”

“I- we can’t.  You know that, right?  That wouldn’t be possible, especially at this stage.”

Redefine possible,” I said, and I said it with venom in my voice.  “Do it like your welfare depends on it.”

“You’ll want to call her Jessie, not Caterpillar,” Duncan said.  “I’m reasonably sure that Sylvester wouldn’t kill you for referring to her as ‘it’ or calling her by the project title, but he’d make you regret it.  We have people we’ve been talking to and utilizing.  We’ll introduce you to them shortly, all going well.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice soft.  I reached out to touch Jessie’s hair.  “Why don’t you go get settled in the throne, Jessie?”

“Um,” Duncan said.  “Here, I’ll instruct you.  Someone had better come and talk us through this.  It’s been a while since I kept up with this project.”

The young man I’d been threatening and the old man both got up, hurrying over to the dais that the great throne stood on.  The young man pulled off his coat and used it to dust the apparatus off.

“Hayle,” someone at the door said.  “At the top floor.”

“Is he in a position to come down to meet us?” Mary asked.

“Are they?” I asked.  “Plural.  Fray has to be there too.”

“Are they in a position to come down to meet us?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the soldier said, sounding bewildered.

“I had a mental picture of one or both of them with a device or creature at hand, or an apparatus, a weapon, or-” Mary started.  “Nevermind.”

“We’ll be up shortly,” Lillian said.  “Unless there’s an immediate concern?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Then we’ll be up shortly,” she said, again.  There was emotion in her voice.

I watched as Jessie was situated.  The cords and tubes were pulled into their rough positions, but not attached.  They dangled, holding position by dint of habits formed long ago, poised like snakes ready to bite.  Jessie slept on, and the stitched that had served as her arms and legs stood behind the throne, following Duncan’s orders when he needed something brought to his waiting hand.

Lillian drew close to my side, rubbing my back.

“Jamie was lovely,” she said.  “Jessie had her good points too.”

“Has,” I said.  “Has her good points.”

“Okay, Sy.”

“They’ll fix her.  They should have followed my project enough to know I’ve got a great imagination, and people as smart as them should know I’ve got reason to despise them to the core of my being.  I’ve got motive, opportunity, means and more means.  As mean as you get.”

I said it loud enough to be sure they heard.

“I’ll stay,” Duncan said.

“Hm?” I made an inquisitive noise.

“Unless you need me.  I’ll stay.  I’ll watch Jessie.”

I stared at him, trying to figure it out.

“You can trust me,” he said.

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

“The pill-”

“Again, not what I was thinking.  I was just… thinking about logistics.  My head is in a different place right now.”

“You can’t trust they won’t try something, like taking her hostage, not unless you have someone who knows their stuff.  You could have one of your rebel doctors watch over things.  We have some who followed along with the preliminary work we were doing with Jessie, but… short of Lillian, I’m the one most familiar with her.  And Lillian wants to confront Hayle.”

“You’re sure?” Lillian asked.

“I’m sure,” Duncan said.  “Just leave me some soldiers.”

Mary called out some names.  Lillian and I stood back while people got arranged.

Ashton and Helen approached.  I messed up Ashton’s hair.

“Rude,” he said.  His hair stayed sticking up.  “I’ve got my hands full of Helen.”

“And no cause to be concerned for your safety,” I said.  “Many a lad has wished to be in the position you’re in.”

He looked at Helen, then made a face.

“No,” he said.  “No, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that.”

“A joke, young sir,” I said.  “Because the alternative is too hard to bear.”

“Okay, Sy,” he said.

I settled my hand on his head, partially patting the hair back into place.

“If Fray isn’t here-” Mary said, looking away from the soldiers she was directing.  The Professors were working out who would be permitted to do the preliminary work and who would hang back, corralled and held at gunpoint.

I shook my head.  “She’s here.”

Go.  End this.

“Bye, Jessie,” I said.

Someone threw a switch.  Turning on a machine.  I flinched and turned away.

We left Jessie and Duncan behind.  We ascended the stairs, and we passed Gordon and Hubris’ old lab.

We passed the room where Mary’s staff had worked from.  I watched as Mary touched the door in passing.

The hallway was one that wound up the tower exterior like a spiral staircase.  The windows looked out on the city.  Wreckage, harvester-modified surfaces and homes, innumerable bodies, and shapes that might have been clusters of bodies or warbeasts.  Rain obscured everything.  If it hadn’t, I might have seen some sign of black wood or the countermeasures against it in the distance.  Whether black woods or a burn circle, the effect on the landscape was much the same.

We passed Ashton’s lab, closer to the top.

Hayle’s office had no need for hallways along any side but the one with the entrance.  The windows provided an expansive view of the city.  He sat at his desk.

Warren stood to one side- except it wasn’t Warren.  A Bruno, but its head hung forward and was revealed as a mask, no skull or anything behind the flesh.  It was a husk, and it was a lifeless one.  Soldiers stood by, weapons at the ready.  Three guarded the Bruno.

Fray stood by the desk.  She was preparing tea.

“Invisible gas and antidotes in the tea?” I asked.

Fray shook her head.

“Anything fun?” I asked.  I examined the Bruno.  “Anything in the Bruno suit?”

“Useful for getting around when Genevieve Fray couldn’t.  The face is interchangeable.  I would periodically use Warren’s face, and sometimes something more generic.”

“Copying me?” Lillian asked.

“No.  Coincidence, Doctor Garey, and barely a coincidence, at that,” Fray said.  “It isn’t strong.  It just moves the way I want it to move when I wear it.  Avis designed the mechanisms for connecting my physiology to it.”

“It sounds wrong when you call me Doctor.”

“Be that as it may,” she said.

I was aware that the soldiers were watching the exchange.  The Treasurer was in the hallway, with Gordeux.

I looked at Hayle.  The old man, lines etched deep in his skin.  He made me think of a gargoyle.  In his natural process of aging, he looked more like an experiment than most of the experiments present.

“I’d appreciate it if the room were less crowded,” I said.  “The Treasurer and Gordeux can stay.”

“I have a name,” Gordo said.

“Guys, give us some breathing room.  Stay in earshot, in case anything happens,” the Treasurer said.

The soldiers left the room, passing by the Treasurer and Gord, who remained just outside the door.  Mary sat in the chair across from Hayle, because she didn’t look up to standing much longer.  Ashton sat as well, getting comfortable with Helen in his lap.  I stood beside Lillian at the back of the room.

The two gods remained on the other side of the desk.

“I wasn’t sure if you heard,” Fray said.  “I was glad to see it was you.  It would have been such a terrible fate for this to unfold and for it to be the likes of Mauer.”

“There would have been something just in Mauer finally getting his win.”

“It would have been a waste, Sylvester.  I think you know that,” Fray said.

I know.

I nodded.

Hayle had yet to speak.  That was fitting, given the god he represented.

“I always feel so glad to see you all,” Fray said.  “Less so when you arrange to have me chased down, but I get by.  I’m fond of you all.”

“Sy says it’s because you made them,” Mary said.

“That’s not what I said, exactly,” I said.

Fray smiled, red lips parting to reveal just a bit of her teeth.  She looked at me.  “What did you say, exactly?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask if you want exact recollection,” I said.  “But… I said we were your project.”

Fray smiled again.  She looked down at Hayle, who sat to her left, then back at us.  “You were.”

The rain drummed against one side of the tower.

“I can’t say I expected it to go this way,” she said.  “But that’s you, isn’t it, Sylvester?  Unexpected.”

Hayle finally spoke, his voice far older than I remembered it, which I didn’t, really.  “I wish you hadn’t destroyed my Academy.”

The other Lambs were watching the exchange, tense.  They were as tense about what I was going to say as they were about anything.

“Did Helen, Jessie, or Duncan make it?” Fray asked.

“Helen’s there,” Lillian said, indicating the parcel in Ashton’s lap.  “Duncan and Jessie are in the lab downstairs.”

“An uphill battle, I imagine,” Fray said.

“You imagine right,” Lillian said.

“What a shame about Helen.  She was a work of art.”

“She will be again,” I said. “We have Ibbot.  And, you know, we have pretty much everything else, this side of the King’s Ocean.”

Gunshots sounded elsewhere in the city.  Mary craned her head to look, perhaps in hopes of seeing who was shooting, and in what directions.  She eased back down.  She had a knife in her hands, where she hadn’t before.

“Well, I suppose Helen’s current situation simplifies the desserts I might serve with tea, then.  It was why I asked as to her whereabouts.  Who am I serving?” Fray asked.  “I recall you turned down my invitation, the last time we talked, Sylvester.”

“No tea,” I said.

Mary and Lillian refused.

“I’ll have tea,” Ashton said.  Mary gave him a stern look.  He changed his mind, saying, “I won’t have tea.”

Genevieve Fray served herself and Hayle.  She opened a tin and put a biscuit on each saucer with the cups.

“That’s not poison, is it?” I asked.  “I think we deserve more than you two offing yourselves.”

“No,” Fray said.  “I wouldn’t do that to you Lambs.”

“Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘my Lambs’?” I asked.

“It could be.  I’d be worried that Mary might kill me, with that look in her eyes.”

“Don’t kill her, Mary,” I said.  I watched the knife disappear, then drew in a deep breath and sighed.

“I wouldn’t call you mine,” Fray said.  “Whatever part I might have played.  You are your own individuals.  As a case in point, your war was rather more messy than I’d have done, Hayle’s Academy in ruins and all.”

“And the deaths,” Lillian said.

“Of course.”

“I think you’re going to have to explain sooner than later,” Mary said.  “One of you.  And I do hate that I’m talking about a plural ‘you’ with Sylvester and Fray included.”

Lillian didn’t look very happy about it either.

“I don’t know how it started,” I said.

“Hayle set the class a project,” Fray said.

“I’d like to hear it from him,” I said.  “At least to start.”

“I had a good crop of students,” Hayle said.  “I wanted to challenge them, and I wanted to be challenged.  I set them the task of creating a better brain, or repurposing old projects to include one.  It was something I’d done before, but I pushed it, even though it was something the Academy didn’t encourage or reward.  In terms of advancement and funding, it was often a dead end.  Genevieve Fray was my student, then.”

“I went looking for a way to approach my project.  My journey took me to the Block, but not to the… full extent of the Block,” Fray said.

“They know,” I said.  I glanced over my shoulder at the Treasurer and Gordeux.

She gave them a searching look, then said, “I figured a large part of things out.  The copious amount of study drugs I was taking might have helped.  That I started from a child slave bought at auction and sought to make an experiment that would complement the Nobles… well.  Not a far cry.”

I bit my tongue.

“My project was Evette,” she said.

I’d wondered.  I nodded to myself.

“Evette failed,” Lillian said.

“She did.  I was overly ambitious, but some of it had to do with luck.  Had she succeeded, I don’t know what would have happened.  I took care to erase my background as team lead once we decided on a future course of action.”

Hayle joined in once more, “I called her to my office to speak about the failure.  We found our way to the subject of the block, as she explained why she’d been so ambitious.  Had she been anything but a favorite student, a circumspect one, and me a favorite, teacher of hers, both circumspect and harboring a desire for a greater challenge that he couldn’t articulate, one of us would have likely met our end after that talk.”

“But you didn’t,” Mary said.

“Unless you’re Stitched,” Ashton said.

“We raised the subject of the Lambs, a larger project with an ultimate end goal.  The Academy was complacent.  The Crown is stagnant, and it’s a stagnation that’s doing a great deal of harm.  They’re content to bury continents and uncover them again after a century or more.  They trust that any problem that arises is one they can solve,” Hayle said.

“When you say you wanted a challenge, you mean you wanted to raise one.  Literally raise us,” I said.

“In effect,” Hayle said.  “We adjusted the experiment, we created the idea of the Lambs as a gestalt of the best projects.  We turned down Percy, because Percy’s idea, while good in its own right, was very much what we didn’t want.”

“Ironic,” I said.  “That Mary’s here now.”

“What-” Lillian started.  “What exactly did you want?  What aren’t you saying?”

Fray smiled, and looked at me.

“I suppose I have to ask.  How did we do?” I asked.

“You did just fine,” she said.  “We’ll have to see how Jessie does, and if Helen can be restored, but I would venture to say you did perfect, getting as far as you did.”

“All according to plan.”

“Not even close to the original plan.  I’d initially hoped you would accept one of my invitations.  That I could guide you, nudge you.  We tried to separate you when you started to run into problems, and our attempt to keep things manageable backfired.  The, ah, crises I manufactured to pave the way and provide you something of an education got out of hand.”

“Mauer,” I said.

Fray smiled.

“Providence,” Hayle said.  “That you would walk your own path and-”

“We ended up right where you wanted us,” I finished his sentence.  I looked at the other Lambs.  “Poised to become Nobles in our own right.”

“Nobles?” Lillian asked.

I could see the alarm on her face.  The concern on Mary’s.

“Poised,” Hayle said, and he leaned forward, elbows on the desk.  I imagined he was seeing over a decade of work come to fruition in this.  “But are you willing?”

Yes,” the voice said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.18 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.18

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

“I think you’d better explain,” Mary said.

We become Nobles.  The plan at the start would have been to prop us up.  Offer us up as a more battle-tested, flexible, dangerous sort of Noble.  The kind that could trounce rebellions, that could use small amounts of power to do great things, best monsters, and test even the greatest minds.  Better yet, we coordinate like no nobles taken separately could.  We work together on an instinctive level.”

“The Twins worked together,” Mary said.

The Twins failed.  The Twins were relegated to bastarddom.  I think they craved that natural cooperation.  Something was missing.  We strike that note.”

I looked to Hayle for confirmation.

He didn’t respond.  He sat at his desk, arms folded before him.  He looked very old and very tired.

I nodded.  “Knowing Hayle and Fray, they left both options open.  The Lambs who survive are poised as great weapons, massive inconveniences to the Crown and Academy.  We and the Crown get an offer.  Lambs become Lords and Ladies, we become an asset instead of an inconvenience.  We get everything we want, we get power like we’ve never had it, and Hayle gets to leverage the one thing he has over us.”

“The expiration dates,” Lillian said.

I walked around the desk.  “The expiration dates.  He removes the gun that’s been held to our heads since we were small.  That, or he hands it over to the Academy, so they can control us.

“To what ends?” Lillian asked.  “What’s the end goal?”

I looked back over my shoulder at the old Professor.

He was silent.

“Things have been untenable for a long time,” Fray said, from the opposite end of the desk as me, supplying the answer.  “There was a balance once.  Wollstone was the start.  I personally suspect he was mythologized, the extent of his deeds and knowledge exaggerated to the Academy’s benefit, but all the same, his work was discovered and made known to the nobility.  What formed was a partnership.  Government and the Academy apparatus, enmeshed.  Over and over again, that pairing is hammered in, so that one is rarely mentioned without the other.”

“At some point the Block became an essential part of things,” Lillian said.

“Yes,” Fray said.  Cynthia was behind her.  “I imagine that is when the balance shifted.”

“This is where I get a little stuck,” I paused as I walked around behind Mary, Ashton, and Lillian.  “It’s where Hayle is sitting there, remaining quiet.  He’s confirmed the main thrust of what he’s doing, but the god lurks there, ominous.  It’s where you’re there, Fray, and I’m aware of the bits and pieces that you’ve threaded through everything.  Bigger and more devastating than the rebel groups you propped up.  You were up to something else.  You had a greater plan at work, and I don’t know if it was a greater part of what you’re putting toward the Lambs to Lords gambit, or if it was a fallback.  That’s the other god.”

“Gods?” Fray asked.

On each of our prior visits, you were careful to ask me about my beliefs.  What did I want, what did I believe in?  What would prompt me to take the great leap of faith, if and when it counted?  What was I here to do?

“I did.  I wanted to know what kind of Lord you might be, given the chance, Sylvester,” she said.

Did I ever give you an answer?”

“You gave me several.  I worry you’re giving me another, with this talk of gods.”

“It’s Sylvester’s metaphor,” Lillian said.  “For the great, abstract, hard-to-comprehend forces you two represent, that could still ruin us.  The Infante was the first.  Sylvester named that god Power.”

“And Power is conquered.  Securely in your hands,” Fray said.  “I see, now.”

I smiled.

“Let me think, then.  Control… you already have control.  You had it once you co-opted the lesser Academies and aristocrats.  Based on the thrust of Sylvester’s statement, I’m… the plot?  Intrigue?  Machinations?”

“Conspiracy,” Mary said.

“That would suffice.  Yes.  It was absolutely my job to keep pieces in play, remove others, strike a balance, distract, and now I’m here.”

With cards up your sleeve.

“Do you think I have cards up my sleeve, Sylvester?”

The dissemination of Academy knowledge, the creation of primordials, the fact you were working with just about every rebel group… you were building things that weren’t solely for us.

“I was.”

Primordials played a part.  Then and now.”

“In a way.”

I nodded.

“Will you do me a favor, Sylvester?” Mary asked.

I tilted my head to one side.

“Stand where I can see you and them at the same time?”

I’m not a threat to you.

“Please,” she said.

I crossed the room.  I stood at the side, near the bookshelves.  Torches and lanterns were lit throughout the Academy grounds.  It looked like the Hag Nerve was being dealt with, and people were freer to move.  Our people.  I settled in where I stood, close to the skin suit.

“Hayle… well, if he’s another god, he’d have to be another great force.  You’re not going to have power and then power again,” Fray said.

I shook my head.

“It wouldn’t suit Hayle either way.  Neither would Control, as a repeated thing.  It would need to be something that could rattle you, once you settled on this course of action.  And you have settled.  You were telling the truth about that.”

I did.  I was.  I am.

“I have my guess,” Fray said.

“You said you wanted what I wanted, out of Hayle,” Lillian said.  “And I really just wanted answers.  I wanted to ask why.  I’m afraid of the answer.  Maybe- maybe Sylvester is afraid of the answer too.  Is that what you meant, Sy?”

I wanted to respond to her use of my name.  That would have to wait.

It is.

“The unknown,” Fray said.  “You can’t wrap things up in Radham without asking the questions.  Professor Hayle’s relative silence up until now may stem from a concern about how you respond to the answers.”

“In part,” Hayle said.

The unknown.”  I nodded.  “That works.

“I’m quiet in part because this is a day I’ve seen coming for a very long time,” Professor Hayle said.  “I’ve known you since the very beginning, Sylvester.”

“Who was I?”

“Who were you?”

On the Block?

“I couldn’t even tell you, Sylvester.  It didn’t matter.  I visited the Block, I walked down the row, talking to the Academy Doctors who had brought their quotas or looked after each of you.  I browsed the paperwork, I made small talk with my peers.  Tea was served, and we discussed the projects that their picks would be slated for.  There was mention of a transplant of a child’s brain to the body of a specialized warbeast, they had their eye on one little girl with a vicious streak and a propensity for escape attempts for that.”

“It’s horrible,” Lillian said.

“If it makes you feel better, that one killed its creator,” Fray said.

“That does make me feel better,” Lillian said.  “But it’s minor, when I know so many others suffer.”

“They did.  They do.  There were other Professors who wanted hale and hearty children for breeding programs, some who intended to test drugs that would alter how children grew, with an eye to gigantism and custom proportions.  Most, however, wouldn’t tell me.  It would show their hands before the bidding, you understand.”

And me?

It was the first of the dangerous questions that threatened to ruin us.

“The son of a Doctor.  He pricked his finger with a needle containing a patient’s blood.  The blood was tainted from one of the weapons used in the war to the south.  It was primed to take the life of a soldier, it took your father, and in a roundabout way, Sylvester, it took your family.”

I had a family?

“You had an older brother and three sisters.  You might have been the youngest, but memory fails me here, it was a little over a decade ago that I read the paper, and I read it with an eye to anything that might qualify or disqualify you for what we had in mind.  You had a mother and a father.  Your father passed, your mother couldn’t look after you all.  I suspect she was told you’d get a life of some sort, even if it wasn’t the one you’d been born to.”

A doctor’s son.  Had things played out differently, if a man hadn’t pricked his finger, if a soldier hadn’t grown ill, I might have been a student.

“One who might have attended Radham, even, given the location of that Block.”

I nodded.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that.  Given the lack of a response, I wasn’t sure the voice had any ideas either.

“It was my second visit that I met you, months after the one prior, where I escorted my students to the Block and met… you have a new name for them, now that they wear skirts and dresses.”

Jessie.  But they weren’t Jessie then.  They wouldn’t have been Jamie either.

“I remember them, too,” Hayle said.

I’d ask, but I think Jessie has had enough shadows of the past nipping at her heels.

“I’d always hoped it would be constructive, not destructive.  Building them up.”

If I hadn’t been in the picture, it might have.

“We tried to revive Genevieve’s Prophetissima project, we erased her connection to it.  The Yggdrasil-G project was a failure to thrive.  Your predecessor, Ashton.  The Wyvern project was an easy one to sell, when budget was a concern and criticism of my project.  I made my visit to the Block, looking for my Wyvern.  I remember looking at you, you were wearing a paper smock.  You glared at me, Sylvester.”

I glared at you?

“It was important that you glared at me,” Hayle said.  “Do you know Wollstone’s last law?”

“I wasn’t aware they had a particular order,” Lillian said.

“It’s not one of the ones you’ll find in the textbooks,” Hayle said.  “Not a law that they teach students.  It’s been passed on by word of mouth or rumor to anyone taking on a particularly ambitious project.  Wollstone created the stitched and created the means for us to work out the scripts and patterns of living beings.”

He was killed by an advanced stitched of his, one with more memory and retention than the ones that preceded them.  I’ve heard this.”  I folded my arms.

“We lead secure lives.  Professors retire late, if at all, and we don’t tend to visit the battlefields directly.  What’s our most likely cause of death?”

“Your work,” Mary said.

She would be thinking of Percy.

“You glared at me, Sylvester, and I could see the expression you might wear when, after a dark and bloody affair, you walked into my office to confront me and ask me questions.”

Why did it matter?

“Because I didn’t want to forget that this was how it would end,” he said.

I nodded.

“When you made your bid for those badges of yours, I realized you were slipping away, that you might already be trying to find some measure of authority that might tip my hand for me.”

“You should have known what you were buying into, with that glaring child,” Genevieve Fray said.

“I should well have,” Hayle said.  He met my eyes, staring at me.

He hadn’t touched his tea or biscuit.  Slowly, surely, that tea would be getting cold.

You can’t even know the depths of despair you subjected me to.

“Every step of the way, every failure, every time it looked like the Lambs were lost or broken, I despaired,” he said.

My mouth for the voice to speak.  Ashton beat me to it.

“Can I interrupt?” Ashton asked.  He craned his head around, to look at the others, to look at me.

Go ahead.

“What’s going through your mind, Ashton?” Fray asked.

“Thank you.  If I understand you all correctly, Sylvester is going to kill Professor Hayle after this.”

“I hope he doesn’t, but I’m hardly in a position to stop him,” Hayle said.  “I can try to negotiate, but he’s headstrong.”

“Okay, then I’ll ask my questions before anything happens or anyone decides.  If your projects are what kills you, why aren’t you worried about me or Helen?  Why is it Sy?”

Helen’s hardly equipped to do much at this juncture.

“That’s distasteful, Sy,” Ashton said, making a face.  “My point stands.”

“It could be a rare fit of poetic fancy for an old man, but I’d like to think that projects such as Gordon’s, Helen’s, Jamie’s- Jessie’s-”

Jamie is accurate too.  Both.  Jessie existing doesn’t mean Jamie didn’t.

“They weren’t mine.  They were under my oversight, but other students brought them into the world.”

“Oh,” Ashton said.  “What about Doctor Fray?  Who kills her?”

“Evette was mine but she never saw fruition.  I do have my share of ownership in all of you,” Genevieve said.  “But I’m not feeling as fatalistic as Professor Hayle.”

Cards up your sleeve.

“Not like you imagine, it’s not that kind of leverage, that might save my life.”

I nodded.

“We don’t get to kill anyone, then?” Ashton asked.

“You had opportunities earlier tonight,” Mary said.

“I was hoping that I could knock someone down and tie their hands, then make them suffocate with Helen held down over their faces.  It might take some doing, but I think Helen would really enjoy it.  She doesn’t have a lot to enjoy when she’s like this.”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” Lillian said, gently.  “It’s really nice that you’re thinking about Helen like that, even if that isn’t quite so nice.  We have other things to get out of the way, first.”

“Okay.  She’s important to me.”

She’s important to all of us.

“She is,” Lillian said.

“An ignoble way to die,” Fray observed, looking at Helen, who lay across Ashton’s lap.

“Do you deserve noble?” I asked.

“Perhaps not.  Based on my colleagues’ parting words, I might not.”

“Isn’t it very Noble if Helen gets to deliver the kill, if that’s what we were raised to be?” Ashton asked.

“We’re not at that point yet,” Mary said.  “We’re far from being Nobles, like this, and as much as Sylvester is talking like this is decided, I’m not so sure.”

“I might be on the same page as Mary here,” Lillian said.

I nodded to myself.

“Will that be a problem?” Lillian asked, looking at her former mentor and the Lambs’ nemesis.  “What happens if they decide not to be Nobles?”

“Things have been out of my hands for some time,” Hayle said.  “As far back as the night where your black coat was discussed, Doctor Garey.  I’ve created my monster, as Wollstone created his.  I unleashed it on the world and it has come home to roost.  I can give it some clarity, but I doubt I can change it anymore.”

It might have been further back than that.

“When, do you think?”

I looked at Mary.  “I might have seen the team as mine, when I extended one invitation to one enemy I respected.

“I could see that.  Not long before the badges.”

The badges.  I’d nearly forgotten.

“Well, like I said, it’s well out of my hands.  You’ll decide how to move forward, as you have been doing since you left, maybe even before then, what with your interactions with the Duke of Francis.”

I watched as Lillian drew in a deep breath.  Her hands were clasped in front of her as she stood by the chairs, standing across from Hayle.

I’d say this is where the dangerous questions begin, but I already asked about my origins, and we touched on Jessie and Jamie’s.  Let’s have them begin in earnest.

“So be it,” Hayle said.  “Your questions?”

“I think Lillian should ask hers.  Because once I start asking mine, we run the risk of a premature end.”

“I just have a few,” Lillian said.

“I was and am fond of you, Lillian,” Hayle said.

“What drove you to choose me?  Had things happened differently, I could have been any one of the doctors out there.  Students in service to the military that we killed or turned into Tangles, or the ones we used as stepping stones.”

“My dear Lillian,” Hayle said.  “No.”

“No?”

“Had you carried on like you were, I think you wouldn’t have had it in you.  When I found you, you were close to quitting.  When Sylvester turned his attention to you, you moved even closer to that decision.  It was the other Lambs that pulled you back.  Without the Lambs, you would have been a fine but minor Doctor from a lesser Academy like Beattle, I think.  You have a good heart and you would have been a credit to your profession, serving a town or a neighborhood of a city.  You wouldn’t have sought your black coat, and you wouldn’t have joined the military without the influence of the Lambs to drive you upward and forward.”

“I might have.”

“No, Lillian.  I’ve known many students, and your fear is unfounded.”

“Why deny me my black coat, then?”

“He spoke to me about it,” Fray said.  “About being a woman in the Academies, about the challenges, the expectations.  The politics were wrong for it.  The timing, the stance of your parents, your relationship to the Lambs project and the direction that project was going… it didn’t make sense.”

“It made sense to me,” Lillian said.  She turned to Hayle.  “I wanted it.  I deserved it.  I deserved the advanced commendations and Duncan did too.  I gave you everything and you couldn’t give me that.”

“I could have,” Hayle said.  “It would have destroyed you, because it wasn’t what you really wanted, and in that destruction, with the Lambs as fragile as they were, you would have taken them with you.”

Did you know I was watching?

“I thought it was possible, Sylvester.  I wondered if you would barge in or sneak in.  I thought you would take the Lambs with you in entirety if you left, or you’d transform if you stayed.  I didn’t expect a partial leaving, or the transformation that went with it,” Hayle said.  He turned back to Lillian.  “I know my fate today depends on you all.  I know I haven’t given you the answer you wanted.  I know you may decide not to spare me because of that.”

“That was the day I lost my family,” Lillian said.

“I expect it was.”

“My parents, Sylvester, and Jamie.”

“I understand that.”

Lillian’s hands were clasped in front of her.  Mary reached out to touch those hands.

“You can ask your questions, Sylvester,” Lillian said.

There were lights illuminating buildings across the campus.  The rain continued to fall, streaking the windows, and the little droplets that were left in the way of the streaks glittered with the light of buildings and fires.  Where water collected at the branches that ran through and around each window, the elongated blobs and narrow pools caught the light in lines, making those branches seem to glow.

Jamie.

One word that passed through my lips, the question only existing in the implicit.

“Not me,” Hayle said.  “Not the Duke, not Fray, not Cynthia or her predecessor, not you.”

I stared him down.

“I’m complicit only in that I agreed that the Caterpillar project should have several evolutions.  That the slate would be wiped clean several times, each phase retaining the best that we could impart onto it.  Jamie’s fate was very much expected as a thing that would happen.”

The books?  They were part of this evolution?

“The books were another part of things, in more than one way, but the other plans fell by the wayside,” he said.

Elaborate.

“The books were part of that sought-after evolution, yes, but I thought they could be a way to get the word out, that might slip the Academy’s notice for a time.  Fiction, at first, then the facts would add up, in an undeniable detail, with codes only the most astute could find out.”

“He mentioned, once, that he might be chronicling our adventures in some form,” Lillian said.

“I mentioned it to him, yes,” Hayle said.

“I had the printing presses,” Fray said.  “But that’s minor.  Tertiary.  We didn’t go that route.”

We could.

“You could, Sylvester,” she admitted.  “I could tell you where the means to produce the books are, I’m sure the black wood and plague haven’t consumed them all.”

“You stole the second Jamie away before we could carry on with his evolution or make use of the books.” Hayle said.  “The end result is your creation, not mine.  As you suggested, the team was already yours.”

I nodded.  “Gordon?

“Yes.  That was on my shoulders.  He expressed interest in joining Genevieve.  We started to sway him the other way, but he was already losing the vigor we wanted to see in him.  We tried to encourage him.  We thought he might shift stances after you’d lost Jessie, so we gave him the dog.  It didn’t matter, the fight had gone out of him.  He would have taken you in the opposite route you needed to travel.”

I watched Mary tighten her grip on her knife.

I was worried at the emotions that roiled in me, that the voice wasn’t elaborating on.  I was worried at the dark feelings, that I might reach out to kill Hayle, the other answers be damned.

It would be so easy to murder the man, to murder Fray, and to let everything else fall by the wayside.  There would be fallout, questions still left unanswered, and it would ruin us in the end.

“You killed Gordon,” Lillian said.

“We let him go,” Hayle said.  “You and Genevieve discussed your beliefs.  Had you given the wrong answers, we would have made a similar decision.”

The girlfriend.  She fed you the information on how he was doing.”  There was emotion in the voice

“Shipman,” Lillian said, eyes wide, as she looked at me, then back to Hayle.

“She didn’t know the entirety of what she was doing when she answered my questions.  I hope that informs any decisions you make about her,” Hayle said.  “But yes.”

The plague, then.  Who was responsible in the end?

“Mauer, in a way.  The Infante, in another way.  Me,” Fray said. “In that I expected something like it.  It seems inevitable, with the primordials.  They reach a point where they want to create tools.”

Which brings us back to your cards.

“It does,” Fray said.

And it brings us back to the final, most dangerous question.

“It does,” Fray said.

Why?

Outside the door, our lieutenants were talking.  Others had joined them.  Red was with them, as were Bea, and Junior, and Gordeux, and Rudy…

“Why?” Hayle asked.

What was the end goal?  Restoring balance?  Sabotage?  Reclaiming the world for humanity?

Poor Lillian was so tense.  Mary gripped that knife, had been gripping it since Gordon had come up.

“Does it matter?” Hayle asked.

It does.

“You are where you are.  The decision is yours to make.  You’ll decide what you do next.”

I looked between Hayle and Fray.

“You believe that.”

“I do.”

“It’s the safe answer,” Mary said.

I bit my tongue, thinking.

“It’s the answer the puppeteer gives to the puppet, because anything he says might give up more control than the doubt will,” she said.  “It’s the only answer he can give that gives him a chance at staying alive.”

Thinking of Percy.  She was always thinking of Percy when it counted.

Hayle wouldn’t say.  So long as he remained that god, the unanswered questions, he had cause to live.

I’d already ceded control.  I’d made a bargain with the voice in my head, after my thought processes and more had been consolidated by a dose given to me while I slept.  I’d realized how this ended and I’d taken on one last role, giving that role a voice and giving myself over to that voice.

I lost little to nothing, in pushing myself, in taking everything I could dredge up, and trying to give it form.

I pieced together a Hayle from my impressions of the man.

I put that Hayle in the room, in a matching chair, with a matching cup of tea beside him.

I was careful to obey Mary’s wishes as I walked around the desk, until I stood where that Hayle stood.  I leaned forward, planting my hands on the desk, so my head was level with Hayle’s.

There are several answers, Lambs,” they said.  “Several possibilities.  Believe me, in taking on a project of this scale, I considered them all as end goals.  I got to know each of you, and that desire to know you was part of my reason for keeping you as close as I did, when you first joined us, Mary Cobourn.”

The Lambs’ expressions were like stone as they watched me.  The people in the hallway beyond were much the same.

“Because I know you,” they said, Hayle’s phantom and the voice together, “I know that if I tell you, knowing full well that you rebelled by carrying on your romance with Sylvester, Lillian, that you’re set on carving your own path, Mary, even if it’s one that cleaves close to your friends, and that Ashton is set on reinterpreting the world around him, even if it’s down to the paint on the walls and grass on the fields…”

Hayle was staring at me.

“…Anything I tell you, you’ll rebel against it, yet if I lie, you’ll know.  Silence is the only answer.  If I don’t tell you what to do, then there’s a chance that when all is said and done, you’ll end up there.”

“As we ended up here,” Mary said.

Yes.

“That doesn’t seem terribly fair,” Ashton said.

“It isn’t,” Lillian said.  “Because it always leaves that doubt.  Was it us?  Was it our goal?  Or were we just working toward a finale that was set for us?  We’ll never know.”

“We could stop,” Ashton said.  “We could carve out a nice little area and protect it from plague and black wood, and we could lead nice, simple lives with the new Lambs.  We could have all of our Doctors and scientists work on doing good things without worrying about war.”

“Can you?” Fray asked.  “Knowing everything you do?  Knowing what is happening in the rest of the world?”

“No,” Lillian said.  Mary shook her head.

No,” the voice said.

Lillian looked me in the eyes.

The lack of an answer is dangerous.  The answer is dangerous in another way.

“Tell us,” she said.  “If you’re speaking for Hayle, then give us the answer.”

I looked at Hayle.

I’m yours, you’re right.  I started with you, you end with me,” the voice said.

“I wonder who you are, then,” Hayle said.  “Because I’m not positive you’re Sylvester.”

“I’m not.  I’m every monster I’ve ever fought.  Every enemy I’ve defeated.  I’m Sylvester and I’m not.  I’m the Noble that Sylvester will become.”

A frown creased the space between his eyes.  “The Noble you describe sounds like a monstrous one.”

“Isn’t it?” the voice asked.  “What a mistake you’ve made.”

We stuck a knife between his ribs, and swiftly backed away, bringing the knife with us, so the wound could bleed freely, air escaping his lungs.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.19 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.19

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

We watched our creator bleed out.  We watched him lean heavily on the table, breathing as if each inhaled breath was an attempt to lift a large weight, blood bubbling around the wound, each exhalation comparatively feeble and sudden.

We watched him grope at the wound, pressing his hand to it.  Still holding our knife, we moved it to the crook of his elbow, drawing the blade against that crease.  He reached out, fumbling through the air in an attempt to grab the knife so he could be free to try to stop the bleeding, and he caught nothing but air.  He attempted to staunch the wound again, and again, we used the blade of the knife to pull his elbow and hand back.  His arm bled from the cut.  He didn’t try to stop the bleeding with his hand a third time.

“Sylvester,” Lillian said.

The blade of our knife touched our lips, in a ‘silence’ motion.

“I wanted an answer,” she said.  “I wanted to hear what the end goal was.”

Genevieve Fray had moved away from her position at one side of the desk, moving closer to the others.

Fray, Lillian, and Mary, standing opposite us.  Ashton was standing from his seat, backing away.  He’d been a little slow to notice the response of the others.

“If we say, he’ll know he was right or wrong.”

“Sy.”

We shook our head.  “He doesn’t get to know.”

“If you let him die like this, the rest of us don’t get to know either,” Mary said.

“I’ll tell you.”  It sounded strange to use ‘I’.

“When have you ever, ever said anything and had it be the unvarnished, undeniable truth?” Mary asked.

“That’s not terribly fair.  You know how my memory is.”

It was Lillian who chimed in, now, “Your memory might be bad, but you understand people.  You understand yourself.  You know people on an intrinsic level.  You know you lie, you bend the truth, you manipulate.  Even with us.”

Hayle reached over, trying to staunch the wound.  We caught his wrist.

His breathing sounded bad.

He fought to wrench his arm free, pulled against us, to try to match my strength with his own.

We were stronger than him.  We weren’t strong, Sylvester had never been, not compared to the average man, but we were stronger than him.  Our creator was an old man, and all of the political power and scientific knowledge at his disposal didn’t change that he had very human limitations.

Hayle fell from his chair in the process of fighting us, slumping against the front of the desk.  We held his wrist, so it was visible above the top of the desk.

“I love you, Doctor Lillian Garey.  I regret every single day, hour, and minute I didn’t get to spend in your company.  I love the girl you were, the young woman you are, and the person you’ll become.”

“That’s dirty.”

“It’s the unvarnished truth Mary wanted.  Like you said, I understand people.  I know who you are.  I know who I am.  I’m painfully aware of the ways we don’t mesh, the conflicts, the ways the gears and cogs that make up my being often grate and do damage when they run up against your finer workings.  I’m… dangerously aware of the ways we could mesh, given an opportunity.”

We met her eyes.  We still held Hayle’s wrist.

“As am I,” she said.  “Dangerously aware.”

“It’s the fate of a Doctor to reap what they’ve sown.  You’ve been gentle, Lillian.  Any ugliness in you was sown by others.”

“And you, Sy?”

I’m not your Sy.

“I was worried that Hayle’s revelations would ruin us, by revealing something that could divide us.  If we’d been- anyone else.  If the blame fell down differently.  He wants to ruin us with silence, so he gets this fate.  I was a child who scowled at him.  Maybe that’s ruinous in itself.  It raises questions, doesn’t it?  Maybe I was always ill-tempered and contrary.  Maybe I can’t lay the blame at my creator’s feet.  That might make things harder.”

“It’s only ruinous if you let it be,” Mary said.

We stopped, pausing.  Part of it was for effect.  Part of it was to digest, to find our bearings.

“Mary.”

“You shot me in the leg,” she said.

We fell silent, staring at her.

“You shot me in the leg, and now you’ll invent reasons and explanations as to why, but it’s my best response to what you’re about to say.”

“Assuming you know.”

“I’m going to assume you’ll say you love me, you’ll say it with just as much meaning, and it’ll strike me right in the heart, with just as much impact as any dagger or bullet I could deliver to you.”

Hayle pulled at my grip on his arm.  We let him.  It wasn’t because he was fighting us.  He was slumping over to the ground.

Mary went on, “You have your mission, and I don’t, not anymore.  I’m not looped into it anymore, even now.  I joined you, I fought the Infante, I brought Lillian and the others, but this was your plan.  You told us to trust you.  There’s a limit to how far that goes.”

“There is.”

“I already killed my creator, nascent Noble whatever you plan to call yourself.  I’ve stood where you stand.”

“You did, you have.”

“But you don’t get to pull that card, to call back to the first time you kissed me, or to the time you helped me get my knives on under the stairs, or how you leaned on me after we lost Jamie.  You don’t get to reminisce about how you brought me on the team, or how we play off of one another on a battlefield.”

Lillian touched Mary’s arm.

“You don’t get to,” Mary said.  “I understand why you did it, why you needed to, but that ‘why’?  It was evidence that I’m not your first priority.  You don’t love me like that.  You got to leave me behind, but you bought and paid for that opportunity at a cost.  You can’t say the same kind of thing to me that you said to Lillian, or it’ll be a lie, and if you can’t give me truth, against your better nature, then I can’t know you’re speaking the truth when you tell us what Hayle’s end goal for us was.”

We nodded.

“I’ve said my piece.  Now say what you’re going to say, be your manipulative self, pull on my strings and convince me you’re telling the truth,” Mary said.

We were silent.

“Please,” she added, as a belated afterthought.

“Thank you for looking after Lillian.”

Lillian’s hand dropped away from Mary’s arm.

“I know by saying that, I’m only reinforcing that you’re not in first place, I don’t like that.  But it’s heartfelt.  I do mean it.  The only thing that kept me sane at times was that you were there with her.  Ashton, Helen, and even Duncan too, but… mostly you, in that sense.”

Mary nodded.

“I’ll tell you where you do fall in first place.  I realized the truth about the Block because of you.  The nature of Nobles.  The Falconer.  She was you.  That undefinable, underlying element.  I saw that part of you in her.”

“I’m glad I helped,” she said.

I believed her.  There was no malice in her voice.  For all that she’d mentioned me shooting her in the knee, there was no hatred.  Only quiet concern.

She wasn’t gripping that throwing knife with any less intensity than before.

“You’ve always been goal oriented.  The mission, the challenge.”

“Percy hammered it into me.  Slight alterations in my growth and upbringing to tune me to those ends.”

We looked down at Hayle.  He was still, not even trying to breathe.  A bubble of congealing blood popped at his side.

We stepped on the side of his neck for good measure.  More blood bubbled out of his side in response, mostly due to how he’d shifted position at the added weight.

“And now I’ve killed my creator too.”

Lillian moved forward, hesistant to approach us.  We didn’t move, watching as she circled the desk, giving me a wide berth.

“I won’t bite.”

The eye contact on her part was intense, unflinching.  A thousand things communicated.  She maintained it well past the point where she could have broken the connection and looked down at Hayle.

We saw her purse her lips slightly at the sight.

Fray, off to one side, frowned.  She’d fallen silent.  No doubt she was considering her various alternatives.

“The mission, Sy?” Mary asked.

“Our goal in this?  Jessie and I had our plan we were working on.  Key pieces we needed to knock down, things and people we could use, ways we could whittle at the greater hierarchy until something toppled.  We didn’t have all of the information, we didn’t know how far the Infante would go, but it was workable.  A long shot, but workable.  That’s what Jessie and I were doing.”

“We’ve never shied away from long shots,” Lillian said.  She returned to Mary’s side, glancing up at Fray as she passed the woman.

“No we haven’t.  But I want you to know, Mary, my connection to you and your connection to the Falconer started us on this greater mission.  It was when we started moving in this particular direction.  One that sees all of us in this office.  I’d hoped Jessie would be here, mind you.”

“Not entirely unpredictable,” Mary said.

“Not entirely.  It’s still a shame.”

“It really is.”

“I couldn’t share the plan because if I’d been wrong, it would’ve left us with nothing.  ‘Nothing’ is salvageable if it’s all you have at the end, all you need is the strength for one final effort.  ‘Nothing’ at the outset or midway point of a long campaign makes the rest doubly difficult.  We couldn’t have managed that.”

“We’re not so weak as that, Sy.”

“You aren’t.  I might’ve been.”

We watched her, we saw the small changes in her expression, the way she looked at Lillian, as if she was betraying her friend by thinking it.

“Maybe.”

“It all comes together with us becoming Nobles, that’s the conclusion.  I never would have figured it out or imagined us here if I hadn’t seen your other self as such a fine Noble, if I hadn’t known to my core that our Mary would have been so much better than her.  It took a while to digest things and realize, I had my doubts, but it was a real process, and one that wouldn’t have been possible without you.  Whether I communicated it or not, the mission was and is yours.”

We watched Mary, in much the same way we’d watched Hayle.  The little details, summed up into the greater battle.

The rain was so heavy outside.  We’d really missed it so.  We’d missed how dark things became in the late evening, how the rooms were illuminated in strange hues by the combinations of candles and lamps, by artificial, voltaic lights burning their chemical yellows and oranges, and by the blue-green light so common to bioluminescent sources.  No one light source was consistent or powerful enough to reach the corners and crevices, the combinations therein casting everything in a strange light.

Mary was so beautiful, so elegant.  We felt an appreciation for her, and we tried to feel it in a way that could reach past the desk and the chasm that separated us.

Lillian not elegant, but beautiful in so many other ways.  Lillian had been Mary’s professed reason for killing Percy.  A just, overdue killing.

“Where does this mission lead?” Mary asked.  “Hayle is dead, you can say.”

“Fray and Hayle gave up on us when we fractured and when we abdicated.”

“Not entirely,” Genevieve Fray spoke.  “We held out a measure of hope.”

“But you made plans in case we didn’t succeed.  Things were tenuous.”

“Eggs and baskets,” Fray said.

“The question arises, then.  What does a rebel terrorist like yourself get up to when she needs something that would scare even the Crown, who thinks nothing of leveling whole continents, with plans to return to recolonize the ruins several generations later?  She wants to spare humanity.  Her resources are a headmaster of a special projects Academy, scattered few lost souls, innumerable rebel groups, a printing press…”

“Do you know, or are you asking?” Fray asked.

“I don’t know the exact answer.  I expect the primordials are involved.  Nothing else would scare the Crown, and you need to scare them if you’re going to try and convince them that defeating you means they lose as well.  Nothing else would break Avis and Warren.”

“You’ve seen the answer, Sylvester.  Lambs.”

“Clarify,” Mary said.

“The Hag Nerve.  The Black Wood.  The Harvester units.  The Whelps.  The Belchers.  The Little Ones.  I could name others, but I’d be less confident you’ve encountered them.”

“And somehow the printing press and the spread of Academy knowledge helps you deploy this assortment?” Lillian asked.

“It helps her deploy the safeguard.  Only the safeguard.  A backup measure, and a means of preparing distribution.”

“Sylvester,” Fray said.  “Or… whoever you are.  If you’re doing what I think you’re doing.  I understand you wanted Hayle to die with doubts and torment, worrying about what he brought forth.  If you think perverting my mission or even entertaining the idea of doing so is a similar kind of punishment for my role in your existence, then I- I really have to argue otherwise.  I’m wary enough as it is.”

“I don’t understand,” Lillian said.  “Those projects?  All put together, they’ll create a mess.  But… only a mess.  Is there a greater whole I’m missing?”

“No.”

“No.  Nothing like that,” Fray echoed us.  “But none of it is like it was.  I’ve been refining them with the help of my lab partners.  No one answer will really stop the Academy.  Hayle and I planned to threaten a strike on all fronts.  A crushing offense in a way that tops whatever they could bring to bear.”

“With a collection of special projects?  You’re talented, I’m sure, Avis has her strengths, I read over her graduate work, but-”

“The lab partners aren’t Avis and Warren,” we interrupted.

Lillian closed her mouth.  She looked between us and Fray.

“Primordials?” Ashton asked.  He’d been the first to clue in, picking up on the lingering detail.  “Your lab partners are primordials?  That’s crazy.  They’d be terrible at taking notes.”

“They weren’t there to take notes,” Fray said.  “They were there to take what I gave them, turn the projects over and around, explore them, and give us something better.”

“That’s what you meant when you said they reached a point where they wanted to create tools.  You’re insane,” Lillian said.

“I was desperate,” Fray said.

“You’re actually more insane than Sylvester.”

“I was desperate!” Fray said, with new emotion in her voice.  “We were desperate.  We’re all desperate, don’t you see?”

“We absolutely see,” the words left our lips.

“And you’re absolutely the wrong type of person to handle this, Sylvester-the-Noble,” Fray said.  “I’m not even sure I’m the person to handle it.  Only two of the projects are in a state where I could imagine using them.  The others need more time.”

“So your safeguard might hold.  Your tainted water, the leash.”

“Lillian,” Fray said.  She wasn’t even talking to us, changing focus to our Doctor.  Our heart.  “You’re most equipped to understand what I was doing.  It took two years to teach them that the chemicals I used in the leash was anathema, death and frustration as assured as anything.  I kept them small, each of my primordials no larger than a human head.  I’ve been working on it for years, and I still think it’s too dangerous.  It was a last resort, and I don’t think you’re right, in calling me more insane than he is.  I’m worried Sylvester is going to try to convince you all it’s a resort of the less than final kind.”

“I’m still trying to grasp this.  What you were doing, with the barrier to the primordials, the scale of this,” Lillian said.  Her eyes went wider than they already were.  “You’d destroy everything?

“Everything that wasn’t leashed.  We’d distribute the leash.  We’d clear out everything, but for an island of humanity.  But only if it looked like there was no other way.  I can’t emphasize that enough.”

“Oh my lords,” Lillian said.  She looked between Fray and us as if she was trying to tell which was worse.

“That kind of cussing loses its meaning when we got here by killing lords.”

“Please don’t try to be funny,” Lillian said.  “How close did we come?  How close are we?  Is this something you’re even entertaining, Sy?”

“I entertain everything.  It’s part of what I do.”

“I-” she started.  She turned and nearly lost her balance.  Mary caught her.  Lillian backed away several steps, to get a better view out the door.  Our lieutenants were there.  Red was there.  My fairy tales.

Their expressions were dark.

“Please tell me I’m not the only sane person here,” Lillian said.

“You’re not the only sane person here,” Gordeux said.

The Treasurer spoke, “I’m not sure I get it.  I’ve read about Primordials, I understand them in that sense, but I read about the war for the Crown Empire.  Past a certain point, it’s words on a page.  Important, ominous words, but still black ink on white or yellowed paper.”

“Don’t say that,” Lillian said.  “Please.  Don’t let me think that Sylvester could convince you to go along with this.”

“Would he?”

“He’s considering it, like he considers everything,” Mary said, from beside Lillian.  While Lillian made her plea to the Beattle rebels, Mary fixed her gaze on me.

“It’s a potential bargaining chip.”

“To?” Mary asked.

“To approach the King’s table as a person with a voice, if it comes to it.  To threaten a war they couldn’t necessarily win.”

“We can’t do this, we can’t touch it,” Lillian said.  “As a last resort, or as a bargaining chip.  I don’t trust you that much, Sy, however much I do believe that you love me and the rest of the Lambs.”

“Ah.”

It was barely a word that passed through our lips.

“When Sylvester was addressing Mary,” Fray said.  “He spoke of needing something.  That having ‘nothing’ at the early or middle stages of the journey made it impossible to forge forward.”

“He did,” Mary said.

“Then I want you to know this was our something.  There wasn’t necessarily truth to this as a plan.  We needed to know we had the option of going that far, while we were simultaneously terrified of being forced to.  Because it grants confidence and the desperate need to put other options forward or bring other things to fruition.”

“That’s not good enough,” Lillian said.

Hayle was thoroughly dead.  Our foot hurt where it pressed against his neck.  We started to bend down to check him, and Mary moved, tensing.

Once she saw what we were doing, she gestured, allowing us to carry on.

We pressed one finger to the old man’s throat, and found it without a pulse.

We ran one hand over his thin white hair, brushing it back.

We looked at him, examining the features that had shifted as consciousness had fled him, and searched for a sign that he’d gone out doubting, afraid, and lost.

In the background, the others were talking.  Lillian spoke about her brief experience with primordials.  Fray countered with talk of the safeguards.  Lillian made mention of how unsecure things had been at Lugh, how close we’d been to disaster.

We tuned it out.  We paid attention to the patter of rain on the window.  We knew the only enemies that remained to be defeated were across an ocean, years away from a confrontation, and were arranged here, in this room.  Mary, Ashton, Lillian.

“I trust you,” the Treasurer said.  “I don’t know, but you have the greatest grasp of things here.  You know the Lambs in ways we don’t, you know the enemy, you have experience with Primordials.”

“I don’t know if I deserve that trust,” Lillian said.  “But thank you.”

“I can’t guarantee we’ll all go along with you, but maybe most.”

“Maybe most,” one of the other Lieutenants echoed the Treasurer.

We straightened.  We felt a kind of peace.  Fray’s conspiracy, the tools she’d devised, they’d been the last god to defeat.

As we’d taken Power and turned it against the enemy, then taken Hayle’s unknown and visited it on him, we stood poised to take Fray’s conspiracy from her.  The grand plan, the cards in her sleeve.

She would desperately fight to keep us from doing so.  Lillian would too.

We walked around the desk, approaching the group, our thoughts turning.

It was Ashton who got in our way.  He held Helen up and out, so Helen butted into our chest.

“Helen says no.”

The conversation in the background stopped.

“Helen can’t talk.”

“She deserves a chance, just like me,” Ashton said.  “You convinced Mary and Lillian you’re being honest.”

“Not quite,” Lillian said.

“Well it sounded like you did,” Ashton said.  “And then you were less convinced when Sylvester started talking about using primordials as an option.”

“Primordial-refined threats.”

“Don’t be pedantic, Sylvester,” Ashton said, almost sighing as he said it.

“Alright.”

“Well, I think Helen and I deserve a chance to hear what you have to say and argue about it.  I think we’re harder to convince, because Helen mostly doesn’t have ears or a mouth, and I’m stubborn.  And as much as I like them, I think Mary and Lillian are very biased, because you’ve slept with them lots-”

Someone in the back cleared their throat.

“-and lots, and sometimes both at the same time-”

“Move it along, Ashton,” Lillian said.  Then, addressing the larger group, she added, “He’s referring to us sleeping in the same bed, for the record, when we were much younger.”

Ashton frowned, turning his head and opening his mouth, his expression changing as if he was trying to formulate an Ashton argument.

“Move it along,” Lillian said.

“Okay, well, you’ve only slept with me a couple of times, like that one time at Hackthorn,” Ashton said.

“Enough about that, please,” Lillian said.  She was flushed now.

“I’m not as biased,” Ashton said, firm.  “I think we should talk to Duncan and I think we should leave this be.”

“I think we should hold onto everything we can, as options and weapons go.  We’re so close to having security for the first time ever, it’d be the worst kind of tragedy to get here and to lose that security immediately after.”

“At what price?” Lillian asked.

“Did I interrupt your one-on-one with Sylvester?” Ashton asked.  “You’re all so terribly rude these days.  It’s the rebel thing, I’m sure.  It’s done away with your etiquette.”

“I’m sorry.  Carry on.”

“You like the mice.  There are mice all over the place.  I think if you were the Sylvester I knew in the beginning, then you’d never want to risk hurting them, and I’m concerned you’ve forgotten that part.  Or you’ve given it up, Sylvester.”

“I made a compromise.  I’ve wrestled with this, with everything, over a very long period of time.  Everything I’ve taken in and digested has led me to this conclusion.  I think you’ve been taking things in and digesting them too.  I think you’re trying to be funny, to fill a role, you’ve been looser, more free, more creative.”

“I’m trying,” Ashton said.  “But it takes work for me.   I think it takes you work to not slip away.”

“I think you might be right.”

“I like Abby, Lara, Nora, Bo Peep, Emmett, and Quinton.  When I was reading my books and trying to figure out empathy back in the beginning, I was told to imagine my favorite people and I was told to imagine other people in their place.  I imagined Helen, then, and that led to me getting yelled at a lot.  It was very frustrating.”

We reached out.  We rested one hand on top of Helen.

“The world has other Abbys and Laras, Noras, Bo Peeps, Emmetts and Quintons out there.  Ones I haven’t met yet.  If Ms. Genevieve Fray asked you what you wanted and what you believed, if that mattered, then someone should ask me what I want.  I want to meet more of those people I’m very fond of.  I don’t want to risk killing them, and I think that Fray is right and you’re the wrong person to trust with these primordial-refined projects.”

“Alright,” we said.  “That’s a good argument.”

“Thank you.”

“Should we hear Helen’s, before we respond?”

“She can’t talk, Sylvester.  Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“So you’re going to have to imagine her arguing at you.  I want you to imagine really hard, and come up with an argument that beats you, okay?  Do her justice, give her a moment to shine.  She likes those moments.”

“I can’t do that, Ashton.”

We stroked Helen, running a hand along the wadding of bandage-covered flesh.

“I want to bring about a world that makes Helen happiest.  Her ideal world, in a way.”

“That’s not reassuring,” Lillian said.

“I want to bring about a world that makes you happiest, Lillian,” we said.  “One where you have every last thing you want, and yes, the stakes are high, it feels like the world is resting on your shoulders.  But isn’t that something you wanted, in its way?  You wanted to run an Academy and run it well, and deal with all of those pressures.  You’ve been preparing for it for a long time.”

We walked past Ashton, approaching Lillian.

“I want to give you us,” we said, placing an emphasis on ‘us’.  We let the word sit for a moment.  “I want to give you a black coat you’ve earned, and family, and peace.  I want the cogs and gears to fit together.  Believe it or not, with everything else set aside or reframed, I think it could be achievable.”

Lillian pursed her lips.

“You know he’s good at this,” Fray said.  “The deceit, the manipulations.”

We shot her a look.  Warning.

“He is,” Lillian said.

“But?”

“But I’d like to believe it.”

We nodded.  We glanced at the group just outside the door.

“I want the Beattle rebels and our other assorted allies to have what they wanted, when they offered us their help.  A chance to finish their educations, a chance to bring about change that will see the history books.  Security, safety, success, and something we haven’t had for a long, long time now.  A shot at a life that resembles ‘normal’, at a time when it feels impossible to get back to that point.”

“All the promises in the world,” Fray said.

“I’ve been thinking on this very hard, for a very long time.”

“I imagine you have,” Fray said.

“Mary would make a fine Noble, and she would have her armies, her soldiers to train, and a mission unlike any other, one that might mark a turning point in history.”

“And Helen?”  Ashton asked.

Beautiful again.  She’d have to be, to be a Noble.  She would revel in the role, especially with some tuning.  She could have the greatest of prey to hunt.

Ashton nodded.

Your friends would be taken care of, as a generation to follow us.  They’d be free and they’d be together.  You’d have them, and others like them, Ashton.”

Ashton was silent at that, but he looked introspective.

We spread our arms.  Emphasis, theater, trying to make ourselves larger, as if it was a demand for more attention.

“I want Jessie to live.  I want Jessie to be Jessie.  I want to be greedy and have everyone, and I want to be greedy and claim my fairy tale happy ending.  I want everything I’ve promised to all of you, because those same things would nourish me.”

They were listening.

“I want to win, and I want to turn this shitty, blighted, corpse-strewn landscape into something we can be proud of.”

“At what cost?” Fray asked.

“The cost has been paid,” we said.  “In large part.  It’ll be hard work to secure things.  Taking all of these things I’ve described, they could be easy enough.  Keeping them will be hard.  Costly.  It will require work and focus.”

“And it’ll require you to have that bargaining chip, the world held at gunpoint,” Lillian said.  She looked so terribly sad.

“No.”

“No?”

“Mary, if you would?”

“Would what?”

“Search Genevieve.  She’ll have the means on her.  She wouldn’t trust it to other hands.  Be wary of the needles in her fingers.”

“The means?” Mary asked.  But she approached Genevieve Fray.

“I’m praying this is all an elaborate head game,” Fray said.  She submitted to the search.  Mary’s hands glided over her, searching, patting her down.  Vials and tools came free, were held up for us to see, then tossed to the ground.  “That Sylvester intends to break me in a different way than he broke Hayle.  You’re better than this, Lambs.”

“Of course we are.  We’re of the same stock as Nobles.”

“That is not what I meant.”

Fray reacted as Mary shifted to another location to search.

“There.”

We watched as Fray closed her eyes.

Mary sliced at Fray’s blouse, to reveal what was beneath.  She reached- and tentacles reached out, seizing her arm.

Fray had a creature living beneath her clothing.

“Down, Nina,” Fray said.

The tentacles released Mary’s hand.

Fray’s ‘means’ took the form of a key.  She’d made a spot below her ribcage for the item to slide in.  A sheath buried in flesh, so that the item could slide in, with only the uppermost end visible as a bar of dark metal against pale flesh.

Mary hooked the item with one finger and pulled it free.

A heavy iron key.

“Wendy will tell us where it is,” we said.

We paused for emphasis.

“You’ll find out, but don’t tell anyone, least of all me,” we said.  We watched as expressions shifted.  Relief, almost.  “Lillian safeguards the key.  Mary safeguards Lillian.”

We’d disarmed ourselves.  The weapon was known, but we were no longer a threat.  The hope we’d fostered would be free to blossom.

We touched the small of Lillian’s back as we approached her.  “We’ve won.  We have what we need.”

She stood taller.  There was an element of the dream, here.  The heady notion of possibility.  She wasn’t alone, either.  We’d claimed our third god, devoured it.

“He wanted us to worm our way into the graces of the Crown,” we said.  “To subvert it from within.  A gamble, one that could be made once at best.  We had to prove we were worthy, surviving to this point.”

“We’re here,” Mary said.

“We’re here,” Ashton said to Helen.

Indeed.  We were here.

“Take Fray into custody,” we ordered.

She stared us down as she walked past.  There was no hint of a smile on her face.  Much like Hayle in his final moments, she was left to wonder, to agonize.

The key could be obtained later, as the situation called for it.  To potentially have the ability to bring about the end of life on earth as we knew it, but for our small parcel of reality.

When we’d come to our compromise, hearing out the voice, weighing everything and losing that fight to hold onto everything worth having and hold onto our sense of right, we’d realized it was untenable.

There would need to be sacrifices, to preserve those things we so wanted.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.20 – Twig

Crown of Thorns – 20.20

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The deal had been struck.  The alternative had been erasure of all Sylvester had been.  All but the shell, the flesh, and even that would have taken its beatings.

The Lambs had to live, because they were integral, but we had to be prepared to eliminate them if they truly stood in the way.  One Lamb’s death was worth the life of two others, if it came down to it.  We’d striven to keep things from coming down to it.

The enemies had to die.  Fray, Hayle, the Infante.  When all we’d had was uncertainty, the people who fostered that uncertainty and carried their own visions for the future were too dangerous.  They pressured us from all sides and created too small a space for us to exist within.

We’d had to compromise, to be willing to kill mice and damage relationships.  We’d known we would have to play party to some of the same evils we had once condemned.

We’d had to be prepared, even, to do worse than the Crown and Academy were prepared to.  The arms race wasn’t a war of better technology and science so much as it was a war of freer and looser ethics.

We’d had to embrace monsters we resisted, to accept their direction.

We’d had to do as we were told, unflinching, when it truly came down to it, and we’d had to avoid looking too hard at what that voice sounded like, where it came from.  We had abandoned the allusions between certain characters in our past and the roles they had in our minds.

We’d had to surrender to the notion of being crafted to be Noble at the very beginning, and becoming Noble as a means to ends.

While Sylvester had slept and dreamed his feverish dreams, his thoughts scattered so far that they seemed unrecoverable, the Lambs had administered the Wyvern’s poison.  Sylvester had rebuilt his brain without thinking, and his unconscious had come across the closest thing he could have to a solution.  He had fabricated a way of concentrating this sentiment, all of the individual terms of the deal, and pit it against himself.

He had known, we had known, that to go against this fabrication was to risk erasure and oblivion.

We stood at a hole in the wall.  Floor to ceiling, nothing remained of this one part of the tower.  The remainder of the room was a medical office, a doctor’s quarters for quiet study, when the broader lab space elsewhere on the floor wasn’t suitable.  The rain hit the side of the tower and ran down it, and it poured across the opening as a sheet.

Outside the office, further down the hall, some of the others were discussing what to do.  One of Radham’s specialist doctors was providing information on the bowels, how accessible they were.  The others, including Mary and several Beattle lieutenants were discussing the possibility of holding prisoners there en masse.  Fray would be one of them.

Beyond the front of the tower, stitched were arriving from various points in the Academy grounds.  Clad in raincoats with heavy hoods or helmets with sufficient breadth to keep their heads dry, they moved in single file, arms loaded down with weapons.  Those weapons were then deposited at the foot of Hayle’s tower.

Squadrons were being disarmed, armories emptied.

Elsewhere, we could see lanterns of the people overseeing the stitched soldiers that were carrying away the dead or cleaning up the Hag Nerve.

Sylvester had recruited armies, gathered soldiers, and extorted others into playing along.

We, however, had relatively few allies in this.  Even the Lambs… that would be a transition.  We would have to be patient, and we would have to wait for a time when everyone was transitioning into their new roles.  Then, hopefully, they could acclimatize, they would wear their new skin, bear their new statures, and they would see the changed Sylvester.

Until then, indeed, few allies.

A small handful of those allies approached us, entering the office.  Red.  Goldie.  Paul.  Sonny.

“You really did it,” Red said.

“We did.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“You sound different,” Paul said.  He’d been Poll Parrot, once.  Now he was Paul.  He’d wanted to be a soldier, and he’d been given what he wanted.  The deep scars of plague removal scarred one side of him, and his hand was a mismatch, a graft marred further by the way the plague had crawled across it.  It didn’t seem as though it had much strength to it.

“Not so surprising, that.  I am different.”

“You’ve been changing since we met you,” Red said.

We nodded at that.

“Wild, uncontrolled, scary, even to us.”

“That won’t entirely go away.  I won’t be controlled.  I’ll probably scare most rational people.”

“I can live with scary,” Red said.  “You’ve all done what nobody else could do.”

“You won,” Goldie said.

“No.  Not a win.  A controlled mutual loss.  Sylvester is gone, sacrificed.  So are several of the Lambs.  We traded one of ours for one of theirs, several times.  We’ll do it again if we have to.  Then, with the groundwork we laid, we get to our feet faster than the enemies we fight.”

“Is it over?” Paul asked.

“No.  There are major cities to take.  There’s an incredible amount of work to be done.  In a way, this is just the beginning.”

“The war is done, at least?”

“This one.  There will be more.  But yes, this is over in the sense that the rebellions are toothless, there aren’t any major figures remaining in the Crown States who are prepared to contest our control.”

Paul nodded.  He looked harrowed, angry.

“Do we have a problem?”

“We did, before,” Paul said.  “Now, I’m just trying to process this.  I didn’t think we’d get here.”

“Things will get easier because we have armies that can wear Crown uniforms and we have the ability to lie.  We know most of their secrets, we have access to their projects, and we have access to their students and doctors.  Once things settle, we’ll have the people.”

“You think so?” Paul asked.  “You really think you have the people?”

“We can.  We had some of the best teachers.”

“Some of the worst, by my impression,” Paul said.

“Things will settle.  We’ve had food and water tainted with Fray’s chemicals for sterilization and leashing, we’ve had disease ravage us like no other, we’ve faced death, and we’ve faced down war.  Rain fell from the sky, melting flesh and creating pools of blood.  Mucus-laden superweapons have formed out of the same water.  Swarms of parasites have ravaged this city and others.  So many warbeasts have been deployed that we won’t bring all of them back.  We’ve seen countless poisons and diseases, fire, storms, refugees sweeping through areas and leaving nothing edible behind.  We’ve seen smoke and clouds of insects blacking out the sun.  Families of all classes have lost their sons and daughters.  You three were among those lost.  To somebody.”

“We don’t know for sure,” Goldie said.

“We’ll find out.”

“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Red said.

We acknowledged that with a nod.

“Too many families have lost people.  We lost Gordon and Jessie, we might yet lose Helen.  People are tired, Paul, Red, Goldie.  For all that the arrogant people at the top have butted heads, people are tired.  They’re ready to hear whatever we have to say, if it means that all of this stops.”

“You really believe that,” Red.

“I believe in a lot of things now.”

She nodded slowly.  Her dark eyes turned to look out over the same city I’d been looking at.

“Among them, I believe all things are possible.”

“‘All’ includes an awful lot of bad things,” Red said.

Goldie frowned at that.  Paul, for his part, seemed to consider it before nodding his agreement.

“It includes things like a Crown States where no child is subjected to experiments without their permission, and they would be treated gently and with respect thereafter, retaining their memories.”

“I expected you to say you wouldn’t allow experimentation on children,” Red said.

We were silent.

“It costs us too much, doesn’t it?  It’s too important, when you’re thinking about a war in-”

“Five years, twenty, a hundred.  Inevitably.”

Red pursed her lips.  An expression of disgust scrunched a sculpted nose.  She hung her head, and her mouth was close to the scarf she’d wrapped around her face at one point, then allowed to fall around her neck.  She hadn’t picked red because of its connotations, but blood had splattered much of it at one point.  Hers or someone else’s.  It was more of a dark brown-red now.

“We can’t lose that war, or things will go back to the way they were,” she finally said.

“If you think that, then you might be on the same page as me.”

“That’s a scary thought,” Red said.

“An appropriate one.  I think I want a retinue.”

“A retinue?”

“Consider it.  The road the Lambs take now is one that gives us some incredible freedoms, but at the cost of others.  We’re in need of capable protectors, ones that inspire something beyond simple fear, and that extend our reach.”

“You’d have us?” Paul asked.

“I would.  It would mean status, power, things I think you wanted when you wanted to fight, Paul.  What Red wanted when she took up her axe and danced with her Wolf.  I think it gives you freedom like you wanted when you and your peers had your carnival, Goldie.”

“I remember Bo Peep was frightened by that,” Goldie said.

“I remember that too.  I think she’s found her own happiness.  There’s little need to worry.”

“The problem wasn’t with her,” Goldie said.  “It was where we stood, how we acted.  We were so angry and bitter.”

We thought back, imagining the scene.  We remembered being drunk on girls and on madness, delirious, disconnected.

“Perhaps you’re right.  Perhaps I’m mistaken to ask.  Joining the retinue could mean going to the table, to be fixed, improved.  I know many of you don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t,” Red said.  “And I’m worried about your reasoning.”

“The Nobles as they were existed as something too disparate.  We need to tie ourselves together.  We need to maintain a connection to our roots, those who helped us get here.  I want to find excuses to make all of those connections into something long-term, transform them.”

“You could have the other Lambs.” Goldie suggested.

“We will.  But that connection can’t be the entirety of it.  It’s too insular.  That road leads to madness, in my expert opinion.”

“Can we think about it?” Red asked.

“Please do,” we said.

Red put a hand on Goldie’s shoulder.  Paul broke away from staring at the shattered city to walk alongside them, departing with a great deal on their minds.

They stopped at the door.

“Do I call you Lord?” Red asked.

“Soon.”

It was all we could do to not approach the Lambs.  We stalked around the edges, had our flirtatious visits with each.  It was flirtatious not in the romantic sense, but in the intimate kinship sense, as only people who knew each other was well as we did could approach, touch, and speak to each other, communicating in a manner far more efficient than would be possible with any stranger.

But as much as we moved around the periphery, we knew we were something alien.

We were a threat they were coming to terms with, a new reality.

Sylvester was gone.  He would not come back.  He had been subsumed, he had subsumed.  They might have sensed it.

They, we acknowledged, would experience it.

Until then, we were cautious.  They would be on their guard for manipulation.  They would push back if pushed.  We wanted them to join us, to stand at our side, to face down the threat and take up the new mission, but we couldn’t do it by any means except extortion or by patience.

We would let them decide, but they had to make the decisions themselves.  We had to trust in the Lambs.

We had to trust that, when the time came, they would come around to the idea of using the key to access Fray’s primordials and her work.  We would be free to unleash primordial-cultivated superweapons and we would destroy all of the world except for the Crown States.

Yes, it was a bargaining chip.  Yes, it was the motivating force that Fray described, a weapon of last resort.  As it drove her, now it would drive us to work fervently to ensure that there was always another measure to put forward, so we wouldn’t have to face the last one.

It was all of those things.

It was another kind of contingency.  If the Lambs faced the same dilemma that Nobles the world over had, if breeding proved difficult, and if we couldn’t create our successors as so many Nobles did, then we would need a way to strike out, ensuring the Crown couldn’t flourish in our absence.

After all, Jessie was lacking, much like Jamie had.  Helen and Ashton couldn’t bear children, as they weren’t human.  We had reason to suspect that Project Wyvern meant we were sterile, owing to the poison that tainted our system.  Gordon wouldn’t have produced ‘Gordon’ stock, but whatever source had supplied that individual seed.  Mary’s offspring would be only an exceptional person, if she could even carry to term with the state of her internal organs.

Much as Fray had sought alternatives, we would strive to have something to put forward.  Our doctors would work hard, looking for a way.

If they couldn’t, perhaps it would be best to visit an end to the rest of the world that Fray’s chemicals hadn’t touched.  A clean slate was better than a world where the Crown resumed power again.

Wasn’t it?

The question bothered us.

We had steered clear of Duncan, and Duncan had avoided us.

We visited Jessie’s lab.  We stared at Jessie’s doctors, a mingling of the old guard and new ones.  Duncan still gave direction, much as he’d been doing when we stepped away days ago, to confront Fray and Hayle.

Duncan looked at us as we entered.

“I was wondering when you would show up,” he said.

We walked around the room.  Jessie sat in the throne on the dais, a sheet wrapped around her.

“Everyone, you can leave for the day.  Back to your cells and quarters,” Duncan ordered the other Doctors and Professors in the room.

They began filing out.  Soldiers outside the door guided them.  We watched them go, studying expressions and body language, searching for any tricks or problems.

When they were gone, we looked to the rain-streaked windows above the bookshelves, that gave us a glimpse of the sky above and around the tower.  It was late in the day, the shadows long.

“How is she?”

“She’s resting,” Duncan answered.  He stood by a table with folders and notes strewn across it, half his attention on me, half on the notes.

“Progress?”

“No,” Duncan said.  “We’ve only been laying the groundwork in hopes of future progress.  Powering things on and turning them off again is a net loss, and we can’t do that.”

We approached the throne, walking up the dais.  With fingers and fingernails, we combed Jessie’s hair, and then began doing it into the braid she liked, that draped over her shoulder.  Her glasses sat on the throne beside her.

“The others are weighing your ideas.  They’re hopeful.”

“And you?”

“I was always one to follow the administrative shuffling and manipulation in the Academies.  I’m aware of the games that are played, the tricks, what kinds of promises go furthest.”

“Interesting.  Most were looking at it as manipulation, but it wasn’t.”

“No,” Duncan said.  “I don’t believe it was.  You believed what you said.  It’s the broader picture that was more of a problem.  It was politics, in part.”

“Politics aren’t necessarily bad.”

“They aren’t.  Still, I worry.”

“Justifiably,” we said.

“Lillian told me on several occasions about what it was like, being young, being against you.  You targeted her, you tore her down, teased her mercilessly.”

“It’s come up a few times.  I was someone different then.  I was trying to express something, and I regret that she suffered for that expression.”

Duncan nodded.  “I was your nemesis du jour for a bit.”

“You were.”

“I took the advice of others, and I tried to be like your fellow orphan Rick.  I let it be water off my back, I tried not to react, to play dumb, I didn’t want to give you anything.”

“If it helps, it wasn’t you.  You could have been anyone.  Anyone else would have been a bad fit, a symbol for the divide in the Lambs.”

“It does help,” Duncan said.

He looked at Jessie and sighed.

“Are you’re thinking you’re my enemy now?”

“I’m wondering,” he said.

“You’re one of the harder ones for me to reach out to.  I don’t know you so well.  I know you’re attached to Helen and Ashton.”

“I am.  And the other little ones.  But you used a promise to Helen to sway Ashton.  You want to bring about her perfect world.”

“Something like it.  The world I’m envisioning will be a hard one to work with.”

“You have ideas then?”

“It’s going to mean leaving a lot of things behind, Doctor Foster.”

“Doctor Foster,” Duncan said.

“What are you thinking?”

“That I wish I’d paid more attention, when you and the others had been discussing the tools you use and how you approach problems.  I’m trying to figure out your angle for approaching this conversation.”

“Everyone has an angle for approaching every conversation.”

“You more than most.  I’ve been dreading and anticipating this conversation for two days now.  I started to wonder if you planned to ignore me entirely.”

“You also thought perhaps I was avoiding this lab because Jessie was here.  You’ve had meals brought here, you’ve been sleeping in a chair.  You’ve been here more than Lillian, even when Lillian is the one who has always been more familiar with Jessie’s project.”

“That was me acting on the dread, hiding here, thinking you might not come and I’d have time to think,” Duncan said.  He smiled with that too-small mouth of his, then let the smile drop away.  “I was wringing my hands.  I concluded you would most likely make mention of my family.”

“Does it drive you?  Family?”

“I’m not sure they’re alive, actually.  When we sent armies and orders to the coasts to control the ports, I had people ask to find them.  There hasn’t been a response, and I imagined there should be one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ll see,” Duncan said.  “I worry about what it says about me if I say that my family isn’t a major driving force in what I do, not anymore.  I can’t imagine you bringing them up would sway me much, whether you wanted to help or hurt them.”

“I think you’re a fine person, Duncan.  I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“My other thought,” he said.  “Was that I can’t guess.  You know what I like and want.  I care about the others, but unless you plan to exile me, I have them, and I’ll continue to look after them.  I want a black coat, but the whole system is broken, me attending the Academy now would be a farce.”

“You keep going back to the notion of ordinary life.  Family, friends, school.”

“I didn’t realize that,” Duncan said.  “Lords.”

“Lords,” we said, with a note of amusement at the irony.

“And yet we- I didn’t approach this conversation from that angle.  I wonder if I misread you, now.”

“Who did you imagine Doctor Duncan Foster to be, if not a man who wrings his hands with anxiety while hoping for a good life?”

“I imagined you would wake Jessie and send her to me, to change my mind.”

Duncan looked up at me, as we finished with Jessie’s hair.  We tied the braid.

“I thought about it,” he said.  “I can’t put a word to it.  I felt like you wanted me to, and even if I’m not a good enough chess player to know the best move to make, I might be able to feel things out, intuit when I’m walking into a trap.”

“You’ve learned a lot.”

“I was right then?  It was a trap?”

“I don’t know.  I might have answered her, then been upset at you, putting you on the back foot, swaying you that way.  Waking her up would cost her countless memories.  It would do irreparable damage.  I could have gone on the attack, I could have been gentle, I could have played off of your goals as a Doctor.  I could have called it cowardice.  Above all else, I would have tried to show you my human side.  I think your ability to see us as humans is where you’ve changed most.  Yet all of that feels like manipulation more than politics.”

“It does.  What made you finally decide you were coming to me here?”

“Timeframes, schedules, and a few skirmishes in places like New Amsterdam… it would all be easier if we got the worst of it out of the way.  I’m willing to take that step.  I’ll be the first if need be.  Constraints forced my hand.  So I’m here.  Like I said, I wasn’t sure how to approach you.”

“A big step.  I’m sure you had some kind of strategy, didn’t you?”

“Nothing so grand.  You have the ability to say no, Doctor Foster.  You have the ability to talk to the others and cast doubt on my honesty, and I’m sure if you argued well enough, while I wasn’t there to say my piece, you could change their minds.  We’d find another way, or they would.  We respect the role your voice plays in all of this.”

Duncan reached out to the table, moving some papers.

He stopped, midway through one rearrangement.

“Respect,” he said.

“In talking to the others, we were only ever thinking about what I could give them.  We want to give them the world, Duncan, and they deserve it.”

“Do you think I’m so petty that all I want is respect?”

“We didn’t come here to give you that.  We came here to give you a share of what you’d experience if things went forward.  A reasonably fair conversation with a Noble, as an equal.”

“Did ‘we’?”

We nodded.

“You’re still a boy that’s shorter than me, Sylvester.  By all rights, I should say it’s far from being a fair, reasonable, or conversation with a Noble, equal to equal.”

“By all rights.”

“You terrify me,” he said.

“As it should be.  I just hope the other emotions outweigh the unpleasantness of the terror.”

“You’re dangerous.”

“We wouldn’t have gotten this far if we weren’t.”

“What you want is to go under the knife, to be changed, to have a body that matches your mind.  You want me to facilitate that.”

“We would hope our body isn’t so crowded, damaged, or lonely.”

Duncan moved more folders and papers.  He collected a few into a stack, looked down at it, and drew in a deep breath.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.  “About the body you’d get, who we’d have on that project, and whether I really want to do this.”

“That’s all we can ask.”

“Where are you going next?” he asked.

“To the gates, maybe to Lambsbridge.”

“It was damaged.”

“We know.”

“You’re still avoiding the others?”

“I made my arguments, I framed things.  It’s up to them to come to terms with it.”

“Or are you scared?”

We were terrified.  We were on the brink of something and the state of the Lambs had never been questioned.  Even with our departure.  Even with the schism that had formed with Lillian and Jamie in that windy room at the top floor of the building in West Corinth.

We were unsure what to say or do with Duncan.  Well… one question.

“You gave us a pill.”

“I did,” Duncan said.

“What was it?”

“Something I’ve used a hundred times.  One of our most powerful tools.”

“Ah.”

“Just a placebo, Sylvester.  I had enough things on my mind, without trying to rush anything too fancy with chemicals, medicine, and your unique biology.  If you’d taken it and not discarded it after, I wouldn’t have been sitting in this lab for as long as I had, wringing my hands, considering my options”

“What if I said I didn’t discard it?”

“The instant you took it, I realized I knew.  I knew you couldn’t submit yourself to that.  It runs against everything you’re warring against.  I’d call you a liar, and I’d tell the others you were a liar.”

We fell silent, turning our attention to Jessie again.

“Helen grasps, Ashton gets distracted by watching grass growing.  Abby has her fits.  You flinch away from any smiling Doctor giving you your medicine in the same way even a snail that’s struck ten times with a stick will wince in anticipation of the next blow.  It’s reality,” Duncan said.  “It was an unfair test.”

“But it still affects your final judgment.”

“You asked the others if they thought you were honest.  Yes.  You’re honest.  You’re honest on turf you’ve chosen to allow honesty on.  What did I say?  It was the context or the big picture that concerned me.”

We took that in.

“I’m going to address you as if you were Sy.  Because I’m worried it might be the last time it happens,” Duncan said.  “Lillian fell in love with you for a reason.  It wasn’t that you’re a scoundrel.  It wasn’t that you were cruel to her and then you were kind.  Mary was swayed to join the Lambs because you gave her something she couldn’t get elsewhere.  Gordon considered you a true friend, by all accounts.  Jamie and Jessie independently fell in love with you, and it wasn’t because of a genetic predisposition on their part for short, scrawny kids with naturally messy hair.”

“We note you’re leaving Ashton and Helen out.”

“Ashton and Helen are Ashton and Helen.  Ashton can be fascinated by an unusually shaped bit of glass from outside a factory in Luxham and he’ll carry it with him for two years.  Helen falls in love with dead birds she finds by the side of the road, so long as she can step on them.  They don’t challenge you so much as they accept you and ask for a peculiar kind of acceptance in turn.  They do challenge you, but they don’t ask for you to dig particularly deep into your being to offer something up.  The others challenged, they demanded something, and you answered and gave.”

“We wouldn’t discount the value of acceptance, given or taken.  When you’re a lost little experiment, that acceptance and that smile count for a lot.  The reliable, insistent little voice counts for a lot.”

“I’ll cede that one to you, then,” Duncan said.  “But I worry.  You’re changing, nobody’s denying that, and bigger changes are coming.  But what happens if you lose touch with all those things that drew the others to you in the first place?  Worse, what if you lose all of those things, but you find other ways to set your hooks in?”

Other ways.

We’d already started.  It was part of the negotiation, the exploration, and the transformation that came with the next big steps.

“You’re right, Doctor Foster,” we replied.

“What does it say about me,” he asked, “That I actually wondered if you’d kill me, for testing you in the here and now?”

“That you’re smart,” we answered.

He didn’t tense.  Neither did we.

“We’ll muse on what you said,” we responded.  “Thank you.”

So much to think about.  So many others who had to consider where they’d stand.  We were on the brink of a revolution, a change to how a continent and its government functioned.

We gave Jessie a fond touch on the cheek, and then we left our good Doctor Foster to his work.

We made our way out of the lab and out the door, to the Academy grounds.  We were brisk as we walked, eyeing the damage here and there, the ongoing work to clear rubble, where it would be cast off the side of Radham, to land far below.

We checked the time on our way, and we were content that we’d arrived fifteen minutes early.  We’d planned for the chat with Duncan to be shorter, but we’d left ourselves an abundance of time.

It would be such a shame to miss this.

The rain poured, and the clouds rolled.  It was windy, and the light of the sky was peeking between the thinnest parts of the clouds.

We passed through the gate, and the military forces there were ours, allowing us through without complaint.

We were greeted by a view.  Such a beautiful world.

The war had stopped, the guns were put away, and the people of Radham were out of their homes and shelters, starting to find their routine.  Radham was permanently raised up, the walls cracked, the Harvesters’ work on the architecture and landscape still visible in places, and yet children ran in groups down the street far below.  They ran through fields that had had bodies on them just days before, now rinsed and drained, bodies collected and waste consumed by organisms.

Horses trotted down the streets, but it was far less than there had been once upon a time.  Warbeasts were repurposed to work, and they hauled creations that would serve as winch-operated platforms, lowering people and things to the ground.  Something would be worked out later.  At least two hundred men were working on and around the hulk of the Infante’s ship, which remained where it had been, crashed into the walls of Radham.

There were still areas that were grisly.  We didn’t miss the carts and wagons that were shipping bodies up to the Academy proper.

This city would be our fortress for some time, damaged as it was.

The rain shifted in direction and strength.  A patter now.

Lambsbridge had been hit by a shell.  Most of the damage had been relegated to the stable where Mrs. Earles kept her horses, but I wasn’t sure of particulars.  It had come after we’d left.  It had rolled through into the building, collapsing the dining room and sitting room, and it might have damaged the staircase.

The only thing that assured us there hadn’t been any major casualties was that children played around the building.  We only recognized a small few, and they didn’t, at a glance, seem to recognize me in turn.  Too many years, too many changes here and there.

Bo Peep, Quinton, and Abby were playing in one corner with the smallest children, Bo Peep holding the oversize umbrella with the butt-end on the ground.  Nora and Lara sat with their backs to the stone wall that framed the orphanage’s yard.

Emmett was in the tree, and being there, he seemed more like the boy he was.

It was only when we drew close that we saw the Lambs, sitting on the back porch.  Ashton, Helen, Lillian, Mary.

It seemed like a dream, a flight of fancy.

They didn’t question where we’d been.  They waved.  There were some smiles, and there were far more complicated looks.  Lillian wore one.

We stopped short of stepping onto the grounds of the orphanage.

We’d given an order hours ago.  The timing around it had been a big motivating factor in us finally talking to Duncan, hashing things out.  Now we waited, hands in our pockets, hood down, letting the drizzle patter against our head and shirt.

The Lambs stood, one by one, and they made their way around the back of the orphanage.  There wasn’t a gate at the side, but a stone wall a couple of feet high was hardly an obstacle.

There was an expression on several faces, as they crossed the wall.

It had never been home for Lillian, but she surely had some good memories there.

For Mary it had been home for a while.  The crossing of that wall was one more string or ribbon cut, that otherwise tied her to something.

For Ashton, it had been a place, and he’d always put some importance on places, on landscapes and on familiar things.  He’d moved past that in a lot of ways, based on my observations, but he was still who he was.

For Helen, it had been one of two homes.  Her home for now was being embraced wherever she went, firmly in the warm arms of Ashton or whoever had custody of her.

The drizzle stopped.  The rain ceased falling on Radham for the first time in our lifetime.

“This is going to wreak havoc on the ecosystem,” Ashton observed.

“Shh,” Lillian said.

All around the city, people and vehicles stopped.  There was almost a sense of alarm among the locals, that we hadn’t seen much evidence of when the war had been ongoing, what with them huddled and hidden away.  The mischievous child in us liked that alarm.

“Did you have your talk with Duncan?” Lillian asked.

“Was everyone waiting for me to do that?” we asked.

“In a way.”

“Food for thought,” we said.

“In a way that’s going to delay us?” Mary asked.  “Or are you reconsidering?”

“No, Mary dear,” we replied, “No on both counts.”

We hadn’t stepped onto the orphanage grounds because of what they represented, and what we represented.

Lamb to Lord.

There was reason to suspect the others, Ashton possibly excepted, had made it their last visit too.  Even though we would remain in this city for some time to come.

The wind pushed the cloud cover across the sky with startling speed.  The nature of the new landscape might have played its part, Radham jutting skyward.  The lack of smoke from Radham’s smokestacks and buildings would be another part of it.  The sky looked alive, while the city was still.

Over five, ten minutes, people started resuming movement again.  The Lambs chattered.  We watched the sky.

The carts of bodies and slain soldiers were an obstruction for our visitor.  Duncan made his belated appearance at the head of one wagon.  Swaddled in a blanket, sitting on the bench next to him, was Jessie.

We’d asked without asking.  We’d made mention of it, made no secret that we’d hoped for it, as Duncan had suspected.  We’d get mad at him, in our selfish way.

We hurried to catch up with them.  We were halfway up the side of the wagon when we saw.

She slept, still.

Bittersweet.  It hadn’t been possible to wake her up for this.

It hadn’t made sense.  It hadn’t been right.

It would have made such a difference, all the same.

“Gentle, gentle,” Duncan said.  “Some of the test work we’ve been doing isn’t housed firmly.”

We were gentle, working with Duncan, getting into position to lower Jessie down.

“There’s so much to ask, to fill you in on,” we murmured.

As the rain had given way, so did the opaque cloud cover that cast Radham in its perpetual gloom.  Sun began to shine through, and then swelled as it found more open sky to peer through.  With all of the moisture in the air, light colored the sky.  We held Jessie.

Duncan’s advice hadn’t been enough.  We worried.  It made too much sense to destroy our enemy, to secure this.

Lillian’s key was only part of it.  There were other evils.  Other questions.  We would turn from Lambs to Lords and Ladies.  Duncan’s concern weighed on us.  What would we become in the end?  Would the divides widen?  Would Duncan name us for the liar we were, citing his pill?

As the others chattered around us, we felt warmth swell in our breast and we felt fear in equal measure.  Jessie rested her head on our shoulder.  Lillian held one of our hands.  Ashton was constantly moving, going back and forth between Helen and the younger Lambs.

The only Lambs, really.

“Who’ll be first?” Lillian asked.

“Me,” we said.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== 20.x (Enemy) – Twig

Enemy (Arc 20)

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Lawrence was jolted just as he finished penning one of the final lines of his letter.  The chandelier in the room swung, the curtains swayed, and books on shelves slid across the shelves or slammed forward against the doors of branches and glass that kept them from scattering across the room.

Whoever designed this thing should be poisoned and left to die a gasping death, he mused.

He leaned back in his chair, running his fingers through his hair without putting the pen down, holding the instrument with the point away from his head.  His eye traveled to the bed that was just a short distance away.

The sheets were black, only fragments and pieces of a pale form visible amid the waves of spun silk fabric.  Jeanette.  She had slept through the most recent crash- the alcohol that he could still smell was likely a part of that.  He didn’t begrudge her the alcohol, nor the sleep.  That wasn’t how he wanted to operate.

He turned his eye to the letter.  A line stretched across it.  Frustrating.

He mused for a moment, then used the head of the fountain pen to stab a beetle at one corner of his desk.  He shook it loose over the trash bin, tracking it with one eye to make sure it fell within, then opened a tin case, collecting a nearly identical beetle.

He was careful not just the words he chose for the letter, but in how he penned it out.  There was a care that needed to be taken in the formation of strokes, in the intensity, rhythm and speed with which he put words on the page.   It was closer to the enunciation and rhetoric of a speech than to the crafting of the written word.

Silent, scratching, black ink on white, but a speech all the same.

He finished,then picked up the letter.  Striking a match, he burned it.  He held it until it was almost entirely gone, then carefully deposited the remaining corner  in the bin.  He placed a lid over the top of it.

Gathering his things, he set the pen and paper away, careful to secure each.  The paper went in a box that was fixed to the shelf, and the pen went in a case.  The beetle he gathered in his hand.

He stood from his chair with care not to let the feet scrape on the floorboards of the cabin, and he walked over to the window, stretching as he did so.  He opened it, and he released the beetle.

He remained at the window, watching the speck that was the beetle fly off.  It would travel to its destination and, with the right coded chemical to unlock its instincts, pen a replica of his letter.  By similar secure means, the letter’s contents would find their way to the Crown Capitol.

He shut the window and turned.  Jeanette was awake.  She held the sheet around her breasts, for modesty’s sake.

“Did I sleep too late?” she asked.

“Not possible,” he said.

“I have to make you breakfast, or tea,” she said.

“You don’t,” he said, firm.  “All you have to do is… enjoy existing.  Within the week, all other business going well, we’ll be on our way to the crown jewel of the Crown States.  Circumstances allowing, I’ll defer my primary duties and we’ll travel over the winter and spring while I show you some of our most beautiful cities.”

“All of this feels dreamlike,” she said.

“It does,” Lawrence admitted.

They both harbored thoughts that they didn’t say.

He broke the momentary silence, “I’ll be busy.  Have you given any thought to what you want to do with your day?”

“Read,” she said, without hesitation.

“Alright,” he said.  He smiled.  “Let me know if you run out of books.”

“Ha,” she said, in mild disbelief.  Her eyes roved over the room.  Countless bookshelves stored texts with leather covers.

He walked over to the washroom, which was partitioned off by a partial wall, with a section that could slide to afford more privacy.  An esophageal hose lay coiled white and alive in the commode, like a severed umbilical cord or a section of intestine with a toothless mouth.

Jeanette was not a fan of the ‘tube’.

He washed his hands of stray bits of ink, then started washing his hands thoroughly, in the way he’d been taught to do in the Academy, from fingertip to elbow.  It wasn’t necessary, with the various measures they had against infection, but he liked the ritual of it, and he liked the symbolism.  Preparing for every day as if he was preparing for surgery.  In a way, he was.

He faced the mirror.  The face on the other side was pale, with sculpted cheekbones, a high forehead, and a defined jaw.  The nose was narrow, the lips thin, and the eyes intense and blue.  He lathered a brush and applied the foam to face and head before shaving cheek, chin, and neck.  That done, he turned his attention to the hair at each side and the back.

Jeanette appeared behind him, pressing her front against him.  Her hands rubbed at his shoulders as she looked past him to the face in the mirror.  Her own face was visible, made faintly foggy by the steam from the sink.  The effect was dreamlike, as she’d said.  Freckles dotted her cheekbones and nose, her hair was straight and brown, her lips full, and her eyes were large and green.

They were solemn, too.  The eyes.

He stared into her eyes as he finished wiping at the foam and fixing hair, and he didn’t break the eye contact while rinsing the brush and razor.  He didn’t flinch as she reached over to touch one cheek.

Not his cheek, really.  One cheek.

He firmly took her hand, moving it away.  She lowered her eyes, and gave him one kiss on the shoulder before walking to the bookshelf, no doubt to consider what she might read while lounging about in his cabin.

Even words that were implied were dangerous, much like the speech to the beetle wasn’t actually spoken.  Through silences and gestures like what she’d just done, she could say so much, and that ran contrary to the deal they’d struck.  He’d said it was because it would disrupt things if people knew, if they found out, but that wasn’t true.

He preferred things if he didn’t have to think too deeply on the subject of faces.

He’d fallen for her beauty, initially.  He was willing to admit as much.  She had worked in a coffee house, in a city he was only in temporarily.  He had struck conversations with her, and he’d remembered her bewilderment when a man like him had spoken to her, expressed interest in her day, and made a daily habit of going there.

He remembered the fear when he’d given her a gift.  She loved reading but rarely had an opportunity, so he’d given her some favorites.  She’d been afraid, because of the black coat he wore and the power he wielded, and because of the disparity she saw between them.

If it had just been her beauty that drew him to her, he might not have used his free days to travel to see her.  But he liked her mind, as literary and creative as he was analytical.  More than a few times, as he’d outlined problems that stumped him in terms someone without Academy education could understand, she had made suggestions, and while they hadn’t been answers, they had set him on the right track.

That was what love was supposed to do, wasn’t it?  Aside from the reproductive side of things, which would be complicated, it brought people together who might be stronger as a pair than they were summed up alone.  ‘Behind every great man…’, as the saying went.

He’d courted her, and he was fairly sure she had only accepted at first because of the fear.  After nearly two years, when he was sure the fear was well behind them, he’d made his proposal, and he’d revealed the secret that he’d removed several rivals to keep.

She’d accepted the deal, and its few solitary provisions.  As he’d done to himself, he would change the color of her skin, he would change the structure and details of her face, change her hair and eyes, and in the doing, he would open all of the doors to her that such a procedure might entail.  He would give her all the freedom he could, even let her go if she so asked, and he would made only two stipulations.

The first was that she never mention the procedure.  Certainly not to others, but not to him, and never committed to the written word in any diary, letter, or journal.  The second was that once she accepted the deal and the surgeries, he could never change her back.

They were selfish requests with complicated reasons he wasn’t fully prepared to admit to himself, but after much deliberation, she had accepted.

He thought a lot about that night.  His tears, as he took a scalpel to the most beautiful young lady he’d ever laid eyes on.  The consignment of a whole human being’s worth of skin and hair to the incinerator.

He’d expected her to cry, to weep, to be inconsolable.  Lords knew he had been.  What he hadn’t expected was for her to show him a face without tears, and then to save that anguish for when she thought he couldn’t hear.

He was partway through getting dressed when Jeanette approached.  She took over the buttoning of his shirt, and he took hold of her hips.  She kissed him once with each button she placed through the eyeholes of the shirt.  Kisses on the collarbone, on the neck, on the shoulder.

“Don’t look so sad,” she said.

She kissed him on the mouth this time.

“You have a war to win, Lawrence,” she said.  “You and your fellow Professors.  There’s no place for sadness.”

A long time ago, Lawrence had been told and had told himself that it was necessary, to walk this path he had chosen.  He might get a white coat, if his skin were black.  He would, he was promised, get his black coat if his skin wasn’t.  Propriety, he was told.  He could do things to help others, he was told.

He’d become a black coat fairly quickly after he’d transformed himself.  He played the political games and broke ground with his science, and he’d been called a great mind.

After her, after the scalpel and the incinerator, something in him had awakened and countless other things in him had died, and dwell as he might on the subject, he couldn’t quite articulate which things belonged where.  But others had remarked on how driven and how dangerous he seemed.

A year and a half ago, he had earned his place on this team.  That had led to him being here.

“I know,” he murmured.  “I’m the best here.”

“In the Crown States.”

“Yes.  The best in the Crown States,” he repeated.

“I’ve been reading books about war and strategy, in case you ever want to talk about it,” Jeanette said.  She helped him put on his vest, then went to his black coat.  “I know you’ve read them all, but it’s a thing I like thinking about.  If you saw the need.”

“I might just,” he said.  “I like your way of seeing the ways through the knots and tangles in things.”

She smiled.  He turned his back and let her help him into his lab coat.  He felt the familiar weight of it on his shoulders, and he stood taller because of it.

“Will you come back for lunch?  No, wait, of course.  Not with the battle.”

“There’s no telling.  We don’t know how severe this is.  Countless armies are marching when we didn’t ask or allow for it.”

“An interesting puzzle,” she said.

He kissed her.  “I may send someone to you if there’s any concern that you could be in danger.”

“I’ll be dressed,” she said.

He kissed her again, then turned to his desk, collecting folders and papers he’d weighed down with inkwells and fossils.

The outer deck of the vessel was windy.  Already, even though they were a distance from Radham, the rain pelted the craft’s metal and wood exterior.

He spotted one of his colleagues at the prow of the vessel.  He joined the man, and in the doing, saw that the others were sitting nearby.

“A slow start today, Lawrence?” one asked.

“I had the letter to write.  The vessel shuddered just as I was penning the last of it.  I imagined I was stabbing this damned craft when I executed the first scrivener beetle.”

The others chuckled.

“I’ll send tomorrow’s,” Copeland offered.  “And I’ll be mindful of the jostling of the craft.”

“No objection,” Lawrence said.  He approached the railing.

The vessel was of a scale to do any warship proud, but it wasn’t a warship, quite.  Metal and wood, with enough fortitude to withstand artillery and cannons, it traveled over plains and through sparse forest, cleaved across hills and crossed rivers with scarcely any hesitation.

Great insect legs dragged it forward with steady, mechanical movement.  Altogether, the craft might have looked like a great beetle with the exterior of a grand ship, but it was really a number of creatures working in concert.

“Radham,” Savage said, beside Lawrence.

“I won’t say I haven’t thought we should send an army to Radham to stamp out all the troubles and nuisances that seem to pour from it,” Lawrence said.

More wry chuckles.

“But we didn’t make this request,” Copeland finished the thought.

“The timing couldn’t be worse,” Lawrence said.  He wanted to lead, here, so he had ventured the risky thought.  “I’m sure the three of you discussed this before I arrived.”

“We didn’t actually,” Savage said.  “But I’m interested to hear you elaborate on that.”

Lawrence turned around, back resting against the railing, looking to see that the coast was clear.

“Ah,” Savage said, as if that answered the question.

“Exactly,” Lawrence said, raising one eyebrow.  “I’ll be diplomatic and say I was very glad we were making preparations to travel back to the Crown Capitol.”

Professor Poole reached into a pocket.  A creature, mouse-like but without fur, its features somewhat eel-like, pawed its way over the back of his fingers.  He met Lawrence’s eyes.

Lawrence gave Poole a curt nod.

The creature was deposited on the table that sat before the seated professors.  It looked around, then settled.

There were measures to listen for eavesdroppers, but they were very often confounded by the fact that they were surrounded by people.  This was a measure to listen for one very dangerous person who was almost always present.  A man they couldn’t have overhearing any of what they would say.

“He’s in a dangerous state,” Lawrence observed.  “I’d be much happier if a team three times our size was working on him.”

“He’s plague-infected,” Poole said.  “He has to be in incredible pain, but he’s hiding it.”

“He’s reveling in it,” Savage said.  “The pain, and the fact that he’s holding onto the plague.”

“In all of this,” Copeland said.  “He’s reveling in all of it.”

Lawrence nodded his agreement.  “Do we need to steer?”

The creature perked its head up.

The conversation aborted, the professors settled.  Poole reached down, and the creature scampered up his arm, disappearing into his sleeve.

Propriety dictated that they use covert means to communicate.  The beetle, the small creature, countless other measures, they shared essential information that would probably go without incident if they were mentioned out loud.  Things were what they were, and nobody had any illusions about that.

The Infante least of all.

But, by that same measure, both Lawrence and Jeanette knew their shared story.  They knew who they were, and Lawrence suspected that much as he imagined her as she’d once been, when the lights were off, she might well imagine the him he would’ve been.  But if they ever spoke it out loud… it would destroy everything between them.

Propriety.

“Which experiments do we have on board?” Savage asked.

“The belchers, the locust knights, the tunnel gnawers, and the helmed,” Lawrence said.

“A veritable army.  Any issues?”

“Hydration for the gnawers.  We debated stopping to take on water- you were there.”

“I was distracted.  We were talking about other concerns at the side of the room.”

The Duke, Lawrence thought.  He nodded.  “We didn’t stop.  Our Lord Infante wants to get to Radham without delay.  Whatever this is, it’s a priority.”

Indeed,” the Infante spoke as he ascended from below decks.  A tower of a man, stout, all muscle and presence.  He was followed by the remaining two members of his entourage.  Lawrence’s peers, ostensibly, but they were newer to the role than even he was, and they weren’t quite to the point where they were privy to discussions that the eel-rat needed to preside over.

Lawrence joined the others in bowing.

“It’s poetic,” the Infante said.  He indicated the city in the distance.  “The very nature of Radham is that it is always in shadow.  There’s always a dark cloud above it.”

“Yes, lord Infante,” Lawrence said.

“None of that,” the Infante said.  “We’re going into battle.  You know my preferences.”

“Yes,” Lawrence said, straightening.

The Duke was brought forth by a team of vat-grown servants, and followed by two of his professors.  Adams and Berger, if Lawrence was remembering right.

They looked weary.

The Duke looked almost normal.  He held himself with poise, he looked at everyone with eyes that seemed no less alert than any other person’s might be, he looked healthy and even magnificent, and only his silence might mark him as unusual to the untrained.

But Lawrence was well versed in these things.  He’d seen many a noble, and his initial work on those fronts had been sufficient to see him placed with the Infante’s team.  He was responsible for the Infante’s ability to house multiple hostile experiments within his body.

“This is your doing,” the Infante said.

Heads turned in surprise.

The Duke stared out at the city in the distance, his chin set.

“Nothing will come of it.  Nothing can,” the Infante said.

The Duke approached the railing.  He raised a hand, and with a measure of deliberation, reached out to seize it, gripping it.

“You’ll go out with grace,” the Infante said.  “As far as any bystander is concerned, you’ll wade into the fray and you won’t emerge.  Your professors will try to save you and they’ll perish in the process.”

The Duke turned.  He looked at his professors.

“As you wish, Lord Infante,” Berger said.

“Yes,” Adams said.

Lawrence watched the exchange without revealing what he was feeling.  How easily might he find himself in the position they described.  What might be leveraged to make him comply?  Jeanette, really.  There wasn’t much else he held nearer or dearer, that he would walk without argument to his execution.

The Duke nodded once.

“The slate will be wiped clean, legacy left untainted,” the Infante said.  “For you, and for the Crown States.”

Lawrence imagined the Infante stood a touch taller, a touch greater, as he said that.  Much as Lawrence might have, as he’d had his black coat placed at his back.

They were close enough to Radham to see the army arrayed against it.  The battle had already begun, Radham was in the midst of unveiling its superweapons, and the walls were already damaged.  Clouds of gas billowed from it, and plumes of more vapor speared from the Academy and the city to the sky, feeding the cloud cover above.  The vapor was darker than it should have been.

Lawrence felt his heart beat faster at the sight.

He had so much he wanted to say and do, but he couldn’t, with the Infante present.

The vessel marched onward.  Even at a distance, the army on the field seemed to react to the approaching vessel.  Most of them wouldn’t even know what this was.  The others would know and they would be awestruck.  The Infante’s personal conveyance, normally meant for travel across the oceans.

He was forced to hold his tongue, to keep the company of the three doomed.  He tried to anticipate what the others would say.

The vessel slowed as they approached a settlement.  It looked to be the staging point of the battle.  They remained silent until it had ground to its stop, the keel of the craft dragging into the earth.  Far below the railing at the prow, legs folded back into the front, protected by layers of armor

The Infante turned to leave, and all present followed him, Lawrence among them.

He stopped as he spotted a squadron of personal guards.  They bowed as they acknowledged him.

“O’Neil?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the captain said.

“My cabin.  The woman in there, Jeanette.  You’ll look after her.”

“As you wish, Professor.”

The stairwell led down through the literal guts of the vessel, and gates in the side cracked open, stairs unfolding by the same insect-leg mechanisms that dragged the ship forward over land.  At the very last hallway, leading to those stairs, they were joined by gargantuan stitched that carried the mobile laboratories.

Soldiers knelt by the hundreds as they emerged and made their way down the final set of stairs.

The Infante’s attention was on the leadership.  The seeming bulk of them approached from the hill where the largest manors and nicest grounds were.  Aristocrats, Nobles, Doctors, Professors, military leaders…

Lawrence felt his heart beat faster at seeing how very comprehensive this was.

He could see the looks on their faces:  anguish, a full and complete knowledge that the Infante’s appearance had doomed them, whatever leverage had been used to bring them here and make them do this.  One woman of sixteen or so looked away to hide her tears from the larger crowd.

The Lady Gloria approached, bowing as she acknowledged the Infante.

The Infante reached out with his left hand, and touched her face, raising her up to a standing position.

Killing her, Lawrence realized.

Very possibly killing her with plague that would strike her down within the hour.

The Duke walked to a vantage point on the path that led up to the manors, high ground where he could look over the houses and see the Radham that now stood, uneven, raised up into stages and levels, smoke pouring off of it, plumes of vapor reaching skyward from it.  From the right perspective, with a slight squint of the eyes, the walls couldn’t be clearly seen.  A shattered city floating in the midst of poison and vapor.

Lawrence had only a moment where Savage and Poole were in earshot.  Copeland wasn’t close, but he would be gathering information.

Poole allowed the eel-rat free of his sleeve, where the creature danced across the back of his hand before disappearing within.

“Steering,” Lawrence said.  “We’ll only be able to make one push before he balks.  We’ll need to decide what it is.”

They bowed to the Infante, but they were the ones in charge in the end.  They were supposed to be, in any event.  The nature of the plague and the sheer devastation here had given the Infante more freedom than he might normally have.  The war served him.  He hadn’t orchestrated all of this, but he thrived in it.

“The Duke dies, we’re not changing that,” Savage said.

“Agreed,” Lawrence said.

“The battle has to be fought.  We’ve tried to wrest the plague from him,” Poole said.  “He’s intent on holding onto it.”

“We’ll cleanse him of it before we cross back to the Capitol,” Lawrence said.  His eye roved over the crowd.

“I can see us making the argument.  It’s one of the few things that the Lord King might kill him for, bringing plague with him,” Savage said.

“I worry he might be beyond caring,” Lawrence murmured, under his breath.

Poole and Savage nodded.

The Infante’s voice was audible, deep and loud as it was, even though he was a distance away.

He seemed intent on continuing this battle, but on his terms.

Lawrence looked over the assembled forces.  He could see how gruesome a thing this might be.

The army had been gathered to wage a war against Radham.  They had yet to know the full reason why.  The simple appearance of the Infante had turned the tides, and now the army belonged to the Infante again.

For now.  Supposedly.

He could see the Infante deciding that betrayal was betrayal.  That they’d acted against the Crown, they might very well be seeded with betrayers, with agents and provocateurs.  A few touches of plague in the midst of this army, it was only a few steps down the road the Infante was traveling.

He worried where that road went, when the damage was already as bad as it was, and the Infante was empowered by the devastation to the Academy’s empire, not weakened by it.

He worried because in part, he’d made the choices and sacrifices he’d made to clear a way, and some of those people he’d worked to help would be here.

“We’ll ensure he spares the army and the unwitting Academy Doctors, Specialists and Professors that support it,” Lawrence said.  “We check him there, have him draw on the forces we brought with us in the vessel, if he needs anyone.  We can’t let him get carried away.”

“You think you can make the argument?” Savage asked.

Lawrence nodded slowly.  He was prepared to, if it came down to it.  “We’ll tell him we can’t trust the army in the field.  We need to find the culprits.  They’ll be close, if they aren’t outright involved.”

“Not many options for something on this scale,” Savage said.

“No,” Lawrence said.  It was hard to believe there was any option for something on this scale.

It was the nature of Academy science that man created things that could destroy him.  The work they did, the strength, intelligences, the capability and the beauty they created required sacrifice.  They had to put something of themselves into their best work.

Lawrence thought momentarily of Jeanette.

Sacrifice and responsibility.

If the responsibility to look after the consequences of one’s own work wasn’t seen to?  He suspected that Radham’s current crisis was one answer to that question.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== e.01 – Twig

Forest for the Trees – e.1

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Her footsteps made no sound as she climbed to the top of a hill.  The woods around her were noiseless, without bird, without buzz, without the sound of branch rustling against branch.  There was little movement, for most of the particles that could be blown away had already found their way free, and the remainder formed only dark clouds that swirled through the trees at knee or waist height.  Weather and the slow, steady pressure of time had seen most of it compressed and condensed down, like snow without the crunch of a layer of ice on top.

The sky was brilliant with blue, but it was the only color she could see.  The landscape had been painted with the black of a charcoal without any shine to it.  That which could not be made black had been powdered or outright caked with the stuff.  If any of the large boulders she saw had any color to them at all, her mind convinced her eyes it was a trick of perception.  Soil had been thoroughly mixed with the stuff, sterilized in the process, and the color had bled out from it.  Gray at best, but most often black.

She raised a gloved hand, and the caked-on powder cracked and fell away as she reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew a brush.  She swept it over the glass eyes of her mask, then dusted off the filters of the breathing apparatus.  She’d alternately been glad at the silence of the apparatus and wished that the apparatus made sound, so there could be something.

The forest here was past the point of creaking.  That which would change had changed, and it had died.  The wind and movement would break it down, it would crumble, the wind would do away with the fine dust, the rain and snow would compress the larger granules, and all of this would disappear.

The branches that remained were skeletal, condensed in their way, much as the ground underfoot was.  They had drawn in the moisture, compressed with the weather, drawing in more moisture, and what hadn’t fallen away had become like needles, too thin, twisted, criss crossing one another.

The sun shone, and the blackened landscape ate that sunlight.

She stretched, shook herself as a dog might, to shake off the weight of the dust that had managed to accumulate on her, and then she sprinted down the hill, faster than any human could move.  The dust that was kicked up behind her formed clouds taller than she was.

She avoided the path, moving through the trees.  There was always the danger of something falling, but the density of the ground was better, where there were or had been tree roots, and where the ground hadn’t been cleared of stones and rocks for the road.  There were other hazards too, rare, but it really took only one unlucky step.

She was strong.  She had been made strong, because that was a prerequisite for being made fast, for being acrobatic.  She had been made to put up a fight, to lose that fight.  She had been made to be fucked, should anyone want it of her.  She’d been made to die, if anyone wanted to see it from her, and she’d been made to even like or want that death, if given the appropriate instruction.  The reaction she would have to the death or the fucking was up to others, not her, decided by a key phrase.  Her wishes had never factored in, not for her, not for any or all of the others, be they boy, girl, or other; nearly normal or strange; big or small.

It was the strength, however, that let her move through the sometimes knee-deep debris.  If she found that one step carried her forward into a ditch, her entire body plunging into black powder so deep that she could stand on her toes and reach skyward and her fingertips wouldn’t stick out of the powder, that strength let her gather herself together and then bound up and forward, free.

Spotting a sturdy tree through the film of black on the glass eyes of her mask, she leaped up, onto the thickest, lowest branch.  It didn’t break under her, and it didn’t bring the tree down, but smaller branches and finer structures all shattered at the impact.  Branch and twig fell to the cover below.  Much of what hit her broke and snapped without sound on impact, so light it could barely be felt.

She shook off her glove, then reached for the brush.  She dusted off her eyes and filters again.  She glanced at the filters, then pressed the back of her hand to her mask, mouth pressed against the breathing hole, and blew with as much force as she could muster.  Fine dust geysered out of the filters.

Tilting her head to the right, she reached up, and she brushed off her antlers, the top of her head, and her shoulders.  It was idle movement, vanity.  But the antlers were vanity.  So was the mask she wore.  Preening let her avoid kinks, cramps, or getting into too routine a set of movements.  It made her aware that a tougher branch had fallen amid the antlers, tangled up in the tines.

She would need to stop soon.  She was hungry, she needed to hydrate, to relieve herself.  The filters needed changing, and she needed to be somewhere reasonably clean and safe to do that.

Taking stock of the landscape, she searched for the telltale hints in the forest of black on black.  She saw a particularly flat expanse.

More twigs and branches fell in a shower around the tree as she jumped down.  The landing was an awkward one, but she caught herself.  The biology she had been given spared her a twisted ankle in the middle of a barren black wasteland.

The flat expanse took her a minute to reach.  There were more dips and rises here, more ditches to swallow her up.  She started bounding more than running, moving horizontally,  either hand and both feet ready to catch the first solid earth they came in contact with, finding secure footing, then moving into the next bound.

She slowed as she approached it.  Spots like this were especially treacherous, and bad things happened if she had a misstep.  The ground was soft, swallowing and sucking instead of absorbing and giving way.  Her hands found the equipment, the flask, the filter and crank for the flask, and the hose.

She had to dive into the powder to reach what lay beneath.  She fed the hose into the black liquid, then cranked the contents into the flask.  The crank was necessary, given the work needed to pull the fluid through the filters.

The flask started ticking with each crank, and she detached the apparatus, coiled up the hose, stowed it in the jacket pocket, buttoned that pocket to secure it, and then closed up the flask, the filter within.  She walked with care while continuing to work the crank, finding her way to the point where the powder wasn’t nearly up to her shoulders.

The filter would get the water mostly clear of the dust that choked it to the point it was sludge.  It was a problem that water and dust both tended to collect at low ground, that she had to dive into the powder to get at the pond, that she could fall in and find herself in something much like quicksand, her outfit and pack soaking through and becoming many times heavier in an instant.

Still cranking, working the filter through the sealed flask, she searched out high ground, and paused in the cranking to stretch and dusted herself, her eyes, and her filters off.

She was looking for things.  There was a long list of possible things, and she found one of those things as she secured the high ground here.  Hard geometric shapes, with right angles.

She ignored the flask that still occupied her hand as she leaped from high ground to high ground, avoiding the ditches.  If there was a pond, there could be other collections of water.

The shape was small, and near the road.  Examination revealed itself to be a carriage, much of the exterior changed into the black wood that would become black chunks, black splinters, and ultimately black dust.

Her feet kicked up the bones of a warbeast.  The toes of her boots caught on the wires and fastenings that had given it a facsimile of life as a stitched.  She stooped down to seize it, tore it up and away, and coiled it with her hands as she paced around the carriage.

One of the doors had fallen away, and the black wood had gotten inside.  Two bodies, a mother and daughter, sat together, each holding the other.  The material of their dresses wasn’t organic, so the black wood had left it alone, and the gold of the mother’s dress and the violet of the girl’s dress were startling after there being nothing but the blue of the sky.  Black wood had grown up and around them, ensnaring their bodies and the fabric.  The flesh had been dessicated, changed, and disintegrated, revealing the white bone beneath.

Fine dresses.  She knew what to look for.  This woman and girl were ladies of high station.

“My ladies,” she said, her voice muted by the dust.  Her eyes roved over the interior of the carriage, over cushions that had disintegrated, over the lacquered walls, and over the finer details of their clothing.  Her gloved hands traced their necks, then their fingers, searching for jewelry.  A pendant.  She dusted it off with her brush, but it wasn’t a locket.  There was no engraving or message.  She laid the jewelry on the bench.  “Perhaps it’s a good thing if I can’t know your family name.  I might resent you.”

She’d been told of family crests and colors, of the aristocratic lines and such.  She’d known some would be invited to the festivities.  In another scenario, could this mother or this daughter have conceivably been in attendance?  Ordering her killed?  Ordering her fucked?  Participating in either?  Would they have applauded as they watched her be beaten and battered for show?

“My name is Red,” she told them.  “I can’t express my condolences for what happened to you.  I can’t bring myself to feel any pity.  You played your role in bringing about this world, this is what you wrought for the sake of your pretty dresses and beast-drawn carriages, your balls and manors.  Most likely.”

With a gloved hand and her brush, she removed all but the most stubborn fragments of condensed black wood that had used to be the younger girl’s face.  Much of it had retained its shape.  Other parts had been deformed by the wood’s growth, where they were more exposed to the water and wind.

“Yet, in case you had no choice, born to a gilded cage with no clear opportunity to go… I’ll be your escort.”

There was a clasp on the wall of the carriage the two were facing.  Red undid the clasp, then eased the table down, the hinges protesting.  A share of the table disintegrated with the effort, but the rest seemed to be holding up.  A slab of condensed carbon.

She tried to keep the largest pieces intact.  The dress made things harder, so she cut it away, turning the knife to the seams, so the fabric would be left more or less in its panels and carefully arranged ties.  She laid the largest sections of dress out on the table, and then placed head and part of the upper body on it.  More had to be arranged so it lay in the gaps and cavities.  Arms and segments of leg were gathered together into a bundle, placed so half of their length was within the chest cavity, a hand and foot  were collected individually and set near the throat.

She broke away everything she could.  One of the hands, however, was particularly stubborn, almost entirely intact, barely gnarled.

Red turned it over in her own hands, and found herself holding it, as if giving the young lady a handshake.

She recoiled at that, and hurried to put it down and be rid of it.  The bones and densest parts of the young lady were gathered together into a bundle made of a dress she had no doubt been ecstatic to receive, and the bundle was tied together and secured.  Barely more than a Crown stone in weight.

After the hand-holding moment with the girl, Red was more brusque with the mother.  She used her knife to pry and break chunks away, to separate head and neck from torso, because she couldn’t have it be too bulky, and she couldn’t have it be too heavy.  She had to whittle it down as best as she was able, keeping the woman down to just the bones.

She discovered the woman’s dress had a secret fold that could be reached through to find the leg.  At that same leg, a pistol barely as large as Red’s closed fist was tucked into a garter holster.

“You have a story, miss?” she asked, dusting the thing off.  “Is this to protect yourself, or for the confidence it gives?”

Red tested the gun, and found it jammed.  She pocketed it.

Mother was bound into a bundle, one and a half stone in weight.  Both mother and daughter were bound together.

The jewelry was collected, then bound into squares of fabric, a bit from each of the two’s dresses.  It went into a side pouch of her bag.

“We have a long way to go,” she told them.  “It’s been days of travel through this mess, no sound, and barely anything to see.”

That which hadn’t been protected was lost.

She was grateful to have been protected.

Red began bounding through the landscape, seeking out anything that might be suitable for a stop.  She zig-zagged through the landscape until she spied a mesa-like bit of rocky outcropping.

“We’ll stop for dinner there,” she told the passengers, who were making her already heavy pack weigh that much more.  She was making use of her natural athleticism.

It had been almost a day since she had come across a forest that creaked, in the early-middle stages of its transition to dust.  The silence was maddening in its peacefulness, the landscape disorienting in its bleak serenity.

She’d wanted to get away.  To understand what was out there.  She’d spent so long in the labs, a prisoner, she hadn’t been able to see the outside world.  Once she was freed, she had found out she wasn’t truly free, either.  There were restrictions and threats of another sort.  Ongoing skirmishes and civil wars, prohibiting travel to other places, plague, black wood.

She’d needed to get away.  Sylvester had rescued her, but he had threatened to be another thing that bound her, one of the things that had scared her most, once she’d found out about it, experiencing Ferres’ trial runs and tests.  To be killed was one thing, but to have the choice of how to face or feel about one’s own murder was another.  Her relationship to Sylvester threatened to be a subservient role she wanted, that was not entirely of her own choosing.

She felt much the same about Paul, in a different way.  With Paul, it wasn’t about leading and following.  It was about giving and taking other things, and not being sure she was choosing that.

Sylvester was gone now.  The Lambs were largely gone.

For months now, Red had traveled.  She’d stopped in cities and towns, observing, taking notes, sending messages back to the others, and then she’d left again.  It had only really been this corner of the Crown States that she’d started to feel the impact of all of this.  Here, it was especially bleak.

Being out in the midst of all of this, she could find herself, free of others and their complications, she could decide how she felt about things like love and Paul and Sylvester and she could see through the glass eyes of her mask that the world wasn’t there waiting for her anymore, now that the dust had settled, literally and metaphorically.

There was nothing but the occasional set of bones, without enough about them to let her distinguish or name them.  Choked ponds, spidery forests, and silence.

What had they fought for?

She reached the hilly outcropping of rock, high enough up that the dust didn’t really reach it.

She was gentle with the bag as she set it down, accounting for her passengers.  She was careful to dust herself off before pulling her mask off.  Her hood came down, and she was careful with the antlers that were attached to the hood.

The air was stale.  Her hair stuck to her face with sweat.  All around her, it was charcoal darkness.  Flat, forest, hidden swamps, hills, dusty clouds.

She cranked her flask more, then drank from it, emptying it.  She paced as she did, walking over the largest, flattest bit of rock, surveying her surroundings.

Part of it was to look for a place to relieve herself.  She spied one place, far off to the side, and approached it, starting the arduous process of peeling away the jacket and other conveniences, then starting on the skintight sleeves that protected her from black wood and plague.

An arrow struck rock an arm’s length away from her head.  It shattered, and one fragment spun away, in an arc such that she could have caught it out of the air.

She turned on her heel, and she was running at a full sprint before her own gasp of surprise was even fully expressed.  She dashed for the bag.

Four young men and women in red clothing were coming over the side of the rock, not far from her bag.  All wore masks.  Mercies.

They were like her.  They were survivors in this bleak land that didn’t allow for life.  They and others like them were the reason she was reluctant to set foot on the road.  Traps abounded.

Her explorations were supplied, paid for, and encouraged with the idea that she would keep an eye out for certain things.  The state of the black wood in various places was one of those things.  Creaking wood.  Settlements could be found and checked.

There were rarer things, too.  Survivors outside of the major settlements were one of those especially rare things.

Enemies?  She was supposed to watch for those.  They weren’t necessarily rare, in her experience.  There were enough out there.  People who roved, Academy people wearing Academy gear, with no idea the war had been won, soldiers with their masks and rebels with those same masks, stolen from the dead.  So many were hostile and dangerous.  Almost always, she’d ran.  Twice, she’d had to use her axe.

It was rare that she’d get caught off guard.  Had they been more patient, she might have been caught with her pants down, she mused.

It wasn’t so bad as that, but it was still dire.  She jumped behind a bit of rock on the mostly flat hill, and she glanced out only long enough to check on her bag.

Her mask was there.  Her jacket, all of the equipment.  Her weapons- even the small gun.  Without those things, she might as well have been trapped on a small island, surrounded by sea and unable to swim.

They were doing what she was doing, in large part.  They weren’t as covered up, but they might have been using similar equipment.  They were roaming, and they were seeking refuge in spots like this, too inorganic to be affected by the black wood, too high up to be caught in the storms of dust.

“Hello!” she called out, her back still to the rock.  Her voice sounded strange without the mask on.

“Greetings!” came the jovial response.

“I’m not much of a threat!”

“Nor are we!”

She patted her pockets, and she found a kerchief.  She often used it to wet and wipe away the dust as she pulled off her outfit and washed up.  She tossed it out to the side.

The arrow flew by a moment later.

“It’s awfully hard to convince our visitor we’re not a threat when you’re shooting at her.”

“I thought I could hit her.”

“You could if you weren’t useless with that thing.  Give it back.”

“Not a threat?” Red called out.

“Not when Ansel is shooting!” came the jovial response.  “But he’s not shooting anymore.  It’s my bow, and I can put an arrow through a sneezing donkey’s arse without making it bleed anywhere you could see.”

She hung her head at that.

“You can,” one of the other Mercies said, “But that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed.”

“One in three times,” the Jovial Mercy said.

“One in five, at best.”

“I don’t suppose you’d let me go with my things?” Red asked.

“We need our protein, my dear, and you’re it,” Jovial said.

“Jewelry!” one Mercy said.  The sole female one.  “Watches.  There’s a whole bag filled with things!  She’s a looter!”

“I am not,” Red said.  “The possessions go with the bodies.”

“One, two, three… hm.  Twelve parcels.  Some with fine things in them.  Some with less fine things.”

“Twelve parcels.  Two bodies,” another Mercy said.

“Three, could be,” the female Mercy said.  “It’s hard to tell.”

“Still, something doesn’t add up.”

“It’s not as though we needed the excuse of you being a grave robber to eat and kill you, mind you,” Jovial said.  “But perhaps it’ll feel more right if you feel as though you deserved it.”

She hated this.  Being cornered, being contained, knowing that horrible things were coming.

What had all of this been for?  How was it worth it?  She’d steeled herself to get through Ferres’ training and treatments at Beattle, she’d helped the others, encouraged them, fought, and even played her part on Ferres’ stage, for the Lambs’ ruse.  She’d dreaded it and it had been just as bad as she’d feared.

She had played her part in the war.  She had played a part in the cleanup.  She had played her part in the months that followed, patrolling, searching, mapping out a changed landscape, to make sure no disasters unfolded while they were without a leadership.

She felt so angry, and the anger was so familiar.

“I don’t know what tricks you’ve got up your sleeve, ma’am,” one Mercy said.  He was close.  “But if you’re kind enough to not put up any kind of fight, we’ll make it quick, so you’re dead for everything that comes after.”

I got this far, she thought, but the statement lacked in heart, and she worried she’d need all the heart she had for what was imminent.

She’d gotten this far, but the journey had been long and tiring.  She felt heartsick, after seeing the depth of the darkness and the damage done.  There were bodies, there were fallen villages and cities, and whatever the Lambs had said, they were gone now, and the words had lost some meaning, this far into the bleak wastes of the black woods, where civilization was so far away.

“I’ll cooperate,” she said, lowering her head.

“Thank you,” the Mercy said.

He stepped around the rocks that were providing her cover.  She was quick to move, to act.  She lunged at him, keeping him between herself and the Jovial Mercy who was wielding the bow.  His guard was down, and he stumbled, while she tried to guide that stumble.

But as fast as she was engineered to be, he was engineered to be strong.  She’d hoped to use momentum and timing to drag him toward the edge.   She’d hoped to go over that edge with him, and be gone or in a hiding place by the time the Jovial Mercy was in a position to shoot.  She didn’t manage to drag him more than the initial one step to the side.

An arrow cracked against the stone below her, shattering.  The pain came a moment later.  Jovial had placed a shot through the gap between his fellow Mercy’s legs, to graze her calf.

“I’ve been fighting for a long time,” she said.  She stumbled back, and her injured calf didn’t want to bear her full weight.  The Mercy right in front of her reached out and grabbed her.  She spoke to him, defiant, “I got this far.  I’m not about to stop struggling now.”

“There’s a point where you break, you know, where you have to stop fighting back, give up, and tend to other things.”

“And how is that doing for you?” she asked.  “You get me, and then what?  You subsist on the animals that retreated onto these mountains and places like this, you wait for them to run out, and you wait for the black wood to take over everything?”

“We have a chateau to go back to,” the female Mercy said.  “Books to read, food to look after, we’ll keep ourselves occupied until the Crown returns.”

“You’re Crown?” Red asked, her eyes widening.

“Of course.”

“So am I.”

The Jovial Mercy sniffed a laugh, as if one from the mouth was too much effort for the petty lie.

“In my jacket.  There’s an envelope.  Inside breast pocket.”

The small Mercy checked.  She retrieved an envelope, then unfolded it, reading it.

“What is it?” the Jovial Mercy asked.

“She’s Crown.  The letter is signed by others.  She’s an envoy.”

“Where are you from?”

“Bathaven,” the Small Mercy said.  “Other places before that.”

“We thought we lost Bathaven.  Our messengers said the bridge washed out and things looked grim on the other side.  I thought you had to be defectors, to be in an area with no settlement to fall back to.”

“Things were only grim because the people panicked.  Now they’re quiet.  We’ve been using the port when the weather is clear,” the Small Mercy said.

“We’re on the same side,” Red said.

On the other side of the group, the Jovial Mercy toyed with an arrow.

“We are,” Red said.

“I recognize the signatures,” one of the other male Mercies said.

“I expect you’re right,” Jovial said.  He smiled wide.  “I’m awfully hungry, though.”

Red’s expression faltered.  She limped back a bit further, then remembered that the Jovial one had a bow.

“You were made to be loyal,” Red said.

The statement felt hypocritical to the point she thought her whole being was diminished by it.

“I was.  I was also made to be hungry, to seek out my protein sources,” Jovial said.  “It’s the funny thing about life, isn’t it?  It finds a way around things.  We adapt.  I’ve adapted to my current circumstances.  And they’ve adapted to me.”

The three Mercies didn’t look particularly happy.  Their instinct was supposed to keep them loyal to the Crown.  That didn’t give them the drive to push back when someone was being disloyal, perhaps.  Or he’d bullied them enough to get them to cooperate up to this point, and they didn’t have it in them to fight back.

Red had seen so many of the methodologies.

“It’s treason,” Red said.  “I’m a representative of the Crown, performing a vital service for the Crown.”

Of all the statements she couldn’t have ever imagined she’d say with such conviction.

“It’s only treason if I get caught.”

“Raise your muzzle, blackest of wolves,” Red said.  It was like a prayer.  “Howl, and we shall howl with you.  Hunt, and we shall hunt with you.  Bloody those claws, and fill that belly, and we shall draw blood and feast alongside you.”

“You consider yourself one of us?” Jovial asked.  “You think you can hunt with me?”

“All but the one with the bow bear the pelts of wolves.  He… he bears the pelt of a traitor to the Crown.”

She hoped it could hear, if it was even out there.  It was finding its own independence.

The Jovial Mercy nocked his arrow.  His expression was more firm now.

He didn’t get his chance to shoot her.  The Wolfdog, as Lillian had termed it, was already sweeping out from the darkness below the rocky bit of hill.  The Jovial Mercy turned, arrow drawn back, and found himself faced with a wolf as big as any carriage, with no weak points in plain view.  The beast’s eyes were covered with lenses, its muzzle a mess of machinery and breathing apparatuses.

Jovial fired the arrow as he tried to leap aside.  The arrow did nothing of consequence, and the Wolfdog did something of final consequence.  It pounced on the Mercy and by size and momentum, it destroyed him.

The others remained stock still.

“Lay your head down to rest, black harbinger,” she said.  “Stay clear of me.  Begone.”

She watched it lope away.  Where her breathing apparatus was silent, it hissed and wheezed.  The saddlebags, tent, and the packages that were the ten other dead bodies she’d collected hung off of its sides.

Her guardian, her nemesis.  Her Wolf, with another project’s best qualities.  Her feelings toward it were complicated.  It was supposed to be her partner, as she worked well with it, but the memories she associated with it were so grim.  Lillian had urged her to give it a try.

She felt guilty, in a way.  It wasn’t dumb, and it had some of the instincts that domesticated dogs did.  It wanted to please, and it was keenly aware of her and her mood.

It knew she hated it, so it lurked in a place where it was out of her sight, out of her thoughts, its wheezy breaths out of her earshot, yet where she was still in its earshot.

She was coming to terms with that.  Like so many other things, it seemed like a loss.

She stepped forward, walking without nearly so much fear, now.  She had to pick her way past the bloody smear that had once been a Mercy, and she had to walk between two of the Mercies to get there.  They didn’t approach or comment.

The Small Mercy was sitting by her bag, gathering the components and pieces back into the bag.  No longer sorted, sadly.  She’d have to rely on memory.

“As an emissary of the Crown, I’ll ask you to lead me and my partner to Bathaven.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Small Mercy said, extending a hand, the mask held out.

It was an image of various animals all blended together, softened, made warm.  A deer, a rabbit, and other prey animals, combined into a single pretty face.

It was hard to articulate why she’d asked for a mask with that face.

Whatever face she had or mask she wore, it wouldn’t be hers.  Not anymore.  She wanted to make peace, to conquer that demon.  She didn’t want to wear anything else, because then she might not have been able to take it off and reveal this face again.

“I’m sorry about him,” one of the other Mercies said, possibly reading her expression as something else.

“Good,” Red said.

She pulled the hood up, and clicked the small antlers into the waiting places at the top of the mask, as part of the arrangement to get everything sealed.

“You’ll keep me company,” she said.  The Wolfdog had been doing much the same.  “Take me to your home.  I’ll take record of how things are doing, check on the people you’re supposed to be watching over, and I’ll be gone, leaving you with only my urgings that nobody is to hunt.”

“Nobody?”

“We’re trying something experimental, and we can’t trust there won’t be other mistakes like this one.”

She saw their expressions change.

“For now, at the very least” she said.

That got her some nods.

“If I may?” the Small Mercy asked.

“Yes?”

“There’s something you might find of more importance than the report.  Can I show you?”

“What is it?”

“A plant.  It’s not too far out of our way.”

She frowned at that, behind her mask, but she nodded.

They were faster than she might have thought.  Once they all had their gear on and masks in place, they set out as a group.  Where she was strong in a way necessary to let her be agile, they were nimble as a side effect of their strength.

She was faster, but she didn’t have to slow herself to a crawl to let them catch up.  She could get ahead, peer back over her shoulder, and see the direction.

She liked having people, she was realizing.  She liked company, and it helped with the dark thoughts, the feeling of pressure on all sides, in this bleak place.

Not so much that she felt like she could or would keep her Wolfdog company on the long way back, but she would work on that, as she worked on so many things.

If she was to take Sylvester’s offer, she would need the Wolfdog’s assistance to be properly useful.  She’d memorized the commands.  It was hers.  Bonded to her.  She was it’s.

She simply wished this wouldn’t be so hard, bleak, and uncertain.

“There,” the Small Mercy said.

There.

She blinked, convinced her eyes had fooled her.

It wasn’t massive.  It wasn’t even pretty, or useful, or anything of the sort.

But, amid black trees and black ground, black branches and black clouds of dust that drifted close to the ground, there was a slice of green, like clover.  It encircled the trunk on the side closest to the sun, and it peeked through where the dust wasn’t piled too high on the ground.

This.  This was why.  Why she fought, why she’d tried.  It was hope.  Acknowledgment on some greater level.

“What was it your friend said?  Life adapts.  We adapt.”

“He wasn’t a friend,” the Small Mercy said.  “Not really.”

Red was quiet.  She reached out to touch the green leaves, that were somehow surviving despite so much.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== e.02 – Twig

Forest for the Trees – e.2

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

The snow was starting to fall, and both students and kids were involved in the extensive relay, handing crates back, each packed and covered with a cloth.  On the other side of the road, another team was sending crates out.

There were shouts as a carriage rolled by, piled high with greenery, moving too close to the people on one side.

“Can I have a few minutes of your time?” a Doctor asked.  He was young, with dark hair that curled around his ears.  He wore an indoor lab coat under one worn by those who worked outdoors, and the shirt beneath that coat had been badly wrinkled.

“You may,” Shirley responded.

“We have a problem,” he said.  He paused for effect, which annoyed her.  He’d turned up a minute ago, and had paused to take in the scene, hands jammed into his pockets.  Despite the pause he’d taken to observe and let the words sink in, he said, “We’ll need to act sooner than later.”

Further down the line, one of the smaller children in cold-weather jackets called out, “I’m getting tired!”

Nobody seemed to be ready or willing to pick up the slack.  Shirley looked back at the Doctor, “Come and talk to me.”

She touched shoulders, and the little boy backed off, the older child to her right shuffling to one side to make room.  She began passing the crates down.  Each was light, only five or so pounds, more a basket of wood strips than a proper crate, whatever its construction might have looked like.  The contents weren’t densely packed, either.

Peevish, perhaps, to busy herself and refuse to be swept up into the man’s tempo, but she would have done this if he hadn’t turned up, and she could leave at any moment.

The Doctor explained, “In any disaster, or when we use a serious weapon, we can expect that as much as ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the target population or area will be killed.  The number varies, but bear with me.  It applies to bacteria, to plant matter, to animal, and human populations.  For much of what we’re dealing with when it comes to the Black Wood and the long-term effects of the plague, it’s most of the above.”

“Cats and cockroaches,” Shirley said.

“Oh, it seems you know something about it then.”

“I’ve picked up some things,” she said.

“Well, good for you, miss.  Good for you.”

Shirley met the eyes of the girl to her left.  Ten years old, if she had to guess.  “You said you had a problem?  Semi-urgent.”

“Urgent, very urgent,” he said, giving no evidence to that urgency in how he comported himself.  She’d met people like this, for whom everything was an emergency and a priority, to the point that the label meant nothing, even to them.  “We’ve got cockroaches.”

“Actual cockroaches?  Or the-”

“The same cockroaches made famous by the ‘cats and cockroaches’ term.”

“Alright.  Do you distinguish between the cats and cockroaches when using the term?”

“Yes, sometimes we do.  The use of the term can vary from place to place, institution to institution, often after the little disasters and clean-ups that demand a shift in perspective.  Oftentimes it’s the cats that are wanted, the cockroaches that aren’t.  That’s how I’m using it now.  This might be good in the long-run, but it’s a bad thing in the here and now.”

“What is it?”

“Rats.  There are a lot of them.  Think of the parcels of land we’ve carved out as islands, surrounded by water.”

“There’s the actual water too,” Shirley said.  “We’re on the ocean, here.”

The Doctor made a face, looking very unimpressed with her contribution.

“Go on,” she said.  Even with gloves on, her hands were cold, handling the snow-dusted boxes.

“If we have a small population of these rats here that seem able to survive the Black Wood, then there’s a strong possibility they’re more numerous, spreading with no predator population to control them.”

“They need food, don’t they?  That’s in short supply out there.”

“We think they might be burrowing, digging deep enough to get to the soil beneath the detritus.  To find worms and deep-buried roots or tubers.  There’s more to it, but it’s easier to show than to tell.”

“Why approach me about this?  I’m not in charge.”

“Anyone in charge stays only a short time, then becomes preoccupied.  They leave to travel, organize, abdicate their positions, or get so caught up in running things that they lose sight of the day to day issues.  Our current ‘mayor’ is locked in his office, trying to work out rationing and the bartering budget so we can get through the winter.”

“I heard about that.”

“Indeed!  No surprise, as you, little miss, struck us as the person who knows everyone, with a thumb on the pulse of things.”

“Perhaps.  I’ve been something of a liaison, and I catch the rumors and gossip at the shop.”

“Someone told me to talk to you, and I knew exactly who you were, thinking back.  There’s a concern that with the weather getting colder, the rats might seek refuge here on this island of ours.  They’re already getting at the food, I think I said.  The mayor is claiming he’s trying to prevent the food crisis, but he’s ignoring this.”

The ten year old girl next to Shirley cast a worried look her way.

“We’ll figure something out,” Shirley said.

“The mayor seems to share that quaint notion, but he and you would be ignoring the experts in thinking anything like that,” the Doctor said.  “We were short on resources already.  I’m not sure how we’ll rally this.”

“We came this far, through plague, war, and black wood.  Don’t discount humanity,” Shirley said.

“Humanity might be the source of this problem.  Residual Academy work, as it happens.”

Shirley, between the handing off of boxes, raised a hand, to get the attention of a group of older adolescents by the gate to the city.  It was one of the boys who stood and hurried over, pausing only to let one wagon by.

“I know you had a shift earlier, but can you take over?  I have something I need to do,” she said.

“Sure thing, Miss Shirley,” he said.

She briefly put a hand on the boy’s shoulder before leaving the line.  She didn’t miss how he stood a little taller at the contact.

The Doctor, however, had noticed something else.

“Miss Shirley,” the Doctor said, once they were out of earshot.

“Hm?”

“The way they look at you, and the way they address you, it struck me as odd.”

“A boy who wears his heart on his sleeve, that’s all.”

“It’s not an isolated incident.  I’ve seen you interacting with others before.”

“It’s simply the way things have panned out, Doctor.”

“It’s disconcerting.”

“Disconcerting?” she asked, a little surprised.

“I don’t mean any disrespect, but that tone, it’s a degree of veneration normally reserved for Nobles, aristocrats and Doctors.”

“‘Miss’ is ?”

“The tone, dear.  The tone.”

“As you say, I know a great many people.  I’ve been through warzones, I played a part in getting the orphans to safety.”

“Yes, of course.  Many of us were tested during the conflicts.  But things have settled, Shirley.  The rebels are quashed, at some cost, the Infante is reportedly back overseas, and we’re picking up the pieces.  This new landscape is a fantastic challenge to work with.”

“A more daunting one for us civilians.  Can I ask you not to go on at such length about how dire things are, when children are in earshot?  We don’t want panic.”

“Better to panic now than to panic too late.  We have to act in times of crisis, you know.”

“As I said, I’ve waded through warzones.  I’ve killed people.  I know about action in times of crisis.”

“You don’t strike me as an ex-soldier,” he remarked.

“I wasn’t.”

“I see,” he said.  “Right through here, by the by.”

She was glad for the lessons Sylvester had given her in poise, so she could keep her expression still, her body language confident.  She was less glad about the situation.  She didn’t know this Doctor, and she didn’t like him.

She didn’t recognize or like the ominous stone building he was asking her to enter, either.  It was a tower, squat and defensively-focused, with what might have been an armory adjacent to it.  The door was five paces beyond the arch and short recess that preceded it.

She turned her head, looking around.  She felt a measure of relief when she saw that Pierre stood a distance away, leaning against the wall.  His ears moved as she looked directly his way.

Her hand moved.  The ears moved in response.  Not a signal, beyond acknowledgement of her message.

She stepped through the archway, approaching the door.  The Doctor was a step behind her, where she couldn’t easily see him.

The feeling she felt at this whole situation reminded her of a time years ago, when she’d been younger, more or less the age the oldest Lambs seemed to be.  She had meant to go out with a partner.  Not quite a friend, but someone she knew enough to work with.  The partner had backed out, Shirley had needed the money, so she had gone out alone.

She had taken up with a customer, and she had felt then much like she felt now.  That situation had ended with her being hurt terribly.  The hurt of the beating had been dwarfed by the hurt to her spirit.

“I’ll get the door,” he said.

She reached forward and hauled it open herself.  She didn’t wait for him before passing through.  The interior was stone walls with wood threaded through it, and it was dark, with only the midday light streaming in through the windows to illuminate the interior.  Even the light snowfall made the light noticeably brighter and more diffuse.

“Turn left,” he said.  “There’s a basement area.”

She did.  She could smell the vegetation before she saw it.  The air was humid.

“Our line of thinking was that you might be able to appeal to the Mayor.”

“You can’t?”

“We feel he’s striving to maintain a divide between the Academy and the local government.  It wouldn’t be the first time someone has wanted to protect his position by doing so.  Most government positions are purely ornamental, you understand.  Secretaries with better titles who balance the books and provide the information so Professors and those of Noble bearing can make the decisions.”

“You want me to be your mouthpiece?”

“We’d like you to be a lot of things, Miss Shirley,” the Doctor said.

He hadn’t said ‘Miss Shirley’ in a way that implied deference or respect.

She felt a sick feeling in her gut at that.

There were more Doctors waiting in the room at the bottom of the stairs.  One Professor, it seemed.  Three of the five Doctors were hanging back, two with arms folded, the other with hands in his pockets.

It could have been read as defensive.  It wasn’t.  They’d been expecting her, by the way they reacted to her.  They’d been prepared with their guard up.  They were ready for a fight, if they had to make one.

“My friends.  This is the young lady you spoke of?”

Shirley knew he knew she was.

“She is,” one of the Doctors said.  “Shirley, was it?”

“I am.  Pleased to meet you.  I don’t believe I have your names?”

“I’m Nester,” the Professor said.  “Professor Nester.”

“Orville,” the Doctor she had been speaking to introduced himself.  The others mentioned their names, and she committed them to memory, but she didn’t dwell on them.  Nester and Orville were the ones she was facing down, here.

“Charmed,” Shirley said, putting some charm into her voice, even while her body language showed none but that which came automatically.  She wanted to seem unflappable, almost untouchable.  She achieved the result she wanted, as two people exchanged glances.

She took control of the exchange by turning away from Nester.  She did a circuit of the room, keeping them in her peripheral vision.

Cages lined shelves, and tables throughout the room had plant samples in pots.  A skylight allowed some limited light through, and the largest of the plants had been placed to absorb that light.

“We’ve trapped some rats and placed them in the cages, you’ll see.”

She saw.  Green rats.  They looked almost like plant-animal hybrids.  Their fur was like grass, and plants grew out of them as if they were fertile soil.  The largest had outright flowers growing from them.  But most telling was that the predominant plant was the wolf clover.

It was the same clover that one of the Lamb’s own followers had found in an exploration.  Shirley had heard, but hadn’t heard who.  It was minor, small, of little nutritional value, but it grew in the black wood.

After a bit of attention from various Academy scientists, the means by which it managed that growth were becoming clearer, and the plant was being strengthened, given more value.  The same crop that students and Samuel’s children were collecting and bringing in by that relay of crates would hopefully help to keep everyone fed over the winter.

A winter of thin soups, potentially, but so long as they had the Academy science and bio-material, a great many things were possible.

“An escaped project that found the opportunity to thrive?” she asked, examining one very pretty little green rat, which wasn’t very large, but had a long, long trail of grasses growing from it.

“Thrive might be an exaggeration.  It’s a great deal of work to get food in that environment, and the net cost might approach or even eclipse the gains.  The ones we trapped were skinny.”

“They get some sustenance from the plants growing on them?” Shirley asked.

“They do.  But they prefer easier sustenance.  They’ve been getting into our food, and they’re starting to nest in houses.  When the winter rolls in-”

“I told her that much.  They’ll be pressured to find shelter.”

“Alright,” Shirley said.  “We’ll warn people, tell them to go over their homes and stop up any points the creatures might use to get inside.”

“It’s best if we warn people,” Nester said.  “We hold some position of authority.  If we had you handle this matter, we’d run the risk that some citizens would dismiss the crisis as a flight of fancy.”

If I never again felt the way I feel right now, I’d be so glad, Shirley thought.

“It’s just how people think, you see,” Nester said.

“I imagine it is,” she said.  She kept a small smile on her face, but she gave him nothing else.

Orville said, “We thought you might talk to the Mayor.  Charm him, or convince him of the danger.  Whatever works.  Pleas for the well being of the children, even deception, if you were so inclined…”

“The Mayor isn’t inclined to listen to you, so you want me to be your representative.”

“It’s a step up,” Orville said.

“Is it?” she asked.

“It is!” Orville said, with emphasis, almost surprise.  “Good Professors in their black coats prove their worth and become right-hand men to the most powerful people in the world.  Is it so bad to be the woman at the side of someone like Professor Nester?  Two steps and change removed from being at the ear of true-born Nobility.  I’ll have you know that Professor Nester is man of such standing that an Academy and its research projects were entrusted into his care when the continent was evacuated.”

“I’m well aware,” Shirley said.  “I wasn’t aware he was in charge.”

“The Academy is in my care, nonetheless,” Nester said.

She turned around, clasping her hands in front of her.  Her heart was pounding.  That heartbeat changed when she saw Pierre standing in the door, which was open just enough that only a sliver of him was visible.

“Professor Cavvy runs the Academy side of things, doesn’t he?” she asked.

“He does,” Nester said.

“He does a fine job,” Shirley said.

“He manages.”

She smiled.  “I’ll be sure to talk to him.  He’ll need to know about this, and his input will be invaluable, I’m sure.”

“There’s no need to complicate things,” Orville said.  “Cavvy is working hard on his experiments and he isn’t to be disturbed.”

“But it’s clearly a crisis, you said,” she said.

“It’s a crisis we can handle,” Orville said.

“You weren’t so sure before, when you were talking to the children.  Pierre!”

Pierre opened the door.  He struck a dashing figure, in a way that made Shirley think a children’s storybook character might.  The fop, the rapier-wielding duelist who drank a touch too much, the jester who’d changed into fine clothing.  He was lanky enough he threatened to trip over himself when he wasn’t running, his tall frame made it hard for him to find clothes of the appropriate kind that fit, and his head was a touch too large for his body.  That of a white-furred rabbit, slack-jawed.

His head was tilted to one side, so he watched her with only one eye as she gestured.

He swept himself forward into a bow.  “Miss Shirley.”

She stepped forward, touching the side of his face.  “Dear Pierre.”

She saw the muscles of his face shift into something resembling a smile, but it was only a glimpse, and it wasn’t a true smile with his mouth being what it was.  He straightened, and his head moved well out of her reach.

“We didn’t invite your friend here,” Nester said.

“Oh, not to worry,” she said.  “Pierre can be trusted with anything I can.  He very frequently goes where I do and appears where I do.”

“And he is?  A pet?”

“A protector of sorts, an escort, a fantastic scout and messenger, and a dear friend,” Shirley said.  “Pierre.  We could do with bringing the good Professor Cavvy into this discussion.  We might have some very strange rats getting at our food stores.”

“I’ll find him and let him know before you’ve counted to a hundred, Miss Shirley,” Pierre said.  He bowed at the Doctors.  “Please pardon my intrusion.”

“Stop,” Nester ordered.

Pierre glanced at Shirley.  Shirley, for her part, was aware of how Nester bristled at that.

“I know full well what you’re doing,” Nester said.

Shirley turned toward him, smiling.  It was meant to be provocative purely in the ‘provoking’ sense.

“You think you’re cleverer and better situated than you are,” Nester said.

“I don’t think I’m clever,” Shirley said.

“Give yourself more stock,” Pierre said.

She ignored him, “I can’t claim to be brilliant or educated in scholarly things, but as I tried to communicate to your Doctor Orville, I’ve earned my stripes.”

“And how did a calico with supposed stripes like yours end up in our city?” Nester asked.

The Lambs had wanted someone they trusted, they’d needed eyes out, and the city had been of a good size to host the children from the West Corinth orphanage.  She wouldn’t say that, though.

“Luck,” she said.

“It’s clear you’re looking to cause trouble,” Nester said.

“Trouble?  Gosh no.”

“You’re clearly challenging the natural order and structure here,” Orville said.

“Am I?  By asking after the man in charge of the local Academy?”

“By ignoring our recommendations, interrupting someone hard at work.”

“As you want me to interrupt the mayor?”

“The mayor, as I’ve stated,” Orville said, with some stress, “Is meaningless in the grand scheme.”

“Then you don’t need him at all, you don’t need me to talk to him.”

“Perhaps,” Nester said, “Considering your apparent bewilderment at all of this, you should avoid talking to him after all.”

“Perhaps,” Shirley said.

“We’ll find someone else to act as liaison.”

As pawn.

Her hand moved.  “If you’ll excuse me, then.”

“You’re well excused,” one of the doctors on the sideline said.

So rude.

Nester shot the man a stern look, then turned to her.  “Thank you for your visit.  I hope you realize the severity of the situation.”

“I do believe I have an idea of it,” she said.  “If the rats have multiplied out there, they might come our way, a veritable plague.”

“A beautiful plague,” Pierre observed.  “I do like animals in this vein.  Rodents and burrowing creatures.  These are finer.  Aesthetically pleasing, even.”

Shirley let that go without comment.

“You might not think that when they’ve swarmed us,” Nester said.  “Be careful about how you disturb things in the coming days.  It would be easy to upset the balance and have this crisis become a catastrophe.”

“Not to worry,” Shirley said.  “I’m harmless.”

“I’m sure,” Nester said.

Shirley gave him a light curtsy with a bow of the head only, then turned away.

“You’re on a first name basis with the current mayor, aren’t you?” Pierre asked her, as he took hold of the doorknob.  He opened the door for her

“I am.”

“He wouldn’t mind a visit, I’m sure.”

“Do you think?”  She stepped through.

“Yes, yes,” Pierre said.

“You’re aware,” Nester said, from the room they’d just left.  “That would be the kind of disturbance that I was just talking about.”

“Not at all,” Shirley said.  She turned around to look at him.  “I’m not so clumsy as to misstep like that.”

Her expression changed.  She’d worked, at Sylvester and Helen’s instruction, on working with her own expression in the mirror, for the sake of moments like this.  She let Nester and the others see just how dangerous the Shirley she wanted to be was.

Nester’s expression hardened.

Pierre shut the door with more care and gentleness than was necessary.

“You’ve upset them,” he observed.

“I know.  Ill-advised, perhaps.   I don’t know if it’s this city or if it’s this way when you approach these echelons, but it gets to me.  I had something to prove.”

“There’s absolutely no need for any excuses,” Pierre said.  “We’ll do just fine, I think.”

“I’d feel better if there wasn’t the complete and total silence from the Lords and Ladies.”

“The Lords and Ladies might have their hands full getting themselves put back together.  Give it time.”

“In the meantime, we’re here, with several hundred children to look after and keep busy.  The local Academy is feuding internally and with the government.  I’ve angered a warbeast I share a cage with.”

“We can leave if we have to.  I’ve looked into the means.  It would be tight, but we could transport the young ones in sealed containers.”

“Let’s avoid that,” Shirley said.  “We’re best situated here, overseeing things.”

“In case Cavvy manages a breakthrough.”

“There’s that,” she said.  She drew in a breath and sighed.

A student passed them in the hallway.  Shirley gestured, and Pierre responded.  They didn’t say anything more until they’d exited the stone building.

Pierre gestured again.

On several rooftops and in several alleyways, people of ill-repute backed off, disappearing.

“You didn’t have to go that far.”

“I’d be lost if something happened to you, my dear,” Pierre said.

She touched his arm.  He moved it, and held it out so his elbow was where she could reach up and hold it.

The town hall was only a short distance.  Pierre opened the door for her.

“Miss Shirley,” the Mayor’s assistant said.

“Is Ben too busy?” Shirley asked.

“He said no disturbances.  Unless it was you or one or two select others.  I can show you in.”

“Please,” Shirley said.

The older, rotund man in a woolen suit looked up as the door to his office opened.  He leaned back in his chair on seeing her.

“These meetings with you and your lot feel so clandestine,” the Mayor observed.

“Aren’t they?” Pierre asked.

“How are our children?” the Mayor asked.

“All as well as can be expected.  We’ve put them to work helping with getting the harvest collected, before too much frost sets in.”

“Good.  I do like that.”

“We just had a meeting with Professor Nester.”

“Any more pleasant than your chance meeting with Professor Cavvy?”

Shirley shook her head.  “Just the opposite.”

The man pressed his lips together.  They parted reluctantly for him to say, “Do tell.”

Shirley explained, “He wants to supplant Cavvy.  He wants to subvert you.  To send a pawn your way to plead and sway you.  He won’t be satisfied until this city is under his thumb.  He’s spending much of the remainder of his lifetime here, after all.”

“I’m not surprised,” the Mayor said.  He looked weary.

“It’s how the Academy works, and the Academy is still existent,” she said.

“It is,” the older man said.

“If I had to pose a guess,” Pierre said, “May I?”

“You may, whatever it is.”

“The food crisis might be manufactured.  They’re worried.  Something got away from them.  Either the budget and rationing issues you’re facing are manufactured but the rats are real and threaten to spoil their play, or it’s all real.  I’m inclined toward the former.”

“You really think so?” Shirley asked.

“What are a few starving children for the sake of utter control of a small city and it’s Academy?” Pierre asked.

Shirley frowned.

“I’m too old for this.  I retired years ago, you know.  They’ve forced out my predecessors, sent them on trips with no return trip, pressured them, cut their hamstrings.”

“Not literally, I hope,” Pierre said.

“I couldn’t guarantee anything,” the Mayor said.

“Are you at your limit?” Shirley asked.

“I’m rapidly approaching it,” the Mayor said.

“Cavvy’s bubbles.  Are they sustainable?” she asked.

Professor Cavvy was one of countless leaders who were charged with finding a means to survive in these harsh environs.  The thought had been to find a way to build off of the coastline.  If it could be arranged, then the next step would be to find a way to grow things there, where the Black Wood wouldn’t touch.

“A year away at best.  These things do drag on, and it could be two years, or ten, or fifty.  It won’t get us through the Winter.”

“They have reason to make it difficult.  The Crown at large, I mean,” Pierre said.  “They have monsters released into the oceans that search the coasts.”

“The plan is to set something up at the mouth of the river and set up a barrier,” the Mayor said.

“Yes, I remember that now,” Pierre said.

Cavvy would keep himself occupied in the meantime, then.  He’d handle his own internal drama to some degree, but his impact on the city would be limited, at least for now.

Nester’s task was a little more mundane, though Shirley thought it sounded more interesting.  Like many others, Nester was taking the Wolf Clover and working on creating strains and variants.  More nutritious or durable versions would be essential.

“We made enemies, didn’t we?” she asked.  “A small Academy in a small city.  But enemies all the same.”

“That’s worrisome,” the Mayor said.

“We’re capable of handling it,” Pierre said.  “Their army is relaxing, while I’ve been talking to our people and making sure ours is ready, should the call come.”

Shirley nodded.  “We should be capable of handling it.  I agree with you there.”

“What are you thinking, then?” he asked.

She paused, then looked at the Mayor.  “How eager are you to hold your seat there?”

“I took this job only to help in a time of need.  You want your fellow here to take it?”

“I was thinking I might take it for myself.”

The Mayor and Pierre exchanged glances.

“It’s not unheard of, for a woman to lead,” the Mayor said.  “But it’s typically a woman of some standing, in bloodline and background, and only for short terms.”

“I halfway expected a hard refusal,” she said.

“You underestimate how much I miss my retirement.  Or how concerned I am with how they might force me to give up my seat.”

“I’d need you to hold a position in some capacity,” she said.  “To advise, make appearances.  At least until everyone in the city is ready for something new.”

“I could do that.”

“I’ve had a degree of training,” she said.  “I think I can play this game with them, and keep a kind of balance.  At least until we get word from our Lords and Ladies.”

Their Lords and Ladies.  She saw that expression that was a smile for Pierre.  For extra measure, he gestured his amusement.

“I think we could do this,” Pierre said.

The Mayor didn’t know the full extent of things.  He didn’t know who his Lords and Ladies were, nor what had happened to the Infante.  He did think she was a well-connected individual with discreet ties to those same Lords and Ladies, and some expertise in warfare, subterfuge, and politics.

None of which was wrong.  There were simply details omitted.

Sylvester had taught her things.  How to move, how to look, how to speak, and the techniques, the subterfuge, the violence.

Above all else, he’d helped her realize how one person could piece themselves together again after being broken.  He’d helped her do that by breaking and rebuilding himself, over and over again, until none of it was recognizable as the boy she’d first met.

She’d broken once, and she’d pieced herself back together again.  Sylvester had helped inform and instruct that person she’d been then.  She knew it was possible she’d hit a wall and break again.  She found an eerie confidence in the knowledge that if it happened, she would piece herself back together.

Endlessly, if need be.  But she wouldn’t be cowed.

She would take the things she wanted.

She touched the small of Pierre’s back, moving fingers along it while she mused aloud.  “I’m thinking we might start by having you involve me in things more, sir.  Then we can have you fall ill.”

“Ill,” the Mayor said.

“I’ll take care of you.  I’ll see to some of your duties.  I’ll take over more as you suffer more.”

“The Academy would want to address my health,” the Mayor said.  “As a point of pride.”

“Mental health?” she suggested.  “Harder to pin down.”

The Mayor considered, then nodded.

“We should be able to nail that one down,” Pierre said.

“There’ll be pushback,” the Mayor said.  “You’re not an aristocrat.”

“We’ll do fine, I think,” Shirley said, thinking hard.  It felt so strange to be moving forward in the face of adversity like this.  “It’ll need to start with me proving myself in regard to the food crisis.”

“We’ll pit them against each other, I imagine,” Pierre said.

“Perfect,” she said.

“We’ll want to involve the others,” Shirley said.  “Samuel is in town, he doesn’t like the complex machinations, but he has an eye for some kinds of trickery and forgery.”

“We can reach out to other areas,” Pierre said.  “To the others.  There might be resources.”

The discussion continued until they needed to bring out the lamps and candles, and for some time thereafter.  The snow began to fall more heavily.

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== e.03 – Twig

Forest for the Trees – e.3

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

Just beyond the periphery of the city, the landscape rippled and bulged from the mass graves.  All was now buried under a carpet of wolf clover.  The plague had hit New Amsterdam, and war had hit it some time after.  Word was that the putrescence made walking out among those mounds and that clover dangerous.

It was still so nice to see green again.  It had been a bleak time of it.

Drake puffed on his cigarette, then moved his hand, putting the cigarette just in front of Emily’s mouth.  She drew on it.  Then, smoke still suppressed, she kissed the back of Drake’s hand before he pulled away.  Her exhalation of smoke chased after his hand.

He moved the cigarette to his right hand, before reaching beneath her hair to rest his hand on the back of her neck.  She half closed her eyes and let her head rock left and right as he used the one hand to massage her.  The scales that decorated his hands were smooth on the surface, rough at the edges.  His fingertips were clawed, and she shivered every time the points grazed her.

“I always planned to come here.  I was so young, the last time I came,” Drake said.

“New Amsterdam?”

“Yeah.  It’s our city, isn’t it?”

“It’s everyone’s.  Or it was,” she said.  “It’s supposed to be big and messy enough that anyone can find their place here.”

His hands were strong.  She loved his hands.  They were long-fingered and capable of massaging her neck, from hairline to shoulder.  It would be so easy to pinch or squeeze in the wrong way, and he avoided it.  She loved that they were studded with scales and marked with tattoo and as a consequence there were probably no hands like his in the world.

She loved that just about every last part of him was like that.

A distant train whistle screamed, and people that had been in the station or sitting on benches under the eaves began to migrate out toward the platform.

That same group of people represented a cross section of the city’s residents.  The rich, the poor, the young, the old.  The free, the slaves, the living, and the dead that were animated with voltaic riggings.  There were families there, Emily noted.  She felt a twinge at seeing that.

Drake’s thumb ran down the side of her neck, tracing beneath the collar of her shirt, the nail touching skin of her shoulder that clothing covered.

“You’re bored, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Never, when I’m with you.”

Clearly,” she said, with exaggerated amusement.  “You turn your full attention my way when you have to wait around for even a few minutes.”

“It’s been an hour.”

“Not even half of one.”

The relatively chaste contact of his hand on the back of her neck was drawing some stares from some of the people who’d gathered closer to them on the platform.  Well-to-do families.  Not as well-to-do, perhaps, as the family Emily had been born into, Emily figured, but well-to-do enough to have clothes of the latest fashion and stitched to carry their bags.  They would be paying the fares for those stitched servants, too.  Those same servants would have a separate car.  The smell of death and ozone tended to come up when they gathered in an enclosed space.

She was aware of the pressure.  There was an unspoken expectation that Emily and Drake would get out of the way.  They were supposed to move to a place on the train platform that would be out of sight.  They were altered.  Tattooed, physically changed.  She was horned and her teeth were fangs.  Her clothes were a men’s work shirt, because ordinary woman’s clothing didn’t fit well with her altered musculature, and she wore overalls with the straps and front piece of the upper half tied around her waist, knotted in front.  Drake wore a sleeveless shirt and canvas pants with suspenders.  The suspenders were a necessity, with him having next to nothing in body fat.  Lean muscle, more lean muscle, the requisite pieces and organs to keep him alive, the skeleton to keep him upright, and everything else was decoration.

She wouldn’t have it any other way.

There was a girl, Emily noticed.  Thirteen or fourteen, in nice clothes with nice hair, a pretty stitched servant carrying her bag.  Where the girl’s family and greater group were turning up their noses or stopping just shy of outright sneering at Emily and Drake, the girl kept sneaking glances, and her expression was unreadable.

Please, little lady, Emily thought.  Please see this for what it is.

She reached up for Drake’s hand, and she pulled it down, so his arm was against her neck and shoulder, his arm against her front, his front against her back.

She held that arm with both hands, holding it against herself, holding herself against it.

Look, she willed.

“What’s our agenda for later?” Drake asked.

“Our agenda?  We have guests to entertain.”

“Mmm,” he made the sound, and she felt that sound through where his chest and stomach. pressed against her back.

“We’re fairly flexible, though.”

“That we are,” he murmured in her ear.

She laughed, loud.  That got her more annoyed glances than the affectionate touching had.  The little lady looked away, rather than at her, as if ashamed, embarrassed on her behalf.

Look, Emily willed, prayed.

“Good thing too,” Drake continued.  “The very next moment we’re alone together, I’m going to pounce on you, beautiful creature, and I won’t be letting you go.”

Where his hand draped down in front of her, his fingertip tapped twice against the knot of the overall’s straps, that knot just a bit lower than a belt buckle ought to be.

She hugged his arm to her, tighter, and she smiled to herself.

In many things, she worried.  In many other things, she was far from alright.  In most things, even, there was anger or pain.  Old, present, and looming.

In this, however, she was content.  She had fought for this.  She had claimed her scale-decorated man and left him behind, and she had fought her way back to him again.  She wanted to embody her contentment in a way that could be seen.

That little lady with the fine well-to-do family and the stitched carrying her bag looked her way, curious despite herself.

Drake placed the cigarette in her mouth again.  Emily drew back, then exhaled the smoke through her nostrils, twin plumes.

The train screamed again.  It was coming out of the trees now.  One scream after another, as it drew close to the platform.  The sound of the whistles and horns were joined by the sounds of the brakes.

Soon the passengers would flood out and flood in.

I’m everything you’re not, little lady.  I don’t have the fine clothes, I don’t have the money or the future waiting for me.  Not properly.  I could hang tomorrow, if things unfolded wrong, if the wrong words found the wrong ear or if the wrong people happened to arrive in this city.

But I’m free.

The train came to a stop.

Stairs stretched down from the side of the train, part machinery, part musculature.  The passengers followed a moment later.

The car closest to Emily and Drake was filled with people like the little lady.

“Shall we go find them?”

Emily nodded.

They took their time traveling around the back of the crowd.  They got several more dirty looks.

Chance and Lainie were getting off the rear car.  They had a crowd around them.  Lainie wore a sleeveless dress in a dusty rose shade that wouldn’t have looked out of place on someone in the well-to-do crowd, but she wore it to show off her arms.  Plague scars marked one arm, and tattoos marked the other.  Thorny branches reached up from her hands, and Kraken tentacles reached down from her shoulder, making only the slightest contact, just past the elbow.  It was part of a broader tattoo that claimed her back.

Her eyes were modified, in what was supposed to be a minor change, but there had been a complication.  A red ring marked the division between pupil and iris, stark and bright, but her actual eyelids were reddened, the spaces beneath each eye darkened, as if she’d just finished a marathon session of crying and gone a night without sleep.

Emily always noticed the eyes.  Eyes held meaning to her.  She’d offered to find someone good who could fix it, and Lainie had declined.

Chance was relatively unchanged, for his part.  He was fit, with the work he did in the downtime, he had one or two tattoos, he had some plague scars that were worse than Lainie’s, mostly beneath his clothes, and he had a mod-girl at his side, but he was still recognizable as Chance.

The rest of their small crowd was of similar caliber.  They were dockworkers, youth of questionable reputation, thieves, charlatans, with tattoos, modifications, and delightfully poor fashion choices.

Emily’s hand moved.  Together.

Of the group, Chance’s hand, Lainie’s hand, and three others all moved in the answering sign. Agreement.

She broke away from Drake to reach out.  Her hand caught Lainie at the side of the head, fingers in Lainie’s red hair.

“How are you?” she asked Lainie.

“Tired from the trip.  Hungry.  We made friends on the train.”

“Good,” Emily said.

Chance said, “Job finished early, but trains took forever.  They were pulling trains off of one line to put them on this one.  Five more trains are going to pass through this station before the afternoon and evening are over.”

“Why?” Emily asked.

“We should find out and report back to our Lords and Ladies,” Chance said.  “After.”

“After food and sleep, please,” Lainie said.

Chance put an arm around the girl he’d been close to since stepping off the train.  The girl had lace growing out of her, to the point it wasn’t clear where clothing ended and skin began.  “After.”

Emily laughed.  “I know just the place.”

“You know a place?” Drake asked.

Emily nodded.  “Come on.  All of you.”

She gave them a hand with one of the heavier bags, slinging it over one shoulder.  She led them toward the city, the rest of the group chattering and smiling.

She cast a look over her shoulder, searching the crowd for the little lady.  She found her target in the window, meeting the girl’s eyes.

Emily smiled, revealing her fangs.  The girl turned away from the window, a flicker of annoyance on her face.

That was fine.

It had been the theaters of Tynewear, not a train station, she’d been two or three years younger, but years ago she had been that girl.  She had cast the same inquisitive glances, her expression flat because she’d been unable to come to a judgment.  Rather than a couple, it had been a heavily tattooed man and his friends, drunk off their asses, singing.

She hoped and she prayed that the girl, should she need it, would find it the same opportunity that she had.  The first seed of a realization, if not the catalyst itself.

“Where are we going?” Drake asked her.  She knew what he really wanted to ask.  With this crowd in their company, would there be any pouncing?

“Home,” she said.  “In a fashion.”

The music played throughout the apartment home.  She moved her hand and it caught in torn sheets with beads of blood on them.

The room was nice.  The walls were painted evenly, decorated with portraits and landscapes in fine frames.  One wall had a bookshelf sitting against it, and the books were all leather, including some exotic kinds that had been Academy created.  The bed had four posts and a canopy, the floor had a fine rug from halfway around the planet.

Everything in the apartment home would be of similar caliber.

She wanted to destroy the rest of it, as friction, scales, claws, and other decorations had destroyed the sheets.  She wanted to tell the others to help her destroy it, but she didn’t want to spoil their rest.

Before they left, perhaps.

She sat up.

“Cigarette?” Drake asked.

She reached to the bedside table, retrieved the sole remaining cigarette from the little metal case, and handed it to Drake.  She found a matchbook and pressed it against his bare chest, before standing from the bed.

“Not partaking?”

“Getting water and checking on our guests,” she said.  “I’ll be back.”

“Get dressed first,” he told her.  “I’ll save it until you’re back.”

She threw a small pillow at him, then stretched.

She found the clothes she’d had on, and put them back, the overall’s straps going over her shoulders this time.  She walked barefoot into the next room.

Lainie was curled up in a young man’s lap, head on his shoulder.  The lad had a guitar resting across the armsrest of the chair and her lap, laid with strings up.  As the music box played, he plucked the strings.

One of the young men stood and approached her as she found a wine glass and filled it with water from the tap.

“Keep your distance,” she warned.  “I imagine I smell atrocious.”

“Can’t smell a thing,” he said.  “Too many years of exposure to noxious chemicals, even before the Lambs found me and snatched me up.”

“Chemicals, hm?”

“And after they found me, it was more poisons, gases, and other things that singe the nose hairs, even if you’re being careful,” he said.

She drank her water, making a bit of a nodding motion to make it clear she’d heard.

“Junior,” he introduced himself.  “Posie is over there, with one of our guests from the train.  The other two, are boys I’m training up in hopes they’ll be able to follow in my footsteps.  Marv and Vic.”

“Emily,” she said.  She offered a hand to shake.  He shook it.  “I’m the princess in the tower that Lillian and Sylvester rescued, and now they don’t know what to do with me.”

“I think-” Junior started.

There was a hard knock at the door.

“-He knew exactly what to do with everyone.”

Past tense?

She went to the door.

No peephole.  In a building like this, there wasn’t really a need.  Each resident had an apartment that spanned one or two floors.

She opened the door.  The people on the other side forced it the rest of the way open.  Soldiers.  They flooded into the apartment.  Anyone who could have gone for a gun wasn’t given a chance.

Candy stared down the officer who pointed a pistol at her.

If they shot Drake-

“On your knees!” the officer shouted into her face.

“No,” Emily said.

The others were kneeling.  Junior had dropped to his knees of his own volition, even without a gun pointed his way.  It freed officers to turn their attention to her.

Two approached her from behind, grabbing her arm and shoulder.  A boot kicked the back of her knee, sharp.

Her leg didn’t bend or even move in reaction.

“I will not ask you again!  Down on the ground or I will put a bullet in you!”

“My answer will remain the same.  If you shoot me-”

“Candida.”

Emily closed her eyes for a moment.

“Officers, it’s alright.”

“Are you sure?”

The pair stepped through the door.  More officers followed behind them.  He was an older man, his features chiseled to the point they looked artificial.  She looked thirty years younger than she was, her figure ridiculous.

“Everard.  Adelaide,” Emily greeted them.

“Candida.  Don’t use our first names like that.  It’s petulant.  We’re your father and your mother,” Everard said.

“I’d hoped never to see you again.”

“Then our family apartment in New Amsterdam was a bad place to visit.  You’ve brought squatters?”

“Friends and acquaintances.”

Drake had emerged from the other room, dressed.

“They’ve broken into our liquor cabinet, it seems,” Everard observed.

“My lords!  You’ve destroyed yourself,” Adelaide said.

“I feel better than ever, Adelaide.”

“Your eyes,” Adelaide said.  “Whatever possessed you?”

Emily raised her hand to her face, touching near her eye.  The orbs were there, but they had been made utterly clear and translucent, visible only if the light caught them at the right angles.  Otherwise, it left her eye sockets looking empty, raw.

“The husband you picked for me had it done.”

“Nothing so grotesque, I’m sure,” Adelaide said.

“What even brought you to New Amsterdam?” Everard asked.

“I could ask you the same thing.  You could have left.”

“We tried,” he said.  “Our timing was wrong.  There was supposed to be a boat this spring.  We made the trip and were turned away.  Imagine our surprise when we return here, only to hear the doorman is alarmed at the rabble that forced their way through, and that authorities are already contacted and en-route.”

Emily glanced at her friends.  “The trains.  It’s why so many were coming back.  They weren’t allowed to leave.”

“Quarantine concerns,” Everard said.

“What a shame,” Emily said, with no emotion in her voice.  She wondered if it was one of the other groups, isolating and rooting out key players in aristocracy and business.

Her father certainly didn’t look happy.  She’d seen that unhappy expression on his face many a time, but it had typically been reserved for her misadventures and delinquency.

“We’re hoping the ports will open soon,” Adelaide said.  “We’re expecting ships next fall.”

They won’t.

“What shall we do with them?” the officer asked.

“Will you behave?” Everard asked.  “We can have all of that stripped away, the tattoos removed, the eyes replaced.”

“I would sooner kill you than let that happen,” she answered.

“Please,” Adelaide said.  She drew closer, hesitated, then closed the distance.  “Candida.”

“That’s not my name.”

“It’s the name we gave you,” Adelaide said.  She sniffed.  “You reek.”

“That might well be the cigarettes,” Emily said.

“Not ladylike, those.  Phallic, stinking things.  Unhealthy, the Academies say.”

“Oh yes.  Unhealthy.  If only I were immortal, and didn’t have to worry about such things.”

Her parents exchanged glances.  Her mother said, “It’s not the cigarettes.  You smell like sex and sweat.”

“I should hope so, after six goes at it.”

Everard made a face.  Emily only glared at him, staring him down.

“Why do you have to make it all so hard?” he asked.

You tried to sell me.  I was the currency you used to bet your chips on a particular horse, and that horse was put down.

“Why couldn’t you have ever made it easy for me?” she asked.

“We gave you everything,” Adelaide said.  “You seem to glory in perverting it.  Ruining those things.  It’s a wonder you haven’t soiled this place more than you have.”

She glanced at the mess.  Considering the people she kept company with, it was so mild as to be laughable.

She caught Junior’s eye.  He gestured.  FightQuestion.

She shook her head slightly.

“Tell us you’ll cooperate, that you’ll be good.  We can discuss fixing what you’ve done to yourself.  Perhaps, if the local authorities are willing, we could have them take your friends into custody, and free them, contingent on your cooperation,” Everard said.

“Whatever you need, Mr. Gage, sir,” an officer said.

“Thank you.”

“The local authorities are so obedient.  You’ve climbed the ranks, haven’t you?” Emily asked.

“Even with the fate of the Lord Baron Richmond, the tragedy that was, we were elevated by our association with him.”

“Ah,” she said.  “Were you?  I would say that was the most tragic part of it all, except I wouldn’t want to undermine how very horrible the rest of it was.”

“His death was a great loss.  Then you disappeared.  You played at being dead for a time, only to resurface, tried your hand at playing dead, but we had eyes on you- and then you disappeared for a considerably longer period of time, appearing only today,” Everard said.  “For the best, perhaps, considering the last word was that you were associating with rebels.”

“Rebels?” the officer in charge asked.

“I would recommend treating her colleagues here as such,” Everard said, with a kind of finality.

“You’re aware that the penalty for even suspected involvement in rebel groups would be death by execution?”

“I’m aware,” Everard said, staring Emily down, before he couldn’t stare into the void of the raw, translucent orbs any longer.  His sculpted, Academy-given lips twisted with disgust.  “Arrest her with them.  But postpone her execution, at the very least, if you can.  I do have hope she’ll come around.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You really don’t know me at all,” she said.  “Thinking I can come around.”

Everard drew closer, until he was shoulder to shoulder with his wife.  He was smaller and shorter than Emily, with all the augmentations she’d had.

He reached up for her face, and she caught his hand.

She squeezed it, watching his expression, wanting to see just a little bit of the pain.  She heard the parts of his hand grind into one another.  She saw his expression tested, but she didn’t see it break.

“Let him go,” the officer said.

She let Everard go.

They were led as a group toward the lift.  Thick fluids churned through tubes as the lift made its way toward the ground floor, their small crowd of delinquents and rebels with shackles on, arms behind their backs, while officers lined up behind and to the side of them, guns in hand.

Drake stood by her, his upper arm pressing against hers.  That ended when her father intervened.  Drake was pulled back by men in uniform.  Everard stood to Emily’s left instead.

“You really want to do this?” she asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Everard said.  “But what other option do we have?”

“Leave us to this.  Admit there’s no rebel involvement.  Go to one of your other homes.  Accept that I served my role and elevated you in status, and leave me to lead the rest of my very, very long life as I see fit.”

He shook his head, and he remained silent, as if he couldn’t even dignify her with a response.  He could dignify her by making her a Noble’s wife, but… it terminated there.

“Does the lobby of this building have a phone?” Junior asked.

“Of course,” Adelaide said.

“Shush, dear.  Don’t entertain them.”

“Of course,” Junior muttered.  “Like it’s assumed.”

The lift’s door opened.  They stepped out into the lobby.

“We’re on Crown business,” Junior said.  “It’s meant to be discreet.  Before things go any further, I’ll have to ask that I can make a phone call.”

The officers exchanged glances.

“I was the fiancee of the late Baron Richmond,” Emily said.  “Adelaide and Everard Gage will confirm this.  Take that into account and hear me when I say that you must allow that phone call.”

“She was, but-” Adelaide said.

“Shush,” Everard said.  “It’s fine.”

Junior smiled.

They approached the desk.  Junior took the phone.  He paused for a long moment before dialing the number, as if he had to remember.

It was a much longer moment before there was a response.  He stood where he was, waiting.

“Junior,” he finally said.  “Yes, my Lord.  Yes, my Lord.”

He held the phone out to Emily.

She took it.

“It’s Emily, my Lord,” she said.

“You don’t ever have to call me that.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Shall I leave this to Junior?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Do visit.  That’s not an order.  Only a wish.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

There was a soft sound of amusement on the other end.

“Hand the phone to the person in charge.”

She extended the phone toward the head officer.

She watched as he listened.  Whatever he heard, he wasn’t given a chance to speak, much less utter a ‘my lord’.  Not until the end.

“Yes, my Lord,” the officer said.

Emily watched her parents’ expression transform.  Puzzlement, then something between concern and hope.

The officer hung up.  He kept his hand on the bar of the phone while it rested on the cradle, then glanced at the secretary at the desk.  “That was the true number?”

“Yes, sir.”

The officer nodded.  He turned to Junior.  “My apologies for the inconvenience, sir.”

Junior smiled.  “Please take the shackles off.”

The officer motioned.  Officers in the retinue hurried to oblige.

“What is this?” Everard asked.

“You can shackle them,” Junior said.

“What!?”

Junior glanced at Emily.

“They were directly implicated in the Baron Richmond’s death,” she said.  “That in mind, keep them alive.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the officer said.

“I don’t understand,” Everard said.

“I think you do,” she said.  “It’s really very simple.  You and your ilk owned and ran this country.  You ran it into the ground, as a matter of fact.  Now it’s no longer yours, and debts are coming due.”

“We’re your parents.  Your family!”

“You never even resembled family, let alone parents,” she said.  “You’re traitors.”

The officers stood ready to cart the two away.  They looked to her for leadership, expecting their orders.

She didn’t like it.  It resembled what she’d seen and done as the Baron’s fiancee.

The Lords and Ladies of Radham had asked her if she wanted a greater role in things.  She had refused.  She had her family.  She looked at Drake.

“A question, before they go,” Junior said.  “Though I suppose I could interrogate them properly, with chemicals-”

“There’s no need,” Everard said, “We’re loyal to the Crown.  This has to be a misunderstanding or a lie.  I’ll tell you whatever you need to know, without chemicals.”

“You said you expected ships next fall?”

“Yes,” Adelaide said.

“Incoming or outgoing?”

“Incoming,” she said.  “It was the talk of Trimountaine Port.  We’re hoping- were hoping, that we could sail out with them when they left.  You can’t imprison us, none of this makes sense-”

“That’s enough,” Junior said.  “That’ll be all.”

Their group remained in the lobby while the officers, Everard, and Adelaide left.

Together, they all returned to the lift, many rubbing at wrists.  Couples paired off and friends met to converse.

“Incoming guests?” Drake asked.  “How?  How would we even know?”

The questions echoed her own thought processes, even if the direction of those questions didn’t.  In many things, she worried.  In other things, she was far from alright.  In most things, even, there was anger or pain.

Some of that had quieted, with this.  Some of the fears had been put to rest, the demons slain.  Her parents were gone, and with luck, would never darken her path again.  Old pain there, yes, but never to be present or future pain again.

Monstrous, perhaps, to turn on her parents like that, to let it happen.  But she wore that monstrousness with pride.

Her hand with its clawed fingertips reached for and found Drake’s.

“A singular guest, I imagine,” Junior said.  “As to how, I have to think our Lords and Ladies sent out an invitation.”

Previous                                                                                                                    Next

================================================== e.04 – Twig

Forest for the Trees – e.4

Previous                                                                                                                    End

Lacey’s hands shook.  She clasped them together, then unclasped them, balled them into fists, and then clasped them together again.  She leaned on the railing, high above the city, elbows resting on the wood, her eyes roving over the city below, where countless citizens were clustering at vantage points and railings like hers, trying to see what was coming.  She gazed over overgrowth and water.

It was fall, and the wolf clover thrived more than anything.  It had been found in the late summer, disseminated over the fall, and it had survived its first winter.  The Academies of the Crown States had devised and disseminated the strains, crossbreeds, and other materials as winter gave way to spring.  The black wood was still there, the soil was tainted with the stuff to the point it was stained.  But the clover had spread over the summer.  The Crown States were now painted in a palette of black and green.

The cities affected by plague had been more or less reclaimed.  The black wood had consumed the worst of the plague growths, but there was concern of resurgence, so those cities were occupied primarily by the Mercies.

Everyone had been working so hard.  Lacey was put in mind of the times when exam season and the culling of the bottom percents of the student body had come around.  Times when everyone had been fighting to stay afloat, because they knew that if they didn’t give their all, they would have nothing.  This mentality had run through the most recent seasons.

People fought even harder now that the war was over.  Studying, figuring out answers, figuring out the balances, and how to use piecemeal scraps of cats and cockroaches to form a passable ecosystem.

It had been over a year.

A long, long time ago, she’d been told that she did the things she did out of selfishness.  She had been told that she extended kindness toward a wild and terrible child for herself, not for that child.  The words had annoyed her, shaken her, and even cut her.  She had pulled away.  She had thought, naively, that it would be her last involvement with the project.

The problem all along had been her failure to see that the wild, terrible little boy had come from somewhere.  He had learned from great teachers.  She had learned to be on guard against him, and she had failed to see what the first of the teachers was doing.  Whatever direction she turned, whatever path she took, she was pulled back in.  By the boy.  By the Lambs.  By Hayle.

She wrapped one fist in the other hand and squeezed it until she knew it would hurt to hold a pen or a scalpel tomorrow, if tomorrow came.

She could have left.  She always had the ability to walk away.  She could have attended a less prestigious Academy and graduated with honors and accolades.  She could have found a Professor to marry and been his assistant and partner.

On paper, as regrets, those options seemed so clear, so plain.  She could spell them out like any project outline, in thesis, hypothesis, costs, goals, applications.  She could have drafted each one with the letters with the carefully chosen language that were meant to sell the idea to the people with the resources to make them happen.  In her work with poisons and drugs it was Professors and Headmasters, even whole Academies that she wrote those letters to appeal to.  In this choice of life paths, it was her parents, colleagues, friends.  Herself.

She couldn’t have left.  In her naivety, she had taken on a project with immense responsibility.  When she had been rebuked, she had said what she had thought were final, parting words to the Wyvern.  She had told him that she knew him.

That knowledge had been the trap, that pulled her in, that drove Hayle to keep her close and involved, so he could guard what he was doing, that compelled her to be here, right now, trying to summon her courage.

A sea creature was making its way to the Eastern shore of the Crown States.  Other sea creatures and weapons were gravitating toward it.  She couldn’t see the battle or the frothing of the water, but she could see that the great sea creature continued its inexorable approach, and the water around it was dark with the floating bodies and viscera of its hundred challengers.

It wasn’t the largest creature in the world.  It probably wasn’t.  It wasn’t the most powerful.

It would, all the same, hit the shore, and the Crown States could well be broken by that arrival.  She had absolutely no say in the outcome.  Her say had been in the beginning, when she’d played her part in setting this in motion.

She was terrified in a way she never had been before.  There had always been a way forward, the notion that she could return to her laboratory and try to figure out her options or if there was a solution.  There was always ground to retreat to in times of war, when she was one of the people who served the back lines.  Her position as one of the people closest to the headmaster of a top Academy meant that in times of plague or other catastrophe, she had always had some right to be one of the ones who were secured an out.

It was only the noxious child she had helped create that latched his claws in her, creating any uncertainty in her footing.  That facet of things had only gotten worse with time and distance.

She straightened, turning her back on the scene.  The fear she had wasn’t because of the great sea beast or the potential devastation it threatened to bring with it.  The poisonous child wasn’t a child anymore.

They had claimed a neighborhood.  The residents had largely been evacuated, and the ones who hadn’t left were incentivized to leave.  Ten manors on a cliffside were now in the process of being transformed.  Teams of students were running around, setting their work into motion.  Wood grew so quickly she could follow the formation of branch and the expansion of trunk with her eyes.  All was charcoal black.  Harvesters crawled through everything, chewing away anything that wasn’t part of the greater construction.

It was claustrophobic, to enter a building that was forming around her.  The light was fading as the growths rose up, elaborating on and exaggerating the features of the manors.  Ten separate buildings were made more uniform in design by the shared material that formed them.

“My lord,” Duncan could be heard from down the hall.  “Could I beg you to please don some clothing?”

“My Duncan, I will get to it when necessary.  Abigail and I are deciding what I should wear.”

Lacey rounded the corner.  Duncan stood with his back to the wall beside the door that was open a crack.  The girl with the soft white curls stood on the other side of the door, wearing a fine dress.  She went by Bonnie these days.  The latest Quinton sat beside her, very un-lamblike in its behavior as it sat there with the wariness of a guard dog.

“My lord, it has been two hours now.”

“My Duncan, I am very much capable of looking at a clock and keeping track of time, as is Abigail.  Don’t fuss.”

Duncan looked like he was going to say something, then spotted Lacey.  He relaxed once he recognized her.  “We’re nearly out of time, my lord.”

“I do believe our guest is on the horizon,” Lacey informed them.

“Our guest is on the horizon, my lord,” Duncan repeated, pitching his voice to be heard.

“My ears work perfectly fine, my Duncan.”

Duncan made a pained face.  “He’s really going to need to stop saying that.”

“So do you,” the Lord said, from the next room.

“Please tell me the others are ready,” Lacey said.

“I wish I could,” Duncan said.  “It’s been a year and two months of preparation and convalescence, the deadline’s here, and we are down to the razor’s edge.”

“We shouldn’t have set the deadline in the first place,” Lacey said.

“Far be it from me to lay the blame at the foot of any of our esteemed Lords or Ladies,” Duncan said, “But I recall something said about them wanting to put pressure on their own.  They worried if they didn’t have a deadline, that nothing would get done.”

“They?  He.”

Duncan drew in a deep breath.  “Abigail, could I see you for a moment?”

There was a pause, and then the door moved.  Abigail stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.  She was as tall as Lacey, though she was less than half Lacey’s age, and she was beautiful in a very peculiar way.  Her dark hair was long, and she wore a fine green silk dress that draped straight down from armpit to ankle.  Her slenderness was the slenderness of youth.

Abigail walked a fine line as it was.  It was hard to call her a Noble, because she wasn’t quite there.  It was hard to call her just an aristocrat.  Perhaps it was fitting.

Seeing her made Lacey feel that fear rising a touch.  It made the vague feeling of claustrophobia and the looming, unavoidable crisis that much worse.

A distance away, the hallway was growing into place.  Harvesters swarmed, keeping the growth from reaching inward, creating the apertures that would be windows, and redistributing material to smooth out the floor into a flat plane without even the divides of floorboards.

“Abigail,” Duncan said.  “Please forgive me for saying so, but I don’t believe you’re helping matters.”

“Rest assured, Doctor, our Lord does what he says he’ll do.  If he says he’ll be ready on time, he’ll be ready.”

Duncan suppressed a response, which might have been a sigh and which might have been a bark of uncharacteristic anger.

He was as scared as Lacey.  For different reasons, yes, but he was scared.

“My Lord, for all his punctuality and finer points, is shortening my lifespan with the stress he’s causing me,” Duncan said.  He said it so the room’s occupant could hear.

“How so, my Duncan?”

“By insisting on calling me ‘my Duncan’, for one thing.”

“He’ll stop when you stop using ‘My Lord’ when there’s no bystanders in earshot,” Bonnie said.

“We never know who’s in earshot,” Duncan said.

“I have very good ears,” said the voice in the next room.

“Just the wait is causing me enough stress, you know,” Duncan said.  “I’m going to have a heart attack if we cut it any closer.  Would someone please help me with this?”

“I think Abigail’s heart is skipping beats for different reasons,” Bonnie said, her voice soft.  There was the faintest hint of something wry in her tone.  “Playing dress-up with a red-haired young Noble, when every moment counts?  Oh my, oh gosh.”

“Such insolence,” Abby said, affronted.  For all the character she managed to inject into the words, she proved the lie by the gentleness with which she touched the side of Bonnie’s face.  She paused at the door, looking at Duncan.  “We will be on time.  I promise.”

Lacey approached the small group as Abigail stepped through the door.  She saw Bonnie’s expression change as the girl paid more attention to her.

Poison had its way of spreading through systems, Lacey observed.  It could affect character and personality.  There were traces of the boy she’d known in so many of these things.  In the jokes, the cavalier treatment of danger, in the anger a soft, gentle child could display toward a woman in a laboratory coat.

“Is it what you expected?” Lacey asked.

“You’re asking me?” Duncan asked.

“Yes.  You wanted to work with Nobles.”

“I don’t know.  He might not be one.  We’re holding off on a final decision or verdict.  The last time we talked about it, we decided we wouldn’t announce him as one.”

“As you’re not announcing Abigail or the others?”

Duncan nodded slowly.  “We thought we’d decide when we saw them all together.  If he looked the part, and if he could play it.  But we have, what, less than half an hour?  Tens of minutes?  Less?”

“I couldn’t tell you.  Any of the above.”

“We’ll have other things in mind.  Unless it’s unanimous and instant, I think we’ll hold off.  So to answer your question, I don’t know.  I don’t know if any of this is what I expected.”

“You work closely with other Nobles.”

“Of my share of our Lords and Ladies, do you really think any of them are the type you work with?”

“I’m not wholly certain any of them are,” Lacey said.

“And I’m not wholly certain why you’re here,” Bonnie said.

Lacey glanced down at the girl.  She saw the anger and it took her breath away.  She’d seen the same expression on a young face, a decade ago.

“I’m only a witness,” Lacey said.  “I think I’m one of the only ones still standing who knows enough to know what happened, who isn’t threatening enough to warrant being destroyed, and I’m not so close to things that my judgment is obscured.”

“I heard who you were.  What you’ve done,” Bonnie said.

“I’ve done good and bad,” Lacey said.  “Yes, absolutely.”

The anger didn’t wane in the slightest.

Like so many things, that anger had been passed down in its way.  By deed, by word of mouth.

“I think you’re lying to yourself if you think your judgment is clear,” Bonnie said.

Lacey paused at that.

It was Duncan who rescued her, or who interrupted at the moment she could have made order of very disordered thoughts and sentiments.  “Lacey?”

“Yes?”

“I’m tied up here.  Could I ask you to check on Ibbot next door?”

Lacey glanced down at the girl from Hackthorn’s Fairy Tale ending.  She saw the hard expression, and she left, so she wouldn’t subject the girl to her presence any longer.

“I’m thinking I’ll need to check on everyone.”

“That might be good.  You could fill us in last minute.”

“Excuse me, then.  No time to waste.”

“Thank you, Lacey.”

What had come before would come again.

She had to pass through the hallway in progress, Harvesters swarming along their prescribed paths, removing and depositing material.  Branches slowly reached out toward her like grasping hands, only to wobble, jerk, and twitch as they were gnawed at their bases.  That which fell to litter the corners between wall and floor was swiftly caught up and carried in the same direction Lacey traveled.

A young man ducked his head in a hasty little bow as he passed Lacey, traveling the other direction.

Lacey reached and knocked on the door to the next manor, which was becoming part of the overstructure.

The answer was a woman’s voice.  “Come in.”

Lacey bent her head in a bow as she entered.

“No need to bow, my dear.”

“My lady,” Lacey said.  She raised her eyes.  “You might want to know that your guest is on the horizon and fast approaching.”

“I know.  We had lookouts poised.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

Ibbot was in the center of the foyer.  He knelt, his eyes fixed on the ground, and his entire body was rigid.

Galatea was there, wearing a dress that resembled a toga, all in spun golden silk.  It draped off of one shoulder, gathered in careful folds around a belt that accentuated her waist, and the bottom hem was knee height at one side, ankle length at the other, the one calf exposed.  Her shoes were stilettos with golden ribbons fixing them to her feet and ankles, but she was still putting one on.

She was and always had been fairly Noble in appearance.  She’d only ever needed to grow to her full proportions to fit the mold.

No, it wasn’t appearance that had marked the change, here.

Galatea finished doing up the other set of ribbon-straps.  She moved her foot and leg to examine it from multiple angles.  Some of the angles bordered on the unlikely, but it was a thing she might have dismissed as an illusion or trick of the mind if she hadn’t known better.

Lacey averted her eyes, hands clasped in front of her.  She’d been told not to bow, but here especially, she felt the need to.  She wondered if it would be the case with the others, or if it was only the feeling of danger that went hand in hand with this particular young Lady.

The Galatea project had very nearly come to a conclusion when she had been reduced to only the core, essential pieces.  The experience that had followed would have broken any other individual, to be confined in a parcel of flesh and brain for months, before a body was ready.  But this woman had not and never would operate like other individuals.  She was an actress, and she would never allow others to know the full extent to which she had changed, if she didn’t see the need to.

With Lacey, as familiar as Lacey might be to her, she wouldn’t see the need.

“Is there anything else?”

“I’m checking on everyone, my Lady.  Duncan requested I check on you and the Professor Ibbot.”

“Very well.  I’m still getting ready.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

“The Professor is fine.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

The fat little man had barely moved since Lacey had entered.

“Is my little brother well?”

“He seems to be taking his time, but miss Abigail is helping him, my Lady.  Bonnie suggested miss Abigail is secretly enjoying the process.”

The Lady in front of Lacey tittered at that.  Lacey swallowed.

“If she’s enjoying herself, then he is too.  Good.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

“I’ll be along shortly, once I’ve put my Professor in his cage.”

“Yes, my Lady,” Lacey said.  “Please excuse me.”

She only felt as though she could breathe once she’d left the room.

She passed a cluster of Doctors who were discussing the harvester’s work with the overstructure of the castle-in-progress in hurried and hushed tones.

She knocked on the next door.

The doors were opened.  In the hallway alone, there were three men and three women in dress uniforms, the men to the left, the women to the right.  Rapiers as their sides, rifles in hand, resting against shoulders.

Lacey bowed as she entered, and she kept her eyes to the ground as she made her way through the manor, using the position of the guards to know when to turn.  If they were in her way and she had another path, she would take that path.

She entered the master bedroom.  The Lady of this particular house was standing in front of a mirror, her back to the door as Lacey entered.  Lacey saw only one eye, peering over the Noble Lady’s shoulder.  The eye assessed her, then returned to the arrangement of jewelry.

“If you’re looking for our Doctor Lillian, she left a minute ago.”

“I’m under instruction to look for everyone, my Lady.  The messengers told you that your guest is imminent?”

“They did, thank you.”

“Is there anything I can do for you while I’m here, my Lady?” Lacey asked.

“No, I don’t imagine there is.”

“Very well, my Lady.”

“I never could have worn a dress like this before.”

“I’m afraid I don’t fully follow, my Lady.  You’re referring to your weapons?”

“I do miss the feeling of the flats of the metal blades resting on my skin.  Not that I’m any less dangerous.  Just the opposite.”

“Yes, my Lady.  You could still use the blades, I imagine.”

“Not today.  They wouldn’t make a difference, but the others thought that our guest might be able to smell the metal or the oils used on it.  I had some special work done, blades of material other than metal.  It’s not the same.  Very different.  Lighter.”

“Yes, my Lady.  I imagine so.”

“It all reached a certain point, and then it started playing out backward.”

“My Lady?”

“I knew who I was and where I belonged, part of my unit, knowing who I followed.  The crisis.  Taking that leap of faith, at his behest.  Getting to know the Lambs.  Being a prisoner while I was secured and reconfigured for a new role.  Crossing the threshold with a new kind of mission.  The big, new, intriguing missions.  Thinking I was falling in love.  Finding love.  Loss.  More missions.  More losses.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

“More losses, more missions.  Loss.  Falls in love, both false and real.  The big, new, intriguing missions.  The new, greater, grander missions.  Being a prisoner while I’m remade for a new role.  That’s as far as we’ve gotten.  Now…”

“Getting to know them again, My Lady?  Taking that leap of faith, at his behest?  The challenge.”

“The crisis.  Yes.  That would be our imminent guest, this time around.”

“If you’ll excuse me saying, then after the crisis is faced down, with luck, you’ll find the security you had at the very beginning?  Knowing who you are and where you belong?”  Lacey asked.  She realized she’d forgotten the appellation and was quick to add, “My Lady.”

“Ah,” the Lady said.  She adjusted her jewelry, her back still to the door.  “I should have said that differently.  I don’t know if I really knew, then.”

Did that mirror, as well?

Lacey said, “I remember seeing Mary Cobourn, back then, my Lady.  I talked to Professor Hayle about her.”

“Yes.  Mary Cobourn.  We talk about her as someone who has passed.  Or someone we’ve passed on from.  New names, now.  Did she look lonely then?  Lost?”

“She did.  But if I may say so, my Lady, that didn’t last for long.”

“A good reminder, that.  Thank you, Lacey.”

“You’re quite welcome, my Lady.”

“Would you give me a moment’s privacy?  I’ll be along shortly.”

“As you wish.”

For all that the Noble Lady had turned down her offer for support, Lacey suspected she’d wanted, needed, and benefited from it most.

The outer shell was formed, at least for the ground floor, as Lacey emerged.  The growth was faster now.  The building had its outer walls, and the interior space was being fleshed out.  Students hurried to place pots and tumbles of clover and the derivative plants in sconces and troughs, so the green spilled out to the ground below.  It turned the area that had once been the cul-de-sac in the midst of the manors into a kind of garden or an overlarge gazebo.  Flowers were set with care throughout, splashes of color in a dark aesthetic.  They avoided the color red, it seemed.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes?” she asked, turning.

It was a messenger.  A young man, black-skinned with his head shaved of all hair.  He wore a vest over a dress shirt.  “I was told to tell you the guest has touched ground.  We’ve sent people to meet him, and we can expect updates shortly.”

“Thank you,” she said.

She picked up her pace, all but running to her next destination.

It was everything the last houses hadn’t been.  Busy, with Academy science in plain sight.  Doctors and Professors worked to get everything arranged.  Tanks bore the floating brains within, glowing faintly, as Lacey had seen countless times.  Smaller tanks, these.

They were arranged as a wedding cake was, one atop the other, each a bit smaller than the one below.

“Don’t be so flustered, Lacey.”

It was hard to find her voice.  She could barely see the Lady through the jumble of bodies.

“All according to schedule, thus far.”

“Forgive me for saying so, but your castle is still growing, my Lady.  Things started late, as we expected him today, but we didn’t know what city to expect him in.”

“All according to schedule, I assure you.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

“Moving,” one Professor announced.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

Tubes were disconnected.  Pressurized gases hissed out, and mechanical latches snapped.

Stitched provided the lifting, though it would have been incorrect to call it steady lifting.  It was a team that did the work because grace was required.  With a team, it could be done fluidly.  An upper body was carried into place.  Trailing cords and tubes were plugged into the new housing, the layered stack.

Lacey averted her eyes, as stitched moved away, and an opening was provided that gave her a glimpse of the full picture.

Latches snapped into place, gases hissed, and things were connected.

“Ahem,” the Lady said.  “I don’t seem to have feet, Professor Verde.”

“Beg pardon, my Lady,” a man muttered.

There were more snaps, then another hiss of gas escaping.

In Lacey’s peripheral vision, as she stared at the ground, the connected body raised itself up a fraction.  The Lady didn’t move as a biped moved.  She glided.

Cloth swept into the air as attendants took over.  A dress was put in place.  Hair was adjusted, where it had already been pre-done.  There were no glasses.

The crowd thinned as everyone filled their prescribed role.  All on a kind of schedule.

When they moved away, there was only a young woman of Noble-caliber beauty, silver hair braided in an intricate way and left draped over one shoulder.  Her dress was of top quality, but modest, draping down to graze the ground.

“Walk with me?”

“As you wish, my Lady.  I haven’t checked on Doctor Foster or-”

“Of course.  I planned to give them a bit of time together, but the deadline’s come.”

The young Lady moved like a ghost floating through the air, always a measured, even distance above the ground.  Even at the short set of steps that had once been the front steps of the manor, she moved fluidly and without effort.

Others were gathering and preparing.  Duncan had arrived, which meant the others would be on their way.

Lacey could see Red and the other fairy tale creations.  They had been done up pretty, but many had left monstrous features in place.  Bonnie -Bo Peep- was in their company.

Shirley was present, too.  The woman had made herself mayor of one of the cities to the west.  The Lords and Ladies had recently made her an aristocrat proper.  Shirley was in the company of a lanky, white-haired man, with a cast to his features that suggested they had been provided by the Academy.  They were close.

Emily Gage was present.  She’d done away with her monstrous features in part, solely for this event, but she was still an imposing woman.

Each had seen facets of the Wyvern when Lacey hadn’t been looking.  Witnesses in their own ways, perhaps.  Each compromised in ways Lacey wasn’t.

She wished she could compare notes with them and she doubted it was possible.

This particular beast had flown its coop.

“How are the others?” Lacey’s companion asked, as they walked the outer perimeter of the interior garden plaza.  More guests were arriving by the moment.

“If you had asked me an hour ago, my Lady, I would have said I knew them well enough to say.  Now… I’m not sure I have a grasp of any of them.  Of any of you, I beg pardon, my Lady.”

“Riddles and enigmas.”

“One fusses and makes others fuss.  One is compelling and frightening at the same times.  The next is dwelling on arming themselves against the wrong thing.”

“And the next?”

Lacey glanced at the Lady beside her.

“Speak openly.  If our guest doesn’t take to our hospitality, it could be your last chance.”

She said it in such a cavalier way.  That this was all so critical a thing.

“You should be the most concerned of all of us, my Lady.  You remember everything.  You should see what’s unfolding with the most clarity, shouldn’t you?  The others are caught up in the details, they’re dwelling on their personal perspectives, their needs and drives, the imminent threats and dangers.  You’re equipped to see the big picture, the greater agendas, and how those details connect into something greater.”

“You think we’re missing something?”

“I think each of you have touched on pieces of it, my Lady.  I hoped and felt you might be the one who would take those pieces and pull them together.”

“I played my part in getting us to this point.  This meeting was always going to be part of the greater plan.”

“You didn’t see him toward the end, my Lady.  Not around the time they besieged Radham, killed Hayle, or confined Genevieve Fray.”

“I did see,” the silver haired young lady said.  She drew in a deep breath, then smiled.  “I saw it in a dream, you see.  Words spoken while I was asleep, all left unsorted.  Ones I can forget or interpret, or that exist only in abstract.  I would even say they’re my most cherished, special memories.”

Lacey felt her partially prepared response wither in the midst of her vocal chords, at those final words.

That response died when the young Lady said, “I believe in him.”

Lacey stopped in her tracks.

Her walking companion progressed a bit further, then paused, looking back.

“My Lady,” Lacey said.  “I wouldn’t want to cause trouble, but-”

The silver haired young lady waved her off.  “Speak frankly.  Without titles, if it’s easier.  Barely anyone is in earshot, and I trust all present who could listen in.”

“I- I beg your pardon.  But really, truly.  I spent the last decade of my life mired in this project.  I’ve kept tabs on everything, I’ve followed along, I saw Project Wyvern at its inception, from that angry little boy that Hayle had delivered to our offices to the young man who killed Hayle and watched him die.  He’s a shapeshifter of the mind, a sponge, a… puzzle.”

“He is.”

“It’s impossible to say anything for sure about Sylvester except that you can’t believe him.  You can’t trust him.  Once you do that, you’ve lost.  Only disaster follows.  Please.  If all the years I’ve spent being involved in this count for anything, it needs to be that you hear and realize that.  You can’t believe Sylvester.  You can’t believe in SylvesterHe’s very possibly the scariest and most dangerous person in the Crown States, and I say that with your guest disembarking onto your shores.”

“I’m sure you’re right.  I won’t deny your long and storied experience when it comes to Sylvester and the Lambs.  It’s a large part of why you’re here.”

“Please, my lady.”

“But he isn’t Sylvester any longer.”

“Please.”

“And we’re no longer Lambs.”

With that, Lacey knew she had lost.

An entire city bent at the knee with his arrival.

He was a giant.  His humanity had long been discarded.  He was only human in the face he wore and his rough shape.

He strode down the carefully swept road, his retinue of fantastical beasts on either side of him and behind him.  His beard was heavy, his hair long, and his footsteps had gravity, which made the bowing heads near him bend lower.

He had no carpet unfurled before him, but he had one trail behind him.  Tubes, wires, and conduits of all sorts followed him, flowing from his back and shoulders, arranged in fine, orderly lines behind him.  For every ten steps he took, there was a set of servants to take up position at the trail of fluid-filled tubes, to ensure that everything flowed straight and without issue.  He took corners and traveled bends in the path, and the team worked discreetly to manage the trail so nothing caught, nothing became disorderly.

The trail extended to the mouth of the great sea beast that had borne him across his ocean, down at the harbor.  The beast had unfolded itself, turning itself inside out to provide functional accommodations at the harbor, the revealed buildings taller than any building in the not-immodest city.

The bellowing of trumpets marked his approach and words were spoken to announce his coming, further down the road.  His steps were measured.

The words were spoken as he passed through the gates.  The hush was such that the words could have been whispered and most would have caught them.  “You are graced by the presence of your rightful Lord King Adam, Emperor of the one hundred nations, bearer of the Crown, sword, and scales!”

All were already bowing, scraping the ground.  The Lord King gazed at his subjects.  He raised his eyes to look at the building that was still erecting itself, black branches reaching for the sky as it grew, shapes forming into arches and decoration.

You,” the King spoke.  Most present startled at the sound.  “Have succeeded in drawing my attention.

His head turned, taking in the surroundings.

“If this is an attempt to kill me, you should know this isn’t my true body.  Your attempts will fail.  If this is a mere farce, then the perpetrators of it should announce and explain themselves.”

If I may, Lord King” one figure said, rising, only to segue straight into a deep, flourishing bow.  His dark hair was long, and he was Noble in appearance, with sharp green eyes and a taller frame than even many Nobles.  “I would announce those who invited you.”

“You may.”

“Lord Asher.”

The young man appeared to be close kin to the first, but was red haired, his hair tidily taken care of.  He was adolescent, but had all of the hallmarks of anyone Noble-made.  He had a woman of similar age beside him, still bowing.  They wore clothes of similar colors, both in dark blues, in the finest fabrics.

The expression that Lord Asher wore was an unflinching one.

Lady Helena.

A beauty, possessed of grace.  There was artistry there that few beyond the Lord King himself, his Queen and his Prince could lay any claim to.  Most importantly, she carried it all with the bearing of someone that had known it from birth.

She smelled like blood.

“Lady Margaret.”

Another beauty, if a sharper one, in the dangerous glint of her eyes and the way she held herself.  Had he seen her in another context, he would have believed she was any of his new Nobles, still learning their new bodies.  Promising.  Dangerous.

Lady Jessica.”

Something else, there.  Confident, but not nearly as immediately dangerous as the other two announced, supposed Ladies.  Silver haired, modest, alert, her hands clasped together.  She immediately went to the side of the tall man that had announced her, her hand on his arm.

One of the key players in this, then.

“You may, if you so desire, my Lord King, call me Lord Simon.”

The King stared at the assembled group.  He looked at the crowd, and he saw the assorted monsters, the rough-edged hiding in the back rows, the ones decorated with tattoos and other things no true aristocracy would harbor.

“Let’s do away with the audience of this particular theater.”

Lord Simon gestured with one hand.  The assembled crowd turned away, filing into the back hallways and doorways.  In less than thirty seconds, only the announced Lords and Ladies remained, alongside two young individuals in lab coats, a boy and a girl.

The girl approached the Lord Simon and stood at his other side.  He placed a hand on her shoulder, and he stared down the King.

“The stage is a good one,” the King observed.  He looked up, where the branches were striving to meet in a steeple.  “I’ve not seen one quite like it.”

“Thank you, my Lord King,” Simon said.

“It represents something.  Transformation, growth, and timing.”

“Yes, Lord King.  I’m gratified that came across.”

“I have never met any with the gall you supposed Lords and Ladies have on display here.”

The girl in the white coat that stood beside this Simon was scared, he observed.  The boy who stood in the back was.  The remainder were better at hiding it, if they were capable of feeling fear at all.

He went on, “That you would even try this ruse suggests that you know things few get to survive knowing.  The existence of your audience suggests you’ve talked about these things.”

“Yes, Lord King.  We know these things.”

“You’ve waged a war, clearly.  You killed my kin.”

“Yes, my Lord King.  Most here have Noble blood on their hands, in some form.”

The King moved through the room, traveling slowly.

Most, if taken at face value as Nobles, were only of the caliber that would be called bastards.  Odd, that the one doing the speaking was one of those.  Some were better, or had more promise.

“You managed to draw me here with your invitation.  Now you’ll likely die for what you’ve admitted to me.  You did this for a reason.  You wanted my ear.”

“Yes, Lord King.”

“You have it.”

“Lord King, we would humbly request your sanction for our plan to wage war with the Crown Empire in its entirety, to ruin the Academy structure, and to behead the nobility.  Yourself and ourselves excluded, of course.

“You continue to call yourselves Nobles.”

It seemed to surprise more than a few of them that he’d chosen to dwell on that part of things.

Simon seemed to take it in stride.  “Yes, Lord King.  Absolutely.”

“Why?”

“Because the nobility under you is more farce than what we’ve posed here, Lord King.  We proved our value by taking your Crown States as our own.  I believe wholeheartedly that we’ll be better nobles than the nobles your Academy manufactures.”

“You would destroy our Academies, not just behead and replace our nobility.”

“They’ve grown too powerful, Lord King.  In cutting them down, we would bring them in balance.  It is in fact the reason we first decided we would approach you with the idea of a deal.  We believe that you, being who you are, you would have to feel some degree of frustration with the state of the Crown as it is beside its brother, the Academy.”

“You would wage war with the Crown Empire.  One broken nation against a hundred?”

“Yes, Lord King.  We would, given an opportunity, colonize every place you’ve rendered unfit for habitation.  We would stage wars from these grounds.  Competition is healthy, yet the Crown never loses.  You need an enemy or your people will wage a war against their own.  They’re dangerously close to doing that.  Even here, they were.”

“That plan of yours would require a great deal of time.”

“Generations, Lord King.”

“It would require my silence.”

The tall young Noble smiled.  “Yes, Lord King.  Your arrival or the arrival of your kin was inevitable.  We thought we would invite it, so we could answer it appropriately, and make our best offer.”

“As offers go, it is not a very good one.  War and death for me and my people.”

“The alternative was that we would raise the spectre of primordial-derived superweapons unleashed on the world at large, my Lord King.”

“You would not even be the first to do so.”

“We imagine not, Lord King.  We would hope-“ Simon paused.  “Well, perhaps not hope, but we may be breaking from pattern in that we’ll relinquish this leverage.  We would hope others would do the same in similar circumstance, but we suspect we’re striking new ground in doing it this way.”

The young ‘Noble’ turned to the girl in the coat.

She hesitated, the Lord King saw.

But she turned over the iron key.

Simon approached, and he reached up to hand the Lord King the key.  “The experiments are ready to be unleashed with a turn of the key, Lord King.  They’re sitting dormant in the red-decked boat on port.  You’ll want to dispose of them, I imagine.”

The key almost disappeared in the Lord King’s palm, as he held it.  It was almost weightless.

“You believe this.  You’d throw yourselves on my mercy to make it happen.”

“Belief is all we have.  Belief that you’d have to find this necessary, interesting, or valuable.  That you can’t possibly be satisfied with the way things are.”

“I’m the most powerful individual in the world.  Why would I not be satisfied?”

“We’ve lived in that world, Lord King.  We’ve seen it from the lowest to the highest points.  The audience you saw ranged that same gamut.  If you’re a representative of that world in near-totality, then you have to have seen the need for it to change.  You must have seen and recognized that monstrousness at the core of things.  The darkness.  The ugliness.”

“Must I?”

Simon touched his own chest, “It’s standing right in front of you, calling itself a Lord, my King.”

Others reacted to that, to varying degrees.  The one in the back.  The young woman with the dangerous eyes, ‘Margaret’.

Lady Jessica didn’t react.  She raised her hand, holding Simon’s, and kissed the back of it.

“My King,” Lady Jessica said, as she lowered their hands.  “The Academy wanted control and it pushed that control to the point of slavery.  The result was rebellion.  Your Crown wanted power and it exercised that power, breaking that which didn’t bend.  Lord Simon here is a representative of every aspect of that.  He was made to absorb and adapt, to mold himself to environments.  He molded himself to us first.  He molded himself to your world last.”

“And I’m supposed to trust him, knowing this?”

Trust them.  They’re the reason I’m here and wanting good things.  They’re the reason I didn’t use the key.  Well, as something more than a token,” Simon said.

The Lord King looked down at the key that rested in his hand.

“You’re not the first to make a bid or to pose a challenge,” the King said.  He looked between them.  He saw Helena’s hand on Asher’s shoulder, the look she cast back over her shoulder at the male Doctor.  The way Lady Jessica and Simon and the female doctor stood together, and how the female doctor looked back at Margaret.

All knit together, their body language woven into one another.

“If you were to give us the chance, we can be the ones who succeed,” the young Doctor said.  “We’ve come too far to do anything else, I promise you that much, Lord King.”

They might just.

The King clenched his fist, destroying the key.

“Do as you will.”

Previous                                                                                                                    End

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